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WASHINGTON (AP)  The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued a subpoena to Donald Trump. The nine-member panel sent a letter to the former president's lawyers on Friday, demanding his testimony under oath by mid-November and outlining a series of corresponding documents. The decision by lawmakers to exercise their subpoena power comes a week after the committee made its final case against the former president, who they say is the "central cause" of the multi-part effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It remains unclear how Trump and his legal team will respond to the subpoena, if at all.
Northwestern University alumni Julia Louis-Dreyfus (C83, H07) and George R.R. Martin (J70; GJ71) both made television history at the 68th annual Emmy Awards on Sunday.

HBOs Game of Thrones, based on Martins beloved adult fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, took home awards for Best Drama, Best Writing and Best Directing, replacing Frasier as the most decorated television series in Emmy history, with a total of 38 awards.

A Medill alumnus, Martin is co-executive producer of the series and has scripted one episode for the first four seasons.

School of Communication alumna Louis-Dreyfus won her sixth Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series award and her fifth in a row playing President Selina Meyer on HBOs Veep.

She was previously tied with Mary Tyler Moore for her work on The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Candice Bergen in Murphy Brown for most Outstanding Lead Actress wins, at five apiece.

Louis-Dreyfuss Sunday night victory elevated her to legendary status both for overall Outstanding Actress wins as well as for wins in a row, thus eclipsing Helen Hunts four awards for Mad About You.

At seven overall wins, she is now tied with Mary Tyler Moore and Allison Janney for most Emmys won by a female performer. The record, eight wins, is held by fellow School of Communication alumna Cloris Leachman (C48, H14).

Veep took home the Outstanding Comedy Series award for the second consecutive year. Louis-Dreyfus is an executive producer of the series.

For more on the big winners of the Creative Arts Emmy Awards, held Sept. 10 and 11, visit the School of Communication website.
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Fagen Pharmacy will be moving its East Chicago store into the heart of the Harbor community late next month, opening an expanded store at 2100 Broadway Ave. The new store will take the place of the current one on a street corner at 2002 E. Columbus Drive.

The new store will be 3,500 square feet, allowing Fagen to expand services and offerings. Fagen has operated in East Chicago for 23 years. It has been expanding services and its Region footprint in recent years, with upgraded stores in several communities.

Among those moves was the opening of a large store on Calumet Avenue, in Valparaiso, last year, and a new store in Gary, on Broadway, in 2014.

Fagen has 24 locations in Indiana and Illinois. It was founded in 1972 and is the largest family-owned and operated chain of pharmacies in the state of Indiana.
SAN FRANCISCO  Older drivers may soon be traveling a safer road thanks to smarter cars that can detect oncoming traffic, steer clear of trouble and even hit the brakes when a collision appears imminent.

A few of these innovations, such as blind-spot warning systems, are already built in or offered as optional features in some vehicles, primarily in more expensive models.

But more revolutionary breakthroughs are expected in the next few years, when measures such as robotic braking systems are supposed to become standard features in all cars on U.S. roads.

Better technology, of course, can help prevent drivers of all ages from getting into accidents. But those in their 70s and older are more likely to become confused at heavily trafficked intersections and on-ramps. Aging also frequently limits a bodys range of motion, making it more difficult to scan all around for nearby vehicles and other hazards. And older drivers tend to be more fragile than their younger counterparts, suffering more serious injuries in traffic accidents.

Anything that reduces the likelihood or severity of a collision is really a technology that is primed for helping tomorrows older adults, says Bryan Reimer, research scientist for the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys AgeLab and associate director of the New England University Transportation Center. We are moving toward an ecosystem where older adults will increasingly be supported by the technology that may help enhance their mobility.

Automakers are rolling out more technology just as the first members of the culture-shifting Baby Boom generation turn 70 this year. By 2030, the U.S. Census Bureau expects there will be nearly 54 million people who are 70 or older living in the country, up from about 31 million in 2014.

About 80 percent of that group is expected to be licensed to drive, based on current trends, and that ratio could rise even higher if technology lets elderly people remain behind the wheel and preserve a sense of independence longer.

The presence of safety technology will be a key consideration for three-fourths of the drivers older than 50 who plan to buy a car in the next two years, according to a recent survey by auto insurer The Hartford and MIT AgeLab. In an indication that priorities are shifting, only one-third of the surveyed 50-and-older drivers who bought a car during the past two years focused on safety technology.

The push to engineer self-driving cars has helped heighten awareness about the role technology can play in eliminating the human error that causes most accidents.

Google, now part of Alphabet Inc., ignited the self-driving car research seven years ago when it began working on autonomous vehicles in a secret laboratory. Now, most automakers and other major technology companies, including Apple and Uber, are also working on self-driving technology, though there is still wide disagreement over when robotic chauffeurs will be ready  and legally cleared  to assume sole responsibility for navigating public roads.

Google aims to have its fully autonomous vehicles cruising around by 2020. That objective is considered too ambitious by many auto industry executives and experts who believe self-driving cars are a decade or more away from becoming a reality.

In the meantime, plenty of other technology should be widely available for older drivers.

Earlier this year, the auto industry vowed to make automated emergency brakes a standard feature by September 2022, but it wont be that long before the technology is widely available. Toyota plans to build it into most models, including its Lexus brand, by the end of next year.

Cameras on a dashboard screen that show whats behind the car have become commonplace in recent years and will be mandatory on all new cars by May 2018. The equipment is expected to be especially helpful for older drivers with a limited range of motion.

Other technology expected to assist older drivers includes automated parking, and adaptive headlights that swivel in the same direction as the steering wheel and adjust the beams intensity depending on driving conditions and oncoming traffic.

Robotic systems that temporarily assist with highway driving already are available, most notably in Tesla Motors high end Model S. The electric-car maker released its Autopilot feature last fall, prompting some Model S owners to entrust more of the driving to the robot than Tesla recommends while the system is still in testing mode. For instance, some drivers have posted pictures of themselves reading a newspaper or book with the Model S on Autopilot, or even sitting in the back seat.

In May, an Ohio man was killed when a Model S in Autopilot mode crashed into the side of a tractor-trailer while traveling 9 mph above the speed limit on a highway near Gainesville, Florida. Federal investigators are looking into the cause.

Highly publicized incidents like that may make it more difficult to persuade older drivers to trust the technology coming to their cars.

Older drivers also will need help understanding its benefits and how to use it, says Dale Rife, senior adviser to AARP. To help, AARP is planning to put more focus on car technology in its 37-year-old driver safety programs.

This evolution is going to accelerate in the next few years, Rife predicts, but people fear what they dont understand. And if they dont understand it, they will just avoid it.
Food and wine fans will want to travel to Chicago's Millennium Park this weekend.

Chicago Gourmet will celebrate its 9th anniversary at the premiere park on Saturday and Sunday. Considered one of the popular food events in the city, the culinary festival annually draws thousands of food and wine lovers for opportunities to sample the city's fare, take part in educational seminars and also do a bit of networking with other foodies.

The festival is presented by Bon Appetit magazine, in conjunction with the Illinois Restaurant Association. Guests may attend one day or both days to get their fill of watching celebrity chef demos, attend cookbook signings, enjoy wine seminars, taste assorted dishes and more.

"We had more than 13,500 people attend the event last year. And we're expecting that this year," said Jessica Yarbrough, executive director of Chicago Gourmet.

Yarbrough said the event has a few new features for 2016.

"This is the first time we have a host chef," she said, adding that Rick Bayless is acting as host and has curated many of the special culinary events on the program.

The theme for this year is "Food is Art: Use Your Palate," Yarbrough explained. She said with Bayless being passionate about the arts in general, in addition to his food passion, there will be many interesting seminars, demonstrations and programs at the event.

"That theme is pulled through to what's on stage (and in other areas of the fest)," she said.

The roster of celebrity chefs doing demos at the event is definitely eclectic. Among chefs making appearances, in addition to Bayless, will be Todd English, Stephanie Izard, Jose Garces, Sarah Grueneberg, Art Smith, Jeff Mauro and more.

Among other activities and events taking place in conjunction with or at Chicago Gourmet, will be The Tao of Tacos, Hamburger Hop, Late Night Gourmet, Grand Cru, Rise and Shine Gourmet and more. For prices, schedule and more information, visit chicagogourmet.org.
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I grew up in a small town (Kentland, Indiana), and upon graduation from Indiana University in Bloomington, arrived at my first job as a banker in Detroit.

Six years later, after marrying my high school sweetheart (Mary), and disenchanted with my daily cross-town commute, we moved back to Kentland and purchased my parents business.

It was during the next 20 years that I met a guy (and future boss at Nipsco, who was born in the Region), named Vic Demeyer, and he was the Nipsco manager in Kentland.

We became close friends with Vic and his bride, Karen, and it was during our frequent trips to Lake County with Vic that I began to feel the pull of the Region. It went like this: We would cross the Newton/Lake County Line and Vic would immediately start to get energized, knowing he was back in Lake County, and the fun would begin!

Having moved our family to Lake County over 22 years ago, I can attest to that pull that Vic would feel whenever he returned home, because now we feel it also.

There is no other county in Indiana that can match the Region for its rich ethnic and cultural diversity, the beauty of the Lake Michigan shoreline, the power of our industry, the magic of Chicago, and the hard-working men and women of Lake County.
At least 153 people have been killed and 133 others injured in a deadly stampede in Seoul's Itaewon district as huge crowds of partygoers, many in their 20s, converged in the enter...
CROWN POINT  An arrest warrant has been issued for Joseph Alan Prosser of Alsip, Illinois, on a felony charge of attempted murder in Saturday's stabbing of a man in Hobart.

Prosser, 40, is also charged with aggravated battery, battery committed with a deadly weapon and battery resulting in serious bodily injury in the incident. Prosser will be held on a $50,000 bond when arrested, officials said.

According to court documents, Prosser stabbed Christopher Martin repeatedly with a pocket knife about 9:30 p.m. in the 200 block of Brandt Place in Hobart. The victim was outside the home of a female friend, identified as Prossers girlfriend, and confronted Prosser about battering the woman.

When the argument became heated, Prosser began what he (the victim) thought was slapping him. However, he soon learned that the slaps actually were stab wounds, Hobart police Officer Christopher Sipes said in the affidavit.

The woman said she heard yelling outside her home, ran to the top of the stairs and saw Prosser enter her home. After telling her I stabbed him, Prosser took her car keys and drove off in her car, according to that document.

Responding officers found a folding pocket knife covered in blood in the area.

Martin was taken first to St. Mary Medical Center and then airlifted to Advocate Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, where he remains in the surgical intensive care unit. He suffered serious puncture wounds to his chest and back, had deep lacerations to his right arm and a cut on his face that bisected his lip to the bone.

Medical staff at Advocate Christ Hospital said Martin required two separate life-saving surgeries because of bleeding in his lungs.
A DeMotte man is the fourth person to be charged in connection with a Sept. 7 home invasion in southern Porter County where the homeowner was shot in the leg.

Chad Kackos, 36, was formally charged Wednesday with burglary, robbery and confinement. Joseph Potts, another suspect in the case, named Kackos as the shooter in the robbery attempt, according to court documents. Kackos was booked Tuesday morning into the Porter County Jail on Tuesday morning.

A probable cause affidavit filed Wednesday said he was part of a plan conceived by the victims girlfriend to break into a safe and steal cash from the victim.

Also charged were Andrea and Leslie Wert, both 36 and of Pleasant Township. They were booked into Porter County Jail on Friday. They were both charged with two counts of aiding in a burglary and aiding in robbery.

Joseph Potts, 32, of northern Jasper County, was arrested Tuesday morning. He is being charged with two counts of burglary, robbery and criminal confinement.

According to court documents, Andrea Wert is the girlfriend of the victim. Police say she, with the help of her twin sister, arranged the burglary.

The victim told police he fell asleep on the couch at his home in the 400 block of East County Road 1000 South on Sept. 7 and was awakened when he was hit on the head with the butt of a pistol.

He said two men wearing ski masks tried to tie his hands. As he tried to escape, he was shot in the leg.

He said the two men dragged him to his porch, tied his hands with zip ties and demanded he open a safe in his barn.

Andrea Wert told police she arrived home while the men were at the house and was grabbed by one of the men and taken to the barn.

But the victim told police the men did nothing to her and were not alarmed she was with them. The victim said when the men threatened his children he opened the safe. He told police the two men took cash out of the safe and fled in a black Chevy pickup truck.

Detectives said Andrea Wert disappeared from Sept. 10 to 12, and her twin sister, Leslie Wert, texted the victims mother that she and Andrea were with her children at a water park in Illinois.

Detectives interviewed Leslie Wert on Sept. 13. According to court documents, she told them she was at Coco Keys water park with a friend, her boyfriend and her nephews. But police said Coco Keys had been closed for more than a year.

Police learned from another relative they had gone to a Wisconsin Dells water park and met up with a friend and a man named Joe, who drove a black Chevy pickup truck.

Police learned that the friend was Joe Potts sister, who lived in northern Jasper County.

Andrea Wert told detectives Friday she had told her sister and Potts that it would be funny if someone stole her boyfriends money. She said she arranged for all of them to be out of town on Labor Day weekend to allow them to break in.

Andrea Wert told police the first attempt to take the money over Labor Day weekend failed.

She told police Joe Potts and Kackos told Andrea Wert they would just rob her boyfriend.

She said she left with their children and did not return until she thought they would be gone. According to police, she said she didnt know they were bringing guns to the robbery.

She told police she received no money from Joe Potts, but Potts gave them money at the Wisconsin Dells water park to go out and he paid cash for their hotel rooms.

Leslie Wert told police she, her sister and Potts agreed to split the money three ways.

According to court documents, Potts told police that Kackos shot the victim and that Potts received much less than half of the money stolen from the safe. He told detectives he did not argue about his share of the money because Kackos had just shot the victim.
LAPORTE  A 33-year old man is accused of having a sexual relationship with a 10-year old LaPorte girl he had been texting and communicating with on Facebook.

Initially, the suspect denied engaging in such activity with the girl, saying the alleged sexual conduct had taken place only in his dreams, according to court documents.

Joshua Morgan, of Plymouth, Indiana, is charged in LaPorte Circuit Court with seven counts of child molesting and one count of child solicitation.

According to LaPorte police, Detective Jim Ferguson was assigned the case July 20 when the girl was interviewed at the Dunebrook Child Advocacy Center near Michigan City.

A week later, pictures of the girl and requests from Morgan for her to send him videos were among the pieces of evidence forensically recovered from her cellphone and computer tablet, court documents state.

The alleged sexual encounters occurred during about a six-month period this year, police said.

The girl alleged all of the sexual activity occurred in her home, except for one encounter where they were alone in a vehicle, according to court records.

In written findings of the case submitted to the court, police said Morgan claimed he drinks heavily and could have blacked out during the times the girl alleged sexual activity had taken place.

He then admitted to one inappropriate act but said the rest either probably happened or transpired only in his dreams, police said.

When informed by investigators about the physical evidence obtained in the case, Morgan said that some of the alleged acts probably happened but he didnt remember.

It just all felt like a dream or deja vu as if it happened but it didnt happen, Morgan allegedly told police, who also stated if anything did happen, I really apologize. I dont want people to think Im a child molester, man. I really dont, but it did feel like it was real.

Morgan was being held on $100,000 bond.

If convicted, he could face anywhere from a 20- to 40-year sentence on each of the four most serious charges and two to 12 years apiece on the remaining counts.
PORTAGE  Three people were arrested Monday night after police here and in Valparaiso investigated a string of attempts to pass counterfeit $100 bills.

Jacqueline Markos, 22, of Hobart, Ronald Abrams, 32, of Chicago, and Joseph Wilson, 34, no hometown reported, were initially charged with forgery.

Police in Valparaiso reported employees at Kohls, 350 S. Silhavy Road, Shoe Carnival, 360 S. Silhavy Road, and Kirklands, 510 Porters Vale Drive, all reported a woman trying to make small purchases between 7:30 and 8 p.m. Monday with fake $100 bills.

In some of the cases, she was accompanied by a man and in others she was with a man and a woman.

Valparaiso police informed other agencies the three people were traveling in a silver Jeep and a silver Pontiac.

About 9:30 p.m., police in Portage were called to South Shore Liquors, 6548 U.S. 6, for a report of a woman attempting to pay for a six-pack of beer with a fake $100 bill.

The woman left the store, and while police were still at South Shore Liquors, an employee at Applebees, 6211 U.S. 6, reported a woman, matching the same description, placed a to-go order and tried to pay with a counterfeit $100 bill. When the bartender checked the bill and realized it was a counterfeit, the woman ran out a side door, police said.

Portage police spotted the two vehicles near Walgreens at U.S. 6 and Willowcreek Road and spoke to passengers in both vehicles.

Police said they found in one of the vehicles a receipt from Gordmans, 710 Porters Vale Drive, for a $8.55 purchase of Taylor Swift brand Wonderstruck Body Mist made with a $100 bill, in which the customer received $91.45 in change.

The three were taken to the Portage Police Department for questioning and then were booked into Porter County Jail.
CROWN POINT  Two of the three men charged with robbing and severely beating a man in New Chicago on Aug. 31 made separate formal appearances Tuesday before Lake Criminal Court Judge Salvador Vasquez.

Jacob Cortina, 20, and Dylan Michael Popelas, 20, are each charged with level 2 felony robbery resulting in serious bodily injury as well as three level 3 felonies. Both men submitted a not guilty plea.

The two are being held in Lake County Jail. Bail for each is set at $150,000 of which 10 percent cash must be posted.

Cortina, Popelas and co-defendant David A. Manier, 23, live together in the 1700 block of E. 28th Avenue in Lake Station. According to court records Popelas girlfriend, Mariah D. Sluder, 23, of Hobart, also is charged in the aug. 31 incident. She is free after posting a $3,500 bond. Manier is being held in Lake County Jail on a $150,000 bond.

Court records indicate that Cortina was out on bond in a 2015 attempted murder case when the New Chicago crime occurred.

Cortina and his defense attorney, Jamise Perkins, return to Vasquezs court on Nov. 3. Popelas, represented by defense attorney Daryl Jones, will be back in Vasquezs court Tuesday for a bond reduction hearing.

This is Cortinas second appearance in Vasquezs courtroom in less than a week.

On Sept. 15, he pleaded guilty to aggravated battery in the 2015 case. He was charged with attempted murder, a level 1 felony, and other felony counts for entering a Lake Station home, grabbing a woman from behind and stabbing her three times in the neck.

In that plea agreement, Cortina pleaded guilty to the felony level 3 count of aggravated battery. The agreement with the Lake County prosecutors office calls for Cortina to serve 12 years in the Indiana Department of Correction. He will return to Vasquezs court on Nov. 3 for sentencing in that case with defense attorney Thomas Vanes.
MICHIGAN CITY  Drug conspiracy charges have been secured against seven individuals, police announced Wednesday following a monthslong investigation into an extensive narcotics operation in and around the city's Eastport neighborhood.

The Michigan City Police Department's Street Crimes Unit in a news release announced the conclusion of the joint investigation with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The investigation began early this year after police received numerous complaints about a person  known only as "Black"  distributing heroin to LaPorte County residents.

The Street Crimes Unit eventually infiltrated Black's drug distribution operation and fount his true identity to be Gregory Brown, of Chicago, according to the news release.

Probable cause was established Sept. 14 to issue federal indictments for seven people: Brown, 35, and Eric Smith, both of Chicago; Donnie Allison, 41, Jalen Wilson, 20, Jimmy Thomas, 23, and Daniel Mallett, 31, all of Michigan City; and Terry Byrd, 33, of Chicago Heights.

Each has been charged with aiding and abetting and conspiracy to distribute more than 100 grams of heroin.

Officers sought out all those who were not yet in custody on Friday. All have been apprehended, according to police.
INDIANAPOLIS  The Republican nominee for state superintendent of public instruction is pledging to bring a new, cooperative attitude to Indiana education debates, even as she embraces many of the same policy goals as Glenda Ritz, the Democratic incumbent.

Yorktown Schools Superintendent Jennifer McCormick said Wednesday that Hoosiers want state education leadership that puts students ahead of politics and provides local schools a clear, consistent vision of what's expected from them.

"Right now we have a state superintendent who has severed a lot of relationships," McCormick said. "We need to rebuild and repair."

She said that includes relations with the Republican-controlled General Assembly and the governor's office, which repeatedly have clashed over the past four years with Ritz, the only statewide Democratic officeholder.

"I'm going to work tirelessly and professionally to make sure that we have a relationship," McCormick said. "It's too important. We need to make sure that the state superintendent has an obligation to work with the governor."

McCormick's election could finally prove whether GOP lawmakers killed Ritz's proposed education reforms simply because she is a Democrat, as many items on McCormick's "Indiana Lesson Plan" match Ritz proposals and go against recent Republican policies.

For example, McCormick wants to replace school A-F grades with a "multifaceted accountability report," because she said a single letter "doesn't give ... a true picture of what's really happening in that school or in that district."

Like Ritz, McCormick also wants shorter standardized tests that matter less in teacher evaluations and favors higher teacher pay, while GOP lawmakers have pushed to continue Indiana's high-stakes testing practices and rejected nearly all of Ritz's suggestions to reduce teacher shortages, including improved salaries.

McCormick also is less keen than most Statehouse Republicans on diverting education revenue to charter schools and private school vouchers, even as a majority of her campaign funds have originated from "school choice" organizations.

"I think we have to be careful with some of those programs and make sure we're doing our due diligence to say what is the impact on everybody who's already in the field," McCormick said.

McCormick diverges from Ritz on pre-kindergarten education, preferring to hold off on expanding Indiana's preschool pilot program statewide for a few more years while a comprehensive funding and teacher training plan is developed.

At the same time, McCormick wants to spend an estimated $10 million in new funds to install broadband internet connections in every school in the state.
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VALPARAISO  Humane Society Calumet Areas Moraine Ridge Wildlife Rehabilitation Center hosts an open house with a chance to meet wildlife and enjoy fun activities for all ages from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday at the center, 570 N. County Road 450 East.

MRWRCs open house offers the public an opportunity to learn about Indiana native wildlife and get an up-close view of the centers ambassador animals, said Stephanie Kadletz, MRWRCs director and licensed rehabilitator.

The event features hands-on kids activities, a bake sale and information about wildlife species and how to help our wild neighbors. Visitors also can meet MRWRCs educational ambassador animalsEastern Screech Owl, Red-tailed Hawk, Eastern Box Turtle, American Crow and Corn Snake.

Guests to the open house are asked to bring a supply donation from MRWRCs wish list, which can be found at www.mrwildliferehab.org/wishlist.asp, or a monetary donation to the open house. Proceeds benefit MRWRCs injured and orphaned wildlife.

For more information on the event and MRWRC, visit www.mrwildliferehab.org or call (219) 299-8027 or info@mrwildliferehab.org.
If you havent heard of the Ideal Section in Dyer, youre missing an important piece of transportation history.

It was on Sept. 12, 1910, that Carl Fisher, an Indiana entrepreneur, first shared his idea for a coast-to-coast highway across the United States. Exactly one year later, the Lincoln Highway Association published the route of the Lincoln Highway, Bruce Butgereit said Saturday at the dedication of the Ideal Section and Henry Ostermann monuments on U.S. 30 and near Meyer Castle in Dyer.

Butgereit is on the board of the Indiana Lincoln Highway Association and was the project chairman.

On September of 1920, the Lincoln Highway Association sent out 4,600 questionnaires to the best engineering brains in our country for their opinion on what would constitute the most technologically advanced road in the world, Butgereit said.

In September 1921, Lake County offered $25,000  $336,099.16 in 2016 dollars  for construction of the show road of the world, he said.

That 1.3-mile stretch of road was built to the same width and depth of modern interstate highways.

When you drive on the Ideal Section today, youre not driving on the same road surface that was built nearly a century ago. The road has been rebuilt since then. There are two other notable changes, too.

On May 13, 1921, The Lake County Times reported on the deal to build the Ideal Section in Dyer.

Practically every state in the union has attempted to obtain this ideal road, and it is a distinct compliment for Indiana and Lake County to secure the privilege. Noted, as the United States is, for its wonderful highways, this particular stretch will be the acme of perfection and from the standpoint of the tourist and will draw the attention and investigation of many foreign countries, the story said.

At the time, a 40-acre campsite was to be included along the Ideal Section for the hundreds and thousands of tourists who will without doubt flock to Lake County to view the road.

That campsite was never built, deemed by the Lincoln Highway Association to be too expensive. Meyer Castle, built by Calumet National Bank founder Joseph Meyer, was erected there instead.

But the lighting along that stretch of road was put in place, and it was impressive. Butgereit said there was a fear drivers would forget to use their headlights because the road was lighted so well.

When the Ideal Section was built, along the old Sauk Trail used by Indians long ago, it included lighting designed specifically for that stretch of highway by General Electric engineers. The Lake County Times reported on it on April 11, 1922.

The lighting unit developed is extremely simple with regard to installation cost and operation, as well as maintenance.

It embodies an entirely new principle for collecting the light rays and casting them only where needed, the story said. There is no need for lighting the vacant fields adjacent to a highway, and engineers have spent years studying methods of preventing such a waste of power.

The lights were to be put 250 feet apart, with underground wires serving each pole.

On Saturday, as vehicles whizzed by, a newly restored and enhanced monument to the Ideal Section was unveiled.

Along with it is a monument to Henry C. Ostermann, who served as field secretary to the Lincoln Highway Association.

Ostermanns background, detailed in a Dyer Historical Society pamphlet, is worth reading. In an era before child labor laws, he served as a newsboy in New York City at age 7, living in a newsboys home. He was a bellboy at a hotel at age 9, a messenger boy at age 10 and a cigar clerk at 14.

Just a month shy of his 15th birthday, on July 8, 1899, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Ostermann traveled with Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, too.

In 1906, he invented a grain door for freight cars and formed his own manufacturing company.

Ostermann was at the head of a convoy of 50 military and civilian vehicles.

Among the occupants was Lt. Col. and future President Dwight Eisenhower.

The Lake County Times told of that approaching convoy on July 15, 1919. The convoy arrived in San Francisco on Sept. 6, 1919.

Ostermann was driving on another cross-country road trip on June 8, 1920, when he lost control of his 1918 Packard and died on the Lincoln Highway he loved so much.

Famed landscape architect Jens Jensen designed a memorial to Ostermann along the Ideal Section in Dyer. The years took their toll.

Under Butgereits leadership, many groups came together to restore the Ostermann and Ideal Section monuments in Dyer. A sidewalk now makes it easy to get there, and its worth the visit. Interpretative panels have been added to tell the history of Ostermann and the Ideal Section to keep the memories alive for future generations.
Our Region abounds with social media snipers who take verbal potshots at initiatives and projects they oppose from behind the protection of computer or smartphone keypads.

Thats why were so inspired by Porter County residents, who recently rose in opposition  in person and in a very public way  to what they perceived as a bad proposed idea for local education.

Residents packed Chestertons Westchester Public Library last week, speaking at a public hearing regarding a proposed charter school in Valparaiso.

The majority of those residents argued a charter school wasnt needed in Valparaiso, which already has a thriving public school system.

We vehemently contend charter schools are a viable alternative in communities begging for competition with failing school districts. However, we also questioned the business model of a proposed charter school in Valpo, where public schools rank among the Regions and states best.

Regardless of where one stands on this particular argument, we all should be impressed with the way these Porter County residents, many of them concerned parents, conducted themselves. Rather than griping on Facebook feeds alongside like-minded naysayers, the Valparaiso residents attended the hearing en masse to voice their opposition.

In other words, they made use of a the public forum in which their voices would have the most productive impact. And they left the comfort of their homes to be part of the process.

The end result: Valparaiso charter school proponents pulled the plug on their plan, citing the strong public opposition as a key reason for doing so.

Democracy cries out for participatory government by citizens.

Its a civics lesson we all should learn as well as the Valparaiso charter school opponents practiced it.
Shame on The Times for its hypocritical editorial praising Dean White for his contributions to our community after slamming him last year in its full, front-page criticism for choosing to use his own hard-earned wealth to legally contribute to Indiana Republicans rather than local Democrats. Unlike The Times newcomers, Dean White's long, productive, generous life experiences in Indiana must have led him to these decisions. He was a wise role model. To little, too late.
I attended Valpo public schools and received an excellent education. Now my familys kids are going through the same schools  schools that have an "A" rating. They're schools we just voted to support with two new taxes.

We have excellent public schools. We want our dollars to continue to go to the schools already existing in our community. The Sept. 14 public meeting regarding a proposed Valparaiso charter school was filled with locals whose children they would be trying to lure to the school. They said, No, we don't need this."
BEIRUT  An airstrike in northern Syria killed four medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, a relief group said Wednesday, as the U.N. announced it would resume aid deliveries suspended after an attack on a convoy two days ago that killed 20 people.

The escalation of violence against humanitarian workers has all but destroyed a cease-fire that took effect on Sept. 12, and has stoked tensions between the truce's architects, the U.S. and Russia, which have traded blame for running it into the ground.

The U.N said convoys to priority areas would be resumed, with deliveries planned as early as Thursday. "Our obligation to civilians on all sides is to go where and when we can with relief," said Jan Egeland, a senior U.N. humanitarian official focused on Syria. "We hope to resume convoys tomorrow and Friday, but still work on security guarantees.

But air raids continued in other parts of Syria, with activists reporting at least 23 civilians killed in the besieged parts of Aleppo city and the nearby rebel-held Idlib province.

The attack that killed the medics took place shortly after they arrived at the scene of an airstrike in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman on Tuesday. As the medics deployed, planes circled around and struck the area again, Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said. Al-Moufti initially said that five medics were killed. The group later said two nurses and two ambulance drivers were killed, while a third nurse remains in critical condition.

Syrian government forces have been accused of carrying out "double tap" attacks throughout the 5-1/2 year war, placing paramedics and rescue workers in peril.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nine militants, some of them belonging to the Fatah al-Sham Front, an al-Qaida-linked group previously known as the Nusra Front, were also killed in the "double tap" attack.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike. Aircraft from Syria, Russia and the U.S.-led coalition are targeting the Fatah al-Sham Front, which along with the Islamic State group was excluded from the cease-fire.

The airstrike on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy Monday night prompted international condemnation over attacks targeting humanitarian facilities and workers. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the convoy strike as a "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack." The convoy was carrying U.N. aid.

The U.S. initially said it believed Russian or Syrian government jets were behind the attack on the aid convoy. But a senior U.S. official said Wednesday that Washington has determined with a very high degree of confidence that the attack was carried out by a Russian piloted aircraft.

Moscow denied that Russian or Syrian aircraft were behind the attack, saying there was a fire in the cargo. Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said a U.S. Predator drone was in the area of the convoy attack when it happened.

In New York on Tuesday, Russian and U.S. diplomats insisted that the cease-fire, which went into effect nine days ago, was not dead, despite soaring violence. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart Sergey Lavrov exchanged blame in a public session on Syria at the U.N. Security Council.

The Syrian military said the truce expired Monday night, shortly before presumed Russian or Syrian government jets launched a sustained aerial attack on Aleppo's opposition-held neighborhoods.

The cease-fire was intended in part to allow humanitarian convoys to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas throughout Syria. The U.N. estimates that some 6 million Syrians live in such areas.

On Wednesday, Syrian opposition activists said suspected government airstrikes in the northern city of Aleppo and the rebel-held Idlib province killed 23 civilians, including at least five children.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, said at least 11 civilians, including three children and three women, were killed Wednesday during air raids on several rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo.

Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in the Aleppo strikes.

In nearby Idlib, the Observatory said 12 civilians, including two children, were killed in at least eight air raids.

Elsewhere in Syria, airstrikes on the opposition-run town of Talbiseh, outside of the central city of Homs, killed two civilians and wounded tens of others, according to the activist-run Talbiseh Media Center.

The town is besieged by government forces. The Observatory said government jets subjected the town to heavy bombardment Wednesday morning.

State TV meanwhile said a Syrian warplane crashed after carrying out a combat mission against Islamic State militants northwest of the capital, Damascus. The pilot was rescued, according to an unnamed military official quoted on state TV.

The IS-affiliated news agency Aamaq said the group downed the plane in the eastern Qalamoun mountains after the aircraft carried out four raids. IS shot down a government aircraft on Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.

___

Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.
NEW YORK - As the investigation into the Chelsea bombing attack continues, federal authorities on Wednesday released a surveillance photo of two men wanted for questioning in the discovery of one of the devices.

The FBI says the two men came in contact with the second device, a pressure-cooker bomb, which was located inside a piece of luggage on the sidewalk on West 27th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues last Saturday.

The FBI has labeled the men witnesses, not suspects.

They say in addition to questioning them they would like to recover the luggage for evidence analysis.

"We're very much interested in speaking to them, finding out who they are. They are witnesses, there are no criminal charges, they're not in any jeopardy of being arrested. So if you can help us find them, or anyone else can tell us who they are. We'd be very interested to speak to them," added NYPD Counterterrorism Chief Jim Waters told reporters.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara held a news conference this afternoon updating the Chelsea bombing investigation, and how the man charged in the case will be prosecuted.

Anyone with information is being asked to contact the FBI's toll-free tipline at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324).



Meanwhile, federal charges have been filed against Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man believed to be behind this past weekend's bombings in Chelsea and New Jersey.

Rahami, 28, is being charged with several counts of using weapons of mass destruction, bombing a public place, causing destruction of property with fire or explosives and using a destructive device to cause crime and violence.

He is still recovering in a hospital in Newark, N.J.

The federal complaint says Rahami was seen on surveillance video near both spots where bombs were placed.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on Wednesday also said they have license plate readings of Rahami's car entering the city on Saturday.

Bharara is calling Saturday's attack in Chelsea a "premeditated act of terrorism".

Federal authorities say Rahami's fingerprints were found on the un-detonated pressure-cooker bomb recovered on 27th Street the night of the Chelsea bombing, which injured more than two-dozen people.



The complaint says Rahami purchased cell phones in 2015 which were used as timers for the explosives.

It says he also bought bomb components online in the months before the attack.

Investigators say the suspect allegedly kept a YouTube account in which he listed two Jihadist anthems in a list of favorite videos.

They also found a journal in which he referred to Osama Bin Laden as "brother."

The FBI has acknowledged it interviewed Rahami's father after he told authorities his son was a terrorist back in 2014.

He said his son was being violent towards their family, even stabbing his brother.

Sources say Rahami's father later recanted the tip and changed his story.

After conducting their investigation, the FBI concluded that it could find no links between Rahami and terrorism.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the father says he contacted authorities because his son was causing trouble and not because of terrorist motivations.

Mohammad Rahami, suspect's father: They checked that almost two months. They said he's OK, he's clear, he's not a terrorist. I said OK. Now they say he's a terrorist. I say OK.

Q: Why did you call the FBI two years ago?

Mohammad Rahami: He doing bad.

Q: What did he do bad?

Mohammad Rahami: He stabbed my son, he hit my wife, and I put him to jail.

Rahami was not prosecuted for the stabbing after a grand jury declined to indict him.

Two officers were injured and Rahami was hit in the leg during a shootout with New Jersey police Monday.

New Jersey prosecutors charged Rahami with attempted murder of a police officer.

Meanwhile, Muslims in New Jersey say they are concerned after the arrest of Rahami.

At the National Islamic Center in Newark, members have been volunteering their time to watch over their mosque.

While Rahami was not a member, they fear any potential retaliation.

"This guy goes out and does something crazy and all of a sudden we're walking on pins and needles and we have to be careful of what we're seeing or what we're doing and looking over our shoulders," said National Islamic Association Treasurer Mike Rahim.

"We're not like that, the religion is not preaching to hate against other people. You know there are a lot of us who practice our faith as peace," said National Islamic Association Officer Manager Debbie Rahim.

Members say they don't want people to shape their ideas of Islam because of the actions of one person.

Back in Chelsea, residents and businesses are working to get their lives back to normal in the days after the bombing.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with city and homeland security officials, toured the area Tuesday to offer support and listen to concerns from New Yorkers.

The mayor also stopped by "Visions", a support center for the blind close to where the blast occurred on 23rd Street.

Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Esposito praised the city for moving so quickly after the bombing.

"No city in this country that's more prepared to prevent or react to a terrorist attack. I think we showed that here on 23rd Street - the quick response, the way the street is back to normal two days later - it's just unbelievable," he said.

Officials say 23rd Street was completely reopened to traffic Monday night.
The arrest of Muslim man who allegedly was inspired by Islamic terrorists to set off homemade bombs in New Jersey and New York has some in the Muslim community angry and scared, especially near his New Jersey home. Our Michael Herzenberg has the story.

Mike Rahim is keeping a watchful eye on a Newark mosque, the National Islamic Association, where he is the treasurer.

Rahim and fellow congregants are worried about a backlash against Muslims after the arrest of New Jersey man who allegedly planted bombs in New York and New Jersey.

"This guy goes out and does something crazy and all of a sudden we're all walking on pins and needles," Rahim said.

The bombing Saturday night in Chelsea and the indictment against Ahmad Rahami, which claims his motivation was an Islamic Jihad has Rahim so concerned.

He thought when we drove into the parking lot we were coming to assault him.

"I'm here by myself we don't have anyone else or local police protecting us or the building," he said.

No one has come after them yet he says, and the mosque has grown to about 500 members since it was founded in the 1980s.

Debbie Rahim is the office manager.

"We're outraged too," she said.

She says she goes through a roller coaster of emotions each time someone tries to kill in the name of her religion.

"Every time you hear something like this you're like 'Please don't let this be a Muslim,'" she said.

She says the world should know her religion is about peace and making the world a better place.

Members hold their annual day of dignity in less than a month. They provide services for the neighborhood. Including school supplies for kids, health and dental checks.

It's proof they say of their desire to embrace the community in a time when they increasingly worry about physical and political retribution.

"For most of us there's no reason for police to patrol our masjid just to keep security," said Debbie Rahim. "You know I hear this on the news, You know, Donald Trump saying, 'Oh yeah, they should be in the masjid patrolling and keeping watch.' It's not going to be a comfortable situation it's just going to make things worse.

They also address the issue of radicalization saying the Muslim community here is primarily an immigrant community and that they do what they can to embrace newcomers. They worry that those who turn violent do so because of their own issues and then use Islam to justify it.
She has carved out a huge role on the nations highest court, even earning a nickname after a rapper. Now we're learning more about what Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks of her two decades on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Justice spoke about her career during an event at Fordham Law School Tuesday. She also gave her opinion on the current Supreme Court vacancy.

The Senate has refused to act on President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland for months.

"I think everyone would agree, for a collegial body eight is not a good number," she said. "You need an odd number and all of us hope by the end of the current term we will have a full house."

She did not weigh in on the presidential race though.

Earlier this year the Justice was the center of controversy for criticizing Donald Trump, but later apologized.
A mother fights for a better life for her son, who has cerebral palsy, in Speechless, starring Minnie Driver and Micah Fowler. Clayne Crawford and Damon Wayans play unlikely perfect partners in Lethal Weapon. And Kiefer Sutherland suddenly finds himself president of the United States in Designated Survivor.

Whats on TV

SPEECHLESS 8:30 p.m. on ABC. Minnie Driver plays Maya DiMeo, a warrior mother whose desire to make life perfect for her oldest son, J. J. (Micah Fowler)  who has cerebral palsy, cant speak and uses an alternative communication device to express himself  causes her to sometimes overlook the needs of her other children (Mason Cook and Kyla Kenedy) and husband (John Ross Bowie). J. J. connects with Kenneth (Cedric Yarbrough), the school groundskeeper, and asks him to become his caregiver, and give him a voice. That J. J., at times sarcastic, devious and rude, is a flawed kid with a flawed family in a reasonably funny sitcom is what makes Speechless good, rather than simply worthy, James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times.

LETHAL WEAPON 8 p.m. on Fox. After the death of his wife and unborn child, Martin Riggs (Clayne Crawford), a former member of the Navy SEALs, tries to rebuild his life by taking a job with the Los Angeles Police Department. Hes partnered with Roger Murtaugh (Damon Wayans), a by-the-book type; Riggs dives right in. Its a combination that could work, if it doesnt get them killed first. Their chemistry isnt instantaneous, but by the end of the premiere you can at least see potential there, Neil Genzlinger wrote in The Times.
Orlando, Florida - 21 September 2016 SOUNDBITE (English) Hillary Clinton, (D) Presidential Nominee: Today I want to focus on one area that hasnt gotten enough attention. It concerns a group of Americans who are too often invisible, overlooked and undervalued, who have so much to offer but are given too few chances to prove it. Now thats been true for a long time and we have to change it. Im talking about people with disabilities. Men and women, boys and girls who have talents, skills, ideas and dreams for themselves and their families just like anybody else. Whether they can participate in our economy and lead rich full lives that are as healthy and productive as possible is a reflection on us as a country and right now in too many ways we are falling short. // Just last year a young woman named Leah Katz-Hernandez became the first West Wing receptionist who is deaf. So when world leaders come to the White House the person who greets them is Leah. Think of the message that sends about how our nation sees the talent in everyone. And Americans with disabilities are working on presidential campaigns. I know because several of my staff and advisers have disabilities and theyre doing phenomenal work. Im grateful for them every single day. // People with physical and intellectual disabilities are people still subjected to stigma and discrimination every single day. Weve got to build an inclusive economy that welcomes people with disabilities, values their work, treats them with respect. One advocate after another has told me the same thing: we dont want pity, we want paychecks, we want the chance to contribute. // This issue is very close to my heart. Ive always believed that the ultimate test of our society is more than the size of our economy or the strength of our military. Its how we treat our fellow human beings, especially the most vulnerable among us and on this front especially, I intend for my presidency to move our country forward. Together we will make our economy and our country more welcoming to people with disabilities because we all win when everyone gets to share in the American dream.
In the realm of international trade, it is a truism seemingly as consistent as gravity: Jobs and investment flow from north to south, while manufactured goods travel the other way around. Factories in the United States and Canada shutter as work shifts to Mexico and Central America, where human hands do it more cheaply.

So the established order of trade was by all appearances turned upside down on Tuesday, as General Motors agreed to cease manufacturing an automobile engine at a factory in Mexico while moving jobs to a plant in Canada.

One might reflexively assume that this turn effectively validates a central promise made repeatedly by Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential aspirant. Loudly and frequently, Mr. Trump has vowed to yank jobs back to America from Mexico, using shame, executive fiat and his uniquely Trumpian form of threats to make it happen. Here was apparent proof that such a goal was doable.

Except life turns out to be more complicated than that.

The General Motors deal does indeed signal that work can today wind up transferred seemingly anywhere  never mind the well-pounded pathway of north to south. In an era of increasingly sophisticated manufacturing that relies more on computers and robotics than low-wage hands, centers of innovation like Canada and the United States will exert a greater pull than before.
And she made a recipe from Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking that she had never seen before: La Tentation de Bramafam, a fluffy eggplant-walnut dip with a clear connection to dishes like baba ghanouj.  It is tasty, absurdly easy, and must have been somehow slipped past La Super-Francaise, as it contains raw ginger and hot sauce, two of the least-French ingredients imaginable. (Julias writing is so delicious!)

So start with that, and see where it takes you. Or if you want to partake of our Wednesday tradition of cooking without proper recipes, you could join us for some barbecued salmon.

My fridge has all kinds of barbecue sauce left over from various experiments conducted over the course of the last few weekends. Yours may as well, or maybe you have a half-jar of the store-bought kind. Check: You probably do. Now either get some fresh hot cherry peppers from the market or, if youre jammed for time, a jar of the pickled sort. If you have fresh, roast four or five of them into soft compliance in the oven and cut them into your barbecue sauce and heat it all through on the stove, with a few pats of butter just because. And if you dont, just mince the pickled version and add it to the sauce, also with a few pats of butter just because.

Meanwhile, heat your oven to 400. Take some salmon fillets and put them on a lightly oiled, foil-covered sheet pan. Salt-and-pepper them and put them into the oven for 10 or 12 minutes, or until they are just barely cooked through. Spoon that pepper-studded barbecue sauce over the top and go to!

Want an actual recipe? Heres one for shrimp scampi from Melissa Clark. Heres another, for curried tofu with soy sauce. Heres a third, for a spinach and bacon tartine. And shouldnt you be doing something about all those zucchini your neighbor left on the porch? Melissas recipe for an olive oil zucchini bread abides like the Dude. (As does, by the way, Julias recipe for zucchini carpaccio.)
A withered, elderly Pakistani man with watery blue eyes and a snow-cone turban leaned on another pilgrims shoulder for support, so he would not be pulled into the crowd. He chanted prayers in a high, sweet voice. I walked beside them until we were separated in the crowd. Somebodys mobile phone pealed. Some read prayer books as they walked. One elderly man fainted, and the crowd cleared as he was carried away.

My brother, who made the hajj in 2012, was right: It felt as if I was being carried on a sea of humanity. I leaned on others, and a young woman leaned on me, holding my back as she walked through a tight crowd. I took her hand and kissed it, a sign of affection and humility, before she melted into the crowd again. I began sidestepping women wearing long robes that trailed on the ground; if I stepped on a hem, someone could trip and set off a human pileup.

An elderly woman put her hand on my shoulder. Worried she was about to fall, I put my hand on hers to steady her. She kissed my hand in thanks and then disappeared.

So did my iPhone, which must have slipped from my hand. Whoever picked it up will see on the camera app a man who held his toddler as he walked. She had large black eyes, and the pilgrims who passed her reached out to touch her hand and pinch her cheek.

They will see an African lady who balanced a bottle of water on her head. They will see close-ups of hands clutching each other, and thousands of feet, walking. They will see me raising my phone high, showing the crowd behind me, and a man waving into the camera. They will see me saying into the phone that I hope to return on hajj with my mother and sisters. Maybe they will even catch the pedantic Egyptian who ordered me to roll down my sleeves.
Steps away from the site where a Dumpster was blasted into the air, the owner of King David Gallery on West 23rd Street took his first look at the shattered glass covering his windowless store in Manhattan on Tuesday morning.

The owner, Daniel Peretz, watched as his employees swept up the debris surrounding at least a dozen broken mirrors  some worth nearly $3,000  that he would no longer be able to sell. One of the mirrors was smeared with blood.

Some might perceive a roomful of broken mirrors as an unlucky omen. But Mr. Peretz disagreed. Because the explosion took place on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, the store was closed, and none of the employees were exposed to the blast. They were lucky, the owner said.

God was watching us, Mr. Peretz said. Theres no question about it.

For the first time since Saturday night, daily life returned to 23rd Street, which was reopened to traffic the night before. Businesses reopened, construction workers began repairing damaged storefronts, and residents felt free to walk around without police escorts.


Federal authorities in Manhattan and New Jersey charged Ahmad Khan Rahami with several crimes late Tuesday, including the use of weapons of mass destruction and bombing a place of public use. A federal complaint roughly laid out the method the authorities believe Mr. Rahami used to compile the materials for bombs and then place them in New Jersey and New York.

Here are some details from the document:

Cellphone Video

Two days before the bombing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Mr. Rahami was filmed igniting a device in the backyard of his home in Elizabeth, N.J. Federal investigators said the video shows Mr. Rahami in his backyard, lighting the fuse of a small cylindrical object in the ground followed by a loud noise and flames, smoke and laughter.

Making the Bombs

Investigators believe Mr. Rahami bought some of the materials he used to make bombs on eBay between June 20 and Aug. 10 under the name ahmad rahimi.

On July 12, that user bought an electric igniter for a fireworks system. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that an analysis of the 27th Street bomb identified numerous electric igniters inside.
In Russias parliamentary election on Sunday, Vladimir Putins party won three-quarters of the seats outright in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, and the rest indirectly, through parties loyal to him. It apparently did so without many voting irregularities, and despite a sluggish economy, sanctions imposed by the West and unrest in some quarters over the governments crackdown on civil liberties. What gives?

What gives is the sorry degree to which Mr. Putin and his Kremlin cronies have consolidated full control over Russian politics. Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia appears to have returned full circle to a pseudo-parliament whose only function is to give a semblance of legitimacy to an authoritarian ruler. The post-Soviet Russian Constitution already granted more powers to the president and cabinet than to the legislature, but at least the Duma was a platform for the opposition to question and criticize Kremlin policies. Now even this function is effectively gone.

Its true that after almost 17 years in power as president or prime minister, Mr. Putin enjoys an astounding approval rating hovering around 80 percent  founded in part on his demagogic claims to be standing up to a United States that he accuses of engineering all Russias woes and thus restoring Russias imperial greatness.
Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C.  nobodys idea of progressive forces, usually  are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, theres a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clintons peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer lefts Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as irredeemable before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the lefts cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion  which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the countrys government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trumps act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, hes occupying a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock. (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to upend the culture  but in this case its the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.
The true measure of any society is how we take care of our children. With all of our countrys resources, no child should ever have to grow up in poverty. Yet every single night, all across America, kids go to sleep hungry or without a place to call home.

We have to do better. Advocating for children and families has been the cause of my life, starting with my first job as a young attorney at the Childrens Defense Fund, and if I have the honor of serving as president, it will be the driving mission of my administration.

The good news is that were making progress, thanks to the hard work of the American people and President Obama. The global poverty rate has been cut in half in recent decades. In the United States, a new report from the Census Bureau found that there were 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty in 2015 than just a year before.

Median incomes rose by 5.2 percent, the fastest growth on record. Households at all income levels saw gains, with the largest going to those struggling the most. The census report makes clear that when hard-working Americans get a small boost  like food stamps and health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act  they can climb out of poverty.
As an investor, one who has been entrusted with helping to safeguard other peoples money over many years, I value the high degree of disclosure required from American public companies. Corporations and the world in which they operate change every day, so investors need to know the risks their money faces.

No area of business demonstrates the need for full disclosure as much as one that has been in the news a lot lately: large American companies shifting profits overseas to minimize tax bills, or to avoid taxes altogether. These schemes are starting to attract the attention of regulators and governments who view them more as tax dodges than as legitimate financial arrangements.

Given the risks, the last thing investors need is less disclosure. But the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency responsible to ensure that companies are being open and honest, is considering exactly that: scaling back the information available to the public.

Earlier this year, the S.E.C. published 340 questions seeking feedback about what companies should be required to disclose to investors as part of the agencys Disclosure Effectiveness Initiative  a process that was started following comments by the S.E.C. chairwoman, Mary Jo White. She warned of information overload, which made it difficult for an investor to wade through the volume of information she receives to ferret out the information that is most relevant.
All major party nominees for president going back nearly 40 years have released their tax returns except Donald Trump. That leads to a simple question: What is he hiding?

Mr. Trumps principal argument for why he should lead the country is that he is a successful businessman and billionaire. According to him, he alone has the negotiating chops necessary to boost the economy and bring foreign adversaries to their knees. Yet, he refuses to tell voters how he comes by his money, how much he actually has and what he does with it.

It is odd that Mr. Trump, who demanded proof on paper that President Obama was born in the United States, would expect voters to take on faith his own claims about his commercial successes, his dealings with business partners, what he gives to charity and other financial matters that could conflict with his duties if elected president. His tax returns are the only documents that can conclusively corroborate or disprove his claims and allay concerns about conflicts of interest.

Mr. Trump has offered nothing but fallacious excuses for keeping his returns secret. Initially, he said he would not release returns until the Internal Revenue Service completed an ongoing audit; the agency said theres no rule stopping disclosure during an audit. Recently, one of his sons said the returns are so long and complex that people would ask too many questions if they were allowed to see them. None of these claims make sense. Here are some plausible explanations for Mr. Trumps refusal:

He earns very little money or uses loopholes and tax shelters and, as a result, pays little or no tax. Many voters were shocked when Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, disclosed that he paid an average of just 14 percent of his income in taxes. Mr. Trump might pay even less, perhaps even zero. Real estate developers like Mr. Trump can take advantage of numerous deductions, credits and other tax loopholes that allow them to minimize how much tax they owe. In fact, Mr. Trump has boasted about avoiding taxes, telling George Stephanopoulos of ABC in May, I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.
Clinton still has time to address her judgment and credibility issues and earn votes of people like himself, Gates said. As for Trump, he said, on national security, I believe [he] is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.

I admire Gates for speaking out. Not enough attention has been paid to the national security implications of a Trump presidency.

Im certain youd see U.S. military officers and government officials quitting if Trump ordered them to torture captured terrorists, go house to house to evict illegal immigrants, start trade wars with China and Mexico or ban Muslims. Trump the chaos primary candidate became the chaos presidential nominee, and you can bet hed be a chaos president.

Being unpredictable as a leader is fine, if you know where youre going and it is a tool to get you there by keeping foes off balance. But being unpredictable because you have no discipline; because you think issues like ISIS are just a manhood test; because you have not studied the issues so anything can come out of your mouth; and because you dont realize that when we tell countries like Japan or South Korea or our NATO allies that we might not protect them from Russia or China, they will go get their own nukes and make the world even less stable  well, that kind of unpredictability is how alliances get broken, messes get made and wars get started.
Kim Thome

If he werent a designer, Norway-born Kim Thome, 35, might find work as a magician, given how often his creations weave optical illusions. For an installation last year, he placed his large geometric-patterned pedestals within a Louis XIV-style interior, a play on Versailless Hall of Mirrors. Play being the operative word here. Even Thomes most functional furniture and objects entertain with bold patterns and color. I stay playful for as long as I can before an object needs to become something, he says. Every designer relies on imagination, but Thomes creativity is particularly resourceful. Consider his range of pigmented furniture colored by ink powder from discarded printer cartridges, which was recently installed in an employee common area at Bloombergs European headquarters in London. It seems I have become known for using bright colors and patterns, but this hasnt been a conscious decision, says the Royal Academy of Art graduate, who does not subscribe to any particular philosophy, other than being more inspired by art than design. I dont think too hard about my aesthetic.
DIGITAL SECURITY The vehicles should be engineered with safeguards to prevent online attacks. Automakers should record all programming decisions and testing around security and share that information with others in the industry.

HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACE Carmakers must show how their vehicles can safely switch between autopilot and human control. Human drivers should be able to easily find basic information about issues such as when automated driving is not available. Automakers should also consider ways to communicate to pedestrians and other cars when the car is in autopilot mode. Fully autonomous vehicle controls should be designed for people with disabilities.

CRASHWORTHINESS Driverless cars must meet the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations regular standards for crashworthiness, or prove that the vehicles are built to best protect occupants in a crash. If an autonomous vehicle crashes, the crash damage should not be any different from the damage to any other car of the same type.

CONSUMER EDUCATION Automakers must train their sales representatives and other staff members on how autopilot works so they can educate car dealers and distributors. The carmakers and sellers should also provide consumers with training on the capabilities and limitations of autonomous vehicles and on emergency fallback scenarios.

CERTIFICATION Any software updates or new driverless features must be submitted to the N.H.T.S.A.

POST-CRASH BEHAVIOR Automakers should prove their cars are safe to use again after a crash. For example, a car should not be able to go into driverless mode unless damaged sensors or critical safety control systems have been repaired.
CHICAGO  This city, reeling from a rising toll of gun violence, may soon hire hundreds of additional police officers  more than 500 of them.

Superintendent Eddie Johnson of the Chicago police is expected to announce plans for a significant increase in officers during a news conference on Wednesday afternoon at Police Headquarters, a spokesman said late Tuesday. Officials would not provide specific numbers or details, but said that the new hires would be over and above the current force, not a replacement for retiring officers or unfilled positions.

Chicagos Police Department is the second-largest municipal force in the nation, with more than 12,000 officers, but Mayor Rahm Emanuel has faced intensifying criticism over the citys handling of violence as the death toll has mounted. New York, which has more police officers, has seen homicides decrease in recent years. Mr. Emanuel is scheduled to present an address on Thursday regarding his plans for public safety here.

Already this year, more than 500 people have been killed in Chicago  more than in all of last year in this city and more than Los Angeles and New York combined have experienced this year. The uptick in violence, particularly in neighborhoods on the citys South and West Sides, has left many questioning the effectiveness of the Police Department in closing cases or slowing the violence.
The family of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man whose fatal confrontation with the Tulsa, Okla., police was recorded on video, said Tuesday that Mr. Crutcher had posed no threat and that his hands were in the air when he was shot.

We watch the video and its clear to see that Terence did not have a weapon in his hand, a lawyer for the family, Damario Solomon-Simmons, said at a news conference Tuesday. Its clear to see that Terence was not being belligerent. 

The shooting, the family and its lawyers said, was a clear case of excessive force.

Mr. Crutcher, 40, was killed Friday evening on a Tulsa street by an officer identified as Betty Jo Shelby, a five-year veteran of the citys Police Department. Officer Shelby, who is white, was responding to reports of a tan S.U.V. abandoned in the middle of the road  its motor running, the drivers door open and the driver nowhere in sight.

The familys news conference came as the Tulsa police promised a thorough investigation and as a lawyer for Officer Shelby, Scott Wood, defended her actions. The case is the latest in a series of deaths across the country at the hands of the police that have raised questions about officers use of force, particularly against African-American men.
Allister Sparks, a prominent South African journalist who challenged apartheid and exposed a covert propaganda campaign by his government, leading to the presidents downfall, died on Monday in Johannesburg. He was 83.

The cause was heart failure after an infection, his son Michael said.

Mr. Sparks was the crusading editor of The Rand Daily Mail, the major voice of liberal opposition to the white Pretoria government and a champion of majority rule, when he revealed that the apartheid opponent Steve Biko had been beaten to death by the police in 1977.

His paper later exposed a secret offensive by the authorities against the mainstream news media in which a slush fund was used to establish a government-friendly newspaper, The Citizen, to counter The Rand Daily Mail and to buy stakes in other publications. That revelation led to the resignation of President John Vorster in 1979.

In 1981, with The Rand Daily Mail ailing financially, the owners fired Mr. Sparks as part of an effort, he said, to lower the papers voice and to shift the emphasis more toward white readers and less toward black readers. The newspaper went out of business in 1985.
GENEVA  I could be your child; I beg you, save me, the 16-year-old pleaded to police officers in Burundi. Seconds later, an officer put two bullets in his head.

The killing of the teenager, Jean Nepo, during an antigovernment protest on the streets of Bujumbura, the capital, was one of hundreds of summary killings cited by United Nations investigators in a report issued on Tuesday. The report documented serious abuses during the last 18 months that could amount to crimes against humanity.

The responsibility for the vast majority of these violations should be laid at the door of the government, the investigators wrote, urging international action to contain a crisis they said threatened the peace and security of the surrounding region in Central Africa.

The report documented 564 summary killings in Burundi from April 2015 to the end of August, but the reports three authors wrote that this is clearly a conservative estimate. Their inquiry began in December and included two visits to Burundi.
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo  The bodies were still smoking Tuesday morning, hours after the sun had risen and the killers had driven off.

They were charred beyond recognition, arms held up in agony, every piece of skin burned away.

It was the government who did this, said Felix Tshisekedi, the son of one of Congos most popular opposition figures. I have no doubt.

Image The headquarters of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, an opposition party, in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, on Tuesday after it was attacked. Credit... Junior D. Kannah/Agence France-Presse  Getty Images

A dirty war is shaping up on the streets of Kinshasa, Congos capital. In the past two days, at least 25 people from opposing sides of the political divide have been killed by machetes, gunshots, grenades or fire. The burst of violence has paralyzed one of Africas biggest cities and could be a harbinger of more bloodshed to come.
Canada has agreed to negotiate a bilateral extradition treaty with China, breaking with a longstanding opposition over concerns about Chinas lack of due process and other human rights violations, according to a joint communique quietly posted on the website of the Canadian prime ministers office.

The announcement, which has prompted criticism by human rights advocates, came a day before Beijing deported a Canadian missionary, Kevin Garratt, who had been detained in China on espionage charges for more than two years. The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week denied that it had made any concessions for Mr. Garratts release, though the timing has led many to believe the deportation was part of a deal that will also grant the Chinese authorities an official role in identifying Chinese nationals who entered Canada illegally.

China has long wanted bilateral extradition treaties with Western nations that it claims have become havens for corrupt officials who have fled. Beijing has increased diplomatic pressure in recent years amid a series of anti-corruption campaigns led by President Xi Jinping, which critics say are more about settling political scores and bolstering public loyalty for the governing Communist Party than ending endemic graft.

The United States, Britain and New Zealand have refused to negotiate such treaties, and Australia has not ratified one that it signed with China in 2007, largely over concerns including the systemic use of torture to extract confessions, show trials and the imposition of the death penalty for noncapital crimes.
SAO PAULO  The judge overseeing the investigation into the colossal scandal around Brazils national oil company accepted corruption charges on Tuesday against the nations former president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, setting the stage for a trial of one of Latin Americas most influential political figures.

The decision, by Judge Sergio Moro in Curitiba, adds to the problems of Mr. da Silva, 70, who was president from 2003 to 2010. Plagued by scandals, his leftist Workers Party lost the presidency in August when the Senate impeached Mr. da Silvas handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, in a power struggle that has consumed the political establishment.

The move to put Mr. da Silva on trial comes amid a national debate over whether prosecutors are overreaching in their efforts to ensnare him. Delton Dallagnol, a prosecutor in the case, last week called Mr. da Silva the ultimate commander of bribery and kickback schemes aimed at maintaining his partys grip on the presidency, but failed to offer hard evidence of his claim.

Judge Moro seemed to nod at those concerns, cautioning that his decision to put the former president on trial was not the equivalent of a conclusive ruling. Mr. da Silva has lashed out at Judge Moro for releasing intercepts of his private telephone conversations, arguing that the move reflected bias and efforts to prevent him from running again for the presidency.
In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, the king called the elections a sign of Jordans growing democracy. It is one more step in our countrys positive, evolutionary path, he said, a path to which we have insistently conformed, despite regional turbulence and a massive refugee burden.

Jordan sits at the crossroads of chaos, uncomfortably close to the wars in Syria and Iraq. With 650,000 Syrian refugees registered and more unregistered, Jordan has been overrun by the flight from civil war and terrorism. Maintaining stability in Jordan is a top American priority in the region and the United States is providing $1.6 billion this year to help it cope with the crisis, making it one of the top recipients of foreign aid.

Apathy and cynicism marked the balloting on Tuesday. At polling places, there was a lot of politicking but few voters. Youngsters in colored vests handing out fliers vastly outnumbered actual voters as candidates searched for hands to shake. By days end, turnout was reported to be 37 percent.

Emerging from a womens school with her index finger painted blue to show she had voted, Rasha Sharayha, 30, an accountant, said she was wary of the Muslim Brotherhood. Theyre too extreme, she said. Religion in general, too much of it is extreme.

But Nermine Nashashib, 53, said she voted for the Brotherhood candidates because they understand everyday people.

A lot of the people in the Muslim Brotherhood, they had to work hard to get to where they are  they still have to, she said. Theyre not very rich like some of these politicians who dont know about the struggles of the people, so they reflect the people better.

Mr. Sukkar, the party leader, said Jordans version of the Brotherhood differs from the one ousted in Cairo. In Egypt, they were forced in a way to fail, he said. There is pressure internationally and regionally for Jordan to fight the Muslim Brotherhood, but the government knows the reality of the Jordan context and the positive historical role it has played in Jordan.
Youre talking about the layout of the building, the ways you move through it?

I think about the building in three parts. There are the historical galleries, which make a kind of crypt, in an underground space. Then a second part deals with migration from the South to urban centers and the beginning of the professional classes. I wanted the journey from that crypt up into the corona to be analogous to history, as a kind of migratory process, toward the light. Then you go up to the uppermost level; I call it Now. Its about the arts. So this tripartite structure relates to the coronas three tiers. Its meant to suggest the link between symbolic form and the museums content.

You also orchestrate views, through the facade, with cutouts, and through windows in the galleries, onto the National Mall.

Youre looking at the Jefferson Memorial, youre looking at the Washington Monument, youre looking at the Lincoln Memorial. Youre looking at Congress. Youre looking at the National Archives and the White House. History is played out in front of your eyes.

And you wanted all this to be visible from within, as you move through the museum.

From within, yeah, through what can sometimes look like strange apertures on the outside. People say to me, Is that your idea of stylish architecture? This is not a project about intuitive whimsy. Everything here is driven by research, which creates its own kind of poetry, I hope. Most museums on the Mall are closed to the outside in the sense that they take you to another world. They function a bit like cinema: You go into a different world and then you come back out. I didnt want that. The experience of being black is not a fiction. Theres something important about always coming back to the light of day.

The ground floor is basically a transparent container, a sort of Miesian glass box, open all around, letting light in. Outside the entrance facing the Mall theres a water feature, which you cross, making a kind of symbolic passage, to a porch, beneath the bronzed facade, that I gather alludes to the Southern tradition of porches.

Its a building that I was clear from the start was not going to be white marble. It needed to speak a different language. Bronze is a material for both memorials and monuments. I thought bronze was perfect for the panels on the outside. The thing is that the Smithsonian has this extraordinary thing of wanting its buildings to be guaranteed for 50 years. You could make a bronze building cost-effective, but the problem was that we couldnt get anyone to guarantee it would have no problems for 50 years. Bronze was not a price issue. The problem was that the weight of bronze is onerous. This is a mechanically fixed system: trusses support these things, and they all have mechanical fixings. It was the potential failure of the fixings that posed the challenge. You have to be able to access any of those panels, meaning you have to be able to get to each panel, be able to take it off and not disrupt the functionality of the building or its safety. Aluminum solved the problem. With these panels, four men can basically unbolt a panel and take it off.
For an artist obsessed for nearly half a century with the concepts of maintenance and sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles keeps an office in desperate need of a cleaning. Or maybe an intervention by a department of doctoral students.

This stuff needs to go into an archive, because its getting insane, she said one August morning, surveying shelves groaning with piles of paper, file boxes, photographs, videotapes, rolls of film and other testaments to one of the more unlikely, and underappreciated, careers in the postwar New York art world.

The office, on Beaver Street in Lower Manhattan, deep within the headquarters of the New York Department of Sanitation  where she has been an unsalaried artist in residence since not long after she proposed the idea to the city agency in 1976  was the site that morning of feverish preparations for the first comprehensive retrospective of Ms. Ukeless work, which has just opened at the Queens Museum.
Over a thousand archaeologists, anthropologists, curators, museum officials and academics have added their names and voices to the protest against an oil pipeline being built in North Dakota.

In a letter released on Wednesday, 1,281 people have signed on to an appeal to President Obama, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers, asking for further study of land involved in the pipeline project, around the Missouri River near the border of South Dakota.

Development of the area has been contested by Native American tribes like the Standing Rock Sioux, who contend that the land and water crossings are sacred space, used for burials and containing historically and culturally vital information about their origins.

Its smack-dab practically in the center of our ancestral homelands, Kelly Morgan, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux and its tribal archaeologist, said. Construction of the pipeline on private land has already wiped out some stones and markers that the Standing Rock Sioux considered valuable, they say, a development that helped spur the letter campaign.
Churchill hoped that the Second Boer War would finally do the trick. It did, and how. While on a scouting expedition on an armored train, he and scores of British soldiers were shelled by pom-poms, vicious weapons with a deceptively quaint nickname. His army instincts took over, and it was in large part because of his courageous efforts  and a dash of MacGyver ingenuity  that anyone on the train came back.

The bad news: Churchill was captured. The good news: Everyone in England knew about his bravery. The headlines were the stuff of his dreams. MR. CHURCHILLS HEROISM screamed The Yorkshire Evening Post.

This part of the book  where the train derails  is the only part where the narrative derails, too. (The logistics of this particular skirmish? A bit of a bore. Or rather, too minutely conveyed. Theyre hard to follow.)

Soldier through. The rest of Ms. Millards book  about Churchills time as a prisoner of war, his audacious escape, the outcome of the conflict  are as involving as a popcorn thriller. Ms. Millard does an excellent job conveying the drama of confinement, both inside the prison and out. Being on the run meant hiding in many dark, dank, undignified spaces. It meant tolerating uncertainty, which Churchill hated. It meant being powerless, utterly dependent on the mercy of strangers, and he hated that, too. It had been hard enough, she writes, to take orders from his superiors while he was in the army.

Ms. Millard also shows, as she has in her previous work, that she has a great ear for quotes  an underrated virtue in writers of history. (Favorite example: The British ambassador to Berlin wrote that Churchills mother had more of the panther than of the woman in her look.) Her eye for detail is equally good. With just a few key images, she conveys how the most formidable empire on the planet could be so discomfited by an unpolished, seemingly ragtag army of Boers: At most, British soldiers spent two months of the year actually training to fight, she writes. The other 10 were devoted to parading, attending to their uniforms and waiting on their officers.

It didnt help matters that the British soldiers brought heaps of amenities into the field, which required many mules and oxen to lug. They were the hopeless dowager aunt who brings way too much luggage on holiday.

But the real example of profligacy in this story may be young Churchills ego. Its not a surprise, exactly. Whats striking is the high volume of evidence Ms. Millard has compiled to show how unswervingly he believed in his own majestic destiny more than 40 years before he fulfilled it, and how early this belief began to appear, like the first visible outlines on a Polaroid.
The Justice Department, which is suing Anthem and Cigna to block their $48 billion deal, revealed on Wednesday in court documents that the two health insurers have been accusing each other of breaching their merger agreement.

On Aug. 16, Cignas counsel told the courts special master that the insurers in-house lawyers had been exchanging letters accusing each other of breaching the merger agreement, according to a filing Wednesday in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The government has asked the two companies to produce documents that discuss any breaches but both objected, saying their correspondence is privileged. On Wednesday, the government asked the court to compel them to turn over the correspondence.

United States Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced in July that the government had filed lawsuits to block not just the deal between Cigna and Anthem, but also one between Aetna and Humana. The transactions would condense the five biggest American health insurers to three, which the government has argued is noncompetitive.

Even before the lawsuit, Cigna and Anthem appeared reluctant to close their deal. In May, a series of letters reported by The Wall Street Journal revealed brewing hostilities between the two, including Cignas tendency to miss deadlines and submit paperwork in the wrong format during the antitrust review process.
The income gap doesnt just apply to people  it applies to states, as well.

American corporate might is increasingly concentrated in just four states: California, Massachusetts, New York and Texas.

In fact, California alone accounts for a fifth of public companies in the United States, despite having only 12 percent of the population. By contrast, states like Illinois and Ohio are home to a shrinking proportion of public companies, according to analysis by the Deal Professor.

The change reflects a shift toward the technology and biotechnology industries.

There does not seem to be a special template, though, for making a state attractive  it just seems to be winner takes all.

The concentration needs to be studied further but, in the meantime, the West Coast is likely to strengthen its pull, especially on lawyers and bankers.
SAN FRANCISCO  The increasing digitization of finance, and the move away from cash, could add 6 percent to the annual economic output of the worlds developing nations over the next 10 years, according to a new report from the McKinsey consulting firms research arm.

The report, released on Wednesday, says that developing nations  and to a lesser extent developed economies like the United States  lose enormous amounts of economic potential from the continuing reliance on cash and the difficulty many businesses and individuals encounter when trying to gain access to the financial system.

The mobile phone, however, has provided a new and cheaper way to provide basic financial services to nearly everyone in the developing world.

The 124-page report from the McKinsey Global Institute says that 80 percent of the people in the developing world currently have mobile phones, and by 2020 that will rise to 90 percent.
The big I.P.O. is shining a light on the practice, called cornerstone investing, of inviting big investors to buy up large chunks of shares before a company goes public. Though it is less common in other markets, it has been increasingly used by Chinese state firms going public in Hong Kong, where government-controlled companies purchase growing numbers of shares to ensure a smooth offering.

Banks tend to go along with the practice because it helps get deals done, but it has come under criticism in the past because it can give plugged-in investors preferential access to new offerings.

Postal Savings Bank declined to comment.

On the face of it, the I.P.O. recalls a period a decade ago, when an initial wave of offerings by Chinas biggest state banks on overseas stock markets resulted in megalistings attracting eager investors among foreign funds and Wall Street banks.

Optimism about Chinas banks soared with the countrys double-digit economic growth rates, and lenders like the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Bank of China surpassed traditional names like Citigroup and Bank of America to become the biggest banks in the world by market value.

That enthusiasm has been replaced by an increasing wariness of problems with Chinas traditional growth model, which relied heavily on state-directed investment to support economic growth. That led to mountains of debt and rampant industrial overcapacity in areas like mining, steel making and other manufacturing businesses.
Some sales have returned, but more slowly than investors expected, and shares have fallen 45 percent in the last year. Even Steve Ells, the companys founder and co-chief executive, said he thought the company would rebound faster.

Yet Mr. Ells also noted that Chipotle was in uncharted waters.

No one has ever had this kind of a food safety crisis in the era of social media, Mr. Ells said.

Jack In The Box, a burger chain where more than 700 people got sick in 1993 after eating E. coli-contaminated meat, never had to deal with Facebook and Twitter, he said.

Chipotles problems began in August 2015, when more than 200 people were sickened with norovirus after eating at one of its restaurants in Simi Valley, Calif. The same month, 64 people who ate at one of 22 Chipotle restaurants in Minnesota and Wisconsin got salmonella poisoning.

But it wasnt until November, when the company announced it had closed a string of stores across the Pacific Northwest because of E. coli contamination, that investors began to flee. The next month, there was another E. coli problem in the Midwest. And in February, some 200 people got sick with norovirus after eating at a Chipotle in Boston.

Part of the thing that was so devastating was because there were multiple incidents, and so it may have looked like we were out of control, Mr. Ells said. We had good food safety standards in place  but were they good enough to ensure something like this wouldnt happen given the momentum of our business and that we rely on fresh ingredients prepared on the spot? Maybe not.
A German court has been flooded with new lawsuits against Volkswagen from investors who say they lost billions as the value of the carmakers shares plunged after its diesel emissions scandal.

The surge could add to the companys financial woes as it deals with the fallout from the revelation a year ago that it had cheated on emission tests.

In Germany, a regional court in Braunschweig, near Volkswagens headquarters in Wolfsburg, said it had registered more than 1,400 complaints from institutional and individual shareholders seeking 8.2 billion euros, or about $9.2 billion, in damages. Of those suits, 750 were submitted on Monday alone, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the disclosure by United States authorities of the companys use of illegal software on its diesel vehicles to cheat on American emission tests.

The company had already reached a $15 billion settlement in the United States and set aside 17.8 billion for costs related to the deception. It also faces a raft of complaints from customers in Europe, though regional law means it is harder for disaffected vehicle owners to unite to sue the carmaker.
Very few start-ups offer retirement plans on Day 1, said Jamie Hopkins, a professor at the American College of Financial Services in Bryn Mawr, Pa., which trains financial professionals, and a co-director of its New York Life Center for Retirement Income. Less than 10 percent of start-ups offer a plan.

In recent years, the needle has barely moved when it comes to small companies offering 401(k)s.

According to employer data analyzed for The New York Times by BrightScope, a financial information company based in San Diego, in 2006, about 36,000 401(k) plans at companies with fewer than 250 employees were new, or started that calendar year.

Eight years later, slightly more than 34,000 401(k) plans were started by similar-size companies, said Brooks Herman, head of data and research for BrightScope, noting that there was a dip in new plans after the 2008 financial crisis. The companys snapshot does not include individual or small-employer individual retirement accounts, so the actual numbers are probably higher.

Economic and market conditions have a greater effect on new benefits  like a 401(k) plan being offered  than the availability of cheap services, Mr. Herman said.

Although they are subject to various rules and contribution limits, tax deductions are also available to employers for 401(k) plans. Businesses that start such plans can qualify for a tax credit of up to $500 for each of the first three years of their plans.

To qualify, a business must have at least one employee, other than the owner, who earns less than $120,000 a year. Employers can also deduct any matching contributions.

Still, costs matter for businesses. Entrepreneurs understandably watch every dollar, so the often-steep administrative expenses of a retirement plan can be discouraging. Most conventional 401(k)s involve a lot of paperwork, filing requirements and continuing administrative expenses.
As the fashion shows move from London to Milan so, too, does the debate around Britains departure from the European Union (and the rain). But among the Italian fashion folk, the reaction to Brexit has a somewhat more glittering lame lining.

Several major houses, including Prada, are reporting that the weakened pound has bolstered sales in Britain, with their wares now cheaper for the tourists who shop there.

The decision to Brexit is having an impact on Tods business, said its president and chief executive, Diego Della Valle, during a trip to London last week, but in a positive way.

In the latest quarter, sales in our British stores showed steady growth, probably because the local currency had lost so much of its value, he said.
The mayor toured the bombing site almost immediately after it was deemed safe, resisted calls to label the attack an act of terrorism before more was known, and backed a decision by the Police Department and emergency management officials to send a first-of-its-kind digital wanted message to cellphones across New York City.

His response to the crisis, as well as how it was received, contrasted with the atmosphere toward the end of his first year in office, when two police officers were fatally shot by a deranged man angered over the killing of black men by officers around the country. Officers revolted, turning their backs on Mr. de Blasio in pointed displays of no confidence.

The bombing on Saturday in many ways presented a less fraught challenge for Mr. de Blasio. He and his police force were on the same side of the crisis. No one died in the bombing. Investigators arrested the suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, with stunning rapidity.

He got his Rudy Giuliani moment, said Doug Muzzio, a professor of political science at Baruch College. I thought he was responsible; he stated the facts as he knew them. He kept the city informed. But, Professor Muzzio added, the mayors handling of the attack was unlikely to convince skeptical voters of his management skills. Its so minor that its not going to significantly affect him either way, he said.

Phil Walzak, a top aide to the mayor, described a two-track approach aimed at keeping focus on the administrations core mission of increasing equity and fairness for New Yorkers, while dealing with unforeseen crises, large and small.

When these inevitable incidents occur, as they have for every single mayor, the imperative is on addressing them in a way that really squares with the mayors values, Mr. Walzak said in an interview before the bombing.

That appeared to be at least part of the mayors calculation on Sunday in refusing to describe the bombing as an act of terrorism. He did so on Monday, after Mr. Rahamis capture. The issue vanished almost immediately.
Already on edge days after two bombings in New York and New Jersey, residents were startled on Wednesday afternoon by an earthshaking boom that thundered across several neighborhoods in Queens and on Long Island.

Many jumped on Twitter to unleash a stream of panicked, anxious questions: Did you hear that? What happened? Had terrorists struck again?

Well, New York, there is good news and bad news. The noise that shook buildings and rattled nerves does not appear to have been caused by terrorism. But no one seems to know what, exactly, was the cause.
On the night three years ago when Kevin Moores dreadlocks were ripped out and his ribs and facial bones were broken, a group of New York State corrections officers involved in a confrontation with him said that they were the victims, that Mr. Moore, a 56-year-old inmate, had attacked them.

To make their case, the officers, who worked at Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, produced a trove of evidence. There were photos of a back injury one of them had sustained; pages from use-of-force reports; assorted memorandums and entries in a cellblock log book  all of it attesting to the professionalism the officers displayed in subduing Mr. Moore.

In fact, it was all lies, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday as they unsealed charges of civil rights violations and fraud against five of the officers involved in the Nov. 12, 2013, beating.

The back injury? Corrections Officer George Santiago Jr. had actually hit another officer with a baton to make it appear that the inmate had attacked him, the prosecutors said. The stacks of reports? Falsified, the prosecutors said, by several officers who cleaned up Mr. Moores blood and then, instead of sending him to the hospital, placed him in solitary confinement overnight.
BERLIN  It has been a difficult year for many Western democracies  and China is rubbing it in. As Donald J. Trump rose in the Republican primaries, the state-run Xinhua news agency gleefully described the United States presidential election as an entertaining drama that illustrates the malfunction of the self-claimed world standard of democracy. Another Xinhua article exploited the leak of Democratic Party emails to reassert that money politics has become an incurable disease of the American electoral system.

Americas democracy is not the only target. Chinas state media also came out swinging after the British vote to leave the European Union. An article in Global Times put it bluntly: Brexit lays bare Western democracys facade.

At a time when the West is struggling with the shortcomings of the democratic process, China is seizing the opportunity to promote its own system. Much more so than his immediate predecessors, President Xi Jinping views his country in an ideological competition with the West. No longer content with stopping the influence of democratic ideas at Chinas borders, Chinese propaganda experts have decided they need to focus on making Chinas political system attractive abroad if the Communist Party wants to stay in power.

Backed by an estimated annual budget of $10 billion, Chinese media organizations are expanding their global presence, heeding Mr. Xis call to media organizations to tell Chinas story well. This means casting the Chinese political system, the so-called China model, as meritocratic, efficiency-oriented rule by well-trained technocrat visionaries that is superior to Western democracy.
Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe?

The question, one of the biggest in studies of human evolution, has intrigued scientists for decades. In a series of extraordinary genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer.

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.
The experts say this new method may make it possible to read other ancient scrolls, including several Dead Sea scrolls and about 300 carbonized ones from Herculaneum, which were destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

The date of the En-Gedi scroll is the subject of conflicting evidence. A carbon-14 measurement indicates that the scroll was copied around A.D. 300. But the style of the ancient script suggests a date nearer to A.D. 100. We may safely date this scroll to between A.D. 50 and 100, wrote Ada Yardeni, an expert on Hebrew paleography, in an article in the journal Textus. Dr. Tov said he was inclined toward a first-century date, based on paleography.

The feat of recovering the text was made possible by software programs developed by W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. Inspired by the hope of reading the many charred and unopenable scrolls found at Herculaneum, near Pompeii in Italy, Dr. Seales has been working for the last 13 years on ways to read the text inside an ancient scroll.

Methods like CT scans can pick out blobs of ink inside a charred scroll, but the jumble of letters is unreadable unless each letter can be assigned to the surface on which it is written. Dr. Seales realized that the writing surface of the scroll had first to be reconstructed and the letters then stuck back to it.

He succeeded in 2009 in working out the physical structure of the ruffled layers of papyrus in a Herculaneum scroll.

He has since developed a method, called virtual unwrapping, to model the surface of an ancient scroll in the form of a mesh of tiny triangles. Each triangle can be resized by the computer until the virtual surface makes the best fit to the internal structure of the scroll, as revealed by the scanning method. The blobs of ink are assigned to their right place on the structure, and the computer then unfolds the whole 3-D structure into a 2-D sheet.
Carl Sagans Voyager Golden Record  of sounds of Earth, recorded greetings and an eclectic mix of music that was sent into space  has long been out of print and pretty much unobtainable for decades.

One copy of the record is attached to NASAs Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has entered interstellar space, the farthest artifact ever tossed out by humanity. A second copy, on Voyager 2, is not quite as distant, just 10 billion miles away.

Both are receding from Earth at more than 35,000 miles per hour.

Not even Dr. Sagan, the Cornell astrophysicist who led the creation of the record in 1977 for the listening pleasure of any aliens who happened upon it, could get a copy.

He asked. NASA said no.

But now, a Kickstarter crowdfunding project begun on Wednesday is planning to reissue it, long a dream of David Pescovitz, an editor and managing partner at Boing Boing, the technology news website, and a research director at the nonprofit Institute for the Future.
Add another new messaging app to the proliferation of chat apps.

On Wednesday, Google made its new messaging app, Allo, officially available. The app is distinct from Googles past messaging efforts in that Allo includes an artificially intelligent assistant that is designed to help people with their conversations and searches for information.

Image

Allo joins a crowded messaging field. In the United States, Apples iMessage (of which a new version was released last week), Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, among others, are already popular. In Asia, where messaging became more popular earlier than in the United States, WeChat and Line are used by millions.

So how much can Google Allo stand out from that horde and how well does it work?

To arrive at a determination, Brian X. Chen recently tested Allo for five days and compared it with other apps like iMessage, Messenger and Google Hangouts. We wont give away all of his conclusions, but suffice it to say that he ultimately compared Allo with an office intern  and not a full-blown office assistant  for a reason.
SAN FRANCISCO  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive, and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, last year said they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charitable causes. Now they are putting a large chunk of that money to work.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the limited liability company into which Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan put their Facebook shares, on Wednesday said it would invest at least $3 billion over the next decade toward preventing, curing or managing all diseases by the end of the century.

While the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has already made investments in charter schools and education start-ups, the money toward curing diseases represents the groups first major initiative in science. The announcement was also a coming out of sorts for Dr. Chan, who has a big interest in health and was trained in pediatrics.

In a speech to introduce the health initiative at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Dr. Chan said the work to cure disease was in keeping with her organizations mission to advance human potential and promote equality. She gave an emotional preamble, describing how a high-quality education helped her succeed as the daughter of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants.
You may now have more messaging apps than you have close friends.

As of this week, there are six prominent chat apps in the United States  or as I see it, one too many. The latest to join the horde is Allo, Googles highly anticipated messaging app that lets people take advantage of artificial intelligence to chat and make plans. Google began offering the smarter app on Wednesday.

Allo is appearing at a time when smartphones are already crowded with chat apps. IMessage from Apple is prominent among iPhone owners. Facebook Messenger is widely used on that social network. Also popular is WhatsApp, the chat service from Facebook that has largely replaced text messaging internationally. Add to the list Slack, a group chat tool that is popular among businesses, and Google Hangouts, which was released in 2013, and you have six.

I asked the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who studies the relationship between brain size and social circles, about the overload. His research has found that most people have the mental capacity to sustain 150 meaningful relationships, and among them, only five close ones.

Having more apps than close friends doesnt help, as something will have to go, Mr. Dunbar said in an email, though he noted that the various messaging apps serve different purposes. Younger people are shying away from chatting on Facebook, for example, to have more private conversations on apps like WhatsApp.
You can send the stickers as stand-alone images or drop them on top of written messages or photos. Add them to selfies youre sending in iMessage, and suddenly the Death Star is exploding above you. The free Pac-Man sticker pack is another great option for some retro fun.

Image Stickers from Star Wars, Sticker Pals and others can be dropped into messages or added to photos.

The Grammar Snob sticker app, for $1, lets you add editorial red ink over a text message to fix a friends bad grammar.

Sticker Pals, which is free, is a more contemporary option, with hundreds of animated cartoon characters and special effects, as well as a neat feature that lets users send stickers to friends for their use. And the free Aardman Face Bomb sticker pack includes funny cartoon faces in the style of the Aardman animation studio.

Apple iMessage also lets you play games within the app. With classic games like Words With Friends, which is free, this feature makes chatting throughout a game easier, so you can express your feelings when someone gets 50 points by dropping a word on a triple-word-score square. In addition, Chess42 is a free chess game that you can play directly inside an iMessage chat.

There are also plenty of utility apps that can make iMessage more powerful. The Doodle: Schedule Maker app lets users set up a simple in-message voting system for particular dates  perfect for trying to pin down a time to get together with one or more contacts. Doodle is free.
Last year, the actor and writer Brian Quijada proposed to his girlfriend. Diamond ring. Bended knee. White sand beach. The whole Instagram-worthy shebang.

Then he began to worry. His fiancee is half Austrian and half Swiss; he is the son of undocumented immigrants from El Salvador. First he wondered how the wedding D.J. might remix polka and reggaeton. Later, more substantively, he questioned how to describe this varied inheritance to future offspring. Im not entirely sure how I fit into this crazy world, let alone ever figuring out how to explain it to my child, Mr. Quijada said.

Some people might go to insight-oriented therapy for help. Others might consult a spiritual adviser. Others might let those unborn children sort it out for themselves and go back to their calligraphy pens and place cards.

Mr. Quijada instead elected to write and perform a solo hip-hop show, the engaging and obliging Where Did We Sit on the Bus?, directed by Chay Yew at the Ensemble Studio Theater. Another autobiographical monologue opening this week, Sonya Kellys droll How to Keep an Alien, directed by Gina Moxley at the Irish Arts Center, is also a tale of immigration. More pointedly, both pieces detail the performers attempts to wedge months and years of disorderly lived experience into more or less tidy narratives, to create life stories that they could live with.
At a campaign rally in Orlando, Fla., Hillary Clinton spoke about the shootings here and in Tulsa.

There is still much we dont know about what happened in both incidents, but we do know that we have two more names to add to a list of African-Americans killed by police officers in these encounters, she said.

Its unbearable, and it needs to become intolerable. We also saw the targeting of police officers in Philadelphia last week. And last night in Charlotte, 12 officers were injured in demonstrations following Keith Scotts death. Every day police officers are serving with courage, honor and skill.

Her Republican rival, Donald J. Trump, reacted on Twitter. Hopefully the violence & unrest in Charlotte will come to an immediate end, he wrote. To those injured, get well soon. We need unity & leadership.

Unity, thus far, has been in short supply. On Friday, Mr. Trump earned the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police. But polls show that his support among African-Americans is negligible, even though he has singled them out in promising to solve the ills of poverty and violence that he has characterized as plaguing black neighborhoods.

On Wednesday, Mr. Jackson, the man who came here to mourn, was not thinking about the current presidential candidates.

The police, he said, are out here killing people, and they dont even know their backgrounds, he said. They could be killing the next president.
With less than a week until the first general election debate, Donald J. Trump has used his recent rallies to sharpen the nationalist message he has embraced throughout the campaign.

The three debates will be Mr. Trumps best chance to halt his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who has a clearer path to the nomination even as the race tightens. And with the race most likely to be decided by more than 100 million voters who did not cast ballots in either party primary, some voters will be getting their first hard look at Mr. Trump.

In a typical campaign, nominees of both parties modulate positions to appeal to independent voters. In Mrs. Clintons case, she has not budged on her economic proposals, which were drafted while she was still battling Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for the Democratic nomination. On issues like national security, however, she has more to offer moderate voters.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has done little to adjust the underpinnings of his message. He has heightened his incendiary comments in recent days, striking notes of nationalism as he continues to call for drastic changes to the immigration system. In North Carolina on Tuesday, he said he wanted to see the immigration policies of the nation changed to reflect American values.
ORLANDO, Fla.  Of all the attacks that Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats have tried against Donald J. Trump since he captured the Republican presidential nomination, one has stood out for its emotional force and persuasive power: No one, it seems, can abide Mr. Trumps mockery last year of a reporters physical disability.

And as Mrs. Clinton strains to make a more affirmative case for her own candidacy, after a summer focused largely on hammering Mr. Trump, her campaign believes that a focus on an often-overlooked constituency  voters with disabilities  can accomplish both goals at once.

On Wednesday, without mentioning the Trump episode, Mrs. Clinton discussed her vision for an inclusive economy with expanded job opportunities for what she called a group of Americans who are, too often, invisible, overlooked and undervalued  who have so much to offer, but are given far too few chances to prove it.

Thats been true for a long time, she said, and we have to change it.

In keeping with a recent campaign theme, she described how her career had informed her policy goals, from her work for people with disabilities during her time at the Childrens Defense Fund to her tenure as secretary of state, when she appointed the first special adviser for international disability rights.
WASHINGTON  Few issues in this campaign cycle seem as toxic as trade: Both major-party presidential candidates oppose President Obamas 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, and congressional leaders, having refused all year to vote on the trade accord until after the election, say they will not do so even then  potentially killing the largest regional trade pact in history.

So that must mean voters are overwhelmingly opposed, right? Wrong.

National polls continue to show that Americans either narrowly favor international trade generally, and the so-called T.P.P. specifically, or are split. Younger voters are especially favorable. But Republicans are not, reflecting the influence of the anti-trade nominee Donald J. Trump on his traditionally pro-trade party. And certainly trade remains more unpopular in battleground states like Ohio, where it is blamed for years of manufacturing job losses.

Yet the level of support for trade agreements in general, and the pending Pacific pact in particular, stands in notable contrast to the toxicity of trade in an election season largely defined by anger among working-class voters. What matters to many politicians, however, is the fact that the opponents are the ones most motivated to vote based on the issue  just as they are on issues like immigration and gun restrictions that also have more support than divisive debates suggest.

There really is a lot of ambivalence on the part of the public toward expanded foreign trade, said Jay Campbell, a senior vice president with the polling firm Hart Research, who is not working for a presidential campaign.
Nearly 200 people have died in accidents related to the production, storage and transportation of chemicals in China this year, according to a report by Greenpeace released on Wednesday.

The report suggested that regulation of Chinas powerful chemical industry remained lax and inconsistent, a year after a deadly explosion in the port city of Tianjin prompted public outrage and calls for greater oversight.

Chinas chemicals industry is the largest in the world, but it is appallingly underregulated, Cheng Qian, a Greenpeace activist who studies toxic chemicals, said in the report. The government must take urgent action.

The investigation by Greenpeace, which relied on government statistics, found that chemical accidents occurred with alarming frequency in China. From January to August, there were 232  an average of nearly one a day  killing 199 people and injuring 400 others, the report said. The group did not examine how those figures compared with those from previous years.
BEIJING  If youve ever wondered what class of person you are, move to China and find out.

Starting Nov. 1, the government will begin sorting foreigners into three categories: A, B and C. It is part of a new nationwide work permit system that aims to build an innovation-driven economy by encouraging the top, controlling the middle and limiting the bottom of foreigners in China, the state news media reported.

It aims to better serve overseas talent coming to work in China, said Zhang Jianguo, the leader of the State Administration of Foreign Experts, which will run the system that is to go nationwide on April 1 after being tested in nine cities or provinces, including Beijing and Shanghai.

The planned change is creating a buzz among foreigners working here who are keen to know: How will the government classify me?

According to the most recent official figures, in the 2010 census, about 200,000 foreigners worked legally in China and an additional 400,000 were family dependents.
The water helps sustain the regions half-million residents and ensures that Turpans family farms can grow the grapes that have shaped the citys identity for centuries. Grape arbors grace nearly every home here, and the rural landscape is dotted with imposing brick-and-mud drying towers, where the grapes are turned into raisins.

Standing beneath a tangle of grape vines, Mijiti Saludin, 32, said he and his wife were forced to buy water from the municipal government after the karez across from their home ran dry several years ago. We used to get it for free, but now we have to pay for our water and it isnt very clean, he said.

He led a visitor to an opening in the chalky gray earth, and into a tunnel just tall enough to crouch inside. When he was a child, he recalled, the entire community would turn out each spring to clean out the karez, using buckets to remove silt that impeded the flow of water. Every family would send a young man, but now its hard to get people to work for free, he said.

The Chinese government recognizes the threat to the regions karez, and in recent years it has sought to ban the drilling of new wells that have contributed to a steady drop of the water table. In 2008, the regional government announced a $182 million project, funded in part by a loan from the World Bank, to protect and rehabilitate the system.

According to government estimates, the aquifer beneath the Turpan Basin shrinks by about three million cubic meters a year, much of it because of oil drilling and agriculture.
The bulk of the evidence was already analyzed and digitized and stored on a computer server not on the site, he said. But justice officials say it is not clear if the courts will accept digitized evidence alone if the physical evidence is destroyed.

According to the Brussels prosecutors office, it is up to a judge to determine whether a digital copy of a lost piece of physical evidence has the same value. So far this has never posed any problems, said Ine Van Wymersch, a spokeswoman for the Brussels prosecutors office, which is handling the criminal investigation of the arson.

But Thierry Werts, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor, acknowledged that the crime lab has thousands and thousands of forensic evidence pieces from terrorism investigations, including from the Paris network. If theyre completely destroyed, then that can be troublesome for all of our cases that are concerned, he said. If theyre only in part destroyed, then well have to redo the analysis.

Mr. Courtoy pointed to a number of terrorism cases that could potentially be affected. One involves his client Mehdi Nemmouche, who has been charged in an attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014. His DNA was found at the museum, the authorities say, and was stored at the lab.

Another is that of Mohamed Abrini, the so-called man in the hat at the airport bombing, who is suspected of having participated in the Paris and Brussels attacks. His DNA was found in most of the hide-outs in Brussels, the authorities say.

And then there is the case against Yassine Atar, a suspected member of the Brussels terrorist network who authorities say helped hide Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks who was captured after an intensive three-month manhunt. Nitrogen that could be used in making bombs was found on Mr. Atars hair and his beard, the authorities say, samples of which were sent to the lab for analysis.

Mr. Abdeslam was extradited to France this year, and his case may not be affected by what was lost in the fire because he will be prosecuted there, and much of the evidence was gathered in France. Still, Mr. Abdeslams Belgian lawyer, Sven Mary, expressed consternation at the lack of security at a government facility housing the forensic evidence of thousands of cases.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, the poor and chronically divided Balkan country, is facing a new threat of disintegration.

On Sunday, the government of the Bosnian Serbs will defy the countrys constitutional court, the United States and the European Union by holding a vote to affirm Jan. 9 as a holiday. The date, which is also a Serbian Orthodox Christian holiday, is fraught in a country with a history of ethnic divisions: It commemorates the Bosnian Serbs unilateral declaration of independence from Bosnia in 1992, one of the catalysts for a brutal war that ended in 1995 with the Dayton accord. The court ruled in November that celebrating the holiday discriminated against Muslims and Croats, the countrys two other main ethnic groups.

Observers fear the vote could be a prelude and pretext for the Bosnian Serb Republic, one of Bosnias two constituent entities, to declare its independence, effectively ripping apart the Dayton peace agreement.

This week, representatives from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Turkey and the United States  who sit on a body that oversees implementation of the Dayton accord  warned that there will be no redrawing of the map in Bosnia.
DOUGLAS, Isle of Man  The Isle of Mans governing body, the Tynwald, was founded by Viking settlers and first gained notoriety in 1237 when a gathering degenerated into a pitched battle between two factions that left three men dead.

These days, disputes are settled peaceably at the ballot box, and there is no real party system in the Tynwald, which some citizens see as a modern form of Athenian democracy. Still, much is at stake in elections on Thursday.

Situated in the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is a geopolitical oddity: It is not technically part of the United Kingdom but is instead a crown dependency. Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state, yet the island is self-governing and reliant on Britain for its defense. It is not a member of the European Union, but its close ties to Britain mean that it effectively trades under Europes system of tariffs and customs duties.

In recent decades, that system has suited the Isle of Man just fine. It has chalked up more than three consecutive decades of annual economic growth. It has kept business taxes low or at zero, while bringing more transparency to its banking system in an effort to shed its reputation as a tax haven. It has nurtured online gambling and other new niche industries.
MOSCOW  Russia sought to distance itself on Wednesday from American accusations that it was responsible for the fiery destruction of a humanitarian convoy in Syria, with the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, also seeking to absolve Syria of responsibility for the attack.

The charges and countercharges divided opinion in Russia, with some accusing the Syrian government and others blaming the United States. If there was any consensus, it was that the destruction of the much-needed aid convoy bound for rebel-held parts of Aleppo Province on Monday dealt a serious blow to already beleaguered attempts by the United States and Russian to find a way to work together on Syria.

Mr. Lavrov, noting that the Russian Air Force had already announced that it had not hit the convoy, said the Syrians were not able to fly at night. The Syrian Air Force could not have been at work, because the convoy was attacked during the hours of darkness, Mr. Lavrov said from the United Nations General Assembly session in New York, speaking to Russias state-run Rossiya 1 television.

Later on Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that a United States Predator drone had appeared in the area just minutes before the aid convoy was attacked. There was no immediate response from the Pentagon.
WASHINGTON  Fighters with the Islamic State fired a shell onto a military base in northern Iraq, home to American and Iraqi troops, that may have contained a chemical agent, military officials said on Wednesday.

The shell did not explode, and the officials said no American or Iraqi troops were injured in the attack.

The soldier who brought the shell in for testing has not shown any blistering in the 24 hours since handling it, said the military officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation.

While the unexploded shell initially tested positive for a mustard agent, a second test was negative. Additional tests have been ordered.
The eyewitnesses will tell you what happened, Mr. Kerry said, in a direct confrontation with Russia of a kind rarely seen at the Security Council since the Cold War. The place turned into hell and fighter jets were in the sky.

With his new proposal, Mr. Kerry was also making what amounts to an 11th-hour effort to test Russian intentions in Syria, where the Kremlin has increasingly engaged militarily to defend Mr. Assad. Mr. Lavrovs spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, who was accompanying him, suggested after Mr. Kerry spoke that the Russians were not enthused by his ideas.

Its about nothing, she said. That was a show.

In private, senior Obama administration officials acknowledge that the very viability of the agreement with the Russians is in question. Yet none of the players wanted to walk away and concede that the effort had failed.

Mr. Kerry said the flight ban should be in key areas. American officials declined to specify them. But they said he was referring to parts of northwest Syria that are in dire need of aid, including cities like Aleppo, where the opposition is prevalent.

The flight ban proposal will be discussed Thursday at a meeting in New York of the International Syrian Support Group, a multinational body that is led by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov. A more definitive Russian response to the proposal may come then.

One of the crucial American tasks in those cities is to separate Syrian opposition groups that the United States has supported and groups like the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate that now calls itself the Levant Conquest Front. But fulfilling that task has proved far more difficult in Aleppo, for example, than it seemed in the negotiating room in Geneva.

While separating the American-backed groups from their tactical alliances with the Nusra Front sounds logical, for the rebels it would often mean abandoning their home territory, leaving Nusra unchallenged and opening their towns to an American-Russian bombing campaign. Others groups would have to fight Nusra, something they do not have the capability to do.
CAIRO  A boat carrying African migrants headed for Europe capsized in the Mediterranean Sea near the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Wednesday, killing at least 42 people, the Egyptian authorities said.

The Egyptian Army gave the toll in a statement, saying that it had thwarted an illegal immigration attempt and that the boat had been 12 nautical miles off the coast when it sank.

A Health Ministry spokesman, Khaled Megahed, said the total number of dead was still unknown. An official from Beheira Province, Alaa Osman, said the migrants were from several African countries. He added that more than 150 people had been rescued so far but that bodies were still being pulled from the water.

Egypts official news agency, MENA, said the boat was carrying 600 people when it sank near the coast, more than 100 miles north of Cairo, the capital. Mr. Osman said it was likely that the boat had departed from Kafr el Sheikh Province, farther to the east.
WASHINGTON  The Obama administration is weighing a military plan to directly arm Syrian Kurdish fighters combating the Islamic State, a major policy shift that could speed up the offensive against the terrorist group but also sharply escalate tensions between Turkey and the United States.

The plan has been under discussion by the National Security Council staff at a moment when President Obama has directed aides to examine all proposals that could accelerate the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Mr. Obama has told aides that he wants an offensive well underway before he leaves office that is aimed at routing the Islamic State from Raqqa, the groups de facto capital in northern Syria.

Deciding whether to arm the Syrian Kurds is a difficult decision for Mr. Obama, who is caught in the middle trying to balance the territorial and political ambitions of Turkey and the Syrian Kurds, two warring American allies that Washington needs to combat the Islamic insurgency.

Directly providing weapons for the first time to the Syrian Kurds, whom American commanders view as their most effective ground partner against the Islamic State, would help build momentum for the assault on Raqqa. But arming them would also aggravate Mr. Obamas already tense relations with Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The United States and Turkey sharply disagree over Syrias Kurdish militias, which Turkey sees as its main enemy in Syria.
Maggie Thompson, executive director of Generation Progress, a nonprofit advocacy group that focuses on issues affecting young adults, including student debt reform, said the schools closing had left students in a crushing situation, and her group is generally encouraging former ITT students to have their loans discharged. Ms. Thompson said she was concerned that other for-profit schools advertising for ITT transfers were themselves under regulatory scrutiny. The most sensible choice, she said, may be for students to have their debts canceled and pursue a degree from an institution that employers respect.

For many of these students, she said, the best option is to start over.

Alexandra Bernadotte, chief executive of Beyond 12, said students need personalized help to navigate their options. Students who have just a few credits remaining to complete a program and can find a reputable school nearby that will accept them, she said, may find that it makes sense to transfer.

Many nonprofit schools may be reluctant to accept credits from ITT. But the government is urging community colleges, in particular, to be flexible in considering transfers, and many are opening their doors and holding open houses for ITT students, Mr. Mitchell said. Were very encouraged.

Tineya Brown, a 35-year-old single mother in Westland, Mich., said she was two quarters away from completing a nursing program at ITT Technical Institute, where she attended classes during the day while holding down a job at night. She said she had about $9,000 in federal loans. She is now waiting to hear if she can continue her nursing studies at a local community college in January and complete an associates degree next year. This whole situation, she said, has been stressful.

Here are some questions and answers about options for ITT students:

Who is eligible for a closed school loan discharge?

ITT students who were enrolled or withdrew after May 6 may seek a discharge of their federal debt. The option is not available to students who have already completed their studies, according to the Education Department.

Students can find the discharge form online or contact their loan servicer.

Does the discharge apply to private student loans?

No. The discharge option applies to loans made or backed by the federal government, not to private loans, which are generally made by banks or other lenders and have fewer consumer protections than federal loans. So ITT students who also have private loans may be left with debt even if they have their federal loans discharged.
Flush with oil money and political bravado, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela used his United Nations platform a decade ago to call George W. Bush the devil.

Thursdays speech will most likely adhere to the old anti-imperialist themes honed by Mr. Chavez, but it will not be delivered by his successor, President Nicolas Maduro, who dropped out at the last minute.

In a speech late Tuesday night, Mr. Maduro announced that Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez would speak for him before the General Assembly. In the same speech, he condemned what he claimed were acts by the United States against his country  including violations of Venezuelan airspace by American planes from a base in Curacao. American officials on Wednesday denied that any such flights had taken place.

Mr. Maduro did not offer a specific reason for backing out, yet his announcement did not cause much of a stir in Venezuela because his government often cancels engagements and meetings without explanation. He has also sent Ms. Rodriguez in his place on several previous occasions.
For Benjamin Netanyahu, the brash prime minister of Israel, there are few audiences more skeptical than the world leaders he will face at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. But if his international peers are not all that fond of him, it is fair to say the feeling is mutual.

Still, they are useful foils for Mr. Netanyahu as he makes his points to a wider world. He regularly chides the body at these annual sessions for what he considers its reflexive anti-Israel positions. Last year, he condemned the worlds deafening silence about Iranian threats to eradicate Israel, then remained silent himself for 45 seconds to dramatize his point.

As he takes the rostrum this year during a resurgence of Palestinian attacks at home, Mr. Netanyahu has signaled that he will challenge the United Nations on what he calls its double standard where terrorism is concerned. His broader ambition is to head off any effort by President Obama to use the world body to dictate terms of a peace settlement with Palestinians.
When Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, attends sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, he enjoys many of the trappings of a head of state. He is invited to address other world leaders. Last year, the Palestinian flag was even raised over the United Nations for the first time.

But he is not a head of state, no matter how much he wants to be, and that is the point Mr. Abbas is likely to make in yet another appeal to the world body to help make him one. With so much of the Middle East in turmoil, however, the challenge for Mr. Abbas is to push his cause back to the top of the international agenda amid fresh Palestinian attacks, which he attributes to frustration over Israels long occupation of the West Bank.

There are only so many ways to draw attention to his issue  and he has already used many of them. Last year, after aides promised a bombshell in his annual speech, he declared that the Palestinians were no longer bound by the requirements of the Oslo peace accords since, he argued, Israel was not abiding by them. In effect, he seemed to be tossing aside two decades of economic, security and other arrangements, which would transform the situation on the ground.
The French breakdancer Anne Nguyen combines years of dance-battle experience with an avid interest in geometry  fields not as unrelated as they may sound  in her works for par Terre Dance Company, the Paris-based troupe she founded in 2005.

As part of the Crossing the Line Festival, presented by the French Institute Alliance Francaise, shes making her New York debut with two projects that consider the hip-hop dancers complex relationship to space.

After four performances of Graphic Cyphers, featuring an army of New York street dancers at sites in the Bronx and Times Square (through Sunday, Sept. 25), Ms. Nguyen heads to Gibney Dance in Lower Manhattan with Autarcie (.): a search for self-sufficiency (Thursday, Sept. 29, through Saturday). While the protean Cyphers moves the audience around and through the dancers, Autarcie, for four women, finds possibilities in the limitations of a stage. The game of strategy, as Ms. Nguyen calls it, is interpersonal and mathematical. (crossingthelinefestival.org.)
In Russia, courtyard gates are usually left open, but this one was locked. We slipped in behind an exiting car, and the driver yelled at us. After gazing at Raskolnikovs entryway, we left the courtyard at the same time as a woman and her young daughter. The mother told Olesya the gate was locked because every day tour groups came by. Meanwhile an older Russian woman led eight high school students up to the gate and started pressing buttons. When the mother objected, the group broke up and drifted away. But by the time the woman and her daughter were down the block, the teacher was back with her flock of T-shirted and flanneled teenagers. As we moved on, they were buzzed in.

The area was poor when Dostoyevsky lived there, and the canals that surrounded it on three sides stank. I had reread the beginning of Crime and Punishment the night before, and part of the magic of looking at the place now was how it made you see through its middle-class present into its more rugged past. Thomas, Olesya and I retraced Raskolnikovs footsteps on the day of the murder. When we walked into the somewhat dilapidated courtyard of the murdered pawnbroker, Olesya said: Ah, this is more like the old yellow these buildings were painted. Sick dirty yellow. Asylums were always painted yellow. Dostoyevskys references to yellow immediately brought this to mind. In class they told us to count the yellows.

Next was Moscow. In the Tolstoys 16-room winter house were many objects: books, a chess set, a piano, a tiger skin, a closet of clothes. On the landing an upright stuffed bear held a plate for visiting cards. Tolstoy was a man of obsessive enthusiasms. At the back of the house was a workroom with his cobbler tools, which he used to make shoes, including a pair for his oldest daughter Tatyanas future husband. Next to it was his study, where he wrote by the light of a single candle and received the common people through the backstairs, which he also used to come and go unnoticed. Cater-cornered was the room of his valet, whose job was to take Tolstoys wife and children to balls, since Tolstoy refused to go.

Image Leo Tolstoy. Credit... Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The Tolstoys moved there after his spiritual awakening. He and his wife, Sophia, were soon quarreling furiously over his desire to give his money to the peasants. Sophia wanted it for their children. Their compromise was rancorous. Their son Vanya, a prodigy who had already dictated a story published in a childrens magazine, died of scarlet fever at 6 at their home. By the end of Tolstoys life, the couples bedroom had been moved into a sort of foyer between the dining room and nursery.

Sophia preserved 6,000 objects for posterity, in homage to her husbands genius.

After our visit Thomas said, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were on different paths to the same destination. What was that, I wondered. God, faith, he said. You choose the paths that match your brain. I prefer Dostoyevsky because thats the way I think.

He and I took the metro back to our hotel and got off at the Lenin Library stop. Waiting for us above ground was a statue of Dostoyevsky, bigger than life, grimly slouching, eyes cast down, tension in his legs and in the hand resting on his thigh.
2 of 10

All over Mexico City are green rectangles and circles , as small as a window fan or as large as a trampoline, each with four white arrows directed toward a white dot in the center. These indicate:
I have not overcome it, not even a little. It is something that haunts me and you dont survive. It stays with you. I could never tell my son and my father of the fact I was raped by not one but several policemen, because they would have gone mad.

Maria Patricia Romero Hernandez, 48
SANTA ANA  Two weeks after City Council members declared a public health and safety homeless crisis at the Civic Center, theyve approved a program with the county to enhance safety and security in the area.

The Civic Center Safety and Security Program  approved unanimously by the council Tuesday without discussion  includes nine initiatives around the homeless population affecting workers and the public that the city and county will share in implementing.

Initiatives and contribution amounts from the city and county are a result of discussions between City Manager David Cavazos and county CEO Frank Kim. Together, it will cost the city and the county $1.3 million over the next year.

When Cavazos met with Kim, both parties agreed on the need to enhance services to improve conditions for the public and employees at the Civic Center.

According to a staff report, there was a consensus on regular power washing and cleaning that would cost the city and county $176,500 each, plus a safety assessment that would cost each entity $12,500.

Kim requested more information on a proposal to install LED bulbs in the Civic Center that would cost the city and county $38,000 each. Kim also asked for more details on doubling police officers from seven to 14 for 24/7 coverage to cost $178,500 to each entity, and adding five security guards, which would cost $107,336 to each entity.

Staff is confident that a commitment from the county would be forthcoming, the city staff report states. It is for this reason that staff is recommending approval of 50 percent of the common area items that both jurisdictions are anticipated to authorize so that we may begin the planning and implementation of those initiatives.

The program also calls for constructing a kiosk or building for police officers and security guards that would cost the city and county $75,000 each.

Two initiatives do not have dollar amounts  relocating a needle exchange program and homeless feeding efforts away from the Civic Center.

Under the Civic Center Joint Powers Authority, formed in 1966 between the city and county, both share expenses to maintain and operate the Civic Center.

The city alone would pay $144,000 to rent 150 parking spaces so employees required to park away from the Civic Center instead can use a structure adjacent to Santa Ana Public Library. Due to that initiative, Santa Anas contribution from its fiscal 2016 general fund balance is $731,836, and the countys expected contribution is $587,836.

Though the program was approved without discussion, at the end of the meeting Councilman David Benavides said he was pleased that Kim reiterated that the county is willing to work with Santa Ana.

I just want to continue to stress to the city manager to continue to bring the county to the table, to demonstrate our commitment as we have been doing, Benavides said, And to engage not only in a dialogue but in practical next steps how are we going to be able to take care of this together.

Hours before Santa Ana council members declared a public health and safety crisis on Sept. 6, the county, under pressure from the city, approved turning a former Santa Ana bus terminal into a temporary homeless shelter, a move that is intended to alleviate ongoing issues involving the growing homeless population.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7762 or jkwong@ocregister.com or on Twitter: @JessicaGKwong
SANTA ANA  Convicted double-murderer Daniel Wozniak, a community theater actor from Costa Mesa, is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, a judge determined on Wednesday.

Judge John D. Conley could follow a jurys recommendation that Wozniak be sentenced to death, after more than six years of court hearings.

The case was delayed as Wozniaks defense attorney, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, alleged systemic misconduct by Orange County prosecutors and sheriffs deputies involving the use of jailhouse informants.

Sanders was able to persuade a judge to removed the entire District Attorneys Office from the penalty phase for Scott Dekraai, who pleaded guilty to shooting eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011 and awaits sentencing, in another one of his cases. The ruling is under appeal.

In the Wozniak case, Conley found no evidence of misconduct and cleared the way for the trial to begin last year.

On Wednesday, the judge denied Sanders final effort to delay sentencing so he could respond to accusations by Prosecutor Matt Murphy.

Im only interested in the case of Mr. Wozniak, he said. I think the bickering between you two has clouded your judgment.

Wozniak, 31, was convicted in December of killing two friends for money to pay for his wedding and honeymoon.

On May 21, 2010, Wozniak lured Sam Herr, 26, to the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos and then shot and killed him. The actor returned the next day and cut off Herrs head, a hand and a forearm and tossed the body parts in Long Beachs El Dorado Park.

In an attempt to throw police off of his trail, Wozniak used Herrs cellphone to lure Juri Julie Kibuishi, 23, to Herrs apartment. Prosecutors said Wozniak then shot and killed her.

Many friends and family members, including fellow Army veterans who served with Herr in Afghanistan, are expected to attend the hearing. Those closest to the victims will give statements in court before the sentence is handed down.

Contact the writer: kpuente@ocregister.com
Convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala was charged with murder Tuesday in Wyoming in the killing of a woman reported missing in 1977  a charge authorities credited, in part, to information from the Huntington Beach Police Department.

Alcala, 73, a former child photographer convicted in Orange County for a string of murders in Southern California, remains at Californias Corcoran State Prison and is sentenced to death.

The man once nicknamed The Dating Game Killer because he appeared on that game show while in the midst of his killing rampage may have as many as 130 victims across the country, police in Wyoming said Tuesday, citing estimates by authorities. Some online news stories mention Alcala may have an estimated 50 to 130 victims, but the actual number is unknown.

Prosecutors in Rock Springs, Wyo., said Tuesday that one of those victims was Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio. They said Alcala met Thornton and killed her while on a road trip, then buried her on a ranch in Granger, Wyo.

Thornton was about six months pregnant at the time of her death, according to the warrant for Alcalas arrest.

Though prosecutors said her body was uncovered by a rancher in Wyoming in 1982, Thorntons alleged link to Alcala wasnt known for decades.

THE PHOTOS

In 2013, Thorntons sister, Kathy Thornton, saw an online display of photos taken by Alcala decades earlier, and recognized the subject of one of those photos as her sister. After that, investigative work by police in Huntington Beach and Wyoming  and a link to a federal database, NamUS, which matches DNA evidence to remains of unidentified people  helped connect the alleged crime to the picture.

In all, about 200 Alcala photos were released to the public by Huntington Beach police in 2010, after Alcala was sentenced to death for five sexual assault slayings committed in the 1970s.

Detectives said Tuesday that they released the photos for that exact purpose  to be seen by people who might be connected to other possible victims.

I had a gut feeling there were more out there, said Huntington Beach police Detective Patrick Ellis, who said he played only a small role in the initial investigation but was part of the decision to make the photos public.

The pictures, Ellis added, came with an unspoken message: Here it is, and here we are.

HOW SHE WAS DISCOVERED

One of those photos was of a pretty 20-something woman, wearing a yellow top and flip-flops and looking to be about six months pregnant, sitting atop a Kawasaki 500 motorcycle. After Kathy Thornton saw the picture, in 2013, she called the source  Huntington Beach police. From there, investigations and DNA testing of Thorntons family eventually tracked the remains to a federal database that included information about a then-unidentified body in Wyoming.

When investigators in Wyoming saw the picture, they didnt recognize the woman but they did notice the background looked like Wyoming. They eventually linked that background to a spot near where a womans body had been unearthed decades earlier about 6 miles north of I-80, according to the warrant.

That body was found with a yellow top and faded flip-flops, and was eventually identified by DNA evidence as Christine Thornton.

Huntington Beach police Chief Robert Handy says the Thornton case highlights strong work by his detectives, then and now.

This wouldnt be solved if he didnt have a hunch, Handy said of Ellis. This is a case of a detective who was super passionate.

ALCALA REACTION

The new murder charge against Alcala might not change his status.

Its unclear if Alcala will be extradited to stand trial in Wyoming or what his plea might be if he is. After years of saying he was innocent of murder, Alcala pleaded guilty in 2013 to killing two young women in New York state.

When Wyoming investigators spoke with Alcala this month in Corcoran, they showed him an aerial photo of the location where Thorntons body was found, according to the warrant.

When asked if the land looked familiar, Alcala said, Its part of my area. And when presented with the photo of Thornton on the motorcycle, Alcala told investigators that he knew Thornton and took the picture.

When asked if she left the area with him, Alcala said no, according to the warrant. When investigators pressed him, asking if she was alive when he left her, he replied, She was alive before I left her.

HES MURDERED BEFORE

The charge filed Tuesday is the latest step in Alcalas complex, sometimes byzantine criminal history.

Though hes been in jail or prison since 1979, Alcala has been tried, convicted and retried for five sexual assault murders in Southern California.

In 1980, he was convicted of murdering Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl who was raped and killed by Alcala after he lured her from the beach by promising to take her picture.

That conviction was overturned in 1986 on grounds that the jury had been improperly informed of previous sex crimes committed by Alcala. That year he was retried and again convicted in Orange County, but that conviction also was overturned, this time because a witness wasnt allowed to substantiate Alcalas contention that a park ranger who found Samsoes body had been hypnotized by investigators.

Over the decades, investigators linked Alcala to other homicides in Los Angeles, San Francisco, upstate New York, New Hampshire and Seattle.

In 2010, Alcala was convicted of sexually assaulting and killing Samsoe as well as Jill Barcomb, 18, of Los Angeles; Georgia Wixted, 27, of Malibu; Charlotte Lamb, 31, of El Segundo; and Jill Parenteau, 21, of Burbank.

In the years since the photos were released, Ellis said he and other detectives have taken hundreds of calls and emails from people looking for missing loved ones. The process has helped identify about 40 women in photos who are still alive and well, Ellis estimates.

Thornton is the first alleged slaying victim linked to those photos, but Ellis believes there are others.

There are thousands out there that are unidentified, he said. Now, theres one less.

Former staff writer Larry Welborn contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON  The sculpture was packed in bubble wrap inside a taped-up box and was wheeled on a dolly to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial one day last month by three people who looked to be in their 60s.

They asked Al Gallant, a volunteer guide, if it was OK to leave a memento. Sure, he said. They pushed the cart down the path to the wall, took the sculpture from the box and walked away. One of them paused to snap a picture as they departed.

What they had left was an unusual piece  macabre, Gallant called it. And, like many of the 400,000 items left at the wall since 1982, it had a story.

The object was the painted bust of an American soldier, one side of the face depicting a smooth-skinned young serviceman, the other an aged, long-haired veteran with pocked features and a tearful, staring eye.

On one side, the top of the head was protected by an Army helmet. On the other, the helmet and skull were cut away to reveal the gray folds of the brain, etched with the names of battles and slogans from the war.

The dog tag on the sculpture bore the name, blood type and religion of U.S. Army Pvt. Leo C. Buckley Jr., a Vietnam veteran who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 60 in Walterboro, South Carolina.

But the face was that of Samuel Elliott, 73, a church deacon who lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He is the artist who created the sculpture.

Both men served in the war. Both saw combat. Both suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Neither knew the other during the war.

It was Buckleys widow who, with two friends, left the sculpture at the wall, which bears the names of more than 58,000 men and women claimed by the war. She snapped the photo as she walked away.

Clay Buckley had been a paratrooper with the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade during the war, and was severely injured when he stepped on a land mine, which tore off a chunk of one of his legs.

He spent 13 months recuperating in hospitals.

Elliott served with an Army survey team, which helicoptered into the bush and selected sites where artillery could be placed. He was hit by shrapnel, and lost a revered commander who had served as a father figure.

Following the war, Elliotts life fell apart and he was in and out of a veterans hospital in Georgia for counseling, he said. It was after a final stay in the mid-1990s that he started work on the sculpture as part of his healing.

He had realized the Vietnam veterans dilemma: Were back, but the memories of the war are embedded in our brain so deeply that we cant seem to escape that part of us, he said in a recent telephone interview.

An artist and a writer, he said he did the first version of the sculpture in bronze as personal therapy in 1995. But he produced eleven more versions in high-density plaster of Paris for fellow veterans.

I would hand engrave their name and serial number and all that on the dog tag, to personalize it for them, he said.

He explained the two sides to the sculpture:

First, youre proud to be an American soldier, he said. By God, Im in uniform and Im here and Im ready to do what Ive go to do.

Afterward, you feel scarred, he said. You feel wounded. Youre aged. Youve matured way too fast, came back an old man in spirit.

Elliott, a native of Hendersonville, said he was drafted in 1966, and was in a field artillery unit in the 1st Air Cavalry Division. He was in Vietnam from March 15, 1967, to March 15, 1968, and had a job that was often dangerous.

We had to go out in small groups out in the middle of nowhere all by ourselves, he said. Got shot at I dont know how many times. . . .

They used us as scouts. . . .

It was to position our artillery.

Helicopters would then airlift artillery pieces to sites selected by the surveyors, he said.

His most wrenching experience of the war was the death of a commander, Lt. Col. Robert Whitbeck, to whom he had grown close. He said he often served as Whitbecks jeep driver, and he has an old photo of them shaking hands.

It really affected me, Elliott said. I really loved the guy. He became almost like a father figure. . . . Id have stuck my neck out any time for him.

Whitbeck was killed Jan. 30, 1968. Elliott said his recollection is that the jeep Whitbeck was riding in that day was hit by a mortar during an attack.

After Elliott left Vietnam he stayed in the Army for 15 years, but was medically discharged with migraine headaches. Thats when my life began to fall apart, he said. I was lost.

Buckley was originally from Vienna, Virginia, his wife, Susan, said in a telephone interview this month.

She said he joined the Army in 1968, when he was 19, and was blown up in 1969, after being in Vietnam about three months.

His combat injuries were severe.

His leg was badly damaged, she said. They wanted to take it off, but he wouldnt let them. . . . He didnt wear anything but long pants for the longest period of time. . . . Half his leg was missing in the calf.

He had also been peppered with shrapnel. He used to sit at the kitchen table and dig . . . pieces of shrapnel with a knife out of his arm, she said. He was given the Purple Heart and Bronze Star medals, but seldom spoke of the war.

Discharged from the Army in 1970, Buckley, who worked as a truck driver, was reluctant to seek help for his PTSD, his wife said.

Finally I convinced him, You do have problems, she said. He never believed that he did. About 2004 or so he finally went . . . and got treatments and medicines.

It was about that time that Buckley and Elliott crossed paths. Elliott said he was passing through the Washington area en route to an art show, and was introduced to Buckley by a mutual acquaintance.

Buckley, a student of the Civil War, took Elliott on a tour of the Manassas Battlefield, near where the Buckleys were then living.

The two men soon shared their Vietnam war experiences.

I think thats why they got along so well as soon as they met, Susan Buckley said.

Elliott told Buckley about his Vietnam sculptures, and Buckley requested one. Susan Buckley said her husband thought it was a perfect rendering of the Vietnam veterans experience.

Elliott personalized the sculpture, adding the 173rd Airborne Brigades blue-and-white winged patch.

Susan Buckley said the bust was prominently displayed in the living room of their home in Manassas, Virginia, and later the sun porch of their home in South Carolina.

Some visitors found it overwhelming, she said. But I guess if youve been there, and understand why it looks like that, its not so hard.

Recently, in the process of moving, she decided to bring the sculpture to the wall.

I thought other people should see it, she said. I thought maybe it might help somebody else.

She typed up a summary of her husbands service and taped it to the bottom of the sculpture. I need to honor my husband somehow, and I thought this is the way to do it, she said.

With the help of friends, she transported the bust from South Carolina.

After she placed the piece at the wall on Aug. 24, Gallant, the volunteer, left it there for several hours. Later, the National Park Service took custody of it and moved it to the Park Services Museum Resource Center, in suburban Maryland.

There it joined the thousands of other objects left in tribute to those on the wall, and to the veterans of the war who carried its legacy.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post.
The state agency that oversees fair employment has launched an investigation into alleged job discrimination in the Orange County Superior Court system that union leaders say is delaying trials.

Officials with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing said the investigation was triggered by complaints by nearly half of the court systems 90 court reporters alleging age and gender discrimination.

Court officials declined comment Tuesday because of the potential litigation.

Jennifer Muir Beuthin, general manager of the Orange County Employees Association, said the issue involved the court administrations reduction of hours for court reporters, to 35 hours a week. Beuthin said the reduction means that court operations  trials, hearings and other business  must stop early, potentially jamming the system.

When court days are shorter, everyone involved suffers, and, more importantly, justice suffers, Beuthin wrote in a recent editorial. District attorneys, public defenders, county counsel and their support staffs are deprived of valuable courtroom time  resulting in longer trials, delayed trials and higher legal fees.

Court reporters, predominately women, work to create a transcript of everything that occurs in the court room. They produce the record.

According to court administrators, court reporters in Orange County make as much as $103,389 yearly.

No trial, motion or hearing can proceed in the courtroom without the court reporter copying everything down.

But for whatever reason, the court administration has decided to nickel and dime them, Beuthin said in an interview.

Court administrators, she said, had balanced cost reductions on the backs of a mostly female workforce.

In practice, Orange County courts usually stop for the day at 4:15 p.m.

Defense attorney Rudy Loewenstein said it is tough to work around the court reporters shortened days, but the court still finds ways to do it.

Any time theres less court time it causes longer trials, Loewenstein said. Sometimes you dont call a witness because you only have 15 minutes.

Beuthin notes that everyone else in the court system works an eight-hour day and therefore is left in the lurch for that one hour when court reporters have to clock out.

She said restoring court reporters to eight-hour days would also restore confidence and judicial efficiency.

Contact the writer: tsaavedra@ocregister.com
The concepts for some stage shows are better left on the drawing board. Paradoxically, though, that fact doesnt usually become apparent until time, energy, money and resources have been expended.

The 1999 Disney musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame and its reworking (translating German to English) is a great example of concepts, approach, storyline and songs winding up as something as misshapen as the twisted frame of Quasimodo, the storys wretched protagonist.

And although it brims with talent from its solid cast to its music and visuals, La Mirada Theatre and McCoy Rigby Productions new staging of that 2014 version proves that almost no amount of musical theater magic can spark life into so woebegone a property or forge a hit from it.

Director Glenn Casales well-crafted staging has its moments, chiefly because his cast and production team are so good. Music director and conductor Dennis Castellano and the superlative pit orchestra spin gold from the dross of Alan Menkens so-so score, Dana Solimandos choreography generates visual interest, and the entire cast, from top to bottom, delivers top-grade singing, dancing and acting.

Stephen Schwartzs lyrics provide heartfelt expressions of genuine emotion for La Miradas first-rate principal and supporting cast and 31-person onstage choir. As laudable are scenic designer Stephen Giffords creation of the interior of the famed Gothic cathedral, which doubles for other areas in and around Paris, and Marcy Froehlichs medieval costumes.

The flaws are in Peter Parnells plot-heavy book and Menken-Schwartz songs created to provide pro forma elements of Disney stage musicals in place of whats riveting and engrossing in Hugos tale. The shows 17 songs are pleasant enough but unmemorable  not a potential hit or showstopper in the lot.

Appealing to fans of deaf actor John McGinty, or any deaf audience members, is an admirable, even noble, goal, but its a misfire in terms of dramatic impact or artistry. The sight of 15th-century characters gesturing in American Sign Language is distracting, even ludicrous, straining credibility.

Patterning Quasimodos look after the animated image is yet another misstep. As the name literally means half-formed, letting McGinty look hideous would add spice and complexity to what is a blandly generic Disney good-guy role. McGinty, for his part, is likable and sympathetic, making hay from his oddly punchless role.

Thankfully, the current version replaces the trio of goofy gargoyles  Quasimodos only friends, who provided the standard Disney-style comic relief  with ensemble members playing 12 now-nameless gargoyles.

Dino Nicandros plays a gargoyle but, more crucially, provides the singing for McGintys Quasimodo  delicate, expressive tenor vocals that give voice to the hunchbacks turbulent feelings in the songs Out There, Heavens Light and Top of the World. Yet like the use of ASL, the technique creates an awkward effect akin to the speaking-singing actor-puppeteers of Avenue Q.

Hugos story contains more than sufficient drama, yet the characters of gypsy Esmeralda and Phoebus, captain of the cathedral guards, are pressed into service as standard Disney romantic leads  an ungainly notion.

The character of Esmeralda is remade as a Disney-style Jasmine, Ariel or Belle  strong-willed, independent, rebellious  instead of trusting the characters ample compassion and sensuality. Numbers like God Help the Outcasts showcase Cassie Simones soaring vocals while proving that the roles boundless empathy more than sufficiently defines her.

Unlike Aladdin and other Disney romantic heroes, Eric Kunzes Phoebus, for all his wry impudence, is sketchy at best. His pairing with Esmeralda comes off as merely an excuse for rapturous Broadway-style duets like Someday and In a Place of Miracles.

The only star of La Miradas staging to emerge with a compelling role that holds our interest and makes sense is Mark Jacoby as Frollo, Quasimodos stern, pious guardian. Frollo uses Gods name to justify acts of sadism and persecution, and Jacoby is positively electrifying.

More gripping is this Archdeacon of Notre Dames all-consuming lust for Esmeralda, which both terrifies and motivates him, and Jacobys work in the songs Hellfire and Sanctuary ably shows Frollo as tortured in mind, body and spirit.

La Miradas production is a great example of a cast and production team displaying and delivering heartfelt conviction in the service of a flawed work.

Contact the writer: emarchesewriter@gmail.com
Maurice Allan Enderles widow enjoyed a single year with him.

And what a year it was, said Rozetta Enderle. He was one of a kind.

Just for example, after marrying the Tustin luminary on Sept. 16, 2015, her new husband  known as Al  took her to San Antonio, Texas, where a motor home he bought online awaited. Then the couple drove the highways and byways back home.

Al Enderle was diagnosed with leukemia just three weeks before his death. He died Sept. 17 at age 87.

He was many things, but sedentary was not one of them. Born in Santa Ana-Tustin Community Hospital to citrus growers, Al Enderle was a farmer, a Stanford-educated engineer, an entrepreneur, a pilot, a land developer and a familiar face at just about every civic event.

But to many local organizations  among them, the Kiwanis and the Boys & Girls Clubs and Tustin Public Schools Foundation  the Tustin High alum was best known as a generous philanthropist always looking to help.

His name is also recognizable for the Enderle Center. Built in the 1970s, the Tustin shopping and restaurant mall sits on land once occupied by his fathers orange groves.

Enderle outlived five wives. His first wife, Joan, died of spinal meningitis in 1952, leaving him a single father with a two-month-old baby. Wanting to stay near his child, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars by working as an Air Force engineer in California until 1968  gaining the rank of captain.

Enderles next four wives died of cancer. He is survived by four children, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Rozetta said her husband found his strength in tragedy through his faith. He became a devout born-again Christian in 1976, she said. He believed everything happens for a reason.

She met Enderle through her sister and brother-in-law  his friends  at a Christian Valentines dance last year. We both had lost our spouses the year before, Rozetta said. We were engaged within six weeks.

She moved to North Tustin from the San Joaquin Valley to be with him.

Enderles multifaceted career included founding Enderle Equipment, which became the largest wholesaler of used farm and industrial equipment.

Ever busy, Enderle was an adventurer who loved flying, boating and off-road biking. In the late 1960s, he worked on a trading ship as a chief mate in Micronesia  just for the heck of it.

He continued to fly until just a few years ago, including dangerous stuff like gyrocopters, Rozetta said. Al had so much little boy in him, like he still played games with walkie-talkies. He was so charming and witty and delightful.

Most of all, she added, he loved being around people.

Contact the writer: sgoulding@scng.com
One cat died and two people suffered from smoke inhalation after a fire tore through a Costa Mesa apartment on Tuesday night.

The blaze was reported just after 7 p.m. at the South Pointe apartment community at 655 Baker St., said Capt. Chris Coates of the Costa Mesa Fire Department.

When firefighters arrived, one unit was burning heavily and they began to attack the fire aggressively to keep it from spreading, Coates said. Residents from 10 units were evacuated while 25 firefighters battled the blaze. It took them about 30 minutes to get the fire under control.

Upon investigation, they learned that the residents of the apartment had left and found black smoke coming out of it when they returned. They went in to rescue their three cats, but one of them had died, Coates said.

Two of the residents who went back to the home to rescue the cats were treated for smoke inhalation and released.

The apartment was heavily damaged by the fire and three others units had smoke or water damage. The residents of the four apartments were displaced but would be offered help by the Red Cross.

Investigators were working to determine what started the fire. Baker Street was temporarily closed, but was soon reopened.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or afausto@ocregister.com
Laguna Hills resident and military veteran Owen Litfin was presented with a certificate of recognition by the city council, Sept. 13, for being named Veteran of the Year for the 73rd Assembly District.

The honor followed a June 29 ceremony at the California State Assembly where the state honored veterans during its annual Veteran of the Year Recognition Luncheon at the State Capitol.

It was an honor to be selected, said Litfin, who served as a Corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1963-66, which included a tour in Vietnam. I do feel that there many other in the district that could be honored.

During his service, he earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam. While on patrol overseas, he ran into an explosive device attached to a gate and he was hit by fragmentation from the bomb.

I was fortunate, my injuries were minor, he said.

Litfin, 72, grew up in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and moved to Laguna Hills 35 years ago with his wife Karen and his son.

Litfin continues serving his community through Laguna Hills Team Dark Horse, a volunteer group of residents who support the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton. Its mission is to provide encouragement, relief and comfort to the Marines, sailors and their families by holding holiday parties, baby showers, a ball gown drive, marine departure events and offer support to the families when the Marines are on deployment.

I feel its important that a society needs to honor the service of our Marines, military and veterans, and show them the respect they have earned and deserve, he said.

His dad served in the Navy, his two brothers in the Army, and his sister married a Naval officer.

My family always felt it was an honor to serve the country, he said.
UNITED NATIONS  Ahead of a major European meeting on the refugee crisis convened by Austria, the countrys chancellor and foreign minister on Tuesday urged joint EU action on tightening up Europes external borders and a Marshall Plan for countries responsible for most of the migrant influx to the continent to reduce incentives to leave.

Austria is governed by a coalition of Social Democrats and the center-right Peoples Party. At a time of increased tension between the two parties, comments by Chancellor Christian Kern and Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz reflected attempts to stake out political positions that will appeal to their voter base. Kern, a Social Democrat, focused on the need to reduce the migrant influx by improving the lives of those most likely to leave their home countries. Kurz, of the Peoples Party, hit hard on the need to secure border controls.

But both strove to reduce fears of a rightward lurch by Austria, through increasingly restrictive border policies and amid projections that Norbert Hofer of Austrias xenophobic Freedom Party has the edge in delayed presidential elections now scheduled for December.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Kern avoided directly responding when asked if that perceived rightward shift had been raised by other leaders attending the session. Even in case Mr. Hofer would win the election, life would go on, he said. We have a stable government, and we are part of the European Union representing the values of its foundation.

Kurzs party has moved further right on refugees than Kerns, opening it up to criticism that its policies are not much different from those of the Freedom Party. But Kurz said Austria is not alone in its switch this year from open to tight borders.

There is now an understanding in the European Union that we have to stop the flow of illegal migrants, and that we need border controls to our external borders, he said. I dont think this is a far-right position. Its a necessary position.

The two spoke ahead of a regional refugee summit in Vienna on Saturday, convened by Kern to try and harmonize policies  a difficult proposition considering that those attending will include German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who lead opposing camps on the issue.

Kern saw no problem, saying the two often meet at summits. Still, their encounters have been bumpy.

At a summit of EU leaders on Friday in Slovakia, Orban again criticized Germany for refusing to set limits on migrant arrivals. Unless Berlin caps arrivals, he said, the flood will continue because everyone sees  that there is a place in Europe where the good life can be achieved, where they are welcomed and where their needs are taken care of.

He said Hungarys razor-wire barrier is meant to stop at the Hungarian border the negative consequences of the suction effect of German domestic politics.
BEIRUT  An airstrike in northern Syria killed four medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, a relief group said Wednesday, as the U.N. announced it would resume aid deliveries suspended after an attack on a convoy two days ago that killed 20 people.

The escalation of violence against humanitarian workers has all but destroyed a cease-fire that took effect on Sept. 12 and has stoked tensions between the truces architects, the U.S. and Russia, which have traded blame for running it into the ground.

The U.N said convoys to priority areas would be resumed, with deliveries planned as early as Thursday. Our obligation to civilians on all sides is to go where and when we can with relief, said Jan Egeland, a senior U.N. humanitarian official focused on Syria. We hope to resume convoys tomorrow and Friday, but still work on security guarantees.

But air raids continued in other parts of Syria, with activists reporting at least 23 civilians killed in the besieged parts of Aleppo city and the nearby rebel-held Idlib province.

The attack that killed the medics took place shortly after they arrived at the scene of an airstrike in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman on Tuesday. As the medics deployed, planes circled around and struck the area again, Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said. Al-Moufti initially said that five medics were killed. The group later said two nurses and two ambulance drivers were killed, while a third nurse remains in critical condition.

Syrian government forces have been accused of carrying out double tap attacks throughout the 51/2 year war, placing paramedics and rescue workers in peril.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nine militants, some of them belonging to the Fatah al-Sham Front, an al-Qaida-linked group previously known as the Nusra Front, were also killed in the double tap attack.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike. Aircraft from Syria, Russia and the U.S.-led coalition are targeting the Fatah al-Sham Front, which along with the Islamic State group was excluded from the cease-fire.

On Wednesday, Syrian opposition activists said suspected government airstrikes in the northern city of Aleppo and the rebel-held Idlib province killed 23 civilians, including at least five children.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, said at least 11 civilians, including three children and three women, were killed Wednesday during air raids on several rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo.

Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in the Aleppo strikes.

In nearby Idlib, the Observatory said 12 civilians, including two children, were killed in at least eight air raids.

Elsewhere in Syria, airstrikes on the opposition-run town of Talbiseh, outside of the central city of Homs, killed two civilians and wounded tens of others, according to the activist-run Talbiseh Media Center.

The town is besieged by government forces. The Observatory said government jets subjected the town to heavy bombardment Wednesday morning.

State TV meanwhile said a Syrian warplane crashed after carrying out a combat mission against Islamic State militants northwest of the capital, Damascus. The pilot was rescued, according to an unnamed military official quoted on state TV.

The Islamic State-affiliated news agency Aamaq said the group downed the plane in the eastern Qalamoun mountains after the aircraft carried out four raids. Islamic State shot down a government aircraft on Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.
CAIRO  A boat carrying African migrants headed to Europe capsized off the Mediterranean coast near the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Wednesday, killing at least 29 people, Egyptian authorities said.

Health Ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed said that the total number of dead was still unknown. Local official Alaa Osman from Beheira province said the migrants were from several African countries. He said 155 people have been rescued so far but that bodies are still being pulled from the water.

Egypts official news agency MENA said the boat was carrying 600 people when it sank near the coast, some 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of the capital, Cairo. Osman said the boat had likely come from Kafr el-Sheik province, further to the east.

Thousands of illegal migrants have made the dangerous sea voyage across the Mediterranean in recent years fleeing war and poverty, mostly via lawless Libya. Thousands have drowned.

The number of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Europe has increased significantly in the past year, EU border agency Frontex said earlier this month. More than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September, compared to 7,000 in the same period last year, it said.

Experts say smugglers in Egypt mostly use old fishing vessels, stuffed way beyond capacity both below and above deck.

New and more dangerous smuggling practices and attempts to reach Europe by riskier routes have led to a spike in the number of migrants dying as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean, the International Organization for Migration said in a report last month.

It said newer routes, particularly from Egypt, are longer and riskier, leading to search and rescue efforts often being carried out farther away from land. It said 2,901 people died or disappeared crossing the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2016, a 37 percent increase over the first six months of last year.

Last May, hundreds of migrants died after a wooden boat coming from Libya capsized, even as the Italian navy rushed to the rescue. European rescue boats, including naval vessels, often patrol off the Libyan coast to prevent such disasters.

The migrant crisis has proven deeply divisive in Europe, which has struggled to come up with a unified response. Right-wing nationalist parties opposed to taking in more migrants and refugees have made gains, including in Germany, which has accepted more migrants than any other European country.

Migrants rescued by the Italian navy near Europes southern borders are brought to processing centers and offered accommodation while they apply for asylum. But many of the thousands registered each month travel further onwards toward Europes richer north, in hopes of settling there.

More than 60,000 migrants and refugees are stranded in transit in Greece  just across the Mediterranean from Egypt  and those who arrived after March 20 have been restricted to five Aegean islands under an EU-brokered deal to deport them back to Turkey. The agreement has been fraught with delays, however, and most of the people in island camps have applied for asylum in Greece, launching a lengthy process during which they cannot be deported.
How Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton reacted to the recent terrorist bombings in New York and New Jersey clearly shows the differences in their styles.

Trump was bold but also impulsive and emotional, recklessly saying things before he got all of the information. If he became president he also would vigorously profile Muslims and ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., which would be illegal and unconstitutional.

Mrs. Clinton had a less emotional but more measured, level-headed, cautious, calm and calculated response to the bombings. She wanted to get all of the information and have it verified and substantiated before commenting on it, and was just interested in capturing the bad guys instead of violating the civil liberties of innocent people.

Her more steady response reassured me, as opposed to Trumps erratic and emotionally charged response. She seemed to have a plan to combat terrorists, while Trump just seemed to emotionally shoot-from-the-hip in a haphazard manner.

Kenneth L. Zimmerman

Huntington Beach

  

In light of the attacks in Minnesota, New York and New Jersey its clear that someone needs to press forward on the development and enforcement of bomb free zones and bomb control laws, not to mention knives. Isnt it obvious that would put a stop to all this?

David Y. Cantwell

Irvine

Opinion not fact

While I appreciate the Registers policy of printing letters on all sides of an issue, sometimes those letters run contrary to accepted facts.

Over the weekend, reader Tom Britton [Legal or not, still a gateway drug, Letters, Sept. 18] weighed in on the question of legalizing marijuana in California, and his comments about the dangers of legalized pot fly in the face of recent scientific research on the subject; they also repeat discredited myths about marijuana usage.

Specifically, he indicates that marijuana is a gateway drug that inevitably leads to heroin addiction. To imply that a completely sober teen could smoke marijuana and instantly move to hard drugs is both specious and absurd.

For future reference, I would submit Daniel Moynihans well known quote: You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

Johnny Knox

San Juan Capistrano
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ANAHEIM  Brandon Sean Murphy, 24, was arrested and booked on suspicion of operating a small-scale butane honey oil lab in a condominium Wednesday morning, police Sgt. Daron Wyatt said.

A hazardous-materials team was sent to the home in the 2000 block of E. Figwood Lane after officers, conducting a probation-compliance check on Murphy, discovered the lab.

About 15 residents were evacuated for a half-hour while the Fire Departments hazardous-materials team examined the lab, Wyatt said.

Honey oil, also know as hash oil or wax, is a created when THC, the chemical responsible for some of marijuanas psychological effects, is extracted from marijuana by boiling it in butane.

The gooey, honey-like product can be smoked or inhaled through a vaporizer.

The creation of honey oil can be dangerous. When done wrong, the chemicals and apparatus can explode or produce unexpected fireballs. In January, an Anaheim garage exploded, and two months later a Placentia garage burned.

Murphy was being held in jail on $75,000 bail, Wyatt said.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7802 or jsudock@ocregister.com
AMMAN, Jordan  Jordanians voted Tuesday for a new parliament under revised rules that officials say are meant to strengthen political parties but are seen by some as a small step, at most, toward democratic reform.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the kingdoms most organized opposition group, competed for the first time since 2007, but was not expected to win enough seats to challenge control of parliament by establishment candidates, including tribal representatives.

The vote comes at a time of regional turmoil, including domestic and external security threats to pro-Western Jordan by Islamic State extremists who control large areas in neighboring Syria and Iraq. In holding regular elections, Jordan seeks to strengthen its image as an island of stability in the region.

However, parliament is weak, with most powers remaining in the hands of King Abdullah II. Polls have indicated widespread voter apathy, despite the participation of the Brotherhood.

Polls closed at 8 p.m., after 13 hours of voting, including an hour-long extension in some districts due to a late voter surge, officials said. About 1.5 million Jordanians cast ballots, the Independent Election Commission said, or roughly 200,000 more than in the last election in 2013.

In principle, more than 4.1 million Jordanians older than 17 were eligible to vote, but those presently abroad  about 1 million according to commission spokesman Jihad Momani  cannot cast ballots. The potential voter pool was half that size in 2013, when voters had to pre-register and turnout reached 56 percent. Momani said there was no point in comparing turnout percentages.

Results were not expected before Wednesday, Momani said.

Voter Nour al-Ghwairi, 44, said she hoped the new parliament would tackle Jordans economic difficulties, such as rising joblessness, particularly among the young. The country suffers from unemployment and other problems, she said after voting in the Jabal Hussein neighborhood of the capital, Amman.

Elsewhere in central Amman, 71-year-old Othman Abu Felah said he didnt bother voting because it doesnt help anything. Katrina Sammour, a political researcher, said she would cast a blank ballot in protest because she believes parliament is weak and no party or list addresses her concerns.

Prime Minister Hani al-Mulki, appointed in May after the king dissolved the outgoing parliament, said that Jordan is proud to hold elections in a stable atmosphere.

We resort to ballot boxes and to the electoral process to select the path for the future, and we dont resort to anything else, he said, apparently referring to escalating conflicts in the region.

Tuesdays election is being held under new rules that replace the one man, one vote system. The old method, in place since 1993, had discouraged the formation of political parties.

Critics said the latest electoral reforms have fallen short and are unlikely to lead to meaningful change.

They said they expect the new parliament to be similar to the outgoing one  largely made up of individuals with competing, narrow interests.

Under new voting rules, voters chose candidates from lists in 23 electoral districts. In all, 1,252 candidates ran on 226 lists.

Only six percent of the lists are affiliated with a specific political party, 11 percent have some party representatives, 39 percent are independent and 43 percent are based on tribal affiliations, according to the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-based non-partisan group that seeks to promote democracy.

While there might be some consolidation compared to previous parliaments, you are still going to see a parliament of individuals, said Ramsey Day, the IRIs Jordan director. He said this is somewhat inconsistent with what has been cited as the ultimate goal of democratic reforms, a government formed by parliament.

While this (election) might take a step forward toward that, its quite a small step, he said.

Anja Wehler-Schoeck, Jordan director of Germanys Friedrich Ebert Foundation, said that we are still very far from a robust parliamentary democracy.

Parliament is a weak institution in the political system in Jordan, said Wehler-Schoeck, who also cited a trust gap between citizens and legislators. The foundation is affiliated with Germanys Social Democratic Party and seeks to promote democracy worldwide.

The most organized party is the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a veteran opposition movement linked to the regional organization of the same name.

In Jordan, ideological arguments split the group into rival factions, with one of the breakaways recognized by the government as the official Brotherhood.

The IAF said the group expects to win at least one-fourth of the seats and serve as a vocal opposition, while analysts expected they would win about 20 seats. The group boycotted elections in 2010 and 2013, saying electoral laws were unfair.

Zaki Bani Ersheid, a senior Brotherhood official, said Tuesday that he believes a strong showing for the movement would increase confidence in the legislative institution, and confidence between the people and the government.

The IAF couldnt afford boycotting this election, despite continued misgivings about procedures, said analyst Ayoub al-Nmour from the election monitoring group Al-Hayat.

Boycotting for so long caused them to lose a lot of their weight in Jordanian politics, he said.
Long Beach port officials picked an interim top executive to replace CEO Jon Slangerup, who announced his resignation earlier this month.

Duane Kenagy, an engineer who came to the port in 2014 to oversee some of the ports largest capital projects, will serve as CEO beginning Oct. 31 when Slangerup departs.

Lori Ann Guzman, president of the board of Harbor Commissioners, said in a statement that Kenagy is highly respected by all of the commissioners, very well regarded in our industry, and well-liked by the port staff.

The full board, set to meet tonight at 6 p.m., must still give final approval to Kenagys appointment.

Kenagy, who will earn $275,000 in the interim position, becomes the fifth person to head the nations second busiest port since 2011. Kenagy and the commission stated in a press release that he would not be a candidate for the permanent appointment.

Kenagy came to the port in 2014 from engineer consulting firm Moffatt & Nicol. He was appointed by Slangerup to rein in the ports nearly $4.5 billion capital plan that included two of the ports biggest projects: the Gerald Desmond Bridge and the Middle Harbor terminal. The cost of the bridge, originally budgeted at $950 million in 2010, ballooned to $1.5 billion due mostly to the tangle of oil wells workers found at the construction site.

Among the issues Kenagy will contend with when he takes the helm: competition from the newly expanded Panama Canal, which opens up alternative shipping routes into the U.S. market; recent financial turmoil in the shipping industry, which is estimated by analysts to lose $5 billion this year; and the recent bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping Co., which has a financial stake in the local ports largest terminal.

Beyond that, the port saw import volume decline 10 percent last month compared to the previous August, just as the holiday season begins. Overall imports in Long Beach are down 2.6 percent this year. Slangerup, who had a three-year contract, will become the head of Mxi Technologies, a Canadian aviation software company. The last time the port had a vacancy in its top post, it took more than one year to name a permanent leader.

The board has been meeting behind closed doors to find a temporary replacement for Slangerup. In its announcement of Kenagys proposed promotion, Guzman said the board will issue a bid to search for the next chief executive this week.

We are committed to carrying out a thorough, professional and transparent global search for our next CEO, she said.

The Port of Long Beach, which is owned by the city, employs close to 500 full-time workers, and oversees roughly $180 billion in trade each year.

A major economic engine in the region, 300,000 jobs regionally depend on trade at the port.

Contact the writer:
A Yorba Linda man who held up a Subway restaurant in Hemet and forced employees into a walk-in refrigerator was sentenced to 185 years to life in prison Monday, authorities said.

Raynaldo Sanchez Salcido, 50, was convicted in July of armed robbery, kidnapping and sentence-enhancing allegations of using a firearm and committing a crime within five years of parole.

Riverside County Superior Court Judge W. Charles Morgan imposed the upper terms for each count.

In July 2015, Salcido and an unidentified man burst into the sandwich shop, brandished handguns and told employees to empty the cash register, authorities said.

After taking several hundred dollars, the men forced victims into a walk-in refrigerator and took their personal belongings, authorities said.

Salcido, who has a prior criminal record, was later charged and convicted in a separate robbery involving a Menifee man the day before the Subway robbery.

City News Service contributed to this report.
Detectives are asking the publics help finding a 32-year-old man who they said broke into the Mexican Consulate building in Santa Ana twice, most recently on Saturday .

Albert Sierra is suspected of smashing a glass door and entering the consulate building at 2100 E. 4th St. Saturday night, Santa Ana police said Tuesday.

Sierra, who police say is a transient, was also caught on surveillance footage breaking into the consulate July 10, officials said. Police say he stole office equipment, money and several Red Cross donation containers.

He is suspected of three other burglaries in July and August around Santa Ana, in which thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment was stolen.

Anyone with information is asked to call Detective Duane Greaver at 714-245-8362 or Orange County Crime Stoppers at 1-855-TIP-OCCS.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or afausto@scng.com
UNITED NATIONS  The United States and Russia blamed each other for Syrias failing cease-fire Wednesday, illustrating why a fractured U.N. Security Council has been unable for more than five years to do anything to stop the Arab countrys civil war.

In a public session originally envisioned to enshrine Syrias Sept. 9 truce, world powers were left to rue the possibility of the conflict entering an even darker phase after a series of attacks on humanitarian workers.

Washington, Moscow and the councils other nations all sought to revive the U.S.-Russian cease-fire deal, but seemed stuck on fundamental differences old and new: Who bears ultimate responsibility for the war and whose actions over the last days scuttled perhaps the best opportunity for peace?

Supposedly we all want the same goal. Ive heard that again and again, a clearly angry U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the council, referencing oft-repeated international objectives of a united, secular and democratic Syria. But we are proving woefully inadequate in  making that happen.

Kerry outlined a litany of U.S. complaints against Syrian President Bashar Assads government and its chief backer, Russia. He recited Moscows changing narrative over a deadly attack this week on an aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counterterror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.

This is not a joke, Kerry said, sharply criticizing those who engage in word games to dodge responsibility over questions of war and peace, life and death.

Kerry offered one concrete suggestion to revive diplomatic hopes. Focused on protecting key aid routes in northern Syria, it was unclear if Russia and Syria would agree.

To restore credibility, we must immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded, he said.

The top American diplomat spoke just after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered his own set of barbs, underscoring the breakdown in trust in the 12 days since he and Kerry clinched a cease-fire agreement and a potential U.S.-Russian military partnership against the Islamic State and al-Qaida. The former Cold War foes and much of the international community hailed the outcome, only to watch it unravel amid an upsurge in violence that even included an accidental U.S. strike that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers.

Unlike Kerry, who stressed the importance of Assads government ending military operations against rebels and allowing in unfettered aid, Lavrov said the U.S. had the biggest responsibility.

The key priority is to separate the opposition forces from the terrorists, Lavrov said.

Responding to the wide criticism of the convoy airstrike, which American officials are blaming on Russia, Lavrov cited various possible explanations. Twenty civilians were killed when the Syrian Red Crescent convoy was struck.

Lavrov was more direct in laying out what he presented as a series off truce violations by U.S.-backed rebels groups near the northern city of Aleppo. And he declared Syrias conflict, as well as that of Iraq, Libya and other instable nations, the direct consequence of foreign military interventions in the region. It was a not-so-subtle finger pointed at Washington.

Larvov and Kerrys speeches laid bare their widely divergent views of a war that has killed up to a half-million people, contributed to Europes worst refugee crisis since World War II and allowed the Islamic State to emerge as a global terror threat. At one point, Kerry said listening to his Russian counterpart was like hearing about a parallel universe.

On Tuesday, the two diplomats met with more than a dozen Arab and European foreign ministers belonging to the International Syria Support Group, hoping to hold onto what might be salvageable from a week of relative calm in Syria.

No one spoke of any progress, beyond a decision to hold follow-up discussions later this week.

Lavrov on Wednesday mentioned the possibility of a three-day period of silence being announced.

We are at a make-or-break moment, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, opening the session.

His peace envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said after the Security Council meeting: Everything now depends on the renewal of the cessation of hostilities, and there is a chance  and you will know it in two days time.

De Mistura was referring to a follow-up meeting of the International Syria Support Group on Friday.

Speaking to the council, he described his long-delayed plans for a multi-step Syrian peace process and transition that appeared, even by his own admission, untethered to reality on the ground. Wednesdays latest violence included an airstrike in the north that killed five medical staff, according to a relief organization.

I know, it looks like a dream, de Mistura said.

Venezuelas U.N. ambassador, Rafael Ramirez Carreno, said the council meeting clearly showed the confrontation between Russia and the United States

I believe this is like a PR exercise, he said, but unfortunately the conflict is still a very, very, very, very tough situation.
Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are monitoring a humpback whale seen off Newport Beach and Dana Point last weekend and Monday that could be the same whale entanglement teams have tried to free in recent weeks.

Only this time, the humpback seems to be clear of the bait traps and fishing line seen on it since August.

Whale watching boats from Newport Beach and Dana Point have compared photos taken during disentanglement efforts to photos of the whale taken in the last few days. The whale has distinctive markings and dorsal fin.

Justin Viezbicke, marine mammal stranding coordinator for NOAA, said Tuesday he is monitoring the whale.

Its hard to say at this point for sure what has happened, he said. Even if the gear off the flipper is no longer visible we dont know for sure until we get better footage. Hopefully, the whale will hang out a while longer so we can continue to monitor.

Drone footage taken Saturday showed the whale with line still entangled. But when Ryan Lawler, a boat captain on Newport Coastal Adventures, took drone footage on Sunday of the humpback feeding with a pod of dolphins, the line seemed to be gone.

There was no line anywhere to be seen on the whale, he said. The whale was behaving like it was feeding, and keeping up a good pace. Putting all those things together to evaluate the whale from the drone, it appeared to me it showed a disentanglement.

Dave Anderson, who operates Capt. Daves Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari, said two of his captains spotted the whale on Monday when it came up and mugged the boat  or took over the water near the boat.

Video and photos taken from the boats underwater pod also indicate that there is no more entanglement.

The whale originally had rope wrapped around its left pectoral fin. The rope went around the whales body and through its mouth.

Anderson, who had been on previous disentanglement efforts and is part of NOAAs trained disentanglement team, said the fishing line was so tightly wrapped that it appeared to dig into the whales skin. It also had a buoy line that had been attached to it by rescue teams. But that line might have been cut off during other attempts to free it near Central California.

The whale watch community has been very good about documenting this animal, and weve been able to compare videos and photographs, Anderson said. The video that was shot Sunday by Ryan (Lawler) showed the whale swimming in a pod of dolphins feeding. That is a pretty good sign. Its amazing it might be free.

If it is free, Anderson said, the result is a perfect scenario.

Nobody had to risk their life to free it, he said.

The Marine Animal Entanglement Response network last week determined it could not get close enough to the creature to help. The animal had  and still has  lice all over its body, an indication that its not in good health. The line in the mouth could have been making it difficult to feed.

Data from NOAA shows that the number of entanglements has increased in recent years. Last year, 61 whales were reported entangled off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, the highest number since NOAA began keeping records in 1982.

Since January, about 40 whale entanglements off California have been reported, putting 2016 on track for another record-breaking year.

On average, about 10 whales were reported entangled off the West Coast annually from 2000 to 2012. Humpback whales are the most commonly entangled whale species on the West Coast, according to NOAA.

Contact the writer: lconnelly@ocregister.com and eritchie@ocregister.com
From now on, when you get the munchies for a delicious street food snack, youll no longer have to choose between a hamburger and a hotdog, because you can have both in the same bun. Introducing the Hamdog, probably the craziest fast food hybrid ever.

Mark Murray, of Perth, Australia, came up with the idea for the Hamdog in 2004, and by 2009, he had already obtained a patent for the uniquely-shaped bun of the treat. Last year, he appeared on Channel 10s Shark Tank show to pitch his idea to potential investors and secure enough funding to get his fast food business off the ground. The judges were not impressed, and even laughed when he described eating the Hamdog as a party in your mouth. But Murray didnt let the experience bring him down, and one year later, hes selling Hamdogs in his home city and wants to expand nationally.

Photo: Hamdog/Facebook

Everyone told me it wasnt possible, because youd need a patent lawyer and it would cost millions of dollars, Murray told News.com.au. Even [Boost Juice founder and Shark Tank judge] Janine Allis told me that it was impossible to patent. Shell be eating her words now. The ambitious entrepreneur has been operating a Hamdog marquee in Perth for about two months now, and is currently looking for people willing to invest $10,000 to become Hamdog resellers and open marquees of their own across Australia.

The Hamdog consists of a patented bun, a Bunbury beef patty cut in half to accommodate a Hunsa frankfurt in the middle, lettuce, tomato, cheese, pickles and three sauces  American mustard, tomato sauce and mayonnaise. We use all local ingredients. The only thing thats not from WA are the pickles, Mark Murray said

Photo: Twitter

So far the Hamdog marquee has made appearances at events such as local markets, shows, races in Perth, and Murray said the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We launched our marquee two months ago and we had people come from everywhere just to experience the Hamdog. At one stage the crew were knocking out about one every 15 seconds. It was amazing, he told reporters.

The only thing thats sort of giving Murray headaches right now is the production of the unique Hamdog bun. Because of its peculiar shape, it has to be hand made at a Perth bakery. At the moment there is a fair bit of labor involved in making the buns because theyre made by people, not machines, he said. Were still developing a way to semi automate production.

Photo: Hamdog/Facebook

For now, though, Murray is focusing his efforts on promoting the Hamdog and attracting potential resellers. Once thats done with, he wants to work on diversifying the menu. Weve had requests of all sorts for gluten free, vegan and vegetarian Hamdogs. Once the product is out there and that process is sorted, well start experimenting, he said.

Sources: News.com.au, BBC
In case you needed any more proof that life is unfair, a dog managed to get his paws on an iPhone 7 before you. In fact, she got eight of them, as a gift from her wealthy owner, the son of Chinas richest man.

Photos doing the rounds on Chinese social media show Coco, a gorgeous Alaskan Malamute, posing with a stack of brand new iPhone 7s that her master, 28-year-old Wang Sicong bought just for her. Youd think shed be happier about getting such an expensive gift on the day Apples iPhone 7 went on sale, but Coco doesnt seem to impressed. Too bad she cant read all the comments from users complaining that their lives are so much worse than hers. Maybe then she could appreciate these little gestures more.

Wang Sicong, also known as the nations husband, for his status of Chinas most eligible bachelor, is part of Chinas fuerdai or second-generation rich, youth who love nothing more than to flaunt their decadent lifestyles online. His father, Wang Jianlin, runs Chinas largest real-estate development company, and is worth a reported $30 billion. Hes currently the richest man in the Asian country and the 20th richest man in the world.

This isnt the first time the young heir made headlines for showering his pet dog with extravagant gifts. Last year, he came under fire for snapping photos of Coco wearing two Apple Watches  one on each of her front legs  with luxury bands worth over $37,000.

The iPhone 7 currently sells for 7,988 yuan ($1,197), so Cocos eight handhelds could be worth as much as $9,584, although its not clear what model her owner went for, from the photos.

Wang Sicong

Source: CNN
Stagwell Group, the marketing investment group headed by polling guru and former Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn, has purchased preferred stock in global independent agency Finn Partners.

The private equity fund's preferred share investment in Finn Partners carries future conversion rights to a minority interest in the firm, according to the agency in a statement. As a result of the deal, Penn now joins Finn Partners' board. No other changes in Finn Partners management, structure or operations will occur, according to the agency.

Finn Partners founding partner Peter Finn told ODwyers that bringing on a minority investor was something hed wanted to do for quite some time.

Were on track to becoming a top global agency, but were still far from where we need to be, and for some time Ive wanted to bring in a minority investor to help accomplish that, Finn told ODwyers. What was important to me was to find an investor who was willing to take minority position and was willing to do it on terms that worked for us, and Mark was willing to do it on terms that made sense to me. He firmly understands our business.

Finn told ODwyers that he and Penn attended high school together and have known each other for 45 years.

As a result of the investment, Stagwell and Finn Partners will also launch a new jointly-owned PR agency titled Wye Communications. Wye will hold multiple purposes, serving as a conflict shop for Finn Partners and slated to become a home to some significant accounts that Stagwell will bring to the table, according to Finn.

Wye will initially maintain offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Finn Partners will provide office space for Wye in the agencys existing offices.

Stagwell, which was established last year after Penns exit as EVP and chief strategy officer of Microsoft, has been in the midst of a purchasing frenzy. The investment advisory shop in January acquired a majority stake in New York-based digital agency Code and Theory, a deal that followed Stagwells October 2015 purchase of PR and public affairs firm SKDKnickerbocker, and its November acquisition of Nielsens National Research Group. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is a Stagwell investor.

Finn Partners in August acquired Portland-based agency Lane PR, and in July picked up Washington, D.C.-based branding and marketing services shop Greenfield Belser. The New York-based agency also acquired San Francisco-based tech agency Horn Group last year.

Finn Partners in 2015 accounted for nearly $71.5 million in net fees, revealing 35 percent year-over-year growth.
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Agricultural News

Oklahoma Farm Bureau President Tom Buchanan Says SQ777 Opponents Took Him Out of Context as He Defends Right to Farm

Groups in opposition to State Question 777 used comments by Oklahoma Farm Bureau President Tom Buchanan out of context in order to misguide Oklahoma voters. Buchanan issued the following statement in response.





"The Right to Farm amendment is perfect in its form, and protects both agriculture and the people of Oklahoma into the future. However, critics of the measure have twisted my words in another attempt to mislead voters.





"State Question 777 not only protects farmers and ranchers, but ensures Oklahomans can continue to vote with their dollar as they are offered the healthiest, most abundant and most affordable food supply in history. The use of the compelling state interest language ensures all new legislation is backed by research and science, not on the whims of activist legislators and groups.





"The outside interest groups opposing Right to Farm have resorted to lies and deceit to cloud the judgment of Oklahoma voters. We in agriculture and in Oklahoma stand united in voting yes on SQ 777 on Nov. 8."





Source of Statement- Oklahoma Farm Bureau





If you want to learn more about State Question 777, we have several resources that you can go and investigate. To begin with, we would suggest you go and read the actual State Question from the official State of Oklahoma website- click here for the ballot language for 777. The State Legislature passed underlying legislation in spring of 2015 to send the Right to Farm amendment to a vote of the people by votes of 90 to 6 in the State House and 39 to 6 in the State Senate. After the vote, Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays sat down with one of the lead authors of the underlying bill, State Representative Scott Biggs, to discuss the measure- click here to review that story and their conversation.





There is one PAC that is registered with the State of Oklahoma that is raising money with the intent of supporting the State Question- Oklahoma Farmers Care. Click here for their website. There are two PACs registered with the State of Oklahoma opposed to the State Question, Click on their names to jump to their respective websites- the Oklahoma Stewardship Council and Oklahomans for Food, Farm and Families. After the Stewardship Council was formed, Hays talked with former Attorney General Drew Edmondson about the efforts to organize a "NO" vote on the measure- click here for that story from November of 2015.





A new resource that has just been released is from Oklahoma State University- Dr. Shannon Ferrell and Dr. Larry Sanders have written a Fact Sheet on State Question 777- click here to go and read their analysis.











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Top Agricultural News
The jungle is getting a new canopy.

Construction workers have begun replacing the roof in the Lied Jungle at the Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium. The new roof, made with high-impact acrylic sheets, is designed to let in more ultraviolet light, which the plants need for growth.

The project carries a $2.9 million price tag, with insurance covering a large majority of the cost.

So far, visitors to the zoo are noticing more vivid colors and textures as a result. The zoos plants and animals have been more responsive to the increased UV light, a zoo spokesperson said.

The roof will be replaced bit by bit through Dec. 31. The jungle, which was built in 1992, will remain open with animals on display throughout construction.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Top officials for Monsanto and Bayer defended their proposed $66 billion merger before skeptical senators on Tuesday, insisting that the deal would lead to greater investments in technology that could help American farmers.

Monsanto, the American seed and weed killer, and Bayer, the German medicine and farm-chemical maker, responded to concerns from Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Grassley warned that consolidation and competition in the U.S. seed and agrochemical industry could hurt American farmers who are already dealing with an economic downturn.

Im afraid this consolidation wave has become a tsunami, he said.

After months of negotiations, St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. last week accepted an offer from Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer AG that will pay $57 billion to Monsanto shareholders and assume $9 billion in Monsanto debt. The deal combines two of the six U.S. and European companies that dominate the agrochemical market, and would create a global agricultural and chemical giant with a broad array of products.

Robb Fraley, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Monsanto, and Jim Blome, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience North America, testified that the combined investment is needed to meet a rising food demand.

This type of change enables more innovation and delivers better products to the farm even faster, Fraley said.

Blome noted that Monsanto has a greater presence in North America, while Bayers business is greater outside of North America.

Monsanto is a perfect match to Bayers agricultural business  combining complementary skills with limited geographic overlap, Blome said.

Grassley pointed to lower crop prices and higher seed prices, saying farmers are under tremendous pressure as the agriculture economy has slowed in the past couple of years.

The Iowa senator said antitrust regulators should closely watch consolidation of the agricultural biotech industry and coordinate oversight among agencies. He said the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing another merger between Syngenta AG and the China National Chemical Corp., and the Justice Department is looking at the merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont.

The innovations of the companies in this room today have helped the world reach productivity levels which ease fears over meeting the long-term demands of our growing global population, Grassley said. However, when does the size of companies and concentration in the market reach the tipping point, so much that a market becomes anti-competitive?

Executives from Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont similarly defended their own merger plans at the hearing.

Farm groups testified that they are worried about the consequences.

Roger Johnson, head of the National Farmers Union, said the mergers would mean that three companies would have more than 80 percent of U.S. corn seed sales and 70 percent of the global pesticide market.

These mergers will result in fewer choices for farmers, higher prices and less innovation, he said.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Homebuilders pulled back on construction in the South, causing the pace of August housing starts nationwide to fall to its lowest level since May. Despite the monthly decline, construction activity has accelerated for much of this year. In August, groundbreakings dropped 5.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.14 million from 1.21 million in July, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Starts plummeted 14.8 percent in the South, likely reflecting the monthly volatility of the government report.

Comcast looks to add cellphone service

Comcast plans to launch a cellphone service next year in areas of the country where its a cable provider. That could potentially offer competition to carriers like Verizon and AT&T for a subset of the country. The cable giant plans to create a service that would run on its 15 million Wi-Fi hotspots and use Verizons wireless network, which it has a deal to resell. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts suggested Tuesday that Comcast was looking at the mobile service as an add-on to customer bundles.

Whole Foods settles over disposal of waste

Whole Foods Market Inc. has reached a $3.5 million settlement with regulators over the disposal of products that were once for sale but later classified as hazardous waste. The Environmental Protection Agency announced the fine and an agreement Tuesday for Austin-based Whole Foods to comply with waste regulations and better train workers. The EPA says the grocer improperly identified or mishandled hazardous waste in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Icahn says taxes fueled cut in Chesapeake stake

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn said his decision to cut his stake in shale driller Chesapeake Energy Corp. by more than half to 4.6 percent was for tax reasons, and he retains his confidence in the companys executives. Icahn, the activist investor who helped lead a shareholder revolt in 2013, is no longer the Oklahoma City-based explorers biggest shareholder. A heavy debt load and weak energy prices have weighed on Chesapeake, the second-largest U.S. natural gas producer.
Bozell, the Omaha-based advertising agency, is like a cat with nine lives, or so it seems when you dig into its history.

Scratch around, and youll uncover a string of past lives that includes a stint in New York City, numerous mergers and acquisitions, a network of 110 offices in 51 countries, a 1998 survey by Advertising Age Magazine that ranked Bozell as the eighth-largest advertising agency in the world and clients such as Chrysler, Verizon and Taco Bell. Oh, and a 1990 agreement that Bozell Worldwide inked with Tass, the Soviet Unions official news agency.

But that was then.

We like to say were standing on the shoulders of giants, said Bozells president, Robin Donovan, who joined the company in 1999.

Founded in 1921 by two Omaha journalists, Leo Bozell and Morris Jacobs, the agency, famous for its Pork, the Other White Meat and milk mustache campaigns, is celebrating its 95th anniversary in business. This year also marks the companys 15th year of private ownership.

Its part of a regional ecosystem of ad firms that includes the areas other large Nebraska-based agencies: Bailey Lauerman, founded in 1970, and Swanson Russell, founded in 1962.

Those firms say its not necessary to be based in New York City or Los Angeles or San Francisco to be a major player. Creativity is no longer based on the coasts, said Kim Mickelsen, Bozells chief executive officer.

Bozell and Bailey Lauerman declined to report their annual revenue figures. Swanson Russell said it had $112 million in 2015 revenue.

Tracy Stanko, managing director and executive vice president of Swanson Russells Omaha office, said less than 10 percent of agencies could say theyve been in business for more than 50 years.

The longevity of the advertising agencies in Nebraska is really something to be proud of, she said.

We have competed for business  and won  against some of the top agencies from across the country. Clients understand that regardless of location, its sound business strategy, depth of market knowledge and creative expertise that matters when selecting an agency partner, she said.

Swanson Russells client roster includes Winnebago RVs, Rain Bird sprinklers, Runza restaurants and the Omaha Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Omaha-based Bailey Lauerman just attracted a hometown boy to return from the coasts: It recently appointed Greg Andersen, 48, as chief executive. The Omaha native returns to the city after 23 years in New York City and three in Los Angeles.

In 2013, Advertising Age magazine named Bailey Lauerman the National Small Agency of the Year.

Years ago, Andersen said, many large corporations were located on the coasts. In a less technical age, geographic proximity was important.

Our ability to travel and the ability to collaborate has changed that, he said. Cities like Los Angeles or New York dont have a monopoly on creativity. There are very good agencies here  Bozell started here. Any agency here can compete with agencies across the country.

Bailey Lauermans clients include Union Pacific, Panda Express restaurants, TD Ameritrade and Nebraska Tourism.

Meanwhile, the new Bozell  which has called Omaha home for 15 years  occupies a 10,000-square-foot structure turned creative workspace in the old Butternut building at 1022 Leavenworth St. Artist Sean Ward's and designer Andrew Conzett's wooden huts, constructed from dumpster diving forays, provide interior meeting pods. Its a comfortable, artistic space that welcomes employees dogs, as well as children and other relatives when someones in a bind or just wants to bring in visitors, said Mickelsen, who co-owns Bozell with Donovan.

Bozell once had offices in the former Blackstone Hotel at 36th and Farnam Streets and later in Regency office park, and up until six years ago the Valmont building near 138th Street and West Dodge Road.

In recent years, Bozell has been approached by agencies in Chicago and on both coasts asking for a merger, Mickelsen said. That would have probably meant a move out of town. But we like living in Omaha, said Mickelsen, who joined the agency in 1990.

The companys C-suite includes three women: Mickelsen, CEO; Donovan, president; and Jackie Miller, chief marketing officer.

Twenty-five of its 41 employees are women.

Still, thats a big drop in employee headcount from the more than 2,000 that Bozell Worldwide employed when it was owned by Interpublic and based in New York City.

To understand why the numbers plummeted, you have to look back to 2001. That year Bozell became part of Interpublic Group, a holding company. The company was consolidating and wrapping the multitude of Bozells offices into Interpublic, Mickelsen said.

Suddenly, Interpublic gave the Omaha office the opportunity to buy itself.

Four Bozell executives, including Mickelsen and Donovan, stepped up and bought the agency for an undisclosed amount in 2001. Had we not bought it back, the Bozell name would have disappeared, Mickelsen said. Eventually, the other two buyers left the company.

With the 2001 buyback, Bozells headquarters  based in New York City since 1978  returned to Omaha.

Mickelsen and Donovan say theyve achieved a working balance.

Im a driver, very task-oriented, said Donovan, whos tracks the companys bottom line and oversees business operations.

Mickelsen, who works with clients on the creative side, describes herself as the dreamer and the visionary.

Donovan said the agency has increased its revenue 30 percent over the last two years and is growing.

Bozells clients include First National Bank of Omaha, the University of Nebraska, the College World Series and H&H Automotive.

When Steve Hinchcliff, president and chief executive of H&H, was agency shopping in 2011, he hoped to find a local practitioner.

We had not had an Omaha ad agency since 1990, said Hinchcliff. H&H owns four dealerships in the Omaha-Council Bluffs metro area and is now building a fifth.

I wanted to get back to someone who had an understanding of the Omaha market, Hinchcliff said.

But his was a long list of requirements. If a local agency couldnt meet them, he wasnt about to accept second fiddle.

I would have gone to a regional agency, he said.

But Bozell fit the bill.

Its expertise in digital marketing was a big plus, he said.

We were looking for digital expertise, Hinchcliff said.

Five years in, theyve done everything for us since then, Hinchcliff said. Theyre high-caliber people.
Jason L. Golka was 16 days shy of turning 18 years old when he shot and killed two men in Gretna in 2004.

On Wednesday, a judge said Golka will be about 16 days shy of turning 63 when hell be eligible for parole.

Golkas age at the time of the crime and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prompted the judge to issue a new sentence in Sarpy County District Court.

With family and friends of the victims and Golka watching, the now-29-year-old was given two terms of 45 years to life for a 2004 double homicide. The sentences will be served consecutively, and Golka will get credit for time hes already served.

A previous sentence did not give Golka the possibility of parole. Sarpy County District Judge William Zastera told Golka he must be a model prisoner or parole wont happen.

This is giving you a chance, Zastera said. And thats it.

Its a chance the prosecution and family members of the victims didnt think Golka deserved.

Golka shot and killed two men, Jay Ellis, 41, and Roscoe Jordan, 38, at a Gretna home on Oct. 24, 2004. Golka had a special relationship with Jordan and Ellis. Defense attorney Jeffrey Pickens said his client called the two men his uncles and did and shared drugs with them.

Two nights prior to the shootings, Golka was at Ellis and Jordans home at 213 Shamrock Road for a party. Pickens said at that party somebody hit Golka over the head and knocked him unconscious. While Golka was out, someone shaved off his hair, spray-painted his face and hair and let a lit cigarette burn down on his forearm.

He woke up at the party humiliated and wanting to know who had done that to him, but no one would tell him, Pickens said.

Golka went back the next day with a gun trying to figure out who had done that to him. He was confronted about bringing a gun to the property.

Armed again, Golka returned on Oct. 24.

It was planned. It was premeditated. It was a brutal attack on the two men, Sarpy County Chief Deputy Attorney Tricia Freeman told the judge.

Golka picked a gun, sawed off the barrel and had target practice, she said.

He lured Jordan outside by knocking over a flower pot and opened fire on Jordan, Freeman and Pickens both said. When Jordan was down, Golka shot him again.

Then Golka went back to the car, got another gun and went inside the house. Golka tried to rouse Ellis but got no response from him. Then Golka shot Ellis in the back of the head.

On his way out, Golka shot Jordan again.

Golka is one of 27 people in Nebraska who were under the age of 18 when they received mandatory life sentences. They are being resentenced following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said mandatory life without parole for juveniles violates the Constitutions ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Changes have also been made to Nebraskas sentencing law.

Golka barely made the cutoff for juvenile status, a fact Freeman emphasized.

I think this is a crime that was particularly heinous, it was barbaric, it was planned, it was premeditated, Freeman said. Sixteen days later and its a completely different result and completely different consideration.

Freeman said Golkas behavior in prison is indicative of his behavior if hes let out of prison. Hes had almost 100 misconduct reports, though those have slowed in recent years. He did test positive for marijuana on a urine test in the months leading up the hearing.

Sheila Hill, Golkas mother, said shes seen a change in her son. Hill said Golka is truly remorseful and knows he has problems that he needs to take care of to be released.

During the hearing Golka said that he had no one to blame but himself for his position and that he has grown up during his time in prison.

Every day is a day that I can wake up and be better than I was yesterday, he said. And I have thousands of days left to do that. That is my goal.

Ellis and Jordan were trying to get their lives on track too, family members said after the hearing. Now theyll never have that chance.

Roscoe had been in prison, hed been in jail, said Shayla Jordan, niece of Jordan. He was trying to get his life on track. What stinks is he didnt have that chance. Hes not around to have that chance.

Danielle Ellis, Ellis niece, said theres no justification for taking two peoples lives the way Golka did and the families were disappointed with Wednesdays outcome.

All we can do is be here in 33 years when hes going to get parole and tell our side and say, Hey, theres no reason he should get out and live a free life when these two people didnt get to live past 38 and 41,  she said.

This is not the first time Golkas sentence was re-examined. In 2006 the phrase without parole was removed from Golkas sentence following a ruling from the Nebraska Supreme Court.

Golka also appealed his sentence to the Nebraska Supreme Court saying he had ineffective counsel and that a life sentence at age 17 amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. His conviction was affirmed by the court in 2011.
LINCOLN  State legislative leaders said that a computer upgrade announced Wednesday to more accurately calculate release dates of prison inmates was long overdue.

On Saturday, a new software system will go online that Corrections Department officials believe will eliminate the chances of a repeat of a scandal uncovered in 2014 that resulted in the mistaken, early release of hundreds of inmates.

Three senators who dug into the matter on a special investigative committee said the prison system needed such an upgrade 10 or 15 years ago.

It shocked me, as well as some of the other members of the committee, about how they were doing their calculations, manually, with a paper and pencil and a calculator, said State Sen. Heath Mello of Omaha.

Another Omaha senator, Bob Krist, said the computer upgrades will improve public safety by better ensuring that inmates arent released before their legal sentence is served.

Columbus Sen. Paul Schumacher said, Its about 15 years overdue.

Two years ago, The World-Herald revealed that the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services had, for nearly two decades, miscalculated certain sentences, resulting in the improper early release of hundreds of prisoners.

State Corrections Director Scott Frakes, who was hired 19 months ago to reform the agency, announced the launch of the new automated system on Wednesday.

Frakes told reporters that the updated system, coupled with more robust reviews by legal and records staff, should eliminate any future systemwide breakdowns.

Weve created a system that shouldnt allow that to happen, he said. Theres always a chance of an individual error, but we wont see a system error like we saw.

The scandal involving inmate release dates is one of several problems facing the department. Prisons are overcrowded, prompting threats of a civil rights lawsuit; excessive staff turnover is leading to excessive use of overtime; and, most recently, assaults of staff have increased.

In 2015, the State Legislature allocated $395,000 for automating sentence calculations.

Frakes said that the new computer system had been scheduled to go online late last year. But in reviewing sentence calculations, more mistakes were found, which delayed the launch, he said.

The automated, software-based sentence calculation system replaces one that required manual calculation of release dates that then were entered into a computer system that dates to the 1980s, prison officials said.

Under the old system, sentences were calculated by hand and were based on every month having 30 days and a year having 360 days, which officials said was common in many states. Under the new system, calculations will be based on a full, 365-day calendar year.

The old system didnt arrive at a legally exact release date for a sentence that, for example, was two years and six months. If a sentence involved a number of months, the number of days an inmate should serve would depend on which months were involved since months vary in days from 28 to 31.

When the new computer system goes online, release dates and parole eligibility dates of all 5,300 inmates in the state prison system will be recalculated. Frakes said he expects that will require minor adjustments in the sentences of about half of all inmates.

He said that the department has already looked at 18 inmates whose release dates were scheduled from Saturday to Oct. 4. Of those, 15 inmates had no change or a reduction of one day in prison, and the three others had additions of one, two and seven days.

Much of the sentence miscalculation scandal was caused by agency lawyers ignoring State Supreme Court opinions on how to determine release dates. Frakes said that department attorneys now review all court opinions.

The office of the prison systems record administrator is now located just across the hall from the legal division, which has improved communications, said Julie Smith, the agencys top lawyer.

Several corrections administrators resigned or retired in the wake of the scandal involving release dates, including the agencys lead legal counsel and the records administrator.

Frakes said hed give the new computer system a grade of B plus. The department still needs to automate the process of calculating consecutive and concurrent sentences that can be mixed together when an inmate is sentenced for multiple offenses and multiple cases.

Several factors go into the calculation of a release date. State laws involving good time (a reduction in a sentence for good behavior) have changed seven times in recent decades. Mandatory minimum sentences, in which an inmate is required to serve a certain number of years in prison without getting good time, impact release dates. In addition, an inmate convicted of multiple crimes might get a sentence that requires prison terms to be served concurrently (at the same time) or consecutively (one after the other).

There are still improvements that need to be made in the departments computer systems, said Frakes and the state senators.

Some states, for instance, have an integrated criminal justice computer system that is used by law enforcement, the courts and corrections, Frakes said.

Right now, a records clerk still needs to manually input a sentencing order from a judge, which is often a paper record, Frakes said. That data is double checked by a second clerk, he added.
The Nebraska Supreme Court will not step in to review a judges decision to bar an advanced DNA analysis that could have more strongly connected Anthony Garcia to a burglary committed the same day that a doctor and his wife were killed.

The ruling, issued Wednesday afternoon, means that Garcias trial on four counts of first-degree murder will begin Monday. It is expected to last four to six weeks.

We knew that, procedurally, our chances were slight in getting the Supreme Court to take action here, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said. We respect their opinion. We were ready to go before. Well be ready to go on Monday.

Prosecutors will have to rely on a previous DNA analysis that essentially concluded that DNA left on the door handle of a Creighton doctors house could be connected to Garcia or a male relative.

The new DNA analysis would have more strongly connected the skin cells to Garcia, prosecutors have said.

Prosecutors rarely are allowed to appeal a judges order before trial, but Kleine asked Nebraskas high court to hear the matter.

Nebraska Chief Justice Michael Heavican wrote that the judges decision in question is discretionary, and appellate courts do not review such discretionary decisions before trial.

Heavican wrote that such an appeal can be heard only if the judge has an absolute duty to perform in a specified manner upon the existence of certain facts.

That wasnt the case with Judge Gary Randalls decision to bar the analysis, Heavican wrote.

Authorities allege that skin cells left on Creighton Dr. Chhanda Bewtras door handle can be connected to Garcia. Further, prosecutors allege, those skin cells were left on May 12, 2013  the same day that Garcias former boss, Dr. Roger Brumback, and his wife, Mary, were killed in their Omaha home near 114th and Shirley Streets.

Garcia was charged in July 2013 with the March 2008 killings of Thomas Hunter, 11, and Shirlee Sherman, 57, and the May 2013 killings of the Brumbacks. Authorities allege that he committed the slayings as revenge for being fired from Creighton University Medical Center in 2001 by Hunters father, Dr. William Hunter, as well as Dr. Brumback.

One of Garcias attorneys, Jeremy Jorgenson, had noted that prosecutors didnt have the new analysis when the case was last scheduled for trial  in April.

Kleine had countered that prosecutors provided the new analysis to defense attorneys in June, some three months before the trial.

Jorgenson suggested that it would take him several months, if not years, to arrange for an expert to counter the new analysis. He also invoked Garcias right to a speedy trial.

Jorgensons argument won the day with Randall. This Court believes any additional delay in this trial is not in any partys best interest and it would likely negatively impact the evidence that can be presented by both the State and the Defendant, Randall wrote. At some point, the State, the Defendant and the public are entitled to a resolution of this case.

Kleine said he believed that the new analysis was worth fighting for.

I have great respect for Judge Randall, Kleine said. The position he was put in was by defense counsel when they simply said, Were not ready, and were not going to be ready for this evidence. 

Jorgenson did not return phone calls Wednesday.

Kleine said prosecutors can file pretrial appeals only on suppression orders. Other states allow prosecutors to appeal other pretrial rulings, provided that they can show that they would suffer irreparable harm if the ruling were to stand.

The prosecutor said its something that he might look into with state senators.

Theres not really a manner where the (Nebraska) Supreme Court allows prosecutors to appeal based on irreparable harm, Kleine said. Maybe theres a hole in the appellate process here.
An arrest warrant has been issued for a 79-year-old woman accused of stealing more than $1.2 million over eight years from the travel agency where she worked.

Anne Carbullido of Omaha also racked up losses at two Council Bluffs casinos totaling more than $2 million since 2000.

Carbullidos lawyer, Steve Lefler, said that he has been in contact with authorities and that his client will turn herself in Thursday or Friday.

We knew this was coming. It just unfortunately came yesterday, on a day where this week shes got a number of medical issues scheduled, said Lefler, who declined to detail his clients health problems.

Carbullido has been charged with four counts of theft by deception. Because Nebraskas statute of limitations for embezzlement charges is three years, the charges allege that Carbullido took money as early as Sept. 19, 2013  three years before the arrest warrant was issued Monday.

If convicted of all counts, she would face a maximum of 32 years in prison.

In August, the attorney for Travel Faire Inc. called Omaha police because the company believed that it had uncovered a long-term embezzlement scheme.

Carbullido had recently taken a medical leave of absence, and the company hired a temporary employee in her stead.

That employee discovered several checks written by Carbullido to cash, according to an affidavit.

An audit revealed that Carbullido wrote many checks to cash, but the checks were instead entered into the general ledger as travel expenses, such as for cruise lines and travel packages.

The auditor calculated each years total of the checks written since 2009  which amounted to $1,231,525. The most money taken in a year was $247,000 in 2012, the affidavit said.

Officials requested Carbullidos records from various casinos and received information from two Council Bluffs casinos.

At Ameristar Casino, Carbullido gambled and lost roughly $1.9 million since 2003. The most she lost in a single year at the casino was about $246,000 in 2012.

Carbullido had slightly better luck at Horseshoe Casino, where she had a net gain of nearly $3,000 in 2006. But she lost thousands of dollars at Horseshoe in all other years since 2000  a total loss of about $186,000.

Lefler declined to answer questions about Carbullidos gambling or whether she has received treatment for any addiction.

Carbullido worked at Travel Faire Inc. as a controller since 2001, according to court documents.

She was authorized to sign checks for the business.

Lefler said Carbullido is no longer employed with the company. A manager at Travel Faire did not return a phone call Tuesday.

The company filed a civil lawsuit against Carbullido on Aug. 11, demanding that she pay back the more than $1.2 million in checks that she wrote to herself.

Carbullido denied the allegations in the civil lawsuit and asked the judge to dismiss the case, in a document filed Friday.

We are absolutely looking forward to our day in court, Lefler said.
Weather has been part of the daily routine for Benny Gullach and his daughter Melissa Mueller for decades.

The duo has been measuring, recording and reporting precipitation measurements in Papillion since 1981.

In 1981, Muellers brother, Benny Jr., who began taking measurements in 1977, handed over his responsibilities to her.

Each day, they call in precipitation readings to the National Weather Service, which eventually become a permanent part of the climatic record for the area. Each day they do so, as they have the past 35 years.

Recently, Gullach and Mueller  whose home is the official National Weather Service cooperative weather observer for Papillion  were presented with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Service Award, commemorating 35 years of cooperative weather observing in Papillion.

We report either no rain, trace of rain and if so, the rain amounts, Mueller said. We determine the official amount for Papillion.

Mueller, the youngest of six siblings, got her start as the official weather observer for Papillion at age 10. She had grown up around the idea, as her brother had done so for six years before she took over. Her father, Gullach, was deputy chief meteorologist at the National Weather Service before retiring in 1990, spending 40 years working for the National Weather Service.

When I was younger, I used to be the back up for Papio Creek, Mueller said. If their data machine broke, I would have to go out there and measure. Back then it was all handwritten logs that you had to mail in every month.

At the time, Mueller was one of the youngest weather observers in the state of Nebraska. She said in Papillion everybody knew everybody, and she was known as the little weather girl.

As Mueller got older, she said her dad took over many of her weather observer responsibilities, thus forging the cooperation between the two.

Mueller, who received her five years of service award her junior year of high school, said commemorating 35 years, this time along with her dad, was a special moment.

To me it was special because my dad is not doing well health-wise, she said. This was the first year he was recognized, too. We used to go out there when I was little, too, and let off the weather balloons.

The occasion allowed her to reflect on numerous weather-related memories shared with her father over the years.

It was a special thing, she said.
KEARNEY, Neb.  Jeff Searcy considers Nebraskas sesquicentennial as a special event, not to be missed.

Its a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to look at Nebraska  where weve been, where we are today at that 150-year mark and where were headed, he said at a reception for the leaders of the celebration Sunday at The Archway in Kearney, Nebraska.

Searcy, a former Kearney resident who now lives in Omaha, also understands the importance of acknowledging the states history. To underscore the importance of the 150th anniversary of Nebraska statehood, he now serves as the chair for the Nebraska Statehood 150 Friends Foundation.

We want to make sure that the story, that fabric, the history we dont want to lose, remains vibrant because its so easy to live in the current, he said. At the same time we look at that and say, how did that prepare us to be where we are today? Where can we go tomorrow?

Searcy hopes the entire state can appreciate the states birthday.

That opportunity to pause in 2017 gives us not only a chance to reflect, but to celebrate today and look forward to the future, he said.

Leaders from across Nebraska began planning for the yearlong 150th anniversary more than six years ago. They hope to create a celebration that will serve as a catalyst for promoting a spirit of pride, growth, engagement and connection within the state.

The statewide programs start on Jan. 1.

Highlights include:

* NE 150 Union Pacific Whistle Stop Tour Across Nebraska  A three-day railroad tour with stops and events in communities along the way.

* Time Machine: Nebraska Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow  A Mobile Childrens Museum  A state-of-the-art childrens museum that will tour the state for 26 weeks visiting 40 communities

* Nebraska Atlas Project  An opportunity for fourth-grade students to learn about the state, our history and our people

* A Salute to the Good Life  Celebration on Centennial Mall in Lincoln  A large scale tribute to Nebraskas history and culture with performances, music, fireworks and food

* Painting the Legacy  An exhibit of paintings of all of Nebraskas 93 counties by Central City native Todd Williams, touring the state throughout 2017

More information can be found at ne150.org.

Sara Crook, chair of the Nebraska Sesquicentennial Commission, noted that the planning includes the entire state.

We wanted to plan some things that were statewide and not just a Lincoln or an Omaha thing, she said. The commission is made up of people from all over the state. Were doing things from the top down.

Communities and organizations throughout the state can submit events to help celebrate Nebraskas sesquicentennial.

If Kearney wants to do something, Kearney can plan an event, Crook said. Once they get a plan together, they apply to be recognized as an official event. They can use the logo and all that information will go on the website.

With only one geographic boarder  the Missouri River  Crook sees Nebraskans as a group of people who possess a unique quality.

I go back to something Addison Sheldon said: That its the spirit of the people, the pioneer spirit of the people, Crook said. We are anything but wimps. We are hard-working, community-minded, loyal individuals in Nebraska who support each other and support our communities.

She hopes to see that spirit reflected in the sesquicentennial celebration.

Searcy agrees.

When word of the celebration began to circulate, Searcy heard from people who wanted to help.

All of the sudden, we had people wanting to join the organization, he said. We had a lady from Singapore that had Nebraska roots, from Vancouver, from various states. That was a thrill. It was because of their roots and their love of Nebraska. I had a gentleman who called me the other day. Hes lived in the Des Moines area for the last 50 years, but he said, Nebraska is home. Nebraska really is home for a lot of people.
A 19-year-old Pacific Junction, Iowa, man was critically injured early Wednesday after he crashed a stolen motorcycle in east-central Council Bluffs.

Bluffs police said Khadin Theisen was found by an officer around 3:25 a.m. after he lost control of the stolen dirt bike on some railroad tracks in an alley near South 12th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Police said Theisen, who suffered a head injury, was taken to Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. He was not wearing a helmet, police said.

About 10 minutes before the crash, police said officers spotted three men riding dirt bikes recklessly in the area of South 10th Street and Eighth Avenue.

The men fled from the officers, heading west in an alley, police said. One man dumped his dirt bike and fled on foot, police said, and the other two men fled west on their dirt bikes through the alley.

Officers searching the area found Theisen lying next to the wrecked dirt bike in the alley, police said.
A strong odor Tuesday from painters chemicals caused about 350 people to be evacuated from a Nebraska Medical Center building in midtown Omaha.

One person was taken to the med centers emergency room for coughing and lung and eye irritation. That person was released shortly after being admitted, said med center spokesperson Taylor Wilson.

The initial call to Douglas County 911 dispatchers came in at 9:50 a.m., saying a natural gas leak was causing breathing and eye irritations, Wilson said.

However, the odor did not come from a chemical spill or a gas leak. The odor was due to chemicals and sealant that painters were using in a parking garage just southwest of the Durham Outpatient Center, 44th and Emile Streets, on the south edge of the campus.

That forced the evacuation of about 350 staff members and patients from the outpatient center, Wilson said. Officials hoped that the outpatient center would be reopened to staff members by afternoon, Wilson said. Later, the center said all afternoon appointments had been canceled.

The garage reopened about 2:30 p.m. after workers removed the sealant, Wilson said. Parking was moved to another garage directly to the south of the outpatient center but will return to normal today.

Painters were working in the garage that also will serve the Fred and Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, set to open in May 2017.

Three or four other people complained of throat or eye irritation and were checked by firefighters at the scene, fire officials said.

Many of the patients from the center were taken directly west to the Durham Research Centers auditorium. From there, some patients remained outside awaiting the outpatient centers reopening.

Wilson praised the evacuation effort, saying staff members are well-trained for emergencies.

Sara Mangiameli, 30, of Omaha said she was preparing to enter the center when officials told her that it was being evacuated. She was with her grandmother and uncle, who were at the center for physical therapy.

They turned us right around, said Mangiameli, who also had her 6-week-old baby with her. They said it was a gas leak, and they were evacuating everybody.

Jacqulynn Vasser, 18, who is pregnant, said she was at the outpatient center for a checkup.
Another warm and humid day is expected across eastern Nebraska and southwest Iowa before a decent chance of storms moves into the region tonight and Thursday.

Todays heat and humidity are likely to provide fuel tonight for thunderstorms and possibly severe weather, which can include strong winds, damaging hail and heavy rain, in some parts of the region.

The National Weather Service office in Valley said most of eastern Nebraska and western Iowa, including the Omaha area, were under a slight risk for severe weather tonight. Also, parts of southeast, east-central and northeast Nebraska and southwest Iowa were under a marginal risk for severe weather.

The weather service also issued a flash flood watch through Thursday for northwest Iowa due to heavy rains forecast for tonight.

In the Omaha area today, mostly sunny skies and a high temperature in the upper 80s to lower 90s are likely. Tonight, there is a 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 10 p.m., and a low in the lower 70s.

Thursdays forecast calls for a 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly before 4 p.m., with a high in the mid-80s. And Thursday night, there is a 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms with a low in the upper 60s.

The rest of the Omaha-area forecast, according to the weather service:

Friday  Mostly sunny with a high in the upper 80s.

Friday night  Mostly clear with a low in the upper 60s.

Saturday  A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms with a high in the lower 80s.

Saturday night  Showers and thunderstorms likely with a low in the lower 60s.

Sunday  A chance of showers and thunderstorms with a high in the lower 70s.

Sunday night  A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms with a low in the mid-50s.

Monday  Partly sunny with a high in the upper 60s.

Monday night  Partly cloudy with a low in the lower 50s.

Tuesday  Mostly sunny with a high in the lower 70s.

With autumn officially beginning Thursday at 9:21 a.m. CDT, here are some Omaha-area numbers of note for summer 2016, according to the weather service:

 June: Average high temperature 90.6 degrees, 7.4 degrees over the norm; average low temperature 66.8 degrees, 5.8 degrees above the norm; precipitation .94 inches, 3.24 inches under the norm.

 July: Average high 87.1 degrees, .02 below the norm; average low 68.4, 2.2 over the norm; precipitation 6.61 inches, 2.78 over the norm.

 August: Average high 85.9 degrees, .08 over the norm; average low 65.9, 1.9 above the norm; precipitation 5.78 inches, 1.96 over the norm.
WASHINGTON  A House committee signed off Wednesday on legislation aimed at paving the way for a new veterans ambulatory care center in Omaha built through private-public partnership.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs advanced the legislation introduced by Rep. Brad Ashford, D-Neb.

The committees chairman, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., later told The World-Herald that the bill probably wont come up on the House floor until after the election but that its an important proposal.

Its a big piece because this is the first opportunity that we will have to highlight a large private donation to the VA, Miller said. This may be the way that we can solve some of our funding problems in the future.

Reps. Jeff Fortenberry and Adrian Smith, both R-Neb., and David Young, R-Iowa, have co-sponsored the Ashford bill, which would create a pilot program allowing the VA to accept private donations of money and property.

Several Omaha business leaders have indicated that they will lead a local fundraising effort to make up the gap between the $56 million allocated years ago for a new Omaha hospital and the $136 million estimated price tag for a 157,000-square-foot clinic.

Omaha has been waiting for over 20 years for a new facility and we are a key step closer toward accomplishing this goal, Ashford said in a press release.

The committee also advanced legislation by Young to improve the Veterans Crisis Line. Thats the confidential toll-free hotline for veterans in need of suicide prevention and crisis resources.

Young said his bill would create a quality-assurance process that includes a timeline on when improvements will be accomplished. It would require a plan to be submitted to Congress to ensure that any calls to the line are answered in a timely manner.

When a veteran in need calls the Veterans Crisis Line, they should not be left waiting on the line, Young said in a release.
LINCOLN  The Lancaster County public defender, who supports legalizing marijuana, says its hard to know whether an uptick in marijuana arrests can be tied to Colorados policy, and questioned whether law enforcement has stepped up its enforcement efforts.

Public Defender Joe Nigro and others responded Tuesday to a study about marijuana enforcement released by the University of Nebraska at Omahas Nebraska Center for Justice Research.

The study, presented to a committee of lawmakers last week, found that the rate of marijuana arrests in Nebraska grew 11 percent between 2013 and 2014, the year marijuana shops opened in Colorado.

Counties with the highest rates of such arrests were generally in western Nebraska along the Colorado border and along the Interstate 80 corridor.

Nigro said he couldnt comment on the specifics of the study, but said the prohibition of marijuana has not worked, and that lawmakers ought to treat it as a health problem and not a criminal justice problem.

I think this is a discussion thats going to go on across the United States. Its only going to gain in intensity, he said. If we got out in front of it, we could address it in a more thoughtful way.

Last week, Nigro presented a talk called Did Prohibition Work? to Nebraskas chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, where Attorney General Doug Peterson, a Republican who has been vocal about the spillover of marijuana from Colorado, also spoke.

Nigro, a Democrat, said he is not involved in marijuana legalization efforts and simply has an opinion from his 32 years as a public defender. He said he does not advocate for the use of marijuana, and that children and people with certain mental health conditions should not use it.

Peterson said through a spokeswoman on Tuesday that he appreciates UNOs work, and that hes monitoring the findings, along with those from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Investigative Support Center.

That report found 21 incidents in which Colorado marijuana reportedly destined for Nebraska was seized in 2015.

While UNOs study confirmed the observations of western Nebraska sheriffs whove reported increases in marijuana-related arrests since Colorado legalized pot, the study stopped short of fully attributing the increases to that states policy.

The study pointed to the possibility that numbers are up due to stepped-up law enforcement efforts. It found that Nebraska spent an estimated $10.2 million on enforcement of marijuana laws in 2014, a 12 percent increase from the previous year.

The data show the main reason for increased arrests in Nebraska is because state and local law enforcement are spending significantly more time and monetary resources to enforce marijuana laws, said Bryan Boganowski, founder of Omaha NORML, a group that supports medical and responsible adult use of cannabis.

Mark Elworth Jr., whos leading the effort to recognize the Marijuana Party of Nebraska, said people bringing marijuana into Nebraska have been in a cat and mouse game with law enforcement since the 1970s, and that officials should focus on methamphetamine, prescription drug abuse and alcohol addictions.
The director of Nebraskas understaffed and overcrowded state prison system proposes adding 164 new full-time positions and $75 million in expanded prison space.

Such a blunt public assessment of the needs of a starved system is a constructive change after the prisons drift and instability under former Govs. Dave Heineman and Mike Johanns.

Corrections Director Scott Frakes rightly called this a very different day.

Its never easy to swallow a potential state spending increase of $20.1 million over two years  a task made harder as Gov. Pete Ricketts and the Legislature work to develop a tax-reform package in an already budget-lean year.

But Frakes was tasked with rebuilding the Corrections Department. He has offered a realistic plan that focuses on adequate staffing levels to protect the public, employees and inmates. He and the governor have joined lawmakers in a consensus that the department needs to raise its pay and incentives to attract and retain more of those employees. Frakes plan would add space to prisons over the long term where needed.

State and prison leaders appear to be listening to lawmakers who called for a boost in staffing levels nearer to the level recommended by a team of prison employees. The department is now asking to add 164.5 full-time employees, up from the 138 Frakes proposed earlier this month.

Frakes proposes battling a 30 percent staff turnover rate on two fronts: a significantly larger staff, combined with ongoing negotiations with the state employees union on issues such as higher pay and longevity pay.

The department proposal, on top of previous efforts to reform who is sent to prison and for how long, should chip away at crowding over time.

Progress is vital: Nebraskas prison system remains the nations fourth most crowded by percentage, at 158 percent of designed capacity.

Frakes budget request, and the governors response, are a sign of healthy change in the culture of Corrections. Lawmakers should reward such timely candor with thoughtful action.
If Hillary Clinton wins in November, will the lame-duck Republican Senate confirm Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court?

Last week, Clinton said she would look for diversity and wouldnt feel bound to renominate Garland, which in theory should give Republican senators more reason to confirm Garland before Clinton could nominate a more liberal candidate.

Yet a careful analysis of Republican senators incentives in the case of a Democratic win in November points the other way. If Republicans lose the presidency, the party will enter an intense period of self-reflection and disarray. And if they also lose the Senate, the disarray will be greater still.

Under those conditions, it seems most likely that Republican senators wouldnt want the final act of their majority session to be acquiescence to the judicial candidate nominated by President Barack Obama. Instead, looking to future primary challenges, theyll have reason to reject Garland by denying him a vote  even if that might lead to a more liberal Supreme Court in the long run.

To see why Republican senators immediate motives might well outweigh the broader conservative interest in getting the most moderate Supreme Court nominee possible, you have to consider the difference between ideology and partisanship and the vulnerabilities of Senate candidates subject to primary challenges from the right.

From an ideological perspective, the wisest thing for conservative Senate Republicans would be to confirm Garland. As Democratic nominees go, Garland is about as centrist as can be imagined.

On the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he has a reputation as being pro-prosecutor, a result of his years serving in the Department of Justice.

Although Garland has long been on the short list for a possible Supreme Court nomination, to his credit, no one seems to think hes a Trojan horse who would be more liberal on the court that he has been as an appellate judge.

Whomever Clinton might nominate would almost certainly have to be more liberal than Garland. That she would like to name a justice of color adds to that probability.

Whats more, even if Clinton nominated another centrist similar to Garland, such as Judge Sri Srinivasan of the D.C. Circuit, that nominee would almost certainly be younger than Garland. Srinivasan is 49 to Garlands 63. A younger nominee is ideologically bad for Republicans, because he or she will probably last longer on the court.

But long-term ideology isnt what gets senators elected  or blocked from re-election. Especially if they suffer a major defeat in November, Republican senators will have to worry about whats going to happen to them and their party in upcoming re-election battles.

Uncertainty will reign. Some Republicans will say the party has to tack back to the center. Others, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, will inevitably argue that the Republicans went wrong by nominating someone who wasnt a true movement conservative but rather a centrist populist who broke the traditional Republican alliance between business interests and white social conservatism.

Republican senators will have to worry about being challenged from the right in future primaries. They will also have to worry about populist challengers. In both cases, Republican senators will worry about being described as having sided with the hated Obama.

Worse, the moment Garland joins the liberal side in any publicly salient Supreme Court decision, the future opponents of sitting Republican senators will be able to criticize them for confirming Garland.

Thats a significant cost in those primaries  and on its own would probably be enough to stop most Republican senators from voting for Garland in the lame-duck session.

But theres more. Republicans anticipating Clintons presidency would have something to look forward to in a robust challenge to her Supreme Court nominee, whoever that is. If Republicans control the Senate in a Clinton first term, they would potentially be able to hand the Democratic president an early defeat.

Even if the Democrats win the Senate in November, Republicans could anticipate using the filibuster against a more liberal nominee than Garland.

The deal that followed the Democrats invocation of the so-called nuclear option in 2013 eliminated the filibuster for most judicial appointments. But it preserved the option for Supreme Court nominations.

The Republicans could therefore filibuster without provoking the Democrats into saying that they had violated the Senates filibuster rules.

True, keeping the Supreme Court seat empty even longer could make the Republican senators look obstructionist. But what do they have to lose if theyre facing a Democratic president and Democratic Senate?

The upshot is that Garlands chances for confirmation now seem smaller than they did a few months ago. Democratic efforts to draw attention to the empty seat dont seem to have had any serious impact beyond the Democratic base.

Republicans might have to sacrifice a more liberal court to protect their individual political interests. But for elected politicians, thats an easy trade to make.
Another vision for the riverfront

I have a plan for the Omaha riverfront, once the city cleans up and removes traces of Ricks Cafe Boatyard and the Storz Trophy Room.

Lets put the Farmers Market on that site. Make it like the one in Kansas City with covered areas for the vendors to set up. It would provide a lot more room with more parking.

Perhaps a museum could be built to tell the stories of the Omaha stockyards and the beer brewers in Omaha, as well as the history of South Omaha and north Omaha.

There must be a lot of stuff stored somewhere that could be put on display.

The area could include a park with tables to sit down and play chess.

Just an idea.

Ronald A. Schmidt, Omaha

Protecting our water, our land

Another pipeline, another fight. I think that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other tribes who are fighting to prevent the Dakota Access pipeline from being constructed are right to do so. The pipeline construction would disturb sacred sites and artifacts. They are calling themselves protectors  and not just for themselves and their land but for all the land.

This pipeline will also go under parts of the Missouri River. If it fails or leaks, the water supply could be contaminated. There recently was a pipeline leak in Alabama, and just look at the failures in South Dakota and other areas.

These Indians deserve better protection for their sacred lands and water. So do we all.

Barbara MacLennan, Omaha

Karma for the big banks

Pardon me if I shed a crocodile tear for financial professionals who lost jobs due to the Great Recession that was brought to us courtesy of financial professionals (A job cloud that wont lift, Sept. 17 World-Herald). And pardon me again if I find it incredible that 5,000 rogue employees at Wells Fargo made up their own rules in opening unwanted and unneeded accounts for bank customers.

According to the article, other banks have also been fined for predatory practices  without admitting responsibility, of course. Many of us, my family included, suffered losses because of our bloated and unethical financial sector. Of course, no one went to jail, big banks were bailed out at taxpayer expense, and some of those responsible are now sailing the Caribbean on their personal yachts.

And whats the response from the Republican-dominated Congress?

Why, repeal Dodd-Frank reforms and eliminate the independence of the watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Lesson unlearned.

Peter S. Gadzinski, Omaha

Let them pick up the check

Donald Trump says hes going to build hundreds of new military ships, hundreds of jets and a missile defense system. He says hes going to do this and lower taxes.

I was wondering how he was going to pay for this. Oh, I forgot, hell get Mexico to pay for it.

Jim Trummer, Omaha

Choosing between disaster and status quo

With Donald Trump as president, the country would become mired in more wars, the deficit would explode, the economy would crash and the country could even be thrown into bankruptcy, like several of Trumps businesses.

If Hillary Clinton became president, she would be unable to get her liberal agenda through a conservative Congress, and we would have four more years of stalemate.

The choice is clear: stasis or destruction.

Remember, failure to vote is a vote for Trump, as is voting for an alternative candidate.

Andrew White, Kearney, Neb.

Clintons sour message

Hillary Clinton constantly stresses her slogan of Better Together.

Now she says that half of Trump supporters are a deplorable basket of racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic people. Open-minded people know that, unfortunately, there are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic people in every political party. But Clinton puts only Trump supporters in a basket, like they are objects rather than people.

How in the world can anyone buy the slogan of Better Together when Clinton vilifies so many Americans?

Dennis Swanson, Glenwood, Iowa

Ad misrepresents Catholic doctrine

A full-page ad in the Sept. 12 World-Herald claimed that public funding for abortion is a Catholic social justice value.

Abortion is the intentional killing of a human being. This is why Dorothy Day, a woman who lived and breathed Catholic social justice values, added her signature to the 1974 Catholic Peace Fellowship Statement on Abortion, which reads in part, No one has the right to choose life or death for another; to assume such power has always been recognized as the ultimate form of oppression. The statement calls for a repeal of Roe v. Wade.

John Noble and Catholics for Choice, who paid for the ad, reflect a position that is not social justice, does not reflect a consistent ethic of life and is not Catholic.

Omar F.A. Gutierrez, Omaha

manager, Office of Missions and Justice

Archdiocese of Omaha
I knew from the start that my passion for social justice was about to grow, wrote senior Maria Corpuz, blogging about her experience on this summers Creighton University Backpack Journalism trip to Nogales, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico.

Backpack Journalism is a collaborative, immersive five-week program led by theology professor John OKeefe, Ph.D., and journalism professors Carol Zuegner, Ph.D., and Tim Guthrie, MFA, during which students produce a mini-documentary telling a story of marginalized people. Since 2010, Backpack Journalism has produced four award-winning documentaries. The 2016 film, in its production stages, is tentatively scheduled for screening this fall.

Nico Sandi, a 2015 Creighton graduate, first took part in Backpack Journalism as a student in 2014 and returned as the director of photography for the 2016 project. Sandi believes filmmaking can give a voice to the voiceless. He says the current film is meant to sensitize viewers to the complex issues around immigration.

Within that complexity, these people are human beings and they deserve fair treatment, and a dignified treatment, said Sandi, who will begin a two-year graduate program at Stanford University this fall producing documentaries.

Zuegner said students see the world differently after participating in Backpack Journalism. Corpuz said that during her two weeks in the Nogales region, she gained a deeper, more intimate understanding of the topic of migration and of migrant people.

I know that I will live differently by how I handle myself when encountering strangers, wrote Corpuz. I will meet them where they are and walk with them as my brothers and sisters.

Backpack Journalism recently received funding as part of the new Creighton Global Initiative (CGI)  an effort by Creighton University President the Rev. Daniel Hendrickson, S.J., Ph.D., to enrich and embrace the Universitys global focus.

Sophomore A.J. Olnes said he was inspired to join the 2016 Backpack Journalism trip after learning about the program as a member of the CGI Committee.

It was a privilege to serve on the committee and have an opportunity to help shape Creighton, said Olnes. And through Backpack Journalism, I had a real opportunity to create change through a truly amazing learning experience.

More than 30 campus proposals were awarded nearly $1.5 million in funding in April through CGI. Projects include research initiatives, faculty development, student immersion experiences, scholarships and lecture series.

The projects chosen are innovative and prompt special focus on pressing global issues, such as migration, refugees, climate change, disease and the use of natural resources, all in the interest of further internationalizing the Creighton campus.

Rene Padilla, Ph.D., executive director of global engagement at Creighton, said the Creighton Global Initiative is about global education  building relationships and connections, in an effort to foster greater global understanding.

Fr. Hendrickson said he hopes the Creighton Global Initiative not only provides students with a deeper, more personal perspective on global issues, but also inspires them to be more engaged in their own communities.

CGI will take more of Creighton out into the world, and it will bring more of the world to Creighton.
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Cauvery row: BJP to boycott all party meet, JD(S) reps to resign

Bengaluru

oi-Vicky

Bengaluru, Sept 21: There is a lot of activity in Karnataka following the verdict of the Supreme Court which directed the release of Cauvery Water to Tamil Nadu.

While on one hand the BJP has decided to boycott the all party meeting called by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, on the other, the JD(S) representatives have decided to resign from all positions.

The BJP decided to boycott the all party meeting while terming it as a waste exercise. During the last all party meeting, the BJP had suggested that water should not be released.

However, the Congress did not take their suggestion into account and decided to release water while abiding with the verdict of the Supreme Court. If our views are not taken into account then what is the point in attending such meetings, the BJP leaders said.

Also read: Cauvery row: SC tells Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs water to TN from Sep 21 to 27

In another development, M S Puttaraju, member of Parliament, JD(S) has tendered his resignation. As a mark of protest all JD(S) representatives at the ZP, TP, MPs and MLAs will resign from their posts.

Meanwhile, a Cabinet meeting to discuss Tuesday's order of the Supreme Court has been convened. The meeting to be held at 11 am will discuss the next course of action.

Karnataka which was asked to release 6,000 cusecs of water to TN from Wednesday until September 27 has made it clear that it has no more water left. An all party meeting will be held at 6 pm on Wednesday.

OneIndia News
Surgical strikes: How India's heroes returned from PoK with bullets whistling past their ears

A year since Uri, new vigour in Indian Army that left 178 terrorists dead

Attack at Uri? It was just speculative fire, say sources

Four years on: Remembering the surgical strike that dealt a lethal blow to Pakistan

AIATF workers protest against Uri attack, burn Pakistan PM's effigy

India

oi-PTI

Greater Noida, Sept 20 Workers of the All India Anti-Terrorist Front (AIATF) today staged a protest here against the attack on an army base at Uri in Kashmir and burnt the effigy of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif amid raising of anti-Pak slogans.

Front workers Radhey Shyam, Mahesh Nagar, Deepak Bhati and others were present at the protest and said, "India should retaliate in strong manner and teach Pakistan a lesson."

Front members held the march from Alpha sector commercial belt before burning the effigy of the Pakistani Prime Minister at Pari Chowk.

BJP leaders Anand Bhati, Sachin Awana, Vikas and others also burnt the effigy of Pakistan PM.

Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarti Parishad members held a candle light march for the slain soldiers and prayed for the peace of the departed souls.

"India needs to take a proactive stand on terrorism from Pakistan and take measures to get PoK back. Once PoK is occupied by India, terrorists will not get hideout," ABVP worker Ashok Bhati said.

PTI
AIIMS fee structure for education could be modelled along lines of IITs, IIMs

AIIMS students pay homage to Uri martyrs

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Sep 21: Students of AIIMS today held a candlelight vigil on its campus to pay tribute to the 18 soldiers martyred in the terror attack at Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir.

The students began their march from the boys' hostel and walked up to the Jawahar Lal Nehru auditorium showing solidarity with the bereaved families, an AIIMS official said.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Army in recent years, 18 jawans were killed and 19 injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Uri town in the wee hours on September 18.

The attack has left the nation benumbed and prompted tributes to the fallen soldiers from various parts of the country. Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army.

PTI
Centre of Excellency Lab to be set up by University of Jammu, Delhi firm

Bhagalpur University recommends cancellation of AAP MLA's law degree

India

oi-PTI

Bhagalpur, Sep 21: The Examination Board of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TMBU) in Bihar today recommended cancellation of the law degree of former Delhi Law Minister and AAP MLA Jitender Singh Tomar, who was arrested on charge that his degree was fake.

The Examination board of the university found true the findings of an interim committee constituted earlier on Tomar's degree and recommended cancellation of the degree, Pro Vice Chancellor A K Rai said.

The Board's recommendation would now go to University Senate for necessary action, Rai said. If due to any reason the Senate, whose Chairman is state's Governor Ramnath Kovind, fails to meet, then the recommendation would go to Syndicate and then to the Chancellor, he said.

The interim committee in its report a few months ago had found the migration certificate of the former Law Minister of the Arvind Kejriwal cabinet wrong and on the basis of it had recommended cancellation of the Law degree.

The controversy relates to the acquisition of Law degree by Tomar on the basis of a doubtful enrollment at Biswanath Law College in Munger in the academic session 1994-95. He had claimed to have passed the law examination in 1998-99.

Tomar was arrested and later released on bail last year in the Law degree issue and had to resign from the Kejriwal ministry.

PTI
Cauvery row: Social media-savvy Bengaluru cops pre-empt unrest, win hearts

India

oi-Oneindia

By Maitreyee Boruah

In the wake of the ongoing Cauvery water dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, tech hub Bengaluru has been facing days of fear and tension.

Once again, after Tuesday's Supreme Court directive to Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water a day to Tamil Nadu from September 21 to 27, the city is on tenterhooks.

But the men in khaki are not only diligently manning the roads and important government and commercial establishments, they have also turned to social media in a big way to scorch rumours as well as address citizens' concerns, constantly updating the city about the law and order situation. It's new for the police as well as for the city, but going by public reaction, the cops are already doing a stellar job.

A quick look at the Twitter handle of Bengaluru City Police (@BlrCityPolice) gives us an idea how the cops are making the best use of social media to maintain law and order in the city in these tense times.

On Tuesday morning, the police tweeted that there was no bandh in the city and residents should rely only on authentic information to end the spread of any rumours.

"#NoBandh ; Online miscreants will try to exploit such a time. Do not pay heed to rumours. Wait for authentic updates from @BlrCityPolice," tweeted Bengaluru City Police (@BlrCityPolice).

In a city, where a majority of the population is connected to the internet, news and updates from the police help to maintain normal flow of life.

The cops inform that as a preventive measure Section 144 prohibitory orders will remain in force in the city till September 25.

"As a preventive measure Section 144 will continue till Sep 25 In Bengaluru. Strong bandobust will continue.. #NoNeedToPanic," tweeted Bengaluru City Police (@BlrCityPolice).

The short and quick updates by the tech-savvy cops are winning applaud from the citizens, who are upset at the turn of events, both at the court judgements that Karnataka has to live with as well as the resulting violence and arson by miscreants.

"@BlrCityPolice Just to express my gratitude on the exemplary work you are doing. Your frequent updates on Twitter reassure us all. Thanks!," tweeted RL Ramakrishnan (@rlramakrishnan), a city resident.

Bengalureans can reach the city police on twitter @BlrCityPolice @blrcitytraffic and @CPBlr ,Facebook on https://www.facebook.com/blrcitypolice/ and WhatsAPP on 9480801000 for any information.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 11:06 [IST]
Give befitting reply to Uri attack perpetrators: Kargil martyr Vikram Batra's brother

India

oi-PTI

Chandigarh, Sep 21: Give a befitting reply to those responsible for Uri attack even if that means carrying out surgical strikes across the border, Kargil martyr Captain Vikram Batra's twin brother Vishal Batra said today.

He was also of the opinion that the three services chiefs should have more "say" in such a situation. "India cannot allow situation to go on like this," Batra told PTI in the wake of recent terror strike in Uri sector in which 18 soldiers were killed.

"The moment I switched on TV and saw the 18 coffins of Uri attack martyrs, it reminded me of the Kargil war... When Vikram came back in coffin... I realised that government should give a befitting reply," Vishal, who is a banker, said.

He said, "I don't think we can allow the situation to go on like that. Government has to take a step forward, so that this (incidents like Uri) do not happen again. Pakistan has not responded to our friendly gestures, it is not learning lessons.

Uri attack: Were porters the 'insiders' who helped terrorists with precise info?

Time has come it should be the other way around." 24-year-old Capt Vikram Batra had laid down his life while recapturing the strategic 5140-point in the Tiger hill stretch from the Pakistani troops during the Kargil war in 1999.

In the morning of June 20, 1999 Vikram and his troops captured 5140-point, which finally lead to the decisive fall of Tiger Hill and to India's eventual victory. Vikram, who hailed from Palampur in Himachal Pradesh, was awarded Param Vir Chakra.

These details reveal that Uri attackers were from terrorist state Pakistan

43-year-old Vishal said post-Kargil war in 1999, Pakistan has not learnt any lesson. India can consider carrying out surgical strikes to destroy terrorist camps across the border, he said.

"We are capable of carrying out surgical strikes to destroy bases where terrorists are being trained across the border. I think at this time world powers are with us, we can isolate Pakistan," he said.

PTI
3 youths arrested for assaulting Dalit woman in Karnataka over drinking-water related issue

Dalit man in Kerala beaten up by wife's brother allegedly for not converting to Christianity

In UP, ex-pradhan thrashes Dalit girl, throws her out of school over uniform

In Rajasthan, Dalit man thrashed for using water from pot 'meant' for upper castes

Cops deny caste angle after family claims Dalit man killed for sitting on chair

In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat

News

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

Dalit community members have been staging protests against the attacks on them Gujarat state.

They have been protesting since July 11 when four Dalit men were stripped, paraded and hit in full public view in Una for skinning a dead cow.

In pics here is the anger demonstrated by Dalits across Gujarat:

In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Una: Four Dalit men who were attacked by cow-vigilantes arrive to take part in a solidarity rally in Una. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Ahmedabad: Members of Dalit community Hold Placard during the Protest against Attack on People of Dalit community in the state outside the collector office in Ahmedabad. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Una: Dalit community members raise hands during a solidarity rally in Una on Monday. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Ahmedabad: Dalit community people attend a Mahasammelan in Ahmedabad on Sunday in the wake of the Una incident. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Ahmedabad: Dalit community people attend a Mahasammelan in Ahmedabad on Sunday in the wake of the Una incident. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Surat: Dalit Community takes out a protest rally in Surat. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Bhuj: People of dalit community holding a protest rally against the Una incident, in Bhuj. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Ahmedabad: Prakash Yashwant Ambedkar addressing "Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Sammelan" in Rajkot. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Gandhinagar: Dalit community members holding a banner while protesting against the attacks on them in Gujarat state, in Gandhinagar. PTI In Pics: Protest by Dalits in Gujarat Ahmedabad: Dalit women attend to a lady during a protest organized by members of the Dalit community in response to an alleged increase in atrocities against them, in Ahmedabad. PTI

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 15:20 [IST]
Kashmir unrest and fear of public spectre forced hurried burial of Uri attackers

India

oi-Vicky

What led to the hurried burial of the four terrorists who struck at an army camp at Uri last Sunday. The normal protocol is to preserve the bodies for at least a month before it is buried. In the case of the Uri attack, the bodies of the terrorists were buried the very next day.

Officials give two reasons behind the hurried burial. The bodies were badly charred and hence could not be preserved for long. Secondly, Jammu and Kashmir has witnessed an ugly trend in the past few months where people turn up at terrorists' funerals and try making martyrs out of them. We wanted to avoid this scenario as felt that some people may land up and ask for a public burial, an officer noted.

Did not want a public display

The bodies of the terrorists who struck Mumbai on 26/11 were kept for nearly a year. In the Pathankot attack case, the bodies were kept for a month. However, both these scenarios cannot be compared to the one at Uri. In Kashmir there have been public funerals for the local militants.

However, in the case of Abu Qasim, a Lashkar-e-Taiba foreign militant there was a huge gathering at his funeral. Officials say that they did not want a repeat of this at Uri. Moreover the NIA arrived at Uri on Monday a day after the attack.

Photographs of the militants apart from DNA samples were collected. It was only after this that the bodies were buried at an undisclosed location near the camp, officials also point out.

In the past India has confronted Pakistan and asked them to collect the bodies. However, this time around there was no such exercise.

"Do you think Pakistan would come forward and collect or claim the bodies. It is a futile exercise. Moreover the unrest in Kashmir was also on the back of our minds. The more time we kept the bodies the chances of a public gathering was higher," the officer also says.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 10:26 [IST]
How Statue of Unity is becoming a major tourist destination with PM Modis vision

Cable bridge collapses in Gujarat; at least 60 dead; PM takes stock of situation

Modi poisoning society, says Rahul Gandhi

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Kanpur, Sep 21: Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of poisoning the society.

"Modi poisons the society and makes Indians fight each other," Gandhi told a gathering of farmers at Ghatampur in the course of his Kisan Yatra that began at Deoria and will conclude in New Delhi.

Gandhi also raised issues facing the farmers and said if the Congress party was voted to power in Uttar Pradesh, all the loans of farmers would be waived off.

"It is unfortunate that the pain and problems of the farmers are not reaching the Prime Minister," he said.

Describing Uttar Pradesh as a land of unlimited opportunities, the Congress leader accused the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP of doing nothing for the people.

"Their (SP, BSP and BJP) governments have only looted the people and given nothing to them," he alleged.

The Congress wanted to take the state on the path of prosperity, he said.

Gandhi emphasised that he had undertaken the 2,500-km Kisan Yatra only to highlight the problems of farmers.

He, however, refused to be drawn into the ongoing power struggle in the ruling Samajwadi Party.

Asked on his statement that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was a "good boy", Gandhi said he had cordial relations with politicians in many parties and no negative meaning should be drawn from his comment.

"I also respect Mayawatiji, but somehow I don't gel well with Modiji," he said.

The Congress leader is scheduled to hold a roadshow in Kanpur and spend the night in the city.

IANS


Nitish Kumar has been affected by his age: Prashant Kishor

Could not care less: Nitish on Amit Shahs jibe

Prashant Kishor claims Nitish Kumar in touch with BJP says don't be surprised if he joins hands with it again

Nitish flays decision to scrap separate Rail budget

India

oi-PTI

Patna, Sept 21: Former Railway minister and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today criticised the decision of Union cabinet to scrap separate Railway budget and merge it with general budget which he said would end autonomy of the largest public carrier in the country.

Making a strong point against ending over nine-decade old tradition of presentation of separate Rail budget in Parliament, he asked the NDA government at the Centre to rethink its decision.

The Union Cabinet today approved advancing presentation of the annual Budget by a month, scrapped over nine-decade old tradition of having a separate Railway Budget and removed classifications for expenditure to make the exercise simpler.

"Based on my personal experience as Railway minister I can say the decision will have no benefit," said Kumar, who was Railway minister during NDA government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee

"It seems Railway is not on priority of the NDA government at the Centre...this step would end autonomy of Railway," he told reporters emerging from a press conference on International Sikh conclave.

Railway is means of transportation of poor people who have unbreaking faith on the largest public transporter, he added.

"Common man has faith on Railway which would be dented by this decision," Kumar said.

Presentation of a separate Railway budget has been a tradition which all the successive governments followed earlier, he said.

Counting virtues of separate Railway budget, Kumar said the dividend paid by Railway to the government is decided by Parliament.

Attraction of MPs for Railway budget is so deep that I have seen Parliament deliberating the entire night on Rail budget, he said.

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 16:12 [IST]
Tamil Nadu bandh over Cauvery issue today: All you need to know

No more water for Tamil Nadu;Karnataka decides, special House session on Friday

India

oi-Vicky

Bengaluru, Sept 22: The Karnataka Cabinet has decided that it will not release Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu as per the interim order of the Supreme Court. At a cabinet meeting held in Karnataka on Wednesday it was decided that water shall not be released until a special session of the legislative assembly is convened on September 23.

Following an all party meet in which the BJP was absent, it was decided that a special legislative session of both the houses should be convened to discuss the order of the Supreme Court. The meeting was attended by leaders of the Congress and the JD(S).

Following the all party meeting, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah convened an emergency cabinet meeting.

At the meeting it was decided that a final decision should be taken following a special legislative session of the both the houses on Saturday. It was also decided that the Governor would be requested to convene the special legislative session on Saturday.

The CM and other ministers would meet with the governor and ask him to convene the special session.

At the Cabinet meet, all leaders were of the view that it is impossible to release water to Tamil Nadu.

All ministers said that abiding by the order of the Supreme Court at this stage would be impossible as Karnataka had no water left. The court had yesterday ordered the release of 6,000 cusecs of water to TN for seven days starting September 21.

OneIndia News
Sachin Pilot is free so he attended funeral of slain jawan: Saraf

India

oi-PTI

Jaipur, Sep 20 In a surprising statement, state Higher Education Minister Kalicharan Saraf today said that PCC President Sachin pilot is "free these days" so he attended the funeral of soldier Nimb Singh.

Since Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje had her schedule pre-decided, she sent a senior minister to Rajsamand to attend the funeral.

"Pilot is free these days so he went. But the state government is also sensitive. The chief minister had her programme so she sent senior minister Kiran Maheshwari to Rajsamand," Kalicharan told reporters when pointed out that Pilot was present at the funeral and the chief minister was not.

"It is not they (Congress) who will decide what the government will do. We have many things to do in the government and the government was represented there," he said at the BJP office.

PTI
Tuesday is now No Meeting Day in Haryana and officers to be with people on Friday

Seventh Pay Commission: Haryana to give benefits at earliest

India

oi-PTI

Chandigarh, Sep 21: The Haryana government is working towards providing the benefits recommended by the 7th Central Pay Commission to its employees at the earliest, state Finance Minister Abhimanyu Singh Sindhu said here today.

The committee constituted to review the recommendations has received around 50 reports from the employees' unions regarding their demands, which were being reviewed, an official release said here, quoting the minister.

PTI
These details reveal that Uri attackers were from terrorist state Pakistan

India

oi-Vicky

Even as Pakistan continues to deny that the Uri attackers had come in from their soil, India has managed to collect a great deal of information that suggests otherwise.

While the GPS data that is being analysed will get more details on the exact route that the terrorists had taken, preliminary investigations show that the terrorists had entered into Uri through the Haji Pir pass.

Kashmir unrest and fear of public spectre forced hurried burial of Uri attackers

The terrorists had used the Garmin eTrex GPS sets to guide them into Uri. The data of the GPS set has also been given to the National Technical Research Organisation and the same is being looked into.

Further investigations also show that the terrorists had entered into a small village along the LoC called Sukhdhar which has a population of 500. Investigators believe that one of the porters working in this area may have guided the terrorists from Pakistan. The NIA is investigating who this mole could be.

The kit too that was carried by the terrorists is identical to the one found on terrorists who carried out the Pathankot attack. Ready to eat food, syringes and pain killers which have Pakistan markings were found on the terrorists both at Pathankot as well as Uri.

The other bit of evidence that points towards Pakistan is the ICom manufactured handsets. Recently the security forces had arrested Pakistani terrorists Bahadur Ali in Jammu and Kashmir. He too was found with the exact same equipment and the handset.

The ICom manufactured handset is also used by security agencies. Investigators feel that such handsets are provided to the terrorists by the Pakistan establishment.

Further the investigators also suspect that the terrorists were nurtured and trained at the Jaish-e-Mohammad's headquarters at Bahawalpur, Pakistan.

"We suspect that they may have come in from the JeM headquarters as was the case in the Pathankot attack as well. The data analysis is very crucial in such cases which will help us pin point the exact route," officials also say.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 15:38 [IST]
Surgical strikes: How India's heroes returned from PoK with bullets whistling past their ears

A year since Uri, new vigour in Indian Army that left 178 terrorists dead

Attack at Uri? It was just speculative fire, say sources

Four years on: Remembering the surgical strike that dealt a lethal blow to Pakistan

News flash: BJP welcomes decision not to release water to Tamil Nadu

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Sept 21: All party meeting called by Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah on Wednesday to discuss the pros and cons of the SC order on the Cauvery issue.

Get all the latest updates of the day:

11: 57 pm: Karnataka, BJP state president, B S Yeddyurappa welcomes decision of state cabinet not to release water to Tamil Nadu

11:30 pm: Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces has emerged as a symbol of latest Kashmiri 'Intifada': Nawaz Sharif

11:20 pm: This is an objective evaluation not a partisan position. Our predictions have now been confirmed by events: Nawaz Sharif

11:12 pm: Peace between India and Pakistan cannot be finally achieved without resolution to the Kashmir dispute: Nawaz Sharif.

11:10 pm: Pakistan wants peace with India, we have gone the extra mile to achieve this: Nawaz Sharif

11:00 pm: Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif addresses 71st Session of UNGA.

10:30 pm: Special legislative session of Karnataka to be held on Saturday to take final call on release of water to TN

10:00 pm: Afghan forces eliminated hundreds of Taliban and ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan, but terrorists have foreign backers: Afghan VP

9:45 pm: Cauvery row: Karnataka Cabinet decides to not release water to Tamil Nadu

9:30 pm: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah chairs cabinet meeting to discuss Cauvery issue, after the all party meeting.

9:25 pm: Liquor ban to continue in Bengaluru till September 25.

8:40 pm: I can't be very critical of Amit Shah ji as my wife is a Gujarati and I have to go and eat food at home: Amar Singh

8:30 pm: I am grateful to Amit Shah ji for comparing me with a saint like Narad Muni who was a proud Vishnu bhakt: Amar Singh

8:10 pm: Rafale deal to be inked on Sep 23

7:55 pm: Some 60 Canada schools, universities evacuated over possible threat says police: AFP

7:50 pm: Pakistan is a rogue terrorist state and it must be taken to task for its actions: Baloch leader in exile

7: 40 pm: Foreign Secy told the Pak High Commissioner that even now two encounters between terrorists and Indian army are underway at the border: MEA

7:21 pm: We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting & sponsoring terrorism against India Uri Attack: MEA.

7:10 pm: We have recovered number of items like Pak mark grenades, communication equipment, food & medicines made in Pakistan: MEAIndia on UriAttacks.

#UriAttack Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summons Pakistan High Commissioner Basit: MEA pic.twitter.com/rvtVomeECn  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

6:55 pm: All party meet underway on Cauvery. Congress and JD(S) at meet, BJP boycotts.

6:32 pm: Despite separatist call to not join Indian Army, J&K youth line up for recruitment test in Anantnag (J&K).

I appeal to misguided youth in J&K to throw away their guns and stones, so that we fulfil our dreams and talent: Shabbir Ahmed,candidate pic.twitter.com/ewuo7sbmu5  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

6:25 pm: 10 drown, 150 rescued from capsized migrant boat off Egypt: Officials.

6:20 pm: PM's statement that those behind Uri Attack will not go unpunished, will not remain a statement. We are serious: Manohar Parrikar.

6:17 pm: Party is like mother, cheating your party is same as cheating your mother: CM Parkash Singh Badal on Navjot Sidhu.

6:10 pm: I love, respect my country & my soldiers.Hence, in the wake of Uri attacks, I have cancelled my Sept 26 show in Pakistan: Kumar Sanu, Singer.

5:56 pm: As a nation should ensure this is not repeated again and again. I will take steps to ensure it doesn't go wrong again: Parrikar.

5.47 pm: Something may have gone wrong there (on Uri attack). It is a sensitive matter. I believe in zero error, says Manohar Parrikar.

5.37 pm: Pakistani Women Human Rights Organisation protests in Geneva, highlights atrocities against women in Pakistan.

5.23 pm: Race Course road in Delhi renamed to Lok Kalyan Marg.

5.17 pm: Fire at Safdarjung Hospital has been doused.

5.10 pm: There were some suggestions in NDMC meeting, but consensus was that Race course road be now called Lok Kalyan Marg, says Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal.

5.08 pm: Despite separatist call to not join Indian Army, J&K youth line up for recruitment test in Anantnag (J&K).

4.50 pm: Extortion case: Siwan Court sends Wanted Shooter Mohammad.

4.39 pm: Siwan Court sends Wanted Shooter Mohammad Kaif to 14 days judicial custody in Extortion case.

4.34 pm: Fire breaks out in Delhi's Safdarjung hospital, people being evacuated. 3 Fire tenders being rushed to the spot.

4.27 pm: MP doesn't have dacoits or naxalites. You get better law and order. We have a number of engineering colleges. The environment is nice, says MP CM.

4.26 pm: Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah meets former PM HD Deve Gowda to discuss Supreme Court order on.

4.25 pm: The law and order situation in MP is good. There is no dacoit, Naxalism or any other threat in the region: Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

4.15 pm: Wanted Shooter Mohammad Kaif surrenders before Siwan court in Bihar.

4.10 pm: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah arrives at former prime minister Deve Gowda's residence to talk on Cauvery issue.

4.07 pm: Student union elections at Aligarh Muslim University cancelled over "violation of Lyngdoh Committee Recommendations".

4.00 pm: AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan who was arrested in alleged sexual harassment case, has been sent to one day judicial custody.

3.55 pm: Sensex 15.78 points down to close at 28507.42. Nifty closes at 8777.15.

3.33 pm: Shooting outside Israeli Embassy in Ankara; 1 wounded.

3.25 pm: If war (with Pakistan) is to take place, it should be for the nation, not for votes: Shiv Sena Chief Uddhav Thackeray.

3.11 pm: BSF's commander level meeting held in Jaisalmer to discuss border security in the wake of Uri Attack in Rajasthan.

3.10 pm: Kadakkal police registers a case against a man for allegedly molesting a 90-year old lady.

3.09 pm: Life thrown out of gear after heavy rainfall hits Hyderabad.

2.51 pm: A meeting between former Prime Minister, H D Deve Gowda and Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah has been scheduled for this evening.

2.44 pm: School children in Moradabad (UP) pay tribute to the soldiers who lost their lives in UriAttack.

2.42 pm: Karnataka CM will meet former PM HD Deve Gowda this evening to discuss SC order on Cauvery Issue.

2.41 pm: In all party meeting we will brief them about SC's order. After the all party meet, K'taka Govt will have a cabinet meeting: Karnataka HM.

2.36 pm: NIA to seek help of Army, IB & RAW in/around Uri sector. Agencies will be asked to provide with intercepts of last 2 to 4 months in region.

2.35 pm: AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan arrested in alleged sexual harassment case.

2.34 pm: Fire broke out in plastic factory in Surat's Kim area, fire broke out around 6 AM this morning. More than 15 fire tenders at spot.

2.09 pm: BCCI to hold a special general meet on 30th September.

2.08 pm: Merging rail budget and general budget won't do any good, it will lose its autonomy, says Nitish Kumar, Former Railways Minister.

2.01 pm: LG said officers from Raj Niwas will make regular visits to the garbage collection points in coming days; civic agencies need to be vigilant.

1.50 pm: Why did Rahul Gandhi not think about an "Agriculture Budget" when Congress was in power?: Arun Jaitley

1.48 pm: We are deeply concerned about the farmers of both Tamil Nadu & Karnataka: Arun Jaitley on #CauveryIssue

1.42 pm: PDHPL project will connect Eastern part of the country with National Gas Grid: Dharmendra Pradhan

1.42 pm: GAIL to be given funding worth Rs. 5,176 crore for Phulpur-Dhamra-Haldia Gas Pipeline (PDHPL) project: Dharmendra Pradhan

1.40 pm: Odisha Govt had challenged the HC order in the apex court, giving access to 12 million tonne iron ore to JSPL. Next hearing on November 23.

1.40 pm: Korba (Chhattisgarh)- Doctors stopped her (wife) treatment immediately after I failed to arrange for money on time: Victim's husband

1.38 pm: Korba-Pregnant woman dies of infection post carrying dead fetus for few days allegedly aftr doc refused to attend her as she ws unable to pay

1.37 pm: SC issued notice to Central Govt & State of Odisha seeking reply on iron ore sharing contract btwn Sarda Mines & JSPL within 2 months.

1.33 pm: The revised scale of pension has taken effect from Independence Day 2016: Arun Jaitley

1.32 pm: Cabinet gives ex-post facto approval to enhancement of Pension for Freedom Fighters and their eligible dependants: Arun Jaitley

1.30 pm: Reforms also include merger of the Plan and the Non-Plan classification in the Budget and Accounts: FM #Budget2017

1.20 pm: However its functional autonomy will continue to be maintained: FM Arun Jaitley on Rail budget to be amalgamated with General budget

1.19 pm: Rail budget and General budget will be amalgamated from now, there will only be one budget: FM Jaitley

1.05 pm: Delhi: Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu meets FM Arun Jaitley

1.03 pm: Other selectors of BCCI senior selection committee are Devang Gandhi, Gagan Khoda, Sarandeep Singh and Jatin Paranjape.

12.58 pm: Delhi: BJP women wing protest against DCW Chief Swati Malliwal over alleged irregularities in appointment of DCW staff

12.56 pm: My role has not been mentioned even once in the FIR: Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal on FIR registered by ACB against DCW Chief.

12.53 pm: Don't know why my name is in the FIR. What is my role in this?: Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal on FIR registered by ACB against DCW Chief

12.51 pm: #FLASH MSK Prasad replaces Sandeep Patil to be the new chairman of BCCI senior selection committee.

12.45 pm: The Supreme Court has sought a reply from Tamil Nadu chief minister, J Jayalalithaa on a plea filed by Vijayakanth seeking to quash the defamation cases filed against him. Jayalalithaa has been granted two weeks to reply

12.44 pm: Burari Incident: Delhi minister Kapil Mishra meets the victim's family.

12.40 pm: Cabinet approves merger of annual railway budget with Union budget: Govt Sources

12.39 pm: Maharashtra dance bar issue: SC says the three dance bars with proper CCTVs can continue their daily activities. Next hearing on Nov 24.

12.17 pm: Delhi: Union Cabinet meeting ends. HM Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, MoS PMO Jitendra Singh leave PMO.

12.13 pm: BJP and JDS decides to not attend the all-party meet called by Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah over #CauveryIssue, today.

12.10 pm: "Aawaze Punjab" forum welcomes any alliance for the betterment of Punjab and will not be a political party: Navjot Singh Sidhu

12.08 pm: Delhi: NSUI stages a protest against Pakistan near Pakistan High Commission over #UriAttack

12.05 pm: Ajay Shirke re-elected unopposed as BCCI Secretary.

12.01 pm: Ahmedabad (Gujarat): Locals hold protest against Pakistan over #UriAttack

12.00 pm: Delhi: Union Cabinet meeting at the PMO ends.

11.57 am: NGT directs the principal Committee (to be formed to tackle the menace of chikungunya/dengue in Delhi) to submit its report within 15 days.

11.56 am: NGT also orders to form a district level committee to check all preventive measures being taken on ground, to be headed by DC MCD zone.

11.50 am: Pakistan's terrorism export exceeds their export of economic goods and services: Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

11.30 am: NGT orders a principal committee to be formed to tackle the menace of chikungunya/dengue in Delhi.

10.55 am: NGT slams all municipal agencies for not taking any strong measurement and action to control chikungunya/dengue.

10.50 am: Govt of Sri Lanka strongly condemns Uri attack. Sri Lanka resents all forms and manifestation of terrorism.

10.44 am: Cabinet Committee on Security meeting underway. Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrive for meeting.

Delhi: Cabinet Committee on Security meeting underway, HM Rajnath Singh, FM Arun Jaitley, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrive for meet pic.twitter.com/Ve53ZWoAki  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

10.35 am: In a mark of protest against the verdict of the Supreme Court which directed release of Cauvery water to TN, all JD(S) representatives at the ZP, TP, MPs and MLAs will resign from their posts.

10.25 am: JD(S)MP CS Puttaraju has already submitted his resignation through the District Collector.

9.57 am: Fire broke out in a plastic factory in Surat's Kim area, more than 15 fire tenders at the spot.

Gujarat: Fire broke out in a plastic factory in Surat's Kim area, more than 15 fire tenders at the spot. pic.twitter.com/hWpp1Uisxv  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

9.25 am: Security tightened around Bengaluru (Karnataka) over Cauvery issue.

8.50 am: Protests are being staged at the Myrsuru road at Bengaluru. Farmers and activists protested by tying a noose around their necks. The protests are being staged after the SC verdict on Cauvery.

Protest by farmers at Mysore road in Bengaluru (Karnataka), tie noose around their necks #CauveryProtests pic.twitter.com/TOv7kRdjmr  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

8.18 am: Pakistan IB chief will not attend the SAARC high level group of eminent experts to be held in New Delhi.

8.10 am: Union Cabinet meeting to be held in Delhi today.

8.00 am: All party meeting called by Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah today to discuss SC order on Cauvery row.

OneIndia News
In a case of bad karma Taliban outs Pakistan on what India had always said on Azhar

Will China block India's move against Maulana Masood Azhar again?

India

oi-Vicky

Bengaluru, Sept 21: Will India succeed in getting Maulana Masood Azhar, the chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, proscribed a terrorist by the United Nations? After a failed attempt earlier this year, India will make another attempt by the end of this month.

Having Azhar proscribed a terrorist becomes extremely important considering he masterminded the attacks at Tangdhar, Gurdaspur, Pathankot and not Uri. The last time around India's attempts failed after China blocked the same. Will China block India's attempt this time too?

When it comes to Azhar, the current favourite of the ISI is concerned, there is a lot than what meets the eye. While he has been the proxy warrior for the ISI against India, on the other hand, he also ensures that his men protect Chinese interests in Pakistan. This could well be one of the reasons, why China blocked India's efforts the last time around, officials in New Delhi say.

Is Azhar China's bouncer?

China has plenty of business interests in Pakistan. China has sought from Pakistan an assurance that its assets would be protected and the same has been reciprocated.

Following the Pathankot attack, India had renewed its call to impose a ban on Azhar and declare him a terrorist. India had submitted evidence about the involvement of the Jaish-e-Mohammad and also its leader in the Pathankot attack before the UN.

It even told the sanctions committee of the UN that not listing Azhar would expose not just India but the whole of South Asia to a potential risk. The committee while submitting the proposal to UK, US and the other members said that if there is no objection then the decision to impose the ban would go through.

However, China stepped in and told the committee to place the decision on hold. It may be recalled that China had blocked India's move to ban Azhar after the 26/11 Mumbai attack as well. Officials say that there is more than what meets the eye. On one hand, it is Pakistan which requested China to block India's move against Azhar.

Pakistan has classified terrorists as good and bad. Pakistan's bad terrorists look to hurt investments made in that country. In such a scenario, the ISI uses the likes of Azhar to keep an eye on such elements.

The intelligence from the ground or countering such elements is normally done by the ISI's proxies such as Azhar or Hafiz Saeed.

India says that blocking Azhar from being declared a terrorist will have a bad effect on the region. These are elements capable of turning rogue anytime and China would need to understand that.

Azhar is the same person who plotted the killing of Pervez Musharaff when he was the president. However, he worked out a back room deal with the ISI as a result of which he was spared.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 13:00 [IST]
Visa rules don't apply in PoK, it is part of India: Sushma Swaraj

Aziz briefs FMs of Japan, Austria on Kashmir

International

oi-PTI

Islamabad, Sep 21: Continuing with efforts to internationalise the Kashmir issue, Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz has briefed foreign ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland about "human rights violation" in Kashmir.

Aziz, on the sidelines of 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, separately met with the foreign minsters -- Fumio Kishida of Japan, Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland, Pakistan's Foreign Office said.

Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Indo-Pak relations and the situation in Kashmir.

Highlighting "human rights abuse perpetrated by Indian security forces with impunity" in Kashmir, he stated that settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability of South Asia, the Foreign Office said.

It claimed that while acknowledging the "sacrifices" rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three foreign ministers appreciated "successful counter -terrorism operations" conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country.

Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistan's economy to grow at steady and sustainable rate.

He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria and Switzerland in Pakistan.

The Foreign Office said that Japan, Austria and Switzerland have underscored commitment to further strengthen existing cordial relations with Pakistan and promote mutual understanding on regional and international issues of common concerns.

Foreign Minister Kishida stated that Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistan's power sector.

Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz welcomed the prospects of investment in Pakistan due to improved security situation. He recognised significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy.

Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter stated that Swiss development cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan, the Foreign Office statement said.

Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organisations, Pakistan's application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly, the statement said.

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 17:16 [IST]
China working to create largest regional trading bloc: Official

International

oi-PTI

Beijing, Sep 21: China is working towards creating one the largest trading block in history spanning from India to Japan, a top US trade official has said.

US Trade Representative (USTR) Mike Froman said that not signing Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) would be akin to conceding the Asia Pacific space to China.

"China is executing on its regional strategy: the One Belt, One Road initiative, the Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the challenges in the East and South China Seas, and its push to conclude the regional comprehensive economic partnership, or RCEP," Froman said yesterday in his address at the Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Dallas Texas.

"RCEP is a mega-regional trade agreement with 16 countries, spanning from India to Japan. It would be the largest regional trading block in history. Russia too has an active regional strategy, signing partnership agreement with countries in the region and through its Eurasian economic union," Froman said.

Observing that China is posing a major challenge to the US, Froman said that answer to this challenge was to put TPP in place as soon as possible.

"China is not our adversary. But it is a competitor that in many respects holds very different views of its role and responsibilities than other major powers," he said.

"There is a perception that China doesn't play by the same rules that we and much of the rest of the world do, that it's taking advantage of us, and that it's asserting its interests in the Asia-Pacific region, and more generally, at the expense of ours and at the expense of its neighbours," he added.

What is interesting about this debate is that while the diagnosis might be right, many have come to exactly the wrong prescription. The answer to this challenge is not to allow China to write the rules of the road for trade, but for the United States to lead that effort, he said.

"The answer is not to allow China to carve up the markets of the future, but to level the playing field and give American workers and businesses a shot to compete and win. The answer to China's challenge is not to withdraw from TPP, but to put it in place as soon as possible," Froman said.

He said that at a time when political discourse in the US was increasingly turning inward, it is worth recalling what's at stake in the Asia-Pacific.

The US is a Pacific power with a long history of leadership and deep interests in the region, he asserted. Forman warned that for the US turning inward meant turning away from this century's greatest economic opportunity.

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 17:07 [IST]
Blacklisting Mahmood blocked by China: The man who raised funds under garb of religion in India

In Pics: Leaders at 71st session of UN General Assembly

International

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

United Nations, Sept 21: At the 71st annual debate of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), UN Secretary General Ban-Ki moon highlighted several issues including the ongoing conflict in Syria. Ban urged world leaders to engage in issues relating to the global refugee crisis and poverty and to make efforts to end such crisis.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama in his address at the UNGA said that nations involving in proxy war must end them.

Obama warned that if communities are not allowed to co-exist, the "embers of extremism will continue to burn" causing sufferings to countless human beings and export of extremism overseas.

However, all eyes will be on Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif's address as he is likely to rake up the Kashmir issue at the UN. Here are some images from the United Nations General Assembly:

World leaders arrive for the UNGA The 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly kicked off at the UN Headquaters, New York. UN Secretary General Ban-Ki moon addresses the gathering Ban Ki-moon shakes hands with President of the 71st session of the General Assembly Peter Thomson, during the opening of a summit to address large movements of refugees and migrants. US President Barack Obama addresses UNGA United States President Barack Obama addresses the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters. Obama greets Ban-Ki moon, Peter Thomson at UNGA Barack Obama greets Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and General Assembly president Peter Thomson after speaking at the 71st session of the UNGA. French President Francois Hollande addresses UNGA France's President Francois Hollande addressed the 71st session of UNGA and called for an end to the Syrian crisis. Nawaz Sharif attends a Leader's Summit on Refugees Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will address the UNGA on Wednesday and is likely to mention the Kashmir issue during his speech. Theresa May said that the UK won't turn inward after Brexit vote British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters and said that UK won't turn inward after Brexit vote.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 14:42 [IST]
Members of US Congress strongly condemn Uri terror attack

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Washington, Sept 21: Members of the US Congress have come down heavily on Sunday's cross-border terror attack from Pakistan on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

"I condemn the horrible terror attack against an Indian Army Base in Uri in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers," Senator Mark Warner (Democrat), Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus said in a statement.

"The terrorists who perpetrated this cowardly act must be brought to justice," he stated. "I extend condolences to the family and friends of the soldiers who lost their lives in the attack."

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group for the early morning attack on the sleeping soldiers. All the four attackers were killed.

Though the JeM is yet to claim responsibility for the attack, it had admitted to its role in the cross-border attack on the Pathankot Indian Air Force base on January 2 this year that left seven Indian security personnel dead.

Congressman Ted Poe (Republcian), Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non Proliferation and Trade, described the attack as "the deadliest assault" in Kashmir in over two decades.

"It is a reminder to democracies the world over that terrorism seeks to destroy peace loving societies everywhere," Poe said in a statement.

Stating that though it was not clear which terrorist group was behind the attack, he said one things was certain: "This is just the latest consequence of Pakistan's longstanding irresponsible policy of supporting and providing operational space for all stripes of jihadi terrorist groups. Pakistan's reckless behavior in this regard is a serious security risk to its neighbors - and India unfortunately pays the price all too often."

Condemning the attack, "as well as Pakistan's support for many criminals like the ones who carried it out", Poe said that the US stood firm in its "commitment to our friends in India".

"A threat to democracy in India is a threat to democracy everywhere. And that's just the way it is," he said

In his statement, Senator Tom Cotton (Republican), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Airland, described the attack as "a cowardly act, one that deserves the strongest condemnation".

"I extend my condolences to the Indian government and to the families of the fallen," he said.

"The United States and India share a vital interest in defending our democracies from the threat of radical Islamic terrorism," Cotton said.

"Both our nations must commit fully to deepening our security partnership so that radical jihadists are defeated and stability in the region is maintained."

Condemning the attack, Congressman Pete Sessions (Republican), Chairman of House Rules Committee, said: "We will not let these attacks affect our united fight against terrorism."

In his statement, Congressman Brad Sherman (Democrat), Ranking Member of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, said that the attack was "yet another reminder of the threat international terrorism poses".

"I strongly encourage the governments in the region to make every effort to find the terrorists that carried out these attacks and bring them to justice," he said.

"The United States should continue to assist these governments and ensure they can eliminate terrorist threats."

IANS
Steelmakers closer to creating mega mill Updated: 2016-09-21 07:03 By Yang Ziman(China Daily)

A worker takes quality samples of molten iron from a furnace at Wuhan Iron & Steel Group Corp in Wuhan, Hubei province. [Provided to China Daily]

Baosteel to merge with Wuhan Iron & Steel in key part of plan to consolidate sector, cut overcapacity

Two of China's biggest steelmakers agreed to merge their listed units, moving a step closer to a union that would create the world's second-biggest mill.

The publicly traded arm of Shanghai Baosteel Group Corp, China's largest steel company, will swap shares with the listed unit of Wuhan Iron & Steel Group Corp, China's sixth-largest steelmaker, the smaller company said in a statement on Tuesday.

The parent firms remain in talks about restructuring, Wuhan Iron & Steel said, without elaborating.

The plan is part of the government's push to consolidate the steel industry to combat overcapacity.

The merger of Baosteel and Wuhan Iron & Steel is a major move in the transition from low-end supply to high quality manufacturing, said Li Xinchuang, president of the China Metallurgical Industry Planning and Research Institute.

"The steel industry is a sector playing a major role in China's capacity downsizing. Through the merger, the two companies will draw on each other's respective strengths," said Li.

Baosteel has its presence in the Yangtze Delta Region, the Pearl River Delta Region and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Wuhan Iron and Steel has its major bases in Hubei and Yunnan provinces, and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

The combination of the two companies will connect their scattered production bases into one organic whole, said Li.

According to a report by Everbright Securities, the merger of Baosteel and Wuhan Iron & Steel will usher in a period of more rational development in China's steel industry.

The report said that State-owned enterprises account for 46 percent of China's crude steel output, but their losses take up more than 90 percent of the total.

Baosteel is the world's fifth-largest steel company by output. It achieved net profits of 1.8 billion yuan ($269.9 million) in 2015, down 78 percent year-on-year. Wuhan Iron & Steel registered losses of 7.5 billion yuan last year.

Wang Guoqing, director of Lange Steel Information Center, an industrial consultancy in Beijing, said that the merger of the two companies will bring down production costs.

"Both Baosteel and Wuhan Iron & Steel have factories in urban areas, which contributes to increased traffic jams and pollution. As a result, they will be moved elsewhere sooner or later. As one group, if they are to relocate the factories to places closer to sea ports, or in other words, Baosteel to Zhanjiang Port in Guangdong province and Wuhan Iron and Steel to Fangcheng Port in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, it will greatly reduce their transportation costs," said Wang.

Du Juan contributed to this story
Nawaz Sharif consults army chief ahead of UNGA address

International

oi-PTI

Islamabad, Sept 21: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has held a telephonic conversation with Pakistan's powerful army chief General Raheel Sharif ahead of his speech at the UN in which he is expected to raise the Kashmir issue, amid signs he may tone down his rhetoric to reduce tensions with India.

An official from the Prime Minister's Office said the two on Tuesday night discussed the situation in Kashmir and tense relations with India after the terrorist attack on an Indian army camp in Uri on Sunday in which 18 soldiers were killed.

Nawaz Sharif raising Kashmir with all leaders amid isolation fears

Sharif had a plan to forcefully highlight the Kashmir violence, but the scenario changed after Uri terrorist attack which spotlighted the issue of cross-border militancy. "The prime minister might strike a balance in his speech. He would talks about the Indian atrocities in Kashmir but also would be conciliatory to end tension," said the official.

Sharif may also offer proposals to address the Kashmir issue, including emphasis on implementing UN resolutions and the mediatory role of the international community.

No statement was issued after the talks between the two Sharifs, which was their first contact since the Uri attack. Geo TV reported that the conversation between the two leaders shows that the situation after Uri attack was serious.

The Uri incident was one of the deadliest attacks on Indian Army in recent years, as heavily-armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed. India's DGMO Lt Gen Ranbir Singh has said the four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings and that initial reports indicated that they belonged to Pakistan-based Jaish-E-Mohammed group.

Sharif is poised to address the 71st UNGA session in New York later on Wednesday.

PTI
Slip of Tongue in Pak Parliament: Speaker pronounces Nawaz Sharif's name instead of Shehbaz Sharif

Prevent terrorists from using Pak territory as safe havens: Kerry tells Sharif

International

oi-PTI

New York, Sept 21: US Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to prevent terrorists from "using Pakistani territory as safe havens". He expressed concern over the violence in Kashmir particularly the terror attack on an Army base in Uri.

John Kerry met Nawaz Sharif on Monday on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly. Sharif raised the issue of alleged human rights violations and killings in Kashmir and sought American help to resolve the Kashmir issue.

Ban makes no reference to Kashmir in final UNGA address

US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner said that the US wants to see more progress from Pakistan in dealing with the terror groups effectively.

"We've seen some progress; we want to see more, and I think moving forward we'll just continue to work closely and try to encourage greater counter terrorism cooperation with Pakistan but also within the region," Toner said.

Later, State Department Spokesperson John Kirby said that John Kerry "reiterated the need for Pakistan to prevent all terrorists from using Pakistani territory as safe havens, while commending recent efforts by Pakistani security forces to counter extremist violence."

"The Prime Minister and Secretary Kerry expressed strong concern with recent violence in Kashmir - particularly the army base attack - and the need for all sides to reduce tensions," he said.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Indian Army in recent years, 18 soldiers were killed and several injured as heavily armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Kashmir's Uri town on Sunday.

John Kerry also stressed the need for restraint in nuclear weapons programs.

According to a readout of the meeting by the Pakistan mission, Sharif asked the "US Administration and Secretary Kerry to use his good offices to help in resolving bilateral issues between Pakistan and India."

In his meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Sharif again raised the Kashmir issue and asked the British leader to play her role in convincing India to stop the alleged use of force against the people in the region.

Sharif said Pakistan's support for Kashmiri people in their legitimate struggle for self determination and its commitment to the Kashmir cause are non-negotiable, according to information released by the Pakistani mission.

Sharif alleged that human rights violations and state oppression is at its peak in Kashmir and it is the duty of the international community to "ask India to immediately end state atrocities on innocent and defenceless Kashmiri people".

He said the people of Jammu & Kashmir must be allowed to chose their destiny and longstanding resolutions of the UNSC on the right to self determination of the Kashmiri people need to be implemented.

He added that "if the international community does not succeed in asking India to immediately end state oppression on the people in Jammu & Kashmir, India will be encouraged to increase the intensity of the continuing state atrocities."

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 10:13 [IST]
Helal Akbar Chowdhury Babor is an excellent example of non-communal spirit

Protests erupt in US after police kills black man

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Washington, Sep 21: Protests erupted in North Carolina state of the US after an African-American police officer shot dead a black man while serving a warrant for a different person in Charlotte city.

At least seven persons were transported to hospital with minor injuries, CNN reported. Five others have been arrested during the protest after a Charlotte police officer killed Keith Lamont Scott on Tuesday afternoon.

According to the police, the man they shot had a gun and posed an "imminent deadly threat", but his family said he was carrying a book.

Though the police insisted the man "was armed", he's not the one police were looking for, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement later.

Several hundred people gathered at the site on Tuesday night, chanting "No justice, no peace!" and carrying signs that said "Black Lives Matter".

While some threw bottles and rocks at officers working to control the protesters, others implored them to stop.

At least 12 officers suffered injuries during the protests, the police department tweeted. It did not provide details on the nature and severity of the injuries, but said one of its officers was hit in the face with a rock.

"That's when things really started to pick up. I would say not long before 11 p.m., police deployed tear-gas... as they tried to clear the streets," said Adam Rhew, associate editor for a Charlotte magazine.

According to CNN, after a brief lull, the crowds regrouped early on Wednesday and blocked Interstate 85.

They started a fire at the centre of the highway, forcing vehicles and tractor-trailers to stall. Police cars with flashing lights hovered nearby.

Shortly after, the highway partially opened, some protesters remained in the vicinity and continued chanting, while others jumped on top of a police van and stomped on it.

Brentley Vinson, the officer involved in the shooting, has been placed on paid administrative leave, according to the Mayor. He is also reported to be African-American.

Racial tensions are high nationwide following other officer-involved shootings. The fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sparked protests after video of the killing appeared on Monday.

Charlotte's is the latest case involving an officer-involved shooting, and protesters are demanding justice and an end to police brutality for months.

Most of the protesters cited the case of Ahmad Rahami, the suspect in the New York and New Jersey explosions who was arrested alive on Monday after a shootout.

"Something has to be done... there was a terrorist in New Jersey, New York. He was taken alive," protester Nichelle Dunlap told CNN affiliate WCCB in Charlotte.

"They said they want to question him. So because you wanted to question him, does his life mean more than our black men across the nation? It doesn't make any sense."

"When will our lives truly matter? A black father is dead. There are children tonight who will never see their father again," said another.

IANS
UK seminar analyses terrorism in Pakistan

International

oi-PTI

London, Sep 21: Pakistan's powerful security agencies are supporting religious extremists to "undermine" its democratically elected government's efforts to reach a reconciliation with India, British foreign policy experts have said.

At a event organised by the UK-based Democracy Forum and Henry Jackson Society, academics and global foreign policy experts sought to answer the central question of: "Is Pakistan a Victim or Perpetrator of Terrorism?" Christine Fair of Georgetown University, Washington, addressed the topic using data for incidents of terrorism in Pakistan over the last 20 years and various surveys and case studies.

"There is ample proof that Pakistani security agencies are supporting religious extremist outfits," she said, adding that Pakistan's reliance on terrorism as a foreign policy instrument had "backfired" and they are now fighting those terrorist groups that they can no longer control.

"Whenever there appears to be a possible reconciliation with India by Pakistan's democratically elected government, the military undermine it by mounting terrorist attacks," she said at the seminar held at the University of London's Senate House last week.

Bob Blackman, a Conservative party MP, said that evidence demonstrates that Pakistan is a "perpetrator of terrorism" in Jammu and Kashmir.

He demanded that Pakistan's "illegal occupation" of parts of Kashmir should be ended. Pakistani writer and journalist Irfan Hussain concluded that Pakistan was both a "victim and source of terrorism," while Dr Aqil Shah of Oklahoma University added that the Pakistani military's mistake was that it distinguishes between "good, bad and ugly" terrorists.

"Good groups, such as the Haqqani Network and Lashkar-e- Tayyaba, are free to roam the country collecting funds. Other groups classified as bad can still be brought under control and used by the state. "Ugly groups, such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, are irreconcilable and are being fought by the military," Dr Shah said.

PTI
Pak off the FATF grey list doesn't mean it's not under scrutiny anymore: MEA secretary

Imran Khan again targets Pakistan's establishment on Day 2 of protest march; govt rules out talks over snap polls

US lawmakers introduce bill to designate Pak a 'State sponsor of terrorism'

International

oi-PTI

New York, Sept 21: A bipartisan group of two powerful American lawmakers has introduced an act in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a State Sponsor of terrorism.

"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

Prevent terrorists from using Pak territory as safe havens: Kerry tells Sharif

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is Ranking member of this influential Congressional Committee on terrorism.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe said.

"From harboring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he alleged.

Poe said the bill will require the Obama Administration to formally answer this question.

The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said.

"Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a State Sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," Poe said.

In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack.

"I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace," he said.

"I support every effort to find out who committed this heinous act, so that the perpetrators are brought to justice. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims," Olson said.

Senator John Cornyn, Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest stack in a decade.

Indian-Americans continued to call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.

"Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state," said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA.

"OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan," it said.

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 11:21 [IST]
Imran Khan's party rejects ISI chief's allegations; says he never made unconstitutional demands

Why is 'Mr. Bean controversy trending on Twitter after Zimbabwe beat Pakistan?

Pak off the FATF grey list doesn't mean it's not under scrutiny anymore: MEA secretary

Imran Khan again targets Pakistan's establishment on Day 2 of protest march; govt rules out talks over snap polls

First put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India: Pakistan

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New York, Sept 21: Pakistan won't limit its nuclear programme, its UN envoy Maleeha Lodhi said on Wednesday, a day after Washington urged Islamabad to curtail its atomic activities.

Lodhi told reporters here that such proposals of nuclear restraint should be first implemented by India before Pakistan does it.

"Pakistan's nuclear programme cannot be limited," Lodhi said at the joint press conference with Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry.

"The world should first put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India."

The remarks came a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to limit Pakistan's atomic programme.

US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said at a briefing on Tuesday that Kerry and Sharif discussed "our strong, long-term bilateral partnership and to build upon the US-Pakistan Strategic dialogue".

"Kerry also stressed the need for restraint in nuclear weapon programmes. The secretary praised Pakistan for hosting the Afghan refugees for over 40 years and highlighted the importance of continued respect for humanitarian principles."

IANS
Uri attack: Were porters the 'insiders' who helped terrorists with precise info?

New Delhi

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Sept 21: The National Investigation Agency which is now probing the Uri attacks has learnt that there was a mole who would have helped the terrorists.

While digging out details regarding the moles, it has also been found that the terrorists had infiltrated into India through a forest which falls in between a village and the Line of Control. OneIndia had earlier reported that the terrorists had help from a mole.

Who was Jaish-e-Mohammad's 'mole' in Uri?

The NIA is trying to find out if the terrorists had entered in through the Sukhdar area near the Line of Control. This area which has a population of 500 people, is under the scanner of the investigation agency.

The NIA has sent the GPS sets used by the terrorists to the United States for forensic examination and once those details come, the agency would be able to pin point the route taken by the terrorists.

The NIA is also probing the three levels of breach that took place before the terrorists entered into the base. They first breached the fence at the LoC following which they cut the main fencing at the brigade headquarters.

Following this they dodged the security. This makes it clear that they were fully aware of the movement in the base.

The mole

However, for the investigation agency, getting to the mole who passed on the information is more important at this stage. The manner in which the terrorists carried out the operation makes it clear that they had first hand knowledge about the base which they attacked.

The terrorists had knowledge of the movement within the base and also the fact that there was a changeover taking place. The four terrorists who were later shot down had managed to dodge security before entering the camp unnoticed.

Investigators do not rule out the possibility of porters who could have passed on information. They will be investigated, an officer informed. The investigators are gathering data about the porters who work near the LoC.

There are nearly 500 of them and each one will be investigated, officers also added.

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Bihar strongly pitches for action due to siltation caused by Farakka

Patna

oi-PTI

Patna, Sep 21: The Bihar government today made a strong presentation before a committee constituted by Union Water Resources ministry to show how siltation in Ganga river due to Farakka dam led to rise in water level of the river at several points, resulting in flood.

Principal Secretary of Bihar Water Resources Department Arun Kumar Singh made a power point presentation before Madhav Chittle committee, an official statement said here. The committee was formed at the initiative of the Bihar government.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar during his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi had drawn his attention towards siltation triggered by Farakka dam resulting in rise in water level in Ganga and resulting in flood every year.

He had urged the PM for a deep study of the situation and formulate a national silt policy. The Bihar government's presentation in national capital was attended by Secretary of Union Water Resources ministry Shashi Sekhar and IIT Delhi Professor A K Gosain.

In his presentation, Singh showed how due to siltation caused by Farakka dam resulted in record rise in water level in Ganga at Patna, Hathidah and Bhagalpur this year causing widespread destruction. He demanded decommissioning of Farakka dam due to its bad impact.

The officer also made a strong case for formulation of national silt policy. Newly appointed Vice President of Bihar State Disaster Management Authority Vyasji was present in the function.

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 13:04 [IST]
A 21-year-old woman was allegedly pushed off the balcony of her house by a man, after she "refused" to accept his marriage proposal in outer Delhi's Mongolpuri area. Police said that they have arrested Amit. The girl is in hospital and received fractures on her hand, legs and head.
Kerala CM urges Centre to rescue Indians stranded in Riyadh

Thiruvananthapuram

oi-PTI

Thiruvananthapuram, Sep 21: Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan today sought the intervention of the Centre to bring back 72 Indians, including Keralites, who have been stranded at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

In a letter to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, he said the stranded Indians were now living in labour camps. They were brought from Dubai for an Economic City project.

They have not been getting salary for the past one year and are unable to go out of the camp, he said. The workers are also not being provided with food and drinking water at the camps, the Chief Minister said and called for urgent steps to bring them back home safely. Even though they lodged a complaint with the Indian embassy, no steps have been taken, Vijayan added.

PTI
China's service outsourcing continues to grow Updated: 2016-09-21 08:25 (Xinhua)

BEIJING - China's service outsourcing industry continued to grow in the first eight months, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said on Tuesday.

Chinese companies agreed service outsourcing contracts worth 629 billion yuan ($95 billion) in the period, up 31.2 percent year on year.

Among the deals were offshore service outsourcing contracts valued at 434 billion yuan, up 42.4 percent year on year, according to the MOC.

The eastern coastal provinces and cities saw total contract value reach 416 billion yuan, up 48.6 percent year on year.

Cooperation in service outsourcing with countries along the Belt and Road saw contracts valued at 76 billion yuan for the January-August period, rising 22.2 percent from a year ago.

China's service outsourcing sector was described by the State Council as a "green industry" that will be a new engine for tertiary industry and job creation.
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State Councilor urges more efforts to simplify business registration Updated: 2016-09-21 09:04 (Xinhua)

HAIKOU - State Councilor Wang Yong has asked local governments to do more to simplify business registration procedures.

During a visit to South China's Hainan province, Wang said authorities should continue to reduce approval procedures and omit unnecessary registrations.

Better information disclosure, stricter measures against companies with poor credit and stronger law enforcement were all required, Wang said.

Wang visited governments, innovation centers, street markets and small firms since Sunday.

The government initiated business registration reforms in March 2014 by lowering barriers for market entry and cutting red tape.

New business registrations jumped 28.9 percent year on year in the first eight months of 2016.
Aided by Microsoft, China Daily aims high by moving to the cloud Updated: 2016-09-21 10:11 By Song Jingli(chinadaily.com.cn)

China Daily and Microsoft signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build a global media cloud and develop a new tech lab, Sept 21, 2016. [Provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China Daily, the country's leading English-language newspaper, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft on Wednesday to further its digital integration and enhance its capability to provide more targeted and more valuable multimedia products to its global audience.

To promote cloud computing and big data technological innovation and application in the area of media integration, China Daily and Microsoft will build a global media cloud and develop a new tech lab.

Wang Hao, deputy editor-in-chief of the national newspaper, said that in the era of media integration, China Daily needs to incorporate cutting-edge technologies, platforms, channels into its own innovation to keep itself strong.

Shen Yuanqing, chief operation officer of Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group, said that the media industry is undergoing a digital transformation and Microsoft, which aims to help industry players succeed in this transformation, will provide a custom-built media integration solution to China Daily, relying on its Azure cloud service, big data analysis and artificial intelligence technologies.

Microsoft's Sandy Gupta said big data analysis and artificial intelligence technologies from the cloud will facilitate China Daily's information acquisition and help it more accurately visualize its readers.

China Daily, which has a global audience of 47 million, is one of the highest cited media organizations of the country.
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Premier Li says Chinese economy capable of maintaining medium-to-high growth Updated: 2016-09-22 00:07 (Xinhua)

Chinese premier Li Keqiang attends the general debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Sept 21, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

NEW YORK - Chinese premier Li Keqiang said on late Tuesday that the Chinese economy needs and is capable of maintaining medium-to-high growth rate.

Li made the statement when addressing a welcoming dinner party organized by the Economic Club of New York, the National Committee on US-China Relations, and the US-China Business Council.

Faced with weak global economic recovery and waves of geopolitical conflicts, no countries can stay immune to these unstable and uncertain factors, Li, who is here for a series of United Nations conferences and engagement with a wide spectrum of Americans, told about 1,000 elites of American business.

China' s economy, which has been deeply integrated into the world, is slowing down, but still maintains stable growth, at an annual rate of 6.7 percent for the first half this year, which is not easy for an economy that has reached $10 trillion, he said.

With an annual growth rate of 6 percent to 7 percent, China' s economy each year can add the volume equivalent to a medium-sized economy, Li added.

The Chinese economy still needs to grow at medium-to-high rates, because every year there are 14 million extra population of labor force in urban areas and China also needs to wage war on poverty which is still plaguing over 50 million Chinese people, the premier said.

China is capable of maintaining this medium-to-high growth rate, thanks to its ongoing efforts to restructure and upgrade its economy and the emergence of new growth driving forces and dynamics, Li reassured the audience.

The great achievements China made in over three decades in the past is attributable to reform and opening up, which is still crucial for today's economic restructuring and upgrading, said the premier.

The gathering came one day after the premier met with US President Barack Obama in New York, during which Li called for concerted efforts to promote economic and trade ties between the world's top two economies.

Economic and trade cooperation is the "cornerstone" and "propeller" of the China-US relations, Li said during their talks.

Enhancing China-US cooperation is in accord with the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the common wish of the world community, he said, while expressing China's willingness to deepen bilateral, regional and global cooperation in various fields.

Obama, for his part, reiterated that his country supports China's reform process and hopes that the two sides can make further progress in bilateral investment treaty negotiations.

Li is scheduled to attend the general debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday before heading to Canada to continue his overseas trip, which will also take him to Cuba.
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From its inception, and well before it made $10 billion of earthquake aid money disappear, Bill and Hillary Clinton's Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) was a vicious joke on Haitians. The original name, Commission Inte'rimaire pour la Reconstruction d'Haiti, should have been simply translated as Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti. After all, it was the commission that was temporary, not Haiti. There was also no need to change the word reconstruction to the vague term recovery, unless one deliberately wanted to suggest the collection of something. As the I-HRC, however, the organization not only acquired Hillary Rodham Clinton's initials but also boasted that it would scoop up Haiti's reconstruction funds and turn the world's first black republic into a temporary construct. If Mrs. Clinton has become a zombie and the "I" in I-HRC has faded, this could easily be interpreted as a sign of the Haitian gods' wicked sense of humor.



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The great writer Toni Morrison once described Bill Clinton as "our first black President," because of his background as a poor boy in Arkansas from a single-parent home, his fondness for junk food, and the political attacks on his sexuality. If so, then he has graduated to being the first black-American dictator of Haiti. For six years of a full dictatorship of the Clintons and their surrogates, on earthquake anniversaries Haitians at home and in the diaspora have made a ritual of searching through the rubble for the reconstruction funds that were donated by good people from all around the world. "Where did the money go?" everyone asks. The answer is simple: for a while it probably sat in the Swiss and Caribbean offshore banks where dictators stash their loots.



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In 2012, the United States presidential elections cost a record $2.6 billion. The Republican challenger Mitt Romney raised $0.99 billion, and the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama managed to raise an unprecedented $1.07 billion. Both politicians are regarded as champion fundraisers because of their feats. In 2016, by all estimates, the cost of the US presidential elections doubled or quadrupled to about $5-10 billion. This is the most expensive presidential bid in history, and Hillary Clinton has vastly outspent Donald Trump. Where did the money come from?



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As of August 22, 2016, Clinton had officially raised only $0.436 billion, and her top six donors had contributed about one tenth of these funds. Donald Trump, for his part, had raised $0.129 billion, and the money from his top six contributors amounted to $0.011 billion. These sums fell quite short of the money being spent by the two politicians, especially Clinton, who had already spent about $0.1 billion on television advertisements alone by the end of August and had planned to spend $0.077 billion more for advertisements in September and October. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton has relied on a large and well-paid entourage that has probably included medical personnel, and during her busy campaign schedule, she has used private airplanes like some of us take buses and taxis. Most of the money for her campaign has probably come as "disbursements," which are not counted as carefully as money donations. These include out-of-pocket funds from the candidates and friendly donations of various services. Such disbursements have obscured the engine of the 2016 US elections to an unprecedented degree.



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It is not possible to raise billions to tens of billions of dollars legitimately for political campaigns. More and more, in the West and in emerging market economies, these astronomical sums for elections are extracted from unsuspecting taxpayers. We have Brazil to thank for some insights into the machinations of politicians to finance their campaigns. In Brazil, the state energy company, Petrobras, was granting contracts to construction companies with the understanding that a percentage of the funds would be applied to the campaigns of various corrupt politicians. The money-laundering scandal, which involved more than $15 billion and led to President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, is estimated to have touched every political party and 70 percent of the country's ministers and legislators.



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For the Clintons, the boon from Haiti's earthquake of January 12, 2010 came while HRC was Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton was the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti. As soon as massive numbers of Americans began to donate small sums of money for earthquake relief, Bill and Hillary Clinton transformed themselves into the face of Haiti. In their most calculated compassionate voices, they told stories about their marvelous honeymoon on the island and implored the public for donations. In reality, in the US State Department, the mood was festive. On February 1, the US Ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, cheerfully titled a section of his situation report, "THE GOLD RUSH IS ON!"



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By March 8, 2010, Bill Clinton had applied sufficient pressure on President Rene' Pre'val, to force Haiti's Lower House to vote yes on a State of Emergency that would allow a group of rich donors to run the country for 18 months via the IHRC. During the same month, Hillary Clinton went to Montreal to raise money, ostensibly for Haiti's reconstruction, and Bill Clinton went to Davos to collect the rich donors. The next month, Bill Clinton worked to push his project on Haiti's Senate, where it was ironically called a coup d'e'tat d'urgence. The Senate voted no on April 8, but President Pre'val insisted on another vote. In the next vote on April 13, 10 out of 25 senators stayed home to prevent a quorum. On April 14, Michelle Obama made a special trip to Haiti, and the next day the deal was done. The vote was 9 away, 2 abstaining, 1 no, and 13 yes. All but one of the yes votes had come from Pre'val's party. Thus slightly more than three months after the earthquake, on April 21, 2010 the IHRC was inaugurated.



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With the IHRC, the Clintons established in Haiti their dream government, which I described, when I first observed it, as "pay-to-play," meaning: an unelected government where political participation is based on money invested. In the IHRC, there were two parts: one foreign and the other Haitian. Bill Clinton chaired the foreign section, which included the representatives of 14 donors [US, European Union (EU), France, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), United Nations, World Bank, Organization of American States, CARICOM, the private donors, the diaspora, and the NGOs]. Each donor had to pledge to the IHRC $0.10 billion over two years or forgive $0.20 billion of Haitian debt.



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The poorer, Haitian, section of the IHRC had only seven members. Haiti's Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, formally led it as the nominal Co-Chair of the IHRC. The other six members were President Pre'val, who was allowed only a symbolic veto, plus one person each to represent the Lower House, Senate, judiciary, business sector, and unions. Every Haitian member had to be approved by the foreigners, and Clinton ran all the show.



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As the reconstruction money poured in, the IHRC became increasingly arrogant and opaque. According to the IHRC charter, Clinton and Bellerive gained the right of final approval over all major construction projects in Haiti. In addition, they even gave themselves the power to grant titles. Meanwhile, Haitian ministers and elected officials were blocked from IHRC meetings because they were "not on the list."



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The IHRC is estimated to have collected $5.3 billion over two years and $9.9 billion over three years, without reconstructing much of anything. This represents more than five times the money that the Clintons have collected by other mechanisms like the Clinton Foundation or Laureate Education. Bill Clinton has claimed at various times that he only received 10 percent of the funds that had been pledged to the IHRC, but even if this were true, a vast sum of money would still have disappeared. By July 2011, Haiti's Ministry of Public Works, Transportation and Communication (MPTC) had approved $3.2 billion of IHRC projects, but only $0.084 billion (2.6 percent) worth of projects had been completed.



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In a meeting of the Senate Public Works Committee with the MPTC on August 11, 2011, the Senate Committee Chair, William Jeanty, said that the IHRC had not only appropriated for its balance sheets the projects of several Haitian ministries but also claimed credit for financing MPTC projects that had been funded by the EU and IDB before the IHRC was formed! To date, the only notable IHRC project has been Caracol Industrial Park, a sweatshop complex in northern Haiti, well away from the earthquake damage. Its construction was financed by USAID ($0.124 billion) and the IDB ($0.105 billion), and its unstated purpose was to force the construction of modern seaports and airports in northern Haiti to support mining. To create a few thousand slave-wage jobs, this industrial park, built without regard to its environmental impact, has destroyed the homes of hundreds of farmers and polluted a pristine river and bay.



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The IHRC barely lasted through its 18-month term. After this, Haitian politicians publicly declared it to be dysfunctional, and the Haitian Senate did not renew its mandate. On April 10, 2014, two Haitian lawyers, Newton Louis St. Juste and Andre' Michel, filed a legal action against Bill Clinton in Haiti's Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes. On October 13, 2014, the court asked Clinton to provide an audit of the IHRC funds. Rather than abide by the court's request, Clinton claimed immunity based on the fact that he had been the UN Special Envoy to Haiti.



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It is unlikely that Haitians will ever recover the funds that have vanished into the IHRC, and that are now probably financing HRC's campaign. At best, one might hope that Hillary Clinton will lose the election and thus be prevented from gathering more power. The big prize in her sights now is the United States, where she and Bill Clinton should be able to charge billions of dollars to each participant in a pay-to-play government. Political arguments about racial justice and the lesser evil entirely miss the point that in a pay-to-play government, those who are poor or even middle class, will count only for what they can furnish of themselves to the rich. This will certainly mean low wages, prisons, and an unprecedented predation on those who are directly hit by climate-change catastrophes. For Haitians at home and in the diaspora, who have seen the devil itself in I-HRC, she could never be a choice for anything. As for the ancestors: if they have their way with her, she will come close enough to the presidency to taste it, touch it and smell it, and then, she will lose it.

Editor's Notes: This article was originally published in News Junkie Post. Dady Chery is the author of We Have Dared to Be Free. Photographs one and eight from United Nations Development Programme archive; two and fourteen by Zoriah; three and seven from the World Economic Forum archive; four and six from Direct Relief archive; five and thirteen from the Minesterio Das Relacoes Exteriores archive; nine, ten and twelve from the US Department of State archive; and eleven from Blue Skyz Studios.


This man, who has ordered the assassination without trial of hundreds (thousands?) of American and other civilians by drone, who can't get along with the heads of other states whose world views dare to differ from his, who paints a rosy picture of reality while ensuring that it will never come to pass, insulting in passing most of the inhabitants of planet earth, probably doesn't even realize that other people rightly mock his words, in a triumph of propaganda in which the perpetrator comes to believe his own lies.

When Obama was first elected, like hundreds of thousands of other people of good will, I believed he would be able to make a difference, but I soon realized that he had merely been 'allowed' to become the Democratic candidate in 2008 by the Clintons, on condition he do as he was told by the real powers that be, or risk the fate of Kennedy.

There appears to be growing contest between authoritarianism and liberalism right now. And I want everybody to understand, I am not neutral in that contest. I believe in a liberal political order -- an order built not just through elections and representative government, but also through respect for human rights and civil society, and independent judiciaries and the rule of law.

When I held conversations with the leaders of the Cuban revolution in the early sixties, they would say that democracy was fine on paper, but in practice it enabled the ruling class to get its way. I filed that opinion away for possible future reference. All these years later, and even after the end of the Cold War, a US-led West resoundingly demonstrates its truth. Here's a great red herring:

I believe the road of true democracy remains the better path. I believe that in the 21st century, economies can only grow to a certain point until they need to open up -- because entrepreneurs need to access information in order to invent; young people need a global education in order to thrive; independent media needs to check the abuses of power.

It's easy to verify that President Putin is all in favor of Russians being part of the international intellectual world. If you Google 'St Petersburg', you will come up with an almost endless list of international events that take place there, in every imaginable domain, that take place there - and in which many Americans participate.

Next, Obama claims that:

In Europe, the progress of those countries in the former Soviet bloc that embraced democracy stand in clear contrast to those that did not. After all, the people of Ukraine did not take to the streets because of some plot imposed from abroad.

The problem with that statement is that the alternative press is full of accounts of Eastern European disappointment in the Western way of doing things to which they gained access by joining the (US-backed) European Union. Many regret the old days, when they could walk the streets safely at night and everyone had free medical care and education, especially given that the benefits of the neo-liberal upheaval of their economies go only to the 1%.

In a world that left the age of empire behind, we see Russia attempting to recover lost glory through force. Asian powers debate competing claims of history.

Here Obama lumps Russia and China together, inadvertently acknowledging that the US considers them a major threat, which they are, potentially. What separates Obama from his counter-parts is that these latter have not the slightest interest in besting the US: they just refuse to accept its claim to hegemony. As for Russia using force, the US repeats this claim daily in order to prepare the public for the war it plans to launch to gain access to Russia's vast mineral wealth. In the latest iteration, prominent Europeans are warning that Russia could take over the continent in the blink of an eye - just exactly as they did during the Cold War, when the US installed Pershing missiles in Germany to supposedly counter this threat.

Across the region's conflicts, we have to insist that all parties recognize a common humanity and that nations end proxy wars that fuel disorder.

Unbelievable! The US has engaged in several wars during the last two decades, none of which has ceased, and it is currently in its fifth year of devastating efforts to bring down the democratically elected Syrian government. Hutzpah is putting it mildly.

And this leads me to the fourth and final thing we need to do, and that is sustain our commitment to international cooperation rooted in the rights and responsibilities of nations.

No other country on earth has mocked international cooperation more than the US. Perhaps the reason is a lack of mastery of the English - or any other - language: for the US, cooperation means accepting its orders.
Reprinted from Counterpunch



U.S. Led Attack on Syria

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"Everything suggests that the attack... was deliberately committed by forces inside the US government hostile to the ceasefire...Claims that US fighters were unaware of who they were bombing are simply not credible, and are flatly contradicted by other accounts in the media..." -- Alex Lantier, World Socialist Web Site

A rift between the Pentagon and the White House turned into open rebellion on Saturday when two US F-16s and two A-10 warplanes bombed Syrian Arab Army (SAA) positions at Deir al-Zor killing at least 62 Syrian regulars and wounding 100 others. The US has officially taken responsibility for the incident which it called a "mistake," but the timing of the massacre has increased speculation that the attack was a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to derail the fragile ceasefire and avoid parts of the implementation agreement that Pentagon leaders publicly opposed.

Many analysts now wonder whether the attacks are an indication that the neocon-strewn DOD is actively engaged in sabotaging President Obama's Syria policy, a claim that implies that the Pentagon is led by anti-democratic rebels who reject the Constitutional authority of the civilian leadership. Saturday's bloodletting strongly suggests that a mutiny is brewing at the War Department.

The chasm that's emerged between the Pentagon warhawks and the more conciliatory members of the Obama administration has drawn criticism from leading media outlets in the US (The New York Times) to high-ranking members in the Russian cabinet. On Saturday, at an emergency press conference at the United Nations, Russia's UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin referred to the apparent power struggle that is taking place in Washington with these blunt comments:

"The big question that has to be asked is 'Who is in charge in Washington? Is it the White House or the Pentagon?' "Because we have heard comments from the Pentagon which fly in the face of comments we have heard from Obama and Kerry..." Watch here. (See -- 10:15 second)

Churkin is not the only one who has noticed the gap between Obama and his generals. A recent article in the New York Times also highlighted the divisions which appear to be widening as the situation in Syria continues to deteriorate. Here's an excerpt from the New York Times:

"(SECDEF Ash) 'Carter was among the administration officials who pushed against the (ceasefire) agreement ... Although President Obama ultimately approved the effort. On Tuesday at the Pentagon, officials would not even agree that if a cessation of violence in Syria held for seven days -- the initial part of the deal -- the Defense Department would put in place its part of the agreement on the eighth day... "'I'm not saying yes or no,' Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, commander of the United States Air Forces Central Command, told reporters on a video conference call. 'It would be premature to say that we're going to jump right into it.'" ("Details of Syria Pact Widen Rift Between John Kerry and Pentagon," New York Times)

Think about that for a minute: Lt. General Harrigian appears to be saying that he may not follow an order from the Commander in Chief if it's not to his liking. When exactly did military leaders start to believe that orders are optional or that the DOD had a role to play in policymaking? Here's more from the NYT:

"The divide between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Carter reflects the inherent conflict in Mr. Obama's Syria policy. The president has come under increased fire politically for his refusal to intervene more forcefully in the five-year civil war, which the United Nations says has killed more than 400,000 people, displaced more than six million and led to a refugee crisis in Europe. But keeping large numbers of American ground forces out of Syria has also created space for Russia to assume a greater role there, both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table... "The result is that at a time when the United States and Russia are at their most combative posture since the end of the Cold War, the American military is suddenly being told that it may, in a week, have to start sharing intelligence with one of its biggest adversaries to jointly target Islamic State and Nusra Front forces in Syria. "'I remain skeptical about anything to do with the Russians,' Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, who recently stepped down as NATO's supreme allied commander, said Monday in an interview. 'There are a lot of concerns about putting out there where our folks are.'" (New York Times)

So warhawk Supremo, Ash Carter, and his Russophobe colleagues want to intensify the conflict, expand America's military footprint in Syria, and confront Russia directly. They don't approve of the President's policy, so they're doing everything they can to torpedo the ceasefire deal. But why now, after all, the ceasefire began five days ago? If Carter and Co. saw the cessation of hostilities as such a threat , why didn't they act before?

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Reprinted from Sputnik

A schism within US government has come spectacularly into the open, with the Pentagon and CIA militarists seemingly subverting the president's authority over Syria policy.



This amounts to a brazen pulling of rank by the militarist elements within the US power structure over the civilian titular head of government. This power struggle came to light dramatically -- if briefly -- with the US air strike last weekend on the Syrian army base near Deir ez-Zor in which over 60 troops were killed.



That massacre was no accident, as the Pentagon subsequently claimed. It was a deliberate mortal blow to the shaky ceasefire worked out the week before by US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.



Within hours of the Deir ez-Zor attack on Saturday evening, there were reports of air strikes on civilian areas of insurgent-held eastern Aleppo. But none of the reports were able to confirm the identity of the warplanes involved.

Two days later, media coverage shifted to the collapse of the Syrian ceasefire and what is being described as an "outrageous" air strike by Syrian or Russian warplanes on a UN aid convoy near the northern city of Aleppo. Again, no reports have been able to identify the aircraft alleged to have perpetrated that attack, although Washington blamed Syria and its Russian ally.

Predictably, following the attack on the humanitarian convoy in which 12 civilian aid workers were killed and several trucks ferrying food were destroyed, the US is saying that plans to cooperate with Russian military in Syria are now off the agenda.

It is true that the Syrian government declared earlier on Monday that the ceasefire was over. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have resumed air strikes and ground operations against insurgents in eastern Aleppo and around the capital Damascus. Russian air power is also providing support in the resumption of operations by the Syrian army.



But it is the aforementioned sequence of violence that needs to be particularly ascertained in order to appreciate the real significance of why and how the latest Syrian ceasefire has broken down.

First of all, we should note that the Pentagon and its CIA covert arm were conspicuous in their dissent to the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts to implement a ceasefire in partnership with Russia.

When John Kerry met with Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on September 9 to finalize a planned truce, the head of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, was openly telling media outlets that he opposed any deal with Russia. It wasn't just Carter. Other American military chiefs were also deprecating any liaison with Russia over Syria.



Nevertheless, Obama and his top diplomat Kerry persisted -- despite the objections of the US military -- in coming up with a "deal" with Russia that envisaged a cessation of violence, humanitarian aid to war-torn cities like Aleppo, and, remarkably, an ambitious proposal for US and Russian military forces to form a joint task force to go after al-Qaeda-linked terror groups, such as the rebranded al-Nusra Front and Daesh (ISIS/ISIL/IS).

For the ceasefire to take hold and for US-Russia joint operations to begin, the Kerry-Lavrov deal hinged on the separation of US-backed supposed "moderate rebels" from the notorious al-Qaeda-type extremists.



Even as the ceasefire came into effect on September 12, the Pentagon was contemptuously voicing doubts about its success. It was obvious that the US military establishment did not want the ceasefire arrangement with Russia. That dissent was tantamount to subverting Obama's presidential authority and his favored diplomatic option.

Why was the Pentagon antsy over the ceasefire plan with Russia? After demonizing Moscow as a global threat for the past two years, part of the Pentagon's aversion was that any successful partnership with Russia over Syria would be a pointed negation to the hype of the new Cold War over Ukraine and Europe.

More importantly, however, is that the Pentagon and the CIA knew that in Syria the White House spiel about "moderates" and "terrorists" being separable was always an illusion.



President Obama and his foreign secretary John Kerry may talk all they want about "vetted opposition fighters" and purportedly "fighting against terrorists."



But the war planners in Washington know all too well that in the real world of America's dirty war in Syria there is no such division of "good" and "bad" rebels among the insurgents. They are all part of a proxy terror front of illegally armed militants, which the US and its NATO and Arab allies have funded, armed, trained and directed for the past six years to overthrow the Syrian government.



That's why the Pentagon was expressing such pessimism about Kerry's diplomatic efforts with Lavrov. The US militarists have a more realistic, if unspoken, awareness of the true criminal nature of the militant groups fighting against the Assad government. Simply because the Pentagon and the CIA have masterminded the proxies, all of which are acting as terrorists, whether they go by the media monikers of "moderates" or "extremists."



A second crucial reason for why the US military planners opposed the ceasefire was because they were apprehensive that if the truce failed -- as it surely would -- then the failure would demonstrate the fallacy of the official Washington narrative of it only supporting "legitimate, moderate, vetted rebels."

And, thirdly, if somehow the US and Russian air forces were to get to the stage of carrying out joint strikes against terror units that would be the ultimate anathema for the Pentagon and CIA. In that unlikely event, the Americans would be obliged to disclose to the Russians where their supposed "moderate rebels" are located. Which, as noted, is a fabrication. What the US and Russia would be targeting are covert American regime-change assets, which is impermissible for Washington's war planners.

The Pentagon's misgivings were founded too. From the outset of the ceasefire, all the anti-government militant groups were engaging in breaches. And, glaringly, there was no separation of any of the insurgents, as John Kerry had appealed for. In other words, the American official narrative about the Syrian war was being exposed as a huge lie. And America's involvement in sponsoring a terrorist front in Syria was becoming transparent.

The ceasefire regime was abided by Syria and Russia, but it was the US-backed militants who continued acts of terrorism, preventing, for example, humanitarian access to Aleppo all last week because of shelling and sniping at the Castello Road arterial route.

Given the damning revelation of US terrorist collusion in Syria, the Pentagon apparently took the decision to blow up the incriminating ceasefire. The first sabotage came with the US air strikes on the Syrian army base near Deir ez-Zor. It is inconceivable that such a massacre, accompanied by Daesh temporarily taking over the base, could have been caused accidentally.



In short order, a series of unidentified warplanes carried out strikes in and around Aleppo, including the blast on the UN aid convoy. No one knows as yet who carried out those strikes, but it is plausible that they were false flag attacks by US forces intent on obliterating the waning ceasefire, and distracting from the earlier US massacre at Deir ez-Zor.

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The numbers seldom lie and the fact of the matter is that as far as ecommerce platforms go, it is well-nigh impossible to beat the indomitable eBay. eBay ranks among the pioneers of the industry and in this time period, they have evolved into one of the largest, if not the largest, ecommerce platform in the whole wide world. As of January 2016, they had a total of 162 million users. Additionally, eBay has 25 million sellers, 1 billion live listings and more than 800 million items listed in the eBay marketplace.

This means that if BI on eBay is well mastered and understood, you will be in a very competitive position to have a leg up on the competition and to reap the financial rewards of being a seller on eBay. A good piece of market research software should at the very least be able to offer you plenty of information on key metrics such as users, sellers, sales, searches(and the associated keywords), revenues generated on all platforms e.g. mobile and desktop devices and much more.

Let us explore the benefits that are available to you when you use market research effectively on eBay.

Discovery -- The market research tools will enable you to make decisions on pricing and packaging of your product on the basis of the completed listings on eBay, thus you will be able to engage in optimal pricing and packaging of your product to make sure that you get the best value for money.

The old adage is that the customer is always right and such tools will help you to make the decision that is based on customer's prior purchases so that you can make an informed decision about how to best go about marketing the product to you and your customer's advantage.

The research is done in real-time, allowing you to make the sales decisions in a matter of minutes in response to consumer feedback. It will provide information on the highest, lowest and average prices that a product has recently been sold for on eBay. You can thus list based on existing evidence as per the customers' requirements.

Research -- BI will allow you to engage in snooping on the habits of the competition. And a little espionage is often the best way of getting a clear picture of the market and the actors therein. You will be able to review all the sales info, listing strategies and pricing of your competition using eBay tools for sellers .

Additionally, you will be able to find out who the top sellers in that particular category are, narrow down your search to individual sellers, categories and items, the most popular products on eBay and the tactics that separate the top sellersfrom the rest of the pack.

Keywords -- The BI tools will go over and beyond, giving you valuable metrics on how your items and similar items are faring on the platform. For the unenlightened, the keyword simply means the search terms which you key into the search bar when you are searching for something to buy on eBay.

This means that you will have at your fingertips the very words that people use to look for the items and as such, you can tailor your listings' descriptions to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages, SERPs.

By using advanced business intelligence software, you will be better placed to use the proper keywords on your title that will guarantee you the best sell through rates by using the most profitable keywords that give the best conversions.

Format--The format of your listing will go a long way in determining whether you sell or not and so the best way to go about this is to make sure that your formatting optimizes on CRO. Therefore, the BI software of choice should be able to provide the best listing format, options and features for all the items which you have put up for sale.

You will be able to narrow down on the timing for best conversions, the features to include on your items, the auction types and whether to offer a fixed price or to go the way of the auction. Having all these options available to you will give you that competitive edge that will ensure that the customers do get full value for their money.

In a nutshell, as an ecommerce retailer, you must make sure that you are going about the entire process the right way considering the fact that unlike a brick and mortar store, which is often limited by its customers having to be present at the physical store, in online selling you are competing with every other business in the world which is offering the same product as you are.

Therefore, any slight advantage that you can get over the competition can and will translate into big profits for you. Hence, you must start a good habit of collecting all the data that is related to your niche as soon as possible and using that data to make informed decisions about the state of your business and how to position yourself to take full advantage of the opportunities which the market presents.

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Reprinted from The Guardian

Last week I was given the "good news" that the Department of Defense will grant my request to see a surgeon for treatment related to my gender dysphoria. Although I don't have anything in writing, I was shown a memorandum with my name on it that confirmed the military is moving forward with my request. Everything that they have presented to me leads me to believe that they are going to provide the care that has been recommended by my doctor. I have requested this for nearly a year. That same week, I was also given "bad news": I may be punished for a suicide attempt in July.

For the past week, I have been busy preparing for my disciplinary board. This administrative board has the power to sentence me for indefinite solitary confinement. Preparing to defend yourself for a disciplinary board is time consuming. It takes time to research, collect evidence, and organize a defense. The process is rather stressful. I am facing this alone. I am not allowed to have a lawyer or anyone else with me.

Last week I was escorted to view the evidence before the board. There are now nearly 100 pages. I do not have easy access. I do not have a copy. I could only see it for an hour. Looking through the evidence and taking notes in a hurried manner was very stressful.

In the evidence, I saw a photograph of myself shortly after my suicide attempt. Seeing this photograph has haunted me for the past week. It has disturbed me. It sends a chill down my spine. This hurt me more than any physical injury or hardship I have lived through. This process has forced me to relive one of the worst moments of my entire life.

I saw the face of a woman who had given up. I saw the face of woman who, for years, has politely asked, formally requested, and desperately begged for help.

I am not alone in my struggle. Suicide pervades the trans community. The risk among our trans siblings with no or inadequate treatment is staggering. In comparison with the general population, the risk is a full order of magnitude higher. While a specific suicide rate among trans prisoners is not available, it is estimated to be significantly higher than among the community outside.

I lack the words to describe how concerned my family and friends are about this board. I lack the words to express how deeply pained I am about this board and the fact that the government is pursuing my punishment so aggressively. How am I supposed to explain this to my family? How am I going to explain this to future generations when they look back and ask how I could have been punished for my own desperation? I have absolutely no idea. I have no idea how to explain it at all.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here

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Delivery drone flies toward the future Updated: 2016-09-20 07:09 By Shi Xiaofeng in Hangzhou and Sun Xiaochenin Beijing(China Daily)



Chen Yong, a postal worker, receives packages delivered by a drone in Anji county, Zhejiang province, on Monday. Yu Lebin / For China Daily

A successful package delivery by drone on Monday bodes well for the commercial use of unmanned aircraft in the logistics sector, but more tests are needed, according to those involved with the test.

As a six-propeller China Post drone carrying a package landed smoothly on a playground in Qiguan village, Anji county, Zhejiang province, to the cheers and applause of a group of residents that included local postal worker Chen Yong. The package was the first to be delivered by drone in the rugged mountain area.

"It came way faster than I expected," Chen said, after collecting newspapers and mail delivered by the drone 10 minutes after leaving the town 10 kilometers away.

It was the first successful trial by China Post on its proposed unmanned aircraft delivery route, as it faces the challenge of rising delivery costs in rural areas, where demand for faster and safer delivery has taken off with e-commerce.

Zhang Lifeng, general manager of China Post's Anji county branch, said the trial will run for three months as part of a feasibility analysis for future long-term operations.

"It was conducted for testing the possibility of flying delivery drones on carefully designed fixed routes in this mountainous region," he said.

"Still, we need more research and observation regarding the drone's power supply, the stability of the online control system and the operational cost to know whether the technology is reliable and practical," he said.

The drone, together with a remote control system, which was provided by an unmanned aircraft manufacturer in Hangzhou, can fly as long as 30 minutes - a total range of 20 kilometers - on each battery recharge, according to the county post office.

"What also caters to rural needs is that the drone will fly on pre-established, fixed routes control operations that are not too complicated," Zhang said.

Two more trial routes connecting the town's post office with two remote villages, Dongling and Daxi, will be opened soon, according to the county government.

"It will for sure bring more convenience for local residents and promote efficiency in logistical services in the long term," said Xia Liang, chief of Hanggai township, which governs Qiguan village.
Traumatic Brain Injury - Pipeline Review, H2 2016; New Report Launched

http://www.drugpipeline.net/global-markets-direct/beta-secretase-1-aspartyl-protease-2-or-beta-site-amyloid-precursor-protein

http://www.drugpipeline.net/global-markets-direct/maternal-embryonic-leucine-zipper-kinase-protein-kinase-eg3-or-tyrosine

http://www.drugpipeline.net/

Traumatic Brain Injury - Pipeline Review, H2 2016, provides an overview of the Traumatic Brain Injury pipeline landscape.The report provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Traumatic Brain Injury, complete with analysis by stage of development, drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The report also covers the descriptive pharmacological action of the therapeutics, its complete research and development history and latest news and press releases. Additionally, the report provides an overview of key players involved in therapeutic development for Traumatic Brain Injury and features dormant and discontinued projects.The report features investigational drugs from across globe covering over 20 therapy areas and nearly 3,000 indications. The report is built using data and information sourced from Global Markets Directs proprietary databases, company/university websites, clinical trial registries, conferences, SEC filings, investor presentations and featured press releases from company/university sites and industry-specific third party sources. Drug profiles featured in the report undergoes periodic review following a stringent set of processes to ensure that all the profiles are updated with the latest set of information. Additionally, various dynamic tracking processes ensure that the most recent developments are captured on a real time basis.The report helps in identifying and tracking emerging players in the market and their portfolios, enhances decision making capabilities and helps to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.Scope- The report provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Traumatic Brain Injury- The report reviews pipeline therapeutics for Traumatic Brain Injury by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources- The report covers pipeline products based on various stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages- The report features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which includes, product description, descriptive MoA, R&D brief, licensing and collaboration details & other developmental activities- The report reviews key players involved Traumatic Brain Injury therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects- The report assesses Traumatic Brain Injury therapeutics based on drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type- The report summarizes all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects- The report reviews latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for Traumatic Brain InjuryReasons to buy- Gain strategically significant competitor information, analysis, and insights to formulate effective R&D strategies- Identify emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage- Identify and understand important and diverse types of therapeutics under development for Traumatic Brain Injury- Identify potential new clients or partners in the target demographic- Develop strategic initiatives by understanding the focus areas of leading companies- Plan mergers and acquisitions effectively by identifying key players and its most promising pipeline therapeutics- Devise corrective measures for pipeline projects by understanding Traumatic Brain Injury pipeline depth and focus of Indication therapeutics- Develop and design in-licensing and out-licensing strategies by identifying prospective partners with the most attractive projects to enhance and expand business potential and scope- Modify the therapeutic portfolio by identifying discontinued projects and understanding the factors that drove them from pipelineSpanning over 262 pages Traumatic Brain Injury - Pipeline Review, H2 2016 report covers Introduction, Traumatic Brain Injury Overview, Therapeutics Development, Drug Profiles, Appendix, Methodology. The report covered companies are - ALSP, Inc., Amarantus Bioscience Holdings, Inc., Athersys, Inc., Beech Tree Labs, Inc., Cognosci, Inc., Euroscreen S.A., Intellect Neurosciences, Inc., Ischemix, Inc., Karyopharm Therapeutics, Inc., Kyorin Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Levolta Pharmaceuticals, Inc.For more information Visit at: drugpipeline.net/global-markets-direct/traumatic-brain-injury-pipeline-review-h2-2016Related Reports:Hepcidin (Liver Expressed Antimicrobial Peptide 1 or Putative Liver Tumor Regressor or HAMP) - Pipeline Review, H2 2016; visit - drugpipeline.net/global-markets-direct/hepcidin-liver-expressed-antimicrobial-peptide-1-or-putative-liver-tumorBeta Secretase 1 (Aspartyl Protease 2 or Beta Site Amyloid Precursor Protein Cleaving Enzyme 1 or Memapsin 2 or Membrane Associated Aspartic Protease 2 or BACE1 or EC 3.4.23.46) - Pipeline Review, H2 2016; visit -Maternal Embryonic Leucine Zipper Kinase (Protein Kinase Eg3 or Tyrosine Protein Kinase MELK or Protein Kinase PK38 or MELK or EC 2.7.11.1) - Pipeline Review, H2 2016; visit -About DrugPipeline.netDrugPipeline.net is a market research reports distribution platform which hosts research reports from all leading global market research firms related to pharma industry. It also assist decision makers locate the right market research solution from a single place.Press Contact:Mr. Sudeep ChakravartyDirector - OperationsDrugPipeline.netNo. 1101, Golden Square, 3rd Floor,24th Main, J P Nagar, 1st Phase,Bangalore, Karnataka, India- 560078Tel USA: +1-302-703-7787Tel India: +91- 8762746600
Le Tour de Finanace Visits Switzerland

What is Le Tour de Finance?Are you interested in finding out how to make the most of your money in France, Spain or Italy? Do you have pressing questions about making international payments, pensions, tax, wealth or the healthcare system? Why not take the time and come to a local event, bring some friends and make it a great day out?Le Tour de Finance is the financial forum for expats which will help you with a range of different financial products and services. Just as Le Tour de France takes a route throughout the regions of France, so too does Le Tour de Finance, but we also visit Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Belgium. We want to reach expats where you live so that you can seek advice particular to your local area. Tax advice, pensions, mortgages,healthcare, schools, business advice and making the most of your assets are just some of the subjects that expats need to know more about. Le Tour de Finance is the ideal opportunity to find answers to the most pressing questions facing people living in France, Spain or Italy.The forum will bring together key players who assist expats settling or already living in these countries. It will also be an ideal opportunity to socialise by enjoying a free Buffet lunch and meeting people in similar circumstances in your neighbourhood.29th September, Nyon, SwitzerlandBringing experts in Swiss Expat Finance closer to you.As an expat, do you make the most out of your finances?Come and join us for expert advice and to meet other like-minded expats in your local area. The event starts at 18.45 with a welcome drink, followed by some brief presentations from experts on a range of topics that could affect you now, or in the future. This engaging events ends at 20:30 with drinks and canapes and a chance to meet the experts and hopefully make some new friends.Register for this FREE event or for further information, by sending an email with your full contact details to: seminars@ltdf.eu, register online below or call +33(0)4 22 32 62 40Where:Le Caveau de NyonChateau de Nyon, Place du Chateau,1260 Nyon,SwitzerlandWhen:29th September, 2016The event starts at 18.45 and ends at 20.30 with drinks and canapes.What:Brief presentations on a range of topics including: Tax efficient planning: for Frontaliers and Swiss residents; Why you need a Swiss Will!, Transfers between currencies: beat the bank margins!, Wealth management: seeking positive returns post-Brexit, QROPS- the latest rules on transferring UK pensions overseas, and what the advantages may be, How do the Swiss Pillars work, and how do I save taxes?, Swiss Mortgages- how they work, how to optimise to save taxesLe Tour de Finance is the financial forum for expats which will help you with a range of different financial products and services. Just as Le Tour de France takes a route throughout the regions of France, so too does Le Tour de Finance, but we also visit Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Belgium. We want to reach expats where you live so that you can seek advice particular to your local area. Tax advice, pensions, mortgages,healthcare, schools, business advice and making the most of your assets are just some of the subjects that expats need to know more about. Le Tour de Finance is the ideal opportunity to find answers to the most pressing questions facing people living in France, Spain or Italy.The forum will bring together key players who assist expats settling or already living in these countries. It will also be an ideal opportunity to socialise by enjoying a free Buffet lunch and meeting people in similar circumstances in your neighbourhood.Le Tour de FinanceCurrencies DirectOphira 1,Place Joseph BermondValbonne Sophia Antipolis06560FranceOrganiser: Pippa MaileEmail: seminars@ltdf.euMobile (France): +33 (0) 681 799 424Phone (Spain): +34 950 478 914Phone (Italy): +39 06 9926 8080
2,500 scientists to assemble for 20th Mendeleev Congress in Ekaterinburg, Russia

https://mendeleev2016.uran.ru/

The 20th Mendeleev Congress on General and Applied Chemistry is taking place on September 26  September 30, 2016 in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Its delegates are going to present the achievements of global and Russian chemical science and discuss todays most important problems of the field. For several days, Ural Federal University and the Ekaterinburg-EXPO International Exhibition Center in Ekaterinburg will turn into discussion platforms for representatives of science and industry determining key areas of development and interaction for modern chemical engineering enterprises.The Mendeleev Congress, being one of the most large-scale scientific events, is solving the important problem of popularization of chemistry: Ekaterinburg is visited by the worlds leading scientists, and the Congress itself is preceded by a number of events for school students and teachers.Ural Federal University is a recognized center of chemical research both in and outside Russia. This was made possible to achieve due to the efforts of the research teams from the universitys Institute of Chemical Engineering and Institute of Natural Sciences, and also due to the creation of the new Chemical and Pharmaceutical Center, which was built within the framework of the Pharma-2020 project.Victor Koksharov,Rector of Ural Federal UniversityThe Mendeleev Congress is held once every 4 or 5 years, and Ekaterinburg will be hosting it for the first time. This years Congress is going to be very diverse in terms of the membership: more than 30 countries will be represented by their leading researchers specializing in virtually every field of development of the chemical science.The ways chemistry influences our lives are numerous, and what the members of the Congress are going to discuss is, in fact, the outlines of the nearest future. What we are doing today in chemical laboratories will tomorrow define the development of the chemical industry, which is vitally important for the national economy. The Congress will, undoubtedly, promote the development of education, medicine and industries, including the mining industry. Without the scientific basis, it is impossible to develop all these areas. This event is of exceptional importance for the Ural region.Valery Charushin,President of the Ural Division of the Russian Academy of SciencesThe agenda of the Congress covers a wide variety of fields: medical chemistry, oil and gas production, water industry, chemical education and others. The opening ceremony of the 20th Mendeleev Congress is taking place on September 26 in Ekaterinburg, Russia.Official website of the event:Ural Federal University (UrFU) is one of the largest higher educational institutions in Russia, which brings together fundamental education and innovative approach towards the challenges of modern times.Currently, the university is home to almost 35,000 students from 80 countries of the world and more than 4,000 faculty members, including the top-notch global experts in the spheres of natural sciences, engineering and social sciences. Our institutes offer about 400 Bachelor, Master and Doctoral Programs in natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, economics and management taught in Russian and English. The number of UrFU alumni exceeds 360,000 people.Breakthrough studies are pursued in 72 research excellence centers. The university is open to international collaboration having almost 400 partners all over the globe and being an active participant of such initiatives as BRICS Network University, SCO Network University, CIS University.19, Mira str. Ekaterinburg, Russia, 620002
Douglas County High Schools Closing the Workforce Skills Gap with YouScience Thanks to Sponsor Donations

www.YouScience.com

www.Caliber1Construction.com

www.southernae.com

DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. (Sept. 19, 2016)  High school sophomores and juniors in the Douglas County School District will have an opportunity to take the YouScience student profile thanks to generous donations from Caliber 1 Construction, Southern A&E, GreyStone Power Corporation and R. K. Redding Construction (RKR). The YouScience profile uses brain games to capture real measures of aptitudes, which are the natural abilities most important to career choice. Through a scientific algorithm, students are given a personalized match with their best-fit careers, allowing students to expand their vision of opportunity.We are excited about helping students find their career path quicker through our YouScience sponsorship, said Chris Elliott, CEO of Caliber 1 Construction. In addition to helping build a larger, more diverse workforce for our industry, these results will benefit any industry that is facing a critical labor shortage.The Metro Atlanta Chamber recently released an Accenture study that discovered a gap between education and workforce skills. YouScience addresses many of the recommendations made in this report by providing personal insight and market information that allows students to connect education with career options. By using the students own portfolio of talents as a basis for career recommendations, they gain the confidence needed to succeed in a potential career.YouScience gives students personal insight, career recommendations and market information all in a single online location. Students then have the opportunity to work with their counselor at school or their parents at home to develop a more focused post-secondary education and skill development path into a successful high-growth industry career.Workforce development is essential to our district to help us fulfill our vision of building a community of productive citizens, said Douglas County School System Superintendent Dr. Gordon Pritz. YouScience will help our students expand their vision of opportunities by uncovering their natural abilities and aptitudes then aligning their educational pursuits with high demand careers that best fit their talents and interests.The YouScience profile allows students to discover the intersection of their aptitudes, interests and career opportunities and confidently set a direction for education and career success.Solving the skills gap problem starts with giving students the necessary self-discovery and career exploration tools as the time they are making critical decisions for their education and career, said Philip Hardin, CEO of YouScience. Leaders such as Superintendent Pritz, sponsors such as Caliber 1 Construction and public servants such as Senator Lindsey Tippins have been actively engaged in working with YouScience to improve student success and ensure productive workforce opportunities in Georgia industry.The five Douglas County School District high schools include: Alexander High School, Chapel Hill High School, Douglas County High School, Lithia Springs High School and New Manchester High School, as well as a College & Career Institute and Performance Learning Center.For more information, please visit YouScience at, Caliber 1 Construction at, Southern A&E at, GreyStone Power at GreyStonePower.com, R.K. Redding Construction at RKRedding.com and Douglas County Schools at Douglas.k12.ga.us.CO&P500 Bishop St B2 Atlanta, GA 30318USA
Global Colocation Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% during the forecast period, 20152020

World Colocation - Market 2020

http://www.marketintelreports.com/report/allied0165/world-colocation--market-opportunities-and-forecasts-2014--2020

http://www.marketintelreports.com/pdfdownload.php?id=allied0165

www.marketintelreports.com

Colocation facility is the administration that allows small and large organizations to set up their servers (or contract a server on rent) at the location of data center suppliers. This permits the companies to concentrate on their core business activities. The global colocation market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% during the forecast period, 20152020.Check Complete Report @Colocation facility provides cost effective solutions for organizations as against the installation of servers at their own premises. It eliminates the prerequisite requirements of space and reduces the operating cost incurred for cooling and heating systems. In addition, handling the operation of data centers requires IT expertise for the company, which can be handled by colocation facilities. Moreover, the growing awareness towards reduction of carbon footprints is has boosted the growth of the market.However, due to limited network bandwidths available in colocation, some organizations prefer in-house LAN connected data center facilities to colocation. In any case, high start-up capital expenditure and continually fluctuating operational expenses act as restraints for the market, as these factors do not permit the organizations to keep control over their expenses. Colocation data centers supplemented with cloud computing permits adaptability and enhanced networking capabilities, thus, promoting opportunities for the growth of the market.The market is segmented on the basis of retail solution and wholesale solution for colocation hosting. The retail solution consists of shared rack space, which is generally preferred by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The wholesale solution allows companies to have a dedicated rack space or floor space to host their servers. The retail colocation holds the highest market share in the colocation market. However, the wholesale colocation segment would exhibit the highest growth rate during the forecast period.The end-user market is segmented into SMEs and large organizations. Large organizations are further segmented into Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), government and public sector utilities, telecommunication & IT and healthcare and life sciences. The share of large organizations is more as they opt for colocation services on a larger scale. However, it is expected that the SMEs would have a better growth potential as more small businesses would prefer retail colocation services.Get Sample Brochure of the Report @geographically, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and LAMEA. North America is anticipated to be the largest market for colocation. The Asia-Pacific market for colocation had accounted for 24.9% of the overall colocation market and expected to grow at a higher CAGR of 14.3% during 20152020. The economic growth rate of the developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region would promote more organizations to opt for colocation hosting. Therefore, this region is likely to have the highest growth rate, whereas LAMEA is expected to grow at a decent pace. The principal strategies adopted by key companies of the market are partnerships and collaborations.This facilitates the provision of strategic location services to Equinix, Inc, Interxion Holding NV, SunGuard Availability Services, CenturyLINK Technology Solutions, Verizon Communication Ltd, KDDI Telehouse Corporation, NTT data Corporation, American Telephone & Telegraph, Inc., Telecity Group, Global Switch Corporation, DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc., Digital Reality, Rackspace and Navisite, Inc.POTENTIALBENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS: This report forecast the prospects of the global colocation market based on market trends of 2014.The report provides a competitive scenario of the global colocation markets with current and future growth trends, structure, driving factors, scope, opportunities and challenges. The report includes comprehensive analysis of market segments to provide insights about market dynamics. Porters five forces model analysis provides inputs on the buyer and supplier potential and highlights the competitive structure of the market that would enable market players to devise effective plans and facilitate better decision making. Value chain analysis provides key inputs on the role of all stakeholders in the market.SWOT analysis of key players of market draw out the essential strengths and potential opportunities in the market.KEY MARKET SEGMENTS: The global colocation market segmentation is illustrated below:Global Colocation Market :By Type :Retail Colocation ,Wholesale ColocationBy End User Small : Medium Enterprises, Large EnterprisesBy Industry : Vertical Banking, Financial and Insurance Sector, Government & Public sector Telecom & IT Sector ,Healthcare & Life sciences Sector, Energy Sector ,Other SectorsBy Geography : North ,America, Europe, Asia-Pacific ,LAMEAKEY PLAYERS : Equinix, Inc Interxion Holding NVSunGuard Availability ServicesCenturyLINK Technology SolutionsVerizon Communication Ltd.KDDI Telehouse CorporationNTT data CorporationAmerican Telephone & Telegraph, Inc.Telecity GroupGlobal Switch CorporationDuPont Fabros TechnologyDigital RealityRackspaceNavisite, Inc.About us:MarketIntelReports (MIR) aim to empower our clients to successfully manage and outperform in their business decisions, we do this by providing Premium Market Intelligence, Strategic Insights and Databases from a range of Global Publishers.A group of industry veterans who are well experienced in reputed international consulting firms after identifying the sourcing needs of MNCs for market intelligence, have together started this business savior MarketIntelReports.MIR intends to be a one-stop shop with an intuitive design, exhaustive database, expert assistance, secure cart checkout and data privacy integrated. It curates the list of reports, publishers and studies to ensure that the database is constantly updated to dynamically meet the targeted, specific needs of our clients.MarketIntelReports currently has more than 10,000 plus titles and 35+ publishers on our platform and growing consistently to fill the Global Intelligence Demand  Supply Gap. We cover more than 15 industry verticals being: Automotive, Electronics, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Chemicals, Building & Construction, Agriculture, Food & Beverages, Banking & Finance, Media and Government, Public Sector Studies.Contact us:Mayur SSales Manager2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400,Wilmington,Delaware,19808United Statessales@marketintelreports.comTelephone: 1-302-261-5343
Intellect Outsource reinforcing its squad for better product data management & product import service

http://www.intellectoutsource.com/bulk-product-upload.html

http://www.intellectoutsource.com/

The number of people opting web to purchase is increasing swiftly and in such a scenario, every business is trying some thing or the other online. However, only few succeed to gain some momentum and the main reason why most of the businesses fail is that they associate with the wrong people. A company that keeps on expanding and updating itself would be the right choice to make and Intellect Outsource is outsourcing ecommerce service provider india one among them. Latest news points towards the said fact. The company has announced that it has strengthened its existing team by updating them with a strategic training program.Most businesses out of sheer excitement start an ecommerce website and start dreaming big. Well! No one can blame them for that. They are victims of fake promises made to them. In fact, starting a website is just the beginning. A lot of associated processes are there that have to be taken care of. Regular product import and product data management are imperative, the CEO was quoted saying. He added, We have assigned a separate team for the same. As a part of our company policy, periodic training has to be provided and just a week back, the professionals underwent a shrewd training program of 18 days. The results are quite amazing and all the 21 attendees have showcased great performance in the final phase of work excellence evaluation.Bulk product upload and product data management is a process that needs consideration of several facts. Right and maximum possible information must be collected. Categorization should be done appropriately based on different product attributes. Images should be refined and presented professionally. The list continues. Training covered the whole aspects related to these and techniques as well as technologies to increase effectiveness and swiftness of concerned processes were detailed.In our company, we believe that proper team structure is pivotal and thus we have divided our members into different groups at various hierarchies. From top to bottom, the designations flow in the order of project manager, team leader, supervisor, Quality Checkers and team members, the CEO said. As the training is over, there are some new plans and responsibilities to be assigned for different members.Are you planning to outsource any sort of product import service or bulk product data entry projects? Rely on Intellect Outsource and you can be assured of best results.Businesses from across the world have benefited immensely from the companys services. The rates are reasonable and there are multiple packages to please every type of customer. To discuss further, contact Intellect Outsource, at your convenience.Geographically located in South India, Intellect outsource was incorporated in 2009. The actual intention of this venture was to meet the ever-mounting demand for ecommerce services, website design and development services; we are successful in doing the same ever since our inception. The credit for this attributes to the sheer commitment of our entire squad and astute implementation of well thought-out sneakily designed stratagems.Intellect OutsourceNethaji Road, Padavarad, Kuttanellur P O,Thrissur,Kerala,680014, INPhone: 91 - 487 2323563Email: info@intellectoutsource.com, shaju.nd@gmail.com
Artificial lift systems market size worth $31.88 bn by 2023

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Artificial lift systems market size is forecast to reach USD 31.88 billion by 2023; as per the latest research report by Global Market Insights, Inc.Rising demand for energy across the globe is expected to propel global artificial lift systems market growth over the forecast timeframe. Rapid industrialization as well as infrastructure development in emerging economies such as India and China is expected to fuel energy demand. Factors such as growing population and improved standard of living will also favorably impact revenue.Request for a sample of this research report @The industrial sector accounts for significant share in distributed energy consumption. The need to meet growing energy demand has instigated high usage of renewable energy sources. However, the world may still depend on considerable percentage of fossil fuels to satiate the ever growing energy needs.Increase in requirement for energy efficient products allowing manufacturers to invest in R&D to provide advanced solutions. Presently, artificial lift systems have the lowest penetration across Middle East & Africa; however, escalating drilling activities and oil & natural gas production provide huge growth opportunities.The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) mentioned that the production of shale gas has reached a highest level in 2013, which is also expected to increase over the forecast timeframe. The U.S. economy which is an oil importer has been dramatically affected by increasing oil prices. U.S. has increased oil & gas production with the aim of minimizing oil imports. Increasing shale gas production would help to meet rising natural gas demand in the country.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Artificial lift systems market manufacturers distribute their machinery directly to their end-users, including oil & natural gas companies. Companies maintain their relation with dealers through standard sales and service agreements. Several customers enter into long-term, fixed pricing contracts with manufacturers.Innovative technologies such as web-based monitoring services and multiphase gas-handling pumps are expected to drive global artificial lift systems market growth from 2016 to 2023. Web-based monitoring services minimize the intervention cost and optimize production. Multiphase gas-handling pumps are mainly deployed to condense free gas into homogenous fluid.High capital as well as maintenance cost associated with the industry adds up to overall operational cost. Increasing raw material prices such steel and copper prices has led to high artificial lift systems market price trend.Key insights from the report include:Electrical submersible pumps industry was valued at over USD 8.5 billion in 2015, and is expected to surpass USD 17 billion by 2023. This product offers higher efficiency, low maintenance and low space requirements.Rod lifts accounted for more than 20% of the artificial lift systems market share in 2015. It provides optimization controls, reduced corrosion concerns and high efficiency. Manufacturers are offering advanced rod lift systems in less complex designs together with increased extraction rate of hydrocarbons.North America artificial lift systems market size was worth over USD 6 billion in 2015. This high growth is due to rising production of shale gas across the region.Asia Pacific industry revenue is forecast to continue occupying more than 22% of the overall share by 2023. This can be attributed to high demand and consumption of oil & gas in countries such as India, China, and Japan. Saudi Arabia is also increasing drilling activities to meet the increasing energy demand.Key players include Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, General Electric, Weatherford International and Cameron International. Manufacturers emphasize on achieving product differentiation on the basis of quality. For instance, Baker Hughes introduced VisiTrak geospatial navigation to improve drilling efficiency in 2015.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.29L Atlantic Avenue,Suite L 105, Ocean View,Delaware 19970United States
Peru Cards and Payments Market: Total Card Market Grew at a CAGR of 7.6% for the Period 2012 to 2014

www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/peru-databook-cards-payments-market

www.psmarketresearch.com/industry-report/financial-services

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The research report provides in depth analysis and insights into the Peru Cards and Payments Market and competitive landscape (card issuers in the country) for both debit cards and credit cards. The study includes 3 years historical market size and 6 years market forecast in terms of number of cards, value and volume of transactions processed through these cards, and other key metrics. The report also provides information on the key industry trends, major schemes, banks and detailed segmentation of card and payment industry. The research report is a new offering from the companys Financial Services domain, and leveraged from the companys existing cards and payments database of 50+ countries.Explore Report with Detailed TOC on Peru Cards and Payments Market at:In terms of number of cards in circulation, the Peru payment cards market grew at a CAGR of 7.6% during the period 2012-2014 and it is expected to grow further over the forecast period. In 2012, Perus GDP per capita was USD 6,325, which is likely to increase further over the period 20152020, to reach USD 6,882 in 2020. This increase is expected to increase the cards usage over the forecast period. Also Perus population grew steadily from 30.4 million in 2012 to 31.4 million in 2014, and is expected to reach 34.4 million by 2020. The increase in population is expected to encourage card spending over the forecast period.In Peru, the debit cards dominate the card payments market in terms of number of cards in circulation. Debit card also dominated the Peru card payments market in terms of number of transactions and value of transactions. Average debit card transaction value increased from PEN 362.9 in 2012 to PEN 409.0 in 2014, at a CAGR of 6.2%.The credit card penetration in Peru per 100 inhabitants increased from 19 in 2012 to 21 in 2014 and it is further expected to increase during the forecast period. The transaction value of credit cards reported at POS terminals was greater than at ATMs. The average credit card transaction value in Peru declined marginally from PEN 375.8 in 2012 to PEN 368.1 in 2014, at a CAGR of -1.0%. The average transaction value is anticipated to decrease during the forecast period.Browse Other Related Report at:Some of the key players in the debit cards market include Banco de Credito del Peru, BBVA Continental Scotiabank, Midbanco, Banco Financiero and Banco Falabella Peru. Banco de Credito del Peru was the leading bank in terms of the number of debit cards in 2014. Some of the key players in the credit card market of Peru include Banco Falabella Peru, Banco de Credito del Peru, Interbank, BBVA Continental and Scotiabank. In the credit card segment, Banco Falabella Peru was the leading bank in 2014, in terms of number of credit cards in circulation.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a market research company, which offers market research and consulting services for various geographies around the globe. We provide market research reports, industry forecasting reports, business intelligence, and research based consulting services across different industry/business verticals.As one of the top growing market research agency, were keen upon providing market landscape and accurate forecasting. Our analysts and consultants are proficient with business intelligence and market analysis, through their interaction with leading companies of the concerned domain. We help our clients with B2B market research and assist them in identifying various windows of opportunity, and framing informed and customized business expansion strategies in different regions.Contact:DeepAssistant  Client Partner347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb:347 5th Ave. #1402- 210New York CityUnited States
Turkey Cards and Payments Market Forecasted to Grow at a Healthy Rate During 2015-2020

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The report includes the market size and forecast of the Turkish cards and payments market for the period 2012 to 2020 (in terms of number of cards, value and volume of transactions processed through these cards), along with the key industry trends, major schemes, banks and card market by customer segments. The report also includes competitive landscape (card issuers in the country) for both debit cards and credit cards.Explore Report with Detailed TOC at:The card payments market in Turkey grew at a healthy pace during the period 2012 - 2014, both in terms of volume and value. Some of the factors fueling the growth of the market are payment infrastructure modernization, growing number of cards in circulation, and the benefits offered to debit card and credit card holders by the card issuers. In terms of number of transactions, the overall Turkish card market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.7% during 2015-2020.In Turkey, the debit cards dominate the total card payments market in terms of number of cards in circulation. In 2014, debit cards accounted for 65.2% of total cards in circulation. Debit card also dominated the Turkish card payments market in terms of number of transactions and value of transactions. By scheme, Visa dominates the number of debit cards in circulation, followed by MasterCard in 2014.The credit cards transaction value reported at POS terminals was greater than at ATMs. The credit cards transaction value at POS terminals represented 91.5% of the total credit cards transaction value in 2014. Widespread acceptance of credit cards by merchants, the growing consumer demand, and increase in the number of POS terminals contributed to the growth of the credit card segment in Turkey.Consumer preference for cashless payments enables growth of card payments. Banks and card issuers have implemented different pricing and marketing strategies to encourage consumers to increase card payments rather than paying in cash. Common strategies used by banks and card issuers are product discounts and reward points. As the internet users have increased, it has contributed to the growth of e-commerce in Turkey, which has directly influenced the growth of cards and payments industry in the country. The credit and debit cards dominate e-commerce because of attractive promotional offers such as discounts and free shipping. As increased number of retailers moving their business operations online to increase market share and to expand their customer base, the e-commerce growth is expected to continue in Turkey.The prepaid cards segment in terms of number of cards recorded a growth of 21.5% during the period 2010 to 2014 and is anticipated to continue to grow at CAGR of 7.7% over the period 2015 to 2020.In September 2015, InterBank Card Center (BKM) announced the launch of a new electronic card payment clearing system "TROY and is expected to be operational in 2016. As part of the TROY system, customers card payments will be processed by the merchant and then completed through a clearing network supported by the BKM. Visa and MasterCard were previously the companies of choice for this operation. Customers will be charged a fee for using the TROY payment system, but as per BKM it will be lower than the fees charged by international card networks such as MasterCard and Visa.Browse Other Related Report at:Some of the key players in the Turkish debit card market include Ziraat, VakifBank, Yap Kredi, Garanti and Finansbank. The key players in the credit card market include Yap Kredi, Garanti, Finansbank, Ziraat and VakifBank. Yap Kredi was the leading bank in credit card segment in 2014, in credit cards in circulation.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a market research company, which offers market research and consulting services for various geographies around the globe. We provide market research reports, industry forecasting reports, business intelligence, and research based consulting services across different industry/business verticals.As one of the top growing market research agency, were keen upon providing market landscape and accurate forecasting. Our analysts and consultants are proficient with business intelligence and market analysis, through their interaction with leading companies of the concerned domain. We help our clients with B2B market research and assist them in identifying various windows of opportunity, and framing informed and customized business expansion strategies in different regions.Contact:DeepAssistant  Client Partner347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb:347 5th Ave. #1402- 210New York CityUnited States
Li tells Obama of opposition to THAAD deployment plan Updated: 2016-09-21 01:58 By ZHAO HUANXIN in New York and ZHANG YUNBI in Beijing(China Daily)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the ongoing 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, the US on Monday. [Photo/Xinhua]

Premier Li Keqiang voiced Beijing's opposition to the plan by Washington and Seoul to deploy an advanced missile-defense system in the Republic of Korea while meeting with US President Barack Obama in New York.

Li said "it is hoped that all parties will avoid taking actions that lead to escalation of the tense situation".

He and Obama met on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday.

Earlier this year, Washington and Seoul agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, angering Beijing and Moscow. The system's radar has a maximum reach of 2,000 km and could cover parts of China and Russia.

Earlier this month, tension rose anew on the Korean Peninsula after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea conducted a nuclear test in an area near the China-DPRK border.

Li said China endorses the UN Security Council's plan to further respond to the nuclear test by the DPRK.

Beijing remains committed to denuclearization of the peninsula, ensuring peace and stability, and resolving the issue through dialogue and consultation, Li said.

A White House statement released later on Monday said Obama and Li "resolved to strengthen coordination in achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula".

Zhang Tuosheng, director of the research department at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, said China should continue tackling two tasks simultaneously  counteracting the THAAD deployment plan as well as strengthening cooperation with the US and the ROK in boosting denuclearization of the peninsula.

"No efforts should be spared to resume the Six-Party Talks, and even if the resumption is unlikely, support should be given to other dialogue promoting peace on the peninsula and denuclearization," Zhang said.

Jia Xiudong, a senior researcher in international affairs at the China Institute of International Studies, said the DPRK nuclear tests and the US-ROK plan to deploy THAAD are "pushing the peninsula situation to a deadlock, which serves no interest of any party".

The root cause of the nuclear issue is the mutual distrust between the US and the DPRK, and the only way out is to resume dialogue, Jia said.

During their talk, Li and Obama also touched upon bilateral trade and investment, as well as global issues including sustainable development, refugee crises and peacekeeping.

Contact the writers at zhaohuanxin@chinadaily.com.cn
Baby Food in Egypt Market: Current Trends and Market Growth Drivers

http://www.mrrse.com/egypt-baby-food-market

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Transparency Market Researchs report on the baby food market in Egypt features a highly detailed market survey, analyses, growth forecasts, and recommendations for growth. The report reviews the historical data of the Egypt baby food market before further branching out to analyze this market based on baby food products and types of baby food available in the market. This report offers a comprehensive view of the overall Egypt Baby Food and Pediatric Nutrition market. It also comprises an overview of the Middle East and Africa Markets.This report also discusses both existing and emerging manufacturing techniques and innovations. It explores the growth potential of baby food across key regions with the Egypt market while offering details about growth drivers and restraints. A comprehensive list of domestic as well as global brands is included in the Egypt baby food market research report. Transparency Market Researchs report further discusses production capacity and value, costs, and market shares held by the dominant players.Read Complete Report @Besides a full quantitative analysis of the baby food market in Egypt, the report features a detailed qualitative analysis as well. The data is broken down systematically and presented in the form of easy-to-understand graphs, charts, and info-graphics. As part of the value chain analysis of the baby food industry in Egypt, the report discusses factors such as: upstream raw material, downstream markets, and dynamics of the current baby food market in Egypt. Recommendations for growth and an overview of opportunities add further value to TMRs analysis.OverviewThe Egypt baby food market grew at a CAGR of 6.26% over the review period, reaching a market value of USD 43.0 million as of 2011. The market stood at USD 33.7 million in 2007. This consistent and substantial growth in the market for baby food in Egypt is attributable to a growing parental awareness about better nutrition for their infants and toddlers.Inquiry for Check discount @This report segments the market for baby food in Egypt based on product as: Bottled baby food, baby cereals, baby snacks, canned and frozen baby foods, and baby soups. Further, the market is also classified and studied based on type as: Dried baby food, milk formula, prepared baby food, and other baby food.As nutritional requirements change through the early development stage of infants, the demand for related products changes as well. Besides a heightened awareness about the nutritional needs of their babies, parents-especially full-time working professionals-find ready baby food products to be a convenient alternative to conventional home-cooked food.Get a Free Sample Copy of the Report @In a number of developing nations, where disposable income is growing, parents consider name-brands as a status symbol. The baby food market is no exception. This trend is also being observed in the Egyptian baby food market.MRRSE stands for Market Research Reports Search Engine, the largest online catalog of latest market research reports based on industries, companies, and countries. MRRSE sources thousands of industry reports, market statistics, and company profiles from trusted entities and makes them available at a click. Besides well-known private publishers, the reports featured on MRRSE typically come from national statistics agencies, investment agencies, leading media houses, trade unions, governments, and embassies.Corporate OfficeState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United States
Adhesives and Tapes Market Analysis, Research, share, Growth, Sales, Trends, Supply and Insights By 2023

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Adhesives and tapes are binding materials used to join two surfaces. These are used as compact replacements for fasteners such as screws, clamps, and nails. Adhesives and tapes are used in packaging, construction, footwear, furniture, automotive, bookbinding, crafts, and medical industries in Saudi Arabia.This report provides a detailed description of the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia based on volume share (kilo tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) from 2014 to 2023. It highlights factors contributing to growth of the market and restraints hindering the market. Detailed forecast for adhesives and tapes from 2015 to 2023 has been provided separately for a better understanding of the market scenario. The adhesives and tapes market is described with respect to various segments along with potential opportunities during the next six years.Read Complete Report @In terms of technology, the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia has been segmented into pressure sensitive, hot melt, and others (including moisture curing, heat curing, radiation curing, and chemical curing). The study provides forecasts and estimates for each technology segment in terms of revenue and volume during the forecast period. The study also includes bifurcation of the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia on the basis of formulations into water based and spray & cylinder based adhesive and tapes formulations from 2014 to 2023.Inquiry for Check discount @The study further segments the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia on the basis of key products such as acrylic, epoxy, polyvinyl acetate (PVAc), ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA), polMRRSE stands for Market Research Reports Search Engine, the largest online catalog of latest market research reports based on industries, companies, and countries. MRRSE sources thousands of industry reports, market statistics, and company profiles from trusted entities and makes them available at a click. Besides well-known private publishers, the reports featured on MRRSE typically come from national statistics agencies, investment agencies, leading media houses, trade unions, governments, and embassies.yurethane (PU), and others (including silicone and polyisobutylene). It provides forecasts and estimates for each product segment in terms of revenue and volume during the forecast period. The study also analyzes market attractiveness for all products of adhesives and tapes with the help of the market attractiveness tool. Additionally, the study segments the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia into key end-users such as packaging, footwear, construction, furniture, and others (including, bookbinding, automotive, and electronics). It includes forecasts and estimates for each end-user segment in terms of revenue and volume between 2014 and 2023.Increasing demand for adhesives and tapes in key end-user industries such as packaging and construction is projected to fuel the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia. However, downward pressure on manufacturers margins due to volatility in crude oil prices is likely to hamper growth of the adhesives and tapes market in Saudi Arabia during the forecast period.Get a Free Sample Copy of the Report @Value chain analysis and Porters Five Forces Model have been presented to provide a comprehensive view of the market. These would also help understand specifics of the industry structure apart from giving an overview of degree of competitiveness. The report also includes detailed profiles of key players such as Henkel AG & Company KGaA, Avery Dennison Corporation, BASF SE, H.B. Fuller Company, Ashland Inc, Bostik SA, Nitto Denko Corporation, Scapa plc, tesa SE, The Dow Chemical Company, Dymax Corporation, SAAF Co. Ltd., ABRO Industries Inc., and Sika AG. A detailed description of players includes parameters such as company overview, financial overview, business strategies, upcoming facilities, capacity addition, mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures, new products, and recent developments.MRRSE stands for Market Research Reports Search Engine, the largest online catalog of latest market research reports based on industries, companies, and countries. MRRSE sources thousands of industry reports, market statistics, and company profiles from trusted entities and makes them available at a click. Besides well-known private publishers, the reports featured on MRRSE typically come from national statistics agencies, investment agencies, leading media houses, trade unions, governments, and embassies.Corporate OfficeState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United States
Latest Research Report on Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market: Trends, Business Strategies and Opportunities 2025 The Insight Partners

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http://www.theinsightpartners.com/inquiry/TIPTE100000155

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The Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market to 2025 - Global Analysis and Forecasts by Device Type, Application, End-users report provides a detailed overview of the major factors impacting the global market with the market share analysis and revenues of various sub segments.Browse market data tables and in-depth TOC of the Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market to 2025 @Automotive industry anticipated years ago, the need for advanced vehicle monitoring systems, Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) and Temperature monitoring were the key concerns in automotive industry. SAW sensors are to play significant role in TPMS to sense and monitor the tire pressure in real time. Automakers such as Ford Motors, Nissan, Tesla and others have initiated offering this feature in almost all the SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) and MUV (Multi Utility Vehicle), according to the statistics the tires have been linked to 119 deaths in the U.S.A., and all these accidents are mainly on Ford Explorer SUVs. The applications of SAW in TPMS will upsurge the market for SAW sensors by 2025.Apart from automotive, SAW devices are used widely in medical applications for pressure and strain monitoring, pressure values from various locations is recorded and used for further diagnosis while treating cardiology, gastroenterology, urology, orthopedics and many others. There is increasing demand for sensors which are small, reliable, and economical in medical industry for various applications, acoustic wave sensors one among the most preferred sensors. Acoustic wave biosensors use acoustic wave to detect and record medical, bio-chemical, biophysical information.Request sample copy @Touch screens market is gaining traction across various industries such as consumer electronics, industrial, medical, automotive and many others. The demand for acoustic wave touch screens are rapidly increase as an alternative for optical touch screens which are expensive compared to that of acoustic wave screens. SAW touch screens are manufactured using sheet of glass with transmitting transducers, receiving transducers and reflectors. These transducers are used to generate ultrasonic waves, which is transferred over the screen and get reflected and the feedback is captured at receiver transducers.North Americas is a leading region to hold the major share of SAW devices for a wide range of applications across different verticals. Some of the key SAW devices used are resonators, filters, and sensors, the devices are found to be more feasible than other semiconductor devices. While the major market for these devices is North America, APAC region being one of the largest electronics manufacturers is one of the growing markets for SAW devices.Inquire about discount on this report @Some of the key players in SAW market include Honeywell International, Murata Manufacturing, Co, Ltd., Senseor, Vectron International, CTS Corporation and Epcos are among the other players in this market.Some of the key points covered in the report: Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market Landscape Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market  Key Industry Dynamics Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market  Five Forces Analysis Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market  Competitive Landscape Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  Device Type Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  Applications Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  End-users Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025  Geographical Analysis Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Market, Key Company ProfilesAbout The Insight Partners:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comThe Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Heparin Market: Ban on API Imports from China to Boost Heparin Production in Europe, predicts TMR

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The heparin market in Europe is rather consolidated, with the Sanofi, Aspen, Pfizer, and Leo Pharma accounting for over 65% of the market in 2015. In a new study, Transparency Market Research (TMR) has found that Sanofi is the clear leader in the Europe heparin market, enjoying a 47.5% share in 2015. Increased global sales of Lovenox can be attributed to the companys success.Download Free Exclusive Sample of this Report:A focus on the expansion of R&D activities, in-licensing and acquisitions, and portfolio management are the key strategies adopted by the market leader, the author of the study finds. In 2015, the company spent over US$5 bn on the research and development of 18 new medicines and vaccines. Companies in the heparin market in Europe are also emphasizing on key BRIC-M countries, developing market-specific innovations, and prioritizing resource allocation.Rise in Incidence of Coagulation and Renal Disorders Spurring Demand for HeparinThe recall of heparin products imported from China in 2008 was a turning point in the heparin market across the globe. The presence of a high level of allergenic substances in heparin products imported from China resulted in over a 100 deaths in the U.S. Tainted supplies were also found in several European countries, forcing the implementation of strict regulations regarding the use of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) produced outside the European Economic Area (EEA).This event spurred the domestic development of crude and API heparin and a number of companies entered the heparin processing business in the years that followed. This has had a significant impact on the growth of the heparin market in Europe, a lead analyst at TMR comments.The heparin market in Europe is also fueled by the growing incidence of coagulation disorders such as venous thromboembolism (VTE). These disorders cause nearly half a million deaths in the region each year, even more than the collective deaths caused by breast and prostate cancer, AIDS, and highway accidents, the author of the study finds.Low-molecular-weight Heparin to Register Remarkable Growth by 2024The opportunity in the Europe heparin market is estimated to be worth US$3.4 bn by 2024, rising from US$2.2 bn in 2015. The market is projected to register a steady CAGR of 5.2% from 2016 to 2024. Among the key product types, low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) accounted for a massive share of close to 80% in 2015, emerging as the leading segment. Generating a revenue of US$2.9 bn by the end of the forecast period, LMWH is also anticipated to post substantial growth, registering a 5.8% CAGR from 2016 to 2024. Unfractionated heparin, on the other hand, will grow at a sluggish pace.Browse Research Report:On the basis of end user, hospitals led the heparin market in Europe by value and are also anticipated to expand at the most rapid pace by 2024. By region, Germany contributed majority of the heparin market share in 2015. In addition to Germany, France, Belgium, and Portugal are likely to register the highest growth rates throughout the forecast period.This review is based on the findings of a TMR report titled Heparin Market - Europe Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Global Baby Food Market  Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016-2021

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Gens report, Global Baby Food Market  Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016-2021 provides detailed market and segment level data on the Global and Chinese consumption of Baby Food. The report provides historic, forecast and growth patterns by company, country and type/application from 2016 to 2021.This report delivers an extensive overview of Global Baby Food industry with a focus on China. It also acts as an essential tool to companies active across the value chain and to the new entrants by enabling them to capitalize the opportunities and develop business strategies. It also helps the companies to better understand the trends of Soups market to seize opportunities and formulate crucial business strategies.Request Sample Report:With this report, you will get access to:1. Market overview including definition, industrial chain (upstream & downstream), manufacturing technology details and the costs analysis from the aspects of raw materials, labor costs and depreciation.2. Value and volume consumption status and trends of the market, including Global and Chinese top players capacity & production, price & production value, cost & profit and market shares from 2011 to 2016.3. Worldwide supply/demand pattern of Baby Food by country or region (North America, China, EMEA, Asia except China), and by application/type.4. Growth, trends and forecast of 2016-2021 Baby Food market and some important proposals for new investment of Baby Food Industry before evaluating its feasibility.Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2011-2021 Global and Chinese Baby Food industry covering all important parameters.Enquiry Before Buying:Table Of Content:Chapter One Description1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Findings of IndustryChapter Two Brief Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Industry Chain Structure2.2.1 Upstream Raw Materials2.2.2 Downstream MarketChapter Three Development and Trends3.1 Key Manufacturing Technologies3.2 Issues and TrendsChapter Four Cost Structure4.1 Bill of Materials (BOM)4.3 Labor Costs4.4 Depreciation Costs4.5 Manufacturing CostsChapter Five Worldwide Key VendorsCompany ACompany BCompany CCompany DCompany ECompany FCompany GChapter Six Market Overview6.1 Global Market Size6.2 Chinese Market SizeChapter Seven Market Status7.1 Market Competition Status by Key Vendors7.2 Regional Market Competition StatusChinaNorth AmericanEMEAAsia except ChinaBuy Complete Report:Reportbazzar.com is your trusted source for the most inclusive and informative assortment of market research reports designed to empower you with the latest in industry information that translates to time and cost savings for your business. We not only help you give wing to your latent business ideas but also facilitate you in taking the best informed and strategic decisions that guarantee success in your most promising business endeavors.ReportBazzarOffice # 203,Vishal Shopping Complex,DSK Ranwara, Bavdhan,Pune  411021, IndiaIndia: +91 20 66528525Email Id: sales@reportbazzar.comWebsite:
Gastrointestinal Electrocardiograph Market: Segment and Analysis up to 2015  2020

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Gastrointestinal system is combination of gastrointestinal tract and accessory organs. Liver, stomach, pancreas, esophagus, intestines and other linked body organs are the disease related to gastrointestinal system. Electrocardiographs are the techniques used to identify the electric signals produce from cardiac activity. The signals generate the ECG that is a graphic record with voltage versus time.Electrocardiograph records the electrical signals with the help of electrodes placed on the skin in specific time.Get a copy of free Sample Report @The report provides a comprehensive view on the gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market we have included a detailed value chain analysis. To understand the competitive landscape in the market, an analysis of Porters Five Forces model for the gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market has also been included. The study encompasses a market attractiveness analysis, wherein product segments are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate and general attractiveness. The report also analyzes several driving and restraining factors and their impact on the market during the forecast period.Increasing prevalence of gastrointestinal disorders and growing incidences of chronic disorders such as cancer and diabetes drives the gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market. Rapid changing lifestyle and government support also contributes for the growth of gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market. Rising awareness for gastrointestinal disorders triggers the demand for gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market. However, high cost and insufficient funding has impact on the growth of gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market. Nevertheless, ongoing research and development for cost effective method is likely to open new opportunities in the market in coming up years.Get in-depth TOC (Table of Contents) with Tables and Figures @Electrogastroenterography (EGEG) and cutaneous electrogastrography are the types of gastrointestinal electrocardiograph. Extensive applications of gastrointestinal electrocardiograph include peptic ulcer, gastric cancer diagnosis, functional dyspepsia, irritable bowel syndrome and mobility disorders among others. Peptic ulcer emerged as the potential segment and is expected to dominate the market in coming up years due to escalating number of patients with peptic ulcer.Inquire more before buying this report @Geographically, gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, further bifurcation of region on the country level, which include U.S., Germany, UK, France, China, Japan and India.North America is the dominating in overall market due to technological advancement and rising number of gastrointestinal patients. Asia Pacific is expected to loom as the fastest growing segment of gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market in the forecast period owing to increase in occurrence of gastrointestinal disease and generating awareness among people.CardioNet, Mindray Medical International Limited, Spacelabs Healthcare, GE Healthcare, Nihon Kohden Corporation, CompuMed, Schiller AG, Mortara Instrument and Welch Allyn among others are some of the major key players in gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market.Browse detail report @The report segments of the gastrointestinal electrocardiograph market into:Gastrointestinal Electrocardiograph Markets: Type Segment AnalysisElectrogastroenterography (EGEG)Cutaneous electrogastrographyGastrointestinal Electrocardiograph Markets: Application Segment AnalysisPeptic ulcerGastric cancer diagnosisFunctional dyspepsiaIrritable bowel syndromeMobility disordersOtherGastrointestinal Electrocardiograph Markets: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout US:Syndicate Market Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Syndicate Market Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@SyndicateMarketResearch.comWebsite:
Meet Espire Infolabs at Recruitment Technology & Social Media Conference London

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Espire Infolabs, the global digital experience transformation company is a key sponsor of Recruitment Technology & Social Media Conference.London, UK: Recruitment industry is relationship-driven. To nurture long-term relationships with Clients and Candidates and build a strong brand loyalty, implementing best-of-breed recruitment technology solutions is not enough. It is important to ensure that whenever Clients are Candidates interact with your business  through any communication channel of their choice - they receive personalised, consistent and exceptional customer experience.Anything less than excellent customer experience is not acceptable by digital customers who dont think twice before switching loyalties for better services.Understanding this, global recruitment businesses are looking out for innovative Client and Candidate Experience Management Technologies that can give them a strong competitive edge. What they are currently struggling with is, evaluating and identifying just the right technology solutions that not only suit their unique business goals but also align well with their existing legacy system.To find answers to this industry-wide business problem, Recruitment Technology & Social Media Conference 2016 is set to bring global recruitment businesses and recruitment technology solution providers under one roof. To be held on 13th October 2016 in London, UK, the Conference aims to enrich recruiters to take profitability to the next level, by letting them experience a range of latest recruitment technology solutions, attend interesting keynote sessions, free workshops and access independent experts.Espire Infolabs, the global digital experience transformation company is a key sponsor of Recruitment Technology & Social Media Conference. Here, we would be showcasing our innovative Client and Candidate Experience Management Technology Solutions, such as: Digital Transformation Technologies to deliver exceptional Candidate and Client Experiences across multiple channels (website, mobile, social and print) by leveraging best in class Digital Content Management solutions. Recruitment Application Services covering support, development and enhancements of bespoke or packaged software including CRM, Vendor Management Solutions, among others. Mobile Application Development and its integration with other portals or applications to seamlessly connect recruiters with their Candidates and Clients. Technology Solutions and Services including Cloud Computing, Business Intelligence, Infrastructure & Security Management, Data Management and Testing Services. End-to-End Technology Consulting and System Integration ServicesAt the Conference, we would be showcasing how our Client and Candidate Experience Management Technology Solutions are enabling global Recruitment businesses to enhance their brand value, respond quickly to strategic market developments, expand their business and improve profit margins, while efficiently serving and nurturing their existing Clients and Candidates.To know how Espire's Client and Candidate Experience Management Solutions can give you a competitive edge and make you more profitable, schedule a meeting with our experts at the Recruitment Technology & Social Media Conference, by writing to us.Espire Infolabs is a global technology company empowering businesses to drive growth and customer engagement with exceptional digital experience solutions through digital content management, multi-channel customer communication management, enterprise applications and IT infrastructure solutions.Espire Infolabs Pvt. Ltd.486 & 487, Udyog Vihar Phase-III, Gurgaon-122016, IndiaAsha GopinathVice President, Marketing and Corporate CommunicationLandline: +91-1243843000Email: marketing@espire.com
Global Radiofrequency Ablation  Key market driver analysis, by region and type, 2014  2020

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Radiofrequency Ablation (Capital Equipment, Disposable Equipment and Reusable Equipment) Market: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2014  2020. According to the report, global demand for radiofrequency ablation devices market was valued at around USD 361.5 million in 2014 and is expected to reach USD 696.5 million in 2020, growing at a CAGR of around 11.60% between 2015 and 2020.Get a copy of free Sample Report @In recent couple of years radiofrequency ablation has gained huge demand due to its safety, convenience and rapid advancement in the image guided tumor ablation. Radiofrequency ablation is the method with minimal invasion for expel of unwanted tissue, tumor and is appropriate for inoperable patients. The radiofrequency ablation procedure involves partially insulated electrodes directly inserted into the tumor. Radiofrequency energy pass through the probes causing agitation and friction, further the friction generates the heat which removes the target tissue.Ever increasing incidence of patients infected by cancer and many other diverse diseases are expected to fuel the growth of radiofrequency ablation market. Moreover, adoption of the minimum invasion procedures for the less pain and time saving practice has influence the growth of radiofrequency ablation market. Huge maintenance and operating cost are the restrains for the radiofrequency ablation market. However, acceptance of ablation over conventional methods along with the growing demand from the developing regions is likely to open new avenue for the growth of radiofrequency ablation market.Know more before buying this report @Based on product the radiofrequency ablation market is segmented into capital equipment, disposable equipment and reusable equipment. Reusable equipment is further classified into RF electrodes and probes. Disposable equipment consists of needles, cannulas, single-use electrodes and single-use probes. With around 42.16% of market share disposable equipment led the market in 2014. Increasing usage of the minimal invasive practices couple with the avoidance of infections are some of the factors to spur the market growth.. Rising demand of needles and cannulas accelerates the demand for disposable equipment market.In 2014, North America dominated the market for radiofrequency ablation devices with 42.10% market share followed by Europe. This was mainly contributed by implementation of advance technologies and high acceptance for radiofrequency ablation for treating various diseases. Asia Pacific is likely to experience high-growth over the period due to large pool of patients with unmet medical requirements, and support from the government for development of healthcare sector.Browse detail report with in-depth TOC @Some of the key participants in this market are Angiodynamics, Boston Scientific, Covidien, CardioFocus, St Jude Medical and Stryker. Boston Scientific is one of the global leaders for tumor ablation market due to the adoption of strategies like new product launch, advance manufacturing facilities, joint venture and acquisitions.Read Report TOC:About UsZion Research is a market intelligence company providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Zion Research experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants uses proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Dot Com Infoway Releases New Insightful Infographic Highlighting the Importance of SEO for Startups

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Dot Com Infoway (DCI), one of the globally leading digital marketing firms, recently released an insightful Infographic highlighting the utility, benefits and importance of employing SEO for businesses, especially startups. Indeed, given the fact the fact that most users rely on online searches for finding even the smallest product or service and 75% of these users never really go beyond the first page of online search results, understanding and employing SEO in a planned manner can actually mean the distance between success and failure for modern day startups.Through this logical, coherent and easy to understand Infographic, DCI inarguably drives across the point that days of SEO are far from over. In fact, it only gets bigger and more important for businesses that hope to be found in a highly competitive digital marketplace. The Infographic lays down hard facts, useful tips and explains effective SEO strategies in simple steps for enhanced retention and benefit.The Infographic by DCI reveals the benefits of long-term SEO strategies as well as local SEO, the integral relation between web and mobile, the value of good quality and original content, the importance of data analytics to understand user behavior and the implications of poorly implemented SEO strategies. The Infographic follows an insightful webinar on Importance of SEO for Startups in August this year, facilitated by Mercy Livingstone, Head of Search Engine Marketing at DCI.SEO is a dynamic process and not a one time effort. As search engines constantly evolve and so do the preferences of users, it is important to stay updated and be open to change on a continual basis. Startups who have recently embarked on their journey cannot have a clear cut view of the market and need to be more focused on their SEO efforts to build their online presence from scratch and maintain it. This Infographic by DCI explains in the most simple fashion the fundamentals of effective SEO and provides useful insights and tips that all businesses, especially startups will benefit from, said C.R. Venkatesh, CEO of Dot Com Infoway.The Infographic is a one-stop guide containing detailed information on the importance of SEO and handy tips and strategies for users to employ to their businesses. Readers will appreciate the lucid, fun and interactive style of the Infographic that hits the nail on its head, cogently.Check the infographic hereDot Com Infoway, a CMMI Level 3 multinational information technology company, is a pioneer in delivering software development, mobile application and Internet marketing solutions and technologies to business. With offices in India, the United States and Germany, DCI is positioned to become a leader in delivering advanced IT services for your business.189, Aarthy chamber, Mount road,Opposite to Raj Video Vision Building,Chennai  600 006India
Platelet Aggregation Devices Market: Segment and Analysis up to 2015  2020

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Platelet aggregation is defined as the clumping together of platelets in the blood. It is a part of the sequence of events leading to the formation of a clot called thrombus. It is a process in which platelets adhere to each other at sites of vascular injury, which has long been recognized as critical for hemostatic, plug formation and thrombosis. Various medical devices are used in platelet aggregation which allows precise control over the dynamic differential rate of blood flow control along with the extent of platelet thrombus formation. These devices include platelet function analyzer (PFA), aggregometers, platelet function centrifuge, platelet collection systems, and consumables & accessories.Get a copy of free Sample Report @The market growth of global platelet aggregation devices market has been accelerated by geriatric population across the globe, technological improvement in platelet aggregometers, demand for platelet screening programs to identify diseases like HIV, Dengue etc. However, unfavorable healthcare reforms in the U.S. are expected to hamper the growth of platelet aggregation device market over the years. Nonetheless, ongoing research and development in the platelet devices market is is expected to open up new growth opportunities in forecast period.The report covers forecast and analysis for the platelet aggregation device market on a global and regional level. The study provides historic data of 2015 along with a forecast from 2016 to 2021 based on revenue (USD Million). Study covers Porters Five Forces model, which offers an insights view and intensity of competition within the market. The study also covers, drivers, restraints and opportunities of the market. Moreover, the study also provides market attractiveness in terms of products, applications, end-users and regions.Get in-depth TOC (Table of Contents) with Tables and Figures @In terms of segmentation, the platelet aggregation devices market has been segmented on the basis of product into three major segments, which includes consumables, instruments, reagents and accessories. Factors like continuous technological improvement, rising trend in platelet aggregation testing market and growing adoption will tend to grow product segment with highest CAGR in forecast period. The system segment is expected to acquire the largest market share of global market in 2016.On the basis of end users, the platelet aggregation market categorized into diagnostic laboratories, academia, standalone hospitals and blood bank. Increasing number of hospitals across developing countries and growing public-private investments for development and modernization of healthcare infrastructure are the key factor to fuel growth to this segment.Inquire more before buying this report @Geographically, the market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, further bifurcation of region on the country level, which include U.S., Germany, UK, France, China, Japan and India. Demand has been analyzed and forecast based on the current trends for the period of six years. North America was leading segment of platelet aggregation devices market followed by Europe.The report covers scenario including the company overviews, financial revenues of the key participants. Key players included in report are Siemens AG, Helena Laboratories Corporation, Haemonetics Corporation, Accriva Diagnostics, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd, Sysmex Corporation, TEM Group etc.Browse detail report @This report segments the global platelet aggregation devices market as follows:Platelet Aggregation Devices Market: Product Segment AnalysisSystemsReagentsConsumables and AccessoriesPlatelet Aggregation Devices Market: Application Segment AnalysisClinical ApplicationResearch ApplicationPlatelet Aggregation Devices Market: End User Segment AnalysisHospitalDiagnostic laboratoriesAcademiaOthers end usersPlatelet Aggregation Devices Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout US:Syndicate Market Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Syndicate Market Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@SyndicateMarketResearch.comWebsite:
Fighting to record the war's history Updated: 2016-09-21 08:28 By Wang Kaihao(China Daily)

Li Min attends a Beijing event marking the launch of three new books about veterans who fought against Japanese invaders. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Old soldiers never die. That is, if they're remembered.

Sunday commemorated the Sept 18 Incident's 85th anniversary, marking the Japanese occupation of northeastern China. It's a day remembered with a mix of misery and pride.

Many in the crowd shed tears when 92-year-old female veteran Li Min stood onstage in the National Library of China to recall her experiences fighting the invaders and close calls with death.

"I was the only one among the comrades in my unit who didn't die on the battlefield," she says.

"I got lost and found another unit. I joined them to continue to fight. Most of them also died."

Li is one of only two surviving women veterans of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army led by the Communist Party of China.

Files show the army had about 30,000 guerrilla fighters when it was formed after the Sept 18 Incident. There were fewer than 1,000 by the end of World War II in 1945.

The NLC on Sunday released three new books based on interviews with United Army veterans.

It also opened an exhibition about this history, and the vets' bravery and sacrifice, that will run until Sept 30.

The 220,000-character-long Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, one of the trilogy's books, includes oral history. It records interviews with 16 veterans and four of their sons since 2012.

"This has taken the longest time and included the most interviews among the NLC's oral history projects in recent years," project organizer Tang Gengsheng says.

Tang's group interviewed all known 25 veterans and 60 veterans' sons in seven province-level administrative regions. It filmed 240 hours of footage, and obtained numerous manuscripts and pictures.

Only 13 of the vets are still alive.

"We have to hurry against time," Tang says.

"Records must be saved before the old soldiers are gone."

The other two books are compiled according to two researchers' interviews, starting from the mid-1990s.

"Soldiers had to fight invaders. Their families were killed in many brutal ways," researcher Jiang Baocai says.

"Some details shock me. Some women soldiers abandoned their babies when hiding in the forests, since the infants' cries attracted enemy attention.

"War is so cruel. But they didn't have a choice. It's much more difficult to honor unnamed people than (famous) heroes. But history is made by many unnamed people's efforts."

Oral history scholar Ding Yizhuang expects more projects on United Army to follow the books' release.

"Wars' oral histories reveal many vivid details that can't be gained from official records," she says.

"The books provide many new angles from heroines, although wars are often seen as fights among men."

The research faced many difficulties. One is confirming details provided by interviewees with historical records.

"And some veterans' children initially refused to do interviews due to the lack of their parents' recognition as heroes," Jiang says.

Some soldiers returned to their farms rather than fight until the war's end. Authorities in later decades refused to recognize their brave deeds.

"I'm glad the new books give those soldiers the recognition they deserve," says Li.

"Every memoir of us survivors is not about individual memories but serves a whole generation."

Liu Yuebin, a history professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, believes more research on the United Army will dispel some stereotypes about the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

The war has traditionally been considered to have broken out with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in Beijing. But more official documents reviewed in recent years point toward the Sept 18 Incident.

"We got used to saying 'eight-years' when referring to the war in textbooks," he says.

"However, that's unfair to northeastern China's fighters, who sacrificed before the rest of the country."
Global Hepatitis C Drug Market share, by application, 2015 -2021

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Hepatitis C Drug Market for (Hospitals, Private Labs, Physician Offices, Public Health Labs and Blood Banks) by Application - Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015  2021 According to the report, global demand for hepatitis C drug market was valued at USD 11.81 billion in 2015, is expected to reach USD 27.63 billion in 2021 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 17% between 2016 and 2021.Get a copy of free Sample Report @HCV is a major public health problem that attacks the liver and leads to inflammation. Certain drugs, toxins, heavy alcohol use, bacterial and viral infections can cause hepatitis infection. The most common types of hepatitis infections are Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C and they are caused by three dissimilar dissimilar viruses. Although each virus can cause similar symptoms, they have different modes of transmission and can affect the liver differently. Hepatitis C infection can bring both acute and chronic hepatitis disease. Approximately, 80% of patients get chronically infected with hepatitis C disease. Hepatitis C infection (HCV) spreads through the blood of infected individual by the use of shared needles or supplies used to infuse drugs. Vaccines are available only for Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B viruses. Research into the development of a vaccine for hepatitis C is under way.The prevalence of the infection, new productive treatments, relatively lesser time of treatment from before, and rising government subsidizing, can drive the hepatitis C drug market. Lack of awareness and information about HCV and treatment expense of disease can influence the hepatitis C market. In the last few years a couple of new drugs have been launched in the market which has huge success and captured maximum market share of the hepatitis C market. However, cost of these drugs is too high. Hospitals, private labs, physician offices, public health labs, and blood banks are the key application of hepatitis C drug market.Know more before buying this report @North America was one of the fastest growing hepatitis C drug markets across the world with more than 40% share of the total revenue generated in 2015. U. S. is the largest revenue contributor for worldwide Hepatitis C market. Government funding for drug development will continue to play an essential role in the growth of U.S. HCV treatment market. Europe was the second major market for Hepatitis C in 2015.Ongoing research and development in pharmaceutical industry for hepatitis C drug development is expected to propel the market growth in the coming years. Moreover, interest for Hepatitis C medication is expanding in Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa due to prevalence of the disease in the regions combined with expenditure on healthcare infrastructure.Browse detail report with in-depth TOC @Harvoni and Sovaldi are newly discovered drugs for Hepatitis C. Marketed by pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences and has more than 95% cure rate. The problem with this drug is its high cost, Harvoni drug is one of the expensive drug in the world. Some of the key player in the hepatitis C drug market includes Merck & Co, Kenilworth, Roche, Basel GlaxoSmith, Gilead Sciences, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers Squibb.Read Report TOC:About UsZion Research is a market intelligence company providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Zion Research experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants uses proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Synthetic Biology Market Size , 2015  2020

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Synthetic biology deals with the design and construction of new biological entities. It is an interdependent combination of biology and engineering for the construction of artificial biological system. It involves the synthesis of complex, biologically based systems which display functions that do not exist in nature. Synthetic biology starts with the advances in molecular, cell, and systems biology and follow to transform biology in the way that synthesis transformed chemistry and integrated circuit design transformed computing.Get a copy of free Sample Report @The synthetic biology market is mainly driven by the growing demand for improved drugs and vaccines. Advancement in molecular biology is another key factor to drive the synthetic biology market. Synthetic biotechnology widely used in different application areas such as healthcare, chemicals, agriculture etc. This has fueled the growth of global synthetic biology market. However, some issues like bio-safety and bio-security of synthetic biology is expected to hamper growth of synthetic biology industry.The global synthetic biology market is segmented on the basis of product, technology, application and region. Based on different products, market is segmented as core and enabling products. The core product segment futher segmented into synthetic DNA, synthetic genes, synthetic cells, XNA (xeno nucleic acid) and chassis organisms. And the enabling product segment further classified into DNA synthesis and oligonucleotide synthesis. Furthermore, technology of the synthetic biology market can be segmented as genome engineering, DNA sequencing, bioinformatics and biological components & integrated systems.Get in-depth TOC (Table of Contents) with Tables and Figures @The report provides a comprehensive view on the synthetic biology market we have included a detailed company market share analysis, product portfolio of the major industry participants. To understand the competitive landscape in the market, an analysis of Porters Five Forces model for the synthetic biology market has also been included. The study encompasses a market attractiveness analysis, wherein application segments are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate and general attractiveness.Application segments have been analyzed based on historic, present, and future trends, and the market has been estimated from 2015 to 2020 in terms of revenue (USD Million). Healthcare, chemicals, agriculture and other applications such as biosecurity, R&D, energy environment etc. are the application segments of synthetic biology market from which healthcare application segment holds highest market share in terms of revenue.Inquire more before buying this report @Major regional segments analyzed in this study include North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. This report also provides further bifurcation of region on the country level. Major countries analyzed in this reports are U.S., Germany, France, UK, China, Japan, India, and Brazil. Synthetic biology market was dominated by Europe in 2014 and is expected have consistent growth in coming years. Europe is followed by North America.Some of the key players for global synthetic biology market includes DuPont, Inc., Agrivida, Inc., GeneWorks Pty Ltd., Biosearch Technologies, Inc., Evolva SA, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Green Biologics Limited, REG Life Sciences, LLC and Royal DSM.Browse detail report @This report segments the global synthetic biology market as follows:Global Synthetic Biology Market: Product Segment AnalysisCore ProductsSynthetic DNASynthetic GenesSynthetic CellsXNA (Xeno Nucleic Acid)Chassis OrganismsEnabling ProductsDNA SynthesisOligonucleotide SynthesisGlobal Synthetic Biology Market: Technology Segment AnalysisGenome EngineeringDNA SequencingBioinformaticsBiological Components and Integrated SystemsGlobal Synthetic Biology Market: Application Segment AnalysisHealthcareChemicals (Including Bio-Fuels)AgricultureOthers (Biosecurity, R&D, Energy and Environment)Global Synthetic Biology Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout US:Syndicate Market Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Syndicate Market Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@SyndicateMarketResearch.comWebsite:
Global Steel Coupling Market 2016 Industry Trends, Sales Revenue and Top Player 2021

Steel Coupling

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The market study on the Global Steel Coupling Market 2016 across the world, this is a detailed report scrutinising statistical data related to the global market. Furthermore, the factors on which the companies compete in the market have been evaluated in the report. The report offers a close summary of the key segments within the market. The report offers a close summary of the key segments within the market. The key rising opportunities of the quickest growing international Steel Coupling market segments also are coated during this report.Access Free Sample Report of Steel Coupling Market @A key feature of this report is it focus on major industry players, providing an overview, product specification, product capacity, production price and contact information for Global Top 15 companies. This enables end users to gain a comprehensive insight into the structure of the global Steel Coupling industry.The past price of 2013-2016 and future price of 2017-2023 are analysed according to the supply-demand relation, as well as perspectives and forecasts. Analysis also covers upstream raw materials, equipment, downstream client survey, marketing channels, industry development trend and proposals.The Steel Coupling report gives a detailed overview of the key segments in the market. The quickest and slowest growing market segments ar coated during this report. This research report covers the growth prospects of the global market based on end-users. It outlines the market shares of key regions in top ten countries, it also includes analysis of the leading vendors in this market.Click Here To Access Complete Report on Steel Coupling Market:The import, export, stock size and relevant data of Major GDP regions such as EU, US, Japan and China are listed in the report. As a global report, in addition to above-mentioned Major GDP regions, we provide breakdown data of Germany, UK, and France of the EU, and data of other countries such as India, South Korea, Brazil and Australia.In the end, the report includes Steel Coupling new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, investment return analysis, and development trend analysis. The key rising opportunities of the quickest growing international Steel Coupling market segments also are coated during this report. This report also presents product specification, manufacturing process, and product cost structure. Production is separated by regions, technology and applications.About Us:QYResearch Group is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. QYResearch Group also carries the capability to assist you with your customized market research requirements including in-depth market surveys, primary interviews, competitive landscaping, and company profiles. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics. QYResearch Group is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651Email: sales (@) qyresearchgroup (dot) com
Genetically Modified Organisms Market Size ,2015  2020

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Genetic engineering is the science for cloning or manipulating DNAs or genes to create new characteristic in organism or produce protein or hormone. Genetic engineering is mostly used for generating recombinant DNA and is done by inserting desired trait gene or by deletion or mutating gene in cell or virus known as vector. Genetically engineered plants, animals or microbes are called as genetically modified organisms.Get a copy of free Sample Report @Increased productivity due to genetically modified plants and government subsidy for development of genetically modified organisms are factors driving the growth of genetically modified organism market. Furthermore, strong inclination of R&D in genetic research and expanding biotech and pharmaceuticals industries triggers the growth in the market. Also affordable food, long shelf life, resistance to disease and increased flavors are some aspects that help in development of market. Yet, strict regulatory policy issues, moral concern of human health and development of superweeds are prime restraints affecting the growth of genetically modified organisms market. Nevertheless, funding from government and private institutions for research and developing of genetically modified organism is likely to open new market avenues in the near future.Get in-depth TOC (Table of Contents) with Tables and Figures @The report covers forecast and analysis for the genetically modified organisms market on a global and regional level. The study provides significant data of 2014 along with estimated from 2014 to 2020 based on revenue (USD Million). The report also offers detailed competitive landscape of the global genetically modified organisms market. It includes company market share analysis, product portfolio of the major industry participants. The report provides detailed segmentation of the genetically modified organisms market based on application segment, end users segment and region.Inquire more before buying this report @The genetically modified organisms market is segmented on the basis of application, end user and region. Modified plants, animals and cell line are three types of applications. Modified plants are also known as transgenic plants. GM rice, GM cotton, GM soybeans, GM maize and others are some of the modified plants. Further, dolly the sheep, ruppy the fluorescent dog, glofish, vacanti mouse and others are types of genetically modified animals. Modified plants accounted for major market share due to widespread applications and advantages. Biotech and pharmaceuticals companies and research centers, clinical trial centers are the different end users of the genetically modified organisms market.The U.S., India, Brazil, China, Argentina and Canada are witnessing an unprecedented boom in GM crops in recent times. There was sharp rise in demand of GM crops in South Africa, Paraguay and Australia in 2006. Europe has shown exceptional growth due to appreciable production of GM maize in Spain owing to high cultivation rate. In Germany, Portugal, Czech Republic and France, transgenic crops continue to gain traction in the years to come.Browse detail report @Some top research centers in genetically modified organisms markets are NIAS, and ICGEB among others.The report segments of the genetically modified organisms market into:Genetically Modified Organisms Markets: Applications Segment AnalysisGenetically modified plantsGenetically modified animalsGenetically modified cell lineGenetically Modified Organisms Markets: End users Segment AnalysisBiotech companiesPharmaceuticals companiesResearch centerClinical trials research centersGenetically Modified Organisms Markets: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout US:Syndicate Market Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Syndicate Market Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@SyndicateMarketResearch.comWebsite:
Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) Antibodies Market Size, 2015  2021

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EGFR is the primary receptor recognized in a group of receptors and is a cell surface protein that binds to epidermal growth factor. EGFR is a cell membrane growth factor receptor characterized by tyrosine kinase receptor which plays very important role in the control of key cellular transduction pathways in both normal and cancerous cells. EGFR is the first molecular target against which monoclonal antibodies (mAb) have been developed in cancer therapy.Get a copy of free Sample Report @On the basis of types, the global epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibodies market is segmented into cetuximab, panitumumab, and nimotuzumab. Cetuximab and panitumumab are the most favored EGFR antibodies which are utilized for treatment of cancer. Nimotuzumab is a humanized monoclonal antibody that recognizes the EGFR antibody. These antibodies are used in the treatment of colorectal tumor as single chairmen and in mix with routine chemotherapy.Get in-depth TOC (Table of Contents) with Tables and Figures @The report covers forecast and analysis for the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibodies market on a global and regional level. The study provides historic data of 2015 along with a forecast from 2016 to 2021 based on revenue (USD Million). The report also offers detailed competitive landscape of the global epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibodies market. It includes company market share analysis, product portfolio of the major industry participants. The report provides detailed segmentation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibodies market based on type segment. Cetuximab, panitumumab, and nimotuzumab are different type of EGFR antibodies.Increasing rate of cancer around the world, and advancement in the treatments are few drivers for EGFR antibody market. Prevalence of cancer is high in North America specifically in U.S. Cancer cases globally are escalating at an alarming rate. Cancer represents a key challenge to development, undermining economic and social advances all over the world. Breast cancer is most common diagnosed cancer and second leading cause of death amongst women in the U.S. According to World Cancer Report, produced by the WHO's specialized cancer agency, predicted that new cancer cases would rise from 14 million annually in 2012 to 22 million within two decades.Inquire more before buying this report @Geographically, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibodies market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. EGFR antibody market was dominated by North America followed by Europe. Key players in this market are Biocon ltd, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Vaccinex, NovelMed Therapeutics, Janssen Biotech (J&J), Merck, Angiochem , Bio-Synthesis, Antibody SystemsEpidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) Antibodies Market: Type Segment AnalysisBrowse detail report @CetuximabPanitumumabNimotuzumabEpidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) Antibodies Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout US:Syndicate Market Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Syndicate Market Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@SyndicateMarketResearch.comWebsite:
How Dubais Property Market is About to Change Forever..

Given the downturn in the Oil and Gas industry and the knock-on effects that this has had on the overall numbers of expatriates leaving the UAE, Dubai is still moving forward at full pace on its path to the EXPO 2020. A sizable number of new property developments, both apartment complexes and gated villa compounds are still being announced daily in a bid to capitalize on the population and tourism growth that Dubais leaders have projected will occur for the next 3-4 years.At Echo-Xpats, the biggest question that the majority of our inbound relocating clients are asking at this stage is are rental prices dropping and will it continue?The simple answer to this question is yes and in our opinion the decrease in rental prices does not look like it will stop anytime soon. One of the main contributing factors to this market shift is quite simply down to the traditional supply and demand model as more and more apartment complexes are being handed over every month giving prospective renters a massive choice of affordable and upscale apartments to choose from.At Echo-Xpats our inboxes are bombarded every day with pre-launch offers of off-plan properties that have yet to break ground or last few remaining offers for apartments, supposedly deals of a lifetime! This explosion of residential and commercial properties from seasoned companies such as Damac Properties and Dubai Properties have seemingly appeared from out of no where meaning the supply will still continue long after 2020.One factor that we feel is making an impact on certain established expatriate housing communities is the age and condition of the properties themselves. A prime example of a location that has seen a significant drop in rental prices is the Springs community within the Emirates Living District. The first phase of the Springs was handed over in 2003-2004 and as we approach 2017, the villas are now in many cases suffering from neglect and dated interior features that put many would be renters off the development.There are many other examples of housing areas that have also suffered from a similar fate and are now in desperate need of refurbishment, renovation and an overall investment in the property to bring it back in favor with families moving to Dubai.Flagship real estate developments such as the Palm Jumeirah have also seen a slight decrease in rental price although nowhere near as prolific as the Dubai Marina, which has suffered the most out of the New Dubais housing areas. A two-bedroom apartment in the Dubai Marina in a reputable quality building has now dropped to below AED140,000 per annum which is coming dangerously close to prices in the 2009-2010s real estate crash.Companies that are still relocating to Dubai are realizing this shift in prices and are capitalizing on this depressed market condition, offering individuals less annual housing allowance and protecting their cash flow by paying landlords in multiple cheques rather than the Dubai norm of a single installment.Overall, Dubais outlook is certainly gearing up to be one of great things, with massive scale tourism boosting projects such as the Dubai Canal Project and the Dubai Parks and Resorts theme park first phase that opens late 2016.The positive news for Relocation Companies and individual Renters in Dubai is the huge choice and range of quality properties that are now available to more people than ever before!Echo-Xpats Is The Premier Relocation Provider In The Middle East.Echo-Xpats Relocations has been operating in the Middle East for over 10 years and offer a turnkey approach to relocation. Whether corporate or individual, our mission and company ethos is to provide exceptional levels of inbound and outbound relocation support. As a Eura accredited destination service provider we benefit from a global network of affiliates and can assist in all aspects of relocation.7th Floor, Opal Tower, Business Bay
Household Vacuum Cleaner Market to Reach US$14.6 bn Driven by Demand for Better and More Convenient Living

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The rising demand for better living standards, coupled with the introduction of the latest vacuum cleaner technology by prominent enterprises, has been encouraging the widespread adoption of household vacuum cleaners. In its report, titled Household Vacuum Cleaners Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share And Forecasts 2012 - 2018, Transparency Market Research (TMR) presents insights into various factors influencing the demand for vacuum cleaners across the global household vacuum cleaner market.Vacuum cleaners are devices that suck up dust and dirt from floors, rugs, and other surfaces such as drapery and upholstery using an air pump. Some of the older models of vacuum cleaners are inbuilt with a centrifugal pump in place of newer air pumps. The dust thus sucked in by the machine is then collected by a dust bag for later disposal. Due to the intrinsic benefits of these machines and the convenience they offer, vacuum cleaners are rapidly replacing traditional brooms and other indigenous cleaning techniques. The TMR report presents a granular analysis of the various drivers encouraging the uptake of these modern devices and factors dampening the markets growth.Get More Information:The report has pegged the overall value of the global household vacuum cleaners market at US$11.0 bn in 2012. Rising at a steady CAGR of 4.90%, the market is expected to reach US$14.6 bn by the end of 2018. The increasing disposable income of consumers in emerging nations and the subsequent demand for better hygiene and living standards are the key factors boosting the uptake of household vacuum cleaners. The market will also significantly gain from the development of novel technologies and improvements introduced to enhance device performance.By product type, the report has segmented the market into upright, canister vacuum cleaners, central, wet/dry, drum, robotic, and other vacuum cleaners (such as stick operated and handheld). Of these, the canister vacuum cleaner segment led the market in 2012, accounting for a share of 35% in the market. The same year, the segment stood at a valuation of US$4.21 bn. As per the report, the demand for canister vacuum cleaners is expected to remain high through the forecast period. The market is also expected to witness the demand for robotic vacuum cleaners rising at an impressive pace.View exclusive Global strategic Business report:The most prominent companies operating in the market are focusing on introducing eco-friendly vacuum cleaners that are more compact and easier to operate. Such upgrades in the technology are intended to woo prospective customers. This, however, intensifies the already prevailing competition in the market. The report profiles companies such as Miele, TTI Floor Care, Bissell, and others to present a holistic overview of the prevailing competitive landscape. The impact of the latest business strategies on their growth trajectory has also been examined in the report in detail.Regionally, the global household vacuum cleaners market was dominated by Asia Pacific in 2012 with a share of 30.5% in the overall market. Owing to the rapid urbanization witnessed in emerging economies such as India, South Korea, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the household vacuum cleaner market in Asia Pacific is expected to remain the largest in the world through the reports forecast period. In terms of retail selling price, the market is bifurcated into price more than US$200 and price less than US$200. Factors influencing demand for either segments are studied in detail.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
DENSOs BHT-1300 - Handheld Terminals used in Slovenian Libraries

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The BHT-1300 also convinces Slovenian National libraries with its stability and speed in the everyday business.DENSOs handheld terminal BHT-1300 was introduced to Slovenian National libraries. / Enormous improvement in efficiency. Great cost and time savings. / Handheld terminal BHT-1300 is compact, robust and ultra-light. / DENSO Auto-ID Business Unit are experts for mobile data capture. / Further information on the QR Code, handheld terminals and scanners, mobile data capture and DENSO Auto-ID can be found on the company's website.Dusseldorf. A Slovenian system integrator introduced DENSOs handheld terminal BHT-1300 with a Windows operating system to the Slovenian National libraries. For inventory use in particular, the system integrator developed a software application called Library Intelligence, which can be deployed onto the BHT-1300 from DENSO, inventor of the QR Code and part of the Toyota Group. This software application can communicate directly with the library software system Cobiss, which is used primarily in Slovenian and eastern European libraries, such as in Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria. With the aid of DENSOs handheld terminal BHT-1300 and the application Library Intelligence in Slovenian libraries, it was possible to achieve enormous improvements in efficiency. Further information on DENSO, the QR Code, scanners and handheld terminals, and DENSO Auto-ID can be found at http://www.denso-autoid-eu.com/en.html.While inventories in Slovenian libraries in the past took several days to complete without using a mobile data capture device, it now only takes a couple of hours with the BHT-1300. This leads to enormous cost and time savings. During a trial test, various scanners were compared to each other to see which mobile data capture handheld terminal was the most suitable for book inventories. The BHT-1300 from DENSO, inventor of the QR Code and part of the Toyota Group, proved itself against all the other competitive products for mobile data capture. On the one hand, the reason for its success is the three-year warranty offered which is quite unique, and on the other hand, the handheld terminal BHT-1300 is best known for its compactness, robustness and mobility. The ultra-light weight design of the handheld terminal  the BHT-1300 only weighs 188 grams  allows for a comfortable capture of the entire book collection in the libraries; with all the data saved easily on the 2GB of storage memory provided. Further information on DENSO, the QR Code, scanners and handheld terminals, and DENSO Auto-ID can be found at the company's website.The barcode handheld terminals of the BHT-1300 series from DENSO, inventor of the QR Code and part of the Toyota Group, offer reliable mobile data capture possibilities. The 2D model can read barcodes in every direction, regardless of which angle the unit is pointing at. The high brilliant QVGA LCD display provides for a clear and easy scanning of codes while the wide viewing angle also secures a good readability in strong sunlight. The design is thinner, smaller and lighter and despite its compact size, the functional design provides for a long and comfortable operation. With a micro-SHDC card, the storage space of 2 GB can be upgraded to 32 Gigabytes. The BHT-1300 can be employed in temperatures ranging from -20 to +50 degrees Celsius. The unit also convinces with its long durability and the fact, that it can withstand drops from a height of up to 1.2 meters.For the European market, the DENSO Auto-ID Business Unit is the contact window for all enquiries on QR Codes, mobile data capture, handheld terminals and scanners. The durable and robust terminals and scanners manufactured by DENSO are to be found in storage, logistics, POS, production and field & sales automation applications. Short and informative video clips about the terminals, scanners and solutions from the DENSO Auto-ID Business Unit can now be viewed on YouTube. The clips include the 20th anniversary of the QR Code, a company presentation, and introductions to the various devices for mobile data capture such as the BHT-1500, BHT-1400 and the GT20 scanner. For more information, click on the link below:QR Code is a registered trademark of DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED.DENSO is one of the worlds leading manufacturers of mobile data capture devices. We follow one mission: Driven by Quality  maximum quality in mobile data capture. Decision-makers in the fields of retail, logistics and production rely on DENSO for their business requirements and in implementing the Internet of Things. DENSO is a member of the Toyota Group and is exclusively represented in Europe by the DENSO Auto-ID Business Unit of TT Network Integration Europe.DENSO Auto-ID Business UnitImmermannstr. 65 BD-40210 DusseldorfPhone +49 (0)211 88 252 450Fax +49 (0)211 88 252 502Managing Director:Takashi HaraMarketing Assistant:Sina HauptPhone +49 211 88252 403E-Mail:Sina.Haupt@denso-autoid-eu.comWebsite:http://www.denso-autoid-eu.com/en.htmlPress Contact:PPR HamburgRafael R. Pilsczek, M. A.Sinstorfer Kirchweg 18D-21077 HamburgPhone +49 (0)40 32 80 89 80Fax +49 (0)40 32 80 89 81Mobil: +49 (0)170 310 79 72
JMA Pilani Students Celebrate International Day of Peace

JMA Pilani Students Celebrate International Day of Peace

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No one has doubt that there can be no sustainable future without a sustainable peace which must be built on sustainable development.The theme chosen this year for celebration is The Sustainable Development Goals: Building Blocks for Peace. Each year the International Day of Peace is observed all over the world from 1982 on 21 September. The United Nations General Assembly has declared this as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, both within and among all nations and peoples.The root causes of many conflicts are directly related to or fuelled by valuable natural resources, such as diamonds, gold, oil, timber or water. The International Day of Peace offers people globally a shared date to think about how, individually, they can contribute to ensuring that natural resources are managed in a sustainable manner, thus reducing potential for disputes, and paving the road to a sustainable future, the "Future We Want".But peace is about much more than putting weapons aside. For peace to be everywhere and in everyone there must be peace on earth, water, fire, air, sky, sun, moon, universe, in all living beings, in body, in mind, and soul as stated in the Sanskrit Shloka Bhoomi Mangalam, Udaka Mangalam, Agni Mangalam, Vayu Mangalam, Gagana Mangalam, Surya Mangalam, Chandra Mangalam, Jagat Mangalam, Jiva Mangalam, Deha Mangalam, Mano Mangalam, Atma Mangalam, Sarva Mangalam Bhavatu Bhavatu Bhavatu.Sharing the above thoughts, Principal JMA Pilani Mrs Booma Natarajan read out the message of UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon Let us all work together to help all human beings achieve dignity and equality; to build a greener planet; and to make sure no one is left behind and urged the students to express their commitment to peace by becoming a champion of the Sustainable Development Goals.The students recited the Sanskrit shloka for peace and did a peace dove formation to prove that Peace is not just yet another 5 letter word but a "divine manifestation which we have to give birth to within ourselves.For more details about JMA Pilani seeAbout JMA Pilani: Smt. Jamuna Mishra Academy (JMA) established in the year 2004 which has been making rapid strides in early childhood education is presently one of the most sought after schools at Pilani Rajasthan well known in India today for BITS Pilani University as well as CSIR Laboratory CEERI and world renowned Birla Science Museum. JMA Pilani is a Co-educational English Medium School with Experienced Teachers, Spacious Classrooms and Modern Amenities designed to impart Quality Education combined with All Round Personality Development and lay the Best Foundation for the Childs Future. JMA which started in 2004 with an enrollment of 60 students for the Nursery, LKG, First Junior and Class I has grown today till Class XII and enrollment of 900. While the school admits both boys and girls, the girl student enrollment has been steadily rising every year and is presently nearly 50% of the total strength. The school has NCC for boys and the school girls band has been winning laurels every year too. Yoga and Fine arts are not just part of school routine but a way of life for the students.Mrs Booma Natarajan, M.Sc., M.A., B.Ed.Principal, Jamuna Mishra Academy  JMANear Old Pilani Post OfficePilani Rajasthan 333031 IndiaPhone 91-1596-242314Email booma_pilani at yahoo.co.inWebsite:
iPhone 7 Teardown: Better Waterproofing, but Weird Screws

Berlin, September 20, 2016: The technicians at iDoc could hardly wait to take apart the latest iPhone. Now Apple has finally released its latest smartphone, and the repair experts from Berlin got straight to work. In a new teardown and a Full HD video, iDoc gave the iPhone 7 a bath and took it apart to see exactly how waterproof the new model is, and how difficult future repairs will be. Compared to many other smartphones, the iPhone 7 is still fairly easy to repair. Unfortunately, some aspects have gotten more difficult since the iPhone 6s. The IP67 protection rating means the display is glued on again, making it more difficult to take off, but considerably less vulnerable to water damage. There is one pitfall to watch out for when removing the display: Users who try to lift it up above the FaceTime camera as in the previous model risk tearing the display cables, which are now routed along the edge on the side. The new tri-wing screws make their first appearance in the display cover. Removing them requires a special screwdriver, which youll need again to remove components like the logic board. Most people dont have a tri-wing screwdriver lying around, and buying one costs a lot more than the standard Phillips PH00 screwdriver you would usually need. Aside from these screws, the individual components are easy to remove, and only a few are really glued in place. Unfortunately, removing the Lightning connector is a little more difficult. You have to remove the motherboard before you can take out this part, which tends to get damaged sooner or later. The IP67 protection makes a few things more complicated, but its certainly effective. iDoc tested it by dunking the iPhone in water for about 10 seconds, and found that no water had gotten into the phone at all. The new iPhone also owes its protection rating to various rubber seals on its buttons, SIM card tray, microphones and speakers. All in all, there are a number of positive aspects, such as the display, which is fairly easy to remove. If you want to remove other components, you can now simply fold the display to one side instead of taking it off all the way. Afterwards, you have access to the entire interior of the new iPhone. That also applies to the battery, which is now easier to remove because the adhesive strips are less likely to tear. However, the tri-wing screws make things more difficult at several points in the new iPhone, and may serve no other purpose than making it more difficult to repair. In general, there are a lot of screws inside the iPhone 7, as well as some parts that are glued on, but all that glue goes hand-in-hand with the IP67 rating. When it comes to modularity, the new model leaves something to be desired because not all parts can be removed independently of each other. As in the last model, the exposed position of the display glass means its likely to get damaged if dropped. The detailed teardown and the video are available at idoc.eu/manuals/en. More repair guides for the iPhone 7 and helpful videos on iDocs YouTube channel are coming soon.iDoc is a Berlin-based startup that not only repairs smartphones and other devices, but also offers tools, replacement parts, and free step-by-step repair guides and videos.Mehringdamm 33, 10961 Berlin, Germany
'Distinctly Chinese' elements stealing spotlight Updated: 2016-09-21 17:15 By CECILY LIU(China Daily UK)

Founder of Chinese fashion brand NETIGER, Zhang Zhifeng, and models showcase the collection during London Fashion Week on Monday. [Photo by QIAN XINGQIANG/CHINA NEWS SERVICE]

Chinese fashion designers who have studied and lived overseas are pushing a new wave of modern design.

They aim to champion cultural elements from China, and their collections are becoming increasingly popular at home and abroad.

At this year's London Fashion Week, many Chinese designers exhibited garments, accessories and jewelry incorporating material such as silk and precious stones. They also used Chinese design elements, such as traditional qipao costumes and traditional water and ink painting.

All these designers developed a deeper appreciation of Chinese culture while living abroad. This coincided with a new trend among Chinese customers with more disposable income who are seeking Chinese-influenced design for new identity and individual expression.

"There is so much depth and volume to Chinese culture, which we can use to express ourselves, our feelings and emotions, and characters as Chinese. That's what fashion is all about," said Wang Yang, who founded her luxury jewelry brand Hera Moment eight years ago.

Although it is the first time that Wang has exhibited her jewelry overseas, she said the interest from international boutique brands' buyers and individual overseas Chinese customers has been "enormous".

Her collections are a particular favorite with high net worth Chinese who hold management positions in the UK.

"They want something distinctly Chinese, which will shine when they go to conferences and meetings dominated by Western management leaders," Wang said.

Hera Moment is characterized by jewelry made by using flowers that frequently appear in Chinese poetry and pictures, like the water lily, which symbolizes purity, and plum blossom, which symbolizes pride and individuality.

Prices range from a few hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

The jewelry pieces are made in China, and material is bought from international locations.

Wang, who studied Japanese at Peking University, worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers after graduation, but she and her husband later went to live in Botswana.

During this time, many Chinese consumers asked her to bring back precious jewelry from the African country, and this prompted her to think about o ering her customers more in terms of Chinese elements and design.

Quality, attention to detail and appreciation of Chinese elements are also shared by Yu Ge, who founded her brand Annderstand in Shanghai this year.

Like Wang, Yu has an international background, having traveled extensively between China and Japan in her early school years because of her parents' work. She studied design in New York before working in fashion merchandising for global brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton.

Her brand combines Chinese elements from traditional paintings and characteristics of the qipao with Japanese fashion design elements from the kimono and Western elements, such as women's corsets.

Yu and Wang are just two representatives of a string of Chinese indigenous brands that have grown rapidly.

One key example is the 22-year-old Chinese cultural fashion company Eve Group, which joined with Chinese e-commerce platform JD.com this year to showcase works of six Chinese indigenous brands in London.

One of these is Eve Group's Eve de Cina, which wowed an international audience with its evening gowns, using patterns and fabric from the qipao.

Courtney Blackman, managing director of Forward PR, a London public relations agency that specializes in fashion, said: "Chinese designs are increasingly appearing on international catwalks, because many Chinese designers are educated in international fashion capitals like London, New York and Milan. So they naturally bring their collections to these cities.

"Chinese designs vary greatly in style, ranging from the beautiful designs of Ji Cheng, which incorporate Chinese poetry and patterns, to Fun Affair by Zhu Xi, which blends Chinese mysteriousness with UK street style.

"I wore a Ji Cheng skirt to a London Fashion Week event this year and really enjoyed it."
Increasing trend of pet ownership in North America is also fuelling the animal healthcare market

http://www.researchnester.com/reports/global-animal-healthcare-market-analysis-opportunity-outlook-2021/134

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http://www.researchnester.com/reports/global-pediatric-vaccines-market-analysis-opportunity-outlook-2021/120

Research Nester Upcoming Research on Global Animal Healthcare Market Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2021Animal healthcare is an act of preserving, guiding and protecting animals from diseases and providing them needful veterinary services with the aim of increasing their lifespan and yield.The animal healthcare market has emerged as a market of very prime importance in the world in past few years. The main reason behind increased focus on animal healthcare industry can be attributed to the outbreak of new animal diseases in recent years. In addition to that, changes in factory farming practices for bulk production, which requires good quality animal feed additives, hygiene management products and vaccines etc. have allowed the animal healthcare market to expand.Geographically, animal healthcare market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and Middle East. In 2014, North America dominates the animal healthcare market with around 35 percent of market share followed by Europe at 28%. Emerging markets like Asia  Pacific is anticipated to have a rapid growth in animal healthcare market by 2020. This burgeoned growth in animal healthcare market in countries like Asia and China can be attributed to the increased trend of adopting pet animals in these countries. The animal healthcare market of India is estimated to have a fastest growth at around 10% CAGR by 2020.North America Animal Healthcare market overviewNorth America dominates the animal healthcare market in the world with approximately 35 percent share of market recorded in 2014. It leads in almost every animal healthcare market segment including vaccine, medical feed, anti-infective or diagnostic market. The U.S. and Canada are the two prominent markets of animal healthcare in North America. The market of animal healthcare in North America is mainly boosted by the rising awareness about animal related diseases and food safety. Furthermore, it is expected that North America will continue to maintain its largest share globally for animal healthcare products and services in near future.Growth Drivers and ChallengesThe evolution of zoonotic and foodborne diseases in recent years have become a major driving cause for animal healthcare market in North America. People are now more concerned about animal health and demand for safer animal products for their consumption, which has led to innovation of new technologies and pharmaceuticals in animal healthcare market.Apart from this, increasing trend of pet ownership in North America is also fuelling the animal healthcare market. According to a survey, U.S. owns approximately 65.1 percent of households with pets. As number of pets is on a rise, the cases of animal bites is also increasing, which is strengthening the growth of veterinary vaccine market.However, strict regulatory guidelines and complex procedures for obtaining approval and licensing of animal healthcare products is a major restraint in front of the veterinary healthcare market in North America. Considering the existing hurdles and legal procedures, it is quite evident that approval of a newly developed veterinary vaccine from USDA Center for Veterinary Biologics in the U.S. may take approximately 4 to 5 years of time.Moreover, scarcity of arable land and rise in competition for cultivated land are also creating hurdles for the animal healthcare market in North America.Market Size and GrowthNorth America is the leader of animal healthcare market in the world and touched USD 6,800 million in 2014. Further, it is anticipated that the veterinary market in North America will escalate at a CAGR of around 6% during 2015-2020. Increasing awareness about animal related diseases and rising demand for safer animal related products have fuelled the animal healthcare market of North America in recent times.The U.S. and Canada are the two major animal healthcare markets in North America. It is anticipated that the animal healthcare market in the U.S. will grow at a CAGR of 5.25% in next five years. The future of animal healthcare market in the U.S. will be driven by the requirement to enhance the production of animal related products (milk, egg, meat and other dairy products).Following the same trend, the animal healthcare market in Canada will also receive a significant boost in near future. The animal vaccine market in Canada is expected to expand from USD 490 million USD in 2014 to approximately USD 630 million by 2019 at around 5.4% CAGR.To know more, click the link below:Related Reports:researchnester.com/reports/global-transdermal-drug-delivery-market-analysis-opportunity-outlook-2021/111Ajay deniel is head of sales and marketing team of Research Nester. Research Nester is a leading & tracking every movement on global industry Analysis in sectors like healthcare, pharma, ICT & electronics, food & beverages, textiles, oil & gas, energy & power & information service company operating with a network of partner firms across the US, Asia and Europe.Contact for more info:Ajay DanielEmail: ajay.daniel@researchnester.comPhone : U.S. +1 646 586 9123U.K. +44 203 608 5919
Parking Management Market to Cross US$ 9.0 Billion by 2021

Parking Management Market

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New York, September 21: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled as Parking Management Market by Software (Payment and Information Systems), by Verticals (Corporate and commercial parks, Retail, Hospitality, Healthcare, Recreations)  Global Industry Analysis, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2021The parking management market is expected to exceed more than US$ 9000 million by 2021.Download Free Sample Report:The number of vehicles are growing on road rapidly which increases problem regarding to the shortage of parking space. Scarcity of parking spaces or parking problems is increasing globally so that parking management is best solution for this problem. Parking management contains various solutions such as it provides information of current parking space existence which results in less traffic congestion to the driver. It also provides efficient and effective use of parking spaces.The major driving factors of parking management market are as follows:Requirement of smooth traffic flowFalling connectivity and hardware costsThe restraining factors of parking management market are as follows:System inter-operabilityCost sensitivity of parking space machinistsBrowse Full Report:The parking management market is segmented on the lines of its software, system device, and service, parking site type, solutions and verticals. Based on software segmentation it covers payment system and information system. Under system device segmentation it contains automated gates, surveillance cameras and digital video recorders, radio frequency identification transponders, ultrasonic occupancy sensors, handheld ticket writers and parking management meters. The parking management market is segmented on the lines of its services like maintenance and support and deployments and customization. Based on parking site type segmentation it covers off street parking and on street parking. Under solution segmentation it covers parking guidance and slot management, parking enforcement and slot management, valet parking management, parking reservation management, security and surveillance, parking and revenue management and access control. Parking and revenue management is further segmented into pay by plate, smart card based and coin based. Access control segmentation covers LPR based automatic vehicle identification, ID management and biometric. Under verticals segmentation it covers BFSI, corporate and commercial parks, retail, hospitality, healthcare, recreations, transportation transits, government and municipalities and academia. The parking management market is geographic segmentation covers various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. Each geography market is further segmented to provide market revenue for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. Germany, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and GCC countries.This report provides:1) An overview of the global market for parking management and related technologies globally.2) Analysis of global market trends, with data from 2013, estimates for 2014 and 2015, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2021.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for parking management.4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.REPORT SCOPE:The scope of the report includes a detailed study of global and regional markets for various types of parking management solutions with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include Tyco Security Products (Nedap AVI), 3M Company, Siemens AG, HCL Technologies Ltd., TCS International Inc, Integrapark, LLC, Complus Data Innovations, Inc., Amano Corporation, Passport Parking, LLC, TransCore LP, Vodafone Group PLC, Affiliated Computer Services, Group Techna, Inc., Netpark, LLC, Data Ticket, Inc., Parkopedia Inc. and Energy Development Corporation. Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.The Top Companies Report is intended to provide our buyers with a snapshot of the industrys most influential players.The Parking Management Market has been segmented as below:By Software AnalysisPayment systemInformation systemBy System Device AnalysisAutomated gatesSurveillance cameras and digital video recordersRadio frequency identification transpondersUltrasonic occupancy sensorsHandheld ticket writersParking management metersBy Service AnalysisMaintenance and supportDeployments and customizationBy Parking site type AnalysisOff street parkingOn street parkingBy Solution AnalysisParking guidance and slot managementParking enforcement and slot managementValet parking managementParking reservation managementSecurity and surveillanceParking and revenue managementPay by plateSmart card basedCoin basedAccess ControlLPR based automatic vehicle identificationID managementBiometricBy Verticals AnalysisBFSICorporate and commercial parksRetailHospitalityHealthcareRecreationsTransportation transitsGovernment and municipalitiesAcademiaBy Regional AnalysisNorth AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificRest of the WorldAbout MarketResearchEngine.comMarket Research Engine is a global market research and consulting organization. We provide market intelligence in emerging, niche technologies and markets. Our market analysis powered by rigorous methodology and quality metrics provide information and forecasts across emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models. Our deep focus on industry verticals and country reports help our clients to identify opportunities and develop business strategies.Media ContactCompany Name: Market Research EngineContact Person: John BayEmail: john@marketresearchengine.comPhone: +1-855-984-1862, +91-860-565-7204Country: United StatesWebsite:Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States
Global Retail IT Spending Market Growth Elements, Sales, Recent Developments and Revenue Forecast 2016

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The report is the result of extensive research carried out by a team of analysts and researchers scrutinizing the Retail IT Spending market according to its geographical segments and applications. The industrial chain supporting the Retail IT Spending market is studied comprehensively, including accurate and up to date information about various aspects such as the manufacturing chain, top offerings by the vendors, efficiency in utilization of available capacity of production, and industry policies that affect the Retail IT Spending market. It also gives detailed descriptions of the research methodology and economic indicators of the global Retail IT Spending market used in the compilation of the report.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Efficient and dependable analytical tools such as market attractiveness analysis, investment feasibility, and investment return analysis are used to examine the Retail IT Spending industry. The competitive landscape of the Retail IT Spending market is examined using tools such as Porteras five force analysis and SWOT analysis. Costing of products available in the Retail IT Spending market is analyzed with respect to the profit gained by vendors, as well as the policies affecting it. The cost-profit margins are reviewed regionally, leading to analysis results that explain the market condition in a specific geographical area. The resultant statistics can be used as a tool by new entrants as well as existing players to make focused market policies.To provide a better understanding of how the market functions, market dynamics such as drivers, restraints, and opportunities, along with their impact on the Retail IT Spending market, are mentioned in the report. The report also provides a comprehensive snapshot of the historical condition of the market, which is useful in determining the future growth trajectory of the Retail IT Spending market. It also points out profitable market strategies to exploit the development of the market in the forecast period.Browse Complete Report with TOC @Table of ContentsChapter One Retail IT Spending Industry Overview1.1 Retail IT Spending Definition1.1.1 Retail IT Spending Product Pictures & Product Specifications1.2 Retail IT Spending Classification & ApplicationChapter Two Retail IT Spending Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis2.1 Retail IT Spending Raw Material & Equipments Supplier and Price Analysis2.2 Retail IT Spending Labor & Other Cost Analysis2.3 Retail IT Spending Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis2.4 Retail IT Spending Manufacturing Process AnalysisChapter Three Retail IT Spending Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis3.1 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Retail IT Spending Capacity and Commercial Production Date3.2 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Retail IT Spending Manufacturing Plants Distribution3.3 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Retail IT Spending R&D Status and Technology Sources3.4 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Retail IT Spending Raw Materials Sources AnalysisChapter Four Retail IT Spending Production by Regions, Technology and Applications4.1 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Production by Regions(such as US, EU, China and Japan etc)4.2 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Production by Product Type & Application4.3 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Price by key Manufacturers4.4 2010-2016 US & China Retail IT Spending Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis4.5 2010-2016 Europe and Japan Retail IT Spending Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis4.6 2010-2016 US and China Retail IT Spending Supply Import Export Consumption4.7 2010-2016 Europe and Japan Retail IT Spending Supply Import Export ConsumptionChapter Five Retail IT Spending Sales and Sales Revenue by Regions5.1 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Sales by Regions (such as US, EU, China & Japan etc)5.2 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Sales Revenue by Regions (such as US EU China Japan etc)5.3 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Sales Price by Regions (such as US EU China Japan etc)5.4 2010-2016 Retail IT Spending Demand by ApplicationsRead More @About QyresearchreportsQYresearchreports.com focuses on wind and solar energy markets.Apart from providing market research reports we are also capable of providing customized services comprising of primary interviews and in-depth market surveys.Our primary focus is to provide the best in class, in-depth and reliable market data related to Chinese markets.Contact US:Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-618-1030Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
H2 2016 Global Capacity and Capital Expenditure Outlook for Refineries - Projects Stalling Slow Momentum for New Build Refining Capacity

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"The Report H2 2016 Global Capacity and Capital Expenditure Outlook for Refineries - Projects Stalling Slow Momentum for New Build Refining Capacity provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"Globally the Refinery industry is set to witness a growth of around 16.7% during the 2016-2020 period. The total global CDU capacity is expected to increase to over 100 mmbd by 2020. Asia is expected to lead the growth in the industry with proposed capital spending of more than US$140 billion outlined for more than 40 planned (new-build) refineries. The total capacity addition in the region is expected to be more than 5,000 mbd. Nakhodka, Okporoma, Shanghai II and Pengerang will be the top refineries in the world in terms of capital spending, while Merapoh, Lagos I and Al-Zour are expected to be the top three refineries in terms of capacity additions.Download Sample copy of this Report at :Scope- Refinery crude distillation unit capacity data by region for the period 2010 to 2020- Annual breakdown of capital expenditure spending on refineries for the period 2016 to 2020- Global planned (new build) refinery capacity additions and capital expenditure spending by key countries and operators- Capital expenditure spending on planned (new build) refineries by key countries and operators in a region- Details of all planned (new build) refineries in the world up to 2020Reasons to buy- Obtain the most up to date information available on refineries globally- Identify growth segments and opportunities in the industry- Facilitate decision making on the basis of strong historical, and outlook of planned refinery capacity data- Develop business strategies with the help of specific insights about the planned refineries globally- Keep abreast of key planned refinery projects across the world- Assess your competitors planned refinery projects and capacitiesFollow us on LinkedIn:Table of Contents1 Table of Contents1 Table of Contents 21.1 List of Tables 31.2 List of Figures 42 Global Refining Industry 62.1 Key Highlights 62.2 New Project Announcements 72.3 Major Project Cancellations 72.4 Major Stalled Projects 82.5 CDU Capacity Additions Through New and Existing Units by Region 232.6 Coking Capacity Additions Through New and Existing Units by Region 242.7 FCC Capacity Additions Through New and Existing Units by Region 252.8 Hydrocracking Capacity Additions Through New and Existing Units by Region 262.9 Planned (New-Build) Refineries in the World 272.10 Stalled (New-Build) Refineries in the World 322.11 Major Refinery Operators in the World by Planned Capacity 343 Appendix 373.1 Abbreviations 373.2 Methodology 373.2.1 Coverage 373.2.2 Secondary Research 373.3 Disclaimer 38MarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.State Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Global Airport IT Market 2016 Industry Developments, Investment Analysis, Competitive Research & Emerging Companies

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http://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-airport-it-industry-2016-market-research-report.htm

http://www.qyresearchreports.com/category/defense-and-security-market-reports-139.htm

The intelligence report on the global Airport IT market presents an in-depth study of the market, emphasizing on the current market trends, key growth drivers, and the competitive landscape of the market. The global Airport IT market has been analyzed on the basis of revenue and value, considering the forecast period from 2016 to 2021. Furthermore, the research study throws light on the expected impact of the potential opportunities and challenges in the Airport IT market across the globe. The report also covers the product segmentation and key geographical segments of the global Airport IT market.The research study provides a comprehensive analysis focusing on the different elements of the Airport IT market, coupled with the past performance of the market. The study offers forecast figures concerning the state of the global Airport IT market. An in-depth analysis of the data collected with the help of primary and secondary research tactics has been mentioned in the scope of the research study.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Furthermore, the research report presents an overview of the global Airport IT market by categorizing it on the basis of relevant criteria. Each segment of the market has been discussed thoroughly to offer a clear understanding of the market. Moreover, the estimated figures, share, growth rate, and size for each segment have been included in the scope of the research report.The research report studies the key geographical segments of the global Airport IT market and also throws light on the factors estimated to drive the segments in the next few years. In addition, a detailed picture of the regulatory framework is provided in the report in order to provide a clear understanding of the regulations, plans, and strategies. The research study has also included a list of the leading players in the global Airport IT market.Browse Complete Report with TOC @Table of ContentsChapter One Airport IT Industry Overview1.1 Airport IT Definition1.1.1 Airport IT Product Pictures & Product Specifications1.2 Airport IT Classification & ApplicationChapter Two Airport IT Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis2.1 Airport IT Raw Material & Equipments Supplier and Price Analysis2.2 Airport IT Labor & Other Cost Analysis2.3 Airport IT Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis2.4 Airport IT Manufacturing Process AnalysisChapter Three Airport IT Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis3.1 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Airport IT Capacity and Commercial Production Date3.2 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Airport IT Manufacturing Plants Distribution3.3 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Airport IT R&D Status and Technology Sources3.4 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Airport IT Raw Materials Sources AnalysisChapter Four Airport IT Production by Regions, Technology and Applications4.1 2010-2016 Airport IT Production by Regions(such as US, EU, China and Japan etc)4.2 2010-2016 Airport IT Production by Product Type & Application4.3 2010-2016 Airport IT Price by key Manufacturers4.4 2010-2016 US & China Airport IT Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis4.5 2010-2016 Europe and Japan Airport IT Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis4.6 2010-2016 US and China Airport IT Supply Import Export Consumption4.7 2010-2016 Europe and Japan Airport IT Supply Import Export ConsumptionChapter Five Airport IT Sales and Sales Revenue by Regions5.1 2010-2016 Airport IT Sales by Regions (such as US, EU, China & Japan etc)5.2 2010-2016 Airport IT Sales Revenue by Regions (such as US EU China Japan etc)5.3 2010-2016 Airport IT Sales Price by Regions (such as US EU China Japan etc)5.4 2010-2016 Airport IT Demand by ApplicationsRead More @About QyresearchreportsQYresearchreports.com focuses on wind and solar energy markets.Apart from providing market research reports we are also capable of providing customized services comprising of primary interviews and in-depth market surveys.Our primary focus is to provide the best in class, in-depth and reliable market data related to Chinese markets.Contact US:Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-618-1030Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Global Metastatic Prostate Cancer Market Opportunities, Trends, Size, Drivers, Strategies, Products Clinical Trials Review, H2, 2016

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"The Report Metastatic Prostate Cancer Global Clinical Trials Review, H2, 2016 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"GlobalData's clinical trial report, Metastatic Prostate Cancer Global Clinical Trials Review, H2, 2016" provides an overview of Metastatic Prostate Cancer clinical trials scenario. This report provides top line data relating to the clinical trials on Metastatic Prostate Cancer. Report includes an overview of trial numbers and their average enrollment in top countries conducted across the globe. The report offers coverage of disease clinical trials by region, country (G7 & E7), phase, trial status, end points status and sponsor type. Report also provides prominent drugs for in-progress trials (based on number of ongoing trials). GlobalData Clinical Trial Reports are generated using GlobalDatas proprietary database - Pharma eTrack Clinical trials database. Clinical trials are collated from 80+ different clinical trial registries, conferences, journals, news etc across the globe. Clinical trials database undergoes periodic update by dynamic process.The report enhances the decision making capabilities and helps to create an effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.Download Sample copy of this Report @Scope- The report provides a snapshot of the global clinical trials landscape- Report provides top level data related to the clinical trials by Region, Country (G7 & E7), Trial Status, Trial Phase, Sponsor Type and End point status- The report reviews top companies involved and enlists all trials (Trial title, Phase, and Status) pertaining to the company- The report provides all the unaccomplished trials (Terminated, Suspended and Withdrawn) with reason for unaccomplishment- The Report provides enrollment trends for the past five years- Report provides latest news for the past three monthsReasons to buy- Assists in formulating key business strategies with regards to investment- Helps in identifying prominent locations for conducting clinical trials which saves time and cost- Provides top level analysis of Global Clinical Trials Market which helps in identifying key business opportunities- Supports understanding of trials count and enrollment trends by country in global therapeutics market- Aids in interpreting the success rates of clinical trials by providing a comparative scenario of completed and uncompleted (terminated, suspended or withdrawn) trials- Facilitates clinical trial assessment of the indication on a global, regional and country levelTable of Content :Table of Contents 2List of Tables 3List of Figures 4Report Guidance 5Clinical Trials by Region 6Clinical Trials and Average Enrollment by Country 7Top Five Countries Contributing to Clinical Trials in Asia-Pacific 9Top Five Countries Contributing to Clinical Trials in Europe 10Top Countries Contributing to Clinical Trials in North America 11Top Countries Contributing to Clinical Trials in Middle East and Africa 12Top Five Countries Contributing to Clinical Trials in Central and South America 13Clinical Trials by G7 Countries: Proportion of Metastatic Prostate Cancer to Oncology Clinical Trials 14Clinical Trials by Phase in G7 Countries 15Clinical Trials in G7 Countries by Trial Status 16Clinical Trials by E7 Countries: Proportion of Metastatic Prostate Cancer to Oncology Clinical Trials 17Clinical Trials by Phase in E7 Countries 18Clinical Trials in E7 Countries by Trial Status 19Clinical Trials by Phase 20In Progress Trials by Phase 21Clinical Trials by Trial Status 22Clinical Trials by End Point Status 23Subjects Recruited Over a Period of Time 24Clinical Trials by Sponsor Type 25Prominent Sponsors 26Top Companies Participating in Metastatic Prostate Cancer Therapeutics Clinical Trials 27Prominent Drugs 28Clinical Trial Profile Snapshots 29Appendix 312Abbreviations 312Definitions 312Research Methodology 313Secondary Research 313About GlobalData 314Contact Us 314Disclaimer 314Source 315MarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.State Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA: Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Website:E : sales@marketresearchreports.biz
China Peripheral Artery Disease - Drug Forecast and Market Analysis to 2024

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"The Report Peripheral Artery Disease - China Drug Forecast and Market Analysis to 2024 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"In the 2014 base year, the Global PAD Market was worth approximately $543.4m, including both branded and generic drugs. By 2024, GlobalData expects that the global PAD market will experience significant expansion, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of approximately 4.15%, equating to around $816.3m. The dramatic increase in the value of the overall global PAD therapeutics market will be partly attributable to the launch of several PAD drugs currently in late-stage pipeline development, which GlobalData believes have extraordinary potential. These include the novel antithrombotic pharmacological agents, Merck & Co.s Zontivity (vorapaxar), AstraZenecas Brilinta (ticagrelor), and Bayer and Janssens (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) Xarelto (rivaroxaban), which have the capacity to reform the antiplatelet and anticoagulatory PAD treatment landscape.In 2014, the PAD therapeutics market in China was worth approximately $93.7m. Generic anticoagulant drugs, primarily warfarin, will suffer a negative CAGR of approximately 10.15% as Xarelto and generic rivaroxaban begin to encroach on warfarins stake in the PAD market.Download Sample copy of this Report at :Scope- Overview of PAD including epidemiology, etiology, symptoms, diagnosis, pathology and treatment guidelines as well as an overview on the competitive landscape.- Detailed information on the key drugs in China including product PADcription, safety and efficacy profiles as well as a SWOT analysis.- Sales forecast for the top drugs in China from 2014-2024.- Analysis of the impact of key events as well the drivers and restraints affecting China PAD market.Reasons to buy- Understand and capitalize by identifying products that are most likely to ensure a robust return- Stay ahead of the competition by understanding the changing competitive landscape for PAD.- Effectively plan your M&A and partnership strategies by identifying drugs with the most promising sales potential- Make more informed business decisions from insightful and in-depth analysis of drug performance- Obtain sales forecast for drugs from 2014-2024 in China.Table of Contents1 Table of Contents 21.1 List of Tables 51.2 List of Figures 82 Introduction 92.1 Catalyst 92.2 Related Reports 102.3 Upcoming Related Reports 103 Disease Overview 113.1 Etiology and Pathophysiology 123.1.1 Etiology 123.1.2 Pathophysiology 143.2 Classification and Staging Systems 153.3 Symptoms and Clinical Presentation 173.4 Prognosis 213.5 Quality of Life 254 Disease Management 274.1 Diagnosis and Treatment Overview 274.1.1 Diagnosis 274.1.2 Treatment Guidelines and Leading Prescribed Drugs 314.2 Urban China 325 Competitive Assessment 385.1 Overview 385.2 Lifestyle Modifications 425.2.1 Exercise 425.2.2 Smoking cessation 455.3 Risk Factor Modification Drugs 475.3.1 Lipid-Lowering Medical Therapies 475.3.2 Antihypertensive Medical Therapies 545.3.3 Antithrombotic Medical Therapies 615.3.4 Glucose-Lowering Medical Therapies 825.3.5 Thrombolytic Therapies 855.4 Medical Therapies Treating the Symptoms of PAD - Major Brands 865.4.1 Pletal / Pletaal (cilostazol) 865.4.2 Praxilene (naftidrofuryl oxalate) 100MarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.State Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Popular Market Report On Peripheral Artery Disease - Current and Future Players

http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/816328

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"The Report Peripheral Artery Disease - Current and Future Players provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"GlobalData has released its pharma report, Peripheral Artery Disease - Current and Future Players. The report is a vital source of up-to-date information with in-depth analysis on the companies in the rapidly growing Peripheral Artery Disease Market. The report identifies and analyses the key companies shaping and driving the global Peripheral Artery Disease market. The report provides insight into the competitive Peripheral Artery Disease landscape, including new companies entering the market. This report is built using data and information sourced from proprietary databases, primary and secondary and in-house analysis by GlobalDatas team of industry experts.Download Sample copy of this Report at :Scope- Investigation of current and future market competition for Peripheral Artery Disease- Competitor assessment- Coverage of key market players and company profiles including business description, financial overview and SWOT analysis.- Strategic assessment of Peripheral Artery Disease sector through market impact analysis, future market scenario and company analysisReasons to buy- Gain a high level view of the trends shaping and driving Peripheral Artery Disease market- Assess competitiveness of products in market by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of current competition.- Create an effective counter-strategy to gain a competitive advantage against those currently in the market- Whats the next big thing in the global Peripheral Artery Disease market landscape? Identify, understand and capitalizeTable of Contents1 Table of Contents 21.1 List of Tables 41.2 List of Figures 42 Introduction 52.1 Catalyst 52.2 Related Reports 62.3 Upcoming Related Reports 63 Market Outlook 73.1 Global Markets 73.1.1 Forecast 73.1.2 Drivers and Barriers - Global Issues 124 Current and Future Players 174.1 Overview and Trends in Corporate Strategy 174.2 Company Profiles 214.2.1 Bayer 214.2.2 Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) 234.2.3 AstraZeneca 254.2.4 Merck & Co. 284.2.5 Sanofi 294.2.6 Pfizer 314.2.7 Bristol-Myers Squibb 324.2.8 Otsuka Holdings 335 Appendix 355.1 Bibliography 355.2 Abbreviations 635.3 Methodology 685.4 Forecasting Methodology 685.4.1 Diagnosed PAD Patients 685.4.2 Percent Drug-Treated Patients 695.4.3 Drugs Included in Each Therapeutic Class 695.4.4 Launch and Patent Expiry Dates 695.4.5 General Pricing Assumptions 705.4.6 Individual Drug Assumptions 715.4.7 Generic Erosion 765.4.8 Pricing of Pipeline Agents 765.5 Physicians and Specialists Included in this Study 775.6 About the Authors 815.6.1 Analyst 815.6.2 Therapy Area Director 815.6.3 Epidemiologist 825.6.4 Global Head of Healthcare 825.6.5 Global Director of Therapy Analysis and Epidemiology 835.7 About GlobalData 845.8 Disclaimer 84MarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.State Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Webhosting Service Bitpalace Attracts New Clients Through Affiliate Marketing Program

http://cheap-webserver-us.bitpalast.net

http://cheap-webserver-us.bitpalast.net/pr/i

Summary:Webhosting provider Bitpalace launches an affiliate marketing program to promote its web space offering. The idea is as simple as it is successful. Even on the first day, many affiliates have begun signing up for the program.Body:Chicago, September 20, 2016. For almost a year now, Bitpalace has been modernizing its service and its marketing, focusing all of its efforts on a single product: the Bitpalace Business Booster.The Bitpalace Business Booster is a web space offer tailored to companies, associations and private individuals. While customers of other web space providers are forced to determine and select the scope of services they wish to use, Bitpalace offers one, comprehensive web space plan, making it easier for clients to commit. There is an upside for Bitpalace, too. Corporate funds are focused and applied more effectively. Therefore, the web space provider aims its entire marketing effort to this one web space package and recently launched an affiliate program to promote it.Affiliates receive a commission for recruiting new clients. For this purpose Bitpalace provides advertising banners and links, that can be embedded into the affiliates website through copy & paste, or shared via social media. If a person clicks on the affiliate link and this action results in a sale, the affiliate receives a commission. The technology underlying this program is so sophisticated that it will work even if a whole year passes between the initial click and the subsequent sale.Legend has it that a world-renowned American online bookseller first came up with this selling technique. Affiliate programs help turn advertising and branding into viral messages, often being more effective than regular advertising. Socially accepted friend-based referrals have a more pronounced impact than advertising promises coming from the provider itself. And affiliates can make money while they sleep, literally. After all, embedding links or banners into your own home page is simple, but the effect is lasting and can be enjoyed in the form of money.Everyone can be an affiliate, even those who dont have a Bitpalace web space.About Bitpalace:Bitpalace is the Anglo-American brand of Bitpalace GmbH, Germany. Since 1990, the company has been developing into a leading provider of systematic internet solutions and today operates web servers for international, almost exclusively commercial customers. The portfolio includes software development and web hosting services as well as personal support for each customer.Website:Photos:Bitpalast GmbHSensburger Allee 27D-14055 Berlin, GermanyInterview partner:Peter Debik MAPhone (Chicago, IL): +1 (815) 526-7037Skype: bitpalastservice@bitpalace.com
Asian Artisans Are Rising Up Against Fashion Giants

https://www.facebook.com/efaisto.co/videos/1328560347167766/

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hYBaA-6-CfT3d4ZENMX1BYYW8/view

www.efaisto.com

Its a story of David and Goliath. Southeast Asia has been considered for decades as a manufacturing resource for the fashion industry, largely associated with low cost workforce, poor quality and mass-produced design. But skilled tailors, talented shoe makers and inspired leather artisans are gathering to show the world they are worth much more than that. Now they can use the power of e-commerce to directly reach customers around the world, cutting-out greedy intermediaries and traditional fashion brands.Still fashion, but custom-made and fair:Bernard fell in love with the feeling of wearing bespoke clothes for the first time whilst living in Vietnam, where he was working for a Belgian chocolate manufacturer. Meanwhile, Lou was dreaming about entrepreneurship in collaborative economy while working for a video game company in Ho Chi Minh City. Together, they came up with the idea of Efaisto, an e-commerce marketplace that helps the most talented artisans in Southeast Asia to sell their skills abroad. Doing so, they allow customers from around the globe to enjoy purchasing bespoke quality clothing and accessories in a fair way.Watch the video 'Three Dollar Shirt' :The maker controls the price:Thats the real difference. On Efaisto, the artisans decide on their selling price and always get what they asked for. This translates to approximately 50% of the final price customers pay. Compare this to the big fashion brands who pocket a hefty 95% margin. On Efaisto you also know who you are buying from. You can review the makers profile and discover their story from the website. Efaisto selects the best artisans in Southeast Asia and executes a strict quality check on each order.Some facts & figures:Efaisto launched in April 2015 and has picked up customers and media attention mainly from France and Belgium; the 2 co-founders home countries. There are currently 30 makers selling on the platform, which is supported by a team of 8 in sales, operations, marketing and development. Efaisto is currently looking to raise $650.000 in round A seed funding to help them make fashion more personal and fair in other countries too.Read more:Efaisto is a tech startup based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, co-founded in 2015 by Bernard Seys and Lou-Adrien Fabre. Named after the greek god of makers, Efaisto wants to drastically change the way we shop.Their marketplace makes shopping quality fashion and accessories 1) custom-made and 2) fair by connecting consumers around the world directly with makers in Southeast Asia, with the vision to put people at the center of economic transactions.Efaisto261 Waterloo Street #02524Waterloo CentreSingapore 180261Bernard Seys, CEO & Cofounderbernard.seys@efaisto.comefaisto.comPress contact: Marie Cordiez - marie@efaisto.com - Tel/Whatsapp: +84 120 39 22 907
Having trouble viewing? View this mailing online. SUBSCRIBE TO THE FLAME HOTLINE DONATE TO FLAME FORWARD TO A FRIEND September 20, 2016 Why Do the Palestinians Insist on Ethnically Cleansing Palestine of Jewsand Why Is That OK? Dear Friend of FLAME: Did you see the Bibi Netanyahu video that created such a kerfuffle last week at the U.S. State Department and the United Nations? In the video, the Prime Minister had the audacity to claim that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) are not an obstacle to peace. (Watch it here.) But Netanyahu went further, maintaining the only reason that settlements are a problem for Arabs is that the Palestinians want to ethnically cleanse their future state they want it to be judenrein (free of Jews)just as Hitler wanted the entire world. Since the State Department and the U.N. also intractably oppose Jews living in the future Palestine, theyno surprisetook umbrage at the notion that they support ethnic cleansing. A State spokesperson called the Netanyahu analysis inappropriate and unhelpful. U.N. head Ban Ki-moon called Bibis assertion unacceptable and outrageous. You get the impression that the ethnic-cleansing phrase kind of hit a nerve. For good reason. Netanyahus logic is unassailable. If two million Arabs can live in the state of Israel as equals, why should half a million Jews living in the future Palestine be a problem? Especially since there is no Palestine only disputed territories to which the Jews can also legitimately lay claimbecause the Palestinians have refused for nigh on a hundred years to make peace with their neighbors. Whats truly unhelpful and outrageous is that the U.S. and the U.N., contrary to any sound interpretation of international law, consider Judea and Samaria a prioribefore any peace negotiationsto be Palestinian territory. It simply is not. This weeks FLAME Hotline-featured article, below, clarifies these issues succinctly. Commentator Jonathan Tobin argues not only that Netanyahus ethnic cleansing trope rings true compared with other examples in recent history, but he also confronts the nasty truth that given Palestinian anti-Semitism and murderous incitement to violence, Jews living in a future Palestine would rightfully fear for their lives. I think youll find Tobins brief analysis to be useful as the possibility of an Obama manifesto on the path to an Israel-Palestinian peace looms large for years end. Youll want to remind your friends, family and colleagues that Judea and Samaria were originally Jewish territory and were granted to the Jews again at the beginning of this century. Better yet, consider forwarding this issue of the FLAME Hotline to them directly. In addition, I hope youll also quickly review the P.S. immediately below, which describes FLAMEs hasbarah campaign to oppose U.S. funding of United Nations schools that teach half a million Palestinian children to wage jihad and hate Jews. Best regards, Jim Sinkinson

President, Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME) P.S. A Palestinian boy, standing in front of his UNRWA school in Jerusalem, says They teach us that Jews are bad people. I am ready to stab a Jew and drive over them. This school is one of hundreds operated by UNRWA, which is supported by more than $400 million annually in U.S. taxpayer dollars . In order to make Americans aware of this travesty, FLAME has just begun publishing a new position paper in media nationwidewhich exposes the extent of UNRWAs perpetuation of Islamic jihad and murderous terror among Palestinian youth. I urge you to review this outspokenn hasbarah message: "U.N. School for Terrorism This paid editorial is appearing in magazines and newspapers, including college newspapers, with a combined readership of some 10 million people. In addition, it is being sent to every member of the U.S. Congress and President Obama. If you agree that this kind of public relations effort on Israel's behalf is critical, I urge you to support us. Remember: FLAME's powerful ability to influence public opinionand U.S. aid to Israelcomes from individuals like you, one by one. I hope you'll consider giving a donation now, as you're ablewith $500, $250, $100, or even $18. (Remember, your donation to FLAME is tax deductible.) To donate online, just go to donate now. Now more than ever we need your support to ensure that the American people and the U.S. Congress end our support of blatantly anti-Semitic, global jihadist organizations. As of today, more than 15,000 Israel supporters receive the FLAME Hotline at no charge every week. If youre not yet a subscriber, wont you join us in receiving these timely updates, so you can more effectively tell the truth about Israel ? Just go to free subscription. Where Ethnic Cleansing Is Permissible By Jonathan Tobin, Commentary, September 13, 2016 As far as the Palestinians, the Israeli left, and the Obama administration are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone too far. In a video released by his office last week, the prime minister claimed that what the Palestinians were really after in their quest to force the removal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank was the ethnic cleansing of Jews. The Palestinian Authority responded angrily that they had nothing against Jews but what they wanted was the end of the Israeli occupation. The U.S. State Department agreed with Netanyahus critics, saying there was no connection between opposition to settlements and bigotry. Washington thinks the issue is the need to advance a two-state solution. To frame the discussion as one about the right of Jews to live in the West Bank is, to Obamas administration, irrelevant. But the problem with the State Departments view of the issuewhich was criticized by the Donald Trump campaignis that its clear that a two-state solution means a Palestinian state that would be only for Arabs alongside an Israel in which an Arab minority enjoys full legal rights, as they do today. On this point, there is some argument. Netanyahu can point to statements such as one made by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas in 2013. In a final resolution, Abbas told Egyptian journalists, we would not see the presence of a single Israelicivilian or soldieron our lands. Apologists for the Palestinians point to other comments made by various Palestinian leadersalmost always to Western audiences or journalists rather than in Arabic to their own peoplein which they say Jews would enjoy equal rights in a state of Palestine. Which view of Palestinian intentions is correct? Given the drumbeat of incitement to hatred of Jews and Israelis heard and read in Palestinian media and in their schools, it is hard to argue, as some critics of Netanyahu do, that Jews wouldnt be at risk in their state. The wave of Palestinian violence known as the stabbing intifada is rooted in a religious-based rage against the Jewish presence throughout the country. That includes the settlements of Tel Aviv and Haifa that are within the 1967 borders and not just the West Bank and Jerusalem. The primary reason Israel withdrew every settler and soldier when it evacuated Gaza in 2005 is the certainty that Jews whose lives would depend on the mercy of the Palestinians would be as good as dead. Indeed, deprived of the opportunity to attack individual Jews after the Israelis withdrew, Palestinian mobs vented their rage on the abandoned buildings the Jews left behind, including the greenhouses that had been purchased by well-meaning philanthropists for use by the Arab population. Though the U.S., its European allies, and the United Nations claim that the settlements violate international law, Israelis correctly note that Jews were guaranteed the right of settlement in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. The West Bank is not and never has been sovereign Palestinian Arab territory. The disposition of this land is a matter of dispute and subject to negotiation. The Israelis have repeatedly offered the Palestinians an independent state in almost all of the West Bank and even a share of Jerusalem but neither Abbas nor his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, could ever muster the will to say yes. If Palestinians still refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn, how can Israelis believe they would respect the rights of Jews who will be essentially defenseless?. That is why Netanyahus attempt to reframe the discussion about settlements requires more than the impatient dismissal it got from Washington. Nobody on either side of this conflict or in Washington believes for a minute that Jews in remote communities, let alone the hundreds of thousands who live in blocs along the border and in parts of Jerusalem (that were illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967) can safely stay if their homes become part of a Palestinian state. In any other conflict, we would label the Palestinian demand for the removal of Jewish communities (or those of any other group) with the same words used by Netanyahu: ethnic cleansing. But when it comes to Jews living in their ancient homeland, the rules are different, and bigotry is not only accepted but also supported. Until Palestinian hostility to the presence of Jews is addressed by both the U.S. and the international community rather than ignored, the peace everyone claims to be seeking will never happen. HOME SUBSCRIBE DONATE PR FOR ISRAEL HOTLINE ARCHIVE ABOUT CONTACT US THIS MONTH'S AD APPEARED IN PUBLICATIONS REACHING 10 MILLION READERS IF YOU SUPPORT PUBLISHING FLAME'S BOLD PR MESSAGES, PLEASE HELP US!! FLAME is the only organization that defends Israel with paid editorial hasbarah messages placed in media nationwide every month: The dire threats from Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah, the injustice of BDS, Palestinian anti-Semitism and more. If you support a bold voice that tells the truth about Israel in American media, please donate now. FLAME'S WEEKLY HOTLINE E-NEWSLETTER FLAME's Hotline e-newsletter keeps you up to date on the most important pro-Israel advocacy issues and features our choice of the week's most informative and thought-provoking article on Israel and the Middle East. If you only subscribe to one pro-Israel news service, make it the FLAME Hotline.

Facts and Logic

About the Middle East

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Product Premiers at SPS IPC Drives

Besides other novelties, ESCHA shows five pin M12x1 connectors with L- and K-coding for power supply.

www.escha.net

www.escha.net/en/company/press-room/

Halver, 21 September 2016  At this years SPS IPC Drives in Nuremberg from 22 to 24 November 2016, the connectivity specialist ESCHA is again presenting lots of novelties including a new variant of its successful product portfolio Automation Line. The Automation Line easystrip is equipped with a special cable which can be particularly easily stripped. In addition, and for the first time, ESCHA is showing new M8x1- and M12x1-Y-junctions with cable outlet as well as new power connectivity with L- and K-coding types. Moreover, and once more, there are many standard products and interesting modification- and development projects on display on Stand 414 in Hall10.Automation Line easystripThe new Automation Line easystrip is equipped with a PUR/PP-cable called S400 exclusively available from ESCHA. This cable can be quite easily stripped up to 1.5 meters through a special production process. Despite this function, M8x1- and M12x1-connectors with S400-cable are excellently adapted for dynamic applications in automation fields. All new Automation Line easystrip products are UL-approved and can thus be also used on the North American market. Directly after the SPS IPC Drives, 3- to 12-wire variants in unshielded version will be available.Y-junctions with cable outletOther ESCHA highlights at the European leading trade show for electrical automation are the new and extremely compact Y-junctions with cable outlet available in housing styles M8x1 and M12x1. Male- and female connector alignment is customer freely selectable. All standard cables in PUR and PVC for cable outlets will be available from the outset. The cable outlets can be equipped with M8x1-, M12x1- or valve connectors upon request. As a result of the various options, a high diversity will facilitate product configuration for every application.L- and K-coding types for M12x1 PowerAfter the successful market launch of the M12x1 Power products with S- and T-coding types last year, ESCHA is now presenting the five-pole variants at the SPS IPC Drives 2016. These dispose of an L-coding (63V, 16A, 4+FE), respectively a K-coding (630V, 12A, 4+PE). Due to their compact housing design, they are especially adapted for the power supply in the automation field. Classical applications include fieldbus-controlled I/O-boxes, power supply units or small servo motors. The new coding is available for overmolded connectors as well as for T-, H-, and h-junctions.Standard, Special, Tailor-madeIn addition to the above mentioned trade show premieres, ESCHA is also showing its comprehensive standard product portfolio and numerous interesting modification- and development projects at the SPS IPC Drives. Visitors can get information on all these topics on Stand 414 in Hall 10 of the Nuremberg trade show.About ESCHAThe ESCHA Group is a leading supplier in the fields of connectivity and housing technology. For more than 30 years, the family-controlled company has been developing and manufacturing innovative product novelties taking dynamics to the market for automation components. Based on its standard products, the company designs custom-made connectivity and individual special solutions. With about 600 employees around the globe and highly in-depth development and production, ESCHA is extending its product portfolio constantly and independently. The annual group turnover amounts to 55 million Euros. ESCHA guarantees high availability and consistent quality of its products worldwide through production facilities in Germany, Czech Republic and China as well as licensed production in USA and Mexico.ESCHA GmbH & Co. KGElberfelder Str. 3258553 Halver | GermanyDipl.-Medienokonom Florian SchnellManager Corporate CommunicationsTel.: +49 2353 708-8156E-Mail: f.schnell@escha.net
Europe Baby Monitor Market 2016: Industry Growth, Research, Future Outlook to 2022

http://www.intenseresearch.com/market-analysis/europe-baby-monitor-market-opportunities-and-forecasts-20142022.html

http://bit.ly/2d1mAFj

http://www.intenseresearch.com/

Latest industry research report on: Baby monitor is an electronic baby caring device. A basic audio monitor consists of a transmitter, receiver and a microphone and transmits babys sounds to the parent/attendant, by means of radio waves. Video monitors consist of video camera and enable transmission of real time video along with sound, to the receiver (equipped with a screen). Apart from video and sound transmission, advanced video monitors offer features such as talk-back, temperature sensing, heart rate monitoring and many others.Complete Report of Europe Baby Monitor Market @Major factors that drive the Europe baby monitor market include rising number of employed parents, high spending on baby care and rising demand for higher-end baby monitors. Moreover, increasing sale of baby monitors through online retailing platforms has fueled the market growth as they offer wide range of products at competitive prices. However, safety concerns of parents with respect to the emission of radiation from these devices and low birth rates, primarily in the Western Europe are factors that restrain the market growth. Increasing demand for high-end differentiated products in Western Europe and increasing awareness towards baby safety in Eastern Europe are expected to offer lucrative business opportunities in near future.Get Free Sample Report of Europe Baby Monitor Market @The Europe baby monitor market is segmented on the basis of type, mode of connection, and country. On the basis of type, it is bifurcated into audio and video baby monitors. Video baby monitors are being increasingly used over audio ones on account of features such as real-time video transmission, Wi-Fi & smart phone connectivity and others, offered by them. On the basis of connection, it is divided into wired and wireless baby monitors. Wireless baby monitors are majorly used, owing to higher mobility and safety provided by them. The market is analyzed across key countries, which include France, UK, Germany, Ireland, Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg), and Rest of Europe.Key players profiled in the report include Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Motorola Mobility LLC., Angelcare Monitors Inc., Tomy Company Ltd., Vtech Holdings Ltd., ShenZhen Foscam Intelligent Technology Company Ltd., Summer Infant Inc., Koninklijke Philips N.V., Luvion Premium Babyproducts, and Withings Inc.About Intense ResearchIntense Research is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations. Market Research Store is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact UsNicole Austin3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651Email: nicole@Intenseresearch.comWeb:
Global Punch Sets Market 2016: Size, Share, Analysis, Demands & Forecast - 2021

Punch Sets

http://www.mrsresearchgroup.com/market-analysis/global-punch-sets-market-2016-production-sales-supply.html

http://bit.ly/2diMVB0

http://www.mrsresearchgroup.com/

MRS Research Group added new research report on Global Punch Sets Market 2016 includes Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Demand, Supply, Application, Segmentation, Opportunity, Market Development, production, capacity utilization, supply, Analysis and Forecast by 2021The Global Punch Sets Industry 2016-2021 Market Research Report' is analytical reports based on a current situation and trends of the global as well as Chinese market. It is in-depth study of the comprehensive content which compiles statistics for the key elements of subject. The repot ensure the quality of the content and guideline which needed. It includes basic information of the company profile, products, generated revenue and future treads and various other vital data.Complete Report With TOC Available @It keeps the main focus on the priority need of the individualand provides a brief report on the annual basis. The global Punch Sets market report will provide significant and reliable information on the market clearly in structured format. The report will offers you a key manufacturer of the products, applications, DROS and others.Our experts team takes out key information from the various sources which include primary and secondary sources and help to provides related information of the client interest. Report will easily mold information as per client requirement which covers forecast and analysis of Punch Sets market on global and regional level.We generate reports on market variations across verticals like energy, chemicals, technology, food, electronics and others. It consists of a highly detailed analysis of the subject.Access Free Sample Report @We use numerous tools and techniques to collect information on various parameters. The report includes key competitors in global Punch Sets market. Our experts team provides forward-looking insight on market growth. It will clear you with the suitable schematics diagrams, statistical analysis and related deep insight. It will also cover value chain analysis, market attractiveness, supply-demand & Chinese import export and 2011-2016 revenue for each company.It includes proper segmentation at the micro and macro level, dominant, largest and leading segment in the market. Moreover, includes future projects in the market with most reliable information indispensable for marketplace.Table of Content Of Punch Sets Market (Index) :Global Punch Sets Market Research Report 20161 Punch Sets Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Punch Sets1.2 Punch Sets Segment by Type1.2.1 Global Production Market Share of Punch Sets by Type in 20151.2.2 Type I1.2.3 Type II1.2.4 Type III1.3 Punch Sets Segment by Application1.3.1 Punch Sets Consumption Market Share by Application in 20151.3.2 Application 11.3.3 Application 21.3.4 Application 31.4 Punch Sets Market by Region1.4.1 North America Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.2 Europe Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.3 China Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.4 Japan Status and Prospect (2011-2021)MRS Research Group is the worlds giant collection of the Market research Reports. Where we specialized in global publisher, tailor made reports and specialists consulting. Global Publisher provides in-depth analysis of global and Chinese market. Tailor-made reports represent methodologies deliverable to proper insight of the client. While, expertise research specialist helps to provide strategic solution in specialists consulting. It consists of head such as, latest report, category, niche market and news. Reports published on the million of category like chemical, machinery and equipment, consumer goods, manufacturing and construction etc. Latest national, international, business News published under news portal.Contact UsJoel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free : +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@mrsresearchgroup.comWebsite:
Global Radiographic Film Processor Market 2016: Size, Share, Analysis, Demands & Forecast - 2021

Radiographic Film Processor

http://www.mrsresearchgroup.com/market-analysis/global-radiographic-film-processor-market-2016-production-sales.html

http://bit.ly/2cCptL4

http://www.mrsresearchgroup.com/

MRS Research Group added new research report on Global Radiographic Film Processor Market 2016 includes Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Demand, Supply, Application, Segmentation, Opportunity, Market Development, production, capacity utilization, supply, Analysis and Forecast by 2021The Global Radiographic Film Processor Industry 2016-2021 Market Research Report' is analytical reports based on a current situation and trends of the global as well as Chinese market. It is in-depth study of the comprehensive content which compiles statistics for the key elements of subject. The repot ensure the quality of the content and guideline which needed. It includes basic information of the company profile, products, generated revenue and future treads and various other vital data.Complete Report With TOC Available @It keeps the main focus on the priority need of the individualand provides a brief report on the annual basis. The global Radiographic Film Processor market report will provide significant and reliable information on the market clearly in structured format. The report will offers you a key manufacturer of the products, applications, DROS and others.Our experts team takes out key information from the various sources which include primary and secondary sources and help to provides related information of the client interest. Report will easily mold information as per client requirement which covers forecast and analysis of Radiographic Film Processor market on global and regional level.We generate reports on market variations across verticals like energy, chemicals, technology, food, electronics and others. It consists of a highly detailed analysis of the subject.Access Free Sample Report @We use numerous tools and techniques to collect information on various parameters. The report includes key competitors in global Radiographic Film Processor market. Our experts team provides forward-looking insight on market growth. It will clear you with the suitable schematics diagrams, statistical analysis and related deep insight. It will also cover value chain analysis, market attractiveness, supply-demand & Chinese import export and 2011-2016 revenue for each company.It includes proper segmentation at the micro and macro level, dominant, largest and leading segment in the market. Moreover, includes future projects in the market with most reliable information indispensable for marketplace.Table of Content Of Radiographic Film Processor Market (Index) :Global Radiographic Film Processor Sales Market Report 20161 Radiographic Film Processor Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Radiographic Film Processor1.2 Classification of Radiographic Film Processor1.2.1 Type I1.2.2 Type II1.2.3 Type III1.3 Application of Radiographic Film Processor1.3.1 Application 11.3.2 Application 21.3.3 Application 31.4 Radiographic Film Processor Market by Regions1.4.1 USA Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.2 China Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.4 Japan Status and Prospect (2011-2021)1.4.5 India Status and Prospect (2011-2021)MRS Research Group is the worlds giant collection of the Market research Reports. Where we specialized in global publisher, tailor made reports and specialists consulting. Global Publisher provides in-depth analysis of global and Chinese market. Tailor-made reports represent methodologies deliverable to proper insight of the client. While, expertise research specialist helps to provide strategic solution in specialists consulting. It consists of head such as, latest report, category, niche market and news. Reports published on the million of category like chemical, machinery and equipment, consumer goods, manufacturing and construction etc. Latest national, international, business News published under news portal.Contact UsJoel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free : +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@mrsresearchgroup.comWebsite:
Global Breath Analyzer Market for semiconductor oxide sensor technology, 2015 - 2021

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http://www.zionmarketresearch.com/inquiry/breath-analyzers-market

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Zion Market Research has published a new report titled Breath Analyzers (Fuel Cell, Semiconductor, Infrared and Crystal) Market by Application (Alcohol, Drug Abuse, Tuberculosis, Asthma and Cancer), by End-user (Law Enforcement, Enterprises and Individuals) - Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015  2021. According to the report, global demand for breath analyzer market was valued at USD 500.0million in 2015, is expected to reach USD 1,600.0 million in 2021 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of around 25% between 2016 and 2021.Get a copy of free Sample Report @Breathalyzer is actually a brand name trademarked by the breath analyzers creator. Breathalyzer term has since become a routinely utilized term to refer to all breath examination tests employas a part of the field.Nowadays, breathalyzer is utilized by law enforcement officers during traffic stops when the driver is suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol. The breath analyzer is usually used to test an individuals blood alcohol content.The market growth of global breath analyzer market has been accelerated by increasing alcohol consumption, drug abuse, and strict government laws. Growing demand from healthcare industry for disease identification is one of the major driving factors for growth of market. Unhygienic conditions for use and lower accuracy of the devices are expected to hamper the growth of breath analyzer market over the years. However, ongoing research and development in the breath analyzer devices market is expected to open up new growth opportunities in coming years.Know more before buying this report @The market is segmented on the basis of technology, application, end users and regions. Technology segment include semiconductor oxide sensor technology and fuel cell technology. The key applications covered under this study include alcohol detection, drug abuse detection, and medical applications. Among all, alcohol detection and drug abuse detection were the largest application segments that accounted for a significant share of global breath analyzer in 2015. By end user segment breath analyzer market is mainly categorized into law enforcement agencies, enterprises, and individuals application.Geographically, breath analyzer market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa. North America represented the major share in the global breath analyzer market in 2015. However, In Asia Pacific region due to the presence of developing countries like China and India is expected to witness growth in forecast period. Increase probability of road accidents is one of the major reasons to drive the breath analyzer market in this region.Browse the full report atDragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, Alcohol Countermeasure Systems Corporation, Akers Biosciences, Inc, Lifeloc Technologies, Quest products, Inc, BACtrackInc, and MDP among others are some of the leading profiles in the breath analyzermarket.About UsZion Market Research is a market intelligence company providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Zion Market Research experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants uses proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact US:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
IN BUDAPEST CLINIC IGOR IANKOVSKYI MET WITH MAXIM KRIVONOSOV WHICH UNDERGOING THE TREATMENT SUPPORTED BY THE PATRON

IN BUDAPEST CLINIC IGOR IANKOVSKYI MET WITH MAXIM KRIVONOSOV WHICH UNDERGOING THE TREATMENT SUPPORTED BY THE PATRON

http://iff-charity.org/uk/novyny/fond-yankovskoho-zabezpechuye-likuvannya-11richnoho-syna-heroya-ukrainy

http://iff-charity.org/uk/novyny/vintervyuhazetiholosukrayinyakryvonosovapodyakuvalafonduyankovskohozadopomohuvlikuvannisyna

The warm and sincere meeting took place after the next survey of Hungarian doctors for Ukrainian boy from Mykolaiv City, which cares by the patron Iankovskyi, which fully funding the treatment of the child and providing the moral support. At this time, completing the next stage of the Maxim Krivonosov medical survey, the doctors gave a real beam of light - a good hope for the child's recovery. The boy did not give up, together with benefactors; he is fighting for his life.During the period of treatment follow-up the examinations have shown the some progress - improvement, the disease does not progress, and there is a real chance of recovery. In a friendly meeting attended by a special guest - Vadim Merikov, former head of Mykolaiv regional state administration, which, together with Igor Iankovskyi talked with boy, learning about the state of his health, after hearing predictions of doctors, a further course of treatment plans. It is thanks to Vadim Merikov, caring volunteers helped a family from Mykolaiv boy.After all, from the birth date of Maxim suffered a severe illness. The family asked for help to Iankovskyi Foundation, when suddenly lost hope and basic support, a strong shoulder. The Maxims father - Sergey Krivonosov, the officer of the 79th special airmobile brigade, was tragically killed during the hostilities ATO. The sick boy was a "son of the Hero of Ukraine", the one with his mother and with his illness. On the advice of those who care, Anastasia Krivonosova (Maximmother) decided to write a letter to Igor Iankovskyi. The appeal was considered. Since then has passed more than a year - the founder of the Charity Foundation "Initiative for the Future", patron Iankovskyi serves curator of treatment to Maxim boy. Igor Iankovskyi funded the treatment, a trip to Hungary for the survey, providing the necessary medications for a child. After treatment, Maxim Krivonosov undergoing tests in the best specialized clinic in Budapest. Doctors return to the child a chance to live a full life. During this time the family of Mykolaiv, burnt with fire and pain events in the East of Ukraine, in the end, to get reliable help and support in difficult times."I am struck by the boy's resistance. He is seriously ill, but did not give up, and we - are helping to survive in an unequal battle with the disease. Now, after more than 1.5 years of the treatment we see the real improvement. Previously, because of an inoperable tumor in the brain, he had frequent attacks of epilepsy; however, they stopped during the treatment. Now he struggles with the disease. I believe that he will cope. At a minimum, we will do everything possible for that. Today such cases are difficult to treat in Ukraine. In many ways, the significant progress in the treatment of such children was made possible by innovations in the field of medicine outside the country. I am sure, that soon we will be able to provide the all necessary assistance in Ukrainian hospitals too", - says Igor Iankovskyi.Together with the patron, the family of Major Sergei Krivonosov believes in its future, when Maxim will recover, get an education and will become a full-fledged citizen of Ukraine, healthy, full of strength and energy.If you interested about chronicle of events and the history of the treatment of Maxim Krivonosov from the city of Mykolaiv, please, see the links:"Initiative for the Future"  is Ukrainian Charitable Foundation, founded by Igor Iankovskyi - a successful Ukrainian businessman, financier and philanthropist.Charities unite like-minded people in a common goal - to develop and implement educational and cultural programs in Ukraine. Activities of the organization based on voluntary initiatives.Igor Iankovskyi Foundation "Initiative for the Future" was founded June 5, 2012, and since its foundation supports talented young people from all over Ukraine, contributing to a highly cultured society in the future. Projects that have already been implemented charitable foundation, got success not only in Ukraine, but also in USA, some European countries - Belgium, France, Germany and Poland.Horizon Park business center12 Amosova str, Kyiv, 03680, Ukraine
Mold Inhibitors Market: Size, Share & trends up to 20152021

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Mold is a ubiquitous type of fungus which commonly grows on the food products and when present in large quantity can be hazardous for human health. Molds are generally grown over the food with high water content and temperature produce aflatoxin. Mold inhibitors are the substance that inhibits or restrict the growth of molds.Get a copy of free Sample Report @Rising demand from the consumers for the extended shelf life of food drives the mold inhibitors market. Moreover, increasing concern for health effects caused due to molds stimulates the growth of the market. In addition, animal feed market is growing rapidly owing to escalating demand for meat which is turns prompts the market demand. Growing demand for beverages and baked foods further adds to the mold inhibitors market growth. However, impact of some of the inhibitors on the human health is likely to hamper the growth of this market. Nevertheless, rising awareness along with high demand from the emerging economies is expected to offer ample opportunities for mold inhibitors market.In order to provide comprehensive view on the mold inhibitors market we have included a detailed value chain analysis. To understand the competitive landscape in the market, an analysis of Porters Five Forces model for the mold inhibitors market has also been included. The study encompasses a market attractiveness analysis, wherein product segments are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate and general attractiveness. The report also analyzes several driving and restraining factors and their impact on the market during the forecast period.Know more before buying this report @On the basis of type the mold inhibitors market can be segmented as benzoates, natamycin, propionates, sorbates and others. Natamycin is the most prominent segment and has usage in food industry, animal feed and pharma industry. Mold inhibitors have various applications in animal feed, food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics & personal care and other. Animal feed is the one of the leading segment due to high global demand for animal feedstock.North America dominated the mold inhibitors market owing to high usage of mold inhibitors in animal feed, food industry, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and others. U.S. is the leading consumer for mold inhibitors. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market due to rapidly growing food industry along with rising disposable income, particularly in China and India. Latin America, Middle East and Africa are expected to experience sustainable growth in the forecast period owing to rising awareness for mold inhibitors.Some of the key players in the mold inhibitors market are Pacific Coast Chemicals, Associated British Foods Plc, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Handary SA, Niacet Corporation, Eastman Chemical Company, Kemin Industries Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Company, BASF SE, Koninklijke DSM N.V., Associated British Foods Plc and Hawkins Watts Limited among others.Browse detail report with in-depth TOC @The report segments of the mold inhibitors market into:Mold Inhibitors Market: Type Segment AnalysisBenzoatesNatamycinPropionatesSorbatesOthersMold Inhibitors Market: Application Segment AnalysisAnimal feedFood industryPharmaceuticalsCosmetics & personal careOthersMold Inhibitors Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaPurchase a direct copy of report with TOC @About Us:Zion Market Research is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations. Zion Market Research is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading industry and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact Us:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
Epilepsy Therapeutics Market : Segment and Analysis up to 20152021

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Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by unpredictable seizures. Epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological disorder that affects peoples of all age group. Seizures may be classified as focal seizures, generalized seizures, and other seizures. Focal seizures are the most common type of epilepsy which involves secondary generalized tonic/clonic seizures (sGTCS) and complex partial seizures. Generalized seizures include myoclonic seizures, tonic seizures, atonic seizures, absences, and clonic seizures. These seizures occur when neurons in the brain or a group of nerve cells send wrong signals to the body.Get a copy of free Sample Report @Treatment of epilepsies is done by using antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). Antiepileptic drugs are segmented into two major categories namely first generation AEDs and second generation AEDs. Selection of drugs is done by prescriber depending upon the type of seizure, part of brain involved in epilepsy, age of patient.Epilepsy therapeutic drug market is mostly driven by increasing prevalence of neurological disorders and technological advancements across many countries. Moreover, increasing awareness about diagnostics and treatment of neurological disorders in global market also help in driving the epileptic market growth. Non availability of medical facilities in poor and developing countries can restrict or hinder the growth of epileptic therapeutic market over the years. Conversely, the prescribing pattern of drugs that give preference to first generation AEDs over second generation AEDs is restraining the epilepsy therapeutics market. Nonetheless, ongoing research and development in the healthcare literacy rate are expected to open growth avenues for the market over the years.Know more before buying this report @The report covers forecast and analysis of the epileptic therapeutic market on a global and regional level. The study provides historic data of 2015 along with a forecast from 2016 to 2021 based on revenue (USD Million). To understand the competitive landscape in the market, an analysis of Porters Five Forces model for the epileptic therapeutic drug market has also been included in the study. The report also analyzes several driving and restraining factors and their impact on the market during the forecast period. The study encompasses a market attractiveness analysis, wherein type segments are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate and general attractiveness.The report provides detailed segmentation of the epileptic therapeutic drug market based on type and regional segment.Geographically, the market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Demand has been analyzed and forecast based on the current trends for the period of six years. North America & Europe were the leading regional segments of the epileptic therapeutic drug market due to availability of second generation antiepileptic drug.Browse detail report with in-depth TOC @Three new AEDs have been approved in the U.S. since 2012 including ezogabine/retigabine, perampanel and eslicarbazepine acetate. Ezogabine/retigabine and perampanel among these have new mechanism of action and thus it is capturing good amount of market share in the U.S. The epileptic therapeutic market is expected to witness the highest growth in the Asia-Pacific region in the coming years due to high prevalence of epilepsy in India and China, increasing health care infrastructure, incomes and awareness.Key players in epileptic therapeutic market include Abbott Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Cephalon, Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Inc., Novartis AG, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.., Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc., Sanofi S.A. and Shire.This report segments the epileptic therapeutic market are:-Epileptic Therapeutic Market: Type Segment AnalysisFirst GenerationSecond GenerationPurchase a direct copy of report with TOC @Epileptic Therapeutic Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaEuropeAsia pacificLatin AmericaMiddle east & AfricaAbout Us:Zion Market Research is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations. Zion Market Research is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading industry and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact Us:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
Food Traceability Technology Market - Huge Opportunity, 2016 - 2022

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/9920

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Owing to globalization and integration, food production and distribution system are becoming more interdependent. In order to reduce the wastage of food, and maintain a proper value chain ranging from production to consumption, a technologically advanced traceability is required. Traceability helps to manage the possible risk in the supply chain. Currently, by law in Japan, European Union (EU), and the United States, specific standards for food traceability are mandated internationally.Request to view TOC :There are two type of traceability system namely internal traceability and chain traceability. Internal traceability refers to recording of data within the organization or any separate geographic location. Chain traceability refers to recording data and transferring it through a supply chain among intra and inter organisations. Depending on the type of business, traceability data can be both static and dynamic. Static data is fixed, whereas dynamic data changes over the time. In order to capture, record, store, and share traceability data efficiently, use of softwares such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and database management solutions, cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) solutions are anticipated to lead towards reduced cost and cost-effective operations.Food traceability technology market is primarily driving by the technologically advanced countries, for instance, U.S., Japan, U.K. and others. The technologies are being adopted by the end-users from developing countries due to awareness. Moreover, presently, companies maintain a proper framework of business for optimum level of inventory and smooth operation; hence demand for food traceability technology increasing worldwide.Some of the restraining factors for food traceability technology market include additional cost for traceability technology and privacy issue for data security, since data management, data tracking and security of data is cost-oriented. Moreover, the technologies are product specific; hence different technologies are used for different applications of products, for instance data management and tracking is different in manufacturing to wholesale to retail, also it is different in terms of countable and non-countable food products.There is a huge opportunity for players in countries such as ASEAN countries, Gulf countries to expand their market share in food traceability technology market. Moreover, new smart technology for easy and universal accessibility can bring a new opportunity for the food traceability technology players.Global Food Traceability market is segmented by: technology type, hardware, application, end-user and regionFood Traceability by Technology typeRadio Frequency Identification/Real Time Location System (RFID/RTLS)Global Positioning System (GPS)BarcodesInfraredBiometricsFood Traceability by Hardware TypeSmart Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)1D and 2D scannerThermal printersTags and labelsSensorsFood Traceability by ApplicationCulinary Food ProductReady-to-eat Food ProductsMeat & sea Food ProductsDairy ProductsFood Traceability by End-UsersFood Manufacturer & RetailersWarehouse for Food ProductsGovernment DepartmentsNon-Governmental Organization (NGO) & Cooperative organizationOthers (Defense and security departments)Food Traceability By RegionAsia PacificEuropeNorth AmericaLatin AmericaThe Middle East & AfricaSome of the key players in the food traceability market are Honeywell International, Inc, Cognex Corporation, C.H. Robinson Inc., Zebra Technologies, Motorola Solutions, Inc., MASS Group Inc., IBM Corporation and Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Food Traceability Market SegmentsFood Traceability Market DynamicsHistorical Actual Market Size, 2013 - 2015Food Traceability Market Size & Forecast 2016 to 2022Supply & Demand Value ChainFood Traceability Market Current Trends/Issues/ChallengesCompetition & Companies involvedTechnologyValue ChainFood Traceability Market Drivers and RestraintsRegional analysis for Food Traceability Market includes:North AmericaLatin AmericaEuropeAsia PacificThe Middle East and AfricaRequest to view Sample Report :Report Highlights:Shifting Industry dynamicsIn-depth market segmentationHistorical, current and projected industry size Recent industry trendsKey Competition landscapeStrategies of key players and product offeringsPotential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growthA neutral perspective towards market performanceAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Biological Drugs Market : major players Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., and Others

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According to a new market report published by Persistence Market Research Global Market Study on Biological Drugs: North America to Witness Highest Growth By 2020, the global biological drugs market was valued at US$ 161,056.5 Mn in 2014 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.1% from 2014 to 2020, to reach US$ 287,139.7 Mn by 2020.Biological drugs are typically derived from living cells and are used in the prevention and treatment of various diseases such as cancer, blood disorders, auto-immune diseases, and other medical disorders. Biological drugs have more complex structures compared to that of conventional drugs.Globally, the biological drugs market is witnessing significant growth due to the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and growing geriatric population. In addition, health and awareness initiatives by various government associations are also supporting the growth of the biological drugs market. However, high costs of biological drugs and patent expiry of blockbuster drugs impede the growth of the biological drugs market. Moreover, risks of adverse effects associated with biologic injectable drugs also inhibit the growth of the market.Browse the full Global Market Study on Biological Drugs: North America to Witness Highest Growth By 2020 report @The global biological drugs market is anticipated to grow from an estimated US$ 161,056.5 Mn in 2014 to US$ 287,139.7 Mn by 2020 at a CAGR 10.1% during the forecast period.Download Research Study Sample @North America dominates the global biological drugs market. This is due to increasing use of biological drugs in the treatment of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases in the region. In addition, several clinics in the region are focusing on biological drugs for the treatment of various diseases.The biological drugs market in Europe is growing due to increasing aging population in the region. For instance, according to a UN report, elderly people accounted for 23.2% of the total population in Germany in 2000, and the number is expected to reach 33.2% by 2025. Aging can lead to certain disorders such as age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma, which require effective biological drugs for their treatment.Low manufacturing costs in Asia are attracting biopharmaceutical companies to invest in the region, supporting the growth of the biological drugs market. Moreover, governments of some Asian countries are also supporting the growth of the biological drugs market by providing funds to life sciences research institutes and biotech companies for the construction of R&D and manufacturing facilities.Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc., and Merck & Co., Inc. are some of the leading players in the global biological drugs market. Other major players in the market include Abbott Laboratories, Baxter International Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Eli Lilly and Company, Biogen Idec, and Amgen Inc.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Biopreservation Market size to exceed $9.7bn by 2024

Global Market Insights Inc.

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Biopreservation Market size will reach to USD 9.7 billion by 2024; growing at 13.4% CAGR, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc.Growing number of biobanks for preservation of stem cells and improved acceptance of assisted reproductive technology (ART) will drive global biopreservation market growth. The trend of people suffering from lifestyle diseases will further stimulate industry expansion.Soaring expenditures on medical goods and services, growing disposable income and rising demand for regenerative medicines will also fuel biopreservation market size expansion over the forecast timeframe. Several government initiatives in the form of grants, funds, contracts and other funding systems have accelerated R&D in healthcare. Rapid economic development across the globe will also assist industry expansion. However, lack of stringent laws and ethics will be a major challenge for business growth.Request for a sample of this research report -Global biopreservation market share is segmented into media, equipment and laboratory information management system (LIMS). Equipment segment dominated the industry in 2015, holding around 80% of revenue share owing to its application in bio-preservation of DNA, stem cell, plasma, and tissue research sectors. Biopreservation media market will also experience a surge due to advancements in tissue engineering and regenerative medicines.Applications include regenerative medicines, bio banking, and drug discovery. Bio banking generated highest revenue in 2015 and it will retain its dominance owing to approval of new projects in several developing countries. Regenerative medicine segment should grow with the rising demand for efficient biopreservation techniques.APAC will witness a sustainable growth due to increasing prevalence of chronic illness, unmet healthcare needs and growing awareness regarding preservation of umbilical cord cells. Increasing population base and rising investments in healthcare research will open up great market size expansion opportunities.U.S. leads the industry attributing to 45% of global revenue share. The major driving factors include, the advancement in biobank technology, rising applications of biopreservation across healthcare and rising patient population affected by chronic lifestyle disorders.Browse key industry insights spread across 105 pages with 50 market data tables & 6 figures & charts from the report, Biopreservation Market Size By Product (Equipment, Media, Laboratory Information Management System), By Application (Regenerative Medicine, Biobanking, Drug Discovery), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2016  2024 in detail along with the table of contents:Key insights from the report include: Global biopreservation market size generated revenue of USD 3 billion in 2015 and it is likely to witness robust 13.4% growth in the coming years. U.S. biopreservation market share dominates the industry with USD 1.26 billion in 2015 due to increased demand for diagnosis of chronic diseases, government regulations supporting ethical usage of biological samples and development of novel drugs and therapies in healthcare research. Asia Pacific, with Japan and China biopreservation market size, was USD 564 million in 2015 is set to growth with 15.6% CAGR primarily due to increasing healthcare expenditure and rising chronic illness. Major industry players are Qiagen, Biolife Solutions, Thermo Fisher, Cesca therapeutics, Atlanta Biologicals, Lifeline Scientific, LabVantage Solutions and VWR International. Thermo Fisher Scientific and BioCision were leading industry participants in 2015 due to their wide regional presence and broad product portfolio particularly relating to media, freezers, refrigerators and consumables. Competitors focus on merger and acquisitions, R&D investments and innovation as a part of their growth strategy.Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Jack DavisCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688
Honey Market to witness significant growth, 2016 - 2022

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Honey is a natural product that is widely used for its healing effects and food preservative application. Honey consists of glucose and fructose and has similar sweetness as granulated sugar. It includes chemical properties, it is used for baking and cereal products applications. Honey possess distinctive flavor in comparison to sugar and regular sweeteners, which make consumers more inclined towards honey. There are various type of honey which includes raw honey, crystallized honey, pasteurized honey and dried honey. Honey is used in various applications such as wounds, burns and cough. Honey includes antioxidant that is used as preventive measure from various diseases. Antioxidant capacity of honey is important in many disease conditions. Honey is used to prevent various diseases such as gastrointestinal, inflammatory neoplastic state and cardiovascular. Global honey market is propelled by the growing awareness among consumers related to home remedies coupled with health benefits associated with its consumption. However major factor that hampers the growth of honey market across the globe is the presence of the price gap among different forms of honey.Request to view TOC :Major factor that are expected to drive the honey market is that it is used for direct consumption and as ingredients in a various range of food products. Various promotion and marketing activities are used as medium to reach food service sectors and consumers.in order to further enhance their awareness related to the uses and market opportunities. . However, major factors that are expected to hamper the growth of the global honey market across the globe are crystallization of the honey and increasing adulteration of the honey with sugar syrup.Global Honey market is segmented by: type, and by regionHoney by Type:Date HoneyAcacia HoneyBuckwheat HoneyLinden HoneyFlower HoneyOthersHoney By Region:Asia PacificEuropeNorth AmericaLatin AmericaThe Middle East & AfricaThe global honey market is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period due to rising awareness among consumers related to the health benefits associated with the consumption of the honey. Globally, among all regions, North America is expected to contribute maximum revenue in the global honey market followed by Middle East. In North America, U.S. is expected to account maximum market share in terms of revenue owing to the high consumer awareness related to the health benefits associated with the consumption of honey. However Asia Pacific is expected to exhibit maximum market growth owing to the rising population coupled with growing health awareness among consumers.Major companies that operates in the global honey market are operating in honey market are Hi Tech Natural Products (India) Limited, LITTLE BEE IMPEX, Phondaghat Pharmacy, Honey Sugar Product and Lamex Foods UK Limited. Companies that manufacture honey are primarily launching wide range of honey products that are available in various packaging types that caters to the evolving needs of the customers. Various companies that operates in the global honey market are investing huge amount in advertising and branding in order to increase the market share to the overall honey market.The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Honey Market SegmentsHoney Market DynamicsHistorical Actual Market Size, 2013 - 2015Honey Market Size & Forecast 2016 to 2022Supply & Demand Value ChainHoney Market Current Trends/Issues/ChallengesCompetition & Companies involvedTechnologyValue ChainHoney Market Drivers and RestraintsRegional analysis for Honey Market includes:North AmericaLatin AmericaEuropeAsia PacificThe Middle East and AfricaRequest to view Sample Report :Report Highlights:Shifting Industry dynamicsIn-depth market segmentationHistorical, current and projected industry size Recent industry trendsKey Competition landscapeStrategies of key players and product offeringsPotential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growthA neutral perspective towards market performanceAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Global Pneumatic Equipment Market Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin 2016-2022

Pneumatic Equipment

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MRS Research Group addsGlobal Pneumatic Equipment Market 2016 Share,Size,Trends and Forecast to 2022 Market Research Reportreports to its database.The Available report by QY Research on the global Pneumatic Equipment market is the detailed and thorough analysis of different factors surrounding and influencing Pneumatic Equipment industries all around the world. The report throws light on different boosters, restraints and opportunities and probable threats that exists and expected to arise in future.Created by the team of experts from the Pneumatic Equipment market and made available on MRS Research Group, the report offers an overview of all the key performance indicators of the industry. The analysis covers the industry on the accounts of revenue, volume, wherever applicable and needed.Access Full Report @This Report Pneumatic Equipment report has taken into consideration all the internal and external factors related to Pneumatic Equipment industry. Report has covered the key players of the industry along with current and potential competitors.The report not only highlights the glimpses of Pneumatic Equipment market, but it goes in details of the industry, current scenario, revenues (net ad gross) of the competitors and key players and their position in the market in terms of geography, monetary value and brand value or goodwill.Request For Free Sample Report @This in depth information available in report is coupled with present and future opportunities hiding in the Pneumatic Equipment industry. Report considers the importance of R&D in the Pneumatic Equipment market and fathoms upcoming inventions too. It compares the current status of Pneumatic Equipment industry with the future goals and growth. Possible threats with potential to hinder the growth of Pneumatic Equipment market is been studies in the report to have an all pervasive view of the market.In the given report, made available on MRS Research Group, the expert team has successfully delivered a complete and realistic picture of the future actions, that the Pneumatic Equipment is expected to take. The report covers all question that a business faces in a bid to sustain its industrial position.Table Of Content On Pneumatic Equipment Market (Index) :Chapter One Introduction1.1 Brief Introduction1.2 Development of Industry1.3 Status of IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology2.1 Development of Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of Manufacturing TechnologyBrowse More Report Related On Machinery & Equipments @The machinery and equipment industry consists of establishments involved in producing compressors and pumps, roll mills, steam generators, forest machinery, agricultural and mining equipment and many more.MRS Research group provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Prof Research cover more than 30 industries including energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free : +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@mrsresearchgroup.com
Binary Trading Club

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The Binary Trading Club is now open to new members. For a limited time period only, investors who have an interest in Binary Options and Forex trading can apply to become a member of their exclusive community.In order to become a member of the Binary Trading Club, one has to visit theirwebsite and fill out their form with the relevant information. Once complete, you will be contacted by someone from their member services team. They will ask you a few questions on experience, interests and most importantly, motivations.If they decide that you would be a positive member of the group, they will authorize your membership. Once this is complete, one will receive a complete list of informative education material, recommended brokers and market news and tips.They are also specialists in Binary Options managed accounts. Given that trading binary options and Forex can be quite an extensive and time consuming, they have also vetted a number of services that could monitor your positions and adjust in order for a busy investor to spend their time effectively.For investors who would like to be more hands on with their trading but stillprefer to receive informative trading signals, the club has an extensive listof successful signal providers. They regularly communicate these trading signals to the community.The club is based in the city of London but accepts members from all countries and regions. The community has geographical specific chapters that are best able to meet the demands and requirements of local members. This includes specific discussions around country stocks and forex pairs.Additional Offer:Upon successful application to the club, new members shall receive trading bonus offers from their recommended and trusted broker. This will allow the investor to trade in a risk free manner and hone their skills with all of the other benefits offered by the club.About the Binary Trading Club:Established in 2013, the primary purpose of the Binary Trading Club was to inform, educate and train investors with varying degrees of skill. With their long standing expertise and connections in the market, they were able to cut above the noise and provide only the best advice. Although comprised of many experienced investors, the club is also open to new traders who are just starting out.Binary Trading Club95 Mortimer Street,London,UK,W1W 7GB
Compounding Pharmacies Market size to grow at over 5% CAGR from 2016 to 2024

Global Market Insights Inc.

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Compounding Pharmacies Market size was over USD 6 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow at over 5% CAGR from 2016 to 2024.The growing geriatric population and their improved longevity is anticipated to increase demand for compounded medicine. As per UN estimates, the number of people above 60 years of age is projected to grow from 901 million in 2015 to 1.4 billion in 2030. It is expected to double its size and reach nearly 2.1 billion by 2050.Compounding allows dispensing of medication according to patient specifications in terms of route of administration, composition and dose of medication. The practice of dispensing tailored medicine is widely accepted in regions where availability of standardized drugs is a challenge. The increased acceptance trend of personalized medicine will fuel industry growth.Shortage of drug supply across various regions will boost the industry growth. Amongst others, U.S. alone is facing a shortage of over 300 drugs. For instance, more than one million women go through menopausal phase annually requiring human replacement therapy. Compounded drugs are sought for as an option, when need for critical drugs are not met through commercially available branded drugs.Request for an in-depth table of contents for this report @Convenience of compounded drug administration provides a significant benefit, especially during alleviation of chronic pain associated with cancer where patient is unable to swallow the medication. It is estimated that about 116 million people in U.S. suffer from chronic pain associated with chronic diseases. The drugs are either administered as a transdermal or intravenous preparation. Convenient drug dispensing methods will enable distribution of small and unique doses thus improving the acceptance of compounded medicines.The potential restrain for industry growth should be the unavailability of skilled lab technicians and pharmacists. Furthermore, the pharmacies involved in preparation of injectable incur high cost for purchasing equipment and maintaining a sterile environment with minimal risk of contamination.Based on therapeutic area, compounding pharmacies dispense medication predominantly for pain management, hormone replacement and others. Special preparations for pain management enable delivery of correct dose to a patient without any adverse effects. Pain management dominates the compounding market size and is expected to continue its dominance during forecast period followed by hormone replacement therapy and others.Compounding pharmacies are required to conform with the regulatory guidelines issued by state laws governing the practice. The growing need to strictly comply with the changing regulatory specifications should act as an impediment for industry growth.Increasing Demand for Anti-aging and other cosmetic products is anticipated to drive cosmeceuticals compounding market size. The demand for compounding services in bio-identical hormone replacement and other such sub-therapeutic areas is increasing gradually. In U.S., out of about 56,000 community-based pharmacies, approximately 7,500 pharmacies are specialized in compounding services with majority of the pharmacists engaged in formulation of compounded drugs.U.S. dominates the region with revenue of over $5.6 billion in 2015. It is expected to have a stable growth due to increasing geriatric population, higher life expectancy and increasing per capita income of the citizens. Regulating the compounding pharmacies, FDA needs manufacturing facilities to comply with good manufacturing practices and takes disciplinary action against any reports of drug contamination in the country.Europe is the second largest market for compounded pharmacies. Improved healthcare infrastructure and rise in number of skilled pharmacists is expected to have a positive impact on industry growth.Asia-Pacific is anticipated to witness a double digit growth with countries such as Singapore and Australia driving the market growth. Strong economic growth and improved R& D activities will drive the regional market growth. Products used for pain management are expected to stimulate market growth whereas, lack of reimbursement policies will hindrance regional industry growth.Some of the major players in compounding pharmacies include Fagron, PharMEDium Services, B. Braun Melsungen AG Company, Institutional Pharmacy Solutions, Triangle Compounding Pharmacies, Cantrell Drug Company, Fresenius Kabi AG and Lorraines Pharmacy.Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Jack DavisCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688
Food Safety Testing Market Revenue, By Contaminant, 2015  2021

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Zion Market Research has published a new report titled Food safety testing Market (traditional and rapid) by Technology, (pathogens, toxins, GMOs, pesticides and others) by contaminant, (meat & poultry, dairy, process food, fruit & vegetables and others) by Application - Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015  2021 According to the report, global demand for food safety testing market was valued at USD 4.8 billion in 2015, is expected to reach USD 8.04 billion in 2021 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 7.8% between 2016 and 2021.Get a copy of free Sample Report @Globally, food safety is major concern in consumers due to constant threat of foodborne illness. Food safety testing is necessary to achieve a certificate of analysis of raw food products and ready to eat foods at several stages of food processing. Customers are provided with food safety labels on food products to ensure quality and safety of products.The global food safety testing market has been presenting tremendous growth with increasing foodborne illness worldwide. The market growth is driven by growing consumer awareness associated with food safety matters. Worldwide all regions experiencing food disease epidemic cases, due occurrence of microbial pathogens and chemical contaminant. The key market players are experiencing escalating demand for food safety testing owing health issues and increasing awareness amongst customers.Know more before buying this report @Food safety testing market is segmented based on technology, contaminant, application, and by region. Different technologies used for testing food safety include traditional technologies and rapid technologies. Due to some limitations of traditional food safety methods, rapid food testing technology accounted for significant share in 2015 market. Pathogen is a leading contaminant segment in food safety market. Furthermore, GMO testing segment is expected to fastest growing segment over forecast period. The key application covered under this study includes Meat & poultry, dairy, process food, Fruit & vegetables, and others. Among all, meat & poultry were the largest application segments that accounted for a significant share of global food safety testing market in 2015 and are expected to be the fastest growing segment for the predicted coming years.Geographically, North America dominated the food safety testing market in 2015. The biggest share of this region can be attributed to various factors such as increased prevalence of food disease and rising government regulations. Europe is a one of the major player in the food safety testing market due to increased awareness about government food safety policies in this region. Asia Pacific represents a region with a very large potential for food safety testing market due to increases emphasis on food securities in this regions.Purchase a direct copy of report with TOC @Biocontrol Systems Incorporated, 3M Company, Roka Bioscience, Bio-Rad Laboratories Incorporated, Agilent Technologies Incorporated, Douglas Scientific, IDDEX Laboratories INC, and Ecolab Incorporated are some of the leading profiles in the food safety testing market.The report segments the global food safety testing market as:Food Safety Testing Market: Technology Segment AnalysisTraditionalRapidFood Safety Testing Market: Contaminate Segment AnalysisPathogensToxinsGMOsPesticidesOthersBrowse the full report atFood Safety Testing Market: Application Segment AnalysisMeat & poultryDairyProcess foodFruit & vegetablesOthersFood Safety Testing Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout UsZion Market Research is a market intelligence company providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Zion Market Research experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants uses proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact US:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
Personal Mobility Devices Market : Facts, Figures and Analytical Insights 2015  2023

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This report on the personal mobility devices market studies the current as well as future prospects of the market globally. The stakeholders of this report include companies and intermediaries engaged in the manufacture and commercialization of various personal mobility devices such as wheelchairs as well as new entrants planning to enter this market. This report comprises an elaborate executive summary along with a market snapshot providing overall information of various segments and sub-segments considered in the scope of the study. This section also provides the overall information and data analysis of the global personal mobility devices market with respect to the leading market segments based on major products and/or devices and geographies.The global personal mobility devices market has been studied based on major product/device segments, and their regional as well as national markets. Based on device type, the global market has been categorized into two major segments: medical mobility aids & ambulatory devices and medical furniture & bathroom safety products. The medical mobility aids & ambulatory devices segment has been further categorized into six sub-segments: wheelchairs, scooters, canes & crutches, walkers, stair lifts, and others. The medical furniture & bathroom safety products segment has also been categorized into five sub-segments: patient lifts, medical beds, bars & railings, commodes & shower chairs, and others. The market for these segments and sub-segments has been extensively analyzed based on their utility, effectiveness, sales, and geographic presence. Market revenue in terms of USD million and volume in terms of number of units for the period from 2013 to 2023 along with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR %) from 2015 to 2023 are provided for all segments and sub-segments, considering 2014 as the base year.Read Complete Report @The market overview section of the report explores the market dynamics such as drivers, restraints, and opportunities that currently have a strong impact on the personal mobility devices market and could influence the market in the near future. Market attractiveness analysis has been provided in the market overview section in order to explain the intensity of competition in the market across different geographies. Porters Five Forces analysis is also explained in this section to understand the personal mobility devices market considering the different parameters that have an impact on the sustainability of the companies operating in the market. The competitive scenario among different market players is evaluated through market share analysis in the competitive landscape section of the report. All these factors would help market players to take strategic decisions in order to strengthen their positions and expand their shares in the global market.Geographically, the personal mobility devices market has been segmented into five regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Each geographic market for personal mobility devices has been further categorized into major device segments and sub-segments; these segments represent the global market. In addition, Asia Pacific has been segmented into national markets such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Rest of Asia Pacific. The market of each country in Asia Pacific has been further categorized into device segments and sub-segments. Market revenue in terms of USD million, and volume in terms of number of units for the period from 2013 to 2023 along with CAGR % from 2015 to 2023 are provided for all the regions and nations, and their products/device markets, considering 2014 as the base year.Enquiry For This Report @The recommendations section included in the report would assist existing market players in expanding their market shares, and new companies in establishing their presence in the global market. The report also profiles major players in the personal mobility devices market based on various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, business strategies, product portfolio, and recent developments. Major players profiled in this report include Amigo Mobility International, Inc., Argo Medical, ArjoHuntleigh, Drive Medical, Graham-Field Health Products Incorporated, Hill-Rom Holdings, Inc., Invacare Corporation, Otto Bock Healthcare GmbH, Patterson Medical Holdings, Inc., Permobil AB, Pride Mobility Products Corporation, Stryker Corporation, and Sunrise Medical LLC.The global personal mobility devices market is segmented as follows:Global Personal Mobility Devices Market, by Device TypeMedical Mobility Aids & Ambulatory DevicesWheelchairsManual WheelchairsElectric Wheelchairs1. Standard2. Rehab3. Obese/BariatricScootersCanes & CrutchesWalkersStair LiftsOthersMedical Furniture & Bathroom Safety ProductsPatient LiftsMedical BedsBars & RailingsCommodes & Shower ChairsOthersRequest a Sample Copy of the Report @Global Personal Mobility Devices Market, by GeographyNorth AmericaEuropeAsia Pacific1. Japan2. South Korea3. China4. Rest of Asia PacificLatin America (LATAM)Middle East and Africa (MEA)About MRRSEMRRSE stands for Market Research Reports Search Engine, the largest online catalog of latest market research reports based on industries, companies, and countries. MRRSE sources thousands of industry reports, market statistics, and company profiles from trusted entities and makes them available at a click. Besides well-known private publishers, the reports featured on MRRSE typically come from national statistics agencies, investment agencies, leading media houses, trade unions, governments, and embassies.Corporate Office State Tower 90 State Street, Suite 700 Albany, NY 12207,United States
FMI Releases New Report on the Fluorite Market 2015-2025

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Fluorite, also known as fluorspar is a popular mineral that is available naturally in all colors of spectrum. It is the mineral form of calcium fluorite that belongs to the halide minerals. It is a visible mineral both in ultraviolet as well as visible light. Pure fluorite is colorless and the variations in the color are caused by impurities. The common colors of fluorite include purple, blue, yellow, green, and blue. Fluorite has an attractive cleavage habits and the cleavage, which is perfect and parallel to octahedral faces, can be peeled off in some cases to make a smooth crystal perfect octahedron. Fluorite is known to be one of the famous fluorescent minerals. The word fluorescent has arrived from fluorite mineral. Fluorite crystallizes in a cubic design. The major reserves for fluorite is found in China which accounts for around 24 million tons in inner Jiangxi, Mongolia, Hunan, Zhejiang and Fujian provinces. These reserves make about 80% of the national total of fluorite reserves. As China has introduced many measures to protect the fluorite reserves, the output for fluoride has remained steady.Fluorite generally has lapidary and ornamental uses. Fluorite can be drilled into jewelry, however it is not used as a semiprecious stone due to its relative softness. In industries, fluorite is usually used in the production of certain glasses and enamels and used as flux for smelting. Three different grades of fluorspar include acid, ceramic and metallurgical. The pure form of fluorite is used for manufacture of hydrofluoric acid, which acts as an intermediate source for most of the fine chemicals containing fluorine. Transparent fluorite lenses have low dispersion and so lenses that are manufactured using them have low dispersion and they exhibit very less chromatic aberration. This property of fluorite mineral makes it important in telescopes and microscopes.The major driving factors for fluorite market are the growing chemical industry and increasing use of fluorine in the glass industry. The chemical industry and glass industry accounts for the major share of the fluorine demand globally. The other market that has applications of fluorite includes the metallurgy and aluminum smelting industry among others.Request Free Report Sample@The key segments for fluorite market include North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World (RoW). Western Europe, China and the U.S. are said to be the major consumers of fluorite worldwide. Western Europe and the U.S account for major demand for acid fluorite that is used in the manufacture of hydrofluoric acid. The cement and glass industry in China generate the largest demand for fluorite and are expected to drive the market globally.The key companies profiled in the report include Centralfluor Industries Group and Zhejiang Wuyi Shenlong Flotation Co Ltd., Sinochem Lantian Co., Ltd, Inner Mongolia Xiang Zhen Mining Group Ltd., China Kings Resources Group Co., Ltd. DO-Fluoride and Zhejiang Yongtai Technology has started its expansion in the fluorite field. Multiple fluorite enterprises are focusing on strengthening the integration of downstream and upstream industry chain of fluorite reserves for avoiding price volatility and to achieve higher value for its products. Mexichem enterprise has large reserves of fluorite that produces fluoroelastomers and fluoropolymers for benefits. Minersa is said to be the second largest producer of fluorite with production capacity of 380 Kt/a. It has a fluorite-fluorine industrial chemical chain.Visit For TOC@About Us Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Aluminium Foil Packaging Market by Region, 2016 - 2022

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http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/9803

Aluminium foil provides various benefits to the food and packaging industries. The consumers can heat or freeze food items in the foil container directly. Aluminium foil packaging material is a part of the flexible packaging material and is generally formed using aluminium sheets. Aluminium foil can be utilized to wrap around any product for packaging functions. It is produced through the regular casting and cold calling. Aluminium foil packaging is a sort of packaging, which arranges a resistant barrier to safeguard food, beverage, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and helps in waste reduction. Aluminium packaging is extremely corrosion-resistant and chemically neutral. Moreover, it is hygienic and non-toxic in nature. The raw materials for aluminium foil packaging is produced utilizing aluminium sheets and it is a part of stretchable packaging material. The major users of aluminium foil packaging include pharmaceuticals, food and beverage industries. Aluminium foil wrap is produced through regular casting and cold rolling and thus it is favorable to be utilized to enclose around any product for packaging functions. The aluminium foil packaging market has showcased an upliftment in its revenue over the past few years and is likely to grow at a higher pace over the next few years till 2022.Request Sample Report@Robust economic growth along with rising middle population with inclining personal disposable income is anticipated to intensify the growth of global aluminium foil packaging market during the forecast period. The change in life style which includes changed food habits has led to inclining demand for packaging. Besides this, robust demand for aluminium foil packaging in snacks and chocolate industry are also strengthening the growth of aluminium foil packaging market all across the globe. Some of the major opportunities in global aluminium foil packaging market includes technological development to enhance the product quality, reduction in plants lossess, inclination in the obtainability of foils in different forms for crucial mass consumption usages and progress in the exportability of aluminium foils. The global aluminium foil packaging market is foreseen to observe a robust CAGR during the projected period.The Geographically, the global aluminium foil packaging industry can be divided by major regions which include North America, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific region, Japan, Middle East and Africa. American region captured the highest share in revenue terms in 2014. Followed by it, Europe and Asia-Pacific region grabbed the market. The North American aluminium foil packaging market is likely to be dominant during the forecast period. This is majorly due to change in technology in order to enhance the product quality by the manufacturers in the region. Apart from this, inclining demand for packaged food in Asian region is anticipated to incline the growth of Aluminium foil packaging market in Asia by 2022.Download TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report:Some of the key vendors identified across the value chain of aluminium foil packaging includes Ardagh Group, ACM Carcano, Tetra Pack, Zenith, Jasch Foils, Assan Aluminyum, Flexifoil, Amcor, and others. The aluminium foil packaging manufacturers are focusing on development of varieties of packaging in order to gain the competitive advantage in the global aluminium foil packaging market.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Research report covers the Chromatography Instrumentation Market share and Growth, 2015-2025

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Chromatography is the most essential and well known separation technique which is extensively used across various industries. Chromatography is referred to as a technique that is used for the purification of biomolecules in which the components that are to be separated are distributed between two phases. Among these two phases, one is stationary phase and other is a mobile phase. All types of chromatography systems work on the same principle i.e., separation of sample mixture into stationary phase (solid or liquid supported on solid) and mobile phase (liquid or gas). Over the years chromatography technique and its instrument are being used in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies for the development of pure drug molecule. The instruments that are utilized in the chromatography have benefitted the researches due to their ability to separate, analyze and purify a molecule in an efficient and effective manner. These chromatography instrumentation techniques are used in various application areas such as pharmaceutical, biotechnology, food production, diagnostics, genetic engineering, drug discovery and water analysis.Request Free Report Sample@The global market for chromatography instrumentation can be segmented as follows:By systemGas chromatography systemLiquid chromatography systemHigh pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC)Ultra high pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC)Low pressure liquid chromatography (LPLC)OthersIon-exchange chromatographyAffinity chromatographySuper critical fluid chromatographyColumn chromatographyThin layer chromatographyBy consumables and instrumentsColumnsSyringe filtersVialsTubingsDetectorsAutosamplersPumpsFraction collectorsOthersBy end usersBiotechnology and pharmaceuticals industriesHospitals and research laboratoriesAgriculture and food industriesOthers (cosmetic industries, environmental agencies and nutraceutical companies)The market for chromatography instrumentation holds an immense potential due to increasing number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Rising government investments for research purpose, expansion of chromatography companies in the Asian region and increasing collaborations among the existing players in the market are some of the other propelling factors for this market. The chromatography instrumentation market is also witnessing huge advancements in the design of column which is consequently raising the demand for development of better analytical resins and reagents. Additionally, emergence of green chromatography, usage of nanomaterial in chromatography and increasing usage of chromatography instrument for monoclonal antibody purification are some of the other opportunities that are fuelling the growth of this market. However, high cost of the chromatography systems and economic slowdown across the globe has resulted in decreased sales of chromatography systems. In addition need of skilled personnel for operates chromatography instrument is a factor which might restrict its demand in the global chromatography instrumentation market.Geographically, North America accounts for the largest share of the chromatography instrumentation market followed by the European region. The dominance of these regions in this market is seen due to growing government investments and funding for research. Further, augmented research and development activities of drugs and biologics and increasing number of conferences on chromatography are some of the key drivers of this industry. However, in the near future the U.S market is expected to decline its market share owing to the market maturity. Asia-Pacific region is expected to show healthy growth in the near future due to expansion of chromatography companies in the regions of India, China, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. Additionally, several major pharmaceutical companies are also increasingly outsourcing their drug and development services especially in the Asian region which is indentified as another major driver that is augmenting the demand of chromatography reagents in this region.Visit For TOC@Major players operating in this market includes Agilent Technologies, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Bio-Rad Laboratories, GE Healthcare, Life Technologies Corporation, Pall Corporation, Regis Technologies, Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, Waters Corporation, Helena Laboratories, Phenomenex, Inc. WWR International, Tosoh Corporation and others.About Us Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Wood Pellet Market To Make Great Impact In Near Future by 2025

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In order to meet the increasing demand for energy and fossil fuels alternative along with intensifying concerns for greenhouse gas (GHG), the demand for global wood pellet market is rapidly escalating. Wood pellet is a solid fuel that is produced by compressing biomass or organic matter. Usually, it is made from waste timber like sawdust, residues of forest and various industrial by products. Its length is 1-2 cm and generally the diameter is 6, 8, 10, or 12mm. At greatest, it is possible to produce 25mm wood pellet. Being extremely thick, it is produced at low moisture, which allows them to burn with high combustion efficiency. Over the other types of solid biomass available, feasibility in transportation, storability and high energy density, among many others are the advantages of using wood pellet and so, it is used as fuels for residential & commercial heating, cooking and generating power.Wood Pellet Market: Drivers & RestraintsIncreasing consumption of wood pellets and the policy support for heating/CHP application (either large scale or small scale plant) is the main driver for the wood pellet market. The increasing (heating) oil prices, carbon dioxide price, concerns over climatic change, demand for large scale electricity production gives the potential scope for the growth of wood pellet market. However, the fluctuation in feedstock prices and limitation of the availability of woody biomass are the major constraints for the wood pellet market. Other factors hindering the growth of wood pellet market are logistical barriers for the transportation, competition with natural gas, coal and other fossil fuels and fulfilling technical quality standards.Request Free Report Sample@Wood Pellet Market: SegmentationOn the basis of the feedstock, the global wood pellet market can be segmented into Forest and wood waste resources, Agricultural residues & waste and Energy crops. On the basis of types of pellet heating appliances, it is segmented into free standing pellet stoves, pellet stove inserts and pellet boilers.On the basis of application, the global wood pellet market is segmented intoIndustrial pellet for CHP/district heatingIndustrial pellet for co-firingPellet for heating residential/commercialOthersThe wood pellet market can also be segmented on the basis of density variance which is different for different brand as well as bags in which they are packed.Wood Pellet Market: Region-wise OutlookGlobal wood pellet market is foreseen to witness the highest growth in Europe, currently accounting for almost 80% of global consumption, followed by U.S. and South Korea. The export of wood pellet are mainly done by Russia, U.S. and Canada. South America, South Africa and Australia are the emerging regions for becoming the potential exporters of the wood pellet market. As per our in-depth analysis by 2020, the annual demand for woody biomass would rise to 305 million tons. Owing to this, the demand for global wood pellet market is anticipated to reach double digit million tons during the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Wood Pellet Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players of the global wood pellet market are Corinth Wood Pellets, New England Wood Pellets, Energex, OUOsulaGraanul, the subsidiary of AS Graanul Invest, Natures Flame, Green Circle Cottondale, Weyerhaeuser, Mitsubishi Corporation and many others.About Us Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Magnetic Materials Market to Witness Steady Growth During the Forecast Period 2015-2025

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Magnetic material are objects that can be magnetized or naturally hold magnetic properties. According to the ease of magnetization, magnetic materials can be classified into hard and soft. Hard magnetic materials retain their magnetism even in the absence of an applied magnetic field. Hard magnetic materials are difficult to magnetize and demagnetize. On the other hand, soft magnetic materials can be easily magnetized and demagnetized. They lose their magnetism when an external magnetic field is removed.Demand for effective utilization of electricity and faster transmission of data, and decreasing size of technological devices have provided an impetus to the magnetic material market.Request Free Report Sample@Magnetic Materials Market: Drivers & RestraintsEnvironmental concerns, government support & incentives, increasing demand from end use industries, such as demand in automotive industry for electric vehicles, demand in medical devices for body scanners and others are the driving factors for the growth of the magnetic material market. Additionally, rapid industrialization, specifically in emerging economies and demand for alternative power sources, such as water turbine and wind mill are also driving the demand for magnetic material market. However, the variation in the price of raw material can be a restraining factor in the growth of the magnetic material market.Magnetic Materials Market: SegmentationOn the basis of types, the global magnetic material can be broadly segmented into soft magnetic material and hard or permanent magnet. In 2014, permanent magnet accounted for more than fifty percent of market share of the global magnetic materials market in terms of volume.On the basis of application, the global magnetic material market has largest applications in automotive, industrial and electronics segment. The automotive segment is projected to have the highest growth rate during the forecast period.Magnetic Materials Market: Region-wise OutlookIn terms of region, Asia Pacific is anticipated to have an attractive growth for magnetic material market as various multinational companies shifting their manufacturing set-ups to this region. China has the highest automobile production rate according to the 2014 automobile production rate of OICA which, in turn, is a factor behind the growing demand of magnetic material market. China and India are projected to be the dominant countries for the global magnetic material market.Visit For TOC@Magnetic Materials Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players for magnetic material market are Arnold Magnetic Technologies, Hitachi Metals Ltd., Molycorp Inc., Electron Energy Corporation, Lynas Corporation Ltd., Tengam Engineering Inc. and many others.About Us Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
OPDE begins construction of a new 5MWp solar farm in the United Kingdom

- The construction will be carried out between October and December of 2016, and at its completion, the new solar farm will generate enough electricity to provide more than 1,300 homes every year.- With this new solar farm, located in the county of North Yorkshire, OPDE is near to meet 100MW of built solar photovoltaic capacity in the United Kingdom.OPDE, a multinational solar company specialising in the development, investment, construction and operation of solar photovoltaic farms, is going to begin the construction of a new 5 MWp solar farm near the little municipality of Low Bentham, North Yorkshire County, north of the country.According to the information given by the company, it is expected that the works will begin next October and are to be completed this year. Once connected to the grid, the new plant will generate each year the equivalent energy consumption of 1,335 homes and will avoid the emission of approximately 49,400 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere during its lifetime.Once the new plant is completed, OPDE will have accumulated near 100MWp photovoltaic built in England, a country in which the company has increased considerably its activity in the years 2015 and 2016.This is mainly due to two factors: the bet that the country has made for solar photovoltaic energy; and the extensive experience of the multinational company in projects located in Italy, Spain, Mexico, USA or Chile, among other countries, which has not gone unnoticed by the major agents of the local energy market.Other projectsLast June, the company connected in England three new solar farms of 5 MW each located in the municipalities of Sittingbourne (Kent County); Langar (Nottinghamshire County), and Crewkerne (Somerset County).With more than a decade of history, OPDE currently keeps solar photovoltaic development projects in excess of 800 MW distributed throughout the world.Established in 2005, OPDE Group is one of the pioneering corporations that has helped develop the photovoltaic industry. In the past ten years, the company has effectively grown in terms of corporate size, global expansion and technological development.The group focuses mainly on the design, construction and operation of reliable, safe and competitive renewable energy solutions.Argentum, 2 Queen Caroline Street W6 9DX LondonUK+ 44 (0) 208 323 8000info@opde.net
Stevia Market expected to grow at a single-digit CAGR during 2014 to 2020

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-38

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Future Market Insights (FMI), with sharp focus on emerging regions, delivers key insights on the global stevia market in its recent report titled, Stevia Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2014 - 2020. According to the report, the global stevia market is projected to grow at a single-digit CAGR during the forecast period, accounting for US $ 565.2 Mn by 2020. Shifting consumer preference for natural sweeteners is a major factor driving growth of this market. Additionally, stevia extracts are finding increasing application in soft drinks and juices, ice creams and various other products. This is attributed to its high-intensity natural sweetness properties. Due to these factors, share of the stevia market is expected to account for around 15% of the overall sweetener market by 2020.The global stevia market is sub-segmented on the basis of type into liquid, powdered and leaf form. The powdered stevia sub-segment is projected to account for around 65.4% share of the total stevia market by 2020, owing to ease of availability and use. The liquid stevia sub-segment on the other hand, is expected to record a CAGR of around 9.0% during the forecast period.Request Free Report Sample@All forms of stevia extracts are extensively used in end-use industries such as dairy, bakery, confectionery, beverages, packaged food, snacks and others. Increasing introduction of products with stevia-based sweetener ingredients in various end-use industries is expected to bolster growth of the global stevia market by 2020. Increasing popularity of such products owing to growing modern retail, urbanization, awareness and health concerns and changing preferences among consumers are major factors driving growth of this market.Apart from application in the food and beverages industry, introduction of products with stevia-based sweeteners across end-use industries such as bakery and confectionery is expected to bolster growth of the global stevia market by 2020. Furthermore, the global stevia market is driven by the need for effective alternatives for artificial sugar-based products owing to changing consumer lifestyle, increasing product visibility in urban areas and approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for rebaudioside A as an ingredient in food products in European countries.FMI analyst Vipassa K sheds light on why stevia extracts will become a mainstream ingredient in the global food and beverages industry in the near future. Increasing demand for alternatives to synthetic or artificial sweeteners due to health concerns, coupled with rising demand for plant-based sweeteners is projected to fuel growth of the stevia market over the next five to six years, she said.Visit For TOC@Furthermore, use of stevia extracts with other ingredients such as monk fruit as a blend to be used in various food and beverage products and increasing consumer preference for products with natural ingredient is a key trend expected to drive growth of the stevia market at a significant single-digit CAGR during the forecast period.About Us Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Uschi Ackermann's and Pug Sir Henry's Charity Auction at Ketterer Kunst in Germany

Uschi Ackermann and Ben Neumann with his VITA assistance dog Quest (Foto: T. Tremper)

www.ketterer-internet-auction.com

Munich, 20 September 2016 (kk)  It has to be the biggest private collection of large factices of renowned perfume classics in the world that the PR lady Uschi Ackermann, mistress of Germany's most famous pug Sir Henry, has compiled over the years. The widow of Gerd Kafer, delicatessen king and organizer of legendary parties, is now going to put the noble flasks into the service of a good cause.The auction house Ketterer Kunst will offer Uschi Ackermann's complete collection of around 300 large-size perfume flasks in Munich on 7 December 2016. Proceeds will go to VITA, an organization that trains assistance dogs for disabled people. I decided in favor of VITA assistance dogs, because I have found so much inspiration from Ben Neumann, an eleven-year old blind boy and his VITA-trained dog Quest. Sir Henry and I spent a lot of time with them and it is so astounding to see how much is possible with a good animal friend at your side, says Uschi Ackermann, who has made countless perfume promotions during her 30 years as PR consultant for international cosmetics companies.Robert Ketterer, owner and CEO of the renowned German auction house, which sold the furnishings and equipment of the famous restaurant 'Kafer-Schanke' in 2005, was enthusiastic on the spot: Assistance dogs make the lives of so many people easier, so I am very happy to contribute with this auction. He continues: The sale of the well-kept flacons will be surely met with a lot interest. I am convinced that the proceeds will help immensely, as the sale is a unique opportunity for both collectors and perfume lovers. Especially as many of the flasks are no longer available, says the auctioneer.All flacons can be viewed at Ketterer Kunst. Ben Neumann will open the auction with a short speech. On the day of the auction the bakery Grimminger will provide guests with Christmas cookies and stollen, while Delicatessen Kafer will donate Christmas punch and sparkling wine. The auction catalog with images of all bottles - the cover design comes from the former Montessori student Terence Tremper - will be available at Ketterer Kunst as of mid November.Preview4 - 6 December, Ketterer Kunst, Joseph-Wild-Str. 18, 81829 Munich, GermanyAuction7 December, Ketterer Kunst, Joseph-Wild-Str. 18, 81829 Munich, GermanySince it was founded in 1954, Ketterer Kunst has become established as one of Germany's biggest auction houses dealing in Fine Art and Rare Books, with its headquarters in Munich and a branch in Hamburg. Representative offices in Berlin, Heidelberg, Dusseldorf, as well as in Modena (Italy), the Benelux Union, France, Switzerland and in Los Angeles (USA) have substantially contributed to the company's success. In addition, exhibitions, special thematic and charity auctions, as well as monthly online auctions atare regular events at Ketterer Kunst. Robert Ketterer is owner and CEO of Ketterer Kunst.Press inquiries:Ketterer KunstJoseph-Wild-Str. 1881829 MunchenMichaela Derra M.A.Telefon: +49-(0)89-55244-152Fax: +49-(0)89-55244-177E-Mail: m.derra@kettererkunst.deClient inquiries:Ketterer KunstJoseph-Wild-Str. 1881829 MunchenTel. +49-(0)55244-444Fax.: +49-(0)55244-177E-mail: infomuenchen@kettererkunst.de
Summary: Webhosting provider Bitpalace launches an affiliate marketing program to promote its web space offering. The idea is as simple as it is successful. Even on the first day, many affiliates have begun signing up for the program. Body: Chicago, September 20, 2016. For almost a year now, Bitpalace has been modernizing its service and its marketing, focusing all of its efforts on a single product: the Bitpalace Business Booster. The Bitpalace 
SeaPort Airlines, an 8-year-old commuter carrier that tried to carve a niche serving subsidized routes to small regional airports, will ground its flights Tuesday as it faces liquidation in bankruptcy.

The airline's bid to reorganize collapsed this month after the airline learned it would lose a key contract and a line of credit helping keep it afloat. A judge on Tuesday ordered the airline's Chapter 11 bankruptcy to be converted to a Chapter 7 liquidation effective at noon on Wednesday.

An attorney for the airline's creditors said its fleet would be grounded by 6 p.m. Tuesday.

"This is certainly not the result hoped for by SeaPort's employees or its creditors who have patiently cooperated as the company has tried to reinvent itself," said Douglas Pahl, a partner at Perkins Coie LLP and attorney for the airline's unsecured creditors. "This is further evidence of the difficulties facing those attempting to service rural, underserved communities."

Employees would be paid through Tuesday, Pahl said.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the company said customers with tickets for future flights can apply for a refund through their credit card company.

"This is a very sad day for our employees, shareholders, and the communities we serve," SeaPort President Tim Sieber said in the statement. I would like extend my heartfelt appreciation to the employee team that I have been honored to lead and who delivered industry leading operational performance. While we made great strides, a successful financial reorganization did not appear possible and we were forced to make the difficult decision to cease operations."

SeaPort was founded in 2008 and was named for its flights between Portland and Seattle's Boeing Field. It later restructured its business around serving small airports from regional hubs.

It most recently operated flights between Portland and Pendleton and it served several smaller airports from a hub in Memphis, Tennessee. The commuter airline previously said it planned to continue operating as it refocused its efforts around its hubs in Portland and Memphis.

It also recently served North Bend from Portland International Airport, but stopped flights on that route in March.

In a court filing, the airline said it would lose its contract to fly the federally-subsidized route between Portland and Pendleton to a competitor. It had planned to cease operations at Portland International Airport as it continued its reorganization, but it lost a key line of credit and was unable to find replacement financing to continue operations.

The East Oregonian newspaper reported Pendleton had decided to replace SeaPort with Boutique Air, a San Francisco-based airline.

The airline operated five leased aircraft, two of which were stationed in Portland and three of which were stationed in Memphis. It sought permission from the court to complete operations Tuesday so each plane would be at its home base when it entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings.

The Federal Aviation Administration fined the airline $500,000 earlier this year for operating three planes that hadn't been inspected. The airline said then it wouldn't affect the reorganization effort.

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com

503-294-5034

@enjus
cadet_exterior.jpg

Cadet says its new owner will retain the Vancouver factory and more than 100 employees there.

(Hutch Johnson/Cadet)

Electric heater company Cadet Manufacturing said Wednesday it has sold the Vancouver business to an Irish company called Glen Dimplex.

The 59-year-old company had continued to be owned by one of its founders, longtime Cadet chief executive Dick Anderson. Now 87, Anderson said he opted to sell now given his age and the absence of anyone else in his family eager to run the business.

The companies didn't report terms of their transaction but Cadet said Glen Dimplex will retain the Cadet name, its Vancouver factory, and the 109 full-time employees who work there, at least "for the foreseeable future."

"They have our type of culture," Anderson said. "They have a strong need to use this as a steppingstone into the United States."

Anderson will remain with the business as a consultant following the deal, and current president Hutch Johnson will become Cadet's chief executive.

Cadet endured bankruptcy and a recall of 1.9 million heaters during the 1990s after federal authorities connected its products to more than 300 malfunctions, resulting in a string of fires linked to four deaths. Then, in 2006, Cadet sold its building and land to the Port of Vancouver in a settlement over industrial pollution on the property, linked to the company's operations there in the 1970s.

Cadet's business has survived, though, and the company says its sales are up more than 50 percent since 2010. Home Depot and other national retailers carry its heaters. Anderson said Glen Dimplex's offerings in the U.S. are currently limited to electric fireplaces, and the Cadet deal represents an opportunity for the Irish company to expand.

Amid Cadet's setbacks, Anderson said the company, its suppliers and clients continued to look ahead: "We never had an attitude that there wasn't going to be a next chapter," he said.

-- Mike Rogoway

mrogoway@oregonian.com

503-294-7699

@rogoway
By JOAN HARVEY

Among the great pleasures of travel are eating and shopping.

For people who like to cook, that shopping has a very definite mission: finding the rare, exotic and often beautiful implements to use back home to create wonderful food. A friend, for instance, spent a year planning a trip to China, and from the beginning the top of her list of must-do's was hunting down old, wooden moon cake molds in Beijing. Any trip to Paris has to include time scrounging through the cavernous, dusty tunnels of the legendary E. Dehillerin.

But you don't have to go that far to have the fun; most of Oregon's popular tourist towns have small, independent cookware shops. The amazing and wonderful thing about them is that you can find objects in these shops that aren't available in the large, urban, chain cookware stores. In a tiny, long-gone shop in Ashland, I found a lovely copper cataplana, a pan used for making the Portuguese stew of the same name. I had to buy it, even though we were late to a play. We made it in time, but I had to sit through the entire play with the pan, in a very noisy bag, on my lap.

It was worth it, though; it opened up a whole, delicious world of cataplanas for me. Inevitably, every time I make the pork and mussel cataplana from the recipe that came with the pan, I can't stop thinking of "King Lear."

While some of the shops may look a bit too cute, serious cooks would be foolish to turn up their noses at them. They are usually staffed by owner-buyers who are experienced and knowledgeable cooks, who have personally tested all the merchandise, and can tell you where in town (or in the state) to get the best ingredients to use with your purchase. If the shop doesn't have a particular item, the owner-buyer-clerk will happily tell you where you can probably find it.

Recipes included with this story: Pork and Mussels (or Clams) Cataplana; Shrimp Cataplana.

People who like to cook naturally have friends who like to cook, so these small shops are perfect for finding the appropriate gifts to bring home. Who wouldn't prefer a handmade bowl, or even an unusual oven mitt or silly gadget, over yet another smart-aleck T-shirt?

I'm sure there are some shops, hidden away in pretty towns, that I don't know about, but here are three of my favorites:

Tu-tu-tu Kitchenware Cottage in Newport: When a friend and I wandered into Tu-tu-tu Kitchenware Cottage in Newport's Nye Beach area one day between Christmas and New Year's, we immediately made utter fools of ourselves; it was like Christmas all over again, only better. The first thing I spotted was the coeur a la creme mold that I'd been looking for all over. It was not only cheaper than the only ones I could find in Portland, but better; it had a rim at the bottom to hold it up out of the drain. There were gorgeous Le Creuset pieces (on sale!); beautiful, serious, French deBuyer black steel pans; curious gadgets; and practical, no-nonsense utensils.

In the past couple years since that first visit, I've found a French lame (for scoring bread dough), a copper zabaglione pot (infinitely useful for other things), a silicon boiling bag, several Le Creuset treasures, ingenious cloth cut-outs that go between frying pans to protect them, and many, many gifts. When I gave a friend a nostalgic paper "cake topper," she was so enchanted by it that she immediately dispatched another friend to the beach to buy up all that were left.

Jody George owns the 650-square-foot store with her husband, Mar Lehrman. He was a chef for different Transcendental Meditation venues, often supervising 5,000 meals a day. George has always been a passionate home cook and is the store's buyer and manager, bookkeeper, display designer, cleaning service, and general Jane-of-all-trades. She travels extensively (she also co-owns Jovi, an import boutique a couple doors away), and knows her way around the paella pans, Japanese hot pots, sushi mats and other international cookware in Tu-tu-tu.

"The core to having a rich life is to feed yourself and your family well," says George, and her store is dedicated to helping people do that.

When George is traveling, her friend Debra Spoelstra takes over the store. A professional chocolatier, she also knows well the things in the store and how to use them. She points out a unique line of gadgets that make cooking easier for the aging population, among them a "jar popper" and a kiwi peeler. Not particularly fond of one-use gadgets, I nonetheless bought the latter and it works beautifully and led to a very successful kiwi tart and a kiwi Waldorf salad. (222 N.W. Coast St., Newport; 541-265-8065)

Judith's Kitchen Tools in Yachats: Judith MacDonald opened her 131-square-foot shop in 2002. Judith's Kitchen Tools sits right along the highway and is a tiny treasure chest of wonderful gadgets, utensils, tools, and kitchen and dining paraphernalia. Every object crammed into the store has been tested by MacDonald.

Several years ago, I found charming, rick-rack trimmed aprons tucked away in a corner of the shop. They were perfect gifts for a couple friends who could appreciate the quaint rick-rack.

MacDonald's best sellers this year are "chopulas," "supoons" and "spadles," colorful silicon utensils from Dreamfarm in Australia. They are flexible yet strong, says MacDonald, and are designed so that the working end sits hygienically off the counter. She's also enthusiastic about new spiral slicers from Progressive and Microplane's latest cube grater. Perennial best sellers are the stainless steel magnetic measuring spoons.

Like her fellow shopkeepers, MacDonald is an unapologetic town booster. Originally from Rhode Island, she extols Yachats' diverse population, its high number of people holding advanced degrees and its many artists. The town's unofficial motto is, "We're all here because we're not all there," she laughs. If you want to know what's really going on in a town, these small shops are the places to go. (261 Highway 101 N., Yachats; 541-547-3020)

Pot Rack in Jacksonville: Set in the heart of Jacksonville's old business district, the Pot Rack at 1,200 square feet is larger than the previous stores, but still maintains a personal and friendly ambiance. Owned by Joann Freeland and her husband, Steve Abandonato, the shop is sunny and bright. Freeland does all the buying and displaying, and she loves color.

The shop currently features sets of Melamine dinnerware in Italian Majolica designs, fine French tablecloths, and lazy Susans locally handmade out of wine barrels. Among the more unusual items are cutting boards made out of paper and Greek peppermills.

Like the other shops, there's an abundance of colorful towels and hot pads. While the whimsical and charming draws in tourists, the stores also provide the practical necessities to keep the kitchens of residents running smoothly. And tourists, while they're there, can always pick up the new potato peeler or wooden spoon. (140 W. California St., Jacksonville; 541-899-5736)

-- Joan Harvey is a Portland freelance writer and a regular contributor to Foodday.
Blue Mountain Community College

Schools like Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton charge a higher tuition than the state average used to determine the Oregon Promise grant's average tuition.

(Andrew Theen/The Oregonian)

Thousands of community college students will start fall classes next week through the Oregon Promise - a program designed to make school more affordable.

But the costs of attending school won't necessarily be completely covered by the state program, which may come as a surprise to some parents and students who heard about "free community college" and missed the fine-print.

Last July, Gov. Kate Brown touted the program after she signed the bill into law. "In rural and urban communities alike, recent high school graduates will now be able to earn their undergraduate education tuition-free at their local community college," Brown said.

But according to the bill itself, Brown and others, may have overstated the program's reach.

While the largest share of expected Oregon Promise students said they would receive zero financial support from their parents on federal financial aid applications, state officials said several thousand students can expect to pay at least some tuition this fall.

The promise grant is available to Oregon residents who finished high school with at least a 2.5 grade point average or obtained a GED and enrolled in a community college at least part-time within six months of finishing high school.

Oregon chipped in $10 million for the first year, but the overall plan works because the state is banking on students qualifying for other grants available to low-income students.

Ben Cannon, Oregon's Higher Education Coordinating Commission executive director, said the state doesn't know how many promise eligible students will show up and remain in school. But according to his office, about 3,700 students - or more than one-third of eligible promise students - would expect to pay some of their tuition.

For many, that could mean a couple dollars, Cannon said, for others it "could be up to about $300 for the year" depending on where they are enrolled.

Cannon stressed that for the thousands of low-income promise students who do qualify for the federal Pell Grants or the Oregon Opportunity Grant, tuition will not be an issue. Those two grants will cover the cost of tuition.

But not all of the roughly 10,379 students who submitted valid promise applications and are eligible for the program receive those assistance programs. And some students attending more expensive community colleges could be on the hook for paying a portion of their tuition because of how the state law established the specific grant amounts.

"This nuance has gotten lost," Cannon said, "and we may be partly to blame for that."

This year, the maximum Pell Grant is $5,815 per year - depending on a student's financial need. In Oregon, the state may provide an additional $2,250 per year for needy students through its Opportunity Grant.

The Oregon Promise deducts the amount of those grants from the cost of tuition first, if a student qualifies. The student is responsible for $50 per term under the bill's language. For those low-income Oregonians, their annual promise grant is capped at $1,000 annually. That's money they could use to pay for books or additional student fees, or other costs not covered by the grant.

Inside the Numbers

Some 10,379 Oregon students are eligible for the Oregon Promise in 2016-17. Each had to fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid and list the expected amount of money they would receive from their families to pay for school. Here's a breakdown of those figures:

- 9 percent: Expected more than $30,000 in financial support from parents

- 28.9 percent: Expected no financial support from parents, the largest share of eligible students

- 32.3 percent: Expected more than $10,000 in financial support from parents

(percentages based on data provided by HECC)

So where does the potential for a tuition gap come into play?

When Oregon lawmakers approved the program, the law specified the maximum grants to students would be capped at the average cost of tuition statewide. That figure was based on a 12-credit course load.

The average community college tuition is approximately $3,398 per year. If a student chooses a more expensive school, or takes a heavier class load, they will owe the difference.

Sherrie Nicholson, a Corvallis resident, said her daughter's expected cost to attend Linn-Benton Community College took the family by surprise.

"It's not what the kids were told in the schools, at all," Nicholson said Monday. Her daughter, Makayla, attended West Albany High School, where she recalled she was told the Oregon Promise pays for her to attend the school. The Nicholsons expected to owe just $50 per term.

"I think people have been misled and they're finding out now that these kids are enrolled that they're not getting what they were told," she said.

Makayla Nicholson fell perfectly into the tuition gap.

She's going to Linn Benton Community College, the cost per student credit hour is at least $5 more than the state average, according to a state spreadsheet.

She's also enrolled in 15 credits starting next week, and the Oregon Promise is only designed to pay grants for students taking 12 credits. Nicholson's out-of-pocket costs are likely above Cannon's $300 estimate because of her heavy course load.

The Nicholsons didn't take out any federal student loans, and they don't qualify for either grant program for low-income students.

Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, said the the state had to find a solution to cap the tuition, and a statewide average seemed like the way to go.

"This is a basic no-frills plan that is all we could afford," said Hass, who sponsored the legislation.

Hass, who has been touring some community colleges and meeting with hundreds of promise students, said lawmakers did not intend for students to have a tuition gap. "If there are some bugs to work out, we will [fix them]," he said. Hass said the turnout for the program, and the students' personal stories are "heartwarming."

Cannon said the state has been expecting to hear from students for months about situations like the Nicholsons.

But he described the situation as "rare" and added that many Oregon families wouldn't pay for any tuition.

Cannon said the higher education commission may take a look at increasing the amount of state grants to students like Makayla Nicholson who want to take a heavier course load.

Hass agreed he would like to see the credit level raised.

The state only funded the program for one school year, and Hass said he will push hard for continuing the grant in the next legislative session.



-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen
Sunset High School

Public health officials said a person at Sunset High School in Beaverton has been treated and is no longer infectious.

(Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Staff)

The person at Sunset High School who contracted tuberculosis got sick in June and has since recovered. But the school only just notified staff and parents about the case on Monday.

Oregon public health officials said Tuesday that there was no need to alert the public sooner because it was very unlikely the disease would spread through casual contact at a school, on the street or while sharing a bus ride.

"It's pretty hard to catch," said Dr. Jennifer Vines, deputy health officer for Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties. "It takes close face-to-face, prolonged contact for us to see transmission."

Public health officials have not named the person at the Beaverton school who got sick or said whether it's a student or staff member.

"We're not disclosing any details," Vines said. "TB is still a stigmatized disease in this world."

She said the state found out about the case in June through routine channels such as a provider or a lab. Officials launched an investigation, focusing on immediate family members. They're the ones most likely to get infected.

Tuberculosis is transmitted by airborne droplets that can be released when a sick person coughs or sneezes. The bacteria are easily swept away by air currents. They're killed by sunlight, making the disease virtually impossible to contract outside, said Dr. Kevin Winthrop of Oregon Health & Science University and the state's medical consultant on TB.

Transmission usually occurs in a poorly ventilated room, Winthrop said. Also, not everyone is equally contagious. A person has to have a lot of bacterium in their lungs to transmit it to someone else, he said.

"If you cough a lot into the air, then you're a lot more infectious than if you're coughing a little," Winthrop said.

Physicians use a host of antibiotics over about six months to treat TB. Some strains are antibiotic-resistant, making them more difficult to cure. But in Oregon, physicians only see one to two of those cases a year.

Vines said the person at Sunset High was treated but not hospitalized and is no longer infectious.

Health officials don't know how that person contracted tuberculosis.

"The chances are that this person's infection happened years ago," Vines said.

TB is relatively uncommon in the United States. Those with weakened immune systems are the most likely to get sick. People who are homeless or imprisioned tend to be at the highest risk. Last year there were 76 cases in Oregon, with nearly 50 in Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties. Since 2012, four people in Oregon have died from TB.

The disease runs rampant in many developing countries. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 10 million people around the globe were sickened by TB in 2014 and 1.5 million died.

The bacteria usually attack the lungs, though nearly a quarter of cases involve the lymph nodes, bones or kidneys, Winthrop said.

TB can stay in the body for years and not cause any symptoms. Those with a latent form of TB are not infectious.

Only about 5 to 10 percent of those with latent TB ever get sick. Symptoms include coughing for three weeks or longer, coughing up blood and chest pain, as well as loss of appetite, night sweats, fever, fatigue or chills. It takes about eight weeks to confirm an infection. Winthrop said anyone with symptoms should get a lung X-ray and have their spit tested. That latter test takes four to six weeks to get a result, Winthrop said.

Winthrop said tuberculosis investigations take time. Officials start by looking at close family members then widen the circle if they find cases. Vines said that the state has begun testing about 30 people beyond the family who might have had close contact with the TB patient. Some of them are associated with Sunset High School.

"We're not looking at a big school investigation," Vines said. "We have no reason to believe that anyone else in the broader school community is at risk."

She said that a handful of people have been tested. Two have a latent form of the disease and have been offered antibiotics to prevent illness.

-- Lynne Terry

lterry@oregonian.com; 503-221-8503
lightbar

Emergency crews have responded to a crash involving a car and pedestrians by a school in Hillsboro.

(The Oregonian/File)

Update 10:05 a.m.

Emergency crews have responded Wednesday morning to a crash involving a car and pedestrians near a school in Hillsboro.

Two children and their mother were injured at Southeast 75th Avenue and Johnson Street just before 8 a.m. Wednesday. A five-year-old girl sustained life-threatening injuries and a toddler in a stroller suffered a concussion on a crosswalk south of Ladd Acres Elementary School, officials said.

The mother, who injured her foot, and firefighters rode with the children to a local hospital, said Mike Rouches, Hillsboro Police Department spokesman, and Bruce Montgomery, public information officer for the Hillsboro Fire Department.

The toddler appears to be stable, and doctors are working to determine the extent of the five-year-old child's injuries, Rouches said.

The driver, a 33-year-old man from Hillsboro, was driving east on Johnson Street when the crash occurred. It appears he was driving within the 20-mile-an-hour speed limit during school hours, Rouches said.

"He simply didn't see them," Rouches said. The road conditions were clear and sunny at the time of the accident, he said. Investigators are working to confirm his identification, he said.

Police didn't find any signs of impairment, but officers are in the process of obtaining a blood sample, Rouches said.

This post will be updated as news develops.

Auto vs Ped w/two children down. One in stroller. SE 75 & Johnson.

Auto vs Ped w/two children down. One in stroller. SE 75 & Johnson.  Hillsboro Fire Dept (@HillsboroFire) September 21, 2016

-- Tony Hernandez

thernandez@oregonian.com

503-294-5928

@tonyhreports
snowdenvideo.jpg

Edward Snowden, who has leaked scores of documents from the National Security Agency, is shown on a giant video screen in Hong Kong on June 23, 2013.

(Associated Press/2013)

A pardon for Snowden?: President Barack Obama should pardon Edward Snowden. Those who say Snowden should be punished because he broke the law are wrong. The abolitionists broke the laws of their day as well -- and they didn't turn themselves in for prison time in order to show how moral and courageous they were; they stayed on the outside and kept up the fight.

In the present case, the government broke the laws by spying on every one of us. Snowden merely exposed their criminal behavior and did a great service to the American people. If it weren't for him, we'd be even further down the road to a police state than we already are.

Those who say a pardon can only be issued to someone who has already been convicted of a crime are also wrong. President Gerald Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon to President Richard Nixon in 1974 in order to avoid having a trial.

While he's at it, Obama should also pardon Chelsea Manning. But he won't. His administration has prosecuted -- really persecuted -- more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined.

Martha Shelley

North Portland

*

A pardon for Snowden?: Yes, President Obama should pardon Edward Snowden, who has made a positive contribution and has even been acknowledged by Obama as having made a positive contribution.

The USA Freedom Act, which Congress passed and Obama signed into law (this is the re-up of the discredited Patriot Act) contained limits on the bulk collection of telephone records of Americans for the first time. These limits came from the "Snowden Effect."

At the same time it's clear that Obama will never pardon Snowden because, while Obama has many good qualities, he has an obvious love of technological spying and an obvious hate of any limits to it. If Obama hadn't been so tied up with cleaning up after the mess from George W. Bush's presidency, I think it's very clear that he would have greatly expanded the Patriot Act and curtailed Americans' right to privacy.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and since government has judged that online speech is not protected under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment (Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act implements this), electronic spying of the internet is increasingly going to be irresistible to future presidents, who will keep the DMCA's interpretation that online speech has no protections. Because Snowden represents an opposition to this, he will never be pardoned -- even though we have pardoned criminals such as President Nixon in advance of conviction, who have done far worse than this.

Ted Mittelstaedt

Southeast Portland

*

A pardon for Snowden?: The simple answer to the Hot Button question: Of course Edward Snowden should be pardoned. He revealed tyranny in process.

The questions that follow should be: Why haven't the government officials responsible for the massive violation of every law-abiding American citizens' Fourth Amendment rights been unmasked and publicly shamed? Why haven't they been removed from their government jobs? Why haven't they been stripped of their government pensions? Why haven't they been prosecuted under the civil rights statutes already on the books?

The violation of those officials' oaths to uphold the Constitution is an affront to all of us and deserves punishment as well. That includes voting against anyone who says this behavior was justified. It isn't at all permissible; undoing our Constitution is just what the terrorists and totalitarian regimes who do hate us want to have happen.

Presidential candidate Gary Johnson has said our nation's founders would be disgusted to find that the government spied on its own citizens. My own addition is that those same founders would find citizens who did nothing to oppose that spying even more abhorrent.

Selective prosecution of Mr. Snowden is unacceptable.

Dennis H. Medley

Hillsboro

*

A pardon for Snowden?: The president should absolutely pardon Snowden. He did the American people a big service and at his own risk. What a patriot! Some people think he should have done it another way. How would Snowden have been able to do this? Impossible, and he knew it. He gave up everything in his life to save us.

Bob Button

North Portland

*

A pardon for Snowden?: On March 12, 2013, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was asked by Oregon's Sen. Ron Wyden one straightforward question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper's negative response, under oath, was a lie -- to Sen. Wyden, to Congress and to the American people. Data had been collected for years and conversations of American citizens surveilled, all without warrants and all clearly in violation of U.S. law (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and the U.S. Constitution.

Edward Snowden's motivations in providing classified documents to journalists (who ultimately made the decision to release them) are well told in Oliver Stone's new film, "Snowden," as well as in the Academy Award winning documentary, "Citizenfour." A major factor for Snowden was Clapper's lie to Wyden, because Snowden realized that Wyden -- who knew Clapper was lying -- could never release classified documents himself.

It has never been proven that any of the documents that were published as a result of Snowden's actions have compromised any U.S. intelligence operations or endangered any U.S. agents. What the release of the documents did do was to begin a conversation in this country about how to balance Americans' privacy rights against our national intelligence requirements. The law has been changed to at least somewhat better protect those privacy rights -- directly and solely because of Snowden's actions.

Of course, as unlikely as it is -- given his administration's continued faintheartedness (this is the president whose administration has refused to bring criminal charges against a single bank or executive who truly harmed Americans in causing the 2008 recession) -- President Obama should pardon Snowden.

Steven Goldberg

Southeast Portland

Goldberg, an attorney, was involved on behalf of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in one of the cases challenging the government's warrantless surveillance program.
-16e38a9e4ec5a502.JPG

The Oregon State Capitol Building in Salem.

(Michael Lloyd/2013)

Measure 97 debate continues: I've served my community as a Unitarian Universalist minister for the last 20 years. In that role I too often saw congregants and neighbors struggle as education, health care and senior services have been cut again and again. I saw promising young students not receive the attention they needed, even as their parents advocated for better education services. Consequently many did not thrive or reach their full potential in school. I saw parents struggle to find and keep family-wage jobs with benefits and not be able to afford health insurance. And I saw elders struggle to find services that would enable them to age in place and to find suitable alternative supportive living situations.

Over that same time, I saw the tax burden shift from big companies to the average folks in my congregation. According to the Oregon Center for Public Policy, "In the 1973-75 budget period, corporations paid 18.5 percent of all Oregon income taxes. Today they pay just 6.7 percent, a decline of nearly two-thirds."

Measure 97 would change this by ensuring that some of the largest corporations invest in our communities. Only about 1000 of Oregon's some 400,000 businesses will be affected, but the measure will generate a game-changing amount of revenue dedicated to public education, health care and senior services.

I'm tired of seeing my community struggle at the expense of corporate profits. I hope you'll join me and other faith leaders across the state by voting yes on Measure 97 this November.

Duane H. Fickeisen

Southeast Portland

*

Measure 97 debate continues: The Oregonian/OregonLive story about the Marsh Minick audit of the Oregon Department of Energy's business energy tax credit program demonstrates just why I will vote no on Measure 97 ("Audit of state energy tax credits finds improprieties," Sept. 9). The audit tells a depressing and exasperating tale of a program with questionable policy goals that was poorly designed by the Legislature; subjected to political pressure by two governors and various legislators in pursuit of their pet projects; managed by a department underfunded for its task; and very poorly managed by that department.

It has taken over six years and an Oregonian/OregonLive investigative story to finally bring this to light after some $347 million in questionable tax credits have been issued. Gov. Kate Brown assures us that she repeatedly expressed concerns about the program, but why was it her successor in the secretary of state's office who finally was concerned enough to order an audit?

And this is the system that will manage the largest tax increase in Oregon's history, the large majority of which would be uncommitted to any specific use and subject only to the prevailing political winds?

Not a chance.

Jim Barclay

Hillsboro

*

Measure 97 debate continues: Regarding the promotion of tax Measure 97: It is not a fact, as claimed, that Oregon has the lowest corporate tax in the nation. Somebody needs to tell the truth. In fact, Oregon ranks 11th-highest in the country, according to the Tax Foundation's State Business Tax Index. Oregon's corporate tax rate is 7.6 percent. What we do have is a low minimum tax. That is a charge to corporations that do not make a profit -- and that is why it is called a "minimum tax."

Measure 97 backers says they are raising the minimum. This is not what they are doing at all. They are creating a sales or consumption tax that we will all pay because it will be levied on our necessities, such as groceries and medicine and utilities. Since this is a tax on our basic needs, lower-income families will be punished the most.

Don't fall for the further claim that this will be paid by out-of-state corporations. It will be paid by your local grocery store and all your utilities and, therefore, by you, the consumer.

Wallace Preble

Northwest Portland

Preble is chairman of Carr Auto Group.

*

Measure 97 debate continues: Right now, I'm leaning against voting for Measure 97. I know that Oregon needs money to pay for a lot of its citizens' needs, such as education, transportation and health, and the measure seems to be a way to get a lot of money. One problem is that it taxes revenues rather than profits -- although I realize that a company can figure out ways to minimize profits even in a good year.

Another problem is that we citizens have little say on how the money will be spent. And a third problem is that the tax will result in an increase in state government jobs and a decrease in private sector jobs. I think the reverse is better, especially since we can't seem to fix the unsustainable state pension burden. Number four is that only C-corporations would be taxed and not other forms of business ownership. There probably is a reason, but I have not seen any discussion of that.

It has been alleged that one of the effects of Measure 97 will be to raise prices of some goods and services and that the increases will affect poorer people more than richer people -- kind of like a regressive tax. Not good. And, finally, Measure 97 only perpetuates, and does not improve, the overall tax system in Oregon. Passing this measure would be just another way to kick the can down the road and not tackle the underlying problem -- a flawed tax system.

Richard Friedmar

Southwest Portland

*

Measure 97 debate continues: I keep reading op-eds for and against Measure 97. The op-eds for Measure 97 seem to come from teachers or heads of the PTA. Their argument is basically that our schools need the money and corporations needs to pay their fair share. The op-eds against Measure 97 seem to come from businesses or business associations. Their argument is that Measure 97 is not the correct mechanism to raise money because it taxes sales, not profits, and it only affects C-corporations.

I agree with the teachers that we need more money for our schools. My children's classrooms have 28 students in them.

I would like to know: What is a better way to raise money for schools? I would like to hear an alternative proposal with as many specific details as possible.

If Measure 97 isn't the way, then what is?

Kara Colley

Southwest Portland
Emergency housing plan in Portland

County commissioner Jules Bailey (left) and city commissioners Dan Saltzman and Nick Fish talk after the press conference as Multnomah County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury hugs Portland Mayor Charlie Hales (right) after Portland and Multnomah County pledged $30 million in support of an emergency housing plan, September 30, 2015, at City Hall in Portland. The funds will increase shelter space and create affordable housing.

(Kristyna Wentz-Graff/The Oregonian )

Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman promised a California-based developer an apartment project designed to help community members displaced by gentrification in North and Northeast Portland.

Then, Saltzman changed his mind and gave the $4.5 million project to a local nonprofit that serves African Americans.

http://media.oregonlive.com/opinion_impact/photo/agenda-2013jpg-da8a3522a991b9c6.jpg

Editorial Agenda 2016

Get Oregon centered

Better leadership in education

Make Portland a city that works

Build Oregon prosperity

Protect and expand personal freedom

Get pot right

_______________________________

Saltzman told The Oregonian/OregonLive reporter Brad Schmidt that in retrospect, he'd failed to recognize the site's significance to Portland's black community.

Saltzman's statement is nearly as lame as the process that led to his course-correction.

The saga began in late 2015, when the city announced plans to provide $61.6 million to help build affordable housing across the Portland area. Among an array of housing options, the plan called for a complex with at least 50 apartments on a city-owned lot at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Rosa Parks Way.

Just consider that address for a moment.

The project was aimed specifically to help families who had been - or were about to be - displaced by urban renewal projects that have sprouted over the past two decades in the historically black neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland.

Saltzman, who oversees the city housing bureau, is a Portland native who has served on the Portland City Council during the very period that many African American families have been priced out of those areas.

A housing bureau report issued in 2015 was clear whom the city wanted to help. But unfortunately, the 27-page report wasn't clear about who should help make those decisions.

As it turned out, Saltzman made the decisions all on his own - without any public discussion or debate.

The committee assigned to judge the proposals for the apartments at Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks did not include any African American members.

And while the city has an oversight committee created specifically to help shape development in nearby neighborhoods, the group wasn't included in the apartment process. Oversight committee members said they weren't even informed last April when the decision was made.

In fact, the oversight committee had been formed in 2014 in response to a gentrification controversy following a proposal for a Trader Joe's store at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Alberta Street. (The group's mandate recently was expanded to include reviewing more of the displacement plan's projects).

Ultimately, the so-call King Parks apartment complex proposals submitted by the California developer and the Portland nonprofit tied. The bureau had tossed aside a 100-point scoring system to help the committees evaluate the proposals. Instead, a bulleted list of pros and cons were presented to Saltzman.

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He opted for the California-based developer.

Almost immediately after Saltzman made his decision, Schmidt reported, the local nonprofit pushed back and questioned the process through emails and meetings with the housing bureau and with the commissioner. Despite the fact he'd promised the deal to the developer - and potentially risked a lawsuit if he took it back -- Saltzman changed his mind.

He later explained that as a city commissioner, he gets to "make the final decision, and that's what I did - even though I reversed myself from an earlier final decision."

Saltzman said he made the move after reflecting on his conversations with the nonprofit and with community members - consideration and conversation he should have had before his first attempt at making the decision. It also would have been nice if all of this were done out in the open. But it wasn't. That's how our city works at its worst.

Regardless of which group is most qualified to take on this needed project, the community deserved more thought and accounting throughout this troubled process.

Saltzman may have ultimately made the right decision, yet his method lacked the transparency and fairness all Portlanders expect.

- The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board
Clackamas County's public shooting range gets heavy use, sees spike in concealed permits

A member of the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office demonstrates how to hold a revolver during a class on gun safety. In Oregon, more than half of all suicide deaths involve a gun.

(Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian)

By Craig Roberts

Suicide prevention resources

Call 911: Clackamas County Sheriff's Office and other law enforcement agencies have crisis intervention teams available to help.

: 1-800-273-8255 for people experiencing difficult or suicidal thoughts.

: 1-800-950-6264 helpline for more information, referrals or support.

Youth suicide prevention: Call

at 1-800-273-8255 or text 273TALK to 839863.

September is Suicide Prevention Month. Suicide is a major public health concern in Clackamas County and affects individuals of all ages. I have personally responded to far too many suicide deaths in my law enforcement career. I have also seen the profound impact the loss of a loved one by suicide has on family and friends. The emotional toll lasts well beyond the death -- often for a lifetime.

Sadly, guns are the No. 1 method for deaths by suicide in the U.S. and in Oregon. In Oregon, more than half of all suicide deaths involved a gun. That's more than all other methods combined. Among those aged 65 or older, 75 percent used a gun.

But let me be clear: This is not a pro-gun or anti-gun issue. Evidence shows suicide is often a decision made suddenly. What's being raised is a movement to educate the public about the importance of temporarily limiting access to guns when individuals are in crisis.

Research has shown that putting time and distance between a suicidal person and a lethal weapon is important. It's similar to the campaign, "Friends don't let friends drive drunk"; friends take away the keys. We need to make it socially acceptable for friends and relatives to hold on to a potentially suicidal gun owner's weapons until the crisis has passed.

Share your opinion

Submit your essay of 700 words or less to commentary@oregonlive.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.

Experts believe that most individuals with suicidal thoughts desperately want to live, but are unable to see answers to their pain or situation at that time. When suicidal intent or risk is detected early, lives can be saved.

What can we do to prevent deaths by suicide? If you are concerned about a family member or friend in crisis who has access to a gun, have the conversation. Ask the person if they are thinking about hurting themselves. Temporarily remove access, and store guns out of the home.

And call for help!

Working together, I know we can reduce the number of individuals that die tragically by suicide using a gun.

*

Craig Roberts is the Clackamas County sheriff.
1solar.JPG

This Aug. 13, 2014 photo, shows an array of mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating site in Primm, Nev. Solar and wind energy are estimated to make up only 0.5 percent of the world's energy.

(AP Photo/John Locher)

By Bjorn Lomborg

Special to The Washington Post

The next administration must recognize not only that climate change is a real problem but also that we are not on course to solve it. The next president needs the courage to discard our current feel-good but ineffective solutions. Ending our reliance on the fossil fuels that have powered two centuries of economic growth will require an energy revolution.

Many policies focus on solving global warming by investing in solar and wind, but over the coming quarter-century, these technologies will contribute only marginally to the solution. Moreover, they are not competitive now and will be mostly inefficient for at least 25 years.

The International Energy Agency estimates that just 0.5 percent of the world's energy comes from solar and wind, and even with the Paris agreement, this will increase to only 2.4 percent by 2040. It also estimates that the world is spending about $90 billion on solar and wind subsidies this year, and that even by 2040, they will still need about the same support. That's not sustainable.

Fixing climate change will require what philanthropist Bill Gates calls an "energy miracle": a massive increase in research and development, by far the most effective way to find new breakthrough technologies cheap enough to outcompete fossil fuels. If that happens, we will have fixed global warming, because everyone will switch to cheaper energy sources.

Green energy innovation initiatives launched at the Paris Treaty talks by Gates, other business leaders and about 20 governments are an excellent start. Gates is investing $2 billion in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, and President Barack Obama and fellow leaders have promised to double global green energy R&D to $30 billion annually in 2021.

But this is only a start. A panel of Nobel laureates for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate project found that we should not just double research funding but increase it more than six times over, to $100 billion a year.

We must also bear in mind that global warming is not the planet's only challenge. We often hear that it is the defining issue of our time, but it is no such thing. By the 2070s, the IPCC -- the U.N. climate change panel -- estimates that warming will cost between 0.2 and 2 percent of global GDP. This is certainly a problem, but not the end of world.

Speaking of climate change in catastrophic terms easily makes us ignore bigger problems, including malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and corruption. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change since the 1970s causes about 140,000 additional deaths each year, and toward the middle of the century will kill 250,000 people annually, mostly in poor countries. This pales in comparison with much deadlier environmental problems such as indoor air pollution, claiming 4.3 million lives annually, outdoor air pollution killing 3.7 million and lack of water and sanitation killing 760,000. Outside of environment, the problems are even bigger: Poverty arguably kills 18 million each year.

Every dollar spent on climate change could instead help save many more people from these more tractable problems. The current approach to subsidize solar and wind arguably saves one life across the century for every $4 million spent -- the same expenditure on vaccinations could save 4,000 lives. Each person -- and the next president -- needs to decide his or her legacy.

The next president must focus on the smartest solutions for all the world's many ills, not just those that get the most attention. In facing climate change, he or she needs the courage to forgo subsidizing politically popular solar and wind, and to focus on green research that will help much more to solve the problem.

Lomborg is president and founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. Find him on Twitter: @BjornLomborg
Chinese officials are heralding the success of the country's first space station, Tiangong-1, saying it has "comprehensively fulfilled its historical mission."

The space lab is expected to fall to Earth sometime next year.

That the Chinese government isn't giving a more precise time period for the station's reentry suggests to independent scientists that China has "lost control" of the approximately 35-foot-long, 18,000-pound unit.

Chinese officials, however, are not showing any concern.

"Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up [in the atmosphere] during falling," Wu Ping, deputy director of China's space agency, said via the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.

Note the word "most."

Writes Britain's The Independent: "Like other lost satellites, it's likely that the freefalling station will burn up on its way back into Earth and come back down in smaller chunks of molten metal rather than with a big crash."

A NASA adviser called Tiangong-1 "a potent political symbol" when China launched it in 2011. Now it's more like the plot of a disaster movie.

If Chinese space-agency operators have indeed lost contact with the unit, that means it could come down almost anywhere, rather than being guided over one of the oceans.

"[W]e probably won't know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it's going to come down," Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told The Guardian. "Not knowing when it's going to come down translates as not knowing where it's going to come down."

McDowell later clarified on Twitter that the molten chunks could hit not anywhere on Earth but "anywhere between lat[itude] 43N and 43S," which The Verge notes includes "most of North America, parts of Europe and Asia, and all of South America, Africa and Oceania (in the Pacific Ocean)."

How much should we be concerned about the pieces that could land in people's back yards? The risk of damage to humans or property is considered very small -- oceans do cover 70 percent of the planet, for example -- but the risk is real.

"There will be lumps of about (200 pounds) or so," McDowell said. "Still enough to give you a nasty wallop if it hit you."

-- Douglas Perry
NEW YORK -- The FBI looked into New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami two years ago -- and came up with nothing alarming -- after his father expressed concerns his son might be a terrorist, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd, including gang members, and acting like a thug, the officials said.

In any case, the FBI checked its databases and other sources and closed the inquiry in a matter of weeks after seeing nothing tying Rahami to terrorism, three law enforcement officials said.

Also Tuesday, investigators disclosed that when Rahami was shot and captured, he had a notebook with him that contained extremist ramblings.

One bloodstained section contained references to both Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a 2011 drone strike and whose preaching has inspired other acts of violence, and Nidal Hasan, the former Army officer who went on a deadly shooting rampage in 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas.

The information emerged as the younger Rahami, 28, was being held on $5.2 million bail, charged with the attempted murder of police officers during the shootout that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, New Jersey. Federal prosecutors said they were still drawing up charges over the weekend bombings in New York City and a New Jersey seaside town that wounded 29 people.

Rahami, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, remained hospitalized Tuesday with gunshot wounds to the leg, forearm and shoulder, authorities said.

Federal agents have attempted to question Rahami in the hospital. But Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., who received a classified briefing from the FBI, said Rahami was not cooperating. The congressman said he doesn't know whether Rahami has a lawyer.

Investigators are looking into Rahami's overseas travel, including a visit to Pakistan a few years ago, and want to know whether he received any money or training from extremist organizations.

Rahami's father, Mohammad Rahami, spoke with the FBI after the younger Rahami was charged in 2014 with stabbing his brother, according to the officials, who were not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Rahami was not prosecuted in the stabbing; a grand jury declined to indict him.

Rahami's father told reporters Tuesday outside the family's fried-chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that he called the FBI at the time because Rahami "was doing real bad," having stabbed the brother and hit his mother.

"But they checked, almost two months, and they say, 'He's OK, he's clear, he's not terrorist.' Now they say he's a terrorist," the father said. Asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, he said: "No. And the FBI, they know that."

The disclosure of the father's contacts with the FBI raises questions about whether there was anything more law enforcement could have done at the time to determine whether Rahami had terrorist aspirations.

That issue arose after the Orlando massacre in June, when FBI Director James Comey said agents a few years earlier had looked into the gunman, Omar Mateen, but did not find enough information to pursue charges or keep him under investigation.

In Rahami's case, the law enforcement official said the FBI had opened up an "assessment," the least intrusive form of an FBI inquiry. Justice Department guidelines restrict the types of actions agents may take; they cannot, for instance, record phone calls without obtaining a higher level of approval or developing more grounds for suspicion.

"In August 2014, the FBI initiated an assessment of Ahmad Rahami based upon comments made by his father after a domestic dispute that were subsequently reported to authorities," the bureau said in a statement. "The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism."

It was not clear from the FBI's statement how the contact between the elder Rahami and the FBI began. Nor was it clear exactly what he supposedly said about his son having terrorist inclinations.

The younger Rahami worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said Rahami worked night shifts at the AP building and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the AP told law enforcement officials about Rahami's work at the Cranbury facility.

Summit's vice president of security services, Daniel Sepulveda, said Rahami last did work for the company in 2011 and left the job because he wanted an extended leave that didn't coincide with his work schedule.

Sepulveda wouldn't discuss where else Rahami had security assignments but said he was unaware of any complaints about his conduct. He said he had all licenses required by New Jersey law.

William Sweeney, the FBI's assistant director in New York, said on Monday that that at the time of the bombing, Rahami was apparently not on the FBI's radar. Nor were Afghan intelligence officials aware of either Rahami or his family, said Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, director-general of the Afghan National Directorate of Security.

The bombing investigation began when a pipe bomb blew up Saturday morning in Seaside Park, New Jersey, before a charity race to benefit Marines. No one was injured. Then a shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bomb exploded Saturday night in New York's Chelsea section, wounding 29 people, none seriously. An unexploded pressure-cooker bomb was found blocks away.

Late Sunday night, five explosive devices were discovered in a trash can at an Elizabeth train station. Investigators have not publicly tied Rahami to those devices.

Rahami provided investigators with a wealth of clues that led to his arrest just 50 hours after the first explosion, including fingerprints and DNA at the scene of the Manhattan bombing and a clear surveillance-camera image of his face near the site of the blast, according to law enforcement officials.

-- The Associated Press
Duke v Gonzaga

Former First Lady Barbara Bush and former President George H.W. Bush look on prior to the South Regional Final of the 2015 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on March 29, 2015 in Houston, Texas. The former president has said he's voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton instead of Republican Donald Trump in this year's presidential election.

(Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

Call this the mother of all social media spoiler alerts.

A Facebook post published Monday confirmed what many suspected when George H.W. Bush declined to attend this year's Republican National Convention -- the 41st President of the United States is voting for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump.

Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, posted a photo of herself and the elder Bush with the caption, "The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!"

A spokesman for Bush semi-confirmed to Politico the former president's plans to vote for a Democrat, all the while downplaying the fact.

"The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days," Jim McGrath wrote. "He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim."

Bush isn't the only high-profile Republican to distance himself from the GOP's 2016 standard-bearer. His son, George W. Bush, also sat out the convention.

John McCain, who lost in 2008 to President Obama, endorsed Trump but has since began campaigning for his own re-election by warning his voters against handing Clinton a "blank check" rather than helping elect a Republican to the presidency. Not exactly a vote of confidence.

But the most vocal of the GOP's former presidential contenders is easily Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor went out of his way to warn voters against electing Trump during the Republican primaries. In late June, Romney went so far as to say that, "I can't vote for either of those two people."

Both former Vice President Dan Quayle and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole have rallied behind Trump. Still, other prominent Republicans have less than a stellar impression of the party's latest nominee, even if they don't say it in public.

When a trove of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's emails were leaked, they contained language calling Trump, among other things, "an national disgrace and an international pariah" and "a know-nothing."

So even though Bush Sr.'s staff claims that his vote isn't indicative of a broader statement, his sentiment is evidently not unique among his peers.

--Eder Campuzano

503.221.4344

@edercampuzano

ecampuzano@oregonian.com
IMG_0181.JPG

The Oregon State Police Dept. of Fish & Wildlife responded to reports of a dead bull elk in Glendale Sept. 17. The agency is now asking for the public's help to identify a suspected poacher.

(Oregon State Police)

The Oregon State Police is asking for the public's help in identifying somebody it says unlawfully killed a bull elk in Douglas County, the agency's Department of Fish & Wildlife announced Tuesday.

OSP is offering a $500 reward for information that leads to an arrest.

The agency got a call about the dead elk Sept. 17 in Glendale, a town near the border of Douglas and Josephine counties.

Troopers found the animal in a field between two houses, the agency said in a release. They believe the elk was shot at approximately 2:30 a.m. that same day.

Anyone with information can contact Senior Trooper Ryan Niehus through the OSP tip line at 1-800-452-7888 or via email: tip@state.or.us.

--Eder Campuzano

503.221.4344

@edercampuzano

ecampuzano@oregonian.com
The Case of: JonBenAA(c)t Ramsey

Investigators looked into the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in the CBS docuseries, "The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey."

(CBS)

The unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old girl who was found dead in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado, at Christmastime in 1996, has been the subject of endless speculation, documentaries, investigations and cable news specials ever since it happened.

In the past few weeks, TV has had a renewed fascination with the Ramsey case, bringing another round of documentaries dredging up theories, along with old photos of the family -- father Jon, mother Patsy, brother Burke and JonBenet -- and images of JonBenet in her age-inappropriate junior beauty-pageant costumes and makeup.

The latest of these, CBS' "The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey," aired four hours over Sunday and Monday nights (the docuseries was originally planned to be six hours, but shortly before the airdate, the network cut it back to two nights.)

In those four hours, "The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey" presented the case for a suspect in the murder -- Burke Ramsey, JonBenet's then-9-year-old brother.

"The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey" showed a team of investigators scrutinizing such evidence items as the supposed ransom note left at the Ramsey home, and the 911 call Patsy Ramsey made.

The team included Jim Clemente, who the show's CBS website identifies as a former New York City prosecutor, retired FBI supervisory special agent, and profiler; Laura Richards, former New Scotland Yard criminal behavioral analyst; forensic scientist Henry Lee; James Kolar, former chief investigator for the District Attorney in Boulder, Colorado; forensic pathologist Werner Spitz; James Fitzgerald, retired FBI supervisory special agent and forensic linguistic profiler; and Stan Burke, retired FBI supervisory special agent and statement analyst.

A crew also built a full-scale replica of the Ramsey home, inside a warehouse.

As USA Today reports, the docuseries showed the investigators questioning the veracity of the supposed ransom note, and after enhancements to the 911 call recording, trying to identify voices heard after Patsy Ramsey thought she had ended the call.

'Clemente, Richards and the audio engineer said they heard what sounded like JonBenet's father, John, saying, 'We're not speaking to you.' Then, likely Patsy, asking, 'What did you do?', followed by 'Help me, Jesus.' It may also have been 'Help me, Jesus' twice in a row. Finally, what sounded like the voice of a child -- which the investigators claimed must have been Burke -- asking, 'What did you find?'"

The theory put forward in the docuseries is that Burke had gotten angry with his sister about something, and struck her, though it wasn't his intention to kill her. To cover it up, the investigators suggest, Patsy wrote the ransom note and the family pretended JonBenet had been killed by an unknown intruder.

People interviewed in the docuseries also suggest that former district attorney Alex Hunter seemed reluctant to try and build a case against the Ramsey family, who were affluent members of the community.

Burke Ramsey, who's now 29, appeared in a three-part interview with Phil McGraw on the "Dr. Phil" show earlier this month. McGraw noted that Burke Ramsey has been criticized for his seeming lack of grief in a video filmed when Burke was 9 years old and being interviewed about his sister's death.

"I guess this is the combination of sitting in there with this weird guy that I'd never talked to before asking personal questions," Burke Ramsey said. "It's a combination of that and at some point, you just have to move on. I'm not saying I moved on. Then kind of the other end is that I really didn't get it, but you've got to stop crying at some point, I guess."

McGraw directly asked Burke Ramsey about theories that he was the killer, and that the family covered it up to protect him. Burke Ramsey says that's not what happened.

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com

503-221-8227

@Kristiturnquist
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An organization that began in a basement in Midland County six years ago now stretches between four mid-Michigan counties and is helping hundreds of families and thousands of children.

In that basement, The Diaper Alliance began in 2010 when Debi Keyes, founder and executive director, decided to do something positive with her spare time.

The Diaper Alliance was on the minds of about 150 mid-Michigan residents Tuesday as the director of external affairs for the National Diaper Bank Network, Troy Moore, visited the area to contribute to The Diaper Alliances second annual fundraiser, which took place at Apple Mountain Conference Center. He also helped deliver diapers to partner agencies in the morning from the Alliances warehouse on James Savage Road.

The fundraiser was hosted by Jimmy Greene, president and CEO of Associated Builders and Contractors. Greene was also the honorary chairman of the event.

But Keyes was the focus of the day.

I prayed for something to do to help families that was not already being done and was led to research diapers, Keyes said. I spent many hours researching the challenges families face to provide this basic need for their babies and found there was really nothing in place to help cover baby bottoms. WIC and Bridge card programs dont cover diapers for families in need. A lot of day cares require families to provide diapers for their children, which is an extra expense.

Soon after Keyes started the organization, it was accepted as a community nonprofit and grew into an agency that distributes diapers in Midland, Bay, Saginaw and Clare counties. It is the only agency that provides this service in the region and contributes to more than 40 partner agencies.

It was something that started out as a part-time hobby and over 1.6 million diapers later, here we are, Keyes said.

The Diaper Alliance is an affiliate of the National Diaper Bank Network, an organization that connects and supports more than 315 community-based diaper banks throughout the country. The NDBN was formed in 2011 and its founding sponsor, the Huggies Foundation, donated 20 million diapers in 2015. Last year alone, NDBN distributed 46 million diapers.

Working with Debi and seeing that kind of spread throughout the region impressed me, Moore said. It says a lot about the Midland community. Neighbors help their neighbors so why not communities help other communities. To work on the front lines and see this kind of growth is exciting and unique.

Diaper need is experienced in 33 percent of American families. As of now, there is no state or federal program that allocates dollars specifically toward the purchase of diapers.

Its amazing that no matter what differences we may have  political, religious, ideology  that we can all come together to help babies and toddlers. That we can help struggling families. Its the personal stories that make that possible. The success stories, like a parent going back to work and being able to put their child in day care. That has a real impact and its residual, Moore said.

The spirit of collaboration was celebrated at the fundraising dinner.

We are currently distributing over 65,000 diapers each month to our partner agencies, who give them free of charge to their registered clients in need, Keyes said. There are many parts of our large collaboration and we all have a common goal of helping others to be healthier and happier.

Keyes recognized that their purpose could not be served if it was not for all involved, including the NDBN, Huggies, partner agencies, volunteers and those who choose to donate.

The issue of poverty manifests itself in so many ways, Moore said. Every child has a need for clean diapers and whats been done in this community is remarkable.

Touching stories were shared from organizations that work with The Diaper Alliance.

Since we have become a partner with the Diaper Alliance, our parents no longer worry about keeping their 64 childrens bottoms dry and rash-free as they receive 60 diapers each month, Suzanne Greenburg, the president and CEO of the CAN Council of Saginaw, said. The CAN Council Great Lakes Bay Region works to prevent child abuse and neglect.

Partnering with The Diaper Alliance means that we can say yes to our parents in need. Greenburg said. It is a priceless partnership.

To make all of this possible, volunteers are necessary. Keyes explained that 120 hours of volunteer work is done monthly in order to get the orders ready, packaged and distributed. For more information, call (989) 495-9226.
Judge Dorene S. Allen, Probate and Family Court Judge for Midland County announced that the Midland County Attorney Team has been selected to attend the National Child Welfare, Juvenile and Family Law Conference presented by the National Association of Counsel for Children.

The selection of the Midland Team was competitive and just two teams were selected by the State Court Administrative Office and Michigan Court Improvement Team. In the award notification it was noted that the compelling factor for inclusion at the conference is the emphasis on the importance and rarity of a collaborative training approach to increase team building, trust and creativity among attorneys who normally work in silos
I have never seen the morale so low among our staff.

Im tired of feeling like the punching bag for everything that is wrong in education.

Our education system is headed for a crisis.

I am counting the days until I can retire.

These are just some of the sentiments expressed in a survey taken by 11,000 Michigan school employees who are members of the American Federation of Teachers Michigan and the Michigan Education Association. The results of the anonymous online survey provide a chilling picture of the state of education in Michigan.

Michigan school employees have been dealt blow after blow in recent years, accepting pay cuts and freezes and other attacks from Lansing that most Michiganders would find unacceptable, said MEA President Steven Cook. This survey is a damning indictment of toxic education policies and a toxic attitude toward those who educate our kids.

The school employees surveyed had a combined total of 215,765 years of experience and an average of 20 years each. Yet despite having a lifetime of experience at their jobs, school employees  who are experts in how best to educate students and run schools  feel demoralized, demeaned and devalued by lawmakers in Lansing.

By cutting budgets and issuing draconian mandates that demonize public school employees and public schools, the state is destroying the quality of our childrens education, said AFT Michigan President David Hecker. The warning signs are out there, but Lansings policymakers have chosen to bury their heads in the sand rather than listen to experts  Michigans hardworking school employees.

The survey data and open-ended comments reveal a shocking reality for those who work in Michigans public schools, one marked by low morale, exhaustion from needless testing, high job insecurity and disgust with Lansings policies that hurt rather than help student achievement.

The survey was conducted over a one-week period last spring. Participants included PreK-12 teachers and support staff, higher education faculty and support staff, and retirees of all groups. Respondents included bus drivers, secretaries and office personnel, paraprofessionals, food service employees, custodial and maintenance workers, IT/tech support and safety/security employees.

School employees cited stagnated compensation as their top concern, followed by too much standardized testing and then evaluation systems. Employees said state mandates are harming the quality of education by hijacking well-rounded curricula and forcing schools to focus on needless testing. They said such policies are dampening collaboration and pitting teachers against each other in a competition by subjective evaluations conducted by administrators. Many said they fear for the future of education in Michigan and believe a true education crisis will come to a head within the decade.

Highlights of the survey include:

 80 percent of school employees said they are under-compensated for the job they do. In fact, many said they take home several thousand dollars less per year compared to five years ago, often due to pay freezes and skyrocketing health care premiums and deductibles. A contributing factor is the 2011 law that mandates that districts cap health insurance costs, forcing employees to pay more out of pocket.

 More than half of school employees  52 percent  said they didnt think they could comfortably retire; 36 percent said they just werent sure, and only 12 percent have any confidence that they can retire comfortably.

 Their students take an average of four different standardized tests each year. Many teachers said dozens, and for some, the number was so high that they could only make a ballpark guess. At least 40 answered simply, Too many.

 A dismal 16 percent said they were well-supported in implementing new state educational standards and curricula; 43 percent said merely average, while 40 percent gave the quality of their support a poor rating.

 Only 7 percent of teachers thought changes to the evaluation system over the past several years have had a positive impact on their teaching. In fact, 60 percent said these changes had a negative impact on their teaching.
NORMAL  Job opportunities are expanding in the agricultural field and that is reflected in a record number of companies participating in Illinois State Universitys Department of Agriculture Career Fair on Tuesday and in growing enrollment within the department.

Fifty-three companies sent representatives to the career fair at the Bone Student Center, seeking both interns and employees for full-time positions.

Brooke Wright, a 2009 ISU graduate recruiting for Archer Daniels Midland, said, There are huge opportunities because the population is ever growing so the agriculture industry has to grow with it.

Aslihan Spaulding,, an agri-business professor and adviser to the ISU National Agri-Marketers Association, said employers are interested in ISU students because they are well-rounded. They are exposed to all aspects of agriculture.

This fall, there are 630 undergraduate and graduate students in the agriculture department, a 6 percent increase over last year and nearly three times the number in the department when Spaulding joined the faculty 14 years ago, she said.

We keep growing like that, I dont know when its going to taper off, Spaulding said.

There are a lot of career opportunities in the field, said Spaulding, pointing to the growth of the farm-to-fork concept as one reason. The positions include providing farmers with input  from seeds to chemicals, livestock management, sales positions and marketing jobs, she said.

Kayla Portwood of Growmark said, We have openings in all areas of our business, including agronomy and energy.

Theres a growing need for people to help feed the world, Portwood said.

Senior Marissa Zyck, an agri-business major from Geneva, said the career fair is helpful for making contacts and seeing what companies are looking for.

There are so many different careers in the ag world, Zyck said.

Wright, who has been with ADM for nearly six years, said the company is looking for students who are confident, have clear goals and are willing to step out of their comfort zones.

Several of the companies were scheduling interviews with prospective interns and employees.
BLOOMINGTON  A 100-year-old former school building near downtown could see yet another transformation in the near future  this time offering affordable apartments for senior citizens.

Washington Square East, at 510 E. Washington St., has been sold to Iceberg Development Group LLC of LeClaire, Iowa, according to documents filed with the McLean County Recorder's Office.

Iceberg paid $400,000 for the former Bloomington Junior High School building, according to the documents.

The building was constructed in 1915-16, first to house Bloomington High School, and then used as the junior high, starting in 1959. In 1992, Bloomington District 87 sold the property to brothers Chip and Scott Henrichs, who developed the former school into a site that still houses a mix of businesses.

While there are no definite plans yet, Iceberg owner James N. Bergman said Tuesday his development company is looking at converting the second and third floors into apartments for those 55 and older.

About a dozen or so commercial tenants in the building are being asked to stay, but some may have to relocate from the upper floors to the main floor.

"There is a management company involved, and we are going to try to relocate everybody so they are closer to each other," said Bergman.

"I'm excited. Finally some of the uncertainties are out of the way," said Jeff Schwartz, a financial adviser with Ameriprise Financial Services, which has an office in the building. "From what we've been told, they are going to have businesses on the bottom floor so we don't have to move. We like that."

Rob Knight, a 25-year commercial tenant of the building, rents the pool, among the first ever built by an Illinois high school, where he operates a business offering swimming lessons.

"If we develop it, he can continue what he is doing and if there are tenants who want to use the pool, they will be able to do that as well," said Bergman.

"We're thrilled in having a new owner who is interested in rehabbing the building and taking care of the building properly and fixing it up," said Knight. "We're looking forward to working with the new owner. We look forward to operating the pool and making that available to new tenants."

Bergman said he learned of the Bloomington building through a colleague who was acquainted with Jeff Giebelhausen, an East Peoria commercial real estate broker who represented Iceberg in purchasing the building from Busey Bank. Giebelhausen could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

"A colleague of mine knows him, and we were just talking about looking for another historic rehab to do and this just came up somehow," said Bergman.

"It's a beautiful building, and I think it would make a really nice elderly housing complex," said Bergman, adding that is primarily the type of development he does.

Mayor Tari Renner said he thinks the building's redevelopment will create more economic development along the Washington Street corridor between downtown and under-construction Green Top grocery store and the nearby David Davis Mansion State Historic Site.

"It's an exciting project because a great, old historic building is being preserved," said Renner. "Both of my kids went to nursery school and kindergarten in the old Blooming Grove, so I love that building," he added, referring to Blooming Grove Academy that used to be in the building.

Bergman, a former attorney, said he's been doing real estate development since he quit practicing law in the late 1990s.

He has developed about 60 buildings in eight to 10 states throughout the Midwest, he said.

Bergman was among a trio of development partners who were sued in 2014 by the Washington, D.C.based National Fair Housing Alliance, the HOPE Fair Housing Center in West Chicago and Winnetka-based Open Communities.

Bergman said the lawsuit has been settled with the three groups that asked a federal court in Chicago to compel the development partners to improve accessibility for those with disabilities at about a dozen senior housing apartment complexes in Illinois and Iowa.

"Those were all new construction buildings and they allegedly all had issues that violated the Fair Housing Act, which I disagree with even today," said Bergman. "It wasn't a discrimination case against me or anybody else involved.
BLOOMINGTON  A federal judge in southern Illinois has approved class action status for a lawsuit accusing State Farm of violating federal racketeering laws by directing money into the election campaign of a state Supreme Court justice in hopes of influencing a ruling.

About 4.7 million policyholders with the Bloomington-based insurance giant could benefit from an estimated $7.6 billion payout, according to Clifford Law Offices, the Chicago-based law firm representing the policyholders.

The alleged "scheme," claims the lawsuit before U.S. District Court Judge David Herndon, is a violation of the Racketeering Influence and Corruption Act, more commonly referred to as RICO. The lawsuit is related to an alleged, complex plot to influence a decision by the Illinois Supreme Court on an appeal of a $1.05 billion verdict against State Farm in a 1997 lawsuit, Avery vs. State Farm.

That judgement was based on a contention that State Farm authorized non-factory parts for repairs on cars involved in accident claims between between 1987 and 1998.

In a response Tuesday, State Farm spokesman Justin Tomczak said the company was "disappointed in the courts decision on the class certification question, and respectfully disagree with it.

"We intend to ask the appellate court to review this ruling in the very near future. Plaintiffs have unsuccessfully asserted and reasserted these allegations for many years and should not be permitted to do so any longer.

The alleged scheme to defraud policyholders involved State Farm creating a pipeline of campaign contributions that ended up in the coffers of the committee to elect Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier to the Illinois Supreme Court.

State Farm funneled millions of so-called "dark money" through donations to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which then sent the money onto a political action committee and the Illinois Republican Party for use in Karmeier's 2004 campaign, according to the lawsuit.

After he was elected in November 2004, Karmeier cast the deciding vote in favor of overturning the appellate court ruling that upheld the billion-dollar verdict in the Avery case, contends the lawsuit.

Karmeier, who is not a defendant in the case, was named Monday by the Illinois Supreme Court to serve as its next chief justice.

State Farm was accused in a 2012 lawsuit filed by two Texas men of hiding the alleged donations and its intent to influence the Supreme Court decision.

With the new ruling giving that lawsuit class action status, the estimated settlement could now exceed $7.6 billion, according to Clifford.

As part of his ruling on Friday, Herndon noted that the initial complaint said State Farm "recruited Karmeier, directed his campaign, had developed a vast network of contributors and funneled as much as $4 million to the campaign."

State Farm concealed its connection to Karmeier's campaign after he was elected and the appeal of its case was pending, said the complaint.
While we all have access to tomatoes in even the depths of winter, the words we use to describe them all sound like other names for disappointment  mealy, bland and sad. But describe an encounter with the best summertime tomatoes, and suddenly it sounds as if you're reliving some steamy affair -- luscious, sumptuous and messy.

The best summertime tomatoes have a super juicy interior with a taste that hovers from sweet to acidic to, most importantly, savory. You probably think I'm joking, but tomatoes contain a high proportion of glutamic acid, which also lends Parmesan cheese and soy sauce their oddly meaty powers. Kind of amazing, no?

This partly explains the appeal of the summertime tomato sandwich. Even though you're feasting on fruit (tomatoes are, as you know, not a vegetable), something feels greedy and exciting about the whole affair.

As an American, I make sure to eat my fair share of BLT sandwiches; when done right, it is a nearly flawless creation. But it's not the only word on tomatoes and bread. There's a wide world of options out there, and making the slightest adjustment to the bread or the fat used completely changes the result. The only rule is to keep things simple.

Let's start with the obvious. We've all heard of bruschetta, right? At its simplest, the base recipe is nothing more than toasted or grilled slices of bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil and salt. If you're using great bread, this can be satisfying, if a tad boring. But add tomatoes to the mix and maybe some torn basil, and now you have one of the most ubiquitous appetizers on earth. The crunch of the bread contrasts with the soft chopped tomatoes, with the garlic heat coming at the end.

In northern Spain, they also serve a toasted bread and tomato dish called pan de tomate (or pa amb tomaquet in the Catalan language), but while the ingredients are extremely similar to bruschetta, the dish differs dramatically. Instead of neatly chopped tomatoes and a pop of bright green basil, cooks drag a halved tomato across the toasted bread, saturating the slice and leaving a trail of pulp and seeds in its wake. Compared to bruschetta, it's a messy, unkempt sight. But it's immensely satisfying, perhaps even more so than the Italian version, because of the mix of crunchy toasted bread and the soft tomato-soaked interior. So what if looks like you're eating an old soggy shoe?

If you prefer your sandwich more handsome, follow the example of Denmark's meticulously composed open-faced sandwiches, called smorrebrod. Though topping options are nearly limitless, they all start with a firm foundation of grilled or toasted rye bread spread with butter. One of the simplest is to pair sliced tomato with hard-cooked egg and watercress.

Not all tomato sandwiches need to be toasted. In the Southern United States, tomato sandwiches are usually built on untoasted, pearly white bread. While the softness of the bread seems destined to buckle under the juicy tomato slices, a healthy coating of mayonnaise helps protect it. What kind of mayonnaise? According to Southern cookbook author Virginia Willis, store-bought brands are actually the traditional way, with the regional brand Duke's being mentioned often, though Hellman's works, too. Honestly, I quite enjoyed the sandwich I made with Japanese Kewpie mayonnaise, though that will seem sacrilegious to some.

Regardless of which recipe you try, the tomato sandwich should be unreasonably messy, necessitating a nearby stack of napkins for backup. That part of the sandwich crosses all borders.

Southern Tomato Sandwich

Prep: 5 minutes

Makes: 1 serving

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

2 slices white bread

1 large tomato, core removed, sliced thickly

Salt and pepper

Spread the mayonnaise on one side of both slices of bread. With one slice facing mayonnaise-side up, add a tomato slice and season with salt and pepper. Continue adding tomato slices and seasoning them until the whole tomato has been used. Top with slice of bread facing mayonnaise-side down. Slice sandwich down the middle and serve.

Nutrition information per serving: 359 calories, 23 g fat, 3 g saturated fat, 12 mg cholesterol, 35 g carbohydrates, 9 g sugar, 6 g protein, 436 mg sodium, 2 g fiber

Bruschetta

Prep: 10 minutes; broil: 4 minutes; makes 2 servings

1 large tomato

Salt and pepper

2 slices rustic bread, sliced -inch thick

1 clove garlic, peeled, sliced in half

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

10 fresh basil leaves, torn or chopped

1. Chop the tomato, discarding the core, and transfer to a bowl. Season with a pinch of salt and pepper. Stir well; set aside for 10 minutes.

2. Heat a broiler to high. Place bread slices on a baking sheet; transfer to the top rack of the oven underneath the broiler. Cook until bread is well toasted on top, about 2 minutes. Flip and toast bread on the other side, about 2 minutes. Remove and immediately rub one side of both slices with cut side of the garlic.

3. Spoon the chopped tomatoes over the garlic-rubbed side of both slices of bread. Drizzle each with olive oil; garnish with fresh basil.

Nutrition information per serving: 153 calories, 8 g fat, 1 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 18 g carbohydrates, 3 g sugar, 3 g protein, 161 mg sodium, 2 g fiber

Pan de Tomate

Prep: 10 minutes

Broil: 4 minutes

Makes: 2 servings

2 slices of rustic bread, sliced 1-inch thick

1 clove garlic, peeled, sliced in half

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 large tomato, cut in half

Salt and pepper

1. Heat a broiler to high. Place bread on a baking sheet; transfer to the top rack of the oven underneath the broiler. Cook until bread is well toasted on top, about 2 minutes. Flip and toast bread on the other side, about 2 minutes. Remove and immediately rub one side of both slices with cut side of the garlic.

2. Drizzle both slices with olive oil. Take a tomato half and firmly rub it on the top of one slice of bread, leaving some of the pulp and seeds behind, but not the skin. Repeat on other slice. Season with salt and pepper.
BLOOMONGTON  A 19-year-old Normal man with a long history of breaking the law was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years for the armed robbery of a Bloomington gas station.

Terrell Hibbler was convicted in August of the Oct. 3 armed robbery of the Citgo gas station at 807 S. Main St., Bloomington.

The state played a small portion of a surveillance tape at the sentencing hearing from the robbery that showed Hibbler pointing a gun at two store clerks with one hand and shoving cash into his pockets with the other.

McLean County State's Attorney Jason Chambers said the robbery could have ended in tragedy.

"We were a flinch away from this being a homicide," said Chambers.

In a summary of Hibbler's record, Chambers said Hibbler moved to Bloomington in September 2014 from Chicago and began a pattern of criminal activity, including an aggravated robbery while armed. Hibbler was on probation for threatening a public official when he committed the armed robbery.

The bad behavior continued while Hibbler was incarcerated, said Chambers, noting nine disciplinary reports issued during the 353 days Hibbler was in the McLean County jail.

After a May 25 incident, Hibbler told jail staff "yeah, I said it and I meant it. I got nothing to lose," according to Chambers.

The state's attorney asked for a total of 37 years for armed robbery, resisting arrest and threatening a public official.

Public defender James Tusek asked Judge Casey Costigan to consider several factors before making a determination on a sentence. Hibbler's young age and success in the YouthBuild program for at-risk teens show a potential for rehabilitation, said Tusek.

A childhood marked by multiple caretakers and uncertainty culminated with a violent incident where Hibbler's best friend died in his arms after a shooting in Chicago, said Tusek. The move to Bloomington came after Hibbler received death threats from gang members, said Tusek.

Hibbler was disagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder after the killing, said the lawyer.

In his comments to Hibbler, the judge said he understood the circumstances that made Hibbler's life difficult, but he was not willing to accept those circumstances as an excuse for the armed robbery.

The decision to take a loaded weapon into a business threatened the entire community, said Costigan.

After the hearing, Chambers said: "I think everyone can recognize that it is a travesty that a 19-year-old was being sentenced for an armed robbery with a firearm today. But a long sentence was necessary to send a strong message that this is not tolerated and to keep others safe."

Bloomington police Officer Joseph Rizzi, who was injured during Hibbler's arrest, "performed his duties perfectly the night of this offense while arresting a suspect he believed to be dangerous," said Chambers.
NORMAL  Heartland Community College students who transfer to Western Illinois University will be able to benefit under agreements signed this week by the two schools.

One of the more unusual agreements involves a program called Linkages and a financial aid consortium.

Under the agreement, students with dual enrollment at WIU and Heartland who have financial aid would pay qualify for the WIU level of aid, but the difference between the WIU level of aid and HCC would be banked for use by students when they transfer to Western, explained Joe Rives, vice president of Quad Cities and planning at Western.

With dual enrollment, students would lock in the freshman level rate of tuition, fees and room and board at WIU even though they might not transfer to the WIU campus for a couple of years, said Rives. However, they would need to enroll in at least one WIU course each regular term, which could be an online course.

Western is the only public university in Illinois that guarantees tuition, fees and room and board for four years, according to Rives.

Heartland President Rob Widmer said the agreements provide some additional opportunities to our students and an incentive for students to stay in Illinois.

We're thrilled to be a door of opportunity, Rives said after the agreements. He taught at Heartland from 1994 to 1998 and has been at WIU since 2005.

Another agreement applies to honors students at Heartland. They will be able to transfer into WIU's Centennial Honors College after completing a degree at Heartland.

Honors programs are typically unique to each institution, said Sarah Diel-Hunt, Heartland's associate vice president for academic affairs. The fact that Western fully accepts HCC's honors program credit towards its own allows our students to seamlessly transition with no trouble completing and graduating on time.

Also signed was a reverse transfer agreement, which Heartland already has with Eastern Illinois and Millikin universities. That allows students who transfer to Western before receiving a degree from Heartland to have WIU credits transferred back to Heartland so they can receive an associate's degree.

Another agreement involves WIU's bachelor of arts in general studies and grants full credit for coursework completed in the associate's degree and most other prior credit. This is an online program primarily serving working adults, according to Rives.
People have a right to live in areas with less crime. They also should have a right to have less crime in the areas where they go to school or church or play in parks.

That's part of the idea behind drug-free zones, distinct areas in which there are higher penalties for those caught doing the illegal business of buying and selling drugs. With higher penalties, supporters argue, fewer people will want to risk their future near schools, parks or churches; that, in turn, will make safer areas for children, recreation and worship.

Opponents, however, don't think the threat of higher penalties dissuades dealers or buyers, and point to jail and prison overcrowding as a result, in part, because of enhanced sentencing penalties.

Some states are revising their rules. That's not happening in the Twin Cities.

As recently reported by Edith Brady-Lunny, Illinois is one of 31 states that has expanded the original intent of the law beyond the protection of school children to include nursing homes, public housing, parks, rest areas, churches and truck stops.

It makes for a slim chance to complete a drug deal outside a drug-free zone in more densely populated areas.

It aids our ability to reach appropriate dispositions, said Adam Ghrist, McLean County first assistant state's attorney.

Rather than eliminating drug-free zones, some states are reducing their size or requiring signs to mark their borders. Supporters of that idea say it would put the focus back on the laws' original intent: to make a specific area more safe, not to enlarge a net to snare a dealer or buyer.

"Posting signs makes perfect sense. If it's really the goal to keep drugs out of certain neighborhoods, that would accomplish it," Bloomington defense attorney Brendan Bukalski told Brady-Lunny.

A weekend story by Stateline.org, shared by Tribune News Service, said "research in Massachusetts indicated that when the zones are so extensive, they arent effective in moving drugs away from children and can have unintended consequences, such as targeting minorities in densely packed urban neighborhoods."

"Did the presence of school zones move drug dealing away from the schools? The answer to that question is clearly no, study co-author Will Brownsberger, a Massachusetts Democrat state senator, told Stateline.org, a program of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Its not a deterrent. If every place is a school zone, then no place is a school zone.

It's an argument worth considering. Condensing the size of the drug-free zones would continue to offer the opportunity for safe housing, schools and churches, while still warning drug sellers and buyers that they risk higher penalties if they're caught in those areas.
September is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Awareness Month. On Sept. 9, or 9/9, I set my cellphone for 9:09 a.m. as a reminder to pray for individuals and families who struggle with FASD. Its something we are asked annually to do and churches are asked to ring their bells at 9:09 a.m., if possible. FASD is widely recognized as the largest preventable cause of birth defects and developmental disabilities in the United States. The disorder is 100 percent preventable if a woman does not drink alcohol during her nine months of pregnancy.

Another idea to help is Pregnant Pause, an initiative of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, which asks spouses, family members and friends to support mother-to-be by not drinking alcohol during the pregnancy. Women are drinking more alcohol and starting to drink at a younger age. Alcohol use during pregnancy can lead to lifelong effects.

With the growing popularity of craft beers and acceptance of wine as a health drink, it is concerning that many women may not realize that there is no safe alcoholic drink. Ethyl alcohol is a toxic poison, and there is the same amount in each average can of beer, glass of wine or shot of whiskey. The Womans Christian Temperance Union wants everyone to be aware, to help spread the word, and thereby protect our children.

Loreta Jent, Bloomington

The writer is president, Normal WCTU.
SPRINGFIELD  A federal appeals court has denied requests from David Gill that could have allowed the Bloomington physician to appear on the Nov. 8 ballot as an independent candidate in the 13th Congressional District.

The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday declined to reconsider a three-judge panels earlier action blocking Gill from the ballot or to quickly grant him a hearing on his case.

After U.S. District Judge Sue Myerscough ruled late last month that Gill should appear on the ballot despite not having collected all of the 10,754 signatures he needed on his nominating petitions, the appeals court halted her order.

The Illinois State Board of Elections, which had previously certified the ballot with Gills name on it, voted unanimously Monday to formally remove him.

Sam Cahnman, the Springfield attorney representing Gill in the case, said theyre still studying the appellate courts order, which he believes may have left the door open for future court action between now and Monday.

Ballot access appeals are ordinarily expedited, so treating this as a standard appeal, which would yield a ruling after the election and therefore be moot, would be unusual, Cahnman wrote in an email.

Gill, who previously ran for Congress four times as a Democrat, collected nearly 8,500 valid petition signatures. He filed a federal lawsuit challenging the states signature requirement for independent congressional candidates because his would-be opponents, Republican U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis of Taylorville and Democratic challenger Mark Wicklund of Decatur, each had to collect fewer than 740.

With Election Day drawing nearer, Gills options may be running out. Local election authorities must have absentee ballots prepared to mail to military and overseas voters by Friday.

Gill still could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and overrule the appeals court, an option Cahnman said hes still weighing.

Barring that, he has until a week before the election to notify local election authorities in the 13th District, which stretches from Champaign County to the Mississippi River and includes parts of Bloomington, Normal and Decatur, that he wishes to run as a write-in candidate.
Crane Currency to Build Banknote Printing Facility in Malta

Sept. 21, 2016 - Crane Currency today announced plans to build a new banknote printing facility and customer experience center in the country of Malta. The Malta facility will represent an investment of approximately $100 million for the construction of the factory, the machinery and the equipment.

Crane made the announcement during a visit to its offices by the Prime Minister of Malta, The Honorable Dr. Joseph Muscat.

The company expects to initially hire approximately 200 new employees.

Crane currently supports its international customers from its Tumba, Sweden operations which includes a modern printing works, banknote paper mill and design services team and from its security technologies operation in New Hampshire and Georgia.

The country of Malta has a well-known history of banknote production providing Crane access to a skilled workforce. In addition, Malta has a business-friendly environment and is located in close proximity to many of Crane's customers.

Crane Currency Malta will be the first commercial banknote printing facility to be built in several decades.

Prime Minister Muscat said, "What is being announced today is a significant landmark achievement for our nation. To give one an inkling of the sheer significance of this investment to our manufacturing sector, I need only say that the last time the country managed to attract a greenfield investor that started its manufacturing operations with a comparable number of employees was in 1981."

The planned 140,000 square foot facility, expected to be completed in early 2018, is being constructed in the Hal Far industrial area.

Crane has been a global producer of currency products for more than 200 years. To learn more, please visit: www.cranecurrency.com.

SOURCE: Crane Currency
"Attack on Titan Season 2 will see major changes to the story line as soon as it gets back. While fans of "AoT" thinks that the upcoming season will focus on the manga series, recent reports have already made it clear that the next season will be a separate story.

While there are still no confirmation on how the story line would be or if it would continue the events that unfolded during "Attack on Titan" Season but it can be concluded that it will still unravel the mysteries of the Titans inside the walls.

There are reports that "Attack on Titan" Season 2 would feature the stories of the manga series of the "Clash of the Titans" and the "Uprising." However, there are clashing reports as well that says that "Attack on Titan" Season 2 would be different from the manga series.

"Clash of the Titans" may sit well with the upcoming "Attack on Titan" Season 2 since in the promotional poster of "AoT" the Colossus Titan is featured as he tries to break into the walls. The anime may just continue the story of the first season while still revealing more of the story of how the walls came to be and where the Titans came from.

While "Attack on Titan" Season 2 may also get its story line from its manga counterpart as there are good stories to tell in the "Uprising" especially with the storyline of Eren and Historia being abducted by Minister Nick.

If "Attack on Titan" Season 2 would follow the manga series, it is definite that they will not run out of stories to tell. However, reports are saying that "AoT" will stand on its own and will be different from the manga series.

Fans of "Attack on Titan" Season 2 would still have to wait for further confirmation about the real story line of the upcoming "AoT." But it won't be long as the upcoming anime will be back in the first quarter of 2017.
The filming of "Homeland" Season 6 in New York has been hit with a minor delay. Rupert Friend, who plays Peter Quinn in the series, has been injured on the set. Meanwhile, showrunner Alex Gansa reveals that "Homeland" might close its final chapter after Season 8.

Deadline reports that Rupert Friend has been walking with crutches in recent days, following an injury at work on the "Homeland" set. The actor confirmed that he hurt his right ankle and "weakened his ligaments" as a result of previous set injuries.

Friend had been filming the first two episodes for "Homeland" Season 6 in New York since late August. The actor was actually spotted on the streets while in character as Peter Quinn, which suggests of the secret agent's fate in the show's return, as Parent Herald reported.

But now that he's off work and healing, the "Homeland" production had to change some of its shooting schedules to minimize the delays, while waiting for the actor's return in a couple more weeks. "Homeland" Season 6 has a Jan. 15, 2017 premiere on Showtime, and showrunner Alex Gansa assures its fans and viewers they will be able to deliver this.

Meanwhile, Gansa also revealed that "Homeland" could end after Season 8. Following its two-season renewal in August, a Showtime executive stated that "Homeland" actually has an "open-ended expiration date," per TV Line. Gansa stated that he hopes "Homeland" will be able to shoot its final scenes in Israel, where the show's original source comes from.

"Homeland" Season 6 will follow Carrie Mathison's (Claire Danes) new life as a New York City foundation worker for Muslim groups. It will open during the transition of governments, as a new president has just been elected. "There will be striking parallels between what's happening politically [in reality] and what's happening in our world of make believe," said Danes, via People.

Catch "Homeland" Season 6 on Showtime on Jan. 15, 2017. Keep checking back to this site for the updates.
"Making a Murderer" subject Brendan Dassey and his lawyers have filed a Motion for Release on Personal Recognizance in Wisconsin. They are asking the courts to grant Dassey his freedom as soon as possible, following the overturning of his conviction in August. If approved, Brendan Dassey plans to stay with his mother for at least three months, as he tries to get his life back in order.

The motion, which was filed last Sept. 14, comes after the state of Wisconsin also sought to appeal Brendan Dassey's overturn, per Parent Herald. But his legal team argues that the 26-year-old "Making a Murderer" subject has had no bad record in his 10 years in prison and that the evidence against him in the murder of Teresa Halbach has been obtained illegally. They defend that Dassey is of no risk to the public, hence must already be released.

The motion also outlines Brendan Dassey's plan to return to society, which will definitely be documented in "Making a Murderer" Season 2. Viewers of the Netflix series might recall that Dassey was just a minor at 16-years-old when he was convicted of being accessory to murder, as seen in "Making a Murderer's" first season.

Outlined in the release plan includes having "Making a Murderer's" Brendan Dassey live with his mother as soon as he gets out of prison. "Petitioner [will] spend the initial one to three months of his release on bond living in a family-owned trailer with his mother in rural northeast Wisconsin," the motion stated, per Rolling Stones. Then, the "Making a Murderer" subject is expected to rent is own place eventually, which "would be initially paid for by his mother and stepfather," until he finds a job. He will also be expected to seek out therapy, education and training as part of his assimilation to society.

"Making a Murderer" directors have earlier released a statement saying that their documentation on Dassey and his uncle, Steven Avery, is far from over in light of recent developments. Netflix has confirmed "Making a Murderer" is returning for Season 2 last July, per Variety.
Arizona's Supreme Court has upheld a ruling that might make baby diaper changing a potential criminal offense. The move comes as the judges handed out its decision in a child sexual abuse case but it has only given rise to concerns, which could affect any parent, babysitter or caregiver of children.

The Arizona court's decision, which was handed down on Sept. 13, stated that any contact between a baby's genitals and an adult could be seen as a criminal act. According to Slate, the ruling wasn't specific about the "touch" being sexual in nature, thus even an innocent routine such as changing a baby's diaper could land a person in jail. It further stated that because the law is vague, it could be interpreted literally to mean that any parent or child caregiver, or even a pediatrician, could become a sex offender.

Lawyer Bill Montgomery of the Maricopa County, however, stated the ruling did imply "sexual contact" and "sexual abuse" in its title and there are sections 13-1410 and 13-1404 in the law to support it. Good lawyers also give child molestation cases a good amount of checks and vetting before filing the cases.

"If a defendant is going to bring that up in trial, and we don't have any evidence to show that there was sexual motivation," said Montgomery, via 12 News. "Then juries are not going to convict, grand jurors are not going to indict."

Legal analyst Monica Lindstrom also compounds on Montgomery's points saying, "No sane, reasonable prosecutor is going to bring a case against parents or a guardian for changing their baby's diaper of helping them change their swimsuit," per Fox 10 Phoenix. However, Lindstrom also recognizes that the law could be open to abuse by prosecutors, albeit with remote possibility.

Arizona's Supreme Court judges was hearing an appeal of a man who was charged with sexually abusing his step daughter. The original ruling was upheld in the State vs. Holle case.
USA Network's "Falling Water," a new series hails from executive producers Blake Masters ('Brotherhood') and Gale Anne Hurd ('The Walking Dead') is set to debut in just a few more weeks. The cast members explain the premise of the thriller series that is all set for Oct. 13.

The upcoming series is described as "a mind-bending thriller intersecting reality and unconscious thoughts," also produced by the late Emmy Award-winning Henry Bromell ('Homeland') is all about three unrelated who realize that they are dreaming separate parts of a single common dream. David Ajala ('Fast & Furious 6'), Lizzie Brochere ('American Horror Story') and Will Yun Lee ('Hawaii 5-0') will be starring "Falling Water" as the three unrelated people.

According to Dread Central, the story is about three unrelated people slowly realize that they are dreaming parts of a single common dream. Each of them is on a mysterious and highly personal quest - one is searching for his missing girlfriend, one is searching for his lost child, one is looking to cure his catatonic mother. They realize that it is a collective mission and not their individual agendas - that the visions found in their common dream just might hold the key to the fate of the world.

"Falling Water starts with a really simple premise: What if all of our individual dreams are actually part of one giant dream we're all dreaming together?" the co-creator and executive producer Blake Masters said in an exclusive interview with Hollywood Reporter.

"After watching the premiere, viewers will say, 'What the f-? Give me more,' " Ajala added. USA Network has been releasing many trailers of the upcoming series, the recent one is entitled "The Battle" and the former trailer named "Absolute Connectivity." Check out the trailer video below.
Consumers haven't seen the last of Nokia-branded phones yet. Microsoft just launched the Nokia 216, a feature phone with outdated design and technology that could still sell millions on the market.

On Tuesday, the Redmond-headquartered tech giant introduced the Nokia 216 to the surprise of many tech experts and analysts, since the company is in the process of selling its feature phone business. It was found out this past May that Microsoft was poised to sell the department that makes Nokia-branded feature phones to Foxconn's subsidiary FIX Mobile for $350 million, ZDNet reported.

With the launch of the Nokia 216, however, it seems that the deal between the two companies has yet to come to fruition. A Microsoft spokesperson has even come out to confirm this, explaining that the tech giant's feature phone business would continue to function until the closing of the transaction sometime in the second half of 2016.

Nokia 216 is perhaps the most basic cellphone launched this year, with The Verge reporting that it only has a 2.4-inch QVGA display, 0.3MP cameras on both sides, an Opera mini browser and a headphone jack. The Series 30 OS-running device is also devoid of touchscreen so it has an alphanumeric keypad.

GSM Arena listed the device as having 16MB of RAM, a card slot that can accommodate up to 32 GB of external memory, Bluetooth v3.0 and dual SIM card slots. The tech site also listed its status as slated for release this October. Despite its basic hardware and features, the new Nokia feature phone could still do well on the market because The Verge has learned that Microsoft is selling millions of units of its feature phones every month.

Aside from selling its feature phone business, Microsoft is also reportedly discontinuing the Nokia X, Nokia and S40 lines. Also, as part of its deal with FIH Mobile, the Redmond tech company is also turning over its Hanoi, Vietnam-based manufacturing facility to the former.
Earlier this week, the world was shocked when reports about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's divorce run wild on the internet. But while many fans were saddened over the Brangelina marriage fallout, some were curious in what will happen to the custody of their six children. Will Jolie and Pitt agree on the shared parenting concept?

In recent months, shared parenting has been making headlines as various U.S. states enacted their own version of the strongly recommended co-parenting or child custody reform bill. As Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt called it quits, many are wondering if the latest Hollywood divorcing couple will adapt this egalitarian approach to child custody and visitation over their six kids.

Ever since the Brangelina divorce broke out, there have been several speculations regarding the real reason for Jolie and Pitt's failed marriage. One of the reasons cited was the couple's opposing views on parenting, E! News noted.

In a statement shared by Jolie's manager Geyer Kosinski, the best interest of the couple's children was mentioned, sparking the speculations that their parenting methods might be the reason for their separation. As a matter of fact, Pitt told The Telegraph last November that he was more of the disciplinarian compared to soon-to-be ex-wife, Jolie.

Even though high-profile divorces would often end up on nasty battles over wealth and properties, celebrity divorce attorney Neal Hersch revealed that it's not quite the case for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who cited irreconcilable differences on the court documents. The lawyer told CNN the major battle for Brangelina could be over their children: 15-year-old Maddox; 12-year-old Pax; 11-year-old Zahara; 10-year-old Shiloh and 8-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox.

With that said, will the shared parenting concept work with Jolie and Pitt? Given the fact that the 41-year-old "Maleficent" actress is seeking sole physical custody of their six children while requesting the court to grant visitation rights for Pitt.

In spite of the rumors that a tense and acrimonious child custody battle may ensue, another CNN report revealed an insider close to Pitt and Jolie said the couple is determined to have a cordial separation. Both Pitt and Jolie also stressed the divorce was made for the well-being of their children and for the health of the family.

Meanwhile, shared parenting has been widely encouraged and highly recommended across the United States with Missouri, Utah, Minnesota, South Dakota and Arizona having their own child custody reform law. Although not everyone seemed to agree with the concept especially for high conflict and complex living circumstances, shared parenting remains a better solution for separated parents to have equal rights and responsibilities on their children, The Gazette reported.

Do you think Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will adapt the shared parenting concept? Share your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
"One Punch Man" hero Saitama is set to display his greatest power in the action-comedy anime this week, as it approaches its series finale for season 1. The action-comedy "One Punch Man" has been successful in attracting a huge following on Toonami, and there have been talks of a second season afterwards.

The original manga had gained rising popularity when it circulated last 2009, and the anime adaptation received the same recognition since being released on TV, according to the Inquisitr. Fans are already anticipating on a "One Punch Man" season 2 sometime soon.

Other than the anime characters' antics in "One Punch Man", its relatively popular English-dubbed first season is said to have its final run by October this year. While this is yet to be confirmed, there's also talks of a Japanese version for season 2.

An interesting development from the "One Punch Man" webcomic and manga is that of villain Garou, who is predicted to appear in the anime version. It has been known that Garou is a disciple of elderly sensei Bang, who went rogue. Bang has already appeared in few of the episodes for "One Punch Man" season 1.

And just like that, it's over! Apparently the earth is doomed, so... See you next time, One-Punch Peeps! #OnePunchMan  Max Mittelman (@MaxMittelman) September 18, 2016

There's further speculation that Hero Registry member Amai Mask would turn against Saitama in upcoming "One Punch Man" episodes, and that our hero would be defeated this time around.

Meanwhile, Viz Media has also announced the English voice cast for the remaining episodes of "One Punch Man" for season 1, in a related Anime News Network post. During an interview with Dave Casipit, the producer for One Punch Man's English version, he stated that it took them a while to search for the person who would be behind Saitama's great enemy.

As it turns out, Chris Jai Alex came out on top as equal to the Japanese version of Boros. Casipit added that Alex's voice as well as his "performance, pitch and rhythm were all a perfect match". Cool!
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You know the story of Ruby Bridges, right?

In 1960, Ruby desegregated her New Orleans elementary school. She was only six years old at the time. I remember reading about her when I was a child. A few years ago I learned that there was a made-for-TV movie about her experience. I got my hands on it, and it was well worth the watch. My daughter Sally is around the age Bridges was when she found herself in the center of a firestorm. Ive read her the same books my mother read me as a child, and Bridges is her hero.

Well you know what? I recently came upon this 2015 photo of Bridges:

I showed the picture to Sally. She was shocked. Shed pictured the stories wed read about desegregation and sit-ins happening in the old, old days. I was surprised too, even though I know, intellectually, that someone born in 1954 is only 62.

Have you seen the trailer for this falls movie, Loving?

I showed Sally this preview, explained what happened, and told her that the case happened while her granny was a little girl like her. Again she was shocked. And in a way, so was I. Its easy to forget how close those events really are.

Sally has black children in her classroom. Their grandparents were likely born before desegregation. I have an African American neighbor who is in her 80s whom I just realized must have been born in the 1930s. I need to taker her cookies and ask what life was like, before. Too often we think of the civil rights movement as something that happened ages ago, something thats ancient history. It isnt.

Of course, this means many of the segregationists who opposed the civil rights movement are still alive as well. I once overheard my husbands grandfather, who died only two or three years ago, complain about a black family that moved into his neighborhood, decades ago, and lowered his property value. He was born in the late 1910s. He was in his forties during the civil rights movement. What had he thought of the civil rights movement, during those years? I never asked. One of my own grandmothers was a young mother during the civil rights movement. She lived in the north, and says she didnt pay much attention to what was going on. But what of other grandmothers?

The white teens harassing the young man at this 1960 sit-in are in their 70s now. The majority of them are probably still alive today.

This stuff isnt ancient history. Its living memory.

Both of these pictures were taken in 1963:

How many of the young people in these pictures are still alive? Someone who was 15 in 1963 would be 68 today. All four of my grandparents are older than that, and three of them are still alive. Life expectancy in the U.S. is currently 78.

So I thought Id look up views on interracial marriage broken down by age range. Um. Wow. Even I was surprised. It turns out that only a third of white Americans over 65 would be okay with a family member marrying someone of another race.

We need to stop pretending the civil rights movement happened that long ago, or that its over and done. It wasnt and its not. And did you know that those over 65 vote at a higher rate than any other demographic? Well, they do.

The battles the civil rights movement fought didnt end with the 1960s either. This picture is from an anti-busing rally in Boston in 1975:

And as you know, the latest battle of the civil rights movement revolves around police brutality. And its not just that. Even in school districts dedicated to providing a racially equitable education, inequalities persist.

There are two takeaways here. First, were a lot closer to our history of racial segregation and discrimination than we think. Second, you should take your elderly black neighbor cookies and sit down for a chat. Or maybe thats just me.
The source of nearly all human misery can be traced back to an often unconscious disconnection between the ends and the means. When humans treat other people, or the planet, or our own bodies as if they are nothing more than a means to an end, then we invite suffering into our lives. If we are ever to have an impact for the better on the plight of this world, surely this will involve the ability to treasure the doing, more than the getting it done.

Think of the emphasis most organizations place on the achievement of their own goalsthe agenda, the mission, the outcomeskeep your eyes on the prize and then do whatever it takes to succeed. If the ends are all-important, then nearly any means can be justified. This path is uncritically taken by businesses and churches alike: do whatever it takes to succeed. With our eyes on the prize we have no time to think about collateral damage, much less the unintended consequences. Any organization that ascribes to this philosophy will leave a trail of broken bodies in its wake.

I would contend that this is precisely the power of the goal or mission statement within most organizations: they artificially inflate outcomes to the point that people will chase them by any means necessary.

Perhaps even more tragically, our attempts to control outcomes by any means necessary serves to steal away the joy of the present moment. The focus is out there in the future, invested in some reality that does not yet exist. That in itself is not a bad thing, unless the focus on the future serves to eliminate ones ability to enjoy the moment, and to inhabit the moment with great care. Those who do not learn to patiently inhabit the present moment will end up doing great damage.

This ability to be less invested in controlling the future is what the great Duke University theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas calls becoming a friend of time. Hauerwas asserts that people can best learn this discipline when we are placed in a situation over which we have no real control terminal cancer, natural disasters, or rebellious children.

The moment we realize that we have precious little control over the outcomes of our life is the moment we surrender to time, and learn to become its friend. The moment we realize that, although we could marshall all our strength and resources we still cannot dictate the outcomes of our lives, that is the moment when we become fully human. That is when I truly become a creature of this earth, not the master and commander. That is when I realize that I am not the master of my fate; I am not the captain of my soul. I am a creature, not a creator.

The problem is, you have to want it. You have to want to be a creature in this world. You have to want to become a friend of time, and all too many people who inhabit leadership positions in our world would rather try to play God. Its never a good trade to barter away the present for the hope of some desired future. All true stewardship is a stewardship of the present in light of the future, not a stewardship of the future at the expense of the present. The latter approach usually ends up costing you both the future and the present.

When we emphasize not the ends, but the meansthe process, the journey, the day to day practices and habits of our livesthen we are able to enjoy life and experience peace no matter the outcomes. We have a saying at my church: how we get there is where we are going. The journey is the destination. Anna Quindlen noted this about her time as a parent of young children: I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

This language developed in our community as a reaction to the fact that it is often difficult to live in fidelity to other people who are broken, who hurt and disappoint one another as a matter of course. It also comes as a byproduct of caring for the poor. Make loving your neighbor your primary concern and you are sure to experience a budget shortfall. Translation: the ends dont always meet their means. All the goals in the world cannot change this reality. It is simply part of the human condition.

So, what do we do when we realize that we cant save our neighbors just down the street, much less the planet? We do very small things. Forgive quickly. Speak less and listen more. Seek justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. We try our best to treasure the doing more than the getting it done.
Iran president arrives in New York for 71st UN General Assembly session

09/21/16

Source: Press TV (photos by Ahmad Moeinijam, Islamic Republic News Agency)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has arrived in New York to participate in the 71st annual session of the United Nations General Assembly. Heading a high-ranking politico-economic delegation, Rouhani arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday and was welcomed by Gholam-Ali Khoshrou, Iran's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations.







The Iranian president is scheduled to deliver a speech at the General Assembly session and hold talks with senior officials of some other countries attending the meeting. He will also meet with world's religious leaders as well as political and economic elites.

The 71st session of the General Assembly is facing one of the toughest to-do lists as the world is currently grappling with serious issues, including violence, terrorism, refugee crisis, climate change and nuclear proliferation.

Among the important topics on the agenda is Syria's five-year foreign-backed militancy, which has so far claimed the lives of at least 300,000 people, according to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The worst refugee crisis in 70 years is also among the challenges that the UN members hope to tackle.









Ahead of New York trip, Rouhani traveled to Havana and held talks with his Cuban counterpart, Ral Castro, and revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, on Monday.

At a meeting between the two countries' high-ranking delegations, chaired by the Iranian and Cuban presidents, the two sides discussed ways to improve relations.

Iranian and Cuban officials signed agreements for cooperation in the health, education and science sectors as well as a memorandum of understanding on banking cooperation.

Rouhani arrived in Cuba from Venezuela, where he addressed the 17th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on the island of Margarita on Saturday, during which he handed over the movement's rotating presidency to his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro.

Addressing the opening ceremony of the summit, the Iranian president called for further cooperation among the NAM member states, saying the bloc plays an "undeniable" role in resolving the crises across the world.

He also held talks with senior officials attending the NAM summit about major regional and international developments.
Iran Marks War Anniversary With Military Parades

09/21/16

Report by Press TV; photos by ISNA

Various divisions of Irans Armed Forces are holding annual military parades on the first day of the Sacred Defense Week, which marks the 36th anniversary of the eight-year Iraqi war on Iran.



The parade in Tehran, held in an area near the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, features military units from the Army, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) as well as the Police Force.

Similar rallies were also held in other Iranian provinces to commemorate the occasion.

During the parade in southern Tehran, Iranian Armed Forces showcased their latest achievements in the area of defense, including various missile defense systems.

Among the military equipment showcased during the event was the S-300 missile defense system as well the domestically-built Emad ballistic missile successfully test-fired in October.







































Units of the Armys ground forces also put on display a series of defense hardware, including a new generation of the Zolfaghar battle tanks, the Fajr rocket-launching vehicles and the Kiaan 120mm self-propelled guns.

Militarty Parade Bandar Abbas

Meanwhile, Irans southern waters near the port city of have also been the scene of another large-scale naval parade featuring 500 vessels, submarines, fighter jets and helicopters.

During a military parade by ground forces in Bandar Abbas, Irans state-of-the-art Zolfaghar missile defense system was unveiled.

Zolfaghar is a multiple reentry vehicle (MRV) missile capable of carrying several warheads.

It is the latest generation of Irans long-range missiles and can carry out precision-strikes against targets on the ground and airport tarmacs.















Iran-Iraq War

In late September 1980, the regime of slain Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched a war against Iran. Iran holds a military parade every year to honor the martyrs of the eight-year war imposed by the former regime in Baghdad.

Head of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri has delivered a speech at the event in place of President Hassan Rouhani, who is currently in New York to attend the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly.

Enemies cannot catch Iran off-guard

In his address, Major General Baqeri said the Sacred Defense Week is a reminder of the Iranian nations bravery in the face of an enemy that failed to achieve its goals in a war that it waged 36 years ago with the backing of Western and Eastern powers.





Head of Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri (center)





Enemies masterminded the eight-year offensive against Iran to bring the country to its knees, but that turned into a strategic opportunity for the nation and the establishment to display their capabilities in defending their independence and the ideals of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

During the Sacred Defense, our soldiers learned how to stand on their own feet under sanctions, said the senior commander, adding that the preparedness of Irans Armed Forces is currently at a satisfactory level.

He further said the strategies and defense plans of Irans Armed Forces have been designed in compliance with the countrys internal and external security as well as its ability to give a timely response to enemy threats.

Major General Baqeri further said Irans military achievements are aimed at strengthening its defense might, adding that the countrys military tests and maneuvers will continue as scheduled, and will not be suspended or postponed under any circumstances.

Iranian Armed Forces are closely and precisely monitoring all enemys moves in the region, said the senior military official, emphasizing that the country is capable of foiling the attempts of regional and extra-regional enemies.

He said enemies fear Irans defense power and that is why they seek to pile pressure on the resistance front by purchasing large amounts of weapons as well as training and supporting terrorists.

The ultimate goal of the United States, the Zionist regime and their supporters in launching proxy wars is to destroy the infrastructure of Muslim states, he stated.

The senior commander described Iranians as a peace-seeking nation, saying the Islamic Republic has never initiated any war against any country throughout its history.

Armed Forces, Irans iron fist against enemies

Addressing the event in Bandar Abbas, IRGC Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari advised the Americans against wasting their peoples resources on boosting their mischievous presence in the Persian Gulf.



IRGC Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari (R)



Jafari said the Armed Forces will be the Iranian nations iron fist in the face of enemies, adding, This is our home, and we are highly sensitive vis-a-vis the enemies wandering around our home.

The senior commander slammed the United States for its unprofessional conduct in the region, saying the Americans' "unbalanced behavior and lack of intelligence command come at considerable cost to the US and other states.

The Islamic Republic has proved to be qualified for controlling and protecting the security of this sensitive and strategic region, said Jafari, stressing that the Iranian Armed Forces are doing their best to boost their capabilities.
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A U.S. lawmaker has introduced two bills to protect voting systems from hacking, amid fears that Russian cyber spies may be interfering with this years presidential election.

Representative Hank Johnson, a Democrat serving Georgia, is proposing a moratorium on state purchases of electronic voting machines that dont produce a paper trail. His Election Integrity Act, introduced Wednesday, would also prohibit voting systems from being connected to the internet as a way to prevent online tampering.

The high-profile hack of the Democratic National Committee publicized in June has citizens worried that U.S. election systems may be vulnerable, Johnson said.

The hack of the DNC stole sensitive files that were later leaked online. Although the FBI is investigating the breach, U.S. intelligence officials are reportedly confident that the Russian government was involved.

Security experts have also long been warning that some U.S. voting machines are outdated and rife with security holes. This can make them easy to hack or prone to casting ballot errors.

We must work to reduce the vulnerability of our crucial voting systems, Johnson said in a statement. His bills were also meant to address well-documented efforts of alleged voter suppression, he added.

Johnsons second bill proposes designating U.S. voting systems as critical infrastructure, meaning that the federal government would take a role in protecting it. The countrys electrical grid and banking sector are among those already designated as critical infrastructure.

Johnsons bill would also require the Department of Homeland Security to submit a plan to Congress to protect the U.S. election process from threats including cyber terrorism. In addition, it asks that better standards be developed so that citizens can verify their votes.

Johnson introduced his bills just weeks after the FBI began warning that hackers had targeted two state election systems. One of those breaches may have involved stealing login credentials from a county official that could have allowed the hackers to delete voter registration records.

Johnsons bills are unlikely to pass in Congress this year because legislative activity slows down as the national election approaches.
Convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala was charged with murder Tuesday in Wyoming in the killing of a woman reported missing in 1977  a charge authorities credited, in part, to information from the Huntington Beach Police Department.

Alcala, 73, a former child photographer convicted in Orange County for a string of murders in Southern California, and of rape in Riverside County, remains at Californias Corcoran State Prison and is sentenced to death.

The Riverside County crime took place near Banning in early 1979.

The man once nicknamed The Dating Game Killer because he appeared on that game show while in the midst of his killing rampage may have as many as 130 victims across the country, police in Wyoming said Tuesday, citing estimates by authorities. Some online news stories mention Alcala may have an estimated 50 to 130 victims, but the actual number is unknown.

Prosecutors in Rock Springs, Wyo., said Tuesday that one of those victims was Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio. They said Alcala met Thornton and killed her while on a road trip, then buried her on a ranch in Granger, Wyo.

Thornton was about six months pregnant at the time of her death, according to the warrant for Alcalas arrest.

Though prosecutors said her body was uncovered by a rancher in Wyoming in 1982, Thorntons alleged link to Alcala wasnt known for decades.

In 2013, Thorntons sister, Kathy Thornton, saw an online display of photos taken by Alcala decades earlier, and recognized the subject of one of those photos as her sister. After that, investigative work by police in Huntington Beach and Wyoming  and a link to a federal database, NamUS, which matches DNA evidence to remains of unidentified people  helped connect the alleged crime to the picture.

In all, about 200 Alcala photos were released to the public by Huntington Beach police in 2010, after Alcala was sentenced to death for five sexual assault slayings committed in the 1970s.

Detectives said Tuesday that they released the photos for that exact purpose  to be seen by people who might be connected to other possible victims.

I had a gut feeling there were more out there, said Huntington Beach police Detective Patrick Ellis, who said he played only a small role in the initial investigation but was part of the decision to make the photos public.

The pictures, Ellis added, came with an unspoken message: Here it is, and here we are.

One of those photos was of a pretty 20-something woman, wearing a yellow top and flip-flops and looking to be about six months pregnant, sitting atop a Kawasaki 500 motorcycle. After Kathy Thornton saw the picture, in 2013, she called the source  Huntington Beach police. From there, investigations and DNA testing of Thorntons family eventually tracked the remains to a federal database that included information about a then-unidentified body in Wyoming.

When investigators in Wyoming saw the picture, they didnt recognize the woman but they did notice the background looked like Wyoming. They eventually linked that background to a spot near where a womans body had been unearthed decades earlier about 6 miles north of I-80, according to the warrant.

That body was found with a yellow top and faded flip-flops, and was eventually identified by DNA evidence as Christine Thornton.

Huntington Beach police Chief Robert Handy says the Thornton case highlights strong work by his detectives, then and now.

This wouldnt be solved if he didnt have a hunch, Handy said of Ellis. This is a case of a detective who was super passionate.

The new murder charge against Alcala might not change his status.

Its unclear if Alcala will be extradited to stand trial in Wyoming or what his plea might be if he is. After years of saying he was innocent of murder, Alcala pleaded guilty in 2013 to killing two young women in New York state.

When Wyoming investigators spoke with Alcala this month in Corcoran, they showed him an aerial photo of the location where Thorntons body was found, according to the warrant.

When asked if the land looked familiar, Alcala said, Its part of my area. And when presented with the photo of Thornton on the motorcycle, Alcala told investigators that he knew Thornton and took the picture.

When asked if she left the area with him, Alcala said no, according to the warrant. When investigators pressed him, asking if she was alive when he left her, he replied, She was alive before I left her.

The charge filed Tuesday is the latest step in Alcalas complex, sometimes byzantine criminal history.

Though hes been in jail or prison since 1979, Alcala has been tried, convicted and retried for five sexual assault murders in Southern California.

In 1980, he was convicted of murdering Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl who was raped and killed by Alcala after he lured her from the beach by promising to take her picture.

That conviction was overturned in 1986 on grounds that the jury had been improperly informed of previous sex crimes committed by Alcala. That year he was retried and again convicted in Orange County, but that conviction also was overturned, this time because a witness wasnt allowed to substantiate Alcalas contention that a park ranger who found Samsoes body had been hypnotized by investigators.

Over the decades, investigators linked Alcala to other homicides in Los Angeles, San Francisco, upstate New York, New Hampshire and Seattle.

In 2010, Alcala was convicted of sexually assaulting and killing Samsoe as well as Jill Barcomb, 18, of Los Angeles; Georgia Wixted, 27, of Malibu; Charlotte Lamb, 31, of El Segundo; and Jill Parenteau, 21, of Burbank.

In the years since the photos were released, Ellis said he and other detectives have taken hundreds of calls and emails from people looking for missing loved ones. The process has helped identify about 40 women in photos who are still alive and well, Ellis estimates.

Thornton is the first alleged slaying victim linked to those photos, but Ellis believes there are others.

There are thousands out there that are unidentified, he said. Now, theres one less.

Former staff writer

Larry Welborn contributed

to this report.
A thirsty but healthy deer is safe in a county animal shelter after a sheriffs deputy and an animal control officer rescued the critter in Jurupa Valley.

The deputy found the apparently domesticated deer about noon Tuesday, Sept. 20, and summoned the Animal Control Officer Will Luna to Limonite Avenue east of Wineville Avenue, less than 1-1/2 miles north of the Santa Ana River.

The deer stayed hitched to the patrol car until being placed in a transport truck and taken to the animal shelter in Jurupa Valley.

Its very likely someone was keeping the deer as a pet, illegally, county Animal Services Department spokesman John Welsh said in a written statement.

California Fish & Wildlife officials will decide what happens next.

Its likely she will be taken to a sanctuary to live out the rest of her life, Welsh wrote.
A black police officer shot an armed black man at a Charlotte, North Carolina, apartment complex Tuesday, authorities said, prompting angry street protests late into the night.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. Television coverage showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. The protests came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police went to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw the man  not the suspect they were looking for  inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers saw the man get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

The man, identified as 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Detectives recovered a firearm at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Some protesters were heard yelling Black lives matter, and Hands up, dont shoot! One person held up a sign saying Stop Killing Us.

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

Earlier, a tow truck was brought in to take another police cruiser away. Local media outlets reported that car suffered damage to its rear end.

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that the community deserves answers.

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Shelbys attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutchers family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.
The National Institutes of Health on Wednesday, Sept. 21, awarded USCs medical school $6 million to continue probing the effects of smog on Southern California children.

The Keck School of Medicine had applied for $45 million to continue work on its influential Childrens Health Study, which began tracking the respiratory health of thousands of kids in the early 1990s.

The medical school expects to receive more money once it completes a two-year phase of a new seven-year federal initiative to study the environmental effects on children, said Carrie Breton, a USC assistant professor of preventive medicine and an environmental epidemiologist.

The new funding will pay for research into how freeway pollution affects fetuses.

It will involve following 750 to 1,000 pregnant women, said Breton, in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. We are now recruiting women in the Los Angeles area.

The funds also will go toward more research on how air pollution correlates with higher rates of obesity among children.

The USC team also will follow up with adults who participated in the study in the 1990s when they were children. Researchers want to examine their respiratory health and they also plan to test the children of former participants.

The Childrens Health Study started in 1992 when researchers began tracking more than 3,000 children in 12 communities  Riverside, Mira Loma, Lake Elsinore, Alpine, Lake Arrowhead, Upland, Lancaster, Atascadero, Santa Maria, Lompoc, San Dimas, Long Beach, and Anaheim.

This allowed them to compare the health of children growing up in smoggy areas, such as the Mira Loma area of Jurupa Valley, with those living in clean-air communities, such as Santa Maria off of the central coast.

One of the earlier findings was that children living in more polluted areas had stunted lung development. These results and other research then factored into subsequent decisions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set tougher health and clean-up standards for air pollution.

The funds awarded to USC are part of $157 million for universities and hospitals throughout the nation announced Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health for a seven-year initiative on how the environment affects childrens health.

Im very excited to work with many of our nations best scientists to tackle vital unanswered questions about child health and development, said program director, Dr. Matthew W. Gillman in a prepared statement.

The institutes are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9471 or ddanelski@scng.com
Rancho California Water Districts credit rating has been raised to AAA, the S&P Global Ratings announced Wednesday, Sept. 22

The upgraded rating will benefit ratepayers, according to a district release, because the district will incur lower financing costs. This marks the first time the district has achieved a AAA rating, the highest offered by S&P.

The ratings agency  one of the big three international ratings agencies  credited the upgrade to the districts strong financial performance despite challenging drought conditions, affordable service rates, and good operational management practices and policies, the release states.

S&P also noted strengths, including a manageable five-year capital plan that does not require additional debt for the next four fiscal years and satisfactory resolution to the creation of the Santa Rosa Regional Resources Authority, which will facilitate required wastewater treatment plant upgrades.

The district covers Temecula, portions of Murrieta and other unincorporated areas of Southwest Riverside County.

We are proud that RCWDs conservative fiscal policies have been recognized by S&P, as a higher bond rating will bring real savings to our customers, said Bill Plummer, the districts board president. This upgrade is a testament to the well-founded board policies and principles guiding RCWDs planning efforts.

Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
Members of Laguna Beach Unhinged, an informal social media group, gathered on Saturday at the home of Lori Laras family in Lake Elsinore to do a good dead.

The group has about 350 members ranging in ages from 50 to 70. On Saturday, Sept. 17, about 20 members showed up to work on Laras house. Group members volunteered their services to do home renovation to Laras home which included, power washing, sanding and painting.

The group was created about three years ago by Chris Kreymann. Some of its rules include no discussion of religion or politics and everyones opinions must be respected.

Most of us grew up in Laguna Beach, said Kreymann. Were all a bunch of misfits who enjoy having a good, old time.

According to Lara, the paint supplies were donated by Home Depot and Sherwin-Williams and the group donated the labor.

The last time we had the house painted it was $6,000, said Lara, who is also the mother to an autistic child.

The Laguna Beach Unhinged group has a reputation for doing random acts of kindness. According to Lara, in the past they have bought airline tickets for a member to visit her family in Nevada, paid for medical expenses, comforted groups members during illness and held a celebration of life party for a group member who passed away.

Though identified with the popular Orange County city, the group includes members from around the nation. One group member, Susan Tyler, drove cross-country from Cheboygan, Mich.

Tyler said she was the recipient of one of the groups random acts of kindness when they surprised her with a round-trip ticket to visit her daughter in Reno, Nev.

According to Tyler, she was glad to make the three-day trip, which was quite an adventure since she drove with her two dogs.

She (Lara) needed the help, said Tyler.

Tyler said she cherishes her friendships with members of the group.

Theyll do anything, Tyler said. Everyone loves each other.

Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
Landing a job can be tough under any circumstances. But discrimination can make the job hunt for transgender people even more difficult.

Michaela Mendelsohn hopes to remedy that. Mendelsohn, a successful franchisee of six El Pollo Loco restaurants and a transgender woman herself, has employed trans people at her restaurants for years.

Weve had a great experience and weve gotten a tremendous response from our customers, she said. We get more compliments on our trans employees than we do on anyone else.

Mendelsohn recently launched the California Trans Work Project, a program thats dedicated to working with service industries and chambers of commerce to create entry-level jobs for trans people with pathways to management through education and training.

And the program comes with an incentive. The first 60 hours of a new hires wages will be paid through a $150,000 grant offered by the California Workforce Development Board. That averages out to be about $800 per employee.

Mendelsohn also has partnered with the California Restaurant Association to get word out on the program.

My interest is to help people in the lower economic sector, the 64-year-old Woodland Hills resident said. Transgender people are twice as likely to live in poverty and four times as likely if they are a transgender of color.

WORKERS OFTEN FACE DISCRIMINATION

A 2015 report from the Center for American Progress and the Movement Advancement Project reveals that employment discrimination is a fact of life for trans people. And it has serious economic consequences.

The study, Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for Being Transgender, shows that as many as 47 percent of trans workers report being unfairly denied a job, and 78 percent report being harassed, mistreated or discriminated against at work.

There are two main reasons why employers wont hire transgenders, Mendelsohn said. They are concerned about how customers will react. But weve had nothing but positive feedback at our restaurants. Employers are also concerned about how it will affect the relationship between their employees. And again, we havent had one incident in four years.

But negative reactions still happen.

I do some mentoring at the Los Angeles LGBT Center and there was this girl from Honduras who had a great job history, Mendelsohn said. But last year she went on more than 50 job interviews and didnt get one job. Things were going well until she finally had to show her ID and it showed a different gender. No one would hire her, but I did and shes done great and is now on a management track at one of my restaurants.

Marie Hoole, a transgender woman who works at one of Mendelsohns locations, said she had a tough time finding work before landing her current job.

I went to many interviews and everything would be going well, but when they learned about my gender identity things got a little cold, said Hoole, 25, who lives in Los Angeles. They would say, Well call you later. But that call never came.  It was disheartening and very discouraging.

Hoole says shes glad to be working for Mendelsohn.

This job is a platform where everyone is treated equally with equal responsibilities and equal access to opportunities, she said.

A recent survey by the Williams Institute at UCLA shows that California has an adult trans population of more than 220,000.

Sharokina Shams, a spokeswoman for the California Restaurant Association, said her organizations partnership with Mendelsohn came about through a conversation Mendelsohn had earlier this year with association president and CEO Jot Condie.

She struck up a conversation about the trouble transgenders were having getting jobs, Shams said. There is really no way to sugarcoat this  they feel they are being discriminated against. So we started doing seminars. We did one at the Western Foodservice & Hospitality Expo that was held in August at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Several restaurant owners and members of the LGBT community attended the event and Mendelsohn gave a presentation outlining the challenges trans people face in finding work.

We want to continue to do these events around the state, Shams said. Our goal is to place 100 people in jobs. If we can accomplish that well call this a huge success.

As CEO of Pollo West Corp., one of the largest franchises for El Pollo Loco restaurants in the western region of the U.S., Mendelsohn employs about 150 workers, and 12 to 15 percent of them are trans employees.

Contact the writer: Kevin.Smith@sgvn.com
Riverside Community College District trustees began the process to consider formally rebuking Vice President Nathan Miller, who sent two tweets last month featuring a noose-holding hangman and the words Im Ready for Hillary.

Board member Mary Figueroa urged her colleagues Tuesday to form a committee of two board members to look into censuring Miller.

Figueroa and board member Tracey Vackar will serve on the panel. If the committee agrees on a censure, the matter will come back to the full board for a vote next month.

Board President Virginia Blumenthal said she doesnt condone Millers actions and noted the board issued a strong statement condemning the tweets shortly after they were posted.

Representatives of faculty and student groups in the district repeated their criticism of Miller at Tuesdays meeting. Speakers noted the groups passed resolutions urging the board to censure Miller, remove him from his post as vice president, or pass a no-confidence vote.

Miller is up for re-election on Nov. 8. His critics want him to step down and not run for office again.

Miller has expressed remorse for the tweets but said he will not resign.

I respect and appreciate everybodys personal feelings, Miller said near the end of the meeting. I serve at the will and pleasure of the voters. I take that responsibility seriously.

About a dozen speakers urged the board to take swift action against Miller.

Meet this crisis with integrity and act appropriately, Mark Sellick, president of Riverside City Colleges Academic Senate, told the board. This is a watershed moment.

He said the overwhelming majority of RCC faculty reject Miller.

Failure of the board to act will force the colleges academic senate to consider a no-confidence vote against all trustees, he said.

One speaker supported Miller, saying that while not perfect, Miller is a good man.

Riverside resident Gaurav Taneja said people condemning Miller are making a mountain out of a molehill and said that those seeking his resignation support Millers opponent in the election.

Former Corona-Norco Unified School District trustee Bill Hedrick is running against Miller.

Miller, who serves on the Riverside County Republican Party central committee, resigned from his state government job Aug. 4, a day after tweeting the hangman picture from the county GOPs official Twitter account. He worked as an adviser to state Board of Equalization member Diane Harkey.

The tweets drew outrage from Democrats and others who considered the images a threat against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Miller, who lives in Corona, was elected in 2012 to represent a district that encompasses Eastvale, Norco and part of Corona.

Earlier this month, Miller agreed to become campaign manager for Riverside County supervisor candidate Shellie Milne, a Republican who is seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Chuck Washington in the November election.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9292, stwall@scng.com, @pe_swall
California college educators, students and the Secretary of States office will join forces in hopes of getting more young people to the polls under a new set of agreements, proclaimed Tuesday.

We need to collectively embrace our responsibility in educating those young people for their civic responsibility, which begins with registering and voting, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said Tuesday during a meeting of the Cal State University Board of Trustees.

Padilla appeared at the trustees meeting, which took place at the CSU Chancellors Office in Long Beach, to speak on a new agreement between his office, the California State Student Association and CSU Chancellor Timothy White.

Although Padilla asserted every voter is a lawmaker  and thats particularly true with 17 ballot measures set to appear on the November ballot  he also said a mere 8 percent of California youths ages 18 to 24 voted during the November 2014 election.

Elements of the agreement:

 Each of the CSUs 23 campuses will host voter registration activities on days when students move in to dorms and graduate.

 All campuses will deliver at least one email blast to encourage students to register.

 Cal State Student Association volunteers will aid nonpartisan voter registration and education activities.

 The Secretary of States office will schedule campus visits where Padilla will encourage students to vote.

There are similar agreements for the University of California and California Community College systems, said Padilla and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a trustee by virtue of his office. Padilla also said hes not aware of any other states creating similar get-out-the-vote programs for their respective college systems.

Also on Tuesday, CSU trustees government relations committee voted to endorse Proposition 55, which would keep tax increases on high-income earners on the books in order to finance K-12 schools, community colleges and Medi-Cal.

The tax hikes, which voters previously approved by passing Proposition 30 in 2012, are currently scheduled to expire in 2018. If the new ballot measure passes, they would remain in effect until 2030. The states nonpartisan Legislative Analysts office estimates the measure could generate $4 to $9 billion in annual income tax revenues, depending upon economic conditions and stock market performance.

Contact the writer: aedwards@scng.com; @AndrewEdwardsLB on Twitter
There is no point denying or sugar-coating the plain fact that the voters this election year face a choice between two of the worst candidates in living memory. A professor at Morgan State University summarized the situation by saying that the upcoming debates may enable voters to decide which is the less insufferable candidate to be president of the United States.

My own take on this election is that the voter is in a situation much like that of an American fighter pilot in World War II, whose plane has been hit by enemy fire out over the Pacific Ocean and is beginning to burst into flames.

If he bails out, there is no guarantee that his parachute will open. But even if he lands safely in the ocean, he may be eaten by sharks. If he comes down on land, he may be captured by the Japanese and tortured and/or killed.

In other words, there are huge and potentially fatal risks. But, if he remains in the plane, he is doomed for certain. To me, Donald Trump represents multiple and potentially fatal risks. But Hillary Clinton is a certainty of disaster. Her vaunted experience is an experience of having repeatedly made decisions that turned out to be not merely wrong but catastrophic.

The most obvious example has been her role as Secretary of State during the Obama administrations decision to undermine and help destroy the governments of two nations  Egypt and Libya  that were no threat whatsoever to Americans or to Americas interests.

The net result was that two Middle East nations that were at least neutral toward the United States, in contrast to others who are hostile and belligerent, were turned into countries where Islamic extremists created turmoil, and one in which Islamic terrorists killed the American ambassador and those who came to his aid.

President Obama and Secretary Clinton inherited an Iraq where terrorists had been soundly defeated, thanks to General David Petraeus surge campaign, which both had opposed when they were in the Senate.

But the Obama administration turned victory into defeat by pulling American troops out of Iraq, against the advice of top military leaders, setting the stage for the emergence of ISIS and its triumphant barbarism that attracted adherents who began waging a terrorist war inside Western nations, including the United States.

A whole series of disastrous military and foreign policy decisions have led to public criticisms by an extraordinary succession of former Secretaries of Defense and top generals who had served under the Obama administration. Such public criticisms of any administration, by its own former high officials, are virtually unheard of.

One of these Secretaries of Defense, Robert Gates  who has served under several administrations of both parties  criticized Donald Trump as well. Secretary Gates said: The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes that he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone.

Secretary Gates called Trump beyond repair. He also criticized Hillary Clinton, so this was no partisan attack. Unfortunately  perhaps tragically  she and Trump are our only alternatives this election year. On the domestic front, as well, Trump is an uncertainty, while Hillary is a guaranteed catastrophe. Given the advanced ages of various Supreme Court justices, whoever becomes the next president of the United States can expect to have enough appointments to that court to determine the future of American law  and American freedom  for decades after that presidents term of office is over.

Hillary Clinton has already said that she wants to see the current Supreme Courts decision overturned in a case where they ruled, by a 5 to 4 vote, that both corporations and labor unions have free speech rights. On other issues as well, she has advocated curtailments on free speech. And without free speech, there is no effective limit on what any administration can do.

On racial issues, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly pushed the idea that blacks are besieged by enemies on all sides, and need her to protect them  in exchange for their votes. Trump has at least supported charter schools, which are one of the few avenues through which the next generation of blacks can get a decent education.

There are no good choices, but nevertheless we must choose.
Some Riverside residents want potential mosquito breeding sites removed from their neighborhood after at least two people have suffered serious health impacts from West Nile virus.

Signs went up throughout the Victoria neighborhood last fall warning people to enter the area with caution after mosquitoes tested positive and at least two neighbors were diagnosed with the disease as the disease ramped up in California.

The two neighbors  one a retired doctor  and their spouses believe others living nearby have the disease, whose symptoms dont show in most cases. The couples also fear more residents could become infected by mosquitoes hatched in standing water in neighborhood arroyos.

A Riverside County public health official said theres no evidence of a West Nile cluster.

A mosquito control official said theyve been larviciding there regularly, mosquito numbers are down and none tested positive for West Nile this year.

Electrical contractor Greg Stoever, 63, said he discovered standing water in two blocked storm drains and two arroyos below each drain last fall after his wife, Mary Anne, was hospitalized and diagnosed with West Nile virus Sept. 4, 2015.

Our life has been ruined by this. I dont want one more person to go through what we have, he said.

DOESNT REMEMBER A BITE

Mosquito-borne illness including West Nile and Zika will be among the topics Wednesday, Sept. 21, at Ward 3 City Councilman Mike Soubirous first town hall meeting for residents.

Soubirous said city and vector control officials will speak briefly and residents can ask questions about a range of issues at the 6:30 p.m. meeting at the Janet Goeske Center, 5257 Sierra St., Riverside.

Stoever said hes worked for at least a year to get the water cleaned up after his wife, a San Bernardino County child protective services supervisor, was debilitated by neurological problems from West Nile. Now 63, she is fatigued, off balance and walks with a cane half the time.

The Stoevers neighbor, retired Riverside pediatrician Dr. Herbert Metsch, said he doesnt remember being bitten by a mosquito before he too, was diagnosed with West Nile last September.

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His wife, Kathy Metsch, insisted he be tested for West Nile because she knew other neighbors had the virus. Herbert Metsch, 82, also was left with extreme fatigue and a lack of balance that makes walking hard. He and his wife are concerned about the arroyos standing water.

The elderly and very young are among those most at risk for serious illness from potentially deadly West Nile.

Symptoms can include fever, headache, body aches, joint pains, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, fatigue and weakness. Serious neurological symptoms can include neck stiffness, disorientation, coma, tremors, seizures or paralysis.

Mosquitoes have been found to be breeding in water in the arroyos and there were unusually high mosquito counts in the neighborhood last year, said Northwest Mosquito and Vector Control District vector ecologist Michelle Brown.

Theres no evidence of a cluster of West Nile cases in that area, said Riverside County Director of Disease Control Barbara Cole.

Extra surveillance was done to find potential sources.

Technicians went door to door looking for stagnant water. They also sprayed to kill adult mosquitoes in the Victoria neighborhood four times in 2015, Brown said.

Sixteen sites have gotten rotating larvicide treatment in the last two months. No spraying has been needed in the area this year, she added.

The neighborhood has seven traps, with three set and checked weekly or biweekly. One is near a storm drain that sometimes collects water near a masonic temple. Another is on Brisa Court near near the Stoevers house and an arroyo.

The Brisa Court trap caught 53 mosquitoes overnight in early September 2015. The same trap contained four mosquitoes in a one-night catch Sept. 7, 2016, Brown said.

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UPCOMING MEETING

Stoever said both arroyos have standing water, and two storm drains leading to them do when it rains. Debris was cleared from one drain recently, he added.

He believes concrete runoff channels or pipes should be installed to eliminate stagnant pools.

One stagnant water complaint out of 35 in the neighborhood in 2015 and 2015 involved an arroyo and most others were swimming pools. Vector control treated arroyo water for mosquitoes, code enforcement Director Gary Merk said.

Soubirous has arranged to check out the arroyos and a ditch next to the Stoevers house Wednesday, Sept. 28, with Greg Stoever, city public works staff and Northwest vector control. They also met two months ago, and late last year at City Hall.

I appreciate his endeavors in bringing this to our attention, said Soubirous, who thought county flood control might be part of a solution.

Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District Assistant Chief Engineer Bob Cullen said thats unlikely.

Natural water courses like arroyos are nearly all on private property in cities and counties. Cities often own storm drain works, he said.

City public works Director Kris Martinez said city officials goal for Sept. 28 is to hear Stoevers concerns and proposed solutions, and have the right people assess what can be done.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9444 or shurt@scng.com
Despite an unwavering rise in public debt and governments difficulty to meet key statutory financial obligations, the Finance Minister has dispelled a widely held view that the economy is broke.



Seth Terkper insists governments tax revenue mobilization is progressing, suggesting that government's borrowing spree is temporary.



The economy is not broke. We are even in an era where the Bank of Ghana is not financing government, it has never happened, he said.



There were renewed fears of a severely cash strapped economy after Bank of Ghanas summary of Economic and Financial Data revealed last week that the countrys total public debt has hit almost GH110 billion as at July this year. ?



Prior to the Bank of Ghanas revelation on September 18, there were claims by Minority Members of Parliament that cheques issued by the Common Fund Secretariat to pay some suppliers have not cleared.



However, speaking on Joy FMs Super Morning Show on Wednesday, September 21, 2016 the Minster said the economy may be challenged but not broke.



Looking at the tax revenue, we are mobilizing. GRA  Ghana Revenue Authority  is doing significant work, he told show host Nhyira Addo.



The Minister also explained that risks in the economy, characterised by fiscal deficits cannot be pinned down on poor economic management.

Currently, the fiscal deficit of GDP stands a little above 5%.



We must also understand that it is not something to do with Ghana only. We know, for example that China was growing at a very, very fast pace but it has slowed over the last 4 or 5 years, he said.



He adds that the economies of Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria have all suffered from external shocks, reiterating his point that drops in revenues from Ghanas exports is inevitable.



I am mentioning these countries because these are the BRICs - emerging countries with propelled global growth. So when you look at these countries then you can also explain partly what is happening to us domestically, he said.



He however said government was committed to implementing home-grown policies under the three-year IMF programme in a bid to restore macro-economic stability shore up its depleting coffers.

Source: Myjoyonline.com









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The Taxpayers League Ghana welcomes policies announced by Dr. Bawumia on tax reductions as incentives to production and business growth.



It is refreshing to note that our continuous cry that taxes are becoming heavier on individuals and business organisations is getting the attention of political players and policy makers.



The decision by the former deputy governor of the Bank of Ghana, should the New Patriotic Party win the December Presidential polls, to see to; the reduction of corporate tax rate from 25% to 20%, removal of import duties on raw materials and machinery for production, elimination the special levy on imports, abolishment of the 17.5% of VAT on imported medicine, among others, will not only reduce the burden on individuals workers and corporate organisations, but will boost production and reduce unemployment.



It is our view, just as the Vice Presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party espoused during his lecture las week at the National Theatre, that the tax base should be broadened by formalising the economy. Stringent laws should rather be made to ensure compliance of existing taxes, whilst government reduces its expenditure.



The Auditor General's report puts unaccounted government funds at GHC 5.9 billion. This is between 2012 and 2014. It presupposes that, the problem with our revenues is not insufficiency, but corruption, thievery and deliberate reckless expenditure by appointees of government.



We strongly maintain that taxes in Ghana are too high, the NDC government must quickly review tax laws to alleviate the tax burdens on businesses. Taxes such as the 17.5% VAT on real estate, 17.5% VAT on domestic airline, 17.5% VAT paid by micro and small enterprises are all too burdensome and must be removed.



The government must reduce taxes now!!!



......... Signed.........



Priscilla Afriyie,



Director of Operations, 0543939024



Opoku Nti Ernest,



Research,



0243023123

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The General Secretary of Ghana Medical Association Dr. Frank Serebuor has stated that government did not construct University of Ghana Teaching Hospital.



He refuted assertions that it is a government funded project and wondered why government will claim ownership of the facility to score cheap political points ahead of elections.



President John Dramani during the highlights of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) manifesto among other health facilities said it built the teaching hospital.



But speaking on Kumasi-based Abusua FM, Dr. Serebuor said government is throwing dust in the eyes of the public and that the project is solely private.



He said government only served as a loan guarantor, saying the loan is being paid by the university and not government.



He disclosed that the teaching aspect of the facility had to even be negotiated among the parties involved.



The University of Ghana Teaching hospital, that hospital is a private hospital, the university built it by seeking funding from Israel. I am telling you, I know that even for people to agree that Doctors in training (post graduates) to get access to the facility was a problem, you wont believe the kind of negotiations that went on just to open up the place for training.



I wasnt surprised that the president during NDC manifesto highlights claimed ownership of the University of Ghana Teaching hospital, because sometimes politicians look at the infrastructural developments put up in the regime and claim ownership, as far as I know, government did not build that facility, it only guaranteed the loan for the establishment, he said.



Dr. Serebuor said the facility cannot be accessed just like a public one, saying poaching of Doctors was problematic.



He remarked that government has fairly improved the health system, saying there is still more work to be done.

Source: ultimatefmonline









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The Former Finance Minister Dr. Kwabena Duffuor insists that government built the University of Ghana Teaching Hospital and not otherwise.



He indicated that he was personally involved in seeking funds for the construction of the multi million dollar project which is almost complete.



Dispelling allegations that the hospital is not government-owned, he told host of Abusua Nkommo on Abusua FM, Kwame Adinkrah that government funded the project through a loan agreement.



At the presentation of the 2016 Campaign manifesto highlights of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) last week, President John Dramani Mahama in the areas of health facilities said they built the University of Ghana Teaching Hospital.



Dr. Duffuor said he is ready to debate anybody on that score and that the facility is not privately-owned as speculated by the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) and a section of the public.



He called on the citizenry to disregard such unfounded allegations perpetrated by some people including members of the Ghana Medical Association.



He indicated that he hardly comments on issues but this particular debate has prompted his response.



Those who are making such allegations let me ask them this, if a Finance Minister presents papers covering a project to cabinet, and its approved in parliament, who seeks for the loan? Definitely is Ghana government its really disturbing that some people are making such allegations. its not true. I was personally involved in the process of that loan as the Finance Minister and worked on all the papers. One Dr. Lawson was the Coordinator of this project; ask him the details of the project. Government sought for the loan for the University from Israel, I signed all the papers, they should come forward with their papers so that we debate the issue, all the documents can be found in the Finance and Health Ministries. I am telling you the truth, he said.

Source: ghanapoliticsonline.com









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The Chief of Staff Mr Julius Debrah has assured the Chiefs and People of the Nadowli Traditional area that the next term of President John Dramani Mahama will radically transform the agricultural economy of the Nadowli-Kaleo traditional areas and the rest of the country.



Speaking during a campaign interaction with the Chiefs and opinion leaders of the Nadowli Traditional area in the company of the General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, the Chief of Staff laid out the investments the President intends his government to make in the area of agriculture.



He revealed to loud applause that twelve thousand tractors will be procured as part of that investment in modernising agriculture with the aim of transforming the local economies while ensuring that it leads to positive changes in the lives of the people.



He dubbed that agenda 'the green revolution' which he recalled is similar to the 'operation feed yourself' which was successfully executed by General Kutu Acheampong during his leadership of Ghana in the 1970s.



During his turn to speak, the Parliamentary Candidate, Honourable Alban Sumana Kinsford Bagbin said he was humbled by the show of comradeship by the Chief of Staff, "the General of Ghana politics" Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketiah and all those who support the NDC and his candidature.

Source: Kofi Adoli (Gazette Newspaper)









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In the unmistakable voice of Chandler Bing,

Could Donald Trump and his spawn *BE* any worse?

Well, yes.

So, you may be aware of the drama over Donald Trumps son, Donald Trump Jr., posting a incendiary and honestly quite fucking shithouse photo to Twitter that compared displaced Syrian refugees to Skittles, yeah?

This image says it all. Lets end the politically correct agenda that doesnt put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN  Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016

Well, it turns out that the guy who took the Skittles stock photo was actually a refugee himself.

48-year-old photographer David Kittos has told the BBC that he would never approve their usage of his photo, as he himself arrived in Britain as a Greek-Cypriot refugee.

I am now a British citizen but I am Greek-Cypriot by birth and in 1974 I was a refugee because of the Turkish occupation. I was six years old. We lived in the area of Cyprus that is now under Turkish military control.

We had to leave everything behind overnight. Our property and our possessions.

Kittos says that he posted the image to Flickr in 2010 as a lighting test and was not asked for permission to use it.

I have never put this image up for sale. I dont support his (Donald Trumps) policies and I would never take his money to use it.

Despite the fact that many photos on Flickr are able to be used under Creative Commons licensing, Kittos image is registered as All Rights Reserved, which means hes got full rights under copyright law.

Kittos has considered contacting lawyers, but reckons he doesnt have the patience:

This isnt about the money for me. They could have just bought a cheap image from a micro stock library.

Source: BBC.

Photo: Twitter / Skittles.
Along with sunburn and sandy bum cracks, Aquabumps is synonymous with Sydneys Bondi Beach.

Todays a doozie. You need to be outside. A photo posted by A Q U A B U M P S (@aquabumps) on Aug 10, 2016 at 8:57pm PDT

Veteran snapper Eugene Tan has spent the last 17 years shooting the iconic shoreline and its colourful characters, from grommets and lifeguards to local dog walkers and tourists  theres no part of Bondi hes not familiar with. Or so he thought.

Like most of us, Tan had no idea that a spate of gay hate crimes were committed in the area throughout the 1980s and 90s; there were over 80 murders of gay men, thousands more horrific assaults and 30 cases still unsolved today.

The dark underbelly of the citys most popular tourist destination is the foundation for the new SBS mini-series, Deep Water, which stars Aussie Orange Is The New Black star Yael Stone, Game Of Thrones Noah Taylor, Danielle Cormack and William McInnes, plus a bunch more impressive names.

I had heard of these murders and unsolved cases, says Tan. But I had no idea just how many people were killed  and that the majority of the murders happened in Bondi and along the coastline to Maroubra.

It was a decent-sized challenge for Tan, whose images almost always make you smile when they pop up in your feed, but he was keen to help spread the word on a crime-wave thats so infrequently discussed.

I think its good to shine a light on both the positive and darker side of places especially if it helps to solve some of these unsolved cases, he says.

The result? Pretty bloody breathtaking, not to mention v. haunting.





#deepwater #SBS A photo posted by A Q U A B U M P S (@aquabumps) on Sep 19, 2016 at 6:20pm PDT

A framed and signed original of Tans photo for Deep Water will also be gifted to the Aids Council of NSW (ACON) to auction off, with all proceeds going towards their planned Bondi memorial to honour the victims of the senseless crimes  a pretty generous gift considering his original pics sell for as much as $4,000.

Deep Water premieres on Wednesday, October 5 at 8.30pm on SBS.

Source: SBS.

Photo: Eugene Tan / Aquabumps.
Today has not been a great one for Australia. Between Bill Leak releasing his most cockfaced cartoon yet and Essential Research releasing a poll that suggested that 49% of Australians back Pauline Hansons proposed ban on Muslim immigration, today actually sucked an entire ass.

The poll had a sample size of 1000, which probably isnt conclusive enough to make you don a heavy coat and march into the ocean, but it is enough to make you want to stay in bed for a few days getting sad and angry about how ignorant a lot of people are.

Luckily, not everyone in Australia a complete dingus  Greens senator Scott Ludlam was also galled by the poll, writing on Facebook:

Reports this morning about the level of public support for Hansons Muslim immigration ban make for sobering reading. Almost half of the country supports some sort of ban on Muslim immigration. Most jolting for me was that the poll reported that around 1/3 of Greens voters support such a proposal. Its only small comfort that the largest cohort that opposes the proposal are Greens voters too, but make no mistake, this division is one that will define politics for all of us for the foreseeable future.

He acknowledged that a lot of these prejudices come from fear:

Whether its the precision targeted dog-whistling of Abbott in recent years, the enfeebled opposition that failed to take on the racially loaded asylum seeker debate, the never-ending escalation of the war on terror, the devastation left in the wake of the failed promises of globalised corporate trade or the growing gap between the rich and poor in Australia, for too many people their fears about the future have been given a name and a face by politicians willing to exploit them.

And that Australia is going to have to work to find alternatives to politicians like Pauline Hanson who prey on peoples fear and turn it into bigotry:

Its a formidable challenge, to offer alternatives, to take that fear and find a better way. But the scale of the task is nothing next to the persecution of the people coming to Australia from places like Syria, Iran or Afghanistan. These desperate people are seeking a better life, only to find that almost half of the population wants to send them away, send them anywhere but here.  We dont have long to address this. Indeed for those already suffering, for the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Australians already at greater risk of hate crimes and societal exclusion, we have no time at all. We need to get to work, and it is going to take every one of us, and every one else you can find.

You can read the whole thing here:

It is a pretty disheartening time to be an Australian.

Source: Facebook.
We hope youre in a private space or just generally not at work, because youre about to make some very strange involuntary noises.

Taronga Zoo in Sydney is having a banner year for its meerkat population, with a particularly toey couple apparently procreating with the kind of urgency usually reserved solely for the apocalypse.

Parents Nairobi and Maputo have just welcomed their second litter of pups for the year, having previously welcomed little Lwazi and Serati back in January.

This new pair of wee little mates was trotted out for their first media photoshoot after their birth on August 18th, and will start being introduced to the public exhibit from this week.

And OH YEAH. They just so happen to be *insanely* fkn cute, you guys.

LOOKIT.

The little pairs sex is as yet unknown, and is expected to be confirmed next month after they have their first vet examination.

The meerkats keeper Courtney Mahony stated the new lil buds are quite the adventurous pair, spurred on by a very supportive family unit.

They were eager to investigate their new surroundings. These pups are more confident and adventurous than the previous litter and I think thats because they have mum, dad and two siblings to support and protect them. [Nairobi and Maputo] are fantastic and attentive parents, but its also been wonderful to watch big sister Serati play a role in caring for the pups. Shes grooming them, helping to babysit and always checking on them to make sure theyre safe. Its incredible to see such a young Meerkat stepping up and taking on that responsibility.

Youll be able to get your eyes across/melt all over the baby meerkats in short bursts as they are gradually introduced into the public display over the coming weeks.

WEE LITTLE BABIES, YOU GUYS.

Photos: Supplied.
There are many words you can use to describe people like Bill Leak: fuckwit, dickhead, bastard man, fuckface, pissdrinker, assclown, horsecock, shit for brains and complete dipshit of cyclopean proportions, to name a few. To summarise: he is not a very good man.

Bill Leak has made his whole thing out of making cartoons that are either just completely unfunny or completely unfunny and wildly offensive, so its not unsurprising that he has once again poked his head out from the filthy hole he lives in to dispense more bigoted shit from his drool-covered drawing desk.

If it sounds like Im being mean, you have to weigh this up against how hes consistently published hateful shit against pretty well every kind of minority you can imagine, have a look at these pearlers:

You get the idea. He is a scared little man with a paintbrush, a platform and very little understanding of how anything outside his worldview operates.

This time hes possibly managed to outdo himself (although his last big upset was pretty fucked), deciding that the best way to express the fact that everyone in the world except for a handful of fucked, backwards, bigoted right-wingers reckons marriage equality is dope by comparing them to Nazis.

King Dickhead over here thought himself up a cheeky little pun and thought it would be a genius idea to portray people pushing for same-sex marriage as members of the SS  not just any Nazis, the Nazis that were literally in charge of running the concentration and extermination camps.

The exact same troops who arrested 50,000 people accused of being homosexuals and killed around 15,000 of those very same people  those are the people he thinks are representative of the LGBTIQ push for same-sex marriage.

This literally requires no explanation for why its offensive. Making jokes about the Holocaust is already in pretty poor taste, but making it about a group of people who were direct victims? Get in the fucking bin and set yourself on fire, you ignorant old shit.

Are we just giving him more airtime by getting angry about this? Good. More people should know that hes a complete wingnut and should actively condemn him for the ridiculous bullshit he keeps pulling.

Cant wait to see what ever bullshit excuse The Australian pulls out this time about Leak starting a conversation.

Source: The Australian / Bill Leak (Dick).
To be honest with you: I needed this. Today was pretty shitty  Bill Leak pissed out another one of his shitty cartoons, a poll got released saying that 49% of Australians support a ban on Muslim immigration, and I spent all day copping abuse on twitter because I said that Bill Leak was a dickhead  but this takes the edge off a little bit.

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts reared his Grand Moff Tarkin-esque head on The Project tonight to discuss that very same poll, and he sure came across like someone who had accidentally wandered onto the set of a panel show and just tried their best to make it up as they go along.

Fill-in host Hamish Macdonald wasted no time grilling the senator about One Nations completely ridiculous swamped by Muslims claim, which he wasted no time in not at all answering in any way:

Macdonald: I just wonder what you mean by swamped, how fast are the numbers increasing? Roberts: Our culture- I dont know that, weve got an advisor who goes into all of that. Macdonald: You dont know that but you think were being swamped. Roberts: Our culture is being swamped, is what were discussing. Macdonald: But you said were being swamped by Muslims, so I just want to know what the figures are, and you say you dont know. Roberts: Sharia law. Macdonald: What about sharia law? Roberts: Look, were opposed to the, um  The Sharia law is a set of laws that Islamic people want to take in preference to us. Macdonald: But we dont have sharia law here.

It does not get much better from there. Macdonald asks Roberts if he knows what the second-fastest growing religion in Australia is (after Christianity):

Roberts: No, I dont. Macdonald: Dont you think you ought to know before you start saying this sort of stuff in public? Roberts: No, I dont think we need to know that, I think what we need to focus on is whether Islam is an ideology or a religion.

Roberts also takes some time to try and take a shot at the absent Waleed for not condemning Muslim extremist terrorism, which counts as like 5 squares on bigot bingo.

What a muppet. Watch it for yourself, if youre inclined to have a laugh at a racist mans expense:

Source and photo: Channel 10.
China Postal Savings Bank

A company with unglamorous roots is on track to make the biggest IPO of the year.

The Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC), one of the largest consumer banks in China, will issue 12.1 billion new shares at HK$4.76 each on the Hong Kong Stock exchange, raising $7.4 billion upon listing.

That will make PSBCs listing the largest IPO of the yearnearly double the size of Denmarks Dong Energy, which listed in June.

It will also be the largest since Alibaba raised $26 billion on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2014.

and the fifth-largest listing of a Chinese state owned bank.

PSBC gets its namesake from its progenitorChinas state postal service. For decades, Chinas village postal outlets served as makeshift consumer banks (paywall) for consumers to store their savings in. The postal service officially spun out its banking unit to establish PSBC in 2007.

PSBC is now the largest consumer retail bank in China when measured by outlets, with over 40,000 (pdf, pg 1) brick-and-mortar storefronts across the country and 505 million customers, about one third of Chinas population.

It is also getting some help in the IPO from Beijing, in the form of Chinese state-run companies that are putting 75% of the funding as cornerstone investors, as the New York Times points out (paywall). While such investors are common in Hong Kongs listings, their investment in PSBC is far higher than this years average of about 46%.

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Gorillaz, your favourite virtual band made up of cartoon ape-men and helmed by Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn, have been teasing a new release for some time now. Last year they announced plans to re-enter the studio, and footage surfaced of them doing just that. News emerged that names like De La Soul and Snoop Dogg had recorded seshes for a new album.

Now theyve opened an Instagram for the first time, which is rolling out a retrospective of the music theyve done in the past. The comments are a good, pure space of people losing their freakin minds.

A photo posted by Gorillaz (@gorillaz) on Sep 20, 2016 at 2:07am PDT

Ive got the balls to A photo posted by Gorillaz (@gorillaz) on Sep 20, 2016 at 2:43am PDT

Now playing: Gorillaz.com/YouTube A video posted by Gorillaz (@gorillaz) on Sep 20, 2016 at 2:52am PDT

They finished up with a tweet reading THE END and until next time, which freaked people out. They assumed it was a weird way of announcing that the band had broken up, which is almost certainly not true. Nobody sets up a social media campaign to just piss fans off like that, its not particularly good for business.

Regardless of what goes down, its unlikely that well be seeing a new album til next year. Hewlett said last year that the new album is really fuckin special album cant be rushed. But maybe hes wrong. Something is being teased here.

Source: Instagram.

Photo: Gorillaz.
Celebrities releasing headphones isnt exactly groundbreaking. Dr. Dre has done exceptionally well on the back of his Beats headphones and good on him. While the obvious brand push shouldnt be ignored, Beats at least make an effort to stand out in the audio spectrum, tailoring the experience to fans of bass-heavy music.

But these, these are just a blatant, Ariana Grande-branded grab for cash.

Theyre just wireless headphones with some incredibly tacky cat ears stuck on the top and they want you to pay $US150 ($AU198.86) for them. They dont even pretend to care about the audio fidelity youll receive, they are literally just aiming straight for the wallets of CHILDREN.

Some days you dont even have to leave the house to make a scene. All you really need is a pair of Brookstone Cat Ear Headphones, says the product page. Christ, do you have no shame?

In protest of this disgusting attack on human decency, I made my own pair of cat headphones for absolutely nothing and I suggest you do the same.

Ya see? Just like the picture. But if youre not convinced, the Ariana monstrosities are shipping in mid November and you can also change the accented colours to blue, green, purple, orange, white, red, yellow and pink, which I could also do with mine.

Source: Vanity Fair.

Photo: Brookstone.com.
Charlotte Police Fatal Shooting

Protesters clash with police in Charlotte, N.C. on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters in an overnight demonstration that broke out Tuesday after Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by an officer at an apartment complex. (Jeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer via AP)

(Jeff Siner)

An outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam is calling for an economic boycott of Charlotte after a police officer shot a man to death.

B.J. Murphy called for the boycott Wednesday at a news conference of black leaders, saying if black lives don't matter, black money shouldn't matter.

Murphy and others were reacting to the police shooting of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was killed Tuesday. Authorities say he had a gun and refused officers' commands to drop it. The officer who fired the fatal shot is also black.

A woman claiming to be Scott's daughter said in a video posted on Facebook that her father was unarmed and had a book, not a gun. Police say they did not find a book at the scene.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney says officers recovered a gun that they say Scott had when he was shot and killed.

Putney also says several police vehicles were damaged in the protests that followed Wednesday afternoon's shooting.

Putney says the officer who shot Scott, Brently Vinson, was not wearing a body camera. Putney says he cannot release body camera and dashboard camera video from other officers because of the ongoing investigation.
Libby Schaaf, Sean Whent

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, left, speaks beside then-Oakland Chief of Police Sean Whent in May. Whent resigned, as well as the two people appointed to replace him, neither of whom lasted a week. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

(Ben Margot, AP File Photo)

The teenager had been selling herself for money since she was 12. She had been "exploited by pimps," she says, and was in the act of running away from one when she met Brendan O'Brien, a police officer in Oakland, Calif.

But instead of helping the then-17-year-old prostitute, O'Brien and more than 30 other law enforcement officers "continued to traffic, rape, victimize and exploit a teenage girl who needed to be rescued," according to a legal claim filed with the Oakland city attorney's office. "Instead of helping [the teen] find a way out of exploitation, they furthered and deepened her spiral down into the sex trade," the claim adds.

Now 19, the teen is seeking $66 million in damages from the city, its police force, its former chief and multiple officers - the latest twist in an astonishing sex scandal that has swept up several police departments in the San Francisco Bay area.

The scandal led to the resignation of Oakland's police chief, as well as the two people appointed to replace him, neither of whom lasted a week. It also led to other firings and suspensions, numerous criminal charges -- and an apology from Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.

"I am deeply sorry for the harm that this scandal has caused, particularly to community trust, which for many was already so tenuous," Schaaf said earlier this month.

The teen's claim, filed Friday, implicates not just O'Brien and the officers accused of having sex with the teen, but also supervisors who "stood by with a blind eye" as the teen became a sex slave for the officers, her attorneys said.

O'Brien committed suicide in the midst of a growing internal investigation. A note he left behind named other officers who he said had sex with the teen.

Investigators have moved ahead with their case against 10 officers - seven were charged last month, another three this week. Prosecutors say more charges are coming.

And leaders in Oakland and other municipalities have said they are cleaning house. "I am here to run a police department, not a frat house," Schaaf said in June, according to the Los Angeles Times. She vowed to "root out what is clearly a toxic, macho, culture," the Times reported. Schaaf did not respond to messages seeking comment this week.

The teen's attorneys say there's something systemically wrong with the departments involved.

"It's hard to imagine a situation where this happens, where you bring in so many cops doing things of this nature and you don't have some fundamental breakdown in the department," the teen's attorney, A. Cabral Bonner, told The Washington Post. "It's a cultural thing."

Bonner said the attorneys are asking for approximately $6 million for each Oakland officer accused of having sexual contact with the teen, and less for supervisors who knew about the activity but didn't report it.

The officers, their superiors and other civic employees "either directly engaged in, stood by with a blind eye, or acted to cover up this modern-day slavery . . . in order to engage in sexual acts with her while she was a minor," the claim states.

The claim was filed in the teen's name, but The Post generally does not identify victims of sexual assault.

Revelations about her relationship with the police departments first came to light over the summer. In all, she says she had sex with more than 30 officers from six law enforcement agencies around the Bay Area. Many didn't pay her, but instead tipped her off to prostitution stings, keeping her on the streets, she says.

She also claims she had sex with several officers while she was underage.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

"The officers told each other about her, and an additional 15 engaged in sex-related online chatting with her, she said.

"A few of the officers paid her, she said, while some of the others abused their authority, tipping her to anti-prostitution stings or running names of people she was curious about through confidential databases. One Oakland officer, she said, had sex with her at a hotel near the Oakland airport in February, then texted her later in the morning to warn of an undercover sting.

"Their perks become your perks," [the teen] said. "They have resources. They can run things for you. They can find out s- about anybody. If they can find out s- about anybody, I can find out s- about anybody."

The claim seeking $66 million was filed after the teen spent two weeks in jail for biting a security guard during an altercation at a rehabilitation facility in Florida.

Even her time at that facility sparked controversy. The teen was sent there - some say under questionable circumstances -- by the police department in Richmond, just north of Oakland.

That department is also embroiled in the sex scandal: Five of the officers the teen claimed she had sex with were from the police force there, including one who was a lieutenant, according to the East Bay Times.

On Aug. 26, Richmond police helped the teenager check into a rehabilitation center more than 2,500 miles from her home, using taxpayer money from the California Victims Compensation Fund.

Prosecutors in Northern California said the teen's time in Florida impeded their ability to bring charges against officers, according to the East Bay Times; her family has said she was sent to the East Coast in an attempt to stop her from damaging the Richmond Police Department's reputation.

"Right in the heart of the investigation, when charges are imminent, when a witness is required, she's sent to rehab," Bonner, her attorney, said this week. "It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pick the place the furthest away from where she lives. Even then, it should be a facility she's free to leave - and then she ends up in a situation where she's arrested."

Three days into her rehab stint, the teen was accused of attacking security officers. According to a police report obtained by Bay Area television station KRON, the teen removed her shirt and bra and began flashing motorists passing outside the rehab facility. A worker got her to come inside, but the situation only escalated.

"The workers were afraid [she] was going to become violent," according to the report, which said she balled up her fists. At one point she tried to pull down a countertop safe and had to be restrained.

"When the security officers intervened, [she] began resisting, starting a physical altercation. While standing in the room [she] began screaming at the employees then lunged at one of the female security officers."

Her father told KRON that the rehab center staff wouldn't let her use a phone to call her parents. That, he said, is what sparked the latest incident that landed her in jail.

She ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge in Florida, according to the East Bay Times.

When she was released from jail, one of her other attorneys said the teen had been systematically victimized by police agencies.

"If we allow her to become victimized by law enforcement or to be used or abused or tricked . . . then every child on the street that is facing the same kind of life that is trapped in a web of sexual assault and sexual abuse would know that you cannot come forward," Pamela Price told reporters.

Bonner, whose Northern California law firm filed the claim against the city of Oakland, also sought to defend the teen's reputation after several news organizations published racy photos of her and highlighted the young woman's lifestyle.

"If you're talking about whether a 16-year-old girl is impressionable and can make a poor decision, well, obviously she can," Bonner said. "But you have adult men who have a legal responsibility to make the right decision, but don't."
Estrada-Vargas.png

Frank Estrada-Vargas

(Lebanon Police)

A Lebanon man who police say jump out of his car and fired shots while assaulting an acquaintance is now facing multiple criminal charges.

City police said Wednesday that Frank Estrada-Vargas, 50, saw his victim on the sidewalk in the 400 block of Ninth Street just after 5:35 p.m. Tuesday. They said Estrada-Vargas stopped his car, attacked the victim and fired his gun.

No one was injured, police said. They said multiple witnesses helped them identify Estrada-Vargas as the shooter and helped locate the discarded pistol. The gun was reported stolen in Lehigh County in 2010, investigators said.

Police said Estrada-Vargas is in the Lebanon County Correctional Facility in lieu of $100,000 bail on charges including receiving stolen property, illegal possession of a firearm, carrying a firearm without a license, reckless endangerment and tampering with evidence.
The Pennsylvania lawmaker who has spearheaded the movement to reform the state's child sex crimes law says he is emboldened by the fact that the state's newly appointed top law enforcement official is leaning on the side of reform.

"It's great day for victims knowing we have an attorney general who is not afraid to stand up and do what is right and fight for the victims of this commonwealth," said Rep. Mark Rozzi D-Berks.

In an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, newly appointed Attorney General Bruce Beemer rejected the opinion that allowing past victims of abuse the ability to revive expired civil legal rights in order to bring to court predators would not violate the state constitution.

In so doing, Beemer countered the opinion given by his immediate predecessor Bruce Castor Jr., who as solicitor general, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee attesting that the retroactive measure in House Bill 1947 would be unconstitutional.

Speaking with The Inquirer, Beemer said of Castor's opinion on the law: "I do not agree with it. He added that "reasonable legal minds can differ" on the matter.

The Senate ultimately cited Castor's opinion and that of several others to strip the retroactive measure of the bill, which was otherwise approved unanimously and awaits action from the House.

"Ultimately, you would think it would be up to the highest court on Pennsylvania to determine if it's unconstitutional," Beemer told The Inquirer.

Castor had been appointed by former AG Kathleen Kane, who in August was found guilty of orchestrating a leak of secret grand jury materials and then lied about it.

Rozzi has vowed to revive attempts to restore the original language of the bill.

Rep. Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, says he is emboldened by the position taken by Attorney General Bruce Beemer. The newly appointed AG this week said a defeated amendment in the child sex crimes reform bill would not have been unconstitutional.

Speaking of Beemer and attorneys general as a whole, Rozzi said: "They stand behind their findings and recommendations. They don't make recommendations lightly. They make them by doing work and researching law."

Since the partial defeat of HB 1947 in June, Rozzi has continued to campaign to shore up support in the House for the retroactive amendment. This week, Rozzi joined other victims advocates in Philadelphia for the annual conference of the National Center for Victims of Crime.

Rozzi vowed to continue to fight to restore or rewrite the retroactive measure of the statute of limitations bill and send back to Senate.

"I think it's the right thing to do," he said. "Whether the Senate takes it up or not, we have to do what is right as elected officials."

Last week, dioceses across the state confirmed that the Attorney General's office was conducting an ongoing investigation into clergy sex abuse. Those dioceses include Harrisburg, Allentown and Pittsburgh.

The investigations were launched in the wake of a scathing grand jury report in March documenting the systemic abuse of hundreds of children by more than 50 priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese. Investigators uncovered decades of abuse and cover up by church officials.

"How many more grand juries need to come out?" Rozzi said. "Will six grand juries make it right for them? Waiting does nobody good."

Advocates like Rozzi want the law to extend a window of time during which victims who have "timed out" of the legal system can take legal civil action against their alleged predators. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that reviving expired criminal statutes is unconstitutional.

The Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, along with the insurance industry and other business groups, oppose the revival of expired civil statute of limitations.

Beemer told the Philadelphia news outlet that he had no plans to draft a formal legal opinion unless asked to do so by lawmakers.

Beemer, who was appointed to finish out the term vacated by former AG Kathleen Kane, will serve until January.
Residents ordered to evacuate following a gas leak in Derry Township Tuesday afternoon may return home, the township fire department said.

UGI responded to the leak at the intersection of Hilltop and Church roads and repaired a damaged line, the fire department said. I
SHAMOKIN -- A Harrisburg man has been charged with sexually assaulting a young Shamokin girl up to 10 times over a four-year period.

Brian Scott Murdorf, 34, of the 3200 block of North Fourth Street, was arrested at his home Tuesday and transported to Shamokin, where he was arraigned on a number of charges, including rape of a child. He was jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail.

The arrest affidavit states Murdorf formerly lived in Shamokin.

The girl, who police said no longer lives in the area, said the sexual activity occurred between 2010 and 2014.

Murdorf has confessed and told police he was aware the girl was only 10, the affidavit states.

Murdorf is charged with statutory sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault, aggravated indecent and indecent assault, corruption of minors and rape of a child. The charges reflect the victim was a juvenile.

Shamokin police had made initial contact with Murdorf in July, according to the arrest documents, but he was not arrested because he denied the allegations and the investigation was incomplete.

The News-Item in Shamokin reported Murdorf said at his arraignment he had pleaded guilty in Arkansas in 2000 to having sex with a 15-year-old girl who claimed she was 18. He was placed on five years' probation and required to register under Megan's Law.
Tristan Rogers.png

Harrisburg police are searching for Tristan Rogers, 21, who is investigators consider a person of interest in a shooting that occurred in the city's Allison Hill neighborhood Wednesday morning.

(Harrisburg police )

Police are searching for a city man in connection with a shooting that occurred in Harrisburg's Allison Hill neighborhood Wednesday morning.

Investigators said Tristan Rogers, 21, who also is wanted on drug trafficking charges, is a person of interest in the case.

Police found the victim, who was struck by a stray bullet, after responding to the report of multiple shots fired in the 1900 block of Mulberry Street just after 11:30 a.m.

The victim was rushed to a local hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg. He is expected to recover.

Police said a black male in a vehicle was seen firing a handgun at an unknown person, who was not struck and fled from the scene.

The victim was walking down the street when he was hit by a stray bullet, police said.

Anyone with information about this incident or the whereabouts of Rodgers is asked to call police at 717-255-3181. Confidential tips also can be submitted via the Dauphin County Crime Watch website.

Dauphin County Crime Stoppers is offering a reward of up to $2,000 for information leading to an arrest.
federal courthouse.jpg

Saying the state prison system has three decades of security improvements to look to, a federal judge in Harrisburg has ordered an end to an inmate's solitary confinement after 36 years.

Arthur Johnson, 64, was convicted in the 1970 murder of a man during a street fight in Philadelphia, the Associated Press reports, but after prison officials characterized him as an "escape artist," he was put into a 7-by-10-foot cell in 1979 and kept there despite being known as a model prisoner for the past 25 years.

While he made several escape attempts in his first years of incarceration -- including one in which he bound a prison guard -- he has received only one misconduct citation since, for having a multivitamin in his cell.

"The court has no crystal ball," U.S. Middle District Judge Christopher Conner wrote in a court order issued late Tuesday. "It may well be that Johnson will endeavor to escape again. But Mr. Johnson . . . will be subject to three decades of improvements in institutional security over the general population. The Department has at its disposal a broad array of investigative and penological techniques to dissuade even the most entrenched escape artist. Surely, there are less restrictive means to monitor Mr. Johnson than solitary confinement."

Humanitarian concerns over cruel and unusual punishment outweigh other concerns, Conner wrote.

Johnson's cell in the State Correctional Institution at Frackville has a TV, radio, bed, desk and toilet. Light are on 24 hours a day. Five days a week, he gets to spend one hour in a small caged-in area of the prison yard five days a week and is taken to showers in handcuffs three times a week.

Johnson is a grade-school dropout with an IQ classified as "educable mentally retarded," philly.com reported Tuesday night. He is serving life in prison without parole for the 1970 gang-related murder of Jerome Wakefield in Philadelphia. when Johnson was then 18. He was convicted of shooting and stabbing Wakefield during a fight on a Philadelphia street.

The judge has given prison officials a target of 90 days to comply with his order. They have a week to come up with a detailed plan of how to accomplish that.

A spokeswoman for the Corrections Department said the matter was under review, and declined comment, the AP reported.
School Lunch

More than 300 families owed the Canon-McMillian school district between $60,000 and $100,000 annually before the new lunch policy was put in place.

(PennLive file photo)

Stacy Koltiska said that she will never forget the look in the little boy's eyes. As an elementary school lunchroom staffer, her job was to work the register for the children when they paid for their meals.

But the boy had a negative balance on his account, and a new policy in the Canon-McMillan, Pa., school district this year prevents cafeteria workers from serving a hot meal to students who owe more than $25. Koltiska said she had to follow the policy and was ordered to refuse the boy his hot meal because he couldn't pay for it.

"As a Christian, I have an issue with this," said Koltiska, of Canonsburg, Pa. "It's sinful and shameful is what it is."

Rather than continue to enforce the policy at Wylandville Elementary School in Eighty Four, Pa., Koltiska tendered her resignation last week. Koltiska said in an interview that she had worked for the school district for two years. She said she was stunned by the new policy, which began this fall.

Students who were refused the hot meal instead got a sandwich made of two slices of wheat bread and a single, cold slice of "government cheese," Koltiska said. The contents of the hot lunch, such as chicken nuggets or corn dog bites, were thrown away, Koltiska said, even though parents would still be charged the full regular price of $2.05 for the meal. Koltiska said that she resigned out of a moral obligation.

"God is love, and we should love one another and be kind," Koltiska said. "There's enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong."

The Canon-McMillan school district's superintendent, Matthew Daniels, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. He told Action News 4 WTAE that the policy has cut down on the number of parents who don't keep current on their lunch accounts, and that the policy does not target those who qualify for financial assistance.

"There has never been the intent with the adoption of this policy to shame or embarrass a child," he told Action News 4, noting that more than 300 families owed the district between $60,000 and $100,000 annually before the policy was put in place; now there are 70 families who owe the district a total of $20,000.

Koltiska said that she knows what it's like to feel hunger. She grew up north of Pittsburgh and survived on food stamps and free lunches at school. "I know the shame I felt, and it was of no fault of my own," Koltiska said, noting that when she was young, she got a job reading out bingo numbers and saved up enough money for a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

"I thought if I could dress like the other kids then they wouldn't know I was poor," she said.

Since resigning, Koltiska said that she has received messages of support from inmates in a nearby prison who want to donate their food to the schoolchildren and a nun who told Koltiska that she started a revolution "with a cheese sandwich."

Koltiska said she believes the school administration made a mistake with the new policy. "They're suits at a board meeting," she said. "They are not the ones facing a child and looking them in the eye and taking their food away."
CLEVELAND, OH--(Marketwired - September 21, 2016) -

Click to tweet: .@Allegiant announces expansion in northeast Ohio and its move from Akron / Canton to @GoingPlacesCle http://gofly.us/WGw7B

Allegiant (ALGT) today announces it is doubling its presence in northeast Ohio by moving its existing service from the Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE). In addition to the move, the company will offer area travelers four new nonstop routes to vacation destinations this winter. To celebrate this expansion in northeast Ohio, the company, known for its ultra-low fares, is offering one-way fares on the new routes for as low as $39.*

"We're very excited to announce this major growth in northeast Ohio, a region that has demanded more low-cost, nonstop service to the wonderful vacation destinations we serve," said Jude Bricker, Allegiant chief operating officer. "This move to Cleveland will allow Allegiant to have a stronger presence in northeast Ohio and allow us to offer our low fares and convenient travel to even more travelers."

"Not only are we pleased to have Allegiant as our newest business partner at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, we're encouraged with the variety of destinations they are adding for our passengers," said Interim Airport Director Fred Szabo. "Of the 10 markets they will be flying, we are initiating service to four new markets and adding service to six destinations. This represents a big win for northeast Ohio and our region."

Service moving from Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE) includes nonstop flights to:

Tampa Bay via the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport (PIE) - begins Feb. 15, 2017 with fares as low as $39* Orlando, Florida via the Orlando Sanford International Airport (SFB) - begins Feb. 16, 2017 with fares as low as $49* Fort Lauderdale, Florida via the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) - begins Feb. 16, 2017 with fares as low as $39* Punta Gorda / Fort Myers, Florida via the Punta Gorda Airport (PGD) - begins Feb. 16, 2017 with fares as low as $59* Savannah, Georgia via the Savannah / Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) - begins Feb. 16, 2017 with fares as low as $58* Myrtle Beach, South Carolina via the Myrtle Beach International Airport (MYR) - seasonal service begins April 13, 2017 with fares as low as $58*

Story continues

New service coming to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE) includes nonstop flights to:

Jacksonville, Florida via the Jacksonville International Airport (JAX) - begins Feb. 16, 2017 with fares as low as $50** Austin, Texas via the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) - begins Feb. 17, 2017 with fares as low as $44** New Orleans via the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) - begins Feb. 17, 2017 with fares as low as $52* Phoenix via the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport (AZA) - seasonal service begins Feb. 17, 2017 and ends May 15, 2017 with fares as low as $64**

Flights will move from Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE) on Feb. 15, 2017. Passengers with existing reservations on or after Feb. 15, 2017 from Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) can be re-accommodated from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE) or receive a full refund.

Allegiant will offer a unique option to Cleveland travelers with low base fares averaging less than half the cost of domestic round-trip tickets purchased in 2015. The innovative business model has allowed it to grow from one aircraft and one route over 15 years ago, to offering convenient, affordable vacation travel in over 110 markets across the country, more than any other low-cost airline.

*About the introductory one-way fares:

Seats are limited. Price includes taxes and fees. Fares are one way and not available on all flights. Must be purchased by Sept. 24, 2016 for travel by May 16, 2017. Price displayed reflects purchase by debit card; purchase by credit card subject to surcharge not to exceed $8 each way per passenger. See Allegiant.com for details. Additional restrictions may apply.

**About the introductory one-way fares:

Seats are limited. Price includes taxes and fees. Fares are one way and not available on all flights. Must be purchased by Sept. 28, 2016 for travel by May 16, 2017. Price displayed reflects purchase by debit card; purchase by credit card subject to surcharge not to exceed $8 each way per passenger. See Allegiant.com for details. Additional restrictions may apply.

Allegiant

Las Vegas-based Allegiant (ALGT) is focused on linking travelers in small cities to world-class leisure destinations. The airline offers industry-low fares on an all-jet fleet while also offering other travel-related products such as hotel rooms, rental cars and attraction tickets. All can be purchased only through the company website, Allegiant.com. Beginning with one aircraft and one route in 1999, the company has grown to over 80 aircraft and more than 300 routes across the country with base airfares less than half the cost of the average domestic roundtrip ticket. For downloadable press kit, including photos, visit: http://gofly.us/iiFa303wrtF.
FILE - In this April 23, 2016 file photo, Elijah Voge-Meyers carries cod caught in the nets of a trawler off the coast of New Hampshire. The United States and Canada have brokered a deal to share what's left of the dwindling North American cod fishing business in the Atlantic next year. The two fisheries overlap in the eastern reaches of Georges Bank, an important fishing area located off of New England. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, file)
FILE -- In this March 2, 2008 file photo, two passenger planes of Iran's national air carrier, Iran Air, are parked at the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, Iran. Airbus announced Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, that the U.S. government has granted it a license allowing it to sell the first 17 planes involved in a landmark deal with Iran. Most Iranian planes were purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Islamists to power. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
Yemeni soldiers search cars at a checkpoint as authorities tighten up security measures in the capital Sanaa on September 20, 2016 (AFP Photo/Mohammed Huwais) (AFP)

Sanaa (AFP) - Gunmen posing as security forces on Tuesday detained a US national in the Yemeni capital where he runs an English-language school, witnesses said.

A dozen men dressed as members of the Huthi rebels' "national security service" appeared at the Exceed Language Center in the afternoon, according to students.

Three of the gunmen, who were masked and brandishing automatic weapons, headed to the principal's office, before escorting the American to their vehicle.

The man who was only identified by his first name, Peter, was taken away to an unknown location.

The Exceed Language Center is located Algiers Street in the western part of the Yemeni capital.

Its website lists only one staff member with the same given name -- Peter Willems who is identified as the school's director.

His seizure caused panic among the students, one of them said on condition of anonymity.

The same source said the gunmen belonged to the "national security service" of the Iran-backed Huthi rebels who overran the Yemeni capital two years ago.

They gave no reason for detaining him.
Gaylord volleyball wins Boyne City Tournament

Gaylord may be hitting its stride at the perfect time, going 7-0-2 with a tournament victory at Boyne City in their last nine matches before playoffs.
Petrobras to raises asset sales goal and cut spending, in five-year plan



Petrobras Chief Executive Officer Pedro Parente

RIO DE JANEIRO/SAO PAULO

Petroleumworld.com 09 21 2016

Brazil's state-led oil company Petrobras on Tuesday cut planned investments by 25 percent in a drive to reduce the largest debt burden among global petroleum producers and revive investor confidence battered by a corruption scandal.

Petrobras contributes about 10 percent of the nation's economic output and Brazil's government, the company's controlling shareholder, is counting on it to help pull the economy out of its worst recession in decades.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is formally known, pledged up to $74.1 billion in capital spending for the 2017-2021 period compared with a $98.4 billion target in the prior four-year 2015-2019 plan, according to a securities filing.

This program outlines Petrobras' smallest capital budget since 2006 and fell short of the $82.7 billion average forecast of eight analysts surveyed by Reuters.

Petrobras reaffirmed its goal of $15.1 billion in asset sales for the 2015-2016 period and plans to raise an additional $19.5 billion through divestments and partnerships between 2017 and 2018.

The company said it could sell as much as $40 billion of assets over the next 10 years.

Chief Executive Officer Pedro Parente is seeking to cut the company's $125 billion of debt, amassed after years of state-directed policies overstretched the company.

Parente faces several obstacles including the lowest oil prices in a decade, a corruption scandal highlighting governance flaws, and its struggle to recover from huge losses incurred over many years because of government-mandated fuel subsidies.

Petrobras's stock rose 2.68 percent in afternoon trading in Sao Paulo. Its U.S.-traded common stock rose 1.31 percent in New York.

Speaking to reporters in Rio de Janeiro, Parente vowed to cut costs and sharpen the focus on high-return activities to restore profitability.

"This plan should start bearing fruit within two years, when we expect to have strong metrics that will allow us to return to the good situation of a few years back," said Parente, who was appointed in May to turn around the struggling oil giant.

In line with focusing on oil and gas production, Petrobras said it will exit the biofuels business by selling ethanol and biodiesel production assets.

The plan shows how far Parente, appointed by new President Michel Temer, is prepared to go to reverse the policies of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, removed from office in August for breaking budget laws.

OUTPUT MAINTAINED

"Lower capital spending makes absolute sense as the company aims at decreasing cash burn to accommodate interest and debt payments and to avoid stretching even further its balance sheet," said Rodolfo de Angele, an analyst with JPMorgan Securities in Sao Paulo, in a note to clients.

Exploration and production will get 82 percent of the investment budget. Spending on "downstream" refining, natural gas distribution and electricity generation will see spending cut 24 percent to $12.4 billion.

While investment cuts were bigger than analysts expected, production targets were largely unchanged.

Petrobras expects crude output in Brazil to fall in 2017 to 2.07 million barrels per day (bpd) from an average 2.22 million bpd in August. However, the company maintained its target of 2.70 million bpd for 2020, 16 percent above the median estimate of analysts surveyed by Reuters.

The company expects to produce 2.77 million bpd in 2021.

Total output of domestic and international oil and natural gas equivalent is expected to rise 19 percent in the 2017-2021 period to an average of 3.41 million bpd.

Before the plan was released, Luana Siegfried, oil and gas analyst at Raymond James in Houston, said failure to cut the outlook for 2020 Brazil crude oil production in the face of significant budget cuts raises the risk Petrobras will fall short of its promises.

In the past 14 years Petrobras has met its annual oil output target only once, in 2015.

Parente said that big efficiency gains and higher-than-expected output from new offshore wells will allow Petrobras to meet its targets in the years ahead.

The business plan is based on a price of Brent crude oil averaging $48 a barrel in 2017 rising to $71 a barrel in 2021. The plan expects the U.S. dollar to be worth an average of 3.55 reais in 2017, strengthening to 3.71 reais in 2021.








By working with Philips we plan to protect more children by improving the quality of immunization data, said Gavi CEO Dr. Seth Berkley. Weak data leads to poor planning, often meaning that children, whether they live in urban slums or remote rural outposts, miss out on vaccines multiple times because health workers simply dont know where to find them. I am pleased that Philips will bring its experience in connected healthcare informatics to help us tackle this problem. We are convinced that partnerships, such as this one with Gavi, are paramount to realizing the goal of universal health coverage for all, especially among children, said Jeroen Tas, CEO, Connected Care and Health Informatics at Philips. Thanks to the digital revolution, we can now start doing what was previously unthinkable: enable access to care, improve patient outcomes and lower healthcare costs., Our vision for the partnership is that we will put our strengths in connected health, data analytics and population health management to further good use, by helping Gavi and the countries it supports to confidently identify and effectively immunize children, no matter where they live. Working in partnership with interested Ministries of Health, Gavi and Philips will bring together a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, researchers, designers and digital experts to collaborate on developing a shared vision and plan, tailored to local needs. Philips will leverage itsHealthSuite Labs methodology to co-design, prototype and apply new technologies to improve service outreach and enable accurate bottom-up forecasting of immunization needs. In addition, Philips and Gavi aim to develop data-driven feedback mechanisms to help improve decision making and identify the children that would benefit from vaccination. The partnership announced today with Philips is another example of how Gavi aims to step up its data strengthening activities and further address some of the fundamental weaknesses in data collection systems in Gavi countries across the globe. It also supports Philips aim to improve the lives of three billion people a year by 2025 by making the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation, as well as the companys commitment to the universally agreed United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially those aimed at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages, and encouraging sustainable consumption and production patterns.
The last time Hudson Realty Capital LLC went to court to dissolve developer Bart Blatstein's legal claim to the South Broad Street property it previously had agreed to sell him, a judge declined, saying she had seen no proof anybody else wanted to buy it.

Now, Hudson's lawyers are taking another crack at wresting back control of the South Philadelphia parcel.

Attorney John A. Guernsey said in a recent court filing that Blatstein's claim was keeping Hudson from consummating a sale to New York-based Midwood Investment & Development. The filing also contains letters revealing that Target Corp. had negotiated with Blatstein for space in the project at the northeast corner of Broad Street and Washington Avenue.

Broad & Washington LP, the unit of Blatstein's Tower Investments Inc. that had sealed a purchase contract with affiliates of Hudson, "has no right, title, or interest in the property," Guernsey wrote in this month's court petition. He said Broad & Washington's claim to the site "is an immediate and irreparable harm to [Hudson's affiliates] by preventing them from marketing their valuable property."

The legal action presents the latest challenge to Blatstein's beleaguered proposal for a 32-story tower atop a large retail-and-parking structure on the four-acre site. In May, zoning hearings on the plan drew vocal opposition from neighbors, one of whom has appealed its approvals.

Guernsey argued to Common Pleas Judge Patricia McInerney in May that Blatstein lost his legal claim to the property after missing a March 15 deadline to buy it. Lawyers for Blatstein held that the purchase agreement still should be considered valid.

McInerney let stand Blatstein's claim to an interest in the property, because Hudson Realty Capital had not demonstrated that it was interfering with another purchaser's interest in the land.

Guernsey's response came in a Sept. 13 filing identifying Midwood as having discussed "a possible agreement of sale for the property."

Blatstein lawyer Rona Rosen said Tuesday that she had no comment.

Included in the filing is a June 10 letter from Blatstein's lawyers to Midwood president John Usdan threatening legal action if negotiations with Hudson continued.

A separate June 10 letter to Hudson Realty managing director Joseph Morningstar accuses his company of making contact with Blatstein's "proposed anchor tenant at the project  Target."

"The clear and undeniable purpose of your communications with Target was an attempt to induce Target to cease their well-developed negotiations with" Blatstein, the attorneys wrote.

Midwood acquisitions director Michelle Goldman declined to comment Tuesday. Target spokeswoman Kristy Welker said the company had no "details to share regarding potential new Target stores."

Midwood's current Philadelphia holdings include the glass-walled structure at 1430 Walnut St. that accommodates a Cheesecake Factory and a site at Ninth Street and Washington Avenue where it is developing 70 apartments. Its affiliates also acquired at least 10 properties on the 300, 500, and 700 blocks of South Street this year in transactions totaling $14.7 million, according to records filed with the city.

Target, meanwhile, has made a push into densely populated parts of Center City with smaller versions of its big-box, suburban-focused stores.

Larry Steinberg, a senior vice president at real estate brokerage CBRE, said the retailer likely has shifted its focus from Blatstein's proposal to the Lincoln Square mixed-use project being developed just across Broad Street by a partnership involving Philadelphia's Alterra Property Group.

Alterra managing partner Leo Addimando did not respond to a phone message.
Shakespeare Thomas More

Some six hundred years ago in medieval England, feverish xenophobia swept through the population as 64,000 foreigners, from wealthy Lombard bankers to Flemish laborers, arrived on English shores between 1330 and 1550 in search of better lives. Locals blamed them for taking their jobs and distorting their culture. Tensions reached a zenith on May 1, 1517, as riots broke out in London and a mob armed with stones, bricks, bats, boots and boiling water attacked the immigrants and looted their homes. Thomas More, then the citys deputy sherif, tried to reason with the crowd.

This dark day in history, known as Evil May Day, was portrayed in a then-banned play called The Book of Sir Thomas More, believed to be written between 1596 and 1601. William Shakespeare and two other writers were called to edit the manuscript, with the Bard contributing the 147 lines of Mores emphatic pro-immigrant monologue.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers / Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage / Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation The play was never performed in Shakespeares lifetime because the Queens censor, Edmund Tilney, thought it might incite riots during a time when England was once again besieged by another immigrant crisis with the arrival of French-speaking Protestant asylum seekers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Mores call for empathy, famously delivered by actor Ian Mckellan who played More on stage in 1964, has since become a clarion call for refugee advocates today.

Thomas Mores speech to the mob is as relevant as ever, said US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power in a Sept. 16 speech at the Lincoln Center Global Exchange to champion refugees. The wretched strangers have changed of course, from the Lombards targeted in 1517 in those riots to the Huguenot refugees in Shakespeares time and to the Syrians, Iraqis, South Sudanese, Eritreans and others fleeing repressive governments of our time, explained Powers. She recruited Shakespearean actor Jay O. Sanders to perform the monologue in the middle of her speech.

Story continues

The text begins with Mores response to the mob.

The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act 2, Scene 4



Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England;

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silent by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

What had you got? Ill tell you: you had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

Say now the king

Should so much come too short of your great trespass

As but to banish you, whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,

Nay, any where that not adheres to England,

Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? this is the strangers case;

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

The handwritten manuscript, the only example of a script written in Shakespeares penmanship, is on view at Londons British Library.

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VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Sep 20, 2016) - BCGold Corp. (TSX VENTURE:BCG) ("BCGold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that Phase I exploration has commenced at the Company's 100% owned Pucacorral property, situated in the San Mateo mining district in east-central Peru. Phase I exploration will consist of geological mapping, prospecting and sampling, on both surface and underground in the San Mateo mine. This US$200,000 exploration program will be supervised by Dr. Adam Szybinski, BCGold's Peru exploration manager. The objective of Phase I exploration is to i) confirm the presence of "Chanape-type" high-grade gold-copper-silver breccia pipe epithermal mineralization at Pucacorral and ii) confirm geological controls, strike extent and the gold-copper-silver-zinc tenor of the San Mateo mine veins. Phase II exploration at Pucacorral will entail a $225,000 detailed 3D Induced Polarization survey to define vein, breccia pipe and possible Cu-Au-Ag porphyry geometry and drill targets on the property.

Chanape and Pucacorral Exploration Strategy

BCGold's exploration strategy at San Mateo is to advance the 100% owned and adjacent Chanape and Pucacorral properties to the option or joint venture stage with well-funded exploration partners. At BCGold's Chanape property, which overlays mineralized extensions of the central and smaller, similarly named property previously owned by Inca Minerals Ltd. (ICG-ASX), the Company's strategy is to jointly work with the private owner to secure a well-funded exploration partner to combine these properties and advance our interests. The Chanape mineralizing system, as defined to date, represents a major bulk-tonnage epithermal gold-copper-silver and deeper copper-gold porphyry exploration target.

BCGold also wishes to announce that it has retained the services of a Peruvian sociologist to act as the Company's Community Relations Officer for exploration activities in the San Mateo mining district. This individual has a proven track record and working relationship with the nearby communities, which control the surface rights of the Chanape and Pucacorral projects, both of which are 100% owned by BCGold Corp.

BCGold Closes Final Tranche of $1 Million Private Placement

BCGold is also pleased to announce that it has closed the final tranche of its previously announced $1,000,000 private placement (the "Final Tranche"), on an over-subscribed basis, and raised an additional $279,500, for a total of $1,030,500. A total of 5,590,000 units ("Units") priced at $0.05 per Unit were issued in the Final Tranche. Each Unit consists of one common share and one common share purchase warrant. Each warrant entitles the holder to purchase one additional common share at a price of $0.10 per share for up to two years expiring September 20th, 2018. The Company paid finder's fees in connection with the Final Tranche of $18,760 and issued 375,200 finder warrants, each of which entitle the holder to purchase one BCGold common share at a price of $0.05 per share for up to one year expiring September 20th, 2017.

All securities issued in connection with the Final Tranche are subject to a four month hold period expiring January 21st, 2017. Gross proceeds of the final tranche of the private placement will be used primarily for working capital and general and administrative operating expenses.

Qualified Person

The technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Brian P. Fowler, P.Geo., a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

About BCGold

BCGold is a Vancouver-based junior resource company that has been listed on the TSX Venture Exchange for 10 years, with a focus on copper and gold exploration in British Columbia, Yukon and more recently, Peru. The Company acquires prospective gold and copper-gold exploration properties considered to have significant mineral potential by staking, option or purchase agreements. The Company strives to acquire 100% of these opportunities and after cost-effective and diligent exploration to develop drill targets, option 51-70% of these properties to third parties in return for some multiple of the Company's expenditures. The Company currently has a portfolio of 2 - 100% owned gold-copper-silver properties in Peru, 10 - 100% owned and 2 partially owned gold and copper-gold properties in B.C. and Yukon. BCGold is actively seeking qualified option partners to advance these properties.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, Brian P. Fowler, P. Geo., President & CEO

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Some statements in this news release contain forward-looking information or forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to future expenditures and exploration, development and production activities. These statements address future events and conditions and, as such, involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the statements. Such factors include, among others, the timing and completion of contemplated financings, the actual use of proceeds, receipt of regulatory approvals and the timing and success of future exploration, development and production activities. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.
(Adds quote from Lula)

By Brad Brooks

SAO PAULO, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption charges, a crusading federal judge ruled on Tuesday, adding more turbulence to the country's political landscape.

Judge Sergio Moro said that Lula, who served as president from 2003-11 and has for two decades been an iconic and powerful political force in Brazil, will face charges of accepting 3.7 million Brazilian reais ($1.14 million) in bribes connected to a sweeping kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras .

Moro wrote in his ruling that according to the prosecutors' charges, Lula was a "direct beneficiary" of bribes from OAS SA , one of the engineering and construction firms at the center of the graft scandal, and therefore must stand trial.

The corruption case will also put on trial Lula's wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva; OAS Chief Executive Jose Aldemario "Leo" Pinheiro; Paulo Okamotto, the president of the Lula Institute, and four others.

In an emailed note late on Tuesday, Lula's lawyers again said their client had committed no crime and labeled Moro as a "impartial" judge who was on a witch hunt to see the former leader jailed.

Lula, speaking via video link, told an event held by his lawyers in New York that the charges were a "farce."

"What's happening isn't getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more," said Lula, adding that he "will keep fighting."

Tuesday's events capped an incredibly choppy few weeks for Brazil.

Lula's hand-chosen successor Dilma Rousseff was found guilty by the Senate of breaking budget rules and dismissed from the presidency late last month.

Her successor, former vice president Michel Temer, has abruptly pulled the country to the political and economic right, and is trying to boost Brazil out of its worst economic recession since the 1930s.

Moro's decision may prevent Lula from making a political comeback in the 2018 presidential campaign. It could also derail any hopes the Workers' Party (PT) had of returning to power, or possibly even surviving, according to some experts.

Story continues

Despite the corruption allegations facing the PT and several of its former coalition parties, the most recent polls have shown Lula remains a leading candidate for 2018.

Lula was charged with three counts each of corruption, which carries a maximum sentence of 16 years per count, and money laundering, with a possible sentence of up to 10 years per count.

If found guilty, however, the sentence would be determined by the judge, and Lula and the others to stand trial would have chances to appeal.

TURN OF FORTUNES

Nonetheless, simply putting on trial the former president who left office with an 83-percent approval rating sent shockwaves across Brazil.

Lula was widely adored at home and abroad for his exceptional life story, rising from poverty to the presidency, and of being the charismatic, rough-talking former union leader who led massive strikes in the 1980s that helped topple an entrenched military dictatorship.

"It's a huge, grave blow to Lula's myth," said Claudio Couto, professor of political science at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) university in Sao Paulo. "Any condemnation of Lula would also end up being a condemnation of the Workers Party."

The decision and the Petrobras probe as a whole make up a watershed moment for the fight against corruption in Brazil, experts say, where for centuries the rich, powerful and politically connected have enjoyed impunity.

Now they are the target of this country's most sweeping anti-corruption push ever, which became known to the public two years ago. It has since seen nearly 200 people, including top executives and politicians, facing corruption charges and 83 people already found guilty and jailed.

Federal prosecutors leveled charges against Lula last week, labeling him as the "commander" of the Petrobras graft scheme that they say has caused an estimated 42 billion reais ($12.6 billion) in losses to Petrobras shareholders and tax payers.

It was the first time that Lula, 70, has been charged by federal prosecutors for involvement in the political kickbacks scheme at Petrobras.

He has been indicted separately by a court in Brasilia for obstruction of justice in a case related to an attempt to persuade a defendant in the Petrobras scandal not to turn state's witness.

Lula's lawyers have said prosecutors lacked the evidence to back up their accusations and that charges against him amount to political persecution to stop him from running for president in 2018.

But experts say that if the prosecutors' charges are proven, the case against Lula is essential to demonstrate a new strength in rule of law and the determination of institutions to prosecute corruption at the highest levels.

"It's a crucial and critical juncture for Brazil, to try such a powerful figure like Lula and, if he is guilty, to send him to jail," said Carlos Pereira, a professor of public policy at FGV in Rio de Janeiro and one of Brazil's top experts on corruption.

"Voters now see powerful white guys going to jail - not just poor, black Brazilians, as was always the case."

But Pereira also warned that the political fallout if Lula were to be found guilty and sent to jail would be enormous, and that the chances of the PT "disintegrating" even more likely.

"The PT has been an incredibly important party for the re-democratization of Brazil, being the main force that represents leftist groups and created policies that promoted unprecedented social inclusion in our unequal society," he said.

"Without the PT, it may take a long time for smaller, left-wing parties to find a new 'nucleus' to gravitate around, to provide a healthy counterweight within the political system to the more right-leaning parties," Pereira added. ($1 = 3.2570 Brazilian reais) (Additional reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasilia and Christian Plumb in New York,; editing by Daniel Flynn, G Crosse)
Under the agreement, Carube will acquire:



A 100% interest in terrain showing the best copper and gold prospects in Jamaica as defined by exploration work to date;

The substantial benefit of $14M of exploration work by OZ Minerals over the last 3 years.

The newly combined properties contain:



An excellent mix of advanced targets with promising drill intersections to follow up;



Over 30 untested blue sky targets



Large geophysical, geological and geochemical databases

OTTAWA, ON / ACCESSWIRE / September 21, 2016 / Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV: CUC), Mr. Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper announces that the company has finalized a heads of agreement (HOA) with OZ Minerals Limited to acquire 100% of OZ Minerals' holdings in Jamaica, which will include:

OZ Minerals' 70% interest in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture licenses;

OZ Minerals' 100% interest in five licences covering 276km2 acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014;

For clarification, Carube Copper will retain its 100% interest in the Above Rocks Project.

Under terms of the HOA, OZ Minerals will transfer 100% of its interests in the properties described to Carube Copper in return for cash payments totalling $14 million due after the commencement of commercial production together with a 2% Net Smelter Return Royalty. All matters will be concluded via a final all inclusive definitive agreement to be signed within 60 days. At that point Carube Copper will have 100% interest in eleven licences covering over 535km2 (subject to underlying royalties) covering the best copper-gold prospects identified to date in Jamaica by historic work and the recent exploration work by Carube and OZ Minerals.

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper comments: "The acquisition OZ Minerals' large land package, together with our own licences gives Carube Copper control of over 500 square kilometres of the most prospective ground in Jamaica based on historic showings, the work completed and reported in 1993 by the Canadian International Development Agency ('CIDA') and the recent work by Carube and OZ Minerals. We are excited to be in a position to commit to the exploration and development of all assets. By building on the work completed by OZ Minerals and Carube Copper and with our new strategic flexibility, we will be able to prioritize organic growth or potential joint venture funding on a project by project basis."

Story continues

Bellas Gate

Previously announced results at the Bellas Gate Joint venture included drill intercepts from the Connors and Provost Prospects.

At Connors

Hole DDH-CON-14-005 intersected 294m of 0.56% CuEq (0.41%Cu, 0.27 g/t Au); including 96m of 1.00% CuEq , (0.67%Cu, 0.58 g/t Au)

Hole DDH-CON-14-003 intersected 297m of 0.53% CuEq, (0.40%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au) including 55m of 1.00% CuEq (0.67%Cu, 0.59 g/t Au)

At Provost

Hole PVT-16-002 intersected 339m of 0.34% CuEq (0.28%Cu, 0.12 g/t Au), including 10m of 1.79% CuEq (1.28%Cu, 0.90 g/t Au)

Hole PVT-16-001 intersected 82m of 0.46% CuEq (0.37%Cu, 0.16 g/t Au), including 29m of 0.63% CuEq (0.49%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au)

The intervals do not necessarily indicate true width of mineralization, as its geometry is not known. Copper equivalents are calculated using a US $3.00/lb. copper and a US$1200 per ounce gold price assuming unlimited internal dilution and 100% recovery of both metals.

The Provost Prospect will be one of several high-priority areas where copper-gold porphyry mineralization has been identified to be followed up with additional drilling.

During OZ Minerals' tenure at the Bellas Gate JV over 14,000 metres of drilling was completed on 11 of the more than 20 prospects on the property. High-resolution airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys were completed over the entire property and 46 line kilometres of Induced Polarization (IP) surveying was completed. Geological mapping was completed on the previously identified prospects and over 400 rock samples and 4000 soil samples were collected and analysed. All data generated during the Bellas Gate and Above Rocks joint ventures will be handed over to Carube Copper by OZ Minerals.

Five Additional Licences

The five additional licences acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014 are strategically located to cover known copper and gold prospects and anomalous stream sediment sample drainage basins within the Cretaceous aged inliers in the interior of Jamaica. The Shirley Castle licence is located within the Blue Mountain Inlier, The Above Rocks, Windsor Castle and Berkshire Hall licences are located in close proximity to Carube Copper's Above Rocks project and the Arthur's Seat licence is located between the Bellas Gate and Main Ridge projects in the Central Inlier. All were covered by detailed airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys. The company is currently reviewing the recent geophysics and historic work in order to prioritize exploration targets.

Above Rocks

Carube Copper will retain 100% interest in the Above Rocks Joint Venture which it signed with OZ Minerals in February 2016. The property has been covered by detailed magnetic and radiometric surveys. Follow-up work carried out by OZ Minerals between February and August 2016 includes 200 soil samples, 85 rock samples, 92m of trenching and over 400 metres of drilling in 3 holes.

Heads of Agreement

Under the terms of the HOA:

To regain the 70% interest that OZ Minerals' had earned in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $8,500,000 within one year of commencement of commercial production;

b. pay a further $4,000,000 within two years of commercial production; and

c. grant OZ Minerals a 2% NSR with a buy-back of 2/3 of the NSR for $1.3M, royalty payments to be capped at $20M



To acquire the 100% interest in the five OZ Minerals licenses, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $1,500,000 within a year of commencement of commercial production

on any of the five licenses;



Carube will retain its 100% interest in Carube Copper's Above Rocks Project free and clear of any obligation to OZ Minerals.



The final agreement will be signed within 60 days of September 21, 2016.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO  1-613-839-3258  jackert@carubecopper.com

Vern Rampton, Executive VP of Corporate Development  1-613-839-3258  vrampton@carubecopper.com

Alar Soever, Chairman  1-705-682-9297  asoever@carubecopper.com

www.carubecopper.com

QP Statement: This press release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Vern Rampton, P. Eng. in his capacity as a qualified person as defined under NI 43-101.

Carube Copper Corp. (CUC.V), is a Canadian exploration company focused on the exploration and development of copper and gold projects in Jamaica and Canada. In Jamaica, Carube Copper will hold, subject to finalization of the final agreement with OZ Minerals, a 100% interest in 11 projects, totalling over 500 square kilometres. In Canada, Carube Copper holds a 100% interest in three porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum properties, totalling 593 square kilometres within the Tertiary-aged Cascade Magmatic Arc in southwestern British Columbia. Exploration continues on these properties with the goal of joint-venturing them to larger exploration and mining companies. Carube Copper continues to seek opportunities in Canada and the Caribbean for acquisition and development.

DISCLAIMER & FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" which are not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, and by their very nature involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on currently available information, Carube Copper Corp. provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Factors which cause results to differ materially are set out in the Company's documents filed on SEDAR. Undue reliance should not be placed on "forward looking statements".

IMPORTANT NOTICE: By reference herewith, Carube Copper incorporates into this release the entire disclaimer set forth on its website at http://carubecopper.com/disclaimer.htm.

SOURCE: Carube Copper Corp.
VIDEO: 12 Charlotte Officers Injured, Police Vehicles Damaged in Rioting After Fatal OIS

Rioting that erupted after a fatal officer-involved shooting in Charlotte, NC, injured 12 officers, damaged police vehicles, and blocked Interstate 85 Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning.

Hours after the shooting, a large crowd had gathered near the scene in protest, sparking clashes with police and tear gas was deployed.

Protesters damaged at least two CMPD vehicles, one cruiser and one SUV, which were removed from the scene. One officer was hit in the face with a rock, CMPD told the Charlotte Observer. At least seven officers were taken to local hospitals in ambulances, according to WBTV.

Northbound lanes of Interstate 85 was shut down overnight and reopened early Wednesday morning.

The shooting happened around 4 p.m. at an apartment complex. Officers said they were searching for a person with an outstanding warrant when they saw a man get out of a vehicle with a firearm.

When the man, later identified as 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, got back into the vehicle, the officers approached. The report states Scott then got back out of the vehicle "armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject."

Police said a firearm "the subject was holding at the time of the shooting" was recovered at the scene, and that detectives were interviewing witnesses to the incident.

A woman claiming to be Scott's daughter live streamed the scene on Facebook for more than an hour after the shooting, WBTV reports.

In the video, she said her father was unarmed.

Both the officer involved and the subject are reportedly African American.
Ford has announced it will host an exclusive Police Interceptor drive on Sept. 29 in Fort Worth, Texas. Government fleet managers and purchasers are invited to attend the event and will have the opportunity to drive the Police Interceptor Sedan, Police Interceptor Utility, and both the F-150 Special Service Vehicle (SSV) and Expedition SSV. The Transit Prisoner Transport Vehicle (PTV) will also be on display.

The event will take place at the Bob Bolen Public Safety Complex beginning at 9 a.m. All those interested can register via e-mail. For additional information, contact the call center at (877) 890-8875.
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In his final speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Barack Obama urged Americans and the international community to reject the dark worldview that has given rise to Donald Trump.

He never mentioned the GOP nominee by name, but it was clear several times throughout his address that it was Trumps vision of the world he was warning against.

Video:

Obama: Our identities do not have to be defined by putting someone else down but by lifting somebody else up https://t.co/hZyaxsRhcz  CNN (@CNN) September 20, 2016

Obama said:

As president, I have learned that our identities do not have to be defined by putting someone else down, but can be enhanced by lifting somebody else up. That they dont have to be defined in opposition to others but rather by a belief in liberty and equality and justice and fairness. The embrace of these principles as universal doesnt weaken by particular pride, my particular love for America  it strengthens it. My belief that these ideals apply everywhere doesnt lessen my commitment to help those that look like me or pray as I do or pledge allegiance to my flag.

In direct contrast with a Republican nominee who has made putting other people down  whether its Mexican immigrants, Muslims, women or the disabled  the president spoke of a world where we lift each other up and work together to meet that challenges we face.

He also rejected a central component of Trumps campaign: that America needs to wall itself out from the rest of the world.

Video:

Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself, Obama told the UN.

The president also urged the international community to reject those who are using refugees to stoke fear and instead open our hearts to people who are desperate for a home, even if its not good politics.

Video:

Pres. Obama: We have to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home. https://t.co/KC0FPbM5A4  CNN (@CNN) September 20, 2016

We have to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home, Obama said. We should all welcome the pledges of increased assistance hat have been made at this general assembly gathering  We have to follow through, even when the politics are hard.

The Republican nominee, on the other hand, has consistently used refugees as political pawns to stoke fear among his supporters. On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. even tweeted an image that compared them to poisonous Skittles.

The contrast between Barack Obamas vision of the world  and, of course, Hillary Clintons, as she shares much of the same ideals  couldnt be starker.

We can either choose a path built upon fear, paranoia, and bigotry  where we point fingers at each other and close ourselves off from the rest of the world  or we can work together and recognize that most of us, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation, share much of the same hopes and fears about the future.

Obamas presidency is coming to a conclusion in a few short months, but he knows his vision of the world is most certainly still on the ballot  and hes not about to let Trumpism take its place.
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Whenever an incident of terrorism pops up somewhere around the world, or here at home, you can mostly take two things to the bank: 1. Donald Trump is going to exploit the hell out of it; 2. Hes going to use it not to call for unity, but instead to stoke more fear and division.

Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominees son, followed his fathers lead quite brilliantly on Monday night in a tweet of a picture that compared Syrian refugees to deadly Skittles.

Tweet:

This image says it all. Lets end the politically correct agenda that doesnt put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN  Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016

Like his father, Trump Jr. is predictably using the recent terror incidents to spread more fear and sow more divisions. On a normal day of the campaign, the others we are supposed to fear is Mexican immigrants or Muslims, but in the event of a terrorist attack, it is Syrian refugees that are the real bogeymen.

Mars, Inc., the maker of Skittles responded swiftly and appropriately with this tweet:

The truth, of course, is a lot more simple and less scary than the Trump campaign would want you to believe.

There is no flood of Syrian refugee-terrorists coming into the United States to carry out attacks. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is leaving the door unlocked for violent extremists to mosey on in.

And despite the constant myths perpetuated by Trump and son, the refugee screening protocol is about as stringent a process as there is. It often takes up to two years to complete and allows mostly women and children into the country.

But, of course, this isnt about an accurate portrayal of facts for the Republican nominees campaign. Its about scaring as many Americans as possible in order to win votes. The candidate of chaos can only succeed if those going to the polls on Nov. 8 are afraid of their own shadows.

Whether its a terrorist planting a bomb in a dumpster or an unfit man seeking the presidency, Americans should not cower to fear and hatred.

We should reject it.
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*The following is an opinion column by R Muse*

It has been a very good year for Republicans in Congress who finally are pretending to be back on the job after seven weeks of vacation; one of the longest in modern history. In two weeks, Congress will be taking another paid vacation because unlike the American people, they want a bunch of free stuff and are unwilling to even feign they are doing anything worthwhile for the American people paying their bloated salaries. No matter how one parses it, congressional Republicans are the epitome of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Ayn Rands takers; they are contributing nothing and wantonly taking taxpayer money as if they are entitled to a serious bunch of free stuff.

That lack of willingness to work for what they are overpaid for never seems to bother conservative voters who are happy Republicans refuse to contribute to a functioning government; because they hate the idea of an African American President. Over the weekend, after Vice President Joe Biden attempted to coax congressional Republicans to get off their lazy asses and do their jobs last week, President Obama took to the radio in his weekly address to upbraid the lazy GOP representatives and senators for not doing their jobs.

The President said,

Ive delivered a few hundred of these weekly addresses over the years. And you may have noticed a theme that pops up pretty often:

The Republicans who run this Congress arent doing their jobs.

Well, guess what? Congress recently returned from a seven-week vacation. Theyve only got two weeks left until their next one. But theres a lot of business they need to get done first.

First  even as were seeing more and more Zika cases inside the United States, theyve refused to fund our efforts to protect women and children by fighting Zika in a serious way.

Now the President is right, of course, but he could, and should, have explained to the American people precisely why Republicans refuse to fund efforts to protect women and children; their allegiance to the Catholic and evangelical religion. Republicans refuse to appropriate one penny to fight the Zika virus until the President agrees to defund Planned Parenthood because the organization provides contraception in the form of condoms to prevent the spread of the virus.

It is noteworthy that Planned Parenthood is the one organization on the forefront of the battle to stop the spread of Zika to protect women and children. It is a secondary reason why religious Republicans want the organization abolished because protecting anything or anyone except the extremely rich and the extremely religious is anathema to an inaptly-named social conservative. There is nothing whatsoever social about a group of religious acolytes who refuse to help women and children.

Keeping on the subject of Republicans refusing to help any Americans, the President said,

Second  they [Republicans] still need to provide resources to help the people of Louisiana recover from last months terrible floods, and to help communities like Flint recover from their own challenges.

The President knows, like any conscious American, that providing resources to help disaster victims or poisoned children is not acceptable to Republicans and likely why they sequestered themselves out of the public eye for seven weeks. Now, if President Obama asked Republicans to provide money for Israels military, greater tax cuts for the rich and corporations, or fund a new war, Republicans would have cut their seven week vacation short, convened a special session of Congress, and passed appropriate legislation for the President to sign within a day of returning back to work. Helping Americans is just something Republicans refuse to do.

The President also reminded Americans, and Republican members of Congress that,

By the way, its been almost a decade since Congress voted to raise the minimum wage. Im just saying.

While Americans who actually have to go to work every day of every month and are damn lucky to have a job with a weeks paid vacation, members of Congress have received nine pay raises during the same general period working Americans have had none. It is also noteworthy that if any American showed up to work a cushy part-time job earning a minimum of $179,000 a year, with superb benefits and literally entire months worth of paid vacations and still refused to do the work they were paid to do, they would be summarily fired. And, they would be extremely fortunate to ever get an employers recommendation as a worthwhile hire, much less a job. And, these are the same Republicans who want to eliminate the minimum wage and regularly accuse Americans of being inherently lazy and just want a bunch of free stuff like a living wage, a paid vacation, sick leave, and family necessitated leave that every member of Congress enjoys for doing nothing.

The President wrapped up his weekly scold saying the glaringly obvious:

None of this should be controversial. All of it is within our reach. This is America  we can do anything. We just need a Congress that works as hard as you do. At the very least, we should expect that they do their jobs; like protecting Americans from disease, earn a decent living and help Americans recover from climate changed-caused disasters.

The President reminded Americans that if any of these priorities matter to you, let your Congressperson know. And if they still refuse to do their jobs  well, you know what to do in November. Our government only works as well as the people we elect. And thats entirely up to you.

Americas government hasnt worked since 2011 when the Koch brothers bought the Republican Party and installed a group of malcontent conservatives to make governing impossible. President Obama knows all too well that Republicans in Congress are not going to accomplish even one of the minimal goals he mentioned for two reasons. One, they have no interest doing any work to help the American people, and two, they are anxiously counting down the next two weeks of not doing any work till they take another underserved paid vacation.
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At a rally in North Carolina, Donald Trump bragged about how little money he is spending, and how phenomenal his poll numbers are. The truth is that Trump is losing the election while pocketing millions off of his donors.

Video:

.@realDonaldTrump: We're "getting these phenomenal poll numbers" while "spending a tiny fraction' of what Clinton is https://t.co/HjuQkXpc0z  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 20, 2016

Trump said, We have just gotten some reports, and we are getting these phenomenal poll numbers, and theyre saying that our expenditures on advertising, our expenditures on people, our expenditures on everything, are a tiny fraction, and yet were minimum tied, and might probably actually be winning, spending a tiny fraction, spending a tiny fraction.

Donald Trump isnt winning this election. An examination of the national polls suggests that Trump might be tied with Clinton, but a national popular vote isnt how a president is elected. The Electoral College map continues to suggest that Hillary Clinton has a decided advantage, and Donald Trump remains an underdog. Contrary to what the man who lies 91% of the time said, he is not currently winning.

Trumps poll numbers are phenomenal because they are so low. Donald Trump continues to range between 38% and 42% support. Trumps numbers havent moved for months, and one wonders if they would be better if he spent his donors money building a presidential campaign.

The fact is that Trump has raised $127.6 million. If he isnt spending the cash on building his campaign, where is the money going?

Donald Trump is making a profit off of his campaign by funneling donor money into Trump owned businesses that he is paying for campaign work.

It is true that Trump isnt spending money on his campaign, but what he left out of his bragging in North Carolina is that millions upon millions of dollars are finding their way to Trump owned and related businesses.

Trump supporters are so dumb that they are cheering for Donald Trump while he is picking their pockets clean.
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Donald Trump is now claiming that African-Americans are worse off under Obama than they were at any time in history, which includes slavery.

Video:

.@realDonaldTrump: African-American communities "in the worst shape that theyve ever been in before, ever." https://t.co/9LBPglLJSo  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 20, 2016

Trump said, Were going to rebuild our inner cities because our African American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that theyve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.

By adding the several evers to the statement, Trump is claiming that African-Americans are worse off under President Obama than they were when they were considered property and were enslaved.

The idea that African Americans had it good during slavery is one that gained prominence in far right/tea party circles during the Obama years.

Trumps statement was loaded with racism on many levels. Donald Trump continues to suffer from the belief that all African-Americans are poor. Trump is also clinging to the racial stereotype that all African-Americans live in inner cities. This also is not true, but when a candidate claims that slavery was good for black people, questioning geographic inaccuracies begins to feel like quibbling.

Some in conservative media have been floating bogus stories about Trump making massive gains with African-American voters, but the truth is that statements like these are the reason why Trump will be lucky to break double digits with black voters.

Trumps penchants for both exaggeration and racism have made ideas like African-Americans have never been worse off than they are under Obama the expected output from a bigoted and fatally flawed Republican nominee for president.
(Removes hyphen in between Chan Zuckerberg in headline and third-last paragraph)

By Deborah M. Todd

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan on Wednesday pledged more than $3 billion toward a plan to "cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime."

Speaking through tears at a San Francisco event to announce the initiative, Chan said she hoped to spare parents the pain she had seen while delivering difficult news as a pediatrician.

"In those moments and in many others we're at the limit of what we understand about the human body and disease, the science behind medicine, the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering. We want to push back that boundary," she said.

The event was attended by business and political luminaries including former Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom.

Zuckerberg said science and the medical community have made rapid advancements over the last 50 years, including eradicating smallpox and nearly eliminating polio without the aid of modern technology.

"Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths," Zuckerberg added in a posting on his Facebook page, citing cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases and neurological diseases. "We can make progress on all of them with the right technology."

The plan includes creating a bioscience research center, called the Biohub, developing a chip to diagnose diseases, and ways to monitor the bloodstream continuously and map cell types in the body.

Chan and Zuckerberg will donate $600 million over the next decade to the Biohub in San Francisco, bringing together Bay-area researchers and scientists from the University of California at San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University.

Two initial Biohub projects will be a Cell Atlas, a map of cells controlling the body's major organs, and the Infectious Disease Initiative to develop new tools, tests, vaccines and strategies for fighting diseases such as HIV, Ebola and Zika.

Story continues

The Biohub will be led by University of California, San Francisco professor Joseph DeRisi and Stanford University professor Stephen Quake, whose work includes small molecule screening and biological measurements.

Dr. Cori Bargmann, a Rockefeller University neuroscientist, will lead all of Chan Zuckerberg's science initiatives.

Any research, tools and material coming out of Biohub, which will work with a network of 10 to 15 laboratories across the world, will be "available to every scientist, everywhere," Bargmann said.

"If you take great people and set them loose on important problems in an intelligent way and give them a long time horizon there will be progress." (Reporting by Deborah M. Todd; Editing by Peter Cooney and Richard Chang)
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*The following is an opinion column by R Muse*

Throughout this long, tiresome and bizarre campaign season Donald Trump has managed to insult and criticize any- and everyone not supporting or associated with Donald Trump; that is typically what happens with a megalomaniac. This week, it looks like Trump actually got around to criticizing the last demographic in America and it was bad enough that he opened his mouth at all, but to criticize Americas law enforcement community as afraid to do anything is going too far and rivals calling veterans who fought for America in the Iraq War thieves. But this is Donald Trump and a day cant pass without him condemning some group whether its to earn points from his faithful acolytes or impress his own sense of self-importance on the American people.

Of course the mainstream media failed to report that on Fox and Friends on Monday, Donald Trump weighed in on New Yorks law enforcement officers, and by extension all American law enforcement professionals, by claiming they are afraid to do their jobs. The big-time wrestling celebrity said:

You know, our police are amazing. Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. Theyre afraid to do anything about it because they dont want to be accused of profiling, and they dont want to be accused of all sorts of things.

Now, that first bit about police are amazing ranks right up there with his remark and assumption that some Hispanics are probably good people in the same breath he accused all of them of being rapists, murderers, and drug pushers. The rest of his condemnation, and it is a condemnation, about law enforcement being afraid to do anything for fear of being accused of profiling is sheer bovine excrement. This is particularly true when the same cops he criticized as being afraid to do anything confronted, engaged in gunfire with, and apprehended the Chelsea bombing suspect in Linden New Jersey, and they did it without calling in a battalion of militarized reinforcements.

Linden Mayor Derek Armstead gave a brief accounting of the gunfight and apprehension that certainly refutes Trumps assertion that police are afraid of anything for fear of being accused of profiling. Mayor Armstead said,

At approximately 10:30 this morning, the owner of one of the establishments in town reported that there was an individual sleeping in his hallway. One of our police officers went to investigate, to wake him up, and realized that he was the suspect that had been sought in the other bombings that had occurred priorHe realized it was the suspect, and within moments, the suspect had fired on him. And thank god that he had his vest on. I think that saved his life.

Setting aside that department regulations, not god, was responsible for the officer wearing his vest, this incident is typical of law enforcement officers not being afraid to do their jobs and putting public safety far ahead of any concerns about being accused of profiling. However, Trump wasnt only questioning and criticizing law enforcements courage in the face of serious danger, he was sending a signal to his malcontent followers that real police would know who these people (all Muslims) are and would not be afraid to do anything about it; like gunning them down for being suspected Muslims. No doubt Trump praises the rogue officers that shoot unarmed African Americans because they share Trumps sensibilities and know who these people (African Americans) are and shoot them dead because they are not afraid of being accused of profiling those people.

Trump couldnt even keep his stories straight about the courage or efficacy of police over a nine-minute period. In one Tweet he said,

Great job once again by law enforcement. We are proud of them and should embrace them  without them, we dont have a country.

But that phony pride quickly turned to dire disappointment when Trump Tweeted,

Once again someone we were told is ok turns out to be a terrorist who wants to destroy our country and its people  how did he get thru (sic) system?

First, the alleged bomber got through the system because he arrived in America when he was seven years old and was not on a terror watch list over the past 21 years; not because law enforcement or national security is lax, or because they were afraid to do their due diligence as police officers out of a fear of being accused of profiling a second or third grade child. And, this someone we were told is okay is a not-so-subtle reference to all American citizens adhering to Islam that Trump and his followers are certain are not okay. Donald Trump or his followers can never accept, and would put an end to, the idea that this is America and according to the criminal justice system everyone is okay until proven otherwise in a court of law; not because Donald Trump and his bigoted supporters say they are not okay based on their religion, skin pigmentation, or cultural heritage.

It is nearly impossible to think of any group of Americans Donald Trump hasnt insulted; including his own supporters he loves because they are uneducated (Read really stupid). One thought Trump assailing members of the military fighting a war in Iraq as thieves was an atrocity, and was nearly as horrid as attacking the Muslim parents of a fallen war hero. But even implying that Americas law enforcement community is afraid of anything is just beyond the pale. Just as during the terror attacks on 9/11 and the horrific ambush of police in Houston, while civilians were fleeing for their very lives, first responders and law enforcement were rushing directly toward the danger.

Trumps comments are a portent of what he would impose on Americans given half a chance; like deporting millions of peaceful American Muslims and the Chelsea bomber when he was just a child. Trump and his ilk, like his kind of fascist police, certainly would have known that a second-grader was one of those people Trump knows are terrorists. Fortunately for Americans, the great preponderance of law enforcement officials whether cops on the beat or high-ranking officials are not like Donald Trump and are not afraid of anything; including protecting and serving without fear of being accused of profiling.
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A new poll reveals that the race for the White House in North Carolina is as close as it gets, but Republicans may lose thanks to President Obamas popularity.

PPP has the details of their latest poll of the state:



Donald Trump leads the race in the state with 45% to 43% for Hillary Clinton and 6% for Gary Johnson. But when Johnson voters and undecideds are asked who they would pick if they had to choose between Clinton and Trump, the contest moves into a tie at 47%.

.

62% of them would prefer more Obama, to only 5% who would take Trumps direction. If those folks voted for Clinton and Trump along the same lines, Clinton would have a 50/48 advantage in the state.

Only 10% of them have a favorable opinion of Clinton, to 75% with an unfavorable view. Of course that puts her in better stead than Trump who literally none of the voters in this group see favorably, to 79% who have a negative opinion of him.Overall 51% of voters in the state would rather have four more years of Obama to 46% who prefer Trump.

The North Carolina poll confirms that Hillary Clinton has a huge political asset in the popularity of President Obama. It is possible that Obama could swing North Carolina into Hillary Clintons column because voters in the state are expressing a preference for four more years of Obama over Trump.

Trump and the GOP have used the argument that Hillary Clintons election would equal another Obama term, but in a state like North Carolina, that argument could backfire and get Clinton elected.

Republicans thought that they were done with losing to Obama. The GOPs worst nightmare would be having to run against the popular president again. Their nightmares are going to come true as the Clinton campaign will likely deploy the President to the Tar Heel State often and frequently.

Even though he isnt on the ballot, President Obama to play a gigantic role in a potential third straight White House defeat for the Republican Party.
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For the first time in the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump held competing rallies and all three cable networks chose to cover Clinton over Trump.

Jamie Dupree of Cox Radio noted:

Clinton in Orlando, Trump in Toledo  all 3 nets as I type carrying Clinton live pic.twitter.com/dMaYw3B5C1  Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) September 21, 2016

CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all took Clintons remarks about the recent police shooting in Tulsa, OK and Charlotte, NC live. The networks had a chance to cover a Trump rally from Toledo, OH, and passed.

It is impossible to call this decision a coincidence after Donald Trump suckered the press to his new hotel in Washington, D.C. with the promise of a press conference, and then refused to take any questions.

Since Donald Trump isnt spending money on ads or building an actual presidential campaign, free media is the lifeblood of his presidential bid. If the press stops covering every Trump rally, the Republican candidate for president is going to have a major problem.

The press is starting to treat Hillary Clinton like a person who may actually win the White House, and not just that other person to talk about when Donald Trump isnt doing something.

The coverage and approach towards Trump changed. The media has gotten serious. They have stopped viewing Trump as a ratings pumping sideshow. Much to the determent of the Republican Party, Donald Trump is being treated as a man who could be the next president.

Equally important is the fact that Hillary Clinton is beginning to be treated like the woman who is on track to be the next president. As the country gets closer to Election Day, the tone is getting more serious, which should benefit Hillary Clinton and deliver more horrible news to Donald Trump.
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A new poll of New Hampshire shows Hillary Clinton with a 9 point lead over Donald Trump as the Republican path to retaking the White House is narrowing.

According to the Monmouth University poll of New Hampshire:

Among Granite State voters likely to participate in Novembers presidential election, 47% support Clinton and 38% back Trump. Another 10% intend to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson, 1% support Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and 3% are currently undecided.

Clinton has the support of 94% of self-identified Democrats while Trump gets the backing of 85% of Republicans. Clinton edges Trump among the states sizable bloc of independents by 42% to 35%.

Clinton has the advantage among voters under 50 years old (45% to 35%) as well as those age 50 and older (49% to 41%). Clinton leads among women (56% to 30%) and voters with a college degree (54% to 31%). Trump leads among men (47% to 37%) and voters without a college education (47% to 40%).

Polls in the last two days have shown Clinton leading in Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Hampshire.

Here is what her Electoral College total looks like if she wins Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Hampshire:

In this scenario, Trump could win every other swing state, and still lose the election. The map above illustrates why the national poll numbers mean less than the state results. Hillary Clinton has more options and pathways to victory than Donald Trump.

Trump needs to win every swing state that he can get, so a loss even in tiny New Hampshire narrows his path to victory.

Donald Trump is trying to win New Hampshire, but the latest polling suggests that the state may be a lost cause.
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Trumps had issued repeated threats against freedom of the press, and has even inciting violence against journalists, like Katy Tur, who had to be protected by the Secret Service. Taking their cue from him, his supporters regularly issue death threats against reporters who say something critical about their hero.

Katy Tur, who had to be taken under the protection of Trumps own Secret Service detail after he whipped up the crowd against her, threatening her safety, has told her story to Marie Claire:

The wave of insults, harassment, and threats, via various social-media feeds, hasnt stopped since. Many of the attacks are unprintable.



MAYBE A FEW JOURNALISTS DO NEED TO BE WHACKED, tweeted someone with the handle GuyScott33, two weeks after Trump lashed out. MAYBE THEN THEYD STOP BEI[N]G BIASED HACKS. KILL EM ALL STARTING W/ KATY TUR.

Newsweeks Kurt Eichenwald had the temerity to speak truthfully about the national security threat of Donald Trumps overseas business entanglements. He tweeted about the immediate reaction of Trump followers, and that has continued:

Reporters get death threats. But the ones I receive from Trump supporters are the most vile, most violent & most brownshirt-y of my career.  Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) September 21, 2016

In another tweet, Eichenwald highlighted the neo-Nazi tenor of this hate:

Never in my life did I imagine, as a result of covering a US presidential election, I would learn secret neo-nazi symbols from my emails.  Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) September 21, 2016

He is quick to assure his readers that neo nazi crap does not scare me.

By the wayto be clear. Death threats and neo nazi crap do not scare me. These ppl are wimps. I will keep doing my job without hesitation.  Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) September 21, 2016

Journalists regularly have insults hurled at them during Trump rallies. As Jared Sexton, who heard people at a Trump rally in Charlotte talking beating the shit out of reporters, tweeted in August, If you thought Trump couldnt be more terrifying, welcome to The Age of Breitbart.

In February, we are told by The Daily Beast, Conservative essayist Bethany S. Mandel, who has been awash in a deluge of social media abuse since she began denouncing Donald Trump, finally purchased a handgun over the weekend. She has been told things by Trump followers that you deserve the oven, and Missed one, you slimy Jewess.

When Jewish journalist Julia Ioffe wrote in GQ about Donald and Melania Trump this spring, her inbox and phone were flooded with anti-Semitic hate and death threats. They said Id make a good lampshade, she said.

CNNs Sara Murray told Cosmopolitan Before Donald Trump, it was rare for a presidential candidate to be attacking individual reporters. She described his attack on her:

He was unhappy with some story I had done and he did a little impression of me on stage, and started talking about this terrible CNN reporter. Then he called me out by name. The next thing I knew, I had thousands of Trump fans turning around [and] jeering at me.

Unlike Katy Tur, she didnt feel physically unsafe and she did not need to be rescued by the Secret Service, but she issued what is possibly the most damning statement of all about Trumps hostility to those who question him:



I think any reporter who has asked Trump a tough question has gotten the Trump treatment.

Katy Tur told Morning Joe that Trump realizes he needs the media, but he has a strange way of showing it. It hardly matters how gracious he can be on an individual basis when he is inciting crowds against you, and those Trump rallies are beacons to white supremacists and anti-Semites.

The real hero here isnt Donald Trump. And while the mainstream media has been justly criticized at both an institutional and personal level (looking at you, Matt Lauer) for taking it easy on Donald Trump, the real heroes are those among the press corps who have the courage to stand up to Donald Trump and ask him the difficult questions he neither wants to hear, nor answer, will endure the abuse, and, like Katy Tur or Kurt Eichenwald, keep asking those questions.
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WASHINGTON  Top officials for Monsanto and Bayer defended their proposed $66 billion merger before skeptical senators on Tuesday, insisting that the deal would lead to greater investments in technology that could help American farmers.

Monsanto, the American seed and weed-killer, and Bayer, the German medicine and farm-chemical maker, responded to concerns from Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Grassley warned that consolidation and competition in the U.S. seed and agrochemical industry could hurt American farmers who are already dealing with an economic downturn.

"I'm afraid this consolidation wave has become a tsunami," Grassley said as the hearing opened.

After months of negotiations, St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. last week accepted an offer from Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer AG that will pay $57 billion to Monsanto shareholders and assume $9 billion in Monsanto debt. The deal combines two of the six U.S. and European companies that dominate the agrochemical market, and would create a global agricultural and chemical giant with a broad array of products.

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Robb Fraley, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Monsanto, and Jim Blome, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience North America, both testified that the combined investment is needed to meet a rising food demand.

"This type of change enables more innovation and delivers better products to the farm even faster," Fraley said. "Farmers are best served when companies invest more in new technologies and accelerate the pace of their (research and development), which in turn spurs robust competition."

Blome noted that Monsanto has a greater presence in North America while Bayer's business is greater outside of North America.

"Monsanto is a perfect match to Bayer's agricultural business  combining complementary skills with limited geographic overlap," Blome said.

Farm groups testified that they are worried about the consequences.

Roger Johnson, head of the National Farmers Union, said that the mergers would mean that three companies would have more than 80 percent of U.S. corn seed sales and 70 percent of the global pesticide market.

"These mergers will result in fewer choices for farmers, higher prices, and less innovation," he said.

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WASHINGTON  The CEO of Wells Fargo faced calls for his resignation Tuesday from harshly critical senators over allegations that bank employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts to meet sales quotas.

Members of the Senate Banking Committee showed bipartisan outrage over the long-running conduct, unsatisfied by Chief Executive John Stumpf's show of contrition.

Stumpf said he was "deeply sorry" that the bank failed to meet its responsibility to customers and didn't act sooner to stem "this unacceptable activity." He promised to assist affected customers.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren flatly told Stumpf he should step down. "You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers," she said. "You should resign. You should give back the money you took while the scam was going on."

The Massachusetts Democrat, one of the fiercest critics of Wall Street, also advocated for a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and a civil probe by securities regulators.

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Stumpf, a 34-year veteran of Wells Fargo and CEO since 2007, earned $19.3 million last year. The bank does have in place provisions its board could implement to claim back executive compensation.

Wells Fargo sales employees, trying to meet targets that called for every customer have eight products with the bank, opened more than 2 million bank and credit card accounts, regulators said last week in levying a $185 million fine.

Money in customers' accounts was said to have been moved to these new accounts without their permission. Debit cards were issued and activated, as well as PINs created, without telling customers. In some cases, bank employees even created fake email addresses to sign up customers for online banking services, the regulators said.

Wells Fargo has long been known in the banking industry for its aggressive sales goals. Stumpf bristled at Warren's suggestion that the sales practices were a "scam."

He defended the cross-selling of products  trying to draw customers into taking on more  as "deepening relationships."

The senators also challenged assertions that Stumpf and other Wells Fargo senior executives didn't become aware of the problems until 2013  when the sales misconduct was reported by The Los Angeles Times. The practices apparently began at least in 2009.
Elderly Americans' well-being is at risk unless the U.S. does much more to help millions of family caregivers who sacrifice their own health, finances and personal lives to look out for loved ones, reported a study released Tuesday.

Nearly 18 million people care for a relative older than 65 who needs help, yet "the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the most significant challenges" facing the nation's swelling elderly population, their families and society, according to the report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Describing family caregiving as "a critical issue of public policy," a committee of experts in health care and aging said the next presidential administration in 2017 should direct a national strategy to develop ways to support caregivers, including economically.

According to the report, people who help elderly family members with three or more personal tasks a day devote 253 hours a month to caregiving  almost the equivalent of two full-time jobs.

Five years is the median duration that family members care for older adults with high needs, the report said.

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For some Americans who accept that responsibility, that can mean taking a less demanding job, foregoing promotions or dropping out of the workforce.

Lost wages and benefits average $303,880 over the lifetimes of people 50 and older who stop working to care for a parent, according to a study cited in the report.

That's not all: A lower earnings history also means reduced Social Security payments for caregivers when they become eligible.

A possible fix for that problem, proposed by researchers in 2009, is to provide caregivers with a Social Security credit for a defined level of deemed wages during a specified time period, the report said.

Leave programs do exist for some workers shouldering caregiving duties, but many lack such job protections.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act doesn't cover 40 percent of the workforce. It allows eligible employees to take 12 weeks of unpaid time off to care for certain family members, but the law only applies to those who work federal, state and local governments and private companies with more than 50 employees. But ineligible family relationships for leave include sons- and daughters-in-law, stepchildren, grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews. Many workers can't afford to give up their incomes for 12 weeks.

In 2011, 17 percent of caregivers didn't take leave because they feared losing their jobs, according to a national survey cited in the report.

The report recommends that family caregivers receive status as a protected class under existing job discrimination laws and that employers get guidance and training on ways to support workers caring for family members.

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Beyond the economic costs of caregiving, the report notes that the social and physical toll of caregiving should get more attention than it does.

"If their needs are not recognized and addressed, family caregivers risk burnout from the prolonged distress and physical demands of caregiving, and the nation will bear the costs," the report said.

Instead of delivering "patient-centered" care, health care providers should adopt "family-centered" models that include checking with caregivers to ensure they are healthy and capable of filling the role. The report also recommended wellness visits, counseling sessions and better training for caregivers who must understand increasingly complicated medical instructions.

Dealing with feeding and drainage tubes, catheters and other complicated medical devices causes stress, and the study's authors noted that caregivers report "learning by trial and error and fearing that they will make a life-threatening mistake."

The study was funded by 13 private foundations, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and an anonymous donor that requested the National Academies undertake the research in 2014.
In just over two months I will be turning 18, and with that a new level of adulthood that I don't know I am ready for.

For the past two or three years, I have been looking toward that day with growing dread. I'm in my senior year. Twelve months from now I will be living on my own for the first time in my life. So many new responsibilities will pile on all at once that I feel totally unprepared for, despite my mother's best efforts.

It's like I'm going to be thrown in water over my head and told to sink or swim. I will have to pay my own bills, buy my own food, make sure that I eat something other than microwave popcorn for three meals a day.

In the past year or so, I have made stumbling steps forward: I got my first job, started classes at the community college, and even figured out how to make something that vaguely resembles an omelet, but at the same time, I know I'm still so far from where I need to be. I mean, sure, I could talk about the life of President Garfield for hours and diagram a sentence like nobody's business, but I still don't know exactly what it means to change the oil in a car, or how you would go about doing it.

I had to do taxes for the first time last year, and even with my dad's help I still have no idea how any of that works. I'm being told that I'm going to be an adult when I don't feel like I am that far out of middle school.

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Even with all this uncertainty and fear, there is still a part of me that is excited. It reminds me of the "Lord of the Rings" movies  whenever I watched them, I always thought how I would rather just stay in the Shire. It always seemed so calm and peaceful. I know that at heart, I am nothing more than a very tall hobbit.

I have never really seen the appeal for adventures outside of daydreams. Actual adventures always seemed hard and dangerous and frightening, like a roller coaster that I really didn't want to ride.

But now, when I am on the cusp of my own adventure, I think I get it. Going out and trying to survive in an unknown world, exploring the possibilities of life like some modern day Lewis and Clark, every day bringing new things to experience.

So while I am still terrified at all the unknown that lies ahead of me, I have confidence that I will be all right. Maybe the best thing is for me to be thrown in water over my head so that I can learn to swim on my own. I mean, if everyone else has survived college, then why can't I?
MILLVILLE  A 19-year-old and a juvenile male have been arrested in connection with the robbery of a Millville gun shop on Sept. 2. More arrests are expected.

Wabasha County Chief Deputy Jim Warren said the older male, Trinity Wicka, is in custody in Winona County on a probation violation; the juvenile has been arraigned and is in a secure juvenile facility.

Some of the firearms taken have been recovered, and authorities are looking for more, he said.

The arrests were made with the cooperation of the Wabasha and Winona county sheriff's offices, Winona Police Department, the Southeastern Minnesota Violent Offenders Task Force and the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

Anyone with more information is asked to call 651-565-3361.
The Rochester School Board has agreed to offer a one-year extension to Superintendent Michael Munoz so that he remains under contact with Rochester schools through the 2017-2018 school year.

The one-year offer comes after a board review of Munoz's performance. Munoz was hired in 2011 and is in his fifth year as Rochester superintendent.

But unlike the first extension, which covered three years, this one is only for an additional year. Board Chairman Gary Smith said the one-year proposal should not be viewed as less of an endorsement or vote of confidence than that of the first extension.

In a prepared statement, Smith noted "many positive changes" that have occurred under Munoz's tenure, including a student-centered focus. But the needs of the district have changed, and Smith described a number of areas that needed greater emphasis. They included communications between superintendent and the board; the culture in the district; and the "delineation of the superintendent's role as the leader of the district."

"We're pleased with the job he's done to date," Smith said afterward. "We're talking about where we need to go in the context of our plan. Let's take a couple of more years to figure that out."

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The offer means that the board and Munoz will enter into negotiations to see if the sides can agree on terms. Munoz sat next to Smith as Smith read his statement but made no comment.

Munoz, who makes a $208,000 annual salary, is in his final year of a three-year extension with Rochester schools. He leads a district of more than 17,600 students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and a staff of 2,800 employees, of which 1,450 are teachers.

The superintendent undergoes an evaluation each year. In previous years, getting a sense of the board's attitude toward Munoz's performance has been a challenge, because the information shared with the public has been limited. Often it has been limited to the board chair stating that Munoz has meet the conditions of his contract. But in the final years of his contract, the board has been more forthcoming.

Rochester Education Association President Tucker Quetone said communication and work climate have been identified as areas in need of improvement in staff surveys. In the past, teachers or staff have been reluctant to speak out for fear of being labeled troublemakers or "somebody who has a negative attitude."

"There is a reticence to being open and honest, because people aren't always willing to be the ones to step forward and make a comment," Quetone said.

Smith said the school board and Munoz met twice in closed session to review his performance and to discuss expectations going forward.

"This contract renewal will provide the board with the opportunity to continuing working with Superintendent Munoz so we can focus our joint efforts on reviewing the district's progress within the context of our strategic plan," the statement said.
Dodge County

EDA discusses Main Street building

WEST CONCORD  Members of the West Concord EDA discussed the future of the 207 W. Main St. building at its Nov. 7 meeting.

The EDA chose to table any discussion on moving forward with the sale of the building. The potential buyers of the space will wait until the issue is discussed at next month's EDA meeting, according to members of the body.

Houston County

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Clinic grand opening set for Saturday

CALEDONIA  Gundersen Lutheran will host a grand opening for the new orthopedic clinic Saturday at 8 a.m. It is at 405 S. Highway 44/76.

Fillmore County

Service focuses on 'Beauty of the Earth'

LENORA  The historic Lenora United Methodist Church will hold a Thanksgiving worship service Sunday at 4 p.m.

It will focus on themes in the hymn "For the Beauty of the Earth." Attendees are invited to bring nonperishable food items for the food shelf.

Refreshments will be served at the Lenora Fellowship House after the service.

The church is on Fillmore County Road 24 in Lenora.

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Mower County

Three blood drives planned

AUSTIN  There are three upcoming blood drives in Mower County.

The first is 1 to 7 p.m. Thursday at Southland High School in Adams. The second is 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday at Riverland Community College in Austin. The third is 1 to 7 p.m. Nov. 29 at Mower County Senior Citizens Center in Austin.

To make an appointment to give blood, download the Red Cross App, visit redcrossblood.org or call 800-REDCROSS.

Wabasha County

Black and Orange Gala will be Saturday

LAKE CITYThe Lake City Education Foundation will hold the Black and Orange Gala on Saturday at St. Mary of the Lake.

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There will be hors d'oeuvres, drinks and dessert. Tickets cost $50 and are available at lakecityeducationfoundation.org or by calling 225-993-6706.

Goodhue County

Levee Road construction underway

RED WING  Concrete work on Levee Road from the Jackson Street Roundabout to Broad Street is ongoing this week.

To facilitate the concrete repair work in the roundabout, the Levee Road/Jackson Street Roundabout will be closed until Friday, depending on weather and site conditions.

Levee Road will be open from Broad Street up to the roundabout (including access to boat houses and the parking lot east of the roundabout) during the concrete repair work.

Access to Bay Point Park also will be open using Levee Road and Withers Harbor Road west of the roundabout.

Winona County

Cabin Coffee celebrates anniversary

ST. CHARLES  Cabin Coffee in St. Charles is celebrating its nine-year anniversary Thursday.

Coffee will be 90 cents, fresh-roasted beans will be 20 percent off and all drinks are 20 percent off between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. There also will be door prizes and free samples all day.

Cabin Coffee is on U.S. Highway 14 in St. Charles.
RED WINGThe Goodhue County Board of Commissioners decided to haggle over money before approving the preliminary levy and budget for 2017 at Tuesday's board meeting.

"We don't show up on Sept. 20 and do budgeting," said commissioner Dan Rechtzigel, the board chairman. "We ask staff to get budget requests to us in June. It sure would have been nice to talk about this at a budget workshop."

The initially proposed levy and budget  $31,151,526 and $59,749,521, respectively  immediately were voted down in a 3-2 vote, with only Rechtzigel and commissioner Brad Anderson voting affirmative.

Right away, commissioner Ted Seifert touted a plan to save $300,000 on both the budget and levy by not buying a new snowplow in 2017. The county owns 14 snowplows, according to public works director Greg Isakson. Currently, the fleet of snowplows is replaced every 14 years, buying a new plow each year and retiring the oldest plow. Seifert said his plan would be to buy snowplows on a rotation that would replace the fleet every 21 years.

"Your plows will not be going down the road at 21 years," Isakson said. "The wheels will be falling off. It's a recipe for disaster."

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"You're welcome to make that motion, but I'm not going to support it, or we'll just be cherry picking things (all day) from the budget," Rechtzigel said.

County administrator Scott Arenson said the original levy of $31,151,526 represented a 7.6 increase over the 2016 levy, but because of an increased tax base, the actual change in tax dollars was less than one quarter of a percent. Cutting $300,000 from the levy likely would reduce tax bills across the county.

In addition to Rechtzigel, Anderson voiced concern to Seifert about his last-minute change on a preliminary levy, saying Seifert complains when other agencies come to the county with last-minute needs.

"We should approve the budget before we approve the levy," Anderson said. "We seem to do it backwards in this county."

Seifert's recommendation failed 2-3, with only Seifert and commissioner Ron Allen voting in favor of cutting the $300,000 for the snowplow.

The initially proposed levy also represented an increase from 2016 of about $48,000. Arenson said. Commissioners suggested approving a levy of $31,103,526  essentially cutting that $48,000 increase to the levy  then holding a budget workshop to find the savings before the levy and budget need to be set in December after a Truth in Taxation meeting.

That proposal was approved with Majerus, Rechtzigel and Allen voting in favor of that levy amount.

"Wasn't there time to look at this up to now?" Rechtzigel asked. "I went through the budget line by line. it took a couple of nights, but that's what we're paid for. It should have been done already."

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The county board also approved a levy of $273,990 for the Southeastern Minnesota Multi-County Housing and Redevelopment Authority. The organization provides help for low-income housing, home rehabilitation and rental assistance in six southeast Minnesota counties. That levy passed 4-1, with only Seifert voting no.
A mudslide brought trees down across U.S. Highway 61 south of Winona as thunderstorms once again drenched Southeast Minnesota early Wednesday morning.

The Winona County Sheriff's Office reported that trees fell across the southbound lane of Hwy. 61 near mile marker 20. Traffic was reduced to one lane while the obstructions were cleaned up by crews from the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the sheriff's department reported.

"They were smaller trees," said Mike Dougherty, spokesman for MnDOT District 6. "It was in one of the traffic lanes, and they got to that about 5:30 or 6 a.m. They were done by 7 a.m."

Dougherty said MnDOT is on alert for more trouble  though no calls had come in yet this morning  due to the wet September thus far. According to the National Weather Service, Rochester has seen 5.54 inches of rain this month. And more rain is in the forecast. "We've had a very wet September. That does tend to loosen up the soil," Dougherty said.

MnDOT is keying an eye on highways near the river bluffs in Houston and Winona counties, he said, particularly Hwy. 61 and Minnesota Highway 26 that heads toward the Iowa border. "We're watching the key areas where creeks rise historically," he said.

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Lake Zumbro is expected to hit minor flood stage Friday, according to NWS forecasts. But that could get bumped up if more rain falls.

Forecasts from the NWS call for a 50 percent chance of rain later today and a 90 percent chance overnight with possible rainfall totals of 2-3 inches. A 70 percent chance of rain Thursday along and a 50 percent chance Thursday night could bring another inch of rain. From Friday through the rest of the week, the NWS sees at least a 20 percent chance of rain through Tuesday.

Rochester Emergency Management Director Ken Jones said the threat of heavy rain through Thursday will be accompanied by high winds and a chance of hail throughout the region. The threat of flooding, he said, is high over the next 36 hours.

Reports of heavy rain were splattered like raindrops across the region, according to NWS reports. Rochester International Airport saw 0.89 inches of rain overnight. Anything under an inch, it seems, was a dry night.

In Minnesota City, just north of Winona, 2.15 inches fell. Mabel, in Fillmore County, reported 1.69 inches of rain, another 1.9 inches fell in Lake City and 1.72 inches fell in High Forest, in far southern Olmsted County, the NWS reported. A flash flood warning was in effect early this morning for the eastern portions of Wabasha and Winona counties along with the southeastern corner of Houston County.

The rain was accompanied by plenty of lightning  one strike causing a house fire in southeast Rochester  and wind gusts of 50 mph in Hayfield and 45 mph in both Kasson and Dodge Center.
Billed as a press conference on Sept. 16, Donald Trump had to succumb under pressure to admit that President Obama was indeed born in the United States. Trump took no questions from the press.

Does this put the birther question to rest? No, it does not. It raises more questions than it answers. Why harbor and nurture this sentiment for five years? What exactly did his investigators find in Hawaii? Trump did not issue an apology to Obama for the pain this all has caused or to the American people for placing doubt that still remains relevant to this day.

Polls show among Republican voters over 60 percent are still convinced, thanks to Trump, that Obama was not born in the U.S. and is a Muslim.

The birtherism question will continue to dog Trump for the rest of this election cycle. He has other things to answer for, such as his lack of transparency.

One thing has been made clear, neither Donald Trump or his children will apologize to anyone for anything they have said or done on behalf of this election.

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Kathleen Castrovinci

Rochester
Petitions signed by Guam residents asking Gov. Eddie Calvo to veto Bill 326-33 were delivered to the governor's office in Adelup yesterday.

A statement released by the Archdiocese of Agana stated that petitions asking the governor to reconsider the bill on the grounds that it poses great potential harm to the charitable operations of the church had been submitted for his review on Wednesday, Sept. 21.

"More than 4,500 signatures were gathered in a span of four days from the various parishes, schools and institutions within our Archdiocese," the release said.

Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request.

Bill 326-33 would remove the statute of limitations on civil litigation of cases involving accusations of child sex abuse. The bill passed the legislature in an unanimous vote and is now on the governor's desk awaiting determination by Friday. If the governor decides to veto the bill, it will return to the legislative session agenda in October, when senators will have a chance to override the executive branch veto decision.

In response to reports that children from Catholic schools were being sent home with petitions asking their parents to urge the governor to veto the bill, concerned Catholic and former senator Bob Klitzkie said that such action on the part of the archdiocese was wrong.

'Leave the kids out of it'

"We've got a long history of abuse of altar boys and children by priests. Obviously we haven't learned anything from it because we're still using them for our own ulterior ends and not for what they go to school for or what they sign up to be altar boys for," he said in an interview with the Post on Tuesday. "We shouldn't involve children in something like this. Leave the kids out of it."

Klitzkie went on to condemn the church for using scare tactics against children who were told that their schools could be closed unless they get their parents to sign the bill.

"Lets try really hard not to try to scare them," he said.

Oyaol Ngirairikl, spokeswoman for the governor, confirmed that the petitions had been delivered to Adelup and that signatures numbered at around 4,700. Ngirairikl also told the Post that the governor had received visits from different members of the church.

In a statement released earlier in the week, Ngirairikl stated that the governor had received messages from various sources regarding the bill.

"The governor is taking these comments into consideration but also has tasked his legal team to review the bill, as he would any other bill," she said in the statement. "The Governors decision on the bill is due on Friday."

If no action by the governor is taken by Friday, Guam Law states that Bill 326-33 would lapse into law.

Override

If the bill is returned to the legislature for consideration, at least two senators have told the Post that they would vote in favor of an override.

Speaker Judi Won Pat said in comments released to the Post that she would vote in favor of its passing.

Sen. Frank Blas, the author of Bill 326-33, said that he would also vote in favor. Blas further stated that after speaking with other senators, he was very confident the bill would pass via an override vote should it come to that.

"I just hope the governor signs the bill," he said in an interview with the Post.

In response to suggestions that Gov. Calvo had met with church officials to talk about the bill, Blas said that such meetings were expected.

"I would expect that the governor would gather all the information that he could in making his decision concerning the bill," he told the Post.

Church opposition

The Archdiocese of Agana has repeatedly issued statements in opposition to the passage of Bill 326.

The argument from church officials has been one of self-preservation. Rev. Jeff San Nicolas, the delegate to the apostolic administrator who is currently absent from the island, held a press conference Tuesday in which he reiterated the "unintended consequences" of the bill should it pass into law.

According to San Nicolas and other church officials, the passage of Bill 326-33 would open the floodgates of child sex abuse cases going back decades and leave the church to pick up the bill from civil litigation served against many clergy members who are either dead, no longer under the Archdiocese of Agana or who otherwise lack the assets necessary to pay settlements.

San Nicolas cited examples of other dioceses in similar situations that, after being served by so many victims of child sex abuse, had to declare bankruptcy.

On Guam, San Nicolas said this would mean the closing of church assets that house educational and charitable services in order to muster the capital needed to settle suits that would be filed against them.

Members of the various lay organizations have come out since the church made such claims and countered first that the church's anxiety over the threat of litigation is in fact an admission of guilt or at least of knowledge of child sex abuse cases going back decades.

Blas told the Post that the language of the bill was written with the intent that it hold all parties and entities involved in perpetuating child sex abuse accountable for their actions.

"If there was abuse done to a child and that abuse was carried out through an institution that was supposed to protect that child, then they are just as culpable," he said.

Blas said that he originally authored the bill because he became very disturbed by the number of cases of child sex abuse being carried out by families and other institutions besides the Catholic Church.

"The bill never once mentions the church," he said in response to questions that the bill unfairly targets religious institutions.

Blas further stated that he was never contacted by church officials regarding opposition or concern over the bill's implications.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, writing in the Observer*, says that having examined Hillary Clintons emails, he is hard-pressed to find a single note that is sympathetic toward the Jewish state from any of the people she trusted. He reminds us that Sid Blumenthal, one of Hillarys most trusted advisers, sent Clinton dozens of anti-Israel articles written by Sids rabidly anti-Israel son Max. Hillary responded favorably to them.

But, says Boteach, the stream of anti-Israel advice received by Ms. Clinton was much more comprehensive than just the Blumenthal missives, and emails between Ms. Clinton and other advisrrs. . .are equally appalling. According to Boteach, the negative, poisonous approach Ms. Clinton established demonstrates that a huge segment of her close advisers and confidants were attacking Israel, condemning Prime Minister Netanyahu, and strategizing how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria at all costs.

Consider long-time Clintonite Sandy Berger:

[In] September 2010 [Berger] sent Ms. Clinton ideas on how to pressure Israel to make concessions for peace. Mr. Berger acknowledged how fragile Abbas political position [is], and how Palestinians are in disarray and that [f]ailure is a real possibility. Mr. Berger was well aware, and informed Ms. Clinton, of the very real possibility that Israel would be placing its national security at grave risk in a deal that would very likely fail and lead to a Hamas takeover. But Mr. Berger felt the risks to Israeli lives were worth it. He advised making Mr. Netanyahu feel uneasy about incurring our displeasure.. . . Astoundingly, Mr. Berger seemed to accuse the Jews in America of racism toward Obama. At a political level, the past year has clearly demonstrated the degree to which the U.S. has been hamstrung by its low ratings in Israel and among important segments of the domestic Jewish constituency, he writes. Domestically, he faces a reservoir of skepticism on this issue which reflects many factors, including inexcusable prejudice.

Now consider Anne Marie Slaughter, Clintons director of policy planning from 2009 to 2011:

She wrote Ms. Clinton in September 2010, devising a scheme to encourage wealthy philanthropists to pledge millions to the Palestinians (which no doubt would have been embezzled by Abbas and his cronies, as were other funds). Ms. Slaughter writes, This may be a crazy idea Suppose we launched a Pledge for Palestine campaign Such a campaign among billionaires/multimillionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state. She adds, There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.

Heres how Clinton responded to this call for aiding Palestine and shaming Israelis: I am very interested-pls flesh out. Thx.

Then there is Thomas Pickering, he of the infamous review board that cleared Clinton of culpability regarding Benghazi without even interviewing her:

Pickering wrote Ms. Clinton on December 18, 2011, suggesting a secret plan to stir up major Palestinian protests in an attempt to force the Israeli government into peace negotiations. He stated that the protests must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force. Mr. Pickerings goal was to ignite protests that would engulf the West Bank, just like Tahrir Square. He adds that the Palestinian leadership has shied away from this idea because they cant control it, and they are afraid of being replaced.. . . The idea was as dangerous for the Palestinians as it was for Israel. As Mr. Pickering admits, widespread protests could overthrow Abbas government, and if Palestinian men joined in, widespread violence would inevitably break out. It would obviously be impossible to prevent men from participating in these demonstrations, yet Mr. Pickering felt this extreme risk was worth taking, even if it meant the replacement of Abbas with another Hamas-styled governmenteven if it meant violence breaking out across the West Bank, leading to a third intifada and the murder of countless Jews. He emphasized the need to hide all U.S. involvement in this plot. Ms. Clinton forwarded the email to Monica Hanley and asked her to pls print. Clandestinely stirring up potentially violent protests in an attempt to force Israel to go against its best interests? Advice like this was par for the course when it came to Ms. Clintons advisers.

These emails make it clear that, as Boteach says, key Clinton advisers were looking for ways, including manifestly irresponsible ones, to coerce Israel into making dangerous concessions to the Palestinians in exchange (from all that appears) for nothing.

These folks wouldnt have sent such ideas to Clinton if they didnt understand that she was looking for ways to accomplish the same goal.

I do not want a president who would entertain the kind of proposals Blumenthal, Berger, Slaughter, and Pickering put forth. Clinton entertained them and said she was very interested in at least one.

Shouldnt the neo-conservatives/Reagan interventionists who plan to vote for Hillary Clinton rethink their stance?

* The Observer is owned by Jared Kushner, Donald Trumps son-in-law. I understand Kushner to be a close adviser to the Trump campaign.

These facts raise the possibility of bias in the Observers reporting. However, Boteachs piece is built on quotations from emails. Unless hes inventing the content, the only bias I detect is Boteachs strong sense that the ideas presented to Clinton by her trusted advisers were outrageous. I share that bias.

We can be confident that Trump wont receive advice like this from Kushner, an Orthodox Jew with strong ties to Israel, and I doubt hell receive, much less entertain it from any other trusted adviser.
Mia Love is the daughter of Haitian immigrants who first ran for Congress in 2012, losing by 768 votes. She ran again in 2014, winning this time by 4,000 votes against a different opponent, Democrat Doug Owens. In office, Love has been a fiery spokeswoman for the GOPs conservative wing. The American Conservative Union gives her a 96% rating on her two years in office.

As a young, black Republican woman, Mia Love draws constant fire from Democrats. They are pouring lots of resources into this years race, in which Mia is again facing Doug Owens. At one point, Owens reportedly led by six points, but later polling has shown her ahead by 17 and 13 points. However, given how close her first two races were, and given the Democrats determination to knock her off, this is no time for complacency.

In June, The Hill headlined: Dems target Mia Love in must-win Utah House race.

Freshman Rep. Mia Loves (R-Utah) heavily targeted seat is moving closer to the Democratic column in a must-win contest for Democrats. Democrats are rejoicing over a recent Salt Lake Tribune/Hinckley Institute poll showing Democratic rival Doug Owens up by 6 points and two nonpartisan election handicappers moving the seat to toss-up.

***

Love, a rising star in the Republican Party and the first black female Republican in Congress, goes into the rematch with better name recognition and about $300,000 more than Owens has on hand.

***

The Love campaign is taking the race seriously. The campaign has sent several fundraising emails highlighting the poll and acknowledging the tough fight ahead for the GOP freshman.

I am confident that Love can win, but she needs and deserves our support. I encourage you to take a look at her new web site and donate here. Her impressive issues page is here.
John Kerrys latest cease fire agreement in Syria was a farce from its inception. Farce turned to tragedy on Monday when a Russian (or conceivably a Syrian) jet attacked a U.N. convoy near Aleppo.

Aid workers say that trucks carrying desperately needed aid to the rebel-held side of the city were repeatedly bombed, as was a warehouse. At least 20 people were killed.

Pursuant to the cease fire arrangement, notification of the convoy was provided to all parties to the conflict and the convoy was clearly marked as humanitarian, according to the U.N emergency relief coordinator. Yet, fighter jets swooped in as the trucks were being unloaded and the killing commenced. The notification provided the Russians with a road map to a massacre.

The attack on the convoy is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, in the words of Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Both the Red Cross and U.N. officials have demanded an investigation.

What about the Obama administration? The logical response  to borrow the Washington Posts phrase  would have been to ask for an immediate meeting of the U.N. Security Council. This is what Russia did after the mistaken bombing of a Syrian army camp by planes from the U.S.-backed coalition fighting ISIS.

But the Obama administration has made no such request. Instead, John Kerry, the village idiot, declared that the alleged cease fire is not dead. He called for more talks with Russia.

The Syrian government, by contrast, has declared the cease fire over, while Russia says the prospects for it are very weak. Lets call this a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The main purpose of the cease fire, in the short term at least, was to enable humanitarian agencies to deliver relief to across combat lines. No one will be delivering relief now; all aid shipments have been suspended.

Given this reality, the continued fighting on the ground, and the pronouncements of Syrian and Russia, Kerrys claim that the cease fire lives on is preposterous.

President Obamas reaction is almost as criminally lame. In his U.N. speech, where he at least had the good sense to mention Syria only briefly, Obama intoned: Were going to have to pursue the hard work of diplomacy that aims to stop the violence and deliver aid to those in need.

Is negotiating meaningless agreements hard work? I dont think so. At any rate, it comes easily enough to John Kerry who was born to pursue fools errands.

Hard work would be to take meaningful action to minimize the killing of civilians in Syria. That work has been made much harder by Obamas past decisions not to act.

What kind of action should we take at this point? I agree with the Posts editorial board. At a minimum, we should establish and defend a safe zone for civilians. We should also consider military action to ground the Syrian air force and, if it comes to that, Russias as well.

If thats too hard, Obama and Kerry should forget about Syria instead of negotiating agreements that Assad and the Russians use to their advantage.
There are several articles up just now that deserve more than just a nod in our Picks banner. Start with The Weeks Damon Linker, a center-left writer usually worth reading for his straight shooting self-criticism of liberalism. His latest column dissents from the liberal line that the nationalism evinced by Donald Trump is solely and purely racist:

[The] perfect distillation of liberalism in 2016: Trump voters and their analogues overseas have regressive attitudes. Theyre motivated by bigotry, fear, and selfishness, all of which makes them angry that various outsiders are threatening to take away their abundant privileges. They certainly have no justification  economic or otherwise  for their grievances. . . [T]he real problem with the way Beauchamp and so many others on the center-left talk about those on the nationalist right is that it displays outright contempt for particularistic instincts that are not and should not be considered morally and politically beyond the pale. On the contrary, a very good case can be made that these instincts are natural to human beings and even coeval with political life as such  and that it is the universalistic cosmopolitanism of humanitarian liberalism (or progressivism) that, as much as anything, has provoked the right-wing backlash in the first place. . . Underlying liberal denigration of the new nationalism  the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia  is the desire to delegitimize any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic. As I explained shortly after the Brexit vote, cosmopolitan liberals presume that all particularistic forms of solidarity must be superseded by a love of humanity in general, and indeed that these particularistic attachments will be superseded by humanitarianism before long, as part of the inevitable unfolding of human progress.

The liberal attitude Linker describes is not new: it is what the French Hegelian-Stalinist philosopher Alexandre Kojeve described more than 50 years ago as the vision of the universal homogenous state. Some other time Ill go into why the universalism of liberal globalism is at war with its operating premises of identity politics.

Second, over at Politico, former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer points out the deeper reasons for the success of Trump that track closely with what I had to say here last week:

At one level, Trumps survival, so far, is less a testament to his shrewdnessthough it is a disservice to claim he hasnt been shrewdthan it is to Washingtons studied cowardice. Trump is not only making gaffes, hes brashly owning them, daring the political gods to smite him in what has become an epic rebuke to the dull, predictable, cautious political culture that everyone outside the Beltway has learned to recognize and abhor. In terror of the gaffe, candidates have increasingly immersed their true selves behind carefully vetted talking points, anodyne scripts, and cynical consultants, all with the primary purpose of suffocating in its cradle anything approaching a cavalier statement, never mind a surprising or provocative thought. The culmination of this effort is before us: the enthusiasm-starved campaign of Hillary Clinton, who over her decades in politics has perfected the talent of making even the most cutting-edge idea immediately sound like a cliche. Set against this apotheosis of safe, gaffe-free politics, millions have delightedly embraced a man who seems to recognize their appetite for something recognizably real, even if its vulgar and offensive. His gaffes arent a sideshow: theyre integral to his pitch. For this cohort, a vote for Trump is a vote to make the safe, protected, consultant-scripted lives of everyone in D.C. miserable every single day, because theyve earned it.

Finally, Hadley Arkes writes well in First Things of the dilemma facing conservative voters:

I yield to no one in my recoil from Donald Trump. But for anyone who shares the perspectives of the Republican Party, far more is involved here than aversion to an implausible candidate. A conservative should have an interest in repealing and replacing Obamacare, a program that tends inexorably to the political control of medicine, with everything drawn into a national budget, subject to national rationing by a federal commission. A conservative should have an interest in repealing the Dodd-Frank Act, with its heavy toll of regulation, suffocating private businesses with vast new expenses in paperwork and compliance. He might have an interest also in scaling back the corporate tax rate, which leads to inversions and reduces the incentive to invest and create new jobs. None of these things can be accomplished without a Republican president to sign such measures, passed by a Republican Congress. These are the issues that can win for a conservative candidate, and yet the conservative party has at its head the only Republican candidate who seems incapable of explaining them.

Is there a confidence-building step Trump could take? Hadley offers this thought:
Scotlands leading airport has turned to BlipTracks technology and sensors to gather data about passenger queue and flow. The information enables the airport to streamline operations at security lines and to display real-time waiting times throughout the airport.

Wait time sign at Edinburgh Airport

PR-Inside.com: 2016-09-21 09:01:58

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# 606 Words

Haekken 2, Vester Hassing9310 VodskovDenmarkMarketing Manager+4551168586Christian Carstens51168586

With 11 million travelers last year and heading towards 12 million this year, Edinburgh Airport is Scotlands busiest airport. It is crucial that logistics are on point around the airport to keep passengers happy. In July 2016, the airport reported the busiest-ever month after seeing 1,332,282 travelers through its doors  an increase of 9.6% on the same month last year.With the constant increase in passengers, Edinburgh Airport enlisted the expertise of Denmark-based BLIP Systems to design and implement the BlipTrack solution at the airports security lines, to help measure and handle passenger numbers smoothly and efficiently.The solution provides the airport with detailed information about passengers queue times and how they move around the airport. The data gives the airport a clear picture on trends and patterns and how they are performing. It allows them to respond promptly and effectively  if lines are becoming congested  to ultimately reduce processing times. In addition, it also enables the airport to provide optimum service by displaying wait times on signs in the airport and on their website, thereby reducing passengers frustration by creating realistic wait time expectations.With BlipTrack we are able to keep our passengers fully informed 24/7  both in the terminal and online  about what to expect at security. At peak times, up to 3,000 passengers an hour travel through security and our aim is to make that experience as smooth as possible whilst ensuring safety  BLIP Systems helps us do that, says Adrian Witherow, Chief Operating Officer at Edinburgh Airport.In order to improve traveler satisfaction, comply with service-level agreements and evaluate key performance indicators, it is important that airport managers are able to measure passenger queue and flow and subsequently improve waiting times. With our fourth UK installation, we are confident that BlipTrack also will be successful in providing Edinburgh Airport with all the necessary data to both optimize processes and improve the passenger experience, says Christian Bugislaus Carstens, Marketing Manager at BLIP Systems.Edinburgh joins a host of other leading international airports, including JFK, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dublin, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Auckland, Keflavik and Oslo, who are displaying real-time wait times, using the BlipTrack solution.About Edinburgh Airport:Edinburgh Airport is Scotlands busiest airport. More than 40 airlines serve over 100 destinations and 11 million passengers travelled through the airport in 2015. In June 2011, Edinburgh Airport was named Best European Airport (5-10 million passengers) by ACI EUROPE. Earlier in the year, the airport was also named as being in the top 5 in Europe for customer service as measured by the ACIs ASQ survey. Edinburgh aims to grow and develop the airport responsibly over a 30-year period while improving the experience for their passengers and enhancing the contribution the airport makes to the regional and national economy.About BLIP Systems:BLIP Systems is a privately-held information technology company with headquarters in Aalborg, Denmark. The company is one of the leading providers of data analytic tools to transform traveler flow into value, and creating easy-to-interpret decision-making tools of end-users. The BlipTrack solution is successfully employed in optimization efforts in more than 30 international airports, including Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, JFK Airport in New York, El-Prat Airport in Barcelona, Sydney, Copenhagen, Oslo, Malpensa and Linate Airports in Milano, Manchester, Brussels, Edinburgh, Dublin, San Diego, Helsinki, Auckland, Montreal, Christchurch, Geneve, Birmingham, Bristol, Cincinnati, Brussels South Charleroi, Keflavik, Billund and Aalborg. The solution is also implemented in road traffic in Switzerland, New Zealand, USA, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Ireland. In recent years, the solution has also been rolled out in ports in Denmark and UK, train stations in UK and Holland, ski resorts in USA, amusement parks, and at events all over the world.
PR-Inside.com: 2016-09-21 06:02:01

The Internet Society Opens Regional Bureau in the Middle East and Appoints New Director

Internet Society

Allesandra de Santillana, +41-22-807-1451

desantillana@isoc.org

The Internet Society today announced that it has opened a new regional bureau in the Middle East and appointed Salam Yamout to the role of Regional Director.

Ms. Yamout brings over 25 years of experience to her new role where she will be responsible for building awareness of the Internet Society and advancing its mission of promoting access to the Internet for the benefit of people everywhere.

Prior to joining the Internet Society, Ms. Yamout was the National Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Strategy Coordinator for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, in Beirut, Lebanon. She was responsible for planning and implementing national ICT projects in addition to advising on regulatory and legislative issues related to ICT as well as Internet Governance.

Ms. Yamout is founder and executive board member of the Lebanese Internet Center and the Lebanon Chapter of the Internet Society. She also serves on the board of various organizations including RIPE NCC (the Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia); MIT Enterprise Forum for the Pan Arab Region, and Lebanon for Entrepreneurs.

The Internet Society has been looking for the right person who can help us engage with regional partners, policy makers and Internet communities throughout the Middle East. With her extensive experience in technology and working with various stakeholders in the region, she is well positioned to help the Internet Society promote the benefits of an open, trusted, Internet, explains Raul Echeberria, Vice President of Global Engagement for the Internet Society.

Mr. Yamout holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Ecole Superieure des Affaires (ESA) in Beirut and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona. She will be based in Beirut, Lebanon.

About the Internet Society

The Internet Society, www.internetsociety.org, is the trusted independent source for Internet information and thought leadership from around the world. It is also the organizational home for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). With its principled vision and substantial technological foundation, the Internet Society promotes open dialogue on Internet policy, technology, and future development among users, companies, governments, and other organizations. Working with its members and Chapters around the world, the Internet Society enables the continued evolution and growth of the Internet for everyone.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201609200060

The Internet Society Opens Regional Bureau in the Middle East and Appoints New Director
Last Friday, my wife and I traveled from New York City to Canton, upstate New York State, the location of St. Lawrence University. We were fortunate to be invited to take part in a series of events to celebrate fifty years of Obiora Udechukwus extraordinary artistic career.

Udechukwu is primarily an artistone whose output over five decades has been at once prodigious and consistently outstanding. Yet, to characterise his profession in the way I have just done is, I fear, to obscure the nature and scope of his intellectual and creative engagements. For, as I told the audience at St. Lawrence, the man is a Renaissance in the broadest sense of that word, a scholar whose versatility is evident in his work as a painter, poet, and scholar, both of art history and literature. One of the marvelous treats of the celebration was to hear two of the poets read from Udechukwus book, What the Madman Said, a poetic collection of startling images and crystalline lines.

The events themselvesa retrospective exhibit of Udechukwus outstanding work; an impressive keynote lecture by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Udechukwus former student who now teaches at Princeton; readings by several poets and novelists; and a traditional Igbo dancewere affecting and elegantly achieved, each event an orchestration of Udechukwus stature as a giant in the field of visual arts, a man of penetrating insight and reach. Yet, remarkable as they were, the formal events seemed to me far from the most meaningful aspect of the celebration.

What moved me more was the way in which the celebration of Udechukwus work became an occasion for those of us gathered at St. Lawrence University to reflect on the drama of Nigerias desultory odyssey.

There was something instructiveI could say even magicalabout the gathering. You could gauge the celebrants mettle by the number and quality of people who turned out to honour him. There were his former students, some of the most skilled artists and art scholars of their age: among them, Tayo Adenaike, Olu Oguibe, and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Adenaike happened to be visiting the US, and eagerly accepted Udechukwus invitation to come for the celebration. In fact, he arrived a few days early to give talks to Udechukwus art students.

The poet, Uche Nduka, spoke with palpable joy about the delight of seeing some of his friends for the first time in more than twenty years. Ijele Anozie, another of Udechukwus former students, traveled with her son and daughter from Dallas, TX, to perform a traditional dance. Nduka Otiono, like me an admirer of Udechukwus work as a scholar, artist and social conscience, drove with his wife from Ottawa, Canada to moderate the evening of readings in honour of the celebrant. Akin Adesokan, a novelist, poet and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, focused on Udechukwus personal magnificence, his legendary generosity, his insistence on treating everybody with gracious consideration. Moments after we arrived at the guesthouse where we stayed, my wife and I got a taste of the specialness of the man Udechukwu. An American woman, who lived next door to the guesthouse, engaged us in conversation. On learning we were in town for the universitys celebration of Udechukwus work, she voiced her admiration for the man. She had graduated from St. Lawrence University, a science student, but she had talked to Udechukwu just before she traveled to Kenya for research work. She remarked on his warmth, the ease of his person.

Speaker after speaker testified to how powerfully Udechukwus work as artist, scholar and teacher shaped their own development as artist, scholar or teacher. They also pointed to the celebrants moral courage, his distaste for injustice, and his stubborn fidelity to noble principles even in the face of threats from power-drunk and diabolical forces. His academic career in Nigeria was marked by his struggles against overreaching, amoral power. Such battles leave scars, including the truncation of his otherwise stellar academic career at UNN.

Udechukwu first came to St. Lawrence University twenty years ago. The original plan was that he would spend a year or two as a visiting professor and then return to his post at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. It was a time of considerable upheaval in Nigerias academe. At the time, General Sani Abacha was at the helm, doing his best to misrule Nigeria. The dictator had little use for academics and their dogon turenchi (their penchant for long-winded language). To curb academics excesses and teach them who was in charge, the general appointed a sole administrator to run UNN.

Udechukwu and other likeminded professors resisted the effort to reduce their university to the equivalent of a barracks, a space where scholars first and foremost called to obedience. Under the military ethos, scholarly activities were viewed with suspicion, and scholars who nursed notions of operating without hindrance were particularly targeted. Udechukwu was one of the most visible of these resisters.

Of course, the military and their minions were in no mood to countenance dissent. Udechukwu and a few of his colleagues were arrested on trumped up charges, and charged before a tribunal.

This absurd ordeal was playing out in his life when St. Lawrence sought him out to assume a visiting professorship. It is one of those sad stories that recur in Nigeria: a narrative of mediocrities hounding some of the countrys noblest citizens and most enlightened mindschasing them, as it were, into the embrace of countries that recognise and celebrate talent and accomplishment.

Despite the heroic effort of some academics, theres no question that Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions are today a shadow of their former selves. The reason for that disheartening state of affairs is rather complex, a subject that demands more than the space of this column. But I have no doubt that a central part of the story has to do with what happened to Professor Udechukwu and others like him.

As we spoke and sang and danced last week in honour of Udechukwu, I could not shake off from my mind this sense of a shadow hovering ever so obliquely over this moment of exultation. What did it mean that a major American university would for twenty years treasure a man that the forces that runand ruinNigeria were in a haste to cast away? Lets forget for the moment Udechukwus stalwart accomplishments as an artist, poet and scholar. I propose that we look, instead, at the extraordinary profile of the students he once mentored at NsukkaAdenaike, Oguibe, Okeke-Agulu. Imagine all the Okeke-Agulus, Oguibes and Adenaikes lost to Nigeria, a country deeply hostile to excellence, wedded to the veneration of the vilest among its citizens.

For me, the ultimate takeaway from taking part in, witnessing, the adulation of Udechukwu was this: that the last word belongs, not to the greedy ones who make a fetish of conspicuous consumption, but to men and women of honour and talent who labour every day to enrich their fellows, to make the world a more beautiful place. Through his visual art, poetry, scholarship and social engagements, Udechukwu has inspired countless people. I salute an essential scholar, a graceful and dignified human: Obiora nwa Udechukwu!

Please follow me on twitter @okeyndibe
The American Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday announced an award of more than $4 million to a whistleblower whose original information alerted the agency to a fraud.

The SECs whistleblower programme has awarded more than $111 million to 34 whistleblowers since its inception in 2011.

Our programme continues to incentivize whistleblowers to come forward with solid information that helps us bring violators to justice before more wrongdoing can occur, said Jane Norberg, Acting Chief of the SECs Office of the Whistleblower.

By law, the SEC protects the confidentiality of whistleblowers and does not disclose information that might directly or indirectly reveal a whistleblowers identity.

Whistleblowers may be eligible for an award when they voluntarily provide the SEC with unique and useful information that leads to a successful enforcement action. Whistleblower awards can range from 10 percent to 30 percent of the money collected when the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million.

All payments are made out of an investor protection fund established by Congress that is financed through monetary sanctions paid to the SEC by securities law violators.

No money has been taken or withheld from harmed investors to pay whistleblower awards.
Among Nigerias numerous national challenges, which do you think the next president should focus on first?
The House of Representatives on Wednesday referred the allegations contained in budget padding petition by one of its members from Kano, Abdulmumin Jibrin, to its Ethics and Privileges Committee.



The move consequently dashed widespread expectations that the House would move to sanction Mr. Jibrin, who had been stirring the budget padding scandal since he was removed as chairman of the Appropriation Committee in July.



At the resumed sitting Wednesday morning, Emmanuel Oker-Jev, House Rules and Business Chairman, moved a motion for the House to address alleged breach of House ethics by Mr. Jibrin.



Subsequently, Speaker Yakubu Dogara suggested that Mr. Oker-Jevs motion be referred to House Ethics and Privileges Committee for further investigation.



But another lawmaker from Kano, Aliyu Madaki, expressed reservations about the motion and submitted that the entire House should resign in the wake of the scandal.



Mr. Madaki said all representatives have been indicted by Mr. Jibrin in his scathing allegations.



Mr. Madakis interjection was in turn interrupted by lawmakers loyal to Mr. Dogara, who chanted Dogara! Dogara! Dogara!



Throughout the deliberations, Mr. Jibrin kept his cool but later walked out, also without raising any issues.



The House has since continued with its deliberations on other matters.

Among Nigerias numerous national challenges, which do you think the next president should focus on first?  Premium Times (@PremiumTimesng) October 5, 2022 Support PREMIUM TIMES' journalism of integrity and credibility Good journalism costs a lot of money. Yet only good journalism can ensure the possibility of a good society, an accountable democracy, and a transparent government. For continued free access to the best investigative journalism in the country we ask you to consider making a modest support to this noble endeavour. By contributing to PREMIUM TIMES, you are helping to sustain a journalism of relevance and ensuring it remains free and available to all. Donate TEXT AD: Call Willie - +2348098788999 Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
A ruling of the Supreme Court upholding the election of Gov. Yahaya Bello on Tuesday did not meet expectations of being untainted by lucre, a former governor of the state, Idris Wada, who challenged the election, said.

The court said Mr. Bello was validly elected, and dismissed cases filed by Mr. Wada and James Faleke, a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.

Mr. Faleke said he should have replaced Abubakar Audu, the first candidate of the party in the November 2015 election, after Mr. Audus sudden death.

The APC nominated Mr. Bello, instead.

Mr. Wada, the immediate past governor and a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, said the election was flawed.

Though we expected the noble dispensers of Justice at the Apex court to have delivered a judgment that will be untainted by lucre and un-cowed by the threat of immoral power; unfortunately, it was not to be, Mr. Wada said in a statement signed by his Chief Communications Manager, Phrank Shaibu.

But we are proud to have represented the moral imperative in a polity struggling to retrieve its conscience from the depravity of men who have no honour. We are proud to have stood beside the good people of Kogi State in their struggle to assert the legitimacy and dignity of their vote.

Mr. Wada said the judgement was against the golden dawn in the state that bears the cradle of the Kogi people. It was against the golden dawn for all lovers of democracy in Nigeria and all over the world but we are proud to be at the vanguard of the revolution.

The decision of the court brought to an end months of legal battle to unseat Mr. Bello.

Mr. Wada said he challenged the election not because he wanted a second term in office; but to serve as a historic denunciation and a befitting dirge for electoral fraud.

Those who do not understand the ways of God and the efficacy of His powers may mock or deride you, but keep your head high for the common good of the greater Kogi of our dream, he said.

The Supreme Court judgment may not have come the way we desired but thats the more reason we should demonstrate to the world how much we love our dear state by maintaining peace and order.

As a people, we are resolved to do our best in whatever way possible to offer support to Governor Yahaya Bello for the uplift of Kogi State. Without doubt, we shall serve as the polished metal for the compunction of Government with the quality of opposition we will provide in the days ahead but it is our prayer that Governor Yahaya Bello and his aides will appreciate our advice and proposals in the overall interest of the Kogi people.

Finally, we are comforted by that fact that, beyond the judgement of the Supreme Court, there is the judgement of God.
Nigerian Army personnel and operatives of the State Security Service on Wednesday attacked a news crew putting up at a hotel in downtown Benin, the Edo State capital, PREMIUM TIMES has learnt.

The crew, which comprised reporters, producers and a driver, arrived in Benin on Tuesday evening and subsequently checked in at Douban Hotel along Airport Road, Taiye Garick, the editor of Watchdog Media, told PREMIUM TIMES Wednesday.

At approximately 1:45 a.m. soldiers and SSS agents stormed the hotel and demanded the whereabouts of our reporters, Mr. Garrick said quoting witnesses. They went from room to room dragging them out and brutalising them.

Mr. Garrick said his staff were then dragged into a waiting van and taken to the SSS field office in Benin, where they remained locked as at 7:00 p.m.Wednesday.

Mr. Garrick said the soldiers were attached to Operation Thunderstorm which is being coordinated by the Armys 4th Mechanised Brigade in Benin.

The affected journalists and their designations as listed by Mr. Garrick in an email to PREMIUM TIMES are as follows:

Tony Abulu (Production Manager); Richard Hasley (Reporter); Opara Uche (Reporter); Handy Romeo Eze (Reporter); Kelvin Toryila (Video Editor) and Lanre Ogunleye, an IT associate.

Others include: Balogun Ehigie (IT ); Kenneth Danpome (Head IT), Mathew (Logistics Manager) and Joe Epi (Driver).

The journalists were taken away, wearing only boxers after they were brutalised and their properties including identity cards, laptops and mobile phones were seized from them, Mr. Garrick said.

Mr. Garrick said they were in Benin to carry out survey of voters and report on early preparations of INEC and other stakeholders ahead of the gubernatorial election holding there on September 28.

Army spokesman, Sani Usman, did not respond to PREMIUM TIMES request for comment.

The management of Douban Hotel declined comments Wednesday evening.

But Edo State Police Public Relations Officer, Theodore Okafor, confirmed the development to PREMIUM TIMES.

Some agents of the SSS and soldiers from the 4th Mechanised Brigade went to the hotel around 10 p.m., Mr. Okafor, a DSP, said. They searched the hotel and some people were taken away. Theyre being interrogated at the 4th Brigade now.

Mr. Garrick condemned rising cases of attacks against free speech and demanded an immediate release of his staff.

I am deeply saddened to see that the rising cases of attacks against journalists, bloggers and other free speech advocates have gotten to my turn, Mr. Garrick said. I never knew it would get to this extent or to me.

The onslaught against Watchdog Media crew comes exactly two weeks after SSS operatives stormed the residence of Emenike Iroegbu, a political blogger based in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital.
A Nigerian police unit set up to combat violent crime has instead been systematically torturing detainees in its custody as a means of extracting confessions and lucrative bribes, Amnesty International said in a report published on September 21.

In Nigeria: You have signed your death warrant, former detainees told Amnesty International. They said they had been subjected to horrific torture methods, including hanging, starvation, beatings, shootings and mock executions, at the hands of corrupt officers from the feared Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).

A police unit created to protect the people has instead become a danger to society, torturing its victims with complete impunity while fomenting a toxic climate of fear and corruption, said Damian Ugwu,Amnesty Internationals Nigeria researcher.

Our research has uncovered a pattern of ruthless human rights violations where victims are arrested and tortured until they either make a confession or pay officers a bribe to be released.

Amnesty International has received reports from lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists and collected testimonies stating that some police officers in SARS regularly demand bribes, steal and extort money from criminal suspects and their families.

SARS officers are getting rich through their brutality. In Nigeria, it seems that torture is a lucrative business, said Damian Ugwu.

SARS detainees are held in a variety of locations, including a grim detention centre in Abuja known as the Abattoir, where Amnesty International found 130 detainees living in overcrowded cells.

Amnesty Internationals research shows that, in addition to its stated remit of tackling violent crime, SARS investigates civil matters and in some cases tortures detainees involved in contractual, business and even non-criminal disputes.

In one case in Onitsha, Anambra state, a 25-year-old fuel attendant was arrested by SARS after his employer had accused him of being responsible for a burglary at their business premises.

He told Amnesty International: The policemen asked me to sign a plain sheet. When I signed it, they told me I have signed my death warrant. They left me hanging on a suspended iron rod. My body ceased to function. I lost consciousness. When I was about to die they took me down and poured water on me to revive me.

Like many people detained by SARS, he was not allowed access to a lawyer, a doctor or his family during his two-week detention.

Yet in various cases where victims of police torture or other ill-treatment attempted to seek justice, the authorities took no action.

When asked by Amnesty International to explain why no police officers had been suspended or prosecuted for torture, the police simply denied that any torture had taken place.

However, one senior officer disclosed that around 40 officers alleged to have carried out various acts of torture and ill-treatment of detainees were transferred to other stations in April 2016. He did not say whether the claims against them were being investigated.

This lack of accountability breeds and perpetuates impunity, creating an environment where SARS officers believe they have carte blanche to carry out acts of torture, said Damian Ugwu.

This is hardly surprising when many of these officers have bribed their way to SARS in the first place. The police chiefs in charge are themselves entwined in the corruption.

Chidi Oluchi, 32, told Amnesty international he was arrested in Enugu before being robbed of his belongings and then tortured in custody by SARS officers.

They told me to slap myself and, when I refused, they started beating me with the side of their machetes and heavy sticks. My mouth was bleeding and my vision became blurred, said Chidi, who was released after he paid SARS officers N25,500 ($100) to be freed.

Apart from demanding bribes, SARS officers have been accused of stealing or confiscating property from relatives of detained suspects.

Some family members told Amnesty International that SARS officers stole their cars or withdrew all the money from their bank accounts.

The brother of a man arrested on suspicion of participating in an armed robbery told AmnestyInternational how a team of SARS officers raided his home in Nsukka.

The police team from SARS forcefully broke into boxes, locked furniture and drawers. By the time they left, several items including watches, jewellery and shoes were missing. We were too scared to reportthe incident, he said.

The majority of the victims of torture in SARS custody are poor and unable to hire legal representatives. In some cases when detainees cannot afford to pay bribes, they are simply tortured more.

Our research has exposed the callous workings of a police squad operating outside of the law and inflicting daily brutality on Nigerians who are often legally powerless to defend themselves against criminal accusations, let alone from the torture meted out by SARS, said Damian Ugwu.

Depressingly, there are scant judicial or any other mechanisms in place to prevent SARS officers from subjecting vulnerable targets to human rights violations for their own financial gain.

Despite repeated calls from Amnesty International in recent years, the Nigerian justice system has failed to prevent or punish torture.

In December 2014, the Nigerian police launched a human rights manual which prohibits torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, but SARS has failed to implement it.

When a new Inspector General of Police was appointed in early 2015 it was announced that there would be reform and reorganisation of SARS, but officers attached to the unit told Amnesty International they were not aware of the reforms.

A revised version of a bill to criminalize torture, which was first introduced in 2012 but was returned unsigned by the President, was passed by the House of Representatives in June 2016 and will be resubmitted to the Senate for further debates in 2016.

With the Nigerian governments previous attempts at stamping out torture proving completely ineffective, it is time for the authorities to ensure that officers responsible for such human rights violations are finally held accountable, said Damian Ugwu.

Police torture is a stain on Nigerian society that must be addressed with clear orders to law enforcement officers not to inflict torture or other ill-treatment on detainees under any circumstances.

There is also an urgent need for robust legislation that ensures all acts of torture are offences under Nigerias criminal law. All victims have a right to reparations, and steps must be taken to ensure that nobody profits from abusing detainees.

Nigeria is obligated under international and regional human rights law to ensure the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment.
A 30-year-old self-ordained pastor, Adewumi Alade, and his brother, Adewole,25, will spend six months each for job scam.

An Ado-Ekiti Chief Magistrate presided over by Adesoji Adegboye did not give an option of fine.

Mr. Adegboye, while reviewing the case said the prosecutor, Leranmo Caleb, called five witnesses, and the defence counsel, Busuyi Ayeni, called the convicts as his witness.

He said the evidence of the convicts were not credible, adding that the prosecution proved his case beyond reasonable doubt.

On Tuesday, Mr. Adegboye said he was lenient on the convicts because of the plea of their counsel.

The convicts were charged with conspiracy, obtaining money under false pretence and defrauding some people that their brother was a civil defence Officer at Abuja.

Caleb said the convicts committed the crime at Basiri Area between November 2014 and June 2015.

The prosecution said that the convicts under false pretence obtained one million naira from five different people with intent of giving them work at the civil defence.

He said the offence contravened section 419,108 of the Criminal Code, Cap C 16, Laws of Ekiti State, 2012.

(NAN)
gringothedangerouslifeofjohnmcafee

The story of John McAfee going from an antivirus-software mogul to a man fleeing Belize on questions about a murder has been chronicled numerous times, but exactly why he had to leave paradise in 2012 is still shrouded in mystery.

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein ("On the Ropes," "The Kid Stays in the Picture") went down to Central America to find the truth in her new movie, but as with many things related to McAfee, it's layered with more questions than answers.

"Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee," which recently had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and will air on Showtime on Saturday, is a revealing look at McAfee's time in Belize from the locals who were there alongside him and some who claim they committed violent acts on McAfee's orders  including murder.

In 2012, a neighbor of McAfee's in Belize, Gregory Faull, was murdered. Sought for questioning as a "person of interest," McAfee fled to Guatemala, and after being arrested there on accusations of entering the country illegally, he suffered heath-related issues and ultimately was expelled from Guatemala and sent back to the US, where he has lived since.

The murder case of Faull has never been solved.

In "Gringo," Burstein travels to Belize and gains the trust of McAfee's associates, members of his security detail, and numerous women to learn of McAfee's alleged involvement in not just the Faull case but other crimes.

McAfee (who has contributed to Business Insider in the past) declined to be filmed for the movie, but Burstein does include correspondence the two had via email.

"I've always been fascinated by people who are under the spotlight of coming from fame, money, power, and how that affects them," Burstein told Business Insider at the Toronto festival. "So John is someone I read about when he was escaping to Guatemala, and there was tons of press, but I still had a lot to learn. There were a lot of surprises along the way."

Story continues

Nanette Burstein Mike Windle Getty final

In October of last year, Showtime approached Burstein with the idea to do a story about the Belize episode in McAfee's life. (A year earlier, Spike TV asked her whether she wanted to make a film with McAfee's involvement, for which she would follow him around for a year. She declined. It has since been made into the series "The McAfee Project.")

An executive producer for the Showtime doc, Jeff Wise, who has written numerous stories about McAfee, and fellow producer Michael Hirschorn presented Burstein with a promo tape of interviews they put together of revelations about McAfee from his associates in Belize.

"I was like, 'Now, this is interesting,'" Burstein said.

She jumped on a plane and went down to Belize to begin work. One of the first people she met was through Wise. That person was Eddie McKoy, a local who is known for his ties to gangs in Belize and who goes by the nickname "Mac 10" (like the gun). Having at one time planned to kill McAfee, he ended up being a part of his security detail, according to the film and stories by Wise.

And in the towns of San Pedro and Orange Walk, McAfee's old stomping grounds, Burstein quickly stood out as the woman who was doing a story on the eccentric millionaire who once lived there.

Though the setting was extremely intimidating, Burstein says being a woman in that environment was actually a huge advantage.

"Tough guys like Eddie McKoy saw me as a sister and they were nice to me and respectful," Burstein said. "They would speak to me in a different way than if I was a guy. And the women, because they were younger than me, this maternal thing was happening."

After a few weeks on the ground, Burstein began to get into McAfee's inner sanctum in the country and found some chilling revelations.

The alleged $5,000 hitman

Burstein uncovers allegations about the Faull murder. Most notably, McAfee's caretaker, Cassian Chavarria, claims on camera that McAfee ordered him to wire $5,000 to McKoy with instructions to kill Faull because McAfee thought Faull poisoned his dogs. When Burstein confronts McKoy in the movie with this information, however, he denies it.

Greg Faull Showtime

She also learned that the allegations about McAfee's time in Belize don't end there.

A man named David Middleton, whom subjects in the film say McAfee suspected of breaking into his house in Belize, was beaten to death. Men who claim to have been involved in the beating speak in "Gringo" about the incident, saying McAfee hired them.

Then there's a disturbing recollection by microbiologist Allison Adonizio, who was working for McAfee developing antibiotics derived from jungle plants in Orange Walk. She alleges McAfee drugged her one night and raped her.

The director acknowledges she had to be careful not to be susceptible to the rumormongering in Belize, however.

"That was one of the hardest parts of this film, trying to decide what is true and what is an exaggeration, because there's definitely a huge rumor mill in Belize," Burstein said.

In the film, Burstein attempts to ask McAfee questions about what happened in Belize by cornering him at a debate for the American Libertarian Party in New York (McAfee was a 2016 presidential candidate). Once he realizes who she is, however, he walks away. This leads back to an email conversation, one in which McAfee calls Burstein "Satan."

'If I'm going to be crucified, I want to have some fun out of it'

If spending months in Belize trying to gain the trust of people to talk about potentially criminal details weren't stressful enough for Burstein, once in postproduction and faced with a July deadline to lock the movie for Showtime, she endured continued correspondence with McAfee and others in his inner circle.

"As soon as I found out Jeff Wise was involved, at that point I decided I would just start messing with" the film, McAfee recently told Business Insider over the phone of his side of the events. "If I'm going to be crucified, I want to have some fun out of it."

McAfee claims that the email correspondence between Burstein and him featured in the film was not authentic because he never wrote any of the emails. According to McAfee, he hired a group of people to impersonate him in emails with Burstein.

Asked why he didn't just refuse to communicate with Burstein at all, McAfee told us: "Here's the issue, Nanette and Jeff Wise had their minds made up before they even went down there, so why not? I knew it was a film that, without anything from me, what would it be? Seriously, what's a documentary about John McAfee with nothing from John McAfee?"

Burstein, on the other hand, told Business Insider that when she got involved with the film, McAfee was willing to be interviewed but only if he got a share of the film's profits. McAfee says this is false.

Burstein is convinced that McAfee was the author of all the emails she received.

"I would be shocked if I was catfished," Burstein said, using the term for someone duped by a false identity online. "I really would, given that the people that were coming out pretending to have impersonated him did not sound like they could actually pull that off."

Burstein believes her theory was confirmed when McAfee's daughter called her.

"She wanted to make sure she wasn't in the film  she's not," Burstein said. "And I don't know if she was trying to find out stuff for him. She was like, 'My dad is really worried that there's more than one murder [featured] in the film,' and I just didn't say anything."

But when Burstein brought up to McAfee's daughter the suggestion that the emails were not really from her father, according to Burstein, she said, "That's ridiculous, he would never do that, he's a total control freak, he has to do everything himself."

But that's not the only way in which McAfee has picked at the legitimacy of "Gringo."

Cassian John McAfee YouTube

Before finishing the film, Burstein got word that McAfee posted a video on his YouTube channel that features people from her movie stating on camera that Showtime paid them to say McAfee was behind the crimes discussed in the movie.

The video posted by McAfee includes McKoy and Chavarria saying Showtime paid them.

Burstein, who said she and Showtime did not pay anyone for interviews (but did pay some subjects a nominal fee for use of photos they had of McAfee after the interviews took place), quickly called Chavarria, the man who in the film says he's the one who paid McKoy on the orders of McAfee to kill Faull, after seeing him in the YouTube video.

"I called Cassian and recorded it on my phone. I asked why he would say this," Burstein said, "and he said John paid him $1,200 to say it. That he needed the money. I said, 'Did you lie to me? I cannot put in the film something that's not true.' And he said, 'I swear to God, put it in the film. I would not lie to you  I want to get this out.'"

When contacted by Business Insider, Chavarria did not corroborate Burstein's story. Instead, he said Burstein paid him to lie about McAfee in the movie. When asked to present proof of payment, he didn't respond.

Showtime sent Business Insider the following statement about the accusations that subjects in the film were paid for their stories: "Showtime Documentary Films does not pay subjects for their interviews. We fully support 'Gringo' filmmaker Nanette Burstein and applaud the bravery of those interviewed in the film."

Burstein also sent the following statement: "I am confident that all the interviews I present in 'Gringo' are true. None of my subjects were paid by me or Showtime Documentary Films for their interviews. The people in the film voluntarily came forward to share their stories with me. I truly admire their courage, but understand that under duress, and in light of the vast resources available to John McAfee, these subjects could be pressured to recant their statements."

I swear to God, put it in the film. I would not lie to you  I want to get this out.

McAfee, for his part, told us, "Showtime has done the most disgraceful things to these people in Belize, and I'm trying to bring this to light."

He then sent Business Insider photos of documents from the Supreme Court of Belize in which locals interviewed for the movie say they were paid for what they said.

McAfee also posted more government documents from Belize authorities saying the information in the movie isn't valid in a post on the site for the cybersecurity technology company MGT Capital Investments, of which he is the CEO. In the post, he addresses the rape allegation by Adonizio, which he denies. (The Belize government did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.)

Burstein told us of the official Belize documents: "What can you do? The guy pays people to do s---."

The 'threatening' texts from McAfee

Burstein calls "Gringo" the most bizarre movie she's ever made and acknowledges that at one point it got very scary for her.

After trying to get McAfee on camera at the Libertarian Party debate, she says, she started receiving emails for the next 24 hours from McAfee that she calls "threatening." Afterward, Burstein says, she received a text message from McAfee stating: "I want to send you something very precious to me. I need an address where you can sign for something."

"My husband was away, I was alone, and the last [email] before the text he called me Satan, which I put in the film," Burstein said. "I didn't know if he was still in New York and he's got an armed security guard who is licensed to carry. I was scared at that moment."

Nothing ever came of it. When asked about the text, McAfee told Business Insider he did text her but only to inform her about the video in which people said Showtime paid them to lie about him. He denies ever asking for Bursteins address.

But after McAfee first spoke with Business Insider about the text, Burstein sent us a screenshot of the text he sent her asking for her address. When confronted with this, McAfee changed his story and admitted asking for her address but said he did so only to send her back a jar of Marmite that she had sent to him. (Marmite is a food spread common in the UK and Australia.)

"I had already told her how precious Marmite was to me," he said. He believed she was trying to poison him with the Marmite. (This is not the first time McAfee has apparently misled a reporter, having previously sent journalists phones with malware trying to convince them that he had hacked the encryption used on WhatsApp, according to Gizmodo.)

Regardless of whether "Gringo" convinces you that John McAfee is a murderer, as some say, or that he's a victim of a Belizean government plot to kill him, as he claims, it is certainly not short on stories.

In fact, Burstein says that while in Belize she heard McAfee's name tied to more killings than she highlights in the movie.

"I didn't put those [allegations] in the film because I couldn't substantiate enough," Burstein said. "But there were others that were talking, but I didn't know if they were true, and didn't find the people who were directly involved, like the murders in the film."

So would McAfee  who denied on numerous occasions to Business Insider that he was responsible for the deaths of either Faull or Middleton  be shocked if in the future he is linked to other murders in Belize?

"I wouldn't be shocked at all," he told us. "The governor of Belize is certainly not a friend of mine, and I'm certain they would use whatever comes out in Showtime to their advantage, so I wouldn't be shocked at all."





More From Business Insider


The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, has called for a 3-day fasting and prayer session for the nation in commemoration of its 56th independence anniversary coming up on October 1st.

October 1, 2016 will mark 56 years since Nigeria gained its independence from British colonial rule in 1960.

Various developments in the last few years have triggered growing concerns about Nigerias unity and national development.

The CAN President, Samson Ayokunle, in a statement from his head of media and publicity, Adebayo Oladeji, said the prayers will be for the nation and its president, Muhammadu Buhari.

Mr. Ayokunle had during his message at Sallah called for patience and understanding from Nigerians for the current government.

He noted that although the times were hard, God will show his mercies to Nigeria if the nation prays to God.

Reiterating his earlier point, Mr. Ayokunle, a pastor, called on Nigerians to use the opportunity of the anniversary to talk to God about Nigerias many challenges.

We call on all Christians nation-wide to seek the face of God for divine intervention as our political leaders are seeking for the panacea to the economic recession and the attendant problems, he said quoting 2 Chronicles 7:14.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday called for global support for the cleanup of Ogoniland and to raise 14 billion US Dollars for the restoration of Lake Chad Basin.

The president made the call while presenting Nigerias statement at the 71th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA71) in New York, U.S.A.

He said the call had become imperative in view of the drying up of the Lake Chad to the negative consequences of Climate Change.

Nigeria is proud to have been part of the process leading to the adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015, and supports the African Union Initiative on the Great Green Wall to halt desertification, he said.

The president said it was in furtherance of the countrys commitment to environmental sustainability that Nigeria launched the cleanup of Ogoniland.

He called on development partners and multinationals to contribute to the Ogoniland Restoration Fund.

The Nigerian leader also spoke on dangers posed by global terrorists.

Nigeria has made remarkable progress in our resolve to defeat Boko Haram, whose capacity to launch orchestrated attacks as a formed group has been severely degraded.

In the last few months, their operations have been limited to sporadic use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) against soft targets.

According to him, Nigeria will continue to fight terrorism based on the established rules of engagement and in conformity with international best practices.

Mr. Buhari also called for enhanced international cooperation to defeat the global scourge.

The president also declared Nigerias position on flow of migrants, statehood for Palestinians, the vital role of youth to national development, and nuclear security.

He also advocated for the reform of the United Nations Security Council to give Africa adequate representation.

Nigeria stands ready to serve Africa and the world on a reformed Security Council to advance international peace and security, he declared.(NAN)
The embattled member of the House of Representatives, Abdulmumin Jibrin, has dragged two lawyers to the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory over claims that the lawmaker has 1.5million pounds in his account in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Jibrin had previously denied the allegations, saying it was the handwork of Speaker Dogara and his hatchet men.

In the writ of summon served on the defendants, Messrs. Ikenga Imo Ugochinyere and Ifeanyi Okonkwo, the lawmaker said the statements in newspaper publications titled Jibrin owns E1.558m in UK bank, NYCN alleges implicitly and/or expressly procured, authorized, and or caused to be published by the Defendants against the Plaintiff in page 11 of the PUNCH Newspaper of Monday the 19th day of September 2016 Vol.40 No.21,270 are false, malicious, without legal justification, and are defamatory / libellous of the reputation and character of the Plaintiff to the general public.

Mr. Jibrin therefore sought the following orders:

An order compelling the Defendants to publish in 5 National Dailies an unconditional, detailed apology, and full page retraction of, the statements in newspaper publications titled Jibrin owns E1.558m in UK bank, NYCN alleges implicitly and/or expressly procured, authorized, and or caused to be published by the Defendants against the Plaintiff in page 11 of the PUNCH Newspaper of Monday the 19th day of September 2016 Vol.40 No.21,270 .

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff the sum of N1,000,000,000 (One Billion Naira) as general damages for the Defendants defamation/libel of the Plaintiff under the circumstances of this Suit.

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff the sum of N1,000,000,000 (One Billion Naira) only to the Plaintiff, as exemplary and/or aggravated damages under the circumstances of this Suit.

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff post Judgment interest on Prayers 3 and 4 above at 10% from the day Judgment is delivered to the date the Judgment sums are fully and finally paid by the Defendants.

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff cost of this Suit estimated at N20,000,000 (Twenty Million Naira).
A group of Nigerians on Wednesday called for constitutional amendment to make the National Assembly work on part-time basis.

The group, Be the Change Organisation, at a rally at Unity Fountain, Abuja, also called for the scrapping of the Nigerian Senate.

Some Nigerians have argued that the output of the National Assembly is not commensurate with the huge funds expended by the institution.

Members of Be the Change Organization aligned themselves with the argument.

The group called on the leadership of the National Assembly to disclose to Nigerians its annual budget.

Convener of the group, Recson Pedheke, told PREMIUM TIMES that the group was planning a mass protest march against the National Assembly and other government agencies for October.

On October 10, we shall be going to the National Assembly in our thousands and our demand is the immediate opening up of the budget of the National Assembly to Nigerians.

We will demand that the budget of the NASS in the last 16 years be opened up for review and examination by the people.

We will be demanding restructuring and downward review of the salaries and related benefits of the National Assembly members. We are also asking that all legislative business must become part-time. NASS and RMAFC are the target here.

Nigerians are demanding a unicameral legislative house. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives are too expensive for Nigeria, Mr. Recson said.

Another member and a co-convener of the group, Maryam Ikunnaye, said: the reforms in education, agriculture and police and other government agencies must be taken seriously.

On the issue of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, Mrs. Ikunnaye said the group was aware that it is not being strictly adhered to.

The CJN and the NJC are culpable and must clean up quickly or we are coming to the Judiciary too, he said.
Officials of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency have arrested two suspected drug couriers at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos.

Chinedu Ifedigbo and Francis Okonkwo tested positive for cocaine during the inward screening of passengers on a Royal Air Maroc flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil, through Casablanca, Morocco.

The suspects inserted seven wraps of cocaine each weighing 350 grammes into their bodies to evade arrest, the NDLEA said in a statement on Wednesday.

Preliminary investigation revealed that both suspects planned and executed the unlawful act together, said Ahmadu Garba, NDLEA Commander at the Lagos airport.

Mr. Ifedigbo, 37, who had spent two years in Brazil said his arrest was due to ill-luck.

I am a business man. I import female shoes from Brazil since 2014, the NDLEA quoted Mr. Ifedigbo as saying.

This arrest is just bad luck for me because I was already calculating my profit from the deal, said the suspect who hails from Anambra State.

The second suspect, Mr. Okonkwo, who hails from Enugu State said he agreed to smuggle the drugs out of frustration.

I was stranded in Brazil where I worked as a waiter in a restaurant for two years, said Mr. Okonkwo, 44, who is married with two children.

Life was awful as I was struggling daily just to feed myself. When I was contacted to smuggle cocaine to Nigeria, I was very happy because it was an opportunity to return home.

My sponsor also promised to pay me half a million naira with which I had planned to start a business.

Muhammad Abdallah, Chairman of NDLEA, said the agency would not relent in the fight against drug trafficking.

NDLEA is committed to the fight against narcotic production and trafficking, said Mr. Abdallah, a retired colonel.

Brazil is a source country for cocaine and I am glad with the high level of vigilance on the route resulting in several arrests and seizures.

It is however sad that the suspects could insert narcotics into their alimentary canals in utter disregard of the health consequences. The suspects will be arraigned soon.
Education is a veritable tool necessary to equip individuals with skills required to navigate the complexities of an ever changing world. Without doubt, education is fundamental to human existence and provides both youth and adults the power to reflect and make choices that affect and invariably uplift their standards of living. It is a key ingredient in economic and social activity and therefore vital for effecting national development. Sadly, third world countries continue to perform below global educational ratings with Nigeria being no exception.

Some of the major challenges facing the educational sector in Nigeria are access, equity, value, relevance, quality, management and funding. A vibrant economy cannot be built on lack of access to education and low attendance at schools. According to UNESCO, it was estimated that over eight million Nigerian children were out of school in 2014  the highest in the world. Transition and completion rates are poor, with 32% transiting from primary to secondary school and only 10% of eligible youths in tertiary education. The average completion rate for the primary school Nigerian girl is 65% and 80% for boys. These appalling statistics can simply be described as poor education for poor people.

The ever declining state of the Nigerian educational sector calls for serious concern. It is on this premise that Gamaliel & Susan Onosode Foundation has been at the forefront of promoting viable options for Nigerias education system and has organized series of lectures since inception. These lectures are designed to periodically x-ray the varying topical issues facing stakeholders  students, teachers, parents, partners, sponsors, etc.  and to interact, understand and discover the prospects and challenges for growth and development in the sector.

The 2016 Lecture is themed, Finding Solutions to the Problems of the Nigerian Education System: A Multi-stakeholder Approach and the keynote address will be delivered by Oby Ezekwesili, CFR, former Minister of Education and Co-Founder, Transparency International, alongside other discussants relevant to the sector. The Lecture aims to influence policy formulation and to contribute to strategic thinking on critical issues surrounding education in the country.

The Lecture is scheduled to hold on Thursday, September 22 at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, NIIA, Victoria Island, Lagos at 11:00 a.m.

Gamaliel & Susan Onosode Foundation is a not-for-profit, non-political organisation incorporated in May 2013 and committed to contributing consistently to the promotion of quality education in Nigeria. It was founded by late Gamaliel Onosode. Its mission is to foster the success of the Nigerian child through innovative and flexible learning opportunities while providing the enabling environment. We will not relent until there is positive change.
President Muhammadu Buhari has asked Switzerland to urgently release Nigerias stolen funds stashed in the European nation.

The Nigerian leader stated this at a meeting with his Swiss counterpart, Johann Schneider-Ammann, his spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Read the full statement by Mr. Buharis spokesperson below.

President Muhammadu Buhari has applauded the long history of economic relationship between Nigeria and France on the one hand, and Nigeria and Switzerland on the other.

At separate bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the ongoing 71st United Nations General Assembly in New York, United States of America, the President welcomed more investment and economic partnerships, saying Nigeria was a fertile ground for handsome return on investments.

Apart from your countrys close relationship with us, you have the same with most of our neighbours, President Buhari told Francois Hollande of France. We seek more collaboration, particularly in agriculture, mining and security.

The President told his French counterpart of the Presidential Committee on the North East, which he described as a one-stop mechanism on development partnership for a zone that had been ravaged for many years by Boko Haram insurgents, and which needed urgent rebuilding.

Responding, President Hollande pledged that France would not only fully engage with Nigeria on different fronts, but would also provide humanitarian assistance in the North East.

We will invest in Nigeria, we believe in her, the French President said.

At another audience with President Johann Schneider-Ammann of Switzerland, President Buhari sought his counterparts cooperation on speedy repatriation of Nigerian money stashed in that country, stressing that Nigeria needed such resources, particularly for infrastructure.

With the two countries having agreed on projects to which the restituted funds would be deployed, President Schneider-Ammann promised quick action, as soon as the draft agreement was signed. He also pledged consolidation of mutual trade relationships, infrastructural development as well as support in training and equipping of the Nigerian military.
The protection of voters information by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has come under scrutiny by a social advocacy organisation in the ICT sector.

The Paradigm Initiative Nigeria, PIN, through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request has asked INEC to explain the true state of data collected from Nigerian voters currently on the website www.voters.ng, a third party organisation.

According to the FOI request dated September 19, 2016 and addressed to the chairman of INEC, Mahmoud Yakubu, PIN stated that in continuation of its commitment for the respect of constitutional guaranteed rights of every Nigerian especially those that deal with and must respect the sanctity of personal data of Nigerian citizens, the commission should provide it with details of the transactions between it and www.voters.ng within the time stipulated by the Freedom of Information Act.

While these data are much needed to prosecute the core objectives of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in conducting seamless elections, we are sure that the good conscience of the commission would agree that these data are delicate social infrastructure exchanged in trust.

Where these data are found within the domain of a third party with no prior consent of the owners sought, that trust may be said to have been seriously eroded, the letter stated.

This call is being made to ensure that the rights of every Nigerian citizen are adequately protected especially in the age where technologies are capable of being used against individual safety, Tomiwa Ilori, Program Assistant (ICT Policy) of PIN, said in a statement.

It is important to also note, that not only does it smack of distrust and lack of due diligence by a public institution in performing its duties to find data of private citizens handed to them in trust in the hand of a third party without any evidence of consent of these citizens sought, it portends great danger to the digital survival of our social, political and economic environment.

We use this medium to call on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to heed the call and comply with the request made to them in the interest of Nigerian citizens. Also, we call on all stakeholders interested in ensuring that our social capital as a society is preserved to weigh in on this issue, join hands with us and see it to a logical conclusion, Gbenga Sesan, Executive Director of PIN, added.

INEC has until September 26 to respond to the request.
Gov. Willy Obiano of Anambra State on Tuesday announced a range of economic stimulus plans to fight the impact of Nigerias recession on residents of the state.

The governor announced tax reliefs and packages for small, medium and large scale entrepreneurs.

He also announced a social intervention programme for low income households and an intervention in Infrastructure-for-Jobs.

Under tax reliefs, Mr. Obiano announced the suspension of the sale of consolidated emblems and the collection of Hawkers Permit on all streets in the state.

He also suspended the collection of Wheelbarrow Tax in all markets in the state, and abolished the imposition of unapproved levies on students in public primary and secondary schools in the state.

Anambra is the first state to announce specific programmes aimed at providing reliefs to its residents.

The objective of our Tax Relief Programme is to evaluate existing taxes, levies and fees in the state and introduce some waivers and in some cases scrap the collection of some illegal levies imposed on our people, Mr. Obiano said.

The government is to provide the Anambra Small Business Agency with a minimum of N3 billion to lend to SMEs and MSMEs at 9% interest rate across key sectors.

It will also re-channel earlier accessed Bank of Industry, Bank of Agriculture and Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme funds totalling to about N1.5 billion to support this sector.

Among other Social Intervention Programme for Low Income Households and the most vulnerable populations of the state, the government says it will provide N3.6 billion to fund ongoing N20 million community projects in all the 179 communities in the state.

Each community has been allocated N20 million to spend on their most pressing concern. The projects will also be executed by the community and strictly supervised by the States Tenders Board and the community members in line with best practice, the governor said.

The government will also give automatic employment to all graduates from universities in Anambra State that are living with disabilities into the State Civil Service.

On infrastructure, the government said it will fund the development of 500 hectares of land in all agrarian communities across the three Senatorial Zones in the state to support out-grower schemes and link them up to big industries in the state.

For example, next year, Delfarm Songhai Ltd will commence the supply of sorghum that is produced in Igbariam to Intafact Breweries Ltd in Onitsha, Mr. Obiano said.

Having trained 250 youths at our School of Agriculture in Mbakwu, we shall fund three Youth Empowerment Schemes in fish farming, garri and ice processing clusters in the State. We have earmarked the sum of N225m for that.

We have also earmarked the sum of N300m to be distributed to stimulate Vegetable Production in the state and enhance our highly popular Vegetables-Export Programme to the UK and other parts of the world.
U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday commended President Muhammadu Buharis economic reforms, describing them as bold.

Mr. Obama made the commendation when he met with Mr. Buhari on the sideline of the ongoing 71st UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

He said the U.S. would continue to offer support to Nigeria in areas of agricultural development, recovery of stolen funds and the fight against Boko Haram.

He said his country would put things on ground to sustain partnership and cooperation between the two countries.

We discussed broader issues on development and the president is taking some very bold economic reforms in allowing for a flexible exchange rate, he said.

We are focusing on agriculture and we pledged to offer all the assistance that we can in that area and as the president is trying to stamp out corruption and to recover external funds that may have been illegally obtained and are sitting in bank accounts around the world.

As he continues to work to see that the security forces inside Nigeria are abiding to professional and human right standards, what we have pledged is that we will partner in any way that we can be helpful, President Obama said at a briefing after the bilateral talks.

The U.S. leader said his administration was carefully coordinating additional ways to make further progress in not only destroying Boko Haram but to ensure that the region fully recovered.

He said America was also willing to assist Nigeria to facilitate a reduction of the conflict in the Niger Delta region.

America is willing to help in any way it can to facilitate a reduction of conflict in the Niger Delta region, a major oil-producing region, but one that has been mired by a number of militant organisations that have appropriated or siphoned off the oil revenues.

The president, I think, is wisely heading a delegation to bring varying stakeholders together and try to make progress on that front. We want to be helpful in any way that we can, Mr. Obama said.

In his remarks, President Buhari thanked Mr. Obama for the assistance rendered so far in the fight against terrorism, especially in the training of Nigerian military in both hard and software.

He said steady progress was being made towards resolving the problem in the Niger Delta region, which led to economic sabotage on a grand scale.(NAN)
Warren hearing 2

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday explained where the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission should look to see if Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf violated accountability laws.

During a joint press call with Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate Katie McGinty, Warren told Business Insider that an investigation could reveal Stumpf "not only crossed the line morally, he crossed a line criminally"  that is, if he knowingly misled investors about the strength of his company while thousands of employees were creating accounts without customers' knowledge to keep up with aggressive sales incentives.

Wells Fargo and Stumpf have recently come under fire for the bank's employees opening 2 million accounts between 2011 and 2015 without the knowledge of customers. In the Senate hearing on Tuesday, Stumpf said he became aware of the openings of the fake accounts in 2013, when lower-level executives brought it up to him.

During a fiery exchange in the hearing, Warren suggested that Stumpf had not only failed customers, but may have also violated laws.

"You should resign, you should give back the money you made while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission," Warren told Stumpf.

Warren told Business Insider on Wednesday that while there are "several rules the departments should look into," the Justice Department should investigate whether Stumpf violated the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, known as the SOX Act, which requires CEOs to sign accounting statements and personally certify their accuracy.

"With a massive fraud going on at Wells Fargo, it would certainly be worth investigation to see if the documents he signed under penalty of perjury are in fact accurate," Warren said.

The SOX Act came about after financial scandals in the late 1990s and 2000s, such as with Enron and WorldCom, in which executives signed off on financial statements that contained fraudulent or misleading information. Warren argued, essentially, that Stumpf signed off on financial statements that could have contained revenue from fees and cross-selling that he knew did not exist and did not disclose this risk.

Story continues

Warren also advised the SEC to examine whether Stumpf knowingly pumped up the company's stock with investors and analysts after learning of the fake accounts, which Warren argued constituted a securities law violation.

"When Wells Fargo cheated its customers, it also cheated investors," Warren said.

She added: "If Mr. Stumpf misled those investors who bought that stock, drove that price up, that would involve security violation."

Wells Fargo did not immediately return a request for comment.

NOW WATCH: Watch Elizabeth Warren rip Wells Fargo CEO: 'You should resign'





More From Business Insider


The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), John Odigie-Oyegun, has congratulated Kogi Governor, Yahaya Bello, on his victory at the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

In a statement released to journalists on Wednesday in Abuja, the chairman called on the party and its members to close ranks and unite.

Mr. Bello replaced Abubakar Audu in the 2015 Kogi governorship election, after Mr. Audu died as he took the lead in the polls.

After his selection and regularisation with INEC, running mate to late Mr. Audu, James Faleke, declined to run with Mr. Bello in the supplementary election of December 2015.

Mr. Faleke challenged his candidacy in the court.

After the conclusion of the election, which was won by Mr. Bello, his opponent of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Idris Wada, also challenged the result at the tribunal.

Mr. Bello won at the tribunal, at the Court of Appeal and at the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Going forward, I call on all party leaders, stakeholders and teeming members of our great party to put aside any differences and unite as a strong political force in support of the administration of Gov. Yahaya Bello.

I also call on the governor to reach out to all aggrieved political stakeholders and mend fences.

Only then can the administration successfully achieve its plans to build a strong foundation for the growth, development and prosperity of the good people of Kogi state, Mr. Odigie-Oyegun said in the statement. (NAN)
Some senators on Wednesday kicked against the call by some Nigerians for the sale of the nations assets as a means of surviving the current economic recession.

The senators, who spoke on the floor of the senate during a debate on the state of the economy, also called for constitutional amendment to stop sharing of all revenue accruable to the federation account.

Business mogul, Aliko Dangote, had called for the sale of the assets.

Senate President Bukola Saraki also made the call in his welcome address at the resumption of legislative activities by the Senate on Tuesday.

However, the deputy Senate President, Ike Ekwerenmadu, and George Akume, cautioned against the sale of the assets during the debate.

According to them, no country resorts to selling its assets as a way out of economic recession.

Mr. Ekwerenmadu said: UAE does not even allow you close to oil wells let alone selling them.

For a country like Saudi Arabia, its budget each year is run by investments from oil revenue.

Other countries are investing; I am sure we will not be fair to the next generation if we sell off our assets.

If we must sell, we have to sell the non-performing assets so that people can turn them around and create employment.

He said the recession had buttressed the importance of savings, and called for amendment of the revenue sharing formula between the federal and state governments to encourage savings.

We need to amend Section 162 especially from 3,4,5,6 where each money in the federation account is made to be shared, he said.

Commenting, Mr. Akume advised Nigerians to refrain from calling for assets sale.

He said that the country should focus on recovering stolen funds.

If we want to sell our oil assets at this time when the price of oil crashed, how much are we going to realise?

We are making a mistake here; what we are doing is to ensure that those who are within the bracket of the stolen dollars will still come to buy, he said.

Mr. Akume said the country should rather focus on industrialisation through agriculture.

The senator also called for the review of the revenue sharing formula to encourage savings, saying states should not insist on sharing revenue.

Mr. Shehu Sani (APC Kaduna Central) also urged the review of the revenue sharing formula.

He said that sharing all revenues contributed to Nigerias economic crisis.

The situation whereby states come to Abuja every month to collect cheques and then go back to execute capital and recurrent expenditure has made impossible any initiative to boost our economy, he said.

Mr. Sani called on state governments to look into ways to improve their internally generated revenue rather than relying on the federal allocation.

(NAN)
The Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, said budget padding allegations against him and other leaders impacted negatively on the integrity of the National Assembly.

The speaker said this in his remarks while welcoming members back to plenary after their eight-week recess.

A member of the house, who was removed as Chairman, Appropriations Committee, Abdulmumin Jibrin, made the allegations against Mr. Dogara and some principal officers of the lower chamber.

Mr. Dogara said the scandal orchestrated by the member posed a threat to the corporate integrity and image of the house as a democratic institution.

Shortly after we adjourned for the recess, the erstwhile Chairman, Appropriations Committee, embarked on strange propaganda clearly aimed not only at the destruction of the image of some members.

It was also a systematic destruction of the institution of the House of Representatives and indeed, the legislature, by portraying it to the public as an irredeemably corrupt institution.

The motivation for his actions as he has said severally and repeatedly, is to have the four principal officers removed from their positions and not that the truth should be known.

These wild allegations which were initially directed at four members of the House leadership progressively engulfed the entire membership of the House and then, the institution, he said.

According to Mr. Dogara, the house leadership chose the part of maturity by maintaining great restraint, fully conscious of the fact that at the appropriate time, the truth will prevail.

He said, I have bad news for those who think they can pull down this institution of the people.

If history is any guide, no one, in a democracy has ever succeeded in destroying a democratic institution such as the House of Representatives.

While assuring that the House was fully conscious of its role, the speaker said lawmakers would not be distracted by the allegations.

He described the method adopted by Jibrin to address his allegations as inappropriate, saying there were constitutional avenues to address them considering the criminal nature of some of the allegations.

It is, however, important to briefly say that nothing warrants the deliberate attempt at destructive public misinformation aimed at discrediting the house as an institution, he added.

The speaker promised that reforms in the budgeting process would be initiated by the National Assembly to guard against abuses.

He said he had directed the various committees to conduct fact-finding on the level of implementation of the 2016 budget by various Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs).

(NAN)
Some soldiers were on Tuesday involved in a fierce battle with Boko Haram fighters in northern Borno, an official said.

The soldiers were from the Nigeria army, Multinational Joint Task Force. and the Nigeria Air Force.

The spokesperson of the Nigeria Army, Sani Usman, said many insurgents were killed in the heated gun battle that took place in Mallam Fatori village, the headquarters of Abadam Local Government Area of Borno.

Some parts of Mallam Fatori, a border community near Niger Republic, were still under the control of Boko Haram despite the militarys efforts at reclaiming most of the territory initially occupied by the insurgents.

Mr. Usman, a Colonel, said troops of Operation Lafiya Dole and Multinational Joint Task Force captured Mallam Fatori in northernmost part of Borno State after a fierce battle closely covered by air operations.

However, the insurgents seemed to have leveraged on the advantage of the area being their stronghold to regroup and re-launch another round of hostility despite the massive casualty they were said to have incurred.

The terrorists reinforced around the border with Niger Republic, Mr. Usman said.

This was while the troops were consolidating on this success. The troops killed several of the Boko Haram terrorists in the resulting encounter and subsequently had to withdraw to a vantage position.

Mallam Fatori is one of the first communities, outside Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, to suffer from Boko Haram attacks in 2013.

In July 2013, Boko Haram insurgents attacked the community, shooting and setting parts of the village on fire. Most residents were forced to flee to Niger Republic as refugees.

Since then, Boko Haram has continued to hold the area as one of its strongholds by defying most military operations launched by both the federal troops and Multinational Joint Task Force.

Mallam Fatori is about 204 kilometres north of Maiduguri. It is the farthest village and local government headquarters from the state capital. It is the only part of the state that has no tarred road, but open sandy desert routes, leading to it.
Barely two weeks after an earth tremor occurred in Sabandagi community in Kaduna State, another incident occurred on Monday in Kwoi, Jaba Local Government Area.

The tremor in Kwoi was the second after an earlier one on September 11.

According to the National Emergency Management Agency, over 300 houses where affected by the September 11 tremor.

A resident of Kwoi, Sule Philip, narrated how Mondays tremor occurred in the early hours.

Mr. Philip said though he was not in the community when it happened, his siblings were affected.

I rushed down to Kwoi to see for myself and check on the safety of my people. Many people are relocating, leaving the town. Mr. Philip said.

According to Mr. Philip, some schools are still shut in the community for fear of a re-occurrence.

The Kaduna State Government has since called for calm in the communities.

According to Samuel Aruwan, spokesperson to Governor Nasir El-Rufai, The National Geological Agency has been notified, and has been invited to investigate the tremor in the Kwoi area and provide appropriate guidance.

The Kaduna State Government wishes to appeal for calm, and urges everyone not to spread unverified information, or create panic.

Mr. Aruwan told PREMIUM TIMES that the state government is receiving updates from the area and relevant government agencies have been directed to take steps to comfort the residents and to assuage their unease as they come to terms with an unusual event.

Despite the governments comforting statements, some residents of Kwoi still live in fear.

We are all in intense fear now. Nobody knows when it will happen again, Bitrus Gaya, a resident, said. We thank Governor El-Rufai for sending professionals to check on the situation and even remain within the community.
Gov. Udom Emmanuel Akwa Ibom says that the state Independent Power Plant (IPP) is generating more than 150 megawatts of electricity in the country.

Mr. Emmanuel made the disclosure at a media interaction to mark the 29th anniversary of the creation of the state.

He said some communities in the state were now enjoying electricity for 18 to 20 hours daily.

I am the only governor in Nigeria who generates more than 150 megawatts of electricity.

And you can check; there are some communities where the rate of vandalism is low; they enjoy electricity on the average of 18 hours to 20 hours daily.

He, however, decried the high rate of vandalism of electricity installations in the state.

Mr. Emmanuel said the state government deployed more than 600 transformers to alleviate the suffering of the people in areas where electricity installation had been vandalised.

As we are fixing those transformers; people are trying to drain the oil. Once it reaches two to three days, the transformer will get burnt again.

The governor urged the people to protect electricity installations in their communities against vandals.

He, however, expressed regret that electricity transmission was still the exclusive preserve of the Federal Government.

If we evacuate the 150 megawatts that we generate in the state today, we could have solved so much of our problems if not all.

He said the state government was building a second power turbine to supply five local government areas along coastal areas with electricity.

We have started the second turbine of Ibom Power Plant that will give us 24 hours every day.

So, we can start generating economic activities in the area and lots of employment opportunities.

He said the state government was planning to build two sub-stations in Uyo to improve electricity in the state capital.

The governor said the electric metering factory in Onna Local Government Area of the state would begin production in January 2017.

According to him, the metering factory is one of the many industries expected to yield benefits from the series of projects under his stewardship so far.

(NAN)
The people of Anambra have commended Gov. Willie Obiano for abolishing levies to cushion their suffering following the economic recession in the country.

In separate interviews with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the residents lauded the governor, saying that it should be carried out to the letter.

They also said that it was a show of empathy by the governor.

Kenneth Adindu, a trader, said with such pronouncement by the governor, relevant organs to enforce them should be on their toes.

I was elated when he said that all manner of education levies in our schools should be stopped. Now what is expected of the state education ministry is to carry out investigation in schools.

We the parents do not know the actual amount we are to pay per term, there should be uniform amount and made public for us to stop paying variant sums in different schools in the state, he said.

A bus driver, Okey Obiorah, on his part said he was happy when his colleagues told him of the suspension of the payment of emblem fees by the governor.

Due to my inability to get enough money to pay for emblem, I have been avoiding those guys that impound buses and make us suffer the more for nonpayment.

I can now hustle well to make ends meet by plying all roads to realise enough to take care of all that depend on the bus, including giving garage boys theirs, he said.

Luke Obi, a wheel barrow pusher, said that now that NAN had broken the news to them, it would spread to their more than 500 members in Eke Awka Market.

Most of us did not hear this news, if not you telling us. Governments levy collectors would have come and we will ignorantly pay, Obi said.

Mr. Obiano in a message said I am happy to announce to you that I have come up with a stimulus package that will ease the pain of the recession and help our dear state to bounce back to prosperity.

Consequently, our intervention comes in four key areas  tax relief programme, special intervention programmes for small and medium enterprises and large enterprises and social intervention programme for low income households and finally, intervention in infrastructure-for-jobs, the governor had said.

(NAN)
Representatives from Jewish organisations in the United States expressed their satisfaction after a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda in New York on Monday.

They said they welcomed the presidents words that he would continue to speak out against anti-Semitism.

Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an international Jewish nongovernmental organisation based in the United States, has told PAP that the Jewish leaders thanked the Polish president for his statements against anti-Semitism and asked him to continue in his efforts to oppose it.

The hour-and-a-half meeting took place at the Polish Consulate General in New York. In addition to Foxman, it was attended by members of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

According to Foxman, meeting participants talked about legislation that Jewish organisations believe needs to be adopted to help combat anti-Semitism.

Those taking part in the meeting also discussed the issue of restitution of Jewish property in Poland and Polands relations with Israel, Foxman said.

President Duda has demonstrated expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and sensitivity in matters of history, Foxman told PAP. (PAP)
With news that the Bank of Japan will continue on its quantitative easing path, and with accommodative policies in Europe and the United States, there is still a massive amount of sovereign debt trading around the planet with negative yields. Yep, you get less money back than you invested.

For investors and savers alike, there finally may be some good news coming. Or maybe the news is just less bad. Fitch Ratings is reporting that, as of September 12, the sovereign debt with negative yields has fallen to $10.9 trillion.

Japan is still the largest single nation contributing to the total. In fact, Japan's tally was a whopping 63% share of the global sovereign negative yields. What is amazing is that this represents a decrease of $1 trillion since June 27.

ALSO READ: RBC Says These 4 Top Biotechs Could Have Big Upside Potential

Fitch noted that the global universe decreased primarily due to yields for longer-dated maturities, of seven years and longer, moving into positive territory.

European countries follow Japan for negative yields. Another issue to consider is that these European countries also have the lowest aggregate yields (the most negative that is). Germany was shown to be leading the way at negative 30 basis points.

To show a contrasting view: the comparable average yield on $38 trillion in investment-grade sovereign debt from 34 countries is actually 84 basis points.

Here is how much the negative yields are hurting savers and investors: Fitch calculated that investors in the $38 trillion of investment grade sovereign debt are earning nearly $500 billion less annually in investment income than they would have earned with yields available in 2011. That has pinched income for banks, insurers and pension funds.

Related Articles
EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP  The local school board and the education association have approved a new three-year contract that provides and average annual 4 percent salary increase for professional, custodian and support staff and 6 percent for secretaries.

Egg Harbor Township Education Association President Kathy Waszen said they are very pleased with the contract and how quickly and amicably it was achieved. The old contract expired in June.

State tells Atlantic City to withhold teachers' opt-out pay The state Department of Education has told the Atlantic City school district not to pay teac

We didnt get everything we wanted, and they didnt get everything they wanted, but we didnt want it to be as difficult as the last contract, she said. We worked this out in three meetings and are pleased to be starting the year with a settled contract.

The settlement is generous compared with others around the state. The New Jersey School Boards Association said the average salary increase for 2016-17 is just over 2.6 percent.

One unusual aspect of the EHT settlement is that the salary increases will be distributed on a split-year schedule, so the financial impact is spread out. The salary guide also was adjusted to eliminate some of the bubbles that had teachers getting very small raises for several years, then very large raises.

Waszen said the secretaries received larger raises to bring them more in line with the area average.

Teachers picket outside Oakcrest High School Wednesday over contract Teachers at staff at Oakcrest High School did informational picketing before school Wednesda

The starting salary for 12-month secretaries, $29,713, will rise to $36,033 in January 2019. The top salary will go from $39,015 to $44,105.

The starting salary for 10-month secretaries, $24,799 will rise to $30,193 in January 2019. The top salary will go from $32,503 to $36,753.

School board President James Galvin and interim Superintendent Fred Nickles did not respond to emailed requests for comment. The school board approved the contract at its Sept. 13 meeting, with board members Pete Castellano and John Haines abstaining due to conflicts.

The starting salary for new teachers will remain at $52,010. The maximum salary for a teacher with a bachelors degree will be $87,000 in the second half of the 2018-19 school year, up from $81,293 in 2015-16.

Christie asks Supreme Court to stop Abbott funding In a move that would gut the historic Abbott vs. Burke decision on funding public schools, G

The school district uses the state health benefits plan, and teachers will continue to contribute to the cost following the state-tiered system.

Waszen said with the additional health-benefit costs and the bubble adjustments in the guide, some teachers, including herself, will actually make less money this year, but that was a concession to improving the entire guide.

We know people waited for those big increases, but we had warned them what to expect, she said.

Waszen said they also made some adjustments to maternity leaves and summer hours that were not large or costly items, but were appreciated by the staff.

I hope we can continue with this positive attitude, she said.

Contact: 609-272-7241

Twitter @ACPressDamico
This was the oddest episode of FXs Atlanta since the show started three weeks ago.

This is a season that has already featured deja vu-inducing dogs, tall men infatuated with Nutella and batman-masked hoodlums.

When asked months ago about his new show coming to FX, Donald Glover said he always wanted to create the Twin Peaks of hip hop. This show isnt Twin Peaks but it is its own beautiful type of strange.

We start the show with Earn and his cousin Alfred outside a club smoking a joint. Theyre approached by a creepy man who goes by the name of Zan.

Zan is all over the place in a great way. Hes shooting photos of Earn and Alfred, handing out hats to Darius and rolling away on his hoverboard. Hes that type of social media troll who acts like a businessman. Or is he a business man acting like a social media troll? Either way it works. The dude is weird and hes pretty hilarious.

The next day Earn and Darius take a ride to trade in Earns phone at a pawn shop. Earn is super broke because hes devoted himself to being Alfreds manager. Meanwhile, Alfreds image as Big Boi is being harassed online and the shade being thrown is being spearheaded by creepy Zan from the night before.

The one constant in this weeks episode was how ridiculous stereotypes can be. While Earn and Darius are heading to the pawn shop, Darius tells Earn that black people dont know who Steve McQueen is.

But you know Steve McQueen, Earn asked him.

Yeah, man, I mean Im Nigerian, Darius responded.

Even when the two men walk in the pawn shop and see a Steve McQueen movie poster, the owner (who is also black) said he agreed with Darius that most black people have no idea who McQueen is but that he puts that up to avoid being robbed.

Darius tells Earn to trade his phone in for a samurai sword he finds, telling him he can make him more money by trading up instead of the $190 that Earn is offered for his phone. Earn accepts and theyre on their way.

Meanwhile Alfred is having some cyber bullying problems with Zan. Zan calls him out for being weak at rapping, so Alfred finds out where he works and sits out in his car waiting for him. Zans race comes into question in multiple scenes. Is he Asian? Indian? Dominican? And with each assumption comes a stereotype, like when Darius said he looked Asian because he was pretty short.

When Zan walks out of the pizza shop, Alfred confronts him and knocks his hat off his head. Zan tells him to come in the car with him since hes delivering a pizza. Theres a boy sitting in the back of Zans car.

The next argument that takes place brings the whole stereotype full circle when Alfred tells Zan that he has to rap: hes living in an apartment complex, he scares people at the ATM, and hes stuck. Zan tells Alfred that he is exploiting his situation to make money as a rapper from the street. He adds that hes only exploiting Alfred exploiting his situation. Alfred is outwardly upset but says hell keep his mouth shut since his son is in the backseat.

Oh thats not my son, thats my business partner. Hes great at the club, Zan said. Z

Alfred is fed up and leaves the car when Zan record his toddler business partner get robbed during a pizza delivery. Zan is too strange for even the characters in this show. In the same vein as David Lynhc, Zan would totally be the Mystery Man from Lost Highway  that is if the Mystery Man had a twitter handle and a Vine account.

After trading the samurai sword for a dog, Darius brings Earn to what looks like some weird Georgia farm where they trade the dog to a man who takes the pup and heads back in.

Is he getting the money, Earn asked Darius.

Yeah in September, Darius answered, as the guy will breed the dog with another purebred and make puppies.

Earn is devastated as he needed the money for Vanessa and his daughter. Darius realizes Earn is worried and he hands him his own phone, telling him to trade it in.

Were friends now, he said as they pull away from the farm.

The show is a separate weird from Twin Peaks, yes, but the one thing the shows share in common is their ability to make you stop worrying about plot points or care about the pace of a shows summary throughout each episode.

Much like not caring who killed Laura Palmer and instead worrying about the people who lived in the town of Twin Peaks, its not necessary to worry about Paper Bois fame from week to week. Its much more exciting watching Darius and Earn drive around Atlanta and trading goods or seeing Alfred talk about why its so necessary for him to be famous.

This show gets more peculiar every week and its already been cleared for a second season. Im ready to keep embracing the weird.
CAPE MAY  City Council needs more time to consider a $369,000 draft settlement with a former police officer who accused the city of discriminating against him based on his sexual orientation, City Attorney Anthony Monzo said Wednesday.

Steven Pascal claimed in a 2013 lawsuit that Capt. Rob Sheehan and the Police Department created a hostile, anti-gay work environment and unjustly fired him three years ago.

Council was scheduled to vote Tuesday night on whether to approve the payment to Pascal, but Monzo said no vote took place during the meeting, which stretched late into the night.

Police chiefs demotion big topic at Cape May candidates forum CAPE MAY  The controversial demotion of a popular police chief has been hanging over this q

A decision on the draft settlement may take a little more time because the citys insurer, the Atlantic County Municipal Joint Insurance Fund, would not pick up the full payment, he said. The city would have to pay $50,000 of the total, according to the proposed settlement.

It will probably be brought up again, Monzo said, but he couldnt say whether it would be a topic at next months meeting.

The proposed settlement would not include an admission of guilt by either Cape May or Sheehan, whos suing the city in a separate case to get his job back as chief.

Sheehans attorney, John Grady, said there was no evidence that Sheehan did anything wrong, adding that Sheehan will not be paying anything toward the settlement. City Manager Bruce MacLeod said he wanted to wait until the settlement was finalized to comment further.

Pascal said in his suit that he was harassed by members of the public with anti-gay slurs. Two residents of Cape May who had harassed Pascal for months once threatened to snap his neck in a dark alley, according to court filings.

Cape May council replaces Sheehan as police chief CAPE MAY  City Council in a split vote on Monday appointed 25-year veteran Detective Sgt. A

These incidents were witnessed by other officers and brought to the attention of Sheehan and then-Chief Diane Sorantino, the lawsuit states. No action was taken against the hecklers, and Sheehan opened a bogus Internal Affairs investigation, Pascal claims in the suit.

Pascal was fired after the investigation, which involved a probe into how he handled a traffic stop in 2012.

Contact: 609-272-7411

Twitter @ACPressTomczuk
The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security is working with South Jersey law enforcement to track shoulder-season events in shore towns following a pipe bomb explosion prior to the start of a charitable 5K last weekend in Ocean County.

I dont think anyone should stay away from any event. I certainly would not, said U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-2nd. They show the strength of our community.

N.J. Homeland Security is compiling a statewide list of special events to distribute to all law-enforcement agencies, which it says helps police better protect the public.

Homeland Security is involved in response to Saturdays explosion, which resulted in the arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami, of Elizabeth. Rahami was charged with attempted murder and bombing charges. He is also charged with federal terror crimes and state charges of attempting to murder police officers, stemming from incidents in Elizabeth, Linden and Manhattan.

LoBiondo, who has been in Washington all week, said that if Congress takes a break and he can return home this weekend, he plans to attend the Walk for the Wounded in Ocean City.

The 5K walk benefiting wounded veterans is just one of several weekend events for the Cape May County town. In addition, the Ocean City Municipal Airport is hosting an Airport Festival and Air Show Saturday and Sunday. Local police have committed to adding more officers to cover these events.

This weekend in particular the Police Department, Fire Department, Public Works Department and the community emergency response team are all working together to make sure theres a little bit of extra cover given some of the recent events, said Public Information Officer Doug Bergen.

In North Wildwood, the 25th annual Irish Festival is expected to draw 250,000 visitors over three days.

Mayor Patrick Rosenello said the city has been in contact with county and state law enforcement about security.

Our chief of police has been in communication with them. Theyve coordinated a couple of things, and we have some resources coming from the county for this event, which is not unusual, he said. This is a very large event. We have built in some security measures over the years that we are refining and enhancing for this weekend.

Rosenello said vehicle access is restricted from the festival area and there is video surveillance, as well as uniformed and plainclothes officers patrolling.

We have taken all the threats and concerns very seriously, and I think were putting in place the correct level of security, Rosenello said.

The North Wildwood Police Department issued a release asking festival visitors to report suspicious activity to 609-522-2411 or notify a police officer in the festival area.

Backpacks and coolers are not permitted inside the festival area, and guests are prohibited from bringing alcoholic beverages into the festival site.

LoBiondo said reporting suspicious activity is vital.

Certainly recent events further highlight the risk that we face each and every day, he said. Law enforcement is more connected and coordinated than ever before. They have an ability to sort out if there is something in the wrong direction.

Other weekend events include the Run for the Fallen and the Bike MS City to Shore Ride, both of which traverse cross South Jersey. Sea Isle City is hosting an Irish Festival Friday through Sunday. Wildwood Crest will host its annual Seafarers Celebration on Saturday.

Margate police will be coordinating security at the annual Fall Funfest by the Bay Saturday and Sunday.

They are very aware of the situations that are going on in the state. Of course, weve had conversations with the chief of police, and were very comfortable with the precautions in place, Margate Business Association President Ed Berger said.

Contact: 609-272-7251

Twitter @clairelowe
Imagine that the first crisis facing the next president would be a seizure by China of the Scarborough Shoal, a coral atoll off the Philippines in the South China Sea.

How would a President Donald Trump respond? Perhaps he would assemble his new generals to come up with a 30-day plan to attack China. Or maybe he'd say, "They can have him; I hate that guy," confusing the strategically situated potential Chinese Naval base with the morning television host, Joe Scarborough, with whom he has a bitter feud.

What's remarkable is that seven weeks before election day, so little is known about the Republican presidential nominee's foreign policy. He has given only a couple of perfunctory speeches on the topic and on the stump reverts to cliches and bluster.

From the end of World War II through the Cold War, a presidential candidate had to persuade voters that he was credible on foreign policy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign affairs became a secondary political issue for three elections. But the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars made it important again.

Except when it comes to Trump.

There is no Trump doctrine. The closest thing to it is the slogan "America First," which has unfortunate antecedents in the isolationist opposition to American intervention in the World War II and its prominent Nazi sympathizers.

Trump boasts that some of his positions are bold and new, like his insistence that allies pick up a greater share of the global defense burden. But Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader from 1961 to 1977, was calling for the same thing four decades ago and President Barack Obama has done so as well. The difference is that Trump threatens to abrogate alliances unless they go along.

Contradictions abound. He's against nation-building and opposed to interventions generally - though he repeatedly lies that he opposed the Iraq War and the later intervention in Libya. Last week he said that the U.S. should have seized Iraq's oil wells. Now, you can't transport them to Ohio so - apart from the legal and political nightmares that would have resulted - it would have required tens of thousands of American troops to safeguard these "possessions." That sounds like a semi-permanent occupation.

He proclaims Islamic terrorism to be the dominant threat facing the U.S. Yet somehow, having offended Muslims all over the world, he seems to think America can go it alone in this struggle.

On the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, he insists that U.S. pressure on China would subdue that rogue nation. It isn't clear if the pressure would be applied before or after he slaps a 40-percent tariff on Chinese imports, as he has also vowed to do.

Then there's his favorite foreign leader, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, whose regime invades countries and kills political opponents.

Trump has faced intense criticism for some of his views. Mortified former intelligence officials lambasted him for politicizing an intelligence briefing. A month ago, 50 leading Republican national security experts proclaimed that Trump "would be the most reckless president in American history," endangering the country's security.

As of now, with polls showing Trump and Hillary Clinton in a virtual tie, it doesn't seem to matter.

Albert Hunt is a Bloomberg View columnist.
People can't change the weather. They can do their best to prepare for it, but then they just have to accept whatever comes.

That was tough over Labor Day weekend, when warnings about Tropical Storm Hermine and a declaration of a state of emergency caused many big events to be canceled and many shore visitors to stay home. When the weekend weather turned out to be rather nice - not even rain to relieve the drought - regret for a summer finale lost and second-guessing of officials and forecasters was common.

The underperforming storm was reminiscent of Hurricane Irene, which threatened the East Coast at the end of the 2011 summer season. Irene was predicted to be a Category 2 or 3 hurricane when it hit New Jersey - quite strong for this far north. Residents and visitors on the barriers islands were forced to evacuate, and major highways were partly shut to prevent people from coming to the region (even those returning home).

But Irene weakened to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall at the border of Atlantic and Ocean counties. There was much discussion about the evacuations that turned out to be unneeded. Perhaps this caused coastal residents in New Jersey and New York to discount warnings a bit about a storm the following year that turned out to be much worse - Hurricane Sandy.

Weather forecasting in general and storm forecasting in particular have improved dramatically the past couple of decades, thanks to advances in meteorology and the use of vastly more powerful computers. But weather still isn't fully predictable. That means people, including elected leaders, must make important decisions about it with insufficient information to be certain of what's correct. People don't like to do that, and they often don't do it well.

Gov. Chris Christie, who was responsible for the major decisions in the above examples, has made clear his method. "When I have to make a decision like this about evacuating or not evacuating, I'm going to err on the side of evacuating," he said in the days after Irene. "I always try to err on the side of caution," he said this month after Hermine.

His approach is common. It sounds like it would result in the least harm to people. But since people tend to downplay or even ignore warnings they judge to be excessive, that may not be the case.

This much is certain, and public leaders know it: Their risk of being blamed for harm to people after insufficient warning is much greater than being held accountable for harm to people lulled into complacency.

We've suggested before that clear criteria for evacuations and emergency declarations would improve acceptance and compliance by the public. Storm forecasting is a science, expressed in probabilities, and warnings should be based on the probabilities and the potential for risk and damage they pose.

We can imagine a computer formula taking into account the main variables and yielding a default recommendation. Then if elected officials instead chose warnings, emergency declarations or evacuations that were different, they could state their reasons for doing so.

People, including state officials, can't change human nature. They might think erring on the side of caution about weather is always prudent, but it's still erring.

Forecasting and storm warnings that are as honest, accurate and transparent as possible should be the most effective in the long run.

Our view
Legislators not letting county assess casinos

Regarding the Sept. 12 letter, "Officials need to work on lowering property taxes":

The letter writer called upon Atlantic County to conduct a full reassessment of casino property values. This would be a worthwhile effort, but the county does not have the statutory authority to assess casino properties. It would require state legislation. The county has not been able to get such legislation approved. For whatever reasons, the Legislature has not been responsive despite promises at election time to support countywide assessment of all properties.

The writer is correct that successful casino tax appeals impose a burden on all property taxpayers in Atlantic County. County taxpayers have had to refund over $50 million to Atlantic City due to its incorrect casino assessments.

The right solution is to assess casino properties at true value. However, as a result of the recent PILOT legislation, the amount casinos will pay in property taxes is locked in for the next 10 years. Unfortunately, any increase in property taxes will be paid solely by non-casino taxpayers.

Dennis Levinson

Atlantic County Executive

Winner-takes-all vote disenfranchises millions

There are complaints about voter ID laws disenfranchising minority voters, elderly and others who cannot seem to obtain an ID. Requiring identification for voting makes sense. Identification and photo IDs are required by so many elements of society already. Many argue that voter fraud isn't at a level requiring voter ID. But we don't know the extent of voter fraud because so much of it remains undiscovered.

The number of voters hurt by voter ID laws pales compared to the millions disenfranchised by the presidential election "winner-takes-all" awarding of electoral votes to the candidate getting the most popular votes in a given state. Only two states apportion electoral votes according to popular vote distribution: Maine and Nebraska.

If you're a GOP voter in a "blue" state like New Jersey with a very large Democratic majority, all the state's electoral votes are awarded to the Democratic candidate. Your GOP vote won't count. Or if you're a Democratic voter in a "red" state, the GOP candidate gets all the electoral votes. Your vote doesn't count.

States could choose to apportion like this: The person with the most popular votes in the state gets two electoral votes (one each for their two senators) and the rest are apportioned by the distribution of popular vote in each congressional district. All votes would have an impact in this fairer approach.

Politicians like winner-takes-all because they then focus on the battleground states. Red and blue states are in the bag.

Bob Lovell

Cape May Court House

Fine didn't match ticket

I recently received a much-deserved traffic violation from the Egg Harbor Township police. I failed to maintain marked lanes near that nightmare of a traffic circle at Atlantic City International Airport.

I mailed the requested amount of $85 to the municipal court. To my surprise, it was returned with a note informing me that the fine was $185.

When I asked the court clerk questions such as when the fine was changed and could they show me something in writing, the only answer I got was "I don't know."

If the fine was $185, the summons should have reflected that. It seems outdated tickets wasted energy all around. It just reconfirms that the entire state is one giant money grab.

Greg Bowers

Cologne
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.




Theres a persistent skills gap in Americas labor market, and it may fall to companies to solve the mismatch between their needs and workers skills and education.

The middle skills gap is one of the key factors putting downward pressure on our economy, according to Harvard Business Schools (HBS) recent study on competitiveness, which explains that the absence of US workers with relevant training to handle in-demand jobs is affecting US global competitiveness.

HBS professor and study team member Joe Fuller explained to Yahoo Finance that this gap has translated to weakness in the jobs marketwith openings not filled for months at a timebut that companies can take a more active role in solving this issue.

Employers must actively participate in employee training

While many think of skills development in the context of the pre-K through 12 educational system, Fuller said key training development needs to come from on-the-job training as well.

Fuller explained that business has a central role to play in addressing workforce skills gaps.

No one is better equipped than local business leadersor more motivatedto ensure that education and training efforts develop individuals who can thrive in the workforce, the report explained.

Specifically, by partnering with local community colleges, companies can help narrow the growing gap between employees skills and employers needs, Fuller explained.

In Georgia, for example, Southwirea cable and wire manufactureris working with the Carroll County school system to place at-risk students in jobs, allowing them to earn money while completing high school degrees, the report states.



Importantly, companies can also provide training that develops skills that are portable across industries and promote career development.



Wal-Mart (WMT) is one company that is working to improove employees credentials, Fuller said. The company has been working with its employees to up-skill and promote them. The company also has programs targeting veterans.



Story continues

[Wal-mart has] begun to acknowledge that a significant number of their employees will not finish their career at Wal-Mart. Their first or second job is at Wal-Mart. So theyre gearing some of their training for broader job readiness skills, not just focused on the very narrow policies and strategy of Wal-Mart itself, Fuller said.

Fuller added the company recognizes that its stores are members of their communities and that it must respond to outside criticism and realize that those former employees are customers as well.

Whether its raising the lowest wages theyre paying or making greater investments in workforce development, I think theyre responding to that message from a public that, while people love their prices, theyd like to see better outcomes for Wal-Mart employees, he said.

Meanwhile, the National Network of Business and Industry Associations is developing new cross-industry, national credentials that will provide longer careers and greater job security for restaurant and hotel industry workers, metal workers, construction workers, and automotive workers, according to the report.

Retrain existing employees



JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is another company that has invested in employee programs.

JPMorgan has a very innovative program theyve announced to take existing employees, bank tellers, and train them to assume higher level jobs in their retail banking operation, particularly being customer service reps, Fuller said.

This could have a significant impact on middle skilled worker populations, especially as the number of bank tellers is expected to shrink by 50% over the next ten years. Thats a large number of middle skilled workers who will be out of work.



The company recognized, according to Fuller, that by investing in employees they already have and know, they can develop the group without having to hire a new employees.

Why not use the personnel file, as opposed to the interview notes and the resume, to make a judgment about someones ability to be a success at the bank? Fuller said.

And while there are some companies dedicated to investing in the skills of employees, especially skill sets that change over timelike UPS (UPS), according to Fullermany are too short-term focused, he added.

Many employers essentially play what we call the spot market for labor, he said. They have a job that gets opened. Their reflex action is to go and post a help-wanted ad on a job site, and not consider how they could take one of their own employees, and through a little bit of investment, thinking ahead, have that person job-ready for that job opening.

Fuller emphasized that companies need to invest in what the report refers to as the commons, a set of communal assets that every economy and company rely on to be productive and competitive. This refers to not only to skills development but also to a commitment to wage growth and general support.

Companies are starting to respond to this need, Fuller said, largely because of public pressure.

To address shared prosperity while improving productivity, leading companies are focusing new attention on prospects for their lower-income workers, according to the report. For example, companies like Gap, Ikea, JPMorgan Chase, McDonalds, Starbucks, TJ Maxx, and Wal-Mart have discovered that by raising wages for low-income employees, they can often boost productivity, improve customer service and reduce employee turnover.

Shifting incentives

Fuller explained that HBS has found that business leaders are preferring part-term workers and outsourcing versus investing in employeesa trend that is increasing over time.

There is no industry here that isnt intensely competitive, Fuller said. And so managers, appropriately, are always looking for ways to sculpt and customize their cost structure to fit with their actual needs.

Outsourcingvia companies like Kelly Services (KELYA) and Manpower (MAN)has been one of the big trends in the economy for the last two decades. Weve gone from 10% of workers employed by staffing agencies to almost 16%, he explained. Meanwhile, two-thirds of employers, if given an alternative, would rather have an outsourcing company do the hiring.



Higher educational standards

Fuller explained that to be ready for one of todays jobs, a post-high school education is key. In particular, the requirements for higher-paid jobs with wage growth have increased over time.

And with only one-third of Americans attending a four-year college, other optionsincluding an Associates degree from a community college or a certificate related to a specific skillare key to form a household and lead an independent life, Fuller explained.

In addition, skills need to be further developed after educational training has been completed.

Skills mismatch has led to the dissatisfaction we see in the current election

If you look at the demographics of the campaign and compare it to the demographics of economic developments in the last 25 years in the United States, theres a correlation, Fuller said. [A] large number of communities, [a] large number of regions, were exposed to types of competition that they were unable to match, but were not able to rebound.

Jobs that became unsustainable in the USeither because of low wage rates elsewhere or the level of regulation in the USdisappeared and workers didnt have the breadth of skills.

This has led to anger and blame that can be seen in this years presidential election. Instead of blaming outsourcing and international displacement, it is key to focus on skills development on the job, along with increased alignment between education systems and career opportunities, Fuller explained.

A job thats very closely defined is one you can write a specification for and send to China or send to Mexico or you can build a machine or write software to do, Fuller said. Once that work goes away, its not coming back. Its important that the candidates at all levels stop talking about the good old days And start talking about what kind of workforce we need in the future and how we can help people make that transition.

For more on the US Competitiveness Study, please see here:

Harvard economist never thought his new study would take him where it did

Harvard professor identifies the worst nightmare in America right now

Harvard study singles out a game-changing economic opportunity: TAX REFORM

Theres a silver lining behind the dark clouds hanging over US businesses

Harvard Business Dean tells us what this huge 5-year study is all about

Harvard Business Dean: The post-crisis monetary policy is running out of runway

How improved infrastructure could end Americas vicious cycle of poverty

Theres one piece of tax reform that would have a real impact with little resistance

Americas outdated education system isnt producing the workers companies need



Revitalizing small businesses is key to drive Americas economic growth
Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman and his firm Omega Advisors were charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.

In a civil complaint, the SEC alleges that Cooperman, 73, traded on non-public information in the summer 2010, when he learned in several telephone conversations with a corporate executive at Atlas Pipeline Partners about the impending sale of its natural gas processing facility in Elk City, Oklahoma.

The SEC also says he violated federal securities laws relating to timely reporting of securities holdings. The regulatory agency is seeking the the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and other penalties.

We allege that hedge fund manager Cooperman, who as a large APL shareholder obtained access to confidential corporate information, abused that access by trading on this information, said Andrew J. Ceresney, Director of the SECs Division of Enforcement. By doing so, he allegedly undermined the public confidence in the securities markets and took advantage of other investors who did not have this information.

Cooperman, who has been running Omega for 25 years, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. In March, he revealed that he had received a Wells Notice from the SEC, a letter indicating the agency would bring an enforcement action. On a call with investors, he said at the time he didnt think the investigations would be an issue.

We have done nothing improper and categorically deny the Commissions allegations, Cooperman, who has been running Omega for 25 years, wrote in a letter to investors of Wednesday, a copy of which has been obtained by Yahoo Finance.

Cooperman continued: As I wrote last year when we first received the subpoenas, I have throughout my fifty-year career in the securities business firmly believed in detailed, fundamental research. As I explained then, that approach has long contemplated direct, face-to-face interactions with company management. Such exchanges of information with company management are appropriate, well-established in the industry, and even necessary. As a Wall Street Journal op-ed put it just last year, information is not a crime.'

Story continues

Omega had been invested in Atlas Pipelines stock since 2007. The fund had been bearish on its position in the first half of 2010, the SECs complaint notes, pointing out that Cooperman previously described it as a shy business.

The SEC said Cooperman learned of the Elk City deal during phone conversations with an unnamed executive at the company based in Pennsylvania. He spoke with that executive on the phone on July 7, 9, 20, and 27. In at least one of the conversations, Cooperman allegedly learned of the $650 million sale price, the SEC complaint said.

On July 7, the day of the first phone call, Cooperman and Omega purchased a total of 1,966 Atlas Pipeline call options with a $15 strike price, expiring August 21, 2010. Atlas Pipelines stock closed at $9.66 per share the day the options were purchased, the SEC notes.

He continued to purchase Atlas Pipeline between July 8 and July 19. On July 19, the SEC said that Cooperman spoke with the executive at Atlas Pipeline. After the call, he made an electronic calendar entry for July 27, 20010 at 10:30 a.m. with the title APL Board Meeting.

On July 20, Cooperman had another phone call with the Atlas Pipeline executive at 9:43 a.m. for approximately 7 minutes. At 9:50 a.m. he called an unnamed Omega Consultant where he revealed that he had learned about the Elk City sale for $650 million. That same day, Omega and Cooperman purchased 3,800 out-of-the-money call options with a $15 strike price, expiring November 20, 2010. The Cooperman Offshore Account bought 61,700 shares. Cooperman also bought $50,000 worth of Atlas Pipeline bonds for an account belonging to a family member.

On the evening of July 27, Cooperman spoke with the Atlas Pipeline executive who told him the board had approved the sale, the complaint said. Shortly after, he sent an email to a family member, who is also a hedge fund manager, that said, Good news on APL [t]hey sold their ELK City operation for $682mm which will enable them to pay off bank debt, de-risk company because keep whole contracts largely gone and fund their Laurel Mountain obligations. We think stock worth at least $15 in near term  for what that is worth.

The Cooperman family member forwarded the email to a colleague who replied, That explains the fishy $17 August calls, etc. I still havent come across any press release  want to see how its discussed. The Cooperman family member responded, Somebody should investigate that.

On the morning of July 28, 2010, Atlas Pipeline announced the sale Elk City for $682 million. The stock jumped 31% that day. The SEC claims that the Cooperman, Omega and family accounts generated profits of approximately $4.09 million between July 7 and July 27, 2010.

Whats more is the Cooperman family member who had emailed the somebody should investigate that response complained to another executive at Atlas Pipeline about fishy and shady options trades.

I would like to make sure the sec looks into the shady options trades and volume in apl last 2 weeks or so in front of this deal[.] How do I become a whistle blower[?] the email said.

Furthermore, sometime in late 2011 or early 2012, Cooperman told the executive at the company that Omega received a subpoena related to the trading in Atlas Pipeline shares. The SEC alleges that Cooperman tried to fabricate a story to tell if questioned about this activity. The SEC said this executive was shocked and angry upon learning Cooperman traded ahead of the announcement.

The SEC further alleges that Cooperman repeatedly violated securities laws by failing to timely report information about holdings and transactions in stocks that he owned. The SEC alleges that he violated securities laws 40 times.

The SEC is seeking the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus interest, penalties, and permanent injunctions against Cooperman and Omega.

Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

Why hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman is warning young people to avoid the fund management industry

Billionaire Rubenstein: These 6 traits will help you succeed on Wall Street

How a $650,100 lunch with Warren Buffett changed one hedge fund managers life
PEORIA, Illinois, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT / NYSE Euronext: CATR) informs its stockholders that today, a Form 8-K has been furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") with respect to monthly retail statistics.

Caterpillar files electronically with the SEC required reports on Form 8-K, Form 10-Q, Form 10-K and Form 11-K; proxy materials; ownership reports for insiders as required by Section 16(a) of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended; and registration statements on Forms S-3 and S-8, as necessary; and other forms or reports, as required. All of the forms and reports filed electronically with the SEC are available on the SEC Internet site (www.sec.gov).

Caterpillar also maintains an Internet site (www.Caterpillar.com) and copies of its annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and any amendments to these reports filed or furnished with the SEC are available free of charge through Caterpillar's Internet site (www.Caterpillar.com/secfilings ) as soon as reasonably practicable after the relevant document has been filed with the SEC.

CONTACT: Rachel Potts, Corporate Public Affairs, +1-309-675-6892

This is a disclosure announcement from PR Newswire.

SOURCE Caterpillar Inc.
ALBANY, New York, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

According to the research report, the global craniomaxillofacial market is anticipated to be worth US$1.7 bn by the end of 2022 as the market exhibits a CAGR of 6.2% between 2014 and 2022. Analysts predict that the global market is anticipated to be led by internal fixators segment as it will reach a valuation of US$1.5 bn by 2022. The ability of these devices to fix facial deformities or injuries without any infections will drive this segment. Technological advancements in this segment will also be responsible for the growth internal fixators in this region. Geographically, North America will dominate the global market as it is estimated to contribute revenue worth US$ 929.4 mn by 2022.

The key players in the global craniomaxillofacial implants market in 2013 were Synthes, Stryker Corporation, Biomet, Inc., KLS Martin LP, and OsteoMed. Their collective share estimated to 81.1% in 2013. Analysts have described the market to be highly competitive with a burgeoning demand for technologically advanced implants, observes Transparency Market Research in its new research report.

"Focusing on developing high-quality nonmetallic or bioresorbable materials to develop internal fixators is projected to create new growth opportunities for the players in the global market," suggests the lead author of this research report. Demand for nonmetallic internal fixators is expected to be an upcoming trend as they assimilate with the tissue, thereby eliminating the need for a follow-up surgery.

Browse Market Research Report on Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/craniomaxillofacial-implants-market.html

High Incidence of Facial Traumas Augments Uptake of Craniomaxillofacial Implants

The increasing frequency of facial fractures is one of the key drivers for the increased uptake of the craniomaxillofacial implants. The rise in the number of road accidents along with slips, falls, and other industrial accidents have also led to growing cases of craniomaxillofacial injuries and trauma. Furthermore, growing pool of geriatrics, that are more susceptible to facial fractures due to reducing bone mineral density is also anticipated to augment the growth of this market in the near future. The increasing cases of osteoporosis, rising participation in adventures sports, and outdoor recreational activities have collectively led to a growing number of facial injuries, thus providing the market with an incredible impetus.

The high adoption of craniomaxillofacial implants can also be attributed to the growing technological advancements and increasing demand for minimally invasive procedures. The reduced hospitalization time and non-disruptive procedures to fix these implants have made it easy for both patients and surgeons to operate. Advancements such as developments in 3D printing technology have opened up a chance for customization of implants that can be made to suit the anatomy of the patient. This technological advancement has revolutionized the cranial fracture fixation by providing an improved bone fitting and compression as compared to conventional implants.

Browse Press Release on Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/craniomaxillofacial-implants-market.htm

The improving healthcare expenditure in both developed as well as developing countries have also boosted the craniomaxillofacial implants. The improved healthcare infrastructure in countries such as China and India that have gigantic population bases is also anticipated to lead to an extensive usage of craniomaxillofacial implants in the near future.

Expensive Implants Discourages Market Growth

The high costs associated with craniomaxillofacial surgeries due to the expensive cost of manufacturing and selling implants is expected to discourage the market from growing. This market will also be restrained due to the rising demand for exceptionally skilled labor to perform these surgeries. Furthermore, the unaffordability of modern technologies as manufacturers price them high to recover the heavy investments they make will also prevent the market from reaching its full potential, predict analysts. The lack of insurance schemes to cover the expenses associated with craniomaxillofacial surgeries will also act as a major hindrance to the overall market.

The review of the global craniomaxillofacial implants market is based on Transparency Market Research's research report, titled "Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2014 - 2022."

Request a PDF Brochure with Report Analysis: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=4861

The global craniomaxillofacial implants market has been segmented as follows:

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Location

Internal Fixators

External Fixators

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Composition

Calcium Ceramics

Metals and Alloys

Polymers

Biologic Materials

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Nature

Non-resorbable

Resorbable Fixators

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Type

Plate and Screw Fixator System

Bone Graft Substitutes

Distraction Systems

TMJ Replacement Devices

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Geography

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America (LATAM)

(LATAM) Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

and (MENA) Rest of the World (RoW)

Browse Related Research Reports:

Oncology Biosimilars Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/oncology-biosimilars-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/oncology-biosimilars-market.html Chemoinformatics Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/chemoinformatics-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/chemoinformatics-market.html Global Healthcare WLAN Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/healthcare-wlan-market.html

About Us:

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S. based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMR's global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.



US Office Contact

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Albany, NY 12207

Tel: +1-518-618-1030

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Blog: http://www.tmrblog.com/

SOURCE Transparency Market Research
MANCHESTER, England, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

EDM, a leading global provider of training simulators to the civil aviation and defence sectors, announced today that Ethiopian Airlines' new aviation academy is fitted out with a range of its cabin crew training simulators.

The $100m state-of-the-art Aviation Academy was officially opened at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa earlier this year by the country's Prime Minister, Hailemaraim Desalegn, in front of some of the country's leading business and aviation dignitaries. Widely regarded as Africa's finest airline training facility, the Academy will enable 4000 aviation students to be trained annually. Housed within the facility is the comprehensive range of cabin crew training simulators designed, manufactured and installed by EDM. They comprise:

B737 / B757 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET) on an electric motion system

B787 / B777 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET)

Extended B767 Door Trainer

Extended Q400 Door Trainer

A350 Door Trainer

The market-leading simulators will enable cabin crew to be fully trained in cabin service as well as emergency and evacuation safety procedures. EDM was selected by Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's fastest growing airline, to supply its crew training simulators after an international tender in 2014. EDM also provided support to Ethiopian Airlines regarding the design and specification of the new Aviation Academy.

Last month, the shipping of the B787 / B777 CEET to Ethiopia featured in TV documentary series, Mega Shippers, on Quest TV. The programme followed the journey of the CEET from EDM's manufacturing facility in Manchester all the way to Addis Ababa via the Port of Southampton.

"Ethiopian Airlines' new Aviation Academy sets a highly impressive new standard in the provision of aviation training," said Tony Bermingham, Managing Director of EDM. "It is one of the best airline training facilities in the world and we were privileged to play a part in this fine accomplishment by Ethiopian Airlines."

For more information about Ethiopian Airlines visit: http://www.ethiopianairlines.com

For more information about EDM visit: http://www.edm.ltd.uk

About EDM

EDM is a leading global provider of training simulators to the civil aviation, defence, rail and other industries. Combining the highest engineering standards with leading-edge technologies, EDM provides airlines with Door Trainers, Cabin Service Trainers, Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainers and Full Size Mockups and defence organsiations with Procedure Trainers, Maintenance Trainers, Ejection Seats, Simulators and Full Size Replicas. Serving organisations worldwide from its UK headquarters, EDM is committed to delivering exceptional quality and value to its clients to help them enhance safety and operational efficiency.

SOURCE EDM Limited
SHENZHEN, China, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei recently announced its positioning in Gartner's Visionaries quadrant in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure.1 This is the first time that Huawei has entered the Visionaries quadrant since 2012 when Huawei was included into Gartner evaluation.

Huawei believes, within the wired and wireless LAN access field, it has become more competitive, and has shown excellence in the global market. While ensuring an outstanding ability to execute, Huawei believes that it has shown a great improvement in the completeness of its vision, owing to Huawei's accurate insight into the market, correct product strategies, and continued product technology innovation.

"In the past year, Huawei has continued to maintain high-speed growth within the market and increasingly mature global channels, and has won customer approval for its products and solutions. We are proud that Huawei has seen huge improvements in the benefits of our keen market insights, visionary market strategies, as well as innovative products and solutions," said Swift Liu, President of Huawei Enterprise Network Product Line.

"Being customer-centric, Huawei has always insisted on innovation and continued investment in Research and Development to help customers build ultimate-experience campus networks in their digital transformation by proactively tackling challenges created by user and service mobility as well as application cloudification," continued Liu.

According to the Gartner report, "A vendor in the Visionaries quadrant demonstrates an ability to increase features in its offering to provide a unique and differentiated approach to the market. A Visionary will have innovated in one or more of the key areas of access layer technologies within the enterprise (for example, convergence, security, management or operational efficiency). The ability to apply differentiating functionality across the entire access layer will affect its position."

In order to help enterprises deal with the challenges brought by new technologies such as mobility, cloud computing, Big Data, and SDN, Huawei has released a series of diverse products and solutions in the wired and wireless LAN access domain. For example, in product innovation, Huawei launched the industry's first 802.11ac Wave 2 indoor AP with high-density smart antennas, along with the industry's first fixed agile switch that supports iPCA and wired and wireless convergence. In terms of innovative solutions, Huawei launched its Agile Distributed Wi-Fi Solution and Cloud Managed Network Solution along with other innovative solutions.

Huawei's Agile Distributed Wi-Fi Solution uses an innovative "AC + central AP + RU" architecture, thoroughly solving the problems of weak indoor signals and low performance in hotel rooms, dormitories, hospitals and so on. Huawei's Cloud Managed Network Solution uses cloud technology to achieve service rollout in minutes and implements full-lifecycle network management covering campus network planning, deployment, and operations and maintenance (O&M). This solution not only serves small to mid-sized campuses, but can also be adapted to mid to large-sized campuses. The cloud management platform, applied in the solution, is based on a leasable and sellable business model, where users can choose Huawei's or a managed service provider's (MSP) services, or can also build their own industrial-grade cloud management platforms if they wish.

Aside from striving in technology innovation to provide customers with diverse solutions, Huawei also maintains fast market growth in the wired and wireless LAN access domain. According to Market Share: Enterprise Network Equipment by Market Segment, Worldwide, 1Q162, Huawei's Enterprise campus Ethernet switches revenue in 1Q16 ranked No. 3 in the world; the Enterprise WLAN Equipment revenue in 1Q16 worldwide grew rapidly, with a year-on-year increase of 102.5%. Apart from this, Huawei's wired and wireless LAN access solutions and products are already being used in education, government and public services, finance, health care, transportation, and other vertical industries by customers in all corners of the globe.

[1] Gartner "Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure" by Tim Zimmerman, Christian Canales, Bill Menezes, Danilo Ciscato, [30 August 2016] [2] Gartner "Market Share: Enterprise Network Equipment by Market Segment, Worldwide, 1Q16" 08 June 2016

About Huawei

Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry.

For more information, please visit: www.huawei.com

Related Links

http://www.huawei.com



SOURCE Huawei
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the City of London Police, memorializing their solidarity in fighting for intellectual property rights.

The signing comes on the heels of similar engagements with Europol and the Guardia di Finanzia, further affirming the IACC's commitment to the protection of intellectual property in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

"Partnerships like these are an important step in winning the battle against counterfeiting," said IACC President Bob Barchiesi. "We commend the City of London Police for its dedication to intellectual property protection, and we look forward to working hand-in-hand with law enforcement to stop fakes from making their way to London and beyond."

The MOU was signed at the 10th Annual Intellectual Property Crime Conference in London, hosted by Interpol and UL (Underwriters Laboratories) and attended by more than 600 international practitioners and enforcement officials.

The IACC has long worked in partnership with law enforcement agencies around the world to seek innovative ways to address the counterfeiting problem wherever needed. The IACC has conducted more than 30 law enforcement trainings during the past year, and has upcoming events scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Guatemala.

About IACC

The IACC (www.iacc.org) is a Washington, DC-based not-for-profit organization representing the interests of companies concerned with trademark counterfeiting and the related theft of intellectual property. The members of the IACC include many of the world's best-known brands across all product sectors. The IACC has played a leading role in the development of cross-industry voluntary agreements, to address the illicit trafficking of counterfeit and pirated goods online, including its IACC MarketSafe and RogueBlock initiatives.

Related Links

http://www.iacc.org



SOURCE International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The cost of most renewable energy systems for both private use and utility scale projects have been reduced by so much that in several instances they have reached parity with fossil fuels, or are even cheaper. The most effective progress has been made in photovoltaic systems, while concentrated solar power, biomass, wind energy and hydro-power have greatly improved payback periods too.

Photo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160921/8521605997

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121014/HK92339LOGO-d

In Indonesia the average price charged on electricity bills is 0.11 USD per KWh. This cost is deemed to increase since by 2018 subsidies will be abolished. The cost of electricity derived from solar panels in Indonesia ranges between 8 to 13 cents / KWh, depending on location and capacity installed. Payback time is about 6 years. Cost of production with fossil fuels is similar or higher, with diesel topping the list at about 23/25 cents per KWh. (Sources: MEMR, PLN, ADB). This makes solar an extremely attractive alternative.

To be informed on all developments in this industry and act upon them sign up for Renewable Energy Indonesia, the only trade show in Indonesia addressing exclusively Renewable Energy, which will be held at the Jakarta International Expo, Kemayoran, on 29 to 31 March 2017. The exhibition, organized by UBM plc, aims to be a platform that brings together professionals, investors and stakeholders with a sharp and exclusive focus on renewable energy and energy efficiency in order to exchange knowledge, best practices, resources and information.

Conference, seminars, workshops, debates and exhibitors' presentations will add into the mix, and will complement the 3 days together with a business matchmaking platform.

About Renewable Energy Indonesia

Renewable Energy Indonesia, a B2B trade show with a uniquely clear focus on the spectrum of renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions available on the market will showcase resources, ideas, cutting-edge machinery, equipment, technology - including the latest Wind and Solar Power systems, Thermal, Hydro-power, Bio-mass - and the innovative financing solutions needed to foster the development of this strategic sector in Indonesia. Part of the very successful series of UBM events on Renewable Energy.

"Find out more on how to exhibit"

Contact Person: Ivan Ferrari

Phone Number: +62 21 2930 5959 ext 138

Email: Ivan.Ferrari@ubm.com



Contact Person: Budi Sutrisno

Phone Number: +62 21 2930 5959

Email: budi.sutrisno@ubm.com

Related Links

http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160921/8521605997



SOURCE Renewable Energy Indonesia - UBM
NEW YORK, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The US Elections 2016 are scheduled for November 8, and the first of the three debates leading up to it is on September 26. Till now both Hillary and Trump have projected themselves through an aggressive campaign, but this the first opportunity where the people will be able to gauge them during a one-on-one debate. While Hillary has been preparing herself religiously for the debate, Donald Trump is relying more on his extempore skills.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410189LOGO )



As per GaneshaSpeaks.com's expert astrologers, "Hillary's past may come back to haunt her during the debate. On the other hand, Trump's lofty promises, often made without due deliberation, may backfire on him. On the whole it will be a fiery debate with Trump having a slight advantage over Hillary."

Astrological predictions

On September, 26th i.e. the first debate, the transiting Moon will be in the star of Mercury in Cancer, which indicates a high voltage debate between the two candidates. The transiting Moon in conjunction with natal Venus in trine with the natal Moon indicates momentum in favour of Trump in the first debate. Also, a strong Venus in the 3rd House is an added advantage for Trump. But, Mercury-NorthNode(Rahu) conjunction can be a spoiling factor. His hopeful promises and pronouncements may bring discomfort. Also, over enthusiasm and aggression may backfire or raise questions in the minds of voters.

In Hillary Clinton's chart, the transiting Moon will be passing through the 10th House over the natal Mars and Saturn. So, she will be equally prepared. But, Mercury-NorthNode(Rahu) conjunction indicates that she will struggle to defend her credibility and matters related to her past may bother her. However, the transiting Venus in the Ascendant over the natal Venus is a significant advantage for her, despite which, she will be on the receiving end many times. On the whole, she will be less impressive than Trump.

Astrological analysis: Between now and the first debate

The transiting Mercury is about to turn direct in Leo. But, it is still in conjunction with NorthNode(Rahu). For Hillary, it is a critical period for her campaign. She can't take anything for granted since Trump's popularity is surging in key states, clearly demonstrated by the ratings. However, Mercury in direct motion will be less harmful, so she may recover some of her lost ground. But, the race will remain tight as it approaches the first debate.

On the other hand, Trump will continue his aggressive campaign and despite some deterioration, he will have a solid footing before the first debate. The period between 22nd and 25th September will be very important for his campaign. His campaign may hit some roadblocks or his own misjudgment may bring some uncomfortable issues to the fore. Nevertheless, the race will get tighter.

About GaneshaSpeaks.com:

GaneshaSpeaks.com is India's number one and the world's third largest astrology portal. The predictions by the portal bear the remarkable accuracy rate of about 85%-90%. Launched in 2003 by Mr. Bejan Daruwalla, a veteran astrologer of international repute, the astrology giant today attracts over 130 million visitors to its online properties. With a team size of 700+ employees, GaneshaSpeaks.com strives to be a friend, astrologer and guide and works towards making a positive difference to the lives of its patrons.

Media contact:

Hemang Arunbhai Pandit

Founder, MD & CEO

corpcomm@ganeshaspeaks.com

GaneshaSpeaks.com

+91-8141400168



SOURCE GaneshaSpeaks.com
~ Newly-created role to support opportunities in Europe and emerging freight rail markets ~

LAKE OSWEGO, Oregon, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Greenbrier Companies, Inc. (NYSE: GBX) announced today that Jim Cowan has been appointed President, Greenbrier International. Cowan continues to report to William A. Furman, Chairman and CEO of Greenbrier and remains as CEO of GBW Railcar Services, LLC, a 50/50 railcar repair and refurbishment joint venture with Watco Companies, LLC. Ray Pericola, who has served at GBW since its creation in 2014, has been promoted to President reporting to Cowan.

In this newly-created role, Cowan's broad experience in manufacturing and the rail industry will support Greenbrier's rapidly-growing international operations. Cowan's responsibilities extend to all railcar markets outside the Americas and include international project coordination with Greenbrier's Global Manufacturing Organization (GMO). Cowan will work closely with Alejandro Centurion, President of GMO, and Martin Graham, Executive Vice President, GMO.

Cowan is well known in the railcar industry with decades of experience in senior leadership positions. Prior to joining Greenbrier in 2014, Cowan worked for Amsted Rail supporting their activities in Brazil. Previously, Cowan served as President and Chief Executive Officer of American Railcar Industries, Inc. (ARI) where he had oversight of ARI's activities in international rail markets where Greenbrier is currently active.

"Today, Greenbrier serves railcar markets from our facilities in the US, Mexico, Europe and Brazil. Greenbrier's presence is also rapidly growing in emerging railcar markets that we can serve from Europe including markets in the Middle East, Africa and Eurasia," Furman said. "I have asked Jim to take on this new role to more fully focus Greenbrier on global business opportunities. I am pleased that he will bring important new leadership to our international activities."

About Greenbrier

Greenbrier (www.gbrx.com), headquartered in Lake Oswego, Oregon, is a leading supplier of transportation equipment and services to the railroad industry. Greenbrier builds new railroad freight cars in manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Mexico and Poland and marine barges at our U.S. manufacturing facility. Greenbrier sells reconditioned wheel sets and provides wheel services at locations throughout the U.S. We recondition, manufacture and sell railcar parts at various U.S. sites. Through GBW Railcar Services, LLC, a 50/50 joint venture with Watco Companies, LLC, freight cars are repaired and refurbished at over 30 locations across North America, including more than 10 tank car repair and maintenance facilities certified by the Association of American Railroads. Greenbrier owns a lease fleet of over 8,900 railcars and performs management services for over 264,000 railcars.

Related Links

http://www.gbrx.com



SOURCE The Greenbrier Companies, Inc. (GBX)
Kalray to demonstrate its processor technology at the Autosens Connected Car conference

BRUSSELS, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kalray, a world leader in manycore processors, used its participation today at the Autosens connected car conference to showcase its Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) processors for autonomous vehicles. In order to deliver passengers safely to their destinations, self-driving vehicles need microprocessors that are both powerful and reliable, ensuring faultlessly high levels of performance and safety. With a determinist architecture and extremely low latency, Kalray's MPPA is particularly well-equipped for use in autonomous vehicles.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160203/329978LOGO

Kalray has begun working with some of the automotive industry's key manufacturers to put its MPPA technology at the heart of the electronics systems of their new fleets of self-driving vehicles. Because the MPPA processor brings together a rare combination of high performance, guaranteed safety and low power consumption, these vehicles are able to perform multiple, diverse tasks in parallel, without sacrificing safety or performance. Kalray's processor performs the following tasks:

sensor fusion

deep learning

network security

"We are enthusiastic about introducing our embedded processing technology into the domain of autonomous vehicles," said Stephane Cordova, director of the Embedded Business Unit at Kalray. "It is important that self-driving cars be equipped with the most reliable and highest-performing technology and Kalray is confident that it can provide an unparalleled solution for automotive companies developing autonomous vehicles."

Kalray will be showcasing its MPPA technology throughout the Autosens event with a live Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) demonstration.

About Kalray

Kalray Inc., is a fabless semiconductor company and pioneer in manycore processor solutions. Its innovative MPPA architecture delivers real-time processing solutions to the domains of data center infrastructure and embedded technology.

To learn more about Kalray and its technology, visit: www.kalrayinc.com

Press Contact:

Andrea Busch

Marketing & Communications, Kalray

abusch@kalrayinc.com

+33 6 50 27 47 52

Related Links

http://www.kalrayinc.com



SOURCE Kalray
** A not-for-profit initiative led by Marvelstone Group **

** LATTICE80 has been working closely with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) **

SINGAPORE, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvelstone Group is set to launch the world's largest Fintech Hub (over 30,000 sq ft) in early November.

An independent not-for-profit initiative, its objectives are to:

Help fintech startups prototype, develop and expand their business models overseas

Support existing companies and financial institutions in their adoption of innovations

Form public-private partnerships to further develop new tech and financial infrastructure

LATTICE80 is located in the Central Business District (CBD), close to the key financial institutions, stock exchange and the regulators - the same institutions that brought Singapore to its current position as the world's third most competitive financial centre, after London and New York, according to a survey by London-based research firm Z/Yen Group.

Joe Seunghyun Cho, Chairman of Marvelstone Group commented, "We think Singapore is the right place for a global Fintech Hub for a number of reasons. Singapore, being a traditional financial and trading hub, has the legal infrastructure and access to global investors that budding fintech companies would look for."

"Plus, the time is right for innovation, and people are more receptive to the use of technology in financial services," said Marvelstone Group CEO, Gina Heng. She added, "Singapore, as a regional hub can also connect us to fintech globally."

"LATTICE80," said Heng, "aims to support the fintech ecosystem in Asia and bridge global players to the region. We have been working closely with MAS, who has made great strides in shaping the local fintech ecosystem. We also seek to bring partners onboard and collaborate with other Fintech hubs like London's Level 39, Australia's Stone & Chalk, and Israel's The Floor."

The move to establish LATTICE80 is in line with the Singapore Government's overarching Smart Nation Vision, which is aimed at empowering people and businesses through increased access to data, innovative ideas and solutions, and utilising technology to better serve citizens' needs.

Said Cho, "Singapore can be the best test bed for smart city solutions. Financial technology is one of the most important components of a Smart Nation, and can serve to power further innovation.

More details will be released closer to the launch.

For media enquiries, please contact: partnerships@lattice80.com or +65-6817-3141

Related Links

http://www.lattice80.com



SOURCE Marvelstone
DUBAI, UAE, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

A team from Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai has successfully treated a patient who required a complex surgical implant of extremely powerful intraocular lenses (IOL) to treat her cataract (clouding of the eye's natural lens) and correct her high myopia (extreme short sightedness). As a result of implanting two lenses with the highest minus power ever implanted in the UAE, the patient's vision and quality of life have improved dramatically. Standard IOLs were not an option and the lenses were delivered from Germany, custom-made specifically for the patient.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409990 )



The patient, who is a UAE resident, had a complicated history of eye problems including cataract and was unable to see without very thick lenses, due to her extreme short sightedness. The complexity of the treatment included the challenge of very accurately calculating the power of the lenses required to correct the patient's vision, manufacturing the custom lenses, and finally the surgical procedure to implant correctly such powerful lenses.

Professor Robert Scott, Medical Director at Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai, comments: "Though complex, the bilateral surgery to implant these special intraocular lenses was performed without complications and the results have been excellent. Our patient presented us with the challenge of treating her cataract and correcting her extreme short sightedness, which meant that we had to arrange the custom-made lenses with the most minus refractive reading ever implanted in the UAE. We are all delighted that she is now able to see very well and only needs her light glasses for reading; we believe the surgery to improve her vision will significantly enhance her life."

According to the patient, opening her eyes for the first time after the surgery was "an amazing experience and the world seemed brighter and clearer without contact lenses and like seeing the world in a new light. It feels like I've started a new chapter in my life. I'm very pleased that I had the surgery done at Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai where the expert team gave me the confidence and support needed for successful surgery. I can't thank Professor Robert Scott, the anesthesiologist and nurses at Moorfields enough for their kindness and expertise."

Cataract refers to the clouding of the natural lens in the eye; it is the most cause of vision loss in people over the age of 40 and is the leading cause of blindness in the world. Myopia is a very common condition that affects around 25% of the general population. High myopia (extreme short sightedness) is very difficult to treat/correct using standard contact lenses or spectacles, because of the thickness of the lenses needed to correct the vision. This is where an intraocular lens (IOL) - a synthetic artificial lens implanted into the eye to replace the natural lens - is a very effective treatment.

Notes to editors

About Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai

Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai (MEHD) is the first overseas branch of Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the oldest and one of the largest centres for ophthalmic treatment, teaching and research in the world. Located at the Al Razi Medical Complex in Dubai Health Care City, the facility provides day case surgery and outpatient diagnostic and treatment services, for a variety of surgical and non-surgical eye conditions. MEHD will also raise standards for research and teaching in the region. MEHD is owned and managed by the NHS Foundation Trust, and maintains close links with London, to ensure that patients in the GCC receive the best eye care treatment in the world.

Issued on behalf of Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai by WPR.

SOURCE Moorfields Eye Hospital
China's Philanthropist of the Year Charles Chen Yidan to award $7.6 million annually for education research and development.

HONG KONG, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The official nomination procedure for the largest international prize in education research and development The Yidan Prize has been launched. The Yidan Prize established by Charles Chen Yidan, core founder of Chinese internet company Tencent and China's Philanthropist of the Year, recognizes individuals whose work transforms education in an innovative way that can be repeated around the world to provide access and improve the quality of education for all.

In early September Mr. Chen visited the USA to introduce the Yidan Prize to leading members of the academic community as well as facilitate dialogue on the future of education with a number of educational institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also had meetings with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and among other foundations. During his stay in the USA, Mr. Chen gave a keynote at UBS Philanthropy Forum -- Americas.

Speaking on his visit to the USA, Mr. Chen said: "The idea of the Yidan Prize is to highlight awareness of the best projects and ideas out there today that could benefit people all around the world. There are fantastic initiatives all across the United States. Some schools are working with the idea of games as the way to a child's mind. Others are engaged in 'flipping' the school program, so that children watch their lessons at home and do their homework at school, under the supervision of the teacher. Some are working with nature and the environment as the entry point to a child's mind. Personalization of the school program allows for the interests, strengths and weaknesses of each child to form his or her curriculum, starting from a young age and continuing through higher education. I want not only to show my support with grant money associated with the Prize, but also to spread the word about best practice that could be accessed by all. I hope we receive many nominations from the United States and other countries."

After the Yidan Prize Foundation's visit to the USA, the team will head off to Canada as part of its outreach to North America. During the nomination period from this September to March 2017, the Foundation plans to visit Europe, Asia and other regions to call for more high quality nominations from across the globe.

Each nomination will be reviewed by a jury of highly respected experts led by former director-general of UNESCO Dr. Kichiro Matsuura. The Prize is divided between two categories -- The Yidan Prize for Education Research and the Yidan Prize for Education Development. The two independent judging panels will screen valid nominations and select a candidate for each prize category. Prof Paul Chu Ching-wu, professor of physics, T.L.L., temple chair of science, University of Houston heads the Yidan Prize for Education Research panel, and Dorothy K. Gordon, director-general of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT leads the Yidan Prize for Education Development panel.

Judging committee will review each nomination based on the criteria covering sustainability, future orientation, ability to achieve transformation and spirit of innovation. The first laureates will be announced in September 2017.

The Yidan Prize in education research and development will become the largest educational prize in the world. Each recipient will receive a total of HK$30 million (about $3.8 million), with a cash award of HK$15 million (about $1.9 million), and another HK$15 million (about $1.9 million) impact investment, to finance the winners' research or projects. The Prize is backed by an endowment trust of HK$2.5 billion (about $320 million).

For nominees:

Nominations can be made by individuals or institutions -- including schools, international organizations and private companies -- from anywhere in the world. Self-nomination is allowed in exceptional cases.

Submissions must be made through the Yidan Prize website by March 31 2017. Nominations will be reviewed by international Judging Committee chaired by Dr Koichiro Matsuura, former director-general of UNESCO. The laureates are to announced in September 2017 and awarded at the Yidan Prize Summit in December 2017.

To submit a nomination: https://nomination.yidanprize.org

Lawrence Lui

Tel: +852-2155-1582

Email: lawrence@yidanprize.org

Related Links

http://nomination.yidanprize.org



SOURCE Yidan Prize Foundation
TEHRAN, Iran, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Global OConnect, an unprecedented cross-border e-commerce platform committed to connecting global businesses with China, is launching the Foshan Household Essentials (FHE) brand experience center in Tehran, Iran from September 25 through December 25, taking a major step to introduce Chinese companies to Iran to explore further business opportunities.

With a total area of 5,200 square meters, the center is hosted at Behnoush Building, 9km Jade Makhsos Karaj, Kheyabane Shahid Mohammad Pur in Tehran to display a wide array of household essentials from Foshan, among which the general Foshan furniture industry's brand presentation will last one year.

The endeavor is part of Global OConnect's grand plan to bring business opportunities and partnerships for Chinese brands in Iran and the Middle East, with an aim to change how Iranians think of "made-in-China" products in the past as cheap and low quality by introducing the new, best quality products and brands from China.

The FHE will facilitate both online and offline events to highlight China's furniture manufacturing base and Foshan's booming household essentials businesses. The three-month exhibition will feature 19 top Foshan furniture companies including Foshan Qixin, Dongmin and Qi He Furniture Company, 12 leading ceramic companies such as Monalisa Group, Foshan Dongpeng Ceramic Company and Foshan Nanhai Sannora Sanitary Ware Company, as well as 32 major household appliance companies including Midea, Galanz and Foshan EPDA Electronic Technology Company, all internationally-acclaimed brands that can represent the high-quality of "New Made-in-China" products.

"Foshan has gained strategic advantages that are supported by a whole industry chain, rich resources and innovative thinking. Through introducing products of quality from Foshan, we want to reverse the stereotype of China products that are cost effective and present a new image of Chinese brands to the Iranian market through our groundbreaking e-commerce platforms that combine online business with showroom displays," said Kevin Fenn, founder and Chairman of Global OConnect.

This win-win China-Iran partnership in the furniture industry paves the way for leading Chinese industries to research the Iranian market. It is also a milestone in China-Iran cooperation in trade and the economy, a mutually beneficial collaboration that introduces high standard industries from China and encourages Chinese manufacturers to seek opportunities globally.

With Guangdong Province signing an agreement to expand cooperation with Qeshm Island, one of Iran's free trade zones, earlier this year, Global OConnect's innovative foreign trade platforms will further develop individualized plans for Foshan and more of China's competitive industries to enter the emerging markets in Iran and the Middle East by integrating all resources of logistics, custom clearance, payments, localized legal, branding, market survey and other services to provide comprehensive solutions for Chinese companies to promote their businesses and to develop future investment plans.

The second largest economic power in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia, Iran is fully recovering from recently-lifted economic sanctions and has great market potential. Trade between China and Iran presents an unprecedented opportunity. Global OConnect will not only bring investments and create more job opportunities in Iran and the Middle East in this context, but also establish new trade and investment landmark in the dynamic and promising regions.

About Global OConnect

Established in 2015 and partly funded by the state, Global OConnect Cross-Border E-commerce Co. Ltd. is an essential and organic component of China's national economic strategy of going abroad. The company's mission is to introduce China-made products globally in a more interactive and efficient way.

SOURCE Global OConnect
LONDON, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

New documentary film from Johnnie Walker Storyline

"Can you really ignore what's in front of your eyes? Because tomorrow it could be me. I could be on a boat with my family and I would like to be helped," says fisherman Stratis Valamios in Ode to Lesvos, a new documentary film from Johnnie Walker Storyline.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409341 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409343 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409344 )



This time 12 months ago, Stratis' life changed beyond recognition as he spent months on end rescuing men, women and children from the waters around his home. His village, with a population of just 150, became the front line of the refugee crisis as hundreds of thousands of people came ashore, fleeing war and seeking a better future.

The positive response of the people of Lesvos who, last year alone, helped almost half a million refugees making the dangerous voyage across the Aegean Sea, has been documented in Ode to Lesvos. The film was created by Scotch whisky maker Johnnie Walker as part of its Storyline initiative, which gives a voice to real life stories from around the world.

Ode to Lesvos is a documentary short that tells the stories of the islanders whose uncompromising compassion has earned some of them, including Stratis, fellow fisherman Thanassis Marmarinos and 85-year-old Aimilia Kamvisi a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Throughout the past year, headlines from the region have naturally focused on the tragic aspects of the unfolding human drama in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Ode to Lesvos shines a light on a lesser told story - the inspiring response of islanders who opened their hearts to the refugees and whose positivity drove them to rescue people from the sea, give shelter, and provide food and water.

As part of the launch of Ode to Lesvos, Johnnie Walker is supporting Mercy Corps, a leading global organisation that helps people around the world survive and thrive after conflict, crisis and natural disaster. Since the Syrian war began, Mercy Corps has helped more than 7.7million people affected by the crisis and expanded its programming to Greece and The Balkans in response to the migration crisis.

Simon O'Connell, Executive Director, Mercy Corps Europe, said: "The migration crisis continues to have a huge impact on the world in which we live. It is vitally important that we are able to tell these kinds of stories and raise awareness of the issues faced by those who are forcibly displaced and the communities who receive them.

"It is our hope that by working with Johnnie Walker to share the remarkable story of how the islanders of Lesvos responded to the plight of refugees last summer, we will inspire others to positive actions. There is a thread of humanity that links each and every one of us and when someone needs help, we must be present."

Speaking about Ode to Lesvos Guy Escolme, Global Brand Director at Johnnie Walker, said: "The film represents one chapter in the evolving, larger story of the refugee crisis but it is one that highlights how acts of kindness and positivity made a difference to the lives of those who made a dangerous journey in search of a better future. We hope people will be inspired by Ode to Lesvos and one way they can respond is by supporting the efforts of Mercy Corps, a leading global organisation whose work through this crisis and many others around the world has brought the promise of hope and possibility to hundreds of thousands of displaced people."

In addition to encouraging people to donate to the work of Mercy Corps, Johnnie Walker is also continuing to work with the local community featured in the Ode to Lesvos to identify a number of local projects that will make a positive impact as they look to life beyond the crisis.

Ode to Lesvos has been directed by Sundance Film Festival-winning director Talal Derki. "This was a deeply personal project, influenced by my life experience of the Syrian and Greek cultures" said Derki, himself a Syrian exile who was honoured at Sundance for his documentary on the war in his homeland - Return to Homs.

He continued: "Following the events of last summer and knowing first-hand the despair migrants face as they seek refuge and a better future for their families, I felt compelled to tell the inspiring story of the response of the community of Lesvos. Their enduring positivity, readiness to help, and, above all, humanity remind the world that it is possible to make tomorrow better than today."

Ode to Lesvos is being released in time for International Peace Day (September 21) and can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/INkT00ewy48?list=PLxitlhQXKCQyzUWycTBoQ_7zvuYr22lj-

People can donate to the work of Mercy Corps by visiting: http://www.mercycorps.org/johnniewalker

Notes to Editors

About Diageo

Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol with an outstanding collection of brands including Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, J&B, Buchanan's and Windsor whiskies, Smirnoff and Ciroc vodkas, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Don Julio, Tanqueray and Guinness.

Diageo is listed on both the London Stock Exchange (DGE) and the New York Stock Exchange (DEO) and our products are sold in more than 180 countries around the world. For more information about Diageo, our people, our brands, and performance, visit us at http://www.diageo.com. Visit Diageo's global responsible drinking resource, http://www.DRINKiQ.com, for information, initiatives, and ways to share best practice.

Celebrating life, every day, everywhere.

The JOHNNIE WALKER and KEEP WALKING words, the Striding Figure device and associated logos are trademarks  John Walker & Sons 2016.

Enjoy Johnnie Walker responsibly.

DRINKiQ.com

SOURCE Johnnie Walker
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Planet today hosted EU Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska at their San Francisco office and manufacturing facility. Bienkowska is the EU Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). In her position, Commissioner Bienkowska works to ensure that the EU remains a healthy place for entrepreneurs and new technology companies. She is also responsible for the EU's space policy, which aims to open up new opportunities for space-based applications and services and to attract new players to enter the space industry.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150928/271386LOGO

As a space technology company with offices in Berlin and Amsterdam, Planet was excited to host Commissioner Bienkowska. During her visit, she toured Planet's satellite manufacturing facilities and learned about Planet's one-of-a-kind, automated data chain that includes a growing constellation of over 65 imaging satellites; a global network of ground stations; a cloud-based data processing pipeline; and an online software product that allows end-users to access and analyze satellite imagery instantly online.

"Hosting Commissioner Bienkowska at Planet's offices in San Francisco was an honour," said Will Marshall, Planet CEO and Co-Founder. "Planet's expansion in Europe with our Amsterdam office and RapidEye team in Berlin means EU space policy and data applications are a top priority. We very much enjoyed hearing about the Commissioner's vision for expanding opportunities for innovation in Europe and look forward to playing a central role in the EU's participation in the Space Renaissance."

During the Commissioner's visit, discussions with Planet's leadership centered on the hosting of EU-derived data streams on Planet's platform as well as the region's broader space policies. "We are working to ensure that Europe offers exciting opportunities for space technology which ultimately delivers new apps and services," said Commissioner Bienkowska following the visit.

Planet looks forward to continuing a fruitful dialogue with Commissioner Bienkowska regarding the state of space technology and new data sources in the EU.

About Planet:

Planet designs, builds and operates the world's largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. Planet's mission is to image the entire Earth, every day and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. With the complementary RapidEye constellation, Planet has an image archive from 2009 and a network of over one hundred partners around the world. See change. Change the world. To learn more visit http://www.planet.com.

Media Contact:

Trevor Hammond

press@planet.com

1 (415) 829-3313

Related Links

https://www.planet.com



SOURCE Planet
NEW YORK, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

UN General Assembly -- The Clooney Foundation for Justice has launched a private sector initiative designed to educate all out-of-school children in Lebanon, including Syrian refugees. Google.Org, Virgin Unite, the Radcliffe Foundation, and the SABIS Foundation are among the founding partners who, along with the Clooney Foundation, are contributing funding and resources to the initiative.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410374LOGO )



The private sector initiative comes amid growing estimates of the number of out-of-school Syrian refugees in Lebanon. It comes in answer to an UNHCR call "for governments, donors, humanitarian agencies, and development partners as well as private-sector partners to strengthen their commitment to ensuring that every child receives a quality education." Of the half-million Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, 200,000 of them are not enrolled in school, even with a significant increase in refugee enrollment thanks to initiatives undertaken by the Lebanese government.

George and Amal Clooney, both staunch supporters of human rights, made the official announcement of the project and showed a video in a UN General Assembly session calling the private sector to action. "We want to get every single out-of-school child in Lebanon an education," remarked Amal Clooney. "Let's not lose an entire generation of people because they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time," George added.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice will be working with SABIS, a global education management company, to roll out a phased plan to open schools starting in September 2017. In the first year of the plan, the schools will enroll between 5,000 and 10,000 refugee children as well as Lebanese children who are not enrolled in school. In subsequent years, additional schools will be added to increase capacity by up to 50,000 students per year.

The schools, which will be located in areas of Lebanon most heavily populated by Syrian refugees, will implement the SABIS Educational System, a proven educational program that is backed by 130 years of success in the region and currently used to provide over 70,000 students enrolled in SABIS Network schools around the world with a high-quality education. As with all SABIS Network schools, the schools serving the refugee children will leverage technology to drive and monitor the learning process, using digital resources that are highly interactive and capture valuable data on individual student progress to facilitate learning.

"The SABIS Network is proud to be a part of this project," said SABIS president Carl Bistany. "SABIS has worked over the past 130 years to build a reputation for excellence in education and to make a difference in the lives of the students in our schools. This project allows us to mobilize our experience and resources to give Syrian refugee children access to education so that they have a solid foundation they can continue to build on wherever they may find themselves in the future."

Speaking on behalf of Google.org, Jacquelline Fuller, the organization's director said: "Access to learning and access to information is so much a core part of our values, and we're supporting the Clooney Foundation for Justice with a $1 million grant focused on education for refugee children in Lebanon through their work with SABIS. This grant will support expanding their efforts to develop a new school model, using digital tools, for up to 10,000 out-of-school children in Lebanon. Through our employee volunteering program, we'll also provide technical expertise to help with everything from connectivity to cloud storage by having Googlers helping both on the ground and remotely."

"If you saw what I saw, you too would want to help," said Radcliffe Foundation Founder and President Frank Giustra after witnessing firsthand the plight of refugees in receptor countries. The Radcliffe Foundation has actively been responding to the refugee crisis by brokering the first private sector partnership with the Greek Ministry of Migration to create the Elpida, a residence in northern Greece with capacity for 800 of the most vulnerable refugees, 60% of them youth. It also funded the building of a receiving center with capacity for 1500 refugees arriving in the island of Lesbos. "In continuation of this important work," Mr. Giustra said "the Radcliffe Foundation is proud to be part of this coalition to educate children in Lebanon as destabilization will come when you have a lost generation of children growing up in an environment where there is no education or social support. It is in our self-interest to address the humanitarian needs of displaced people. Our failure to do so can only fuel resentment, exacerbate conflict, and further destabilize the world."

Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Unite, the non-profit foundation of Virgin Group that unites people and entrepreneurial ideas to create opportunities for a better world, also shared his remarks about the project: "The global business community and citizens of the world must embrace refugees and migrants who have escaped the daily horrors of war in their countries with love, kindness, and access to basic rights. Access to a quality education will help vulnerable young people realize their goals and aspirations and instill in them the knowledge, skills, and hope to build a future of peace for us all."

Start-up funding totaling $7 million USD is being provided by the project's founding members. Additional funding is being sourced from the private sector on an ongoing basis. To learn more about how to join the coalition, contact info@cfj.org.

SOURCE Virgin Unite
OXFORD, England, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Professor of Bioengineering Recognized for the Personal Challenges She Overcame to Undertake Ground Breaking Research in Nanomaterials

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has announced that Professor Kytai Nguyen is the winner of the first Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award. Prof. Nguyen was given the award for the personal challenges she overcame to make a significant contribution to nano-materials research and education.

The Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award aims to recognize researchers in the field of materials science and engineering who have overcome difficult circumstances to pursue their research career, however early or advanced, and are contributing meaningful insights in their particular field of investigation. Difficult circumstances may include challenges arising from gender, socioeconomic background, ethnicity/culture, disability, and/or the local economic environment.

The Materials Science Council, chaired by Professor Subra Suresh, former Director of the NSF and current President of Carnegie Mellon University, selected the winner based on her achievements and the challenges she overcame in realizing these achievements. The prize includes USD $5,000 and all-expenses-paid attendance at the award reception.

The Council were impressed with the way Prof. Nguyen overcame several challenges during her formative years including her difficult upbringing in Vietnam, and the challenges she faced when she studied in the US while learning English and working several jobs to support her studies. Most recently, she managed to successfully balance family life with an active research and teaching career.

Prof. Nguyen will receive her award on Tuesday, November 29 at a special reception during the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston, USA.

"I am truly honored to receive the Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award," said Prof. Nguyen about her recognition. "I am grateful for the help that I received from my family, mentors, students and colleagues at the University of Texas at Arlington. There are many opportunities out there for young scientists that can be attainable even though there may be challenges in your life. Trust yourself, persevere through your challenges, and use your inner determination and strength to seek your own success."

"Kytai's story really stood out from the nominations, and the Materials Science Council were unanimous in their decision to award her," said Subra Suresh, chair of the Materials Science Council and President of Carnegie Mellon University. "Not only has she been a pioneer in the development of nanoparticles for controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering application but she achieved this having overcome substantial obstacles throughout all of the formative stages of her life and career. We hope that this award will inspire other researchers who are facing challenges to see what can be achieved when working in and overcoming difficult circumstances."

Nominations for the 2017 edition of the Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award are now open. Applications can be submitted until February 28, 2017.

Read more on Elsevier Connect.

Notes to editors

Reporters wishing to attend the award ceremony on November 29 in Boston, or who would like to interview Prof. Nguyen can contact Joe d'Angelo: j.dangelo@elsevier.com.

About the Materials Science Council

Commencing in 2014, the Materials Science Council is undertaking a range of activities with Elsevier to help support the research community in three ways: supporting the sharing and communication of scientific information and data through new technology platforms and pathways; helping researchers communicate the importance of materials science to the general public; and rewarding researchers, particularly those working in difficult conditions or in countries with limited infrastructure.



About Materials Today

Materials Today is a community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience. Supported by Elsevier, we publish high impact peer-reviewed journals and industry magazines, organize academic conferences, broadcast educational webinars and much more.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions - among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey - and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries.

Media contacts

Joe d'Angelo

Elsevier

+441865843700

j.dangelo@elsevier.com



SOURCE Elsevier
Nintex InspireX brings together business and IT decision makers who are driving digital workflow automation to improve how they work

BELLEVUE, Washington, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Nintex announced today that registration for its second annual customer and partner conference, Nintex InspireX, is open. The event will be held February 13-15, 2017, in New Orleans at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410166

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150810/257450LOGO

Register now for Nintex InspireX which will be held February 13-15, 2017, in New Orleans at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. Early bird pricing of $695 is valid until November 1, 2016. Confirm your attendance at www.nintex.com/inspirex. InspireX is a three-day conference which provides attendees with an opportunity to connect and collaborate with Nintex customers and partners from around the globe. Attendees will gain new knowledge about how to solve process and document generation challenges and see first-hand how Nintex technology can improve how they work.

Register for Nintex InspireX 2017 at www.nintex.com/inspirex. Early bird pricing of $695 is valid until November 1, 2016.

InspireX is a three-day conference which provides attendees with an opportunity to connect and collaborate with Nintex customers and partners from around the globe. Attendees will gain new knowledge about how to solve process and document generation challenges and see first-hand how Nintex technology can improve how they work.

"Nintex InspireX is truly awe-inspiring," says Anthony Gouder, business improvement analyst at Hawkes Bay Regional Council (HBRC). "Coming all the way from New Zealand to attend the inaugural event in 2016, I immediately connected with workflow peers from around the world and brought back learnings that I have already applied to improve our business processes at HBRC."

Attendee benefits include:

The latest product news and updates from Nintex including its breakthrough offerings  Nintex Workflow Cloud , Nintex Hawkeye , and Nintex Drawloop Document Generation

, , and The opportunity to network with hundreds of Nintex customers, partners, and employees who will share insights into process automation and document generation best practices

A selection of more than 50 breakout sessions, interactive demos, and other education programs that feature valuable process automation and document generation case studies and examples from customers and partners

Gain valuable insights about the latest digital transformation trends and technologies and how to apply them from industry leaders including Carl Lehmann of 451 Research, Jim Lundy of Aragon Research, and Peter Coffee of Salesforce

"InspireX is a powerful opportunity for our community of customers, partners and employees to come together to collaborate on creative new ways to get work done across, within and outside of each organization," says Nintex CEO John Burton. "We're looking forward to hosting an exciting and educational event in New Orleans in February 2017."

Media Contact

Kristin Treat

Nintex Public Relations

kristin.treat@nintex.com

cell: (215) 317-9091

Product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Related Links

http://www.nintex.com



SOURCE Nintex
ROVANIEMI, Finland, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

As Santa Claus prepares for the Christmas ahead in his official hometown Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle in Lapland, Finland, he started thinking about all the Chinese people that have visited him recently: how could he better reach them and all their friends in China?

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409205 )



(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409206 )



Luckily, one of his savvy elves is up to date with social networking, and recommended Santa join Weibo, China's most popular social medium. Weibo and Santa Claus were a perfect match, and they quickly decided to work together for the common good.

Santa will be sharing moments of his life at the Arctic Circle

As a result, Santa Claus has now officially joined the Weibo community! The world's most famous person's verified personal Weibo account will be launched on Thursday September 22nd, and Santa Claus is eager to get in contact with all his friends in China.

- Ni hao! I'm so happy I finally have a terrific way of reaching all my Chinese friends. I have many wonderful things to share with you from my hometown Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland, says Santa Claus.

Through his Weibo account, Santa plans to share special moments of his life at the Arctic Circle, where he receives visitors every single day of the year. Besides everyday chores, the changing seasons and phenomena like the Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun make sure Santa Claus always has some interesting posts from Rovaniemi for his followers.

Mayor of Rovaniemi: we are thrilled

Rovaniemi, the Official Hometown of Santa Claus, is thrilled to have its premier resident reach a whole new audience across the globe and hope many of Santa's Chinese friends have the chance of meeting him in person one day.

- Meeting Santa Claus is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many, and Rovaniemi is thrilled to offer the opportunity to Chinese travellers looking for a unique holiday in Lapland, says Mayor Esko Lotvonen.

Santa Claus' verified Weibo account: http://www.weibo.com/santaclausofficial

Further information :

Sanna Karkkainen

Managing Director, Visit Rovaniemi, Finland

+358-40-576-3414

sanna.karkkainen@visitrovaniemi.fi

SOURCE Visit Rovaniemi (www.visitrovaniemi.fi)
LONDON, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

62% of expats in Singapore experience an increase in their earnings

Switzerland , New Zealand and Sweden top the Economics, Experience and Family expat league tables

Expat millennials are moving abroad to find purpose in their career

For the second year in a row, Singapore takes the top spot in HSBC's Expat Explorer country league table. Expatriates in Singapore enjoy some of the world's best financial rewards and career opportunities, while benefiting from an excellent quality of life and a safe, family-friendly environment.

Expats' ratings of 45 host countries are available to explore online through the Expat Explorer interactive tool: http://www.expatexplorer.hsbc.com/survey

More than three in five (62%) expats in Singapore say it is a good place to progress their career, with the same proportion seeing their earnings rise after moving to the country (compared with 43% and 42% respectively of expats globally). The average annual income for expats in Singapore is USD139,000 (compared with USD97,000 across the world), while nearly a quarter (23%) earn more than USD200,000 (more than twice the global expat average of 11%).

Overall, 66% of expats agree that Singapore offers a better quality of life than their home country (compared to 52% of expats globally), while three quarters (75%) say the quality of education in Singapore is better than at home, the highest proportion in the world (global average 43%).

Expat Explorer 2016 overall league table The best countries for expats to live and work 1. Singapore 2. New Zealand 3. Canada 4. Czech Republic 5. Switzerland 6. Norway 7. Austria 8. Sweden 9. Bahrain 10.Germany

Now in its ninth year, Expat Explorer is the largest and one of the longest running surveys of expats, with 26,871 respondents sharing their views on life abroad including careers, financial wellbeing, quality of life and ease of settling for children.

The 2016 Expat Explorer report also reveals:

Millennials are drawn to expat life to find more purpose in their careers

Nearly a quarter (22%) of expats aged 18-34 moved abroad to find more purpose in their career. This compares to 14% of those aged 34-54 and only 7% of those aged 55 and over. Millennials are also the most likely to embrace expat life in search of a new challenge: more than two in five (43%) say this, compared with 38% of those aged 34-54 and only 30% of those aged 55 and over. Millennials are finding the purpose they seek, with almost half (49%) reporting that they are more fulfilled at work than they were in their home country.

Expat life accelerates progress towards financial goals

Far from slowing progress towards their longer term financial goals, expats find many are fast tracked by life abroad. Around two in five expats say that moving abroad has accelerated their progress towards saving for retirement (40%) or towards buying a property (41%), compared to around one in five (20% and 19% respectively) whose move abroad has slowed their progress towards these financial goals. Almost a third (29%) of expats say living abroad has helped them to save towards their children's education more quickly, compared to only 15% who say it has slowed them down.

The top expat destinations for economics, experience and family are:

Economics Experience Family 1. Switzerland 1. New Zealand 1. Sweden 2. Singapore 2. Spain 2. Czech Republic 3. Germany 3. Canada 3. Singapore 4. Norway 4. Singapore 4. New Zealand 5. UAE 5. Australia 5. Canada

#1 for Economics - Switzerland

Switzerland shines for the second year in a row, offering unrivalled financial wellbeing and a strong economy for expats. Nearly nine in ten (87%) expats living there in Switzerland feel confident about the political stability of the country and four in five (80%) feel confident about its economy. Three quarters (75%) of expats say the earning prospects are better in Switzerland than they are back in their home country, with an average annual income of USD188,000. Nearly three quarters (71%) of expats in Switzerland are able to save more of their income there, while 73% now have more disposable income. This compares to global expat averages of 53% and 56% respectively.

#1 for Experience - New Zealand

New Zealand leads the way for an unrivalled expat experience. The vast majority (83%) of expats there praise the country's environment (air pollution, water quality) as better than in their home country, and nearly three quarters (73%) say their quality of life has improved, which compares to 52% of expats globally. Nearly three quarters (72%) of expats are integrating well with the local people and culture, and the majority (57%) agree that New Zealand welcomes people regardless of faith, races, gender and sexual orientation better than their home country.

#1 for Family - Sweden

Sweden offers an excellent environment for expat families. Nearly three quarters (75%) of expat parents in Sweden rate their children's quality of life as better than back home. Nearly half (46%) say the quality of education in Sweden is better and 72% say it is less expensive. A similar proportion (75%) believe the quality of childcare available in Sweden is better than it is at home.

Dean Blackburn, Head of HSBC Expat, comments:

"Expats consistently tell us that moving abroad has helped them achieve their ambitions and long-term financial goals, from getting access to better education for their children to buying property or saving more for retirement. Most expats also find that their quality of life has improved since making the move - and that they are integrating well with the local people and culture."

Follow Expat Explorer and join the debate online:

Tweet at: http://www.twitter.com/expatexplorer

Share your expat experiences: http://www.expatexplorer.blogspot.com/

See how your country compares and read the report: http://www.expatexplorer.hsbc.com/survey

Notes to editors

About the Expat Explorer survey and country league table

An expatriate is defined as anyone over 18 years old, currently living away from their country of origin/home country.

The Expat Explorer survey was completed by 26,871 expats from 190 countries through an online questionnaire in March and April 2016.

A minimum sample of 100 expat respondents and at least 30 expat parents is required for a country to be included in the league tables, with 45 countries qualifying in 2016.

About HSBC Group

HSBC Holdings plc, the parent company of the HSBC Group, is headquartered in London. The Group serves customers worldwide from around 4,400 offices in 71 countries and territories in Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. With assets of US$2,608bn at 30 June 2016, HSBC is one of the world's largest banking and financial services organisations.

About HSBC Expat

HSBC Expat is a trading name of HSBC Bank International Limited. HSBC Expat is an award winning provider of expat financial services, with its head office based in Jersey, Channel Islands. It also has representation in Dubai and Hong Kong. As part of HSBC Holdings plc, HSBC Expat has the experience to offer tailored financial solutions to customers living and working abroad. For more information visit: http://www.expat.hsbc.com

Media enquiries to:

Auriane Potel

HSBC

Phone: +44-207-991-0081

Email: auriane.potel@hsbc.com

Ben Robinson / Delia Williams-Falokun

Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Phone: +44-207-413-3499 / 413-3041

Email: ben.robinson@hkstrategies.com / Delia.Williams-Falokun@hkstrategies.com

SOURCE HSBC Expat
The projects, primarily ground-mounted in order to solve the problem of restricted roof space, will be constructed in areas where there is a high demand for daily energy consumption. Additionally, Urban Solar Farms will incorporate the integration of solar power with energy storage to support peak energy demand requirements, as well as grid stability and help defer utility substation and network upgrades.

"This groundbreaking study has the potential to impact the way municipalities across South Africa accommodate privately-owned clean power generation within their distribution borders," said SolarReserve's CEO Kevin Smith, who signed the grant alongside USTDA Director Leocadia I. Zak. "It represents a unique approach to involving the private sector in expanding South Africa's generation capacity, while stimulating job growth and small business development."

Urban Solar Farms have the potential to fill a niche market in South Africa for mid-sized generation projects that ensure a reliable, clean power supply for customers with substantial energy needs.

"This unique private sector-led power solution is a clear demonstration of the impact Power Africa is having on Africa's economic development," said Director Zak. "Working together with an innovative American company and a strong partner in South Africa, USTDA is proud to support increased use of renewable energy that will spur broader gains across the economy."

SolarReserve is a leading global energy developer, with 246 megawatts of solar capacity already on-line in South Africa, an additional 100 megawatts of solar thermal with energy storage awarded by the South Africa Department of Energy, and 450 megawatts bid into the latest round of bidding in South Africa. SolarReserve has selected U.S. firm Mott MacDonald, Inc., a global management, engineering and development consultancy working in over 140 countries, to conduct a critical study that will support SolarReserve with various technical, economic, financial, legal, regulatory, permitting and commercial inputs in order for SolarReserve to complete its strategic analysis and to progress financing and begin implementing the projects.

This grant agreement was signed during the U.S.-Africa Business Forum in New York City, which is focused on strengthening trade and financial ties between the United States and Africa.

About SolarReserve

SolarReserve is a leading global developer of solar power projects, which include electricity generation by solar thermal energy and photovoltaic panels. The company currently has more than $1.8 billion of projects in operation worldwide, with development and long-term power contracts for 482 megawatts of solar projects representing $2.8 billion of project capital. In addition, SolarReserve has commercialized a proprietary advanced solar thermal technology with integrated energy storage that solves the intermittency issues experienced with other renewable energy sources. Since the company's formation in early 2008, SolarReserve's experienced team has assembled an extensive global development pipeline of 10 gigawatts (GW) across the world's most attractive, high growth renewable energy markets. SolarReserve is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and maintains a global presence with seven international offices strategically located in Africa, the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and Europe to support its widespread project development activities across more than 20 countries.

Media Contact:

Mary Grikas, (310) 315-2274

mary.grikas@solarreserve.com

Related Links

http://www.solarreserve.com



SOURCE SolarReserve
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On Aug. 31, 2016, the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute (TCAI) at St. David's Medical Center became the first facility in the United States to use the THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter after it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this month.

The procedure was performed by Andrea Natale, M.D., F.H.R.S., F.A.C.C., F.E.S.C., cardiac electrophysiologist and executive medical director of TCAI. TCAI was also part of the clinical trial to study the use of the THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter to treat Atrial Fibrillation, or A Fib, a common heart rhythm disorder.

The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter enables doctors to accurately control the amount of contact force applied to the heart wall during radiofrequency catheter ablation procedures. This can increase the effectiveness and safety of the procedure for patients.

During catheter ablation, doctors insert a therapeutic catheter through a small incision in the groin, where it is then weaved up to the heart through a blood vessel. Once it reaches the left upper chamber of the heart (atrium), radiofrequency energy is delivered to the heart wall to create lesions that block faulty electrical impulses that can cause heart rhythm disorders. Providing doctors with the ability to apply stable contact force during catheter ablation has been shown to improve patient outcomes, as poor tissue contact force may result in incomplete lesion formation that could result in the need for additional treatment. Too much contact force may damage the tissue.

"The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter represents a significant advancement for the clinical community," Dr. Natale said. "Numerous trials, including the SMART-AF and SMART-SF studies, have proven that this technology enables physicians to achieve targeted stability in the defined contact force range, leading to shorter procedure times and enhanced results without compromising safety."

The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter is the only approved device pairing contact force technology with a porous tip designed to optimize efficiency by providing uniform cooling at half the flow rate of earlier generation irrigated catheters, easing the fluid management process.

The catheter is seamlessly integrated with the CARTO 3 System, which combines contact force technology, 3D mapping, and advanced navigation capabilities to provide active measurement of stable contact force and catheter tip location.

Clinical data have proven the safety of the device when used to treat drug refractory paroxysmal A Fib. The SMART-AF trial, a multicenter, prospective study of the earlier generation THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH technology, revealed no unanticipated adverse events and demonstrated a success rate of greater than 80 percent, with increased stability within the contact force range. The more recent SMART-SF study, which tested the newest generation THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter, demonstrated excellent safety results as well. The study found an 18.7 percent reduction in overall procedure time and a 14.2 percent reduction in overall ablation time when compared to the SMART-AF study. It also demonstrated a 55.2 percent reduction in total fluoroscopy time, limiting radiation exposure to patients.

The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter, manufactured by Biosense Webster, was approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. on Aug. 15, 2016.

A Fib is the most prevalent heart rhythm disorder and a leading cause of stroke among people 65 years and older. An estimated 3 million people in the United States and 20 million worldwide are affected by A Fib, and its prevalence is projected to increase significantly as the population ages. A Fib is a progressive disease and increases in severity and frequency as patients get older. Left untreated, it can lead to heart valve disease, sleep apnea, chronic fatigue, congestive heart failure and stroke. Public health implications of A Fib are a growing concern because those with A Fib are at an increased risk of morbidity and mortality, as well as a reduced quality of life. The disorder is estimated to be responsible for 88,000 deaths each year.

Media Contacts:

Erin Ochoa or Kristin Marcum

Elizabeth Christian Public Relations

512.472.9599

Related Links

http://www.tcainstitute.com



SOURCE Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute (TCAI) at St. David's Medical Center
PITTSBURGH, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The ninth annual DVE Rocks for Children's Radiothon raised over $605,000 for Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation, making it the third year in a row surpassing $600,000 in donations. The radiothon broadcasted live from the Eat'n Park Atrium at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC Thursday, September 15 through Saturday, September 17.

With this year's fundraising, the event has exceeded more than $4 million in total giving for Children's Hospital over the past nine years.

102.5 WDVE Rocks' on-air personalities Randy Baumann, Bill Crawford, Val Porter, Mike Prisuta, Michele Michaels and Sean McDowell broadcasted on-site to encourage listeners to donate to the radiothon and to tell stories of outstanding care and incredible courage from patients, families and staff from Children's Hospital.

"We want to thank WDVE and its listeners for their tremendous support. This year, and for the past nine years, the DVE community has given generously to sick and injured kids so they can get back to what they do best  being a kid," said Greg Barrett, president, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation. "Radiothon showcases our community coming together supporting our kids, and highlights how Children's will always be supported by the Pittsburgh community."

The three-day radiothon featured live performances from Scott Blasey of The Clarks, local musicians Josh and Gab, and Clinton Clegg and Mike DeLuca from the Commonheart. Also, special guests included Thomas Tull, Chairman and CEO of Legendary Pictures, and the 2016 Little League World Series Champions from Maine-Endwell, NY. Pittsburgh Steelers players, Arthur Moats, B.J. Finney, Travis Feeney, supported the Radiothon by answering phones and visiting patients and families.

"WDVE's Rocks for Children's Radiothon continues to improve the life of the families in the Pittsburgh community," said Tim McAleer, Market President for iHeartMedia Pittsburgh. "We truly appreciate the generosity of the 102.5 WDVE Rocks listeners and their willingness to support their hometown children's hospital."

The presenting sponsors of this year's event were Great Clips, Northwood Realty Services, and Rohrich Toyota.

For more information about the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation or to donate, please visit www.givetochildrens.org.

Contact: Andrea Kunicky

Phone: 412-692-6254

E-mail: [email protected]

Contact: Anthony Alfonsi

Phone: 412-937-1441

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation

Related Links

http://www.givetochildrens.org


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- At the UN Women HeForShe second anniversary event, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, actor Edgar Ramirez spoke about how the social norms that define masculinity are destructive for men, women and societies as a whole. By posing the philosophical question, "what does it mean to be human?", Ramirez posited that even though it is our feelings that make us human, the expression of feelings is often discouraged by society, particularly for men and boys. Ramirez said the consequences are a burden for everyone and an impediment to gender equality, stating, "In the journey for equality, women and men are like two strands of DNA wrapped together in an embrace. Our burdens are as intertwined as our common destiny. The constraints that burden me will eventually burden you. And the same is true in reverse: as long as you are burdened, I am too. By recognizing this inter-dependence, I can work for your well-being and know that I am also working towards my own. I can know that whatever action I take to free you, also frees me. This is not just what makes us human. This is what makes us a human family."

Watch Full Video: http://www.heforshe.org/en/newsroom/events/heforshe-turns-two-live

Download Full Video: https://we.tl/ilD2XlB8lS

Photos from the events will be available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/heforshe/

ABOUT UN WOMEN

UN Women is the UN entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide. For more information, visit www.unwomen.org. UN Women, 220 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017, New York. Tel: +1 646 781-4400. Fax: +1 646 781-4496.

ABOUT HeForShe

Created by UN Women, the HeForShe solidarity movement for gender equality provides a systematic approach and targeted platform on which men and boys can engage and become change agents towards the achievement of gender equality. HeForShe invites men and boys to build on the work of the women's movement as equal partners, crafting and implementing a shared vision of gender equality that will benefit all of humanity. For more information, visit http://www.heforshe.org

Media contact:

Abigail Somma

Phone and email:

646.781.4588

[email protected]

SOURCE UN Women

Related Links

http://www.unwomen.org


BRYN MAWR, Pa., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A survey of families with children with special needs found that a large majority (82%) of caregivers are concerned that they do not have enough financial resources to last their disabled relative's entire lifetime. Just as alarming, because of the time and cost required for caring for those with special needs, 30% of caregivers are not saving at all for their own retirement.

These findings are part of the new Special Needs Caregiver Survey from The American College of Financial Services, which sought to better understand the challenges that caregivers of special needs children and young adults face managing their day-to-day and long-term finances, as well as explore possible solutions that may help these households prepare for their dependent relative's financial futures.

"Caring for a child with special needs is a full time job that requires all of your emotional and physical energy, which is why it makes sense that planning beyond the present is often delayed or ignored," said Professor Adam Beck, Director of The American College MassMutual Center for Special Needs Planning. "Leaving a special needs child financially insecure is a serious problem and this study confirms that a majority of special needs families lack the most basic preparations for their own financial security and that of their child."

Disabled Americans' Financial Crisis

Caregivers are concerned about what the future holds for their special needs relative, and for good reason. Alarmingly, 67% of Americans with special needs have no Special Needs Trust established for them, which puts them at imminent risk of losing Medicaid coverage and Social Security benefits.

Almost nine in ten caregivers (87%) are concerned about what will happen to their special needs relative when they are no longer living.

59% of caregivers have not even taken the basic step of preparing a will

60% of caregivers with life insurance have less than $300,000 of coverage and fewer than half have the protection of whole life coverage. However, the lifetime cost of caring for a dependent with autism is between $1.4 and $2.4 million .

of coverage and fewer than half have the protection of whole life coverage. However, the lifetime cost of caring for a dependent with autism is between . Only 23% of caregivers have a formal financial plan for their dependent and only 37% work with a financial advisor.

Retirement Gap

Caregivers are also concerned about their own financial future and how their caregiving responsibilities may adversely impact their retirement. Most special needs caregivers will be caregivers for the duration of their lives  encompassing their entire retirement period  yet almost one-third of this group (30%) is not saving at all for retirement.

Only 16% of caregivers strongly believe they are financial secure.

70% believe they will have to compromise their own retirement plans in order to provide for their special needs dependent.

77% are concerned they won't be able to retire when they want to.

80% of caregivers are concerned they won't be able to maintain a comfortable lifestyle throughout retirement.

"The number of children born with special needs continues to grow, and the cost of care is escalating as well. Unfortunately, the financial services profession has not made special needs planning a priority, so too many families are unprepared for their financial future," continued Beck. "However, there are well-established resources for special needs planning and advisors who specialize in serving these families. Together, these solutions can help provide financial security for both caregivers and those in need."

The Opportunity to Help Families of Those with Special Needs

Although financial advisors are viewed as important sources of financial planning advice to special needs families, most caregivers do not currently work with one. Most caregivers (63%) don't work with a financial advisor; however there is strong interest in working with a financial advisor who specializes in special needs planning. Among those who do not have a financial advisor but want one, 98% would be somewhat or very interested in working with someone with expertise in special needs financial planning issues.

Professional designations are highly valued, with 87% of those who have an advisor or want to work with one say it's important to work with a financial advisor who has professional designations.

90% of caregivers believe having an advisor who works for a company that has products and services for special needs households is important.

84% of caregivers who value designations say that they would be more inclined to work with an advisor who holds the Chartered Special Needs Consultant designation (ChSNC).

Methodology

The questionnaire for this study was designed by Greenwald & Associates in cooperation with The American College of Financial Services. Information for this study was gathered through 20-minute online interviews conducted between March 30-April 12, 2016. Respondents were recruited through the Research Now online panel, and a total of 1,015 Americans were interviewed. To qualify for participation in the study, respondents had to be unpaid caregivers to a child or adult who has some type of special needs or disability and to whom they are related; caring for a special needs individual whose condition was expected to be lifelong or to last for an indefinite or unknown duration; and needed to agree that the special needs individual will be, or is, unable to support themselves financially as a result of that condition.

About The American College of Financial Services

The American College is the nation's largest non-profit educational institution devoted to financial services. Holding the highest level of academic accreditation, The College has served as a valued business partner to banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies and others since 1927. The American College's faculty represents some of the financial services industry's foremost thought leaders. For more information, visit TheAmericanCollege.edu.

SOURCE The American College

Related Links

http://www.theamericancollege.edu


HOUSTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kraton Performance Polymers, Inc. (NYSE: KRA) is a leading global producer of styrenic block copolymer (SBC). Kraton has a history of innovation focused on driving growth for its customers. With a broad portfolio of value-enhancing polymers used in a wide variety of applications, we are pleased to introduce our newest innovation polymer that we believe will enable our customers to further expand their competitive edge.

Introducing Kraton G1653

The new developmental polymer, Kraton G1653 polymer, is a styrene-ethylene-butylene-styrene (SEBS) block copolymer. With lower molecular weight than Kraton G1652 polymer, it still retains the high tensile strength and toughness of Kraton G1652 while offering significantly lower melt and solution viscosities. Kraton G1653 is suitable for food contact and medical applications.

Features and benefits

Although Kraton G1653 retains similar physical properties as Kraton G1652, it has a much lower solution viscosity than Kraton G1652. This low solution viscosity increases solid content and decreases VOC of solvent based products, yet maintains similar processability. For coating applications, the increased solid level translates to potentially reduced coating layers and lower labor cost. For sealant applications, the increased solid content is expected to reduce shrinkage and costs associated with solvent. Kraton G1653 also can be dissolved in PCBTF at 20 percent solids, which may enable formulators to replace organic solvents with PCBTF to reduce VOCs associated with the final product.

The free flowing dense pellet form of Kraton G1653 is expected to improve storage, handling, and feeding of the polymer in comparison to SEBS polymers in powder form. The polymer has the following qualities:

Does not block together during storage

Can be transferred using conventional pneumatic conveying equipment

Does not agglomerate when dissolving in solvents, and

The dense pellet form may enable improved production rates

Potential market applications include:

Coating applications, sealants, pressure sensitive adhesives, hot melt adhesives, TPE compound, elastic compound, medical compound, color master batch, additive concentrates, oil gel, and polymer modification.

Prakash Kolluri, Vice President Sales & Marketing Asia Pacific noted, "Kraton G1653 is another new Kraton innovation polymer that was developed to meet the market trend toward lower viscosity, high flow, and lower processing temperature. We expect that Kraton G1653 will allow our customers to meet the tight VOC regulatory requirements without sacrificing performance and processability."

(NTD: covered in the "About Kraton Polymers" section below)* The product Kraton G1653 will be offered under the name Kraton MD1653 until fully commercialized.

Information for Technical Audiences

Typical properties of Kraton G1653 Properties Kraton G1653 Solution Viscosity (cP), 25% @ RT 480 MFR (g/10min) @ 230C, 2.16 kg 27 MFR (g/10min) @ 230C, 5 kg 77 Polystyrene Content (%) 30 Hardness (Shore A) 73 Tensile Strength (MPa)* > 30 Ultimate Elongation (%)* > 500 Product Form Pellet

* Properties measured on film cast from toluene solution.

Kraton G1653 offers significantly higher melt flow and lower solution viscosity than its conventional SEBS analogue. This allows formulators to develop high flow compounds with excellent properties without adding excessive oils. Compounds based on Kraton G1653 can also be extruded or molded at lower temperatures. For hot melt adhesives, the lower melt viscosity translates to lower processing temperatures, which is expected to reduce energy consumption and improve production rates.

Kraton G1653 has the same low rubber phase Tg (-48.5C) as the conventional G1600 series polymers. This rubber Tg allows the polymer to remain flexible and elastic at low temperatures. G1653 can also be compounded with random copolypropylene and extruded into clear films with superior toughness for medical applications. Such films can be heat sealed and sterilized. It can also be used as an impact modifier for rigid polymers or as an interfacial compatibilizer for polymer alloys or blends.

Packaging and availability information

Kraton G1653 is produced at Kraton's Belpre plant. It is available immediately in commercial quantities. Please contact your Kraton representative or distributors for samples.

About Kraton Polymers

Kraton Performance Polymers, Inc. (NYSE "KRA") is a leading global producer of styrenic block copolymers, specialty polymers and high-value performance products derived from pine wood pulping co-products. Kraton's polymers are used in a wide range of applications, including adhesives, coatings, consumer and personal care products, sealants and lubricants, and medical, packaging, automotive, paving, roofing and footwear products. As the largest global provider in the pine chemicals industry, the company's pine-based specialty products are sold into adhesive, road and construction and tire markets, and it produces and sells a broad range of chemical intermediates into markets that include fuel additives, oilfield chemicals, coatings, metalworking fluids and lubricants, inks, flavors and fragrances and mining. Kraton offers its products to a diverse customer base in over 70 countries worldwide. Kraton, the Kraton logo and design, and the "Giving Innovators their Edge" tagline are all trademarks of Kraton Performance Polymers, Inc., or its subsidiaries or affiliates.

Kraton Performance Polymers, Inc. and all of its affiliates, including Arizona Chemical, believe the information set forth herein to be true and accurate, but any recommendations, presentations, statements or suggestions that may be made are without any warranty or guarantee whatsoever, and shall establish no legal duty on the part of any Kraton affiliated entity. The legal responsibilities of any Kraton affiliate with respect to the products described herein are limited to those set forth in Kraton's Conditions of Sale or any effective sales contract. NOTE TO USER: by ordering/receiving Kraton product you accept the Kraton Conditions of Sale applicable in the region. All other terms are rejected. Kraton does not warrant that the products described herein are suitable for any particular uses, including, without limitation, cosmetics and/or medical uses. Persons using the products must rely on their own independent technical and legal judgment, and must conduct their own studies, registrations, and other related activities, to establish the safety and efficacy of their end products incorporating any Kraton products for any application. Nothing set forth herein shall be construed as a recommendation to use any Kraton product in any specific application or in conflict with any existing patent rights. Kraton reserves the right to withdraw any product from commercial availability and to make any changes to any existing commercial or developmental product. Kraton expressly disclaims, on behalf of all Kraton affiliates, any and all liability for any damages or injuries arising out of any activities relating to the use of any information set forth in this publication, or the use of any Kraton products.

Kraton maintains a Cosmetics, Drugs and Medical Device Policy that restricts the use of Kraton's Products in certain end use applications without Kraton's prior written consent. Accordingly, Kraton does not guarantee that Kraton's products will be available for use in all potential end use applications. Kraton's Cosmetics, Drugs and Medical Device Policy is available on Kraton's website at www.kraton.com.

Contact information:

For more information, please contact Kraton Polymers at www.kraton.com or [email protected].

Media Contact: Vaneese Bell; T: +1 281 504 4792

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SOURCE Kraton Performance Polymers, Inc.

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"We are very excited to have Felicia on our team," said Bill Scrantom, Americas Region Healthcare Leader, Arup. "Her expertise and insight will enhance the advice and solutions we provide our healthcare clients to further target efficient, positive clinical and operational outcomes. Throughout her career, she has been a pioneer in redefining, de-institutionalizing, and modernizing medical facilities. Felicia's addition will benefit both our Owner and architect clients and is the obvious next step for our growing practice."

Cleper-Borkovi's award-winning healthcare projects innovatively integrate architecture, clinical planning, landscape, interior architecture, lighting, art, and environmental design. Her past projects include Li Ka Shing Foundation Cancer Hospital of Shantou University Medical College, Laguna Honda Replacement Hospital in San Francisco, Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center, Meyer Children's Hospital in Florence, Italy, the New Acute Hospital for the SouthWest in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland and Norris Cancer Hospital and Research Institute at University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Prior to joining Arup, she held leadership positions at Anshen+Allen in San Francisco and London and Aditazz.

"Having previously collaborated with many of Arup's offices around the globe, I am thrilled to join the firm," said Cleper-Borkovi. "With its extraordinary resources and commitment to shaping a better world, I'm looking forward to strengthening our leadership in the healthcare sector."

Felicia Cleper-Borkovi is an architect with specific expertise in medical planning and in orchestrating inter-disciplinary healthcare design teams. She has a Master of Architecture degree from Ion Mincu Academy of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest and post-graduate degrees from the Royal College of Art in London, Domus Academy in Milan, Stanford Graduate School of Business and Said Business School at Oxford.

Felicia discusses the relationship between creativity and design in Doggerel's Sound bites: Maintaining the creative spirit in design.

About Arup

Arup provides planning, engineering, design, and consulting services for the most prominent projects and sites in the built environment. Since its founding in 1946, the firm has consistently delivered technical excellence, innovation, and value to its clients, while maintaining its core mission of shaping a better world. Arup opened its first US office more than 30 years ago and now employs 1,300 people in the Americas. The firm's employee-ownership structure promotes ongoing investment in joint research to yield better outcomes that benefit its clients and partners. Visit Arup's website, www.arup.com, and the online magazine of Arup in the Americas, doggerel.arup.com, for more information.

Contact: Tami Hausman

[email protected]

646.742.1700

Contact: Rebecca Maloney

[email protected]

617.412.6632

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SOURCE Arup

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OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Rather than respond to shareholder concerns that Walgreens' store-brand infant formula may contain harmful, "needle-like" nanomaterials, Walgreens filed a motion with the SEC to block the inquiry.

Walgreen's Well Beginnings Advantage infant formula has been reported to contain engineered hydroxyapatite (HA) nanoparticles, according to independent laboratory testing commissioned by nonprofit group Friends of the Earth. The E.U. Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) has determined that nano-HA may be toxic to humans and that the needle-form of nano-HA should not be used in products.

Walgreens' "no-action letter" to the SEC argues that the company can exclude the shareholder proposal because "the use of nanomaterials in products . . . does not involve a significant social policy issue." The company also claims its infant formula does not contain engineered nanomaterials, contrary to the independent laboratory testing.

"Walgreens is effectively silencing shareholder discussion of this subject," said Austin Wilson, Environmental Health Program Manager of shareholder advocacy group As You Sow. "If Walgreens had responded to consumers' and investors' concerns, there would be no need for shareholders to file a proposal."

"Shareholders will ultimately bear the burden of litigation if infants are harmed," said Danielle Fugere, President and Chief Counsel of As You Sow. "Walgreens' attempt to silence, rather than address, shareholder concerns raises red flags. To be successful, Walgreens must remain a trusted name for consumers and it can't do that by sweeping new health studies under the rug."

Nanoparticles are extremely small particles that can permeate cell membranes and travel throughout the body, including into organs, in ways that larger ingredients cannot. The extremely small size of nanoparticles may result in greater toxicity for human health and the environment.

The shareholder proposal asks the company to issue a report about actions the company is taking to reduce or eliminate the risk of nanoparticles.

In 2014, Dunkin' Donuts reached an agreement with As You Sow to remove the nanoparticle titanium dioxide from its donuts. Starbucks plans to remove it from all products by 2017, and Krispy Kreme is reformulating its products to exclude titanium dioxide and other nanoparticles.

CONTACT: Taraneh Arhamsadr, (510) 735-8157, [email protected]

As You Sow is a nonprofit that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility. www.asyousow.org.

SOURCE As You Sow

Related Links

http://www.asyousow.org


STAMFORD, Conn., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BlackStratus, a leading provider of security and compliance technology tailored for both SMBs and large enterprises, announced today that it has selected Charles Johnson as the Director of its new Security Operations Center (SOC) located in Stamford, Conn. Johnson's appointment comes on the heels of the recent grand opening of BlackStratus' new Stamford office, which is dedicated to its CYBERShark service; a new cloud-based Security-as-a-Service tailored to fill the huge security and compliance void in the SMB market. Reporting to BlackStratus' Chief Security Officer, Mike Maxwell, Johnson is responsible for the entire operation, including hiring support staff to strategic planning meetings with clients, of the new SOC.

As the SOC Director, Johnson oversees the development of the SOC, from sourcing the talent and developing them to building out the process and procedures necessary to deliver a professional, streamlined service which monitors BlackStratus' partner networks to identify incidents and provide valuable, pragmatic security remediation information. Before arriving at BlackStratus, Johnson spent 20 years at Schenker, Inc., where his career started as a network engineer and would eventually culminate in a senior management position in a dual role as the Director of Infrastructure Systems & Service Delivery and Regional Information Security Officer. Prior to his multiple roles at Schenker, Johnson served several years in the U.S. Marine Corps' S2 (Intelligence) Group.

"Charles is a very important addition to our management team and to the global operations of our new Security Operations Center that will handle the majority of services for our recently launched CYBERShark platform," said Dale Cline, CEO of BlackStratus.

Johnson's additional responsibilities as the Director of the SOC include managing and maintaining compliance with relevant security requirements; managing and maintaining relationships/partnership with customers, suppliers and stakeholders; providing leadership for a globally dispersed team of security professionals; providing security advice and direction to customers and partners, and delivering mitigation controls and incident response to BlackStratus' customers.

"I'm thrilled to join an organization like BlackStratus that is at the crux of cyber security and compliance activities affecting every size business and government agency," said Charles Johnson. "A majority of small to midsize businesses today are onshoring their network security and compliance services to Managed Service Providers and cyber security vendors like BlackStratus, which is why our new CYBERShark and Security Operations Center play such a pivotal role in monitoring and reporting any suspicious activities identified on our clients' networks."

About BlackStratus

BlackStratus is a pioneer of trusted security and compliance solutions deployed and operated on premise, in the cloud or "as a Service'' by providers of all sizes, government agencies and individual enterprises. Through patented multitenant security information and event management (SIEM) technology, BlackStratus delivers unparalleled security visibility, prevents downtime and achieves and maintains compliant operations at a lower cost to operate. BlackStratus is headquartered in Piscataway, New Jersey, and protects millions of devices and thousands of businesses worldwide.

For more information about BlackStratus, please visit www.blackstratus.com. Follow the firm via Twitter at @BlackStratusInc.

BlackStratus PR Contact:

David Splivalo

[email protected]

1.703.798.2395

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SOURCE BlackStratus

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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing (BCEN) selected Angel MedFlight Worldwide Air Ambulance as the winner of the 2016 BCEN Honorary Certification Recognition Award  Small Health Care Facility. The honor was presented at a ceremony on September 16 as part of the Emergency Nursing 2016 Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California. The accolade celebrates the hard work and achievement of Angel MedFlight's medical crew. All of Angel MedFlight's nurses have earned their Certified Flight Registered Nurse (CFRN) credential, joining an elite group of air medical transport clinicians who hold the prestigious designation. Worldwide less than 3,400 nurses have earned the certification.

Administered by the BCEN, the CFRN is a specialty care certification that verifies medical expertise specific to flight nursing. The rigorous exam tests a nurse's knowledge of body systems, disease specific care, and flight physiology. Nationally, only 59% of nurses who take the test earn their CFRN credential. Few fixed-wing air ambulance medical teams achieve 100 percent certification, making Angel MedFlight's accomplishment an impressive distinction worthy of the BCEN's recognition and award.

"We launched an initiative for our flight nurses to earn their CFRN credential when Angel MedFlight changed ownership in 2014. We are very proud to achieve this goal," Jason Siegert, President and Chief Operating Officer of Angel MedFlight, said. "The CFRN credential tells healthcare professionals, patients, and their family members that they can depend on the proven clinical expertise of the Angel MedFlight medical team. This accomplishment demonstrates our ongoing commitment to exceed air medical transport standards and lead the air ambulance industry."

About the CFRN and the Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing

The Certified Flight Registered Nurse (CFRN) credential is administered by the Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing (BCEN) and measures the attainment of medical knowledge specific to flight nursing. The program is designed to elevate professional standards and enhance individual performance. BCEN certifications can be viewed as a guarantee of competency and commitment to continuing education and provides proof of dedication to the practice of emergency nursing care.

About Angel MedFlight Worldwide Air Ambulance

Angel MedFlight Worldwide Air Ambulance provides domestic and international air medical transportation services on a fleet of medically-configured Learjet aircraft. Built on a One Touch Promise, Angel MedFlight's compassionate team of medical, aviation, and insurance professionals simplify the coordination of air ambulance transfers for patients, their families and the healthcare professionals who care for them.

Available around the clock, the Angel MedFlight team coordinates every detail of Bedside-to-Bedside patient transfers to ensure seamless service on the ground and in the air. Angel MedFlight is accredited for operational excellence in air medical transport by NAAMTA, an ISO 9001:2008 organization.

Find more information at Angel MedFlight, on Facebook and on its blog.

Contact: Kim Halloran

Office: 877.264.3570

Cell: 602.696.9269

17851 N. 85th St.

Suite 350

Scottsdale, AZ 85255

Website: www.angelmedflight.com

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SOURCE Angel MedFlight Worldwide Air Ambulance

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Cadet will retain its name for the foreseeable future, maintain its headquarters in Vancouver and continue to be overseen by its existing management team. Cadet founder and current CEO, Dick Anderson, will continue with the company in a consulting role. Cadet's current president, Hutch Johnson, who has been with the company since 1998, will be promoted to CEO.

Founded and wholly owned by the Naughton family, Glen Dimplex is a leading international industrial group with business and manufacturing bases in Ireland, United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australasia and Asia. Glen Dimplex was established in 1973 as a manufacturer of oil-filled radiators, with seven employees. Today, the company owns more than 30 companies with upwards of 10,000 employees.

"We are proud to welcome Cadet to the Glen Dimplex family," said Fergal Naughton, Glen Dimplex CEO. "As a group we are focused on putting our employees and customers first, and this emphasis will continue for Cadet."

Cadet currently has 109 full-time employees at its Vancouver headquarters, and 20 part-time employees. A key consideration for Glen Dimplex in purchasing Cadet was the company's track record of fostering long term employees and providing a culture based on family values. Ensuring a stable future for employees was concurrently a prime consideration for Anderson when he chose to sell his company to Glen Dimplex.

"Cadet has been a very important part of my family's life since founding it 59 years ago," said Anderson. "I am so pleased to transition ownership to an organization that will continue to make Cadet a great place to work for generations to come. Besides being the right thing for my family, selling to Glen Dimplex is the right thing to do for our employees, our customers, our suppliers, and the Vancouver community."

Naughton noted that adding Cadet to the Glen Dimplex roster will allow the global company to expand its service well beyond its current scope. Glen Dimplex currently owns another electric heat manufacturer, Dimplex North America, based in Cambridge, Ontario, which manufactures many additional products that Cadet will take to market.

"The synergies between Cadet and Dimplex North America will greatly enhance our ability to support our customers in North America," said Naughton. "We strongly value Cadet for its future place in our organization, and for the additional sales strength it will provide us for exploring new opportunities and markets. The acquisition of Cadet is an important step in our ambition to be a major player in North America."

"With this sale to Glen Dimplex, Vancouver will continue to be home to a great company, our employees can feel secure about their jobs, and our customers can be assured that we will continue to build high-quality products, backed by our exceptional customer service," said Johnson.

Cadet has experienced a 50 percent sales increase nationally since 2010, and according to Johnson the sale will allow the company to continue this growth in the consumer and commercial heating markets.

For more information about Cadet, go to www.cadetheat.com or call 855.CADET.US.

For more information about Dimplex North America go to www.dimplex.com.

For more information about Glen Dimplex go to www.glendimplex.com.

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SOURCE Cadet Manufacturing

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SAN ANGELO, Texas, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CalTech today announced that it has successfully completed the MSPAlliance's MSP/Cloud Verify Program (MSPCV) certification process, the oldest certification program for cloud computing and managed services providers. The MSPCV is based on the 10 control objectives of the Unified Certification Standard for Cloud & MSPs.

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The MSPCV was the first certification created specifically for the managed services and cloud industry. Every certification comes with a written report with the entire process documented, validated and signed by a 3rd party accounting firm. The MSPCV has been reviewed by governmental agencies and regulatory bodies across the globe and is used and accepted in 5 continents around the world.

"The MSPCV examination is a rigorous certification process that benchmarks and verifies the quality of the company providing cloud and/or managed services," said Charles Weaver, MSPAlliance CEO. "We are very proud to have CalTech as a member of this elite community of cloud and MSPs."

MSPCV was created, using a wide base of criteria, to certify cloud and Managed IT Solution Providers thereby ensuring that they have met and exceed well-established standards of excellence and client care. Customers who select a company that is part of the MSPCV can also rest assured that their IT solution provider has met and exceeded the following standards dealing with:

Corporate Risk Management

Documentation

Service & Program Change Management

Event Management

Logical Security

Data privacy, security, and integrity

Physical security

Managed services SLA, reporting, and billing

Corporate health

Company is under constant external review from the MSPAlliance and the IT profession to continually maintain and improve standards of care of excellence

The MSPCV examination is performed by a third party accounting firm.

Brent McCasland, CalTech President and CFO, said, "CalTech is always looking for ways to improve our services to community banks. We have invested millions into our EverSpace product that provides community banks a comprehensive IT infrastructure on highly secure, enterprise grade technology. MSP Alliance's Cloud Verify certification and SSAE 16 certification process provides our customers and prospects with the peace of mind that CalTech can deliver services to the high standards that community banks demand."

About CalTech

Committed to providing best in class service, CalTech specializes in optimizing technology for financial institutions by designing unique business-aligned IT strategies. By creating an innovative IT environment within your organization, CalTech gives you the ability to have flexible functionality and a competitive business advantage that yields positive outcomes. With over 25 years of experience in the financial industry, CalTech's services and solutions are designed to increase your financial institution's profitability, productivity, and efficiency while ensuring the security and prosperity of your business.

About MSPAlliance

MSPAlliance is a global industry association and accrediting body for the Cyber Security, Cloud Computing and Managed Services Provider (MSP) industry. Established in 2000 with the objective of helping MSPs become better MSPs. Today, MSPAlliance has more than 30,000 cloud computing and manage service provider corporate members across the globe and works in a collaborative effort to assist its members, along with foreign and domestic governments, on creating standards, setting policies and establishing best practices. For more information, visit www.mspalliance.com.

If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Allen Rodarte at 325-223-6100 or email.

SOURCE CalTech
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following tip sheet was released today by the U.S. Census Bureau:

In May 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau held a forum of community members, academics, organization leaders and other experts to gather feedback on testing a Middle Eastern or North African category on the 2015 National Content Test. The meeting and the feedback are summarized in this report: 2015 Forum on Ethnic Groups From the Middle East and North Africa: Meeting Summary and Main Findings.

No news release associated with this product. Tip Sheet only.

Public Information Office

301-763-3030 / [email protected]

census.gov

Connect with us on Social media

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SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau

Related Links

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COLUMBUS, Ohio, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Central and Southern Ohio chapter of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (CSOHIMSS), has announced its Fall conference titled Holy MACRA! It's Interoperate 2016!. It will be held on Friday, October 28th, 2016 at the Kingsgate Marriott Conference Center at the University of Cincinnati.

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The conference will be a wide-ranging overview of key issues affecting healthcare IT in 2016.

Keynote sessions will focus on national and local public policy initiatives and on the hospital of the future.

Breakout sessions throughout the day will provide attendees with a full menu of topics, including system quality, analytics, information privacy, and project management.

The keynote speakers are Jeff Coughlin, the Senior Director of HIMSS Federal and State Affairs; and Jason Mortensen, Director of Global Healthcare Solutions for Cisco. The day will conclude with a panel discussion on MACRA and Payment Reform, featuring participants from the Ohio Health Information Partnership, the Health Services Advisory Group, Mercy Health, and Healthbridge.

Ajay Sharma, Program Chair for the chapter said, "Every year we try to strike a balance between the Healthcare provider and system solution vendors when we develop the program. This year though, our Taste of Healthcare conference in Cincinnati has seen an overwhelming response from our community Provider organizations to present on various topics of relevance for our Central & Southern Ohio HIMSS community."

Chapter President, Jeff Haas commented that, "We have Columbus, Dayton and host city Cincinnati represented for our event and have Keynotes from Cisco, talking about what's in store for us in 'the Hospital of the Future'; and HIMSS Regulatory Affairs, on the topic of MACRA. These are topics that are critical for our community to understand. We look forward to helping fill that need."

Those interested in attending can find additional information and on-line registration at:https://www.eventbrite.com/e/central-southern-ohio-himss-fall-conference-2016-interoperate-2016-tickets-27011512160.

CSOHIMSS supports careers in healthcare information systems in Ohio. CSOHIMSS has representation from the provider, consultant and vendor healthcare industry segments and works to enhance communication and education among its over 1,100 local chapter members.

Additional information is available on the CSOHIMSS website at http://www.csohimss.org and via social media, on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CSOHIMSS and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Csohimss.

Media Contact:

Mark Harvey

740-591-2190

SOURCE Central & Southern Ohio HIMSS

Related Links

http://www.csohimss.org


VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Christian Broadcasting Network announces the launch of Faithwire.com, a new, editorially independent organization targeting millennials with a mobile, social, and distributed content approach to faith content. The multiplatform launch features the Faithwire Podcast Network, articles, opinions, and a growing library of video features and series focusing on "what God is doing in the world."

"We're enthusiastic about the vision for Faithwire.com, and believe it can reach a whole new generation," says CBN Chief Executive Officer, Gordon Robertson. "Faithwire.com is well-positioned to meet millennials' growing interest for news from the faith community. While CBN will be here to lend a helping hand wherever it's needed, Faithwire.com will operate independently and they will go places and cover stories differently from CBN  and that's exactly the way it should be."

Faithwire.com will benefit from the experience of its newly named Managing Editor, Dan Andros, the 15-year former head writer for Glenn Beck at Fox News and TheBlaze.com and CBN News Director, Rob Allman, will also provide leadership as Faithwire.com's founding president. Allman brings more than twenty years of news director experience to his expanded role.

"When we surveyed the faith media landscape, we felt like there was a real opportunity," says Faithwire.com President, Rob Allman. "We live in the world of Vice News, Serial, Netflix documentaries and all-digital viewing habits. We have an opportunity to be that for a growing segment of the faith audience. These are deeper stories, more human and real, and they're just waiting for someone to cover them in an honest, thought-provoking way. Faithwire.com exists to fill this void and we'll do so in a way that doesn't depress you but instead leaves you with hope."

Among the many podcasts, articles and series you can expect to find on Faithwire.com:

Kirsten Haglund, a former Miss America covering hard-hitting issues impacting women at the intersection of Hollywood , Politics and Faith which will also include her featured podcast series on the Faithwire Podcast Network ;

covering hard-hitting issues impacting women at the intersection of , Politics and Faith which will also include her featured podcast series on the ; An on the ground look at the almost surprising rise of young millennials going to church in one of the trendiest, least-churched sections of Brooklyn ;

; A conversation with the average citizens trying to stop the cycle of imprisonment by welcoming newly released convicts  many of whom have violent pasts  as soon as they get off the greyhound bus, fresh from prison;

A glimpse into the life of a big time drug dealer who fled from police and managed to escape, scot-free. After reluctantly going to church and reading the Bible, he felt compelled to turn himself in to authorities.

"Audiences everywhere have been subjected to what I call 'hate-clicks' where we are provoked by blatantly controversial headlines that pit one group against the other," says Faithwire.com Managing Editor, Dan Andros. "Do bad things happen? Of course they do and we will cover those stories so our audience is informed. But we are also going to report on people and organizations injecting themselves into some of the stickiest, most incredible and fascinating situations around the world  all trying to make a difference and bring hope. Our coverage will be edgier, more human and ground level. Perhaps most importantly, we want people to understand how they can get involved if they want to help."

Faithwire's content is now live on the web, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, and other content distribution platforms.

Christian Broadcasting Network is a multifaceted nonprofit organization that provides cable, broadcast, satellite and online programming to approximately 200 countries around the world. CBN and its affiliated organizations aim to report the news of the day from an informed Christian perspective. For more than 50 years, CBN has continued to grow in both size and scope as a leading voice in Christian broadcasting, media and communications by utilizing cutting-edge technology in every area of its operation.

Faithwire.com -

Website | https://www.Faithwire.com Twitter | @FaithwireNews

CONTACT:

Johnnie Moore for FAITHWIRE

[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410303LOGO

SOURCE Christian Broadcasting Network
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Association, today presented the CompTIA Excellence in Cybersecurity award at a breakfast ceremony to Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT); and Dr. Ray Letteer, Chief of the Cybersecurity Division of the Command, Control, Communications, and Computer (C4) Department at Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps.

The breakfast also included remarks by Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott.

"As the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Chairman McCaul has continuously made preparedness to prevent cybersecurity threats a top priority," said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO, CompTIA. "As the Co-Chair and Co-Founder of both the Congressional High Tech Caucus and the Cybersecurity Caucus, he has demonstrated a strong understanding of some of the most serious threats to our nation's technology infrastructure.

Texas is second only to California in technology industry jobs with more than 585,000, according to Cyberstates 2016: The Definitive State-by-State Analysis of the U.S. Tech Industry. Many of these workers are tasked to protect user's personal information and critical systems across the Lone Star from cyber-attacks.

"The fact is, every day, our government and businesses are under attack. Countries like North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran are continually attempting to conduct espionage and steal the intellectual property of Americans," said Rep. Michael McCaul. "Attacks such as the ones carried out on the State Department, Target, Sony Pictures, OPM, and Anthem are just the tip of this growing threat."

"Texas, as we know, is home to some of the world's largest companies and has become a nucleus for the Startup and Tech industries," continued McCaul. "It is vital, in the current threat environment, that the government and private companies continue to work together to promote the most effective cyber workforce and protect the vital digital networks and infrastructure in Texas and the United States. "

CompTIA created its Excellence in Cybersecurity Awards to recognize members of Congress and federal agency program managers who have the foresight to use federal resources wisely to improve the cybersecurity skills of those who work for the U.S. Government. As Chief Information Officer Scott highlighted in his remarks, the Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Strategy emphasizes the importance of developing highly skilled talent in the federal workforce.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130107/DC38135LOGO

SOURCE CompTIA

Related Links

http://www.comptia.org


Ian Foster, former Contract Management Global Functional Leader (GFL) for a leading international EPC company stated, "During my 15 years as GFL I never found a contract management tool designed specifically for projects that offered the level of functionality we truly needed. It was therefore exciting for me to be given unrestricted authority and support by Coreworx to incorporate my lifetime of experiences into the development of a truly effective contract management system, and in doing so, fill a much needed gap in improving project performance at all levels."

"Our continued partnerships with industry and customer experts have proven to be a successful strategy. We are extremely proud of Coreworx Contract Management and are confident it will further enable our customers to maintain leadership positions in their respective industries," said Allen Boudreaux, Coreworx Executive Chairman.

For further information, please visit (http://www.coreworx.com/contract-management).

About Coreworx

Coreworx is a software and services company who provides integrated project information management solutions for the world's engineering and construction projects. Coreworx solutions are deployed across a portfolio of oil & gas, mining, power, and infrastructure projects valued at over $950 billion in more than 40 countries with 100,000+ users. For more information, visit www.coreworx.com.

Contact

Jenn Spencer

Marketing Manager, Coreworx

519-772-3181 ext. 4036

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410106

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410105LOGO

SOURCE Coreworx

Related Links

http://www.coreworx.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Could tax revenue from the sale of recreational marijuana be enough to push the legalization of marijuana in more states? 24/7 Wall St., a financial news and opinion website, has identified the potential tax revenue from the sale of marijuana in every state.

24/7 Wall St. used estimates based on sales per capita in Colorado and Washington from the The Tax Foundation. Colorado and Washington  the first two states to legalize marijuana  began sales in 2014. After a slow start, tax revenues now exceed expectations in both states. While the legal structure supporting marijuana sales would be quite different in each U.S. region, other states can begin to better understand the financial impact legalization would have on their states. The Tax Foundation used sales per capita in these two states and the assumption of a 25% effective tax rate to determine the potential tax revenue from marijuana sales in each state. Total state tax revenues are from the U.S. Census Bureau. Marijuana usage figures were obtained from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The likelihood of legalization is based on two previous analyses from 24/7 Wall St.

Click here to see the potential tax revenue from recreational marijuana in each state.

Increasing tax revenues is not the only financial benefit of legalization. States also save from spending less on enforcing marijuana laws. However, this saved money is at least partially repurposed to regulating the new market.

Marijuana legalization is still hotly debated nationwide, with many states likely to legalize soon while others are doubtful. Based on two previous analyses, 24/7 Wall St. identified the next 14 states to legalize marijuana and the 11 states least likely to legalize marijuana. If all of the 14 states legalize, the combined annual additional revenue is expected to be $3.1 billion. The 11 states least likely to legalize would miss out on an estimated $1.2 billion annually.

"While tax revenue from marijuana sales exceeded expectations in both Colorado and Washington, the revenue increase remains small relative to the overall state tax revenue," said Douglas A. McIntyre, Editor-In-Chief and CEO of 24/7 Wall St. "This could support arguments of both those who claim the financial incentives are enough to push for legalization, and those who claim they are not worth the potential risks."

About Us

24/7 Wall St., LLC is a Delaware corporation which runs a financial news and opinion company with content delivered over the Internet. The company's articles are republished by many of the largest news sites and portals, including MSN Money, Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch, Time.com, USAToday, and The Huffington Post.

The company publishes over 30 articles per day and has readers throughout North America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Contact : Tom Gibson

GIBSON Communications, LLC

Office: +1.201.476.0322

Mobile: +1.201.264.3646

SOURCE 24/7 Wall St., LLC
BOSTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Crane Currency, a rapidly growing global producer of currency products, today announced plans to build a new banknote printing facility and customer experience center in the country of Malta. The Malta facility will represent an investment of approximately $100 million for the construction of the factory, the machinery and the equipment. The company expects to initially hire approximately 200 new employees. The planned 140,000 square foot facility, expected to be completed in early 2018, is being constructed in the Hal Far industrial area. The company made the announcement during a visit to its offices by the Prime Minister of Malta, The Honorable Dr. Joseph Muscat.

Crane currently supports its international customers from its Tumba, Sweden operations which includes a modern printing works, banknote paper mill and design services team and from its security technologies operation in New Hampshire and Georgia.

The country of Malta has a well-known history of banknote production providing Crane access to a skilled workforce. In addition, Malta has a business-friendly environment and is located in close proximity to many of Crane's customers. Crane Currency Malta will be the first commercial banknote printing facility to be built in several decades.

The state-of-the art banknote production and customer experience center will offer the latest in printing equipment and technology to support the most demanding customer requirements. As banknotes move away from 'ink on paper' to a combination of highly engineered substrates and applied security features like Crane's MOTION micro-optics, the capabilities of the modern printing works must also evolve. Crane Currency Malta will reflect this technological evolution in its layout and equipment.

"What is being announced today is a significant landmark achievement for our nation," stated Dr. Joseph Muscat, Prime Minister of Malta. "To give one an inkling of the sheer significance of this investment to our manufacturing sector, I need only say that the last time the country managed to attract a greenfield investor that started its manufacturing operations with a comparable number of employees was in 1981."

"We are delighted to expand our banknote printing capacity with our new facility in Malta," stated Stephen P. DeFalco, Chief Executive Officer of Crane Currency. "I would like to extend my gratitude to Prime Minister Muscat and Malta Enterprise for their support. We look forward to a long term relationship with our future employees in Malta and to building the most modern banknote printing facility in the world."

About Crane Currency

Crane has been a global producer of currency products for more than 200 years and is entrusted by more than 50 central banks to play an integral role in the design and manufacture of their nations' banknotes. From the most traditional of cotton substrates to the most advanced micro-optic security elements and design, Crane is a responsive partner focused on delivering innovative products and solutions that meet clients' most demanding requirements. For more information, please visit www.cranecurrency.com.

Contact:

Craig Conrad

[email protected]

+1 617-648-3722

SOURCE Crane Currency

Related Links

http://www.cranecurrency.com


ALBANY, New York, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

According to the research report, the global craniomaxillofacial market is anticipated to be worth US$1.7 bn by the end of 2022 as the market exhibits a CAGR of 6.2% between 2014 and 2022. Analysts predict that the global market is anticipated to be led by internal fixators segment as it will reach a valuation of US$1.5 bn by 2022. The ability of these devices to fix facial deformities or injuries without any infections will drive this segment. Technological advancements in this segment will also be responsible for the growth internal fixators in this region. Geographically, North America will dominate the global market as it is estimated to contribute revenue worth US$ 929.4 mn by 2022.

The key players in the global craniomaxillofacial implants market in 2013 were Synthes, Stryker Corporation, Biomet, Inc., KLS Martin LP, and OsteoMed. Their collective share estimated to 81.1% in 2013. Analysts have described the market to be highly competitive with a burgeoning demand for technologically advanced implants, observes Transparency Market Research in its new research report.

"Focusing on developing high-quality nonmetallic or bioresorbable materials to develop internal fixators is projected to create new growth opportunities for the players in the global market," suggests the lead author of this research report. Demand for nonmetallic internal fixators is expected to be an upcoming trend as they assimilate with the tissue, thereby eliminating the need for a follow-up surgery.

Browse Market Research Report on Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/craniomaxillofacial-implants-market.html

High Incidence of Facial Traumas Augments Uptake of Craniomaxillofacial Implants

The increasing frequency of facial fractures is one of the key drivers for the increased uptake of the craniomaxillofacial implants. The rise in the number of road accidents along with slips, falls, and other industrial accidents have also led to growing cases of craniomaxillofacial injuries and trauma. Furthermore, growing pool of geriatrics, that are more susceptible to facial fractures due to reducing bone mineral density is also anticipated to augment the growth of this market in the near future. The increasing cases of osteoporosis, rising participation in adventures sports, and outdoor recreational activities have collectively led to a growing number of facial injuries, thus providing the market with an incredible impetus.

The high adoption of craniomaxillofacial implants can also be attributed to the growing technological advancements and increasing demand for minimally invasive procedures. The reduced hospitalization time and non-disruptive procedures to fix these implants have made it easy for both patients and surgeons to operate. Advancements such as developments in 3D printing technology have opened up a chance for customization of implants that can be made to suit the anatomy of the patient. This technological advancement has revolutionized the cranial fracture fixation by providing an improved bone fitting and compression as compared to conventional implants.

Browse Press Release on Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/craniomaxillofacial-implants-market.htm

The improving healthcare expenditure in both developed as well as developing countries have also boosted the craniomaxillofacial implants. The improved healthcare infrastructure in countries such as China and India that have gigantic population bases is also anticipated to lead to an extensive usage of craniomaxillofacial implants in the near future.

Expensive Implants Discourages Market Growth

The high costs associated with craniomaxillofacial surgeries due to the expensive cost of manufacturing and selling implants is expected to discourage the market from growing. This market will also be restrained due to the rising demand for exceptionally skilled labor to perform these surgeries. Furthermore, the unaffordability of modern technologies as manufacturers price them high to recover the heavy investments they make will also prevent the market from reaching its full potential, predict analysts. The lack of insurance schemes to cover the expenses associated with craniomaxillofacial surgeries will also act as a major hindrance to the overall market.

The review of the global craniomaxillofacial implants market is based on Transparency Market Research's research report, titled "Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2014 - 2022."

Request a PDF Brochure with Report Analysis: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=4861

The global craniomaxillofacial implants market has been segmented as follows:

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Location

Internal Fixators

External Fixators

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Composition

Calcium Ceramics

Metals and Alloys

Polymers

Biologic Materials

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Nature

Non-resorbable

Resorbable Fixators

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Type

Plate and Screw Fixator System

Bone Graft Substitutes

Distraction Systems

TMJ Replacement Devices

Craniomaxillofacial Implants Market, by Geography

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America (LATAM)

(LATAM) Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

and (MENA) Rest of the World (RoW)

Browse Related Research Reports:

Oncology Biosimilars Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/oncology-biosimilars-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/oncology-biosimilars-market.html Chemoinformatics Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/chemoinformatics-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/chemoinformatics-market.html Global Healthcare WLAN Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/healthcare-wlan-market.html

About Us:

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S. based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMR's global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.



US Office Contact

Transparency Market Research

90 State Street, Suite 700

Albany, NY 12207

Tel: +1-518-618-1030

USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453

Email: [email protected]



Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Blog: http://www.tmrblog.com/

SOURCE Transparency Market Research
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- David P. Gaus, MD, MPH, founder and director of Andean Health & Development in Ecuador, was awarded the 2016 Humanitarian Award by the American Academy of Family Physicians at its annual meeting.

The Humanitarian Award honors extraordinary and enduring humanitarian efforts by AAFP members, both within and beyond the borders of the United States.

The mission of AHD is to provide quality, sustainable health care for rural Latin America. It is based at the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Gaus spends part of the year.

After receiving a Bachelor of Arts in accounting at the University of Notre Dame, Gaus traveled to Ecuador where he spent two years volunteering at an orphanage. The experience was life changing and led him to medical school, followed by residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He returned to Ecuador and soon discovered that rural hospital care was the country's greatest need.

Working with Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, Gaus founded AHD in 1997. Their pilot project was a hospital in the underserved community of Pedro Vicente Maldonado. It opened in 2000 and by 2007 was financially self-sustaining.

The hospital provides high quality secondary care to an extended community of 80,000 and also serves as a training ground for physicians, nurses and other leaders in the local community.

Gaus's current project, Hesburgh Hospital in Santo Domingo, Ecuador, continues to expand the reach of AHD. The hospital opened in June 2014 and serves a community of 600,000.

A quarter of that population lives on less than $4.00 a day. The hospital is expected to be financially self-sustaining within two years and will serve as a headquarters for the region's public sector physicians.

Gaus has written numerous articles and lectured regionally, nationally, and internationally on the topic of rural health care in Latin America.

Gaus earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in accounting from the University of Notre Dame and his medical degree from Tulane Medical School. He completed his family medicine residency at the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine.

About the American Academy of Family Physicians

Founded in 1947, the AAFP represents 124,900 physicians and medical students nationwide. It is the only medical society devoted solely to primary care.

Family physicians conduct approximately one in five office visits -- that's 192 million visits annually or 48 percent more than the next most visited medical specialty. Today, family physicians provide more care for America's underserved and rural populations than any other medical specialty. Family medicine's cornerstone is an ongoing, personal patient-physician relationship focused on integrated care.

To learn more about the specialty of family medicine, the AAFP's positions on issues and clinical care, and for downloadable multi-media highlighting family medicine, visit www.aafp.org/media. For information about health care, health conditions and wellness, please visit the AAFP's award-winning consumer website, www.FamilyDoctor.org.

SOURCE American Academy of Family Physicians

Related Links

http://www.aafp.org


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Dermatology is a branch of medical science that deals with examination and treatment of various disorders and diseases related to the skin, hair, nails, including its surgical aspect. The stakeholders of this market report comprise established original equipment and pharmaceutical product manufacturers, product distributors, and new players who wish to enter the global dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market.

This report provides a complete analysis of the global dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market and helps in recognizing several governing factors that impact the market both positively and negatively. Executive summary of the report captures comprehensive insights about every segment considered in this study. It includes a market snapshot offering an insight into the current scenario of the dermatology diagnostic device and dermatology market in terms of current and future market size along with growth rate.



The market overview segment provides thorough information on the trends in the usage pattern of various diagnostic devices and therapeutics for dermatology, such as drivers, restraints, and growth opportunities that presently regulate the dynamics of the overall market. Competitive analysis tools such as Porter's Five Forces analysis and market attractiveness analysis have also been incorporated in this study to provide analysis about the level of competition within the dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market. Competitive intelligence tools such as market attractiveness analysis have also been included in the market overview section of the report to deliver a clear understanding of the most attractive and fastest growing device segment, drug class and region globally for dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics.

Market share analysis thus provided in this study is in context with major players of dermatology diagnostic devices and dermatology therapeutics operating in the market; this would help new players to understand the key business models and geographical presence and identify the specific product lines of existing companies to establish a strong presence in the dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market. Furthermore, the research comprises a chapter on pipeline analysis for this industry that includes tabular representation of phase I and phase II candidates along with sales forecast potential drugs that are undergoing phase III clinical trials and are expected to be marketed during the forecast period.



The global dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market has been segmented based on various dermatology diagnostic devices, drug classes used for treating dermatology disorders, and geographies. Based on dermatology diagnostic products the market has been categorized into dermatoscopes, microscopes & trichoscopes, and imaging equipment. Based on drug class the dermatology therapeutics market has been segmented into antibacterials, antifungal agents, antiviral agents, corticosteroids, retinoids, immunosuppresants, biologics. The market size for the period from 2013 to 2023 has been provided for each of the devices and therapeutics categories mentioned above in terms of US$ Mn. Along with the market size that was projected considering 2014 as the base year and 2013 as the historical year, the CAGR (%) of each market segment for the forecast period from 2015 to 2023 (for therapeutics forecast period is from 2013 to 2018 and 2018 to 2023) has also been provided.



Geographically, the dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East & North Africa, and Rest of the World. North America has been further segmented into the U.S. and Canada; Europe into Germany, the U.K. and Rest of Europe; Asia Pacific into China, Japan, India, Australia, and Rest of Asia Pacific; Latin America into Brazil and Rest of Latin America; Middle East & North Africa (MENA) into Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and rest of MENA; and Rest of the world. The market revenue of dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics for each geographical region for 2014 and 2023 along with forecast from 2015 to 2023 in respective regions in terms of USD Mn, has been explained in the geography section of the report.

This market study concludes with profiles of key players in the global dermatology diagnostic devices and dermatology market. The report summarizes the companies in terms of overview, financial overview, product and services portfolio, key business strategies, and recent developments. The major players profiled in the section are Agfa-Gevaert N.V., Astellas Pharma, Inc., Cutera, Inc., Dino-Lite Europe/IDCP B.V., Galderma S.A., Genentech, a Roche Company, GlaxoSmithKline plc (Stiefel Laboratories, Inc.), LEO Pharma A/S, Michelson Diagnostics Ltd., Novartis International AG, and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc.



The global dermatology diagnostic devices and therapeutics market has been segmented as follows:



Dermatology Diagnostic Devices Market, by Products



Dermatoscopes

Microscopes and Trichoscopes

Imaging Equipment

Dermatology Therapeutics Market, by Drug Class



Antibacterials

Antifungal Agents

Antiviral Agents

Corticosteroids

Retinoids

Immunosuppresants

Biologics

Dermatology Therapeutics Market: Pipeline Overview, Phase 1, 2, and 3



Tabular Representation: Phase 1 and Phase 2 Candidates

Pipeline Analysis and Forecast: Phase 3

LAS41008

Ixekizumab

Dupilumab

CD5789

IDP-118

Dermatology Diagnostic Devices and Therapeutics Market, by Geography



North America

U.S.

Canada

Europe

Germany

U.K.

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific (APAC)

China

Japan

India

Australia

Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America

Brazil

Rest of Latin America

Middle East & North Africa (MENA)

Egypt

Kuwait

UAE

Saudi Arabia

Rest of MENA

Rest of the World (RoW)

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03999368-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

http://www.reportlinker.com





__________________________

Contact Clare: [email protected]

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

SOURCE Reportlinker

Related Links

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NEW YORK and PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Telemedicine startup Digital Noema Telehealth (DN Telehealth) announced the integration of Temasys' Embedded Real-Time Communications WebRTC platform with DN Telehealth's white label telemedicine solutions. DN Telehealth makes extensive use of Temasys' secure messaging, screen sharing, and archiving capabilities by creating a unique healthcare delivery offering with many value-added features.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410282LOGO

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410283LOGO

Already in use by 13 customers, the DN Telehealth platform is a first-of-its-kind, full spectrum solution where a single platform offers the convenience of telemedicine within the context of a fully integrated clinic management, care coordination and Remote Patient Monitoring. DN Telehealth accomplishes this by connecting to more than 260 available medical devices and being accessible to core health care providers that make up the ecosystem.

"Our Embedded Real Time Communication (ERTC) technology fills a significant void in the healthcare industry which has existed up until today. That missing piece was the ability to manage episodes of care in an end-to-end manner, all within a single system, while meeting all the compliance requirements that surround virtual patient care," says Bent Rye, CEO of Temasys. "With Digital Noema's use of our technology, that hurdle has been overcome."

DN Telehealth maximizes collaboration compatibility for its clients and their patients, in real-time, extending consultations beyond a physical clinical setting to include fully secure, web browser-based conferencing sessions in which the patient, clinicians, and other caregivers can all participate in the care of a particular patient, in a fully HIPAA-compliant online environment. The DN Telehealth solution works on iOS and Android mobile devices, and on all major desktop web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari (thanks to the Temasys WebRTC Plugin).

"We are now in a place where a proverbial 'box' has been removed, allowing for innovation in healthcare delivery to thrive," said Roque Espinal-Valdez, founder, and CEO of DN Telehealth. "Thanks to the far-reaching functionality provided by the Temasys SDKs, our platform now uses the latest real-time audio and video technology paired with our own rich application that is perfect for healthcare; from the ability to conference clinicians and caregivers in to an appointment to the convenience of securely sharing a medical record and having clinicians annotate it in real-time."

"More than technology and disruptive innovation, Temasys has allowed us to develop our vision to bring forth interoperability, as well as to help create a much more complete healthcare system in which these systems work together for the benefit of patients," continued Espinal-Valdez.

Customers using Digital Noema's solution include Elite Patient Care, a leader in post-acute and transitional care services, and Armored Telehealth, which services patients in correctional healthcare facilities and home health agencies across Texas.

"Digital Noema provides us with the vital link to remotely deliver care to the vastly underserved and rapidly growing elderly population. We're doing this in a seamless and elegant manner as a result of the integration of the real-time telemedicine platform, that's accessible from any platform or device," said Dr. Antonio Gamboa, CEO and Managing Partner of Elite Patient Care.

"Armored Telehealth's work with Digital Noema has allowed us to deploy their unique platform and make use of its embedded real-time communications capabilities. This has provided Armored the greatest flexibility to pursue opportunities in a variety of markets ranging from correctional facilities to home healthcare agencies," said Jeremy D. Vernon, Managing Partner for Armored Telehealth.

About Digital Noema (DN) Telehealth

DN Telehealth is one of the highest quality service providers of telemedicine/telehealth white label solutions specializing in Managed Care (MCO, MSO), Private & Specialty Practices, (PCP, Medical Tourism, Diaspora Med), Post-Acute Care (IPRs, SNFs, ALFs, and ILFs), and Remote Patient Monitoring.

About Temasys

Temasys Communications is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company with offices in Singapore and Palo Alto, Calif., providing APIs and SDKs to enable Embedded Real-Time Communications (ERTC) based upon WebRTC, the emerging standard for real-time communications in apps and on the web. Temasys' industry-leading products include the Temasys Platform and the Temasys WebRTC Plugin for IE and Safari. For more information visit the Temasys website at http://temasys.io/.

Contact:

Andy Abramson

+18587779777

Email

SOURCE Temasys

Related Links

http://temasys.io


"Energy Access Ventures works closely with companies bringing reliable energy access to rural and peri-urban areas, and d.light is the perfect addition to our portfolio," said Dr. Michael H. Gera, Managing Partner of Energy Access Ventures, who will be joining the d.light board. "This is our largest investment to date, and we wholeheartedly believe in d.light's efforts to raise more people up the energy access ladder."

The funding round also includes over $5 million in grant funding. Shell Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development - Development Innovation Ventures (USAID-DIV) and United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) were key contributors to this round.

"We are thankful for the support from these global organizations, which is instrumental for achieving our goal to bring safe and affordable energy to off-grid families," said d.light CFO Kamal Lath. "Consumer financing for solar home systems makes the technology significantly more affordable for our customers. This funding will enable more families and business owners to enjoy access to the affordable, clean and reliable solar energy solutions they need to improve their quality of life."

As an early pioneer in solar lighting and home systems, d.light paved the way for the development of the off-grid solar industry and is now the industry's largest manufacturer. d.light's commanding market share, dedication to reliability and user-centered design have allowed it to sell hundreds of thousands of units per month, while maintaining excellent quality at scale. With this new funding, d.light will focus on ramping up sales for its D30 solar home system, as well as bringing new products to market that can power other appliances, like TVs and fans. Currently, d.light operates five distribution hubs in East Africa, West Africa, India, Southeast Asia and the United States.

As of August 2016, d.light has impacted the lives of over 65 million people, including 17 million school-aged children, with its solar lighting and solar home system solutions. d.light aims to empower 100 million people with affordable and reliable solar by 2020.

"We're extremely grateful for the partnership of such esteemed investors as we work to make solar and energy available for all households in the developing world," said d.light CEO Ned Tozun. "Our solar products have enabled tens of millions of customers to significantly enhance their homes and supplement their incomes. With this funding, we look forward to helping even more people living off the grid to achieve better quality of life through solar ownership."

About d.light

Founded in 2006 as a for-profit social enterprise, d.light manufactures and distributes award-winning solar lighting and power products designed to serve the more than 2 billion people globally without access to reliable electricity. Through five distribution hubs in East Africa, West Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States, d.light has impacted over 65 million lives with its products. d.light is dedicated to providing the most reliable, affordable and accessible solar lighting and power systems for the developing world, with the goal of reaching 100 million people by 2020. For more information, please visit www.dlight.com.

Media Contact

For d.light

Lisa Ann Pinkerton

408-806-9626

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410058

SOURCE d.light

Related Links

http://www.dlight.com


CHICAGO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DRIVIN, a premier service for automotive dealers that utilizes data to help sell, source, acquire and deliver quality used vehicles for its dealer partners, today announced that it is expanding its partnership with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the bank of the world's most innovative companies and their investors, with a new $6.5 million senior debt facility.

With more than 500% growth in monthly transaction volume from January to July 2016, DRIVIN's current dealership partners are realizing the value of working with a partner that utilizes data and human capital to solve one of the industry's biggest pain points  acquisition of quality used vehicles. This new financing will accelerate DRIVIN's growth initiatives and enable DRIVIN to continue its growth trajectory with its current dealer partners while simultaneously establishing new relationships with dealerships nationwide. In addition, DRIVIN will be announcing the launch of DRIVIN Marketplace, the industry's first intelligent marketplace, this fall. The full-service solution will enable dealers to acquire recommended inventory optimal to their lot, while also remarketing unwanted inventory to DRIVIN's nationwide network.

"We selected Silicon Valley Bank because they can provide us with the enhanced customized resources and capabilities that we need to keep up with the rapid growth we are experiencing," said Kayne Grau, co-founder and CEO. "DRIVIN is disrupting the traditional way that dealers acquire and dispose of used cars. Our relationship with SVB allows us to further our growth with the acquisition of additional inventory, while continuing to build services that change the way dealers move metal on their lots  first helping them sell aged inventory and then helping them replace those units with strategically selected vehicles that meet the needs of their target audience and their dealership brand position."

"Silicon Valley Bank is pleased to partner with DRIVIN to support the company's continued growth," said Dennis Grunt, Managing Director for Silicon Valley Bank in the Midwest. "DRIVIN has achieved impressive growth in a short period of time and is guided by a leadership team focused on innovating and disrupting one of the country's largest industries. Our objective is to provide DRIVIN with the right financing, connections and services to achieve continued success."

For more information on DRIVIN, please visit the recently updated website at http://www.drivindealer.com.

About DRIVIN

DRIVIN is redefining the used vehicle industry by bringing data and technology together in a first-of-its-kind, high-touch fashion to help automotive dealers sell and acquire the right used cars, at the right price, right now. Combining highly personalized service with cutting edge technology and local market analytics, DRIVIN casts a nationwide net to find and vet quality, whole-sale priced vehicles, and connect them with dealers all across the country. Launched in 2015, DRIVIN is powered by CarCo Technologies.

About Silicon Valley Bank

For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has helped innovative companies and their investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB provides targeted financial services and expertise through its offices in innovation centers around the world. With commercial, international and private banking services, SVB helps address the unique needs of innovators. Learn more at svb.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150810/257183LOGO

SOURCE DRIVIN

Related Links

http://www.drivindealer.com


WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today at the National Parking Association's (NPA) 65th Annual Convention & Expo, NPA will present its first annual Executive Sustainability Series. Bijan Eghtedari, CLH president and president of Lanier Parking Solutions and NPA board member, will be interviewed by Jeff Pinyot, President, ECO Lighting Solutions (ECO), the sponsor of this session.

In this first series, Eghtedari we discuss how Lanier incorporated green practices into their parking operations at Atlantic Station, a mixed-use facility in Atlanta, Georgia. It is one of the largest parking structures in the United States and incorporates green practices and promotes sustainability for its patrons and employees with EV charging, free bike parking and local shuttle.

"Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important consideration for parking operators," said NPA President Christine Banning, MA, CAE, on why NPA is launching the Executive Sustainability Series. She continued, "The Executive Sustainability Series allows C-suite parking professionals to discuss how to improve sustainability practices in their facilities and the challenges and benefits associated with implementing those principles on a peer-to-peer level."

This Executive Sustainability Series is sponsored by ECO Parking Solutions. NPA member and president of ECO Parking Solutions, Jeff Pinyot, will host the interview. The executive interview will highlight sustainable parking strategies, implementation and best practices.

About NPA: The National Parking Association, established in 1951, is the voice of the $28 billion parking & industry composed of private parking owners and public parking operators that together employ more than 143,000 people. NPA is the premier association for parking owners & leadersproviding research, advocacy, and education and credentialing. Visit NPA at WeAreParking.org.

Contact:

Christina Garneski, CAE

202.296.4336

[email protected]

SOURCE National Parking Association

Related Links

http://www.npapark.org


ATLANTA and LONDON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants, a retail property, casualty insurance brokerage and employee benefits consultant, announced today that Risk Management Consultant Thompson (Tom) Mackey is one of 35 young insurance and risk management professionals from the U.S. and Canada selected to participate in the 2016 Andrew Beazley Broker Academy in London, England. The Academy is hosted by Lloyd's, the world's leading specialist (re)insurance market.

The Andrew Beazley Broker Academy at Lloyd's is designed to support and enrich the training that U.S. and Canadian broking firms provide to their high potential employees through a unique and intensive week in the Lloyd's Market in London.

The Academy's curriculum is designed for highly motivated individuals with approximately three to eight years' insurance experience, and it focuses primarily on deepening the participants' understanding of their existing areas of specialization.

The 2016 academy will run during the week of September 19th, offering the carefully-selected group of 35 attendees the opportunity to see Lloyd's through the eyes of the market's underwriters and brokers, gaining a detailed understanding of how business is transacted in the world's oldest, largest and most vibrant market for insurance.

Managing Principal and Practice Leader of EPIC's Financial Risk Solutions Practice, Bill Cosgrove, nominated Mackey for this prestigious opportunity, leading to his selection to participate in the Management Liability Track.

Cosgrove said, "I was very excited when I heard that Tom was accepted into the Beazley program. Beazley is a key strategic partner for EPIC and Tom's acceptance into the Beazley Broker Academy will go a long way towards strengthening our relationship. BBA is an innovative approach towards fostering a better understanding of the Lloyds marketplace for the next generation of industry leaders. Tom will come away with a solid grasp of the unique aspects of the London market, enhanced product knowledge, and industry contacts that will serve him well in his EPIC career."

Mackey completed a summer-long college internship with EPIC and was then offered a full-time position following his graduation in August of 2014.

Since joining EPIC, Mackey has earned his Associate in Risk Management (ARM) designation and continues to develop his skills and expertise through education and training opportunities such as the Lloyd's Broker Academy.

About EPIC:

EPIC is a unique and innovative retail property and casualty and employee benefits insurance brokerage and consulting firm. EPIC has created a values-based, client-focused culture that attracts and retains top talent, fosters employee satisfaction and loyalty and sustains a high level of customer service excellence. EPIC team members have consistently recognized their company as a "Best Place to Work" in multiple regions and as a "Best Place to Work in the Insurance Industry" nationally.

EPIC now has more than 850 team members operating from offices across the U.S., providing Property Casualty, Employee Benefits, Specialty Programs and Private Client solutions to more than 13,000 clients.

With more than $200 million in revenues, EPIC ranks among the top 20 retail insurance brokers in the United States. Backed by the Carlyle Group, the company continues to expand organically and through strategic acquisitions across the country. For additional information, please visit http://www.epicbrokers.com/.

*PHOTO for media: https://www.Send2Press.com/mediaboom/16-0921s2p-mackey-300dpi.jpg

CONTACT:

David Hock

650-295-4608

[email protected]

Nicole Conley

650-422-3156

[email protected]

This release was issued through Send2Press, a unit of Neotrope. For more information, visit Send2Press Newswire at https://www.Send2Press.com

SOURCE EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants

Related Links

http://www.epicbrokers.com/


COSTA MESA, Calif. and SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Experian, the leading global information services company, and Nav, the only free source for both personal and business credit scores, today announced a strategic partnership to provide small businesses greater transparency into their business and personal credit data, along with instant access to their most-qualified financing options based on their credit profile. This new and free approach saves small businesses valuable time and money, helping to fuel economic growth in one of America's most important sectors.

"Together, Experian and Nav empower business owners by providing deep insight into their credit profiles, which enables greater access to capital and helps them uncover new growth opportunities," says Hiq Lee, president of Experian's Business Information Services. "Working with Nav is a natural fit, because they share our commitment to providing the education resources and innovative tools that small businesses need to successfully manage their financial well-being and improve their bottom line."

Transparency, Education and Streamlined Financing

Despite being a significant economic driver, 72 percent of small businesses1 get turned down for traditional loans. Moreover, the average Annual Percentage Rate for an alternative loan is 94 percent. If small businesses are really going to thrive in America, business owners need to know how to qualify forand get connected tofunding they can afford.

By working together, Experian and Nav are able help small businesses do this by leveraging Experian's deep levels of data on consumers and businesses and Nav's technology platform, which is already used by more than 150,000 small business owners. The new collaboration will provide business owners with the personal and business credit data lenders use to evaluate them, actionable tools to help improve their business profiles, and an algorithm that matches them to their most-qualified funding options based on their actual data before they apply  all quickly and easily within a secure environment.

"Partnering with Experian strengthens our commitment to small businesses and is a validation of our mission," says Levi King, CEO and co-founder of Nav. "By empowering small businesses with the technology to improve their credit and streamline access to financing, Nav and Experian can help fuel small business success, dreams and economic growth."

Nav recently completed its series B funding of $25 million from existing investors and new investors including Experian. Experian is the lead investor in the round and will also secure a seat on Nav's Board. Financial Technology Partners LP served as exclusive strategic advisor to Nav in this transaction.

About Experian's Business Information Services

Experian's Business Information Services is a leader in providing data and predictive insights to organizations, helping them mitigate risk and improve profitability. The company's business database provides comprehensive, third-party-verified information on virtually all U.S. companies, with the industry's most extensive data on the broad spectrum of small and midsize businesses.

By leveraging state-of-the-art technology and superior data-compilation techniques, Experian provides market-leading tools that proactively support the entire credit life cycle, enabling our clients to find new customers, process new applications, manage customer relationships and collect on delinquent accounts.

About Experian

We are the leading global information services company, providing data and analytical tools to our clients around the world. We help businesses to manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision making. We also help people to check their credit report and credit score and protect against identity theft. In 2016, for the third year running, we were named one of the "World's Most Innovative Companies" by Forbes magazine.

We employ approximately 17,000 people in 37 countries and our corporate headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Nottingham, UK; California, US; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Experian plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. Total revenue for the year ended March 31, 2016, was US$4.6 billion.

To find out more about our company, please visit http://www.experianplc.com or watch our documentary, "Inside Experian."

About Nav

Nav is the only site and app giving free access to personal and business credit reports, self-serve tools to help build business credit and a financing marketplace with MatchFactor technology that estimates approval odds based on credit profiles. This all helps business owners get more funding, lower their costs and save time so they can run and grow their business the way they want. More than 150,000 small business owners are already using Nav to get their business and personal credit scores and access financing for free. Nav has partnered with more than 40 of the top business lenders and credit cards. Nav has offices in Silicon Valley and Salt Lake City. For more information visit nav.com, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Experian and the Experian marks used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Experian Information Solutions, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

Nav marks used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nav, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

1 2013 Federal Reserve Bank of New York small business owner study: https://www.newyorkfed.org/smallbusiness/Fall2013/index.html

Roslyn Whitehurst

[email protected]

714.830.5578



Adam Blacker

[email protected]

781.684.6558

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379534LOGO

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130131/LA51658LOGO

SOURCE Nav, Inc.; Experian

Related Links

http://www.experianplc.com


SASABE, Ariz., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Rancho de la Osa has hosted a long line of presidents, movie stars and famous authors in its long and storied history. And now the historic ranch will be offered for sale to the highest bidder on Thursday, October 20, with Albert Burney Auctioneers conducting the event.

The ranch's guests have included Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, authors Margaret Mitchell and Zane Gray, and film stars John Wayne, Cesar Romero and Joan Crawford. But its current owners, Veronica and Richard Schultz, who operated the 239-acre ranch as a resort for 20 years, have retired and decided to sell it at auction.

"It's been an incredible experience to own such a place with so much history, but it's time to put in the hands of someone who can continue to enjoy it as we did for so many years," said Mrs. Schultz. "Over the last two decades, we restored many of the older buildings, furnished the guest rooms and Hacienda with Mexican antiques, and hosted thousands of guests," she said.

The ranch's history stretches back to 1700, when part of the land was established as a mission. "The ranch has served primarily as a country inn/dude ranch or cattle ranch since the 1920s, but is also suitable as a wellness center, corporate retreat, equestrian center or event venue," said Warren Ward, president of the auction company. The ranch has 10 buildings, including the Hacienda (main house) that has been featured in numerous magazines, including Architectural Digest.

Auction staff will be available to accommodate inspections from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily from Oct. 15 to Oct 20. The auction will begin at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 20, at the property.

Individuals interested in additional information visit albertburney.com or call 256-543-1654.

Albert Burney Auctioneers, based in Huntsville, Ala., conducts auctions and markets high-value real estate throughout North and Central America.

For more information:

Carl Carter, 205-823-3273

SOURCE Albert Burney Auctioneers

Related Links

http://albertburney.com


This joint effort is expected to benefit customers and prospective customers of both Bluestar Silicones and Graham Engineering Corporation by enabling them to interact with and learn more about silicone materials, silicone extrusion equipment, and processing, all in one location on the state-of-the-art American Kuhne brand lab line.

"We are very excited to partner with globally-recognized extrusion innovator Graham Engineering Corporation," says Bob Waitt, marketing manager for Bluestar Silicones's U.S. medical market. "American Kuhne silicone extruders are the most advanced on the market today. In concert with our silicone materials expertise, we expect the collaboration to further optimize our heat-cured rubber product processing performance, as well as to provide additional levels of technical service and training for our medical and pharmaceutical tubing customers."

"When cutting-edge materials, equipment, and processing expertise convene, it creates a rich environment for development and learning. We believe this is a unique opportunity to ally with Bluestar Silicones and that it will cultivate learning to benefit not only both organizations and their customers, but also the industry," said Steve Maxson, Graham Engineering Corporation's business development director, extrusion.

In addition to heat cured rubber, Bluestar Silicones offers a full range of silicone technologies for the medical and pharmaceutical markets including liquid silicone rubber (LSR), room-temperature vulcanized silicones (RTVs), skin adhesive tacky gels, cushioning gels and permanent adhesives for the healthcare market. The company also plans to launch three new medical, pharma, and implant grade heat cured rubber product lines in Q4 of 2016.

About Bluestar Silicones

With worldwide operations headquartered in Lyon, France, Bluestar Silicones is a $550 million worldwide silicones raw material manufacturer. The company is one of the world's leading fully integrated global silicones manufacturers with more than 60 years of silicone expertise. Bluestar Silicones has manufacturing operations throughout the world and combines upstream silicon metal operations and capacity with downstream silicone market and application development expertise. The company offers a comprehensive range of silicone technologies in support of diverse specialty markets including paper release, textile coatings, healthcare, moldmaking, automotive, aerospace, and personal care. Bluestar Silicones is owned by Elkem AS, Norway. For more information, call +1 866.474.6342 or visit www.bluestarsilicones.com.

About Graham Engineering Corporation

The Graham Group acquired majority interest in American Kuhne in 2012, followed by Graham Engineering Corporation's acquisition of Welex in June 2013. Together, American Kuhne, Welex, and Graham Engineering create a convergence of leading technologies, people, and capabilities in extrusion. Graham is a privately held company headquartered in York, Pennsylvania, USA.

American Kuhne is the preferred provider of engineered solutions for plastics, rubber, and silicone extrusion. American Kuhne solutions comprise standard and custom single screw extruders, feed screws, extrusion systems, and specialized turnkey systems for laboratory, medical tubing, narrow web, wire and cable, pipe, tubing, and profile applications. Visit www.americankuhne.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410334

SOURCE Bluestar Silicones

Related Links

http://www.bluestarsilicones.com


SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Graviton Consulting Services, Inc., IT consulting firm based on the West Coast of North America, announced today an exciting new collaboration with Canon Information and Imaging Solutions, Inc. (CIIS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc. As Solutions Partner of CIIS, Graviton Consulting Services will combine Canon's cutting edge automation technology with Graviton's industry leading PeopleSoft services to provide PeopleSoft users across all industries solutions for their Financial and Human Resource business processes.

The collaboration will focus on Canon's Accounts Payable (AP) Automation Solution, based on Canon's Enterprise Imaging Platform (EIP), and Graviton's extensive background in PeopleSoft implementations to provide digitized, automated document workflows to PeopleSoft customers. In addition, both companies will look for more integration opportunities with PeopleSoft, using Canon's Enterprise Imaging Platform (EIP).

"Graviton is excited about this partnership, as Canon's state of the art imaging and business process management expertise enable us to offer integrated AP automation solution to our clients," said Vineet Srivastava, President of Graviton Consulting services, Inc. "This solution, which has achieved Oracle Validated Integration with PeopleSoft, will help organizations reduce cost and increase performance."

"Canon is happy to collaborate with Graviton Consulting and leverage its outstanding PeopleSoft services. Combining Graviton Consulting's expertise in Financial and Human Resource business processes with Canon's imaging technologies and deep knowledge of business process automation will help our clients maximize their investment in PeopleSoft," said Tetsuhiro Minamide, President and CEO, Canon Information and Imaging Solutions.

About Graviton Consulting Services

Graviton Consulting Services, Inc. is based out of Sacramento, CA. We provide full project life-cycle consulting services for PeopleSoft and Oracle Cloud applications. Our consultants are highly experienced and motivated individuals with many years of experience across various industries. Graviton Consulting offers implementation, upgrade, and managed services to its clients across the North American continent.

http://gravitonconsulting.com/Graviton/

About Canon Information and Imaging Solutions, Inc.

Canon Information and Imaging Solutions, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., was formed to harness the power of Canon's in-depth knowledge of information flow and world-class imaging technology. Utilizing Canon's vast collection of imaging technology and development tools along with select third-party enterprise applications, Canon Information and Imaging Solutions delivers compelling market-driven solutions in the area of business process automation, accounts payable & procure-to-pay automation, order-to-cash automation, records management, and print management. Additional information about the company, its programs and mission can be found at www.ciis.canon.com.

All referenced product names, and other marks, are trademarks of their respective owners.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160906/404386LOGO

SOURCE Canon Information and Imaging Solutions, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.ciis.canon.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras said Europe must devote more resources toward dealing with refugees and migrants, stressing that collective cooperation from all countries is the only way to manage the problem.

Mr. Tsipras made his comments while co-hosting a roundtable on the refugee issue during the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York this week. Greece has seen a dramatic influx in refugees in recent years, a byproduct of continuing turmoil in the Middle East.

Of the refugee crisis, Mr. Tsipras said, "either we will manage to face it collectively, comprehensively and on the basis of our values, or we will fail."

During the roundtable, Mr. Tsipras said that Greece, even while facing an economic crisis, has faced the issue head-on. "We faced it when 1.2 million migrants entered our country,'' he said. "We faced it when -through unilateral steps of others- our northern borders were closed. We face it as we try to support the nearly 60,000 migrants stranded in Greece, and the new ones coming.''

Mr. Tsipras said that coping with the refugee influx can only work on the basis of solidarity and shared responsibility. Mr. Tsipras said other countries must follow through with the promises they have made to help Greece with the refugee problem. Specifically, Mr. Tsipras asked for an increase in the number of European Asylum officials supporting the Greek asylum service, and also for help in relocating refugees from Greece to other European countries.

Mr. Tsipras concluded by asking for the creation of a "broader global compact " that will:

increase economic and personnel support to countries hosting refugees

increase returns of people who are not in need of international protection

increase diplomatic initiatives and funding to tackle the root causes of migration

increase police, border and coast guard cooperation to eradicate trafficking networks.

For more information, please contact:

Dimitris Karamanis - PM General Secretary's office

Email

+30 698 295 9260

SOURCE Government of Greece
The number one goal for the CMI is to increase the number of skilled workers for manufacturing in order to close the skills gap that has hampered the progress of many Upstate employers. The U.S. is the world's largest manufacturing economy and in South Carolina, manufacturing helps to drive the economy, with $28.90 billion in manufactured goods exported in 2014. Manufacturing in Greenville County is an economic powerhouse, first in gross regional product, first in total payroll for all industries, and third in number of individuals employed in the private sector.

The result of that strength is opportunity for those with the right skills. The average salary of manufacturing workers with an associate degree in Greenville County is $63,936. Yet despite the opportunities, as workers retire in record numbers, there are too few younger workers to replace them.

Two challenges exist. The first is a perception among young adults and their parents of manufacturing as taking place on the old shop floor. The CMI will showcase the robotics and electronics used in manufacturing today and the extremely high skill level required to be part of the workforce. The facility is designed to allow visitors to see the process from above as they cross the GE Bridge to Learning. Hands-on activities will engage visitors of all ages.

A second challenge is to meet the needs of older adults who are changing careers. Some of these individuals will need to brush up on skills as they return to the classroom. The Center for Manufacturing Innovation will offer contextualized learning so that adult learners can improve in the basics as they are immersed in the manufacturing curriculum. Many of these students will continue to work as they gain new job skills, and a modularized curriculum will meet their needs, allowing them to stop out as required and to re-enter easily.

CMI brings many firsts to advanced manufacturing education. The involvement of Clemson University (CU) as a partner, which is designed to bridge the gap between the education of the technician and the education of the engineer, is the first of its kind between a technical college and a research university in the U.S. This is not a shared location for separate offerings; instead, educational offerings will be integrated.

A Manufacturing Honors College, which will allow GTC and CU students to work together to solve real world manufacturing challenges, is also a first. An additive manufacturing partnership with Renishaw at a technical college is another groundbreaking effort, and the open manufacturing lab for education, training, and industry collaboration is unlike anything else in South Carolina. This campus is a first for Greenville Technical College with its focus on one sector of the economy and contains the college's first precision metrology lab.

With CMI, Greenville Technical College has forged a stronger relationship with Greenville County Schools in order to expose more students to the opportunities available in manufacturing. Coursework starting in K-12 will transfer or transition to GTC and then to Clemson so that all levels of education in Greenville County are coming together to impact economic success.

CMI is a reflection of the strong partnership between the college and manufacturers. In fact, the idea originated with employer needs. Around 2010, as the economy showed signs of improvement, advanced manufacturing employers voiced concerns about finding an adequate supply of skilled workers in order to take advantage of opportunities. The idea for the CMI grew out of these discussions. Greenville County Council supported the initiative by approving $25 million in bonds to build the campus, and state government provided additional support for equipment.

Companies have donated equipment and funds to ensure that what is taught at the CMI will meet their needs. Donors include the Gene Haas Foundation, which provided $2 million for scholarships and equipment. In recognition of this gift, the building has been named in honor of Gene Haas.

Dollie and Melvin Younts donated $1 million to create two entrances to the Center for Manufacturing Innovation, expected to be complete in November. These entrances and the main drive on the campus, which allow access to growth and success, bear their names.

GE Power donated $500,000 to create a bridge to learning, coming later this fall to the main entrance of the Gene Haas Center for Manufacturing Innovation. Here, students, parents, and members of the community will be able to catch the excitement of manufacturing by looking down on the high bay space and by using touch screens and interactive technology to see how things are made.

Additional donors include 3M Greenville, Bank of America, Bosch Rexroth and the Bosch Community Fund, Duke Energy Foundation, The Graham Foundation, Hubbell Lighting, John I. Smith Charities, Jennie Johnson, Master Gage & Tool, Meyer Tool, Michelin, Piedmont Natural Gas, ProfilGate, Cliff Rosen, ScanSource, Dick Stofan, T&S Brass & Bronze, and Wells Fargo.

Programs will be offered in a variety of formats, from continuing education workshops and shorter certificate programs to two-year associate degrees and beyond. Offerings will include Machine Tool Technology, CNC, Robotics, and Mechatronics. Additive manufacturing will be incorporated into the curriculum for Machine Tool Technology and CNC students and will also be offered through continuing education classes for working engineers and technicians.

The facility was designed by LS3P and constructed by Rodgers Builders.

"Using traditional methods to increase the pipeline of qualified workers for advanced manufacturing just won't work," said Dr. Keith Miller, president of Greenville Technical College. "In Greenville County, we are taking a new approach with the Center for Manufacturing Innovation, breaking traditions and innovating to close the skills gap. I am grateful to see this strong and concerted effort by educators, employers, government, and other leaders. I know that the Upstate and South Carolina will benefit."

Contact: Becky Mann, 864.250.8305, [email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410525

SOURCE Greenville Technical College
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Guidefitter, the online network for guided hunting and fishing adventures, is introducing the outdoor industry's first trade publication for professional guides and outfitters. Guidefitter Journal is a quarterly guide to overcoming challenges of the trade and an introduction to some of the people, products and stories that give life to the industry.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409909LOGO

Guidefitter is an industry leading online platform serving guides, outfitters and sportspeople with news, advice and stories. The Grid is an influencer marketing solution helping outdoor gear manufacturers reach a large network of verified guides and outfitters by offering pro-discounts. The Journal serves to expand upon the Guidefitter mission by delivering content written specifically for pros.

"There are hunting and fishing magazines aimed at helping sportspeople become better hunters and anglers, but nothing to help inform professional guides and outfitters," said Toni Korzan, owner of Dakota Prairie Lodge and Resort in Kimball, South Dakota. "Guidefitter's new Journal speaks to me as a professional outfitter and lodge owner."

With features like "Top 10 Mistakes New Clients Make" and "Outfitting in the Digital Age," Guidefitter Journal offers solutions to common issues faced by industry pros, as informed by expert guides and outfitters.





"We hope Guidefitter Journal will help better inform and unite the industry," said Bryan Koontz, Founder and CEO of Guidefitter. "Many outfitters and guides have questions and face common challenges as they operate their businesses. We expect the Guidefitter Journal to help make the industry as a whole much more informed, efficient and stronger."

Professional guides and outfitters can receive Guidefitter Journal and exclusive gear discounts by joining at guidefitter.com/join.

Brands can leverage Guidefitter's expert influencer network and learn more about advertising opportunities by visiting www.guidefitter.com/thegrid or contacting [email protected].

About Guidefitter

Guidefitter is the online network for guided hunting and fishing adventures. It is the destination for consumers seeking and sharing guided adventures of a lifetime, the platform for outfitters to save money and run a better business, and the influencer marketing and sales channel for outdoor gear manufacturers. Guidefitter members and the information they share through web, mobile apps and print, represent the pulse of the guided hunting and fishing industry.





Media Contact:

Providence Marketing Group

Luke Hartle

Email

952-239-5076

SOURCE Guidefitter

Related Links

http://guidefitter.com


SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Health 2.0 today unveils the Top 10 finalists in each category of its Global Retrospective Awards. The finalists are:

Top Patient Activists Top Industry Leaders Erin Moore

Christine Bechtel

Regina Holliday

Donna Cryer

Jess Jacobs

Dave DeBronkart

Miriam Kaufman

Hugo Campos

Shannon des roches Rosa

Sharon Terry Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe

Roberto Ascione, Healthware Intl

Bridget Duffy, EIN Network

Jonathan Bush, athenahealth

Geri Lynn Baumblatt, Emmi

Eric Topol, Scripps

Kenneth Mandl, Boston Children's/SMART

Susannah Fox, CTO, HHS

Anne DeGheest, HealthTech Capital

Helen Figge, LumiraDX

Top Health Tech Companies Top Health Care Organizations Fitbit

GetWellNetwork

PatientsLikeMe

WebMD

Athenahealth

23andme

Omada Health

LumiraDx

IBM Watson

Shift Health Texas Children's Hospital

Boston's Children Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital

Mayo Clinic (Connected Health Team)

Toronto Hospital for sick kids

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Xerox

Kaiser Permanente

Providence Health

John Hopkins

At Health 2.0's 10th Annual Fall Conference, we are recognizing the accomplishments of our movement. To do this, Health 2.0 asked the community to nominate the top influencers in four categories: Patient Activists, Industry Leaders, Technology Companies, and Health Care Organizations. Through thousands of votes gathered from this past summer and in the preliminary final round the past few weeks, we have narrowed down to the top 10 in our four categories.

Final voting is now open up to the start of the Conference on Sunday! The winners will be announced and honored at the conference, on September 25-28 in Santa Clara, California.

About Health 2.0 Fall Conference

With more than 200 LIVE Product Demos, 100+ Thought Leaders, 10 New Company Launches, 2000+ Attendees and 4 Days of Prime Networking, Health 2.0's Fall Conference is known as the largest global conference and innovation community in digital health.

Learn more about the agenda here and visit the registration website to attend.

About Health 2.0

Health 2.0 is the premiere showcase and catalyst for the advancement of new health technologies. Through a global series of conferences, thought leadership roundtables, developer competitions, pilot programs, and leading market intelligence, Health 2.0 drives the innovation and collaboration necessary to transform health and health care.

For ten years Health 2.0 has showcased and connected with thousands of technologies, companies, innovative thought leaders, and patient activists through countless events and conferences, challenges, code-a-thons, market research, blog posts, pilot programs and general industry promotion. Since our first conference in 2007, Health 2.0 has grown into a global movement and community of over 100,000 entrepreneurs, developers, and health care stakeholders, and 110+ chapters on six continents.

Contact: Deepa Mistry, [email protected]

SOURCE Health 2.0
DRESDEN, Germany, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

To finance large manufacturing expansion and support worldwide market development

Heliatek HQ with active HeliaFilm(R) facade (PRNewsFoto/Heliatek)

Heliatek, a world leader in organic photovoltaic and a manufacturer of solar films, has put together an 80 million ($88 million) round to finance the expansion of its HeliaFilm manufacturing capacity by one million m p.a.. This round comprises 42 million in equity, 20 million in debt and about 18 million in subsidies.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410009 )



"We are very excited to have successfully completed this financing round. This allows us to strengthen our world leadership in organic solar film and to accelerate our expansion. We will continue to lead the way in enabling distributed energy generation on industrial and commercial buildings," stated Thibaud Le Seguillon, Heliatek CEO. "We will follow our strategy by expanding the BIOPV - Building Integrated Organic Photovoltaic - market through supplying large quantities of our HeliaFilms to our customers in the building and construction material field."

The Series D financing round is led by innogy SE, one of the leading European energy companies. New investors also include ENGIE, BNP Paribas and CEE Group, an investment company of Lampe Equity Management specialized in renewable energy. The existing investors, AQTON, BASF, eCAPITAL, HTGF, Innogy Venture Capital, TUDAG and Wellington Partners, participated in this round.

The European Investment Bank, under the "InnovFin - EU Finance for Innovators" program, granted a 20 million loan to Heliatek. This program is a joint initiative launched by the European Investment Bank in cooperation with the European Commission under Horizon 2020.

The company has applied for the newly developed "KETs Pilot Lines project" technology and innovation funding scheme offered by the State of Saxony and financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Grants up to 18 million over the duration of the project can be expected.

Heliatek plans to install its new manufacturing roll-to-roll facility on its site in Dresden over the next 18 months. It will offer a capacity of one million m p.a. of solar films when fully ramped up. The company will continue in parallel its worldwide roll out of its HeliaFilm products to the building material and the automotive industry. These expansions should create more than 50 new high-tech jobs in Saxony.

Heliatek http://www.heliatek.com

innogy SE http://www.innogy.com

BNP Paribas http://www.bnpparibas.com

CEE http://www.cee-group.de

ENGIE http://www.engie.com

European Investment Bank http://www.eib.org/press

HeliaFilm is a registered trademark of Heliatek GmbH.

Media only:

Cornelia Jahnel, Heliatek GmbH, Tel: +49-351-213-034-421, [email protected]

Nigel Robson, Vortex PR, Tel +44-1481-233080, [email protected]

SOURCE Heliatek
CHICAGO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hinduja Global Solutions Limited (HGS), (listed on NSE & BSE in India) a global leader in business process management, today announced its ranking as a "Leader" in the NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for Customer Management Services in the Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods sector.

"Always being open, easy to do business with, helping customers complete transactions and quickly resolve issue, over any device is the new shopping expectation of today's consumer," said Chris Lord, SVP, Global Growth Strategy at HGS. "HGS's NEAT Report ranking underscores our expertise in helping companies design and deploy great customer experience solutions across all consumer touchpoints to drive meaningful business impact in the form of improved NPS, longer customer retention, and increased revenue."

HGS's ranking is based on its ability to deliver immediate benefits to clients as well as meet their future requirements by reducing costs while improving the customer experience. According to NelsonHall analysts, the Company's strengths include its ability to integrate and manage portions of Company websites within multi-channel customer care and sales, its proprietary multi-channel platform incorporating analytics, self-service and automation, and its demonstrated ability to quickly ramp, train and support crisis management for retail clients.

In addition to providing industry leading steady-state customer care, during 2015-16 HGS managed dozens of product recalls or crisis communication issues between brands and their end consumers. In each instance the brand was able to avoid the issue escalating into a larger public relations issue by empathizing with customers and helping to quickly explain the situation and satisfactorily resolve their concerns. In each special case, HGS used a combination of flexible staffing capabilities and DigiCX capabilities to cover all the voice and digital non-voice channels.

The NelsonHall report examined HGS' key offerings, strategies, and strengths for supporting retail and CPG organizations in customer management services. According to the report, HGS is strategically inclined for growth in retail and CPG through its focus on automation, self-service and full-service front and back-office support capabilities.

"HGS has proven experience supporting a diverse list of retail and CPG clients. It has particular strength in supporting CPG clients, going beyond the traditional customer care to include crisis management and product lab testing. HGS is an innovator in multi-channel customer engagement, particularly in supporting retail and CPG clients," said Vicki Jenkins, Senior Industry Analyst at NelsonHall. "Companies like HGS stand out when they can integrate, design and manage customer care as well as technical support portions within these industries," she added.

The NEAT tool shows how customer management services vendors are positioned in the marketplace overall and against specific business criteria such as cost reduction. Evaluations are based on a combination of interviews with the vendors and their clients, plus extensive NelsonHall analysis. The vendors are scored against a wide range of criteria, establishing a number of scenarios, each representing a different business situation or client business need.

To download the full NEAT report, visit http://bit.ly/2blWGeN. If you are not a registered client you may access the report by visiting http://bit.ly/2bpCCFZ.

About Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS)

HGS is a leader in optimizing the customer experience and helping our clients to become more competitive. HGS provides a full suite of business process management (BPM) services from traditional voice contact center services and transformational DigiCX services that are unifying customer engagement to platform-based, back-office services and digital marketing solutions. By applying analytics, automation, and interaction expertise to deliver innovation and thought leadership, HGS increases revenue, improves operating efficiency, and helps retain valuable customers. HGS expertise spans the telecommunications and media, healthcare, insurance, banking, consumer electronics and technology, retail, and consumer packaged goods industries, as well as the public sector. HGS operates on a global landscape with around 41,000 employees in 69 worldwide locations delivering localized solutions. For the year ended 31st March 2016, HGS had revenues of US$ 507 million. HGS, part of the multi-billion dollar Hinduja Group, has more than four decades of experience working with some of the world's most recognized brands.

About NelsonHall



NelsonHall is the leading BPS and IT services research firm with analysts in the U.S., U.K., and Continental Europe. The company takes a global approach to analysis of vendors and outsourcing markets and is widely respected for the quality and depth of its research. With its "Speed-to-Source" methodology and NEAT vendor evaluations, NelsonHall is helping buy-side organizations significantly reduce the time and cost associated with BPS and ITS sourcing projects.

SOURCE Hinduja Global Solutions Limited (HGS)
ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- This week, incoming American Trucking Associations' Chairman Kevin Burch, president of Jet Express Inc., will participate in a roundtable discussion hosted by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Highways and Transit Subcommittee on the impact of the freight provisions in last year's highway bill.

American Trucking Associations is the largest national trade association for the trucking industry. Through a federation of 50 affiliated state trucking associations and industry-related conferences and councils, ATA is the voice of the industry America depends on most to move our nation's freight.Trucking Moves America Forward

"Ensuring dedicated funding for highway freight projects was an important victory for ATA and the trucking industry in the FAST Act," Burch said. "Having good, uncongested highways is important to my company and to trucking companies across the country."

The roundtable will be hosted by Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chairman of the subcommittee on highways and transit, at 10 a.m. on September 22 in Room 2167 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

"We agree with Chairman Graves and the committee that we can and must do more to maintain our competitive advantage in the global economy, the funds in last year's bill are a good start," Burch said. "Discussions like this are how we can move beyond that good start to an improved, more robust highway bill the next time."

American Trucking Associations is the largest national trade association for the trucking industry. Through a federation of 50 affiliated state trucking associations and industry-related conferences and councils, ATA is the voice of the industry America depends on most to move our nation's freight. Follow ATA on Twitter or on Facebook. Trucking Moves America Forward

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140523/90962



SOURCE American Trucking Associations

Related Links

http://www.trucking.org


LONDON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Executive Summary

The report titled "India Electronic Security Industry Potential to 2020 - Growing System Integrators Market with Real Estate Development in Upcoming Smart Cities" provides a comprehensive analysis of electronic security market in India. The report focuses on the electronic security products sales and solutions revenue by system integrators separately in detail. The report covers market size and segmentation of overall electronic security market by verticals (i.e. Video Surveillance - CCTV, Fire Detection, Access Control, Intrusion Alarm and Speciality devices), by end users (residential and non residential - commercial, government, hospitality, transportation, education and others), by organized and unorganized and by domestic and foreign companies operating in the sector.



The report puts forth in-depth analysis on system integrators market size and potential for multiple players including Firepro, Chubb Alba, Polixel, and others including statistics on business models, market share and detailed company profile. The potential and future outlook for electronic security solutions has also been discussed in the publication at each product level. Detailed analysis of major OEMs such as Zicom Electronic Systems, Honeywell Automation, Tyco Fire and Security India, Johnson Controls India, Aditya Infotech and Prama Hikvision India has been presented in the report. The report covers margin analysis, growth drivers, trends and development, barriers have been covered in the publication. The report also provides future outlook and constraints, security solutions based opportunity along technological limitation and global opportunities that can applied in India.



India Electronic Security Market

The electronic security market in India has recorded revenue worth INR ~ million in FY'2010, which grew at a rate of over ~% during FY'2011, amounting to INR ~ million. Number of property crime cases augmented from ~ in 2012 to ~ during 2014. The revenue of the electronic security industry was reported at INR ~ million in FY'2014 which was further increased to INR ~ million in FY'2015.

In FY'2010, contribution of the organized sector in the overall electronic security market revenue was ~%, while unorganized market accounted for the remaining ~% share. By the end of FY'2015, the contribution of the unorganized sector declined to ~%. Foreign players such as Honeywell, Bosch, UTC, Axis Communications and others have expanded their base in the market over the period from FY'2010 to FY'2015.



System Integrator Market

The electronic security system integration market in India has been fragmented with the presence of over ~ organized as well as around ~ unorganized system integrators in the market. The market size of the organized space in the system integrators market has been evaluated at INR ~ million in 2015.



Video Surveillance Market

Video surveillance systems have been the largest product category in India electronics security products market over the period FY'2010-FY'2015. It has accounted for a revenue share of ~% in FY'2015. The demand for these systems is majorly driven by the government, banking, commercial and transportation sector which require high level of security systems. Government has tightened the security in all the major states significantly post Bombay and Pune attacks. Completion of various large infrastructural projects further aided the growth in revenues of the CCTV market over the period FY'2013-FY'2015. Government sector has accounted for the largest revenue share during FY'2015. Commercial offices and buildings which include the banking and financial sector, accounted for a revenue share of ~% in FY'2015. Public places such as Airport, Railway Stations has captured ~% share in the revenue of video surveillance. CP Plus has been the largest player in the domestic video surveillance market. After starting a joint venture with Prama technologies in 2008, Hikvision has established itself as a major player in the CCTV section. Zicom garnered revenue share of ~% in FY'2015. Dahua Technology contributed ~% in the revenues of the video surveillance market during FY'2015.



Fire Alarm Systems

Honeywell has been the market's leader in fire alarms category with a revenue share of ~% in FY'2015. Tyco has been a major provider of fire and security equipments in India since its incorporation in 1996. Players such as Siemens, Bosch, UTC, Zicom, Johnson Controls, Agni, Gunnebo and Others also accounts for considerable share in the market. The commercial buildings and offices contributed the highest share of ~% in the overall revenue of Indian fire alarm system market during FY'2015. In FY'2015, the fire alarm market had generated revenues worth INR ~ million.



Access Control Market

Access control systems have been the third largest segment in the overall electronic security equipment market as they accounted for a revenue share of ~% during FY'2015. The electronic access control systems market in India registered revenue worth INR ~ million in FY'2015 as compared to INR ~ million in FY'2010, growing at a rate of ~%. The increase in revenues has been attributed to the technological advances in the access control systems market and improved usage of smart cards and biometric solutions. Tyco, Honeywell, UTC products, Lenel, Siemens, Johnson Controls and Other companies such as Bosch, Kaba, HID, Zicom, ESSL are the major players in this space. Unorganized sector contributed ~% to the revenues of the access control market of India during FY'2015.



Intrusion Alarm Market

Tyco, Honeywell with Lyric home security, Zicom, Bosch, Siemens Intrusion Detection Products & Systems, UTC, Securens and Diebold are the major players operating in this category. Intrusion alarms are most popular amongst the residential sector. The revenue of intrusion alarm systems category has increased at a CAGR of ~% during the period FY'2010-FY'2015. Banking sector is one of the major end user of intrusion alarm systems in India.



Key Topics Covered in the Report:

- The Market Size Of The Electronic Security Market In India, FY'2010-FY'2015

- The Market size of Electronic Security System Integration Market in India, FY'2010-FY'2020

- Market segmentation of the India electronic security market on the basis of basis of Products-CCTV, Fire Alarm systems, Access Control Systems, Intrusion Alarm Systems and Specialty Devices such as VMS, Metal Detectors, X-Ray Scanners and Barriers, Industry structure-Organized and Unorganized, Sector- Residential and Non Residential and others.

- Market Share of leading manufacturers in India Electronic Security Market by Products on the basis of Revenue,FY'2015

- Expected Margins Of Manufacturers By Different End Users.

- Landscape of Major System integrators in India electronic Security Market

- Trends and Development in the India Electronic Security market.

- Government Regulations in the India Electronic Security Market.

- Growth Drivers for India electronic Security Market

- Future outlook and projections of India electronic Security Market on the basis of revenue, FY'2016-FY'2020.

- Future outlook and projections of India Electronic Security System Integration Market on the basis of revenue, FY'2016-FY'2020.

- Opportunity Analysis



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4150699/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

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SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sacramento Region Innovation Awards is thrilled to announce that 17 innovation finalists have been selected for its inaugural 2016 program. Presented by Stoel Rives LLP, Moss Adams LLP and the Sacramento Business Journal, the program will feature winners in six categories to be announced at an awards luncheon on Friday, November 4, 2016 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Sacramento.

The Innovation Awards is also excited to announce that Golden 1 Center, the new home of the NBA's Sacramento Kings, will receive a special "Innovation of the Year" award at the event. The arena will be the most sustainable and technologically advanced arena in the world. Accepting the award on behalf of the Kings, President Chris Granger will give a keynote speech at the luncheon, highlighting the arena's impact on the surrounding community and its industry-leading commitments to sustainability, technology innovation and local industry.

The Sacramento Region Innovation Awards celebrates and promotes pioneering innovations and the local talent behind new products, services and processes in the marketplace. The 2016 Finalists are:

Advanced Manufacturing

BOLT STAR by Construction Innovations LLC

Watercraft Manufacturing by Free Form Factory Inc.

Food and Agribusiness

Automated Irrigation Advisor by Tule Technologies

Radio Frequency Pasteurizer by RF Biocidics

RAPID Kit by AstRoNA Biotechnologies

Hardware & Electronics

LinkBot by Barobo, Inc.

Real-Time Network (CSDS RTN) by California Surveying & Drafting Supply

SenCam by Senworth

Medical and Health Technologies & Services - supported by MedStart

B. infantis by Evolve Biosystems

by Evolve Biosystems GroCell-3D HCCP Scaffolds by Molecular Matrix Musculoskeletal, Inc.

ViVita Process & ViVita BP by ViVita Technologies, Inc.

Software

DialSource by DialSource, Inc.

The Risk Number by Riskalyze

Wyndow by Wyndow

Sustainability

FastOx Gasifier by Sierra Energy

Pipeline Leak Detection by Electro Scan Inc.

TdX 20 by Bluon Energy

"This program is our hat tip to the greater Sacramento business community," said Melissa Jones, Managing Partner of Stoel Rives' California offices. "Having fostered innovation awards platforms in Utah and Idaho for many years, we're excited to bring our brand of innovation recognition to this region. We're also delighted to have the Sacramento Kings as part of our program, along with the team's new Golden 1 Center, which is a beacon of cutting-edge innovation in our hometown."

The program's Selection Committee reviewed more than 80 nominations submitted online through the Sacramento Business Journal between June 1 and July 29, 2016. Committee members were sourced from the region's business, academic and technology sectors, and include representatives from MedStart, CleanStart, AgStart, UC Davis' Venture Catalyst, Greater Sacramento Area Economic Council, World Food Center, Teichert, Intel, Pride Industries, California Manufacturing & Technology Association, Valley Vision, SMUD, Raley's and Sutter Health, among others.

The November 4 awards luncheon begins at 11:30 am with a networking period and innovation showcase, followed by formal program from noon to 1:30 pm. Individual tickets and table sponsorships may be reserved through the Sacramento Business Journal.

About Stoel Rives LLP: Stoel Rives is a business law firm providing corporate and litigation services to clients in the Energy & Infrastructure, Agribusiness, Food & Beverage, Manufacturing & Consumer Products, Technology, Life Sciences, Healthcare, Government & Public Agencies and Natural Resources industries throughout the United States. The firm has nearly 400 attorneys operating out of 10 offices in seven states and the District of Columbia. Stoel Rives is a leader in corporate, energy, environmental, intellectual property, labor and employment, land use and construction, litigation, natural resources, project development and real estate law. For more information, follow @stoelrives or visit www.stoel.com.

About Moss Adams LLP: Moss Adams LLP provides accounting, tax, and consulting services to public and private middle-market enterprises in many different industries. Founded in 1913 and headquartered in Seattle, Moss Adams has 29 locations in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, and Texas. Moss Adams is one of the 15 largest accounting and consulting firms in the United States. Our staff of more than 2,400 includes approximately 267 partners. For more information, visit www.mossadams.com.

SOURCE Stoel Rives LLP

Related Links

https://www.stoel.com


WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Fermanagh-born leader of the Capitol Hill-based Irish National Caucus has been forced to address why he was not invited to the September 7th Washington meeting with James Brokenshire, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

This according to Barbara Flaherty, Executive Vice President of the Irish National Caucus. Ms. Flaherty said: "Fr. Mc Manus was not going to make any comment on his exclusion but he has received so many phone call and emails that he was forced to address it. Fr. Mc Manus personally was not the slightest put out by being excluded. He does not seek to meet with British Government officials; however, hundreds of Irish-Americans are now very suspicious and angry about the whole thing."

The Brokenshire meeting was arranged, and invitations extended by Norman Houston, head of the NI Bureau Ms. Flaherty said: "Fr. Mc Manus had to tell Irish-Americans that he was not aware of the meeting and that he did not receive and invitation. That, of course, then led to Irish- Americans asking Fr. Mc Manus why he thought he was excluded because, obviously, there is no Irish-American leader better known than Fr. Mc Manusnor longer involved than he in the struggle for Irish justice."

Fr. Mc Manus was finally forced to say: "I have no idea why I was excluded as I've always had a friendly and professional relationship with Norman Houston. I am aware, of course, that First Minister Arlene Foster had, surprisingly and gratuitously, attacked me. Let me first say here that I respect Ms. Foster and I am proud she is a Fermanagh woman. But the Belfast Telegraph took exception to the Irish National Caucus animated internet video, which is on our website (IrishNationalCaucus.org) and that newspaper may have actually incited Ms. Foster to attack. However, the video is the essence of moderation and common sense. It welcomes the progress of the peace process, stresses that non-violence is the way forward and encourages people to think of Northern Ireland as "the Beloved Community" the term made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr. How many people, apart from me, speak of Northern Ireland as the Beloved Community? Seriously?

The video also regrets that despite the progress there is still sadly a deep strain of anti-Catholic bigotry in Northern Ireland something that cannot be denied. Yet, amazingly, Ms. Foster accused me of being sectarian! I deplored sectarianism and she accused me of sectarianism. And the Belfast Telegraph ran headlines, 'Irish National Caucus lies must be challenged.'"

Ms. Flaherty explained: "We don't know if any of this played a part in Fr. Mc Manus being excluded. But when we said that to Irish-Americans, the very large response was almost identical: 'But Martin Mc Guinness is supposed to be co-leader of Northern Ireland . Norman Houston is supposed to represent both Mc Guinness and Foster. Would Mc Guinness approve of Houston excluding Fr. Mc Manus?'"

Ms. Flaherty concluded: "However, had Fr. Mc Manus attended the meeting, you can be certain he would have raised the Pat Finucane case, the Raymond Mc Cord Jr. Case, the Scappaticci-Stakeknife case and the Ballymurphy Massacre. He would also have challenged Mr. Brokenshire on British Government spying on Irish-Americans organizations as the 1985 PRONI released papers prove. And he would also most certainly have raised the legal challenge to Brexit by Raymond Mc Cord, Sr.

Fr. Sean Mc Manus

President

Irish National Caucus

P.O. BOX 15128

Capitol Hill

Washington, DC 20003-0849

Tel. 202-544-0568

Fax. 202-488-7537

[email protected]

SOURCE Irish National Caucus
NEW YORK, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The US Elections 2016 are scheduled for November 8, and the first of the three debates leading up to it is on September 26. Till now both Hillary and Trump have projected themselves through an aggressive campaign, but this the first opportunity where the people will be able to gauge them during a one-on-one debate. While Hillary has been preparing herself religiously for the debate, Donald Trump is relying more on his extempore skills.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410189LOGO )



As per GaneshaSpeaks.com's expert astrologers, "Hillary's past may come back to haunt her during the debate. On the other hand, Trump's lofty promises, often made without due deliberation, may backfire on him. On the whole it will be a fiery debate with Trump having a slight advantage over Hillary."

Astrological predictions

On September, 26th i.e. the first debate, the transiting Moon will be in the star of Mercury in Cancer, which indicates a high voltage debate between the two candidates. The transiting Moon in conjunction with natal Venus in trine with the natal Moon indicates momentum in favour of Trump in the first debate. Also, a strong Venus in the 3rd House is an added advantage for Trump. But, Mercury-NorthNode(Rahu) conjunction can be a spoiling factor. His hopeful promises and pronouncements may bring discomfort. Also, over enthusiasm and aggression may backfire or raise questions in the minds of voters.

In Hillary Clinton's chart, the transiting Moon will be passing through the 10th House over the natal Mars and Saturn. So, she will be equally prepared. But, Mercury-NorthNode(Rahu) conjunction indicates that she will struggle to defend her credibility and matters related to her past may bother her. However, the transiting Venus in the Ascendant over the natal Venus is a significant advantage for her, despite which, she will be on the receiving end many times. On the whole, she will be less impressive than Trump.

Astrological analysis: Between now and the first debate

The transiting Mercury is about to turn direct in Leo. But, it is still in conjunction with NorthNode(Rahu). For Hillary, it is a critical period for her campaign. She can't take anything for granted since Trump's popularity is surging in key states, clearly demonstrated by the ratings. However, Mercury in direct motion will be less harmful, so she may recover some of her lost ground. But, the race will remain tight as it approaches the first debate.

On the other hand, Trump will continue his aggressive campaign and despite some deterioration, he will have a solid footing before the first debate. The period between 22nd and 25th September will be very important for his campaign. His campaign may hit some roadblocks or his own misjudgment may bring some uncomfortable issues to the fore. Nevertheless, the race will get tighter.

About GaneshaSpeaks.com:

GaneshaSpeaks.com is India's number one and the world's third largest astrology portal. The predictions by the portal bear the remarkable accuracy rate of about 85%-90%. Launched in 2003 by Mr. Bejan Daruwalla, a veteran astrologer of international repute, the astrology giant today attracts over 130 million visitors to its online properties. With a team size of 700+ employees, GaneshaSpeaks.com strives to be a friend, astrologer and guide and works towards making a positive difference to the lives of its patrons.

Media contact:

Hemang Arunbhai Pandit

Founder, MD & CEO

[email protected]

GaneshaSpeaks.com

+91-8141400168



SOURCE GaneshaSpeaks.com
LAKE OSWEGO, Ore., Sept. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Greenbrier Companies, Inc. (NYSE:GBX) announced today that Jim Cowan has been appointed President, Greenbrier International. Cowan continues to report to William A. Furman, Chairman and CEO of Greenbrier and remains as CEO of GBW Railcar Services, LLC, a 50/50 railcar repair and refurbishment joint venture with Watco Companies, LLC. Ray Pericola, who has served at GBW since its creation in 2014, has been promoted to President reporting to Cowan.

In this newly-created role, Cowan's broad experience in manufacturing and the rail industry will support Greenbrier's rapidly-growing international operations. Cowan's responsibilities extend to all railcar markets outside the Americas and include international project coordination with Greenbrier's Global Manufacturing Organization (GMO). Cowan will work closely with Alejandro Centurion, President of GMO, and Martin Graham, Executive Vice President, GMO.

Cowan is well known in the railcar industry with decades of experience in senior leadership positions. Prior to joining Greenbrier in 2014, Cowan worked for Amsted Rail supporting their activities in Brazil. Previously, Cowan served as President and Chief Executive Officer of American Railcar Industries, Inc. (ARI) where he had oversight of ARI's activities in international rail markets where Greenbrier is currently active.

"Today, Greenbrier serves railcar markets from our facilities in the US, Mexico, Europe and Brazil. Greenbrier's presence is also rapidly growing in emerging railcar markets that we can serve from Europe including markets in the Middle East, Africa and Eurasia," Furman said. "I have asked Jim to take on this new role to more fully focus Greenbrier on global business opportunities. I am pleased that he will bring important new leadership to our international activities."

About Greenbrier

Greenbrier (www.gbrx.com), headquartered in Lake Oswego, Oregon, is a leading supplier of transportation equipment and services to the railroad industry. Greenbrier builds new railroad freight cars in manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Mexico and Poland and marine barges at our U.S. manufacturing facility. Greenbrier sells reconditioned wheel sets and provides wheel services at locations throughout the U.S. We recondition, manufacture and sell railcar parts at various U.S. sites. Through GBW Railcar Services, LLC, a 50/50 joint venture with Watco Companies, LLC, freight cars are repaired and refurbished at over 30 locations across North America, including more than 10 tank car repair and maintenance facilities certified by the Association of American Railroads. Greenbrier owns a lease fleet of over 8,900 railcars and performs management services for over 264,000 railcars.

SOURCE The Greenbrier Companies, Inc. (GBX)

Related Links

http://www.gbrx.com


"Linda brings extensive state, national and international regulatory leadership experience to our board, and we are delighted to welcome her," said James D. Gallagher, Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Chief Administrative Officer of John Hancock. "Since joining our company, Linda has built our state government regulatory and legislative affairs platform, become a strategic partner on our executive leadership team, and has reported regularly to John Hancock and Manulife boards on legislative and regulatory issues. She also has coordinated with Manulife on international regulatory affairs in six Asian nations."

Before joining John Hancock, Ms. Watters was a Managing Director, Financial Risk Management, with KPMG LLP in Chicago. From 2003 to 2007, she served as Commissioner, the Office of Financial and Insurance Services, for the State of Michigan. Ms. Watters was appointed to the post by Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and unanimously confirmed by the Michigan State Senate. During her tenure, Michigan fully implemented coordination of the regulation of the insurance, banking and securities industries. Ms. Watters also was the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Detroit Commerce Bank from 1998 to 2003. Prior to that, she held positions with commercial banks in the Midwest and with General Motors Corporation.

In 2014, Ms. Watters was appointed by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to the Successful Women, Successful Families Task Force, part of the state's Women in the Workforce initiative. She also serves on the board of the U.S. National Archives Foundation (finance and governance committees). Her professional and volunteer service has included board directorships and membership in insurance, community health, business, education, women's, and urban/minority advocacy organizations.

She is a current board director of the John Hancock Trust Company, and a past board director of Detroit Commerce Bank and of publicly traded United American Healthcare Corporation, where she served on the finance and audit committees.

Ms. Watters earned her MBA from the University of Dayton and BA in Business Administration/Economics from Bowling Green State University. She was awarded a Leadership in the 21st Century certificate from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government executive education program. She also holds an Advanced Professional Director Certification from the American College of Corporate Directors.

About John Hancock Life Insurance Company (U.S.A.)

John Hancock Life Insurance Company (U.S.A.) ("JHUSA" or the "Company") is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Manufacturers Investment Corporation ("MIC"). MIC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of John Hancock Financial Corporation ("JHFC"), which is an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company ("MLI"). MLI, in turn, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Manulife Financial Corporation ("MFC"), a Canadian-based, publicly traded financial services holding company.

The Company provides a wide range of financial protection and wealth management products and services to both individual and institutional customers located primarily in the United States. Through its insurance operations, the Company offers a variety of individual life insurance and individual long-term care insurance products that are distributed through multiple distribution channels, including insurance agents, brokers, banks, financial planners, and direct marketing. The Company also offers mutual fund products and services which include a variety of retirement products to retirement plans. The Company distributes these products through multiple distribution channels, including insurance agents and affiliated brokers, securities brokerage firms, financial planners, pension plan sponsors, pension plan consultants, and banks. In 2013, the Company discontinued sales of its structured settlements and single premium immediate annuity products. The Company is licensed to sell insurance in 49 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

John Hancock Distributors LLC ("JHD"), a registered broker-dealer and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company, acts as the principal underwriter of variable life contracts and other products issued pursuant to a distribution agreement with the Company.

The Company has two wholly-owned life insurance subsidiaries, John Hancock Life Insurance Company of New York ("JHNY") and John Hancock Life & Health Insurance Company ("JHLH").

About John Hancock Financial and Manulife

John Hancock Financial is a division of Manulife, a leading Canada-based financial services group with principal operations in Asia, Canada and the United States. Operating as Manulife in Canada and Asia, and primarily as John Hancock in the United States, our group of companies offers clients a diverse range of financial protection products and wealth management services through its extensive network of employees, agents and distribution partners. Assets under management and administration by Manulife and its subsidiaries were $934 billion (US $718 billion) as at June 30, 2016. Manulife Financial Corporation trades as 'MFC' on the TSX, NYSE and PSE, and under '945' on the SEHK. Manulife can be found on the Internet at manulife.com.

The John Hancock unit, through its insurance companies, comprises one of the largest life insurers in the United States. John Hancock offers and administers a broad range of financial products, including life insurance, annuities, investments, 401(k) plans, long-term care insurance, college savings, and other forms of business insurance. Additional information about John Hancock may be found at johnhancock.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410373

SOURCE John Hancock Financial

Related Links

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ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- John Meigs, Jr., MD, FAAFP, a family physician in Centreville, Alabama, today assumes the role of president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Previously, he served one year as president-elect, four years as speaker and three years as vice speaker of the AAFP's governing body, the Congress of Delegates. The AAFP represents 124,900 physicians and medical students nationwide.

As president of the AAFP, Meigs will advocate on behalf of family physicians and patients to inspire positive change in the U.S. health care system.

Meigs was in private practice in Centreville, Alabama, his hometown, from 1982 to 2013. In 2013, he merged with another practice to become a part of Bibb Medical Associates, which is housed in a clinic at Bibb Medical Center, a 25-bed rural hospital in Centreville. He also serves as chief of staff at Bibb Medical Center.

A member of the AAFP since 1979, Meigs has served on numerous commissions and committees, including the Scientific Assembly Resolutions Committee and the Committee on Rural Health. He also is a past member of the AAFP Commission on Health of the Public. Prior to his terms as speaker and vice speaker of the Congress of Delegates, he had served as Alabama's delegate or alternate delegate to the Congress since 1996.

Meigs is an active member of the Alabama Academy of Family Physicians. He served on its board of directors, including terms as president-elect, president and board chair. He also has served on the Alabama AFP's Executive Committee and chaired both the Public Relations Committee and Education Committee. Meigs also was vice president of the Alabama Academy of Family Physicians Foundation, the charitable arm of the organization, from 2003 to 2008.

A former speaker of the House of Delegates and College of Counselors for the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, Meigs currently serves as a member of its Board of Censors. In addition, he is a member of the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners and the chair of the State Committee on Public Health. He also serves on the Alabama Family Practice Rural Health Board and the Alabama Board of Medical Scholarships.

Meigs is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and a clinical professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, Birmingham. In 2003, he was awarded the University of Alabama School of Medicine Argus Award for Best Attending Physician in Family Medicine. Meigs also serves as adjunct clinical faculty for the Cahaba Family Medicine Residency Program in his home town of Centreville. In 2014, he was inducted into the Alabama Healthcare Hall of Fame.



An active member of his community, Meigs serves on the Board of Directors of Distinguished Young Women of Bibb County, a scholarship program for high school senior girls. He was President of that organization from 1995 to 2015. In 2004, he was named Bibb County Citizen of the Year by the Kiwanis Club of Centreville

Meigs earned his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and his medical degree from the University of South Alabama, Mobile. He completed his family medicine residency at the University of Alabama Birmingham Selma Family Practice Residency Program in Selma, Alabama, where he also served as chief resident.

Meigs is board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine. He has the AAFP Degree of Fellow, an earned degree awarded to family physicians for distinguished service and continuing medical education.

About the American Academy of Family Physicians

Founded in 1947, the AAFP represents 124,900 physicians and medical students nationwide. It is the only medical society devoted solely to primary care.

Family physicians conduct approximately one in five office visits -- that's 192 million visits annually or 48 percent more than to the next most visited medical specialty. Today, family physicians provide more care for America's underserved and rural populations than any other medical specialty. Family medicine's cornerstone is an ongoing, personal patient-physician relationship focused on integrated care.

To learn more about the specialty of family medicine, the AAFP's positions on issues and clinical care, and for downloadable multi-media highlighting family medicine, visit www.aafp.org/media. For information about health care, health conditions and wellness, please visit the AAFP's award-winning consumer website, www.FamilyDoctor.org.

SOURCE American Academy of Family Physicians

Related Links

http://www.aafp.org


RESEDA, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --The Los Angeles Jewish Home is hosting a special celebration to recognize its 39 residents (two males and 37 females) who are turning 100 years of age or more this year. Scheduled for September 22nd - National Centenarians Day - the residents will be treated to a celebratory event with cake, music and other festivities. A few of the centenarians you will meet include:

Dorothy Goldman , age 103

, age 103 Ben Weisel , age 101

, age 101 Fae Dragin , age 103

, age 103 Albert Weber , age 102

, age 102 Myrtle Feenberg , age 100

, age 100 Sadye Peckman , age 100

When: Thursday, September 22; 10:00 am media remarks followed by a special program and brief remarks.

Who: Welcome  Molly Forrest, CEO-President

Blessing  Rabbi Karen Bender

Video presentation  Forever Young

Centenarian remarks  Myrtle Feenberg

Dignitaries presentation/remarks

Congressman Brad Sherman Representative

Mayor Garcetti Representative

Assemblyman Matt Dababneh

Where: Los Angeles Jewish Home, Grancell Village

Schulman Activities Center, Azus Park

7150 Tampa Ave., Reseda, CA (parking available on-site)

Note: During interviews, please remember to speak up. Our Centenarians are a bit hard of hearing. See a preview of our centenarians here: http://bit.ly/2cD11fk

SOURCE Los Angeles Jewish Home

Related Links

http://www.jha.org


ROCKVILLE, Md., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States is the only Private plan available through employer-sponsored health coverage in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia  and one of only 13 Private health plans available nationwide  to earn a five out of five rating from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Health Insurance Plan Ratings 20162017.

In addition, Kaiser Permanente has the highest rated Medicare plan in the region.

The ratings were published by NCQA in the Health Insurance Plan Ratings 2016-17 report. NCQA is recognized as the national leader in health care performance measurement and rates more than 1,000 health plans nationally each year, including Medicare, Medicaid and Private (commercial).

These ratings place Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States among the top three percent of Private health plans nationwide and the top 10 percent of Medicare plans nationwide.

"This is the fifth consecutive year that Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States rated as one of the top Private health plans in the nation," said Bernadette Loftus, MD, associate executive director, The Permanente Medical Group. "Our consistently high ratings reflect how Kaiser Permanente's commitment to quality and service translates into our members living healthier, fuller lives."

"The information provided by NCQA empowers consumers to compare health plans using independent information and allows us all to make the best health care decisions for ourselves and our families," said Kim Horn, president of Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States. "This rating reflects the success of Kaiser Permanente's integrated care model and shows that we are setting the pace for the highest quality health care in our region."

The NCQA Health Insurance Plan Ratings are based on combined scores for health plans in the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set, commonly called HEDIS; the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or CAHPS; and NCQA Accreditation standards.

To see this year's ratings, visit URL http://healthinsuranceratings.ncqa.org. This website contains information to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices. The measurement tools used by NCQA are among the most comprehensive, comparable across plans and widely respected in the nation, and cover a wide range of clinical and service measures, including women's reproductive health, immunizations and cancer screenings, as well as clinical treatment measures for the management of chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes and heart disease.

About Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States

Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States region, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, provides and coordinates complete health care services for more than 660,000 members through 29 medical centers in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Founded in 1980, Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States is a total health organization comprising Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States, Inc., and the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group, P.C., an independent medical group that features more than 1,200 physicians. For more information about Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States, visit kp.org or follow us on Twitter, twitter.com/KPMidAtlantic, or Facebook, www.facebook.com/kpthrive.

About the National Committee for Quality Assurance

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations and recognizes clinicians in key clinical areas. NCQA's HEDIS is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care. NCQA's Web site (www.ncqa.org) contains information to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices.

SOURCE Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States

Related Links

http://www.kp.org


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- According to Kalorama Information, the sequencing market has evolved to the point where it is experiencing rapid growth, with an estimated $3.8 billion in product revenues in 2015. This estimate includes both sequencing instruments plus consumables, and also service revenue such as from extended instrument service contracts. New uses of sequencing, especially clinical uses, are driving sales. The healthcare market research firm's report, Next-Generation Sequencing Markets, analyzes the current and potential world market for next-generation sequencing.

Next-Generation Sequencing Markets (Systems, Consumables, Services, Competitive Analysis, Trends, Platforms) can be found at Kalorama Information: http://www.kaloramainformation.com/Generation-Sequencing-Systems-10290041/?productid=10290041.

"Clinical applications of DNA sequencing are being developed and commercialized," said Bruce Carlson, Publisher of Kalorama Information. "The major clinical market for sequencing continues to be oncology, followed by genetic or inherited disorders, and sequencing is being applied to other clinical applications as well."

Research that eventually led to the emergence of next-generation sequencing ten years ago actually started as early as the 1970s. The road to where the sequencing market is today has been long and hard, with improvements in sequencing technology still needed to make sequencing-based diagnostic tests widely available and used by all physicians. However, the sequencing field has entered an exciting time where it is now becoming possible to realize some of the potential benefits long dreamed about by researchers and companies in this field.

DNA sequencing has successfully penetrated the research market. Today, this market is large, and is expected to continue to grow, despite funding issues and other challenges. In addition, technology advances in knowledge of the genome, and in DNA sequencing technology/platforms, will continue to fuel the growth of diagnostic applications of next-generation sequencing in clinical laboratories and companies having laboratories that are Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certified, and also in in vitro diagnostic (IVD) companies that sell kits to clinical labs.

DNA sequencing is also penetrating the clinical diagnostic market. Most currently available clinical tests based on next-generation sequencing are laboratory-developed tests (LDTs). The first next-generation sequencing system and in vitro diagnostic tests have been cleared by the FDA, and more will follow. The next-generation sequencing clinical diagnostic market is poised for continued rapid growth over the next several years.

Next-generation sequencing is increasingly being used in the field of personalized medicine and companion diagnostics. For example, in oncology, pharmaceutical companies are developing and commercializing a growing number of targeted therapies. This has generated a need for assays that detect the presence or absence of increasingly more genetic markers, all from a small sample of tissue. In other words, multiplexed assays and/or panels are needed. This, in turn, has led to increased interest in technologies such as next-generation sequencing, which can be used to interrogate a large number of genes in a single assay. As diagnostic companies develop assays based on next-generation sequencing, the focus is on assays that generate actionable results  where there is sufficient clinically validated information on the significance of the genetic change so that the results are useful in helping a clinician make a treatment decision. As a result, many diagnostic assays are based on targeted sequencing approaches that focus on genes for which the clinical utility of genetic changes is known.

Companies in the next-generation sequencing market have attracted major investments. Since the beginning of 2015 alone, companies have raised billions in investments. Many pharmaceutical companies have entered into deals with next-generation sequencing companies. These include acquisitions or other deals to gain access or enhance their own internal sequencing capabilities and expertise, and also deals with diagnostic companies who can develop companion diagnostic or other tests for use with therapies being developed by pharmaceutical companies. Kalorama profiles 70 companies in its report, including Abbott Laboratories; Beckman Coulter, Inc. (a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation); Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD); Illumina, Inc.; Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp); Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc.; QIAGEN N.V.; Roche; Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics; and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

Next-Generation Sequencing Markets examines the segments of the sequencing market, including sequencing instruments plus consumables and also service revenue such as from extended instrument service contracts, with analysis of the full sequencing market including: worldwide sequencing market product revenues (instruments and consumables), 2015 and 2020; sequencing market, worldwide, 2015 and 2020 (instrument revenue, consumables revenue, services revenue, total market); market share of sequencing market, by company (instruments, consumables, services relating to supporting products); sequencing market by geographical region, worldwide, 2015 and 2020 (North America, Europe, Asia, rest of world, total market); next-generation sequencing system ownership by country, percentage (United States, China, Germany, U.K., South Korea, Spain, Canada, France, Australia, Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan, Brazil, Japan, India, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, others); next-generation sequencing system ownership by brand (HiSeq2000, Genome Analyser, Roche 454, ABI SOLiD, Ion Torrent, MiSeq, Ion Proton, Pacific Biosciences, Oxford Nanopore MinION, Polonator, NextSeq); percent of end users (academic & government versus commercial, non-profit & hospital), 2014, 2015, and 2018 (projected); research sequencing market  types of sequencing: targeted or whole exome sequencing versus de novo or whole genome sequencing (2015); clinical sequencing market by disease category, 2015, percentage (genetic testing/inherited disorders, other disorders); clinical sequencing market by disease category, 2020, percentage (oncology, genetic testing/inherited disorders, infectious disease, other disorders); and investments in next-generation sequencing companies, 2015 and first half of 2016.

Next-Generation Sequencing Markets (Systems, Consumables, Services, Competitive Analysis, Trends, Platforms) can be found at Kalorama Information: http://www.kaloramainformation.com/Generation-Sequencing-Systems-10290041/?productid=10290041.

Please link any media or news references to our reports or data to http://www.kaloramainformation.com/.

About Kalorama Information

Kalorama Information, a division of MarketResearch.com, supplies the latest in independent medical market research in diagnostics, biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and healthcare; as well as a full range of custom research services. Reports can be purchased through Kalorama's website and are also available on www.marketresearch.com and www.profound.com.

We routinely assist the media with healthcare topics. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and our blog at www.kaloramainformation.com.

Contact:

Bruce Carlson

(212) 807-2622

[email protected]

www.KaloramaInformation.com

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150831/262422LOGO

SOURCE Kalorama Information

Related Links

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SINGAPORE, Sept. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvelstone Group is set to launch the world's largest Fintech Hub (over 30,000 sq ft) in early November.

An independent not-for-profit initiative, its objectives are to:

Help fintech startups prototype, develop and expand their business models overseas

Support existing companies and financial institutions in their adoption of innovations

Form public-private partnerships to further develop new tech and financial infrastructure

LATTICE80 is located in the Central Business District (CBD), close to the key financial institutions, stock exchange and the regulators - the same institutions that brought Singapore to its current position as the world's third most competitive financial centre, after London and New York, according to a survey by London-based research firm Z/Yen Group.

Joe Seunghyun Cho, Chairman of Marvelstone Group commented, "We think Singapore is the right place for a global Fintech Hub for a number of reasons. Singapore, being a traditional financial and trading hub, has the legal infrastructure and access to global investors that budding fintech companies would look for."

"Plus, the time is right for innovation, and people are more receptive to the use of technology in financial services," said Marvelstone Group CEO, Gina Heng. She added, "Singapore, as a regional hub can also connect us to fintech globally."

"LATTICE80," said Heng, "aims to support the fintech ecosystem in Asia and bridge global players to the region. We have been working closely with MAS, who has made great strides in shaping the local fintech ecosystem. We also seek to bring partners onboard and collaborate with other Fintech hubs like London's Level 39, Australia's Stone & Chalk, and Israel's The Floor."

The move to establish LATTICE80 is in line with the Singapore Government's overarching Smart Nation Vision, which is aimed at empowering people and businesses through increased access to data, innovative ideas and solutions, and utilising technology to better serve citizens' needs.

Said Cho, "Singapore can be the best test bed for smart city solutions. Financial technology is one of the most important components of a Smart Nation, and can serve to power further innovation.

More details will be released closer to the launch.

For media enquiries, please contact: [email protected] or +65-6817-3141

SOURCE Marvelstone

Related Links

http://www.lattice80.com


LAS VEGAS, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Life is Beautiful Music & Art Festival will celebrate their fourth annual event with an official after party hosted by Grammy nominated hip hop recording artist and the festival's headliner, J. Cole. The highly anticipated evening will begin at 10:30pm on Saturday, September 24th at LIGHT nightclub inside the Mandalay Bay (3950 S Las Vegas Blvd). Sounds will be provided by mega DJ and producer, DJ Mustard.

Hundreds of celebrities, festivalgoers, and guests will fill the venue to celebrate the one-of-a-kind 3 day festival that brings together the very best music, art, food and learning programming into Downtown Las Vegas. To purchase tickets to the Life is Beautiful Music & Art Festival, visit Lifeisbeautiful.com. Tickets and table reservations for the official after party are available for purchase on Thelightvegas.com.

ABOUT LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Life is Beautiful Music & Art Festival is an annual celebration where people from all walks of life (generations, orientation, race, religion, and nationality) come together and create an experience centered in music, art, taste and ideas. That gathering of people, by very nature, becomes a platform in which positivity prevails, culture and creativity thrive and transformation occurs.

Life is Beautiful launched in October 2013 featuring marquee musicians, chefs, artists and speakers. Held in the heart of Downtown Las Vegas, Life is Beautiful attracted more than 100,000 attendees in 2015. For more information on the company's projects and the latest festival news, visit www.lifeisbeautiful.com, or connect with Life is Beautiful socially at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

ABOUT LIGHT

LIGHT merges groundbreaking music with creative and cutting-edge visual to produce a new nightlife experience. Headlining DJs lead the charge, coupled with exclusively built visuals, innovative video mapping, lighting, sound and special effects. Designed as an experience to play with your senses, LIGHT offers far more than the traditional nightclub. The chic, fashion-forward 38,000-square-foot venue features state-of-the-art production, visual effects and world-renowned DJs.

Media Contact

LIGHT Nightclub

Beth Bartolini  [email protected]

Abegail Cal  [email protected]

Life Is Beautiful

Jaclyn Dadas / Lea Komitzky / Paige Adams

Kirvin Doak Communications

(702) 737-3100

[email protected]

SOURCE LIGHT Nightclub
LONDON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Telematics Penetration to Reach 24.6% by 2022, Generating 4.3 Billion



The aim of this study is to analyze the developments of telematics industry for LCVs in Europe and present an outlook of market growth opportunities and performance. The major focus is market trends (LCV OEMs' increasing focus in telematics market, mobile freight brokerage, growing demand for field service management, rising preference for portable solutions, and field service management); regional trends (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Benelux, the Nordics,Iberia, and Rest of Europe ) in services, solutions, and technologies. The study highlights telematics opportunities created by integrating video-based safety solutions, mobile-based freight exchange, and field service management with mainframe telematics to improve safety, operational efficiency, load management, and to reduce empty miles.



Telematics service business models, roadmap for key telematics services to be integrated, and growth/revenue analysis till 2022 are also included. Market measurements were analyzed for 20152022 (LCV telematics scenario analysis by installed base, LCV telematicsaddressable market by country, LCV telematics penetration by fleet size, hardware and service revenue forecast). Market focus and market share details of key players, such as TomTom Telematics, Masternaut, Trimble Navigation, 1-Fleet Alliance, Transpoco, RAC monitoring and OEMs (Volkswagen-vans UK, Ford Europe, Toyota Europe, PSA Group, and Mercedes-Benz vans) are included. The base year for the study is 2015, forecast period is from 2016 to 2022.



Key Questions This Study Will Answer:

1. What is the current status of the LCV telematics market in Europe?

2. What's in store for LCV telematics in the short, medium, and long terms?

3. What will be the potential LCV telematics market size in Europe 2015 through 2022?

4. What are the key LCV telematics solutions?

5.What are the key LCV telematics solutions likely to be launched in the near future?

6. Who are the major LCV telematics market participants?

7. What is the level of involvement of OEMs in telematics?

8. What business model can be used in the future to benefit LCV telematics stakeholders?

9. What is the business environment (dynamics and impact) of the LCV telematics market in Europe?

10. What are the different trends in the LCV FMS market?

11. What are the countries that hold significant FMS potential?

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4155599/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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DENVER, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lilis Energy, Inc. (OTCQB: LLEX) today announced plans to spud its first two Wolfcamp horizontal wells in the Delaware Basin. Both wells will be Re-Entry horizontal completions, which utilize existing vertical wellbores by "cutting a window" and provide the Company with significant cost savings. The Company's first well, the Bison #1H, is expected to be a 6,000 foot lateral and is targeting the Wolfcamp formation. The wellbore has been prepped and Lilis expects to commence drilling activities on or about October 1. After reaching Total Depth on the Bison #1H, the Company plans for the rig to move directly to the next Wolfcamp Re-Entry location, the Grizzly #1H.

After the conclusion of the drilling of the first two wells, the company plans to move forward with the completion phase. The Bison #1H will be targeting a planned proppant placement of 2,200 pounds per foot across 33 frac stages. The Company expects to announce initial test results before the end of the year.

The spudding of the Company's first two Wolfcamp wells commences the 12 well Re-Entry horizontal development program targeting the Wolfcamp, Bone Springs and Avalon formations planned over the next 18 months.

About Lilis Energy, Inc.

Lilis Energy, Inc. is a Denver-based independent oil and gas exploration and production company that operates in the Permian's Delaware Basin and in the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin, considered amongst the leading resource plays in North America. Lilis's total net acreage in the Permian Basin is approximately 3,800 acres, and total net acreage in the DJ is approximately 7,600 acres. Lilis Energy's near-term E&P focus is to grow current reserves and production, and pursue strategic acquisitions in its core areas. For more information, please contact CorProminence LLC: (516) 222-2560 or visit www.lilisenergy.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release may include or incorporate by reference "forward-looking statements" as defined by the SEC, including but not limited to statements regarding Lilis Energy's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. These statements are qualified by important factors that could cause Lilis Energy's actual results to differ materially from those reflected by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include but are not limited to Lilis Energy's ability to finance its continued exploration, drilling operations and working capital needs, and the general risks associated with oil and gas exploration and development, including those risks and factors described from time to time in Lilis Energy's reports filed with the SEC.

SOURCE Lilis Energy, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.lilisenergy.com


Each #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet helps provide a girl in Kenya with access to primary school education

TORONTO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday at WE Day Minnesota, comedian, actress and YouTube entertainer, Lilly Singh launched the #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet, her first-ever accessory piece with ME to WE, a social enterprise that creates socially-conscious products and experiences that allow people to do good through their everyday choices. Available for purchase at www.we.org/GirlLove the #GirlLove Rafiki is Lilly's continuation of #GirlLove, a social media campaign encouraging women to stop the girl-on-girl hate and start spreading the love. Every $15 purchase of a #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet will help provide a girl in Kenya with access to primary school education.

In Swahili, the word for friend is rafiki  Lilly's #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet acts as a reminder for girls to build each other up, leave behind negativity and achieve amazing things together. Lilly's bracelet is made with metallic and natural-toned beads with a delicate #GIRLLOVE silver paillette charm which acts as a daily reminder to embrace sisterhood and live WE.

"When I saw the #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet for the first time I thought it was exactly what I wanted it to be. The bracelet represents not only my passion for #GirlLove, but me acting on that passion," said Lilly Singh "In Kenya, not all girls are able to go to school and while on my ME to WE Trip, I was honoured to meet three girls currently studying at Kisaruni All Girls Secondary School. As they walked me through the Kisaruni campus, I could see how going to school has given them more than an education, but confidence and ambition. All girls should have that opportunity and that's why proceeds from my bracelet go towards giving Kenyan girls the chance to go to primary school."

ME to WE is part of the WE Movement, which brings people together and giving them the tools to change the world locally and globally, achieving transformative outcomes for themselves and others. ME to WE creates socially-conscious products and experiences including handmade ME to WE Artisans accessory pieces and ME to WE trips. Working alongside ME to WE Artisans in Kenya, Lilly designed her first-ever accessory piece drawing from beading traditions deeply-rooted in the Kenyan culture.

This summer, Lilly travelled with ME to WE to Kenya's Maasai Mara region where she immersed herself in the community and learned about its customs. In addition to Kisaruni All Girls Secondary School, Lilly visited ME to WE's Women's Empowerment Centre where she joined Kenyan mamas in a traditional beading circle. While sitting with the mamas, Lilly felt their strength as a group and saw its ripple effect in the community throughout the duration of her trip. With a sustainable income, each woman can access education, support her family or start her own business.

"The #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet is so much more than an accessory, it's empowering Kenyan mamas to earn an income, granting girls access to education and encouraging sisterhood amongst girls," said Roxanne Joyal, CEO of ME to WE. "We are so excited to be collaborating with Lilly Singh and uniting girls and women across the globe to create change."

ME to WE Artisans pieces are beautifully handcrafted by women in Kenya using traditional skills passed down through generations. Each piece celebrates heritage art forms and provides artisans with an income and the empowerment to become a respected voice in the community.

Join Lilly's mission to end girl-on-girl hate and celebrate her birthday by visiting WE.org and purchasing a #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet.

High resolution images available here: http://send.freethechildren.com/I5DnQBBGc2

Photography credit: Jesse Giddings

Follow ME to WE on:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Follow the Girl Love movement on:

Twitter

Instagram

#GirlLove

About ME to WE

ME to WE creates socially conscious products and experiences that allow people to do good through their everyday choices. These products and experiences include handmade ME to WE artisans accessories, ME to WE immersive volunteer trips and ME to WE leadership programming. Half of all ME to WE's profits are donated to support WE Charity, while the other half is reinvested to grow the mission of the social enterprise. ME to WE is a fully transparent model backed by its Track Your Impact promise. The positive impact of products and experiences can be traced to a WE Villages partner community where it was delivered.

For more information please contact:

Vanessa Morcom

Public Relations, ME to WE

+1.647.407.4570

[email protected]

SOURCE ME to WE

Related Links

http://www.WE.org


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- LIM College, which is located in New York City and focused exclusively on the study of business and fashion, will offer a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree program in Fashion Media starting in Fall 2017. This new program will focus on all aspects of fashion media, including the development of content across traditional, social media, and video platforms, as well as media business management and marketing.

The B.S. in Fashion Media is a unique interdisciplinary program that integrates study in the business of fashion and consumer behavior with the development of creative skills. Built upon a foundation in the humanities and social sciences, the curriculum will combine elements of the fashion industry, core business competencies, and hands-on experience in multi-media content production.

Fashion Media majors will also gain practical experience through work on The Lexington Line, LIM College's student magazine which focuses on fashion, beauty, culture, and college life. Named for the subway line that many students take from LIM's residence hall to its academic buildings, The Lexington Line will give students opportunities to develop writing and reporting skills, publish original writing and photography, interview fashion professionals, critique runway shows, review products, style fashion spreads, and learn about marketing and distribution. In addition to the online version, a print edition of The Lexington Line is produced twice a year.

Says LIM College President Elizabeth S. Marcuse, "LIM College is ideally suited to offer a degree in Fashion Media. With our location in New York City  the nation's fashion and media capital  and signature blend of classroom instruction and required internships, students will have access to a multitude of opportunities for real-world experience as they develop the wide-ranging skill set required of future media professionals. LIM has been a leader in fashion business education for nearly 80 years, so adding a Fashion Media major is a natural progression for us."

With courses in reporting for both long- and short-form media, fashion styling, graphic design, intellectual property law, video and photography, brand building, global cultures and media, discovering and sharing trends, and influencing ever-savvier and digitally-connected consumers, graduates will be prepared to pursue a range of career paths, including those on the business and creative sides of marketing within the fashion and related industries, as well as in fashion publishing.

For additional information about LIM College's new Fashion Media program contact: [email protected] or visit https://www.limcollege.edu/academics/undergraduate/fashion-media

About LIM College

LIM College, founded in 1939, is focused exclusively on the study of business and fashion. Offering MPS, BS, BBA, BPS, AAS and AOS degrees, LIM College provides a well-rounded education through the combination of in-class instruction and required internships. LIM College is located in four buildings in Manhattan  the nation's fashion and business capital  giving students vast opportunities for hands-on experience and professional development. Alumni have gone on to excel at top companies, including The Jones Group, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys New York, Macy's, and Neiman Marcus.

CONTACT:

Meredith Finnin 646.218.2156

[email protected]

Melissa Krantz 917.653.6716

[email protected]

SOURCE LIM College

Related Links

http://www.limcollege.edu


WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Destination World Media is pleased to announce the launch of the premier issue of LuxeGetaways Magazine (FALL 2016). The full issue is available at www.LuxeGetaways.com/magazine; as well as several of today's leading digital newsstands including Magzter, PressReader and ISSUU  making the Fall 2016 Issue easily accessible to a combined audience of more than 300 million subscribers and visitors associated with these distribution outlets.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410011

Cover: LuxeGetaways Magazine

Taking the time to get to know the readers, and collectively looking at all of the current and upcoming trends available today, this issue is a diverse collection of travel opportunities across the globe. The Fall Issue includes a culinary escape in London, an adventure through Zimbabwe, luxury getaways throughout Hawaii and Europe, a family guide to Beverly Hills, an in-depth look at the cruise industry, train travel in Switzerland, interviews with travel agents and hotel concierges, a hotel and restaurant guide to Washington, DC, and a number of other travel and lifestyle features that appeals to today's savvy travelers.

Believing strongly in the "high-low" approach to travel, LuxeGetaways makes a point to feature both luxury and value-driven travel options so that readers can plan their getaways with a combination of splurges and value. With this honest approach to travel that appeals to today's intelligent travelers, LuxeGetaways' readers include the retired Baby Boomers and wired Millennials  all who are in search of their next great getaway.

"With the website continuing to see thousands of visitors daily, we are pleased to now be launching the quarterly magazine this season to highlight additional travel options available today," said Damon Banks, Editor at LuxeGetaways Magazine. "While we do look forward to adding print copies with our distribution partners in the future, we are extremely excited with all of the digital opportunities available to us now via our outstanding digital distribution partners that enhance the LuxeGetaways Magazine experience for both our advertisers and readers."

LuxeGetaways brings a unique vision of today's travel lifestyle to readers, and showcases these many experiences and trends that can inspire them to think outside of the box and push their boundaries to discover a whole new world of travel. Advertising inquiries can be directed to [email protected]  Media Kit available upon request.

About Magzter

Magzter is the world's fastest growing digital newsstand with 30+million users in 212 countries; and distributes LuxeGetaways Magazine's quarterly issues on most international mobile devices via Apple, Google Play, Kindle Fire, Nook and Amazon.

About PressReader

PressReader delivers LuxeGetaways to a massive global audience of more than 300+million people, including access to full issues via 8,400 HotSpots that are sponsored by hotels, airport lounges, airlines, cruise lines, cafes, libraries, corporate offices and more.

About ISSUU

ISSUU is a modern digital newsstand that connects LuxeGetaways Magazine with more than 100 million monthly visitors. As the industry's leading digital publishing platform, ISSUU also delivers over 5 billion page views each month.

Related Images

image1.jpg

image2.jpg

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE LuxeGetaways Magazine

Related Links

http://www.LuxeGetaways.com


SAN ANTONIO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Massage Heights, a leader of professional, affordable and convenient therapeutic massage and facial services, announced today it has expanded its presence in Virginia with the opening of its first location in Vienna. Located at 2674 Avenir Place, Suite B, the new Retreat is owned and operated by first-time franchisee Courtland Wyatt of Roman Republic, LLC and marks the fourth Retreat in Virginia.

As a part of the new Retreat grand opening activities, the Massage Heights of Vienna will host a ribbon cutting ceremony on Oct. 28 for residents of the local community. Members of the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce will attend the celebration alongside members of the Maryfield Business Association. Wyatt also plans to support several charitable initiatives in the area, including the local Arthritis Foundation walk later this year.

"After my first experience at the Massage Heights corporate office, I knew my search for a turnkey, diverse business opportunity was matched," Wyatt said. "I saw the future of the brand headed in the right direction and wanted to bring the vision back to the community of Vienna. I am excited to educate local residents of the benefits of massage therapy and look forward to providing the upmost elevated experience to consumers in the area."

Wyatt brings over two decades of industry experience to the Massage Heights team. Prior to joining the franchise, he served four years in the U.S. Army before going on to receive his master's degree in physical therapy at Howard University. Wyatt then attended Alabama State University, where he obtained his Doctorate of Physical Therapy. In addition to his new Retreat, Wyatt is also co-owner of Ergo Solutions, the largest outsourcing physical rehab company in Washington, D.C., and serves as CEO of Ergo OccMed, a physical rehab clinic specializing in outpatient services. Alongside his roles as co-owner, CEO, therapist and now franchisee, Wyatt also started a non-profit organization aimed at eliminating health disparities in socioeconomically deprived areas across the nation.

"We've been targeting the Northeast region for franchise expansion and are hopeful to continue the growth momentum in the area following the new Retreat opening in Vienna," said Shane Evans, co-founder and president of Massage Heights. "Courtland embodies our same expertise and passion for massage therapy, and we plan to give our full support as he makes a name for Massage Heights in Fairfax County."

Massage Heights is on track to open 40 locations this year, with a goal of having 300 Retreats open by the end of 2018. As part of its accelerated growth strategy, the brand plans to develop franchised locations in cities like Denver, Kansas City, Tampa-St. Petersburg, San Diego, Nashville, Knoxville and Las Vegas in 2016. Additionally, Massage Heights is seeking area developers to grow the brand in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Northern Virginia, Nashville, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Salt Lake City.

As part of its nationwide expansion plans, Massage Heights is seeking qualified franchisees and area developers to join its growing brand. Prospective single- and multi-unit franchisees should have $175,000 in liquid assets and minimum $400,000 net worth per location, as well as experience in sales or retail management and managing hourly wage employees. Prospective area representatives should have $375,000 in liquid assets and minimum $600,000 net worth, as well as previous experience in franchising, sales, marketing and operating multiple sites, preferably in the retail, restaurant, hospitality or customer services industries.

Massage Heights in Vienna will be open Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  9 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m.  7 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m.  6 p.m. For more information, visit http://www.massageheightsfranchise.com, or call (703) 520-1004.

About Massage Heights

Massage Heights is a family-owned, membership-based therapeutic services franchise company that provides Members and Guests convenient, professional, affordable resort-quality massage and facial services that help people achieve a balanced and healthy lifestyle, in an upscale Retreat environment. Regular massage and skin therapy services help people look and feel their best from the inside out by aiding in the reduction of stress, pain management and increased relaxation, all resulting in the ability to tackle daily life with a higher level of vitality and positivity, truly elevating the everyday.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Fish Consulting

Tiffany Trilli

[email protected]

954-893-9150

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160727/393591LOGO

SOURCE Massage Heights

Related Links

http://www.massageheights.com


PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- McKean Defense Group, LLC announced today that it was awarded a $34M contract to provide engineering and management support for Auxiliary Systems. The single award cost plus contract was awarded by the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Philadelphia Division, and has a five-year period of performance.

"This NSWC Philadelphia customer was one of McKean's original customers," said Joseph Carlini, Chief Executive Officer of McKean Defense. "With ten years of support to Navy Hull, Mechanical & Electrical programs, I am proud that our team continues to delight the customer, and capture follow-on work." McKean celebrated its tenth anniversary in August. The company has been successful in retaining over 90 percent of their contracts that have been recompeted.

Tasking includes alteration support, equipment life cycle management, Ship Change Document (SCD) development, data collection and analysis, system design, development and testing support, and logistic product development. The work will support the Life Support and Ventilation Systems code.

Additional Information:

McKean Defense is an employee-owned Naval Life Cycle Management, Engineering, Enterprise Transformation, and Program Management business headquartered in Philadelphia, PA. McKean Defense's engineers, developers, technical staff, programmers, analysts, and program managers identify and deploy new shipboard technologies, integrate information technology across shipboard platforms, and develop strategies to support the Warfighter. McKean Defense's employees create strategic solutions to help customers reach new levels of mission support and transform their organizations. More information can be found at www.mckean-defense.com.

SOURCE McKean Defense Group, LLC

Related Links

http://www.mckean-defense.com


RAMAT YISHAI, Israel, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Medoc, a leading innovator of neuro-diagnostic medical systems, announced today its official expansion from supporting academic research to serving the needs of Clinical Research Organizations, yielding improved success probabilities of pharmaceutical clinical trials.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409739

Medoc's products provide neuro-diagnostic testing of small sensory nerve fibers and pain mechanisms using Quantitative Sensory Testing (QST) and Contact Heat Evoked Potential (CHEPs) techniques.

The company's devices have been utilized and integrated into all phases of clinical trials. In Phase I studies, Medoc devices are used to assess analgesic effects based on subjects' responses to experimental pain models. These are used to produce first-in-human early efficacy measures. Medoc devices are also commonly used in both Phase II and III studies to phenotype subjects for either inclusion or sub-grouping based on specific characteristics as a predictor of treatment response.

Implementing Medoc capabilities in Phase I and II trials contributes significantly to the development of an optimal, robust study design for the pivotal trials, maximizing the chances that they will succeed.

With its expansion into the pharmaceutical sphere, Medoc now offers tailored solutions to accommodate the specific needs and requirements of pharma and CROs including: research and development supporting early design phases, recommendations for advanced QST test batteries and trial end-points, software customized to trial-specific protocols as well as data collection methods, training and support.

Medoc's testing devices are streamlined, plug & play solutions without time-consuming set-up procedures or complex operation.

Visit our dedicated section to learn more: http://bit.do/medoc-qst

Mr. Amir Haiman, General Manager QST Division & CTO, commented on Medoc's recent expansion: "With vast experience in medical research, advanced technologies and creative solutions to complex trial challenges, Medoc is the perfect partner for CROs looking to optimize their pain-related clinical trials anywhere in the world."

About Medoc:

Medoc Ltd, Advanced Medical Systems is a leading innovator of diagnostic medical systems for clinics and research institutions around the world. With over 25 years of experience in the fields of pain research and neurological pathology, Medoc develops state-of-the-art systems in the fields of thermal simulators and QST. Medoc systems are utilized in the assessment of neurological diseases, including chronic pain, and are widely regarded as a "Gold-Standard" in the field. All products are FDA approved and are CE marked.

To learn more about Medoc, visit www.medoc-web.com

For further information:

Yardena Belenstein

+972-4-903-8805

Email

SOURCE Medoc

Related Links

http://www.medoc-web.com


Intact Financial, CPIC, Index Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), First Round Capital, Mitsui, SV Angel, Metromile Founder and Chairman David Friedberg and well-known entrepreneur Mark Cuban participated in the company's recent financing events. Series D funding closed for $103.1 million plus an additional strategic investment for $50 million from CPIC. In late 2014, Series C financing closed for $38.4 million. The total capital raised by Metromile is $205.5 million.

"Closing this financing round not only accelerates our nationwide expansion but allows Metromile to operate as an end-to-end insurance company which includes providing our customers a fully seamless claims experience," said Dan Preston, CEO at Metromile. "This foundation, coupled with our expertise in technology, will allow us to deliver exciting new features to our drivers that make car ownership easy, personal and affordable while providing an exceptional customer experience."

"Our goal, in partnering with Metromile, was to build a relationship that would allow both organizations to strengthen their core competencies in order to enhance the customer experience," said Karim Hirji, Senior Vice-President, International & Ventures, Intact Financial Corporation. "We look forward to this ongoing collaboration as Metromile redefines the marketplace with its unique business model, innovations and smart technology offerings."

"Metromile is a proven leader in usage-based insurance technology," said CPIC Property. "Our relationship with Metromile gives us the opportunity to more closely understand the pay-as-you-drive model, allowing us to create more innovative products and a better service experience for the younger and digitalized generation of the future."

Metromile is licensed nationwide but currently underwriting policies in N.J., Ore., and Pa., and will underwrite policies in Calif., Ill., Va. and Wash. in the coming weeks. In the event that customers need to file a claim, each customer will have a dedicated claims representative to ensure the claim gets filed quickly and fairly. Metromile's claims team is comprised of industry experts with over 20 years of experience at major insurance companies, with both extensive knowledge of best practices as well as innovative plans to improve the experience. Additionally, as a technology-driven company, Metromile will also be introducing new updates and features that will continuously improve the experience.

Metromile is the leader in pay-per-mile car insurance in the United States, saving low mileage drivers $500 on average each year. Additionally, Metromile's smart driving app and in-car telematics device help customers pinpoint their car's exact location via the vehicle locator, track detailed information on every trip they take using trip tracking, keep their car in tip top shape with vehicle diagnostics and car health, as well as avoid parking tickets via the app's street sweeping alerts feature (in select cities). Metromile's pay-per-mile insurance is available in seven states including Calif., Ill., N.J., Ore., Pa., Va., and Wash. The company has rapid state expansion plans in the coming year.

For more information about Metromile, visit metromile.com or follow Metromile on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To get a quote, call 888-761-9061 or visit metromile.com/insurance.

About Metromile

Metromile is revolutionizing car insurance through technology with its pay-per-mile insurance model. By offering affordable car insurance, transparent pricing based on the miles you actually drive, data to optimize how you use your car, and instant access to detailed vehicle diagnostics via the driving app, Metromile is transforming car insurance  and car ownership  to be more intelligent, seamless, and accessible than ever before. Metromile is expanding across the US, and currently empowering drivers in California, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. For more information, visit metromile.com.

Video - http://youtu.be/Cn9Kn4OvxxQ

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410132

SOURCE Metromile

Related Links

http://metromile.com


DALLAS, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Over 400 people attended the 10th annual "Cena de la Mariposa" fundraising dinner on September 7, 2016, in support of Mi Escuelita. The gala was held at the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas and emceed by Vic Trevino. The children were the focal point of the night as they greeted guests while dressed up as future architects and engineers. The dinner's "Bridge the Gap" theme came to life with this inspiring welcome, and a bridge backdrop lit up as attendees made their donations. Funds raised will be used for scholarships for children from low-income families.

Mi Escuelita 2016 Cena de La Mariposa honoree Artie Starrs, President of Pizza Hut and his wife Elizabeth Starrs, dinner honorary chairs Greg and Carolyn Creed and Laree Hulshoff at the fundraising dinner. Mi Escuelita students at the 2016 Cena de La Mariposa dinner

As Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." For 4.4 million students in the U.S., Spanish is their first language. Trends indicate that this number will continue to increase, which is why Mi Escuelita steps up to bridge the gap in English-language deficiency.

Another highlight of the evening was the launch of the Waki Waki Campaign. As we know, LANGUAGE IS KEY when acclimating to a new culture. The Waki Waki Social Media Campaign allows Mi Escuelita to capture people's attention by taking existing brand videos and dubbing over them with Waki Waki, a made-up language that doesn't make any sense. The 30-second videos will be uploaded to social networks so that everybody can be placed in the children's shoes and understand how hard it is to become immersed in a new language. Brands participating in the campaign include: Pizza Hut, Brigg's Equipment, the Dallas Cowboys, SignaPay, and LALA Foods - and the preschool is looking for more brands to participate.

Honors Aplenty

The following organizations and individuals were honored for their ongoing support:

Monarch Award  Mi Escuelita proudly honors Artie Starrs and Pizza Hut with the 2016 Monarch Award. Pizza Hut has been a committed partner in helping address the need for higher quality early childhood education. Thank you to Pizza Hut for their community leadership and to Artie Starrs , Elizabeth Starrs , Greg Creed , Carolyn Creed and Laree Hulshoff .

and Pizza Hut with the 2016 Monarch Award. Pizza Hut has been a committed partner in helping address the need for higher quality early childhood education. Thank you to for their community leadership and to , , , and . Corporate Volunteers of the Year  McCarthy Building Companies

Individual Volunteer of the Year  Adeline Cruz-Phillips with Dieste

Sponsors included  Briggs Equipment (presenting sponsor), Pizza Hut, Alliance Data, Dieste, Kimberly-Clark, Lisa and Les Vines , Lynn Smith , Atmos Energy, Target, EY, Estrada-Hinojosa, Frost Bank, McCarthy Building Companies, Telemundo, Ricardo Barrenchea , Renza & Alejandro Diaz, Dr. Jay and Mary Jo Gartner , Mike and Flora Hernandez and Marcia & Noe Hinojosa . Valet sponsor was SignaPay. Photography Sponsor was Laree Hulshoff & Ben Fisher . Wine Pull was sponsored by Pioneer Wines, Patron Party was sponsored by Samuel Lynne Galleries. Our Dessert Reception was sponsored by Nothing Bundt Cakes and our Technology Sponsor was Frontier Communications. Event design and messaging by Dieste. Production by Tara Wilson .

"Our mission at Mi Escuelita is to give wings to young children through the gift of language. But we can't do it alone," said Gayle Nave, President and CEO of Mi Escuelita Preschool. "Through their gifts and sponsorships, our community is helping lay the foundation for success with our children. We are so thankful to all who partook in the 2016 Cena de la Mariposa dinner and those participating in our Waki Waki campaign."

About Mi Escuelita Preschool

Mi Escuelita is a distinguished non-profit preschool that teaches the English language to children before they enter kindergarten. To learn more, please visit http://miescuelita.org.

Contact: Adeline Cruz-Phillips

214-259-8049

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410452

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410453

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410454LOGO

SOURCE Mi Escuelita Preschool

Related Links

http://www.miescuelita.org


IVREA, Italy, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

ARCA, the largest provider of cash handling devices in the world announce that it will demonstrate its myTeller assisted self-service solution at Banque & Innovation 2016, Le salon Professionnel des innovations bancaires, held in Paris La Defense, September 27th - 28th. Auriga is one of the leading European suppliers of innovative omnichannel solutions to banks and other financial institutions. At booth 18, Auriga will showcase its WWS (WinWebServer) Branch Software running on the innovative myTeller device.

ARCA MyTeller is the best approach to branch transformation. The same technologies that make consumer banking more convenient threaten the very existence of the traditional bank branch. In the face of declining branch traffic, banks and credit unions are seeking ways to reinvigorate branch relevance. By refining their services as well as redesigning the physical look and feel of their locations, banks can better address the needs of today's consumers (PRNewsFoto/ARCA) Reimagining Everyday Transactions (PRNewsFoto/ARCA)

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409857 )

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150219/731012 )

Banque & Innovation is the most important event of the year exhibiting bank innovations. More than 3000 experts in the field will gather, making this is an ideal environment to enhance professional relations and a perfect location to discuss the hottest topics in banking technology. Attendees can also see the latest software solutions and their applications.

ARCA's myTeller unit has forged the path for self-service options available to retail banks through its ability to adapt to changing strategies in the branch. As bank branches continue to evolve, this ahead-of-the-curve solution was designed with an eye toward the future.

"myTeller is evolving the bank branch to a new level of experience, the integration with Auriga is allowing ARCA to supply a turnkey solution for anyone looking to build the bank of the future" Said Luca Cococcia, Head of Sales and Marketing at ARCA France.

Auriga's WWS software is a modern omnichannel banking suite designed to help banks to improve their efficiency and facilitate the rapid deployment of new distribution channels and services. It also works to lower costs and establish a long-term competitive advantage. To participate in a live demonstration of the myTeller unit, please stop by booth 18 to meet with an Auriga representative and an ARCA Branch Transformation Expert.

To know more:

https://arca.com/solutions/branch-transformation

About ARCA

Since 1998, ARCA has been committed to helping people control and streamline cash operations in bank branches, retail stores and self-service kiosks. By focusing on technology and services, ARCA delivers thoughtful solutions to make transactions simpler, more efficient and more secure. Today, ARCA provides the largest selection of cash handling devices of any manufacturer in the world.

To learn more about ARCA's innovative culture and commitment to our customers, please visit www.arca.com .

About Auriga

Auriga is a leading supplier of software and technical solutions for the banking and payments industries, and a specialist provider of innovative omnichannel solutions to banks and other financial institutions. Its solutions, deployed on over 67% of Italian ATMS, are founded on modern architecture and improve time to market for new services while lowering costs and building long-term competitive advantage. Auriga is a global company, with a dedicated presence in Eastern and Western Europe and expanding operations in the UK.

More information is available on Auriga's website: www.aurigaspa.com

SOURCE ARCA
LYNDHURST, N.J., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Scarinci Hollenbeck (www.sh-law.com) is pleased to announce its further expansion with the addition of new associate Jason Mushnick to the firm's Labor and Employment law group. Mr. Mushnick will work out of Scarinci Hollenbeck's Lyndhurst office. He will devote a significant portion of his practice to working with private and public sector clients on both state and federal labor and employment issues, and general business transactions and disputes.

Jason T. Mushnick, Esq.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409972

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409973LOGO

Before joining Scarinci Hollenbeck, Jason was a Judicial Law Clerk for two Hudson County Superior Court, Civil Division Judges: The Hon. Joseph A. Turula, J.S.C. and former Scarinci Hollenbeck partner, the Hon. Christine M. Vanek, J.S.C.

Mr. Mushnick graduated from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2014, where he was a student bar association senator and a member of Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity. During law school, he interned for the Hon. Esther Salas, U.S.D.J. and the Hon. Lawrence M. Maron, J.S.C. He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration in Business Law and Entrepreneurship from Boston University School of Management in 2009.

He is admitted to practice in New Jersey, New York and North Carolina.

About Scarinci Hollenbeck

Scarinci Hollenbeck is a 50-plus attorney regional law firm with offices in New Jersey, New York City, and the District of Columbia. We have upheld a commitment to excellence since our founding in 1988. Our principal areas of practice include Business Law, Real Estate Law, Environmental and Land Use Law, Labor and Employment Law, Litigation, Insurance Law, and Intellectual Property Law.

Attorneys from our Labor and Employment law group regularly offer seminars and customized training sessions for management and employees. Our training has been effective in implementing and reinforcing internal company policies, emphasizing compliance with existing law, and setting the tone for the workplace environment.

Contact : Peter Moeller

Tel: 201-896-4100 x 3328

Email

SOURCE Scarinci Hollenbeck, LLC

Related Links

http://www.sh-law.com


MIAMI, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Next Group Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: NXGH) (the "Company") today is providing an Update to its Shareholders to advise them of the important steps and accomplishments that the Company has recently achieved and is working on for the very near future.

On July 29, 2016 NGH announced that it had signed definitive Agreements with four separate Finance Groups that hold an aggregated value of $713,250 in Convertible Notes. These Note Conversion Agreements were originally to be completed by September 22, 2016 but the process has taken longer than expected, so the note holders have extended the agreements through October 22, 2016. This "Buy Back" of notes is extremely important for NGH and its shareholders because it will avoid the issuance of a significant number of common shares into the public market. The Company recognizes the importance of this procedure and is taking important steps to enhance the stock value for its shareholders.

The Company has retained the New York City-based law firm of Ellenoff Grossman & Schole LLP (EGS) to act as counsel to the Company and its affiliates with respect to financial opportunities as well as corporate and securities matters. The firm's website, located at http://www.egsllp.com states that "The Firm's Corporate and Securities Practice Group is comprised of more than 30 professionals and is one of the leading practices in the U.S. focusing on smaller public and private companies." "The Firm provides legal services for companies in a variety of industries, including life sciences consumer products, social networking, information processing, telecommunications, Internet and software and real estate."

Next Group Holdings, Inc. is proud to announce the promotion of its interim CFO, Christian Carnell, to Corporate Chief Financial Officer. Christian has been instrumental to lead, coordinate and complete the recent SEC 10Q filings, which, due to the merger in January 2016, were complex. Mr. Carnell has 10 years of experience in private and public accounting including forecasting, financial reporting and implementation of internal controls. He has worked with over thirty publicly traded companies to assist with financial statement preparation and financial reporting. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant through the state of California and holds a Bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Utah.

The Company, through its subsidiary Meimoun & Mammon, LLC and its marketing brand, Tel3, have begun the rollout, sale and installation of its State of the Art, "Super Functional" Point Of Sale - POS/Cash Register that has received great attention due to its sleek, modern, efficient design and amazing combination of interactive tools that make the retail experience friendlier, quicker and better both for the shopper and for store management. The system can currently manage sale and inventory of hard goods, food, fuels, long distance telephone service, cellular "TopUps" (US & International) and Bill Pay for utilities. Within the next 90 days, the system should be enabled for US & International Money Transfers, Rewards Programs, General Purpose Reload Debit cards (VISA, Mastercard), Digital gift cards and other financial products. The Company's aggressive program to install the POS/Cash register systems in qualifying stores and through vertical markets has been well received. The Company's strong Financial Technology, Telecom and Mobility assets will play a major role in the development and deployment of our strategies. For more information, visit the website http://www.pos.nxtgn.net

"The steps summarized above should help to restore investor confidence in NXGH and confirm that we are taking important steps and making the right investments to support the Company." said Michael De Prado NXGH's President and COO. "We believe that these actions and future plans we have architected and plan to execute will be supported by new products, revenues and profits within the next 3-6 months, that in turn should reflect on additional shareholder value and further support." added De Prado.

"Next Group Holdings has a fantastic group of products and services that we believe will have a major impact to improve the consumer experience," said Arik Maimon, the Company's Chairman and CEO. "We expect NXGH, through its products and services, to become an integral part of daily life for the unbanked, underbanked and underserved populations in the US. NXGH plans to provide effective, simple, financial, lifestyle and telecommunications solutions to consumers - at very reasonable prices." added Maimon.

About Us: NXGH is a corporation headquartered in Miami, Florida, which, through its operating subsidiaries, engages in the business of using proprietary technology and certain licensed technology to provide innovative mobile banking, mobility, and telecommunications solutions to underserved, unbanked, and emerging markets. NXGH's principal executive offices are located at 1111 Brickell Avenue, Suite 2200, Miami, Florida 33131, and its telephone number at that location is (800) 611-3622. NXGH's web address is http://www.nextgroupholdings.com.

THIS NEWS RELEASE CONTAINS "FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS", AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN SECTION 27A OF THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933, AS AMENDED, AND SECTION 21E OF THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934, AS AMENDED. STATEMENTS IN THIS NEWS RELEASE, WHICH ARE NOT PURELY HISTORICAL, ARE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS AND INCLUDE ANY STATEMENTS REGARDING BELIEFS, PLANS, EXPECTATIONS OR INTENTIONS REGARDING THE FUTURE. EXCEPT FOR THE HISTORICAL INFORMATION PRESENTED HEREIN, MATTERS DISCUSSED IN THIS NEWS RELEASE CONTAIN FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS THAT ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN RISKS AND UNCERTAINTIES THAT COULD CAUSE ACTUAL RESULTS TO DIFFER MATERIALLY FROM ANY FUTURE RESULTS, PERFORMANCE OR ACHIEVEMENTS EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED BY SUCH STATEMENTS. STATEMENTS THAT ARE NOT HISTORICAL FACTS, INCLUDING STATEMENTS THAT ARE PRECEDED BY, FOLLOWED BY, OR THAT INCLUDE SUCH WORDS AS"ESTIMATE", "ANTICIPATE", "BELIEVE", "PLAN" OR "EXPECT" OR SIMILAR STATEMENTS ARE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS CONTAINED IN THIS NEWS RELEASE INCLUDE STATEMENTS RELATING TO OTHER PUBLICLY AVAILABLE INFORMATION REGARDING THE COMPANY.

Contact:

NEXT Group Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: NXGH), Telephone: +1-800-611-3622, [email protected]

SOURCE Next Group Holdings, Inc.
SEATTLE, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- To further accelerate its e-commerce, digital and mobile efforts, Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE: JWN) announced that it has appointed Ken Worzel as president, Nordstrom.com.

Worzel has served as executive vice president of Strategy and Development at the company since 2010, where he has been responsible for strengthening the company's competitive position and relevance through developing and executing customer-driven strategies to support the company's growth. Prior to Nordstrom he worked as a consultant, including partnering with Nordstrom for 13 years while at Marakon Associates and McKinsey & Company.

"Through his six years as a leader at Nordstrom and many years prior to that working alongside our executive team, Ken has gained a deep understanding of how our e-commerce, digital and mobile efforts play an integral role in providing customers a differentiated experience through service, personalization and convenience," said Erik Nordstrom, co-president of Nordstrom. "Ken comes into this position with expertise around Nordstrom.com's current position and a strong vision for its future potential that will continue to bring the company a tremendous amount of value as we evolve our strategy and build on our success."

Additionally, to better serve the changing needs of its customers and how they shop, the company also announced a strategic shift of leadership responsibilities to better support the Nordstrom (full-price) and Nordstrom Rack (off-price) brands across both stores and digital. New assignments include:

Co-President Erik Nordstrom will now be responsible for the Nordstrom brand, including Nordstrom stores, Nordstrom.com, and Trunk Club as well as Customer Care, Marketing and Supply Chain.

will now be responsible for the Nordstrom brand, including Nordstrom stores, Nordstrom.com, and Trunk Club as well as Customer Care, Marketing and Supply Chain. Co-President Blake Nordstrom will be responsible for the Nordstrom Rack brand, including Rack stores and NordstromRack.com/HauteLook and other corporate functions including Finance, Technology, Legal and Human Resources.

will be responsible for the Nordstrom Rack brand, including Rack stores and NordstromRack.com/HauteLook and other corporate functions including Finance, Technology, Legal and Human Resources. Co-President Pete Nordstrom will continue to support all of the company's merchandising functions and Store Planning. He will also remain closely involved in all areas impacting the Nordstrom brand, including marketing.

ABOUT NORDSTROM

Nordstrom, Inc. is a leading fashion specialty retailer based in the U.S. Founded in 1901 as a shoe store in Seattle, today Nordstrom operates 334 stores in 39 states and Canada. Customers are served at 121 Nordstrom stores in the U.S. and Canada; 205 Nordstrom Rack stores; two Jeffrey boutiques; and one clearance store. Additionally, customers are served online through Nordstrom.com, NordstromRack.com and HauteLook. The company also owns Trunk Club, a personalized clothing service serving customers online at TrunkClub.com and its five clubhouses. Nordstrom, Inc.'s common stock is publicly traded on the NYSE under the symbol JWN.



INVESTOR CONTACT: Trina Schurman



Nordstrom, Inc.



(206) 303-6503







MEDIA CONTACT: Tara Darrow



Nordstrom, Inc.



(206) 303-3016

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20001011/NORDLOGO

SOURCE Nordstrom, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.nordstrom.com


WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Novant Health today released findings of its first Consumer Attitudes About Health Study noting the latest trends in millennial health attitudes and behavior. The nationwide online survey of 2,104 U.S. adults aged 18 and older, including 419 millennials aged 18-35, was recently conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Novant Health.

Key takeaways and findings from the study suggest millennials approach and engage with health care in four surprising ways:

Millennials indicate they would take better care of themselves if they had more time to do so (66 percent); however, they also report spending large amounts of time watching television and engaging on social media.

The Consumer Attitudes About Health Study indicates millennials spend significantly more time on sedentary activities than they do exercising on average, they spend almost three hours sitting at a work desk, nearly three hours watching TV, and more than two hours on social media, while exercising makes up only about one hour of a millennial's day.



The Consumer Attitudes About Health Study indicates millennials spend significantly more time on sedentary activities than they do exercising on average, they spend almost three hours sitting at a work desk, nearly three hours watching TV, and more than two hours on social media, while exercising makes up only about one hour of a millennial's day. Millennials are going "old school" when it comes to health informationfour times as many millennials report relying on a healthcare professional for health information (63 percent) vs. using social media (15 percent) as a health resource.

While millennials spend more than two hours per day on social media on average, only about 21 percent use social media to diagnose themselves or their loved ones. Three in five millennials (61 percent) reported that social media is harmful (vs. helpful) to their health.



While millennials spend more than two hours per day on social media on average, only about 21 percent use social media to diagnose themselves or their loved ones. Three in five millennials (61 percent) reported that social media is harmful (vs. helpful) to their health. Millennials understand the importance of making end-of-life plans, but do not feel equipped to do so. While 88 percent feel that planning for end-of-life care is important, millennials don't feel they have the tools they need to do so.

More than 60 percent of millennials (62 percent) report not knowing where to start when thinking about end-of-life care, suggesting that they may not feel equipped to start planning for end-of-life care regardless of when they plan to start thinking about it.



More than 60 percent of millennials (62 percent) report not knowing where to start when thinking about end-of-life care, suggesting that they may not feel equipped to start planning for end-of-life care regardless of when they plan to start thinking about it. The importance of being treated with respect by healthcare providers cuts across all demographics, with seven in 10 millennials indicating that being treated well/with respect is how they would define "quality healthcare."

According to the Consumer Attitudes About Health Study's findings, similar proportions of millennials say that being treated well/with respect (69 percent) and effective treatments (73 percent) are how they would define quality healthcare. Quality in healthcare is defined multi-dimensionally, starting with effective treatment, but respect, disclosure, meeting expectations for care and being treated as a person, not a patient, are also commonly mentioned. Around seven in 10 millennials agree with this holistic view of quality, defining healthcare as effective treatment, being treated with respect, and being kept fully-informed.

"The closer we look, the more we see how unique the millennial population is," said Jesse Cureton, Novant Health's Chief Consumer Officer. "This study provides new insights into how millennials think and behave when it comes to their health, and the more we understand about them, the easier it will be to maintain our commitment as a consumer-centric organization that directly meets the needs of our specific patient population."

For the full Consumer Attitudes About Health Study and its findings, visit: NovantHealth.org/ConsumerAttitudes.

Survey Method:

The nationwide survey was conducted online among 2,104 U.S. adults aged 18 and older (including 419 millennials aged 18-35) by Harris Poll on behalf of Novant Health from March 1-9, 2016. For the complete research method, including weighting variables and additional subgroup sample sizes, please visit NovantHealth.org/ConsumerAttitudes or contact Caryn Klebba, [email protected].

About Novant Health

Novant Health is an integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient facilities and hospitals that delivers a seamless and convenient healthcare experience to communities in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. Named in 2016 by Becker's Hospital Review as one of the nation's 150 best places to work in healthcare, Novant Health consists of more than 1,380 physicians and nearly 24,000 employees and provides care at 530 locations, including 14 medical centers and hundreds of outpatient facilities and physician clinics. Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the health system serves more than 4 million patients annually and in 2015 provided more than $706 million in community benefit, including charity care and services. Diversity MBA has recognized the organization as one of the 50 best places for women and managers of diverse background to work and SK&A ranks Novant Health among the top 25 integrated health systems in the nation. Novant Health provides care in Virginia under the joint operating company, Novant Health UVA Health System.

For more information, please visit our website at NovantHealth.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130226/CL66825LOGO

SOURCE Novant Health

Related Links

https://www.novanthealth.org


HOUSTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- October is a time for fall foliage, cooler temperatures, and classic horror movies. It's also the best time of year to enjoy audio drama  whether it's bloodcurdling horror, or a chatty radio comedy from the past. October 30th is "World Audio Drama Day," commemorating "The War of the Worlds," which first thrilled listeners on October 30th, 1938, and thousands of audio dramas that followed.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410007

Pete Lutz performs with the Narada Radio Company and Pulp-Pourri Theatre podcast. Courtesy Narada Radio Company, http://naradaradio.libsyn.com "The Hadron Gospel Hour" performs live. Courtesy of Hadron Gospel Hour,http://www.hadrongospelhour.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410008

Orson Welles' infamous broadcast has long been a gateway to audio drama. "It was the first radio drama I remember hearing," says Pete Lutz, a writer-producer and creator of the Pulp-Pourri Theatre podcast. "My parents bought it in LP form when I was a boy, and I played it over and over again, never tiring of the story -- it remains, more than 40 years later, my favorite radio drama."

Meanwhile, Jack Bowman, one of the creators of the Victorian-era thriller "Springheel'd Jack," also discovered a related alien invasion  and not on Halloween, but on Bonfire Night. "Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds  though that's a Prog Rock musical album" he explains. "I was then introduced to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio drama, followed by Doctor Who: Paradise of Death on BBC Radio 5."

Science fiction and fantasy stories like "The Springheel Saga" are the most popular with modern audio drama audiences. Many fans of "old time radio"  the pre-podcast classics - also prefer genre works, from the long-running "Suspense" to Canadian horror anthology "Nightfall."

Bowman explains, "Both science fiction and fantasy are incredibly rich in terms of visual imagery  and there's no medium that can carry visuals and the imagination freely as audio." He notes, "You are only limited by what you can generate in your imagination."

"Creators can tell stories via audio drama for a fraction of the cost of shooting a film or web video series, and these shows can be distributed easily to an audience in a very direct way," notes Richard Wentworth, a voice actor, announcer, and co-creator of the science fiction comedy "Hadron Gospel Hour."

A website, AudioDramaDay.com, now features articles that can help new listeners discover audio dramas from the past and the present, as well as an open calendar of events for audio drama creators to list live performances and broadcasts, including 11th Hour, a rollicking creative experiment that lets creators build a crowdsourced horror tale in record time. "Last year, we recorded in historic Lowell, MA," Richard Wentworth explains, "with a great gang of audio dramatists from all over the eastern seaboard. It was a genuine blast to collaborate in real time with other folks from the community."

Audio drama fans enjoy modern technical improvements  using podcast syndication, improved equipment, and social media - continuing the legacy of Welles' broadcast, which terrorized audiences with an innovative "docudrama" format and time compression. "Modern audio drama is on the cutting edge of storytelling styles," argues Pete Lutz. "And modern sound design mimics the immersive way people receive TV and film today."

"Audio drama is in a very special and exciting place right now," explains Wentworth. "Creators are seeing their audiences swell, but there's still a 'Wild West' vibe out there, where the rules are undefined, where anything goes and every experiment is worth trying once."

He adds, "We have existential space operas, sitcoms, adventure, mystery, contemporary horror, cyberpunk, love stories, musicals -- all being told in the most intimate way: whispered in our ears."

Contact:

Sibby Wieland

Email

www.audiodramaday.com

Ph: 281-236-2924

SOURCE AudioDramaDay.com

Related Links

http://www.audiodramaday.com


LONDON, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

New documentary film from Johnnie Walker Storyline

Ode to Lesvos is a new documentary film by Scotch whisky makers Johnnie Walker that charts the spontaneous humanitarian response of the Greek islanders who helped almost half a million refugees forced to flee their homelands. The islanders' inspiring human response has earned them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. (PRNewsFoto/Johnnie Walker) Fisherman Stratis Valamios features in Ode to Lesvos, a new documentary film by Scotch whisky makers Johnnie Walker, which charts the spontaneous humanitarian response of the Greek islanders who helped almost half a million refugees forced to flee their homelands. The islanders' inspiring human response, in the face of extraordinary tragedy, has earned them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. (PRNewsFoto/Johnnie Walker) 85-year-old Aimilia Kamvisi features in Ode to Lesvos, a new documentary film by Scotch whisky makers Johnnie Walker, which charts the spontaneous humanitarian response of the Greek islanders who helped almost half a million refugees forced to flee their homelands. The islanders' inspiring human response has earned them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. (PRNewsFoto/Johnnie Walker)

"Can you really ignore what's in front of your eyes? Because tomorrow it could be me. I could be on a boat with my family and I would like to be helped," says fisherman Stratis Valamios in Ode to Lesvos, a new documentary film from Johnnie Walker Storyline.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409341 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409343 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409344 )



This time 12 months ago, Stratis' life changed beyond recognition as he spent months on end rescuing men, women and children from the waters around his home. His village, with a population of just 150, became the front line of the refugee crisis as hundreds of thousands of people came ashore, fleeing war and seeking a better future.

The positive response of the people of Lesvos who, last year alone, helped almost half a million refugees making the dangerous voyage across the Aegean Sea, has been documented in Ode to Lesvos. The film was created by Scotch whisky maker Johnnie Walker as part of its Storyline initiative, which gives a voice to real life stories from around the world.

Ode to Lesvos is a documentary short that tells the stories of the islanders whose uncompromising compassion has earned some of them, including Stratis, fellow fisherman Thanassis Marmarinos and 85-year-old Aimilia Kamvisi a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Throughout the past year, headlines from the region have naturally focused on the tragic aspects of the unfolding human drama in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Ode to Lesvos shines a light on a lesser told story - the inspiring response of islanders who opened their hearts to the refugees and whose positivity drove them to rescue people from the sea, give shelter, and provide food and water.

As part of the launch of Ode to Lesvos, Johnnie Walker is supporting Mercy Corps, a leading global organisation that helps people around the world survive and thrive after conflict, crisis and natural disaster. Since the Syrian war began, Mercy Corps has helped more than 7.7million people affected by the crisis and expanded its programming to Greece and The Balkans in response to the migration crisis.

Simon O'Connell, Executive Director, Mercy Corps Europe, said: "The migration crisis continues to have a huge impact on the world in which we live. It is vitally important that we are able to tell these kinds of stories and raise awareness of the issues faced by those who are forcibly displaced and the communities who receive them.

"It is our hope that by working with Johnnie Walker to share the remarkable story of how the islanders of Lesvos responded to the plight of refugees last summer, we will inspire others to positive actions. There is a thread of humanity that links each and every one of us and when someone needs help, we must be present."

Speaking about Ode to Lesvos Guy Escolme, Global Brand Director at Johnnie Walker, said: "The film represents one chapter in the evolving, larger story of the refugee crisis but it is one that highlights how acts of kindness and positivity made a difference to the lives of those who made a dangerous journey in search of a better future. We hope people will be inspired by Ode to Lesvos and one way they can respond is by supporting the efforts of Mercy Corps, a leading global organisation whose work through this crisis and many others around the world has brought the promise of hope and possibility to hundreds of thousands of displaced people."

In addition to encouraging people to donate to the work of Mercy Corps, Johnnie Walker is also continuing to work with the local community featured in the Ode to Lesvos to identify a number of local projects that will make a positive impact as they look to life beyond the crisis.

Ode to Lesvos has been directed by Sundance Film Festival-winning director Talal Derki. "This was a deeply personal project, influenced by my life experience of the Syrian and Greek cultures" said Derki, himself a Syrian exile who was honoured at Sundance for his documentary on the war in his homeland - Return to Homs.

He continued: "Following the events of last summer and knowing first-hand the despair migrants face as they seek refuge and a better future for their families, I felt compelled to tell the inspiring story of the response of the community of Lesvos. Their enduring positivity, readiness to help, and, above all, humanity remind the world that it is possible to make tomorrow better than today."

Ode to Lesvos is being released in time for International Peace Day (September 21) and can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/INkT00ewy48?list=PLxitlhQXKCQyzUWycTBoQ_7zvuYr22lj-

People can donate to the work of Mercy Corps by visiting: http://www.mercycorps.org/johnniewalker

Notes to Editors

About Diageo

Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol with an outstanding collection of brands including Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, J&B, Buchanan's and Windsor whiskies, Smirnoff and Ciroc vodkas, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Don Julio, Tanqueray and Guinness.

Diageo is listed on both the London Stock Exchange (DGE) and the New York Stock Exchange (DEO) and our products are sold in more than 180 countries around the world. For more information about Diageo, our people, our brands, and performance, visit us at http://www.diageo.com. Visit Diageo's global responsible drinking resource, http://www.DRINKiQ.com, for information, initiatives, and ways to share best practice.

Celebrating life, every day, everywhere.

The JOHNNIE WALKER and KEEP WALKING words, the Striding Figure device and associated logos are trademarks  John Walker & Sons 2016.

Enjoy Johnnie Walker responsibly.

DRINKiQ.com

SOURCE Johnnie Walker
BEACHWOOD, Ohio, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- OMNOVA Solutions (NYSE: OMN) will hold its conference call to discuss third quarter 2016 results on Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 11:00am ET. The call will be hosted by OMNOVA Solutions' Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Kevin McMullen, and Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Paul DeSantis. OMNOVA will release earnings before the market opens on September 22 for the quarter ending August 31, 2016.

The call will be webcast and participants may log on from the Investor Relations section of OMNOVA's website at www.omnova.com. OMNOVA will archive the call on its website until noon ET, October 12, 2016. Or, to listen to a digitized telephone replay (1:00pm ET, September 22 until 11:59pm ET, October 12, 2016), callers should dial:

(USA) 800-475-6701, Access Code 401203

(Int'l) 320-365-3844, Access Code 401203

OMNOVA Solutions Inc. is a global innovator of performance-enhancing chemistries and surfaces used in products for a variety of commercial, industrial and residential applications. As a strategic business-to-business supplier, OMNOVA provides The Science in Better Brands, with emulsion polymers, specialty chemicals, and functional and decorative surfaces that deliver critical performance attributes to top brand-name, end-use products sold around the world. OMNOVA's sales for the last 12 months ended May 31, 2016, were $788 million. The Company has a global workforce of approximately 1,950. Visit OMNOVA Solutions on the internet at www.omnova.com.

SOURCE OMNOVA Solutions

Related Links

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GENEVA, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

On September 21, the International Forum for Rights of Pakistan hosted a seminar at the UNHRC in Geneva on the human rights violations caused by the Pakistani Army, under the garb of Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Speakers at the conference included Faiz Mohd Zaland, human rights activist from Afghanistan, Jacek Wlocowicz, Member of the Senate of Polish Parliament, Paulo Casaca, Executive Director, South Asia Democratic Forum, Tarek Fateh, Executive Director Baluchistan House and Mehran Marri, Baluch Representative at the UNHRC .

Dr. Faiz Modh Zaland, while speaking at the event, stated that the Pakistan Army and its intelligence agencies had victimized the Pashtuns who were living in North and South Waziristan. He stated that the military operation Zarb-e-Azb had only destroyed the homes of the local people and not the terrorists, unlike the claims of the Pakistani government. With UN agencies and the world media denied access to the areas of the operation, Dr Zaland said that the Pakistani government had ensured that these atrocities did not come out in the open.

Jacek Wlocowicz, in his speech, stated that though the Pakisatni Army had left no stone unturned to project that the operation was a success, this was actually one of the worst humanitarian crisis witnessed, forcing more than 2 million people from their homes. He added that what was more concerning was the Pakistani government's statement that the offensive would not end till all terrorists were eliminated, thereby turning it into an indefinite process. He concluded that the Pakistani government was barely taking any concrete and substantial initiatives to rehabilitate refugees in the region, let alone acknowledge the lives lost in the humanitarian crisis that had engulfed the region.

While speaking on Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Mehran Marri stated that the operation had been launched to protect the Haqqani network and what Pakistan described as the good Taliban. He charged Pakistan of being linked to 75 per cent of the terror incidents in the world.

Tarek Fateh in his statement informed that the Pakistan Army had started the operation to kill its own citizens in order to ensure the smooth exit of nearly 2000 Central Asian and Chechen terrorists to move to Syria to join the ISIS. He warned that if not checked, Pakistan would become a threat to the citizens of Europe and America.

A 45-minute documentary on the humanitarian disaster caused by Op Zarb-e Azb, was also screened at the seminar.

SOURCE Baluchistan House
NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thousands of members of New York's Orthodox Jewish community, organized by the Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada, plan to protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in conjunction with his address to the UN General Assembly. The demonstration will be held in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in Manhattan, 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, Thursday September 22 at 5:30 PM.

Under a 2014 law, the Israeli government has been forcing Orthodox Jewish young men to serve in its army. Those who refuse, due to their religious convictions, as well as those who protest against the law, are incarcerated for weeks and sometimes months Currently Rabbi Shmuel Zalman Weissfish, a father of seven, is held in prison for protesting against the draft. Authorities say they will hold him until his trial ends. No one can tell how long that will be  possibly more than a year.

"Netanyahu and his state don't represent Jews or Judaism," said Rabbi David Weiss "This draft issue once again proves that their intention is to uproot religious Judaism."

There are very few countries in the world that draft their citizens even in peacetime. And even those that do grant exemptions in reasonable circumstances  certainly for religious convictions.

"Only the Israeli government breaks into people's homes in the middle of the night, drags them out and throws them in jail for a year and a half, just because they don't want to be influenced by the irreligious and immoral environment of the Israeli army. Furthermore, the very act of serving in the Israeli army is forbidden by Torah. According to Jewish law, Jews are not allowed to wage wars against other nations or to create a Jewish sovereign state of any kind before the messiah comes".

Media Contact: Isaac Greenfield, 1-347-3851405

SOURCE Central Rabbinical Congress
NEW YORK and WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire -- Peter Romer-Friedman, a litigator with an extraordinary combination of employment and public interest law experience, has joined Outten & Golden LLP as Counsel. He will be working both in the District of Columbia and in New York.

Wayne N. Outten, managing partner of Outten & Golden, said, "We welcome Peter to the firm. He is a skilled employment law litigator who will help further strengthen our capabilities in both class action and individual cases. His arrival reflects Outten & Golden's continued commitment to hiring and retaining top lawyers to successfully represent our clients."

Mr. Romer-Friedman said, "Outten & Golden has a strong national reputation for protecting and promoting the rights of employees. I'm delighted to join the firm as it builds momentum in protecting veterans, service members, people of color, women, and LGBTQ employees who are subjected to unlawful discrimination. I look forward to collaborating with so many accomplished litigators whom I have long admired and respected."

Mr. Romer-Friedman has litigated, developed, supervised and settled dozens of employment discrimination, wage theft, veterans' rights, credit discrimination, fair housing, disability rights, Title VII, parental leave, LGBTQ rights, and public accommodations cases.

He joins Outten & Golden from the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs, where he was Deputy Director of Litigation. He previously litigated employment and civil rights matters at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, PLLC in Washington. He served as labor counsel for Sen. Edward Kennedy on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and as legislative representative for the United Steelworkers of America.

A finalist for Public Justice's Trial Lawyer of the Year award in 2011, Mr. Romer-Friedman has been a Super Lawyers "Rising Star" for the past three years. He is an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Mr. Romer-Friedman graduated with honors from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and received his law degree from Columbia Law School. He served as a law clerk for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

He is admitted to practice in New York and the District of Columbia and before many federal District Courts (the District of Columbia, the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the Northern District of Illinois, and the District of Colorado) and Circuit Courts (the District of Columbia Circuit and the Ninth and Sixth Circuits).

About Outten & Golden LLP

Outten & Golden LLP focuses on advising and representing individuals in employment, partnership, and related workplace matters both domestically and internationally. The firm counsels individuals on employment and severance agreements; handles complex compensation and benefits issues (including bonuses, commissions, and stock/ option agreements); and advises professionals (including doctors and lawyers) on contractual issues. It also represents employees with a wide variety of claims, including discrimination and harassment based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race, disability, national origin, religion, and age, as well as retaliation, whistleblower, and contract claims. The firm handles class actions involving a wide range of employment issues, including economic exploitation, gender- and race-based discrimination, wage-and-hour violations, violations of the WARN Act, and other systemic workers' rights issues.

Outten & Golden has nine practice groups: Executives & Professionals, Financial Services, Sexual Harassment & Sex Discrimination, Family Responsibilities & Disabilities Discrimination, Lesbian Gay Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Workplace Rights, Discrimination & Retaliation, Whistleblower Retaliation, Class & Collective Actions, and WARN Act.

Outten & Golden has offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco

Contact: Wayne N. Outten, Outten & Golden LLP, 212.245.1000

SOURCE Outten & Golden LLP

Related Links

http://www.outtengolden.com


HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Secretary of Education Pedro A. Rivera announced that the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) has released its 2015 Educator Discipline Report, detailing the number of educator discipline cases handled by the Educator Discipline Unit over the past year.

Rivera noted the report showed an increase in the number of complaints filed, charges filed by the Office of Chief Counsel, and investigations completed over previous years.

"The Department's partnership with the Pennsylvania Justice Network, important changes under the law, and more awareness about educator responsibilities have all contributed to a rise in the number of cases taken on this year," Rivera said. "Through its work to address these complaints, the Department remains committed to ensuring that educators across the state are carrying out their duties with fidelity."

The Department oversees approximately 882,685 certified educators, charter school and cyber charter school staff, contracted educational providers, and other staff. In its report, PDE noted that in 2015, 384 complaints were resolved. Seventy percent of those cases included imposed professional discipline measures. The Department received 768 educator misconduct complaints, 70 percent coming from within the Department, 13 percent coming from a parent or family member, seven percent from an administrator, four percent from another school employee, 3 percent from another educator, 1 percent from a school board member, and 2 percent from other sources.

Types of educator misconduct can include criminal conduct, noncriminal conduct, and conduct occurring in another jurisdiction. Professional discipline can include private or public reprimands; certificate suspension, revocation, or surrender; and supplemental sanctions.

"Despite the rise in complaints against educators, it is important to note that these cases represent an extremely small portion of educators in the commonwealth," Rivera added. "Teachers, administrators, and support staff overwhelmingly create a safe and healthy atmosphere conducive to growth and learning in schools across Pennsylvania, and the large majority of educators take their roles and responsibilities seriously."

MEDIA CONTACT: Nicole Reigelman, 717-783-9802

SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of Education

Related Links

http://www.state.pa.us


GENEVA, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Pakistani Women's Human Rights Organisation organized a silent protest outside the UNHRC in Geneva on September 21, against gender-related violence and honour killing in Pakistan.

The women displayed banners that said "Pakistan Free Your Daughters", "There is no Honour in Killing" and "Stop Abusing Women". Speaking to the media, one of the protestors, Alisha Khan, stated that she was here to protest to remind the world that Pakistani women, in their daily lives, were still faced with domestic violence and honour killing. She added that despite international media attention to some of these incidents of violence, things were not changing in Pakistan. She held the growing influence of Islamic clerics in Pakistan's policy making as one of the main reasons for its society becoming so regressive. In this connection, she gave the example of the human rights bill that was introduced in the Punjab Assembly not being implemented, because ot the objection of fundamentalist leaders, who claimed that such a bill would be against the Sharia.

Tarek Fateh, who was also present at the venue of the protest, said that these women who stood silently to protest against this oppression, very aptly symbolized the reality of Pakistani women being voiceless. He informed that every year nearly 5000 women were killed by their fathers, husbands or brothers in incidents of honour killing. Calling Pakistan a pariah State, he said that the country practiced the worst form of Islamic fascism, and the present condition of women and the support by the Pakistani State to terrorism, was a result of this.

SOURCE pakistani women human rights organization
TAMPA, Fla., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The PDQ restaurant brand, short for People Dedicated to Quality, has launched a new responsive website (http://www.eatPDQ.com), designed and developed by Roger West, a digital agency based in Tampa. Founded in 2011, PDQ is blurring the lines between fast food and fast casual with its high-touch, high-integrity approach to fresh food, fast.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409856

PDQ's new homepage at www.eatpdq.com

The new web design is a showcase for PDQ's recent rebranding, and features evocative food imagery, interactive and downloadable menus, a location finder and more. The new site is optimized on all devices: desktop, tablet and mobile.

Jeffrey Kamis, PDQ's Chief Marketing and PR Officer, said, "We're thrilled with the new website; it's a much better reflection of our brand as a fresh and modern take on fast food. The site is not only aesthetically pleasing, it's also easier for our guests to navigate, and provides more information about our food and our brand story. Roger West has built a place for us to connect with and engage our fans."

Roger West collaborated with PDQ to develop a new, more user-friendly site architecture, incorporate video, and build the site within Sitefinity CMS, an enterprise-level .NET content management system, which allows PDQ to easily add or edit news posts, community events, special promotions and more.

Mike Westafer, CEO of Roger West, said, "We're honored to work with top brands like PDQ, and to see how quickly a bold new website like theirs can bring in measurable results. It's been a pleasure to work with Jeff and his team."

"Plus, the team at Roger West really likes their food."

For more information about this project, please contact Roger West .

ABOUT PDQ

Founded in 2011, PDQ - short for "People Dedicated to Quality" - is blurring the lines between fast food and fast casual with its high-touch, high-integrity approach to fresh food, fast. Beloved throughout the Southeast and now beyond for its hand-breaded chicken tenders, PDQ crafts delicious salads, sandwiches, and hand-spun milkshakes fresh in store, every day. PDQ is committed to creating deep roots in its local communities and gives thousands of dollars to local charities, schools, and organizations in need every year. Outback Steakhouse co-founder Bob Basham and MVP Holdings CEO Nick Reader are the two principal owners of PDQ. The concept now has 55 locations throughout Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. For more information, visit www.eatPDQ.com.

ABOUT ROGER WEST

Roger West is an award-winning, Tampa-based digital marketing agency that carefully combines creative and code to deliver marketing solutions that inspire and engage your audience. Our team is composed of a group of artists, designers, musicians, advertising veterans, software engineers and surfers who have come together to create and deliver ideas that get results.

As a full service digital marketing agency, Roger West offers a comprehensive suite of services including enterprise website development, third party integrations, custom programming, campaign development, email marketing, video production, PPC/remarketing, SEO/SEM, content development and more.

Media Contact: Diane Callihan, Marketing Manager

(813) 286-9100

Email

SOURCE Roger West

Related Links

http://www.rogerwest.com


These actions and more in at least 36 states, in war zones and in other countries worldwide are part of a U.S. Institute of Peace initiative to elevate the International Day of Peace with concrete action. The #PeaceDayChallenge , now in its second year, urges everyone to take steps that affirm peace as a real alternative to the violence chronicled every day in the news.

Established by the United Nations in 1981, the International Day of Peace is observed each year on September 21. This year marks the 35th anniversary.

"Peace is possible, but it doesn't manifest of its own accord," said USIP President Nancy Lindborg. "It requires hard work by people in their own communities and across their nations."

Last year, the #PeaceDayChallenge reached 23 million people on social media, engaging communities, organizations and students of all ages, as well as leaders from U.S. Members of Congress to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In a June event this year at USIP, the Dalai Lama urged tangible work to advance peace, saying "the real effect comes through  serious action."

USIP will kick off its Peace Day activities at its Washington D.C. headquarters at 10:00 a.m., with the exchange between Roosevelt High School students and the young civic leaders from the three African countries who are part of the institute's Generation Change Fellows Program. The fellows will lead workshops that emphasize the power of sharing stories to form human connections and build community in areas affected by conflict.

No matter where action is taking place under the banner of the Peace Day Challenge, learning and further activities will continue with the help of guides such as USIP's Peacebuilding Toolkit for Educators.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409815

SOURCE United States Institute of Peace

Related Links

http://www.usip.org


ALBANY, New York, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Transparency Market Research (TMR) has announced the release of a new report on the global pet wearables market. The report examines the historical trajectory of the global market and presents detailed forecasts regarding the market's development from 2016 to 2024. The report examines the competitive dynamics, segmentation, and major drivers and restraints of the global lithium-ion battery market in order to provide a complete overview. The report is titled 'Pet Wearable Market (By Technology Type - GPS, RFID Sensors; and By Application - Medical diagnosis & treatment, Behavior monitoring & control, Facilitation, safety & security and Identification and tracking) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024' and is available for sale on the official website of TMR. According to the report, the opportunity in the global pet wearables market is estimated to rise from US$1.0 bn in 2016 to be worth US$2.5 bn by 2024 at a strong CAGR of 12.0% therein.

Download Sample Report Copy or for further inquiries, click here: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=12701

Pet Wearables for Medical Diagnosis and Treatment Present Lucrative Options for Growth

Based on technology, the global pet wearable market is expected to be led by GPS-based products and the segment is likely to account for a share just short of 45% by the end of 2016. This will be followed by the RFID segment. Although sensors account for a low share in the pet wearables market in terms of revenue, the segment is anticipated to register a 12.3% from 2016 to 2024, higher than any other technology segment. By application, the pet wearables market is dominated by the identification and tracking segment, while the medical diagnosis and treatment segment will report a high CAGR during the forecast period.

Geographically, North America and Europe will contribute to over 75% of the market during the forecast period, predicts TMR. North America presently has the highest penetration of pet wearables in the world. Majority of the uptake of pet wearable technologies and devices is attributed to the U.S., reflecting close to 75% from 2016 to 2024. Asia Pacific, which is anticipated to project a CAGR higher than any other regional pet wearables market, is expected to be driven by the increased adoption and sales of GPS-based devices.

Browse Regional PR: http://www.europlat.org/pet-wearable-market.htm

Connectivity Costs and Issues Restricts Wide-scale Adoption of Pet Wearables in Developing Markets

Increasing expenditure on pets and remarkable changes in the global demographics have proven to be two of the key factors driving the pet wearables market. "Fueled by increased disposable income, pet owners are investing more on their pets now than ever before," the author of the study notes. TMR predicts that the overall expenditure on pets is slated to increase by about 50% by 2020, with spending on pet wearables to surpass that on pet food by 2017.

In addition to this, the global market for pet wearables is fueled by the growing awareness among pet owners and owners of farm animals regarding the importance of monitoring and tracking the animals' health and fitness.

In contrast, unreliable internet connectivity in several developing markets acts as a major impediment to the growth of the pet wearables market. The high cost per line of wireless technology is also threatens to slow down the acceptance of pet wearables in many countries.

The global pet wearables market is extremely consolidated and the top two players - GEA Group AG and DeLaval Inc. - together accounted for a whopping 89% of the total market revenue in 2015. Transparency Market Research finds that strategic expansion of businesses is the general trend observed among the leading players in the pet wearables market. Considering that the market is still in its initial growth phase, companies are keen on expanding their foothold in untapped product and technology segments and regions.

Strong R&D efforts and product innovation are some other key strategies adopted by prominent companies. A case in point would be DeLaval Inc. The firm launched LONGEVITY in May 2016, a program that is designed to help producers manage the health of their herd. The program offers a complete nutritional solution at all stages of a cow's lifecycle.

This review is based on the findings of a TMR report titled "Pet Wearable Market (By Technology Type - GPS, RFID Sensors; and By Application - Medical diagnosis & treatment, Behavior monitoring & control, Facilitation, safety & security and Identification and tracking) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024."

Global Pet Wearable Market, by Technology Type

GPS

RFID

Sensors

Global Pet Wearable Market, by Application

Medical diagnosis &treatment

Behavior monitoring& control

Facilitation, safety &security

Identification and tracking

Global Pet Wearable Market, by Geography

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Middle East and Africa

and Latin America

Recent Research Reports by Transparency Market Research:

Wearable Sensor Market:

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/wearable-sensor-market.html

European Wearable Technology Market:

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/europe-wearable-technology-market.html

About Us

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.

Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMR's syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.

US Office Contact

Transparency Market Research

90 State Street, Suite 700

Albany, NY 12207

Tel: +1-518-618-1030

USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453

Email: [email protected]



Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

SOURCE Transparency Market Research
Master chef of T'ang Court, Justin Tan (L) waves on stage after the announcement of his three stars award in the Michelin Guide Shanghai on September 21, 2016 (AFP Photo/Johannes Eisele)

The famed Michelin food guide launched its first edition in mainland China Wednesday, awarding stars to elegant luxury establishments as well as a humble haunt serving up Cantonese staples.

The inaugural edition covers the commercial hub of Shanghai and gives stars to 26 restaurants, including the world's least expensive two-star establishment Canton 8 -- a popular lunchtime spot catering to local families.

"Canton 8 is a reflection of what can be found in Shanghai -- masterful, delicious and very good-quality cooking," said Michael Ellis, international director of the Michelin guides.

Lunch there can cost as little as 48 yuan ($7), Michelin said.

Chef Jian Jieming of Canton 8 said he had never dreamed of making the list. He credited the fresh ingredients and comfortable atmosphere of the restaurant for its two-star award.

The publication of the inaugural mainland China edition follows the company's first guide to Singapore in July, when Michelin inspectors gave stars to the city-state's famous street food stalls.

The guides, first published in France more than a century ago to promote automobile travel, now cover 28 countries and spotlight diverse cuisines including Brazilian, Burmese, Cajun, Peruvian, and Tibetan.

But they are not without their critics, who question whether the quality of street fare in places like Hong Kong and Singapore can compare to the French haute cuisine on which the guide's reputation was made.

"We have to adapt to the country," Claire Dorland-Clauzel, executive vice president at Michelin, told AFP.

"Our role is to promote quality food everywhere, not (only) French food."

The China guide awarded its highest three-star rating to T'ang Court, a cosy six-table Cantonese restaurant in The Langham hotel, famous for dishes that include braised sea cucumber and Wagyu beef.

"The talented and creative chef Justin Tan offers cuisine in which traditional Cantonese dishes rub shoulders with some very modern dishes," Ellis said.

Story continues

After learning of the award, chef Tan told AFP he "never imagined" winning three stars, adding that he was now "very nervous".

Restaurants that have won a star from the culinary bible have in the past built big businesses after being recognised, with Hong Kong's Tim Ho Wan and Taiwan's Din Tai Fung turning into international franchises.

Canton 8 can likely expect to see a similar surge in customers. On Tuesday night, before the release of the guide, the inexpensive two-storey restaurant was filled with only around 20 diners feasting on crystal prawn dumplings and lobster porridge.

Regular patrons expressed pride Wednesday in the recognition of their local favourite, where tables were packed and reservations required for lunch.

-'Overdue' recognition -

A cosmopolitan city with a sprawling, tree-lined French Quarter, Shanghai is the latest Asian city to feature in the guide following the launch of editions focusing on Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore.

"What makes Shanghai particularly exciting is its been an economic and cultural crossroads for decades and the gastronomy of Shanghai really reflects that rich history," Ellis told AFP.

International recognition of Chinese cuisine is "overdue", said Fuchsia Dunlop, a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine.

"China has the most amazing gastronomic culture, and for historic reasons it has not been at the forefront of international gastronomy," she said.

But she was not convinced Michelin's approach of sending individual reviewers could truly identify the country's best restaurants.

Chinese cuisine traditionally caters to groups, with family-style meals consisting of several shared dishes, she said.

"If you have one person going out to eat, it's impossible for them to get a sense of a full, balanced Chinese meal," she said.

"Even if you went 10 times, you wouldnt get a sense of a meal with all the contrasts."
MEMPHIS, Tennessee, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings, Inc., (OTC: PPMH) has announced its acquisition of TBX Group (TBX) and its subsidiaries.

To further enhance its strategic market positioning, Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings, Inc. has completed the private acquisition of TBX Group, Inc., whose subsidiaries include:

mPathDiscovery, LLC

Smacked Ventures, Inc.

Smacktive, LLC

Great Day, Inc.

TBX has operated as a management holding company acquiring and expanding the outreach of technologies and innovation.

Through its acquisition of TBX, PPMH has acquired:

mPathDiscovery, LLC is the leader in Digital Sociology, developing innovative systems that create Actionable Business Intelligence. mPathDiscovery is a unique, science-based intelligence firm offering deep levels of knowledge and awareness previously thought unattainable. The mPath Engine foresees how the decisions you make today will impact your company tomorrow. Welcome to a paradigm shift in marketing, planning, crisis management and more.

mPathDiscovery is led by Richard Neal, the foremost authority in Digital Sociology and credited as an original innovator for this Field of Study. mPathDiscovery hosts clients from all avenues of business, from small marketing firms to the likes of Microsoft, P&G, and BP.

Smacked Ventures, Inc. SmackedVentures.com, is a bold group of creative thinkers, mobile application designers and developers at the forefront of technology, founded by Sam Feuer. Mr. Feuer is a globally respected entrepreneur in his field with over 18 years of hard work and earned success. Smacked Ventures currently holds the rights to 21 apps and games, including the new "Celebrity Tap - The Trumpie Challenge", Apple's featured holiday shopping app "FastMall" which includes intelligent offline mapping technology (MapOS), and "ChosenApps", a fully monetized, internet based version of the App Store & Google Play. "ChosenApps" allows developers and/or agencies the ability to receive a higher ranking relative to other top apps and games in the world.

Smacktive, LLC The "Smacktive" (iPhone & Android) app is a real world, in-person social networking experience, which focuses on getting people out of the house and active - a healthier choice than typical social media applications. This app instantly enables anyone to chat (one on one or in groups) about doing any activity, then meet offline and in-person to enjoy the activity together. Built by our award winning, Apple featured design and development team and led by Sam Feuer and Marcelo Moyano, Smacktive's goal is to allow anyone to utilize technology to have meaningful, active, offline, in-person experiences.

PPMH has acquired the controlling interest of Smacktive with purchase rights for full ownership.

GreatDay, Inc. is a development stage company that is designing a consumer app for the burgeoning automotive software market.

The products and leadership involved in this acquisition have been featured across the globe in numerous articles and features from the likes of the Los Angeles Times and CNN Money to the Today Show.

"The acquisition of TBX represents a major positive step for our Company", says Paul Baioni, CEO of PPMH. "The increased shareholder value, potential revenue earnings and addition of TBX leadership, including our recent addition of Mr. John Miller, who has held senior management positions with Ford and Federal Express, will support solid future growth for our company."

Along with the aforementioned corporate acquisitions, PPMH has acquired a vast amount of intellectual property and assets.

Mr. Baioni added "PPMH started down this new path when we acquired Rugged Outdoor Computing Systems (http://www.rocomputing.com) just a few months ago. Their innovative and groundbreaking solutions for high social awareness markets, Public Safety and Homeland Security are what we feel PPMH stands for. Now we've added another group with more of the same: high visibility markets and innovative solutions promising great returns for our investors. With the addition of experienced management staff, I foresee a steady growth in value for the future."

For more information about Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings, Inc., (PPMH) please visit the newly redesigned web site: http://www.PPMHinc.com

Disclaimer:

This release contains forward-looking statements that are based on beliefs of Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings management and reflect Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings current expectations as contemplated under section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. When we use in this release the words "estimate," "project," "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "expect," "plan," "predict," "may," "should," "will," "can," the negative of these words, or such other variations thereon, or comparable terminology, are all intended to identify forward looking statements. Such statements reflect the current views of Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings with respect to future events based on currently available information and are subject to numerous assumptions, risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to, risks and uncertainties pertaining to development of a salable market, changes in economic conditions and other risks, uncertainties and factors, which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievement expressed or implied by such forward looking statements to differ materially from the forward looking statements. The information contained in this press release is historical in nature, has not been updated, and is current only to the date shown in this press release. This information may no longer be accurate and therefore you should not rely on the information contained in this press release. To the extent permitted by law, Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings and its employees, agents and consultants exclude all liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, any such information, whether or not caused by any negligent act or omission. This press release might incorporate by reference the Company's filings and other reports. Investors are encouraged to review all filings. There is no assurance Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings will identify projects of merit or if it will have sufficient financing to implement its business plan. There is no assurance that the Company's due diligence on the acquisitions assets, companies, and projects will be favorable nor that definitive terms can be negotiated. Information in this release includes representations from the private companies referred to which has not been independently verified by the company. A downturn in the market would affect the potential profitability of the proposed acquisition negatively.

Contact:

Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings, Inc.

CEO/President

Paul Baioni

[email protected]

+1-901-761-2159



SOURCE Platinum Pari-Mutuel Holdings, Inc
MINNEAPOLIS, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Bill Baer, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice will outline U.S. Government Enforcement Trends at the Compliance and Ethics Institute, Tuesday, September 27, 2016, the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) announced today.

Bill Baer's presentation on Enforcement Trends joins the following sessions added in recent weeks to the Compliance & Ethics Institute's already packed agenda.

Cyber Threats, Information Security and Compliance: Future Trends and Leading Practices in an Evolving Threat Environment - Speakers: Pamela Passman , President and CEO and Craig Moss , COO, Center for Responsible Enterprise and Trade,

, President and CEO and , COO, Center for Responsible Enterprise and Trade, Ethical Leadership  Speaker: Jane L. Mitchell , Director, J&M Ltd,

, Director, J&M Ltd, Export Controls Risk: Challenges, Strategies, and Effective Management  Speakers: Brian Warshawsky , Systemwide Export Controls Officer, University of California Office of the President and Luanna Putney , Associate Chancellor and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor, University of California Merced ,

, Systemwide Export Controls Officer, Office of the President and , Associate Chancellor and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor, , How Internal Controls Are Needed to Augment Compliance Programs  Speaker: Russ A. Berland , Partner, Dentons US LLP,

, Partner, Dentons US LLP, The Ethical, Professional and Personal Challenges of Being Both a Company's Lawyer and its C&E Professional  Moderator Rebecca Walker , Partner, Kaplan & Walker LLP, Speakers: Anne Tkacs , Managing Director, Ethics and Compliance Southern Company Gas, Odell Guyton , Vise President, Global Compliance, Jabil Circuit, Inc., and Carol Helliker , Senior Vice President, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, CenterPoint Energy, Inc.,

, Partner, Kaplan & Walker LLP, Speakers: , Managing Director, Ethics and Compliance Southern Company Gas, , Vise President, Global Compliance, Jabil Circuit, Inc., and , Senior Vice President, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, CenterPoint Energy, Inc., Top Labor and Employment Risk Areas  Speakers: Earl M. (Chip) Jones, III , Shareholder and Paul E. Bateman , Shareholder, Littler Mendelson, P.C.,

, Shareholder and , Shareholder, Littler Mendelson, P.C., iCare: Tyco's Compliance Liaison Program  How a Pilot Program Became a Cornerstone of the Compliance Department Speakers: Katherine Snell , Ombudsman/Senior Manager, Compliance & Ethics, Tyco and Valerie Raye , NPD Manager  LSP, Tyco Global Supply Chain,

, Ombudsman/Senior Manager, Compliance & Ethics, , NPD Manager  LSP, Tyco Global Supply Chain, Using Employee Engagement Data to Spot and Address Risk Areas  Speakers: William Kruse , Vice President Law & Counsel, Regulatory Compliance Officer and Jim Harter , Chief Scientist of International Workplace Management and Well-Being, Gallup Inc.,

, Vice President Law & Counsel, Regulatory Compliance Officer and , Chief Scientist of International Workplace Management and Well-Being, Gallup Inc., Navigating the Rough Waters of Ethics and Compliance Risks  Speakers: Helen Goodwin , Compliance & Ethics Professional and Jana Utter , Vice President Enterprise Risk Management, Centene Corporation,

, Compliance & Ethics Professional and , Vice President Enterprise Risk Management, Centene Corporation, In Pursuit of Clean Earnings: Dodging an SEC Investigation or Litigation  Speaker: Susan Markel , Managing Director, AlixPartners and former Chief Accountant  Division of Enforcement, US Securities and Exchange Commission.

About the CEI

The Compliance & Ethics Institute is the primary education and networking event for professionals working in the Compliance and Ethics profession across all industries around the world. This conference features 155+ speakers, 100+ sessions, numerous networking events, and a full-day investigations workshop. The CEI offers eight learning tracksRisk, Ethics, Compliance Lawyer, IT Compliance, Case Studies, Hot Topics/General Compliance, the International/Multi-National Track, and Advanced Discussion Groups.

The sessions offered at the Compliance & Ethics Institute not only identify the challenges, but they also point to solutions that can help create more effective compliance and ethics programs. Use this link for more information: www.complianceethicsinstitute.org.

About the SCCE

The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE), established in 2004, is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. SCCE is a non-profit professional member association that serves more than 5,500 compliance and ethics professionals globally. The association provides resources and training to compliance professionals and champions ethical practices and compliance standards. Visit the SCCE website at www.corporatecompliance.org.

For general inquiries, please contact:

Lizza Catalano

952-933-4977

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140218/DC67044LOGO-b

SOURCE Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics

Related Links

http://www.corporatecompliance.org


OXFORD, England, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Professor of Bioengineering Recognized for the Personal Challenges She Overcame to Undertake Ground Breaking Research in Nanomaterials

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has announced that Professor Kytai Nguyen is the winner of the first Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award. Prof. Nguyen was given the award for the personal challenges she overcame to make a significant contribution to nano-materials research and education.

The Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award aims to recognize researchers in the field of materials science and engineering who have overcome difficult circumstances to pursue their research career, however early or advanced, and are contributing meaningful insights in their particular field of investigation. Difficult circumstances may include challenges arising from gender, socioeconomic background, ethnicity/culture, disability, and/or the local economic environment.

The Materials Science Council, chaired by Professor Subra Suresh, former Director of the NSF and current President of Carnegie Mellon University, selected the winner based on her achievements and the challenges she overcame in realizing these achievements. The prize includes USD $5,000 and all-expenses-paid attendance at the award reception.

The Council were impressed with the way Prof. Nguyen overcame several challenges during her formative years including her difficult upbringing in Vietnam, and the challenges she faced when she studied in the US while learning English and working several jobs to support her studies. Most recently, she managed to successfully balance family life with an active research and teaching career.

Prof. Nguyen will receive her award on Tuesday, November 29 at a special reception during the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston, USA.

"I am truly honored to receive the Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award," said Prof. Nguyen about her recognition. "I am grateful for the help that I received from my family, mentors, students and colleagues at the University of Texas at Arlington. There are many opportunities out there for young scientists that can be attainable even though there may be challenges in your life. Trust yourself, persevere through your challenges, and use your inner determination and strength to seek your own success."

"Kytai's story really stood out from the nominations, and the Materials Science Council were unanimous in their decision to award her," said Subra Suresh, chair of the Materials Science Council and President of Carnegie Mellon University. "Not only has she been a pioneer in the development of nanoparticles for controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering application but she achieved this having overcome substantial obstacles throughout all of the formative stages of her life and career. We hope that this award will inspire other researchers who are facing challenges to see what can be achieved when working in and overcoming difficult circumstances."

Nominations for the 2017 edition of the Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award are now open. Applications can be submitted until February 28, 2017.

Read more on Elsevier Connect.

Notes to editors

Reporters wishing to attend the award ceremony on November 29 in Boston, or who would like to interview Prof. Nguyen can contact Joe d'Angelo: [email protected].

About the Materials Science Council

Commencing in 2014, the Materials Science Council is undertaking a range of activities with Elsevier to help support the research community in three ways: supporting the sharing and communication of scientific information and data through new technology platforms and pathways; helping researchers communicate the importance of materials science to the general public; and rewarding researchers, particularly those working in difficult conditions or in countries with limited infrastructure.



About Materials Today

Materials Today is a community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience. Supported by Elsevier, we publish high impact peer-reviewed journals and industry magazines, organize academic conferences, broadcast educational webinars and much more.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions - among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey - and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries.

Media contacts

Joe d'Angelo

Elsevier

+441865843700

[email protected]



SOURCE Elsevier
GENEVA, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

On September 20, 2016 a demonstration was held outside the UN Human Rights Council to protest against the human rights violations in Pakistan. Representatives from Pakistan Administered Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Sindh participated, seeking the attention of the UN and the international community to the grave violations committed by the Pakistani government and the military against the minorities in the country.

Jameel Maqsood, Belgium Representative of the United Kashmir People's National Party, while speaking on the occasion said that the Pakistan intelligence service and the Army had thwarted the basic right of expression of the people of Pakistan Administered Kashmir, and an environment of fear and persecution prevailed in the area. He charged the Pakistani government of supporting Islamic fundamentalist forces and using them to spread terror.

Junaid Qureshi, a prominent Kashmiri human rights leader, also participated in the event. He raised the demand for Arif Shahid, deceased political activist from Pakistan Administered Kashmir, to be declared a martyr. He stated that even though Arif Shahid never raised a gun against the Pakistani State, he was killed by the country's security services for raising his voice against Pakistan.

The protestors also raised their voice against the Pakistani government's policy of looting the natural resources of Gilgit -Baltistan and against the Chinese presence in the province and China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Senge Sering, Chairman of the Gilgit Baltistan Institute, was present at the protest.

Raising the issue of targeted killing of minorities, including Christians, Hindus and Shias in Sindh, Sindhi leaders including Lakhu Luhana, President of the World Sindhi Congress called on the international community to put pressure on Pakistan to stop persecution of minorities.

The prominent banners displayed on this occasion read 'Stop Killing of Minorities in Pakistan', 'Stop Persecution of Christians in Pakistan', 'We resent Chinese presence in Gilgit-Baltistan' and 'Arif Shahid is a Martyr'.

SOURCE European Organization for Pakistani Minorities
PLANO, Texas, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- QuEST Forum has announced a new online tool that allows users to determine their company's sustainability maturity and benchmark their progress to sustainability against industry best practices. The assessment tool, branded as the QuEST Assessor, gives an organization a rating of how they perform in ten different areas of sustainability, and provides customized recommendations for improvement. The new tool is the first of its kind to streamline the entire measurement process to about 15 minutes, allowing for rapid feedback on how to improve and impact the bottom line.

The QuEST Assessor builds on an approach developed by epi (Energy Performance Index, Ltd, a British company) and BT as part of BT's Better Future Supplier Forum program which was launched in 2012. In conjunction with our charter partners (Huawei and others) we plan to raise awareness of sustainability, educate and engage users, and provide the tools needed to implement a sustainability program that goes beyond mere compliance in any company. This assessor was developed to raise awareness of sustainability, educate and engage users, and provide the tools they need to implement a sustainability program in their company that goes beyond mere compliance. The ultimate goal is to empower companies with the ability to create an environmentally friendly strategy that considers every dimension of how a business operates in the social, cultural, and economic environment. Long term, it creates both consumer and employee value.

"Our membership of over 200 companies looks to us for guidance regarding standards and best practices, said Fraser Pajak, CEO of QuEST Forum. "We need to supply tools that demonstrate business benefits through the application of best practices in all relevant areas of the business. Now, in response to the needs of our industry, we are putting a focus on the area of sustainability." Fraser goes on to include, "This is the first tool on the market that both meets this objective, and educates users on the steps they should take to improve and track their performance over time."

A New Approach to Sustainability Benchmarking

Through an extensive analysis of existing approaches to sustainability benchmarking, QuEST Assessor uses a business model that incorporates most standards and maps them to the scale of impact it will have to the top and bottom line. All best practices have been evidenced by practical case studies drawn from within the ICT industry and are continually updated as sustainability implementation evolves and different companies demonstrate superior performance in this area.

Expected Benefits

Accessible via any browser, the New QuEST Assessor Sustainability Benchmarking Tool walks the user through a series of questions that guide them to a solution based on corporate priorities, educating them along the way. The resulting output includes a prioritised action plan that can be tracked over time. Users who implement this plan can expect to:

Reduce CSR and supply chain risk

Reduced costs and increased profitability through reduced resource consumption, increased worker productivity, reduced quality defect levels and reduced product cost.

through reduced resource consumption, increased worker productivity, reduced quality defect levels and reduced product cost. Increased sales by enabling product and service innovation through the application of sustainability tools and concepts such as eco-design, circular economy and end to end supply chain optimization.

Security and confidentiality

Since the platform was developed to be completely anonymous, the application has been secured through multiple levels of encryption software and protocols that provide multiple layers of security to protect the confidentiality and privacy of its users. Companies are benchmarked against others in their field, but without knowing which companies they are being measured against.

Data Ownership

All data input to the assessor remains the property of the user who inputs it and a user can view or modify his/her data, or ask for the data to be deleted at any time.

Availability

The QuEST Assessor tool is available now to all companies wishing to improve their sustainability initiatives while improving their bottom line. Pricing is available upon request. Contact QuEST Forum at [email protected].

SOURCE QuEST Forum

Related Links

http://www.questforum.org


Gatena courted business and corporate clients, offering personalized services unlike typical brick and mortar stores. Abacus One had a focus on service that allowed it to continue growing in spite of increased competition from online retail giants like Amazon. Unlike the competition, Abacus One partnered with various data services companies support that could identify and remedy critical issues well beyond the realm of personal shopping or big box discount chains.

The Challenges and Rewards of Changing Careers

By every measurable standard, Gatena was successful with Abacus One. She had built a solid company from scratch, based upon an original idea for an expanding niche. But after she no longer had to fill both the roles of provider and caregiver, she was faced with the question of whether her talents were being put to the best use. Her son, Steven, graduated from the University of Southern California and had begun setting up a business based in part on a concept they had brainstormed together. In its earliest incarnation, REP Interactive was a real estate-focused video production company.

Judy Gatena joined REP as President and COO in order to guide the fledgling company's operations and act as an advisor to the young entrepreneur following in her footsteps. A commitment to work a "few hours" each week quickly escalated. The company vision expanded beyond the real estate marketplace, fueled in part by the addition of Chris Carter in sales and marketing. Gatena's data-driven personality combined with Carter's marketing skills to guide the development of REP's media prospects, finding another under-served area for which she could leverage tools provided by emerging technologies. Through the experience of producing real estate videos for online consumption, the team at REP had invested a considerable amount of time exploring the possibilities of streaming video as a marketing tool. With a small cadre of creative talent under its umbrella, REP slowly began amassing awards for its expanding client base -- including a diverse collection of corporate powerhouses eager to tap into new media advertising.

Gatena discovered that she thrived in a creative environment. While Abacus One remained a solid business with a loyal customer base, it no longer relied on her for innovation and daily oversight. When Steven was recruited away from REP in 2015 to pursue new challenges, his mother took the opportunity to step into the role of CEO and focus on the long-term vision and strategy of the now well-established production company/creative agency hybrid. What had begun as a spark of an idea to launch a niche company had become a mainstream industry player under her management, and stepping into the role of CEO completed Gatena's "after 40" career transition.

"When I started out, my focus was on making ends meet, just finding a way to take care of my family. I stuck with what I was good at, parsing data, figuring out my core client base and providing a service that no one else was offering. And it was great, but I never took the time to realize that I was missing something, that there were sides of me I had not been able to explore. Sometimes it takes a lot of life experience to really discover what you are meant to do, and I was fortunate

enough to have a son who could help me find that through a shared venture. For years, I thought 'this is what I do, this is my job,' and never expected to move beyond that. But when your talent collides with a job that sparks your passion, it is suddenly easy to see that there is more over that horizon. Just because you didn't see it before didn't mean it wasn't there -- moving forward, suddenly it's visible. Move forward some more, you can grab it. Change can happen at any

age. We only have to be willing to challenge ourselves, find our passions even if we didn't know they were there, and embrace the opportunities that come our way." -- Judy Gatena, CEO of REP Interactive

About REP Interactive

Founded in 2009, REP Interactive has created hundreds of video projects for Fortune 500 Companies and Government Organizations. Based in Los Angeles, CA with satellite offices in La Jolla, California and Morristown, New Jersey, REP is the proud winner of over 142 awards including W3s, Tellys, Stevies, Communicators and Daveys. With a bursting portfolio of over 138 clients, the agency is composed of dedicated employees who believe in empowering every organization through the use of storytelling with video and broadcast media. For more information, visit http://www.REPInteractive.com.

Media Contact

Nicholas Muntz

Account Manager

REP Interactive

888.789.1299 x100

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409845

SOURCE REP Interactive

Related Links

http://www.repinteractive.com


DALLAS, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MetLoop (www.metloop.com), a Florida-based weather technology company, is booked to sponsor the 2016 Restoration Summit, coming to the Dallas Marriott City Center on Friday, October 21st in Dallas, Texas. The conference is boasting high-profile industry leaders, both locally, and nationally, speaking on focused topics surrounding residential and commercial restoration and key issues impacting the individual contractor's bottom dollar.

Not surprisingly, these contractor issues include consideration of the impact of severe weather on cities in the Midwestern United States, including hail and tornadoes. MetLoop's severe weather monitoring technology has been boasting record results, alerting when specific addresses will be affected, often 30-60 minutes before the storm occurs. Roofers and insurance claim adjusters are using the product now, and sharing their success stories on Facebook.

MetLoop CEO, David Carlson, has been invited to lead and participate in the forum, and has seen a great interest in the program. He says of the summit,

"We've had more inquiries in early 2016 than any other year from the insurance and restoration industry, requesting education on how to respond best to severe weather emergencies. We plan on introducing our address-specific severe weather alert technology to help contractors to do their job better, become more profitable, and become a real resource in their community."

In prior years, the Restoration Summit was by invite-only, but this year the conference has opened to the public  online and via social media  and will be attended by manufacturers, suppliers, value-added companies (like MetLoop), industry experts, and watchful industrial trade publications. Because of the new open-registration model and increased social media discussion around featured topics, registration has been cut in half to $595.00 per registration, and preparation is underway to host the existing 1,000+ pre-registrations.

Want $100 off registration?

(pay $495), use discount code: METLOOP

Go register now at www.restorationsummit.org.

The 1-day shotgun-education approach has been highly successful in helping contractors and trade-focused companies and organizations to quickly get informed on trends in restoration. The 2016 Restoration Summit is targeting education on the best practices to increase revenue by adopting new technology and restoration techniques that have proved successful across industry. This year, MetLoop is one of the premier featured technologies.

For conference inquiries or more info:

Dominique Villela

[email protected]

520-245-0054

SOURCE MetLoop

Related Links

http://www.metloop.com


DAYTON, Ohio, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Reynolds and Reynolds Company today announced that Reynolds Document Services has developed 30 state-specific Reynolds LAW brand finance and insurance (F&I) documents libraries, surpassing the midway point to a goal of creating LAW F&I libraries for all 50 states.

The Reynolds LAW brand F&I libraries contain a comprehensive suite of standardized F&I documents developed to help meet the business needs of new vehicle retailers in the specific state.

"F&I paperwork can be exacting and demanding both for dealerships and for their customers," said Jerry Kirwan, senior vice president and general manager of Reynolds Document Services. "The F&I forms in use are often sourced from different vendors, may be outdated, or may have other inconsistencies  all of which can raise compliance risk for dealers and add confusion for dealership personnel and car buyers."

"With each state-specific F&I forms library, we've built a trusted resource for dealers to better manage all of the forms necessary to complete a deal; better meet federal, state, and city F&I paperwork requirements; and deliver a more consistent, rewarding experience to car buyers at the dealership."

Kirwan said each state-specific LAW forms library is designed to deliver the following for automotive retailers:

Manage compliance risk  Reynolds' industry-leading forms specialists regularly review the documents in the LAW F&I Libraries for legal sufficiency with the latest automotive regulations. They work in conjunction with Reynolds' outside legal partners and, where applicable, state automobile dealer associations.

 industry-leading forms specialists regularly review the documents in the LAW F&I Libraries for legal sufficiency with the latest automotive regulations. They work in conjunction with outside legal partners and, where applicable, state automobile dealer associations. Streamline F&I processes  By using the standardized vehicle deal documents in the LAW F&I Libraries, dealers can achieve a more consistent and effective F&I process in every transaction.

 By using the standardized vehicle deal documents in the LAW F&I Libraries, dealers can achieve a more consistent and effective F&I process in every transaction. Increase customer satisfaction  Documents in the LAW F&I Libraries are written in consumer-friendly language to help create a more transparent and understandable F&I process and improve the consumer experience with the dealership.

 Documents in the LAW F&I Libraries are written in consumer-friendly language to help create a more transparent and understandable F&I process and improve the consumer experience with the dealership. Smooth the transition to electronic documents  The printed documents in the LAW F&I Libraries are also available in digital format, which helps facilitate the conversion to laser-printed transactions or e-contracting. Reynolds Document Services maintains licensing agreements with all major providers of electronic F&I (eF&I) solutions.

States available include: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Kirwan concluded: "To surpass the midway point of creating an F&I forms library for every state is a testament to our team's document development knowledge and compliance expertise, as well as to the printing and fulfillment capabilities of our forms manufacturing operation. We look forward to the completion of this project nationwide and to the ongoing work of maintaining the F&I forms libraries. Our team will continue to regularly review and update the documents to incorporate dealer and OEM feedback and keep pace with current legislation and regulatory requirements."

About Reynolds LAW Brand Documents

The Reynolds LAW brand is well established as one of the most trusted brands in the automotive industry. LAW documents have been endorsed by a number of state automobile dealers associations and leading automotive finance institutions. LAW documents are available in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

The flagship product of the LAW brand is the Reynolds LAW 553 Universal Retail Installment Sale Contract, which is the most widely accepted document in auto finance. The Reynolds LAW 553 is regularly reviewed by industry experts to help keep pace with new legislative and regulatory developments. Dealers who use the LAW 553 find they can use one contract to finance dealers through multiple lending institutions.

About Reynolds Document Services

In 1866, Reynolds and Reynolds was founded as a business forms printer. Since the 1920s, Reynolds has been known as the leader in serving automobile dealerships nationwide with standard and custom business forms. Today, Reynolds Document Services carries on the company's 150-year forms legacy by delivering a wide range of printed and electronic business documents, branding services, and dealership supplies that help dealers brand their retail enterprise, manage compliance risk, and improve operational efficiencies.

About Reynolds

Reynolds and Reynolds is a leading provider of automobile dealership software, services, and forms to help dealerships deliver better business results and transform the customer experience. The company is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with major operations in Houston and College Station, Texas, and Celina, Ohio.

(www.reyrey.com)

SOURCE The Reynolds and Reynolds Company

Related Links

http://www.reyrey.com


ATLANTA, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Rubenstein Partners, L.P., a vertically integrated real estate investment manager focused on value-added office property opportunities, along with a minority equity partner, announced the acquisition of Sanctuary Park, a 1.6 million-square-foot office park complex in the North Fulton submarket of Atlanta for $265 million.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410063

Sanctuary Park in Atlanta

The Sanctuary Park property has been institutionally owned, developed and maintained for nearly 20 years and is considered the premier Class-A office park in the high-growth North Fulton submarket. The property is comprised of nine mid-rise buildings within a 152-acre, master-planned environment and also offers three zoned development sites that could accommodate an additional 750,000 sf of build-to-suit office space.

The Sanctuary Park complex has historically outperformed other similar office product in the submarket. The property is currently 96% leased with prominent tenants that include Delta Dental Insurance, Coca-Cola, Ernst & Young, Ciena Corporation and LeasePlan. However, the anticipated near term departure of Verizon Wireless will lower occupancy to approximately 75%. Rubenstein views the large block vacancy left from Verizon's departure as a unique opportunity to capture the growing tenant demand for office space in the area.

"Sanctuary Park is exactly the kind of unique value-add opportunity Rubenstein Partners seeks out," said Taylor Smith with Rubenstein Partners. "The Class-A property is generally regarded as the top office park in North Fulton and we are thrilled to complete the acquisition of this asset. We believe Verizon's departure created an opportunity for the joint venture to acquire an asset with a strong historical performance as well as control the best large block of available Class-A space in a submarket that is lacking in the same. We anticipate our planned enhancements to the Property will help solidify Sanctuary Park's standing as the preeminent destination for tenants in North Fulton."

Will Yowell, Justin Parsonnet and Jay O'Meara of CBRE marketed the property and the joint venture worked closely with Patterson Advisory Group to arrange the acquisition financing. Jones Lang LaSalle's team of Jeff Bellamy and Adam Viente will continue in their role heading up the leasing team.

About Sanctuary Park

The Sanctuary Park nine-building complex enjoys a secure and private park-like setting, unique to the North Fulton market and includes combined surface and structured parking of 4.3 spaces per 1,000 square-feet. In addition, seven out of the nine existing buildings are LEED and Energy Star certified. The property is centrally located with quick and easy access to Georgia 400 via Haynes Bridge or Mansell Road along Westside Parkway. Onsite amenities include three conference centers, one modern training room, two full-service cafes, two state-of-the-art fitness centers, a manicured softball field and pavilion, two gated part entrances, complimentary shuttle service to and from the North Springs MARTA station and secured building access.

About Rubenstein Partners

Rubenstein Partners, founded in September 2005, is a private real estate investment management and advisory firm with operations throughout the Eastern United States. The firm is led by its founder, David Rubenstein, and a group of senior real estate executives, and is focused on directing and managing value-added office real estate investments, primarily in markets in the Eastern United States that encompass more than two-thirds of U.S. office space inventory. Rubenstein Partners' predecessor company, The Rubenstein Company, LP and affiliates, founded in 1969, was one of the largest private owner operators of Class A office real estate in the Mid-Atlantic, owning and operating a portfolio of assets valued at approximately $1.2 billion at the time of its disposition in 2004. Since 2005, Rubenstein Partners has, on behalf of its investors and clients, invested in more than 10,000,000 sq. ft. of office real estate assets throughout the Eastern United States. For more information, visit www.rubensteinpartners.com.

Contact :

Great Ink Communications, Ltd.  212-741-2977

Tom Nolan (Email)

Eric Waters (Email)

SOURCE Rubenstein Partners

Related Links

http://www.rubensteinpartners.com


WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Naif announced yesterday that Saudi Arabia will provide an additional $75 million to support refugees, in coordination with international organizations. Prince Mohammad announced this during a speech at the Leaders' Summit on the Global Refugee Crises hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama on the margins of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly.

During his speech, Prince Mohammad highlighted the Kingdom's efforts in relief work and humanitarian aid.

"The total humanitarian assistance provided by the Kingdom over the past four decades amounted to about $139 billion," he said.

He singled out Saudi Arabia's assistance to the Syrian people, saying that Saudi Arabia was one of the largest providers of aid.

"The Kingdom has received around 2.5 million Syrian citizens, and it is keen on not treating them simply as refugees or putting them in refugee camps. On the other hand, the Kingdom safeguarded their dignity and ensured their safety by granting full freedom of movement and issuing residence permits for hundreds of thousands of Syrians who wanted to remain in the Kingdom."

"The Kingdom has also given them access to the labor market and provided healthcare and education free of charge. There are more than 141,000 Syrian children pursuing their education free of cost," he said.

Prince Mohammad also said that Saudi Arabia has supported millions of Syrian refugees living in neighboring states, with aid reaching more than $800 million.

In addition, the crown prince said that Saudi Arabia has also welcomed Yemeni refugees, considering them as visitors and exempting them from residence and work regulations. Saudi Arabia has been the single-largest donor of humanitarian aid to Yemen.

Prince Mohammad highlighted the establishment in 2015 of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center. He said that Saudi aid to refugees in other countries included $59 million to the United Nations and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in February 2016, $30 million to Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and the Kingdom's pledge to provide $50 million to the Indonesian government to support the Rohingya refugees.

SOURCE Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, Information Office
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, addresses the delegates during the third day session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Wednesday, July 20, 2016. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

A small band of Republican lawmakers is engaged in a fierce, last-minute fight to force the Obama administration to retain its authority over part of the internet.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The unlikely spectacle of Republicans battling to preserve government control shows that you can make an argument out of anything in Washington  at least, if the White House offers an opinion about it first.

Yes we ICANN

The story as pitched by Sen. Ted Cruz (R.-Tex.) and others looks bad: The US will abandon its historic supervision of a core part of the internet, leaving it open for other countries to swoop in.

The Obama administration intends to give away control of the internet to an international body akin to the United Nations, Cruz warns in a video posted on his site. Do we want China and Russia and Iran to have the power to determine if a web site is unacceptable?

To stop that, Cruz and other Republicans are trying to attach a rider to the continuing resolutionthe spending bill needed to keep the government in businessthat would halt the transition.

But the actual power at stake and the organization involved amount to far less than that. Cruz and other GOP opponents who put this concern in the 2016 Republican platform are making a Panama Canal out of a molehilland unlike the US handing over that facility to Panama, here we yield nothing of real value.

Small ball

Instead, the plan that the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced in March of 2014 covers something much less important: administrative oversight of the domain name system that routes you to sites when you enter their addresses.

NTIA doesnt create or delete websites names like yahoo.com, nor does it have any say in the creation of new top-level domains (the .com in yahoo.com). That power was handed off by the Feds to a California non-profit called the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) back in 1998.

So, what will it mean when NTIA cedes its remaining oversight at the end of the month?

Story continues

Nothing.

The internet will continue to function just as it does now.

Both tech companies (Yahoo Finances publisher Yahoo included) and interest groups have supported the move. And firms that deal directly in domain names see no problem either.

ICAAN has been effectively overseeing this for years, wrote Andrew Miller, founder of the domain-name broker ATM Holdings.

An executive with a domain-name registry expressed zero worries, calling Cruzs worries of a foreign takeover a misnomer.

Indeed, foreign governments already tried and failed at a takeover in 2012, when some teamed up with the United Nations International Telecommunications Union to move domain-name-system governance to the ITU. If that had passed, the ITU could have been able to decide what top-level-domains get created, or restrict the content hosted on new ones.

The US and other opponents walked out of that event, killing the proposal. And the current transition specifically bars ICANN from allowing a future takeover.

Going through with the transition is simply the best way to ensure that the internet stays out of the hands of a multilateral organization like the ITU, wrote Eli Dourado, director of the Technology Policy Program at George Mason Universitys Mercatus Center.

Dourado emphasized that none of this is new. Weve been through a two-year process implementing a plan thats been anticipated since 1998.

ICANN issues

People who will defend this transition can just as readily criticize ICANN. That organization has at times looked like a fine example of crony capitalism, raking in fees from domain registries while expanding its own income sources by authorizing the creation of dozens of new top-level domains.

The aforementioned domain-registry executive, for instance, griped about ICANN being overly protective of trademarks and other kinds of intellectual property. Miller noted the risk of its dispute-resolution mechanisms being gamed, although he allowed that this could get worse without Washingtons oversight.

But US government oversight hasnt helped to solve those problems. Under the transition, ICANN member organizations will at least gain some new authority over its board via a new Empowered Community body  while the US will keep an effective veto over major changes to ICANNs role.

And the .gov and .mil domains that government and military sites use will stay under American control. What were left with is mainly procedural concerns (as outlined in a paper from the libertarian group TechFreedom) that Congress can address (as the R Street Institute, a free-market-minded think tank, explained in its own summary).

In a worst-case scenario, network administrators can work around ICANN interference, as Dourado argued in June. It remains fundamentally difficult to cut somebody off of the internet.

Meanwhile, stalling on this handover gives people a reason to complain about the U.S. claiming ownership of what has long since become a global medium  remember that the web was invented by a Brit working in a Swiss lab, Tim Berners-Lee.

Holding on to government authority that we dont exercise doesnt make us stronger, it just makes us look selfish. And it leaves the door open for a future US administration to pick up that power and start abusing it.

More from Rob:

Email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com; follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.
BROOKLYN, N.Y., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A comprehensive initiative that will help the nation's military veterans launch businesses in Brooklyn  and then support them as they grow  is one of just three projects in New York City and 68 nationwide to win the U.S. Small Business Administration's 3rd Annual Growth Accelerator Fund Competition.

The SBA awarded $50,000 in operating funds to the Brooklyn project, which will combine the expertise and services of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, which operates some of the city's premier startup business incubators and a veterans' entrepreneurial program. The new program will expand NYU Tandon's entrepreneurial support for veterans, which currently includes a devoted incubator called Bunker Labs NY at NYU Tandon, and add comprehensive business development services from the Brooklyn Chamber's business assistance, health insurance, and workforce development programs.

The program will initially operate from the pilot veteran incubator facilities within NYU Tandon's Digital Future Lab, located in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. It will provide participants with

Education and technical support from NYU faculty and mentors

faculty and mentors Access to technology, service providers, customers, and potential investors

Business development services from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce

Chamber of Commerce Mentorship from veteran entrepreneurs and other successful innovation start-ups

Networking opportunities to connect with peers, mentors, Chamber members and resources

Peer-to-peer learning

Connection to procurement opportunities

"Our experience demonstrates that military veterans share many of the attributes of successful entrepreneurs, including the ability to find innovative solutions to overcome obstacles and the commitment, persistence and dedication necessary to build thriving businesses," said Kurt H. Becker, NYU Tandon vice dean for research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. "We are pleased to work alongside the Brooklyn Chamber to enable veterans to acquire and apply the skills that will help them to join the innovation economy of Brooklyn and beyond."

The Brooklyn Chamber  the largest chamber of commerce in New York State with over 2,200 members  promotes and enhances economic activity throughout the borough. Along with its nonprofit affiliate, the Brooklyn Alliance, the Chamber support Brooklyn's innovation economy through a suite of business development services and networking events, reaching over 10,000 businesses and entrepreneurs each year.

"Veterans possess all the tools necessary to prosper as entrepreneurs, and this funding will allow us to positively impact the lives of vets by helping them launch and sustain their own businesses," said Carlo A. Scissura, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. "Brooklyn's innovation corridor is thriving, and I have no doubt that our new veteran-owned businesses will take it to even greater heights. Thank you to SBA, NYU Tandon, Assemblyman Joe Lentol and everyone who helped make this possible."

NYU Tandon began formally supporting veterans' entrepreneurial needs in 2015, when New York Assembly Member Joseph Lentol secured funding for a dedicated entrepreneurial training program. The Future Labs subsequently took on several pre-startup companies founded by veterans who graduated from the training. They became part of a thriving incubator network: NYU Tandon opened its first start-up business incubator in 2009 as part of its mission to accelerate the adoption of innovative technology for the good of society. Today three incubators, part of the Future Labs at NYU Tandon, claim a success rate for exiting companies that is nearly a mirror opposite of the norm: Nearly 90 percent are thriving businesses (or successful acquisitions) two years after graduation, versus the normal failure rate of 80 percent for new businesses.

Harlem Biospace and Coalition of Queens also won SBA awards.

"Accelerators provide valuable resources to potential startups: a physical infrastructure to work while they get started, mentoring, business-plan assistance, networking, opportunities to obtain venture capital, and introductions to potential customers, partners and suppliersall critical elements of small business success," said SBA's New York District Director Beth Goldberg. "We believe that the three organizations selected from New York City can have significant impact on startups." For more information on the SBA awards, visit www.sba.gov/accelerators.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151013/276541LOGO

SOURCE NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Related Links

http://www.poly.edu


SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today announced that Schneider Electric -- a Fortune 500 global specialist in energy management and automation -- is expanding its use of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to empower its employees worldwide to connect with their customers in entirely new ways. In addition, the company is leveraging Salesforce to drive its Internet of Things (IoT) vision and help customers manage their energy use more efficiently.

Schneider Electric, most recently ranked by Fortune magazine among the top 25 companies that change the world, started using Salesforce Sales Cloud five years ago to transform its sales force with 360-degree views of its customers. The company has since expanded its use of Salesforce significantly. All of the company's call centers now run on Salesforce Service Cloud, and the company's partner program is now powered by Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Identity.

Driving Innovation At Every Level

Schneider Electric's 'Innovation At Every Level' strategy creates connected technologies that reshape industries, transform cities and enrich lives. The global company is leveraging Salesforce to push forward its vision of connecting millions of energy and automation objects around the world with its millions of customers. Objects can include anything -- from cars, planes and trains; to smart home devices such as lights, digital circuit breakers, switches and blinds; to industrial connected products such as sensors, drives, smart machines, thermostats, HVAC systems and motors.

For example, Schneider Electric is helping customers tackle energy efficiency in buildings and plants with predictive maintenance and Edge Control capabilities. Using analytics from its connected objects -- together with data in their Salesforce instance -- the company can deliver more powerful customer services, including automated planning and scheduling, so that customers can proactively prevent issues from arising.

Comments on the News

"We believe that all products should be connectable and that we should be able to use the information generated by every one of our products to serve our customers better," said Herve Coureil, CIO at Schneider Electric. "With the convergence of IoT, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence, there's a huge opportunity for us to close the loop between products, the information they're generating and customer processes -- and we see the Salesforce Customer Success Platform as the connective tissue that will allow us to bring this all together. This data-driven customer experience fuels our vision for everyone on our planet to have access to safe, reliable, efficient and sustainable energy."

"In today's customer-driven world, businesses can no longer simply react to customer needs; they must be able to proactively engage and predict their needs," said Keith Block, vice chairman, president and COO at Salesforce. "With Salesforce, Schneider Electric is able to harness IoT, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence on one platform to get smarter and more predictive about its business and customers. This is truly a game-changer for Schneider Electric, and we're proud to be a part of their journey."

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is the global specialist in energy management and automation. With revenues of 27 billion in FY2015, our 160,000 employees serve customers in over 100 countries, helping them to manage their energy and process in ways that are safe, reliable, efficient and sustainable. From the simplest of switches to complex operational systems, our technology, software and services improve the way our customers manage and automate their operations. Our connected technologies will reshape industries, transform cities and enrich lives. At Schneider Electric, we call this Life Is On.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

This press release contains "forward-looking statements." All statements other than historical facts included in this press release, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the timing and the closing of the transaction, the financing for the transaction, the expected benefits of the transaction, prospective performance and future business plans, and any assumptions underlying any of the foregoing, are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations of future events. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or unknown, or unknown risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results could vary materially from the parties' expectations and projections. These forward-looking statements reflect Salesforce's expectations as of the date of this press release. Salesforce undertakes no obligation to update the information provided herein.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130612/SF30598LOGO

SOURCE Salesforce
CINCINNATI, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Scripps National Spelling Bee is returning to the nation's capital in the final weeks leading up to Election Day to administer the "Politicians vs. Press" event hosted by the National Press Club today at 7 p.m. In this spelling competition, members of Congress and D.C.-area journalists will battle for team supremacy as they take on the dictionary to see which individual walks away with the honorary title of champion.

For the politicians' team, participants include Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va.; Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla..; Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash.; Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif.; and Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif.

The press team includes Karoun Demirjian, reporter for The Washington Post; Clinton Yates, blog writer from ESPN's "The Undefeated"; Art Swift, managing editor at Gallup.com; Carrie Budoff Brown, editor of Politico; Angela Greiling Keane, formerly of Bloomberg; Rod Kuckro, reporter for E&E News; Emmarie Huetteman, reporter for The New York Times; and Carrie Johnson, reporter for NPR.

Unlike the Scripps National Spelling Bee, where the champion cannot return to compete in the National Finals, in this competition, Rep. Beyer is returning to defend his title. It is a rematch between the congressman and Demirjian, who were the last two spellers in 2015.

"This event is great fun and it is an honor for the Scripps National Spelling Bee to administer this for the National Press Club," said Paige Kimble, executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. "To have the opportunity to put words in the spotlight, especially so close to the elections, signifies the popularity of the event."

"The National Press Club is honored to partner with the Scripps National Spelling Bee to pit journalists against members of Congress in a competition for the best speller," said Thomas Burr, Club president and Washington correspondent for The Salt Lake Tribune. "At a time of heightened partisanship, it's great to have a night where journalists and politicians can compete in a fun event that raises money for promotion of the freedom of the press."

Dr. Jacques Bailly, official pronouncer of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, will serve in that same role for this spirited rivalry. The Scripps National Spelling Bee and its presenting sponsor Kindle are both internationally recognized brands that share in the belief that reading is critically important to a child's lifelong achievement.

Blake Giddens, one of the Bee's judges at the national finals and the 1983 national champion, will be the head judge. Joining him are the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee co-champions Jairam Hathwar, from Painted Post, New York, and Nihar Janga, from Austin, Texas, who also will serve as judges for the National Press Club event and will ring one of two bells. In this competition, the participants can misspell one time before being eliminated from the competition. There is the regular-sized bell widely known by Bee fans and there is a much larger bell used specifically for this event when a participant is knocked out of the competition.

This is the second year in a row for this contest, but its origin dates back to 1913, when the National Press Club held a spelling bee pitting elected officials against news reporters. President Woodrow Wilson and members of his Cabinet were among the 1,000 people who showed up to watch a representative from Ohio win.

In 2013, on the 100th anniversary of that very first bee, Sen. Tim Kaine, R-Va., took the title and now is the vice presidential nominee for the Democratic Party.

All proceeds from the event will benefit the National Press Club Journalism Institute, which provides training, resources, education and career development programs to media and communications professionals; awards scholarships to the next generation of journalists; and continually recognizes excellence in journalism and advocates for press freedom worldwide.

About the Scripps National Spelling Bee:

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is the nation's largest and longest-running educational program. The purpose of the Scripps National Spelling Bee is to help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts and develop correct English usage that will help them all of their lives. Visit spellingbee.com for more information about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is administered on a not-for-profit basis by The E.W. Scripps Company.

About Scripps:

The E.W. Scripps Company (NYSE: SSP) serves audiences and businesses through a growing portfolio of television, radio and digital media brands. Scripps is one of the nation's largest independent TV station owners, with 33 television stations in 24 markets and a reach of nearly one in five U.S. households. It also owns 34 radio stations in eight markets. Scripps also runs an expanding collection of local and national digital journalism and information businesses, including satire and humor video and web brand Cracked, podcast industry leader Midroll Media and over-the-top video news service Newsy. Scripps also produces television shows including "THE LIST" and "The Now" and runs an award-winning investigative reporting newsroom in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1878, Scripps has held for decades to the motto, "Give light and the people will find their own way."

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151020/278609LOGO

SOURCE The E.W. Scripps Company

Related Links

http://www.scripps.com


OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sitel, a leading global customer care provider, today announced the availability of 50 new career opportunities at its Oak Ridge, Tennessee customer experience center. To help fill these permanent, full-time positions, Sitel will hold a job fair on September 24. These positions will support the company's military financial services and insurance client.

Sitel will host the job fair at its Oak Ridge customer experience center located at 1089 Commerce Park Drive on Saturday, September 24 from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Applicants interested in a career with Sitel are encouraged to bring their resume to the event or apply online at the "Careers" tab of www.sitel.com. Previous customer service experience and strong computer knowledge are preferred.

Additionally, the site will be hosting a multi-family yard sale from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit Smoky Mountain Service Dogs, a nonprofit which provides custom-trained mobility-assistance service dogs to veterans.

"We depend greatly on the volunteer and giving spirit of the community as we pursue our mission of enhancing the physical and psychological quality of life for wounded veterans. A highly-trained mobility assistance service dog makes a huge difference in the daily life of the veteran and their family. To have companies like Sitel reach out to us in support of the mission is invaluable," said Mike Kitchens, Volunteer Chair of Smoky Mountain Service Dogs.

Sitel Oak Ridge is the happy home of over 700 associates and we are excited to add more to our team," said Kelin Mock, Site Director for Sitel Oak Ridge. "We are proud supporters of our community and enjoy partnering with groups such as Smoky Mountain Service Dogs to give back to those around us. As an employer of choice, we truly look forward to seeing each of you at our event and hopefully welcoming you to the Sitel family."

Career path development is a foundational building block for Sitel, with a long reputation for promoting team members through the ranks to management positions. The company provides competitive compensation and benefits packages, including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid vacation and holiday time as well as lucrative bonus and incentive opportunities.

About Sitel

As caring for customers becomes the differentiator that drives consumer engagement and spend, Sitel is advancing its position as a world leader in outsourced customer experience innovation. With over 30 years of industry-leading experience, Sitel's 75,100 passionate and talented associates support more than 400 clients in 48 languages from 146 facilities strategically located in 22 countries. Combining comprehensive customer care capabilities, leading omnichannel solutions and unparalleled expertise across industries, Sitel collaborates with some of the best known global brands to help consistently deliver outstanding customer experiences. Sitel is a subsidiary of Groupe Acticall. Visit www.sitel.com to learn more.

Media Contact:

Shirley Loebsack

Sitel

+1 877.95.Sitel

[email protected]

SOURCE Sitel

Related Links

http://www.sitel.com


DENVER, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- b2d Marketing, a full-service marketing firm serving dentists, physicians, and other healthcare professionals, has been selected by the national Small Business Drives America campaign as a 2016 model company.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410016

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410017

Dr. Michael Silverman, b2d Founder and Chief Creative Officer Small Business Drives America(TM) salutes model small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Small Business Drives America (SBDA) salutes our nation's small business owners and entrepreneurs who are role models based on their achievements and longevity. While roughly half of all new businesses fail within their first five years, SBDA honors those companies that defy the odds to provide valuable products and services, as well as the majority of new jobs that are generated in America.

SBDA selected b2d Marketing, headquartered in Seattle, in recognition of its 10th Anniversary delivering outstanding results to those in the healthcare industry.

"b2d Marketing is a pioneer in the field of business-to-doctor marketing, helping its clients better serve the public with innovative products and services," SBDA said. "b2d Marketing has also demonstrated an enviable business culture, fostering a workplace that values team members, and strives to provide every employee personal and professional fulfillment."

Other companies honored thus far in 2016 by SBDA include:

Gold Medal Service  East Brunswick, NJ

PTPA Media, Inc.  Fort Lauderdale, FL

Huthmaker Violins  Suwanee, GA

The Sales Whisperer (10 years)  Murrieta, CA

280 Group  Los Gatos, CA

Temin and Company  New York, NY

Janska Clothing  Colorado Springs, CO

Rowheels, Inc.  Fitchburg, WI

A-1 Scuba & Travel  Denver, CO

M. Grisafe Architect  Long Beach, CA

Convey Clearly (20 years)  Los Angeles, CA

"We are grateful to be included among Small Business Drives America's list of outstanding companies," said Dr. Michael Silverman (DMD, FICD), founder and chief creative officer of b2d Marketing. "The honor belongs to each and every one of our dedicated employees who work tirelessly to serve our clients, and who view themselves as key contributors to our own business success."

b2d Marketing specializes in working closely with businesses that are seeking exponential growth, advising them on strategy, and providing sales, branding, design, and interactive services support.

To better handle its expanding client based in the U.S. and abroad, b2d Marketing is opening a second office, based in Concord, MA.

"We don't take on just anyone as a client," Dr. Silverman noted. "We work exclusively with clients whose ideas deserve, and need, strategic exposure."

"We make your business better because we work with intention and integrity," explained Mike Meehan, president of b2d Marketing. "Your needs are distinct, shouldn't your marketing be the same?" he asked.

To learn more about b2d Marketing visit the company's website at www.b2dmarketing.com.

The Small Business Drives America campaign is conducted in association with Monday Morning Radio, the weekly podcast that showcases small business owners and experts. For more information, visit www.mondaymorningradio.com.

Media Contact:

303-296-1200

Email

Dean Rotbart

SOURCE Small Business Drives America
NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --



"Rising need for policy-driven, scalable, and programmable security is expected to drive the growth in the market"

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the global Software-Defined Security (SDSec) market to grow from USD 1.59 billion in 2016 to USD 6.76 billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 33.6%. The SDSec market is growing rapidly because of the need for policy-driven, scalable, and programmable security architecture, need for faster response and increased security, and upsurge in cloud adoption.



"Virtual Machines/Storage/Server Security is expected to grow at a higher CAGR"

The SDSec market by enforcement point consists of application and mobile device security, virtual machines/server/storage security, network security gateways, and others (cloud, database, and web). Enforcement points, or platforms for executing protections, are introduced at the boundaries of each segment to enforce defined protection.



"Cloud deployment mode is expected to have the largest market share"

The SDSec market has been segmented by deployment mode into cloud and on premise deployments. Both, on premise and cloud-based solutions depend upon an organization's requirements. The cloud SDSec market is expected to grow at a higher CAGR and occupies a larger share in the total SDSec market. The cloud SDSec market has been steadily increasing in recent years due to the prevailing trends of advancement in cloud technology. As security evolves and data centers become software driven, businesses will need agile, elastic SDSec to deliver uncompromised services and performance at scale.



Breakup of Primary Interviews:

- By Company type  Tier 1- 30%, Tier 2- 40%, Tier 3- 30%

- By Designation  C-Level- 72%, Director Level- 14%. Others- 14%

- By Region  North America- 57%, Europe- 14%, APAC- 29%



Enterprises are concerned about the security of the virtualized and automated infrastructure before adopting Software-Defined Networking (SDN). SDSec helps enterprises in the deployment and automation of network security controls using software instead of traditional security controls. It is managed via specific policies that are defined and customized according to business needs.



The report includes the study of key players offering SDSec solutions: Check Point Technologies (Israel), Cisco Systems (California), Intel Corporation (California), VMware, Inc. (California), Symantec Corporation (California), EMC Corporation (Massachusetts), Fortinet, Inc. (California), Juniper Networks (California), and Palo Alto Networks (California). Furthermore, the report also includes in-depth competitive analysis of the key players in the SDSec market, with their company profiles, recent developments, and key market strategies.



Objective of the Study



- To define, describe, and forecast the global Software-Defined Security (SDSec) market on the basis of enforcement points, components, deployment modes, and end users.

- To provide detailed information regarding the major factors influencing the growth of the market (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and industry-specific challenges).

- To strategically analyze micromarkets1 with respect to individual growth trends, future prospects, and contribution to the total market.

- To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders and details of a competitive landscape for market leaders.

- To forecast the market size of various segments with respect to five main regions, namely North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America.

- To strategically profile key players and comprehensively analyze their market shares and core competencies.

- To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and development activities (R&D) in the SDSec market.



Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04157904-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



http://www.reportlinker.com





__________________________

Contact Clare: [email protected]

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

SOURCE Reportlinker

Related Links

http://www.reportlinker.com


SEBASTOPOL, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The top international nutritional forum  Informa Exhibition's SupplySide -- has named Golden Goddess Turmeric Matrix Instant Tea by Spice Pharm as one of its five finalists for the 2016 SupplySide Editor's Choice Awards.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410226

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410227

The SupplySide editorial team selects consumer products for achievements in innovation and market impact.

"We are thrilled that our cutting-edge turmeric tea formula has been recognized with this honor," said Kitty Wells, CEO of Spice Pharm. "Unlike anything on the market, Golden Goddess Turmeric Matrix delivers the health benefits of turmeric and curcumin in an inviting cup of tea. Who needs another pill to swallow?"

Turmeric root is a complex botanical containing over 350 beneficial compounds. Curcumin  an extract of turmeric -- shows a wide range of health benefits in over 6,000 scientific studies.

Golden Goddess Matrix uses an innovative extract of turmeric that preserves the complete natural matrix of turmeric and delivers a high 50% curcumin content, while mellowing the bitterness of raw turmeric into a pleasant herbal flavor.

"We scrutinize every ingredient for effectiveness, safety and taste," said Wells. "We didn't settle for isolated curcumin, which demonstrates problems with low bioavailability."

Studies on the extract in Golden Goddess Turmeric Tea show benefits for joint, skin and immune health, plus:

10x greater bioavailability than standard curcumin

6x greater bioavailability and 3x faster absorption than curcumin with turmeric oil

5x greater bioavailability and 2.5x faster absorption than curcumin with phospholipids

While curcumin is notoriously non-soluble, Spice Pharm's revolutionary pure-plant blend mixes easily with hot or cold water. This ultra-clean formula is 100% solvent-free and contains NO black pepper extract, which inhibits key detoxifying liver enzymes that affect the metabolism of a wide range of pharmaceuticals and toxins.

"In the past few years we've had tremendous success highlighting the products that are coming to market, driven by the innovative ingredients highlighted at SupplySide," said Heather Granato, vice president, content, in Informa's Health & Nutrition Network. "In considering hundreds of products, our team narrowed the field based on the unique positioning and ability to serve consumers with truly cutting-edge products."

About Spice Pharm: Spice Pharm delivers the intelligence of nature's pharmacy in products that uplift the body, mind and spirit. Founded by former Silicon Valley executives Kitty Wells and Frank Schwartz, Spice Pharm was recognized as one of the Top 3 Brands of the San Francisco Green Festival for dedication to sustainable wellness, ethical sourcing and eco-entrepreneurship. Spice Pharm's Golden Goddess Turmeric Chai and Chocolate Elixirs won a 2015 SupplySide Editor's Choice Award. www.spicepharm.com

About SupplySide West: This annual tradeshow and educational forum is the finished product manufacturer's gathering place for top performers, trends, scientific advances and networking. SupplySide West is all about the exploration, discovery, innovation and marketing strategy around the development of finished consumer goods that drive the global business economy. The 2016 show will be held October 4-7at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. www.supplysideshow.com.

Media Contact:

Kitty Wells

707-634-6033 x101

Email

SOURCE Spice Pharm, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.spicepharm.com


LOS ANGELES, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- GEM&BOLT Mezcal is bringing its "liquid spirit" to the West Coast. The innovative mezcal has attracted the spirits industry's most brilliant executives including CEO Lisa Derman, partner Jody Levy and board member Ted Roman. The team's experience and expertise are sure to catapult the unique spirit to fame as they enter a new market.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410239LOGO

Lisa Derman most recently left her post as COO of Stoli Group USA to join GEM&BOLT as CEO. Her twenty-plus year career includes executive level positions with Proximo, Absolut Spirits and Schieffelin & Somerset. GEM&BOLT has also added industry veteran Ted Roman to the board of directors. One the most respected and impactful executives in America, Roman was instrumental in building industry-leading performance at William Grant & Sons and Pernod Ricard, "GEM&BOLT is authentic with an edge; it's tapped into a growing conscious that goes beyond hype," says Roman. "It's about how and where a spirit is made. I am truly excited to be a member of the GEM&BOLT board and contribute to the success that lies ahead for this superior, wonderfully-crafted brand."

These industry greats join GEM&BOLT partner Jody Levy, co-founder of the sustainable beverage company WTRMLN WTR, "GEM&BOLT is truly differentiated in a growing conscious community that cares about the quality of what they eat and drink."

Fair-trade and sustainable, GEM&BOLT Mezcal is created by a 4th generation master distiller in Oaxaca, Mexico and is the only mezcal on the market distilled with damiana, a mythical Mexican herb that naturally complements the essential "heart opening properties" of this 100% pure agave mezcal. Unlike Tequila (by regulation) which only has to be 51% agave, mezcal is closely regulated to adhere to strict traditional methods, and must be 100% agave. Making GEM&BOLT Mezcal a clean, unadulterated product for consumers who care about what they put in their bodies.

"The mezcal category is one of the fastest growing categories in our industry. The opportunity to work with not only a growing brand, but also business partners who have a keen focus on quality spirit, design, and corporate responsibility was one I knew I could not pass up," says Derman, CEO.

Raised together in a bohemian enclave in the mountains of Virginia, GEM&BOLT co-founders and artist-alchemist duo AdrinAdrina and Elliott Coon have created a brand that is rooted in the sophistication of fine art, celebration, ritual and plant intelligence. "We grew up in a community that valued plant knowledge and the elevating power of conscious celebration  both values that have become intrinsic to our product and our brand," says Co-founder AdrinAdrina.

In Los Angeles, GEM&BOLT can be found at Las Perlas, Barkeeper, Sawyer, NeueHouse and other fine retailers and restaurants across Los Angeles.

ABOUT GEM&BOLT: Creative, innovative GEM&BOLT is a fair-trade mezcal brand distilled with damiana, a Mexican herb with mythological healing properties. GEM&BOLT is made with Espadin agave produced and distilled in Oaxaca, Mexico, the spirit's capital and one of eight mezcal-producing states. Espadin is one of the most common agaves used for mezcal production because of its large size and shorter maturation period of 8-12 years. GEM&BOLT is available in 750ml, 200ml, and 50ml bottles (44% Alc. Vol) and served in select restaurants, bars, and hotels in Austin, TX and Los Angeles, CA, and in finer bars from Oaxaca, Tulum, and Mexico City to Ibiza, Mykonos, and Berlin. www.gemandbolt.com.

Contact:

Christina Lazzaro

323-656-6996

Email

SOURCE GEM&BOLT

Related Links

http://www.gemandbolt.com


The firm's website allows entrepreneurs seeking to form an LLC in Wisconsin to fill out a simple online questionnaire. The firm's attorneys review all the information submitted through the questionnaire and then file all the applicable documents with the State of Wisconsin to organize the business. A comprehensive and customized operating agreement is also drafted and included with the firm's LLC formation packages. An operating agreement is the main governing document of an LLC in Wisconsin and it defines how the LLC will run itself. The firm has implemented a process that assures an LLC in Wisconsin will be formed within 3 business days.

"Our vision is to utilize cutting edge technology and exceptional attorney know-how to transform the legal industry and provide clients with a new kind of legal experience that is accessible, convenient, reliable, and affordable," said Attorney Ili J. Subhan, the founding and managing attorney, of Subhan Law Office, LLC. The firm uses high-end-to-end encryption and a secure client portal to protect clients' confidences and share and receive information. "We are an entrepreneurial and innovative law firm that began as a start-up company. We understand the challenges that entrepreneurs, startups, and small business encounter. That is why we developed our online legal services to help them through the business formation process," said Attorney Subhan.

About Subhan Law Office, LLC

Subhan Law Office, LLC, specializes in immigration law, business law, and estate planning. Our firm helps families, entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses immigrate to the United States, form businesses domestically and internationally, protect intellectual property rights, and protect family estates. The firm was awarded the State Bar of Wisconsin's Pro Bono Honor Society award for 2014 and 2015 for providing high quality legal services to those in need in the Milwaukee community.

Our firm is headquartered in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our immigration law, international law, intellectual property law, and federal tax law practice groups are authorized to practice in all 50 States, U.S. territories and possessions, all U.S. Embassies and Consulates, and around the world. We are a Wisconsin based law firm with Midwest values having a global reach and perspective.

Contact Us

Attorney Ili J. Subhan

Subhan Law Office, LLC

250 East Wisconsin Avenue

Suite 1800

Milwaukee, WI 53202

Office: (414) 223-5718

Email

www.subhanlaw.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410031

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410224LOGO

SOURCE Subhan Law Office, LLC

Related Links

http://www.subhanlaw.com


"This event underscores Peru's rapid ascent as the world's number one destination for travel, culture, and culinary adventures," said Xavier Equihua, CEO and President of the Peruvian Avocado Commission (PAC). "We are extremely grateful that President Kuczynski was able to join us in celebrating Peruvian culture and the wide variety of incredible superfoods that Peru has to offer the world."

In addition to being honored by the presence of President Kuczynski, the Peru to the World Expo had the pleasure of welcoming Mr. Jose Antonio Gomez Bazan of Camposol Trading, the culinary talents of the award winning Peruvian Brothers, and Peruvian Minister of Foreign Commerce and Tourism Eduardo Ferreyros, who delivered the keynote address at the event and highlighted agriculture as Peru's second most important export behind minerals.

Peru has proudly provided the world with superfoods for over 5000 years and there are very few countries that can match its distinction as a net superfood producer. From being the second largest producer of Haas avocados and blueberries in the world, to production of numerous other superfoods such as pomegranates, figs, mandarins, grapes, coffee, and cacao, Peru is the world's go to source for superfoods and healthy eating.

The Peruvian Avocado Commission is proud to have been a sponsor of this annual celebration and looks forward to continuing to share the benefits of Peruvian superfoods with the world.

About the Peruvian Avocado Commission

The Peruvian Avocado Commission (PAC) is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was established in 2011 to increase the consumption/demand for Avocados from Peru through advertising, retail promotion and public relations. The PAC's promotional activities are conducted under the guidelines of the federal promotion program for Hass avocados, which is under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For more information about the PAC please visit www.avocadosfromperu.com or email [email protected].

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410129LOGO

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410127

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410128

SOURCE Peruvian Avocado Commission

Related Links

http://www.avocadosfromperu.com


CHICAGO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- tesori trattoria & bar, part of the newly announced Round The Table Hospitality family of companies, is pleased to announce Carlos Ysaguirre as its new executive chef.

Chef Carlos Ysaguirre (Photo credit: Andrew Stegmeyer)

Ysaguirre comes to the Chicago Loop restaurant from Jacoby's Restaurant & Mercantile in Austin, Texas where he championed his simple and rustic culinary point-of-view of using seasonal, high-quality ingredients while continuing his passion for working with local purveyors. While in Austin he flexed his "celebrity chef" bone, appearing at the celebrated Austin Food & Wine Festival and earning accolades for "People's Favorite Dish" in the Do512 Karbach Chili Cook-off as well as "Best in Show" for the American Lamb Board's premier Lamb Jam Global Flavors Tour.

Before Jacoby's, Ysaguirre helmed the kitchen at Chicago's rustic Italian spot -- Anteprima -- where for six years he brought acclaim to the Andersonville restaurant with his philosophy of seasonally and locally-driven cuisine. During his tenure, he also helped open neighboring farm-to-table Acre and regional-focused Italian Bar Ombra of the same ownership to high praise, exhibiting his ability for larger leadership over a family of restaurants.

Says Ysaguirre, "I'm very excited to join the tesori team and once again share my love of the kitchen and Italian food with Chicago. I was taught that great cooking is about showcasing good, quality ingredients in an interesting way and letting the ingredients speak for themselves. tesori's philosophy of seasonally-driven, rustic fare aligns perfectly with that point-of-view."

At tesori, Ysaguirre will focus on seasonal-driven menus featuring simple and rustic flavors inspired by regional Italian ingredients. The menu will include a combination of antipasti, house-made pastas, piatti (entrees) and contorni (sides). Highlights from the upcoming fall menu include: eggplant caponata (sweet & sour Sicilian relish, capers, pine nuts), duck breast saltimbocca (butternut squash, apples, Brussels sprouts, saba), grilled marinated leg of lamb (Borlotti beans, fennel, radish, pickled peppers, feta) and more. Ysaguirre will continue tesori's tradition of signature, hand-crafted pizza with the main pizza bar featuring both red and white Neapolitan-style pizzas. Further details on Ysaguirre's full menu will be available mid-October.

Says owner Jim Horan, "Ysaguirre's strong background in rustic and seasonally-driven Italian fare and passion for forging relationships with local purveyors was a perfect fit for tesori. We are excited to welcome him to our family of companies and back to Chicago."

The public is invited to come meet Ysaguirre this Sunday, September 25th at the upcoming Chicago Gourmet in Millennium Park at US Tasting Pavilion 8 where he will be showcasing his take on fagioli e polpettine, a traditional Italian dish.

tesori trattoria & bar is open daily at 11:30 am and offers both lunch and dinner service as well as daily happy hour specials. More information can be found at tesorichicago.com.

High-res photo available here.

About tesori trattoria and bar

tesori trattoria & bar is Chicago Loop's premier Italian-inspired restaurant and bar located at 65 East Adams in the historic Symphony Center off of Chicago's Cultural Mile. Its uniquely modern take on rustic, Italian food and drink borrows from Italy's various regional influences and traditions to create an authentic Italian experience while the lively bar features handcrafted cocktails, a curated menu of craft beer and an extensive Italian-driven wine list that highlights many of Italy's regional varieties as well as old and new world wines. The architecturally-driven space designed by Knauer Inc. offers casual ambience and a bright and spacious setting including a private event room perfect for special events.

About Round The Table Hospitality

Round The Table Hospitality (RTTH) is a family of companies based in Chicago's West Loop, founded by Blue Plate Catering CEO Jim Horan in 2016. The RTTH roster includes the state-of-the-art facility Larkin Hall, an intrapreneurial incubator program Wild Blue, Blue Plate Catering, and restaurants tesori trattoria & bar and Park Grill.

For more information:

Brandy Gonsoulin

[email protected]

Logo- http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410070LOGO



Photo- http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410071

SOURCE tesori trattoria & bar

Related Links

http://www.tesorichicago.com


AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On Aug. 31, 2016, the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute (TCAI) at St. David's Medical Center became the first facility in the United States to use the THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter after it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this month.

The procedure was performed by Andrea Natale, M.D., F.H.R.S., F.A.C.C., F.E.S.C., cardiac electrophysiologist and executive medical director of TCAI. TCAI was also part of the clinical trial to study the use of the THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter to treat Atrial Fibrillation, or A Fib, a common heart rhythm disorder.

The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter enables doctors to accurately control the amount of contact force applied to the heart wall during radiofrequency catheter ablation procedures. This can increase the effectiveness and safety of the procedure for patients.

During catheter ablation, doctors insert a therapeutic catheter through a small incision in the groin, where it is then weaved up to the heart through a blood vessel. Once it reaches the left upper chamber of the heart (atrium), radiofrequency energy is delivered to the heart wall to create lesions that block faulty electrical impulses that can cause heart rhythm disorders. Providing doctors with the ability to apply stable contact force during catheter ablation has been shown to improve patient outcomes, as poor tissue contact force may result in incomplete lesion formation that could result in the need for additional treatment. Too much contact force may damage the tissue.

"The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter represents a significant advancement for the clinical community," Dr. Natale said. "Numerous trials, including the SMART-AF and SMART-SF studies, have proven that this technology enables physicians to achieve targeted stability in the defined contact force range, leading to shorter procedure times and enhanced results without compromising safety."

The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter is the only approved device pairing contact force technology with a porous tip designed to optimize efficiency by providing uniform cooling at half the flow rate of earlier generation irrigated catheters, easing the fluid management process.

The catheter is seamlessly integrated with the CARTO 3 System, which combines contact force technology, 3D mapping, and advanced navigation capabilities to provide active measurement of stable contact force and catheter tip location.

Clinical data have proven the safety of the device when used to treat drug refractory paroxysmal A Fib. The SMART-AF trial, a multicenter, prospective study of the earlier generation THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH technology, revealed no unanticipated adverse events and demonstrated a success rate of greater than 80 percent, with increased stability within the contact force range. The more recent SMART-SF study, which tested the newest generation THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter, demonstrated excellent safety results as well. The study found an 18.7 percent reduction in overall procedure time and a 14.2 percent reduction in overall ablation time when compared to the SMART-AF study. It also demonstrated a 55.2 percent reduction in total fluoroscopy time, limiting radiation exposure to patients.

The THERMOCOOL SMARTTOUCH SF Catheter, manufactured by Biosense Webster, was approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. on Aug. 15, 2016.

A Fib is the most prevalent heart rhythm disorder and a leading cause of stroke among people 65 years and older. An estimated 3 million people in the United States and 20 million worldwide are affected by A Fib, and its prevalence is projected to increase significantly as the population ages. A Fib is a progressive disease and increases in severity and frequency as patients get older. Left untreated, it can lead to heart valve disease, sleep apnea, chronic fatigue, congestive heart failure and stroke. Public health implications of A Fib are a growing concern because those with A Fib are at an increased risk of morbidity and mortality, as well as a reduced quality of life. The disorder is estimated to be responsible for 88,000 deaths each year.

Media Contacts:

Erin Ochoa or Kristin Marcum

Elizabeth Christian Public Relations

512.472.9599

SOURCE Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute (TCAI) at St. David's Medical Center

Related Links

http://www.tcainstitute.com


"Each year thousands of new products are launched at CES. Some thrive; others wither. We believe that the crowds can spot a winner when they see one, so we invite a selection of the top products at CES to strut their stuff while the audience votes (both online and in the audience)," said Robin Raskin, founder and president, Living in Digital Times.

Products entered into the competition reach an international community of expert judges, tech journalists, potential partners, investors and technophiles, who are some of the biggest names in their fields.

Last year's Last Gadget Standing live event winner was VUZE 3D and 360 Camera the first consumer, portable 360 3D VR camera and software studio that brings immersive content creation to the masses, while the online winner was awarded to The Ripple Maker, an IoT device that turns every cup of coffee into an extraordinary experience. Using coffee extract, the Ripple Maker creates stunning designs atop the foam of a cappuccino or latte, in a matter of seconds. Last year's Mobile Apps Showdown live event and online winner was iHeartLocal, providing small businesses with a free Customer Relationship System to help grow their business in three easy steps: connect, retain and reengage your current and new customers.

In addition to the judges, an online audience makes their voices heard by voting for the products they believe will endure the test of time. Finalists ultimately compete in a live presentation on Saturday, January 7. With roars and cheers of encouragement and excitement from the audience, the live event is a true celebration of all that is great in tech innovation today.

Returning for a second year to emcee is David Pogue, founder of Yahoo! Tech and a guy who knows a good gadget when he sees one.

Last Gadget Standing

10:30 AM - Noon, Saturday, January 7; LVCC, North Hall, N257

One of the most anticipated events at CES, where finalists will fascinate, captivate and become indispensable.

Who Should Enter: CES exhibitors and participants who believe their gadgets have what it takes to win a live and online contest determining the "most likely to succeed product." The hottest new gadgets will compete to showcase how they are pioneering change and innovation in the digital landscape. 10 finalists are selected by a panel of expert judges and will be invited to CES for a live competition to demo their gadgets. Products should be new  not older than 2016, and must be shipping by Q2 of 2017. Winners will be chosen by audience vote online and at the live event. To apply, go here.

Fee: $900 for 1 entry; $1,700 for 2 entries; $2,400 for 3 entries.

Deadline to Enter: December 15.

See a history of the winners or view last year's show.

To view the list of judges, go here.

Mobile Apps Showdown

12:30-2 PM, Saturday, January 7; LVCC, North Hall, N257

Now in its eighth year, this friendly yet fierce competition showcases the innovation and ingenuity of today's app builders.

Who should enter: CES exhibitors and participants who feel that their mobile app has what it takes to win a live and online contest determining the "most likely to succeed app." iOs, Android and Windows 8, as well as apps that power hardware, eyewear, wristwear and bodywear, will be accepted. Apps will be evaluated by editorial judges to determine five finalists. Winners will be determined by an audience vote online and at the live event. To apply go here.

Fee: 1 app $600; 2 apps $1,100; 3 apps $1,500

Deadline to Enter: December 12.

See a history of the winners or view last year's show.

To view a list of judges, go here.

For updates on the Last Gadget Standing competition, follow Last Gadget Standing on Twitter at @GadgetLast and keep an eye on hashtag #LastGadget. For updates on the Mobile Apps Showdown competition, watch hashtag #AppsShowdown.

Tweet this: Is your product ready for the spotlight? Entries now open for 16th annual #LastGadget Standing at #CES2017.

About Living in Digital Times

Founded by veteran technology journalist Robin Raskin, Living in Digital Times brings together the most knowledgeable leaders and the latest innovations impacting both technology and lifestyle. It helps companies identify and act on emerging trends, create compelling company narratives, and do better business through strong network connections. Living in Digital Times produces technology conferences, exhibits and events at CES and other locations throughout the year by lifestyle verticals. Core brands include Digital Health Summit, Fitness Tech, Baby Tech, [email protected], Family Tech Summit, TransformingEDU, MommyTech TV, Beauty Tech, Wearables and FashionWare runway show, Mobile Apps Showdown, Last Gadget Standing, Robots on the Runway and the KAPi Awards. The company also works with various foundations and manages the Appreneur Scholar awards program for budding mobile entrepreneurs, as well as the 10 Under 20: Young Innovators to Watch awards recognizing student STEAM innovations in New York City. For more information, visit www.LivinginDigitalTimes.com and keep up with our latest news on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.

About CES:

CES is the world's gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. It has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 yearsthe global stage where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace. As the largest hands-on event of its kind, CES features all aspects of the industry. Owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)TM, the technology trade association representing the $287 billion U.S. consumer technology industry, it attracts the world's business leaders and pioneering thinkers. Check out CES video highlights. Follow CES online at CES.tech and on social.

Media Contact:

Karen Pineman

LKPR, Inc. for Living in Digital Times

[email protected]

917-453-6887 (mobile)

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410158

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410159LOGO

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140918/147059

SOURCE Living in Digital Times

Related Links

http://www.livingindigitaltimes.com


MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), the global advisor on staffing and workforce solutions has published findings into the current size of the Gig Economy. Measuring the Gig Economy: Inside the New Paradigm of Contingent Work covers key findings and data from recent SIA research on the gig economy, including market estimates and features of the US contingent workforce. The research was based on a survey of over 7000 adults in the US.

The gig economy includes any contingent work such as independent contracting, consulting, freelancing, seasonal work and other temporary work. While the term gig has more recently emerged to describe freelance work facilitated by an internet platform or app, SIA considers the term as more broadly describing any work explicitly short term in nature.

The ground-breaking research measures the size of the US gig economy and provides the first-ever estimate of gig economy spending. According to the research, an estimated 44 million people took on gig work in the US in 2015, with 29% of all US workers performing gig/contingent work last year. Total spending on gig work in the US was $792 billion. SIA believes this is the first estimate of its kind around US contingent workforce spend.

"At close to $800 billion, gig and contingent work is a very large sector of the economy, on par with areas that get much more scrutiny and understanding," said Barry Asin, President of SIA. "It's important to understand what is happening in the gig economy, not the least because there is a significant portion of the US workforce that prefers alternative work arrangements to traditional, full time employment."

Close to 40% of people overall prefer alternatives to a traditional job, with 69% of independent contractors and self-employed workers preferring to engage in work outside of a full-time employment situation.

The research, which also provides a detailed overview of the workers comprising the gig economy, total spend per category of worker, worker preferences and data on the prevalence of moonlighting among US contingent workers, is being unveiled this week at SIA's Collaboration in the Gig Economy conference, September 21-22 at the Red Rocks Resort in Las Vegas, NV.

View more findings and download the full version of Measuring the Gig Economy: Inside the New Paradigm of Contingent Work via SIA's website.

About Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA)

SIA is the Global Advisor on Staffing and Workforce Solutions

Founded in 1989, SIA is the global advisor on staffing and workforce solutions. Our proprietary research covers all categories of employed and non-employed work including temporary staffing, independent contracting and other types of contingent labor. As a division of the international business media company, Crain Communications Inc., SIA is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in London, England. Read more about SIA here.

Media Contact

Jennifer Arcuni, Communications Director, Staffing Industry Analysts

[email protected] | +1 650-390-6171 | www.staffingindustry.com

SOURCE Staffing Industry Analysts

Related Links

http://www.staffingindustry.com


Fresh from your trusted dairy and made with no high fructose corn syrup, no artificial growth hormones and no artificial sweeteners, TruMoo milk is the delicious and nutritious treat that's perfect for the whole family. And back by popular demand this Halloween season, and for a limited time, fans can also enjoy TruMoo Orange Scream . Inspired by orange frozen pops with vanilla ice cream, this creamy orange milk is so frightfully delicious, it might make you screamwith joy!

"We couldn't be more excited to team up with DreamWorks Animation to celebrate the release of the new movie Trolls," said Greg Schwarz, Vice President of Marketing, Dean Foods. "At Dean Foods, we love delighting our consumers with delicious and nutritious seasonal offerings, like TruMoo Orange Scream, and we're pretty sure even the Bergens would much prefer our colorful milk over trolls."

To further celebrate the promotional partnership, from now until November 16, 2016, consumers can visit TruMoo.com to enter the codes found on specially-marked bottles of TruMoo Chocolate and Orange Scream milks to enter for a chance to win a Royal Caribbean DreamWorks Experience cruise, plus weekly Trolls prizes.*

And if movie-goers are looking to whip up Trolls-inspired treats for the premiere, TruMoo Chocolate and Orange Scream milks are the perfect option. Whether served in a glass or incorporated in creative recipes like Poppy's Orange Scream Pudding Parfaits and "Trollicious" Chocolate Cheesecake Dip, every little Troll and Bergen will be asking for more.

"Trollicious" TruMoo Chocolate and Orange Scream milks are available nationwide now through October 2016. Regular TruMoo Chocolate, Calcium Plus and Protein milks can be found year round in dairy cases at grocery stores nationwide.

To find TruMoo at a store near you and for Trolls-inspired recipes and sweepstakes information, visit www.TruMoo.com, and find TruMoo on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

About Dean Foods

Dean Foods is a leading food and beverage company and the largest processor and direct-to-store distributor of fluid milk and other dairy and dairy case products in the United States. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, the Dean Foods portfolio includes DairyPure, the country's first and largest fresh, white milk national brand, and TruMoo, the leading national flavored milk brand, along with well-known regional dairy brands such as Alta Dena, Berkeley Farms, Country Fresh, Dean's, Garelick Farms, Friendly's, LAND O LAKES milk and cultured products,** Lehigh Valley Dairy Farms, Mayfield, McArthur, Meadow Gold, Oak Farms, PET,*** T.G. Lee, Tuscan and more. In all, Dean Foods has more than 50 local and regional dairy brands and private labels. Dean Foods also makes and distributes ice cream, cultured products, juices, teas, and bottled water. Almost 17,000 employees across the country work every day to make Dean Foods the most admired and trusted provider of wholesome, great-tasting dairy products at every occasion. For more information about Dean Foods and its brands, visit www.deanfoods.com.

*2016 TruMoo Halloween Sweepstakes. NO PURCHASE OR PAYMENT NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. Starts on 8/11/16 at 12:00:01 p.m. PT and ends on 11/16/16 at 11:59:59 a.m. PT. Weekly drawings start 8/19/16. Open to legal residents of 50 U.S./D.C. (excl. CO), 18+. Void in CO & where prohibited. Free Code: Send SASE to TruMoo Halloween Sweepstakes, P.O. Box 536, Elmhurst, IL 60126. Requests must be postmarked by 10/31/16; rec'd by 11/7/16. For complete Official Rules, go online to www.trumoo.com. Sponsor: Dean Foods Company, 2711 North Haskell Avenue, Suite 3400, Dallas, TX, 75204.

**The LAND O LAKES brand is owned by Land O'Lakes, Inc. and is used by license.

***PET is a trademark of Eagle Family Foods Group LLC, used under license.

DreamWorks Trolls  2016 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All rights reserved.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409897

SOURCE Dean Foods Company
"Empowering women and girls is not only the right thing to do, it is also a simple recipe for success. Just look at Finland: Gender equality has been key to my country's rise from poverty to prosperity," His Excellency Sauli Niinisto, President of Finland said at the event.

Showcasing stories of global activists, the event renewed momentum to create a gender equal world by or before 2030. Highlights from the night included stories about the impact of outlawing child marriage and sending girls back to school in Malawi; how HeForShe IMPACT scholarships are creating more opportunities for girls in the STEM fields; and what happens when college fraternity brothers unite to stop sexual assault.

"HeForShe was launched in the conviction that we needed to find the right way for men to get involved in changing the status quo," Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women said. "Tonight's activists have shown us how together we really can get rapid, incremental results that benefit both women and men. Their work will open new opportunities that reinforce each other in schools, workplaces and wider communities. Millions of men and boys have already signed up for gender equality and now we need to get the next 1 million on board."

HeForShe commemorated the anniversary with bold commitments and new narratives about what it means to be HeForShe. The evening featured a number of IMPACT 10x10x10 Champions, who shared the progress that they have made since joining the movement. IMPACT 10x10x10 is an initiative that engages 10 Heads of States, 10 corporations and 10 universities in fast-tracking gender equality in boardrooms, classrooms and world capitals.

"In January, PwC's Global Leadership team was made up of 20% women. Today, PwC's Global Leadership is made up of 44% women," said IMPACT Champion Bob Moritz, Chairman, PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited. "That's real progress and it's something I'm proud of. But, it didn't happen overnight and we have a tremendous amount of work still to do ... I think HeForShe is going to be the tipping point for gender parity in the coming years."

The evening reception was held the same day as the launch of the first HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 University Parity report, which is the first progress report since 10 leading global universities publicly announced bold commitments to achieve gender parity in academia by 2020.

"Stony Brook University is committed to be the national leader -- a model in gender equality in the United States for colleges and universities," said Stony Brook University President and IMPACT Champion Samuel L. Stanley Jr. "That is why we are so invested in HeForShe. It provides a visionary and sound foundation from which we can all work together to improve the human condition through the achievement of gender equality."

On September 20th, 2014, UN Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson extended an invitation to men and boys to build on the work of the women's movement as equal partners. Within the first week, more than 100,000 men and boys from around the world committed to gender equality, including one man in at least every country in the world. Today, millions more have signed on and more than 200 HeForShe student clubs have organically emerged in different countries and regions.

"The reason I have shared my personal journey is that though this is a global movement, it is each of our personal stories and what we choose to do that will make a global difference," said UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson at the event. "And at this moment in history, there is a unique opportunity and energy for us to win change all over the world."

Photos from the events will be available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/heforshe/

Join the conversation: Follow @HeForShe on Twitter and share your messages using #HeForShe #TurnsTwo #MoMA

ABOUT UN WOMEN

UN Women is the UN entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide. For more information, visit www.unwomen.org. UN Women, 220 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017, New York. Tel: +1 646 781-4400. Fax: +1 646 781-4496.

ABOUT HeForShe

Created by UN Women, the HeForShe solidarity movement for gender equality provides a systematic approach and targeted platform on which men and boys can engage and become change agents towards the achievement of gender equality. HeForShe invites men and boys to build on the work of the women's movement as equal partners, crafting and implementing a shared vision of gender equality that will benefit all of humanity. For more information, visit http://www.heforshe.org/en

Media contact:

Abigail Somma

Phone and email:

646.781.4588

[email protected]

Photo- http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410284

SOURCE UN Women

Related Links

http://www.unwomen.org


NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- UNICEF and Playing For Change Foundation joined in celebration at the 2nd Annual Youth Summit at the United Nations on Friday, September 16, embracing their partnership within International Day of Peace events and the convening of the General Assembly.

The organizations have signed a three-year regional partnership to build on the comparative advantages of each organization to improve conditions for children, families and communities through music, thus contributing to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Screening the new music video OYE, children from Latin America harmonized and beckoned to the world with lyrics that included the appeal, "Are you listening?" followed by a live performance of the song by youth of the Baja Musical Arts Initiative.

The partnership, signed this summer in Panama City, Panama, by UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and Caribbean Maria Cristina Perceval and Playing For Change Foundation Executive Director John McKenna, marked the first official alliance bridging the world's leading agency on children's rights with the ground-breaking music mission advancing artistic expression as a direct channel for peace building, conflict resolution and positive change.

"This partnership with UNICEF further demonstrates when we help others we also help ourselves to move forward in positive ways as global citizens," Playing For Change Co-Founder Mark Johnson said. "No matter how many things in life divide us, they are never as strong as the power of music and inspiration to bring us back together."

"Participation in cultural, recreational and artistic activities is every child's right," said Maria Cristina Perceval, UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. "We are very proud to partner with an inspiring and creative organization such as Playing For Change Foundation to drive positive change through music for the 200 million children and adolescents in the region, particularly the most vulnerable."

"In Baja Musical Arts Initiative we believe that music has the power to positively impact the living conditions of the communities we benefit in Baja California, Mexico City and New York," said Baja Musical Arts Initiative Executive Director Monica Abrego. "In a joint effort with Playing For Change we will increase the number of beneficiaries and strengthen our community choirs and orchestras program Redes."

Following the Article 31 of the Convention on the Rights of the Children, which recognizes the right of the child to engage in play and recreational activities, and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts, UNICEF in Latin America and the Caribbean region and Playing For Change Foundation are working jointly as strategic partners to create a social movement promoting policies for music to reach every child, in particular the most vulnerable, including in times of emergency.

Together, the partners are reaching out to academic supporters, communities and regional associations for funding while positioning music at a policy level. Additionally, the deal calls for the partners to work jointly in the production of multimedia projects and special events, including World Peace Day, International Day of the Girl Child and the United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants.

Playing For Change Foundation's global network of music schools includes campuses in Brazil and Argentina, with a slate of programs emerging in Mexico. "In a region with such a rich and diverse musical heritage, yet so many social concerns for children and young people especially, this partnership could not be more pertinent," said Playing For Change Foundation Board Member Gabriella Windsor, who will serve in a special capacity as liaison in the mission. "What a great opportunity to make a real difference through music."

The immediate deliverables of the partnership consisted of organizing and staging music instruction with instrument-building exercises for communities in Honduras facing extreme violence, as well as children in areas of Ecuador impacted by the devastating April earthquake. Content from the experiences were incorporated into a series of video productions, including OYE.

www.unicef.org/lac

www.playingforchange.org

Photos:

http://www.prlog.org/12588486

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE Playing For Change Foundation

Related Links

http://www.playingforchange.org


SWANSEA, Wales, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Last month saw a surge in the number of IRS telephone scams being reported. Across every state, criminals claiming to be from the IRS have been threatening to take legal action if outstanding debts are not settled immediately.

Although there has been an increase in IRS telephone scams in recent weeks, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which investigates IRS scams, estimates that since October 2013, Americans have lost more than $44 million to these types of scams.

However, there is a growing trend towards Americans taking back control of their telephones and sending a firm message to scammers. Calling blocking specialists, CPR Call Blocker, have reported an increase in sales of its call blocking products by 150% this year, thanks to consumers facing up to the problem of unwanted calls.

CPR Call Blocker's own research into scam calls echoes what is currently happening across the country. A YouGov study commissioned by the company showed that 11% of Americans have been the victim of a telephone scam, with 20% of those having lost between $500 and $10,000. The most common scam to affect the victims was fraudulent calls from those claiming to be from the IRS.

Kris Hicks of CPR Call Blocker comments: "Scam calls are a major problem but we are encouraged by the fact that so many people are finding a solution to the problem through purchasing call blocking technology.

"Almost nine in ten Americans receive unwanted phone calls each month. While adding your number to the Do Not Call Register and being careful where you share your personal data will eliminate some of these calls, it cannot stop callers from outside of the US contacting you.

"Our research showed that 60% of Americans receive repeated calls from the same organization despite telling them to stop. The great thing about call blockers is that it permanently blocks numbers from getting through to you again so you can't be targeted by the same person twice."

CPR Call Blocker is urging consumers to be aware of the current IRS scam and to follow their guidance to consumers, reassuring them that initial contact regarding tax payments will always be through the mail.

CPR Call Blockers are available from http://www.callblockerusa.com/

SOURCE CPR Call Blocker
CHARLOTTE, N.C., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- UTC Aerospace Systems, a unit of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX), is expanding its presence in Puerto Rico over the next three years with the establishment of an Operations and Supply Chain Business Services Center. The company is working with Accenture, a leading global professional services provider of industry and business process solutions for aerospace and defense organizations, which will bring decades of expertise to the center. As part of the expanded capability, Accenture will hire, train and manage up to 150 new employees over the next three years. The establishment of the center marks Accenture's first service operation in Puerto Rico.

With more than 1,500 employees today, UTC Aerospace Systems' Santa Isabel campus has been in operation since 1992. Over the next three years the site will grow to accommodate the new center and business process service jobs.

Hector Ortiz, director, Puerto Rico Operations for UTC Aerospace Systems, said, "Standing up the Business Services Center will enable us to achieve a seamless support structure for our business units and customers. It will also contribute to the economic growth of our company and Puerto Rico."

The primary mission of the center is to create a best-in-class, global support structure for Operations and Supply Chain management. Accenture's management of the employees and their processes allows UTC Aerospace Systems to focus on lean operations, productivity improvements and on time delivery.

"Accenture and United Technologies Corp. continue to build on their long standing collaboration and we are excited to support UTC Aerospace Systems in their new Operations and Supply Chain Business Services Center," said John Schmidt, Global Lead for Accenture's Aerospace & Defense practice. "Accenture is committed to bring decades of experience to the center, tapping into the wealth of resident talent, and ultimately furthering operational performance for UTC Aerospace Systems. We appreciate the opportunity to establish our first operations footprint in Puerto Rico and contribute to the community and the commonwealth of Puerto Rico."

UTC Aerospace Systems has decades of history in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico, and has made major contributions to the growth of the aerospace market on the island. Puerto Rico has significant capacity and skill in its workforce which is key to the company's local operations.

"Colleges in Puerto Rico award over 30,000 degrees each year," said Tanya Hooper, vice president, Human Resources for UTC Aerospace Systems. "The community of Puerto Rico is booming with talent, and UTC Aerospace Systems is excited to work with Accenture on this promising new endeavor."

The commonwealth's Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO) has assisted UTC Aerospace Systems with the lease of an existing 11,000 square-foot building that sits adjacent to the Santa Isabel manufacturing facility and will serve as the footprint for the center. PRIDCO will also assist both companies in meeting the necessary infrastructure, job creation and training requirements associated with the expansion.

UTC Aerospace Systems designs, manufactures and services integrated systems and components for the aerospace and defense industries. UTC Aerospace Systems supports a global customer base with significant worldwide manufacturing and customer service facilities.

United Technologies Corp., based in Farmington, Connecticut, provides high-technology systems and services to the building and aerospace industries. To learn more about UTC, visit the website at www.utc.com or follow the company on Twitter: @UTC.

Related Links

http://www.utcaerospacesystems.com



SOURCE UTC Aerospace Systems
BROOMFIELD, Colo., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The fall installment of the Webroot Quarterly Threat Trends, which tracked the first six months of 2016, finds users are over 20 percent less likely to encounter malware and other undesirable executable files than in 2015. The data, collected by Webroot, the market leader in next-generation endpoint security and threat intelligence, shows that, although the number of overall malware encounters is decreasing, malware attacks are more sophisticated and short-lived than ever before. Many attacks appear, infect, and disappear within hourseven minuteshaving successfully exfiltrated sensitive data, launched ransomware, or found other means to achieve financial gain.

Other notable findings from the Fall 2016 Webroot Quarterly Threat Update include:

Google and Wells Fargo heavily targeted for phishing attacks  Starting in May, attacks against Google and Wells Fargo rose sharply. By June, they were the most targeted technology and financial companies. The report also reveals "phishers" are increasingly implementing polymorphic URLs, enabling attackers to target numerous users at once while avoiding traditional detection.

 Starting in May, attacks against Google and Wells Fargo rose sharply. By June, they were the most targeted technology and financial companies. The report also reveals "phishers" are increasingly implementing polymorphic URLs, enabling attackers to target numerous users at once while avoiding traditional detection. Geofiltering outwitted  The United States now hosts over 40 percent of malicious URLs, a slight increase from 2015. This increase is likely a means of circumventing geofiltering services, which block network traffic involving certain geographic regions. Given the high percentage of legitimate websites hosted in the U.S., it is counterproductive to block all traffic to and from the United States . This trend underscores the importance of URL reputation filtering for security assessment/risk in addition to content-based filtering.

 now hosts over 40 percent of malicious URLs, a slight increase from 2015. This increase is likely a means of circumventing geofiltering services, which block network traffic involving certain geographic regions. Given the high percentage of legitimate websites hosted in the U.S., it is counterproductive to block all traffic to and from . This trend underscores the importance of URL reputation filtering for security assessment/risk in addition to content-based filtering. Mobile app epidemic  The number of new malicious Android apps is on track to increase by almost 400 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Malicious apps are mainly targeting Asia , due in large part to the prevalence of Android devices in that geography. Additionally, many Android users in Asian countries download their apps from unofficial app stores, which do not have as robust an evaluation process as Google Play.

 The number of new malicious Android apps is on track to increase by almost 400 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Malicious apps are mainly targeting , due in large part to the prevalence of Android devices in that geography. Additionally, many Android users in Asian countries download their apps from unofficial app stores, which do not have as robust an evaluation process as Google Play. Malicious IP address origins  Nearly half of all malicious IP addresses are now associated with China , India , or Vietnam . Additionally, analysis from Webroot data shows that initial attacks from malicious IP addresses stem from spam (email and web) and scanning activities.

"The report data demonstrates that, while malware encounters may be on a downturn, the business of cybercrime is indeed alive and well," said Tyler Moffitt, senior threat research analyst at Webroot. "As attack timelines accelerate and polymorphism continues to grow and spread across attack vectors, it's more important than ever for organizations to adopt next-generation security approaches that can adapt and predict malware behaviors as they evolve."

Webroot collected data for its Quarterly Threat Trends by means of the Webroot Threat Intelligence Platform through the first half of 2016 and compared it to threat data from 2014 and 2015.

For more information, please visit https://www.webroot.com/us/en/business/resources/threat-trends/sept-2016; and register to attend the upcoming webinar, "Operational Threat Intelligence: Keeping up with the Speed of Morphing Threats," co-hosted by Jon Oltsik, ESG senior principal analyst.

About Webroot

Webroot delivers next-generation endpoint security and threat intelligence services to protect businesses and individuals around the globe. Our smarter approach harnesses the power of cloud-based collective threat intelligence derived from millions of operational devices to stop threats in real time and help secure the connected world. Our award-winning SecureAnywhere endpoint solutions and BrightCloud Threat Intelligence Services protect tens of millions of devices across businesses, home users, and the Internet of Things. Trusted and integrated by market-leading companies, including Cisco, F5 Networks, Aruba, Palo Alto Networks, A10 Networks, and more, Webroot is headquartered in Colorado and operates globally across North America, Europe, and Asia. Discover Smarter Cybersecurity solutions at www.webroot.com.

Social Media: Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Facebook

2016 Webroot Inc. All rights reserved. Webroot, SecureAnywhere, Webroot SecureAnywhere, Webroot BrightCloud, BrightCloud, and Smarter Cybersecurity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Webroot Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121016/LA94090LOGO

SOURCE Webroot

Related Links

http://www.webroot.com


TOKYO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- NTT Resonant Inc. announced that starting on September 20, Q&A services for international tourists traveling to Japan will be available on the "Oshiete! goo" website. There is a Chinese (traditional characters) version called "goo Shuo!" and an English version called "Oshiete! goo." We already introduced in March this year our Chinese (simplified characters) version.

Visitors to Japan could post their questions and problems regarding sightseeing in Japan, and foreign residents such as international students and experts traveling in Japan answer submitted questions. With a new connection to the Japanese version of Oshiete! goo, responses will now also be supplied by Japanese users, allowing question askers to get even more detailed information about Japan.

Recently, the number of international travelers to Japan has been continuing to rise, and with the Q&A community Oshiete! goo, we hope to show Japan's hospitality, answering questions and calming the worries of each sightseer asking about things like "How to access sightseeing spots?" and "What is the information?"

1. About the New Service

- With a connection to the Japanese Oshiete! goo site, Japanese users can also answer questions from international travelers coming to Japan:

On the Chinese (simplified and traditional) and English communities of Oshiete! goo, users can post and answer questions in those respective languages. Additionally, with a connection to the largest Japanese-language Q&A community, Oshiete! goo, boasting one million users and 30 million posts, Japanese users will also be able to answer questions asked by international travelers, giving these visitors tourism information directly from Japanese people.

(Photo1: http://prw.kyodonews.jp/prwfile/release/M101547/201609204467/_prw_OI1im_dtf1555G.png)

- Experts knowledgeable about Japanese tourism will participate:

Participating as an expert source will be Selected Onsen Ryokan (http://www.selected-ryokan.com), a web portal for onsen ryokan (hot spring inns) for international travelers to Japan, operated by Maido Nippon Corporation headquartered in Tokyo. Users who are browsing or asking questions can get information not just from other users but also from the reliable source of these experts. We also hope to increase our connections with other groups knowledgeable in Japanese tourism.

- Special articles on the latest Japanese trends and hot spots:

In addition to the Q&A, we will be posting articles on themes users are most interested in as well as things like inside information on different Japanese locales.

Where to Find It

Access each site via the links below.

- Oshiete! goo Q&A Community for International Visitors to Japan

Chinese (simplified characters): goo Shuo! https://cn.oshiete.goo.ne.jp/

Chinese (traditional characters): goo Shuo! https://tw.oshiete.goo.ne.jp/

English: Oshiete! goo https://en.oshiete.goo.ne.jp/

(Photo2 Chinese traditional characters: http://prw.kyodonews.jp/prwfile/release/M101547/201609204467/_prw_OI2im_b2Y97J8y.png)

(Photo3 English: http://prw.kyodonews.jp/prwfile/release/M101547/201609204467/_prw_OI3im_8I727TXO.png)

Oshiete! goo Japanese site

Category for questions on visiting Japan http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/inboundjapan

(Photo4: http://prw.kyodonews.jp/prwfile/release/M101547/201609204467/_prw_OI4im_NDCDx7dk.png)

2What's Next

Down the line we are planning to improve the Q&A process, create an app for the Q&A community for international visitors to Japan, introduce automated translation, and expand to additional languages. Focusing on the Q&A services, we are aiming to create a one-stop web portal for visitors to Japan to get their questions answered.

*The above company, service, and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE NTT Resonant Inc.

Related Links

http://www.selected-ryokan.com


WEST CHESTER, Pa., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Borough of West Chester is officially an age-friendly community.

At a ceremony held at Borough Hall, the Borough of West Chester was inducted into the AARP Network of Age-Friendly Communities which helps participating communities become great places for all ages by adopting such features as safe, walkable streets, better housing and transportation options, access to key services, and opportunities for residents to participate in community activities. As a member, West Chester will be a part of a growing national movement of livable communities striving to meet the needs of their 19,000 residents.

West Chester's age-friendly designation is a result of a partnership between the WCU Department of Psychology as well as faculty, administrators, and students from West Chester University, the office of the Mayor of West Chester, the Borough Council, as well as service providers in the West Chester area such as the Senior Center, the Hickman, and the Area Agency on Aging offices. West Chester University completed a comprehensive action plan that includes conducting assessments of Borough services and programs, and exploring components of the Borough which foster or hinder the health and well-being of its aging population.

"It is crucial for communities to address the needs of a rapidly aging population," stated Bill Johnston-Walsh, AARP PA State President. "Older adults are living longer and not only want to stay in their communities, but want to become more involved in their communities. Livable communities are an investment that will not only improve the lives of their residents today, but prepare us for the growing number of older residents tomorrow."

Between 2015 and 2025, the number of Pennsylvanians age 65+ is expected to increase by 31.5 percent. In 2015, 16 percent of Pennsylvania's population was over the age of 65. Pennsylvania is the fourth oldest state in the country.

"West Chester University is pleased to join the Borough of West Chester in an innovative partnership that addresses the well-being and happiness of elders in our community," stated Christopher Fiorentino, Interim President of West Chester University of Pennsylvania. "As a result of these efforts, the Borough of West Chester has been accepted as a member of the AARP Network of Age-Friendly Communities and the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities.

"West Chester is proud to have earned the WHO designation as an Age-Friendly Community," stated Mayor Carolyn Comitta. "We celebrate our diversity, our walkability, our vibrant downtown and our beautiful neighborhoods. West Chester has been named one of the best places in the country to raise a family, to go to school and to retire."

West Chester will join other US cities in the AARP Network of Age-Friendly Communities which launched in April 2012. The initiative is affiliated with the World Health Organization's (WHO) Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Program, an international effort launched in 2006 to help cities become more livable and prepare for a rapidly aging population. The program currently has over 1,000 participating communities in 20 countries around the world, including Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago.

AARP Livable Communities supports the efforts of neighborhoods, towns and cities to become great places for people of all ages. We believe that communities should provide safe, walkable streets; age-friendly housing and transportation options; access to needed services; and opportunities for residents of all ages to participate in community life.

About AARP

AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, with a membership of nearly 38 million that helps people turn their goals and dreams into 'Real Possibilities' by changing the way America defines aging. With staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, AARP works to strengthen communities and promote the issues that matter most to families such as healthcare security, financial security and personal fulfillment. AARP also advocates for individuals in the marketplace by selecting products and services of high quality and value to carry the AARP name. As a trusted source for news and information, AARP produces the world's largest circulation magazine, AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. AARP does not endorse candidates for public office or make contributions to political campaigns or candidates. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org or follow @aarp and our CEO @JoAnn_Jenkins on Twitter.

CONTACT:

Jacklyn Isasi, 609-902-6242, [email protected], @JacklynIsasi

SOURCE AARP Pennsylvania

Related Links

http://www.aarp.org


KENT, Wash., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As more than 40,000 students  including hundreds living in Washington  consider their educational options following the closure of ITT Tech, WGU Washington has launched the ITT Transfer Scholarship. Qualifying ITT Tech students who transfer to the nonprofit, online university are eligible to apply for this exclusive scholarship.

WGU Washington is the locally-based affiliate of Western Governors University (WGU). With nearly 10,000 students from all over the state currently enrolled, Washington is home to more WGU students than any other state in the country. Students from Washington and across the nation are eligible for this scholarship.

The maximum value of ITT Transfer Scholarship is $2,000 ($500 per six-month term, renewable for up to four terms). Awards will be applied to WGU Washington's already-low tuition of about $6,000 per 12-month year for most programs. Those interested in applying should visit the university's website to ensure WGU Washington is the best option for them.

"While WGU won't be a fit for every ITT student, it may be an alternative that many should consider as they sort out their options," said WGU President Scott Pulsipher. "Our mission is to enable every student to achieve his or her academic goals, no matter the circumstances. No matter how frustrated or lost ITT students may feel at this point, we strongly urge them to thoroughly explore their options before letting their hard work go to waste."

The ITT Transfer Scholarship is available to students interested in any one of WGU Washington's more than 50 bachelor's and master's degree programs in information technology, business, teacher education and healthcare  including bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing. The scholarship program is competitive; awards will be granted based on the student's academic record, previous college experience, readiness for online study, current competency and other considerations.

In addition to the scholarships, WGU Washington will waive the university's $65 application fee as well as the first-term resource fee of $145 for ITT students. WGU Washington has dedicated admissions staff to review ITT students' situations and answer transfer or other questions.

Further information for ITT students may be obtained at washington.wgu.edu/ITT.

About WGU Washington

WGU Washington was established by the State Legislature in 2011 in partnership with nationally recognized and accredited Western Governors University to expand access to higher education for Washington residents.

The state-endorsed, online university offers more than 50 bachelor's and master's degree programs in Business, Information Technology, Teacher Education and Health Professions, including Nursing. WGU Washington's competency-based learning model is designed to meet the needs of working adults by providing an affordable, flexible option for earning an accredited, respected college degree. It's non-profit and receives no money from the state.

Degrees are granted under the accreditation of Western Governors University, which is regionally accredited through the Northwest Commission on Colleges; Universities Teachers College programs are accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education; and nursing programs are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education*.

The university has earned the support of more than 20 leading corporations and foundations including AT&T, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lilly Endowment, HCA, Hewlett-Packard, Lumina Foundation, Microsoft, Oracle, SunGard Higher Education and Zions Bank.

* One Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 5380, Washington DC 20036, 202-877-6791

Follow WGU Washington:

https://www.facebook.com/wguwashington/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/western-governors-university

https://twitter.com/wguwashington

https://www.youtube.com/user/WGUWashington

Contact for media inquiries:

Jake Riddell  Public Relations Manager

(206) 512-0025

Contact for enrollment information:

877.214.7004

washington.wgu.edu

SOURCE WGU Washington
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The nation's largest wireless providers can't escape any part of a lawsuit claiming they overcharged California government customers more than $100 million, a California court ruled on September 13.

The Honorable Judy Holzer Hersher in the Superior Court of California in Sacramento County denied several demurrers, a California procedural hurdle similar to a motion to dismiss, filed by the defendants Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile . The case will now move to the discovery, or evidence-gathering, phase.

The fraud case alleges that the wireless companies overcharged government customers more than $100 million by failing to meet "rate plan optimization" requirements. The case was originally filed under the California False Claims Act in 2012 and unsealed in December 2015. In all, 43 California government entities, including the University of California, the California State University system, and some of the largest counties in the state, have intervened in the qui tam lawsuit.

The Court soundly rejected the defendants' three demurrers. The wireless carriers argued that the government customers failed to state facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action. The defendants also urged that the government customers' allegations were publicly disclosed, and that the contract language precluded the lawsuit. The Court dismissed all three arguments, concluding that the detailed complaint presented sufficient allegations to support the claims that the defendants knowingly defrauded the government customers. The Court also held that no prior public disclosure of the government customers' fraud allegations occurred, and that the government customers reasonably interpreted the contract to require the defendants to provide valuable cost-saving measures.

Constantine Cannon LLP represents the state and local government interveners and the whistleblower, OntheGo Wireless, LLC.

The wireless companies are alleged to have purposefully ignored two cost-saving requirements included in master contracts under which the California state and local government customers bought wireless services. Under the contracts, the carriers were required to determine and report to the government customers which rate-plan selections would result in the lowest cost, referred to as "rate plan optimization," and to provide wireless services at "the lowest available cost." Selecting the rate plan that best matches usage patterns reduces costs by 20-30% over the term of a contract. The carriers' failure to live up to their contractual promises, the lawsuit alleges, resulted in overcharges to the government of more than $100 million.

"We are pleased that the Court rejected the wireless carriers' efforts to escape their obligations to government customers," said Anne Hayes Hartman, a partner at Constantine Cannon who is co-lead counsel on the case. "It is unconscionable that these companies defrauded hundreds of government entities in California."

"The judge was correct in dismissing the wireless carriers' objections," said Wayne T. Lamprey, a partner at Constantine Cannon, who, with Hartman, heads the government customers' legal team. "We look forward to moving on to the next phase of the case and recovering the damages taxpayers were cheated out of."

The suit was brought by OntheGo Wireless, a pioneer in the field of rate-plan optimization. A current list of intervening government entities is below.

The case is State of California et al. ex rel. OntheGo Wireless, LLC v. Cellco Partnership et al., Case No. 34-2012-00127517 (Super. Ct. Cal., Sacramento County).

Updated Intervening Entities

Board of Trustees of the California State University Regents of the University of California Los Angeles County Madera County Marin County Orange County Riverside County Sacramento County San Bernardino County Santa Cruz County Sonoma County Stanislaus County Yuba County City of Capitola City of Chino City of Corona City of Fortuna City of Long Beach City of Oxnard City of Rancho Cucamonga City of Ripon City of Riverside City of Sacramento City of San Bernardino City of San Mateo City of Santa Cruz City of Santa Rosa City of Vernon City of Victorville Grossmont Union High School District Irvine Unified School District Kaweah Delta Health Care District Kings Canyon Unified School District Olivenhain Municipal Water District Sonoma County Water Agency Rosemead School District Saddleback Valley Unified San Diego Unified School District Santa Cruz Public Libraries Torrance Unified School District Victor Valley Transit Authority Whittier Union High School District Woodbridge Fire District

About Constantine Cannon LLP

Constantine Cannon, with offices in New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco and London, has deep expertise in practice areas that include antitrust and complex commercial litigation, whistleblower representation, government relations, securities and e-discovery. The firm's antitrust practice is among the largest and most well recognized in the nation. Constantine Cannon's experience spans across multiple industries including healthcare, banking, electronic payments, insurance, high tech, telecommunications, the Internet and government contracting.

Constantine Cannon's whistleblower lawyer practice represents whistleblowers under the False Claims Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, and the various federal and state laws that encourage industry insiders to report evidence of fraud or misconduct. The firm was one of the first in the country to bring a claim under the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act. To learn more about Constantine Cannon's whistleblower practice, click here. To learn more about the firm generally, click here.

Contact:

Andrea M. Garcia

PRCG | Haggerty LLC

[email protected]

(212) 683-8100

SOURCE Constantine Cannon LLP

Related Links

http://constantinecannon.com


SAGINAW, Mich., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Wineman Technology, Inc., a leading test solutions company, today announced its 25th anniversary. For the last quarter-century, Wineman Technology has brought the best of test systems and test cell applications to applications around the world from Saginaw, Michigan. The company's systems span a breadth of industries, from aerospace and motorized vehicles to medical devices and consumer electronics.

Building on Prior Experience

Jim Wineman, founder of Wineman Technology, took an early retirement from General Motors in 1991 to start the company, which has since tipped the mark of 50 employees and deployed systems internationally  from the US to South America, to east Asia.

"Our collective passion for quality test systems, commitment to clients, belief in open platforms, and sound engineering has helped us develop a thriving business here in Saginaw. Our test solutions include focused efforts on dynamometer and hydraulic test systems, real-time control and data acquisition, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation, and custom test machines," said Jim Wineman, CEO of Wineman Technology. "We're proud to celebrate the accomplishments we've made for customers and employees through the last 25 years, and are excited for the decades to come."

Successful technology and customer engagements led to a booming business with consistent revenue growth around 20% YOY and recognition as one of America's fastest growing companies.

A Proven History of Off-the-Shelf Test Systems

As a leader in the design and development of test equipment, Wineman Technology combines dedicated engineers, the latest technologies, and state-of-the art equipment to solve critical testing challenges across a spectrum of applications. Highlights over the last 25 years include:

Long-Term Partnerships

Wineman Technology believes open, adaptable platforms are critical to the long-term success of clients' test investments. The company's systems are designed by customizing the latest off-the-shelf hardware and non-proprietary architectures, ultimately providing solutions that are cost-effective and more easily maintained.

As part of a commitment to delivering complete test systems with proven, off-the-shelf hardware, Wineman Technology has an established partnership with National Instruments. The NI platform allows engineers to focus on the right technology necessary to deploy the system our customer needs.

Wineman Technology has been an active NI Alliance Partner for more than two decades. The company previously received honors including a LabVIEW Tools Network Product of the Year award for INERTIA; a LabVIEW Achievement Award for Green Engineering Application of the Year; a LabVIEW Achievement Award as a finalist in the Transportation category and finalist in Machine Control & Monitoring; and a Service Achievement Award for outstanding performance as an NI Alliance Partner for over 20 years.

Wineman Technology will celebrate its anniversary with an invitation-only party at its headquarters in Saginaw, Michigan on Sept. 21. To learn more about Wineman Technology, readers can visit winemantech.com.

About Wineman Technology

Established in 1991, Wineman Technology, Inc. specializes in test systems and test cell applications with a focus on dynamometer and hydraulic test systems , real-time control and data acquisition , hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation , and custom test machines. Unlike other companies where test plays a partial role, Wineman Technology's singular focus is the design and development of test equipment for advanced research and development, functional test labs, and manufacturing production across a wide range of industries including aerospace, automotive, medical, and energy. Wineman Technology's engineers meet test challenges with the experience of hundreds of successful deployed test solutions.

Media/Customer Contact: Darryn LaZar , Wineman Technology, [email protected]

SOURCE Wineman Technology, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.winemantech.com


PLANO, Texas, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WorldVentures, a leading direct seller of travel and lifestyle community memberships and a two-time Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private company inductee, announces its partner-membership with Success North Dallas, a prestigious networking group.

Success North Dallas comprises high achievers in business who convene monthly for presentations by world-class speakers on topics in industry, economics and politics.

WorldVentures fosters an environment where independent-minded entrepreneurs can build their own businesses, set their own direction and define their own future. The alliance supports the company's mission to help its Independent Representatives, DreamTrips Members and employees achieve more fun, freedom and fulfillment in their lives.

"We are committed to the personal development of our employees," WorldVentures CEO Dan Stammen said. "And providing them an opportunity to learn from speakers and local business leaders is a great step toward that commitment."

Success North Dallas Founder and Director Bill Wallace introduced WorldVentures at its monthly breakfast meeting on September 21. He said he was "proud to welcome WorldVentures" as a new partner-member, and this alliance directly reflects the overall principles of his organization.

"Success North Dallas was built on the concept of servant leadership, of connecting the right individuals for the right reasons at the right time, and we think our organizational values are closely aligned," said Wallace.

Success North Dallas is committed to providing a thought-provoking, educational, mutually supportive environment for its members and guests. Meetings are held from 7 to 9 a.m. the third Wednesday of every month. Guest speakers include renowned authors, inspirational speakers, and local, national and international business leaders.

About WorldVentures

WorldVentures is a privately held company based in Plano, Texas, that sells travel and lifestyle community memberships providing a diverse set of products and experiences. The company's goal is to help Independent Representatives, DreamTrips Members and employees achieve more fun, freedom and fulfillment in their lives. WorldVentures uses the direct-sales model to go to market with active Representatives and Members in 29 markets. For more information, visit www.worldventures.com.

About Success North Dallas

Success North Dallas originated in 1988 in Dallas, Texas, as a breakfast gathering of 14 select individuals, each of whom embraced Bill Wallace's idea of meeting monthly to serve as an informal Board of Directors and mentor group for each other's respective businesses. Based on the success of this format and the vision of its potential to benefit an expanded audience, the group adopted and signed its bylaws in March 1989. It has grown into a group of more than 3,000 active participants. For more information, to view a list of past speakers, and to learn more about the benefits of membership, visit www.successnorthdallas.com.

Media Contact

Connie Glover

Manager, Public Relations

WorldVentures Holdings, LLC

[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150528/219300LOGO

SOURCE WorldVentures Marketing, LLC

Related Links

http://worldventures.com


Obama UN

Obama gave his final address to the United Nations on Tuesday, where he discussed how investing in new technologies can help combat climate change, among other issues.

He highlighted the need for a "new model" for the global marketplace, one that's both environmentally sustainable and inclusive of rich and poor countries.

The address came just a day before Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum requiring the federal government to consider climate change when setting national security policies.

In the address, Obama said that "investing in research" and providing "market incentives" to develop new technologies is critical to fighting climate change and greenhouse gases.

He also discussed the landmark Paris climate deal, signed in December 2015, giving it another boost in front of world leaders.

Obama said that the agreement  which was ratified by both the US and China when Obama visited Hangzhou for the G20 conference earlier in September  gives the global community a "framework to act," but only if we "scale up our ambition."

On Wednesday, thirty-one more countries officially ratified the Paris climate deal, in New York, including Mexico, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates, reports PBS. Countries who sign the deal must work to keep the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.

climate change global warming

"There must be a sense of urgency about bringing the agreement into force," Obama said, noting that the agreement will help developing countries "leapfrog" to cleaner energy sources.

"And only then can we continue lifting all people up from poverty without condemning our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair," he said.

Story continues

Obama also said that the Green Climate Fund  an international fund that helps poor countries adapt to climate change  is "only the beginning." The US gave $500 million to the fund in March, the first payment out of a promised $3 billion.

In his speech, Obama warned that if the global community doesn't "act boldly," the next climate agreement will be due to "mass migrations, and cities submerged and nations displaced, and food supplies decimated, and conflicts born of despair."

Climate change and national security

Obama's Presidential Memorandum, released on Wednesday, called for the federal government to "fully consider the impacts of climate change in the development and implementation of all national security policies and plans."

The president has said that climate change will be one of his top priorities after leaving the Oval Office.

Louisiana flooding

"Around the world, climate change will only continue to threaten the stability of countries, heighten social and political tensions, increase health risks, jeopardize food security, and negatively impact economic growth," The White House's announcement reads.

The announcement, supported by a National Intelligence Council report released on Wednesday, points out that a "devastating drought" contributed to conflict in Syria. The report concludes that climate change is likely to "pose significant national security challenges for the United States."

"Responsible Scientists"

On the other hand, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has said that he would pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement if he were to be elected president.

Hundreds of climate experts, calling themselves "Responsible Scientists" rebuked the "Republican nominee for president" in an open letter published on Wednesday.

The letter, without naming Trump directly, said that his positions on climate change were "inconsistent with reality."

"Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy," the letter reads. "It is a physical reality."

NOW WATCH: 'PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE': James Carville goes on an impassioned rant in defense of the Clinton Foundation





More From Business Insider


It was a week which saw oil prices settle at its lowest level since Aug 10, while natural gas futures rose to a 2 month high.

On the news front, domestic upstream operator Anadarko Petroleum Corp. APC has agreed to buy deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GoM) properties from Freeport McMoRan Inc. for $2 billion, while Canadas Encana Corp. ECA launched a $1 billion share offering to pay debt and boost drilling.

Overall, it was a mixed week for the sector. While West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures plunged 6.2% to close at $43.03 per barrel, natural gas prices ended up 5.4% to $2.948 per million Btu (MMBtu). (See the last Oil & Gas Stock Roundup here: Spectra Energy & Enbridge to Merge, Apache Scores Big in Texas.)

Oil prices moved south for the third time in 4 weeks after the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) projected a bleak demand outlook for the commodity. In its monthly report, the energy-monitoring body that advises oil-consuming countries, said that global crude demand will rise by 1.3 million barrels a day in 2016  down by about 100,000 barrels a day from its earlier projection.

The IEA also trimmed next years forecast by 200,000 barrels per day to growth of 1.2 million barrels a day. With demand growth slowing amid the specter of record high inventories and rising supply, the agency warned that the worlds oil surplus is set to persist at least until mid-2017.

Before IEAs weak demand predictions, crude was already falling on OPECs worries about the oversupply crisis. On Monday, the international cartel of oil producers said that it expects production from non-member countries  such as Russia  to increase in 2017, reversing prior expectations of a drop.

Finally, expectations regarding the resumption of shipments from Nigeria and Libya proved another headwind for oil prices.

Oils-Energy Sector Price Index

Oils-Energy Sector Price Index

Story continues

Meanwhile, natural gas eked out a handsome gain following an in-line build and predictions of strong gas-powered cooling demand with forecasts of warmer temperature throughout Sep.

Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories

1. Oil and gas finder Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has inked a deal to acquire mining giant Freeport McMoRan Inc.s deepwater Gulf of Mexico assets for a consideration of $2 billion in a bid to expand its operation in the region and gain additional scope for exploration. The transaction is anticipated to close by 2016 end.

The acquisition will double Anadarkos ownership in the Lucius development to 49% from 23.8%, thereby enabling the company to leverage future value addition at Lucius and achieve over 400 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) in estimated recovery from the development.

The to-be-bought assets are expected to generate $3 billion free cash flow over the next five years, while adding nearly 80,000 BOE per day to Anadarkos production volume (80% crude). (Read more: Anadarko Acquires Freeport's Gulf of Mexico Assets.)

2. Canadian energy explorer Encana Corp. announced the pricing of its previously declared public share offering. The company has offered 107 million of its common shares at US$9.35 per share. Encana  which currently carries a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy)  expects to generate gross proceeds of more than US$1 billion from the offering. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Encana is expected to utilize nearly half of the net proceeds to lower its long-term debt and strengthen its balance sheet. The remainder will be utilized by the company to fund a portion of its 2017 capital budget.

The capital budget of 2017 is mainly focused on boosting oil and petroleum liquids production from Encana's Permian Basin  where the company is a top tier operator  by increasing the number of rigs. This, in turn, is expected to double the number of wells on stream in the Permian in 2017 from that in 2016.

3. Leading Houston-based oil and gas finder ConocoPhillips COP is on track to divest its entire 40% stake in an oil and gas production sharing block that it operates on the South Natuna Sea Block B off Indonesia. The assets will be purchased by Indonesias PT Medco Energi Tbk.

ConocoPhillips has been contemplating the sale of its interest in Block B  which produces about 300 million standard cubic feet of gas and 30,000 barrels of oil a day  and related facilities in the Natuna since Aug 2015. Neither of the companies disclosed any details relating to the transaction.

This acquisition is being viewed by many as an attempt by Indonesian officials to strengthen defenses of the nations maritime borders by ramping up of energy projects as well as boosting resource nationalism.

The block is located in an energy-rich chain at the edge of the South China Sea in the Natuna Islands. Notably, Indonesia has faced increasingly aggressive maritime moves by China in this region.

4. Italys Eni SpA E has signed a deal with the government of Montenegro to explore four offshore blocks in the country for a period of 30 years. The blocks cover 1,228 square kilometers and the company received the exploration license following the First International Competitive Bid Round.

Per the concession contract, Eni will be the operator of blocks 4118-4, 4118-5, 4118-9 and 4118-10 with a 50% interest. The remaining stake will be held by OAO NOVATEK  Russias leading gas player.

Eni management added that this contract reflects its aim to significantly strengthen the companys upstream portfolio. Eni has been present in the region as a leading exploration and production player since early '60. (Read more: Eni in 30-Year Exploration Deal with Montenegro Government.)

5. Onshore contract driller Patterson-UTI Energy Inc. PTEN recently declared that it has signed a deal to acquire Calgary, Alberta-based drilling technology company, Warrior Rig Ltd., and certain related entities. The transaction amount has not been disclosed as yet.

Patterson-UTI expects that the deal would improve its competitive position within the high-spec rig market and expand its technology portfolio. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to conclude soon. (Read more: Patterson-UTI Signs Agreement to Acquire Warrior Rig.)

Price Performance

The following table shows the price movement of some the major oil and gas players over the past week and during the last 6 months.

Company Last Week Last 6 Months XOM -2.84% +0.25% CVX -2.26% +1.66% COP -5.69% -7.75% OXY -6.17% +0.21% SLB -1.51% +1.43% RIG -5.46% -14.91% VLO +3.52% -13.23% TSO +4.91% -6.73%

Over the course of last week, The Energy Select Sector SPDR was down 2.47% amid bearish outlook from worlds leading energy bodies. Consequently, investors witnessed selling in most market heavyweights. The worst performer was domestic oil and gas explorer Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY whose stock price fell 6.17%.

But longer-term, over the last 6 months, the sector tracker has gained 6.54%. U.S. energy major Chevron Corp. CVX has been one of the beneficiaries during this period, experiencing a 1.66% price increase.

Whats Next in the Energy World?

As usual, market participants will be closely tracking the regular weekly releases i.e. the U.S. government data on oil and natural gas. Energy traders will also be focusing on the Baker Hughes data on rig count.

Where Do Zacks' Investment Ideas Come From?

You are welcome to download the full, up-to-the-minute list of 220 Zacks Rank #1 "Strong Buy" stocks free of charge. There is no better place to start your own stock search. Plus you can access the full list of must-avoid Zacks Rank #5 "Strong Sells" and other private research. See the stocks free >>



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report



ENCANA CORP (ECA): Free Stock Analysis Report



CHEVRON CORP (CVX): Free Stock Analysis Report



ENI SPA-ADR (E): Free Stock Analysis Report



PATTERSON-UTI (PTEN): Free Stock Analysis Report



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New Delhi, Sep 15 : BRICS High Representatives responsible for national security met here on Thursday and discussed issues of counter-terrorism, cyber security and energy security among others ahead of the BRICS Summit next month in Goa.

It was the sixth such meeting of those in charge of national security in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) and was presided over by India's National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.

India assumed chairmanship of BRICS this year and will host the 8th Summit meeting in Goa on October 15-16.

In Thursday's meeting, the delegation from Brazil was led by Gen. Sergio Westphalen Etchegoyen, Minister of State, and Head of the Cabinet for Institutional Security, that of Russia by Nikolai P. Patrushev, Secretary of the country's Security Council, that of China by Yang Jiechi, State Councillor, and that of South Africa by Mbangiseni David Mahlobo, Minister of State Security.

"Acknowledging the positive contribution of the BRICS grouping on important global issues, they deliberated on security issues such as counter-terrorism, cyber security and energy security," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement following the meeting.

"They also exchanged assessments of recent developments in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region," it stated.

In the area of cyber and information security, the participants agreed to strengthen joint efforts on enhancing cyber security by sharing information and best practices, combating cyber crimes, improving cooperation between technical and law enforcement agencies including joint cyber security research and development capacity building.

"The High Representatives encouraged cooperation and exchanging of best practices, expertise, information and knowledge on counter-terrorism issues," the statement said.

"In this context, they welcomed the first meeting of the BRICS Working Group on Counter-Terrorism that was held a day before," it said.

"They also agreed to expand BRICS counter-terrorism cooperation further to include measures for denying terrorists access to finance and terror-hardware such as equipment, arms and ammunition. They underscored the need for a global legal regime to deal with the global menace of terrorism."

The participants also agreed to explore a regular energy dialogue between BRICS countries in order to discuss long-term and medium-term energy security issues.

"While highlighting the need for resolution of outstanding disputes in the WANA region through dialogue, peaceful means and in accordance with international law and the principles of the UN charter, the BRICS High Representatives also agreed to pool BRICS's efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism emanating from the region," the statement continued.

"The High Representatives concurred on a BRICS Forum to progressively consolidate cooperation and exchanges among respective agencies in security related fields."
Itanagar, Sep 18 : The BJP will support the People's Party of Arunachal (PPA) government in Arunachal Pradesh from outside as of now and the decision on joining the government will be taken in near future, a senior leader said on Sunday.

"As of now, the BJP is going to support Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu-led PPA government from outside. However, the party leadership will take the decision whether the BJP will join the government or not," said Assam Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Sarma, who is the convener of the BJP-led anti-Congress alliance, North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), was addressing a press conference in Itanagar, Arunchal Pradesh capital city.

The BJP has 11 legislators in the 60-member Arunachal Pradesh assembly.

"The PPA is a constituent of NEDA and so, the government in Arunachal Pradesh will be known as NEDA government," Sarma said.

He also hinted that the issue of the BJP joining the government in Arunachal Pradesh may be taken up for discussion at the forthcoming national executive of the party in Kerala later this week.

Sarma reiterated that the BJP has no role in the decision of the Congress legislators to merge with the PPA on Friday.

"The BJP or the NEDA came to know about this only after the merger took place. I got a call from Chief Minister Pema Khandu on Friday evening and informed this to my national (BJP) president Amit Shah," Sarma said.

"PPA is already a member of the NEDA and Chief Minister Khandu also expressed his desire to be a member of the NEDA," he added.

"NEDA was formed in May this year for the sake of development in the northeastern region. Now with a stable government in place in Arunachal Pradesh under the leadership of Chief Minister Pema Khandu, I hope the NEDA government will usher in a new dimension of development in Arunachal Pradesh," he added.

Pema Khandu, who was also present in the press conference, said that the decision of the Congress legislators to merge with the People's Party of Arunachal (PPA) was taken considering the demand of the people for a regional party-led government in the state.

"There has been a demand from the grassroots people for a regional party-led government in Arunachal Pradesh for the sake of development. The people here have seen the development works initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, particularly in the region, and so we unanimously decided to merge with the PPA," Khandu said.
United Nations, Sep 21 : BRICS ministers have condemned recent terrorist attacks against India and other countries, calling for speeding up the international pact against terrorism in order to give legal weight to a concerted global effort to counter the scourge.

The ministers of the five emerging powers -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) -- met here on Tuesday on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly to review their strategic partnership and discuss cooperation.

India, which currently chairs BRICS, was represented by M. J. Akbar, the Minister of State for External Affairs.

A statement issued after the meeting, while strongly condemning the terrorist attacks against some BRICS countries including India, said: "They urged concerted efforts to counter terrorism on a firm international legal basis, under the UN auspices, and expressed their conviction that a comprehensive approach was necessary to ensure effective fight against terrorism."

"They called for an early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against terrorism," the statement said.

India took the lead in proposing the Comprehensive Convention on International Convention 20 years ago. But the convention has faced opposition over who is a terrorist.

Pakistan as well as several other Muslim and Arab countries do not want it to cover organisations that they consider national liberation movements.

While China went along with the sentiments of the other BRICS ministers on countering terrorism, Beijing has been provided cover at the UN to Pakistan and Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar.

According to the statement, the ministers mentioned the convening of the BRICS National Security Advisors meeting as well as the constitution of BRICS Working Group on Counter Terrorism and its first meeting in New Delhi.

The other ministers at the meeting were Sergei Lavrov of Russia, Wang Yi of China, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane of South Africa and Jose Serra of Brazil.

The eighth BRICS Summit is to be held in Goa next month. China is scheduled to take over as the chair of BRICS next year.

Turning to the state of the global economy, their statement noted that the recovery continues to be weak and uneven and reiterated the need to improve economic governance, promote international trade and investment, and address income inequality and achieving sustainable development.

The statement said they appreciated the progress made by the New Development Bank, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and called for the implementation of the strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership.
Agartala, Sep 21 : India is a big player in Bangladesh, having already invested $3 billion in many projects and considering the infusion of another $11 billion, a top diplomat has said.

Equally important, India Inc is investing an estimated $11 billion dollars in various ventures in the country," Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Harsh Vardhan Shringla told IANS.

Prominent among these companies are Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, the Tata Group, Ashok Leyland, Hero MotoCorp, Airtel, Marico, Godrej, VIP Industries, Ceat Tyres, Ambattur Clothing, Sahara, L&T and the Adani Group.

Shringla was in Tripura as a part of his visit to five Indian states that border Bangladesh. He met Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, Chief Secretary Yashpal Singh and various other officials and dignitaries and discussed India-Bangladesh issues.

The High Commissioner said that a large number of important projects are being implemented jointly in Bangladesh or being executed under India's Line of Credit funding.

"With the completion of these ongoing and proposed projects, the current India-Bangladesh annual trade volume of $6.5 billion would increase significantly. To boost trade and economy, India has already built two Integrated Check Posts (ICPs) on the India-Bangladesh borders at Agartala and Petrapole (in West Bengal)."

India's Commerce Ministry constructed the multi-purpose ICPs for Rs 75 crore each to provide better facilities for effective and efficient discharge of functions like security, immigration, customs and quarantine, while also providing support facilities for smooth cross-border movement of people, goods and transport.

"A third ICP would be constructed at Dawki (in Meghalaya) and the official process has begun for this," the envoy said.

In this context, the envoy noted that a pilot cargo truck from Bangladesh recently travelled more than 1,850 km and reached Delhi in three days, successfully demonstrating the benefits of the Motor Vehicle Agreement inked by Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal.

"India-Bangladesh relations have improved extensively in last five years and are much better than in the last 30 years. We are working towards the re-integration of our economies. We have largest length of 4,096-km borders and this can be useful if its potential is realised. Realising this, both countries are developing their border infrastructure."

He said that after increasing bus services between the cities of Bangladesh and India, two new rail links -- Agartala (India)-Akhaura (Bangladesh) and Kolkata (India)-Khulna (Bangladesh) -- are being developed.

"Work for constructing a bridge in southern Tripura over the river Feni to connect the northeastern states with the Chittagong sea port and extension of Bangladeshi highways to link the northeastern states would start early next year."

"Bangladesh has already offered India the use of the Chittagong, Mongla and Ashuganj ports. India is also helping develop the Ashuganj port. All these ports would be greatly beneficial for land-locked northeast India."

The High Commissioner said that India has liberalised its visa procedures to a large extent and the Dhaka mission is issuing, on an average, 3,500 tourist visas per day.

"There are several types of visa being issued and there is no maximum limit on their issuing. This is being done to further reinforce the India-Bangladesh people-to-people contacts," he added.

Five Indian states -- West Bengal (2,216 km), Tripura (856 km), Meghalaya (443 km), Mizoram (318 km) and Assam ( 263 km) -- share their border with Bangladesh.

(Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in)
Kanpur, Sep 21 : Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of poisoning the society.

"Modi poisons the society and makes Indians fight each other," Gandhi told a gathering of farmers at Ghatampur in the course of his Kisan Yatra that began at Deoria and will conclude in New Delhi.

Gandhi also raised issues facing the farmers and said if the Congress party was voted to power in Uttar Pradesh, all the loans of farmers would be waived off.

"It is unfortunate that the pain and problems of the farmers are not reaching the Prime Minister," he said.

Describing Uttar Pradesh as a land of unlimited opportunities, the Congress leader accused the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP of doing nothing for the people.

"Their (SP, BSP and BJP) governments have only looted the people and given nothing to them," he alleged.

The Congress wanted to take the state on the path of prosperity, he said.

Gandhi emphasised that he had undertaken the 2,500-km Kisan Yatra only to highlight the problems of farmers.

He, however, refused to be drawn into the ongoing power struggle in the ruling Samajwadi Party.

Asked on his statement that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was a "good boy", Gandhi said he had cordial relations with politicians in many parties and no negative meaning should be drawn from his comment.

"I also respect Mayawatiji, but somehow I don't gel well with Modiji," he said.

The Congress leader is scheduled to hold a roadshow in Kanpur and spend the night in the city.
Mumbai, Sep 21 : The Indian equity markets on Wednesday closed flat, as the initial gains were pared by a last hour bout of profit booking.

In addition, investors sentiments were dented by caution ahead of the US rate decision, expected later at night. Heavy selling pressure was witnessed in FMCG and banking stocks.

The wider 51-scrip Nifty of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) inched up by 1.25 points or 0.01 per cent, to 8,777.15 points.

In contrast, the barometer 30-scrip sensitive index (Sensex) of the BSE, which opened at 28,554.38 points, closed at 28,507.42 points -- down 15.78 points or 0.06 per cent from the previous close at 28,523.20 points.

The Sensex touched a high of 28,689.36 points and a low of 28,462.33 points during the intra-day trade.

However, the BSE market breadth was marginally tilted in favour of the bulls -- with 1,417 advances and 1,311 declines.

On Tuesday, the benchmark indices ended in the red due to caution ahead of major global financial events and profit-booking.

The barometer index had slipped by 111.30 points or 0.39 per cent, while the NSE Nifty edged down 32.50 points, or 0.37 per cent.

"The equity markets were largely positive during the intra-day trade as hopes of a rate-hike turned down in the US Fed meet. This had enhanced the risk-taking appetite," Anand James, Chief Market Strategist at Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services, told IANS.

"However, investors were not willing to push prices higher as caution still prevailed ahead of the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) final decision. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) decision (to keep its policy balance rates unchanged) did not have much impact on the domestic markets."

Initially on Wednesday, the benchmark indices opened on a flat-to-positive note in sync with their Asian peers.

Besides, sentiments were buoyed after the BoJ announced new monetary policy measures.

Moreover, domestic cues such as the proposal to merge the general and railway budget, along with consultations to advance the budget presentation date, provided some support to the equity markets.

However, the key indices capped gains as caution prevailed ahead of the decision of the US Fed's FOMC meet.

The global and domestic markets are cautious as the decision could provide cues to a possible rate-hike in December.

A rate-hike can potentially lead FPIs (Foreign Portfolio Investors) away from emerging markets such as India, and is also expected to dent business margins as access to capital from the US will become expensive.

According to Dhruv Desai, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Tradebulls, the CNX Nifty traded with volatile sentiments throughout the trading session ahead of US Federal Reserve's rate decision.

"IT and banking stocks faced profit booking at higher levels in the second half of the session and traded with mixed sentiments. Pharma and auto stocks also traded with mixed sentiments," Desai said.

"FMCG and oil and gas stocks traded with mixed sentiments on selling pressure. Sugar stocks failed to sustain at higher levels and traded down due to profit booking."

The rupee weakened by a paise to 67.02 against a US dollar from its previous close of 67.01 on Tuesday.

In terms of investments, provisional data with the exchanges showed that the foreign institutional investors (FIIs) purchased stocks worth Rs 183.85 crore, whereas the domestic institutional investors (DIIs) divested scrip worth Rs 230.59 crore.

Sector-wise, the S&P FMCG index declined by 51.25 points, followed by the banking index, which receded by 42.45 points, and the capital goods index fell by 21.15 points.

On the other hand, the S&P BSE consumer durables index surged by 107.15 points, the automobile index gained 56.24 points, and the metal index rose by 51.34 points.

Major Sensex gainers during Wednesday's trade were: Tata Steel, up 1.05 per cent at Rs 369.30; Hindustan Unilever (HUL), up 1 per cent at Rs 912.20; Axis Bank, up 0.85 per cent at Rs 598; Bharti Airtel, up 0.69 per cent at Rs 322; and Wipro, up 0.64 per cent at Rs 483.25.

Major Sensex losers were: Power Grid, down 1.46 per cent at Rs 175.35; ITC, down 1.26 per cent at Rs 253.80; State Bank of India (SBI), down 1.14 per cent at Rs 251.35; ICICI Bank, down 0.86 per cent at Rs 269.65; and ONGC, down 0.68 per cent at Rs 256.
New Delhi, Sep 21 : The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the proposal to extend subsidy support of Rs 1,250 crore to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).

The amount compensates for the deficit the state-run telecom provider incurred in operating the rural wire-line connections installed prior to April 1, 2002.

The eligible rural wire-line connections installed across India prior to April 1, 2002, are 32.32 lakh.

The Cabinet meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also decided that the subsidy support of Rs 1,250 crore would be the last and final payment and no further request from BSNL for financial or subsidy support from USOF on this count would be considered.

In order to make BSNL eligible for subsidy funding on nomination basis from USOF, an amendment will be required to Rule 526 of the Indian Telegraph Rules (ITRs), 1951.

It stipulates that the criteria for selection of Universal Service Providers would be made through bidding from among eligible entities for implementation of USOF schemes. A corresponding Amendment in Rule 525 will also be required.

USOF since its inception in 2002 has been providing BSNL subsidy for the rural wire-line connections installed prior to April 1, 2002. A total of Rs 8,692 crore has been extended as USOF subsidy support till date, for these rural wire-line connections.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in its report on May 14, 2012, had recommended Rs 15,000 crore as subsidy support for the period July 18, 2011, to July 17, 2012, and Rs. 1,250 crore for the timeframe of July 18, 2012 to July 17, 2013.

The Telecom Commission in 2012 considered the views of TRAI and USOF and directed that an assessment be carried out about the current status of the infrastructure.

In July 2015, the Telecom Commission considered the findings of the evaluation/assessment study conducted by the National Institute of Communication Finance and recommended the subsidy support of Rs 1250 crore to BSNL.
New Delhi, Sep 21 : Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar on Wednesday summoned Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit here following Sunday's cross-border terror attack on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

According to a statement issued by the External Affairs Ministry, Basit was reminded that the Pakistan government "had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India".

"The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," the statement said.

"The latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India."

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist outfit for the early morning attacks.

The statement said that beginning with the cross-border terror attack in January this year, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the Line of Control (LoC) and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

"Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of 31 terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism," it said, adding that Jaishankar also reminded Basit that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing.

The statement also listed the items recovered from the terrorists, including GPS, with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site; grenades with Pakistani markings; communication matrix sheets; communication equipment; and other stores made in Pakistan, including food, medicines and clothes.

"If the government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," it stated.

"We now expect a response from the government of Pakistan," it added.
Tura (Meghalaya), Sep 21 : A Bangladeshi national said to be a close associate of Dristhi Rajkhowa, one of India's most wanted rebel leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), was arrested on Wednesday from western Meghalaya, an official said.

Peramisom Marak was arrested from Kachhuadogri area in Meghalaya's West Garo Hills district bordering Bangladesh, Border Security Force (BSF) spokesman Sushil Kumar Singh told IANS.

The troopers also seized one .9 mm pistol, two .9 mm magazines and eight rounds of ammunition of the same calibre and a mobile phone with a Bangladeshi SIM card from him.

"Marak told interrogators that he has been working with ULFA in Bangladesh for three years and maintains close association with Rajkhowa, the deputy chief of ULFA's military wing and his bodyguards," Singh said.

The BSF official said Marak also confessed to smuggling arms and ammunition from Bangladesh through the Garo Hills, besides assisting ULFA cadres in Bangladesh's Badagazni village to criss-cross the India-Bangladesh border with the help of some Indian accomplices.

Singh said Marak is also wanted by the Bangladesh government for his illegal activities.

Meghalaya shares a 443-km border with Bangladesh, part of which is porous, hilly, unfenced and thus prone to frequent infiltration.

"We are trying to find the Indians providing assistance to the ULFA rebels in bordering areas," Singh said.

The troopers have since handed over Marak to the Meghalaya Police for further action.
New York, Sep 21 : China on Wednesday hoped that there will be a better understanding of Pakistans position on Kashmir by the international community and that Beijing attaches great importance to Islamabad's position on Kashmir.

This was conveyed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during his meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the UNGA meet here on Wednesday, Geo News reported.

Chinese Premier said his country would stand with Pakistan. "We support Pakistan and will speak for Pakistan at every forum."

Stating that Pakistan was a victim of terrorism, the Chinese premier hoped the situation between India and Pakistan would not escalate. "We are ready to play constructive role in improvement of relations between Pakistan and India," the Chinese Premier added.

Li said China will stand with Pakistan; we support Pakistan and we will speak for Pakistan at every forum.

"We are thankful to Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif for investing huge resources for the safety and security of Chinese personnel in Pakistan," Li Keqiang said, according to Geo.

Nawaz said that things are going well in Pakistan-China relations, and that the relationship has entered a different phase.

He thanked China for expressing concern regarding Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir.

He said that Pakistan and China were "iron brothers".

The meeting came ahead of Sharif's address at the UNGA on Wednesday, where he is expected to flag the Kashmir issue.
Kolkata, Sep 21 : The central government will use megastar Amitabh Bachchan-starrer "Pink" to promote the FIR law and Zero FIR system, filmmaker Shoojit Sircar said here on Wednesday, observing a lot of young women are not aware of the legal procedure.

"They (Law Ministry) are still strengthening this (Zero FIR law) and figuring out the basics of how to apply this but they are going to use the film as a platform and promote the Zero FIR, the FIR and the bail process that on a Saturday and Sunday, women and children will be heard at judge's residence," Sircar told the media here.

Directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury and co-produced by Sircar, the film, which released on September 16, also features Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Andrea Tariang, Angad Bedi, Piyush Mishra and Dhritiman Chatterjee in key roles.

"We spoke to the Law Minister. This FIR law is existing but a lot of young women don't know how to use this law. So the rule is that any given time if you go to the police station you will be heard and your FIR will be registered," he said.

"... and if something happens with a girl, say somewhere out in the (Bengal) districts and you are not able to register your FIR there, then there is a system called Zero FIR which a lot of women and men don't know of. You can come into the city and still register the complaint. You can put that Zero FIR wherever you are," he said.
New Delhi, Sep 21 : Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu on Wednesday said that the government will ensure functional autonomy of the Railways and its distinct identity even after the merger of railway and general budgets.

"These decisions (railway and freight fares etc) will continue to be taken by the Railways. But the accounts of Railways will be presented to parliament by the Finance Minister," Jaitley told reporters here.

Asserting that the functional autonomy of Railways will be maintained, Jaitley said: "The government will also ensure a separate discussion on Railways (expenditure) during the budget session every year."

It will ensure "detailed parliamentary scrutiny and accountability" vis-a-vis the expenses made under Railways is continued.

He said the presentation of statement of accounts will be consolidated and efforts will be made to ensure that there is horizontal merger of the two accounts.

Describing the merger move as "historic" and one "matching global benchmark", Prabhu also asserted that his ministry will maintain its distinct entity as a "commercial enterprise" even after the merger of budgets.

"It will help raise capital expenditure in the Railways, which will enhance the rail connectivity in the country. The distinct identity of the Railways will be maintained. Our effort to leverage extra budgetary resources will also continue," Prabhu said.

The financial powers of Divisional Railway Managers will continue, he said, adding in addition the Railways will also not pay dividends to the central exchequer.

Till now, the Railways has been paying about Rs 10,000 crore as dividend annually.

The first Report of the Railway Convention Committee (2014), appointed to review the rate of dividend payable by the Railway Undertaking to the general revenue, had also favoured against payment of dividend, officials said.
Ahmedabad, Sep 21 : The Gujarat High Court on Wednesday issued notice to the state government on an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) petition that Surat police was not granting the party permission to hold a rally of AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

"This will be the first rally by Kejriwal in the state, to be held at Varachha in Surat on October 16. Considering that we have to prepare for the rally well in advance, we applied for police permission on August 19, but have not received any confirmation so far despite reminders," AAP's media convener Harshil Naik said.

The High Court issued notice to the additional secretary (Home), Gujarat, and Surat police commissioner and the district collector and adjourned the hearing to September 27.

"A party delegation even met Governor O.P. Kohli on September 6 and requested him to intervene, but nothing has happened so far," Naik said.

The petition claimed that Surat police had allowed rallies by BJP chief Amit Shah, Union Minister Smriti Irani and senior Congress leader Shankersinh Vaghela recently. "What could possibly be objection with Kejriwal holding a rally?" Naik said.

Earlier in July, the AAP was forced to curtail Kejriwal's two-day maiden visit to Gujarat by half.

Kejriwal, who was to visit the state on July 9 and 10, was forced to cancel his Surat programme, with the AAP claiming that the then Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel's office had pressurised the venue owners to cancel their booking.

Kejriwal was to meet businessmen from Surat, but instead he visited Somanth temple on July 9.

Kejriwal also visited the state again in July second half, when he visited Mota Samadhiyala in Gir-Somnath district and Rajkot to meet the Dalit youths who were flogged by cow vigilantes at Una.
Thiruvananthapuram, September 21 : Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala has devised a novel idea to truly democratise the legislative assembly proceedings by giving the public an opportunity to suggest issues to be raised on the floor of the house ahead of the assembly session starting September 26.

Chennithala put out a post on his official facebook page calling for the public to write in about a burning issue in their locality, or an issue having state-wide relevance.

The public are to send their suggestions to Chennithalas official facebook page.

Chennithala wrote that the opposition legislators would try to raise the issues suggested by the public on the floor of the house.

The reply given by the government to the issues thus raised would also be posted on the facebook page, he wrote.

The senior congress leader also called on the public to give their feedback and opinions on other contemporary issues of import in the state.

He expressed the hope that the public would wholeheartedly support this venture that is aimed at not only democratising the legislative process but also enabling the opposition to join hands with the public to tackle various issues in the state.

Grapevine has it that the move is aimed at connecting with the masses at the grassroots level as well as gauging the public mood at a time when the popular support for the opposition UDF and the congress is at its lowest ebb.
New York, Sep 21 : Bangladesh, which has over 500,000 Muslim Rohingyas residing in its refugee camps, has said it is looking forward to working with Myanmar to find a permanent solution to the issue.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said this in her address at the UN General Assembly 'Leaders' Summit on Refugees'.

In her address at the summit hosted by US President Barack Obama, Hasina said she was 'already in touch' with Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Press Secretary to the PM Ihsanul Karim was quoted as saying by bdnews.24.

The two countries have a dispute over Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

Hasina told the summit that Bangladesh, with its limited resources, has been hosting the 500,000 refugees for nearly three decades, which she said poses many social, economic and political challenges for the country.

She, however, said her government will keep investing in their security, health, education and skills.

Bangladesh plans to provide identity documents for refugees from the neighbouring country, Hasina said, adding it will help them to get services like health and education.

Urging the international community to remain engaged on the issue, Hasina said, "As part of our commitment to leave no one behind, we must promote orderly, safe, regular and responsible mobility of people."
New Delhi, Sep 21 : Given its geography and rich cultural diversity, India has every reason to attract many more tourists than it at present does, but the sector remains largely unexplored, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Wednesday.

"Given India's cultural diversity and its geography, tourism should have come as a natural activity to its people," Jaitley said while inaugurating the 'Incredible India Tourism Investors Summit 2016' here.

The three-day event will see participation from several ministers, senior government officials and investors from across the world.

The participants will deliberate on how to tap the immense potential of the country's tourism sector, including religious, medical, educational and business tourism, as also how to make India a sought-after tourist destination.

Jaitley said till sometime back, connectivity was a major issue, which probably put off many potential tourists, but connectivity has improved substantially now.

"Today, our airports can be compared with the best in the world. We have 70 operating airports in India and plan to start 30-35 more regional airports."

"Besides, there has been an emphasis on improving the quality of railway services. Earlier, the focus was only on expansion," he said.

Jaitley said the national highway network was growing at an unprecedented pace, which will further enhance connectivity.

He also called for restoration and improvement of historical monuments and their marketing as tourist attractions.

Speaking on the occasion, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu asked Jaitley to give more concessions to the tourism industry in the next budget.

Union Tourism Minister Mahesh Sharma said tourism has been identified as a prime focus area by the central government and it plans to extend e-visa facility to nationals of more and more countries.

"This is the time when we (central and state governments) have to join hands with investors to promote tourism in the country," he said Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha said private enterprise should step in to tap the country's tourism potential as the government of India is trying its best to provide conducive environment for business.

Echoing the sentiments, Naushad Forbes, President of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), said: "Tourism is a driver of growth and employment. The sector has huge potential and its up to us to turn the potential into reality."
New Delhi, Sep 22 : The government on Wednesday approved the deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets, sources said.

The deal was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security.

The government, however, chose to stay mum over the issue with no official words coming from the government or defence ministry.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, asked about the deal at the briefing on cabinet decisions, dodged the question and said the matter was not listed in the cabinet.

The sources said the an inter-governmental agreement, which could not be signed during French President Francois Hollande's visit in January, is likely to be signed on Friday by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

According to sources, the deal will cost 7.87 billion euros, after tough negotiation from the Indian side which led to delay in finalisation of the deal, which includes weapons and spares apart from 36 jets in flyaway condition.

This also includes air-to-air Meteor missiles.

The deal also has a 50 per cent offset clause, which will bring investments to India.

A team from France was present in the national capital since last few weeks and hectic negotiations were on for conclusion of the deal.

According to sources, the Prime Minister's Office has pushed for concluding the deal early, after more than year-long negotiations, during which the price was a major sticking point.

In 2012, India decided to ink a deal for 126 Rafale jets.

As the deal could not work out, another deal for purchasing 36 Rafale combat jets in fly-away condition was inked during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to France in April last year.

Both the sides also agreed to conclude an inter-governmental agreement for supply of the aircraft after which a negotiating team was constituted.

Drian arrives on Thursday evening along with CEOs of Dassault Aviation, Thales and MBDA and top government officials.
New Delhi, Sep 21 : The Home Ministry on Wednesday sanctioned 10,000 more Special Police Officers in Jammu and Kashmir Police in view of security-related requirements due to ongoing unrest in the Kashmir Valley.

"The Home Ministry has sanctioned 10,000 additional SPOs for the Jammu and Kashmir Police Department. The orders have been implemented with immediate effect and the additional numbers is over and above the existing strength of the SPOs," a government statement said.

It said the additional police officers will be utilised especially for "security related requirements".

The reimbursement of expenditure to the state government by the Centre in respect of these 10,000 officials will be as per the existing approved security-related expenditure guidelines, it said.

Normal life in the Kashmir Valley remained affected for the 75th day on Wednesday.

As many as 89 people have been killed in the ongoing unrest that broke out a day after the July 8 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani by security forces in south Kashmir.
"Analysis across Districts, not just Cities, brings new perspectives on dynamics and opportunities in China's housing markets" - Robert Ciemniak, Founder-CEO of Real Estate Foresight Ltd

Specialist analytics and financial technology firm Real Estate Foresight today published the annual analysis exploring the performance of the housing markets in China at a district level, covering 220 districts in 23 major cities and focused on January-July 2016 price and volume growth metrics for new home sales markets.

This second annual special report on China Districts presents Districts that stand out on multiple-criteria rankings for performance on growth in average house prices and gross floor area (GFA) volumes, with latest data for July 2016, focused on year-to-date year-on-year changes, and drawing on the underlying data from China Index Academy (SouFun-CREIS).

"Performance within a city can vary widely across different districts, especially that certain types of districts like Economic Development Zones, CBDs or New Districts may carry more similarities to each other across cities than with other districts in their cities", commented Robert Ciemniak, Founder-CEO of Real Estate Foresight.

Sizes of Chinese districts are large, making many look like what elsewhere would be considered a standalone city. The performance of districts with manufacturing plants or high-tech zones may be entirely dependent on the performance and outlook for the industries and supply chains operating there, and driving demand for local housing, added Ciemniak.

Compared to a year ago, price growth rates across 220 districts are now much higher, with the 10th fastest growth rate at +62% compared to +24% a year ago and price growth on average at +16% compared to +2% a year earlier. Volume growth slowed down slightly from +54% to +44%. The range of price and volume changes is greater today than a year ago, though outliers tend to be relatively smaller markets.

There is no district that would be a top performer on both price growth AND volume growth over all other districts, the same case as in the previous report a year ago.

Among districts that stand out on strong performance - Hongkou (Shanghai), Qinhuai (Nanjing) and Xinzhan (Hefei) have enjoyed very strong combined average price (between +17% and +59%) and volume (between +183% and +402%) growth though the first two are relatively smaller markets in absolute size (see chart in the attachment).

ABOUT REAL ESTATE FORESIGHT

Real Estate Foresight is an independent real estate analytics, research and financial technology firm based in Hong Kong and established in 2012. Combining data science with primary research, Real Estate Foresight helps foreign investors and fund managers assess opportunities in real estate markets focusing on China. Services include the flagship China Forecast monthly research program, as well as bespoke market studies for due diligence and operational project decisions. Real Estate Foresight provides independent views as the company is not involved in any brokerage, trading or fund business.

For more information about Real Estate Foresight, visit http://www.realestateforesight.com and Quantiviable press release (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/05/prweb13420983.htm) for more information, stay connected @reforesight on Twitter (https://twitter.com/reforesight).

Contact: research(at)realestateforesight(dot)com
Steak Hotel by Holycow This year, Holycow gave a Royal Enfield GT 500xx motorcycle to one lucky customer.

The Steak Hotel by Holycow opened its doors in Jakarta, Republic of Indonesia, back in 2010. This year, this popular eatery celebrated its sixth anniversary. To honour the occasion, this impressive steak house Jakarta, which is renowned for offering delectable and ultra-tender Wagyu steaks to patrons (for very reasonable rates!) is offering a fun special promotion to customers. These special promotions happen yearly and they are a great way to mark the passage of time, as well as the continued success of the restaurant.

This September, Holycow gave a Royal Enfield GT 500xx motorcycle to one lucky customer, who collected the most Holycow Steak stamps. The winner this year is M. Khairnadif, who earned a whopping 896 stamps! The motorcycle giveaway was promoted online under the hashtag, #HolycowXRoyalEnfield.

The previous year, a customer with 173 stamps received a free vacation to Japan. Each customer gets a stamp whenever he or she buys a steak!

Restaurant History and Information

The Steak Hotel by Holycow evolved from a street food operation. Its founder, @WyndaMardio, isn't classically trained as a chef. However, her natural ability to cook up exceptional cuts of beef brought her acclaim and respect, as well as plenty of hungry customers! The restaurant may be found on Radio Dalam Raya Street in Jakarta. Fourteen other Holycow steak houses are also open all over the Republic of Indonesia.

Discover Another Fun Anniversary Promotion

While the motorcycle has already been awarded, there is another way to celebrate the sixth anniversary of this steak house. The other promotion is a weekly contest which is run via the eatery's official Instagram account. To participate, take a picture of your preferred steak and post it to Instagram. During your post, you must mention @holycow_radal - Whoever posts the best picture will win a free Buddy's Special Steak. While posting a pic of your favourite steak, also insert the hashtag, #weeklycompetition.

If you live in Jakarta or you're planning a visit, be sure to participate in the weekly steak giveaway. It will be such a great way to have fun online and to boost your chances of winning a tender and succulent Buddy's Steak. You'll love the atmosphere and great service that you find at Holycow and you may just become a regular at this popular restaurant, which is definitely one of Jakarta's best! Learn more about Steak Hotel by Holycow by visiting https://holycowsteak.com.
BCI Group was awarded three grants from the state of Oregon to assist individuals in the Columbia Gorge community with enrolling in individual health insurance. The grant funding allows BCI Group to invest in technology and allocate resources specifically to help residents of Hood River, The Dalles and beyond efficiently enroll in Oregons health insurance marketplace.

The individual health insurance market can be a confusing and difficult process, but were here to help, said Karissa Way Hamm, individual and medicare accounts manager at BCI Group. Our agents offer consultations and step-by-step enrollment assistance so that individuals and families can get the coverage they need and our services are always offered at no cost.

BCI Group is one of several agents selected by the state to partner with the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services (DCBS) agent storefront enrollment program. In 2016, the DCBS program helped more than 4,750 residents enroll in Oregons health insurance marketplace.

Way Hamm and the team at BCI Group can help residents choose a health insurance plan, apply for coverage, ensure claims are paid correctly and more. BCI Group also provides year-round assistance with individual insurance needs, including dental, vision, travel and life insurance.

In anticipation of the open enrollment period for 2017  which is Nov. 1, 2016Jan. 31, 2017  BCI Group will host an Individual Insurance Workshop Sept. 29, from 67 p.m., at the Hood River Fire Department, located at 1785 Meyer Pkwy, Hood River, Oregon. This free and open event will review market and plan updates, how to calculate subsidies, legal updates and open enrollment deadlines for 2017.

Its difficult to keep up with all the changes in the health insurance marketplace, especially if youre self-employed, between jobs or doing contract work, Way Hamm said. Life happens, which is why were here to provide the free assistance you need to put your health first.

About BCI Group

BCI Group works with the best employers in the Northwest to provide benefits and retirement planning, employee education, third party administration and business consulting. The company has established strong relationships with investors and insurance product providers to provide companies with access to competitive pricing and astute planning services. With corporate offices in Hood River and Portland, BCI Group helps promote overall employee and financial wellness. Learn more at bcigroup.com.
FUSION STS models can be live linked with chemical assays, production instrumentation, and environmental sensors for real-time toxicity screening.

IOMICS today announced the release of its first vertical product, FUSION STS, a new class of chemical analytics that will allow scientists and chemical engineers to rapidly build and deploy in silico HTS systems that can be used stand-alone or to augment in vitro screening initiatives.

If you want a healthier planet we need to shift our thinking away from only downstream regulatory testing to much earlier and continuous toxicity screening for all product development initiatives, said J. Gormley, CTO and senior software architect at IOMICS. Our expectations for safer products are much higher today than they were just a decade ago. Part of the continuing problem, however, is the product development paradigm itself. Chemists and chemical engineers have unintentionally designed products with inherent safety problems due to the lack of reference data and analytical tools to model and characterize a broad range of chemical hazards within food, packaging materials, cosmetics, pesticides, and more recently, nanomaterials. Consumers have expected downstream regulatory testing, with all of its inadequacies, to keep us safe for a given level of exposure. That approach to chemical testing will continue to allow potentially dangerous products into the marketplace. We believe the solution is to apply safe-design practices continuously and much earlier in the product development cycle.

FUSION STS promotes safer consumer product design through early and continuous in silico toxicity screening and rational chemical design. FUSION STS utilizes multiple cheminformatics techniques and advanced machine learning to characterize biochemical activity and structural patterns that are inherently toxic or may later permit hazards to form from heat, chemical exposure, or other stressors. FUSION STS provides multiple chemical, omic, and assay data sets along with automated model building to predict reduced toxicity potential, provide evidence reporting, and even recommend alternative structures for consideration. All of these features are seamlessly integrated in IOMICSs high-performance cloud servers and accessed directly from your browser with minimal learning time and no coding. Once a custom screening model is developed, chemicals can be assessed in real time directly from FUSION STSs chemical editor or easily integrated into established HTS initiatives.

We are excited by the initial reviews coming from early adopters. We believe FUSION STS will reshape the future of green chemical design, accelerated drug development, and safer food production, said Dan Corkill, Ph.D., computer scientist and senior adviser at IOMICS. To be clear, FUSION STS goes beyond read-across methods, application-specific QSAR models, and open source analytics tools with respect to data staging, model development, evidence generation, and mechanistic interpretation. FUSION STS is the first QSTR system to allow the chemist or chemical engineer to automate safety monitoring and do it from the earliest stages of a project.

Tom Zisk, Technical Lead on the software product, notes: Ive been asked what is FUSION STS's most significant contribution to the emerging field of systems toxicology, and more specifically in silico screening. It is FUSION's ability to simultaneously explore chemical space and develop a series of matching toxicity models in real time across a range of species, targets, and endpoints. No other analytical tool today has this capability.

"We are enthusiastic about the potential of FUSION STS to rapidly screen for bioactivity in plant natural products," said Professors Jennifer Normanly and Sergey Savinov of the University of Massachusetts Amherst BioFoundry Consortium for the Discovery and Synthesis of Bioactive Natural Products. "We are initiating an HTS pilot with IOMICS this fall to model the behavior of extracts from one of the largest known collections of plant cell cultures. Our aim is to identify new antimicrobial compounds relevant to human health and U.S. Agriculture."

"We believe continuous in silico based safety screening should be the foundation of every researcher's strategy, and when used in concert with in vitro testing, will increase information yield while reducing R&D costs," said Gormley. "In addition, in silico screening technologies may soon challenge and improve upon many animal-based testing procedures. Reducing animal use is consistent with the evolving recommendations from REACH and more recently the EPA and the FDA regarding alternative testing approaches. In collaboration with our corporate partners we are accelerating toward an era of low-cost continuous toxicity screening for a broad range of products and endpoints without the need for animal models."

"ChemAxon has been pleased to provide supporting tools for the FUSION Analytics Platform," said Eufrozina Hoffmann, Product Owner of Marvin, ChemAxon's chemical drawing suite. "We believe that software products like FUSION STS are the future of life science informatics.

ABOUT IOMICS:

The IOMICS Corporation is an innovative analytics company based in Cambridge Massachusetts. IOMICS believes the freedom to explore new ideas and rapidly deploy advanced analytics is essential to accelerating science, designing safer consumer products, and improving healthcare. Its mission is to put advanced decision models to work everywhere  in the lab, in the clinic, and in the environment. IOMICS encourages collaborations to create new products and services for chemical engineering, medical research, and clinical care.

To learn more about the FUSION Analytics Platform, or to become an application development partner, visit us at http://www.iomics.us
Lamps.com CEO Anthony Balsamo says, Its an exciting time at Lamps.com, and Im proud to lead a team that has achieved such an honorable recognition on a national level.

Shining light on the growth and revitalization of downtown Philadelphia, Lamps.com is proud to be named number two on Fortune Magazines Inner City 100 list.

The list, revealed in mid-September, was presented in cooperation between Fortune Magazine and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) and serves to highlight companies exhibiting great growth and success within Americas larger inner city business environments. The full list can be viewed on the Fortune website here.

The recognition is something the Lamps.com executive team has strived for over the past several years.

Lamps.com CEO Anthony Balsamo says, Its an exciting time at Lamps.com, and Im proud to lead a team that has achieved such an honorable recognition on a national level.

Offering a wide variety of ceiling, wall, table, and floor lighting options, Lamps.com prides themselves on offering to their customers a stylish selection of light fixtures through personalized service. Lamps.com recognizes that finding the perfect light can be a challenge; and they offer free, one-on-one design consults which take the challenge out of searching. Driven by a set of core standards including the need to display humility and to constantly evolve, Lamps.com is proud of the workplace environment it has created over the past several years.

In addition to being named number two on the Inner City 100 list, Lamps.com was highlighted on the Inc. 5,000 list and has been named one of the fastest growing companies in America by Inc. Magazine.

About Lamps.com

A Philadelphia-based company, Lamps.com was founded in 2010 by native entrepreneur Chris DiMarco. Based in the Midtown Village neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lamps.com prides itself on providing not only high-quality lighting, furniture, and home decor, but also core values that center around community and culture. The company is also committed to giving thanks, not only to national charities like Habitat for Humanity and charity:water, but also focusing on those locally including the Vetri Foundation for Children and Alexs Lemonade Stand. To learn more, please visit http://www.lamps.com.

About the ICSI & Fortune Top 100 List

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) s Inner City 100 list is an annually compiled and released list featuring high-power, high-potential businesses from around the country with headquarters in inner cities. Each company is selected by ICIC with help from a national network of nominating partners who seek to identify, spotlight, and further enable the named companies innovative urban entrepreneurship. Ranked by revenue growth, the esteemed recipients go on to have their names published in Fortune Magazine.

The Inner City 100 program recognizes and supports successful inner city business leaders and celebrates their role in providing innovation and job creation in Americas cities. These companies strengthen local American economies, provide job opportunities for underrepresented communities, and drive forward economic and social development.
Contravisory, an SEC registered Investment Advisory firm located in Norwell MA, announced it has added Tripp Neville to the firm as Director of Business Development and Jared Sweeney as Vice President of Sales.

Tripp, an 11 year industry veteran will be responsible for growing Contravisorys investor relationships and partnerships. Tripp joined Contravisory from Bank of New York Mellon where he served in a senior-level business development role. He received his M.B.A. from Bentley University and an undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College and currently resides in Duxbury, MA with his wife and three children.

Jared, a Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan veteran has joined as a Private Client Advisor responsible for expanding Contravisorys services into the financial planning space. Jared is native to the Boston area and currently resides in Walpole with his wife and son and has a BS in Economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Bill Noonan, CEO of Contravisory, explains these additions to the team are a function of our growth and commitment to our clients. As we look to expand our offering and client base, we are excited to have both Tripp and Jared join the team and help us continue to grow and serve our clients.

Founded in 1972 by G. Edward Noonan, Contravisory is a SEC registered investment advisory firm and serves clients of all types, from high-net worth individuals and families, to large corporations and institutions. To learn more about Contravisory please go to http://www.contravisory.com.
Sedona East unites relaxed, West Coast bohemian styles with chic East Coast sensibilities, carrying a unique assortment of well-made yet affordable items from labels including Raga, Chaser Brand, Cotton Candy LA, Baggu, Lovestitch, Nectar Sunglasses and more. New online womens boutique, http://www.sedonaeast.com, launches with a curated collection of fashions, gifts and accessories aimed at inspiring the wanderlust in every woman.



Founder Gillian Deck conceptualized Sedona East while pursuing a graduate degree in business at Fordham in NYC. Hailing from Colorado, living in laid-back Los Angeles for college and her early 20s and subsequently moving to savvy New York City, she craved an online retail site that united both West and East coast styles. Gillian also knew that she needed to create an e-commerce site that appealed to a womans fun, free-spirited and adventurous side as well as appealing to her practicality (based on reasonable price points - affordable for the working professional, mothers and students).



Fashion is supposed to be FUN. It should be a creative outlet that as women we can enjoy everyday! Fashion is a way to express a womans inner beauty and personal story in whatever way she chooses, on any given day, for any given occasion says Gillian.



Sedona East values aesthetic beauty as a reflection of the inner light that is in every woman. The online boutique inspires women to embrace and express their individuality and creativity through adorning themselves in decorative style each and every morning.



When a woman feels she can express her inner beauty to the world, she can go out and conquer it, says Gillian.



The Sedona East woman has a Western spirit in the pioneer sense; she knows theres gold (aka amazing experiences) out there and shes going to find it. Less is more and natural is beautiful for Sedona East customers. A bit boho, feminine but not girly, effortless, financially practical and fun in fashion, Sedona East customers relish in the streamlined website that offers endless combinations to express their individuality.



Sedona East brings the basic human need for beauty, identity, individuality, personal creativity and inspiration to the female masses in an effort to enhance their daily lives. With a curated selection of well priced clothing, accessories and gifts under $250, an easy to navigate website and a modern mix of boho and classic styles, http://www.sedonaeast.com is the new must-shop online womens boutique.



####

About Sedona East

Online womens boutique, Sedona East, offers a curated selection of free-spirited fashions and accessories for women looking for on-trend, quality items at affordable prices (under $250). Combining laid-back West Coast style with chic East Coast sensibilities, Sedona East is a one-stop shop for women 20-45 looking for fun, laid-back style with a sophisticated edge.

Sedona East carries clothing, accessories, jewelry, handbags, home goods and gifts from brands including Raga, Chaser, Cotton Candy LA, Baggu, Lovestitch, Bohemia Wholesale and more and has been featured in publications including People StyleWatch, Self, Redbook and Teen Vogue. For additional information on Sedona East please visit http://www.sedonaeast.com.
Netra Today's consumers are organically sharing their favorite brands & products through social channels.

Netra, a leader in Visual Intelligence and Search, has been named a finalist in the competition for Shop.orgs Digital Commerce Startup of the Year. The finalists were selected by a panel of investors and industry experts based on their potential to transform retail and ecommerce in the next five years. The winner will be announced at Shop.orgs 2016 Digital Summit which takes place September 26-28 in Dallas.

Executives from three selected companies will present their solutions to a live audience and panel of judges, with a focus on why their company is the most likely to transform and empower the retail and digital commerce industry in the coming years. Only one innovative company will take home the prestigious title of Start Up of the Year.

Each year, this program aims to find promising rising stars who have what it takes to make a significant impact on the digital retail industry, said Artemis Berry, Vice President, Digital Retail for Shop.org and NRF. We are incredibly excited to have Netra in the competition this year, and believe that each of our finalists has the potential to bring retailing to the next level.

Its a huge honor for Netra to be considered for this award and a strong validation for what were building, said Richard Lee, CEO of Netra. Todays consumers are organically sharing their favorite brands & products through social channels. We believe these same consumers want to be able to shop their friends photos & videos, or take a picture of a product to search for visually similar products  something Netras solution can deliver today. With VR / AR replacing computers and mobile phones in the near future, Netras technology will have an even more profound impact on how we search and shop.

About Netra

Netras mission is to organize the deluge of photos and videos online, extracting data and insights to understand consumer intent and preferences, and helping drive visual discovery. Netra has four patents pending on its technology, which was borne out of research from MIT CSAIL. Netra offers Visual Intelligence & Search services to brands, agencies, social listening platforms and omni channel retailers. To learn more, visit http://www.netra.io.
Director of the Lau China Institute Kerry Brown meets previous State Council Premier Wen Jiabao Lau China Institute weekly events and publications bring to the public the latest expert thinking on Greater China in the heart of London Past News Releases RSS

The Lau China Institute of King's College London is a unique centre for research and teaching on Greater China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong in addition to the world's second largest economy. A genuinely multi-disciplinary centre, one where environment, healthcare and finance sit alongside social and political science, culture and history, the Lau China Institute also engages the public in weekly research seminars, book launches, a policy paper series and working paper series.

Director of the Lau China Institute, and previously the Head of the East Timor, Indonesia and Philippines section of the British Foreign Office, the prolific writer and public commentator Professor Kerry Brown has recently signed a memorandum of understanding between the Lau China Institute and the Director of Security & Crisis Management at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), China's oldest think tank and policy advisory unit set in the heart of the megacity municapality. This will facilitate joint research, policy influence and the already flourishing educational and research exchange partnerships between King's College London and universities in China.

Given the recent interest in China and particularly a resurgence of security concerns (for example, Australia recently refused an acquisition of Ausgrid by Chinese investors, the US has warned against doing business with China in strategic industries, and the UK recently approved after a special investigaton the Chinese involvement in the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant deal), the Lau China Institute has invited world-leading security expert and security consultant to the UK and Australian governments, Professor Greg Austin, to deliver an exclusive paper on China's cyber power and security as the inaugural Lau China Institute Research Seminar for the coming academic year 2016/17.

This public launch event, involving a China security and cyber power talk and live Q&A with Professor Austin, will take place in the prestigious Nash Lecture theatre at the Strand Campus of King's College London at 5.00pm (for 5.30pm start) on Wednesday, 28 September 2016, as part of a series of weekly events hosted by the Lau China Institute with guest speakers from around the world. As a public event, there is generally no need to book or register, guests are welcome into the College at these times.

Other upcoming events at the Lau China Institute include Stein Ringen on The Perfect Dictatorship - China in the 21st Century, a film screening of Nick Torrens China 3Dreams in collaboration with the China Visual Festival, highly regarded China civil society researcher Dr Andreas Fulda, and Professor Andrew Tylecote on China's high technology challenge. Several researchers from the University of Oxford will be presenting guest seminars during the 2016/17 calendar including popular China author, column-writer and political economist, Will Hutton.

If you or anyone you know are interested in the latest research and policy thinking on China, then the Lau China Institute welcomes you and/or your guest(s) to this Research seminar, Policy Paper launch and Book Launch series that will take place on Wednesdays at 5.30pm throughout the Autumn and Spring semesters.

For more details:

Lau China Institute Events Webpage

Complimentary downloads of accompanying papers for the talks where applicable are available at the Lau China Institute website. It is not necessary to book for these events, although you are welcome to register your interest.

You can follow the Lau China Institute on facebook and twitter.

Lau China Institute Facebook page

Twitter handle: @lauchinainst

Press Email: china-institute(at)kcl.ac(dot)uk
A simple, easy to use and cost effective security solution to a seemingly complicated protocol issue

We are living in an era of pull through drug marketing for both over-the-counter supplements and prescription drugs. As a result, an increasing number of patients are arriving at hospitals and other medical facilities for treatment with personal medications  many self-prescribed and purchased over the counter. Patients medicating with their own drugs in combination with a new medication protocol puts both the patient and medical staff at risk. Cross drug interactions can have some very serious consequences  sometimes even fatal. The simple solution  The Alert Patients Medication single use security bag.

Alert Security Bags have been adopted in hospitals and medical facilities as an integral component of a patients medication control protocol. Introducing unknown drugs into a medication treatment plan is very problematic. The types and severity of possible adverse patient reactions is literally unknown and unpredictable. When patients surrender their medications as part of the check in procedure, the medications are sealed in the Alert Patients Medication Security Bag. This bag can then be transferred to the hospital pharmacy for storage until patients retrieve their personal medications at check out.

Security features including serial numbers with corresponding bar codes on the body of the bag and a tear off receipt for the patient with the same serial number / bar code. The Alert tamper evident security tape closure shows a visual Alert Void message if tampering occurs with the security seal. Patients can be assured that all of their personal medications will be returned and the medical staff can be confident that personal medications will not interfere with their prescribed treatment.

Accountability is a key element of every security system. The Alert Patient's Medicine Security Bag is designed specifically to provide a high level of security and accountability. The unique serial numbered bag can be logged by each department or person transporting the bag so that a Chain of Custody is created. Each person taking procession of the Security Bag is assigned personal responsibility for its contents while in their procession. At the time of transfer the seal is examined for signs of tampering and if intact, responsibility is moved to the next person accepting the Security bag.

John Gregor, Vice President and General Manager of Packaging Horizons characterizes the importance of the Alert Patients Medication security bag as a simple, easy to use and cost effective security solution to a seemingly complicated protocol issue. Free samples are available by visiting the website. Trying a few samples will show you just how easy and practical it is to use the Alert Patients Medication Security Bag  a very simple security solution to what seems to be a daunting problem.

Packaging Horizons was founded in 1974 as a manufacturer of flexible plastic packaging. polyethylene bags. With a focus on specialized tamper evident security packaging, Packaging Horizons has been an innovator and leader in the field for more than 20 years. Their products are manufactured in the USA and sold worldwide. The Alert brand is used in many commercial and government / military applications including forensic evidence protection, police evidence, confiscated or checked personal property, chain of custody for sample collection, currency transfer and secure document protection. For additional information on the uses and security features of the Alert Security Bag please visit http://www.SecurityBag.com. The Company is headquartered in Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. For information on developing a patient's medication security policy you may find it helpful to refer to a document published by Tenet Healthcare. Tenet Healthcare  Patient's Medication Policy
Brians ingenuity and high-level expertise will help leverage Ascend, and thus Paradigm, to become the technology leader in our industry.

Paradigm Tax Group (Paradigm) continues to make strategic organizational hires, most recently adding Brian Elkins as the Companys Chief Technology Officer. Elkins is an entrepreneurial, hands-on technology executive with over 20 years of engineering and business management experience. His expertise encompasses Agile software development, engineering, product management, partner management and cloud architecture in startup and large companies. He has built, grown and led global cross-functional teams that have delivered over $400MM in new products and services to market.

Elkins will lead the Companys engineering team in the continual development of Ascend, Paradigms proprietary portfolio management database system.

Developing start-of-the-art technology is a top priority as we continue to transform our business model and strategy to support the growth of large portfolio clients nationally, said Paradigm Chief Executive Officer, Mark Wanic. Brians ingenuity and high-level expertise will help leverage Ascend, and thus Paradigm, to become the technology leader in our industry.

Prior to joining Paradigm, Brian held senior technical management roles at Examsoft Worldwide, Inc.; Beyond Office, LLC; Google, Inc.; QuickOffice, Inc.; Phonefactor, Inc.; Wayport, Inc.; and Macromedia, Inc.

About Paradigm

Paradigm Tax Group is a national property tax consulting firm with more than 30 offices. The firm provides a full range of property tax assessment and tax management services to commercial, industrial, multi-residential and special purpose property owners and taxpayers.
Cornea and External Eye Disease Specialist, Nina Ni, MD Dr. Ni's professional focus includes procedures such as corneal transplants, complex cataract surgery using the latest technologies, and anterior segment reconstruction.

Dr. Ni graduated from Yale School of Medicine in 2011, and completed an Internal Medicine internship at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. She completed her ophthalmology residency at the world-renowned Wills Eye Hospital at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Dr. Ni accomplished an advanced fellowship in cornea, external disease and uveitis at the University of California, San Franciscos Proctor Foundation.

Dr. Ni was awarded the Claes Dohlman Fellowship Award, a prestigious award granted to only one outstanding cornea fellow in the nation annually. During her training, Dr. Ni was privileged to provide refractive surgery for the armed forces in Texas, as well as ophthalmic care overseas for the local population in Tenwek, Kenya. Her professional focus includes procedures such as corneal transplants, complex cataract surgery using the latest technologies, and anterior segment reconstruction.

About ECI

The Eye Care Institute was founded in 1952 and has since aimed to provide excellent patient care to the community. ECI offers a broad range of services to help patients with their eye health and to achieve their visual goals. With offices in Santa Rosa and Petaluma, the team of ophthalmologists and optometrists work together to help treat a comprehensive range of ocular diseases including but not limited to cataracts (changes in the lens), glaucoma (a disease of the optic nerve), corneal disorders (including dry eye, corneal dystrophies or ocular surface disease), and to evaluate for ocular disease related to diabetes and hypertension. ECI performs eye surgery with advanced technologies such as laser vision correction and femtosecond guided cataract surgery to help patients improve their vision and decrease dependence on glasses. The Santa Rosa and Petaluma Optical Shops have a great range of frames and offer experienced opticians along with on-site computerized manufacturing for the highest quality optics including progressive, transitional and prism lenses.

For more information about the full range of services offered by The Eye Care Institute, visit http://www.see-eci.com. To make an appointment with Dr. Ni call: (707) 546-9800.
This winter, the world's largest and most well respected Petrochemical Supply Chain & Export Logistics event will take place in Houston, Texas. More than 500 senior level executives representing North Americas multi-billion-dollar petrochemical export market, will come together to network and share strategies on streamlining the supply chain, to drive efficiency and reliability for the North American Petrochemical Supply Chain Industry. Visit the conference website here: http://www.petchem-update.com/petrochemical-supplychain/

The conference will feature world class speakers from highly respected companies including BASF, The Dow Chemical Company, COSCO, Maersk Line, and LyondellBasell, and will cover topics such as port congestion and increasing capacity across transportation modes (rail, trucking, marine),across both Plastic Resin and Bulk Liquid Petrochemical sectors.

Organisers promise this year's conference will be bigger and better than any before, featuring a brand new multi-track agenda which allows delegates to join focused sessions based on their focus in either Plastic Resins or Bulk Liquid. Additionally, on opening night, delegates will be treated to a networking drinks reception at the Omni Galleria, which will gather the movers and shakers of North Americas petrochemical supply chain market for a party to remember.

Although in its early years, this firmly established conference is well attended by Producers, Transportation Companies (rail, 3PLs, shipping, trucking), Ports and vendors alike, and organisations who attended in previous years have spoken very highly of the format, speakers and topics covered, with Brent Railey, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company saying, The conference is a great opportunity to hear from and meet the key players in the resin export sector: Producers, Warehousing, Packagers, and Trucking companies.

Building on the success of previous years, the event's organisers aim to focus on topics and issues that are critical to this constantly-changing industry, and to bring together the most innovative and forward thinking petrochemical producers & transportation companies who can contribute to new thinking on driving efficiency, reliability and transparency across the petrochemical supply chain.

Mel Pinks, Commercial Director at Odfjell promises the conference will be a A valuable conference for all functions of the US Gulf reliant petrochemical industry, detailing forward capacity projections and the associated constraints.

Make sure you download the conference brochure here for a full speaker line-up; attendee list & important registration deadlines: http://1.petchem-update.com/LP=13876

Petrochemical Supply Chain & Export Logistics 2016 is where the North American petrochemical construction industry comes to do business. For more information, please contact: Emily McMahon at emily(at)petchem-update(dot)com
Hanley Wood, the premier information, media, event, and strategic marketing services company serving the residential, commercial design, and construction industries, is pleased to announce the winners of its 2016 Multifamily Executive Awards. Two executives and 29 project winners were honored at a special event held during the 2016 Multifamily Executive Conference, which took place September 19-21 in Las Vegas.

Each year, Multifamily Executive honors the industrys best and brightest with its prestigious MFE Awards competition. Winning projects, leaders, and initiatives are featured in the September and October issues of MFE and at http://www.multifamilyexecutive.com.

Bob Faith, CEO of Greystar in Charleston, S.C., was honored as the 2016 MFE Executive of the Year. Faith has piloted Greystar to the No. 1 spot on the NMHCs Top 50 Managers list for the past five years, with a current management portfolio of 413,000 units. His attention to the granular details of the business has made Greystar a top owner and developer, as well.

Bob Faiths visionary leadership has made Greystar a dominant force in the apartment market and an obvious choice as Executive of the Year, said Les Shaver, editor of Multifamily Executive. Faith led the company through the integration of its largest competitor and an expansion into Europe and Latin America and has been at the forefront of the data revolution in the industry.

Khushbu Sikaria, vice president of advisory services for Greenbelt, Md.based Bozzuto, was honored as the 2016 MFE Rising Star. In her five years in the multifamily industry, she has worked her way up from social media coordinator. That fast rise can be attributed to Sikarias interest in all facets of the industry. Her ability to identify trends in other industries and seamlessly apply them to Bozzutos strategy has caught the attention of the companys upper management, which earned her an expanded role and added responsibility. Sikarias vast background in law, business, and creative digital marketing has prepared her to take on any challenges she faces in the future.

The 2016 MFE Editors Choice Award was presented to Wood Partners for its Block 17 development in Portland, Ore. Wood Partners and Bora Architects created a full city-block development that blended a quintessential Portland design with a modern luxury essence. The project features sustainable building assets where possible and materials that were made with recyclable items and sourced locally. The overall design creates a smooth transition between indoor and outdoor areas and makes Block 17 a part of the natural habitat surrounding it.

The rest of the 2016 Multifamily Executive Award winners:

Adaptive Reuse

GRAND AWARD



Loft Five50, Lawrence, Mass. (EDI International)

MERIT AWARD



Beacon Criterion, Jersey City, N.J. (The Architectural Team, Inc.)

Affordable (100% affordable)

GRAND AWARD



Celadon at 9th & Broadway, San Diego (BRIDGE Housing Corp.)

MERIT AWARD



East Harlem Center for Living and Learning, New York City (Perkins Eastman Architects)

Apartment Renovation

GRAND AWARD



Broadstone Coronado on the Bay, Coronado, Calif. (Alliance Residential)

Best Amenity

GRAND AWARD



AMLI South Lake Union Phase II Workshop, Seattle (GGLO)

MERIT AWARD



AVA Brew, New York City (AvalonBay Communities)

Best Use of Technology

GRAND AWARD



Alliance Insights (Alliance Residential)

Community Service

GRAND AWARD



Shelters to Shutters and Corporate Citizenship Program (Middleburg Real Estate Partners)

MERIT AWARD



Greystar Giving - Camp Hope (Greystar Real Estate Partners)

MERIT AWARD



Pillar Passions (Pillar Properties)

Green

GRAND AWARD



A-Mill Artist Lofts, Minneapolis (Dominium)

MERIT AWARD



The Woodlawn, Portland, Ore. (SolTerra)

High-Rise

GRAND AWARD



Block 17, Portland, Ore. (Wood Partners)

MERIT AWARD



AVA Theater District, Boston (AvalonBay Communities)

MERIT AWARD



The Bowie, Austin, Texas (Lynd Development Partners and Endeavor Real Estate Group)

Low-Rise Walk-Up

GRAND AWARD



Brookside Square Apartments, West Concord, Mass. (Tocci Building Companies)

Mid-Rise (7 to 11 stories)

GRAND AWARD



AVA Capitol Hill, Seattle (AvalonBay Communities)

MERIT AWARD



Atlantic Plumbing, Washington, D.C. (JBG Companies)

Mid-Rise Podium or Wrap (4 to 6 stories)

GRAND AWARD



The Maxwell, Arlington, Va. (KTGY Architecture + Planning)

MERIT AWARD



Milehouse, Redmond, Wash. (Tiscareno Associates)

Mixed-Income

GRAND AWARD



Sheridan Station, Washington, D.C. (SK+I Architecture)

MERIT AWARD



The Millennium, McKinney, Texas (KWA Construction)

Senior

GRAND AWARD



Kings Court at Freedom Village, Paterson, N.J. (Pennrose)

MERIT AWARD



Monteverde, Orinda, Calif. (Dahlin Group)

Student

GRAND AWARD



Cornish Commons, Seattle (Capstone Development Partners)

MERIT AWARD



The Summit at University City, Philadelphia (American Campus Communities)

Marketing & Advertising

GRAND AWARD



Bozzuto Listens (Bozzuto)

MERIT AWARD



TROY Boston, Boston (Greystar Real Estate Partners)

About Hanley Wood

Hanley Wood is the premier company serving the information, media, and marketing needs of the residential, commercial design and construction industry. Utilizing the largest analytics and editorially driven Construction Industry Database, the company provides business intelligence and data-driven services. The company produces award-winning media, high-profile executive events, and strategic marketing solutions. To learn more, visit hanleywood.com.
BeneFlex, the nations leading consumer benefits specialist, and Empower Me Benefits, a provider of Benefits Administration Platforms, has announced the two commonly owned companies have combined to create a full service solution that simplifies the entire benefits life cycle. The total rebrand includes a new name, Clarity Benefit Solutions, logo, tagline, and new website, http://www.claritybenefitsolutions.com, to support its new mission statement.

The combined company is completely streamlining the entire healthcare and benefits administration process. With best-in-class technology, Clarity Benefits Solutions has fine-tuned its year-round solution that covers every stage of the benefits life cyclefrom designing a benefit plan, employee education, enrollment, and integration with providers to helping employees manage and pay for their benefits.

About BeneFlex and EmpowerMeBenefits

BeneFlex was founded in 1992 to provide the administration of tax free benefit programs. BeneFlex provides administration of Flexible Spending Plans, Health Savings Accounts, and Health Reimbursement Arrangements, Commuter Benefits, and COBRA Administration.

EmpowerMeBenefits, founded in 2014, was established to provide online Enrollment Platform. Our Platform educates employees about their benefits, provides decision making support tools like Emma. Updates, payroll and insurance providers, automates billing, and provides ACA compliance.

The redesigned Clarity Benefit Solutions logo and website (http://www.Claritybenefitsolutions.com) showcases a fresh look for the company, commented Bill Catuzzi, Founder and CEO. Our new name, Clarity Benefit Solutions, is more than just a marketing makeoverit is a reflection of our companys renewed commitment to being a strategic partner to our clients. We are excited to continue to provide innovative solutions that meets the need to control healthcare costs with the need to maintain employee satisfaction, attract, and retain talent. In the coming months we will launch even more new products and services, with the goal of continuing our mission statement to make healthcare affordable and easy.
Its exciting to see mental health agencies investing in training clinicians in cutting edge evidence based treatments, said Dr. Melissa Magaro trainer and psychologist at Cognitive Behavior Associates (CBA).

Mental illness often leaves families in crowded emergency rooms or in psychiatric hospitals, leading to higher costs and poorer outcomes. In order to offer the best in patient care Tri-City Mental Health Center (TCMHC), a Joint Powers Authority, that serves the Cities of Pomona, Claremont and La Verne for low-income families, has partnered with Cognitive Behavior Therapy Institute (CBTI) one of the largest cognitive behavior therapy training institutes in Southern California to train its clinicians in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Psychosis (CBTp).



CBTp addresses chronic and often debilitating psychotic spectrum illnesses characterized by hallucinations, delusional thinking, paranoia, reduced social interaction, emotional expression and motivation. While antipsychotic medications are effective in managing many of the symptoms of the illness, between 30%-40% of those taking therapeutic doses of medications will continue to experience hallucinations, delusions and be impaired by negative symptoms of the illness.

CBTp is an empirically supported mental health intervention, said Antonette Navarro, Executive Director of Tri-City Mental Health Center. The ongoing training of TCMHC staff allows us to provide patients the very best in care which is essential to TCMHCs mission to be both a place of healing, and resource within the community.



Its exciting to see mental health agencies investing in training clinicians in cutting edge evidence based treatments, said Dr. Melissa Magaro trainer and psychologist at Cognitive Behavior Associates (CBA). TCMHC also offers the ongoing support needed when implementing new approaches.



The lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia is estimated to be between .3% and .7% and those are affected suffer significant social and occupational limitations. CBTp is a talk therapy that aims to reduce distress and impairment by teaching ways to challenging dysfunctional ways of thinking, developing more effective behavioral ways of coping and empowering clients to move forward in their recovery. The CBTp Clinician Training Program provided by Dr. Magaro includes full day trainings and case consultation.



About Tri-City Mental Health Center:

Tri-City Mental Health Center provides a diverse spectrum of mental health services and education. With a commitment to serve in a caring, nurturing atmosphere, they strive to promote optimal health and improve the quality of life for every individual and family living in their three cities community. Learn more at: http://www.tricitymhs.org



About Cognitive Behavior Therapy Institute and Cognitive Behavior Associates:

Cognitive Behavior Associates (CBA), founded and directed by Joel L. Becker, Ph.D., is one of the largest cognitive behavior therapy practices in Southern California. Clinicians practice the most current treatments supported by empirical research. CBA specializes in short-term, problem-focused therapy for a full range of psychological disorders. The Institute provides CE education opportunities for clinicians.

For more information visit http://cognitivebehaviorassociates.com
We are pleased to welcome Ronak to Kelly Hart. Ronaks regulatory experience and background will make him a valuable asset to our law firm, said Managing Partner, Dee Kelly Jr.

Ronak Patel has extensive regulatory experience with securities regulatory agencies across the U.S. He has served as lead counsel in a number of high profile investigations including Ponzi fraud schemes, broker misconduct, and complex investment products. Mr. Patel is skilled in directing investigations, litigating matters involving investment advisers and breach of fiduciary duty allegations, and has substantial experience with broker-dealer and investment adviser compliance matters.

Andrew Weber, Partner-in-Charge, Kelly Hart Austin office, said We are excited to have Ronak join our Austin team. His depth and breadth of experience complement our existing efforts to assist clients in navigating administrative and regulatory requirements.

Prior to joining Kelly Hart, Mr. Patel served as Deputy Securities Commissioner of Texas and worked with the Securities Commissioner to manage the Texas State Securities Board. Prior to assuming the role of Deputy Securities Commissioner, Mr. Patel served as both attorney, since 2003, and Director of Inspections & Compliance, since 2011, of the Texas State Securities Board. Mr. Patel held numerous leadership positions with the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), working with numerous state and federal securities regulators.

Ronak Patel graduated with a B.S. from Baylor University in 1999. He attended St. Marys University School of Law in San Antonio, and earned his J.D. from Baylor Law School in 2002.

About Kelly Hart and Hallman LLP

Kelly Hart & Hallman LLP is a limited liability partnership with more than 150 attorney's in its offices in Fort Worth, Austin, Baton Rouge, Midland, Nacogdoches and New Orleans. Kelly Hart lists among its clients Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, individuals, foundations, investor groups, and governmental entities. Areas of practice include administrative, appellate, aviation, banking and finance, business reorganization and bankruptcy, corporate and securities, energy, environmental, estate planning and probate, healthcare, intellectual property and technology, labor and employment, litigation, nonprofit organizations, oil & gas/energy, public finance, real estate, school law, tax, and white-collar defense. The Kelly Hart & Hallman website can be found at http://www.kellyhart.com.
Ohio transportation engineering firm KS Associates, Inc. will be among the exhibitors at the 2016 Ohio Transportation Engineering Conference, October 25-26, Columbus Convention Center.

KS Associates, Inc., an Ohio transportation engineering firm, will be among this years exhibitors and sponsors at the 70th annual Ohio Transportation Engineering Conference (OTEC) on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 25-26, 2016. The conference takes place at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. The event addresses the latest technologies and policies affecting the Ohio transportation industry and is expected to bring together more than 3,750 professionals from around the state.

Attendees are encouraged to stop by KS Associates booth (#522) to discuss transportation engineering and surveying topics, and to meet members of KS Associates Transportation and Survey Groups. Representatives will be on hand to discuss recent projects including the major rehabilitation of three bridges and approximately .75 miles of pavement replacement along I-90 in Cleveland, Ohio, (CUY-90-26.16); the $22 million State Route 57 Corridor Improvement Project in Elyria, Ohio; the use of 3D laser scanning to perform surveying services for the reconstruction of Cleveland Public Square; and other major projects for transportation and transit authorities including the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT), the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission (OTIC), Cleveland Airport Systems, and Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA).

The KS Associates Transportation Group specializes in planning, bridge and roadway design, and construction inspection services for all types of transportation projects. The Group is pre-qualified by ODOT, and works with cities and counties to provide transportation engineering services throughout the state of Ohio.

The KS Associates Survey Group is comprised of Professional Surveyors and experienced field crew with the training, technology, and skill necessary to tackle large, complex transportation projects.

About KS Associates, Inc.:

KS Associates is a civil engineering, transportation engineering, and land surveying firm that provides planning, design, and construction phase services related to public infrastructure projects. KS Associates specializes in the areas of transportation, potable water, waste water and storm water; coastal engineering services; site development engineering services for institutional, commercial and residential uses; land surveying and mapping services; and 3D laser scanning services.
On Thursday, Sept. 22 at 1 p.m. EDT, BPO Media will host a webinar titled HP + Samsung + A3: Winners and Losers in the Industry's Biggest Deal  Ever. The webinar will explore the largest print acquisition in HPs history: HP Inc.s planned $1.05 billion acquisition of Samsungs printer business, announced last week. In its Sept. 12 announcement of the acquisition, HP touts the move as groundbreaking, saying it positions HP to disrupt and reinvent the $55 billion copier industry, a segment that hasn't innovated in decades. (http://h30261.www3.hp.com/news-and-events/news-library/2016/09-12-2016.aspx)

Is it really that big of a deal? Is this true disruption? BPO Media will explore that, as well as a number of other questions surrounding the transaction including:



What does it mean for HPs three-decade-long manufacturing partnership with Canon?

Can HP make business inkjet a reality with its PageWide A3 devices?

Will copier dealers embrace  or even accept  the new HP devices or even just HP?

Can HPs brand awareness with the IT buyer create new opportunities for copier placements?

What new features, programs and devices can we expect to see from a marriage of Samsung and HP technology?

BPO Medias team of analysts bring more than 40 years of experience in the printing industry to the discussion as we examine these and more questions. Senior Analyst John McIntyre will lead the discussion. McIntyre has worked in the industry as an analyst, product developer, strategist, marketer and researcher, and has covered the printing and supplies sectors for prominent market research firms and major OEMs, allowing a unique and unrivaled perspective on this major announcement.

Learn more and register for Thursdays webinar at http://www.theimagingchannel.com/webinars

The Analyst Corner Live! webinar series is sponsored by MWA Intelligence and presented by BPO Media.

About BPO Media

BPO Media is a publishing, marketing, and research firm. Its BPO Research division provides market research and consulting services focused on office technology, workflow, process optimization, and the transformation resulting from the ongoing integration of digital and mobile technologies. BPO Media's other divisions include BPO Marketing and the Office Technology Group, which produces the leading trade publications The Imaging Channel and Workflow. Visit http://www.workflowotg.com, http://www.theimagingchannel.com, or email info(at)bpomedia(dot)com.
Todd Boyette, Morehead Planetarium & Science Center's Director gives a speech at Rivers Agency's "Look for the Stars" event. We had a wonderful evening in our new space with our many Chapel Hill friends.

Rivers Agency, a full-service advertising firm, recently hosted a Look for the Stars party to celebrate and build awareness of Morehead Planetarium and Science Centers new enhancement project on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills campus.

The invitation-only event took place on Thursday, Sept. 15 and included live music by the soulful roots quartet Skinny Bag of Sugar and Southern cuisine by the famed Crooks Corner restaurant. Chapel Hills iconic Top of the Hill bar provided Cosmos under the Cosmos cocktails, and a local artist created a piece of unique art, which was raffled off to one lucky winner.

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is being reimagined for the 21st century as a modern day, technologically advanced science education facility for the people of North Carolina, said Todd Boyette, director. Todays tech savvy museum-goer expects a different kind of experience than what was originally created when the Planetarium was originally built in 1949, and thats what our latest enhancement is designed to deliver.

The plans for Morehead Planetarium and Science Center include newly designed, cross-functional educational spaces and exhibits utilizing the latest technologies; an upgraded Science Stage offering a dynamic, multimedia experience for larger audiences; and the creation of a new path of entry through the buildings West Entrance. The new visitor experience is being created by Mycotoo, a Pasedena, Calif.-based design firm known for its award-winning museum and exhibition work.

By creating an engaging and interactive experience poised to serve more than 160,000 visitors every year, Morehead is committed to continuing its legacy by inspiring the next generation of scientists and explorers, said Boyette. During the Look for the Stars event, Boyette will provide an update on the enhancement project.

Boyette added that Morehead was originally designed by the architects of the Jefferson Memorial and that, when it opened, it was the first planetarium on a U.S. college campus and also the first such science center in the South. Since its opening nearly 70 years ago, Morehead has welcomed more than 8 million visitors and provided training for nearly every American astronaut from 1959 to 1975, including 11 moonwalkers.

Today, Morehead provides non-credit classes for adults and children, special courses for teachers, summer camps for children, monthly skywatching sessions and a host of other programs for all ages that keep the community involved in science. Morehead also offers extensive outreach programs statewide and organizes the North Carolina Science Festival.

The Look for the Stars party was held at Rivers Agencys office in the LEED Gold-certified Greenbridge Condominums complex in Chapel Hill. Rivers 4,700-square-foot office space, which the agency moved into in 2014, was designed by Phillip Szostak, an award-winning architect with Szostak Design of Chapel Hill.

We had a wonderful evening in our new space with our many Chapel Hill friends, said Lauren Rivers, president and founder of Rivers Agency. The longest red carpet ever seen in Chapel Hill set the stage for a star-powered night of cosmic conversation and creative cocktails. Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is one of our areas  and states  true treasures, and this party marked the beginning of a new chapter in its storied history.

About Rivers Agency

Rivers Agency is a full-service advertising agency with a full-time staff of 46 specializing in advertising, marketing, public relations, graphic design, web design and development, and TV and video production. Launched by Lauren Rivers in 1993, Rivers Agency has grown from a small start-up to a thriving firm that serves more than 70 active clients. Since its founding, Rivers has designed, developed and deployed more than 150 websites for businesses, universities and nonprofit organizations.

About Morehead Planetarium and Science Center

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center delivers informal science education programs as part of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Founded in 1949, Morehead is best known for its original planetarium shows, which are distributed to dozens of planetariums worldwide, and for its history as a training center for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab astronauts. Each year, Morehead on-site and outreach programs serve more than 150,000 North Carolinians. Morehead also founded and produces the annual North Carolina Science Festival. For more information, visit moreheadplanetarium.org or call 919-962-1236.

# # #

For media inquiries, contact Rivers Agency:

publicrelations(at)riversagency(dot)com

919-932-9985

For Images: http://bit.ly/2cMbfKJ
Key Bridge LLC is pleased to announce that CEO Jesse Caulfield was recently awarded Patent No. 9,357,395 by the United States Patent Office.

The patent is for a system to protect non-informing transmitters from receiving interference. A non-informing transmitter is a radio system that must be empirically detected and cannot be otherwise learned from a database. Examples of non-informing transmissions generally include mobile, sensitive and secure applications.

This patent makes important claims required to operate a Environmental Sensing Capability in the 3.5 GHz band. These will prove necessary to successfully protect any non-informing user from receiving interference. This invention protects United States Navy radar systems, a quintessential non-informing incumbent user, and in a manner that satisfies their exactly operational security requirements, said Jesse Caulfield, Key Bridge CEO. He continued, This is the first award in a series of recent filings. It is an exciting confirmation of our innovation and leadership in spectrum administration, sharing and dynamic access.

The patent is generally related to spectrum sharing, wherein one wireless user opportunistically exploits fallow spectrum in the absence of a superior user. In certain frequency bands the sharing is coordinated by a centralized entity, and in some scenarios the superior users configuration is not known and must be empirically detected. The patent makes broad claims for implementing this last scenario with a geographically distributed collection of spectrum sensors and a geographic partitioning strategy, wherein opportunistic spectrum users are enabled or disabled in certain geographic regions based upon the detected presence or absence of a incumbent system.

Key Bridge recently submitted proposals to operate a Spectrum Access System (SAS) and Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) in the 3,500  3,700 MHz band as part of the FCCs recently developed Part 96 Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).

This patent sits at the heart of our ESC, which is neutral, transparent and secure by design, said Mr. Caulfield. I am excited to continue our collaboration with industry partners and the U.S. Government as we test, certify and ultimately bring this capability to market.

About Key Bridge LLC

Key Bridge is a leading provider of government-certified shared spectrum administration services and registry databases. Key Bridge develops and offers low-cost, very high-performance wireless spectrum coexistence technologies, products and services. We make spectrum simple.

More information about Key Bridge LLC, including the companys recent filings to the FCC, can be found at http://www.keybridgeglobal.com.
We strive to continuously observe the market and listen to our customers needs in order to deliver comprehensive solutions to help insure their success by reducing their time to market while increasing their profitability

EMA Design Automation (ema-eda.com), a full-service provider and innovator of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) solutions, has just announced EMA Enterprise Integrate to enable OrCAD customers to bring products to market faster with a direct integration between OrCAD data and corporate PLM and ERP/MRP systems. A fully integrated design environment that includes bidirectional integration between the ECAD toolset and widely used corporate PLM systems is critical to rapidly produce innovative and quality-driven products, said Manny Marcano, president of EMA Design Automation. Having PLM enterprise connectivity available inside OrCAD encourages end users to leverage supply chain preferred part selection as well as final BOM and file management for released data, and all saving time by reducing a duplication of effort.

The bidirectional integration of EMA Enterprise Integrate enables OrCAD to automatically upload information from corporate systems seamlessly while working within the OrCAD solution. OrCAD users do not have to leave their native OrCAD interface to access various PLM functions. Engineering teams now have a direct link between their PCB design tools and their corporate system, maintaining data integrity between the engineering work-in-process data and corporate product lifecycle data. The integration enables two-way communication between the two databases to ensure data integrity by eliminating manual processes reducing wasted time and error. With embedded menus and PLM capabilities within the native OrCAD tool, engineering is empowered to make intelligent design decisions upfront with access to critical data such as lifecycle, stock, and pricing directly inside OrCAD.

EMA Enterprise Integrate, along with Enterprise Link and Advanced Arena Integration, is part of the EMA Enterprise Connect family of products. Like most EMA solutions, Enterprise Integrate is scalable. Teams can start by purchasing the component library and meta data synchronization, and later scale into bidirectional vaulting of the OrCAD Capture schematic and eventually the PCB Editor board file. The other option is to integrate the entire design environment from the beginning. EMA currently supports the following systems: ARAS Innovator, Arena, Infor, Oracle Agile, SAP, SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, and Windchill PTC. EMAs Enterprise Connect solutions scale with the needs of the user, based on their particular requirements and budget.

We strive to continuously observe the market and listen to our customers needs in order to deliver comprehensive solutions to help insure their success by reducing their time to market while increasing their profitability, added Marcano.

To learn more about EMA Enterprise Integrate and other solutions offered by EMA, go to ema-eda.com/connect or call 585.334.6001.

About EMA Design Automation, Inc.

EMA Design Automation is a trailblazer in product development solutions offering a complete range of EDA tools, PLM integrations, services, training, and technical support. EMA is a Cadence Channel Partner serving all of North America. EMA develops Ultra Librarian, TimingDesigner, CircuitSpace, CIP, EDABuilder, and a host of custom solutions to enhance the OrCAD products, and all are distributed through a worldwide network of value added resellers. EMA is a privately held corporation headquartered in Rochester, New York. Visit EMA at ema-eda.com for more information.

# # #

EMA Design Automation, TimingDesigner, CircuitSpace, EDABuilder, and the EMA logo are registered trademarks, and Component Information Portal and Ultra Librarian are trademarks of EMA Design Automation, Inc.

Cadence and OrCAD are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

All other trademarks in this release are the property of their respective owners.
"This is an exciting time for driving simulation, as the price for the technology that can support the performance needed has finally arrived," reports Reg.

Advanced Training Systems (ATS) announced today that Reginald T. Welles has been appointed Chief Technology Officer, effective September 1, 2016. Welles will be based in Salt Lake City and report to Chief Executive Officer John Kearney. Welles will play a key role in shaping ATS's simulation technology strategy as the company continues to expand its market offerings.

Kearney said, "The addition of Reginald Welles to our team of experts speaks volumes about the forward momentum of ATS. It brings the business, technical and intellectual property ownership aspects together to provide the end user with the best product at the lowest price."

Welles will bring more than 40 years of engineering, technical & corporate management experience. His expertise includes actively managing research and design in advanced, high fidelity simulator technologies, with a focus on human factor integration and behavioral modification through synthetic interactive training environments. Welles has co-founded 3 simulation companies, including the simulation giant I-Sim Corporation, which sold to GE Capital in 2000.

Welles earned a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering from San Jose State University and a Master of Business Administration from Golden Gate University. He has been awarded 5 patents and has published several papers and articles on driving simulation. His work has been incorporated into simulation solutions at Eaton Corporation, Goodyear, and the Federal DOT. He has conducted research at several universities, including the University of Mainz, Germany, Monash University, University of Central Florida, Carnegie Mellon, University of Utah, University of Washington, University of Tokyo, and University of Mass.

ABOUT ATS

Founded in 2008, Advanced Training Systems LLC is a designer, developer producer of interactive driver training simulator systems for multiple types of land wheeled vehicles. With combined experience of 100 years, ATS offers a patented training methodology to train student drivers to acquire a Commercial Drivers License as well as train experienced drivers in need of continued or rehabilitative training. The ATS innovative and self-paced training approach allows the ATS systems to be offered at a much less expensive cost than previously seen in the market. For more information about ATS and its patented simulator technology, please contact Rebecca Hudson, VP Sales and Marketing, at 1-800-870-5782 ext. 204.
Meeting the Challenge (MTC), a nationally recognized disability rights laws expert and provider of implementation solutions for government and commercial clients, is proud to announce that it has been awarded a five year, $5 million grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) to continue operating The Rocky Mountain ADA Center (RMADA).

This award marks the sixth time the Meeting the Challenge has received the grant since the center opened in 1991. Under the grant RMADA will provide free technical assistance, training, awareness programs and materials to Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming on the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We are humbled to have the opportunity to continue to operate the Rocky Mountain ADA Center as a project of Meeting the Challenge, said Kent Kelley, President of Meeting the Challenge. The ADA Center provides so much valuable information, training and several awareness programs not only for our Rocky Mountain region, but in some cases the nation. It is a tribute to the centers entire staff that NIDILRR responded so positively to our application by presenting our organization an additional five year award. We are excited for the future and are honored to continue to support the ADA needs of those living in our six state region.

The grant will be used to fund the RMADAs array of projects and outreach, including trainings, original research, online courses, awareness programs and daily operations including the telephone center where the public can call and have questions answered about the ADA at no cost. For more information on the Rocky Mountain ADA Center, visit their website or call 800-949-4232.

Today marks a culmination of many months of hard work by our team to ensure the RMADA continues to be a project of MTC and remains in Colorado Springs, said Rachael Stafford, Director of The Rocky Mountain ADA Center. For the next five years our staff of disability law experts will continue to be a hub of information for those seeking to learn more about the ADA. We will continue to offer free and low cost training, technical assistance and information on the law, along with many of our programs launched in 2015/16. These include our no-cost, first of a kind online disability etiquette training courses, as well as a training course about how to make voting locations accessible, along with the our national awareness program NO H Word. In addition, we are excited to continue to build upon our relationships with many entities outside of the Rocky Mountain Region, including The White House to ensure the 60 million Americans who identify with a disability have the support, training and materials they need.

NIDILRR is a federal government grants-making agency that sponsors grantees to generate new disability and rehabilitation knowledge and promote its use and adoption. The grant is number 90DP0094-01-00.

About MTC: Since 1989, Meeting the Challenge has provided a starting place for public and private entities to gain understanding and guidance to solve compliance challenges. What MTC does as a company is grounded in many federal disability laws. At the most basic level, it is important for organizations to be in compliance with these laws to minimize their exposure to legal proceedings that could result from noncompliance. MTC believes that accessibility should be about more than compliance. It believes the investment clients make in compliance should have a measurable return. This return can come in many forms, and MTCs experience across 25 years of disability law consulting has shown innovative ways to help clients realize that return. For more information: http://www.mtc-inc.com.

About The Rocky Mountain ADA Center: The Rocky Mountain ADA Center, operated by Meeting the Challenge, is funded under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant number 90DP0094-01-00) to provide technical assistance, training, and materials to Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming on the Americans with Disabilities Act. For more information: http://www.rockymountainada.org.
b-1b

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland  In the wake of North Korea's nuclear testing, the US dispatched a set of bombers to fly over South Korea (again).

On Wednesday, the pair of long-range B-1B Lancer strategic bombers flew from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, but this time, one of the bombers landed at Osan Air Base, approximately 75 miles from the North's border.

When the US Air Force bombers flew last week, Pyongyang mocked the show of force saying, "they are bluffing that B-1Bs are enough for fighting an all-out nuclear war."

But US Air Force Maj. Gen. Steven Basham stressed the importance of US Pacific Command's continuous bomber presence in the region.

"A US presence is absolutely required, certainly as we talk to our allies and assure our allies that we will always be there for them," Basham, a command pilot with more than 3,400 flying hours in the B-1, B-2, and B-52, told Business Insider.

"It really does get back to the point of we are always, always, always prepared and constantly training."

And training in Guam, a tiny island roughly five times smaller than Rhode Island in the middle of the Pacific, plays to the strengths of the bombers.

"Bombers in general are well-suited to the vast distances and challenges of the Pacific," Lt. Col. Seth Spanier, commander of the 34th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, said in a statement. "The B-1 bomber is specifically suited for the Pacific region."

Guam, one of the most strategically important bases in US Pacific Command's portfolio, also offers unique advantages for bomber pilots.

"Of course Guam is US territory, so the nice part about it is that you're still inside the United States and we get to train in some of the best environments," Basham told Business Insider.

Meanwhile, South Korea's Defense Ministry spokesman said the rogue regime is ready to conduct an additional nuclear test at any time.

"Assessment by South Korean and US intelligence is that the North is always ready for an additional nuclear test in the Punggye-ri area," spokesman Moon Sang-gyun said, according to Reuters.

Story continues

NOW WATCH: America's B-2 stealth bomber is unlike any military aircraft in the world





More From Business Insider


Penn Community Bank is pleased to announce that longtime insurance industry executive Michael A. Meeneghan has joined the organization to lead its licensed subsidiary, Penn Community Insurance.

Growing Penn Community Insurance is an important goal of ours, and we are excited to have Michael leading our insurance team, said Penn Community Bank President and CEO Jeane M. Coyle. Helping our customers meet all of their financial needs, from banking to insurance and investments, is at the heart of our mission, and Michaels insurance industry experience will help us fulfill that mission.

With more than 30 years of experience in insurance, Meeneghan brings with him a deeply rooted knowledge of a complex industry. Meeneghan has built a proven record of success in setting strategic direction, initiating growth strategies, and building and fine-tuning operations. He began his insurance career in sales, and most recently served as Executive Vice President and Profit Center Manager at one of the largest retail insurance brokers in the United States.

In his role at Penn Community Insurance, Meeneghan will oversee the operations of the entire insurance division, which offers business, personal, life and health insurance. About his new role, Meenaghan said, As a bank-owned insurance agency, we work with clients to provide insurance and risk management services that protect them from the unexpected while helping to reduce their total cost of risk.

Meenaghan earned a bachelors degree from Springfield College, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania.

About Penn Community Bank: PennCommunityBank.com holds more than $1.8 billion in assets and employs more than 300 people at 22 bank branches and two administrative centers throughout Bucks County, Pennsylvania. As an independent, mutual financial institution, Penn Community Bank is not publicly traded and operates with its long-term mission in mind: to help businesses grow and prosper, to support individuals and families throughout their lifetimes, to strengthen the local economy, and to partner with local organizations to act as a catalyst for positive growth in every market it serves.

# # #
Symbios Technologies The TPR is the first of its kind multi-modal oxidation system that combines electricity and air to achieve both hydrogen- and oxygen-based oxidation chemistries, without added chemicals. - Justin Bzdek

New Orleans, Louisiana, September 21, 2016 - Symbios Technologies, Inc., a world-leading developer of dynamic aqueous plasma technology platforms, is attending Water Environment Federation Technical Exhibition and Conference (WEFTEC), in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program Pavilion, Booth 5725. Company leadership will be on hand to discuss plasma technology, treatment advantages, and answer collaboration questions.

Symbios is commercializing its Tubular Plasma Reactor (TPR4000) advanced plasma oxidation system for fluid treatment in manufacturing, healthcare, utility, and oil and gas vertical markets. Justin Bzdek, president and CEO, Symbios, said, The TPR is the first of its kind multi-modal oxidation system that combines electricity and air to achieve both hydrogen- and oxygen-based oxidation chemistries, without added chemicals.

The Symbios TPR4000 is being advanced under Phase II and Phase IIB supplement NSF SBIR grants along with other grants and industry investment. Through non-thermal, homogeneous, distributed plasma discharge directly in water via its patented, groundbreaking design, the TPR4000 achieves rapid disinfection and reduction of BOD and COD with superior efficacy and lower cost vs. other advanced oxidation processes, without waste streams. Combining the best of UV, ozone, peroxide, and chemical oxidation technologies, the Symbios TPR technology has been tested for efficacy in the food & beverage, healthcare, power plant, fracking wastewater treatment, and other industrial and municipal applications.

The NSFs support of science and technology startups with non-dilutive grants through the SBIR program is critical to the success innovative companies like Symbios, continued Bzdek. We are honored to be joining other SBIR companies in the NSF Small Business Pavilion at WEFTEC, the Water Environment Federations Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference, and other like-minded businesses and professionals at the worlds largest annual water quality exhibition.

About Symbios Technologies

Symbios Technologies, Inc. is a world-leading developer of dynamic aqueous plasma technology platforms for water treatment, specialty manufacturing, and biotherapeutic applications. The company, working with its university, government and industrial partners is commercializing its disruptive advanced low-cost aqueous plasma oxidation technology, the Symbios Tubular Plasma Reactor (TPR4000), to clean water, preserve the environment, and protect human health as well as improve production economics and sustainability. Symbios Technologies modular reactor is low in capital cost, able to replace existing energy-hungry or poor-performing advanced oxidation processes, reduce or eliminate the use of biocides, reduce or eliminate chemical additives, and reduce the overall maintenance cost of water treatment systems, in particular extending the life and reducing fouling of membranes. For more information, go to http://www.symbiosplasma.com/.

Media Contact

Justin Bzdek

President and CEO, Symbios Technologies

info(at)symbiostechnologies(dot)com

970-492-4418
Travel Insured International has been awarded a 2016 Top Workplaces honor by The Hartford Courant. Travel Insured has been a recipient of this award each year from 2012 to 2016. The Top Workplaces lists are based solely on the results of an employee feedback survey administered by WorkplaceDynamics, LLC, a leading research firm that specializes in organizational health and workplace improvement. Several aspects of workplace culture were measured, including Alignment, Execution, and Connection, just to name a few.

The Top Workplaces award is not a popularity contest. And oftentimes, people assume its all about fancy perks and benefits. says Doug Claffey, CEO of WorkplaceDynamics. But to be a Top Workplace, organizations must meet our strict standards for organizational health. And who better to ask about work life than the people who live the culture every daythe employees. Time and time again, our research has proven that whats most important to them is a strong belief in where the organization is headed, how its going to get there, and the feeling that everyone is in it together. Claffey adds, Without this sense of connection, an organization doesnt have a shot at being named a Top Workplace.

About Travel Insured:

Founded in 1994 by Peter Gehris, Travel Insured International is one of the leading travel protection providers, offering the highest quality worldwide travel protection for over 20 years. Located in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the company offers an array of travel protection benefits including Emergency Assistance and Evacuation, Trip Cancellation and Trip Interruption Protection, Medical Insurance, Baggage Insurance, Airline Ticket Protection, and more. Travel Insured maintains relationships with specialty travel providers and tour operators, as well as provides 24/7 insurance assistance that allows you to travel relaxed, travel secure, and travel insured.

Travel Insured International

855 Winding Brook Drive

Glastonbury, CT
NATIC Agency Relationship Manager Michael Soviero Mike will be a true asset for any title agency looking to strengthen its customer base, streamline its operations or expand its agency business.

North American Title Insurance Co. (NATIC) has hired Michael Soviero as an agency relationship manager for Florida. Based in Tampa, Soviero will be working closely with NATIC State Agency Manager Geoff Harris to further permeate the Florida market.

Since Mike lives in the Tampa area, he is within quick striking distance and has tremendous accessibility to title agents in central Florida, said Rich Griffin, NATIC vice president and national sales manager. Under the tutelage of Geoff, Mike will be a true asset for any agency looking to strengthen its customer base, streamline its operations or expand its agency business.

Soviero has 13 years sales and management experience in the hospitality industry, working on both the East and West Coasts and then moving to Florida in 2014.

Michael has the ability to be a good leader and business strategist because he is a good listener, said Harris. He learns from conversations and as a result, he creates the ability to be a resource. Like the rest of the Florida NATIC team, he will act as a free concierge-style consultant to our title agents.

Soviero is the first to be hired as an agency relationship manager, a new position in NATICs national sales division.

Our agency relationship managers will be equipped with comprehensive market knowledge to offer consultation to an agent on anything from knowing market rates for office leases and employee expenses to the cost of closing software, e-recording, reconciliation partners and everything in between, said Griffin. They will become the go-to resource for the agent. We are thrilled to have Mike start this new initiative.

Soviero is located at 2107 Portofino Place, unit 3025, Palm Harbor, Florida 34683, telephone number (813) 682-7891.

About North American Title Insurance Co. (NATIC)

North American Title Insurance Co. (NATIC) is a seasoned title insurance underwriter, helping title agents to achieve the goal of true business success for over 50 years. NATIC conducts real estate settlement services in 39 states and the District of Columbia. NATIC earned the reputation as the underwriter next door, because their decision makers and associates are easy to reach and their processes are quick and straightforward. The NATIC agency application process is fast and transparent for qualified agents. NATIC has a one-hour underwriting response guarantee that is unparalleled in the industry.

NATIC is in Peer Group 1, which groups companies with total assets of greater than $100 million as determined by Kroll Bond Rating Agency, Inc. NATIC is ranked 6th by The Performance of the Title Insurance Underwriters in terms of cash or cash equivalents. NATIC maintains over $95 million* in cash and invested assets. This represents over 93 percent of the companys assets and is characteristic of the most important attribute to title protection, namely, financial responsibility. *As of 12/31/2015.

Demotech, Inc. awarded NATIC a rating of: A (A Prime) Unsurpassed. A.M Best rated B++ (Good). NATIC is headquartered in Miami, Florida. To learn more, visit http://www.natic.com
L to R: Vincent Colauto, Sidney Schutte. a culinary experience with multiple dishes with the finest ingredients from the best local and international purveyor

Grand Velas Los Cabos, the fifth property of the family owned and operated Velas Resorts opening in late 2016, announces that two star Michelin chef Chef Sidney Schutte will head up its signature Cocina de Autor restaurant. Netherlands rising star Vincent Colauto will be chef de cuisine.

Chef Schuttes Dutch heritage, passion for traveling and four years in Asia shaped his palate and inspires him to present different taste sensations in a single meal. Ingredients themselves are a source of creative inspiration. My cuisine is distinctive for its outspoken flavours that pop. I create a culinary experience with multiple dishes with the finest ingredients from the best local and international purveyors, and thats what well do at Cocina de Autor, said Schutte.

Schutte gained extensive experience in prestigious kitchens throughout Europe and Asia, including those run by Dutch top chef Richard Ekkebus at Amber, a two Michelin star restaurant in Hong Kong; Roger Souvereyns, of the two Michelin-starred De Scholteshof in Belgium; and Jonnie Boer, acclaimed chef and owner of restaurant De Librije in Zwolle. With his support, De Librije earned its third coveted Michelin star. Only seven months after opening, Boers second outpost, Librijes Zusje Amsterdam, was awarded with two Michelin stars under his reign. Schutte has been acknowledged as SVH Meesterkok, the highest recognition that a chef can achieve in The Netherlands.

Colauto, who worked with Schutte at De Liberije, will oversee Cocina de Autors kitchen staff. He has completed training at the ROC and Spermalie in Bruges in addition to Katseveer, awarded one Michelin star. Most recently, he acted as Head Chef at Fletcher Hotel-Restaurant Duinzicht in the Netherlands.

Velas Resorts Cocina de Autor signature restaurant was originally launched at Grand Velas Riviera Maya where it continues to be overseen by award winning culinary stars Mikel Alonso and Bruno Oteiza, disciples of uber chef Juan Maria Arzak.

For reservations or additional information, please call 1-888-407-4869 or visit http://loscabos.grandvelas.com.

About Grand Velas Los Cabos:

Opening in late 2016, Grand Velas Los Cabos on Mexicos Baja Peninsula is the fifth property of the family owned and operated Velas Resorts. Located between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, the $150 million beachfront property will offer the next generation of all-inclusive amenities and facilities with dramatic ocean views and unique spaces infusing every area of the resort. All 304 ocean view suites are over 1,180 sq. ft. with private terraces and personal plunge pools while duplex wellness suites have designated wellness amenities and insuite juice bars. Grand Velas Los Cabos features five gourmet restaurants with an extensive beverage program and wine based features inspired by the proximity to the region producing Mexicos fine wines. A staff ratio of 3 to 1; 16,370 sq. ft. convention center with the capability for 20 breakout rooms; 35,000 sq. ft. Leading Spa with 20 treatment rooms and hydrotherapy facility; three pools, including one adults-only; and pool and beach concierges are available. Rounding out the list of amenities and services are a Life Fitness Center with personal trainers, exercise programs, yoga, Pilates and meditation; recreational activities program; separate teens and kids club facilities and activities program; 24-hour personalized butler concierge service; and 24-hour insuite service. A gallery of contemporary art will continue the companys commitment to bringing the art, fashion and culture of Mexico to guests. The curved, half-moon design of the hotel will catch eyes along the corridor with an iconic grand entrance thats open air, three stories high and over 300 ft. above sea level. All of this beachfront, just 35 minutes from the Los Cabos International Airport which directly services over 40 destinations in the United States, Canada and Latin America. Velas Resorts are operated by Eduardo Vela Ruiz, majority owner, founder and president of Velas Resorts, with brother Juan Vela by his side, vice president of Velas Resorts. For reservations or additional information, please call 1-888-407-4869 or visit http://loscabos.grandvelas.com/.
Lord Mark Malloch-Brown Mark Malloch-Brown has served at the highest levels of government, international organizations, and in the private sector. His deep regional expertise across the world will be invaluable to our clients. Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group President

Eurasia Group is proud to welcome the Right Honorable Lord Mark Malloch-Brown as a senior advisor to the firm. An expert on international affairs, Lord Malloch-Brown will partner with Eurasia Group to offer strategic insight into navigating the diverse challenges across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Mark Malloch-Brown has served at the highest levels of government, international organizations, and in the private sector, said Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Groups president. His deep regional expertise across the world will be invaluable to our clients.

Lord Malloch-Brown served as Deputy Secretary-General and Chief of Staff of the UN under Kofi Annan. For six years before that he was Administrator of the UNDP, leading the UNs development efforts around the world. He was later Minister of State in the Foreign Office, covering Africa and Asia, and was a member of Gordon Browns cabinet. He previously led FTI Consultings EMEA practice and was a member of the global executive committee.

Lord Malloch-Brown brings a unique blend of senior level government and business experience that significantly expands Eurasia Groups capabilities in the EMEA space, said Sean West, Deputy CEO at Eurasia Group.

I am thrilled to team up with Ian Bremmer and other old friends at Eurasia Group, a firm I have admired from its beginning. I look forward to helping provide clients with perspectives and insights that I hope draw both on the years I have been lucky enough to spend on the international political frontline and on my continued international activity, said Lord Malloch-Brown.

In addition to his work with Eurasia Group, Lord Malloch-Brown is Chairman of SGO and its electronic elections division Smartmatic, and is on a number of other public and private boards. He is Co-Chair of the International Crisis Group and Chair of a new Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development. He is also a Visiting Distinguished Practitioner at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and an Adjunct Fellow at The Queen Elizabeth 11 Academy for Leadership at Chatham House. (Full bio)

***

Eurasia Group is the world's leading global political risk research and consulting firm. By providing information and insight on how political developments move markets, we help clients anticipate and respond to instability and opportunities everywhere they invest or do business. Founded in 1998, the firm's name reveals its early focus on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but today our research platform is global. Our analysts monitor political, economic, social, and security developments in Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Headquartered in New York, we have offices in Washington, DC, and London, as well as on-the-ground experts and resources in more than a hundred countries. Our analysts are highly trained political scientists with extensive experience in the public and private sectors.

http://www.eurasiagroup.net

http://www.facebook.com/eurasiagroup

Twitter: @eurasiagroup
Horizon Goodwills CEO, John McCain said, "We believe in removing barriers and creating opportunities for all ages. And just like our other programs, participants in this program are intelligent, hard-working, and capable."

Senior job hunters can face a myriad of barriers as they look for employment after the age of 55. Some companies may not be interested in older employees because of higher wages and healthcare costs while other employers choose to layoff workers 55 and over because the investment in training would be prohibitive.

Horizon Goodwill Industries(HGI), a SCSEP Host Agency, in partnership with the Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation, administers a program to mentor and train older workers to develop workplace skills so they can obtain permanent positions within Goodwill or other companies after successfully completing the program. Horizon Goodwills CEO, John McCain said, We believe in removing barriers and creating opportunities for all ages. And just like our other programs, we find participants in this program to be intelligent, hard-working, and capable. It is essential in todays world to employ the baby boomers that desire to work. Retirement isnt attainable for everyone, and some may be able to retire but instead strive to stay in the workforce. So it is equally as imperative to provide them with the necessary training to live meaningful, productive lives.

One of HGIs program participants, Sondra Brotemarkle, started at Goodwill about nine months ago performing clerical duties, answering phones, greeting customers, filing, and scanning documents. However, the work wasnt a good fit for Sondras skill set. Goodwill training staff discovered that she was more of a people person and would be happier and could contribute more by working with individuals and clients at Goodwill. They made the modification, and now it has been rewarding for both Sondra and HGI. Brotemarkle said, The transition that I have made from clerical work to working directly with individuals has made me feel more fulfilled. I really enjoy what Im doing now and being with the individuals every day has made a big difference in my life.

HGI started the pilot initiative of SCSEP because it fit well within the mission to put people back to work. Now that we have seen the benefits to the older population, said McCain, We look forward to expanding it to our other locations in West Virginia and Virginia.

The Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, Division of Workforce Development and Adult Learning is committed to promoting the employment of older workers. Many Maryland employers are hiring older workers as part of their regular recruitment effort. However, as the median age of the workforce increases over the next decade, more employers will need to utilize the skills, experience and talents of older workers.

HGI serves people in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia and can support needs that could otherwise go unmet in local communities. Goodwills vision is helping people realize and achieve their fullest potential through the dignity and power of work.

For more information, please visit http://www.horizongoodwill.org
Today, I am proud to say our experimental vineyard has blossomed into a world-class winery that has transformed the landscape of New Mexico and that of the sparkling wine industry in America. -Gruet's Founding Winemaker, Laurent Gruet

Gruet Winery is pleased to announce the grand opening of its new Santa Fe tasting room at the Hotel St. Francis on Sept. 22, 2016. Located at the heart of Santa Fes historic district  a leading destination for art, music, food, and now, great wine, the tasting room provides an outstanding opportunity to share Gruet Winerys passion for premium American sparkling wines with visitors and residents alike.

When we embarked on our journey to create a sparkling wine house in New Mexico, many wondered about our vision, which was to produce premium Methode Champenoise sparkling wines in the U.S., Founding Winemaker Laurent Gruet said. Today, I am proud to say our experimental vineyard has blossomed into a world-class winery that has transformed the landscape of New Mexico and that of the sparkling wine industry in America.

The grand opening will coincide with the celebration of the 26th annual Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta (Sept. 18-25), for which Gruet Winery has been a longtime sponsor and advocate. The new tasting room will be a place to learn about the Gruet story and sip on its nationally-acclaimed sparkling wines and tasting room exclusives or relax with bubbly cocktails on its new outdoor patio. Hotel St. Francis, 210 Don Gaspar Avenue, is owned by Heritage Hotels & Resorts and is Santa Fes oldest hotel on the National Register of Historic Places.

For more than 30 years, Laurent Gruet has been producing premium sparkling wines using the same methods his father, Gilbert Gruet, did at their familys Champagne House in Bethon, France. On a family trip to the southwestern U.S., the family met a group of European winemakers who had successfully planted vineyards in the New Mexican town of Engle, about 170 miles south of Albuquerque. After hearing of vineyards that had been planted as early as the 1600s there, and learning about the specific climate and soil conditions of the region, Gilbert Gruet knew he had found something incredibly special and purchased a small vineyard.

Built on the tradition of generations past and with perseverance and dedication, the Gruets worked with their estate vineyard as well as with other New Mexican winegrowers, to champion the development of world-class sparkling wine from New Mexico. As their wines grew in popularity around the U.S., they forged alliances to bring fruit from Americas greatest wine growing regions to redefine the sparkling wine category; providing quality American-appellated wines made in the traditional method.

Gruet Winerys nationally available methode champenoise sparkling wines include:



Gruet Brut

Gruet Brut Rose

Gruet Blanc de Blancs

Gruet Blanc de Noirs

Gruet Demi-Sec

Gruet Sauvage

It is remarkable what the Gruets have accomplished and we are so proud see their wines experience continued growth and acclaim, Precept Wine Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Alex Evans said. Precept Wine purchased Gruet Winery in 2014. It was only natural to build our second tasting room in Santa Fe, a leading tourist destination with a vibrant cultural community. It is truly an honor to be here.

Today, Gruet continues to be a leader in New Mexico and in the American viticultural industry. The 2016 vintage marks the first year of harvest at the Santa Ana Pueblo Vineyard managed by The Pueblo of Santa Ana and the Tamaya Nation. The partnership between the growers and Gruet was established in 2014 and the fruit has been highly anticipated.

In addition, Gruets tasting room and winery in Albuquerque is undergoing substantial renovations. The first phase of the project, which includes a redesign of the tasting room, will be completed Oct. 1  just in time for the world-renowned Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. The second phase of construction will make additional improvements to the winery and will begin in spring 2017.

Visit Us:

Albuquerque Tasting Room & Winery

Established: 1984

Address: 8400 Pan American Freeway N.E., Albuquerque, NM 87113

Phone: 505.821.0055

Website: http://www.gruetwinery.com

Hours:



Monday-Thursday: 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Friday  10 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Saturday  Noon - 7 p.m.

Sunday  Noon - 5 p.m.

Santa Fe Tasting Room

Opening: Sept. 22

Address: 210 Don Gaspar Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87501

Website: http://www.gruetwinery.com

Phone: 505.983.5700 (hotel)

Hours:



Monday  Wednesday: 11 a.m.  7 p.m.

Thursday  Saturday: 11 a.m.  8 p.m.

Sunday: Noon  7 p.m.

Helpful links:

http://www.gruetwinery.com

Follow us:

Instagram - @gruetwinery

Facebook  gruetwinery

MEDIA CONTACTS

Heidi Witherspoon

heidiw(at)preceptwine(dot)com

206.276.7846

Chantelle Lusebrink

chantellel(at)preceptwine(dot)com

206.280.9621

Gruet Winery  Founded in 1984, Gruet Winery specializes in Methode Champenoise sparkling wines. Family driven, the New Mexico-based winery produces Pinot Noir and Chardonnay-based sparkling wines and a small collection of still wines, with roots originating from Gilbert Gruets Champagne house in Bethon, France. More than 25 vintages later, Gruet Winery has achieved unprecedented acclaim and remains a favorite of the nations top sommeliers. Learn more at http://www.gruetwinery.com.

Seattle-based Precept Wine  Is the largest privately held wine producer in the Pacific Northwest and a top 15 American wine producer. With deep roots representing 30 years of Northwest investments in the wine industry, it owns and operates more than 4,500 acres of vineyards across Washington, Idaho, New Mexico and Oregon; such leading wine brands as Waterbrook, Gruet, Canoe Ridge Vineyard, Ste. Chapelle, HOUSE Wine, Browne Family Vineyards, Pendulum, Primarius, Washington Hills, Shingleback, and Red Knot, plus tasting rooms and hospitality throughout the Northwest. Founded in 2003 by Andrew Browne, the companys wineries have garnered more than 600 combined best buys and critical scores exceeding 90 points. Learn more at http://www.preceptwine.com.
GRC Annual Meeting & GEA GeoExpo+ www.geothermal.org

The deadline for early-bird rates for registration for the biggest annual geothermal event is this Friday, September 23. The GRC Annual Meeting & GEA GeoExpo+ will bring together geothermal companies, academics, financiers, policy leaders, students, and other individuals to attend or exhibit at the event, to be held from October 23 to 26 at the Sacramento Convention Center, Sacramento, California, USA.

Early birds who register before September 24 pay only $795 as GRC members or $995 if non-members. The non-member registration includes GRC membership through 2017. Students with a current identification card from an accredited institution pay just $5 which also includes GRC membership through 2017. Registration to the GRC Annual Meeting also includes entry to the GEA GeoExpo+ trade show.

Registration is available from the GRC website at geothermal.org. A Preliminary Program complete with a Registration Form is available to view and download. However, the GRC recommends online registration through a secured connection. The link is also available on the front page of the GRC website at geothermal.org.

The deadline for discounted hotel room rates is September 28. Hotel room reservations can be made by following a link from the GRC website at http://www.geothermal.org. Book now as there are only a certain number of discounted rooms available.

This is the premier gathering to learn about the latest developments in geothermal energy. Last year, the GRC Annual Meeting & GEA Expo hosted over 1,200 representatives from more than 26 countries. In 2016, an even broader international attendance is anticipated.

The GRC Annual Meeting will offer technical, policy, and market conference sessions, educational seminars, tours of local geothermal and renewable energy projects, and numerous networking opportunities.

The GEA GeoExpo+ floor features a unique opportunity for leaders in the business to showcase their projects, equipment, services and state of the art technology to the geothermal community. Exhibit space still remains but is selling quickly.

For more information about the GRC Annual Meeting & GEA GeoExpo+ at the Sacramento Convention Center, Sacramento, California, USA, visit http://www.geothermal.org or call (530) 758-2360.

For information on how to sponsor this event, contact Anh Lay, GRC at (530) 758-2360 X100 or alay(at)geothermal(dot)org.

##

About the Geothermal Resources Council:

With the experience and dedication of its diverse, international membership bolstering a more than 40-year track record, the Geothermal Resources Council has built a solid reputation as one of the worlds preeminent geothermal associations. The GRC serves as a focal point for continuing professional development for its members through its outreach, information transfer and education services.

For more information, please visit http://www.geothermal.org.

Get your daily geothermal news at Global Geothermal News [globalgeothermalnews.com]. Become a fan on Facebook [ facebook.com/GeothermalResourcesCouncil]. Follow GRC on Twitter [#GRCAM2016 & @GRC2001]. Check out GRCs YouTube Channel [ youtube.com/GeothermalCouncil]. See geothermal photos on GRCs Flicker page. [flickr.com/photos/geothermalresourcescouncil]

###
Theresa Reno-Weber Im excited and honored to be named to the Board of an organization that is as passionate as I am about strengthening and improving organizations across all sectors.

The Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University announced today that Theresa Reno-Weber, Chief of Performance & Technology for the Louisville Metro Government, has joined its Board of Advisors.

We are fortunate to have a robust Board of Advisors populated by tremendous leaders. Today, we add a new one to our ranks, one who shares our deep passion for our mission: strengthening organizations to strengthen society," said Curt Pullen, Chairman.

Im excited and honored to be named to the Board of Advisors for the Drucker Institute, an organization that is as passionate as I am about strengthening and improving organizations across all sectors, said Ms. Reno-Weber. The Institutes work to share timeless wisdom, tailored for today and the tools to do the right things welland stop doing everything else is so needed in todays organizations, be they in the public, private or social sector.

In her leadership position in Louisville Metro, Ms. Reno-Weber coordinates the people, processes and technology required to improve the way government works. She helped launch, and continues to manage, Louisvilles internationally-recognized OPI Team and LouieStat program. She has spoken in the U.S. and abroad on performance management, data-driven decision making and culture change, and she co-authored a chapter in the book Beyond Transparency. In 2015, Government Technology named Ms. Reno-Weber one of the Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers.

A graduate of the United States Coast Guard Academy and former Lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard, Ms. Reno-Weber earned a Masters in Public Policy from Harvards Kennedy School of Government and previously worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company. She is a current Moneyball for Government Fellow, is part of the inaugural cohorts in Living Cities City Accelerator and Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana and the International Association of Internal Management Consultants (AIMC). In January 2017, Ms. Reno-Weber will become the President and CEO of Metro United Way, which serves communities in seven counties across Kentucky and Indiana.

"Theresa is working to create a wealth of new knowledge about how to answer Peter Druckers call for effective government in the knowledge age," said Zach First, the Drucker Institute's executive director. "She shares our commitment to working across sectors. And she is that rare powerhouse who is also a delight to be around. My team and I are thrilled to welcome her on board."

About the Drucker Institute

The Drucker Institute is a social enterprise based at Claremont Graduate University.

Our mission is strengthening organizations to strengthen society. Our programmingfor the corporate, nonprofit and public sectorsis built on a foundation of YESTERDAY/TODAY/MONDAY* Yesterday refers to the fact that our work is grounded in Peter Druckers timeless wisdom. Today speaks to the urgency that we know organizational leaders feel to successfully meet their greatest challenges and opportunities. And Monday points to our proven ability to help executives move quickly from ideas to action to results, just as Drucker urged his own consulting clients: Dont tell me you had a wonderful meeting with me. Tell me what youre going to do on Monday thats different.

For more, visit http://www.druckerinstitute.com.

About Claremont Graduate University

Founded in 1925, Claremont Graduate University is the graduate university of the Claremont Colleges. Our five academic schools conduct leading-edge research and award masters and doctoral degrees in 24 disciplines. Because the worlds problems are not simple nor easily defined, diverse faculty and students research and study across the traditional discipline boundaries to create new and practical solutions for the major problems facing the world. A Southern California based graduate school devoted entirely to graduate research and study, CGU boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio.
Geneva (AFP) - Burundi's government is behind systematic human rights violations, including executions and torture, UN investigators said Tuesday, warning of the looming risk of "genocide".

In a sharp response, Burundi accused the UN of bias, saying its investigators were "politically motivated" and their conclusions based on anonymous and unverifiable sources.

The report by three independent experts said "gross human rights violations have and are taking place, committed primarily by state agents and those linked to them."

They said they could "not exclude that some instances of these gross human rights violations amount to crimes against humanity."

The investigators were tasked by the UN Human Rights Council in January with probing rights abuses in Burundi since it descended into violence in April 2015, over President Pierre Nkurunziza's controversial decision to run for a third term -- a vote he won in July.

After making two trips to Burundi and conducting 227 interviews, the experts painted a bleak picture, pointing to some estimates that more than 1,000 people have been killed since the crisis began.

The UN human rights office has verified 564 cases of executions between April 26, 2015 and August 30, 2016, the report said, stressing that this was "clearly a conservative estimate".

The president's communications chief Willy Nyamitwe tweeted that the findings were "politically motivated and based on anonymous, unverifiable witness statements".

"@UNHumanRights did not respect the usual rules by releasing the report without the response of @BurundiGov," he added.

- Targeted assassinations -

Thousands of people have been tortured, suffered sexual abuse or disappeared, while arbitrary detention has happened "on a massive scale", the report said.

Nearly 300,000 people have fled the country as refugees.

The experts warned that without dramatic changes from Burundi's government and "robust engagement" from the international community, "the country's downward spiral is unlikely to be reversed," endangering the entire region.

Story continues

They said they had satellite images and received testimony corroborating the existence of mass graves, as well as several lists of both civilians and military personnel destined for "targeted assassinations" by security forces.

Horrific torture meanwhile appeared to be "a common feature of the crisis," the report said, listing 17 methods described by victims and witnesses including forcing a victim to sit on acid and attaching weights to testicles.

Sexual violence was also widespread, especially against women and girls related to men in the opposition. Many of the victims were also sexually mutilated.

- Spiralling out of control -

Perhaps most worrying was "the general trend of ethnically divisive rhetoric by the government," the experts said, warning this carried "a serious potential of the situation spiralling out of control, including beyond Burundi's borders."

"Given the country's history, the danger of the crime of genocide also looms large," the report warned.

Burundi suffered a brutal civil war from 1993 until 2006 between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, which claimed an estimated 300,000 lives.

The current unrest has also sparked fear of a wider crisis in Africa's volatile Great Lakes region, with the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda having been fuelled by similar ethnic tensions.

Tuesday's report urged swift international action to "prevent further mass violations with ethnical connotations."

It called on the UN rights council to create a Commission of Inquiry to investigation the violations in Burundi, and allegations that cross-border armed groups are operating in the country and that other states may be implicated.

And they asked the UN General Assembly to consider whether Burundi could remain a Human Rights Council member -- marking a first in the council's decade-long history.
The Columbus area office of UNCF (United Negro College Fund), the nations largest and most effective minority education organization, will host the 33rd annual UNCF Walk for Education on Saturday, Sept 24 at Wolfe Park. Members of the community and friends of UNCF are invited to register as an individual or form/join a team to help deserving students pursue a higher education.

We invite all members of the Columbus community to join us as we raise money to send deserving young people to college, said Natalie R. Coles, UNCF area development director. Everyone who believes that A mind is a terrible thing to waste should attend as we inspire and empower our young people to secure passports to opportunity by way of their college degree.

For more than 70 years, UNCF has provided financial assistance to students and its 37 member historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Without UNCFs support, many of the students attending these colleges would not have access to higher education or the benefits they provide. UNCFs Walk for Education supports more than 60,000 students a year at more than 1,100 colleges and universities across America. Sixty percent of UNCF scholars are the first in their families to attend college while 60 percent come from households with an annual income under $25,000.

UNCF invests nearly $2 million in scholarships for Ohio students each year. Last year, more than 1,000 supporters participated in Columbuss Walk for Education, raising over $125,000 for local area students. Sponsors for this years walk include The American Electric Power Foundation, 10tv, The Kroger Company, UPS, Huntington National Bank, Columbia Gas and First Church of God. The walk is chaired by Daryle Cobb of Franklin County Childrens Services and Michael Ward of American Electric Power.

Opening ceremonies begin at 9 a.m., and the timed 5k walk/run begins promptly at 9:30 a.m. Registration is $25. For more information on the Columbus UNCF Walk for Education, including sponsorship packages and registration, please contact Natalie Coles at 614.221.5309, natalie(dot)coles(at)uncf(dot)org or visit UNCF.org/ColumbusWalk.

###

About UNCF

UNCF (United Negro College Fund) is the nations largest and most effective minority education organization. To serve youth, the community and the nation, UNCF supports students education and development through scholarships and other programs, strengthens its 37 member colleges and universities, and advocates for the importance of minority education and college readiness. UNCF institutions and other historically black colleges and universities are highly effective, awarding nearly 20 percent of African American baccalaureate degrees. UNCF awards more than $100 million in scholarships annually and administers more than 400 programs, including scholarship, internship and fellowship, mentoring, summer enrichment, and curriculum and faculty development programs. Today, UNCF supports more than 60,000 students at more than 1,100 colleges and universities across the country. Its logo features the UNCF torch of leadership in education and its widely recognized motto, A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Learn more at UNCF.org, or for continuous updates and news, follow UNCF on Twitter at @UNCF
Firstmark Employees Volunteer at CUFK Golf Tournament Supporting The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio has been a community focus of our credit union for many years. Our employees have devoted countless time and resources to this cause because they truly understand the importance of helping a child in their

Celebrating 30 years of partnership, Firstmark Credit Union has surpassed the $1 million threshold in giving to Credit Unions for Kids (CUFK). The donations collected through Firstmark and CUFKs partnership are given to The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio Foundation, our local Childrens Miracle Network hospital. This extraordinary milestone was made possible primarily through the generous giving of the credit unions employees and members.

Supporting The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio has been a community focus of our credit union for many years, said Nathanael Tarwasokono, President and Chief Executive Officer of Firstmark Credit Union. Mr. Leon Ewing, our recently retired President and CEO of 31 years, should be commended for his career-long dedication to this worthy cause. His vision and leadership as one of the founding partners of CUFK played a monumental role in this achievement that we celebrate together.

Firstmark has raised money to directly impact CUFKs charitable mission by encouraging employee and member donations, bowling events, hosting giveaways, selling Fiesta Medals and many other community initiatives. All monetary contributions collected through these efforts are then used to fund various needs of The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio Foundation, including life-saving research, cutting edge and innovative technology, and essential charity care required to treat children every year.

We are grateful to Firstmark Credit Union for their continued commitment to Credit Unions for Kids and ultimately to patients and families we are privileged to serve at The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio, stated John E. Bel, President of The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio Foundation. With the generous philanthropic support from Firstmark Credit Union, we are able to ensure that every child receives life-saving, world-class medical care that they deserve, regardless of their parents ability to pay.

Firstmarks goal in 2016 is to raise $50,000 in giving, which will continue to support the efforts of CUFK and The Childrens Hospital of San Antonio.

Our employees have devoted countless time and resources to this cause because they truly understand the importance of helping a child in their time of need, added Tarwasokono. We encourage all business leaders in San Antonio to join Firstmark Credit Union in supporting this outstanding cause.

About Firstmark Credit Union

Firstmark Credit Union is committed to giving back to our community and making a difference in the lives of others. Founded in 1932 by educators, Firstmark is San Antonios oldest state-chartered credit union, managing over $1 billion in assets and serving members throughout Bexar County and many surrounding counties in southwest Texas with sixteen locations. Firstmark is a not-for-profit, member-owned financial institution, dedicated to meeting the needs of our members with innovative products, competitive rates and personal service. For more information, visit http://firstmarkcu.org or call (210) 342-8484.
Inmar Corporate Counsel Mark Johnson has been named among 2016 Leaders in the Law by North Carolina Lawyers Weekly. According to the publication the award honors legal professionals licensed and practicing law in the state of North Carolina, who have gone above and beyond in their profession and their community. These honorees represent the most influential individuals within our states legal community." Those receiving the award will be honored at a reception on September 23 in Raleigh, NC.

Johnson joined Inmar in 2014. In addition to his responsibilities as Corporate Counsel, he is active with Inmars intern program and its United Way efforts. He also served as a Corps Member for Teach for America and is an advocate for education, currently a candidate for N.C. Superintendent of Public Instruction. Johnson was also named among 2016 top 40 Leaders Under 40 in the Triad region of North Carolina.

Inmar and our community are so fortunate to benefit from Marks commitment to excellence in the field of Law and in the areas of education and service, says Inmar Chairman and CEO David Mounts, adding that The entire Inmar team extends our congratulations on this award and our gratitude for his many contributions.

Prior to joining Inmar, Johnson was an associate in Womble Carlyles Corporate and Securities Practice Group. His practice focused on assisting large and small, publicly and privately held companies with corporate and securities needs ranging from mergers, acquisitions and other complex business transactions.

###

About Inmar

Anyone who has redeemed a coupon, filled a prescription or returned a product, has touched Inmar. We apply technology and data science to improve outcomes for consumers and those who serve them. As a trusted intermediary for over 35 years, we have unmatched access to billions of consumer and business transactions in real time. Our analytics, platforms and services enable engagement with shoppers and patients, and optimize results.
Novogradac & Company LLP today unveiled a new free online mapping tool that allows users to search and browse federal historic tax credit (HTC) investments made from 2001 through 2015. The tool uses Part 3 data from the National Park Service (NPS).

This mapping tool makes it simple and clear to access information about HTC properties by a variety of categories, said Michael J. Novogradac, CPA, the managing partner in the firms San Francisco office. Weve collected and presented the NPSs data in a searchable mapping tool, along with other relevant community development data, which allows those in the HTC community to leverage 15 years of data about the properties.

The tool, created by Novogradac, allows users to view detailed information about HTC properties by congressional district, state and eligibility criteria. This tools flexibility makes it an extremely valuable addition to Novogradac & Companys online resources, said Peter Lawrence, Novogradacs director of public policy and government relations in Washington, D.C. Among other things, it provides an essential new tool for investors, developers, advocates and others to demonstrate to lawmakers and policymakers how the HTC has improved their communities and constituencies.

Novogradac & Company LLP offers the HTC mapping tool at http://www.historictaxcredits.com. The tool includes information on total project cost, Washington Area Service Office (WASO) number, date of Part 3 approval, address and project description. There are additional data layers available, including 2016 low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC)-qualified census tracts and difficult development areas, new markets tax credit (NMTC)-eligible census tracts and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) eligibility.

The NPS data set includes information about more than 12,000 properties.

About Novogradac & Company

Novogradac began operations in 1989 and has since grown to more than 500 employees and partners with offices in San Francisco, San Rafael, Walnut Creek and Long Beach, Calif.; Dover, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio; St. Louis; Boston; New York; Chicago; Austin and Dallas, Texas; Portland, Ore.; Naples, Fla., Raleigh, N.C.; Toms River and Iselin, N.J.; and the greater metropolitan areas of Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Detroit; Kansas City, Mo.; and Seattle.

Specialty practice areas include tax, audit and consulting services for tax-credit-assisted affordable housing, community revitalization, rehabilitation of historic properties and renewable energy. Other areas of expertise include business valuation, preparation and analysis of market studies and appraisals of multifamily housing investments and renewable energy tax credits.
Natural Power is set to attend the worlds leading expo for wind energy, WindEnergy Hamburg, from 27th  30th September at the Hamburg Messe Exhibition Center, Germany. Exhibiting at stand number 106 in Hall B4.EG, experts from the fields of energy analysis, due diligence, planning and environmental will be on hand to answer any queries. Natural Power also has two key speaker slots and three further poster presentations.

Key information:



Neil Douglas, Director of Levelised Cost of Energy at Natural Power is presenting: Managing Information for total asset management on Wednesday, 28th September at 13.45hrs

Claude Abiven, Senior CFD Engineer at Natural Power is presenting: Wind flow modelling uncertainties in forested terrain on Thursday 29th September at 09.00hrs as part of the session on Challenges of forest modelling in Hall G1

John Woodruff, Natural Powers Planning and Development Principal Consultant is presenting: Environmental impact of repowering/refurbishing projects  optimising outcome in a levelised cost of energy marketplace on Thursday 29th September at 11.00hrs

Poster presentation by Neil Douglas: Managing Information for Total Asset Management

Poster presentation by Neil Douglas: Predictive Analysis and Benchmarking: Demystifying Failure

Poster presentation by Gregorie Dudziak: The Cost of peace of mind - a comparative review of terms and costs of long-term, comprehensive O&M contracts offered by original equipment manufacturers

*All poster presentations take place between 10.30am-11.30am on Thursday 29th September

WindEnergy Hamburg is wholly tailored toward addressing the major issues facing the international wind energy sector. It brings together a high-calibre, professional audience of over 30,000 visitors and 1,200 exhibitors demonstrating their innovations and solutions from across the entire value chain of the industry.

The expo provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospects of the sector, along with the entire value chain of the international wind industry both onshore and offshore.

Find out more and book your tickets here: http://www.windenergyhamburg.com/en/

Ends

About Natural Power

Established in the mid 1990s, Natural Power is a leading independent renewable energy consultancy and products provider. The company offers proactive and integrated consultancy, management and due diligence services, backed by an innovative product range, across the onshore wind, offshore wind, wave, tidal, renewable heat, solar pv and hydro sectors, whilst maintaining a strong outlook on other new and emerging renewable energy sectors.

Natural Power has been at the heart of many groundbreaking projects, products and portfolios for more than two decades, assisting project developers, investors, manufacturers, research houses and other consulting companies. With its iconic Scottish headquarters, The Green House, Natural Power has expanded internationally to work in 32 countries, and now employs over 320 renewable energy experts. This project experience spans a portfolio of 69GW which is equivalent to powering 4.7m UK homes.

http://www.naturalpower.com

https://twitter.com/Natural_Power

https://www.linkedin.com/company/natural-power

Contact details:

Jane Maher

PR and Media

Natural Power

T: 07887 995 589

E: janem(at)naturalpower(dot)com

http://www.naturalpower.com https://twitter.com/Natural_Power
Eliminate Print Servers We've fixed so many MEDITECH print problems with PrinterLogic

PrinterLogic, a leading Enterprise Print Management solution, announced today that Princeton Community Hospital has deployed PrinterLogics Print Management software to eliminate the health organizations print servers, simplify front end and MEDITECH electronic health record (EHR) printing.

Princeton Community Hospital makes use of the popular MEDITECH EHR information system to store patient records, schedule appointments and equip its medical staff with vital information. Yet, despite its many benefits, MEDITECH has one requirement that proved to be more hassle than the organization could tolerate: print servers.

To ensure the organization could leverage the many benefits of MEDITECH without suffering print management headaches, Princeton Community Hospital selected PrinterLogic to eliminate its print servers while enhancing management capabilities.

Based in Princeton, West Virginia, Princeton Community Hospital's 267-bed facility is not unlike many medical institutions around the world. Along with its reliance on MEDITECH, it maintains a fleet of approximately 1,000 computers and 700 printers for a staff of 160 physicians and around 1,100 employees in a distributed environment consisting of a primary central facility with twenty satellite offices and practices. But Princeton Community Hospital struggled with print management in this kind of environment for many years, mostly on account of the limitations and shortcomings of its two MEDITECH-required print servers.

"MEDITECH is a great EHR system, but one of the big problems is printing," says Jessica Pennington, a server administrator at Princeton Community Hospital. "Our printers are both onsite and offsite, and we have just about every kind you can think of. And administering all the different drivers for all those different devices across so many different operating systems can be a beast. MEDITECH hates dealing with the different drivers."

Along with backend printer and driver management being a chore for administrators, frontend users regularly had to deal with printing downtime and lost productivity.

"For reasons we could never pinpoint, all of our printers on our background servers would time out and go offline, and we would have to reboot our servers to get them to refresh the printers," Pennington says. The root issues could broadly be traced back to incompatibilities between the MEDITECH system and the print servers, leaving Princeton Community Hospital and its IT team with one aim: "We wanted to get rid of our Windows Print Server."

Pennington and her team began looking into a new print management solution that would enable them to eliminate print servers from its environment without jeopardizing MEDITECH functionality. Ideally, they wanted a solution that would not merely substitute print servers but would actually enhance the stability and ease of management of the organization's print environment.

"As soon as we saw the features and benefits of PrinterLogic, we stopped looking," she says. "Wed found exactly what we were after."

Safely eliminating print servers

After a smooth roll-out and PrinterLogic's seamless integration with the MEDITECH EHR system, the organization eliminated its two print servers while gaining the effortless print management it sought.

"PrinterLogic has given us a wonderful, centralized management console," says Pennington. "We have gone from a print server that we had to manage locally to a solution that we can now manage centrally. We've gone from trying to control our printers hospital-wide to where I can do it at a single desktop."

And the new print management solution hasn't just introduced improved ease of administration. It has resulted in unprecedented uptime and printing availability throughout the print environment.

"We've fixed so many MEDITECH print problems with PrinterLogic," she says. "We have not rebooted a background server for a print issue since we started using PrinterLogic."

Simplified print management, simplified printer installation

Admins aren't the only ones who have benefitted from PrinterLogic's user-friendly approach to print management. Princeton Community Hospital's service desk staff and end users have been delighted with the simplified process of printer installation, which no longer takes as much time and avoids common installation errors.

"If somebody needs a printer, instead of the service desk having to actually go to where the user is located, they can just send the user the link and it will just perform the printer install for them. It saves the user time, and it saves the service desk time while keeping the same level of oversight," said Pennington.

Focusing on patients, not printers

With its print servers eliminated and its problems with MEDITECH printing solved, Princeton Community Hospital is no longer wrestling with the minutiae of print management and dealing with downtime. The organization continues to use the MEDITECH EHR system as before but now enjoys a print environment with centralized management, simplified printer installation and unparalleled availability.

"It means that our medical and administrative staff can continue to deliver first-rate customer service by focusing on patients rather than printers."

About PrinterLogic

PrinterLogic is the world's leading Enterprise Print Management solution for server-less remote site printer deployments. With more than 1,500 customers in over 120 countries, PrinterLogic enables organizations of all sizes to eliminate print servers. PrinterLogic's single integrated printer management platform is an on-premises web application that simplifies the management, migration, and deployment of printers while drastically reducing cost. In 2016, PrinterLogic has been recognized twice as one of the fastest growing companies in North America  being ranked number 141 overall (and 8th amongst software vendors) on the Inc. 5000 and number 107 on the Deloitte Fast 500. For more information, or for a free trial, please visit http://www.printerlogic.com. Questions? Watch our video or connect with us on Twitter at @PrinterLogic or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Google+.
Wayne Homes employees prepare to pass out sweatshirts and socks to those in need. To be able to see the looks on their faces when we handed them their items was an amazing feeling.

On September 13, employees of Ohio-based custom home builder Wayne Homes volunteered and distributed clothing at Project Homeless Connect of Stark County at the Canton Civic Center.

Each year Project Homeless Connect hosts an event that networks those who are in danger of becoming homeless, are homeless or are getting re-established after being homeless with agencies and services that give them a hand up.

Wayne Homes employees volunteered for the event during work hours as part of the companys Random Acts of Kindness program. Through the Random Acts of Kindness program employees are encouraged to contribute to the community where they live and work.

At Wayne Homes, we feel that is very important to be an active part of your community, and it is even part of our company core values, Stephanie Yates, Wayne Homes Steering Committee member said. With living in Stark County for my entire life, it means so much to me that I am able to give back to those in my community who are in need and that the company I work for is so passionate about helping them, as well.

This year the company went beyond volunteering at the event and distributed sweatshirts and socks to those in need. With the help of trade partners, Wayne Homes was able to distribute over 3,000 pairs of socks and 730 sweatshirts.

I love volunteering with Project Homeless Connect every year, Brittany Burkhart said. Its a great way to give back to our community. This year the sock and sweatshirt hand out was a huge success and I could not be more proud of our company for providing that for so many people in need. To be able to see the looks on their faces when we handed them their items was an amazing feeling.

A total of 26 Wayne Homes employees from the 10 offices volunteered during the event, including Jeremy Hill, Tracy Gershom, Dana Huntley, Brittany Burkhart, Laura Kerchner, Morgan Keener, John Logsdon, Cheryl Chamberlin, Chelsea Coughlan, Kathy Pierson, Mike Sanders, Amy Kraus, Ben Vogel, Keith Drollinger, William Boyd, Erin Collins, Jen Collinsworth, Chris Ward, Megan Moncrief, Mike Leckie-Ewing, Anne Fowkes, Katie Logsdon, Stephanie Lowe, Jennifer Kovach, Tiffany Ury and Stephanie Yates.

Many of the employees walked away from the event with touching personal experiences and appreciative attitudes.

For my first time volunteering for this event, I had a heavy heart all day, Jennifer Kovach said. Seeing all kinds of folks come through there and each having a different priority of needs, truly made me appreciate what I have. I am proud I work for a company that supports this cause. It was a fulfilling experience and I would definitely do it again.

For more information about Wayne Homes, including current job openings, visit WayneHomes.com.

About Wayne Homes

Wayne Homes is a custom home builder in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia (see all Model Home Centers). We offer more than 40 fully customizable floor plans and a team dedicated to providing the best experience in the home building industry. For more information, Ask Julie, our online sales team, by Live Chat or call us at (866) 253-6807.
Today, the UN Foundation, the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN NGLS), and the Global Innovation Exchange, in collaboration with the SDG Philanthropy Platform, the Global Entrepreneurs Council, and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network announce the second annual Solutions Summit to take place on September 21 at UN Headquarters.The effort was also supported by three private sector leaders who are working to integrate an SDG solutions-based approach into their business: Qualcomm Wireless Reach, MasterCard and Guggenheim Partners.

During the Solutions Summit, a group of selected global innovators will present their sustainable solution pitch to an audience of senior policymakers who have the means to pave solid regulatory foundations, investors who care deeply about long-term change and impact, and industry leaders who are able to deploy quickly and at scale. The gathering will serve as a catalyst to convene resources and talent around solution-makers.

If the global community is to live up to our commitments to end extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change by 2030, we will need to see more solutions that tackle these issues and help reach the most vulnerable people as quickly as possible, says Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation. The Solutions Summit will help spotlight exceptional innovators who are developing solutions that are making progress on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The first Solutions Summit in 2015 immediately followed the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by all countries. It showed that people already have extraordinary solutions in progress to some of our most complex challenges. For 2016, the Solutions Summit will highlight projects that advance the objectives of 5 conferences centered on themes where the international community has identified the need for early action on the SDG agenda: the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants, the UN Habitat III Conference, the UN Climate Change Conference, the Open Government Partnership Global Summit, and the UN Oceans Conference.

The ten finalists were identified through a global call for solutions and selected through a transparent and participatory process coordination by UN NGLS. We convened a regionally and gender balanced Selection Committee of leading innovators and technologists from around the world to review nearly 440 applications, explains Susan Alzner, Head of the UN-NGLS NY office. The Committee and the Solutions Summit co-organizers worked together to assess projects for their potential to create significant positive global impact if scaled.

All applicants could select to have their profile and project information uploaded to the Global Innovation Exchange  an online community of more than 10,000 innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors addressing global challenges. The Exchange connects innovators including students, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and civil society organizations to global funding, markets, and support to help accelerate their vision. Funding opportunities on the Exchange range from awards and prizes to grants and seed funding.

2016 Solutions Summit Finalists

Rainier Mallol, Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiology (Dominican Republic)

WHO reported the incidence of dengue cases increased from 2.2 million in 2010 to 3.2 million in 2015. Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiologys (AIME) platform provides critical information for disease prediction and outbreak management via machine learning and artificial intelligence with the goal to identify the location of the next disease outbreak up to three months before it occurs. AIME can predict the outbreak of Dengue Fever with 87% accuracy through an algorithm that uses 11 different variables like weather data, construction data, dengue death data and other points. http://aime.life

Christopher White, Atmocean (United States)

Carbon sequestration, or the drawdown of carbon already in the atmosphere, is one potential solution for climate change. Atmocean leverages the natural power of the ocean to green arid lands and freshwater to rural coastal areas. It starts offshore with wave energy converters that operate ocean pumps driven by waves that move pressurized sea-water to an onshore desalination plant where the sea water can be converted into fresh water. The fresh water is then delivered to drip irrigation pipe networks, creating new agricultural cropland in the rural coastal desert regions. http://atmocean.com

Zubaida Bai, Ayzh (India)

Female refugees and migrants continue to suffer from a lack of access to essential health products around vulnerable times of menstruation and childbirth. Ayzh has an innovative model for developing and distributing simple, low-cost products that meet the unique needs of women in low-resource settings, targeting the entire continuum of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health. Since 2012, Ayzh has sold more than 250,000 products to more than 300 institutions in 15 countries. http://www.ayzh.com

Emmanuel Noah, BenBen (Ghana)

In Ghana, land-records are paper based which are easily lost, destroyed or corrupted. The lack of trust in these analog records leads to long court cases and often violent disputes. Without trusted land records financial institutions are unable to provide loans, individuals cannot prove ownership, and land investment stays stagnant. BenBen is an interactive map platform and census database that aims to tackle the inefficiencies of land administration to promote investment, reduce poverty and encourage transparent natural-resource management. http://benben.com.gh

Fabrice Schnoller, DareWin (France)

Can whales help us minimize the effects of climate change, keep our oxygen supply intact and increase food production? DareWin aims is to bring to light the complex language of whales to unlock some of the mysteries of these highly evolved, large brained, sentient life forms. With advanced filming, recording and free diving techniques, DareWin translates their language and brings these animals depth, awareness and global importance to millions. http://www.darewin.org

Asher Hasan, DoctHERs (Pakistan)

Three out of every four female medical school graduates in Pakistan is excluded from the health workforce, while 90% of families in urban slum and rural areas lack access to affordable, quality healthcare. doctHERs is an exclusive network of home-based, female doctors that creates inclusive employment for women in emerging markets while delivering high-quality healthcare in communities to prevent maternal-child mortality. doctHERs has launched 8 telemedicine clinics, treating more than 15,000 patients in just over 12 months while generating over $140,000 in operating revenue. http://www.docthers.com

Zuraina Zaharin, Ecoloo (Sweden)

2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation. Ecoloo is a sustainable toilet system that uses a special formulated bacterial culture to treat human waste and transform it into natural fertilizer. In nearly ten years Ecoloos have been installed in more than 16 countries including Kenya, municipalities in Borneo, festivals in Portugal, factories in Mongolia and Korea, off grid housing for disaster areas in Malaysia and the Philippines, UNDP headquarters in Uganda and UNESCO heritage sites in Jordan. Plans are underway to begin producing up to 1 million toilets per year. http://www.ecoloogroup.com

Ida Jeng, REFUNITE (Denmark)

In the past, people missing family who had exhausted personal networks could only turn to international humanitarian agencies, often having to wait for months or years without updates. REFUNITE set out to change this in 2008 with the first-ever global, web-based search tool for refugees. Now with 500,000 refugees looking for family through the platform, REFUNITE is currently the largest user-driven family tracing platform in the world. Today, REFUNITE registers 100,000 refugees and displaced persons annually and has successfully reconnected more than 20,000 family members. https://refunite.org

ElsaMarie DSilva, SafeCity (India)

According to UN Women, 1 in 3 women face some kind of sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. Yet 80% of girls and women do not talk about abuse for multiple reasons  fear, cultural issues, victim blaming  being a few. To mitigate the lack of reporting and create safer public spaces, SafeCity crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces via a web app. Women and girls can report their experience anonymously, allowing them to read other's experiences thus giving them courage to break their silence. http://safecity.in

Hend Alhinnawi, Syria Tracker (United States)

After the conflict broke out in Syria in March 2011, a group of concerned citizens created Syria Tracker, a crowd sourced online platform that allows people in Syria to share what was happening to and around them. Since its launch, hundreds of thousands of eyewitness and other reports have been submitted, giving ordinary citizens a chance to tell the world their stories. http://www.humanitariantracker.org

###

For any press inquiries, please contact Eric Porterfield at eporterfield(at)unfoundation(dot)org.
Rocket Boys Festival One of the Festival's signature events gives students the opportunity to join Hickam and the other Rocket Boys to launch rockets at the Cape Coalwood launch pad.

The Rocket Boys/October Sky Festival is coming to Beckley, West Virginia the first weekend in October, just in time for peak mountain fall foliage, featuring best-selling author Homer Hickam and his fellow Rocket Boys, and special celebrity guest of honor Hollywood actor Chad Lindberg, who played Homers friend and fellow Rocket Boy ODell in the movie October Sky.

The Rocket Boys Festival central location is Beckleys New River Park, which boasts an authentic exhibition working coal mine that will be open for discounted tours, taking riders on a motorized tour 1,500 feet underground. The park also features an award-winning youth museum and planetarium, great Appalachian food, a complete full size replica of a 1950s mining town like Coalwood, a miners museum, and more.

Fans of Homer Hickams New York Times #1 best-seller Rocket Boys and the movie version October Sky will have the opportunity to enjoy free autograph signings and photo ops with actual Rocket Boys Hickam, Roy Lee Cooke, Jimmy ODell Carroll and Billy Rose as well as movie cast member Chad Lindberg.

Chad is one of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood. His film and television appearances in addition to "October Sky" include lead and supporting roles in "The Fast and the Furious," "The Last Samurai," "Alex Cross," "I Spit On Your Grave," "The Rookie," "NCIS," "CSI:NY," "Cold Case," and "Law & Order: SVU."

Fans of October Sky can enjoy a special movie screening Friday night at the Raleigh Theater as part of the festival hosted by Chad and the Rocket Boys. Prior to the screening, Chad will conduct an informal actors workshop and Inside the Actors Studio Q&A session, with behind-the-scenes details on the movies filming and how Hollywood made Coalwood come to life on the big screen.

One of the highlights of the annual Rocket Boys Festival is the writers workshop hosted by Homer Hickam for aspiring and seasoned authors, as well as book signings from other notable writers including Bram Stoker Award winning author Michael Knost.

The Rocket Boys Festival is topped off with a huge Chili Night celebration Saturday night October 1st, which annually attracts thousands of visitors to downtown Beckley.

One of the Rocket Boys Festival signature events gives dozens of students from schools all over America the opportunity to join Homer Hickam and the other Rocket Boys to launch rockets at New River Parks hilltop Cape Coalwood launch pad. Rocket kits and launch supplies will be available for sale at the festival. Construction and launch is easy  even for first timers. Students from Homer Hickams alma mater Virginia Tech will be there to assist.

More information on the Rocket Boys/October Sky Festival, including a complete schedule of events and lodging information, is available online at http://www.rocketboysfestival.com. The city of Beckley is located on Interstate 64 in southern West Virginia, and is also accessible via Beckley/Raleigh County Airport and Amtrak service on the Cardinal line.

For media interview requests prior to the event with Rocket Boys Homer Hickam, Roy Lee Cooke, ODell Carroll or Billy Rose, or Hollywood actor Chad Lindberg, contact: Allen Media Strategies Burke Allen at (703) 589-8960 or by email burke(at)allenmediastrategies(dot)com.
Having served in a law enforcement agency, as a consultant, as part of an in-house team, and now in the role of strategic partner to in-house counsel, I hope my experience will contribute to the discussion

Clutch Group, a leading legal, risk, and compliance analytics and consulting firm is pleased to announce that Aman Chee, Senior Director at Clutch Group, will be speaking at the 2016 Annual Conference of In-House Lawyers organized by the Law Society of Hong Kong.

The topic of discussion will be A Counsels Role in Internal Investigation and Legal Advice Privilege. Mr. Chee will be joined by Mr. Warren Ganesh, Senior Consultant, Smyth & Co., Mr. Yong Kai Wong, Managing Director, Head of Legal and Compliance, CITIC Capital, and Mr. Lief Thassim , Co-General Counsel, Deutsche Bank AG, Hong Kong (Moderator).

Im honored to have been invited by the Law Society of Hong Kong to speak on a subject with which Im very familiar, says Aman Chee, Senior Director, Clutch Group. Having served in a law enforcement agency, as a consultant, as part of an in-house team, and now in the role of strategic partner to in-house counsel, I hope my experience will contribute to the discussion.

Mr. Chee leads the Clutch Groups Hong Kong office  opened in June of 2015  with the mandate to lead the organizations expansion strategy in the APAC region. He possesses 20 years of experience in financial crime investigation, including fraud, corruption, money-laundering and credit card counterfeiting, and has assisted in related court prosecutions.

Mr. Chee spent 14 years with the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) of Hong Kong, an organization dedicated to fighting corruption through investigation, prevention, and education, where he moved up to the rank of Chief Investigator. He was a core team member in a special task force jointly set up with the Hong Kong Police concerning a major cross-border bank-related corruption and AML investigation. Afterwards, Mr Chee joined Ernst & Young as a Senior Manager in Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services. He later joined Deutsche Bank as the Head of Anti-Fraud and Forensics.

Mr. Chees experience has seen him become a frequent industry speaker. Most recently, he spoke to graduate trainees from the Securities & Futures Commission of Hong Kong on the topic of Managing Financial Crime Risks and Digital Investigation. Earlier this year, he led a panel session on Employee Misconduct Investigation at the InnoXcell Annual Symposium in Hong Kong and spoke at the Managing Financial Crime Risks and Digital Investigation seminar hosted by the Hong Kong Institute of Bankers in 2015. Previously, he also spoke to a group of delegates of China Banking Regulatory Commission on Anti-Fraud and Corruption Investigation and Prevention in Singapore and on Managing Anti-Corruption Investigation in an international conference organized by the United Nations Offices on Drugs and Crimes in Thailand.

The Law Society of Hong Kong is a professional association for solicitors in Hong Kong.

About Clutch

Clutch Group is a leading legal, risk, and compliance analytics and managed services firm headquartered in Washington D.C., with offices in NY, Chicago, London, Bangalore, Zurich and Hong Kong. The firm is dedicated to helping companies in the financial services, life sciences, and energy industries solve complex problems presented by the exponential growth of data and regulation. Clutchs global team of attorneys, consultants, and technologists leverage deep subject-matter expertise and Clutch.IQ, a suite of cutting-edge data analytics solutions, to help clients manage large-scale litigation and investigations, conduct comprehensive communications surveillance, and re-engineer their internal legal and compliance functions. Clutch has been recognized by industry authorities including Nelson Hall, the New York Law Journal, Chambers Global, Frost & Sullivan, and Dun & Bradstreet and is regularly featured across major industry and market publications. For more information, visit http://www.clutchgroup.com.
Admiral Kuznetsov Russian aircraft carrier

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the US should be flattered that Russia plans to deploy their only aircraft carrier, the 26 year-old Admiral Kuznetsov, off Syria's coast for its first combat deployment.

A successful deployment of a full-blown aircraft carrier represents the kind of sophisticated military task only a first-rate world power can pull off, and that seems to be exactly what Russia hopes for.

Much like their 2015 salvo of cruise missiles fired from the Caspian sea into Syria, the event will likely serve as a commercial for Russian military exports  one of the few bright spots in Russia's ailing economy.

The deployment will seek to present the best and brightest of Russia's resurgent military. The Kuznetsov, which has suffered from a litany of mechanical failures and often requires tow boats, will stay tight to Syria's shores due to the limited range of the carrier's air wing.

The air wing, comprised of only 15 or so Su-33s and MiG-29s and a handful of helicopters, does not even have half of the US Nimitz class carrier's 60 plus planes.

Furthermore, the carrier lacks plane launching catapults. Instead, the carrier relies on a ski-jump platform that limits how much fuel and ordnance the Russian jets can carry.

Even so, the Russian jets aboard will be some of the latest models in Russia's entire inventory, according to Russian state-run media. The bombs they carry will be guided, a sharp departure from Russia's usual indiscriminate use of "dumb" or unguided munitions which can drift unpredictably when dropped from altitude.

Su33 kuznetsov

Russian media quotes a military source as saying that with the new X-38 guided bombs, "we reinforce our aviation group and bring in completely new means of destruction to the region." The same report states the bombs are accurate to within a few meters, which isn't ideal, but an improvement.

Story continues

Indeed, the Kuznetsov's entire flight deck will function as somewhat of a showroom for Russian military goods. China operates a Soviet-designed carrier, as does India. Both of those nations have purchased Russian planes in the past. A solid performance from the jets in Syria would bode well for their prospects as exports, even as India struggles to get its current crop of Russian-made jets up to grade.

"Despite its resemblance to the land-based version of the MiG-29, this is a completely different aircraft," Russian media quotes a defence official as saying of the MiG-29K carrier-based variant.

MiG 29K aircraft INS Vikramaditya indian navy aircraft carrier

"This applies to its stealth technologies, a new system of in-flight refueling, folding wings and mechanisms by which the aircraft has the ability to perform short take-offs and land at low speeds."

But the Russian jets practice on land bases that simulate the Kuznetsov, and any US Navy pilot will tell you that landing on a bobbing airstrip sailing along at sea is an entirely different beast.

One thing Russia's upcoming carrier deployment does have going for it will be having the world's premier naval and carrier power, the US, at least nominally aligned with them in a recently brokered cease-fire.

NOW WATCH: Watch Russian warplanes fly dangerously close by a US Navy ship





More From Business Insider


Prof. Luciana Lagana receives Best Political Statement Movie Award at 2016 AOF Film Festival The fact that this movie is winning awards suggests that the topics of LGBTQ bullying, violence, homelessness and extreme discrimination are close to the hearts of many people, including LGBTQ allies. Past News Releases RSS CSUN Professor Luciana Lagana and...

CSUN Professor Luciana Lagana and...

CSUN Psychology Professor Luciana...

Psychology professor, actor, host, director and social impact filmmaker Luciana Lagana received the Best Political Statement Movie Award at the 2016 Action on Film (AOF) International Film Festival in Monrovia, California for her feature documentary LGBT UNITED.

This film is currently being tested for its anti-bias value at California State University, Northridge. It won several awards on the film festival circuit, including a diversity award at the Long Beach Indie Film Festival 2016, the California Endowment Special Sons and Brothers Award for positive and balanced depictions of young men of color.

The fact that this movie is winning awards suggests that the topics of LGBTQ bullying, violence, homelessness and extreme discrimination are close to the hearts of many people, including LGBTQ allies, stated Dr. Luciana. One of those allies is a young lawyer who is a very dedicated LGBTQ rights advocate. In the film, she provided a heartfelt description of her LGBTQ family members struggles that motivated her to become an ally for LGBTQ human rights.

Not all the interviewees in LGBT UNITED are LGBTQ members. The LGBTQ ally interviewed in my movie was very direct and at times struggled to hold back her tears on camera as she recounted what happened to some of her LGBTQ family members. She stated that witnessing many examples of human rights violations at a young age, without being able to help her loved ones who had to endure severe discrimination and violence just because they were not heterosexual, motivated her to become an attorney and fight for justice for this discriminated minority. She is certainly a strong role model of human rights activism, Dr. Luciana concluded.

Written by Stefanie Friesen

Luciana Lagana is a caring clinical and experimental psychologist. She is also a professor of psychology, gerontology, womens health and sexuality at CSUN, where she teaches classes and mentors many undergraduate and graduate students. Additionally, since 2002, she has been conducting government-funded research at CSUN on the physical, psychological, sexual and social health of ethnically diverse, primarily low-income older women. Since 2006, she has also been pursuing her creative endeavors by studying acting, TV and radio hosting, screenwriting, directing and producing in Los Angeles. She has over 50 IMDb credits for hosting and acting in many independent feature films, TV pilots and web series as well as several credits for her award-winning screenwriting, directing and producing. She is the writer/lead actor/director/producer of the 2014 award-winning satirical web series INTIMATE TEMP AGENCY on helping young people with special needs find employment, which won Best Trailer at the 2015 Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival among other awards. Her 2014 DR. LUCIANA SHOW  AGING AND FALLING web series won numerous awards, including Best Educational Show at the 2015 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival. Within the past two years, she co-wrote, hosted and co-produced the TV pilot DR. LUCIANA ON AGING AND FALLING and also wrote, hosted, directed and produced three award-winning social impact feature documentaries, UNDERSTANDING PAIN IN OLDER AGE, LGBT UNITED and AGING AND FALLING, which are currently on the film festival circuit.
Ambarish Mohan Anahata is delighted to appoint Ambarish as a senior Java Architect for all our projects. With his support and skills, Anahata is gearing up to ramp up operations in Victoria and is aiming to delight their customers with exceptional product features.

A highly reputed software application development services firm, Anahata Technologies Pty Ltd has recently appointed a Java Architect, Mr. Ambarish Mohan to lead their team of Java devlopers. Mr Mohan has a vast experience of 13 years in this domain and has hands-on-skills in JavaFX and Java EE. To date, Mr. Mohan has led teams of over 20 developers and worked for a huge number of clients across Europe, Asia and Australia. He has developed numerous software applications for industries like Healthcare, Education, Publishing and Construction. The company is relying on his skills and expertise to meet the needs of their global clients for top class software applications.

Anahata Technologies Pty Ltd is one of the most sought names in the industry for providing top class software development services. These services are rendered by their team of highly skilled and experienced software developers who have wide experience of this domain and a high level of expertise in Oracle Java, JavaFX, Java EE, Linux and My SQL databases. Today, the company stands among the top software development service providers in Australia for offering a range of services like Business Process Improvement, E-Commerce Development, Enterprise Software Development, Cloud Development, IT Staff Provisioning and many others. Anahatas experts utilise the latest development tools to ensure that the software applications are developed as per their clients specifications and help them in carrying out their business processes smoothly.

Anahata Technologies Pty Ltd has been in this business since 2010. Today, they are consulted by business owners from every nook and corner of the world for their top class software application development services. This reputed software development company, based out of Perth and Melbourne has partnered with a number of world renowned brands like Oracle, MYOB Developer, NetOrigin, ATY Advisory and many others. Business owners planning to opt for the services of this Oracle Java specialised Gold partner can get in touch with them by filling a simple questionnaire present on their official website, http://www.anahata.net.au. In addition to software application development, they also provide a free initial assessment to businesses located within the Perth or Melbourne metropolitan area.

Talking more about the role of Ambarish, Mr. Pablo Rodriguez, Founder, Owner and CEO of Anahata Technologies Pty Ltd stated, Anahata is delighted to appoint Ambarish as a senior Java Architect for all our projects. With his support and skills, Anahata is gearing up to ramp up operations in Victoria and is aiming to delight their customers with exceptional product features and services.

About Anahata Technologies Pty Ltd

Founded in Western Australia in 2010 by Pablo Rodriguez Pina, Anahata Technologies Pty Ltd is an Australian privately owned Software Development Company with presence in Perth and Melbourne specializing in the analysis, design, implementation and support of cost-effective custom built software applications.

Anahatas preferred delivery approach is an iterative, agile, customer centric software development process where business analysts and developers work with the customers to gather requirements and an understanding of the current business processes, and to design and deliver a software solution that not only meets the businesss needs, but is also designed to improve business productivity.

Anahatas preferred technological choice is to deliver cross-platform solutions based on open standards and open source technology that ensure stability, compatibility, and security over a long application life span. This enables a reduction in upfront and ongoing licensing fees.

Anahata is an Oracle Certified Partner and delivers custom software solutions based on Oracle Technology, such as Java, Linux, Java Enterprise Edition, MySQL or Oracle Database. Anahata is a member of Open Source Industry Australia and contributes a number of Java libraries to the open source community.

Anahata is a WA Government Recommended ICT Business Solutions Implementation Services Provider.

Anahata is a certified MYOB developer partner providing Custom Software solutions that can integrate seamlessly with MYOB software packages such as MYOB AccountRight desktop or MYOB AccountRight Live (cloud).

For more information, please visit: http://www.anahata.net.au
Relias Learning, the leader in online training and compliance solutions for the healthcare market, announced the first major wave of employment opportunities in the area as it continues an aggressive growth track fueled by domestic acquisitions and organic growth. This is the start of what will grow to 450 new positions at the Cary location over the next five years.

There are currently more than 50 positions to fill as a result of the ever-changing health landscape and need for more sophisticated and impactful training solutions. The company recently ventured into mobile training applications and population health management analytics as a result of market demands and seeking research and development, sales and marketing and administrative professionals.

Were looking for co-workers who have a thirst for constant learning and will help Relias continue to grow and expand our continuum of care, said Jim Triandiflou, CEO, Relias Learning. We are committed to measurably improving the lives of the most vulnerable members of society and those who care for them. With the degree of talent here in the Triangle, we are confident in the impactful change we can make.

Relias Learning provides training for those serving in post-acute care, health and human services, intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism and ABA and public safety. The expansive education modules and certification programs have been administered to more than three million people in the United States. Through its training and professional development platforms, there are more than 60 million complete courses, with 5,000 organizations and 2,800,000 learners served.

We walk the talk at Relias by providing more training per employee than our competitors, said Triandiflou. Education and strategic development are critical. Thats why every new hire participates in a two-week corporate boot camp to assure they are ready to make a difference. Were a learning company, and we take this seriously!

Job candidates can learn more about careers at Relias Learning at http://www.reliaslearning.com.

About Relias Learning

Relias Learning provides an online training solution for senior care, health and human services, intellectual and developmental disabilities, law enforcement and correctional facilities. Relias offers unrivaled content, provides the ability for customers to create unique content including live training, and allows for the demonstration of skill and performance, all in a singular, powerful learning management system. Learn more about Relias Learning at http://www.reliaslearning.com.

Media Contact:

Jen Caro

Largemouth Communications

Jennifer(at)largemouthpr(dot)com

(919) 459-6456
Master Your Card, a community empowerment program sponsored by Mastercard, today joined educators from Marco Antonio Firebaugh High School in Lynwood, Calif., to launch the Master Your Card interactive, online financial education program in East Los Angeles schools. The launch marks the beginning of a community initiative aimed at providing financial education to students and empowering them to make smart financial decisions. In addition to East Los Angeles, Master Your Card is also working with schools in Baltimore, New York City, the Mississippi Delta and Richmond, Va.

By educating young people and providing them with the information and skills they need, we are putting them on a path for financial stability and success, said Fabian Nunez, former speaker of the California Assembly and chair of the Master Your Card: Oportunidad Advisory Board. Through the Master Your Card program, we are providing people of all ages with the tools, information and resources they need to confidently navigate todays modern, digital economy.

Master Your Card partnered with EverFi, Inc., the nations leading education technology company, to bring this financial education program to students at no cost to schools or taxpayers. The program uses the latest in simulation and gaming technologies to bring financial concepts to life for todays digital generation.

Marco Antonio Firebaugh High School is focused on preparing students to be problem solvers, lifelong learners and productive members of society, said Hector Preciado, the schools principal. Financial knowledge is a foundation for all those characteristics. We are grateful for this partnership with Master Your Card, which will allow us to provide innovative resources and new opportunities to students in Lynwood Unified and the East Los Angeles community.

The financial education program is mapped to national financial literacy standards. Taught in the classroom, the program offers more than six hours of instruction on a variety of financial topics, including credit scores, insurance, payment cards, student loans, mortgages, taxes, stocks, savings and other critical concepts. The interactive, online platform uniquely tracks the progress and performance of each user, further helping to set students on a path to financial security, stability and success.

###

About Master Your Card

Master Your Card is a community empowerment program sponsored by Mastercard to help consumer advocacy groups, small business groups and governments appreciate the value of credit, prepaid and debit cards as access points to an economically empowering electronic payments network. Learn more at http://www.masteryourcardusa.org.

About EverFi

EverFi, Inc. is the leading education technology company focused on teaching, assessing, and certifying K-12 and college students in the critical skills they need for life. The company teams with major corporations and foundations to provide the programs at no cost to K-12 schools. Some of Americas leading CEOs and venture capital firms are EverFi investors including Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Twitter founder Evan Williams, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. Learn more at everfi.com.
Andrew Heiberger, Founder and CEO TOWN Residential Renters are poised to reap the benefits of this changing market. They have their choice of amenity-rich apartments and opportunities to upgrade their current apartment with little to no increase in their monthly housing budget.

Townresdential.com provides comprehensive information on the citys exciting inventory and is a regarded destination for savvy buyers, sellers and renters alike. To best serve the citys rental customers and provide them with access to the most options and in turn best service available, TOWN Residential has launched a section dedicated to no fee listings. These listings will also be widely syndicated to popular real estate search engines such as nyt.com, and renthop.com, among others.

TOWN Residential Representatives have extensive experience in the leasing of Manhattans luxury properties, with many having helped transform the industry throughout their careers. Through the inclusion of no fee listings, prospective renters can search the firms robust database and engage the deep expertise of the TOWN Representatives at no cost.

Approximately 37,000 rental units are anticipated to come online in Manhattan between January 2016 through 2018. In the changing rental environment marked by increased supply, incentives such as owner paid commissions now account for more than 20% of all transactions.

"TOWN continues to market hundreds of exclusive listings that command a standard 15 percent commission, and we are pleased to now offer this additional owner-paid inventory, said Andrew Heiberger, founder and CEO of TOWN Residential and foremost rental expert. The one-click availability of these listings coupled with TOWNs best in class service will change the residential landscape.

In my 28 years in the industry, I have never seen this level of inventory, shared Heiberger. Renters are increasingly flexible and are willing to compromise on views and even location. They will not compromise on quality of finishes or price and should never compromise on quality of experience.

To competitively position properties, developers are focused on delivering prime properties with condo-like finishes and all-encompassing amenities such as common workspaces, sky-high lounges, childrens playrooms, tween spaces, and rooftop retreats. Real estate professionals have also noted a softening of building policies, ranging from application requirements to pet and roommate accommodations, in an effort to entice prospective renters.

Renters are poised to reap the benefits of this changing market. They have their choice of amenity-rich apartments and opportunities to upgrade their current apartment with little to no increase in their monthly housing budget, said Dan Marrello, Leasing Director and past chairman of the Rental Committee for the Real Estate Board of New York. The inclusion of no fee listings within our website speaks directly to the level of transparency and commitment to service that are hallmark values of our firm.

As the Founder and CEO of TOWN Residential, Andrew Heiberger has been the driving force behind the companys business strategy and long-term vision. Under his thoughtful leadership, the firm boasts a team of over 450 licensed Representatives and professionals within seven strategically located neighborhood offices. Since launching in December 2010, TOWN has transacted more than $9.5 billion while remaining committed to redefining the way in which a real estate services company both operates and delivers.

A successful entrepreneur and New York real estate industry veteran with the oversight of more than 50,000 sales and leasing transactions to his credit, Heiberger has founded and served as CEO of several successful companies. In 1994, at the age of 26 and just out of law school, Heiberger founded Citi Habitats, his first residential real estate brokerage. Over the next 10 years, he orchestrated the company's tremendous growth from two brokers in one office to over 1,000 licensed Representatives and staff in 20 locations throughout Manhattan. In June of 2004, Citi Habitats was acquired by NRT Incorporated.
As deaths from the famine in Northeastern Nigeria increase and the international humanitarian community grows increasingly aware of famine condition there, scene of a years-long terrorist insurgency, the American University of Nigeria (AUN) has instructed its community-based networks to prepare to care for massive numbers of hungry and starving people.

Nigeria is on the brink of a famine unlike any we have ever seen anywhere, said the UNs Assistant Secretary-General Toby Lanzer. He said nearly a quarter of a million children in Nigerias northeast are severely malnourished.

According to AUN President Margee Ensign, the number of at risk people is between three and five million. Getting an accurate estimate is difficult, she said, because probably more than one million people, many of them women and children, are in remote areas that have become more isolated due to damage inflicted on roads and bridges by the Boko Haram terrorists.

Although the terrorist fighters have been pushed from their strongholds by the Nigerian army, most farmers fled their land to escape being killed, or werent able to plant crops at all, both factors contributing to the current crisis. During a recent crop seed distribution funded in part by the U.S. government and AUNs founder and a former Nigerian vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, internally displaced people who recently returned to their villages to farm were so desperately hungry that they wanted to eat the seeds. Instead, food was provided to the farmers and their families so that the seeds would be planted and more people would have food later.

According to Dr. Ensign, enough seeds were distributed to grow beans, sorghum and other staples to feed about 75,000 people, a fraction of those in need. This was a valuable experiment to demonstrate that we could actually get the seeds to remote areas to help the most desperate people, she said. Were ready to use the local networks weve developed, consisting of Muslim, Christian and community leaders, to distribute food to those most in need.

AUN and the Adamawa Peace Initiative (API), at the height of the violence caused by Boko Haram, fed nearly 300,000 displaced people in and around the city of Yola, where the University is located. More than 100,000 displaced people continue to be fed, often on the grounds of local mosques and churches. Most of the funding comes from local sources. But the scope of the current disaster will require massive international intervention, according to University and other experts.

John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, last week in Washington, D.C., told members of the Congressional Black Caucus and others interested in U.S. foreign policy towards Africa that he is very concerned about how little is known about whats happening in northeast Nigeria. He said that the Doctors Without Borders organization has reported that children in refugee camps are dying daily from malnutrition and related illnesses. Its heartbreaking as it is unnecessary, he said.

He lauded AUNs programs and said that they are the right mix of deftly delivered humanitarian assistance while simultaneously engaged in womens empowerment, conflict resolution, workforce training, and literacy instruction for the regions large population of out-of-school children. As a world community, we cant just deal with the symptoms of these crises, he said. We need sustained, collaborative effort to find long-term solutions.

Donations to AUN-API programs can be made via the American University Foundation at http://www.aunf.org.

# # #

About American University of Nigeria (AUN)

The American University of Nigeria (AUN), located in Yola in Adamawa state in northeastern Nigeria, is the only American-style university in Sub-Saharan Africa. Founded in 2004, AUNs unique mission is to be a development university that helps its community and society achieve equitable and sustainable prosperity, where everyone has the freedom and opportunity to pursue their dreams in peace. AUN teaches the importance of development from within: all AUN undergraduate students are required to work on one of the universitys development projects. Students thus graduate with both theoretical knowledge from the classroom as well as the inspiration and ability to apply their academic know-how to find practical solutions in the real world. They become leaders in helping to solve the regions most pressing challenges.

About the Adamawa Peace Initiative (API)

The Adamawa Peace Initiative was formed in 2012 to respond to the threat of violence and growing unrest. With various programs, including Peace through Sports, aimed at fostering peace through education, empowerment and community development, this partnership brought the academic leaders of AUN and the religious and community leaders of API together to create a unified peace and reconciliation strategy that has had a broad impact. The cooperation and progress that have already emerged from this locally developed peace initiative and their programs could ultimately serve as a model for similar efforts far beyond the borders of Adamawa State and Nigeria.

About American University of Nigeria Foundation (AUNF)

The American University of Nigeria Foundation is an independent tax exempt U.S.-based 501(c)3 nonprofit. AUNFs mission is to raise funds for the American University of Nigeria to provide education for vulnerable Nigerian youth and humanitarian assistance (including food, medicine and clothing) to Internally Displaced Persons who have fled from Boko Haram. To learn more about the American University of Nigerian Foundation and to donate, visit http://www.aunf.org.

Conover + Gould Strategic Communications is sending this information on behalf of the American University of Nigeria. Additional information is on file with the U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia.
Texas trial and appellate firm, Godwin Bowman & Martinez PC is pleased to announce that name shareholders Donald E. Godwin, Bruce W. Bowman Jr. and Jenny L. Martinez, along with two additional attorneys from its Dallas office, are being honored on the 2016 Texas Super Lawyers list of Texas' top attorneys.

Peer recognition of this type is very gratifying," says Mr. Godwin, the firm Chairman and CEO. Our attorneys at Godwin Bowman & Martinez are committed to a very high level of excellence, and to see that commitment acknowledged makes us very proud."

2016 marks the 14th consecutive Texas Super Lawyers selection for Mr. Godwin, whose Business Litigation practice has been recognized each year since the publications 2003 inaugural edition. Beyond that honor, Mr. Godwin's received an 8th selection to the list of the Top 100 Super Lawyers in Texas in 2016, and his 12th selection to the Top 100 Lawyers in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and a member of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA), Mr. Godwin is one of the most highly-regarded attorneys in Texas. He has been recognized among the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America, in Chambers USA, the American City Business Journals Whos Who in Energy, The Best Lawyers in America, D Magazine's Best Lawyers in Dallas and Texas Lawbook's 50 Lions of the Texas Bar among others.

Earning selection to the Texas Super Lawyers list for the eleventh year is name shareholder, Executive Vice President and Dallas Business Litigation shareholder Bruce W. Bowman Jr. Board certified in Civil Trial Law, and AV-Rated by Martindale-Hubbell, Mr. Bowman brings nearly a half century of experience and litigation success to his clients.

Listed for the third time in Super Lawyers is Board certified Appellate shareholder Shawn M. McCaskill, while name shareholder and Executive Committee member Jenny L. Martinez is being honored on the Texas Super Lawyers list for the second time. Both Mr. McCaskill and Ms. Martinez have also been recognized multiple times in past years among Thomson Reuters' Texas Rising Stars. The Firm is also pleased to welcome shareholder, Carolyn Raines, to the list of Texas Super Lawyers for the first time in 2016. Ms. Raines is being honored for her work in Commercial Litigation.

Texas Super Lawyers selections are based on peer nominations from attorneys across the state. A panel of lawyers chosen by the publications editors makes the final selections, with less than 5 percent of Texas attorneys earning spots on the list. The full listing appears in the October 2016 issues of Texas Monthly and Texas Super Lawyers magazines, and is available online at http://www.superlawyers.com.

Godwin Bowman & Martinez PC is a trial and appellate law firm based in Dallas, Texas. The firm focuses on a wide array of legal matters including commercial litigation, appellate law, employment law, energy, zoning and condemnation, accountants and lawyers professional liability defense, family law, bankruptcy, trust and estate litigation and more. The firm's attorneys represent Fortune 500 companies, middle-market leaders and individuals in some of the nation's most public and high-stakes trials, and have done so for more than 35 years. To learn more about Godwin Bowman & Martinez, visit http://www.godwinlaw.com.

For more information, please contact Ed Sothcott at 214-939-8626 or ESothcott@GodwinLaw.com
William A. Davidson Jr., outgoing member of Civil Air Patrols Board of Governors, accepts a framed proclamation in honor of his five years of service on the board from the BoGs chairman, U.S. Army a

William A. Davidson Jr., former senior career civilian adviser at the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, was honored Tuesday for his half-decade of service on Civil Air Patrols Board of Governors.

Davidson was presented a framed BoG proclamation commemorating his service, most recently as the boards vice chairman. He joined the BoG in October 2011. His term ends next month.

During his time on the BoG, the board introduced a new governance structure to streamline CAPs policy- and decision-making processes. The revised structure provided for creation of the CAP Command Council and CAP Senior Advisory Group and revised the selection process for CAPs commander/chief executive officer.

The Command Council consists of the national commander, national vice commander, national executive officer, the eight region commanders and the 52 wing commanders. The national commander and national vice commander, CAPs national executive officer, eight region commanders, chief master sergeant and the national inspector general make up the CSAG, with the CAP-U.S. Air Force commander and CAPs chief operating officer as ex officio nonvoting members.

Before retiring from the Air Force in 2011 he previously served as administrative assistant to the secretary of the Air Force. He was involved in security and investigative programs throughout his military career.

The proclamation presentation occurred at the Air Force Associations annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.

Civil Air Patrol, the longtime all-volunteer U.S. Air Force auxiliary, is the newest member of the Air Forces Total Force, which consists of regular Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, along with Air Force retired military and civilian employees. CAP, in its Total Force role, operates a fleet of 550 aircraft and performs about 90 percent of continental U.S. inland search and rescue missions as tasked by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center and is credited by the AFRCC with saving an average of 78 lives annually. Civil Air Patrols 56,000 members nationwide also perform homeland security, disaster relief and drug interdiction missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies. Its members additionally play a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to more than 24,000 young people currently participating in the CAP cadet program. Performing missions for America for the past 75 years, CAP received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2014 in honor of the heroic efforts of its World War II veterans. CAP also participates in Wreaths Across America, an initiative to remember, honor and teach about the sacrifices of U.S. military veterans. Visit http://www.capvolunteernow.com for more information.
Calvary Hospital will host its 10th annual Spiritual Care Day from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 19 in Fordham Lincoln Center's Pope Auditorium located at 113 West 60th St., New York, NY.

The Hospital will be collaborating for the first time with the Fordham University Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center and the Collaborative for Palliative Care. The theme for Calvarys event will be: Sacred Encounters: Bridging Hope and Faith.

Speakers will include, but are not limited to: Michael J. Brescia, MD, Calvary Hospital; Sr. Kathleen Deignan, CND, Ph.D., Iona College; and Mark P. Freeman, Ph.D., College of the Holy Cross.

Experts will lead workshops on topics such as Mindfulness/Complementary Clinical Modalities, Sacred Space/Concept of Home for Patients near the End of Life, Research Concepts: Spirituality and Healthcare Outcomes, Psychological Suffering and Delirium at the End of Life, and A National and Theological Dilemma: Medical Aid-in-Dying.

Doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains/pastoral care providers in all settings and other health care professionals are welcome. There is no fee to attend. Kosher and halal meals are available upon advance request.

Registration is strongly recommended by Friday, Oct. 14. To register online, visit: http://www.calvaryhospital.org/scd2016. Email spiritualcareday(at)calvaryhospital(dot)org with any questions about the event.

About the Company:

For more than a century, Calvary Hospital has been the nations only fully-accredited, acute care specialty hospital devoted exclusively to providing palliative care to adult patients with advanced cancer and other life-limiting illnesses. More than 6,000 patients are cared for annually by Calvarys inpatient, outpatient, home care, hospice, and wound care services. Inpatient care is offered at their 200-bed facility in the Bronx and 25-bed Brooklyn Satellite at NYU Lutheran. Calvary Hospice provides short-term inpatient care at The Dawn Greene Hospice, located at Mary Manning Walsh Home in Manhattan. To learn more or sign up for the e-newsletter, Calvary Life, please go to http://www.calvaryhospital.org.
Where digital leaders are heading: Omnidirectional The winners in this new playing field will likely be large full-service institutions, mutual funds companies, and trusted names in wealth management

Technological, economic, and demographic shifts will transform the wealth management industry by 2021, according to research released today by Roubini ThoughtLab, a thought leadership firm. These shifts will unlock tremendous global wealth, but also raise investor expectations for new advisory and digital solutions that some investment providers are not yet prepared to offer. If their new needs are not met, 48% of investors declared that they will switch providers.

The new report, Wealth and Asset Management 2021, is based on a survey of 2,000 investors and 500 investment providers across 10 major wealth markets, in-depth interviews, and economic modeling led by noted economist Dr. Nouriel Roubini. The study was produced in conjunction with a diverse coalition of sponsors, including Bank of Montreal, Broadridge Financial Solutions, CFA Institute, Cisco, eToro, Schroders, SEI, and State Street.

The changing investor landscape

The Roubini analysis foresees huge wealth creation across changing investor demographics over the next five years:



Household assets will rise $89 trillion in 25 top markets, with the biggest gains coming from emerging markets, such as China, Mexico, and Poland.

More than $50 trillion in investment will flow into the wealth industry from the rise in household assets in these markets alone, increasing the pool of investors.

Millennials, Gen X, women, and emerging market investors will see their wealth climb and their investments grow. Even those with small savings will invest more thanks to greater market access through technology.

The technology gap - wealth management firms fall short

Changing demographics and digital usage will transform client expectations over the next five years, faster than some wealth providers can cope:



Investors will expect more from wealth providers, including more customized solutions (72%), access to wider investment options (64%), greater cybersecurity (63%), and the use of the latest technology (62%). They will also demand more from personal wealth advisors: responsive 24x7 service (51%), advice that delivers high returns (40%), digital proficiency (37%), broader financial and life-planning advice (36%), and lower fees (35%).

While wealth providers are moving fast to adapt, some are not as prepared as their clients think. For example, 63% of investors believe their providers are prepared to ensure cybersecurity, versus 48% of providers who say they are. Similarly, 64% of investors think their investment providers can offer options across asset classes and global markets, but 47% of firms say they are prepared to do so.

The digital imperative is not just from millennials and the mass affluent, but from across generations and wealth levels. For example, forty-one percent of millennials expect to use anytime, any device access over the next five years, but 49% of Gen X and 50% of baby boomers expect to do the same. Similarly, 54% of ultra-high-net-worth investors want their investment providers to use the latest digital technology, versus 39% for the mass affluent.

The Winners: Large institutions, trusted brands and digital leaders

The research also shows that financial technology will disrupt the industry from within. Unlike other industries, such as retail, which experienced external disruption from digital startups such as Amazon and eBay, fintech solutions will become widely adopted by incumbents with trusted brands.

The winners in this new playing field will likely be large full-service institutions, mutual funds companies, and trusted names in wealth management, said Lou Celi, CEO of Roubini ThoughtLab and the Program Director. These organizations may be better equipped to meet the rising demand for specialized expertise, responsive 24x7 service, and wider investment and financial services.

Key findings from the research show that:



A top priority of 59% of investment providers is to build, partner or acquire fintech capabilities. This product strategy will resonate with investors: 37% said they would only work with a fintech associated with a trusted brand, and 45% said that fintech solutions can be very valuable when used with traditional investment services.

To stay competitive, most wealth firms are developing new digital capabilities, such as anytime, anywhere, any device access (55%), omnichannel customer experiences (48%), technology-enabled planning tools (45%) and improved performance analytics (41%).

Universal banks and mutual fund firms are more digitally advanced than other providers. More than two-thirds of these organizations have already set up in-house teams and incubators to drive digital transformation. They are also ahead in setting a digital vision and adapting products and business models, aligning the front, middle and back offices, and ensuring close coordination between IT and business units.

Smarter technologies will set wealth management firms apart. With SMAC technologies (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) now becoming table stakes, in the future wealth firms will target smart technologies that can provide greater differentiation. These include virtual reality (set to grow 130%), artificial intelligence (128%), web analytics and sentiment analysis (77%), telepresence and web collaboration (68%), and Blockchain (43%).

Wealth Industry to Completely Transform by 2021

The research indicates that wealth companies will transform their strategies, products, and business models to become fully integrated, digitally driven businesses by 2021. Digital leaders  firms in advanced stages of digital transformation  report that last year they increased assets under management by 7.2%, profitability 6.8% and productivity by 9.4% through the use of technology. The ultimate goal for these firms is to become omniproviders, able to serve customers seamlessly across all channels. By 2021, 57% of digital leaders surveyed plan to be fully integrated omniproviders.

Crucially, the research reveals five key pathways to success used by todays digital leaders: invest adequately in new technologies (41%), make the customer central (37%), nurture an innovation culture (33%), develop an effective transformation process (32%), and bring the right talent on board (31%).

Even in normal times, wealth executives face a complex set of global economic, market and regulatory challenges. But, these are hardly normal times, says Lou Celi. Many investment providers in our survey do not appreciate just how fast these changes will happenand the profound impact they will have on their business.

The executive briefing and full white paper can be downloaded at http://www.roubinithoughtlab.com/wealth2021 (requires email).

About Roubini ThoughtLab

Roubini ThoughtLab is a trend-setting thought leadership consultancy providing fresh management thinking and decision support to help business and government leaders cope with transformative change. By applying the latest analytical tools, predictive models, and expert opinion, we provide actionable insight into future megatrends and their impact on the world. We specialize in creating 360 thought leadership that sits at the intersection of visionary thinking, analytical insights, and cross-media outreach.

An agile, collaborative enterprise, Roubini ThoughtLab draws on the diverse skills of its in-house team, global expert network, and alliance partners to fill any or all thought leadership needsfrom surveys, interviews, and advisory boards, to analytical tools, indexes and econometric models, to white papers, social media, and infographics.

Roubini ThoughtLab is a joint venture with Econsult Solutions, a leading economic consultancy with links to academia. It was founded in 2015 by noted economist Dr. Nouriel Roubini and Lou Celi, a pioneer in thought leadership and digital publishing. For more information on Roubini ThoughtLab, please visit http://www.RoubiniThoughtLab.com.

For further information, contact:

Barry Rutizer

Commercial Director

Phone: 917-251-4190

Email: barryrutizer(at)roubinithoughtlab(dot)com

Lou Celi

Chief Executive

Phone: 917-459-4614

Email: louceli(at)roubinithoughtlab(dot)com

About Bank of Montreal

Established in 1817, BMO Financial Group is a highly diversified financial services provider based in North America. With total assets of $692 billion as of July 31, 2016 and over 46,000 employees, BMO provides a broad range of retail banking, wealth management and investment banking products and services to more than 12 million customers and conducts business through three operating groups: Personal and Commercial Banking, Wealth Management and BMO Capital Markets. For more information, visit http://www.bmo.com.

About Broadridge

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., is the leading provider of investor communications and technology-driven solutions for broker-dealers, banks, mutual funds and other corporations globally. Broadridge's investor and customer communications, securities processing and managed services solutions help clients reduce their capital investments in operations infrastructure, allowing them to increase their focus on core business activities. With over 50 years of experience, Broadridge's infrastructure underpins proxy voting services for over 90% of public companies and mutual funds in North America, and processes on average $5 trillion in equity and fixed income trades per day. Broadridge employs approximately 10,000 associates in 14 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.broadridge.com or contact Brett Philbin, + 1 212 704 8263, Brett.philbin(at)edelman(dot)com.

About Cisco

Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com. For more information, please contact Kristen Palazzolo, +1 408 525 7974, krpalazz(at)cisco(dot)com.

About SEI

SEI is a leading global provider of investment processing, investment management, and investment operations solutions that help corporations, financial institutions, financial advisors, and ultra-high-net-worth families create and manage wealth. As of June 30, 2016, through its subsidiaries and partnerships in which the company has a significant interest, SEI manages or administers $707 billion in mutual fund and pooled or separately managed assets, including $269 billion in assets under management and $438 billion in client assets under administration. For more information, visit seic.com, or contact Dana Grosser, +1 610 676 2459, dgrosser(at)seic(dot)com.

About CFA Institute

CFA Institute is the global association of investment professionals that sets the standard for professional excellence and credentials. The organization is a champion for ethical behavior in investment markets and a respected source of knowledge in the global financial community. The end goal: to create an environment where investors interests come first, markets function at their best, and economies grow. CFA Institute has over 147,000 members in 158 countries and territories, including 140,000 CFA charterholders, and 147 member societies. For more information, visit http://www.cfainstitute.org, or contact Robert Dannhauser, +1 212 705 1723, bob.dannhauser(at)cfainstitute(dot)org.

About eToro

eToro is the worlds leading online social trading network, with over 5 million registered members from 140 different countries and thousands of new accounts opened each day. eToros mission is to revolutionise the way people access the financial markets and make their trading experience more social, simple, enjoyable and transparent. A global social platform, it allows members to communicate, copy and follow each other to harness the wisdom and success of others. The community element is the first of its kind, making trading transparent and open, unlike traditional solitary trading platforms. eToro is regulated by both CySEC in Cyprus and the FCA in the UK. For media information, visit https://www.etoro.com/, or contact Joey Ng, +44 207 973 5941, Joey.ng(at)hkstrategies(dot)com.

About Schroders plc

Schroders is a global asset management company with 343.8 billion (413.7 billion/US$459.6 billion) assets under management as at 30 June 2016. Our clients are major financial institutions including pension funds, banks and insurance companies, local and public authorities, governments, charities, high net worth individuals and retail investors. With one of the largest networks of offices of any dedicated asset management company, we operate from 37 offices in 27 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Middle East and Africa. Schroders has developed under stable ownership for over 200 years and long-term thinking governs our approach to investing, building client relationships and growing our business. Further information about Schroders can be found at http://www.schroders.com.

About State Street

State Street Corporation is one of the world's leading providers of financial services to institutional investors, including investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading. With $28 trillion in assets under custody and administration and $2 trillion* in assets under management as of June 30, 2016, State Street operates in more than 100 geographic markets worldwide, including the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. For more information, visit State Streets website at http://www.statestreet.com/, or contact Lauren Willington, +44 20 3395 6701, Lauren.willington(at)statestreet(dot)com.


Every group has its ultimate challenge, an experience that defines those who participate as the most talented in their field... and aspiring public servants have the Coro Fellows Program.

The Coro Fellowship uses the community as a classroom to train the next generation of change makers. Todays complex urban environments present constantly evolving challenges and opportunities, creating an increasing need for versatile leaders with the ability to forge connections and lead across the nonprofit, business and government sectors. Competitively selected applicants will join an intimate cohort of 12 participants each in five cities for the nine-month program, with each cohort encompassing a wide range of communities, interests, ideologies and experiences.

The Princeton Review said of Coro: Every group has its ultimate challenge, an experience that defines those who participate as the most talented in their field. Track-and-field enthusiasts have the decathlon. Whiz kids have the Odyssey of the Mind competition. Fitness freaks have the Iron Man Triathlon. And aspiring public servants have the Coro Fellows Program.

More than 10,000 alumni have graduated from Coro programs over the past 70 years. These alumni are currently serving as leaders in national/global businesses, nonprofit organizations, government agencies and elected public office. The United States Senate includes two Coro alumni including Diane Feinstein (CA) and Michael Bennet (CO). Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, former Governor and US Senator from Virginia, is also an alum. For more information about the program, visit: http://www.corofellowship.org.

The following list, grouped by city, includes those selected for the 2016-2017 Coro Fellows Program and the universities from which they graduated:

Coro Southern California in Los Angeles



Bridget Bones, San Diego, CA  University of California, Berkeley

Haley E. Broder, Seal Beach, CA  University of California, Berkeley

Michael Ervin, Riverside, CA  University of California, Riverside

Maribel Garcia Ochoa, Los Angeles, CA  University of California, Los Angeles

Tori Kanhayuwa, Woodland Hills, CA  California State University, Long Beach

Maria T. Khan, Winnetka, CA  University of California, Irvine

Bobby Kobara, Pasadena, CA  University of California, Santa Barbara

Theodore G. Lee, Valencia, CA  University of Southern California

Hannah Levien, Davis, CA  Marist College

Adam Mohabbat, San Diego, CA  University of California, Berkeley

Tanya Ortiz, Los Angeles, CA  University of California, Los Angeles

Dana R. Vanderford, Chapel Hill, NC  University of Texas at Austin

For Information regarding the Coro Southern California Fellows Program contact Executive Director Sara Hernandez, sara(at)corola(dot)org.

Coro Pittsburgh

Sarah Amick, Pittsburgh, PA  Carnegie Mellon University

Darryl Edwards, East Orange, NJ  Morehouse College

Joanna Hernandez, Mexico City, MX  The College of William & Mary

Reena Naik, Birmingham, AL  University of Pittsburgh

Emily Neff, Pittsburgh, PA  Allegheny College; Teachers College Columbia University

Satvika Neti, Enola, PA  Carnegie Mellon University

Brian Rhindress, King of Prussia, PA  University of Pittsburgh

Lawrence J. Rockwell, Brownsville, PA  University of Pittsburgh

Sofia Sandoval, Houston, TX  University of Pittsburgh

Manjot Singh, Valencia, CA  University of California, Los Angeles

Laier Rayshon Smith, Pittsburgh, PA  Point Park University

Paul von Autenried, West Windsor, NJ  Princeton University

For Information regarding Coro Pittsburgh Fellows Program contact President and CEO Greg Crowley at gcrowley(at)coropittsburgh(dot)org.

Coro Northern California in San Francisco



Monica Ayers, Sacramento, CA -- Menlo College; Mills College

Hanna Beckman, Orange, CA -- University of California, Santa Barbara

Lindsey Burkart-Lima, Larkspur, CA -- Pitzer College

Caroline Hays, Annapolis, MD -- Claremont McKenna College

Nicholas (Brady) Hirsch, Oakland, CA -- Williams College

Andrew Jacobs, Flagstaff, AZ -- Stanford University

Nora Jendoubi, San Francisco, CA -- Stanford University

Claire Maniti, San Francisco, CA -- University of California, San Diego

Ji-Ho Park, Pittsburgh, PA -- Duke University

Anthony Rodriguez, San Francisco, CA -- University of California, Berkeley

Nicholas Sanchez, Stockton, CA -- University of California, Davis

Dalia Velasco, Los Angeles, CA -- Azusa Pacific University

For Information regarding Coro Northern California Fellows Program contact CEO Laney Whitcanack, lwhitcanack(at)coronorcal(dot)org.

Coro St. Louis



Andrew Barenz, Solon, IA  Saint Louis University

Sarah Cornett, Sacramento, CA  Whitman College

Evan Glantz, St. Louis, MO  University of Missouri, Columbia

Brinda Gupta, Naperville, IL  Saint Louis University

Kevin Hutchins, Rockledge, FL  Brown University

Senit Kidane, Houston, TX  Washington University in St. Louis

Olivia (Livi) Logan-Wood, Cincinnati, OH  Saint Louis University

Mackenzie Norton, Whitefish Bay, WI  The University of Iowa

Zack Panter, Miami, FL  Washington University in St. Louis

Jonathan Puricelli, Webster Groves, MO  University of Dayton

Jorge G. Rodriguez, Berkeley, CA  University of California, Riverside

Janae Staicer, Johnstown, PA  Duquesne University

For Information regarding Coro St. Louis Fellows Program contact Director Michelle Miller, michellem(at)focus-stl(dot)org.

Coro New York

Elliana Bisgaard-Church, Davis, CA  Swarthmore College

Amiel Fields-Meyer, Los Angeles, CA  Emory University

Samantha Hom, Syosset, NY  Colgate University

Jonathan Huang, Montville, NJ  Moody Bible Institute

Jose Javier Castro, Bronx, NY  John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Adeline Lee, West Windsor, NJ  Wellesley College

Bonnie Maldonado, Bronx, NY  Colby College

Tania Marinos, New York, NY  Dickinson College

Chrisel Martinez, Harlem, NY  University of Albany

Lindsey Mayer, Ogden, Utah  University of Portland

Martin Schmid, Buffalo, NY  Baruch College

Akina Younge, White Plains, NY  Yale University

For Information regarding Coro New York Fellows Program contact Executive Director Scott Millstein at smillstein(at)coronewyork(dot)org.

About Coro: Coro began in San Francisco in 1942 to train young people in the leadership skills necessary to assure that our democratic system of government could more effectively meet the needs of its citizens. Since its founding, Coro has grown to include Coro programs in six cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles (1957), St. Louis (1972), Kansas City (1975), New York (1980) and Pittsburgh (1999). More than 400 participants a year go through a variety of Coro programs nationwide. At least 10,000 program alumni are currently serving as leaders in local, regional and national/global businesses, nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies and elected public office. Coro is a non-profit, non-partisan educational institute supported by foundations, corporations and individuals.
Meet Dr. Rick Sponaugle at the 2016 ILADS Conference - Leading Physician treating patients suffering from neurotoxicity as a result of lyme disease and mold toxicity Dr. Sponaugle's revolutionary protocols have helped 27 chronic Lyme disease patients come out of their wheelchairs, a feat unparalleled by any other Lyme disease specialist in the world.

We are excited to announce that Dr. Rick Sponaugle, Medical Director at Sponaugle Wellness Institute, will be a speaker at the 2016 ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society) Annual Conference in Philadelphia this November. He will be speaking on Saturday, November 5th at 4:15pm on "PET Brain Imaging in Lyme Disease and Mold Toxic Patients: The Correlation of Neurological Symptoms with Specific Brain Regions."

Dr. Sponaugle has written chapters on neurotoxicity for Suzanne Summers, as well as chapters on the gut-brain connection for gut expert Brenda Watson. He has been featured on the Dr. Phil show, Suzanne Somers show, CNN, FOX News, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and PBS.

With emphasis on environmental medicine and tick-borne infections, Dr. Sponaugle specializes in treating Brain and Neurological disorders derived from severe Neurotoxicity. The majority of Dr. Sponaugle's patients require simultaneous treatment for neurological Lyme disease, mold toxicity, industrial toxicity, and gastrointestinal dysbiosis.

His clinical research includes a brain imaging database of 600 PET and SPECT scans in neurological Lyme disease patients. Dr. Sponaugle has correlated underactive brain regions on PET brain imaging as causation of his patients' neurological symptoms. In addition, he has performed analysis of 9,000 neurotransmitter patterns and 6000 mold mycotoxin levels in neurotoxic patients.

Dr. Sponaugles experience treating this unique subset of patients has him to be recognized as one of the top leading providers of lyme disease treatment and mold toxicity treatment in the world. Dr. Sponaugle has used his 20 years of experience working in critical care medicine along with his individualized treatment protocols to treat patients who have gone misdiagnosed by some of the worlds leading institutions.

His revolutionary protocols have helped 27 chronic Lyme disease patients come out of their wheelchairs, a feat unparalleled by any other Lyme disease specialist in the world.

Read more about Dr. Sponaugles research and wheelchair success stories on the Sponaugle Wellness Institute website: http://www.sponauglewellness.com Learn more about Dr. Sponaugles upcoming presentation on the ILADS 2016 Conferences website. Dont forget to register for the conference and follow Dr. Sponaugle on Twitter: @DrRickSponaugle

About Sponaugle Wellness Institute

Sponaugle Wellness Institute, located in Tampa Bay, Florida, is led by Medical Director, Rick Sponaugle, MD. Dr. Sponaugle is an integrative physician who practices functional medicine. He approaches healing on an intracellular level using Biochemistry, Phospholipid therapy, and detoxification protocols to optimize mitochondrial function, to treat patients suffering from neurotoxicity as a result of lyme disease and mold toxicity. Sponaugle Wellness combines the best of western medicine and natural medicine to assist the healing of patients suffering from chronic illness. Typical Sponaugle Wellness patients have undergone treatment from multiple doctors and wellness centers, but have failed to regain their health.
The National Book Foundation will present lifetime achievement awards to Robert A. Caro, the journalist and biographer, and Cave Canem, the literary center dedicated to black American poetry, at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 16 in New York.

Caro, best known for his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson and his biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, will receive the 29th annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Prior recipients include Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, Maxine Hong Kingston, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Toni Morrison.

Robert Caro has long been one of our most treasured biographers, David Steinberger, chairman of the board of directors of the National Book Foundation, said in a statement. His ability to understand power, privilege, and the unique ways in which that power has shaped American government and American cities throughout the 20th century is a road map that will endure because of its depth, breadth, and import, and we are honored to have the privilege to present him with this medal.

Cave Canem, founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, will receive the 12th annual Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Prior recipients include Dr. Maya Angelou, Dave Eggers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Patterson, and Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr.

"Cave Canems innovative and effective literary activism has been transformative to the world of letters," NBF executive director Lisa Lucas said in a statement. "Their ongoing commitment to provide supportive channels for African American poets to thrive has yielded works that enrich the worlds literary culture."
An all-star celebration marking the 40th anniversary of groundbreaking independent comics publisher Fantagraphics Books was the centerpiece of the annual Small Press Expo, held September 17-18 in Bethesda, Md.

The Seattle-based indie comics house brought a line-up of some of the best known comics artists in independent publishing to the show, including Daniel Clowes (Patience), Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (Love & Rockets), Joe Sacco (Palestine), Trina Robbins (Complete Wimmens Comix), Jim Woodring (Frank in the 3rd Dimension) and Carol Tyler (Soldiers Heart).

It was the publisher's largest and most impressive line-up of cartoonists at the show to date, publisher Gary Groth told PW, adding that it led to "our biggest show ever," in terms of sales.

Although final attendance figures were not available, SPX generally draws about 4,000 fans. SPX director Warren Bernard said show attendance was up a bit from last year.

Publishers noticed and cited the impact of the stars and the crowds on sales. NBM publisher Terry Nantier, who hosted a signing by French comics artist Cyril Pedrosa at the NBM booth, said he sold out of both the French and newly released English editions of Pedrosas new book, Equinoxes.

NBM collaborated with Europe Comics, the online rights and promotional coalition of 13 European comics publishers, to bring Pedrosa to SPX. This is the first year Europe Comics has exhibited at SPX. Nazeli Kyuregan, director of editorial and marketing for Europe Comics, said she was impressed that American fans also snapped up every copy of the French language edition of Equinoxes, "we should have brought more copies."

Although Fantagraphics adult comics lineup stole the show, cartoonists who cater to a younger crowd were also a draw. One such example was Jeffrey Brown who was at the show promoting Lucy and Andy Neanderthal (Crown Books for Young Readers), the first book in a trilogy about two Neanderthal kids who learn about humans and cooling temperatures.

Nobrow Press quickly sold out of the latest volume of Luke Pearsons Hilda series, Hilda and the Stone Forest (published by Nobrows Flying Eye Books childrens imprint). The series is the publisher's biggest hit, and an animated show based on it is in the works at Netflix.

And SPX also hosted two days of programming with presentations featuring among others, Joe Sacco (Palestine) and Sarah Glidden (Rolling Black Outs) discussing comics journalism, an onstage interview with Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez (Love & Rockets), and a 40th anniversary panel on Fantagraphics (which is publishing We Told You So: Comics and Art, an Oral History of Fantagraphics by Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean, a 40 year history of the house in December) and its impact on American comics publishing.

Now more than 20 years old, the Small Press Expo is a key stop for many indie and self publishers. This year's show featured nearly 700 exhibitors. Tables at SPX are assigned via lottery, and in the past there has been controversy around securing a table. Although major publishers and cartoonists are locked into booth space, getting one of the highly coveted tables is mostly left to chance for smaller exhibitors, and many creators grumble about it every year, with 2016 being no exception.

Nevertheless, Bernard said the event will never become a curated or juried showwhere organizers decide who will exhibitlike other popular shows, including the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and Comic Arts Brooklyn. "The lottery is part of the character of the show, he told PW. And if people dont like the system, they dont have to exhibit."

However, Bernard said, a change in the lottery system will be announced for 2017. He declined, though, to provide more details at press time.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Purdue Extension's Indiana Beginning Farmer program is offering two workshops covering a range of food safety and marketing topics useful to anyone who is new to farming or thinking about starting a farm.

The Beginning Farmer Northwest Regional Workshop will be 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Nov. 15 in the Home Economics Building at the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds, 1406 Teal Road, Lafayette. The Beginning Farmer Northeast Regional Workshop will be 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, 2101 E. Coliseum Blvd.

Sessions will be presented by Extension specialists and local farmers. Topics for both workshops include:

* Fresh produce safety and the Food Safety Modernization Act.

* Regulations for processing and marketing meat, poultry and eggs.

* Technical and financial resources for beginning farmers.

* Identifying market opportunities.

The Lafayette workshop will also include a panel of farmers discussing the proper equipment for farms of various sizes. The Fort Wayne workshop will feature a session on aquaponics.

"In addition to learning about the latest trends in produce safety and marketing, there will be ample opportunities for participants to meet other farmers and interact with Extension educators," said Tamara Benjamin, diversified food and farming systems coordinator and one of the organizers of the beginning farmer regional workshops.

The Northwest Regional Workshop will be led by Karen Mitchell, Extension educator in Tippecanoe County, and Andrew Westfall, White County Extension educator. The Northeast Regional Workshop will be led by Michael ODonnell, Extension educator in Delaware County, and James Wolff, Allen County Extension educator.

The workshops are free but space is limited and advance registration is recommended. Lunch and refreshments will be served.

To sign up for the Northwest Regional Workshop, go to https://edustore.purdue.edu/wk_rules.asp?itemID=22614. To sign up for the Northeast Regional Workshop, go to https://edustore.purdue.edu/wk_rules.asp?itemID=22604.

For more information on the workshops or the Indiana Beginning Farmer program, contact Tamara Benjamin at 765-496-1930 or tamara17@purdue.edu.

Writer: Darrin Pack, 765-494-8415, dpack@purdue.edu

Source: Tamara Benjamin, 765-496-1930, tamara17@purdue.edu

Agricultural Communications: (765) 494-8415;

Darrin Pack, dpack@purdue.edu

Agriculture News Page
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BETTENDORF -- Jennie Peakin donated two of her biggest talents -- breathtaking photography and a generous heart -- to help villagers in rural Tanzania improve their lives.

The 36-year-old, married mother of three traveled to Africa in May with Leslie Klipsch, of Davenport, who is director of communications and development for the Des Moines-based Empower Tanzania. It's a nongovernmental organization that works with one of the poorest countries in the world, to bolster residents' health, education and economic opportunity. Ms. Peakin shot hundreds of photos during those 10 days, which will be used to raise awareness and money for the group.

"I have always had a heart for Africa," she said this week, noting she's donated to organizations like charity: water and the Adventure Project, which also work in developing nations. "Now that I've been there, I need to do more."

I've always known about the struggles many people around the world face, but to see it first-hand ... to meet the people who are struggling and be welcomed into their homes, makes it so much more real," Ms. Peakin said. "It made me understand more than I ever knew I could.

Today from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., the owner of Jennie Peakin Photography and VantageNine19 (a wedding photo business), will present her gallery of Tanzania images at Suite 205 of Bucktown Center for the Arts, 225 E. 2nd St., Davenport.

Ms. Peakin is good friends with Ms. Klipsch, the co-owner of coworkqc (formerly The Creative Collective), a space at Bucktown for working, collaborating and networking. The shutterbug has been a member there since the organization started last November.

Ms. Klipsch went to Tanzania last year and asked Ms. Peakin to join this year to capture stories of the people the nonprofit helps. Those stories of programs and benefits will be used in marketing materials, including social media.

"She did an incredible job," Ms. Klipsch said of her photos. "They're stunning."

"It's so beautiful how Jennie is using her art, not just to raise awareness of people living in sub-Saharan Africa, but to raise money for the organization," she said. "She's so talented, and she has such a good heart."

"She was able to capture the pride and the work they're doing," Ms. Klipsch added.

Led by Iowa volunteers, this year, Empower Tanzania will train well mechanics to repair and build fresh water wells in places that lack access to clean water because of the lack of infrastructure or broken down wells, providing education and water for members of the community, according to the group.

"It's 100 percent empowerment. We hope to work ourselves out of a job," Ms. Klipsch said, noting other programs are offered in farming, women's health care and safe water handling.

Ms. Peakin grew up in a Methodist household in Muscatine, and considers herself religious. She has a number of large crosses on the wall of her living room. This was her first time photographing for a nonprofit, and her first trip to Africa.

"I noticed that for what little they had, they were much happier than I expected," Ms. Peakin said of Tanzanians she met. "They were just the happiest people."

"It's amazing how much they give for how little they have," she said of their generosity to the American visitors (including donors there at the same time). "They knew we stood for clean water. They gave us a royal welcome. They were so thankful and joyous."

"This part of Tanzania is just gorgeous -- gorgeous people and gorgeous landscapes," Ms. Klipsch said.

"This could be my job, if I didn't have three small children at home," Ms. Peakin said. "I loved it, it was so fulfilling. It truly changed my life. ... Looking back, I can't believe we did that."

Friends encouraged her to display the photos, in the first time she's ever exhibited her work. At Bucktown tonight, she will have large canvasses, smaller matted prints and four-packs of postcards for sale.

Patrons can enjoy wine, beer and appetizers as they mingle and see the beauty of rural Tanzania come to life in the images. Half of all sale proceeds will go directly to Empower Tanzania (empowertz.org).

Ms. Peakin loves the atmosphere of coworkqc, which is right across from where the exhibit will be shown. Though most all her photography business is done on location, she said working at home is too distracting.

"I'm so much more productive going to an office space," she said. "There's really great energy; there's a lot of creative people."

On Nov. 7 (because their Bucktown lease is ending), the co-working organization will open at a new, more modern space at 2nd and Brady streets.

"It's still going to be a really cool vibe," Ms. Peakin said.

The Tanzania photos are a perfect illustration of one of coworkqc's main goals -- sparking collaboration, Ms. Klipsch said. You can see more of Ms. Peakin's work at jenniepeakinphotography.com.
A Chicago man allegedly trespassed in a Milan woman's home and assaulted and sexually assaulted her on Saturday.

Daniel Tyrese Morgan, 26, was charged with criminal sexual abuse, battery and criminal trespass to a residence, according to Rock Island County Court documents filed Monday.

Mr. Morgan also was accused of violating his probation in a March 20 incident. That day, Mr. Morgan committed aggravated domestic battery, according to court records. He was sentenced to 30 months of adult probation on the condition that he have no contact with the victim of the assault.

Mr. Morgan allegedly contacted the victim of the March 20 assault on Saturday, court documents say.

Mr. Morgan was in the Rock Island County Jail on Tuesday afternoon with a $50,000 bond. A preliminary hearing is set for Oct. 4.
Submitted press release

BISHOP HILL, Ill.  You dont have to say Jordbruksdagarna to know what it means: food, music,

dancing, games, and crafts at Bishop Hill. The annual fall festival (pronounced yord-brooks-DAH-

ga-na) takes place Saturday September 24 and Sunday September 25, 2016. This year, we have added

some additional events. New for 2016 is music behind the Bjorklund Hotel, a blacksmith forging in

the park, tractor people movers transporting guests around Bishop Hill, a book signing at the Bishop

Hill Museum, a seed saving activity, and 10 antique/primitive vendors setting up a Settlers Harvest

market in the park.

As always, there will be a variety of traditional craft demonstrations in the village park during the

45th Jordbruksdagarna (Swedish for earth work days). Artisans will make rope, process flax, forge

metal, and more. Vendors will also sell farm produce, pumpkins, pioneer popcorn, antiques,

primitives, and much more in the park from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. Two people movers will be

available to transport people around town to experience many of the activities, museums, and stores.

Stops will be at the VASA archives, the Henry County Museum, the Village Park, the Colony Church,

and the Albert Krans Livery Stable Museum.

At the Bjorklund Hotel from noon to 4 p.m. each day, there will be demonstrations on how to press

and cook sorghum and bake hard tack. Visitors can try their hand at shelling corn, making bricks,

pressing cider, and making a corn husk doll. In addition, there will be free music by Norm Brown

from 1 to 3 p.m. both days. Performances in the park include Hammer and Pick at noon and 2 p.m., and the Nordic Dancers at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday.

Visitors can explore Henry Countys agricultural heritage at the Henry County Historical Museum,

where a variety of antique tractors and implements will be displayed. The museum will also be the

location of demonstrations on both days of the event from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Demonstrations will

include threshing, corn shelling, and plowing. In addition, there will also be a tractor parade starting

at noon each day.

At the Bishop Hill Museum, located at 304 South Bishop Hill road, there will be a reading and book

signing for Mary Davidsavers Clouds over Bishop Hill on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. There will be

refreshments, prizes, and a drawing for one of her books (you must be present to win). Mary will be

donating part of her proceeds from her sales to the Bishop Hill Museum. In addition, Mary

Davidsaver will also be appearing at the Feathered Nest Open House on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.

Of course, food will be in abundance. The Bishop Hill Old Settlers Association will serve Colony

stew and rice pudding in the park. The Bishop Hill Heritage Associations Svensk Varm Korv, or

Swedish hotdog dinner, will be served by Colony Store 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. both days. The Bishop Hill

Methodist Church will be having a bake sale both days by the Steeple Building Museum.
Submitted press release

September is National Preparedness Month and the American Red Cross Central and Southern Illinois encourages people to create a fire escape plan so everyone in the household knows what to do if a fire occurs.

Large-scale disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes and floods always make the news, but the most common disaster threat people face across the country is a fire in their home, said Lyn Hruska, Chief Executive Officer, American Red Cross Central and Southern Illinois Region. In the Central and Southern Illinois Region, we have responded to more than 140 home fires since July 1, and helped more than 500 people at the scene of fires. We urge residents to develop a fire escape plan and practice it with everyone in their household.

CREATE A PLAN Steps for people to create a fire escape plan include:

Walking through the home and looking at all exits and possible escape routes, including windows;

Listing two ways to get out of every room in case fire blocks one of the paths;

Picking a place to meet outside, a safe distance away from the home;

Conducting drills. Practice until every member of the household, including children, can escape the home in less than two minutes;

Making sure everyone knows how to call 9-1-1; and

Teaching everyone to STOP, DROP and ROLL if their clothes should catch on fire.

People should also install smoke alarms on every level of their home, inside bedrooms and outside sleeping areas. They should test the alarms monthly, install new batteries at least once a year or according to the alarm manufacturers instructions, and replace alarms every ten years.

Additional fire safety tips and resources are available at redcross.org/homefires.

HELP WITH HOME FIRE CAMPAIGN The Red Cross Home Fire Campaign, now in its second year, aims to reduce deaths and injuries from home fires in the United States by as much as 25 percent over a five-year span.

People can become a Red Cross volunteer at redcross.org/volunteer or help by donating to Red Cross Disaster Relief by visiting redcross.org, calling 1-800-RED CROSS or texting the word REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation. Donations to Disaster Relief will be used to prepare for, respond to and help people recover from disasters big and small.
ROCK ISLAND -- On a 20-to-3 vote, the Rock Island County Board on Tuesday approved reducing the number of standing committees from seven to four.

The motion, though, was amended, to change one of the four committees to a Committee-of-the-Whole where all board members would attend.

Scott Terry, D-Rock Island, chairman of the county's governmental affairs committee, made the original motion, and Kai Swanson, D-Rock Island, asked for and received the board vote for the amendment.

Board members voting against the final amended motion were Robert Westpfahl, R-MIlan; Larry Burns, D-East Moline, and Michael Burns, D-Silvis. Board member Jeff Deppe, D-East Moline, was not at the meeting.

In addition to the Committee-of-the-Whole, other committees are Finance and Personnel; Governance, Health and Administration; and Public Works. The Executive Board, part of Mr. Terry's original motion, was replaced by the Committee-of-the-Whole with Mr. Swanson's amendment.

Proponents have said the streamlined committees are a way to save the money. Initial estimates were it would save the county about $40,000 a year. Board member Mia Mayberry, D-Rock Island, asked how much the county would save with the Committee-of-the-Whole replacing the executive committee.

Board chairman Ken "Moose" Maranda, D-Milan, said the streamlined committee system has been discussed by the board since early 2016. With the Committee-of-the-Whole amendment, he said, "I don't think we can put a figure on it (savings) at this time."

Mr. Terry said the savings likely would be less than originally estimated, maybe in the $20,000 to $30,000 range.

Some board members have wanted a Committee-of-the-Whole, saying it provides a better communication platform for disseminating information to the entire 25-member board prior to the full board meeting each month.

The changes will take effect after the county board's Dec. 5 organizational meeting.

In other business, Hope Creek Care Center's board of directors announced Lynda Vogt, interim administrator at the nursing home, was hired Monday as the full-time administrator.

Ms. Vogt will be paid $125,000 annually. She was hired from a field of about 40 candidates, according to Health and Human Services Committee Chairman Kimberly Callaway Thompson, D-Rock Island.

Jesse Hullon, chairman of the nursing home's board of directors, said they want to market the positive aspects of the nursing home. The home is at 88 percent occupancy, or about 215 residents at the 245 resident capacity home.

He told the board 55 percent of the residents are on Medicaid.

"I know it's not a very popular discussion, perhaps, but we would like to bring that Medicaid number down to about 51 percent and try to bring in more private pay, managed care, veterans - a different source of income to help the bottom line of this home," Mr. Hullon said.

"I know this has been a hotly debated issue. It's going to take a good bottom line for this home to continue. We know we were a five-star facility at one time. We're down to a one-star facility. Obviously, the goal of the advisory board, of the administrator, I'm sure, is to get that rating back up."
CALDCs Halloween Celebration A Real Treat! The Central Astoria LDCs 7th annual Batty Over Halloween Celebration held on Sunday, October 23rd was a real treat for everyone who came out. Despite...

Meng Brings NASA Astronaut To Queens On October 17, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens) brought NASA astronaut Dr. Jonny Kim to Queens where he met and spoke with students at Francis...

Celebrating Columbus The Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Queens (FIAO) held their annual Columbus Day parade in Astoria, on Saturday, October 8, during Italian Heritage Month. The...
G'day! It's Murray here. I've put together a little quiz to test your musical knowledge. Think you can score top marks in Murray's Magic Music Quiz? Give it a go now!
The HarrisX  Ragan CEO/Communicators Perceptions Survey needs CEOs, CCOs and senior-level communicators to share their opinions on variety of topics including ESG, CSR and purpose, DE&I, and whether organizations should take a stand on political and social issues. Well share the preliminary findings, including how CEOs and communicators differed in their responses, during Ragans communications Week, Nov. 1-7. Full results will be shared in a special report this winter.

Take the survey here.

For those who take the time to share their insights and who provide us their email, we will send a copy of the final, aggregated findings and executive report.

Your views are important to us and your answers will be kept anonymous.
As E&M partner in the Bechtel-led Bacs consortium, Siemens is supplying 45 four-car trains for Line 1 and 29 two-car trains for Line 2 (Red Line) under a turnkey contract which also includes automatic train control systems and electrification for the two lines.

Each 75.7m-long four-car train for Line 1 accommodates up to 522 passengers (at 4 passengers/m2), 123 of them seated, in first, family, and second class accommodation. Interior and exterior design was developed by Siemens in collaboration with French design bureau Avant Premiere. Notably, there are no visible screw heads or fixing points inside the train  a requirement of ARAs specification.

Each aluminium-bodied car has six sets of sliding plug doors and two compact HVAC units, which are designed to operate in ambient temperatures as high as 55oC. The trains also feature LED interior lighting and full-width gangways.

Three vehicles in each four-car train are motorised and each motor bogie is driven by two self-ventilated 1TB 20 series traction motors, which are controlled without speed sensors.

Siemens says it has tested the performance of all electrical equipment using sand and dust from the Riyadh region to simulate the condition the 750V dc third-rail trains will encounter in Saud Arabia.

The trains are due to be delivered to Riyadh in 2017-18. Two trains are currently undergoing tests at Siemens test facility at Wildenrath in northwest Germany.
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Looking to provide broadcasting capacity not only for Bolivia but for Latin America, Bolivia has confirmed plans for a second national satellite.





According to Ivan Zambrana, director of the Agencia Boliviana Espacial (ABE), during a TV interview, the TKSAT-2, or Tupac Katari II, will be launched by 2021 and target the telecoms market, including direct-to-home (DTH) TV.We intend to reach a wider market so the satellite becomes more profitable. The TKSAT-2 is to provide services for the telecom industry in Bolivia and Latin America, said Zambrana.The project, which is still at an early stage, aims to design and develop a satellite with up-to-date technology for $200 million; the TKSAT-1 cost over $300 million.Local media reports say that the announcement has been criticised as the TKSAT-1 has not yet reached full capacity . Almost three years after launching, the satellite is leasing 70% of its capacity (mostly to the national telco Entel), the same percentage as 12 months ago.
The TVPlayer multiscreen service, which claims to be the UKs fastest growing online TV platform, is to be among the first streaming video platforms to be pre-installed on all new Samsung tablets.





The company has confirmed that complete roll-out will be available on 24 variants of six tablet versions to more than 700,000 devices in the UK over the next 12 months: Galaxy View, Galaxy Tab S2, Galaxy Tab Active, Galaxy Tab A, Galaxy Tab E and Galaxy Tab S. Two variants of both the Galaxy Tab S2 and the Galaxy Tab A 2016 will be the first to be deployed with the TVPlayer pre-installed app.TVPlayer offers free access to over 60 free-to-air channels, anytime on any connected device, through a single app. Available as both a live-and catch-up TV service across Web, iOS and Android apps, as well as Amazon Fire and Apple TV, TVPlayer claims to address the increasing demand for an aggregated TV offering.Existing Samsung tablet users will be able to download TVPlayer from the Google Play store. New and existing Samsung users will receive an exclusive three-month free trial of TVPlayer plus.In a world where there are more mobile devices than people, TVPlayer meets consumer appetite for live TV to be available anywhere, anytime and on any device, explained TVPlayer founder and CEO Adam Smith. We are delighted to be collaborating with Samsung to further enhance the delivery of content in a streamlined and flexible way to more UK consumers.
Ukrainian Supreme Court dismisses Gazprom appeal against $3 bln fine

MOSCOW, September 21 (RAPSI)  Ukraines Supreme Court has stricken an appeal filed by Gazprom challenging the lower courts rulings over an 86 billion hryvnia (over $3 bln) fine issued by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU) against Russian natural gas giant, RIA Novosti reported on Wednesday.

The Supreme Court is a final judicial authority in Ukraine; the next possible step is reference to international courts.

Earlier, Yuri Terentyev, the head of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU), said that AMCU would demand enforced recovery of the imposed fine from Gazprom in court if the natural gas producer fails to pay it off voluntary.

In 2015, Gazprom was fined by the Antimonopoly Committee for abuse of its dominant position on the gas transit market. At that time, the company was ordered to pay the fine until April 12, 2016. According to a companys representative, this fine was unexpected since the firm was not engaged in business activity within the Ukrainian territory. Gazprom states that natural gas is being sold to Naftogaz on the Russian-Ukrainian border.

In April the Russian company appealed the fine in the Kiev Commercial Court but the complaint was returned to the plaintiff without hearing. In May, the Kiev Commercial Court of Appeal upheld this decision, and in June the Ukrainian Supreme Economic Court has upheld the lower courts rulings.
ECHR proceeds with appeal filed by defense of deceased Russian prisoner

MOSCOW, September 21 (RAPSI, Oleg Sivozhelezov)  The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has communicated an application over refusal to provide Sergei Kuznetsov, 54, who has died in a Sverdlovsk Region prison, with medical help, lawyer Sergei Petryakov told RAPSI on Wednesday.

Petryakov said that, since Kuznetsov, who had no close relatives, has died, Human rights association Agora has been acknowledged as the applicant. Agoras lawyers have earlier represented interests of Kuznestov in courts.

ECHR has forwarded several questions to Russian Government regarding Kuznetsovs case, concerning medical care in particular.

According to Permyakov, Russian authorities violated Article 2 (Right to life) and Article 3 (Prohibition of torture) of the European Convention of Human Rights.

According to another Kuznetsovs attorney, Alexei Bushmakov, the Russian authorities did not provide requisite medical assistance to Kuznetsov in prison and did not release him although he had the legal right to be released. Sergei had several serious diseases, including oral cancer. The prison doctors defined his condition as serious and were expecting an adverse outcome. Furthermore, Kuznetsovs diagnosis is on the list of diseases that has been approved by a government resolution and can be used to release a prisoner from his term, Bushmakov said earlier.

A petition to release Kuznetsov was filed by the administration of Prison No. 2 where Kuznetsov served his sentence. The Verkh-Isetsky District Court of Yekaterinburg dismissed the motion in July.

In mid-August Kuznetsov died. In September, the Sverdlovsk Region Court has ruled against the lower courts refusal to release the terminally ill prisoner and closed the case due to his death. Human rights activists quoted independent medical experts who revealed gross violations during provision medical care for Kuznetsov. According to experts, if sufficient medical care was provided, Kuznetsovs life could be extended by five years.
Russian Constitutional Court upholds blocking of extremists bank accounts

MOSCOW, September 21 (RAPSI)  Russias Constitutional Court has upheld blocking of bank accounts belonging to people convicted of involvement in extremism or terrorism, according to the ruling published on the official courts website.

Earlier, Russian citizen Anton Podchasov, who had been found guilty of making public calls for extremism, lodged a complaint with the court against provisions of law. His bank account was frozen after the man had been put on the list of extremists. The plaintiff asked the bank to return his money twice but was refused.

The man asked the Constitutional Court to declare this regulation illegal. However, the court did not find grounds to consider the complaint.

According to the court, need for the protection of constitutional values does not rule out taking actions preventing individuals convicted of terrorism and extremism from committing such crimes in future.

Thus, the Constitutional Court explained that freezing of assets is aimed to limit unsupervised disposal of the funds by persons included on the list of organizations and individuals implicated in extremist or terrorist activities.
At this years Insurtech Connect conference, Insider Engage spoke to Pranav Pasricha, Swiss Re's global head property and casualty solutions, Reinsurance, to discuss why the protection gap is the biggest challenge the reinsurance industry faces today and how Swiss Re is using technology to support clients to respond to new and emerging threats.
Voter guides are hitting doorsteps across California with a thud. Clocking in at over 220 pages, an inch thick, and weighing about 10 ounces, the 2016 guide is akin to an election novella. Its size reinforces the enormous responsibility Californians have when voting. Here's a snapshot of some of the good, bad, and ugly on this November's ballot.

The Good - Holding crony capitalists accountable: Propositions 67 and 65 may seem like esoteric environmental debates, but in reality they are about business manipulation of government policy for personal gain. The two measures relate to Senate Bill 270 - California's statewide ban on single-use plastic bags. After a statewide plastic bag ban failed in 2013, then-State Senator Alex Padilla (now Secretary of State) reintroduced the ban in the form of SB 270, which included a last minute, backroom deal with the California Grocers Association to include a mandated minimum 10 cent fee for all compliant reusable carry-out bags purchased at the grocery store to be collected and retained by the grocery store. Consumers are mandated by state law to pad the profits of grocery stores - the very definition of crony capitalism. Proposition 67 is a voter referendum to overturn SB 270 and eliminate this encoded crony capitalism (Note: a "NO" vote overturns SB 270).

But just in case Proposition 67 passes and upholds the crony capitalist-law, Proposition 65 can step in. This measure would create a special environmental protection account overseen by the Wildlife Conservation Board and audited every two years by the State Auditor funded by - you guessed it - the 10 cents fee currently collected and retained by the grocery stores. To teach Sacramento a lesson about crony capitalism, vote "NO" on Proposition 67 and "YES" on Proposition 65. At the very least, the initiative system should be used to keep our government honest.

The Bad - Flirting with one-party rule super-majorities: State Democrats are seeking to regain legislative super-majorities in the State Assembly and State Senate. To do so, they need to net two seats in the State Assembly and one in the State Senate. And in both chambers, they have options. In the Assembly, Democrats are targeting AD 16, AD 35, AD 36, AD 40, AD 60, AD 65, and AD 66. In aggregate, Democrats won 51% of the vote in those seven districts in the June Primary. In fact, just two of the districts saw the aggregate Republican vote outpace the Democratic (AD 16 and AD 35). Meanwhile, Assembly Republicans don't have any plausible pick-up opportunities to offset loses. In the State Senate, Republicans are fighting to retain SD 21 and SD 29. Again, in aggregate, Democrats won 51% of the vote in the June Primary with Republicans grabbing a majority in SD 21. And while at the start of the election cycle Republicans theoretically had two pick-up opportunities - SD 25 and SD 27 - the June Primary aggregate vote was 62% Democratic in these two districts.

Winning the super-majority in both chambers obviously allows Democratic one-party rule a clear path to pass new taxes, increase taxes, place anything on the ballot, and pass constitutional amendments. So, why is this "the bad" and not "the ugly?" Because it theoretically empowers the "Mod Dems," thus enabling Republicans to build coalitions with the more moderate caucus on common fiscal responsibility issues. It's what we've seen in other states with dominant one-party rule - like Rhode Island's moderate Democrats and Kansas' moderate Republicans.

The Ugly - Doubling down on volatile revenues: As State Controller Betty Yee states, "Under our outdated tax structure, revenues fluctuate greatly from month to month..." And California is dangerously close to doubling down on this systemic characteristic. The driver behind California's volatile revenue is the state's reliance on personal income taxes to fund government operations. In Fiscal Year 2014-2015, personal income taxes accounted for 67% of total General Fund revenue (and just under half of total revenues). This is up from the low-to-mid 40 percent levels in the 1980s and 1990s. And why is this a problem? The personal income tax has come to rely heavily on the wealthiest of Californians. In Tax Year 2013, those making $400,000 or more in AGI accounted for half of California's personal income tax liability, a jump from just 23% in Tax Year 1993. And why is this a problem? Wealthy individuals rely more heavily on non-salary-and-wage income, such as capital gains on investments, which is extremely sensitive to swings in economic cycles.

Therefore, by relying more and more on a source of revenue that itself is more reliant on a tax base that is itself reliant on highly volatile income, California's revenue situation is ripe for rollercoaster-like booms and busts, which means the state's budget swings wildly between good and bad times. Proposition 55, which extends the 2012 Proposition 30 personal income tax rate increases on California's wealthiest, exacerbates this situation. What makes this "the ugly" is that California is due for an economic downturn and Sacramento hasn't prepared for it by fixing California's revenue volatility.

There is a lot on California's November ballot, including seventeen ballot propositions, all Assembly races, half of the State Senate districts, the first open U.S. Senate race since 1992, a presidential race, and countless local and county races and ballot measures. This is a just a snapshot of the sort of decisions voters have to make (see here for more information on California's 2016 elections). As the saying goes, "elections have consequences," and 2016's consequences could be far-reaching.
Donald Trump

A Ukrainian official said in a Wednesday statement that the government was "puzzled" as to why Donald Trump did not respond to an invitation to meet with President Petro Poroshenko during the United Nations General Assembly gathering this week in New York.

The statement provided to NBC News came from a senior official with Poroshenko, who said he "can confirm the Ukrainians reached out" to Trump for a meeting "and that they were puzzled at the lack of an RSVP."

"Thus far, the President of Ukraine has been pleased with the number of meetings that have taken place in NYC with world leader after world leader, including with [Democratic nominee] Hillary Clinton," the official said.

Poroshenko is on the opposite side of the Ukrainian conflict as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump has repeatedly made warm comments toward.

Trump, the Republican nominee, has come under fire at various points along the campaign trail for his affectionate comments toward Putin, such as when he recently said the Russian president is a "stronger leader" than US President Barack Obama during NBC's Commander in Chief forum.

Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

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NEW YORK  Brexit might mean Brexit, but Britain still wants to be a player on the world stage.

That, at least, was the message Theresa May wanted the world to hear as she addressed the United Nations general assembly in New York Tuesday.
The foreign policy positions of third-party candidates haven't received a great deal of media attention in the 2016 presidential election, but that could change in the weeks ahead as polls continue to tighten in crucial battleground states.

[M]ost voters think/assume that Clinton is going to win. That can de-motivate turnout, or shift votes to [third] parties, tweeted elections analyst Nate Silver.

RealClearWorld had the opportunity this week to discuss a variety of foreign policy issues with Joe Hunter, communications director for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson. This email interview has been edited for clarity and length.

RCW: Gov. Johnson said in a recent interview with NY1 that U.S. policy in Syria has led to the violent and sectarian situation on the ground in that country. The governor has also proposed working with Russia to bring violence there to an end. What is the long-term solution in the country? Should President Bashar Assad remain in power, as Moscow would prefer?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: Whether we want Assad to remain in power or not is irrelevant as long as Russia is backing him. A power dynamic in which Russia is backing the government and we are supporting or encouraging those opposed to Assad is destined to be a stalemate with no resolution in the foreseeable future. That is what we have today. Thus, the only way to shift that dynamic and bring an end to the civil war and the humanitarian consequences is to engage Russia in a credible peace process. And, of course, as long as the status quo remains, ISIS will continue to find a home in Syria. It is not a matter of whether we want to work with Russia; it is that there is no alternative that will work.

RCW: How would Gov. Johnson end that stalemate? Would he end U.S. support for Syrian rebel groups?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: Whether we like it or not, the reality in Syria is that it is probably impossible to end the stalemate without Russian "buy-in" to a real cease-fire and resolution. Until that happens, support for the rebel groups may extend the stalemate, but will not bring it to an end. Any decision about continued support for those groups must be part of a larger conversation with Russia.

RCW: Various human rights organizations have accused the Syrian government of using incendiary weapons and cluster bombs, and the United Nations has reported on the use of chlorine bombs in the war-torn country. Considering Russias support for Assad, would these human rights violations at all complicate Gov. Johnsons proposal to work closer with Russia in Syria?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: Of course the governments actions and abuses complicate any proposed solution. But until Russia engages in a process to end the fighting and, hopefully, the resulting atrocities, there is no rational path to a safer and more stable Syria that the U.S. can pursue. Simply saying that Assad must go is not a strategy. It is a wish. American regime changes in Iraq and Libya certainly did not produce the intended results, and if anything, Syria is even more complex and dangerous.

RCW: The governor has proposed that the United States stop policing the world -- how might that look in actual policy terms in the Middle East?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: In policy terms, it means that the U.S. must stop engaging in regime change efforts with no clear U.S. interest and uncertain outcomes. Our policy must be to protect the U.S., its citizens, and its property. Injecting ourselves into conflicts on the other side of the globe, that have persisted for literally hundreds of years in some cases, in the hope that we can somehow resolve them has failed miserably to make us safer or the MIddle East more stable.

RCW: The United States has several bases across the region, and thousands of troops stationed there. The U.S. also engages in counterterrorism efforts with host countries across the region, and sponsors troop and police training programs in countries like Jordan and Bahrain, just to name a couple. Would Gov. Johnson dismantle much of this?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: Dismantle isnt the right word. Taking office, getting the benefit of national security briefings, and understanding the commitments that exist today would all be necessary before reshaping the U.S. footprint in the region. However, it would begin with the fundamental goal of reducing that footprint, and withdrawing troops that are not needed to defend U.S. interests, as opposed to nation-building and interventions. Certainly, maintaining and supporting strategic alliances that make us safer will continue.

RCW: The United States agreed last week to a military aid deal with the Israeli government worth $38 billion -- what is Gov. Johnsons position on this, and as president would he honor this agreement or work to overturn it?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: We will honor agreements that have been made. Not honoring our commitments is not an option. However, going forward, all such agreements will be examined through the lens of fiscal realities, defending the United States, and keeping us safe.

RCW: Does Gov. Johnson personally agree with the $38 billion aid package allotted in the memorandum of understanding signed with Israel last week? Does he, generally speaking, support U.S. military aid to Israel? Has the relationship with Israel, to use your own words, made America safer and the Middle East more stable?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: Gov. Johnson has consistently viewed our relationship with Israel as one of the critical strategic partnerships about which he frequently speaks, and has long considered the military aid provided to Israel as a cost-effective way of helping to secure U.S. interests in the region. The $38 billion commitment over 10 years is, in reality, a modest increase over the $3.1 billion in aid we have been providing for several years, and represents an extension of the military partnership that has been in place for a long time.

And yes, our relationship with Israel does make America safer. Having a reliable and democratic ally in the region is of tremendous value, and in all likelihood, actually saves U.S. defense dollars.

RCW: As president, Gov. Johnson would inherit the Iran nuclear agreement from his predecessor, Barack Obama. How would he handle enforcement of the nuclear deal? Would he seek better ties with the Iranian government, or work to isolate the regime in Tehran?

JOHNSON CAMPAIGN: There appear to be many problems with the Iran agreement, including the likely and acknowledged flow of funds to terrorists. Likewise, the lack of transparency in the agreement and its development are extremely troubling. However, assessing agreements after the fact is a question of net benefits and costs. If the agreement delays the development of nuclear weapons and grants us greater ability to know what the Iranians are doing, the net benefits may outweigh the costs and flaws. As a matter of principle, engaging foreign governments and opening doors is good policy.
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UPI News Service, 09/21/2016



Offended dancers have lashed out at Kendall Jenner after she released pictures of a ballet-themed Vogue Espana photoshoot.

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Jenner, who is not a classically trained ballerina, posed in pointe shoes, leaning against a barre for support.

Dancers took umbrage with Jenner's portrayal, noting her incorrect form and improper dress.

Jenner's pointe shoes are missing the usual ankle-supporting ribbons and are not even broken in, offering no arch.

The accompanying video features Jenner jumping around in various ballet-inspired looks, including a pair of unrealistic fuzzy pointe shoes.

"Dance Moms" star Abby Lee Miller left a now deleted comment on a screenshot of the video posted to Jenner's Instagram saying she "cannot be a fan of this shoot."

"There are so many amazing dancers in the world...Kendall Jenner is not one of them!" Miller posted.

Kendall Jenner/Instagram
Kim Kardashian is giving the public an up-close glimpse of her massive new ring from Kanye West.

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The 35-year-old "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star showed off an enormous diamond sparkler from the 39-year-old rapper next to her 15-carat engagement ring in a Snapchat video.

E! News confirmed the new ring is from Lorraine Schwartz, who also designed Kardashian's engagement ring.

West proposed to the reality star at AT&T Park in San Francisco, Calif., in 2013.

"Kim's ring is [color grade] D -- flawless," a Lorraine Schwartz rep told E! News at the time.

"It's the best color, clarity and cut there is. There's no comparison!"

"Kanye was involved in every single way. He had a vision from the beginning. He looked at a lot of stones and he wanted only the best," the rep revealed. "He wanted the diamond to look like it was floating on air."

A source recently told Us Weekly the new, 20-carat ring is also color grade D and worth an estimated $10 million.

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Kardashian had debuted the new jewelry at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards in August.

The "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star also made headlines this week for criticizing the Wall Street Journal.

She called out the publication in the New York Times for publishing an ad that denied the Armenian genocide.
Katie Donovan first saw a photo of Dalton Prager posted on Facebook from his hospital bed. The date was August 1, 2009. "I'll never forget it," she tells PEOPLE.



Both had been born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease leading to thick buildup of mucus in the lungs and other organs that restricts and worsens the ability to breathe over time. Patients have a current average life expectancy of 40 years. Dalton was then 17. Katie was 18.



"Hey, I see you're in the hospital if you ever need somebody to talk to," Katie wrote to him.



Dalton's response: "I'm sorry, but do I know you?"



She explained the connection. Dalton's mom was a pediatric nurse in St. Louis, Missouri, and knew someone who knew Katie, nearly 400 miles away in small-town Ewing, Kentucky. Katie had spotted Dalton's picture on his mother's Facebook site. "I know how it is to be in the hospital by yourself, and I just wanted to make sure he wasn't lonely," Katie, now 26, says.



They started messaging, first about the disease, then about everything, and never stopped. Like the star-crossed young cancer patients in the best-selling novel and 2014 film The Fault in Our Stars, each found a sympathetic ear, and an instant understanding, that swiftly evolved into something deeper.



"Let's just say that after three days of talking to Dalton on the phone," Katie says, "I called my mom and told her that I knew who I was going to marry."





Wife in Real-Life Fault in Our Stars Couple Opens Up About Their Heartbreaking Love Story: 'He Was My Other Half'| Real People Stories



Dalton knew it, too.



"He was like a new person," his mom, Renee, tells PEOPLE. "Before, he just saw 'my life is going to end,' and he just knew that. But all of a sudden he wanted to do things, he wanted to go places. He could see things that he never saw before. He saw a future. He saw happiness."



When they vowed to meet in person, it was against the advice of doctors, who say that due to risk of infections, cystic fibrosis patients should steer clear of each other. Dalton's mom was fearful; she flat-out opposed the meeting. But Dalton was insistent. "I'm going to Kentucky to meet her with or without you," he told her. She backed off and made the trip with him.



In Kentucky, Dalton parked his mom at their bed-and-breakfast, then walked to the Dairy Queen, where Katie was waiting for him.



The teenagers already had talked about the risks. "I knew that there was a possibility that we would get sicker and something could happen," Katie says. "I just told Dalton I'd rather have somebody that I was totally in love with for five years, than be either lonely or not as happy with somebody for 20 years."



Neither had been sickly as kids. Although they would adjust to IV's and feeding tubes and breathing treatments as a way of life, the disease didn't define them. Katie was an elementary school cheerleader, ran high school cross country, played on softball and volleyball teams. Dalton wrestled competitively, binding his tubes to his body and tucking them under his singlet. Each worked teenage jobs.



Was the disease scary during those years? "It could be at times," Katie says. "But I knew that God has control of the situation, so it wasn't bad."



Five months after reaching out, Katie left Kentucky in January 2010 to settle into an apartment with Dalton outside of St. Louis. A month later, on a trip to St. Thomas with his grandparents, Dalton fell to one knee at the edge of the crystalline blue water and proposed.



Katie cried. "I was just so happy," she says.





Wife in Real-Life Fault in Our Stars Couple Opens Up About Their Heartbreaking Love Story: 'He Was My Other Half'| Real People Stories



They married on July 16, 2011, under an outdoor gazebo in Kentucky, with Katie in a sequined, strapless wedding dress. A bridesmaid walked their cockapoo Marley, a rescue dog, down the aisle. (They later expanded their family with a German shepherd, Bo, another rescue.) For their first dance, they chose the Bryan Adams song "Heaven."



"She looked like an angel," says Katie's father, John Donovan, 58, a railroad engineer. "I wanted to see them grow old together. I knew it wasn't going to happen, but that's what I wanted to see."



They were a well-matched couple: Dalton, a graduate of culinary school, liked to cook, and Katie, who otherwise favored Taco Bell, liked to eat. "We weren't really that sick, so we were able to do whatever we wanted," Katie says. "It was fun."



At his lowest moments, prior to Katie, Dalton had been so wracked by breathing struggles that he had vowed to shut the door on extended care and surgeries that didn't guarantee success; at age 11, he'd even drafted a will, promising his collection of Yugioh cards to his best friend. Making things worse was the bacterial infection burkholderia cepacia, which had taken hold in Dalton before his teen years and never let go.



Soon that infection transferred to Katie. "I didn't know how serious it was," she says, "until it pretty much took over my whole life."



By late 2012 and early 2013, "we started getting sicker," Katie says. "It was just very miserable."



The couple had relocated to Kentucky, and with their forward-focus on each other, embraced the idea of lung transplants. "We wanted to keep living, we wanted to keep traveling, we wanted to just keep being the married couple that we always wanted," Katie says. Dalton told his mom: "We want more time together, even if it's a short amount of time."



The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center performed the surgery. Both entered the hospital in August 2014; told he wouldn't live to see Christmas if he didn't get new lungs before Thanksgiving, Dalton received his transplant that November. Due to insurance complications, Katie did not receive her lungs until seven months later, in July 2015.



Only after Dalton's surgery did Katie's mom, Debra Donovan, learn that Katie had taken her own name off the transplant list to ensure Dalton got his lungs first.



With her husband in recovery, "I took her to the doors of the I.C.U to look in on him," Donovan recalls. "That's all she wanted  to be able to look in for herself to see that he was okay."



But he never was, not fully. By the time of Katie's transplant, Dalton was back with his family in St. Louis, where his health struggles would continue as he developed lymphoma. Back home in Kentucky, Katie also found herself in and out of the hospital again under her own family's watch. The two were incapable of caring for each other.



Through texts, phone calls and Skype conversations, the couple did their best to keep in touch. "They were complete soul mates, and he couldn't imagine life without her," says Dalton's mom.



On their fifth anniversary last July, Dalton traveled to see Katie  for only a few minutes  in her hospital room. He was ill himself back in St. Louis when Katie decided in early September that she'd had enough of hospitals and wanted to finish her days on her own terms at home under hospice care. Her doctors have told her they don't expect she'll live into the new year.



"How am I supposed to watch my wife die?" Dalton asked his mom. "How am I supposed to see her in a casket? I'm supposed to go first." Renee Prager told her son: "You are the one that has to be strong; you have to be strong for her. Maybe this is the reason you have not died all these other times."



Still, Renee Prager packed up her car, started the engine, and prepared to take Dalton on one more long drive to see his bride, if only briefly. He was too weak to get in the car. That afternoon he was in an ambulance with pneumonia and back in the hospital yet again. The families secured a donated medical transport to relocate Dalton closer to Katie, if only he could rebound to make the trip.



On Facebook, Katie posted news of her calls to his nurse. "They will be starting breathing trials in the morning," she wrote September 11. "He is on a very small dose of blood pressure medicine and she said he should be off of that very soon. He is still stable. God is great!" On September 12: "He did a breathing trial earlier this morning and did wonderful! They will be doing that again this afternoon. They are expecting to be able to transfer him most likely tomorrow which is amazing!" They looked forward to seeing each other.



Believing that her own days were growing short, Katie accelerated her bucket list. Last Saturday her family planned "Christmas" at her aunt's house.



That afternoon came word that Dalton had died. He was 25.



"My angel, my best friend, the love of my life, my husband went to be with the Lord our God today," Katie wrote on Facebook, where she and Dalton had found each other. "Dalton fought a long hard battle with cystic fibrosis. He was a courageous fighter and 'give up' wasn't in his vocabulary. Thank you for all of your love, prayers and kind words that you have shown to us over the past few years. God bless each of you.  Katie."



Two days earlier, Katie considered her own life, and whether she ever worried that love and marriage might never come her way in the time she was given.



"Those thoughts go through everybody's head that has CF," she said, "but I didn't let that take over my mind. I knew that I was going to be fine and that I could do this  I could live and do whatever I want."



"I believe that God does everything for a reason," she said. "He is the master. He has a plan for all of us, and if this is my plan, then I'm ready and I'm not afraid, and I'm going to just keep going until I can't go any more."



She went forward with Dalton as long as their time allowed. "We told each other we loved each other the first day we met in person. We just knew," she says. "He understood everything about me. He knew what I was going through, and he was just my other half. And I knew it."
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Many Athens residents were initially confused and upset when they heard Mayor Nancy Denson decided to pull an anti-discrimination ordinance from being voted on this month, but now some welcome the time to push for further expansion of the ordinance.
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Athens-Clarke County has the fifth-highest amount of bicycle-car collisions and cyclist injuries in Georgia, and Athens has the third-highest number of bicycle collisions when broken down by city, behind Savannah and Atlanta. Mark Coyne, transportation systems coordinator for Athens-Clarke County, said improvements to bike safety are in the works.
Going to school at The University of Georgia is a full-time job in itself. Students weeks are filled with studying, club meetings, classes and of course, homework. Here is a list of six things that you can do to make some money without getting an actual job.
Redding Chamber of Commerce logo

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Redding Chamber hosts lunch

The Redding Chamber of Commerce will host Connect 4 Lunch noon to 1 p.m. Sept. 28 at 747 Auditorium Drive.

The lunch is open to all chamber members and it will feature four chamber members presenting on their companies.

A pizza lunch will be provided but seating is limited. Attendees are encouraged to bring their business cards and company brochures to share.

Go to http://bit.ly/2cFCNQO to reserve a seat.

Democrats host open house

The Shasta County Democrats will hold an open house noon to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at 900 Locust St. in Redding.

This is an opportunity for people to volunteer and learn more.

The headquarters' regular hours through Nov. 8 are noon to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.

Go to www.democratsofshastacounty.org, check them out on Facebook or call 782-4286.

Conservationist hired

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service has appointed Melinda Graves as the new district conservationist at its field office in Redding.

A Midwest native, Graves lived in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin prior to moving to California in 2005. Graves started serving in her new NRCS position on Sept. 4.

Graves graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Steven Point with a degree in forest ecosystem management and restoration and a minor in soil science. Prior to earning her degree, Graves was an AmeriCorps volunteer for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Iowa nonprofit environmental group Trees Forever.

NRCS is a federal agency that works in partnership with resource conservation districts. Go to www.ca.nrcs.usda.gov for more information.

Reporter David Benda can be reached at 225-8219 or at david.benda@redding.com.
This Aug. 4, 2016 photo shows a plane conducts mosquito control aerial spraying over Wynwood area of Miami, Fla., and the surrounding areas in order combat the spread of Zika. Miami-Dade County officials say they're delaying the aerial spraying of an insecticide called naled over South Beach following concerns voiced by residents and local officials. County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said in a statement Wednesday, Sept. 7 that the spraying to fight the Zika virus scheduled for Thursday morning was moved to Friday morning. Additional sprayings are scheduled for Sunday and the next two weekends. (Logan Riely/Miami Herald via AP)

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MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP)  Aerial insecticide spraying to combat mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus is underway in Miami Beach.

A plane carrying the insecticide naled released the spray over the targeted area before dawn Friday. The next round is scheduled for 6 a.m. Sunday.

Some residents oppose the spraying, citing the potential for harmful effects. But county officials say the low concentration of naled won't harm them.

"We are concerned that the naled actually has more of a potential risk of creating the problems we are trying to avert than the actual concern with Zika," area resident Brik Viera said.

Local television stations reported that some parents kept their children home from school on Friday because of the spraying. The aerial spraying targets adult mosquitoes; different pesticides for larvae will be sprayed on the ground.

The touristy South Beach area of Miami Beach is the second site declared an active zone of Zika transmission by mosquitoes on the U.S. mainland. The discovery in August led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to include a section of Miami Beach in a travel warning issued for pregnant women. Earlier in the summer, a travel warning was issued for Miami's Wynwood arts district, which is popular for day trips.

South Beach also became the first place on the mainland where the virus was isolated in mosquito samples, with health authorities reporting last week that three batches of the insects tested positive for Zika. Florida's agriculture department said Friday that one more batch from the area had tested positive. Statewide, an additional 2,900 batches of more than a dozen insects each have tested negative for the virus, state officials said in a news release.

Zika infection can cause severe brain-related birth defects, including a dangerously small head, if women are infected during pregnancy.

Of Florida's 56 non-travel-related Zika cases, 11 have been traced to Miami Beach and 29 to Wynwood. The rest are being considered isolated cases and have not prompted authorities to issue warnings of local transmission.

___

Information from: The Miami Herald, http://www.herald.com
FILE - In this Aug. 18, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks in New York. Hillary Clinton has spent decades talking about the needs of children and touting the benefits of early education. Its a new subject for Donald Trump. The Republican presidential nominee added plans for education to his still relatively thin roster of policy proposals this past week, unveiling an effort to spend $20 billion during his first year in office to help states expand school choice programs. Trump wasnt shy about his intentions, debuting his ideas at an inner-city charter school in Cleveland as part of his new outreach to minority voters. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

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By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP)  Hillary Clinton has spent decades talking about the needs of children and touting the benefits of early education. It's a new subject for Donald Trump.

The Republican presidential nominee added plans for education to his still relatively thin roster of policy proposals this past week, unveiling an effort to spend $20 billion during his first year in office to help states expand school choice programs. Trump wasn't shy about his intentions, debuting his ideas at an inner-city charter school in Cleveland as part of his new outreach to minority voters.

"There's no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly," Trump said at the school, blaming the Democratic Party for having "trapped millions of African-American and Hispanic youth in failing government schools that deny them the opportunity to join the ladder of American success."

"It's time to break up that monopoly," he said.

But like many of his policy plans, this was one was vague, with few specifics.

Trump argued his approach would create "a massive education market," one that produces better outcomes than the nation's existing public education system. Beyond his $20 billion in federal money, he wants states to divert another $110 billion of their own education budgets to support school choice efforts, providing $12,000 to every elementary school student living in poverty to attend the school of their choice.

Clinton's much more detailed education plans, meanwhile, are firmly rooted in improving the country's public schools. The Democratic nominee has called for new spending to improve classrooms, improve teacher salaries and add computer science programs.

"We're going to invest in education and skills, from early childhood education to giving our teachers the tools and flexibility they need to succeed in the classroom, without a lot of top-down strings all over them from Washington," she said on Monday.

On education, the two candidates are as far apart as they are on any issue at stake in the 2016 election. A summary of their proposals:

___

SCHOOL CHOICE

TRUMP: The billionaire businessman has embraced the concept popular among conservatives, which calls for students and their parents to be able to select the school they wish to attend  public, private, charter or magnet. To support that effort, Trump proposed reallocating an unspecified $20 billion in his first budget as president into block grants to states, and directing them to use the money to help millions of elementary school students living in poverty attend the school of their choice. That money "should follow the students," a concept known in education policy as portability. Critics of school choice argue that approach would deprive public schools of money, and Congress rejected the idea in the education law it passed last year to replace the No Child Left Behind Act.

CLINTON: Clinton has voiced support for charter schools, which operate with public money but are governed by an independent "charter" rather than a community's established public education system. But Clinton does not back the broader concept of school choice. "I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system  not outside of it  but within it, because I am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy and it is a path for opportunity," she said in November 2015.

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STUDENT LOANS AND DEBT

TRUMP: He has decried the impact of debt from loans on college students, but beyond his often-stated promise to create jobs as president, he has not offered a concrete proposal to address what he called "one of the biggest questions I get is from people in college." Trump has criticized the federal government's student loan program for making a profit, telling The Hill newspaper in July 2015 "that's probably one of the only things the government shouldn't make money off. I think it's terrible that one of the only profit centers we have is student loans."

CLINTON: She has proposed that students from families making less than $125,000 a year be able to attend a public college or university in their home state without having to pay tuition, and that all community colleges be tuition-free. Under her plan, students with existing student loan debt would be able to refinance, and Clinton promises a three-month moratorium on payments to allow those in debt to take steps to reduce their monthly payments. Those deemed "entrepreneurs" will get a three-year deferment on their loans "so that student debt and the lack of family wealth is not a barrier to innovation in our country."

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COMMON CORE

TRUMP: The academic standards adopted in more than 40 states are a frequent target of Trump's ire. "We spend more by far, and we're doing very poorly. So, obviously, Common Core does not work," he said this past week. Trump has pledged to do away with the standards if elected, which could prove a challenge: they were created and adopted by states, not the federal government. Trump has also pledged that ripping up the state-developed standards and bringing education "to the local level" would immediately boost student performance.

CLINTON: The standards are not mentioned in Clinton's education plans, although her campaign does note that as the first lady of Arkansas, she chaired the state's education standards commission. Speaking in Iowa during the primary season, Clinton lamented what she called the "really unfortunate argument" about the standards. "It wasn't politicized," she said. "It was to try to come up with a core of learning that we might expect students to achieve across our country, no matter what kind of school district they were in, no matter how poor their family was, that there wouldn't be two tiers of education."

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CHILD CARE

TRUMP: Trump said in August he would "reduce the cost of child care by allowing parents to fully deduct the average cost of child care spending from their taxes." He has not provided more details, which he said would come after he refined his plan with his daughter, Ivanka. As a tax deduction, rather than a tax credit, Trump's plan would primarily help more affluent households. More than 40 percent of U.S. taxpayers don't make enough money to owe taxes to the federal government, meaning they would not benefit from a deduction.

CLINTON: She proposes that no family should spend more than 10 percent of its income on child care. To achieve this goal, Clinton would seek to boost federal spending on child care subsidies and provide "tax relief for the cost of child care to working families." Those benefits would be offered on a "sliding scale" based on need. Since announcing the plan in May, Clinton has offered few details on the specifics, including how it would be funded beyond raising taxes on wealthy Americans.

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EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

TRUMP: Trump has not discussed early childhood education.

CLINTON: She would seek to make preschool universal for all 4-year-old children within 10 years of her election by providing new federal dollars to states. Clinton also seeks to double the number of children enrolled in Early Head Start, a government program that provides early education services to low-income families. Clinton has not detailed in depth on how she would pay for these expanded efforts.

___

What political news is the world searching for on Google and talking about on Twitter? Find out via AP's Election Buzz interactive. http://elections.ap.org/buzz
Dr. Ziad Niazi talks to patients at his office in Redding. Niazi is retiring from his practice by the end of the month.

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By Ryan Sabalow

Since moving to Redding in 1980, Dr. Ziad Niazi has helped diagnose and treat thousands of cases of some of the most unpleasant ailments to afflict the human anatomy ? everything from agonizing kidney stones to cancers hidden in the most sensitive of places.

"In my life I've always ventured to help people, you know," the 72-year-old Iraq-born urologist said last week. "Since I was a kid, the allowance which I got from my family, I'd see people in the street, begging or something, and I'd give them most of my allowance. So I always came to like helping people. I felt that medicine was the best, most honorable way that you can help people."

But later this month, Niazi is closing the doors of his Gold Street practice for the last time.

He's retiring. His hundreds of patients will have to go elsewhere for care.

Niazi's story is hardly unique. Shasta County's doctors are a rapidly aging bunch, and members of the local medical community are worried that there won't be enough physicians available to treat a projected influx of older baby boomers with longer life expectancies. There also are worries of growing demand caused by now-uninsured patients who will be covered by federal health care reform laws in 2014.

"The real tidal wave or tsunami is gradually building," said Dr. Douglas McConnell, Shasta Regional Medical Center's director of cardiac surgery. "When that's combined with upcoming reimbursement changes, you've got a perfect storm for Medicare access for seniors."

McConnell is 65 himself, but he said doesn't plan to retire any time soon.

Aging doctors, aging population

Of the 435 doctors who listed a Shasta County address with the California Medical Board, 269 are older than 50, according to a list of age ranges provided to the Record Searchlight by the state's doctor-licensing board.

That's more than 60 percent.

Around 150 of the 435 are over 60.

That's a third.

Just 52 are 40 or younger.

By comparison, nearly a third of Shasta County's estimated 181,099 residents are older than 55, according to 2009 population estimates provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Those who aren't already on Medicare, the federal government's socialized medical insurance program for seniors and the disabled, are expected to join in ever-growing numbers.

There are expected to be roughly 60,000 Medicare beneficiaries in Shasta, Trinity, Siskiyou, Lassen and Modoc counties in 2011, according to the California Department of Aging's Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program.

That's about 2,000 more than in 2010.

HICAP officials say those numbers are expected to keep climbing in the years to come.

Shortages elsewhere

Shasta County's pending doctor shortage isn't unique.

The rest of California, and to a slightly smaller extent, the country at large, faces the dilemma of finding ways to treat more aging patients amid a dearth of doctors.

"You (California) have a serious problem where you're going to lose probably a third of your physicians over the next 10 years ...," said Atul Grover, the chief advocacy officer for Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Medical Colleges. "If you're lucky, the stock market will stay down and these guys won't be able to retire. A lot of doctors are waiting for their 401Ks go back up before they start to leave their practice."

He said in California, between 27,000 and 28,000 of the 90,000 or so doctors are older than 60.

That's the highest percentage of doctors nearing retirement age in the country, Grover said.

Even so, nationally, a third of the country's doctors are older than 55, he said.

As it stands, there isn't an influx of young doctors lining up to replace their graying peers.

California's medical schools simply aren't producing enough physicians to meet the demand, said Andrew LaMar, a spokesman for California Medical Association, which has been pushing for state lawmakers to build new medical colleges at U.C. Irvine and U.C. Merced.

In addition, specialty programs that train doctors in fields like urology, cardiology or advanced cancer care are graduating fewer doctors than ever before. And when graduates do leave, they find fewer residency programs that allow them to complete on-the-job training, Grover said.

LaMar and Grover's groups are pushing for federal lawmakers to reinstate programs that allowed the Medicare system to pay hospitals and the U.C. system to train resident physicians. LaMar's group also advocates for student-loan forgiveness programs that allow doctors to pay less to complete their schooling.

When doctors do get out of school or the training stages, sometimes a decade or longer process, many choose to head to a big city to find a more lucrative practice to pay off piles of student loan debt, he said.

Making matters more complicated is that even though many doctors who are nearing retirement age may want to keep working part time, there are a number of barriers to doing so, Grover said.

The costs to keep a clinic running part time are nearly the same as keeping it open full time. Plus, malpractice insurance companies don't prorate their bills for a part time physician, he said.

Other factors

Compounding issues surrounding the north state's aging physicians, local doctors also are leaving their practices for other reasons, said Dr. Dan Lensink, a 52-year-old Redding ophthalmic plastic surgeon and past president of the North Valley Medical Association.

The NVMA has tracked at least 35 north state doctors who closed their practices and moved to another state, or they chose to work at a hospital, walk-in clinic or at a state prison.

Lensink said that only one of those doctors' clinics has found a replacement.

Lensink says the doctors are shuttering their practices due to reimbursement reductions from government and private insurers and partly because of the government's growing list of mandates for doctors and the reams of paperwork that go with them.

"You wouldn't believe the regulations that are coming at us so fast so furious," Lensink said.

Dr. Maja Sandberg, a 58-year-old breast cancer and vascular surgeon, moved from Redding to Iowa in October to work at a small-town clinic with a longtime doctor friend.

"There's no question that we are finding it very difficult to practice in the current environment," Sandberg said. "I think the private practice doctors are very much affected by reimbursement rates from MediCal and Medicare, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield have historically followed those cuts."

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the area's primary private insurers, typically reimburse doctors on a formula based on Medicare payments, LaMar and others say.

When Medicare rates go down, the insurers' formulas force down rates paid to physicians.

Those payments to doctors have been in flux of late as Congress debates whether to stop a 23 percent cut in doctors' Medicare payments. The cuts were slated to go forward Dec. 1 unless Congress steps in to delay them or find a new funding source. Last week, Congress voted to delay the cuts for another month.

Sandberg said she felt Iowa would be a more conducive environment for a private practice. There are fewer physicians with which to compete, and the insurers' rates are better, she said.

"Ultimately, you have to keep the doors open just like any other business," she said.

?Overwhelmed' with patients

Lensink said many local doctors are already considering not taking new Medicare patients amid worries that reimbursement rates won't be enough to keep their clinics solvent.

LaMar said that, combined with doctors retiring in droves, could mean long waits or worse for Medicare patients hoping to see the remaining doctors who'll treat them.

"The bottom line is they'll end up driving to other counties, or they may not be able to find someone (to treat them)," LaMar said. "They'll end up in the emergency room. That's a bad outcome for everybody. It's putting patients in danger, and that's not something that's going to contain costs."

But Joanne Spetz, a researcher at the Center for Health Professions at UC San Francisco, told the Ventura County Star recently that the news isn't entirely grim. She said provisions in the new health care reforms are designed to boost doctors and other health professionals dedicated to primary care.

She said she thinks those efforts plus an infusion of immigrant health workers could limit the damage of the doctor shortages.

"... I don't think it's a done deal," she told the paper.

In Niazi's case, the Redding urologist' patients are going to be divvied up among the five other doctors remaining in Redding who practice in his specialty.

He hasn't been able to find another doctor to keep his clinic open.

"I have so many patients I've accumulated over the years," he said. "A lot of them, they have cancer, you know. A lot of the doctors will be overwhelmed with my patients, I suppose."

He paused.

"I wish them luck, you know."
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By Joe Szydlowski of the Redding Record Searchlight

SHASTA LAKE  Shasta Lake's City Council unanimously approved a water-system plan and a list prioritizing projects for the city's water system whose age and long-delayed maintenance city staff and council members cited as why they hiked water rates.

The 2016-26 Master Water Plan doesn't set aside any money or authorize the projects, but instead guides public works staff decisions about how to prioritize projects for the water system, parts of which are about 70 years old, said Jeff Tedder, city engineer.

"Much of the original steel system was installed in the 1940s and '50s," he said. "It is well beyond its life."

That list ranks mostly new water tanks and other fixtures at the city's Fishermans Point water treatment plant as the highest priority using a computer-simulated stress test, said Scott Parker, senior vice president at Carollo Engineers, a Sacramento firm that helped Tedder craft the plan.

The test examined the system during a hypothetical big fire that breaks out during peak water use, the two biggest draws on the potable water, Parker said. Then, he used that information to prioritize areas most susceptible to failure and the biggest problems. It also looked at scenarios involving 1 percent yearly population growth and if developers build out to the city limits, Parker said.

Councilman Greg Watkins noted how much firefighting taxes local reservoirs, saying he regularly sees one reservoir fluctuate 2 feet.

"During (the Lake Fire), it dropped four feet," he said.

But one woman told the council she wanted to know why a 70-year-old system had been allowed to degrade so much and asked about oversight of the rate hikes, which if all phases are implemented over three years would be 67 percent higher for the average residence.

Tedder said the system hadn't been setting aside money for larger construction and major infrastructure undertakings, known as capital improvements, before 2009.

"When I first came to the city it was a little bit shocking. How do you maintain a system when there's no money (for capital improvements)," he said. "Basically, public works was running it as, 'Repair it as it breaks' (system)."

The city had relied on grants and hadn't planned longer term, such as using a small main to connect a house to water in a then-rural area that went on to become a subdivision, stretching that small pipe's supply.

"We have a lot of 4-inch, 5-inch and 2-inch water mains in the city," he said. "The normal standard is six inches."

As for oversight, Watkins said that any capital improvements come before the council to be improved individually.

The first tier of the water rate increases is set to take effect Oct. 1.
SHARE Suren Patel

Red Bluff City Councilman Suren Patel was released Tuesday night from Tehama County Jail after his $1 million bail was reduced earlier that day to $300,000.

Patel, who appeared Tuesday morning in Tehama County Superior Court for further arraignment on felony theft, perjury, conspiracy and other charges, pleaded not guilty and has retained Red Bluff defense attorney Ron McIver to represent him.

Patel, who had been represented at his arraignment earlier this month by defense attorney Elizabeth Latimer of Chico, is scheduled to have his preliminary hearing on Oct. 25.

Arrested in July and charged with 13 felonies, including grand theft, two counts of conspiracy to commit a crime and crime of a public officer, Patel is facing about nine years, eight months in prison if convicted, Tehama County District Attorney Gregg Cohen has said.

Prosecutors have said Patel was arrested in Florida while trying to flee the country, but Latimer said following his arraignment earlier this month that he was going on a prepaid Disney cruise with his family booked in January and was not trying to flee.

The 44-year-old Patel, who was extradited from Florida following his arrest, was appointed to the Red Bluff City Council in December 2014 to fill a vacancy, but is not seeking to keep the seat in the upcoming election.

He owned Americas Best Value Inn in Red Bluff, but is no longer affiliated with the company, authorities have said.

Patel was the focus of a yearlong investigation by the Tehama County District Attorneys Office that started in March 2015.

In May of that year, authorities took computers, cellphones and business records from his hotel. Cohen has said Patel did not pay taxes owed to the city as owner of the hotel.

The investigation into Patels business practices began with a tip on his payment of workers compensation, but soon grew to include other charges, including theft from the city of Red Bluff, Cohen has said.

He has said Patel is accused of bilking four victims, including a 70-year-old woman out of about $7,000, as well as about $20,000 in transient occupancy monies from the city.
Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight

Stevie Lee Boston, shown Tuesday at his preliminary hearing, was ordered to stand trial on 15 felony counts.

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By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

A 20-year-old Sacramento man charged with 15 felonies, including kidnapping, assault and a series of sex crimes, will stand trial on those criminal counts.

Retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Candace Beason ordered Stevie Lee Boston to stand trial Tuesday following a near day-long preliminary hearing in Shasta County Superior Court.

Boston, due back in Superior Court on Oct. 3 to set his trial date, was arrested in June for allegedly kidnapping and physically and sexually abusing two women in Redding.

It's also alleged he had both women lure clients to hotel rooms and other locales in Sacramento, Red Bluff, Chico, Redding and Stockton through advertisements on sex-related websites for promises of sex for cash. But it's alleged the women never exchanged sexual favors, and instead robbed the men.

One of those two women, who is 19, spent about three hours on the witness stand Tuesday, saying she loves Boston and that he never abused her or the other woman.

"He never laid a hand on me," she said during questioning by Deputy District Attorney Sarah Murphy and defense attorney Steve Whitworth of Elk Grove.

She said the other woman fabricated the entire story against Boston because she's jealous of their relationship, which began when she was 15.

"He would never have put me in that situation," she said, adamantly denying the allegations against Boston.

Police have said they began their investigation after receiving a call from Hinkle's Market on June 21.

Upon arriving, they spoke with a Redding woman who said she escaped Boston after a fight.

Redding Police officer Dean Adams testified Tuesday that the woman, who was distraught and crying, told her of the abuse and had visible bruising on her left arm and back.

"She seemed to be very afraid," he said.

She and Boston had connected in March, and although nice at first, he became abusive and brought the 19-year-old woman to Redding, police have said.

The woman who said she escaped from Boston said he physically and sexually abused both of the women and held them against their will in a Redding apartment, police and prosecutors said.

Officers tracked a cellphone to a Sacramento home, which a SWAT team raided. There, police found Boston and the 19-year-old woman, safe.

Boston, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, remains in Shasta County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail. He faces a potential life prison sentence if convicted.
The Rev. Timothy Moore of Church of The Redeemed, who was killed in a traffic collision Monday.

SHARE David Benda/Record Searchlight Deacon Robert Nichols talks about the loss of Timothy Moore, pastor at Church of The Redeemed in Redding. Moore, who was killed in a vehicle wreck Monday morning in Palo Cedro, established the church more than 20 years ago.

By David Benda, Record Searchlight

The Rev. Timothy Moore of Church of The Redeemed in Redding was remembered as a man with a big heart whose ministry helped thousands of people in its 20-plus years of existence.

The doors were always open. Anything people needed, he would help out, Moores son, Micah, said Tuesday afternoon inside the church on Butte Street. He would do the best of his ability and it was always above and beyond.

Timothy Moore was known to many as Pastor Tim.

Moore, 68, was killed Monday morning when the SUV he was driving collided with a truck near the Deschutes off-ramp in Palo Cedro.

California Highway Patrol investigators say Moore for unknown reasons turned his vehicle left and crossed over into oncoming traffic. The wreck is still under investigation.

Micah Moore, 37, was driving back from Millville with his wife, Garnett, when they came upon the wreck Monday morning. They were coming from Garnetts parents home on their way to Micahs landscaping business.

We saw the wreckage and ... they were moving traffic, he said. My wife looked over at me and says, Is that Dad? I said, Thats not Dad, thats not Dad. "

Micah said he got a phone call around 11 a.m. with the tragic news.

We went to my moms house and weve been with family ever since, he said.

Micah said his dad would drive east of Redding every morning and watch the sunrise. That is why his father was in the Palo Cedro area Monday morning.

He would take his time, talked to God and thanked him for everything thats going on, he said.

After ministering with a few other churches in Redding, Timothy Moore and other pastors established Church of The Redeemed. The church started by ministering and feeding the homeless in city parks. The congregation met in the basement of the Lorenz Hotel before moving to its current Butte Street home just west of the Thai Cafe.

The churchs ministry focused on the disadvantaged, drug addicts and people with criminal records.

The lost, those who lost their way in life, Micah Moore said. They were there to just help out any way they could.

Timothy Moore worked in maintenance at Shasta Paper Co. in Anderson and retired about a month before the plant closed in August 2001.

He worked 40-plus hours a week, Micah Moore said. We used to joke around, Do you ever sleep, Dad?' Cause he was always going and he never stopped.

Micah, the youngest of four children, said he drank and used drugs before he straightened his life out. Hes been sober for more than eight years.

I walked away and came back and settled down, he said. I realized there was more to life than seeking other things, alcohol and drugs.

For Robert Nichols, whos now deacon at Church of The Redeemed, his drug and alcohol habit left him homeless before he walked through Timothy Moores church. He calls Moore his mentor.

Nichols sat at a table inside the church Tuesday afternoon. Four greeting cards sat in front him: one for the first-responders to Mondays wreck; one for Robert Reed, whose truck collided with Moores SUV; one for Micah and his family; and one for Moores widow, Carole.

Nichols talked about the courage of emergency responders who saved Reed and how they shouldnt feel remorse over not being able to save Moore, adding it was the late pastors time to come home.

Hes the one they needed to save, Nichols said of Reed.

Reed, 31, suffered major injuries and was in critical condition at Mercy Medical Center in Redding, a nursing supervisor said Tuesday evening.

In addition to his wife, Carole, and son, Micah, Timothy Moore is survived by three daughters: Sheila Kepler, Mandy Moore and Misty Moore.

A celebration of life is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sunday at Church of The Redeemed at 844 Butte St.
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By Nathan Solis of the Redding Record Searchlight

Shasta County supervisors approved a salary hike for sheriff's deputies, sergeants and investigators with the District Attorney's Office on Tuesday.

The new agreement will cost $564,000 and will give employees the option to enroll in a new retirement plan starting next year, which includes a contribution match from the county.

The new contract updates terms for overtime pay, stipends for uniforms and equipment, and a 6 percent salary increase over the next two years. Approximately 80 employees will be affected by the new agreement  including 56 deputies, 15 sergeants, eight district attorney investigators and one supervising investigator, said Director of Support Services Angela Davis.

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said the increase may help his department in attracting candidates outside the county. He said officers transferring to the same position in Shasta County often take a reduction in their salary.

The salary range for a sheriff's deputy before the increase is $51,600 to $65,856. This includes a retirement plan, medical care for family members and other benefits. The salary range for a sergeant is $58,296 to $74,400.

The new contract will run until the end of August 2018 and was last updated in 2013. The Shasta County Deputy Sheriffs' Association was in negotiations with the county since June, according to county documents, and represents both Sheriff's Office deputies and investigators with the District Attorney's Office.

The first 3 percent base salary increase goes into effect immediately, along with a bulk of the other terms in the contract agreement, including an option to appeal disciplinary actions to a department head in the Sheriff's Office.

Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett said the increase in pay would make the DA's office appear a destination for new investigators.

"We have had a problem with recruitment for the DA's investigators," she said. "This (salary increase) would make us more appealing for those qualified candidates."

In 2009 Shasta County faced a $7.5 million budget gap and in order to avoid layoffs, deputies agreed to pay into their retirement benefits at a rate 9 percent. County staff said this latest pay increase is making right the cut employees took seven years ago.

In July the Professional Peace Officers Association negotiated a salary hike for probation and detention officers. The roughly 81 employees saw similar terms in their new agreement, including a salary increase and the option to enroll in the new retirement plan. That agreement carried with it a cost of $521,000.
SHARE Cal Thomas

Next week's presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could determine the outcome of the election. As polls show Trump leading in some swing states and closing the gap in others, it appears the only burden he must overcome is the one Ronald Reagan shared, looking presidential enough that voters trust him with so much power.

The way these debates have usually gone in the past is that the Republican candidate is asked about abortion, gay rights and other social issues and the Democratic candidate is asked about subjects that appeal to a wider range of voters.

Lester Holt, the "NBC Nightly News" anchor, will moderate the first debate. Here are some questions he should ask:

For Clinton: You once supported traditional marriage, but now favor same-sex marriage. Polygamists now want to be next in line to receive legal and cultural approval. Do you oppose polygamy, and if so on what basis? If elected president, how would we know you wouldn't change your mind on this issue?

Follow-up: What is your standard for defining right from wrong?

For Trump: You were pro-choice, you said, until you heard about a baby that was going to be aborted, but wasn't. You called the child a "total superstar." Do you have a utilitarian view of human life  that a baby is only valuable if it grows up to be a superstar  or is every life valuable?

For Clinton: You said you would have a "bunch of litmus tests" for Supreme Court nominees, including requiring potential nominees to have a commitment to preserving a woman's right to an abortion. Would you overlook qualified candidates because they oppose abortion?

Also for Clinton: You appear to have an interventionist foreign policy record. What is your standard for sending American forces into battle, especially in the Middle East where nothing ever seems to get resolved?

Follow-up: In one of your emails you praise Sidney Blumenthal's son, Max, for his virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments, favoring the dismantling of the State of Israel. Since Israel's enemies have also vowed to destroy the only democracy in the Middle East and one of the United States' few allies in the region, as president, would you support the Jewish state or demand that it give up more land to Palestinians when the land it has already relinquished has brought it no closer to peace?

For Trump: Many voters are worried about your praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who routinely behaves like the KGB agent he once was. Putin has invaded and occupied territories, censored the news and been accused of murdering his opposition. Why do you admire his leadership? Should you become president, what do you think your public praise of Putin will accomplish that will be in America's interests?

Follow-up: Under what circumstances would you use military force against Russia or our enemies in the Middle East?

For both candidates: North Korea is developing nuclear weapons that will fit on top of missiles capable of reaching the U.S. Would you authorize a missile defense system able to shoot down North Korean missiles, despite China's opposition to such a system?

For Clinton: The federal government took in record amounts of tax money in 2015  $3.18 trillion  but the debt is approaching $20 trillion, and you want to spend more. Why won't you propose cutting programs that aren't working?

For Trump: What agencies and programs would you eliminate or reform?

Public interest for the debates will be at Super Bowl level. These and similar questions would produce the information undecided voters need to cast their votes wisely.

The future of this country hangs in the balance.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.
GM is already in our food chain for years. The approval for indigenous GM mustard should put fake fear-mongering to rest, says Shekhar Gupta.

If you want to see how some of the issues most vital to us and our future generations are debated in a vacuum -- of facts -- please take a short journey with me to University of Delhis South Campus. at the north-western edge of Rao Tula Ram Marg, just before the more famous Springdales School.

It is even challenging to reach there now. The road has been dug up for our long-delayed Metro Phase-III and if you come in from the Ring Road side, as you normally would, you will have to walk about a kilometre past many stinking garbage heaps (normal for Delhi) and wade through piles of posters in this university election week.

Its a beautiful, quiet, leafy and serious campus and houses, among others, possibly one of the most important research laboratories in our country, at the biotechnology centre.

It is a tiny lab, just one wing of a floor of no more than, may be 10,000 sq ft, housing about two dozen researchers, aged between 22 and 65, working on that technology so dreaded in urban legends and Frankenstein-ish scare-mongering -- genetically modified crops. Of course, the scientist who heads it, Professor Deepak Pental, insists that the description genetically modified is misleading. He prefers "genetically engineered or GE, instead of GM.

But distorted popular nomenclature is the least of his problems when he, and his core team of five other giants of genetic research and plant-breeding in India savour a moment of joy and relief, with the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee clearing their labour of 32 years, genetically engineered (or modified) mustard safe on all parameters.

The seed has been ready since 2002, says Mr Pental, and then theres been this never-ending fight with science-sceptics and naysayers.

This should set doubts at rest, he says, pointing to the 4,000-page report in five spiral-bound volumes, loaded with safety data on all requisite parameters that the team submitted to the GEAC. He is philosophical about not just the doubts and scepticism, but abuse and calumny he has faced including, as he reminds me, wild charges of plagiarism, anything that will trip his quest.

GM crops, as we know, is a highly politicised and emotional issue, one where peer-reviewed facts usually fade in the face of totally imaginary and unproven fears that unite the ideologues of the Left and the Right. Or holy Greenpeace to holier Swadeshis of the RSS.

In the fuel-mix driving the activist engine, one of the most important is the fear of the foreign. That GM seeds are developed by evil, rapacious multinationals with patented, proprietary technologies and gene-stocks, terminator seeds, enabling them to monopolise supplies and prices, making poor-country farmers slave to them.

This mustard has been fully developed and owned by a public lab funded only by government agencies, notable among them being late Verghese Kuriens National Dairy Development Board, who took a fancy to Rajiv Gandhis national oil seeds mission.

India has always been -- and is -- woefully short of edible oils and imports large volumes annually. Mustard constitutes about a third of all oil crops in India, and a seed that will now increase its yield by 25-30 per cent, besides other positive attributes, was just a dream when the NDDB decided to fund a lab led by a still young scientist, Deepak Pental, in 1987 (Disclosure: Mr Pental and I are both alumni of Panjab University, Chandigarh, and stayed in the same hostel, although he was a few years my senior).

Mr Pental, a botanist, did a PhD from Rutgers and fell in love with sarson (mustard) during a research and teaching stint in Poland. He worked on crossing a Polish variety with the Indian one through the normal hybridisation (cross-pollination) route. It was near impossible. Mustard flower is what botanists would call hermaphrodite, in that it contains both male and female organs which self-pollinate before you can take any external sperm to them.

What if, he thought, he could fully suppress the male element (I am consciously using simplistic language instead of jargon), so he could render one variety female and cross-pollinate it with the other?

Genetic engineering was a very new and exciting science then. Prof Pental and his core team of modestly-paid Delhi University scientists took up the challenge. The route they pursued was to insert three new genes into our own desi mustard, Barnase, Barstar and Bar. The first two are derived from a common soil bacterium and the third from a species of Streptomyces, all totally harmless (or non-pathogenic). There are, by the way, more than 85,000 genes in mustard.

The group of researchers has huddled together, from their youth to ripe ages now, publishing more than 40 research papers in top peer-reviewed journals, producing dozens of young PhDs (the current crop of PhD scholars still form the bulwark of the lab), and now this wonderful seed. Each one tossed much greater allurements, private sector jobs, foreign universities and simple old bureaucratic power in their scientific curiosity and quest.

Mr Pental rose to be a distinguished vice-chancellor of Delhi University, but never left his lab, and returned to it full-time after his stint.

We mourn together the decline of indigenous science through the decades, flight of talent, our dependence on vital products patented and milked by other countries. He says one of the big problems is that our scientists give up research once they get a top job. Or, become what he calls science-bureaucrats, vice-chancellors, directors and so on.

He was offered a membership of UPSC -- a terrific five-year sinecure -- but he turned it down to rededicate his life to his favourite mustard. Never mind, he didnt know then he was losing an opportunity to rub shoulders with eminences like former Delhi police commissioner B S Bassi.

Here's a top scientist saying the prime minister's target of doubling farmers' incomes in six years is not hype. You can treble or quadruple it, he says, but embrace science.

Will these scientists eat their own mustard and feed it to their children? They say absolutely, from the day it is approved. All toxicity and allergenicity studies have shown no harm.

Globally, trillions of GM meals have been consumed without any documented, peer-reviewed case of harm, leave out the urban legends. Among the first GM crops to be approved was canola, a modified mustard, in Canada in 1996. India imports nearly 300,000 tonnes of it annually, and nobody is complaining.

A bulk of our edible oil and vanaspati cocktails consist of imported soybean oil, about three million tonnes every year, and all of it is GM. We eat plenty of our own cotton seed (binola) oil, and most of our cotton is now GM/Bt. Almost every Indian has been eating GM oils for years now and nobody protests, or can protest because nothing else is available.

The US, Canada, Latin America, most of Africa and China have embraced genetic engineering. Even if we still wanted to protect ourselves by being like the Europeans (who are rich enough to afford their stupidity), that train left the station with so much GM oil already being in our food chain.

Or, all right, you can take Ramdevs advice and consume only desi ghee made of the most venerable desi cows milk. You can still be sure it would have eaten plenty of binola-based feed which gives the milk its fat content, and it is tough to find any binola in India now that isnt Bt.

Eggs and chicken? Poultry feed has GM maize.

Of course we can still be stupid. We are a sovereign country and our current discourse is Luddite, lazy, anti-science and doesnt want to be confused with facts.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are not concerned. They are spending $43 billion (about Rs 2.9 lakh crore) to buy Syngenta, the worlds third-largest crop-science/GM research company (while the largest, Bayer, has bid $65 billion for Monsanto).

Mr Pental says they want his mustard, developed at the cost of Rs 50 crore ($7 million) of taxpayers money -- theyve also been crediting his team in their papers. They want it because it is also drought-resistant.

They dont eat mustard oil, nor do they need it for maalish. Remember, almost all Chinese greens essential to their cuisine, Bok Choy, Choi Sum, Gan Lang and Chinese long-leaf cabbage are siblings in the same mustard family.

I suppose this leaves us something to chew on.
Some overseas investors refuse to be part of roadshows, citing environment risks

The central government, which is struggling to meet the divestment target, has to surmount one more challenge. According to sources, several big-ticket foreign funds are refusing to participate in the divestment drive in mining and related companies, citing environment issues.

Some of the companies in which they might abstain from investing include Coal India (CIL), Manganese Ore (India), or MOIL, and National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), where the government is looking to offload stake to meet the minimum public shareholding norms as well as to meet the 2016-17 disinvestment target.

The issue came to light when investment banks handling these issues initiated preliminary talks with potential investors. According to sources, the share sale in these companies has been put on hold for now.

During the initial roadshows, several funds have made it clear that they would not participate in the market offering. There is a lot of pressure on sovereign funds and other public funds to stop investing in companies that cause environment pollution, said an investment banker.

Investment in companies such as CIL, which generate substantial revenue from coal, is considered to be against the principle of environmental protection.

Investment bankers said they have already sounded out the department of disinvestment on this issue.

Earlier this year, Norways Government Pension Fund Global, one of the worlds biggest institutional investors, had excluded CIL and NTPC from its portfolio over environmental concerns.

The move was not restricted to India; the Norwegian fund made a call to drop investments in as many as 52 companies, whose main source of revenue was coal.

Investment experts say principle-based investing is a trend that is fast catching up.

There are several funds globally, which believe in certain core values and are ready to sacrifice a few sectors or stocks for the greater cause. For instance, some of the pension funds do not invest in tobacco, liquor or gambling-related stocks.

Similarly, Islamic funds that follow Sharia law dont invest in banks or financial lending companies. Financially, these decisions dont impact their portfolio much, as it is usually a sector or a few companies that they shy away from investing in, said Rajeev Thakkar, chief investment officer at Parag Parikh Financial Advisory Services.

The government is looking to divest 10 per cent each in CIL, MOIL and NMDC as a part of this years ambitious disinvestment target, say sources.

For the current financial year, the government has outlined a target of Rs 56,500 crore, of which Rs 36,000 crore is estimated to come from minority stake sales in various public sector units, while the remaining Rs 20,500 crore would come from strategic sale in various companies.

Out of this, the government has managed to garner only Rs 3,182.82 crore till date. Of this, Rs 2,716 crore was on account of an offer for sale in NHPC.

The government has to compulsorily divest stakes in all these companies by next year to fulfil the 25 per cent minimum public shareholding criteria. The Centre, which owns 79.65 per cent stake in CIL, will have to divest at least 4.35 per cent in the coal miner.

Similarly, in NMDC, the government needs to divest at least five per cent of its stake, which would be valued at Rs 2,040 crore. In case of MOIL, a five per cent dilution by the government would amount to Rs 208 crore.

Photograph: Ajay Verma/Reuters
Uber will provide mentorship for start-ups on matters such as funding, marketing, operations and scalability.

American taxi aggregation company Uber is looking at start-ups with a social impact in the next phase of its mentoring programme.

The San Francisco-headquartered company started an exchange programme for start-ups in India earlier this year, coinciding with the Startup India initiative, a flagship scheme of the Narendra Modi government.

On Tuesday, Uber signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with T-Hub, a Telengana-based incubator, for partnering with UberExchange, its global mentorship programme.

Under the MoU, 20 start-ups will be short-listed through the existing networks of Uber and T-Hub. T-Hub will invite applications from start-ups through an online process.

Other American companies such as Amazon and Intel, too, offer similar programmes.

I exchanged cards with the CEOs of all the start-ups in T-Hub and I will mentor them all, Uber Asia Business Head Eric Alexander said after conducting a session.

Mentoring start-ups is one of the promises Uber's Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick made to Modi, when they met in the US last September.

As part of this commitment, Uber will provide mentorship for start-ups on matters such as funding, marketing, operations and scalability.

To begin with, 10 start-ups will be taken to San Francisco by January 2017 for further exposure at Uber. They would be introduced to global investors.

Every one that built Uber had a mentor in life and we are here to give back by mentoring start-ups. We built a very successful and great business in India and the governments have been incredibly generous to us, Alexander said.

Responding to a question, he said regulatory freedom in states like Telangana has helped the company grow. Uber has a technology development centre in Hyderabad that employs 2,000 people.

This centre develops crucial solutions that are being used across all the businesses of Uber globally, Alexander said.

He added that issues like surge pricing would not come in the way of forging a bigger partnership with the people of India.

SUCCESS MANTRA
The spectre of Singur and now its verdict is looming large on the future of many of Bengals projects, especially the state governments industrial parks that are vacant. As many more episodes await, the question uppermost on everyones minds is, how long will Singur haunt Bengal?

September 14, 2016. The event was Singur Diwas, celebration of the Supreme Court order that directed the state government to return the land acquired for Tata Motors at Singur to its original land owners. Around 150,000 people had gathered to hear Mamata Banerjee speak. She didnt disappoint.

Land is our asset. Land is our strength. Land is more pure than gold, she said passionately, amid applause and cheers.

Then came a proposal for Tatas that sounded more like an appeal. Think a little, I am giving you one month, will you set up a factory in Goaltore (West Medinipur)? We have 1,000 acres there.

In the background, the melancholy of twilight, set the perfect tone of a pyrrhic victory. A fortnight ago, the Supreme Court had ruled that the acquisition of land in Singur by the Left Front government of West Bengal in 2006 for Tata Motors Nano project was illegal as it had violated the procedure laid by the Land Acquisition Act,1894.

The fight over Singur May 18,06 Tata Motors announces first plant for small car to come up in West Bengal Jan 21,07 Tata Motors takes initial steps for construction of small car plant Dec 3,07 Mamata Banerjee announces indefinite hunger strike Dec 19,07 Tata Motors launches the Nano at Delhi Auto Expo Dec 28,07 Mamata Banerjee ends fast Jan 18,08 Calcutta high court upholds Singur land acquisition May 21,08 Trinamool Congress wins majority in panchayat elections Aug 24,08 Mamata Banerjee starts dharna at Singur Sep 2,08 Tata Motors suspends work on Nano Plant Oct 3,08 Tata Motors decides to move out of Singur May 20,11 Mamata Banerjee sworn in as Bengal chief minister, announces decision to return 400 acres to unwilling farmers Jun 9,11 Takes over 997 acres citing non-performance by Tata Motors Jun 14,11 Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill, 2011, passed in the Assembly Sep 28,11 Calcutta high court upholds the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011 Oct 29,11 Tata Motors challenges the order Aug 6,12 The West Bengal government moves the Supreme Court Aug 31,16 The Supreme Court quashes land acquisition for Tata Motors

The court ordered the land to be returned to the owners in 12 weeks. The verdict brought the curtains down on a decade-old controversy.

In 2006, the Left Front government had invoked the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 to acquire 997 acres in Singur for the Tata Motors project. However, of the 13,000 project-affected farmers, 2,000 refused to accept compensation cheques. An indefinite agitation backed by Banerjee, then in the Opposition, followed for return of land to farmers, ultimately resulting in Tata Motors moving out of Singur.

Not a clear victory

So far, at least 800 farmers have received part of their compensation. Around 9,917 of the affected farmers have been given back their land deeds. But a happy ending is still far off.

Binoy Khara, 60, is one of the 800 who received a compensation cheque of Rs 42,000 from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Singur Diwas. Kharas share is one-fourth of a total of 1.5 bighas (three bighas make an acre).

Khara, therefore, is relieved after news that Banerjee will continue with her dole of Rs 2,000 per person and subsidised rice for unwilling farmers till their land is made cultivable. The longer it takes, the better it is for Khara and his lot.

The unpaid list of awardees attached with the Singur Act, 2011, that the Banerjee government implemented to vest the entire land allotted to Tata Motors and its vendors, shows that some of the plots are as small as 0.001111333 of an acre, with a cheque amount Rs 892.

But the minuscule size of plots is not confined to Singur alone. West Bengal has eight per cent of the countrys population and less than three per cent of its land, says a bureaucrat involved with the land acquisition in Singur.

The spectacular success of the erstwhile Communist governments land reform initiatives that entailed redistribution of land to three million farmers over 34 years has diminished the size of the plots.

Operation Barga, which registered sharecroppers in the state and then gave them legal rights to land, benefited another 1.5 million farmers. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has estimated the value of the distributed land to be nearly Rs 130,000 crore.

The resultant effect: 84 per cent of the land in West Bengal is held by small and marginal farmers. But perhaps the worst nugget of information from the perspective of industrialisation is that only one per cent of the land in West Bengal is fallow.

This means that for industry, the use of fertile land is nearly unavoidable.

But Banerjees stated policy is to stay away from acquiring land for industry. This means that investors have to purchase land from farmers, and possibly from a whole lot of them. Former professor of economics at Indian Statistical Institute, Dipankar Dasgupta, says the small size of the land makes industrialisation imperative for West Bengal.

The family size has increased since the distribution of land but the land is finite. The only way they can survive is through development of industry, he explains.

Industry on the edge

Banerjee has offered Tata Motors locations other than Goaltore in West Medinipur - Kharagpur (West Medinipur) and Panagarh (Barddhaman).

According to the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporations website, there are two industrial parks, the Vidyasagar Industrial Park in Kharagpur where 480 acres of land is available and Panagarh Industrial Park that can allocate 454 acres.

The land for these industrial parks was acquired in 2008 after Tata Motors pulled out. Initially, we tried to purchase the land after the controversy in Singur because the Left Front didnt want to invoke the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. But it was impossible.

Ultimately, we had to resort to acquisition. Even after Singur and Nandigram, we did manage to acquire about 8,000 acres for several industrial parks, a bureaucrat recalls.

There are several examples of private companies which at that time tried their hands at purchasing land from farmers but ultimately had to seek the Left Front governments help to make it happen.

Land acquisition is mandatory in nature. That is why it is called acquisition. It means that there are some owners who are unwilling, the bureaucrat points out.

But the spectre of Singur and now its verdict is looming large on the future of many of Bengals projects, especially the state governments industrial parks that are vacant.

Days after the Supreme Court ordered return of land to the farmers in Singur, in Raghunathpur Industrial Park, Purulia, farmers submitted a petition at the block development officers office for return of land.

The Left Front government had acquired around 3,000 acres across three industrial parks in Purulia in 2007 for steel, cement and power projects of Jai Balaji Industries, Adhunik Corporation, Shyam Steel Industries and DPSC, respectively. The projects didnt fructify for various reasons and now the farmers want their land back.

The ranks of unwilling farmers are growing by the day. So far, the casualty is a mishti hub (sweets hub), the land for which was acquired in 2007. It has been scaled down and relocated.

This is just the beginning. Protests are being staged in front of the West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation office in Rajarhat. Farmers claim that their land was taken by force by the Left Front government at throwaway prices.

As many more episodes await, the question uppermost on everyones minds is, how long will Singur haunt Bengal?

Photograph: Swapan Mahapatra/PTI Photo and Rupak De Choudhuri/Reuters


Bollywood stars go for the loveliest holidays -- exotic locations with a lot of adventure thrown in.

So we decided to document their travels with a special series.

Nargis Fakhri had a fun holiday in Greece, Ranveer Singh explored Switzerland, Bipasha Basu and Karan Singh Grover had a beautiful Bali holiday, Mallika Sherawat visited France.

It's time to tour Lebanon with Lisa Ray, who had gone on vacation with husband Jason Dehni.

Take a look at her pictures on Instagram.





Lisa Ray enjoys the view at the Veer Beach Club in Beirut, Lebanon.





'Come away with me,' Lisa invites, as she shares this picture of a beautiful lane in Byblos.

Fun time in the pool!





Lisa shares a picture of the beautiful Dehni mansion, with a caption: 'Proud my husband's family has invested back in #Lebanon after being forced to leave decades ago during the civil war. This is a beautiful, complex land.'





A day at the Private Beach Club.





Chilling at the Eddy Sands Private Beach Club.

Some beautiful vignettes of downtown Beirut.

'A pastiche of European and Middle Eastern influences seem to define trademark Lebanese style. It's heartening to see how the city has been rebuilt after 15 years of civil war,' she writes.





The exotic view from Babel Bahr, a restaurant in Lebanon.





Another scenic view from Babel Bahr.

An obligatory 'I Love Beirut' picture.





The starters are laid out before the guests arrive at the Babel Bahr.





Lisa lets herself go and enjoys the evening with a friend.

A selfie with the hubby at Raouche Rock.

It's followed by a picture with her mother and sister-in-law.





Dessert, anyone?





The beautiful St John The Baptist Church at Byblos.





Lisa Ray kickstarts Jason Dehni's birthday celebrations with some delicious breakfast.





'Family, laughs and food. What else do you need?' Lisa asks.

Photographs: Lisa Ray/Instagram
How he hopes to retain his fort is anyone's guess, says Nazarwala, the man who called right the 2007 and 2012 UP elections.

It seems that Mulayam and chaos seem to be made for each other!

After all, that is what looms large in the Samajwadi Party.

Although ambitions have somehow been kept under check in the past, time is running out for the vulnerably ageing patriarch.

Although Mulayam could have formally inducted resourceful 'friend' Amar Singh into the party any time, he didn't dare do so all along till Tuesday, when he made him the party's national general secretary.

After all, the veritable triumvirate of Azam Khan, Ram Gopal Yadav and Jaya Bachchan hate Amar Singh.

It is undeniable, the stress Mulayam feels in tolerating Azam Khan's tantrums is palpable.

On the other hand, the still inexperienced Akhilesh has no gauge of the need of Muslim support for his party's survival.

This situation is exasperated since the Muslim vote-bank is confused by Asaduddin Owaisi's presence in the fray. However, Mulayam is an old horse and has a few tricks to cut through this danger.

And what, pray tell, is Mulayam's innovative solution to the 'Owaisi problem'?

Promise quotas for the Muslims. We only hope he knows the judiciary may turn it down.

Meanwhile, the Samajwadi Party supremo's younger brother Shivpal is restlessly chafing in frustration, despite having been palmed off the presidentship of the state unit despite opposition from Akhilesh Yadav.

Forced to accept his nephew as the CM and convinced of his prior claims to the 'throne,' will the angry brother leave his brother's political establishment?

Mulayam's erudite aide and intellectual 'think-tank' is his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav who claims to have a better worldview and is, as such, best suited for the CM's chair. He is, of course, ranked behind Akhilesh now (wink, wink).

Prateek, Mulayam's irrepressible and ambitious younger son, is a firebrand and literally so.

Fond of playing with toy guns since childhood, he has grown up wanting his rightful share of the family's power and pelf with real ones.

He has been goaded and persuaded to pursue the 'builder-line' in Noida, but that is only for the time being.

He is another of those impatient men in the Samajwadi Party.

With anti-incumbency looming large, the stress of distributing party tickets among desperate contenders is taking its toll too.

Muted whispers among the inner circle are increasingly centred on the vital question,

"After Mulayam, who?"

The knives are being sharpened, clandestinely.

Coterie in-fighting is straining at the leash.

And keeping all these loose cannons under check is telling on the enfeebled heart of Mulayam who will, in November, turn 77.

He wants to be the PM, but his past is worrisome. The disproportionate assets case keeps hanging fire and the CBI posse gives him sleepless nights.

And the fate of resourceful pal Saharashri Subrata Roy, who underwent a two-year sojourn in Tihar jail, is a constant reminder of the shape of things that may come to cripple him in his old age.

One certainly cannot deny that the seniority-conscious Mulayam is envious of a junior like Modi having ascended the PM's post.

His juniors like Nitish Kumar, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal, along with the likes of Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalitha, are in the queue for the PM's chair.

In such a scenario, what happens to the life-long dream of this Saifai pehelwan?

Prashant Kishor, Owaisi, Nitish, Priyanka, Mayawati et al are actively creating problems for him.

Nitish Kumar, the Bihari Kurmi expanding his turf into UP, is an obvious provocation, causing unneeded nervousness to the septuagenarian.

Swallowing past insults from Beni Prasad Verma, Mulayam, perforce of caste equations, re-inducted Benibabu into the SP -- with an anguished heart.

External enemies, CBI inquiries and intense family feuds are increasingly becoming difficult for him to cope with.

Containing the anti-incumbency fallout is proving stressful for the father-son duo.

The equation between the two is frayed, and over the last week spilled over into the public domain.

All these issues confound this ambitious dhartiputra.

Whenever he has to be rushed to Delhi for medical treatment, right follows the usual plea of attending an 'important political meeting'.

Akhilesh 'claims' to have developed UP with over 25 institutions on the medical front. Yet, this dutiful son does not wish risking his father being treated in them.

Strangely, these days Mulayam is reported to be mumbling in his sleep.

And the one waking dream of becoming the prime minister of India keeps this ex-defence minister awake and surging on.
The American, Russian and Chinese reactions to the Uri attack indicates how tough it will be for India to 'isolate' Pakistan internationally,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.

IMAGE: Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan, and US President Barack Obama at the APEC summit in Beijing, November 10, 2014.

The official reaction by three big powers -- the United States, Russia and China -- to the terrorist attack on the Indian Army base in Uri on Sunday becomes a sample test of New Delhi's bid to 'isolate' Pakistan internationally.

The US State Department spokesman issued the following statement:

'The United States strongly condemns the terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir during the early morning of September 18. We extend our condolences to the victims and their families. The United States is committed to our strong partnership with the Indian government to combat terrorism.'

The Russian foreign ministry issued a full-bodied statement expressing solidarity:

'We strongly condemn the terrorist attack against an army base in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri in the early hours of September 18, which killed 17 and injured 30 service personnel. We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and wish a rapid recovery to all those injured.'

'Regarding the Pathankot Indian air base attack in January 2016, we are very concerned about the terrorist attacks near the Line of Control. We are also concerned about the fact that, according to New Delhi, the army base near Uri was attacked from Pakistani territory.'

'We believe that this criminal act will be investigated properly, and that its organisers and perpetrators will be held accountable.'

'We confirm our continued support for the Indian government's counterterrorism efforts.'

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman made the following remarks in response to a query at a routine media briefing in Beijing:

'We have noted relevant reports. We are shocked by this attack and express our deep sympathy and condolences to the bereaved families and the injured. China firmly opposes and strongly condemns all forms of terrorism. We are concerned about such rising temperature surrounding the Kashmir region, and hope that all relevant parties can resolve differences through dialogue and consultation, enhance counter-terrorism cooperation and jointly maintain peace and security of the region.'

All three statements took note of the attack in Uri as an act of terrorism and strongly condemned it.

The Russian statement made it a point to acknowledge Indian reports that the attack emanated from across the Pakistan border, while the statements by Washington and Beijing completely ignored that aspect.

Significantly, all three statements took note that the incident took place in 'Kashmir.'

The Chinese statement explicitly related the incident to the 'rising temperature surrounding the Kashmir region' over which it expressed concern. It is a worrisome reference, especially taking into account the current tensions in Sino-Indian relations.

Unsurprisingly, the Russian statement was the most supportive. However, the bottom line is that none of the above statements even remotely finger-pointed at Pakistan.

US President Barack Obama is meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in New York, which only underscores at the very minimum that the US will continue to remain constructively engaged with Pakistan.

In a series of remarks through recent weeks, the US State Department also carefully differentiated Washington's stance from the Indian positions on issues such as the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, India-Pakistan tensions, Baluchistan, etc.

Interestingly, Russia sees no reason to call off the scheduled military exercises with Pakistan -- the first-ever such exercises between the two countries -- for a period of two weeks starting September 24.

By the way, the exercises, code-named 'Friendship 2016' is due to be held in the province of Khyber-Paktunkhwa and in Gilgit-Baltistan.

The Narendra Modi government's decision in the past year or so to expand the scope of the Indian claim on Kashmir to also include Gilgit-Baltistan as an integral part of our country does not appear to perturb Russia. (Do we make a demarche to the Russians, as we do with the Chinese?)

Military exercises testify to the quality of inter-State relationships. It is easy to exaggerate their political significance, but then, their symbolism cannot be overlooked, either.

Most certainly, the forthcoming Russian-Pakistani exercises flag the rapid 'thaw' in the ties between the two countries, and signify a mutual affirmation of common concerns over regional security.

As a matter of fact, the Russian news agency Sputnik carried two reports recently on the negotiations on the sale of Russian Su-35, Su-37 jets to Pakistan. In a related report, Sputnik also disclosed that the first delivery of the deal for supply of 24 Su-35 jets to China will take place within this year.

The bottom line is that when Russia is willing to consider selling to Pakistan its top-of-the-line Su-35 fighter jets, there is no way it will be party to a campaign to 'isolate' Pakistan.

Nor will China be willing to isolate its 'all-weather' friend on whom it is making a $46 billion investment within the ambit of One Belt One Road.

Nor for that matter the US, which acknowledges the centrality of Pakistan in any viable search for an Afghan settlement. Indeed, the US depends on Pakistan's cooperation so long as American troops are deployed in Afghanistan.

Taking into account the Pentagon's 'war contractors' as well, there are somewhere around 30,000 to 40,000 American military personnel in Afghanistan.

Clearly, for reasons of self-interest, all three big powers -- the US, Russia and China -- will only counsel India to resolve its differences and disputes with Pakistan peacefully through talks.

The geopolitical backdrop is such that any precipitate Indian moves to attack Pakistan will trigger swift intervention by the big powers and we will not be in control of the sequence of events that may ensue.

Those who speculate on the 'options' lying on Prime Minister Modi's table are, well, merely speculating.
'Part of the problem lies in the US failure to stay focused on the goal of convincing Pakistan to crack down on terrorists that attack India.'

'The US should have reacted more strongly to the release from jail of Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi last year and pressured Pakistan over its failure to prosecute the Mumbai attackers.'

A former diplomat in the US embassies in India and Pakistan, Lisa Curtis has been an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs in the George W Bush administration and has testified before the US Congress on about 20 occasions on topics related to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Islamist extremism and America's image abroad.

Currently a senior research fellow on South Asia at The Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Centre in Washington, she has worked for the US government on South Asian issues for 16 years.

In an e-mail interview with Rediff.com's Archana Masih, Curtis says Washington should condition its military aid to Pakistan on its efforts to crack down on groups that attack India, and warns that India should be careful not to play into Pakistan's trap of trying to escalate military tensions in order to bring international attention to Kashmir.

Pakistan has once again said it is India's tradition to blame Pakistan -- why hasn't world opinion prevailed upon Islamabad to shut down the terror camps or arrest terror masterminds all these years?

Part of the problem lies in the US failure to stay focused on the goal of convincing Pakistan to crack down on terrorists that attack India.

While the US gets on the ball whenever a crisis breaks out (like now), Washington has repeatedly failed to hold Pakistan's feet to the fire on cracking down on anti-India terrorist groups.

The US should have reacted more strongly to the release from jail of Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi last year and pressured Pakistan to a greater extent over its failure to prosecute the Mumbai attackers.

The US should place as much priority on Pakistan cracking down on LeT and JeM (Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohamed) as it does on groups like Al Qaeda and the Haqqani Network.

What should the US role be, especially since Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is in New York to address the UN General Assembly?

US officials must prevail on both Pakistani and Indian leaders to lower their rhetoric at the UN General Assembly and to stop referencing developments on the other's territory.

The US should convince both sides to agree to scrap any mention of either Kashmir or Balochistan during their formal UN statements.

India perhaps has never been under such pressure to take action against Pakistan. What should be the right reply to the Uri attack?

Indian leaders should make a careful evaluation of the costs and benefits of each potential response to the Uri attack, keeping their long term goals vis a vis Pakistan in mind.

They should be careful not to play into Pakistan's trap of trying to escalate military tensions on the subcontinent in order to bring international attention to Kashmir.

India should seek to build on the frustration within the US Congress regarding Pakistan's failure to crack down on terrorists that attack in Afghanistan, making common cause with US officials to develop a joint diplomatic strategy to pressure Pakistan on its continued support for terrorism.

During the Kargil War, the Parliament attack and the Mumbai attacks, India did not cross the LoC -- what are India's diplomatic and military options?

Any military response to the Uri attack will likely invite a Pakistani counterstrike, sending the two countries up the escalation ladder.

Military escalation between two nuclear powers would likely spook foreign investors, similar to how it did during the 2001-2002 Indo-Pakistani military mobilisation.

What does America need to do more and further from condemning the attack that can result in something concrete for India this time?

Washington should condition its military aid to Pakistan on its successful efforts to crack down on groups that attack India, like the LeT and JeM. Such conditions were part of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill several years ago, and should be revived.

How has the unrest in Kashmir been a factor in this attack?

It appears Pakistan is seeking to take advantage of the current civil unrest in Kashmir.

Pakistani leaders may have calculated that a major militant attack in the midst of the civil unrest in Kashmir and the convening of the UN General Assembly in New York would redound in their favor by spotlighting the high stakes involved in the conflict.

It is a risky gambit for Pakistan, however, because such a high profile attack also spotlights Pakistan's continued support for terrorism.

Despite its efforts to portray itself as the protector of Kashmiri human rights, Pakistan has been more intent on stoking violence in the region to bleed India and embarrass it on the international stage.

The reality is Islamabad has disrupted several attempts by Kashmiri separatists to forge peace with New Delhi.

It is widely believed, for instance, that Pakistani intelligence murdered separatist leader Abdul Ghani Lone in 2002 for his attempts to reach an understanding with New Delhi.

It is remarkable that Pakistan issued a statement today referring to US President Clinton's promise to stay engaged on Kashmir from 1999.

Putting the statement into context, Clinton made it following a meeting in which he forced Nawaz Sharif to agree to pull back Pakistani troops to end the Kargil conflict.

The decision to occupy the heights at Kargil in May 1999 may have been the single biggest mistake of the Pakistan military since its launch of Operation Gibraltar in 1965.

Pakistan's continued attempts to disrupt the status quo in Kashmir will come with increasing diplomatic costs in a post-9/11 world.
'If Indian armed forces entered Pakistan and succeeded in inflicting major damage on the Pakistani army and occupied territory in the Pakistani heartland, there is reason to think the Pakistani military would use some nuclear weapons against the incoming Indian forces to compel India to stop.'

IMAGE: Soldiers search for terrorists in Lachipora in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, September 20, 2016. Photograph: Umar Ganie

Testifying before the United States Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Strategic Forces on February 25 last year, Dr George Perkovich, arguably the world's leading expert on nuclear politics in South Asia, warned that a Pakistan-inspired terrorist attack in India could provoke an Indian military retaliation and in turn provoke a Pakistani nuclear response.

Barring a PTI dispatch from Washington, DC, Dr Perkovich's well argued warning (external link) largely went unnoticed in India.

The terrorist attack in Uri on Sunday, September 18, revived the possibility of an Indian military strike against terrorist camps across the Line of Control.

Would this incite the Pakistani army to draw its nuclear weapons? Will this, as American observers have long feared, lead to nuclear conflict in the sub-continent?

Rediff.com's Nikhil Lakshman asked Dr Perkovich -- vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, and the co-author (with Toby Dalton) of the recent book, Not War, Not Peace: Motivating Pakistan to Prevent Cross-Border Terrorism -- to explain the many complexities involved in military retaliation and possible nuclear conflict.

In your testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, you raised the possibility of a nuclear conflict if India responded militarily to Pakistan-inspired terrorism on its soil. What led you to this assertion?

The one thing nuclear weapons are good for is deterring adversaries from massively invading your territory or harming your people on a massive scale. They cannot credibly be used against anything other than large-scale threats.

If, after another terror attack on India, Indian armed forces entered into Pakistan and succeeded in inflicting major damage on the Pakistani army and occupied territory in the Pakistani heartland, there is reason to think the Pakistani military would use some nuclear weapons against the incoming Indian forces to compel India to stop.

Of course, Indian military officers and experts are aware of this possibility and seek to identify ways of defeating Pakistan below the threshold that would prompt Rawalpindi to use nuclear weapons.

In our new book -- Not War, Not Peace -- we analyse these possibilities. Basically, we conclude that anything that would harm the Pakistani military enough to compel it to give in to Indian demands and demobilise jihadi groups would also be severe enough to make Pakistan threaten the use of nuclear weapons. (It also needs to be explained how a badly damaged Pakistani military would be willing and able to take down the most potent militant anti-India groups).

Conversely, any Indian military action restrained enough to avoid real risks of escalation would be too weak to make the Pakistani security establishment abandon resort to violence against India, so long as Kashmir remains unresolved.

In your study, India's Nuclear Options and Escalation Dominance for the Carnegie Endowment, you point out that 'Pakistan's adoption of tactical nuclear weapons lowers the threshold for nuclear use, further complicating India's conventional and nuclear options to deter and, if conflict cannot be avoided, defeat its neigbour.'

Could you explain what led you to this conclusion?

As I mentioned, Pakistan is developing nuclear capabilities and plans to raise the costs of Indian incursion into Pakistan, in case the Pakistani army cannot stop Indian forces by conventional means.

Because in the premised scenarios, Indian forces would be on Pakistani territory, there is some credibility to the threat.

Further, India's stated nuclear doctrine is to respond massively to any Pakistani use of nuclear weapons.

If the Pakistan used nuclear weapons on a battlefield (and perhaps against Indian nuclear assets at air bases) and not immediately on Indian cities, India's threat to attack Pakistani cities is irrational and/or not credible. Especially insofar as enough Pakistani nuclear weapons could be secured from Indian strikes and would remain to retaliate against Indian cities.

So, in response to a terrorist attack, which, however outrageous, killed a relatively small number of people, if India sent significant forces into Pakistan and 'succeeded' to the point of motivating Pakistani leaders to detonate nuclear weapons to deter India from continuing, India would then be faced with the choice of stopping, or of retaliating in ways that could lead to the destruction of Indian cities.

Yes, Pakistani cities could be destroyed, too. But the exchange would hardly seem worthwhile for India.

IMAGE: Soldiers conduct search operations in Lachipora in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, September 20, 2016. Photograph: Umar Ganie

'If Indian forces were in the process of destroying the Pakistani military -- physically and/or politically within Pakistan -- Pakistani military leaders could feel they have relatively little to lose by using nuclear weapons,' says Dr Perkovich.

Do you believe the Pakistan army would actually use nuclear weapons if India went to war, risking both devastation and worldwide opprobrium?

Yes, if Indian forces were in the process of destroying the Pakistani military -- physically and/or politically within Pakistan -- Pakistani military leaders could feel they have relatively little to lose.

As I suggested, their first uses of nuclear weapons could be designed to avoid targeting cities, shifting the burden of escalation to India, giving the Pakistanis some reason to believe/hope that the tactic would stop the war and not destroy either Pakistan or India.

This may be a wild gamble, but if you feel that you are about to die anyway..

Speaking on television the other night, a former high commissioner to Pakistan dismissed the Pakistan threat of using nuclear weapons against India as 'mere bluster.'

He felt Pakistan's generals would not risk disrupting their cosy, comfortable world by doing something foolhardy like initiating nuclear warfare.

I hope he is right, but am not convinced he is. It depends on the scenario, as I tried to describe earlier. If India successfully fought through Pakistani defences (a big question) and threatened the Pakistani armys physical and/or political survival, I believe they would use some small number of nuclear weapons to motivate India to stop.

By the way, this was US strategy -- more or less -- during the Cold War and Russia's and North Korea's strategy today. It may be crazy or a bluff, but is it a bluff India would be sane to call?

There have been concerns about the dramatic increase in Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in recent years. Could this increase, in your opinion, be linked to the deterrent factor, to prevent an Indian military retaliation?

How many nuclear warheads do you believe Pakistan has? Have you been alarmed by the increase in nuclear warheads?

Pakistan has steadily increased the size of its nuclear arsenal. There are several reasons for this, including institutional momentum.

One reason is the basic view that Pakistan must compete with and deter an India that will continue to grow stronger every year thanks to the growth of its already much larger economy and thanks to conventional and other weapons it can afford to import from the US, France, Israel, etc.

The Pakistani military feels it needs to build nuclear forces to keep up with the combination of India's conventional and nuclear capabilities as these capabilities will grow over the next 30 years.

This is not crazy, but it does raise lots of worries about things that could go wrong.

Is Pakistan, in your opinion, the most dangerous nuclear power in the world?

How real are the fears that nuclear weapons could easily fall in the hands of the country's many terror groups?

It's hard to rank nuclear powers in terms of danger, and different people around the world would rank them differently. I think most would say North Korea is most dangerous.

Many would say that today Russia is quite dangerous. Pakistan would be somewhere around Russia, due to the Pakistani security establishment's unwillingness to demobilise groups that conduct cross-border terrorism.

IMAGE: Soldiers look out for terrorists in Lachipora in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, September 20, 2016. Photograph: Umar Ganie

'One of the consequences of nuclear deterrence,' says Dr Perkovich, 'is that it limits each side's options for fighting the other.'

Do you believe nuclear parity between the two neighbours and the fear of atomic conflict has kept the peace in South Asia since Kargil?

What would it take to disrupt the equilibrium?

Would Sunday's attack in Uri qualify as the tipping point for India?

I think that mutual nuclear deterrence has made leaders on both sides conclude that major warfare between the two States would be suicidal.

To that extent, nuclear weapons have been stabilising. But beneath the threshold of major warfare, Pakistan has still conducted/facilitated/tolerated terrorism against India.

India may increasingly be tempted to do the same to Pakistan.

This low-intensity conflict can escalate, which is why we write in our book of an 'unstable equilibrium.'

I should not make a prediction, but I don't think Uri will cause India to undertake a major military action that would be destabilising.

Among other reasons, as outrageous as the attack was, it was against a military installation in Kashmir, not a civilian target in the heartland. The camp should have been better protected, etc.

So, for India to react disproportionately would be to invite further damage that would be much greater than that which occurred on Sunday.

In your interactions with Indian strategic thinkers and military leaders, do you detect a sense of helplessness that they are unable to punish Pakistan's Deep State for fomenting terror because of the nuclear threat?

Not helplessness, but deep frustration. And this is understandable.

But one of the consequences of nuclear deterrence is that it limits each side's options for fighting the other.

While the good news is that this may reduce risks of major warfare, the bad news is that it increases temptations to inflict harm on a lower scale.

This dynamic is difficult, perhaps impossible, to escape.

IMAGE: US President Barack Obama with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

'Rather than immediately winning international support for declaring Pakistan a State-sponsor of terrorism,' Dr Perkovich says, 'it might be more advisable to continue developing India's larger strategy for diplomatically and economically isolating Pakistan.'

Some American strategic thinkers have advocated diplomacy as a solution -- 'A better approach would be to seek diplomatic support for labeling Pakistan a patron State sponsor of terrorism,' one eminence suggested to Rediff.com on Monday.

But will that be enough to satisfy the calls for retribution in India?

Political leaders have extremely difficult jobs in situations like these. The media and Opposition political parties have great incentives to inflame passions and accuse you of weakness -- it makes good television drama and political theatre.

But leaders have a deep responsibility for the lives of their soldiers and people, and for the economic well-being on which progress depends, etc.

Leaders also have a better sense of possible risks and trade-offs in potential uses of force.

Diplomatic isolation of Pakistan, including by having it recognised as a State-sponsor of terrorism, may not satisfy the crowd, but it will deeply affront Pakistan and add leverage against it, and will come with none of the risks that war could bring.

What the US did after 9/11 is a good example of what not to do, though the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were popular for awhile.

Look at Afghanistan today, and how Americans regard that experience.

Look at Iraq, and the emergence of ISIL/ISIS...

The situation between India and Pakistan obviously is different in many ways, but the general point is that it is worthwhile to look for more clever and less volatile ways to punish supporters of terrorism than the ways that might satisfy the crowd.

Military action that might satisfy public opinion on the first day can lead to consequences weeks later that will make the crowd turn on the leaders that they at first cheered.

And how realistic is that objective, given the fact that both America and China would be unwilling to isolate Pakistan, given their interests in that country?

As I mentioned, the fact that the attack at Uri and earlier Pathankot were against military installations complicates the international effort to condemn Pakistan.

Here I'm assuming that credible evidence will be produced to tie the attackers somehow to Pakistan; otherwise the challenge is even greater.

It's complicated still further by the tensions and violence in the Kashmir valley that preceded the attack and that most observers understand to be rooted in indigenous factors, not the 'Pakistani hand.'

Nevertheless, both China and the US have major interests in stability between India and Pakistan and in countering terrorism.

Rather than immediately winning international support for declaring Pakistan a State-sponsor of terrorism, with all the complications this entails, it might be more advisable to continue developing India's larger strategy for diplomatically and economically isolating Pakistan for its inadequate fulfillment of counter-terrorism obligations under UN Resolutions.

The Uri attack can be added to the list of particulars in a broader campaign.

In our book, for example, we ask whether brilliant Indian economists, social media experts and others -- in Indian and global consulting firms and other enterprises -- could not be commissioned to design political, economic, and social strategies that could threaten the economic and social interests of entities controlled by current and former Pakistani military leaders. This could be done in parallel to direct outreach to governments.

It would take time, and would not satisfy immediate desires for revenge, but there is no quick solution to the problems Pakistan poses in any case.

Even if somehow India could devastate the Pakistani military without causing escalatory warfare that would also hurt India, the question would still remain whether and how that would end the activities of militants who target India.

India seems to have very limited military and diplomatic options to deal with terrorism on its territory, which is why there is a feeling of helplessness. How can India resolve this dilemma?

I've tried to suggest some of the considerations surrounding various options. Here I would add that India is not alone in facing such challenges. Israel, the US, now European States, and others face chronic threats from terrorism. Everyone feels rather helpless against this.

In India's case (as arguably with Israel and the Palestinians) there is probably no solution that excludes some sort of political accommodation with representatives of significant elements of the Kashmiri Muslim population and, frustratingly, with Pakistan.

Terrorism is too easy to do and too hard to stop, in the absence of broader political processes to satisfy enough people that they will turn on those who conduct terrorism in their name.

I say this recogniSing that there are elements within the Pakistani Deep State and the militant groups who will act violently in order to disrupt political resolution because their identity and economic interests depend on conflict.

Perhaps the most that can be done is to limit the threat and contain risks of escalation. Again, this is not satisfying, but it's not clear what the better alternatives are.

In your article in Seminar some years ago, you made this point: 'I believe that the prominence and power of the Pakistani Army, intelligence services and jihadis will not diminish as long as the prominence and power of the Hindutva agenda are rising in India. These two internal dynamics are related; they feed on each other.'

'Pakistanis cite the RSS and VHP as proof that Hindus are out to destroy Muslims and, of course, Pakistan.'

' The RSS and VHP, of course, use the prominence of Islamist parties and terrorist organisations in Pakistan as proof that Muslims are evil.'

'My point is simply that pursuit of the Hindutva agenda will only tighten the handcuffs, the hyphen, that connects Pakistan to India.'

'The only way for India to liberate itself from Pakistan is through pluralist liberalism, not cultural nationalism.'

Could you please explain how you arrived at this conclusion?

Indians are well aware how violent jihadi ideology intensifies the feeling of threat from Pakistan and makes people seek forceful ways to root out the bad guys and punish Pakistan.

In Pakistan, one hears even quite liberal, sophisticated people say that the RSS and VHP agendas are inherently threatening to Muslims, and indeed is why the formation of Pakistan was necessary.

I have heard this alot in the past two years. When leaders emerge who appear strong and forceful -- whether in India or in the Pakistani military -- people naturally feel that such leaders must be confronted and shown that they cannot succeed in bullying the other side into submission.

'If we give in, they will only keep pushing for more.' This is a central Indian argument toward the Pakistani military and jihadis; it is also an argument that some in the Pakistani military and militant forces make toward the proponents of Hindutva.

The two forces then fuel each other. It's hard to see that either can 'win' without enormous sacrifices of their people.

Pakistan, in particular, has suffered the violence from forces that were first cultivated to harm India.

IMAGE: A hoarding welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping in Islamabad last year.

'In past crises with India,' Dr Perkovich explains 'China has not done all or even much of what Pakistani leaders wished.'

In April last year, a retired general writing on Rediff.com noted Pakistan's swagger and warned that 'Pakistan may feel emboldened to give an upswing to the proxy war in J&K, having secured a better international consensus on its strategic importance.'

What is the source of Pakistan's swagger? Does it come from its belief that it is too valuable for the United States to alienate it?

Does it come from President Xi Jinping's desire to create Pakistan as a linchpin in China's future economic and strategic plans?

I don't sense a genuine feeling of confidence or swagger in Pakistan. Quite the contrary. The country is experiencing all sorts of difficulties -- in Balochistan, Karachi, Punjab, KP (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), in economics, in dysfunctional politics.

The internal security situation was horrible for years, though maybe somewhat better in recent times.

All in all, though, I don't find many Pakistanis who are optimistic about the future of Pakistan as a secure, developing, modern country.

There is a marked contrast with the atmosphere in much of India.

Nor do I see evidence that Pakistanis rely on or trust the US. If anything, it's the opposite of reliance and trust, especially as the US is seen to strongly favour India.

Regarding China, the feeling is more mixed. At the State level there is some confidence that China can be relied upon to buttress Pakistan and perhaps to help build infrastructure, etc. But among businesspeople and others there is a lot of scepticism. There is little social or cultural or emotional attachment between the two countries and societies.

China is perceived to single-mindedly seek its own narrow interests. It does not, for example, contribute funding for health, education and other forms of development in Pakistan.

In past crises with India, China has not done all or even much of what Pakistani leaders wished.

China has a great interest in stability and preventing terrorism, even as it also sees value in using Pakistan to divert India's attention and strength.

None of this, in my experience, emboldens Pakistanis to feel that somehow China will underwrite or protect Pakistan.

IMAGE: November 26, 2008, after midnight: Police constables outside a burning Taj Mahal hotel. Photograph: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

'I believe the Pakistani establishment realised that the Mumbai attacks ultimately harmed Pakistan's interests. This is one reason that attacks in Pathankot and Uri were directed at military installations and not civilians.'

Finally, how do you see the next few months play out in South Asia? How close are we to war? How close are we to a possible nuclear conflict?

So-called experts should be prepared to make predictions, but events almost always turn out differently than they predict. So I should avoid this question.

But, if I had to guess, I would say that the leaders of India and Pakistan understand that they have more to lose than to gain by military conflict.

They both have interests in avoiding escalation, in part due to the shadow of potential nuclear war if escalation did occur.

I believe, but certainly cannot prove, that the Pakistani establishment realised that the Mumbai attacks ultimately harmed Pakistan's interests.

This is one reason, I speculate, that attacks in Pathankot and Uri were directed at military installations and not civilians.

Whether or not, the Pakistani authorities directed or knew about these attacks, whoever conducted them chose targets that would be less likely to outrage the world, cause large-scale Indian military reactions, and offend the decency of educated Pakistanis -- all of which would undermine Pakistan's interests.

I believe Indian leaders will make similar calculations as they consider how to respond, in order to keep what is a painful-but-manageable chronic problem from leading to much more damaging conflict.
Despite inclement weather, army was on Wednesday carrying out intense combing-cum-search operations in Uri and Naugam sectors along the Line of Control in Kashmir where alert troops foiled two infiltration bids but have so far drawn a blank in retrieving bodies of the slain terrorists.

Army personnel continued their search operations in the higher reaches of Uri and Naugam sectors of Baramulla and Kupwara districts respectively but have not managed to reach the spot where the bodies were supposed to be lying.

The bodies lay very close to the LoC and there was a possibility of the jawans coming under fire from across the border, official sources said.

The army personnel were maintaining a tight vigil to foil any fresh attempts by terrorists to sneak in through these sectors by breaking the security cordon or inflicting casualties on the troops.

Low clouds were also hampering the operation for retrieving the bodies of the terrorists which were lying close to the LoC, the sources said.

The operations along the LoC in Uri and Naugam sectors continue, an Army spokesman said.

One soldier was killed on Tuesday as Army foiled two infiltration bids in the two sectors of Kashmir.

While bodies of militants have been spotted nearly 300 metres short of the LoC, a search is on in neighbouring areas to find out if there are more casualties on ultras side, the sources said.

Army officials in New Delhi yesterday had claimed that 15 terrorists had attempted to cross the LoC.

However, the sources said army was treading cautiously in retrieving the bodies of the slain terrorists as there was a possibility of enemy troops opening fire.

The bodies of the terrorists are so close to the LoC that army might not be able to recover them, they said.

The combing-cum-search operations have been intensified to cover the densely forested areas adjacent to Uri and Naugam sectors to ensure that no remnants of the infiltrating terrorists are missed, they said.

The infiltration bid came just two days after the deadly attack by four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists on the Army base in Uri which claimed the lives of 18 soldiers and left several others injured.

As part of strengthening the counter-infiltration grid, army is firing illuminators intermittently at night to prevent more militants from sneaking in to this side of LoC, the sources said.

The failed infiltration bids on Tuesday were provided cover by the Pakistani troops, who resorted to ceasefire violation in Uri sector.

Army has refrained from making any comment on the number of terrorists killed during its operations to neutralise the infiltration attempts as the operations are still going on.

IMAGES: Delayed visuals of counter-infiltration operations underway in Uri and Naugam districts of Kashmir. Photographs: Umar Ganie
The Sikh-American who helped police capture the man wanted for the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey, said he feared he might have been mistaken as the perpetrator because of the misconceptions about his faith.

Harinder Singh Bains, 51, said he does not like being called a hero for accurately identifying 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born American man behind the bombings.

Asserting that he is "what America looks like," Bains said he did what any other American would have done.

"When I heard about the attacks and realised the suspect was sleeping in a doorway across the street, I did what any American would do. I called the police. I'm not a hero. The police are heroes; the EMTs are heroes; everyone who is working to bring New York and New Jersey together today is a hero," Bains, who owns a bar in Linden, told media persons.

He said as a Sikh-American, he understand that "I could have been mistaken for the perpetrator. My faith teaches me justice and tolerance for all and I know that I'm lucky to live in a community that shares this view."

Bains, who had emigrated from Chandigarh in 1996, stressed that after any attack, Americans should target people based on evidence of their role in the crime and not because of their faith or their country of origin or their accent.

"I came to this country from India 20 years ago to create a better life for my family. I am a father of four and a proud American citizen. I am also what America looks like," he said.

Bains said America is strongest when all Americans stand together in the face of violence "intended to divide us."

On the morning of September 19, Bains unlocked the door of his deli when he noticed Rahami sleeping in a vestibule next to a tavern across the street.

He later recognised Rahami's face from television reports following the failed attacks and contacted police.

When police arrived, Rahami allegedly shot an officer in the abdomen and began a shoot-out with police that led to his arrest.

Bains had earlier said he thought Rahami "looked very familiar" and "exactly" like the "guy" whose picture is being shown on TV channels.

"I kept wondering is he the same guy," Bains has said, adding that he then asked a friend of his who visited him that Rahami looked exactly like the person whose pictures were being circulated by law enforcement agencies in connection with the bombing.

Bains then called the police but didn't not immediately tell them that Rahami was in front of his store.

He initially told the police that there is a "guy in front of his bar who looks a little suspicious and does not look good to me" and that the police should come and check.

The police then came within five minutes and all the while Bains kept an eye on Rahami as he had a strong feeling he is the same person wanted for the bombings.

"I'm just a regular citizen doing what every citizen should do. Cops are the real heroes, law enforcement are the real heroes," Bains has said.
A sessions court in Srinagar ordered the release of human rights activist Khurram Parvez, who was taken into preventive detention for allegedly posing an imminent threat of breach of peace, but he was later allegedly booked under the Public Safety Act.

The court had on Tuesday stated that the executive official, who ordered the activists detention, had not followed necessary procedures including failure to adequately explain the grounds for his detention.

Meanwhile, the activist was on Wednesday booked under the PSA and shifted to Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu, JK Coalition of Civil Societies, an organisation run by the activist, claimed.

Parvez was arrested on September 16 and placed in administrative detention in a jail in Kupwara for allegedly posing an imminent threat of breach of peace.

Repeated attempts to contact District Magistrate Srinagar Farooq Ahmad Lone, who is vested with the authority to issue detention order under PSA, did not fructify.

Amnesty International India criticised the re-arrest of the activist.

Detaining a person right after he is released, without any intention to charge him or bring him to trial, amounts to using a revolving door of persecution, Aakar Patel, executive director, Amnesty International India, said in a statement.

This kind of arbitrary use of the law suggests that the Jammu and Kashmir police is determined to lock up Khurram Parvez at any cost, he said.
Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects have challenged the legality of a Pakistani judicial commission that travelled to India in 2013 to probe the 2008 attack, which could further delay the case proceedings.

Lakhvis counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi on Wednesday said the defence lawyers on Monday challenged the proceedings of the judicial commission that travelled to Mumbai to record the statements of four Indian prosecution witnesses in the Islamabad high court.

When asked had not the trial court already declared the commissions proceedings null and void, Abbasi said: No, the trial court had not declared the commissions proceedings null and void and we have challenged the legality of the commission in the IHC early this week.

Earlier, the defence lawyer had challenged the legality of the commission before the trial court in 2013 but it was dismissed.

A Pakistani panel comprising special prosecutors and the defence counsel in 2013 had visited Mumbai to record the statements from prosecution witnesses, including Magistrate R V Sawant Waghule, who recorded the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab; Ramesh Mahale, the chief investigation officer of the case, and Ganesh Dhunraj and Chintaman Mohite, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the terrorists killed during the attack.

The commission in 2012 had recorded the statement of these witnesses but due to an 'official understanding' between the Pakistani and Indian governments, had not cross-examined them.

Lakhvis lawyer has filed a plea the commission that went to India had not been allowed to cross-examine four key Indian witnesses.

A prosecution lawyer said the defence lawyers challenging the legality of the commission and saying it was not allowed to cross-examine the key Indian witnesses was aimed at delaying the case further.

He said this is evident from the fact that the legality of the commission is being challenged over three years after it had travelled to Mumbai.

As the case is already not heading further because India has yet to decide whether to send 24 witnesses to Pakistan to record their statement the defence lawyers challenging the Pakistani commission's proceedings in the IHC may further delay it, he said.

The court has not fixed the date of hearing.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba operations commander Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people in November, 2008.

Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attack, is living in undisclosed location after being released from jail on bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi. The case has been underway in the country for more than six years.
Pakistan's lack of will in dealing with insurgents stems from its "India phobia", its military and civilian tensions and its trust deficit with neighbours, Afghanistan's foreign minister has said while demanding the dismantling of "safe havens" in Pakistan to defeat terrorism.

"The way Pakistan behaves is because they have India phobia, there are military and civilian tensions and there is trust deficit between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Salahuddin Rabbani said here when asked what motivates Pakistan in dealing with insurgent groups and its "lack of will" to help deal with Taliban and other terror groups.

In a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday, Rabbani said out of these three reasons, Afghanistan and Pakistan can work on the issue of the trust deficit.

"After the formation of the national unity government, we did our best to go and work with Pakistan and we tried to open a new chapter of relations. On India phobia and the military and civilian tensions of the Pakistani leaders, this is something that they (Pakistan) have to sort it out," he said.

He said Afghanistan does not expect the violence and terror to subside anytime soon "as the Taliban and affiliate groups are sustained with logistical, financial and material support from elements in Pakistan."

Kabul has repeatedly underscored that terrorism will not be defeated in Afghanistan or elsewhere "as long as the distinction between good and bad terrorist continues" coupled with the lingering problem of terrorists' safe havens and sanctuaries which remain unaddressed.

"As our fight against terrorism continues, we have not closed the widow of opportunity for peace and reconciliation with the elements of armed opposition ready to give up violence. Yet we know that any prospect for the success is strictly contingent on the extent to which the government of Pakistan is ready and willing to clamp down on extremist groups," he said.

On the safe havens provided to terror groups in Pakistan, he said the spike in violence in Afghanistan shows that terror groups have continuous support "from somewhere" otherwise they would not have been able to fight in several provinces at the same time.

"We saw where their leader (Mullah Akhtar Mohammad) Mansour got killed," he said referring to the Taliban leader killed in an airstrike in Pakistan in May this year.

"Their sanctuaries, bases are somewhere in Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership should take this seriously and should make sure that these groups don't operate in those areas," Rabbani said.

Afghanistan is concerned about the sanctuaries and safe havens that the terror groups enjoy in Pakistan, with Rabbani hoping that the government in Pakistan "will take this issue seriously."

Rabbani said the US can play a role in persuading Pakistan to "change course and act in good faith."

He noted that despite the fact that peace efforts with the Taliban have not met with desired results, Afghanistan is optimistic about making progress in talks with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former prime minister of Afghanistan and founder and active leader of the Hezb-e Islami group.

"This is an important development," Rabbani said.

On whether Afghanistan has a vision on how it will manage its ties with India and Pakistan, he said Kabul's relation with one country is not at the expense of its relations with any other country.

"If you are close with one country, it does not mean we are moving away from other countries. We want to have good relations with all the countries in the region, that includes Pakistan and India," he said.
Here's a recap of moments captured in India in the past 48 hours.

Long Range Surface to Air missile lifts off after it was test fired at the integrated test range at Chandipur off Odisha coast on Tuesday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Water gushes out after the release of water from Mettur Dam in Salem in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday for irrigation of over 12 lakh acres of Samba crops. Photograph: PTI Photo

Bharatiya Janata Party activists protest against the terror attack on Uri army base, in Patna on Tuesday. Photograph: PTI Photo

The train signal fell on one of the bogies of the Doon Express which derailed in Faizabad on Tuesday. No casualties were reported. Photograph: PTI Photo

Swaminarayan Gurukul school children in Surat pay tribute to army soldiers who were killed in Uri attack, on Tuesday. Photograph: PTI Photo

People look at the damaged school bus that fell in a drain at village Mahwa in Attari on Tuesday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Labourers work as they prepare for Bharatiya Janata Party national executive meet in Kozhikode on Tuesday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Army displays arms and ammunition recovered from the four fidayeen terrorists who attacked army brigade Camp, at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on Monday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Workers carry out renovation work at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai on Monday. Photograph: Shashank Parade/PTI Photo

Cranes being used to tear down Tata Motor's Nano factory shed at Singur in Hooghly district of West Bengal on Monday. The dismantling of the abandoned shed began after the Supreme Court on August 31 had ruled that land acquisition process in Singur was faulty and directed the state government to return it to the farmers within 12 weeks. Photograph: PTI Photo

Army jawans paying gun salute during the funeral of Havildar Ravi Paul at his native village, Sarwa in Samba on Monday. Ravi Paul was martyred in terrorist attack at the army camp at Uri near LoC. Photograph: PTI Photo

Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on Monday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik creates a sand sculpture on the soldiers who lost their lives in Kashmir with message "We salute our Heroes, Life of each of our martyrs is Priceless", at Puri beach of Odisha on Monday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Rescue work was in progress after a 50-seater passenger bus fell into a pond at Benipatti in Madhubani district of Bihar on Monday. At least 35 bodies were recovered from the pond. Search for missing passengers were on. Photograph: PTI Photo

Security stepped up near Taj Mahal in Agra on Monday in the wake of Uri terrorist attack. Photograph: PTI Photo

A mahout guides a forest department elephant to demolish a house at Bandardubi village, on the periphery of the Kaziranga National Park on Monday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Devotees carry an idol of Lord Vishwakarma, the Hindu deity of architecture and machinery, to immerse it into the waters of the river Ganga in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

Security jawans stop people to enter Lal Chowk area where movement of people was restricted by authorities to foil sepratists march in Srinagar on Monday. Photograph: S Irfan/PTI Photo
In a criticism of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's rhetoric, US President Barack Obama said if America turned away refugees simply because they are "Muslim", it would reinforce the terrorists' propaganda and the "ugly lie" that the US is opposed to Islam.

Obama, who hosted a 'Leaders Summit on Refugees' during the 71st UN General Assembly session in the United Nations on Tuesday, said the world was facing a refugee crisis of "epic proportions" with more than 65 million people having been driven from their homes, more than any time since the World War-II.

"Among them are more than 21 million refugees who have fled their countries - everything and everyone they've ever known, fleeing with a suitcase or the clothes on their back," he said.

"And if we were to turn refugees away simply because of their background or religion, or, for example, because they are Muslim, then we would be reinforcing terrorist propaganda that nations like my own are somehow opposed to Islam, which is an ugly lie that must be rejected in all of our countries by upholding the values of pluralism and diversity," he said at the summit attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Bangladesh Prime Minsiter Sheikh Hasina.

He highlighted that in recent years, the US has put in place intensive screening and security checks to take in refugees as well as ensure the nation's security.

"Refugees are subject to more rigorous screening than the average tourist. We've seen in America, hardworking, patriotic refugees serve in our military, and start new businesses and help revitalise communities. I believe refugees can make us stronger," he said.

"So the challenge to our security is because when desperate refugees pay cold-hearted traffickers for passage, it funds the same criminals who are smuggling arms and drugs and children.

"When nations with their own internal difficulties find themselves hosting massive refugee populations for years on end, it can risk more instability. It oftentimes surfaces tensions in our society when we have disorderly and disproportionate migration into some countries that skews our politics and is subject to demagoguery," he said.

For the past year, Trump has been warning that letting refugees in would make the US vulnerable to new terror attacks. The brash tycoon has spearked a wave of criticism over his comments on race, immigrants and refugees, including calling for a ban on Muslim travelers to the United States.

And this week, one of Trump's sons triggered an online storm with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl containing an assortment of tainted and untainted candies.

Obama said he called the summit because the refugee crisis is "one of the most urgent tests of our time - our capacity for collective action. To test, first and foremost, our ability to end conflicts, because so many of the world's refugees come from just three countries ravaged by war - Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia," he said.

Obama, who is attending the last UN General-Assembly session of his presidency, said nations cannot excuse the mentality that allows for violence with impunity.

He added it was not fair that a handful of countries, mostly with limited resources, are bearing the burden of hosting the maximum refugees.

"And collectively, we continue to make excuses. It's not the subject of this summit, but we all know that what is happening in Syria, for example, is unacceptable. And we are not as unified as we should be in pushing to make it stop.

"It's a test of our international system where all nations ought to share in our collective responsibilities, because the vast majority of refugees are hosted by just 10 countries who are bearing a very heavy burden - among them Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia. Countries that often have fewer resources than many of those who are doing little or nothing," he said.

The refugee crisis also tests the nations' shared security. "Not because refugees are a threat. Refugees, most of whom are women and children, are often fleeing war and terrorism. They are victims. They're families who want to be safe and to work, be good citizens and contribute to their country... who are interested in assimilating and contributing to the society in which they find themselves."

He underlined the need to recognise that refugees are a symptom of "larger failures" such as war, ethnic tensions or persecution.

"If we truly want to address the crisis, wars like the savagery in Syria must be brought to an end - and it will be brought to an end through political settlement and diplomacy, and not simply by bombing."

He told the summit that as President, he has increased the number of refugees America is resettling to 85,000 this year, which includes 10,000 Syrian refugees.

In the coming fiscal year, the US will welcome and resettle 110,000 refugees from around the world - which is a nearly 60 percent increase over 2015.

IMAGE: US President Barack Obama speaks during a meeting on refugees on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York City. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The Prime Ministers residential address will now be 7 Lok Kalyan Marg and not the famous 7 Race Course Road with the authorities today approving the renaming of the iconic British-era road in posh Lutyens Delhi.

A decision to this effect was taken at a high-level meeting of the New Delhi Municipal Council presided by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. A notification will be issued soon to complete the process of renaming the road.

It is the second road to be renamed in the national capital after the National Democratic Alliance government came to power at the Centre. The Aurangzeb Road was renamed after former president A P J Abdul Kalam last year.

The NDMC has also decided to rename the Gurudwara Rakabganj round-about adjacent to the Parliament complex as Guru Gobind Singh Chowk following representations from various Sikh organisations.

The Race Course Road was named after the Delhi race Course, part of the Delhi Race Club, which was established in 1940.

The rechristening of the road in Lutyen's Delhi came days after Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament Meenakshi Lekhi wrote to the NDMC, suggesting that the name of the road on which the PMs official residence is located should be changed to Ekatma Marg to match the Indian culture.

However, her proposal was rejected in today's meeting. Kejriwal proposed to rename the street after Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Sikh Guru but the idea also did not find favour.

I had proposed renaming of the road after Guru Govind Singh while Lekhi said it should be renamed as Ekatma Marg. I suggested that the PM should be consulted on this but the Council members decided that on the basis of suggestions received from public, the road should be renamed as Lok Kalyan Marg, Kejriwal said.

Aam Aadmi Party MLA Surinder Singh, also member of the Council, opposed Lekhis proposal to rename the road as Ekatma Marg.

NDMC chairperson Naresh Kumar said it was a unanimous decision to change the name of the road as Lok Kalyan Marg.

It was observed by the Council that the name of the road as Race Course Road on which the official residence of the prime minister of India is situated does not match with the Indian ethos and value system. Hence, it was decided to rename it as Lok Kalyan Marg so to take the philosophy of public welfare in the mind, said Kumar.

The change of name of Gurudwara Rakabganj round-about to Guru Gobind Singh Chowk is seen as an effort to woo the Sikh community by both BJP and AAP ahead of the Punjab assembly polls early next year.

Last year, the Aurangzeb Road, which is also not far from the Race Course road, was renamed after former president A P J Abdul Kalam.

AAP MLA Jarnail Singh had earlier on Wednesday met Kejriwal at his residence along with a delegation of Sikhs suggesting that he recommends renaming of the road after Guru Gobind Singh.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/Reuters
Pak PM discussed the Kashmir situation and tense relations with India post the Uri attack with Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has held a telephonic conversation with army chief General Raheel Sharif ahead of his speech at the United Nations, in which he is expected to raise the Kashmir issue, amid signs he may tone down his rhetoric to reduce tensions with India.

An official from the Prime Ministers Office said the two discussed the situation in Kashmir and tense relations with India on Tuesday night after the terrorist attack on an Indian army camp in Uri on Sunday.

Sharif had a plan to forcefully highlight the Kashmir violence, but the scenario changed after Uri terrorist attack which spotlighted the issue of cross-border terrorism.

"The prime minister might strike a balance in his speech. He would talks about the Indian atrocities in Kashmir but also would be conciliatory to end tension," said the official.

Sharif may also offer proposals to address the Kashmir issue, including emphasis on implementing UN resolutions and the mediatory role of the international community.

No statement was issued after the talks between the two Sharifs, which was their first contact since the Uri attack.

Geo TV reported that the conversation between the two leaders shows that the situation after Uri attack was serious.

The Uri incident was one of the deadliest attacks on Indian Army in recent years, as heavily-armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force.

India's Director General of Military Operations Lt Gen Ranbir Singh has said the four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings and that initial reports indicated that they belonged to Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed group.

Sharif is poised to address the 71st United Nations General Assembly session in New York on Wednesday.

IMAGE: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif speaks during a high-level meeting on addressing large movements of refugees and migrants at the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan, New York. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Raking up Kashmir at the United Nations, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday glorified slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "young leader" even as he expressed readiness for a "serious and sustained dialogue" with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.

Sharif devoted much of his 20-minute speech at the UN General Assembly session to Kashmir and the current situation in the valley and said Pakistan "fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination".

He demanded an "independent inquiry into the extra-judicial killings" and a UN fact-finding mission to Kashmir "so that those guilty of these atrocities are punished."

Insisting that peace and normalisation between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, Sharif made a number of allegations with regard to the current unrest in the valley. India has blamed Pakistan for engineering and fuelling the unrest.

While talking about the situation in Kashmir, the Pakistan Prime Minister referred to Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, as a "young leader" and said he has "emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement..."

Sharif said the "Indian brutalities are well documented" and that "Pakistan will share with the Secretary General a dossier containing detailed information and evidence of the gross and systematic violations of human rights committed" in Jammu and Kashmir.

"The security council has called for the exercise of the right to self-determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under UN auspices. The people of Kashmir have waited 70 years for implementation of this promise," he said, adding the security council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions.

Sharif, who spoke amid heightening tensions between India and Pakistan, insisted that his country wants peace with the neighbour as "confrontation should not be our destiny in South Asia."

The Pakistan prime minister claimed that he had "gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues but India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue.

"Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to avert the danger of any escalation."

While insisting that peace and normalization between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, he said, "This is an objective evaluation, not a partisan position."

"Today, from this rostrum, I would also like to reiterate our offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir," Sharif said.

He also said that Pakistan was "open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions."

Pakistan is "ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty," he added.

Claiming that Pakistan "neither wants, nor is engaged in an arms race with India", Sharif said, "We have consistently urged the conclusion of bilateral arms control and disarmament measures between Pakistan and India to prevent conflict and avoid wasteful military expenditures."

"The international community ignores the danger of rising tensions in South Asia, at its own peril," the Pakistan prime minister said.

He said Pakistan is "committed to the establishment of strategic stability in the region" but "we cannot ignore our neighbors unprecedented arms build up and will take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence."

Sharif, while speaking about the unrest in Kashmir, said, "We demand the immediate release of all Kashmiri political prisoners; an end to the curfew; freedom for the Kashmiris to demonstrate peacefully; urgent medical help for the injured; abrogation of Indias draconian laws; and removal of the foreign travel ban on Kashmiri leaders."

To this end, he said, "steps should be taken by the United Nations to demilitarize Jammu and Kashmir and undertake consultations with India, Pakistan and the true representatives of the Kashmiri people to implement the resolutions of the security council."

In this context, Sharif said he welcomes "the offer of good offices by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon."

India has always maintained that Kashmir is a bilateral issue and not third party, including the UN, has any role.

"We will also open consultations with members of the security council to explore the modalities for implementation of the security council resolutions on Kashmir," Sharif said.

He claimed that Pakistan is the "principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored and financed from abroad" and has the resolve of eliminating the scourge.

"Our comprehensive strategy of law enforcement and targeted military operations has produced remarkable results and enabled Pakistan to turn the tide against terrorism," he said.

Sharif also made a pitch for Pakistan's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group, claiming that it is a "responsible" nuclear weapon state.

"As a responsible nuclear weapon state, Pakistan will continue to cooperate with all international efforts that seek to promote fair and equitable solutions to disarmament and non-proliferation challenges," he said.

"We have introduced state of the art measures to strengthen the safety and security of our nuclear materials and facilities. We have adopted a comprehensive export control regime that is fully consistent with international standards," Sharif said.

"Judged on the basis of objective criteria, and without discrimination, Pakistan is fully eligible for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group," he said.

Sharif also talked about Afghanistan, which earlier alleged that "merciless" terror attacks against its civilians are being planned and organised in Pakistan which trains, equips and finances terror groups like Taliban and Haqqani network.

He said Pakistan has been "facilitating the process of reconciliation in Afghanistan" but "progress will be assured only when the Afghan parties themselves conclude that there is no military solution to the Afghan war."

India slams Wani's reference in Nawaz Sharif's UN speech Slamming Sharif for glorifying slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani at the UN, India said his remarks show Pakistan's continued attachment to terrorism. "Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA glorifies Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani in UN's highest forum. Shows continued Pak attachment to terrorism," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted. During his address to the UN General Assembly session, Sharif raked up Kashmir issue and described Wani as a "young leader". Pakistan Prime Minister said Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, has "emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement". Sharif also claimed that he had gone the extra mile to offer "a dialogue to address all outstanding issues but India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue." Responding to Sharif's allegations, Swarup said India's only condition for talks is an end to terrorism. "PM Sharif at UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. India's only condition is an end to terrorism. This not acceptable," Swarup said.

IMAGE: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addresses the United Nations General Assembly in the Manhattan borough of New York, US. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
India on Wednesday gave Pakistan evidence of involvement of Pak-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against this country.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active.

Jaishankar provided Basit with the content of Global Positioning System device recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the Line of Control and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistan's role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed.

If the government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents, he told the Pakistan envoy.

Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

He also reminded Basit that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India. The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern, he told Basit.

In a release, the External Affairs Ministry said this year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of thirty one terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism. The foreign secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing, it said.

Apart from GPS content, India has recovered a number of items that included communication matrix sheets and equipment, other made in Pakistan stuff like food, medicines and clothes, which were shown to Basit.

We now expect a response from the government of Pakistan, Jaishankar told him.

Basits summoning came a day after Jaishankar headed a high-level meeting, attended by senior Home Ministry officials and Director General of Military Operations, during which the evidence recovered by Indian Army from the terrorists was shared with the MEA.
Two powerful American lawmakers have introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, saying it was time the US stopped paying the country for its "betrayal".

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act (HR 6069) has been moved by Republican Ted Poe and Democrat Dana Rohrabacher, who is a ranking member of the influential Congressional Committee on Terrorism.

"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Poe, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe said.



"From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he alleged.

Poe said the bill will require the Obama administration to formally answer this question.

The president must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said.

"Thirty days after that, the secretary of state (John Kerry) must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," Poe said.

In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack by Pakistan-backed terrorists.

"I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace," he said, adding "I support every effort to find out who committed this heinous act, so that the perpetrators are brought to justice."

Senator John Cornyn, co-chair of the Senate-India Caucus, tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest setback in a decade.

Indian-Americans continued to rally behind the call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.

"Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state," said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA.

"OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan," it said.

Representative Image: Mohsin Raza/Reuters
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has raised the Kashmir issue with almost every world leader he has held talks with on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session, but his efforts to internationalise the dispute with India appeared to have gained no traction.

Sharif raised the issue with the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Turkey and sought their intervention to resolve the matter. He met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday.

"PM Sharif briefed Japanese PM about the grave turn that the situation in occupied Kashmir is taking. Reminded him about UNSC resolutions," Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi tweeted.

"PM Nawaz Sharif also apprised his Japanese counterpart of the human rights violations being committed by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir," Lodhi said in another tweet.

Erdogan and Sharif "agreed that OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) Comm on Human Rights should send a fact-finding mission" to Kashmir, Lodhi said.

On Monday, Sharif held bilateral talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry and UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

According to a readout of his meeting with Kerry by the Pakistan mission, Sharif told him that more than 107 people have been "assassinated" in Kashmir, thousands injured and "worst human rights violations are being committed at the state level."

"I still remember President (Bill) Clinton's promise that US will play its role to help out in resolving bilateral disputes and issues between Pakistan and India," Sharif said, according to the release.

"I expect US Administration and Secretary Kerry to use his good offices to help in resolving bilateral issues between Pakistan and India," he added.

In his meeting with May, Sharif urged her to play her role in convincing India to stop the use of force against the people in the region.

He said Pakistan's support for Kashmiri people "in their legitimate struggle for self determination and its commitment to the Kashmir cause are non-negotiable."

However, Sharif's repeated calls to the UN to help resolve the Kashmir dispute appeared to be gaining no traction as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made no reference to Kashmir in his final speech to the UNGA as the UN chief.

At the opening session of the General Debate on Tuesday, Ban touched upon a cross-section of global issues including the Syrian crisis, the Palestinian issue, the refugee and migrant movements and tension in the Korean Peninsula.

Kashmir will be the focal point of Sharif's address to the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

Tension have heightened between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attack by heavily-armed militants, suspected to be from Pakistan, on an army base in Uri in which 18 jawans died.

Ban has repeatedly said his "good offices" are available to help resolve the Kashmir dispute only if both India and Pakistan request for it, a clear indication that the issue is bilateral and should be solved by the two countries only.

Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Syria: 'Horrific' attack on UN aid convoy is a flagrant violation of international law

Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Amnesty International, Syria: 'Horrific' attack on UN aid convoy is a flagrant violation of international law, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e236624.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Last night's attack on a UN/Syrian Arab Red Crescent aid convoy, intended for 78,000 people in Aleppo, is a flagrant violation of the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, Amnesty International said.

Witnesses in Syria have told the organization that the convoy, along with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent warehouse where it had docked, were bombed intensively for two hours on Monday evening, heightening the suspicion that Syrian government forces deliberately targeted the relief operation.

"A sustained attack on a humanitarian convoy and workers, horrific enough in any circumstances, will in this case also have a disastrous impact not only on those desperate civilians for whom the assistance was intended, but for life-saving humanitarian operations throughout Syria," said Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

"If the convoy was - as it appears - deliberately attacked, this would be yet another war crime committed by the Syrian government. It illustrates how civilians in Syria are paying with their lives for five years of total impunity for systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity. Until the international community shows that it is serious about bringing perpetrators to justice, these appalling crimes will continue on a daily basis."

The UN aid chief, Stephen O'Brien, earlier said that the convoy was travelling with all the necessary permits, and that all parties in the conflict had been notified of its route. The UN has announced a temporary suspension of all aid convoys in Syria following the attack. Around 20 civilians were killed in the attack, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Witnesses interviewed by Amnesty International said a variety of aircraft, including helicopters and Russian-made fighter jets, took part in the bombardment, in the town of Urum al-Kubra in the west of Aleppo governorate. Twenty-one of the 31 trucks in the convoy had been partially or completely destroyed.

"The explosions focused only on the vicinity of the Red Crescent centre, which is far from any military presence. I couldn't initiate a search and rescue operation until the bombing stopped it kept going for at least two hours," a rescue worker in Urum al-Kubra told Amnesty International.

Abu Haytham, a media activist, said he heard a warplane in the area but had never imagined that the Syrian Red Crescent building would be targeted. When he arrived at the site after the bombardment, many trucks were aflame and the building had been destroyed.

"I saw the bodies of men on the ground," he said. "I was told they were truck drivers and volunteers who had been unloading the trucks. The trucks had the logo of UNHCR. The aid included medicine, food and other desperately needed items."

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
UN officials condemn attacks against aid convoy and warehouse in rural Aleppo

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as UN News Service, UN officials condemn attacks against aid convoy and warehouse in rural Aleppo, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e2399540c.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

20 September 2016 - Top United Nations officials have condemned attacks last night against a UN/Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) aid convoy, as well as a SARC warehouse and health clinic in Urum al-Kubra (Big Orem), northwest of Aleppo city in Syria, in which about 20 civilians and one SARC staff member were killed and vital food and medical assistance was destroyed.

"Notification of the convoy - which planned to reach some 78,000 people - had been provided to all parties to the conflict and the convoy was clearly marked as humanitarian. There can be no explanation or excuse, no reason or rationale for waging war on brave and selfless humanitarian workers trying to reach their fellow citizens in desperLet me be clear: if this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crimeate need of assistance," said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O'Brien in a statement issued yesterday evening by his office (OCHA).

According to the statement, initial reports also indicate that many people were killed or seriously injured, including SARC volunteers, as a result of the attacks. A SARC warehouse was also hit and a SARC health clinic was also reportedly severely damaged.

The attacks came on the heels of reports that the Syrian army had announced yesterday that the ceasefire that began on 12 September - aiming to curtail violence for seven consecutive days and allow access to humanitarian aid - had expired.

Condemning the attacks in the "strongest possible terms" and noting that he was "disgusted and horrified by the news," Mr. O'Brien, who is also the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, emphasized that international humanitarian law and human rights law plainly set out the basic responsibilities of warring parties to ensure the necessary protection of all humanitarian organizations, including personnel, facilities and other relief assets.

"Let me be clear: if this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime," he said, calling for an immediate, impartial and independent investigation into the "deadly incident."

"The perpetrators should know that they will one day be held accountable for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law," he added.

Mr. O'Brien noted that despite very difficult and dangerous conditions, humanitarian aid organizations remain committed to continuing their work and reaching all those in need. In that regard, he reiterated a call for speedy, unconditional, and unimpeded and sustained access to the millions of people in need, particularly those in besieged and hard-to-reach areas across Syria.

"Now, more than ever, this horror has to be brought to an end," he stressed.

UN suspends aid convoys

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the opening of the general debate of the General Assembly's seventy-first session. UN Photo/Cia Pak

Echoing those remarks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referenced the attacks earlier today during the opening of the General Assembly's annual general debate, emphasizing that the crisis in Syria is "taking the greatest number of lives and sowing the widest instability."

"Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower. Yesterday's sickening, savage, and apparently deliberate attack on a UN-Syrian Arab Red Crescent aid convoy is the latest example," the UN chief said.

Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower

"The United Nations has been forced to suspend aid convoys as a result of this outrage. The humanitarians delivering life-saving aid were heroes. Those who bombed them were cowards. Accountability for crimes such as these is essential," he added.

Along those lines, the General Assembly President Peter Thomson said in his opening remarks that the crisis in Syria continues to bring immense human suffering to the country's people, both for those who have fled in search of sanctuary and those who have stayed under inhumane conditions.

"I strongly condemn the attacks on a UN aid convey, seeking to bring desperately needed food and medical supplies to people in need. The deliberate targeting of humanitarian personnel is a flagrant violation of international law, and totally morally unacceptable," he said.

In addition, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), Ertharin Cousin, said in a statement that she was horrified by the attack.

"This assault on the humanitarian relief effort in Syria, however, will not discourage WFP from continuing to perform our life-saving service to all people in need across the country," Ms. Cousin said. "I urge all parties to this hideous conflict to respect international law and our common humanitarian principles and provide unconditional, unimpeded, sustained and safe access to the millions of civilians in need across Syria, no matter where they are or who they are."

UN independent commission on Syria calls for accountability

In a separate press release, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic also condemned the attacks in the strongest possible terms.

"This attack comes at a critical time in which the unhindered and rapid delivery of aid to besieged areas had been agreed as a vital part of the cessation of hostilities agreement brokered between the United States and Russian Federation early last week. At a time when warring parties were meant to support the delivery of humanitarian assistance, aid deliveries have been deliberately obstructed or attacked," the Commission said.

Chair of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria Sergio Paulo Pinheiro. UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

For his part, Commission Chair Paulo Pinheiro noted that the incident is a "particularly cruel blow to deliver to the people of Syria at a time when the priority was supposed to be on improving the humanitarian situation of besieged civilians."

"Humanitarian aid workers are not a party to this conflict and they should never be targeted or their assistance politicized," he stressed, calling on all parties to the conflict to respect international humanitarian law, especially the special protections afforded to humanitarian and medical personnel.

"Attacks against humanitarian personnel should be discussed urgently as part of the high-level meeting of the Security Council scheduled for tomorrow in New York," urged Mr. Pinheiro. "Action is needed to ensure the protection of such workers and accountability for those who harm them."
ICC: Countries Should Press Kenya on Obstruction

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 19 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, ICC: Countries Should Press Kenya on Obstruction, 19 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23ac64.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

International Criminal Court (ICC) member countries should address the court's finding of obstruction by Kenya in the case against President Uhuru Kenyatta, Human Rights Watch said today. An ICC trial chamber on September 19, 2016 referred a finding of non-cooperation in the now-withdrawn case against Kenyatta to the court's membership, known collectively as the Assembly of States Parties.

"The ICC has squarely called out Kenya's breach of its obligations to the ICC," said Elizabeth Evenson, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. "ICC member countries should make sure the message is heard in Nairobi that they will not turn a blind eye to the government's obstruction of justice."

ICC judges in January 2012 had charged Kenyatta, then deputy prime minister and finance minister, with crimes against humanity for his alleged role in organizing and financing murder, displacement, and rape during the violence that followed Kenya's 2007 presidential election. Although the prosecutor withdrew charges against Kenyatta in December 2014, the issue of whether the government of Kenya should be sanctioned for non-cooperation in the case remained pending.

The ICC trial chamber had previously declined to send a finding of non-cooperation to the assembly. In an August 2015 ruling, however, the ICC appeals chamber found that inconsistences in the initial decision required a re-examination of the issues. The prosecutor, the victims' counsel, and the government of Kenya made new submissions to the trial chamber. On September 19, the trial chamber entered a formal finding of non-cooperation and referred the matter to the assembly for action. It did so because it considered that "the [Assembly of States Parties] would be best placed to address the lack of cooperation, in order to provide an incentive for the Kenyan Government to cooperate with the Court, in relation to [cooperation requests in the Kenyatta case] and more generally."

The decision is the first ICC finding of non-cooperation sent to the Assembly of States Parties related to the failure of an ICC member country to provide assistance to the prosecution's investigations. Previous findings of non-cooperation against other ICC member countries have related to failures to enforce the court's arrest warrants.

As an ICC member country, Kenya is obligated to cooperate with the court, including by responding to the prosecution's requests for assistance with investigations. The Rome Statute, the ICC's founding treaty, leaves it up to the Assembly of States Parties to decide what enforcement action to take in non-cooperation cases referred to it.

This finding of "non-cooperation" is specific to the Kenyatta case, and relates only to Kenya's failure to comply fully with the prosecution's request for tax, bank, company, land transfer, and telephone records. Crimes against humanity charges in a parallel case against William Ruto, Kenya's deputy president, and a co-defendant, Joshua arap Sang, were vacated for lack of evidence in April 2016.

The failure of the Kenyan government to provide records sought by the prosecution in the Kenyatta case occurred against a backdrop of hostile rhetoric from the government against the ICC proceedings. The Kenyatta administration initiated an aggressive diplomatic campaign to lobby leaders, particularly within the African Union, to support ending the ICC's cases and undermine African support for the ICC, calling the ICC a "toy of declining imperial powers." It has made repeated efforts to use the annual meeting of the Assembly of States Parties to politicize the court's proceedings.

In 2010, the Assembly of States Parties adopted procedures to guide its response to findings of non-cooperation, which could culminate in recommendations for assembly action at their annual meetings. But the assembly has limited experience in carrying out these procedures. Beyond dialogue with the non-cooperating member country, the procedures do not list specific possible measures the assembly can take. The European Union also has procedures to guide its response to non-cooperation with the ICC.

For other tribunals, countries have shown a willingness to enforce court orders. Targeted sanctions and conditions for providing assistance have been used to bring about cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The assembly should ensure a consistent and effective approach toward non-cooperation findings to bring about the cooperation by ICC member countries that the court needs to deliver justice, Human Rights Watch said.

When it comes to findings of non-cooperation on the part of ICC member countries, ICC judges have issued previous non-cooperation decisions against the governments of Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Malawi, and Uganda for allowing President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan to visit their countries without facing arrest. Al-Bashir is wanted on two outstanding ICC warrants. A determination on South Africa's cooperation is currently pending before the ICC regarding the failure of South Africa to arrest Bashir during a June 2015 visit to the country, in violation of both ICC obligations and two orders by a domestic court.

"Defaulting on legal obligations to the ICC should not be allowed to go unchecked," Evenson said. "Member countries should take Kenya's obstruction seriously, as they should whenever the court's judges find that a state party has breached its obligations to the court."

Previous Developments in the Kenyatta Case

In early 2014, as a February trial date neared, the prosecution admitted that its investigations had hit a dead end, partly because a key insider witness confessed to giving false testimony. In March 2014, judges granted a temporary adjournment in the trial to permit the prosecution and the government of Kenya to work together to resolve a long-outstanding request for Kenyatta's financial and other records, which the prosecution hoped could provide additional evidence. When the vast majority of records had still not been produced by October 2014, the prosecution asked the judges to refer Kenya to the Assembly of States Parties for non-cooperation and adjourn the case indefinitely until the government complied.

In two December 2014 decisions, the judges rejected the prosecution's request to postpone Kenyatta's trial, finding that further delay - particularly since the prosecution was uncertain whether even full cooperation by the government would lead to sufficient evidence - would be incompatible with the interests of justice. They faulted Kenya for failing to provide records sought by the prosecution but decided not to send a formal finding of non-cooperation against Kenya to the assembly. They found that the non-cooperation did not warrant sanction due in part to concerns about the prosecution's diligence in following up on cooperation requests and also given their decision not to further adjourn the case.

The ICC prosecution then withdrew its charges against Kenyatta. It sought leave to appeal the decision on non-cooperation, however, leading to the August 2015 ruling by the appeals chamber.

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UN rights body cannot ignore the situations in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 19 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, UN rights body cannot ignore the situations in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, 19 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23b4d4.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Human Rights Watch continues to be concerned about a number of country situations that are not receiving the attention they require from the Human Rights Council.

In Turkey, since the coup attempt on July 15, authorities have jailed over 22,000 soldiers, officers, police, judges and prosecutors on suspicion of involvement with the coup. Up to 100,000 teachers and public servants have been suspended or dismissed. At least 131 media outlets have been shut down, and an estimated 116 journalists are in jail pending criminal investigation  the vast majority since the coup attempt. The state of emergency and emergency decrees have removed crucial safeguards against ill treatment and torture.

The Council should urgently support calls by the High Commissioner to allow access to places of detention for independent observers, and for an independent investigation into the violations committed in southeast Turkey.

Bangladesh has been hit by a series of violent attacks, culminating in the July 1 assault by armed militants on a cafe in central Dhaka. This was preceded by attacks on free expression and religious freedom: nearly 50 were killed including secularists, LGBT activists, and religious figures. Initially slow to respond, in reaction to rising international criticism authorities have arrested people seemingly arbitrarily and en masse. Many are being held secretly; some have been killed in raids.

Security forces have a long history of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture, but the targeting of the political opposition has escalated in recent years. We are increasingly concerned at the lack of basic due process rights, particularly given a politicized judiciary which hands down judgments leading to executions. We urge states to raise this situation at the Council and directly with the government.

In Ethiopia, in August security forces repeatedly fired on generally peaceful protesters, bringing the death toll to over 500 since the suppression of demonstrations began in Oromia in November 2015. Thousands more have been wounded and arrested. Since the government systematically restricts independent media and civil society, there has been limited reporting on the crackdown and inadequate international attention to this ongoing crisis. These human rights violations as well as the persistent denial of country visits by Special Procedures are not consistent with Ethiopia's obligations as a Council Member and Vice-President. Human Rights Watch urges the Council to raise concerns over the serious abuses, particularly in the Oromia and Amhara regions, and support the High Commissioner's call for an independent investigation into the unlawful killings and other violations.

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Hungary: Failing to Protect Vulnerable Refugees

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Hungary: Failing to Protect Vulnerable Refugees, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23bbe4.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Hungary is keeping many of the most vulnerable asylum seekers stranded on its border in poor conditions for weeks while they wait to enter the country and file their claims. Some said that border officials had used excessive force against them.

Hungary has imposed a daily cap on the number of asylum seekers who can enter Hungary to present asylum claims, and a July 5, 2016, law allows push-backs of people found to have entered the country irregularly. This means that even especially vulnerable people are being sent back to the Serbian border and spending weeks in poor conditions there as they wait to enter.

"It is particularly cruel to force vulnerable asylum seekers who are already inside Hungary back to the Serbian border to line up for weeks in awful conditions," said Lydia Gall, Balkans and Eastern Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Hungary should provide timely access to the asylum system for all refugees, and take special measures to treat vulnerable groups humanely."

To look at the effects of the July 5 law, Human Rights Watch interviewed 30 asylum seekers, including single males and members of vulnerable groups, as well as representatives of nongovernmental groups, staff of UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, human rights lawyers, and activists.

Those interviewed included nine families with children, four unaccompanied children, an elderly person, and a person with a disability. All had been apprehended after crossing irregularly into Hungary after the new law was adopted and had been pushed back across the border. Human Rights Watch also interviewed six additional families with children who had been waiting to enter Hungary for up to several weeks.

A September 2015 law established a fast track asylum procedure requiring most people filing asylum claims to wait in two transit zones inside the Hungarian border in poor conditions while their claims are processed. The law exempts vulnerable asylum-seekers - including families with children, elderly, sick, unaccompanied children, and people with disabilities, who are supposed to be given access to regular processing in reception facilities inside Hungary.

But the situation, particularly for vulnerable people, has worsened under the July 5 law, which enables police to push back to the Serbian border asylum seekers caught inside Hungary within 8 kilometres of the border. There is no exception made for vulnerable people, despite the fact that they are exempt from the transit zone procedure. They are also sent back to the Serbian border to await entry to Hungary under the daily quota of 15 asylum seekers at each of the two transit zones. Many vulnerable people are stranded at the border for weeks.

In the past year, Hungary has adopted laws and procedures that make access to asylum increasingly difficult. In September 2015, Hungary built a razor wire fence and established the two transit zones on its border with Serbia where asylum seekers are held while processing takes place. But as Human Rights Watch has documented, even those subjected to the fast-track transit zone procedure are being denied effective access to asylum.

Human Rights Watch documented 12 cases of violence against migrants and asylum seekers, including four unaccompanied children and a family with young children, who crossed irregularly into Hungary after July 5. Migrants and asylum seekers reported being severely beaten by people wearing uniforms consistent with those of Hungarian police, army, or local paramilitary - so-called "field guards."

A 37-year-old Iraqi man traveling with his 35-year-old wife and 10-month-old baby said his family entered the country the night of July 6 and walked about 10 kilometres in the rain. In the morning, he sought help in a village 3 kilometres away. "My wife and baby were shaking from the rain and cold as I returned with the police but they didn't help," the man said. "They threw our bags away with our phones and money and made us walk to the village."

He said that his wife sprained her ankle but the police refused to help her. "I had to carry my wife on one arm and the baby on the other," he said. "In the village, they put us in a police car and told us they were going to take us to hospital first and then to a camp. We were happy. But they lied to us. They drove us straight to the fence, showed us some paper saying that we crossed illegally and forced us through the steel door back to Serbia." I told them, "Please take us to camp in Hungary" but they just told us, "Go back to Serbia."

A 39-year-old Afghan man traveling with his 28-year-old wife and 3-month-old baby in early August said the police used a pepper gas spray while pushing them back to Serbia. The police "were threatening us, then laughing," the man said. "They brought out a gas canister and sprayed in front of the steel gate where we were supposed to walk through to the Serbian side. Once we walked through, they sprayed behind us. I said please don't spray because of the baby, but they didn't listen. They sprayed anyway."

Asylum seekers said they were beaten with batons, pummelled with fists, and kicked. Human Rights Watch observed, and obtained photos of, bruises, skin perforations, and other wounds consistent with marks from batons and dog bites. In three cases, asylum seekers reported that police officers videotaped the pushbacks from the moment the police took them to the fence until the police made them cross a steel gate towards the Serbian side of the border. The asylum seekers said that the police acted respectfully while they were filming but turned violent when the camera was turned off.

In a July 13 report, Human Rights Watch documented similar abuses against migrants and asylum seekers. The Hungarian government dismissed those concerns in a public statement on July 14. Hungarian authorities should thoroughly investigate alleged abuses by border officials during push-backs to the Serbian border and hold those responsible to account, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch wrote to Hungary's Office of Immigration and Nationality and to the Hungarian Interior and Defense Ministries, on August 23 informing them of the newest findings and requesting comment but has yet to receive a substantive response.

The European Commission opened infringement proceedings against Hungary in December 2015, with respect to its problematic asylum legislation. But it has been silent on Hungary's practice of forcing vulnerable people to wait at the border for excessive periods in appalling conditions instead of admitting them for regular processing. The European Commission has also failed to speak out publicly on the need for Hungarian authorities to investigate violent push-backs of asylum seekers and migrants at Hungary's border with Serbia.

EU member states should refrain from returning any asylum seekers to Hungary under the Dublin regulation, which allows sending a refugee back to the first EU country they entered to file an asylum claim, until it ensures meaningful access to asylum, including adequate time for a substantive in-country appeal and halts violent and other summary returns of asylum seekers to the Serbian border, Human Rights Watch said.

"Making vulnerable asylum seekers suffer needlessly in miserable conditions without legal justification is simply wrong," Gall said. "The European Commission should push Hungarian authorities to comply with their obligations under EU and human rights law to provide access to asylum, protect vulnerable asylum seekers, and investigate allegations of excessive use of force by border officials."

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Philippines: Committee Chair Ousted for Death Squad Inquiry

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 19 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Philippines: Committee Chair Ousted for Death Squad Inquiry, 19 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23c244.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

On September 19, 2016, senators who accused De Lima of being "biased" voted 16 to 4 to replace her as chairwoman in favor of "someone neutral." At a Senate hearing on September 15, admitted former "hit man" Edgar Matobato had testified on Duterte's involvement in the killings of about 1,000 people in Davao City, where Duterte had been mayor for more than two decades.

"The Senate vote to remove the chair of the Committee on Justice and Human Rights is a craven attempt to derail accountability for the appalling death toll from President Duterte's abusive 'war on drugs,'" said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director. "The Senate is imperiling the Philippine public by covering up allegations of state-sanctioned murder rather than exposing them."

In August, De Lima convened Senate hearings into the killings of more than 2,000 alleged drug users and drug dealers since Duterte took office on June 30. The hearings exposed her to a torrent of harassment and intimidation from Duterte and other government officials. Last month Duterte told a crowd of supporters that De Lima should commit suicide, saying, "If I were De Lima, ladies and gentlemen, I'll hang myself."

The most recent Philippine National Police data shows that from July 1 to September 4, police killed an estimated 1,011 suspected "drug pushers and users," more than 14 times the 68 such police killings recorded between January 1 and June 15. Police blame the killings on suspects who "resisted arrest and shot at police officers," but refuse to launch an investigation into the deaths. Police statistics attribute another 1,067 killings of alleged drug dealers and users in the past two months to unknown gunmen.

In 2009, Human Rights Watch published the report, "'You Can Die Any Time': Death Squad Killings in Mindanao," detailing the involvement of police and local government officials in targeted death squad killings in Davao City during Duterte's time as mayor. Another Human Rights Watch report from 2014, "'One Shot to the Head': Death Squad Killings in Tagum City, Philippines," documents police involvement in what appeared to be a copycat policy of extrajudicial killings in a city nearby Davao City. Human Rights Watch has called for the Philippine government to convene an independent investigation involving the United Nations into allegations of direct involvement by President Duterte in extrajudicial killings.

"The Philippine Senate has a duty to promote accountability for the thousands of victims of this 'war on drugs,' rather than siding with those advocating summary killings as law enforcement," Kine said. "Opposition to an impartial investigation into these killings only intensifies the spotlight on Duterte and his administration's disregard for basic human rights protections for all Filipinos."

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Vietnam: Free Imprisoned Bloggers

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 19 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Vietnam: Free Imprisoned Bloggers, 19 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23caf4.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Vietnamese authorities should quash the politically motivated convictions of two bloggers and release them from prison, Human Rights Watch said today. On September 22, 2016, the Higher People's Court of Hanoi will hear the appeal of prominent blogger Nguyen Huu Vinh and his colleague Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy who ran a website critical of the Vietnamese government.

Police arrested Nguyen Huu Vinh, also known as Ba Sam, and Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy in May 2014 and charged them under article 258 of Vietnam's penal code for "abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interest of the state." In March 2016, the People's Court of Hanoi sentenced Nguyen Huu Vinh to five years in prison and Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy to three years. Nguyen Huu Vinh's wife, Le Thi Minh Ha, said that his family has not been allowed to see him for more than 11 months, despite multiple requests.

"Vietnamese authorities have decided it is a crime to provide independent information to the Vietnamese public," said Brad Adams, Asia director. "The appeals court now has an important opportunity to uphold the right to free speech in Vietnam."

Nguyen Huu Vinh, 60, is a former police officer and a Communist Party member from a prominent communist family. In September 2007, he founded the blog Ba Sam (Talking Nonsense). Using the motto "Pha vong no le" ("breaking the slavery ring"), the stated goal of Ba Sam was to bring news from various perspectives to its readers. Ba Sam provided links to "hot news"  sometimes accompanied by short comments from the blog's administrators  about politics, economics, culture, society, the environment, and world events from a variety of sources, including state-controlled media and individual blogs. It also published critical commentary and Vietnamese translations of overseas articles related to Vietnam's social and political situation. Over the six years it was published up until the arrests of Nguyen Huu Vinh and Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, Ba Sam had attracted several million readers in Vietnam and abroad.

During the bloggers' trial in March, police put many people under house arrest so they could not go to the court to show solidarity. Nevertheless, dozens of bloggers and rights activists managed to stage a protest calling for their release on the sidewalk across from the court. The police briefly detained several people, including prominent rights activist Nguyen Quang A.

In 2016, repression of Internet writers has accelerated. During the first nine months of the year, Vietnamese courts have convicted and sentenced to prison terms at least 18 bloggers and activists for violating a series of articles in the penal code that criminalize freedom of speech and religion.

"Vietnam has more than a thousand state newspapers, websites, and radio and television stations that provide news approved by the authorities, and yet it prosecutes the courageous bloggers and journalists unwilling to publish the official line," said Adams. "Vietnamese leaders should know that locking up these bloggers and journalists will not stop them from informing the Vietnamese people about the state of their country. International donors and trade partners should publicly press Vietnam to stop persecuting its citizens for peacefully exercising their rights."

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Egypt: Ruling Risks Eradicating Human Rights Work

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Ruling Risks Eradicating Human Rights Work, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23d1f4.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

"Egyptian authorities are single-mindedly pushing for the elimination of the country's most prominent independent human rights defenders," said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. "Egypt's international partners should not be fooled by repression cloaked in the guise of legalistic procedure."

The order targeted the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, and the Egyptian Center on the Right to Education. It also included the personal assets of their directors, and those of Gamal Eid, director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, and Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. It was not immediately clear how the ruling would affect the latter two groups.

On June 15, 2016, a judge also froze the assets of another group, al-Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies.

These orders are provisional and can become final only after a criminal trial, according to Egyptian activists. At that point, the government could take over the groups and shut them down.

The September 17 asset freeze decision is one facet of an extensive case against independent Egyptian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) known as Case 173 of 2011, which alleges that as many as 37 NGOs have illegally received foreign funding.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi should order the Justice Ministry to halt its investigation into human rights groups. The Egyptian government should abide by its March 2015 pledge at the United Nations Human Rights Council to "respect the free exercise of the associations defending human rights" and end its targeting of legitimate independent human rights work.

Under an article of the penal code amended by decree by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2014, NGO workers can receive a 25-year sentence if a judge determines that they received foreign funding for "pursuing acts harmful to national interests or destabilizing gaeneral peace or the country's independence and its unity, or committing hostile acts against Egypt or harming security and public order." It does not define such acts.

Investigative judges have banned at least 12 NGO directors, founders, and staff members from leaving Egypt, including from some of these organizations. Activists said the travel bans are probably a prelude to the filing of criminal charges against them.

The investigative judges issued their first travel ban in December 2014, against Esraa Abd al-Fattah, director of the Egyptian Democratic Academy. Nasser Amin, a member of the government-funded National Council for Human Rights, has also been banned from travel.

The investigation into the funding of local and foreign organizations began in July 2011, five months after the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak. It led to a criminal trial that concluded in 2013, when a judge handed down sentences of between one and five years to 43 employees of five foreign NGOs and ordered the organizations to close.

A new panel of three investigative judges chosen by the Cairo Court of Appeals at the request of the Justice Ministry began looking into the work and finances of independent Egyptian NGOs in 2014, when the Social Solidarity Ministry gave groups an ultimatum to register under an onerous associations law dating to Mubarak's presidency.

Authorities have also pressured human rights defenders in other ways. Since April 2015, a judge has interrogated Negad al-Borai, a human rights lawyer involved in drafting an anti-torture law, at least six times. Al-Borai is being investigated for illegal funding, establishing an unlicensed entity, and spreading false information. In February 2016, security officers and local government officials attempted to shut down the Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, stating that the center had violated the terms of its license, but providing no details.

The evidence used by the investigative judges in Case 173 appears to be based mostly on reports by the National Security Agency of the Interior Ministry. These reports claim the NGOs received funds for activities that harm national security.

On September 8, state media reported that the cabinet had approved and sent for court review a new draft law on associations that had been prepared without public discussion. Independent groups criticized the draft, saying that it would prevent human rights groups from legalizing their status and ban activists who have received prison sentences from forming their own NGOs. The law would place NGO activities and foreign funding under the supervision of a government committee that includes security agency officials and would require groups to obtain Social Solidarity Ministry approval before cooperating with foreign entities.

Egypt should withdraw the current draft law, wait for parliament to reconvene, and consider a 2013 proposal prepared under former Minister of Social Solidarity Ahmed al-Borai, which activists said was the most democratic draft yet prepared.

The UN Human Rights Council and member states should condemn the current crackdown on civil society members and demand concrete measures to improve respect for human rights, including the withdrawal of the current draft law on associations, Human Rights Watch said.

Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights obliges Egypt, as a state party, to ensure freedom of association and remove any unlawful restrictions. Human Rights Council resolution 22/6 on protecting human rights defenders calls upon states to ensure "that no law should criminalize or delegitimize activities in defense of human rights on account of the origin of funding thereto."

"Egypt's international partners and should speak up now to prevent the disappearance of independent human rights groups," Fakih said. "Members of the UN Human Rights Council should live up to their commitment to defend human rights defenders by demanding reforms from President al-Sisi and the Egyptian government."



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Thailand: Labor Activist Convicted for Reporting Abuses

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Thailand: Labor Activist Convicted for Reporting Abuses, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23d694.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

A Thai court's conviction of the British researcher Andy Hall for his work on labor abuses will have a serious chilling effect on workers' rights monitoring in Thailand, Human Rights Watch said today. On September 20, 2016, the Bangkok South Criminal Court found Hall guilty of criminal defamation and violating the Computer Crime Act and sentenced him to four years in prison, which the judge suspended because Hall's work was beneficial to Thai society. Hall was also ordered to pay a 150,000 baht (US$4,300) fine and to publish the verdict in print and online media.

The prosecution of Hall, whose work focused on the mistreatment of migrant workers, demonstrates the hollowness of Prime Minister Gen. Prayut Chan-ocha's support for the United Nations General Assembly's New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants.

"Andy Hall's conviction and sentence is a major blow to desperately needed research and reporting on labor rights violations in Thailand," said Brad Adams, Asia director. "Instead of punishing the messenger, the government should fully investigate abuses against migrant workers and press companies to respect labor rights."

Hall researched alleged serious labor rights abuses, including poor working conditions, low wages, and child labor at the Natural Fruit Company, Ltd.'s factory in Prachuap Khiri Khan province. In February 2013, the company sued Hall in response to an investigative report by the nongovernmental organization Finnwatch, which Hall had co-authored. The report, "Cheap has a high price: Responsibility problems relating to international private label products and food production in Thailand," investigates the production practices of private label juices and fruit sold in Finland  including by the Natural Fruit Company.

In recent years, Thai government officials and companies have frequently retaliated against individuals who report allegations of human rights violations. Common tactics include filing criminal defamation charges and seeking prosecution for computer crimes.

Human Rights Watch, along with an increasing number of governments and international bodies, believes that criminal defamation laws should be abolished because criminal penalties are always disproportionate punishments for reputational harm, and infringe on the right to free expression. Criminal defamation laws are easily abused, resulting in very harsh consequences for the accused, including imprisonment. An increasing number of countries have repealed criminal defamation laws, showing that such laws are not necessary to protect reputations.

Human Rights Watch's own research has found the human rights and labor rights of migrant workers in Thailand from Burma, Cambodia, and Laos have been regularly violated with impunity over the years. Migrant workers frequently receive little or no protection from Thai labor laws despite government assertions that all legally registered migrant workers will be protected under those laws. Migrant workers who raise complaints against Thai employers commonly face retaliation.

"The Thai government should recognize that freedom to investigate corporate abuses is critical for ensuring compliance and accountability under Thai laws and international human rights standards," Adams said. "At the same time, international companies sourcing from Thailand should press Thai authorities and exporters to stop using criminal charges to silence critics and obstruct investigation of human rights violations."

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Tajikistan: Video Spotlights Crackdown

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 21 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Tajikistan: Video Spotlights Crackdown, 21 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23e104.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Governments and intergovernmental organizations should denounce the worsening human rights crisis in Tajikistan, Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee said in a video released today during the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The United States and the European Union and its member countries, as well as the United Nations and the OSCE, should press for targeted sanctions absent immediate reform.

Tajikistan is in the midst of its most dire human rights crisis in 20 years, the organizations said. Over the past two years, authorities have arrested, imprisoned, and tortured opposition party members and banned as terrorist the country's leading opposition party. The authorities have also arrested scores of lawyers, journalists, and anyone posting statements critical of the government on social media. While hundreds of activists have fled the country, the government has targeted perceived critics abroad, seeking their arrest and extradition to Tajikistan. Some critics abducted abroad have reappeared in Tajik custody.

"Tajikistan is in the midst of its worst crackdown since the country's civil war two decades ago, with the authorities jailing hundreds of people for their peaceful political work," said Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Tajikistan's human rights crisis is expanding by the day, but the response from Washington, Brussels, and other international partners has fallen seriously short."

In the video, four victims of the crackdown describe how Tajik authorities have persecuted them for their peaceful exercise of freedom of expression.

Shabnam Khudoydodova, a political activist from Tajikistan living in Russia, criticized the authoritarian rule of President Emomali Rahmon. Tajik authorities accused her of "extremism." They listed an international warrant for her arrest on the Interpol database  an abuse of the international police organization that the government has repeated for several other activists. In June 2015, fearing arrest, she fled Russia for Poland.

"When I arrived in the Republic of Poland, Poland did not accept me," Khudoydodova said. "They wanted to extradite me [to Tajikistan]. In order to stop the extradition process, I requested political asylum in Belarus. When they sent me to the temporary holding facility, Tajik law enforcement representatives came in. They interrogated me, asked me what I wanted. They asked why I was involved in politics. They called me a terrorist, an extremist." Khudoydodova was detained for nearly nine months in Belarus on an extradition request on trumped-up charges before her release.

Vaisiddin Odinaev tells the story of his brother, Ehson Odinaev, 25, an opposition blogger active with the peaceful opposition movement "Group 24," who disappeared in St. Petersburg in May 2015. Ehson Odinaev's disappearance came less than two months after Umarali Kuvvatov, Group 24's leader, was shot and killed in Istanbul in circumstances that pointed to the involvement of the Tajik security services.

"A week before he disappeared he sent me a screen shot showing that he was on the Interpol list," said Vaisiddin Odinaev. "After that on May 19, at 6:53 p.m., he left his building, went onto Kurskaya Street and disappeared without a trace. And nobody could tell us anything."

The family's attempts to raise his case with Russian and Tajik law enforcement have been met with inaction. During one meeting in Moscow with Russian and Tajik authorities, "they hinted that there's a separate group, a special group that's not the GKNB [intelligence services], not the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It's a kind of special group that was formednot to liquidate exactly, but to solve the problem of the opposition." Odinaev and his mother suspect the involvement of the Tajik security services and appeal in the video to anyone who can provide them with information about Ehson Odinaev's whereabouts and well-being.

Sobir Valiev, also a Group 24 member, fled Turkey following Kuvvatov's killing, fearing arrest or worse. Tajik authorities tracked him down in Moldova, forwarding a request for his detention and extradition on false charges of extremism. "I decided to fly to Moldova," Valiev said. "When the term of my stay in Moldova was expiring, I wanted to leaveand was arrested in the airport on August 11, 2015. After that I learned that Tajik authorities were accusing me under article 307, sections 1 and 2  they were accusing me of extremism." Valiev was released and his extradition prevented only after human rights organizations intervened.

Inside Tajikistan, the government stepped up a long-running campaign to dismantle the country's most important opposition party, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan. Beginning in June 2015, Tajik security services pressured the party's representatives in various regions of the country to record videos denouncing the party and announcing they were leaving it. Among those Tajik security services detained was Ilhomjon Yakubov, the party's representative from the northern Sughd region.

"Under threats and torture, they [the security forces] wanted me to resign from the party and for me to condemn our party in front of their cameras, condemn the party leader and they wanted me to say all of this in front of a television camera," Yakubov said. "The Committee for National Security Staff from our Sughd region forced me to literally eat all of the material I published. For more than six hours, they tried to force me to swallow all that paper."

Yakubov was able to flee Tajikistan, but hundreds of other party members were detained beginning in September 2015, when authorities accused party leaders of organizing a failed coup and declared the group a terrorist organization.

The US and EU should set a timeline for the Tajik government to undertake concrete human rights improvements, and make clear the specific policy consequences that will follow if it does not, Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee said. These should include targeted, restrictive measures such as visa bans and asset freezes against government officials and entities responsible for grave human rights violations, including torture, and arbitrary arrests.

The OSCE and UN Human Rights Council members should also show their concern about Tajikistan's human rights crisis.

"Tajikistan's international partners should publicly and unanimously condemn Tajikistan's ongoing human rights crackdown," said Marius Fossum, Central Asia representative of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. "As Tajikistan's human rights situation spirals out of control, the time has come for Washington, Brussels, and other OSCE members to examine the possibility of enacting targeted sanctions unless immediate human rights improvements are made."

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Syria: Investigate Attack on UN Aid Convoy

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Syria: Investigate Attack on UN Aid Convoy, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e23e8a4.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

An attack on a United Nations aid convoy and on a Red Crescent warehouse in Aleppo should be investigated as possible war crimes. The apparent airstrikes on September 19, 2016, hit the convoy and building for over three hours with no military targets in the vicinity. The attacks violate the laws of armed conflict and would constitute war crimes if they intentionally targeted personnel, vehicles, or installations involved in providing humanitarian assistance. Only Syrian and Russian air forces are known to be active in this part of Syria.

In a statement on September 19, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that the UN-Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy was hit in Urum al-Kubra, northwest of the city of Aleppo. A Red Crescent warehouse was also hit and a health clinic operated by the Red Crescent was damaged, the organization said. It said that 20 civilians and one staff member were killed as they unloaded trucks, and that most of the aid, including food and medical supplies that was meant to help at least 78,000 people, was destroyed. The UN said that the convoy had received proper permits from the Syrian government in advance to cross from government-controlled Aleppo to parts of opposition-held western Aleppo to deliver the aid.

"The apparent targeting of a humanitarian convoy that had been cleared to operate and a known aid warehouse raises serious questions about whether the strikes were intentional," said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director. "An independent UN-led investigation is needed to determine if this was a deliberate attack on civilians."

Human Rights Watch called on the UN secretary-general to announce at a high level session of the Security Council set to meet on September 21, that he will promptly seek to identify the parties responsible for the attack and report back to the Council.

In a statement released on September 20, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent announced that the head of the Urum al-Kubra branch, Omar Barakat, was killed in the attack and that the organization would suspend its activities in Aleppo for three days.

The Russian government denied its or the Syrian government's involvement in the attack in a statement released on September 20, even though witnesses told Human Rights Watch the attack was by air, and they are the only parties to the conflict known to carry out aerial attacks in those areas. Ahmad al-Ahmad, a local journalist, was in the area the night of the attack and told Human Rights Watch that the warehouse was known to be a Red Crescent building:

The warehouse was far away from any front line or military headquarters. The attack lasted until 10:30 p.m. The Urum-Aleppo-Kafarnaha road was under heavy fire with missiles. Rescue workers couldn't get in to rescue people. One said to me late at night, "Ahmad, we're under fire, we can't go in, we can't rescue anyone." We arrived the next morning and they began to pull people out. It was unimaginable. Remains were scattered everywhere. Buildings, vehicles, everything was charred. People, however, saw many surveillance planes in the sky that evening.

Ammar al-Salmo, a member of the volunteer search-and-rescue crew known as the Syrian Civil Defense, was also in the vicinity of the attack and told Human Rights Watch that the attack started at 7:10 p.m.:

We heard helicopters in the air just before the attack. There were 31 aid trucks that were unloading aid at the time. The fires and strikes were so bad that we weren't able to even start a response to save people until 3 in the morning. That's when we started to pull out the deceased from under the rubble. The warehouse is on a highway and it is known to everyone in Urum al-Kubra and the area that this is a Red Crescent warehouse and there are no military bases around it.

Human Rights Watch reviewed more than 10 photos of the aftermath of the attack that showed injured and dead civilians, huge fires engulfing buildings, damaged trucks filled with what seemed to be food and other supplies, and people showing logos of the Red Crescent and UN agencies on damaged supplies.

Security Council Resolution 2254, adopted on December 18, 2015, called on all parties to the conflict in Syria to "immediately cease any attacks against civilians and civilian objects as such, including attacks against medical facilities and personnel, and any indiscriminate use of weapons, including through shelling and aerial bombardment."

On September 10, the United States and Russia brokered a seven-day cease-fire, which largely held and resulted in a decrease in civilian casualties. But the parties were not able to take advantage of the calm to deliver aid into besieged areas like eastern Aleppo. The Syrian government called off the cease-fire earlier on September 19, even though the US and Russian governments did not announce an end to the cease-fire.

Human Rights Watch has documented previous possible unlawful US airstrikes in Syria in 2014, when US missile strikes on Idlib killed at least seven civilians.

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, "intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance  mission" is a war crime, as is intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.

"Whether the cease-fire collapses or is revived, key backers of the negotiations should ensure that protecting civilians remains a priority," Fakih said.



Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Southern Thailand's Peace Dialogue: No Traction

Publisher International Crisis Group (ICG) Publication Date 21 September 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Breifing N148 Cite as International Crisis Group (ICG), Southern Thailand's Peace Dialogue: No Traction, 21 September 2016, Breifing N148, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e27ce94.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

I. Overview

The peace dialogue between Thailand's military government and some Malay-Muslim separatist leaders in exile has foundered. Coordinated bombings in August on tourist areas outside the customary conflict zone in the deep south bear the hallmarks of the separatists and indicate that the government's approach of containing the insurgency is not working. The National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which seized power in the 2014 coup, professes to support dialogue to end the insurgency but avoids commitment, and the prime minister has questioned the talks. The main insurgent group has rejected the process, and the number of fighters the umbrella entity set up to negotiate in 2015 controls is unknown. A decentralised political system could help resolve the conflict by giving respect to Malay-Muslim identity and aspirations while preserving the unitary state, but a pernicious stalemate prevails, with both state and militants preferring hostilities to compromise. The August bombings in the upper south should encourage the government to seek talks for a comprehensive settlement.

Since seizing power, the NCPO has been preoccupied with running a politically divided country slipping toward the uncertainties of the approaching end of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's seven-decade reign. Though the army opposed the dialogue process when it began under Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's government in 2013, the NCPO pledged to restart talks and invited Malaysia to resume facilitation. However, the NCPO appears caught between the imperative of talking to show locals and the international community that it does the right thing and an abiding fear that dialogue will legitimise the separatists and pave the way for international intervention and eventual partition.

In March 2016, after two plenaries and three rounds of technical talks, the NCPO's dialogue team and the MARA Patani  the Majlis Syura Patani (Patani Consultative Council) umbrella body established in 2015 to negotiate with Bangkok  reached preliminary agreement on an eight-point Terms of Reference (ToR) that would open the way for official talks. But the next month, the army abruptly transferred the secretary for the Thai dialogue team, who had led efforts on the ToR. At a 27 April meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the Thai team declined to sign, saying it needed to review the document, and questioned MARA Patani's standing to engage in official talks. Despite a further meeting on 2 September, dialogue remains at a preliminary, unofficial stage.

The NCPO's preferred approach has more to do with convincing militants to surrender than achieving a settlement with leaders in exile. It has suppressed political engagement countrywide, suspending elections and curtailing civil liberties, while seeking to establish a foundation for long-term control after the general election promised for late 2017. Its argument that rebels should give up violence and work for peaceful change rings hollow, since it allows no political activity. With local civil society increasingly stifled, prospects for bringing popular pressure to bear for genuine dialogue are slim.

Serious talks are also hindered by the militants' disunity and parochialism. While proponents of the dialogue argue that other factions will join once the process gains momentum, many observers doubt MARA Patani currently can speak for a critical mass of fighters. Professed members of the main insurgent group, the Barisan Revolusi Nasional Melayu Patani (Patani-Malay National Revolutionary Front, BRN), hold leading positions in MARA Patani, but do not have the sanction of the group's leadership. BRN has questioned NCPO sincerity and emphatically rejected talks without foreign observers, a stipulation that stokes the regime's fears of internationalisation. There are no indications that Islamic State (IS) or proponents of its global jihadist ideology have made inroads with Thailand's ethno-nationalist Malay militants.

Divisions and capacity constraints pose major challenges but are a less immediate obstacle than lack of determination to negotiate a settlement. The NCPO appears interested primarily in mere semblance of dialogue and opposed to any solution involving devolution of political power. BRN has not advanced a political platform that could serve as a basis for talks. MARA Patani has yet to demonstrate an ability to influence events on the ground. The stalemate is insufficiently painful to induce the parties to seek a negotiated end to the conflict with a sense of urgency. The 11-12 August bombings indicate the militants' capacity to inflict greater damage on lives, property and the economy, however. The government should recognise this threat and reconsider its approach to dialogue. The militants should recognise that a wider conflict and continued targeting of tourist areas is likely to bring an uncompromising military response from Bangkok and international opprobrium.

II. The Second Dialogue Process

The ethno-nationalist insurgency stems from the region's 1902 incorporation into Siam. For earlier Crisis Group work, see Asia Reports Ns 270, Southern Thailand: Dialogue in Doubt, 8 July 2015; 241, Thailand: The Evolving Conflict in the South, 11 December 2012; 181, Southern Thailand: Moving Towards Political Solutions?, 8 December 2009; 170, Recruiting Militants in Southern Thailand, 22 June 2009; 140, Southern Thailand: The Problem with Paramilitaries, 23 October 2007; 129, Southern Thailand: The Impact of the Coup, 15 March 2007; 105, Thailand's Emergency Decree: No Solution, 18 November 2005; 98, Southern Thailand: Insurgency, Not Jihad, 18 May 2005; and Briefings Ns 113, Stalemate in Southern Thailand, 3 November 2010; 80, Thailand: Political Turmoil and the Southern Insurgency, 28 August 2008. Beginning in the 1960s, but dormant for most of the 1990s, when BRN, the major militant group, was building a clandestine network in the southernmost provinces, it re-emerged with new vigour in 2004. Since then, more than 6,670 have been killed and 12,231 wounded; some 6,000 children have lost a parent and 3,000 women been widowed. Casualty figures are for January 2004-June 2016 and from Deep South Watch's Incident Database. Some violence is from common criminality, not insurgency, but determination is often hard. "Children, women, bear toll of violence in Thailand's Deep South", Benar News, 4 January 2016. The provinces involved are Narathiwat, Pattani, Songkhla and Yala, which are referred to in this briefing alternatively as the "southernmost provinces" or the "deep south". The conflict zone includes four south-eastern districts of Songkhla  Chana, Na Thawi, Saba Yoi and Thepa  and the three other provinces. The conflict zone's population is roughly 1.8 million, about 80 per cent Malay Muslim, the remainder mostly Thai or Sino-Thai Buddhists. "Pattani" with two "t's" is a transliteration of the province name. "Patani" refers to the pre-annexation sultanate, corresponding roughly to the conflict zone.

BRN and other Malay nationalist movements cast their struggle as one of self-determination and liberation from Thai rule. BRN recruitment appeals emphasise the discrepancy between an idealised, prosperous and pious past with what they portray as present degradation and injustice resulting from Thai subjugation.  , ": " [Arthit Teansiri, "Political Indoctrination of Delinquents in the Three Southern Border Provinces: A Case Study of Narathiwat Province"], MA thesis, Sukhothaithammatirat University (2008); Sascha Helbardt, Deciphering Southern Thailand's Violence (Singapore, 2015), pp. 115-118. Support is hard to measure, but the insurgents' ability to sustain operations over twelve years in the face of determined countermeasures is telling. While Bangkok has eschewed overtly assimilationist policies since the 1980s, BRN continues to harness disaffection arising from the rigid emphasis on Thai identity at the expense of Malay identity. Its aims are above all local and nationalist. It has spurned foreign jihadist efforts to establish links, and there is no evidence of such presence in the deep south. Crisis Group interviews, MARA Patani member Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, Kota Bharu (Malaysia), senior army officer, March 2016; intelligence officer, April 2016; PULO member, BRN member, June 2016. Crisis Group Report, Insurgency, op. cit., pp. 1, 32, 37-38.

A. Legacy of the Kuala Lumpur Process

The dialogue process the NCPO military government initiated is a legacy of the Yingluck Shinawatra government (2011-2104). On 28 February 2013, in Kuala Lumpur, its representatives, identified as Party A, and BRN, then recognised as Party B, signed a "General Consensus on Peace Dialogue Process", inaugurating the first official talks between Bangkok and Malay-Muslim separatists. Malaysia facilitated via Datuk Seri Ahmad Zamzamin Hashim, ex-director general of the prime minister's department. Crisis Group Report, Dialogue in Doubt, op. cit., p. 8. This dialogue collapsed after three plenaries amid disarray on both sides and political turmoil in Bangkok that preceded the May 2014 coup. But it was also a breakthrough: Bangkok's first public acknowledgement of the need to negotiate an end to the conflict with "those with different views and ideologies from the state who use violence". "National Security Policy for Development and Administration of the Southern Border Provinces, 2012-2014", Office of the National Security Council. This policy remains in effect pending National Legislative Assembly approval of a new one. The army has held secret, unofficial talks with separatist groups since the 1970s, usually as intelligence exercises or to induce surrenders. In 2006, an international NGO received approval to facilitate dialogue with militants, but the process was undermined by disunity on both sides.

Another outcome of this process was that BRN issued five conditions for continuing talks: Malaysia must mediate, not just facilitate; the Thai state must recognise the talks as between it and Patani Malays, represented solely by BRN; the Association of South East Asian Nations, the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) must observe; the state must release all insurgent suspects and revoke all arrest warrants; and it must recognise BRN as an independence, rather than separatist movement. Crisis Group Report, Dialogue in Doubt, op. cit., pp. 6-7. After the Yingluck government determined in October 2013 that the conditions did not conflict with the constitution and could be discussed with the BRN, it faced seven months of anti-government protests in Bangkok. See also Duncan McCargo, "Southern Thailand: From Conflict to Negotiations?", The Lowy Institute, April 2014.

In spite of the army's well-advertised opposition to the Kuala Lumpur process, the NCPO, headed by General and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, publicly committed to a second dialogue process. The NCPO reportedly recognised that locals supported peace dialogue, so retained it as policy to bolster its popularity. Crisis Group interview, senior police officer, Bangkok, April 2016. On 26 November 2014, Prayuth issued Prime Minister's Order 230/2557 establishing a three-level dialogue mechanism: at the policy level, the Steering Committee for Peace Dialogue, chaired by him; a peace dialogue delegation, headed by General Aksara Kerdpol; and at the local level, an interagency coordination working group, headed by the commander of the 4th Army Region, Ltieutenant General Wiwat Pathompak. The Steering Committee also includes the army chief, justice ministry permanent secretary, and directors of the National Intelligence Agency, National Security Council and Southern Border Provinces Administration Centre (SBPAC). The 4th Army Region, headquartered in Nakorn Sri Thammarat, is responsible for the fourteen southern provinces of peninsular Thailand. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Army Regions cover the centre, north east and north. The order authorises the dialogue panel to hold official talks with "those who think differently". " 230/2557     " [Prime Minister's Office Order 230/2014, "Establishment of a Mechanism for Peace Dialogue for the Southern Border Provinces"]. The NCPO set out three phases of dialogue: confidence building, an agreement, and a roadmap for its implementation.

B. Re-starting Preliminary Talks

The second dialogue process started in Prayuth's 1 December 2014 meeting with Prime Minister Najib Razak, when he asked that Malaysia again facilitate. In March 2015, militant-group representatives established the MARA Patani for united participation in talks with Bangkok. It nominally brings together five groups: BRN, Barisan Islam Pembebesan Patani (Islamic Liberation Front of Patani, BIPP), two factions of the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), and Gerakan Mujahidin Islam Patani (Patani Islamic Mujahidin Movement, GMIP). The PULO factions in MARA Patani are PULO-MKP (Majlis Kepimpinan Pertubuhan, Party Leadership Council) headed by Kasturi Makhota, and PULO-DSPP (Dewan Syura Pimpinan Pertubuhan, Consultative Council Leadership Party) headed by Noor Abdurahman. A third, PULO-4P (Pertubuhan Persatuan Pembebesan Patani, Patani United Liberation Organisation) headed by Samsudin Khan, did not sign the founding agreement and withdrew in June 2015. Little is known about GMIP, which appears not to have conducted operations since the early 2000s. A recent survey of 1,559 people in the region found that 55.1 per cent of respondents had heard of PULO and 48 per cent of BRN, but only 6.5 per cent of BIPP. "   1" ["Peace Survey, Results 1st Survey on Opinions of the People on the Peace Dialogue Process in the Southern Border Provinces"], press release, Centre for Study of Conflict and Cultural Diversity, May 2016, p. 7. A consortium of fifteen Thai research organisations did the survey. MARA's leaders are senior figures with long ties to the separatist movement who have been in exile, often for decades and mostly in Malaysia.

The top positions are held by professed BRN members  Awang Jabat is chairman, Shukri Hari delegation chief and Ahmad Chuwo a steering committee member. However, that group's senior leaders have not endorsed their participation. Movement sources say these MARA delegates were senior BRN figures but were suspended after violating its code of secrecy to participate in the dialogue. They may keep unofficial links to BRN and followers in the region, but their participation in MARA is freelance. Awang Jabat was present at the signing of the General Consensus in February 2013 but was then dropped from the BRN delegation. Shukri Hari and Ahmad Chuwo taught at the Thammawitaya Mulinithi School in Yala. Shukri fled Thailand in 2007 after being indicted for a security offence and receiving bail. Secrecy is a defining BRN characteristic: experience persuaded its leaders that public exposure and security are incompatible. Crisis Group interviews (all 2016), BRN member, PULO member, June; MARA Patani member, Kota Bharu, March; intelligence officer, Bangkok, April; BRN sympathiser, May. See also Crisis Group Report, Dialogue in Doubt, op. cit., p. 21. The other MARA groups are not known to command significant numbers of fighters. Supporters have played this down, arguing that as the process shows progress, BRN will eventually join. A Thai military source estimated that BRN controls more than 90 per cent of fighters. Don Pathan, "Decades-long identity crisis fuels insurgency in Thailand", Thailand News Today (online), 9 July 2016. Crisis Group interviews, PULO member, BRN member, June 2016; BIPP and MARA Patani member Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, Kota Bharu, March 2016. Major General Nakrob Bunbuathong, deputy commander, 5th Operations Co-Ordination Centre, Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) and secretary, Thai peace dialogue delegation, comments at Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand (FCCT), 2016; Dato' Sri Ahmad Zamzamin Hashim, facilitator, Joint Working Group (JWG)-Peace Dialogue Process on Southern Thailand, "Facilitating the Peace Dialogue: Challenges and Next Steps", unpublished remarks delivered at third Pa(t)tani Peace Media Day, Pattani, 28 February 2016.

The sides convened for a low-key introduction on 8 April 2015 in Kuala Lumpur. At the first "unofficial meeting" of the Joint Working Group (JWG)-Peace Dialogue Process on 8 June, Aksara, the Thai delegation head, proposed creating safety zones in which the militants would cease attacks. MARA said these could only be discussed after an agreement to begin official talks.

At the second JWG meeting, 25 August, each side tabled three proposals. MARA Patani demanded, as preconditions for an official process, that the government acknowledge it as Party B, rather than merely "those who have different views from the state"; the legislature endorse the process, thus making it part of the "national agenda", to ensure continuity; and MARA members receive immunity from prosecution to facilitate visits to Thailand. Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, "Voice outside the fence: 1 year of peace dialogue  where are we?", Prachatai, 1 December 2015. The Thai delegation proposed to identify priority areas for development to improve life quality; mutually determine safety zones; and ensure equal access to the judicial process. These are standard formulations of NCPO policy for resolving the region's problems, but, a Malay-Muslim noted, development, security and justice are existing governmental responsibilities, so not appropriate peace dialogue topics. See ,    .. 2559 [Office of the National Security Council, "Implementation Plan for Resolving Problems of the Southern Border Provinces", Fiscal Year 2016, January 2016], p. 2. Crisis Group interview, Muslim religious leader, Pattani, April 2016. The facilitator circulated a draft ToR, intended to set guidelines for official talks.

On 27 August, MARA Patani met the press in Kuala Lumpur. Abu Hafez Al-Hakim of BIPP said sovereignty remained the ultimate goal, but MARA was "considering other options", and the independence issue would be determined by negotiations. He conveyed MARA's intention to be a platform for all Patani liberation movements and civil society organisations, including Buddhist and women's groups. Thaweeporn Kunmetha, "Thailand's Deep South insurgents officially meets media first time", Prachatai, 27 August 2015. MARA, as well as non-MARA BRN representatives, have said that Patani independence would benefit all those native to the region, including Chinese and Thais, and that an independent Patani would protect freedom of religion. Crisis Group interview, BRN member, June 2015. Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, comments quoted in Thaweeporn Kunmetha, "Pattani with two t's or one? The politics of naming", Prachatai, 20 September 2015.

C. BRN Opts Out

With MARA's unprecedented press conference and the exchange of proposals, the dialogue appeared at last to be making modest progress, but insurgent unity did not last. BRN broke its silence with a 7 September 2015 video declaring its intention to continue fighting for Patani independence. Its message was unequivocal rejection of the process, but not of dialogue in principle. Abdul Karim Khalib, speaking as a representative of its information department, noted the suspension of political rights under the military government and asserted that "establishment of a democratic government that respects the will of the people is the way out of the conflict" in the deep south. Abdul Karim Khalib, a BRN youth wing leader, is considered a hardliner. He joined BRN's delegation in talks with Yingluck's government in 2013 after signing of the General Consensus. He also accused the "Siamese colonisers" of lacking sincerity and mentioned the challenge posed to Thailand by imminent royal succession. Crisis Group email correspondence, Pattani-based analyst, 9 June 2016. A Thai translation of the Abdul Karim Khalib video omitted reference to succession and softened the original Malay language's tone. " BRN " ["Full translation of BRN clip with viewpoint of the state"], Isara News, 8 September 2015.

In a rare interview on 11 October 2015, another information department representative criticised discontinuity with the 2013 dialogue process and declared "BRN is categorically not involved", and "the way in which this process has been set up is flatly rejected". Anthony Davis, "Southern Thai insurgents stake out peace terms", Nikkei Asian Review, 11 October 2015. Its statement the next day referred to the five conditions submitted under the previous dialogue and reaffirmed willingness to participate in peace talks if there was "engagement of a mediator and observers from other states". Echoing Abdul Karim, it cited UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960) on decolonisation as a basis for Patani self-determination and rejected "a peace process used as a form of political subterfuge in order to deceive and undermine the strategy of the Patani-Malay people's advancement". Statement, BRN Information Department, 12 October 2015. "Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples", UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960). "[F]rom a legal perspective, a 'people' [in Resolution 1514] is generally understood as the collective inhabitants of a colonial territorial unit; minority groups are not intrinsically covered by it". Jay Lamey, "Peace in Patani? The Prospect of a Settlement in Southern Thailand", in Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, vol. 2, (2013), p. 5.

A few days after the video, Prayuth said he had not accepted MARA's conditions, would not be pressured, and dialogue was already a national priority, codified in national security strategies for resolving the conflict. Recognising MARA as Party B, he added, was not needed; trust had to be built first. "''3'" ["'Big Tu' [Prayuth] doesn't accept MARA's 3 conditions", Matichon, 11 September 2015]. "''", ["PM rejects MARA Patani's demands"], Krungthep Thurakit, 11 September 2015.

D. Technical Team Meetings

In October 2015, MARA received a more detailed response to its proposals that reportedly linked its three conditions to each of Thailand's proposals in a manner that a member called "vague and not up to our expectation". In the Thai proposal, acknowledgment of MARA Patani is tied to reduced violence, the national agenda issue to development, and immunity for members of the Party B panel to access to alternative judicial procedures. Al-Hakim, "Voice", op. cit., Prachatai, 1 December 2015. MARA did not respond, preferring to wait for the next JWG meeting. In view of substantive disagreements, the sides decided to hold separate technical talks on the sticking points of the draft ToR. Major General Nakrob Bunbuathong, comments at FCCT, op. cit. Unsourced Thai-language media later reported that the meetings produced agreement on safety zones in Narathiwat's Bacho and Cho Airong districts. From the Thai perspective, this would help establish which groups were able to control fighters. " '-'  2 " ["State-MARA technical teams decide on ceasefire villages in 2 Nara districts"], Isra News Service, 19 November 2015; "2 ' '?" ["Does a ceasefire in 2 Nara districts prove MARA Patani is for real?"], Khom Chad Leuk, 20 November 2015. However, on 22 November, MARA Patani's Shukri Hari described reports that the meeting addressed safety zones as "untrue and baseless", and a deliberate effort to undermine the dialogue. MARA, he said, would not discuss safety zones until the dialogue was official."Patani Consultative Council (MARA Patani) Disclaimer", Deep South Watch (online), 22 November 2015.

On 10 January 2016, MARA Patani met in Kuala Lumpur with the OIC secretary general, Iyad Ameen Madani, at, according to Abu Hafez, the OIC's initiative. Crisis Group interview, Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, Kota Bharu, 25 March 2016. Several civil society representatives from the deep south also attended. Crisis Group interviews, ibid; imam, Pattani, March 2016. "Interview: What is being discussed by OIC, Patani independence group in KL?", Prachatai, 13 January 2016. Madani went on to Bangkok, meeting on 12 January with Prayuth, who said Madani praised Thai efforts and sincerity in solving the problems of the southernmost provinces; however, the OIC meeting rankled Thai officials. A retired army officer speculated that Malaysia organised it to help MARA gain OIC observer status as part of a strategy to achieve "special administration", or autonomy, like Mindanao's Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines, an OIC observer since 1977. " ''  '' ",  ["OIC visits, speaks about IS"], Thai Post, 15 January 2016. Thailand is one of five OIC observers since 1998. "-''''" ["South situation: MARA Patani's advance will have negative impact on 'peace dialogue'"], Naew Na, 26 January 2016. "-" ["Peace-reconciliation with proposals to end southern conflict"], Thai Post, 17 January 2016.

The technical teams met again on 25-27 January to address the conflict parties' names; geographical scope of the conflict area; promotion of justice; and facilitation and logistics. "" ["Head of South peace dialogue panel says talks proceeding well"], Benar News, 2 February 2016. In February, Major General Nakrob Bunbuathong, the Thai delegation secretary, said a ToR document was 95 per cent set. Recognition of MARA Patani was resolved by a footnote that Thailand would refer to Party B, though Party B refers to itself as "MARA Patani". "We could not accept the name because although BRN is in the room [with MARA], there's that video saying BRN disagrees. And there's still violence. It shows they don't control all their people". Major General Nakrob Bunbuathong, comments at FCCT, op. cit. Immunity for MARA members and arrangements for travel to Thailand remained open, but Nakrob said he expected ToR agreement in June. MARA was similarly optimistic. Crisis Group interviews, MARA Patani members, Kota Bharu, March 2016.

On 28 February, a Pattani university hosted a Peace Media Day to mark the third anniversary of the General Consensus on Peace Dialogue at which Nakrob spoke for the Thai delegation and Malaysian facilitator Zamzamin Hashim and MARA Patani's Awang Jabat sent video statements. Zamzamin acknowledged the high mutual mistrust: MARA, he said, had concerns about NCPO sincerity and its interim government status; Thais had misgivings about whether Awang Jabat had a mandate from BRN's leadership, though he is "the best available BRN leader that had agreed to come out in public to initiate the process". Awang Jabat said, "MARA Patani is not confident of the Thai government's commitment to seek fair, holistic and sustainable solution to the conflict". After three rounds of technical meetings over five months, the sides agreed to an eight-section ToR on 23 March, covering guidelines for talks, including identification of dialogue parties, formation of a Technical Working Group and security for Party B. Dato' Sri Ahmad Zamzamin Hashim, "Facilitating the Peace Dialogue", op. cit. Awang Jabat, "The Patani Peace Process 3rd Anniversary Speech", 28 February 2016. Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, "Dissecting the T-O-R", Prachatai, 19 May 2016.

III. BRN Weighs In

A. Spike in Violence

In February, after several years of declining violence, militants stepped up operations. Over the course of the insurgency, violence has regularly risen and fallen, conditioned by insurgent strategy and resources and state countermeasures. Improvised explosive device (IED) and shooting attacks left 44 dead between 10 February and 1 June. On 27 February, a 100kg bomb exploded in a stolen car in front of a roadside restaurant next to a police post in Pattani's Muang district, injuring seven police officers and five civilians. The site was just metres from a main security checkpoint leading into Pattani town, near to the university where the Peace Media Day was to be held the next day and the hotel where many participants were staying. This suggested the bomb was a BRN statement of opposition to the dialogue process."Thai deep south: 7 killed in 2 days of violence", Benar News, 1 June 2016. Crisis Group email correspondence, analyst close to BRN's political wing, 28 February 2016; interview, diplomat, Bangkok, March 2016.

In a bold 13 March raid in Cho Airong district, Narathiwat, some 50 militants seized a hospital for more than an hour, detained staff and fired almost 2,000 rounds at a ranger base. Seven rangers and one militant were wounded; rangers did not return fire on the hospital. Diversionary attacks took place in the district the same day. It was the largest militant operation since February 2013, when sixteen militants were killed attacking a marine base in Bacho district. A military officer said a "hard-core" BRN faction sought to commemorate the BRN's 56th anniversary and signal opposition to the dialogue process. Several sources said the intent was to embarrass the security forces, if not entice them to fire on the hospital. It was also widely viewed as a repudiation of the military's unilateral designation of Cho Airong as one of two prospective safety zones."BRN linked to attacks in Cho Airong"; "Latest attacks show BRN's new strategy", both Bangkok Post, 15, 29 March 2016. "The only dignity [the rangers] salvaged was not firing on the hospital". Crisis Group interview, Kasturi Makhota, president, PULO, Kota Bharu, 26 March 2016. "They wanted us to fire on the hospital, to create another incident like Tak Bai or Kreu Se". Crisis Group interview, senior army officer, Hat Yai, 29 March 2016. "The safety zone  was a unilateral proposal . Considering the area is the [militants'] stronghold, the retaliation is understandable". Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, quoted in "MARA Patani says peace dialogue not affected by Sunday attacks, willing to adopt laws of war", Prachatai, 16 March 2013.

Thai authorities, local human rights and international organisations and MARA Patani all condemned the raid. Crisis Group interviews, MARA Patani members, Kota Bharu, March 2016. "UN condemns Thai insurgents for seizing hospital during attack", The Nation, 16 March 2016. "Thailand: Insurgents Seize Hospital in South", Human Rights Watch, 13 March 2016. The attack on a health facility highlighted belligerent obligations under International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which applies to non-state as well as state armed groups. Reproof fell on militants, but attention was also drawn to the military's practice of stationing forces in or near public buildings, including schools and health facilities. Crisis Group interview, BRN member, June 2016. Don Pathan, "Outrage over hospital raid reveals military hypocrisy", The Nation, editorial, 18 March 2016; also, Benjamin Zawacki, "Politically Inconvenient, Legally Correct: A Non-international Armed Conflict in Southern Thailand", Journal of Conflict & Security Law (2012), pp. 1-29.

B. Pondok Jihad

A decision to seize the land of a small pondok (traditional Islamic boarding school) in Yaring, Pattani, gave militants a cause and helped drive another wedge between the state and ordinary Malay Muslims. Authorities closed Pondok Jihad, the Jihad Witaya school, in 2005 on suspicion its grounds were used to train militant fighters. The Anti-Money Laundering Office filed a case against the school in 2013. On 14 December 2015, the court ordered confiscation of its 14 rai (2.24 hectares). Don Pathan, "Southern insurgency: Islamic schools next in firing line?", The Nation, 29 December 2015. Hara Shintaro, "An extraordinary event of ordinary people: The story of the fund raising event for Pondok Jihad", Prachatai, 19 April 2016. Villagers donated the land, which was not common property (wakaf), but owned by the five children of the school's founder, Baheng Che-asae, to establish the school in 1968. In practice, the owners and villagers regarded the land as common property, however.

The verdict echoed Bangkok's efforts in the early 1960s to control Islamic schools that helped spur armed resistance to the state and disturbed many locals, who regard pondok as repositories of Malay identity. Recognising popular blowback from the ruling, Thai officials attempted to persuade Balyan Waemano, son of the school's former administrator, and his family to appeal and offered to allow them to rent the land. The family, in consultation with villagers, decided not to seek legal redress, but to accept the court's authority and vacate the property. In so doing, it sought an end to the case and formally demonstrated due regard for the judiciary. But it also ensured that the land seizure would be a cause celebre. Crisis Group Report, Recruiting Militants, op. cit., pp. 2-4; Hara Shinatro, "An extraordinary event of ordinary people: Part 2", Prachatai, 10 May 2016; Otto F. von Feigenblatt, et al., "Weapons of Mass Assimilation: A Critical Analysis of the Use of Education in Thailand", Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (2010), pp. 292-311. Crisis Group interviews, Balyan Waemano, analyst, Pattani, February 2016.

The authorities contributed to this by prevailing on religious leaders and the Pattani Provincial Islamic Council to issue a statement urging the family to heed the advice to appeal and complaining that local civil society organisations were causing confusion. Crisis Group interviews, member, Pattani Provincial Islamic Council, director, Malay-Muslim NGO, Yala, April 2016. Provincial Islamic Councils are state-sanctioned elected bodies that oversee mosque committees and application of Islamic family and inheritance laws. They are embedded in a state-sponsored administrative hierarchy under the National Islamic Council and royally-appointed chularajamontri (national Islamic leader and Islamic-affairs adviser to the king). Crisis Group Report, Evolving Conflict, op. cit., p. 6, fn. 47. This coordination with the military tarnished the Council and associated religious leaders in the eyes of many Malay Muslims. The school's history added a political dimension. Dolloh Waemano became headmaster after the founder, his father-in-law, was murdered in 1979. Dolloh, whom authorities believe is a senior BRN leader, fled Thailand in 2005, before the shutdown. In June 2005, his son, Ridwan Waemano, was killed in his Pattani apartment, with two other men, in what many locals consider an extrajudicial killing. Crisis Group interviews, intelligence officer, Bangkok, April 2016; Malay-Muslim activists, local leaders, Pattani and Yala, February, March 2016. Images mocking the Pattani Provincial Islamic Council circulated on social media; one was captioned: "We are cattle led by the nose!"

On 19 March 2016, Pondok Jihad supporters organised an event to raise funds for the owner's family, featuring traditional local food and a panel discussion. Such fundraisers are common in the region, but the school's purported links to BRN charged it with political significance. Roughly 50,000 people attended, donating 3.9 million baht ($110,740). To depress turnout, the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) ordered prayer ceremonies to coincide with the event, including one at Cho Airong Hospital, telling village headmen to have hundreds of people in front of every district office in the region. Crisis Group interview, humanitarian worker, Pattani, March 2016. It was the largest gathering of Malay Muslims since the 1975 Pattani protests that precipitated a new era of Patani-Malay activism. Many liken the Pondok Jihad issue to earlier state blunders that excited public contempt and played into BRN's hands, such as the Kreu Se mosque massacre and the Tak Bai incident, both in 2004. Sparked by the extrajudicial killing of five Muslim youths in Bacho district, Narathiwat, 45 days of protests joined by 70,000 Malay-Muslims and covertly organised by PULO began in December 1975. Security forces killed 32 in the Krue Se mosque, Muang, Pattani, after militants took it over on 28 April 2004. Seven Malay Muslims were shot dead at a demonstration in Tak Bai, Narathiwat, and 78 detainees suffocated while being transported to a military base in Pattani on 25 October 2004. Crisis Group Report, Insurgency, op. cit., pp. 9-10, 22-24, 27-30. Crisis Group interviews, Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, Kota Bharu; army officer, Bangkok, March, April 2016.

IV. Bangkok Balks

Faced with an uptick in attacks and widespread disaffection, the military tightened its grip on the deep south. The Pondok Jihad case convinced the army it had allowed a dangerous degree of political space there. The government was reportedly increasingly worried about BRN's long-term strategy, purportedly based on indoctrination of tens of thousands of youths in Islamic schools who might, in a decade or two, form a broad base of support and pool of recruits. Crisis Group interviews, Malay-Muslim analyst, Pattani, 31 March 2016; army officers, Narathiwat, civil society activist, Yala, March 2016. The relative liberty afforded civil society in the southernmost provinces post-coup contrasted with the repression in the rest of Thailand.

Tightened military control took various forms. The army barred the Federation of Patani Students and Youth (PerMAS) from staging an event on public participation in the peace process, scheduled for 13 February 2016. A spokesman explained it was prohibited because it concerned self-determination, meaning independence: "[PerMAS] is trying to internationalise the issue. Using the words 'right to self-determination' is against the law". On 12 April, 4th Army Region Commander Lieutenant General Wiwat Pathompak, warned he would begin summoning for discussions those who "spread misinformation", especially on Facebook. This was already the practice in other army regions since the coup. " ..4  right to self determination    PerMAS " ["ISOC 4 spokesman says 'right to self determination' means independence, illegal, cancels PerMAS event"], Wartani.com, 13 February 2016. ".. 3  " ["ISOC points out 3 factors behind violence, asks the people to help compel all groups to join talks"], Deep South Journalism School, 14 April 2016. Release of two reports by human rights groups detailing allegations of torture and other mistreatment of detainees by security forces in the deep south elicited another combative army response. Three groups released a 59-page report in January 2016 documenting 54 cases of alleged torture by security forces between 2014 and 2015. Another published a report in February citing 33 cases of alleged torture and ill treatment of insurgent suspects in 2015. "Torture and ill treatment in The Deep South Documented in 2014-2015", Duay Jai Group, Patani Human Rights Network, Cross Cultural Foundation (CrCF), January 2016; "" ["Report on Human Rights Abuses from Use of Special Laws in the Southern Border Provinces"], Muslim Attorney Centre, 2 February 2016. The army denies torture, but a court ordered the ISOC to compensate two Malay-Muslim men security forces beat in 2009. "Court orders govt to compensate Muslim Malay torture victims", Prachatai, 19 May 2016. On 17 May 2016, the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) Region 4 filed criminal complaints against three authors of one report, accusing them of defamation and violation of the Computer Crimes Act. ISOC filed complaints against Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, CrCF director, Somchai Homla-or, Law Reform Commission member and Anchana Heemmina, Duay Jai Group president. "Military say Deep South rights advocates sued 'to defend country's honour'", Prachatai, 14 June 2016. The Computer Crimes Act (2007), which criminalises "bringing false computer information into the system", is used to curb online dissent and regularly in conjunction with the lese-majeste law. The judiciary construes "false computer information" as online speech in addition to technical crimes such as hacking. "Thailand Country Report", Freedom House, 2015.

On 4 April, Prime Minister Prayuth completed subordination to the military of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (SBPAC), a special agency established in 1980 charged with coordinating civilian development and administration in the five southernmost provinces. Prayuth used the interim constitution's Article 44 to suspend several articles of the 2010 Southern Border Provinces Administration Act, mostly concerning SBPAC's advisory council. The council's 49 members were elected in nine professional groups. Prayuth ordered the creation of an Advisory Committee for Administration and Development of the Southern Border Provinces, with 60 members, 45 appointed by ISOC and SBPAC, ten by the five governors (each appointing two), and five appointed by the prime minister. " ''  ''" ["Watching important changes, 'blinding' the 'board to end South violence'"], ASTV Manager Online, 9 April 2016. "'' " ["Dissolve advisory council, set up 'board' to quell southern fire, or decrease people's power"], Thai Post, 16 April 2016. SBPAC's status vis-a-vis the military has been a recurring preoccupation of the bureaucracy from the start. Crisis Group Reports, Stalemate, pp. 10-11; Evolving Conflict, pp. 15-18; Dialogue in Doubt, p. 4, fn. 17, all op. cit.

The new regulations diminish its status, concentrating its budget with ISOC's military officials. The move was presented as a way to increase efficiency, but the effect is that many local people are losing the confidence SBPAC had gained under its previous director. The former director, Police Colonel Thawee Sodsong, won praise for tirelessness, accessibility and informal manner, which contrasted with that of most civil servants. Crisis Group interviews, Malay-Muslim provincial official, civil society activist, Yala, March, May 2016.

Through March and early April 2016, members of the Thai and MARA delegations were upbeat on the dialogue's prospects. That changed on 20 April, when the army chief transferred Nakrob from his ISOC position and thus his post as secretary of the Thai delegation. NCPO officials insisted the move was routine, with no bearing on the dialogue but its abruptness, a week before a scheduled JWG meeting, appeared to signal something more, particularly given Nakrob's energetic efforts to finalise the ToR and build public support for the process. Rumours circulated that Nakrob was forced out of the dialogue team because he was too sympathetic to dissidents, talked too freely to the media and had a conflict with the army chief's younger brother. Crisis Group interview, army officer, Bangkok, April 2016. "" ["Changes to South dialogue team"], Post Today, 22 April 2016.

It was at that next JWG meeting that Aksara declined to sign the ToR, saying Prime Minister Prayuth had not approved it. Foreign affairs and justice ministry officials reportedly persuaded the NCPO to reverse course out of fear the ToR would boost MARA's international status and trap Bangkok into concessions. Explaining the refusal to sign, Aksara also questioned MARA's standing to conduct negotiations. Crisis Group interviews, army officer, diplomat, Bangkok, April, May 2016. Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, "Regime's stance hurts South peace talks", Bangkok Post, 9 May 2016. "Thailand: Officials give mixed signals on Deep South talks", Benar News, 29 April 2016. Aksara said MARA Patani does "not have a clear status while we  have an order from the prime minister's office [to negotiate]". "''" ["'Aksara' affirms south peace talks to continue"], Krungthep Thurakit, 30 April 2016.

Questioned by reporters, Prayuth expressed annoyance with the dialogue, saying he had to contend with it as an inheritance from the old government. It had to be held abroad because the law and constitution prohibit negotiations with "lawbreakers", he said; recognising Party B by name would encourage others to make similar demands, embroiling the state in difficulties."  ." ["Big Tu' [Prayuth] opposes talks to end south violence [which] can't solve the problem, must clean up after previous gov't", Khao Sod, 29 April 2016.

Abu Hafez conveyed MARA's disappointment but said the delay would give Bangkok "ample time to reconsider and reverse that decision" and reminded Prayuth that he had requested Malaysia's help to resume the process. MARA's Shukri Hari expressed concern about Prayuth's subsequent comments, which, he said indicated "that the peace talks are only a false promise despite the fact that we are in the process of confidence building". Thai officials insist the process will continue. Aksara said the ToR would be reviewed by the National Security Council and other agencies, amended and submitted to the prime minister for approval. Crisis Group email correspondence, Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, 28 April 2016. "Thailand to unilaterally review TOR of Deep South peace talks", Prachatai, 9 May 2016. "." ["NSC meets dialogue team to change the ToR with dissidents"], Daily News, 7 May 2016. The sides reportedly exchanged letters stating their willingness to continue through facilitator Zamzamin on 1 June during his visit to Bangkok.

V. Bombs of August

On 7 August, voters approved a draft constitution prepared by the NCPO's handpicked committee, with 61 per cent voting in favour and 59 per cent turnout. The referendum process was flawed. The NCPO prohibited open debate on the draft, and the appointed national assembly passed a law in April 2016 that made campaigning for a "no" vote punishable by up to ten years in prison. The three Malay-Muslim majority southern provinces, however, voted 60 per cent "no". The draft codifies semi-democracy, including an appointed senate, the possibility of an unelected prime minister, and a continuing role for the NCPO after the next general election. That Section 67 enjoins the state to propagate Buddhist principles does not sit well with many Malay Muslims. The deep south experienced a wave of bombings, at least 50 in the first ten days of August, and graffiti condemning the draft appeared across the three provinces. Anders Engvall, "Bombs, facts, and myths in southern Thailand", New Mandala blog, 13 August 2016.

On 11-12 August, coinciding with Mothers' Day and Queen Sirikit's birthday, seventeen coordinated bombing and arson attacks in tourist destinations in seven provinces of the upper south killed four and wounded 35. Targets included Phuket, Phang-nga, and Hua Hin, which suffered four bombings and two fatalities. NCPO officials were quick to blame domestic political foes ostensibly upset at the referendum, and to dismiss the possibility Malay-Muslim militants were involved. Consistent with BRN operations, there was no claim of responsibility, but the attacks bore its hallmarks. An anonymous BRN commander reportedly claimed responsibility for the 11-12 August attacks and subsequent bombings in the deep south, including one in Narathiwat on 6 September that killed a young Malay-Muslim girl and her father. Many observers are sceptical of the claim, which did not originate from BRN's information department. "Thai deep south: bomb kills three, including small girl", Benar News, 6 September 2016. Crisis Group interviews, diplomats, analyst, Bangkok, September 2016. Investigators considered the devices and tactics, including coordination over wide areas and blasts in sequence to hit responders to the initial bombing, the same as those employed in the deep south. Arrest warrants were issued for suspects associated with the insurgency."Thai leader links attacks on tourist sites to constitution change", The New York Times, 12 August 2016; "Reds denounce attempts to blame them for serial bombings", The Nation, 15 August 2016. Anthony Davis, "Thailand bombings mark major shift in southern separatist strategy", Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Monitor, 18 August 2016; "Prawit: KL offers help to hunt for bombers", The Nation, 30 August 2016; "Thai police arrest first suspect in connection with tourist-town bombs", Reuters, 5 September 2016.

These attacks were not the first by militants outside their customary operations area of the four southernmost provinces. In addition to periodic attacks on Hat Yai in Songkhla province, the largest city and commercial centre of the south, militants deployed a truck bomb to Phuket, which did not explode and was discovered in December 2013. A car bomb on Samui Island in April 2015 wounded seven. Crisis Group Report, Dialogue in Doubt, op. cit., pp. 18-19. But the scale of the August attacks, geographic reach and choice of targets mark a clear shift, and apparent decision to expand the conflict.

Speculation about the timing of the August attacks has centred on BRN's displeasure with Bangkok's approach to dialogue. Proximity to the referendum and the bombings that preceded it suggest a political message to the NCPO. An experienced analyst said, "it was a signal to warn the government that [dialogue] is a big issue for them  and the government will pay more attention from now on". Srisompob Jitpiromsri, quoted in, "Bombings won't stall peace talks, army says", Khao Sod English, 17 August 2016. Diminishing returns from twelve years of insurgent operations in the deep south may also have factored into the unprecedented scale and choice of targets beyond the traditional area of the insurgency.

In the wake of the Mothers' Day attacks, the dialogue process began to move again. A technical meeting took place on 16 August, and on 23 August, Prayuth told reporters a plenary meeting could take place on 2 September."Thai deep south: government, rebels to meet next month", Benar News, 23 August 2016. That night, a car bomb  the fourth of 2016  exploded in front of a hotel and nightclub in Pattani, killing one person and wounding more than 30.

The dialogue teams met on 2 September in Kuala Lumpur. The day before, women from 23 deep south civil society organisations marched in Pattani calling for safety zones, a longstanding NCPO precondition for official talks. The Thai delegation tabled a proposal from one such group, Women's Agenda for Peace, on a safety-zone concept, which MARA said it would evaluate. The sides reportedly reached preliminary consensus on a revised ToR, but nothing was signed, and the meeting ended with agreement to continue the unofficial dialogue."Thai govt, Deep South insurgents reach agreements crucial for official peace talks", Prachatai, 2 September 2016; "South 'safety zones' on table", Bangkok Post, 3 September 2016; "Progress in South peace talks", The Nation, 3 September 2016.

VI. Intractability and Other Obstacles to Dialogue

The conflict has characteristics of a "soft, stable, self-serving stalemate", which is "generally bearable to both parties, both in the absolute and relative to any likely solution on the table at the moment". The protagonists still seem inclined to preserve the status quo rather than opt for the uncertainties of compromise. "The predominance of [soft, stable, self-serving] stalemates instead of ripe moments in intractable conflicts means that there is no pressure on the parties to come to a resolution of the conflict on their own or even listen to mediators. At most, there may be motivation to manage the conflict, that is, to reduce the conflict to a less costly level without touching on the basic issues and underlying causes . But reducing the cost also reduces the pressure for a settlement and so further contributes to intractability". William I. Zartman, "Analyzing Intractability", in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall (eds.), Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict (Washington DC, 2005), pp. 52, 53. This is evident in the military's tacit aversion to substantive dialogue and political change and BRN's explicit opposition to the current talks. MARA's uncertain influence over fighters and civil society's limited role complicate matters. "Civil society" here refers to NGOs and non-profits that may receive state support, including academics, media and religious leaders. Kayanee Chor Boonpunth, Mark G. Rolls, "The Role of Civil Society in Peacebuilding in Southern Thailand", Journal of Public Affairs (2016).

The NCPO and army are guided by two imperatives in their approach to dialogue. The first is that the conflict is and must remain domestic. They harbour an abiding fear it will be internationalised, leading to foreign intervention and, eventually, partition. "International organisations want to say it's armed conflict; they want to internationalise it". Crisis Group interview, senior army officer, Narathiwat, May 2016. "We do not want to make it an international security issue because it's our internal security issue". General Aksara Kerdpol, quoted in "Hospital siege shows disunity among Deep South separatists: authorities", Prachatai, 7 April 2016 (translation from Thai, Prachachat Business, 19 March 2016). The second is that it must be resolved without political reform or devolution of power, which many officials regard as a potential precursor to national fragmentation. "Deep down, Thai officials and political leaders fear that granting some form of regional autonomy could lead to the unraveling of the modern Thai state, as other ethnic minority groups in the North (Lanna) and Northeast (Isan/Lao) might demand parallel recognition and treatment". Duncan McCargo, "Autonomy for the South: Thinking the Unthinkable?", Pacific Affairs, vol. 83, no. 2 (June 2010), p. 267. Proposals for "special administration", such as a regional governing council or popularly elected provincial governors, were widely discussed in the region prior to the 2014 coup but today are again taboo. Crisis Group Reports, Moving Towards Political Solutions?, pp. 17-18, Evolving Conflict, pp. 19-20, both op. cit. See also Srisompob Jitpiromsri and Duncan McCargo, "A Ministry for the South: New Governance Proposals for Thailand's Southern Region", Contemporary Southeast Asia, vol. 30, no. 3 (2008); and McCargo, "Autonomy for the South", op. cit. Asked if autonomy was needed, Aksara replied: "What year is this? Is there anyone still talking about this? We passed beyond the old context". The government needs to relinquish the wish to resolve the conflict without devolution. A recent regional survey found 61 per cent of respondents considered new administrative arrangements appropriate to local conditions necessary to end the insurgency. Aksara, quoted in "Hospital siege", op. cit. "When they talk about self-determination, I ask, 'what's wrong with the existing system, with sub-district and provincial administrative councils?'". Major General Nakrob, comments at FCCT, op. cit.. "Don't ask about governance  in terms of development the [central] government can provide everything". Prime minister, quoted in "Thai junta chief plays down autonomy for rebellious south", Agence France-Presse, 22 April 2016."Peace Survey", op. cit., p. 10.

Thus, many regard dialogue with MARA as little more than the NCPO's "flagship public relations project". Some military officers share the view it is primarily about improving the regime's image. Crisis Group interviews, Malay-Muslim analyst, Pattani, March 2016; senior army officers, Hat Yai, March, Bangkok, April 2016. " '" ["Untangling the protracted problem of 'southern peace talks'"], Khom Chad Leuk, 17 June 2015. Many officials understand dialogue as a means to persuade militants to lay down arms and accept an amnesty or plea bargain rather than a process aimed at achieving an agreement with militant leaders. Crisis Group interviews, Malay-Muslim provincial official, Yala, army officer, Narathiwat, May; Muslim religious leader, Pattani, April; all 2016. ".. 3  " ["ISOC points out 3 factors behind violence, asks the people to urge all groups to join talks"], Deep South Journalism School, 14 April 2016. This is the army's traditional approach to talks with militants, currently embodied in the "Bring the People Home Project". An ISOC spokesman reported that 4,089 people had joined the project since its 2012 launch, 2,093 of them in 2016 up to 25 June. "''13 .''22." ["Army vehicle bombed, 1 dead, 3 wounded after meeting Rangae villagers, luckily 22kg bomb in Tak Bai misfires"], Matichon, 30 June 2016. Some army officers privately discount the amnesty program, and BRN is reportedly untroubled by it. Crisis Group interviews, army officer, April; BRN member, June 2016. Prayuth repeatedly said the way out of the conflict was for militants to surrender under Article 21 of the Internal Security Act, which provides a form of plea bargain. "" ["Revealing the instigators of violence"], Thai Post (online), 9 April 2016. "PM refuses to recognise any separatist South group", The Nation, 30 April 2016. See Crisis Group Reports, Stalemate in Southern Thailand, pp. 8-9; Evolving Conflict, p. 11; and Briefing, Political Turmoil, p. 13, all op. cit. The aim is to reach out via family or civil society organisations to sway insurgents to give up violence. "The idea", an army officer said, "is to coax them out to talk; that's real dialogue". Crisis Group interview, army officer, Narathiwat, May 2016. The SBPAC director, Panu Uthairat, said in reference to dialogue: "We have to ask first, are you Thai? Do you love Thailand? We don't speak to foreigners who wish to separate themselves. If you are Thai, then dialogue is a process of building understanding. You don't have the right to set out conditions for me . What do you misunderstand?  It's my duty to listen  and solve [their problems]". "' ' 2 " ["'Panu Uthairat' confirms South improves over past two years"], Matichon Weekly, 1 July 2016.

The NCPO's lack of a democratic mandate and restrictions on civil liberties are another problem. Those who oppose the NCPO or the political status quo do not enjoy the right to call for political change without fear of reprisal, not only in the deep south, but also nationwide. This renders hollow army arguments that militants should abandon armed conflict to pursue peaceful change. The NCPO has promised a 2017 general election, but the draft constitution provides for a five-year transition during which the military regime retains broad powers. Protracted military tutelage bodes ill for decentralisation prospects.

A related issue is the diminishing space for civil society to engage on political issues. For various reasons, locals are less interested in the current dialogue than they were in the previous process. Crisis Group interview, civil society activist, Yala, 3 March 2016. Thaweeporn Kunmetha, "Peace talks get cold shoulder from villagers: local Deep South media", Prachatai, 4 January 2016. According to a recent survey of 1,559 people in the region, 33 per cent had no opinion on whether the dialogue process would bring peace; 20.6 per cent were confident it would, and 23.1 per cent believed it would not. "Peace Survey", press release, op. cit., p. 8. The army is on one side, a separatist diaspora leadership on the other, and they are excluded. Crisis Group interview, Malay-Muslim analyst, Pattani, March 2016. Zamzamin's encouragement of them to get involved with MARA Patani, even elect representatives to its central committee "to synchronise your demands and aspirations with those of the Armed Groups", misapprehends conditions in Thailand: authorities would not permit collaboration with armed rebels. After more than a decade of conflict, many in civil society who work on peace issues are exhausted, and their groups lack space and resources to push for greater popular engagement with dialogue. Hara Shintaro, "Rhetoric and reality about the Patani Peace Process", Prachatai, 8 March 2016. Crisis Group interview, Malay-Muslim civil society activist, Yala, March 2016.

Another critical impediment is BRN's refusal to participate. A process that does not include its armed wing will not deliver a lasting resolution. It questions Bangkok's seriousness and has reiterated in public statements its demand for international organisations to observe the talks. A lack of technical capacity and a detailed, long-term political platform also inhibit it. "In terms of personnel, preparation, platform, BRN is not ready", a sympathiser said. This must change. BRN should subordinate military operations to pursuit of viable political ends and observe its obligations under IHL, including an end to targeting civilians. Many militants have misgivings about Malaysia's facilitation. A PULO member said the dialogue has failed twice, and new personnel and procedures in facilitation, such as including third-party observers and advisers, could help rebuild confidence. Crisis Group interviews, BRN member, June 2016; sympathiser, May 2016; PULO member, June 2016.

Though MARA has some support in the southernmost provinces, it also faces indifference and antagonism. Many locals know little about it. Only 21.8 per cent of respondents to a recent survey in the region reported having heard of MARA Patani. Crisis Group interviews, imam, analyst, Pattani, March, April 2016; civil society activist, local elected official, Yala, March 2016. "Peace Survey", op. cit., p. 7. This is one reason it emphasises proposals for immunity and safe passage, without which it cannot build links to its ostensible constituents. Some locals consider MARA a creature of Malaysia, lacking the local support BRN has cultivated over two decades. A prominent Muslim human rights activist said MARA must prove itself, and that people need more than a binary choice between it and the government. Crisis Group interviews, Malay-Muslim politician, Malay-Muslim religious leader, Pattani, March, April 2016. An ex-PerMAS leader, Suhaimee Dulasa, critiqued MARA's and Malaysia's roles in the dialogue on Facebook, 6 March 2016. ": " ["Up against a wall: Must stop the violence first"], Khao Sod, 7 September 2015. The extent to which MARA might eventually represent BRN's militant wing, as well as separatists in exile, remains an open question. Popular support will ultimately be determined by its ability to deliver a deal, which requires buy-in from BRN and local people.

Given NCPO aversion to participatory politics and fear of internationalising the insurgency, near-term scope for breaking the stalemate is narrow. But the Mothers' Day attacks illustrate the risks of attempting to preserve the status quo while engaging in a pro forma dialogue that leaves out the main insurgent group. The attacks should also encourage the NCPO and any successor government to develop avenues of exchange with BRN's leaders so as to start official peace talks. The alternative could be further, more damaging attacks outside the customary conflict zone as BRN seeks leverage. BRN should facilitate and reciprocate overtures from Bangkok. It should also be prepared to implement a ceasefire or safety zones to satisfy the government's preconditions for talks. MARA Patani should be candid about the extent of its influence inside Thailand and encourage a broader dialogue with BRN. The NCPO should also restore rights to freedom of expression and assembly. A lasting resolution to the conflict is unlikely without sustained public participation.

VII. Conclusion

The protracted conflict is more than twelve years old, with no signs of abating. The dialogue process is beset by deep mutual mistrust that a year of preliminary talks has done little to dispel. The failure to sign a ToR agreement and comments by Thai officials questioning MARA Patani's status cast doubt on NCPO willingness to engage in an official dialogue. The assumption that the dialogue's momentum will sway BRN to join is improbable at best. The belligerents need to take seriously their obligation to those they claim to represent to find a peaceful resolution, based on a political order that accords with local aspirations.

The August bomb attacks in the upper south raise the spectre of a wider conflict, with more attacks in tourist areas. That should prompt the NCPO to reconsider its approach of containing the insurgency and seeking militant capitulation rather than a comprehensive political solution. In view of the military government's antipathy to decentralisation and determination to keep control after the promised 2017 election, however, there is little scope for a breakthrough. An earnest attempt to decentralise power, the best hope for resolution of the conflict, is unlikely to materialise under the current government.

Bangkok/Brussels, 21 September 2016
Disclaimer

This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
DRC: Authorities must not fan the flames of unrest with violence

Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Amnesty International, DRC: Authorities must not fan the flames of unrest with violence, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e2b3734.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) must show restraint in their handling of protests to ensure that they do not inflame tensions in the country, and conduct thorough, prompt, impartial and transparent investigations into killings and violence that took place at opposition rallies in Kinshasa yesterday, Amnesty International said today.

The government has said 17 people, including three police officers, were killed at rallies held to demand that the electoral commission announce the date of the next presidential election, while the opposition parties put the death toll at more than 50 protesters. Credible civil society reports mention 25 deaths, including the three police officers.

"Confronting people exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly with excessive force fans the flames of unrest. The DRC authorities must take immediate steps to halt this escalating tension, and all parties must refrain from violence."

Fourteen people also suffered bullet wounds during the protests, and fires broke out at the offices of three opposition political parties in Kinshasa this morning.

Amnesty International warned in its latest report on the DRC that the authorities' mounting crackdown on the right to freedom of expression could trigger violence in an already tense political climate.

Background

Yesterday was the constitutional deadline for the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) to announce the date for presidential elections.

The opposition parties want elections to be held so that President Joseph Kabila can be replaced when his second term ends on 19 December, but the electoral commission has failed to call the election, citing lack of funds and insufficient time to update the voting register.

The constitutional court ruled in May that the incumbent can legally remain in office until his successor is in place, a ruling the opposition rejects.

A process called by the government to resolve the impasse, known as the National Dialogue, has been rejected by opposition groups who say it is a ploy to extend Kabila's stay in power

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
Mexico: Two Mexican journalists murdered in space of three days

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 20 September 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Mexico: Two Mexican journalists murdered in space of three days, 20 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e2b5834.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Two more Mexican journalists were slain last week, bringing the number of media personnel murdered in Mexico since the start of the year to 12. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) sounds the alarms and urges the local authorities to quickly identify those behind these murders.

The latest victim was Aurelio Cabrera Campos, the founder and editor of the local news weekly El Grafico de la Sierra, who was shot several times on the night of 14 September while driving home on the Mexico City-Tuxpan road in Huauchinango (in the central state of Puebla). He died of his injuries a few hours later in hospital.

The police are investigating the killing but have so far reported nothing about the motive or identity of the perpetrators. Speaking shortly after the murder, a friend, Pablo Estrada, the editor of the newspaper El Caminante, said Cabrera had told him that he had received "death threats, like all journalists."

Members of his family told RSF they felt in danger and had requested immediate protection for themselves and the other persons working for his newspaper.

"The danger is real and serious because the authorities have not told us who ordered his murder and for what reason," one said. "We are convinced that it was because of his journalistic work. In recent months he published reports about abductions and murders in the Sierra Norte de Puebla."

Radio journalist Agustin Pavia was gunned down as he was getting out of his car outside his home in Huajuapan de Leon (in the southern state Oaxaca) on the night of 12 September.

The host of the political programme "Forum" for community radio Tu Un Nuu Savi, he often criticized the Oaxaca state government's policies on the air. He was also a human rights lawyer and member of the MORENA political party.

"Mexico is in the process of turning into a cemetery for journalists," said Emmanuel Colombie, the head of RSF's Latin America desk. "The local and national authorities must urgently overhaul the alert and protection mechanisms for journalists and must give the police and judicial authorities the resources they need to quickly and systematically identify those behind these murders."

Another Tu Un Nuu Savi radio presenter was killed in Huajuapan de Leon on 26 June. The host of the programme "Pitaya Negra," Salvador Garcia Olmos was run down by a municipal police car as he was trying to escape from other members of the same police force who were arresting him. An investigation into his death has yet to report its findings.

With the latest murders, Mexico is now the world's most dangerous country for journalists. It is ranked 149th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
In the past week, at least two journalists have been arrested and others have been threatened by the judicial apparatus, which is controlled the Supreme Leader and the ministry of intelligence.

The latest victim is Sadra Mohghgh, a journalist in charge of coverage of social issues at the daily newspaper Shargh, who was arrested by intelligence officials at his Tehran home on 19 September.

His arrest was reported briefly by the semi-official news agency Maehnews, which described him as an "element in contact with counter-revolutionary media who sent reports about the country's internal situation." In the past few weeks, he had published several stories about a case of corruption at Tehran's city hall.





Yashar Soltani, the editor of the Memarinews.com online newspaper, was the first journalist to be jailed for covering the case, which involves the sale of land and apartments by the city hall to senior government officials and members of the municipal council.

Soltani was jailed on 17 September after being summoned to the culture and media court for non-payment of the large amount of bail that had demanded in return for his release. He was first summoned by the court on 29 August, just hours after his website posted several documents revealing the details of the sales.

The website was closed indefinitely the same day by the Committee for Determining Content that Constitutes Internet Crime, which is headed by the prosecutor-general.

The Committee went on to block the Puyesh and 9sobh news sites and the Mojnews and Bornanews news agencies on 5 September because they had relayed the corruption story reports or had criticized the inconsistencies of the judicial system's attempts to combat corruption. They were unblocked a week later.





"Hassan Rouhani is reaching the end of his term as president and is attending the UN General Assembly for the last time," said Reza Moini, the head of RSF's Iran/Afghanistan desk. "He did not keep his election promise to promote freedom of expression and the media. The level of freedom of information in Iran is still deplorable and is declining even more as a result of the threat of war and corruption.

Moini added: "The judicial system and the Revolutionary Guards, which get their orders from the Supreme Leader, persecute independently reported news and information. Rouhani, who is supposed to guarantee implementation of the Iranian constitution, could have put an end to this unacceptable situation, but he did not. He preferred to concentrate on opening Iran's markets to foreign trade instead of opening its prisons."





Journalists unjustly convicted, denied medical care in prison

The journalist Foad Sadeghi was arrested by plainclothesmen in Tehran on 28 August. No official reason was given but it could be to serve a prison sentence. An adviser to former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and onetime editor of the Ayandeh News and Baztab Emrooz websites (closed in 2009 and 2013 respectively), he was previously arrested in 2009 and 2013 for covering corruption cases involving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration and was released provisionally





The lawyers of jailed independent journalist Issa Saharkhiz were told on 17 September that his three-year jail sentence has been reduced to 21 months. One of his lawyers, Mahmoud Alizadeh-Tabatabaie, had reported on 9 August that Saharkhiz had been sentenced to two years in prison for anti-government propaganda and one year for insulting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

He was convicted in connection with an article about his previous spells in prison (from 2009 to 2013) in which he wrote that his fellow inmates had baptised the cell where they played cards and backgammon as the "Seide Ali Casino." This was interpreted as an insulting allusion to Khamenei.

The former editor of several reformist newspapers, Saharkhiz was one of several journalists arrested on 2 November 2015. Since 10 March, he has been hospitalized under surveillance in Tehran.





The sentence of another of the victims of the November 2015 wave of arrests, Afarin Chitsaz, was reduced by a Tehran appeal court on 7 September from ten years in prison to two years in prison and a two-year ban on working as a journalist after release. Two other journalists, Ehssan Mazndarani and Saman Safarzai, were sentenced to seven and five years in prison respectively. An appeal court reduced the sentences to two years.





These imprisoned journalists are ill, as are other detained journalists such as Mohammad Sedegh Kabodvand, Narges Mohammadi and Roya Saberi Negad Nobakht. But the authorities refuse to release them, thereby denying them access to appropriate medical care.





Iran is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which regards depriving detainees of medical care as a violation of the ban on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.





The Iranian authorities do not respect international human rights law. In his opening address to the UN Human Rights Council on 13 September, UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein condemned Iran's refusal to cooperate in any way with the Council's "special procedures."





In May 2011, the Council appointed Ahmed Shaheed as special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran but the Iranian authorities never allowed him to visit the country. Shaheed was replaced as special rapporteur by the lawyer Asma Jahangir at the end of last month.





Iran is ranked 169th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.


Eritrea ended media freedom 15 years ago this month

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 21 September 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Eritrea ended media freedom 15 years ago this month, 21 September 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e2b6504.html [accessed 30 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) pays tribute to the 11 journalists held indefinitely in inhuman conditions after being arrested without charge 15 years ago this month in Eritrea, in a September 2001 crackdown that ended all media freedom in this Horn of Africa country. RSF urges the European Union, which is trying to normalize its relations with Asmara, to not close its eyes to actions that constitute crimes against humanity and violations of the Eritrean population's fundamental rights.

On 18 September 2001, the government led by Issayas Afeworki, a former hero of the Eritrean revolution turned dictator, rounded up all the opposition members who had dared to publish an open letter in the privately-owned media calling on the government to implement the constitution and hold elections.

The editors of all the independent print media were arrested a week later. Held in Asmara without being tried or charged, they went on hunger strike. In order to hide them from their outraged families and fellow citizens, the authorities transferred them to the remote EiraEiro detention centre. Their families have not seen them since then.

Of the 11 journalists arrested in September 2001, seven are believed to have died in detention. The survivors, Dawit Isaak, Seyoum Tsehaye, Temesgen Gebreyesus and Emanuel Asrat, continue to be held. RSF has referred their cases to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

"We call on President Afeworki to stop persisting in these arbitrary and repressive practices and to free the journalists who are still imprisoned," RSF said. "The freedoms of Eritrea's citizens have been constantly flouted for the past 15 years on the grounds of national security and the eternal conflict with Ethiopia. The president says his priority is development. You cannot have sustainable development without an open society in which the justice system functions and freedoms are respected.

"We also address this message to the EU governments that are negotiating a return to normal relations with Asmara without asking about political prisoners and human rights. The journalist Seyoum Tsehaye was arrested 15 years ago today. He is not alone. At least 15 journalists are currently detained arbitrarily in Eritrea. The number is probably higher because no information emerges from this country.

"The EU cannot close its eyes to the Eritrean government's countless violations, which a UN Human Rights Council report in June described as 'crimes against humanity.' The EU cannot adopt a conciliatory position towards the Afeworki regime."

In June 2015, RSF filed a complaint against persons unknown before a French court on behalf of Tsehaye's daughters, but the French judicial authorities said they have no competence over the matter.

Western governments are clearly interested in normalizing relations with Asmara because they want to stop the flow of Eritrean refugees, thousands of whom are fleeing the country every month to escape the threat of lifelong conscription.

Nonetheless, a UN commission of enquiry into the human rights situation in Eritrea concluded in June that events taking place there, including the enforced disappearance of journalists and politicians, constitute crimes against humanity.

RSF is changing its logo on today's anniversary of Tsehaye's arrest in order to draw attention to the complete lack of a free press in Eritrea.

Eritrea has been ranked last out of 180 countries in RSF's World Press Freedom Index every year for the past eight years.
Shania Twain coming to Indianapolis on first tour in nearly five years
Sponsors of the second annual Texas Shrimp & Wine Festival are hoping for a big turnout, but they are hoping the awareness raised is even bigger.

The free festival will take place from 1-11 p.m. Sept. 24 on Cypress Street, between North Second and North Third streets. Beverages and food will be available for purchase. Representatives from 20 to 30 Texas vineyards will be offering samples for sale.

Live music will include country performers Holly Tucker, the Cornell Hurd Band and others. San Antonio Lights, a Journey tribute band, also will perform.

Tucker will bring a local connection with her, said Richard Kemp, who does the farm and ranch report on KLGD, 106.9. Her father lives in Clyde.

In 2013, Tucker rose to Number 6 on the fourth season of NBC's 'The Voice,' according to Tucker's website.

As tasty as the wine and shrimp are expected to be and as lively as the music is guaranteed to be, Kemp said the main idea behind the festival is to get people interested in promoting the Big Country as a wine grape-growing region.

'We want to promote grapes,' he said. 'That's really the idea.'

It's part of the process required to be designated an American Viticultural Area, a wine grape-growing region defined by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Kemp said he believes the Big Country is ripe for such a designation and is supported in his efforts by Sid Miller of Stephenville, commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture. Texas currently has nine AVAs and Kemp would like to see the Big Country become No. 10.

Currently, there are about a dozen vineyards in the Abilene area, Kemp said.

He noted that Terry County west of Lubbock is the largest grape-growing county in the state and receives less rainfall per year than the Abilene area.

Another plus, Kemp said, is that agritourism is becoming a big business.

'That's a growth opportunity for us,' he said.

IF YOU GO

What: 2nd annual KLGD Texas Shrimp & Wine Festival

When: 1-11 p.m. Sept. 24

Where: Cypress Street, between North Second and North Third streets

Admission: Free; wine, beer, shrimp, food truck fare for purchase; for more information, call 325-701-7823 or find the festival on Facebook

Of note: Portions of the proceeds benefit Noah Project.




Incident reports released Tuesday by the Abilene Police Department:

Robbery, 1200 block of Grape Street, Tuesday

A convenience store employee told police a man entered the store and demanded money. The employee said the suspect was wearing a dark blue jacket, light colored pants and a trash bag over his head.

Driving while intoxicated, 600 block of Butternut Street, Tuesday

Police said a man was arrested after a traffic stop for failing to stop at a red light. Police said the driver was traveling at a high rate of speed and almost collided with another vehicle. The driver pulled into a parking lot and appeared to throw something on the ground after getting out, police said. He told police he was chasing his fiance after she'd run up an expensive bar tab and left with another man. Police said he appeared intoxicated at the time and was asked to perform field sobriety tests. He reportedly performed poorly, police said.

Shoplifting, 1600 block of Highway 351, Monday

Police said a man and woman were arrested after a report from a store employee said they were acting suspicious before concealing items and switching price labels on items. The employee told police the pair then went to the self-checkout area but left without paying for the concealed and switched-label items.

Assault, 400 block of Green Street, Monday

Police said a woman reported she was punched in the eye by someone she knew.

Criminal mischief, 1200 block of Fannin Street, Tuesday

Police said a man and woman in a dating relationship damaged each other's vehicles. The woman went to the man's residence and damaged his vehicle, so he retaliated, police said.
Amanda Hernandez found herself in pretty elaborate company recently after finding out her performance on a standardized test qualified her for national recognition.

The Abilene Christian High School senior found out she scored in the top 2.5 percent of all Hispanic and Latino PSAT takers, earning her a chance to become a member of the National Hispanic Recognition Program.

'I didn't know it even existed,' Hernandez said. 'It feels good to be recognized for something I did.'

Hernandez is shy of the attention the accomplishment brings, remaining soft-spoken and quiet when asked to describe herself. But the student, who has attended Abilene Christian School since she was in prekindergarten, did say her favorite subject is English.

Reading, writing, research and all that comes with it are easier to her than does a subject like math, she said. She attributes this to the fluid state of affairs an English class has, compared to the rigid way mathematics works.

It's about coming to her own conclusions, she said.

'Math has to have a definite answer,' Hernandez said. 'But with English, there's not just one way to come to a conclusion. You can get there in a way that fits you. You come to your own conclusions your own way rather than being told how to do something. It's like there really isn't a wrong answer.'

While celebrating  or shying away from  her accomplishment and the attention it brings, Hernandez is also in the midst of writing a research paper for class on the topic of a potential career choice.

Though she said she doesn't intend to pursue it, she's chosen dentistry for her paper. In her own life, she said the medical field is where she would like to find herself, though not working on teeth.

No, she'd like to have a career in some form of surgery if she's accepted into medical school, she said.

'My mother's a nurse, so I've been around the medical field my entire life,' Hernandez said. 'So I thought it would be really cool to go down that path as well, helping people.'
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SHARE Poll Has your water bill risen recently for reasons you cannot explain? Yes No vote View Results Yes: 58% No: 42% Total Responses: 60

By Brooke Crum of the Abilene Reporter News

City Manager Robert Hanna assured Abilene residents Tuesday night that if he discovered a problem with the city's water meter reading system he would waste no time finding a remedy.

The problem is he simply hasn't found a problem, Hanna said.

But that was not a satisfactory answer for the roughly 50 people in attendance at a community meeting organized by Councilman Bruce Kreitler.

The residents wanted to know why their water usage jumped by more than 50 percent in one month. They wanted to know if their water meters were being read accurately or at all. They wanted to know if their meters even worked.

Some asked the councilmen who attended  Jay Hardaway and Anthony Williams in addition to Kreitler  to reconsider the water rate increase set to go into effect in November.

Kreitler started the meeting by saying that he, Hanna and Assistant City Manager James Childers shadowed a meter reader Monday to better understand the process and help address residents' concerns over high water bills. He said the worker read 120 water meters in an hour and 15 minutes.

The city's meter reader supervisor said the six meter readers on staff work quickly but efficiently, reading anywhere from 300 to 700 meters a day.

"If there's a smoking gun, no one's found it," Kreitler said of the high water bill issue.

The council member read from his own water bills, which went from 4,000 gallons used in one month to 36,000 gallons used two months later, and he does not have a pool or a sprinkler system.

At that point, Kreitler opened the meeting up to the audience members, who raised their hands and asked questions or offered comments as City Secretary Danette Dunlap passed around a microphone.

One woman said she does not have a choice as to whether she uses the city's water supply because there is no alternative. Unmoved by city officials' responses to her concerns, she said she would start reading her water meter daily. Another man in the audience advised people to do the same.

"I am forced to take your word for it," said the woman, who did not give her name, when told that nothing is wrong with the city's water system.

Hanna said that ultimately the issue comes down to trust in the government and that if he found a problem he would fix it. If he knew employees were intentionally miscalculating residents' water meters, he would fire them. But until he has proof, there is little he can do but try to address people's concerns, he said. Crediting every person who complained of a high water bill would be bad business, he said.

Another woman said her meter was misread twice and she was billed for 40,000 gallons of water she never used. Another man said his water bill stated that he used 190,000 gallons of water in one month. The man, who said he lives alone, called a plumber, who found no leaks.

"You could grow rice in the front yard with that amount of water," he said.

Hanna told the audience that he wanted to find something, an answer that would assuage residents' concerns because he doesn't "go through life wanting to (anger) citizens."

"Just because you don't find a problem does not mean one does not exist," one man said, declaring an impasse between residents and city officials an hour and a half into the meeting.

Twitter: BrookeCrum_ARN
A question frequently asked about how to make a community safer and better is, 'What can I do?'

Felicia Hopkins, pastor of St. Paul United Methodist Church, has an answer.

'You just do what you can,' Hopkins said at a community meeting Tuesday night in the church's fellowship hall. 'It's something that you and I can do.'

It may not sound like much, Hopkins said, but if everyone did something, problems could be solved. The meeting was a follow-up to a Stop the Violence meeting held in July at The Mission church.

At the first meeting, the concept of ACT was introduced as a means of stopping violence:

Accept responsibility for the current state of crime in the city,

Collaborate with the community on finding solutions, and

Take action.

Primary leaders of the movement are Chad Mitchell, pastor of The Mission, and Anthony Williams, a city councilman. Among other speakers Tuesday night were Police Chief Stan Standridge, District Attorney Jim Hicks, and representatives of social agencies and ministries.

A number of pastors, city and police representatives, and interested residents filled the fellowship hall.

'Everybody in Abilene is represented by someone in this room,' Hicks said.

Williams said a third meeting will be held sometime in October, but with a different format. Instead of presentations such as those in the first two meetings, the next one will be an opportunity for audience participation.

'We want some discussion,' Williams said. 'We want dialogue.'

Organizers got a lot of feedback after the first meeting, Williams said. 'Bite-sized pieces' of that feedback will be presented at the next meeting, Williams said, and the audience will be asked to weigh-in on it.

The first part of Tuesday night's meeting was devoted to crime in Abilene and the reasons for it. Both Hicks and Standridge said the top reasons are drugs and domestic violence. And, both lamented a lack of civic involvement.

Standridge said he had hoped for 20,000 responses from a cross-section of the community to a survey conducted by the Abilene Police Department. Only 1,626 people responded and most were from the 79605 ZIP code.

Hicks noted that when 600 jury service notifications are mailed out, only about 150 people show up, despite being required to by law except in certain situations.

'Let's make a difference,' he said. 'Show up.'

Two speakers talked about ways to get involved in the community. Linda Carleton, one of the founders of Connecting Caring Communities, said the Abilene Dinner Table will be reintroduced in the spring. CCC sponsored the event annually for about five years but had to stop because of a small staff.

The Junior League of Abilene has taken over sponsorship of the event. Hosts sign up for training and then invite about 10 guests of diverse backgrounds to their home, church or a public site for a casual dinner and conversation.

'The goal,' Carleton said, 'is to put people together who come from different perspectives.'

Kristina Davis, president-elect of the Junior League and a sociology professor at Abilene Christian University, said the Junior League agreed to take over the program because of its emphasis on diversity, which also is a Junior League emphasis.

Another opportunity for involvement came from Sari David, whose 21-year-old son was murdered in Abilene in February 2011. David is spearheading an effort to create a volunteer Victim Response Team in Abilene, something she found was needed after her ordeal.

'We had no offer of any services,' David said in an interview after the meeting.

About four months into the legal process after the murder, she learned about services that are available through the state and through the Regional Victim Crisis Center. But that was too late, she said. Assistance was needed immediately, at the scene.

Since then, David has gone through victim assistance training and wants to get a team formed that will be responsible for immediate response when a crime occurs. In the meantime, she is helping as she can.

She recently contacted a woman who was seeking donations on Facebook to pay for the funeral of a loved one who was murdered. Financial assistance is available, David said, but that woman didn't know it.

Residents should be interested in helping victims  even ones they don't know, David said, because of the effect on the community when victims don't get assistance. Their anger simmers, which can lead to more violence.

'If you leave victims alone,' she said, 'you're breeding violence in the community.'

OPPORTUNITIES TO SERVE

Two speakers at Tuesday nights community meeting held at St. Paul United Methodist Church gave information on ways to get involved. One is a re-introduction of Abilene Dinner Table and the other is the creation of an all-volunteer Victim Response Team. Information is presented below on how to get involved with one or both.

ABILENE DINNER TABLE

The event was sponsored annually for about five years by Connecting Caring Communities. When CCC no longer could sponsor the event, due to staff size, the program died. The event will begin again next spring, sponsored by the Junior League of Abilene. People sign up to host about 10 people of different backgrounds in their home or at a church or public site for dinner and conversation. For more information on becoming a host, call Kristina Davis, president-elect of the Junior League of Abilene, at 677-1879, or email her at kristina.davis@acu.edu

VICTIM RESPONSE TEAM

Sari David, whose son was murdered in Abilene in February 2011, presented information on the need for a volunteer Victim Response Team. Members would respond immediately after a crime has been committed and would commit to follow-up with victims. For more information in becoming a part of the team, contact David through The Mission church, 232-8258.
Voting starts surprisingly behind 2018; what can we read into that?

editorials
Carroll and Warren Goldsmith still should be honored.

There was a plan to honor the brothers this week for their long service to Abilene Masonic Lodge 559. A ceremony was planned for August but Carroll Goldsmith took ill. The event was pushed back to Thursday.

Last Thursday, Carroll Goldsmith died at 94.

Al Woody, a local Mason with the title junior warden, stopped by the Reporter-News on Monday to make sure we knew that the ceremony would not be held. We had talked previously about coverage.

You see, Ardouth Carroll Goldsmith was to be honored for 65 years of service to the lodge and his community. For years, he was a builder and contractor here, founding a business that became H&G Construction. Born in Ira, he lived most of his life here, graduating from Abilene High School in 1941. He was a Navy veteran and a 32nd degree Scottish Rite Mason  the highest level of achievement.

Warren Goldsmith, who's just a bit younger, served for 60 years. He formerly was a grocery wholesaler in this area.

That's 125 years of membership and service, certainly worth noting.

Guests at the event planned at Wesley Court were to include Donald Reynolds, district deputy grand master of Masonic District 75, which is part of the Grand Lodge of Texas, and Lee Ramirez Jr., master of Abilene Lodge 559.

The local lodge was chartered in 1882 and in 1926, the cornerstone was placed for its building in the 1200 block of North Second Street downtown. The building still is in use today.

We lost Carroll Goldsmith last week, and a public opportunity to honor him with his brother. He was buried Monday.

Time indeed marches on but the Goldsmith brothers still deserved notice.

Thank you both for being contributing members of our city for years and years.
Steve Kirby, Abilene

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is in the news a lot lately for his efforts to join Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump onstage at the debates.

Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Mark Miller has been endorsed by both the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News.

However, I am writing this letter to the Democrat voters of U.S. Congressional Districts 11, 13, and 19.

You guys have no Democrat Congressional candidate to vote for, but that doesn't mean you don't have a say in those races. You can vote against the Republican by voting for the Libertarian. Your vote can count by reducing the percentage the Republican takes.

For those in District 19, after you've cast your votes for the races in which there are Democrat candidates, scroll back to US Congress District 19, and vote for Libertarian Troy Bonar against Republican Jodey Arrington. You can have a say in that race.

In District 11, Nicholas Landholt is the Libertarian opposing Republican Mike Conaway.

In District 13, Libertarian Calvin DeWeese is running against Republican Mac Thornberry.

This seems to be the year to vote 'against' candidates, but you can't vote 'against' these Republicans if you only vote the 'straight party' option.

Spend a few extra minutes, and vote 'For' these Libertarians.
(Via GoSanAngelo.com)

Texas is in violation of an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department regarding voter ID rulings, according to a ruling from U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos in Corpus Christi.

Ramos issued an order Tuesday instructing Texas officials to amend voter-education language, which the court feels could discourage eligible voters from going to the polls.

Under the agreement's terms, voters may use several alternative forms of identification if they do not possess one of the seven forms of ID required by Texas law and 'cannot reasonably obtain it.'

Ramos said Texas ran afoul of the agreement by changing the wording from 'cannot reasonably obtain it,' to 'cannot obtain' and 'have not obtained' the ID in the state's voter-education campaign.

According to Tom Green County Elections Administrator Vona Hudson, election officials want the maximum eligible number of voters to turn up at the polls, and every effort is being made to make sure people in this county can vote.

'We want people to vote,' Hudson said. 'There are seven main forms of ID, and frankly, that's what most people use, and they will continue to do so  But if there is anyone out there that has not been able to obtain one of those seven forms of ID, there is an alternate list of acceptable IDs, and they just have to fill out a form stating they have a reasonable impediment to getting one of the main forms of ID.

'We will have these forms available at the polls,' Hudson said. 'So as long as they have one of the alternate forms of ID, we can have them sign a declaration, and they will be able to vote  It just might take them a little longer to get to the voting booth.'

According to a handout from the Tom Green County Elections Office, the seven forms of identification are:

DPS issued Texas driver's license

DPS issued Texas election identification certificate

DPS issued Texas personal identification card

Texas license to carry a handgun

U.S. military identification card

U.S. citizenship certificate containing the person's photograph

U.S. passport

If a voter has not been able to obtain one of the forms of acceptable photo identification listed above, and the voter has a reasonable impediment to obtaining such identification, the voter has the right to execute s Reasonable Impediment Declaration and present of the following forms supporting documents:

Valid voter registration certificate

Certified birth certificate (must be an original)

Copy or original current utility bill

Copy or original bank statement

Copy or original government check

Copy or original paycheck

Copy of or original government document that displays your name and an address (Original required if it contains a photograph.)

Exemptions: Voters with a disability may apply with the county voter registrar for a permanent exemption to showing an acceptable for of photo identification at the polls. Voters with a religious objection to being photographed or voters who cannot present an acceptable form of photo identification due to certain natural disasters may apply for a temporary exemption to showing an acceptable for of photo identification at the polls.

Provisional voting: If a voter does not present one of the acceptable forms of identification listed above, which is not expired more than four years, and the voter does not have a reasonable impediment to obtaining one of these forms of identification, or if the voter does have one of the acceptable forms of identification, but did not bring it to the polling place, the voter may cast a provisional ballot at the polls and will have six calendar days after election day to present a valid form of identification in the presence of the county

DPS to issue voter id certificates at mobile stations

Election identification certificates  one form of identification that can be used for voting purposes  will be available for free for eligible Texans at mobile stations in Mason, Glasscock, Coke and Concho counties next month, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

EIC mobile stations will be open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. the following days and locations:
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This just in...
A Cambodian man scans his finger during voter registration at a commune in Kandal province, Sept. 1, 2016.

Cambodian authorities in Pailin province may be attempting to suppress the vote as they are demanding that residents of some communes bring a witness with them to prove their eligibility when they attempt to register to vote, opposition party officials tell RFAs Khmer service.

Khoeum Ponn, deputy head of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) in the province, told RFA that the authorities demand is a violation of the countrys election law and is taking away Cambodians rights.

It creates difficulties for people who have to find a witness because the registration office is far away from their home, and it causes them lose their right to vote, he said.

Residents of OAndong, Bor Yikha, OTavao, and Sala Krao communes in the western province that lies about 170 miles from the capital of Phnom Penh are being required to bring a witness when they register, he said.

Bun Sophy, head of Pailins provincial election secretariat, told RFA that people with registration issues can file a complaint to the election commission.

Firstly, if they have no ID, the commune council must issue them a [certified] document, Bun Sophy said.

Secondly, if there is no permanent residence they [the commune council] must help issue them a residential certification letter, she explained. The residential document is issued by the Ministry of Interior, not by the National Election Commission.

Sin Tit Seiha, an official with the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL), told RFA the demand is a clear violation of Cambodias election law.

What the commune authorities demanded, that they have to bring a witness from their home village, is wrong and against procedures of the election law, he said. In this case, people can request for intervention from the Pailin provincial election commission secretary.

A new system

Cambodians are using a new digital voter registration system that is designed to combat voter fraud.

Elections in 2013 were dogged by accusations of fraud, and the new system is part of a 2014 election reform deal between the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) and opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) that ended almost a year of deadlock following the disputed 2013 national ballot.

Rights groups and foreign aid donors, including the European Union, have expressed concern about the election registration process which is unfolding amid rising political tensions in Cambodia.

In particular, National Election Commission (NEC ) Deputy Secretary-General Ny Chakriya is in police custody, one of five people arrested by the government in its wide-ranging probe into an alleged affair opposition Cambodia national rescue party leader Kem Sokha had with a young hairdresser.

Local commune elections will be held in 2017 and national parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2018.

This is not the first time that questions were raised about interference in the registration process by the government or the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP).

Earlier in September, Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) officials told RFA that they had filed five different complaints with the National Election Commission (NEC) regarding voter-registration irregularities, including attempts to register soldiers in districts where they are ineligible.

Reported by Hum Hour for for RFA's Khmer Service. Translated by Yanny Hin. Written in English by Brooks Boliek.
Rakhine state government officials are moving to demolish more than 3,000 allegedly illegal buildings, including a dozen mosques and more than 30 other religious buildings, in the Maungdaw District, RFAs Myanmar Service has learned.

During a meeting in the state capital of Sittwe, a committee of village elders was convened to take stock of illegal buildings that need to be razed, Rakhine State Security and Border Affairs Minister Col. Htein Lin told RFA.

Those buildings include 12 mosques, 35 religious school buildings and more than 2,500 houses and other structures that were constructed over the years without permission from the authorities, he said.

Maungdaw area village chiefs were notified of the decision on Sept. 18, he said. It was unclear exactly when the demolitions would occur, or precisely how the buildings were chosen.

Tensions between majority Buddhists and minority Muslims in various parts of the country flare up from time to time over the building of religious structures.

The troubled Rakhine state is home to more than 1.1 million stateless Rohingya Muslims whom many Burmese call Bengalis because they consider them illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

Myanmars Buddhist majority has long subjected the Rohingya to persecution and attacks and denied them basic rights, including citizenship.

Earlier this year, Myanmar authorities began demolishing Buddhist and Islamic religious structures across the country that were built on state-owned land without permission from state or regional officials.

In August the government began removing 173 Buddhist monasteries in lower Myanmars Yangon region and 86 monasteries in other states and regions that were constructed without official permission.

The central governments actions came as authorities in northern Myanmars Kachin state arrested five local villagers who led a Buddhist mob that burned down a mosque on July 1 in Lebyin Village of Lone Khin Village Tract of Hpakant township.

Several days prior to the incident, township authorities told trustees of the mosque that they would have to demolish the structure because it had not been legally authorized for religious purposes, according to a report in the online journal The Irrawaddy.

Buddhist monk Myaing Kyee Ngu, also known as U Thuzana, has been erecting stupas on the grounds of churches and mosques in eastern Myanmars Karen State since April in an act of defiance supposedly aimed at reclaiming ancient Buddhist lands.

He is also an influential figure within the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA), a splinter group of the predominantly Christian-led Karen National Union, a fellow ethnic armed organization, according to The Irrawaddy.

Despite objections by religious authorities, Myaing Kyee Ngu and his supporters built several stupas on the grounds of St. Mark Anglican church in Kondawgyi village of Hlaingbwe township and elsewhere in the village.

Reported and translated by RFA's Myanmar Service. Written in English by Brooks Boliek.
Mohammad Nayeb-Zehi was among the hundreds of worshippers who gathered on September 30 at the Great Mosalla, a religious site in Iran's southeastern city of Zahedan, for Friday Prayers.

Just hours later, the 16-year-old's family learned he was dead.

Nayeb-Zehi was among the scores of people gunned down by security forces in a brutal crackdown following anti-government protests in Zahedan, the provincial capital of Sistan-Baluchistan Province, which is home to the country's Baluch minority.

"He was a simple laborer and not political," Nayeb-Zehi's brother, Ahmad, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda in a telephone interview from Zahedan, adding that his sibling had been shot in the heart. "We're in pain, and we cannot accept it."

The crackdown in Zahedan came amid weeks-long nationwide protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who died on September 16, days after she was detained by Iran's morality police.

In Sistan-Baluchistan, public anger at the authorities escalated amid reports that a 15-year-old Baluch girl had been raped by a police official in the province's southern port city of Chabahar.

The violence erupted soon after protesters gathered outside a police station near the central mosque in Zahedan. Members of the crowd chanted anti-government slogans, and some threw rocks. Security forces responded with deadly force by firing on the crowd from the station, according to witnesses.

Security forces also raided the central mosque and the nearby Great Mosalla and opened fire on worshippers using live ammunition, rights groups said, adding that many were shot in the head, heart, neck, or torso, revealing a clear intent to kill or seriously wound.

At least 94 people were killed and 350 wounded on that day, referred to as "Bloody Friday," according to the U.S.-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. At least 13 minors were among those killed, including Nayeb-Zehi.

The victims were overwhelmingly Baluch -- a mostly Sunni ethnic group that has long faced disproportionate discrimination at the hands of the Iranian authorities.

"He was martyred inside the Mosalla while holding his prayer mat," said Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi.

Nayeb-Zehi's family first visited Zahedan's Khatam al-Anbia hospital, hoping he was among the wounded. They later found his body in a seminary at the Great Mosalla.

"We entered a room there and saw about 10 bodies," said Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi. "[Mohammad] was among them."

He said the authorities prevented the family from filming the scene. "I told them this has to be documented, it has to be published by international media," he said, adding that footage later emerged on social media showing the gruesome scene at the seminary.

The family refused to send Nayeb-Zehi's body to the morgue. Instead, his body lay in the living room for around 24 hours before he was buried.

"We said he was martyred and there was no need for an autopsy," said Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi.

The authorities accused Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni militant group, of attacking the police station. The group is recognized as a terrorist organization by both Iran and the United States and has previously claimed deadly attacks in Sistan-Baluchistan targeting Iranian security forces.

But local and independent sources have rejected the authorities' claims.

The authorities have also reported a much lower number of fatalities, announcing that only 19 people, including several members of the security forces, were killed.

Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi said the authorities were "rubbing salt into the wounds of the people" by claiming "terrorists" were involved.

He said he witnessed a military helicopter shooting at civilians near the Great Mosalla. "I haven't even seen such scenes in Hollywood movies," he said. "A helicopter was shooting at people. A lady was shot in front of my eyes."

RFE/RL could not verify his account. But activists have accused security forces of shooting at protestors from helicopters.

"I don't know what the intention of this crime was," he said. "Our only demand from the establishment is for the murderers of our [family members] to be punished."

The killings have led to widespread anger in Sistan-Baluchistan, one of Iran's poorest provinces.

Anti-establishment protests have been reported in Zahedan since the crackdown, including on October 14 and October 21, when protesters took to the streets after Friday Prayers and chanted "Death to the dictator."

During his Friday Prayers sermon on October 21, influential Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid Ismaeelzahi said senior officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were "responsible" for the September 30 killings.

"We are surprised by the silence of the high-ranking officials," he said in his sermon, which was posted on his website.

"Scores were killed here without any reason. I don't have the exact number. Some have reported 90, some say less, some say more," Ismaeelzahi added.

He also said people will not be satisfied until "those who killed the people" are brought to justice.

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center said the events of September 30 amounted to "a massacre of protesters by security forces."

"The government's total denial of responsibility for the massacring of citizens by its security apparatus is consistent with similar past denials and is evidence that internal calls for investigation of such crimes are insufficient," said the rights group, which documents human rights violations in Iran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says the world faces the most dangerous decade since World War II and predicted that the historical period of the West's "undivided dominance over world affairs" is coming to an end.

Speaking on October 27 at a conference of international policy experts in Moscow, Putin said the decade ahead is "probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important...since the end of World War II."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, Russian protests, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

Putin laid the blame for the situation at the feet of Western countries, which he said have cast aside the norms of international affairs in order to maintain dominance and hold down countries they see as "second-class civilizations."

The Russian leader also said he had no regrets about sending troops into Ukraine and sought to explain the conflict as part of the efforts by Western countries to secure their global domination.

Putin claimed in his speech to the Valdai Discussion Club, a think tank, that the West had helped incite the conflict and also seeks to stoke a crisis over Taiwan in an attempt to enforce global dominance.

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, triggering the biggest military conflict in Europe since World War II and driving relations with Western countries that back Ukraine and its drive to be part of the European Union and NATO to their lowest depths since the Cold War.

Putin cast the conflict in Ukraine as a battle between the West and Russia for the fate of the second-largest Eastern Slav country. It is partly a "civil war," he said, as Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kyiv has flatly rejected both of those ideas.

The goal of what Russia refers to as a "special military operation" is to take the eastern Donbas region, Putin said, adding that in his view the region would "not have survived" on its own had Russia not intervened militarily in Ukraine.

WATCH: A local official told Russian conscripts "You are not cannon fodder" in a video published online recently. The men responded by angrily shouting that, actually, that's exactly what they are.

But the war has gone far beyond the Donbas region, with Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, and other nonmilitary structures, killing tens of thousands of Ukrainians across the country.

Putin used the speech largely to rail against the West, saying it has nothing to offer to the world "except its own domination," and the goal of globalization "is neocolonialism to dominate the world." He said Russia is only trying to defend its right to exist in the face these Western efforts.

Putin also asserted that more and more nations refuse to follow Washington's demands and Russia will never accept the West's attempts to dominate the world.

Citing gay pride parades and the acceptance of transgender people in Western countries, Putin also defended "traditional values" and said "nobody can dictate to our people how to develop and what society we should build."

He also said Russia has never considered the West an enemy and has many things in common with it but will continue to oppose the diktat of Western neoliberal elites.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Putin's speech presented no new ideas.

"We don't believe that Mr. Putin's strategic goals have changed here. He doesn't want Ukraine to exist as a sovereign, independent nation state," Kirby said.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Putin's speech can be described as "for Freud," referring to psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud.



"The person who invaded a foreign country, annexed its land, and committed genocide accuses others of violating international law and the sovereignty of other countries? One truth: The person who started a wind will get a storm. The storm is coming," he said on Twitter.

Answering questions from journalists after his speech, Putin reiterated the Kremlin's assertion that Ukraine plans to use a so-called dirty bomb on its own territory. The claim has been dismissed as false by Ukraine and its allies, who say Russia may have raised the matter because it plans to use such a bomb in Ukraine as a pretext for escalation.

"It was me who ordered [Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu to inform by phone all his colleagues about it," Putin said, adding that Russia does not need to use dirty bombs in Ukraine.

Putin also said he supported plans by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit Ukraine's nuclear power plants for inspections.

"It must be done as soon and as openly as possible because we know that Kyiv authorities are now working to cover up such [dirty-bomb attack] preparations," Putin said, without giving any exact information proving the claim.

Ukraine invited IAEA inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities after the Kremlin made its unsubstantiated claim about the preparation of a dirty bomb -- which would use the explosion of a conventional warhead to spread radioactive material or chemicals over a wide area.

Ukraine said it would welcome inspections because it had "nothing to hide."

According to Putin, Russia has never talked about the use of nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine despite his own promise to defend Russian territory with any means at our disposal" and saying his words were "not a bluff."

"We see no need for [using nuclear weapons in Ukraine]," Putin told reporters. "There is no sense for that, neither political, nor military."
A founding member of the Russian dissident art collective Voina (War) has been released from custody in the Czech Republic.

The Prague City Court ruled on September 21 that Oleg Vorotnikov, who is wanted in Russia for alleged hooliganism, must be released.

Vorotnikov promised the judge not to leave Prague while a final decision on his possible extradition to Russia is made.

Vorotnikov's lawyer, Radim Kozub, said his client plans to ask for political asylum in the Czech Republic.

Vorotnikov was detained in Prague on September 18.

He fled Russia with his family in 2011 after authorities launched investigations against him, defining one of his group's public actions as hooliganism.

Vorotnikov and his family have lived in several European countries since then but failed to get political asylum in any of them.

Voina became famous across Russia and beyond for stunts like painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge facing the St. Petersburg headquarters of the Federal Security Service and overturning police cars.

Based on reporting by CTK and aktualne.cz
The Verkhovna Rada will shun the State Duma.

Ukraine's parliament has passed a resolution declaring that it will not recognize Russian's new legislature as legitimate because some of its members were elected in the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula.

Ukrainian prosecutors, meanwhile, have followed up by opening a criminal case against electoral officials in Crimea.

Now, this, of course, was to be expected.

There is just no way Ukraine can recognize a legislature that was partially elected on territory that was forcefully and illegally stolen from it.

But the question now is, will anybody else follow their lead?

Several countries, including Lithuania, Poland, and the United States have said they don't recognize the legitimacy of the elections in Crimea.

But, so far, only Ukraine has refused to recognize the new State Duma entirely.

The Prague-based European Values think tank is trying to change all that.

It has launched a petition calling on all democratic parliaments to withhold recognition from the Russian State Duma, suspend all interparliamentary cooperation with it, and place Crimean electoral officials, as well as lawmakers who won seats there, under international sanctions.

Russia crossed an important line on Sunday. They held elections on somebody else's territory.

They held elections on the first forcefully annexed territory in Europe since World War II.

And by holding elections there, they hoped to legitimize this in the eyes of the world.

They hoped, once and for all, to establish a fait accompli.

And we'll soon see whether this ploy was successful or whether Russia elected an unrecognizable Duma.

Keep telling me what you think on The Power Vertical's Twitter feed and on our Facebook page.
Iraqi lawmakers have voted to dismiss Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

Parliament voted by majority on September 21 to dismiss Zebari after questioning him last month on charges of corruption and mismanagement -- which he denies.

The vote came after parliament dismissed the country's defense minister over the allegations last month.

Zebari, a Kurd who previously served for years as Iraq's foreign minister, became finance minister in 2014.

He has recently led negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a loan deal and with international lenders for a Eurobond.

Iraq's economy has been hit by a drop in global oil prices and the costs associated with the campaign against the Islamic State group.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has accused India of putting "unacceptable" conditions on holding talks with Pakistan amid increased tensions between the South Asian neighbors.

Sharif told the United Nations General Assembly on September 21 that Pakistan cannot ignore India's "unprecedented" weapons build-up and will "take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence."

He also warned world powers that it would be a mistake to ignore the "dangers of rising tensions" between India and Pakistan

Sharif also strongly criticized what he called India's suppression of protests in the disputed Kashmir region and called for an independent investigation into extrajudicial killings and what he called "brutalities."

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. Both claim the disputed Himalayan territory in its entirety and have fought two wars over it.

Tensions between the two nuclear powers have intensified since Indian security forces killed a popular Kashmir rebel commander on July 8.

At least 80 people have been killed in subsequent protests.

India accuses Pakistan of supporting the separatist fighters in the Indian-held part of Kashmir.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AP
The spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, says he "decided" to resign from his position.

Markin announced on September 21 that he had submitted his resignation letter to committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin.

Markin said that he made the decision voluntarily, saying he wants to try himself in new activities.

Media reports said last week that Markin and Bastrykin were going to resign.

Kommersant newspaper reported that the Investigative Committee might be reorganized and added to a new official body -- the Ministry of State Security (MGB) that will also comprise the Federal Security Service, the External Intelligence Service, and structures of the Federal Guarding Service.

Based on reporting by Interfax and Kommersant
A Russian journalist known for his anti-Kremlin stance has left Russia, saying he feared for his life.

In a video posted on YouTube on September 20, Aleksandr Sotnik said he had received threats in a telephone call.

We are going to tolerate you until October and after that we will transfer you to a vegetable department," Sotnik quoted the unknown caller as telling him.

Sotnik said that he would temporarily stay in Georgia, from where he plans to continue his online video channel.

The channel, called Sotnik-TV, has been available on YouTube for five years.

He has criticized the Russian leadership, including President Vladimir Putin, and expressed support to Ukraine in its fight against Russia-backed separatists.

Russia illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and has supported separatists in the country's east.
Josef Stalin never visited the western Siberian city of Surgut. But earlier this month, local activists from the nationalist Russky Dukh (Russian Spirit) movement erected a bust of the Soviet dictator on the embankment of the Ob River.

"The idea came up when we were celebrating the 70th anniversary of victory [over Hitler's Germany in 1945]," Russky Dukh activist and Communist Party member Denis Khanzhin told RFE/RL. "To honor the leader of that victory: Generalissimus Josef Stalin."

The group collected 260,000 rubles ($4,000) for the project through online crowdfunding, said Khanzhin, 28. He claims that "60 percent" of locals back the idea of honoring Stalin.

A couple of hundred meters away from the bust, however, a wooden sign tells a different story: "On this spot we are building a monument to the victims of political repression."

Surgut, now the largest city in the natural-gas-rich Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District, was not formally part of Stalin's notorious gulag network. There were no camps there. But tens of thousands of dispossessed peasants from southern Russia, as well as thousands of representatives of deported ethnic groups such as Finns, Moldovans, and Volga Germans, were internally exiled there, euphemistically labelled "special resettlers."

Pavel Akimov, one of the organizers of the project to remember Stalin's victims, told RFE/RL what happened to him and his parents, independent farmers who were sent to Surgut from Tyumen Oblast in 1930.

"First they were sent to Tobolsk," says Akimov, 71. "Then to Khanty-Mansiisk, which was then called Ostyako-Vagulsk. From there, people were scattered around. My parents and others were simply dropped off on the banks of the river. They were given a few axes and shovels and told to dig themselves some bunkers. It was autumn. They were left to the whims of fate to survive."

'Special Resettlers'

Akimov's father died in 1950. His mother was only given an internal passport, which would have allowed her to leave the region, in 1964, but by then she and her three sons had nowhere to go. The family received an official certificate of "rehabilitation" -- meaning they were recognized as innocent victims of repression -- in 1991, the year the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Like Akimov, many people in Surgut and the surrounding region today are the descendants of Stalin's "special resettlers." Akimov says there are still 760 children of the exiled in Surgut itself, and a total of about 10,000-15,000 descendants and their families in the surrounding region.

For more than a year, Akimov's group, Our Memory, has been raising funds to erect the monument and negotiating with local officials on the details of the project.

Khanzhin told RFE/RL that there is no reason for the descendants of the exiled to object to the Stalin monument. After all, he says, the dictator gave their relatives work when he evacuated a fish cannery to the city from Odesa, in Ukraine, during the war.

"They could work for the good of the motherland," Khanzhin said. "We shouldn't confuse these people with Gulag prisoners who were convicted under the law. And their descendants, I think, are not so bad off now. After all, their relatives were not shot, and they were able to work for the benefit of the motherland, to help during the war. And now they themselves live in a wonderful, rich city."

"What's more, that's 'how the steel was tempered,'" he added, meaning how people who endured such hardships were made tough. "Stalin himself went through this school -- he was exiled, but he dealt with it and became not a criminal but a statesman!"

He acknowledges that there are many opinions about Stalin, but says accounts putting the number of people Stalin killed in the tens of millions are "myths" from the perestroika era.

Drenched In Red

Not everyone seems to agree with his views. At least twice during the bust's first two weeks, unknown vandals drenched it in blood-red paint. Local officials say the Stalin bust was installed without permission and that it might be removed following an investigation by the municipal monuments committee.

Khanzhin denies that his group intentionally placed the Stalin bust next to the place where the victims' memorial is to be. He says Russky Dukh has no objection to the proposed memorial.

"People need to know history and the two [monuments] will complement one another," he said. Moreover, Stalin himself, Khanzhin claimed, "was a victim of [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev's political repressions."

Akimov agrees that people need to know history -- but fears that young Russians of Khanzhin's generation know nothing of what happened to the Soviet people under Stalin.

"No one teaches them this and so no one knows," Akimov told RFE/RL. "In textbooks there is just the phrase 'there were repressions.' Two words -- that is all. And who remembers the summary executions of 1937 and 1938 when nearly 1 million people were shot -- just according to official figures."

"I have children, and they know that I was repressed. When I tell them about my parents, I get chills," he said. "When we were gathering information about the people who were shot here [in Surgut], I wrote it all down but for a long time I couldn't look at those papers. I began trembling when I saw those pages and how whole families were shot down. Not only healthy men who might do something illegal. But what about a 70-year-old? What was he shot for? But they stood him up against the wall together with small children. You don't have to experience that yourself -- just seeing such things on paper is horrifying."
An alleged militant for the Islamic State (IS) group has been detained in Russia's Tatarstan region.

The Federal Security Service said on September 21 that Sharifbek Shoyev, 38, is suspected of spending about three years in Syria, where he allegedly received training in terrorist camps.

He is also accused of fighting alongside IS militants.

Shoyev is facing up to 10 years in jail if he is found guilty of "taking part in the activities of an illegal armed group abroad."

Shoyev has been transferred to the city of his registered permanent residence, Yekaterinburg.

Officials have said at least 5,000 Russians and citizens of other ex-Soviet republics have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join IS fighters.

Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax
Human Rights Watch says it is checking reports that authorities in Tajikistan detained some 50 relatives of Tajik activists who had staged a protest at an OSCE conference in Poland this week.

HRWs Central Asia researcher Steve Swerdlow told RFE/RL that, if confirmed, the detentions would be defined as a "human rights violation."

Swerdlow said some 20 Tajik opposition and rights activists residing in Europe held a silent protest in Warsaw on September 19 during a conference session where the situation of human rights in Tajikistan was being discussed.

The protesters wore T-shirts with portraits of Tajik opposition politicians and lawyers who were jailed in the country in recent months. Human rights groups have called the cases politically motivated.

Tajik government officials told RFE/RL they do not have any information about the alleged arrests.

Sources in Tajikistan's State Committee for National Security said the detentions took place across the country and have nothing to do with the protesters in Poland.
ON MY MIND

If the Kremlin is really planning to establish a new Ministry of State Security, one big question looms: Who is going to head it?

Whom will Vladimir Putin trust to lead such a powerful new structure that is essentially a recreation of the old Soviet KGB?

In fact, it could be even stronger and less accountable than the KGB, which was tightly controlled by the Soviet Communist Party.

For the past year, Putin has been busy removing his old security service cronies from key posts, most recently dismissing Sergei Ivanov as Kremlin chief of staff. There are many reasons for this, but one appears to be that he wants to eliminate any potential challenge to his rule from within his court.

When Putin established a new National Guard, he made sure it answered to him alone and placed his uber-loyal former bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov, at its helm.

Judging from the lack of denials from the Kremlin and the spin from Kremlin surrogates (see below), the creation of a new Ministry of State Security looks increasingly likely.

And once we know who will be in charge of it, we will know whom -- other than Zolotov -- Putin truly trusts.

IN THE NEWS

In his final address to the UN General Assembly after nearly eight years in office, U.S. President Barack Obama said that Russia was seeking to regain "lost glory" through the use of force and warned that interference in its neighbors' affairs would make it less respected and less secure.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has told Ukraine's president that reforms to the country's energy sector are imperative and need to be accelerated.

The Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada has branded Russia's parliamentary elections illegitimate because they were also held in the forcibly annexed Crimean peninsula.

Russia says the Syria cease-fire can only resume if attacks against government forces stop.

The White House has explicitly blamed Russia for this week's deadly attack on a humanitarian aid convoy in Syria, an attack that prompted angry denunciations and put a week-old cease-fire on the brink of collapse.

WHAT I'M READING

More On The New KGB

It seems that nobody is denying reports that the Kremlin is preparing to establish a powerful new Ministry of State Security, or MGB, that would effectively resurrect the Soviet-era KGB. In fact, insiders are talking about it like it's a done deal -- and a good thing.

In an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, FSB General Aleksandr MIkhailov says it won't result in radical changes and could make the work of the security services more effective.

Likewise, Oleg Denisenko, the deputy chair of the outgoing State Duma's Security Committee, told the FAP news agency that creating the new super ministry would be justified because it would "optimize" the work of the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

Political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, meanwhile, writes in a piece for Slon.ru that the apparent creation of the MGB combined with United Russia's new super-majority in the State Duma represents a "victory for the party of the Chekists."

And writing in Vox, Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Studies in Prague argues that if Putin goes ahead with plans to create a Ministry of State Security, he may come to regret it.

Putin's Brain

Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, author of the books Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust As History And Warning, has a must-read piece in The New York Times on the influence of the early 20th century emigre Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin on Vladimir Putin's thinking.

"While Russian leaders consciously work to hollow out the idea of democracy in their own country, they also seek to discredit democracy abroad  including, this year, in the United States," Snyder writes

"Russias interventions in our presidential elections are not only the opportunistic support of a preferred candidate, Donald J. Trump, who backs Russian foreign policy. They are also the logical projection of the new ideology: Democracy is not a means of changing leadership at home, but a means of weakening enemies abroad. If we see politics as Ilyin did, Russias ritualization of elections becomes a virtue rather than a vice. Degrading democracy around the world would be a service to mankind."

The Ceasefire That Wasn't

Moscow-based foreign affairs analyst Vladimir Frolov weighs in on the flailing Syrian cease-fire, arguing that its terms were very favorable to Russia.

"It is therefore difficult to understand why from the beginning of the ceasefire, the Russian side, in particular the Ministry of Defense, was publicly very skeptical about its prospects," Frolov writes.

"The exaggerated abuses by opposition (up to using staged video footage) and otherwise ignored the gross violations of the truce by the Syrian government troops, including the blocking of humanitarian aid."

NATO And Russia's Nukes

Jacek Durkalec of the Polish Institute of International Affairs on NATO's adaptation to Russia's nuclear posture:

"In response to Russias nuclear threats, NATO has strengthened its nuclear deterrence. The Warsaw Summit aimed to send a message of resolve and readiness to face nuclear risks. The Alliances credibility depends, however, on its continued efforts in strategic communication, planning and exercises, and investment in maintaining effective capabilities," Durkalec writes.

The EU And The EEU

Sijbren de Jong of The Hague Center for Strategic Studies has just published a policy brief for the Swedish Institute of European Policy Studies looking at prospects for cooperation between the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union.

"Russias economic downturn and the wider regional fallout have significantly eroded the EEUs attractiveness as a motor for economic integration. Moreover, Moscow's tendency to let geopolitics and foreign policy considerations trump economic cooperation causes friction among EEU members," de Jong writes.

"The growing signs that individual EEU states are disillusioned with how membership in the Union has turned out should mean that there will be more willingness on their part to pursue a distinctly multi-vector foreign policy that seeks greater cooperation with both the EU, as well as China."

The Conquest Of Europe?

Former NATO commander Richard Barrons says Russia could deploy warplanes, ships, and troops to Europe within 48 hours. And it would take the Western alliance months to mount an effective counter-strike.

Estonian President: Don't Be Naive About Russia

In an interview with BuzzFeed, outgoing Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves warned European leaders against naivete in dealing with a revanchist Russia.



Crimea's Loyalist Ukrainians

Halya Coynash has a piece for the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group on the plight of Ukrainian citizens in Crimea who have refused to take Russian passports.
Karl Rove is relaxed but adamant: "The threat from Russia is definitely growing," he says. "Putin is becoming more bellicose; he feels he can push the edge of the envelope further than ever before."

The former senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff to U.S. President George W. Bush has no interest in being diplomatic as we sit on a pristine white sofa inside the Mystetskyi Arsenal in central Kyiv, Ukraine's capital city.

The arsenal is a grand building with high and rounded brick ceilings and large, arched, almost church-like, windows. Completed in 1801, it once housed the garrison charged with guarding Kyiv; now it stands as a monument to Ukrainian culture and art. Today, however, it houses the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference, sponsored by Ukrainian businessman Viktor Pinchuk, which has brought politicians and diplomats from all corners of the world to discuss the situation in Ukraine -- and that is simply impossible to do without discussing Russia.

Rove continues: "[Putin is doing] anything that can and will expand Russian influence to U.S.S.R.-era levels of power. Russia is back in the Middle East for the first time since 1972. As well as Ukraine, he is menacing the Baltics and the Nordic countries, and critically, he is willing to tolerate the cost to his country, which is considerable."

He's right. Putin first began to reassert Russian power in the Georgian war of 2008. He followed this, in 2014, by illegally annexing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine. Late last year, Russian forces entered Syria. It's been a heady few years for the Kremlin.

But Russia has suffered considerably as a result of all this adventurism. International sanctions and declining oil prices have combined to pummel its economy. When he began to consolidate his power in the early 2000s, Putin's deal with the Russian people was simple: They would receive economic stability -- and, critically, much higher standards of living -- in exchange for a loss of freedoms. Today, that deal no longer looks sustainable, so a new, unspoken one now lies on the table: In exchange for a (further) loss of freedoms and (now) economic hardship, the Russian people will swell with national pride at a Russia -- once mocked and belittled by the West -- now retaking its rightful place at the center of global power politics. Economic growth is out; chauvinism is in.

Mass Support For Putin

At the moment, it is a deal that seems to be holding. During my visit to Moscow and Siberia in April, it was clear that beyond educated and globally engaged millennials, mass support for the president still existed. "Russia is strong once more" was a comment I heard, in various formulations, again and again during my time there. Criticism of Putin was largely confined to journalists or tattooed youths in the capital's hipster bars.

Putin has arguably played his cards well, especially when it comes to his latest global show of strength: Syria. The emergence of the self-declared Islamic State extremist group (IS) in the region allowed Moscow to intervene in the conflict under the guise of combating the group's horrific atrocities. In essence, it has assumed a leadership role in Washington's largest foreign-policy initiative of the 21st century: the "Global War on Terror." Putin is using American policy to further Russian ends. He has used the doctrine as cover to further expand Russia's sphere of influence; for Putin, Islamic State is a geopolitical gift he can use to secure his country's strategic influence in the Middle East.

And some argue that he has been allowed to do so by exploiting Western indecision. Rove adds: "President [Barack] Obama has mishandled Syria from the beginning. You don't say the use of chemical weapons is a red line and when they are deployed not take any effective action. Now we are seeing close coordination between Russia and the U.S. in combating Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, which may not be the best of moves -- we will have to see how it works in practice. [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad is a Russian client and Russia is merely concerned that he remain in power, despite the destruction of Syria and the threat to Sunni Muslims he poses. Moscow is merely concerned with strengthening Assad's hold over part of the country, which also includes its [Russia's] naval facility [at Tartus]."

Depressingly Prophetic

Rove's words proved depressingly prophetic. The cease-fire that had been brokered between the U.S. and Russia between forces loyal to Assad and the assorted rebel groups opposing it -- designed to allow Moscow and Washington to join forces and smash IS and the other jihadist groups -- agreed upon on September 12, is over. Even worse, U.S. air strikes that were first believed to have mistakenly killed 60 Syrian troops instead of IS now appear to have killed regime prisoners forced to put on Syrian army uniforms.

Putin claimed that while the Syrian regime was "fully abiding" by the cease-fire, rebel groups (some of which the U.S. backs) were using it merely as an opportunity to regroup, and he accused Washington of being more concerned with retaining its military capacity in the area than with trying to weed out the extremist rebel groups from the more "moderate" ones.

On the ground, things appear to be in more disarray than ever. Perhaps most shockingly, footage emerged of Free Syrian Army rebels (FSA), the group with arguably the closest ties to Washington, ordering U.S. Special Forces out of the town of Al-Rai in northern Syria, screaming in the process that "Christians and Americans have no place among us." Hours later, U.S. soldiers reportedly returned to the town accompanied by FSA fighters, and the rebels who led the protest were reportedly "discharged," likely under orders from Ankara.

A 'Net Loss'

All of this suits Russia just fine -- for the moment. The question remains: How long can it sustain its imperial adventures? Rove concluded: "Putin has temporarily succeeded through the popular support of the Russian people, but that will decline after another year of economic stagnation. At the same time, his actions have forced Europe to rethink its energy policy" -- whereby Europe is heavily reliant on Russian gas -- "so at the same time he is also losing customers. Overall, this is going to be a net loss for him."

In the meantime, however, Putin marches onward, with troops still massed on Ukraine's border while he swaggers across the global stage, trying -- ostensibly -- to bring "peace" to Syria while at the same time trying -- ostensibly -- to eradicate the threat from IS. The reality that Russian forces have in fact spent their time in Syria mostly attacking non-IS targets who are hostile to Assad in order to prop up their client is merely the final layer of hypocrisy within which the brutal cynicism of Russia's Syria policy -- especially regarding IS -- is coated.

At a panel discussion at the YES conference on September 17, the former director of policy planning for President George W. Bush, Richard Haass, struck a glum note. "[Former Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev still had to deal with the Politburo during the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis," he told an audience of Ukrainian MPs, foreign diplomats, and journalists.

"But I see no equivalent checks and balances for Putin. In fact, I'm not even sure there is a Russian expression for 'checks and balances.'"


U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has told Ukraine's president that reforms to the country's energy sector are imperative and need to be accelerated.

The White House said in a statement on September 21 that Biden also told visiting President Petro Poroshenko that he needed to do more to clean up Ukraine's judiciary and prosecutor's office, which have been tainted by corruption for years.

The two officials met in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian president's office to the meeting.

Biden also told Poroshenko that the U.S. administration is prepared to go ahead with another $1 billion sovereign loan guarantee for Kyiv to help it shore up its finances.

Biden has been the U.S. administration's point person in dealings with Ukraine and one of its staunchest supporters as Kyiv struggles with Russia's forcible annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the Russia-backed insurgency in the eastern Donbas region.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has criticized Russia for being "the instigator and major participant" in the ongoing deadly conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Poroshenko told the UN General Assembly on September 21 that Russia was financing, sponsoring, and coordinating "terrorist groups which have committed countless crimes against my compatriots."

He added that "the terrorist component of the undeclared hybrid war that Russia wages against Ukraine is evident."

More than 9,600 people have been killed since separatist forces and Ukrainian government troops began fighting in April 2014.

Poroshenko also used his UN speech to criticize what he called the UN Security Council's "inefficiency" in resolving the war in Syria or reacting more forcefully to "Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea."

He said the council's limitations "undermines the mission" of the UN and "challenges its existence."

Poroshenko met with U.S. President Barack Obama later on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session. The Ukrainian president said the two discussed the next steps in implementing the Minsk agreements and U.S. financial aid to Kyiv of some $1 billion in loan guarantees.

In Minsk, Ukrainian officials and Russia-backed separatist representatives agreed on September 21 to pull back troops and heavy weapons from several areas in eastern Ukraine in an effort to uphold a tenuous peace deal reached in the Belarusian capital in 2015.

Based on reporting by AP and Interfax
When the door opens into the bright little shop at 16 W. Bank St. in Old Towne Petersburg, a doorbell goes off. Its a Dutch doorbell with a distinct sound, shipped all the way from the Netherlands for the sole purpose of greeting the customers who patronize Petersburg Provisions, one of the citys newest retail establishments.

Inside, freshly baked baguettes wrapped in white paper and extra-large cookies packed with salted caramel and nuts or bright blueberries beckon from wire baskets and cake stands. There are baskets of heirloom tomatoes, peppers and other seasonal produce, plus hot coffee and a limited number of kitchen staples, such as pasta, olive oils, hand towels and soaps.

Refrigerated cases hold locally sourced milk, butter and eggs, as well as prepared foods: crabcakes, savory meatloaf wrapped in bacon, chunky homemade chili and soups. Scribbled on a chalkboard toward the back are the days offerings of salads  egg, potato, smoked salmon and more  plus Cuban, Italian, turkey, and ham and cheese sandwiches.

Petersburg Provisions had a soft opening Aug. 11, and officially opened earlier this month. Owners Andrea and Frits Huntjens are well-known within Richmonds culinary scene  Frits, for his upscale Museum District restaurant, 1 North Belmont, which closed in December 2009, and Andrea, for Sophisticated Soirees, a Richmond-based catering company.

Richmond, however, is in their rear-view mirror. The husband-and-wife team picked up and moved south several months ago, settling into a town house a few blocks from their store in a building thats been around since the late 1860s.

Geographically, its miles from the Huntjenses former suburban Henrico County existence, but worlds apart in every other way.

As she prepares to sample her husbands freshly made pimento cheese  which she jokingly calls Petersburg crack for its addicting nature  Andreas response to inquiring minds is simple: She and Frits wanted to live and work in a place where community had real meaning, where they could make a difference for people whove been marginalized within their own neighborhoods.

As life would show them, by a series of twists and turns, 16. W. Bank St. was just what they were looking for.

***

A sunshine-yellow bicycle rests in one of the large storefront windows, which face the Siege Museum, closed for renovations, across the street.

As Andrea made the days chili and Frits worked on sandwiches and other goods at the store, construction resumed about four blocks away at an octagonal-shaped building thats seen a variety of uses during its 137 years, from bars to farmers markets.

Frits is one of three owners of that building, and early next year, it will open as The Farmers Market Restaurant & Bar.

Its also the catalyst for the Huntjenses lifestyle change and, ultimately, the establishment of Petersburg Provisions.

Andrea explained the connections that brought them to Petersburg. Shed met Sandy Graham during a catering job several years ago in a nearby special events venue he owned, a historic home in Old Towne called the McIlwaine House. Graham happened to know Frits from decades before, when Frits first moved to the U.S.  to Richmond  to oversee the opening of the Richmond Marriott Hotel. Graham shared an idea that Andrea took home to Frits.

Graham had a concept for a restaurant in the old farmers market building, and ultimately asked Frits to help him with planning and menus and essentially running the restaurant. Their restaurant will feature seafood and locally sourced ingredients.

Andrea said she had her doubts, given that much of the news coming out of Petersburg wasnt particularly good. But they had friends here and began visiting, and soon, opinions changed.

We started coming down here and we were like, I dont think anybody knows what a great little place this really is, she said. Frits took the job, and the couple ended up buying a home just minutes away. As they assimilated into the community, they were often asked about opening a grocery store.

To this day, Andrea said, she has no idea where that idea came from, as they had no plans to open a grocery store. She came to learn, however, that Petersburgs downtown area was a food desert. The closest grocery stores are a few miles away, and for some residents are not accessible by public transportation.

As work on the restaurant got underway, she learned of a grant program aimed at rejuvenating depressed downtown areas. She applied for and won the grant.

Bruce Clarke, a chef who most recently led the cooking school at Southern Season until the store closed earlier this year, is working with the Huntjenses. Rather than retiring, he said, he decided to help one of his former students. Clarke was Andreas culinary instructor at J. Sargeant Reynolds nearly 30 years ago.

So, I opened a grocery store, she said. Never having operated a retail shop, the Huntjenses decided to continue the catering services, and through that, also offer prepared meals at their shop for folks seeking lunch or dinner to go.

I still get to cook, which Im passionate about, she said, and we get to help the community.

Through some sort of serendipity, here we are, Andrea said.

***

The stores sign hanging out front features a black pug  the Huntjenses dog, Mopsie  riding the same bicycle that sits in the window. Like the doorbell, a gift from Frits brother, the bike is another nod to his familys Dutch heritage and adds to the colorful facade along a street buzzing with activity.

Shamekia Smith was born and raised in Petersburg and works within walking distance of Petersburg Provisions. On a recent weekday, she and co-worker Shahna Williams stopped by to grab lunch  some macaroni and cheese and homemade cookies. It was their first time in the store, which they likened to a gourmet shop.

Its really nice, Smith said. It has a nice array of things (and) you can just come in and grab lunch.

As for the new businesses that are beginning to transform Old Towne Petersburg, I love the growth thats happening down here, Smith continued. We need it so bad because, for a time, there wasnt a lot to do in Petersburg. She said being able to stay in the city on weekends for entertainment and dining rather than going to Richmond and other places is a nice change.

Williams, a Goochland County resident, said the shop has a sort of gourmet feel (thats) definitely new for this area, she said. It offers a lot of choices that you dont see down this way.

Which is a big reason the Huntjenses made the leap. Much of Old Townes customer base comes from right around town, they said, but also Colonial Heights, Chester and Fort Lee. Its the only place offering grocery items in Old Towne, though Andrea acknowledges that shes not trying to compete with big grocery retailers. Rather, its about having somewhere convenient to go for milk or cheese or good bread, which she said neighbors have asked for.

In addition to a thriving restaurant scene, more people are seeking to move to the area, the Huntjenses said. Two apartments are under construction right above the shop, Frits said.

Andrea likened the changes to the period of time when new restaurants and businesses ventured into Richmonds Church Hill, creating a destination zone for small businesses and restaurants and, ultimately, sparking new life into the residential redevelopment there.

In short, shes happy. Ive never felt so fulfilled.
The State Water Control Board will decide on a water-discharge permit today that will govern the dewatering of coal ash ponds at Dominion Virginia Powers 1,640-megawatt Chesterfield Power Station, the largest fossil-fuel power station in Virginia.

Technically a re-issuance of an existing permit, it will also include other wastewater streams at the plant, which will continue to burn coal, unlike other Dominion plants that have switched to natural gas generation. Instead of using ash ponds, the plant will convert to dry management of coal ash, a $300 million project that includes the construction of a new lined landfill onsite.

The decision will be the fourth rendered by the board on draining coal ash ponds by treating and releasing the wastewater to adjacent waterways after the federal Environmental Protection Agency, acting in the wake of major coal ash spills in North Carolina and Tennessee, established new regulations governing coal ash management. The board has approved draining permits for Dominions Bremo and Possum Point stations and Appalachian Powers Clinch River plant. The actual closure of the ponds, by capping with a synthetic liner, will be governed by a separate solid waste permit process.

And though past permit decisions have been hotly contested by environmental and riverkeeper groups, at least part of the controversy over Chesterfields permit has been allayed by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and Dominion agreeing to incorporate additional treatment protocols for the wastewater from the two Chesterfield ponds, which contain nearly a total of 13.4 million tons of ash.

The utility made similar agreements for enhanced treatment when testing reveals certain levels of heavy metals such as arsenic, selenium, lead, copper, antimony and thallium with the James River Association for the Bremo plant and with Prince William County for the Possum Point station. But even with those stipulations, some will press the board today for stricter limits, particularly given treatment testing results from those power stations that show Dominion hasnt come close to its permit limits.

Theyre doing a good job removing toxic metals from that waste stream, said Brad McLane, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville. The permit allows arsenic to be as high as 440 parts per billion. The experience at Possum Point and Bremo has been that arsenic has not been over 50 parts per billion. Wed like to see end-of-pipe limits that are set more stringently.

The group will also press for stricter temperature controls on cooling water entering Farrar Gut and ask the board to eliminate mixing zones, which would allow Dominion to take into account dilution caused by adding the treated pond water to the James River when calculating discharge limits.

We want to tighten up some of the requirements and shorten some of the time frames for Clean Water Act requirements. McLane said.

He acknowledged, however that the board has usually deferred to the Department of Environmental Quality. DEQ spokesman Bill Hayden said the agency will recommend that the board approve the permit in its current form.

Its at least recent experience that its a challenge to get the water board to depart from what the DEQ recommends. They have a tendency to defer to the agency staff, McLane said.

Robert Richardson, a Dominion spokesman, said the company will spend about $80 million on water treatment technology involved in closing the ash ponds at Chesterfield and converting to dry management, in which ash from power generation is conveyed through tubes to the new landfill.

He said the permit up for consideration today incorporates new stringent limits for the station and will ensure that discharges from the station over the next six years are fully protective of aquatic life and other uses of the James River.

***

The permit hearing comes a day after poll conducted on behalf of an environmental group found that a majority of Virginia voters disagree with Gov. Terry McAuliffes handling of coal ash disposal and his support for the construction of a pair of natural gas pipelines.

The poll was conducted by The Cromer Group, which has done public opinion research for political candidates and organizations, nonprofits, private corporations and media outlets, among others, including on environmental issues. The agency asked 732 Virginia registered voters selected at random two questions.

One asked if they supported the governors enthusiastic embrace of a pair of proposed pipelines, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will transport fracked natural gas through Virginia from the Marcellus and Utica basins, which cover parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Opposition has centered on the risk of pipeline failure, destruction and seizure of private property through eminent domain and the potential for increased pollution and drinking water contamination.

Fifty-five percent of respondents said they did not support the governors stance, while 28 percent did and 17 percent were unsure or did not have an opinion.

The other referenced Dominions proposal largely to cap in place its coal ash ponds, with the exception of Possum Point, where the ash is being consolidated into a pond with a clay liner.

In other states, such as Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, utilities are removing ash from the banks of waterways and depositing it in lined landfills, either voluntarily or to comply with legal settlements or state regulations. In some cases, however, those closures will take considerably longer than Dominions plans. And they are not uniformly excavating all ash. Georgia Power, for example has opted to excavate ash at facilities near waterways but close in place others.

Dominion called the poll an obvious effort to use biased questions based on incorrect information to slant the results.

Dominions plans for closing coal ash ponds as well as building the ACP protect the environment. To say otherwise is untrue, Dominion Virginia Power spokesman David Botkins said in an email. Over the last many months, Dominion has developed plans to close our ponds by consolidating the ash on station property. EPA endorses that approach.

Environmental groups such as the James River Association, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network and the Southern Environmental Law Center have pointed to testing they say shows the existing ash ponds have been leaching contaminants such as lead, arsenic and other metals into waterways for years. Dominion has maintained its closure plans will protect the environment and that there is no evidence that there have been any offsite impacts from their ponds.

Seventy-one percent of respondents said McAuliffe should follow the approach of other Southern states in handling coal ash waste. Only 14 percent said the governor should support Dominions approach to handling coal ash waste. Fifteen percent were unsure or undecided.

The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percent at a 95 percent level of confidence, which means that at least 95 percent of the time the survey results will differ by no more than the 4 percent margin of voter if every voter in Virginia had been interviewed.

Christina Nuckols, a spokeswoman for the governor, said in a statement that McAuliffe has made it clear to state agencies that they are charged with ensuring that all of these projects are handled in a way that protects human health and minimizes the impact on Virginias natural resources.

She said the governor supports the proposed pipelines because of the tremendous economic benefits that will be generated as communities across Virginia obtain access to new energy sources but has also called for them to be developed in a way that minimizes impacts to the environment, landowners and historic resources.

She added that the Virginia Department of Environmental Qualitys requirements for coal ash pond closure exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requirements and state laws.

The agency is requiring utilities to obtain separate water and solid waste permits to protect human health and aquatic life, she said. Those projects will be closely monitored to ensure that they remain in compliance at all times with the state permits.

In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and Virginia Organizing, a nonprofit that has allied with McAuliffes administration on restoring voting rights to felons, also announced a picket of McAuliffes offices on Oct. 3, 4 and 5 to call for more executive action on the environmental front. It will be the latest broadside from similar groups aimed at the Democratic governors environmental record.
Man wanted in Colonial Heights for missing court date on drug, firearms charges arrested in South America

A man sought by Colonial Heights police after skipping a court appearance has been arrested in South America.

Andrew Griffith Williams, 47, is awaiting extradition to Virginia after being arrested in Bogota, Colombia, Colonial Heights police said in a news release. Williams was wanted for failure to appear in Colonial Heights Circuit Court on drug and firearms charges.

In addition to Colonial Heights police, other agencies involved in Williams' arrest were the U. S. Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force, Diplomatic Security Service, U. S. Marshals International Investigations Branch and Migracion Colombia.
Residents of Petersburg who had their first chance to sound off Tuesday on a replacement for acting City Manager Dironna M. Belton soundly rejected a North Carolina administrator in contention during a spirited public comment session at the Union Train Station.

Speakers voiced support for Belton and derided the Petersburg City Council for courting Rochelle Small-Toney, currently a deputy city manager in Fayetteville, N.C., who resigned a previous position as city manager of Savannah, Ga., for the post.

Small-Toney visited the city last week as council members held a special meeting to consider candidates. No agreement was reached at last Wednesdays meeting, but speculation about her potential hire brought media accounts critical of Small-Toneys time in Georgia to the fore.

Council members must not be concerned about having a skilled financial manager at the helm, said city resident Barb Rudolph, citing media reports of controversy over Small-Toneys financial management. Thats not at all the type of leadership we need in Petersburg.

It would appear their concerns were heard. Late into the meeting and ahead of a closed session in which the positions of city manager and city attorney were slated for discussion, the council voted unanimously to seek a recruitment firms help in finding a new city executive.

The vote drew applause, but it was not immediately clear where the cash-strapped city would find the money for such an endeavor.

The meeting came one day after state lawmakers briefed on the citys challenges voiced concerns that any state-backed financial bailout for Petersburg would set a dangerous precedent. The city has not had a balanced budget since 2006.

Petersburg has not formally requested state assistance to date, Del. R. Steven Landes, R-Augusta, told members of the House Appropriations Committee on Monday.

But with mounting Virginia Retirement System obligations and a $1.4 million payment due Oct. 1 to the Virginia Resources Authority  which finances public infrastructure projects  the citys options are increasingly limited.

If Petersburg misses the Oct. 1 deadline, the state could move to intercept state aid to the city until its obligations are met, the states finance secretary, Richard D. Ric Brown, told lawmakers Monday.

Auditors have identified a projected $12 million shortfall in the current fiscal years budget; the city had owed $18.8 million in bills at the close of the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Councilwoman Treska Wilson-Smith rolled out plans to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and boost transparency through the establishment of a citizen audit committee; monthly financial reports to the public; and prohibition against salary increases without council approval.

The latter followed revelations that select city administrators had received a combined total of nearly $1.7 million in combined raises in recent years, Wilson-Smith said.

She called for cuts to be made to departmental budgets; for the citys museums to be turned over to a nonprofit; for the closure of the citys golf course; and either an increase in fees for the citys Freedom Support Center for veterans or its closure, among other proposals.

The uncertainty over the citys future is weighing on residents, said Ella Sykes. We go to bed every night worried to death  not knowing whether water will turn on in the morning, Sykes said. I love it, I want to stay here, but we got to do better.

The council voted 5-1, with Vice Mayor Brian A. Moore dissenting, to reduce by half a 20 percent reduction in the salaries of Moore and the city assessor.

Interim City Attorney Mark Flynn told the board that the reduction  which was 10 percent higher than a reduction to other city workers approved in July  was in violation of their employment contracts.

At a time when existing and prospective businesses have fled, councilors decided they could not afford to turn down a request from an existing restaurant to extend its hours into the early morning, allowing the spot to function as a nightclub from Thursdays to Sundays.

Members voted unanimously to grant Plaza Mexico permission to extend its hours to 2 a.m. on certain days against the advice of the citys Planning Commission, which voted 5-2 against the proposal. Several residents spoke in favor of the special-use permit.
Members of the Richmond Crusade for Voters voted Tuesday night to support Joe Morrissey for mayor, giving the candidate his first endorsement from a prominent area political group.

The Crusade was established in 1956 with the goal of increasing effective black participation in Richmonds political process, and currently has about 100 members.

Of 38 members who attended Tuesdays meeting, 18 supported Morrissey, according to organizers. The runner-up for the endorsement was Jack Berry, who received 10 votes.

Personally, I think it has to do with the fact that he has name recognition, hes been in politics awhile and hes done a lot of defense work (as an attorney), said Corey Nicholson, the groups president. Hes known a lot in the black community.

Marty Jewell, a Crusade member who supported Morrissey, agreed. People know Joe Morrissey, he said. Those who consider themselves left outside of the economic mainstream, I suspect, had more support for Morrissey than those who are financially comfortable. I think thats his appeal.

Morrissey was leading the field of eight mayoral candidates at the end of August with 28 percent of the vote, according to a poll conducted by Christopher Newport University. His strongest support came from black and lower-income voters, the poll found.

Morrissey has made the economic divide in Richmond a theme of his campaign and stressed the plight of Richmonds poorest residents in his campaign and promised to do more than his opponents to address issues facing them.

In a statement, Morrisseys campaign said he was honored to receive the endorsement of this revered and venerable organization, calling it the most important endorsement of the 2016 mayoral campaign.

Before Tuesday, he had not attracted endorsements from major political groups, who have instead gravitated toward Levar Stoney and Berry.

The Crusade also voted on endorsements for City Council and School Board candidates.

On the City Council, they endorsed Harry Warner in the 1st District, Charlie Diradour in the 2nd District, Milondra Coleman in the 3rd District, Johnny Walker in the 4th District, Garrett Sawyer in the 5th District, Ellen Robertson in the 6th District, Cynthia Newbille in the 7th District, Reva Trammell in the 8th District and Michael Jones in the 9th District.
Virginia Commonwealth University police have arrested a man accused of grabbing a woman's buttocks on Monday on the school's Monroe Park campus.

Doniell L. Herman Jr., 19, of Richmond, surrendered to police Tuesday at the urging of a friend who had seen media coverage of the incident, VCU police said.

Herman is charged with one misdemeanor count of sexual battery. He was released on a summons.

VCU police continue to investigate a sexual battery case at the university's Student Commons on Sept. 10.
Three Henrico County men have been arrested in connection with a nonfatal shooting Tuesday on Jahnke Road in South Richmond.

Officers were called shortly after 4 p.m. to the 6300 block of Jahnke Road, where they found a man with a gunshot wound. The victim was taken to a local hospital with wounds that were not considered life-threatening.

The suspects were arrested after officers from the Richmond Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Richmond Police Department stopped a vehicle on Interstate 95 just north of Broad Street shortly after the shooting, police said.

The men were arrested without incident, and several firearms were found in their car, police said. They are Fletcher Robinson Jr., 26, of the 2600 block of Hilliard Road; Waverly M. Robinson, 20, also of the 2600 block of Hilliard Road; and Satwon L. McKnight, 19, of the 5200 block of Lewis Road in Sandston.

All three were charged with attempted robbery and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, police said. Other charges were under consideration.

Anyone with further information about the case is asked to call Major Crimes Detective Jay Brissette at (804) 646-3867 or Crime Stoppers at (804) 780-1000. Citizens also can text Crime Stoppers at 274637, using the keyword iTip followed by the tip.
The first of three victims testified in the opening day of trial for a Richmond man accused of robbing and abducting two men and shooting one in the head after a police chase that ended in a shootout.

Frank E. Reid, 37, of the 1100 block of Williamsburg Road, has been charged with malicious wounding, attempted capital murder of a police officer, carjacking, two counts each of abduction and robbery, and seven firearm charges.

Orran Brown Jr., senior counsel at the Rocketts Landing law firm BrownGreer, testified Tuesday in Richmond Circuit Court that on Nov. 16 he and a colleague, Russ Turner, a senior analyst, had gone to lunch and were filling up at a gas station in the 2600 block of East Main Street when a man approached the SUV asking for money.

Brown, who had gotten out of the car to finish pumping the gas, said he saw the man leaning into his car through the open drivers side window talking to Turner.

Brown described the man, whom he never identified as Reid, as having an aggressive posture and that he was visibly angry.

 Hey, give me a few dollars,  Brown recalled the man saying. It was not necessarily a question.

When the men said they didnt have any cash, the man attempted to open the rear drivers-side door, telling them to give him a ride.

I felt something very hard hit my chin, Brown said. Its the barrel of a gun. A black, metal gun.

During his 90-minute testimony, Brown methodically walked the jury through every thought he had and movement he made during the exchange, which he estimated lasted no longer than 20 minutes. Brown said he gave the man his wallet and cellphone and Turners wallet and cellphone.

There was a moment when I was hopeful that was the end of the exchange, Brown said. Hes calm. Hes angry obviously. But hes not yelling or anything. Not making a scene. Hes in control of the gun. Comfortable with it.

Then Brown testified that he saw the man throw what looked like one of the cellphones onto the ground and get into the back seat of the car.

I mentally prepared for a very different type of exchange, Brown said.

Brown said he made an effort not to turn and look at or view Reid through the rear-view mirror. He told the man he had $1,200 in the bank and would get it for him. The man had him drive to the bank. On the way there, Brown said the man flipped through their wallets and read from their identification.

He started saying over and over (Russ) name and address, like he was committing it to memory, Brown said on the stand. Then he said, I know where you are. I know where you live. Every time he talked to us about shooting us, I vividly remember Russ saying, Please, dont do that sir. 

The man instructed Brown to go into the bank and not use the cash machine, which has withdraw limits, Brown said. When he arrived at the Bank of America, at 1111 E. Main St., Brown said he alerted the tellers about a man holding his friend hostage in the car.

When police arrived outside the bank, the SUV took off with Turner apparently behind the wheel, according to a Richmond police officers testimony. Richmond Detective Kevin Hiner followed the car and saw another person in the car pop up from the back seat. Hiner said he saw the man in the back hitting the driver in the head.

The chase lasted about 30 minutes. It started in Richmond, proceeded through Henrico County, and ended in a crash near North 25th and R streets in Church Hill, according to police.

Police identified the man in the car as Reid. Police said Reid shot Turner, who is expected to testify today, then he shot at officers. Master patrol officer Matthew Cavanaugh was shot in the ear  he is also slated to testify. Police then opened fire hitting Reid five times, including three times in the head.

Reid, who served about 15 years in prison for a 1999 robbery and shooting, still appears to be recovering from the injuries he sustained in November. Hes partially paralyzed, and remained seated throughout the trial Tuesday.

At the start of Tuesdays proceedings, Reid asked to represent himself and for a continuance so he could prepare. Both motions were denied. Reid at first refused to change from his black and white jail jumpsuit, saying his lawyers had brought him funeral clothes.

Im still living and those are clothes for a dead man, Reid said, asking for brighter clothing. For inspiration, he said.

A compromise was reached when a bright teal shirt was made available. But he remained in the jail-issue bottoms  another reason he was allowed to sit throughout.

There was mention of Reids mental competency. He suffers from a traumatic brain injury from the shootout with police.

But an evaluation performed last month found it crystal clear that the defendant is quite competent to stand trial, said Assistant Commonwealths Attorney Elizabeth Hobbs.
Virginia Commonwealth University police are investigating a sexual assault that happened over the weekend, according to an alert sent to students and staff.

The assault happened early Sunday in an on-campus residential housing facility, the alert said. The attacker was known to the victim.
A former member of the House of Delegates formed a political action committee last week that plans to campaign against Richmond mayoral hopeful Joseph D. Morrissey.

Albert C. Pollard represented the Northern Neck at the same time as Morrissey, a fellow Democrat, represented parts of Henrico County, Richmond and Charles City County.

Pollard said he formed the committee, called A Stronger Richmond Community, because hes concerned about what would happen in the state capital should Morrissey be elected to lead the city.

Ill be very blunt with you  I served with Joe Morrissey, and I am deeply concerned about the future of the city of Richmond if he were to be elected mayor, said Pollard, who lives in Irvington.

Asked about the committee and its plans, Morrissey said Pollard never voiced one degree of sentiment opposing me while the two served in the General Assembly together.

But Im not surprised its another Terry McAuliffe acolyte that is weighing in, and he, like everybody else, is entitled to his opinion, he said.

Pollard said he has donated $500 to the committee to kick things off but declined to say what his fundraising goal is or speak more broadly about the committees strategy.

Pollard has donated $250 to one of Morrisseys opponents, former Secretary of the Commonwealth Levar Stoney. He stressed, however, that his effort is not connected with Stoneys campaign.
An 18-year-old Hanover County man has been arrested and charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of two passengers in a truck authorities said he was driving when it hit a tree in Mechanicsville.

Nickolas Seth Fleming, 18, was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday and arrested later that day, the Hanover County Sheriffs Office said Wednesday.

After being indicted, Fleming went to Pamunkey Regional Jail and turned himself over to the lead investigator in the case, according to Sgt. James Cooper of the Sheriffs Office.

Fleming was released on a $20,000 bond.

According to authorities, Fleming was the driver of a 2001 Dodge Ram pickup truck that went off Cold Harbor Road while rounding a curve and crashed into a tree at about 10:30 p.m. April 23, killing Dylan Ballard, 17, and Elliott Hinton, 22, both of Mechanicsville.

Fleming and three additional passengers were seriously injured and taken to VCU Medical Center for treatment, the sheriffs office said.

In court records, detectives noted that the extended-cab pickup was full of beer cans and smelled of alcohol, and there also was a strong smell of alcohol about the person of Mr. Fleming. A marijuana smoking device also was recovered from the truck.

Authorities have not said whether Fleming had been drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana.

Five of the six people who were in the truck were students at Lee-Davis High School or had graduated in the past few years. Ballard and Fleming were seniors, and Hinton was a 2011 Lee-Davis graduate.

Fleming faces up to 20 years total for the two counts of involuntary manslaughter, which are class 5 felonies. In other recent involuntary manslaughter cases in Hanover, offenders have been given active sentences that range from six months to 11 years.
A Richmond man whose brother has been convicted in a summer 2015 murder and abduction in Mosby Court is on trial for the same crimes.

Marcus T. Coles, 28, of the 600 block of East Gladstone Avenue, is accused of first-degree murder, abduction and two counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony in the fatal shooting of Davie Young, 26, of Hopewell. Hes also charged with the abduction of a witness who saw the July 24, 2015, shooting in the East End public housing neighborhood.

A jury was selected and prosecutors began presenting their evidence Wednesday. According to Richmond Commonwealths Attorney Michael N. Herrings opening statement, he plans to present the same evidence and witnesses from the trial of Coles brother, John Jerry James Jr.

In June, James pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and abduction two days into that proceeding. He received a 32-year sentence.

Herring said Wednesday it was Coles who fired the fatal shot, not his brother. But since the two men were working together, theyre equally responsible  a legal principle called concert of action.

Coles attorney Melvin Todd said his client will admit he was there, and fought with Young that day, but was unarmed. Todd said a prosecution witness, Youngs girlfriend, who was with him when he died, will corroborate that statement.

The commonwealth will fail to meet its heavy burden of proof, Todd said.

On July 24, 2015, Young stopped at a friends home on Gay Street in Mosby Court while his girlfriend and two kids waited in his car, according to previous testimony. When he knocked and got no answer at the friends apartment, Young struck up a conversation with a neighbor, who was dating James at the time. As Young was leaving, James and Coles arrived and a fight broke out.

Youngs girlfriend said it was James who pulled out a gun and shot Young several times. James girlfriend, who witnessed the fight from her front porch, said James and Coles both brandished guns and that James shot Young in the leg while Coles shot Young in the side, which proved to be the fatal shot, as he attempted to drive away.

Young drove off but crashed less than a quarter-mile away, near the intersection of Coalter and Redd streets. He was taken to VCU Medical Center, where he died.

The next day, James pulled his girlfriend from her apartment and into a car driven by Coles. The brothers took her into the woods and threatened her, she testified.
Richmond police Chief Gerald Smith resigned Tuesday after a 27-month tenure that included calls for his resignation from some of the departments rank-and-file and an ongoing controversy over his comments regarding an alleged mass shooting plot at Dogwood Dell.
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence returned to Virginia on Tuesday and told a crowd that braved a rainstorm in Williamsburg that Virginia could make the difference for Donald Trump in the presidential election.

Im going to pick up the phone with this soggy arm and call the man and tell him how great you all are, the Indiana governor told the crowd as rain poured down outside the Colonial Capitol.

Virginians are tough  and youre going to bring Virginia home for Donald Trump on November 8th, arent you?

It was the ninth campaign trip to Virginia by Trump and/or Pence since late July, when Democrat Hillary Clinton named Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., as her running mate. Earlier Tuesday, Pence held a roundtable with military veterans in Norfolk aboard the USS Wisconsin, a decommissioned battleship.

On Saturday, Trump will hold a 6 p.m. rally at the Berglund Center in Roanoke.

In Williamsburg, Pence criticized Clinton, who on Monday had rebuked Trump for what she called his irresponsible, reckless rhetoric following the weekend attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

Hillary, Ive got news for you here in Virginia, Pence said. Strength does not give comfort to the adversaries of the United States of America, weakness does. And thats going to end the day that Donald Trump becomes the president of the United States of America.

Alluding to the rain, Pence added: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are all wet on the economy, too.

Del. Marcia S. Price, D-Newport News, spoke at a news conference in Williamsburg ahead of Pences speech. She criticized Trump for spending years stoking false rumors that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States.

On Friday, Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was born in the U.S.

Trump has refused to apologize or take any accountability for his years of divisive rhetoric, peddling a bigoted attack against our countrys first black president, Price said, according to the Clinton campaign. Instead, he stood up and told more lies about the origin of the conspiracy theory.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
An 18-month-old girl was crushed to death by a vehicle in Greene County on Monday afternoon.

According to Virginia State Police, the incident occurred at 4:30 p.m. Monday on Daniels Park Road in Ruckersville.

A 25-year-old woman was washing her 2002 Ford Explorer and turned away momentarily from the vehicle when her 5-year-old daughter got into the front seat of the vehicle and unknowingly pulled the gear shift out of park and into neutral, according to police. The Explorer began rolling backward and struck the womans other daughter. Despite the mothers immediate response and efforts to pull the little girl out of the way, the 18-month-old was crushed by the vehicle, police said in a statement.

Trooper T.M. Smith administered first aid and CPR as soon as he arrived, and the Greene County Rescue Squad continued to try to resuscitate the toddler, the statement said. The child, Aeayla Camacho, died at the scene. Her remains have been tak

en to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Richmond for examination and autopsy.

Further examination of the vehicle discovered the gear shift could easily be moved without applying the brake or turning on the vehicle, the statement said.

The mother was taken to the University of Virginia Medical Center for treatment of minor injuries sustained while trying to rescue her infant daughter. The 5-year-old and another child inside the Explorer were not injured in the incident.

Police said no charges will be filed.
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FOUR fruit machines were ransacked at a pub in the early hours of the morning by burglars.



The break-in was carried out at the Church House pub in Wath on September 1.



The burglars gained entry by breaking a front bay window of the Wetherspoon pub, said spokesman Eddie Gershon.



Mr Gershon said the pubs smoke cloak security fog system, which fills a room with a thick cloud of fog, had been detonated and four bandit machines had been ransacked.



No stock was stolen from the pub, he added, but an unknown amount of money from the machines.



Mr Gershon added: "The burglary is obviously upsetting for staff.



However, the fact that no one was injured as a result of the burglary is the most important factor.



Fortunately incidents like this are rare at the pub.



"We will work closely with the police in order to bring the burglars to justice."


Diamcor more than doubles Q2 revenue Diamcor generated gross revenues of about $3 million from its operations in the interim period ended September 30, 2022, compared to $1,4 million for the same period in the previous year. The company is still conducting trial mining exercises at its...

IBJA commits to Declaration of Responsibility & Sustainability Principles The Indian gold industry has signed a Declaration of Responsibility and Sustainability Principles, convened by the LBMA and the World Gold Council, which expresses a commitment to operate responsibly and sustainably, based on a clear set of shared goals...

De Beers boosts Q3 output, maintains production guidance De Beers rough diamond production rose 4% to 9.6 million carats, mainly due to the treatment of higher grade ore at both Orapa in Botswana and South Africa as well as continued strong performance in Namibia, according to its parent company, Anglo...

Hong Kongs major jewellery fairs are set to return in 2023 An announcement from Informa Markets Jewellery indicates that the industrys two biggest B2B sourcing events will be back in action in Hong Kong in 2023 following a three-year forced pandemic break.
Petra Diamonds said its net profit after tax for the year ended 30 June 2016 grew 12 percent to $66.8 million compared with $59.6 million, a year earlier.

It said revenue for the period under review rose 1 percent to $430.9 million from last years $425.0 million.

Petra, which has operations in South Africa and Tanzania said production, grew 16 percent to 3.7 million carats, ahead of guidance compared with 3.2 million carats produced during the same period last year.

The company delivered a strong set of results notwithstanding the number of challenges faced during FY 2016, which included managing production from heavily diluted areas at our underground mines, as well as market related pressure on prices particularly in H1, said Petra chief executive Johan Dippenaar.

I am particularly pleased with the continued steady progress that has been made with our expansion programmes, which have remained on target over the last seven years.

Petra said production was expected to rise between 4.4 million carats and 4.6 million carats in the fiscal year, before reaching the companys stated long-term target of about 5 million carats in fiscal year 2018, a year earlier than expected.

 FY 2017 is forecast to be the first year that the Company reaps the benefit of this work as we are in line to become free cashflow positive in H2, with our cashflow profile rising strongly thereafter, the company said.

We now enter the final phase of our capital expansion programmes in a strong position, with a robust balance sheet, efficient cost base and the drive to succeed.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff

WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff (WSP), a global engineering and professional services organization, has announced four new appointments within the company.

WSP named Pamela Townsend senior vice president and Southeast region business manager for its transportation and infrastructure sector.

Under her new role, Townsend will oversee strategic business development, client service delivery and financial performance for the companys Southeast region while based out of its Raleigh, N.C., office.

Representatives say Townsend, a North Carolina State University alumna, brings more than 30 years of leadership skills, including program and project management experience working with federal, state and local governments. She has also worked with commercial and industrial clients throughout the Southeast.

Before joining WSPs staff, Townsend held the position of senior vice president at a large consulting engineering firm with strategic planning and growth duties for all Southeast market sectors. She also moved through many roles in a 24-year timeframe at an international consulting organization.

The firm has selected Yassmin Gramian to serve as Northeast business development director for its transportation and infrastructure sector. A University of Michigan alumna, Gramian will work out of Philadelphia while managing the growth of WSPs Northeast region.

Representatives say Gramian has more than three decades of experience in operations, business development and client services, along with project management and structural engineering skills. She has worked as a project manager and structural engineer, focusing on Pennsylvania-based transportation and infrastructure projects.

Prior to joining WSP, she was a senior vice president overseeing Pennsylvania operations at a global architecture, civil engineering and construction management firm.

Dale A. Brown has been named assistant vice president for transit and rail systems in WSPs Atlanta office. His new position will require Brown to guide a team of systems and specialty engineers to handle project, safety and asset accountability requirements set forth by rail and transit agencies throughout North America. He is also expected to facilitate business process improvements to allow for the integration of transit and intelligent transportation systems.

A University of Western Ontario alumnus, Brown has more than 30 years of experience implementing systems engineering practices for complex rail and manufactured systems, including design and delivery of embedded control for specialty equipment and military and rail vehicles throughout North America, South America and Europe. Before joining WSP, officials say Brown held the role of systems engineering director for the transit and rail practice of a diversified international design, engineering and project management firm.

WSP has selected Jennifer Hall as the new project manager for its Murray, Utah, office. In her new position, Hall will oversee the design and management of drainage facilities for transportation projects.

As a project manager and senior drainage engineer, Hall is said to have considerable experience in the design and construction of railroad infrastructure. Before joining WSP, she was a senior drainage engineer based in Salt Lake City for an international organization, supporting civil infrastructure development of storm drain and utilities for roadway and rail transportation projects nationwide.

Hall earned a bachelors degree in civil engineering from Idaho State University.
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has given its approval to the Metro Blue Line Extension Light Rail Transit Project's environmental review.

The completion of the federal environmental review is an important milestone for the Blue Line Extension LRT Project, Metropolitan Council (Met Council) Chair Adam Duininck said.

With the FTAs issuance of the Record of Decision for the projects Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), the next step is for the Met Council, as the Responsible Government Unit, is to determine the adequacy of the Final EIS on Sept. 28. That will conclude the state environmental review process for the project under Minnesota Rules chapter 4410.

After the Met Council vote on Sept. 28, the project will ask the FTA to authorize the projects entry into the engineering phase.

The project will be poised then to advance the design over the next year and request federal funding in spring 2017, Duininck said.

The Blue Line Extension will operate northwest from downtown Minneapolis, Minn., through north Minneapolis, Golden Valley, Robbinsdale, Crystal and Brooklyn Park, drawing riders northwest of Brooklyn Park. The proposed alignment is primarily at-grade and will have 11 new stations in addition to Target Field Station and about 13 miles of double track.
West Hollywood would see rail service become a reality through an accelerated schedule per a letter from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) to the city.

On Friday, Sept. 16, LACMTA CEO Phil Washington outlined LACMTAs commitment to proceed with key technical studies for a proposed LACMTA rail project that would connect the Metro Red Line and Metro Crenshaw/LAX Northern Extension through West Hollywood. The city of West Hollywood has been conducting outreach for the proposed line, which would more directly connect the city of West Hollywood to the existing LACMTA regional rail network and to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and provide new mobility choices for underserved communities along the corridor.

Officials noted that the proposed Crenshaw/LAX Northern Extension through West Hollywood would connect four existing lines (Red, Purple, Expo and Green), which would optimize the existing rail network by greatly enhancing regional connectivity.

The schedule to move forward with the proposal is part of LACMTAs Operation Shovel Ready Initiative, which represents a potential 20-year acceleration of the project. Metro has confirmed that it will:

Complete the current line Feasibility Study (by June 2017)

Proceed with an engineering study to determine a preferred alignment (in 2017)

Proceed with an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) (in 2018)

Pursue additional funding to accelerate construction

West Hollywood says the city has long supported increasing its transit options.

On Sept. 20, the City Council unanimously approved support of Measure M, LACMTA ballot measure, which Los Angeles County voters will decide upon in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016. Measure M, the Los Angeles County Traffic Improvement Plan, proposes to increase the sales tax countywide to support transportation improvements to regional bus and rail transit networks, streets and highways.

If approved by two-thirds of voters in Los Angeles County, Measure M would generate approximately $860 million annually. Measure M proposes a Local Return program for municipalities to use for transportation-related capital and program expenditures. Based on 2018 projections, Measure Ms proposed 17 percent Local Return program would generate an additional $509,000 annually for the city of West Hollywood.

Additionally, the West Hollywood City Council adopted a Resolution to support LACMTA in placing Measure M on the ballot in 2015 and it called for the formation of an advocacy committee, West Hollywood Advocates for Metro (WHAM), which has been working to engage the community. A countywide grassroots coalition, All on Board, was formed to demonstrate the projects regional benefits.

The city says residents in West Hollywood have consistently demonstrated support for additional transit options by voting in significant numbers in favor of countywide tax measures for transportation projects.

The city of West Hollywood always strives to find collaborative solutions to traffic and gridlock, said West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister. Thats why we are extremely pleased with the progress the city has made advocating for [LACMTA] rail to come to our community in the near term. Also, Measure M will help fund a comprehensive approach to mobility  not only rail, but also active transportation projects and new technologies.
Reuters reported after the bell Tuesday that Nu Skin Enterprises (NUS) has reached an agreement with the SEC to settle an investigation into the company's charitable contribution in China in 2013. Nu Skin has agreed to pay $765,688 in the settlement. The stock is now up 2.12 on 20K shares.

Nu Skin Enterprises gapped open lower Tuesday, but was range-bound throughout the session. Shares finished with a loss of 0.79 at $58.88. The stock closed near the middle of a month and a half long trading range at the highs of the year.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton plc's (BHP.AX,BLT.L,BBL,BHP) Chief Financial Officer Peter Beaven said that the company is continuing to negotiate with the Australian Tax Office over a higher A$1.02 billion bill for pricing of sales of commodities, including iron ore, to its Singapore marketing unit.

The Australian Taxation Office has issued BHP with an assessment of additional charges liable on sales of commodities from Australia from fiscal 2003-to-2013 to its Singapore marketing unit, the company said in its annual payments to government report. The marketing unit re-sells both BHP and third party material to customers at higher prices, and BHP disputes the ruling, it said.

"BHP Billiton does not agree with the ATO's position. Consequently, we have objected to all of the amended assessments and intend to continue to defend our position, including by initiating court action if necessary," the company said.

BHP Billiton released its Economic contribution and payments to governments Report which shows the Company's total economic contribution globally in the 2016 financial year was US$26.7 billion. This includes US$3.7 billion globally in taxes, royalties and other payments to governments.

Releasing the report today, Peter Beaven said the Company's adjusted effective tax rate in the 2016 financial year was 35.8 per cent, demonstrating BHP Billiton pays its fair share of tax. When royalties are included, the rate is more than 58 per cent.

"The Company's adjusted effective tax rate averaged 31.9 per cent over the past decade, and 39.8 per cent when royalties are included," Mr Beaven said.

"Over the last decade, our average effective tax rate was higher than the 30 per cent company rate in Australia and the average OECD rate of 25 per cent."

In the last decade, BHP Billiton has paid about US$85 billion globally in taxes, royalties and other payments to governments, including US$58 billion or A$65 billion in Australia.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Public finances data from the U.K. is due on Wednesday, headlining a light day for the European economic news.

At 3.30 am ET, the Riksbank publishes the minutes of the monetary policy meeting held on September 6. The bank had kept its rate at -0.50 percent early this month.

At 4.00 am ET, Norway's unemployment data is due for July. The jobless rate is forecast to remain at 4.8 percent in July.

At 4.30 am ET, the Office for National Statistics publishes U.K. public sector finance data for August. The budget balance is expected to register GBP 10.2 billion surplus compared to a shortfall of GBP 0.9 billion in July.

At 5.00 am ET, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development releases economic outlook.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.
Saga plc (SAGA.L), the UK's specialist in products and services for life after 50, reported profit before tax from continuing operations of 109.9 million pounds for the six months ended 31 July 2016 compared to 101.3 million pounds, prior year. Earnings per share from continuing operations was 7.8 pence compared to 7.2 pence. Profit before tax, excluding the effect of derivative gains, increased by 3.9% to 104.5 million pounds from 100.6 million pounds.



First-half trading profit was 117.6 million pounds compared to 117.5 million pounds, last year. Trading Profit was flat against the first half of 2015, with the current period incurring a 4.7 million pounds profit impact from the scheduled Saga Sapphire maintenance. Trading profit in the core businesses grew by 2.0%.

Group revenue decreased by 8.6% to 437.2 million pounds from 478.3 million pounds, reflecting the accounting impact from the introduction of the funds-withheld quota share arrangement in motor insurance.

Lance Batchelor, Group CEO, said: "The robust operational performance in the first half means that we are on track to meet our targets for the full year."

The interim dividend has been increased by 23% to 2.7 pence per share. The dividend will be paid on 18 November 2016 to holders of ordinary shares on the register at the close of on 7 October 2016.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Conglomerate General Electric Co. (GE) announced Wednesday that the company and Barata Indonesia signed a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU to collaborate on manufacturing parts and provide services for GE's aero derivatives, heavy duty gas turbines, boilers for coal-fired power plants and renewable energy solutions.

In addition, GE committed to support a pilot that aims to accelerate rural electrification across Indonesia, a key priority of the Indonesian Government's poverty alleviation program.

The decisions followed the Future of Electricity Summit hosted by GE, in association with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry or KADIN.

During the summit, and government leaders discussed the digital transformation of the electricity sector and how digital solutions, now commercially available, can improve power generation and distribution across Indonesia.

Summit participants also discussed GE's collaboration with PLN, several of which were completed in six months after initial discussions.

GE also announced its commitment to fund a pilot project in Eastern Indonesia to showcase technology which can help electrify remote villages. This pilot is in support of the government's Bright Indonesia program which aims to electrify more than 12,600 villages.

The program will deploy digitally-enabled hybrid power solutions. GE is also testing this hybrid technology in India and Africa.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Latvia's producer prices continued to decline in August, though at a slower pace than in the previous month, figures from the Central Statistical Bureau showed Wednesday.

The producer price index fell 2.0 percent year-over-year in August, following a 3.1 percent drop in July. The measure has been falling since January 2015.

Both domestic and foreign market prices decreased by 2.4 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively in August from a year ago.

Among the main industrial groups, prices in the manufacturing sector dipped 1.5 percent, while mining and quarrying prices grew by 1.7 percent.

On a monthly basis, producer prices rose 0.6 percent from July, when it dropped by 0.1 percent.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.
Nu Skin Enterprises (NUS) announced after the bell Tuesday that it has reached an agreement with the SEC to settle an investigation into the company's charitable contribution in China in 2013. Nu Skin will neither admit or deny guilt and has agreed to pay $765,688 in the settlement.

Nu Skin Enterprises gapped open higher Wednesday morning and is now up 1.99 at $60.87. The stock is challenging the upper end of a month and a half long trading range at the highs of the year.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Crude oil futures surged Wednesday, taking back recent losses after the government said U.S. oil inventories plunged last week.

Oil for November delivery settled up $1.29, or 2.9%, at $45.34 a barrel.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a 6.2 million barrel decline in weekly crude inventories, confirming a similr reading from the American Petroleum Institute yesterday.

Traders also reacted as the Federal Reserve decided against a September rate hike.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis
Presidential decree issued to grant general amnesty



SANAA, Sept. 21 (Saba)  President Saleh al-Sammad of the Supreme Political Council on Tuesday issued decree No. 15 for 2016 for granting general amnesty.



The decree was ordered to be published in the official gazette as following:



For giving an opportunity to Yemeni nationals who involved in supporting and serving the Saudi aggression and its allies against Yemen, to return back to the homeland and re-enjoy full rights of peace and public life to share in re-building the country.



And for reasons of the country's higher interest, the President of the Supreme Political Council decides:



Article (1) - Granting comprehensive amnesty to those, whether civilians or affiliated military individuals, who took part by word or practical action in supporting the aggression by Saudi Arabia against Yemen since March 26, 2015, but under the following conditions:



- Whoever corrects his stance, renounces the aggression by word or action and return back to the homeland within two months of this decree's date.



- Whoever returns to his home by his own choice, renouncing fighting alongside the aggression before the issuance of this decree.



- Whoever renounces battling alongside the enemy and join the ranks of the national army and popular committees.



- All arrested on charges of backing the aggression, during the issuance of the decree, once he presents a pledge to act in good behaviour and rejects the aggression or supporting it.



Article ( 2): All specific categories in the previous article enjoy the benefits of the general amnesty that allows them to exercise full their civil and political rights in accordance to the Constitution and laws.



Also they will not be prosecuted or sued and all charges before decree would be dismissed against them in one fell swoop.



Article ( 3): The amnesty will not include those who provoked the aggression against Yemen.



- Or those who committed crimes against the humanity and help providing GPS coordinates to hit Yemeni people and infrastructure.



- Or anyone who committed or associated with committing terrorist crimes.



- Or anyone committed crimes of looting and attacking families.



- Or prisoners who escaped during the aggression or before.



- Or anyone arrested while he was fighting in the ranks of the aggression after the expire of amnesty period specified in the Article (1) of this decree.



Article (4): This amnesty does not preclude the rights of citizens from prosecuting those granted amnesty from suing them in case of any relating crimes against any of the citizens.



Article (5): Those granted amnesty should come to reception committees formed by the political council to obtain official document that states their right situation, secures their lives, and keeps avoiding them from exposing to future legal interrogation.





MA

SABA

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[21/September/2016]
Millennial Moms Review: 2022 Acura MDX is pretty close to the perfect family car

I dont know if perfect is attainable, especially considering weve got the world of options when it comes to modern vehicles. Were spoiled and, as such, we have very specific needs and wants. Driving-wise, the 2022 Acura MDX is one of my favourite ...
A first-of-its-kind journey along India and Pakistan border

What binds the two most talked about nations - India and Pakistan together? What makes the
HONOLULU (AP)  Pacific Islanders are speaking out against one of Disney's newest costumes, likening its long-sleeve brown shirt and long pants featuring full-body tattoos to a version of blackface.

Disney under fire for Moana Halloween costume; Brown skin is not a costume |... https://t.co/wV1QxtdgXn pic.twitter.com/Oe4iTYqGqX  Disney Trends (@Disneylizer) September 21, 2016

The getup depicts the character Maui in the upcoming animated movie "Moana." Disney's online store offered pajamas in a similar design.

Chelsie Haunani Fairchild says it's offputting to have a child wear the skin of another race. The Native Hawaiian college student says "Polyface is Disney's new version of blackface."

The Disney online store began selling the costume earlier this month, saying it has "padded arms and legs for mighty stature!" But on Wednesday, the costume and pajamas had been taken down. Disney didn't immediately comment.

"Moana" is due to be released in November.
Dear Editor,

Ive been following with interest the stories coming out about Bluesky being sold by its parent company to Fijis Government, who is barely disguised as company Amalgamated Telecom Holdings (A.T.H).

I also find it curious that the local government have taken the position, to sit it out, claiming that its just a business deal.

Is it really, just a business deal?

I mean, this is a foreign government buying the communications network of the country. Youre not even a little interested or worried?

A little research reveals that Fiji government and Fiji National Provident Fund (F.N.P.F) appoint all A.T.Hs directors.

F.N.P.F directors are all appointed by government, so lets make no mistake that its Bainimarama and his cronies who are controlling A.T.H and behind this deal, and its them who will be collecting the talas from the sweat of Blueskys Samoan staff and operations very soon once this deal is done.

Which so far, looks for A.T.H like a walk on the seawall. No obstacles, rather safe, and quite pleasant actually.

A.T.H have released statements in Fiji News about how they are going to make lots of money from this deal as the Bluesky companies will be managed out of Fiji, and F.N.P.F will loan to the companies. Those are their words.

I wonder if thats what Tuilaepa envisioned when he privatized SamoaTel, that it would one day be owned by his political arch nemesis, Bainimarama, and our citizens would be making money for Fiji.

And then Fiji would gloat about it in the news.

But its just a business deal, right? Its a business deal, that aside from making the Fijians rich on Samoan sweat, will also very soon see Bainimarama and his mates enjoy access to all of Samoas calls, emails and communications.

In a 2014 article published in the U.K. Guardian and in the Fiji Today, A.T.H owned Vodafone Fiji, admitted to spying on its customers.

The headline reads, Vodafone admits it allowed state surveillance in Fiji.

I can just picture Baini and his Cabinet sipping on some Punjas Ceylon tea while they laugh at Tuilaepa explaining over the phone to John Campbell where the lost tsunami money is.

Perhaps you could say that the Baini tea session is a far-fetched scenario, except this is Bainimarama were talking about  known leader of coups and crusher of democracies.

This is the guy that had the leaders of the opposition parties arrested for having a public meeting, just last week. Can you trust that they wont use your personal information?

Personally, I wont be taking my chances.

So, given all this publicly available information about A.T.H and how they are waltzing in and buying Bluesky, Im surprised there isnt so much as a peep from the Regulator, from the Ministry, from anyone given what I would consider to be serious national security risks, and impacts on Samoa.

The Unit Trust of Samoa is a part OWNER of Bluesky Samoa, are they okay with this? All this silence leads me to believe they are either asleep at the wheel, or someone is getting a decent lovo as part of all this.

Press releases from A.T.H indicate they plan to get the signed deal approved by shareholders on October 3rd.

Keep sitting, guys.

T. Pouesi
Thirty one percent of people who registered for the 2016 General Election did not vote.

The figure was revealed at the National University of Samoa (N.U.S) yesterday during the third day of Pacific Islands University Research Network (P.I.U.R.N) Conference.

The major findings from the 2016 Samoa General Elections Review were launched by Associate Professor Nicole Haley and Dr. Roannie Ng Shiu, from the Australian National University (A.N.U).

Samoa needs to be congratulated for the successful implementation of its gender quota, particularly in view of the fact that under-representation more pronounced in the Pacific than anywhere else in the world, said Prof. Haley.

It mandated that a minimum of five seats in Parliament be held by women, with provisions for up to five additional seats, to be filled by the highest-polling unsuccessful female candidates from the election, should fewer than five women be elected in a general election.

Prof. Haley said that voters residing on freehold, leased and other non-customary land in urban Apia were able to register for the first time in one of two newly created urban constituencies.

To do so they needed to have been residing in the constituency for no less than six months prior to the election.

One issue highlighted by the observation team is the uneven size of constituencies in Samoa, which, although in some ways an inevitable by-product of traditional political divisions, creates significant representational disparities.

Unlike other countries where electoral boundaries are drawn and periodically redrawn based on shifts in population, constituencies in Samoa were and continue to be organised around traditional political districts that were associated with paramount matai titles, said Prof. Haley.

As at the 2016 election the smallest constituency was Lepa, with 764 registered voters; whilst the largest constituency was Faleata West, with 5091. On average there are 2365 registered voters in each Samoan constituency.

Apart from the variation in the size of electorates, the prioritising of traditional political organisation results in uneven representation across the country, and especially between the two main islands, she said.

In Savaii the ratio of Members of Parliament to registered voters is 1:1868, compared to 1:2738 for Upolu.

Indeed while Upolu has three times the population of Savaii, it has only seven more constituencies.

Because Samoas constituencies are not and never have been relatively equivalent in size, citizens in some constituencies and some parts of the country have greater voting power than others, meaning Samoa fails to achieve a key cornerstone of representative democracy.

Many residents of Upolu, especially residents of Apia are registered voters in Savaii constituencies, Prof Haley said.

In fact, the voting-age population, as per census data, of Samoan constituencies usually does not correspond closely at all with the number of registered voters, which would be an additional difficulty in a review of electoral boundaries, Prof. Haley said.

This was the first in-depth research-based Domestic Election Observation of its kind to be carried out in Samoa, the research design and methodologies were based on previous projects led by A.N.U academics in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.

Overall the 2016 election should be considered a success.

Prof. Haley congratulated the then Acting Electoral Commissioner, Faimalomatumua Mathew Lemisio, and his team for delivering a highly credible election.

Assistant Electoral Commissioner, Francis Ainuu was present during the presentation of the report and he appreciated Prof. Haley comments.

We have been working together with the A.N.U and N.U.S on this project. The results were mainly from the Office of the Electoral Commissioner (O.E.C) of Samoa, said Mr Ainuu.

The results will also advise the candidates.

The report was not reviewed by the Office of the Electoral Commissioner as it is now not yet official, added Mr Ainuu.

There were some challenges, particularly in relation to the number and location polling stations in urban Apia such as the provision of extra polling stations, which were intended to mitigate anticipated concerns arising from the new regulation prohibiting candidates from offering transport to voters, and the difficulties some voters might experience getting to a polling station, saw O.E.C capacity stretched thin on polling day and seemingly did not go far enough the address the anticipated logistical challenges, Prof. Haley said.

This should be easily mitigated in future elections.

Looking forward another key area requiring attention is the electoral legislation.

As a consequence, the legislation is now replete with terminological inconsistencies, such that key electoral roles or positions are referred to by different names in different parts of the legislation, explained Prof. Haley.

For example the terms Assistant Electoral Officer (A.E.O), Deputy Returning Officer (D.R.O) and Presiding Officer (P.O) are seemingly used interchangeably, reflecting, we suspect, the preference of the different drafters responsible for the legislative amendments enacted at various times.

A completely new and revised Electoral Act is needed given the significant changes recommended in this report and anomalies which exist in the current Act (Government of Samoa 2006:19), although this did not transpire.

We recommend that the Act be reviewed for consistency as a matter of priority, she said.

The high degree of confidence voters and observers registered in relation to the election, but the relatively low turnout is of concern.

Voters turn out in total of 69 per cent it does not account four constituencies who did not vote, said Prof. Haley.

It resulted up to five ministers who lost their seats, fifty member quotas activated with six of the official election petitions and three private petitions, she added.

There was a little tension during the campaign period with campaign activities mostly low-key and conducted peacefully, notwithstanding isolated incidents such as the vandalism of one candidates billboards.

It is a sustained visibility in the village, said Prof. Haley.

In the two constituencies we observed that were won by a female candidate they focused on village meetings and door-to-door campaigning.

In several constituencies, polling officials were co-opted very late in the process, and received no formal training.

While polling officials in general conducted themselves well, these last-minute personnel changes presented some administrative challenges, she said.

There was an increase in the number of polling booths

In many places polling completed before 2pm, in some cases preliminary count took less than 30 minutes, explained Prof. Haley.

At each polling station there were voters who required assistance, which slowed the voting process somewhat, and led, in cases, to procedural breaches, such as voting taking place in vehicles outside polling stations.

Prof. Haley explained that the majority of citizens surveyed considered the 2016 elections better than the 2011 and 2006 elections, both in terms of general peacefulness and the extent to which money politics influenced the conduct of the elections.

The new parliamentary gender quota was one of the major topics of discussion during the election period.

Almost all of the observers in every constituency noted that they believed female voters were able to vote freely and without undue influence, said Prof. Haley.

The four women elected were Fiame Naomi Mataafa (Deputy Prime Minister), Gatoloai Amataga Alesana-Gidlow, Faimalotoa Kika Iemaima Stowers , Aliimalemanu Alofa Tuuau and the 50th member for the Samoa Quota was Faaulusau Rosa Duffy-Stowers

This means young Samoan women are participating in elections as voters at a higher rate compared to their male counterparts, concluded Prof. Haley.

*Both Katalina and Julie are media and journalism students.
The journey for Samoas most promising emerging fashion designer, Dane Mulinuu Fabricius, of D.M.F has just begun.

Having secured a spot on the Pacific Runway Fashion Show in Australia next month during the finale of the Inaugural Samoa Fashion Week, Mr. Fabricius has got his sights firmly fixed on taking on the world.

The 30-year-old who hails from the village of Lotopa is the son of Silupevaelei and Vaea Fabricius.

From humble beginnings, Mr. Fabiricus is thrilled and humbled by his recent success, having collected just about all the prizes there were to be won last Saturday.

I am overwhelmed and humbled for this wonderful opportunity, he told Samoa Observer.

I feel so blessed beyond words to be selected to represent Samoa at such a prestigious event. Not only will I be promoting and representing my beautiful Samoa to all Pacific nations but this will be a milestone for me personally to showcase my very own designs and work during Pacific Fashion week Australia.

He commended the Samoa Art Council for the great initiative to have a Fashion Week in Samoa, and to also invite professional names to be the main judges of the event.

This was an outstanding idea to have a Samoa Fashion week, he said.

It did not only showcase and expose our local talent and designs for clothing but also artistry of makeup and hair, lighting and to express fashion in Samoa.

This also acknowledges our unique Samoan culture and what a better way to promote exceptional talent here in Samoa as a foundation.

This was also an opportunity for our local generation to experience and further take out to the wider world by using local natural beauty, handicrafts, resources and just by expressing what we have available here in Samoa for the world to see.

The Fashion week also give us the opportunity for us to put out there that Samoa can be popular in the world of fashion as well, because we have so much talent and potential but we dont have that many opportunity to showcase it.

For Mr. Fabricius, there was a lot to take in from the events of last week.

It was also an opportunity to learn from some of our prominent and famous fashion designers, and also learn about how to develop our talents.

The S.F.W model and designer forum also did an exceptional job in promoting copyright of our local culturally influenced designs and branding and it was definitely an honor and privilege to be part of it all.

Fashion, he said, has always been his passion and hobby.

I have a great passion for fashion, he says.

I always look forward to opportunities to dress up and show off my own designs and ideas whether it be Halloween parties, party planners, custom parties or basically any excuse to glamour up.

I saw S.F.W as an opportunity to express and show Samoa my love for fashion and of course having encouragement of my families and friends to venture out my line of designs made it more meaningful.

Mr. Fabricius said he only had a month to prepare for the Samoa Fashion Week.

The day they announced Fashion Week was the day I started getting my designs in order.

So what inspires Dane and his creations?

Personality inspires me the most, he said.

My fashion line was a reflection and influence of strong personalities of people that I love and hold to my heart; my late mum Silupevaelei, dad Vaea, late uncle Ponty, auntie Fiame Naomi and my eleven siblings to name a few.

Their different personalities combined different textures, colours; details made these 16 pieces unique in their own way and come alive.

And the fashion week has definitely been a stepping stone for me, he added.

Being able to see my designs I had envisioned become a reality was just amazing.

And like anything in life, Dane said putting together his fashion line for the show wasnt easy.

It wasnt easy, it took time away from family and friends and I felt anxious about how Samoa would embrace my creations.

However, he is completely in awe that everything turned out the way he envisioned it to be.

And as the S.F.W is done and dusted, Danes now looking at another bigger competition where he will be looking at taking his best to showcase in Australia.

And in the next couple of weeks, he will be working hard to put together his best for the Pacific Runway Fashion.

But before that, Dane firstly wants to acknowledge everyone who supported him and encouraged him to pursue his passion.

First I would like to give thanks to my Heavenly Father for blessing me with this amazing talent; being able to have an eye that captures the natural beauty of the unseen and being able to transform ideas and visions to reality is all Him. He made it happen for me and I give him the credit for everything.

Secondly I want to thank my loving family and friends who offer endless support, encouragement and pushing me to believe in myself and something that I love.

Lastly, he wanted to thank the organizing committee of the SFW-SAC for the great initiative and for hosting a successful show which had been a stepping stone for him to the outside world.
The sale of Bluesky to a Fiji-government owned company, Amalgamated Telecom Holdings (A.T.H), is not yet official.

And until the Office of the Regulator is officially informed about an agreement, it will not be endorsed.

This is according to the Regulator, Unutoa Auelua  Fonoti, when her opinion was sought on the sale plan.

Blueskys parent company Amper SA had recently announced it had accepted a binding offer to sell its South Pacific business, which includes the Bluesky Pacific Group, for US$79million (T$181m) to A.T.H.

At the moment I havent been given any official communication from them about the purchase, said Unutoa.

Under the law, any purchase needs to be approved by us. There are procedures that needs to be fulfilled before that can be done.

The Regulator confirmed she has met with A.T.H but it was only to inform their Office about the initial negotiations.

They have confirmed to me that they have been talking, she explained.

The Samoa Observer understands that Amper and A.T.H. are engaged in discussions on the terms of the transaction with a view of signing a formal agreement by the end of the month.

The Samoa Observer also understands that officials from A.T.H are in the country for further negotiations.

They could not be contacted for a comment yesterday.

In a press release issued earlier this month, Chief Executive Officer of Bluesky Pacific Group, Aoee Adolfo Montenegro said; We have fully briefed the governments, our other local investors and Bluesky team about the transaction.

It is my and the management teams priority to ensure that we continue to look after the interests of all our shareholders, staff, and customers throughout this process.

Our teams remain focused on continuing to serve and add value to our customers and our local communities.
Stanford University scientists say they have discovered a cause of Parkinsons disease probably common to all forms.

If confirmed by other scientists, the finding would provide the first detailed explanation of how the movement disorder arises at the molecular level, along with a strategy for how to fix it.

The cause is a defect in removing damaged mitochondria, the scientists report in a study published Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell. These damaged mitochondria emit reactive oxygen species, or free radicals that damage and eventually kill neurons supplying dopamine, a neurotransmitter essential for movement.

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This molecular-level explanation applies in both familial Parkinsons and in the much more common sporadic kind, which has not been linked to any underlying genetic cause. It was reported in 2011 for a hereditary form of the disease. The new study generalizes it to all Parkinsons.

Researchers also describe a method to allow the neurons to remove the damaged mitochondria and protect the neurons. This method has been validated in cell cultures of neurons produced from 16 Parkinsons patients, with sporadic and familial forms of the disease.

Skin cells called fibroblasts were converted into artificial embryonic stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, then grown into dopamine-making neurons. This disease in a dish model has been increasingly adopted to study diseases of the brain.

The research must be tested in animals before treating humans can occur, said Xinnan Wang, MD, PhD, the studys senior author. Wang was also first author of the 2011 study.

Mitochondria, which have their own DNA, are attached to the cell by a protein on their surface called Miro. This protein must be removed before damaged mitochondria can be removed. This is a normal process inside neurons, which contain hundreds of mitochondria, Wang said. Healthy mitochondria then replicate to replace those removed.

But in Parkinsons, Miro removal is impaired, so the damaged mitochondria tend to remain in place, emitting toxic amounts of free radicals. To treat that, researchers reduced levels of Miro in the Parkinsons cell cultures. They used a technology called RNA interference, or RNAi, to partially block the synthesis of Miro from its RNA template.

After the researchers induced damage to some mitochondria, the treated cells removed them. Normal mitochondria were spared, Wang said.

The study didnt provide absolute proof that the Miro defect is the same in all Parkinsons, Wang said. But that it was present in all Parkinsons cell samples was strong evidence.

Parkinsons Disease New Developments and Therapies - On Our Mind.mp4

This mechanism was also tested in a Parkinsons model of fruit flies, engineered to have a genetic defect that keeps Miro in place. Their larvae had difficulty crawling. But lowering Miro protein levels fully restored normal performance.

Its a long way from fruit flies to people, and right now no good rodent models of the disease exist, the researchers say. Presumably, such a model will need to be created in rodents or other mammals to provide further testing.

The immediate next step is to look for a rodent model, but unfortunately the genetic models are not great, Wang said. However, some other rodent models could potentially be adapted to this research

If that work proves successful, translating it to human therapy will need further refinement.

We need to optimize exactly what percentage of the protein to knock down, Wang said. For a clinical trial, one concern is how long the drug will stay and how often we need to inject this RNAi.

Its possible that other methods of inhibiting Miro will work better for human use, such as small-molecule drugs, she said.

Asa Abeliovich, a pathologist and neurologist at Columbia University, told Scientific American said the study made significant findings unifying the cause of the hereditary forms of Parkinsons, but didnt firmly establish the cause of sporadic Parkinsons.

Difficult to treat, diagnose

About 1 million Americans are estimated to have Parkinsons, which generally occurs in older people but also can occur in the young.

The average age of onset is 60, according to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research. Fox himself was diagnosed with Parkinsons in 1991, when he was 29.

The research may provide a better test for Parkinsons, Wang said. Cells from potential Parkinsons patients could be converted into dopamine-making neurons and then screened for the ability to remove diseased mitochondria. This would be possible before any therapies from the study could get to patients.

Causes of Parkinsons are obscure, but theres evidence that both genetic and environmental factors are involved. Environmental stresses are thought to increase the likelihood of the disease manifesting in susceptible people.

A mutation in a brain protein makes people exposed to pesticides and a herbicide more likely to develop Parkinsons disease, according to a 2011 study led by researchers at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute.

Currently, diagnosis of Parkinsons can be difficult, because the symptoms can resemble those of other conditions.

Symptoms include trouble moving hands, shaking, slurred speech and less expression in the face. It may be more difficult to button a shirt, to move feet up when walking, and maintain balance. People may freeze in place, temporarily unable to move. Some may experience psychological changes such as delusions and hallucinations.

In advanced cases, patients may require wheelchairs to move, and often cant stand without falling.

Drugs and therapies such as deep-brain stimulation can greatly reduce symptoms, but none stop destruction of the dopamine-making neurons. And drugs produce side effects such as uncontrolled movement.

Replacements envisioned

Partial success has been reported in restoring normal movement by transplants of fetal dopamine-making neurons. But the results have been unpredictable.

Efforts continue to refine this treatment. One approach is to make replacement neurons from the patients, using the same induced pluripotent stem cell technology employed in the new study.

A group of San Diego-based researchers, patients and supporters, Summit for Stem Cell, is supporting research to bring this treatment to patients. A grant to support this work was recently awarded to scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Clinic by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The new study from Stanford was supported by the National Institutes of Health; the William N. and Bernice E. Bumpus Foundation; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Klingenstein Foundation; the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation; and the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. The Michael J. Fox Foundation; the Blume Foundation; and Stanfords Department of Neurosurgery also supported the study.
The solar industrys national trade group is wrestling with an internal debate that has taken a very public turn in recent weeks.

A rooftop solar executive based in San Jose and a clean energy entrepreneur claim the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) is tilted too much in favor of companies aligned with utilities, to the detriment of smaller solar companies on the state and local levels.

I have always been a rebel and Id say almost all of the other companies doing rooftop solar installations consider themselves part of the rebellion against a conventional monopoly utility industry, said Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Spice Solar, based in San Jose.

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SEIA vice president of communications Dan Whitten said, we welcome any input from anybody but at the same time insisted the trade associations board is not stacked against rooftop solar, also called distributed generation.

We dont think theres an imbalance, Whitten said in a telephone interview. We dont know where that comes from, honestly.

Working with 1,000 of its member companies, SEIA has lobbied for expanding solar energys reach from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. since 1974.

Cinnamon, a rooftop solar installer, joined forces with entrepreneur Jigar Shah and sent out an urgent letter to solar industry officials and customers earlier this month, just before a massive solar industry trade show was held in Las Vegas.

While the letter applauded SEIA for its work in helping coax members of Congress to extend solars investment tax credit last December, Cinnamon and Shah said leadership is focused almost entirely on minutiae in Washington and the dominant interests on the SEIA board are not making room for voices from the vast majority of solar installers and customers.

Cinnamon and Shah urged readers to sign a petition they posted on change.org, titled, Change SEIA Board Governance to make it more Democratic. As of Wednesday morning, 699 people had signed it.

On the heels of the Cinnamon-Shah letter, SEIAs chairman of the board, Nat Kreamer, issued his own Open Letter to the U.S. Solar Industry.

Kraemer said the industry will grow faster and more profitably when we work together and our fortunes rise and fall together.

The issue highlights a long-running battle within the solar community.

Although were one big, happy solar industry and we all work really hard together, the real heart of the issue is companies that are in the utility-scale business basically want to generate wholesale power so they can sell it to consumers, Cinnamon told the Union-Tribune.

And people who are in the (distributed generation) business who are selling to homeowners and businesses really want to sell directly to these consumers. So were basically fighting for the same customers.

A flash-point is net metering  the process that allows customers who generate their own electricity from solar power to feed electricity they do not use back into the grid.

Utilities have complained about net metering, saying that users get the advantages of a reliable source of power from the grid while getting money back from the power company when their homes generate more solar power than they use in a given month.

They also say that net metering benefits customers who can afford to install rooftop solar over poorer customers who cannot.

Net metering has proven to be very popular among its users, especially in California, the top state for energy generation capacity from rooftop solar. The San Diego area consistently finishes high in national rankings for the number of installed solar panels.

Its all about net metering, Cinnamon said. And we want customers to have full net metering and the utilities dont like that.

Whitten said net metering is not the crux of the debate. Weve been fighting like hell for net metering everywhere its in an issue, for years, he said.

The solar industry suffered a defeat in Nevada, where the state public utilities commission last year cut net metering rates but Whitten was quick to point out SEIAs efforts in a ruling made last Friday by Nevada regulators to grandfather net metering for some 32,000 who had systems already in place.

Fights in other states such as Hawaii and Florida have also centered on net metering.

The industry is undergoing massive flux in business models, said Ryan Willemsen, CEO of Solar to the People, a San Diego-based company that offers information and price quotes to consumers looking to go solar. And its getting more difficult to separate utility-scale from distributed businesses.

Cinnamon, elected as an alternate to the SEIA board last November, said the board is made up of more than two-thirds utility interests.

Whitten said SEIAs board members run across the spectrum of the solar industry.

Just because you dont recognize them as being (distributed generation) doesnt mean theyre not , Whitten said.

The flap comes at a time when SEIA is looking for a new president and CEO, after Rhone Resch stepped down in May after 12 years.

Next month SEIA holds a board meeting in San Francisco where the complaints from Shah and Cinnamon will surely be brought up.

This is not going to cause a rift in the solar industry, Whitten said. Just like any trade association in any industry, youre going to have some members have different points of view. This is what we do for a living. We work to resolve these differences ... Thats a challenge we welcome.

Cinnamon insisted that hes not working to overthrow SEIA or its board.

Jigar and I just really wanted to open up a dialogue within the industry, saying, heres this issue and, how can we work together to resolve it?

Willemsen said many small and medium-sized installers who are driving much of the growth in distributed solar are so involved in their day-to-day businesses they dont pay adequate attention to policy and lobbying efforts in D.C. and state capitals.

Our industry is heavily driven by legislation, Willemsen said in an email. If smaller solar companies dont start putting more effort into being aware of legislative issues and pushing to make sure their voices are heard, then it is little surprise that the lions share of attention goes to the larger utility-scale operations who have actively engaged policy teams.

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San Diegos Tealium, which makes website data management software, said Wednesday that it has raised another $35 million in venture capital to help it expand globally and beef up its digital marketing services.

The latest funding round was led by Georgian Partners, an existing investor. All other Tealium investors also participated, including Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Silver Lake Partners and Tenaya Capital.

Founded in 2008, Tealium has raised $77 million in debt and equity financing before this latest round of capital.

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Tealiums main product centers on tag management for websites. Tags are pieces of software code that email marketers, ad networks, web analytics firms, app developers and others run behind the scenes to gather data about users.

All these tags can make a website sluggish for users. Moreover, they can result in separate silos for data coming into a company about what customers are doing.

Tealium consolidates the disparate pieces of software code into a single tag. It has tools that let companies put the data in one place and apply their own analytics.

Recently, the company has begun adding real time data services so customers can store and analyze digital marketing data from several sources such as mobile phones, Internet of Things gadgets and off-line sources.

To that end, Tealium launched a new Executive Briefing Center at its San Diego headquarters. It will help the companys customers dig deep into their online marketing efforts.

As the mobile and Internet of Things revolutions create increasing flows of real-time customer data, our goal is to be a strategic partner that actively helps our customers design and deliver compelling experiences with a best-of-breed combination of all of the amazing solutions available in the market place, said Chief Executive Jeff Lunsford in a statement.

Tealium has more than 700 enterprise customers worldwide, including Nokia, ProFlowers, Fox, Dominos, Petco and Time.

The company said it has quadrupled its employee base over the last three years, adding workers in engineering, customer support, sales and other areas. It employs about 260 workers globally, with 150 of those workers in San Diego. It also has outposts in London, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

Lunsford previously ran Limelight Networks, which went public in 2007. He also was chief executive of WebSideStory, an early San Diego web analytics software firm that went public in 2004 and is now part of Adobe Systems.
Reporter Bradley J. Fikes has profiled five companies that embody the spirit of innovation and risk-taking essential to the regions thriving bioscience hub. Heres some questions and answers about what its like to cover the biotech industry.

Q: While each business is a distinct entity, what elements seem to make for successful companies in the life sciences? How important are qualities such as daring to take a huge gamble, creative thinking, an entrepreneurial spirit, a teamwork ethic and the patience needed for testing an experimental drug or product for years?

A: Those elements are all significant, but I would place another element at the top of the list: Experienced management that has successfully built other life-science companies. Of course, you also have to have good science and a good business plan. Luck also helps.

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Richard Heyman, founder of successful local biotechs such as Aragon and Seragon, is a great example. He is scientifically trained and still keeps in touch with his mentor, Ron Evans of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. Evans himself is an expert at launching biotech companies based on fundamental science discoveries made in the lab.

Avalon Ventures does this well from a venture-capital perspective. Their partners keep in close touch with the science world and specific scientists, and they use their business knowledge to judge when the science is ripe for building a company. Avalon has a great return on investment, and has partnered with the drug giant GSK to build biotechs in the San Diego area.

Also, Ionis Pharmaceuticals in Carlsbad and its investors have demonstrated extraordinary patience in building up a new biotech niche  antisense therapeutics. The company was founded in 1989 and has encountered a number of setbacks, such as certain drugs failing clinical testing and soured partnerships with some partners. Yet it has continued to improve its technology and has several important medications in late-stage clinical trials.

Q: What are the biggest adjectives you would use to describe San Diego Countys life-sciences community overall?

A: Creative, science-oriented, passionate, fun-loving. (Go to Bella Vista Social Club & Caffe in the Sanford Consortium building across from the Salk Institute and youll see what I mean about fun-loving).

Q: When did you start writing about biotechnology and the life sciences?

A: That was back in 1990, in the Mesozoic era of biotechnology. I was hired by the San Diego Business Journal to write about the closely related subjects of biotech and health care. Things were very different then.

Biotechs talked about becoming fully integrated pharmaceutical companies. But most biotechs dont create the most value by copying what the big pharmas do, with their expensive sales teams and clinical-trial apparatus. They originate and develop ideas in a smaller setting, without the lumbering bureaucracies and turf wars of big pharmas.

Ive also seen biotechs go through cycles of unwarranted hype  and despair thats just as unwarranted.

Q: And youve actually worked for a biotech company, right?

A: DoubleTwist, a startup based in Oakland, hired me in early 2000. I was part of a team of journalists who wrote stories about biotechnology for DoubleTwists website.

DoubleTwists business model was to sell Web access to its software for characterizing genes. That allowed scientists anywhere with an Internet connection to perform sophisticated genetic inquiries to guide their work. They didnt need a big mainframe computer in their lab.

We journalists worked remotely. I was living in Oceanside at the time while my editor, Karl Thiel, was based in Oregon. Another reporter lived in Colorado. We wrote legitimate news stories, to the point where I prominently featured one of DoubleTwists competitors in a story. I thank DoubleTwist for providing a quality environment where the news came before spin.

My job was to not only write stories, but to place wire stories and news releases on the website. The system worked very well, and I took satisfaction in making sure the best news items and announcements were prominently displayed. And the software I used to do my work performed flawlessly.

That lasted for nearly a year, and it taught me I could work from home on a daily basis. I was laid off after the companys attempt to go public failed during one of the biotech down cycles. I knew it would happen, and I reached out to my former employer, the North County Times, which brought me back.

Q: What are the joys of writing about life science, and what are the challenges?

A: At the top of the list of joys is self-education. I learn something new every day and get to talk with some of the worlds most accomplished scientists. I read their studies, ask for guidance and write articles about meaningful topics.

I get more excited about meeting scientists than meeting celebrities, especially since so many of the latter make profoundly ignorant statements about science and medicine. Honorable exception to Angelina Jolie Pitt for her important educational work on breast and ovarian cancers. And Ozzy Osbourne, the Black Sabbath vocalist now on what the band says is its final tour, let his genome be sequenced and then discussed publicly. He wrote a funny and informative book about it, Trust me, Im Dr. Ozzy.

Jon Armstrong of Cofactor Genomics discusses what was discovered from sequencing the genome of rock legend Ozzy Osbourne, the Black Sabbath lead singer. Taken in San Diego in December, 2010.

Just about equally, I take joy in helping people who are dealing with serious diseases. I often write about disease research or clinical trials. Patients and those close to them read my articles and call me.

Some humility is called for, as journalists know much less about the subjects they cover than those directly in the field. But patients often hear about medical news from reporters, and so we get the inquiries. The role of unofficial counselor is one I take with great seriousness. Patients ask me for advice, and I steer them to the best sources I know.

The research and medical communities offer more options for therapy or prevention than ever before. But first-time patients often dont know where to begin. They have a million questions and their doctor is probably not going to have all the answers.

Id like to see a universal guidance system of counselors thats easy to access, sort of like 911 for emergencies. For anyone interested in improving our health care system, this is an area worthy of your consideration.

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @sandiegoscience

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UTBiotech
A major conference on genomics has moved its West Coast location to San Diego, a leading hub of genomic technology.

The Festival of Genomics California runs Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 20-21 at the San Diego Convention Center The festival itself is free, People can register at j.mp/fog2016. A pre-event Base Camp on Monday, Sept. 19 costs $699; information is available at j.mp/2016basecamp.

This years Festival offers sessions on clinical access to genomic medicine, applied technology and data sharing, along with artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.

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Tuesday is devoted to the effect of genomics on health care, especially in pediatrics. Speakers include two pediatric genomics specialists; Stephen Kingsmore, CEO of Rady Childrens Hospital; and Sharon Plon, director of Texas Childrens Hospital.

On Wednesday, speakers will outline the role of technology in health care. These include Michael Weiner, IBM Healthcares chief medical information officer, to discuss machine learning and AI.

James Lu, co-founder of Helix, will discuss how people can take control over information from their own genomes and put it to the best uses. Helix, with offices in San Francisco and San Diego, was founded in 2015 with $100 million from Illumina, the dominant maker of DNA sequencing instruments.

Joe Panetta, CEO of Biocom, the San Diego-based life sciences trade group, said the festival advances Biocoms goal to make San Diego the dominant center of genomics and personalized medicine.

This is a huge opportunity to highlight what we have going on here in genomics in San Diego, Panetta said. As we look forward to 2020, its definitely going to position us to be the leader in personalized medicine.

Topics such as identifying the best personalized treatments for cancer, and applying genomics for drug development will attract attendees nationally and internationally, Panetta said, providing a good platform to showcase San Diegos genomics commercial and research infrastructure.

Illuminas Vice President of Applied Genomics, Dawn Barry will speak about personal genomics at a Wednesday session. Barry has been a leader in developing Illuminas Understand Your Genome program, and guiding the companys entry into other markets, including microbiology, forensics, and agriculture.

Barry said her talk will discuss the effect of genomics in healthy people.

Theres a lot of focus on genomic studies in sick patients, but were also learning a lot in healthy populations, Barry said.

Our health care system today is largely based on intervening when disease happens, Barry said. The promise of genomic medicine is that well start to understand our DNA blueprint so we can use the information in a more pro-active manner.

In other words, health can can be more directed to keeping people healthy, instead of treating people when they fall ill. This will be done by tracking genomic predispositions to disease, so preventive care can be given before symptoms occur.

This is an extension of what doctors already do to understand the individual susceptibilities of their patients, Barry said.

As a society were very comfortable with being proactive on our health based on family history, Barry said. The future of genomic medicine is looking at your DNA blueprint and saying what are the predispositions to chronic diseases I may have, and then modifying your nutrition, lifestyle or environment to play to those weaknesses or those strengths.

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @sandiegoscience

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UTBiotech
San Diego Countys homeless population is soaring, filling our sidewalks and canyons with human tragedy thats increasingly hard to ignore. Nobody in power seems to know why, let alone what to do about it.

Maybe its the fabulous weather. And were just too nice to street people. Why endure a Las Vegas summer or Minneapolis winter when theres plenty of pavement and free meals available year-round in San Diego?

I understand the intuitive appeal of both theories, which are popular among local leaders as well as dozens of readers of my recent column on homelessness.

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For openers, they let us off the hook. If perfect climate is drawing misery to our streets, there are no fundamental social policy failures to fix. Bus tickets, backed by jail terms, would suffice.

Alas, theres not much evidence to support this relatively benign view. We can note that the nations eighth-largest city has its fourth-largest homeless population. Beyond that, the available numbers fail us.

Even basic logic doesnt quite explain the recent, alarming increase. San Diego has been sunny and mild for thousands of years.

As for free meals and such, no radical change is under way. If anything, taxpayer money has been redirected toward expensive, permanent apartments for chronically homeless, thus reducing some resources for shelter-level freebies.

Yet in July, officials counted 43 percent more people living on the citys downtown streets compared to the same month last year, and 71 percent more compared to 2014.

If you believe that a city has become a magnet for street people, youre obliged to explain its sudden boost in drawing power this year.

Before we go any further, lets explore the homeless dumping theory. This holds that deeply troubled people are living  and dying  on our streets because other cities are shipping their toughest cases to San Diego. Here we have some spotty, though significant evidence.

In 2013, an investigation by the Sacramento Bee found a single hospital in Las Vegas had bussed more than 1,000 mental patients over a few years to cities around the nation, roughly a third to California.

One of them, a sex offender from Montana who raped a 9-year-old girl, was sent to San Diego, according to a lawsuit filed by San Franciscos city attorney that was settled last year.

We may discover someday that another bad actor accounts for the recent surge in homelessness. Nearly 1,200 people were counted living on downtown streets in July, so one major city could have dumped the 240 or so people each year required to boost our numbers by 71 percent.

However, rising numbers have prompted city officials in Seattle and Portland to declare homelessness emergencies, while New York and Washington, D.C. added hundreds of beds to shelters last winter. So the simplest explanation seems unlikely.

Besides, major cities give bus tickets to the indigent all the time for perfectly noble purposes.

San Diego, for example, has sent more than 900 people home since 2012 under its Family Reunification Program. San Francisco and New York operate similar programs. Travelers Aid International has been giving tickets to stranded people for 165 years.

Its also possible that local officials overstate the magnitude of San Diegos problem, either unconsciously or otherwise. Owners of high-priced condos and hotel towers want their streets cleaned up, so pressure is building on politicians and nonprofits.

Hard numbers are hard to come by. For example, officials operating under federal guidelines estimate that each tent or hand-built structure they see is holding an average of 1.7 people. Counts are taken well after midnight, and the counters try not to wake occupants.

Meanwhile, the number of tents has more than doubled since 2014 as church groups and other well-intentioned people have taken on the cause of improving conditions for the homeless. This business of not looking inside tents could be inflating the official count.

On the other hand, the estimate is based on the work of survey-takers who ask street people about how they share their encampments. Maybe the true numbers are higher.

By way of context, fully half of San Diego Countys 3.3 million residents were born outside of California, according to the latest U.S. Census estimates. So if native Californians and newcomers lose their housing at the same rate, we should expect half our homeless people to have originated somewhere else.

I hasten to note the latest countywide survey, which included people in shelters and permanent subsidized housing, didnt ask that question. Instead, officials asked people where they became homeless.

The answer  24 percent already were homeless when they arrived in San Diego  suggests a remarkable ability to travel among the indigent. Previous surveys didnt ask the question at all, so theres no way to know if something has spurred an influx.

My guess is the true percentage is much lower among the people who are living outdoors. An estimated 80 percent of the unsheltered are mentally ill, either from addiction or organic causes. These are people who have trouble pulling together the cash and focus required for a four-day bus ride.

Then again, levels of competency and disability vary widely.

Thomas Reed Fairbanks, 27, who lives on the streets in the East Village, told me that he arrived this spring from Texas after crashing oil prices destroyed a seven-year career as a service technician on drilling rigs. Despite some pointed complaints about the dearth of public toilets in San Diego, he retained a fundamental optimism that opportunity was close at hand.

When you havent had anything in your life, that gives you a kind of spiritual power, because nobody can take anything away from you, Fairbanks said.

Its hard to blame the well-housed who would rather see the homeless reach for the first rung of the economic ladder somewhere else. Still, our admittedly imperfect statistics suggest that the great majority became homeless right here.

Without question, San Diego is a magnet. Sometimes it drops people. Whether this problem evokes compassion or disgust, youd think everybody could see the value in getting people off our streets, permanently. Buses wont work, because they make round trips.

Aside from the weather, understanding primary causes would be a great first step. In future columns, I plan to also explore some solutions, based largely on the successes of other cities that saved money in the process.

For starters, San Diego needs a homeless czar to coordinate the dozens of agencies that handle $400 million or so in taxpayer money each year, and to encourage better collaboration among nonprofits. Federal dollars are moving away from temporary beds to permanent ones, so locals need to backfill the losses.

Legal settlements prevent police from forcibly clearing problem areas when no beds are available. This argues for a big, new shelter and processing center downtown to absorb the swelling numbers.

Statewide, lawmakers can restore certain incentives for serious drug addicts to seek treatment that were removed by voters in 2014 through Proposition 47, which cut penalties for possession of heroin and methamphetamine, along with theft.

More difficult steps, like improving care for the mentally ill and freeing developers to build low-cost market housing, are next in line.

In the meantime, nobody who works with street people doubts that a crisis is building.

We dont create homelessness, we treat it, said Ruth Bruland, chief program officer at Father Joes Villages, the sprawling complex that serves the indigent in downtown San Diego. Something is terribly broken.

RELATED

 California led the nation in violent crimes against the homeless by housed assailants last year, with San Diego contributing one of 20 known crimes statewide, according to a report released this week by the National Coalition for the Homeless.

dan.mcswain@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1280  Twitter: @McSwainUT
In a harrowing 10 minutes on July 4 in Carlsbad, California State Lifeguards Cole Magro and Jeff Knapp headed into a massive rip current to rescue 19 people, many of whom were screaming for help and one who was unconscious and being held aloft by a friend. The two lifeguards prevented multiple fatalities, officials said.

In Encinitas earlier this year, Sheriffs Deputy Jeffrey Chu located a young victim of human trafficking who had been forced into prostitution by a man who Homeland Security officials said kidnapped girls across the country and was suspected of murdering a woman in Florida.

Magro, Knapp and Chu were among 22 public safety officers and first responders honored Tuesday at the 5th annual Hero Awards, hosted by the North San Diego Business Chamber.

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The event, held at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, included a tribute to slain San Diego Police Officer Jonathan JD DeGuzman, who was gunned down July 28 during a pedestrian stop in San Diegos Southcrest neighborhood.

DeGuzman teenage son, Jed, said the family has been buoyed by a close-knit law enforcement community that reminds them theyre not alone in their grief.

They are always there for us, always looking out for us and stopping by, he said. I cant stress how grateful and appreciative I am of everyone.

San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore and District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis were among the speakers at the event.

Escondido Police Chief Craig Carter said the men and women being honored exemplified what it means to dedicate your life to the service of others.

 Public safety professionals run toward the fire, run toward the bad guy while the public runs away, he said. That is what we do and what we signed up for. I couldnt think of a better group of individuals that I would like to work with, Carter said.

In addition to Magro, Knapp and Chu, honorees included:

Escondido Police Officer Patrick Hand, who investigated and apprehended a dangerous predator suspected in a series of indecent exposure and lewd acts in the city;

Rincon Fire Department Paramedic team of James Banister and Scott Ferguson, who provide advanced life saving measures to the Rincon community, resulting in four lives saved in the last seven months;

US Secret Service Supervisory Investigative Analyst Blair Keene, who spent countless hours and multiple investigative techniques to locate and extradite a Sea World employee who fled the state amid allegations he had stolen $818,000 through an elaborate embezzlement scheme;

SDPD Northwestern Division Juvenile Services Officer Bob Briggs, who for part of the year was the only uniformed JST officer serving 30 campuses across four school districts, and who saved the life of a suicidal student who was found to have knives and other military-style gear;

San Diego Police Officer Jacob Vasinda, who took a proactive role targeting areas known for transient-related problems and helped the departments Quality of Life team within the Northwestern Division make 13 felony arrests and 123 misdemeanor arrests, including the arrest of a suspect in a violent attack on an 88-year-old business owner;

Deputy Probation Officer Cyrus Rust, who supervises a large caseload of criminally sophisticated offenders recently released from state prison and has taken the lead on planning and coordinating monthly enforcement details, which have yielded numerous arrests of violent individuals and the recovery of several weapons;

Valley Center Sheriffs Deputy John Malan, who led a crime-supression operation with his partner, Deputy Boer, that led to the arrest of more than 50 people and the confiscation of more than 20 guns, including high-powered assault rifles;

Deportation Officer Mario Vidrio, who assisted Escondido Police in identifying a woman who had been stabbed multiple times and left for deadefforts which led to the perpetrators apprehension within 12 hours of the crime. Vidrio also arrested a woman who threatened to take a gun to the middle school and shoot children;

CHP Officers Kerry Comphel and Jason Hughes, who grabbed on to a distraught 21-year-old woman who had jumped over the guardrail of a freeway overpass, threatening to commit suicide;

San Diego police Detectives Cesar Delgado and Mark Green, who  after a student threatened a victim with a handgun  worked closely with the SDPD Gang Suppression Team in identifying, locating, and arresting the suspect, and were also instrumental in assisting patrol units in a kidnapping and domestic violence incident involving a 16-year old female victim;

DEA Special Agent Ryan Ford, who is part of a team that targeted a heroin distribution cell operating in San Diego while controlled by its leaders in Mexico. Ford served as primary liaison between various state, local, and federal agency partners, and conducted nine months and hundreds of hours of surveillance operations, that led to the arrest of 11 members of the criminal organization, and the seizure of 22 pounds of meth and 18 pounds of heroin.

District Attorney Investigator Steve Utter, who helped build a difficult case against a criminal who had held a woman for two days, assaulting, choking, and beating the victim to the point of having a broken jaw and teeth;

San Diego Lifeguard Jordan Gaudet, who helped rescue a family of four in distress at Mission Beach on the Fourth of July;

ATF Special Agents Scott Brahin and Sean Becker, who  while investigating an illegal firearms trafficking operation  prevented two murders, saved the life of a 15-year-old runaway, and seized 74 firearms, including untraceable AR assault weapons and silencers;

Oceanside Lifeguard Nicholas Kaipo Kelley, who saved a mans life using CPR and an automated external defribilator;

San Diego Police Officers Dan Neifer and Josh Clabough, who were able to procure $10,000 to start a program using GPS and radio technology to successfully combat bicycle thefts in the city;

Escondido Fire Captains Dan Revere and Tyler Batson, who worked diligently to implement Blue Card training, which will simplify ground fire communication and enhance safety for all firefighters in a hazard zone;

DEA Officer Jason Arnotti, who helped break up a drug trafficking organization based in Carlsbad that was distributing large quantities of methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana and pharmaceuticals around the county;

Cal Fire Fire Captain Steve VanHeertum, who  after coming across a head-on traffic collision, with one victim trapped in a burning vehicle  extinguished the fire on his own, suffering burns to both his hands and forearms, and then began to treat the trapped burn victim until first responders arrived;

and Murrieta Fire Battalion Chief Steve Kean, who has excelled in a 36-year career with the Murrieta Fire Department by learning new aspects of the job and by getting his hands dirty on tasks normally reserved for firefighters of much lower rank, exhibiting a level of leading by example rarely seen.

jharry.jones@sduniontribune.com; 760/529-4931; Twitter: @jharryjones
Hes been a star of the biggest show on Broadway; now Leslie Odom Jr. will headline the biggest fund-raiser of the year at the Old Globe.

The former Hamilton star (and 2016 Tony Award-winner) performs at the Balboa Park theaters annual black-tie gala on Saturday night.

2016 Old Globe Gala, with Leslie Odom Jr.

When: 7 p.m. Saturday (catered reception begins at 6 p.m. on the Globes Copley Plaza).

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Where: Old Globes Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage, Balboa Park.

Tickets: $800-$1,000 (includes reception, performance, dinner and dancing, plus parking)

Details/reservations: Contact Eileen Prisby, (619) 684-4146 or eprisby@TheOldGlobe.org.

It will, of course, cost more than a few Hamiltons to be in (to quote from the show) the room where it happens, but there probably wont be many chances like this one to see the man who actually made Aaron Burr seem cool.

Odom had his first big splash on NBC-TVs Smash before landing the role of a lifetime as Burr, opposite Hamilton writer-composer Lin-Manuel Miranda as the title character.

The rich role of the politician and eventual vice president, who shot Hamilton dead in an 1804 duel, gave him such memorable numbers as Wait for It and The Room Where It Happens.

Since leaving the show July 9, Odom has been almost as nonstop (to quote another show tune) as Hamilton himself, doing a series of performances and recording a self-titled jazz album, now available.

He also just appeared alongside numerous other celebrities in this election-season video (above) aimed at a certain presidential candidate.

Odoms signature line: Do we really want to give nuclear weapons to a man whose signature move is firing things?

Twitter: @jimhebert

jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com
After an 11-year Broadway run, the La Jolla Playhouse-born musical Jersey Boys is about to see its final season.

Producers announced Tuesday that the show about the highly eventful rise and fall of the pop group The Four Seasons will run through autumn before closing Jan. 15.

Jersey Boys had its world premiere at the Playhouse in the fall of 2004, under the direction of Des McAnuff, who was then in his second stint as the theaters artistic chief.

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It opened on Broadway the following year, and went on to win four Tony Awards, including best musical and a featured-actor trophy for the San Diego-bred Christian Hoff, who originated the role of Four Seasons member Tommy DeVito at the Playhouse.

(John Lloyd Young, who won the lead-actor Tony for playing Seasons leader Frankie Valli, joined the show on Broadway.)

Jersey Boys will have notched 4,642 performances at its closing.

Reached in Los Angeles, McAnuff said he was disappointed at the closing notice but pleased at the musicals epic run.

Obviously I would prefer it to run forever, he said. But inevitably shows close, and its not a complete shock.

On the other hand, it is, I believe, the 12th-longest-running Broadway show of all time. Thats a huge accomplishment.

Its certainly a bittersweet moment, I will confess. But if you told me 11 years ago that it was going to run for 11 years, I wouldve asked for a sip of whatever you were drinking. Im really amazed that so many people have managed to see it.

Looking back on how the seeds of the shows success were planted at the Playhouse, McAnuff said: One thing is that I think we were able to put it into production quite quickly, only six to eight months after its development began.

I think that was in fact a real benefit. I dont think we had time to second-guess ourselves. It couldve been foolhardy, but as it turned out it was an advantage. Everyone at the theater just stepped up.

And we had a well-oiled machine. I think the fact that the show was such a polished production had everything to do with the prowess of the artisans at the Playhouse.

Im not sure it wouldve happened without the Playhouse. I think the Playhouse deserves a lot of credit for that achievement.

He added: My wife and I sure will have a drink tonight in honor of the show.

Jersey Boys has earned more than $2 billion worldwide via its Broadway, international and touring productions. The 10th anniversary of its opening at Broadways August Wilson Theatre was celebrated last fall with a bash in Manhattan attended by McAnuff, Hoff and other cast and creative-team members as well as stars from other Broadway shows.

Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice wrote the musical, which is driven by such Seasons hits as Sherry, Big Girls Dont Cry, Oh What A Night, Walk Like A Man, Cant Take My Eyes Off You and Working My Way Back To You.

RELATED
A naked and bloody man was arrested on suspicion of murder Tuesday night after officers found him near a corpse in a San Bernardino backyard, police said.

Marvin Ramirez, 29, of Covina, was taken into custody in connection with the death of Thurston Alexander Watkins, 39, of Studio City, according to the San Bernardino Police Department.

Police received calls at 10:27 p.m. of a possible killing occurring in the backyard of a home in the 1600 block of West 26th Street.

When officers arrived at the home, they found Watkins in the backyard, with signs of significant trauma, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

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Ramirez, who was nude, was in close proximity to Watkins, San Bernardino police said.

He was disoriented and initially resisted officers orders, but was eventually arrested, police spokeswoman Eileen Hards said.

TV news footage showed officers outside the home, escorting Ramirez, whose face was smeared with blood. He was wearing a white hospital gown.

Ramirez and Watkins were visiting friends at the home, KTLA-TV reported.

Detectives are still investigating the motive for the killing. Watkins cause of death was not known and is under investigation, police said.

Anyone with details about the death is urged to call Det. John Munoz (909) 384-5630 or Sgt. Robert Sullivan (909) 384-5615.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

ALSO

Deaf teen killed by gunman after he and friends explain in a text, We cant hear you

Ventura County firefighter is killed while driving to Canyon fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base

Drunken Glendale mom runs over 7-year-olds son leg after argument over misbehaving, police say
LA 90: Housing Orange Countys homeless vets, three shipping containers apiece An Orange County nonprofit is hoping that used shipping containers can provide shelter that is quick and economical but also permanent and homelike.
A Ventura County firefighter was killed and another was injured early Wednesday in a rollover crash near Lompoc as the pair were hauling water to the Canyon fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The firefighters were assigned to a water tender by the California Governors Office of Emergency Services and headed to the 12,353-acre wildfire about 6:20 a.m., when the rollover crash occurred on the westbound California 246, said Capt. Mike Lindbery, spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

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The water tender struck a curb within a roundabout at Purisima Road, causing the truck to overturn, according to the California Highway Patrol. The firefighters were wearing seat belts.

When CHP officers arrived, they found the firefighter trapped in the passenger seat inside the water tender.

The Ventura County Fire Department identified him as fire engineer Ryan Osler.

The second firefighter, who has not been identified, was taken to an area hospital, Lindbery said. He suffered minor injuries, authorities said.

The firefighters were among more than 1,000 personnel assigned to the massive blaze.

On Tuesday, Air Force officials said fire crews were making progress on the wildfire, but officials are concerned that increased winds later this week could rekindle flames.

The blaze has remained active along the northern portion, but cooler temperatures allowed firefighters to build lines around the fire, Air Force officials said in a statement Wednesday. The fire is 50% contained.

Using infrared heat detection, an aircraft was expected to fly over the Canyon fire overnight to determine whether firefighters had made significant gains, Air Force officials said.

The wildfire, which started Saturday in a remote canyon, has knocked out power to several buildings and has halted railway service through the sprawling base. Four firefighters suffered minor injuries while battling the blaze: two on Sunday and two on Monday, officials said.

Northwest winds Wednesday are expected to push the fire toward already-scorched areas, allowing crews to amp their firefighting efforts.

Fire crews will concentrate their efforts from the northwest portion of the fire area in order to stem the fires spread in that direction, and to provide additional protection for the bases space launch complexes, the Air Force said in a statement.

But increased winds Thursday could kick up flames, so Air Force officials said fire crews will be monitoring any hot spots.

Vandenberg Fire Department Assistant Chief Wayne Seda on Tuesday said crews have been making plans to defend its critical assets, including the Atlas V rocket, which was scheduled to take off Sunday and carry a commercial satellite to space.

He said the rocket was not in danger, although its a concern.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

ALSO:

1,200-acre wildfire at Vandenberg Air Force Base delays satellite launch

Another kind of drought: Inmate fire crews dwindle as wildfire season grows ever longer

Above average wildfire activity is forecast through October

UPDATES:

11:35 a.m.: This article was updated with information about the fires acreage and containment.

10:40 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details about the fatal crash.

9:50 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details about the fire and with the name of the deceased firefighter.

9:20 a.m.: This article was updated with information about a Ventura County firefighter killed in a rollover accident.

This article was originally published at 6:55 a.m.
That smoke looks pretty bad. Residents run for their lives as Cajon fire rages

A helicopter battles the Blue Cut fire near Lytle Creek Tuesday afternoon. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Sheriffs deputies went door to door in various neighborhoods in Lytle Creek Canyon, asking residents to evacuate Tuesday afternoon.

Ellen Pomella, 63, and her husband had been told to leave their home in Happy Jack, a neighborhood of about 160 homes. About an hour later, they were parked a few miles down the road at a ranger station, waiting to be sure an elderly neighbor also made it down.

Pomella sat in her Prius, which was packed with pillows, blankets and clothes. A cat rested in its carrier. Her husband was parked in an SUV behind her, with the couples three dogs.

Theyve lived in the area for 25 years and have had to evacuate before so they were well prepared and unsurprised by how fast the fire was moving, she said.

Its part of living in this canyon, she said. It went fast. But its very dry.

Pomella has volunteered to help with fire preparedness in her community and said she and her neighbors have worked to ensure that their properties are cleared of brush and anything else that could make them more flammable.

People need to be prepared and just know that thats part of the risk of living in these kinds of areas, she said. Weve got a beautiful community.

Further up the road at an RV park where deputies were knocking on doors and asking people to leave, Emilio, who gave his first name only, said he had his things packed and ready to go but would wait to see how the fire progressed.

Theyre doing an amazing job, he said of the deputies and fire fighters in the area. Theyre fighting hard for Lytle Creek right now.

Not far away Joe Gonzales, who has lived in his Lytle Creek Canyon home for six years now, said deputies had come by a few minutes earlier and old him to leave. He grabbed laptops and important papers and was ready to go, but was waiting first to hear from deputies whether an elderly neighbor would need a ride before evacuating himself.

Im a little worried. I dont want to leave here. We love it in the canyon, he said. But that smoke looks pretty bad.
Its not every day both Skittles and slavery become campaign trail topics, but in 2016 just about anything seems possible.

Im Christina Bellantoni. Welcome to Essential Politics.

The popular sweet candy has found itself caught in the middle of a political debate over Syrian refugees. Donald Trumps son, Don Jr., tweeted an image comparing the risk of allowing refugees into the country to reaching into a bowl of Skittles knowing a few of them are poisoned. It was a vivid reminder of the Republican nominees opposition to letting people fleeing the conflict in Syria into the United States, despite the screening that is already being done by government officials.

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Skittles manufacturer, Wrigley Americas, wanted no part of the issue. Skittles are candy. Refugees are people, the company said in a statement. We dont feel it is an appropriate analogy. After facing fierce criticism for what Democrats called an insensitive and inaccurate comparison, Trumps campaign defended the tweet.

On Tuesday, Trump told supporters at a rally in North Carolina that, Our African American communities are absolutely in the worse shape theyve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever. The statement, of course, overlooked the fact that slavery was legal for nearly a century.

Trump also told the crowd in North Carolina that Arab countries would fund safe zones in the Middle East for Syrian refugees. Its called other peoples money, he said. Theres nothing like doing things with other peoples money. Because it takes the risk [away].

How will all of this play out in Mondays debate? And what sort of language will the candidates use to criticize one another?

Cathleen Decker takes a look at how Team Trump has been using gender to try to undercut Hillary Clintons candidacy, from broad shoulders to talk about having the presidential look.

Ahead of the high-stakes debate, Team Clinton is shrugging off polling that has shown a tightening presidential race and insists that her path to the presidency remains clearer than Trumps. Robby Mook wrote in a memo to donors and supporters that what he sees on the Electoral College map arent great odds for the GOP nominee.

Give our Electoral College map a spin and see for yourself.

Get the latest from the campaign trail on Trail Guide and follow @latimespolitics. Check our daily USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll at the top of the politics page.

CLINTONS GOT A FRIEND

James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma are appearing in concert next week in Carpinteria to raise money for Clintons campaign.

The Sept. 28 event is co-hosted by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin, Nancy Koppelman, Susan Rose and Allan Ghitterman, Diane Meyer Simon, Deirdre Hade and William Arntz. According to an invitation obtained by The Times, tickets range from $2,500 to $10,000 for hosts.

REID VS. TRUMP

Harry Reid is back at it again. The hard-edged Senate minority leader blasted Trump on Tuesday, saying he would be the scammer in chief if elected. Speaking from the Senate floor, Reid accused Trump of refusing to release his tax returns because hes worth far less money than he claims.

IT STARTED AT STARBUCKS

When she sat down at a Starbucks in Torrance a few years ago, Michele Sutter was desperately looking for a California legislator to sponsor a bill regarded by many as a nonstarter  a proposition instructing the states Congressional delegation to change the U.S. Constitution.

Sarah Wire has the story on how Sutter and others at her nonprofit  Money Out, Voters In  ushered that legislation through Californias Legislature (twice) and the state Supreme Court. On Nov. 8 the entire state gets a say on whether the 55 Californians they send to Congress should fight to overturn the controversial 2010 Citizens United decision that has allowed money to flood American elections.

Keep an eye on our Essential Politics news feed for news on Californias 17 ballot measures.

TODAYS ESSENTIALS

 Billionaire Tom Steyer says he will put $20 million of his own money behind a campaign to mobilize voters in eight swing states to boost support for Clinton.

 In a rare bit of bipartisanship, members of the Senate Banking Committee banded together to pillory Wells Fargo chief John Stumpf over revelations that thousands of bank workers opened as many as 2 million accounts for customers without their knowledge.

 Patrick McGreevy reports that open-government groups are criticizing the state Fair Political Practices Commission for what they call heavy-handed lobbying tactics that tried to get groups to drop support for a bill requiring more disclosure of campaign finance information.

 A prominent group advocating for LGBT rights has withdrawn its endorsement of six state Assembly members because they abstained or voted against a bill aimed at protecting gay and transgender students from discrimination at private colleges.

 California Democrats launched a new online and social media campaign on Tuesday to link seven GOP congressional candidates, all in closely contested races, to Trump.

 Rep. Darrell Issas Democratic challenger, Douglas Applegate, on Tuesday released a new ad accusing the eight-term incumbent of profiting off his years in Congress. Issa returned fire with a political mailer detailing the accusations that Applegate threatened his former wife during their divorce.

 U.S. Senate candidate Kamala Harris wants public colleges to be tuition-free for students from families that earn less than $140,000 a year. Phil Willon reports that the tuition-free proposal was the highlight of the higher education platform Harris rolled out Tuesday.

 More taxpayer dollars could be diverted in 2017 to paying for public employee pensions. On Tuesday, the chief forecaster for the California Public Employees Retirement System urged the agencys directors to consider lowering long-term investment projections.

 I can take that kind of stuff. Ive been at this. And I understand its a contact sport, Clinton said Tuesday of her preparation for debating Trump next week.

 It sounds like former President George H.W. Bush is voting for Clinton.

 Californias housing crisis isnt going anywhere. Have questions about why Gov. Jerry Browns proposal to fix the problem failed, and how you could be affected in the future? Reporter Liam Dillon will answer on Twitter at 11 a.m. Pacific time Friday. Follow @LATPoliticsCA and @dillonliam, and use #housingchat to join in.

 The Los Angeles Times is hosting another debate watch party, and this one will be our biggest yet. Join us on Sept. 26 at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Tickets are $13. RSVP here.

 Samantha Bee wasnt happy with Jimmy Fallons interview with Trump.

 U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says Trump should apologize to President Obama for spreading false conspiracy theories about whether he was born in the United States. I had a lot of distaste for it, he said. No factual basis.

LOGISTICS

Miss yesterdays newsletter? Here you go. Did someone forward you this? Sign up here to get Essential Politics in your inbox daily. And keep an eye on our politics page throughout the day for the latest and greatest. And are you following us on Twitter at @latimespolitics?

Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com.
Interfaith Community Services plans to open a 75-bed behavior health and addiction recovery center in North County early next year, the head of the nonprofit announced at the groups annual meeting Tuesday.

The project is being funded by the Alliance Healthcare Foundation, which awarded Interfaith a $1 million grant to operate it for the next two years.

Interfaiths Recovery and Welleness Center will include sobriety services, which are available in downtown San Diego and El Cajon, but havent existed in North County since 2013, when Interfaith closed its Escondido Community Sobering Services. That facility had 10 beds for detox and 32 bed residential program.

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The center also will have a range of services that include residential treatment and outpatient services.

To have all of that in one place is pretty unique in the country, said Alliance Healthcare Foundation Executive Director Nancy Sasaki If theres others that exist out there, theyre few and far between.

Greg Anglea, executive director of Interfaith Community Services, said the sobering beds will be an alternative to time in jail and will address one of the root causes of homelessness.

We had more than 9,000 people go to Vista County Jail with drug- and alcohol-related charges in the last year, he said. The vast majority were there less than 72 hours. Theyre ending up back on the streets of Vista and repeating the cycle.

The new center will have 10 beds for low-level sobering services and 10 medically assisted detox beds for people who use opiates or are severally addicted to alcohol. Another 30 beds will be for residential care and 25 beds will be additional recuperative care for homeless people coming out of hospitals.

Anglea said the next step is to find a site for the program.

After the two-year startup period funded with the $1 million grant, Anglea said the program will be funded through partners, with revenue coming from the county and hospitals.

By breaking the cycle and not having people come back over and over again, you can save a lot of money, he said.

The average homeless person visits the ER five times a year. An average visit to the ER costs about $3,500 in un-reimbursed expenses.

While a sobering bed is consider a low-level service, Anglea said it is a crucial first step because recovery programs wont take in a client until the person has three days of sobriety.

During the Tuesday meeting, former Interfaith client Debbie Snyder said that wait can be the longest three days of a persons life, and they often arent able to enter treatment because they cant stick it out.

Snyder thanked Interfaith, the police and Child Protective Services with saving her life and the life of her son 11 years ago when she started on the path to sobriety.

I started to realize that I could do something things, that I could be the person my parents raised me to, she said.

Snyder is a professional substance abuse counselor with a masters degree, and she received a standing ovation at the meeting when she announced she was on track to earn a doctorate.

During the Tuesday meeting, Anglea also announced Interfaiths budget had grown from $9 million to $12 million in the past two years.

Anglea and Sasaki signed the $1 million at the end of the meeting, which was held at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Vista.

Interfaith pitched the idea for similar services to Alliance Healthcare Foundation in July. Sasaki said the proposal was one of five finalists that were narrowed down from about 20 proposals.

The foundation formed in 1992 and in 2010 started its competitive Innovation Initiative grant program. Projects it has funded included the Community Information Exchange, which created a way for organizations to share information about homeless people they serve to help them receive consistence and uninterrupted care.

Weve always been working in the area of homelessness, but this is the first time a project like this came to us, Sasaki said. We really look for good ideas. We look for strong leadership. We look for a strong organization that has the wherewithal to carry it out.

Three headlines that you cant miss.

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @GaryWarthUT

760-529-4939
The Navy on Monday officially removed the commander of a Guam-based helicopter squadron after he was charged with attempted rape of a San Diego woman last week.

Cmdr. John Michael Neuhart II, 39, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Monday on charges of assault with intent to commit rape, attempted forcible rape, burglary when an occupant is home and resisting arrest.

If convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of more than seven years, said San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Tag.

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The decision to relieve [Neuhart of his position] was based on actions taken by Cmdr. Neuhart that demonstrated a lack of good judgment and professionalism, calling into question his leadership and undermining his credibility to continue to serve effectively in command, said Cmdr. Jeannie Groeneveld, spokeswoman for the Naval Air Forces command in Coronado.

Neuharts civilian defense lawyer said his client has served in the Navy for 16 years and has lived a good life.

San Diego attorney Kerry Armstrong said the pilot is married and has five children, and the family has come from Guam to San Diego to support him during the legal case.

I cant imagine that he would have done something like this, Armstrong said late Monday.

Its too soon to say if military charges are coming against Neuhart.

Right now, this is an active criminal investigation being conducted by local authorities. It would be inappropriate to speculate on possible outcomes or future military charges at this time, Groeneveld said.

Neuhart is free on $100,000 bail.

He was in San Diego for a military conference when the alleged incident happened.

According to San Diego police, the alleged victim is a Navy woman in her late 20s. She was with friends at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown San Diego when they spotted Neuhart, an acquaintance. After talking for awhile, Neuhart went home with the woman to Valencia Park.

Once inside the residence, Neuhart allegedly became forceful with her and attempted to sexually assault her. She fought him off, authorities said.

A neighbor heard her loud screams and called police. When officers arrived, the neighbor pointed them to a man bolting out the back door, police said.

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com

Facebook: U-T Military

Twitter: @jensteeley
A clothing drive called Operation Dress Code kicked off Tuesday in San Diego with an eye toward helping female veterans.

The effort is a collaboration of Courage to Call, American Legion Post 731 and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, in addition to the California Department of Veterans.

Through Oct. 9, pink bins will be at office buildings, veterans organizations and some Starbucks locations throughout San Diego County.

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Organizers are looking for new or gently used professional clothing, shoes, jewelry, accessories and handbags.

The donations will be distributed on Oct. 15 to women veterans during a Dress Code Boutique Day event.

The idea is that women veterans face unique challenges when making the switch from the military world to civilian life. One of those is the need for an entirely new wardrobe for the world of civilian work.

Female veterans can register to attend the Oct. 15 event at thedresscodeca.com.

This is the second year of the clothing drive for female veterans.

Drop-off locations include:

San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, 402 W Broadway #1000, San Diego

Courage to Call Mental Health Systems, 9465 Farnham St., San Diego

American Legion Post 731, 7245 Linda Vista Rd., San Diego

Veterans Museum at Balboa Park, 2115 Park Blvd., San Diego

Starbucks, 8 locations around the county.

For the full list, go to thedresscodeca.com

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com

Facebook: U-T Military

Twitter: @jensteeley
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has taken fire for ship names during his seven-year stint at the helm of the Navy, the longest occupant of the job since World War I.

The littoral combat ship Gabrielle Giffords in 2012  too political, critics said, as the former Democratic congresswomans gunshot injuries have become a rallying cry for gun-control advocates.

Some, including San Diego Countys U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, didnt like a cargo ship being named for farm workers organizer Cesar Chavez in 2011. Hunter said there were more deserving candidates who would honor and uphold naval traditions.

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Others opposed naming an oiler after slain gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, a move revealed in July.

But Mabus has forged ahead, and two of his three latest announcements have arguably even less to do with naval tradition  though all three appear to be less controversial picks.

Three new Navy oilers will be called Lucy Stone, after the 19th century suffragist; Sojourner Truth, after the abolitionist who also pressed for the rights of black women; and Robert F. Kennedy, after the former U.S. attorney general and New York senator slain in 1968, the Navy said this week.

San Diego plays a role in this naming saga, as the Chavez and the oilers are contracted to be built here at the General Dynamics NASSCO shipyard.

As these are supply ships, not warships, the expectation that names will be tied to military service is lower. In January, Mabus announced that the John Lewis-class of oilers will focus on people who fought for civil rights and human rights.

Comparing war heroes and civil-rights heroes, Mabus sees similarities, the Navy secretary told the San Diego Union-Tribune last month.

These people represent American values that we hold dear, he said.

Stone was a dynamo of the early suffrage movement, helping to form organizations that pushed to end slavery and give women the vote. She is famous for being the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree and for not taking her husbands last name.

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree in 1797. She and her daughter escaped and then won her sons freedom in court. Her lifes work was pushing to end slavery and gain acknowledgement for black womens rights.

Heres actress Kerry Washington re-enacting Truths famous 1851 speech, Aint I A Woman?

Neither woman has any obvious connection to the Navy, though Truth is credited with recruiting black troops for the Union Army.

Robert F. Kennedy was U.S. attorney general under his brother John F. Kennedy and later a U.S. senator from New York. A public face of the civil-rights movement, he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president when assassinated.

Like Chavez and Milk, Kennedy did serve briefly in the Navy.

He enlisted at age 17 and did two years as a reservist between 1944 and 1946. After his brother Joseph Kennedy Jr. was killed in action in 1944, the younger Kennedy got permission to serve on the destroyer named after his brother during its initial cruise.

According to the JFK Library, Robert Kennedy participated in patrols looking for submarines in the Caribbean.

These new ships  Stone, Truth and Kennedy  wont be procured for three to five years, and wont start construction until 2021 and 2022.

Why name them so far out?

Mabus spokesman said the Navy secretary names ships when they are put under contract.

The contract for all six oilers was announced in July, therefore they are eligible to be named, Capt. Patrick McNally said in an email.

Also, its widely expected that Mabus will leave office with the Obama administration in 2017. These ships may be among the last that this Navy secretary  who has never ducked controversy  gets to name.

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com

Facebook: U-T Military

Twitter: @jensteeley
By Veterans Day, the sound of bells should be in the air at Miramar National Cemetery.

A bell tower, with 250-pound cast metal bell, will be the next major addition to the site  and the largest gift yet for the veterans cemetery that opened in 2010.

The 30-foot tower is expected to become the visual focal point of the sweeping property, erected at the highest point on the 313 acres.

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It may provide an emotional note for families of the fallen and San Diegos 250,000 veterans, as well.

When the bell chimes on the hour, or at the end of the day we play Taps, for those that are visiting here, that gives them a serene feeling that they are on hallowed grounds, said Rex Kern, director of the cemetery, which is run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The Miramar National Cemetery Support Foundation, a volunteer group that raises money for the site, chose the bell tower as a special project because members felt it would enhance the solemn experience at whats considered a national shrine.

It will be a focal point for patriotic reflection and reverence for those that paid the ultimate price for our country, said Dennis Schoville, foundation president and a Vietnam War-era Army helicopter pilot.

The $400,000 project is a reality thanks to an early donation of $250,000 from Bob Baker, the San Diego County car dealer who has invested heavily in bringing attention to soldiers who fought in the Korean War. Public funds of $78,000 from County Supervisor Bill Horns office have also been given to the project.

Baker was a 20-year-old Army corporal when he participated in the bloody June 1953 campaign at Outpost Harry.

Four U.S. infantry companies, a Greek company and a group of South Koreans were ordered to hold the outpost at all costs. The Chinese, who saw the location as the fastest route to Seoul, attacked over nine days.

The Chinese had more manpower, but the allies unloaded more ammunition. Outpost Harry was held  at the cost of hundreds of American and Greek lives.

The victory arguably put the United States in a stronger negotiating position for armistice talks that followed.

When I came home, I said, What am I going to do with my life? Baker, now 84, said during an interview Friday.

I dawned on me that I owed the men who never came home, who are still buried maybe at Outpost Harrys hills. I was going to do everything I could to tell the story to the American public, Baker said. War is terrible.

The Miramar tower will be accompanied by a plaque honoring the soldiers of the U.S. Third Infantry Division who fought at Outpost Harry.

However, the tower is meant to honor all U.S. veterans, as another plaque will detail.

San Diego will join a select group of VA cemeteries with a bell tower.

Only roughly a third have them because the projects depend on outside donations, said Kern, who is also director of the Rosecrans National Cemtery.

The tower will house a genuine bell, with a working clapper. But it will also carry a carillon with electronic bells. The carillon will be programmed with at least 100 patriotic songs, such as the Marine Corps Hymn, Anchors Aweigh and Taps.

Kern said organizers havent decided the exact schedule for songs. Its likely that snippets of various songs will be played at designated hours and Taps at sunset.

Currently, theres little capacity for music at the cemetery, unless you bring your own band. Cemetery workers can play a recorded version of Taps at covered gathering places, but thats all.

The towers look will be spare and modern in a bronze color. Coordinators said it should match the cemeterys modern desert look.

The Verdin Company of Cincinnati, a family business that installed its first clock tower and bell in 1842, is supplying the equipment.

The finished tower is scheduled to be trucked from Cincinnati to San Diego in late October. After finishing touches, a crane will erect the tower on a cement pedestal, organizers said.

The expected dedication ceremony on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, will top off two years of work by the cemetery foundation.

Baker, the Outpost Harry survivor, has donated other funds to tell the story of Korea, sometimes called the Forgotten War.

In 2010, the car dealership magnate produced a documentary called Hold At All Costs about Outpost Harry. He also underwrote a Korean War exhibit at The Veterans Museum at Balboa Park.

Recently, Baker has turned his attention to the National Museum of the United States Army, being developed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. His focus is ensuring that the Korean War gets a rightful place in that history.

The Miramar bell tower is a link in that chain, he said.

I owe it to the men who did not come home, Baker said. [Its] a memory of all heroism of our men who are fighting in wars.

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @jensteeley
Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton outlined their plans for defeating the Islamic State and addressing the struggling Veterans Affairs department during a nationally televised forum Wednesday.

They appeared back to back at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York, a retired aircraft carrier, to answer questions from audience members and moderator Matt Lauer of NBC. The event was part of an effort by both nominees to burnish their national security credentials through a weeklong succession of announcements about military, defense and veterans issues.

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On Tuesday and Wednesday, Trump and Clinton released dueling lists of retired military generals and admirals who endorsed them.

And before Wednesdays forum, Trump used a speech at the Union League of Philadelphia to unveil his blueprint for drastically bulking up the American military, including increasing the U.S. fleet from 276 warships to 350.

However, at a San Diego watching party Wednesday evening, several veterans said they didnt hear anything that changed their minds.

I was hoping for more meat and potatoes of the debate to be really about care for veterans, reform for veterans, schooling, active-duty pay boosts, would they be supported if they are to engage again in Iraq boots on the ground. It was a kind of a letdown, said Steven Padilla, a 33-year-old Army veteran who served in Iraq.

Padilla came to the event undecided and remains so, he said, after viewing the forum at a VFW Hall in Mission Valley.

Padilla is a field representative for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the national advocacy group that sponsored the Wednesday forum.

Another person who came to the Mission Valley gathering, Vietnam-era Navy veteran and VFW member Thomas Dorsey, said: Hillary, I dont think she ever really answered the questions. She just tossed things around.

Dorsey, who is a Trump backer, added: Donald Trump, I dont think [he] got the chance to come up with conclusive answers. (Lauer) was throwing softballs to Hillary and fastballs to Trump.

And nearby, event participant Rex Abshire said: I saw facts and figures coming from Ms. Clinton. I saw yet more allegory coming from Mr. Trump.

Trump gave more vague statements, more Ill solve everything in one day. If it could be that solved quickly, we would have done it in the past 14 or so years, said Abshire, 34, an Army veteran who deployed twice to Iraq and is now a member of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets organization.

During their turns, Clinton and Trump alternated between defending some of their past votes, actions and statements and making pledges on how they would boost the nations safety.

Trump promised to be a disruptive force for improvement, contending that Americas military generals have been reduced to rubble under President Barack Obamas watch.

He also reaffirmed his controversial view that having men and women serve alongside one another is the root of sexual assaults in the military. He said recent intelligence briefings he received have convinced him that Clinton and other Obama administration officials did not heed the advice of experts on restive places such as Libya and Syria. And he praised Vladimir Putin, a years-long adversary of Obama and NATO.

Trump made a gaffe regarding veteran suicide. He corrected an audience member who asked what he would do to address the crisis of 20 U.S. veterans who die each day by suicide.

Trump said the number is 22 a day. But thats an old figure; the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs updated its estimate to 20 this year.

The discrepancy didnt go unnoticed at the San Diego watching party, which was attended by Howard and Jean Somers of Coronado. Their son, National Guard veteran Daniel Somers, killed himself in 2013 after struggling with trauma from his combat experience. The Somerses have launched an effort to find solutions for whats been called an epidemic.

Thats pretty amazing  correcting somebody who has the newer number, Howard Somers said.

Clinton portrayed herself as a model of absolute rock steadiness on foreign policy, but she also spent considerable time explaining her Senate vote for the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003 and defended her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

On the fight against the militant group Islamic State, Clinton vowed to not send American ground troops into Iraq or Syria. She instead believes the U.S. can defeat the jihadists with airstrikes and support for homegrown forces in those countries.

Trump insisted he has a confidential plan for defeating the extremist group and that he would demand a formal strategy from military leaders within 30 days of taking office.

Asked to square his request for military options with his criticism of the current crop of generals, Trump said simply: Theyll probably be different generals.

On reforming the VA, Trump said he doesnt advocate privatizing the federal agencys health network.

He said he would allow vets facing long wait times  which he described as more than six or seven days  to turn to outside doctors. Well pay the bills, Trump added.

Clinton pledged to hold weekly Oval Office meetings with representatives from the Pentagon and the VA to stay abreast of health care for veterans.

Earlier in the day, Trump issued his defense framework, which calls for a robust expansion of U.S. military capabilities and an end to budget sequestration on defense spending.

He emphasized that both the Army and Marine Corps have been reduced in overall troop strength since 2009. Such reductions have been common in the past as wars have wound down, but Trump and many conservatives argue that recent downsizing has gone too far. Trump pledged to halt the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, that went into effect in 2013.

The White House has long asked Congress to lift the sequester across the government and has decried efforts by congressional Republicans to shelter only the Pentagon from spending caps. Lawmakers have put extra money  about $8 billion in fiscal 2016  into wartime funding to provide the Defense Department a larger budget, which the Obama administration said comes at the cost of other priorities and agencies.

Also, Trump said he would also ask Congress to fully offset the cost of defense spending increases. He said those offsets would be matched by eliminating government waste  but offered a guarantee that his administration would protect hard-earned benefits for Americans. He said hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue can be gained by finding and stopping incorrect overpayments and recovering unpaid taxes. He also said energy production and economic gains during his administration would help to offset costs.

On Tuesday, Trump had released a list of 88 retired military generals and admirals who support him. Clinton countered Wednesday with a list of 95 retired military brass who are in her camp.

The Washington Post contributed to this story.

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com
The Sea & Air Parade returned to San Diego Fleet Week on Saturday, after being absent for eight years.

Not only did the parade put the fleet back in Fleet Week, its the rebirth of a signature event.

Navy warships promenaded sedately up the middle of San Diego Bay and military aircraft rumbled overhead for two hours.

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Fleet Week Sea & Air Parade

The event was meant to celebrate San Diegos troops right in their home port, organizers said. It appeared to accomplish that, in addition to providing a blast of nostalgia for veterans.

As the amphibious assault ship America cruised past, its sailors in dress whites, spectators at the USS Midway Museum waved at the hulking warship.

Patrick Marshall said the sight put chills up his back.

Marshall came all the way from Pennsylvania to take part in San Diegos Fleet Week calendar, as he has for several years.

I was in the Navy for four years during Vietnam. You dont realize how much you miss something until its not there anymore, Marshall said.

The America was joined by the minesweeper Champion, the destroyers Pinckney and Sterett, the Coast Guard cutter Sherman and the Canadian warship Winnipeg.

The amphibious ship San Diego and the destroyer Kidd were open for ship tours at downtown San Diegos B Street pier, along with the Sherman and Winnipeg. Tours continue through Friday.

Navy Vice Adm. Nora Tyson said she thinks the parade is back to stay.

Tyson is widely credited with green-lighting the return of Sea & Air, canceled since 2009 because of tight defense budgets and demand for Navy warships around the world.

The fact that we all live here, it made sense that we need to do a better job of connecting the community with the service men and women who live and deploy from here, said Tyson, who commands the U.S. Third Fleet from headquarters in Point Loma.

What are sailors saying to her about it?

Sailors love for people to come on board and say thank you. They love to tell you about what they do, she said.

Tyson had to stop talking while two Navy F/A-18 Hornet jets thundered by overhead, making it impossible to hear.

Dont you love it? she responded.

Im going to say, yes, we are going to keep doing this, because its good for us and its good for the community, Tyson concluded.

Around the events Saturday, there were sweet moments of connections made.

As visitors exited a display of Marine Corps gear on Broadway Pier, several of them spontaneously shook the hand of the young Marine standing guard. He looked a little surprised.

Similarly, people stopped to take photos with sailors in dress whites. The sailors obliged, striking tough-guy poses.

And on the Midway, as Navy warships sailed by, gray-haired veterans in civilian clothes snapped smartly to attention and saluted.

Its a great day for San Diego, said Jack Harkins, chairman of the San Diego County United Veterans Council. Its especially a great day for veterans because so many veterans served on these ships and aircraft.

About 1,000 people watched the parade from Harbor Island, where they got front-row seats for a demonstration of rescue swimmers at work.

Also, a Navy hovercraft wowed the crowd with plumes of water kicked up by its engines.

Other spectators gathered at the end of Navy and Broadway piers, listening to announcers narrating from the Midways VIP reception.

Tourists visiting from Finland happened to stumble upon the parade and watched from the Midways bow.

Does Finland do something similar?

On a very small scale, said Ahti Vaisanen, chuckling.

Mayor Kevin Faulconer said he sees strong support to keep the ship parade going.

This is quintessential San Diego, Faulconer said.

Remaining Fleet Week events

For the latest details about the following events  including final times, locations and ticket prices (if applicable)  go to fleetweeksandiego.org.

*Sept. 11: Fair at Broadway and B piers to showcase militarys contributions to education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

*Through Sept. 14: Tours of some Navy ships docked at B Street Pier.

*Sept. 14: Breakfast hosted by the Fleet Week Foundation and the San Diego Military Advisory Council, at Admiral Kidd Conference Center in Point Loma.

*Sept. 15: Recognition luncheon for enlisted service members, at SeaWorld San Diego.

*Sept. 17 and 18: Coronado Speed Festival at North Island Naval Air Station.

*Sept. 23-25: Miramar Air Show, at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.

*Oct. 1: Cabrillo Festival, at Point Loma Naval Base.

*Oct. 1: Boot Camp Challenge, at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.
The San Diego skies were as clear and blue Sunday as they were 15 years ago.

But instead of the shock and horror of that earlier, terrorist-filled Sept. 11 morning, some 500 people gathered on the flight deck of the Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum to celebrate the heroism of hundreds of first responders who gave their lives to save others.

Former New York firefighter Dan Noonan, master of ceremonies at the annual event, recounted his 55-hour race back to New York after having retired to San Diego. He help dig down into the 65-foot deep pile where the World Trade Centers twin towers had collapseda sc

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ene of catastrophe, this landscape of roaring hell.

Looking into this pit of death, I thought ultimate evil was on display, he said. But just the next day, he saw thousands of volunteers helping each other. I saw good triumphing over evil and that was also on display.

Also helping in the rescue effort was retired FDNY Lt. Paul Geidel, whose son Gary had followed him into the fire rescue service and was presumed lost in the towers collapse.

Gary was a 6-foot-2, 225-pound gentle giant, Geidel said.

His second son Ralph, also a firefighter, helped in the rescue effort as well and two years ago died of complications from the toxins he inhaled at the scene. His third son, Michael, is a senior firefighter on the force today.

Listening to these and other testimonials was Sandy Kirkwood who was marking but not celebrating her 70th birthday Sunday.

Its either on the 10th or the 12th that she eats a slice of cake, she said. Accompanied by her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, she sought out the 9/11 ceremonies aboard the Midway.

Escondido resident Efrain Chacon, 31, said he decided, just out of high school, to join the Marines rather than attend the Naval Academy. His brother did the same.

It was all because of 9/11, he said.

Chacon was standing beside a New York City fire truck that was restored after the 9/11 attacks and is spending several months in San Diego as part of the national Remembrance Rescue Project to share relics of Ground Zero with the public.

Chris Stack, 35, of North Park and Cody Lingard, 27, of Ocean Beach, who only recently graduated from the firefighters training academy, volunteered to man the 55-foot-long rig at Navy Pier.

You get a humbling feel that so many firefighters jumped in and helped out, Lindgard said.

As years pass, new generations grow up that only know 9/11 through the history books. But the terrorist attacks arent the only thing to remember, San Diego Fire-Rescue Chief Brian Hennessy said at the noontime event.

Even on that awful day, he said, we saw something that was strictly American  ordinary citizens rising to the occasion and responding with extraordinary acts of courage.

roger.showley@sduniontribune.com; (619) 293-1286; Twitter: @rogershowley
A 21-year-old man from Chula Vista was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison for trying to force two 15-year-old girls into prostitution, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

Eric Watkins, also known as Crank Moe, previously pleaded guilty to a count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of children.

His co-conspirator, Ricardo Bojorquez, 24, of San Diego, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years and six months in prison in April, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

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Both men were ordered to register as sex offenders for life.

In September 2014, Watkins and Bojorquez used social networking sites, including Facebook, to find girls and young women with the intent to force them to prostitute themselves, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

One girl was taken to Bojorquezs apartment in San Diego, where the two men forced her to call her father to tell him she would not be coming home, prosecutors said.

The men took her cellphone, told her she was not free to leave and that she would make money for them as a prostitute.

At the time, another 15-year-old girl was also there. Prosecutors said the girl had Watkins pimp moniker tattooed on her neck and had a history of working as a prostitute for Watkins.

The two men posted online escort advertisements, which included photographs of the two girls.

A few days later, Watkins and Bojorquez took the girls to Oceanside to force them to prostitute themselves. One of the teens, the girl who had her cellphone taken away, was able to run into a bar in Oceanside and use a phone to call her father.
A wanted felon believed to be armed holed up in a North Park apartment, surrounded by SWAT officers, for six hours before surrendering early Wednesday.

San Diego police took Nathan Lopez, 29, into custody about 4 a.m.

He was wanted in Riverside County on two felony warrants, police said.

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The incident began when Lopezs girlfriend in the apartment near El Cajon Boulevard called police about 9:30 p.m. She asked that officers help calm down an argument between the couple., Officer Frank Cali said.

Officers checked Lopezs records and found out about the warrants and a warning that he might have a handgun, Cali said.

They surrounded the apartment and called for Lopez to come out. When he didnt, SWAT was called in about 11:40 p.m.

Officers helped some neighbors evacuate their second-floor unit by climbing down a ladder. They used a bullhorn to repeatedly urge Lopez to phone them, and fired noisy flash-bang grenades.

Lopez ignored the orders for about four more hours, but finally came out, was handcuffed and taken away.
Veteran federal appeals court Judge J. Clifford Wallace will receive an award recognizing his work on behalf of a national legal organization at a ceremony at the U.S. Supreme Court in November.

The award recognizes someone who has contributed distinguished, significant and exceptional leadership to the efforts of the American Inns of Court.

Wallace was one of the founders of the group in the late 1970s, along with then-U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger. The organization now has 360 chapters across the U.S with more than 130,000 active and alumni members, according to the group. It is made up of lawyers, judges, law professors and law students.

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President Richard Nixon nominated Wallace to a position on the U.S. District Court bench in San Diego in 1970. Two years later, Nixon nominated him to a seat on the appeals court. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate the next month.

From 1991 to 1996, Wallace served as the chief justice of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the largest appeals court in the nation.

He has been on senior status since 1996. That is a kind of semi-retirement for some judges, where they are active on the bench but carry a reduced caseload.

Before going on senior status, Wallace was often mentioned as a possible nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court but was passed over four times between 1975 and 1987.

Wallace, 87, is a graduate of San Diego State University and received his law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California Berkeley, where he was editor of the California Law Review. Before his appointment to the bench, he was a lawyer in private practice in San Diego for 15 years.

Twitter: @gregmoran

greg.moran@sduniontribune.com
UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla has been appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker to serve on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Khosla was one of 30 academic, nonprofit or private sector leaders appointed Sept. 19 after being chosen from more than 200 applicants.

Council members will offer recommendations for policies and programs designed to make U.S. communities, businesses, and the workforce more globally competitive.

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I am honored to be appointed to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Khosla said in a statement. Entrepreneurship and innovation are integral to the culture at UC San Diego. Being a member of NACIE offers a valuable opportunity to share ideas with a prestigious group of leaders to help make America more competitive globally.

The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship was established in 2010 and operates as an independent entity managed through the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which is housed in the U.S. Department of Commerces Economic Development Administration.

The members of NACIE provide important counsel to the Department of Commerce on the types of federal policies that will support entrepreneurship, innovation and job-driven workforce training, all of which are critical to American competitiveness, Pritzker said. As Americas Innovation Agency, we value the expertise of our private sector partners and appreciate the opportunity to incorporate their views into our policymaking process.

NACIE members, who will each serve a two-year term, have demonstrated expertise and experience in the areas of innovation, entrepreneurship and employer-driven talent development, according to the federal government.

In reviewing applications, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship sought a diverse group of nationally recognized leaders representing different demographics, organization size, industry sector and geographic regions to provide a balanced viewpoint on these issues.

The council will convene four times each year, with its inaugural meeting scheduled for October.

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

760-529-4939

@GaryWarthUT
Foreign entrepreneurs who dont have visas may be able to get temporary entry to the U.S. under a proposed rule from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The rule would allow entrepreneurs who have at least 15 percent ownership in a U.S.-based startup and an active and central role in its operations to stay in the U.S. for two years to work.

Under the proposal, the startup would qualify if it has at least $345,000 from qualified U.S. investors or at least $100,000 in government grants and if the startup was formed in the past three years.

The proposed rule would also allow the entrepreneur to request up to three additional years if the company continues to show that it is providing a significant public benefit as evidenced by substantial increases in capital investment, revenue or job creation.

Tim Ryan, co-founder and treasurer at Startup San Diego, said he hopes the final version of the rule  which is undergoing review and public comment  will help stop a brain drain of international students. He said they get degrees in the U.S. and then found companies back in their home countries because they dont have a way to stay here legally.

Ryan said its especially an issue for the biotech industry, which makes up a substantial portion of San Diegos startups. He said the $345,000 investment requirement might be too high, and that $200,000 or $250,000 might be more appropriate.

Overall, something needs to be done, and this is a very good step in the right direction, Ryan said.

Bernhard Schroeder, director of the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University.

Bernhard Schroeder, director at San Diego State Universitys Lavin Entrepreneurship Center, said he sees a lot of interest in entrepreneurship from the universitys international students. He said that for many, unemployment and wage rates in their home countries make working for startups a desirable alternative to traditional career paths.

If they dont take charge of their future, there aint one, Schroeder said.

He said that as long as the rule does what its supposed to do in terms of job creation and growth, and without creating a loophole for people to stay in the U.S., he thought it was a good idea economically.

Something like this is going to draw its fair share of political commentary, Schroeder said. Im more about ecosystems, and I like talent in an ecosystem. If its legit and it helps create more companies, especially in San Diego or other places in the U.S. where entrepreneurs congregate, it makes those ecosystems healthier and have a more global perspective.

Almost two years ago, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson directed the citizenship and immigration agency to propose such a rule that would allow entry of certain inventors, investors, researchers and startup founders on a case-by-case basis.

As secretary, Johnson has legal power to grant temporary entry for individuals to enter the U.S. for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.

Americas economy has long benefitted from the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs, from Main Street to Silicon Valley, said Leon Rodriguez, director of citizenship and immigration services, in a statement. This proposed rule, when finalized, will help our economy grow by expanding immigration options for foreign entrepreneurs who meet certain criteria for creating jobs, attracting investment and generating revenue in the U.S.

The temporary entry, formally known as parole, would allow an individual to request employment authorization once inside the U.S.

The government estimates that 2,940 entrepreneurs could be eligible annually under this rule.
House candidate Denise Gitsham has repeatedly pointed out that Rep. Scott Peters has voted to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp, a move she says could bring the prisoners to a brig at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar and put San Diego at risk.

In posts on social media, in campaign materials, and at a recent news conference, Gitsham said Peters, D-San Diego, supported closing Guantanamo Bay all the while knowing that San Diego, specifically Miramar, was one of six locations in America where detainees could be relocated to. He voted just like a career politician does, in lock-step with Washingtons interests.

The Pentagon, however, has said as far back as at least August 2015  two months before Gitsham launched her campaign  that the brig at the air station is not being considered for inmates currently at Guantanamo Bay.

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Peters stance on Guantanamo surfaced again recently after the incumbent voted against a House resolution that prohibits the transfer of detainees out of Guantanamo Bay to the United States or foreign countries. It passed the House on Sept. 15 mostly along party lines, with Republican members in favor.

I voted against this bill today because it is my firm belief that our top military leaders should decide how to deal with and where to house suspected terrorists  not Congress, Peters said in a statement. A vote against this bill does not equate support for bringing suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to the United States, which is already prohibited by law.

Gitsham renewed her focus on the issue before the suspected terrorist bombings in New York and New Jersey. She said Peters latest vote put the the 52nd Congressional District at risk.

Congressman Peters had one last chance to side with his constituents and oppose the transfer of GITMO detainees, she said in a statement. Unfortunately, Peters proved again he is more interested in toeing the party line than doing what is best for his constituents.

Peters campaign accused Gitsham of being uninformed or deceitful by misrepresenting his stance on Guantanamo Bay, his efforts to keep terrorists out of the brig at Miramar, and the Pentagons plans for detainees.

Navy leaders said more than a year ago that MCAS Miramar is not being surveyed as a destination for detainees, Peters campaign manager MaryAnne Pintar said. Either she is intentionally misrepresenting the facts or she doesnt understand the votes the Congress has taken. Whichever it is, the voters deserve better.

Gitshams campaign said that while Peters has personally opposed moving detainees to Miramar, he has voted nine times against measures that would have kept detainees in Cuba, and that one day the brig at Miramar could be home to terrorists.

Scott Peters has never made sure this could never be an option in the future, Gitshams campaign said.

Some of his votes on legislation that supports keeping detainees at the naval base came before it was clear that Miramar was not a likely destination for detainees. Even so, moving the detainees off the island increases the risks back in the United States, Gitshams campaign said.

Peters campaign countered. He wants the Guantanamo detention center closed, but he hasnt voted on any bills that say where the detainees would be transferred. Instead, he has supported measures that let the military decide where suspected terrorists should be kept.

Some of the nations most prominent military and national security leaders, Republicans and Democrats, believe closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay is the best approach to keep Americans safe, Pintar said. Just like Donald Trump, Denise Gitsham thinks she knows more than the generals.

Peters has also on several occasions said he supports the detention centers closure because its an expensive boondoggle that serves as a recruiting tool for terrorist organizations.

He has previously said that he will only support plans to close Gitmo that transfer suspected terrorists to maximum security facilities in remote locations away from population centers. These facilities must have a perfect record on escapes, and they must have experience housing the most dangerous criminals. Miramar, he said, does not meet that security criteria.

President Barack Obama wants to close the detention facility before he leaves office early next year and transfer some detainees to other countries, sending others to a currently undetermined compound in the United States.

Miramar is one of six facilities that were once considered to hold Guantanamo Bay detainees. It can hold as many as 599 prisoners.

Twitter: @jptstewart

joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1841
Members of the House and Senate who served in the military routinely violate a Defense Department ethics policy that regulates how they can use their experience in uniform when campaigning for office.

Often they fail to run a required disclaimer that says they are not endorsed by the armed forces.

A review of incumbent reservists and veterans in both chambers of Congress show that 58 of the 81 who served appear in a uniform or mention their military experience on their campaign website or in campaign mailers. Only 13 of the 58 include the disclaimer.

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Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, was the only member from the San Diego area who is a veteran that didnt include the disclosure.

The candidates span the two major political parties and include members serving their first terms as well as seasoned legislators.

Issa mentions his service as an enlisted soldier and later as an Army officer on both his website and in a recent campaign mailer targeted to veterans. His district includes Camp Pendleton as well as parts of northern San Diego County and southern Orange County that are favorite retirement spots for people who served.

Issas mailer includes a picture of an officer pinning on rank to a young Issas shirt collar. Another shows him with a parachute strapped to his back and a helmet on his head as he participates in jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1975. The mailer does not include any sort of disclosure.

The pictures are old and dont give the impression of backing from the armed forces, said Issas campaign spokesman, Calvin Moore, who questioned whether the disclaimer was needed.

When you look at the photos from 30 years ago, theyre from a scrapbook, and certainly wed be the first ones to fix it if there is something wrong there, Moore said.

The Issa campaign added a disclosure to its website on Friday afternoon after inquires from the Union-Tribune. Moore said they wanted to be sure they complied with the Defense Department policy.

Issas opponent, retired Marine Col. Doug Applegate, a Democrat, also has a description of his military career and pictures of himself in uniform on his website. Applegate included a disclaimer that says he is no longer in the military and that he is not endorsed by either the Corps or its parent organizations, the Department of the Navy and the Department of Defense.

The incumbents who use their experience in the military in their re-election campaign materials range from the countrys most prominent veteran in office today, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, to Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Massachusetts, a first-term congressman who served as an officer in the Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq. Both included pictures of themselves in uniform, a practice the Defense Department says is acceptable for veterans, but not without the prominent and clearly displayed disclaimer.

Archived copies of McCains website from his 2008 campaign for president also lack the disclosure. Neither the Moulton nor the McCain campaigns returned a request for comment.

Per a February 2008 Defense Department directive, reservists, national guard members, and veterans running for office may include their current or former specific military duty, title, or position, or photographs in military uniform, when displayed with other non-military biographical details. Any such military information must be accompanied by a prominent and clearly displayed disclaimer that neither the military information nor photographs imply endorsement by the Department of Defense or their particular Military Department.

The Defense Department has a longstanding policy of encouraging its members and veterans to be active citizens, but it also wants to make sure that it doesnt appear to back a candidacy, Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson said.

The rules reflect the fact that military service and uniform worn are in service to our nation and Constitution and not to a political party or candidate, he said.

The policy applies to printed campaign material, as well as online content, including social media accounts that make reference to a candidates service, Sakrisson said.

The regulations dont make any reference to sanctions against a violator, but Sakrisson said that the policy is enforced by the relevant branch of the armed forces, or the candidates reserve or national guard component.

Many members of Congress follow the regulation. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, isnt shy to talk about his time serving in the Marine Corps, his deployments as an artillery officer, and his affinity for the military. His campaign website includes texts about his time in the service, pictures of him in uniform  and the disclaimer.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs lists 81 veterans from active duty and reserve units as a representative or delegate in that chamber, while four veterans in the Senate are also running for re-election.

A review of their websites show that the vast majority make a reference to their military service in their effort to get re-elected. How they reference their military service varies from a passing mention of an enlistment after high school, to details about the commands they served in. Most candidates just use text when referencing their service. But 17 use a photo, a display specifically the Defense Department says must be accompanied with a disclosure. Of the incumbents with a photo, 10 have a disclaimer.
Theyre trying to land humans on Mars, design robots to serve the sick and elderly and identify which areas of Earth will be damaged most by climate change.

Theyre also looking for remnants of the Big Bang, evaluating Great Britains pending exit from the European Union and studying why a villainous gene causes Huntingtons disease.

Meet the Class of 2016. Not the students, but the scientists wholl teach them.

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From San Diego to San Marcos, the regions major universities have been hiring scores of proven and promising scientists and engineers to cope with booming enrollment and exploit research opportunities in a region thats a mecca for science.

The schools together recruited upward of 125 scholars, whose interests span broad areas of science. These researchers will explore everything from ways to make clunky robots more like people to figuring out how dragonflies adapt to drought.

The newcomers are about to get to work.

San Diego State University and Cal State San Marcos are set to begin classes on Aug. 29. The University of San Diego is slated to start two days later. And UC San Diegos fall quarter is scheduled to begin Sept. 19.

The four universities will collectively serve more than 92,000 students this fall, which marks an increase of about 10,000 during the past five years.

Heres a sampling of this years crop of professors:

UC SAN DIEGO

Robotics

Youve probably read that robots are going to take over the world. While experts said most of the claims are bogus, robotic systems are becoming a bigger part of everyday life, from the operating room to battle zones to elder-care facilities.

UC San Diego has decided to become a dominant player in the field. Last year, it founded the Contextual Robotics Institute, creating a home for researchers aiming to make machines that can quickly size up what people are thinking, doing and feeling.

The goal is to produce robotic systems that anticipate and meet peoples needs, especially in health care and public safety.

To push things forward, UC San Diego recently hired a group of experts in robotics and computer science, including star roboticist Henrick Christensen. He was recruited from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he created an acclaimed robotics research center.

Christensen immediately set an ambitious goal for UC San Diego, saying: I want to build a research institute that, ideally, will be in the top five in the world five years from now. Why not see if we can make San Diego Robot Valley.

His colleagues will include three young, new recruits: Laurel Riek, Nick Gravish and Ndapa Nakashole.

They work in different areas, but their research is related, especially in its practicality.

Nakasholes focus deals with a source of great frustration: getting computer systems to understand what people say, do and write.

Siri  the intelligent assistant on iPhones  can answer many questions. So can supercomputers like IBM Watson, which crushed its human competitors on the TV game show Jeopardy!

But these systems struggle to place words and sentences into context. They also struggle with nuance and deciphering things such as sarcasm and irony.

Nakashole, who was recruited from Carnegie Mellon University, is striving to fix these language problems, and that could lead to better operating systems for phones and robots. It may even hasten the day when police are aided by robotic interrogators.

Riek just arrived from the University of Notre Dame, where she was exploring ways to get robots to work with humans in real-world environments, such as hospitals and peoples homes. The computer scientist also proposed that a code of ethics be developed for engineers who design robots that directly serve people.

Riek and co-author Don Howard said in an academic paper that theyre concerned about the involvement of robots in particularly intimate activities such as bathing and sanitation; direct physical contact between robots and humans, as in lifting patients in and out of beds and wheelchairs; and the high probability of patients forming emotional bonds with robots in environments otherwise sometimes comparatively lacking in human companionship.

Gravishs work also involves robotics, though on a much smaller scale.

The Georgia Tech-trained professor studies the nature and movement of small creatures  bees, ants and the like. It helps him learn how to design and build micro-robots, possibly including ones that could be used in surgery.

He helped to develop a snake-like robot that might eventually be used to inspect nuclear power plants.

Nature may help us figure things out, and we can learn a lot about biology along the way! Gravish said.

Physics and astronomy

Steve Boggs holds one of the loftiest titles in science: Hes chair of physics at UC Berkeley, a program that has few peers.

And yet hes leaving that post, heading south to become dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego. Boggs accepted the challenge of improving a sprawling division that takes in chemistry, biochemistry, mathematics and physics.

The universitys leaders want the division to be not just good, but world-class. And world-class is demanded in La Jolla, especially in chemistry, a program that feeds the regions life-science companies.

This years UC San Diego recruits also include two young scientists who work in Boggs own field, astrophysics. Kam Arnold earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley, and Raphael Flauger arrives from the University of Texas, where he was on the faculty.

Metaphorically speaking, theyre time travelers.

Flauger and Arnold study the earliest moments of the universe, a pursuit that got a big lift at UC San Diego earlier this year. The campus received $40 million in donations for an observatory whose mission includes producing a baby picture of the cosmos.

In addition, UC San Diego also recruited a highly respected computer scientist, Philip Guo, who comes from the University of Rochester. Guo develops large-scale computer programs for online education, particularly data analyis, one of the hottest fields in science.

Climate change

UC San Diego is deeply linked to the study of climate change. One of the schools founders, Roger Revelle, was known as the father of the greenhouse effect. His colleague Charles Keeling created the now acclaimed Keeling Curve, a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The universitys researchers also helped to shape the recent Paris Agreement, in which nearly 200 countries agreed to fight global warming.

The school has dozens of people working on the topic, including two new, young faculty recruits, Isabel Rivera-Collazo, who earned her doctorate at the University College London, and Kate Ricke, who received her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon.

They hold complementary positions.

Rivera-Collazo, an environmental archaeologist, studies how people responded to climate change in the distant past. Ricke, an engineer and public policy expert, examines the potential local and regional impacts of climate change and weighs the social and economic implications.

Rickes work involves a daunting question: How and where will people migrate as climate impacts worsen?

SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY

San Diego State, which pulled in a near-record $130 million for research last year, recruited faculty with interests near and far for the coming academic year.

The new appointees include Ping Lu, a veteran aerospace engineer from Iowa State University. He arrives as the aerospace industry appears to be on the upswing in Southern California with the success of rocket companies like SpaceX.

Lu is helping NASA deal with the dicey question of how to land human explorers on Mars.

If they come in at the wrong angle, the spacecraft could break up or skip away from the planet, Lu said.

Kate Rubins attention is focused even deeper in space. The newly hired astronomer from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics studies how galaxies form and evolve. SDSU has a small astronomy department, but the program has earned lots of respect in recent years, notably for its work on galaxies and extrasolar planets.

San Diego State also recruited Kim Twist, a young political scientist who earned her doctorate at UC Berkeley. Her research includes one of the hottest political stories of the year: Great Britains decision to leave the European Union, widely known as Brexit.

The implications of Brexit are very hard to know, because its unprecedented, Twist said. This may have been further complicated by the election of (Prime Minister) Theresa May, who doesnt seem to be in a hurry to conclude the process.

In the field of anthropology, Isaac Ullah is joining the faculty from Arizona State University.

My expertise is in the archaeology of the Neolithic period  the time when humans first came to rely on domesticated plants and animals for their main sources of food, Ullah said. This occurred in the Near East very early on, and eventually, these early Near Eastern farmers began to spread to the west  interestingly mostly by boat.

A fifth recruit, bioengineer Shawn OConnor, will work in SDSUs new Smart Health Institute, which specializes in wearable health sensors. OConnor was a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego, where he explored the issues of balance and mobility, especially in older people.

San Diego State also hired Jayson Richardson, an educational leadership expert who earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota. Richardson focuses on many aspects of technology, especially on evaluating how well digital devices are used in schools.

CAL STATE SAN MARCOS

The campus, created less than 30 years ago, has become one of the most important institutions in North County, a fact reflected by the schools booming enrollment. Five years ago, the university had 10,000 students. This fall, the figure will hit 15,000.

The faculty is growing, too. The school recently added Jane Kim, a biologist from Tufts University who studies how cells duplicate in their genomes. Such work is important to understanding how Huntingtons disease and other disorders progress.

The university also recruited Diego Sustaita, an ecology researcher from Brown University who looks at how an animals anatomy affects key functions such as eating and building habitats. He mostly focuses on birds.

UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO

The University of San Diego is expanding as well, although at a slower rate. The campus will add about 150 students this fall, pushing enrollment to a record high 8,400.

There will be many new professors to help with the increased load, including Anthony Bell, a biochemist who arrives from the University of Southern Mississippi. Hes been studying HMGB1, a protein that can influence everything from sepsis to lupus to cancer. Such research is important in drug discovery.

USD also recruited Kate Boersma, a young biologist who earned her doctorate at Oregon State University. She studies a subject of special importance in Southern California  drought. Specifically, Boersma studies how drought affects animals that live in lakes and ponds.

We expect to see an increasing number of extreme droughts, Boersma said.
Roger Tsien, the exuberant and resourceful UC San Diego researcher who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for helping to find a more effective way to peer inside cells and organisms, died on Aug. 24. He was 64.

Tsien passed away while visiting Eugene, Oregon, said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, who broke the news to the campus community on Wednesday. The precise cause of death has yet to be determined.

Tsien, a first-generation American who began to explore chemistry at age 8, was hailed for illuminating the study of such diseases as cancer and HIV. He teamed with fellow scientists Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie to turn green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is found in jellyfish, into a research tool.

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Khosla recalled the collaboration, saying in a statement: Shimomura identified the crucial jellyfish protein and revealed that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. Chalfie showed how it could be used as a biological marker. Combining his deep skills in chemistry and biology, Tsien found ways to make GFP glow more brightly and consistently; then he created a full palette of fluorescent proteins that scientists could use to track different cellular processes at the same time.

GFPs have become a fundamental fixture in life sciences labs around the world, allowing researchers to look into cells or whole animals, to watch molecules interact in real-time and ask questions once thought impossible.

After winning the Nobel in 2008, Tsien told The San Diego Union-Tribune, Ive always been attracted to colors. Color helps make the work more interesting and endurable. It helps when things arent going well. If I had been born color-blind, I probably never would have gone into this.

The news of Tsiens death caused mourning across the Torrey Pines Mesa in La Jolla, home to one of the nations largest life-science clusters.

Roger Tsien was truly one of the most remarkable and inspiring scientists of our time, says Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel laureate and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla.

He will be sorely missed as a colleague for his revolutionary work and keen mind, and also as a wonderful person. I felt privileged to get to know him over the years.

Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, said, Rarely are the smartest people the most creative, too  but Roger was both.

Kristiina Vuori, president of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, said, The mesa is a little darker with the passing of Nobel laureate Roger Tsien. His death is a huge loss to the scientific world. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues and we will continue to be inspired by the remarkable scientific discoveries he made through the years.

Bioluminescence researcher Nathan Shaner, who studied in Tsiens lab, said he was struggling with shock and disbelief.

He gave me a huge opportunity, said Shaner, a founding investigator of the nonprofit Scintillon Institute for Biomedical and Bioenergy Research in Sorrento Valley.

He was the smartest person Ive ever met, the most creative, and he was also incredibly humble about his place in the big picture, Shaner said.

Shaner said Tsien gave students great freedom to pursue their projects. He would frequently ask for updates on their progress, but otherwise remain in the background.

He was very good about letting us figure things out for ourselves, Shaner said. I really learned to be independent.

Shaner and colleagues put green fluorescent protein to artistic use by using genetically engineered bacteria to draw a multicolored San Diego beach scene. Other scientists have adopted this new artistic medium.

The diversity of genetic mutations is illustrated by this San Diego beach scene drawn with living bacteria expressing 8 different colors of fluorescent proteins. They are derived from green fluorescent protein, the use of which was pioneered by Roger Tsien, and from dsRed fluorescent protein. ( / Artwork by Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Roger Tsien in 2006)

Roger Yonchien Tsien was born in New York City on Feb., 1, 1952. His father, Hsue Chu, was an engineer. His mother, Yi Ying Li, trained as a nurse.

His father found various jobs, but those early years werent easy. Roger Tsien wrote in his Nobel biography that the family chose a new housing development in Livingston, N.J., but the developer refused to sell to us, saying that they could not permit Livingston to become a Chinatown, nor could they afford the likelihood that other customers would refuse to buy houses next to a Chinese family.

My parents appealed to the Governor of New Jersey, Robert Meyner. His office sent a letter to the developers warning them that racial discrimination was illegal.

Roger Tsien prospered as a student, and was awarded first prize in the 1968 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for high school seniors.

I remember being envious of my fellow finalists, who were much more adult and sophisticated, Tsien wrote in his bio. Also their projects and exhibits seemed much more exciting and explainable than mine. I felt intimidated by the senior judge, Glenn Seaborg, partly because of his commanding height, partly because he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, partly because of his 1951 Nobel Prize for work in inorganic chemistry.

Tsien went on to study chemistry and physics at Harvard College, and later earned a doctorate in physiology at the University of Cambridge in England. He became a junior professor at UC Berkeley before landing at his permanent home, UC San Diego, in 1989.

UCSD ... was much younger, roomier, faster-growing, and less tradition-bound than Berkeley, which I felt more than compensated for its lesser fame. Tsien wrote in his bio.

Tsien earned many professional honors, including being elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

He was also known for and sticking hard and fast to the facts of science. This side of his personality surfaced in front of 400 people in 2013 at the Salk, when Tsien got into an argument with Nobel laureate James Watson during a public lecture.

Tsien didnt agree with what Watson was saying about oxidants and antioxidants and stood to offer a different perspective. Watson tried to blow him off and dismissively said, All you have to do is think clearly and these difficulties vanish.

Tsien calmly replied by telling the agitated Watson that he could find the real facts of the matter by cracking open a particular book. They traded sour looks before a Salk professor stepped in to restore order.

Tsien made light of the situation as he left the auditorium, telling the Union-Tribune: You should take all elderly scientists with a grain of salt  including me.

Union-Tribune staff writer Bradley J. Fikes contributed to this story.
The bright yellow and toxic Panamanian Golden Frog hasnt been seen in the wild for years, and may be extinct there. But at the San Diego Zoo and elsewhere, this singular amphibian lives on.

Atelopus zeteki, as it is scientifically named, is noteworthy not only for its toxic skin, which yielded poison for the arrows of native tribes.

It also communicates in a nearly human-like gesture, by raising a forelimb to make others aware of its presence. Using sounds would be difficult in its native habitat, which contains noisy streams.

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In addition, the frog has no external or middle ear, although it retains its inner ear. It apparently hears with its lungs, which are located a short distance under its skin and vibrate in resonance with sound.

This frog and other amphibians have been ravaged by a deadly fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis. The fungus disrupts the frogs breathing, which takes place through their skins as well as their lungs.

In this San Diego Zoo video, senior reptile keeper Dave Grubaugh describes how Panamanian Golden Frogs, Atelopus zeteki, are being bred by the Zoo.

But if the fungus can be brought under control, the species could be re-introduced into the wild through breeding programs like those at the San Diego Zoo.

Since 2003, the Zoo says it has hatched more than 500 of these frogs at a breeding center. Right now, five breeding frogs are present at the Zoo, and 69 offspring, said Dave Grubaugh, senior keeper at the Zoos Reptile House.

Right now, we do have one pair in breeding mode, Grubaugh said in a video provided by the Zoo. The male will be on top of the female for several months until she starts to lay eggs. As that happens, he will fertilize the eggs as shes laying them. 

The breeding program began 13 years ago, and successful breeding has taken place during the last five years, Grubaugh said.

The San Diego Zoos programs to preserve endangered species extends across the animal kingdom, including the nearly extinct northern white rhino, the Tasmanian devil, and the California Condor.

Endangered plants are also cared for, including coastal sage scrub, and the Micronesian cycad.
The soaring number of cyber attacks against American companies is causing comparatively little financial damage, discouraging many businesses from beefing up security, the RAND Corp. said in a study Tuesday.

RAND researchers estimate that a typical computer breach costs a company about $200,000. For many firms, that figure represents less than 0.4 percent of their annual revenues.

The researchers also said the cyber attacks are generally less burdensome than the losses caused by fraud, theft, corruption and bad debt.

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Their findings were published in the Journal of Cybersecurity.

In a statement, the studys lead author, Sasha Romanosky, said: Relative to all the other risks companies face, the cyber risks often arent as big a deal as we think. It may be bad for you if you are the victim, but it doesnt change the behavior or strategy of a company.

Like you and me, companies are self-interested and operate in ways that minimize costs. You cant begrudge them for working that way.

The RAND findings are similar to those in a 2015 study by Columbia University, which said major data breaches at many Fortune 500 companies ended up costing the firms less than 1 percent of their annual revenues. The companies included Target, which experienced a data breach in 2013 that revealed information from 40 million debit and credit card accounts.

The RAND Corp. said its analysis comes partly in response to a request by the Obama administration to help create voluntary guidelines for improving information security, which can vary greatly by company. The request was triggered by the attack on Target and other major businesses.

Romanosky said the number of data breaches increased from 64 in 2012 to almost 250 in 2014. Hackers heavily targeted health, insurance and finance companies, as well as the government.

A review of the attacks revealed that the cost of the attacks pale in comparison to other liabilities.

If it is true that on average businesses lose 5 percent of their annual revenue to fraud, and that the cost of a cyber event represents only 0.4 percent of a firms revenues, then one many conclude that these hacks, attacks and careless behaviors represent a small fraction of the cost that firms face, and therefore only a small portion of the cost of doing business, Romanosky said in the statement.

Murray Jennex, a cybersecurity expert at San Diego State University, offered a different perspective Tuesday. Its very difficult to determine cost for compromised data because there is only a real cost if someone uses the data to do something bad. Much data is stolen without ever really being used, Jennex said.

Mark Heckman, a cybersecurity expert at the University of San Diego, said a broader context is needed.

Another consideration is that a small firm that suffers a cyber attack that might register as a small cost in this reports data might still be out of business as a result of the attack. So the cost in dollars is not the whole story, he said.

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Most San Diegans are drinking water containing hexavalent chromium at levels higher than the goals set by Californias scientists, but that fall well below the states legal limits for the toxic metal, a new report by the Environmental Working Group found.

The report, released Wednesday, seeks to draw attention to a chemical thats ubiquitous in drinking water in more than 200 million Americans. It also highlights the tension between maximizing public health and setting limits that regulators deem practical.

Californias public health goal for the chemical is 500 times lower than the legal limit set by state regulators, revealing the disparity between those priorities, the reports authors said.

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Were basically concerned with getting the information out there, letting people know that this is what the scientists say, this is what some other people say, this is what the industry says, said Bill Walker, vice president of the Environmental Working Group. You need to make a decision on what you need to do to protect your familys health.

The group analyzed data collected by the federal Environmental Protection Agency on chromium-6 levels in water agencies throughout the U.S. Among San Diego water districts, Pala and Camp Pendleton had the highest levels for the years 2013 through 2015, while Oceanside and Poway showed the lowest. All San Diego districts had levels that were less than 5 percent of the state legal limit.

Hexavalent chromium, or chromium-6, is one form of the element chromium. Unlike, chromium-3, a nutrient in food, chromium-6 is produced through geologic erosion or industrial processes. Studies on rats and mice show that it can cause cancer when its consumed in drinking water, said Elaine Kahn, the chief of water toxicology for the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

That came into stark light after the residents of Hinkley, California, sued PG&E over chromium pollution in the small, Central Valley town, a story made famous by the movie Erin Brockovich, about the legal clerk who helped bring the suit.

California limits chromium-6 to 10 parts per billion, but environmentalists say thats not tough enough. Based on the mouse studies, state scientists set a public health goal of .02 parts per billion  500 times lower than the legal limit. That goal represents the level of chemical in drinking water that poses no significant health risk. Numerically, its the amount that would cause one extra cancer case per million people.

I think it would be considered negligible, said Sam Delson, deputy director of OEHHA. Obviously one in a million over a 70 year lifetime is an extremely low risk.

Citing pending litigation, the State Water Resources Control Board declined to comment on the maximum legal limit, beyond public documents that say the levels are based in part on what water managers consider technically feasible and cost-effective.

Environmentalists say chemical levels that dont endanger healthy adults can still be hazardous to pregnant women, children, and people with existing illnesses. And toxins can act in concert with other compounds in drinking water, some of which arent regulated at all.

While this report focuses on Chromium 6, in a sense its a poster child for educating people that there are lots of unregulated chemicals in your drinking water, and those chemicals can act in combination to cause cancer in ways that individual chemicals may not, Walker said.

The lower the chromium levels, the lower the risk. So water from Poway, with one of the lowest levels in the county, at .009 parts per billion, would pose a risk of less than one cancer case per million people. Pala, with the highest levels in the county, at .49 parts per billion, represents a risk of about 25 additional cancer cases per million.

Chromium-6, like other toxic chemicals, has been a moving target. Regulations tighten as new research exposes risks, and as new technology allows water managers to better detect and reduce pollution levels, said Richard Williamson, water utility manager for the Carlsbad Municipal Water District.

For instance, the Carlsbad desalination plant launched last year could help cut chromium-6 levels in the future, allowing water agencies to blend its nearly pure outflows with other sources to control water quality.

For things like chrome-6, as we gain more information on the health effects they modified the standard to decrease acceptable levels, he said. Our goal is to protect public health, so our goal is to keep our level as low as possible.

deborah.brennan@sduniontribune (760) 529-4941 Twitter@deborahsbrennan
About half a million babies are born in California each year, which translates to roughly 1,400 per day. Starting today, every one of those newborns will be tested for a rare genetic disorder that can destroy the nervous system. Their parents can thank a variety of people who pushed for the screening, but perhaps most of all a Vista mother who lost her son to the condition.

The test is quietly being incorporated into the states routine screening panel for newborns, which already looks for 80 potential health problems using a few spots of dried blood collected from a babys heel before the child leaves the hospital.

While most parents wont ever know about this new addition, it is expected to deliver a potentially life-saving, early warning to an estimated 100 families per year throughout California. Timely diagnosis and treatment are of the essence for these patients, said Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and state senator from Sacramento who sponsored the screening bill.

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The difference between an early diagnosis through infant screening and a late diagnosis, when symptoms start showing up, could be life and death, Pan said in a statement.

It is widely recognized that no one pushed harder for the latest expansion to the screening panel than Janis Sherwood, the Vista mother turned public health crusader who has spent the past 13 years spreading information about adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD, the disorder that took her boy, Sawyer, on Sept. 30, 2003. He was 8 years old.

By the time Sawyer was able to get an accurate diagnosis, it was too late. Sherwood then dedicated her life to giving other families a better shot at beating the disorder.

Its just very exciting, Sherwood said Tuesday about the states decision to routinely screen for ALD.

The milestone is the culmination of her determined activism. The outreach campaign started with visits to medical conferences and grew to become a cross-country pilgrimage that took Sherwood to 3,200 childrens hospitals, pediatric offices and other medical facilities in 48 states.

There were also lobbying trips to Sacramento and Washington, D.C., where she and others convinced legislators and administrators to add screening for ALD to Californias required screening panel and to recommend similar action by all other states. Legislation is pending in Congress to make that recommendation a requirement.

Sustaining her advocacy for this long has been tough at times, Sherwood said.

You have to shut so much down to be able to go out and talk about your dead son every day. It can be really hard, and it does come to a head every now and then. You just kinda let it come and just know that, in your heart of hearts, its all in his honor. I know he would be really proud of me, she said.

ALD affects one in every 20,000 children, mostly boys. Scientists have traced the condition to a specific genetic mutation on the X chromosome that increases the likelihood that fatty acids will build up in the bodys cells. This buildup gradually devastates the insulation around neurons, which carry the bodys electrical messages, and harms the adrenal glands, which are critical organs that help the body regulate blood pressure, burn fat and react to illness and injury.

Around the time a child turns 2, ALD can manifest symptoms that often begin with behavioral and learning problems. These symptoms are often misdiagnosed as attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity.

By the time doctors realize what is really going on, erosion of nerve pathways has become so severe that the condition impairs cognition and basic senses such as vision and hearing. Progression from this stage toward death can be rapid, typically leaving patients bedridden, blind and unable to speak.

If the mutation is spotted early, then it is possible to treat the disorders effects.

Physicians can compensate for the reduced adrenal gland output with daily pills containing the hormone cortisol. Magnetic resonance imaging scans of the brain are performed every six months, with the aim of spotting early changes in neurons. A bone marrow transplant can stop the damage if it is performed when the initial signs of trouble appear.

And some clinical trials underway have shown significant progress in editing patients own T-cells (part of the bodys immune system) to fix the genetic mutation that causes ALD, Sherwood noted. If ultimately successful, this approach would allow patients to undergo an easier transplant  one that does not require them to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.

Californias new screening expansion will be retroactive for all newborns blood samples collected since Feb. 16.

Sherwood said although news of an ALD diagnosis will likely be frightening for any babys family, she wants other parents to know that piece of knowledge is a gift in the long run.

Our full intention is to be here to help guide them through the process and make them realize that this is a blessing. This is not a death sentence like it is when you get a late diagnosis, Sherwood said.

For more information on adrenoleukodystrophy, visit Sherwoods website at fightald.org.

paul.sisson@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @paulsisson
Former President George H.W. Bushs plan to vote for Hillary Clinton  the wife of the politician who pushed him out of the White House 24 years ago  should come as no surprise to anyone. Whatever you think of his politics, the first President Bush has always put an emphasis on grace and civility. Everything about blustering, transgressive, rude Donald Trump is an affront to his sensibilities. Bush was perhaps most proud of the strong relationships he built with foreign leaders while president. In Clinton, unlike Trump, he sees someone who thinks this matters.

But given that Trumps appeal is built off his contempt for the establishment  any establishment  Bush 41s rejection of Trump may reinforce one of his messages: The people running America are scared that hell shake things up. And the optics of how the news reached the public  via the Facebook page of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the daughter of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and niece of former President John F. Kennedy  prompted a social media frenzy. The fact that a member of one American political dynasty shared the news that another member of an American political dynasty will vote for the member of yet another American political dynasty was treated by Trump fans as affirmation of their conspiratorial mindset  not as a highly credible critique of their Republican candidate by a former Republican president.

How strange these past 16 months have been. We hope things dont get even stranger come Nov. 8.
A sexual assault survivors' "Bill of Rights" that passed the House of Representatives this week is getting praise along with the two California congresswomen who pushed the bill to unanimous approval with bipartisan support.

The Survivors' Bill of Rights Act of 2016 was introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) and was sponsored by Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Irvine). Some 40 other representatives eventually co-sponsored the bill, including Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) who later praised it as one that ensures "victims have access to the justice they deserve."

On Tuesday, House Representatives voted unanimously to pass the bill, which ensures that sexual assault survivors 1) have access to an evidence collection kit, 2) be told in writing when a kit is set to be destroyed, 3) can request that a kit be preserved, and 4) be notified of DNA results. The Senate passed a similar bill back in May, and now both need to be reconciled before President Obama can sign the legislation into law.

Both Lofgren and Walters shared the news with their respective Twitter followers:

'A big step forward'

Under the current law, sexual assault survivors have to jump through hoops to keep kits from getting destroyed. And in several states, rape kits are often destroyed due to lack of resources or when prosecutors drop a case. The bill comes at a time when the issue of sexual assault has mired college campuses for the way some of those cases are handled.

Among the chief advocates of the bill is a group called Rise.

House Speaker Paul Ryan encouraged lawmakers to pass the bill, and issued a statement to signal the bipartisan support: "With todays vote, the House will take a bipartisan step toward preserving the basic rights of sexual assault survivors. Because they have endured enough trauma alreadyand their right to justice is unconditional."

Once passed, the reactions were resoundingly positive.
Facebook is learning a lesson in free speech and perhaps also history.

On Friday, the social network faced a chorus of criticism from Norway's prime minister and other politicians as well as the country's largest newspaper who say the network's takedown of a historic war photo from the Facebook page of Norwegian author Tom Egeland is akin to censorship.

At issue is the iconic 1972 image of a little girl, naked and crying in the aftermath of one of many napalm bombings that happened during the Vietnam War.

The image at question

Facebook's "Community Standards" gives the network power to police nudity and child pornography in many parts of the world. In this case, Facebook did not make the distinction between an iconic image and child nudity.

But by midday, Facebook responded to the backlash and through a spokesperson it said it would reinstate the image.

After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case. An image of a naked girl would normally be presumed to violate our Community Standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography. In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time. Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have decided to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed.

The controversy began as early as a few weeks ago when Egeland posted the image along with an article about iconic war images and their influence on warfare, according to a scathing open letter Aftenposten's editor-in-chief and CEO Espen Egil Hansen wrote to Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook deleted the photo. Soon after, other Norwegians uploaded the photo in protest. But the controversy reached a fever pitch Friday when Prime Minister Erna Solberg also posted the photo, which was subsequently deleted by Facebook. Her response got the world's attention.

'Solberg responds brilliantly.'

"Today, pictures are such an important element in making an impression, that if you edit past events or people, you change history and you change reality," Solberg wrote in her Facebook post. She said it was the first time Facebook had deleted one of her posts.

The hashtag #DearMark surfaced on Twitter to protest and mock Facebook's robotic censorship mechanism, which can't distinguish between images the way humans do.

The internet protests: #DearMark

Did Facebook go too far? Can Facebook do a better job at policing nudity without infringing on free speech?

Share your thoughts.
The 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in America on Sept. 11, 2001 is this weekend, and one super store's attempt at a memorial is falling very short.

In Panama City, Florida, a Walmart built a display that included twin towers made of Coca-Cola Zero, and an American flag behind it made of other red, white and blue Coke product packaging. Above the display was a banner that said "We Will Never Forget" which also included the symbols for Coca-Cola and Walmart.

And oh yeah, there was a sign showing the Coke products used were on sale.

The Panama City Walmart display

The photo, posted Tuesday by Twitter user @online_shawn has been retweeted and liked thousands of times, leading to a slow build of outrage across social media.

"One of the lamest things I've ever seen." Pure outrage. Some people were blaming the entire state of Florida. However some people found the display to be appropriate.

A Walmart spokesperson told Orlando Weekly that the display has since been taken down. He also said the idea for the display was ultimately approved by Walmart.

Sadly, this Walmart isn't alone in trying to cash in on the memorial over the years. One Twitter user pointed to this outrageous tweet by SpaghettiOs in 2013.

Uh-oh SpaghettiOs

Out of touch or thoughtful? You tell us.
At least 88,000 people are saying they've had enough of Hollywood's habit of "whitewashing" movies, and they want to make sure it doesn't happen again in Disney's live-action reboot of "Mulan."

A petition is circulating and has almost reached its signature goal of 90,000.

It's message? To "to tell Disney that we demand to see them cast an Asian Mulan!"

"Whitewashing, the practice of casting white Caucasian actors and actresses in roles originally meant to be characters of color, is all too common in Hollywood," the petition says. "'The Last Airbender,' 'Pan,' the upcoming 'Ghost in the Shell' adaptation, and many, many others have demonstrated this problem. Some whitewashed only the main cast members, leaving them inexplicably the only Caucasians among populations (including supposed blood relatives), while others hired white extras as well except possibly a token (Person of Color) POC."

The signatures come from people all over the world with messages like "I am TIRED of seeing some of my favorite adaptations becoming whitewashed especially when culture appropriation is involved" and "WE WANT A CHINESE GIRL."

The heart of the petition is being echoed on social media too.

Who will Disney cast?

This isn't the first time movie-goers have made it known to Hollywood that they're sick of seeing "whitewashed" movies. George Takei famously slammed Marvel earlier this year for its casting of "Doctor Strange" and many voices rose up with him in protest.

Disney announced the movie last year. It follows the success of live-action films like "The Jungle Book" and "Cinderella."

Do you think this petition has a point?
Call it the case that never ends.

For 23 years, Chevron, the San Ramon-based oil giant, has been fighting charges that it is responsible for polluting an area near the homes of 30,000 villagers along the Amazon River in Ecuador.

But after getting smacked with a $9.5 billion judgment, Chevron has rallied, putting together a string of victories in court. On Monday, the case moves to another venue in yet another country  Canada.

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This whole case has gone off on a tangent because of the behavior of the lawyers, said Paul M. Barrett, a journalist who has written a book about the legal odyssey. At least one of those lawyers turned what was a pollution case into an extortionate enterprise.

The lawyer is Steven Donziger, a Harvard Law School grad who has represented 47 plaintiffs from the Oriente region in eastern Ecuador.

Donziger initially garnered favorable media attention, including a flattering portrayal on 60 Minutes, and enlisted celebrities such as Sting and Daryl Hannah to fly to South America and stick their hands into oily goo that has collected in pools near the rain forest.

Now Donziger has become the focus of the story.

Last month, a U.S. appeals court backed up the findings delivered in a lacerating 485-page ruling by a federal judge in 2014 that said Donziger committed egregious fraud when making his case against Chevron.

In the latest round of the case, which dates back to 1993, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan in August unanimously upheld the decision.

Writing for the appeals court, Judge Amalya Kearse said the conduct of Donzigers team reveals a parade of corrupt actions that included coercion, fraud and bribery.

Its been reported that Donziger stood to get $545 million if the $9.5 billion judgment had stood up.

Donziger has not responded to multiple emails from the Union-Tribune requesting an interview, but he has long insisted he has done nothing wrong.

One of Donzigers staunchest supporters is Amazon Watch, an environmental organization based in Oakland.

Hes a flamboyant character who has said things that Chevron has manipulated and turned into something worse than what he was actually saying, said Paul Paz y Mino, the groups associate director. He was never involved in any fraud.

Longtime watchers of the case predict that Donziger and his legal team will appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the two straight setbacks have raised questions of whether Donziger may eventually face disbarment or even jail time.

This is a huge case, said Michael Krauss, a law professor at George Mason University who teaches legal ethics. "(Nearly) $10 billion is real money. Its a case of terrible misfeasance by an American lawyer.

The battle is a long and complicated one.

Chevron was not directly involved in the Ecuadorean oil fields. Another oil giant, Texaco, was part of a consortium with Petroecuador, the countrys state-run oil company.

Yet when Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it inherited Texacos obligations.

Company officials say Petroecuador told Texaco to clean up one-third of the contaminated sites, because Texaco owned one-third of the partnership.

Texaco left Ecuador in 1992 and spent $40 million to clean up the oily lagoons and, the company said, was told by the Ecuadorean government in 1998 that its remediation efforts closed the book on the matter.

Petroecuador is still running the oil field, where contamination remains.

This did two things, said Barrett, an assistant managing editor and senior writer at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. One, it increased the sheer amount of contamination that existed and, two, over time, it made it more and more difficult to distinguish between pollution that could be traced to Texaco and pollution that could be traceable to Petroecuador and its other contractors.

Led by the hard-charging Donziger, the lawsuit led to the $9.5 billion judgment in an Ecuadorean court.

But rather than paying the fine, Chevron fought back, amassing evidence it said showed Donziger fabricating evidence, coercing a judge in Ecuador and even writing large portions of the ruling that was handed down.

In a March 2014 hearing in the U.S., District Judge Lewis Kaplan barred any American court from enforcing the judgment and ruled Donziger could not personally benefit from the award.

If ever there was a case warranting equitable relief with respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it, Kaplan wrote, determining that Donziger had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO.

Donziger and his allies have attacked the ruling by Kaplan, an appointee of then-President Bill Clinton.

His bias was unbelievable, said Paz y Mino.

But Patton Boggs, one of the nations most prominent law firms and lobbying agencies, withdrew its involvement with Donziger in the case.

In a move that stunned legal observers, Patton Boggs expressed regret for its part in its fight against Chevron and agreed to pay $15 million to Chevron.

Whos responsible for cleaning up what remains of the contamination is still a matter of fierce debate.

These people (Chevron) believe that they are above states, above justice, Ecuadors president, Rafael Correa said recently. The villagers who are plaintiffs in the suit are looking to enforce the $9.5 billion judgment by going after Chevron in other countries, hence the court hearing scheduled for Monday in Toronto, which is expected to run five days.

The Canadian judge will decide whether the $9.5 billion judgment can be seized through Chevrons subsidiary based in Vancouver, or conclude that Chevron Canada has nothing to do with the case.

The plaintiffs in Ecuador are pursuing similar legal arguments in Brazil and Argentina, where Chevron has subsidiaries.

There are certainly environmental issues that must be dealt with, and whats unfortunate is the government of Ecuador and the scheming lawyers are using the indigenous peoples there to advance their own agendas rather than cleaning up the sites, said Morgan Crinklaw, issues management communications manager at Chevron.

Theres more.

Chevron attorneys also are awaiting an arbitration decision at The Hague, saying the government of Ecuador violated its 1998 agreement that the company says released Texaco of liability.

I have no idea what Chevron has spent on lawyers, Krauss said. Im sure its a fortune.

Crinklaw did not disclose Chevrons legal expenses. Donziger has claimed the company has spent more than $2 billion.

It takes a lot of time, effort and resources to uncover an elaborate fraud scheme, said Crinklaw. We had to go around the world, literally, to gather evidence, to piece together this fraud scheme.

Chevron, second only to ExxonMobil as the largest oil and gas company in the country, has aggressively pressed its case.

A company executive once pledged to fight this until hell freezes over  and then well fight it out on the ice. Chevron has created a web page filled with posts hammering Donziger going back as far as 2009.

Never before has a U.S. court allowed someone who lost a case in another country to come to the U.S. to attack a foreign courts damages award, Donzigers attorney Deepak Gupta said after the appeals court hearing. The decision hands well-heeled corporations a template for avoiding legal accountability anywhere in the world.

Amazon Watch has stood by Donziger.

Not a single one of (the charges against Donziger) was true, Paz y Mino said in a telephone interview. There was no bribe, there was no ghost-written verdict, there was no pressure on the judge and Steven didnt violate any U.S. laws or laws in Ecuador.

Krauss, the law professor, has spoken out against Donziger and has written a series of stories about the case for the online version of Forbes, where Krauss is a contributor.

I have no advice to give Mr. Donziger, Krauss said. I have no respect for Mr. Donziger and would only give advice to those for whom I have professional respect.

Barrett was slightly more circumspect.

Certainly Steven Donziger would like to present himself as a Robin Hood-like figure, where you need to bend the law in order to overcome a powerful opponent, Barrett said. But this was not Sherwood Forest. This was the the rain forest, today. And this was not legend, this was reality.

The entire case reads as if it were a John Grisham novel set in the Amazon, or even a movie.

In fact, it may become a movie.

Brad Pitts production company last year edged out George Clooney and bought the rights to Barretts book, Law of the Jungle.

I hope it does become a movie, Barrett said. But only a tiny, tiny percentage of books that are optioned ever lead to an actual movie getting done so Im not counting my chickens and Im not quitting my day job.

But Barrett said the Chevron versus Donziger legal death-match is more than just a courtroom drama, because the environmental damage in Oriente was done and still remains, after all these years.

What strikes me is after 23 years of litigation, the legal combat has not cleaned up a single barrel of contamination, he said. Nor has it resulted in a dime changing hands in a way to allow for building of medical clinics or the improvement of the lives of the poor people in Ecuador.
Which presidential candidate has the more impressive list of military supporters?

Its a timely question as nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton square off tonight at a veterans-centric forum sponsored by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

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Trump on Tuesday released a list of 88 retired military generals and admirals who support him.

Clinton just put out her own list today. Well take a look at those 95 names, as well.

Some corners of the national press have called Trumps list tarnished because its markedly shorter than the 500 retired military brass who came out for nominee Mitt Romney in 2012  and because some of the Trump signers have problematic histories.

For instance, one of the Air Force generals was a birtherwho questioned President Barack Obamas legal legitimacy to be president, a position that has now been largely discredited.

A few of the Navy brass were reportedly present at the notorious 1991 Tailhook Association convention where women were aggressively groped by male aviators with the tacit approval of leaders.

Some of the Trump signers were on lists endorsing prior Republican candidates, including Romney and Sen. John McCain, and came out publicly against ending the dont ask, dont tell policy against gays in the military in 2011.

Looking at the list for San Diego connections and bonafides, it is full of long-retired Navy admirals who served in local commands during their careers.

Its short on Marines.

Only two Marine Corps general officers are on the Trump tally.

They are Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Higginbotham, who led the Defense Industrial Supply Center from 1995 to 1997 before retiring in 2000, according to his Linked In profile and the Defense Logistics Agencys Hall of Fame.

The other Marine is Maj. Gen. Kenneth Weir, a Vietnam combat veteran and former test pilot who moved to the reserves in 1966, according to his posted records.

On the Navy list, the highest-ranking is four-star retired Adm. Jerry Johnson, who was vice chief of naval operations from 1990 to 1992 before retiring that year.

There are two former commanders of the U.S. Third Fleet, which is based in San Diego.

They are Vice Adm. Mike Bucchi, who led Third Fleet in 2003 before retiring that year, and Vice Adm. Jerry Unruh, in command from 1991 to 1994.

Rear Adm. Grady Jackson, another signer, commanded San Diego Naval Base in 1991 before retiring.

Trumps list also includes: a former Navy judge advocate general, a Blue Angels commanding officer and leaders of the Navy Exchange system and the Seabees while they were in uniform.

In terms of Navy combat credentials, one of the most noteworthy is Rear Adm. Byron Fuller, a prisoner in Vietnams Hanoi Hilton for five years.

That would ostensibly make him a comrade of McCain, a fellow prisoner of war whom Trump has mocked as a loser and questionable war hero -- though McCain is still backing the Republican nominee.

Perhaps Trumps most high-profile retired military backer is Michael T. Flynn, the three-star Army general who once led the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama.

Flynn, reportedly once considered by Trump for vice president, spoke in favor of the Republican nominee at the party convention this summer.

And Clinton?

Her list is perhaps topped by John Allen, the four-star Marine Corps general who led allied forces in Afghanistan in 2011. Allen endorsed the Democratic candidate in July.

(Allen had his own brush with scandal, when his promotion was held up during a 2012 investigation into an email flirtation with a Florida socialite. He was later cleared of wrong-doing.)

In the Clinton list that surfaced today, the highest-ranking Navy admiral is four-star retiree John Nathman. He was vice chief of naval operations, the No. 2 in the Navy, from 2004 to 2005, before leading U.S. Fleet Forces Command.

Nathmans local connection is as commander of naval air forces in Coronado in 2001.

Clinton also has three retired Marine Corps three-star generals backing her.

Lt. Gen. John Castellaw was deputy commandant before retiring in 2008. Lt. Gen. Walter Gaskin was commanding general of the 2nd Marine Division, and Lt. Gen. Willie Williams was director of the Marine Corps staff.

The latter two lieutenant generals are African American. Clintons list  at least in terms of the Navy and Marine Corps, which was our focus  is more racially diverse and slightly younger than Trumps list.

Navy admirals backing Clinton include: a former Navy surgeon general, Navy inspector general and Navy judge advocate general.

The former Navy surgeon general, Vice Adm. Donald Arthur, made headlines in 2008 after his retirement when the Chicago Tribune found that the Ph.D. and law degree that he claimed came from unaccredited or otherwise dubious sources. (His medical degree wasnt in question.)

Two of Clintons supporters have spoken out publicly in the past against the Bush administrations policy toward prisoner handling and interrogation.

One of those was Carlsbad attorney David Brahms, who has defended several high-profile Camp Pendleton criminal cases, including Marines involved in the Haditha, Iraq, killings.

Brahms, now in his 70s, is a retired one-star general who served as the Marine Corps senior military attorney when in uniform.

Also in Clintons camp: Rear Adm. Deborah Loewer, the first warfare-qualified woman to make admiral. She was director of the White House Situation Room when the Sept. 11 attacks hit.

Since Clintons list just came out today, the national press has had less time to pick it apart for flaws. Stay tuned.
It sounds like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wants to say, Youre fired, to the U.S. military leaders now in charge of fighting the Islamic State.

Heres what the former reality television star told NBCs Matt Lauer at a forum aboard New Yorks USS Intrepid museum Wednesday night.

Lauer:  Youve already said you know more about ISIS than those generals do.

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Trump: Well, theyll probably be different generals, to be honest with you.

That zinger prompted a few wide-eyed looks at a watching party at a Mission Valley VFW Hall, but -- in essence -- the Republican nominee isnt totally wrong.

It wouldnt be the first time that an American president sacked a sitting general over performance.

The most recent example is President Barack Obama firing Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2010 after the four-star Army leader in charge of the Afghanistan war disparaged the administration in a Rolling Stone magazine profile. (Technically, McChrystal offered his resignation after being summoned to the White House by Obama.)

The practice goes back to Lincoln:

President Abraham Lincoln fired George McClellan in 1862 (and several other generals) during the Civil War.

President Harry Truman fired Gen. George MacArthur in 1951 for insubordination.

President Lyndon Johnson fired Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay because he criticized the administrations Vietnam policies.

President Jimmy Carter fired Gen. John K. Singlaub in 1977 after the general criticized the decision to remove troops from the Korean peninsula.

And, more recently, Adm. William Fox Fallon, chief of U.S. Central Command, resigned from that post in 2008 after he challenged the Bush Administrations military policy toward Iran.

Social media is making hay over Trumps comment -- which was fairly provocative, considering the public imagine he is trying to project as the pro-military, law-and-order candidate.

The Washington Post said the quip shows that Trump doesnt understand how the military works.

Trump could seek the counsel of other members of the militarys leadership, but he cant simply clean house or bring in people from the outside, WaPo opined in its The Fix political blog.

Thats true. Hes largely got the pool of generals and admirals that currently exists.

The president can remove a high-ranking officer from a post, but that doesnt mean that officer is really fired in the civilian sense of the term.

These officers typically retire with full benefits, like McChrystal did.

But Trump  or any incoming president  will almost certainly name a new defense secretary.

And the president and the Pentagon have wide discretion to nominate people for high-ranking jobs, even though actual promotions and nominations often must be approved by Congress.

Combined, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force have hundreds of generals and admirals for them to choose from.

Its unclear, though, if Trump meant hed turn to his list of 88 retired military backers, released on Tuesday.

After he said, theyll probably be different generals, Trumps next comment was:

Today, you probably saw, I have a piece of paper here  88 generals and admirals endorsed me.

If you look at the names on that list, a chunk of them retired in the 1990s and a decent number are in their 70s.

Union-Tribune researcher Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this report.
Road signs, store signs, and just random warning signsthere are lots of beautiful hand-painted, intentionally or unintentional funny signs and often unexpected signs in this little country.

On Tobacco Caye though this one could be in SO many spots.

Here are a bunch of photos that Ive taken over the last few years all around the country. Please send me a picture of any great sign youve seen in BelizeI know that I am missing plenty!

GO SLOW is the unofficial motto of tiny Caye Caulker. They express it in a few different ways. Some grimmer than others.

I couldnt find my own photo of this one, so I have borrowed the photo from EarthMoho  the blog features some gorgeous photos of the tiny caye.

And VERY good reason to go slow.

And wise advice.

Another classic  on a liquor store. While drinking may be fun, drinking high alcohol content mouthwash? Not so much.

And this sign, 2013 in Caye Caulker, Elvis lives! And Priscilla is seriously odd.

I could really get going on Ambergris Caye but I will try to limit myself

This very specific sign at Costa Blu Resort on the lagoon side.

No longer there, this one is a CLASSIC.

Another beauty  at Sauls Coffee Shop on Middle Street.

And I had to sneak into the mens room at Estels for this one. Not an official sign but funny to me.

Ill throw in another bathroom sign to get them out of the way. This one at the Curve Bar in Sittee River, Belize. This one far from a print-outits carved in stone.

Belize City has a few funky ones.

Like this signwatch out for floods. Comes on quick!

Or this crazy and intriguing tattoo shop on Slaughterhouse Road.

As you can imagine, with so much wildlife, animal crossings are quite popular across the country. Jaguar Crossing near Cockscomb Jaguar Reserve.

Tapir crossing outside of Punta Gorda, South Belize.

Turtle Crossing just before you reach Placencia Village.

And chihuahua crossing in the Tres Cocos area of Ambergris Caye.

And one moremaybe my favorite. Brit speak for speed bump = sleeping policeman. In Cristo Rey, Cayo, Belize.

And moving to Placencia townlots of cute signs.

The street signs in Belizes Kriol rock.

Dog Teeth Road.

These great bar signs at Cozy Corner Hotel & Restaurant.

Sound advice right there on the main thoroughfare.

And the cutest water taxi name in the world.

An important message at Caribbean Beach Cabanas  coconuts hurt!

And now headed to the far south of the country  Punta Gorda.

Love the name and sign  The Lazy Fish Restaurant.

And then this surprise message on a wall in the midst of town.

AHHHH! And I know I am missing somethingbut there you go. And again! Please send me your favorite signs in Belize!

To save for lateror just share on Pinterest.
Come and enjoy Read more [...]
Feasterville-Trevose, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/21/2016 -- For over 25 years, Citiwide Adjusters has helped customers in the Delaware Valley region (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) reclaim what is rightfully theirs by filing insurance claims on property damage. These public claims adjusters based near Philadelphia have earned the deep respect of customers and the insurance community at large for their ability to handle claims of all types and sizes with success and integrity. The firm would like to remind customers that their services extend to filing claims on electrical damage.



Electrical damage, most often in the form of fire, can be utterly devastating to a property owner. Often, this type of damage results from poor installation of wiring and other electrical components. Sometimes, electrical damage is the consequence of a faulty appliance or inadequate surge protector. Whatever its origin, this type of damage tends to happen with little warning, but results in severe damage that can render a home uninhabitable.



Thanks to the public adjusters at Citiwide Adjusters, Philadelphia and New Jersey homeowners whose properties have suffered electrical damage can rise above their unfortunate situation. Citiwide Adjusters works diligently to seek the highest possible settlement, and has a high success rate thanks to their excellent reputation within the insurance community. The firm does not collect a fee unless their clients win a settlement.



To get in touch with Citiwide Adjusters, call 215-809-2995 (267-688-6015 in case of emergencies), or visit their contact page at http://citiwideadjusters.com/contact-us. Their representatives will be happy to assist all property owners with questions about filing an insurance settlement claim, no matter the cause.



About Citiwide Adjusters

Since 1988, Citiwide Adjusters has filed insurance claims for clients dealing with property damage from fire, weather, plumbing incidents and other causes. Their long-standing relationship with the insurance community and excellent reputation give clients the winning edge while Citiwide Adjusters interpret insurance policies, evaluate damages, prepare estimates and negotiate with insurance companies.



Citiwide Adjusters is available 24/7 and will meet or beat any competitors' fee. The company operates by a "no settlement, no fee" policy to ensure that its clients are protected.



To learn more, visit Citiwide Adjusters at http://www.citiwideadjusters.com.
New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/21/2016 -- September 8th New York Fashion Week, and Sept 18th at London Fashion week, Renowned designer Malan Breton showcased his Spring/Summer 2017 men's and women's ready-to-wear collections. This season, the designer re-visits his Taiwanese roots through a culturally dynamic form of expression revealing inspiration from the indigenous Tribes of Taitung, on the eastern coastline of Taiwan. The collections represent a portrait of the soul of its people. Hand-beaded embellishments, extravagant color pallets, and authentic print patterns bring forth an ornamental opulence that exudes innovation and deliverance. Malan Breton incorporates these principals while maintaining highly wearable pieces that contain influence from sportswear to demi couture elements. Delivering a dynamic performance and overall vision for Spring/Summer 2017. The collection featured a shoe collaboration with Michela Rigucci for womenswear, and indigenous inspired hairstyles created by Joico, and Vivienne Mackinder. Malan Breton's partnership with the Taiwan Tourism Bureau has led to many successful events in New York, London, and Los Angeles. In an effort to promote tourism to this beautiful island country, the place of his birth. The show will feature the Tourism Bureau uniform selections designed by Malan Breton, a new collection of Malan Breton luxury leather handbags and luggage, and luscious swimwear pieces.



Buyers and retail representative guests of the show will have the opportunity to purchase any pieces directly off the runway by downloading the Markable app prior to the show! Video and production elements created by Cinemalan Productions, and music provided by the Amis tribe, and Warner Music Taiwan at the Style Fashion Week, and Fashion Scout venues.



Malan Breton opened fashion Week with over 50 million global impressions this season, and will set the bar high for the remainder of for Fashion Weeks around the globe. This season, Malan goes back to his Broadway roots by inviting Hollywood notables and social influencers to walk in his show including; Mason Grammer, Frankie Grande, Tituss Burgess, Bryan Batt, Consuelo Vanderbilt, and Nene Leakes who closed the show. The collections have been met with great critical acclaim, each being of different fibres, and elements each inspired by the indigenous people of Taiwan.



Press Contact:

James Murray for Supreme Public Relations

press@supremepublicity.com

Sales Inquiries: info@malanbreton.com



Social Media:

FB: facebook.com/malan.breton

IG: @malanbreton



About Malan Breton

Originating from Taipei, Taiwan. Malan Breton, the designer, founded Malan Breton collection in 2005, following his training at Turnbull & Asser, and Scaasi. Malan Breton HOMME in 2010, Malan Breton Bridal, Underwear, and Cosmetic lines for 2016. The Malan Breton collection is shown each season at New York Fashion Week, also being presented in New York, Taiwan, China, France, and London to retailers. Breton has been designing since the age of eleven, and is known for his signature detailing, his ethereal gowns, and simple shift dresses. For men he is known for his sharply tailored suits, use of color, and impeccable fabrics. The collections can be found at department stores, and specialty boutiques around the globe, Breton is also a master of the made to measure suit, and has a steadfast following of businessmen, celebrities, politicians, and royals globally.



Malan Breton is the recipient of the 2016 FGI "Rising Star" award in Menswear, the 2015 European Fashion Council's "Eirene" award, the 2015, and 2016 Taiwan Tourism Award for contributions in fashion, and media. In 2011 Malan Breton and NBC Universal were a nominee for the WGSN Global Fashion Award in 2011 for Outstanding collaboration. Malan Breton's collections have appeared on the world's brightest stars, and most elite red carpets.



Christina Garrison

Malan Breton

c.garrison@malanbreton.com

www.malanbreton.com

236 5th Ave,

NYC, NY 10001
Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/21/2016 -- "Nuclear Power in Finland, Market Outlook to 2030, Update 2016 - Capacity, Generation, Investment Trends, Regulations and Company Profiles is the latest report from GlobalData, the industry analysis specialists that offer comprehensive information and understanding of the nuclear power market in Finland.



The report provides in depth analysis on global nuclear power market with forecasts up to 2030. The report analyzes the power market scenario in Finland (includes thermal conventional, nuclear, large hydro, pumped storage and renewables) and provides future outlook with forecasts up to 2030. The research details nuclear power market outlook in the country and provides forecasts up to 2030. The report highlights installed capacity and power generation trends from 2006 to 2030 in Finland nuclear power market. A detailed coverage of nuclear energy policy framework governing the market with specific policies pertaining to nuclear is provided in the report. The research also provides details of active nuclear reactors in the country, market size of major equipment and company snapshot of some of the major market participants.



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Lyman-alpha blobs (LAB) are gigantic clouds of hydrogen gas that can span hundreds of thousands of light-years and are found in the distant Universe.

The name reflects the characteristic wavelength of UV light that they emit, known as Lyman-alpha radiation.

Since their discovery, the processes that give rise to LABs have been an astronomical puzzle.

But new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) may have now cleared up the mystery.

SSA22-Lyman-alpha blob 1 (LAB-1 for short), one of the largest LABs known, was the very first such object to be discovered  in 2000.

This gigantic cloud is about 326,000 light-years across (about three times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy), making it one of the largest known single objects in the Universe.

LAB-1 is embedded in the core of a very young galactic cluster and is located so far away that its light has taken about 11.5 billion years to reach our planet.

A multinational group of astronomers led by University of Hertfordshire scientist Jim Geach has now used ALMAs ability to observe light from cool dust clouds in distant galaxies to peer deeply into LAB-1.

This allowed them to pinpoint and resolve several sources of submillimeter emission.

The scientists then combined the ALMA images with observations from the MUSE instrument on ESOs Very Large Telescope.

This showed that two active galaxies are located in the very heart of LAB-1, where they are forming stars at a rate of 150 solar masses per year  over 100 times that of the Milky Way.

Deep imaging with Hubble and spectroscopy at the W. M. Keck Observatory showed in addition that these active galaxies are surrounded by numerous lower mass satellite galaxies that could be bombarding the central galaxies with material, helping to drive their high star formation rates.

The astronomers then turned to a sophisticated simulation of galaxy formation to demonstrate that the giant glowing cloud of Lyman-alpha emission can be explained if UV light produced by star formation in the active galaxies scatters off the surrounding hydrogen gas. This would give rise to the LAB we see.

Think of a streetlight on a foggy night  you see the diffuse glow because light is scattering off the tiny water droplets, Dr. Geach said.

A similar thing is happening here, except the streetlight is an intensely star-forming galaxy and the fog is a huge cloud of intergalactic gas. The galaxies are illuminating their surroundings.

Scientists think LABs are important because they seem to be the places where the most massive galaxies in the Universe form.

In particular, the extended Lyman-alpha glow provides information on what is happening in the primordial gas clouds surrounding young galaxies, a region that is very difficult to study, but critical to understand.

Whats exciting about these blobs is that we are getting a rare glimpse of whats happening around these young, growing galaxies, Dr. Geach said.

For a long time the origin of the extended Lyman-alpha light has been controversial. But with the combination of new observations and cutting-edge simulations, we think we have solved a 15-year-old mystery: LAB-1 is the site of formation of a massive elliptical galaxy that will one day be the heart of a giant cluster.

We are seeing a snapshot of the assembly of that galaxy 11.5 billion years ago, he said.

The teams findings have been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal. The article is also publicly available at arXiv.org.

_____

J.E. Geach et al. 2016. ALMA observations of Lyman-alpha Blob 1: halo sub-structure illuminated from within. ApJ, accepted for publication; arXiv: 1608.02941

This article is based on a press-release from the European Southern Observatory.
[COLOMBO] Experts and authorities attribute Sri Lankas success in eliminating malaria from the island to a concerted effort by multiple programmes acting in concert with a robust national healthcare system.

Hemantha Herath, deputy director of Sri Lankas anti malaria campaign, tells SciDev.Net that case numbers were drastically reduced through focused malaria fighting for a quarter century. From 264,549 reported cases in 1999, Sri Lanka saw its last locally reported case in October 2012.

According to Herath the long-term eradication strategy was combined with effective web-based surveillance. The campaign actively tracked citizens travelling from countries with a history of malaria transmission. In addition, we focused on the security forces personnel, immigrants and tourists.

A key move, Herath notes, was the programmatic shift from vector control to parasite control.

Through a hotline, we added a 247 component to tracking and treatment. Patients were treated in isolation to contain spreading of the infection.Providing the setting to control malaria was the strong public health system in the island says Anura Jayawickrama, Sri Lankas Health Secretary. Early detection and continuous treatment were key to success. For years, mobile clinics have been used reach people in all corners, a scheme intensified in former malaria affected regions.

More than 3,000 health workers were directly involved in the campaign while personnel involved in public health, including midwives, were roped into the work of informing and educating people against malaria.

WHO which formally declared Sri Lanka malaria free on September 6 has commended the mobile clinic strategy in a statement saying: Mobile malaria clinics in high transmission areas meant that prompt and effective treatment could reduce the parasite reservoir and the possibility of further transmission.

Applauding Sri Lankas consistent healthcare gains, WHOs Regional Director, Poonam Khetrapal Singh said the island nations success contrasted with the situation in the middle of the 20th century when the country faced a malaria crisis and was among the worst affected in the region.

Malaria is a disease caused by a plasmodium parasite which is transmitted by the bite of infected female anopheles mosquitoes.

Herath notes that the vigil has to be maintained, especially since over 75 per cent of the islands 21 million population lives in rural areas where ideal ecosystems for the malaria vector exist.

In South Asia, where vector-borne diseases abound, malaria prevalence remains significantly high. The only other country in South Asia to have eradicated malaria is Maldives, declared malaria free in 1984.
NASA's astronaut Kate Rubins on Friday (Sept. 16) wore a colorful flight suit aboard the International Space Station as a part of an effort to raise awareness about childhood cancer. The suit that flight engineer Kate Rubins wore was "COURAGE," a hand-painted flight suit that was created by the pediatric patients recovering at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center located in Houston.

The exceptional article was fashioned by "The Space Suit Art Project," collaboration between NASA Johnson Space Center, MD Anderson and ILC Dover. The latter is a company that develops NASA spacesuits. "This project is a real inspiration for me," Rubins said on Friday during a video conversation with MD Anderson pediatric cancer patients "It was a wonderful opportunity to paint with you guys. I remember when this suit was just a blank canvas and then all of you guys painted it." Before she left for the ISS in July, Rubins had joined Nicole Stott, who was a former astronaut and is now an artist, and various other NASA representatives who lent their artistic talents to create the "COURAGE" and counsel the young cancer patients at MD Anderson, states Space.com.

The Space Suit Art Project is born out of the hospital's initiative: Arts in Medicine Program. The program helps patients undergoing cancer treatment through art. It also inspired the leaders in NASA's space program to support this effort with some help from the astronauts, scientists as well as engineers. The agency designed the patterns for the garments and collaborated with ILC Dover to assemble the suits.

"COURAGE" was delivered to the international space station on SpaceX's ninth Dragon cargo spacecraft on July 20 to provide supplies for the orbiting laboratory. In addition to "COURAGE," The Space Suit Art Project has also manufactured some wearable replica spacesuits based on the same equipment worn by the astronauts outside the ISS, according to Collectspace.com.

The project's such first spacesuit was named "HOPE" and was stitched together from about 600 separate painted art pieces created by patients at MD Anderson. "COURAGE," when returned back to Earth is to go on display at the Space Center at Houston, a visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center, around January 2017.
Tardigrades or also known as water bears and moss piglets are the most durable organisms. They can live for more than 30 years without food and water, withstand an extreme weather condition and even survive in space. So, what is the secret of this earth's toughest animal?

Tardigrade protein helps human DNA withstand radiation Experiments show tardigrades resilience can B transferred 2 cultures of human cells pic.twitter.com/KToB2HQKH9  Joshua P. Rapke (@jprapke) September 21, 2016

The findings of the study, which were published in the journal Nature Communications, reveals a protein that protects its DNA from radiation. The study was led by geneticist Takekazu Kunieda and colleagues from the University of Tokyo, according to Gizmodo.

In the study, the researchers were able to identify a number of genes and biological processes that are accountable for the incredible survival skills of the tardigrades. They found that the genome of the tardigrades has more copies of an anti-oxidant enzyme and a DNA repair gene than any other animal. These could make tardigrade counteract oxidative stress when it is dehydrated and repair its damaged DNA.

The protein that binds itself to DNA, which is dubbed as Dsup, shield it against x-ray radiation. It prevents the DNA from breaking apart. This is the reason why tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space and withstand the radiation. The researchers said that if this protein could be transferred to humans, this could enhance the human's tolerance against X-rays and the tardigrade biology could make humans adaptable to space.

Prof. Mark Blaxter from the University of Edinburgh described the study as groundbreaking. He further said that this is the first time a particular protein from a tardigrade has been shown to be active in radiation protection and radiation is one of the things that's guaranteed to kill you, as noted by BBC.

Tardigrade is the microscopic animal, which is water-dwelling and eight-legged. Its name Tardigrada means "slow stepper." It can be found everywhere from mountain tops, sea, tropical rainforest and even to the Antarctic. It is first discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze, a German zoologist, in 1773.
Recently, Samsung had to face a lot of heat after its Galaxy Note 7 phablets were found to be exploding. Now, in order to regain back customers' faith in the company, it is expected that Samsung will try its level best to lure customers with its highly anticipated Galaxy S8 smartphone. While, nothing about the Samsung Galaxy S8 release date, specs and pricing details have been revealed, it is rumored that the handset will get impressive set of hardware, specs and features which will be far better than its highly successful predecessors "Galaxy S7" and "Galaxy S7 Edge".

Talking about Samsung Galaxy S8 specs, the handset is expected to feature a 4K curved screen display intended for use with VR, Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 830 chipset paired with a massive 6GB of random access memory (RAM), Android 7.1 Nougat, improved iris scanning technology, a new kind of triple-camera system and a USB Type-C port for reversible, fast charging and quicker data transfers. There are also chances that the handset will come with a brand new Exynoss 8895 processor which is faster than Apple's A10 processor and more powerful than Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 830 processor. The use of Exynos 8895 processor in the upcoming Galaxy smartphone is expected to make the handset 30 percent more efficient than the current Galaxy S7 which uses Exynoss 8890 chip.

As per reports, the smartphone maker will roll out two variants of the Galaxy S8 smartphone same like "Galaxy S7" and "Galaxy S7 Edge". According to SamMobile, the two upcoming Samsung Galaxy handsets are internally codenamed Dream and Dream2 and bear model numbers SM-G950 and SMG955 respectively. Samsung's foldable display technology might also debut in the Galaxy S8 models.

Furthermore, with Apple removing the headphone jack from its newly introduced iPhone 7 iteration, it is also possible that Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone will come sans the 3.55-mm jack. As far as Samsung Galaxy S8 release date is concerned, the handset is rumored to be announced at the Mobile World Congress event in February 2017.

Stay tuned to SWR for more updates on Samsung Galaxy S8 release date, specs and pricing details.
Good news for animal lovers: Rialto, the abandoned sea otter pup rescued in Washington State, has now moved to its permanent home. At present, it receives proper care at the Vancouver Aquarium.

CBC News reported that in August 1 this year, the sick and emaciated sea otter pup was found and rescued. It was washed up in Washington State and was taken to the Seattle Aquarium. There, it received 24-hour care from a team of Vancouver facility specialists. According to Dr. Martin Haulena, wild sea otter pups have low rates of survival. Haulena is the Vancouver Aquarium head veterinarian.

But the good thing is that Rialto seems to be surviving. Yesterday, it came to Vancouver; and now, it is set to meet other sea otters namely Tanu, Elfin, and Katmai. Rialto still has to learn survival skills though. Sad to say, it never had the chance to learn such skills from its mother.

According to Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Aquarium stressed the fact that newborn sea otters are naturally helpless. In the first few weeks, a mother is supposed to carry the pup on her tummy for feeding and grooming. Likewise, the mother usually teaches it some skills like searching for food, swimming, and diving. Because Rialto was not able to learn those skills, officials said the sea otter pup is non-releasable. But despite this, it is expected to learn how to swim in a larger pool.

In the time being, a live webcam will enable some fans to follow the progress of Rialto. The aquarium likewise set up a crowdfunding website to help other sea otters.

As defined by the Defenders of Wildlife, sea otters belong to the weasel family. They are the heaviest members of the group, but are the second smallest marine mammals. In the animal kingdom, sea otters possess the densest fur that ranges from 250,000 to one million hairs per square inch.
The launch of the Soyuz MS-02 spaceflight, which was supposed to transport three members of Expedition 49 crew to the International Space Station (ISS), has reportedly been delayed. The Russian Space Agency (RosCosMos) cited technical reasons as the reason for the delay of the Russian-made spacecraft from taking off on the flight on September 23, as was originally planned.

"Roscosmos has decided to move the launch of Soyuz MS-02 ship planned for September 23 due to technical reasons after holding tests on the Baikonur Cosmodrome," a Roscosmos official stated. In addition, NASA also announced the delay of the ISS crew launch in a brief press release and referred to the Roscosmos website for further information. According to a source, the Soyuz MS-02 spaceflight will now take off on November 1, however, the new launch date is still not definite.

Expedition 49 comprises of six members, the three new members who are supposed to join and the three members who continued from the previous expedition, as is the protocol of every ISS expedition. The new batch members include NASA's Shane Kimbrough, as well as Russian cosmonauts Andrei Borisenko and Sergei Ryzhikov. The trio of astronauts is reportedly in the final stages of their training at Kazakhstan's Baikonur launch pad.

Incidentally, the three astronauts from Expedition 48 got back on Earth on the scheduled date of September 7, aboard the Soyuz TMA-20M. The three returning astronauts comprised of members Jeffrey Williams, Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin. The spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan, the site for the launches and landing.

At the moment, the continuing members of Expedition 48-49 are aboard the ISS, waiting for the arrival of the new team. The three astronauts who are at present onboard the space laboratory include NASA's Kathleen Rubin, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin. The trio is currently handling all the scientific experiments performed on the ISS as well as manning it.
HARTSVILLE, S.C.  Hartsville soon might be home to a new childrens museum.

EdVenture Childrens Museum in Columbia, the largest childrens museum in the Southeast, wants to open a satellite museum in Hartsville.

The Hartsville City Council on Sept. 13 gave first-reading approval to two ordinances to purchase a building and parking lot in downtown Hartsville to possibly serve as the campus for a new museum.

If the measures ultimately are approved, they will authorize the city to purchase the 6,250-square-foot building at 146 W. Carolina Ave. for $240,000 and the adjoining parking lot for $30,000. The building most recently housed an antique and collectibles shop and before that a private gym.

Officials with EdVenture presented their proposal to the city council during its regular monthly meeting.

Karen Coltrane, president and CEO of EdVenture Childrens Museum, said Hartsville is the kind of progressive community to which EdVenture is looking to expand.

We are committed to taking this jewel that we have in South Carolina and leveraging it into other communities, Coltrane said.

Council members seemed excited about the prospect.

Thank yall for believing in Hartsville, Mayor Mel Pennington said.

I think its a great idea for hands-on play and learning, Councilwoman Teresa Mack said.

Id like to see it get up and run, Councilman Bernice Wilson said.

While not a done deal, City Manager Natalie Zeigler said Wednesday that councils move toward purchasing the building enhances the likelihood that the city will get the museum satellite.

I think the chances are pretty strong, Zeigler said. We wanted to send a message to the people at EdVenture that were serious about getting a satellite. Weve met with stakeholders in the community, and weve had pretty positive feedback about it. Weve been talking with stakeholders for about six weeks.

A final vote on the two ordinances is expected in October.

Coltrane and other EdVenture officials held their third meeting with stakeholders earlier on Sept. 13, including representatives of The Byerly Foundation, the Sonoco Foundation, the TEACH Foundation, Darlington County First Steps and others, Zeigler said.

A satellite museum would play a significant role in improving education of young children and the quality of life for the community, Coltrane said. Coltrane said reaching children at a young age is important, because statistics show that 99 percent of children who cannot read by the end of the third grade probably will never read.

School readiness is also a key indicator of workforce readiness, she said.

We are the beginning of the workforce pipeline, she said.

A satellite would also play a role in economic development and tourism promotion, Coltrane said. EdVenture in Columbia draws more than 217,000 visitors annually, Coltrane said. While a Hartsville center would not be as big as the Columbia museum, it would still draw visitors to the area, she said.

We use play to further development, Coltrane said. Play is how younger children learn, she said.

Play is a biological drive hardwired into the brains of humans and many animals, Coltrane said. It is essential to developing social skills, adaptability, intelligence, creativity and ability to problem solve, she said.

But in addition to young children, EdVenture also offers programs for youth development for middle school and high school students, she said.

EdVenture hosts more than 1,500 summer campers each summer, Coltrane said. The museum also offers afterschool programs in Richland and Lexington county school districts.

We are as excited as the welcome weve received since we got here, she said.

Opening steps for a satellite center would include securing a location and lease, Coltrane said.

Approval of the project by the EdVenture board of trustees will also be necessary, she said. She said board members have expressed excitement about the prospect of a satellite center in Hartsville. A capital fundraising campaign with a target of about $500,000 would also be needed, she said. Most of that would come from private sources, she said.

EdVenture officials estimate the annual operating budget of a Hartsville satellite at approximately $250,000, with revenue coming from admissions, memberships, birthday parties and camps, fundraising events, grant support and exhibit and event sponsorship and roughly $100,000 in city hospitality tax funds.

Recruiting members for a local education advisory council would also be part of the process.

An EdVenture satellite in Hartsville probably would include a changing exhibit area, a grocery store and bank for teaching life skills, a classroom/party room, an indoor park, a toddler area, a stage and an art studio.

EdVenture programs in Hartsville could include daily museum activities, an annual calendar of events, summer and vacation camps, birthday parties, middle and high school youth programs, afterschool programs, volunteer opportunities, professional development for educators and discounted admission or memberships for families receiving public assistance.

Community involvement also would be a key component for a successful satellite, to include government leaders, community leaders, business leaders, education leaders, families with young children and the general public, Coltrane said.
HARTSVILLE, S.C.  The choices that young people make today will have a profound influence on their futures.

That was the message celebrity chef Jeff Henderson of the Food Networks Flip My Food brought to students on Sept. 13 at Hartsville High School. His visit was part of EdVenture Childrens Museums Be A Boss: Youth Impact Tour.

Henderson is a professional chef, motivational speaker and author. He travels the country providing uplifting messages to students, their caregivers and community leaders.

Successful people know who they are, Henderson said. Successful people know what their strengths are.

Henderson said that as a troubled youth he never valued education. He spent 10 years as a convicted felon in a federal prison because of choices he made. He said he can never get those years back.

I thought I had everything until they locked me up, Henderson said.

To be successful, youve got to build relationships.

He said that while in prison, he made the decision to change his life for the better.

I took a bad situation and turned it around, he said.

Education and learning became addictions for him after prison, he said.

The power of education is for real, Henderson said. Education opens opportunities for you. Education equals the American dream.

He said today he strives to be a lifelong learner and set a positive example for his five children.

When we invited Chef Jeff here last spring for our first ever Youth Summit, we could see the life-changing impact his personal story had on the teens in attendance, said Karen Coltrane, EdVenture president and CEO. He told them how decisions he made at their age landed him in prison. Then through his skillful storytelling, he took everyone in the room along as he found his life purpose and learned to make better decisions, which eventually led him to become the first African-American chef at Las Vegas Bellagio Hotel, a Food Network star, best-selling author and successful business person.

His is a true American success story that inspires everyone who hears it, and we are thrilled to bring him back to Columbia to speak to business and government leaders, as well as teens throughout South Carolina that we hope will be our next generation of leaders.

Hartsville High School was one stop on Hendersons two-day, six-school tour of the state. He also spoke at the Youth Summit breakfast in Columbia and to inmates at Allendale Correctional Institution.

At EdVenture Childrens Museum, we work with children from every background and see firsthand that some have more support than others when navigating their at-risk years, said Nikki Williams, EdVenture executive vice president, a Hartsville native and a 1997 graduate of Hartsville High School. So we are excited to bring students and teachers together with someone as dynamic as Chef Jeff, whose story has the power to change a young persons life.

Located in Columbia, EdVenture is the largest childrens museum in the Southeast. The mission of EdVenture is to inspire children to experience the joy of learning. EdVenture is a locally managed, not-for-profit informal educational institution dedicated to lifelong learning through its 92,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor interactive exhibit space and in its educational outreach programs and afterschool programs.

The museum has welcomed visitors from all 50 states and 18 foreign countries, creating shared experiences and memories for families learning together.
Since the latest column I wrote in August, the local news has been much about two subjects: education and downtown parking.

Education

This is certainly a subject that always should be at the forefront of our news and discussion. At a recent presentation to the Rotary Club of Florence, Christina Lawson, the executive director of the Florence Area Literary Council, indicated that illiteracy plays into your livelihood. In that article it was reported in Florence County one-third of the adults are functionally illiterate and do not read above a fifth-grade level. I dont know where that statistic comes from, but according to what I have learned the national average is approximately 14 percent, and if the numbers are accurate, Florence County adult functional illiteracy rate is approaching three times the national average.

The work done by the Florence Area Literary Council is laudable, but maybe the focus needs to be on the public schools and how we are preparing students to succeed in life. Recent test scores from the Florence County School systems continue to indicate more than 30 percent of the third- through eighth-grade students tested every spring fail to meet the standards for their grade level in mathematics and English language arts. The system continues to promote them to the next grade despite this failure, and possibly this is the beginning of creating a 33 percent adult functional illiteracy in the county.

It is way past the time to fix the problem! Adult functional illiteracy is the symptom, not the problem, and we need to focus on treating the problem. Lowering the standards, social promotion and eliminating testing are not the solution. Students, and for that matter all people strive to meet the standards set for them. Lower standards create lower results.

If Lawson is correct about the rate of functional illiteracy for adults in Florence County, the county school systems are failing in their educational responsibilities.

Downtown parking

The issue of adequate parking in downtown Florence seems to be a hot topic for both the city and county governments. In order for the revitalization of the downtown area to flourish, adequate parking is a key element. This should come as no surprise to either the city or county councils, but based on recent project approvals, it has caught them by surprise.

For the past 25 years I have worked as a construction project scheduling consultant. The projects have covered the gamut from hotels, college dorms, apartment complexes, condominiums, health care facilities and others. I have worked projects in more than 15 governmental project approval authorities. The local governments have required the developer to include parking facilities that are adequate to support the new project. The cost of these parking facilities was included in the project and not an additional tax burden on the general public.

Both Florence County and the city of Florence have seemed to miss the boat in these areas. The FMU Performing Arts Center was built with grossly inadequate parking. Only about 70 parking spaces are provided for a facility that seats close to 900 people, and when you add in staff and performers, occupancy probably exceeds 1,000. Handicap parking for this building is also almost nonexistent. What government authorities ensured the project met the parking requirements?

Across the street is the Florence County Museum, which has only 10 parking spaces. When an event is held there, where are people expected to park? The new FMU Center for Health Sciences building at the corner of Irby and West Evans streets has 12 parking spaces, all of which are reserved for faculty parking. Where do the students park? The new apartment complex just being finished on the corner of South Irby and West Cheves streets surrounds the multi-story, 350-space parking garage. The apartment complex has about 85 units, which probably will require at least 100 parking spaces. This project was built on an existing 270-space parking lot. You do the mathematics; it seems we lost downtown parking in this deal. I wonder who won. It certainly wasnt the taxpayer.

Now a new hotel is being constructed at the corner of Dargan Street and East Evans Street. What parking requirements are being required of the developer? Or is this going to be another example of letting the taxpayer foot the bill?

Last thought

On Sunday, Sept. 11, when the American flag should have been flown at half staff, some of our local government agencies along with many private businesses just could not get it right. Once again the local Social Security office just took the flag down on Saturday rather than have someone come to work to lower the flag on Sunday. The same occurred at the Army Reserve facility on Cashua. The City Fire Department on Palmetto had it flying at full staff. When questioned, they first offered a weak excuse of rain and then said they had not been told to lower it.

The U.S. Post Office on West Evans Street also had the flag at full staff, and it appears King Cadillac just down the street followed the post office lead. The flag in front of the County Building on North Irby Street also was at full staff, as was the flag at the Florence County Museum. The Morning News on South Dargan Street also flew its flag incorrectly.

To those offices who could not get it right because they are closed on Sunday, please check with Chick-fil-A, because it can get this right even when closed on Sunday.

North Dakota State 23 , Iowa 21 .

Citizen Columnist Thomas J. Sheehy is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army and a retired businessman. Hes been married 42 years, has two sons and four grandchildren, whom he and his wife followed to Florence several years ago. Contact Sheehy at citizencolumnist@florencenews.com.
Attorney: Man ignored officers commands before shootingJustin Juozapavicius And Sean Murphy, THE ASSOCIATED PRESSFirst posted: Monday, September 19, 2016 01:39 PM EDT | Updated: Tuesday, September 20, 2016 10:37 PM EDTTULSA, Okla.  Investigators found the drug PCP in the vehicle of an unarmed black man fatally shot by a white officer, according to Oklahoma police, but attorneys for the slain mans family say a discussion of drugs distracts from questions about the use of deadly force.Tulsa Sgt. Dave Walker told the Tulsa World on Tuesday that investigators recovered one vial of PCP in Terence Crutchers SUV, but he declined to say where in the vehicle it was found or whether officers determined if Crutcher used it Friday night. Walker confirmed to The Associated Press that what he told the newspaper was true, but declined further comment.A spokeswoman for the state medical examiners office said autopsy and toxicology results for Crutcher are pending, and police said Tuesday the toxicology report could take several weeks.Attorneys for Crutchers family said the mans relatives did not know whether drugs were found in his vehicle and, even if they were, that wouldnt justify his fatal shooting.Let us not be throwing a red herring, and to say because something was found in the car that was justification to shoot him, said attorney Benjamin Crump, one of the familys lawyers.Crump compared Crutchers shooting to Mondays arrest of New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami, who police say engaged officers in a shootout.He wasnt killed. So why was an unarmed black man who has committed no crime, who only needs a hand, given bullets in his lungs? Crump said.Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby fatally shot the 40-year-old on Friday after responding to a report of a stalled vehicle. Sgt. Shane Tuell said Tuesday that Shelby had a stun gun at the time but did not use it. Officer Tyler Turnbough, who is also white, used a stun gun on Crutcher, police said.Two 911 calls described an SUV that had been abandoned in the middle of the road. One unidentified caller said the driver was acting strangely, adding, I think hes smoking something.PCP or phencyclidine, also called angel dust, can cause slurred speech, loss of co-ordination and a sense of strength or invulnerability, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. At high doses, it can cause hallucinations and paranoia.Oklahoma prison officials confirmed Tuesday that Crutcher served four years in prison on a drug conviction from 2007 to 2011.But Damario Solomon-Simmons, another attorney for Crutchers family, said Shelby and other officers had no way of knowing about Crutchers background or the potential for drugs in his vehicle when they approached him Friday.Its undisputed that the officers on the scene had no idea what may be in Terences car, Solomon-Simmons said. At that particular moment that he was shot, he was not a suspect for any crime. Period.Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday that Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his SUV when he was shot. Its not clear from dashcam and aerial footage what led Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers gave Crutcher.Shelbys attorney, Scott Wood, said Crutcher was not following the officers commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon.He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and thats when she fired her shot, Wood told the Tulsa World.But attorneys for Crutchers family challenged that claim Tuesday, presenting an enlarged photo from the police footage that appeared to show that Crutchers window was rolled up.Local and federal investigations are underway to determine whether criminal charges are warranted and whether Crutchers civil rights were violated.Hundreds of protesters rallied Tuesday night outside police headquarters in downtown Tulsa calling for Shelby to be fired.Police treated Crutcher differently than they would if a white person had been stopped in a similar instance, said Sharon Smith, 60, an African-American resident of the suburb of Broken Arrow.Organizers urged participants to remain peaceful, and the protesters dispersed before nightfall without any incidents.Police helicopter footage was among several clips released Monday that show the shooting and aftermath. A man in the helicopter that arrives above the scene as Crutcher walks to the vehicle can be heard saying time for a Taser and then: That looks like a bad dude, too. Probably on something.Betty Shelbys mother-in-law, Lois Shelby, said the officer is grieving for Crutchers family and isnt prejudiced. She told the AP in a phone interview Tuesday that Shelby thought she had to protect her own life when she shot Crutcher.She wouldnt harm anyone. Were all sick. We feel for the (Crutcher) family, Lois Shelby said. But, you know, we have a family that goes out every day and faces life and death. And when she is being accused of things she didnt do wrong, its too much, and they dont think about our family.Betty Shelby declined comment, referring calls to her attorney.Police video shows Crutcher walking toward his SUV that is stopped in the middle of the road. His hands are up and a female officer is following him. As Crutcher approaches the drivers side of the SUV, more officers arrive and Crutcher appears to lower his hands and place them on the vehicle before the officers surround him.Crutcher can be seen dropping to the ground. Someone on the police radio says, I think he may have just been tasered. Then almost immediately, someone can be heard yelling, Shots fired! and Crutcher is left lying in the street.Shelbys attorney, Wood, said Turnbough fired the stun gun at the same time Shelby opened fire because both perceived a threat.The shooting comes four months after ex-Tulsa County volunteer deputy Robert Bates was sentenced to four years in prison on a second-degree manslaughter conviction in an unarmed black mans 2015 death. Bates said he mistakenly grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. Shelby worked as a Tulsa County sheriffs deputy for four years before joining the Tulsa Police Department in December 2011, officials said. She has been placed on paid leave.
Chuck Maerten got a pretty nice surprise.

On Wednesday, Maerten and his wife, Ann, were in Wahoo. Theyd come to see a memorial dedicated to a World War II submarine crew on the Saunders County Courthouse lawn.

But the Colorado couple got more than they expected.

Besides the tribute to the 80 men who died when the USS Wahoo was sunk off the coast of Japan, the Maertens got to see the new  and almost finished  Saunders County Veterans Memorial.

This vast memorial includes bronze statues designed by Nebraska sculptor Fred Hoppe, gray military tombstones and a black marble wall with veterans names.

The memorial will be dedicated during a 3 p.m. ceremony Sunday on the courthouse grounds at 387 N. Chestnut St., in Wahoo. The public is invited to the event which begins with a P-51 flyover.

County, state and federal officials have been invited.

Mike Helm, past National American Legion commander, is the keynote speaker. Former Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman will speak as well.

The idea for the memorial began after Erik Alm saw one that area veterans built in North Bend.

I was really impressed, said Alm, who served six years in the Nebraska Air Guard.

Efforts to construct the memorial in Wahoo started about three years ago.

We just felt it was time that we do a veterans memorial for Saunders County, Alm said. We met with the county supervisors and got their blessings to put it on the courthouse lawn, where the torpedo (part of the USS Wahoo memorial) already was.

Alm talked with Paul Eddie, past commander of American Legion Post 82, about the memorial. They met with American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars groups to assemble a committee for which Alm and Eddie are co-chairmen.

Fundraising began in late 2013. Groundbreaking for the $700,000 memorial occurred in July 2014. Alm said funds to create the memorial came from donations, not taxpayer dollars. None of the money was borrowed.

Alm said gathering the donations was easy, because people have an appreciation for veterans and recognize that a memorial should have been constructed a long time ago.

More than 900 pavers were sold for the black wall. The black wall also includes tributes to the different branches of the military. There are four tablets honoring MIA, POW, Purple Heart recipients and disabled veterans.

We ordered 10 bronze statues, Alm said. They represent the different branches of the military and the different wars they fought in  World War I through the Gulf War.

Most statues are of men. There is one woman, representing the Gulf War. Nine of the 10 will be finished and on display in time for the dedication.

The memorial also features 110 gray, military style tombstones that rise from a red rock base. Each has the name of someone from Saunders County who lost their life from World War I through the present time, Alm said. The tombstones are arranged in a chevron shape in front of a display of flags.

Memorial benches are part of the tribute as well.

For the Maertens, who live in Colorado Springs, the new memorial was quite a sight  especially since theyd originally just come to see the one paying tribute to the USS Wahoo.

Maerten said the USS Wahoo submarine was sunk off Wakkanai on the island of Hokkaido at the north end of Japan in 1943.

Twelve years later, Maerten, who was serving in the U.S. Air Force, was stationed in Wakkanai. Maerten was a radio intercept operator.

He took an interest in the USS Wahoo submarine, which was located by the Russians who were in search of one of their own sunken subs.

The U.S. Navy confirmed in 2006 that the sunken submarine found in the western Pacific was the USS Wahoo. That year, Adm. Gary Roughead, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, described the USS Wahoo as one of the greatest fighting submarines in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Cmdr. Dudley Morton, the subs skipper, is credited with sinking 19 enemy ships, total, during his four patrols in command of the Wahoo, the Navy reported.

The marker in front of the Saunders County Courthouse pays tribute to the submarines gallant crew who sank 20 Japanese ships before being sunk by action on Oct. 11, 1943.

Japanese reports indicated that one of its planes located an American submarine in the La Perouse Strait that day. The reports indicate that a multi-hour combined sea and air attack involving depth charges and aerial bombs eventually sank the USS Wahoo, the U.S. Navy stated.

Maerten has read about the USS Wahoo and he and his wife have been visiting various memorials. The Maertens wont be at Sundays dedication, but spent awhile looking at the new memorial.

They then went to the nearby Saunders County Historical Museum. Maerten was happy to see the USS Wahoo memorial and very pleased to see the other sites as well.

All of the rest of this is gravy, he said, smiling.
Constitution Week, the annual commemoration of the document that upholds and protects the freedoms central to our American way of life, continues through Friday.

The Daughters of the American Revolution initiated the observance in 1955 when the organization petitioned the U.S. Congress to dedicate Sept. 17-23 of each year to the commemoration of Constitution Week. Congress adopted the resolution, and on Aug. 2, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into Public Law 915.

The celebrations goals are to encourage the study of the historical events that led to the framing of the Constitution in September 1787; to inform people that the Constitution is the basis of Americas heritage and the foundation of our way of life; and to emphasize U.S. citizens responsibility to protect, defend and preserve the Constitution.
Reading isnt always an individual, solitary activity.

In fact, reading can be an ideal way for families to bond and spend time with one another when they might not otherwise do so.

Seven years ago, Keene Memorial Library started participating in a program designed to help acclimate Hispanic and Latino families to the benefits of reading, while also helping children and adults become more engaged, better readers overall.

We were approached by Humanities Nebraska, and asked if we wanted to participate in Prime Time Family Reading Time, said Laura England-Biggs, childrens librarian. Im pretty sure that they identified Fremont as one of the communities that had a growing Hispanic population. The program we run is a bilingual  English and Spanish  discussion-based reading program.

Starting Oct. 6, families in the Fremont Community will have the opportunity to attend the Prime Time Family Reading Time program held from 6-8 p.m. Thursday evenings. The program is free for families with children ages 6 through 10, and runs through Nov. 10.

Each week, participating families will enjoy a light supper with other participating families, followed by a reading session led by two bilingual instructors. Books will be read in both English and Spanish, released information says.

Following the group reading session, a discussion is held to help people better understand content, while simultaneously unleashing some important critical thinking skills, England-Biggs said.

The book read to the entire group is one of two books sent home each week with families. Families then re-read the book they had discussion over and tackle the task of reading the new book sent home as well.

This means that all participating families read 12 books over a course of six weeks.

At the end of the six weeks, prize books are given to all participants to take home and keep, England-Biggs said.

Some years, as many as 15 families  primarily Hispanic and Latino  attend the sessions. Other years as few as six or eight families attend.

The smaller group is almost better sometimes because they can all talk a little easier to one another that way, she said. Then they arent trying to talk over each other.

England-Biggs said that the Prime Time Family Reading Time program is often times equally beneficial to both children and adults.

Weve had times where parents come in and have been hesitant to talk, she said. But over the course of the years that theyve been coming, suddenly they might be one of the chattiest families in the room who are willing to share and laugh with the others.

Any family interested in the Prime Time Family Reading Time program is being asked to contact Keene Memorial at 402-727-2694, or to stop by the library and ask for a Prime Time registration form.
The shipbuilding industry in Brazil is reviewing the direction it will take and planning to meet the challenges of the future, this is the summary of the first day of the 13th edition of Marintec South America  Navalshore.

"We believe that this edition will be a milestone of positive resumption of the shipbuilding and offshore industry in Brazil. In addition to the new products presented by exhibitors, we organized a content programming that aims to prepare the sector for the challenges that will have to be overcome in the coming years, said Jean-Francois Quentin, president of UBM Brazil, organizer of Marintec South America , during the opening ceremony.

The shipping industry has the potential to take on new demands and re-generate jobs and development in the country",

Even with the Brazilian maritime industry facing an uncertain future, the event attracted more than 380 national and international companies. By Wednesday, it is forecast that the main maritime and offshore event in Latin America will attract over 16,000 qualified visitors.

In addition to the exibition, Marintec South America 2016 offers technical lectures, a fisheries seminar, and classification training sessions, along with excellent networking and business opportunities for local and foreign companies.

The conferences kicked off with an attentive audience filling the conference room to capacity during the Leaders Forum talks and continued with standing room only during the UK trade & technology presentations, underlining the partnership between the UK and Brazil in the maritime and oil and gas sectors, which boasts around BRL2bn ($613m) in business over the past three years.

The exibition was busy all day and visitors could be seen interacting at virtually all the booths, which displayed a wide range of products and services from the global maritime industry. The 13th Marintec is being held in South America Convention Center, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
This will be our main business going forward," Accord Projects director Pappu Sastry told Seatrade Maritime News. The former md of Nepa Projects and Investments said he is working with a conglomerate of Indonesian mines to ship coal to India. They had been doing a good business shipping thermal coal to China previously and in 2014-15 were doing volumes of 14m to 15m tons a year.

However the bottom fell out of this market last year and they had stopped production since last October. A new opportunity has now come up with requirements from India, although the demand will be about half, at 6m to 7m tons. The difference however is that Indian coal importers deal on a CIF basis and these producers have no experience in shipping the commodity.

Sastry has been working with them to smoothen import processes and is set to get the first shipments going by October. He expects shipments of 500,000 tons a month once in full flow and will charter four to six panamaxes a month to fulfill these orders.

He added that Accord has also signed a contract for some shipments to Penang in Malaysia but these comprise smaller volumes.
New U.K. Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt has reversed most of an economic package announced by the government just weeks ago, including a planned cut in income taxes. Hunt said Monday he was scrapping almost all the tax cuts announced last month by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Liz Truss, and also signaled that public spending cuts are on the way. It was a bid to soothe turbulent financial markets spooked by fears of excessive government borrowing. The move raises questions about how long the beleaguered prime minister can stay in office, though Truss insisted she has no plans to quit. She vowed to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, but many in the party want her gone.
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of highly classified documents detailing the government's surveillance program, last week announced that he would seek a presidential pardon, outlining his case in an interview with The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill. The request coincides with the release of an Oliver Stone film, titled "Snowden," that casts the whistleblower in a sympathetic light.

Snowden left the United States in 2013 and has been in exile in Russia ever since. Asked in a press conference about the possibility of a Snowden pardon, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest last week said, "Mr. Snowden has been charged with serious crimes, and it's the policy of the administration that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States and face those charges."

This position mirrors a similar response the White House provided following an online petition to pardon Snowden in 2013.

RELATED: Do Government Surveillance Programs Work?

The president "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment," reads Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. How a pardon is used depends entirely on the administration, and past presidencies haven't stopped from granting amnesty to controversial figures.

Richard Nixon

Undoubtedly the most infamous use of the presidential prerogative is in the case of Gerald Ford, who gave Nixon a full pardon. Nixon had been accused of obstruction of justice for his role in the Watergate scandal.

The decision proved controversial at the time and contributed to Ford's failure to secure a 1976 electoral victory to return to the Oval Office. But the pardon dispensed with what would have been a long and divisive trial over the actions of the former commander-in-chief.

Jimmy Hoffa

In 1971, just in time for Christmas, President Nixon commuted the sentence of Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Teamsters Union serving his fourth out of 13-year sentence for jury tampering and fraud. As part of the agreement, Hoffa would be barred working with a labor organization until 1980. Hoffa threw his support behind Nixon in the 1972 election, providing some modest contribution to Nixon's eventual electoral victory.

Years after the commutation, a popular theory alleged that Nixon had received a cash payoff for pardoning Hoffa, a claim denied by both Nixon and his aides as well as Hoffa's successor at the Teamsters Union.

RELATED: Most Infamous Cold Cases

Vietnam War Draft Dodgers

Presidents often save their most controversial pardons for their waning days in office. On the day after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter offered unconditional amnesty to any Americans who didn't register for the draft or fled the country when called to serve, fulfilling a controversial promise he made during the campaign. These men were known as draft dodgers.

Carter's decision did only apply to civilians, however. Service members who served but went AWOL or deserted during the war. Protesters were also ineligible for amnesty.

Critics, particularly veterans, were incensed at the decision. In their view, the amnesty was an affront to those who served and would only encourage future Americans to dodge the draft in times of conflict and avoid punishment.

Iran-Contra Scandal

On Christmas in 1992, in the waning days of his single term in office, President George H.W. Bush pardoned six former officials in Ronald Reagan's Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. Weinberger had been scheduled to stand trial in a matter of weeks on charges of lying to independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, over the secretary's knowledge of the Iran-contra scandal.

Walsh spent over six years investigating the case, and upon hearing the decision, declared that the "Iran-Contra cover-up... has now been completed."

Pardongate

In a move that would later become known as Pardongate, President Bill Clinton pardoned more people in his last day in office than his predecessor did over his entire term.

On Jan. 20, 2001, Clinton issued 140 pardons and 26 commutations. Among the more controversial figures pardoned include Marc Rich, a fugitive who fled the United States following a 1983 indictment on tax evasion; Carlos Vignali, a convicted drug trafficker; and the president's brother, Roger Clinton, who was convicted and served his sentence for drug charges a decade earlier.

WATCH VIDEO: Everything You Need to Know About Edward Snowden
A 30-year-old Antarctic mystery may have just been solved -- and the answer could have troubling implications for a warming world. The story begins in 1984, when a team of researchers from Ohio State University discovered fossil diatoms in East Antarctica. There was just one problem: diatoms are microscopic marine organisms, and the fossils were a mile above sea level, in exposed sedimentary rocks in the Transantarctic Mountains. RELATED: Arctic Warms, Antarctic Ice Shelves Weaken The question of how they got there divided scientists into two groups: one that argued the diatoms had been blown into the mountains by high winds, and another that suggested the fossils' presence pointed to a major upheaval. According to this second scenario, the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated dramatically during warm periods of the Pliocene Epoch, between 3 and 4.5 million years ago; its retreat allowed the ocean to encroach more deeply into Antarctica, and the diatoms in that ocean were transported to the mountains as glaciers returned and expanded. WATCH: Five Islands That Are Going to Disappear

The new study, published in the journal Nature Communications and led by Northern Illinois University geologist Reed Scherer, argues that both camps were right. Yes, diatoms were blown into the mountains by the wind, but only after melting glaciers and rising sea levels had carried them inland. Using sophisticated ice sheet and climate models, Scherer and colleagues found the ice sheet experienced a series of retreats and re-advances during the Pliocene warm periods; the retreats were not as dramatic as some scientists had earlier suggested, but were significant enough to uncover bays of open seawater, with conditions ripe for production of copious amounts of plankton diatoms. When diatoms die, their tiny shells coat the seafloor, and this, Scherer and colleagues argue, is key to understanding what happened next. As the ice retreated, its weight was removed. That allowed the land beneath it to rise up over the course of several thousand years, forming islands amid the encroaching ocean. Those islands were covered with diatoms, and cyclonic winds then carried these lighter, dead diatoms up into the mountains. As well as being of interest in clearing up a long-simmering scientific dispute, the study's findings are important because they show not only that the East Antarctic ice sheet can retreat significantly, but that it did so -- by up to 300 miles, according to the findings of Scherer and colleagues -- in conditions that were not dramatically different from those we are creating today RELATED: Antarctic Library 'Would Protect Ice Memory' At the time of the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, average global temperatures were about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius higher than today, but concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, at around 400 parts per million, were pretty much where they are now. The prospect of a significant collapse of the East Antarctic ice sheet -- as well as that covering West Antarctica, which is modeled to collapse first -- portends a dramatic rise in sea levels worldwide. "During certain intervals of Pliocene warmth, the sea level could have been as much as 75 feet higher than it is now," Scherer said. "The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel has now elevated the concentration to 400 parts per million, matching for the first time the levels of the warm Pliocene. This makes the old debate about whether the ice sheet was notably smaller than it is now more relevant than ever. "The question is always how quickly could sea levels rise, and we're probably looking at several hundred years into the future before reaching a peak high that matches the Pliocene, but the problem of progressive sea-level rise is already upon us." RELATED: Earth May Spin Faster as Glaciers Melt Added study co-author Richard Alley of Penn State University: "This is another piece of a jigsaw puzzle that the community is rapidly putting together, and which appears to show that the ice sheets are more sensitive to warming than we had hoped. If humans continue to warm the climate, we are likely to commit to large and perhaps rapid sea-level rise that could be very costly. No one piece of the puzzle shows this, but as they fit together, the picture is becoming clearer." SEE PHOTOS: 10 Nasty Surprises From Climate Change

style="text-align: left;">You've heard a lot about how human-driven climate change will lead to hotter temperatures, cause sea levels to rise and make storms more intense. But it's projected to have plenty of other unpleasant and even disastrous effects as well. Here are 10 of them. Scientists believe that rising temperatures will lead to increased evaporation of the Great Lakes' water, and precipitation won't make up the difference. That means we're likely to see declines in water levels over the next century, and one study predicts they may drop as much as 8 feet. Earth Shots: Must See Planet Pics (Sept. 21)

style="text-align: left;"> Thanks to climate change, jumbo-sized ragweed plants will spew out more pollen for a longer, more miserable allergy season. Here Are 10 Striking Images Of Future Sea Levels

style="text-align: left;">By altering the wild environment, climate change makes it easier for newly mutated microbes to jump between species, and it's likely that as a result, diseases will emerge and spread across the globe even more rapidly.

style="text-align: left;">A recent Nature article reported that male Australian central bearded dragons have been growing female genitalia because of rising temperatures, a phenomenon that had not previously been observed in that species. 10 Signs Climate Change Is Already Happening

style="text-align: left;">Rising sea levels are wiping out beaches all over the world already. Importing fresh sand and building them up again is only a temporary solution. To make matters worse, there's currently a sand shortage, due to demand from fracking, glass and cement making.

style="text-align: left;">Bark beetles are eating old growth forests, because the winters aren't cold enough to kill them off. So more trees like this American Elm will die. VIDEO: Global Warming And Climate Change: What's The Diff?

style="text-align: left;">Warmer temperatures mean there will be more water vapor trapped in the atmosphere, leading to more lightning. A University of California-Berkeley study predicts that lightning strikes will increase by about 12 percent for every degree Celsius gained. Sierra Nevada Snowpack Worst In Five Centuries

style="text-align: left;"> Wine grape harvests are being hurt. Regions that have historically supplied the world's best wine will no longer be hospitable climates to grow wine grapes, according to research by the Environmental Defense Fund and others.

style="text-align: left;">Coffee flavor depends upon really narrow conditions of temperature and moisture, and climate change is going to wreak havoc with that. Worse yet, as coffee growing regions become warmer, pests that couldn't survive in the past will ravage the crops. This is already being seen in Costa Rica, India and Ethiopia, which have experienced sharp declines in crop yields. California Drought by the Numbers
A new tool based on waste allows researchers to identify a species solely via the animal's poop. The stool tool, described in the journal PLOS ONE, has so far been tested on bats, which leave behind large amounts of fecal material known as guano.

While many animals are easy to identify using just visual information, bats' nocturnal nature, ability to fly, frequent small size and other factors make them challenging to study in the wild. So they were excellent candidates for the Species From Feces tool. RELATED: Pooptastrophe: Roomba Sweeps Floor with Dog Turd Lead author Faith Walker, who is director of the Bat Ecology & Genetics Lab at Northern Arizona University, explained how it works. "Basically about 200 guano pellets are collected from across a bat roost and pooled into a single tube of DNA preservative," Walker told Discovery News. "DNA is then extracted, and after many steps it's placed into a next-generation sequencer, and a short (200 base pairs) DNA region that's really good at species-level identification is sequenced." At that stage, the researchers have tens of thousands of bat "reads" or sequence data. WATCH VIDEO: Why Dogs Spin Before They Poop

"We (then) feed all these data into an analysis pipeline that basically compares our reads to a reference library that we built that contains all available bat sequences," she added. "In this way we can determine all the bat species that contributed to the sample." In short, the stool tool works even if the clump of gathered poop was originally produced by multiple individuals. The technology relies upon the DNA mini-barcode system that targets a small segment of mitochondrial DNA. This is DNA inherited only down the female line. The particular genetic segment that the researchers chose to focus on, called COI, turns out to be very unique in each bat species. It also always traces back to the bats themselves, and not to their prey. That's important because feces is full of material that the individual ate.

The new reference library includes the conservation status for each bat as well as the regions/countries where it can be found. The stool tool's applications highlight three primary goals. The first is to identify bats located in a mine, cave, bridge, bat box or other location. Bats tend to hang out in dark places with low visibility for humans, so the tool allows researchers to study the flying mammals even when they cannot directly look at them.

The second application is to confirm the identification of captured bats that are difficult to distinguish from others. The DNA barcode device can read cheek swab samples as well as feces. Finally, the stool tool is meant to identify IUCN Red List bat species. These are bats that are listed as threatened, endangered or otherwise at risk due to low population numbers. Many bats fall into those classifications, especially in the U.S., where the disease white nose syndrome has devastated various species.

The disease is caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which colonizes the bat's skin. It has proven challenging to prevent and treat. Some species have died out at a rate greater than 90 percent within five years of white nose syndrome reaching their site. RELATED: Could Poop Power Our Cars? So far, the device can identify about a third of the world's bats, representing the majority of the bat species that have been "barcoded," or have had their unique COI signature determined. It works on both fresh and "aged" poop.
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion resulted in what's been named the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. On April 20th, 2010, the explosion on the rig took the lives of 11 workers and caused an estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil and methane gas to leak into the ocean for 87 straight days.

Caleb Holloway was on board the Deepwater Horizon the day of the explosion. Seeker's Kyle Thiermann spoke with Caleb about what happened that day, and his journey to recovery in the aftermath of this tragedy.

RELATED: Even Small Oil Spills Endanger Seafood Supply

"We did everything we could to get as many people off of there and to try to salvage what we could on the rig," Caleb told Kyle. "Whenever it finally sunk, the 11 guys that were missing were the guys from the drill crew. It was very, very hard for me to accept. I wasn't ready to give up. I wanted to go back out there and search some more," he said.

In the months after the explosion, criminal investigations into the incident revealed that BP may not have kept up with multiple design and procedure standards. Their well design had a missing seal that left a gap for gas to escape from, they skipped crucial tests of the well cement lining, and despite various warning signs of an oil leak, rig managers did not evacuate Deepwater Horizon until it was too late.

Still, no one could've imagined the devastation that actually occurred. For months afterward, Caleb struggled to return to normal life. He wanted to be back out on the rig, but knew he wouldn't be able to handle it mentally and emotionally, after what happened.

"I was on a downward spiral, not getting any better every day that I would think about it. I missed the rig, I missed the brotherhood that we had out there," he said.

RELATED: The Fight To Stop North Dakota's Oil Pipeline

Despite the devastation of what Caleb went through, some good did come out of it. After helping in the search and rescue efforts during the disaster, he knew he could handle the pressure of a life or death situation. Caleb is now a firefighter in his hometown of Nacogdoches, Texas, where he continues to save lives.

"I think the Horizon tragedy kinda prepared me for some of the stuff that I'm faced with today," he told Kyle. "You can either run away or you can run and help, and I knew I had that in me to go and help. It gave me the confidence to be able to face the challenges I face today, 'cause when everybody else is running away, we're running in, and that's just something I'm extremely proud to be able to do and try to impact people's lives by helping."

RELATED: Rig With 300 Tons of Oil Runs Aground Off Scotland

After experiencing a tragedy like this, it can be easy to give up and walk away. Caleb was able to overcome his fears and continues to exemplify bravery in his work as a firefighter by risking his own life to save others.

He told Kyle he's very grateful for where he is today. "It's been such a blessing to be able to overcome the tragedy that happened and to be in the place that I'm at now."

-- Molly Fosco
Photo: Shown is a Dickinsonia Costa fossil from the Ediacaran period. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Evidence suggests that microbes existed on Earth as far back as 3.7 billion years ago, a billion years after the planet formed. Animal remains, however, don't appear in the fossil record until 600 million years ago during the Ediacaran period, though there are indirect signs that animal life may have gotten started much earlier.

Scientists are attempting to put a date on the earliest lifeforms in the kingdom of Animalia, but without an actual cast of a body they've had to rely on the credibility of "trace" fossils to show signs of an animal's presence in the form of footprints, scratches, feeding marks or burrows. Some scientists claim to have found trace fossils made by animals more than a billion years ago, raising controversy over whether animal life could have existed this early. There are also trace fossils from the Ediacaran Period and soft bodied animals were known to exist during this period, so understanding the tracks they made is important for studying the early animals.

RELATED: Fossils for Earliest Life on Earth Found

Giulio Mariotti, an oceanographer from Louisiana State University, and colleagues, examined supposed animal trace fossils from the Ediacaran Period, and found that it is possible that some of them could be microbial in origin. The results, which were recently published in a paper entitled "Microbial Origin of Early Animal Trace Fossils" in the Journal of Sedimentary Research, raise questions about the reliability of trace fossils as evidence for early animal life. [Alien Life, Landscapes and the Art of Space (Gallery)]

The research was funded by the Exobiology & Evolutionary Biology element of the NASA Astrobiology Program.

Many of the Ediacaran animal trace fossils are found within "wrinkle" structures, small ridges and pits interpreted as evidence of ancient microbial mats. Microbial mats are comprised of layers of microorganisms, and fossilized mats are among the earliest clear signs of microbial life. Microbial mats were widespread in the Precambrian, the period before animal life became extremely common and diverse. But the mats were no longer able to flourish in certain marine areas when grazing animals became more abundant because the animals destroyed the structures.

Mariotti and colleagues devised an experiment to try to create trails of grooves and pits similar to the trace fossils. They did this by moving microbial aggregates across sand at the bottom of a tank of water by creating waves in the water. Microbial aggregates are small cluster of microbes which are larger than sand but less dense. This low density enables them to be moved across the sand at the bottom of the tank by very low energy waves.

The use of low energy waves is important as waves with higher energy would also erase the trail left in the sand. A wide variety of trails were produced by the aggregates depending on the wave conditions and the size of the aggregate. Some of these trails were strikingly similar to those that are currently deemed to be Ediacaran trace fossils, meaning that it is possible that some trace fossils are actually not fossils at all and are instead caused by the movement of microbial aggregates.

RELATED: Could This Tough Bacteria Survive on Mars?

However, not only did the trails produced by the wave tank experiment replicate the supposed animal traces, the experiment also produced a wrinkle structure in the sand. The aggregates caused the wrinkle structure when they were smaller than the amplitude of the wave, where as the trails were formed when the aggregates were larger than the wave amplitude.

This research does not necessarily mean that all early trace fossils were caused by microbial aggregates, however it does put forward a plausible alternative explanation for those that occur alongside wrinkle structures. Therefore, possible trace fossils from the Ediacaran period or earlier should be looked upon with skepticism until it is possible to rule out microbial aggregates as a cause of the grooves and pits in the rock. [Life on Mars: Exploration & Evidence]

Trails caused by aggregates and those caused by animals can be distinguished in some cases if certain distinctive features exist. For example an animal trail can be "self avoiding," meaning that the animal didn't cross back over its own trail as it had already searched for food in that location. Unfortunately, most of the more distinctive signs of animal activity are rare until the very end of the Ediacaran period.

WATCH VIDEO: How Did Land Animals Evolve?
Astronomers may have found the first binary planets ever observed beyond our solar system.

The two objects straddle the dividing line between gas giants and odd "failed stars" known as brown dwarfs in terms of mass, researchers said. The newfound bodies are also similar to each other in size and age.

"They're probably brother and sister," Daniella Gagliuffi told Space.com. Gagliuffi, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, found the objects amid a cloud of stars about 65 light-years from Earth. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

"It's a little incestuous," said Gagliuffi, who presented her research at the American Astronomical Society's summer meeting in San Diego in June.

RELATED: Can We Call Pluto and Charon a 'Binary Planet' Yet?

The pair lie within a dense cluster of stars that would normally be expected to strip objects away from one another. However, observations suggest that the two objects are so close that interactions with other stars would instead push them closer together, Gagliuffi said.

Galaxies are filled with stars, but they also include faint drifting objects with characteristics that make their status debatable. Such objects can be classified either as planets or as failed stars, given a blurry dividing line between the two.

That's the case for the two objects Gagliuffi identified in a search for failed stars known as brown dwarfs. Gagliuffi sought brown dwarfs that could help her probe the lower boundary of what makes a star.

Unlike stars, brown dwarfs fail to fuse "normal" hydrogen in their interior. But these odd objects are apparently capable of fusing deuterium, or "heavy" hydrogen, a feat that kicks in when a body is around 13 times as massive as Jupiter.

RELATED: Are Habitable Binary Planets Possible?

The newfound pair weigh in at roughly 15 and 14 times the mass of Jupiter. But the error bars associated with those estimates are wide enough that they may actually be in the planetary range.

"Their mass is straddling the deuterium-burning limit," Gagliuffi said.

So, the twins could be a pair of planets dancing around a central point of mass (in which case they would be the history-making exoplanet binary), but they could also be a pair of brown dwarfs, or a brown dwarf hosting a massive gas giant planet.

To complicate the matter, both brown dwarfs and young gas giants produce light so weak that it is difficult to study their composition or differentiate them from one another.

And massive young planets produce heat from within, slowly cooling over their lifetimes. Gagliuffi's studies show the pair are between 200 million and 300 million years old - young enough to confuse the issue.

Pairs of brown dwarfs are abundant throughout the Milky Way galaxy, but young binaries are not so common, Gagliuffi said. If the siblings turn out to be failed stars, they could provide intriguing insights into their family's formation history.

WATCH VIDEO: Did We Find Another Planet In Our Solar System?
Photo: Shown is a Bobbit worm, with only its powerful jaws protruding from the gravel in which it buries itself while it waits to attack. Credit: Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel The Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois) is a long, sneaky ambush-predator of the sea that burrows beneath the sand, with only its jaws above ground. There it waits for unsuspecting fish to come within striking distance.

If a fish comes too close, fish no more:

The attacks happen with lightning speed, as the worm's powerful jaws go to work hauling in prey, which tend to, well, disappear. What happens down in the burrow has not yet been well documented. Here's a lionfish meeting its fate at the hands of a Bobbit worm:

Now, though, at least one species of fish has figured out how to deal with the giant worm, which typically grows to about 3 feet long but can sometimes become a 10-foot monster. RELATED: Ocean Worm Wriggles Back Into View after 140 Years Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the University of Basel describe a novel pushback strategy used by the Peters' monocle bream (Scolopsis affinis), an Indo-Pacific tropical reef fish. If one of the fish sees the worm, or sees one of its brethren captured by it, a mob of the fish gather around the worm's location and being firing strong jets of water until the predator retreats. Here a Scolopsis gang finishes off the job of chasing away a worm, the members taking turns blasting away:
You know what the worst part about talking with someone else is? Actually coming up with your own words or giving any effort. Or at least that's what Google Allo (free on Android and iOS today), the new chat app from the search king, would have you believe. We tried it out this morning and found that the combination of pre-baked chat responses and Google Assistant make for an auto-pilot chatting experience, for better and for worse. RELATED: Superhuman A.I. Can Locate Any Image After setting up Allo, which requires registering your phone number, you're on your way to care-free conversations, since the app provides a few suggested replies from the start of a conversation. Your friends don't even need to be using Allo to chat with them, as it can also send chats over SMS. On the downside, those SMS-only friends won't see the vibrant interface filled with tons of colors and images -- just a lot of links. When I chatted with a friend, I didn't need to create any responses; I just choose between the pre-made Smart Reply options above the keyboard. Google says Smart Reply will improve over time and get to know your style, to understand if you're the kind of person who types words, or one that speaks fluent emoji. WATCH VIDEO: Controlling Your Home with an App

You shouldn't try to rely on Allo for too much, as our brief time with the app proved it's not the best at identifying things. When my colleague sent me an image of his French bulldog, Allo suggested I say "Nice Boston terrier." That's an All-Nope. While Allo offers fun distractions like the Emoji Movie guessing game, its biggest strength lies in Google Assistant, a new AI chatbot that does most of the leg-work of researching things for you. You can either chat one-on-one with Assistant or summon it to join a conversation by typing @google and asking a question. Users interact with Assistant using natural language and its prompt buttons. Adding @Google to a conversation looks a bit awkward, as it floods the screen with chat bubbles, images and options that may force some to scroll up to remember the context. RELATED: Google Street View Could Fight Invasive Species Google Assistant can tell you the weather at the moment, the forecast for the weekend and answer the question of if you need an umbrella. It can also help you find nearby restaurants and provide links to call locations, see menus and look at destinations in Street View. Google Assistant feels like what the future of AI should be, which is both speedier and funnier than Siri currently allows. When I asked when Google Assistant was born, it replied "I try to live every day like it's my birthday. I get more cake that way." Assistant isn't going to book a Comedy Central special off of these yuks, but I chuckled. Unfortunately, Google Assistant hits a snag on the last yard, as it's unable to do much with the restaurant plans you pick. Despite the fact that Google's Maps service features Open Table integration and Uber, you can't book tables at the restaurants you pick, nor can you arrange for a ride to destinations you find. RELATED: Google 'Sheep View' Covers the Faroe Islands If you grow tired of it, you can unregister your phone number by tapping the menu bar, tapping settings and selecting Unregister phone number. While Allo offers a fun look and Assistant is intriguing view into the future of chatbots and AI, I'm not sure if I'll continue to use it. I already chat in Apple's recently refreshed Messages, Google Hangout, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Slack and Twitter DMs - which makes for a lot to keep track of already. Google just threw another tool into a crowded field, so it'll be interesting to see how much adoption it gets. Get more from Toms Guides This article originally appeared on Toms Guides, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. SEE PHOTOS: Top 10 Google Map Adventures of 2015

Its been quite the year for armchair travel. Google Maps cameras took the path less traveled, scaling dizzying cliffs with climbers, hitching a horse-drawn ride across a frozen lake, hiking to Machu Piccu (above) and ziplining through the Amazon. First launched in the U.S. back in 2007, Google Street View is now providing 360-degree panoramas on every continent. In the coming months, Google plans to expand Street Views in India, trek through the Northern British Columbia wilderness and map remote areas in Ireland. Explorers can borrow a camera through the Google Street View Trekker Loan Program , which is an effort to share new perspectives with the world. While we await the next adventures, heres a look back at the ones Google introduced in 2015. GET MORE: Google Maps Tries To Save the Planet: Photos

Over the summer, Google introduced Street Views from their 3,000-mile journey through Mongolia . The previous fall, the team had bolted the camera to a rugged pickup truck, but they frequently found themselves far from actual roads. At times their trekker Ariuntuul strapped the camera to her back and hiked along. At another point they hauled the camera on the back of a horse-drawn sled to cross Khuvsgul Lake, which had become a frozen solid block. The journey also took them through the Gobi Desert, where they encountered locals taming wild horses. On the opposite side of the country, closer to Mongolias border with Russia, the roads look a little different in the winter, Street View program manager Cynthia Wei wrote on Googles blog . The Street View showed their pickup trucks deep tracks in seemingly endless snow. Explore Mongolia Here GET MORE: Google Maps North Korea

Dinosaurs once roamed the land in Colorado and Utah near the Yampa River. Nearly 1,500 of their fossils are still in one large cliff at Dinosaur National Monument. The areas famous canyons are also a scenic draw for hikers and whitewater rafters. A team from the nonprofit conservation organization American Rivers and the rafting outfitter O.A.R.S. borrowed the Google Street View Trekker camera and mounted it on a raft , capturing panoramic river views for a 72-mile stretch of the river. They wanted to spotlight the waterways natural beauty. We hope this inspires viewers from around the world to take an active interest in exploring, protecting, and participating in this beautiful intact ecosystem, Google Earth Outreach program manager Karin Tuxen-Bettman said at the time . Mapping the Yampa was their second River View project after following the endangered Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 2014 . Explore the Yampa River Here GET MORE: Google Street View Goes River Rafting

In the fall, Google released Street View of Kenya for the first time. The maps included the Samburu National Reserve and a chance to see elephants up close with the organization Save the Elephants, which has been studying the animals for 20 years. Theyre helping the elephant population recover from ivory poaching. Inside the Reserve, a Google camera was attached to one of the organizations research vehicles. The elephants there are so accustomed to seeing the truck that they come right up to it. On this virtual tour, viewers get to know some of the elephants by name. While you make your journey through Street View, you may be surprised what awaits, David Daballen, head of field operations at Save the Elephants, wrote on Googles blog . The elephants arent alone out there. Samburu warriors, a leopard, and even a pride of lions appear in the frame. Explore Kenya Here GET MORE: Cats Get Google-Style Street View Map in Japan

More than 2,000 years ago, a group of people called the Nabataeans carved a city called Petra into brightly colored sandstone rock faces. Now this iconic area, considered to be among the worlds greatest wonders, is accessible on Google Street View. Visiting Petra this way is essentially an audio-guided walking tour. The citys sites are narrated by Queen Rania Al Abdullah, who also helped consult on the project. People all over the world now have a window into our beautiful Kingdom in the heart of the Middle East, she wrote on Googles blog . Her silky voice takes virtual visitors from Petras main sandstone gateway all the way to the large Al-Dier monastery, which is surrounded by cliffs that form a natural amphitheater. Movie buffs might recognize the intricately carved rock face at Al Khazna, known as The Treasury, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Explore Petra Here GET MORE: Mysterious Egyptian Spiral Seen on Google Maps

Long before it became an operating system for Apple computers, El Capitan in Yosemite National Park was a rock climbers dream. Soaring 3,000 feet high, this spectacular rock formation is the worlds largest granite monolith, the National Park Service boasts . World-renowned rock climbers Lynn Hill, Tommy Caldwell, and Alex Honnold took Googles camera along for their ascent (video). The views arent just panoramic. The photos they captured are part of an interactive journey that begins at the base, where the climbers ready their gear. Audio clips and videos accompany the panoramas. Hill free-climbed The Nose route on El Cap in 1993 -- a feat many told her would be impossible. Caldwell did the first ascent of the nearby Dawn Wall, considered the hardest big wall climb in the world. Honnold climbed El Cap by himself in five hours, mostly without a rope. I think its very human to want to explore something thats unknown, Hill told Google. Once you step off the ground, you have to navigate whatever challenges come your way. Explore Yosemites El Capitan Here GET MORE: Game of Thrones Gets Ported to Google Maps

We almost lost the giant tortoises that helped give the Galapagos Islands their name. For centuries they were over-exploited by humans and targeted by predators. The Galapagos Conservancy estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 were lost. Several species were on the brink of extinction. But determined conservation efforts saved these gentle giants, which have an impressive ability to survive without food or water for up to a year. Two years ago, Google along with the Charles Darwin Foundation and Galapagos National Park collected 360-degree panoramas showing the diverse local wildlife and landscapes. A second Google project began in 2014 to map the giant tortoises habitat. The Street View Trekker even got to visit areas that are off limits to tourists, project lead Raleigh Seamster told Outside Magazine . Those unique images were released in September 2015. Now anyone can see the thriving tortoises having a snack or traversing the islands. Explore the Galapagos Islands Here GET MORE: Google Rolls Out DIY Street View

Rising nearly 8,000 feet above sea level in the middle of a tropical mountain forest, the Peruvian historical site Machu Picchu has been called one of the worlds greatest wonders. Winding walls, terraces, and buildings are lasting evidence of the Inca Empire. The sites exact purpose remains a mystery, but the breathtaking views from its stone steps dont have to be since Google added a Machu Picchu Street View in December. Google Maps Tech Lead Daniel Filip told The Guardian that the team had been working on getting permission for years. Crisscrossing the sacred World Heritage site with the heavy high-resolution camera took seven days. The team also went inside the Museo Machupicchu at Casa Concha , where virtual visitors can click on more than 130 artifacts to learn about their significance. Machu Picchu, a true wonder of the world, is now just a click away, Filip wrote on Googles blog . Explore Machu Picchu Here GET MORE: Camel Captures Google Street View Of Liwa Desert

Want to get lost in the Amazon rainforest? Well, itll be harder now with Google Street View. For the first time, their bright green and black Trekker camera took a zipline to record images. The Amazon rainforest-mapping project was done in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation to show off the forests wonder and open a window onto conservation efforts there. Although Googles cameras have been photographing the rainforest since 2010, they hadnt been on a zipline before. This custom one allowed the Trekker to reach 62 miles per hour, the BBC reported . Overhead, the tree canopies are so thick they nearly blot out the sun. Below, the mossy trunks of old growth trees and hanging vines provide perfect hiding spots for the millions of flora and fauna that thrive there. Besides ziplining, Google Map visitors can float down rivers that connect to one of the Amazons largest tributaries, and virtually hike more than 12 miles of trails. Fortunately, as Google Earths Karin Tuxen-Bettman pointed out , you can leave the bug repellent at home. Explore the Amazon Rainforest Here GET MORE: Mysterious Egyptian Spiral Seen On Google Maps

Legend has it that spirits roam the top of Malaysias highest peak, Mount Kinabalu. The name itself is said to come from Chinese widow after a tale about a woman hiked up daily for a glimpse of her departed husband. The spirits, touched by her devotion, ultimately turned her into stone at the summit. Her vantage point can now be yours, without having to pay for a climbing permit or jump through any bureaucratic hoops. In October, Google released views from the mountains 13,400-foot-high granite perch. Scaling the Mount Kinabalu peak is even tougher with an 18-kg Trekker on your back, local operations lead Nhazlisham Hamdan captioned a photo showing the ascent on Googles blog . Street View visitors can also make their way down virtually along rope lines into Kinabulu Park, home to orangutans and the fleshy red Rafflesia arnoldii , the worlds largest flower. The nature-filled views continue down the Kinabatangan River and into the clear blue waters around Mabul and Mataking Islands. Explore Malaysias Highest Mountain Here GET MORE: Mysterious Pentagram On Google Maps Explained
The murder of Otzi the Iceman was likely committed at the end of a harsh personal conflict, researchers at a three-day mummy congress in Bolzano, north Italy, concluded. Launched to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Iceman's discovery in the Otztal Alps in South Tyrol, the meeting presented new insights on the 5,300-year-old mummy, including a profile carried out with latest criminological methods.

According to this analysis, Otzi did not flee up the mountain to escape his enemies. On the contrary, he was just resting and taken by surprise by his attacker(s) who shot the arrow from behind and at a distance. The theory is the latest of a series of speculations over Otzi's death. No corpse has been more thoroughly investigated. RELATED: The Ice Mummy: Little-Known Facts "In terms of his significance for science, Otzi is not simply an isolated mummy discovery. He could be seen as a typical European from earlier times and is precious for this reason alone," Albert Zink, director at the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, said. Scientists have learned a lot about Otzi in the past 25 years. Among many things, they discovered that he had brown eyes, was about 5 foot, 3 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. He died at around 45, was arthritic, lactose intolerant, suffered from atherosclerosis and had cavities, worn teeth and periodontal diseases. He was also infected with Helicobacter pylori, the pathogen that gives people gastritis and stomach ulcers. Genetic tests revealed he belonged to the European haplogroup K and was probably infertile. "What concerns us most these days is to know who the Iceman was, what role he played in society and what happened to him in the last days of his life," said Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology where the mummy is housed in refrigerated cell with an observation window. WATCH VIDEO: How Mummies Form Naturally

To help solve the coldest of cold cases, Fleckinger asked chief inspector Alexander Horn, at the Criminal Investigation Department in Muinch, Germany, to probe the "Otzi Murder Case" using behavioral investigative analysis. Horn began his inquire by examining the crime scene as it appeared on Sept. 19, 1991 when a human corpse was found near a melting glacier in the Otztal Alps. The corpse was lying with the chest against a flat rock. Only the back of the head, the bare shoulders and part of the back emerged from the ice and meltwater. He reconstructed the crime scene with the objects that were found in the vicinity and added to his analysis the data from the forensic medical examinations. "I actually had more information with Otzi than in certain modern crime cases," Horn said. RELATED: Oetzi the Iceman Suffered From Stomach Bug The results of his investigation were that Otzi did not feel threatened shortly before his murder. "He wasn't escaping, but resting. He had placed down his gear and enjoyed a hearty meal," Horn said. Indeed, previous research established that Otzi had eaten Alpine ibex -- a wild goat --- just 30 minutes to 2 hours before his death. "When you run away, you do not just sit and stop to eat a big meal," Horn told Discovery News. He noted however that a few days prior to the murder, the Iceman had incurred an injury to his right hand. RELATED: New Tattoos Found on Oetzi the Iceman "The wound was the result of a defensive action during the course of a physical altercation. Since no other injuries could be found, we believe he came out as a winner from that hostile encounter," Horn said. Such conflict could explain the surprise attack a few days later. Anger might have mounted after the unsuccessful hand-to-hand fight in Otzi's counterpart and a new attack was planned -- by surprise this time. According to Horn, the arrow shot appears to have been launched from a great distance in an act of treachery, taking Otzi by surprise. All his objects, including the valuable copper axe, remained at the crime scene -- a fact that made Horn rule out theft as the reason of the killing. "A personal conflict is more likely. We are talking of a behavioral pattern that is also prevalent today in most murder cases. It start with little things and it grows to the extreme," Horn said. SEE PHOTOS: Iceman Mummy 20 Yrs On: Mysteries Remain

style="text-align: left;">On Sept. 19, 1991, German hikers Erika and Helmut Simon spotted something brown while walking near a melting glacier in the Oetztal Alps in South Tyrol. As they got closer, they realized with horror it wasn't a piece of rubbish, but a human corpse lying on its chest against a flat rock.

style="text-align: left;">Only the back of the head, the bare shoulders and part of the back emerged from the ice and meltwater.

style="text-align: left;">In the following days, various attempts at recovering the corpse were made. Finally, on Sept. 23, the body was extracted from the ice along with numerous pieces of leather and hide, string, straps and clumps of hay. The mummified body was taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck.

style="text-align: left;">The mummy lay in a 131-foot-long, 9-foot -deep and 22- foot -wide rocky gully surrounded by steep stone walls at an altitude of 10.531 feet. Since the glacier made it difficult to establish the exact location of the watershed, a controversy arose on which soil -- Italian or Austrian -- it was found. A survey of the border carried out on Oct. 2, 1991 established that the mummy lay 303.67 feet from the border in South Tyrol, in Italy.

style="text-align: left;">The discovery caused a global media sensation. Initially, the mummy was dated to be at least 4,000 years old (later, radio carbon dating established that the man lived around 5,000 years ago, between 3350 and 3100 B.C.). Such an old, well preserved, fully clothed, mummified body had never before been seen.

style="text-align: left;">Between July 20 and Aug. 25, 1992, a second archaeological survey was carried out at the glacier. Numerous pieces of the Iceman's equipment emerged, such as a bearskin cap, leather and hide remnants, grasses, string, pieces of skin, muscle fibers, hair and a fingernail.

style="text-align: left;">Although the most important piece in the Iceman's equipment is a copper-bladed axe (tests have shown it could have chopped down a yew tree in 35 minutes) this stone disc is the most mysterious. Made of white Dolomite marble, it has a hole in the middle through which a hide strip was threaded. Nine twisted hide thongs were tied on to a loop in this strip. After 20 years, the disc's function remains unclear.

style="text-align: left;">Oetzi is the world's most studied mummy. The Neolithic man is a so-called "wet mummy." As humidity is retained in individual cells, the body tissue is elastic and allows in-depth scientific investigations. With all his recovered clothing and equipment, this natural mummy, unaltered by burial rites, provides a unique view into Stone Age life in Europe.

style="text-align: left;">Researchers were able to diagnose several anatomic anomalies and pathologies in the mummy: Oetzi lacked a 12th pair of ribs, had bad teeth, worn joints and hardened arteries, and suffered from whipworm infestation. He also had a remarkable diastema -- a natural gap between his two upper incisors.

style="text-align: left;">Oetzi's body is covered with over 50 tattoos produced by fine incisions into which charcoal was rubbed. The cuts were probably part of a pain-relieving treatment. Indeed, the tattooed areas correspond to skin acupuncture lines. Before Oetzi, it was believed that acupuncture originated 2,000 years later in Asia.

style="text-align: left;">In 2001 new X-ray analysis revealed the presence of a flint arrowhead in the left shoulder. The arrowhead ended up just a few inches from the lung. Although vital organs were not hit, the arrow severed a major blood vessel and damaged the neurovascular fascicles of the left arm. This caused heavy bleeding and possibly paralysis of the arm. The Iceman probably bled to death within a matter of minutes. A deep wound to the hand and numerous bruises confirm that the Iceman engaged in hand-to-hand combat shortly before his death. Recently, researchers also discovered a skull fracture and major bleeding in the back, suggesting that the mummy also suffered a blow to the head. He died in the spring or early summer at about age 45.

style="text-align: left;">This reconstruction by two Dutch experts, Alfons and Adrie Kennis, was produced with the latest in forensic mapping technology. It used three-dimensional images of the mummy's skull as well as infrared and tomographic images. It shows Oetzi as a brown-eyed, bearded, furrow faced man who spent many hours walking in the mountains. He was about 5 foot, 3 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. The Iceman belonged to a European genetic group and was probably infertile.

style="text-align: left;">On Jan. 16, 1998, the Iceman and his belongings were moved from the Institute for Anatomy of Innsbruck University to a newly-built South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. The mummy now lies in a darkened room and can be viewed through a small window. At a temperature of -42F and a relative humidity of 98 percent, Oetzi's house simulates the conditions of the glacier ice. To stop the mummy from gradually drying out, the cell walls are lined with tiles of ice.
This week GrindTV released a roundup of lethal surfing waves around the world, and the spots are as insane as you'd expect. Frigid water, jagged rocks, sharks, monster waves and locations miles from any help apparently can't discourage surfers from trying their luck. And these waves show no mercy. RELATED: 7 Awesome Hurricane Surfing Videos "The steps are what turn that wave from something really, really scary, into an almost mutant death wish," big wave surfer and mixed martial artist Richie Vaculiktold GrindTV, describing the terrifyingly large ripples in the cold waves at Shipstern Bluff in Tasmania. Basically if you want to live, you have to start flying. Oh, and medical help is hours away.

Unsurprisingly, Australia hosts several spots on the list. Great white sharks flock to The Right wave, and Cyclops breaks in shallow water, prompting surfer Koby Abberton to call it a "sick joke." The Cape Fear big wave contest hits the break known as Ours at Cape Solander on the southern side of Botany Bay. Surfing Magazine's Michael Ciaramella called the 2016 event "the scariest surf feed I've ever seen." And given what else he's witnessed, that's saying something. Then there's towering Dungeons in Cape Town, which starts to break at 40 feet. The Wedge in Newport Harbor, California, has killed a bunch of people. So has Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, claiming well-known big-wave surfers Mark Foo in 1994 and Sion Milosky in 2011. RELATED: Surfing Star Rescued From Life-Threatening Wipeout The Encyclopedia of Surfing entry on death and surfing has additional sobering details like how most deaths happen after the surfer gets knocked unconscious, either by hitting a board or the ocean floor. A small percentage die in shark attacks. And the bigger the surf, the higher the likelihood of drowning. While you ponder that, here's a taste of big wave surfing in perfect conditions at the ocean breaks Dungeons and Sunset in Cape Town. Even though the surfers look like ants getting sprayed by a hose in slow motion, I can see why they keep tempting fate. Watch the video above. SEE PHOTOS: Top Surfing Destinations for Spectators

style="text-align: left;">Requiring balance, poise and determination, surfing can be a challenging sport that's probably not for everyone. But that doesn't mean that onlookers can't get a vicarious thrill by watching a surfer conquer monster waves from the safety of their beach. Surfing spectacles can draw huge crowds, too. Just take a look at this photo from the Australian Open of Surfing at Manly Beach in Sydney, Australia. As great as Manly Beach might be, however, there are better sight-surfing opportunities to be had elsewhere in the world. In this slideshow, explore some of the best sites in the United States and abroad for being a surfing spectator.



style="text-align: left;">One of the most popular destinations for professional surfers, the Banzai Pipeline along Oahu's North Shore has attracted surfers and spectators in droves. Although anyone can sit along Banzai Beach watching surfers take to their boards, only those with some experience under the belt should attempt to ride these waves. The winter months are the prime season for surfing the Pipeline, which shouldn't deter spectators since the temperatures even in the coldest months tend not to dip below the mid-60s.

style="text-align: left;">If you're in Hawaii anyway to see some surfing, then island hopping is a must to get the most bang for your buck. After stopping by Oahu's North Shore, head over to Maui to check out Pe'ahi, better known as Jaws. Jaws Beach boasts some of the tallest and fastest waves of anywhere in the world. In order to get on top of these waves, surfers need to be towed out. Once there, they will ride waves 25 to 50 feet high, or more. Spectators of all stripes are welcome, but only the most experienced should consider attempting these waves.

style="text-align: left;">The Pipeline and Jaws are probably the most impressive of the many surfing sites available in Hawaii. The state has so many great surfing destinations that we'll leave the rest off to give other places a chance. But there is one more spot in Hawaii that bears its own mention: Honolua Bay. The bay offers not only giant waves to challenge surfers and keep spectators interested. It also offer whale watching for whenever visitors feel like taking a break from surfing. The one major downside to Honolua Bay, however, is a persistent problem of theft from motor vehicles, so try not to bring your valuables with you to the beach.



Hawaii isn't the only place in the United States for spectators to watch surfers take to the waves. Maverick's in California is among the top destinations for big-wave surfers. Like Jaws, only experienced professional surfers with expert towers should attempt to surf here, with waves that can reach over 80 feet high. In fact, just last year big-wave surfer Sion Milosky died from drowning during an attempt at Maverick's. The site may be dangerous for surfers. But when all goes well, a successful ride can be a thrill for onlookers.

The Cortes Bank in California is the site at which Mark Parsons broke the Guinness World Record for the highest wave ever surfed. To win the title, Parsons rode a wave over 70 feet tall. Although dedicated surfers are motivated to make the trip for the multi-story waves, spectators might have a little trouble getting to this relatively remote and somewhat inaccessible location within Los Angeles county. However, due to its reputation, Cortes Bank still manages to draw in the crowds.

style="text-align: left;">If you don't feel like waiting six months to see the peak surfing season at some of the best surfing sites in the United States, then you might want to remind yourself that it's winter in the southern hemisphere. The Superbank along Queenland's Gold Coast draws its fair share of surfers -- during peak season, upwards of 200 can be spotted from the shore -- and crowds of spectators as well. Visitors should, however, be prepared for a long walk back to their cars once they're ready to call it a day, with more than a mile separating the beach from the nearest parking area.



style="text-align: left;">The Margaret River region is home to two of the best surfing destinations in Australia: Yallingup and Prevelly Park. Yallingup is nestled in a tiny village in southwestern Australia and offers different waves for various surfer skill levels, allowing spectators who also happen to be novice surfers to take part. Located some 25 miles south, Prevelly Park offers the kinds of monster waves that only experienced surfers should attempt. With so much surfing packed into the region, the site is ideal for a surfing enthusiast looking for a real off-the-beaten-path adventure.



style="text-align: left;">Surfing in Bali, Indonesia, has attracted visitors ever since it first became popular in the 1970s. For surfers, Bali offers opportunities for all experience levels. Kuta Beach might cater to beginners starting to pick up their form and watch locals show off what they can do. Uluwatu, on the other hand, has massive swells that can produce waves 30 feet high, and is only for the most experienced surfers. Each of these sites has attractions that complement the surfing spectacle for visitors, ranging from sport fishing at Kuta to visiting the cliff-side temple at Uluwatu.
Researchers at Stanford and UC-Davis recently issued a landmark study that has policy makers buzzing. Crunching the numbers on energy and economics, the researchers conclude that -- with existing technology -- the world could be entirely powered by renewable energy within 20 to 40 years.

The study also concludes that, while the technology is there, the political will to make changes may not be. In this edition of Seeker Daily, Laura Ling looks at countries that have already switched to alternative sources for some or all of their energy needs.

Amazingly, the Central American nation of Costa Rica actually ran on 100 percent renewable energy for 300 out of 365 days in 2015. Almost all of the country's infrastructure and utility energy is provided by hydroelectric and geothermal power, although the country still has about two million cars driving around using gas. Significantly, Costa Rica lawamakers approved another billion-dollar geothermal project in 2014, suggesting that the country can sustain the political will to commit to renewable energy.

RELATED: Eye-Catching Iridescent Cloud Pops Up Over Costa Rica

Iceland is another country enjoying great success with renewables. Nearly 100 percent of the country's electricity is now provided by geothermal and hydroelectric plants. In fact, Iceland generates the most clean electricity per person on Earth -- nearly nine time the European Union average. Iceland has taken a refreshingly straightforward approach to alternative energy by piping geothermal heat, via water, directly into 87 percent of homes.

It's estimated that using geothermal heat, instead of oil, has saved roughly eight billion dollars from 1970 to 2000, and lowered the country's carbon emissions by more than one third.

Albania and Paraguay have also converted almost entirely to renewable hydropower. Albania is home to eight major river systems, and Paraguay gets almost 100 percent of its electricity from the Itaipu Dam, nominated as one of the seven wonders of the modern world by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Laura has more details in her report, or click on over to our related coverage on What Countries Are The Most Energy Efficient.

-- Glenn McDonald

Learn More:

Vox: Costa Rica Has Gone 76 Straight Days Using 100% Renewable Electricity

The Guardian: Iceland's Energy Answer Comes Naturally

Stanford News: The World Can Be Powered By Alternative Energy, Using Today's Technology, In 20-40 Years Says Stanford Researcher Mark Z. Jacobson
Press Release

September 21, 2016 Alarmed by six new Zika virus cases in PH

NANCY CALLS FOR COORDINATED ACTION VS ZIKA VIRUS Alarmed by the six new cases of Zika virus in the country, Senator Nancy Binay said an urgent and coordinated action was necessary from Congress, the Department of Health (DOH), the national government, and local government units (LGUs) in order to combat the spread of the disease. "The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the Zika virus outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. We have already recorded six new cases so far this year, must we wait for the virus to spread before we take action?" Binay asked. The DOH announced on Tuesday that six more persons have contracted Zika virus, bringing the number of recorded cases of the virus in the country to nine. Of the nine cases, six were females; six our of nine came from Iloilo, one came from Cebu and one from Laguna. All new cases also had no history of travel to other countries. "Kailangan po nating magtulungan upang maipaalam sa ating mga kababayan na seryoso po ang threat ng Zika virus sa ating bansa. Kailangan po natin silang bigyan ng sapat na kaalaman upang maprotektahan natin sila mula sa sakit na ito," Binay said. Zika virus is primarily transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. In tropical countries, it is commonly spread by the Aedes aegypti, the same mosquito that transmits dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. However, Zika virus can also be transmitted sexually and through blood transfusion. Those infected with the virus may experience mild fever, skin rash, conjunctivitis, muscle and joint pain, malaise, or headaches, and according to WHO, these may last for 2-7 days. The virus is also being blamed for the increase in cases of microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome in countries where Zika has spread. The latest WHO situation report on Zika virus lists the Philippines as a Category 2-country. Category 2 countries have possible endemic transmission or evidence of local mosquito-borne Zika infections in 2016. In Senate Resolution No. 136, Binay stressed that it is "the duty of the State to protect and promote the right to health of the people." "There is an imminent threat of local and cross-border transmission of Zika virus infection in the country that calls for urgent and coordinated action from Congress, the DOH, national government and local government units to adopt an action plan to prevent the spread of Zika virus, enhance early detection and monitoring of Zika virus, and increase awareness of Zika virus through information, education an communication (EIC) campaigns," Binay said.
Press Release

September 21, 2016 De Lima seeks UN Rapporteur's visit Sen. Leila M. de Lima today urged the Duterte administration to send a formal invitation to United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on summary executions Agnes Callamard to look into the phenomenon of extrajudicial killings in the country. De Lima, a staunch human rights advocate, filed Senate Resolution No. 153 urging the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to invite Dr. Callamard to look into the spate of extrajudicial killings and summary executions amid the campaign against illegal drugs. "Unless a third-party investigator comes in, there is reason to believe that we may not be able to ferret out the whole truth behind the killings, and to serve complete justice to the victims and the Filipino people," she said. Based on official figures, as of last Sept. 14, there are 3,173 total number of persons killed since the all-out war on illegal drugs has started last July 1, of whom 1,138 were killed in police operations while 2,035 were victims of extrajudicial or vigilante killings. "The average number of persons killed daily for the past two and a half months is 42.3. By any standard, the statistics are alarming and staggering. And judging from both official and media sources, there is no showing that we will soon experience a downtrend in the figures," she pointed out. The former justice secretary also noted that multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union, have expressed grave concerns over the drug-related killings in the country, urging the government to put a stop to these killings. Even local as well as international media, she continued, have taken special interests in reporting the administration-sponsored "war on drugs" which many believed disregards due process of the law and disregards basic human rights and sanctity of life. De Lima, former chairperson of the Senate justice committee, also pointed out how Senate witness Edgar Matobato, a former member of the notorious Davao Death Squad, has implicated a highest public official in the death of about 1,000 persons in Davao City. "This call for a speedy and impartial investigation is justified by the perception that our local institutions of law enforcement and justice, including domestic mechanisms of accountability of public officials, appear to be either inadequate, compromised or weak," the senator said. Being a signatory to various UN Conventions, De Lima said the Philippine government may pursue an impartial investigation through an independent commission of inquiry to be conducted by the UN Special Rapporteur. Under the UN Human Rights Council's Resolution 26/12, the Special Rapporteur "undertakes visits to examine the situation of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution in the respective country, and to formulate recommendations to the government and other actors on upholding the right to life. "Such on-site visits by the Special Rapporteur can be initiated by an official invitation from a concerned government, such as the Philippines," De Lima added.
Press Release

September 21, 2016 Drilon, DSWD agree to expand beneficiaries of rice subsidy program, give cash instead of rice The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) agreed to a proposal made by Senate President Pro-Tempore Franklin Drilon to include the 1.3 million families who will be removed from the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) next year in its rice subsidy program. "I do not see any valid reason why these 1.3 million near-poor families cannot receive rice allowances, when clearly they would need it?" Drilon asked. At the Senate Committee on Finance's deliberation on the P130 billion budget of the agency on Wednesday, it was revealed that only 3.1 million of the current 4.4 million 4Ps beneficiaries are entitled to the 20 kilos monthly rice allocation next year. There are about 1.3 million families who are not qualified simply because their monthly income is already P500 to P1,000 above the poverty threshold. Upon learning, Drilon then told Social Welfare Secretary Judith Taguiwalo that the rice subsidy program should be extended to these 1.3 million families, "because whether they are poor or near-poor, the fact is they remain poor and are still vulnerable to external and economic shocks which will make them fall back into poverty." "The fact that these families are making gains in escaping poverty means that we should support them even more and make sure they won't regress to being the poorest of the poor," he said. Likewise, the social welfare department also heeded Drilon's advice to convert the amount allotted for the government's rice subsidy program into an outright cash grant, instead of a monthly rice allocation. "It is in the best interest of the beneficiaries and the government that the rice subsidy be provided in the form of cash instead of rice vouchers or actual rice," Drilon said. "If you give them rice or rice voucher, the poor would just sell it to traders at the lowest price," he added. By giving cash instead of actual rice or rice voucher, Drilon said the agency could avoid the huge cost and logistical nightmare that a rice subsidy program might cause. Under the proposed budget for CCT next year, P49.4 billion was allotted to the cash grant and another P23.4 for the rice allowance program.
Press Release

September 21, 2016 Legarda to DSWD: Spend Remaining 4B Funds for Poorest Filipinos Senator Loren Legarda today said that the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) must use the remaining Four Billion Pesos from its 2015 budget for the poorest Filipinos. During the hearing of the Senate Committee on Finance chaired by Legarda, the DSWD said that as of January 2016, unobligated funds of the Department from its 2015 budget was 18.46 Billion Pesos. As of August 31, 2016, they still have a remaining balance worth 4 Billion Pesos. Since the said fund is from the 2015 budget, any excess by the end of the year will revert to the national treasury. "We should spend this money now for the poorest Filipinos who need the help of government for food, medicine and medical expenses, livelihood, and protective services," Legarda said. The Senator noted that under the 10-point Socio-Economic Agenda of President Rodrigo Duterte, the DSWD will directly contribute to three items including Agenda 9, which is the improvement of social protection programs to protect the poor against instability and economic shocks. Legarda said the DSWD should immediately consult with the Commission on Audit (COA) on where it can use or realign the remaining funds, noting that the Department has three more months to spend it. "I am sure the DSWD and COA can agree on where the funds can be used, whether for rice subsidy for the conditional cash transfer (CCT) beneficiaries, for pension of indigent senior citizens, for its supplementary feeding program, or for livelihood programs. These funds were allocated for our people, government should spend it for our people. It is unacceptable for our citizens to know that the government has funds but is unable to use them even if millions of Filipinos are in dire need of social services," said Legarda. Based on the 2016 Second Quarter Social Weather Survey (SWS), 45% or about 10.2 million Filipino families consider themselves poor, 31% or 6.9 million families consider themselves food poor, and 15.2% or an estimated 3.4 million families experienced involuntary hunger in the 2nd quarter of the year. "The DSWD should make sure that its programs are felt on the ground. We should not wait for people to come to us; government should have the initiative and compassion to bring help and services to our people," said Legarda. The Senator also said she would allocate funds under the DSWD budget for the establishment of homes for street children. She asked the DSWD to recommend to the Senate an amount for the establishment and maintenance of at least two houses for street children in Metro Manila--one in North and one in South. "We need to feed, clothe, teach and nurture our children, especially those who have nowhere to go and are out in the streets. We should not hide them when we have visitors from other nations. We should take them out of the streets not because we are ashamed of them, but because we love and care for them," said Legarda.








With the interest level surrounding hyper-converged appliances continuing to rise, it comes as no surprise that big OEM vendors like HPE want to get in on the action.

HPEs all-in-one-box solution is the HC 250, which packs up to four nodes into a single 2U chassis. It comes in two basic flavors with support for both VMware and Microsofts Cloud Platform Systems  Standard.

The HPE Hyper Converged 380 is the newest member of the family and is based on the popular DL 380 Gen9 server. This product starts with a minimum of two physical servers and scales up to as many as sixteen nodes.

With a front-panel storage capacity of up to twenty-four small form factor (SFF) drive slots, its possible to max out the unit at 25.2 TB of storage per appliance with the current software. This will only increase over time.

HPEs secret sauce for both of these systems is in the companys simplified OneView InstantOn (OVIO) deployment tool. This menu-driven question and answer tool takes the majority of the pain out of configuring multiple machines for clustering, networking and storage.

On the storage side, HPE uses its StoreVirtual VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) product for both the HC 250 and HC 380. StoreVirtual VSA takes the place of VSAN for VMware and Storage Spaces on the Microsoft side. Well look at this feature in more detail in a bit.

Hardware Details

With the HPE DL380 used as the basic building block, the HC 380 requires a minimum of eight disk drives plus 10Gb networking added in. A minimum of 128GB of memory is the recommended starting point with a range of options for number of CPU cores.

Our test system consisted of two HP DL380 systems equipped with Intel E5-2620 v3 CPUs and 128 GB of memory. While you can order the system with all 1 GbE networking, HPE recommends using 10 GbE for best performance.

Its worth pointing out here that VMware requires a minimum of three hosts to construct a minimal VSAN cluster. Some deployment scenarios, such as remote office applications, can be configured as a two-node system with an external system (possibly remote) as the witness.

StoreVirtual scales up to a total of 32 hosts should you need that big of a cluster. VSAN 6.2 now scales up to sixty-four hosts, giving it the edge on expandability.

Disk configurations vary depending on your application. HPE recommends implementing one full block consisting of eight drives at a time.

Each DL 380 will support up to three blocks or a total of twenty-four drives. These can be any combination of HDD or SSD drives to include all HDD or all SSD.

All storage is managed by the StoreVirtual Appliance software and is fully integrated with VMware vSphere. The nice thing about using a commodity server like the DL 380 as the building block is the flexibility it brings.

Special Sauce

Setup and configuration is greatly simplified with the OneView InstantOn (OVIO) tool. The foundation of this tool is used for both the HC 250 running Microsofts Cloud Platform System and the HC 380 we tested running VMware vSphere.

Configuring multiple network addresses and individual settings for each node in a large cluster can be tedious and error prone (see Figure 1). HPEs OVIO takes all the information needed through a simple dialog process and then does everything for you.

HPE offers a simulator-only version of the OneView InstantOn tool for instructional purposes. This tool works just like the real tool with the exception of actually installing or modifying any hardware configurations.

Its useful for walking through the various menus to help identify any information required for a successful installation. In fact, its a great way to identify all the IP addresses and system information youll need to complete the process.

Figure 2 shows the summary page listing the configuration details prior to deployment.

Management

Multiple avenues exist for managing the HC 380 system. An overall dashboard as shown in Figure 3 presents a summary of the system with quick links to tasks such as back and restore and software updates.

Other tabs on the left side show Virtual Machines, system Activity and Utilization. The web-based management interface provides quick access to many functions that would typically take a number of clicks in the vCenter.

HP OneView for VMware vCenter version 7.8.2 provides a connection to a number of management tools specific to the management of the HC 380.

Figure 4 shows the menu that presents when you right-click on the cluster. The All HP Management Actions entry provides links to create a Datastore, VM from Template and deploy the HP StoreOnce management console or an additional VSA instance.

All other vSphere actions, including creating, deleting, moving and cloning VMs, function just as you would expect against the VSA-based datastore.

Bottom Line

The HPE HC 380 builds upon the foundation of the venerable DL 380 system to deliver hyper-converged features with simplified installation and management.

HPEs OVIO takes the complexity out of cluster installation and makes it cookie-cutter simple. HPEs StoreVirtual Appliance brings redundant, multi-node storage at a cost below what you would pay for a similar VSAN installation.

Pricing remains in the call for availability category, but the product is listedon their website.

Paul Ferrill, based in Chelsea, Alabama, has been writing about computers and software for almost 20 years. He has programmed in more languages than he cares to count, but now leans toward Visual Basic and C#.

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Photo courtesy of Inyo County Search and Rescue / Photo courtesy of Inyo County Search and Rescue

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A Stanford medical student died after she slipped and fell hundreds of feet while trying to traverse Bear Creek Spire in Inyo National Forest southeast of Yosemite, authorities said Wednesday.

Described as an avid mountaineer and climber, 26-year-old Maria Birukova was a native of Moscow and a fourth-year graduate student at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said Krista Conger, a spokeswoman for the school.

The accident happened Sunday when Birukova, a resident of Menlo Park, lost her footing on the Sierra Nevada mountain, slipping down the steep slope.

Her climbing partner, identified by Stanford as Ian Isaacson, raced 800 to 1,000 feet down the steep chute of Bear Creek Spire  which has a peak of nearly 14,000 feet  but found her deceased at the bottom, authorities said.

Rescue crews attempted to reach Birukova Monday through treacherous, rocky terrain thats partially covered in snow year-round, but high winds grounded a helicopter, said Carma Roper, a spokeswoman for the Inyo County Sheriffs Office.

On Tuesday, the Sheriffs Office, along with Inyo Search and Rescue and the California Highway Patrol, were able to use a helicopter to recover Birukovas body.

Birukova started at Stanford in 2013 after her graduation from Yale University in 2012. Using her biomedical engineering background, her research focused on innovative ways to treat deadly infections caused by antibiotic-resistant strains of viscous clumps of bacteria known as biofilms.

The medical-school community has suffered a tremendous loss, said Lloyd Minor, dean of the School of Medicine. Marias interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of antibiotic-resistant biofilms brought to bear insights from both chemistry and immunology in an attempt to devise new treatments for patients with few other options.

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Her work was a wonderful example of Stanfords focus on translational medicine, he said, and she will be greatly missed, both professionally and personally.

Birukova also worked for the Stanford Healthcare Consulting Group, a nonprofit dedicated to improving patient care. Outside the world of medicine, she was known most for climbing mountains.

It was clear from the moment I met her that climbing was a major part of her life, said P.J. Utz, a Stanford professor of medicine. In fact, she struggled to choose whether to attend Stanford or the University of Utah for her graduate training, because in Utah the mountains are so close.

Birukova is survived by her parents, Konstantin Birukov and Anna Birukova, both faculty members at the University of Chicagos Pritzker School of Medicine. No information regarding memorial services was immediately released.

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @michael_bodley
Several thousand residents in south Vallejo were ordered to stay indoors Tuesday night after a strong gas smell of unknown origins was reported by residents in the area, officials said.

A few people went to a hospital complaining of nausea, Vallejo Police Lt. Herman Robinson reported.
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Analysts expect Google to unveil its latest Android smartphones, a virtual reality headset and an Internet-connected device for the home that will rival the Amazon Echo at an event the company has set for Oct. 4.

Google has divulged few clues to its intentions. But analysts expect to see new phones that will work with Googles latest Android operating system and will support a virtual reality platform called Daydream. The phones may also command a premium price: Some analysts predict that the new devices, under the Pixel brand, will cost $499 to $649, putting them in line with Apples iPhone 7, which starts at $649.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, expects Google to team up with other manufacturers on cheaper smartphones ranging from $299 to $399  priced similarly to the Nexus-branded phones it has produced in the past. (Some analysts expect the Nexus brand to be discontinued, but Moorhead thinks it will remain.)

Google should be aware that Apple has captured much of the higher-end smartphone market and be careful that the Android name isnt associated only with cheaper phones, he said. To me, they should charge as high a price as they can, without getting piggish on profits.

Google spokeswoman Iska Saric declined to provide specifics on the new products. Look forward to seeing you on October 4th where all of your questions will be answered, she wrote in an email.

Google may also discuss more details about its virtual reality headset and controller that will work with smartphones and the Daydream platform. Google didnt reveal the price of for the headset when it introduced it in May. The Daydream platform could give Google an edge on Apple in the fast-emerging VR field, because the iPhone 7 has not been marketed for high-quality VR in the same way.

Apps for Daydream will be crucial to its success, said Ramon Llamas, an IDC research manager.

If you are going to have just a handful of applications, this is going to be an expensive toy that only a few people will get their hands on, he said.

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In addition to the phones, Google is expected to reveal prices and a release date for Google Home, its Internet-connected device similar to the Amazon Echo. Users can speak to the device, which is roughly the size of a coffee cup, and ask it questions on topics like the weather, schedule appointments or check on deliveries. Google announced Google Home at its developer conference in May.

Moorhead said it is crucial for Google to get the device into stores for the holiday shopping season. Otherwise, they will lose even more momentum to Amazon, he said.

Google is far better known for its software like Gmail and search, not its hardware. But the bonanza of new products is part of the companys plan to increase the number of users and time spent on its own products and services, said Ali Mogharabi, an equity analyst at Morningstar Inc.

The more users that you have, the more businesses and advertisers that you can attract, he said.
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Making shooing gestures with his hands, Ahti Heinla, an engineer who helped start Skype, stood on Balboa Street in San Francisco. Can you come out of the way for the robots? he said to an assembled scrum of journalists. Theyre programmed to not crash into people.

The crowd parted, and two small six-wheeled robots trundled past them at a steady 4 mph, lights flickering around their edges and on a protruding antenna. They glided down the Richmond Districts broad sidewalks, occasionally pausing and zigzagging when they encountered obstacles.

They pulled up outside a house on 20th Avenue. As the resident, Julie OKeefe, came outside, one robots lid popped open revealing a box of pastries.

I got a delivery from a little roaming cooler, it looks like, she said delightedly.

It was a test of robot couriers from Starship Technologies, an Estonian company thats among several contenders seeking to crack the last-mile challenge  getting goods from warehouses or retail storefronts to homes. While Amazon is testing deliveries with flying drones, Starship is one of many upstarts trying a more earthbound approach. Heinla, its CEO, started the company with Skype co-founder Janus Friis after entering a NASA contest to build robots to collect rock samples on Mars and the moon.

We didnt win, but that team became the engineering team for Starship, Heinla said.

Gabrielle Lurie / Special to The Chronicle 2016

Starships friendly sidewalk robots are designed to deliver parcels, groceries and other goods within a 2-mile radius, the company said, operating as a local on-demand service, rather than competing with the likes of FedEx and UPS.

While they drive  or roll  autonomously using nine cameras, GPS, sophisticated software and Starshipss own maps, which are accurate to the nearest inch, they are monitored by humans in a remote location who can take over control if need be.

Starship plans to have 100 robots per human operator and to rent them out to other businesses on demand. To start, each delivery might cost a few dollars, Heinla said, but eventually the cost could be pennies per delivery.

Starship asked San Francisco for permission to do the test. After a few days of pondering, the Department of Public Works decided that a temporary occupancy permit ($66 per side of a block) would be just the ticket.

Gabrielle Lurie/Special to The Chronicle

Thats not a citywide solution, so Starship is talking to San Francisco, among many other cities, about passing laws to enable its brood to hit the streets. Washington this year became the first U.S. city to legalize personal delivery devices powered by electric motors on its sidewalks. That will enable Starship to do more extended tests of its R2-D2-like brood there later this year.

Other companies working on delivery robots include San Joses Fetch Robotics, which has $23 million in funding; San Franciscos Marble, which is still in stealth mode; South San Franciscos Dispatch Robotics, doing testing on college campuses; and Robby Technologies, which recently graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator and soon will begin a pilot program with Instacart. At least three Chinese companies, including e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com, are also developing robotic couriers.

Starship is testing the robots in Europe with commercial partners like Londons Just Eat and Pronto food-delivery companies; the Swiss Post; and Germanys Hermes delivery service. This month it partnered with Mercedes-Benz to develop and test Robovan, which will use the carmakers Sprinter vans as mother ships for eight delivery robots.

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The European test robots have logged some 8,000 miles and encountered more than a million pedestrians. We were worried people would be afraid and would call the police, but most people dont give them a second look, Heinla said.

OKeefe was selected randomly by a company rep knocking on doors to ask for volunteers. She was the first person he asked and was tickled to have such futuristic technology come to the door of the house shes lived in since her birth 67 years ago.

She and her friend Ann Green watched wistfully as one of the robots whizzed away.

Goodbye, R2-D2, Green called after it. What would our grandparents say? she added, shaking her head.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., minced no words in demanding that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf step down during a congressional hearing Tuesday to examine revelations of fraud at the San Francisco bank. This is about accountability, she stormed, while Stumpf looked on impassively. You should resign.

In truth, though, the populist Democrat owes Stumpf a thank-you note. Warren, a former law professor at Harvard, has long argued that the United States should break up big banks. Stumpf just provided Exhibit A for her case.

Wells Fargo just screwed the entire industry, said Richard Bove, an analyst with Rafferty Capital Markets, who recently wrote a book on why the United States needs big banks.

The San Francisco bank recently agreed to pay federal regulators and the city and county of Los Angeles $185 million after admitting that employees created millions of bank and credit card accounts for customers without their knowledge or consent. The company said it fired 5,300 employees, mostly lower-level workers, who presumably opened the fake accounts to meet Wells Fargos sales targets.

Critics have pointed to Wells Fargos sales-hungry culture as the primary culprit behind the scandal. But theres a larger issue here. Since the financial crisis that precipitated the Great Recession nearly a decade ago, a growing chorus of politicians, activists and academics have called for the government to break up big banks. Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt., made such an action a central part of his surprisingly strong campaign for president.

Heres the main argument for breaking up the banks: Financial institutions like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs have grown so big and powerful that the U.S. economy would crumble should any one of them fail.

For the record, I dont agree with the approach. No one has yet come up with a credible plan on how to force the banks to get smaller without damaging investor confidence and hurting the broader economy. And only Wells Fargo had the size and financial strength to absorb Wachovia when the bank faltered during the height of the financial crisis.

Bove also says that consumers, even Millennials, prefer big banks because they can offer a range of products and services that people want, a belief shared by Stumpf and his peers.

Susan Walsh/Associated Press

But scale works two ways, and Stumpf is trying to take advantage of both. During the Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday, Stumpf said that he takes full responsibility for the scandal.

At the same time, he said that the employees who participated in the scheme to create the fake accounts represented about 1 percent of Wells Fargos total workforce of 265,000.

Im not scapegoating those employees, but thats not our culture, Stumpf said at the hearing. Theres nothing we did to encourage that behavior.

And even though those employees opened up to 2 million bogus accounts, Stumpf said the company didnt report the figure to the Securities and Exchange Commission because the information was not financially material to investors.

Heres the problem with Stumpfs argument: He celebrates the banks size when the company generates revenue and profit. But he also says that bad things happen in such a large organization, and thus the company cant effectively police itself.

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Isnt that a great reason to break up the banks?

Were not talking about systemic risk to the entire economy, but rather consumer protection, said Peter Conti-Brown, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School. Its cold comfort to the many consumers who were victims of the fraud when the CEO says, Were actually much bigger than you think.

The number of employees behind the scandal may be relatively small, but the culture they represent can be too difficult for executives to manage in an enterprise that big, he said. The culture becomes so massive that on one end of the stick, you have branch employees who need to hit sales targets. And at the other end of the stick, you have a CEO talking at conferences and in op-eds about how much they value ethics.

In essence, Stumpf always has a convenient way to defend Wells Fargo when scandals erupt. Unless something truly catastrophic happens, Wells Fargo can always claim that any fraud or malfeasance represents only a small percentage of the entire bank.

Then again, most companies didnt generate $23 billion in profit last year alone. By that measure, Wells Fargo cant credibly claim that the $185 million in fines and penalties represents a whole lot of money.

In any case, the scandal will not go away anytime soon, noted Bove. Wells Fargo, he said, is in trouble.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee
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Fairfield police have launched a homicide investigation after a man was found dead in a patch of grass in the city, authorities said Tuesday.

Officers were called out to the 1700 block of West Texas Street about 4:45 p.m. on Monday to investigate reports of a man who was not breathing, police said.
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A man wanted in connection with the kidnapping attempt of a 23-year-old woman in San Leandro two months ago was arrested in another state early last week after police said he fled California and tried to start a new life after the attack.

The mans name was not released but he is a 43-year-old Orange County resident, said Lt. Robert McManus, a San Leandro police spokesman. He was arrested by U.S. Marshalls at an undisclosed location on suspicion of kidnapping, carjacking and assault with a deadly weapon.

Authorities withheld several details on the case  including the exact day and the state where he was arrested  out of concern the information would compromise the investigation, McManus said.

The abduction attempt, which was foiled by a Good Samaritan, began 7:45 a.m. July 28 on the 14700 block of Washington Avenue. The victim was walking to work when the assailant approached her from between two parked cars and sprayed her in the face with pepper spray, police said.

He began dragging the woman to a silver car while she was temporarily blinded when a man driving by came upon the attack and intervened.

The passerby began struggling with the attacker, who also sprayed him in the face with pepper spray. Then, the attacker hopped into the passerbys car and drove it a short distance because it was blocking his getaway car.

He got out, then fled in his silver four-door Nissan Sentra, authorities said.

After news reports on the kidnapping attempt re-aired in August, an East Bay business owner called police to report a vehicle matching the description of the getaway car was abandoned near Oakland International Airport off of Hegenberger Road, McManus said.

Police obtained an arrest warrant for the suspect less than two weeks ago and a search warrant was executed on his Orange County home last week, where police found physical evidence tying him to the crime, McManus said.

Members of the mans family live in the state where he was staying. Police also served a search warrant at his out-of-state home and found additional evidence linking him to the kidnapping attempt, police said.

Investigators believe the man drove his car to the airport hours after the attack and took a flight out of state. He was several states away when authorities tracked him down last week, McManus said.

McManus said the man was probably trying to assume a new life, as it appeared he changed his residence to an out-of-state address and might have been applying for jobs.

The would-be abductor had been convicted of a violent crime, although police would not specify the nature of his crime history or whether he was on a sex offender registry. The suspect had been discharged off of parole 10 days before the attack, McManus said.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Police remained baffled as to why the Orange County resident drove hundreds of miles north to attack a stranger in San Leandro. It did not appear he had any connections in the area, authorities said.

We have no real reason why this man would come up to the East Bay, McManus said.

Two women  one from San Leandro and another from a neighboring city  told police after the attack a man matching the suspect description tried contacting them while driving the same car within a week of the kidnapping attempt, McManus said.

The suspect was awaiting extradition to Alameda County, which officials said would occur in the next few weeks. His bail was set at $595,000.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
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Storks has some telltale signs of a bad animated movie  the kind of film that doesnt aspire to be anything more than a 90-minute babysitter.

The action scenes are frenetic, barely giving audiences a chance to think before the next chase or explosion or dance-party musical interlude. The editing happens at a pace normally reserved for commercials for highly caffeinated beverages. Given the choice between a gag or narrative flow, the filmmakers almost always choose the gag.

But there is unexpected heart in the new film by Warner Animation Group, and an offbeat comic sensibility that justifies the chaos onscreen. Storks suggests that its close cousin The Lego Movie wasnt an isolated incident, and that the new Warner Bros. animation development team has a plan to produce quality movies for years to come.

Storks features live-action comedy director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors), joining forces with director Doug Sweetland and producer Brad Lewis, two Pixar veterans. (Lewis trivia: He has in recent years served as a San Carlos city councilman and mayor.) They collectively seem to have fostered a safe space for comic disruption where no idea is too weird and no joke is too random to make the final cut.

Explained in a few sentences, the plot sounds like an unmanageable mess. Storks have stopped delivering babies, and now handle packages for an Amazon-like monolith. Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg), must fire the one human on staff (Katie Crown) and also deliver one last stork-created baby to its home. And thats only about 8 percent of a short-attention-span story that also includes a wolf pack, human family drama, corporate scheming and a home makeover.

But theres a method to this madness, as the comedy scenes keep connecting.

While Pixar films have a live-action sensibility, Storks goes in a different direction, embracing animations ability to break all rules connected to time and space. And like Phil Lord and Christopher Millers stellar The Lego Movie, the filmmakers work with the confidence that if a joke fails, the one that follows a few seconds later will redeem the scene.

Stoller and Sweetland add something new to the martial-arts genre, with an engaging fight scene where the combatants must battle without waking a baby. The aforementioned wolves have the ability to collectively turn their pack into vehicles, an idea that seems dumb when you write it down, but builds into comic inspiration onscreen.

And hidden in the shadows, much like the surprise live-action Will Ferrell scene in The Lego Movie, are gut punches of emotional resonance. The human family waiting for the baby, a husband-and-wife real estate pairing (Ty Burrell and Jennifer Aniston), is constantly distracted from the attention-starved son and must learn to reconnect.

Storks is too messy, perhaps one more rewrite and three more edits away from an even better movie. (Or maybe there was one rewrite too many.) But like the greater storytellers in animation history, the creators seem to be entertaining themselves, not checking boxes to satisfy corporate decision makers.

Whoever is running Warner Animation Group appears to be allowing the lunatics to run the asylum. And that is a wonderful thing.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicles pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub

Storks

Animated comedy. Starring the voices of Andy Samberg, Katie Crown, Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell. Directed by Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland . (PG. 90 minutes.)

To see a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZENmkJk9fBM
It was a warm reception during the Cold War.

The Chronicles front page from Sept. 21, 1959, covers Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchevs visit to San Francisco.

Khrushchev came, saw and conquered Nob Hill last night, welcomed by a cheering and almost unanimously friendly crowd which police estimated at 10,000, the story read. He was so obviously happy over his warm welcome here that he thrice eluded his anxious security guards to return the crowds greetings.

Earlier in his American trip, Khrushchevs mood was much darker. In Los Angeles he threatened to cut short his stay and return to Moscow. He said: Our rockets are on the assembly lines already. Our rockets are on the launching pads. It is a question of war or peace between our countries.

A few hours later and nearly 400 miles north, Khrushchevs tone was much cheerier. He stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel and seemed surprised and excited by the welcome.

The huge crowd gave him what was almost an ovation as the Cadillac limousine rolled into the Marks courtyard, The Chronicles story read. Instead of moving on into the lobby after he was met by the hotels manager, George D. Smith, Premier Khrushchev turned abruptly and strode over toward the Mason Street edge of the court.

He waved his clasped hands like a champion boxer, grinning widely.

Knowledge from Soviet Russia: During his U.S. visit, Khrushchev was asked about the Hollywood movie Can Can, which featured women dancing provocatively (for the time) in skirts. Said the Soviet leader: A man with normal morals cannot be interested by such dances. A womans face is always more interesting than her backside.

See more front pages: Go to SFChronicle.com/covers to search a database of hundreds of Chronicle Covers articles that showcase the newspapers history.

More from the Archive The Vault Home of the San Francisco Chronicle's archive and more than 150 years of journalism covering the Bay Area and beyond.

Chronicle Covers highlights one classic Chronicle newspaper page from our archive for 366 days. Library director Bill Van Niekerken and producers Kimberly Chua, Michelle Devera and Jillian Sullivan contributed to the project. Tim O'Rourke is the executive producer of SFChronicle.com. Email: torourke@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TimothyORourke

(Click to enlarge)




Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle 2016

A case involving a sexually exploited teenager that has engulfed multiple Bay Area police departments is heading to court. An Oakland police sergeant and a former Livermore police officer were charged by the Alameda County district attorneys office on Friday. On Monday, the Alameda office charged three more officers  two from Oakland and a former deputy sheriff from Contra Costa County  with felonies. All three are accused of engaging in sexual acts with the woman, who was a minor at the time of some of the acts.

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy OMalley said she will file charges against seven officers from three different departments, so two Oakland police officers should be ch arged very soon.
In 2006, I was part of a project under then-Mayor Gavin Newsom that surveyed the homeless individuals on San Francisco streets. We asked: What caused you to become homeless? Domestic violence was second only to couldnt pay rent.

Today, domestic violence remains a leading cause of homelessness  and it persists even after victims flee their dangerous homes. That is why I favor instead the  Housing Not Tents  policy proposed by Supervisor Mark Farrell on the ballot as Proposition Q .

Because you cant lock the door of your sidewalk tent to protect yourself, the tent cities that are cropping up all over the city have become a haven for domestic violence and sexual assault. For people like me who work in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault, its no secret that the encampments are increasingly dangerous.

Near my workplace in the Mission, the sidewalk is overrun with tents. I have personally witnessed many acts of domestic violence there. Intimate partner violence knows no bounds. I have seen fighting between same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples. My staff has seen me go out on the fire escape above Plum Alley to break up fights between homeless couples.

In addition to seeing physical violence and verbal abuse, I have witnessed property violence, where one partner throws the belongings of the other out onto the street.

The situation is out of hand. The San Francisco Police Department reports 13 rapes in tent encampments since January 2015. Seven rapes took place in the first six months of 2016 alone. My organization, La Casa de Las Madres , has experienced an uptick in hotline calls from officers responding to domestic violence and sexual assaults in the tent cities. We believe dozens more incidents have gone unreported.

Jeff Kositsky, the director of the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, reports that the level of crime and sexual assaults in the tents is horrifying, and we agree.

Right under our noses, homeless women and men are being exploited and abused. It is our responsibility to do better by them.

Some in City Hall are seeking to prolong the existence of the tent cities by installing electric power and running water. We fear this would create a permanent sanctuary for those who would perpetrate the growing epidemic of sexual assault and other violence that is occurring within the tents and among this population.

Prop. Q seeks to remove the tents and place homeless people in housing coupled with services. Prop. Q already has won support from a broad coalition including merchants and business owners, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, police officers and firefighters.

Prop. Q will require 24 hours notice before tents are removed. There must be a specific shelter or housing opportunity available, and an individuals personal property must be stored for up to 90 days.

The opponents of Prop. Q are arguing that it is not compassionate to remove people from the tent encampments. We believe it is not compassionate to allow women to remain in an unsafe environment where rape and other forms of violence are on the rise.

True compassion is finding safer alternatives and supporting services to help homeless people start anew. True compassion is taking a stand against rape and violence against women.

Housing Not Tents is not a panacea, but it is a step in the right direction. Tent cities are not a safe place for anyone  let alone vulnerable women  to live. Nobody should have to live in fear. Period.

Prop. Q will make our city safer. It will move at-risk people into the housing and services that they need.

Kathy Black is the executive director of La Casa de las Madres, San Franciscos oldest organization that responds to calls for help from domestic violence victims.
A Western Addition community activist has filed an ethics complaint against Dean Preston, a candidate for District Five supervisor running against incumbent London Breed.

Rico Hamilton, president of the New Community Leadership Foundation, which helps at-risk people living in poor and violent neighborhoods, said Preston put Hamiltons photo on two campaign flyers after Preston was denied permission twice by the foundation. The photo also appears on Prestons website.

The photo was taken at an event to protest the eviction of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church from the West Bay Conference Center on Fillmore Street. It shows Preston talking with Hamilton and a board member of the New Community Leadership Foundation.

The campaign flyer doesnt identify Hamilton or the board member by name, but Hamilton said people in the Western Addition know them by face.

A lot of community members know us, especially in the African American community, Hamilton said. It really makes it come off as if we are endorsing and sponsoring him, and thats just not the case at all.

He said it would be improper for the foundations members to appear on any candidates campaign literature. We cant endorse any of the candidates, especially as a nonprofit, Hamilton said.

Preston said he wasnt aware of the ethics complaint. But, he added, We used a candid news photo of a protest where I was helping people who faced eviction. The piece in no way implies that anyone in the photo is endorsing my campaign for supervisor.

The city Ethics Commission has not weighed in on the complaint, which was filed last week.

 Emily Green

Big money, small lead: Polls show the presidential race is tightening, but its not because the Hillary Clinton forces havent outspent the Donald Trump crew on TV ads. The pro-Clintonites have outspent the Trumpers 5-to-1 so far, according to data from Advertising Analytics.

Clintons campaign has spent $96.4 million so far in advertising compared with $17.3 million for Trump, according to NBC, which partners with Advertising Analytics. Combined with spending by super PACs and other outside groups the pro-Clinton side has outspent the pro-Trump side by $156.6 million to $33.6 million.

Clinton has a one-point advantage, according to the latest RealClearPolitics.com amalgamation of the latest polls. On Aug. 26, she had a six-point advantage. The number crunchers at Fivethirtyeight.com now predict Clinton has a 58 percent chance of winning.

 Joe Garofoli

No family wing: The 83-year-old father of Sacramento-area Rep. Ami Bera may be going to prison for money laundering, but the Elk Grove Democrat wont have a cell beside him.

The U.S. attorneys office has closed the case, saying that no other charges will be sought in connection with Babulal Beras successful effort to funnel at least $260,000 in illegal campaign contributions to his sons campaign for the Seventh Congressional District.

The elder Bera, a La Palma (Orange County) resident, pleaded guilty in May to reimbursing people for their contributions to his son. He was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.

Still, Im not going to prison, but my dad is, doesnt rank as one of the all-time campaign slogans, especially in a relatively conservative district with a long history of electing Republicans.

Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones, Beras GOP opponent, finished second in the June primary but will be using the money-laundering scheme in his effort to deny the Democratic physician a third term.

Bera was not exonerated or cleared, the statement simply says there will be no more charges filed, the Jones campaign said. That Beras elderly immigrant father master-minded a very sophisticated, quarter-of-a-million-dollar political money laundering scheme is beyond rational belief.

As it was two years ago  and will be for as long as a Democrat holds it  Beras congressional seat is one of the Republicans top targets in California.

 John Wildermuth

Email: egreen@sfchronicle.com, jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com, jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @emilytgreen, @joegarofoli, @jfwildermuth
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Attorney General Kamala Harris is on a glide path into Californias first open Senate seat in a generation, lapping fellow Democrat Rep. Loretta Sanchez by 22 percentage points, according to a Field/IGS Poll released Wednesday.

Harris has not so much risen in the polls as Sanchez, a 20-year veteran of Congress representing Orange County, has dropped, Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said.

Its clear that Sanchez hasnt made any inroads, DiCamillo said. If anything, she has less support now than she did before the primary.

Harris support has stayed fairly steady since last spring at 42 percent of likely voters, while Sanchez has slipped to 20 percent from 24 percent in July and 26 percent in late May.

The ease with which Harris is sailing toward victory  and the general somnolence of the Senate campaign  has surprised political experts, who expected a bigger fight for one of the top political prizes in California.

The Senate seat vacated by retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, is the first to open in California since Boxer and fellow Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein won a pair of Senate victories in 1992.

The open Senate seat is really one of the states three jewels, along with the governorship and the other Senate seat held by Feinstein, said San Jose State University political scientist Larry Gerston. He blamed the lack of competition on the states top-two primary system that leaves voters in deep-blue California with a choice of two Democrats.

For years, ambitious Democrats have been clamoring for a chance to move up a political ladder whose top rungs have been blocked by aging party leaders. When Boxer announced her retirement two years ago, she said she acted early to allow potential candidates time to prepare for what was expected to be an expensive and hard-fought race.

But when Gavin Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor and now lieutenant governor who has his eye on the governorship, bowed out and former San Francisco district attorney Harris quickly stepped in, the field cleared, leaving the little-known Sanchez as Harris only real challenger.

Gerston said he is astonished, not by Harris 22-point lead, but by Sanchezs poor campaign performance.

Sanchez had three big assets going into the race, Gerston said: her base in voter-rich Southern California, which has been locked out of the states top offices by Bay Area veterans Boxer, Feinstein and Gov. Jerry Brown; her Latino connection; and her center-right politics that gave her the opportunity to get Republican votes, which could go nowhere else.

Harris easily snatched the top spot in the June primary with 39.9 percent of the vote, while Sanchez came in second with 18.9 percent, in a field crowded with several Republicans, to earn her shot at Harris in November.

Sanchez has tried to woo Republicans by tacking right on issues such as terrorism and water policy.

The problem, DiCamillo said, is that most Republicans are not backing her. Theyre saying theyre not going to vote, mainly because there is no Republican in the race.

Sanchez has potential to tap GOP voters if she can get them to think more positively of her, DiCamillo said. But her approval rating among Republicans is running at a negative 3-to-1, he said, so, If thats the strategy, shes got a long way to go.

Harris leads among nearly every other subgroup of likely voters, the poll found, whether categorized by age, gender, education or geographic region.

Even among Latinos, Sanchez is just holding even with Harris, the poll found, while Harris is leading Sanchez in Southern California. The poll found that more than a quarter of likely voters remain undecided.

Sanchez has lacked the money to run TV ads, the main way politicians court voters in sprawling California. Harris has not had to counter with her own, leaving the airwaves all but silent.

The online survey of 1,426 likely voters was conducted jointly from Sept. 7-13 by the Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. The poll did not supply a margin of error. Opt-in polls such as the online survey do not lend themselves to the calculation of sampling error as easily as traditional telephone surveys, DiCamillo said.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead
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Forget those downtown towers clambering toward the heavens. The biggest change to San Franciscos landscape is taking place 5 miles away  easy to miss unless you know where to look.

Residential landings line new hillside roads. A neighborhood green spills down toward the bay. Balconies with chairs and potted plants look out at concrete being poured and walls being framed. One residential block is adorned with a four-story vegetated wall.

The setting is the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where the first batch of 208 condominiums and apartments forms the figurative beachhead for what eventually will be a 437-acre extension of the Bayview neighborhood. Whats gone up so far has promising elements, including the most inviting park the city has seen in years. Theres also real promise downhill, where one of Englands leading architects is rethinking how the huge project should meet the bay.

That figure is David Adjaye, in the news this month as the designer of the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens Saturday on the National Mall across from the Washington Monument. The Hunters Point development would be his first work in the United States west of Colorado, and his first planning effort in the Americas.

As for whats being marketed as San Francisco Shipyard, its a fast-changing element in a part of the Bayview that outsiders rarely see, except when they visit the artist studios in old naval buildings below the hillside .

Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The Chronicle

Construction of the first phase began in 2014 and eventually will hold roughly 800 housing units spread across 75 ridgeline acres, including 20 acres of parks. So far, five residential complexes have been completed or are near completion, designed by four architectural firms. Three more are being erected along an oval park that includes a playgrou nd.

This is a construction zone, make no mistake. Its also an intriguing work in process.

Inevitably, blocks of housing blur together when theyre built at roughly the same time and at roughly the same scale. Even so, theres more variety here than you find in other newer settings, like Mission Bay.

I particularly like Merchant, where the boxy modern wings along Friedell Street frame a residential courtyard open to the street with a four-story vegetated wall at the back, vines slowly snaking up metal netting against a metallic wall. Architect Ian Birchall and his firm have managed to pull off a four-story condo project that looks like a blend between blue-collar SoMa and mid-century Daly City  and in a good way .

On the next block, David Baker Architects adds visual pop to the low-slung scene at Pacific Point Apartments, 60 units of affordable housing, where the centerpiece is a rounded six-story shaft of perforated Cor-Ten steel.

Topography shakes things up as well. Rooflines jog along the slopes. Hillside stairways between the streets are not just shortcuts, but modest hints of Russian Hill or Bernal Heights.

Also, the master plan for the shipyard by the planning firm IBI weaves in neighborhood parks of varying size. All of them so far have been designed by the landscape architecture firm CMG, including the 2-acre Hillpoint Park that includes a large sloping lawn alongside a constructed overlook that offers cliff-like views of the bay.

Theres nothing fancy about the details within the park, such as the angled slabs of concrete that serve as benches or the cottonwood trees along the lawn. But the restraint is welcome, because it leaves room for something that too many contemporary parks lack  a sense of spacious possibility, where youre part of something larger and at liberty to find your own niche.

The sense of possibility is amped up by Adjayes participation in what might come next.

Born in Tanzania to a Ghanaian diplomat, Adjaye opened his office in London in 1994. Hes best known for understated but potent small buildings that often have a civic function, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and much-praised libraries in London and Washington.

KEVIN GEIL/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

The socially charged museum on the Washington mall  clad in angled panels of patterned bronze and inspired by West African crowns  is a high-profile departure. So is the scale of his work on the former shipyards acres along the water, most of it on artificial fill as the shipyard expanded between the 1870s and World War II.

Weve just started, but we want people to see how were forming the direction, Adjaye told a small group last week at a City Club talk organized by FivePoint. Its not all worked out yet, so dont ask me technical details.

The approved plan maps out the bay-side acreage in ways that emphasize residential blocks on one side of the central inlet (a former drydock) and an urban innovation district on the other. Except for the statuesque crane at the end of the largest pier  the marketing symbol for the overall project  nearly all the structures from before 1950 would be razed.

Adjayes preference is the opposite.

My initial thoughts were, Lets just hold onto everything and inhabit it once again, he said after describing the largely abandoned terrain as something that looks ordinary but is magical. ... Its a site where labor was performed to help the nation.

The initial concept by Adjaye adds at least one major plaza amid new buildings and gives a twist to the orderly layout of the current plan. Thered be pedestrian bridges across the filled drydock and a cultural building to tell the stories of this diverse but long-neglected corner of the city.

Nothing has been filed yet with the city. Any changes must fit within the confines of the approved plans height limits, and a far-sighted response to the threat posed by sea-level rise will be crucial.

Theres also a political angle, no surprise. Proposition O on Novembers ballot would exempt the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point from current citywide limits on the amounts of office space that can be built on an annual basis. If it passes, the developer is likely to focus on trying to attract large tech tenants.

But if the specifics of Adjayes planning vision are still vague, the basics are strong. He wants to add an urban spark  fill in the blanks but not wipe the slate clean.

Today, from CMGs soft green park, you look straight down on the hollowed-out remnants of the shipyard that is Adjayes focus. Its a remarkable setting and a provocative contrast. If San Francisco is lucky, the two sides of the shipyard together might someday form a complex, truly compelling addition to the citys ever-richer fabric.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicles urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron
The police chief of Berkeley resigned Wednesday after facing criticism in recent months from rank-and-file officers over his leadership style and judgment.

Chief Michael Meehans resignation was accepted by City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley after he led the department for six years, said Sgt. Andrew Frankel, a Berkeley Police Department spokesman.

Capt. Andrew Greenwood, a 31-year veteran of the department, will take over as acting chief.

I am extremely confident that acting Chief Greenwood and the men and women of the Police Department will move the department forward and continue providing excellent service to the Berkeley community, Williams-Ridley wrote in a memo to Berkeley officials Wednesday.

Prior to serving as police chief, Meehan was a captain in the Seattle Police Department, where he had worked for 23 years.

Meehan did not immediately explain why he was quitting.

An internal survey obtained by the news site Berkeleyside showed that officers reported low morale and poor communication between Meehan and the ranks.

The chief also weathered criticism for two separate incidents in 2012. In a case that critics deemed preferential treatment, he sent a team of officers, himself included, to track down his sons stolen iPhone. In another incident, he sent a sergeant to a news reporters home after midnight to demand changes to a story about a slaying in the Berkeley hills.

The pair of controversies miffed the rank and file, an attorney for the police union said at the time.

Chief Meehan's indiscretions, which expose a pattern of serious flaws in judgment, have unfortunately caused the national media to focus on the city of Berkeley as the example of poor police decision making, Rocky Lucia, an attorney representing the Berkeley Police Association, said in 2012. The reputation of the Police Department has seriously suffered since Chief Meehan's arrival.

More recently, his department was in the spotlight in 2013 for the in-custody death of a transgender woman  whose demise was ruled a drug overdose by the county coroner  and in December 2014 for its handling of antipolice demonstrations in the city.

In her Wednesday memo, Williams-Ridley said she accepted Meehans resignation and thanked him for his service, highlighting the departments fair and impartial policing efforts, and crisis-intervention training to help those experiencing psychiatric troubles.

Berkeley City Councilman Kriss Worthington called Meehan a reformer and innovator of the department who faced pushback from the rank and file for his efforts.

Chief Meehan instituted dramatic and significant reforms, and they were not universally appreciated in the Police Department, Worthington said. But in the broader Berkeley community, there was great appreciation. ... Its a giant loss.

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates also highlighted Meehans work to reduce racial profiling  including unintentional bias  among police officers on the force.

We have a history of police chiefs and the police force not getting along, Bates said. It was really internal politics.

The friction between Meehan and the rank and file likely made it challenging for Meehans ideas to be pushed through, Bates said.

Maybe thats just our shelf life for a chief  five or six years, Bates said.

Meehans resignation comes after the sudden departures of chiefs on other Bay Area police forces this year.

Greg Suhr resigned as head of the San Francisco Department in May after a Bayview sergeant fatally shot an unarmed woman. A month later, Sean Whent resigned as Oaklands chief amid a broad sexual misconduct scandal.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
John E. Hirten, who had a long career in urban and transportation planning and was the first executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, known more commonly as SPUR, died at his San Francisco home on Sunday. Mr. Hirten, who had suffered from Alzheimers disease, was 90.

He had a major role in transforming SPUR from what The Chronicle called a moribund organization into a vigorous and outspoken agency for citizen participation and education in planning. On Mr. Hirtens watch, SPUR had major roles in creating the Bay Conservation and Development Commission; in transferring the state-owned Port of San Francisco to city control; and in local transit projects, including BART and the Market Street subway.
Geekologie has shut down.

Thank you to everybody.

Now go be happy.
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There's a reason Brews on the Bay is a favorite festival of San Francisco's craft brewers. It's not the sunny, mid-September weather, or the breezy Bay vista (although those things certainly must help)  rather, it's the company of more than two dozen local breweries pouring their coolest, freshest beers. Oh, and the boat. They definitely like the boat.

Atop and around the U.S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien last Saturday, the city's most creative craft breweries brought along more than 70 beers to pour for attendees gathering by the docks at Pier 45. The event, a fundraiser for both the vintage merchant marine ship as well as the San Francisco Brewers Guild, is a more relaxed counterpart to the massive, frenzied San Francisco Beer Week Opening Gala that takes place in early February every year.

For Almanac Beer Company, which is due to open its Mission District taproom soon, the festival is fun for being out of the ordinary. "It's definitely interesting," says Andrew Negri, a sales rep for the company. "Being able to do anything on a boat is always entertaining."

With sailboats whizzing by and sunny skies overhead, the World War II ship is, as SF Brewers Guild Executive Director Joanne Marino says, "a venue unlike any in the world."

But besides the novel home of the event, the other hint that this beer fest is something special lies in what's being poured. Every beer on tap was remarkably fresh, and many of those styles offered were brand new for the breweries presenting them.

"Over 50 percent of the [beer] list were either new releases or were just put out recently, or special releases like cask beers," says Marino. "We had a number of wet-hopped beers, dry-hopped beers, a lot of fruit beers, so everybody is really understanding that they want to delight people's palates and make it a special occasion."

And as happens when there are a lot of creative minds making great things, Marino says crafters are beginning to feel the heat of rivalry.

"I'm really blown away by everyone upping their game, not just for this event but overall," she notes. "All of our brewers know it's getting more competitive out there; they want to bring their experience."

However, for Brewers Guild newcomers Ferment Drink Repeat (also stylized as FDR), the competition is friendly. Noting that brewers often help each other out with production tasks, FDR co-founder Shae Inglin says that the Brewers Guild is "really super tight" and a helpful community.

Borrowing a word from a college friend, she says it's "like a 'cooper-tition,'" or, a cooperative competition, and adds, "We're less in competition with each other than with big beer."

And luckily for us tasters, the crowds got to enjoy the fruits of light-hearted contention. Attendee Mike Arani of San Francisco enjoyed its low-key nature, saying it's "surprisingly relaxed." His friend, Anders Eddy enjoyed the crowd as well. "It's a good mix of people," he said. "I've done big beer events around the world, and I would do this one again."

Brews on the Bay may be quickly becoming one of those unique San Francisco events for which the city is known, due in large part to its casual feel.

"This is [the brewers'] showcase and their chance to remember why they do what they do in the first place," Marino says. "It's a beautiful day, it's a beautiful ship, and the people are all having a great time. You can't help but smile."

See a few of our favorite brews from the day in the above gallery.

Alyssa Pereira is a staff writer for SFGATE. Follow her here on Twitter.
Shortly after winning the 2013 National Book Award for her second collection of poems, Incarnadine, Portlands Mary Szybist told the Paris Review that she started writing poetry when she was young, after losing her ability to pray.

I was devastated by it, she said. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry.

Szybist was raised Catholic, and Incarnadine focuses on the Annunciation, approaching it through many forms and perspectives in an attempt, as she said in that interview, to take the iconography of the Annunciation out of the realm of symbol, where its meaning is predetermined, and into the realm of contemplation  a realm with room for doubt, investigation, imagination, play. The National Book Award judges called it a religious book for nonbelievers.

Asked if she has come to think of poetry as more or less like prayer, she responded by email:

While I still dont think these are interchangeable terms, I feel increasingly open to what both poetry and prayer can be. Can a poem be a poem without traditional markers of poetry such as line, meter and rhyme? I think so. Can a prayer be a prayer without faith or belief? Maybe. I think so. After all, arent most personal prayers pitched against faith? Why would I need to speak to God if I believe God already knows what is in my heart?

Im not sure most prayer is primarily an expression of faith. If prayer is sometimes about trying to connect to presences beyond the self by giving voice to desires, struggles and bewilderments, poems are sometimes about that too.

Szybist is in residence at UC Berkeley this semester, teaching a course called Verse as the Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics. She said she began the workshop with counsel from Ralph Waldo Emerson: People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Poetry seems to me to be the place where things are allowed to be as complicated as they actually are, Szybist said. She excels at making the complex seem simple without reducing either its complexity or its allure.

The following are the closing lines from Happy Ideas, a poem in Incarnadine inspired by Marcel Duchamps statement I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a stool and watch it turn.

I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do, and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes. I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello. It was my happiest idea.

Evan Karp is the creator of Quiet Lightning and Litseen.com. Twitter: @quiet_lightning

Book events

Holloway Reading Series: Mary Szybist: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, free, UC Berkeley, Hearst Field Annex, Room D37 (off Bancroft Way), Berkeley, (510) 642-3467, www .hollowayreadingseries.wordpress.com

Apogee Press presents readings by three of its authors, Pattie McCarthy (Quiet Book), Denise Newman (Wild Goods) and Laura Walker (Story). 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, Moes Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, free. www .moesbooks.com

Snack Bar Collective releases issue 2, Gross, with readings by contributing authors Amy Berkowitz, Tom Comitta, Carrie Hunter, Claire Moshenberg, Matthew Monte, George Pfau and Sable Sullivan. 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St., S.F., free. www. facebook.com/events/1764395033834887

Juan Gabriel Vasquez reads from his novel Reputations. 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 Ninth Ave., S.F., free. www .greenapplebooks.com

Local poets and artists pay homage to poet and art writer Bill Berkson with readings, stories and farewells. 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 24, McRoskey Mattress Co., 1687 Market St., S.F., free. http:// poetry.sfsu.edu/events/29009-bill-berkson-memorial-tribute
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  Airbus announced Wednesday that the U.S. government has granted it a license to sell the first 17 airplanes involved in a landmark deal with Iran made possible by last years nuclear agreement.

The announcement comes as Iranian leaders and U.S. officials are gathered this week in New York for the U.N. General Assembly and serves as a sign that the outgoing administration of President Obama will honor the economic terms of the accord.

Airbus received the license from the U.S. Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon told the Associated Press. He said the first 17 planes will be A320s and A330s. He declined to offer a breakdown of how many of each are involved in the initial sale, but said Airbus hoped to receive a second license allowing it to sell the remaining planes to Iran.

Though based in Europe, Airbus was required to get the U.S. Treasurys approval for the deal as at least 10 percent of Airbus components are of American origin.

Irans U.N. mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the countrys state media did not immediately report the approval. On Sunday, Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan, a deputy transportation minister, told reporters that he expected U.S. permission for all aircraft purchases by the end of September and that several airplanes would arrive by mid-March.

In January, national carrier Iran Air signed agreements to buy 118 planes from Airbus, estimated to be worth some $25 billion. The deal included 21 A320ceos, 24 A320neos, 27 A330ceos, 18 A330neos, 16 A350-1000s and 12 double-decker A380s.

Base model A320s are currently listed at an average of $98 million, while A330s start at $231.5 million.

That puts the value of the approved 17 aircraft in the first license around at least $18 billion and possibly much higher based on list prices, though buyers typically negotiate sizable discounts for bulk orders.

Most Iranian planes were purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Islamists to power. Out of Irans 250 commercial planes, 162 were flying in June, while the rest are grounded due to lack of spare parts.

The announcement by Airbus will be closely watched by Boeing, the Chicago company that has an agreement with Iran that Iranian officials have suggested could be worth as much as $25 billion. Such a deal would be the biggest between an American company and Iran since the Islamic Revolution and U.S. Embassy takeover.

In a June letter to Congress, Boeing said the deal involves Iran Air buying 80 aircraft with a total list price of $17.6 billion, with deliveries beginning in 2017 and running until 2025. Iran Air also will lease 29 new Boeing 737s.

Iran also has ordered 20 airplanes from French-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR.

Irans nuclear deal with world powers, which limits its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions, specifically allows for the purchase of aircraft and parts. However, the Boeing deal has been criticized by both American lawmakers and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In a statement, Boeing spokesman Marc Sklar said his company believed Airbus applied before it did and that the U.S. government follows a first-in, first-out policy.

We look forward to receiving our license from the government shortly, he said.
Paul Alioshin loved tinkering with things, and it was that passion that helped him create some of the biggest technological innovations in our time, including working on the team that brought the first camera to the iPhone.

Alioshin was known as a risk taker and for pushing the boundaries of technology. Friends and family say he died doing what he loved  taking his favorite vintage Fiat Abarth out for a drive on winding Highway 36 in Humboldt County. After sustaining major injuries from a car accident on Sept. 11, he died Saturday in Redding. Alioshin was 50.

The Palo Alto resident was a self-proclaimed gear head and loved to take things apart and build something better. He grew up in Lafayette and graduated from UC San Diego in 1989 with a degree in electrical and electronics engineering. Over his career, Alioshin worked on high-resolution projection TVs at Silicon Light Machines and took apart cameras to build a 360-degree camera under a startup called Centr Cam that was later purchased by Amazons Lab126.

Paul was a creative engineer and a genuinely nice guy, said Amazon spokeswoman Kinley Pearsall in an email. He will be missed both at Lab126 and across the valley.

Alioshin also worked at Apple from 2005 to 2010, working on cameras in the iMac and MacBook as well as iPhones, according to his LinkedIn profile. During that time, Alioshin was part of a team that brought the camera to the first iPhone  a notable milestone, since high-quality cameras have become a signature feature of the iPhone. Alioshin was the first full-time person working on camera hardware at Apple, said Cina Hazegh, who had Alioshin as a manager when he worked at Apple.

At Silicon Light, Alioshin was admired by his colleagues for his dry wit and ability to make startup life fun, despite high pressure from venture capitalists who wanted to see a return on their investment quickly, said Jim Hunter, the companys director of process technology.

Paul was really good in an artful way of using humor and sarcasm to blow off the pressure of the moment but still keep people on task and focused and committed to what we were trying to do, Hunter said.

In his off time, Alioshin loved biking, riding in motorcycles and fixing up his red Fiat Abarth 750. He found the 1960 Abarth by peeping through a hole in a fence inside a Hollywood vintage car lot. He liked to fix up the car in his spare time and added a new muffler and engine.

He had this funny joke how he was Italian, said Kat Alioshin, adding that her husband was actually of Danish ancestry. He appreciated Italian clothes, motorcycles and cars.

He also had a connection with the number 11:11, his wife said. She met him in college and both worked at a radio station where a co-worker believed the numbers 11:11 meant a message from an angel. Paul Alioshin didnt buy into that, but he and Kat would find themselves pointing out connections to the number, and eventually it became a tradition for the couple to call each other at 11:11 a.m. The two were married on Nov. 11 and Alioshins memorial will be held that day, his wife said.

Alioshin is also survived by his children, Desmond and Penelope, sister Annette Dale and father Greg Alioshin.

Wendy Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: wlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, on Wednesday announced an ambitious plan to spend $3 billion over the next 10 years to help cure or better treat disease.

Can we cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century? That doesnt mean that no one will get sick, but it should mean that people will get sick less, Zuckerberg told a crowd gathered at the William J. Rutter Center on UCSFs Mission Bay campus.

The new initiative, Chan Zuckerberg Science, is designed to help bring scientists and engineers together, build new tools and technologies and grow a movement to help fund more science, he said.

This is the first major science project developed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a charitable effort the couple set up after the birth of their daughter last year to focus on promoting equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy. It is also the single largest charitable pledge in the fields of health and science, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which tracks such gifts.

The initial investment in science is for the Biohub, a $600 million collaboration among UCSF, UC Berkeley and Stanford University. The Biohub will serve as an independent research center that will link experts across disciplines and include engineers, computer scientists, biologists and chemists.

In an often emotional presentation, Chan, a pediatrician who graduated from the UCSF School of Medicine, talked about why the work was important to her.

As a pediatrician, I have worked with families at the most difficult moments of their lives, from making a devastating diagnosis of leukemia to sharing with a family that we are unable to resuscitate their child, said Chan, whose daughter, Max, is 10 months old.

Chan said she hopes for a better future for children. We set a goal: Can we all work together to cure or better manage disease for all children in our lifetime? she said.

While the goal is clearly a challenge, the couple appears committed. In December, just after the birth of their daughter, they announced they intended to give away 99 percent of their shares in Facebook in their lifetimes. Unusually, they set up a limited liability company, or LLC, rather than a nonprofit charitable trust or foundation because it allows for more flexibility in how to distribute their wealth.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has, until Wednesday, invested in education, including a coding project in Africa called Andela, and Byju, an Indian education startup.

In a surprise appearance at the end of Wednesdays presentation, Zuckerberg introduced Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who Zuckerberg said has been an inspiration for his philanthropic efforts.

Gates, who through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has become one of the worlds most prolific philanthropists, returned the praise, expressing how hes been impressed by the couples love for science and commitment to where it can take us.

Their vision, their generosity is really inspiring a whole new generation of philanthropists who will do amazing things, Gates told the audience.

Chan and Zuckerberg have already started investing in health. Last year, they donated $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital, where Chan trained as a pediatric resident. The money was used to fund critical equipment and technology for the new public hospital, which opened in May under its new name, the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

As part of Wednesdays announcement, the couple named Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist from New Yorks Rockefeller University, as president of Chan Zuckerberg Science. They also named Stanford University scientist Stephen Quake and UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi as heads of the Biohub.

The Biohub will be located next to UCSFs Mission Bay campus, with a satellite site at Stanford.

The Biohub will immediately start two projects. One, the Cell Atlas, will be a map made available to researchers around the world that reveals the many different types of cells that control the bodys major organs. The Infectious Disease Initiative is designed to promote research for new ways of creating treatments.

DeRisi said the infectious disease effort will be able to react quickly to a developing health problem. There wont be any long debates about whether we should fund something if its a threat, he said.

Bargmann said Chan Zuckerberg Science will find great scientists, allow them to work together and give them a long lead time to find solutions.

This will work, she said confidently.

Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver

What is the initiative?

Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan are putting $3 billion over the next decade into Chan Zuckerberg Science. Its part of their larger Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company that focuses on promoting equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy.

What will the initiative do?

The goal is to invest in basic science research to help advance disease prevention and treatment. The first project is the Biohub, a collaboration among UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford created with a $600 million commitment from the couple.

What will the Biohub do?

It will immediately launch two research projects to be conducted over the next five years: the Cell Atlas and the Infectious Disease Initiative. The Cell Atlas will be a map that reveals the many different types of cells that control the bodys major organs. The Infectious Disease Initiative will promote research for new ways of creating treatments that could aid the fight against immediate threats like HIV, Ebola and Zika.

Sources: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; UCSF; UC Berkeley; Stanford University

Better to give

At $3 billion, the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative is far and away the largest single pledge from individuals in the fields of health and scientific research, and one of only a handful of publicly disclosed gifts exceeding $100 million.

Donor Recipient Year Amount Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative 2016 $3 billion Ted Stanley Broad Institute 2014 $650 million T. Denny Sanford Sioux Valley Hospitals and Health System 2007 $400 million Paul Allen Allen Institute for Brain Science 2012 $300 million Sean Parker Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy 2016 $250 million Sanford Sandy and Joan Weill UCSF 2016 $185 million Charles F. Feeney Global Brain Health Initiative 2015 $177 million David Koch Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center 2015 $150 million T. Denny Sanford Sanford Health 2014 $125 million Ernest Rady Rady Childrens Hospital Foundation 2014 $120 million
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A man wanted in connection with the kidnapping attempt of a 23-year-old woman in San Leandro two months ago was arrested in another state early last week after police said he fled California and tried to start a new life after the attack.

The mans name was not released but he is a 43-year-old Orange County resident, said Lt. Robert McManus, a San Leandro police spokesman. He was arrested by U.S. Marshalls at an undisclosed location on suspicion of kidnapping, carjacking and assault with a deadly weapon.

Authorities withheld several details on the case  including the exact day and the state where he was arrested  out of concern the information would compromise the investigation, McManus said.

The abduction attempt, which was foiled by a Good Samaritan, began 7:45 a.m. July 28 on the 14700 block of Washington Avenue. The victim was walking to work when the assailant approached her from between two parked cars and sprayed her in the face with pepper spray, police said.

He began dragging the woman to a silver car while she was temporarily blinded when a man driving by came upon the attack and intervened.

The passerby began struggling with the attacker, who also sprayed him in the face with pepper spray. Then, the attacker hopped into the passerbys car and drove it a short distance because it was blocking his getaway car.

He got out, then fled in his silver four-door Nissan Sentra, authorities said.

After news reports on the kidnapping attempt re-aired in August, an East Bay business owner called police to report a vehicle matching the description of the getaway car was abandoned near Oakland International Airport off of Hegenberger Road, McManus said.

Police obtained an arrest warrant for the suspect less than two weeks ago and a search warrant was executed on his Orange County home last week, where police found physical evidence tying him to the crime, McManus said.

Members of the mans family live in the state where he was staying. Police also served a search warrant at his out-of-state home and found additional evidence linking him to the kidnapping attempt, police said.

Investigators believe the man drove his car to the airport hours after the attack and took a flight out of state. He was several states away when authorities tracked him down last week, McManus said.

McManus said the man was probably trying to assume a new life, as it appeared he changed his residence to an out-of-state address and might have been applying for jobs.

The would-be abductor had been convicted of a violent crime, although police would not specify the nature of his crime history or whether he was on a sex offender registry. The suspect had been discharged off of parole 10 days before the attack, McManus said.

Police remained baffled as to why the Orange County resident drove hundreds of miles north to attack a stranger in San Leandro. It did not appear he had any connections in the area, authorities said.

We have no real reason why this man would come up to the East Bay, McManus said.

Two women  one from San Leandro and another from a neighboring city  told police after the attack a man matching the suspect description tried contacting them while driving the same car within a week of the kidnapping attempt, McManus said.

The suspect was awaiting extradition to Alameda County, which officials said would occur in the next few weeks. His bail was set at $595,000.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
The Dressmaker was clearly intended to be a ravishing creation, but its patched together from such a ragbag of scraps that it cant be called a success. Despite highly enjoyable moments and the welcome presence of Kate Winslet, even sympathetic viewers will be put off by the movies bewildering variety of genres and tones.

The film sets us up to expect the darkest sort of black comedy: Its the 1950s, and a gorgeously attired Tilly (Winslet) arrives in a backwater Australian village, with the stony-faced announcement, Im back, you bastards. Shes a supremely talented fashion designer, intent on wielding her sewing machine to right some serious wrongs from the distant past.

The residents of this miserable burg are narrow-minded, dowdy and dumb  caricatured hicks meant to be disparaged, a point the film beats into the ground. These grotesques would seem to be no match for revenge-minded Tilly, with her red lipstick, cigarettes and haute couture, the likes of which the local harridans have only goggled at in magazines.

Tilly moves into a dismal shack inhabited by a seeming madwoman, who turns out to be her mother, played by Judy Davis in an unbridled performance that steals the film. Both mom and daughter have serious memory issues, but its clear that something horrible happened when Tilly was a child, which drove her to flee.

The film, based on Rosalie Hams 2000 novel, turns on the promising idea that high fashion can be used as weapon, ensnaring the repulsive townswomen and underlining their ugly natures. In a series of highly striking images, these creatures prance around the dusty streets in Tillys creations, which are parodies of 1950s Paris fashions.

Director Jocelyn Moorhouse includes a cinematic quotation from Sunset Boulevard, and The Dressmaker does have its noir side, a brooding sense of the past and a satirical vision of the present. If only the mood were consistent. Instead, the film weaves in threads of melodrama and romance  the latter involving a rugby-playing stud (Liam Hemsworth) whose sleek body the film all but drools over when he is fitted for a suit by Tilly.

Theres more: A mystery is waiting to be solved involving a boys death, and much ado is made about the cross-dressing (and other risque behavior) of the towns single police officer. It all adds up to an awfully busy two hours.

Davis shows us a proud and vital woman emerging from the damaged hag we saw initially. In one of the movies most entertaining scenes, she attends a showing of Sunset Boulevard and treats both the movie and her fellow viewers to hoots and catcalls. Her deepening interactions with Tilly are the closest the movie approaches to substance.

But tonal inconsistencies sink The Dressmaker, and the same applies to Winslets character. The actress does her best with what shes given, but the film never seems to get a handle on the character  her hard edge comes and goes in a bewildering way.

The Dressmakers incessant bludgeoning of the villagers invites us to feel a too-easy sense of superiority. After several false endings, the film has genuinely worn out its welcome.

What a shame, because Tillys surreal, extravagant handiwork is really something to see.

Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@sfchronicle.com

The Dressmaker

Comedy-drama. Starring Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth. Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse. (R. 118 minutes.)

To see a trailer: http://bit.ly/1gxFseY
Malcolm McGinnis, co-owner and head brewer of FreeWheel Brewing Co., died on Sept. 13 from pancreatic cancer. McGinnis was 57 years old.

An avid home brewer, McGinnis helped popularize British-style cask ales in the Bay Area. In 2012, he opened FreeWheel Brewing Co. in Redwood City with partners Pete Krausa, Larry Bucka and Gary Waymire.

The brewery was a second career for the Canadian-born McGinnis, who moved to the United States in 1977. A scientist in the medical diagnostics field, McGinnis received his doctorate in biochemistry from U.C. Berkeley and went on to co-found Atria Genetics with Krausa in South San Francisco. After selling the company in 2007 and then retiring, McGinnis was diagnosed with bile duct cancer. He was succesfully treated and remained cancer-free until his pancreatic cancer diagnosis in March.

But the initial health scare prompted McGinnis to pursue his lifelong dream of opening a brewery. In 2013, he spoke with The Chronicle about the decision to get into the beer business. Whether youre 50 or 95, its lying there, knowing its over, and saying, Oh, I wish I had done this.

McGinnis threw himself into his passion project. He researched small U.K. breweries and apprenticed at San Franciscos Magnolia Brewery, which at the time was one of the only local breweries making cask beers.

Malcolm was one of the kindest guys, said Chris Cohen, owner of newly-opened Mission beer bar Old Devil Moon and founder of the San Francisco Homebrewers Guild, noting that McGinnis was always willing to share his knowledge and collaborate with other brewers. The beer community is like that  we like to share  but Malcolm took it to another level.

Old Devil Moon always has a FreeWheel beer on cask. Its one of our top-selling beers. Thats a testament to Malcolm and how great his beer is, says Cohen. A lot of Americans have this idea that cask ale is synonymous with warm and fat beer. Guys like Malcolm and FreeWheel are fighting the good fight, introducing people to something wonderful and naturally different.

McGinnis is survived by survived by his wife, Irene Searles; his children Duncan and Lauren McGinnis; parents Arthur (Bud) and Gladys McGinnis; siblings Brenda Reid, Heather Screaton and Cameron McGinnis, along with many nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in memory of McGinnis to Stanford University to support Dr. Brendan Visser and Dr. George Fishers work in cancer research and patient care.

Sarah Fritsche is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sfritsche@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @foodcentric
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Last month we brought you the best and worst suburbs for families in the Bay Area, as determined by a Niche study.

Now the financial data site WalletHub has selected what it considers to be the best cities in California to raise a family.

Several of the larger Bay Area suburban towns cited by the Niche study also scored well in WalletHub's state study, but there were also some surprises.

For example, Foster City, ranked No. 15 in the Niche analysis, did not crack WalletHub's top-20, despite having the fifth-best rated schools in the state.

WalletHub's methodology gave less weight overall to quality of schools than Niche did, but included a more comprehensive list of metrics, including such variables as number of pediatricians per capita, divorce rate and percentage of households receiving food stamps.

Here is a breakdown of WallHub's metrics. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with 100 indicating the most suitable conditions for family living.

Family Life & Fun  Total Points: 25

Number of Playgrounds per Capita: Full Weight (~4.17 Points)

Number of Attractions: Full Weight (~4.17 Points)

Note: "Attractions" includes, for instance, museums, theaters and zoos.

Percentage of Families with Children Aged 0 to 17: Double Weight (~8.33 Points)

WalletHub "Weather" Ranking: Full Weight (~4.17 Points)

Average Commute Time: Full Weight (~4.17 Points)



Education, Health & Safety  Total Points: 25

Quality of School System: Full Weight (~2.94 Points)

High School Graduation Rate: Half Weight (~1.47 Points)

Air Quality: Full Weight (~2.94 Points)

Number of Pediatricians per Capita: Full Weight (~2.94 Points)

Percentage of Children Aged 0 to 17 Lacking Health-Insurance Coverage: Full Weight (~2.94 Points)

Violent-Crime Rate per Capita: Double Weight (~5.88 Points)

Property-Crime Rate per Capita: Double Weight (~5.88 Points)



Affordability  Total Points: 25

Housing Affordability: Full Weight (~12.50 Points)

Note: This metric was calculated by dividing the median annual family income by housing costs, which account for both rental and sale prices.

General Affordability: Full Weight (~12.50 Points)

Note: This metric was calculated by dividing the median family income by the cost-of-living index.



Socioeconomic Environment  Total Points: 25

Separation & Divorce Rate: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

Percentage of Two-Parent Families: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

Percentage of Families Living Below Poverty Level: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

Percentage of Households Receiving Food Stamps: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

Unemployment Rate: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

Wealth Gap: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

Foreclosure Rate: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)

WalletHub's sources: The U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Environmental Protection Agency, California Department of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Renwood RealtyTrac, SchoolDigger.com, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Areavibes and WalletHub research.
Don Buchla, an innovative designer of electronic instruments who helped develop the first line of modular synthesizers around the same time as his East Coast counterpart Robert Moog, died Sept. 14 at his home in Berkeley. He was 79.

The cause was complications from cancer, said his son, Ezra Buchla.

While his name was not as familiar as Moogs outside of music industry circles, Mr. Buchla created several groundbreaking electronic instruments, including the Buchla 100, which was commissioned by the San Francisco Tape Center in 1963; the Buchla Music Easel, an all-in-one, portable synthesizer; and the fully MIDI-enabled Buchla 700.

Composer Morton Subotnick used his voltage-controlled Buchla Modular Electronic Music System (a predecessor of the commercial Series 100 synth) on the landmark 1968 recording Silver Apples of the Moon, widely recognized as the first full-length album of electronic music produced for a record company.

Mr. Buchla, who composed his own music as well, also played an integral part in the West Coast counterculture movement in the 1960s, working with audio engineer Owsley Stanley to build the Grateful Deads immense sound system while his instruments frequently provided the soundtrack for psychedelic-era happenings such as the Trips Festival in San Francisco in 1966 and the writer Ken Keseys Acid Tests.

In his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe wrote about the Buchla electronic music machine screaming like a logical lunatic.

I have always been outside, and Ive chosen to remain there, Mr. Buchla said in a 1983 interview with Polyphony magazine. Ive been an experimentalist since really early childhood.

Mr. Buchla was born in South Gate (Los Angeles County) on April 17, 1937, and grew up in California and New Jersey. He studied astronomy, music and physiology at UC Berkeley, and graduated as a physics major in 1959.

While the instruments designed by Moog, who died in 2005, found their way into the mainstream at the hands of 70s musical rock icons like Yes, Tangerine Dream and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Mr. Buchlas creations had more subversive applications by design.

Moog labeled his synthesizer modules with practical names such as oscillators to generate tones, filters to modify them; Mr. Buchla opted for more fantastical names like Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, Quad Dynamics Manager and Source of Uncertainty. He deliberately left keyboards out of his designs.

A keyboard is dictatorial, Mr. Buchla had said. When youve got a black-and-white keyboard, its hard to play anything but keyboard music.

He worked on NASA projects, including controls for the Gemini space capsule; devised a laser-based navigational aid for the blind for RCA; and produced the sounds used by composer Suzanne Ciani to create the Coca-Cola Pop n Pour audio signature, heard in countless advertisements.

Don Buchla changed so many music and sound makers lives by creating instruments that perpetually bestow novelty, composer Kaitlin Auerlia Smith, said in a statement. I am forever grateful for his existence.

Mr. Buchla, who served as the technical director at the California Institute of the Arts, continued to design instruments through the 1970s and beyond, devising the first MIDI-capable controller in 1987 and introducing his 200e modular system in 2004, which integrated his classic modular designs with digital technology.

In 2012, while struggling with cancer, Mr. Buchla announced that his company had been acquired by a group of investors under the name Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments. He was fired the following year, which led to a lawsuit alleging that he was forced to sign an unfavorable deal and that the defendants acted in bad faith, and with oppression and malice.

The complaint also claimed that the owners of the company that bears his name caused a stroke he suffered in 2014. The case went to arbitration in 2015 and reached a confidential resolution this year.

Mr. Buchla is survived by his wife, Anne-Marie Bonnel; son, Ezra; two daughters, Jeannine Serbanich and Erin Buchla; and two grandchildren.

Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicles pop music critic. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MusicSF
WASHINGTON  At least 35 million Americans who are eligible to vote are shut out of the democratic process because they arent registered. Can tweaking a 21-year-old law add millions of them to the voter rolls?

Thats the idea behind automatic registration, which five states have adopted and two dozen others have considered in the past two years.

Jonathan Brater of the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at the New York University School of Law, said voter ID laws may get more attention, but getting more Americans registered to vote could have the biggest impact on elections.

Registration is one of the biggest barriers to voting, Brater said. Every election, thousands of people go to the polls and cant vote because of complications with registration.

Under the federal Motor Voter Act, which went into effect in 1995, states must offer to register any eligible citizen who seeks a new drivers license or public assistance. But in many states, the law hasnt fulfilled its potential, in part because the process often trips up would-be applicants and many state workers dont consider it a high priority.

States that have switched to automatic registration dont just offer people the opportunity to register  they go ahead and do it for them whenever an eligible voter applies for a license, without requiring the potential voter or a DMV clerk to take any additional action. People can opt out of registration, but they dont have to opt in.

Motor voter was always the homework we didnt want to do, said state Rep. Chris Pearson of the Vermont Progressive Party, who sponsored the legislation there. Motor voter was never the focus of people at the DMV. This in a way turns it on its head. This isnt, Oh, I need to remember to ask them if they want to register to vote. This is about updating our system to make it automated.

In 2015, Oregon became the first state to make the change. Already, automatic registration has added more than 200,000 people to the voter rolls in that state, an increase of nearly 10 percent.

California, where about 7 million people are eligible to vote but not registered, also approved automatic registration last year. The state is still setting up its program, but the Public Policy Institute of California recently estimated that it could yield more than 2 million new voters, a potential increase of more than 10 percent.

Vermont and West Virginia approved automatic registration this year, and Connecticut adopted it administratively.
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GARY, Ind.  Donald Trump swooped into Gary on his private jet and pledged to make the down-on-its-luck city great again.

It was 1993, and the New York mogul was wooing officials in the mostly black city to support his bid to dock a showboat casino along a Lake Michigan shoreline littered with shuttered factories. Trump and his representatives later told state gaming officials he would leverage his incomparable experience to build a floating Shangri-La, with enough slot machines and blackjack tables to fill city coffers and local charities with tens of millions each year, while creating scores of well-paying jobs for minority residents.

Today, as the Republican presidential nominee pursues black voters with vows to fix inner-city troubles, many Gary residents say his pitch to solve the problems of crime and poverty is disturbingly familiar. Like others who have done business with Trump, they say their experience offers a cautionary tale.

Little more than a decade after investing in Gary, Trumps casino company declared bankruptcy and cashed out his stake in the boat  leaving behind lawsuits and hard feelings in a city where more than one-third of residents live in poverty.

Gary is a victim of the economic shifts Trump has bemoaned on the campaign trail. Just 30 miles southeast of Chicago, Garys fortunes fell with the steel industry. The remaining 77,000 residents abide persistent crime and chronic unemployment.

In a presentation to the Indiana Gaming Commission in 1994, Trumps team touted his superior marketing and advertising abilities to pitch a 340-foot-long vessel called Trump Princess with more than 1,500 slot machines.

A May 1996 agreement signed by the Trump organization said the developer would endeavor to fill 70 percent of its 1,200 full-time jobs with minorities. Trump was to invest $153 million.

The eight business partners in Trumps license application had been offered a chance to buy shares worth more than $1 million, but most didnt have the money.

So both sides negotiated a deal offering the group 7.5 percent of the stock for the riverboat and another 7.5 percent into a trust for charity.

However, the men said Trump reneged once the license was approved.

All eight sued for breach of contract, alleging they were dumped after Trumps license was approved.

As construction proceeded in spring 1996, Trumps commitments to hire minorities and local businesses never came to fruition, according to local leaders.

In 2004, Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts Inc., the parent company of the Gary casino, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Trump sold his companys stake in the Gary casino the following year for $253 million.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest child of Robert F. Kennedy, said in a Facebook post on Monday that the first President George Bush told her that he planned to vote for Hillary Clinton. The former president, however, isnt talking.

Townsend, 65, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland who on Facebook uses her middle name, Hartington, posted a picture of her shaking Bushs hand.

The President told me hes voting for Hillary!! the caption said.

Jim McGrath, a spokesman for the former president, 92, would neither confirm nor deny Townsends claim.

The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days, McGrath said in an email. He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim.

Townsends post was reported on Monday by Politico. CNN posted a screen shot of the post, which did not appear to have been made public on Townsends Facebook page.

Townsend told Politico that she had met with the former president in Maine earlier in the day.

A report in The Texas Tribune in May, several months after Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, dropped out of the presidential race, quoted McGrath saying that the former president was not planning to make a public endorsement.

President Bush is retired from politics, McGrath wrote in an email then. He came out of retirement to do a few things for Jeb, but those were the exceptions that proved the rule.

Former President George W. Bush, Bushs oldest son, was also not planning on making a public endorsement, his aide Freddy Ford said at the time.

Neither of the former presidents attended the Republican convention, though the younger Bush has campaigned on behalf of Republican candidates for Senate, including Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.

Many influential Republicans, including various members of both Bush administrations, have said they will not vote for the partys nominee, Donald Trump. In June, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the treasury secretary under George W. Bush, wrote an op-ed article announcing that he would be casting a vote for Clinton, making him one of several members of the last Republican presidential administration who have said they would be voting for the Democratic candidate.

Elder Bush to vote for Hillary Clinton, a Kennedy says; ex-president isnt saying

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest child of Robert F. Kennedy, said in a Facebook post on Monday that the first President George Bush told her that he planned to vote for Hillary Clinton. The former president, however, isnt talking.

Townsend, 65, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland who on Facebook uses her middle name, Hartington, posted a picture of her shaking Bushs hand in Maine. The President told me hes voting for Hillary!! the caption said.

Jim McGrath, a spokesman for the former president, 92, would neither confirm nor deny Townsends claim.

Townsends post was reported on Monday by Politico.

New York Times
TULSA, Okla.  An attorney for a white Oklahoma police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man said the man ignored officers commands, kept touching his pocket and was reaching through a window of his SUV when he was killed.

Tulsa police video shows 40-year-old Terence Crutcher walking away from the officers and toward his SUV Friday with his hands in the air. He then approaches the drivers side of his vehicle, where an officer shocks him with a stun gun and another fatally shoots him.

Officers were called to the scene to respond to a report of a stalled vehicle.

Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday, before the video and audio recordings were released, that Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his SUV when he was shot. Its not clear from the footage what led Betty Shelby, the officer who fired the fatal shot, to draw her gun or what orders officers gave Crutcher.

Shelbys attorney, Scott Wood, said that Crutcher was not following the officers commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon.

He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and thats when she fired her shot, Wood told the Tulsa World for a story published Tuesday.

Local and federal investigations are under way to determine whether criminal charges are warranted in the shooting or if Crutchers civil rights were violated.

Police helicopter footage was among several clips released that show the shooting. A man in the helicopter can be heard saying time for a Taser and then: That looks like a bad dude, too. Probably on something.

Tulsa Police Sgt. Dave Walker later said investigators recovered a vial of PCP in Crutchers vehicle.

Crutchers twin sister, Tiffany Crutcher, called for charges Monday.

The big bad dude was my twin brother. That big bad dude was a father, she said.
1 Police surveillance: Bills being introduced in nearly a dozen cities will seek to force police departments to disclose the surveillance technologies they use, the American Civil Liberties Union and other transparency advocates said Wednesday in Washington D.C. The legislative effort is meant to counter what they call a culture of secrecy surrounding police department surveillance. Among the cities where bills will be introduced are the District of Columbia; New York; Milwaukee; Richmond, Va.; and Seattle.

2 Same-sex marriage: A federal judge dismissed a challenge to a North Carolina law that allows magistrates to refuse to marry same-sex couples by citing religious beliefs. U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn in Asheville dismissed a lawsuit filed by three couples, two gay and one interracial. He ruled the couples lacked legal standing as taxpayers to sue and lacked evidence showing they were harmed directly by the law taking effect in June 2015. Still, the judge wrote there is potential someone could suffer real harm because of the law. The plaintiffs lawyers filed a notice Wednesday that theyll appeal the ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. North Carolina is one of only two states (Mississippi is the other) with such religious-objection laws that are being enforced.
Hal Bernton/Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore.  Hundreds of national wildlife refuges that provide critical habitat for migratory birds and other species are crippled by a staffing shortage that has curtailed educational programs, hampered the fight against invasive species and weakened security at facilities that attract nearly 50 million visitors annually, a group of public employees and law enforcement personnel said Wednesday.

Staffing at the nations 565 wildlife refuges and related properties shrank nearly 15 percent in the past decade, and more than one-third of those locations dont have any staff on site, according to Washingtons Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. More than half of the refuges no longer have their own manager and have been combined into massive complexes that are overseen by someone who might be hundreds of miles away, said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the nonprofit alliance.
WASHINGTON  The summer of 2016 has lurched from one extreme weather disaster to another at great cost in lives and damages. Here are just some of the worst and weirdest, according to insurance statistics and meteorologists:

Flooding in Chinas Yangtze Basin from May through August killed at least 475 people and caused $28 billion in losses.
Child Protective Services investigators and Cleveland police are looking into a series of viral photos taken Monday night that show a man pulling a 5-year-old girl by her hair while shopping at a Walmart store in Cleveland, Texas.

Erika Burch, who took the photos, said she was shopping when she noticed the girl crying and begging the man to let go of her hair.

"She was saying 'please stop, I promise I won't do it again please stop!'" Burch said in a Facebook post. "I took my phone out snapped pictures and then told him to let the little girl's hair go!"

RELATED: Texas mother accused of putting child in oven

Burch said the man told her to mind her own business, but she had no intention of backing down. She confronted the man several times, eventually screaming at him to let go of the child, and then called police.

"I have three little girls of my own," Burch said Tuesday. "I'll be damned if I'll ever let anybody pull them by the hair of their heads."

RELATED: CPS twice stepped in to help children allegedly killed by mom

After leaving the store, Burch said she remained concerned about the child's well-being. She decided to post the photos she'd taken to Facebook, and soon the images had been shared by thousands of people.

"I'm just trying to stand up for a little girl who has no voice," Burch said. "I've done everything now that I know I can do."

Cleveland Police Chief Darrel Broussard said police received a call about the incident at about 4:45 p.m. on Monday. The man, whom Broussard did not identify, told police that his three children including the 5-year-old girl, had been disruptive in the store, and that holding her by the hair was his method of disciplining her.

Broussard said police investigators are concerned about the incident, noting that "there are proper ways of doing discipline" and that when parents cross the line to abuse it can have a lasting impact on a child's well-being.

CPS spokeswoman Tejal Patel said the investigation is in the early stages and that in cases like this, investigators will work with police to see whether there is a pattern of inappropriate discipline and determine whether the agency can provide services to assist the family in question.
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Comedian Amy Schumer is never one to shy away from confronting sexism in any way she can.

Yesterday, the Emmy-nominated actress took to Instagram to compare the September 2016 covers of Boys' Life and Girls' Life, two magazines aimed at children.

Boys' Life leads with, "Explore your future: Astronaut, Artists, Firefighter, Chef? Here's how to be what you want to be."

Girls' Life cover stories include, "Wake up pretty!" "Your dream hair," and "Bye drama: the friendship rules #squads swear by."

Schumer, who captioned the photo, "No." is hardly the first person to note the disparity. She is perhaps, however, the most high profile one to do so. As soon as this month's covers came out, many took to social media to express outrage. Artist Katherine Young went so far as to offer a helpful re-design of the Girls' Life cover, switching the heavily made-up model to Google's 2015 Science Fair Grand Prize Winner, Olivia Hallisey.

Young also changed the headlines. Her version reads, "Wake up hungry? Healthy foods to power you through rough days," "Your dream career," and "Why drama? Taking the stage for #self expression."

The obvious issue doesn't just apply to this month's covers. The first story on the Boys' Life website is, "Poisonous plants quiz."

The first story on the Girls' Life website is, "We asked, you answered: Can I shave my tummy hair?"

It's important to note that the magazines are produced by two completely different publishers. Their similarities in names is what's drawing the direct comparison.'Boys' Life' is published by the Boy Scouts of America. 'Girls' Life' is published by Girls' Life Acquisition Co.
OSAGE  In a spacious room on the second floor of the Osage Municipal Utility building, an amazing transformation is taking place.

OMU, in partnership with Osage High School, is the site for the Iowa BIG North Program.

Iowa BIG is an initiative designed to urge students to dive deeper into the learning process by offering them the opportunity to take part in projects in which they are passionate. In the process, the program seeks to weave a connection between the students and businesses within their communities.

Ten students are currently enrolled in Osages program of project-based learning. They have been working all summer to pull ideas together as well as plan out their work space.

While not learning in a traditional classroom setting, students are getting credits through their projects, based on the disciplines involved in the project components.

Its not a sit n get program, said Osage Superintendent Barb Schwamman, whose son Lucas is part of the inaugural class of students. This program is about engaging students in problem solving. Its not about what job you want to do when you graduate but what kinds of problems youd like to solve as a grown up.

One of the biggest challenges of the program will be connecting students and resources within the school district to people in the community.

The school is looking for businesses which would like to be partnered with the project in the hope that students will form relationships which will one day draw them to come back to work for a particular business, either as summer help or in a more permanent manner.

Its not just about learning a skill, Schwamman said. Its about creating new solutions to old problems.

While Schwamman acknowledges the program isnt a good fit for all students, those students who will benefit from the this program are those who are self-disciplined and motivated, which is why it is a students choice as to whether or not to take part.

Projects are also chosen by the students who have been asked to give real thought to the areas that interest them.

With such a wide range of student interests, there are many opportunities available for local businesses to submit project ideas and needs to the school in the hopes of partnering up with one or several of these talented students.

Students report to the space at OMU for 2-3 periods in the afternoon each day.

The program offers the students an ongoing sense of what life will be like outside of school, how to set their own deadlines realistically and meet those goals, said Osage industrial arts teacher Brent Jennings, who is also involved with the project. It is designed to teach independence while requiring the students to use a multitude of disciplines in order to complete a single project.

Some of the project examples involve web design and public relations, among other areas which allow students to take their creativity and run with it, while applying it to working with a business.

Students would be able to generate project ideas based on the needs of a business, or they can first develop the project and see if there are any businesses that would be interested in being involved.

For more information on the Iowa BIG program, visit www.iowabig.org
OSAGE  Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds offered a big round of applause to Osage and three other partnering schools on their initial work in the Iowa BIG initiative.

You are a model of best practices for other schools in the region, she told students who are part of the project-based learning program, as well as their advisors, school officials and local business people who support the initiative.

Reynolds met with the students at Osage Municipal Utilities, whose upper floor is home to the students workspace and where they meet daily.

The projects overseers are high school instructors Matt Finn, Brett Jennings and Ryan McInroy. Principal Tim Hejhal and Superintendent of Schools Barb Schwamman also spoke about the benefits of the initiative, begun this year.

Students said the initiative puts active learning in play. They consider inbound and outbound projects.

Inbound projects are launched by students to address something they might want to see changed or developed in the community. Outbound projects put students in touch with local businesses that enlist students help in finding solutions to a particular problem.

Hejhal said the initiative helps students actively engage in the learning process. Most will earn their senior English credits or other course credits, depending on the projects.

Ten juniors and seniors are part of the Osage program, established when the district landed a $25,000 STEM BEST grant with the partnering schools  known as Iowa BIG North.

Charles City, New Hampton and Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock make up Big IOWA North. Charles City instructor Donna Forsyth and New Hampton instructor Mike Kuennen also provided input into the discussion with the lieutenant governor.

The students recently met with business leaders in a Partner Palooz event. Business leaders offered some problems that they wanted solved.

One problem posed for students from a Charles City cemetery was how to create an app that would help identify plot locations; another presented by former legislators Brian Quick and Josh Byrnes wondered if there was a way to blur school district lines that would provide a more collaborative and regional focus for education in North Iowa.

The students now will be trying to lock in projects to complete. Two projects are required to be completed by each student with at least one other collaborator. Some projects will be addressed as a group.

I want to come here every single day, said student Hannah Mauser, referring to the programs attraction.

It gets me out of bed in the morning, agreed Alexandra Gentz.

Abigail Arciniega said she was excited about the potential of initiating change with a project, something really awesome.

This is truly project-based learning, said Finn, adding that a projects failure to succeed is as instructive as one that does. Thats far different from the sit and get style of learning where failure to pass a test results in a just a bad grade on a report card.

Reynolds threw out her own suggestions to students, outlining issues that combine to stymie economic growth in Iowa, including how to supply more skilled workers and how to provide more development for housing.

Reynolds said she was impressed with the enthusiasm and response by students, especially in North Iowa.

I really wanted to see this happen in rural Iowa, she said, adding she appreciated a by-product of the program that lets students see and work with North Iowa businesses.

You can see the (job) opportunities you could have in North Iowa  and you dont have to leave (to find a job), she said.
As many of you know, our father, Bill Bollinger, passed away in June. All of us siblings were back recently, packing up his possessions as we hold his and my moms house. We will miss him dearly.

While we have our pictures and cherished memories, we can also see his legacy as we drive about Osage.

Our dad loved Osage.

As his health declined, he passed on opportunities to live elsewhere in more comfort  Osage was his home.

He served as the Director of Public Works from the early 1960s until 1997. He focused on bringing in the needed infrastructure to the City that would serve as the catalyst for its expansion.

While roads, sewers, water lines and pumping stations are sexy, they are what is needed to continue the growth of Osage  or any town for that matter.

Each time we return to town, there seems to be a new industry settling in and this time was no exception. This doesnt just occur by happenstance  it is the product of planning and hard work by so many.

As we hear of the dying rust belt and drive through small towns literally disappearing, the contrast in Osage is stark.

You see a new public safety complex, a repurposed library into City Hall, a new public library, state of the art hospital/clinic, new ball fields, expanded school and beautiful Main Street.

You see new establishments such as Teluwut, Emersons and The Flower Gallery that could easily be found on a main street in a hipster, Vermont village setting.

Our dad would be the first to tell you he played but a small part in this. And thats is really the point of this letter  to say a thank you, on behalf of him, to the many people, past and present, who worked in tandem to make Osage a wonderful place.

He loved the camaraderie of the many dedicated folks who he worked with (though I am sure there were a few he could have done without.)

To the generation of young Osagians soon making their way into the world, take with you your ambition and drive as it will serve you well. But bring with you your compassion, caring and decency as it will serve the world well.

A simple example  as we prepared our fathers house to receive lots of guests for the funeral, we awoke on an unusually hot Sunday morning to no air conditioning. We called Wright Plumbing and Heating but only got their answering machine.

Five minutes later, I got a phone call from Doug, Yes, he heard the news about my father and wanted to help. All his guys, as was he, were away on vacation.

He personally drove from Clear Lake to our house to fix the AC  probably six hours round trip.

I was stunned.

This may occur every day in rural Iowa, but I assure you it doesnt happen every in suburban NYC. Osage does have great infrastructure and perhaps its best is its human infrastructure.

Now sure how often we will ever get back to Osage now, but we will always have so many great memories. One can travel the world and see many amazing things, but nothing can beat a stroll through Spring Park or a trip to Stans on a warm June evening for cheeseballs and broasted chicken.

Goodspeed until we see you again.

Debbie Patterson, Bancroft; Sandi Anderson, Riceville; Karen Slagle, Virginia Beach, Va.; and Bill Bollinger, Monclair, N.J.
A roundup of state government and Capitol news items of interest for Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016:

SPECIAL SENATE ELECTION: Gov. Terry Branstad signed a proclamation Wednesday directing a special election to be held on Dec. 27 in Iowa Senate District 45 following the recent death of state Sen. Joe Seng. The Davenport Democrat and veterinarian died recently after a battle with cancer at age 69. In setting the special election to fill the Senate District 45 vacancy, Branstad said he considers Nov. 8 the best date for the special election -- which would coincide with the general election -- in order to ensure high voter turnout and save Scott County taxpayers the expense of another election. However, he noted that Iowa Code allows the county auditor to prevent a special election from occurring the same day of a general election if the county auditor believes there are undue difficulties with administering both elections. The Scott County auditor informed the governors office that she believed a special election on Nov. 8 would cause undue difficulties. Based on that information, the governor set a Dec. 27 date for the special election in Senate District 45, which comprises portions of Scott County.

FUEL PRICES DIPPING: The average price of unleaded gasoline in Iowa fell two cents a gallon this week, closing at $2.19 according to AAA. The pump price is 14 cents a gallon lower than one year ago and two pennies below the national average. Retail diesel fuel prices in Iowa were one cent lower with a statewide average of $2.36 per gallon  a dime cheaper than one year ago. The national average for diesel is also $2.36 per gallon. The state Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship says propane prices were unchanged from last month with a statewide average of $.95 per gallon, while home heating oil rose three cents from last months figures to a statewide average of $1.89 a gallon and natural gas prices rose two cents to end the week at $3.08/MMbtu.

IOWA TO HONOR ACTRESS JEAN SEBERG: Gov. Terry Branstad and the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs announced Wednesday that plan to honor the late Hollywood legend Jean Seberg. The Marshalltown native who became an actress, an activist and a fashion icon will be the focus of the departments next Hollywood Backstories event in Des Moines next month. A free screening of the documentary Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg will be offered as part of Hollywood Backstories: Remembering Jean Seberg at 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22, at the State Historical Museum of Iowa, 600 E. Locust St. in Des Moines. Sixty years ago, Seberg won a worldwide talent search for the title role in the movie Saint Joan, which made her an overnight star. Over her career, Seberg  who died at age 40 -- starred in 34 films in Hollywood and Europe, including Breathless, Lilith, Paint Your Wagon opposite Clint Eastwood, and Airport. Visit www.iowaculture.gov or call 515-281-5111 for more information.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS RELAY SERVICES: The Iowa Utilities Board reviewed and approved a contract with Hamilton Relay, Inc., of Aurora, Neb., this week regarding its request for proposals to provide Iowas Telecommunications Relay Service --, known as Relay Iowa -- and Iowa Captioned Telephone Relay Service -- known as CapTel -- plus associated outreach services. IUB officials say Hamilton was selected in accordance with the state Department of Administrative Services formal competitive bidding process. The contract for these services will begin Jan. 1, 2017, and run through Dec. 31, 2019, with a potential three-year extension that may be granted at the sole discretion of the board. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires telephone companies to provide TRS throughout the United States. In 1991 the Iowa legislature gave the Iowa Utilities Board the authority and the responsibility to establish and administer the TRS for Iowa. Iowas relay services provide individuals who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, deaf-blind, or have difficulty speaking the opportunity to participate in vital two-way communications with hearing persons for everyday calls.
DES MOINES  Gov. Terry Branstad has set a special election for Dec. 27 to fill the state Senate seat left open by the death of Sen. Joe Seng, D-Davenport.

Meanwhile, two Democratic lawmakers, Reps. Jim Lykam and Cindy Winckler, said Wednesday that they plan to seek the partys nomination for the seat.

Seng, who was not on the ballot this year, died last Friday after a two-year battle with brain cancer. His funeral will be Saturday.

The governors office said Wednesday that he preferred to have the special election the same day as the Nov. 8 general election in order to ensure higher voter turnout and save money. Scott County Auditor Roxanna Moritz objected.

Roland Caldwell, operations manager for the auditors office, said that ballots for the general election have already been printed, and a special election on the same date would have forced the office to miss the deadline to mail overseas ballots for the 20 precincts within the 45th Senate District. He also said a Nov. 8 date would have given those voters less time to cast absentee ballots.

Early and absentee voting for the general election begins Sept. 29, and Caldwell estimated the new ballots wouldnt be ready until mid-October.

We didnt think that was fair, he said.

He also said there were questions about what the nomination deadlines would be.

Branstads office said that because of a six-week blackout period around the general election, the earliest a special election it could be held was December. Governor spokesman Ben Hammes said the 27th would allow maximum time for the auditor to prepare and distribute ballots.

The 45th Senate District is heavily Democratic, and it isnt clear whom Republicans might field as a candidate. Scott County Republican Party Chair Judy Davidson said Wednesday the party is working on it and would likely have somebody on the ballot.

The state Senate is nearly evenly divided. Before Sengs death, the Democrats held a 26-23 seat edge.

The Dec. 27 special election date also will allow Lykam and Winckler to seek the Senate seat without any affect on their ability to run for re-election for their House seats on Nov. 8.

Had the special election been set for Nov. 8, they could not have appeared on both ballots, according to the Iowa Secretary of States Office.

Lykam and Winckler are both running unopposed for their House seats in the general election.

Now, it will be up to the central committee members within each party in the Senate district to choose their respective nominees. Its not clear yet when that will happen.

The 45th Senate District includes much of west Davenport, along with the town of Buffalo. Seng represented the area since 2003.
BRITT  Britts City Council will discuss changes to the citys animal control ordinance next month.

A proposed animal control ordinance was supposed to be discussed Tuesday but was delayed as two council members were absent.

It covers abuse, adequate care, an animal control advisory board, cruelty, neglect and nuisance animals, among other issues. It does not address breed-specific bans.

The one that has been proposed is not breed-specific but it is not clear if council is going to keep it that way or not, Britt City Administrator Shell Anderson said in an email.

The city has an existing animal control ordinance with a vicious dog ordinance banning pit bulls.

Our (current) ordinance now bans pit bulls but a committee was created to propose a new ordinance, Anderson said.

In July, the council directed law enforcement to enforce the citys pit bull ban, which had not been enforced for years.

That decision drew backlash from pit bull owners in Britt and North Iowa.

The council next month agreed to delay enforcing a community ban on the breed.

Ordinance discussion is scheduled for an Oct. 4 meeting.
MASON CITY | A woman hurt when her car hit a pole at a rural Mason City railroad crossing early Wednesday has been released from the hospital.

Charleyann Hemann, 38, was driving east on 300th Street when her 2001 Oldsmobile Silhouette van crashed into a large pole at the Union Pacific crossing about 5:15 a.m., according to a Cerro Gordo County Sheriff's Office statement.

The crash happened about 1.5 miles west of Highway 65.

A Mason City Fire Department ambulance crew took Hemann to Mercy Medical Center- North Iowa. Deputies said her injuries did not appear to be life-threatening.

A hospital spokeswoman said Hemann was treated and released.

-- Molly Montag.
STORM LAKE | A 16-year-old Storm Lake High School student was arrested Tuesday after police said he distributed illegal mushrooms to another student at school.

According to a news release from the Storm Lake Police Department, police took a report Friday involving a juvenile male ingesting psilocybin mushrooms while at Storm Lake High School.

Psilocybin mushrooms, also known as "magic mushrooms," are an illegal substance that causes hallucinations.

Upon investigation, police learned he had acquired the mushrooms at the high school from another student, who was identified as a 16-year-old male living in Storm Lake.

The juvenile who ingested the mushrooms was taken to Buena Vista Regional Medical Center Friday afternoon for treatment and was later released, the release said.

Police on Tuesday arrested the 16-year-old male suspect and charged him with delivery of psilocybin, a class C felony.

The juvenile, whose name has not been released, was processed and transported to the Youth Detention Facility in Cherokee, Iowa, the release said. The case has been forwarded to the Juvenile Court Authority.

-- Ian Richardson is a staff writer for the Sioux City Journal. Like the Globe Gazette, the Journal is owned by Lee Enterprises.
MASON CITY | Police spent Wednesday sorting through stolen items recovered after a Mason City man was arrested for burglary charges.

Jamie Lee Evenson, 29, was charged with five counts of felony third-degree burglary.

Mason City police were called about 7 p.m. Wednesday to a report someone had broken into a parked car in the 1000 block of South Illinois Avenue and then pedaled away on a bicycle, according to a statement from the Mason City Police Department.

Officers say the suspect, Evenson, was later arrested in the 300 block of South Louisiana Avenue.

Mason City Police Capt. Mike McKelvey said investigators spent time Wednesday combing through items, which they suspect were stolen, that were recovered in the area.

They believe the items were taken late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, he said. Police did not say what the items were.

"At this time we're just trying to determine who the owners are of all the property and where it came from," he said.

The case remained under investigation on Wednesday afternoon.

Evenson remained jailed Wednesday afternoon at the Cerro Gordo County Jail.

-- Molly Montag
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Here, have a handful of irony.

The Skittles photo featured in a controversial tweet by Donald Trump Jr. on Monday was taken from the Flickr page of a former refugee, according to the BBC.

The Trump campaign suffered immediate backlash for the tweet, which showed a bowl of Skittles with the phrase "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem."

More for you Trump likens Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles

The BBC reported the photographer who took the Skittles image is David Kittos, of Guildford, United Kingdom.

Kittos told the BBC he posted the photo on his Flickr page in January 2010 and didn't give Trump Jr. permission to use it.

"I don't support his politics and I would never take his money to use it," Kittos told the BBC.

Kittos says he is a former refugee.

"I am now a British citizen but I am Greek-Cypriot by birth and in 1974 I was a refugee because of the Turkish occupation," Kittos said. "I was six years old. We lived in the area of Cyprus that is now under Turkish military control. We had to leave everything behind overnight. Our property and our possessions."

The photographer wasn't the only one reacting to Trump Jr.'s tweet. Click through the gallery above for some of the best Skittles memes on Twitter.
CHARLES CITY  North Iowa students pitched ideas and assisted businesses at Partner-Palooza Tuesday, part of the Iowa BIG North project.

The Iowa BIG program allows students to get academic credit for working on collaborative projects with businesses and local industries.

This is the opportunity to make kids aware of what problems are out there and see if they share the same passion, Iowa BIG North Director of Strategic Partnership Mike Kuennen said.

Iowa BIG North is made up of more than 30 juniors and seniors from Charles City, Osage, Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock and New Hampton.

Kuennen, an industrial technology teacher at New Hampton, is excited about students from different schools interacting and networking before college and the workplace. One of the key components of the program is helping students gain real world experience.

No one has a job where for 45 minutes they work on presentation skills and 45 minutes they go to math class, Kuennen said. Iowa BIG North is interdisciplinary where its like a career.

At Partner-Palooza, local businesses pitch ideas to students and ask for their assistance to solve a problem. From designing new websites to marketing, students will have their choice in what they want to help with.

What Im super excited about is the opportunity for kids passion to direct their education, Kuennen said. Rather than taking a public speaking calls where the topics are chosen for them or theres a limited scope on what they can present on, they are now going to be presenting ideas that they are passionate about to real world audiences.

Participating businesses and organizations pitched their needs to students who asked questions. Students also pitched ideas for projects and needs they see in their communities.

Charles City Area Development is looking for students to help with their web redesign.

We need your creativity and talent, Paul Coonrod said.

They want to be user friendly and to showcase the opportunities the city has to offer.

Fox River Mills, a sock manufacturer in Oasge, wants to launch a new website promoting their business.

Juniors Dylan Parsons and Carter West liked getting out of class to work on real-life projects.

I want the experience of getting out in the community and working on projects, not just hypothetical school projects, Parsons said.

West believes that the program will truly help him in the future.

I like to do stuff that will set me up for success in my future, West said.

Gov. Terry Branstads STEM Advisory Council awarded $25,000 STEM grant to the four districts to encourage work between students and businesses.
MOGADISHU, Somalia  Tears filled Amina Nurs eyes as she cuddled her frail-looking child with a sunken chest.

She and her family returned to Somalia five months ago after several years in a refugee camp in neighboring Kenya, but she regrets that now.

We decided to return home voluntarily, but that was a wrong decision, the mother of six said.

The small money they gave us ran out, and since then we have no assistance to survive.

Nur is among thousands of Somalis who fled at the height of a devastating famine which killed over half a million people in this Horn of Africa nation in 2013.

But now they are hungry again.

A new U.N. report says 5 million people in Somalia are not getting enough food. Thats more than 40 percent of the population. It blames, in part, poor rainfall in southern and central Somalia, the breadbasket of the country.

The report released Tuesday says the number of people who are food insecure has increased by 300,000 since February.

More than 300,000 children under 5 are acutely malnourished.

More than half of those without enough food have been displaced from their homes, sometimes multiple times, the report says.

More than 1 million people inside Somalia are displaced after years of violence, famine and attacks by homegrown al-Shabab extremists.

The al Qaeda-linked group continues to carry out attacks in the capital and elsewhere.
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JOHANNESBURG  Villagers and elephants are competing for scarce water in a remote part of Namibia, one of a minority of African nations that will push for the right to sell millions of dollars worth of ivory at an international wildlife meeting that starts Saturday.

We at times have to go without water when the elephants are at the water points and wells the whole day, villager Iningirua Musaso told the Namibia Press Agency this month.

Conflict between wildlife and some rural communities, particularly during the worst drought in southern Africa in several decades, is often overshadowed by grim news about the continent-wide slaughter of elephants by poachers.

The number of Africas savannah elephants dropped by about 30 percent from 2007 to 2014, to 352,000, because of poaching, according to a recent study.

The southern African countries that want to sell their ivory stockpiles argue that its OK to profit from elephants so that their people see wildlife as a natural resource worth protecting.

African countries, however, are divided over how to conserve elephants. While Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa favor selling ivory stockpiles, they are opposed by about 30 nations that want to tighten an international ban on the ivory trade.

The worlds main ivory consumer, China, plans to close its domestic market. The United States has announced a near-total ban on the domestic sale of African elephant ivory.

Namibia has said it does not expect the discussions at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, to go in its favor.

South Africa supports Namibian and Zimbabwean proposals for international ivory sales, said Edna Molewa, the countrys environment minister. Southern African countries with robust elephant populations should not be treated the same way as other nations hit hard by elephant poaching, she said.

South Africa has about 27,000 elephants, Zimbabwe has 82,000 and Namibia has 20,000 or more. The countries say they can make millions of dollars by selling ivory stockpiles.

Some 3,500 delegates are expected to attend the meeting of the CITES group, which has 183 member countries and seeks to ensure that international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. Proposals that are put to a vote require a two-thirds majority to be accepted.

CITES allowed a one-time sale of elephant ivory that was completed in 2009. In that sale, ivory from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe went to China and Japan. The sale of 102 tons of ivory raised $15.4 million for elephant conservation, according to CITES.

Frank Pope, operations manager at Save the Elephants, a Kenyan group, said elephant populations will suffer if African countries dont unite to oppose the ivory trade.

If one of the nations that wants to sell ivory decides to sell ivory and manages to put that onto the market, that creates a smoke screen for an illegal trade to flourish across the whole of the rest of the continent, he said.
JAKARTA, Indonesia  Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science.

Last years fires in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997, burning about 645,000 acres of forests and peatland and sending haze across the region for weeks. Many were deliberately set by companies to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

The study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Harvard and Columbia researchers estimated the amount of health-threatening fine particles, often referred to as PM2.5, released by the fires that burned from July to October and tracked their spread across Southeast Asia using satellite observations.

In Indonesia, a spokesman for the countrys disaster mitigation agency said the research could be baseless or they have the wrong information. Indonesia officially counted 24 deaths from the haze including people killed fighting the fires.

Singapores Ministry of Health said short-term exposure to haze will generally not cause serious health problems. The study was not reflective of the actual situation, it said, and the overall death rate hadnt changed last year. In Malaysia, Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said officials are still studying the research, which is computer generated, not based on hard data.

The dry season fires are an annual irritant in Indonesias relations with its neighbors Singapore and Malaysia and the finding of a huge public health burden has the potential to worsen those strains. The 2015 burning season, which was worsened by El Ninos dry conditions, also tainted Indonesias reputation globally by releasing a vast amount of atmosphere-warming carbon.

The Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to prosecute companies and individuals who set fires and also strengthened its fire-fighting response. This years fires have affected a smaller area in large part due to unseasonal rains.

Jamal Hisham Hashim, research fellow with the International Institute for Global Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable.

He said decades of air pollution research that followed Londons killer smog in 1952 has established the relationship between fine particulate matter and premature deaths, particularly in people with existing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

The pollution level that occurred during the haze is severe enough to cause premature deaths. That is indisputable, he said. The study is a wake-up call.
BEIRUT  Volunteers were still dousing the fires from an overnight attack on an aid convoy that killed 20 civilians as the U.N. announced Tuesday it was suspending overland aid deliveries in Syria, jeopardizing food and medical security for millions of besieged and hard-to-reach civilians.

Confusion continued about who struck the convoy, but the White House insisted it was either Russia or Syria. White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said either way, the U.S. held Russia responsible, because it was Russias job under the week-old cease-fire to prevent Syrias air force from striking in areas where humanitarian aid was being transported.

All of our information indicates clearly that this was an air strike, Rhodes said, rejecting the claim by Russias Defense Ministry that a cargo fire caused the damage. Both Russia and Syria have denied carrying out the bombing.

Within one minute of the strike, the U.S. tracked a Russian-made Su-24 directly over the region of the attack, U.S. officials said. Even that revelation failed to definitively implicate Russia because both the Russian and Syrian air forces fly the Su-24, although the U.S. officials said there were strong indications that the jet was flown by the Russian military.

The officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the incident.

Witnesses described the Monday attack on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent warehouse and convoy in the rebel-held town of Uram al-Kubra in Aleppo province as prolonged and intense, saying the aerial bombardment continued as rescue workers rushed to pull the wounded from the flaming wreckage and rubble.

The convoy was part of a routine interagency dispatch operated by the Syrian Red Crescent, which U.N. officials said was delivering assistance to 78,000 people in Uram al-Kubra, west of Aleppo city. It was carrying food, medicines, emergency health kits, IV fluids, and other essentials supplied by the U.N. and the World Health Organization.

Local paramedic and media activist Mohammad Rasoul, who was among the first to arrive at the scene, said more than 100 tons of food, medicine and baby formula had gone up in flames. He said 18 of the convoys 31 trucks were completely destroyed.

The attack erased the convoy from the face of the Earth, Rasoul said.

Ive never seen anything like this attack, he said.
Standing in front of Robert Williams art is reminiscent of an awe-inspiring rock show; bright and hardcore, his work is the visual equivalent a guitar riffs crescendo. Williams canvases are aesthetic explosions and hes created 60 of them for his upcoming show at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Slang Aesthetics.

Originally, Williams created the work with another destination in mindThe Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City, the very same gallery that propelled geniuses like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to super stardom. "Shafrazi is a very famous character, he was very good friends with Andy Warhol," Williams says. When Shafrazi lost his lease, however, Williams decided to show (rather than sell) the work, and its first appearance at the Barnsdale Park Municipal Museum in 2015 set attendance records at the 60-year-old institutuion on the outskirts of Hollywood.

The collection, now headed to CCA, utilizes new-school imagery with fairly old-school methodology, an intersection between Williams' forward-thinking aesthetic and knowledgeable reverence for art history. "They are fine art oil paintings painted on good linen," he says, "just like they did 400 years ago." Think radical comic-book imagery painted with the skill and technique of a guy like Monet.

Williams' accomplishments are enough to make any human feel mortal, and his laurels rest in many branches of the art world: from cover art for Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction to pushing an agenda of social evolution through his drawings at Zap Comix and, ultimately, the founding of Juxtapoz Magazine, the number one selling art magazine in the world. Williams, by the way, happens to be a New Mexican, born and raised in Albuquerque.

"I moved to LA in 1963 to go to Los Angeles City College to major in fine arts, and that's when I learned how off-track I really was," Williams says. "I was at odds. I really wanted to be a remarkable fine arts artist and be a realist." Abstract expressionism ruled the art world at the time, and that made it particularly hard for him to find a niche that would allow him to do both.

In the late 1960s, Williams worked as the art director for custom car legend Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. "Custom car shows were very big in the '50s and '60s, and they are very big now," Williams tells SFR. "These were wild extravaganzas with wild creations of automobiles, and Ed Roth was the wildest."

Roth's world was bohemian to say the least, and it introduced Williams to a slew of creative types. He met psychedelic poster artists, which opened the door to underground comics.

"Anything goes as long as you have a wild imagination," Williams says of non-mainstream comics. "They were one of the key factors in social change, and the premier underground comic was the very first one, started by Robert Crumb, Zap Comix, and I was fortunate enough to be one of seven artists in the comic and we all shared ownership."

The comics scene satiated Williams to a certain point but, he says, "In the '70s and '80s, I was still trying to find galleries that would take my wild paintings; paintings were supposed to be sedate and caring and color-conscious, and I was doing paintings that were screaming."

Luckily for Williams, his intense works would interact with the looming punk rock explosion of the '70s and '80s. "The punk rock movement was nothing like the hippie movement," he says. "The punk rock movement was a revolutionary, energetic movement that hated society, and would do anything."

He began to show work at after-hours clubs in Los Angeles during the storied heat of the punk uprising, and his creations were well-received. "My paintings were a total success. I couldn't paint them fast enough. Wild colors, gratuitous sex and violence and anything went.  For the first time in my life, I had a painting peer group."

And still, the art world at large shunned him.

"Art Forum did some writing on menot positive, but no one else did." Williams reminisces. "Art in America wouldn't deal with me, even though I had good friends writing for them, [and] they just turned their back on the fact that there was this enormous energy breaking through in the United Statesso I started a magazine called Juxtapoz."

The magazine promotes alternative art forms, like graffiti, tattoos and gig posters, giving a legitimacy and voice to art not destined for museums. Born in 1994 as a quarterly publication, Williams says, "we decided to have the art be the thing that fills up the page."



Robert Williams: Slang Aesthetics

6-8 pm Friday Sept. 23. Free.

Center for Contemporary Arts,

1050 Old Pecos Trail,

982-1338

Santa Fe Reporter
Whether or not you realize it, youre already intimately familiar with the work of French concept artist Stephan Martiniere. Youve seen his creations in films like Star Wars and Suicide Squad, in the three-dimensional Imagineering work of Disney theme parks and in popular video games like John Woos Stanglehold and Fallout 4. Martiniere even served as the lead art director for 2011 game RAGE, a post-apocalyptic universe that looks absolutely stunning to this day thanks in part to developer ids proprietary id Tech engine, but also Martinieres brilliantly creative ability to realize sweeping, beautiful works of art and world-building within the sci-fi and fantasy genres. If ever there were an argument for science fiction and/or video games as art, Stephan Martinieres portfolio is it.



Martiniere grew up during a golden age of comic books and rapidly became obsessed with their innovative style and creative processes. "During the '60s, there was so much out there in comics that was unbelievable, and I was always attracted to drawing and always thought I would become a comic book artist," he says. "It wasn't until later, when I was in art school in Parisand I was drawing comics then, just not professionallythat I jumped into animation, and I thought this seemed logical as they were just like comic books, only moving."

Martiniere was a natural when it came to animation, and it ultimately led to jobs in Japan and the United States that would change his life forever. He fully believes that, had he stayed in his home country, he would have fallen into comics by default, but small jobs led to larger and better opportunities and a diversification of mediums. The natural evolution of his career led to early 3D video game art design on the Myst series which, in turn, allowed him more creative freedom as he steadily built a name for himself.

"When you hire an art director, you hire someone to come up with a vision from the smallest props to the largest environments, and I would approach video games thinking, 'How do I take a game like this and make it super-cool and super-interesting for everyone? How do I approach it like a film?'" Martiniere tells SFR. "They want you for your sensibility and what you can bring creatively; the only restriction is based in technology, and once you understand the limitation, you work within it.  I always tried to get involved with games where there was enough tech for me to make a difference artistically."

The luxury of artistic and creative freedom often leads to an artist's best work, and in Martiniere's case, it allowed for contributions to the aforementioned projects among countless others and the ability to be more choosy about his projects. This is how he came to work with id, Lucasfilm and others.

These days, Martiniere (who recently moved to Santa Fe full-time) is more ensconced within the world of publishing and the designing of book covers, a field he says he loves because artists can maintain ownership of their original works. He also enjoys a challenge.

"I've done over 150 books so far over the last 15 years," he says. "It's usually something with sci-fi, though sometimes I do covers that are more traditional, but I always approach it from a graphics standpoint. It's almost like doing advertising, only it's more abstract, because you're creating an image that has to be very compelling  It's like, here's a story and you need one image that will attract a reader to open and read the book, and that can also convey an entire story just in that image."

Martiniere's body of work can now be seen locally in his current show at Pop Gallery. Titled Beyond the Horizon, the collection provides an overview of the 15- plus years he's spent as a professional artist and features numerous pieces from his years in publishing. And though his work has been unwittingly viewed by millions, this is the first time Martiniere's creations will be front and center on their own, the focus of attention. Showing in a gallery has also allowed the artist to cut across a wider variety of mediums including canvas, plexi, aluminum and more. "I wanted to create different ways of printing and offering clients different options," Martiniere continues. "These are things I don't normally do when I offer my work as smaller prints."

Beyond the Horizon provides an exciting contrast to the usual Santa Fe art fare and simultaneously flips the script on genres that have historically been considered nerdy. It's been up for several weeks already, but Martiniere will be on hand to discuss his efforts at a special reception this Friday. "There's a wealth of beautiful art out there that isn't necessarily connected to what people see when they think of 'gallery' art," Martiniere points out. "I really appreciate Pop wanting to take the risk, and I think more people need to do that, because people change, curiosities change and there are new intereststhere's no reason why something with a sci-fi or fantasy subject cannot be relevant; there's something to be said there that is important."



Beyond the Horizon; Futurescapes by Stephan Martiniere

5 pm Friday Sept. 23. Free.

Pop Gallery,

125 Lincoln Ave.,

Ste. 111,

820-0788.

Santa Fe Reporter
From the outside, the complexity of the way a single family operates as an organism is unintelligible. Diagramming its biology with a few laughs and a few tears, however, has long been a plan for movies with at least moderate commercial success, and so appears the fate of this one.

The Hollars probably have something in common with your family. Though the film's title might evoke images of swampy coastline or deep Appalachian valleys, the family is really just a melting pot white Midwestern tribe in a city that's never mentioned along that vast highway that cuts the breadbasket of the nation, I-70. Meet Don, Ron, John and their mom (Sally). Dad's business is failing; his rock of ages, Sally, is struggling with her weight; son No. 1 is back home in the den when he's not stalking his ex-wife and Son No. 2 is bummed out even though he's got it all going on far away in New York City.

But chances are, one of the other commonalities you'll find is the sudden, scary hospital stay. When Mrs. Hollar is diagnosed with a brain tumor and the menfolk gather round, their coping strategies run the gamut from a slap fight in a hospital room between the den-dwelling, off-kilter kid (Sharlto Copley, District 9) and the limp father (Richard Jenkins, Jack Reacher) to a touching three-part rendition of one of her favorite songs as she's wheeled off to the operating room.

Most of the tear-jerking moments end with laughter drying out their edge, but there's enough unsettled to keep it real. The bond between mother and the good son, John (John Krasinski, The Office, who also directs) is endearing with a bedside honesty as Margo Martindale plays the woman who's holding up many a man.

Meanwhile, Anna Kendrick's Becca brings her own brand of smart, strong and altogether lovely, weighing in at a formidable 8-plus-months pregnant and full of insight about helping a fearful Krasinski figure out how to embrace his future and that of their new family. Since we all heard enough of it in Pitch Perfect, she holds off on the singing.

The deadpan delivery of brain surgeon Dr. Fong (Randall Park, The Interview) is a notable success in its comedic effect without leaving the bounds of doctorly credibility. When the brothers grill him about the surgery he'll perform and Ron wants to talk about karate, Park's incredulous face says it all.

Although it's full of the circle-of-life predictability you'd expect from the emergency surgery plus the new one on the way, director Krasinski and writer Jim Strouse (New York, I Love You) manage to keep the story from feeling corny. If this is an example of the kind of storytelling we can expect from Krasinski's future directorial efforts, we could be settling in for some good stuff.



The Hollars

Directed by John Krasinski

With Krasinski, Martindale, Kendrick and Park

Violet Crown,

PG-13,

88 min.

Santa Fe Reporter
When the legendary Robin Williams went dramatic (like in 1982's The World According to Garp or 1989's Dead Poets Society), the results wound up stunning. When Jerry Lewis attempts to broaden his resume and do the same, however, it mostly winds up sad and wanting.

Lewis aims for your tears in Max Rose, a film that debuted at Cannes in 2013 but never really made it wide until April of this year. He stars as the titular Rose, an aging jazz pianist who discovers shortly before his wife's death that she may have had an affair in the late '50s. As he grapples with feelings of loneliness and jealousy, his son (The Usual Suspects' Kevin Pollak) and granddaughter (Kerry Bishe of the disastrous final season of sitcom Scrubs) try to lend a hand, but he ultimately winds up obsessed with his wife's potential fling and rallies against their love constantly. It's annoying.

Lewis, who generally only appeals to those too young to understand why his comedy is terrible or to the French, tries his very best to create something memorable, but his character winds up bisected into lines delivered far too- hammily or a confused silence that masquerades as an almost passable performance. We're never shown enough of Max's backstory to build up an affinity for the character, and we only see hints of his son and granddaughter's own troubles that might have been better explained had one of them looked directly into the camera and told us, "Sometimes life is hard."

There is, perhaps, a moral about communication or the true nature of love in there somewhere, it's just buried under so many tropes about how getting old sucks or how families aren't perfect that we don't bother to go looking. Lewis probably took this role in a last-ditch attempt to be remembered as anything other than the "Hey nice LADY!" guy, but as the thin plot unfolds and Rose's search for answers limps along, the only thing worth gleaning is that closure doesn't actually exist.

Max Rose

DeVargas, NR,

83 min.

Santa Fe Reporter
MASON CITY  Good Shepherds head nurse testified Tuesday she believes a former resident received proper care at the nursing home.

The womans family is suing the facility for $10 million in a wrongful death civil lawsuit.

Director of Nursing Services Shari Dunn testified for the defense that she was not concerned with alleged gaps in Maria Savas OBriens records, including a one-month gap where there were no narrative nursing notes  documentation by staff of a patients medical condition and care recommendations.

Daughter says she was not informed of multiple falls MASON CITY  A woman who helped file a $10 million civil lawsuit against Good Shepherd said 

Witness gives Good Shepherd failing grade for level of care MASON CITY  Witness testimony claimed possible medication overdoses and a failure to follow

The alleged gap occurred shortly before OBrien experienced a major fall in March 2014.

There was nothing going on ... that is the only interpretation I can make for that, Dunn said. I still feel the basis of her (overall) chart is accurate and reliable.

Good Shepherd nursing records show Savas OBriens ability to eat and drink independently had deteriorated by April 2014  three weeks after the fall on March 12, 2014.

Dunn said she believed that timing was coincidental.

According to Dunn, Savas OBriens children never talked directly with her about their concerns over their mothers care.

If thats what they saw, I cant disagree with them, Dunn said.

Savas OBrien was living at Good Shepherd Nursing Home in March 2015 when she was admitted to hospital care. She died of dehydration in April 2015.

The familys lawsuit alleging negligence and breach of contract against Good Shepherd was filed in February 2015. After OBrien died, the lawsuit was changed to include the wrongful death allegation.

Savas OBriens children are seeking more than $10 million in damages.

Last week, a former nursing home administrator now acting as a consultant for nursing homes testified Savas OBrien developed avoidable conditions such as severe weight loss, skin problems and falls during her stay, and recounted evidence of mice droppings and bedbugs in her room.

Other witness testimony claimed possible medication overdoses and a failure to follow a care plan.

A specialist in hospice and palliative medicine testified he believed a significant fall in March 2014 at Good Shepherd triggered a downward cascade in her health.

Savas OBrien ran the former Poodle Lounge on North Federal Avenue for decades and was active in Mason Citys Greek community and the Holy Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church.

The trials testimony is expected to continue through Thursday.
When first responders in Santa Fe County encounter someone in the throes of a mental health crisis, the choices for where to go next are severely limited.

There's the emergency room at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, where workers treat more patients for mental illness than any condition. Or there's the county jail, where approximately 67 percent of those incarcerated have mental illness.

"Those are the two options," says Juan Rios, spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department.

Neither is ideal. Emergency room visits are expensive, and taxpayers often end up footing the bill. Jails by definition aren't designed for treating people with mental disorders.

"That's just not a good way to spend community dollars, having them end up in criminal justice settings or high-end medical centers," says Pamela Hyde, former head of the national Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

For years, advocates have pushed for a third option: a place, known as a crisis triage center, for people with mental illness to center themselves before re-entering their community. Such a place could offer refuge for an addict on the cusp of relapse, a schizophrenic experiencing a psychotic episode or anyone else with mental illness who needs time and space to settle down.

Santa Fe County officials recently devised a plan to build a crisis triage center. Voters will decide in November whether to commit taxpayer funds to making that plan a reality.

Two questions on the November election ballot address the possibility of establishing a crisis triage center in the area. One asks voters whether the county should borrow up to $5 million to fund community health facilities. (One of five bond questions on the ballot.) The other, this one non-binding, proposes increasing gross receipts taxes by .125 percent to create ongoing revenue for mental health services.

"I feel that with misdemeanorstrespassing, sitting on a bench, urinating in an alleythose offenders would be better served going to this crisis triage center," says Dr. Merritt Ayad, director of mental health at the county's Adult Detention Center. In 1999, Ayad helped set up a mental health emergency services system in New Orleans. "That's better than spending months here, because it could actually help prevent them from coming back in the future."

Inspired by facilities in Tucson, Arizona, San Antonio, Texas, and Marion County, Oregon, planners envision a center open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Service would be available to individuals for up to 23 hours at a time. Rooms would be furnished with recliners, as opposed to beds, to emphasize the short-term nature of triage stays.

Once a patient becomes stabilized, staff would assess what caused them to tick in the first place and attempt to connect that person to appropriate services. More severe mental health issues could send someone to the 12-bed mental health unit at Christus St. Vincent or maybe the Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas. (Behavioral health and mental health are interchangeable terms.) For ease of access, planners are looking for a spot near the hospital, according to Rachel O'Connor, county director of health and human services.

Crisis triage centers for years have been part of the service array in communities across the country, but recently the facilities have become a "growing phenomenon," according to Hyde. New Mexico cities started showing interest more than a decade ago, but actually getting a center up and running has proven challenging. Snagged by insufficient funding, a crisis center in Dona Ana County has remained unopened for years.

Santa Fe County does not yet have a definitive timeline for its proposed center, O'Connor says. County health administrators are currently working on a business plan to look at potential funding streams for the center on top of tax revenue. State funding and grants from private foundations are possibilities, O'Connor says.

"I'm glad that this is finally happening, but it still doesn't cover everything," says Mary Lou Ortega-Shaw, president of the Santa Fe chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. Ortega-Shaw says the 23-hour service period isn't long enough for some crises and would like to see more long-term options.

The triage center proposal adds to a growing list of mental health initiatives local governments have pushed in recent years. The city in 2013 enacted Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, a program that directs low-level drug offenders straight to treatment, rather than jail. And last year, the county launched a Mobile Crisis Response Team, a program run by Presbyterian Medical Services (not Presbyterian Healthcare Services, the primary care organization) that dispatches therapists straight to people in crisis.

The proposal for a crisis triage center stems from a four-county mental health summit, hosted by Santa Fe County in May at the Eldorado Hotel. Professionals from a wide array of fields, including healthcare, law enforcement and corrections, all provided input that organizers funneled into six priorities for mental health in the region. Crisis triage center services topped that list.

County commissioner Miguel Chavez, who organized the summit, says he took cues from a national movement called the Stepping Up Initiative, which aims to reduce the number of people with mental illnesses in jails. He says the 2013 behavioral health shakeup, in which the state's biggest mental health providers shuttered amid unsubstantiated accusations of fraud, put the onus on counties to help fill new service gaps.

For Chavez, it's personal. Around the time he joined the commission in 2011, an immediate family member was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The family member was recently incarcerated at the Adult Detention Center for missing a court date. Chavez says his family's experience with mental illness helps him put the issue into perspective and make this initiative a priority before he steps down next year.

He tells SFR, "As someone in that position, I felt like I couldn't hide it anymore. I couldn't sweep it under the rug, not just for myself, but the community."



Santa Fe Reporter
Not a lot of things motivate middle schoolers on a Monday morning, but when Steve Cox puts a butter knife to a carrot, cuing a sound effect squeal from his laptop, the kids light up. Cox is a Northern New Mexico College professor starting a science-focused mentoring program. Hands shoot into the air when he asks if kids want to try playing his vegetable orchestra. A trio of carrots and a jalapeno tethered to his laptop with electrical wires chime out the sounds of synthesizers when touched with a finger, provided a wire cable is in the other hand.

"In the future, we're not going to be interacting with computers with keyboards," he tells them. "We're going to be interacting in much more creative waysthat you guys are going to come up with."

This is Cox's second semester at the college in Espanola, but it didn't take long to spot a problem that's hardly unique to New Mexico: a shortage of women and Hispanics in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. Cox's quest to chip away at this issue has landed him in middle school classrooms to recruit students to a new science club. The goal is twofold: to engage students in hands-on ways to excite them about careers in STEM fields, like using Makey Makey to turn refrigerator detritus into a musical instrument, and establish a network of support that includes mentors just a few years older than them.

"Poverty has led to low educational aspirations and expectations that plague our entire community," he wrote in his proposal to the National Science Foundation. "As such, its disruption requires a collective effort from our entire community."



The National Science Foundation recently awarded him almost $300,000 to support the program, its goals of increasing the presence of local STEM mentors and its research questions around the effect that mentorship has both on the protege and the mentor.

Even before that financial support materialized, he started taking college kids into classrooms in nearby schools, but wanted to craft something sustained. This program joins 36 others selected for the first-ever NSF INCLUDES grants, a nationwide initiative to increase the presence of underrepresented groups, including women, Native Americans, African Americans, people from rural areas and those of low socioeconomic status.

"It's such a hard problem because of history, society and poverty," Cox says. "It's not something that we're going to solve in our little collective. It's not something that's going to get solved at Las Cruces. It's going to take a collective response."

A few weeks ago, after the National Science Foundation director toured Sen. Martin Heinrich through Espanola to discuss this program, the senator emerged with a pithy summation, Cox reports: "STEM is the ticket to the middle class."

The theory is to craft mentorships that hit a "sweet spot"a gap just broad enough that there's respect, but not so wide that trust is compromised.

"I'm a white guy from Chicagofor them to use my life experiences as their role model, that's a fantasy. But if I bring in kids who are alums of these schools, they've had the same cultural and financial constraints these kids have," Cox says. "A natural mentorsomeone from the same community, same socioeconomic conditionshas an easier time establishing trust, and without trust then we're just kind of peddling technology and saying, 'Get on the band wagon.'"

Mentorships will match four or five students per mentor and focus on letting kids experiment and investigate their own questions, practice exercising the courage to create, as well as collaboration, critical thinking and resourcefulness. That means building 21st-century skills, says Camille Ulibarri, an eighth grade science teacher at Pojoaque Valley Middle School and co-sponsor of the club there.

"That's why it needs to start with such low-level learners and such young kids  because I believe that creativity is stifled as they progress to 12th grade," she says. "If we can introduce this at a young age, keep that creativity really intact, really promote it from seventh to 12th grade, maybe, just maybe, as soon as they graduate, when they look into their college career to decide what they want to do, it is hopefully in a STEM field."

Thirty-one of her 170 students have expressed an interest in joining the cluband will go through an application process that includes obtaining a letter from a teacher and maintaining a 2.0 GPA.

Editions of this program will roll out at middle and high schools in Espanola, Pojoaque, McCurdy, El Rito and Embudo will reach into two libraries, one museum, Los Alamos National Laboratory and four local youth organizations.

Northern New Mexico College gets more inquiries for potential new hires than they have students enrolled in those programs, Cox told the seventh graders, so he's there to pique their curiosity. In those last minutes before the bell rings, when fidgeting and packing away notebooks usually takes over, he pulls up one of the projects designed with the programming software the club members will use. The image of a killer whale swims on to the screen, spirals once, and then hovers. In just a few moments, the students notice the whale follows the mouse pointer. The murmurs ramp up from vaguely amused to full-blown excitement. The hope is that it sticks.



Santa Fe Reporter
1

CANNABIS PLANT MAKES INAUGURAL APPEARANCE AT STATE FAIR EXHIBIT

And is reportedly forcibly removed because  plants are scary?

2

"WE ARE THE SEEDS: AN INDIGENOUS ART CELEBRATION" TO DEBUT IN SANTA FE RAILYARD NEXT AUGUST

Finally, the mutiny in the IFAM family goes public.

3

MIDTOWN WALMART TO SELL ALCOHOL

Thank goodness! You can't get that stuff just anywhere, you know.

4

OWNERS OF LORETTO CHAPEL FACE EXPANSION DELAYS AGAIN

Too bad, 'cause "Miracle Staircase Mall" had a real nice ring to it.

5

OPIOID MANUFACTURERS LOBBY FOR LOOSER DRUG RULES

The fox is in the henhouse and the chickens are addicted to smack.

6

GOVERNOR CONTINUES HER KICK TO BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY

Look! Over there! Criminals!

7

... AND STILL NO PLAN FOR FIXING STATE'S YAWNING BUDGET GAP

But you knew that already.

Santa Fe Reporter
Unemployment Still High

The states unemployment rate is

and the numbers keeping getting worse. In August, unemployment was at 6.6 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statisticsalmost two percentage points higher than the 4.9 percent national average and way above the 2.9 percent unemployment rate in South Dakota. At least its not the worst rate; Alaska topped New Mexico with 6.8 percent of workers claiming unemployment.

Lawmakers Will Consider Death Penalty Reinstatement During Special Session

State Rep. Monica Youngblood, R-Albuquerque, is going to sponsor Gov. Susana Martinez

in New Mexico during a yet-to-be-scheduled special session. The legislation isnt likely to get passed by the Democrat-controlled state senate, but Martinez and her team get to put lawmakers on the record about the issue before the Nov. 8 election.

Amber Widgery, a death penalty policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said no state has enacted a law to reinstate capital punishment after a legislative repeal over the last 40 years. "I haven't seen a reinstatement bill get traction in recent memory," she said.

Martinez Popularity Among the Lowest in the Country

The governors popularity continues to fall and now The governors popularity continues to fall and now shes ranked the 11th least popular governor in the US. Steve Terrell reports, There were some bright spots for Martinez in the poll. It showed that more people in New Mexico approve of her job performance than disapprove, so in the jargon of pollsters, shes above water. And the numbers are slightly better for the governor than some recent polls. According to the new poll, 50 percent of those who responded approve of Martinezs job performance. Forty-five percent disapprove.

State Fails to Collect Tax Revenue from Health Insurance Premiums

The state The state Office of the Superintendent of Insurance (OSI) should have collected more than $193 million between April 2010 and April 2015, according to the report. OSIs purpose is to collect premium taxes from insurers who do business in New Mexico. In the report, Keller noted that the $193 million total is based on a sample representing 26 percent of all premium taxes collected during the time period.



"The ultimate amount due to the State is likely to be far more than the sums identified in the Audit, Keller wrote. Drug Overdose Fatalities Continue to Rise in Santa Fe County

The New Mexico Health Department reports that drug overdose deaths dropped by 9 percent around most of New Mexico, but not in Other counties that saw a rise in fatal overdoses between 2014 and 2015 are Bernalillo, Chaves, Dona Ana, Eddy, Guadalupe, Los Alamos, Quay, Roosevelt, Sierra and Taos. Each reported an increase of one to three deaths since 2014. Rio Arriba County had the states highest rate of fatal drug overdoses in 2015, at 81.4 deaths per 100,000 residents, despite a 30 percent decrease from 2014, when it reported 40 deaths and a rate of 110.2. Garcia Gets Contract Extension

Santa Fe Public Schools interim superintendent Veronica Garcia now The state failed to collect nearly $200 million in taxes from health insurance companies during a recent five-year period, according to a report released Tuesday by State Auditor Tim Keller and reported by Joey Peters.The New Mexico Health Department reports that drug overdose deaths dropped by 9 percent around most of New Mexico, but not in Santa Fe County, which saw a 6.7 percent increase Santa Fe Public Schools interim superintendent Veronica Garcia now has a permanent contract extension through 2018. Garcia will earn $180,000 a year.

Infrantry Bound

Very cool. Anissa Martinez, 18, who just graduated from Espanola Valley High School Valley High School in May, has taken her oath and



All in a Week

So the Morning Word takes a look at daily news from around the state, but if you want a good laugh about some of the stories that made news over the past week, you should



Very cool. Anissa Martinez, 18, who just graduated from Espanola Valley High School Valley High School in May, has taken her oath and will become the states first woman to join the Armys infantry So the Morning Word takes a look at daily news from around the state, but if you want a good laugh about some of the stories that made news over the past week, you should check out SFRs snarky 7 Days column online.

Santa Fe Reporter
Gung Ho! Pizza, founded by Kiwi entrepreneurs Jade Gray and John OLoghlen, is seeking US$5 million to help expand the brand in Ikea malls as they roll out around China.

It will be the first external investment in the China-based pizza company which the pair and 12 key employees have bootstrapped themselves since it was founded six years ago. They now have four Gung Ho! stores in Beijing selling gourmet pizza, six stores under a separate brand, Pyro, selling a more Americanised, cheaper pizza, and one Lush hamburger bar/restaurant.

In June, Gung Ho! opened its first store within an Ikea LIVAT mall in Beijing and needs the capital to open other stores with Ikea, which has two sites already in Wuhan and Wuxi, one about to open, and plans for more.

It also needs funds to expand its central kitchen in Beijing which prepares items such as shredded cheese, dough, and sauces, that are then used to assemble pizzas in-store.

Gray, who is Gung Ho!s chief executive and divides his time between Auckland and Beijing, said theyre looking for strategic partners rather than just money. Theyre in negotiations with a couple of potential investors and hope to have struck a deal by Christmas, he said.

OLoghlen joined Alibaba as a director of business development for Australia and New Zealand in March but remains a director and significant shareholder in Gung Ho!.

When Gung Ho! opened its first store in an Ikea mall, it also started selling other Kiwi brands such as Moa and Tuatara beer, Yealands wine, Whittakers chocolate, and Zespri kiwifruit and Gray wants to expand that side of the business further.

They get in front of more Chinese eyeballs and we get a favourable deal on supplies, he said.

It also incorporates the products into its pizza menu, with the NZ Inc approach giving it a point of difference in the now crowded Chinese pizza market.

When Gung Ho! first started as a delivered pizza business there were five pizza brands; there are now 483. Three years ago Chinese online retailers Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent moved into the food delivery business, pouring billions of dollars each into it.

Gray said the market moved from three pizza delivery operators to over 5,000 people delivering them within six months.

Gung Ho! responded by developing instore dining stores where customers can also do classes on making pizza. Theyll also soon be able to buy a frozen take-home pizza though Gray said it was challenging developing a pizza that can be cooked in a wok as few Chinese have ovens.

It still derives 70 percent of revenue from pizza delivery which it contracts to Baidu.

Gung Ho! also acts as a food products adviser in China to dairy giant Fonterra Cooperative Group along with using a lot of its mozzarella on its pizzas. Gray said he was looking to deepen that relationship including potential investment in the pizza brand, though hadnt discussed that to date.

The brands big break has been sealing the deal this year with Ikea which has led to interest from other property developers, he said. The companys currently in negotiations with a Chinese company that has 160 malls around the country and wants to add the gourmet pizza brand to the mix.

The upside is that once you get a contract with Ikea a lot of other property companies want to go with you as locally it is seen as an innovation leader, Gray said.

A Chinese investor put $2.5 million into the Pyro brand last year and also opened its first franchised store in Zhangjiakou in north-western Hebei province which will host some of the 2022 Winter Olympics events.

Gung Ho! has 250 employees which it houses, feeds, and offers optional insurance to, as part of their remuneration package because of accommodation problems in Beijing for new young workers coming into the city from other parts of China.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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Fonterra Cooperative Group, which has raised its forecast milk payout twice in as many months, posted a 65 percent gain in full-year profit as cost cutting and cheaper milk prices made up for a decline in sales.

Profit rose to $834 million in the 12 months ended July 31, from $506 million a year earlier, the Auckland-based company said in a statement. Sales fell 9 percent to $17.2 billion while cost of goods sold, which is primarily made up of New Zealand sourced cost of milk, fell about 13 percent to $13.6 billion.

The latest annual results cover most of the 2015/16 season that chairman John Wilson described as "incredibly difficult for farmers, their families and rural communities, with global dairy prices at unsustainable levels". Since then the price of whole milk powder has gained about 38 percent to US$2,782 a tonne, although that's still well below the high of US$5,245 a tonne reached in April 2013 and Wilson said today that global milk prices are still too low.

Current global milk prices remain at unrealistically low levels, but as the signs in the market improve, we are very strongly positioned to build on a good result in the year to come, Wilson said.

The cooperative's cash payout for the 2016 season was $4.30, made up of $3.90 per kilogram of milk solids and a dividend of 40 cents a share. This week Fonterra raised its forecast payout for the current season by 50 cents/kgMS to $5.25/kgMS, for a total payout of $5.75-to-$5.85 including forecast earnings of 50 to 60 cents.

The 2016 accounts show Fonterra trimmed its selling, marketing and distribution expenses and reduced its finance costs. Debt reduced by $1.6 billion to $5.5 billion while its gearing ratio fell to 44.3 percent from 49.7 percent.

Units in the Fonterra Shareholders' Fund, which are entitled to dividend payments from the underlying shares, last traded at $5.93 and have gained 15 percent in the past 12 months, while the S&P/NZX 50 Index gained 28 percent. They are rated a 'buy' based on the consensus of five analysts polled by Reuters.

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New Zealand Merino Co is to take full control of its brand of merino meat, which was previously owned fifty-fifty in a joint venture with Silver Fern Farms.

The partnership started five years ago, creating the Silere alpine origin merino brand through a business called Alpine Origin Merino Limited.

In its annual results published today, NZ Merino said the business had sharpened its in-market focus the past year, following a challenging 18 months. It booked a $60,000 share of profit from the venture, a turnaround from the $149,000 loss the previous year. There was no indication that NZ Merino would take full control of the business in its results.

In the past year, it has focused on identifying farmers able to supply stock that meets Silere specifications year round, so the meat supplier can meet contract requirements, and invested in the Silere brand following market insight work, it said.

"This has set Silere in good stead with respect to its presence in the premium markets we are targeting," the company said.

In a separate statement late in the afternoon, NZ Merino chief executive John Brakenridge said Silere had been built into a successful brand in New Zealand and the United States, "The intention is for Alpine Origin Merino to continue to develop and build the Silere brand in niche markets globally."

Silver Fern Farms chief executive Dean Hamilton added that, "We all agreed that it makes sense for NZ Merino to take charge and drive the merino product range. At Silver Fern Farms our focus today is on the Silver Fern Farms brand."

The government on Tuesday approved the sale of a controlling stake in Silver Fern Farms to China's Shanghai Maling Aquarius, with ministers arguing it would deliver a "substantial and identifiable benefit."

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Port Nicholson Block Settlement Trust, the Wellington Maori tribal investment vehicle, has turned to an annual profit, its first since receiving its Treaty of Waitangi settlement in 2010.

Net profit in the year to March 31 was $54,495 on $3.1 million in revenue, from a $563,763 loss a year earlier on revenue of $936,987, the trust said in a statement. The 2015 report has been restated under new public benefit entities accounting standards, but earlier reports have not. The trust posted a loss of $1.4 million in 2014, and $3.9 million in 2013.

The trust's assets were depleted to $17.3 million in 2015, from $30.4 million at the end of 2010. Toarangatira Pomare, chair of the commercial arm of the trust Taranaki Whanui, said the trust aims to rebuild its assets to 2010 levels in the next five years, and this year's profit had been helped by the collective iwi selectively exercising its treaty settlement rights of first refusal and buying and selling property.

"By managing the on-sale of selected properties carefully, we achieved revenues of $1.825 million and after costs realised more than $400,000," Pomare said. "That amount will only grow as the commercial board further develops its investment profile around Wellington."

The trust is looking to purchase Crown land in Wellington's CBD from agencies including the Ministry of Education, the Department of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice under deferred selection property rights. It says purchases of Victoria University's Karori campus land and the former Mt Crawford Prison in Miramar have been well signalled.

In March, the trust's chair Neville Baker signed a kawenata (covenant) with Waikato-Tainui, cementing its commercial relationship and opening the possibility of joint land development.

It's also developing a $100 million investment fund as part of a "significant tribal co-investment in Wellington that takes advantage of its tribal connections" which will invest in commercial properties, Baker said.

The trust's first residential development in Eastbourne is on track, with three of the four houses sold off the plans, Baker said. A 34-unit development at Jackson St, Petone, and a development at the former Wainuiomata High School site are also planned. Trust members will be given the option to purchase the Petone land before it goes to market, while the trust will retain ownership of the Wainuiomata land with people able to purchase occupational rights.

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Restaurant Brands New Zealand posted a 32 percent gain in second-quarter sales, with the bulk of the increase coming from the 42 KFC stores in New South Wales acquired in April.

Sales rose by $38.6 million to $159.5 million in the 16 weeks ended Sept. 12, the Auckland-based company said in a statement. Same-store sales, which are those for outlets open at least 12 months, rose 2.1 percent to $120.3 million.

The fast-food company made its first foray across the Tasman with the acquisition of the biggest KFC franchisee in NSW for A$82.4 million made up of A$62 million in cash and 5 million shares, which gave vendor Copulos Group almost 5 percent of the company with a 12-month escrow on trading the stock. Investors cheered the deal, pushing the shares up 36 percent since it was announced on March 4. They gained 0.9 percent to $5.70 today.

Total sales for KFC New Zealand rose 3.7 percent to $92 million, while the number of stores fell by one to 91. Pizza Hut sales fell 9.1 percent to $12.9 million as the company sold seven stores to independent franchisees, reducing total outlets to 37. Franchisees now own 53 of the 90 stores in the Pizza Hut network.

Starbucks Coffee sales edged up 0.1 percent to $7.8 million, although with one less store at 25, same-store sales gained 4 percent. Hamburger chain Carl's Jr, the company's newest brand, recorded a 10 percent gain in sales to $11.4 million as the number of stores rose by two to 20. Same-store sales fell 4.4 percent.

The company plans to release its first-half results on Oct. 26.

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New Zealand's net migration rose in the year through August, returning to the record set in the June year on immigrants from Australia, the UK and China.

Annual net migration reached 69,100 in the year to August, equalling the previous annual record set in June this year and driven primarily by more arrivals, Statistics New Zealand said. Migrant numbers dipped slightly in July, snapping what had been a 23-month run of record-breaking annual net gains.

Arrivals rose 6 percent to 125,000 in the August year, one quarter of whom were returning New Zealand citizens. Departures fell 3 percent to 55,900, of which some 60 percent were New Zealand citizens leaving, with the decrease driven by fewer Kiwis migrating to Australia, the government statistician said.

A swelling population stoking economic activity and record inflows of tourists have helped offset the impact of a rural sector that had been reeling from weak dairy prices. At the same time, a rising population has posed problems for policymakers by fuelling demand for an already-stretched housing market in Auckland, while restraining wage growth. The nation's per-capita growth has been anaemic.

The Treasury said in the Budget that it expected annual net migration would peak in June at 70,700, before returning to the long-run average of 12,000 by June 2019.

"We expect annual net migration to gradually slow over the coming years from current record levels," Westpac senior economist Satish Ranchhod said in a note. "Foreigners who have arrived on temporary work or student visas over the past three years will start to depart. In addition, an improving Australian economy is expected to entice New Zealanders across the Tasman over time. However, this will take time, meaning annual net migration will remain at elevated levels for some time yet."

Of those new migrants who arrived in the latest year, a net 32,187, or 47 percent, settled in Auckland, followed by a net 9.9 percent moving to Canterbury, a net 4.7 percent going to Wellington and a net 3.8 percent settling in Waikato.

At the same time, overseas short-term visitor arrivals reached 3.36 million in the year ended August, up 11 percent on the year earlier and a new record.

A 17 percent increase in holidaymakers drove visitor arrivals in the year, with the biggest increases from China, Australia and the US. In August, visitors arriving from the US most commonly came from California, Texas, and New York state, with the increase related to the introduction of new airline routes, Statistics NZ said.

(BusinessDesk)

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MASON CITY  After 10 years of planning, Stephanie and Merrick McGinnis have hit the road for a good cause.

Both firefighters from the Seattle area, the couple began a 15-state, 46-day, 3,000-plus mile bike trip earlier this month, raising money for the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters Burn Foundation, Seattle Brain Cancer Walk, Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research and ALS Association.

Their trip will take them from Boston to Seattle. On Wednesday, they stopped in Mason City with a trip to the fire department.

After seeing their parents  her mom and his dad  suffer from Parkinsons, and co-workers and neighbors battle cancers and other aliments, they decided to turn the long-planned bike trip into an opportunity to raise funds for those causes.

We all know something fighting to live a normal life, they wrote on their website, www.becausesomecant.com. So now, instead, we are biking off into the unknown, and asking you to support our causes and to spread the word to all you know.

So far, they have raised about $12,000, said Stephanie, 50, a captain with the Port of Seattle Fire Department.

I wish we could do more, she said.

They plan to start the 54-mile trek to Algona on Thursday, eventually arriving in Seattle by late October.

Five years ago, they did a trial bike trip from San Francisco to Seattle. Once Stephanie turned 50 this year, they decided to do the cross-country trip.

I cant even (believe) all of a sudden its happening, said Merrick, 46, a firefighter with the South King County Fire & Rescue.

Their goal was to embrace the experience.

Thats what we are doing, he said.
MASON CITY  Parents grieving an unexpected miscarriage will soon have a permanent place to memorialize their child.

At Elmwood Cemetery, members of this years Leadership North Iowa class spent Tuesday morning helping to lay pavers in a path for Lullaby Land.

Parents who lost children to miscarriage under 20 weeks will have the option of having their childs name and date of loss engraved on a paver there to be installed in the pathway.

Around 13 people have requested one, Mercy Foundation Development Specialist Jill Dean said in an email. Each one costs $100.

When finished, it will be a space for people be able to memorialize their child, said Mercy Medical Center Bereavement Coordinator Andrea Campbell.

That way they can individualize that loss if they choose to, she said.

The leadership class  an initiative the Mason City Chamber of Commerce began in 1983  provides leadership training for up-and-coming business people in North Iowa.

Each years class completes a community impact project.

Lullaby Lane will lead up to the headstone engraved with an angel and the words We Remember located in the middle of Lullaby Land.

Dr. Jonna Quinn of the Mercy Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic  a member of the 2016 Leadership North Iowa class as well as the Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa Fetal and Infant Loss Bereavement Committee  suggested the idea for the project.

To date, organizers have raised nearly $16,000 for the project, said Allyson Krull, marketing and leadership development director at the Mason City Chamber of Commerce.

Lehigh Cement donated the raw materials for the pavers and Midwest Roofing also helped haul away sod and dirt, Krull said.

Each year, a memorial service will be held Oct. 15 that will begins at Fullerton Funeral Home then will end at Lullaby Lane.

The service this year begins at 5:30 p.m.

I find that a lot of people come out here on the anniversary of their loss, or their due date, Campbell said. It just gives a piece of mind that they are not along in what they are going through.

Those who wish to purchase a paver can contact the Mercy Foundation at 641-428-7740 or Krull at 641-423-5724.
Rep. Steve King sure is lucky that President Barack Obama isnt a clone of Obamas Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Otherwise, King might find himself in a rat-infested cell.

Hero worship of the Russian despot is a thing now in some circles of hard-right Republican politics. Donald Trump admires Putins strength and willingness to put his country first. Recently, King, R-Iowa, lent his voice to this weird bromance with Russias dictator.

Putin, King said, has been a better leader for his people than Obama.

Maybe King doesnt think much of those political opponents, artists and protesters whove wound up in prison for speaking out in Putins Russia. Maybe King admires a process where election arent worth the paper on which the results are printed and held only as another excuse to again coronate the strongman-in-chief.

Maybe King, a representative, is just tired of this whole representative government thing.

Weird attacks on Obama from the right arent anything new. Trump, the partys presidential nominee, first dipped his toes into the racially tinged swamp of politics years ago when he led the birther movement that insisted the nations first black president wasnt actually born within the United States. Unsurprisingly, white supremacists now celebrate his candidacy.

Even mainline Republicans have questioned Obamas commitment to his own country and religious affiliation.

But the sudden love-affair with a tyrant who rules through fear and force is beyond pale. It is, in essence, a rejection of American democracy. And this is from a guy who proclaims his alleged love of freedom.

King, no doubt, argues that hes speaking simply for the Russians. Often outlandish, King isnt stupid. He even included that careful little clause, for his country, in his comparison of Putin with Obama. Kings career lives or dies in the gray area between simple fear-mongering and full-blown sedition. Hes gotten pretty good at inserting plausible deniability.

Its Putin promotion of hyper-nationalism that King so admires. And thats the key. Its all about an unthinking, slavish allegiance to a flag. Kings perspective is a rejection of the very Renaissance focus on critical, thinking individuals that toppled European monarchies.

Obamas crime? Hes admitted past American foreign policy mistakes. Hes avoided the rampant jingoism thats kept the U.S. in a constant state of war for decades.

Kings nostalgia extends beyond the mid-20th century thats so prevalent among Trumps supporters. Suddenly, in some GOP circles, men like King long for power held by an all-powerful nobility. Its power built upon fear, xenophobia and threat of violence. Its a world where information is solely doled out by the government and the media acts as a ministry of propaganda. For Trump and King, thats what strength looks like.

The fact is, neither Trump nor King know real strength. Its the ability to defend ones position through ideas and rhetoric. Its the security to weather constant verbal attacks. Its to acknowledge other viable contrary opinions.

Earlier this month, King joined the lovefest for Putin, a man so insecure that hell do anything to maintain power. Putin threatens his neighbors. His people are force-fed patriotism. Ideas are controlled and dissenters are jailed.

Putins is an iron-fisted approach that offers but one dark benefit: If our president reacted to criticism the way Russias president reacts, we wouldnt have to listen to Steve Kings drivel anymore.

 The Quad-City Times

another Lee Enterprises newspaper
NEW DELHI: Chinese technology giant Lenovo will bring the much-awaited modular smartphone 'Moto Z' to the Indian market in the first week of October.



The Moto Z, which was unveiled globally in June this year, allows users to attach a set of accessories called 'mods' to the back of the device that adds various functionalities to the device.



"We will launch 8 new devices, of which six we have already announced, in this festive season... This includes the Moto Z," Lenovo India Executive Director Mobile Business Group Sudhin Mathur told PTI.



While Mathur declined to comment on the timeline of availability of Moto Z in India, sources said the product could be launched in the first or second week of October.



Apart from the device, which is expected to be priced upwards of USD 300 (about Rs 20,000), the 'mods' may be available for USD 50 onwards (about Rs 3,300) in India.



Moto Z is currently available in markets like the US, the UK and Latin America in three models (Moto Z Play, Moto Z and Moto Z Force).



Lenovo, which had acquired Motorola from Google in a USD 2.9 billion deal in 2014, is betting on India to contribute significantly to its global growth. Last year, Lenovo's revenues from Indiagrew about 90 per cent while its overall revenues were up 68 per cent.



According to research firm Gartner, smartphone sales are expected to slow down in 2016 globally, rising only seven per cent compared to double-digit growth seen in previous years.



This is on the back of slower sales growth in mature markets like Europe and Japan. India, on the other hand, remains an opportunity and presents the highest growth potential, Gartner said.



Recently, Motorola had also run an ad campaign taking a dig at Apple's iPhone 7 and Samsung's Galaxy Note 7. The ad with the tagline #SkiptheSevens urged consumers to "go for something new, something different."



Motorola today launched 'Moto E Power', priced at 7,999. The smartphone will be available through e-commerce platform Flipkart from mid-night tonight.



The 4G handset features a 5-inch display, 1 GHz quad-core Mediatek processor, 2GB RAM, 16 GB internal memory (expandable up to 32 GB), 8MP rear and 5MP front camera and 3,500 mAh battery.



"Moto E Power is an affordable 4G smartphone designed to keep up with the consumer's non-stop life. They can watch videos and make conversations to their heart's content with a long-lasting battery... It is compatible with Reliance Jio and users can avail the Reliance Jio welcome offer," Motorola Mobility India General Manager Amit Boni said.

Read Also:

Moto E Power Smartphone Launched In India At " border="0" height="9" src="file:///C:UsersNarendraAppDataLocalTempmsohtmlclip1 1clip_image001.jpg" width="7" />7,999

This Wearable Device Sends Heartbeat Report To Mobile Phone
BENGALURU: Facebook hired ex-yahoo, executive Anand Chandrasekaran on a strategic role to boost future anticipations of the Messenger application. The social networking giant appointed Chandrasekaran for a global leadership role to expand its services further in India. The move will build new partnerships and strategies for the Messenger app that has hit over one billion user account. As reported by The Business Insider website, Anand Chandrasekaran will assist social media company in building strategies for Facebook Messenger.

Anand worked at Yahoo from 2011 to 2014 as a Senior Director for search products and mobile products. Later he joined Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel as a Chief Product Officer and helped the company spread its service with music and mobile payment platforms. Later he joined Snapdeal, the Indian e-commerce company as the Chief Product Officer. Anand helped Snapdeal by launching a revamped website and app that introduced the image search feature. Chandrasekaran played a big role in acquiring Freecharge and merging it with Snapdeal at $400 million.

Chandrasekaran completed his undergraduate degree in India and MS from Stanford University. After graduating, he co-founded a mobile application software company, Aeroprise, which was further acquired by BMC software in 2011. Before joining Airtel, he spent about 13 years with various technological firms like Openwave systems, Yodlee and Yahoo in the Silicon Valley. The World Economic Forum awarded Chandrasekaran as the Young Global Leader. Anand notified about joining the Social media giant through a Facebook post. He will join Facebooks Menlo Park office.

Facebook Messenger has a download count of more than one billion, which makes it second most popular Android and iOS application. The app currently has 10 percent of VoIP market share. Facebook is continuously working to make its app user-friendly and with the launch of bots for Messenger, it will further allow businesses to automate responses.

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80 Pct Of Global IT Spend Will Be On Cloud: Oracle

Shotang Ties Up With Xiaomi India
English Lithuanian

Elektrenai, Lithuania, 2016-09-20 08:00 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba, AB, identification code 302648707, registered office placed at Elektrines g. 21, Elektrenai, Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter  the Company). The total number of registered ordinary shares issued by the Company is 635 083 615; ISIN code LT0000128571.

STRATEGY OF LIETUVOS ENERGIJOS GAMYBA FOR 2020: 15 PERCENT MORE EFFICIENT, 15 PERCENT OF WORK TIME DEVOTED FOR NEW OPERATIONS

The energy producer Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba (LEG) providing the services necessary for the security of the energy system has updated its business strategy. Till 2020, the Company will devote at least 15 percent of its time to raise revenue from new operations, at the same time reducing main operating expenses by at least 15 percent.

LEG manages the greatest electricity production capacities in the country: the Elektrenai complex, the Kruonis Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Plant and Kaunas Algirdas Brazauskas Hydroelectric Power Plant. The company plans to implement its goal to increase efficiency of its activities by 15 percent and to devote 15 percent more of its work time for new operations focusing on four main strategic directions, namely, the provision of quality services to its customers, increasing operational efficiency, diversification and development of activities as well as engagement and empowerment of employees.

We have updated the strategy in light of the changes already happened in the energy sector and further prospects: growing competition in the electricity market, emerging new opportunities related to the development of renewable sources and emerging threats. We seek to ensure continuity of the companys activities, return to shareholders and to retain jobs of employees. Therefore we plan to significantly expand our service portfolio by 2020. We plan that in four years every employee of the company will devote at least 6 hours of his working time for new services, - said Egle Ciuzaite, the Chair of the Board and CEO of Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba.

According to the CEO, in light of the needs of other electricity and heat producers, the transmission system operator and new customers, the company plans to provide new services taking advantage of the strongest skills and experience of its employees, the managed infrastructure and facilities. For example, the company could offer competitive services of operation and maintenance of power plants and boiler houses to the market, while many medium and large business enterprises could find a perfect location for business development in no longer used buildings and territories of Elektrenai complex and Kruonis PSHP.

The plan is to have decisions on the construction of a wind park in the territory of Kruonis PSHP and the development of Kruonis PSHP by installing the fifth hydro unit taken during the implementation period of the strategy.

We will devote significant attention to the expansion of the companys activities, but will not confine ourselves thereto. We will pursue to have main operating expenses for electricity and heat production and provision of system services reduced by at least 15 percent by 2020. We want to ensure the lowest possible price of heat in Elektrenai. We will also focus on major repair works of hydro power plants and the programme of works of arrangement of the Elektrenai complex, which includes the dismantling of units no longer used in the production and the clean-up of the territories, - said E. Ciuzaite.

A special focus will be placed on the planning of maintenance and repair works and their prevention. LEG aims to ensure high reliability of its managed capacities. With ongoing discussions on the update of the Lithuanian energy strategy and considering the scope of production capacities that must be maintained in the country, LEG has assessed that capacities of Elektrenai complex are necessary for Lithuania as a strategic reserve.

LEG seeks to form a values-based results-oriented organizational culture substantiated with principles of leadership and a greater focus of the company itself on employees as well as growing involvement of employees in its activities. Low rotation levels of key employees of the company, assurance of occupational safety and health and implementation of the LEAN management system principles-based Operational Excellence programme are named among key goals.

The main condition of the implementation of all the actions provided for in the strategy and development of new activities is engaged employees generating ideas and focused on the achievement of goals. I have no doubt that an even deeper fostering of fundamental values of the company, such as responsibility, cooperation and pursuit for the achievement of goals, will help successfully implement our vision of becoming a competitive international energy generation and service centre, - LEG CEO E. Ciuzaite said.

For more information please refer to Summary of LEG Business Strategy (attached).
MUMBAI: GenNext Hub -- the startup scalerator by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) that is nurturing digital entrepreneurship in India -- on Tuesday organized the graduation ceremony of nine startups that were part of the "Summer 2016" cohort.

The "Summer 2016" cohort is the third batch of startups to participate in the GenNext Hub scalerator programme that helps catalyse a unique start-up ecosystem which caters to talent, technology and trust, the company said in a statement.

During the four-month-long programme, GenNext Hub conducts workshops and mentoring sessions for start-ups in the areas of customer development, market traction, operations, product roadmap, fund raising and pitching.

It also provides expertise in intellectual property (IP), legal, financial compliance, HR and specific sectorial expertise.

The nine startups - Codemojo, DATTUS, Don't Scratch Your Head (DSYH), Happy2Refer (H2R), Headspin, Megdap, NavStik, Recipe Book and Tagalys -- were selected from a pool of over 500 qualified applications received from startups froma cross the country.

"With its structured programme, GenNext Hub is able to refine and reinforce the startups' core product offering and business model," the company said.

The applications for the "Winter 2016" programme are open till October 2.

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nws accident.JPG

A wreck in St. George Tuesday night that sent one person to the hospital was allegedly started by a man in possession of heroin, police said. (Courtesy of Steve S.)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The man who initiated the St. George car wreck that injured a pedestrian Tuesday evening was high on drugs, according to police.

John King was driving a 2012 Chevy pickup with North Carolina plates when he allegedly initiated the wreck that sent a pedestrian to the hospital, police said.

He was found by police bleeding from his left arm with a hypodermic needle in the truck's cab, and several glassine envelopes of heroin in the center console, police said.

King, 27, of the 400 block of Adelaide Avenue in Oakwood, is charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, and operating a vehicle while impaired by drugs.

He was spotted driving erratically and slammed into a large garbage bin. He was able to continue on and crashed into two parked cars, one of which hit a pedestrian, police said.

The victim was taken to Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton, and was expected to recover, a spokesman for the FDNY said.

King was also transported to RUMC, and was expected to recover from injuries he sustained in the crash.
NWS bank.png

Police are asking for the public's help identifying a man sought for questioning in connection to a Great Kills bank robbery. (Courtesy: NYPD)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Police are asking for the public's help identifying a man sought for questioning in connection to a bank robbery that occurred in Great Kills Tuesday afternoon.

A suspect allegedly entered the Richmond County Savings Bank at 3879 Amboy Rd. at 3:19 p.m., and screamed that he had a bomb and was going to blow himself up, according to a written statement from the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

He approached the teller and demanded money. The teller complied and gave him an undetermined amount of money, police said. Earlier reports from the NYPD indicated he had made off with $4,000.

He fled the scene going north on Amboy Road, police said.

The man sought by police is described as a white male in his 50s, 6 feet tall, with a beige colored stocking cap over his head. He was last seen wearing a black hat, a red sweater and blue jeans.

Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.
AX091_3FCA_9.JPG

Student loan debt carried by New Yorkers has more than doubled over the last 10 years, according to a report by state Controller Thomas DiNapoli. (Associated Press

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Student loan debt carried by New Yorkers has more than doubled over the last 10 years, according to a report by state Controller Thomas DiNapoli.

According to the report, the average New Yorker with college loans owed $32,200 in 2015, higher than the national average of $29,700. In New York, student loan debt more than doubled during the last decade, growing to $82 billion from $39 billion, an increase of 112 percent.

"New Yorkers from all walks of life have found higher education the path to a more satisfying and secure life," DiNapoli said. "But many who take out student loans face real difficulties in paying back their debts."

DiNapolo said the high rate of student debt could have damaging effects on the overall economy.

"New Yorkers saddled with college debt have less disposable income and often have to push off buying a home or saving for the future," he noted. "Such struggles have implications not only for those individuals and families with such debt, but also for the state's economy."

According to the report, more than 2.8 million New Yorkers have taken out student loans in the last 10 years, borrowing close to $44 million for tuition.

DiNapoli said skyrocketing college costs were partly to blame for the rise in student debt; average costs for tuition, fees and room and board more than doubled since 2006 at both public and private colleges

In 2006, the average cost in New York for undergraduate tuition, fees, room and board for New York residents at a public college was $13,275. By the 2015,school year, The cost had jumped to $20,549 by 2015, the controller reported.

Click here to read the report.

(If you have an outstanding college loan you've been trying to pay down, tell us how it has impacted your budget and plans in the Comment section below.)
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The man accused of planting explosives that hit Seaside, N.J. and the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan was hit with several terrorism charges Tuesday.

Ahmad Khan Rahami will be facing four charges related to the two blasts, and the several other bombs planted on both sides of the Hudson that he failed to detonate, according to a criminal complaint.

The four counts against Rahami include "use of weapons of mass destruction," and "bombing a place of public use."

Rahami, 28, was captured in Linden, N.J. after a shootout with law enforcement officials.

Two officers were wounded in the gun fight, but were expected to make full recoveries.

He was apprehended not far from his home in Elizabeth, N.J., where his family also owns a takeaway food business.

Evidence against Rahami includes bombs found at an Elizabeth train station, fingerprints found on an undetonated bomb found at 27th Street in Manhattan, and Surveillance video taken from near the Chelsea bombings.

Investigators also discovered a journal on Rahami that was damaged in the shootout with police.

Entries in the journal include references to the Fort Hood Shooter, Anwar al-Awlaki, and "Brother Osama Bin Laden," according to the criminal complaint.

Al-Awlaki was an American-born Yemeni imam and lecturer allegedly working with al-Qaeda who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.

Rahami is also facing five charges of attempted murder of a police officer from the Union County Prosecutor's Office.

A conviction on the federal charges could put Rahami in jail for life.

The full federal complaint against Rahami can be read here.
MISSION VIEJO, Calif., Sept. 20, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MYnd Analytics, Inc. (OTCQB:CNSO) today announced that a reverse split of the Companys common stock, at a ratio of one share for every 200 shares of common stock outstanding, will become effective at 8:00 a.m., Eastern Time, on Wednesday, September 21, 2016.

At the effective time of the reverse split, immediately and without further action by the Companys stockholders, every 200 shares of the Companys common stock issued and outstanding will automatically be combined into one share of common stock. In the event the reverse split leaves a stockholder with a fraction of a share, the number of shares due to the stockholder will be rounded up. Further, any options, warrants and rights outstanding as of the effective time that are subject to adjustment will be adjusted in accordance with the terms thereof. The Companys common stock will trade under a new CUSIP number after the reverse split. Holders of certificated shares of Common Stock will be required to transmit their certificates to the Company's transfer agent, in accordance with the letter of transmittal to be provided to such holders, and will receive the post-reverse split shares to which they are entitled in electronic, book-entry form.

As a result of the reverse split, a D will be placed at the end of the common stocks ticker symbol for 20 business days.

Having recently closed a note round resulting in an aggregate of $6.0 million in proceeds, the Company also announced today that it exercised an option to mandatorily convert such notes, in the aggregate principal amount of $6.0 million dollars (plus accrued interest), into shares of the Company's common stock at $5.00 per share, after giving effect to the reverse split ($0.025 pre-split).

The Company exercised this mandatory conversion right pursuant to an amendment (the "Amendment"), dated September 19, 2016, to its Second Amended and Restated Note and Warrant Purchase Agreement (the "Agreement"), which amended: (i) notes in the aggregate principal amount of $6.0 million issued pursuant thereto; (ii) the Agreement and (iii) the warrants issued pursuant to the Agreement. Pursuant to the Amendment, upon its exercise of the mandatory conversion, the Company: (i) converted the entire $6.0 million outstanding principal balance into 1,200,000 shares at a post-split conversion price of $5.00 per share (pre-split $0.025 per share) along with the accrued interest earned on all of the notes which were converted at the same conversion price and (ii) cancelled all warrants issued pursuant to the Agreement.

The Amendment was entered into by more than 80% of the existing note and warrant holders and became binding upon all other holders in accordance with its terms. The mandatory conversion reduces the Company's debt outstanding, simplifies the Company's capital structure and improves the Company's working capital position.

About MYnd Analytics

MYnd Analytics, Inc. (www.myndanalytics.com) provides a unique set of reference data and analytic tools for clinicians and researchers in psychiatry. While treatment for mental disorders has doubled in the last 20 years, it is estimated that 17 million Americans have failed two or more medication therapies for their mental disorders. The Companys Psychiatric EEG Evaluation Registry, or PEER Online, is a new registry and reporting platform that allows medical professionals to exchange treatment outcome data for patients referenced to objective neurophysiology data obtained through a standard electroencephalogram (EEG). Based on the Companys original physician-developed database, there are now more than 38,000 outcomes for over 10,000 unique patients in the PEER registry. The goal of PEER Online is to provide objective, personalized data to assist physicians in the selection of appropriate medications.

To read more about the benefits of this patented technology for patients, physicians and payers, please visit www.myndanalytics.com.



Forward-looking Statements

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed are forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including the Company's ability to timely implement the reverse split, the ability of the note conversion to substantially reduce outstanding debt, the ability of the conversion to improve the Company's working capital position, as well as those risks and uncertainties set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements made herein.


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PARIS, Sept. 21, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ESI Group, a leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping software and services for manufacturing industries, launches the latest version of its Virtual Reality solution IC.IDO 10.2. In this new version, ESI has strengthened its solution with the new modules IDO.SolidMechanics and IDO.Elastic, while significantly improving pre-existing modules. Benefiting from ESI's unique knowledge of material physics, the two new modules are based on a novel physical simulation solver, which provides unprecedented fidelity of real-time behavior for rigid and elastic parts.

If Virtual Reality has been a popular technology in the business of video games for several decades, its use for industrial applications only dates back to the late 2000s. Giving engineers the ability to immerse themselves in a virtual 3D environment, Virtual Reality is now used by leading industrial manufacturers to experience their future products and interact with them naturally and intuitively. By enabling engineers to experience a product early in its development, Virtual Reality helps manufacturing companies ensure design feasibility and avoid costly design errors. Maintenance operations and use cases can be evaluated before any real prototype even exists. Furthermore, Virtual Reality facilitates collective decision-making by allowing specialists and non-specialists to collaborate around the same model, whether they are on-site or remote.

Image: Thanks to Virtual Reality, Audi can virtually simulate assembly processes in immersive 3D

and optimize them step by step. Read the related article in Audi's Engineering Blog (in German).

Image courtesy of Audi AG

Among the many solutions available on the market, ESI IC.IDO excels at providing a Virtual Reality solution tailored to industrial needs. In particular, IC.IDO features models in real-scale and real-time. Its unequalled capacity to integrate material physics make it a powerful collaborative tool that is used by leading industry players across many industrial sectors, including Audi AG, Bausch & Stroebel, Boeing, Bombardier, Caterpillar, Ford, Gabler, MAN, Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Europe, Renault, Trumpf, and more.

In IC.IDO 10.2, IDO.SolidMechanics enables the simulation of the dynamic behavior of multiple rigid components, simultaneously. Thanks to realistic spatial depiction of virtual products and the possibility to interact directly with them, operations such as assembly and joining sequences can now be simulated more realistically. Production or service specialists can be involved more efficiently in reviewing realistic virtual models, right from the conception phase. Inertia and gravity and collision and sliding when handling parts, are all addressed naturally and in real-time. Motion sequences can be exported and reused in IC.IDO or third-party CAD software. Alleviating manufacturers from the extensive training and experience associated with traditional MBD (Multi-body Dynamics) tools, IDO.SolidMechanics really constitutes a foundation for new generation real-time physical simulation.

The IDO.Elastic module extends IDO.SolidMechanics with simulation of 1D elastic components, including cables and hoses. Based on IDO.SolidMechanics' solver, IDO.Elastic predicts in real-time the dynamic behavior of individual flexibles, as well as complete wire harnesses and full cable branches. The module enables users to realistically simulate operations and assembly & disassembly processes. The possibility to move and modify elastic components and adapt physical parameters helps manufacturers to quickly determine the ideal routing and materials to be used. As a result, real-time assessment of the layout of elastic components is so realistic that it can be done from the early stages of development process all the way to design validation.

To reduce hardware investments, ESI IC.IDO is also available in desktop version, bringing the perfect complement to a CAVE/ power wall set-up.

Michael Bock, VR Expert at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, comments: "The desktop version of IC.IDO enables collaborative work between engineering teams, while significantly reducing hardware cost. Thanks to this high-end DMU (Digital Mock-Up) solution, many issues can be solved immediately at the desktop, while preparing immersive review meetings."

For more information about ESI's Virtual Reality solution IC.IDO, please visit http://virtualreality.esi-group.com/ or contact your local ESI subsidiary.

Download our e-book "Immersive, Interactive Virtual Reality for Engineering" here.

Join ESI's customer portal myESI to get continuously updated product information, tips & tricks, view the online training schedule and access selected software downloads: https://myesi.esi-group.com

For more ESI news, visit: www.esi-group.com/press

ESI Group - Media Relations

Celine Gallerne

Celine.Gallerne@esi-group.com

+33 1 41 73 58 46

For additional information, please feel free to contact our international communications team:

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping software and services. Specialist in material physics, ESI has developed a unique proficiency in helping industrial manufacturers replace physical prototypes by virtually replicating the fabrication, assembly and testing of products in different environments. Today, coupled with Virtual Reality, animated by systems models, and benefiting from data analytics, Virtual Prototyping becomes immersive and interactive: ESI's clients can bring their products to life, ensuring reliable performance, serviceability and maintainability. ESI solutions help world-leading OEM's and innovative companies make sure that their products will pass certification tests - before any physical prototype is built - and that new products are competitive in their market space. Virtual Prototyping addresses the emerging need for products to be smart and autonomous and supports industrial manufacturers in their digital transformation.

Today, ESI's customer base spans nearly every industry sector. The company employs about 1100 high-level specialists worldwide to address the needs of customers in more than 40 countries. For more information, please visit www.esi-group.com/

Follow ESI

News Release in PDF http://hugin.info/156812/R/2043497/762929.pdf
Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG / Key word(s): Corporate Action 21.09.2016 08:13 Disclosure of an inside information according to Article 17 MAR, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notification of Insider Information according to art. 17 MAR Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG plans the issuance of mandatory convertible bonds excluding the subscription right of shareholders. Broderstorf, 21 September 2016 - The executive board of Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG (the "Company"), with the approval of the supervisory board, has passed a resolution in principle today to issue bonds with both a conversion option and a conversion obligation in the total amount of about EUR 14 million. The convertible bonds will have a denomination of EUR 1,000 per partial bond, a term of 2 years and a coupon of 0.25% p.a. They can be converted from the third month after issuance on, i.e. presumably from 27 December 2016 on, at an initial conversion price of EUR 8.50 per share. As a result, they are, subject to an adjustment of the conversion price, convertible into 1,660,000 shares of the Company. The convertible bond comes with a conversion obligation for the bondholders at maturity. The Company plans to use the proceeds from the issuance of the convertible bonds for further real estate purchases. The company is currently assessing the benefits of such prospective purchases. The main shareholder of the Company, Obotritia Capital KGaA, has committed to subscribe for and purchase the convertible bonds in their entirety. It has notified the Company that, simultaneously with the acquisition of the mandatory convertible bonds, it intends to sell up to 1.38 million shares of Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG which are currently in its own stock, at a price equal to the initial conversion price of EUR 8.50. The transaction will be accompanied by ODDO SEYDLER BANK AG. Deutsche Konsum is a REIT, that is specialized in retail properties of every day demand, and which has been listed on the Berlin Stock Exchange since December 2015. Since its listing, the Company has notarized further real estate purchase contracts and currently holds lettable surfaces of 188,000 square meters with an annualised yearly rent of EUR 13.8 million, spread over 34 properties. Issuer: Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG Seat of business: Forsterweg 2 14482 Potsdam ISIN: DE000A14KRD3 WKN: A14KRD3 Stock Markets: Regulated Market in Berlin; Open Market in Frankfurt Disclaimer: This document and the information contained herein are for information purposes only and do not constitute a prospectus or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities of Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG (the 'Company') in the United States or in any other jurisdiction. This announcement may not be published, distributed or transmitted, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan or South Africa. The securities of the Company may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the 'Securities Act'). The securities of the Company have not been, and will not be, registered under the Securities Act or under the applicable securities laws of Australia, Canada, Japan or South Africa. The distribution of this announcement may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions and persons into whose possession any document or other information referred to herein comes should inform themselves about and observe any such restrictions. Any failure to comply with these restrictions may constitute a violation of the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. Contact: Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG Frau Wencke Rockendorf Forsterweg 2 14482 Potsdam Tel. +49 (0)331 / 74 00 76 - 510 21.09.2016 The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Archive at www.dgap.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language: English Company: Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG Forsterweg 2 14482 Potsdam Germany Phone: +49 (0)331 740076510 Fax: E-mail: wr@obocap.com Internet: www.deutsche-konsum.de ISIN: DE000A14KRD3 WKN: A14KRD Listed: Regulated Market in Berlin; Regulated Unofficial Market in Tradegate Exchange; Open Market in Frankfurt End of Announcement DGAP News-Service ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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"Thank you for your link. A wave of your Canadian readers came to my blog! Really impressive." Juan Giner - INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group

I got links from the Weekly Standard, Hot Air and Instapundit yesterday - but SDA was running at least equal to those in visitors clicking through to my blog. Jeff Dobbs

"You may be a nasty right winger, but you're not nasty all the time!" Warren Kinsella

"Go back to collecting your welfare livelihood."Michael E. Zilkowsky

Intelliweather

Seismic Map

Comments Policy

Read this

Best Of SDA

Hide The Decline

The Bottle Genie

(ClimateGate links)

You Might Be A Liberal

Uncrossing The Line

Bob Fife: Knuckledragger

A Modest Proposal (NP)

Settled Science Series

Y2Kyoto Series

SDA: Reader Occupation Survey

Brett Lamb Sheltered Workshop

Flakes On A Plane

All Your Weather Are Belong To Us

Song Of The Sled

The Raise A Flag Debacle

(Now on Youtube!)

(.mwv Video)

Abuse Ruins Life Of Girl

Trudeaupiate

Kleptocrat Jeans

Child Labour

I Concede

Small Dead Feminist

Protein Hoser: THK Interview

The Werewolf Extinction

Dear Laura (VRWC)

We Wait

Blogging The Oscars

Jackson Converts To Islam

Just Shut The HELL Up

Manipulating Condi

Gay Equality Rights


System error

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context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:948

/var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612e8fad110)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f9270)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612e8fad110)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f9270)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612efe4b9b8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f9270)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f9270)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612edc13570)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f0254200)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f0254200)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:948

/var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612e8fad110)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f7640)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612e8fad110)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f7640)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612efe4b358)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f7640)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f01f7640)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612edc0f4c0)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f02e61c8)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f02e61c8)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
Candidates will discover on Thursday their position on the ballot paper in October's election, although with a random ballot paper it is not clear there is any advantage to be had.

The names of more than 100 candidates expected to stand for the hotly contested ACT election will be announced at lunchtime.

ACT Electoral Commissioner Phillip Green, who will announce candidate names and draw the ballot-paper order on Thursday. Credit:Graham Tidy

With an extra eight seats up for grabs as the Parliament swells to 25 members, this election offers the best opportunity to get elected of any election since self-government. If every incumbent keeps their seat other than the two retiring members, there will still be 10 new faces.

To ensure no advantage from ballot position, the ACT Electoral Commission will use a random number generator to decide the order in which the parties appear. Independents will all be on the right-hand side of the ballot paper  in one column if there are up to five independents, and spreading over two or more columns if there are more.
Kyla Kirkpatrick will host a champagne dinner at Ottoman restaurant in Barton celebrating bubbly and fine food.

Kirkpatrick is known as the Champagne Dame and works to promote the French wine region throughout Australia, hosting international tours to the great French maisons and running champagne appreciation masterclasses.

Champagne Dame: Kyla Kirkpatrick Credit:Justin McManus

The dinner at Ottoman is part of her "Sens Inverse" tour - a series of dinners around the country with champagne tasted in reverse. It will begin with demi-sec champagne and then move through the wines finishing with the blanc de blancs.

Kirkpatrick will also tell the story of champagne glassware - the evolution of the flute glass intertwined with the history of the actual wine.
English French

Paris, September 21, 2016 - Sodexo, world leader in Quality of Life Services, has received a top ranking of nine out of nine from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on its Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard, a ranking that assesses the progress of companies on the commitments and actions necessary to be a responsible user of palm oil.

Sodexo's score is a reflection of the company's undertaking to actionably improve its practices regarding sourcing sustainable palm oil and in raising awareness internally, within the supplier community, its sourcing teams and with clients and customers about the importance of sourcing certified sustainably produced palm oil.

Neil Barrett, Sodexo Group SVP Sustainable Development said: "The need for sustainable practices in the palm oil industry has become increasingly urgent, especially considering the devastation in Indonesia this past year due to toxic haze that has been linked to palm oil and paper production. Raising environmental standards across the entire global supply chain is both an economic and ethical responsibility. At Sodexo, we select and source products that support the development of a sustainable palm oil industry and work with suppliers and producers that share the same level of commitment to conducting business responsibly."

Recognizing the role that palm oil production plays in supporting millions of livelihoods, Sodexo has committed to actively support the development of a sustainable palm oil industry by increasing its use of certified sustainable palm oil. Our plan includes selecting products that support the development of a sustainable palm oil industry in all the countries where we operate and working with our suppliers to source sustainable palm oil in the products that we buy from them wherever possible. Where we are not able to source sustainable palm oil, we purchase GreenPalm certificates to reward palm producers for working in a sustainable and responsible way. We seek to reduce our recourse to.Greenpalm certificates every year by increasing our sourcing of physical certified sustainable palm oil.

Palm oil is now the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet, accounting for 65 percent of all vegetable oil traded internationally and the use of palm oil is expected to double by 2020. The increase in demand has driven the development and expansion of new plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia and other Asian countries as well as Africa and Latin America. This expansion leads to the conversion of tropical forests to and for the cultivation of oil palms with considerable social and environmental impacts, including: the displacement of local populations, human rights abuses and conflicts over land rights, the generation of significant carbon emissions and the destruction of habitats of a large number of endangered species.

As part of its Better Tomorrow Plan, Sodexo has defined and achieved an ambitious roadmap to achieve its commitment:

In 2011 Sodexo became a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and defined a time-bound strategy for sustainable palm oil in conjunction with the WWF

In 2012 Sodexo became a member of GreenPalm

Sodexo developed and continues to deploy a Sustainable Palm Oil toolkit to raise awareness internally and with suppliers on the importance of sustainable palm oil

Each year, Sodexo carries out a full survey of the palm oil volumes purchased through the company's sourcing of margarine and frying oil

Since 2012, the company has been purchasing GreenPalm certificates to cover the purchase of non-certified sustainable palm oil

About Sodexo

Founded in 1966 by Pierre Bellon, Sodexo is the global leader in services that improve Quality of Life, an essential factor in individual and organizational performance. Operating in 80 countries, Sodexo serves 75 million consumers each day through its unique combination of On-site Services, Benefits and Rewards Services and Personal and Home Services. Through its more than 100 services, Sodexo provides clients an integrated offering developed over 50 years of experience: from food services, reception, safety, maintenance and cleaning, to facilities and equipment management; from Meal Pass, Gift Pass and Mobility Pass benefits for employees to in-home assistance and concierge services. Sodexo's success and performance are founded on its independence, its sustainable business and financial model and its ability to continuously develop and to engage the commitment of its 420,000 employees throughout the world. Sodexo is a member of the CAC 40 and DJSI Indices.

Key figures (as of August 31, 2015)

19.8 billion euro in consolidated revenues

420,000 employees

19th largest employer worldwide

80 countries

32,000 sites

75 million consumers served daily

15 billion euro market capitalization (as of July 7, 2016)

Contacts
The Elk and Pea in Braddon has new owners - Sydney bartending identity Leeroy Petersen and wife and business partner Sophia.

The couple moved from Sydney earlier this year to be closer to Sophia's family and to have a better lifestyle with their young son.

The Elk and Pea new owners Sophia and Leeroy Petersen. Credit:Jay Cronan

"We were looking around at different spaces and areas and we fell in love with the Elk and Pea," Leeroy says. "It's a beautiful space."

And he's sold on the capital. "I love it. We've been in Canberra for four months, we absolutely love it," he says.
But it was revealed the injury was more serious than first thought despite the star forward not missing a game all year.

Riewoldt initially went under the knife for a minor clean-up to the ankle he rolled badly in the Tigers' round-five loss to Melbourne.

Richmond forward Jack Riewoldt is facing a slow start to the AFL pre-season after undergoing an unexpected ankle reconstruction.

"Sneaky little reco": Jack Riewoldt. Credit:AFL Media/Getty Images

"I thought I was going in for a bit of ankle clean-up," Riewoldt told Fox Footy on Tuesday night.

"Turns out I had a sneaky little reco on a lateral ligament there ... it went a little bit further than what I thought. I had a finger fused as well."

Riewoldt expects a slower-than-usual start to the pre-season and would be monitored until Christmas.

"(I) won't be on my feet as early as I usually would be," Riewoldt said.
A breakdown of the flight processes that can create efficiencies. Credit:Hawaiian Airlines "Idle descent does not mean I'm turning the engines off  it does not mean that  we don't turn into a glider," Captain Beres laughed. "It means that we're operating the engines at idle thrust, a minimum thrust setting for descent, which is basically the equivalent of driving a car down a hill and not having your foot on the accelerator." While some of those measures might seem obvious, they required intense coordination between the involved airlines, air traffic control and the airports at either end. And for the pilots, it meant rethinking their day-to-day operations.

"I don't know if I'd put it in terms of easier or harder," Captain Beres said. "I would say that there may be more things to think about in terms of planning  we want to more carefully plan how we do business as crews and as an airline  but a lot of times when we engage in these practices we find there are better ways to do business anyway. "So it may be just replacing a less efficient practice we were doing before. It's sort of change management  it doesn't necessarily mean it's any more difficult in doing. "It may be difficult for that period of change, in terms of having to manage that, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily harder or easier." Brisbane was an obvious choice for Hawaiian Airlines' second ASPIRE route, Captain Beres said.

"We've been operating into Brisbane for a number of years now, so we have a level of comfort operating on the city pair between Honolulu and Brisbane," he said. "Primarily, we looked at Brisbane and saw they were already engaged in these best practice markers we look to when certifying a new route. "We felt like it was optimally positioned for us to demonstrate as many of those best practices we could." Airservices Australia executive general manager of air navigation Services Stephen Angus said each agency involved had a unique role to play during an ASPIRE flight. "Our role at Airservices is to use efficient air traffic management practices to ensure the success of the ASPIRE flight," he said.

"This new route is another example of airlines, airports and air navigation agencies working together to reduce aviation emissions globally." Brisbane Airport Corporation operations general manager Stephen Goodwin said the airport played its part in assisting airlines to reduce emissions. "Brisbane Airport Corporation is proud to support Hawaiian Airlines in showcasing environmental strategies that reduce fuel burn and carbon emissions in aviation operations," she said. "As such, Brisbane Airport, in conjunction with the ground handler, will assist to ensure ground power units and pre-conditioned air is made available for these flights." While in the air, Captain Beres said, Hawaiian Airlines was collecting important scientific data through the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System, with instruments attached to the A330.
More than 90 Korean backpackers have been underpaid thousands of dollars while working on a farm in south-east Queensland.

The backpackers, who were on 417 working holiday visas, were employed by labour contractor Boonah Packing Pty Ltd.

More than 90 backpackers have been underpaid for picking carrots in south-east Queensland. Credit:Sofia Levin

Boonah Packing supplied labour to Scott Moffatt & Co, trading as Moffatt Fresh Produce, to sort and pack carrots on a farm at Tarome, 100 kilometres south-west of Brisbane.

Moffatt Fresh Produce supplies carrots to markets in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and packages and provides produce to major supermarket chains including Woolworths and Aldi.
George Soros, the world's richest hedge fund billionaire, has pledged to invest as much as $US500 million ($662 million) to help refugees and migrants globally.

"We will invest in startups, established companies, social impact initiatives, and businesses started by migrants and refugees themselves," the currency speculator said in a statement Tuesday. "These investments are intended to be successful."

Billionaire George Soros is known for taking strong stands, not just when it comes to currency bets. Credit:Bloomberg

The investments will be owned by Soros' non-profit organisations and the profits will go to fund programs at the Open Society Foundations, including programs that benefit migrants and refugees, according to the statement. Soros, whose charities have donated more than $US8 billion since the latest 1970s, plans to work with organisations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Rescue Committee to establish appropriate investment principles for the initiative, according to the statement.

Globally, 65.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, according to the UNHCR. Of those, 21.3 million are refugees, and 10 million are stateless. More than half the world's refugees are fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia.
Gender equality is currently a hot topic in Canberra, partly due to the Australian government's stated commitment to removing barriers that may be impeding women's progress in the Australian public service. Views on how best to achieve this, however, differ.

My research on gender equality in the APS has revealed that agencies are undertaking a range of initiatives to progress gender equality. Some of these initiatives are small yet significant, such as arranging workplace morning teas for mothers on maternity leave; others focus on where and how work is conducted, and encourage employees to telework; yet other initiatives aim to change behaviour by uncovering and removing an individual's hidden biases which can, for example, affect recruitment and selection outcomes.

Agencies are undertaking a range of initiatives to progress gender equality.

While all these initiatives are important and share the underlying goal of increasing gender equality in the APS, leading international research has shown that one of the most effective ways to improve gender equality is to address issues systemically, rather than solely relying on approaches that focus on individual employees and/or managers.

So how can workplace culture change so that progressing gender equality is not merely another management exercise aimed at employees, but becomes embedded into the fabric of an organisation? There are various ways in which this can be achieved.
Ever since having seen my late mother suffer so much when all she wanted was to slip away peacefully, I have been a strong public advocate, for others and for myself, of Dying with Dignity.

After a long struggle in the 1990s with a series of hospital physicians, my mother, Edna Fitzgerald (nee Beecher) of 41 Charles Street, East Brighton, in suburban Melbourne, eventually died in her mid-80s.

Activists rally to support a Dying with Dignity bill. Credit:Wayne Taylor

A few years before her death, due to a combination of glaucoma and cataracts, my mother went blind. She was then hospitalised in Melbourne with a series of complaints, which eventually involved both of her legs being amputated.

Despite her stated wish to be able to die with some peace and dignity, the hospital physicians continued to "treat" Edna for a variety of illnesses and complaints.
For those who needed persuading that Malcolm Turnbull is trapped in an unhealthy, co-dependent relationship with his party's hard right, his approach to the proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage clinches the matter. The problem isn't just that the Prime Minister affirmed Tony Abbott's manoeuvre to stymie marriage equality by way of a popular vote. On the contrary: for a while I even saw some merit in the plebiscite idea, although the Brexit poll, with its cautionary lesson about the inherent unpredictability of yes/no contests, rattled me enough to opine against it. But Turnbull's cowardice has further tainted the proposal with bad faith and it deserves to be voted down in the Senate.

Ideally, a popular vote might have exposed the sham arguments of the "no" same-sex marriage camp, their intoning "thousands of years of tradition" (as if, by some strange law of physics, time calcifies as weight), "freedom of religion" (that's the freedom to impose religion on others) and the one that takes the cake for disingenuousness and chutzpah, that by legislating for same-sex marriage the state expands its power over our lives (a stance that's only coherent if it advocates the complete abolition of marriage, but these conflicted libertarians won't go there.) Yes, a plebiscite would give a platform to hate  but also to love, in all its diversity.

Illustration: Matt Davidson

A "yes" vote would confer political legitimacy, burying the idea this social reform is only beloved of an out-of-touch elite that's either too scared or too lofty to test their convictions in the court of public opinion.

So a free vote for marriage equality should have been celebrated as an opportunity  not supporting it looked like a tactical error on the part of Labor and the Greens. Yet all this was before Turnbull's persistent appeasement of the religious lobby undermined the integrity of the plebiscite concept.
I tried moving to a location where I could study in my office. Yes. I do have my own office but I figured that it would be better for me to get out of it so that people wouldn't interrupt me. I found an empty cubicle with divisors up with few people around. However, there's a meeting going on in a nearby office and per my schedule, I needed to write this essay now. I was also pressed for time on this particular essay. I hope it's okay. I need to practice more of my AWA skills. I would appreciate feedback. The highlights are for obvious mistakes I noticed after writing it.Essay Question:

The following appeared in a memorandum from the business department of the Apogee Company:



When the Apogee Company had all its operations in one location, it was more profitable than it is today.

Therefore, the Apogee Company should close down its field offices and conduct all its operations from a single

location. Such centralization would improve profitability by cutting costs and helping the company maintain better

supervision of all employees.



Discuss how well reasoned  etc.

Essay:

Apogee Company should consider their actions before it takes action on the memorandum provided by the business department because of logical issues and fallacies contained in the memorandum that I will address herewith. In the memorandum the success Apogee Company has had in the past is attributed to having only one location. There may actually be other reasons why the company has been profitable in the past. While the memorandum may be an internal document and doesn't necessarily need to address the business Apogee Company is in, it is important for the reader to know whether closing a field office will have a minimal impact on the business. Sales from certain 'field offices' may be a great source of revenue and by closing them, would make Apogee Company less profitable. In addition to these issues, why is consolidated supervision of employees necessary? Supervision may not be enough of a justification for consolidation. I will address these issue henceforth.



At some point in time Apogee Company was profitable. There could be a million reasons why it was. However, the memorandum writers seem to think that having a centralized location was the primary reason why the company was profitable. Lets imagine that Apogee Company implement the major change of consolidating their field offices into one location. Is it possible that the company would not see anything in terms of profit? Is it possible that a profit wouldn't be realized for the short term or the long term? We don't know our time horizon and we don't know how events in the market will affect profit, revenues, and expenses for the company. The memorandum needs to justify why having one location determined profitability in the past.



If the filed offices have some type of sales or regional necessity, it may be a bad idea to close all of the field offices across the board. It may be a very good idea for Apogee Company to determine which field offices have the most impact on the region they lie in as well as determine which field offices generate the most sales (if that's what these field offices functions are) thereby aiding in which offices to keep and which ones to shut down. This would help maintain revenue for those regions and lower expenses for the company overall.



Does supervision actually aid with profit? Not necessarily. Increased supervision may hinder employee satisfaction due to micromanagement and may hinder the company in the long-term which wouldn't be good for company profitability. It may be necessary for Apogee Company to make a more compelling and comprehensive case on what benefits the company will receive due to consolidating their offices before the company takes any action on the memorandum.



With a more rigorous analysis of the past determinants of Apogee Company profitability, the company may have some useful information that can aid it in making a decision. However, the past doesn't equal the future and there are a multidude of factors that can affect company profitability. It will be important for Apogee COmpany to make an analysis in this regard.
He also railed against Harry Potter, claiming that J K Rowling's perennially popular books encourage children to believe in black magic and wizardry. "In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses," he said.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the Catholic journalist Cristina Odone described Amorth as a caricature from the Protestant Truth Society who deserved "the special kind of censorship that only the Catholic Church can impose: life in a Trappist monastery". Although his claims that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin (and, more recently, Islamic State) were possessed by the Devil raised few eyebrows, there were protests in 2011 when he decreed that yoga was the Devil's work.

While modern Christians have tended to sideline the Devil as an embarrassing reminder of a past when the Church used too much stick and not enough carrot in spreading its message, the Vatican never dismantled its medieval network of exorcists in every diocese. Most toiled away in obscurity  but not the outspoken Father Amorth. His book, An Exorcist Tells His Story, became a European bestseller.

Father Gabriele Amorth, who has died aged 91, was the Catholic Church's best-known and most controversial exorcist, and honorary president for life of the International Association of Exorcists, which he co-founded in 1990.

In fact, some of his views were not so far out of line with Vatican orthodoxy. In 1999 the future Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy, had issued a document warning Roman Catholics of the dangers of yoga, transcendental meditation and other "Eastern" practices on the ground they could "degenerate into a cult of the body" that debases Christian prayer.

But other pronouncements caused embarrassment  such as his claim that Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee who had gone missing in Rome in June 1983, had been kidnapped for sex parties involving Vatican police and foreign diplomats, and later murdered.

Meanwhile some felt his contention that the sex abuse scandals which had engulfed the Church in recent years were proof the Antichrist was waging war against the Holy See provided too easy a moral escape hatch for priestly abusers. The possessed person, Father Amorth argued, "isn't a bad person, only a suffering one".

Father Amorth claimed to have carried out between 70,000 and 160,000 exorcisms  often performing the rite several times with one person  and women, it seemed, were especially vulnerable. When in 1996 it was reported that of the 40 or so exorcisms carried out in Rome every week, about 80 per cent of the "possessed" were middle-aged, middle-class women, he explained that women were "more vulnerable because they are the ones who mostly go to see clairvoyants, mediums, card readers, attend seances and belong to satanic sects", speculating that "it could be that the Devil wants to use them to get at men like Eve did to Adam".

Father Amorth believed that people possessed by Satan tended to vomit pieces of iron and shards of glass. and had a collection of regurgitated bits and bobs  nails, keys, chains, plastic figurines  to prove it. During one session, he recalled, "the Devil told a woman that he would make her spit out a transistor radio, and lo and behold she started spitting out bits and pieces of a radio Such things are rare, but they happen". He had seen possessed victims levitate, and he credited the 1973 horror film The Exorcist with giving a "substantially exact" representation of what it was like to be possessed by Satan.
To that end Australia's participation in the Costa Rica scheme is certainly a worthy, albeit politically convenient and very modest, gesture that won't risk a voter backlash.

The security of having a well-managed migration system, the Prime Minister suggested, prompted citizens to unite and support more help for refugees.

Malcolm Turnbull speaks as US President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden listen at the Leader's Refugee Summit at the United Nations General Assembly. Credit:AP

When Malcolm Turnbull trumpeted Australia's asylum seeker policy to the United Nations and said we would accept refugees from a US-backed centre in Costa Rica, he invoked the trade-off underpinning the government's tough border control regime.

But Mr Turnbull's overarching argument about Australia doing more to help refugees is shaky.

The new annual intake of 18,750 is just making a previously announced number permanent. It is still below the level Labor oversaw in 2012 before Tony Abbott slashed it to 13,750. What's more the new intake is well under the 26,000 the Houston report recommended in 2012 as an incentive for asylum seekers to take the official route not board rickety boats.

Within hours of his speech Mr Turnbull's rationale about national unity for a higher refugee intake was looking even more porous when an Essential opinion poll showed about half of all Australians wanted to ban Muslim immigration. This would rule out acceptance of most refugees from war-torn Syria and the Middle East. Presumably, central American refugees would be more welcome.

To his credit, Mr Turnbull will add $130 million over three years towards what he called "peace building and assistance to refugees, forcibly displaced communities and host countries". This is on top of $220 million already committed to help Syria and neighbouring countries.

But the Costa Rica deal attracted most attention.
Melbourne loves its street art. We know that from the regularity our stencil-adorned laneways are used to promote the city in tourism ads and fashion spreads. Not so long ago, Lonely Planet even claimed that Melbourne's street art was now one of Australia's biggest tourist attractions.

So now comes the news that Melbourne will play host to one of the world's most famous street artists, the ubiquitous-yet-elusive Banksy, whose work will be housed in one of our premier cultural institutions in Federation Square later this year.

Yeah, nice one. Banksy rats in Flinders Lane were inadvertently removed by a council worker in 2010.

Banksy may have once been a clever and mildly subversive street artist, but this show surely signals a steep descent from what was once considered outsider fringe art into the league of mainstream acceptability.

The news of the forthcoming Art of Banksy exhibition has been welcomed by mayor Robert Doyle as a "major coup" for the city. After all, Melbourne is internationally feted for its own home-grown street art scene, and has played host to some famously desecrated works by Banksy himself.
Cuddling a kitten may always make you feel better - but it could be dangerous to your health, experts say.

Doctors from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US conducted a large-scale survey of the cat-borne bacterial fever cat-scratch disease.

The scope and impact of cat-scratch disease are wider than previously thought, doctors have found. Credit:Peter Rae

They found the scope and impact of the potentially deadly disease was larger than they thought.

The disease causes fever, pustules and, in extreme cases, the complications from the illness can cause death.
Australian families are paying up to $400 more a month for private health insurance than consumers in comparable countries like Britain and New Zealand.

The Turnbull government acknowledged during the election that a majority of the 13 million people with private health cover feel they are "not getting value for money from their policy".

The private health industry blames this on a range of factors, including the much higher cost of medical devices like pacemakers and hip replacements compared to other countries and the public health system.

An international comparison of premiums confirms Australia's place among the highest cost markets in the world for private health cover.
The government has rejected suggestions that Australia's newly announced acceptance of Central American refugees will form part of a people swap arrangement with the United States.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten demanded to know on Wednesday if there had been consideration of a "Costa Rica solution" to the prolonged detention of refugees in Australian offshore detention centres, following the surprise announcement by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull from the US overnight.

In the speech at the invitation-only United Nations refugee summit, Mr Turnbull announced that an increase in the annual refugee intake to 18,750 would become permanent as well as a boost to humanitarian funding.

"Mr Turnbull needs to spell out: is he having negotiations with Canada?" Mr Shorten asked. "Is he having discussions with New Zealand or the United States? Is he talking to leaders in our region? Has he sent his ministers to talk to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees?"
It is time to end years of heated debate about about whether the federal government should fully fund the Gonski agreements and begin work on a new school funding model, according to the Turnbull government.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham will tell his state counterparts on Friday that Australia's current school funding arrangements are a "corruption" of David Gonski's original vision and must be replaced by a simpler, fairer model.

The meeting of federal and state education ministers in Adelaide marks the start of negotiations for a new four-year school funding model to begin in 2018. This is when the big-spending final two years of the Gonski agreements, worth an extra $4.5 billion, were due to kick in.

Senator Birmingham will present a new analysis showing the current system - negotiated in the final days of the Rudd-Gillard government - is a patchwork of "special deals" with states and school sectors that is riddled with "gross inequalities".
As one of America's most celebrated Armenians, Kim Kardashian was not impressed when the Wall Street Journal published a full page ad in April that denied the Armenian genocide.

The ad, emblazoned with the words "Truth = Peace", portrayed hands coloured in the flags of Armenia and Russia (which in 2015 recognised the Armenian genocide centenary) with crossed fingers; while a hand in the middle representing Turkey was making the peace sign.

Kim Kardashian: "For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous."

"During this week of reflection we remember and mourn the loss of Turkish and Armenian lives," the ad read, "lost in the destructive conflict known as the 1915 tragedy."

At the top, readers were directed to "Stop the allegations" and visit FactCheckArmenia.com, where it's claimed the Ottoman empire's massacre of Armenians in 1915 does not constitute a "genocide".
The NSW government has abandoned a $55-million-a-year program that teaches students to read, 10 months after a damning review found the program that has been used in up to 960 schools for more than 30 years does not work.

The move, buried within the state government's $340 million Literacy and Numeracy Strategy announced on Wednesday, will see Reading Recovery lose its mandated status while the NSW government pushes ahead with a heightened testing regime from the first day of kindergarten to ensure struggling children are not left behind.

"Some children don't know that you read from left to right, some kids don't know which way up a book is read, some kids don't know how to hold a pen," said NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli.

The early intervention strategy will introduce additional regular testing or "assessments" from day one of kindergarten, to online testing on the first day of year 7 until the end of year 12, at 670 schools over the next four years.
The University of Sydney has dropped four places in the world's most prestigious university rankings list, the latest report from Times Higher Education has revealed.

According to the report, due to be released around the world on Thursday, Australia took out 23 places in the world's top 400 universities.

The nation's oldest tertiary institution, the University of Sydney, dropped from 56 to 60 this year, tying with the University of Queensland, while its Sydney rival UNSW moved up four places to 78.

The University of Melbourne is once again the country's highest ranking institution at No. 33, while Australian National University came in second as the 47th best university in the world.
Aboriginal Australians have the closest genetic links to highland Papua New Guinea populations, the largest DNA study of its kind has found, providing new insights into the movement of early humans following their dispersal from Africa.

The study also found that the last ice age led to more genetic differences between Aboriginal populations in eastern and western Australia than between the indigenous populations of North America and Siberia.

Biological anthropologist Michael Westaway from Griffith University obtains a saliva sample from Thanakwith elder Thomas Wales in Cape York. Credit:Tom Cebula, Wall to Wall Media

"We've tried to reconstruct this genetic map of Australia that tells a story of how dynamic Aboriginal society was over 50,000 years," said Michael Westaway, senior research fellow at Griffith University and co-author of the study, published in Nature.

The researchers behind the study sequenced the genomes of 83 Aboriginal Australians from across the mainland, representing a range of geographical and linguistic groups, and 25 people from the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Mariam Veiszadeh was on the bus when she read the poll result.

"I just felt sick in the gut," she said. Sorrow set in. Paranoia worsened.

"Every 2nd person sitting on the bus I was on this morning would ban people like me from coming here," Ms Veiszadeh, a diversity advocate, wrote on Twitter soon after.

An Essential poll had found 49 per cent of Australians support a ban on Muslim immigration.
The man who helped his twin brother conceal the murder of NSW school teacher Stephanie Scott has apologised to her family.

Marcus Stanford, 25, who pawned Ms Scott's engagement and graduation rings, delivered the apology on television shortly after he was released from prison.

"I want to say sorry for what I've done and for the hurt I've caused the family," he told Channel Nine. "For now I hope I don't cause any more trouble." He said he had done "a really stupid thing".

Stanford was sentenced to 15 months' jail last month after pleading guilty to an accessory to murder charge but was released on September 8 because of time already spent in custody.
A key defence witness has given conflicting accounts of where Amirah Droudis, the partner of Sydney siege gunman Man Monis, was on the weekend she allegedly carried out a brutal murder at his command, a court has heard.

Ms Droudis, 37, is on trial in the NSW Supreme Court accused of stabbing Monis' ex-wife 18 times, dousing her in petrol and setting her alight in an apartment complex in April 2013. Ms Droudis has pleaded not guilty, but her defence team does not dispute that Monis was the mastermind of the murder.

Amirah Droudis was the partner of Sydney siege gunman Man Monis.

A young female relative who was called by the defence team as an alibi witness told the court she had slept over at a property in Belmore and had been with Ms Droudis on the afternoon of the murder.

But in cross-examination, the relative conceded that she had given a different version of events when interviewed by police shortly after Ms Droudis was arrested in November 2013.
A man accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting two females, including a 13-year-old girl, in Sydney has been charged with three other attacks on women across the city earlier this year, police say.

Mustafa Kayirici, 26, has been charged with sexually assaulting a number of women in Sydney.

Mustafa Kayirici, 26, has been in custody since June 25 when he allegedly crashed his car into a bus stop on Old South Head Road in Bondi during a police pursuit.

At the time of his arrest, detectives had been searching for Mr Kayirici for nearly a week in connection with two sexual assaults.
A surge in day trippers, school children and people working different hours has led to the state government opting to put on more trains on some lines in the afternoon and changing timetables for parts of NSW's rail network.

Under the latest rejig, three extra all-stops trains will run between Bondi Junction and Hurstville in the city's south in the afternoon, doubling services on the Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra Line from Central Station between 3.15pm and 3.45pm.

The extra trains to run from October 17 mean four existing services bound for Cronulla and Waterfall in south Sydney will stop at fewer stations, in an attempt to reduce crowding and trip times by up to eight minutes.

Patronage on Sydney Trains' network is growing at about 8 per cent a year, leading to overcrowding on services during peak hours.
Police investigations into an accident between a bus and a train in northern Brisbane on Tuesday afternoon were continuing on Wednesday, with no indication of whether the bus driver would face charges.

The council bus, with passengers on board, was travelling on South Pine Road at Alderley when it was struck by the train about 4.45pm on Tuesday.

A QR passenger train hit a council bus at Alderley on Tuesday. Credit:Faith Jarvis

It had stopped on the tracks in heavy traffic, when the train approached and, eventually, struck the bus as the train's brakes strained to stop the vehicle.

All passengers on the train and the bus escaped injury.
Loganlea mother Belinda Williams remains in hospital with her nine-year-old daughter Tessa, just days after losing her husband and two sons in a horrific car crash in New Zealand.

Ms Williams had been travelling in a rental car with her partner Stephen Phillips, her sons aged 14 and 12 and her daughter when the car collided with a truck on State Highway 1 at Huntly on Monday afternoon.

First violinist Stephen Phillips was killed along with his stepsons in a crash on Monday. Credit:www.qso.com.au

They had been on their way to a family reunion for the school holidays.

Mr Phillips and his stepsons were pronounced dead at the scene while Ms Williams and her daughter were rushed to Waikato Hospital.
Assessment and approval processes for foster carers will be reviewed, following the death of Logan schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer.

The Queensland Family and Child Commission will perform the review as part of an investigation into information sharing between government and non-government agencies.

The QFCC review was initially sparked following the disappearance and death of 12-year-old Tiahleigh.

Principal commissioner Cheryl Vardon will also conduct a planned review of blue cards.
Allo supports emojis and sticker packs but doesn't go as overboard as Apple's iMessage in iOS 10. Credit:Adam Turner, You can also change the size of the text in your message, from a whisper to a shout, by dragging the send button up and down. A loud shout also triggers that chirpy "Allo" notification, even if you have the app open. Smart Reply Google Assistant appears on your contact list  you can ask it just about anything but it can be fussy when it comes to syntax. You can also see its suggestions for follow up search queries. Credit:Adam Turner Allo also borrows the Smart Reply feature from Google's Inbox app, which acts like auto-correct to offer you a short list of appropriate canned replies. It can even analyse images to make suggestions, recognising objects and landmarks. It gets to know the way you talk so it sounds more like you over time.

The chat window displays one tick next to a message to show it's been delivered, then adds a second tick to confirm it's been read. Smart Replies are certainly useful when you're in a rush, but the fact that the person on the other end can't distinguish between Smart Replies and real replies leaves it open to abuse. On the left you can see Smart Reply in the action, in the middle Google Assistant recommends restaurants, on the right you can see shouting and whispering in conversations. Credit:Adam Turner For example, if someone types "Love you" then you can simply tap on "Love you too" without giving it too much thought  which perhaps doesn't bode well for the relationship. You can have short conversations which are nothing but Smart Reply ping pong, but Allo catches on after a while and stops coming up with suggestions so you're forced to actually write something. Keep it secret Allo also features "incognito chat" for those times when you want to have more secure conversations. It utilises end-to-end encryption, with nondescript lock screen notifications which simply say "You have a new message" without including details of the sender or message. You can also set messages to automatically delete after any time between five seconds and seven days.

Lots of messaging apps have enabled end-to-end encryption in the last few years to allay privacy concerns, but if you're really that paranoid about security then you're probably not going to use Google services for secret messages  regardless of its security promises. To be honest the most likely use for incognito chat is sexting, and perhaps not with your own partner, but I'm not sure how much I'd trust it with your private pics. I'm not completely sure how these things are supposed to work, but the deletion timer only starts after you open the message  there's no extra passcode on the message which means if someone else picks up your phone they can see the last message you received if you haven't read it yet. Even if you have read all the messages, the fact you were exchanging incognito messages with that person remains in your recent list unless you manually delete the conversation thread. An empty incognito chat thread still looks pretty incriminating. Can I be of assistance?

Allo becomes more interesting when you discover "Google Assistant" in your contact list. You can strike up a conversation with the assistant and converse with it the same way you'd interact with Google Now. Microsoft has done something similar, incorporating a Cortana bot into Skype. For iGadget lovers, it's basically the equivalent of building Siri into iMessage. At this point Google Assistant in Allo is a "preview edition", it will eventually be the foundation of the Google Home voice-controlled benchtop speaker which seemingly will arrive in October (as least in the US). For now Google Assistant supports many of the novelty easter eggs built into Siri which keep children entertained for a while, such as "tell me a joke", but thankfully it can also be quite useful. One of Google's strengths is that it understands the context of follow on questions, for example you can ask "Who is the president of the United State of America?" and follow up with "How tall is he?" to learn that "He is 1.85 metres tall". Siri would be totally lost on that second question, because she wouldn't know who "he" is. One strange quirk in both Android and iOS is that you can't tap the Google mic button so the app will start listening to your spoken OK Google-style commands. Instead pressing that button records what you're saying so you can send an audio file. If you want to dictate commands to the app you need to use the Android/iOS keyboard mic button and then press Enter. It's the same on iOS when you're talking directly to Google Assistant while, on Android, Google Assistant starts listening for commands when you tap the Google mic button.

Ask me anything You can also use the assistant to interact with Google services, such as calling up your Google Calendar schedule or setting alarms and reminders (some features are still in the pipeworks). You can even ask it to remember things, such as "my parking space number is A45". Google Assistant improves over time as it gets to know you. It can call up a wide range of information from the web but, for all of Google artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's more of a stickler than Siri when it comes to syntax. Case in point, the following six queries all make sense to Siri and she'll call up a list of movies screening nearby; Show me movie times, What's on at the cinema, What should I see at the movies, What's on at the movies, What's playing at the movies, What's screening at the movies. Only the first three queries produce a list of movies using Allo, while the rest fall back on Google searches which point to Village cinemas or Wikipedia.

Google joins the conversation What makes Google Assistant particularly interesting is that you can bring it into group conversations with your friends by starting a message with @google. One advantage of this is that you can execute Google searches within the conversation for everyone to see, such as "What's the weather in Melbourne on the weekend" when planning a group outing or "QF74 status" to see whether tomorrow's San Francisco to Sydney to flight is expected to arrive on time. Asking "Restaurants nearby" will find you nearby places to eat, while Allo will eventually integrate with OpenTable so you'll be able to make a reservation without leaving the conversation. It can even be proactive  if you ask the group "feel like Italian food?", Google Assistant will butt in with an offer to find dining recommendations. It's this ability to show initiative that could see Google Assistant evolve into something really amazing. These features and Smart Replies are a bit temperamental on iOS, but that might just be teething issues. It also depends whether third-party integration remains US-centric.
Re: The Public Generally Expects. [ #permalink

2 Kudos

This is a general type of question.

Tone: The tone of the passage can be best described as .



The author begins by criticizing how these publication distort the facts, followed by a number of reasons why these publications are not well substantiated. Finally, at the end of the first parragraph the authors tone towards the passage comes into a clearing. By saying "I contend such journalism alone is of little true value...meaningful detriment to investors decisions", the author expresses disapproval towards these journalists and publications.
In two weeks from now we will likely have official confirmation of brand new smartphones from Google, the first to be designed by the company itself.

The web giant has teased an unveiling set for 2am AEST October 5, and unless it's planning to reveal a completely unexpected product that just happens to have the rounded oblong dimensions of a smartphone, it seems like the long-held rumours of a Google phone will come to pass.

The teaser posted online by Google.

A Google website shows a familiar rectangle  which has been the centrepoint of the company's search empire for almost two decades  slowly morphing upward into the shape of a phone, which fills with a variety of standard lifestyle images. Aside from the graphic, the page features the text "5 Oct." and the Google favicon used across its products, as well as a field for people to enter an email address and be "notified".
You can also make your own personalised Day Plan. Day Plans come with a map that shows you where you'll have to go to follow the itinerary. You can pin a specific attraction on the map, and the app will make sure that point of interest is included when it updates suggested itineraries. In a press release, Google explained:

"Say your friends told you that you have to see the Sagrada Familia  and you're looking for suggestions on things to do around that spot. Press the "+" button in the day plans tile to jump into a map view containing all the top attractions in your destination. If you're time constrained, you can specify above the map whether you have just the morning or afternoon, versus a full day. Then simply tap and pin the Sagrada Familia to build your itinerary around it. Google Trips automatically fills in the day for you. If you want more options, tap the "magic wand" button for more nearby sights. You can pin any new spots you like, and if you want even more, each tap of the "magic wand" instantly gives you a new itinerary with updated nearby attractions like Palau Macaya or Parc del Guinardo, so you can build your own custom itinerary."

I can see this being incredibly useful for long layovers. While it doesn't show up for every city just yet, you'll see a list of suggested itineraries for most major cities.

Food and Drink: This card gives you an overview of what the restaurant scene looks like in your destination city. You get a list of local specialties, food neighbourhoods and nightlife.
A 12-year-old girl has been hospitalised after two schoolgirls exchanged blows in Melbourne's north on Wednesday afternoon.

The fight broke out at a Hungry Jack's car park on High Street in Epping, shortly before 12.30pm.

One of the girls involved in the brawl was taken to The Northern Hospital with minor injuries.

An Ambulance Victoria spokeswoman said she was in a stable condition when assessed by paramedics.

The second girl involved in the scuffle, also aged 12, was no longer at the scene when police arrived.
A man bashed by two brothers near a Melbourne nightclub had stopped to exchange words with one of them, believing he had been racially abused, a court has heard.

James and Matthew Bruce punched and kicked the man to the head and face while he was on the ground after following him to a car park off Chapel Street, Prahran about 3.10am on June 21 last year.

Moments earlier, the man stopped outside Revellers Bar when he heard James Bruce say "my n-----", Melbourne Magistrates Court heard on Wednesday.

Prosecutor Tania Fox said the man - who is originally from Kenya - exchanged words with James and walked away, but James, Matthew and their older brother, Oscar, followed.
A man who presented himself at hospital bleeding from stab wounds was allegedly knocked off his motorbike by a vehicle and then stabbed by its occupants west in Melbourne's west.

Police are investigating after a Tarneit man was taken to a Bacchus Marsh hospital with serious stab wounds about 4.15am on Wednesday.

Police are hunting for offenders who hit a motorcyclist, stabbed him and fled.

It's believed the 33-year-old motorcyclist was on Exford Road in Melton South when he was hit and knocked to the ground by an unknown vehicle about 3am, a police spokesman said.

"The occupants of the vehicle then pulled over and stabbed the 33-year-old motorcyclist," he said.
The railway station at the Melbourne Showgrounds is so badly dilapidated that rail staff say they won't work there again after this year's show finishes next week.

The union representing railway employees has slapped bans on working in the railway station building after the show finishes on Tuesday, warning Metro it is in sore need of a refurbishment.

Showgrounds station Credit:Jason South

"The structure has been neglected to the point of danger," said Luba Grigorovitch, the branch secretary of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union.

The union has applied to WorkSafe to force Metro to carry out urgent repairs to the station, which is only used for 46 days a year.
A Senate committee tackling the controversial CFA dispute was given an outdated version of the contentious workplace agreement between the union and management.

It has been revealed that the committee set up to examine the Turnbull government's proposed new workplace laws, designed to protect volunteers in paid emergency service workers workplace agreements, was given a version of the EBA that did not include special clauses to protect the role of volunteers.

United Firefighters Union secretary Peter Marshall: "It is blatantly clear this whole process has been botched." Credit:Justin McManus

Also missing were clauses that outlined the "seven on the fire ground" rule only applied to the 34 integrated CFA stations, not all 1200 CFA brigades.

The workplace agreement for more than 800 paid CFA firefighters has infuriated the volunteers association who fear the EBA will undermine their role.
The University of Melbourne has continued its reign as the top Australian institution in the most prestigious world rankings.

But it coincides with a warning that Australia's future success is "not guaranteed" due to the impressive rise of Asian universities.

Six Australian universities finished in the top 100 of the Times Higher Education world university rankings, which were released on Thursday.

The University of Melbourne was again ranked 33rd, followed by the Australian National University (47th), the University of Queensland (equal 60th), the University of Sydney (equal 60th), Monash University (74th) and the University of New South Wales (78th).
A veterinarian allegedly at the centre of Australia's biggest doping scandal in a decade says a gambling addiction led him to turn over $4 million in three years.

Former Flemington Equine Clinic vet Dr Adam Matthews gave evidence on Wednesday to a fiery appeal, on the eve of the Spring Racing Carnival, of bans imposed on two of the country's best-known trainers, Mark Kavanagh and Danny O'Brien, for cobalt doping.

Dr Adam Matthews at VCAT where he is giving evidence in an appeal by trainers Mark Kavanagh and Danny O'Brien for cobalt doping. Credit:Jason South

Mr O'Brien and Mr Kavanagh were issued with bans after horses in their care tested positive for cobalt during the 2014 spring racing carnival.

They are appealing those bans in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
A mystery woman leaving flowers and gifts for unsuspecting strangers around Perth's southern suburbs has been revealed as a local mother-of-three whose goal is to simply spread kindness.

In recent weeks Laura Beacham has brought joy to the faces of countless people in Rockingham who she has never met, and who she never sees receive her gift.

Laura Beacham has secretly been leaving flowers and gifts for strangers to stumble upon across Rockingham,

One such person was mother-of-two, Teshia Marree, who stumbled across a note and bouquet of flowers in a shopping trolley in Warnbro on September 15.

The random act of kindness could not have come at a better time for Ms Marree with her sick newborn having just been discharged from hospital that morning.
Police are searching for a Perth teenage girl not seen by her family in five days.

Isabella 'Bella' Farano, 14, was last seen on Friday night leaving her Mirrabooka home.

Missing girl, Isabella Farano. Credit:WA Police

She was wearing black three-quarter length leggings, white Nike 'hi-top' running shoes and a black Adidas zip-up jumper with three white stripes down the sleeves.

Police have concerns for Isabella's welfare and have asked anyone with information on her whereabouts to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
An exasperated John Kerry called out Russia for its support of Syria's regime amid the collapse of a ceasefire, accusing Moscow of enabling President Bashar Assad to violate the truce intended to let in humanitarian relief and lead to negotiations in the civil war.

Wagging his finger at Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov across the horseshoe-shaped table at the United Nations Security Council, the US secretary of state Wednesday urged Russia to ensure Syria's compliance with the ceasefire, which the pair hammered out in Geneva two weeks ago.

Mr Kerry demanded that planes be grounded immediately over areas where humanitarian aid would be delivered as a way "to restore credibility to the process" - a lecture directed at Russia and Syria, the nations flying over those areas.

"How can people go sit at a table with a regime that bombs hospital and drops chlorine gas again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and acts with impunity?" Mr Kerry told a Security Council meeting, setting aside his prepared remarks and his usual dogged optimism in the power of diplomacy. "Are we supposed to sit there and have happy talk in Geneva when you've signed up to a ceasefire and you don't adhere to it? What kind of credibility do you have?"
Manila: Firebrand Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has lashed out with fresh obscenities at foreign critics of his deadly anti-drugs campaign, while issuing a veiled threat to potential coup plotters saying "we're watching you".

The man known as the "Punisher" told local government officials in his home-town of Davao that he became enraged after reading that the European Union had passed a resolution condemning extra-judicial killings in his island-nation of 100 million people.

"I told them 'f--- you. You are only doing it to atone for you own sins'," he said, raising his finger in an obscene gesture.

In another speech Mr Duterte said his foreign critics should know that under his campaign 700,000 drug pushers and users have surrendered to police.
New York: Russia was probably responsible for the deadly bombing of a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in Syria, US officials said Tuesday, further shredding what remained of a severely weakened agreement between the United States and Russia aimed at halting the war.

Aghast at the attack on Monday night, UN officials on Tuesday suspended all aid convoys in Syria, describing the bombing as a possible war crime and a cowardly act.

The suspension was announced as the United Nations was convening its annual General Assembly meetings in New York, where the five-year-old Syria war has become the organisation's most anguishing challenge.

"Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower," Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in his opening remarks to the gathering, his last as leader of the United Nations after 10 years. Ban called the attack on the convoy "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate."
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Checkmate in the news again in negative light  Suspect released by Judge of Instruction but remains a suspect.

PHILIPSBURG:--- A long-time security guard working for Checkmate Security was in police custody over the weekend after he was caught on camera stealing envelopes from the Postal Services St. Maarten (PSS) and pushing it in his crotch.

According to a well-placed source, the security guard identified as Eli Harrison from Jamaica unit 19 went away sometime last week while the management of PSS was investigating the disappearance of USD 80,000.00 that went missing sometime in the month of July. It is also believed that the theft was an inside job and police are busy investigating.

The source said while the known security guard was away on vacation for a few days, PSS installed new cameras, and upon his return to the job he was not aware that PSS management installed new cameras, therefore the uniformed thief went to the back of the post office and was pushing envelopes into his crotch. Police were called to the scene and they conducted a body search of the security guard who has been working at the Post Office for the past 6 years and they indeed found envelopes in his crotch. So far it is not clear if the investigation into the disappearance of the USD 80,000.00 has any relation to Eli Harrison since there are now two complaints filed by PSS, one against Harrison on Friday and one relating to the missing funds.

Chairman of PSS board Stuart Johnson confirmed that there is an ongoing investigation regarding the disappearance of USD 80,000.00. Johnson also admitted that the Checkmate Security Guard that has keys to the building was arrested on Friday when he was caught on camera placing envelopes in his crotch. Johnson said based on the briefing he got from the interim manager of PSS, he was told that the security guard was caught with mails from the registered services, he said he could not correlate whether or not the security guard is involved in the stealing of the missing cash, neither he cannot understand why a security guard would steal registered mail. All I can tell you is what I am told by the interim manager and I am now awaiting a full report from management of PSS.

In invited comment from spokesman from the Prosecutor Office Gino Bernadina states that E.H. was arrested on Friday September 16 on suspicions of theft. The arrest was based on a complaint filed by the post office. The Prosecutor ordered his detention for two days. After that the Prosecutor ordered his prolonged detention for another 8 days. On Monday the suspect appeared in front of the judge of instruction who reviewed his arrest and detention. The judge decided to suspend his detention. E.H. remains a suspect. The investigation continues.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Recent deteriorating developments in the Sint Maartens only prison seem more worrisome than before. This according to the Law Enforcement Council.

In the aftermath of the escape of a prisoner in February 2016 and the most recent incident of August 2016 during which a prisoner inmate was murdered by a fellow inmate with a firearm, is the reason for additional serious concerns. Questions about the safety and security not only of the personnel and the prisoners but as well as society as a whole have been raised publicly, notes the Council.

In October 2016 the Law Enforcement Council will initiate the first of three inspections of the Point Blanche detention facility, all to be conducted through May 2017. In 2015 the consultative platform for the respective Ministers of Justice within the Dutch Kingdom (JVO) jointly requested the Council to monitor the follow-up of the recommendations made by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT).

In the timeframe between the preceding inspections that were conducted in 2013 and 2014 and its preparations towards the upcoming inspections, the Council has already noted several bottlenecks.

The Council inspected the safety within the prison facility in 2014. During that inspection, it also investigated a violent incident whereby a firearm was used but malfunctioned, followed by sharp objects being used to severely injure one of the inmates.

Immediately thereafter, the then Minister of Justice requested the council to include that incident in the 2014 inspection report on safety within the facility.

Findings, conclusions, and recommendations can be found in said report as posted on the Law Enforcement Councils website, www.raadrechtshandhaving.com.

At the time, the Council already expressed its concerns and pessimism regarding the precarious situation at the prison. Many findings in this study were consistent with what had been previously discovered and included in numerous reports dating to as far back as 2005. The Council noted that previous reports on findings and recommendations had often not led to an actual addressing of the shortcomings.

In its own study, the Council reiterated its impression of the great dedication of those who keep the institutions running, under very difficult circumstances.

The Council found that three main factors affect the security and safety within the prison: understaffing as well as the quality and integrity of personnel. The Council concluded that there is a lack of attention for many serious challenges, notwithstanding that the integral support and commitment of the government is mandatory.

The Council presented no less than 15 recommendations to contribute to improvements. It emphasizes that real effect, however, is only achieved when this multifaceted issue is approached integrally. The scope and dimension of the problem and the extent to which it has been consequently lagging behind in following up on findings and recommendations were (are) not a reason to be optimistic in any way. The Council referred to its doubts whether the situation could be substantially improved without the assistance from the Kingdom partners.

A year before (in 2013), an inspection report was published on the capacity of the facility, which indicated the shortcomings in that respect. The calculation made by the Council resulted in an indication that on Sint Maarten (in 2013) there was a need for a minimum of 251 cell locations. Presently the capacity reaches no more than 143 (43% under the minimum).

The Council endorsed what other research had already confirmed on various occasions: creating of detention places is not the greatest problem, but the maintenance of a proper level of treatment is. This is so because not only do extra cells have to be provided for, but well-trained personnel and adequate treatment of detainees is also required. The Council concluded its report with 4 recommendations for improvement, including one to comply with (inter-)national legal provisions and standards.

In the meantime, the Council has encountered the discussion on the same issues and problems on several occasions, the last time in April 2016 during the Justice conference on the Plans of Approach (dating back from 2010) for the Pointe Blanche detention facility. The conclusions of said conference have been presented to the government at the time.

Pursuant to the Kingdom Act on the Law Enforcement Council, all reports, including an executive summary, can be found on the website of the Council: www.raadrechtshandhaving.com.
PACIFIC to Provide Digital Marketing Expertise in Esri Retail Special Interest Group

SAN DIEGO, CA  (Marketwired)  09/20/16  PACIFIC Digital Group today announced it has joined the Esri Retail Special Interest Group, an organization thats dedicated to investigating and advancing the future of the retail industry.

PACIFIC is the only digital marketing agency invited to the group. It joins representatives from leading retail companies already utilizing geographic information systems (GIS) in their business models.

Whereas special interest groups are often seen as unfavorable, the intent of this group will be a positive step forward for retailers. The special interest group will collaborate to form the newest trends and pioneer the future of GIS in retail, working proactively to uncover insights and accelerate the industrys progress in localization.

We are incredibly proud to join an elite group of retailers that embraces innovation to advance their industry, said Norman Brauns, CEO and founder of PACIFIC. Esri data and GIS have already helped provide major advantages to retailers and were thrilled to collaborate with this group to gain further insight for shaping the future of retail.

PACIFIC and the group will have quarterly discussions throughout the next year to share ideas, learn from each others expertise and introduce leading-edge methods of applying GIS in the retail industry.

We are PACIFIC, the Discovery Agency. Our company was founded to provide best-in-class search, content marketing, and link-building services to leading brands, with a client list that includes Expedia, Travelocity, Jacuzzi, Mint, Microsoft, and others. As experts on curiosity, we help our clients align their brand story with the questions their customers are asking. As a result, we build inbound sales campaigns that deliver incredible results. For more information, visit .

Kimberly Deese

PR Coordinator
TierPoint to Build Second Dallas Data Center

DALLAS, TX  (Marketwired)  09/21/16  TierPoint LLC today announced plans to build a new state-of-the-art data center in the Dallas metropolitan area.

Partnering with Compass Data Centers, TierPoints ultimate plan calls for approximately 90,000 sq. ft. of building space in Allen, Texas, with the initial phase including an investment of over $20 million and 16,000 sq. ft. of raised floor. The new carrier-neutral facility will also include infrastructure support and office space and is expected to be operational by spring 2017.

The location we selected in Allen is beneficial for several reasons, said Chris Parsons, TierPoints Regional Vice President for the area. It offers an ideal disaster recovery option for our current customers and provides expansion capabilities for them while remaining local. Allen is a high-tech community in the rapidly growing US 75/State Highway 121 corridor, offering easy access from all points in North Texas and close proximity to the IT workforce, rapidly expanding population, and business growth in the area.

Allen Mayor Stephen Terrell said: Were proud to support the new TierPoint facility in our city. This is yet another example of how the proactive efforts of the Allen Economic Development Corporation attract new and beneficial business investment to our community.

TierPoints roots can be traced to Dallas and the companys first data center acquisition, Colo4Dallas, in 2010. The original 68,000 sq. ft. facility, built in 2000, was one of the first in the area to provide true 2N power, an important factor in preventing outages and giving the company a strong entry into the market. Since then, TierPoint has added 38 more data centers. The new Dallas-area facility will bring the total to 40 nationwide.

Dallas is one of the fastest growing markets in the U.S., offering a technology hub with abundant power, connectivity, and a business-friendly climate, said Jerry Kent, TierPoints Chairman and CEO. Our decision to invest in this second facility in the area is based on strong, regional demand for hybrid IT services and is a testament to the unique blend of world-class products, top-rate professionals, and superior customer service for which TierPoint is increasingly known.

TierPoint is a leading national provider of best-in-class IT infrastructure services that help clients improve agility, drive performance, and manage risk. TierPoint offers multi-tenant, private, and hybrid cloud solutions; disaster recovery, business continuity and other managed services; and colocation  all backed by a commitment to superior customer service and highly-redundant, carrier-neutral data centers coast to coast.

Patrick Baczenas

314-720-3136
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Parents have been informed of the death of a year 10 pupil of a Somerset school this morning.

The pupil at The Kings of Wessex Academy in Cheddar died last night (September 20), according to its headteacher.

The school confirmed the news in a letter to parents earlier today.

The letter from executive head teacher Chris Richardson said: "I am very sorry to have to inform you about some sad news.

"We have been informed by the police that one of our Year 10 students passed away last night. As yet we have no further details.

"I would like to reassure you that we are working hard to support all our students in school who have been affected.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends at this very sad time."

A separate statement from the school said: "The Kings of Wessex Academy is deeply saddened to learn of the tragic loss of a student.

"The student will be greatly missed by staff and students and our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends at this tragic time.

"The academy is currently supporting students in school."
After years of failed negotiations, Bangladesh and Canada have finally agreed to hold talks to find a way to the thorny issue of extraditing fugitive Noor Chowdhury - the self-confessed killer of the country's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman..

The two countries reached a consensus during a meeting between Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau in Montreal last week, the national news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha reported.

After the talks, Foreign Secretary Md Shahidul Huq told reporters that the officials of two countries would find out a way for extradition of Chowdhury from Canada. "The aim of the discussion would be to bring Noor Chowdhury to justice and execute the verdict of the Bangabandhu murder case," he said.

Huq said the government has been trying to extradite Chowdhury, who is in his 70s, from Canada and this decision will open a new window to bring him to Bangladesh.

Chowdhury is a former Bangladeshi military officer who was convicted in absentia in the August 1975 for the assassination of Sheikh Mujib.

Last year Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina came down heavily Canada for giving shelter to Chowdhury.

Noor Chowdhury lives in Toronto, Canada. The Canadian government has opted not to deport Chowdhury. His refugee claims have been rejected and he is technically under a deportation order. But Ottawa does not extradite those facing execution overseas after Canadas Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that it could not extradite fugitives without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman aka Bangabandhu and his family were brutally killed in Aug 1975 by some army officials, and out of the 12 convicted, five were hanged in 2010, one died and six are on the run.

A group of rouge army men killed Bangladeshs independence architect and most of his family on Aug 15, 1975, barely four years after liberation.

Bangabandhus daughters Hasina and Sheikh Rehana were abroad at the time.

Twelve men were condemned to death for their role in the killing. Five of them have been executed but six others are abroad.

Chowdhury was granted visitor status in Canada in 1996, and hasn't left the country since.
When and where to Trick-or-Treat? South Bend and area times listed

local
Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Elizabeth, NJ man accused of planting and detonating multiple explosive devices across New Jersey and New York that injured dozens last weekend, will soon be transported to a New York District Court to face charges of bombing a place of public use and using weapons of mass destruction. And while many are glad that Rahami, an American citizen, was denied the release of death and will instead face a trial followed by a possibly very long imprisonment, Republican leaders want to take away his constitutional rights and label him an "enemy combatant."

The term was invoked by both South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump earlier this week. In a message posted on his website, Graham argued that treating Rahami as an enemy combatant would lead to useful intelligence-gathering that would "help our nation understand how these attacks were planned and carried out," and potentially safeguard against future attacks.

"Holding Rahami as an enemy combatant to determine whether he has ties to terrorist groups, whether he was working for or funded by them, and whether there are co-conspirators, and then trying him in our civilian system for his terrorist acts is the best way to protect our country first, and then achieve justice," the Senator wrote, adding that he doubted the Obama administration would take such steps with Rahami, instead opting to, in his words, "criminalize the war."

Speaking at a campaign rally in Fort Meyers, Florida Monday, Trump repeatedly mentioned Rahami. "Congress should pass measures to ensure that foreign enemy combatants are treated as such," Trump said. "These are enemies, these are combatants and we have to be tough, we have to be strong."

Like most people who have been accused of terrorism-related crimes since 9/11, Rahami is a United States citizen, and designating him as an enemy combatant would preclude the administering of Miranda rights, allow for him to be interrogated without a lawyer, and allow his indefinite detention without habeas corpus. Former U.S. Attorney David Kelleywho prosecuted 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousefbrushed off the Republicans' demands as "absolutely absurd."

"To jeopardize our adherence to the rule of law for the possibility of such little gain is absurd, Kelley told the Daily News.

If you turn in your hymnals to the Book of Rumsfeld, chapter 9, verse 11, you'll recall that "enemy combatant" was used as a label for captured members of the Afghan Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or "any person who committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces." The term was extended to not only foreign captives but U.S. citizens, and its ambiguity was exploited by the Bush administration as a means of keeping accused terrorists' location and treatment away from public view and outside the rule of law.

Enemy combatants became emblematic of the Bush administration's disregard for due process in 2003, when photos and reports of degrading abuse and torture of Iraqi and Afghan "enemy combatants" at the Army's Abu Ghraib prison were made public. Enemy combatants' rights (or lack thereof) were also at the forefront of the federal trial of Jose Padilla, a 36-year-old American citizen arrested in 2002 on suspicion of plotting a radiological "dirty bomb" attack. After President Bush ordered Padilla be labeled an enemy combatant, he was held for over three years in a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolinauncharged, allegedly tortured, and with no access to legal representation. Padilla's status was eventually changed back to that of a criminal civilian, and he was sentenced to 17 years in prison on conspiracy charges.

A 2008 Supreme Court ruling reasserted captives' right to access the U.S. Federal Court system. That decision, known as Boumediene v. Bush, made it possible for detainees held at America's Guantanamo Bay military prison to submit petitions to have their habeas corpus rights restored. However, many of those petitions have been denied by Appeals and Circuit Court judges, and Guantanamo remains open. In 2013 dozens of its prisoners were revealed to be "indefinite detainees." As a result, many have dismissed President Obama's 2009 decision to stop using the "enemy combatant" label as a meaningless gesture. "It's symbolically significant that he's dropped the term 'enemy combatant,' but the power to detain individuals within the 'indefinite detention without charge' paradigm remains substantially intact," Tom Parker, Amnesty International advocacy director for terrorism, said at the time.

Speaking at a campaign rally in February, Trump argued for a return to the Bush administration's treatment of accused terrorists. "Torture works. OK, folks? You know, I have these guys, 'Torture doesn't work!' Believe me, it works. And waterboarding is your minor form," Trump said. "But we should go much stronger than waterboarding."

If you're wondering whether you should "believe" the neon orange sociopath who has been torturing our national psyche this entire election season, please note that no, torture does not work.

Neither Graham nor Trump has publicly called for Rahami to be waterboarded, but the latter has bemoaned the fact that he will be getting a court-appointed lawyer.

If you take an honest and fair look at it, treating suspects as enemy combatants has not resulted in more credible and actionable information than that taken in a normal course by law enforcement professionals in a criminal process," Kelley told the News. Rahami is currently being held in New Jersey and is due to be transported to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to face additional charges.
Workers at the three airpots that serve New York City may soon be earning significantly different wages due to differing minimum wage laws in New York and New Jersey, the New York Times has found.

This past April, Governor Cuomo signed a bill raising the statewide minimum wage over the next five years. The new law stipulates that businesses in New York City are required to pay their employees a minimum wage of $15 an hour by 2018. (Businesses in Westchester have until 2021 to do so, and those upstate have to raise their minimum wage to $12.50 an hour by 2020.)

However, in August, Chris Christie vetoed a similar bill that would have raised New Jersey's minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of five years, calling it a "really radical increase" that "would trigger an escalation of wages that will make doing business in New Jersey nearly unaffordable."

"All of this sounds great, raising the minimum wage, when you're spending someone else's money," Christie said in response to the veto.

Hence the problem: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages the main three NYC airports located in Newark and Queens, currently has a minimum wage of $10.10/hour, and this week it will vote on whether or not to adopt a higher minimum wage for its workers in New York than for those who work across the Hudson River. According to the Times, there are two options on the table: the authority's twelve commissioners will either vote to reset the higher wage for employees in both states; or they'll decide to pay each respective state's minimum wage, unless it is lower than the current hourly wage of $10.10 paid to Port Authority employees. (New Jersey's minimum wage is currently $8.38 an hour).

According to the Times, at least half of New Jersey's six Port Authority commissioners would have to vote in favor of the first option for it to pass. John Degnan, the board's chairman (appointed by Christie), has previously expressed his reluctance for such a large wage hike.

Four months before Cuomo signed New York's minimum wage bill into law, hundreds of airport employees protested the Port Authority's low wages in LaGuardia's Terminal B. Several were arrested during the protest. In November 2015, employees at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports went on strike in a push for higher wages, and during the 2015 protests, some JFK employees who worked for subcontractors claimed they were being paid as little as $6.75 per hour.

Democratic leaders in New Jersey are reportedly planning to introduce an amendment to the state's Constitution that would gradually increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021. Unless New Jersey's minimum wage surpasses $10.10 an hour by 2018, Port Authority workers in NYC will be earning nearly 33 percent more than their counterparts in New Jersey.
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The Paris Agreement, easily the most important climate change-related accord of the century, is thisclose to full ratification. At the UN general assembly today, 31 countries ratified the accord, joining the 29 nations who ratified it previouslythese countries put out 48 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and the agreement needs 55 percent of emissions represented to go into effect. So, we're close! But we're also probably still screwed.

Brazil, Mexico, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Albania, Iceland, Honduras, Singapore and Thailand were among the countries to newly ratify, joining heavy hitters China and the United States, among others. The accord only needs 7 percent more of the world's emissions to fully ratify, and a number of nationsincluding Australia, Argentina, Canada and the United Kingdomhave agreed to ratify by the end of the year, which would push the agreement over the edge.

Once the 60 percent threshhold is crossed, the very complicated agreement kicks into geareach individual country will have to contribute financially to keep the global average temperature from rising, to help adapt to changes brought on by global warming, and to lowering greenhouse gas emissions overall. It's not entirely clear how or whether the agreement will really help, but it's something, and at this point the agreement's gone so far even Nightmare President Trump can't derail it.

Still, it might be too late. 2016 is shaping up to be the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, which is disturbing enough on its own, but it's following a trend. Each climate change study released seems more terrifying than the last, and many scientists seem to agree we've reached a point of no return. The Paris agreement might be a big step, but it would have done a lot more good 50 years ago than it'll do today.

President Obama, who used his last address as president at the U.N. General Assembly to call for "bold" action on climate change, just tweeted this powerful new video. Send it to the climate change denier in your life:

Oh well, at least there won't be any men on Mars.
Buzz Aldrin explored Mars virtually Sept. 18, 2016 with "Destination: Mars," newly opened at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Erisa Hines, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who drives Mars' Curiosity rover, is just to Aldrin's left. Both appear as virtual avatars in the simulation.

Real-life astronaut Buzz Aldrin introduced his virtual counterpart Sunday (Sept. 18) at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, previewing a new "mixed reality" exhibit that lets visitors explore the surface of Mars with a virtual Aldrin as their guide. The exhibit officially opened to the public Monday (Sept. 19) and will be open until the end of the year.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California developed the program, called "Destination: Mars," in partnership with Microsoft HoloLens. Visitors use a HoloLens headset, which makes virtual imagery visible on top of the real world, to experience Mars as observed by NASA's Curiosity rover.

Aldrin, who flew on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, recalled how inspirational the moon landing was for a generation of potential space scientists. Perhaps, he said in a statement, this type of technology could have a similar effect.

"Technology like HoloLens leads us once again toward exploration," Aldrin said. "It's my hope that experiences like 'Destination: Mars' will continue to inspire us to explore."

In the virtual world, Aldrin and Erisa Hines, who drives the real-life rover from JPL, guide viewers through the Martian landscape.

Buzz Aldrin cut a ceremonial ribbon for the new "Destination: Mars" program at Kennedy Space Center Sept. 18, 2016, along with Therrin Protze, chief operating officer of the visitor complex, and Bob Cabana, the center's director, on Aldrin's left. Kudo Tsunoda of Microsoft and Jeff Norris of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are on the astronaut's right. (Image credit: NASA/Charles Babir)

"Destination: Mars" uses software developed at JPL, called OnSight, which lets researchers wearing HoloLens sets participate in a shared virtual reality and plan out routes and points of interest for the Mars rover. Researchers using OnSight could be situated anywhere in the world and interact intuitively with the Martian landscape from the rover's point of view.

Microsoft's HoloLens is not yet commercially available to the public, but visitors to Kennedy Space Center will have a rare opportunity to try out the technology  at least until the exhibit closes, Jan. 1, 2017.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
An artist's concept of Kepler-16b, the first planet known to orbit two stars. Planets around binary stars may be as common as those around single suns.

Worlds with two close suns, like the fictional planet Tatooine in "Star Wars," may be just as common as their single-star cousins  and sometimes, like a mythological phoenix, such planets might be born from the ashes of one star's death.

A new study reveals that the most massive worlds occur nearly as often around tight pairs of stars as they do around singles. While most planets that orbit one star came into being along with their sun, some of the worlds orbiting two tightly paired objects may have come from one of the stars' debris.

"Because of the challenges they present, binary stars have been for a long time neglected," Mariangela Bonavita, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, told Space.com. Bonavita examined a number of stellar surveys, including The Search for Planets Orbiting Two Stars (SPOTS), to which Bonavita contributed, to hunt for worlds around pairs of stars. [Photos: NASA Discovers Real-Life 'Tatooine' Planet With 2 Suns]

"That's changing now, thanks to direct imaging, and also thanks to [NASA's] Kepler spacecraft," she said.

Double sunrise

Binary star systems, which contain two suns rather than a single star, are abundant throughout the galaxy. According to Bonavita, more than half of the stars in our sun's neighborhood have at least one companion. When the two stars are far apart, a planet's path travels around only one of the stars. But if the stars are close enough to each other, worlds can travel around both stars in circumbinary orbits. In all but the most tightly packed systems, however, finding planets around the pair can be a challenge.

That's because most detections are made indirectly, through either the radial velocity method, which tracks the gravitational wobble a planet causes in its star, or the transit method, where light from the star dips in brightness as a planet eclipses its sun. Most radial-velocity planetary surveys omit known binary stars completely, while the need for longer observations makes identifying binary-orbiting planets a challenge in transit surveys. That doesn't mean that they can't be spotted, however  Kepler's long observations helped researchers identify more than a half-dozen circumbinary stars.

Planets with multiple suns can only exist in a handful of stable orbits that can endure through the life of the stars. If their stars are too far apart, the planets are more likely to orbit just one of them, or risk being ejected completely from the system. However, as long as the suns are within 92 billion miles (150 billion kilometers), or about 1,000 times the Earth-sun distance, planets can safely dance around both in what Bonavita calls "moderately wide orbits."

Those wider orbits can be captured by a third method of planetary detection known as direct imaging. Unlike transit and radial-velocity methods, in the direct-imaging approach, a photograph is taken of a planet that is orbiting its sun (or suns). Since this method relies on a coronagraph to block the starlight, the direct-imaging method favors planets that are in wider orbits that won't be covered up.

"Imaging searches are more sensitive to planets in the outer regions, and very tight binaries can be treated as singles when it comes to coronagraphic observations," Bonavita said.

"Therefore, circumbinary planets are indeed ideal targets for those surveys."

When direct imaging is used, larger planets are easier to spot than their smaller cousins. Calculating their mass precisely can be a bit more challenging, however. Many of the objects that are seen with this method fall between the realm of massive planets and brown dwarfs, which are even larger. Because the extremely massive brown dwarfs are too small to kick-start hydrogen fusion in their cores like their stellar cousins, they are often called "failed stars."

Bonavita examined the number of substellar companions  the collection of objects that could be either brown dwarfs or giant planets  that were found in multistar orbits in 23 existing surveys, including SPOTS. She found that they occurred nearly as often around two stars as they did around one.

"There is no strong difference, in terms of frequency of substellar companions in wide orbits, between close binaries and single stars," Bonavita said.

While most direct-imaging surveys focus on single stars, SPOTS deliberately searches for potential pairs that could host planets. The survey is halfway through observing 67 pairs over a span of four to five years.

The research was recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Phoenix Tatooines

Most planets form from the disk of dust and gas left behind after the birth of their star or stars. After jostling one another for the most stable orbit, these first-generation planets can potentially survive until the end of the lifetime of one of their suns. One example is Kepler-16b, the first confirmed circumbinary world.

But when one sun dies, the system changes drastically. The dying star can either explode in a supernova or shed its exterior material, occasionally leaving behind a small dim core known as a white dwarf, a city-sized object more massive than the sun. The dense companion can pull material from the other star in the pair.

Most planets aren't expected to survive the violent end of their stars' evolution. But there have been reports of several planets orbiting double stars where the white dwarf is sucking material from its companion.

"Such planets, if real, are either the remnants of the original planetary system that survived the violent evolution of the stars or [bodies that] formed after the interaction," Bonavita said, cautioning that the reported worlds remained unconfirmed.

Like the mythological phoenixes, secondary worlds would rise from the ashes  in this case, the dust and gas  left behind by the death of the star.

According to past studies, if binary planets commonly survived the death of one parent star, they would be plentiful around debris-sharing stars, Bonavita said. Since such planets aren't frequently observed, that suggests that it is more likely for them to have formed from the ashes after one of the stars blew out to form a white dwarf.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that terrestrial worlds like the fictional Tatooine may be common. Like the phoenix of old, it would be rare for habitable worlds to emerge around these stars.

"A second-generation, Earth-sized planet would be harder to form, because of the lack of heavy elements," Bonavita said, referring to worlds created after one of their stars had died.

If a rocky "phoenix" world did manage to form from the ashes of a star, it would experience extreme radiation from the bodies it orbited, making habitability tricky.

"It would definitely be harder for a second generation planet to be habitable, because any atmosphere would be stripped away during the common envelope phase," she said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
The Cygnus spacecraft and Antares rocket are prepared for launch at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia.

The commercial spaceflight company Orbital ATK is officially planning for an Oct. 9 launch date for its first Antares rocket since a 2014 explosion, a return-to-flight mission that will deliver NASA cargo to the International Space Station.

Under the plan, Orbital ATK's Antares rocket will launch the company's unmanned Cygnus cargo ship from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia no earlier than Sunday, Oct. 9, at 10:47 p.m. EDT (0247 Oct. 10 GMT), according to a NASA statement. The launch window extends to Oct. 13 (which would see a 9:13 p.m. EDT/0113 GMT liftoff), ensuring a nighttime launch that may be visible to a wide swath of the U.S. East Coast.

The mission will be the seventh of 10 Orbital ATK cargo missions for NASA under a deal worth $2.6 billion. NASA and Orbital ATK originally planned to launch the resupply mission in July, but the plans were pushed back to August. On Aug. 10, NASA and Orbital ATK announced that the launch would be delayed until September, citing several reasons, including the need for more tests and inspections.

The upcoming launch will mark Orbital ATK's first flight of its new variant of the Antares rocket, Antares 230. The updated launch vehicle will include a new Russian-made RD-181 engine, which will replace the AJ26 engines that were implicated in a fiery explosion and launch failure on Oct. 28, 2014.

Since the 2014 launch failure, Orbital ATK has launched two Cygnus missions for NASA, including this dazzling night launch in March, using Atlas V rockets provided by the United Launch Alliance. Those Atlas V missions lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Orbital ATK's first two official cargo missions for NASA launched aboard the earlier Antares rocket version in January and July of 2014. Those missions followed two earlier test flights in 2013.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Five corrections officers have been arrested and charged for brutally beating an inmate at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, New Yorkleaving the victim with broken bones, a collapsed lung and his dreadlocks ripped outthen conspiring to cover up the attack.

According to the US Attorney's Office, Kathy Scott, George Santiago, Jr. and Carson Morris have all been charged with conspiracy to deprive civil rights, deprivation of rights under color of law, conspiracy to falsify records, and falsifying records in the 2013 beating of inmate Kevin Moore, 54, that left him hospitalized for 17 days. Two other officers who participated in the alleged beating and cover-up, Donald Cosman and Andrew Lowery, have already pled guilty to similar charges and are cooperating with the prosecutors.

The incident happened on November 12th, 2013, when the officers in question surrounded Moore and another inmate, instructing them to remove their shoelaces because they were going to be confined in Forensic Diagnostic Unit cells, which are designed for inmates with mental health issues. When Moore objected to being confined in a mental health cell, saying he had a good lawyer and that he was a monster," Morris allegedly punched him and the others threw him on the ground.

Here are the sickening details of the alleged beating from the US Attorney's office:

After the officers forced Moore to the ground, the defendants beat Moore for several minutes, striking him dozens of times. Defendant Santiago kicked and punched Moore multiple times, and at one point, reared back and kicked Moore in the face, and then laughed. Defendant Morris punched and struck Moore with his knee multiple times while Moore was prone on the floor. Moores pants fell down during the beating, and Cosman and Lowery punched and kicked him in his exposed groin as he lay on the floor. Both Scott and Santiago taunted Moore by saying, Whos a monster now? During the beating, dreadlocks were ripped from Moores head and Santiago later retrieved the dreadlocks, saying that he wanted to keep them as a souvenir for his motorcycle. Sergeant Scott was present for and watched over the entire beating without stopping the violence. At one point while Moore was on the floor being beaten, Scott grabbed him herself. She also directed that Moore be held in place on the ground, rendering him even more exposed to punches and kicks. While Moore was being beaten, he cried out in pain, begged for the beating to stop, and pleaded with Sergeant Scott, Why, Sarge, why? Make it stop. After the beating, the correction officers needed to physically lift Moore from the ground, where he was lying in a pool of his own blood. Moore suffered several fractured ribs, several facial fractures, and a collapsed lung, in addition to other injuries. Instead of being sent to the hospital for treatment, Moore was locked into solitary confinement to suffer in pain overnight.

Prosecutors say the five all agreed to give false reports about the incident, with Santiago, Morris and Cosman conspiring together by having Santiago strike Cosman on the back with his baton, causing marks, and then blaming the injuries on the prisoner to justify their excessive force.

"Inmates may be walled off from the public, but they are not walled off from the Constitution," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. "And when correction officers viciously beat an inmate in their charge, then collude among themselves to cover it up as alleged herethey trample on the Constitution and the very laws they have sworn to uphold."

As the Times points out, this case was initially investigated by the Corrections Departments internal affairs unit, which up until recently was run by corrections officers "who were often reluctant to take action against their fellow officers." The Times notes that any changes in the way the department does its business are unlikely to happen without the cooperation of the corrections officers unionasked by the Times whether brutality by officers was a problem, union president Michael Powers replied, "What are you talking about?"
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The Elizabeth, NJ man accused of setting off a series of explosive devices in New York and NJ, injuring dozens in Manhattan, bought various components to make the bombs on eBay and was filmed lighting explosives days before the bombing, federal authorities say. Ahmad Khan Rahami was hit with charges yesterday, including bombing a place of public use and using of weapons of mass destruction.

Rahami is currently in NJ, after being charged with attempted murder of a law enforcement officer for shooting a Linden cop during a manhunt. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's office said, "Rahami will first be transported by the United States Marshals Service, pursuant to a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum, to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to face the charges filed in the Southern District of New York."

The bombings took place on Saturday, September 18th; the first bomb detonated in the morning in Seaside Park, where one pipe bomb with a cellphone exploded (two others did not detonate), causing no injuries. The second explosion occurred on West 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues in Manhattan at 8:30 p.m.; according to Bharara's office, over 30 people were injured.

The Chelsea bomb was a pressure cooker with Christmas lights and a cellphone (shrapnel, like ball bearings, was packed into the cooker), and a second pressure cooker device was found on West 27th Street and removed safely. This device was left in a suitcase, but two sidewalk opprtunists may have "inadvertently disabled the explosive" when taking the suitcase. Then a resident called the police after seeing the pressure cooker, though she thought it looked like "kid's science experiment."

On Sunday night, five devices in a backpack were found at the Elizabeth, NJ train station by homeless men; they saw the wires coming out of the bag and informed police. One of the bombs was detonated by a bomb robot.

By Monday morning, Rahami was identified as a person of interest and, after raids of his and his family's home in Elizabeth, was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar in Linden, NJ (by the bar's owner, who called the police). When officers confronted him, Rahami allegedly shot at them, hitting one in the stomach (the cop was wearing a bulletproof vest and survived), and ran away before being shot and wounded.

The criminal complaint, which covers all three areas where bombs were found, says that Rahami ordered bomb parts on eBay between June and August of this year, and shipped them to a Perth Amboy business where he worked:

The criminal complaint also alleges that video of Rahami "igniting incendiary material in a cylindrical container" was found on a relative's cellphone. Feds believe the video was filmed on Thursday, September 15th, in Elizabeth: "The video depicts Rahami in a backyard. Partially buried in the ground is a small black cylindrical object. A fuse is lit and the object ignites; the video depicts the lighting of the fuse, a loud noise and flames, followed by a billowing smoke and laughter. Rahami then entered the frame and is seen picking up the cylindrical container."

Rahami, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan, is currently hospitalized in Newark, NJ. His father called him a "terrorist" during an argument two years ago, prompting a neighbor to call the authorities. The FBI questioned Rahami's father and other relatives; his father was apparently more upset about about his son's drinking and unsavory friends.

Rahami's wife left the country in the days before the bombings. She was headed to Pakistan but was stopped in the United Arab Emirates for questioning. The NY Times reports, "She provided a statement to the F.B.I., according to officials, and the authorities are working to bring her back into the country as soon as possible."

Friends have said that Rahami changed after trips to Afghanistan, appearing more religious and serious. After his arrest, authorities reportedly found a journal sympathetic to jihadist causes. The criminal complaint said Rahami allegedly wrote about his fears of being captured before the bombings: "The handwritten document closes as follows: 'Inshallah [God willin] the sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION.'"
Occupied Smara, September 21, 2016 (SPS) - the Moroccan occupying authorities has brutally dispersed a peaceful demonstration of a group of marginalized young Sahrawi demanding their right to work and a decent life and to benefit from the wealth of their country, reported Sahrawi human rights source.

According to the same source, the occupying authorities attacked the demonstrators in the streets of the city leaving fear among the citizens.

It is not the first time that the Moroccan repressive authoritie deals with the Sahrawi legitimate demands for self-determination and freedom. It should be recalled that, SPS

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Belmopan, Sept 21, 2016 (SPS) - The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic Ambassador to Nicaragua, Mr. Suliman Tieb Henan, as Special Envoy of the President of the Republic, Brahim Gali, has participated in the festivities for the 35th Anniversary of Independence of the Republic of Belize, which took place from 17 to 21 September 2016.

Presidential Envoy delivered a written message, in a bilateral meeting with Foreign Minister of Belize, S.E. WILFRED Elrington, in which the President of the Republic expressed his congratulations and sincere wishes of prosperity, peace and security for the sister Republic of Belize and his noble people; and his wishes to strengthen diplomatic relations between the two governments, congratulating them for leadership and the role that Belize maintains in Central America and in the Community of Caribbean States.

For its part, the Belizean Foreign Minister reaffirmed to the Saharawi Ambassador his country firm position towards Sahrawi people legitimate struggle for self-determination and independence, saying that Belize supports any peace process that will enable the Saharawi people to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination.

Special Envoy of the President of the Republic participated in a diplomatic meeting chaired by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belize with the participation of the authorities of the country and finally attended the traditional flag-raising ceremony and other official acts. SPS

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I read with disgust again in the national press that farmers are being blamed once again for the destruction of the wildlife and loss of biodiversity and bird species in particular. It is worrying that we are still in this culture of blaming the farmers for destroying the countryside and no consideration given to what is actually being done to enhance the wildlife habitat.

Worryingly, these reports are being published close to the NFUs Back British Farming Day and the Red Tractor Week but perhaps we need a new direction going forward led by the industry as a whole, rather than individual parties.

Brexit surely must be the time at which we need to unite and find a way to act as one market to promote British food and create a real brand that is worth something. The Scots have managed it extremely well as have the New Zealanders, and our industry needs to decide if we wish to work together or continue on this individual basis. I know that Yorkshire as a brand is strong, but are we right to continue to market that, rather than pushing the British brand solely? Its great for local provenance but we need more than that, we need a global presence going forward.

Clearly Europe are intent on making it as difficult as possible, but now is the chance for us to take the moral high ground, promote our extremely high standards of production and welfare and promote what we are great at doing. Part of this is to promote how good we are at managing the environment that we live and work in. Yes there will always be the odd few that dont conform as in any industry but ultimately, 99 out of 100 farmers are passionate about where they live and care for the environment as its ultimately their shop floor.
In addition, land already sold may have an overage clause on it whereby the original landowner can claim back a percentage of the increase in the value for the uplift over and above its normal agricultural value.

These potential ransom opportunities can produce large financial benefits to the adjoining landowners if their third party land is required for access or services. The ransom element applies even if only a few square feet of land is required, if the main development cannot take place without rights over this third party land.

Developers will often approach adjoining landowners for a grid connection offering them a one-off payment; a large number of landowners will happily sign up for a grid connection which may only be a few metres long for a one-off capital payment. What is often not realised is that it really does not matter if the grid connection over the land is only one metre or 1000 metres as in each case a ransom situation applies, so the development cannot take place without reaching agreement with the third party landowner.

The developer may try to say that the local District Network Operator (DNO) has compulsory powers if the one-off payment is not agreed. What they say is correct but often any compulsory powers may take 1-2 years to implement. The DNOs strongly resist going down this route and would rather the developer negotiate directly with the landowner. It does not take much for development costs to enter 7 figure sums and there are very tight time limits when building projects so the developer needs to get the matter resolved very quickly. This can produce a fantastic negotiating position for the landowner, if they are aware that these opportunities exist.

Fisher German has been able to achieve some extremely large either one-off capital payments (or for tax reasons some landowners prefer to have large annual rental payments) for a service connection or access. Mark Newton, partner sustainable energy, comments;

I was approached by one landowner who was prepared to agree a grid connection for a short distance across his land to the sum of 100, and he wondered if I could increase his payment. I was able to get it settled fairly quickly for a sum well in excess of 100,000.
You can write me at: James Gurney PO Box 693 Rhinebeck, NY 12572 or by email: gurneyjourney (at) gmail.com Sorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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STAMFORD  A city man jailed with seven criminal cases pending was arrested again this week for stealing more than $16,000 worth of silverware from his former girlfriends 80-year-old mother, police said.

Andrew Michaud, 52, was transported Tuesday to the Stamford courthouse from the Bridgeport Correctional Center and charged with second-degree larceny. He is being held in lieu of an additional $50,000 court appearance bond.

The mother of Michauds ex-girlfriend filed a police report in February that someone stole her sterling silver serving set worth $16,728. The set included knives, forks, spoons, a gravy ladle and pie server.

The Arden Lane woman said she suspected Michaud, who had been living in her basement, police said. The woman said Michaud broke up with her daughter, but was staying in her basement because he had no place to live.

Michaud moved out after he was arrested for numerous copper pipe thefts around Stamford, his four-page arrest affidavit said.

The woman said Michaud knew where she kept the silverware and there was no forced entry into the home, police said. She said he also had taken a China set and put it on consignment at Stamford House Wrecking a few months earlier, the affidavit said.

Officers receovered a Yankee Peddler $287 receipt in Michauds pickup truck related to jewelry chains, bracelets and rings but no silverware, the affidavit said. Officers also found his former girlfriends jewelry bag, which was kept in the same closet as the silverware, the affidavit said.

Police determined the jewelry sold to the Norwalk pawn shop was worth about $2,500, bringing the monetary loss of possessions to $19,230, his arrest warrant states.

Michaud has not yet made a plea to the charges.

jnickerson@scni.com;
STAMFORD  A Norwalk man will spend five years in jail for having sex with his 12-year-old cousin when he was 15.

Javier Funez, 19, pleaded guilty this summer to first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor charges, after accepting a plea agreement that would keep him in jail for the mandatory minimum five-year sentence.

Funez faced up to 25 years in jail if convicted at trial on the sex charge and 20 more years for child endangerment.

They were both juveniles at the time, and I was hoping that the case would stay in juvenile court where I thought the case belonged. That was not to be, Barry Butler, Funezs attorney, told Judge Gary White during Wednesdays sentencing.

While his mother, an attorney in her native Honduras, sat in the courtroom, Funez said, I take full responsibility for my actions and what happened.

Senior Assistant States Attorney Paul Ferencek said the assaults occurred when the girl was 12 years old in the fall of 2012. Ferencek said Funez, who has no criminal record, was three years older than the girl when the incidents occurred. The victim confided during a counseling session in 2015 about the sexual encounters.

Funez was charged in December 2015 with four counts of first-degree sexual assault.

Given Funez admissions to police, this was not the case we were going to have a trial on, Butler said.

As part of the plea bargain that will keep Funez on special parole  a more stringent form of probation  for a decade once released from prison, three of those charges were dismissed and the child endangerment charge was added.

Butler said Funez, who was a student at Western Connecticut State University and working part time before his arrest, would not have been charged if he was two years older than the victim.

jnickerson@scni.com
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Hundreds of scientists, including 30 Nobel laureates and the great explainer of the cosmic world Stephen Hawking, signed an open letter on Tuesday warning that a Donald Trump presidency could wreak havoc on the planet.

The letter begins by stating that climate change is a physical reality, not a hoax, and "the increase in greenhouse gases is changing Earth's climate." The sea levels rising, the warming of the oceans, the altered rainfall patterns, the melting glaciers in the Arcticthese are all clear, solid evidence.

All 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences whose names appear at the bottom of the letter say they are absolutely certain without any doubt that human-caused climate change is "real, serious, and immediate." Failing to address the problem could impact everything from human health to national security.

The letter never mentions Donald Trump by name but it clearly refers to him in the statement: "During the Presidential primary campaign, claims were made that the Earth is not warming, or that warming is due to purely natural causes outside of human control. Such claims are inconsistent with reality."

The letter also cautions that "the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord."

The governments of the world coming together in Paris in December 2015 and making national commitments to address the problem of climate change was an important first step "towards more enlightened stewardship of Earth's climate system," the scientists say. Trump pulling out of this agreement would be disastrous.

"A 'Parexit' would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: 'The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change. You are on your own,'" the letter states.

Dozens of Bay Area scientists signed the letter that's available online, including 14 from UC Berkeley, 24 from Stanford University and three from UC San Francisco.

Stephen Hawking is among the most well-known names to sign and this isn't the first time the theoretical physicist and cosmologist has made critical comments against the businessman-turned-politician. Earlier this year on "Good Morning Britain," the Cambridge professor was asked to explain Trump's political rise and he responded, "I can't. He is a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator."
A few years ago, when internet platforms first began to be used to raise capital for companies, there was much hand-wringing.

The platforms did not have the resources of an investment bank or sophisticated financial institution so it was assumed they would be less able to assess the business plans of the potential fund-raisers.

City opinion also held that the funding of start-ups and small, growing businesses was already a well-trawled area, given the extensive presence of venture capital funds and private-equity houses constantly on the lookout for good ideas to back.

Traditional High Street banks also claimed still to want to be in the market. The implication was that if there was anything good out there, the existing players would pick it up.

There would be very little of quality left for new kids on the block.

The fear  stoked, it must be said, by self-interested incumbents who wanted to discredit the upstarts  was that it was only a matter of time, and probably not a very long time, before gullible investors were duped by dubious ventures peddling misleading financial information.

One should pause for a moment just to note the unintended irony here because the implication is that investors in established listed companies are not likely to fall victim to attempts to mislead, but this is of course not the case.

Earlier this year, former Dutch politician Hans Hoogervorst, head of the International Accounting Standards Board, delivered a blast of a speech in which he highlighted just how far companies went to put a favourable gloss on their figures.

He complained that ever-growing numbers of companies on both sides of the Atlantic were using misleading information to inflate their profits.

More than 88% of the S&P 500 currently disclose non-Gaap metrics in their earnings releases, Hoogervorst said  Gaap being the US accounting guidelines.

Of these releases, 82% show increased net income and are clearly designed to present results in a more favourable light.

They get up to all manner of tricks. Executives remove the nasty bits, and class costs that in fact occur in some form every year as exceptional.

They make like-for-like comparisons, which are not like last year at all. They take credit for profits that have not been, and may never be, earned. They pay people in shares rather than cash but dont deduct the cost of those shares. They rarely admit that these inflated figures bypass the accounting standards.

Given this context from the established markets, what is interesting about equity crowdfunding and the provision of loans through peer-to-peer lending is how little has gone wrong.

True, eavesdropping on fund-raising conference calls can be a toe-curling experience when those seeking the funds get carried away.

There have also been platforms which have abruptly left their respective trade associations, and you can draw your own conclusions as to why. But the industry as a whole has been remarkably trouble-free.

Even more to the point, and though it is still early days, there is now growing evidence that equity crowdfunding is profitable for investors.

Seedrs, which was launched in 2012 and is therefore one of the older platforms, had completed 253 deals across 15 different sectors from launch up to the end of last year.

Earlier this month, it published a comprehensive analysis to show what kind of businesses these were and how they have performed from their initial fund-raising through to the end of July this year.

The results are startlingly good, with the caveat that shares in unquoted and unlisted young companies are difficult to value.

With that in mind, however, Seedrs got Ernst & Young  one of the Big Four accounting firms  to review the valuation processes used.

Seedrs says that, taken as a whole, the 253 deals show an annualised gain after fees of 14.4%.

That, however, is just the beginning because many of these investments qualified for tax breaks as part of various Government initiatives.

If this relief is taken into account, the annualised return then soars to almost 42%.

Separately, Seedrs also calculates that those among its investors who have built up a portfolio of 20 or more different companies have achieved a return of more than 15% on average  which, with tax relief, comes out at 43%.

Nor are they alone. To test the thesis, I also asked Crowdbnk, a rival firm, how it has performed.

They are younger, the sample is much smaller, they dont just do equity and it really is too early to pass judgment on most of their businesses. But if the half-dozen or so that have had subsequent valuation events are judged as a portfolio, then the internal rate of return is 30%.

One has to stress again that it is still early days and there is much that could still go wrong.

But equally, it would be churlish not to give credit for what has been achieved so far.

On this evidence, crowdfunding is delivering a real benefit to entrepreneurs, investors and the whole country.
W hen Martin Roth, the influential director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, announced his surprise resignation from the famed institution this month, he gave a startlingly simple reason.

He was resigning, in part, because of Brexit.

We will have to get used to living without European funds. That will especially affect research, Roth explained.

But I actually feel affected on an ideological level more than on an economic one. We are entering the separation phase. It will be horrible.

It was an emotional response but reflected a concrete fear shared by many of his peers.

Brexit has sharpened minds across Londons big-hitting cultural institutions. Like the financial community, they face similar headwinds related to costs, funding and jobs.

Says Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts: While Brexit isnt necessarily an existential threat to most major cultural institutions in London, its surely going to make life much more difficult, especially in the short to medium term with the inherent uncertainty.

The EU is the creative industrys main trading partner, taking up 56% of Britains overseas cultural exports.

The 84 billion industry is in rude health, growing by 9% last year. That made it the UKs second-fastest growing industry, and also put the UKs overall economic growth of 2.2% in 2015 in the shade.

Its unsurprising then, that 96% of those polled by the Creative Industries Federation, a trade group, before the vote wanted to stay in Europe, with 80% of them saying access to EU markets was a key factor.

Groups like the Creative Industries Federation are due to hold talks with the Government next month to try to thrash out the post-Brexit landscape, but culture vultures must navigate immediate concerns.

Lower sterling has made it relatively more expensive for UK art institutions to book talent and eye-catching exhibits to pull in the punters.

Shows can be pencilled in three to four years in advance, meaning some are being planned now for as far away as 2020.

Competition for the biggest names and most eye-catching exhibits from Londons European rivals is fierce.

Despite informal agreements not to undercut each other on fees, institutions are still on red alert over the problem.

There is a risk that a weaker pound will create upward pressure on fees, counterbalanced to an extent by making us a more economic co-production partner, says Alex Beard, chief executive of the Royal Opera House.

The most important issue is to retain the ability to attract the best artists and staff to work here. We have a diverse workforce with just under 30% being non-UK EU citizens.

That is also a headache facing many cultural institutions, which rely on a flow of talent from places such as Paris and Berlin.

Reports this week suggested that the Royal Scottish National Orchestra was already having increased difficulties obtaining visas for foreign musicians.

Freedom of movement of talent is critical, said Creative Industries Federation chief executive John Kampfner.

There is the issue of recruiting people to jobs such as animation and special effects, where there are already skills shortages in this country.

"There is also the risk of extra costs and potential red tape involved in our orchestras, bands and dance and theatre companies touring Europe in future, and for venues and festivals in this country bringing European companies here.

Away from employment concerns, future funding is also a threat. Most arts institutions are bankrolled through a mixture of taxpayer cash  administered through the Arts Council, which contributes 26% of all funding  EU support and private donations from individual philanthropists and corporate sponsors.

Chancellor Philip Hammond has promised to protect any funding from the EU, which comes from a myriad groups such as Creative Europe and Erasmus, that has been signed before November 23. But any that follows is less certain to be guaranteed by the Government.

New Culture Minister Matt Hancock has pledged to put the creative industry at the heart of the Governments industrial strategy.

But there are strong fears that an oft-predicted UK recession could choke off the flow of Government cash available to fund the arts, placing even more pressure on institutions to tap private donors  who accounted for about 12% of UK arts funding last year  for cash.

Lloyd Dorfman, the founder of Travelex and chairman of The Office Group and Doddle, sits on the board of several arts institutions, and was a prominent board member of the National Theatre. He says boards are watching donor confidence more closely.

Its early days but, in terms of the confidence around the donor base, people havent had quite the same spring in their step as they had before, he adds.

Overall, it will be OK but a lot of the organisations are going to have to run faster to stand still. Im not saying they werent focused on looking after the donor base before but they are now making sure thats the case.

Dorfman says big sponsorships will continue because corporate sponsors are interested in accessing audiences.

But there are murmurings of discontent. The Creative Industries Federations Kampfner says: We have heard anecdotal evidence that the dent in business confidence has already prompted some corporates to hit the pause button on sponsorship deals.

Londons artistic community has faced headwinds before, and survived. The tourists swarming its vast panoply of museums, theatres and galleries, which will buoyed by the weak pound, are testament to that. The pro-active approach of the arts lobby is also likely to ensure London remains strong.

We are still a cultural and creative capital of the world, Dorfman says. Brexit does not change that.
The current highlight of British Sunday night TV, ITV's 'Victoria' star Jenna Coleman has come a long way during her first decade in the industry.

Having landed the role of Jasmine Thomas in Emmerdale in 2005, Coleman went on to play Lindsay James in drama series 'Waterloo Road' before landing a pivotal career role in 2012 as the companion of the Eleventh Doctor - played by Matt Smith - in 'Doctor Who' before leaving in November 2015.

Coleman is currently starring as Queen Victoria in the eight-part ITV drama series 'Victoria'.

Alongside her acting career, the 30-year-old has often showed a keen interest in fashion and sat front row at Burberry's groundbreaking direct-to-consumer spring/summer runway show during London Fashion Week on Monday.

Jenna Coleman - style file 1 /41 Jenna Coleman - style file May 20, 2006 At the British Soap Awards Rex June 17, 2006 Shopping in Manchester city centre Mark Campbell/Rex October 31, 2006 At the National Television Awards David Fisher/Rex March 6, 2007 At The Tric (Television & Radio Industries Club) Awards Gareth Cattermole/Getty May 3, 2008 At the British Soap Awards Gareth Cattermole/Getty May 9, 2009 At the British Soap Awards Tim Whitby/Getty March 18, 2013 At the premiere of HBO's 'Game Of Thrones' Season 3 Jason Merritt/Getty May 12, 2013 At the BAFTAs Tim P. Whitby/Getty June 4, 2013 At the Glamour Women of the Year Awards Gareth Cattermole/Getty November 19, 2013 At the Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! event at Somerset House Ian Gavan/Getty January 22, 2014 With the Best Drama award for Doctor Who during the National Television Awards Ian Gavan/Getty June 3, 2014 At the Glamour Women of the Year Awards Gareth Cattermole/Getty August 7, 2014 At the Cardiff premiere of 'Doctor Who' Adam Gasson/Getty August 12, 2014 During a world tour to promote the new series of Doctor Who Maree Williams/Getty August 14, 2014 At BBC America's 'Doctor Who' Premiere Fan Screening Brad Barket/Getty September 2, 2014 At the GQ Men of the Year Awards Anthony Harvey/Getty October 30, 2014 At the 2014 BAFTA Los Angeles Jaguar Britannia Awards in Beverly Hills Frederick M. Brown/Getty February 8, 2015 At the after party for the BAFTAs Getty Images March 19, 2015 With Richard Madden at the UK premiere of the film 'Cinderella' Jack Taylor/AFP/Getty May 30, 2015 At the Audi Polo Challenge JABPromotions/Rex July 11, 2015 On the Entertainment Weekly: Women Who Kick Ass panel during Comic-Con Kevin Winter/Getty May 25, 2016 At the European Premiere of the film 'Me Before You' in central London Leon Neal/AFP/Getty June 7, 2016 At the Glamour Women of the Year Awards Rex June 10, 2016 At a private Burberry event during London Collections Men Stuart C. Wilson/Getty June 22, 2016 At the Victoria and Albert Museum summer party Nick Harvey/Rex July 6, 2016 At the Serpentine Gallery summer party Nick Harvey/Rex July 28, 2016 At the Television Critics Association Summer Tour Frederick M. Brown/Getty August 11, 2016 At the premiere screening of ITV's Victoria Getty Images August 31, 2016 At the BBC Radio 1 studios Beretta/Sims/Rex September 9, 2016 Out and about in London Beretta/Sims/Rex September 19, 2016 At the Burberry spring/summer 2017 show during London Fashion Week Joel Ryan/Invision/AP

As her career has progressed in terms of more serious acting roles, so too has her personal style.

Having previously plumped for simple form-fitting dresses in a muted palette and a big bouncy blow-dry, the star has more recently been seen wearing looser shapes with unusual detailing in the form of a frilled sleeve, a wide leg or a cut-out mid-section.

As is the case with most stars in the public eye, Coleman has been the subject of a number of relationship rumours and is currently acting alongside Tom Hughes - who plays the role of Prince Albert in 'Victoria' - whom she is reported to be secretly dating.

Despite the pair being "deeply private people", a source told The Mail on Sunday: "Theyve been together for months, on and off since last summer."

"Tom dumped his long-term girlfriend to be with Jenna and she chose to be with him even though Prince Harry was very keen on her."

Prince Harry is another rumoured love interest, but Coleman confirmed on Good Morning Britain in August that they're just good friends.

Jenna Coleman asked about Prince Harry romance on Good Morning Britain

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A chef in this years Great British Menu competition wants to encourage more people with disabilities to take up careers in the catering industry.

Ronnie Murray was group head chef for Mark Hix before launching his own venture and is competing in the South-East region of the BBC contest.

The Peckham-based cook was born with a shortened arm but said he has not let it hinder his career.

Murray, 37, told the Standard: Theres a streak in me that when somebody says I cant do something, Im going to do it to prove people wrong.

Because I was born with it I dont really see myself as having a disability  you just have to get on with it.

Fellow cook Michael Caines lost an arm in a car accident but has since gone on to win his second Michelin star.

Murray said: Hopefully people look at the influence of people like me and Michael and see you can get on and do it.

Its kind of the last taboo. The race things been done, the gender things been done, but you see someone with a disability and youre not sure what to say.

Murray, who runs supper club Peckham Manor from his south London home, appears on GBM from October 3 alongside Marcus Wareings head chef Mark Froydenlund and Hertfordshires Russell Bateman.

He said that most professional kitchens were not equipped for wheelchairs: Id love to see more disabled access in kitchens. Theres no reason if youre in a wheelchair you cant get behind the stove. I know some fantastic chefs in wheelchairs.

He said people with disabilities would be an amazing untapped resource for the industry, and that awareness is key: Publicity is important. People like myself and Michael, anybody who has got disabilities, shout about it and raise the awareness.

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F ood and wine are one of lifes great pairings, and they will come together in almighty form this weekend when the head chef from one of Londons best restaurants hosts a residency at one of the capitals top wine bars.

Chase Lovecky, head chef of Michelin-starred Shoreditch restaurant The Clove Club will host the last of this summers series of barbecue residencies at Bethnal Greens Sager + Wilde on Paradise Row.

He has created a line-up of dishes, most of which will be cooked on the grill and all of which are seasonally-inspired.

The full menu Bread Rolls and Bottarga Butter 3.50 Pickled Melon, Mozzerella, and Coriander Stems 7 Charcoaled Beets, Dulse Vinegar, and Furikake 6 Grilled Lettuce, Cods Roe, Smoked Egg Yolk, and Caper 6 Fried Brussels and Mussels 7 Pork Neck, Pickled Walnuts, Walnut Miso, and Kale 16 Steamed Crab Roll, Togarashi and Radishes 13 Vanilla Custard Tart, Chantrelles, and Smoked Butter Caramel 7 Pistachio Sorbet, Chervil, and Chartreuse 7

Plates include bread rolls with bottarga butter; pork neck with pickled walnuts, walnut miso and kale; pickled melon with mozzarella and coriander stem; and a steamed crab roll with togarashi and radishes. They range in price from 3.50 to 16.

As well as from The Clove Club, Lovecky  who was born in Maine on the East Coast of America  takes his inspiration for these creations from his time in the kitchens of Jean Georges and Momofuku Ko in NYC, and helped open Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney.

The dishes will be served from 12pm to 8pm on Sunday September 25, and you can rest assured that the Sager + Wilde team will be on hand to offer well-matched wines. To make a reservation, email hello@sagerandwilde.com.

Follow Ben Norum on Twitter @BenNorum

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A man is due in court today charged with the double murder of a mother-of-nine and her nephew in north London.

Obina Ezeoke, 24, of no fixed address, was charged on Tuesday night with two counts of murder following the fatal shooting.

Annie Besala Ekofo, 53, and her nephew Bervil Kalikaka-Ekofo, 21, were ruthlessly gunned down at a flat in East Finchley last Thursday, shortly after 6.30am.

Scotland Yard said Ezeoke would appear in custody at Hendon Magistrates Court in north-west London.

Another 20-year-old man who was arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning has been released on bail until a date in late October.

It has also been established that Mr Kalikaka-Ekofo, a psychology student, died from a gunshot wound to the head. His post-mortem examination was carried out at Northwick Park Hospital Mortuary on Saturday.

His mother Maymie Botaba Chantelle paid tribute to her son, who was studying psychology at the University of West London.

Distraught onlookers at the scene in East Finchley last Thursday / Lucy Young

She said: His character and soul was beyond comparison, and it goes without a doubt that he will be truly and deeply missed by his family.

A statement released by Mrs Besala Ekofos family described the mother of nine as the glue that kept everyone together and a comforting voice in the hardest situations.

Four other people, including a child, were also in the house when the pair were gunned down but were not hurt.
G ang members who carried out a "pitiless" 19million pound bank fraud scam before splurging the cash in Harrods and on Rolls-Royce cars have been jailed

A pipeline of tiered bank accounts made up part of a "series of complicated arrangements" used to drain money from small businesses, which was never recovered.

The accounts were targeted in a "vishing" scam masterminded by Feezan Hameed, 23, from Glasgow, Southwark Crown Court was told.

He made phone calls posing as an official from a bank's fraud department and persuaded victims to reveal financial information or use card readers to authorise payments online.

Several members of the gang, which netted 19 million between August 2013 and October 2015, were sentenced on Wednesday.

Judge Peter Testar described Hameed as "persuasive, authoritative to the point of being bullying" and "controlling" as he persuaded victims.

He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Cash: The gang raked in 19 million / PA

The judge said: "Anyone who had heard the calls would have been struck and affected by them. There was a great deal of sophistication in the fraud.

"The people behind the fraud would have need to have an understanding of bank systems. The people involved seem to be able to take control of telephone lines of business so as to shut them out of the banks."

A previous hearing heard that Hameed fled to Paris as the rest of the gang were arrested, but was extradited back to Britain for trial.

The judge said "no-one really knows" where all the money ended up, but 100,000 seems to have been spent in Harrods.

Hameed and colleagues from Glasgow enjoyed the use of Rolls-Royce cars and went to nightclubs on the proceeds.

In one case, around 750,000 was taken from an account within seconds of the conman's cold call, and a firm of solicitors who were also targeted found their account had been emptied of more than 2 million, the court was told.

The bogus calls would have seemed credible to the workers who answered because Hameed's gang had "corrupted" some bank employees to help with the scam. Information such as latest transactions and the name of the account's relationship manager gave credibility to the call.

The gang knew withdrawals of more than 100,000 would trigger a bank's fraud security alert, and prosecutor Michael Shorrock QC said: "There were a number of transfers of just under 100,000."

Of the 19million that was taken, 11 million was taken in the last few months, right up to two days before the fraudsters were arrested.

A network of accounts, using foreign students who had left the country, was set up to ensure the money was swiftly siphoned away.

The gang also created fictitious accounts.

Today, Nouman Chaudhary, 21, of Glasgow, was sentenced to three and a half years for conspiracy to money launder.

Jailed: Nouman Choudhary / PA

Judge Testar said Chaudhary "frittered money away on ephemeral junk" at Harrods and was present when 48,000 was spent at the luxury department store, and also "threw himself fully into the lavish lifestyle" including expensive hotels, cars and nightclubs.

He travelled first class to Dubai and Pakistan.

Abdul Iqbal, 23, of Edinburgh, was sentenced to 21 months for conspiracy to money launder.

In total 16 defendants have been sentenced for a total of more than 35 years in jail.

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
For All U of U Health Patients & Visitors
V iolent crime among young people in London has risen to its highest level in four years, a damning new report reveals today.

From July 2015 to July 2016, there were 6,290 victims of serious youth violence - including assault, sexual offences and robbery as well as gun or knife crime.

That marks a four per cent increase on the previous year and a 20 per cent increase on 2012-13. The number of female victims has risen in particular, with women now accounting for a quarter of serious youth violence victims.

Knives continue to play a key part in youth violence - they are involved in around half of all serious cases - as young people apparently carry them "out of fear".

The Police and Crime Committee report suggests one of the main reasons young people carry knives "appears to be a belief that they need to be prepared to defend themselves".

"If a serious incident occurs, there needs to be a concerted effort by the police and other agencies to reassure young people that they are safe," it says.

London boroughs with the most under-24 victims of knife crime (Aug 2015 - Aug 2016) Lambeth - 110

- 110 Tower Hamlets - 106

- 106 Newham - 96

- 96 Southwark - 95

- 95 Haringey - 92

- 92 Croydon - 84

- 84 Islington - 81

- 81 Hackney - 76

- 76 Lewisham - 71

- 71 Brent - 70

The changing "criminal economy", with more young people involved in the world of drugs, was also suggested as a factor behind the spike in youth crime.

But just five per cent of reported knife crimes were attributed to gang activity.

Steve O'Connell, one of the report's authors who leads the Police and Crime Committee (PCC), said: "This is significant because not many people realise that if you only look at gang violence you won't make much difference to what is happening with knife crime."

Matt Watson, of the Integrated Gangs Unit, added: "We know that if you carry a knife you are far more likely to get stabbed, probably with that knife."

The report suggests that most knives used in violent crimes are regular home blades, and not the "trophy knives" that can be purchased online.

Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has also recognised the problem of under-reporting crime among young people, urging greater awareness of the different ways to report crime anonymously.

They do not often know who to tell to not be then seen as somebody who just gives information to the police, he said.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has made tackling knife crime one of his top priorities, announcing 400,000 funding in July.

A spokesman for his office said he would consider the findings of the report and host a knife crime summit next month.
A west London MP has blasted Morrisons in a Twitter spat for the proposed closure of his local supermarket, putting 170 jobs at risk.

Hammersmith MP Andy Slaughter has branded the decision to shut the Shepherds Bush branch as devastating.

And, in a series of angry tweets, he accused the company of providing a misleading response to him and constituents about the issue.

Writing yesterday, he announced to followers: Terrible news for #ShepherdsBush as local @Morrisons in @West12Shopping set to close with loss of 170 jobs.

The Morrisons Twitter account replied to a host of tweets from concerned constituents by saying they were not aware of any closure.

But this morning, the account finally confirmed: Hey Andy, we're sorry to say that we're proposing to close our store in Shepherd's Bush.

We've looked at lots of options to make the store viable and will now be supporting our colleagues through a consultation process.

But Mr Slaughter hit back: I think my constituents deserve a slightly fuller and more considered response on why you are closing the W12 store, don't you?

He went on: And perhaps an apology for misleading them and contradicting me by saying yesterday that you weren't aware the store was closing.

The MP said in a statement: This is terrible news for the W12 area and to the 170 staff who work in the store.

Having weathered the opening of the nearby Westfield and having shown continued demand for a large retail supermarket on site, it is devastating to hear that this store could close.
A leaflet issued by the Hungarian government has provoked outrage after describing London as a no-go zone because it has too many immigrants.

The pamphlet - issued to millions of households as part of a referendum on EU migrant quotas - claims there are several hundred no-go zones in European cities where the authorities are unable to maintain control and the host nation's social norms do not apply.

The supposed zones are not listed, but a map marks London out with a "no-go" sign, surrounded by five others which appear to relate to locations including Southampton and Peterborough.

Elsewhere in Europe, Paris, Berlin, Marseille, Stockholm and Copenhagen are also marked out as cities with no-go areas.

The leaflet warns: "The so-called 'no-go' zones are areas of cities that the authorities are unable to keep under their control.

"Here the recipient society's written or unwritten norms do not apply. In those European cities, where immigrants live in great numbers, several hundred 'no-go' zones exist."

Challenged over the claims, Hungary's foreign minister Peter Szijjarto told BBC2's Newsnight: "We based this information on open, official reports given by the police of the respective countries and from the news.

"There are no-go zones in Europe and we don't want no-go zones in Hungary."

Mr Szijjarto said he personally "likes" London, but insisted that its designation as a no-go zone was made after consultation with the Hungarian embassy in the capital as well as "very careful" analysis of official reports.

Following its publication, the British Embassy in Budapest complained to the Hungarian foreign ministry about its contents.

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is fighting for a No vote in the October 2 referendum on Brussels' plans to relocate migrants from frontline arrival states like Italy and Greece to other countries around the EU's Schengen zone.

The quota system would require Hungary to take in around 1,500 migrants.

But the leaflet accuses Brussels of trying to "prescribe the obligatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary" without the approval of its Parliament, and warns of the danger that terrorists might "slip in with the crowds of immigrants".

The row comes after a Chinese airline was forced to withdraw an in-flight magazine warning tourists to take precautions when visiting areas of London with ethnic minority populations.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "This leaflet is clearly inaccurate. There are no areas in the UK in which the laws of the UK cannot be enforced."

A spokesman for the Hungarian Embassy in London said: "The October 2 referendum is about the mandatory distribution mechanism and the leaflet serves as an information tool for Hungarian citizens.

"It does not single out London or the United Kingdom."

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
H undreds of hungry Londoners queued for hours to get their hands on an In-N-Out burger today.

The American chain which boasts a cult-like following hosted a four-hour pop-up at a Brazilian restaurant in Swiss Cottage this afternoon.

Queues of up to a mile lasting as long as five hours quickly formed despite news of the venture only being advertised through a small, black and white advert in a local paper.

The teaser read: First come, first served. Limited quantities for sale.

Burger fans took to Twitter to describe chaotic scenes surrounding the pop-up which opened between 11am and 3pm.

Happy customers: From left to right: Hannah White, Rosie Mitton, Zea Elmes and Amanda Grundy / Jamie Bullen

A queue began to form at around 8am today. One user estimated around 300 had queued up by 11.20am.

Recruitment consultant Dan Corbett, 26, said: "I had the day off today and I thought I wasn't ever going to get a chance to do this so I decided to come down.

"I wasn't shocked when I saw queues forming at 10.30am. It's a pretty popular place. I got my wristband that said I was going to be in between 1pm and 2pm.

"I'm pretty hungry so I'm hoping this burger will be worth it."

Ravenous punters were handed-out gold wristbands but shortly after 1pm rumours spread on social media that the wristbands had run out fuelling fears that the store had run out of burgers.

Georgie added: Got to in n out burger pop up shop in London and they're all sold out :((( gonna have to go to California now.

And, Daniel Lovell wrote: Brexit, Bowie, Harambe and In-N-Out in London selling out. In that order. #InNOutBurger #soldout #2016sucks.

The company last made a four-hour appearance in the UK in 2012, with hundreds of people queueing outside a nondescript cafe in Hendon, north London.

Timelapse of the queue for burgers in Swiss Cottage

However, Roberto Trevisan, general manager of Estancia Brasil, who have rented their premises for the day, told the Camden New Journal he had not heard of the company.

He said: I know it's an American company who are going to do some type of, well, American food. I have no idea which one.

Mr Trevisan said than an events company, who hired the space, had told him to expect crowds.

He added: They said they could get a lot of people in here. I know they'll be a lot of people around, that's what they told me. But they will do everything, security, the newspaper [advert], everything.

The chain offers mountains of fast food including the 4x4 burger which features four beef patties and Animal Style fries - a sickly mound of French fries, burger sauce, cheese and onions.
D esperate Londoners were paying 100 in an attempt to get an In-N-Out Burger today after hundreds queued for hours in crazy scenes at the pop-up restaurant.

Lines up to a mile long started forming at 8am this morning at the American chains a stall in Swiss Cottage, a full three hours before it opened.

Restaurant workers handed out gold wristbands to those guaranteed a burger but others, who were not so lucky, were left frantically paying people to give theirs up.

And some who arrived at 10am and got a wristband said they were still forced to wait over three hours before getting any food.

Long queues: Burger lovers joined five-hour queues to get their hands to sample In-N-Out Burger's offerings / Jamie Bullen

The company, which boasts a cult following, has been forced to apologise after angry and disappointed customers left empty-handed.

Amanda Grundy, 30, who arrived at 10.30am, said: "The burger was good and I glad I came but I wasn't blown away and they definitely should have had fries.

"The line to get in was pretty shocking. There were people offering to buy wristbands for 100.

"The whole thing is crazy but yes I did spend the day in a queue."

Some travelled from as far as Bournemouth to go to the stall despite it only being advertised through a small advert in a local paper.

Jane Wallis, 52, who came from Bournemouth with six friends who all missed out on a burger, described the process as a farce and was furious that customers had not been told about the wristband procedure beforehand.

And music student, Max Scardanelli, 19, added: "I've paid 20 and spent the day travelling up from Brighton only to be told I couldn't eat because I don't have a wristband.

"I'm very frustrated. This wasn't mentioned to me or advertised anywhere.

"This is just bad business. They should have known about the queues and got more stock in."

But Eric Billings, manager of special foreign events at In-N-Out Burger, argued that customers were disappointed because they had been misled.

Food fight: Max traveled up from Brighton this morning to get his hands on a burger

He said: "To the people who didn't get served today we apologise.

"I don't know if they were perhaps misled by a third-party but we were just a four-hour pop-up.

"I will take their comments back with me.

Burger frenzy: Those who turned up at 10am had to wait three hours for food

He also denied there were only 200 burgers in stock at the pop-up, a rumour that had been floating around social media.

The company last made a four-hour appearance in the UK in 2012, with hundreds of people queueing outside a small cafe in Hendon, north London.

However, Roberto Trevisan, general manager of Estancia Brasil, who have rented their premises for the day, said he had not heard of the company.

He said: I know it's an American company who are going to do some type of, well, American food. I have no idea which one.

Timelapse of the queue for burgers in Swiss Cottage

Mr Trevisan said than an events company, who hired the space, had told him to expect crowds.

He added: They said they could get a lot of people in here. I know they'll be a lot of people around, that's what they told me. But they will do everything, security, the newspaper [advert], everything.

The chain offers mountains of fast food including the 4x4 burger which features four beef patties and Animal Style fries - a mound of French fries, burger sauce, cheese and onions.
A new map showing how the capital's rail network will look when Transport for London takes control of suburban trains was unveiled today.

Key London Tube and Overground stations will be linked up to suburban rail routes as well as connections to the Crossrail Elizabeth Line under the plans.

Services from operators such as under-fire Southern Rail will be transferred to the London Overground network - turning huge swathes of the rail map orange.

A case for the project put forward by Mayor Sadiq Khan will be considered by TfL this week before a business plan is sent to the government to be signed off later this month.

Sadiq Khan: 'The sooner we take over South Eastern, the better'

Commuter services running from Cannon Street, Charing Cross, Moorgate, Victoria, Waterloo and London Bridge, which has suffered some of the worst delays, would all be transferred under the plans, which were first announced in January.

Devolution: What London's trains would look like if TfL took over suburban services. / Transport for London.

With the capital's population set to rise from 8.6 million today to 10 million by 2030, the proposals are aimed at ensuring the network is able to cope, especially in south London which is heavily reliant on surface rail.

Mr Khan today said he hopes suburban rail devolution to TfL will tackle the problems at London's busiest commuter hubs.

TfL suburban services map - in focus 1 /12 TfL suburban services map - in focus TfL suburban services map - north-west London TfL suburban services map - north-east London TfL TfL suburban services map - east London TfL TfL suburban services map - south-east London TfL TfL suburban services map - south London TfL TfL suburban services map - south-west London TfL TfL suburban services map - south-west London TfL TfL suburban services map - south London TfL TfL suburban services map - south-east London TfL

The Mayor said devolution will bring benefits to commuters including cheaper fares, more reliable and frequent trains.

Passengers on Londons suburban rail routes simply arent getting a good enough service, he said.

They face increasing rail fares year after year, yet face daily delays, cancellations and overcrowding.

The Government has already agreed that devolving rail services would improve the daily commute for millions of Londoners."

Mr Khan will now lobby the government for funding to push the plan through.

Franchise: Commuters complain of delays, overcrowding and cancellations on Southern Rail lines. / PA

He said: Ahead of the Autumn Statement, Im looking forward to presenting the full business case for how a transformed and modernised suburban rail network could also unlock new homes and provide other substantial other economic benefits for London.

As our new TfL map demonstrates, devolution will help us deliver a truly integrated transport network where rail passengers get the same standard of service and reliability they get on the Tube, allowing people to connect quickly with all parts of inner and outer London.

It could mean that more than 80 per cent of stations have a train every 15 minutes, up from 67 per cent today.

Mayor Sadiq Khan has previously called for the government to strip operator Govia Thameslink Railway of the Southern franchise, calling it an embarrassment to our city.

The case for further devolution of suburban rail services was already agreed by the government in January 2016.

The joint Department for Transport and Transport for London plans include proposals for suburban rail routes to be taken over by TfL through to the early 2020s.

Under these proposals, the first franchise to come under TfLs control would be the Southeastern suburban services when the current franchise ends in 2018.

The South Western franchise would be next in 2020 once works at Waterloo are finished.

Suburban services running to London Bridge and Victoria serving south central London would transfer when the current franchise ends in September 2021.
A leading barrister who has defended alleged war criminals is holding classes in meditation to combat stress in the legal profession.

Gillian Higgins, of criminal chambers 9 Bedford Row, described some of her work as extremely distressing and said meditation had helped her to instil calm and peace into her life.

Her clients have included Slobodan Milosevic, the ex-president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was charged with crimes against humanity and genocide before his death in 2006, and Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kenyan president indicted on charges of crimes against humanity, later dropped.

These cases involved complex issues, high-profile clients and analysis of extremely distressing war zone and mass atrocity evidence that one couldnt ignore and needed to process and step away from, said Ms Higgins.

Juggling life at the bar with bringing up her five-year-old daughter led her to meditation, and she then qualified to teach the practice.

Being a barrister, there is very little room for error. The responsibility we carry in respect of our clients liberty or commercial and contractual issues is immense, she said.

Many of us are perfectionists, which can bring its own misery. Even after cases are over, we worry about whether we could have done them differently.

Ms Higgins meditates for 20 minutes a day.

Meditation has given me a space between what was happening in my daily life and how I reacted to it. For me it was an aid to instil calm and peace into what is often a frenetic lifestyle.

This week, she started evening classes at Grays Inn to help barristers increase focus, strengthen professional relationships and reduce anxiety.

I teach people to quiet and steady the mind to an anchor, such as the breath, and to bring their mind back to that anchor when it starts to wander. We practise different techniques that can be done anywhere, she said.

A wellbeing survey by the Bar Council showed that one in eight barristers are emotionally exhausted and more than half do not sleep properly.

For details of the course, click here.
T he European leader who will head the EU when Brexit talks are set to start today warned Britain cant have the cake and eat it.

Joseph Muscat, Prime Minister of Malta, also stressed the UK would be offered an inferior deal to full EU membership.

His comments will be seen as a swipe at Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson who famously said: My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.

Mr Muscat is a little-known political figure but his position will be enhanced when Malta takes over the rotating presidency of the EU at the start of 2017, when the UK is expected to trigger Article 50 to launch the two-year process of quitting the union.

After meeting Theresa May at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he argued that Britain is between a rock and a hard place.

Most of my colleagues want a fair deal for both the UK and Europe, but it has to be a deal that is inferior to membership, so you cant have the cake and eat it, he told Sky News.

He also heaped pressure on the Prime Minister to be clearer about the deal that the Government is seeking.

Can you tell me if the UK government wants access to the single market? Because I dont know, he explained.

Mr Muscat also stressed that the EU Council, of national leaders, would mandate the European Commission to negotiate a deal with the UK.

Experts believe the Commission is likely to seek to strike a tougher bargain to preserve the EU ideals.

Meanwhile, leading economists today halved their growth forecasts for the UK next year to just one per cent, below that of the eurozone at 1.4 per cent.

But the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development also nudged up its prediction for Britain for this year, by 0.1 to 1.8 per cent, given that the economy has been more robust than feared after the Brexit vote.

Hopes that the UK will be able to reach a good deal with the EU rose after European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker signalled that an agreement could be made with Switzerland for access to the single market, in conjunction with a policy which would allow jobs to be offered first to local residents.

However, Morgan Stanleys president warned that the City will be hit by Brexit.

Colm Kelleher said some firms will pull their headquarters out of the UK unless passporting arrangements, which allow firms based in one EU nation to operate across the bloc, are retained.

Warning that uncertainty was leading to a slowdown in investment, he told BBC radio: The City of London will suffer as a result of Brexit, the issue is how much.

Latest figures show that 5,500 UK-registered companies rely on passporting to do business in other EU states.

Mr Kellehers concerns were echoed by Rob Kapito, president of global investment corporation BlackRock, who said: I dont think there is any good firm that has not already started to look at real estate in different areas outside of the UK in case they have to move larger operations.

He believes the unintended consequences of Brexit are very significant and they impact everyone across the UK.
L abour MP Ruth Smeeth has revealed she is taking a 24-hour minder to the party's conference after receiving a tirade of online abuse and death threats.

The Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent said she now requires police protection since she walked out of the launch of an inquiry examining anti-Semitisim within the party.

She has now revealed that she will have security in tow when she attends the Labours annual conference in Liverpool next week.

Ms Smeeth told the Sun: I will have someone with me.

I havent felt the need to do this before, but it is a sensible security precaution for obvious reasons at the moment.

But Ive been to conference every year since 1999, and Im not going to stop going now.

Another unnamed female MP told the newspaper the atmosphere at the conference was likely to be totally horrendous.

On Tuesday, Ms Smeeth said abuse was becoming normal for some Labour MPs seen as critics of Jeremy Corbyn as she revealed she had been subjected to 25,000 incidents.

The abuse was sparked by her decision in June to storm out of an event to launch Shami Chakrabartis inquiry into anti-Semitism in Labour after she was heckled by a Momentum activist.

The 37-year-old accused Mr Corbyn of a catastrophic failure of leadership for failing to contact her afterwards or to intervene when the comments were being made.
C hancellor Philip Hammond today warned that there may be difficult times ahead as leading economists halved their growth forecast for the UK for 2017.

He stressed that Britain had the tools necessary to support the economy as its relationship with the European Union is reshaped.

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development today slashed its prediction for economic growth in the UK next year from two per cent to one per cent, below that of the eurozone at 1.4 per cent.

But the Paris-based think tank also nudged up its forecast for Britain for this year, by 0.1 to 1.8 per cent, given that the economy has been more robust than feared after the Brexit vote.

Responding to its report, Mr Hammond said: The underlying strength in the UK economy will support growth this year, and we have seen that in the labour market where employment is at a record high.

The OECD highlights uncertainty in their outlook and while I recognise that there may be some difficult times ahead, I am confident that we have the tools necessary to suport the economy as we adjust to a new relationship with the EU and take advantage of the opportunities that it offers.

Leave campaigners may question the latest OECD report given that predictions from many organisations including the Treasury, Bank of England and IMF, of economic turmoil from a Brexit vote have not yet materialised.

But ministers are concerned that the public may be becoming complacent to the economic risks of Britain quitting the EU.

The president of financial services giant Morgan Stanley further warned that the City of London will suffer as a result of Brexit.

Colm Kelleher said some firms will pull their headquarters out of the UK unless passporting arrangements, which allow firms based in one EU nation to operate across the bloc, are retained.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It is that uncertainty which is causing problems, you'll see a slowdown in investment into the UK because people, corporations, like certainty before they invest.

"So the sooner we get some clarity on where we are heading, the better."

He added: "I believe, and I have said prior to the referendum, that the City of London will suffer as a result of Brexit, the issue is how much.

"I'm convinced that London will retain its reputation and prestige as a global financial services centre, but clearly some size of our businesses will have to be moved out of London into Europe, into European headquarters, with the absence of any passporting agreement.

"But it's very hard to ascertain what that means at the moment.

"I do think generally though that capital markets in Europe will shrink as a consequence of this."
A hearing on a request from Disability Rights Montana to release two patients held in an intensive treatment unit at the state hospital into the general population has been continued to December.

Helena District Court Judge Kathy Seeley said Tuesday the patients will continue to live in long-term isolation units in the meantime.

In August, four people living at Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs filed a lawsuit alleging they were held in physical restraints for longer than state law allows and kept in isolation for almost 24 hours a day. DRM had asked for the patients to be immediately moved out of isolation before a jury trial could be held. They also asked for damages.

"We're obviously very disappointed we have to wait until December when we have people who are in seclusion 23 hours a day," said Bernadette Franks-Ongoy, executive director of DRM.

Seeley said if asked for a decision from the bench Tuesday, she could not grant the injunction.

I have not heard any testimony tailored to these patients as to what we are supposed to do, she said. And I am not going to direct that they just be placed on the unit, in the regular unit.

Curt Drake, a Helena attorney who is representing the state hospital and employees named in the suit, said there wasnt enough information for Seeley to grant the injunction Tuesday.

It is not safe now in the judgment of people who work with them every day, he said.

Bridgitt Erickson, staff attorney for DRM, called the living conditions of the patients who brought the lawsuit not appropriate.
B rexit voters have showed little sign of buyers remorse since the EU referendum, according to a polling expert.

Professor John Curtice has found that most of the public are content with the decision they took at the ballot box on June 23, with only abstainers having a degree of regret.

He added that members of the public were more realistic about the impact Brexit will have on migration levels and and NHS funding.

Speaking at King's College London, Prof Curtice said: "Some of the expectations about the consequences of Brexit for the level of immigration have been somewhat toned down.

Leave wins EU referendum - in pictures 1 /30 Leave wins EU referendum - in pictures David Cameron announces his resignation outside Number 10 Downing Street Stefan Wermuth/Reuters David and Samantha Cameron outside Downing Street as the PM announces his decision to stand down Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Boris Johnson leaves home following the stunning EU referendum result Lucy Young A triumphant Nigel Farage near the Houses of Parliament Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images Jeremy Corbyn MP, leader of the Labour Party, is followed by journalists as he walks towards the Houses of Parliament Rob Stothard/Getty Images London Mayor Sadiq Khan speaks to the media after Britain voted for Brexit Matt Writle Leave supporters cheer results at a Leave.eu party after polling stations closed in the Referendum on the European Union in London Toby Melville/Reuters Supporters of the Stronger In campaign react after hearing results in the EU referendum at London's Royal Festival Hall Rob Stothard/PA Vote LEAVE supporter Christine Forrester celebrates with others outside Vote Leave HQ Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images Supporters of the Stronger In campaign look dejected as results come in Rob Stothard/AFP/Getty Images The Houses of Parliament as dawn breaks on London after the vote Rob Stothard/Getty Images Stronger in campaigners look dejected after the result Leave supporters celebrate opposite the Houses of Parliament in London Anthony Devlin/PA Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn leaves his home this morning Rob Stothard/Getty Images A man reacts to a vote count results screen at an 'Leave.EU Referendum Party' in London Supporters of the Stronger In campaign react after hearing results in the EU referendum at the Royal Festival Hall Rob Stothard/PA UKIP Leader Nigel Farage at the Leave.EU party in London as he claimed victory Stefan Rousseau/PA A London taxi driver holds a Union flag, as he celebrates following the result of the EU referendum Toby Melville Traders react to the fast moving Euro results at ETX Capital in the City of London this morning Chris Gorman/Evening Standard People gathered in The Churchill Tavern, a British themed bar, react as the BBC predicts Briatin will leave the European Union, in the Manhattan borough of New York Andrew Kelly/Reuters Traders monitor computer screens with the day's exchange rate at a foreign exchange brokerage at a securities firm in Tokyo Eugene Hoshiko/AP Conservative MP Nigel Evans (left) and UKIP's Paul Nuttall, members of the Vote Leave campaign, celebrate at Manchester Town Hall where the national result in the UK referendum will be declared later Peter Byrne/PA Traders react to the fast moving Euro results at ETX Capital in the City of London this morning Chris Gorman/Evening Standard

"Before the referendum, over half the public expected the level of immigration to fall as a consequence of Brexit. Now, however, that number has fallen to around 45%.

"So there are perhaps, somewhat realistic expectations of the consequences of Brexit."

After analysing a range of polls carried out after the vote, Prof Curtice found that both remain and Brexit voters are now looking for a compromise deal that retains access to the European Single Market and control over immigration

Vote Leave produced billboards during the campaign that said: "Let's give our NHS the 350 million the EU takes every week" - a promise that was heavily attacked for lacking credibility.

Before the referendum 40% of voters believed Brexit would have a positive impact on the NHS but that has since dropped to 26%, YouGov research highlighted by Prof Curtice found.

"Most people just don't think it is going to make a difference," he said.

Only around one third of voters want a second referendum, "virtually all of them" remain voters.

Second referendum: 'Virtually all' of the people who want a second referendum voted remain / Getty Images

"Not much evidence of buyer's remorse," Prof Curtice said. "That means the UK is still divided pretty much down the middle over the arguments over the referendum."

He added: "The message that emerges is that actually there is quite an appetite inside the UK for some kind of compromise that means that we will still have quite a lot of access to the Single Market but we also have some control over immigration or at least we are no longer tied to the freedom of movement visions as they are currently constituted."
F lights between the UK and Sharm el-Sheikh could be resumed after a ten-month suspension.

The cancellation of flights to the Egyptian holiday hotspot was sparked by a terrorist bombing which killed 224 people on a Russian plane bound for the resort.

Theresa May has been urged to give the go-ahead for flights to resume by the head of the cross-party parliamentary group on the country.

The group's chairman, Sir Gerald Howarth, wrote to the Prime Minister asking her to end the ban and claimed that significant progress has been made on tightening security checks at the Red Sea resort's airport.

He also warned that there was a risk of people in Sharm becoming "radicalised" if the area's tourism industry continued to suffer.

Flights between the UK and Sharm were suspended by the Government in November 2015 after the bombing of the passenger jet  which Isis claimed responsibility for.

More than 16,000 Britons stranded in the area were brought home on a series of rescue flights amid heightened security.

In June, British Airways suspended its flights to Sharm "indefinitely", stating that "the safety and security of our customers will always be our top priorities".

EasyJet, Monarch and Thomson Airways have previously said they are awaiting for the Foreign and Commonwealth to change its travel advice, which currently warns against all but essential travel by air to or from the resort.

During a visit to Egypt in July Sir Gerald inspected how baggage was handled at the airport and met senior officials.

The Conservative MP for Aldershot said: "I believe that the necessary measures have been put in place to minimise the risk.

"We live in an imperfect world and no government can guarantee 100 per cent security anywhere."

He explained that hotels in Sharm were only 25-35 per cent occupied and were "clearly hurting" from the UK flight ban.

A DfT spokeswoman said: "The security of British nationals is our top priority, and we took the decision to suspend flights from Sharm el-Sheikh in November last year to protect the travelling public.

"We keep aviation security under constant review."
T he UKs angriest, most impatient drivers are found in Glasgow, a new survey claims.

A study into road rage in the 14 biggest cities found Glasgow motorists topped the tables for anger, impatience, anxiety and stress.

Liverpool was the calmest driving city, with just 16% regularly feeling angry behind the wheel, compared with 35% in Glasgow.

London placed seventh for road rage, while Newcastle ranked second and Sheffield third.

The YouGov poll commissioned by Ikano Bank surveyed 2,086 UK drivers and compared them with their counterparts across Europe.

The study found Swedish drivers were the calmest and Italians the most prone to road rage, with UK drivers coming second.

Simon Ripton, head of direct to consumer at Ikano Bank, said: "In the UK, we have long been famous for our capacity for waiting patiently in queues but these results show that we could learn something from Sweden."
A budget airline has banned six passengers from its flights after they were embroiled in a drunken row involving illicit alcohol.

Jet2 made the order after a group on a flight from Newcastle to Tenerife were rude and aggressive to staff on Saturday, it said.

Three people have been banned for a year while the carrier has refused to fly another three from the Spanish holiday island.

A Jet2 spokeswoman said: This group were rude and aggressive to our cabin crew after drinking illicit alcohol, and they should be in no doubt that the consequences of such behaviour will not be accepted.

"As a family friendly airline carrying millions of holidaymakers, many of whom are families, we want our customers to have an enjoyable flight experience without the actions of a disruptive few spoiling it and we will take all necessary action to stamp it out."

Last month Jet2 became the first airline in Europe to ban the sale of alcohol on flights before 8am in a bid to tackle abusive behaviour.

It called on airports and shops to follow suit after it backed the Government's review of how alcohol is sold at airports and has also called for duty free spirits to be sold in sealed bags.
P rime Minister Theresa May has pledged her support for British troops who are facing allegations of the mistreatment of Iraqi people during the 2003 invasion.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat) is examining numerous serious allegations of abuse involving British soldiers.

But concerns have been raised over the industrial scale of claims lodged with the team, supported by the British legal system.

Mrs May said action was being taken to address false abuse claims and that Britons should be proud of the work done by the armed forces.

Speaking to reporters on her way to the UN General Assembly in New York, she said: We can be proud of the disciplined way in which our armed forces operate.

"But what is important is, if there are allegations - proper allegations - of criminal activity, those need to be investigated.

"But what we do need to make sure is that there isn't an industry of vexatious allegations coming forward. I think measures have been taken."

A British serviceman facing prosecution over an Iraqi teenagers death in Basra 13 years ago accused the army of abandoning its troops to be hounded for abuse claims.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the man said: "The Army has surrendered its own powers of discipline and investigation to a private company and betrayed its finest people to protect itself from scrutiny at the highest levels."

He added: "Regardless of the allegation, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Army has failed in its most basic duty of care.

"There are veterans who have been persecuted for years by Ihat, but haven't heard a single word of support from the Army, yet alone legal or psychological support."

Ihat was set up in November 2010 to investigate allegations of abuse by UK military personnel in Iraq between 2003 and 2009.

The team has looked at the cases of around 1,514 possible victims.
A British tourist was turned away from a mountain steam train in Wales because there were too many overweight people on board.

Anthony Poppel, 69, from Suffolk, was told it is becoming a regular problem for the famous Mount Snowdon railway, which carries passengers to the top of Wales tallest mountain.

An apology letter, which he received alongside a 32.50 refund, said: The issue of obesity in our country is leading to more incidents of this type every year.

He had been holidaying in the nearby town of Llandudno where he booked himself onto the train, only to receive the bad news when he arrived at the platform.

A staff member explained to him that a family of four were taking up space meant for five people due to their physical size and weight and were "refusing to move".

Mr Poppel told the Daily Post: When I went to get in, there were people sitting down and several kids in there as well.

The young guard who was there said, Sorry, it is full. I had to go and get my money back.

It ruined my holiday really. I had travelled a long way to see it and I thought it was poor show.

The letter of apology read: Your ticket was valid for the departure at 12 noon but unfortunately it seems that other occupants of the carriage were large in stature and refused to move their family group to accommodate you more easily in your allotted carriage.

It added: Our carriages accommodate 10 people but the issue of obesity in our country is leading to more incidents of this type every year.

A Snowdon Moutain Railway spokesman said: More than 130,000 passengers travel on Snowdons narrow gauge railway every year.

On the day of Mr Poppels visit, a family of four occupied the full width of his carriage due to their physical size and weight, taking the space normally reserved for five people.

We requested that they sit opposite one another but they refused.

We did everything we could to accommodate Mr Poppel and we apologise for any disappointment he experienced.
A nimal-lovers should avoid buying flat-faced dogs and instead choose other breeds because of concerns over their welfare, vets have warned.

Experts said the surge in popularity of dogs with squashed faces and wrinkled noses has increased animal suffering  including health problems like eye ulcers and breathing difficulties.

Pugs, bulldogs, French bulldogs, shih-tzus and Cavalier King Charles spaniels have all become fashionable in the UK in recent years.

But Sean Wensley, president of the British Veterinary Association, said would-be dog owners need to realise breeds such as these can suffer from health issues.

He said: We strongly encourage people to choose a healthier breed or a crossbreed instead."

The BVAs warning has been backed by the PDSA, Royal Veterinary College, RSPCA and the Kennel Club.

On top of this, evidence shows an increasing number of the flat-faced dogs are being abandoned by their owners, the BBC reported.

Six dog rescue companies including Battersea Dogs Home said the breeds  known as brachycephalic or short-muzzled dogs  were being handed over in higher numbers.

Battersea Dogs Home and Bluecross Animal Rescue received a total of 314 "flat-faced" dogs in 2015, compared to 226 in 2014, a rise of 39 per cent.

A recent Royal Veterinary College survey suggested many owners of these fashionable dog breeds were not aware of the health problems  with many thinking noise from the dogs airways is normal.

The typical broad head shape found in pugs and bulldogs is not natural but developed as a result of selective breeding.

The RSPCA has since called for an urgent review of breed standards, which are determined by the Kennel Club.

"The breed standards were set many years ago, said Caroline Kisko, the Kennel Club secretary.

If you look back through history there are some dire things that went on, and undoubtedly we would accept all responsibility for that."

"But I would say that in the here-and-now, after all of the changes to the standards that were made in 2009, we would expect dogs to be far healthier if they are winning prizes at dogs shows."
P rotesters have clashed with US police after an officer shot a black man dead while seeking a different person.

The 43-year-old man was shot and killed after police went to a block of flats in Charlotte, North Carolina, and saw a man inside a car.

After he got out of the car carrying a weapon, at least one police officer fired on the man, who is not the suspect police had been seeking over an outstanding warrant.

The man, named as Keith Lamont Scott, was taken to hospital but pronounced dead. The officer who shot him was placed on administrative leave in line with standard procedure.

Protests: a police shooting sparked the demonstration / REUTERS

Demonstrators smashed up police vehicles as protests erupted after the shooting, just hours after a separate demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma following the shooting of an unarmed black man there.

Police officers were seen firing tear gas to break up the crowd during the protest in which 12 police officers were injured in Charlotte last night.

Video from the scene showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Police line: Officers during the protests in Charlotte / REUTERS

Some protesters were heard yelling "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One person held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that "the community deserves answers."

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Shelby's attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.
A n eight-year-old Chinese girl has been tied to a tree outside her grandparents' home for six years because she suffers from mental illness.

Zhao Ziyis grandparents said they first strapped her to the tree outside their home in 2010 after she became mentally ill and started to hit people, Henan Television reported.

The girl was filmed barefoot with ropes tied around her neck and chest when reporters visited her home, in Henan province, in September.

Footage from local media showed that she was sometimes freed and allowed to walk around near to their home, in a village in Luoyang, before being tied up again.

The youngsters grandparents claimed Zhao had become dangerous after she suffered a series of high fevers in 2010.

The family said they had not been able to afford to send her to hospital for treatment.

Her grandfather told local media: She would attack other children and older people.

She is dangerous to others, so we have to tied her up here.

It is not known where the girl, who does not go to school, slept at night, or whether she was untied and allowed to wash inside her grandparents home.

The couple are the allegedly the sole carers of Zhao and her two healthy younger brothers.

The childrens father is handicapped and works in a factory nearby, while the location of their mother - who is also disabled  is unknown.

Local officials told the South China Morning Post that they provided the family with a basic low-income allowance, but could do nothing to stop Zhao being tied to the tree.
F our medics from a French relief agency have been killed in an air strike on a clinic in Syria as the United States blamed Russia for destroying an aid convoy a day earlier.

A nurse was also critically injured in the attack in rebel-held territory near Syrias second city Aleppo. The four medics were working for the Paris-based Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations. They were in two ambulances that had been called to the clinic in the village of Khan Tuman to take patients for more specialised treatment, according to the USMRO.

The centre was blown apart last night and more dead were feared to be in the rubble of the three-storey building. Khan Tuman is near Urum al-Kubra, the town where an air attack is said to have hit aid trucks and a warehouse killing 20 civilians on Monday.

America today hardened accusations against Russia for the attack which happened as a short-lived truce collapsed. US officials said two Russian SU-24 planes were in the sky above the convoy, heading for the besieged city of Aleppo, at the precise moment it was hit. Syrian dictator Bashar Assads air force also has these aircraft but the attack was said to be too sophisticated to have been carried out by his military.

Given that air attacks should have been stopped in the area under the truce negotiated by Washington and Moscow, White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said: We hold the Russian government responsible.

Moscow strongly denied that its planes targeted the convoy. There was speculation that the air strike was in retaliation for a recent US-led attack, involving at least one RAF drone, which killed dozens of Assads troops mistaken for Islamic State fighters. Queen Rania of Jordan told CNN that the destruction of the aid convoy was a terrible crime that showed how much we have failed in Syria.

Boris Johnson piled pressure on Moscow to rescue the Syrian truce, which has been repeatedly breached and said by the Assads military to have ended.

The Foreign Secretary held face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov in New York yesterday and he is said to have admitted that Russian planes were in the area at the time of the strike.

The United Nations has suspended overland deliveries in Syria, jeopardising food and medical security for millions of besieged and hard-to-reach civilians.
Helena City Commissioner Robert Farris-Olsen plans to ask fellow commissioners to adopt a resolution urging officials not to permit any mining activities that could harm the Smith River.

I just wouldnt want to risk that fishery and river should anything go wrong with that mine, he said on Tuesday.

We do have the history of mining in Montana that causes me great concern, he said, noting the harm mining has caused to other Montana rivers and local economies.

Tintina Resources Inc., based in Canada and controlled by Australian-based Sandfire Resources, is proposing the Black Butte Copper Project near a Smith River tributary close to White Sulphur Springs.

According to the draft version of the resolution, any proposed mining activities that could potentially affect the health and vitality of the Smith River should be viewed skeptically and should not be permitted unless the applicant can demonstrate with 100 percent certainty that the proposal will not harm the river.

The potential impact on Sheep Creek, a tributary of the river that is also a spawning stream for rainbow trout, Farris-Olsen said, was also a concern for him.

Theres just a lot of risks, he said, adding that he wanted the city of Helena to express concerns.

Farris-Olsen said he plans to offer the resolution for discussion during todays administrative meeting of the city commission, and for possible adoption during the commissions Oct. 17 meeting.

The Smith River generates close to $10 million in economic activity, close to $3 million in salaries and wages and about $750,000 in state and local tax revenue, according to the resolution.

Several Helena-area residents and businesses depend on the river in part for their income, the resolution states, adding that in 2016 966 Helena residents participated in the drawing for a permit to float the river and about 100 of them were successful.

Those who want to float a 59-mile stretch of the river, with one place to put in watercraft and one place to take out, must enter a drawing for a launch date because of the rivers popularity.

Both historic and modern mining activity in Montana, the resolution continues, has caused irreparable and long-lasting damage to the water and wildlife of many of the states prized rivers and streams.

Advocates of the Tintina mining project see an economic opportunity, while those with concerns worry that the mining may have adverse effects on Sheep Creek and the Smith River.

Responses to deficiencies with the mine permit application were submitted Monday to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

The Smith River was listed among American Rivers 10 most endangered rivers this year. The organizations website says its a national rivers conservation organization that was formed in 1973. Its genesis is traced to a response to the construction of dams its founders viewed as unnecessary and said were silencing many of the nations last wild, free-flowing rivers.

American Rivers' website said, this legendary trout stream is in danger of permanent degradation from a proposed copper mine. The state of Montana must require the mining company, Tintina Resources, to prove beyond any doubt that their operation will produce no acid mine drainage or cause any environmental harm to the Smith River or its tributaries before the project is allowed to proceed.
C hinas first space station is likely to come crashing down to earth next year amid fears it is out of control.

Authorities in China have confirmed the 8.5-tonne space station will re-enter the atmosphere at some point in 2017 - but said it would be impossible to predict where it will land..

The unmanned Tiangong-1 or Heavenly Palace space station was launched in 2011 as part of plans to turn China into a space superpower.

But last week officials at a satellite launch centre said the module had finished its mission and was set to re-enter the earths atmosphere in the second half of next year.

'Out of control': There is believed to have been a technical failure with Tiangong-1. / AFP/Getty Images

Deputy director of Chinas manned space engineering office, Wu Ping, said they believe most parts of the space lab will burn up during the fall, news agency Xinhua reported.

But it would be impossible to predict where the debris will land, Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said.

You really cant steer these things. Even a couple of days before it re-enters we probably wont know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when its going to come down.

Not knowing when its going to come down translates as not knowing where its going to come down.

For months speculation has been rife that China had lost control of the 10.4m-long module after suffering a suspected technical failure.

Dr McDowell said some parts like the rocket engines were so dense they might not burn up completely, leaving lumps of around 100kg which is enough to give you a nasty wallop.
B rad Pitt has spoken out to say that he is very saddened about his split from wife Angelina Jolie.

The Hollywood A-lister, who had been in a relationship with the Tomb Raider star for 14 years, has issued a statement in the wake of the break-up.

Just hours after Jolie confirmed that she had filed for divorce from the actor, he broke his silence to say:

I am very saddened by this but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids.

"I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."

Jolie, 41, who married Pitt just two years ago, confirmed reports that the pair had split on Tuesday afternoon.

Her lawyer Robert Offer said in a statement that the decision had been made "for the health of the family".

He added: "She will not be commenting and asks that the family be given privacy at this time."

Angelina Jolie files for divorce from Brad Pitt: Twitter reacts

Jolie has cited irreconcilable differences for the divorce in court documents and is requesting custody of their children.

The former couple have six children together - Maddox, 15, Pax, 12, Zahara, 11, Shiloh, 10, and eight-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne.

Jolie and Pitt hadnt made a public appearance together since November last year and were last pictured together back in July.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt - In pictures 1 /36 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt - In pictures Writer-director-producer-actress Angelina Jolie Pitt and actor-producer Brad Pitt attend Audi at the opening night gala premiere of 'By the Sea' during AFI FEST 2015 presented by Audi at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres on 05 November 2015 in Hollywood, California Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt give a press conference on 07 June 2006 at a Swakopmund hotel, Namibia to announce they are proud parents of daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt AFP/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith in the movie Mr & Mrs. Smith in 2005 20th Century Fox Brad Pitt,eats pizza, as actress Angelina Jolie looks on in the audience during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on 02 March 2014 Invision/AP Brad Pitt and children Pax Jolie-Pitt (L), Shiloh Jolie-Pitt (C) and Maddox Jolie-Pitt arrive for the U.S. premiere of Universal Pictures "Unbroken," on 15 December2014 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Family arriving at the Los Angeles International Airport on 05 July 2015 Rex rad Pitt and 2015 Entertainment Innovator Angelina Jolie Pitt attend the WSJ. Magazine 2015 Innovator Awards at the Museum of Modern Art on 04 November 2015 in New York City Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at 'By the Sea' film screening, New York, America -on 03 November 2015 Rex Angelina Jolie hugs Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt (L) and Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (R) after winning award for Favorite Villain in 'Maleficent' during Nickelodeon's 28th Annual Kids' Choice Awards held at The Forum on 28 March 2015 in Inglewood, California Kevin Winter/Getty Images Brad Pitt and actress Angelina Jolie attend the Oscars held at Hollywood & Highland Center on 02 March 2014 in Hollywood Michael Buckner/Getty Images Benedict Cumberbatch, Angelina Jolie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, actor/producer Brad Pitt, director Steve McQueen, actors Lupita Nyong'o and Michael Fassbender celebrate as "12 Years A Slave" is awarded Best Picture during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on 02 March 2014 in Hollywood Kevin Winter/Getty Images Angelina Jolie (L) and Brad Pitt attend the World Premiere of Disney's "Maleficent" at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood Kevin Winter/Getty Images Angelina Jolie (L) and Brad Pitt attend the EE British Academy Film Awards 2014 at The Royal Opera House on 16 February 2014 Dave Benett Angelina Jolie arrives at the world premiere of Unbroken at the State Theatre on 17 November 2014 in Sydney, Australia Brendon Thorne/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attending the premiere of Maleficent at Kensington Palace on 08 May 2014 Justin Tallis/PA ngelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arriving for the world premiere of World War Z, at the Empire Leicester Square, London on 02 June 2013 Dominic Lipinski/PA Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend 'WORLD WAR Z' Germany Premiere at Sony Centre on 04 June 2013 in Berlin, Germany. Sean Gallup/Getty Images Angelina Jolie arrives at the 84th Annual Academy Awards held at the Hollywood & Highland Center on 26 February 2012 Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the Cinema for Peace Gala ceremony at the Konzerthaus Am Gendarmenmarkt during day five of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival on 13 February 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on 15 January 2012 in Beverly Hills Jason Merritt/Getty Images Angelina Jolie (L) and Brad Pitt attend the premiere of DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2" at Mann's Chinese Theatre on 22 May 2011 in Hollywood David Livingston/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend "The Tree Of Life" premiere during the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on 16 May 2011 in Cannes, France Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Hollywood movie stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ride on a motorcycle on a busy street in downtown Ho Chi Minh on 23 November 2006. Jolie and Pitt are expected to adopt a three-year-old Vietnamese boy AFP/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith in the movie Mr & Mrs. Smith in 2005 20th Century Fox Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith in the movie Mr & Mrs. Smith in 2005 20th Century Fox Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with children Zahara, Knox, Maddox, Shiloh, Pax and Vivienne at at Haneda International airport in Tokyo, Japan on 08 November 2011 Masatoshi Okauchi/Rex Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (C) with children (L-R) Pax Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt and Maddox Jolie-Pitt attend the World Premiere of Disney's "Maleficent", starring Angelina Jolie, at the El Capitan Theatre on May 28, 2014 in Hollywood Charley Gallay/Getty Images

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G eorge Clooney found out about friend Brad Pitts split from Angelina Jolie live on camera.

The A-list actor, who has starred alongside Pitt in a number of films, said that he was very sorry for the couple.

Speaking to a CNN reporter at the United Nations on Tuesday, Clooney seemed taken aback by the news, claiming that it he didnt know.

When asked what he thought about the shock break-up, he asked: Whats that? What happened?

After being informed that Jolie had filed for divorce from his friend, Clooney said: I feel very sorry then.

That's a sad story and unfortunate for a family. It's an unfortunate story about a family. I feel very sorry to hear that.

Before walking away, he added: This is the first I've heard of it.

Clooney and Pitt became close friends after co-starring in Oceans Eleven back in 2001 and have appeared together in films including Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in 2002 and Burn After Reading in 2008.

Jolies lawyer confirmed reports that she had filed for divorce from Pitt on Tuesday, saying:

This decision was made for the health of the family. She will not be commenting at this time, and asks that the family be given their privacy during this difficult time.

Just a few hours later, Pitt said: I am very saddened by this but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids.

I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt - In pictures 1 /36 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt - In pictures Writer-director-producer-actress Angelina Jolie Pitt and actor-producer Brad Pitt attend Audi at the opening night gala premiere of 'By the Sea' during AFI FEST 2015 presented by Audi at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres on 05 November 2015 in Hollywood, California Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt give a press conference on 07 June 2006 at a Swakopmund hotel, Namibia to announce they are proud parents of daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt AFP/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith in the movie Mr & Mrs. Smith in 2005 20th Century Fox Brad Pitt,eats pizza, as actress Angelina Jolie looks on in the audience during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on 02 March 2014 Invision/AP Brad Pitt and children Pax Jolie-Pitt (L), Shiloh Jolie-Pitt (C) and Maddox Jolie-Pitt arrive for the U.S. premiere of Universal Pictures "Unbroken," on 15 December2014 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Family arriving at the Los Angeles International Airport on 05 July 2015 Rex rad Pitt and 2015 Entertainment Innovator Angelina Jolie Pitt attend the WSJ. Magazine 2015 Innovator Awards at the Museum of Modern Art on 04 November 2015 in New York City Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at 'By the Sea' film screening, New York, America -on 03 November 2015 Rex Angelina Jolie hugs Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt (L) and Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (R) after winning award for Favorite Villain in 'Maleficent' during Nickelodeon's 28th Annual Kids' Choice Awards held at The Forum on 28 March 2015 in Inglewood, California Kevin Winter/Getty Images Brad Pitt and actress Angelina Jolie attend the Oscars held at Hollywood & Highland Center on 02 March 2014 in Hollywood Michael Buckner/Getty Images Benedict Cumberbatch, Angelina Jolie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, actor/producer Brad Pitt, director Steve McQueen, actors Lupita Nyong'o and Michael Fassbender celebrate as "12 Years A Slave" is awarded Best Picture during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on 02 March 2014 in Hollywood Kevin Winter/Getty Images Angelina Jolie (L) and Brad Pitt attend the World Premiere of Disney's "Maleficent" at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood Kevin Winter/Getty Images Angelina Jolie (L) and Brad Pitt attend the EE British Academy Film Awards 2014 at The Royal Opera House on 16 February 2014 Dave Benett Angelina Jolie arrives at the world premiere of Unbroken at the State Theatre on 17 November 2014 in Sydney, Australia Brendon Thorne/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attending the premiere of Maleficent at Kensington Palace on 08 May 2014 Justin Tallis/PA ngelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arriving for the world premiere of World War Z, at the Empire Leicester Square, London on 02 June 2013 Dominic Lipinski/PA Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend 'WORLD WAR Z' Germany Premiere at Sony Centre on 04 June 2013 in Berlin, Germany. Sean Gallup/Getty Images Angelina Jolie arrives at the 84th Annual Academy Awards held at the Hollywood & Highland Center on 26 February 2012 Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the Cinema for Peace Gala ceremony at the Konzerthaus Am Gendarmenmarkt during day five of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival on 13 February 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on 15 January 2012 in Beverly Hills Jason Merritt/Getty Images Angelina Jolie (L) and Brad Pitt attend the premiere of DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2" at Mann's Chinese Theatre on 22 May 2011 in Hollywood David Livingston/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend "The Tree Of Life" premiere during the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on 16 May 2011 in Cannes, France Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Hollywood movie stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ride on a motorcycle on a busy street in downtown Ho Chi Minh on 23 November 2006. Jolie and Pitt are expected to adopt a three-year-old Vietnamese boy AFP/Getty Images Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith in the movie Mr & Mrs. Smith in 2005 20th Century Fox Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith in the movie Mr & Mrs. Smith in 2005 20th Century Fox Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with children Zahara, Knox, Maddox, Shiloh, Pax and Vivienne at at Haneda International airport in Tokyo, Japan on 08 November 2011 Masatoshi Okauchi/Rex Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (C) with children (L-R) Pax Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt and Maddox Jolie-Pitt attend the World Premiere of Disney's "Maleficent", starring Angelina Jolie, at the El Capitan Theatre on May 28, 2014 in Hollywood Charley Gallay/Getty Images

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L indsay Lohan has claimed she feared her ex-boyfriend would attack her with acid.

The 30-year-old actress said she feared for her safety during her relationship with Russian-born Egor Tarabasov, 23, following a series of furious rows.

Lohan  who made the claim on Russian television's Channel One  said: I went to bed and he broke into my house. He started strangling me.

I feared that Egor may splash acid in my face.

I jumped out to the balcony and shouted with all my force, 'He's trying to kill me, call the police!' I am lucky to come to Moscow to speak.

Egor reportedly begged Lohan not to speak about their relationship on TV, but a spokesperson has since denied there was any truth to the rumour.

Police were called to Lohans Knightsbridge house in the early hours of Saturday, July 23 after neighbours allegedly heard her cries for help.

Police later arrived but Lohan and Tarabasov had already left the property and no arrests were made.

A Met spokesperson told Standard Online at the time: 'Police were called to an address in Knightsbridge, SW7 on Saturday, 23 July at 05:10 hours following a report of a woman in distress.

Celebrity couples who split 1 /34 Celebrity couples who split Nick Young and Iggy Azalea called off their engagement in June 2016 after cheating allegations surfaced against Young. They had been engaged for a year. Jason Merritt/Getty Professor Green and Millie Mackintosh Professor Green and Millie Mackintosh were granted a 30-second quickie divorce after two and a half years of marriage. Mackintosh cited "unreasonable behaviour" as the reason and was soon pictured with new beau Hugo Taylor. Ian Gavan/Getty Cheryl and Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini The couple split after 19 months of marriage and Cheryl struck up a relationship with former One Direction singer Liam Payne Beretta/Sims/REX Shutterstock All over Singer Gwen Stefani and husband Gavin Rossdale filed for divorce amid rumours of an affair. Angela Weiss/Getty Images Short-lived Big Sean and Ariana Grande seemed loved up last year... but it was all over by April. Jason Merritt/Getty Images Calling it quits Olly Murs and Francesca Thomas didn't look too happy at Wimbledon in June. They split shortly afterwards. Different directions Zayn Malik and Perrie Edwards called off their engagement just months after Malik quit One Direction. Disney/Rex So much for a happy ending Chad Kroeger and Avril Lavigne filed for divorce in September. Everett Collection/Rex PArting of the ways Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy have officially started seeing other people. Getty Images Family affair Scott Disick and Kourtney Kardashian finally ended their on/off relationship. Chris Weeks/Getty Images Amicable Vogue Williams and Brian McFadden amicably call off their marriage. Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images Calling it quits Actor Jon Hamm and actress Jennifer Westfeldt have broken up. Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images Bets shot Lewis Hamilton and Nicole Scherzinger gave their on/off relationship one more go this year... before breaking it off for good. Clive Rose/Getty Images Back on the market Olivier Martinez and Halle Berry, previously Hollywood's most gorgeous couple, are both single again. Matt Baron/BEI/Rex Shock split They were one of the strongest couples in Hollywood... until they weren't. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner filed for divorce in 2015. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Life change Louis Tomlinson and girlfriend Eleanor Calder split... and he is now expecting a baby with Briana Jungworth. Richard Young/Rex The beautiful people Joe Jonas were Gigi Hadid went their separate ways this year. Matteo Prandoni/REX Sad announcement Lara Stone and David Walliams had their divorce finalised in September. Photofab/Rex Done and dusted Liam Payne and girlfriend Sophia Smith called it quits at the end of 2015. David Fisher/Rex Nearly there Britney Spears and Charlie Ebersol split after eight months despite rumours they were set to wed. Jason Merritt/Getty Images Still good friends Suki Waterhouse and Bradley Cooper broke up but are still pals. Richard Young/Rex Star appeal Charlize Theron and Sean Penn were the perfect red carpet pair but things didn't work out. Clemens Bilan/Getty Images Icons Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton split after many years together. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Moving on Miley Cyrus and Patrick Schwarzenegger call it a day. Larry Busacca/Getty Images Fond farewell Amanda Seyfried and Justin Long broke up after two years together Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images The beautiful people Cristiano Ronaldo and Irina Shayk said goodbye to each other in 2015. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

"Officers attended and following concerns for the welfare of the occupants inside they forced entry into the address.

"There was no one inside but enquiries were made and the occupants were traced and found to be safe and well."

The Mean Girls actress  who has since split from Tarabasov  thanked her fans for their support following the incident and apologised for exposing aspects of her private life on social media.

She posted: I am sorry that I've exposed certain private matters recently. I was acting out of fear and sadness... We all make mistakes. Sadly mine have always been so public. I have done a lot of soul searching in the past years, and I should have been more clear minded rather than distract from the good heart that I have.

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R uth Wilson says the scrutiny actresses face today is a product of misogyny that comes from women as much as men.

The star of TVs Luther and The Affair, soon to be seen at the National Theatre playing the title character in Hedda Gabler, told ES Magazine:

It is born out of the patriarchal society we have lived in since year dot, and we are victims of it, but we are also complicit in it.

We are objects of desire for men, but often women work in the industries that create those objects of desire. If you ask most men who they find sexy, it might not be the people that women would assume would be the case.

The actress, 34, said double standards were at play when she had to deny unfounded rumours about relationships with co-stars including Johnny Depp and Jude Law.

She said: I doubt any of the actors I have been linked to have been asked about working with me. I do find it a little bit offensive.

She said her co-star in The Affair, Dominic West, agreed to get naked more often in their sex scenes  to the extent that she paid tribute to his bottom when accepting her Golden Globe last year  because she had decided she wasnt going to show my nipples any more.

She said: So poor Dom had to get his arse out more. It was an in-joke, praising his bum, rather than making any comment about male objectification.

The Affair - season 2 trailer

"But men do get it the same as women, and its happening more and more. Film stars these days look buffed up, youve got to be down the gym and probably on steroids. Its not even a model type [body], its sort of superhuman. And if you dont have that, you are a character actor. Or a stage actor: Ill take that.

Wilson, who recently moved back to London from New York, said her parents and three brothers all settled down at a relatively young age but she had no example to follow in her own life.

She said: I feel I am a bit on my own and have to form it as I go. My parents lives were in one place, static and maybe routine and my life isnt. Sometimes I think, God, Id really love some kids, and other times its like, No way.

For a woman my age, its a constant debate  and again, a really annoying thing to deal with, because it defines relationships and how you approach them. Life will take its paths and you have to believe things will happen for a reason.
September 17, 2016, was the 229th anniversary of signing the United States Constitution by the Constitutional Convention and September 17 through 23 is designated as Constitution Week by Public Law 915. Therefore, it is fitting and proper to read and reflect on the U.S. Constitution, the greatest document of human liberty in the history of mankind, and on the foundational principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776.

President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July 1926 saying, Three very definite propositions were set out in its (the Declaration's) preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed. ... No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction ... are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

We often hear people saying they believe the principles in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional structures of limited government are obsolete  they were set forth long ago for a horse and buggy age. Look at all the progress weve made since, they exclaim. Nobody follows that old Constitution anymore, so there is no reason to support an Article V Convention of States to propose amending its scope and jurisdiction.

And others respond, Just look at the mess we are in. We are on the wrong road. The huge federal bureaucracy is massively self-interested and politically motivated. Millions of pages of regulations have become incomprehensible in nearly every sector of our society, even to teams of attorneys.

I believe it is very important for us to understand that free people are not governed by rules and regulations. There is a fundamental distinction between bureaucratic government, where those who have the power to interpret regs get more powerful and progressively do whatever they want, and constitutional government where the primary duty of every employee is to protect individual liberty and to serve that goal across the land. The problem is not with the Constitution.

The problem is as President George Washington warned it would be, "Government is not reason ... it is a force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. Too often we have left our federal government to irresponsible action. And why have we done that?

President Coolidge continued, A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up. ... Equality, liberty ... the rights of man  these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source  in the religious convictions. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions endures, the principles of the Declaration will perish....

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. ... The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. ... Ours is a government of the people. ... Its officers may sometimes go astray, but that is not a reason for criticizing the principles of our institutions. The real heart of the American government depends upon the heart of the American people.

Larry Arnn, Hillsdale College President, said recently, We need government if we are not to descend into anarchy. ... Protecting the equal and inalienable rights of individuals is governments primary responsibility.

To help feed the source of the spring  the Heart of the American People  more than 350 youth and adults gathered in the Montana Capitol Rotunda Sept. 16 for U.S. Constitution commemoration and education. American people must re-revere our spiritual and moral principles lest we degenerate completely into unrestrained tyranny of an influential few. The responsibility rests with each of us.

Jane Hamman, Constitution Week chair, Montana State Society Daughters of the American Revolution, Clancy resident
BUTTE -- Jurors on Monday in Butte district court convicted a Texas man for the fatal shooting of a Whitehall man and wounding two other men on a remote road southeast of Butte in 2015.

In less than four hours, the jury of six men and six women found Tony Dwade Sawyer guilty of deliberate homicide and two counts of attempted deliberate homicide, all felonies, in connection with a late-night triple shooting that killed 37-year-old Joe Powers on Nov. 3.

The 48-year-old, flanked by public defenders Ed Sheehy and Catherine Rickett, sat stone-faced and lowered his eyes while the verdict was read. Powers parents, Tom and Zelda, sat quietly behind prosecutors along with other family members. They declined comment.

Presiding Judge Brad Newman ordered a presentence investigation, and the sentencing was slated for Nov. 7.

Sheehy said his client may be facing a throat cancer diagnosis and asked the judge that his client receive a medical evaluation while incarcerated in the county jail, which Newman ordered.

After the judge adjourned court, family members of Joe Powers embraced County Attorney Eileen Joyce and her co-counsel, Ann Shea and Michael Clague, both deputy county attorneys.

Joyce and her team spent at least 100 hours in preparation for the trial. She wasnt surprised that jurors returned a quick verdict.

We believe that the jury reached the correct verdict, and were happy justice was served for all the victims and Joe Powers family, Joyce said.

In instructing jurors before closing arguments Monday morning, Newman said their task was to deliberate if Sawyer was guilty of the more serious charges or the lesser offenses of mitigated deliberate homicide regarding Powers and attempted mitigated deliberate homicide regarding Whitehall residents Steve Drury and Hunter Smith.

If jurors opted for the lesser offense regarding Drury and Smiths injuries, they would also consider an offense of assault with a weapon.

In an hour-long closing argument to a packed courtroom, Deputy County Attorney Michael Clague faced the jury, saying the case was about a choice Sawyer made and a choice he took away from Powers, who was shot in the back and left face down in a snowy ditch on Fish Creek Road.

Four men got into a car on Nov. 3, 2015, and only one man returned in the vehicle to Drurys residence, Clague continued. No matter the amount of methamphetamine and number of guns, the facts in the case could not be denied  that Tony Sawyer took away these three mens choices.

Clague dismissed the defenses contention that Sawyer was acting in self-defense. If a person acts in self-defense, he argued, then that person would likely turn himself in. Sawyer was apprehended a day after the shooting in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

The prosecutor said testimony showed there was no danger to Sawyer as it related to Powers and Smith. He said the defense wanted the jury to believe danger existed. When Sawyer ran up to Drury, this was not the action of a scared man, Clague said. Rather, it was the behavior of a man running to a fight.

Clague argued the security footage at Drury's house shows Sawyer was not scared when he helped load the Chevy Equinox the four men rode in to go skeet shooting.

After the shooting, when Sawyer returned to Drury's house, he took 45 minutes to methodically pack another vehicle, a Mitsubishi, before he fled, Clague said, adding that the security footage did not support Sawyer's admission that he was scared or suffering severe emotional distress.

Sheehy, in his closing, said the five days of testimony showed his client feared for his life the night the shootings occurred and that his use of force was justified.

Sheehy said testimony based on Sawyers interviews with Idaho law enforcement, Butte police Detective Anthony Jurenic and clinical psychologist Loretta L. Bolyard indicated he fired shots because he feared for his life or serious bodily injury.

As the situation escalated on Fish Creek Road that night, Sawyer questioned You guys aint going to kill me? And then, when the need for self-defense became apparent, said Please, please, please dont make me do it.

That, said Sheehy, indicated Sawyer was doing what he could to save his own life.

In the prosecutions rebuttal, Shea said this is a case of choices and those choices revolved around the defendants choices.

When Sawyer left Texas for Montana, he set in motion a chain of events that changed Powers family forever  and took away Joe Powers life, she said.
POLSON  A small local subsidiary of the tribally owned S&K Technologies is taking one of the worlds largest corporations to court.

Adelos, headquartered in Polson, alleges that Halliburton, the oilfield services giant, received proprietary technology information from Adelos under the guise of acquiring the rights to it, but has since tried to pass it off as its own by incorporating the technology into its own products and services, and secretly filing patent applications for it.

The lawsuit was filed last week in federal court in Missoula by attorney Randy Cox of the Boone Karlberg law firm.

It seeks a judgment that declares Halliburton has directly and willfully infringed on the asserted claims of the asserted patents, that the conversion of Adeloss property was committed with actual fraud and/or malice, and a judgment that would triple the amount of any damages awarded.

Emily Mir, director of public relations for Halliburton, said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

***

The technology involved turns ordinary fiber optic cable into a highly adept sensing device capable of detecting real-time, location-specific changes related to sound, pressure and temperature. Its potential applications range from oil and gas exploration to homeland security.

First developed by the U.S. Navy as a way to locate enemy submarines, the commercial potential of the highly classified technology was eventually recognized. The Navy, according to the lawsuit, chose Adelos as its partner and exclusive licensee of the Navy patents.

Since then, the lawsuit states, Adelos has further developed the Navy technology.

For example, Adelos has created systems directed toward perimeter and homeland security operations, where the sensitive detector can hear intruder or troop movements along vast borders, the complaint says. Adelos has also developed the capability to listen to geological features and movements, opening the capability to hear down oil well bores and extract valuable data about underground gas and petroleum conditions.

The lawsuit states the current market for the technology is estimated at $586 million, and is expected to approach $1.2 billion in the next three years.

The technology apparently caught the eye of Halliburton.

***

In 2011, the lawsuit states, Halliburton contacted the Navy and expressed an interest in acquiring the fiber optic sensing technology.

The Navy told Halliburton it needed to talk with Adelos, the S&K Technologies subsidiary located on the Flathead Indian Reservation. S&K Technologies is owned by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Shortly thereafter, Halliburton and Adelos began discussions regarding Hallibutons interest in the Adelos proprietary technology, the lawsuit states. Halliburton expressed its disappointment with its current fiber optic sensing system and represented that it was interested in establishing a business relationship with Adelos.

For approximately two years, the lawsuit alleges, Halliburton proceeded to extract detailed technical information about the technology.

Believing that Halliburton was acting in good faith and intending to enter into a business relationship with Adelos, Adelos provided details  in an effort to facilitate this potential business relationship, it goes on.

In addition to requests for technical information, Halliburton also demanded that it be allowed to observe multiple tests of Adelos fiber optic sensing systems, the lawsuit states.

In May 2012, it says Christopher Stokely and David Barfoot of Halliburton visited Adelos headquarters in Polson for two days of intense, detailed technical discussion.

***

By September of that year, the lawsuit alleges, Halliburton said it would have to postpone further discussions because of budget concerns. But in early 2013, Halliburton was again contacting the Navy about a potential business relationship involving the technology

The Navy again directed Halliburton to talk with Adelos. Discussions were restarted, but the lawsuit states after Stokely asked for more field testing, Adelos was unable to contact Stokely, or any other Halliburton representative.

Instead, it says that in August 2013, Halliburton surreptitiously filed an international patent application disclosing the technology that is the heart and soul of Adelos fiber optic sensing technology.

Halliburton falsely claimed in this application that its agents, including Christopher Stokely, were the sole inventors of the technology, the lawsuit states. Neither did the company disclose any of the Navy patents on the technology, it adds.

After the international patent application was rejected, the lawsuit states Halliburton again entered into discussions with Adelos, but eventually broke off the talks. This time, the lawsuit states, Halliburton tried to claim the technology as its own in a U.S. patent application.

Halliburton is now marketing and selling services and products involving the technology, according to the complaint.

Adelos is asking also asking for temporary and permanent injunctions to prevent Halliburton from continuing to benefit from the technology. In addition to Boone Karlberg, the company is represented by law firms in Atlanta and Seattle.

In addition to Halliburton, defendants include Halliburton Energy Service and three companies that Halliburton has acquired in the last eight years: Optiphase, SensorTran and Pinnacle Technologies.
This summer I had the opportunity to attend the National Conference of State Legislatures Early Learning Fellows program, which is a multi-day conference of state legislators from around the country gathered to learn about the benefits of early childhood education. There were many issues we examined, all of which tie into early childhood education: crime, environmental factors such as poverty, family support, and professional development for early childhood educators. After learning about these issues, I remain a strong believer in early childhood education.

Early childhood education programs are activities designed for pre-kindergarten aged children, typically up to 5 years old. These programs teach children the soft skills that will be necessary later on in life such as social skills, self-esteem, and an aptitude for learning. In addition to teaching directly to children, early childhood education programs foster family support by developing in-home activities and showing parents how to be engaged in their childrens learning. Research has shown that when children attend early childhood education programs, they are more likely to succeed later on.

We are fortunate to enjoy quality educational systems in Scotts Bluff County. Although many of our communities in the Panhandle have faced their fair share of challenges, education has remained a top priority. For instance, while population statistics show that Scotts Bluff Countys population has remained steady over the last few years, we have seen school enrollment numbers in Scottsbluff grow. This means our young families are staying to raise their children here, making education ever more important.

To ensure our young families experience a quality educational system, I was part of an effort earlier this year to improve early childhood education in Nebraska through school readiness of pre-kindergarten children. LB889 (2016) passed with large bipartisan support of both the Governor and the Legislature. This bill lends support to our early childhood educational system and the professionals who work hard every day to prepare our young children for school. I am confident this innovative law will continue to increase the quality of our early childhood education programs.

In order to ensure that our efforts remain successful, Nebraska must also pay attention to the effects that poverty and crime have on early learning. The first five years include some of the most formative years of a childs life. When children living in poverty go hungry every day, even the worlds best education system can do little to help them. These environmental stressors stave off the development that is crucial to mental and behavioral functioning.

Data from the Nebraska Department of Education shows that nearly 56 percent of Scotts Bluff Countys K-12 aged population are eligible for free or reduced school lunches, meaning that many families live in or close to poverty. By dedicating efforts to early childhood education, we can also lessen the burden on our correctional system. A longitudinal study conducted by researchers at the Institute of Child Development showed a noticeable difference by age 24 on violent crime and incarceration by those children who attended early childhood education programs.

Commitment to early childhood education will build into elementary and high school years, which help our children succeed past the formative years. Helping our future business leaders and entrepreneurs follow their dreams and passions through programs such as Nebraska Extensions Entrepreneurship Investigation (ESI) summer camp are one of the ways our young minds are being fostered. I have been a big advocate of Nebraska Extensions summer camp program, and am looking forward to visiting some of next years summer camp programs.

I look forward to working in my capacity as a legislator to improve the quality of education for the children in my district and all of Nebraska. The Legislature will have many tough decisions to make, especially with a looming budget shortfall, but early childhood education will remain a priority. I look forward to hearing from constituents on other ideas for fostering a quality educational system in Nebraska.

As always, I remain open to your feedback on how I may address the issues that mean most to you. Please do not hesitate to contact my office with any questions you may have over the interim. Thank you to those who have taken the time to express their views on various issues. My contact information is: Senator John P. Stinner, District 48 State Capitol, PO Box 94604, Lincoln NE 68209-4604; telephone: 402-471-2802; email: jstinner@leg.ne.gov.
Last week, in a story thats become too familiar, national news headlines broke with the story of a 13-year-old boy, shot by police.

Police say that the 13-year-old boy pulled a real-looking pellet gun from his waistband during a chase. Lawyers for the family have questioned the officers accounts, saying that some witness accounts conflict with the police version of what happened. They want an independent investigation.

Tyre King is black, the officer is white, and it has generated more discussion on law enforcement and racial relations. Many of us can think of similar cases where young men were shot. As some already know, as a reporter who has covered law enforcement and the courts, I do agree that police departments need to look at use of force procedures and racial profiling as a system and on an individual department level. Some brand me as a cop hater for such a view, however, I genuinely have an interest in the workings of our systems.

Matters of public safety need to and should be discussed and reviewed, reviewed, reviewed. There is something to be learned.

However, in cases such as Tyre King, the young boy who was killed, I want to know why we are not discussing another matter: Why are toy guns being made to look like real guns?

Ive seen cases  including the robbery of the Git N Split locally  of adults committing crimes with toy guns. Adults are committing real crimes with toy guns. And, as the two women who testified in the Git N Split robbery said, its hard to know a toy gun from a real gun when its being pointed at you at the scene of a crime.

I can certainly understand how it may be difficult also for a police officer in an active situation to know a toy from an actual gun.

And, its getting harder, from my limited knowledge of guns. The gun that Tyre King was alleged to have pulled is described as practically identical to the guns carried by police officers. Is a toy gun made to look like an exact replica of a Glock or other type of gun necessary?

I grew up with a little brother who loved toy guns from the time he was little. His guns very obviously looked like toy guns  silver guns with plastic handles, brightly colored guns.

When my brothers were older, they were allowed to have BB guns, which I expect is many young boys (and girls, the feminist in me doesnt dare leave out the girls) introduction to shooting and aiming a gun. From what I understand, federal law has required since 1989 that these guns have bright orange caps at the tips of their barrels. However, for whatever reason, the tips of those guns are easily removable. One has to wonder, is it because the manufacturers of these toy weapons have a potential buyer in the person wanting to carry a real-looking, albeit fake, gun?

There probably isnt one solution - and as mentioned at the opening, its also an issue with further complications. For example, what role do we have as parents to teach our children gun safety, even if we arent putting a real gun in their hands? I can still remember hearing my mom tell him that if he pointed his toy gun at a person, he wasnt allowed to have the gun. And, yes, he got them taken away at times for violating that rule. Fortunately, he was never shot for pointing a gun at someone. I shudder at the thought.

However, the message from my parents  guns are to be taken seriously  still resonates with me, and Im sure, my brothers as well.

I dont think that police officers, bank tellers or gas station clerks should have to wonder if a real gun is being pointed in their faces. In this day and age, when my iPhone can get my email and tell me how many minutes it will take me to drive to work, there has to be a way for a toy gun manufacturer to clearly mark, in a way that cant be altered, a gun as fake.

And, it seems to me that when it comes to our kids safety, its worth requiring toy gun manufacturers to take some extra precautions to protect our children.

Kids shouldnt have to pay for real consequences for carrying around toy guns.
This page is archived. Data published after 5 April 2022 can be found on the renewed website. Go to the new statistics page

Published: 21 September 2016

Total energy consumption rose by 4 per cent in January to June

According to Statistics Finland's preliminary data, total energy consumption in January to June amounted to 695 petajoule (PJ), which was four per cent more than in the corresponding period in 2015. Electricity consumption amounted to 44 terawatt hours (TWh), which is three per cent more than one year earlier. Carbon dioxide emissions of the energy sector rose by five per cent year-on-year. Colder weather than last year contributed to the rise in energy consumption.

Total energy consumption

*preliminary

Among fuels, the consumption of wood fuels increased most in January to June, by five per cent. Oil and coal rose by four per cent and peat by three per cent. Compared with the first half of 2015, only the consumption of natural gas went down by five per cent.

Net imports of electricity grew by 15 per cent in January to June compared with the corresponding period of last year. Net imports of electricity have never before been as large in the first half of the year and their share of total consumption grew to 22 per cent. The growth in wind power levelled off to ten per cent after a couple of years of strong growth. The use of hydro power increased by three per cent and that of nuclear power by two per cent.

In January to June, diverse energy products were imported into Finland to the value of EUR 3.3 billion, which was 16 per cent less than one year earlier. Most energy products were imported from Russia, whose share of the value of imports was 61 per cent. Energy products were exported to the value of EUR 1.7 billion, which was six per cent more than one year previously. Most energy products were exported from Finland to EU countries, which accounted for 82 per cent of the value of exports. The fallen world market price of oil contributed to the reduction in the value of imports of energy products. In turn, the maintenance shutdown of oil production in the second quarter of last year partly caused the slight rise in exports of energy products.

Stocks of coal amounted to 17 TWh at the end of June, which was 30 per cent less than one year earlier. At the end of June, it was estimated that the peat stocks contained 16 TWh of energy peat, which was 22 per cent more than one year earlier.

Total energy consumption by source (TJ) and CO2 emissions (Mt)

Energy source 1) I-II/2016* Annual change-%* Percentage share of

total energy consumption* Oil 155,660 4 22 Coal 2) 59,476 4 9 Natural gas 3) 42,054 -5 6 Nuclear Energy 4) 120,990 2 17 Net Imports of Electricity 5) 33,866 15 5 Hydro power 5) 30,795 3 4 Wind power 5) 4,386 10 1 Peat 31,037 3 5 Wood fuels 188,597 5 27 Others 6) 28,463 5 4 TOTAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION 695,322 4 100 Bunkers 15,773 -15 . CO2 emissions from energy sector 22 5 .

1) *Preliminary2) Coal: includes hard coal, coke, blast furnace gas and coke oven gas.3) The consumption of natural gas does not include raw material use.4) Conversion of electricity generation into fuel units: Nuclear power: 10.91 TJ/GWh (33% total efficiency)5) Conversion of electricity generation into fuel units: Hydro power, wind power and net imports of electricity: 3.6 TJ/GWh (100%)6) Others: includes exothermic heat from industry, recovered fuels and heat pumps.

Source: Statistics Finland, Energy supply and consumption

Inquiries: Ville Maljanen 029 551 2691, energia@stat.fi

Director in charge: Ville Vertanen

Publication in pdf-format (257.5 kB)

Updated 21.9.2016

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Energy supply and consumption [e-publication].

ISSN=1799-7976. 2nd quarter 2016. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 30.10.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/ehk/2016/02/ehk_2016_02_2016-09-21_tie_001_en.html
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When Whitney Gilbert and Shadese (DeeDee) Griffith began dating more than a year ago, neither could have expected that they and their family w
Wednesday, 21 September 2016 23:47:23 (GMT+3) |

Mexican integrated steelmaker Altos Hornos de Mexico (AHMSA) told local media this week it is seeking a $350 million financing from OeKB Bank to buy new equipment, so it can boost activities within the automotive industry.

AHMSAs CEO Alonso Ancira reportedly presented Austria-based OeKB Bank a proposal to buy new equipment and then start producing specialty steel for the automotive industry.

The company said it could produce specialty steel within an 18-month timeframe and could reactivate between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs out of a total 10,000 positions the local steel industry lost last year, according to media reports.


Wednesday, 21 September 2016 23:39:59 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

Brazils anti-trust authority, Cade, approved ArcelorMittal s purchase of a minority stake at Brazilian welded tube producer Tuper.

Cade approved without restrictions the 40 percent stake acquisition for an undisclosed pricethe deal indicates ArcelorMittal will assume Tupers debts.

Additionally, under the terms of the deal, ArcelorMittal will supply flat steel, including HRC, CRC, galvalume, among other products, to Tuper.

In June last year, Tuper made its first shipment of carbon steel welded pipes to a gas company in the state of Santa Catarina, following a BRL 15.4 million investment, the company said at the time. The funds were used to build a new pipe coating line in the city of Sao Bento do Sul, in the state of Santa Catarina, which is already operating. The facility has the capacity to produce 42,000 mt of tubes per year, the company said.
According to Nucor s statement, the specialty cold mill complex will give the company the capability to produce products it currently does not make, adding to its comprehensive product portfolio and further differentiating it from its competitors. Locating the cold mill at Nucor 's sheet mill in Arkansas will give the company a transportation advantage over competitors outside the region currently supplying the local market and the growing Mexican market. The new mill is expected to add approximately 100 jobs.
Wednesday, 21 September 2016 00:08:53 (GMT+3) | San Diego

Canada. According to local media, the province of Ontario announced today that it has signed an agreement with equity fund Bedrock Industries LP to restructure US Steel



Under the agreement, which still requires approval from other stakeholders and a Canadian court, Bedrock will reportedly purchase and continue operating Under the agreement, which still requires approval from other stakeholders and a Canadian court, Bedrock will reportedly purchase and continue operating US Steel Canada 's plants in Hamilton and Nanticoke, which employ a total of 2,000 workers and have a total capacity of 2.6 million tons of steel per year.



"The deal announced today is far from perfect, given the challenges that arise from such a lengthy and complex insolvency process," said United Steelworkers Ontario director Marty Warren, in a statement. "However, we believe this could lead to a good final deal for the union's members and retirees."



Bedrock Industries LP is a private equity fund focused on metals, mining and natural resources. Reports indicate that the company must also complete negotiations with the United Steelworkers union as part of the agreement.




By MARK EVANS mevans@stegenherald.com Bloomsdale will probably host a major fireworks display. The pyrotechnics will not take place until 2024, however. During the Oct. 12 board of aldermen meeting, Kevin Wehner and city officials again discussed the possibility of a July 4 fireworks display at the youth soccer fields on land leased by the city
Mackinac Island What a beautiful weekend on Mackinac. The trees are dressed in autumn blaze and on the way to the Grand...

Outdoors This Week in the Eastern U.P. OK, first, summer was over. Then, next thing you know, September was gone. Now, October is almost over. People, this...

Looking Back 130 YEARS AGO The St. Ignace News Saturday, October 29, 1892 Deer season closed on Tuesday last.  The Gospel...
The Minister of National Defence, Mihnea Motoc received on Wednesday the Portugal Ambassador to Romania, Joao-Bernardo Weinstein in a meeting where the discussions aimed at the bilateral cooperation in defence, the Romanian official appreciating the Portuguese specialists' contribution in the training of the Romanian pilots for the F-16 aircraft. According to a press release sent to Agerpres on Wednesday by the National Defence Ministry, during the meeting were approached practical cooperation methods between Romania and Portugal, both on a bilateral level and also within the North-Atlantic Alliance and the European Union.

"The topics regarding the implementation stage of the measures adopted at the NATO Summit in Warsaw and the Global Strategy of the European Union, were also on the discussion's agenda. Minister Mihnea Motoc expressed his appreciation for the contribution of the Portuguese Air Force specialists in the training of the pilots and the technical personnel who will serve the Fighting Falcon F-16 aircraft the Romanian Army is endowed with," the release added. The source mentions that the military bilateral dialogue will continue, in the following period being scheduled an official visit to Romania of the Portuguese Defence Minister, Jose Alberto de Azeredo Lopes.
The NATO should continue its efforts to ensure security and stability in the Black Sea region, on Wednesday said president Klaus Iohannis when welcoming at the Cotroceni presidential Palace the head of Allied Command Transformation, General Denis Mercier. According to a release by the Presidential Administration, during the meeting the two high officials hailed the decisions made at the July NATO Summit in Warsaw, in particular those destined to strengthening the deterrence and defense posture of the North-Atlantic Alliance, as well as the allies' strong message of unity, solidarity and commitment, sent on this occasion.

"President Klaus Iohannis underlined the importance to completely and without delay implement the decisions of the Warsaw NATO Summit regarding the future advanced presence of the NATO in the South of the Eastern flank," the release adds. The head of state added that it is necessary to be drafted a robust, persistent advanced presence of the Alliance, starting from the propositions lodged by our country and agreed by our allies at the Warsaw NATO Summit. President Klaus Iohannis has also stressed that concrete, substantial allied measures to the implementation of the allied decisions of interest for Romania are essential to consolidate the NATO's deterrence and defense posture.

The president re-asserted the Black Sea's strategic importance for the Euro-Atlantic security, recognized and recorded at the recent summit, and highlighted that it is necessary that the NATO continues its efforts in a proper manner to ensure security and stability in the Black Sea region. In his turn, the NATO official stressed, with regards to the implementation of the Warsaw Summit's decision, the special importance of the co-operation's practical component at allied level, under the joint training and unfolding of multinational exercises, to increase inter-operability at the forces' level and implicitly of the NATO response capacity in a challenging security environment.

General Denis Mercier said the implementation stage of the NATO decisions adopted in Warsaw is especially important for the unitary, balanced strengthening of the entire Eastern flank. So, the NATO official accentuated the involvement of the Allied Command Transformation to enforcing the measures of deterrence and defense in the region.

Agerpres
DECATUR -- As Millikin associate professor of history Dan Monroe started listing off the qualities that made the life of Alexander Hamilton such a fascinating story, he said, "That sounds like a movie."

It likely will be soon. Hamilton's unlikely rise from orphan to one of the authors of the U.S. Constitution before being killed in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr has suddenly become pop culture thanks to "Hamilton: An American Musical," written by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The success of the musical led Millikin's Department of History and Political Science to host: "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Behind the Musical," on Tuesday as part of its Constitution Day celebration. Constitution Day was Sept. 16.

"His story has everything: sex, violence, political conflict, inspiring beginning and a tragic end," Monroe said.

Millikin lecturer of political science Amber Lusvardi said she was skeptical when students first told her about "Hamilton," but once she began listening to the songs, she was hooked.

When it came time to pick this year's Constitution Day presentation, Lusvardi said, "I felt like it had to be Hamilton."

The musical is what helped bring Millikin alumnus and recent retiree Dan Allen to the presentation.

"I didn't know a lot about Hamilton, but I've become more and more intrigued with the popularity of the musical," Allen said.

Lusvardi began the presentation in Schilling Hall Room 418 to about 45 people with Hamilton's backstory: how his mother Rachel Faucette came to give birth to two illegitimate children on a remote island, then orphan Hamilton and his brother, James, after succumbing to fever in 1768.

Hamilton, though, eventually moved to the British North American colonies attended college, served in the Revolutionary War and was the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington.

Monroe spoke about Hamilton's political philosophies, including his dislike of democracy.

"He had a pessimistic view of human nature. He believed that most people's principal motivations were their own self-interest," Monroe said.

But, Monroe said, Hamilton's belief in a strong federal government was influential in the U.S.'s early success and ability to survive the Civil War.

Then Monroe turned the presentation back over to Lusvardi, saying, "It's a gloomy ending; all good movies have one."

Lusvardi set the stage for Hamilton's deadly duel with Burr by pointing out that Hamilton had actually spoke out against duels, before and after his son had died in one.

But Hamilton had a heated rivalry with Burr, and when Hamilton refused to apologize for his disparaging dinner party remarks about Burr that had appeared in a newspaper, it ended with Hamilton dead and Burr still the vice president under President Thomas Jefferson.

"Burr was a genuinely bad guy -- it's a blessing he didn't become president," Monroe said. "We owe Hamilton for that, too."
Updated at 12:45 p.m.

LONDON  McLaren damped down a report on Wednesday that Apple Inc. had made an approach for the British Formula One team owner and supercar maker.

"We can confirm that McLaren is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment," a McLaren spokesman said.

"As you would expect, the nature of our brand means we regularly have confidential conversations with a wide range of parties, but we keep them confidential."

The Financial Times newspaper, citing three sources it said had been briefed on negotiations, had reported that Apple had made an approach for a strategic investment or a potential buyout.

It reported that the automotive group could be valued at between 1 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) and 1.5 billion pounds.

Reports have suggested that Apple, which had no immediate response to the Financial Times story, is working on a self-driving car.

The iPhone maker has hired dozens of automotive experts over the past year and is exploring making charging stations for electric cars.

Apple also invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing earlier this year.

The McLaren Formula One team is partnered by Honda, who provide the power units. The team is the second most successful after Ferrari in terms of race wins and titles but has not won a grand prix since 2012.
German lawmakers called on regulators to curb Bayers $66 billion takeover of U.S. seed giant Monsanto in a skepticism-laced parliamentary session that highlights the backlash to the deal Bayer faces in its home market.

The debate Wednesday in the lower house of parliament, called by the opposition Green Party, laid bare the depth of resistance to Bayers buying a U.S. company that many Germans view as a champion of genetically modified crops and a weedkiller they believe might cause cancer. Eight of the 12 lawmakers who spoke, including parliamentarians from within Chancellor Angela Merkels coalition, cast doubt on the acquisition.

More than 70 percent of Germans say they dont want genetically modified food on their plates, but thats exactly part of the strategy of this merger, said Katharina Droege of the Greens. She warned of massive negative consequences for consumers and called on regulators to block the takeover. Lawmakers have no legislative authority to stop the deal.

Buying Monsanto would give Bayer, based in the industrial western German city of Leverkusen, about 35 percent of the global market for seeds and farm chemicals. The move comes as the number of players in the industry shrinks. China National Chemical Corp. is planning to buy Syngenta, and DuPont and Dow Chemical are seeking to combine and create a new crop-science unit. The deals are drawing scrutiny in the U.S. as well, with one lawmaker in a U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday referring to a tsunami of consolidation.

In a debate that cut across Merkels coalition, three Social Democrats from the governing alliance crossed the aisle to join opposition Greens and Left Party lawmakers to raise antitrust and environmental concerns. One lawmaker from Merkels Christian Democratic Union, Hermann Faerber, himself a farmer, also voiced skepticism. Faerber said that excessive consolidation among suppliers would put pressure on German growers who are already facing mergers among the food companies that are their customers.

The simple German farmer will be caught more and more between two millstones, Faerber said.

The political criticism contrasted with a more positive take from Merkels government. Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt told Mittelbayerische Zeitung on Tuesday that the deal held great potential for digital technology and innovation.

I have the firm expectation that Bayer will transfer its sustainability strategy to the new parts of the company, Schmidt said.

In the Bundestag on Wednesday, amid jeers from the opposition, four lawmakers  all from Merkels CDU-led bloc  either sided with Bayer or called on legislators to wait for an assessment from the European Unions antitrust commission.

What youre holding here is not a conversation, its demonization  of a company, of an entire industry and an entire technology, Kristina Schroeder, Merkels former family minister, told the chamber.

CDU lawmaker Matthias Heider said the parliamentary debate was premature and accused critical colleagues of exerting political pressure on regulators.

Bayers takeover of Monsanto will create the No. 1 agro-chemical company in the world, Heider said. Id say thats rather an advantage than disadvantage.

Still, most of the tenor was against the deal. A Left Party lawmaker, Eva Bulling-Schroeter, said the takeover would create an unparalleled supercompany that should make us afraid.

I hope that the monopoly regulators look very closely at this, said Elvira Drobinski-Weiss, a lawmaker from the governing Social Democrats. Im seeing here a massive market concentration and market dominance.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  The U.S. government granted aviation giants Airbus and Boeing permission on Wednesday to sell aircraft to Iran following last years nuclear accord.

European airplane manufacturer Airbus announced the license from the U.S. Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control early Wednesday. Chicago-based Boeing followed with its own announcement later in the day. The approval clears the way for the two plane manufacturers to access one of the last untapped aviation markets in the world. Both companies have announced separate $25-billion deals to sell aircraft to airlines in the country, although analysts are skeptical that there is demand for so many jets or available financing.

The deal would be the biggest for an American company since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and U.S. Embassy takeover.

The announcements come as Iranian and U.S. leaders are in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and shows that the outgoing administration of President Barack Obama is honoring the economic terms of the nuclear pact.

Though based abroad, Airbus needed the approval of the U.S. Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control for the deal because at least 10 percent of the manufacturers components are of American origin.

Airbus applied for two licenses to cover its deal with Iran to ensure the fast delivery of some of the aircraft, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon told The Associated Press. The license announced Wednesday covers the first 17 planes involved in the deal, which will be A320s and A330s, he said.

Dubon said Airbus hoped to receive a second license allowing it to sell the remaining planes to Iran soon.

Irans U.N. mission did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. State television referred to an AP report on the sale.

Irans nuclear deal with world powers, which limits its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions, specifically allowed for the purchase of aircraft and parts. Thats set off a race between airplane manufacturers for the newly opened market, home to 80 million people.

In January, national carrier Iran Air signed agreements to buy 118 planes from Airbus, estimated to be worth some 22.8 billion euros ($25 billion). On Sunday, state TV reported that Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan, a deputy transportation minister, said Iran would cut the number of Airbus planes to 112.

Base model A320s are listed at an average of $98 million, while A330s start at $231.5 million. That puts the value of the approved 17 aircraft in the first license around at least $1.8 billion and possibly much higher based on list prices, though buyers typically negotiate sizable discounts for bulk orders.

Under Boeings deal, Iran Air will buy 80 aircraft with a total list price of $17.6 billion, with deliveries beginning in 2017 and running until 2025. Iran Air also will lease 29 new Boeing 737s. In a statement, Boeing spokesman Marc Sklar said we have received that license and remain in talks with Iran Air based on the memorandum of agreement reach in June.

The Boeing deal has been criticized by American lawmakers over Irans pernicious behavior, including launching ballistic missiles, firing rockets near U.S. warships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz and briefly detaining American sailors who strayed into its territorial waters.

The U.S. presidential election could also have an effect on the sales. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to tear up the nuclear deal if elected this November.

Most Iranian planes were purchased before the Islamic Revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Islamists to power. Out of Irans 250 commercial planes, 162 were flying in June, while the rest were grounded due to lack of spare parts.

Iran Air, whose website lists 43 airplanes in its fleet, says it has direct flights to over 30 international destinations, including London.
Warren Buffett, the biggest investor in Wells Fargo & Co., said it'll be more than a month before he publicly discusses the bank's phantom-account scandal.

"If I start commenting on that or anything else, it will lead down too many paths so I will wait until November to speak about it, the election or any other subject," Buffett told the Fox Business Network, according to an article on its website.

Wells Fargo is a sensitive topic for the billionaire, who controls a 10 percent stake in the San Francisco-based lender and is seeking Federal Reserve approval to increase the holding. Lawmakers from both major political parties faulted John Stumpf, the chief executive officer of the bank, at a Congressional hearing Tuesday into the practice of opening deposit and credit-card accounts without customers' authorization. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called for his resignation.

Buffett's silence on Wells Fargo contrasts with his support of executives including Goldman Sachs's Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon when their companies drew regulatory scrutiny.

Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is backing the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, a Democrat who wrote in a letter to the bank's customers that she was "deeply disturbed" by Wells Fargo's conduct. The election is scheduled for Nov. 8. Buffett didn't return a call Wednesday seeking elaboration on his remarks to Fox.
The ACLU is behind a campaign to prompt President Obama to pardon National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. As Snowden told the Guardian, he knows he violated "laws on the books," but "that is perhaps why the pardon power exists  for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things."

Snowden shows an understanding of the president's pardon power. Still, I have a few questions I would want answered before I would sign onto the notion that the ex-NSA contractor acted morally and ethically and hence deserves clemency. To wit:

How did a guy who's against authoritarian governments that spy on their citizens end up in Vladmir Putin's Russia? (Snowden blames the State Department for revoking his passport after he left Hong Kong, but why is he in Moscow? His residence belies his rhetoric.)

If Snowden wanted to stop the NSA's practices in 2013, then why didn't he, as former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell suggested in his book "The Great War of Our Time," simply copy a couple of documents and mail them to the Washington Post instead of downloading 1.7 million documents and taking them to China?

If Obama pardons the biggest leaker of all time, then won't he also have to pardon others (Chelsea Manning, former CIA chief David Petraeus) who also shared classified information? If Obama pardons Snowden, then how does the intelligence community keep secrets in the future?

Director Oliver Stone's "Snowden" came out Friday, which gives immediacy to the ACLU's effort, as does the calendar countdown on Obama's ability to absolve Snowden. Photogenic and self-deprecating, Snowden fits the central casting image of a reluctant hero. In Laura Poitras' documentary "Citizenfour," Snowden repeatedly urges others not to make the NSA story about him, which, of course, Poitras does. Better to make this a morality play than a hard-boiled look at the cost of these leaks to U.S. intelligence and America's allies.

Snowden has bravely committed, under his own name, what he frames as an act of civil disobedience. But if Snowden truly is who he says he is, let him come home and face the criminal charges against him before a jury of his peers. As long as Snowden remains holed up in Moscow, he might as well be Donald Trump, who is so smitten with Putin's praise that he compliments him in turn. Trump and Snowden share a willingness to live in Putin's thrall, but at least Donald Trump doesn't live under Vladimir Putin's thumb. President Obama should not pardon Edward Snowden.
John J. Dunphy runs the Second Reading Book Shop in Alton, Ill., and often comes across interesting old titles. His interest in local history seems to lead to further inquiry.

Recently he found one previously owned by something called "Argosy Libraries" of St. Louis. Have you heard of it?

Today, Dunphy writes about two books.

Jane Henderson, Post-Dispatch Book Editor

By John J. Dunphy

As the owner of a used-book shop, Im accustomed to having local residents donate unwanted books to me. A few turn out to be collectibles. Most, however, are just reading copies in conditions ranging from never-perused birthday gifts to an advanced state of decomposition. A couple of recent arrivals, however, defy easy classification. They wouldnt merit a second glance from any serious book collector. Yet, area residents with an interest in this regions history might find them interesting.

The Spirit of the Border by Western writer Zane Grey is the very definition of a reading copy. Its quite worn, lacks a dust jacket and was published in November 1939 by Triangle Books, which specialized in issuing reprints. A notice that had been stamped in the inside cover caught my eye, however. It reads: This book is for Rental Only. Kindly return in two weeks or have renewed. The Convenient Reader Service ARGOSY LIBRARIES ST. LOUIS, MO.

I knew there have been other libraries in the Gateway City besides the St. Louis Public Library. For instance, I have several books in my shop that bear this stamped inscription on their inside covers: PROPERTY OF Famous-Barr Co. Circulating Library, Olive, Locust, Sixth & Seventh, St. Louis. No mystery there, of course. Just about everyone is familiar with Famous-Barr. But Argosy Libraries?

I found nothing on line and contacted the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center. It took some digging on the part of Jason D. Stratman, an assistant librarian at the center, but he eventually uncovered this information and sent it to me"

There is a listing for an Argosy Lending Library in the 1947-48 Saint Louis City Directory. Paul Catching is listed as the manager and he operated the Library out of his home, located at 2209 39th Street. He also worked as a confectioner at 1429 Whittier Avenue.

This the only year in which we found a listing for the Library. It must have been a small collection of books he had in his basement or garage and people borrowed them from him. But that is just a guess on my part.

Perhaps Paul Catching had always wanted to be a librarian and decided to realize that dream by starting his own library. I like to think that he simply loved books and wanted to make certain that his fellow St. Louisans had ready access to the printed word.

The other book has an even more fascinating story. The Faiths of the World was published by Charles Scribners Sons in 1882. As suggested by its title, the work consists of chapters dealing with the worlds religions. Each chapter is by a Scottish clergyman, all but one of whom possessed a doctor of divinity degree, and examines an ancient or modern religion. The chapters were originally a series of lectures delivered at St. Giles. The Faiths of the World is very much a product of its time. The contribution by the Rev. James Cameron Lees, minister of St. Giles Cathedral, High Kirk, Edinburgh, is titled Mahommedanism, an archaic term for Islam that is now regarded as offensive.

A label on the inside cover of this book reads: The Gift of Ebenezer Alden, M.D., of Randolph, Mass., who died January 26, 1881, To the Congregational Church of Brighton, Ill., Intended Especially For The Use Of The Pastor. Sent from A.B.C.F.M. Rooms, 1 Somerset St., Boston, Mass. E.K.A. Brighton, Ill was handwritten on the label.

Born in 1788, Dr. Ebenezer Alden held degrees from Harvard, Dartmouth and Pennsylvania. He was descended from John Alden, who came to America aboard the Mayflower. Alden owned an extensive private library and specialized in collecting books and pamphlets related to the Civil War as well as the ecclesiastical history of New England. He wrote several works dealing with regional medical history and genealogy.

The letters A.B.C.F.M. stand for American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Organized during the first decade of the 19th century, it became the largest and most influential missionary organization in the United States. Founded by Congregationalists and ardently supported by members of that denomination such as Alden, the A.B.C.F.M accepted missionaries from other denominations, especially those that shared the Calvinist roots of Congregationalism. Aldens will provided funds for the distribution of copies of The Faiths of the World by the A.B.C.F.M. to Congregational ministers across the United States.

The A.B.C.F.M. eventually merged with other societies to form the Board for World Ministries (BWM), an agency of the United Church of Christ. According to its web site, the BWM works to secure an ecumenical global sharing of resources and prophetic vision of a just and peaceful world order, joining with Gods concern for the poor and oppressed."

The Pilgrim Congregational Church of Brighton, whose pastor received a copy of The Faiths of the World, was formed in 1867 when some disaffected members of a local Presbyterian congregation withdrew to form a Congregational church. The young church failed to grow, however, and its 13 remaining members voted to disband in 1894. The organ, carpet and Bible of Pilgrim Congregational were given to the Congregational church of Harvey, Ill. The pastors copy of The Faiths of the World evidently remained in this area.

There are copies of The Faiths of the World listed on Abebooks.com in the $35 to $40 price range, so this long-ago pastors copy is somewhat marketable. I doubt whether anyone will want to acquire a ragged Zane Grey novel once owned by Argosy Libraries, however. Only the most meticulous scholar of St. Louis literary history would find such a book historically significant. I think Ill keep it as a poignant memento of an obscure St. Louis bibliophile who realized his dream of becoming a librarian.
Silver City is a mining town in southwest New Mexico, population 10,000 or so, a few hours drive from the nearest big city  maybe not the first place youd open a gourmet grocery store selling $200 bottles of balsamic vinegar and 20 different olive oils.

It made no sense in a town that small, admits Rob Connoley, a St. Louis native who with his husband, Tyler, opened the Curious Kumquat in 2004.

Connoleys career in nonprofit management had brought him to Silver City, but he was also a passionate home cook desperate for the international ingredients necessary to prepare the dishes he loved.

The store was a hit. Sometimes, Connoley says, the line to pay snaked out the front door. And this was merely the first step in his unlikely culinary journey, which would transform the little grocery store into a nationally acclaimed restaurant and has led to the publication this week of his first cookbook, Acorns & Cattails: a Modern Foraging Cookbook of Forest, Farm & Field (Skyhorse, 224 pages, $35).

The book also serves as a preview for local diners. After 30 years away, Connoley decided, it was time to return home. He closed the Curious Kumquat this year and moved back to St. Louis to open a restaurant here. (He is scouting potential locations.)

Connoley had no restaurant experience when he started serving lunch at the Curious Kumquat in 2007. A few months later, he added dinner service, but he struggled to find a middle ground between the kind of food he assumed Silver City residents wanted  I gotta give them a big hunk of meat, he remembers thinking  and the ambitious, modernist multi-course meals he wanted to cook.

The solution was not simply a matter of focusing on local produce. He vividly recalls trying a locally grown hothouse tomato. I took a bite of it as if it were a summer tomato, he says. It was flavorless and mealy. Just because its local doesnt mean its good.

Connoleys answer was to find quality local purveyors and, crucially, to forage for less familiar ingredients: nuts, berries and plants. Nor did he avoid the modernist techniques used at such world-renowned restaurants as El Bulli and Alinea.

Thats when things took off, he says. I was totally underestimating what locals wanted.

In December 2012, the influential food magazine Saveur included the Curious Kumquat in its annual Saveur 100 list, and Connoley says, everything changed overnight. In 2014, he was a semifinalist for Best Chef: Southwest in the annual James Beard Awards.

For Acorns & Cattails, Connoley wanted to honor his work at the Curious Kumquat but not to the point where the recipes became specific to the Southwest.

I want a book that uses ingredients available all over the country, with recipes that are doable by everyone, he says.

The book also features a primer on foraging. There are practical considerations, of course: Will your stomach ache because (the ingredient) has too much fiber or because the bitterness is too intense? But Connoley also addresses the ethics of foraging, from not harming the area to recognizing that an ingredient may also be a food source for wildlife.

Cant find an ingredient locally? Dont want to go foraging? The recipes in Acorns & Cattails do often suggest substitutions for foraged ingredients and some of Connoleys go-to (but not so commonly found) meats such as elk and javelina. For hackberry rabbit pate, for example, Connoley recommends dried dates for the hackberries and chicken livers in place of rabbit livers  though, he notes, the chicken livers will impart a stronger flavor.
More than one in three American adults  35 percent  were given painkiller prescriptions by medical providers last year. The total rate of painkiller use is even higher  38 percent  when you factor in the number of adults who got painkillers for misuse via other means, from friends or relatives, or via drug dealers.

These numbers come from a recent Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report that highlights the stunning ubiquity of prescription painkillers in modern American life. The report indicates that in 2015, more American adults used prescription painkillers than used cigarettes, smokeless tobacco or cigars  combined.

Most painkiller use isnt misuse, which SAMHSA defines as any use of painkillers in a manner not directed by a doctor. This can include taking painkillers without a prescription for the purpose of getting high, or taking the drugs for a longer period of time or at a higher quantity than recommended by a doctor.

Indeed, part of painkillers prevalence is because of how effective they are, and the difference they can make in the lives of pain sufferers. Its hard to imagine recovering from an invasive surgery without having something to treat the residual pain, for instance. And for many people afflicted with chronic pain, proper management with prescription painkillers can mean the difference between debilitating illness and daily functioning.

But many prescription painkillers are highly habit-forming, and they can be deadly if taken at high doses, or in conjunction with other drugs such as alcohol. In 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control, opioid painkillers killed nearly 19,000 Americans. Thats greater than the total number of Americans (15,809) who were murdered that year.

Those numbers are so high partly because Americans have developed a voracious appetite for painkillers in recent years. A 2008 study estimated that Americans consume roughly 80 percent of the global opioid supply, and 99 percent of the supply of hydrocodone, one of the most popular prescription painkillers.

A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and the Associated Press detailed the intense lobbying efforts pharmaceutical companies have made to keep these drugs lightly regulated and readily available. The investigation found that when it comes to lobbying, pro-painkiller groups outspend groups arguing for tighter restrictions by more than 200 to 1.

There are examples of pharmaceutical companies engaging in unscrupulous or illegal behavior to promote opioid drugs. In 2007, Purdue Pharma, maker of Oxycontin, plead guilty to charges that it misled regulators and doctors about the abuse potential of the drug.

More recently, employees at Insys Therapeutics, a manufacturer of the powerful painkiller fentanyl, plead guilty to charges involving kickback schemes for fentanyl sales. The company remains the target of numerous state and federal investigations.

SAMHSAs latest numbers indicate that painkillers are still widespread despite recent federal efforts to impose tighter restrictions on their prescription and use. Its unclear whether the 38 percent of adults using painkillers last year represents an increase or a decrease over previous years, because SAMHSA only recently added a battery of detailed prescription drug use questions to its annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Reducing the scope of the opioid epidemic has been a priority for President Barack Obama. Earlier this year the White House requested $1.1 billion from Congress for fighting opioid addiction.

But critics have argued that Drug Enforcement Administration policies  some long-standing, some new  are undercutting federal efforts to curb opioid abuse.

For instance, earlier this year, the DEA refused to reduce restrictions on marijuana use, arguing that there was insufficient evidence of marijuanas medical benefits. Multiple studies have found that access to medical marijuana is associated with reductions in prescription painkiller abuse and overdose rates.

More recently, the DEA announced a plan to ban the use of kratom, a southeast Asian plant with opiate-like qualities. Many users of kratom report that the plant has helped them quit using more powerful prescription painkillers. Researchers are worried that without kratom available to them, these users will return to prescription painkillers or move on to heroin.
UPDATED at 5 p.m. with arrest of possible suspect.

ST. LOUIS COUNTY  Police have identified the man fatally shot Tuesday night in an apartment parking lot in Spanish Lake as Alphonse Williams, 26, of the 600 block of Yale Boulevard in St. Charles.

A suspect in a "recent" north county homicide was arrested after a short pursuit about 3:45 p.m. Wednesday that ended in the 5400 block of Helen Avenue, in Jennings, a county police spokesman confirmed, but it was not clear if that suspect was related to the Williams case. Nobody was injured in the chase.

Police had been called shortly after 6 p.m. Tuesday to the 1500 block of Bavona Drive, in the Spanish Lake area. Williams was in the parking lot of a nearby apartment complex, suffering from two gunshot wounds. He died at the scene.

Police asked that anyone with information call county police at 314-889-2341 or CrimeStoppers at 866-371-8477.
SHREWSBURY  Inside his office at the Cardinal Rigali Center, Kurt Nelson produced a chart that showed last years and this years enrollment in the regions 140 Catholic schools.

The 4 percent decline isnt enough to cause alarm, said Nelson, the superintendent of Catholic education for the St. Louis Archdiocese. Days after the decision was announced to close John F. Kennedy Catholic High School in Manchester, Nelson said he doesnt expect more school closure announcements this year.

What happened at Kennedy is a very unique situation, he said. Its not like this is part of a master plan.

Catholic schools in the archdiocese have collectively lost about 12,500 students this past decade  a drop attributed to fewer Catholic families and fewer baptisms and exacerbated by the Great Recession. That enrollment drop has led to a number of closures. This year, 37,515 children are enrolled in preschool through 12th grade in the archdiocese.

Since 2011, the Catholic Education Office has made a concerted effort to improve its schools and recruit more students to fill empty seats by supporting innovation and raising more scholarship funds.

Those efforts have paid off at some schools, such as St. Margaret of Scotland School in St. Louis where new classroom space opened last fall and enrollment is up 8 percent this year. Enrollment is also up at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic School in Brentwood, Cardinal Ritter College Prep in St. Louis and Trinity Catholic High School in north St. Louis County.

At Kennedy, rumors had swirled for years that the school would close. But parents and alumni kept working to improve it. About two years ago, they raised about $250,000 to renovate the science lab.

It wasnt that long ago they put in the new scoreboard, said Joe Holden, who graduated from the school 35 years ago and sent his two children there.

The closure was expected but crushing, he said.

The buildings and real estate division of the archdiocese has begun the process of trying to figure out what to do with the school once students finish the year, Nelson said. Students with scholarships will be able to use them at other Catholic schools.

Kennedy opened in 1968, when west St. Louis County was growing and parish schools were enrolling more and more children. But now, there arent enough Catholic families living in that part of the county to sustain a high school, a news release from the archdiocese said.

Enrollment is 191 students this year, down from 333 just three years ago. This years freshman class has just 33.

The plunge in enrollment at Kennedy accounts for half of the combined enrollment loss at the 26 other Catholic high schools this past year.

Nelson emphasized that enrollment is stable in many schools.

Parents, when they feel like something might not be stable, they look for other opportunities, he said.

In September, Nelson joined Catholic school leaders from many U.S. cities and signed a letter in a national Jesuit publication expressing confidence that Catholic schools are rising to numerous changing demographics.

In the St. Louis area, the archdiocese distributed about $1.8 million in scholarships to about 1,100 students in 124 schools. It is also offering grants to schools to improve access to STREAM education  short for science, technology, religion, engineering, art and math.

Its not just enrollment that Nelson is concerned about. Its also improving academics, retaining the Catholic identity and working to serve more families through the expansion of preschool and special education. More than 70 percent of Catholic schools now offer preschool, Nelson said. Ten schools have centers and classrooms for children with special needs. The challenge is getting the word out, Nelson said.

The past 200 years have been shaped so much by Catholic education, he said. We want to continue that.
SPRINGFIELD  In many ways, Gov. Bruce Rauners question-and-answer session Tuesday had the feel of a typical news conference.

The first-term governor made an announcement, in this case the appointment of an executive director to oversee Illinois 2018 bicentennial celebration, and followed it up by fielding questions, often steering the answers back to some of his go-to subjects: the burden of high property taxes, the need for better funding and relief from state mandates for local schools, and the importance of term limits and legislative redistricting reform to restoring faith in state government.

But rather than standing in front of a bank of TV cameras and a half-dozen reporters, Rauner was seated in front of a webcam in his Capitol office, addressing a few hundred viewers on Facebook Live. It was the governors first use of the live-streaming service, which became available to all Facebook users this spring, and he promised more to come.

The event allowed Rauner to bypass the traditional media to speak directly with the audience. Experts say its a strategy that brings both potential benefits and possible pitfalls for someone facing low approval ratings.

Nathan Carpenter, assistant director of convergent media at the Illinois State University School of Communication, said holding an event such as this sends a signal that Rauner doesnt feel his message is getting across to the public and that hes not getting the kind of news coverage hed like.

You dont have to look far for evidence to support that assessment.

During a July conversation with the editorial board of the (Champaign) News-Gazette, Rauner vented his frustration with what he sees as the news medias failure to convey his message about his turnaround agenda to the public.

I underestimated how much most of the standard media just doesn't care about this and ignores it and won't send our message out, he told the newspaper. We've been too slow in creating our own media channels through social media and other outlets. We're doing that now.

Carpenter said one benefit for Rauner in doing things such as answering questions from the public on Facebook is that it creates an image of transparency and draws a stark contrast with his chief political rival, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Chicago Democrat with no social media presence to speak of.

But thats also where the potential pitfalls come in, Carpenter said.

Because the questions were submitted ahead of time and screened by Rauners staff, it can prompt criticisms about the authenticity of the exchange, he said.

The purpose of live-streaming technology is to feed off of the audience, Carpenter said, but as Rauner responded to the pre-submitted questions, comments and questions posted in real time went unaddressed.

In this case, it becomes just another broadcasting tool, he said, and if you run counter to peoples expectations with how the medium works or counter to what are the norms for the medium, you can really turn off and frustrate a lot of users.

Chris Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, said efforts such as this are an extension of the bully pulpit that comes with the governors office.

Anything he does is going to get covered, Mooney said. The governor, especially in the state of Illinois, is a big deal.

As for the format, Mooney said it would be a risky proposition for most politicians or public figures to field unscreened questions from an audience in real time.

Pope Francis could be flustered if he got the wrong question, he said.
JEFFERSON CITY  Voters will have a chance to weigh in on a proposal to raise the tax on a pack of cigarettes by 60 cents, after the Missouri Supreme Court dismissed claims that the initiative was unconstitutional in a 7-0 ruling Tuesday.

The ruling marks the end of a long battle involving multiple lawsuits aimed at keeping the proposal off the ballot. Tobacco vendors sued Raise Your Hand for Kids, the nonprofit pushing the initiative for early childhood education programs, and Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, who certified the initiative for the ballot.

Their main contention is that a summary rewritten by an appeals court didnt match up with the one presented to registered voters who signed to get it on the ballot. So even though the proposal had enough signatures for certification, opponents argued that their signatures shouldnt count because the signers had read a misleading summary of the issue before approving it.

The court found there was no clear and unequivocal requirement that would have kept Kander from certifying the signatures.

In its ruling, the court also dismissed all challenges that relate to what the proposed amendment may do if approved by the voters and put into operation, not whether the proposed amendment satisfies the constitutional requirements to be put before voters in the first place.

There will be time enough for such claims after the election, if Missouri voters find Amendment No. 3 to their liking, the court found.

Its not a debate thats likely to end anytime soon. At issue is a larger fight between bigger and smaller tobacco companies doing business in Missouri, and the proposal the court ruled on Tuesday is one of two tax hikes that will appear on the ballot Nov. 8.

The other is a 23-cent increase backed by smaller tobacco companies, with the promise of money generated going toward transportation improvements.

The dueling initiatives mark a long fight between Big Tobacco, which is bankrolling the Raise Your Hand for Kids petition, and smaller companies backing the 23-cent hike, over a loophole that allows smaller companies to avoid making payments to the state from a 1998 court settlement.

It remains unclear what will immediately happen if both tobacco measures win approval from voters.

While supporters have said they are operating as if both taxes would take effect, a spokesman for Kander said that would be up to the courts to decide after the election.

Language in the 23-cent proposal indicates it would be repealed if in the future, any tax or fee increase on some or all cigarettes or other tobacco products is officially certified to be placed on any local or statewide ballot by the Secretary of State or any other election official at any time.

If the courts Tuesday ruling is any indication, the effort may face continued legal challenges even if voters sign off on it.

For now, though, proponents are celebrating a victory. Raise Your Hand for Kids attorney Jane Dueker called for an end to these frivolous lawsuits and said the decision affirmed the will of more than 200,000 people who wanted the issue to go before voters.

The people of Missouri overwhelmingly believe they should be able to vote on this critical amendment, and their right should not and now will not be denied by these companies and special interests, Dueker said in a statement.

Chuck Hatfield, attorney for the opponents, said while it wasnt the outcome hoped for, voters at the polls will see an accurate, updated summary of what theyre being asked to vote on.

Summaries matter because these measures are very complicated, Hatfield said. Hopefully people will read it all. But at least theyll see a summary that isnt misleading.

For opponents such as the Missouri Petroleum Marketers & Convenience Store Association, the next step will be to share concerns with voters before Election Day.

While we are disappointed the Missouri Supreme Court did not strike Big Tobaccos Amendment 3 from the ballot, we are confident the people will see through Big Tobaccos scam to place many troubling provisions in Missouris constitution and vote no on November 8th, said Ron Leone, the associations executive director.
The bombs planted in New York and New Jersey on Sunday appear to have been the work of a radicalized Muslim man whose behavior and international travel followed familiar patterns.

Some prominent American political figures suggest that the way to deal with people like Ahmad Khan Rahami is to seal up our borders, isolate and profile members of domestic Muslim communities, and impose bans on all people traveling from nations where radicalized Muslims have operated previously.

Such responses appeal to the worst xenophobic tendencies among us, but they wont solve the terrorism problem. In fact, they are certain to make it worse.

U.S. law enforcers at all levels depend on the cooperation of Muslim communities for intelligence about individuals who pose security threats. Police and FBI investigators cannot be everywhere. The people most attuned to whats happening in their neighborhoods are the ones who worship at mosques, attend school and interact daily with potentially radicalized individuals.

Many serve as informants, and they do so in secret specifically because their lives could be in jeopardy if their status became known to the individuals under surveillance. Because its happening in secret, non-Muslim Americans have little appreciation for the reality.

Hate crimes against Muslims in America have reached their highest levels since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What non-Muslims are most likely to hear are the harsh words of politicians like GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who suggests that profiling will make the nation safer. If somebody looks like hes got a massive bomb on his back, we wont go up to that person ... because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world, were not allowed to profile. Give me a break, he said after Sundays attack.

Rahamis own father, Mohammad Rahami, asserted on Tuesday that he called the FBI two years ago to warn that his son was a terrorist. Investigators appear to have discounted the claim because the father later recanted. The father sounded the alarm after a domestic dispute in which Ahmad Rahami was accused of stabbing his brother. He had already begun a series of trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan, venues that probably contributed to his radicalization.

Since 9/11, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been working with local law enforcement agencies across the country to establish fusion centers, which are joint intelligence-gathering operations that rely heavily on information supplied by tipsters within the community. There is no question that the programs success depends on ongoing  albeit low-profile  cooperation with local Muslims.

One radicalized bomber succeeded. More attempts, no doubt, will follow. Logic dictates that dialogue and cooperation are the best way to prevent the next tragedy. Isolation and us-versus-them mentalities can only push more toward the radical cause.
Free-standing chain-link fencing can be put up in a very short amount of time at very little cost, and we all should commit to this solution until the killings in our schools stop.
I have learned a few things in my lifetime concerning prayer. Being in the ministry for decades has granted me opportunity to learn about the subject from the Bible and from the writings of other well-educated theologians. Being in the ministry for decades has also provided me with ample opportunity to acquire prayer skills because of the needs that arise within a congregation. And then there is life  that is a great university that affords all of us a learning environment in the school of prayer.

Personally, I like the kind of prayer where I am proactive. By that, I mean when I am asking before any need arises  like bring my child their God-chosen mate or help us to make wise choices in our business. Right? We all like to think we can pre-plan our lives and pre-set our prayers to eliminate the crisis and cause our future to unfold just the way we had planned  I mean, prayed.

In reality, I have discovered only God holds the future and only rarely is He interested in ordering it just for my convenience (if this were a sermon, I would be asking for an amen to that last comment!). Therefore, I have found the need to pray the kind of prayers that are reactive. By that, I mean the need arises first and then I am asking on the back side. I have also found trusting God when I am out of control or life is not as I planned is the stuff of by faith is matured. Faith  that power to believe God will be present and be true to His promises  is the attitude that pleases the Lord and moves Him to answer us when we call.

Crisis prayer, reactionary request, emergency supplication might just be the most popular kind of prayer. Some folks seem to call upon the name of the Lord when nothing else works and then forget to call on His name when everything else works. But youre my last resort, Lord is not what I mean by reactive prayer. I mean: You are always the one to whom I come, so here I am again, Lord. When we have a practice of prayer, the crisis does not foster the relationship, but rather the relationship sustains us in the crisis.

Two weeks ago, my husband, Dennis, had a small red toenail that prompted us to call his doctor for a quick visit. Thinking his physician might order an antibiotic, we were surprised when he wanted Dennis to get to the ER and be admitted to have antibiotics administered intravenously. We were even more surprised when the local hospital wanted to send him by ambulance to a Level 6 trauma care hospital in St. Louis. We both wanted to say, Wait, we didnt see that coming, nor have we had time to proactively pray about this.

At the other end of the ambulance ride, we were greeted by a team of doctors who were ready to take Dennis into surgery. An aggressive strain of bacteria had been working inside of his toe, foot and leg; and the only cure was to cut out all the tissue and bone affected by this bacteria. Forms, permission slips, hospital waivers were being presented to us for our signatures that would allow the physicians to cut out and to cut off everything they found non-viable. In a matter of several hours, we had gone from a sore toe to the possibility of amputation. EMERGENCY PRAYER!

I was glad we had the practice of prayer and we know a God who can handle an emergency. Dennis life and leg were spared; the damaged tissue was surgically removed; and the greater crisis averted. I am thankful God is both our last resort, our first resort and our continuous resort. Now, on the back side of the emergency, we can offer prayers of thanksgiving, gratitude and worship. If you dont have the practice of prayer, dont wait for your next crises, but offer up a prayer today. Enough practice and you will be ready when an emergency arises.

For more articles by Dr. Amsden, visit www.sonlifechurch.org
J.C. Penney (NYSE: JCP) announced the election of Paul Brown, chief executive officer of Arbys Restaurant Group, Inc., to its board of directors. With extensive experience in the food service, hospitality, e-commerce and consulting industries, Brown has a proven track record of improving the performance of leading global and franchise brands.

Paul is credited for building the financial performance at several global brands by understanding the importance of attracting a new generation of customers as the primary means for sustainable growth, said Marvin R. Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer of JCPenney. His broad expertise makes him an excellent addition to our board as JCPenney continues delivering lasting customer loyalty through value, exclusive shopping experiences and enhanced omnichannel execution.

Im honored to join the board of directors at JCPenney - a Company with a rich history of meeting the needs of an ever-changing American consumer, Brown added. Its a privilege to work with a team that understands the need for a fully integrated online and in-store experience, while staying true to its founding values of excellent service and quality merchandise.

Brown has spent three years leading Arbys Restaurant Group, Inc., a company operating and franchising more than 3,300 restaurant locations worldwide. He is responsible for a successful brand revitalization at Arbys, focusing on company culture, customer service, and new brand positioning and marketing campaigns. Prior to Arbys, Brown served as president, brands and commercial services at Hilton Worldwide, a hospitality company with more than 4,700 hotels, resorts and timeshare properties. Prior to that, Brown served as president of Expedia North America and Expedia Inc.s Partner Services Group at Expedia, Inc., the worlds largest online travel company, and was also partner at McKinsey & Co. consulting. Brown currently serves on the board of directors at H&R Block, Inc. and Lindblad Expeditions Holdings, Inc., and is a member of the Georgia Tech Foundations board of trustees.

Brown has a B.A. degree in business administration and management from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA in marketing and finance from Northwestern University. In June, he was named recipient of an EY Entrepreneur of The Year 2016 Award in the Southeast.
VANCOUVER, BC -- (Marketwired) -- 09/20/16 -- BIOASIS TECHNOLOGIES INC. (OTCQB: BIOAF) (TSX VENTURE: BTI) ("biOasis"), a pioneering biopharmaceutical company focused on overcoming the limitations of therapeutic drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier, today announced it has entered into a License Agreement (the "Agreement") with Vaccinex Inc. ("Vaccinex"). Under the terms of the Agreement, Vaccinex will have the right to commercialize its anti-semaphorin 4D ("anti-SEMA4D") antibody technology in combination with the biOasis Transcend technology. The Vaccinex anti-SEMA4D technology targets neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease and multiple sclerosis, the two initial neurology disease indications being investigated by Vaccinex. Currently the global market for Huntington's disease, as reported by GlobalData, was $252.6M in 2014 with a projected growth to over $2.6B in 2024 (CAGR of 25.6%)1. For multiple sclerosis, GlobalData reports, that the global market was $17.2B in 2014 and projected to grow to $20B by 2024 (CAGR: 1.5%)2. Under the terms of the Agreement, Vaccinex has been provided rights to the Transcend technology and its intellectual (patent) property, and upon achievement of specific events, biOasis could receive up to $US 20 million in the form of upfront and milestone payments, and annual single-digit royalty payments upon commercialization.

Rob Hutchison, biOasis CEO, stated, "Facilitating the delivery of monoclonal antibodies across the blood-brain barrier to reach their therapeutic targets in the brain is the core focus of biOasis. The combination of the Transcend technology and Vaccinex's unique anti-SEMA4D antibody has the potential to facilitate antibody delivery to the brain in patients suffering from neurological disorders such as Huntington's disease and multiple sclerosis. We are looking forward to working with Vaccinex over the months and years to come."

Dr. Maurice Zauderer, Vaccinex CEO commented, "We are very pleased to be entering into this agreement and to collaborate with biOasis. Their promising Transcend technology has unique potential to increase the efficiency of antibody delivery to multiple regions of the brain."

References - GlobalData

1. https://healthcare.globaldata.com/media-center/press-releases/pharmaceuticals/diseasemodifying-drugs-will-propel-huntingtons-disease-market-to-26-billion-by-2024-says-globaldata

2. http://store.globaldata.com/market-reports/pharmaceuticals-and-healthcare/pharmapoint-multiple-sclerosis-global-drug-forecast-and-market-analysis-to-2024

About Transcend

Transcend is biOasis' proprietary platform for the delivery of therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier to address unmet medical needs in the treatment of metastatic brain cancers as well as neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases. The delivery of therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier represents the single greatest challenge in treating neurological disorders. The ability to effectively and safely transverse the blood-brain barrier with the Transcend peptide carrier, MTfp, offers the opportunity for biOasis to deliver therapeutics into the brain at doses sufficient to have a therapeutic effect.

About biOasis

biOasis Technologies Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in the Vancouver, Canada area, focused on overcoming the limitations of therapeutic drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier. The company is developing and commercializing a proprietary brain delivery technology to address unmet medical needs in the treatment of central nervous system disorders. biOasis trades on the OTCQB under the symbol "BIOAF" and on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "BTI". For more information about the company please visit www.bioasis.ca.

Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 or forward-looking information under applicable Canadian securities legislation that may not be based on historical fact, including without limitation statements containing the words "believe", "may", "plan", "will", "estimate", "continue", "anticipate", "intend", "expect" and similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements or information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, events or developments, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, events or developments express or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. Such factors include, among others, our stage of development, lack of any product revenues, additional capital requirements, risk associated with the completion of clinical trials and obtaining regulatory approval to market our products, the ability to protect our intellectual property, dependence on collaborative partners and the prospects for negotiating additional corporate collaborations or licensing arrangements and their timing. Specifically, certain risks and uncertainties that could cause such actual events or results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information to differ materially from any future events or results expressed or implied by such statements and information include, but are not limited to, the risks and uncertainties that: products that we develop may not succeed in preclinical or clinical trials, or future products in our targeted corporate objectives; our future operating results are uncertain and likely to fluctuate; we may not be able to raise additional capital; we may not be successful in establishing additional corporate collaborations or licensing arrangements; we may not be able to establish marketing and the costs of launching our products may be greater than anticipated; we have no experience in commercial manufacturing; we may face unknown risks related to intellectual property matters; we face increased competition from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies; and other factors as described in detail in our filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities at www.sedar.com. Given these risks and uncertainties, you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements and information, which are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. All forward-looking statements and information made herein are based on our current expectations and we undertake no obligation to revise or update such forward- looking statements and information to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as required by law.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Rob Hutchison, Chairman & CEO

"Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release"

Company ContactRob HutchisonbiOasis Technologies [email protected]

Source: biOasis Technologies Inc.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 21, 2016

Professional endurance driver Carl Reese of Santa Clarita, California and Sebastin Montero of Quito, Ecuador set a new world record for riding on motorcycles from the closest point on Earth to the sun to an elevation at sea-level in a single day. After President of Ecuador Rafael Correa and Minister of the Interior of Ecuador Jose Serrano tweeted about Reese's eighth world record attempt, the posts became the top tweets in South America. Reese and Montero reached a gain/loss in elevation of 56,678 feet during their endeavor.

Ecuador is the only place on Earth where Reese and Montero's world record can be accomplished, as the country is home to Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador. While Chimborazo (20,548 feet) is not the highest mountain by elevation above sea-level in the world, its location along the equatorial bulge makes its summit the closest point on Earth's surface to the sun. Although Chimborazo is typically off-limits to motorcycles due to the remoteness of the mountain in the case of an emergency, Minister Serrano granted Reese and his team special access to the natural wonder.

Before daybreak, the record-setting team rallied at Gas Motors in Cumbaya (Quito) where Minister Serrano presided over the world record attempt's opening ceremonies. With the street lined for two blocks with uniformed officers, a marching band played as Reese and Montero were led by a national police motorcade to the starting line atop Chimborazo.

Twelve hours before the planned departure, misfortune set in. Reese became ill and severely dehydrated, prompting the suggestion that Montero ride alongside Reese to keep an eye on his condition while riding in the thin, mountain air. The two became fast friends as they maneuvered their motorcycles along jagged cloud-forest peaks and hairpin bends, traveling from the snow capped Andes through a lush, green, tropical landscape to the finish line near the Pacific Ocean.

Although the day was fraught with challenges, the men formed a tight team and faced each problem head-on. Despite obstacles, delays and the great distance to the finish line, the men completed their journey in just 17 hours, finishing at 10:22 pm only two hours later than expected. "Turning back was not an option." said Reese. "I would have pushed the motorcycle the last 85 miles if I needed to."

Reese and Montero embarked on this record-setting ride to bring awareness to the Coalition of Hope Foundation's efforts to rebuild Ecuador after the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake this past April. On a tour, led by Minister Serrano's staff, Reese witnessed and learned about the heart breaking aftermath of the earthquake, including the loss of over 650 lives and 26,000 homes.

"Seeing the destruction that the earthquake caused was an emotionally overwhelming experience," says Reese. "The challenge of setting endurance records is nothing compared to what the people of this region have had to endure during this rebuilding process. All the people from Ecuador who I have talked to have managed to stay positive despite the grief surrounding them and that is truly inspiring."

In addition to bringing attention to the Ecuadorian earthquake victims in need, this record attempt was an effort to increase awareness of the Motorcycle Relief Project, a 501.3 (c) charity that provides relief to combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries. Reese and his fiance, Deena Mastracci, have set multiple transcontinental records to bring awareness to the Motorcycle Re-lief Project.

As in his previous world record attempts, Reese carried an American flag gifted to him by retired veteran and friend, SFC Rod Hawk, for good luck. The flag originally flew in Iraq and was presented to Hawk for his accomplishments during the war. Reese, who has also served in the army, said "I carry the flag as a reminder of the Motorcycle Relief Project, a major reason why I set these endurance records."

Reese used FirstGear-USA's Adventure Mesh Jacket, Kilimanjaro Pants and Vented Low Boots to keep himself comfortable and protected from the extreme weather changes during the descent from the top of the snowy Andes Mountains, through the humid jungle, to the cool evening weather along Ecuador's coast.

The trip was captured on film by Brad Barker, of Epic Nomad Productions, and will be featured on Barker's YouTube channel, "The Ride of My Life." Barker is an Emmy Award-winning producer based in southern California who has worked on Discovery Channel, History Channel and several documentaries. Barker was instrumental in putting this project together.

The 2016 BMW 1200 GS that Reese rode was on loan from a member of Brosters Group BMW Motor-rad Club Ecuador, Dr. Sergio Vallejo Rojas.

A live map of the ride was provided on CarlReese.net by GPS Insight, as was the telemetry equipment used on the journey. GPS Insight is the leading technology provider of GPS tracking software for businesses with vehicles and other mobile assets. The team will submit their telemetry equipment to Guinness World Records for further verification.

The route taken by Reese and his team was formulated in collaboration with Minister Serrano, Barker and Freedom Bike Rental of Ecuador.

Brosters Group - BMW Motorrad Club Ecuador, provided pre-trip logistics coordination and on-road support for the team throughout the day.

Trip photos and video footage from the record-breaking journey are available to members of the media upon request. For more information about this trip and future expeditions, follow Reese's Twitter account, @EnduranceDriver. Please direct all media inquiries to Shannon Cooper at 410-420-2001 or by email at shannon.cooper(at)fallstongroup.com.

###

About Carl Reese

Carl Reese is an endurance driver. Reese has set more transcontinental records than anyone since Edwin "Cannonball" Baker. Reese and his team have set eight world records, most notably the Solo Motorcycle "Cannonball" Record from Los Angeles to New York in 38 hours and 49 minutes. Reese was born in Mercer, Pennsylvania and now resides in Pine Mountain Club, California. Reese is currently working on a full feature documentary, "Iron Riders: History of Motorcycle Records." Reese is active on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/EnduranceDriver.

About Sebastian Montero

Sebastian Montero is a motorcycle enthusiast who rides adventure motorcycles as a hobby. Montero is a business man who works for CONFITECA, the leading confectionery company in the Andean region, and owns CASSAVE, a healthy snack retail business. He was born in Santiago, Chile and now re-sides in Quito, Ecuador. Montero is one of the founding partners of Brosters Group - BMW Motorrad Club Ecuador.

About Firstgear-USA

Whether it's the open road or the road less traveled, no other experience provides the thrill and passion for living that riding does. It's a uniquely human experience. At Firstgear, we create products that enhance the pure joy of riding. We keep you warm when it's cold, dry when it's wet and cool when it's hot. When all you feel is the thrill of the ride we've done our job. To learn more, visit http://www.firstgear-usa.com/.

About GPS Insight

GPS Insight works with businesses that have fleets of vehicles and other mobile assets to solve unique business challenges through increased revenue, reduced costs and reduced risk. Our GPS fleet tracking software combines real-time robust functionality with a simple, intuitive user-interface. Monitoring and dispatching your vehicles has never been so easy. GPS Insight provides a highly flexible solution, which includes a wide range of customized reports, alerts and other innovative features that can be tailored to meet specific customer requirements to ensure maximum return on investment. Contact GPS Insight by phone at 866-477-4321 or visit http://www.gpsinsight.com for more information.

About Motorcycle Relief Project

Motorcycle Relief Project (MRP) is a 501c3 tax-exempt nonprofit organization that provides relief to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries by taking them on multi-day motorcycle adventure tours. Our mission is to honor and encourage veterans while providing them with opportunities to decompress, get unstuck and connect with other veterans. Donations can be made here: http://www.motorelief.org/make-a-donation.

About "The Ride of My Life"

A group of adventurers led by Brad Barker and his Emmy Award-winning film crew travel the world via their motorcycles, exploring nations and experiencing new cultures. Brad Barker's work has been featured on History Channel and Discovery Channel. Barker's production company also has a YouTube channel, where they document their travels. Visit http://www.therideofmylife.net for more information.

About Coalition of Hope Foundation

Established in 2005, the Coalition of Hope Foundation, Inc. (COH) is a US-based 501(c)(3), non-profit, charitable organization that provides global humanitarian assistance and disaster-relief support. The organization has supported a broad range of domestic and international humanitarian support and dis-aster-relief missions. Donations can be made at https://fundly.com/ecuador-earthquake-relief-7#donate.

About "Brosters Group - BMW Motorrad Club Ecuador"

A team of 60 souls that are moved for the passion of adrenaline, friendship and riding motorcycles, Brosters Group BMW Motorrad Club Ecuador was voted the number one BMW Motorrad Club in Lat-in America for their philanthropy work in the earthquake torn region and for their work with other charities serving people in need all over Ecuador. For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/BMWBrosters.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/09/prweb13701054.htm
GEORGE TOWN, Grand Cayman--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- A 30- strong Cayman Islands delegation, will be heading to Orlando, Florida to represent the jurisdictions captive insurance industry at the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management annual conference (ASHRM), which takes place on the 25th through the 28th of September. Representatives from the insurance managers, audit and law firms, financial institutions and the islands regulator; the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA), will be joined by the Hon. Wayne Panton, the Cayman Islands Minister of Financial Services, Commerce and Environment, along with Mr. Jude Scott, CEO of Cayman Finance, in attending ASHRM.

The Cayman Islands, the worlds leading healthcare captive domicile, with a successful 40-year track record of operating in the healthcare captive industry space, continues to partner with healthcare systems to provide innovative captive centric solutions to the new, larger and more integrated and complex healthcare systems. The healthcare industry in the United States is undergoing exceptional transformation, sparked as a consequence of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Healthcare systems are merging as a result of the search for synergies and economies of scale. The inevitable consequence is that in many instances, the associated captives are also required to merge resulting in an increase in the size, capitalization and usage of the enduring captive enabling them take on new and expanded areas of risk such as non-employed physicians and employee medical stop loss risk.

IMAC Chairperson Kieran OMahony will be spearheading the industry delegation in Orlando. ASHRM is an excellent conference for the Cayman Islands to be represented at. The Islands have many clients who attend each year, which gives us an opportunity to discuss in depth and hear first-hand the ever-changing 'dynamic' that is US Healthcare, prior to the Cayman Captive Forum which will be held on November 29th to December 1st, this year.

For more information on IMAC visit www.caymancaptive.ky.

Insurance Managers Association of Cayman (IMAC) is a non-profit organisation run by the insurance managers of the Cayman Islands. In operation since 1981, IMACs aim is to act as both regulatory liaison with the Cayman Islands Government and to promote the Cayman Islands as a domicile of choice for captive insurance companies.

IMAC hosts the worlds largest captive insurance conference, attracting nearly 1,500 captive owners, directors, officers, reinsurers, fronting carriers, brokers, consultants and service providers.

The Cayman Captive Forum 2016 will be held at The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman from November 29 to December 1, 2016.

For more information on IMAC visit www.caymancaptive.ky.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006350/en/

Insurance Managers Association of Cayman

Alison Shaw, 345-945-8188

[email protected]

Source: Insurance Managers Association of Cayman
GE reaffirms commitment and investment to meet Indonesian power generation needs

GE and Barata Indonesia sign Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on local manufacturing

Summit convenes business and government leaders to accelerate progress in support of Indonesias 21st century energy agenda

JAKARTA, Indonesia--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- GE (NYSE: GE), in association with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KADIN), hosted today the Future of Electricity Summit. Alongside the summit, GE and Barata Indonesia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on manufacturing parts and provide services for GEs aero derivatives, heavy duty gas turbines, boilers for coal-fired power plants and renewable energy solutions. In addition, GE committed to support a technology pilot that aims to accelerate rural electrification across Indonesia, a key priority of the Indonesian Governments poverty alleviation program.

We are pleased to collaborate with GE Indonesia on manufacturing parts and provide services for GEs aero derivatives, heavy duty gas turbines, boilers for coal-fired power plants and renewable energy solutions, said Silmy Karim, CEO PT Barata Indonesia. This is a strategic milestone for PT Barata Indonesia to become a world class engineering procurement company.

During the summit, business and government leaders discussed the digital transformation of the electricity sector and how digital solutions, now commercially available, can improve power generation and distribution across Indonesia. These digital solutions are expected to deliver improved efficiencies, reduce energy costs and provide greater access to electricity. On the policy side, summit participants discussed a range of key regulatory issues including human capital and tariffs.

GE continues to expand the local content in our solutions that we bring to the country, and the collaboration with Barata Indonesia is part of this commitment, Steve Bolze, president and CEO of GE Power said. We applaud President Joko Widodos commitment to increase the countrys electrification rate and the tremendous economic opportunity he is creating for Indonesia. We share his progressive vision that access to electricity is foundational to economic growth, job creation and significant advances in quality of life.

Summit participants also discussed GEs collaboration with PLN, several of which were completed in six months after initial discussions. In June of this year, GE brought on-line a 100 MW mobile plant in Gorontalo, as part of Indonesias 35 GW program. Most recently, GE worked with PLN Batam to commission the first of eight projects, a 50MW plant using GEs TM2500 Fast Power solution in Jeranjang, Lombok.

GE also announced its commitment to fund a pilot project in Eastern Indonesia to showcase technology which can help electrify remote villages. This pilot is in support of the governments Bright Indonesia program which aims to electrify more than 12,600 villages. The program will deploy digitally-enabled hybrid power solutions. GE is also testing this hybrid technology in India and Africa.

Access to electricity is a basic human right, said Steve Bolze. We recognize the challenge ahead and welcome the opportunity to work with the Indonesian government and PLN to bring to market the most innovative solutions available for this unique and important region.

GE has been a development partner with Indonesia for over 70 years and employs approximately 1,300 employees across the country. Today, greater than 30% of Indonesias power generation installed base is powered by GE technology. These power generation solutions include mobile power plants, affordable fossil fuel-based generation, combined cycle gas and aero derivative turbines, reciprocating engines and renewable energy solutions that offer long-term sustainability.

To download GEs digital press kit for Future of Electricity, click here.

About GE

GE (NYSE: GE) is the worlds Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge, the "GE Store," through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry. www.ge.com

About GE Power

GE Power is a world leader in power generation with deep domain expertise to help customers deliver electricity from a wide spectrum of fuel sources. We are transforming the electricity industry with the digital power plant, the worlds largest and most efficient gas turbine, full balance of plant, upgrade and service solutions as well as our data-leveraging software. Our innovative technologies and digital offerings help make power more affordable, reliable, accessible and sustainable.

For more information, visit the company's website at www.gepower.com and follow us on Twitter @GE_Power.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920007000/en/

GE Power

Katie Jackson, 1-518-265-9779

[email protected]

or

GE Indonesia

Ariavita Purnamasari, +62 811 158 8685

[email protected]

Source: GE
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's (FARC) Tatiana, 36-year-old and six months pregnant, sits next to her husband and gifts for the baby at a camp where the FARC will ratify a peace deal with the Colombian government, near El Diamante in Yari Plains,

By Julia Symmes Cobb

YARI PLAINS, Colombia (Reuters) - Tatiana, her pregnant belly bulging beneath a T-shirt decorated with the FARC rebel group's logo, leans down to stroke her teenage son's hair, as if to reassure herself he is really beside her.

The 36-year-old mother-to-be is a 19-year veteran of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) which will sign a peace deal with the government next week to end a 52-year war.

As rebel delegates from across the country gather on the Yari Plains in southern Colombia for a meeting to ratify the accord, the rank and file are preparing to hand in their weapons and return to families many have not seen for decades.

Tatiana's baby boy, due in December, will have a very different life from his 17-year-old half-brother, who was able to visit his mother for the first time since he was two.

"Things have been much more joyful this time," said Tatiana, as she sat in her camp lean-to next to Omar, her 28-year-old partner. "I am very happy."

Tatiana had her first son, who declined to be interviewed, at 19, two years after joining the FARC. He was raised by her brother away from military bombing raids and ambushes.

The shy teenager, who often touched his mother's hand or put an arm around her, grinned ruefully when Tatiana urged him to go back to school. She joined the rebels in part because her poor parents could not fund an education.

Her current pregnancy was unintentional. Rebel couples must seek permission from their commanders to have sexual relations, and guerrilla doctors often perform abortions. Babies can usually only be carried to term if a relative will take them in.

Now a final signature on the deal is near, FARC couples have begun to look forward to once-forbidden parenthood.

"It's only now we're thinking of it as possible," said Yefferson, 36, who has been with his partner Patricia for six years. "We want a family where we can educate our children, where they can be professionals. We don't want them to live through what we have lived through."

Despite his first child's impending arrival, Omar said he is still committed to the Marxist cause and would return to fight if the peace accord falls through.

"If the government does not hold its part of the deal and we have to leave our son, then we will leave him."

(Editing by Helen Murphy)
Congolese opposition supporters chant slogans as they destroy the billboard of President Joseph Kabila during a march to press the President to step down in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa, September 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kenny Katombe

By Kenny Katombe and Benoit Nyemba

KINSHASA (Reuters) - At least 44 people - including 37 demonstrators and six police officers - have been killed in protests over Congolese President Joseph Kabila's perceived bid to extend his rule, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday.

The unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo started on Monday after its election commission decided to try to postpone the next presidential vote, due in November.

Kabila's opponents say the proposed delay is a maneuver to keep him in power although ruling party politicians deny this. Kabila is barred constitutionally from running for a third term and his allies say he will respect the constitution.

With the disturbances forcing schools to close and halting public transport in the sprawling riverside capital Kinshasa, the United Nations expressed fears the situation could worsen.

The United States said Kabila's government should have taken steps to defuse the violence and that it was prepared to impose sanctions targeting individuals involved in abuses.

French President Francoise Hollande blamed Congo authorities and urged them to respect the constitution and hold elections this year.

Adding to the mix of disapproval, Congo's influential Roman Catholic Church suspended its participation in talks over the timetable for the next elections and stressed that Kabila should not be a candidate when they are held.

Several people were killed overnight when security forces burned down the headquarters of the main opposition party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), and attacked buildings of other opposition parties, according to Ida Sawyer, an Africa researcher for New York-based HRW.

Twenty people were killed in clashes on Monday and another 17 on Tuesday - "most (of them) when security forces fired on crowds of protesters", Sawyer said.

"We've also received credible reports that protesters have killed at least six police officers and a (ruling party) PPRD supporter and they have also burned and looted several shops and police stations."

DEATH TOLL DISPUTED

Interior ministry spokesman Claude Pero Luwara said the death toll stood at 17 and that Human Rights Watch's statement was a "typical" exaggeration by the group. The ministry had earlier said three of those killed were policemen.

The early hours fire was a criminal act, said opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi, a UDPS official and son of veteran opposition figure Etienne Tshisekedi, who lost to Kabila in a 2011 presidential run-off.

"We have on our hands seven dead and two people who were amputated: one at the arm and another at the leg, in the fire at our headquarters in Limete. There are also multiple people wounded at the hospital," Felix Tshisekedi told Reuters.

"We won't live with this barbarity. The people are angry."

Government spokesman Lambert Mende condemned the attack on the UDPS premises but denied that security forces were involved.

Witnesses said calm returned to central Kinshasa by Tuesday afternoon, though there were reports of clashes in the suburbs.

Nearly 200 people were believed to have been arrested by Congo authorities on Monday and the United Nations received reports of excessive use of force by security forces, U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told reporters in Geneva.

Kabila took power in 2001 when his father was assassinated, but must by law step down in December.

His opponents fear he may follow the example of leaders in other African countries such as Burundi, Congo Republic and Rwanda and change the constitution to extend his rule.

Congo has not experienced a peaceful transition of political power since its independence from Belgium in 1960.

Tom Perriello, U.S. Special Envoy for Africa's Great Lakes region, said Washington would hold all sides accountable for their actions during the latest violence, which prompted Washington to suspend all travel by its officials to Congo.

"Unfortunately, the pattern over the last year has been to dramatically reduce that open political space ... We have seen a crackdown on the rights and freedoms of Congolese people," he told a news conference in New York.

(Additional reporting by Amedee Mwarabu in Kinshasa, Tom Miles in Geneva and Emma Farge, Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton in Dakar and John Irish at the United Nations; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by)
DUBAI (Reuters) - Gunmen abducted an American teacher on Tuesday from an English language school in Sanaa, capital of wartorn Yemen, witnesses said, in the latest of a series of kidnappings of foreigners.

Armed men in civilian clothes entered the school and forced the teacher into their car as bewildered colleagues and students looked on.

"We were shocked when the armed group entered the building. They got to his office and took him to an unknown location," a Yemeni teacher at the school said.

Local security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"We are aware of reports of U.S. citizens being held in Yemen. Privacy considerations prevent us from commenting further on this case," a U.S. State Department spokeswoman told Reuters.

Dozens of foreigners were abducted in the years before a civil war erupted in March 2015 when the armed Houthi movement, drawn from Yemen's Zaydi Shi'ite sect, seized Sanaa.

Most were released when their tribal abductors won concessions from central authorities in local disputes, but some have been executed by militants.

A Tunisian employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross was kidnapped in December and appeared in a video pleading for her life last month as a masked gunman stood over her.

The Houthi takeover prompted many countries to close their embassies and aid agencies to sharply reduce their staff, reducing the number of foreigners - and kidnappings - in Yemen.

But over the course of the 18-month-old war several Americans have been detained on espionage charges by the Iranian-allied Houthis, who accuse the United States of arming and supporting a Saudi-led coalition which has intervened in the conflict on the side of the exiled government.

Neighboring Oman has mediated the release of two Americans held in Houthi custody.

(Reporting by Noah Browning; additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed; editing by Andrew Roche)
The Boeing logo is seen at their headquarters in Chicago, in this April 24, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Jim Young/File Photo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department notified Congress on Wednesday that it has approved a possible sale of Boeing Co (NYSE: BA) military refueling aircraft to Japan worth up to $1.9 billion, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said.

The agency said in a statement that Japan is seeking four KC-46A aerial refueling aircraft plus an additional spare Pratt & Whitney (NYSE: UTX) turbofan engine as well as other supporting systems. The estimated cost of the aircraft and other equipment is $1.9 billion, DSCA said.

(Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Eric Walsh)
UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION





Washington, D.C. 20549









FORM 8-K





CURRENT REPORT

PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(D) OF THE

SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934





Date of Report (Date of earliest event reported) September 15, 2016





Badger Meter, Inc.

(Exact name of Registrant as Specified in Charter)









Wisconsin 1-6706 39-0143280 (State or Other Jurisdiction of Incorporation) (Commission File Number) (IRS Employer Identification No.)









4545 W. Brown Deer Rd., Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53223 (Address of Principal Executive Offices) (Zip Code)









Registrants telephone number, including area code: (414) 355-0400





Check the appropriate box below if the Form 8-K filing is intended to simultaneously satisfy the filing obligation of the registrant under any of the following provisions:





Written communications pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act (17 CFR 230.425) Soliciting material pursuant to Rule 14a-12 under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14a-12) Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 14d-2(b) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14d-2 (b)) Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 13e-4(c) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.13e-4 (c))





Item 3.03 . Material Modification to Rights of Security Holders .

As previously reported on the Form 8-K of Badger Meter, Inc. (the Company) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 12, 2016, the Companys Board of Directors approved a 2-for-1 stock split in the form of a 100% stock dividend (the Stock Split) on the Companys common stock, par value $1 per share (the Common Stock), to shareholders of record August 31, 2016, payable September 15, 2016 (the Split Date).

The Company is a party to that certain Rights Agreement, dated as of May 26, 1998, as amended (the Rights Agreement), between the Company and American Stock Transfer & Trust Company (the Rights Agent). Pursuant to the Rights Agreement, a common share purchase right (each a Right) is associated with each outstanding share of Common Stock, and each share of Common Stock issued in connection with the Stock Split is accompanied by a Right. Prior to the Split Date, upon the occurrence of certain events, each Right entitled the registered holder to purchase from the Company one share of Common Stock at a Purchase Price (as defined in Section 4 of the Rights Agreement) of $200.00 per share of Common Stock. In connection with the Stock Split, effective as of the Split Date, (1) pursuant to Section 11 of the Rights Agreement, the Purchase Price is reduced from $200.00 to $100.00; and (2) pursuant to Section 23 of the Rights Agreement, the Redemption Price (as defined in Section 23(b) of the Rights Agreement) for each Right that may be redeemed pursuant to Section 23 of the Rights Agreement is reduced from $0.01 to $0.005.

A copy of the Certificate of Adjustment that was sent to the Rights Agent is attached to this Current Report on Form 8-K as Exhibit 4.1 and is incorporated by reference in this Current Report on Form 8-K.

The Rights Agreement was filed as Exhibit 4.1 to the Companys Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2008. Reference is made to the Rights Agreement for a more complete description of the terms of the Rights.

Item 8.01 . Other Events .

In connection with the Stock Split, and pursuant to Rule 416 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, the number of shares of Common Stock registered under the following Registration Statements is proportionately adjusted to give effect to the Stock Split:

 Registration Statements on Form S-8 (File Nos. 033-27650, 033-65618, 033-62239, 033-62241, 333-28617, 333-73228, 333-107850, 333-150567 and 333-173966) registering shares issuable pursuant to the Badger Meter, Inc. 1989 Stock Option Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. 1993 Stock Option Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. 1995 Stock Option Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. Employee Savings and Stock Ownership Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. 1997 Stock Option Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. 1999 Stock Option Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. 2003 Stock Option Plan; Badger Meter, Inc. 2008 Restricted Stock Plan and Badger Meter, Inc. 2011 Omnibus Incentive Plan

 Registration Statement on Form S-3 (File No. 333-202493) registering shares issuable pursuant to the Badger Meter, Inc. Dividend Reinvestment and Stock Purchase Plan.

-2-

Item 9.01 . Financial Statements and Exhibits .

(a) Financial Statements of Business Acquired . Not applicable.

(b) Pro Forma Financial Information . Not applicable.

(c) Shell Company Transactions . Not applicable.

(d) Exhibits . The following exhibit is being furnished herewith:

4.1 Certificate of Adjustment Relating to the Rights Agreement, dated as of February 15, 2008, between Badger Meter, Inc. and American Stock Transfer & Trust Company.

-3-

SIGNATURES





Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned hereunto duly authorized.

BADGER METER, INC. Date: September 21, 2016 By: /s/ Richard E. Johnson Richard E. Johnson Senior Vice President  Finance and Treasurer Chief Financial Officer

-4-

Exhibit Index to Current Report on Form 8-K

Dated September 15, 2016
UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

Schedul e TO

TENDER OFFER STATEMENT UNDER SECTION 14(D)(1) OR 13(E)(1)

OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

(Amendment No. 1)

(Name of Subject Company (Issuer))

(Name of Filing Person (Offeror))

(Translation of Filing Persons Name into English)

(Title of Class of Securities)

(CUSIP Number of Class of Securities)

(1) Estimated for purposes of calculating the filing fee pursuant to Rule 0-11(d) only. The Transaction Value is equal to the product of (i) U.S.$6.24, the average of the high and low sale prices per American Depositary Share, each representing 10 Petrobras Argentina S.A. ( Petrobras Argentina ) Class B Shares, as reported on the New York Stock Exchange on August 8, 2016, divided by 10, and (ii) 231,802,950, the number of Petrobras Argentina Class B Shares held by U.S. Persons (as defined herein) (including those represented by American Depositary Shares) eligible to be tendered in the U.S. Cash Tender Offer (as defined herein) (as of May 27, 2016).

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS PRELIMINARY AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND COMPLETION. THE OFFER DESCRIBED HEREIN HAS NOT YET COMMENCED, AND THIS COMMUNICATION IS NEITHER AN OFFER TO PURCHASE NOR A SOLICITATION OR RECOMMENDATION OF AN OFFER TO SELL CLASS B SHARES, PAR VALUE PS.1.00 PER SHARE ( PESA SHARES ) (INCLUDING PESA SHARES REPRESENTED BY AMERICAN DEPOSITARY SHARES ( PESA ADSs  AND, TOGETHER WITH THE PESA SHARES, THE  PESA SECURITIES ), OF PETROBRAS ARGENTINA S.A. ( PETROBRAS ARGENTINA ), NOR SHALL THERE BE ANY SALE OR PURCHASE OF SECURITIES IN ANY JURISDICTION IN WHICH SUCH OFFER, SOLICITATION OR SALE WOULD BE UNLAWFUL PRIOR TO REGISTRATION OR QUALIFICATION UNDER THE SECURITIES LAWS OF SUCH JURISDICTION. AT THE TIME THE OFFER IS COMMENCE D, PAMPA ENERGIA S.A. ( PAMPA ), Marcelo Mindlin, DamiAn Mindlin, Gustavo Mariani and Ricardo Torres (THE  COFILERS ) WILL FILE AN AMENDED TENDER OFFER STATEMENT ON SCHEDULE TO WITH THE U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION (THE  SEC ). PETROBRAS ARGENTINAS SHAREHOLDERS ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO READ THE AMENDED SCHEDULE TO AND RELATED TENDER OFFER DOCUMENTS WHEN THEY ARE FILED WITH THE SEC BECAUSE THESE DOCUMENTS WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION THAT PETROBRAS ARGENTINAS SHAREHOLDERS SHOULD CONSIDER BEFORE TENDERING THEIR PESA SHARES (INCLUDING PESA SHARES REPRESENTED BY PESA ADSs).

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT

This Amendment No. 1 amends and supplements the Tender Offer Statement on this combined Schedule TO and Schedule 13E-3 under cover of Schedule TO (this  Schedule TO ) filed with the SEC by Pampa on August 10, 2016. The Schedule TO relates to the offer by Pampa and the Co-Filers to purchase any and all outstanding PESA Shares held by U.S. Persons (as defined herein) (the  U.S. Cash Tender Offer ).

The U.S. Cash Tender Offer is being made on the terms and conditions set forth in the prospectus dated August 10, 2016 (as amended on September 20, 2016, the  Prospectus ) attached hereto as Exhibit (a)(4)(i) and incorporated herein by reference, and in the related documents. The Prospectus is also being filed by Pampa in connection with an offer to exchange outstanding PESA Shares held by U.S. Persons and outstanding PESA ADSs for Pampa Common Shares, par value Ps.1.00 per share, and American Depositary Shares, each representing 25 Pampa Shares, under the terms and conditions set forth therein (the  U.S. Exchange Offer  and, together with the U.S. Cash Tender Offer, the  U.S. Offers ). The U.S. Offers are being made in conjunction with an offer by Pampa in Argentina for all outstanding PESA Shares (but not PESA ADSs, unless holders of PESA ADSs first convert their PESA ADSs into PESA Shares, which requires holders to surrender their PESA ADSs to JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., as depositary for the PESA ADSs) (the  Argentine Offer , and together with the U.S. Offers, the  Offers ). The Offer Cash Consideration (as defined in the Prospectus) offered in the Argentine Offer is the same as the Offer Cash Consideration offered in the U.S. Cash Tender Offer, payable in each case in Argentine pesos in Argentina. Pampa and the CoFilers do not intend to change the Offer Cash Consideration and, while the Offers are open, will not purchase or make any arrangements to purchase PESA Securities, other than pursuant to the Offers. This Schedule TO is intended solely for holders of PESA Shares that are U.S. Persons. The information set forth in the Prospectus is incorporated herein by reference with respect to Items 1 through 11 of this Schedule TO. This Schedule TO is being filed on behalf of Pampa and the CoFilers.
The Cap Times hosted a panel discussion on the future of neighborhood taverns at the High Noon Saloon on Tuesday night.
Morris Ramen is available only in house. By the time a steaming bowl went from the open kitchen to your house, the noodles would no longer be any good.
A lucky Lotto player from Papamoa will be celebrating a mid-week windfall after winning $1 million with Lotto First Division in Wednesday nights live Lotto draw.

The winning ticket was sold at Pak N Save Papamoa in Papamoa.
Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.
march_cuople_new.jpg

Alexander March, 34, and his wife, Sima March, 35, a Syracuse couple who fled to Canada after being indicted on mortgage fraud charges five years ago, surrendered Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 at the Canadian border. They were arraigned in Onondaga County Court.

(Provided photos)

Syracuse, N.Y.  A Syracuse couple who fled to Canada after their indictment in a mortgage fraud scheme five years ago surrendered Tuesday and are facing multiple charges.

Alexander March, 34, and his wife, Sima March, 35, surrendered to New York authorities at the Canadian border following years of extradition proceedings and were arraigned in Onondaga County Court, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Wednesday.

The couple faces charges of third-degree grand larceny and first-degree scheme to defraud in connection with an alleged residential mortgage fraud scheme involving multiple properties in Syracuse.

Alexander March also was arraigned on a second indictment charging him with second-degree forgery, fourth-degree tampering with a witness, among other charges, for allegedly conspiring with his former attorney, Jon A. Lefkowitz, to tamper with witnesses who testified against the Marches before a grand jury, Schneiderman said.

"We have zero tolerance for mortgage fraud, and witness tampering erodes the basic principles upon which our justice system was founded," Schneiderman said in a statement Wednesday.

According to prosecutors, an investigation by the attorney general's office and the state Department of Financial Services revealed that the couple engaged in a residential mortgage fraud scheme involving multiple Syracuse properties between February 2006 and July 2010.

Alexander March purchased the properties and then immediately conveyed title to his wife, prosecutors said. They said Sima March then applied for refinancing on six of the properties. In refinancing the properties, the Marches falsely stated their assets and submitted forged documents, prosecutors said.

Lending institutions relying on the statements made in the loan applications gave the Marches more than $240,000 in mortgage funds, the attorney general's office said. The Marches then allegedly defaulted on the mortgages, forcing the banks to initiate foreclosure proceedings on the refinanced properties.

On May 16, 2011, an Onondaga County grand jury charged the Marches with six felony counts of third-degree grand larceny, six felony counts of first-degree falsifying business records and one felony count of first-degree scheme to defraud.

However, before they could be arrested, the Marches fled the United States and entered Canada at the Champlain border crossing on May 13, 2011, prosecutors said. The attorney general's office then initiated proceedings to extradite the Marches from Canada.

According to prosecutors, Alexander March, together with Lefkowitz, a Brooklyn attorney, demanded that witnesses who had testified against the Marches sign affidavits and answer questionnaires that would discredit their prior sworn testimony.

Alexander March and Lefkowitz are accused of impersonating various individuals, including attorneys, and sending forged "judicial subpoenas" that appeared to have been authorized by a state Supreme Court judge.

Alexander March was indicted in November 2015 on charges of forgery, tampering with a witness, criminal impersonation and conspiracy. Lefkowitz was charged with forgery, tampering with a witness, criminal impersonation and conspiracy.

The Marches were arraigned Tuesday before Onondaga County Court Judge Thomas Miller.

Alexander March was released on $50,000 bond bail on the mortgage fraud indictment and $200,000 cash bail on the witness tampering indictment. Sima March was released on $50,000 bond bail.

Both were required to surrender their passports, and Alexander March was also required to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor his whereabouts.

The couple is due back in court Oct. 14.

Contact Rick Moriarty anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148


WATERLOO, N.Y. - A Waterloo man was arrested after a standoff with sheriff's deputies during which he brandished a knife and gun - which turned out to be an air pistol, according to the Seneca County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies said they responded to a domestic violence call at about 5 p.m. Tuesday at 385 Waterloo-Geneva Road, apartment A2 in Waterloo.

Joshua Manko

When deputies arrived, they found Joshua W. Manko, 30, inside the apartment with a butterfly gravity knife and two children, ages 7 and 10. Manko refused to come out or let the children out, deputies said.

Manko had chased and threatened two adult family members earlier with the knife and tried to stop them from leaving, deputies said. One person crashed their car while trying to escape, deputies said.

During negotiations, deputies said Manko refused to give up the children. They said he then pulled out what looked like a semi-automatic pistol from behind his back, pointed it at the negotiator and threatened to kill him.

The negotiator drew his own service pistol in response, but because the children were still near Manko, he did not fire, deputies said. Manko eventually handed his weapon to one of the children, which was when deputies forced their way into the apartment, deputies said.

Though Manko resisted the arrest and fought back, deputies said he was arrested without anyone being injured.

Manko was charged with:

Two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment

Two counts of second-degree menacing

Two counts of endangering the welfare of a child

Third-degree criminal possession of a weapon

Obstructing governmental administration

First-degree unlawfully dealing with a child

Resisting arrest

Unlawful possession of marijuana

Deputies recovered the knife and the gun, which was actually an air pistol replica of a Winchester large-caliber handgun, deputies said. The children were turned over to relatives, and deputies said they will be working with Child Protective Services.

Manko was arraigned to the Town of Waterloo Court and remanded to the Seneca County Correctional Facility without bail. An order of protection was issued by the court.

The investigation is ongoing, deputies said.
Suspects in Carello's arcade.jpg

The New York State Police are looking for these three individuals in relation to a larceny in Sylvan Beach in July.

(New York State Police)

SYLVAN BEACH, N.Y. -- New York State Police are asking for the public's help in identifying three people in a security photo.

The state police in Sylvan Beach are investigating a larceny that took place July 24 when two arcade machines at the Carello's Carousel Arcade were allegedly broken into. Police estimate approximately $1,100 was taken.

The three people in the provided security photo are wanted regarding the larceny.

Police ask anyone who recognizes them or has information about the incident to call (315) 762-4441.
A new report from VideoCardz has detailed AMD's upcoming Vega GPUs, with information allegedly originating from a leaked internal server roadmap, While reports like this should always be taken with a grain of salt, VideoCardz do have a decent track record with publishing early information.

The leaked roadmap suggests that Vega 10, AMD's performance GPU set to compete with the likes of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, is scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2017. It will allegedly bring 64 compute units, which should total around 4,096 shader cores: the same amount as AMD's high-end Fiji GPU as seen in the Radeon R9 Fury X.

The report also states that Vega 10 will come with a whopping 16 GB of HBM2 providing bandwidth of 512 GB/s, and will feature 24 TFLOPs of half-precision (16-bit) compute performance. Listing 16-bit performance is interesting considering we normally see standard 32-bit performance metrics, however the figures provided by VideoCardz do point to decent gains on the R9 Fury X.

As for total board power, we're looking at around 225W from this 14nm part. The R9 Fury X had a rated TDP of 275W, so it looks like Vega 10 will provide a reduction in power consumption for an improvement in performance. However, depending on performance the card may still fall short of the GTX 1080's supreme power efficiency and 180W TDP.

VideoCardz has also detailed Vega 20, which appears to be a 7nm die shrink of Vega 10. This GPU supposedly includes the same 64 compute units, however memory has been increased to 32 GB of HBM2 with 1 TB/s of bandwidth, along with a total board power rating of just 150W. Cards that use Vega 20 will support PCI Express 4.0.

And finally, the report has briefly detailed three further GPUs: Vega 11, Navi 10, and Navi 11. Scheduled for release next year, Vega 11 will replace Polaris 10 in AMD's mid-range GPU line up. Navi 10 and 11 are future GPUs planned for release in 2019.
Plain Talk: Scariest of all about Trump is potential for war
Despite the controversial removal of the headphone jack and the fact it's not a huge upgrade over the iPhone 6S Plus, the new iPhone 7 has received mostly positive reviews. But like most high-end smartphones, the device don't come cheap. In China, however, one son of a billionaire has bought eight brand new iPhone 7s; not for himself, but for his pet dog, Coco.

Wang Sicong's father - billionaire property magnate Wang Jianlin - is worth around $30 billion, which probably explains how he was able to buy the Alaskan Malamute eight of Apple's handsets, though it's not totally clear why he thought the dog would appreciate them - she looks like more of a Samsung fan.

While iPhone 7s are pricey in the US, they're even more expensive in China. A 256GB model goes for 7988 yuan, which works out at about $1197. It's not clear from the pictures exactly which models he bought, but the total cost could have amounted to $9576.

On Coco's verified Weibo account, the caption under the photos reads: "I don't understand all the show-off posts on (social media) What's the point? Don't make me do it?"

Not surprisingly, this isn't the first instance of Wang buying Coco a piece of expensive tech that the dog will likely end up chewing and burying in the yard. In 2015, her 1.9 million followers got to see her two rose gold Apple Watches, said to be worth $12,000 each.

Wang's ostentatious displays of wealth aren't going down well in China. CNN reports that official news agency Xinhua accused him of having "stained the purity of the Chinese (people)," and warned others not to imitate his "arrogant and coarse celebrity."

He got into more trouble after saying the only thing he looked for in potential partners was their breast size. Wang's father blamed his son's preference for "buxom" girlfriends on his overseas "Western schooling."
Tesla Motor Inc.'s proposed acquisition of American energy services provider SolarCity Corp. - worth $2.6 billion - has run into troubled waters and could be deferred.

On Monday, Sept. 19, the company revealed that SolarCity's acquisition could potentially be delayed as Tesla shareholders had filed lawsuits. The four lawsuits against the automaker has been filed by four different shareholders over the imminent buyout and alleges that Tesla's board members breached fiduciary duty as revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.

"Between Sept. 1, 2016 and Sept. 14, 2016, four lawsuits were filed in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware by purported stockholders of Tesla challenging the Merger," notes the SEC filing.

The parties that have filed the lawsuit against the automaker are the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund and shareholders Ellen Prasinos and P. Evan Stephens. The plaintiffs allege that Tesla CEO Elon Musk's too-close association with the management of SolarCity makes it impossible for Tesla to be objective when it comes to purchasing the energy services provider, as aside from being Tesla's Chairman and CEO, Musk also serves as the chairman of SolarCity. He is also related to two of SolarCity's executive officers.

The filing also notes that two more SolarCity board members also hold board memberships and executive positions in Tesla. Therefore, the concerns from the four shareholders.

One of the plaintiffs, Prasinos, is seeking an injunction to halt the acquisition, which could possibly hold up the Tesla and SolarCity deal.

In the event the court permits an injunction to any of the four plaintiffs, the deal may be deferred beyond the end of 2016, which was the anticipated closure date. The hearing is slated for Oct. 18 in Delaware.

Tesla asserts in the regulatory filing that the allegations made in the lawsuit are "without merit." The automaker believes that the shareholders are not likely to be triumphant in deferring the transaction.

"Simply because someone uses litigation to try to delay an acquisition does not mean it will be successful. At this point, it is not yet known if anyone will even end up pursuing such a request. If anyone does, Tesla will oppose it," stated a representative from Tesla.

Tesla also argues in court documents that the plaintiffs have the option of seeking damages from the merged entity and need not hold up the deal. However, the plaintiffs counter that the shareholders could bear irreplaceable damage in the event the merger is complete as intended in Q4 2016. They therefore asked the Delaware Chancery Court to speed up the case.

While it is common for shareholders to file lawsuits if they are displeased with potential mergers, courts in Delaware tend to align with the management. However, the fact that Musk occupies a prominent place in both companies - owning more than 20 percent of both entities - and his cousins are the CEO and CTO of SolarCity, the intended deal may be the subject of further scrutiny.

SolarCity has not commented on the situation.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Volkswagen AG recently announced that its luxury brands Lamborghini and Bentley will not be part of next week's Paris Motor Show, as the car group aims to save up on cash.

Volkswagen needs to cut any unnecessary spending so it can cushion costs from its emissions scandal.

One year ago, Volkswagen admitted that it had been using tampered software to tweak the results of diesel emissions tests. Since that revelation led to a series of callbacks and billions of dollars in fines and compensation payments, the carmaker is looking to rationalize costs throughout the board.

Some of the savings will fill the holes punctured in the revenue stream by the emissions scandal. Cost cuts will aid the company in fueling a massive strategic shift in the business, which is more and more interested in tapping the potential of electric vehicles.

Bentley states that instead of joining other auto brands during the Sept. 29 to 30 event in Paris, it will target smaller events and attempt to market itself more directly to potential customers. Lamborghini joined in, noting that its strategy regarding auto show attendance is under revision. The Italian brand says that it will be very picky in choosing the locations where it will display its superfast premium cars.

Not only will luxury car brands appear less in opulent show stands, but they are also focusing their marketing efforts on web-based events. Car shows are notoriously expensive for car brands, and luxury nameplates sometimes shell out millions of dollars to make their presence noticed at such events.

In a statement, Volkswagen notes that instead of a posh gala in Paris, it is opting for executive speeches on design.

Matthias Mueller, Chief Executive Officer at the group, explains that all crisis can be turned into a step forward.

"A crisis can lead to marginalisation, but it can also mark the turning point for something better," he underlines.

The automaker's interest in new technologies, particularly electric vehicles and electromobility, is nothing new to those who watch the car market.

At the Paris event, the car builder plans to unveil a new EV that has 300-miles autonomy and should be market-ready by 2018. Earlier this year, Volkswagen announced that it is pooling resources to deliver 30 new EVs by 2025.

Other carmakers will be absent from the 2016 Paris show, with notable names such as Aston Martin, Ford and Volvo giving a pass to the auto event.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The world's first-ever 1 TB SDXC card that doubles the storage capacity offered by the biggest current-gen memory card is finally here!

On Tuesday, Sept. 20, global storage technology and solutions firm Western Digital Corporation (WDC) took the wraps off a prototype for its SanDisk 1 TB SDXC memory card at the ongoing Photokina show in Germany.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I with its monstrous 1 terabyte storage space even trumps storage space on a laptop!

WDC's Dinesh Bahal, VP of Product Management (content solutions business unit), shared that the memory card is quite an evolution and bears testament to the company's innovative spirit and journey since it introduced the 64 MB SD card in 2000.

The prototype of the 1 TB Extreme Pro SDXC is reflective of the increasing storage space demands with the changing times. Consumers and professionals are leaning toward higher storage capacities for memory cards as the demand for 4K and 8K content grows.

"The SanDisk 1TB SD card prototype represents another significant achievement as growth of high-resolution content and capacity-intensive applications such as virtual reality, video surveillance and 360 video, are progressing at astounding rates," notes Bahal.

With the onset of VR applications, the need for 1 TB capacity will be quite useful. Moreover, flagship cameras from companies such as Nikon, Sony, Canon and Fujifilm boast 50-megapixel sensors, which would require memory cards that offer higher storage support. Additionally, shooting 360-degree footage from drones or other devices will push the boundaries for storage limits.

The prototype for the SanDisk memory card shared with the media was basically a "sanitized" version and did not indicate its speed. However, the SDXC I logo on the memory card hints at the transfer rate, which is usually 50 Mbps or 104 Mbps for these cards.

Additionally, the Extreme Pro brand on the memory card reveals that the performance should be topnotch as it is SanDisk's top-end line.

Those who need this kind of capacity in a camera, video camera, or drone will have to wait, however. SanDisk used a prototype of the card for its demo and the company didn't say when the card would actually be available for sale.

WDC also didn't disclose the pricing for the impending 1 TB memory card, merely sticking to a diplomatic would "depend on market conditions when released" stance. The release window for the memory card is also veiled in mystery. However, considering the 512 GB SanDisk memory card unveiled at Photokina 2014 hit the shelves a few months after the announcement, the 1 TB card could also make its way to consumers in time for the holiday season.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Samsung Electronics released another statement on Monday, this time addressing its exploding Galaxy Note 7 crisis in China.

However, while many believe the cause of the smartphone explosions was due to battery issues, the company confirmed that it was likely to have been caused by other "outside factors," more specifically external heating.

Samsung is addressing the issue with its Note 7 in China after it announced a global recall of all devices. Just like in the U.S., cases of the smartphone combusting into flames also went viral in China over this past weekend.

Samsung previously cited battery overheating problems as to the reason why it recalled 2.5 million Note 7 devices just two short weeks after its launch in a few countries, including the U.S. However, China was not part of this initial recall because Samsung said the phones sold in the country did not include the battery manufacturing problem.

After two separate instances of the smartphone blackening from flames after what the owner's claim was normal use in China were shared on Chinese social media and made the news, the company opened an investigation to see if its battery exploding crisis has expanded into China as well.

The South Korean tech company was only able to look into one case, because it could not obtain the second phone that reportedly also caught on fire.

Its report found that the battery was not the issue in this combustion case.

"The test results show that the damage to the device was caused by external heating," Samsung China said in a statement.

The battery supplier of the Note 7 phones that are sold in China, Amperex Technology, also commented on the matter, agreeing that the battery was not related to the explosions. Instead, the overheating was probably caused by other factors, although it didn't cite exactly what.

"We believe the heat problem comes from outside the battery. A very large likelihood exists that other factors gave rise to the heat problem," Amperex Technology said.

This is not the first recall of the Note 7 in China. Samsung also recalled 1,858 of the test devices in China that were distributed before sales began on Sept. 1 in the country. This was also because of overheating problems. Both these new cases include Note 7s that were sold after the China launch date.

Samsung has been under fire for its manufacturing error that has caused 34 different cases of its new smartphone exploding, with one of these cases happening while in the hands of a six-year-old in New York.

This couldn't have come at a worse time, since Apple just launched its iPhone 7, which analysts believe could sell 100 million units by the end of this year as more people refrain from purchasing the Note 7.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
No Gender-Detection Ads On Google, Yahoo, And Microsoft Sites | TechTree.com

With Indias gender imbalance going to epic proportions, technology majors Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have pledged to block gender determination ads on their respective sites, thus also adhering to local laws in the process.

This blockade of gender determination related ads is meant for the companies Indian division, and comes in the backdrop of a legal initiative, which was taken recently to ban all such related content on the web, in a case being heard in Indias supreme court (SC). Indias SC had also warned these companies to adhere to local Indian laws and regulations regarding gender determination and related services, or cease their operations in the country. However, there seems to be a discussion about a sweeping ban on even the keywords, as such a step would put an end to access of key research articles and other related content. Hence, the Health Ministry, who made the initial announcement, has not yet clarified how the companies intend on implementing the policy.

The whole issue of gender determination would not have been such a problem, had Indias gender discrepancies not been such a huge problem. According to the statistics issued in 2011, the sex ratio in India is 943 females per 1000 males. A 2015 United Nations report also mentioned, that male children in India are given a better nutrition as compared to female children, and in general, large sections of Indian society believe that males are better future prospects of being family bread earners. What makes the situation truly very grim, is that conducting, selling, advertising, fetal sex selection services are illegal since 1994, but secret clinics across the nation continue to render services of aborting female fetuses, simply because the parents prefer a male child, a problem even more epic in some northern pockets of India.

However, the tech majors have taken an initiative in the direction of curbing the practice in their own way. Google specifically has taken action to prevent searches and advertising gender determination test services, meaning disabling auto-complete predictions for relevant terms on its site and showing a warning that tells users pre-natal gender screening or testing is illegal in India. The other companies have not yet mentioned anything to media, considering the matter is till subjudice.

TAGS: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft
Xiaomi Launches Its Air Purifier 2 For Rs 10,000 | TechTree.com

One of the fastest rising brand in the world, Xiaomi has launched its Air Purifier 2. Priced at Rs 10,000, it competes with similar products from the Dutch brand Philips in India. Although most Indians associate Xiaomi only with smartphones and tablets, the Chinese brand has been selling rice cookers, electric bicycles, smart bulbs, TVs, and even robotic cleaner in its home country. With today's launch, the Air Purifier 2 becomes Xiaomi's first "smart" appliance to officially hit the Indian market.



The Air Purifier 2 features a 360 cylindrical filter that takes in air from every direction. It features a triple-layer filter design to removes particles larger than 0.3m. According to the official product page, the product's high-density EPA filter has been sourced from Japanese manufacturer Toray. Xiaomi claims that the purifier has a CADR (Clean Air Delivery Rate) of 310m3/h. Ideally, it takes around 10 minutes to clean air in an average size room. Other noteworthy features are built-in WiFi module and mobile app support. APart from On/Off controls, the app can push many notifications such as a reminder to replace a filter.







The Xiaomi Mi Air Purifier 2 will be available on 26th of this month via Mi.com for Rs 10,000. A week later, it will also land on Flipkart.





TAGS: Xiaomi
With the arrival of NBN, many Australians are expecting fast internet access in their homes. As for mobile networks, the next generation of a mobile network with incredible speed is coming to the country. Telstra has announced that they have tested one of the worlds first 5G radio test beds in Melbourne, in conjunction with Ericsson.

Telstra networks group managing director Mike Wright said, During the outdoor trial we saw total download speeds (to two mobiles) of greater than 20Gbps, so theres no doubt 5G is going to be a lot faster than todays mobile networks.

The test resulted in 200 times faster than the maximum speed of NBN. A spokesperson for the company told Business Insider: When shared between many users wed expect speeds will be lower than the peak speeds. Theoretically, gigabit speeds could be available on a mobile up to 100 kilometres away from the nearest tower.

Speaking of the test, Wright said: During the outdoor trial we saw total download speeds [to two mobiles] of greater than 20 gigabits per second [Gbps], so theres no doubt 5G is going to be a lot faster than todays mobile networks, but it will also deliver a much lower latency. The test bed used 800 megahertz of spectrum in a previously unattainable, high-frequency band, which is 10 times more spectrum than we use with our 4G service.

Its worth noting that the current 4G LTE standard has a maximum speed of 300Mbps which is tree times faster than the NBN. Telstra has previously stated that they are aiming to conduct full trials of 5G at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. Telstras 5G networks are not expected to go live until 2020.

Meanwhile, the UK Vodafone Group recently partnered with Nokia to test 5G and develop standards. Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have achieved unprecedented transmission capacity and spectral efficiency in an optical communications field trial with a new modulation technique, a statement from Nokia reads. The breakthrough research could extend the capability of optical networks to meet surging data traffic demands.
"The Brazilian people will vote for a project through which democracy will win," the Workers' Party leader said. | Read More
Justice Michael Gableman, shown here during a 2011 administrative conference of the Wisconsin Supreme Court at the state Capitol, wrote the opinion that shut down the John Doe investigation into allegedly illegal campaign coordination by Republicans during the recall elections of 2011 and 2012. Photo by M.P. King-State Journal
Kirstie McLure is to step down as managing director of Pioneer Productions.

After joining the company 23 years ago, McLure is leaving the company to explore other projects.

Pioneer is not planning to replace McLure. Jonathan Hewes will remain as CEO.



McClure became managing director of Pioneer in 2011, overseeing series such as How the Universe Works for Discovery Science US, Worlds Weirdest Weather for Channel 4, In The Womb for National Geographic Channel and Channel 4, David Baddiel on the Silk Road for Discovery UK and PaddleSUP: Mission Amazon for Red Bull Media House.



McLure said: "There are very few places where one can take risks and push the boundaries in factual content in such a ground-breaking way  whether thats producing 4K content, launching SVOD channels, undertaking fast turnaround content or facilitating new international collaborations. Enabling Pioneer to become a truly international scientific and factual production company and bring complex concepts to life, in a way that appeals to everyone all over the world, has been very rewarding."



Arwel Rees, CEO of Pioneers parent company Tinopolis Group, said: "After 23 years at Pioneer, we are proud of everything that Kirstie has achieved. She has been such an asset to the company. We will be sad to see her go, but would like to thank her for her contribution to the Group and wish her all the best for the future.

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A Racine man whose blood droplets led police to arrest him for burglarizing a Racine home last fall will spend the next five years in prison.

Travis A. Williams, 25, of the 1100 block of Wisconsin Ave., was sentenced Tuesday afternoon in Racine County Circuit Court to five years behind bars and five years on extended supervision for the Nov. 12 burglary.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Williams, Racine Police were called to a home in the 1300 block of North Main Street on Nov. 12 after a complainant reported missing $10 in silver dollars and two rings, each worth about $100.

Police collected physical evidence from the scene, including samples of blood droplets left on the exterior of the door, the kitchen floor, and elsewhere in the dwelling.

The blood samples were submitted to the Wisconsin State Crime Lab for analysis. Those samples came back as a match to Williams, who has 2008 and 2010 burglary convictions.

Williams pleaded guilty to a felony burglary charge in connection with the case on July 26.

On top of his sentence in the burglary case, Williams will serve an extra year in prison and an additional year on supervision for taking oxygen tanks and the van of a woman who was in the hospital last September. Williams and his father later sold the van to salvage lot without the womans permission.
An eight-bed emergency room in north Baton Rouge could be open and seeing patients in a year from now, filling an emergency care void on the northern side of Baton Rouge as healthcare resources have shifted south over the past few years, Gov. John Bel Edwards and Our Lady of the Lake leaders said Wednesday.

As political, spiritual, business and community leaders celebrated the details of the emergency room plan at a news conference, many of them pointed to signs in front of Our Lady of the Lake's LSU Health clinic on Airline Highway that say "no emergency room." They said they could not wait for the signs to become obsolete, as Our Lady of the Lake Chief Executive Officer Scott Wester said he hopes to have the emergency room operational within 12 months.

Edwards used the opportunity to defend state government's partnership with Our Lady of the Lake, to tout the benefits of Medicaid expansion and to quiet doubts about whether Our Lady of the Lake was completely committed to north Baton Rouge. He also touched on tensions that have recently simmered over lack of equitable resources between north and south Baton Rouge.

"With all of the things that rose out of the shooting of Mr. Sterling, followed by the police officers and sheriff's deputies who were shot, with flooding, I will tell you that it's time that we have a moment where we can celebrate," Edwards told a packed room of people in the urgent care facility. He was referring to the shooting death of Alton Sterling who was killed during a struggle with Baton Rouge police in July. That was followed by the shooting deaths of officers Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald and deputy Brad Garafola by an out-of-state gunman.

The state will give Our Lady of the Lake a one-time payment of $5.5 million to help build and staff the emergency room as part of their public-private partnership. The money is already available within the contract, as opposed to waiting for money to build the facility from the state's capital outlay budget.

Wester said the hospital will pay for any additional expenses in building and staffing the outlet. Wester said after the news conference that Our Lady of the Lake has been studying access to healthcare in north Baton Rouge, and recently decided this was the time to improve it, and he said Medicaid expansion has changed the dynamic of building in the area.

Months ago, Wester said that Our Lady of the Lake's urgent care clinics in north Baton Rouge were serving the community there well enough. He said then that the healthcare community has been trying to change people's mindsets away from always seeking emergency rooms and looking at urgent care and primary care instead, as they are less expensive and often more efficient ways of treating patients.

In a prayer Wednesday, Sister Helen Cahill of the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady -- who run Our Lady of the Lake -- indicated that they were recently inspired to open the north Baton Rouge emergency room.

"You are a God of surprises, and never cease to open our eyes to new possibilities," Cahill prayed. "Be our guide and inspiration as we expand services to north Baton Rouge, to the emergency room in north Baton Rouge. May it be a source of hope and excitement for all."

Wester said Wednesday that Our Lady of the Lake "is in a different place than we were last year at this time."

"Without Baton Rouge General emergency room services, we really do have a void of emergency room service in north Baton Rouge," Wester said.

Baton Rouge General closed their Mid City emergency room in 2015 after losing too much money from treating an abundance of uninsured patients and having to eat the medical bills for them. Their closure followed a pattern of healthcare moving south in Baton Rouge, as the state shut down the LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center in 2013, which served north Baton Rouge.

The $5.5 million Our Lady of the Lake receives for the emergency room will be in addition to the $112 million the state has agreed to give to the hospital in the fiscal year of 2017 as part of their agreement to take poor patients who previously would have gone to Earl K. Long.

A rendering of the Our lady of the Lake north Baton Rouge emergency department shows it will be adjacent to the urgent care clinic on Airline Highway.

Similar to Our Lady of the Lake's freestanding emergency room in Livingston, the one in north Baton Rouge will have several exam and treatment rooms, a trauma room, a psychiatric holding room and an OBGYN room. It will have both pedestrian and ambulance entrances.

Edwards and Department of Health Secretary Rebekah Gee both touted Medicaid expansion as helping to pave the way for plugging more people into healthcare services, including the north Baton Rouge emergency room. Edwards said Medicaid expansion is generating $184 million in savings this year, and that "many of these advancements" wouldn't have been possible without it.

Edwards was surrounded by legislators and community members who complimented his quickness in reaching the emergency room deal for north Baton Rouge. State Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, said she originally did not believe the north Baton Rouge emergency room could be built this year given the state's precarious budget situation, and she credited Edwards' work.

But not everyone who pushed for an emergency room in north Baton Rouge believes the governor has made the right decision. As the news conference was taking place, Metro Councilwoman Chauna Banks-Daniel fired off a news release that claimed the governor "stole our vision for a full-service ER in north Baton Rouge and crafted it as his own."

In the spring, Banks-Daniel assembled a team called the #NBRNOW Blue Ribbon Commission to come up with solutions for economic development and healthcare in underserved north Baton Rouge. Her group started courting Champion Medical Center, a specialty surgical hospital near the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport, whose owner company in Texas said they could build an emergency room in north Baton Rouge.

Champion executives said they would need $7 million over the next two years to build an emergency room and to help reimburse their payments. They asked for an additional expected $3.8 million a year in subsidies.

Banks-Daniel wrote in her news release that Champion was the only hospital provider to offer to open an emergency room in north Baton Rouge when Our Lady of the Lake and other hospital leaders were less inclined to do so. She also said the Champion plan was cheaper -- though Our Lady of the Lake is receiving a one-time payment of $5.5 million and Champion would have wanted $11.4 million over the first three years.

"In essence, the Governors administration stole our vision for north Baton Rouge and re-packaged it as their own," Banks-Daniel wrote in her news release. "This gives credence to the notion that white privilege, power, and position knows what is best for black communities and will do ANYTHING to advance."

Gary Chambers, a co-chair of the blue ribbon commission, asked the governor at his news conference why Edwards did not choose Champion and pointed out Our Lady of the Lake's past hesitancy to build in north Baton Rouge.

Edwards doubled down on the state's partnership with Our Lady of the Lake. He said it made sense to use Our Lady of the Lake, the state's built-in partner for healthcare, to build an emergency room instead of a for-profit company based in Texas.

"My commitment was to the people of Baton Rouge, not to any healthcare provider," Edwards said. "And I certainly looked at the proposal which came from Champion, which doesn't run an emergency room anywhere, doesn't have a transfer agreement in Baton Rouge, runs boutique specialty hospitals that typically do not take Medicaid, and has not been approved by CMS to deliver emergency room care."
The Wisconsin State Patrol released details Tuesday of a vehicle crash that left a Columbia County Sheriffs deputy severely injured and the vehicle totaled.

Deputy Bradley Graf was responding to an emergency call west of Poynette on Sept. 9 just before 9 p.m., driving east on McGowan Road, which ends at a T-intersection with Smokey Hollow Road. While making a wide right turn, the 2012 Chevy Tahoe overshot the road and entered the driveway of a home on the opposite side of the road.

The front, drivers side corner of the SUV struck a tree in the front yard, whipping the vehicle around 180 degrees, facing west. Due to the damage to the vehicle and injuries suffered by Graf, emergency responders needed to pull the officer from the SUV before he was airlifted to University of Wisconsin-Madison Hospital.

When you look at the vehicle, the severity of the impact was such that were very fortunate that he was not killed or received more extensive injuries, said Detective Lt. Roger Brandner. Graf has since been released from the hospital and is recuperating at home, according to Brandner.

A lot of it is just the healing process and I think he is healing as expected. There are some pretty severe injuries there. He is going to be off for a while until he heals and gets released back to duty.

One reason the vehicle was a Chevy Tahoe, is that Graf is one of sheriffs offices two K-9 units. At the time of the crash, German shepherd Recon was crated in the back of the vehicle. Although Recon was not hurt in the crash, he has been off duty since.

K9 units are trained as a team with bonding much deeper than simply practiced commands, living with their handlers at work and home. As such, Recon has been off duty with Graf until both can return to work.

Were going to have to run short and utilize deputies on an overtime basis, said Brandner. Were not authorized to hire anybody in the months that he will be off recovering. So well have to figure it out with the staff we have, run short at times and have others cover each others shifts.
Nick Tullier's 18-year-old son wonders if he'll ever hear his father's voice again. "Will we still be able to hang out together and just chat? I have no clue," Trent Tullier tells CNN in a feature posted online Friday.
More students than ever are either graduating from Louisiana's community and technical colleges or transferring from the two-year programs to traditional universities, marking an important achievement for the college system and a positive sign for the state's workforce.

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System released data Tuesday that says 28,853 students graduated from one of its programs in the 2015-2016 school year. That's up 26 percent over last year, and 46 percent more than graduates from 2014.

However, LCTCS's definition of a graduate includes any student who got a degree or received an industry or professional credential. Some of the credential courses take less than a year to receive.

Eighty percent of their graduates received degrees or certifications in "high-demand, high-income fields," as defined by the Louisiana Workforce Commission, in areas including industrial production, allied health, construction crafts, computer science, manufacturing and accounting.

"We've had difficult times financially, but we've made the hard decisions to cut programs that aren't as high in demand," said LCTCS President Monty Sullivan. "It means these graduates are going to earn a good living."

In recent years, LCTCS has cut over 500 programs across its 13 campuses, scaling back "soft" degree programs like cosmetology, carpentry and barbering.

LCTCS has taken to using its own data, eschewing traditional performance metrics released by the state and federal government. Sullivan has argued that the graduation and transfer rates released by the state hold two-year schools to unrealistic standards of four-year universities.

For example, traditional graduation rates only include associate degrees, while Sullivan is counting both industry certifications and associate degrees. Graduation rates also traditionally only include first-time, full-time students  a common definition for university freshmen, but a rarity in community colleges, many of whose students are working while studying.

Under these definitions, the LCTCS had a 14 percent graduation rate in 2013, the most recent data available, according to the Louisiana Board of Regents. The nationwide average for two-year schools is about 30 percent.

Sullivan acknowledged that LCTCS data probably won't be used by the state and federal counts. But, he said it's an accurate statement about how many people are being trained to meet Louisiana's workforce needs.

New program aimed at increasing transfers, degree completions at UNO and Delgado A new bridge program between the University of New Orleans and Delgado Community College wil

The system has set a goal of 40,000 graduates per year by the year 2020, and Sullivan says he has no doubt they'll get there.

"A record number of people graduating from community and technical colleges means there are more people with skills and educational backgrounds to go out and provide for their families," he said.

LCTCS also announced that it had 15,805 students who transferred from one of its schools to a university, which included 1,708 to LSU, 1,843 who transferred to the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and 2,170 students who transferred to Southeastern Louisiana University.

The system says that transfers have increased exponentially since 2014 when it counted 2,149. But, Sullivan said their definition of transfer also has been broadened over those years, which means it's not an apples to apples comparison.

Louisiana as a whole has lower transfer rates than many other states, as it's less commonplace for a student in this state who wants a four-year degree to start at a local community college. In states like Texas and Florida, where there's tremendous demand to get into the universities, many local students commonly start at a two-year program before making the switch.

Sullivan said they're trying to change that mentality in Louisiana.

"It's very important for people across Louisiana to understand that a bachelor's degree is within their reach and the place they should begin is a community and technical college," he said. "It's the best bridge to a baccalaureate degree."

Sullivan said they've improved transfer rates by growing general education programs at schools that used to focus primarily on technical training. He said universities have also become valuable partners. He noted that Northwestern University has increased outreach to community colleges, all over the state, encouraging transfers.

Earlier this year, LSU also partnered with LCTCS offering scholarships to students who complete their associate's degree and graduate with honors.
A plan to overhaul the way teachers are trained for the classroom in Louisiana triggered new controversy Wednesday, with critics charging the move would be financially risky and worsen the state's teacher shortage.

Jeanne Burns, assistant commissioner for teacher and learning initiatives for the Board of Regents, said it is unclear how the changes will be financed after the initial roll out.

"The elephant in the room is stable funding," Burns said.

Until that issue is resolved, she added, higher education officials cannot endorse the new system.

The chief feature of the overhaul is a requirement that teacher candidates undergo a one-year apprenticeship before they enter the classroom full-time.

Teachers may face more on-the-job training State education leaders Wednesday held the first in a series of forums to find ways to give 

Backers said the change would mean better qualified teachers.

"We feel the program would be very beneficial for the state of Louisiana," said Mike Milstead, superintendent of the Lincoln Parish school system, where a similar system is already in place.

"Find a way," Milstead said.

The proposal was the sole topic during a meeting of the Superintendents' Advisory Council, a 23-member panel that assists the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

BESE will be asked to endorse the plan next month, and more controversy is expected then.

The panel delayed action on the topic earlier this year, in part because of cost concerns.

Key boards endorse Louisiana teacher training overhaul in rare joint meeting The two boards that oversee public schools and higher education Wednesday signed off on a pl

The new rules could begin for the freshman class of 2018, state Superintendent of Education John White told local superintendents.

Under current requirements, teacher candidates undergo about 10-15 weeks of training as a student-teacher.

White said that, after weeks of meetings with higher education officials and others, a wide array of revisions were made to the original blueprint.

He said the initial, three-year rollout for a new way of training teachers could be done for $7.5 million, including $1,000 stipends for teachers who serve as mentors and $2,000 for students being trained to be teachers.

White said the overhaul would help improve the teacher retention rate.

"It has proven to be a very successful model in pilots," he said. "There are states and systems that have done this."

But some district superintendents and others called the move risky at a time when state finances are wobbly.

Scott Richard, executive director of the Louisiana School Boards Association, noted that state aid for public schools was cut $24 million earlier this year.

Richard called White's $7.5 million estimate low.

"These are fundamental changes in how we recruit and retain our workforce," he said.

"It's the fiscal issues that are the issue," Richard said. "Does that mean we can't move forward? I don't know."

White said a detailed financial report is in the works.

Brian LeJeune, president of the superintendents' group, distributed figures that showed bothersome teacher retirement trends in five southwest Louisiana school districts.

LeJeune, who is superintendent of the Jefferson Davis School District, said a one-year teacher residency requirement may have a chilling effect on prospective teachers.

"That is my concern," he said. "People are saying 'Enough is enough with education, I'm not going there,'" he said.

Steve Bartlett, superintendent of the Winn Parish school system, said he is concerned the new rules will push more students into alternative certification programs, which already account for about half of the state's teachers.

Alternative certification allows teacher candidates who already have an undergraduate degree to earn a certificate in 12-18 months through a fast-track program offered by universities or independent groups.

Debra Schum, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Principals, said she is worried about the state's ability to provide future funding for the overhaul.

White said three sources of federal aid could help finance the changes, and those three had major balances left over for the past three years.

Keith Courville, executive director of the Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana, praised the plan and said money concerns should not be an excuse for delay.
Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday assured listeners of his monthly call-in radio show that he remains optimistic about the potential for Louisiana to secure federal aid for the ongoing flood recovery efforts.

Edwards headed back to Washington, D.C. later Wednesday for his third time lobbying for federal flood relief.

Republicans and Democrats have not reached a deal on a stop-gap spending plan that would keep the federal government operating past Sept. 30. The short-term funding bill, formally known as a continuing resolution, has been identified as the fastest way to get flood money for the state before Congress recesses this month. Lawmakers won't return to D.C. until December, after this fall's elections.

"We have been well received and I sense there is support for giving us timely and meaningful assistance," Edwards said on his radio show.

Despite the fact that no continuing resolution deal has been hatched and more lawmakers have begun expressing skepticism of Louisiana's chances of securing funding this round, Edwards said he's confident that the state will get a "sizable down payment" in the continuing resolution and more money during the December "lame duck" session.

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, on Wednesday morning acknowledged that negotiations were still underway over what the stop-gap budget legislation will include.

"We do support flood aid to the victims in Louisiana," Ryan said during the House GOP leadership's morning news conference.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, told The Advocate on Tuesday that he believes that efforts to link Louisiana flood aid to funding for the Flint, Michigan, water crisis has emerged as a sticking point in negotiations.

During the rest of his call-in show, Edwards fielded questions from callers about climate change, education funding, flood aid for shrimpers and law enforcement's use of deadly force.

On climate change, in light of the catastrophic flooding this year (in north Louisiana this spring and south Louisiana last month), Edwards said he thinks that the human impact on global warming is "somewhat debatable."

"I don't argue with science. I don't think there is any doubt that the climate is changing," said Edwards, a Democrat. "I don't know that I'm prepared to go beyond that at the moment."

A caller who identified himself as Ricky from Lake Charles said he is a shrimper who is worried about the effect that the flood may have on the state's seafood industry.

Edwards said he 's aware that some experts are concerned that fresh water flowing into the brackish water could have an effect. He said that the Louisiana coalition has been stressing the floods impact on the agriculture sector.

"I'm not sure that's going to be in the initial package. we are going to continue to work on it," he said.

A caller identified as Anna from the governor's hometown of Amite, asked for his thoughts on the use of deadly force in law enforcement following high-profile cases across the country, including the death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.

Edwards said "there's no doubt" that there is a problem.

"Everybody can do better," he said, adding that he supports better law enforcement training as well as efforts to train people with how to deal with police officers  possibly as teens or children.

"The shame of it is there are many reasons to believe the application of lethal force by police officers not at an all-time high," he said. "The difference is that today many of these things are caught on camera ... Because all of this is being captured on camera, the issue is at the front of everybody's  it's on TV, it's on the internet  you see it."
After months of desultory campaigning, the U.S. Senate race is about to enter a critical and frenetic phase with six weeks until the primary election.

The major candidates in the 24-candidate field are about to launch their full-bore TV ad campaigns  in an era where the television ad wars usually separate the political thoroughbreds from the also-rans.

No candidate is overpowering the field, but state treasurer John N. Kennedy has led most polls with about 25 percent. That means Kennedy has a big target on his back, political analysts say.

Somebody has got to start saying something about Kennedy, said Roy Fletcher, a veteran ad man not in this race who knows a thing or two about saying things about other candidates. They have to go after him or hes in the runoff. You have to take him down. You have to ride the bull.

Until now, no candidate has tried to take down Kennedy for two reasons. One is that the other major candidates have been spending their time and resources raising money and introducing themselves to voters first, in a field where only Kennedy has run statewide more than once and built the name recognition that comes with that.

The other reason is that no candidate  or outside super PAC  has had enough money to attack him before now. But the political calendar is beginning to compress leading up to the Nov. 8 primary election.

To understand the next moves on the political chessboard, its worth remembering that Louisianas jungle primary puts the top two finishers in the runoff, regardless of party. So its possible that the runoff could involve two Republicans or two Democrats, but the most likely scenario is a Republican and a Democrat.

At this point, four Republicans are given the chance of challenging Kennedy for the top spot among the GOP candidates.

Political analysts believe that the attacks against Kennedy will most likely come from U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany, a Republican from Lafayette who represents Acadiana. Boustany had $2.5 million in contributions in hand, the largest amount of any candidate, through June 30, the latest campaign filing deadline.

Boustany and Kennedy are aiming for the same types of voters  moderate conservatives who dont necessarily view working with Democrats as a sin. Because the race has been so uneventful so far, no major issues have emerged yet to separate the two men.

Kennedy put Boustany on the defensive last week over allegations in a new book, Murder in the Bayou, that Boustany hired several prostitutes, including a couple of the so-called Jeff Davis 8 prostitutes who were murdered from 2005-09 in cases that authorities have not solved. Author Ethan Brown, a New Orleans resident who has written three previous true-crime non-fiction books, relied on anonymous sources to tie Boustany with the women. No hard evidence has emerged.

+2 John Kennedy wont stop pressing prostitution claims involving Charles Boustany State Treasurer John Kennedy said he wont back off asking about allegations that his oppone

The book does not accuse the congressman of playing any role in their disappearances. Boustany last week denounced the allegations as a lie and accused Kennedy of fanning the story.

Congressman Charles Boustany blames John Kennedy for spreading prostitute-involved claims U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany on Wednesday blamed State Treasurer John N. Kennedy  one of his 

Boustany responded to the allegations by broadcasting an ad placing him in a classic south Louisiana setting, a backyard crawfish boil, while he looked into the camera and called Washington broken.

The Senate race also features three other major Republicans  U.S. Rep. John Fleming, retired Col. Rob Maness and David Duke, the former state representative and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard  who are more doctrinaire and less compromising.

But only Fleming and Maness  or a super PAC associated with either one  is seen as having the money to tear down Kennedy. Fleming had $2.4 million on hand through June 30.

Maness had only $200,000 on hand through June 30, but the pro-Maness Warrior PAC is getting funded from a New York billionaire named Robert Mercer, lapolitics.com reported earlier this month.

Duke seems to be spending more time with out-of-town reporters than campaigning in Louisiana. He will begin broadcasting his first ad in the short term, said spokesman Mike Lawrence.

Kennedy was elected as treasurer in 1999 as a Democrat and finished third in the U.S. Senate election of 2004. He switched to the Republican Party in 2007 and lost the 2008 Senate race to incumbent U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, but went on to win re-election as treasurer three more times as a Republican.

In a hyper-partisan time, given his Democratic past, its quite likely that one of the Republicans will paint him as a political opportunist who is not a true party member.

Kennedy said he is expecting an onslaught.

That just goes with being the front-runner, he said in an interview. Im going to stay on my message. But I will respond appropriately if it gets out of hand.

Kennedy said he will begin his TV advertising soon. He had $1.3 million on hand through June 30.

A pro-Kennedy super PAC is airing a positive spot about him now that says he managed the states finances to the benefit of taxpayers. The super PAC, ESA Fund, is not supposed to coordinate its activities with the Kennedy campaign. Like other super PACs, it can accept unlimited donations.

Meanwhile, the two major Democrats  Foster Campbell, a public service commissioner from Bossier Parish, and Caroline Fayard, an attorney from Livingston Parish  are likely to engage in political combat with each other to try to be the top Democrat and make the runoff.

Campbell and Fayard have begun to draw distinctions between each other through public appearances and ads on African-American-oriented radio stations. Neither has launched TV ads yet.

Campbell had $860,000 through June 30 while Fayard had $630,000.

Campbell is running as a traditional Democratic populist who is so focused on Louisiana issues that he wont even say whether hes supporting Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee (or Donald Trump either). A member of the state Senate for 26 years and the PSC for another 14, Campbell presents himself as an experienced, steady hand.

Fayard calls herself a fresh face  shes 38 while Campbell is 69  who represents the future of the Democratic Party.

One of the Democrats has to start coalescing the Democratic vote, said Anthony Licciardi, a University of New Orleans doctoral student in political science who lives in Hammond. The next visible move will be negative ads on one or more of the Democrats.
Advocate staff photo by BILL FEIG  As, from left, Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, Rep. Gene Reynolds, D-Minden, and Dr. Rebekah Gee, DHH Secretary, watch, Gov. John Bel Edwards, right, makes an announcement regarding Medicaid expansion on the June 1 enrollment start date.
A controversial police shooting of a black man in Charlotte, North Carolina and the unrest its prompted throughout the city are a potent remi
A West Bank elected official has been barred from gambling or entering casinos as a condition of a $25,000 bond issued last week on allegation
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  A lawsuit in which a transgender inmate says she was raped after being locked up with a male prisoner last year in the newl
If all goes according to plan, a dilapidated South Side hotel facing the Beltline soon will be demolished to make way for a $2.28 million Mitsubishi auto dealership.

The Madison Plan Commission on Monday night approved a demolition permit for 910 Ann St., now occupied by the shuttered Expo Inn, which had been targeted by the city as a nuisance because of its history as a magnet for violence, drugs and prostitution.

Documents filed with the demolition permit indicate developers want to raze the hotel as quickly as possible and start construction this year on a new 17,650-square-foot auto dealership showroom and service center, which will have 12 service bays and a car wash. Demolition could take up to four weeks.

Pat McNamar, who with business partner Steve Ganser operates Mad City Sales and Service, 95 W. Beltline Highway, said the company has outgrown its existing space.

With our volume of sales and our growing following, we simply have been out of room for a few years, McNamar said. The new site offers the same great visibility on a busy stretch of the Beltline and over 2.5 times our current size, he said.

The current location is less than an acre, while the new site is 2.25 acres. McNamar said the added space allows the company to store inventory on-site, which it has not been able to do the past four years.

The new location also means taking the company to the next level by entering new vehicle sales with Mitsubishi. McNamar said he and his partner sought out the manufacturer and plan to rename their company Mad City Mitsubishi.

Were very excited to be changing from Mad City Sales to Mad City Mitsubishi, McNamar said.

We sought out Mitsubishi as they offer great vehicles and have been underserved in our market for many years, he said.

The closest Mitsubishi dealerships are about 50 miles away in Waukesha and Rockford, Illinois.

He said the existing Mad City Sales location will temporarily house the Mitsubishi dealership but the goal is to move the company to the Ann Street location when the new building is finished by July.

McNamar said he and his partner have not decided what to do with their current location.

The new dealership offices will occupy about 5,500 square feet of the building with the rest going to the vehicle service area.

The new site will feature 35 customer parking stalls and 190 spaces for new and used vehicles as well as an area for four bike stalls.

The value of the land is estimated at $400,000, according to project documents. The project is estimated at $2.28 million and is expected to create 40 temporary construction jobs.

McNamar said Mad City Sales has been experiencing steady growth in recent years. The company now employs about 47 people but expects to add between eight and 14 part-time and full-time positions over the next year. Weve been in business in Madison for 16 years, he said. To be able to give around 60 people a job in an exciting retail culture has been an amazing journey.

A $5.2 million, 124-room WoodSpring Suites extended stay hotel was originally proposed for the property in November 2015, but that plan never progressed beyond a concept meeting with city staff. Hotel developer Shariff Syed has said he still hopes to build a WoodSpring Suites somewhere in Madison and was seeking other South Side sites.
It's not every day flights are greeted with a champagne breakfast and a water cannon.

But so it went for Singapore Airlines' long-anticipated Capital Express route, which made history Wednesday morning as its first flight landed at Canberra International Airport.

Water cannons greeted the first Singapore Airlines flight. Credit:Jay Cronan

Its arrival marked the first time Canberra held regular international flights since Air Pacific's brief service of flights to Fiji in 2004.

The 266-seat Boeing 777-200 was eager for the special occasion, arriving from Singapore nearly half an hour before its scheduled 8.35am arrival.
All passengers on board Singapore Airlines' first international flights to Canberra in more than a decade were part of a significant day, but it was extra special for some.

Canberra-based Iraqi refugee Immir Saleem was reunited with three family members who had travelled through Jordan and Singapore to call the Australian capital home.

Singapore Airlines Flight SQ291 was the last leg of a jounrey that reunited a family of refugees now living in Canberra. Credit:Jay Cronan

Coincidentally, the last leg of their journey was flight SQ291, Singapore Airline's first Capital Express flight to arrive at Canberra International Airport.

After receiving flowers at the gate like all passengers on board the inaugural trip on Wednesday, they got some extra bunches from their excited friends and family.
Get free Richmond news alerts sent to your mobile phone. Click here

Richmond premiership captain Bruce Monteath has not ruled out standing for the Tigers' board in future but said he believed it has been crucial for the club's football rebuilding that the ill-fated Focus On Footy group immediately withdraw its challenge.

Monteath called his former teammate and newly appointed Richmond head of football Neil Balme late on Wednesday to convey that the Martin Hiscock-led challengers had brought their campaign to a halt.

However, the so-called Malvern Hotel group has re-emerged with club president Peggy O'Neal expected to meet representatives of that disenchanted body of supporters early next month.
What do you pay the CEO in a year where your company has posted a loss of more than $8 billion and been involved in a very public disaster like the fatal Samarco dam collapse in Brazil?

The Jac Nasser-chaired BHP Billiton flagged its solution a few weeks back when it said chief executive Andrew Mackenzie would not be getting his short or long-term bonus for the financial year just ended.

"The tailings dam failure at Samarco in November 2015 was a key consideration, along with the ongoing decline in commodity markets," said a spokesman at the time.

On Wednesday, BHP's annual report showed Mackenzie's "actual total remuneration" for the 2016 financial year was $US2.24 million  a fraction of the $US8 million he received just two years earlier.
Technology giant Hewlett-Packard is copping an international backlash after thousands of owners of its printers were suddenly blocked from using cheaper, third-party ink cartridges.

And consumer advocacy group Choice says it will begin investigating whether HP has breached Australian Consumer Law.

Early last week, HP printer owners using non-HP ink cartridges began to complain they were receiving error messages such as "cartridge problem", "one or more cartridges are missing or damaged" or "older generation cartridge".
Obesity, dental health, the occasional product recall - these are the staples of a confectionery maker's public relations team.

Not presidential elections and certainly not the plight of those fleeing the world's bloodiest conflict.

But the maker of Skittles has just delivered a brand management master lesson, according to one expert, after it was dragged into the heated debate around granting asylum to Syrian refugees.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump jnr, a top adviser to his United States presidential candidate father, tweeted a picture of a bowl of Skittles asking if his followers would take a handful if they knew that "three would kill you".
Paramedics from the Madison Fire Department turned into law enforcement officers Monday night, chasing after a man who snatched a womans backpack Downtown.

The firefighters didnt catch the thief but were able to give police a general idea of where he went, with officers later finding the backpack, which was missing valuables.

The incident happened at about 8 p.m. Monday at Madison Area Technical College, 211 N. Carroll St., Madison police said.

Paramedics were at the school attending to a medical emergency, when a criminal grabbed the backpack of a 24-year-old woman, said police spokesman Joel DeSpain. She had been sitting on a bench in a second-floor hallway when he grabbed the backpack lying next to her.

The woman tried to keep the man from taking the backpack but he won the tug of war, so she yelled Thief! and drew the attention of the paramedics.

They kicked into action, giving chase as the robber fled, DeSpain said.

An officer found the backpack next to a dumpster in a nearby alley, with the valuables, including an iPad, missing.
With only seven weeks to go until the election, the question at hand is whether voters will be satisfied with Trump's calls to get "tough and smart" or whether they will demand to know what exactly he is going to do to stop terrorism, because if they do want details, they won't find any. Beyond Trump's bluster, there is ... more bluster. To the extent that he has spelled out any specific policies, they are likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the danger.

In the case of the weekend attacks in New York City, New Jersey, and Minnesota, which did not kill anyone but did leave numerous people injured, Trump did not even wait to find out exactly what had happened before telling a rally in Colorado on Saturday night: "We better get very tough, folks ...It's a terrible thing that's going on in our world and in our country, and we are going to get tough and smart and vigilant." The next day he tweeted with transparent glee: "Under the leadership of Obama & Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories abroad. Time to change the playbook!"

Every time there is a terrorist attack attributed to Muslim extremists anywhere in the world, Donald Trump will rush forward to claim, as he did after an Easter bombing in Pakistan, that he alone can solve the problem of radical Islamic terrorism. His eagerness to score political points has come back to hurt him in the past, as when, following this summer's mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, he sent a tasteless tweet bragging: "Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!" He must have been deeply disappointed that the Orlando attack, which resulted in the deaths of 49 people, did not give him a boost in the polls. But, he apparently figures, there is still time to make political hay out of the suffering of others.

Trump laid out his counterterrorism agenda most comprehensively in an August 15 speech in Youngstown, Ohio. He spent the first part of the speech castigating President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for enabling the growth of terrorism by, among other actions, pulling troops out of Iraq and bombing Libya, with no acknowledgement that he had supported both moves at the time. Even more brazenly, he repeated his oft-told lie: "I was an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning - a major difference between me and my opponent." In fact, Trump did not publicly come out against the war until August 2004, which was not, as he claims, "very early in the conflict," but 17 months into the conflict, by which time it was obvious that it wasn't going to be a "cakewalk."

With Donald Trump, unlike other politicians, the criticism of opponents seems more personal and vitriolic. Credit:AP

In that same August 15 speech, Trump repeated another one of his much-cherished lines: "I have long said that we should have kept the oil in Iraq - another area where my judgment has been proven correct. According to CNN, ISIS made as much $500 million in oil sales in 2014 alone, fuelling and funding its reign of terror." It's true that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, makes money off oil, but it's mainly Syrian, not Iraqi, oil. And Trump never explained in that speech - or in any other public comment since - how he would have "kept the oil in Iraq." In addition to it being a war crime (you're not allowed to "keep" another nation's resources), such an move would have required a long-term US military occupation of the Iraqi oil fields, ports, and all of the land in between. If hatred of America is prevalent in the Muslim world now, imagine how much worse it would be if the United States had seized a Muslim nation's oil wealth.

In the blink of an eye, Trump switched tracks in that Ohio speech from outlining fantastic and unworkable non-solutions to advocating for what is already being done: "My administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cut off their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting." He even pledged to "find common ground with Russia in the fight against ISIS," which is exactly what the Obama administration is doing now in Syria to little effect.

And he vowed - wait for it - to convene an "international conference" to "halt the spread of radical Islam." An international conference! Brilliant! Why didn't anyone ever think of that before? Presumably he has never heard of all the conferences in Geneva and Vienna that Secretary of State John Kerry has convened with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to find a solution to the Syrian mess, Syria being the prime breeding ground of terrorism today.
NEW YORK: A moderate Malcolm Turnbull has emerged on to the world stage as the great multi-lateralist, celebrating global progress in securing higher living standards while praising the usually maligned United Nations for successes on climate change, arms control, and refugee assistance.

In his first-ever address to its General Assembly in New York, Mr Turnbull has dispensed with the usual conservative coolness towards the UN's perceived ineffectiveness and encroachment on nation states, to laud its performance in solving complex international problems.

"In less than a generation, billions have been lifted out of poverty and billions more enabled to connect to each other and to a world of knowledge and ideas in a manner barely imaginable a generation ago," he said.

"Economic freedom between markets and within them, supercharged by the Internet, innovation and technology, have enabled the longest run of economic progress in the history of the world."
The Turnbull Government will push the states to introduce targets aimed at reducing spiraling Indigenous incarceration levels in a clear demonstration of willingness to improve relations with Aboriginal leaders.

The issue was one of many discussed at what Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion later described as a "cracker of a meeting" with around 20 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders in Melbourne on Wednesday.

Senator Scullion agreed that incarceration levels and other key issues would be the subject of separate day-long discussions and be high on the agenda of the next meeting of state and federal leaders.

While the former prime minister, Tony Abbott, strongly resisted justice targets, Malcolm Turnbull expressed a willingness to revisit the issue after toppling Mr Abbott last year.
Milliner Viktoria Novak has fought more than four companies over claims they copied her designs. Credit:Melissa Adams ShowPo's Jane Lu said the offending piece, which has been removed from sale, was "definitely an oversight by myself and my team". "We've been retailing for years, but are new to manufacturing and not enough care was taken in this case," she said. "This is not an excuse. I am sorry and I take full responsibility and all items were removed from sale as soon as we realised. We are in the process of putting measures in place to ensure this does not happen again."



Morgan and Taylor did not respond to a request for an interview. Forever New did not respond to queries before deadline. In the left-hand image, Bec Judd wears a DE Millinery design, by Danica Erard. Erard claims the right-hand image is a copy. Novak and other milliners contacted by Fairfax Media said they were often bullied online for being too expensive.

"It doesn't matter if [my pieces cost] $5 or $5000, intellectual property theft is intellectual property theft," Novak said. Milliner Danica Erard, of DE Millinery, claims her designs have been copied by various companies. Credit:Steb Fisher The incident has again raised the issue of where fair inspiration ends and copying starts. Queensland-based Danica Erard cries foul when consumers can no longer distinguish her work from the knock-offs. Examples of designs by Danica Erard that she claims have been copied by other milliners and manufacturers.

She has settled with one company that used her design, but said she was aware of more. "It's hard to know what is fair inspiration and what is replication, but when you see your work, you know," she said. Lady of Leisure's Nadia cat ears. Credit:Joe Armao Melbourne milliner Lisa Leverington, of Lady of Leisure Millinery, stopped a company from selling a likeness of her "Nadia cat ears" piece in 2015. She said the biggest insult was that the replica, which was made in China, was on sale for just $10 less than her hand-made version.

Leverington, who is known for her edgy take on traditional millinery, said the only way forward was to keep innovating. "I didn't go into millinery to make money, I did it because I love it. And it's not right that local companies can go offshore and reproduce it." While Leverington has been spurred on by copycats, Jill Humphries of Jill and Jack Millinery closed her professional Facebook and Twitter accounts last week because she was fed up. "Everyone feels copying is rife, but no one wants to be the unpopular person who says something," she said. "You can be inspired by colours or technique, but you do it your own way. People do a two-day course and think they are a milliner  it's taken six years for me to get where I am." Handmade headpieces can take up to 40 hours' work, which is often less than $10 an hour.

Leverington believes copying has become more rife as smaller, headband-style pieces have grown in popularity. "They haven't put their own twist on it. They've gone to a lot of detail to achieve the same result instead of varying it up," she said. Leverington said she would keep fighting the copycats as they arise, but she said the industry needed greater protection through changes to laws, and greater consumer awareness. Loading "We have spoken about coming together and seeing what we can do about it," she said. "If we came together they might take a little bit more notice. There obviously aren't enough rules in place to stop these companies copying us."
It has been called the next big public health hazard, perhaps second only to current public enemy number one, sugar.

Too much of either has dire consequences for our health, except we consume one while the other can consume us.

Loneliness: Some people are more inclined to feel it. Credit:iStock

Rates of loneliness in Australia and the world are rising and we tend to assume that it is circumstantial, the counterintuitive result of us becoming more disconnected from each other despite the fact that we are more connected than ever.

While environmental factors are important, previous research has found that about 50 per cent of loneliness is genetic.
Almost 95 per cent of households have completed a census form despite an embarrassing website outage on census night and lingering political controversy over the national headcount.

The Bureau of Statistics says it already has sufficient data for a "high quality" census, ahead of the deadline for forms on Friday.

Here are five things we know about this year's unusually controversial census.

1. Participation
Two men men linked to violent Sydney street gang DLASTHR are behind bars accused of trying to kill a 14-year-old after a fight at a train station.

The teenage boy was found bleeding and suffering multiple stab wounds when he stumbled up to an apartment block on Wilga Street in Fairfield last month.

The 14-year-old boy stumbled up to this unit block on Wilga Street in Fairfield after being stabbed in August. Credit:Ava Benny-Morrison

A resident went to the boy's aid, dragging him inside his unit and waiting with him until paramedics arrived.

It is a believed the boy, who lives in the Fairfield area, was involved in a confrontation at the nearby train station and was chased to Wilga Street, a few hundred metres away.
A Year 7 student has been hospitalised following a muck-up day incident on Sydney's northern beaches.

Police are hunting for a group of Year 12 boys who allegedly chased and attacked students from St Luke's Grammar School, Dee Why, as they got off a school bus on Tuesday afternoon.

The Freshwater bus stop where a group of Year 7 boys were chased and bashed. Credit:Google StreetView

The younger boys were targeted just after 4pm as they walked home from the bus stop near Wyadra Avenue, Freshwater.

A Year 7 student ran away to nearby Harbord Park where he was allegedly tackled to the ground by a male who then fled the scene, a police spokesman said.
A tense situation at East High School involving a student armed with what turned out to be a pellet gun was defused by the schools educational resource officer, Madison police said.

The educational resource officer, who is a Madison police officer, talked to, then disarmed the 17-year-old male student who was arguing with other students, police said.

The student was tentatively charged with possession of a weapon on school premises and disorderly conduct.

The incident happened at about 10 a.m. Friday at the school at 2222 E. Washington Ave.

The officer, prior to discovering the student was armed, worked with him to calm him down, by encouraging him to make good decisions, said police spokesman Joel DeSpain. She told him she wanted him to take a deep breath, understood he was upset, but that she would keep him safe and would try to keep everyone safe.

The officer asked the student if he was armed and he said he was, with the gun in his waistband.

I ordered him to place his hands up and not near his waistband, the officer wrote in her report.

She lifted his sweater and safely removed the gun, DeSpain said. It turned out to be a pellet gun, which also had a mounted laser light.

The officer said in her report that she continued to talk to the student, encouraged him to be cooperative and thanked him for being honest about having a gun.

Nobody was injured during the incident.
Brisbane asylum seeker Mojgan Shamsalipoor has been released after two years in detention, after she was awarded a bridging visa on Wednesday.

It is understood the former Yeronga State High School student was released from detention on Wednesday morning and has been reunited with husband, Milad Jafari.

Ms Shamsalipoor sought asylum in Australia in 2012 after fleeing an arranged marriage to a 60-year-old man and several assaults in Iran.

If returned to Iran, Ms Shamsalipoor feared the prospect of prison and physical threats, exacerbated by her decision to take part in multicultural dance festivals.
Traffic is almost back to normal following a crash that caused hours of delays for CBD workers driving in to Brisbane from the north.

About 9.30am, slow patches remained on the Gateway Motorway through Bracken Ridge and Gympie Road at Carseldine but had otherwise mostly cleared.

EARLIER

The "domino effect" has struck again, ruining the morning drive to work for commuters from the north as the Bruce Highway banked up past Deception Bay.
Tiahleigh's foster father Richard Thorburn has been charged with murder. Credit:Glenn Hunt "The defendant said he was concerned about her being pregnant. "The defendant further outlines the victim had spoken to his mother about it." Mr Thorburn was concerned about Tiahleigh being pregnant, the police prosecutor told court. Credit:Instagram A friend of Tia's allegedly told police the 12-year-old had complained to Mr Thorburn's mother, Julene, about sexual contact with the defendant.

Mr Thorburn's defence lawyer John Ide called for his client to be granted bail on charges including incest, considering his age, lack of criminal history and the potential to spend more time behind bars awaiting a decision than an eventual sentence might impose. Tiahleigh's biological mother Cindy with other supporters outside the packed Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Credit:Glenn Hunt The victim was put into the care and protection of this defendant and his family but this defendant betrayed her trust. Police prosecutor Sergeant Ellen French "He's a young man with no criminal history whatsoever," he said. "In my submission it couldn't be said he's an unacceptable risk of any of the things that's asserted by the prosecution."

Julene Thorburn pleaded guilty to perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. Credit:Jorge Branco Sergeant French told the court Mr Thorburn had denied on five separate occasions any involvement or sexual conduct with Tia and colluded with his family to mislead police. "Eventually the defendant has admitted to the authorities that he had lied on multiple occasions in order to conceal the sexual intercourse between himself and Tiahleigh," she said. Joshua Thorburn, charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. Credit:Glenn Hunt A friend of Tia's also told police the young girl had approached her about a month before her alleged murder, saying "Trent tried to touch me", Sergeant French said.

Mr Thorburn has been charged with incest, perverting the course of justice and two counts of perjury relating to secret Crime and Corruption Commission hearings in July and September this year. "The victim was put into the care and protection of this defendant and his family but rather than providing her with the care and love that she required as a child, this defendant betrayed her trust," Sergeant French said. "He abused his position as big brother and took advantage of her and the consequences are a young life has been taken." Mr Thorburn, an avid dancer, wanted to be released to live with his mother and older brother Joshua, 20, who were charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice but released after all four were hauled into Logan Central police station on Tuesday. Mr Thorburn's entrance to a cramped, wood-panelled Beenleigh courtroom overflowing with purple shirts in support of Tia's mother, Cindy, captured every eyeball.

He was led into the glass-walled witness box in a brown, prison-issue T-shirt, his blond hair cut short at the sides and slicked back on top. After a short hiccup, two dark-blue-shirted officers cracked the door to the off-triangular booth, sitting Mr Thorburn front right, from his perspective. The cuffs came off, along with an officer's hat placed in front of the trio. Just after midday, defence and prosecutors handed up their arguments to Magistrate Pamela Dowse, who considered them for at least 15 minutes as supporters and the media waited in whispered all-but silence. One supporter, not knowing the rules, took a photo of the accused, earning a court officer's reprimand. Another two armed officers watched from the public gallery, removing their caps and standing in front of the crowd rapidly spilling out of the normally reserved space and onto the floor of the court.

Prosecutors argued Mr Thorburn was "highly likely" to interfere with witnesses and "would attempt in every way shape and form to evade and avoid every risk" of imprisonment, including by failing to show up to court. Mr Ide argued these risks could have been negated by strict reporting conditions and a ban on contact with witnesses. Sergeant French aired concerns the 19-year-old was a risk to other children through his job as a dance instructor but Mr Ide assure the court his client had quit in the lead-up to charges being laid. After hearing the arguments from both sides, Ms Dowse kept Mr Thorburn behind bars, saying he was "not a candidate for bail at this point in time" but another application could be made in the future. He will not have to appear for the case's next mention on November 9.
Taiwan's defence ministry has said it is asking Google to blur satellite images showing what experts say appear to be new military installations on Itu Aba, Taipei's sole holding in the disputed South China Sea.

The revelation of new military-related construction could raise tensions in the contested waterway, where China's building of airstrips and other facilities has worried other claimants and the United States.

Four three-pronged structures off the coast of Itu Aba, as seen on Google Earth.

The images seen on Google Earth show four three-pronged structures sitting in a semi-circle just off the northwestern shoreline of Itu Aba, across from an upgraded airstrip and recently constructed port that can dock 3000-ton frigates.

"Under the pre-condition of protecting military secrets and security, we have requested Google blur images of important military facilities," Taiwan Defence Ministry spokesman Chen Chung-chi said on Wednesday, after local media published the images on Itu Aba.
Four Melbourne primary school children have been hospitalised after their bus collided with a car in Elsternwick.

Two of the students suffered abdominal injuries, one received neck injuries, and the fourth had glass in their eye after the crash on Wednesday morning.

The four were taken to the Royal Children's Hospital in a stable condition and the female car driver was planning to see her own doctor, an Ambulance Victoria spokesman said.

There were more than 20 people on the bus when it collided with the car on the Nepean Highway about 9am.
An incoming Nationals MP has lost his Supreme Court bid to force the government to allow him to be sworn into state Parliament.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court refused to intervene in the dispute that has prevented Luke O'Sullivan from taking his seat in the Victorian upper house.

Nationals MP Luke O'Sullivan outside the Supreme Court. The court refused to force the Victorian government to allow him to be sworn into Parliament. Credit:Jason South

The Andrews government has refused to allow a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament to allow Mr O'Sullivan to be sworn in.

A joint sitting of the Victorian Parliament is required to allow Mr O'Sullivan to take his seat.
Did you figure out today's brainteaser?

Here's the answer:

Today's brainteaser definitely divided people into 10 groups - those familiar with binary code and those who aren't.

I boasted earlier that I had received 10,000 emails from people who knew the answer. The blog doesn't quite get that many avid readers - that figure might have been in binary too.

The first to tweet me the answer was @tony_3163 while Chris G was first to email me the solution.
Melbourne community radio station JOY 94.9 FM was forced to evacuate its studios on Tuesday night after receiving a bomb threat, the latest in a string of intimidating messages the LGBTIQ organisation fears will only worsen ahead of the potential marriage plebiscite.

JOY staff received the threatening email shortly before 8.30pm.

Staff at the radio station are a little shaken, but otherwise it's business as usual. Credit:Phil Carrick PJC

They evacuated the studios as per the organisation's emergency response plan, which was updated shortly after the Orlando nightclub shooting in the US in June.

The program on air at the time the threat was received was Beyond The Binary, a show for trans and gender-diverse youth.
WA Green's Senator Scott Ludlam has lashed out at claims almost half of Australia supports a ban on Muslim immigration.

An Essential Research poll released on Wednesday found 49 per cent of Australians were in favour of a ban on Muslim immigration, and listed the most common reasons for a ban as fears over terrorism, and the belief Muslim migrants do not integrate into Australian society.

Green Senator Scott Ludlam has lashed out at claims half of Australia wants a ban on Muslim immigration. Credit:Andrew Meares

Mr Ludlam took hit out at the report, describing it as 'sobering reading'.

"Nearly half of the people you share your life with have the view that people of a particular faith are all too great a risk to their Australian way of life," he wrote.
The shooting, which occurred just before 4 p.m. eastern time, and the subsequent protest in the University City neighbourhood in northeast Charlotte revived scrutiny of a police department that last drew substantial national attention about three years ago, when a white officer was quickly charged with voluntary manslaughter after he killed an unarmed black man.

Demonstrators clashed with police officers in riot gear late Tuesday in Charlotte, North Carolina, after the police shot and killed a black man while trying to serve a warrant on another person at an apartment complex.

The circumstances of Tuesday's shooting were, at least according to the police, far different, with department officials saying that an officer had opened fire because the black man, Keith L. Scott, 43, who they said was armed with a gun, "posed an imminent deadly threat."

Although their accounts sometimes diverged, members of Scott's family generally told local news outlets that he had not had a weapon. Instead, they said, he had been clutching a book while waiting to pick up a child after school.

Police fire tear gas into the crowd of protesters on Old Concord Road, Charlotte, late on Tuesday night. Credit:Ely Portillo

The police said late Tuesday that "agitators" were "destroying marked police units" and that officers were working "to restore order and protect our community."

The police said early Wednesday that about a dozen officers had been injured; one officer was hit in the face with a rock.
side impact with a large SUV or pickup truck;

moderate-offset frontal impact;

small-offset frontal impact;

roof-deformation consistent with a rollover;

rear collision capable of inducing whiplash.

- The 2017 Chrysler Pacifica has earned a rating of Top Safety Pick+ for 2016 from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).**The achievement marks yet another minivan milestone for FCA US LLC, which pioneered the segment more than 30 years ago.Having sold more than 14 million minivans since inventing the segment in 1983, we know whats important to minivan buyers, says Tim Kuniskis, Head of Passenger Car Brands  FCA North America. The 2017 Chrysler Pacifica is the sum of all the knowledge weve accumulated about minivans and the people who are proud to own them. Among the things we know  safety is one of the most important purchase reasons and achieving the Top Safety Pick+ rating helps to establish Pacifica as the segment leader.While the all-new Pacifica achieves top scores for crashworthiness, the best safety features are those that help drivers avoid collisions. The Chrysler Pacificas Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system earns a rating of superior, the highest possible grade that IIHS awards for this technology.The Pacificas system is called Forward Collision Warning-Plus. It features sensor-fusion technology, which combines the particular attributes of radar sensors and cameras for greater precision. The system only responds when camera and radar agree that a frontal impact appears imminent.System response comprises audible and visual driver warnings and/or AEB. No other minivan features sensor-fusion technology; competitive systems employ either cameras or radar sensors.Sensor-fusion, once reserved for luxury-segment vehicles, is the technology of choice at FCA US, says Mike Dahl, Head of Vehicle Safety and Regulatory Compliance.As AEB capability proliferates across our vehicle lineup, we are committed to using sensor-fusion technology, Dahl says. It is a significant stepping stone in our exploration of autonomous-vehicle development, the next horizon for occupant safety.No mainstream automaker offers AEB in more segments than FCA US LLC. AEB is available in nine FCA US vehicles across six segments:Top Safety Pick+ status is contingent on the availability of AEB technology, provided the system achieves ratings of advanced or superior and the vehicle achieves good ratings for crashworthiness. IIHS crash tests simulate:Material choice is a key contributor to the all-new Pacificas outstanding crashworthiness. High-strength steel accounts for 72 percent of its body structure, 38 percent of which is Advanced High-Strength Steel (AHSS).High-strength materials engineered into the all-new Pacifica, such as press-hardened steel and AHSS, which is up to 300 percent stronger than conventional mild steel, afford structural benefits while also delivering fuel-saving weight reduction. The all-new Chrysler Pacifica is 250 pounds lighter than the vehicle it replaces, and its body structure accounts for more than half of that difference.The 2017 Chrysler Pacifica joins the 2016 Fiat 500X and 2016 Chrysler 200 on the list of vehicles to earn Top Safety Pick+ status for 2016. The Pacifica boasts more than 100 available safety and security features, from LaneSense Lane Departure Warning-Plus, to 360-degree Surround View, which provides a birds eye view of the vehicle and its surroundings  from the drivers seat.** The designation applies to any 2017 Chrysler Pacifica produced after August 2016.The Chrysler brand has delighted customers with distinctive designs, craftsmanship, intuitive innovation and technology all at an extraordinary value since the company was founded in 1925.Whether it is the family-room-on-wheels functionality of the all-new Chrysler Pacifica minivan, the groundbreaking, bold design of the Chrysler 300, or the simple elegance and extraordinary driving experience of the Chrysler 200, Chrysler brand vehicles reward the passion, creativity and sense of accomplishment of its owners. Beyond just exceptionally designed vehicles, the Chrysler brand has incorporated thoughtful features into all of its products, such as the innovative center console with pass through storage and sliding cup holders in the Chrysler 200, the industry-exclusive Stow 'n Go seating and storage system on the Chrysler Pacifica and the fuel-saving Fuel Saver Technology in the Chrysler 300.The Chrysler brand's succession of innovative product introductions continues to solidify the brand's standing as the leader in design, engineering and value. The premium for the Chrysler brand is in the product, not the price.
Mobil 1 Asks Fans to Share Their Normal Drives

HOUSTON sEPTEMBER 21, 2016; ExxonMobil is spotlighting Mobil 1 brand loyalists and their anything-but-normal drives in the Our Normal Drives digital video series  showcasing passion and performance stories from Mobil 1 loyalists, partners, specialty car builders and NASCAR-related specialists. Now, ExxonMobil is asking fans of the Mobil 1 brand to share their normal drive stories on social media.

Starting today, consumers whose day-to-day driving experiences transcend the regular commute  and demand a high-performance motor oil  will have the opportunity to share their Mobil 1 motor oil performance stories on the Mobil 1 Twitter and Facebook pages. By tagging their posts with both the #Mobil1Performance and #Sweepstakes hashtags, consumers will be automatically entered for a chance to win Mobil 1 products. For example, participants can share a social post such as, My normal drive is a daily 120-mile journey through the Smoky Mountains steep, winding roads. #Mobil1Performance #Sweepstakes; or, I drive a tow truck through stop-and-go traffic and weather extremes, all while pulling heavy loads. #Mobil1Performance #Sweepstakes.

Each month, two winners will be selected at random. One first place winner will receive 24 quarts of Mobil 1 motor oil, and one second place winner will receive two pieces of Mobil 1 branded merchandise.

Mobil 1 technology offers the ultimate engine protection for different vehicles and driving conditions, said Herbert Steurer, passenger vehicle lubricants brand manager for ExxonMobil Fuels & Lubricants. Thats why ExxonMobil is highlighting Mobil 1 motor oils performance by celebrating the passionate and loyal Mobil 1 enthusiasts whose lifestyles and professions consistently require them to push their engines beyond what are considered ?normal driving experiences.

The Our Normal Drives sweepstakes is open to all legal residents of the United States and the District of Columbia who have reached the age of majority in his or her state, or territory of residence at time of entry. A full list of official rules can be found at http://mobil.co/2czD5ta.

Previous features within the Our Normal Drives series include:
Consumers Union Issues Statement on EPA's Fuel Economy Report







*Consumers Union to Federal Agencies: Fuel Economy Standards Should Remain Strong In Order to Maintain Consumer Savings and Preserve Consumer Choice*

WASHINGTON, DC September 21, 2016; The 2025 standards previously supported by automakers should remain in place, according to comments filed today by Consumers Union <http://consumersunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016_09_21_CU-Comments-to-EPA-NHTSA-on-MTR-TAR-MY2022-2025.pdf>. The comments are in response to the draft Technical Assessment Report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in July.

Maintaining robust fuel economy standards helps ensure that consumers can keep transportation costs down," said Shannon Baker; Branstetter, energy policy counsel for Consumers Union (CU), the policy and mobilization arm of Consumer Reports. "Automakers have made great progress in meeting, and in many cases beating, standards for today; all while maintaining record sales and profits. We want to see this progress continue through 2025 so that consumers can benefit from fuel savings and increased consumer choice".

The findings from the draft technical report support the conclusion that the 2025 standards are reasonable and achievable. As the report states, fuel-saving technologies to meet the standards are already available in the market today, and the costs of those technologies are lower than previously anticipated.

The draft report also found that:

Automakers are developing and deploying new technologies at significantly faster rates and greater scale than previously anticipated, including improvements to engine start/stop, continuously variable transmissions, high-compression engines, and 48-volt batteries, among other technologies; -

The costs of these technologies are expected to be similar or slightly lower than initially anticipated; and -

Automakers can meet the standards primarily through advancements to traditional gasoline engines, with limited deployment of newer hybrid, all-electric or plug-in electric engines.

The comments filed today highlight Consumers Unionas recent analyses that find maintaining strong standards will have substantial benefit for consumers. A recent CU analysis found a clear link between vehicles with higher fuel economy and increased owner satisfaction <http://consumersunion.org/research/mpg-owner-satisfaction-report/>. And a separate CU analysis <http://consumersunion.org/news/fuel-economy-savings-report/> found that consumers could save thousands of dollars in fuel costs over the life of a vehicle that meet the 2025 standards, even at todayas low gas prices.

Increasing efficiency would also align with consumer demand. According to a June 2016 Consumers Union survey <http://consumersunion.org/research/survey-strong-public-support-for-improving-fuel-economy-in-new-vehicles/>, strong majorities of Americans believe increasing fuel efficiency is important (84%) and that the government should continue to set standards for higher fuel economy in cars and trucks (70%). In fact, more than half of all Americans (53%) expect to have higher fuel economy with their next vehicle purchase, across nearly every type of vehicle.

Unfortunately, we continue to hear false claims from automakers <http://consumersunion.org/research/fuel-economy-mythbuster/> that recent low gas prices and consumer buying habits make these standards too difficult to achieve. Car and truck buying trends do not impact automakers; ability to comply with the standards because the standards are "footprint-based" meaning that an automaker's specific fuel economy target for its fleet will depend on the size and mix of vehicles it actually sells. Fuel economy targets are lower for SUVs and trucks, and therefore fleets with a higher proportion of larger vehicles have lower targets to meet and automakers can still comply with the standards.

"Car technologies improve every year and robust fuel economy standards ensure that these technological advances are also directed toward improving fuel economy and helping consumers keep transportation costs down" said Baker-Branstetter. "As the technical report suggests, automakers are on track, and the technologies to make further improvements are already out there. The federal government should stay the course on improving fuel economy standards for model years 2022-2025. When they do, it's a win for consumers and the environment."
Wisconsin lawmakers on Wednesday ordered auditors to perform a sweeping review of conditions at the states largest veterans nursing home, after a newspaper report in August alleged it was providing substandard care.

The Republican-controlled Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted unanimously to authorize a probe at the Wisconsin Veterans Home in King that will examine staffing levels and training, revenue and spending trends, compliance with state and federal regulations, how the state monitors the facility, and maintenance needs.

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary John Scocos told the committee at a hearing before the vote that agency investigators havent been able to substantiate any of the allegations of substandard care. But he said hed welcome an audit because it will show the home is performing well.

Whatever you want, he told the committee. Its sad to see some of the things in the media, the allegations. But were driving on. If there are things to tune up, well tune them up, but were pretty solid on our care for veterans.

Around 700 residents receive care at King, which provides them with nursing, counseling and social activities. The Capital Times ran a story in August raising questions about substandard care, medical errors, deteriorating buildings and prolonged staffing shortages. Sen. Luther Olson, a Ripon Republican whose district includes the home, asked the audit committee to order a review after receiving complaints from residents and staff who he said were too afraid of retribution to come forward before the newspaper published its story.

Frankly, I am appalled that there is an environment at King where people fear retribution for simply being concerned about the well-being of a member under their care or their loved one, Olsen told the committee.

Scocos told the committee that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found the King facilities were in full compliance with all its standards during surveys in June and last year, he said, adding that Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2014 authorized construction of an $80 million facility at King to replace some aging buildings.

Walker appointed Scocos as VA secretary.

Democrats on the committee challenged state Auditor Joe Chrisman to reconcile the accolades with the complaints. They also demanded he find out who made the decision to transfer $18.5 million from a surplus that the states veterans homes have accumulated to other veterans programs when that money could have gone for upgrades at King. Timothy Michael, a former U.S. Marine from Oshkosh who runs an annual motorcycle ride to raise money for the King facility, asked the committee during the pre-vote hearing why he was bothering if the homes have a surplus.

We have some red flags in terms of judgment calls ... of how money is spent, said Rep. Terese Berceau, D-Madison.

Scocos said the transfers went to support other veterans programs. Chrisman, the auditor, promised the committee he would conduct a comprehensive review of the King homes funding.

Several people who spoke at the hearing suggested complaints about King may be exaggerated, given the emotional distress that often goes with living in a nursing home. Tim Thiers, a Navy veteran who worked as a veterans service officer for Manitowoc County, said he has visited King multiple times for his job and to deliver donations and he never saw anything untoward there.
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 21, 2016 -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) 5-Star Safety Ratings Program provides consumers with information about the crash protection and rollover safety of new vehicles, with more stars equaling safer cars.1 Mercury Insurance recently analyzed vehicles that received five stars to determine which would be the most affordable to insure for teen drivers.

Mercury examined 2016 model year vehicles for which ratings are available to compile the list, which was created based on the Mercury price for full coverage  liability, comprehensive and collision  in California.

Here is the complete top-10 list for 2016 vehicles with a 5-Star Safety Rating, beginning with the cheapest to insure.

Kia Sportage Kia Soul Hyundai Tucson Honda CR-V LX Honda Fit Hyundai Elantra GT VW Golf Sportwagen SW Subaru Outback Dodge Dart Honda HR-V EX

"Teenagers are statistically the most likely to be involved in a collision, so it's important for them to be in a vehicle that offers them the most protection if that happens," said Jim Reeves, Group Manager, R&D for Mercury Insurance. "Mercury's hope for members of our community is that they remain safe, and we're proud to be able to provide them with affordable insurance options to help them do that."

Visit Mercury's Drive Safe Challenge to learn more about how to protect teens behind the wheel.

ABOUT MERCURY INSURANCE

Mercury Insurance (MCY) is a multiple-line insurance organization predominantly offering personal automobile, homeowners and commercial insurance through a network of independent agents in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia. Since 1962, Mercury has specialized in offering quality insurance at affordable prices. For more information visit www.mercuryinsurance.com or Facebook and follow the company on Twitter.
if the people of Biafra want Republic of Biafra, it will be a reality during my administration. ----Donald Trump Donald Trump I wi...
The Madison City Council on Tuesday rejected a plan by Mayor Paul Soglin that would have banned people from sleeping on Downtown sidewalks during certain hours.

Council members voted 11-7 against the proposal that would have barred people from sleeping or lying down on sidewalks and public rights of way between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. in the Central Business District, essentially Capitol Square, State Street and the surrounding streets.

Opponents criticized the proposal as pushing homeless people out rather than providing solutions, while supporters argued that people sleeping on sidewalks impedes the vitality of Downtown and can create safety and health problems.

We are not interested in fining anyone. What we are interested in is giving those who are in law enforcement the tool to do and perform their responsibilities, Soglin said.

Those who were against the plan suggested funding more supportive services, such as storage lockers for people who are homeless and rapid reentry housing programs.

An ordinance to stop people from sleeping on the sidewalk for a couple hours is not going to do anything to make a difference, said Ald. Rebecca Kemble, 18th District.

Several council members said they were conflicted, acknowledging the benefits of having sidewalks clear but expressing uncertainty about whether an ordinance was the answer.

This is not solely about how we have failed to provide services to homeless, said Ald. David Ahrens, 15th District, who was among those voting in favor of the ban. Its also a matter of an issue of fairness to the people who are stepping over them to go in and out of work and to go about their business.

Alds. Samba Baldeh, Tim Gruber, Steve King, Paul Skidmore, Mike Verveer and Barbara Harrington-McKinney also voted in favor of the ban. Alds. Sheri Carter and Denise DeMarb were absent.

Soglins proposal would have allowed someone one verbal warning before being fined $10 for a first offense and $25 for second and subsequent offenses. The initial draft of the proposal had fines for a first offense at $100 and additional violations at $250.

Ald. Amanda Hall, 3rd District, asked other council members to put themselves in the situation of someone who has to sleep outside and whether they would feel safe sleeping during the early morning hours.

Madison police Central District Capt. Carl Gloede said the goal of having an ordinance is not to write tickets but to have people know the rules and comply with them.

There is no simple solution, he said. There is no one-size-fits-all, but what I have seen work, at least successfully, is conversations, a set of boundaries, rules and expectations.

While it was shot down by three committees, the proposal was approved by the Public Safety Review Committee at its Thursday meeting.

The proposal also would have excluded people from lying or sleeping on land that holds city offices during the same hours. An exception for someone with a medical emergency was built into the proposal.

Soglin attempted a similar plan last year that would have restricted lying on Downtown sidewalks from 5 a.m. until 1 a.m. in the Downtown area. It also would have limited how long belongings could be kept on benches. Council defeated the plan 15-1 in October 2015.

Last fall, Madison police started enforcing a ban on sleeping overnight on the front porch of the City-County Building, 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., and the Madison Municipal Building across the street. A committee that runs the City-County Building voted to enact the ban because of concerns about health and safety.

Also on Tuesday, council members passed a resolution in support of the Standing Rock Sioux, other tribal nations and a coalition of environmentalists, scientists and farmers opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
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Terry Kohler, scion of a Wisconsin business and political empire who made his own mark in both spheres, has died, according to a statement Tuesday from Gov. Scott Walker. He was 82, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Information about Kohlers death was not immediately available late Tuesday.

Walker, in his statement, described Kohler as a leader in business, politics, sailing, wildlife conservation, aviation, efforts to promote strong marriages, and so much more.

Kohler was the son of former Wisconsin Gov. Walter Kohler Jr., and the grandson of former Gov. Walter Kohler Sr. Both men were executives at Kohler Company, a leading Wisconsin manufacturer.

Terry Kohler made his own bid for governor in 1982. He won the Republican nomination but lost the general election to Democrat Tony Earl.

He also was an unsuccessful candidate for U.S. Senate in 1980.

Afterward, Kohler remained a high-profile GOP activist, Republican National Committee member and campaign donor in Wisconsin. He also was a business leader in the state as president of Vollrath Corp., a Sheboygan-based manufacturer, and of Windway Capital Corp.

Kohlers role as a campaign contributor continued until his death. Most recently, his contributions helped seed a super PAC, Reform America Fund, that began targeting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton this week with a million-dollar statewide ad blitz.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus of Kenosha released a statement late Tuesday hailing Kohlers influence.

His leadership not only helped keep our party strong at the national level, but also helped foster a conservative renaissance in Wisconsin, Priebus said.
Prinsjesdag 2016 (Photo: SANDER KONING/AFP/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands attended the annual opening of parliament in The Hague. The event is one that features a bit of pomp and circumstance, albeit with a daytime twist.

Photo: REMKO DE WAAL/AFP/Getty Images

The dress code for the event is morning dress  the daytime equivalent of evening formal wear  which means that the men (including the king) wear a morning coat, a waistcoat, and striped trousers, while the women wear long gowns with hats. This year, Queen Maxima wore a vivid gown that featured a royal blue blouse and an elaborate embroidered gold and navy skirt. She also wore one of her trademark hats: an exaggerated, architectural piece that sits at a dramatic angle.

Photo: KOEN VAN WEEL/AFP/Getty Images

With her sapphire-colored gown, Maxima wore some of the familys grandest sapphire jewels. Her earrings are the elaborate figure-eight-shaped diamond and sapphire earrings. They were made in the early 1960s using stones from the dismantled tiara from Queen Wilhelminas wedding gift parure, and theyre part of the familys jewel foundation.

Photo: KOEN VAN WEEL/AFP/Getty Images

On her right hand, Maxima wore the large diamond ring that she received from Willem-Alexander after the birth of their third daughter, Princess Ariane. The ring features an impressive emerald-cut diamond flanked by two smaller diamonds.

Photo: FRANK VAN BEEK/AFP/Getty Images

The absolute jewelry showstopper of the day was the brooch that Maxima pinned to the waist of her gown (and over the top of the sash of the Order of the Netherlands Lion): the stunning diamond and sapphire corsage ornament that once belonged to Queen Wilhelmina. The sapphire in the center of the brooch may have an even longer legacy  its possible that it once belonged to Queen Anna, the Romanov-born wife of King Willem II.

Photo: KOEN VAN WEEL/AFP/Getty Images

The only other senior members of the royal family who attend Prinsjesdag these days are the kings brother, Prince Constantijn, and his wife, Princess Laurentien. Her diamond chandelier earrings are of particular interest, because theyre generally thought to belong personally to Queen Maxima. Perhaps they were a sister-in-law loan for the day? Laurentien also secured the sash of the Order of the House of Orange with a jewel from the family collection: the diamond moth brooch.
Emma Watson delivered a report to the United Nations on Tuesday about womens treatment at universities, and she used the occasion to give a powerful speech about the rights of female and minority students.

The experience must make it clear that the safety of women, minorities, and anyone who may be vulnerable is a right, and not a privilege, the Harry Potter actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador said.

The report Watson presented, called the HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 University Parity Report, laid out the specific commitments made by 10 participating universitiesincluding the University of Oxford and Georgetown Universityto achieve gender parity. Watson launched HeForShe, an advocacy group for the equal treatment of women, in 2014.

We believe that students should leave university believing in, striving for, and expecting societies of true equality, Watson said.
The photo of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his crony David Wildstein yukking it up at Ground Zero during a memorial observance of the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was insult enough to the thousands who were murdered there.

Insult becomes obscenity as a federal prosecutor now tells us what the government believes Christie and Wildstein and fellow crony Bill Baroni were laughing about that day in 2013.

As recounted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna in Newark federal court on Monday, Wildstein and Baroni bragged to Christie during this 9/11 memorial that they had shut down access lanes leading from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge three days before to punish the mayor of that New Jersey town because he had failed to endorse the governor for re-election.

The big laugh was that Wildstein and Baroni and Christies chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, had been ignoring repeated calls from the mayor, Mark Sokolich.

Sokolich had been growing increasingly desperate because the traffic resulting from the lane closures was creating what he termed a public safety emergency in which ambulances and other emergency vehicles were having trouble getting through.

The evidence will show that Baroni and Wildstein were so committed to their plan to punish Mayor Sokolich during those few minutes they had alone with the governor they bragged about the fact there were traffic problems in Fort Lee and Mayor Sokolich was not getting his calls returned, Khanna said.

The prosecutors remarks were delivered to the jury at the opening of what is expected to be a six-week trial. Baroni and Kelly face conspiracy, wire fraud, and civil rights charges for their part in the lane closures, which stretched for five days.

Wildstein has already pleaded guilty and is expected to be the prosecutors star witness in exchange for a more lenient sentence. The charges against Baroni and Kelly also include misusing an organization receiving federal funds, the organization in question being the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Baroni had been appointed by Christie to be his top representative there, the executive deputy director. Wildstein was officially the director of interstate capital projects, but he was better known as Christies fixer. Baronis lawyer, Michael Baldassare, told the jury that Christie sometimes called Wildstein his Dr. Wolf, the character who disposes of bodies in the movie Pulp Fiction.

At the Port Authority at the time, when David Wildstein spoke, Governor Christies voice came out and everybody knew it, Baldassare said.

As is widely known, this bi-state agency built the World Trade Center. A total of 37 Port Authority police officers died on 9/11, the greatest single loss of any law enforcement agency in American history.

And yet, the prosecutor says, these two senior officials of the Port Authority were laughing with Christie at a 9/11 memorial about ignoring a mayors distress that Fort Lees first responders were being hindered.

Christie has denied from the start that he had any knowledge of the lane closings. He insisted that he was cleared by an investigation commissioned by his office and headed by a former prosecutor with close ties to Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has called Christie my brother. Christie has characterized the decision of federal prosecutors not to charge him as vindication.

Among the many skeptics of that claim was Donald Trump, who made his opinion known as he was running against Christie in the South Carolina primary back in December.

He totally knew about it, Trump declared.

All that was forgotten as soon as Christie was out of the race and sucking up to Trump with the hope of becoming The Donalds running mate. The honor went instead to Mike Pence, but Christie remained enough of a suck-up to be named the chief of Trumps transition team in May.

A Trumpian twist came in late August, when the Trump campaign hired Bill Stepien, previously Christies campaign manager in his successful run for New Jersey governor and again in the successful re-election bid that the mayor of Fort Lee was punished for failing to support. Stepien was fired from his position as a top Christie aide after emails suggested an embarrassing link to the Bridgegate scandal. Christie declared himself to be shocked, just shocked, saying, I was disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference that was displayed in the emails by my former campaign manager, Bill Stepien.

Stepien, who was romantically linked to Kelly, was said to have broken it off just around the time of the lane closings. He was not indicted, as was his paramour. He set off to work for Trump as she was preparing to defend herself in federal court, facing as much as 20 years in prison for her alleged activities in the days surrounding Sept. 11, 2013.

Their former boss, Christie, continued to ingratiate himself with Stepiens new boss, Trump, with the governor even accompanying The Donald down to Ground Zero for this years memorial observance marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Trumps arrival there was met by a mixture of cheers and boos. Neither was appropriate at such an observance, though the boos were understandable given Trumps long history of lying about 9/11 , saying that he had lost hundreds of friends and that he had watched jumpers from his apartment window four miles away and that he had seen news footage of American Muslims celebrating the attack that day. The cheers for Trump were mystifying, given that admittance to the memorial that day was largely restricted to those who had lost somebody close in the attack.

At least nobody was yukking it up, as Christie and Wildstein were at the 12th anniversary observance. Even if you take Christie at his word that he did not know about the lane closings, there is photographic proof of him laughing with Wildstein on a day of remembrance at a place made sacred by the loss of so many innocents, so many selfless first responders.

If you believe the prosecutor, Christie and Wildstein were laughing at a mayors concern that his first responders might be forced into a nightmare; giving their monumental all to assist somebody in distress only to be thwarted by a traffic jam arranged to avenge a petty political slight.

Either way, Christie exhibited a sickness of soul in 2013 equal to that long evidenced by Trump. And here is an illness far more worrisome than whatever caused Hillary Clinton to leave this years ceremony early and faint just as she reached her vehicle.

Christie and Trump seemed steady enough on their feet as they departed, but their decency must have long since fainted dead away. They had proven themselves devoid of shame.

Christie hurried like a worried duckling behind Trump, whose ducktail hairdo made momentary sense.

Turds of a feather.
GOP Sen. Bob Corker was at dinner Monday night when a friend made a surprising revelation: The president isnt required to give up his or her financial dealings when they enter the Oval Office.

I just realized myself last night that it didnt apply, Corker told The Daily Beast Tuesday. There have been a lot of issues in this campaign that have been brought to peoples attention, that they were unaware of. My guess is that itll be looked at [once the election cycle is over.]

Whether its President Trump or President Clinton, both would bring major potential conflicts of interest to the Oval Office if electedbetween a large international corporate empire and a global foundation, respectively. And theres no law that requires them not to engage in self-dealingsomething that even senior lawmakers are unaware of.

Senior government officials in the Executive Branch are barred from participating in any matter that has a financial benefit for the official or the officials immediate family, to include their spouse or child. But the same rules that restrain, say, the secretary of defense, doesnt apply to the president.

Traditionally, the president has put his finances into a blind trust that is controlled by someone independent. Every president from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush has followed this convention to prevent conflicts of interest. President Obama opted instead to file away most of his money in simple U.S. Treasury bonds, which are low-yield and uncontroversial.

But with a Trump or Clinton White House, the public will just have to take the president as his or her word that they arent acting in a way that would benefit themselves personally, based on what little theyve said publicly on the matterno law would prevent them from doing so. Thats not particularly reassuring considering the publics distrust of both candidates: A June poll found that 62 percent of the public viewed Clinton as not honest, while 63 percent said the same of Trump.

And this is especially disconcerting considering the backgrounds of the two candidates for president.

Either candidate would pose unparalleled conflict of interest questions, for sure, said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group. For Hillary, its primarily the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, and for Trump, its his business and debts.

Neither Trump nor Clintons campaign responded to a Daily Beast inquiry about what specific steps they would take to prevent conflicts of interest while in office.

But there are some hints about what actions they may take to set themselves apartkind offrom their civilian interests.

The Clinton Foundation is planning to spin off many of its international programs to prevent conflicts if Hillary Clinton is elected, while Trump has said that his company would be put into blind trust run by his children (this is not actually a blind trust, which requires an entirely independent trustee to handle finances).

The gap between what Clinton promised for transparency with the Clinton Foundation and what actually occurred remains a stain on her reputation. The State Department was not always formally notified when a foreign government contributed to the foundation, as promised, and the organization fell short of its promise to annually publish the names of its contributors.

But Trumps conflict of interests as a businessman with international investments are a magnitude more complicated than Clintons Foundation. His business dealings are attached to locations all around the world, and his daily decisions as president could impact his companys financial prosperity. And while Trump says that he will not participate in his business while in the White House, he has also been known to change his mind on a whim.

Trump is a very different beast. His holdings span the globe, with many holdings shared with other governmental officials and some invested in countries with which the U.S. does not have good relations. I have a hard time imagining how Trump could ease his many, many conflicts of interest, said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at the left-leaning consumer rights group Public Citizen. Though, to repeat, it need not be done under the law.

The feeling is widespread: Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, who held the same position under Obama, joined together in a Washington Post op-ed Tuesday afternoon to declare that a Trump presidency would be ethically compromised due to his refusal to disclose tax returns or use a blind trust.

Trump has said that if elected he would have his children manage his business and would not discuss business matters with them. That is not sufficient, they write.

The only fix would be through Capitol Hill, where lawmakers could pass a new law. But members of Congress are not well informed on the law and the loopholeand the loophole also applies to them. Other experienced lawmakers were also unaware of how the law affected presidentsbut seemed immediately interested in fixing it.

I dont know what laws apply to the executive on that, said Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who was a lawyer before entering politics, when asked about it. Former GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain saidin his usual, jovial manner, that the loophole needed to be plugged as soon as possible.

Maybe we ought to fix thatnow that theres no likelihood of me being president, McCain said.
Three New York correctional officers beat an inmate, pulled out his dreadlocks, and used them as a trophy, federal prosecutors alleged Wednesday.

George Santiago Jr., Carson Morris, and Kathy Scott of Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, New York have been charged by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for violating Kevin Moores civil rights and falsifying records. Two other officers, Donald Cosman and Andrew Lowery, have also been charged with filing false reports. The indictment by Preet Bhararas office alleges a wide conspiracy of unprovoked torture and cover-up among Downstate correctional officers at the expense of Moore, who is black.

"Excessive use of force in prisons we believe has reached crisis proportions in New York State," Bharara said in a Wednesday afternoon press conference on the indictments.

Moore, 56, was only supposed to spend one night in the Downstate Correctional Facility on November 12, 2013, before being transferred to the Rikers Island facility in New York City. But when he arrived at Downstate for his one-night stay, officers allegedly tried placing him in a ward for inmates with mental health issues.

Moore worried that the Department of Corrections might change his health records to reflect his stay in the specialized cell block. He didnt want his record to portray him as "a monster, he allegedly told officers.

Thats when several officers allegedly grabbed him, while Morris began beating him with his fists and baton.

Who's a monster now? Santiago allegedly told Moore, laughing.

The officers then forced Moore to the ground, where the beating intensified, prosecutors allege. For minutes on end, the officers allegedly punched and kicked him, first in the head, then in the groin after his pants slipped down.

After Moore was moved from the pool of his own blood, Santiago allegedly returned to the scene to collect some of Moores dreadlocks, which had been ripped out. Santiago wanted them as a trophy to decorate his motorcycle.

Moore was hospitalized for 17 days with many life-threatening injuries, including five fractured ribs, a collapsed lung, and facial fractures in multiple places, and severe contusions to the back, hand, leg and foot, the feds say.

The officers did not tell Moore to stop resisting; he wasnt resisting in the first place, the federal charges claim. But thats not what Downstate Correctional records reflected after the incident. Immediately after the beating, officers allegedly cleaned Moores blood from the floor, but denied the badly bleeding man any medical treatment.

Then they allegedly began fabricating their own injuries. To create the appearance of a struggle, Santiago allegedly struck another corrections officers with his baton, while Morris applied friction to the new wound, making it look more serious.

Todd allegedly began taking pictures of the new injuries to file in an incident report. The final report told a fabricated story, one in which Moore initiated the beatdown by shoving an officer, the charges claim.

The charges are not the first for any of the officers. In another 2013 incident, Todd and Morris were found guilty of lying during an investigation into another case of alleged brutality. In this incident, an inmates head was smashed through a glass door in the facilitys library. Todd was slapped with a $5,250 pay cut, and Morris lost eight vacation days. Both remained on duty as officers.

Todd and Santiago were also named in two 2015 lawsuits, which New York settled for a combined $60,000. In one lawsuit, an inmate accused Santiago and other officers of kicking him while he was cuffed, then smashing his head through class, breaking facial bones.

In the other lawsuit, which names both Todd and Santiago, inmate Keenan Parker accused corrections officers of attempting to break his leg during a beating. During a stop-and-frisk, Santiago was allegedly ordered to break Parkers leg. Parker said Santiago stomped and twisted his legs, trying to snap them before giving up.

Fishkill Correctional Facility, a neighboring prison for the mentally ill, has also had a history of prisoner abuse at the hands of corrections officers. The so called beat-up squad of guards drove a mentally ill prisoner to take his own life in 2013, The Daily Beast reported earlier this month. In 2014, the beat-up squad allegedly killed inmate Samuel Harrell by throwing him down a flight of stairs.

No one has been criminally charged in either incident.
Over the weekend, the new Oliver Stone movie on National Security Agency leaker-extraordinaire Edward Snowden clunked into theaters and drew tepid crowds.

At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have launched what they bill as a major effort to persuade President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden.

The Snowdenites hope that the fawning movie will spare their hero from espionage charges. To gin up some urgency, the pardonsnowden.org website countdown clock is ticking off the days, minutes and seconds until Obama leaves office. The Snowden apologists evidently realize President Hillary Clinton or President Donald Trump wouldnt risk the political backlash if they were to go easy on Snowden.

Our capsule review of this effort: Two thumbs down.

Snowden has suggested he would like to return to the United States if his lawyers could negotiate a plea deal. Presumably Snowden has grown weary of Russian President Vladimir Putins hospitality and, were guessing, the intense scrutiny under which he undoubtedly finds himself.

Snowden says he would consider serving a prison term as part of a plea bargain arranged before he leaves his Russian sanctuary, The New York Times reports. How magnanimous.

As we said in 2014 when Snowden supporters first dangled the issue of amnesty: Come home, Ed. Well welcome you with open arms and a pair of handcuffs. We can show you all the damage you caused. And maybe well let a judge and jury decide your fate.

Then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder took the right approach in 2014: He rejected amnesty for Snowden but did not rule out the possibility of plea negotiations, if Snowden returns. If Mr. Snowden wanted to come back to the United States and enter a plea, we would engage with his lawyers, Holder said....

Two years later, we would support the same deal: No amnesty, no pardon. Snowden should return to the U.S. and face whatever charges the Department of Justice levies. If his lawyers think they can limit those charges in return for his surrender, theyre welcome to try. Its a free country. (The U.S., that is.)

Snowdens actions caused immense damage to Americas national security interests. A day before the movies release, a House Intelligence Committee report debunked the myth of Snowden The Noble Whistleblower who did more good than harm. Snowdens actions did severe damage to U.S. national security, compromising the Intelligence Communitys anti-terror efforts and endangering the security of the American people as well as active-duty U.S. troops, the committee said. ...

American intelligence officials still dont know the full extent of the harm, the report says. Some of the damage may not be known for years. The government has, however, spent hundreds of millions of dollars  and eventually will spend billions  to clean up the mess and mitigate the damage Snowden caused. The 22 House committee members sent a unanimous, bipartisan letter to Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden. Bulletin: Democrats and Republicans agreed. ...

Edward Snowden is no hero  hes a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-California, the committee chairman, said in a statement.

Snowdens argument that he acted to defend Americans privacy were self-serving and false, said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, ranking member of the committee. While those disclosures did spark a useful public debate, the collateral damage has been extraordinary.

Three years ago, a self-satisfied Snowden declared victory. For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the missions already accomplished, he told The Washington Post. I already won.

That victory may not be so sweet any more. Not when the reward is a permanent address under Putins thumb. Snowden stole and released thousands of pages of documents that endangered  likely still endanger  U.S. lives. He exposed secrets whose impact he could not possibly comprehend. Thats what he calls winning.

To us, that doesnt sound like a whistleblower who should be celebrated. That sounds like someone who should be in a U.S. prison. Come home, Ed. Make your case.
The last time First Lady Michelle Obama appeared on late-night TV it was to sing Carpool Karaoke with James Corden and Missy Elliott. While it was unlikely that she would top that on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week, she did hang out with the host in a blanket fort.

Hey, Michelle, do you think fruits and vegetables have feelings? Colbert asked the first lady. Gosh, I hope not, I eat way too many of them, she replied.

When she handed him a baby carrot, Colbert told her that when you eat too many carrots you turn orange. And if you turn really orange, you have to start saying crazy things and run for president. The satire was hardly as cutting as his segment on birtherism from the night before.

On the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton last week, Michelle Obama called out Donald Trump for perpetuating the birther myth for more than five years after he claims to have finished the controversy. She said President Obama answered those conspiracy theories by not only releasing his long-form birth certificate but also by going high when his opponents go low.

Most of their interview was pretty light on politics, but there was one moment when the first lady let her guard down and her feelings be known about how Melania Trump lifted portions of her 2012 speech for her RNC address this summer.

Asked by Colbert if she has any sympathy for the political spouses who have to stand by their partners no matter what during this election cycle, Michelle Obama said, No, not really. If she didnt believe in her husband, she said she would have told him about it and couldnt have supported his run. So I stand there proudly, and I hope they are, too, standing with their spouses proudly, she said. So no sympathy.

Colbert told the first lady that he had some sympathy for Melania Trump following the plagiarism scandalthough it didnt stop him from presenting the best parody of her speech on late-night TV. Didnt Obama feel for her at all?

Yeah, that was tough, the first lady said, barely cracking a sly smile.

Lets move on, Colbert said in response.

Michelle also performed her impression of the president for Colbert, something she said she and her two daughters have perfected after listening to Barack drone on about serious issues at the dinner table, usually prompted by a question from Malia. Well, Im glad you asked that, she said, imitating her husband. Let me just answer that in three points. Expressing frustration, she added, Sasha and I want to talk about our favorite song on the Lemonade album. Thats what we want to talk about.

As for her assertion that the president leaves his job at the door when he enters the familys residence in the White House, she said he prefers to talk about gossip because he doesnt have a life. To this, Colbert replied, No, but hes got the NSA, so he can find out what any of us are thinking.
This week the Virginia Flaggers celebrate their five-year anniversary. You may never have heard of this organization, but if you have traveled Virginias highways over the past few years you certainly have seen their handiwork. During this time the Flaggers have raised large Confederate battle flags along I-95, I-81, and I-64. In July 2015 the group raised a 30-by-50 foot flag near Danville, Virginia along the I-29 bypass. These flag raisings have been carried out in response to the steps taken by local governments, along with public and private institutions, to remove or re-locate Confederate iconography.

The organization has enjoyed steady coverage by local media outlets over the last five years, but few reporters have looked closely at Flagger membership or the individuals and organizations with which it has found common cause. Some of these individuals are directly connected with White Nationalist groups such as the League of the South, which openly promote white supremacy. Such a close association blurs the lines between legitimate concerns for the preservation of history and heritage and the racial politics of the present.

The core of the Virginia Flaggers was organized by Susan Hathaway in 2011 in response to the removal of a Confederate battle flag in front of Confederate Memorial Chapel in Richmond, Virginia, which at one point was part of a soldiers home for Confederate veterans. The property is now owned and operated by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). According to the Flaggers, the Confederate battle flag ought to be celebrated, along with the men who fought under it. Their understanding of the war falls neatly within the confines of the Lost Cause narrative: Slavery had nothing to do with the cause of the war; relations between white and black Southerners were peaceful before the war; the Confederacy fought solely for states rights; and African Americans supported the cause in large numbers. According to Hathaway, As sons and daughters of the South, we have inherited a birthright. Ours is a proud heritage.

Early on the Flaggers remained focused on the VMFA by staging weekly protests in front of the chapel, but they quickly expanded their reach across Virginia. In 2012 they protested the opening of the Museum of the Confederacys new branch at Appomattox for refusing to fly the battle flag outside of the building, even though the museum preserves and exhibits one of the largest collection of wartime flags inside. Beginning in 2013 their focus shifted to Lexington, where the city council was deciding whether to discontinue the practice of allowing the display of Confederate flags on city-owned light poles for the annual gathering of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Their protests and threats to boycott city businesses failed to prevent Lexington from discontinuing the practice. Shortly thereafter Washington & Lee University, also located in the city, chose to remove Confederate battle flags from inside Lee Chapel, where the general is buried.

In the face of these defeats the Flaggers chose to take the offensive by buying small plots of land along Virginia highways for their Confederate battle flags. The raising of the first flag along I-95, just south of Richmond, received a good deal of media attention. Hathaway hoped that these flags would serve as a living, breathing memorial to our Confederate dead. Increased publicity, however, brought the Flaggers into closer contact with individuals whose interests in the Confederate battle flag extended far beyond commemorating the dead. In 2012 the Flaggers were photographed parading with Matthew Heimbach. Heimbach was the founder of Towson States White Student Union and Towsons Youth for Western Civilization. In 2014 he became the League of the Souths training director and is considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be the new face of white nationalism.

In response to the twin defeats in Lexington, the Virginia Flaggers raised a battle flag on the property of Raymond Agnor along I-81, just north of the city. Shortly after the flag raising, Agnor took out an ad in a local newspaper stating in no uncertain terms that, No black people or democrats are allowed on my property until further notice. I dont want them on my property, he went on to say, because I have seen what they did in Baltimore and Ferguson and other places. While the Flaggers refused to respond to the controversy at the time there is every reason to believe that they share Agnors racial outlook.

The Confederate battle flag raised in Stafford County near Fredericksburg, Virginia is located on the property of Hubert Wayne Cash, who believes that all blacks are a worthless bunch of freeloading, dangerous animals that should be put down like the dogs that they are. He goes on, but you get the idea.

Last summer Susan Hathaway agreed to join Kirk Lyons of the Southern Legal Resource Centeran organization that the SPLC labels as Extremist and James Bessenger of the South Carolina Secessionist Party for a flag raising ceremony to mark the one-year anniversary of the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state house grounds in Columbia, South Carolina. This followed the mass shooting at a Charleston church by suspect Dylann Roof, who it was learned identified closely with Confederate iconography. Just before the event, which was scheduled for July 10, 2016, Hathaway canceled her appearance, but there is no indication that it had anything to do with the reputations of the other speakers.

The Flaggers have redoubled their efforts in the wake of the Charleston shootings and subsequent calls to remove Confederate flags and monuments from public spaces, but they have met with no success. Communities throughout Virginia continue to question the appropriateness of Confederate iconography in public spaces. The Flaggers have traveled to cities like Charlottesville and Danville to testify at city council hearings and remind community members that the wrong decision will be met with one or more flag raisings, but few people take them seriously.

This past week Alexandria, Virginias City Council voted unanimously to change the name of Jefferson Davis Highway and is looking into the removal of a Confederate soldier statue in the center of town as well. It is very likely that at some point the Virginia Flaggers will visit and may even find a small plot of ground to raise another one of their large battle flags. With each flag raising, however, the Flaggers reveal how very little influence they have had on these community debates and decisions. Instead, they are being left behind and exposed for the reactionaries that they are.

Their highway flags wave in the name of two lost causes, the first being the defeat of an army pledged to establish an independent slaveholding republic and the other, to try to justify it 150 years later. For the Virginia Flaggers, it has always been about hate, not heritage.

Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and is currently at work on Searching For Black Confederate Soldiers: The Civil Wars Most Persistent Myth. You can find him online at Civil War Memory and Twitter @kevinlevin.
MOSCOW  Russias gay-banning frenzy continues. Its putting pressure on LGBT people all across the country, stopping them from marching, and even pushing some back toward the closet.

Russian hardliners like to claim that homosexuality is an evil sent to Russia from the West to reduce the already declining population. But until recently, the internet remained a safe space for Russian homosexuals, and online dating services grew increasingly popular, even in the most provincial towns.

No more.

Earlier this year, a court in the little town of Parabel in Siberia, without any warning or explanation, decided to ban BlueSystem, one of Russias most popular LGBT websites. Then the governments telecommunications agency, Roskomnadzor, reacted to the court decision and banned the site. Internet providers started blocking it, without any notice to the BlueSystem administrators until, this month, the websites users were astonished to see it shut down completely.

The Kremlin is afraid of gays, the BlueSystem team wrote in a post last week on its VKontakte social media page. On the eve of the State Duma elections, the Kremlin activated its repressive machine and included the most popular Runet gay site, visited by over 100,000 people a day, in a list of banned internet resources.

Moscow human rights activists were not surprised to discover such a measure was taken, as a new wave of pressure has begun.

LGBT resources get blocked as part of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression online, Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director for Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Beast. The authorities are also attempting to shut down Children-404 (Deti-404), an online support group for LGBT teens.

In Vladimir Putins Russia, gay activists often end up beaten or arrested for any attempts to demonstrate for their rights. When the Russian parliament passed a homophobic bill banning gay propaganda in 2013, dozens of gay activists took part in a "kissing protest" outside the State Duma in Moscow. They were harassed and pelted with eggs by anti-gay protesters. Police then detained about 20 LGBT activists. The infamous gay propaganda law is used as a key tool to silence LGBT people, Lokshina added.

The BlueSystem site, which can still be accessed outside Russiaand may be available using VPN from insidepublished news about human rights violations, court hearings, and the banning of gay parades all across the country.

Earlier this year, the site reported that communities in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, St. Petersburg, and Tula, as well as in the Crimean towns of Yalta and Simferopol, asked Russian authorities to allow them to march in defense of LGBT rights, and everywhere they heard the same Nyet!

Last week BlueSystem published news from the Russian provincial town of Kaluga, where LGBT people asked authorities to allow them to demonstrate in the Park of Peace and Constitutions in support of tolerant attitudes [and] respect for the rights and freedoms of homosexually orientated people in Russia. What happened to that protest? It was banned.

Russian internet censor Roskomnadzor also has banned four political websites that called earlier this month for a boycott of the State Duma elections. Indeed, the Russian prosecutor general demanded that Roskomnadzor monitor the entire Russian internet and ban any site publishing anti-election agitation, the Regnum news agency reported in July.

Besides anti-government and gay propaganda, Roskomnadzor banned the websites YouPorn and PornHub.

In reaction, the Russian blogger community decided to talk about sexa lot.

The protest was proposed by Daniel Trabun, an editor at Russian Esquire: The government forced a prudish, sterile, and conservative attitude without any explanation or opportunity for discussion. This unhealthy duality also manifests in the lack of a neutral lexicon that we could use to talk about sex," Trabun wrote on Facebook.

Was the BlueSystem website providing Russian LGBT with information about sex? Of course it was. But there was much more.

The BlueSystem website was mainly popular as a dating resource, Pavel Lobkov, a Russian television anchor, told The Daily Beast. Lobkov was the first Russian to come out and publicly declare on live TV that he had HIV, and he said BlueSystem helped him meet others with the virus. Dating on the internet is like water flowing downhill, it finds its own level, and people will always find a new way to date online.

The authorities do not understand that their banning machine is pushing LGBT people to hang out in parks, meet under trees, that sort of thing, which would definitely increase crime in Russia, as has happened in countries like Morocco, Lobkov told The Daily Beast.

But the LGBT community is not giving up. In what will be, at this point, largely a symbolic gesture, two openly gay menAleksei Korolyov, 29, and Bulat Barantayev, 33are running for seats in the State Duma.

The LGBT community now is in a desperate situation and we need allies, said Korolyov, who was quoted by the British newspaper The Independent. The LGBT candidates are running with the pro-European Peoples Freedom Party (Parnas).

The gesture is important, said Korolyov, at a time when the authorities are facilitating homophobic discourse that, in turn, inspires hate crimes.

Before, people might have turned to BlueSystem for advice on how to stay safe. Now that option no longer exists in Russia.
Raising cattle in Campbellsville, Kentucky, Stan McCubbin is used to things that would make most people squeamish. But even he wasnt expecting one of his cows to give birth to a double-headed calf last Friday.

Walking along the farms property, McCubbin thought he was looking at newborn bovine twins, but upon closer inspection noticed that the two heads were attached, he told Inside Edition.

Luckynamed by the familys five-year-old daughteris very literally lucky to be alive. Many calves with this condition, known as polycephaly, are stillborn. The longest surviving calf, according to Ripleys Believe it or Not, lived for 40 days.

A similar case of a two-headed calf was reported by News4Jax in Florida last year. Another calf, born in Vermont in 2013, lived only two days.

Dicephaly, or bicephaly, is the most common form of polycephaly, Dr. Maria Ferrer, an associate professor of reproductive veterinary medicine in the University of Georgias Department of Large Animal Medicine, told The Daily Beast.

Dicephaly is, in general, considered a form of conjoined twins, Dr. Ferrer said. She added that two-headed animals are believed to form in the same manner as conjoined human twins: from a single fertilized egg that fails to divide entirely. Typically, if a single egg is fertilized, it splits into two separate embryosbut this isnt always the case.

The leading theory, known as fission, holds that if the egg fails to divide or splits too late in the developmental process, the two offspring will be conjoined. A single ovum [egg] is fertilized but separation is not complete, leading to duplication of the head while sharing a torso, Dr. Ferrer explained.

An alternative theory, called fusion, suggests that the embryos may separate and then rejoin later in the womb. Some research suggests that both processes may occur. Its not common, but it happens, Dr. Thomas Divers of Cornell Universitys College of Veterinary Medicine told The Daily Beast.

McCubbin and his family were initially shocked to learn that they were the owners of such a curious animal, but have since adopted the calf, providing the extra-special care she requires.

With two heads, two noses, two mouths, and four eyes (though blind in the middle two), the calf has a hard time standing up and walking, much less nursing. Normally within an hour or so of birth, a normal calf is up on its feet and nursing McCubbin said. Everythings pretty instant for them.

But Lucky has spent most of her time lying on the ground and being pampered by the family. Shes given a lot of special care as opposed to the other calves, McCubbin said. We watch after her more [and] were hand feeding her.

McCubbin told The Daily Beast that Lucky has to have her very heavy head held up by someone else, and requires help when feeding or walking. Both her mouths move when she drinks from the bottle and she walks in circles, he said.

Luckys mother has stayed by her calfs side, too. [Luckys mother is] not naturally nursing because we're having to feed her and all, but [she] has still been very motherly. Shes licking her and standing and protecting her.

When asked what their plans for Lucky are, McCubbin told The Daily Beast that theyre just doing what they can for her and taking things day by day. Were just [helping] her survive. The odds are against her... were just doing all we can for her right now.

While Luckys prognosis is likely negative, Dr. Ferrer told The Daily Beast that additional examination by a vet would be required to determine what the prognosis for life is, and what the best and most ethical plan is for [this] particular animal.

Weve spoke to a couple vets and theyve looked at her, McCubbin said. They say shes healthy and everything seems to be normal from the neck back.
The voice on the tapes is tinny, high-pitched, and demanding, and it belongs to one of the most reviled dictators of the 20th century. Why do all of our films have the same ideological plots? shouts an irate Kim Jong Il to his advisors in rare recordings audiences can hear in the new stranger than fiction documentary The Lovers and the Despot. Theres nothing new about them. Why are there so many crying scenes?

Pop culture obsessions are always curious avenues into the psyches of tyrants, and Kims movie nerdery is one of the wackier case studies you can find, as skewered mercilessly in Team America: World Police. In The Lovers and the Despot, British documentarians Ross Adam and Robert Cannan access extraordinary insight into North Koreas late supreme leader through the eyes of director Shin Sang-ok and his movie star wife, Choi Eun-heethe South Korean power couple who were kidnapped in 1978 and forced to make movies for the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

There was something mythological about it, Cannan told The Daily Beast from London this week, recounting how he and Adam zeroed in on the wild tale of kidnapping, imprisonment, and glamorous moviemaking under pain of punishment that Shin and Choi spun when they finally escaped Kims regime in 1994. What we loved about the story was whether or not it was true, it was a great story. We were really intrigued by Shin; if it wasnt true, how did he come up with this amazing story?

Like many observers over the yearsparticularly in South Korea, where many still believe the couple had willingly defected to North KoreaCannan and Adam werent quite sure if they bought Shin and Chois story. It was nearly beyond belief and the stuff of, well, movies: After Choi was kidnapped in Hong Kong by Kim agents posing as film producers, her estranged husband Shin went searching for her and ended up in a North Korean prison for four years, fed grass and rice for trying to escape, and underwent intensive indoctrination reprogramming at Kims behest.

The spouses were finally reunited in the middle of Kims lavish birthday party, where the then-cultural minister giddily orchestrated their meeting like he was Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap. Kims master plan? To make them churn out new films North Korea could be proud ofand match, if not top, the quality of film coming out of their rivals to the southand make North Korean movies great (again). Naturally, Kim also took a producer credit on Shins films.

Shin, who would make 17 pro-government films with Choi during his North Korean period, appears in the film via the incredible documents and diaries he left behind. His trove of materials include hours of illicitly recorded conversations with Kim, whose voice had rarely been heard in publiclet alone heard whining about South Koreas superior movies.

Choi says that this was Shins ideathat once they were reunited and they made this plan together, their only hope of ever escaping would be to go along with Kim and build his trust, explained Cannan. Of course, part of them were probably flattered at the idea of having this blank check to make films as well.

The secret recordings, made on a hidden Dictaphone during the couples meetings with Kim, would serve as proof of their innocence should Choi and Shin manage to escape. Shin had fallen out with the South Korean government before he went missing, said Cannan. It was a convenient time for him to wind up in North Korea, working with Kim Jong Il, and they knew this would look very, very dodgy, and its a serious offense in South Korea to have anything to do with North Korea. They knew that it was worth the risk to record the tapesthat it was something they had to do.

Shin, after all, had made multiple failed escape attempts early on inspired by Steve McQueens The Great Escape. The filmmaker, perhaps, had the sense that what he and Choi were living through was the kind of larger than life adventure only seen in moviesalternately drama, thriller, romance, and black comedy.

They only had the idea to do that because Shin had a sense for storytelling beyond himself, said Adam. The idea of recording this was risking death and an act thats very much a filmmaking trope from a spy movie. They thought every plan through as if it was a screenplay.

Choi, sitting for an interview in the film at age 89, seems to see the absurdist humor in the perilous situation she found herself in all those years ago. According to her, Kim broke the ice after unceremoniously abducting her with a friendly greeting: Arent I small, like a midgets turd? The film makes it easy to see Kim, who succeeded his venerated father Kim Il Sung in 1994, as a childlike terror obsessed with imposing his will on his suffering country, shaped by a bizarrely sheltered and privileged upbringing with movies his only window to the outside world. When Shin later reflected on the ordeal to the press, he revealed Kims esoteric tastes: James Bond moviesespecially the Sean Connery yearsFriday the 13th, Rambo.

He liked lot of pretty pulpy stuff from America, said Cannan. I think because his upbringing was so insular and his outlook was so constricted he could kind of experience the rest of the world through movies. So he had the idea that crime in America was really just terrible because he just watched a lot of cop films. I think it did inform his outlook on the world but he also saw it as this great opportunity to control North Korea and shape their mentality.

Kim Jong Il was also apparently the biggest despotic movie buff, 35mm print collector, and film pirate in modern history. His personal library of film prints is said to have numbered over 20,000mostly stolen or copied from sources around the world. Shin said Kim had prints of his films he thought were lost forever, laughed Cannan. And we met people who had it on good account that hed issued orders to all the North Korean embassies around the world to borrow films from a huge list of films for them to pirate and send copies back to Kim Jong Ils library.

Magnolia Pictures acquired The Lovers and the Despot out of the Sundance Film Festival in January and will release it this week statesidearound the same time the doc opens in South Korea, where its the subject of great curiosity. As for North Korea, the filmmakers arent too worried about getting on current DPKR leader Kim Jong Uns bad side, despite the cyberattack Sony Pictures allegedly suffered at the keyboards of North Korean hackers over The Interview.

I dont imagine we are on their radar, said Adam. I think they have bigger problems to deal with and we havent made any contact with North Korea yet.

Shin passed away in 2006, two decades after the couple fled from their handlers during a film festival appearance in Vienna and successfully sought asylum from the American embassy. They lived under federal protection in Virginia before moving to Los Angeles, where Shin dove back into the film industry under the name Simon Sheen, launching one of the most indelible 90s kid movie franchises of the decade.

Few might realize now that, years after making Kim Jong Ils cinematic dreams come true in films like Pulgasari, a Communist Godzilla knock-off, Shin conceived of and silently co-directed the 1992 classic 3 Ninjas, about a trio of young brothers who fight off bad dudes with the training of their Japanese grandfather. The film spawned three sequels and marked an early hit for director Jon Turteltaub, who went on to helm Hollywood flicks like Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping, and the National Treasure blockbusters.

Indeed: 3 Ninjas story is credited to Kenny Kim, a writer whose only other credit is 1994s Jeungbal, a political thriller about the abduction of a Korean diplomat armed with classified information. Cannan and Adam interviewed Turteltaub for their film and tease that more of his relationship with Shin might pop up in future DVD extras.

They co-directed it together, explained Cannan. Shin kind of did the camera work and the blocking and the action sequences, and Turteltaub worked with the actors.

Shin didnt really speak English, that was the trouble, added Adam.

It was Turteltaub, they say, who brought in the Disney execs who eventually acquired the film, picking it up to fill their 1992 release slate. 3 Ninjas turned into a modest hit and spawned three sequels that Shin executive produced. Does that mean, I asked Cannan and Adam, that we have Kim Jong Il to thankeven if indirectlyfor 3 Ninjas?

They laughed. A blow to the West and to Western culture, quipped Adam, to affect the minds of the young with 3 Ninjas.
The international reaction to Monday nights devastating attack on an aid convoy in the Syrian town of Urem al-Kubra has been swift and furious. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in an unusually forthright speech at the General Assembly, described the attack as savage and apparently deliberate. He concluded by saying the fate of Syria could not depend on the future of one man, namely Bashar al-Assad.

According to a statement released Wednesday by the Free Syrian Army, 31 people in total died19 civilians and 12 aid workers. The director of the local branch of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), Omar Barakat, was among those killed. At least 18 trucks carrying humanitarian aid were destroyed, along with a SARC warehouse and a health clinic.

While aid agencies are naturally hesitant to ascribe direct blame, suspicion fell at once upon the Assad regime and Russia, which are the only air powers operating in this area of Syria.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has gone to great lengths to deflect blame, even claiming that video of the aftermath of the attack shows no sign of damage from an air strike, and suggesting the convoy was attacked by Syrian rebel fighters on the ground. To lend weight to the latter scenario, the MOD released drone footage of a pickup truck towing what it said was a mortar, moving past the convoy in rebel-held territory.

The Russians also have claimed the trucks might have been destroyed by spontaneous combustion.

However, there is a mounting body of evidence that makes it clear the Syrian regime and, in particular, the Russian military, hold responsibility for the atrocity.

Lets start with the witness statements.

Mahmoud Abu Zaid, a relief worker, told the BBCs Newsnight program:

What happened wasalmost two hours before the bombing we heard and saw a drone, as soon as the regime announced the end of the ceasefire. I had concerns that it would start bombing, because it flew over us for a long time. After two hours the helicopter came and dropped the first barrel bomb. After half a minute it dropped two barrel bombs together, afterwards there were six air strikes by the military jets. Then the jets with guns launched an attack. Afterwards the helicopters came back dropping barrel bombs, and then the jet with guns came back and started firing.

Hussein Badawi, head of the Urem al-Kubra branch of Syrian Civil Defense (known as the White Helmets), told the Associated Press that he could hear helicopters, fighter jets, and ballistic missiles overhead.

He, too, reported the presence of a reconnaissance aircraft before the attack began.

Video from Aleppo 24 News captured some of the attack.

The sounds of jets and automatic cannon fire, probably from Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, are distinctly audible. We can also see explosions from bomb or missile strikes.

Mohammed Rasoul, who is credited by the AP for the Aleppo 24 News video of the attack, told the agency that the attack began around 20 minutes after sunset and continued for two hours.

In another video, recorded in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a White Helmet volunteer shows the cameraman parts he said came from a barrel bomb dropped by a helicopter.

With the daylight came more evidence, this time in the form of photos and a video shot by the BBC.

In these images we can clearly see the crushed tail fin of a Russian-made OFAB 250-270 high explosive fragmentation bomb in a crater in the SARC warehouse.

With that, we can safely conclude that air strikes did indeed take place.

U.S. officials have told both Reuters and the BBC that two Russian Sukhoi Su-24 bomber jets were tracked over the area at the exact time of the attacks.

The reports of the use of barrel bombs and ballistic surface-to-surface missiles would also suggest the involvement of the Syrian military, but the BBC was told by the U.S. officials that the strike was too sophisticated to have been carried out by the Syrian army.

That the U.S. government has openly accused Russia of responsibility for the attack is certainly not to be dismissed out of hand.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was still, incredibly, insisting yesterday that the Syrian ceasefire is not dead, and the US had made great efforts to achieve a deal with Russia, despite overwhelming evidence that the Kremlin is an utterly unreliable partner on this (and most other) issues.

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications at the White House, said:

There only could have been two entities responsible, either the Syrian regime or the Russian government. In any event, we hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this space.

Key to the issue of culpability is the fact that the aid convoys itinerary was known in advance to both the Syrian regime and the Russian military.

David Swanson, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told the PM program on BBC Radio 4:

These interagency humanitarian convoys, theyre not just something that just go out on an ad-hoc basis, theyre extremely well planned. Now each one of these particular convoys, OK, is duly applied for with the Syrian government. All parties to the conflict are informed of that and the convoys are duly marked as humanitarian. The contents of the convoy are actually approved. Everything, every effort is made that everyone is on the same page. So its really unbelievable that you could have an attack take place like this and people say, Oh, it was an accident.

Swanson went on to tell BuzzFeeds Mike Giglio that approval for the convoy had come directly from coordination in face-to-face meetings in Damascus with the regime.

But there is worse: Russian drones were publicly monitoring the convoy immediately before the air strikes began.

While the Russian MOD acknowledged that a Russian drone had been tracking the convoy on Monday, official spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed that the Russian drone had stopped monitoring the trucks at around 13:40 that day, over five hours before the attack.

This is demonstrably false.

That same afternoon, Kremlin-owned RT ran a live stream on Facebook from the Russian MOD, relaying real-time footage from a drone flying over western Aleppo. The stream began at 15:17 local time (12:17 GMT). It is worth noting that due to daylight saving time in Syria, Moscow and Damascus are currently on the same time zone. Around an hour into the video, around 16:17 local, the drone is flying the road between Urem al-Kubra and Kafr Naha, just to the east.

According to the Free Syrian Army, the attack began at exactly 8:30 PM. Meanwhile the aid worker who spoke to the BBC, Mahmoud Abu Zaid, reported that the strikes began around two hours after the drone first appeared.

The RT footage likely came from one of the reconnaissance drones that witnesses reported circling the area in the hours preceding the attack.

Indeed the other video released by the Russian military only further refutes Konashenkovs claim that the convoy was not being monitored.

Using SunCalc, an open source tool that allows users to plot the location of the sun relative to a location at any given time, it can be demonstrated that the video was filmed no later than 16:00 local time. Comparison of the footage with Google Earth satellite imagery verifies that the convoy was indeed filmed nearbyless than four kilometers to the east in Khan al-Asal.

The video was clearly filmed by a second drone, given that the footage does not appear at the corresponding time in the RT live stream. Therefore the convoy was being tracked after 13:40 by at least two Russian aircraft.

Meanwhile, the Russian suggestion that the presence of one towed mortar in the same area could support the theory that rebel fighters carried out the attack is farcical. The presence of such a weapon near the front line in a war zone is hardly suspicious, and given the remains of air-launched bombs and the video footage, the attack was clearly carried out by aircraftsomething which Syrian opposition forces lack.

The convoy, which David Swanson from UN OCHA said was delivering aid to 70,000 people, was deliberately attacked over a prolonged period of time by forces who had both clear foreknowledge of its location and real-time video contact shortly before the first strikes began.

Stephen OBrien, OCHA Under Secretary General and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told the BBC that given all the information and prior clearances known to the Russians and the Assad regime, if this was a deliberate act that would amount to a war crime. And it is absolutely vital that there is not immunity, impunity, there has to be accountability because even wars have laws.

Given the evidence, indeed, war crime is just about the only term that can be used to describe what happened on Monday night.
I havent menstruated in three years. Im fortunate to be one of the trans guys whose periods stopped when I started taking testosterone.

This is by no means a universal experience even among trans people taking testosterone, and many of my peers have either continued menstruating or have endless spotting. Many others dont take testosterone, either because it isnt right for them, or because the health care system has kept them waiting.

Recently, the corner of Twitter interested in feminism and gender diversity had a row over transgender inclusion. This has been an issue in feminist circles for many years, as people negotiate who is inside and who is outside the sphere of feminists concern. On Twitter these kind of boundary disputes have been a perennial issue.

In this case, the trigger was the trending hashtag #ifmenhadperiods. Meant to highlight the ways that sexism plays out around the topic of menstruationsuch as through a lack of medical progress or material supportit was roundly criticized for being both inaccurate and oppressive. Why? For starters, some men do have periodsand many women dont.

Planned Parenthood got involved in the discussion, using the term menstruators. Some disliked this term, arguing that sanitary products are a womens issue, and that it is dehumanizing to refer to women as menstruators.

This is an understandable objection to an inelegant term, if one accepts the premise that sanitary products are only for women. However, the term is an attempt to find language thats inclusive.

We do not need to hypothesize what the world would be like if men had periods. Some men do have periods, as do some non-binary people.

Once in awhile, I hear stories of people whose periods started again after many years on testosterone. I dread it happening to me. Its not clear why this happens, but its typically a sign that ones hormone replacement therapy (HRT) needs changing.

Contrary to some contributions to that unfortunate hashtag, menstruating when trans is, on average, pretty terriblefor a number of reasons.

We pay the same luxury taxes as everyone elseeven though we make less money.

One argument made in #ifmenhadperiods is that the luxury tax on sanitary goods would not exist if men had periodsafter all, razors are usually taxed as essentials, despite being arguably less essential than the luxury of keeping clean during your period.

Unfortunately, trans people pay the same luxury goods taxes as everyone else, but theyre statistically less likely to be able to afford itin the US, 15 percent of trans people (16 percent of trans men) earn less than $10k a year, compared to four percent of the general population.

Trans menstruators are more likely to be homeless.

Even if sales taxes on sanitary products were lifted, it would only make a small dent in the impact that menstruation has on the lives of people in severe poverty. There has, thankfully, been more discussion lately about how hard it is to have a period when you live on the street. Some organizations have started helping homeless people with period supplies, such as Conscious Period in California and The Homeless Period in the UK.

With trans people twice as likely to be homeless than the general population, they struggle more to afford sanitary items. They are also less likely to have access to a private space to change pads or tampons, or to empty a menstrual cup.

If advocacy for people who menstruate aims to help the most vulnerable, then it must include people who are dealing with their period in these very difficult circumstances, including not just homeless cis women, but homeless trans people.

Support comes at the cost of denying who you are.

I remember being congratulated when my period started, because it meant I was becoming a woman. This felt like cold comfort when I was in physical agony and psychological distress because the entire experience seemed like it was fundamentally wrong. It wasnt until later that I made sense of that fundamentally wrong feeling as part the pervasive gender dysphoria that would not change until I transitioned. The idea that my period made me a woman was echoed every time I sought support for debilitating period pain.

Having my gender incorrectly guessed is a fairly common occurrence, but it does make me less likely to ask for help if my period should strike. For trans men who keep their trans status private, the problem is even worse. Asking for help would require explaining things about themselves that they might rather keep private.

The health system ignores us when we need help.

The thought of having a period again terrifies me not just because of the dysphoria and unbearable physical pain I used to experience when menstruating, but because I believe the medical system would do little to help me.

Lets face it: the health system is woefully inadequate when it comes to dealing with any kind of problematic menstruation, no matter the gender identity of the person experiencing it. Dysmenorrhea (painful periods) is poorly understood because research into the problem does not receive the funding it needs. Nobody is certain why it happens, and methods for best treating it are not always communicated well.

Before I transitioned, it took almost 10 years of painful periods before I received pain management that worked more than half of time. My experience is far from rare, with huge numbers of people having to put their lives on hold simply because theyre menstruating. Endometriosis and reproductive cancers often go undetected and untreated because reproductive and menstrual pain simply arent taken seriously.

Compounding that problem, trans people face huge barriers to getting good health care. These include problems arising from insurance companies and state health systems that make it difficult or impossible for a man to receive anatomy-appropriate sexual health care if he has a womb and cervix. American health insurance companies have a bad record for this historically, though in recent years new regulations have slowly changed things. Under the NHS in the UK, trans men are not automatically invited for cervical cancer screenings, and instead must persuade their doctors to provide them.

This is a difficult prospect, since trans people also very commonly experience harassment, unfair treatment, and even assault from intolerant doctorsmost of whom have not received any trans-specific training. One in five trans men in the US has been refused care due to their identity, and half have postponed doctors visits due to discrimination. At least one has died due to a reproductive cancer that doctors refused to treat because of his trans status.

Frequently, we end up educating our own doctors about our bodies, and not all doctors are particularly enthusiastic about receiving biology lessons from an untrained member of the public.

This reality is treated as politically inconvenient.

Trans people who want to talk about menstruation and reproduction without giving up their identities have become a bit of a political scapegoat in certain strands of feminist discourse.

When the general needs of people who menstruate are of concern, it is vital to talk about people who menstruate, rather than shut out people who need support simply because they are not women. Solidarity between women who menstruate is vital, but there also need to be initiatives that aim at meeting the needs of all people who menstruate.
The Zika virus is real. It really does cause microcephaly and other birth defects. And it definitely didnt come from the Rockefellers.

But as the Zika virus continues to spread locally in the Miami area, conspiracy theories about its origins are spreading, too. Just last week, for example, some Miami Beach protestors argued against aerial pesticide spraying in a city council meeting by claiming that Zika does not cause microcephaly and by alleging that the CDC is being controlled by pesticide companies.

If left unchecked, the people behind these bogus theories could create a significant threat to public health.

Theyre leaving the most vulnerable people open to these diseases, Dr. Tara C. Smith, a Kent State University infectious disease epidemiologist who has been cataloging Zika conspiracy theories, told The Daily Beast.

The ultimate irony, she says, is that the perpetrators behind these conspiracy theories profit from them while simultaneously alleging that a shadowy cabal of scientists and government figures are raking in money from Zika.

Take, for example, the theory recently promoted by anti-vaccine website Health Impact News that the Zika virus is a masterpiece of public mind control. In a post that has already been shared 24,000 times on Facebookwith all of the ad revenue that number of eyeballs entailswriter John P. Thomas flatly and falsely states that Zika does not cause microcephaly. The truth, he believes, is far more sinister.

[I]f Zika could be connected to some other horrible consequence, such as microcephaly or paralysis for example, then people would insist that we create a Zika vaccine and would insist that every person on planet Earth take it, wrote Thomas. They would be willing to give up basic individual freedoms for the benefit of society, which is always the goal of mind control programs.

His prediction: Zika will be one of the tools used by mind controllers and the ruling elite to move us toward mass vaccination and total government control over our lives.

After 15 years of tracing the conspiracy theories that tend to swirl around infectious disease outbreaks, Smith is unfazed by this latest hare-brained notion.

It doesnt even surprise me anymore, she said. They have to get more and more outlandish as the science comes in that shows that Zika does cause microcephaly and these other neurological issues, so now they have to [promote] real far-out conspiracy theories.

To be fair, they were already pretty far-out to begin with. Smith has already swatted away some truly bizarre Zika conspiracy theories on her blog. Was the current Zika outbreak caused by genetically-modified mosquitoes from the British company Oxitec as websites like Alex Joness InfoWars have implied? No, and as Smith told The Daily Beast, whoever [first] wrote that has obviously not taken more than an intro bio class.

Are vaccines causing microcephaly, as flat earther David Wolfe pointedly asked? Nope. Zika is causing microcephaly. Did the Rockefellers invent Zika to kill millions of people? Come on now.

The conspiracy theories have gotten so bad that the World Health Organization has had to make a specific website for dispelling rumors around Zika and complications.

With regards to the Oxitec conspiracy theory, the WHO anti-rumor FAQ explains that only genetically-modified male mosquitoes are released, so there is no risk of disease transmission to humans because only females bite humans. The WHO also makes it crystal clear that there is no evidence linking any vaccine to the increases in microcephaly cases that have shown up in Brazil.

But for the true believers, public denials from respected sources like the WHO only make the conspiracy theories seem more credible.

Im not writing for those who are completely convincedthose who, just by the virtue of me writing about it, assume that Im in the pocket of Big Pharma, Smith told The Daily Beast. I know Im not going to convince them. Usually who I try to convince are those people who have heard these conspiracy theoriesmaybe through friends of friends, maybe through social mediabut dont really know what to think about them.

Although conspiracy theories about infectious disease have been with us for centuries, Smith says that the internet has facilitated their spread in cases like Ebola and Zika, allowing misinformation to move instantaneously between countries and hemispheres.

A May study in the journal Vaccine by Johns Hopkins and George Washington University researchers found that Twitter conversations in particular were helping to drive pseudoscientific, anti-vaccine commentary around Zika during the first half of 2016.

Even though the science is relatively clear, we found many conspiracy theories that could be affecting peoples health-related decisions, such as whether to vaccinate, study co-author and George Washington professor Dr. David Broniatowski said in a press release. Unfortunately, the people most affected are from the most vulnerable communities, with little access to the facts.

Some of these conspiracy theories have taken a firm hold in the United States. A February Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that 22 percent of Americans believe the current Zika outbreak was caused by genetically modified mosquitoes. The same survey found that 20 percent of Americans falsely believe that scientists think vaccines have caused microcephaly. And despite evidence to the contrary, 19 percent of Americans believe that scientists think that if a pregnant woman drinks water sprayed with a larvicide to stop the spread of mosquitoes, it can cause microcephaly.

It has been months since this polling was conducted but as Dr. Mark Dredze, a John Hopkins University professor and lead author of the Vaccine study said, Once people have made up their minds about something its hard for them to change their opinions.

At worst, these conspiracy theories can convince people in Zika hot spots like Miami that they should fear vaccines, scientists, and the government more than the costly birth defects that Zika can cause.

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden has stated that lifetime health care costs for a microcephalic child can fall between $1 and $10 million. People who are not pregnant can still facilitate the transmission of Zika to a pregnant woman through sex or by being bitten a mosquito that then bites her. Essentially, this means that anyone who refuses to take Zika seriously based on the theory that it does not cause microcephaly is by, default, subjecting others to the potentially devastating consequences of that false belief.

Youre really leaving people who dont have access to this information [and] in some cases dont have access to prevention wide open to viral infection, Smith told The Daily Beast, referring to the people who propagate these theories.

But no matter how vehemently the CDC and the WHO quell the misinformation around Zika, Smith says that the infectious disease conspiracy theorists arent going anywhere.

You have these people and that is their financial model and they do great at it, she said. Theres always going to be some new pathogen, some new scare that they can profit off of.

In the meantime, she wants the diehards to know that shes not exactly getting rich from refuting their theories.

They dont see what kind of cars we actually drive, she joked.
A meandering frontal boundary moving back and forth and causing heavy rains in various locales has resulted in a flash flood watch continuing to Thursday night for about 10 counties in southern Wisconsin, including Dane County.

The National Weather Service said thunderstorms repeatedly moving over the same area brings a serious threat for flash flooding, with many communities seeing 2 to 3 inches of rain and some getting up to 5 inches of rain before the storms diminish by Thursday night.

The watch includes Dane, Columbia, Iowa, Sauk, Marquette, Dodge, Green Lake, Fond du Lac and Sheboygan counties.

"Parts of the Madison metro area are very sensitive to rapid rainfall, resulting in urban flooding," the watch said. "Monitor forecasts and be prepared to take action should flash flood warnings be issued."

The only flash flood warning issued so far was in eastern La Crosse and western Monroe counties, set to expire Wednesday afternoon.

The flash flood watch is in effect until 7 p.m. Thursday.

The Columbia County Emergency Management office said the Baraboo River could reach minor flood stage (16.0 feet) on Saturday and crest at 18.3 feet on Sunday.

The Wisconsin River in Portage is below flood stage and isn't expected to cause issues, except in the flood-prone Blackhawk Park area.

As of 2 p.m., three-quarters of an inch of rain had fallen on Wednesday at the Dane County Regional Airport, with more rain in the forecast.

The day-to-day outlook for Madison:

Wednesday night: A 70 percent chance for showers and thunderstorms, low around 65. Up to a half-inch of rain is possible.

Thursday: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, high near 78.

Thursday night: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, low around 63.

Friday: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, high near 70.

Friday night: Mostly cloudy, low around 60.

Saturday: Partly sunny, high near 76.

Saturday night: Mostly cloudy, low around 60.

Sunday: A 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, high near 76.

Sunday night: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, low around 57.

Monday: A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms, high near 69.

Monday night: A slight chance of showers, low around 51.

Tuesday: Mostly sunny, high near 67.
Fox News star Sean Hannitya vocal supporter of Donald Trump on his radio show and his 10 p.m. program on the top-rated, right-leaning cable networkis in hot water Tuesday after his bosses were alerted to his participation in a Trump campaign video.

Hannity, who regularly features Trump on his shows in softball interviews and town halls, and recently sent a private jet for Newt Gingrich to confer with the Republican presidential nominee, appears along with Ted Nugent, Donald Trump Jr., Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., and other Trumpkins to extol the candidates devotion to gun rights among other virtues.

One of the reasons Im supporting Donald Trump this year, a jeans- and sport-shirt wearing Hannity tells the camera around minute six of the video, is No. 1, hes gonna put originalists on the Supreme Court who believe in fidelity to the Constitution, separation of powers, co-equal branches of government. Hes a guy who vet refugees to keep Americans safe

And so on and so forth.

Apparently, Hannity didnt see fit to obtain permission for starring in the political adan act that would be considered a serious breach of ethics at the overwhelming majority of news outletsand the sort of behavior that is definitely not condoned at a post-Roger Ailes Fox News.

We were not aware of Sean Hannity participating in a promotional video, said a Fox News spokesperson, after The Daily Beast informed the network of Hannitys appearance, and he will not be doing anything along these lines for the remainder of the election season.

It was not clear if Fox News co-presidents Bill Shine and/or Jack Abernethy gave Hannity a talking-to or whether he will face any disciplinary action.
I am Kerry Burgess. This is what I think.
Our beloved, Max Burleson Cronin, committed suicide 1-14-16, at the young age of 27 years old,as a result of devastating complications from an elective laser eye surgery. He is remembered and grieved by his family, his friends, and all who knew him. His absence and loss is a heart shattering event for us left behind. Max was a resident in College Station and attended Blinn College. He had aspirations of attending A&M this Fall pursuing a degree in Petroleum Engineering. Max was an Iraqi War Veteran and proudly served his country against Al Quada on the battle front. He was using his GI Bill for his education. He was proud to be a native Texan, an American Soldier, and soon to be Aggie. Max is a descendent of the Burleson family, an old Texas family who fought Indians and settled Texas to create the great State it is today. Max was known for his smiles, his laughter, his devotion to family and friends, and his big heart. Max was always available to help those in need and to defend those persecuted. Max understood difficulties and had compassion to those struggling in this life. Max had been born with a severe learning and language disability, with his first sentence spoken by him at the age of 7 years old. His struggle to talk and learn created a man of strength, perseverance, and compassion. His pride was achieving his life goal of attending college. Max knew Jesus as His Savior. He is eternally alive in Heaven and in all of our hearts. Max had a simple desire not to have to wear glasses. He believed a Laser Eye Surgery was a safe procedure. He had an "enhancement" of PRK. He developed severe corneal hazing resulting in blindness, severe constant eye pain, dry eyes, and other complications. Efforts to get help through the VA were not successful. He was unable to continue his classes or work, resulting in financial collapse of his household. He left suicide letters stating his eyes were ruined and thus his life. May the Lord grant us who have lost this precious life, strength to endure. I will love you forever son, the most precious life I have had the privilege to know and love.
As government ethics lawyers who have, respectively, counseled the most recent Republican president and the most recent Democratic one, we have watched Donald Trump's campaign with increasing concern. We have come to believe a Trump presidency would be ethically compromised for the following reasons:

Opacity. Trump's refusal to disclose his tax returns shields critical information about his finances that is not found in the basic details he is required to provide on his candidate financial disclosure. For example, his disclosure form does not cover his tax deductions and exemptions and any loopholes he takes advantage of; each represents a policy issue on which he has a potential conflict. To take another example, how much tax is Trump paying or sheltering domestically vs. in foreign jurisdictions? That needs to be known to ascertain which nations Trump has financial ties to and where he may be susceptible to pressure. Absent this information, it is impossible to assess the potential conflicts a President Trump would face in making decisions.

Lack of divestment. Trump has said that if elected, he would have his children manage his business and would not discuss business matters with them. That is not sufficient. Presidents for the past half-century have either converted assets to simple, conflict-free holdings such as U.S. government bonds, adopted blind trusts or done both. Blind trusts were used by Presidents Reagan, Carter, both Bushes and Bill Clinton, none of whom had holdings comparable to the size and complexity of the Trump empire. A true blind trust means that your holdings are liquidated and placed in new investments unknown to you by an independent trustee who manages them free of familial or other bias. Trump has so far declined to commit to taking those steps, and doing so would not be easy for him even if he agreed. A large number of Trump businesses are branded with his name as an integral part of their value. Even if ownership were placed in trust, Trump and everyone else would remain well aware of these assets. Assumption of the presidency requires a much more definitive break than Trump has, so far, been willing to make.

Domestic conflicts. Without considerable additional detail about Trump's finances, we cannot be sure his decisions on domestic matters would be conflict-free. When Trump nominated his Cabinet, offered his budget and invited people to White House meetings, would he be choosing with an eye toward his or his family's business interests? Moreover, based on what we do know, there is ample cause for concern about conflicts. Take the example of bank regulation. Trump's real-estate holdings appear to be heavily leveraged. That means that his businesses, like those of many in the real-estate field, are beholden to banks. It is not fanciful to question whether that would affect the Trump administration's attitude toward regulation of banks and other lenders.

Foreign conflicts. Even more serious are the questions raised by Trump investments abroad. Those relate to some of the United States' most important - and most sensitive - relationships, among them ones with Russia, China, India, South Korea and Turkey. When the United States must support or confront those nations, or their adversaries, would Trump act to benefit the national interest, or his and his family's investments? Moreover, who are the foreign individuals with whom he has had financial ties, and how would those relationships affect his decisions? As the electorate considers those questions, it is entitled to more information.

Legal exposure. Because of Trump's seeming unwillingness to set up a true blind trust, and the difficulty of his doing so, his potential foreign conflicts could raise immediate legal issues. Most federal ethics rules, surprisingly, do not apply to the president. But Trump would be covered by bribery laws and the Constitution's emoluments clause, which broadly prohibits the president from accepting gifts "from any King, Prince, or foreign State." The emoluments clause has been interpreted by the Justice Department to include any payment from a foreign government, except with the consent of Congress. Every time there was a financial transaction between a foreign government - or a company controlled by a foreign government - and any Trump entity, there would be a potential for favorable treatment that could violate this limitation, as well as the anti-bribery laws. That, too, gives us pause.

Veracity. Finally, we must address Trump's propensity for dishonesty. It is disturbing that just 15 percentof his statements checked by PolitiFact are "true" or "mostly true." No ethics program can work if the client is not honest.

To be sure, counsel for a President Hillary Clinton would have to address actual or apparent conflicts posed by the Clinton Foundation, but those have been disclosed and publicly vetted. They are nowhere near as obscure, profound and dangerous as Trump's. The ethics lawyer who would have President Trump as his or her client would face a far more daunting task than either of us - or any of our colleagues in recent years - has ever confronted.
On 19% of pig and chicken meat, E. coli bacteria showed high levels of resistance to the antibiotic Gentamicin, which is of vital importance in treating serious urinary tract infections in people. Resistance to another essential antibiotic, Trimethoprim (which is the most widely used drug for treating lower urinary-tract infections in people) was found on 51% of pork & chicken samples.

The findings provide further evidence that the overuse of antibiotics on British farms is undermining the treatment of dangerous E. coli infections in humans.

Exposing humans to potentially fatal infections

This is of huge concern, as the number of serious E. coli infections is at a record high and increasing every year. E.coli is by far the most common cause of urinary tract and dangerous blood poisoning in humans, and can also cause meningitis. These kinds of infections can be fatal if they do not respond to antibiotics.

But the last 25 years has seen a steady increase in resistance to some of the most important remaining antibiotics which can treat these infections. No new antibiotics for treating E. coli infections have been discovered for over 35 years.

Increasing resistance is leading to record levels of E. coli blood poisoning. Figures we have assembled show that in 2015 there were over 45,000 E. coli blood poisoning infections in the UK.

The number of blood-poisoning infections has increased every year since 2000 (when it stood at about 12,000 or so), and is increasing by about 2,000 each year now. E. coli is by far the most common cause of blood poisoning nowadays, causing more blood poisoning than the next four bacterial causes of blood poisoning combined.

Meanwhile, many important antibiotics - including a number of those examined in the study - are used in far greater quantities in livestock farming than in human medicine, often given to whole groups of (mostly healthy) animals.

This systematic overuse of antibiotics in factory farms is fuelling the emergence of resistant bacteria. These superbugs can then pass to humans through the environment, or via meat that we buy in the supermarket.

The antibiotic resistance crisis is predicted to kill one person every 3 seconds by 2050. Over a third of these deaths will be caused by drug-resistant E. coli. This catastrophe is now unfolding before us.

The silience of the supermarkets

Supermarkets have remained too silent on this issue. While our vital drugs fail, they continue to permit unacceptable antibiotic use in their supply chains.

Supermarkets must now take share the responsibility for tackling this crisis by banning the routine preventative mass medication of groups of animals, dramatically curbing farm-use of the critically important' antibiotics in their supply chains, and setting specifications around good animal husbandry.

Animals should - and can - be kept healthy through good husbandry and welfare, not through routine medication. It's time to stop sacrificing our animals - and our antibiotics - for cheap meat.

As farmers strive to compete with cheap imported pork, many farmers break EU and the UK regulations by depriving the growing pigs of straw (or other bedding material) to reduce labour costs. Crammed into small pens without the ability to express their natural instincts to root in straw for food and play with, pigs are stressed and fight thus increasing their vulnerability to disease.

Without straw the pig waste can more easily drop through the concrete floor slats into tanks underneath. The effluent is spread onto fields, sickening local residents with a toxic stench of ammonia and a cocktail of other gases and disease-causing bio aerosols.

This effluent inevitably leaks into watercourses, killing fish and other wildlife in rivers and the sea. In contrast, pig waste on outdoor farms, whose certification system demands limited pig numbers, nourishes the soil and forms part of the crop cycle that grows the pig feed.

Competing with imports is driving UK farmers in to a downward spiral where farms have to consolidate and reduce labour or go bankrupt. In the past 15 years the UK pig herd has dropped by half, while 70% of the imports have been raised in conditions that are illegal in the UK.

Join the growing movement for high-welfare farming!

The good news is that conscientious consumers are buying pork from high welfare farms. Today 25% of UK pork has been raised either outdoors, or indoors with plenty of straw and space to move around, where the pigs are happy and healthy and rarely, if ever, need antibiotics.

The solution? Of course we must back today's UN initiative to tackle the problem of microbial resistance on a global level. But we can also act closer to home and join the growing movement against factory farming by only buying meat from high welfare farms.

How? In supermarkets, only buy pork with the labels RSPCA Assured, Outdoor Bred, Free Range or best of all, Organic. Ask for high welfare pork in butchers, farmers' markets or online.

It doesn't cost much more - four sausages from a factory pig farm cost the same as three sausages from a real farm where pigs are healthy and free to move around. Reducing our meat intake also helps avoid obesity, diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer.

We can all give up half a sausage and help bring an end to pig factories, for our health and humanity's sake.

Alastair Kenneil is a campaigner with Pig Pledge, a project of Farms not Factories. As a former hill farmer raising sheep in Argyll, he became aware that animals thrive out of doors in a natural environment, and committed to the virtues of sustainable farming. He later became a film-maker, working on TV documentaries about remote communities around the world and their distinctive cultures for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery.

Take the Pig Pledge now!

Petition: Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Health: Please save our antibiotics! (38 Degrees)
Environmental destruction and landgrabs could lead to governments and individuals being prosecuted for crimes against humanity by the international criminal court following a decision to expand its remit.

The UN-backed court, which sits in The Hague, has mostly ruled on cases of genocide and war crimes since it was set up in 2002. It has been criticised for its reluctance to investigate major environmental and cultural crimes, which often happen in peacetime.

In a change of focus, the ICC said on Thursday it would also prioritise crimes that result in the "destruction of the environment", "exploitation of natural resources" and the "illegal dispossession" of land. It also included an explicit reference to land-grabbing.

The court, which is funded by governments and is regarded as the court of last resort, said it would now take many crimes that have been traditionally under-prosecuted into consideration.

The ICC is not formally extending its jurisdiction, but the court said it would assess existing offences, such as crimes against humanity, in a broader context.

The ICC's policy paper on case selection and prioritisation declares: "The office [of the prosecutor] will give particular consideration to prosecuting Rome statute crimes that are committed by means of, or that result in, inter alia, the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land."

Land-grabbing has become increasingly common worldwide, with national and local governments allocating private companies tens of millions of hectares of land in the past 10 years.

The anti-corruption campaigners Global Witness say this has led to many forced evictions, the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples, malnutrition and environmental destruction.

"Land-grabbing is no less harmful than war in terms of negative impacts on civilians", said Alice Harrison, an adviser at Global Witness. "Today's announcement should send a warning shot to company executives and investors that the environment is no longer their playground.

"The terrible impacts of land-grabbing and environmental destruction have been acknowledged at the highest level of criminal justice, and private sector actors could now be put on trial for their role in illegally seizing land, flattening rainforests or poisoning water sources."

Crimes for profit, not just war

International lawyers said broadening the priority cases to include land-grabbing would recognise that mass human rights violations committed during peacetime and in the name of profit could be just as serious as traditional war crimes.

"It will not make land-grabbing per se a crime, but mass forcible evictions that results from land-grabbing may end up being tried as a crime against humanity", said Richard Rogers, a partner in the international criminal law firm Global Diligence.
The Franklin County chapter of FFA (Future Farmers of America) will host its second annual veterans dinner Thursday, Sept. 22.

All veterans and their families are invited to enjoy free hot dogs, beans, chips, hot coffee and sweet tea, courtesy of Rocky Mount McDonalds, from 6 to 8 p.m. in room 20 at the FCHS West Campus.

The dinner is in appreciation of Franklin County veterans and their families.

Those planning to attend should RSVP at (540) 483-0221, ext. 292.

Community service is an important part of the FFA, according to its motto, Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve.

Veterans who served in many conflicts, including WWII, Vietnam, Desert Storm and the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, attended last years dinner.
Around Burlington: Why 800 hunters descended upon Danville in 1921

It was 1921, and the threat of grey wolves preying on livestock drew hundreds of hunters to the town of Danville, but biologists say there may not have been any wolves at all.
NORWALK  City and state leaders took to a Board of Education meeting Tuesday night to draw out the meaning of a state Superior Court Judges Sept. 7 ruling that the state must rework its irrational education funding formula.

Though the decision was appealed by state Attorney General George Jepsen on Thursday, and the appeal was taken up by the state Supreme Court earlier Tuesday, those at the school board meeting were eager not to give up a fight they say could rightfully bring in more money to Norwalk.

My request to you tonight is to continue on this long march, and not put it on the back burner because its on appeal or give up hope because the Supreme Court may well be a harsh critique of some of the trees in the judges opinion, said former Norwalk Mayor Alex Knopp, who is on the steering committee for the coalition that helped bring the lawsuit forward in 2005.

Knopp went on to explain to the board the importance of the judges ruling, despite the appeal.

Lets not miss the forest for the trees, he said.

He said the forest of that

decision is that the property tax system of funding education in Connecticut is fundamentally broken and unfair.

Knopp said the basis of the lawsuit brought against the state was that education funding in was irrational and arbitrary. He said that means it is not based on a factual, evidence-based analysis of what is needed to educate all children.

As an example, Knopp talked about the additional cost of teaching Norwalks Haitian population. He asked about the cost of employing teachers and counselors who work with students who speak French Creole, and said a funding formula should account for similar factors.

It has to be done more on a scientific, measurable and evidence-based purpose, Knopp said. Thats the goal.

He said that despite the states appeal, there is work that can be done now.

I think we need to keep working together to put this issue in front of the Legislature and the governor, Knopp said.

State Rep. Fred Wilms, whose 142nd District includes Norwalk and New Canaan, seemed to agree. He told the school board he was a longtime supporter of revamping the states education funding formula.

Wilms also presented an idea for funding that he said would be based more on student need than on property tax. And he pointed toward District Reference Groups, which were devised as a way to categorize school districts by the Connecticut Department of Education.

The groups are organized based on seven concepts: median family income; percentage of parents with a college degree; occupations of parents; percentage of students with employed parents; percentage of students living in single-parent households; percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunches; and percentage of children whose families speak a language other than English at home.

Wilms said Norwalk would benefit from that sort of funding model because the city is ranked as having much more need compared to more wealthy and less diverse surrounding cities.

The State Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawshers ruling came more than 10 years after Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding filed its lawsuit against the state.

In his ruling, Moukawsher did not find the amount of money the state spends on education unconstitutional, but ruled the way the state distributes school funding is irrational and needs to be fixed in order for the state to say it is abiding by the state Constitutions guarantee of an adequate educational opportunity. The judge gave the state 180 days to come up with a plan.

It remains unclear when the states Supreme Court will hear the case.

KSchultz@thehour.com; 203- 354-1049; @kevinedschultz
NORWALK, Conn.  Eversource Energy and Norwalk police are advising residents that a low-flying helicopter is nothing to fear.

Eversource said Wednesday that the company would be completing aerial inspections of high voltage electrical equipment over Fairfield County.

"This inspection is an important part of the company's ongoing commitment to providing reliable electric service," Eversource spokesman Mitch Gross said in a release. "The work involves the use of low flying helicopters equipped with high-resolution cameras, which can detect potential equipment issues before they occur."

The company will be using two MD500 helicopters (with registration numbers N371EE and N500LK) to inspect lines in Fairfield County and plans to begin inspections in Litchfield and Hartford counties on Monday.

Helicopters will be in the air anywhere between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. during these days, weather permitting.

"Over a million customers in Connecticut depend on us every day for reliable electric service," Craig Hallstrom, Regional Electric Operations President at Eversource, said in a release. "These helicopter inspections of our transmission lines are a crucial part of our commitment to reducing the frequency and duration of power outages."

Norwalk police also took to their Facebook page on Wednesday to let residents know of the helicopter's business in the area.

The helicopter spotted in Norwalk will be seen conducting inspections in the Silvermine, New Canaan Avenue, and Main Avenue areas, police said.

Eversource has been known to conduct aerial inspections of electrical lines, especially in areas near train tracks, throughout the year.

Gross said the use of helicopters to inspect lines is not a new phenomenon and is necessary.

"The region's transmission system is the backbone of the electric grid. Overhead inspections of transmission lines and equipmentoften located upwards of 100 feet in the airhelp engineers detect potential problems in advance, allowing the company to schedule necessary maintenance and upgrades before reliability issues arise," Gross said.

Reports of the helicopter started trickling in early Wednesday morning. Witnesses wrote in worried that the helicopter seemed to have been in the same place for hours.
There is no point denying or sugar-coating the plain fact that the voters this election year face a choice between two of the worst candidates in living memory. A professor at Morgan State University summarized the situation by saying that the upcoming debates may enable voters to decide which is the less insufferable candidate to be president of the United States.

My own take on this election is that the voter is in a situation much like that of an American fighter pilot in World War II, whose plane has been hit by enemy fire out over the Pacific Ocean and is beginning to burst into flames.

If he bails out, there is no guarantee that his parachute will open. But even if he lands safely in the ocean, he may be eaten by sharks. If he comes down on land, he may be captured by the Japanese and tortured and/or killed.

In other words, there are huge and potentially fatal risks. But, if he remains in the plane, he is doomed for certain. To me, Donald Trump represents multiple and potentially fatal risks. But Hillary Clinton is a certainty of disaster. Her vaunted experience is an experience of having repeatedly made decisions that turned out to be not merely wrong but catastrophic.

The most obvious example has been her role as Secretary of State during the Obama administrations decision to undermine and help destroy the governments of two nations  Egypt and Libya  that were no threat whatever to Americans or to Americas interests.

The net result was that two Middle East nations that were at least neutral toward the United States, in contrast to others who are hostile and belligerent, were turned into countries where Islamic extremists created turmoil, and one in which Islamic terrorists killed the American ambassador and those who came to his aid.

President Obama and Secretary Clinton inherited an Iraq where terrorists had been soundly defeated, thanks to General David Petraeus surge campaign, which both had opposed when they were in the Senate.

But the Obama administration turned victory into defeat by pulling American troops out of Iraq, against the advice of top military leaders, setting the stage for the emergence of ISIS and its triumphant barbarism that attracted adherents who began waging a terrorist war inside Western nations, including the United States.

A whole series of disastrous military and foreign policy decisions have led to public criticisms by an extraordinary succession of former Secretaries of Defense and top generals who had served under the Obama administration. Such public criticisms of any administration, by its own former high officials, are virtually unheard of.

One of these Secretaries of Defense, Robert Gates  who has served under several administrations of both parties  criticized Donald Trump as well. Secretary Gates said: The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes that he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone.

Secretary Gates called Trump beyond repair. He also criticized Hillary Clinton, so this was no partisan attack. Unfortunately  perhaps tragically  she and Trump are our only alternatives this election year. On the domestic front, as well, Trump is an uncertainty, while Hillary is a guaranteed catastrophe. Given the advanced ages of various Supreme Court justices, whoever becomes the next President of the United States can expect to have enough appointments to that court to determine the future of American law  and American freedom  for decades after that Presidents term of office is over.

Hillary Clinton has already said that she wants to see the current Supreme Courts decision overturned in a case where they ruled, by a 5 to 4 vote, that both corporations and labor unions have free speech rights. On other issues as well, she has advocated curtailments on free speech. And without free speech, there is no effective limit on what any administration can do.

On racial issues, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly pushed the idea that blacks are besieged by enemies on all sides, and need her to protect them  in exchange for their votes. Trump has at least supported charter schools, which are one of the few avenues through which the next generation of blacks can get a decent education.

There are no good choices, but nevertheless we must choose.
We Nebraskans will soon decide whether to allow our state to execute its citizens. Those who believe the state should have this power say certain criminals deserve this worst punishment, and insist that the death penalty puts the fear of God into potential murderers.

But according to 88 percent of criminal-justice experts, the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to murder. What is more, non-death-penalty states have consistently lower murder rates than states with executions. Yes, it will be difficult to improve sentencing guidelines. Execution is surely an easier solution, but in this hour we are challenged to do not what is easy, but what is right.

It is unfortunate that cost is a factor in so profound a decision, but experts agree there will never be a way to make death penalty cases less expensive than life-in-prison cases. According to Loyola Marymount Law Professor Paula Mitchell, who did a recent long-term study in California, the legal costs for death penalty cases skyrocket to an extra $134 million per year, well above the costs of simple incarcerations. And Amnesty International, in a recent study, determined that even if post-trial litigation were abolished, death penalty cases would still be more expensive.

But the most compelling reason for restraining the powers of the state lies in the unwavering evidence for what is right and what is wrong. In study after study it has been determined that we have mistakenly executed innocent people, and disproportionate numbers of poor and uneducated people, especially racial and religious minorities.

So shall we give the state the power to burn the final bridge over which the accused might travel toward remorse or redemption? Or shall we agree that the state has no business on that holy ground?
Schwarber's 2 big swings went 756 feet, got Phillies nothing

Kyle Schwarber had big swings on consecutive pitches for the Philadelphia Phillies when they needed a comeback in...
Four students from the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Pharmacy diversified their clinical experience during a five-week medical mission in Antigua, Guatemala from June 20-July 22, through the Schools Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience (APPE).

Participants included Class of 2017 PharmD candidates Thomas Kelly, of St. Louis, Decaturs Regan Kitchens, Glen Carbon native Yasmyn Knight, and Janet Ellis, of Latham.

While in Guatemala, the students worked in rural clinics continually run by Guatemalan clinicians trained in ambulatory care services, community outreach and education, explained Misty Gonzalez, PharmD, clinical associate professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at SIUE. The students helped more than 520 patients in pop-up clinics that we arranged, and in the public health clinics during their time there. The experience also allowed time for exploration of Guatemala, including trips to Lake Atitlan and Tikal.

The students clinical responsibilities included interdisciplinary ambulatory care treatment, medication selection, dispensing, counseling, health promotion and disease prevention education. In addition to clinical practice, students gained experience in cultural competency, health literacy and health disparities.

Experiencing healthcare in a poverty-stricken country like Guatemala was an eye-opening experience, said Kelly. Living in the U.S., we often take access to quality healthcare and medications for granted. The U.S. offers the most cutting edge, top of the line services and diagnostic tests. In Guatemala, patients often only receive the most basic of healthcare in the free clinics.

Now in its second year, the Schools Guatemala APPE is a partnership with Saint Louis University School of Medicine physicians, medical students and local Guatemalan healthcare practitioners.

The SIUE School of Pharmacy offers additional global opportunities for students, including experiences in Costa Rica, Jamaica and India. For more information, visit the Schools Global Education Facebook page.
Project Restore, an Edwardsville organization dedicated to addressing education, clean water and medical care issues in developing countries, is moving its annual Howl-O-Ween Dog Costume Parade to Joe Glik Park in Edwardsville.

This event, which takes place on Oct. 15, is a morning of fun for the entire family, including the four-legged ones.

Last years inaugural event, which took place at Dunlap Lake, was such a success that Project Restore is moving the festivities to Joe Glik Park, 710 East Lake in Edwardsville, to accommodate longer routes, larger crowds, and bigger family fun.

We had good participation, Project Restore Executive Director Catherine Keck said about the inaugural event. The dogs came in their costumes and looked fabulous. It was just a nice, eventful day.

Its something that is fun, family oriented, you can include your family pet, and we just decided to try it again this year since we had such a good time. We thought it would give more space to more dogs, Keck added about the move to Glik Park.

Those interested in participating in the parade can register at the event on Oct. 15 beginning at 10 a.m. Its free to watch the parade, which begins at 10:30 a.m., and $20 to enter your pup in the parade and costume contest. First, second and third place ribbons will be awarded for the costume contest. In addition, the first 25 registrants will receive a goody bag.

Dogs must remain leashed, have current rabies and vaccination tags, and wear I.D. tags at all times. No puppies under four months old will be allowed.

In addition to the parade, the event includes raffles, giveaways, and other activities. New this year will be vendor booths for the guests to peruse. Project Restore is still accepting vendors and sponsors for the event as well as donations for goody bags. Vendor booth space, which is 10 feet by 10 feet, is open to any businesses or organizations and are $25 each. However, no electricity is available at the park and no generators are allowed. Call 618-781-4193 or email info@project-restore.org for additional information about becoming a vendor, a sponsor or donating an item for the goody bags.

Keck thanked Carrie Brase and Terri Dalla Riva with Coldwell Banker Brown, this years title sponsor of the Howl-O-Ween Dog Costume Parade. Other parade sponsors include Affiliated Insurance Agencies, Inc., CKC Construction, Kohls, Lauries Place, Nicole Plegge Creative, Louer Facility Planning, Inc., and Jim Reppell at Re/Max Alliance.

All proceeds from the Howl-O-Ween Dog Costume Parade will help Project Restore construct an inpatient dormitory at its Wakiso District Medical Clinic in Namulonge, Uganda. Wakiso is the only healthcare facility in its region, serving 52 villages and more than 53,000 patients, Keck noted. By building an inpatient center, the Clinic can hire a full-time medical doctor and provide better care for patients with chronic conditions and injuries. And because Project Restore is 100 percent volunteer based, all funds go directly to the clinic.

Project Restore, an Edwardsville-based 501(c)3 humanitarian development and relief agency with a purpose to assist in program development that fosters self-reliance and sustainability, has been providing relief efforts in Uganda since 2007. Having a core value of sustainability, the organization seeks to provide the Uganda community with clean water and sanitation, health care, education, nutrition and food supplies.

Over the years, Project Restore has refurbished and rebuilt this medical clinic from just a few foundation walls and a dilapidated building. Theyve added louvered panes to window screens to allow air flow yet keep dust and dirt out of the more sensitive areas creating a more sanitary environment.

Theres a maternity lab there. Before we got there it was not functional, Keck expounded about the many improvements theyve made. One couldnt afford to go to the city to deliver their babies and they were delivering them at home. The death rate of moms and babies was really going up. So that was our first goal to get that able to service the moms and babies in the community.

After making the maternity lab improvements in 2013, the organization then focused on the larger building with the clinic and refurbished it inside and out with security and sanitation improvements. Building the inpatient center is an important next step in providing better healthcare for the people in Uganda.
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Linkedin Hendri Yulius (The Jakarta Post) Sydney  Wed, September 21, 2016

In early September 2016, President Joko Jokowi Widodo was selected as one of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UNWOMEN)s HeForShe ambassadors in the Impact 10x10x10 program that engages world leaders, corporations and universities to mainstream gender justice. Along with other country leadersincluding US President Barack Obama and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Jokowi has committed to championing gender equality, and came up with specific actions to ensure equal opportunities for women, readily launching a nationwide campaign on womens rights.

Jokowi has committed to three major particular actions to improve womens lives, including aims to reach at least a 30 percent representation of women in the House of Representatives, reducing maternal mortality and improving access to reproductive health services, as well as ending violence against women and girls. While it is necessary to address these issues, what can be problematic in his programs is the underlying assumptions that women are monolithic and share similar experiences and vulnerabilities. In fact, particular groups of women are even more prone to violence.

Another largely ignored issue is state violence, in which the state disproportionately targets, polices and offers no protection for certain groups of women due to their immorality or certain backgrounds. Hence, the state, either by actively perpetuating its stance or by being silent, has normalized and nurtured fertile grounds for violence.

UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson in her speech highlighted the importance of male involvement in addressing gender inequality. Without undermining its values and importance, the overemphasis on male involvement reveals that rights have been individualized. In other words, the responsibilities to address inequality have been transferred to individuals, ignoring the fact it is the state that oftentimes plays pivotal roles in perpetuating stigma and discrimination through its policies and practices that impede certain groups of women to be able to access their basic rights, or even deliberately inflict violent acts on women for political purposes.

Indonesia has not yet come to terms with its dark past of the 1965 violence and the May 1998 tragedy. In his attempt to banish communism from Indonesia, Soehartos New Order regime perpetuated myths that women activists of Gerakan Wanita Indonesia - Gerwani (Indonesian Women Movement) allegedly affiliated with communism and tortured and massacred a number of Indonesian military generals, while dancing naked and performing non-normative or lesbian sexual practices in front of them. Gerwanis so-called sexual evilness was imbricated with the murderous acts and hence immorality after the 1965 Soeharto regime found its justifications to murder, send to camps and imprison Gerwani members without trial for years. In the camps, these women also experienced sexual violence and harassment. Furthermore, the propaganda of lesbian Gerwani members provided a platform for state to police non-normative sexuality and the legitimizing of heterosexual family principles alongside traditional gender norms as the states ideology.

In May 1998, before the downfall of authoritarian New Order, hundreds of Chinese-Indonesian women were raped, against the backdrop of mass burnings and looted shops and buildings. This anti-Chinese turmoil was an attempt to blame the ethnic Chinese for the krisis moneter (economic crisis). In Masculinity, Sexuality and Islam (2015), Australian scholar Kathryn Robinson shows that there were recurring patterns of violence against womenincluding murder and rapeby soldiers and the military in places with organized resistance to the state, including East Timor and Papua. Women were often used as instruments of war.

The collapse of the New Order era opened up spaces for previously suppressed Islamic fundamentalist politics to proliferate and exert their power through moral-based regulations that controlled and sanctioned womens bodies, attire and sexualities. In reality, the legislation of the pornography bill, along with perda syariah (local bylaws) that were believed to be able to reduce social ills, instead resulted in more violence against women. The province of Aceh, granted autonomy to be a special province implementing sharia law, is reported to have high numbers of sexual harassment and domestic violence. In this case, the silence of the state, or even the states nods to support Islamic fundamentalist politics, has nurtured it to burgeon and expand its power, while putting women and other minority groups in more vulnerable positions.

During the current anti-LGBT meltdown in the country, state officials have also been actively involved in condemning and giving homophobic public statements that has increasingly fueled hostility toward lesbians and waria (transgender women). Women also have different sexual orientations and lesbians are also a part of women. Although the National Commission on Anti-Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) has acknowledged a waria as a social woman (perempuan sosial), the state is still absent in providing protection to them. Many warias are harassed and even sent to inhumane assessment camps by local public order officers, alongside street children and homeless people. The state seems to neglect complex issues and exclusions experienced by the waria community. The fact that warias face underlying impediments to access education and employment have led them to work on streets, as street musicians or sex workers.

We often ignore the fact that state and power often come in gendered formsit is not always neutral. Through positioning women and other minority groups as second class citizens and reproducing structural violence, the state has restored its masculine dominance. It exerts masculine power through its silence, even bowing to and normalizing violence and discrimination. Instead of HeForShe, the state does She for He it crucifies women and minority groups for the benefit of its own power. Hence, it is necessary to remind everyone that while rights have been increasingly individualized, let us not forget about the roles of the state in perpetuating structural injustice, inequality and control over certain groups that amputate their access to basic rights.

***

The writer, who obtained his Masters in public policy from the National University of Singapore, is the writer of Coming Out and a lecturer of gender and sexuality studies. He is currently pursuing his Masters by Research in Gender and Cultural Studies in The University of Sydney.

---------------

We are looking for information, opinions, and in-depth analysis from experts or scholars in a variety of fields. We choose articles based on facts or opinions about general news, as well as quality analysis and commentary about Indonesia or international events. Send your piece to community@jakpost.com.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin Devina Heriyanto (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Indonesian media outlets have learned to avoid being easily exploited by radical groups, media pundits have said.

Speaking at a discussion during the 2016 Jakarta World Forum for Media Development, The Jakarta Post editor-in-chief Endy Bayuni highlighted a mistake in the medias initial treatment of radicals. In early 2000s, Indonesian media gave a lot of attention to radicals, most notably cleric Abu Bakkar Baasyir, leader of Al-Qaeda-linked terror group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI).

We turned him into a superstar. The radicals and the extremists were exploiting us, Endy told the participants at the forum.

The forum focused on the role the media plays in strategic communication against violent extremism.

Endy said that nowadays, the media was undertaking a new strategy to counter the radicals. We only broadcast news when they break loose, not when they are spreading propaganda, he said.

Furthermore, he argued that media should play a key role in filtering the voice of radicals.

Endy added that even though the Post, for instance, does not give space for radicals, the radicals are now media savvy.

He noted that social media poses challenges in counter extremism efforts. He said many radicals used social media to spread their stories, their propaganda.

The internet is seen by some as an open marketplace for ideologies.

To fight those voices, we have to fight them on the internet, Endy concluded.

Voicing similar concerns, Courtney Radsch, the advocacy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said counter-narrative efforts by media outlets faced an uphill task with the focus on the Islamic State (IS) group.

ISIS media strategy is very sophisticated, she said.

All the literature reviews show that government-funded counter-narratives are ineffective, argued Radsch, particularly on government-sponsored or controlled media.

Furthermore, these failures discredit the idea that the media is independent.

Radsch mentioned a significant problem in the governments counter-narrative efforts, which is the belief that extremist views are not allowed to be expressed.

She argued that online censorship only pushed radicals to private and encrypted chatrooms, thereby not allowing journalists and governments to see what is going on.

According to Radsch, a more sensible approach would be to focus not on content, but on the perception of content. (dmr)
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Linkedin Frazier Moore (Associated Press) New York, United States  Wed, September 21, 2016

Wherever she was, Natascha McElhone's ears must have been burning thanks to Kiefer Sutherland, who stars as her devoted husband and the inadvertent president of the United States in ABC's much-anticipated new thriller "Designated Survivor."

"Aside from the way she can light up a room," said Sutherland, singing her praises, "Natasha's one of the freest actors I've ever worked with. That kind of freedom allowed me to relax a bit and put more of myself into my character."

Sutherland, who spent a decade as action hero Jack Bauer in Fox's "24," is primed to show viewers a new side of himself as Tom Kirkman, a low-level cabinet member (and political independent) suddenly drafted as the nation's chief executive after an attack on the U.S. Capitol kills the incumbent president and wipes out Congress during the State of the Union address. "Designated Survivor" premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. EDT.

"My character," said Sutherland in his husky purr, "was an architect with an idea for low-income housing who became a member of the cabinet. He was never elected to anything. He wears a tweed jacket!"

In this image released by ABC, Kiefer Sutherland portrays Tom Kirkman in a scene from, "Designated Survivor," premiering Wednesday, Sept. 21.(ABC via AP/Ben Mark Holzberg)

Thrust into the Oval Office, Kirkman must resurrect a shattered government while marshaling the campaign to find its attackers. Meanwhile, he must protect what's most important to him: his wife and their two kids.

"The show covers such a wide landscape," said Sutherland. "How does he get the country back on its feet? Who did the bombing, and what is the appropriate response? And what happens to a family that inherits the White House overnight? My character will get to navigate all of those things."

But not without support from his wife, Alex, played by McElhone (whose credits include the feature "Ronin" and Showtime's comedy "Californication").

"Initially, Alex is more tough than he is," said Sutherland. "She's an attorney, aggressive, and much more of a political animal.

"She is the center of his universe. Then he becomes president overnight, and by accepting it, he puts the one thing that matters most to him  his marriage  in jeopardy out of his sense of patriotism and duty."

Granted, this unsought mandate bears a save-the-world likeness to that of Jack Bauer. Yet Kirkman is anything but a lone wolf, and, also unlike Bauer, there's no rock-'em-sock-'em to his style.

"I always enjoyed the physicality of '24,'" said Sutherland, who for this interview was clad in jeans and T-shirt  no tweed!  that seemed to favor Bauer's fashion sense. "But, like Kirkman, I'm a much better talker than I am a fighter, so I feel more at home with this guy."

As he spoke, Sutherland was several episodes deep into production of the series, which, despite being shot in Toronto, clearly keeps him in a D.C. state of mind.

He gets help with that from cast-mate Kal Penn, who plays a presidential speechwriter but, while on a break from his acting career a few years ago, served in the real-life White House of Barack Obama.

(Read also: Ex-NCISs Michael Weatherly stars in new legal drama)

"With that perspective, to have him on our show is invaluable," said Sutherland. "You can ask, 'When the president's walking down the hall, can you say "hi" to him?' And Kal says, 'Yeah, you can, I guess. But you DON'T.'

"Just as an ordinary person, I'm so excited to hear those details!"

But Sutherland is not an ordinary person, of course. He's the leader of the free world, or at least pretending at a job he experiences as "mind-numbingly complicated  and WE'RE only making (stuff) up!"

President Kirkman hasn't been his only performance of late. In the early weeks of shooting "Designated Survivor," Sutherland was also shooting a sci-fi feature "Flatliners" alongside Ellen Page and James Norton.

In this image released by ABC, Kiefer Sutherland portrays Tom Kirkman in a scene from, "Designated Survivor," premiering Wednesday, Sept. 21. (ABC via AP/Ian Watson)

Meanwhile, he's been touring in support of his debut country album, "Down in a Hole."

"The truth is, I really like what I do," he said when asked about this jam-packed schedule. "When '24' ended (in 2010) I didn't know what to do. ... I had a real hard time. So I learned something about myself."

In 2012, he starred in the spiritually based Fox drama "Touch," an ambitious misfire that lasted just two seasons.

Now he's back in a new series that handicappers are forecasting as a surefire hit.

"My response to that is, 'We'll see,'" said Sutherland. "One of the great benefits of having done this for 30 years is you approach everything with cautious optimism. You can survive with that.

"But all of the components of this show feel right to me." He smiled. "We'll see."
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Linkedin Jake Coyle (Associated Press) New York, United States  Wed, September 21, 2016

The 12-year relationship between Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt has been neatly bookended on the big screen.

They famously became acquainted while playing married assassins in Doug Liman's 2005 action comedy "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." And they didn't star together again until last year's "By the Sea," a marital melodrama set on the French Riviera directed by Jolie Pitt and starring the couple as unhappy spouses.

Pitt and Jolie Pitt, who filed for divorce Monday, don't have any joint upcoming projects. But both have a number of films coming soon that will surely receive a little more attention in the wake of their separation.

'ALLIED'

The most sizable and immediate project upcoming is the Robert Zemeckis World War II romantic thriller "Allied" (opening Nov. 23), starring Pitt and Marion Cotillard. The film, in which Pitt plays an intelligence officer in 1942 North Africa, is slotted for release smack in the middle of awards season.

'FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER'

Jolie Pitt has spent much of the last year making "First They Killed My Father," her fourth feature as director. The film, about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, is based on Loung Ung's memoir of living under the Cambodian regime in the 1970s. Jolie Pitt and Ung collaborated on the script and shot the film in Cambodia. Jolie's son Maddox, adopted from Cambodia, has also been involved in the production, which takes the perspective of war from a 5-year-old child. Netflix is expected to debut the film next year.

(Read also: Jennifer Aniston memes explode in response to Pitt divorce)

OTHERS

While Jolie Pitt has been largely focused on directing, Pitt has a string of movies lined up that he either produced or stars in. Pitt narrates Terrence Malick's IMAX documentary "Voyage of Time" (Oct. 7), a cinematic history of the life as viewed through the lens of the revered filmmaker.

Pitt's production company, Plan B, is also behind one of the fall's most acclaimed films, Barry Jenkins' "Moonlight" (Oct. 21), a lyrical coming-of-age tale told in three chapters. Another Pitt-produced film, James Gray's "The Lost City of Z," will debut next month as the closing film of the New York Film Festival. Adapted from David Grann's book, it stars Charlie Hunnam as British explorer Col. Percival Fawcett.

Along with other numerous producing gigs, Pitt stars as Gen. Stanley McChrystal in David Michod's "War Machine," a war satire. With a release planned for next year, Netflix acquired the film for a hefty sum, positioning "War Machine" as one of its boldest forays into original movies yet.

SEQUELS

Both have a pair of big-budget sequels on the distant horizon, as well. Pitt is also prepping a sequel to his 2013 apocalyptic thriller "World War Z," while Jolie Pitt is to return for the planned "Maleficent 2."
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Linkedin Lindsey Bahr (Associated Press)  Wed, September 21, 2016

Deciding to remake "The Magnificent Seven " with a fresh batch of movie stars is certainly no sin. John Sturges' 1960 tome, itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic "Seven Samurai," is a fun confection of star power and charismatic bravado, sure, but held in such high esteem probably more because of Elmer Bernstein's iconic score than anything else. Plus, who doesn't enjoy a ragtag group of outlaws banding together to defeat a powerful bully?

But director Antoine Fuqua doesn't exactly elevate that now well-trod premise in this dutiful and solid rehashing of the seven gunmen who attempt to save a terrorized town, even if he does up the shoot-em-up action (and body count). Bernstein's score is given a few nods throughout the film, but saved in full for the final credits. Thus, it's left to the actors to carry us through the over two-hour running time.

You could do worse than putting it all in the capable hands of Denzel Washington, with some help from Chris Pratt. Washington, as the steely-eyed bounty hunter Sam Chisolm, is the de facto leader, the Yul Brynner of the group. His out-of-use heart starts beating again when the recently widowed Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) begs him to return to her small farming town of Rose Creek to save them from the terror of greedy industrialist Bartholomew Bogue, played with delicious, over-the-top menace by Peter Sarsgaard.

Bogue is running a mining operation nearby and wants their land, too. He'll either pay the residents of Rose Creek an unfairly low price for it or force them to leave (already a less compelling idea than taking the food they've grown, but this "farming town" does very little farming anyway). Fuqua takes no time easing into the story, starting out with an all-out massacre in the town.

(Read also: Lee Byung-hun recalls filming alongside Chris Pratt on Magnificent Seven)

For about an hour, things are fairly fun as Chisolm recruits the other six. Pratt's Josh Faraday is the first up  a bemused gambler with enemies to spare and a fondness for whiskey who signs up for the mission to try to win back his horse. They find a legendary Civil War vet Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and his blade-wielding buddy Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee)  who gets to put his own spin on the memorable gun vs. knife duel.

There's the bearlike, shell-shocked tracker Jack Horne (Vincent D'Onofrio), the Mexican gunslinger Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and an exiled Native American, Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier). It's a delightfully diverse little group, but unfortunately the script, credited to "True Detective" creator Nic Pizzolatto and "The Equalizer" scribe Richard Wenk, doesn't spend much time getting to know these men. What is there isn't nearly clever, funny or insightful enough to make up for that. It felt like no one ever quite agreed on what the tone should be. Fun? Nihilistic? Folksy? Irreverent? Sincere? It's all over the place and it's not good. The actors do their best, but when even Pratt struggles to sell a joke, you know you're in trouble.

All dialogue, however, gets drowned out eventually as the movie gives way to the extremely long and frustratingly illogical final showdown with a Marvel-sized body count that nonetheless provides some exhilarating moments for Washington, Pratt and a few others. The pieces are there but never quite come together. By the time Bernstein's score plays and the credits start rolling, it's a little too late to do anything besides make you even more nostalgic for what came before.

"The Magnificent Seven," a Sony Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "extended and intense sequences of Western violence, and for historical smoking, some language and suggestive material."

Running time: 132 minutes.

Two and a half stars out of four.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

The government is set to recognize traditional arts maestros that have helped preserve and develop the country's authentic culture by providing them with an award and incentive.

"The award is a form of the government's appreciation for individuals as well as institutions that have preserved Indonesian culture," said the Education and Cultural Ministry's culture director-general Hilmar Farid in Jakarta on Tuesday as quoted by Antara news agency.

Dubbed Anugerah Kebudayaan dan Penghargaan Maestro Seni Tradisi 2016 (cultural and traditional arts maestro awards), the recognition is said to be equal to the popular Kalpataru award for conservation of nature and the Adipura award for clean and green cities.

(Read also: 10 maestros join program to share knowledge with students)

Hilmar said the awards would be presented to 54 recipients from nine categories. In terms of incentives, the ministry will provide Rp 60 million (US$4,563) for four recipients of the Bintang Budaya Parama Dharma awards, Rp 55 million for 10 recipients of the Satyalancana Kebudayaan awards and Rp 50 million for 10 recipients of the Pencipta, Pelopor and Pembaharu (creator, pioneer and reformer) awards.

An incentive of Rp 50 million will also be given to nine recipients of the Pelestari (preserver) awards, three local administrations, three media companies, three communities, three foreign individuals and four recipients of the Maestro Seni Tradisi (traditional arts maestro) awards. The ministry has also prepared Rp 25 million for five recipients from the Children/Youth category.

Held since 2012 as part of the government's efforts to strengthen the nation's character, the ceremony is slated for Sept. 23 at Taman Ismail Marzuki in Central Jakarta. (kes)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Gadjah Mada University (UGM) has revealed plans to build a techno-park in Kulon Progo regency, Yogyakarta, Central Java.

"The construction will begin in 2018. We are currently preparing research products that will be manufactured at UGMs mini factory," said rector Dwikorita Karnawati in Yogyakarta on Wednesday as quoted by Antara news agency.

The park aims to become a teaching space to promote downstream academic and research products to the public. It is also hoped the park will develop and expand the university's vocational education.

(Read also: ITB, UGM, UI named top three universities in Indonesia)

Dwikorita said UGM had developed various health equipment products on a limited scale.

The park will allow these products to be produced on a larger scale to fulfill the needs of the universitys medical school and Indonesias healthcare industry.

"Some of the products we develop are trainer robots for post-stroke patients, rubber tubes for hydrocephalus patients and valve rings. However, we only produce a small amount of these things. Hopefully, we will be able to increase production by up to 90 percent to help lower Indonesia's dependency on imported health products," she said.

The park will also develop products for the renewable energy and the communications and information technology sectors.

"We will collaborate with the Kulon Progo regency administration to build the park. Hopefully, we can help boost the local economy," said Dwikorita. (kes)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama and Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat will register with the Jakarta General Elections Commission (KPU) on Wednesday afternoon.

Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri is scheduled to accompany the pair to the headquarters of the KPU along with representatives from the Golkar Party, the Hanura Party and the NasDem Party.

They plan to arrive at the headquarters at 1 p.m.

We will take a bus to the KPU so that we will not cause traffic jams. If Ibu Megawati wants to accompany us, we will pick her up first, Ahok said at City Hall on Wednesday.

Ahok said he had prepared the appropriate documents for the registration process, including a statement of his readiness to take leave if necessary.

However, Ahok said he hoped the Constitutional Court (MK) would allow him to refrain from taking leave. Ahok submitted a judicial review to demand a revision to the requirement in the Regional Elections Law that incumbents must take leave during election campaigns.

We are still waiting for the courts decision on this matter, Ahok said. (bbn)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama has signed a political contract issued by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) stressing his commitment to serve Jakartans.

Ahoks contract with the PDI-P comes after the ruling party officially declared its support for Ahok and Djarot Saiful Hidayat in the upcoming Jakarta gubernatorial election.

PDI-P deputy secretary-general Ahmad Basarah said the political contract should not be thought of as a political dowry. The contract is needed to establish political cooperation between the PDI-P and the appointed candidates, he said.

"In the contract, there is an attachment that contains the party's ideology, or Dasa Prasetya. The contract is needed to develop and serve Jakartans. It isnt related to political dowries," he said on Tuesday evening in Jakarta.

Meanwhile, PDI-P secretary-general Hasto Kristianto said the party board did not object to Ahoks independent style as the party had Djarot, a PDI-P member, running alongside him in the election. "Governors can't work without deputy governors, and vice versa," he said.

He added that the party decided to support Ahok at the last minute, or a day before the opening of candidate registration by Jakarta General Elections Commission, because it wanted to show its support for all its candidates competing in all elections throughout the country.

"There are 101 regional elections in 2017. Therefore, we declared our support for Ahok at the last minute because we wanted to reveal the candidate names all at once," he said. (ags)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

West Java Governor Ahmad Heryawan said Wednesday the provincial administration has sent aid to Garut and Sumedang regencies for the victims of flash floods and landslides that killed at least 24 by Wednesday at 5 p.m.

We have handled the disaster; we have evacuated the site, established shelters and sent help, said Heryawan in Bandung, the provincial capital.

Heryawan said West Java has been sending the aid since Tuesday night.

A search and rescue team has been searching for victims and found some. We have acted swiftly. What is difficult is to prevent [another disaster]. We hope it would not happen again, said Heryawan as quoted by Antara News.

Previously, the authority reported 15 dead and 18 missing in Garut and five deaths in the Sumedang landslides.

The affected areas in Garut regency are Bayongbong, Garut Kota, Banyuresmi, Tarogong Kaler, Tarogong Kidul, Karang Pawitan, and Samarang districts.

The flooding was caused by the overflowing Cimanuk River after heavy rains on Tuesday. (evi)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

The National Polices Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) has officially re-submitted its case dossier on the distribution of fake vaccines to the Attorney Generals Office (AGO). Two earlier dossiers were rejected due to incomplete documentation.

"The case dossier is with the AGO. The AGO is giving special attention to the case," Bareskrim director of special economic crimes Brig. Gen. Agung Setya said in Jakarta as quoted by Antara news agency on Tuesday.

Agung said the police continued to coordinate with the AGO on the case.

"Coordination is ongoing," he said.

In the investigative process, investigators divided the case into four separate files based on the networks producing fake vaccines. Altogether, 25 people have been named suspects.

Each suspect has been categorized further according to his or her role in the production chain. The suspects consist of six producers, nine distributors, two bottle collectors, one label-maker, two nurses and five doctors.

The suspects could face charges of violating the Health Law, the Consumer Protection Law and the Money Laundering Law, and could be sentenced to over 10 years in prison. (liz/ags)
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Linkedin Arif Gunawan Sulistiyono (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Agri-business firm Japfa, through its subsidiary So Good Food, and the US-owned agri-business firm PT Cargill Food Investment Indonesia have agreed to establish PT Cahaya Gunung Foods, a 40-60 joint venture to produce fully-cooked poultry products.

The joint-venture will initially operate out of So Good Foods existing meat processing plant in Boyolali, Central Java, and take over employment at the facility. Meanwhile, So Good Food will continue to operating its four meat processing plants in Indonesia, focused on producing ready-to-eat food products.

This is our first venture into the poultry business in Indonesia and we are excited to be partnering with Japfa, said Cahaya Gunung Foods managing director Derek Schoonbaert in a press statement in Jakarta on Tuesday.

The strategic partnership will boost So Good Foods capabilities in consumer food processing technologies, product innovation and quality assurance.

Both companies will also work together to produce a new range of value-added consumer food products and expand into regional markets.

Our So Good, So Good Sozzis and So Nice brands are already award-winning household names in Indonesia for processed meats, Japfa CEO Tan Yong Nang said. (ags)
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Linkedin Prima Wirayani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

A judicial review hearing on the tax amnesty at the Constitutional Court on Tuesday became a valuable teaching moment for the government as it took the time to present its reasoning behind the controversial program.

It was the first hearing held by the court after four different judicial review petitions were submitted by five individuals and five groups, with the first petition filed on July 13.

The purpose of the hearing was to obtain explanations from the House of Representatives and the government, which were represented by Melchias Markus Mekeng, chairman of House Commission XI overseeing finance; Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati; Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna Laoly; and taxation director general Ken Dwijugiasteadi.

Sri Mulyanis appearance at the court could be regarded as evidence of the governments seriousness in its efforts to quell opposition to the policy.

Just last week she managed to persuade the leaders of Muhammadiyah  the second-largest Muslim organization in the country  to drop its plan to file its own judicial review petition to the court after they met in a two-and-a-half hour closed-door meeting.

At the court, she spent 56 minutes presenting a summary of President Joko Jokowi Widodos arguments to the panel of nine judges and observers attending the court, which included petitioners from several different groups.

Sri Mulyani, a former World Bank managing director, began the explanation by emphasizing that Indonesia was a sovereign country built on the sweat, blood and tears of its people, and how it required sufficient and continued resources to maintain its independence and sovereignty.

Therefore, the state has the right to obtain revenues to carry out its obligations and to maintain independence and sovereignty. The states right to collect revenues is an obligation toward its citizens, she said.

She went on to say that as tax collection was mandated by the Constitution, it was also the states right to collect a portion of citizens income and assets.

Under the amnesty scheme, the government wishes to bring about the return of Rp 1 quadrillion (US$76. billion) worth of Indonesian-owned assets held overseas back to the country and to obtain at least Rp 165 trillion in penalty payments that it plans to use to plug this years state budget deficit.

The government denied the petitioners assertion that the law discriminated against and harmed them, insisting that it was applicable to all citizens and that it was part of a comprehensive effort to build a trusted relationship between the government and its people.

It claimed that the program offered three benefits, including the use of repatriated funds to develop the economy.

After Sri Mulyani concluded her explanation, justice I Dewa Gede Palguna told the government to make use of the open forum of the courtroom to clear up any issues that had caused public concern.

Presiding justice Arief Hidayat said the court required further accurate, firm and clear explanations from the government regarding data confidentiality, possible double taxation, retroactive implementation and the putative privilege granted to wealthy, non-compliant individual taxpayers.

The next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 28 to hear testimony from the petitioners expert witnesses.

However, unlike Muhammadiyah, the Confederation of Indonesian Workers Unions (KSPI), which is one of the petitioners in the judicial review, was unmoved by the governments lengthy explanation.

The governments explanation offends workers because it questions our legal standing, whereas we are the ones who obediently pay taxes, said KSPI chairman Said Iqbal.

Data from the Taxation Directorate General show that as of Tuesday evening, the amount of repatriated assets only amounted to 5.9 percent of the governments target.

Meanwhile, the penalty payment figure was stated as amounting to 16.4 percent of the target, up significantly from the previously stated 7.3 percent, after the tax office changed its calculation method on Sept. 15.

The tax amnesty program will end in March 2017.
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Chicago  Wed, September 21, 2016

A Chicago federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a former Illinois National Guard soldier and his cousin to prison for plotting to join Islamic State fighters and to attack a U.S. military facility.

Hasan Edmonds, 23, the former soldier, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 30 years in prison. His cousin, Jonas Edmonds, 30, received a 21-year prison sentence.

The sentences matched what prosecutors asked for the men, both residents of suburban Aurora.

Hasan Edmonds devised a plan to travel to the Middle East while Jonas Edmonds attacked the National Guard armory in Joliet, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) southwest of Chicago, according to prosecutors. The goal, prosecutors say, was to kill as many as 150 people at the facility.

Jonas Edmonds said he dropped Hasan Edmonds at the airport to travel to the Middle East to join Islamic State fighters. But Jonas Edmonds denied he would have attacked the military armory.

"The person they're trying to make me into, I'm not that person," Edmonds told U.S. District Judge John Lee.

Defense attorney James Graham told the judge that Edmonds was a heavy smoker of marijuana and was boastful, but had no weapons and never would have gone through with the attack.

It was a characterization that was dismissed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas, who noted as he held up a duffel bag filled with National Guard uniforms that Edmonds planned to don the uniform to help him blend in and gain access to the armory for the attack.

"Thank God the FBI was there to stop him," Jonas said.

After dropping his cousin off at Chicago's Midway International Airport on March 25, 2015, Jonas Edmonds went to his cousin's home and collected the uniforms, according to prosecutors. Hasan Edmonds, filings say, instructed Jonas to kill high-ranking officers first.

Agents arrested Hasan Edmonds at the airport and detained Jonas Edmonds at his home shortly thereafter.

Under plea agreements, Hasan Edmonds pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Jonas Edmonds pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and lying to federal agents. (ags)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Ferrari Jakarta unveiled the new 488 Spider at Plaza Indonesia shopping mall on Wednesday, replacing the previous 458 Spider model, which ceased production last year.

The car made its global debut in December 2015 but production of right-hand drive versions usually begins six to seven months after the left-hand drive type.

"Some customers have already placed their orders. They will be made at the Maranello factory and will arrive after six months, including one-month shipping time from Italy to Jakarta," said Ferrari Jakarta CEO Arie Christopher.

Spider is a codename for convertible. Ferrari has made the cars roofs using an aluminum construction with a weight of just 25 kilograms, compared to 40 kg in the previous model. The engine is 3.9 liters, smaller than the 4.5 liters in the previous model, but Ferrari said the application of turbo increased the power to 670 PS from a previous 570 PS.

"The customer can choose personalized options on the seats, interior, rims and other items with the Carrozzeria Scaglietti program. But if thats not enough, you can go further with a tailor-made program," Arie added.

Customers who want a tailor-made Ferrari have to visit the Maranello headquarters and discuss the personalization with designers. A tailor-made Ferrari takes longer to finish  a year or more, Arie said. (evi)
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Linkedin Syamsul Huda M.Suhari (The Jakarta Post) Gorontalo  Wed, September 21, 2016

A group of environmental activists known as Gorontalo Diversity are holding a festival to spread public awareness of environmental protection at Limboto Lake in Gorontalo.

Gorontalo Diversity activist Rosyid Azhar said the Migratory Bird Festival was held to attract visitors and raise awareness on the importance of conserving Limboto Lakes ecosystem and wildlife.

The hunting of migratory birds in Limboto Lake continues massively. Almost every day you can find people there holding air rifles and wild birds they get from their hunting activities, he said on Tuesday.

Having started in August, the Migratory Bird Festival will be held until October, during which Gorontalo's biggest lake will have frequent visits of birds migrating from areas across the world, such as Alaska, Russia and several European countries.

Rosyid said activities being held during the festival include the monitoring and identification of the species of migratory birds stopping by the lake, educational activities for people and school students, movie screenings, documentary film competitions, media trips and bird conservation photo campaigns on social media.

Based on the results from Gorontalo Diversity's observations, several species of water birds, including the wood sandpiper, have stopped by the lake since August in their migration from northern Europe and areas between Asia and Europe to South Asia and Australia.

The greater painted-snipe and the glossy ibis are among the migratory birds that stop by the lake every year. In April, bird conservation group Burung Indonesia revealed that 49 out of 85 water birds found at Limboto Lake are migratory birds. (ebf)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Retired army general and former State Intelligence Agency (BIN) chief AM Hendropriyono requested tax amnesty in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Claiming he was a good taxpayer, he said his participation in the program was mainly to improve his personal and his firms tax administration. I dutifully pay property and other taxes every year, he told journalists.

Hendropriyono expressed his relief after filing his documents and called for other fellow businesspeople to follow suit.

Now I can run my business without worries, he said.

He refused to disclose the value of his assets he reported to tax authorities. He only declared his wealth but said he had no plan to repatriate his overseas assets.

My overseas assets are only a bank account for my children studying abroad and to pay the medical bills of my wife being treated abroad for leukemia, he said.

Hendropriyono started his career as a businessman after retiring as the spy chief in 2004. He is owner of Hendropriyono Corporation Indonesia, a holding company consisting of property developer Nusa Konstruksi Enjiniring, oil and gas company Andalusia Bumi Energi and automotive firm Adiperkasa Citra Lestari (ACL).

Last year, Adiperkasa Citra Lestari started a partnership with Malaysian automaker Proton Holdings Berhard in a car manufacturing project. (rez)
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Linkedin Lita Aruperes (The Jakarta Post) Manado  Wed, September 21, 2016

Two domesticated female macaques aged about three years old were sent to the North Sulawesi Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) by another government office in hope the BKSDA could eventually release the macaques into the wild.

North Sulawesi BKSDA head Sudiyono said he had yet to identify the species of the macaques. But their ages seem to be about three years old. The macaque population is declining, therefore, I hope those who keep [them as pets] can hand them in to the proper authorities like the BKSDA, he said Wednesday.

Sudiyono said they got the monkeys from the Cultural Preservation Agency (BPNB) in North Sulawesi. He said the head of the BPNB received the macaques during a working visit in Bolaang Mongondow. They probably didnt know the procedures so they [the BPNB] only handed over the macaques today, he said.

The macaques had been fed human food like Kentucky Fried Chicken, chocolate and cows milk, which were unhealthy for them, Sudiyono went on.

He said data in 2010 showed that macaques in North Sulawesi were only numbering about 5,000. About 2,000 are in the forests. For [the macaque species] Macaca nigra they are found in North Sulawesi and Macaca nigrisen inhabit Bolaang Mongondow, he said.

Magdalena Sumaraw from the BPNB said the macaques were given to her boss by locals. We know it is a protected species but we didnt want to offend the people who gave them [to us], she said.

The BKSDA would rehabilitate the macaques in the hope they could be returned to the wild. (evi)
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Linkedin Stefani Ribka (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21 2016

After several years of weak manufacturing industry growth, the government hopes to spur the sector through a masterplan that will shift activities from Java and prioritize specific industries.



The government has set a target of boosting manufacturing by 8.4 percent by 2019 after five years of 4 percent annual growth, well below overall economic growth, amid signs of de-industrialization.



During the 1990s, manufacturing grew at twice the pace of GDP growth, with the labor-intensive sector accounting for 30 percent of GDP, a rate that has since dropped to well below 25 percent.



We need to improve the manufacturing sector, Industry Minister Airlangga Hartato said when opening the Indonesia Chamber of Commerce and Industrys (Kadin) national coordination meeting in Jakarta on Tuesday.



In doing so, the government has drafted the National Industry Development Masterplan (RIPIN), which aims to even out industrial growth nationwide, not only in Java, by providing tax incentives and improving infrastructure outside the main island by 2019. Today, 70 percent of the manufacturing sector is concentrated on Java Island.



Under RIPIN, four manufacturing sectors are being prioritized: labor-intensive (food and beverages, furniture and footwear), import substitution (chemicals and pharmaceuticals, iron and steel), export orientation (electronics, palm oil and derivatives, pulp and paper, automotive) and downstream (cacao, sugar, smelter). Oil and gas products like petrochemicals are also prioritized.



Since 1998, weve had no newcomer in the petrochemical sector  not because theres no demand anymore, but its being met by imports from China, Airlangga said. The government is planning to develop a petrochemical industry in Bintuni in West Papua.



Kadin vice chairman for industry Johnny Darmawan said businesspeople were discouraged from investing by the lack of infrastructure outside Java.



The government needs to act fast in disbursing funds to develop infrastructure once the budget is set, he said on the sidelines of the meeting.



High gas, electricity and logistics costs, as well as lengthy dwell times  the time taken for goods to be loaded and unloaded at ports  are also cited as impediments to growth in the manufacturing sector, industry players have said.



Unwillingness by local companies to use local products and government policy flip-flop are two others, said Kadin vice chairman for trade Benny Soetrisno and Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki) secretary general Togar Sitanggang.



Airlangga maintained that ASEAN economies, especially Indonesia as the largest, hoped to provide stable growth to the world amid Chinas lackluster economic performance, with the manufacturing sector poised to expand to fill the gap left by the slowdown in the commodities sector.



The government is also considering the establishment of a development bank to finance manufacturers with long-term projects, boost the participation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in production, as well as marketing value-added products and developing the digital economy to expedite business transactions.



In 2015, non-oil and gas manufacturing grew 4.61 percent. Machinery, equipment and transportation led the growth, while the biggest contributors to the sector remained food and beverages, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and traditional medicines. On the other hand, textiles, garments, rubber and plastics all suffered contractions.

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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Activists have urged the government to make public the recommendations of a national symposium of victims of the 1965 communist purge held in Jakarta on April 18-19.

The two-day symposium was held to seek reconciliation for the 1965 mass killings, the recommendations of which the government has promised to use in resolving the historic human rights abuse case.

Forum 1965 activist Wara Ananditari said Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Wiranto should fulfil his promises that the ministry would push efforts to settle serious past human rights abuses, including the 1965 mass killings, in a comprehensive and transparent manner.

"We cannot see any transparency, however, as the recommendations are being hidden from us [...] The public and victims of the 1965 mass killings have every right to know the outcome of the reconciliation process," Wara said on Wednesday.

Following the submission of the symposiums results to his ministry in May, then coordinating political, legal and security affairs minister Luhut Pandjaitan said his office could not yet publish the document as the government still needed to conduct a further study of the recommendations.

Harry Wibowo of the International People's Tribunal on the 1965 Crimes against Humanity (IPT 1965) said the symposiums recommendations should be regarded as a public document because they were drafted using the input of all participants in the event.

He said it was the responsibility of the state to publish the document to guarantee the publics right to information and justice.

"If the government still lacks the political will to publish the document, we will push for it through a legal process and file this case with the Central Information Commission," Harry said. (ebf)
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Linkedin Prima Wirayani and Dylan Amirio (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21 2016

The government has stepped up efforts to collect what it says are millions of dollars of outstanding tax liabilities from Singapore-based Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., which has allegedly booked hefty revenue from Indonesian advertisers without paying proper taxes.

The message to the tech giant is clear: we want a fair share of what you take.

Jakarta Special Tax Office head Muhammad Haniv confirmed on Tuesday that tax investigators had visited Googles office in the capital city on the previous day as part of an investigation into the companys suspected refusal to undergo a state audit of its tax obligations.

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Linkedin Prima Wirayani and Dylan Amirio (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

The government has stepped up efforts to collect what it says are millions of dollars of outstanding tax liabilities from Singapore-based Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., which has allegedly booked hefty revenue from Indonesian advertisers without paying proper taxes.

The message to the tech giant is clear: we want a fair share of what you take.

Jakarta Special Tax Office head Muhammad Haniv confirmed on Tuesday that tax investigators had visited Googles office in the capital city on the previous day as part of an investigation into the companys suspected refusal to undergo a state audit of its tax obligations.

Google, he added, could face criminal charges on audit refusal as stipulated in the 2009 Tax Law if investigators found sufficient evidence.

Haniv said investigators were also seeking information about whether Google had a permanent establishment (BUT) in Indonesia, as the tax office plans to collect back taxes from revenue Google has generated in Indonesia over the last five years.

Haniv did not specify the amount of Googles unpaid income and value-added taxes for the five-year period, but said the firm could be subject to fines of up to Rp 5.5 trillion (US$418 million) for 2015 alone.

If Google generates income from Indonesia, it has to pay taxes. It is immoral if Google refuses to do so, Haniv told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Indonesia has been struggling to find alternative sources of state revenue as it feels the pinch of the global economic slowdown and plunging energy prices. The governments ongoing tax amnesty program, for example, is expected to help plug the widening state-budget deficit, with tax-revenue realization accounting for less than half of the 2016 target with less than four months left in the year.

Haniv estimated that total internet advertising revenue could amount to around $820 million a year, 70 percent of which was made by Google, whose video-sharing site YouTube has become an increasingly popular outlet for advertisers to air their commercials.

The tax authority earlier confirmed that an independent Indonesian firm, PT Google Indonesia, had been carrying out work under instruction from Singapore-based Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. A contract between the two firms, Haniv said, stipulated that the former received 3 percent of the latters revenue or a reimbursement and a fee for such works instructed by its Singaporean counterpart.

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara issued a circular earlier this year permitting over-the-top (OTT) services to be provided by foreign individuals or legal entities with an obligation to establish a BUT.

On Friday, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani said Indonesia was committed to hunting down both Google and OTT companies alike to force them to comply with local tax regulations.

Google, meanwhile, said it would continue to cooperate with the Indonesian authorities, but claimed that it had complied with all tax regulations in the country.

In January, Google agreed to pay 130 million ($169 million) in back taxes to settle a British tax authority probe, which had challenged the companys low tax returns in the years before 2005, Reuters reported.

Center for Indonesia Taxation Analysis (CITA) executive director Yustinus Prastowo, said Indonesia had two options to resolve the Google conundrum, either extend the definition of a BUT or implement a regulation akin to that of the UKs Google Tax, which targets offshore profits.

Extending the BUT definition can be done by declaring that a virtual presence is considered to be an entity, Yustinus said. (mos/vps)

 Ina Parlina contributed to this story.
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Linkedin Andreas Nathaniel Marbun (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21 2016

Even though it is not the first time a leading political figure has been arrested in connection to graft, many people in Indonesia were shocked upon hearing the news of a sting operation by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) that nailed Regional Representatives Council (DPD) Speaker Irman Gusman over the weekend.

Agus Rahardjo, the KPK chief, said investigators had confiscated Rp 100 million (US$7,600) from Irman. The money is believed to be a bribe he accepted for helping CV Semesta Berjaya, a West Sumatra firm, secure an increased quota of sugar imports this year.

Is there a direct correlation between the authority that Irman wields as DPD speaker and sugar import quotas?

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Renowned poet Ismail Marzuki, cosmetic mogul Martha Tilaar and Dutch-born Javanese culture promoter Franciscus Georgius J van Lith are recipients of one of this years prestigious culture awards for their outstanding contributions to the promotion of arts and culture in Indonesia.

Every year since 2012, the Education and Culture Ministry has given awards to 54 people, local governments, communities and the media as a token of appreciation for their roles in strengthening the character of the nation.

The awards come in eight categories: creator, trailblazer and innovator; art conservation; traditional arts; children and youth; regional administrations; media; community; and foreigners.

It is expected that the honor of receiving an award will spark narratives concerning the preservation of our culture and in turn inspire other people to contribute to arts and culture in Indonesia, Hilmar Farid, the ministrys director general of culture, said on Tuesday.

Another big name on the list is Raden Mas Soerjo Soeparto, the sultan of Surakarta, Central Java, from 1916 through 1944, for creating Langendriyan, a Javanese opera. President Joko Jokowi Widodo presented his award posthumously on Aug. 11.

Several recipients, including Van Lith and artist Semsar Siahaan, will receive their awards posthumously in a ceremony conducted by Education and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy in Jakarta this Friday.

The award for creating new forms of art goes to 10 people with the late Semsar being most well-known for using his art as a medium to criticize the then authoritarian president Soeharto. He was also a co-founder of the Alliance of Independence Journalists (AJI).

Nine individuals will receive awards in the cultural preservation category. Maria Yovita Meta Bastian is one of the nine. She will receive the award for her work in promoting the conservation of tenun ikat (hand-woven textiles) in East Nusa Tenggara. Agustinus Sasundu from North Sulawesi will also receive the award for creating bamboo musical instruments.

A young, internationally recognized pianist, Joey Alexander, is receiving an award for the child and youth category. The 13-year-old prodigy won global attention after being nominated twice for the 58th Annual Grammy Awards this year.

Bengkulu City will get an award for its efforts to preserve local culture, including historical buildings like the Malborough fortress, president Sukarnos exile home and a Chinese village.

A private TV station, Trans7, will receive an award for the popular program Si Bolang, which features local traditions through childrens perspectives. The award in the community category will go to Parmalim from North Sumatra, a musical and visual arts group previously featured at the famed Batak Toba festival.

In 2015, the ministry added the foreigners category for people who have made great contributions to the promotion and/or conservation of Indonesian arts and culture despite having different nationalities. This year, the awards for the foreigners category will go to Merle Calvin Ricklefs, an expert in Indonesian history and Javanese literature, Anthony Reid, a pioneer in modern Sumatra history, and Margaret J. Kartomi, an ethno-musician. All three of the award recipients are Australian. (wnd)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Four political parties have declared their support for Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama and Djarot Saiful Hidjayat in the upcoming Jakarta gubernatorial election. Meanwhile, six other parties are busy preparing a candidate pair to challenge the popular incumbent.

Executive director of Charta Politika Yunarto Wijaya has said former culture and education minister Anies Baswedan and businessman Sandiaga Uno could challenge Ahok-Djarot in the 2017 gubernatorial election.

If Sandiaga and Anies are paired together, the election will be interesting. It will not be easy for Ahok-Djarot to defeat the pair, said Yunarto as reported by tribunnews.com on Wednesday.

The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) declared on Tuesday its support for Ahok, who was earlier supported by the Golkar Party and the Hanura Party.

Meanwhile, the remaining six parties, the Gerindra Party, the Prosperous Justice Party, the Democratic Party, the United Development Party, the National Awakening Party and the National Mandate Party, are still considering who they will support in the election.

Besides Anies and Sandiaga, the parties are also considering former law and human rights minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra, National Narcotics Agency chief Budi Waseso and former coordinating maritime affairs minister Rizal Ramli.

Yunarto said Sandiaga was supported by the Gerindra party and other parties with strong political networks in the capital. He also said Anies, as a former culture and education minister, would be popular with younger voters. (bbn)
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has urged Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya to simplify social forestry regulations and procedures to make it easier for people to access the benefits of forests.

Jokowi said that in their implementation, many social forestry initiatives had missed their targets and people were still facing difficulties in getting necessary permits.

Citing an example, he said, only 610,000 of 2.5 million hectares of the village forests and community forests targeted could be realized partly due to complicated permit procedures.

I want all obstacles hampering the realization and implementation of social forestry resolved soon, Jokowi said on Wednesday.

He further highlighted the importance of paying attention to indigenous people, calling on the Environment and Forestry Ministry to immediately settle issues related to customary forests.

Jokowi further said social forestry initiatives should not only relate to legal matters, such as giving people access to social forestry permits, but should be followed by advanced programs to enhance the welfare of people living in and around forested areas.

The advanced programs should start from the preparation of production infrastructure, training and counseling to the opening of peoples access to market and technology information, financing and post-harvest preparations.

We should also prepare the management of business aspects of social forestry, Jokowi said.

Last year, the government launched an ambitious program that earmarks 12.7 million hectares of forests to be managed by communities through social forestry schemes. These include community forestry, village forests, community plantation forests and customary forests. (ebf)


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Linkedin Liza Yosephine (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Indonesian migrant worker Eni Lestari called on the international community to include migrant workers in the discussion to shape policies and improve conditions for migrant workers during her address at the UN General Assembly on Monday.

"We have a clear message: listen to us. Don't talk about us without us," Eni said with booming confidence in her voice during her remarks in the first ever summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants attended by leaders from the 193 member states.

Eni further went on to criticize the existing exploitative system that does not value the rights and dignity of migrant workers, in a speech which can be viewed on the UN Web TV website, webtv.un.org.

She expressed gratitude for being given a chance to speak on behalf of 244 million migrants from all over the world and called for equality, protection and humane treatment for all migrant members.

Cheap labor

In addressing the heads of states, she stressed that migrant workers are not just cheap labor or commodities. "We are the people who have been denied the future, the rights and the dreams we used to imagine," said Eni, who is also the chairperson of the International Migrant Alliance in Indonesia.

Speaking of her experience, Eni said she dreamed of obtaining higher education. However, these dreams were pushed aside as she was left no choice but to pursue work abroad as a migrant domestic worker due to economic hardship resulting from the financial crisis which engulfed Indonesia in 1997-1998.

Eni noted that many migrant workers risk falling into worse conditions as they are trafficked, tricked into slavery, have their basic rights denied and become vulnerable to abuses.

She called on for the document to be produced at the summit and to be implemented into action, instead of being left as a set of agreements remaining only on paper. Originally from Kediri, East Java, Eni has been a migrant worker in Hong Kong since 1999. (ags)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21 2016

The term global village, coined by Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan, may have become a hackneyed cliche, but for media companies, the term aptly explains the problems they are facing today.

In the past few years, Indonesia has seen a trend of global media companies such as BBC Indonesia and CNN Indonesia offering their content in Indonesian. Meanwhile, the Manila-based Rappler has set up a franchise in Jakarta and Coconuts Media, which focuses on Asias cities, has special pages dedicated to Jakarta and Bali.

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Linkedin Andi Hajramurni (The Jakarta Post) Makassar, South Sulawesi  Wed, September 21, 2016

MAS, 15, a second-year student at state vocational school SMKN 2 Makassar, South Sulawesi, was announced guilty of assaulting his teacher after a closed trial at the Makassar District Court on Wednesday.

The courts sole judge Teguh Sri Raharjo sentenced MAS to a one-year rehabilitation at social education institution LPKS Marsudi Putra Toddopuli Salodong in Makassar.

In his ruling, Teguh said MAS was proven guilty of violating Article 170 of the Criminal Code (KUHP) on attacking or injuring other people, in which together with his father, Adnan Achmad, the student attacked Dasrul, 52, his teacher at SMKN 2 Makassar.

The judge considered the defendants act as negative and showed no respect to his teacher, which later sparked concern within the community.

However, he was imposed with social rehabilitation only because he was still underage and acted politely during his trial. The defendant must attend rehabilitation at LPKS Marsudi Putra Toddopuli Salodong for one year, said Teguh. He also asked that the defendant be immediately taken out from the state detention facility he had been held at.

Earlier, a panel of judges attempted to mediate a settlement of the case out of court. Initially, Dasrul forgave MAS and agreed to make peace with his former student. Two days after, however, he decided to continue the legal case through court.

Prosecutor Rustiani Muin immediately filed an appeal saying the verdict was lighter from what she demanded. In a trial on Tuesday, she asked the court judge to sentence MAS to 18 months in prison.

MASs lawyer Abdul Gafur said he would first consider whether or not he would file an appeal. However, he said he was very disappointed with the judges ruling. (ebf)
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Linkedin Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

In a call that many had long predicted, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) has decided to nominate Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama for next years gubernatorial election still, but not without reservations.



After months of speculation and political maneuvering by both sides, the largest pro government party finally endorsed Ahok, who had already secured the support of other major pro government parties, namely the Golkar Party, the Hanura Party and the NasDem Party.



In return for the partys support, Ahok accepted Jakarta Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat, a member of the PDI-P, as his

running mate.



Dressed in batik rather than the red outfit of the PDI-P, Ahok attended the official announcement of his nomination at the partys headquarters on Jl. Diponegoro in Central Jakarta on Tuesday night.



His sartorial choice may have symbolized his wish to appear independent in spite of the partys support, which he nonetheless needs in order to win the election.



The announcement was preceded by a meeting between Ahok and party officials, including chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri, during which they signed a political contract.



Ahok said after the meeting that he would not become a PDI-P member and the PDI-P had accepted his decision. What matters is his commitment to the political contract, party secretary-general Hasto Kristiyanto said.



The event, broadcast live on TV, crushed the hopes of the anti-Ahok alliance, known as the Kinship Coalition, which had pleaded with the PDI-P to nominate Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini, who hinted her willingness to enter the race at the 11th hour.



It also cemented his position as the candidate to beat in the election. With the largest party in the capital now backing his electoral bid, Ahok, who has consistently topped voter polls, is expected to win the 2017 election with relative ease.



Nevertheless, the political marriage between Ahok and the PDI-P may not be entirely sweetness and light. The fact that the PDI-P waited until four days before the deadline for candidate registration at the General Elections Commission (KPU) to pick Ahok reflected a split within the party and Megawatis indecision over who the party would support in Jakarta.



Supporters of the party at the grass roots, resentful about Ahoks eviction policies, have long voiced their opposition to Ahoks nomination. A number of party leaders in Jakarta have also lambasted Ahok for his refusal to follow party rules regarding the nomination process.



A video that went viral last month showed PDI-P members in Jakarta denouncing Ahok in a song with the line: Ahok must be defeated.



Megawati also sent mixed signals to Ahok and then to Risma before coming to Tuesdays decision.



Ahok is known to be closer to President Joko Jokowi Widodo, his former running mate in the 2012 Jakarta election, than to Megawati, whose relations with the latter have been strained over a number of issues, including the controversial and aborted effort to appoint Budi Gunawan as National Police chief in 2015. Budi was recently installed as the nations spy chief after serving as deputy National Police chief.



Whether or not Ahok will be elected Jakarta governor matters so much to Jokowi, Pelita Harapan University political analyst Emrus Sihombing told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.



The President, Emrus said, needed somebody in the capital with whom he could easily collaborate in executing various projects in the countrys most strategic city. Jokowi needs somebody who is psychologically close to him, he said.



In July, Jokowi, Ahok and Megawati shared a car on the way to a Golkar event. At the time, Megawati was still reluctant to endorse Ahok, telling him that her party had mechanisms for selecting governor candidates.



Emrus, however, suggested party resistance to Ahoks nomination would fade by election day as the partys rank and file were known to be loyal. Never in the past have party members opposed their partys decision, he said.



Ahok, a Christian of Chinese descent, is the first double-minority candidate to top political surveys in Muslim-majority Jakarta. A highly divisive figure as a result of his combative demeanor, Ahok has ruffled the feathers of the political establishment as well as hard-line Muslims, who have called Ahok an infidel and, therefore, unsuited to be elected governor.



Jakarta-based Pollster Indonesia revealed last week that the pair of Ahok-Djarot was chosen by the majority of its 400 respondents over other potential candidates. When provided with a head-to-head scenario of Ahok-Djarot versus former law and human rights minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra and businessman Sandiaga Uno, Ahok-Djarot was preferred by 44.62 percent of the respondents and Yusril-Sandiaga was chosen by 35.38 percent.

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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Activists seeking justice for the 1965 mass killings have called on the government to fulfill the rights of victims and survivors of the communist purge to access rehabilitation.

Resolving the past abuses is not about placing blame on certain parties but solely about upholding human rights, they have said.

Wara Aninditari, an activist from Forum 65, said all efforts to encourage a tougher government stance on the settlement of past abuses were aimed at bringing about justice for victims and survivors of the 1965 tragedy.

It had nothing to do with any attempts to bring back a communist ideology to Indonesia, as claimed by many parties, she went on.

Wara criticized Coordinating Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Minister Wiranto who previously said that "the government did not want the settlement of the 1965 case to lead parties to blame each other". The former military commander made the statement in a letter explaining his refusal to meet with a group of 1965 survivors known as YPKP 65.

We have no intention of putting blame on certain parties or bringing up conflicts of ideology. This is a matter of humanity, such as [providing] rehabilitation for the victims and survivors," Wara said on Wednesday.

She said the legal basis for rehabilitation had been asserted in letters sent to President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo by three institutions, namely the Attorney General's Office (AGO), the House of Representatives and the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), stating that the government should help to rehabilitate 1965 victims. (ebf)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21 2016

Antimicrobial resistance is a global health issue that is somewhat overlooked even though, according to figures from the WHO, it is responsible for 700,000 deaths a year from diseases such as bacterial infections, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Worst affected are poor and developing countries like Indonesia, where the use of antibiotics as a cure for all ailments has become a popular habit and continues unabated although the medicine is in fact only good for bacterial infections.

The problem, which will be addressed by a UN high level meeting in New York this Wednesday, has sparked concern about the comeback of the medical dark ages  the tragic years that saw millions of people die of bacterial infections before penicillin was discovered in 1928.

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Linkedin Saleh Mwanamilongo (Associated Press) Kinshasa  Wed, September 21, 2016

More than 44 people have been killed in Congo in two days of street clashes between security forces and protesters angered over a delayed presidential election, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher said Tuesday. Police said more than 100 people have been arrested in the unrest.

Thousands took to the streets of Congo's capital, Kinshasa, on Monday to oppose an election delay which they call an effort by President Joseph Kabila to stay in power beyond the end of his mandate in late December.

A high court has determined Kabila can stay in office until a new leader is elected. The electoral commission has filed for a delay in elections that were scheduled for November, saying voter registration lists will not be ready.

Gunshots could be heard Tuesday in Kinshasa as tensions rose. Burnt-out cars smoldered in nearly empty streets.

"Leave and let us choose who we want to lead us," Kinshasa resident Jeanne Mongo said. "Obama is leaving power, his mandate is coming to an end and he is leaving voluntarily. Why can't he (Kabila) follow Obama's example and cede his position to a woman?"

Human Rights Watch received credible reports from witnesses that security forces have killed at least 37 civilians, said senior Africa researcher Ida Sawyer.

"Most were killed when the security forces fired on crowds of protesters. Others were killed when the security forces burned down opposition party headquarters last night," she said in an email.

Protesters killed at least six police officers and a supporter of Kabila's party, Sawyer said, adding that demonstrators also burned and looted several shops and police stations.

Police spokesman Pierrot Mwanamputu said that more than 113 people were arrested in connection with Monday's events, and will be brought to justice.

The U.N. human rights office noted reports of "excessive use of force" by both security forces and demonstrators. Both sides denied responsibility for the violence.

An organizer of the opposition protests, Joseph Olengankoy, earlier had put the toll at more than 25 people killed. Interior minister Evariste Boshab had said 17 were killed, including at least three police officers.

At least two people were killed after attacks on the headquarters of five opposition parties late Monday, the U.N. and an opposition party said.

Bruno Tshibala, spokesman for the largest opposition party, said five people were wounded in raids on four party headquarters.

"We will seek international justice," he said.

Congo's government spokesman, Lambert Mende, condemned the burning of opposition party buildings as well as attacks on other buildings, including two ruling party buildings and a school, by opposition protesters.

Mende called on Congolese to regain their composure and let justice do its work.

"The government can only condemn this mob justice mentality," he said.

Kabila, who came to power after his father's assassination in 2001, has yet to announce whether he will pursue another term in office, though the constitution prohibits it.

The violence comes amid growing fears that the election delay could lead to prolonged unrest in Congo, a nation as vast in size as Western Europe. The mineral-rich but largely impoverished country suffered back-to-back civil wars until 2003, and previous instability has drawn in armies from neighboring countries.

Appeals for calm and restraint have been launched by the United Nations, Belgium, the U.S., France and the European Union, which also have called for a rapid organization of presidential elections. (ags)
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Linkedin Grace D. Amianti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21 2016

The countrys tax authority is calling for Indonesians with wealth stored in overseas trusts to join the tax amnesty program with the office claiming it has identified a large number of wealthy taxpayers who have failed to report their assets and income.



Indonesian taxpayers regularly stash their wealth in overseas trust schemes in countries with laws acknowledging trust mechanisms, in contrast to Indonesia, where such agreements are not recognized, according to a review by the Finance Ministrys directorate general of taxation.



A trust is a fiduciary relationship in which one party (trustor) gives another party (trustee) the right to hold title to property or assets for the benefit of a third party (beneficiary). There is no clear figure on the value of Indonesians assets stored in overseas trusts.



Popular trust scheme locations, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, apply an English-derived common law in which arrangements under trust schemes are exempted from tax obligations. In contrast, Indonesia, which applies civil law, only acknowledges taxpayers in the form of individuals and institutions that are obliged to pay income taxes (PPh).



However, as Indonesia lacks laws and regulations regarding trust schemes, the tax office considers that such a situation helps taxpayers with wealth overseas to avoid paying double taxation.



A trust is a unique, non-entity relationship acknowledged in international common law, but as Indonesia applies civil law, we dont recognize such a scheme, said tax office international tax director John Hutagaol on Tuesday.



In order to gain insight about trust schemes, the tax office held a seminar Tuesday with international experts as its speakers, pointing out that tax avoidance from such mechanisms is likely to thwart the governments efforts to raise revenues from the tax amnesty program.



From the seminar, we concluded that there was a strong indication that trust mechanisms gave ample room for tax avoidance, he said, yet there was no estimation on the value of funds stashed by Indonesians in overseas trusts.



We now understand the pattern of tax avoidance through trust mechanisms, so we urge taxpayers not to do that, because it will affect the tax amnesty and tax revenue in the future.



Indonesia expects to pocket Rp 1 quadrillion (US$76 billion) in repatriated assets from the tax amnesty program that will run until next March, however until Tuesday inflows have only reached Rp 58.6 trillion, tax office data show. Meanwhile, declaration of overseas assets reached Rp 296 trillion.



The tax office is also prepared to raise taxpayers awareness on the issue through public campaigns, which will also be held at Indonesian embassies in various countries as there have been many queries

raised by Indonesians living abroad related to trust schemes and their relationship with the tax amnesty program.



What the tax authority is doing right now is very commendable as it understands that trust mechanisms are commonly used by taxpayers worldwide, said Filippo Noseda, a Swiss lawyer based in London, who took part in the tax office seminar.



The seminar shed light on comprehensive policies addressing trust schemes issued by several tax offices around the world, including the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and South African Revenue Service (SARS).



Trust schemes are not an issue at all if they arent used for tax avoidance. They start to become a problem when Indonesian trustors do not declare their wealth and income to the tax authority when they put their assets in trust agreements, Central Jakarta Tax Office head Wahyu Karya Tumakaka said.

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Linkedin Karl Ritter (Associated Press) Stockholm  Wed, September 21, 2016

Thirty more countries are expected to formally join the Paris Agreement on climate change this week, greatly improving the pact's chances of coming into force just a year after it was negotiated in the French capital, the United Nations said Tuesday.

More than 170 world leaders have signed the deal, but it won't take effect until 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global emissions have ratified or accepted it through their domestic procedures.

That was initially expected to take several years, but 28 countries accounting for 39 percent of emissions including the world's two biggest emitters, the United States and China, have already ratified the deal.

The 30 ratifications expected to be handed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a special event at U.N. headquarters in New York on Wednesday would bring the total to 58 countries  but many are small and their total emissions likely won't reach the required 55 percent.

Brazil, Mexico and Argentina are the largest emitters on the list announced late Tuesday by the United Nations. But the 30 countries will only bring the emissions total to 47 percent.

At least half a dozen small island nations including Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Kiribati are expected to ratify along with several countries from Central America, Africa, Asia and one from the Mideast  the United Arab Emirates.

"We are ready. We will announce it in New York," Moroccan Environment Minister Hakima el-Haite told The Associated Press.

In the world of international diplomacy, this is considered a blistering pace, reflecting a sense of urgency in the fight against global warming and a desire to seal the deal before Ban and U.S. President Barack Obama leave office.

After years of negotiations, governments agreed in Paris last December to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say are warming the planet.

Ban, who has made climate change a top priority since he became secretary-general nearly 10 years ago, urged world leaders in his keynote speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday to bring the Paris Agreement into force by the end of the year.

"The Earth assails us with rising seas, record heat and extreme storms," Ban said. "With the Paris Agreement on climate change, we are tackling the defining challenge of our time."

U.S. diplomats are also pushing other countries to accelerate their ratification efforts so that the deal can enter into force this year. The White House says Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry plan to corner foreign leaders in the hallways during the U.N. gathering to personally pressure them to join this week.

"We're very anxious to have it move forward quickly," U.S. climate envoy Jonathan Pershing told the AP. "We are talking to everybody about the urgency."

Pershing said the haste comes down to the fact that "this is a problem that can't wait."

Others say another factor is the potential of a shift in U.S. climate policy depending on the outcome of the presidential election in November. Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton has said the U.S. must implement the Paris Agreement, but Republican candidate Donald Trump has said he will cancel the deal.

"The Obama administration clearly would like to see this done before they leave office," said Alden Meyer, a veteran observer of the U.N. climate talks at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"That doesn't guarantee that the next president will fully implement Paris," Meyer said. "But it would take at least four years for the U.S. to formally withdraw."

The Paris Agreement asks both rich and poor countries to take action to curb the rise in global temperatures that is melting glaciers, raising sea levels and shifting rainfall patterns across the globe. It requires governments to present national plans to reduce emissions, though the targets themselves aren't internationally binding.

The European Union, which considers itself as one of the architects of the Paris deal, is trying to fast-track its ratification process to avoid the embarrassment of sitting on the sidelines when it comes into force.

The EU, which accounts for 12 percent of global emissions, originally planned to wait for its 28 member states to approve the deal domestically, but now wants to ratify it on their behalf.

"It's technically possible," said Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, a spokeswoman for EU Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete. "But politically it's a decision of the member states."

With or without the EU, there's a chance that the deal can enter into force as early as the next U.N. climate conference, which starts Nov. 7 in Marrakech, Morocco.

For some the timing is mostly symbolic, because the first round of emissions targets doesn't start until 2020. For others, like the island nations who face an existential risk from rising seas, it's imperative that countries prepare to implement  and improve  their targets as soon as possible.

"We cannot wait," said Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim, who chairs an alliance of small island states. "We are at the forefront of climate change and we are the people who will suffer if there is no action taken early." (ags)
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Linkedin Primastuti Handayani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, September 21, 2016

Water cannons welcomed the maiden flight of Singapore Airlines to Canberra, the capital of Australia, on Wednesday. The aircraft touched down at around 8:15 a.m and was showered with two water cannons for the welcoming ceremony.

The flight then continued to Wellington, New Zealand, making the airline the first in the world to connect two capitals.

The airline will fly the route four times a week using a Boeing 777. The plane can accommodate 266 passengers, including 38 business-class seats.

This new service linking Singapore, Canberra and Wellington reflects the close ties between the three countries, said Singapore Airlines CEO Goh Choon Phong.

Passengers were welcomed with a small ceremony at the airport in Canberra.

The Singapore-Canberra-Wellington route is the first direct flight into the Australian capital since Air Pacifics short-lived service to Fiji. (dan)
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Linkedin Panca Nugraha (The Jakarta Post) Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara  Wed, September 21, 2016

West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), West Sumatra and Aceh have been officially listed as halal tourist destinations by the Tourism Ministry in a bid to increase the number of Muslim travelers from Asian and Middle Eastern countries visiting the three provinces.

The ministry is currently creating a team to accelerate halal tourism in the three provinces, said the ministry's destination development deputy Dadang Rizky Rahman in Mataram, NTB, on Wednesday.

Following the declaration of Lombok and Sumbawa as halal tourist destinations last year, NTB reportedly recorded an increase in tourists from Malaysia. Based on our data, there has been a shift in Malaysian tourist arrivals. Previously, they preferred Medan, Bandung and Bali. Now, most of them opt to travel to Lombok, said Dadang.

(Read also: West Nusa Tenggara to host halal travel fair)

He said the ministry would make the areas Muslim-friendly.

This includes Muslim-friendly airports, hotels and destinations where Muslim travelers can easily find places to worship. We must also increase halal certifications for restaurants and food products. Japan and Korea are doing this. We should not be left behind.

Meanwhile, Association of Indonesian Tour and Travel Agencies (Asita) chairman Asnawi Bahar called for synergy between the government and local administrations to develop supporting infrastructure for halal tourist destinations, especially in regards to direct flights.

"For example, since the availability of direct flights between Manado and China, up to 10,000 Chinese tourists have arrived in Manado," said Asnawi.

As of September, NTB has reportedly welcomed over 1.5 million domestic and foreign tourists.

We are optimistic that we will attract 3 million tourists by the end of this year," said NTB Deputy Governor Muhammad Amin. (kes)
Safe to say the fashion world doesnt have the best of reputations. For the non-fashionistas amongst us, its full of skinny, snooty, rude women wearing all black. The Devil Wears Prada was a veritable PR disaster for the industry.

However, its so much more than air-headed bimbos spending ludicrous amounts of money on material goods  fashion is representative of so many wider issues, and within it is a microcosm of society.

So if youre not into fashion, maybe dont turn your nose up: heres why you should care about London Fashion Week.

Technology

You may be surprised to learn that the fashion industry is at the forefront of tech. Dont believe us? Just take a look at Burberry, the leading British digital brand.

Burberry was among the first of any brands  not just in the fashion world  to try Snapchat, use Instagrams video ads and Twitters buy buttons. It also allowed people at the show to buy clothes they see on the runway immediately at the touch of a button, marrying the digital and physical experiences.

Topshop followed suit this year as they live streamed the Unique Collection show straight onto their website and app platforms, allowing thousands of shoppers to watch and buy the collection simultaneously.

(Isabel Infantes/PA)

So if you want brand innovation, you should take a look at fashion brands. Fashion is hungry to make the most of every new technological advance, which works particularly well considering its visual nature.

Environment

Believe it or not, the fashion industry is becoming increasingly obsessed with being eco-friendly. Sustainable fashion is on trend, and designers are in a race against each other to be at the forefront of this.

Green Carpet Challenge This year sustainable fashion was supported by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham, Anna Wintour and Colin Firth, who all attended theBAFTA Night to remember event. The idea behind the event was to bring together leaders from the fashion industry who value sustainability.

Sustainability is a key concern for designers, and LFW puts these in the spotlight. Looking good whilst helping the planet  thats something we can get on board with.

Politics

Fashion week is used by many politically active designers as a platform for their views, or to further their political agenda.

Guest appearances on runway by Adele Ellis and Laxmi - acid attack survivors, different times different countries pic.twitter.com/YUfnQY9Wv4  Olivia Kinsley (@LivKinsleyTV) September 12, 2016



This year, Rise On The Runway presented collections from designers Lucy Choi London and Raishma Couture to launch the #giveagirlafuture campaign, which works to empower acid attack survivors.

Laxmi and Adele, both survivors, walked the runway holding cards saying #giveagirlafuture.

This is by no means the only political initiative  and particularly in the current clime, well be keeping a keen eye out for what other messages designers put across in their shows this year.

Art

Fashion is art, theres no denying it. So if you like going to galleries and seeing the latest exhibitions, why shouldnt you enjoy Fashion Week?

Its the time some of the most creative and eccentric minds in the world can show off their work. We personally cant wait to see what Hussein Chalayan comes up with this year.

To give you a taste of Chalayans previous work: for LFW in 2000, he transformed a wooden table into a skirt.

Table dress from Hussein Chalayan's A/W 2000 show "Afterwords" pic.twitter.com/QkX7ngawn5  socrasteeze (@tbssmlltt) April 19, 2016



In Paris last year, he closed his show with models standing under a shower, with their white shirts disintegrating before our eyes to reveal beautiful dresses covered in Swarovski crystals.

Chalayan SS16 Water Reactive Clothing pic.twitter.com/DqYnEcroU4  ~~~ (@katemoss1993) March 11, 2016



the dissolving dresses hussein chalayan showcased in ss16 still makes me gasp  FE 2/2 (@cherubtroye) February 22, 2016



With that kind of artistic creativity on show, Fashion Week is certainly not one to miss.

Individuality

Fashion definitely has an unfortunate problem with diversity. However, many designers are doing all they can to change this.

We always like to keep an eye on what Delhi-born London designer Ashish does, not only because he guarantees a lot of sequins and bright colours, but also because of the casting of his shows. For AW16 he is one of the few designers who ensures he has models of colour both opening and closing his show.

Ashishs AW16 show (Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA)

Whilst the industry has a long way to go, it is still a celebration of individuality and these problems are being met head on.

Fashion is meant to be a vehicle for self-expression, and LFW is just the place for this. Not only on the runways, but also in the crazy and amazing street style that youll be able to see around Brewer Street car park.

So even if you think that fashion isnt your thing  theres so much more to it than just the material. So this Fashion Week, enjoy it for all that it encompasses.
To celebrate Stephen King, one of the greatest authors of our time, on his 69th birthday, we take a look at some of the best film adaptations of his many many books.



King released his first novel Carrie in 1977 and since then has released 54 books. A mixture of horror, drama, fantasy, collections and non-fiction, have definitely solidified Stephen King as one of the greatest modern American writers.

Through Kings fantastical storytelling and many attempts at adapting his stories into film, there have been many amazing transformations, as well as a some very awful ones; here are the best ones, which are not only adapting the source respectfully and effectively, but that also work on a cinematic level.



The Mist

Originally published in 1980 from the collection Skeleton Crew, The Mist was adapted by Frank Darabont, who also made two of the other greatest Stephen King movies: The Green Mile and Shawshank. Darabont is an all round fantastic creative mind in the world of film. Having already been left with the task of adapting two stories, very much proving his competence, Darabont was the perfect person for an adaptation of a very dark and horrific novella.

The Mist follows the story of a group of people who are inadvertently trapped in a supermarket by a mysterious heavy mist full of all sorts of terrifying and murderous creatures. Its full of horror, gore, terrific tension and action sequences. Single setting horror films are largely effective, but have always been a sub-genre of horror (despite many cabin in the woods stories) that always feels refreshing when thoroughly thought out. The Mist is a perfect example of this.

The film features a cast of lesser-known actors, but with some definite standout performances, especially from Thomas Jane who has a nicely developed relationship with his young son. The ending to The Mist has also become very famous, due to the tragedy and shock involved, but is ultimately a wonderful, yet dark, ending to a terrific tale.

Stand By Me

Stand By Me is one of the less horrific and scary stories from Stephen King, instead examining something more personal which resonates with everyone. This lovely coming-of-age story sees four childhood friends who set off on an adventure to find a dead body. So its not the most innocent story, but it feels very real.

The young men are brought to life by Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, Cory Feldman and Jerry OConnel, with much joy, adolescent anguish and rebellion. Rob Reiner handles the direction of the film and perfectly encapsulates friendship and childhood innocence, but is also handled in a way that doesnt feel forced or that sugar-coats the reality of growing up in any way.

Stand by Me is Adapted from the original novella The Body, which features in another one of Kings collections, Different Seasons from 1982. The film follows very closely to the structure of the original story, only tweaking a few minor details. Also featuring the lovely song of the same name by Ben E. King, which fits wonderfully throughout.

The Shining

Although being disregarded by Stephen King as an unfaithful adaptation, Stanley Kubrick does much more with the source material than simply adapt The Shining. Kubrick creates a very artistic and unflinching version of Kings original 1977 novel, that takes the role of a psychological horror, as well as a philosophical meditation. The Shining has so much to offer the world.

The terrifying, but amazing Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrence as he slowly descends into madness, within the confines of The Overlook Hotel. With an unnerving and escalating sense of isolation, terrific horror proceeds. The film is beautifully crafted and put together with so much love for the original story and filmmaking in general.

The Shining is intelligently implicit and secretive, Kubrick beautifully gives us so much mystery and confusion that it requires a passive and creative audience to bring a whole new meaning to the story. There have been so many theories over the past 36 years that have tried to explain the film, even ridiculous ones that just seem a bit too silly, as well as a rather good documentary, Room 237 which deals in-depth with several explanations of the film.

Despite not being Kings preferred adaptation, its still a very good film, that tells an equally interesting story, to near perfection.

The Green Mile

This is the most well known film adapted from a Stephen King story and maybe even the best. The Green Mile follows the journey of John Coffey (Michael Clark Duncan), as he awaits his time for execution. Paul Edgecomb (played terrifically by Tom Hanks) and his co-workers (the nice ones, anyway) form a deep bond and friendship and end up fighting for the release of the seemingly sweet and innocent man.

The film has a very interesting structure; with a run time of over 3 hours, the story takes us through Coffeys time in prison and through this the audience are treated to an assortment of characters and subplots- from the troublesome and mean antics of prison guard Percy (Doug Hutchinson) to the introduction of psychopathic Wild Bill (portrayed, oh so beautifully, by Sam Rockwell).

The Green Mile explores relationships and heavily embedded thematic issues, as well as including commentaries on societal and racial problems in the 1930s, that still feel relevant today. Its a truly beautiful story, filled with very sad and heartbreaking moments, but never fails to feel magical.

Other notably brilliant adaptations:

The Shawshank Redemption (everyone knows how great this film is though)

Carrie

IT

Misery

Children of the Corn

Apt Pupil

1408

With an already pretty good collection of Stephen King films, I'm sure that many more will be made and if not, then we will always have his books!



A Dark Tower adaptation, the most beloved fantasy series by Stephen King, is being worked on currently by Nikolaj Arcel, featuring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba and has a release date of February 2017.
As a small but friendly deli, Herman ze German is sharing its authentic German sausage love in the UK. If you see a Herman in the heart of London, its best to be reassured theyll be serving real German.

I was lucky enough to visit Herman ze German on Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia, the largest of the three restaurants.

Browsing the menu, Metronomy's I'm Aquarius played through the speakers and filled the hip restaurant (bar downstairs) followed by The 1975s Chocolate. The place seems a popular hotspot for commuters, quick to grab a bottled beer and gallop down a hot dog whilst trying not to get the sausage sauce down their white buttoned shirts.

The quirky interior of multi-coloured lights and the wurst doodles which surrounded the benched seating area was comfortable and intriguing enough to hang out inside. The great soundtrack helped too.

Not a master-mind on German alcohols, the servers were happy to help guide my decision. This one tastes slightly like banana bread, very light but a German favourite!  sold. He was right, the Schneider weisse Original was quality and I certainly wasnt moaning at the 2.95 price tag.

As of course, a purveyor of German sausages, it seemed only appropriate to try one of Hermans specials. Priding of their quality protein, Herman ze German are happy to declare that their meat is freshly imported from their trusted butcher in the Black Forest, meaning its as German as it could possibly be. How could one refuse?

I opted for the Ze Uber Ding: chilli wurst, jalapenos (requested to be put on the side to avoid spicy mouth explosion), German mustard, fresh onions, cheese and a handful of pommes all in a brioche roll totalling 7.95.

Along with this I added pommes frites - chips to the UK. As one who usually opts for a burger in oppose to a dog, I was impressed and would definitely recommend. They certainly dont hold back on portion sizes, if your tummy is in desperate need of being filled  head straight there, now.

Hearty food in a cheerful environment is enough to sell it to me. That or the jolly chef who was busting some moves in the open kitchen to the catchy, infectious soundtrack. My sister, who accompanied me, was thrilled with the generous amount of cheese which covered her wurst and pommes frites. You put on so much cheese! Im so glad! she declared to the lady who checked back as we happily made our way through the wurst.

With fast service and generous servings for price, not to forget the class beer, Herman ze German is the place to visit if you cant get the time off work to book a trip to Germany itself. All thats left to say is Gru dich (hello) to the best wurst in London and danke (thank you)!
A pop-up restaurant dedicated to waging peace through food will open on Londons South Bank this week.

Conflict Cafe , hosted by charity International Alert will provide diners with brunch or dinner featuring food from Lebanon and Sri Lanka.

During the meal, held in the House Of Vans underground hall, attendees will hear about the issues faced by the country their meal has originated from and be encouraged to share their own stories and ideas with other diners.

Talking Peace Festival The events form part of the annualwhich surrounds the UN International Day Of Peace on September 21.

(Matthew Mead/AP)

Organisers want diners to experience the unique effect food can have on conflict resolution. The idea is that by breaking bread with a person, we are more likely to be receptive to their ideas and develop a common understanding.

Rebecca Crozier, International Alerts head of emerging programmes, said: Across different cultures and continents, food has the power to bring people together and encourage the act of sharing.

In some Middle Eastern countries, it is custom for the perpetrator of a crime to cook a meal for the victim and their family as a way of fixing broken bonds. In Europe, too, we find ways of using food to calm domestic storms, to unite communities and bring neighbourhoods together.

We hope that Conflict Cafe will give diners a glimpse into the diverse cuisines and complex histories of some of the countries where we work, highlighting the positive role that food can play in peacebuilding.

The Conflict Cafe will run from September 22  October 2. Tickets are 35 for dinner, 20 for brunch.
Earlier this month, we reported

The survey makes for frightening reading as freshers weeks get underway across the country. Over the next few weeks, university cities will suddenly be filled with thousands of new students, unfamiliar with their new surroundings and the people around them. The survey makes for frightening reading as freshers weeks get underway across the country. Over the next few weeks, university cities will suddenly be filled with thousands of new students, unfamiliar with their new surroundings and the people around them.

The National Student spoke to Elaine Hindal, Chief Executive of the charity Drinkaware, whhci carried out the research. She Hindal she had been shocked by some of the stories put forward during the campaign.

"One of the more worrying ones Ive encountered is of a woman having her top ripped off in a club by some male students, supposedly for a laugh  leaving her exposed in just her skirt and bra," Hindal told us. "This highlights how so often this kind of sexually inappropriate behaviour is seen as a joke, making it increasingly difficult for people to recognise and call out sexual harassment."

Identifying sexual harrassment as criminal behaviour, she stresses, is of vital importance. "Most people find being groped or having someone grind up against them on a night out pretty disgusting," she says. "Alcohol is no excuse. There are still limits, even when youre drunk, and we need to remind ourselves - and especially people leaving home for the first time, and going to new places with new people - that getting excessively drunk makes men and women more vulnerable to harm."

The research found that only 14% of female students were surprised that they had not been a victim of sexual harrassment. The problem, Hindal says, is that sexual harassment is often seen as a normal, unavoidable part of university nightlife - as expressed by as many as 50% of female students and 15% of male students surveyed.

"Its all too easy to dismiss drunken sexual harassment as harmless banter, having a laugh or simply being one of the lads," she says. "Women and men whove been subjected to harassment tell us that theyve put up with completely inappropriate behaviour for fear of repercussions."

The drinking culture of university can put students at risk, Hindal says. "Half of young people questioned in the survey said a typical night out involves drinking with friends before going out. For almost a third that includes drinking games, and 27% describe a typical night out as one where they lose count of how much theyve had to drink.

"Students who dont drink can end up feeling excluded or lose out. Its a considerable factor in putting students at risk."

Alongside the report, Drinkaware has launched a new scheme to support students who might be at risk. Specially trained staff, called the Drinkaware Crew, offer help and assistance to people who might otherwise be vulnerable as a result of excessive alcohol consumption.

"Typically, Drinkaware Crew help reunite friends; supporting people who are vulnerable; help people find a safe way home, or simply be a shoulder to cry on," Hindal told us.

The idea was originally piloted in Nottingham and has since been a success in the South West. During Freshers week, the Drinkaware Crew will also be on hand to help in clubs and nightspots in Glasgow, South Wales, Birmingham and Bristol.

The charity has also launched the hashtag #GropeFreeNights, encouraging people to come forward with their experiences. "We are calling on people to shout out against drunken sexual harassment on social media, using #GropeFreeNights and to reject the pervasive culture of sexual harassment on nights out," Hindal says. "By engaging both men and women, our aim is to help empower people not to tolerate behaviour that people have come to expect as normal on a night out part of a night out - even though the majority think it is unacceptable."

Elaine also had this advice for new students: "Freshers Week is a great time to have fun, but students can stay safe by taking responsibility for themselves and their friends; that means drinking within your limits; eating when drinking; alternating alcohol with soft drinks, and having a plan to get home safely with your friends."
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Deaths spur boat safety boost

BANGKOK: The Transport Ministry has rolled out a slew of measures to tighten boat transport safety rules, including the installation of automatic tracking systems, following Sundays deadly boat sinking in Ayutthaya, with the death toll rising to 28.

accidentscrimedeathdisastersmarinepolicetransport

By Bangkok Post

Wednesday 21 September 2016, 09:50AM

A large crane yesterday (Sept 20) took several hours to raise the sunken Sombat Mongkolchai Tabtim passenger boat which sank near the bank of the Chao Phraya River in Ayutthaya on Sunday (Sept 18). Photo: Apichart Jinakul

Transport Minister Arkhom Termpittayapaisith said yesterday (Sept 20) that the tragedy will serve as a lesson to prevent a repeat of future incidents.

The ministry has set up a fact-finding inquiry and issued a set of preventive measures against future incidents.

The first and most urgent step is for the Marine Department to look into matters relating to the oversight and law enforcement of officials, boat registration, and the issuance of licences for helmsmen. The probe will also cover the inspection of boats and piers, life-saving equipment and patrols by marine officials. The probe must be wrapped up within 10 days, Mr Arkhom said.

Marine officials have been instructed to inspect all piers. Helmsmen must have licences. Officials overseeing all public piers in every province have been instructed to step up checks on the condition of transport boats to ensure the maximum safety for passengers, Mr Arkhom said.

Public and private piers, as well as other riverside structures will also be subject to rigorous inspections to prevent encroachment on public waterways that could pose dangers to boat transport.

Passenger boats will also be required to install life-saving equipment such as life jackets.

These measures must be completed within one month, Mr Arkhom said.

For longer-term preventive measures, the Marine Department will issue a regulation requiring passenger boats with a passenger load of 25 or more to install an Automatic Identification System next year to enable marine officials to more efficiently regulate and monitor boats, Mr Arkhom said.

An electronic system to report the check-ins and check-outs at the piers of passenger boats will also be installed next year. Passenger boats that want to divert from their usual course will be required to first obtain permission from the Marine Department, Mr Arkhom said.

Other measures include increasing the number of compulsory boat safety training sessions from twice to four times a year and requiring that all boats install a radio communications system to keep in contact with Marine Department officials on each trip, Mr Arkhom said.

The minister also said the Transport Ministry is considering amending the 1913 Navigation in Thai Waters Act to impose more stringent measures on passenger boat operators, and boat helmsmen.

Under the law, boat passenger operators will only face civil lawsuits in cases involving boat capsizes as a result of passenger overloads, while helmsmen will face a fine of up to B10,000 and/or a jail term of up to six months.

The law may be amended to impose heavier penalties, Mr Arkhom said. He also stressed the need to change the law to authorise helmsmen who refuse to set off if their boats are overloaded with passengers.

As of late yesterday, two more bodies from the boat that capsized in the Chao Phraya River in Ayutthaya on Sunday had been retrieved, bringing the death toll to 28. The body of Thongbai Khantharak, an 89-year-old woman, was recovered 5-7 kilometres from the spot where the boat sank in front of Wat Sanam Chai.

Apilak Boonrak, a three-year-old boy, was found near a Catholic church in tambon Sampao Lom in Ayutthayas Muang district 3-4 kilometres from where the boat sank. No more missing persons have been reported.

Previously, officials reported that there might still be another missing child, a two-year-old boy identified as Apinan Saengkam, but an investigation found that this name was not listed in the state civil register.

As a result, officials have concluded that only 28 deaths occurred in the incident.

The Marine Department sent two recovery vessels with two large cranes to salvage the tourist boat yesterday afternoon.

It took about two hours to raise the sunken boat back to the surface.

The boat was then towed away by the two tug boats to Si Charoen shipyard located 4-5 kilometres from the spot where it sank. Authorities will carry out an investigation to determine the cause of the tragedy.

Marine Department deputy-secretary general Nat Chapchai, who oversaw the operation to salvage the boat, said a team of divers told him that the bottom of the wooden boat had sustained a deep crack almost seven metres long.

Read original storry here.
Man, 39, found dead in Phuket pond

PHUKET: Police are investigating the death of 39-year-old man whose body was found in a pond after he and his friends had reportedly been drinking nearby.

accidentsdeathpolice

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Wednesday 21 September 2016, 01:02PM

It toook divers half an hour to retrieve the body from the pond. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Capt Chatree Choowichein of the Thalang Police received a call from a local resident at 11am yesterday (Sept 20) where it was reported that a man had gone missing after jumping into a pond at Baan Khanan in Thepkrassattri.

Police arrived to the scene with Kusoldharm rescue workers and divers to find a group of residents gathered around the pond.

After half an hour of searching, divers retrieved the body of 39-year-old Samart Marnyaporn from the water. No signs of assault or injury were found on the body, which was checked before being transported to Thalang Hospital.

Capt Chatree said, Witnesses said that Mr Samart had been drinking with three other men near the pond until they were all drunk. Mr Samart allegedly told his drinking partners that that he wanted to die and then jumped into the water.

His friends did not pay much attention to him because they thought he was joking, but after he didnt return for some time they went looking for him and called for help, he said.

We are investigating into the death of Mr Samart and questioning his three friends about the incident, he added.
Phuket police arrest two teen serial motorbike thieves

PHUKET: Two teenagers suspected of being involved in several cases of motorbike theft were arrested with six stolen motorbikes in Phuket Town on Sunday (Sept 18) after one of the teens was involved in a motorbike accident earlier in the morning.

accidentscrimepolicetransport

By Darawan Naknakhon

Wednesday 21 September 2016, 11:25AM

Rut and Da admitted to police that they had stolen a total of nine motorbikes from various parts of the island. Photo: Darawan Naknakhon

Phuket City Police led by Lt Col Naruebadin Pangleesen arrested Rut and Da (real names withheld) aged 14 and 17 respectively, who were both suspected of being involved in the theft of motorbikes in various parts of the island.

During the course of the arrest police seized six stolen motorbikes; four Honda Waves, one Honda Sonic, and one Honda Click.

Lt Col Naruebadin said, The arrest of Rut and Da came after we were called to respond to a motorbike accident at the Surin Junction in Phuket Town. The victim, Rut, had crashed his motorbike and was being helped by his friend, Da, who had gone to the scene on another motorbike.

We have been investigated several cases of motorbikes thefts in various parts of the island which are believed to have been carried out by a group of teenagers, and after making investigations we suspected Rut and Da.

Officers who responded to the accident call reported that the two teenagers were the motorbike theft suspects we have been looking for, he said.

When we questioned them they admitted they had stolen stole nine motorbikes in total.

They took us to their home where we seized a total of six stolen motorbikes. However, we are still trying to trace the remaining three stolen motorbikes which they said they had already sold to locals.

The six seized motorbikes were stolen from Baan Mon in Patong, Moo Baan City Home in Wichit, Soi Tapakhao in Wichit, in front of a SuperCheap in Phuket Town, in front of the a Tesco Lotus store and at the Bang Ku junction in Koh Kaew.

All motorbikes were taken to the station so that we can notify the owners.

Rut and Da were also taken to the station to face theft and also possessing or receiving stolen item charges, Lt Col Naruebadin.
Satree Phuket School students attend Cambridge School Summit

In early September, students and staff from Satree Phuket Schools Cambridge Program travelled to Bangkok to participate in the Thailand Education Hub Cambridge School Summit 2016. This years summit was hosted at Yothinburana Schools beautiful new Bangkok campus, with a total of four schools from across Thailand attending the event, including Narinkun School and Phichairattanakhan School.

Wednesday 21 September 2016, 10:00AM

Students took part in several team sports during the Summit. Photo by Mike Opaliski.

By Mike Opaliski

Following the opening ceremony performances, students and guests heard a speech from Mr Teerakiat Jareonsettasin, Thailands Deputy Minister of Education. Throughout the day students participated in a number of activities such as traditional Thai dances, academic showcases, a student speak-out forum and team sporting events.

The first day of the summit wrapped up with an evening dinner party, with everyone in attendance taking the chance to pay their respect to two upcoming retirees, Mr Nattawat Pathathairattanasarani, Vice Director of Satree Phuket School and Mr Manote Wangthakul, Vice Director of Yothinburana School.

Students talents were also on display at the Cambridge Summit Night Dinner Party with several of Satree Phuket Schools Year Nine girls performing a number of songs on stage.

On the second day of the summit students from all four schools had an opportunity to visit the Erawan Museum in Bangkok. Next, students spent a few hours exploring the open-air Museum of Ancient Siam, learning about Thailands cultural heritage while taking in the sights of some of the countrys most historically significant structures.

Over the course of the summit students made new friends from Cambridge Programs across the Kingdom. In addition, students were given the opportunity to showcase their talents and learn, not only about Thailands cultural past, but also about what it will take for them to be successful in todays world.

Satree Phuket School will be hosting next years Thailand Education Hub Cambridge School Summit and the school will be striving to make everyone in attendance feel welcomed and ensure that they enjoy their stay here on the island.
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Camp offers hands-on experience for students interested in construction

Lake Area Tech construction projects are facing material delays. Educating the future workforce is one way to combat industry challenges.
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Beaconsfield Mayor Georges Bourelle, holding the golden scissors, officially opened the city's new expansive dog park that is open to all West Island residents provided their dog has a license. The park is more than 150,000 square feet and contoured by fencing.
Job Title: IT Officer

Organization: International

Rescue Committee (IRC)

Duty Station: Uganda

Reports to: Field Manager

About US:

The International Rescue Committee helps people whose lives and

livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover, and

gain control of their future. It was created by Albert Einstein more than 80

years and has been working in Uganda since 1998. It has particularly working in

the conflict zones where tens of thousands of people have been kills and over

1.6 million displaced. Following a peace agreement in 2006, Ugandans are

returning home and looking to rebuild their lives. The IRC is there to protect

women and children from violence and exploitation by fostering a safe

environment and encouraging education, and is supporting farmers and small

businesses, and helping communities promote peace and long-term development.

IRC is working in collaboration with OPM, UNHCR and other agencies to

provide multi-sector assistance program in Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in Yumbe

District, which is now home to approximately 20,000 South Sudanese refugees.

Job Summary: The IT Officer is

responsible for the running of the IRC Yumbe IT Section in addition to managing

the security of data; technical operation, efficiency and cost aspects of the

IT system for purposes of improving the IRC Uganda support functions. In order

to achieve better results in terms of support and system utilization, it will

be his/her core responsibility to train staff and reinforce good policies and

best practices of IT facilities. The IT

Officer is specifically responsible for the following tasks:-



Key Duties and Responsibilities:

The incumbent will ensure the Yumbe office

is operating off the IRC IT global standards.

Ensure that all IRC computers are in

working order. All Servers, Firewalls, Unifi Devices, Switches are in

working order. Assist in the maintenance of computers as requested.

Install local area network cabling systems

and equipment such as network interface cards and switches to ensure

connectivity.

Mentor and train IRC staff and guests on

the safe handling and general operation of computers and accessories and ensure

that all IRC staff are in compliance with IT policies and procedures.

Ensure that server backup is done on

regular basis and that staff are reminded to do back up before their

computers are sent out for repairs.

Inform or/and request support from the IT

Officer in Kampala or New York IT help desk on any problem occurred in the

system.

Offer technical assistance on computer

software and hardware. Provide

training, develop training material and assistance in MS Office  Word,

Excel, Access, Office365 and Exchange, Power Point and use of other IRC

Web Platforms such as Service Now, Self-service, Box etc.

Provide assistance to Finance on SUN,

Q&A systems installations, DB Backups/Uploads.

Ensure proper record keeping of

breakdowns, problems and maintenance carried out.

Ensure data security, backups of LAN,

protection against data corruption and loss in all locations. Ensure that

backups are done at a minimum on a weekly basis and stored

appropriately.

Ensure that antivirus programs on each

machine are updated regularly.

Prepare and submit reports with

information on condition of network and ISPs to assist with timely

upgrades and necessary changes.

Carry out service and maintenance of

computers, printers, UPS and other associated equipment. Conduct diagnosis

of problems, follow up with the Supply chain in charge of maintenance, and

inspect that repairs have correctly been done before putting equipment

back into production.

Configure new computers after they have

been properly registered in the assets register.

Develop and maintain an IT Asset register

for all the office sites. Reports to be shared with IT Officer every

month.

Create email addresses, update mailing

lists, and keep proper tracking of email addresses.

Actively participate in system/project

testing, rollout and report logging. All these to be shared with IT

Officer.

Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

The ideal candidate for the International

Rescue Committee (IRC) IT Officer job vacancy should hold a Bachelors

degree in Computer Science or related discipline.

At least three (3) years work experience

in computing and maintenance of LANs, PC desktop and application software,

installing, upgrading, troubleshooting and administering Windows Server

2008 R2 Servers.

Broad knowledge and understanding of

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Databases.

Broad working knowledge of Desktop

operating systems, various software applications and basic hardware for

the PC principles and theories of network systems and management; Internet

technologies and products; basic understanding of electrical safety procedure.

Demonstrated ability to work under

pressure with limited supervision and take initiative.

Possess excellent training skills,

excellent organizational and interpersonal skills with a service oriented

outlook

Good team player.

How to Apply:

All suitably qualified and interested candidates should send their

applications online at the link below.

nd September,

2016 Deadline: 22September,2016
Organisation: United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Position No.: 10026395

Vacancy Notice: 020/2016

Reports to: Protection

Officer

Duty Station: Arua, Uganda

Post Grade: GL7

About UNHCR:

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was

established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly.

UNHCRs mandate under the Statute of the Office of the United Nations High

Commissioner for Refugees is to lead and co-ordinate action for international

protection to refugees; seek permanent solutions for the problems of refugees

and safeguard refugee rights and well-being. UNHCR has an additional mandate

concerning issues of statelessness, as it is given a designated role under

Article 11 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

Job Summary: The Senior

Protection Associate (Community Based)will work closely with other UNHCR staff,

government, NGO partners and other stakeholders to identify the risks they face

and to leverage their capacities to protect themselves, their families and

communities. The incumbent may have direct supervisory responsibility for part

of the protection and/or support staff and supports the application of

community-based protection standards, operational procedures and practices in

community-based protection delivery at the field level. To fulfil this role the

Senior Protection Associate (Community-Based) is required to spend a

substantial percentage of her/his time working outside the office, building and

maintaining networks within communities of persons of concern. The development

and maintenance of constructive relationships with persons of concern that

measurably impact and enhance protection planning, programming and results

forms the core of the work of the Senior Protection Associate

(Community-Based). The incumbent also supports the designing of a

community-based protection strategy by ensuring that it is based on

consultation with persons of concern



Responsibilities: Key Duties andResponsibilities:

The incumbent will support functional

units the Multi-Functional Team (MFT) and senior management to integrate

participatory and community-based approaches in the overall protection

strategy.

Through relationships with persons of

concern and network of partners stay abreast of political, social,

economic and cultural developments that have an impact on the protection

environment and provide advice to the protection team.

The incumbent will understand the

perspectives, capacities, needs and resources of the persons of concern

and advise the protection team accordingly, highlighting the specific

protection needs of women and men, children, youth and older persons,

persons with disabilities, marginalized groups.

Work closely with host communities to

identify opportunities for national civil society involvement in improving

the protection of persons of concern.

Work in liaison with implementing and

operational partners as well as with displaced and local communities to

develop community-owned activities to address, where applicable, the

social, educational, psycho-social, cultural, health, organisational and

livelihood concerns as well as child protection and prevention and

response to SGBV.

Offer support in the analysis that

identifies the capacities of communities of concern and risks they face.

Assist with regular participatory

assessments and ongoing consultation with persons of concern using

multifunctional teams.

In charge of planning and monitoring of

programmes and budgets with an AGD perspective.

Assist in building capacity to maximize

opportunities for participatory and community-based approaches and to make

appropriate use of guidelines and tools in working with partners and other

relevant entities.

Support communities in establishing

representation and coordination structures

Ensure community understanding of UNHCRs

commitment to deliver on accountability and quality assurance in its

response.

Offer support in developing UNHCR

communication strategies by emphasizing the participatory, community-based

and AGD approaches

Act as interpreter in exchange of routine

information, contribute to related liaison activities and respond directly

to routine queries.

Perform other relevant duties as required.

Key Performance Indicators:

Effective support and advice is provided

to promote and undertake community-based protection activities which

address the social, cultural, and livelihood needs of populations of

concern.

AGD sensitive analysis of community risks

and capacities provides the essential basis for all of UNHCRs work.

The participation of persons of concern is

assured through continuous assessment and evaluation using participatory,

rights and community based approaches, which inform protection and

assistance programming and ensure that UNHCR meets its commitments to

accountability to persons of concern.

National protection capacities are

improved through direct engagement, research and advocacy with all

relevant external interlocutors

Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

The ideal candidate for the United Nations

UNHCR Senior Protection Associate (Community Based) job vacancy should

have completed secondary education with Certificate/ training in

International Development, Cultural Studies, Human Rights, International

Social Work, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology,

International Law or other clearly related disciplines is required

At least 11 years relevant job experience.

Computer skills (MS Office, including

Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access).

Fluency in English, Madi, Lugbara, Aringa

and Swahili

Excellent written and oral communication

skills.

How to Apply:

All interested Ugandan nationals who wish to join the United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the aforementioned capacity are

encouraged to click on the link below and follow the application instructions

after reviewing the job details.

th

September, 2016 Deadline: 24September, 2016



find us on our facebook page

For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com orfind us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline




Organisation: United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Position No.: 10026388

Vacancy Notice: 018/2016

Reports to: Senior

Administrative Assistant

Duty Station: Adjumani,

Uganda

Post Grade: GL2

About UNHCR:

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was

established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly.

UNHCRs mandate under the Statute of the Office of the United Nations High

Commissioner for Refugees is to lead and co-ordinate action for international

protection to refugees; seek permanent solutions for the problems of refugees

and safeguard refugee rights and well-being. UNHCR has an additional mandate

concerning issues of statelessness, as it is given a designated role under

Article 11 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

Job Summary: The Driver is

mainly responsible for up keep and maintenance of the assigned UNHCR vehicle(s)

as per technical guidance and specifications established by the organisation.

The incumbent will be required to follow strict instructions and security

guidance provided by the supervisor. While the basic function of a driver is to

drive the official vehicles of UNHCR, he/she may be called upon to perform

minor maintenance and repair of UNHCR vehicles. The incumbent has regular

contacts with staff within UNHCR office and with service providers outside

UNHCR involving a limited exchange of information.



Responsibilities: Key Duties andResponsibilities:

Drive UNHCR vehicles for the transport of

authorized passengers and delivery and collection of mail, documents,

UNHCR pouch and other items.

Meet official personnel at the airport and

facilitate immigration and customs formalities as required.

Carry out the day-to-day maintenance of

the assigned vehicles; check oil, water, battery, brakes, tyres, etc. and

ensure that the assigned UNHCR vehicles are road worthy and maintained up

to the established security standards.

Conduct minor repairs and arrange for

other repairs and ensure that the vehicle is kept clean.

Ensure that the steps required by rules

and regulations are taken in case of involvement in accident.

Log official trips, daily mileage, gas

consumption, oil changes, greasing, etc.

Perform any other related duties as

required by the Senior Administrative Assistant

Key Performance Indicators:

Assigned UNHCR vehicles are properly

maintained and equipped as per technical guidance and specifications

established by the Organisation.

Local traffic rules and regulations are

strictly observed.

Instructions and security guidance

provided by the supervisor and security focal point are strictly followed

by the Driver and the passengers during the journey



Experience: Qualifications, Skills andExperience:

The ideal candidate for the United Nations

UNHCR Driver job vacancy should have completed Primary Education or

equivalent technical or commercial school.

At least two years of previous job

experience relevant to the function.

Driving licence, knowledge of driving

rules and regulations and skills in minor vehicle repair. -Good knowledge

of English, Madi, Lugbara and Aringa

Good mechanical skills are desired

Ability to work in remote areas.

How to Apply:

All interested Ugandan nationals who wish to join the United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the aforementioned capacity are

encouraged to click on the link below and follow the application instructions

after reviewing the job details.

th

September, 2016 Deadline: 24September, 2016
But the tribe has a long way to go
The BJP on Wednesday urged the Karnataka Government to shed selfish interest and release Cauvery waters to neighbouring Tamil Nadu.

Asserting that there is a need to rise above state politics, BJP leader Shaina NC said, "The Supreme Court has made it clear that the Karnataka government must release the Cauvery water at this juncture. I think we need to rise beyond the selfish interests of particular states and understand that India is one."

The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed Karnataka to release a further 6,000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu from 21 to 27 September daily.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has termed the Supreme Court's order as "unimplementable" and will convene a meeting of his cabinet and preside over an all-party meeting today to chalk out the next step.

State Home Minister G Parameshwara said Tuesday that he was disappointed with the Supreme Court judgement on the Cauvery water sharing issue, even as the apex court also directed the Centre to constitute Cauvery Management Board within a month.

He also directed the state police to conduct flag marches around sensitive areas and also appealled to pro-Kannada activists, farmers' associations to maintain peace. Police was also told to keep ready fire engines and other emergency forces ready in sensitive areas around Cauvery belt, including Bengaluru.

In Karnataka's Mandya district, a series of pro-Kannada protests were organised on Tuesday, which included protesters eating mud and placing their slippers on their heads as expressions of their disagreement with the Supreme Court order.

On the other hand, in Tamil Nadu, state ministers were seen taking part in a ceremonial release of waters through the Mettur Dam for Samba cultivation in the Cauvery Delta region.

The water dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu dates back to the latter half of the 19th century.
Karnataka will decide on Wednesday its next course of action on the Cauvery row following the Supreme Court's order to release more water to Tamil Nadu.

"We will decide our next course of action at the council of ministers meeting on Wednesday in consultation with water technical experts and our legal team," Chief Minister Siddaramaiah told reporters on Tuesday night.

Asserting that the state was not in a position to implement the apex court order as the water in the Cauvery reservoirs was just enough for drinking purpose till next June, he said in such a situation it was very difficult to share it as drinking water was a national priority.

"Since we do not have water, it is very difficult to implement the apex court order. It is an unimplementable order," reiterated Siddaramaiah.

A division bench of the apex court ordered the state to release 6,000 cusecs per day from Wednesday for a week till September 27, doubling the quantum fixed by its appointed Cauvery Supervisory Committee on Monday for 10 days till September 30.

The top court's fresh directive comes into force a day after the state completed releasing 12,000 cusecs daily on Tuesday as per the court's September 12 order, modifying its September 5 order to release 15,000 cusecs daily for 10 days from September 7.

"I have also convened an all-party meeting of the floor leaders of both the houses of the state legislature on Wednesday evening to discuss the apex court order and finalise a joint strategy to protest the interests of the state," said Siddaramaiah.

All members of Parliament from the state, including Union Ministers, and state ministers concerned will participate in the meeting to discuss the issue and arrive at a consensus on how to face the situation arising out of the top court order.

The apex court's Tuesdays order will be placed at both meetings along with the state's representation to the supervisory committee meeting and the petitions it filed before thecourt pleading its inability to release any more water for irrigation in the neighbouring state.

The chief minister also appealed to the people to remain calm and maintain peace in the hour of distress as the state was going through a difficult period due to deficit monsoon rains.

"I appeal to the people, especially those in the Cauvery basin areas to maintain peace and not get carried away by emotions. We are committed to protect the interest of the state, its people and its farmers. Everyone should cooperate," added Siddaramaiah.
National Commission for Minorities(NCM) chairman Naseem Ahmad has written to Union Home Minister(HM) Rajnath Singh, expressing concern over the growing violence against Muslims by vigilante groups and emphasising on the need to reinforce a sense of security amongst the minorities.

Ahmad wrote that the commission has been receiving petitions and has prepared reports on some of these incidents. He referred to the recent attack in West Delhi as yet another incident that reinforces the feeling of insecurity amongst the Muslims.

In particular, it is creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion among the Muslims across the country and deteriorating the amity among communities that have traditionally lived together in peace and harmony, he wrote.

The NCM chairman called for a very strong statement from the highest levels of the government. It is true that law and order is a state subject, but certainly the central government would be well within its powers to ask the states to handle such situations with a heavy hand and to enforce a sense of security among the minorities in all seriousness, he said.

Meanwhile, a two-member delegation of the NCM, comprising the chairman and member Praveen Davar, will be visiting Mewat, Haryana, on September 22 to get first-hand information on the murder of a couple and gang rape of two Muslim girls by alleged cow vigilantes.
Amid a spike in bilateral tensions in the wake of the Uri attack, Pakistan is giving a miss to a two-day meeting of security experts and intelligence top brass from Saarc member nations beginning here from Thursday.

Official sources said that the conclave being hosted by Director of Intelligence Bureau, Dineshwar Sharma, will be attended by senior officials of intelligence agencies of other Saarc nationsNepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Afghanistan.

Director General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan, Aftab Sultan, is however not attending, sources said.

The meeting on Thursday and Friday is being hosted as per the recommendation of the Saarc Ministerial Declaration on Cooperation in Combating Terrorism.

Official sources told IANS that the two-day meet only reflects "high priority being attached for regional cooperation in security related matters and anti-terrorism activities".

As per schedule, the deliberations would dwell on the functioning of the existing anti-terrorism mechanisms in the region including the Saarc Terrorist Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD), intelligence sharing and police cooperation.

There may be also recommendations aimed to strengthen the existing mechanisms and discuss potential new areas of cooperation.
The Union Cabinet will be meeting under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Wednesday morning.

Though the Cabinet meeting on Wednesday is a routine affair, it is significant in the sense that it is being held in the backdrop of last Sunday's terror attack in Uri in which 18 army soldiers were killed.

The Cabinet Committee on Security is also expected to hold a meeting to review the situation arising out of the attack.

Meanwhile, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi has reviewed the security situation in Kashmir in the backdrop of the deadly militant attack on an army base in Uri and the ongoing unrest in the valley.

Mehrishi arrived in Srinagar early Tuesday morning and held series of meetings to review security situation across the Kashmir Valley.

He had detailed discussions with top officials from various security forces, police and intelligence agencies.

Mehrishi also called on Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti to discuss the prevailing situation in the valley. He left for New Delhi in the evening.
An indictment was handed down against the 25-year-old Nazareth resident who earlier this month threatened to kill Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The indictment was handed down in the citys magistrate court.

The defendant sent ten messages from his computer to the Prime Ministers Residence.

The indictment states that on August 21, 2016, he sent a threatening message from his personal computer via the online address for the public to contact the Prime Minister in addition to demanding PM Netanyahu deposit NIS 2.5 million in his bank account.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
For the first time in Israels history an international conference led by Education Minister Naftali Bennett will be held in Jerusalem next week, 22 to 24 Elul. Senior delegations from some 30 countries will attend, including Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand and Argentina. The education ministers and high-ranking officials will be exposed to Israeli innovation, especially in the fields of formal and informal education.

Minister of Education Naftali Bennett: Ministers from around the world are coming to Israel, to see the unbelievable innovation and creative minds we have here. The Summit, held in Jerusalem, is the proper response to the de-legitimization campaign. Israel is known as the StartUp Nation, and the conference allows us to show the worlds leading professionals the expansive educational work done here. By participating, the senior officials from dozens of countries will be voting against BDS and for Israel.

The OECDs Summit on innovation in education and educating for innovation will be held in Jerusalem over 25-27 September. The Summit will be held at the request and invitation of Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, and will include delegations from some 30 countries, most of headed by education ministers. In addition, leading academics and industry leaders from around the world will take part in the round-table sessions and professional discussions.

Minister Bennett initiated hosting the Summit in Israel, and it was organized by the Ministry of Education and the heads of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

The OECD Summit will deal with technological and social innovation, and incorporating them in education systems around the world. The Ministers will also look at the affect these innovations have on schools and kindergartens. During the Summit, the education ministers, academics and industry officials will be exposed to Israels creativity, especially in the realms of formal and informal education.

The first day of the Summit will feature a professional tour of Jerusalem and educational institutions. The following days will be dedicated to peer discussions and round-table sessions on innovative education.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Donald Trump is spending a lot of time in this critical presidential swing state, but hes campaigning Tuesday evening far from cities like Charlotte and Raleigh where many candidates have courted moderate voters in recent years.

Instead, hes zeroing in on this tiny, rural town of about 850 people to make his pitch to the disaffected, working-class white voters who have propelled his campaign. The strategy appears to be less about swaying undecideds and more about making sure supporters dont stay home on Election Day.

Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1 in Duplin County, but voters here have chosen the GOP presidential candidate in the past two elections by a wide margin. Among those lifelong Democrats is James Teachey, a 78-year-old retired farmer who said this year was the first he donated to a presidential campaign: $40 to Trump.

People are sick and tired of the way things are going in Washington and the way people are running it, he said. I was born coming out of the Depression. We know what a dollar means, what leaving your door unlocked means. And all those things are gone.

Trumps business background is a big draw for his supporters here in Kenansville, where beyond the small downtown areas handful of restaurants, gas stations and a couple of grocery stores lie farms that are the areas major economic driver. Pork and poultry growers and processing plants employ thousands in Duplin County and have drawn Latino residents who now account for more than 20 percent of the countys population of 60,000.

Trumps rally is scheduled for the Duplin County Events Center, a building that can hold 4,000 spectators on the outskirts of Kenansville. Earlier in the day, he addressed a crowd in High Point, a hub of the declining furniture industry that was hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs but still hosts a world-renowned furniture market and trade show.

Not many high-profile candidates have come through Duplin County over the years. Asked if he could remember any other presidential campaign visits, Teachey laughed and said he thought Eleanor Roosevelt came decades ago.

While Kenansville may seem like an unusual campaign stop, Trumps decision to veer farther away from population centers shows that North Carolina is a state he has to win, said Thomas Eamon, a political science professor at East Carolina University.

Campaigns do generally go to bigger cities, and going to a rural area, theres a certain psychology in going to a small town like Kenansville. I think that symbolically could be good, Eamon said, adding that the sites location near an interstate highway can funnel in conservative spectators from nearby counties.

While North Carolina is dotted with left-leaning urban areas such as Raleigh and Charlotte, it also has one of the countrys largest rural populations. A 2012 analysis by the Census found that North Carolina ranked second only to Texas with 3.2 million rural residents.

Duplin Countys Latino farmworkers are upset by Trumps comments about Mexicans and his stance on immigration, but many cant vote because they are either guest workers or immigrants not legally in the U.S., said Justin Flores, a vice president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee.

The ironic thing is that Donald Trump is coming to talk to a county that owes its entire economy to the work of immigrant workers, some undocumented, almost entirely from Mexico and Central America  the countries that Trump has spoken about with so much disrespect, said Flores, who is based in neighboring Wayne County.

State voter registration figures show that the county has about 1,200 registered Hispanic voters. Approximately 18,000 are white, while 9,000 are black.

Arthur Best, a black voter from Kenansville and U.S. Army veteran, is frustrated like many others by the lack of well-paying jobs, particularly for minorities. But for him, Trump is not the answer.

I lost my father in Vietnam. He didnt die for the foolishness were looking at today, said Best, a Democrat who has been offended by Trumps insults toward U.S. Sen. John McCain and the parents of a Muslim soldier killed while serving in Iraq.

Still, more than a quarter of Duplin Countys residents live in poverty, and only a fraction have college degrees, according to 2014 Census estimate. For voters like Bill Link, a retired U.S. Marine officer from nearby Beulaville, Trumps promises to improve the economy are what really matter.

The majority of people right now are leaning for Trump, said Link, who drives trucks and owns a carnival equipment rental business. Because were all working people. We all work for a living. Were blue-collar, and we believe that the country has gone the wrong way.

(AP)
Two U.S. officials say a notebook with extremist ramblings was found when the man suspected of placing bombs in New York City and New Jersey was taken into custody.

The Associated Press viewed a blood-stained page of the notebook. It contained a reference to Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric killed in a 2011 drone strike, and Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army major who went on a 2009 rampage at the Fort Hood military installation.

The page includes the phrase Join us in our New front.

The officials also said that Ahmad Khan Rahami had traveled to Pakistan in recent years. One said he arrived from Afghanistan with his family as a young child.

The officials were not authorized to publicly reveal details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

(AP)
The commissioner of the IRS is apologizing to Congress for information his agency lost and inaccurate statements he made during congressional investigations of its treatment of tea party and other conservative groups.

John Koskinen is facing an impeachment effort by House conservatives, and hes set to testify Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. That panel released his opening statement late Tuesday.

Koskinens statement doesnt provide specifics.

But in documents his lawyers circulated last week, they noted that he told lawmakers in June 2014 that no emails had been destroyed. And, they say, it wasnt until June 2015 that he learned that a computer hard drive containing numerous emails had been destroyed by IRS workers back in 2011.

Koskinen is opposing the impeachment effort.

(AP)
The nations top intelligence official said Tuesday that he could never agree with a decision to pardon Edward Snowden.

Snowden was an National Security Agency contract employee when he took more than a million documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas.

I could understand what he did, if  what he exposed was limited to domestic surveillance.  But he exposed so much else that had absolutely nothing to do with domestic surveillance, where he has damaged our capability against foreign threats. He has taken away capabilities that were used to protect our troops in Afghanistan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said. I dont think I could concur in offering him a pardon.

Snowdens revelations about the agencys bulk collection of millions of Americans phone records set off a fierce debate that pitted civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism. Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans pushed through a reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year that ended the program.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution. Human rights groups are seeking a presidential pardon, saying he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs.

Asked if Snowden could get a negotiated plea agreement in exchange for information, for example, that he might have gleaned from Russian contacts, Clapper simply replied, No.

The more time that goes on, there is actually, in my mind, less and less incentive for any kind of negotiated plea agreement, Clapper said. At least as far as the intelligence community is concerned, were not in that camp.

(AP)
1:22PM IL: [VIDEO IN EXTENDED ARTICLE] The attacker in Ankara was heard shouting Ala Akbar before trying to stab a local policeman outside the Israeli Embassy.

1:09PM IL: Israel Channel 2 News reports the incident occurred while a protest was taking place outside the embassy. The protest got close to the embassys outer security perimeter comprised of Turkish security personnel. A verbal dispute erupted between protestors and security personnel which was followed by the knife threat. A local officer shot the assailant in a leg while a second officer took another person into custody. [EARLIER REPORTS APPEAR BELOW]

1:05PM IL: Channel 1 News correspondent Amir Bar-Shalom is reporting that the attacker was armed with a knife and tried to stab a security agent at the embassy. He was shot and injured lightly.

1:03PM IL: The Israel Foreign Ministry is reporting all embassy staff is safe. Security personnel shot and wounded an attacker near the embassy.

12:57PM IL: It appears a person fired into the Israeli Embassy and that person was shot and wounded, not killed as believed earlier. It is unknown if other are wounded and if the situation has been declared under control.

12:46PM IL: NTV News from Turkey is reporting one dead in an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Ankara. Two persons tried to get inside.

No additional information is available. Stay with YWN-ISRAEL for details as they become available.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photos & Videos: via Media Resource Group)
Irans chief of staff of the armed forces said Wednesday a $38 billion aid deal between the United States and Israel makes Iran more determined to strengthen its military.

In comments broadcast live on Iranian state TV, Gen Mohammad Hossein Bagheri said the U.S.-Israel aid deal will make us more determined in strengthening the defense power of the country. He spoke at an annual military parade.

Last week the U.S signed an unprecedented new security agreement with Israel that will give the Israeli military $38 billion over 10 years.

Iran does not recognize Israel and supports terror groups such as Palestinian Hamas and Lebanons Hezbollah.

During a separate parade Wednesday in the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, Iran unveiled a new missile, known as Zolfaghar.

It was carried by military truck which bore a banner printed with a 2013 anti-Israeli quote by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying that Iran will annihilate the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa should Israel attack Iran.

Tasnim, the semi-official news agency, which is close to Irans hard-line Revolutionary Guard, said the missile is a long range ballistic with a cluster warhead. It did not provide further details.

The semi-official ISNA news agency later said the solid-fuel missile had a range of 700 kilometers (435 miles.)

Zolfaghar is the name of the sword used by Imam Ali, a cousin of the Prophet Mohammed and his successor according to Shiite belief.

The annual military parade marked the 36th anniversary of the start of 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq that killed more than a million people.

(AP)
The United States on Wednesday flew a pair of supersonic bombers over ally South Korea for the second time in as many weeks in a show of force following North Koreas latest nuclear test earlier this month.

U.S. Forces Korea said one of the two B-1B bombers landed at Osan Air Base, 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the border with North Korea, but did not say when it will return to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

Such flyovers are common when animosity rises on the Korean Peninsula, which is technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The United States also flew two B-1B bombers over South Korea on Sept. 13.

What we are showing today is just one tool we have to choose from a wide array of options. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region, Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, commander of the U.S. 7th Air Force in South Korea, said in a statement.

North Korea uses such flyovers and the American military presence in the South in its propaganda as alleged proof of U.S. hostility, which it says is the reason it needs a nuclear weapons program. After last weeks flyover, North Koreas official Korean Central News Agency described the B-1B as an ill-famed nuclear war means and accused the United States of resorting to nuclear threat and blackmail against the North.

The B-1B doesnt currently carry nuclear weapons under a disarmament treaty, and some U.S. experts do not consider them as nuclear capable in their current configuration.

Military experts raise concerns that North Korea is moving closer toward obtaining the ability to put nuclear warheads on a variety of its ballistic missiles, a growing arsenal that one day may include a reliable weapon that could reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korea conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test to date on Sept. 9, claiming it as a successful nuclear warhead detonation that proved its ability to mass produce standardized nuclear weapons that could be used on missiles.

There is a possibility that North Korea will follow its latest nuclear test with a long-range rocket launch as it did after its fourth nuclear test in January. The Norths state media on Tuesday said leader Kim Jong Un observed a ground test of a new rocket engine and ordered a satellite launch preparation.

Outsiders view North Koreas space launches as a cover for banned ballistic missile tests as the country openly pursues long-range nuclear weapons.

(AP)
Four Melbourne Cheder children have been hospitalized after their bus collided with a car in Elsternwick. The bus was heading to the Divrei Emuna Cheder.

Two of the students suffered abdominal injuries, one received neck injuries, and the fourth had glass in their eye after the crash on Wednesday morning.

The four were taken to the Royal Childrens Hospital in a stable condition and the female car driver was planning to see her own doctor, an Ambulance Victoria spokesman said.

There were more than 20 people on the bus when it collided with the car on the Nepean Highway about 9am.

The remaining passengers were transferred to another bus to complete their journey.

(Source: The Age / YWN World Headquarters  NYC)
The New York City Police Department is asking for the publics assistance in identifying the individuals depicted in the attached photographs in connection to a gunpoint robbery.

The following details were given to YWN by the NYPD:

On Tuesday, September 13, 2016 at approximately 11:05AM, a 72-year-old female victim was at the corner of Avenue T and East 2nd Street when an unknown male knocked her to the ground from behind, struck her in the face with a closed fist and removed her purse containing $5,000. The victim received a laceration to the face.

Surveillance photos taken from the video obtained from the above location are attached.

Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPDs Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.

(YWN Desk  NYC)
Minister of Religious Services David Azoulai has instructed Chief Rabbinate of Israel Director-General Oded Flus to find a solution to bring a halt to the ongoing harassment campaign and death threats against Kiryat Gat Chief Rabbi Moshe Havlin Shlita.

Flus on Wednesday was scheduled to meet with the Chief Rabbinate legal counsel and security officer to discuss the situation. Flus is also conferring with police who have been involved in the case since the protests outside Rabbi Havlins home began.

Rabbi Havlin is being targeted because he is a member of the Chabad Beis Din in Eretz Yisrael who along with a number of colleagues signed an agreement with the IDF. The agreement permits Talmidei Chabad to travel to NYC for a year or two of Kvutza and then return home and continue limudim, then followed by IDF service.

Protestors have already forced themselves into the ravs home and there have been numerous protests outside. At least three persons involved have already been indicted. The Eida Chareidis has since come out against the Chabad deal as well, lending support to the ongoing protests.

However, the protests have led to death threats against the rav as police and other agencies continue probing the matter.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Israel Channel 2 News reports on Wednesday night 18 Elul that Lebanons LBC News reported the remains of Israeli spy Eli Cohen HYD will be returned to Israel for Kvura after 51 years. Cohen was hanged in Damascus after being found guilty of being an Israeli spy in 1965. The family of Cohen has made appeals for the return of his remains over the years, wishing to bring him to kvuras Yisrael.

The surprise message from Lebanon is not attributed to any organization, but simply stating factions connected to Syrian rebels. In addition, it is not known if any organization in Syria has possession of his remains.

Channel 2 does add that this is the same news source, LBC, that in the past released information and a video pertaining to missing IAF navigator Ron Arad.

On Tuesday, the news pertaining to the planned return of Cohens remains made the rounds on Syrian social media including the video of him being put to death in 1965.

His widow, Mrs. Nadia Cohen explains this is most difficult for her, returning sending her back in time. I did not really look at the video she describes, only photos, but the children say it today and as one might expect, the sadness has returned and permeated our neshomos

Cohen was working in Syria from 1961 and was said to have developed close relationships with political and military personnel. His actions were uncovered and he was sentenced to death. The information that he gathered was reportedly a contributory factor to Israels success in the June 1967 Six Day War.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
If your life can be turned upside down by a debt order you had no idea even existed, something is clearly wrong with our justice system.

Dozens of you have contacted the Mail to tell us about the devastating impact of a firm filing a county court judgment against you.

Where the bill was fair and a debtor has only a flimsy excuse for failing to pay, a CCJ does seem a reasonable last resort.

Farmer Libby Portch, from Dunster, Somerset, was left with a 1,000 legal bill after fighting for a year to have a CCJ removed

But innocent families should not be blocked from buying homes, cars and insurance because a stray parking ticket or gas bill went to the wrong address.

As the stories of farmer Libby Portch and buy-to-let landlady Sandra Laine show, you can do everything in your power to stay on top of bills and still fall foul of these nasty credit black marks.

Worse, when Money Mail began investigating how to get rid of a CCJ, we found very little advice on who to talk to, the documents you need or where to send them.

Left to flounder, many will pay thousands to a solicitor for help clearing their name in court (it's worth cutting out our guide and filing it away, just in case).

It is too easy for any company to issue a CCJ against you. Who decided that cowboy parking firms, for instance, should hold sway over major events in your life?

In one case sent to us, a 23-year-old can't buy a home because of a CCJ for staying nine minutes too long in a car park in Shropshire.

Sarah Jones, 32, was given a debt order for overstaying in a car park while she was in hospital.

You have only to look at the awful billing problems at Scottish Power, npower and Vodafone over the past few years to see the dangers of giving utility firms this type of power. Sandra Laine, the landlady wrongly given a CCJ by South West Water, will testify to that.

A CCJ often fails to fit the crime, if there even was one. These days, being blocked from getting credit for six years (the time a CCJ stays on your file) makes life tricky.

You'll find it hard getting a mobile phone, let alone a mortgage.

Rejected: A CCJ means you'll have trouble getting a mobile, let alone a mortgage

Anyone evading tens of thousand of pounds of debt might find it tough to argue against a black mark on their credit file, but is it fair to hand the same treatment to someone with a disputed bill of a few pounds that hits them out of the blue?

There should be a minimum threshold, 20 say, before a court will consider imposing a CCJ.

Clearing your name should be easier, too, with clearer information about how to fight back.

Firms should also be forced to jump through more hoops to obtain a CCJ, such as proving they have tried every known address for you, not just one of several on a file.

They should also have to write and call, to no avail, a certain number of times before a judge can be called in.

The court should also be given proof that it has a current address when it posts a CCJ claims form.

The Government must act fast because it is unclear how many of the 900,000 people a year hit by CCJs have been subject to a miscarriage of justice. I suspect it is rather a lot.

Nanny fate

As any parent will tell you, childcare costs keep rising.

For some families, a nursery or nanny is so expensive, at 10,000 a year plus, that there is little sense in both parents working. No wonder nearly a million 'mumpreneurs' work from their living rooms selling clothes, holidays or books or engaging in some other part-time employment.

That is why it is frustrating when banks and building societies take such a hard-line stance on mortgages.

A typical home loan lasts for 25 years, during which time you might hold a dozen jobs, have more children and move house.

Yet your ability to make monthly repayments is decided on temporary childcare costs and other expenses today.

That does not take into account most working parents' uncanny ability to make ends meet.

Waspi stung

Bad news yesterday for women who have to wait up to six years longer for a state pension.

Richard Harrington, the new pensions minister, says they have no hope of a reprieve.

In his own words: 'I'd like to make it very clear that the Government will be making no further changes in this field.'

I will be meeting Mr Harrington soon and will report back on his opposition to the case put forward by Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi), but I shouldn't hold your breath waiting for a miracle.

If you have any other pension gripe you would like me to raise with the pensions minister, do let me know.

High praise

Another tale of top service, this week from letters editor Tony Hazell, who says: 'We flew to Girona, Spain, with Ryanair and a bag was damaged.

'Mrs H reported it and expected to be given the brush-off. Instead she was given a form with details of how to get a replacement.

'We were skeptical, but she called the number on our return and a new lightweight bag arrived shortly after.

'We were delighted by the speed and efficiency. The bag is worth 60, which is fine because the last one came from TK Maxx.'

Ryanair is known for cutting costs (and service) to the bone, but appears to be making a big effort to change that image. Long may it continue.
Family values? Bob Diamond is about to become a grandfather

Disgraced ex-Barclays chief Bob Diamond says he's interested in investing in European banks. Currently roosting on Manhattan's upper west side, is the smarmy reptile plotting a return to London?

Not likely. After his notorious, profit-at-all-costs regime at Barclays, I am assured the City still rates him as toxic as an untreated sewer. Plus Diamond, 65, is about to become a grandfather.

His bumptious, New York-based daughter Nell, 26, married to preppy Deutsche Bank analyst Teddy Wasserman, is due to give birth at any moment.

Chancellor Philip Hammond has revived the Washington embassy cocktail party at next month's International Monetary Fund meeting.

The reception was once the most sought-after invitation among banking big shots until sulky Gordon Brown did away with it.

Perhaps there's more sparkle to Hammond than he's sometimes credited. His funeral-parlour manner reminds some of the fictional Addams Family's lanky, basso-profundo-voiced manservant Lurch.

Following GlaxoSmithKline's appointment of foxy librarian Emma Walmsley, 47, as chief executive, where next for the firm's current boss, 6.7million-a-year Sir Andrew Witty?

Not long after his 2008 appointment, earnest Sir Andrew, 52, confided he'd like to one day retire and run a farm.

Accompanied by a posse of superfluous advisers, London mayor Sadiq Khan arrived in New York this week to declare London 'open for business'.

Since our capital was never closed, the trip may have been more to do with boosting the mayor's international profile.

Unfortunately, Khan's presence went largely unnoticed in the New York press. Predecessor Boris Johnson at least bagged a network TV interview with chat-show host David Letterman.

Job appointment of the week at chi-chi online fashion boutique Net-A-Porter, which has recruited BT's mousey head of human resources, Deborah Lee, as 'chief people officer'.
When Jamie Byfield left his driving job at electronics firm Dixons Carphone after suffering a seizure, he thought he was going on good terms.

But instead of a farewell card and present, the married father-of-one received a rather less welcome parting gift from his former employer.

Last September, Jamie, 26, from Romsey, Hampshire, was horrified to discover Dixons Carphone had issued a county court judgment (CCJ) against him to chase a 424 overpayment in his wages.

He only realised the judgment had been made after he was turned down for credit.

Potentially devastating: 900,000 county court judgements are handed down every year  sometimes for sums as small as a penny

CCJs are official legal demands issued when debtors repeatedly fail to respond to requests to repay money they owe.

Once on your record, a CCJ can block you from obtaining a mortgage, bank loan and even car insurance.

Jamie had no idea he owed the money because the court judgment had been sent to an old address  even though Dixons Carphone had his new details. He was given no chance to defend his case.

But the impact on his life has been devastating. He fears he will never be able to buy a home or even get a mobile phone contract.

Humiliatingly, he was forced to borrow money from his grandfather to buy a second-hand car because he could not get a loan.

'I would have paid such a small sum immediately if I had known about it,' says Jamie. 'It's disgusting that they can take me to court, given that it's their mistake.'

Dixons Carphone did not respond to requests for comment.

As the Daily Mail exposed last week, 900,000 orders just like Jamie's are handed down every year  sometimes for sums as small as a penny.

In some cases, the recipient has no idea they owe money  and no chance to dispute the debts  because the judgments are sent to an old address from a nondescript office in Northampton.

Even if they later pay off the debt, the judgment remains on their credit file for six years.

As well as former employees like Jamie, landlords are being stung with CCJs for debts owed by former tenants, drivers are being targeted for simple parking mistakes and utility suppliers are handing them out for bungled bills.

TENANT'S WATER BILL STOPPED ME GETTING A NEW BANK ACCOUNT Grandmother Sandra Laine was rejected for a bank account despite having an 'impeccable' credit history. The 72-year-old landlord found she had a CCJ because one of her tenants had moved without paying their water bill. South West Water billed Mrs Laine for the outstanding amount at an address where she had not lived for six years. The mother-of-three from Saltash, Cornwall, had no idea it had happened so was unable to respond to the invoice or summons. A CCJ for 239 was issued against her at Northampton County Court. 'In my whole life I have never not paid a bill on time so I was surprised my bank account application was refused,' she says. 'It's awful they can issue judgments against people when they have no idea it's happened.' After six weeks of phone calls and emails, the water authority removed the CCJ. South West Water insists it was not notified that the property was occupied by a tenant. A South West Water spokesman says: 'As soon as it became clear that a tenancy existed, the judgment was set aside.'

Prime Minister Theresa May says she plans to root out abuse of these debt orders.

Here, Money Mail's guide helps you keep your credit record clean  and fight your corner.

WHAT IS A CCJ?

A county court judgment is sent to you by the court using an address given to it by the person or company that says you owe money.

It's supposed to be a last resort. You should have already received a document called a claim form outlining the firm's plan to issue you with a CCJ and been given 14 days to pay the debt or to challenge it.

Crucially, there is no obligation on the court to check your address. So if the company has submitted the wrong details, the judgment could go to the wrong house. If you do not reply, a CCJ is issued automatically by an office in Northampton.

This is called a default judgment. Once it's been sent out you should have 30 days to clear the debt without it going on your record.

But if you've moved home, you may only learn about the CCJ when you apply for credit, often years later.

If you suspect that you might have a CCJ against you or you are about to apply for a loan and want to find out before you do, you can find out for sure at trustonline.org.uk or ccjcheck.co.uk.

A CCJ is automatically wiped from your credit file after six years.

So if you discover it's been there for five, you can just ignore it.

But if it's currently causing you difficulties, there are steps you can take to rectify it.

DEFEND YOURSELF

If you discover a CCJ on your record and you believe it's unfair, you may be able to get rid of it.

To do this you must persuade a judge to issue something called a 'set aside order'.

This essentially takes you back to square one to when the claim form was issued and gives you the chance to clear the debt and remove the black mark from your credit file. If you accept that you owe the money, you should pay the bill as soon as possible and certainly by any deadline set by the court.

To get an order set aside, you must have a good reason, such as the demand was sent to the wrong address even though you gave the company the correct one, denying you a chance to defend yourself.

Alternatively, you must be able to prove you have a good defence to the claim.

For instance, perhaps you don't owe the money at all because you have been the victim of identity fraud.

The process can take up to a year and will cost at least 255  potentially thousands of pounds if you use a solicitor.

To challenge a CCJ, you need an N244 form. You can get this from hmctsformfinder.justice.gov.uk or call your local county court.

Tick the box that asks if you want your application heard in court.

This allows you to make your argument in person, normally in the county court closest to you.

The form will also ask you why you think the CCJ should be set aside. Outline the facts succinctly and clearly.

If you have witnesses  perhaps someone who can prove you never lived at a certain address  mention that you can provide statements from them as well.

Send the form to the county court that issued the CCJ.

ARGUE YOUR CASE

Try negotiating with the company chasing you for money, as Sandra Laine did successfully (see box above).

Contact whoever deals with debt collection at the firm. This should be listed in the judgment. If you are unsure, call customer services and ask for an address.

If you don't have a copy of the CCJ, ask the court that issued it.

Tell the firm in writing that you are applying to have the CCJ set aside. Explain why. The company may decide it's not worth its while going to court and agree to the order being thrown out as long as you pay what you owe quickly.

However, even if you reach an agreement with the firm, a judge will still have to give permission.

Send the court a letter stating that the debt has been paid and that both parties consent to the judgment being set aside. This must be signed both by you and your creditor.

The judge may still ask you to attend a hearing.

If the company doesn't consent to setting aside the CCJ, the next step is a court hearing. It normally takes three to four months for one to be arranged.

Shock: If you've moved home, you may only learn about the CCJ when you apply for credit, often years later

YOUR DAY IN COURT

If you do not have a solicitor, court can seem scary.

However, your case will not be heard in a court room with lawyers in wigs and gowns, but in a meeting room, where you can sit down.

It should feel like a conversation rather than a formal court case.

Speak only when you are invited to do so and remain polite at all times. Always refer to the judge as 'Sir' or 'Madam'.

Get to the point quickly and clearly. Never rant and rave  even if you are convinced you have been treated unfairly.

Don't behave like a lawyer in a courtroom drama either, as this will annoy the judge.

If you don't feel confident about speaking in court or your case is complicated, it may be worth asking a solicitor to help.

The hearing lasts between 15 minutes and one hour.

The judge will normally decide straight away whether or not to set aside the order  though they may ask you questions about your statement. If they agree to do so, you will receive a letter. They will also notify the Registry Trust, which holds a record of CCJs.

If you pay what you owe within the timeframe set by the judge, every trace of the CCJ will be removed from your record  but check your credit file to be sure.

You should also ask your creditor for a receipt and confirmation that the debt was settled on time.

IF THE CCJ IS WRONG

A set aside order doesn't mean the CCJ has gone forever.

If you fail to pay your debts, it can be put back on your file.

But in some cases you may feel that you owe nothing at all.

For instance, someone might have stolen your identity or the car that incurred a parking fine did not belong to you at the time.

Farmer Libby Portch, from Dunster, Somerset, was left with a 1,000 legal bill after fighting for a year to have a CCJ removed.

Someone had been using her name for two years for their utilities and 200 of unpaid bills were sent to a house where she had never lived. She only discovered the order when the postman in her village spotted a letter in her name had been sent to the wrong house.

If you want to challenge the debt, you must ask to defend it. This is likely to mean a second hearing.

Once the set aside order has been issued, send two copies to the court of your defence explaining why you should not have to pay. Send copies of supporting documents by registered post.

Farmer Libby Portch, from Dunster, Somerset, was left with a 1,000 legal bill after fighting for a year to have a CCJ removed

You will also have to supply any documents you plan to rely on in court to the firm that says you owe it money. You may have to wait between three and four months for a hearing, which should be attended by a representative of the company in question.

The CCJ will not appear on your credit file during this time.

Experts say it's not uncommon for companies to fight fiercely almost to the end  only to fail to turn up to the hearing. This gives you a better chance of winning as the judge will only hear your case.

Even if the judge finds against you, if you pay the debt before the deadline set down by the court (typically 14 to 30 days) it won't appear on your credit record.

IF IT'S NOT REMOVED

There's no guarantee that a judge will remove your CCJ.

In this case your only option is to make the best of a bad situation.

First, clear the debt. CCJs that have been paid can be marked on credit files as 'satisfied', which looks better to a lender.

Apply to the court that issued the judgment for a Certificate of Satisfaction, with evidence the bill has been paid. There is a 15 fee. The court should notify the Registry Trust the CCJ has been satisfied.

You may also want to ask your credit reference agency for something called a Notice of Correction.

This is a 200-word statement you can add to your file. It won't make any difference to your credit score, but it will give you chance to explain the circumstances in which you received the CCJ.

For instance, you might have lost your job when the judgment was passed.

Though it can be very hard to get a mortgage if you have a CCJ, some lenders will consider you  especially if you have a big deposit, no other credit problems and the order was issued more than three years ago.

A broker will help enormously here  try London and Country, landc.co.uk or 0808 292 3857 or John Charcol, charcol.co.uk or 0344 346 3708.
Nightclub group Deltic is planning an 8million investment despite fears of a crisis in the sector.

The number of UK clubs has almost halved in the past decade, but Deltic, which owns the Pryzm and Oceana brands, is to refurbish some of its 59 clubs.

Private-investors backed Deltic rose out of the ashes of Luminar, the publicly quoted leisure group that had to be rescued from administration in 2011.

The firm has also created a drinking venue called Bar & Beyond, which opened in Chelmsford last year and has been extended to Stevenage with a third scheduled to open in Sheffield.

Finance director Russell Margerrison said: 'This latest round of investment demonstrates that the late-night economy in the UK is healthy.

'We pride ourselves on really understanding our guests and what they want.

'The Pryzm concept has proved especially successful with multiple music rooms, celebrity DJs and a focus on service.

'These new concepts, coupled with the return of freshers, is expected to deliver a significant uplift in trading at the start of our busiest period of the year.'
Desperate customers were hounded with threatening messages and had money swiped from their bank accounts without permission.

But as payday loan shark CFO Lending mercilessly pursued thousands of victims, the glamorous family behind the firm enjoyed a gilded lifestyle of exotic foreign holidays and private jet travel.

Founder Henry Smith, an East End property tycoon, toured Italy and Switzerland in a Ferrari with his wife Faye as the firm was investigated over dubious business practices.

Gilded lives: CFO Lendings founder Henry Smith with daughters Shauna, Brogan and Keara, and wife Faye

Social media posts show the couple arm in arm on sun-kissed Mediterra-nean beaches and dressed in finery at lavish parties.

Pictures of their wedding show guests looking on in awe as fireworks fill the sky. One friend wrote that the event 'looks stunning' and asked: 'Did you marry a millionaire?'

Away from the glamour, complaints against CFO Lending  which Smith launched in 2008  were beginning to rack up.

And after facing an astonishing 246 investigations by the Financial Ombudsman, the loan shark was forced to pay back more than 34million to nearly 100,000 victims of its unfair practices.

Henry Smith's daughters Brogan and Shauna Garrit-Smith

The lender took money from customers' accounts without permission, charged them more than they owed and sent threatening letters and text messages, the Financial Conduct Authority found.

The company has been ordered to write off debts of nearly 32million and make 2.9million of cash payments to customers. The firm has also been banned from offering loans.

C FO Lending, which was based in an office in Leytonstone, East London, was the parent company of six other payday lenders  Payday First, Flexible First, Money Resolve, Paycfo, Payday Advance and Payday Credit.

Smith, 54, is still the major shareholder but has never sat on the board of directors.

Company records show that between July 2011 and September 2014 his three daughters  Brogan Garrit-Smith, 25, Keara Garrit-Smith, 24, and Shauna Garrit-Smith, 22  were on the board and had small shareholdings.

Smith's 45-year-old wife was also a director and shareholder. The four women each owned 500 shares in the company until May 2015, according to CFO Lending's last annual report.

Smith's wife and daughters were all directors and investors in the company when it agreed with the regulator in August 2014 to carry out an independent investigation into its business practices. They all stepped down a month later.

Social media posts from around the time of the investigation showed Keara divided her time between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

High life: The glamorous family enjoyed a gilded lifestyle of exotic foreign holidays and private jet travel

A picture on Instagram from last December shows Keara, who works as an assistant at investment bank Goldman Sachs, about to board a private jet from the Harrods Aviation VIP Terminal at Stansted Airport.

Her older sister Brogan has enjoyed numerous foreign trips over the past few years. She attended a 'pool party' in Hollywood, relaxed on sun-kissed beaches in Ibiza and regularly visited popular resort Marbella in Spain.

When one of her friends appeared to joke that she had been on a lot of holidays, Brogan wrote on Facebook: 'God loves a traveller.'

Pose: Brogan and Keara in a social media post

Earlier this year she posted a message which said: 'I enjoy the simple things in life like recklessly spending my cash and being a disappointment to my family.'

More recently the sisters' social media accounts show them frequenting upmarket London bars and hotels, including the Chiltern Firehouse in Marylebone and the Savoy in The Strand.

Earlier this week Brogan, who works for US investment bank Morgan Stanley, posted a picture of her dog sitting on the wing of a private jet with the message: 'Someone is not impressed to be back in London ... Me neither Rolo.'

Neither Smith nor any of his family appears to have worked directly for CFO Lending and none has been accused of any wrongdoing.

A spokesman for CFO Lending said: 'The existing board of directors were appointed to CFO Lending Limited in January and February 2015. The current board has worked closely with the FCA to identify historical issues that resulted in poor consumer outcomes.'

Smith claimed there was a 'remarkable difference' in the business now compared to before January 2015.
The shock vote to leave the European Union has not dented demand for holidays among Britons over 50 years old, according to travel and insurance company Saga.

The firm revealed in a poll that 99 percent of its customers were sticking by their holiday plans despite the June 23 vote to leave the EU.

Chief Executive Officer Lance Batchelor said: 'They are a tough bunch. They love to travel. If you talked to Saga customers as they approached retirement and asked them what they plan to spend their time on, the answer will very often be lots of travel.'

Fun in the sun: Saga revealed that 99 per cent of its customers were sticking by their holiday plans despite the June 23 vote to leave the European Union

He added: 'Because they have at least 50 years of life experience, they are less likely to panic when things happen around the world. They want to carry on travelling, they are really brave and intrepid.'

The poll was published today alongside the firm's first half results, which showed a 8.5 per cent rise in profits to 109.9million.

The company also raised its dividend by almost a quarter as it said it was making good progress towards cutting its debt.

Recent terrorist attacks in Tunisia, Egypt, France and Turkey, coupled with a hit to sterling from the Brexit vote had dampened demand for travel, but Saga's customers have only changed course over their preferred holiday destinations, the company added.

Chief financial officer Jonathan Hill said: 'Events that have happened over the last 12 months in Turkey, Egypt and in some North African countries have certainly led to a lower level of demand there.

'We see certainly good demand for our Asian, Caribbean and South American destinations.'

The company, which also runs a motor and home insurance business, said its Solvency II ratio of 196 per cent was well above new legal European capital requirements.

In reaction to today.s results, Saga were up 1.6 per cent, or 3.7p to 225p at lunchtime.

In April, Saga became a fully public company after investment vehicle Acromas sold the last of its shares.
Devastation: BHP Billitons boss Andrew Mackenzie,

The boss of the world's second- largest miner has seen his pay cut by more than 50 per cent in the wake of a deadly dam disaster which has lumbered the UK-listed firm with a 37billion legal claim.

A dam at BHP Billiton's iron ore mine in Brazil collapsed on November 5 last year, leading to the worst environmental disaster in the country's history and the death of 19 people.

A tidal wave of wastewater and sand was sent crashing down on workers and nearby families, destroying the homes of 700 people and the livelihood of 7,000 others.

Fourteen dam workers lost their lives, along with five people from the community.

The ramifications from the Fundao dam tragedy were reflected in Andrew Mackenzie's pay.

He received no bonus payments after what he said had been a 'difficult' year for BHP and the resources industry.

The 59-year-old was paid 1.7million in the 2016 financial year, compared with 3.5million the previous year and 6.1million the year before. In two years, his salary has fallen by 4.4million.

The company said the dam failure was a 'key consideration' in Mackenzie's pay cut, along with an ongoing decline in commodities and company performance.

But it was not just Mackenzie whose finances were hit by what is known as the Samarco disaster.

BHP crashed into a 4.9billion loss for 2016, partly due to a fall in commodity prices and three exceptional charges. One of these was the dam collapse, which has so far resulted in costs of 1.8billion for BHP.

It has already made payments to thousands of families left without water after the disaster, and to others for loss of earnings after work was halted.

There is also a catalogue of related legal complaints which, if successful, could see it pay out billions of pounds in compensation.

BHP, along with its partner Vale, faces a 36.8billion claim from Brazilian prosecutors for reparation, compensation and moral damages, which it has contested.

This figure has been calculated based on the compensation handed out by BP after its Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

B HP, does not expect to pay such a high penalty. But there are also a series of other cases  including 23,000 small claims of between 200 and 2,000  which could see BHP's bill climb higher.

It falls to Scottish-born Mackenzie, who, ironically, joined the company in 2013 after a long career at BP, to repair the company's reputation and finances.

The father of two, who lives in Australia with his wife of more than three decades, Liz, took a lower salary than his predecessor Marius Kloppers when he joined BHP.

Kloppers was paid 12.3million during his last year in the top post. But Mackenzie reduced that pay packet, and claims to catch a train to work from his home in a converted warehouse in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond.

Tragedy: The collapse of a dam at BHP Billiton's iron ore mine in Brazil left 19 people dead and destroyed the homes of 700 people

In a note to shareholders yesterday he conveyed his 'deep sorrow' for the families and friends of the people who died during the tragic events in Brazil.

'BHP Billiton is committed to doing the right thing to help those affected recover and to work closely with our joint venture partner, Vale, and the operator, Samarco, to achieve this,' he said.

'We are acutely aware that this will be a long process to provide full redress and we are working tirelessly to remediate the community and environmental impacts.'

A n independent investigation found that, on the afternoon of November 5, several dozen people were working on or near the dam at the time. Some were hauling sand and clay and others were building gravel drains in preparation for the next stage of construction.

Sometime after 2pm the workers felt a tremor which lasted for several seconds. Although windows rattled and objects fell from tables, there did not seem to be any serious damage, and work resumed.

But at 3.45pm shouts came over the radio that the dam was collapsing, and that a cloud of dust had formed.

Those closest to the structure could see cracks forming, and the slope above them was beginning to move like a 'wave', as if it were 'melting'.

What had been solid ground just minutes before, liquefied and transformed into a rolling river.

This torrent travelled for 370 miles, and wiped out villages in the nearby Bento Rodrigues district.

The investigation found the dam collapsed because of water pressure building up in the spaces between the structure, causing it to lose strength and flow like liquid.

It was the result of a chain of events, which included structural changes at the dam.

The tragedy sent shockwaves through BHP and the mining industry, raising questions over safety, and work at Samarco has still not restarted, leaving a hole in the company's finances.

The firm is also facing a 582million tax bill from Australia over the price at which it sold commodities to its Singapore-based marketing business over more than a decade.

Employee numbers have taken a hit  last year 65,000 people globally worked for BHP Billiton, down from 80,000 the year before and more than 123,000 in 2013.

In the wake of the disaster, BHP's share price almost halved, but it has climbed back to pre-Samarco levels. Yesterday shares were up 21.8 per cent, or 18.5p, to 1051p.
The boss of property website Zoopla has sold a third of his shares in the company, worth 13.8million.

Alex Chesterman, who founded the business in 2007, has sold 4.25million shares at 325p  1 per cent of the group's total.

The company said the 46-year-old was one of the most 'active tech angel investors in the UK', having backed start-ups including Graze, Secret Escapes, Perkbox and Farmdrop.

Cashing in: Zoopla boss Alex Chesterman has sold a third of his shares in the company totalling 4.25m at 325p  1 per cent of the group's total

'His recent share sale will no doubt be used to back other businesses like DueCourse, where Alex participated alongside several other investors, and further support the UK tech ecosystem,' the company said.

Chesterman made millions in 2011 by selling LoveFilm, the DVD rental business. But his entrepreneurial streak began in the 1990s when he moved to the US and became an executive at restaurant chain Planet Hollywood.

In 1999 he returned to London and started a food business called Bagelmania. Zoopla, in which Daily Mail parent company DMGT owns a 31.3 per cent stake, bought online price comparison site uSwitch last year, leading to a boost in revenues.

Chesterman had made 32million from selling 3.5 per cent of his holdings in the company's 2014 flotation.
Families where both parents work are being penalised by lenders when they apply for a mortgage.

For the first time, we can reveal how banks slash the loans they offer to borrowers whose children go to nursery, where fees are soaring, or are looked after by a nanny.

Parents who pay for childcare are having a third stripped off the amount they can borrow to buy a home.

It means a couple who each earn 30,000 and pay 920 a month for two children in childcare can typically borrow 100,000 less than a family with the same overall income, but where one parent stays at home.

Penalised: Parents who pay for childcare are having a third stripped off the amount they can borrow to buy a home

Our investigation found parents are also hit if they send their children to schools where they have to pay for tuition.

Parents paying a typical 1,343 a month in private school fees will have 150,000 shaved off the amount they can borrow.

And couples planning to take maternity or paternity leave are being told to prove they will return to work within three months  or they will have to accept a smaller loan.

Experts said the blows would be a 'huge shock' to young families, many of whom are already struggling to get on to or move up the property ladder.

They are being grilled on their spending under intrusive tests introduced two-and-a-half years ago.

In a crackdown on the risky loans behind the 2008 financial crisis, banks check your spending on meals out, holidays, gym memberships and TV packages.

The less you have left over at the end of the month, the smaller the mortgage you will be offered.

Until now, it was unclear exactly how much lenders deducted for childcare costs  which for many families last only three or four years of the typical 25-year mortgage term.

Parents paying a typical 1,343 a month in private school fees will have 150,000 shaved off the amount they can borrow

The revelation that 100,000 is commonly taken off could mean that young families have to rent until their children go to school, they change jobs or go part-time.

Daniel Bailey, of mortgage broker Middleton Finance, says: 'People don't think about how having kids might affect the size of the mortgage they could get  why would they?

'So it's a huge shock when they realise their bank won't lend them as much.

'It's vital they know how much it can affect their application, so they can get their affairs in order before applying.'

Childcare costs have rocketed by a third in the past five years. Putting a child under two in a day nursery for 25 hours a week costs an average 115 a week, or 5,980 a year, according to campaign group Family and Childcare Trust. This jumps to 212 a week, or 11,024 a year, if the parent is working full-time.

Until the financial crisis, mortgage lenders happily offered borrowers big loans without even asking how much they were paid, let alone grilling them on their outgoings.

In 2014, new rules from the Financial Conduct Authority, the City watchdog, meant lenders needed cast-iron proof that borrowers could afford monthly repayments.

Research by mortgage broker London & Country found the big banks make huge deductions if you declare childcare costs.

At the Halifax, a couple who have two children and a joint income of 60,000 could borrow up to 285,000. If they spend 920 a month on childcare, their loan would be capped at 190,370  94,630 less.

The amount Barclays will lend to the same couple falls from 300,000 to 198,500  a reduction of 101,500.

Nationwide will lend up to 285,000, falling to 203,900 if they pay for childcare  a difference of 81,100.

Santander offers 300,000 to a couple with no childcare costs  but this falls to 219,488 if there are nursery bills to pay. At HSBC, the maximum falls from 300,000 to 229,800.

If parents send their children to a private school, the loan is reduced by a similar sum.

A couple with no childcare costs, but 16,119 a year in school fees, would be offered a maximum of 130,520 by Halifax, down from 285,000.

Pregnant customers planning maternity leave  and those already taking time away from work  could also find their loan capped.

Pregnant customers planning maternity leave  and those already taking time away from work  could also find their loan capped

Most lenders want to see a date has been agreed for your return to work and evidence of the income you'll get.

Some, such as Tesco Bank and Virgin Money, will take your full salary into account only if you're due to return within three months. If you plan to take a longer maternity or paternity leave, it will demand proof that you have sufficient savings to cover any shortfall.

David Hollingworth, of mortgage broker London & Country, says: 'This is to ensure borrowers don't take on debts they can't afford. Childcare costs can be sky high.'

Bernard Clarke, of the Council of Mortgage Lenders trade body, says: 'Under new rules for lenders, a couple with family commitments is not able to borrow as much as a couple who earn the same amount, but who do not have children.'

Barclays, HSBC and Santander all say that, as responsible lenders, it's right they consider a customer's 'complete financial picture' to make sure they can 'afford their mortgage in the short and long term'.

A spokeswoman for Nationwide says applications are assessed on an 'individual basis' with all sources of income taken into account and a 'full assessment of committed and essential expenditure.'

Halifax says it takes into account child tax credits if the customer is entitled to them.
Payments claims: An Airbus super-jumbo

Airbus is braced for the latest twist in a bitter trade dispute with arch rival Boeing.

Billions of pounds are at stake in a long-running spat between the airlines, with each claiming the other benefited from illegal subsidies.

The World Trade Organisation is expected to give its latest ruling tomorrow on whether Airbus received subsidies from the EU.

It comes at a crucial time when international trade deals are on a knife edge because of Britain's decision to leave the EU.

It will also cast a shadow over stuttering efforts by the EU and United States to negotiate a wider, free trade deal.

The spat dates back to 2004 when the US called on the WTO to act against EU loans to help Airbus.

This was followed by a counter-claim from the EU over aid for Boeing.
Fees: 900 million of savers' cash is snared in pensions with charges of over 3 per cent

When Paul Walton was made redundant earlier this year, he decided it was time to spring-clean his finances.

Digging through the paperwork and bank statements for his pensions and savings, he worked out he had 80,000 set aside for retirement from his 30-year career as an engineering machinist.

This included a 1,300 pension pot squirrelled away with wealth management firm St James's Place from a job the 49-year-old held for a few years in the late Nineties and early Noughties.

Paul, who lives in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, with his wife Tammy, 45, hadn't paid any more into the pension since he left the company in 2001.

He'd hoped that the fund's investment growth in the past 15 years would have turned his pot into a tidy sum.

In August, Paul rang St James's Place to find out how much the fund was worth and received a horrifying reply: there was nothing left.

Every penny had been eaten up in eye-watering charges levied by the company over the years.

The call centre worker who had put him on hold while she double-checked the details with a colleague then broke some even more astonishing news.

Rather than a pot of cash waiting for his retirement, Paul was told he actually owed St James's Place 37.32 for maintaining the fund.

The firm said as a goodwill gesture it would waive this fee  but that still left Paul without the 1,300 paid in to the fund.

'I was in complete shock,' says Paul. 'My jaw dropped to the floor when they told me I actually needed to pay them money.

'I know pensions can rise and fall in line with the stock market, but I would never have thought for a moment that there would be nothing left after all those years.

'It's not a lot of money, but every penny will count in my retirement.'

Paul was particularly surprised because around 14 years earlier he'd contacted St James's Place and asked to transfer the fund into another pension.

He thought it would have been cheaper and easier for him to keep an eye on the fund, but St James's Place persuaded him otherwise.

It sent a letter asking him to stick with the huge wealth manager, which is one of Britain's 100 biggest firms and manages 66 billion for thousands of customers. It even said the charges on the account were unlikely to cause him problems.

Paul Walton was shocked to discover that the 1,300 he had paid into a pension fund had been entirely swallowed up by charges

The letter said: 'Assuming that the fund continues to grow as it has in the past, you can obviously look forward to enhanced fund values in the future.'

St James's Place added that it expected it was 'likely' Paul would keep his fund invested with the firm.

Paul was convinced by the letter, signed by an adviser who boasted an impressive string of qualifications.

Over the years he admits he put the fund to the back of his mind, thinking it would be ticking over nicely.

It didn't help that Paul says St James's Place failed to send him annual statements on the fund  despite him living at the same address during the whole time.

'I took St James's Place's word the fund would be all right. I don't know a lot about pensions and they seemed to be the experts,' he says.

But a web of six different charges had eaten away at his pot until there was nothing left. How much Paul paid in fees varied each year, but documents seen by Money Mail show that in one year he handed over as much as 130.

These included annual management investment charges as well as fees for maintaining his fund.

After Money Mail intervened, St James's Place reviewed Paul's case.

The firm found the adviser who wrote to Paul failed to provide him with enough information to 'make an informed decision' about whether to leave his pension with the firm.

It offered Paul 2,350 in compensation, reflecting how it predicted his fund would have grown if he had not been charged some of the fees.

Since last year, workers being signed up to pensions by their employers can be charged only a maximum of 0.75 per cent a year in fees.

But hundreds of thousands of workers have old, high-charging pensions with a host of firms.

Many of these deals were flogged by salesmen who travelled door-to-door or visited workplaces representing insurers, wealth managers or investment companies.

In 2014, a study by the Independent Project Board, which works alongside the Financial Conduct Authority, found 900 million of savers' cash is snared in pensions with charges of over 3 per cent.

Around 70 per cent of this money belongs to savers who, like Paul, have pots of less than 10,000.

Justin Modray, founder of advice firm Candid Money, says: 'These kind of high fees are inexcusable. It is unfair for firms to cream off cash from customers like this.'

A St James's Place spokesman says the pension should have been transferred when Paul left his job, but due to a 'misunderstanding' this did not happen.

'The small fund was left invested and eroded by the on-going member charge, a situation we ensure no longer happens when members leave their scheme,' he says.

'When we were made aware of the case, we reviewed the situation and were concerned to find that Mr Walton had not been given sufficient information regarding his options on leaving employment.

'We will review our procedures to ensure this is an isolated case.'
Thousands of Britons  including many pensioners  have lost millions of pounds in a secret fraud known as binary options investments.

British police receive an average of two such fraud reports a day and victims have lost up to 200,000.

Insiders at one call centre behind the scam revealed staff were ordered to rape clients of their cash.

MY WEDDING FUND WAS RAIDED AFTER TRADER'S CALL Stephen Taylor, with partner Kim Lorry driver Stephen Taylor, pictured with partner Kim, lost cash saved for their wedding. Binary options sounded like a good idea. It wasnt, he said. Mr Taylor, 59, had received a cold call from an Inside Option trader. His first investment was 200 followed by 800. He then got a call from AA Option, a subsidiary of a company registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Mr Taylor, from the Scottish Highlands, said: I gave him my debit card details but told him I only wanted a very small amount taken out. Then his banks fraud detection team told him his account had been emptied of 2,400. The Bank of Scotland eventually returned the cash. Mr Taylor decided to withdraw the 1,000 placed with Inside Option. Initially, it refused but after months of emailing, Inside Option paid back the sum. AA Option and Inside Option did not respond to requests for a comment. Advertisement

And some brokers involved have swapped tales of people committing suicide after realising they have been duped.

Companies lure victims by scam emails, with high-pressure salesmen persuading responders to invest small sums such as 250.

A second team then lean on these investors to put in thousands more. Meanwhile further thousands are charged to their credit cards without authorisation.

The schemes are regulated or banned in the US, Israel and Belgium, and other nations are looking at following suit. But the British government has, so far, refused to take action.

Binary option investments involve betting on whether financial assets, such as shares, currencies or commodities, will rise or fall over a time period.

Schemes are presented as regulated investments, a better option than leaving cash in a savings account or pension.

Pensioners are not the only targets, with a rising number of young adults duped by bogus get-rich-quick promises.

Investors who try to access winnings hit a brick wall. The scandal has been revealed in a joint investigation by the Daily Mail and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The Bureau received leaked files detailing hundreds of UK victims and how much they lost.

One investor had put in 200,000 and many lost tens of thousands.

The National Fraud Intelligence Bureaus head of crime, Det Chief Insp Andy Fyfe, said the sale of binary options by some off-shore operators is now the biggest fraud in the UK.

An average investor lost 16,000, but this was just the tip of the iceberg.

He warned: People have been persuaded to cash in some of their pensions and invest in rubbish. The vast majority of the non-UK based binary firms are operating from Israel. Many are also registered in Cyprus

Once registered in a EU country they are, in theory, allowed to target Britons and others. A legal loophole means there is no effective regulation.

City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority wants to regulate the sector, but the Treasury and Government have failed to act.

An FCA spokesman warned: Most consumers describe having lost substantial sums of money.

The binary options firms promise excellent returns to customers by betting on stocks

'While this might be expected given the high-risk, win-or-lose nature of the activity, we are particularly concerned about the experiences many consumers report to us when trying to deal with unauthorised or unlicensed binary options firms.

We regularly hear about such firms suddenly closing consumers trading accounts, refusing to pay back their funds and ceasing any further contact.

In theory, binary option investments are policed by the Gambling Commission, but it only covers firms registered in the UK.

One binary options firm called Inside Option left a UK family unable to access their 80,000 investment said to have grown to 500,000.

On its website, Inside Option states it is owned by The Masters Association, a firm based in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

In fact, the company operates from a call centre in Israel.

InsideOption.coms domain is registered to Emir Yedibaslar, a Turkish businessman who has used Facebook to recruit traders for firms including Inside Option.

He denied any connection with it. He said he is involved in many businesses, including registering and selling domain names, one of which was Inside Option.

But he added: I have not worked there never in my life.

Inside Option did not respond to requests for a comment.
Motorola Solutions, Inc. provides mission critical communications and analytics in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Products and Systems Integration, and Software and Services. The Products and Systems Integration segment offers a portfolio of infrastructure, devices, accessories, and video security devices and infrastructure, as well as the implementation, and integration of systems, devices, software, and applications for government, public safety, and commercial customers who operate private communications networks and video security solutions, as well as manage a mobile workforce. Its land mobile radio communications and video security and access control devices include two-way portable and vehicle-mounted radios, fixed and mobile video cameras, and accessories; radio network core and central processing software, base stations, consoles, and repeaters; and video analytics, network video management hardware and software, and access control solutions. The Software and Services segment provides repair, technical support, and hardware maintenance services. This segment also offers monitoring, software updates, and cybersecurity services; and public safety and enterprise command center software, unified communications applications, and video software solutions through on-premise and as a service. It serves government, public safety, and commercial customers. The company was formerly known as Motorola, Inc. and changed its name to Motorola Solutions, Inc. in January 2011. Motorola Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1928 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
The following companies are subsidiares of Archer-Daniels-Midland: 3 Grain Elevators, ACT Exportacao Ltda., ADGENE LABORATOIRE, ADM (Dalian) Animal Health & Nutrition Co. Ltd., ADM (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., ADM (Thailand) Ltd., ADM AGRO S.R.L., ADM Ag Holding Limited, ADM Agri Services Greece MEPE, ADM Agri-Industries Company, ADM Agricultural Commodities Trading (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., ADM Agriculture Limited, ADM Agro Iberica S.L.U., ADM Agro Industries India Private Limited, ADM Agro Industries Kota & Akola Private Limited, ADM Agro Industries Latur & Vizag Private Limited, ADM Agroinvestimentos Ltda., ADM Alliance Nutrition of Puerto Rico LLC, ADM Americas S. de R.L., ADM Andina Peru S.R.L., ADM Animal Health & Nutrition (Nanjing) Co. Ltd., ADM Animal Nutrition (Cambodia) Co. Ltd., ADM Animal Nutrition (Xiangtan) Co. Ltd., ADM Animal Nutrition (Zhangzhou) Co. Ltd., ADM Antwerp NV, ADM Arkady Ireland Limited, ADM Armazens Gerais Ltda., ADM Asia-Pacific Trading Pte. Ltd., ADM Australia Holdings I PTY Limited, ADM Australia Pty. Limited, ADM Bazancourt SASU, ADM Besin ve Tarim Anonim Sirketi, ADM Bio-Productos S.A. de C.V., ADM Bio-Science & Technology (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., ADM Bulgaria Trading EOOD, ADM CARIBBEAN INC., ADM Chile Comercial Limitada, ADM Clinton BioProcessing Inc., ADM Czernin S.A., ADM DO BRASIL LTDA., ADM Direct Polska Sp. z o.o., ADM Dominican Holdings Inc., ADM Dominicana S.A., ADM EMEA Corporate Services GmbH, ADM Edible Bean Specialties Inc., ADM Egypt LLC, ADM El Salvador Ltda. de C.V., ADM Europe Holdco S.L., ADM European Management Holding B.V. & Co. KG, ADM Expatriate Services Inc., ADM Export Co., ADM Food Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., ADM Food Technology (Pinghu) Co. Ltd., ADM France, ADM Fuels Company, ADM German Holdings B.V., ADM Germany GmbH, ADM Grain Costa Rica S.R.L., ADM Grain River System Inc., ADM Grain de Venezuela C.A., ADM Guatemala Limitada, ADM Hamburg Aktiengesellschaft, ADM Holding (Thailand) Ltd., ADM Holdings LLC, ADM Honduras S.de R.L., ADM INGREDIENTS S.R.L., ADM Inca S.A.C., ADM Industries Centers Ltd, ADM International Holdings Inc., ADM International Sarl, ADM Investments Limited, ADM Investor Services Inc., ADM Investor Services International Limited, ADM Ireland Receivables Company Limited, ADM Israel, ADM Italia S.r.l., ADM Japan Ltd., ADM Latin America Inc., ADM Logistics Inc., ADM MANAGEMENT LTD., ADM MOROCCO S.A., ADM Mainz GMBH, ADM Malbork S.A., ADM Medsofts Sarl, ADM Mexico Inc., ADM Mexico S.A. de C.V., ADM Milling Co., ADM Milling Limited, ADM Myanmar Company Limited, ADM New Zealand Limited, ADM Nicaragua SA, ADM Nutrition Holding d.o.o. Beograd, ADM Olomouc S.R.O., ADM PORTUGAL SA, ADM Panama S. De R.L., ADM Paraguay S.R.L., ADM Participacoes Ltda., ADM Poland Sp. z o.o., ADM Protexin Inc., ADM Protexin Limited, ADM Pura Limited, ADM Razgrad EAD, ADM Receivables LLC, ADM Rice Inc., ADM Ringaskiddy Unlimited Company, ADM SERVICIOS S.A. DE C.V., ADM STF DMCC, ADM STF Pte. Ltd., ADM STF Switzerland Sarl, ADM Services B.V., ADM Slovakia s.r.o., ADM Specialty Ingredients (Europe) B.V., ADM Spyck GMBH, ADM Sweden AB, ADM Szamotuly Sp. z o.o., ADM Trading (UK) Limited, ADM Trading Australia Pty. Ltd., ADM Trading Company, ADM Trading Cote D'Ivoire, ADM Transportation Company, ADM Trucking Inc., ADM Unterstutzungskasse GmbH, ADM Uruguay SCA, ADM Ventures Investment Corp., ADM WILD Europe GmbH & Co. KG, ADM WILD Nauen GmbH, ADM WILD Netherlands B.V., ADM WILD SEE Kft, ADM WILD Valencia SAU, ADM Wild Gida Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, ADM Wild UK Limited, ADM Worldwide Holdings L.P., ADMEcuador CIA. Ltda., ADMIS Holding Company Inc., ADMIS Hong Kong Limited, ADMIS SINGAPORE PTE. LIMITED, AGRANIX, AIC Seguros SRL, AMT West LLC, AOR, AT Holdings II Company, Agri Port Services Brasil Ltda., Agri Port Services Investments Ltd., Agri Port Services LLC, Agricolas Madagascar SARLU, Agrinational Insurance Company, Agriserve, Agrograin Ltd., Agrograin Ltd. Sucursal Uruguay, Alfrebro LLC, Alfred C. Toepfer International Exportacao e Importacao Ltda., Alfred C. Toepfer International Netherlands B.V., Alimenta USA, Alimentos Texo SA de CV, American River Transportation Co. LLC, Ameriseed, Anco Animal Nutrition Competence GmbH, Archer Daniels Midland (UK) Limited, Archer Daniels Midland Asia-Pacific Limited, Archer Daniels Midland Company South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Archer Daniels Midland Erith Limited, Archer Daniels Midland Europe B.V., Archer Daniels Midland Europoort B.V., Archer Daniels Midland Korea LLC, Archer Daniels Midland Nederland B.V., Archer Daniels Midland Singapore Pte. Ltd., Archer Daniels Midland Vietnam Company Limited, Archer Daniels Midland Wild Nigeria Ltd., Archer Financial Services Inc., Archer-Daniels-Midland Philippines Inc., Arinos Unlimited, Aston Foods & Food Ingredients, BIOPOLIS S.L., BQ Railroad Company, BTECH Tecnologias Agropecuarias e Comercio Ltda., Balanceados Nova S.A. Balnova, Balto Holdco LLC, Barbados Mills Limited, Bela Vista Bio Etanol Participacoes Ltda., Belize Mills Limited, Belwood Company S.A., Benson-Quinn Commodities Inc., Bern Aqua, Bifodan Inc., Biopolis, CONTROLADORA ADM S.A. DE C.V., Campa Sued GmbH & Co KG, Caribbean Agro-Industries Limited, Casablancas sweetener plant, Cattleman's Choice Loomix LLC, Chamtor, Ci ADM Colombia Ltda., Columbia & Willamette Maritime Services Inc., Comhan, Compania ADM S.A. de C.V., Crosswind Petfoods Inc., DE Holdings LLC, DP Holdings LLC, Daavision B.V., Deerland Europe ApS, Deerland Holdings Inc., Deerland Ireland R&D Limited, Deerland Probiotics & Enzymes, Deerland Probiotics & Enzymes A/S, Deerland Probiotics & Enzymes Inc., Eaststarch, Eatem Corporation, Eatem Foods, Elstar Oils, Empresa de Transporte La Estrella S.R.L., English River Pellets Inc., Epicore BioNetworks Inc., Epicore Ecuador S.A., Epicore Networks (U.S.A.) Inc., Erich Ziegler GmbH, Evialis (Shandong) Co. Ltd., Evialis France, Evialis Galicia S.A., Evialis India Limited, FINANCIERE FRANCO MAGYAR POUR LA NUTRITION ANIMALE - FFMNA, FISA Andina S.A.S., FISA Aromas S.A.S., Fasco Mills Co., Federation Sahanala Vanille, Filozoo SRL, Flavor Infusion, Flavor Infusion International S.A., Florida Chemical, Florida Chemical Company LLC, Flotek Flavor & Fragrance LLC, GLOBAL COCOA HOLDINGS LTD., GP Blanching Inc., GPC Trucking Inc., GROUPE PILARDIERE, GUYOKRMA spol. s.r.o., Golden Farm Production & Commerce Company Limited, Golden Peanut Company, Golden Peanut Company LLC, Golden Peanut and Tree Nut Seed SA (Pty) Ltd., Golden Peanut and Tree Nuts S.A., Green Bison Soy Processing LLC, Group Lysac, Guyomarc'h - VCN Company Limited, Guyomarc'h Vietnam Co. Ltd., Guyovital PT, HFR Shipping Company Ltd., HI-NUTRIENTS INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, HRA Shipping Company Ltd., HTI Shipping Company Ltd., Harvest Innovations, Hilltop Grain and Feed, Holding P & A Asia Company Limited, Hubei Meiweiyuan Biotechnology, Ilitchevskiy Maslo Extractionniy Zavod (IMEZ), Industries Centers EOD Trade 2005 Ltd., Invivo NSA Algerie, Invivo NSA Sanpo (Tianjin) Pet Products Co. Ltd, JDS Sarl, Jamaica Flour Mills Limited, Jamaica Rice Milling Company Limited, LANCENTER S.C.A., Liquid Feed Commodities, Logus Bar Ashdod Port Ltd., Malta Industries S.A. de C.V., Malta Texo De Mexico S.A. de C.V., Maniobras Y Servicios Del Interior S.A. de C.V., Master Mix of Trinidad Unlimited, Medsofts Company LLC, Medsofts for Import Co., Medsofts for Investment LLC, Medsofts for Trade LLC (Medsofts Trading), Mepla Comercio e Navegacao Ltda., Mezclas Biomix S.A.S., Monti Foods (Pty) Ltd., Mundo Logistics S.R.L., NEC Facilities LLC, National Enzyme Company LLC, Naviera Chaco S.R.L., Neovia, Neovia Algerie SPA, Neovia Nutricao e Saude Animal Ltda., Neovia Philippines Inc., North Star Shipping S.R.L., NutraDine, NutraDine LLC, NutriMix Feed Company Inc., Nutrilac, Olenex C.V., Olsen's Mill Inc. Four Grain Storage Elevators, P & A Marketing SA, PANCOSMA FRANCE S.A.S, PJSC ADM Illichivsk, PT ADM Indonesia Trading and Logistics, Pancosma & Associates Marketing (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Pancosma (Jiangsu) Feed Additive Co. Ltd., Pancosma (Shanghai) Feed Additives Co. Ltd., Pancosma Canada Inc., Pancosma Mexico S.A. de C.V., Pancosma North America Inc., Pancosma SA, Pedigree Ovens, Pedigree Ovens LLC, PetDine, PetDine LLC, Prairie Pride - Biodiesel Production Plant, Premiere Agri Technologies Asia Inc., Premiere Agri Technologies of Mexico Inc., Proservicios Potencial Humano S.A. de C.V., Provit Sp. z o.o., Pura Foods Limited, Rodelle Inc., SANICOOPA, SDJ Sarl, SORA Laboratories LLC, Sartco Ltda., Schokinag-Schokolade-Industrie Herrmann, Sermix, Servad S.R.L, Setna Nutricion S.A., Silo P. Kruse Betriebs-GmbH & Co. KG, Silo-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH, Societe Industrielle des Oleagineux-SIO, SojaProtein d.o.o. Becej, Sojaprotein, Southern Cellulose Products Inc., Soy Investors LLC, Specialty Commodities, Specialty Commodities LLC, Sul Mineira Alimentos Ltda., Syngenta - Dry Bean Business, Szabadegyhazai Szolgaltato es Vagyonkezeklo KFT, Terminal Stevedores Inc., Terminales De Cargas Especializadas S.A. De C.V., The Pound Bakery, The Pound Bakery LLC, Toepfer International, Toepfer International Trading (Shanghai) Co. LTD., UPSCIENCE ITALIA S.R.L., Upscience, VIA CHEM GROUP a.s. Oilseed Processing Plant, Vantage Corn Processors LLC, WILD Flavors, Wild Amazon Flavors Concentrados e Corantes para Bebidas Ltda., Wild Flavors (Canada) Inc., Wild Flavors Austria GmbH, Wild Flavors Inc., Wild Flavors International GmbH, Wild Flavors Kenya Limited, Wild Flavors Middle East FZE, Wild Flavors Polska Sp. z o.o., Wild Flavors S.A. de C.V., Wild Intermare GmbH, Wild Polska Sp. z o.o., Wild Russia LLC, Wild Tunesia Sarl, Wisium SA (Pty) Ltd., World's Finest Chocolate - New Cocoa Powder Line, and Yerbalatina Ltda..

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Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc. (NYSE: RHP) is a leading lodging and hospitality real estate investment trust that specializes in upscale convention center resorts and country music entertainment experiences. The Company's core holdings* include a network of five of the top 10 largest non-gaming convention center hotels in the United States based on total indoor meeting space. These convention center resorts operate under the Gaylord Hotels brand and are managed by Marriott International. The Company also owns two adjacent ancillary hotels and a small number of attractions managed by Marriott International for a combined total of 10,110 rooms and more than 2.7 million square feet of total indoor and outdoor meeting space in top convention and leisure destinations across the country. The Company's Entertainment segment includes a growing collection of iconic and emerging country music brands, including the Grand Ole Opry; Ryman Auditorium, WSM 650 AM; Ole Red and Circle, a country lifestyle media network the Company owns in a joint-venture with Gray Television. The Company operates its Entertainment segment as part of a taxable REIT subsidiary. * The Company is the sole owner of Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center; Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center; Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center; and Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. It is the majority owner and managing member of the joint venture that owns the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.
Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to develop and offer operating system, virtualization, management, middleware, cloud, mobile, and storage technologies to various enterprises worldwide. It offers infrastructure-related solutions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, an operating system platform that runs on hardware for use in hybrid cloud environments; Red Hat Satellite, a system management offering that helps to deploy, scale, and manage in hybrid cloud environments; and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, a software solution that allows customers to utilize and manage a common hardware infrastructure to run multiple operating systems and applications. The company offers application development-related and other technology solutions, such as Red Hat JBoss Middleware, a solution for developing, deploying, and managing applications; integrating applications, data, and devices; and automating business processes in hybrid cloud environments; The company's application development-related and other technology solutions also includes Red Hat cloud offerings, a software solution that enables customers to build and manage various cloud computing environments; Red Hat Mobile, a software development platform that enables customers to develop, integrate, deploy, and manage mobile applications for enterprises; and Red Hat Storage, a software solution that enables customers to manage large, unstructured, or semi-structured data in hybrid cloud environments. It also provides consulting, support, and training services; and realtime operating system, distributed computing, directory services, and user authentication. Red Hat, Inc. has collaboration with Juniper Networks Expand to provide a unified solution for enterprises designed to manage and run applications and services. The company was formerly known as Red Hat Software, Inc. and changed its name to Red Hat, Inc. in June 1999. Red Hat, Inc. was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The following companies are subsidiares of Abbott Laboratories: 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Company Limited, ABON Biopharm (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., AGA Medical Belgium, AGA Medical Corporation, AGA Medical Holdings Inc., ALR Holdings, AML Medical LLC, APK Advanced Medical Technologies LLC, ATS Bermuda Holdings Limited, ATS Laboratories Inc., Abbott, Abbott (Jiaxing) Nutrition Co. Ltd., Abbott (UK) Finance Limited, Abbott (UK) Holdings Limited, Abbott AG, Abbott Asia Holdings Limited, Abbott Asia Investments Limited, Abbott Australasia Holdings Limited, Abbott Australasia Pty Ltd, Abbott B.V., Abbott Bahamas Overseas Businesses Corporation, Abbott Belgian Investments, Abbott Bermuda Holding Ltd., Abbott Biologicals B.V., Abbott Biologicals LLC, Abbott Bulgaria Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Capital India Limited, Abbott Cardiovascular Inc., Abbott Cardiovascular Systems Inc., Abbott Delaware LLC, Abbott Diabetes Care Inc., Abbott Diabetes Care Limited, Abbott Diabetes Care Sales Corporation, Abbott Diagnostics GmbH, Abbott Diagnostics International Ltd., Abbott Diagnostics Technologies AS, Abbott Doral Investments S.L., Abbott Equity Holdings Unlimited, Abbott Equity Investments LLC, Abbott Established Products Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Finance Company SA, Abbott Financial Holdings SRL, Abbott France S.A.S., Abbott Fund Tanzania Limited, Abbott Gesellschaft m.b.H., Abbott GmbH & Co. KG, Abbott Health Products LLC, Abbott Healthcare (Puerto Rico) Ltd., Abbott Healthcare B.V., Abbott Healthcare Costa Rica S.A., Abbott Healthcare LLC, Abbott Healthcare Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Healthcare Private Limited, Abbott Healthcare Products B.V., Abbott Healthcare Products Ltd, Abbott Holding (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding GmbH, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited Luxembourg S.C.S., Abbott Holdings B.V., Abbott Holdings LLC, Abbott Holdings Limited, Abbott Holdings Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Iberian Investments (2) Limited, Abbott Iberian Investments Limited, Abbott India Limited, Abbott Informatics Asia Pacific Limited, Abbott Informatics Canada Inc, Abbott Informatics Corporation, Abbott Informatics Europe Limited, Abbott Informatics France, Abbott Informatics Germany GmbH, Abbott Informatics Netherlands B.V., Abbott Informatics Singapore Pte. Limited, Abbott Informatics Spain S.A., Abbott Informatics Technologies Ltd, Abbott International Corporation, Abbott International Enterprises Ltd., Abbott International Holdings Limited, Abbott International LLC, Abbott International Luxembourg S.ar.l., Abbott Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Ireland, Abbott Ireland Financing Designated Activity Company, Abbott Ireland Limited, Abbott Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Abbott Knoll Investments B.V., Abbott Korea Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Bangladesh) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco (Dos) SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Laboratories (Mozambique) Limitada, Abbott Laboratories (Pakistan) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Philippines), Abbott Laboratories (Puerto Rico) Incorporated, Abbott Laboratories (Singapore) Private Limited, Abbott Laboratories A/S, Abbott Laboratories Argentina Sociedad Anonima, Abbott Laboratories B.V., Abbott Laboratories C.A., Abbott Laboratories Finance B.V., Abbott Laboratories GmbH, Abbott Laboratories Inc., Abbott Laboratories International LLC, Abbott Laboratories Ireland Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited - Laboratoires Abbott Limitee, Abbott Laboratories NZ Limited, Abbott Laboratories Pacific Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Laboratories Products B.V., Abbott Laboratories Residential Development Fund Inc., Abbott Laboratories S.A., Abbott Laboratories SA, Abbott Laboratories Services Corp., Abbott Laboratories Slovakia s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trustee Company Limited, Abbott Laboratories Uruguay S.A., Abbott Laboratories Vascular Enterprises, Abbott Laboratories d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories de Chile Limitada, Abbott Laboratories de Colombia S.A., Abbott Laboratories de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Abbott Laboratories druzba za farmacijo in diagnostiko d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories(Hellas) Societe Anonyme, Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios del Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Abbott Laboratuarlari Ithalat Ihracat ve Ticaret Ltd.Sti, Abbott Laboratorios Lda, Abbott Laboratorios do Brasil Ltda., Abbott Limited Egypt LLC, Abbott Logistics B.V., Abbott Management GmbH, Abbott Management LLC, Abbott Manufacturing Singapore Private Limited, Abbott Mature Products International Unlimited Company, Abbott Mature Products Management Limited, Abbott Medical (Hong Kong) Limited, Abbott Medical (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Medical (Portugal) Distribuicao de Produtos Medicos Lda, Abbott Medical (Schweiz) AG, Abbott Medical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Australia Pty. Ltd., Abbott Medical Austria Ges.m.b.H., Abbott Medical Balkan d.o.o. Beograd (Novi Beograd), Abbott Medical Belgium, Abbott Medical Canada Inc./ Medicale Abbott Canada Inc., Abbott Medical Danmark A/S, Abbott Medical Devices Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Espana S.A., Abbott Medical Estonia OU, Abbott Medical Finland Oy, Abbott Medical France SAS, Abbott Medical GmbH, Abbott Medical Hellas Limited Liability Trading Company, Abbott Medical Ireland Limited, Abbott Medical Italia S.p.A., Abbott Medical Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Korea Limited, Abbott Medical Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Medical Laboratories LTD, Abbott Medical Nederland B.V., Abbott Medical New Zealand Limited, Abbott Medical Norway AS, Abbott Medical Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Medical Sweden AB, Abbott Medical Taiwan Co., Abbott Medical U.K. Limited, Abbott Medical spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Middle East S.A.R.L., Abbott Molecular Inc., Abbott Morocco SARL, Abbott Nederland C.V., Abbott Nederland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Netherlands Investments B.V., Abbott Norge AS, Abbott Nutrition Limited, Abbott Nutrition Manufacturing Inc., Abbott Operations Singapore Pte. Ltd., Abbott Operations Uruguay S.R.L., Abbott Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Overseas Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Overseas S.A., Abbott Oy, Abbott Point of Care Canada Limited, Abbott Point of Care Inc., Abbott Poland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Procurement LLC, Abbott Products (Philippines) Inc., Abbott Products (Spain) S.L., Abbott Products Algerie EURL, Abbott Products B.V., Abbott Products Distribution SAS, Abbott Products Egypt LLC, Abbott Products Limited, Abbott Products Limited Liability Company, Abbott Products Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Products Operations AG, Abbott Products Operations LLC, Abbott Products Romania S.R.L., Abbott Products Tunisie S.A.R.L., Abbott Products Unlimited Company, Abbott Resources Inc., Abbott Resources International Inc., Abbott S.r.l., Abbott Saudi Arabia Trading Company, Abbott Scandinavia Aktiebolag, Abbott Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Abbott South Africa Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Strategic Opportunities Limited, Abbott Trading Company Inc., Abbott Universal LLC, Abbott Vascular Devices (2) Limited, Abbott Vascular Devices Limited, Abbott Vascular Inc., Abbott Vascular Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Abbott Vascular International, Abbott Vascular Japan Co. Ltd, Abbott Vascular Limitada, Abbott Vascular Netherlands B.V., Abbott Vascular Solutions Inc., Abbott Ventures Inc., Abbott West Indies Limited, Abbott drustvo sa ogranicenom odgovornoscu za trgovinu i usluge, Advanced Neuromodulation Systems Inc., Alere, Alere (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Healthcare Management Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Medical Sales Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd., Alere A/S, Alere AB, Alere AS, Alere AS Holdings Limited, Alere BBI Holdings Limited, Alere Bangladesh Limited, Alere China Co. Ltd., Alere Colombia S.A., Alere Connect LLC, Alere Connected Health Limited, Alere Connected Health Ltd., Alere Diagnostics GmbH, Alere DoA Holding GmbH, Alere GmbH, Alere GmbH (Austria), Alere GmbH (Germany), Alere HK Holdings Ltd., Alere Health B.V., Alere Health BVBA, Alere Health Corp., Alere Health Sdn Bhd, Alere Health Services B.V., Alere Healthcare (Pty) Limited, Alere Healthcare Connections Limited, Alere Healthcare Inc., Alere Healthcare Nigeria Limited, Alere Healthcare S.L., Alere Holdco Inc., Alere Holding GmbH, Alere Holdings Bermuda Limited, Alere Holdings Pty Limited, Alere Home Monitoring Inc., Alere Inc., Alere Informatics Inc., Alere International Holding Corp., Alere International Limited, Alere Lda, Alere Limited, Alere Limited (New Zealand), Alere Medical BVBA, Alere Medical Co. Ltd., Alere Medical Pakistan (Private) Limited, Alere Medical Private Limited, Alere North America LLC, Alere Oy Ab, Alere Philippines Inc., Alere Phoenix ACQ Inc., Alere Pte Ltd, Alere S.A., Alere S.r.l., Alere S/A, Alere SAS, Alere San Diego Inc., Alere Scarborough Inc., Alere Spain S.L., Alere Switzerland GmbH, Alere Technologies GmbH, Alere Technologies Holdings Limited, Alere Technologies Limited, Alere Toxicology AB, Alere Toxicology Inc., Alere Toxicology S.r.l., Alere Toxicology Services Inc., Alere Toxicology plc, Alere UK Holdings Limited, Alere UK Subco Limited, Alere ULC, Alere US Holdings LLC, Alere s.r.o., Alisoc Investment & Co, Amedica Biotech Inc., Ameditech Inc., American Generics S.A.S., American Medical Supplies Inc., American Pharmacist Inc., Antares S.A., Apica Cardiovascular Limited, Aquagestion Capacitacion S.A., Aquagestion S.A., Arriva Medical LLC, Arriva Medical Philippines Inc., Arvis Investments Limited, Atlas Farmaceutica S.A., Avee Laboratories Inc., Axis-Shield AD III AS, Axis-Shield AD IV AS, Axis-Shield AS, Axis-Shield Diagnostics Limited, Axis-Shield Ltd., BBI Animal Health Limited, BBI Diagnostics Group 2 Public Limited Company, Banco de Vida S.A., Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions Inc., Bioalgae S.A., Biohealth LLC, Biosite Incorporated, Bosque Bonito S.A., Branan Medical Corporation, Brandex Europe C.V., British Colloids Limited, CFR Chile S.A., CFR Interamericas EL Salvador Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, CFR Interamericas Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CFR Interamericas Panama S.A., CFR Pharmaceuticals, California Property Holdings III LLC, CardioMEMS LLC, Caripharm Inc., Cephea Valve Technologies, Cephea Valve Technologies Inc., Colibri Medical Aktiebolag, Comercializadora y Distribuidora CFR Interamericas Honduras S.A., Concateno South Limited, Concateno UK Limited, Consorcio Tecnologico en Biomedicina Clinico-Molecular S.A., Continuum Services LLC, Cozart Limited, Dextech S.A., Diagnostik Nord GmbH, Distribuciones Uquifa S.A.S., Domesco Medical Import-Export Joint-Stock Corporation, Duphar International Research B.V., Endocardial Solutions, Epocal (US) Inc, Esprit de Vie S.A., European Chemicals & Co, European Drug Testing Service EDTS AB, European Services S.A., Evalve Inc., Evalve International Inc., FARMINDUSTRIA S.A., Fada Pharma Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Fadapharma del Ecuador S.A., Farmaceutica Mont Blanc S.L., Farmacologia Em Aquicultura Veterinaria Ltda., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV Ecuador S.A., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV S.A., Fernwood Investment S.A., First Check Diagnostics LLC, Focus Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Forensics Limited, Forestcreek Overseas S.A., Fournier Pharma Corp., Fournier Pharma GmbH, Fournier Pharmaceuticals Limited, Framed B.V., Gabmed GmbH, Garden Hills LLC, Global Analytical Development LLC, Globapharm & CO LP, Glomed Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Golnorth Investments S.A., Gynocare Limited, Gynopharm Sociedad Anonima, Gynopharm de Centroamerica S.A., Gynopharm de Venezuela C.A., Hi-Tronics Designs Inc., IDEV Technologies Inc., IG Innovations Limited, IMTC Finance B.V., IMTC Holdings B.V., IMTC Technologies Inc., Ibis Biosciences LLC, Igloo Zone Chile S.A., Igloo Zone S.L., Inmobiliaria Naknek S.A.C., Innovacon Inc., Instant Tech Subsidiary Acquisition Inc., Instant Technologies Inc., Instituto de Criopreservacion de Chile S.A., Integrated Vascular Systems Inc., Inverness Canadian Acquisition Corporation, Inverness Medical (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Australia Pty Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Hong Kong Limited, Inverness Medical Innovations SK LLC, Inverness Medical Investments LLC, Inverness Medical LLC, Inverness Medical Shimla Private Limited, Inversiones K2 SpA, Inversiones Komodo S.R.L., Ionian Technologies LLC, Irvine Biomedical Inc., Kalila Medical, Kangshenyunga S.A., Knoll UK Investments Unlimited, LLC VeroInPharm, Laboratoires Fournier S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano Lafrancol S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano del Ecuador S.A., Laboratorio Internacional Argentino S.A., Laboratorio Synthesis S.A.S., Laboratorios Lafi Limitada, Laboratorios Naturmedik S.A.S., Laboratorios Pauly Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Laboratorios Recalcine S.A., Laboratorios Transpharm S.A., Laboratory Specialists of America Inc., Lafrancol Dominicana S.A.S., Lafrancol Guatemala S.A. Sociedad Anonima, Lafrancol Internacional S.A.S, Lafrancol Peru S.R.L, Lake Forest Investments LLC, Lightlab Imaging Inc., Limited Liability Company Abbott Laboratories, Limited Liability Company Abbott Ukraine, Limited Liability Company VEROPHARM, Lung Fung Hong (China) Limited, Mansbridge Pharmaceuticals Limited, MediGuide LLC, MediGuide Ltd., Medscreen Holdings Limited, Metropolitana Farmaceutica S.A., Midwest Properties LLC, Murex Argentina S.A., Murex Biotech Limited, Murex Biotech South Africa, Murex Diagnostics Inc., Murex Diagnostics International Inc., Natural Supplement Association LLC, Negocios Denia Sociedad Anonima, Neosalud S.A.C., Nether Pharma N.P. C.V., NeuroTherm LLC, Normann Pharma-Handels GmbH, North Shore Properties Inc., Novamedi S.A., Novasalud.com S.A., Nutravida S.A., OJSC Voronezhkhimpharm, Omnilab Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OptiMedica, Orgenics France SAS, Orgenics International Holdings B.V., Orgenics Ltd., PBM-Selfcare LLC, PDD II LLC, PDD LLC, PT Alere Health, PT. Abbott Indonesia, PT. Abbott Products Indonesia, Pacesetter Inc., Pantech (RF) (PTY) LTD, Pembrooke Occupational Health Inc., Penagos S.A., Pharma International Sociedad Anonima, Pharmaceutical Technologies (Pharmatech) S.A., Pharmatech Boliviana S.A., Polygon Labs S.A., Quality Assured Services Inc., RF Medical Holdings LLC, RTL Holdings Inc., Ramses Business Corp., Recben Xenerics Farmaceutica Limitada, Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc., Rich Horizons International Limited, SC VEROPHARM, SJ Medical Mexico S de R.L. de C.V., SJM International Inc., SJM Thunder Holding Company, SPDH Inc., Saboya Enterprises Corporation, Salviac Limited, Scanax AS, Sealing Solutions Inc., Selfcare Technology Inc., Shandong Abbott Dairy Product Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Medical Devices Science and Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai Si Fa Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Sinensix & Co., Spinal Modulation LLC, St. Jude Medical, St. Jude Medical AB, St. Jude Medical ATG Inc., St. Jude Medical Argentina S.A., St. Jude Medical Asia Pacific Holdings GK, St. Jude Medical Atrial Fibrillation Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Brasil Ltda., St. Jude Medical Business Services Inc., St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Colombia Ltda., St. Jude Medical Coordination Center, St. Jude Medical Costa Rica Limitada, St. Jude Medical Europe Inc., St. Jude Medical Export Ges.m.b.H., St. Jude Medical GVA Sarl, St. Jude Medical Holdings B.V., St. Jude Medical India Private Limited, St. Jude Medical International Holding, St. Jude Medical LLC, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings II, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings NT, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings SMI S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings TC S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Mexico Business Services S. de R.L. de C.V., St. Jude Medical Middle East DMCC, St. Jude Medical Operations (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., St. Jude Medical Puerto Rico LLC, St. Jude Medical S.C. Inc., St. Jude Medical Systems AB, St. Jude Medical Turkey Medikal Urunler Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Standard Diagnostics Inc., Standing Stone LLC, Swan-Myers Incorporated, TC1 LLC, Tendyne Holdings Inc., Tendyne Medical Inc., Thoratec Delaware LLC, Thoratec Europe Limited, Thoratec LLC, Thoratec Switzerland GmbH, Tobal Products Incorporated, Topera GmbH in Liquidation, Topera Inc., Tremora S.A., Tuenir S.A., TwistDx, UAB Abbott Laboratories, UAB Abbott Medical Lithuania, Union-Madison Realty Company Inc., Unipath Limited (dba Alere International/aka Cranfield), Unipath Management Limited, Unipath Pension Trustee Limited, Veropharm, Veropharm Limited Liability Partnership, Vida Cell Inversiones S.A., Vida Cell S.A., Vivalsol, W&R Pharma Handels GmbH, Western Pharmaceuticals S.A., X Technologies Inc., Yissum Holding Limited, ZonePerfect Nutrition Company, eScreen Canada ULC, eScreen Inc.,      ( ), and Abbott Laboratories Baltics.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Tenet Healthcare: 45th Street MOB LLC, 601 N 30th Street I L.L.C., 601 N 30th Street II L.L.C., 601 N 30th Street III Inc., AHM Acquisition Co. Inc., AIG Holdings LLC, AIGB Global LLC, AIGB Group Inc., AIGB Holdings Inc., AIGB Management Services LLC, AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #1 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #2 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #3 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #4 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #5 L.L.C., AMI Information Systems Group Inc., AMI/HTI Tarzana Encino Joint Venture, APN, ARC Worcester Center L.P., ASC Old Co. LP, ASC of New Jersey LLC, ASJH Joint Venture LLC, Abrazo Health Network EP Clinical Services LLC, Abrazo Surgical Outpatient Center LLC, Advanced Ambulatory Surgical Care L.P., Advanced Center for Surgery  Vero Beach LLC, Advanced Regional Surgery Center LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Bethesda LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Metairie LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Northern Louisiana LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Sarasota LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Tampa LLC, Advanced Surgical Care of Lutz LLC, Advanced Surgical Care of St Louis LLC, Advanced Surgical Concepts LLC, Advantage Health Care Management Company LLC, Advantage Health Network Inc., AdventHealth Surgery Center Celebration LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Center Mills Park LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Center Wellswood LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Center Winter Garden LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Centers Central Florida LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Centers West Florida LLC, Alabama Cardiovascular Associates L.L.C., Alabama Digestive Health Endoscopy Center L.L.C., Alabama Hand and Sports Medicine L.L.C., Alamo Heights Surgicare L.P., Alliance Surgery Birmingham LLC, Alliance Surgery Inc., Alvarado Hospital Medical Center Inc., Ambulatory Surgical Associates LLC, Ambulatory Surgical Center of Somerville LLC, American Institute of Gastric Banding Ltd., American Institute of Gastric Banding Phoenix Limited Partnership, American Medical Inc., Amisub Inc., Amisub Inc., Amisub of California Inc., Amisub of North Carolina Inc., Amisub of South Carolina Inc., Amisub of Texas Inc., Anaheim Hills Medical Imaging L.L.C., Anaheim MRI Holding Inc., Anesthesia Partners of Gallatin LLC, Arizona Care Network  Next L.L.C., Arizona Health Partners LLC, Arizona Spine and Joint Hospital LLC, Ascension Saint Thomas Lebanon Surgery Center LLC, Asia Outsourcing US Inc., Aspen Healthcare, Atlanta Medical Center Inc., Atlanta Medical Center Interventional Neurology Associates L.L.C., Atlanta Medical Center Neurosurgical & Spine Specialists L.L.C., Atlanta Medical Center Physician Group L.L.C., Atlantic Coast Surgical Suites LLC, Atlantic Health-USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Audubon Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Avita/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., BBH BMC LLC, BBH CBMC LLC, BBH DevelopmentCo LLC, BBH NP Clinicians Inc., BBH PBMC LLC, BBH SBMC LLC, BBH WBMC LLC, BCDC EmployeeCO LLC, BHC-Talladega Pediatrics LLC, BHS Accountable Care LLC, BHS Affinity LLC, BHS Integrated Physician Partners LLC, BHS Physician Performance Network LLC, BHS Physicians Alliance for ACE LLC, BHS Physicians Network Inc., BHS Specialty Network Inc., BT East Dallas JV LLP, BW Cardiology LLC, BW Cyberknife LLC, BW Hand Practice LLC, BW Office Buildings LLC, BW Parking Decks LLC, BW Physician Practices LLC, BW Retail Pharmacy LLC, BW Sports Practice LLC, Baptist Accountable Care LLC, Baptist Diagnostics LLC, Baptist Health Centers LLC, Baptist Physician Alliance ACO LLC, Baptist Physician Alliance LLC, Baptist Plaza Surgicare L.P., Baptist Surgery Center L.P., Baptist Womens Health Center LLC, Baptist/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Bartlett ASC LLC, Beaumont Surgical Affiliates Ltd., Berkshire Eye LLC, Bloomington ASC LLC, Blue Ridge/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Bluffton Okatie Primary Care L.L.C., Bluffton Okatie Surgery Center L.L.C., Braselton Endoscopy Center LLC, Briarcliff Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Bristol Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Broad River Primary Care L.L.C., Brookwood Ancillary Holdings Inc., Brookwood Baptist Health 1 LLC, Brookwood Baptist Health 2 LLC, Brookwood Baptist Health 3 LLC, Brookwood Baptist Imaging LLC, Brookwood Center Development Corporation, Brookwood Development Inc., Brookwood Diagnostic Imaging Center LLC, Brookwood Garages L.L.C., Brookwood Health Services Inc., Brookwood Home Health LLC, Brookwood Occupational Health Clinic L.L.C., Brookwood Parking Associates Ltd., Brookwood Primary Care Cahaba Heights L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care Hoover L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care The Narrows L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care  Homewood L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care  Inverness L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care  Mountain Brook L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care  Oak Mountain L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care  Vestavia L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Network Care Inc., Brookwood Specialty Care  Endocrinology L.L.C., Brookwood Sports and Orthopedics L.L.C., Brookwood Womens Care L.L.C., Brookwood Womens Diagnostic Center LLC, Brookwood  Maternal Fetal Medicine L.L.C., Brownsville Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, C7 Technologies LLC, CGH GP Inc., CGH Hospital Ltd., CHIC/USP Surgery Centers LLC, CHN Holdings LLC, CHVI Tucson Holdings LLC, CML-Chicago Market Labs Inc., CRNAs of Michigan, CS/USP General Partner LLC, CS/USP Surgery Centers LP, Camp Creek Urgent Care L.L.C., Camp Lowell Surgery Center L.L.C., Cardiology Physicians Associates L.L.C., Cardiology Physicians Corporation L.L.C., Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery Associates L.L.C., Cardiovascular Clinical Excellence at Sierra Providence LLC, CareSpot of Austin LLC, CareSpot of Memphis LLC, Carmel Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Castle Rock Surgery Center LLC, Catawba-Piedmont Cardiothoracic Surgery L.L.C., Cedar Hill Primary Care L.L.C., Cedar Park Surgery Center L.L.P., Center for Advanced Research Excellence L.L.C., Center for the Urban Child Inc., Central Carolina Physicians  Sandhills L.L.C., Central Carolina-IMA L.L.C., Central Jersey Surgery Center LLC, Central Texas Corridor Hospital Company LLC, Central Valley Quality Alliance LLC, Central Virginia Surgi-Center L.P., Centura Ventures Surgery Centers LLC, Centura/USP Colorado Springs Surgery Centers L.L.C., Chalon Living Inc., Chandler Endoscopy Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Charlotte Endoscopic Surgery Center LLC, Chattanooga Pain Management Center LLC, Chesterfield Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Chico Surgery Center L.P., Clarksville Surgery Center LLC, Coast Healthcare Management LLC, Coast Surgery Center L.P., Coastal Carolina Medical Center, Coastal Carolina Medical Center Inc., Coastal Carolina Physician Practices LLC, Coastal Carolina Pro Fee Billing L.L.C., Colorado GI Centers LLC, Commonwealth Continental Health Care Inc., Community Connection Health Plan Inc., Community Hospital of Los Gatos Inc., Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of Asheville LLC, Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of Odessa LLC, Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of Raleigh LLC, Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of St. Petersburg LLC, Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of Tampa LLC, Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of Waco LLC, Compass Surgical Partners Holdings of Winston-Salem LLC, Conifer Care Continuum Solutions LLC, Conifer Ethics and Compliance Inc., Conifer Global Business Center Inc., Conifer Global Holdings Inc., Conifer Health Solutions LLC, Conifer Holdings Inc., Conifer Patient Communications LLC, Conifer Physician Services Holdings Inc., Conifer Physician Services Inc., Conifer Revenue Cycle Solutions LLC, Conifer Value-Based Care LLC, Conroe Surgery Center 2 LLC, Coral Ridge Outpatient Center LLC, Corpus Christi Surgicare Ltd., Covenant/USP Surgery Centers LLC, CreAtiv Management Company Inc., Creekwood Surgery Center L.P., Crown Point Surgery Center LLC, DH/USP SJOSC Investment Company L.L.C., DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital Premier Clinical Co-Management Services LLC, DMC Education & Research, DMC Harper University Hospital Premier Clinical Co-Management Services LLC, DMC Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital Premier Clinical Management Services LLC, DMC Imaging L.L.C., DeTar/USP Surgery Center LLC, Delray Beach ASC LLC, Delray Medical Center Inc., Delray Medical Physician Services L.L.C., Denville Surgery Center LLC, Des Peres Physician Network LLC, Desert Regional Medical Center Inc., Desert Ridge Outpatient Surgery LLC, Desoto Surgicare Partners Ltd., Destin Surgery Center LLC, Detroit Education & Research, DigitalMed Inc., Dignity/Abrazo Health Network LLC, Dignity/USP Phoenix Surgery Centers II LLC, Doctors Hospital of Manteca Inc., Doctors Medical Center Neurosciences Clinical Co-Management LLC, Doctors Medical Center Orthopedics Clinical Co-Management LLC, Doctors Medical Center of Modesto Inc., Doctors Outpatient Surgery Center of Jupiter L.L.C., EPHC Inc., EPIC ASC LLC, East Atlanta Endoscopy Centers LLC, East Cobb Urgent Care LLC, East Cooper Coastal Family Physicians L.L.C., East Cooper Community Hospital Inc., East Cooper Hyperbarics L.L.C., East Cooper OB/GYN L.L.C., East Cooper Physician Network LLC, East Cooper Primary Care Physicians L.L.C., East West Surgery Center L.P., Eastgate Building Center L.L.C., El Mirador Surgery Center L.L.C., El Paso Center for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy LLC, El Paso Day Surgery LLC, El Paso Urology Surgery Center Curie LLC, Emanate/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Emanuel Medical Center, Emerus BHS/SA NW Military LLC, Emerus BHS/SA Southside LLC, Emerus/BHS SA Hausman LLC, Emerus/BHS SA Kelly LLC, Emerus/BHS SA LLC, Emerus/BHS SA Overlook Parkway LLC, Emerus/BHS SA Schertz LLC, Emerus/BHS SA Thousand Oaks LLC, Emerus/BHS SA Westover Hills LLC, Encinitas Endoscopy Center LLC, Endoscopy Consultants LLC, Enterprise Research Solutions LLC, European Surgical Partners Ltd., Eye Center of Nashville UAP LLC, Eye Surgery Center of Nashville LLC, FMC Medical Inc., FMCC Network Contracting L.L.C., FREH Real Estate L.L.C., FRS Imaging Services L.L.C., First Choice Physician Partners, Flatirons Surgery Center LLC, Fort Bend Clinical Services Inc., Fort Worth Hospital Real Estate LP, Foundation Bariatric Hospital of San Antonio LLC, Foundation San Antonio Borrower Sub LLC, Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, Fountain Valley Surgery Center LLC, Franklin Endo UAP LLC, Franklin Endoscopy Center LLC, Frontenac Ambulatory Surgery & Spine Care Center L.P., Frye Regional Medical Center Inc., FryeCare Boone L.L.C., FryeCare Morganton L.L.C., FryeCare Physicians L.L.C., FryeCare Valdese L.L.C., FryeCare Watauga L.L.C., FryeCare Womens Services L.L.C., GAB Endoscopy Center LLC, GCSA Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, GIA/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Gainesville Endoscopy ASC LLC, Gainesville Endoscopy Center LLC, Gamma Surgery Center LLC, Gardendale Surgical Associates LLC, Gastric Health Institute L.L.C., Georgia Endoscopy Center LLC, Georgia Gifts From Grace L.L.C., Georgia Musculoskeletal Network Inc., Georgia North Fulton Healthcare Associates L.L.C., Georgia Northside Ear Nose and Throat L.L.C., Georgia Physicians of Cardiology L.L.C., Georgia Spectrum Neurosurgical Specialists L.L.C., Glen Echo Surgery Center LLC, Golden Ridge ASC LLC, Good Samaritan Medical Center Inc., Good Samaritan Surgery L.L.C., Graystone Family Healthcare  Tenet North Carolina L.L.C., Great Lakes Surgical Suites LLC, Greater Dallas Healthcare Enterprises, Greater Northwest Houston Enterprises, Greenville Physicians Surgery Center LLP, Greenwood ASC LLC, Greystone Internal Medicine  Brookwood L.L.C., Gulf Coast Community Hospital Inc., HC Hialeah Holdings Inc., HCH Tucson Holdings LLC, HCN EP Horizon City LLC, HCN EP Lee Trevino LLC, HCN EP Northeast LLC, HCN EP Sunland Park LLC, HCN Emerus El Paso LLC, HCN Emerus Management Sub LLC, HCN Emerus Texas LLC, HCN Laboratories Inc., HCN Physicians Inc., HCN Surgery Center Holdings Inc., HDMC Holdings L.L.C., HKRI Holdings LLC, HMHP/USP Surgery Centers LLC, HNMC Inc., HNW GP Inc., HNW LP Inc., HSRM International Inc., HSS Palm Beach Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, HSS/USP Surgery Center LLC, Hagerstown Surgery Center LLC, Harbor Heights Surgery Center LLC, Hardeeville Medical Group L.L.C., Hardeeville Primary Care L.L.C., Harlingen Physician Network Inc., Harper-Hutzel AHP Services Inc., Harvard Park Surgery Center LLC, Haymarket Surgery Center LLC, Health & Wellness Surgery Center L.P., Health Horizons of Kansas City Inc., Health Horizons of Murfreesboro Inc., Health Horizons/Piedmont Joint Venture LLC, Health Services CFMC Inc., Health Services HNMC Inc., Health Services Network Care Inc., Health Services Network Hospitals Inc., Health Services Network Texas Inc., HealthCorp Network Inc., Healthcare Compliance LLC, Healthcare Network Alabama Inc., Healthcare Network CFMC Inc., Healthcare Network DPH Inc., Healthcare Network Georgia Inc., Healthcare Network Holdings Inc., Healthcare Network Hospitals Inc., Healthcare Network Louisiana Inc., Healthcare Network Missouri Inc., Healthcare Network North Carolina Inc., Healthcare Network South Carolina Inc., Healthcare Network Tennessee Inc., Healthcare Network Texas Inc., Healthcare SMG I L.L.C., Healthcare SMG II L.L.C., Healthcare SMG IV L.L.C., Healthcare UC Holdings Inc., Healthmark Partners Inc., Healthpoint of North Carolina L.L.C., Heart and Vascular Institute of Michigan, Hialeah Real Properties Inc., Hickory Family Practice Associates - Tenet North Carolina L.L.C., Hill Country ASC Partners LLC, Hill Country Surgery Center LLC, Hilton Head Health System L.P., Hilton Head Regional Healthcare L.L.C., Hilton Head Regional OB/GYN Partners L.L.C., Hilton Head Regional Physician Network LLC, Hilton Head Regional Physician Network  Georgia L.L.C., Hitchcock State Street Real Estate Inc., Holston Valley Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Holy Cross Hospital Inc., Home Health Partners of San Antonio LLC, Hoover Doctors Group Inc., Hoover Land LLC, Hospital Development of West Phoenix Inc., Hospital RCM Services LLC, Houston Northwest Partners Ltd., Houston PSC L.P., Houston Specialty Hospital Inc., Houston Sunrise Investors Inc., Hyde Park Surgery Center LLC, Imaging Center at Baxter Village L.L.C., InforMed Insurance Services LLC, International Health and Wellness Inc., Intracoastal Surgery Center LLC, JFK Memorial Hospital Inc., Jacksonville Endoscopy Centers LLC, Journey Home Healthcare of San Antonio LLC, KHS Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, KHS/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Kingsport Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Laguna Medical Systems Inc., Lake Endoscopy Center LLC, Lake Health Care Facilities Inc., LakeFront Medical Associates LLC, Lakewood Regional Medical Center Inc., Lancaster Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Lebanon Endoscopy Center LLC, Legacy Warren Partners L.P., Leonardtown Surgery Center LLC, Lifemark Hospitals Inc., Lifemark Hospitals of Florida Inc., Lifemark Hospitals of Louisiana Inc., Longleaf Surgery Center LLC, Los Alamitos Medical Center Inc., Lubbock ASC Holding Co LLC, MASC Partners LLC, MH/USP Bay Area LLC, MH/USP Brazoria LLC, MH/USP Kingsland LLC, MH/USP Kingwood LLC, MH/USP Kirby LLC, MH/USP Main Street LLC, MH/USP North Freeway LLC, MH/USP North Houston LLC, MH/USP Richmond LLC, MH/USP Sugar Land LLC, MH/USP TMC Endoscopy LLC, MH/USP West Houston L.L.C., MH/USP Woodlands Parkway LLC, MSV Health/USP Surgery Centers LLC, MVH/USP Surgery Centers LLC, MacNeal Management Services Inc., MacNeal Medical Records Inc., MacNeal Physicians Group LLC, Magnetic Resonance Imaging of San Luis Obispo Inc., Magnolia Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Manchester Ambulatory Surgery Center LP, Maple Lawn Surgery Center LLC, Marion Surgery Center LLC, Mason Ridge Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., McLaren ASC of Flint LLC, Meadowcrest Hospital LLC, Medical House Staffing LLC, Medplex Outpatient Medical Centers Inc., Medplex Outpatient Surgery Center Ltd., Memorial Hermann Bay Area Endoscopy Center LLC, Memorial Hermann Endoscopy & Surgery Center North Houston L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Endoscopy Center North Freeway LLC, Memorial Hermann Specialty Hospital Kingwood L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Surgical Hospital L.L.P., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Brazoria LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Cypress LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Kingsland L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Kirby LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Main Street LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Pinecroft LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Preston Road Ltd., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Richmond LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Woodlands Parkway LLC, Memorial Hermann Texas International Endoscopy Center LLC, Memorial Hermann West Houston Surgery Center LLC, Memorial Hermann/USP Surgery Centers II L.P., Memorial Hermann/USP Surgery Centers IV LLP, Memorial Surgery Center LLC, Memphis Urgent Care #1 L.L.C., Memphis Urgent Care #2 L.L.C., Metro Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Metro Surgery Center LLC, MetroWest HomeCare & Hospice LLC, Metropolitan Medical Partners LLC, Miami Surgical Suites LLC, Michigan Pioneer ACO LLC, Michigan Regional Imaging LLC, Mid Rivers Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Mid State Endo UAP LLC, Mid-State Endoscopy Center LLC, Middle Tennessee Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Midland Memorial/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Midland Texas Surgical Center LLC, Midwest Digestive Health Center LLC, Midwest Pharmacies Inc., Midwest Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Millennium Surgical Center LLC, Minimally Invasive Surgicenter LLC, Minimally Invasive Surgicenter of Delray LLC, Mobile Imaging Management LLC, Mobile Technology Management LLC, Modesto Radiology Imaging Inc., Monocacy Surgery Center LLC, Mountain Empire Surgery Center L.P., Munster Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Murdock Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, NICH GP Holdings LLC, NKCH/USP Briarcliff GP LLC, NKCH/USP Liberty GP LLC, NKCH/USP Surgery Centers II L.L.C., NMC Lessor L.P., NMC Surgery Center L.P., NME Headquarters Inc., NME Properties Corp., NME Properties Inc., NME Property Holding Co. Inc., NME Psychiatric Hospitals Inc., NME Rehabilitation Properties Inc., NS Medical Billing Center L.L.C., NSCH GP Holdings LLC, NSCH/USP Desert Surgery Centers L.L.C., NSMC Holdings Inc., NSN Revenue Resources LLC, NUCH of Georgia L.L.C., NUCH of Massachusetts LLC, NUCH of Michigan Inc., Nacogdoches ASC-LP Inc., National ASC Inc., National Ancillary Inc., National Diagnostic Imaging Centers Inc., National HHC Inc., National Home Health Holdings Inc., National ICN Inc., National Imaging Center Holdings Inc., National Medical Services II Inc., National Outpatient Services Holdings Inc., National Surgery Center Holdings Inc., National Urgent Care Inc., Network Management Associates Inc., New Dimensions LLC, New England Physician Performance Network LLC, New H Acute Inc., New Horizons Surgery Center LLC, New Medical Horizons II Ltd., Newhope Imaging Center Inc., North Anaheim Surgery Center LLC, North Atlantic Surgical Suites LLC, North Campus Surgery Center LLC, North Carolina Community Family Medicine L.L.C., North Denver Musculoskeletal Surgical Partners LLC, North Fulton Cardiovascular Medicine L.L.C., North Fulton Hospitalist Group L.L.C., North Fulton Medical Center Inc., North Fulton Primary Care - Willeo Rd. L.L.C., North Fulton Primary Care - Windward Parkway L.L.C., North Fulton Primary Care - Wylie Bridge L.L.C., North Fulton Primary Care Associates L.L.C., North Fulton Pulmonary Specialists L.L.C., North Fulton Womens Consultants L.L.C., North Haven Surgery Center LLC, North Miami Medical Center Ltd., North Shore Same Day Surgery L.L.C., North Shore Surgical Suites LLC, NorthPointe Surgical Suites LLC, NorthShore/USP Surgery Centers II L.L.C., Northridge Surgery Center L.P., Northwest Georgia Orthopaedic Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Regional ASC LLC, Northwest Regional Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Surgery Center Ltd., Novant Health/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Novant/UVA/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Okatie Surgical Partners L.L.C., Old Tesson Surgery Center L.P., Olive Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Olive Branch Urgent Care #1 LLC, Ophthalmology Anesthesia Services LLC, Ophthalmology Surgery Center of Orlando LLC, Optimum Spine Center LLC, OrNda Healthcorp, OrNda Hospital Corporation, Orlando Health/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., OrthoArizona Surgery Center Gilbert LLC, OrthoLink ASC Corporation, OrthoLink Physicians Corporation, OrthoLink Radiology Services Corporation, OrthoLink/ Georgia ASC Inc., OrthoLink/New Mexico ASC Inc., Orthopedic Associates of the Lowcountry L.L.C., Oxford Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, PAHS/USP Surgery Centers LLC, PDN L.L.C., PHPS Inc., PHPS-CHM Acquisition Inc., PM CyFair Land Partners LLC, PMC Physician Network L.L.C., PSS Patient Solution Services LLC, Pacific Endo-Surgical Center L.P., Pacific Endoscopy and Surgery Center LLC, Paley Institute Global LLC, Palm Beach Gardens Community Hospital Inc., Palm Beach International Surgery Center LLC, Park Plaza Hospital Billing Center L.L.C., ParkCreek ASC LLC, Parkwest Surgery Center L.P., Patient Partners LLC, Peak Gastroenterology ASC LLC, Pediatric Surgery Center  Odessa LLC, Pediatric Surgery Centers LLC, Physician Performance Network L.L.C., Physician Performance Network of Arizona LLC, Physician Performance Network of South Carolina LLC, Physician Performance Network of Tucson LLC, Physicians Performance Network of Houston, Physicians Performance Network of North Texas, Physicians Surgery Center of Tempe LLC, Physicians Surgery Center of Chattanooga L.L.C., Physicians Surgery Center of Knoxville LLC, Piccard Surgery Center LLC, Piedmont ASC LLC, Piedmont Behavioral Medicine Associates LLC, Piedmont Cardiovascular Physicians L.L.C., Piedmont Carolina OB/GYN of York County L.L.C., Piedmont Carolina Vascular Surgery L.L.C., Piedmont East Urgent Care Center L.L.C., Piedmont Express Care at Sutton Road L.L.C., Piedmont Family Practice at Baxter Village L.L.C., Piedmont Family Practice at Rock Hill L.L.C., Piedmont Family Practice at Tega Cay L.L.C., Piedmont General Surgery Associates L.L.C., Piedmont Internal Medicine at Baxter Village L.L.C., Piedmont Physician Network LLC, Piedmont Pulmonology L.L.C., Piedmont Surgical Specialists L.L.C., Piedmont Urgent Care Center at Baxter Village L.L.C., Piedmont Urgent Care and Industrial Health Centers Inc., Piedmont/Carolinas Radiation Therapy LLC, Placentia-Linda Hospital Inc., Pleasanton Diagnostic Imaging Inc., Point of Rocks Surgery Center LLC, Porter Musculoskeletal Surgery Center LLC, Potomac View Surgery Center LLC, Practice Partners Management L.P., Premier ACO Physicians Network LLC, Premier ASC LLC, Premier Adult and Childrens Surgery Center LLC, Premier Endoscopy ASC LLC, Premier Health Plan Services Inc., Premier Medical Specialists L.L.C., Prince William Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Professional Anesthesia Services LLC, Pros Temporary Staffing Inc., Providence/UCLA/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Providence/USP Santa Clarita GP LLC, Providence/USP South Bay Surgery Centers L.L.C., Providence/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Pueblo Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, R.H.S.C. El Paso Inc., RE Plano Med Inc., RHC Parkway Inc., RLC LLC, Reading Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Reading Endoscopy Center LLC, Reagan Street Surgery Center LLC, Red Cedar Surgery Center LLC, Redmond Surgery Center LLC, Republic Health Corporation of Rockwall County, Resolute Health Physicians Network Inc., Resolute Hospital Company LLC, Resurgens Surgery Center LLC, Rheumatology Associates of Atlanta Medical Center L.L.C., Rio Grande Valley Indigent Health Care Corporation, Riva Road Surgery Center LLC, River North Same Day Surgery L.L.C., Riverside Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Rock Bridge Surgical Institute L.L.C., Rock Hill Surgery Center LLC, Rockville Surgical Suites LLC, Rocky Mountain Endoscopy Centers LLC, Roswell Surgery Center L.L.C., SCNRE LLC, SFMP Inc., SFMPE - Crittenden L.L.C., SL-HLC Inc., SLH Physicians L.L.C., SLH Vista Inc., SLPA ACO LLC, SLUH Anesthesia Physicians L.L.C., SMSJ Imaging Company LLC, SMSJ Tucson Holdings LLC, SRRMC Management Inc., SSI Holdings Inc., Safety Harbor ASC Company LLC, Saint Francis Cardiology Associates L.L.C., Saint Francis Cardiovascular Surgery L.L.C., Saint Francis Center for Surgical Weight Loss L.L.C., Saint Francis Hospital Billing Center L.L.C., Saint Francis Hospital Medicare ACO LLC, Saint Francis Hospital Pro Fee Billing L.L.C., Saint Francis Hospital-Bartlett Inc., Saint Francis Medical Partners East L.L.C., Saint Francis Medical Partners General Surgery L.L.C., Saint Francis Physician Network LLC, Saint Francis Quality Alliance LLC, Saint Francis Surgery Center L.L.C., Saint Francis Surgical Associates L.L.C., Saint Francis-Arkansas Physician Network LLC, Saint Francis-Bartlett Physician Network LLC, Saint Thomas Campus Surgicare L.P., Saint Thomas Surgery Center New Salem LLC, Saint Thomas/USP Surgery Centers II L.L.C., Saint Thomas/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Saint Thomas/USP  Baptist Plaza L.L.C., Saint Vincent Physician Services Inc., Salmon Surgery Center LLC, Same Day Management L.L.C., Same Day Surgery L.L.C., San Antonio Endoscopy L.P., San Fernando Valley Surgery Center L.P., San Gabriel Valley Surgical Center L.P., San Ramon ASC L. P., San Ramon Ambulatory Care LLC, San Ramon Network Joint Venture LLC, San Ramon Regional Medical Center LLC, Santa Barbara Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Santa Clarita Surgery Center L.P., Savannah Endoscopy Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Schertz Surgery Center LLC, Scottsdale Endoscopy ASC LLC, Scripps/USP Surgery Centers 2 LLC, Seaside Surgery Center LLC, Shelby Baptist Affinity LLC, Shelby Baptist Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Shore Outpatient Surgicenter L.L.C., Shoreline Real Estate Partnership LLP, Shoreline Surgery Center LLP, Sierra Providence Health Network Inc., Sierra Providence Healthcare Enterprises, Sierra Vista Hospital Inc., Sierra Vista Surgery Center LLC, Silver Cross Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Silver Cross/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Sinai-Grace Premier Clinical Management Services LLC, Solantic Development LLC, Solantic Holdings Corporation, South Carolina East Cooper Surgical Specialists L.L.C., South Carolina Health Services LLC, South Carolina SeWee Family Medicine L.L.C., South County Outpatient Endoscopy Services L.P., South Denver Musculoskeletal Surgical Partners LLC, South Florida Ambulatory Surgical Center LLC, South Fulton Health Care Centers Inc., South Plains Endoscopy Associates LLC, SouthCare Physicians Group Neurology L.L.C., SouthCare Physicians Group Obstetrics & Gynecology L.L.C., Southeast Ohio Surgical Suites LLC, Southern Orthopedics and Sports Medicine L.L.C., Southern States Physician Operations Inc., Southwest Childrens Hospital LLC, Southwest Endoscopy LLC, Southwestern Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Spalding Regional Medical Center Inc., Spalding Regional OB/GYN L.L.C., Spalding Regional Physician Services L.L.C., Specialty Surgicenters Inc., Springfield Service Holding Corporation, St. Augustine Endoscopy Center LLC, St. Christophers Pediatric Urgent Care Center - Allentown L.L.C, St. Josephs Hospital Surgical Co-Management LLC, St. Josephs Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, St. Louis Physician Alliance LLC, St. Louis Surgical Center LC, St. Louis Urology Center LLC, St. Lukes/USP Surgery Centers LLC, St. Marys Hospital Cardiovascular Co-Management LLC, St. Marys Hospital Surgical Co-Management LLC, St. Marys Levee Company LLC, St. Marys Medical Center Inc., St. Vincent Health/USP LLC, St. Vincent/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Suburban Endoscopy Center LLC, Summit View Surgery Center LLC, Sun View Imaging L.L.C., SurgCenter Camelback LLC, SurgCenter Clearwater LLC, SurgCenter Development, SurgCenter Northeast LLC, SurgCenter Pinellas LLC, SurgCenter Tucson LLC, SurgCenter at Paradise Valley LLC, SurgCenter of Deer Valley LLC, SurgCenter of Glen Burnie LLC, SurgCenter of Greater Dallas LLC, SurgCenter of Greater Jacksonville LLC, SurgCenter of Northern Baltimore LLC, SurgCenter of Palm Beach Gardens LLC, SurgCenter of Pine Ridge LLC, SurgCenter of Silver Spring LLC, SurgCenter of Southern Maryland LLC, SurgCenter of St. Lucie LLC, SurgCenter of White Marsh LLC, SurgCenter of the Potomac LLC, Surgery Affiliate of El Paso LLC, Surgery Center at Mount Pleasant LLC, Surgery Center at University Park LLC, Surgery Center of Columbia L.P., Surgery Center of Coral Gables LLC, Surgery Center of Okeechobee LLC, Surgery Center of Pembroke Pines L.L.C., Surgery Center of Peoria L.L.C., Surgery Center of Santa Barbara LLC, Surgery Center of Scottsdale LLC, Surgery Centers of America II L.L.C., Surgery Centre of SW Florida LLC, Surgical & Bariatric Associates of Atlanta Medical Center L.L.C., Surgical Center Development #3 LLC, Surgical Center Development #4 LLC, Surgical Clinical Excellence at Desert Regional LLC, Surgical Elite of Avondale L.L.C., Surgical Health Partners LLC, Surgical Institute Management LLC, Surgical Institute of Reading LLC, Surgicare of Miramar L.L.C., Surginet Inc., Surgis Inc., Surgis Management Services Inc., Surgis of Chico Inc., Surgis of Phoenix Inc., Surgis of Redding Inc., Surgis of Victoria Inc., Sutton Road Pediatrics L.L.C., Sylvan Grove Hospital Inc., T1 Security LLC, TENN SM LLC, TFPS IV L.L.C., TH Healthcare Ltd., TH International Services Florida LLC, TLC ASC LLC, TOPS Specialty Hospital Ltd., TOSCA ASC Holdings LLC, TPR Practice Management LLC, TPS VI of PA L.L.C., TSPE LLC, Tamarac Surgery Center LLC, Tampa Bay Joint and Spine LLC, Tempe New Day Surgery Center LP, Templeton Imaging Inc., Tenet Business Services Corporation, Tenet California Inc., Tenet Central Carolina Physicians Inc., Tenet EKG Inc., Tenet El Paso Ltd., Tenet Employment Inc., Tenet Finance Corp., Tenet Florida Inc., Tenet Florida Physician Services II L.L.C., Tenet Florida Physician Services III L.L.C., Tenet Florida Physician Services L.L.C., Tenet Fort Mill Inc., Tenet Global Business Center Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Bucks County L.L.C., Tenet HealthSystem Graduate L.L.C., Tenet HealthSystem Hahnemann L.L.C., Tenet HealthSystem Medical Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Nacogdoches ASC GP Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Philadelphia Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Roxborough LLC, Tenet HealthSystem St. Christophers Hospital for Children L.L.C., Tenet Hilton Head Heart L.L.C., Tenet Hospitals Limited, Tenet Network Management Inc., Tenet Patient Safety Organization LLC, Tenet Physician Resources LLC, Tenet Physician Services - Hilton Head Inc., Tenet Rehab Piedmont Inc., Tenet Relocation Services L.L.C., Tenet SC East Cooper Hospitalists L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Gastrointestinal Surgical Specialists L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Island Medical L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Lowcountry OB/GYN L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Mt. Pleasant OB/GYN L.L.C., Tenet Unifour Urgent Care Center L.L.C., Tenet Ventures Inc., TenetCare Frisco Inc., Terre Haute Surgical Center LLC, Teton Outpatient Services LLC, Texan Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Texas Orthopedics Surgery Center LLC, Texas Regional Medical in Sunnyvale, The 6300 West Roosevelt Partnership, The Healthcare Insurance Corporation, The Healthcare Underwriting Company a Risk Retention Group, The Huron Corporation, The Old Bridge Surgery Center LLC, The Outpatient Center LLC, The Southeastern Spine Institute Ambulatory Surgery Center L.L.C., The Surgery Center at Jensen Beach LLC, The Tresanti Surgical Center LLC, Theda Oaks Gastroenterology & Endoscopy Center LLC, Three Springs ASC LLC, Timonium Surgery Center LLC, Titan Health Corporation, Titan Health of Chattanooga Inc., Titan Health of Hershey Inc., Titan Health of Mount Laurel LLC, Titan Health of North Haven Inc., Titan Health of Pittsburgh Inc., Titan Health of Pleasant Hills Inc., Titan Health of Princeton Inc., Titan Health of Sacramento Inc., Titan Health of Saginaw Inc., Titan Health of Titusville Inc., Titan Health of West Penn Inc., Titan Health of Westminster Inc., Titan Management Corporation, Titusville Center for Surgical Excellence LLC, Treasure Coast ASC LLC, Trinity Health of New England/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., True Medical Weight Loss L.P., True Medical Wellness LP, True Results Georgia Inc., True Results HoldCo LLC, True Results Missouri LLC, Tucson Digestive Institute LLC, Tucson Hospital Holdings Inc., Tucson Physician Group Holdings LLC, Turlock Imaging Services LLC, Turlock Land Company LLC, Twin Cities Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Twin Cities Community Hospital Inc., UAP Lebanon Endo LLC, UAP Nashville Endoscopy LLC, UAP Scopes LLC, UAP of Arizona Inc., UAP of California Inc., UAP of Missouri Inc., UAP of New Jersey Inc., UAP of Oklahoma Inc., UAP of Tennessee Inc., UAP of Texas Inc., UCC Tucson Holdings LLC, UMC Surgery Center Lubbock LLC, UMC-USP Surgery Centers LLC, USC/Norris Cancer Hospital, USP 12th Ave Real Estate Inc., USP Acquisition Corporation, USP Alexandria Inc., USP Assurance Company, USP Athens Inc., USP Atlanta Inc., USP Austin Inc., USP Bariatric LLC, USP Beaumont Inc., USP Bergen Inc., USP Bloomington Inc., USP Bridgeton Inc., USP Cedar Park Inc., USP Chesterfield Inc., USP Chicago Inc., USP Cincinnati Inc., USP Coast Inc., USP Columbia Inc., USP Connecticut Inc., USP Corpus Christi Inc., USP Creve Coeur Inc., USP Denver Inc., USP Des Peres Inc., USP Destin Inc., USP Domestic Holdings Inc., USP Effingham Inc., USP Encinitas Endoscopy Inc., USP Fenton Inc., USP Festus Inc., USP Florissant Inc., USP Fort Lauderdale Inc., USP Fort Worth Hospital Real Estate Inc., USP Fredericksburg Inc., USP Fresno Inc., USP Frontenac Inc., USP Gateway Inc., USP HMH Surgery Center at Shore LLC, USP Harbour View Inc., USP Houston Inc., USP Indiana Inc., USP International Holdings Inc., USP Jacksonville Inc., USP Jersey City Inc., USP Kansas City Inc., USP Knoxville Inc., USP Little Rock Inc., USP Long Island Inc., USP Louisiana Inc., USP Lubbock Inc., USP Maryland Inc., USP Mason Ridge Inc., USP Mattis Inc., USP Michigan Inc., USP Midland Inc., USP Midland Real Estate Inc., USP Midwest Inc., USP Mission Hills Inc., USP Montana Inc., USP Morris Inc., USP Mt. Vernon Inc., USP Nevada Holdings LLC, USP Nevada Inc., USP New Hampshire Inc., USP New Jersey Inc., USP Newport News Inc., USP North Carolina Inc., USP North Kansas City Inc., USP North Texas Inc., USP Northwest Arkansas Inc., USP OKC Inc., USP OKC Manager Inc., USP Office Parkway Inc., USP Ohio RE Inc., USP Oklahoma Inc., USP Olive Inc., USP Orlando Inc., USP Philadelphia Inc., USP Phoenix Inc., USP Portland Inc., USP Reading Inc., USP Richmond II Inc., USP Richmond Inc., USP Sacramento Inc., USP San Antonio Inc., USP Santa Barbara Surgery Centers Inc., USP Securities Corporation , USP Silver Cross Inc., USP Siouxland Inc., USP Somerset Inc., USP South Carolina Inc., USP Southlake RE Inc., USP St. Louis Inc., USP St. Louis Urology Inc., USP St. Peters Inc., USP Sunset Hills Inc., USP TJ STL Inc., USP Tennessee Inc., USP Texas Air L.L.C., USP Texas L.P., USP Torrance Inc., USP Tucson Inc., USP Turnersville Inc., USP Virginia Beach Inc., USP Washington Inc., USP Waxahachie Management L.L.C., USP Webster Groves Inc., USP West Covina Inc., USP Westwood Inc., USP Winter Park Inc., USP Wisconsin Inc., USP-HMH Surgery Center at Central Jersey LLC, USP/Carondelet Tucson Surgery Centers LLC, USP/SOS Joint Venture LLC, USPI Group Holdings Inc., USPI Holding Company Inc.1, USPI Holdings Inc., USPI Physician Strategy Group LLC, USPI San Diego Inc., USPI Stockton Inc., USPI Surgical Services Inc., Underwood Surgery Center LLC, United Anesthesia Partners Inc., United Real Estate Development Inc., United Real Estate Holdings Inc., United Surgical Partners Holdings Inc., United Surgical Partners International, United Surgical Partners International Inc., Universal Medical Care Center L.L.C., University Surgery Center Ltd., Upper Bay Surgery Center LLC, Utica/USP Tulsa L.L.C., VB Brownsville LTACH LLC, VBOA ASC GP LLC, VBOA ASC Partners L.L.C., VHM Services Inc., VHS Acquisition Corporation, VHS Acquisition Partnership Number 1 L.P, VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 1 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 11 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 12 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 3 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 4 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 5 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 6 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 7 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 8 Inc., VHS Acquisition Subsidiary Number 9 Inc., VHS Arizona Heart Institute Inc., VHS Brownsville Hospital Company LLC, VHS Chicago Market Procurement LLC, VHS Childrens Hospital of Michigan Inc., VHS Detroit Businesses Inc., VHS Detroit Receiving Hospital Inc., VHS Detroit Ventures Inc., VHS Harlingen Hospital Company LLC, VHS Harper-Hutzel Hospital Inc., VHS Holding Company Inc., VHS Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital Inc., VHS Imaging Centers Inc., VHS New England Holding Company I Inc., VHS Outpatient Clinics Inc., VHS Phoenix Health Plan Inc., VHS Physicians of Michigan, VHS Rehabilitation Institute of Michigan Inc., VHS San Antonio Imaging Partners L.P., VHS San Antonio Partners LLC, VHS Sinai-Grace Hospital Inc., VHS University Laboratories Inc., VHS Valley Health System LLC, VHS Valley Holdings LLC, VHS Valley Management Company Inc., VHS West Suburban Medical Center Inc., VHS Westlake Hospital Inc., VHS of Anaheim Inc., VHS of Arrowhead Inc., VHS of Huntington Beach Inc., VHS of Illinois Inc., VHS of Michigan Inc., VHS of Michigan Staffing Inc., VHS of Orange County Inc., VHS of Phoenix Inc., VHS of South Phoenix Inc., Valley Baptist Lab Services LLC, Valley Baptist Physician Performance Network, Valley Baptist Realty Company LLC, Valley Baptist Surgery Center LLC, Valley Baptist Surgery Center Real Estate LLC, Valley Baptist Wellness Center LLC, Valley Health Care Network, Vanguard Health Financial Company LLC, Vanguard Health Holding Company I LLC, Vanguard Health Holding Company II LLC, Vanguard Health Management Inc., Vanguard Health Systems, Vanguard Health Systems Inc., Vanguard Holding Company I Inc., Vanguard Holding Company II Inc., Vanguard Medical Specialists LLC, Vanguard Physician Services LLC, Ventana Surgical Center LLC, Veroscan Inc., Victoria Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., WHASA L.C., Walker Baptist Affinity LLC, Walker Street Imaging Care Inc., Warner Park Surgery Center LLC, Watermark Physician Services Inc., Webster Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Wellington Endo LLC, Wellstar/USP Joint Venture I LLC, Wellstar/USP Joint Venture II LLC, West Boca Health Services L.L.C., West Boca Medical Center Inc., West Bozeman Surgery Center LLC, West Palm Healthcare Real Estate Inc., West Suburban Radiation Therapy Center LLC, Westgate Surgery Center LLC, Westlake Hospital LLC, Westlawn Surgery Center LLC, Westminster Surgery Center LLC, Westminster Surgery Centers LLC, White Fence Surgical Suites LLC, Wilmington Endoscopy Center LLC, Wilshire Rental Corp., Windsor Mill Surgery Center LLC, Winter Haven Ambulatory Surgical Center L.L.C., Wisconsin Specialty Surgery Center LLC, and Wymark Surgery Center LLC.

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AbbVie Inc. discovers, develops, manufactures, and sells pharmaceuticals in the worldwide. The company offers HUMIRA, a therapy administered as an injection for autoimmune and intestinal Behcet's diseases; SKYRIZI to treat moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adults; RINVOQ, a JAK inhibitor for the treatment of moderate to severe active rheumatoid arthritis in adult patients; IMBRUVICA to treat adult patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL), and VENCLEXTA, a BCL-2 inhibitor used to treat adults with CLL or SLL; and MAVYRET to treat patients with chronic HCV genotype 1-6 infection. It also provides CREON, a pancreatic enzyme therapy for exocrine pancreatic insufficiency; Synthroid used in the treatment of hypothyroidism; Linzess/Constella to treat irritable bowel syndrome with constipation and chronic idiopathic constipation; Lupron for the palliative treatment of advanced prostate cancer, endometriosis and central precocious puberty, and patients with anemia caused by uterine fibroids; and Botox therapeutic. In addition, the company offers ORILISSA, a nonpeptide small molecule gonadotropin-releasing hormone antagonist for women with moderate to severe endometriosis pain; Duopa and Duodopa, a levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel to treat Parkinson's disease; Lumigan/Ganfort, a bimatoprost ophthalmic solution for the reduction of elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) in patients with open angle glaucoma (OAG) or ocular hypertension; Ubrelvy to treat migraine with or without aura in adults; Alphagan/ Combigan, an alpha-adrenergic receptor agonist for the reduction of IOP in patients with OAG; and Restasis, a calcineurin inhibitor immunosuppressant to increase tear production, as well as other eye care products. AbbVie Inc. has a research collaboration with Dragonfly Therapeutics, Inc. The company was incorporated in 2012 and is headquartered in North Chicago, Illinois.
Hopewell Community Park remains a 'labor of love' for local community

The lush green park is a product of the combined efforts of the Hopewell Township community and a symbol of decades of conservation efforts in Beaver County.
SHARE Contributed photo Daughters of the American Revolution State Recording Secretary Susan Francis provides a costumed portrayal of DAR founder Ellen Hardin Walworth during the August meeting of DAR's Maj. Francis Grice Chapter of Wichita Falls.

DAR members get visit from 'founder'

Members of the Major Francis Grice Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution took a journey back to the organization's founding during their August meeting.

The meeting featured a special "visit" from one of the DAR's founding members, Ellen Hardin Walworth, who was portrayed in full costume by DAR State Recording Secretary Susan Francis.

Francis presented a dramatization of Walworth's life, including when she became editor of the DAR's official publication, American Monthly Magazine, and her involvement with the Women's National War Relief Effort during the Spanish-American War. She died on June 23, 1915, at age 82.

Swinging Stars plan square dance class

The Swinging Stars Square Dance Club of Wichita Falls will offer square dance lessons starting Sept. 26 for anyone looking for a new pastime. Square dancing is good exercise and a great way to meet new friends, organizers say.

The class will meet from 7-9 p.m. each Monday and Thursday for seven weeks at the Red River Square and Round Dance Association, 812 Travis St. Students can attend the first two lessons free to gauge their interest, then pay $20 for all of the remaining lessons. The cost for children and teens under 17 is $10. Dress is casual. Tim and Lou Tanner will be the instructors.

No smoking nor alcohol is allowed in the facility.

Vocal trio to offer free gospel concert

The Reliance vocal trio will present a free gospel music concert at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 22 at Fain Presbyterian Church, 2201 Speedway.

All three of the group's members have a lifetime of experience singing gospel music. Member Tyson Harness' father was one of the group's founders. Group manager Ken Hurley is the host of two weekly gospel radio shows based in California.

Refreshments will be available after the concert.

Racers Hall of Fame sets induction event

The 11th annual Texhoma Racers Reunion Hall of Fame Induction and Luncheon has been set for Oct. 8 at the Elks Lodge, 4205 Seymour Highway.

Events will start at 11:30 a.m., when guests can participate in bench racing and tour the race cars on site. Lunch will be at noon, and the program will start at 1:30 p.m.

Tickets for the luncheon and program are $15. Attending only the program costs $5. Children age 12 and under are free, and hot dogs will be provided.

Proceeds will go toward Elks' charities.

Information: Jerry Douglas, 733-515, or Steven Young, 781-5655.
Burkburnett Police CHRISTOPER WALKER/TIMES RECOIRD NEWS

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By Christopher Collins of the Times Record News

The Texas Department of Public Safety has forwarded the results of its investigation into the death of a man inside the Burkburnett jail this year to the Wichita County District Attorney's Office for its consideration.

DPS Sgt. John Gonzalez told the Times Record News the agency completed its investigation into the suicide of Marcus Johnson late last week, sending the case to prosecutors, who may decide to convene a grand jury.

After being left alone and unmonitored in a jail cell for two hours on March 10, Johnson was found by police hanged to death from the drawstring of his pants.

An internal investigation  conducted separately from the DPS probe  found that three officers acted inappropriately in the incident. One Burkburnett police officer, Daniel Elbaum, was found to have denied Johnson the opportunity to take his antipsychotic medication, despite being told by Johnson and his mother that he suffered from several mental disorders and had tried to commit suicide just three weeks earlier.

Sgt. Zac Leonard failed to adequately lead the officers under his command, leaving them "in a state of confusion," the internal investigation found.

Elbaum was suspended for one day. Leonard received a "letter of counseling," and a third officer, Matt McDonald, was reprimanded.

As is customary when a person dies in the custody of a small police department, an investigator with the DPS' Texas Rangers was called in to conduct an independent investigation. The Times Record News obtained investigative documents related to the Texas Rangers probe through a state open records request.

The documents show Texas Ranger Toby Catlin's investigation began March 10, the day of Johnson's death. Catlin collected video footage from the jail, along with phone records and other records from the scene.

Catlin interviewed Shelly Parham, Johnson's mother, who told him her son was manic depressive and suffered from schizophrenia. He had an IQ of 42, far below the average human intelligence of between 90 and 110, she said.

Records indicate Parham called the jail on March 10 to insist that Johnson be allowed to take his antipsychotic medication, but officers refused. Her call was put on hold when Johnson was found dead in his cell.

Catlin's notes indicate he planned to interview Burkburnett police officers Elbaum, McDonald and Leonard, but then learned that they had retained legal counsel. The officers agreed to provide Catlin with written statements but did not consent to interviews.

Catlin's investigation was wrapped up this week, and because the Times Record News obtained documents before the investigation was finished, his findings are not included. Catlin did not return a phone call Tuesday to discuss his findings.

It's unknown whether the Wichita County District Attorney's Office will convene a grand jury to consider indictment in the case. DA Maureen Shelton said on Tuesday she is prohibited from discussing whether the case will be presented to a grand jury.
Gov. Greg Abbott

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By Times Record News

Texas has sent a letter to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) giving official notice of the states intention to withdraw from the federal refugee resettlement program should ORR not unconditionally approve Texas own plan by Sept. 30.

The letter, sent Wednesday by Gov. Greg Abbotts office, was in response to ORRs unwillingness to approve Texas updated state refugee plan, which would require national security officials to ensure that refugees do not pose a security threat to Texas.

The states withdrawal would be effective Jan. 31, 2017.

The federal governments refugee settlement program is riddled with serious problems that pose a threat to our nation, Abbott said in the letter . The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Director of National Intelligence have repeatedly declared their inability to fully screen refugees from terrorist-based nations.

Even with the inability to properly vet refugees from Syria and countries known to be supporters or propagators of terrorism, President Obama is now ineptly proposing a dramatic increase in the number of refugees to be resettled in the U.S.

Abbott said empathy must be balanced with security.

While many refugees pose no danger, some pose grave danger, like the Iraqi refugee with ties to ISIS who was arrested earlier this year after he plotted to set off bombs at two malls in Houston, the governor said.

Despite multiple requests by the State of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people.
John C. Mortiz/USA Today Newtwork

State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat who chairs the Texas House County Affairs Committee, said pretext stops are used by law enforcement officers to target motorists they believe might be wanted for a more serious matter.

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AUSTIN  Sandra Bland, the African-American woman who committed suicide in a Texas jail after a traffic stop turned confrontational last year, likely would not have died had the state trooper not been looking for a pretext to pull her over, a key state lawmaker said Tuesday.

State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat who chairs the Texas House County Affairs Committee, said pretext stops are used by law enforcement officers to target motorists they believe might be wanted for a more serious matter.

If a pretext stop wasnt used with Sandra Bland, she probably wouldnt have been arrested, Coleman said. And I think its clear that those stops are used to fish for greater crimes.

Bland was stopped by a DPS trooper near Houston. During the July 2015 stop, which was captured on the troopers in-car-video, showed the trooper loudly arguing with her over her cigarette. The officer removed from her car and used forced to subdue her.

She later was found dead in her Waller County jail cell.

Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the committee that the trooper who arrested Bland acted inappropriately. He was later fired.

The job of all troopers, McCraw said, is to treat everyone with dignity and respect.

Later, McCraw and Coleman exchanged heated words over whether troopers are too quick to use what Coleman called a command voice to demonstrate that they are in charge of a given situation.

McCraw rejected any assertion that troopers use such a voice to harass or intimidate ordinary citizens. But when dealing with an aggressive individual suspected of a serious crime, he said, troopers must be allowed to use the voice necessary to force compliance.

Meanwhile, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill political science professor who has conducted extensive studies of traffic stops and race, said his findings show that black motorists are far more likely than whites to be treated harshly by law enforcement officers during traffic stops.

The Texas Department of Public Safety is not a particular outlier on this issue, said Professor Frank Baumgartner, who testified by way of Skype. This is a national issue that is a concern to every police department everywhere.

Follow USA Today Network's Austin Bureau reporter John C. Mortiz on Twitter at @JohnnieMo
SHARE Logo courtesy of Child Advocates Last year, Child Advocates, whose logo appears above, provided Court Appointed Special Advocates for 237 children, approximately 75 percent of the those under the care of Child Protective Services in Archer, Baylor Clay and Montague counties. More volunteer CASAs are needed to speak for childrenas best interest as they go through the family court system and foster care.

As bad as I hate to admit it, I have reached that age. You know what I am talking about. I find it is sometimes hard to keep up with doctor's appointments.

I have one of those pill boxes for my vitamins and the few pills I take daily (thank goodness). I find myself daydreaming when I am driving and when I snap out of it I realize I am on my way to work on Saturday instead of where I was meaning to go. I remember my mother doing that and thinking "What is wrong with her?" Usually I have a dozen or more things on my mind. I really hate it when my husband is in the car and it happens. He is very quick to point out my error, usually by screaming "Where are you going?", but I do it to him too. Worst thing is I have this routine, especially in the morning, and if it is disturbed, then the whole day is off.

But the real sign of arrival is after scanning the front page. The first thing I read in the paper is the obituaries. I seem to be attending many more funerals and buying a lot more sympathy cards than birthday cards. I actually pay attention in funerals now and I love what people say about their loved ones and I sit and wonder what people will say when it is me. I know what kind of music I want and don't want. Yes, I have even contemplated graveside services only to eliminate the difficulty of finding nice things to say about me.

There is something even more disturbing that I do next. I turn one more page or two and read all the arrests, convictions, trials, etc.  you know the ones with pictures. Almost every other one is a crime involving a child, and the ones who aren't I can bet you money there were children in the home or the car during the time of arrest. How do I know that? It is part of my everyday job. Many of these children are delivered to the Children's Home or Teen Shelter when this happens. Eventually they will enter the court system and need a CASA.

A CASA is a Court Appointed Special Advocate who gives a voice to a child in the court system. It is a job like no other. I hear countless stories from my friends who have had multiple cases and they never speak of details, but only how rewarding it is to know you make a difference in that child's life. It is not a big time commitment, but it is a heart commitment. It is not a job your whole family can do together. Yes, they love CASA Couples, but your extended family cannot be involved in your cases. Why? These kids have already lost one family, they cannot afford for them to become attached is another family who will eventually go away. Your job is to make sure they are now in the very best living situation possible. You visit with their foster parents or court appointed relative they are living with. You may have contact with their teachers, counselors, doctors  basically anyone who is trying to help this child or children.

Why are you so involved? Because one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, you will be asked by the judge questions about the future of this child. Should they be given back to their parents or do they need more time to get their lives back together? Do you approve of their pending adoption and a chance for a fresh start? Your opinion is very valuable to the judge as she makes those decisions. It is not always a happily-ever-after story, but it is an important one. We just never seem to have enough CASAs. Every time we think we are gaining ground, the number of children in need explodes. Investigate this organization and see if it is not a perfect fit for you.

I do know one thing, I am not afraid to be on that obit page. I would not want to be on the next two pages for obvious reasons. We cannot stop people from the natural process of dying, but we can sure work to put a stop to crimes against children. I know where I am going, but these children don't deserve the hell on earth they will be living in after these crimes. They deserve a much better life and CASAs give them that opportunity.
File-In one of South by Southwest Interactives most high-profile sessions this year, NSA leaker Edward Snowden spoke via Google Hangout on Monday, March 10, 2014, about eroding online privacy and led a call to action to the SXSW audience to do more.

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Over the weekend, the new Oliver Stone movie on National Security Agency leaker-extraordinaire Edward Snowden clunked into theaters and drew tepid crowds.

At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have launched what they bill as a major effort to persuade President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden.

The Snowdenites hope that the fawning movie will spare their hero from espionage charges.

To gin up some urgency, the pardonsnowden.org website countdown clock is ticking off the days, minutes and seconds until Obama leaves office. The Snowden apologists evidently realize that President Hillary Clinton or President Donald Trump wouldn't risk the political backlash if they were to go easy on Snowden.

Our capsule review of this effort: Two thumbs-down.

Snowden has suggested that he would like to return to the United States if his lawyers could negotiate a plea deal. Presumably Snowden has grown weary of Russian President Vladimir Putin's hospitality and, we're guessing, the intense scrutiny under which he undoubtedly finds himself.

Snowden says he would consider serving a prison term as part of a plea bargain arranged before he leaves his Russian sanctuary, The New York Times reports. How magnanimous.

As we said in 2014 when Snowden supporters first dangled the issue of amnesty: Come home, Ed. We'll welcome you with open arms and a pair of handcuffs. We can show you all the damage you caused. And maybe we'll let a judge and jury decide your fate.

Then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder took the right approach in 2014: He rejected amnesty for Snowden but did not rule out the possibility of plea negotiations, if Snowden returns. "If Mr. Snowden wanted to come back to the United States and enter a plea, we would engage with his lawyers," Holder said.

Two years later, we would support the same deal: No amnesty, no pardon. Snowden should return to the U.S. and face whatever charges the Department of Justice levies. If his lawyers think they can limit those charges in return for his surrender, they're welcome to try. It's a free country. (The U.S., that is.)

Snowden's actions caused immense damage to America's national security interests. A day before the movie's release, a House Intelligence Committee report debunked the myth of Snowden The Noble Whistleblower who did more good than harm. "Snowden's actions did severe damage to U.S. national security, compromising the Intelligence Community's anti-terror efforts and endangering the security of the American people as well as active-duty U.S. troops," the committee said.

American intelligence officials still don't know the full extent of the harm, the report says. Some of the damage may not be known for years. The government has, however, spent hundreds of millions of dollars  and eventually will spend billions  to clean up the mess and "mitigate the damage" Snowden caused.

The 22 House committee members sent a unanimous, bipartisan letter to Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden. Bulletin: Democrats and Republicans agreed.

"Edward Snowden is no hero  he's a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country," Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the committee chairman, said in a statement.

Snowden's argument that he acted to defend Americans' privacy were "self-serving and false," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., ranking member of the committee. "While those disclosures did spark a useful public debate, the collateral damage has been extraordinary."

Three years ago, a self-satisfied Snowden declared victory. "For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished," he told The Washington Post. "I already won."

That victory may not be so sweet any more. Not when the reward is a permanent address under Putin's thumb.

Snowden stole and released thousands of pages of documents that endangered  likely still endanger  U.S. lives. He exposed secrets whose impact he could not possibly comprehend. That's what he calls winning.

To us, that doesn't sound like a whistleblower who should be celebrated. That sounds like someone who should be in a U.S. prison. Come home, Ed. Make your case.

Chicago Tribune
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July and August were the hottest months for the planet since record keeping began. Scientists are confident that 2016 will be the hottest year. Rising sea levels have made flooding commonplace in several major U.S. cities. And meanwhile, one of our leading presidential candidates says climate change is some kind of Chinese hoax.

Elections have consequences, and this is one of the most fateful: Anyone who takes climate change seriously had better do everything possible to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.

Believe it or not, there are issues more important than Trump's latest offensive outburst or Hillary Clinton's score on the likability scale. Clinton accepts the scientific consensus on climate change, which is increasingly supported by what we see and feel every day. She would build upon President Obama's efforts to address the issue, which include the historic Paris agreement, seen by many experts as our last best hope to prevent catastrophe.

Trump, by contrast, is a baldfaced denier. "Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and ... a lot of it's a hoax," he said at a December rally in South Carolina. "It's a hoax. I mean, it's a moneymaking industry, OK? It's a hoax, a lot of it."

He tweeted in 2012 that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive." He later said this was a joke, but during the campaign he has again said he does not believe in climate change and claimed that action to limit carbon emissions "is done for the benefit of China."

The Paris pact represents the first time the world's two biggest emitters, China and the United States, have formally agreed to hold down the amount of heat-trapping carbon they spew into the atmosphere. Trump would renounce the agreement  and also scrap Obama administration rules limiting emissions from coal-fired power plants. He has promised greater fossil-fuel production and scoffed at alternative energy sources such as wind power.

Clinton recognizes the potential economic benefits of developing the technology to lead the world toward a clean-energy economy. Trump would rather let China, Germany and other nations compete for that prize.

The differences could not be more stark. And the evidence for climate change has never been clearer.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 15 of the warmest 16 years on record have come since the turn of the century. By examining air bubbles preserved for centuries in polar ice, scientists know the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, when large-scale burning of fossil fuels began.

Global warming is affecting weather patterns worldwide. Deniers point out that it is not possible to conclusively blame any given storm or localized heat wave on climate change  and that, yes, it still gets cold in the winter. But the phenomenon is clearly visible in melting glaciers and ice caps, the opening of ice-free sea lanes through the Arctic and, most urgently, sea-level rise.

The oceans are rising because warmer water occupies a greater volume than cooler water and because so much land ice is melting. According to NOAA, average sea level is rising by about 1.2 inches per decade. That may not sound like much, but it has already been enough to at least triple the amount of "nuisance" flooding that coastal cities have to cope with when onshore winds coincide with high tide.

In Norfolk, Virginia, some low-lying intersections flood so often that officials have installed gauges so residents can tell when the water is too deep to drive through. In Miami Beach, some frequently flooded streets are being elevated. In New York, officials are debating how to prepare for the next storm that takes the path of Hurricane Sandy, which caused an estimated $75 billion in damage in 2012.

Last November, in Time magazine, Clinton wrote that "I won't let anyone take us backward, deny our economy the benefits of harnessing a clean energy future, or force our children to endure the catastrophe that would result from unchecked climate change."

Neither her policies nor Trump's will reverse the climate effects we're already seeing. But it is possible, and necessary, to keep the impacts from becoming completely unmanageable. Obama leaves behind a framework for coordinated international action, more than two decades in the making, that still could fail  but that might, just might, succeed. Trump boasts that he can't wait to tear it all down.

The choice is ours.

Eugene Robinson's email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. He writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.
Three former state correction officers, including a sergeant, were charged Wednesday in a federal indictment with the 2013 beating of an inmate at the maximum-security Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill.

The officers, Kathy L. Scott, who is also known as Kathy Todd, and George Santiago Jr. and Carson Morris, were indicted on charges of conspiracy, civil rights violations and fraud.

Two other former prison officers, Donald Cosman and Andrew Lowery, admitted their roles in the beating and pleaded guilty to felony charges during an earlier sealed proceeding, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

The beating took place in November 2013 inside a day room of the Dutchess County prison. Kevin Moore, 57, a repeat felon serving up to 20 years in prison for burglary and grand larceny, was pummeled by at least four state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision officers as Scott, who also took part in the assault, stood by and ignored his pleas for help, according to federal court records.

After he was beaten, Moore could barely walk or see through his swollen eyes. His injuries included a collapsed lung, eye-socket fractures, blurred vision, bruised legs and five broken ribs, according to court records that outline what state officials said happened. Court records indicate Moore was attacked after he and another inmate questioned why they were going to be put in solitary confinement cells used to hold mentally ill inmates.

At the time, Moore was an inmate at Coxsackie Correctional Facility and was being held at the downstate prison for one night on his way to a court hearing in New York City.

"Shortly after he arrived, a group of DOCCS correction officers who were assigned to supervise Moore and other inmates brutally beat him for an extended period of time with fists, boots and batons, causing many life-threatening injuries," the indictment states. "As a result of the beating, Moore was hospitalized for approximately 17 days."

Santiago, who became a correction officer in 2006, was accused of initiating the beating. He and Scott, the supervising officer, were both fired two years ago when an arbitrator found "credible evidence" they took part in the November 2013 assault, and then lied about it and falsified documents to cover up what happened. Two other officers implicated in the beating, Morris and Cosman, were found by an arbitrator to have taken part in the beating incident but were suspended by an arbitrator despite efforts by the department of corrections to terminate their employment. They are no longer employed as corrections officers.

"Inmates may be walled off from the public, but they are not walled off from the Constitution," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement announcing the arrests. "And when correction officers viciously beat an inmate in their charge, then collude among themselves to cover it up  as alleged here  they trample on the Constitution and the very laws they have sworn to uphold."

The indictment accuses Scott, Morris, Santiago and an unidentified officer of making up a story alleging Moore attacked one of the officers. After Moore was beaten, the officers falsified documents, including a use-of-force report. Santiago also hit one of the officers in the back with a baton "to make it appear as if he had been attacked by Moore," the indictment alleges. "Morris further applied friction with his hands to the injury marks in order to make the injury appear more serious." The officers photographed the officer's injured back to document their false story, prosecutors allege.

Another officer, who was not identified in the indictment but listed as a co-conspirator, made false entries in a log book to bolster the officers' "fake story ... that Moore started the incident by shoving a correction officer." It's unclear whether the two officers listed as unnamed co-conspirators are Cosman and Lowery, or whether they may have cooperated with federal investigators as part of a plea agreement.

The beating was first highlighted in a Times Union story in March. The federal investigation is part of an ongoing investigation by Bharara into allegations that prison officers in multiple correctional facilities may have systematically beaten and tortured inmates.

The broader investigation is also examining allegations that a group of officers at Fishkill Correctional Facility, which is less than two miles south of the prison where Moore was attacked, beat a mentally-ill inmate to death in April 2015.

The death of Samuel D. Harrell III, whose alleged assailants were known as the "Beat Up Squad," sparked a federal wrongful-death lawsuit that was filed by Harrell's wife, Diane.

At the request of Bharara's office, the lawsuit was stayed pending the outcome of the federal criminal investigation.

In Moore's case, the four officers accused of taking part in the beating claimed in disciplinary proceedings that he lied about the incident. They also said Moore was only slightly injured when they wrestled him to the ground after he refused orders and shoved a guard trying to ferry him to a holding cell.

After Moore was beaten, and despite his severe injuries, the officers placed him in a special housing unit cell, where he remained for 12 hours after a prison medical evaluation determined he wasn't injured, according to court records.

Moore suffers from claustrophobia and acknowledged to investigators that he became agitated when he and other inmates being transported through the Downstate facility were told they'd be held in isolation cells intended for mentally-ill prisoners.

The sergeant and three officers who were later disciplined denied Moore was bleeding after the incident, although an inmate who witnessed it told investigators he threw away bloody paper towels after he was ordered to clean up the mess.

That inmate also said he saw Moore being dragged out of the day room after the beating. Another inmate told investigators that Moore's face looked "weird," apparently due to his face being disfigured from the beating.

Scott, 42, of Saugerties, Santiago, 34, of Fremont Center, and Morris, 31, of Coconut Creek, Fla., were all arrested Wednesday.

Morris was arrested in Florida. They are each charged with one count of deprivation of rights under color of law, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison; one count of conspiracy to deprive civil rights, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison; one count of falsifying documents, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison; and one count of conspiring to falsify documents, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

Cosman and Lowery pleaded guilty to four counts: conspiring to deprive the victim of his constitutional rights; depriving the victim of his constitutional rights under color of law; obstructing justice by conspiring to file false reports; and filing false reports.

blyons@timesunion.com  518-454-5547  @brendan_lyonstu
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Saratoga Springs

Soul Saving Station church will open as the Code Blue Saratoga haven for the homeless on cold winter nights, starting Nov. 1.

The shelter at the 62 Henry St. church provides overnight housing when temperatures dip below 32 degrees or snowfall is more than 12 inches.

Executive Director Michael Finocchi told the Times Union last month that the downtown church, on the corner of Caroline and Henry streets, has a large, open room attached to the sanctuary, which is ideal for the shelter's needs.

Finocchi joined Mayor Joanne Yepsen and the church's First Lady Neysha Byrd on Wednesday to announce the partnership.

"It's a nice marriage," said Finocchi who is the executive director of the Shelters of Saratoga, which manages Code Blue. "Soul Saving Station has been helping those in need for years. They understand the population. I look forward to our partnership."

The shelter is open to all homeless people without restrictions. On average, the shelter houses 34 people a night. In addition to a bed, the homeless are served a meal. Regardless of the weather, Code Blue doors are also open Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas.

"No one should be alone on the holidays," Finocchi said.

Byrd, who spoke for her husband Pastor Arnold Byrd II, said the church was happy to help.

"Mike and his staff put their heart and soul into the program," she said. "We appreciate their work. We are a community and this gives us the opportunity to grown and work better together."

The only Code Blue site for Saratoga, Warren and Washington counties, it originally was open when the temperature dropped to 20 degrees or when a foot or more of snow was predicted. Last winter, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order that raised the threshold for Code Blue to 32 degrees. Finocchi expects the order will be handed down again.

The change prompted the Salvation Army, which previously rented space to the shelter for two years at a cost of $13,000 to end its rental agreement. At the time, Maj. Roger Duperree of the Salvation Army said the increase in shelter hours interfered with evening programs.

Yepsen has made Code Blue a priority for her administration.

"I swore that no one will die on the streets of Saratoga," said Yepsen. "And no one has."

The Code Blue program was instituted in Saratoga Springs after Nancy Pitts, a homeless woman, died of exposure in December 2013 when Yepsen was the city's mayor-elect.

Code Blue Saratoga is looking for volunteers at Soul Saving Station church. Visit www.codebluesaratoga.org to receive email notifications when volunteer opportunities are available.

For program questions, call Cheryl Ann Murphy Parant, program director, at 812-6886.
CORINTH  A 16-year-old student from Corinth High School was charged with making a terrorist threat, a felony, Saratoga County Sheriff's Office said.

On Tuesday, Emily Berard of 10 Circle Drive posted a threat to the school on Facebook, said Lt. Jeffrey Brown. The school received an anonymous email alerting administrators of the threat, deputies said.

While the threat was not found to be credible, Berard can still be charged with the felony of threatening to harm the school, Brown said.

She was arraigned at Corinth Town Court and released pending her next court date.

 Wendy Liberatore
Albany

The board that sets education policy for New York questioned Monday why the State Education Department touted gains on standardized test scores this year when most agree the data can't be compared against previous years.

The department released the results of the state's 2016 reading and math tests in July, showing that statewide proficiency grew 6.6 percentage points in reading and 1 percentage point in math compared to last year.

Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia warned against making direct comparisons with results from prior years  a point she would reiterate in weeks to come  since the 2016 tests were shorter than previous years and untimed. But in their first public meeting since the announcement, the Regents expressed concern that comparisons were made at all.

"When we send out a package that says, you know, we're moving up and charter schools did so much better, this goes to the press and then to the political people who make decisions on our behalf sometimes based upon data that can't be compared," said Regent Roger Tilles.

Other members expressed similar concerns after Elia presented a 55-page slideshow Monday on the test results that included year-over-year comparisons for students by race/ethnicity, need, disability, English language proficiency and school type. Members were torn between wanting to act on certain troubling trends, and remaining skeptical of the data underlying them.

"The more time I spend looking at the outcomes and growth on the tests, the more I become convinced that we really can't make full sense of it and have full appreciation of the good and perhaps the bad for at least another year," said Vice Chancellor T. Andrew Brown.

State leaders are currently working to revise the Common Core standards on which the tests are based. The revisions, which are expected within the year, must also be reflected in curricula and tests.

While charter school advocates and leaders hailed "tremendous gains" by their students on this year's tests, Regent Catherine Collins said Monday the results should give people pause, and wondered aloud whether lax test security could be behind this year's gains.

"Charter schools are extremely independent, so there's no one there looking over their shoulder like they are in the public schools," she said. "So they're really like a private school when they give their exams, and no one is really there to make sure that in the classrooms there's no help."

Regents also bemoaned another year of abysmal reading scores among students who are new to the English language, and debated whether they should take a more activist stance as a board to allow them to opt out of the exams. Forcing students to take an exam in the English language arts when they still don't have a firm grasp on the language is tantamount to child abuse, Regent Luis Reyes said.

"Not to say bad education law and bad education policy," he said, suggesting the board could use state test results to make a federal civil rights case out of the issue.

The U.S. Department of Education requires states to test all students in grades 3-8 in math and English, regardless of disability or English proficiency. New York has requested waivers to get out of these requirements, to no avail.

"These students feel like losers because they're taking tests that everybody knows they're going to fail, and that often never leaves them," Tilles said.

"I don't know if we should just become more of an activist board," he said. "But I really don't like giving those tests, even if we're asked to do so. I would choose to opt out of them."

bbump@timesunion.com  518-454-5387  @bethanybump
Albany

A stronger focus on fiction reading and boosting interaction in prekindergarten to second grades are among the changes offered Wednesday in response to the backlash over Common Core learning standards.

The proposed revisions were announced Wednesday following a yearlong effort by the state Education Department to quell parent and teacher concerns around the standards, which critics have assailed as age-inappropriate for younger students and confusing in some areas.

Two committees comprised of more than 130 educators and parents recommended Wednesday that the state revise 60 percent of its English language arts standards and 55 percent of its math standards, both of which enumerate what students should know in each subject at each grade level.

The department is now putting those recommendations out to the public, in hopes of gathering feedback before submitting them to the Board of Regents for a vote early next year.

"As we are getting information on any changes that are ultimately approved, we need to make sure teachers have support and an opportunity to know what the changes are," said Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia.

More for you N.Y. Regents question standardized test data comparisons

"One thing we don't want to do is rush this," she added.

New York first adopted the Common Core standards in 2010 and began testing students on them in 2013. The transition drew a backlash from the start, in part because of concerns with the standards themselves but also because of their rushed and messy rollout. In some schools, teachers had inadequate time to develop lesson plans around the new standards before having to test students on material pegged to them.

Outcry grew even more intense when the state moved to evaluate teachers in part on how well their students scored on the tests, prompting a testing backlash so large that roughly one out of every five students in New York boycotted the exams in 2015 and 2016.

The Education Department began surveying educators and other stakeholders about their concerns last fall. In December, a task force convened by Gov. Andrew Cuomo recommended the department revise the standards with help from teachers around the state  and drop the "Common Core" name for political purposes. Critics latched on to the latter recommendation, accusing the state of attempting to appease the public with a mere cosmetic tweak.

In a video outlining the proposed changes, Elia assures viewers that the work done to review the standards was indeed substantive. "It isn't just tinkering around the edges and doing small little things," she said.

The committees propose moving some standards up a grade level so that they are developmentally appropriate, while eliminating others altogether. In some cases, the changes involve regrouping standards or clarifying the language used to describe them to make them easier for educators to use in curricula and instruction.

In English language arts, the revisions would re-emphasize fiction reading, discussion and analysis  a direct response to concerns among educators that Common Core's focus on nonfiction and informational texts had all but eliminated fiction from the classroom.

Another proposal is to refocus on prekindergarten through second grade standards, especially when it comes to the use of "play" in classrooms  a term that refers not to playtime but to lesson plans that promote student interaction with peers and their environment.

In math, proposed changes include providing more time for students to develop deep understanding of concepts and clarifying standards so that students better understand the skills they should be gaining from one course to another.

For both subjects, the committees recommended creating a glossary of terms to further clarify the standards.

Reaction to the proposals was largely positive, with groups such as New York State United Teachers union and the state Council of School Superintendents calling them a good "first step" that must be followed with a thorough public review. The pro-Common Core group High Achievement New York praised them as "common sense" changes that would enhance and retain high standards in the classroom.

Others, however, worried that not all concerns around the standards were reflected in the recommendations released Wednesday.

"I think we all should be asking for a minority report  the dissenting report from the minority of committee members who feel their concerns didn't make it into the revisions," said Lisa Rudley, a parent who helped found the opt-out group New York State Allies for Public Education.

Final revisions will go to the Board of Regents early next year, with tests based on the new standards expected in spring 2019.

The department is accepting public comments on the draft standards until Nov. 4. To review and comment on the standards, visit nysed.gov/aimhighny
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The areas surrounding the Capital Region have a rich history of beer, cider, spirit and wine making, all of which are popular again thanks to the craft beverage movement. Check out a local craft beverage trail, or create your own itinerary. Adventure awaits, and there's a great drink ready for you.

Adirondacks

The ADKs are New York's playground, all year-round. Hit the four major booze groups with stops at Slyboro Cider House, Springbrook Hollow Distillery, Adirondack Winery or Lake Placid Pub and Brewery You can find many Adirondack-made beverages on the Lake George Shoreline Cruises or on the classic Minnie Ha Ha and her sister ships at Lake George Steamboat Company

More info: Adirondack Winery, adkcraftbev.com; Lake George Steamboat Company, lakegeorgesteamboat.com

Berkshires

When most people think "Berkshires," they think Massachusetts. Technically, the eponymous mountain range spans New York's eastern Hudson Valley, as well. Take advantage of the two-state region with a tour of the Hudson-Berkshire Beverage Trail Try 100 percent New York state apple vodka at Harvest Spirits or cold-hearty wines from Furnace Brook Winery Step off the trail to have a beer at Chatham Brewing Company or sip cider from Hilltop Orchards

More info: Hudson Berskshire Wine Festival, hudsonberkshirewinefestival.com; Hudson-Berkshire Beverage Trail, berkshirefarmandtable.org/taste-trails-beer-cider/

Catskills

Some of the best hiking in New York state is in the Catskills, so consider grabbing a growler of beer on your way to your next adventure. (Drink it at the summit.) Start in Schoharie Valley, at one of the stops on the dedicated beverage trail, then move south on Route 30. Cave Mountain Brewing Company or Honey Hollow Brewing Company are sure to please.

More info: Schoharie County Beverage Trail, schohariecounty beveragetrail.com

Mohawk Valley

It should come as no surprise that great beverages can be found in the Mohawk Valley. After all, it was the gateway to the west, shipping goods (including booze) on the Erie Canal. Try Cooperstown, where the Main Street-based Cooperstown Beverage Exchange sells products from Brewery Ommegang, Fly Creek Cider Mill, Pail Shop Vineyards and Cooperstown Distillery. Or travel west on I-90 toward Utica to check out FX Matt (maker of Saranac beers), Villa Verona Vineyard, or ADK Distilling Company

Sign up for The Knick  Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter.

More info: Cooperstown Beverage Trail, cooperstownbeveragetrail.com/beverage-trail-producers

Southern Vermont

Historic, scenic Vermont has become a mecca for craft beer, but don't forget the wine and spirits! At Honora Winery and Vineyard, near Bennington, guests can mix their own wine blends. Try the purple potato vodka or one of the four gin styles at Spirits of Old Bennington distillery

More info: Honora Winery and Vineyard, honorawinery.com; Spirits of Old Bennington, spiritsofoldbennington.com
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Three new enterprise initiatives, funded by Enterprise Ireland, to boost job creation in Tipperary were announced when Minister of State, Pat Breen, visited LEO Tipperary last week.

Exploiting the potential of AgriTech, creating a Digital and Gaming Corridor to link Clonmel and Thurles and the establishment of a Regional Food Cluster are three projects that have received Government backing via the LEO in Tipperary.

During his visit to Clonmel on Thursday, Minister of State for Employment and Small Business, Pat Breen TD said that last June, under the Action Plan for Jobs, my Department announced that 16 proposals put forward by LEOs would receive 2m in funding under the Local Enterprise Office Competitive Fund to support a series of new enterprise and job creation initiatives and collaborations across the Country. I am pleased to announce that LEO Tipperary will lead three out of the six successful applications in the South & East Region and will benefit as partners in two others which is a real boost for the County and indeed the Region enabling local stakeholders to progress a number of high level projects and priorities.

LEO Tipperary has been provided with almost 200,000 in additional funds to drive these three new initiatives. The idea of LEOs working together on a collaborative basis to deliver initiatives for the region is at the heart of the idea behind this competition. I am delighted to see so many ideas and projects emerging and receiving support for their delivery from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.

The LEO in Tipperary operates from two locations, Clonmel and Nenagh in addition to providing outreach clinics at various locations across the County. The LEOs act as a First Stop Shop for anyone seeking information and support relating to starting or growing a business through the provision of direct financial assistance as well as training, mentoring and a sign posting service to other state supports.

Last year LEO Tipperary paid out in grant assistance an amount of 686,295 for 46 projects. At the end of last year LEO client firms showed a net gain in employment numbers of 122 full time and part time jobs, a positive indication of economic recovery in Tipperary.

The Minister met with LEO staff and the Deputy CEO of Tipperary County Council Matt Shortt; 7 LEO clients; an EI client and also visited the Questum Enterprise Centre and the Thurles Chamber Enterprise Centre.
Portroes Niamh Kennedy and Corks Sinead Connery, whose father hails from Tipperary Town, will join 35 other glamorous ladies in Dublin this Friday to vie for the 2016 Miss Ireland title.

Its been an absolutely amazing experience so far. The things weve all got to do and see so far have been unbelievable. I wouldnt take it back for the world its been so much fun, says 2016 Miss Tipperary Niamh Kennedy who has recently signed with Assets Modelling Agency.

And as well as fulfilling all her Miss Tipperary duties, the 22 year old International Finance and Economics student was also behind a hugely successful fundraiser last Saturday in her home village of Portroe for a cause close to Niamhs heart.

My father was diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimers in 2001 and passed away five years ago. Throughout it all the Alzheimers Society of Ireland was a tremendous support to our family so I was honoured to be able to organise a fundraiser event for them.

And while Niamh admits she had felt nervous during the interview rounds when she was crowned Miss Tipp back in May, her many dealings with the media since then have left her confident she can handle any questions the judges throw her way at the final.

Ive had plenty of practice of public speaking since I won and I spoke in front of 150 people at my fundraiser on Saturday, something I wouldnt have been comfortable with before, so Im quite positive about going up on stage in front of the judges. Im just trying to take it all in my stride and have a great time, she says.

Meanwhile paediatric nurse Sinead Connery will also be flying the Tipperary flag in Dublin as Miss Tipperary South after securing her place at the semi final round in July.

The 22 year old CUH intern, whose father Liam is originally from Tipperary Town but now living in Cork, says winning a place in the final has been a dream come true for the long time Miss Ireland fan.

I followed Miss Ireland for years but I wanted to wait until I was a bit older and had more life experience to enter, says the aspiring model who is signed to Cork based agency Lockdown Models.

Im delighted to be representing Tipperary. I spent a lot of time there growing up visiting cousins so I hope I can bring the crown back to Tipp, says Sinead who adds she hopes to be able to juggle her nursing and modelling careers into the future.

Nursing is a versatile job and it's something I always knew Id do but I'm also really interested in pursuing modelling so Id like to continue both into the future. The pageant has been a great way to get my face out there and Ive met loads of wonderful people so far.

I am nervous about the final but Id describe it as excited nerves which Im hoping to transform into positive energy on Friday. It will be a great experience regardless, she laughs.
[September 21, 2016] A-Affordable Insurance Agency Achieves Positive ROI in Four Months with TechCanary's Insurance Solution Built in Salesforce

TechCanary, a provider of a cloud-based, analytics-driven insurance solution and the #1 insurance solution inside the Salesforce CRM platform, today announced its client A-Affordable Insurance Agency, Inc., the largest volume auto insurance agency in Massachusetts, has achieved positive ROI after just four months in production with the TechCanary Insurance Platform. Early benefits range from improved efficiencies to increased revenues through enhanced risk decision making practices. A-Affordable is a high transaction volume agency processing over 12,000 personal auto payments per month, as well as thousands of phone calls daily. Given the high production needs, efficiency is especially key to the operation. While A-Affordable had a traditional agency management system in use, it failed to meet the agency's needs for flexibility and end-to-end process automation. Looking to support its high volume, 105 users, and terabytes of historical data, A-Affordable went in search of a solution that could address all of its agency management needs, but also offered advanced levels of automation including integration with email, electronic signature, accounting, and phone systems. Conducting an extensive market evaluation of available offerings, A-Affordable chose the TechCanary cloud-based, analytics-driven Salesforce CRM-based platform because it was the only option that could deliver the "ideal system", as A-Affordable's CEO and President, Mark Winiker refers to it. After investing approximately 90 days defining A-Affordable's unique requirements and migrating and validating data from thousands of policies, it then took only a few days to go live with all 105 users. A-Affordable managed its own internal training, but A-Affordable's COO, Jason Boggs noted that, "the system is so tuned to the agency's processing and so intuitive that it requires virtually no training, even for new employees." "When I first met with TechCanary they asked me what the perfect solution would look like? I gave them my wish list and can honestly say that's what they delivered. Traditional agency management systems just don't stack up and aren't designed to address the broader needs of today's agencies," commented A-Affordable's Winiker. "We chose te TechCanary platform first to address our efficiency pain, but what has turned out to be a huge bonus and of even greater value are the analytics capabilities it offers. In the past we would spend the bulk of our time and energy just trying to keep up with our high volume of work. With TechCanary, productivity is no longer a concern, allowing us to now focus on how we bring in more revenue and make better risk and pricing decisions. The abilities to create custom fields, processes, and analytics that are included with the TechCanary platform make that aspect of our operation that much more efficient and effective as well."



Winiker continued, "We now have the ability to measure productivity and performance by a variety of criteria, such as conversion ratio or length of time spent on specific tasks. As a result, we've hired a sales trainer who is focusing on helping us to further refine our sales approach and process." Highlights of capabilities the TechCanary productivity platform is enabling at A-Affordable include:

All functionality expected in an agency management system;

Robust customer relationship management (CRM) with SalesForce included as a native part of the system, with no integration required;

Full integration with phone and email, ensuring digital, written and oral communications are automatically part of an account's record;

Seamless integration of DocuSign's electronic signature;

Robust and targeted email marketing;

Deep analytics capabilities;

Automation of business processes from website leads, quotes, follow ups, renewals, and more; and

Ability for A-Affordable to modify all aspects of the system including, but not limited to, screens, fields, email templates, dashboards, reports, automation and workflows. "It has been a tremendous pleasure to work with Mark and Jason to witness the A-Affordable operation evolve to a modern, highly efficient and well-oiled machine. A-Affordable recognized the potential of our technology and knew there had to be a better option than the old school agency management systems," said Reid Holzworth, TechCanary founder and CEO. "We appreciate that they had confidence in our solution and young company to partner with us on this project, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with the A-Affordable team to assist them to derive even greater value." TechCanary's Insurance Platform is a cloud-based, analytics driven solution, well-suited for agencies, brokerages, MGAs, GAs, wholesalers and carriers. Built inside the world's #1 CRM platform Salesforce, the TechCanary solution offers a complete ACORD data structure, support for all lines of business in P&C, life, health and benefits, integration with both email and phone, and all browsers and mobile devices. The platform enables efficient management of the entire insurance sales and service process from lead to sale to ongoing customer support, including renewal. Robust out of the box real-time analytics is included along with fully user-configurable automation and workflows. TechCanary clients can choose from over 3,000 add-on pre-integrated Apps, enabling easy expansion of capabilities and quick-to-value deployment. Included with the TechCanary platform is a Salesforce license. TechCanary professional services are also available for setup, data migration, deployment, configuration assistance, and ongoing support. About A-Affordable Insurance Agency, Inc. A-Affordable Insurance Agency, Inc. was founded on one simple principle: everyone deserves access to affordable insurance. Since 1984, the agency has been devoted to providing Eastern and Central Massachusetts residents with affordable insurance policies for home, auto, and business insurance coverage. To learn more about A-Affordable Insurance, please visit www.a-affordableinsurance.com. About TechCanary TechCanary was born from one insurance professional's dissatisfaction with available agency management and business -automation offerings. Leveraging Salesforce to build a system to successfully manage his own business, Reid Holzworth subsequently founded TechCanary in 2013, making the insurance sales and service productivity platform commercially available. Today, as the #1 insurance solution available on Salesforce, the TechCanary platform supports the sales and service process for all lines of insurance business and for all insurance entities from agency to carriers. To learn more about TechCanary, please call 414-446-3999 or visit www.techcanary.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005101/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Accelerating Growth Globally, Four Communication Security Experts Join KoolSpan TrustCall Team

In response to growth in demand globally, KoolSpan, Inc., announced today that it has appointed noted secure communications experts TK Eppley, Mark Pearson, John Puente and Paul Wood in executive global sales and product management positions. These experts' careers protecting sensitive data for some of the world's most demanding and sensitive organizations add to KoolSpan's (News - Alert) expertise as the company grows its business providing encrypted mobile communications to strategic customers and partners around the world. KoolSpan TrustCall protects mobile communications against the growing number of privacy and security threats affecting governments and businesses across industries and geographies. Flexibly available as either an internal, on-premises solution (TrustCall DIRECT) or subscription service (TrustCall Global Service), TrustCall supports a wide range of devices including Apple (News - Alert), Android and Blackberry smartphones. "We are experiencing accelerating growth in demand for encrypted communication tools and our capabilities as a company have grown alongside," said Nigel Jones, CEO, KoolSpan. "We are bringing on these new team members at a critical time when we are focused on continuing innovation in the encrypted communications marketplace while ensuring that our customers have the best access to our portfolio of advanced solutions across the world." In orderto best serve customers including international enterprises and executives, high net worth families, government agencies, lawyers, finance professionals, R&D organizations and others, KoolSpan named TK Eppley VP of Sales, North America, Mark Pearson as VP of Product Management, John Puente as VP Sales Latin America and the Caribbean and Paul Wood as VP of Sales, Europe, Middle East and Africa.



Eppley, Pearson and Wood come to KoolSpan after serving in a variety of executive roles within Switzerland-based Silent Circle. Puente joined KoolSpan after serving most recently as the founder of an IT consulting practice following a five-year stint with Alexandria, Va.-based communication provider, Cellcrypt (News - Alert). With the appointment of Eppley, Puente and Wood, KoolSpan is tapping into their collective experience to enhance operations and sales in the North American, LATAM/Caribbean and EMEA regions. Pearson is being charged with driving product initiatives from idea to execution and leading efforts to support KoolSpan's current set of products and related features while simultaneously crafting new offerings to support the company's future growth.

Prior to joining KoolSpan, TK Eppley was the Chief Product Officer & Chief of Staff for Silent Circle where he led global operations. Prior to Silent Circle, Eppley was a program manager and senior educator at Blackbird Technologies Inc. He is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL who has led and managed global operations throughout his decorated career. Mark Pearson was previously the VP of Products for Silent Circle, where he was charged with delivering encrypted communications solutions to enterprise customers, managing product offerings and orchestrating sales operations. Prior to that, Pearson worked in the United States and Europe as an independent security consultant and as an instructor to NATO Forces in "Attack the Network" operations. He is a veteran of the British Army and United Kingdom Special Forces. With a 22-year career launching and scaling emerging growth IT wireless and software companies in the Latin America and the Caribbean market, Puente served as Vice President of Sales and General Manager at Cellcrypt from 2009-2014. Prior to that, he was the VP of Sales and GM in Latin America at Orion, a Rockville, Md.-based multinational provider of private, multimedia, network communications services for 7 years, preceding its acquisition by Loral Space Systems; and VP of Business Development and Sales for Qtel (News - Alert) Global. Paul Wood has over 16 years of communications and cyber security experience developing and establishing a market for encrypted communications throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa. His experience includes serving as a communications specialist with the United Kingdom Special Forces and VP Sales EMEA at Silent Circle. Previously, he founded numerous UK-based companies that specialized in cyber security, personal protection, surveillance and investigations, high-value assets, property security, business security and risk assessments. About KoolSpan KoolSpan is the leading provider of robust, cross-platform, end-to-end communication security on mobile devices and desktop phones. KoolSpan offers multiple encryption solutions supporting Android (News - Alert), iPhone and BlackBerry phones. KoolSpan's security and privacy solutions address the growing threat of loss or theft of intellectual property, vital information and proprietary assets. Customers include government organizations and enterprises in over 60 countries worldwide. KoolSpan is FIPS 140-2 validated and has 21 issued patents with dozens more pending. KoolSpan is privately held and based in Bethesda, Md. For more information, visit www.koolspan.com, or follow KoolSpan on Twitter @KoolSpan. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005064/en/

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[September 21, 2016] A.M. Best Affirms Credit Ratings of First Insurance Company of Hawaii, Ltd.

A.M. Best has affirmed the Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of A+ (Superior) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Ratings (Long-Term ICR) of "aa" of First Insurance Company of Hawaii, Ltd. (FICOH) (Honolulu, HI) and its reinsured subsidiaries, collectively referred to as First of Hawaii Group. The outlook of these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable. (See below for a detailed listing of the companies and ratings). The ratings reflect the group's operating results driven by consistently profitable underwriting performance and conservative reserving, its strong balance street and sound local market presence as one of the leading insurance companies in Hawaii. The ratings also consider the operational and financial support provided by the ultimate parent Tokio Marine Holdings, Inc. (TMHD) and its 100% ownership by Tokio Marine North America, Inc., an insurance holding company subsidiary of Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd. (TMNF). These positive rating factors are partially offset by the inherent risks associated with the group operating within a single jurisdiction as it pertains to regulatory, judicial, legislative, and economic factors, and the group's potential exposure to natural catastrophe and terrorism losses. Positive rating action could be taken if the group's operating performance remains strong accompanied by strengthening risk-adjusted capitalization, there is any favorable change i the ratings of TMNF, or if there is a supportive change in A.M. Best's view of FICOH's strategic importance to the ultimate parent. Negative rating action could result if underwriting and operating performance falls markedly short of expectations along with a decline in the group's risk-adjusted capitalization, there is any adverse change in the ratings of TMNF, or if there is an unfavorable change in the strategic importance of the group to the ultimate parent.



The FSR of A+ (Superior) and the Long-Term ICRs of "aa" have been affirmed for First Insurance Company of Hawaii, Ltd. and its following property/casualty subsidiaries: First Fire and Casualty Insurance of Hawaii, Inc.

First Indemnity Insurance of Hawaii, Inc.

First Security Insurance of Hawaii, Inc. This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on A.M. Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see A.M. Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Understanding Best's Credit Ratings.

A.M. Best is the world's oldest and most authoritative insurance rating and information source. For more information, visit www.ambest.com. Copyright  2016 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006038/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Cayman Captive Insurance Visits ASHRM 2016, Orlando, Florida

A 30- strong Cayman Island's delegation, will be heading to Orlando, Florida to represent the jurisdiction's captive insurance industry at the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management annual conference (ASHRM), which takes place on the 25th through the 28th of September. Representatives from the insurance managers, audit and law firms, financial institutions and the island's regulator; the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA (News - Alert)), will be joined by the Hon. Wayne Panton, the Cayman Islands Minister of Financial Services, Commerce and Environment, along with Mr. Jude Scott, CEO of Cayman Finance, in attending ASHRM. The Cayman Islands, the world's leading healthcare captive domicile, with a successful 40-year track record of operating in the healthcare captive industry space, continues to partner with healthcare systems to provide innovative captive centric solutions to the new, larger and more integrated and complex healthcare systems. The healthcare industry in the United States is undergoing exceptional transformation, sparked as a consequence of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Healthcare systems are merging as a result of the search for synergies and economies of scale. The inevitable consequece is that in many instances, the associated captives are also required to merge resulting in an increase in the size, capitalization and usage of the enduring captive enabling them take on new and expanded areas of risk such as non-employed physicians and employee medical stop loss risk.



IMAC Chairperson Kieran O'Mahony will be spearheading the industry delegation in Orlando. "ASHRM is an excellent conference for the Cayman Islands to be represented at. The Islands have many clients who attend each year, which gives us an opportunity to discuss in depth and hear first-hand the ever-changing 'dynamic' that is US Healthcare, prior to the Cayman Captive Forum which will be held on November 29th to December 1st, this year." For more information on IMAC visit www.caymancaptive.ky.

Insurance Managers Association of Cayman (IMAC) is a non-profit organisation run by the insurance managers of the Cayman Islands. In operation since 1981, IMAC's aim is to act as both regulatory liaison with the Cayman Islands Government and to promote the Cayman Islands as a domicile of choice for captive insurance companies. IMAC hosts the world's largest captive insurance conference, attracting nearly 1,500 captive owners, directors, officers, reinsurers, fronting carriers, brokers, consultants and service providers. The Cayman Captive Forum 2016 will be held at The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman from November 29 to December 1, 2016. For more information on IMAC visit www.caymancaptive.ky. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006350/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Centec Networks Closes $47 Million Series E Financing Round Led by China's National IC Fund

Centec Networks, a leading innovator of Ethernet switching silicon and SDN white box solutions, today announced that it has closed a $47 million Series E funding round led by China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (CICF), a national fund established to help develop IC technology companies in China. Founded in 2005, Centec supports an open-networking strategy that has become increasingly popular among data centers, enterprises and carriers who want the most flexible and cost-effective path from 1GE to 10GE, 40GE and 100GE networking capabilities. The company has raised $30 million in previous funding rounds, developed four generations of switching silicon, and has achieved double-digit quarterly growth for the past 3 years. Proceeds from its Series E funding round will be used to develop new products and to scale the company's sales and marketing operations across the globe, especially North America. CICF is joined in the round by existing investor China Electronics Corporation (CEC) through its China Electronics Innovations Fund, which led the company's prior funding round. "This funding round further establishes Centec as one of the top global sources of Ethernet switching silicon, and will enable us to meet growing product demand, accelerate innovation, and launch a new product family for the rapidly growing SDN white box market," said James Sun, CEO of Centec Networks. "The CICF investment also reinforces our position as a leading innovator in the worldwide market for Ethernet switching silicon, and a valued partner for customers entering the Chinese market." "Centec has emerged as a leading competitor in a segment dominated worldwide by a single vendor and has developed impressive switch chips with competitive features using a fraction of the funding a U.S. company would require," sad Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "The additional funding led by CICF will further strengthen its technology and market leadership in China and fuel its major expansion beyond China into the global market."



"Centec is one of the key global vendors of Ethernet switching silicon and emblematic of the growing strength of China's local silicon industry," said Fan Zhiwen, president of network business unit of Fiberhome. "We're pleased to see the company's high growth in recent years and deeper engagement with Fiberhome. We believe this new funding will further fuel Centec's growth and look forward to continuing collaboration with the company in the future." "The market for Ethernet switching silicon is an important one with a very high barrier to entry," said Lu Jun, President of SINO IC Capital (the official investment agency of CICF). "Centec is the national champion in this domain with solid achievements in product deployment and customer engagement over the past years. The prior investment from CEC brought rich business and marketing development resources to Centec, and we believe CICF's investment will further strengthen the company's position as it enters this next stage of rapid growth and market expansion."

Centec supports an open-networking strategy that enables worldwide customers to select the silicon, hardware and operating system solutions they need in each layer of the networking stack. The company has developed and released multiple product generations including switch silicon for 1GE10GE, 40GE and 100GE applications, with OCP's (News - Alert) Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) to ease the integration into both commercial and open source Network Operating System(NOS). Centec has a history of success delivering productized switch platform based on either a commercial or open source NOS for global vendors to integrate and customize for SDN and Open Networking applications., About Centec Centec Networks provides innovative switching silicon and white box solutions that improve SDN deployment while empowering it for carrier, enterprise and data center networks. Leveraging a high-performance open SDN architecture, Centec enables seamless migration from the traditional L2, L3 and MPLS/MPLS-TP architecture to the new SDN era while solving some of SDN's biggest challenges. Centec and its customers are redefining the future of network switching. For more details, please visit the Centec website at http://www.centecnetworks.com. About CICF CICF was established in September 2014 to support the growth of the IC industry in China and enable the integration of the IC supply chain's ecosystem there. With shareholders including China's Ministry of Finance, China Development Bank and China Mobile (News - Alert) Communications Corporation, the CICF has investments in developers of semiconductor technologies, an area of national strategic interest to the Chinese government. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006357/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Devbridge Group Creates Modern Online Banking Experience for Mercantil Commercebank

New Online Banking Application Combines Better User Experience with Greater Functionality CHICAGO, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ -- Devbridge Group, a leading digital products company, announced the launch of Mercantil Commercebank's new online banking site (mercantilcb.com/personal-banking/new-online-banking). Mercantil, one of the largest privately held banks in South Florida, recognized the need to create a better customer experience. The bank sought a partner who had the technical breadth to deliver a stellar product and the industry depth and design expertise to create a scalable, online banking experience. "We had been planning an online banking refresh for quite some time. Our off-the-shelf application simply wasn't cutting it. The product roadmap was slow, and quite frankly we felt that our customers' needs were not being met. Having worked with Devbridge Group on other digital platforms and knowing the company's experience in the financial services sector, we felt confident that they could do the work and do it really well. And they delivered," comments Herbie Folgueira, EVP Operations & Technology, at Mercantil Commercebank. The new site offers greater ease of use and more functionality so customers can manage nearly all aspects of their typical banking activities, when and where it's convenient. Most importantly, by moving Mercantil away from having to support older browsers onto new, modern browsers, the bank is less vulnerable to security risks. O the back end, Devbridge Group included analytics to help Mercantil continually improve the platform around its customers' needs.



Additionally, visitors to the new site will find nearly two dozen new and improved features, including: The ability to download transaction activity to a Microsoft.csv file, Quicken and QuickBooks TM

Paperless statements

Mobile banking enrollment

Advanced search across multiple account types

Online notifications/bill pay

Advanced security features

Enhanced support in Spanish and English "Working with Devbridge Group has been a great experience. We wanted to deliver an online banking application fast and to adopt Agile. Devbridge Group has been a true partner in helping us get there," says Mayte Munoz-Garcia, SVP, IT Implementation & Support Services, Operations & Technology.

About Devbridge Group

Devbridge Group (www.devbridge.com) is a digital products company and strategic partner to upper middle market companies and large enterprises in the Financial Services, Manufacturing and Technology sectors. The company accelerates product to market, engages customers, and motivates employees by combining an agile approach, powerful design, and software engineering expertise. Devbridge Group has offices in the United States, Lithuania, and Canada. About Mercantil Commercebank

Mercantil Commercebank N.A. (mercantilcb.com) is one of the largest banks in South Florida serving its community for over 35 years. Mercantil Servicios Financieros (MSF), the largest provider of financial services in Venezuela with more than 90 years of experience, beneficially owns the Bank through U.S. bank holding companies. Headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida, with assets of $8.3 billion, Mercantil Commercebank has 23 Banking Centers - 16 located in South Florida; and seven in Houston, Texas, and offers a wide variety of domestic, international, personal and commercial banking services. For more information, contact:

Amanda Beto

312-242-1642 (T)

312-675-9221 (M)

[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/devbridge-group-creates-modern-online-banking-experience-for-mercantil-commercebank-300330327.html SOURCE Devbridge Group

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[September 21, 2016] Florida Community Bank Announces Third Annual Pink Day Event in Support of Breast Cancer Awareness

Florida Community Bank, the third largest Florida-based bank, will host its third annual "FCB Pink Day" on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness month. On Pink Day, FCB employees will wear pink in honor of those affected by cancer. Customers and non-customers alike are also encouraged to show their support by visiting any of the 48 FCB banking centers wearing pink. All locations will have complimentary food, refreshments, and giveaways while supplies last. FCB will be making donations to local organizations that are dedicated to finding a cure. Florida Community Bank President and Chief Executive Officer, Kent S. Ellert stated, "FCB Pink Day is a very special day for our company. Each year, we hope that our event will continue to spur awareness of breast cancer and the many preventative measures available to fight this disease." He continued, "On our third Annual FCB Pink Day, and on all days, we recognize our employees, customers and members of the communities we serve impacted by cancer." The complete list of FCB locations and for additional details about FCB Pink Day please visit www.FloridaCommunityBank.com. Visit #FCBPinkDay to follow along with this event and view photos.



About Florida Community Bank Florida Community Bank (NYSE: FCB) is the third largest Florida-based independent bank, and among the most highly capitalized banks in the state. Recently awarded a five-star rating from Bauer Financial, FCB assets are more than $8 billion, with capital ratios that exceed regulatory standards. Since its founding in 2010, FCB has been steadfast in its commitment to delivering personalized service, innovation, and products and services equal to those offered by the national banks with an ever-growing team of highly-experienced associates and financial planning professionals. Similarly, FCB recognizes the importance of community, fostering a corporate culture that promotes employee volunteerism at all levels, while supporting community-based programs and partnerships that help promote greater financial independence and improved quality of life for families. FCB serves individuals, businesses and communities across the state with 48 full-service banking centers from east to west, and from Daytona Beach to Miami-Dade. For more information, visit www.FloridaCommunityBank.com. Equal Housing Lender, Member FDIC.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006171/en/

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HomeSend, Mastercard Aim to Transform the $3bn Remittance Industry in Ethiopia

HomeSend and the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) today announced a new remittance service at the US-Africa Business Forum, that will allow more than 100 million Ethiopians to send funds directly to any mobile number in the East African country.

Launched in 2014, HomeSend is a joint venture of Mastercard, eServGlobal (News - Alert) and BICS that enables business to business cross-border and cross-network transfers. Consumers can send money to and from mobile money accounts, payment cards, bank accounts or cash outlets, regardless of their location or that of the recipient. It is free for receivers and is accessible to anyone with a mobile number, and empowers the sender to transfer funds at a low cost through the HomeSend secure network of money transfer operators and banks.

HomeSend will be available in Ethiopia before the end of the year, says Bekalu Zeleke, President of CBE. "At the CBE, we believe that embracing technology is integral to bringing the best possible service to our customers. HomeSend is an example of how, when working with the right partner, like Mastercard, a financial institution can improve the lives of its customers."

Estimated to be a US$ 3.5 billion industry in Ethiopia, remittance services provides citizens with access to a safe and convenient financial solution, bridging the gap for those previously excluded from the formal financial sector. According to the World Bank Global Financial Inclusion database, only 22 percent of adults in Ethiopia have a financial account with a formal financial institution.







In the 2016 Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) Report it was highlighted that the National Bank of Ethiopia has established several financial inclusion goals in areas such as digital financial services, financial literacy, and payment systems. In 2014, it established a Financial Inclusion Council (FIC (News - Alert)) to advance on inclusive financing and centralize the services offered by various bodies.

"We are committed to helping develop a more inclusive economy, and displacing cash in Ethiopia and across Africa. It's through digital payment solutions such as HomeSend that we are financially empowering people who need it the most," said Daniel Monehin, Division President, Sub Saharan Africa, Mastercard.

"Cash remains the biggest barrier to financial inclusion in Africa. By empowering communities through technology, we provide access to formal financial services which brings with it the opportunity to prosper."

Mastercard continues to rapidly expand the reach of its remittance efforts, including the HomeSend joint venture, with coverage expected to reach more than 70 markets in 2016. These will include a number of new Mobile Money markets, bolstering the interoperability of HomeSend's network and providing consumers with the ability to send and receive remittances globally via a mobile phone.

About Commercial Bank of Ethiopia

Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) is committed to helping meet stakeholders' needs through enhanced financial intermediation globally and supporting national development priorities, by deploying highly motivated, skilled and disciplined employees as well as state-of-the-art technology. We strongly believe that winning the public confidence is the basis of our success. For more information visit the CBE website.

About HomeSend

HomeSend is a joint venture created by Mastercard, eServGlobal and BICS that enables B2B cross-border and cross-network value transfers through a single connection. It builds on the successful deployment of mobile enabled person-to-person transfers in emerging markets and the digitalization of money transfer services. The HomeSend service innovatively bridges the gap between finance and telecommunication service providers and enables consumers to send money to and from mobile money accounts, payment cards, bank accounts or cash outlets - regardless of their location or that of the recipient. Contact us at: https://www.homesend.com/contact-us.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006253/en/
[September 21, 2016] MEDNAX-Affiliated Anesthesiologist Receives First "Physician of Excellence" Designation in the United States by the ERAS Society

MEDNAX, Inc. (NYSE:MD), a national health solutions partner specializing in neonatal and other pediatric services, anesthesiology, radiology, pediatric cardiology and other physician and management services, today announced that MEDNAX-affiliated anesthesiologist William Buhrman, M.D. was named a "Physician of Excellence" in enhanced recovery after surgery implementation, the first U.S. anesthesiologist to receive this honor from the ERAS Society. Optimizing the Perioperative Process The key factors that prolong a patient's hospital stay include the need for pain medication, excessive intravenous fluids and lack of early mobilization. Enhanced recovery after surgery is a multimodal perioperative care pathway designed to address these key factors and optimize the perioperative process through evidence-based best practices, and to provide a roadmap to help clinicians work collaboratively to ensure optimal care. It's also validated by a centralized audit of outcomes. Enhanced recovery programs address the goals of the Institute for Health Improvement's Triple Aim - to improve outcomes, enhance the patient experience and reduce the per capita cost of health care by achieving early recovery for patients undergoing major surgery. Because of this alignment, these programs are gaining traction in the United States across multiple surgical service lines. "The enhanced recovery after surgery initiative is a team effort that requires buy-in and active participation from the entire perioperative team, including surgeons, anesthesiologists, CRNAs and the ptient," said Dr. Buhrman, who spearheads the ERAS program and is an anesthesiologist with Southeast Anesthesia Consultants, the MEDNAX affiliate, practicing at Carolinas Medical Center (CMC) in Charlotte, N.C. "We worked in partnership with the surgeons and administration at CMC, in particular Dionisios Vrochides, M.D. who led the surgery team and was integral to achieving our successful outcomes."



Dr. Buhrman will be presenting on the program and its results at Anesthesiology 2016, the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in October. Enhanced Recovery Results

MEDNAX launched its Enhanced Recovery After Surgery/Perioperative Surgical Home Task Force in 2015, and through its Southeast Anesthesia Consultants practice played an integral role in launching the ERAS Society-based program in the Hepato-Pancreato-Billary (HPB) surgery unit at Carolinas Medical Center. The recognition of Dr. Buhrman as an "ERAS Physician of Excellence," acknowledges the program's outcomes as provided by CMC, which include: 15% reduction in length of stay

12% decrease in readmissions

Reduction of the infection rate to a current rate of zero In addition to Dr. Burhman, MEDNAX-affiliated anesthesiologist Jay Iaconetti, M.D. is leading the enhanced recovery after surgery initiative in partnership with Fairfax Colon and Rectal Surgery Group at Inova (News - Alert) Fairfax Hospital in Va. The practice cares for 300-350 colorectal surgical patients per year under the program. Based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scoring system, the team at Fairfax has seen an increase in patient satisfaction and a decline in length of stay for colorectal patients by one full day. Additionally, outcomes data show that patients eat sooner after surgery, require narcotics less frequently after surgery, and have lower post-operative nausea, vomiting and other symptoms. Next Steps MEDNAX's current network of 45 anesthesia practices will be looking at ways to implement this meaningful initiative. MEDNAX-affiliated anesthesiologists, including Dr. Iaconetti and Dr. Roy Soto, are well-regarded experts on the topic; in fact, Dr. Soto spoke at the ERAS Society's Joint World Congress, Anesthesia Section, in Washington, D.C., in 2015. "Enhanced recovery after surgery represents a paradigm shift in perioperative care in two ways," said Rich Gilbert, M.D. who serves as Chief Medical Officer of MEDNAX's Eastern Division and was the CEO of Southeast Anesthesia Consultants. "First, by implementing evidence based best practice protocols across a given surgical type, there is a reduction in variability, improved outcomes and in turn lower cost of care. Second, it is comprehensive in its scope, covering all areas of the patient's journey through the perioperative process. "From a national perspective, the enhanced recovery program is just one of many initiatives our affiliated practices implement to take great care of patients. They continue to develop and offer solutions to our hospital partners across the country that address the transformation of the U.S. health system toward value-based health care." ABOUT MEDNAX MEDNAX, Inc. is a national health solutions partner comprised of the nation's leading providers of physician services. Physicians and advanced practitioners practicing as part of MEDNAX are reshaping the delivery of care within their specialties and subspecialties, using evidence-based tools, continuous quality initiatives, clinical research and telemedicine to enhance patient outcomes and provide high-quality, cost-effective care. The Company was founded in 1979, and today, through its affiliated professional corporations, MEDNAX provides services through a network of more than 3,400 physicians in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. In addition to its national physician network, MEDNAX provides services to healthcare facilities and physicians in over 40 states through two complementary businesses, consisting of a revenue cycle management company and a consulting services company. Additional information is available at www.mednax.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005273/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Moderna to Build State-of-the-Art Fully Integrated GMP mRNA Clinical Manufacturing Facility in Norwood, Mass.

Moderna Therapeutics, a clinical stage biotechnology company pioneering messenger RNA (mRNA) Therapeutics to create a new generation of transformative medicines for patients, announced today that it has signed a long-term lease (15 years plus renewal options) to build a state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) clinical manufacturing facility in Norwood, Mass. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005422/en/ Moderna is committed to developing a broad array of medicines leveraging its leading mRNA platform, and to delivering on the promise of mRNA science for patients as quickly as possible. Moderna and its partners are simultaneously advancing mRNA drugs for many diseases toward the clinic, and the company anticipates conducting many clinical studies across its portfolio in parallel. To support and manage this anticipated breadth of clinical studies, Moderna's 200,000 square foot Norwood facility will enable the manufacture, quality, control and supply of clinical grade mRNA therapies and vaccines for Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) toxicology studies as well as Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical studies. At the site, Moderna will carry out all manufacturing activities-from raw material production to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), formulation, filling and finish. Moderna will begin initial build-out of the new facility in October 2016. The company plans to open the facility by early 2018. "We are thrilled to announce the site selection for our GMP manufacturing facility, as this is a critical component of the early development engine we are building to advance many mRNA programs in parallel in human clinical studies," said Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna. "With our development pipeline expanding, we need to scale up from our current Cambridge-based GMP clinical supply manufacturing facility. Our Norwood facility will enable us to deliver our mRNA therapies and vaccines quickly, which will support rapid progression from development candidate nomination to human proof-of-concept. I'm very grateful to our team and our partners for enabling us to progress to this exciting next phase in Moderna's history. With the addition of this new facility, we are moving a significant step closer to delivering novel mRNA medicines for patients." Moderna's Norwood clinical supply facility will host GMP manufacturing and quality control; the company's Personalized Cancer Vaccines unit; preclinical technical operations and testing; and general administrative functions to support these teams. At the facility's opening, the annual GMP manufacturing capacity will be 40 GMP mRNA lots and is expected to scale up to over 100 GMP mRNA clinical scale lots annually in the future. Approximately 100 of Moderna's current 460 team members will move from the company's three existing locations in Cambridge, Mass., to the Norwood facility. In addition, Moderna plans to hire more than 100 new employees for the Norwood site. "With the addition of this facility, we are pleased to expand our presence as a driver of innovation in Massachusetts. We appreciate the support we'vereceived at both the state and local levels, and we look forward to creating new jobs and continuing to contribute to the life sciences community and the economy here in Massachusetts," said Mr. Bancel.



"This is quite an ambitious project and will result in a truly unique facility," said Steve Harbin, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing and Operations. "We are designing the Norwood site to accommodate a broad range of GMP manufacturing needs that reflect the diversity of our pipeline-from small-scale, rapid cycle-time manufacturing of personalized cancer vaccines to larger scale Phase 2 clinical study supply across a number of therapeutic areas. This will be among the most integrated end-to-end process facilities I have built and seen in my 25 years working in the pharmaceutical industry." In addition to the Norwood facility, other key components of Moderna's early development engine include its collaborations with leading research organizations Charles River Laboratories, to support GLP toxicology studies, and Pharmaceutical Product Development, LLC (PPD) to support Phase 1 and Phase 2 studies. The company is also building a highly automated and digital enterprise to seamlessly integrate and orchestrate cloud-based IT systems to manage and industrialize the complex planning and execution of its mRNA pipeline scale-up at every stage of development. In addition, Moderna has amassed deep institutional expertise in the U.S. and global regulatory landscape. The ability to share and apply learnings from ongoing regulatory interactions across its ecosystem of internal therapeutically focused ventures and external partners generates a network effect that benefits Moderna and its partners, helping to advance programs through regulatory processes.

About Moderna Therapeutics Moderna is a clinical stage pioneer of messenger RNA Therapeutics, an entirely new in vivo drug technology that produces human proteins, antibodies and entirely novel protein constructs inside patient cells, which are in turn secreted or active intracellularly. This breakthrough platform addresses currently undruggable targets and offers a superior alternative to existing drug modalities for a wide range of diseases and conditions. Moderna is developing and plans to commercialize its innovative mRNA drugs through its own ventures and its strategic relationships with established pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Its current ventures are: Onkaido, focused on oncology, Valera, focused on infectious diseases, Elpidera, focused on rare diseases, and Caperna, focused on personalized cancer vaccines. Founded by Flagship VentureLabs, Cambridge-based Moderna is privately held and currently has strategic agreements with AstraZeneca, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Merck and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. To learn more, visit www.modernatx.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005422/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Morris Animal Foundation Announces 2016 Wildlife Research Grants

Morris Animal Foundation, committed to solving critical health problems of animals around the world, announces 15 new wildlife health research grants totaling nearly $1 million. The grants will fund investigators at 14 prominent research institutions, and include three fellowship training grants for new scientists. The scope of the studies funded covers a diverse set of health challenges across a wide range of species, from a lethal genetic disorder in California condors to deadly fungal diseases threatening the world's amphibian populations. The Foundation's Wildlife Scientific Advisory Board reviewed all submitted grant applications and selected, based on scientific merit and impact, the studies with the greatest potential to save lives, preserve health, and advance veterinary care. Studies funded include: Researchers at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in the United Kingdom will conduct a three-year disease surveillance program to help wildlife managers developa response plan to manage the threat of fungal diseases in Madagascar's amphibians.

Zoological Society of San Diego scientists will study the genetic basis for chondrodystrophy, a lethal form of dwarfism in California condors, to help guide decisions about birds released into the wild or paired in captivity. The California condor remains a critically endangered species, and this genetic disease is threatening recovery efforts.

Researchers with the University of Adelaide in Australia hope to identify populations of retrovirus- and chlamydia-free koalas to increase understanding of the pathogens affecting these animals and assist in conservation efforts. A rapid decline in koala populations in Australia, due to these two major diseases, is threatening the survival of this iconic species.



News - Alert), DVM, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Morris Animal Foundation. "The studies included in this round of funding demonstrate the wide range of health challenges wildlife populations experience, but also give us hope that today's researchers can find ways to protect at-risk populations and ensure they exist for generations to come." About Morris Animal Foundation

Morris Animal Foundation is a global leader in funding scientific studies that advance the health of companion animals, horses and wildlife. Since its founding in 1948, the Foundation has invested more than $103 million toward 2,500 studies that have led to significant breakthroughs in diagnostics, treatments and preventions to benefit animals worldwide. Learn more at Morris Animal Foundation. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005166/en/

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[September 21, 2016] OnProcess Technology to Discuss Using IoT to Transform Post-Sales Services at Managed Services World Congress

OnProcess Technology, a global pioneer in service supply chain management and optimization, today announced it will be a featured speaker at Managed Services World Congress, taking place September 27 - 28, 2016 in London, UK. Buddie Ceronie, the company's VP of Business Development, EMEA, will discuss how businesses can leverage the Internet of Things to dramatically boost efficiencies, drive profits and improve customer experience in the critical post-sale supply chain. "The Internet of Things has the power to transform post-sale services, but most companies don't know how to go about leveraging it, or what results are realistic for their business," said Ceronie. "I look forward to showing attendees how IoT can drive much more accurate planning, streamline processes and slash costs in everything from parts and labor dispatch to customer triage to inventory management and asset recovery." In the session, "Leveraging IoT to Transform Post-Sales Services," on September 28 at 2:40pm, Ceronie will also discuss results of new research by OnProcess and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that using by IoT data to predict machine failures, companies can reduce costly inventory stock while improving their ability to meet service levels.



About Managed Services World Congress

Managed Services World Congress, with its key theme of transformation in 2016, is where senior executives from all over the globe meet and discuss future outsourcing strategies in the world of IT virtualization, advanced networks and the Internet of Everything. MSWC 2016 is focused on the future of communications services operations (4.5/5G, NFV, IoT, big data, analytics) and the journey to get there with the help of strategic partners, with special focus on innovation and integration of examples from other industries. https://tmt.knect365.com/managed-services-world/ About OnProcess Technology

OnProcess Technology is a managed services provider specializing in complex, global service supply chain operations - the flow of people, parts and services following the sale of a product. The company's deep expertise, purpose-built technology delivery and embedded analytics-based process improvement, enable clients to quickly optimize and scale operations, grow revenue and profitability, and deliver superior customer experiences. OnProcess provides services in 26 languages and operates in six global facilities, including its Massachusetts headquarters and facilities in Maine, Costa Rica, India and Bulgaria. www.onprocess.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005046/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Pacamor Kubar Bearings (PKB) Awarded Contract to Support Mars 2020 Mission

Pacamor Kubar Bearings (PKB), a Troy, NY manufacturer of ball bearings for aerospace and defense systems, was recently awarded a contract by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) to supply critical hardware for the Mars 2020 mission. Scheduled to launch in 2020, the robotic science rover will investigate key questions about the habitability of Mars and assess natural resources and hazards in preparation for future human expeditions to the red planet. Under the new contract, PKB will manufacture ball bearings for several motors in the robotic arm actuator and sample caching system. The instruments will enable scientists to identify and select a collection of rock and soil samples that will be analyzed and stored for potential return to Earth. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005227/en/ A computer-generated rendition of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). "PKB has been supporting NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) programs and missions for over 10 years," said Ed Osta, president of Pacamor Kubar Bearings. "We are grateful for NASA and SNC's continued confidence in our ability to produce reliable aerospace bearings for these vital missions. PKB is committed to the success of this mission and proud to partake in this project. We look forward to continuing our longstanding relationships with JPL and SNC." PKB understands the unique challenges presented by aerospace and guidance applications. Temperature extremes an the vacuum of space create demanding requirements for the lubricant type and its ability to withstand the environment. To meet this demand, PKB is providing precise and reliable products in support of successful missions.



"SNC appreciates the PKB's commitment to deliver the promised product within the assured timeline," said Jason Priebe, vice president of productions/operations for SNC's Space Systems business area. "Reliable suppliers are crucial to developing a final product that you're proud to stand behind." PKB is ISO9001:2008 and AS9100 REV C certified, which includes the additional QS requirements specific to the aerospace industry. The company attained certification from the FAA to manufacture bearings per the requirements of TSO-C149, thereby enabling it to provide bearings as replacement parts to FAA certified repair stations. PKB is JCP Certified, which is a joint certification program with United States and Canada.

ABOUT PACAMOR KUBAR BEARINGS Pacamor Kubar Bearings manufactures high performance DFARS compliant miniature and instrument ball bearings for the aerospace, defense, medical, dental, industrial and commercial industries. Customers include major aerospace manufacturers and key resellers as well as various national laboratories and prestigious government organizations such as NASA. PKB provides these industries with precision ball bearings, including those with unique designs and materials used at sub-cryogenic temperatures. For more information on PKB visit www.pacamor.com and follow us at Facebook (News - Alert)/PacamorKubarBearings. Pacamor Kubar Bearings (PKB) offers the right bearing at the right price for all your miniature, precision, and instrument applications. Pacamor Knows Bearings Pacamor Kubar Bearings manufactures DFARS approved FAA TSO-C149 Aircraft Bearings in our ISO 9001:2008 and AS9100 REV C certified factory in Troy, NY. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005227/en/

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[September 21, 2016] RegScan Expands Multilingual Options

WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- RegScan, Inc. proudly announces that we have expanded our multilingual capabilities to nine languages by including Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Italian and Portuguese to our existing support for French, German, Spanish, and English. The updates went online last week, giving global users of the RegScan One platform  particularly non-English speakers in Europe and Asia  increased access to RegScan products and services, making it easier for EHS professionals to streamline operations across their global facilities. Instead of managing separate systems for facilities in each jurisdiction, users of RegScan One tools can access all their legal registers and audit protocols on a single system. Multilingual capabilities eliminate the need for several systems and expand roles for nonEnglish speakers.



"As our reach has continued to expand overseas, we knew we needed to increase our native language options for the non-English speaking world," said Ned Ertel, President and C.E.O. of RegScan. "Since our user interface now covers most major European and Asian languages, we are in a good position to increase our global market share." The RegScan One system allows users to determine which regulations apply, build their own legal registers and audit protocols, and monitor compliance anywhere in the world. It works exactly the same way no matter where you are, from Tokyo to Turin to Tacoma. Information may be accessed through the RegScan One interface, or via web services on any online environmental management system.

Built-in alert tools keep global facility managers up-to-date, and native-language training resources can be made available. Additionally, enhanced services such as our monthly RegScan Country Monitor newsletter publications (English Language only) offer RegScan users expert analysis on current and pending rulemaking. About RegScan:

Independently owned and operated since 1987, RegScan will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year. With dedicated experts in three U.S. states and Washington D.C.  and an ever-growing network of in-country resources  RegScan can always be counted on as a trusted resource for up-to-date regulatory information from every corner of the globe. Do your research and get your alerts through the RegScan One system, or have your content exported via web services to any online environmental management system.

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[September 21, 2016] Siemens Donates Advanced Technology to Support Georgia's THINC College & Career Academy

At a community and industry event held today at the Kia Georgia Training Center in West Point, Georgia, Siemens (News - Alert) Digital Factory, U.S. President, Raj Batra, announced the donation of $100,000 in automation hardware and expert training to support career pathways in manufacturing and engineering at the THINC College & Career Academy located in LaGrange. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006421/en/ Front row: Stuart Countess, Chief Administrative Officer, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, Raj Batra, President, Siemens Digital Factory US; Back row left: Hyun-Jong Shin, President and CEO, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia; Back row right: Chris Carr, Commissioner, Georgia Department of Economic Development at Kia Digital Training Center, West Point, GA (Photo: Business Wire) During the event, Governor Nathan Deal emphasized Georgia's commitment to further fostering public-private-academic partnerships to train the workforce of the future. "We value the continued investments from Kia and Siemens in Georgia and we respect the vision of the companies' leadership," said Deal. "The strong relationships between the company, the community and the state are a model for the kind of partnerships we strive for, as we cultivate the next generation workforce." THINC, designed as a public charter program for high school students in Troup County, was created by a diverse, public-private partnership, offering students the ability to earn college credit at West Georgia Technical College, Point University and LaGrange College, as part of the Move On When Ready Dual Enrollment program. Since its opening in 2009, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia (KMMG) has provided more than $3.54 million in support, funding and scholarships to THINC, includng its Power to Surprise Innovation Center. In addition to offering career pathways that include manufacturing and engineering, THINC also teaches students 13 key fundamental soft skills, such as teamwork, problem solving, communication and cooperation.



Siemens, in partnership with its local distributor, AWC, Inc., will provide automation hardware for THINC's mechatronics laboratory, where students will receive hands-on training, for example, by programming robotic movements. "By partnering with Siemens, THINC mechatronic students will be fully prepared to pursue their career choice, while also being able to offer valuable skills to the future workforce. As a steward of training the next generation of manufacturing employees, we need to make experiential learning a greater focus of our education - this is where our partnership with KMMG and THINC is a natural fit, ensuring students are trained and fluent with one of the most popular and powerful brands in automation," says Raj Batra, President, Siemens Digital Factory, U.S. THINC joins hundreds of educational institutions across the country as part of the Siemens Cooperates with Education (SCE) program, whereby schools partner with Siemens on leading edge industrial technologies in their classrooms, research projects and workforce development initiatives. SCE was established to provide support through equipment, software, instructor and technical guidance. This is the latest of a series of investments as part of Siemens overall commitment to address the workforce skills gap.

During the event, Georgia policy makers, local business leaders and manufacturing executives gathered to discuss best practices, trends and challenges in workforce development. In addition to Gov. Deal's address, attendees heard from Stuart C. Countess, Chief Administrative Officer, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia; Paul Ryan, VP of Trade and Competitiveness, Association of Global Automakers; Chris Carr, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development; Matt Arthur, Deputy Commissioner, Technical College System of Georgia; Martin Pleyer, Chief Operating Officer, Grenzebach and Gail Norris, Director, Technical Training Services, Siemens. According to Batra, the automation hardware being donated to THINC is the same type of equipment that can be found in more than 90 percent of automotive factories globally, including KMMG. Siemens has approximately 2,500 employees in Georgia, primarily in the metropolitan Atlanta area, which is headquarters for three divisions in the U.S., including Digital Factory, Energy Management and Process Industries & Drives. Siemens has a long-standing relationship with Georgia Tech, pursuing manufacturing innovation through software, conducting frontier-pushing research that supports digital product development. Additionally, in a collaborative effort with the Georgia Workforce Initiative, Siemens established a Manufacturing Pathways Program with Lanier Technical College and South Forsyth High School featuring a work study program for careers in manufacturing. This press release, press photos, video and further materials are available at http://siemensusa.synapticdigital.com/Kia Siemens Corporation is a U.S. subsidiary of Siemens AG (News - Alert), a global powerhouse focusing on the areas of electrification, automation and digitalization. One of the world's largest producers of energy-efficient, resource-saving technologies, Siemens is a leading supplier of systems for power generation and transmission as well as medical diagnosis. With approximately 348,000 employees in more than 190 countries, Siemens reported worldwide revenue of $86.2 billion in fiscal 2015. Siemens in the USA reported revenue of $22.4 billion, including $5.5 billion in exports, and employs approximately 50,000 people throughout all 50 states and Puerto Rico. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006421/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Silver Spring Networks Announces Starfish Expansion to Stockholm

Today at Smart Cities Summit, Silver Spring Networks, Inc. (NYSE:SSNI) announced the initial applications leveraging the latest deployment of Starfish in Stockholm, Sweden. Starfish is Silver Spring's international Internet of Things (IoT) public cloud network and data service that arms commercial enterprises, cities, utilities, and developers with two-way command-and-control, near-real time telemetry and industrial-grade security to every device. As part of the EU-funded 'GrowSmarter' program, Silver Spring also announced today that it has been selected to initially deploy its standards-based IPv6 platform and solutions to upgrade aging lighting infrastructure with intelligent street light controls in the capital of Sweden, and to demonstrate the benefits of open standards in this area. GrowSmarter aims to deliver smart innovation energy, infrastructure and mobility solutions in three Lighthouse Cities - Stockholm, Sweden, Barcelona, Spain and Cologne, France - to achieve goals such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent and creating an estimated 1,500 jobs. "Cities and the industry need to collaborate more closely together on innovation to break the status quo of silos and drive more horizontal-focused models," said Gustaf Landahl, Head of Departments, City of Stockholm. "Through GrowSmarter's program and solutions such as those delivered by Silver Spring Networks, Stockholm is closer to meeting its larger sustainability and energy efficiency goals." "We see great synergy between GrowSmarter's program goals and Silver Spring's own vision of a horizontal platform helping to stimulate sustainable innovation within the constraints of city bureaucracy and governance," said Eric Dresselhuys, Executive Vice President of Global Development, Silver Spring Networks. "By demonstrating the efficacy of open standards in enabling interoperability within intelligent lighting systems, we are thrilled to offer Starfish in Stockholm, and to help contribute to the city's larger economic development and sustainability goals." Stockholm will join other cities around the world where Starfish will first be available including Bristol, Copenhagen, Glasgow, London and in Crossmolina, Ireland in Europe; in Chicago, Providence, San Antonio and San Jose in the U.S.; and in Kolkata, ndia.



To learn more on Starfish, join Silver Spring's European Commercial Director for Smart Cities, Brian McGuigan, for a presentation on September 21 at 14.40-15.00 GMT at the Smart Cities Summit in Olympia, London. Or visit www.ssni.com/starfish. Join the Silver Spring Networks Conversation

Read more on the Silver Spring Connect blog at www.ssni.com/blog

Follow @SilverSpringNet on Twitter (News - Alert)

Like Silver Spring Networks on Facebook at www.facebook.com/silverspringnetworks

Learn more about the Wi-Sun Alliance and the value of open standards-based IoT networking at www.wi-sun.org About Silver Spring Networks Silver Spring Networks is a leading networking platform and solutions provider for smart energy networks. Silver Spring's pioneering IPv6 networking platform, with over 24.3 million Silver Spring enabled devices delivered, is connecting utilities to homes and businesses throughout the world with the goal of achieving greater energy efficiency for the planet. Silver Spring's innovative solutions enable utilities to gain operational efficiencies, improve grid reliability, and empower consumers to monitor and manage energy consumption. Silver Spring Networks' customers include major utilities around the globe such as Baltimore Gas & Electric, CitiPower & Powercor, Commonwealth Edison, Consolidated Edison, CPS Energy, Florida Power & Light, Jemena Electricity Networks Limited, Pacific Gas & Electric, Pepco Holdings, Progress Energy, and Singapore Power, among others. To learn more, please visit www.ssni.com Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements about Silver Spring Networks' expectations, plans, intentions, and strategies, including, but not limited to statements regarding the benefits of Silver Spring's Starfish platform; the scope of Silver Spring's engagement with GrowSmarter; and the future availability of Starfish. Statements including words such as "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" or "future" and statements in the future tense are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions, which, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties include the successful implementation of the engagement with GrowSmarter in Stockholm, as well as those described in Silver Spring Networks' documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to Silver Spring Networks as of the date hereof. Silver Spring Networks assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005346/en/

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[September 21, 2016] Todd Krysiewicz Named Senior VP of OnX Enterprise Solutions

TORONTO and NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ -- OnX Enterprise Solutions, a leading enterprise technology services and solutions provider, today announced the appointment of Todd Krysiewicz as Senior Vice President, North American Services Sales, effective immediately. Krysiewicz, a 26-year veteran of the industry, will focus on developing OnX's managed services offerings and continue the ongoing alignment of the company's continuum of services, from core infrastructure solutions to professional and managed services. OnX is aligning its services and solutions offerings within the ever-changing IT industry to provide the maximum value for clients and to accelerate their success. "This is an exciting time to join OnX," said Krysiewicz. "It's a growing, dynamic company and I look forward to strengthening our continuum of professional and managed services offerings to ensure we meet our clients' needs, regardless of how they choose to consume technology." Krysiewicz was selected b OnX CEO Tom Signorello, who took office in August.



"Todd brings exceptional industry expertise and talent to OnX," Signorello said. "He's done outstanding work everywhere he's been and I am delighted to have him as part of our leadership team. His business acumen and track record of success in evolving service strategies and execution will ensure we are bringing the right services to market for our clients." Krysiewicz has held a number of executive leadership positions at prominent tech firms. Before joining OnX, he was vice president global sales  strategic services at Avaya, Inc., global vice president at Unisys Corp., and vice president of Xerox Services. He also held several leadership roles at Computer Sciences Corp.

He is based in Manhattan. He is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University. About OnX Enterprise Solutions OnX Enterprise Solutions is a leading global technology services and solutions provider. The company assesses, designs, builds, secures and manages complete technology environments with specific expertise in Next-Gen Data Center & Hybrid Cloud, IT-as-a-Service, Information Management & Analytics, and Digital & User Experience. For more than 30 years, OnX has helped clients achieve exceptional business results that accelerate their growth and value. OnX's team of more than 600 IT professionals work at OnX offices throughout North America and in the U.K., with global headquarters in Toronto, Canada, and U.S. headquarters in New York, N.Y. For more information about OnX and career opportunities, visit www.OnX.com. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409392

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150120/170196LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/todd-krysiewicz-named-senior-vp-of-onx-enterprise-solutions-300330429.html SOURCE OnX Enterprise Solutions

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[September 21, 2016] VMUG Atlanta UserCon Welcomes Keynote Sanjay Poonen

The VMware User Group (VMUG) is returning to Atlanta on Thursday, October 6, 2016 at the Georgia World Convention Center. This one-day event is designed for all IT professionals currently using VMware and those considering virtualization. The Atlanta VMUG UserCon will position both experts and novices for success with a full day event featuring a packed agenda, including product demos, Hands on Labs, a closing reception and fantastic giveaways. The opening keynote is "VMware: Any application. Any device. Any cloud." by Sanjay Poonen, Executive Vice President and General Manager, End-User Computing, Head of Global Marketing and Communications, VMware. Poonen is responsible for strategy, products, engineering, marketing and sales across all of VMware's Digital Workspace offerings. As the leader of Global Marketing and Communications, Poonen's teams focus on all aspects of marketing to deliver strategies, programs and campaigns, as well as communications and brands for VMware. Attendees will have the opportunity to connect with other users and IT professionals interested in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, explore the Exhibit Hall to learn the latest product nes, and participate in technical sessions from VMware experts on disaster recovery, storage architecture, security and NSX and AirWatch (News - Alert) integration, among many others.



Registration for the Atlanta VMUG UserCon is open to all members of the tech industry. Visit the event details page to view the most up-to-date agenda and register for this must-attend event for VMware users About VMware User Group (VMUG)

VMware User Group (VMUG) is an independent, customer-led organization made up of more than 120,000 members globally, created to maximize members' use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge, sharing, training, collaboration, and events. VMUG is the largest user group in the virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions industry. For more information on VMUG please visit www.vmug.com and view current and past VMUG Voice newsletters at http://www.vmug.com/VMUGVoice. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921006545/en/

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[September 21, 2016] WebAssign Selected as Finalist for 2016 NC Tech Awards

RALEIGH, N.C., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WebAssign, a leading provider of digital instructional solutions for faculty and students, has been selected as a finalist for the NC Tech Awards in two categories, Communications and E-commerce. The NC Tech Awards is North Carolina's only statewide technology awards program, recognizing companies and individuals who have characterized excellence, innovation and leadership, presented by the North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA). Headquartered in Raleigh, on NC State University's Centennial Campus, WebAssign is a benefit company deicated to developing edtech solutions to support STEM education and foster student concept mastery.



"Since 1995, the NC Tech Awards have honored companies for outstanding achievement in the tech sector and use of technology. As a finalist in this year's awards, WebAssign has distinguished itself as one of the state's technology leaders," stated Brooks Raiford, NCTA's President and CEO. A review committee comprised of non-profit, media, education, and technology leaders representing various regions of the state selected this year's finalists. The awards process culminates with the NC Tech Awards Gala on November 10, 2016 at the Raleigh Convention Center where hundreds of leaders from across the state will gather to celebrate the tech sector and honor the winners and finalists in each category.

"We are honored to be recognized in these two categories," said Alex Bloom, president of WebAssign. "We strive to promote, support, and improve education through technology and are pleased to see our efforts recognized by the North Carolina Technology Association." About NCTA

The North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA) is a not-for-profit, membership-driven trade association and the primary voice of the technology industry in North Carolina. NCTA is the intersection of leadership and technology, fueling the growth of North Carolina through Executive Engagement, Public Affairs, and a Knowledge Workforce. For more information, visit our website at www.nctechnology.org. About WebAssign

WebAssign is a flexible and fully customizable online instructional system that puts powerful tools in the hands of teachers, enabling them to deploy assignments, instantly assess individual student performance, and realize their teaching goals. More than eight million students have used WebAssign to submit over 1.7 billion answers to homework assignments, tests, and assessments. Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, WebAssign is an independent, employee-owned benefit company dedicated to education technology. For more information, visit www.webassign.com . NCTA Media Contact:

Jordan Wise, Communications Coordinator

[email protected]

919.890.0776 WebAssign Media Contact:

Annie McQuaid

Senior Marketing Communications Manager

[email protected]

919.829.8181 x124 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130906/CL75373LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webassign-selected-as-finalist-for-2016-nc-tech-awards-300331217.html SOURCE WebAssign

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[September 21, 2016] Zhaopin Announces 2016 Top 100 Employers In China

BEIJING, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Zhaopin Limited (NYSE: ZPIN) ("Zhaopin" or the "Company"), a leading career platform in China focused on connecting users with relevant job opportunities throughout their career lifecycles, announced winners of the "Top 100 China Best Employer Award" for 2016. Among this year's Top 100 employers, 26 companies were from the manufacturing sector, including Audi China, BMW China, BAIC Group and Toyota. Companies in the IT/telecom/electronics/internet sector made significant progress this year, with 24 companies on the list, including Alibaba, Baidu, Didi Chuxing and JD.com. The trade/wholesale/retail/leasing sector had 18 companies edging into the Top 100 list. "The criteria for best employers have changed fundamentally in China over the past decade," said Mr. Evan Guo, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Zhaopin. "Just five years ago, salary and welfare were the most important measures for best employers in China. However, as the number of employees born after the '80s and '90s has increased, equality and respect are becoming essential factors when they evaluate employers. "The old management style and organization structure have been challenged by post '80s and '90s employees," he added. "This year we identified a noteworthy trend in our survey -- the rise of workplace communities among the best employers in China. We believe that such workplace communities will play a vital role in motivating employees and driving organizational success." According to Guo, the three key characteristics for workplace communities comprise: Shared values -- all members possess the same values and goals and enjoy a strong sense of belonging; Partnership -- all members are equal partners who share resources and support each other; and Empowerment -- a flat structure to enable employees to reach their potential and exercise their creativity. The award, now in its 11th consecutive year, has become a valuable reference for job seekers in China. This year's Top 100 list was selected from more than 9,700 companies, a record for the award. More than four million employees and college students in 34 cities voted online this year. The award is jointly issued by Zhaopin and Peking University's Institute of Social Science Survey. The Top 100 list is selected based on four scores, including online voting, candidates' qualifications, experts' evaluation and HR jury voting. About Zhaopin Limited Zhaopin is a leading career platform in China, focusing on connecting users with relevant job opportunities throughout their career lifecycle. The Company's zhaopin.com website is the most popular career platform in China as measured by average daily unique visitors in each of the 12 months ended June 30, 2016, number of registered users as of June 30, 2016 and number of unique customers for the three months ended June 30, 2016. The Company's over 120.0 million registered users include diverse and educated job seekers who are at various stages of their careers and are in demand by employers as a result of the general shortage of skilled and educated workers in China. In the fiscal year ended June 30, 2016, approximately 36.9 million job postings[1] were placed on Zhaopin's platform by 509,813 unique customers including multinational corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises and state-owned entities. The quality and quantity of Zhaopin's users and the resumes in the Company's database attract an increasing number of customers. This in turn leads to more users turning to Zhaopin as their primary recruitment and career- related services provider, creating strong network effects and significant entry barriers for potential competitors. For more information, please visit http://www.zhaopin.com.







[1] Zhaopin calculates the number of job postings by counting the number of newly placed job postings during each respective period. Job postings that were placed prior to a specified period - even if available during such period - are not counted as job postings for such period. Any particular job posting placed on the Company's website may include more than one job opening or position.

Safe Harbor Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements made under the "safe harbor" provisions of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "confident" and similar statements. Zhaopin may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its reports filed with or furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in its annual report to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Any statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Zhaopin's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements that involve factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Such factors and risks include, but not limited to the following: Zhaopin's goals and strategies; its future business development, financial condition and results of operations; its ability to retain and grow its user and customer base for its online career platform; the growth of, and trends in, the markets for its services in China; the demand for and market acceptance of its brand and services; competition in its industry in China; its ability to maintain the network infrastructure necessary to operate its website and mobile applications; relevant government policies and regulations relating to the corporate structure, business and industry; and its ability to protect its users' information and adequately address privacy concerns. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties or factors is included in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. All information provided in this press release is current as of the date of the press release, and Zhaopin does not undertake any obligation to update such information, except as required under applicable law. For more information, please contact: Zhaopin Limited

Ms. Daisy Wang

Investor Relations

[email protected] ICR Beijing

Mr. Edmond Lococo

Phone: +86 10 6583-7510

[email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410211 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zhaopin-announces-2016-top-100-employers-in-china-300331674.html SOURCE Zhaopin Limited

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[September 20, 2016] Menlo Security Named to Prestigious List of SINET Innovators for Cybersecurity

MENLO PARK, Calif., Sept. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Menlo Security, a pioneer of cloud-based malware isolation, today announced that it has been named a SINET innovator, as one of the 16 security start-ups offering cutting edge Cybersecurity technologies to address Web threats and vulnerabilities in the enterprise. SINET is focused on advancing Cybersecurity innovation through public-private collaboration. Sixteen winning companies were selected from a pool of international applicants from nine different countries. "I am proud to recognize Menlo Security as one of this year's SINET 16 Innovators," said Robert Rodriguez, Chairman and Founder of SINET. "Of our four programs each year, Silicon Valley, New York City, Washington DC and London, the Showcase is my favorite as it has a clear deliverable in our mission to advance innovation in the Cybersecurity domain." "Malware coming from the Web and email continues to play a significant role in many of today's high-profile cyber attacks and data breaches," said Poornima DeBolle, co-founder and chief product officer for Menlo Security. "Being named to the SINET list of 16 innovators for Cybersecurity is a great recognition of our pioneering work using Isolation technology to address these major threat vectors." Menlo Security's Isolation solution holds the promise of completely eliminating malware from the Web and email. Unlike current threat prevention systems that attempt to distinguish good content from bad, Menlo Security isolates and executes Web and email content in the cloud, before it can reach user devices. The patented technology is simple to deploy, requires no endpoint software or plug-ins and delivers a 100% secure and completely native user experience, essentially indistinguishable from direct interaction with a web site. This year's SINET entries were evaluated in a two-stage process by the SINET Showcase Steering Committee, comprised of 100 Cybersecurity professionals, including chief security information officers from leading organizations worldwide, experts in government intelligence and defense agencies, distinguished venture capital firms specializing in security, security entrepreneurs and security experts from academia. Menlo Security will present their innovative Cybersecurity products at the SINET Showcase at the National Press Building in Washington, D.C. on November 2nd and 3rd. ABOUT SINET

SINET is a "super connector." We provide a series of platforms for the business of Cybersecurity to take place within the global ecosystem of the entrepreneur including venture capital, investment banking, system integration, academia, science, legal, policy, and industry as well as Government intelligence, military and civilian departments and agencies. SINET programs consistently attract the highest level of international industry and government executives. SINET is well known for its coveted and unparalleled networking opportunities. SINET programs are supported by Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate. Learn more at www.security-innovation.org About Menlo Security

Menlo Security protects organizations from cyber attack by eliminating the threat of malware from Web and email. Menlo Security's cloud based Isolation Platform easily scales to provide comprehensive protection across organizations of any size without requiring end point software or impacting end user experience. Menlo Security is trusted by some of the world's largest enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies and financial services institutions. Backed by General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures and Osage University Partners, Menlo Security is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit http://www.menlosecurity.com or @menlosecurity.







Media Contacts:

Menlo Security Zonic Group PR Peter Lunk Gregory Cross [email protected] [email protected]

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/menlo-security-named-to-prestigious-list-of-sinet-innovators-for-cybersecurity-300331413.html SOURCE Menlo Security

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[September 20, 2016] BOD Tech Announces Partnership with Largest Laundry Service to Launch Laundry.com.mm

SINGAPORE, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, BOD Tech's CEO Mike Than Tun Win and Laundry.com.mm's CEO Sai Lin jointly announce the launch of a new professional laundry service in Yangon: Laundry.com.mm. The new service, launched as a mobile app, has commenced operations in Myanmar's largest city by catering to the needs of Yangon's burgeoning expat community and affluent local community by providing top-tier laundry service for professionals. The exclusive partnership with Shine Professional Dry Cleaning and Laundry Service will guarantee the professional service customers know and trust while charging the same prices with a time-saving additional surcharge for timely pickup and delivery. CEO Sai Lin, an NTU graduate who has years of experience working in Singapore's commodities trading sector and building and construction industry, returnd to Myanmar in 2016 and has started Laundry.com.mm with BOD Tech's CEO Mike Than Tun Win. Of the new endeavor, Lin stated: "We are confident that with the partnering of Shine, our laundry service will have no difference with any other international laundry service provider. With the improvement of standard of living in Yangon, the demand for professional laundry is also increasing, especially for dry cleaning services. The traffic in Yangon is getting more congested these days and we believe our service will greatly benefit those who will want to avoid heavy traffic just to send their laundry." He concluded, "We are confident that our service will be a great convenience to our customers and they will have more time to do what really matters to them." Daw Swe Swe Naing, General Manager of Shine, who has been with the company for 20 years is looking forward to the partnership with Laundry.com.mm - a business model that has never been done before in Myanmar.



About Laundry.com.mm Laundry.com.mm is a new laundry service that will revolutionize the way Yangon's expat and local professional community clean their clothes. In partnership with Shine Professional Dry Cleaning and Laundry Service and powered by BOD Tech, Laundry.com.mm will offer its customers a new way to take care of their most basic and time-consuming chores straight from their smartphones. Plans to provide other basic but necessary cleaning services, such as household cleaning and air-con servicing, are part of Laundry.com.mm's roadmap to success.

Media Contact:

Melissa Lim

+65-9189-8338

[email protected]



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[September 20, 2016] Santa Claus is Now Officially on Weibo

ROVANIEMI, Finland, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As Santa Claus prepares for the Christmas ahead in his official hometown Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle in Lapland, Finland, he started thinking about all the Chinese people that have visited him recently: how could he better reach them and all their friends in China? (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409205 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160919/409206 )

Luckily, one of his savvy elves is up to date with social networking, and recommended Santa join Weibo, China's most popular social medium. Weibo and Santa Claus were a perfect match, and they quickly decided to work together for the common good. Santa will be sharing moments of hislife at the Arctic Circle



As a result, Santa Claus has now officially joined the Weibo community! The world's most famous person's verified personal Weibo account will be launched on Thursday September 22nd, and Santa Claus is eager to get in contact with all his friends in China. - Ni hao! I'm so happy I finally have a terrific way of reaching all my Chinese friends. I have many wonderful things to share with you from my hometown Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland, says Santa Claus.

Through his Weibo account, Santa plans to share special moments of his life at the Arctic Circle, where he receives visitors every single day of the year. Besides everyday chores, the changing seasons and phenomena like the Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun make sure Santa Claus always has some interesting posts from Rovaniemi for his followers. Mayor of Rovaniemi: we are thrilled Rovaniemi, the Official Hometown of Santa Claus, is thrilled to have its premier resident reach a whole new audience across the globe and hope many of Santa's Chinese friends have the chance of meeting him in person one day. - Meeting Santa Claus is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many, and Rovaniemi is thrilled to offer the opportunity to Chinese travellers looking for a unique holiday in Lapland, says Mayor Esko Lotvonen. Santa Claus' verified Weibo account: http://www.weibo.com/santaclausofficial Further information : Sanna Karkkainen

Managing Director, Visit Rovaniemi, Finland

+358-40-576-3414

[email protected]

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[September 20, 2016] Planet Hosts European Union Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska at San Francisco Headquarters

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Planet today hosted EU Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska at their San Francisco office and manufacturing facility. Bienkowska is the EU Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). In her position, Commissioner Bienkowska works to ensure that the EU remains a healthy place for entrepreneurs and new technology companies. She is also responsible for the EU's space policy, which aims to open up new opportunities for space-based applications and services and to attract new players to enter the space industry. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150928/271386LOGO As a space technology company with offices in Berlin and Amsterdam, Planet was excited to host Commissioner Bienkowska. During hervisit, she toured Planet's satellite manufacturing facilities and learned about Planet's one-of-a-kind, automated data chain that includes a growing constellation of over 65 imaging satellites; a global network of ground stations; a cloud-based data processing pipeline; and an online software product that allows end-users to access and analyze satellite imagery instantly online.



"Hosting Commissioner Bienkowska at Planet's offices in San Francisco was an honour," said Will Marshall, Planet CEO and Co-Founder. "Planet's expansion in Europe with our Amsterdam office and RapidEye team in Berlin means EU space policy and data applications are a top priority. We very much enjoyed hearing about the Commissioner's vision for expanding opportunities for innovation in Europe and look forward to playing a central role in the EU's participation in the Space Renaissance." During the Commissioner's visit, discussions with Planet's leadership centered on the hosting of EU-derived data streams on Planet's platform as well as the region's broader space policies. "We are working to ensure that Europe offers exciting opportunities for space technology which ultimately delivers new apps and services," said Commissioner Bienkowska following the visit.

Planet looks forward to continuing a fruitful dialogue with Commissioner Bienkowska regarding the state of space technology and new data sources in the EU. About Planet:

Planet designs, builds and operates the world's largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. Planet's mission is to image the entire Earth, every day and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. With the complementary RapidEye constellation, Planet has an image archive from 2009 and a network of over one hundred partners around the world. See change. Change the world. To learn more visit http://www.planet.com. Media Contact:

Trevor Hammond

[email protected]

1 (415) 829-3313

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[September 20, 2016] NGINX and Ashnik Partner to Offer Indian Businesses Enterprise-Grade Application Delivery at a Fraction of the Cost

MUMBAI, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Partnership Provides Scalable, Flexible NGINX Plus Solution for Building Data Centers and Replacing Legacy Load Balancers NGINX, Inc., the engine delivering sites and applications for the modern web, today announced that it has appointed Ashnik, one of the leading providers of open source solutions in Southeast Asia (SEA) and India, as its exclusive distribution partner in India. Ashnik, a highly focused group of senior industry professionals, offers technology solutions based on open source, cloud, and leading technologies to help address dynamically-changing business challenges. Through this partnership, the two companies are bringing NGINX Plus to the Indian market. NGINX Plus is the complete application delivery platform for the modern web. Built on the open source NGINX, the world's most popular open source web server and reverse proxy for high-traffic sites, NGINX Plus adds award-winning technical support and enterprise-ready features for advanced load balancing, web and mobile acceleration, application security, monitoring and management. "We are excited about our partnership with NGINX, which allows us to empower our enterprise customers to move to high quality, software-based load balancers, reducing total cost of ownership by up to 85% over expensive hardware vendors," said Sandeep Khuperkar, Director, India at Ashink. "Furthermore, with application-based pricing, our customers can use unlimited NGINX Plus instances to support their entire application (including load balancing, caching, web and media serving, and more) across all production, test, and development environments, including cloud and microservices-based applications." NGINX Plus includes advanced functionality designed for mission-critical production environments, simplifies development and alleviates operational risk through enterprise-class support. As a key partner in India, Ashnik is helping organizations harness the power of NGINX through its consulting, systems integration, and implementation services. The relationship brings Ashnik one step closer to bringing the scalable, battle-tested open source ecosystem under one roof, where Ashnik i already offering solutions in the areas of databases, business intelligence, big data and containers.



"At NGINX, our main priority is to provide solutions that allow customers to deliver their sites and applications - whether in the cloud or on-premise - with high performance, reliability, security, and scale," said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, Inc. "We feel that Ashnik, with expertise in a variety of modern, open source solutions, is the right distribution partner for NGINX to grow our integrated application delivery platform's reach in India and throughout Southeast Asia. We look forward to continued success through our partnership with Ashnik." NGINX was recently recognised by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant Report for Application Delivery Controllers. The company also received the highest score in the Mode 2 Application Development and Mode 1/Mode 2 Hybrid ADC use cases in Modern Application Delivery in the Critical Capabilities Report for ADC.

To view the full text of the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers and Critical Capabilities reports, visit: https://www.nginx.com/gartner2016 To know more about Ashnik and NGINX partnership, please visit here. Gartner Disclaimer Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. [1] Gartner "[Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers]" by [Andrew Lerner, Joe Skorupa, Danilo Ciscato], [August 29, 2016]. [2] Gartner "[Critical Capabilities for Application Delivery Controllers]" by [Mark Fabbi, Danilo Ciscato, Andrew Lerner], [August 29, 2016]. About NGINX, Inc NGINX is the heart of the modern web - helping the world's most innovative companies deliver their sites and applications with performance, reliability, security, and scale. The company offers an award-winning, comprehensive application delivery platform in use on more than 160 million sites worldwide. Companies around the world rely on NGINX to ensure flawless digital experiences through features such as advanced load balancing, web and mobile acceleration, security controls, application monitoring, and management. More than half of the Internet's busiest websites rely on NGINX, including Airbnb, Box, Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, SoundCloud, and Zappos. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Moscow and London. Learn more at https://www.nginx.com/ About Ashnik Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Ashnik is a Singapore headquartered leading open source solutions provider, with presence across South East Asia, US and India. Ashnik team members have experience in helping enterprises adopt open source solutions since 2001. Building on this strong foundation, Ashnik was setup in 2009 in Singapore to bring open source technologies to the market. Ashnik, as a business solution provider, is leveraging key open source products such as Pentaho, EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Couchbase, Hadoop, Red Hat, Docker and Elastic Stack to support the entire big data ecosystem. These technologies are backed by Ashnik's strong solutioning and architecting skills sets. Visit http://www.ashnik.com to know more. Media Contact:

Sandeep Khuperkar

[email protected]

+91-22-25771219, +91-9987536436

Director, India

Ashnik Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd.



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[September 21, 2016] Lilly Singh Celebrates Her Birthday by Supporting a Global Cause with the Launch of new #GirlLove ME to WE Rafiki Bracelet

Each #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet helps provide a girl in Kenya with access to primary school education TORONTO, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ -- Yesterday at WE Day Minnesota, comedian, actress and YouTube entertainer, Lilly Singh launched the #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet, her first-ever accessory piece with ME to WE, a social enterprise that creates socially-conscious products and experiences that allow people to do good through their everyday choices. Available for purchase at www.we.org/GirlLove the #GirlLove Rafiki is Lilly's continuation of #GirlLove, a social media campaign encouraging women to stop the girl-on-girl hate and start spreading the love. Every $15 purchase of a #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet will help provide a girl in Kenya with access to primary school education. In Swahili, the word for friend is rafiki  Lilly's #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet acts as a reminder for girls to build each other up, leave behind negativity and achieve amazing things together. Lilly's bracelet is made with metallic and natural-toned beads with a delicate #GIRLLOVE silver paillette charm which acts as a daily reminder to embrace sisterhood and live WE. "When I saw the #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet for the first time I thought it was exactly what I wanted it to be. The bracelet represents not only my passion for #GirlLove, but me acting on that passion," said Lilly Singh "In Kenya, not all girls are able to go to school and while on my ME to WE Trip, I was honoured to meet three girls currently studying at Kisaruni All Girls Secondary School. As they walked me through the Kisaruni campus, I could see how going to school has given them more than an education, but confidence and ambition. All girls should have that opportunity and that's why proceeds from my bracelet go towards giving Kenyan girls the chance to go to primary school." ME to WE is part of the WE Movement, which brings people together and giving them the tools to change the orld locally and globally, achieving transformative outcomes for themselves and others. ME to WE creates socially-conscious products and experiences including handmade ME to WE Artisans accessory pieces and ME to WE trips. Working alongside ME to WE Artisans in Kenya, Lilly designed her first-ever accessory piece drawing from beading traditions deeply-rooted in the Kenyan culture.



This summer, Lilly travelled with ME to WE to Kenya's Maasai Mara region where she immersed herself in the community and learned about its customs. In addition to Kisaruni All Girls Secondary School, Lilly visited ME to WE's Women's Empowerment Centre where she joined Kenyan mamas in a traditional beading circle. While sitting with the mamas, Lilly felt their strength as a group and saw its ripple effect in the community throughout the duration of her trip. With a sustainable income, each woman can access education, support her family or start her own business. "The #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet is so much more than an accessory, it's empowering Kenyan mamas to earn an income, granting girls access to education and encouraging sisterhood amongst girls," said Roxanne Joyal, CEO of ME to WE. "We are so excited to be collaborating with Lilly Singh and uniting girls and women across the globe to create change."

ME to WE Artisans pieces are beautifully handcrafted by women in Kenya using traditional skills passed down through generations. Each piece celebrates heritage art forms and provides artisans with an income and the empowerment to become a respected voice in the community. Join Lilly's mission to end girl-on-girl hate and celebrate her birthday by visiting WE.org and purchasing a #GirlLove Rafiki Bracelet. High resolution images available here: http://send.freethechildren.com/I5DnQBBGc2

Photography credit: Jesse Giddings Follow ME to WE on:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram Follow the Girl Love movement on:

Twitter

Instagram

#GirlLove About ME to WE ME to WE creates socially conscious products and experiences that allow people to do good through their everyday choices. These products and experiences include handmade ME to WE artisans accessories, ME to WE immersive volunteer trips and ME to WE leadership programming. Half of all ME to WE's profits are donated to support WE Charity, while the other half is reinvested to grow the mission of the social enterprise. ME to WE is a fully transparent model backed by its Track Your Impact promise. The positive impact of products and experiences can be traced to a WE Villages partner community where it was delivered. For more information please contact:

Vanessa Morcom

Public Relations, ME to WE

+1.647.407.4570

[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lilly-singh-celebrates-her-birthday-by-supporting-a-global-cause-with-the-launch-of-new-girllove-me-to-we-rafiki-bracelet-300331579.html SOURCE ME to WE

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[September 21, 2016] California Community Colleges Expand Student Access to IT Training Using NETLAB+

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In a statewide effort, California Community Colleges are rapidly expanding the use of NETLAB+ to give students round-the-clock access to Career Technical Education (CTE) training and virtual labs. Nearly 50 colleges are using the virtual lab system for courses that prepare students for jobs in IT. A regional sharing model enables participating colleges to offer courses that support training for Certifications from the industry's most recognized providers like Cisco, CompTIA and VMware. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410051 In a recent interview, Jim Cosentino, Administrator for the Northern Region's shared NETLAB+ hub describes what it took to install the system containing more than 1,400 virtual computers. He also explains why the use of NETLAB+ is growing among the 113-college system. "NETLAB+ gives colleges the ability to do remote labs with equipment they don't typically have," said Cosentino. "The lab setups are made up of one to eight virtual computers called a pod. This is notsomething easy to do in a physical lab on campus. The ability to offer a multitude of classes without each campus investing in expensive lab equipment is a major benefit of using a virtual lab system."



Instructors receive training on how to use NETLAB+ and easily access virtual lab equipment and curriculum for classes installed on the system. In the first eight months of usage, nearly 15 instructors in the Northern Region taught classes using NETLAB+ and the demand for courses is growing. The Bay Area Community College Consortium also hosts a NETLAB+ hub which services the area's 28 community colleges. Click here to read the full interview. NETLAB+ is a product of Network Development Group (NDG), a company that combines business and passion for educational empowerment for students by providing many cost effective and free services. Funding for NETLAB+ at the California Community Colleges comes from many sources, and grant support is provided by the Information Communication Technologies and Digital Media Sector, part of the California Community Colleges Doing What Matters program. The ICT Sector team developed and promotes a NETLAB+ User Group to help faculty use and write grants for the system.

Contact:

Steve Wright

Sector Navigator

Information Communication Technologies and Digital Media

California Community Colleges

(805) 496-8583

Email

http://ict-dm.net To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/california-community-colleges-expand-student-access-to-it-training-using-netlab-300331535.html SOURCE California Community Colleges

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[September 21, 2016] More Rural Hospitals Choosing Telemedicine for Night Coverage Solutions

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Telemedicine has helped rural hospitals increase patient census and avoid transfers. Telemedicine is also proving particularly successful in addressing staffing gaps at rural hospitals, and solving their night coverage challenges. Eagle Telemedicine will share success stories and best practices with attendees at the National Rural Hospital Association's 15th Critical Access Hospital Conference Sept. 21-23, 2016, in Kansas City. Eagle Telemedicine representatives will be at Booth #103 throughout the conference. An NRHA Gold Partner, Eagle invites attendees to visit and register for a raffle for a free iPad mini. "Cost savings are significant when hospitals aren't paying 'full freight' for one physician, but sharing those costs with other facilities that use the same telemedicine services for nighttime care," said Dr. Talbot "Mac" McCormick, President and CEO of Eagle, a physician-led hospitalist management firm providing turnkey programs, Clinical Performance Management (CPM) solutions, and telemedicine services. Results are impressive

Rural hospitals working with Eagle have achieved: Up to 40% savings on nighttime coverage

50% increase in nighttime admissions

An average response time of 1 minute and 9 seconds from the time nurses call telehospitalists to the time the physician is interacting remotely with patients Though telemedicine can include many types of electronic communication, Eagle's approach uses a cart or rbot on wheels with a two-way videoconferencing monitor that brings a patient face-to-face with a physician, who is "beamed in" from a remote location. The physician and patient have direct interaction, and the technology enables the physician to monitor the patient remotely with a stethoscope, otoscope, and blood pressure gauge. It can also transmit still images such as photos and X-rays for interpretation by the physician.



Bringing the doctor to the patient

"Telemedicine's purpose is not to take over or supplant person-to-person physician care. Rather, its most important value is to augment and support physicians and clinical staff. It can be a cost-effective solution in circumstances where physician resources are scarce, and healthcare needs to be administered quickly," Dr. McCormick said. Typically, one remote physician is involved each night from a pool of two or three physicians who are assigned to a particular hospital. The telehospitalist will take patient handoffs from the daytime providers of care, whether an NP, PA or physician. If a patient has a change at any time during the night, the telehospitalist stands ready to respond to rapid responses and codes, and to admit new patients from the ED as necessary.

Especially in rural hospitals, lower admission rates at night often do not warrant a full-time nocturnist, so day-time physicians must work nights or split shifts. "It's not an ideal solution," Dr. McCormick said. "We look forward to sharing with NRHA conference attendees how telemedicine contributes to a sustainable work schedule and stable staffing for hospitals that struggle with night staffing." About Eagle Telemedicine

Founded in 2008, Eagle Telemedicine was one of the first companies to emerge in the telemedicine physician service arena and continues to serve as a pioneer in the industry today, leading practical solutions, management tools and innovation through the use of telemedicine. Eagle currently offers telemedicine programs and solutions in: Hospitalist Medicine, Stroke and Acute Neurology, Psychiatric Care, and Critical Care. The company was launched through Eagle Hospital Physicians, which develops and supports hospitalist physician practices serving hospitals in more than a dozen states. For more information, visit www.eagletelemedicine.com. Media Contact

Jan Sisko

Carabiner Communications

678.591.2022

[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/more-rural-hospitals-choosing-telemedicine-for-night-coverage-solutions-300331605.html SOURCE Eagle Telemedicine

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[September 21, 2016] ATC Global 2016 Concludes On A High Note with Essential Takeaways for Future ATM Growth

BEIJING, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ATC Global, the annual meeting place for the international Air Traffic Management (ATM) community, ended its three-day event with global and Chinese air navigation service providers, civil aviation authorities, airports and airport authorities, airlines, air traffic controllers, regulators, consultancies, system manufacturers and military, who were all actively engaged in focused discussions and business networking activities in Beijing. Organised by UBM, co-organised by the Civil Aviation Museum, and sponsored by ATMB and supported by Eurocontrol and UVS International, the conference, with the theme "Working Together", was officially opened by International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Secretary General, Dr. Liu Fang, who shared that Asia is leading the global growth and the importance of collaboration and harmonisation, which is the role of ICAO Global Air Navigation Plan. She also added that the adoption and implementation of new capabilities was happening at different paces across the globe and that ICAO's No Country Left Behind (NCLB) campaign would help double the effort to support and assist states that fell below the global median for implementation. The three-day conference and two-day workshop and seminar provided attendees with insight and revealed other essential takeaways to spur ATM growth. According to Nikita Danilov, the Deputy Director General at the State ATM Corporation of Russia, the corporation has continuously een consolidating its air traffic control centres, which have been reduced from 118 in 2005 to 37 in 2016, and will be reduced further to 13 by 2020. He also commented on high traffic growth, especially transpolar, where the 4-route system of the year 2000 has been expanded to 18 routes today.



The President of the Air Navigation Commission of ICAO, Farid Zizi, also added that their Global Air Navigation Plan (GANP) has set goals but that does not guarantee implementation. As such, one of the areas which has not been clarified is the avionics roadmap. This will take 25 years of planning to deliver an effective operational solution across a large population of aircraft. ICAO is planning a GANP symposium in 2017 as a precursor to an update of the Global Plan at the next ICAO Air Navigation Conference, which will be held in 2018. ATC Global Event Director, Christine Guan, commented that the vibrant exchange of best practices, experiences and technologies across various government agencies and international organisations over the past few days underscores the event's significance as the premier platform for global ATM stakeholders to have insightful exchange of conversations and to collaborate to find innovative solutions to address various air traffic challenges.

Visitors to the show floor were also treated to an equally appealing show as exhibitors demonstrated extra effort to create unique and outstanding booths to engage and entice them. The show floor was filled with showcases from leading international exhibitors such as Thales' ECOsystem, Honeywell's SmartRunway and SmartLanding system, Inmarsat's Swiftbroadband-Safety, Azimut's ATC system -- GALAXY, LEOSPHERE's Windcube, Almaz-Antey's Sintez-AR2 and other ranges of products and solutions including ATM software development and installation, turnkey solutions, surveillance solutions, AFTN/SITA and ATN/AMHS message switching solutions, air data communications and meteorological reporting solutions. A total of 106 meetings were also scheduled with hosted buyers. One of the hosted buyers, Sanjiv Gautam, the Director General of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, commented that ATC Global is the best platform for all the manufacturers, as well as the service providers, to get together and to find best solutions for safe air transportation. He also added that the industry could gain insights from manufacturers, service providers and ICAO; as well as the best practices among the nations who had participated in this event. The next edition will return to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and will be held at Abu Dhabi National Centre (ADNEC), from 25 to 27 September 2017. For more information on ATC Global 2017, please visit www.atcglobalhub.com. For further information, images or to request an interview regarding the release, please contact: Patricia Chong

International Marketing Manager

t: +86 21 6157 7221

e: [email protected] About ATC Global www.atcglobalhub.com About UBM China For more information, visit the website. Logo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160921/0861609732LOGO

Photo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160921/0861609732

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[September 21, 2016] REP Interactive CEO Judy Gatena Offers Perspective On Changing Careers After 40

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- At the age of 25, Judy Gatena was searching for a solution that would allow her to stay at home while still providing for her family. Gatena faced the choice of endless day care and long hours working to make ends meet or forging her own path as an entrepreneur. She explored the business trends that were expanding at the time, knowing that her choice in career would have a lasting impact on her family. Weighing the importance of being present as a mother, she knew that utilizing emerging technology to create a home-based business was essential. Her research and intuition paid off in 1991, with the creation of Abacus One, a printer and computer supply shop that pre-dated the emergence of behemoths like Staples and Office Depot. Gatena courted business and corporate clients, offering personalized services unlike typical brick and mortar stores. Abacus One had a focus on service that allowed it to continue growing in spite of increased competition from online retail giants like Amazon. Unlike the competition, Abacus One partnered with various data services companies support that could identify and remedy critical issues well beyond the realm of personal shopping or big box discount chains. The Challenges and Rewards of Changing Careers By every measurable standard, Gatena was successful with Abacus One. She had built a solid company from scratch, based upon an original idea for an expanding niche. But after she no longer had to fill both the roles of provider and caregiver, she was faced with the question of whether her talents were being put to the best use. Her son, Steven, graduated from the University of Southern California and had begun setting up a business based in part on a concept they had brainstored together. In its earliest incarnation, REP Interactive was a real estate-focused video production company.



Judy Gatena joined REP as President and COO in order to guide the fledgling company's operations and act as an advisor to the young entrepreneur following in her footsteps. A commitment to work a "few hours" each week quickly escalated. The company vision expanded beyond the real estate marketplace, fueled in part by the addition of Chris Carter in sales and marketing. Gatena's data-driven personality combined with Carter's marketing skills to guide the development of REP's media prospects, finding another under-served area for which she could leverage tools provided by emerging technologies. Through the experience of producing real estate videos for online consumption, the team at REP had invested a considerable amount of time exploring the possibilities of streaming video as a marketing tool. With a small cadre of creative talent under its umbrella, REP slowly began amassing awards for its expanding client base -- including a diverse collection of corporate powerhouses eager to tap into new media advertising. Gatena discovered that she thrived in a creative environment. While Abacus One remained a solid business with a loyal customer base, it no longer relied on her for innovation and daily oversight. When Steven was recruited away from REP in 2015 to pursue new challenges, his mother took the opportunity to step into the role of CEO and focus on the long-term vision and strategy of the now well-established production company/creative agency hybrid. What had begun as a spark of an idea to launch a niche company had become a mainstream industry player under her management, and stepping into the role of CEO completed Gatena's "after 40" career transition.

"When I started out, my focus was on making ends meet, just finding a way to take care of my family. I stuck with what I was good at, parsing data, figuring out my core client base and providing a service that no one else was offering. And it was great, but I never took the time to realize that I was missing something, that there were sides of me I had not been able to explore. Sometimes it takes a lot of life experience to really discover what you are meant to do, and I was fortunate

enough to have a son who could help me find that through a shared venture. For years, I thought 'this is what I do, this is my job,' and never expected to move beyond that. But when your talent collides with a job that sparks your passion, it is suddenly easy to see that there is more over that horizon. Just because you didn't see it before didn't mean it wasn't there -- moving forward, suddenly it's visible. Move forward some more, you can grab it. Change can happen at any

age. We only have to be willing to challenge ourselves, find our passions even if we didn't know they were there, and embrace the opportunities that come our way." -- Judy Gatena, CEO of REP Interactive About REP Interactive

Founded in 2009, REP Interactive has created hundreds of video projects for Fortune 500 Companies and Government Organizations. Based in Los Angeles, CA with satellite offices in La Jolla, California and Morristown, New Jersey, REP is the proud winner of over 142 awards including W3s, Tellys, Stevies, Communicators and Daveys. With a bursting portfolio of over 138 clients, the agency is composed of dedicated employees who believe in empowering every organization through the use of storytelling with video and broadcast media. For more information, visit http://www.REPInteractive.com. Media Contact

Nicholas Muntz

Account Manager

REP Interactive

888.789.1299 x100

[email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409845 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rep-interactive-ceo-judy-gatena-offers-perspective-on-changing-careers-after-40-300331171.html SOURCE REP Interactive

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[September 21, 2016] Verve Releases New Research on Mobile Prodigies - Generation Z and Millennials

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Verve, the leading location-based mobile advertising company, today released new research on Millennials and Generation Z, two groups of young mobile experts that Verve now terms Mobile Prodigies. Highlighting how deeply these younger consumers value their mobile devices and how quickly new mobile technology and apps are becoming an integrated part of their lifestyle, key insights from the report include: 60% of Mobile Prodigies ages 1417 would prefer to lose their wallet instead of their phone.

80% of Mobile Prodigies said that they spend more time on mobile apps than they did a year ago.

95% said they make purchases in brick-and-mortar stores based on ads they have seen on their mobile device.

More than 1-in-4 Mobile Prodigies use a mobile phone while shopping in a physical store to seek guidance and input from friends and family. "Mobile Prodigies are driving the app ecosystem," says Nada tirratt, chief executive officer of Verve. "They are incorporating apps that feature innovative content and creative into nearly all the ways they work, play, and shop  while carefully granting mobile marketers measured access to device data so long as the apps and creative they experience meet their expectations around context and quality."



The research, done in collaboration with Wildness, a youth-insights group founded by Awesomeness TV, involved surveying 3,000 people aged 1429 and also included a series of focus groups. The research shows the profound impact Mobile Prodigies will have on mobile advertising, its intersection with in-store shopping, and the future of mobile creative. Verve's new research shows that Mobile Prodigies are continuously weighing the benefit of sharing their personal data as well. They will grant brands and marketers access to their device information if apps and creative meet or exceed their expectations. In a critical insight for advertisers and publishers, one-third of the study participants said that they would even reverse their data-sharing stance from 'no' to 'yes' if doing so provided them with more relevant personalized ads, experiences, and offers.

The full Mobile Prodigies white paper can be downloaded at http://vervemobile.com/prodigies. ABOUT VERVE Verve is a location-based mobile marketing platform that connects advertisers with consumers to deliver successful business outcomes. The company's proprietary location intelligence, patented technology, premium inventory, and analytics capabilities empower marketers to identify, reach, and engage consumers with compelling advertising experiences. Headquartered in New York City, Verve has offices in San Diego, San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, London, Eastern Europe, India, and Southeast Asia.

For more information, visit www.vervemobile.com. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410013 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/verve-releases-new-research-on-mobile-prodigies--generation-z-and-millennials-300331379.html SOURCE Verve

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[September 21, 2016] MicroTech CEO Tony Jimenez to Receive Reginald F. Lewis Lifetime Achievement Award

VIENNA, Va., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Capital Region Minority Supplier Development Council (CRMSDC) today announced the finalists and winners of their annual awards recognizing the region's individuals, corporations and minority businesses that have made outstanding contributions in supporting the Council's mission of advancing Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American suppliers in a globalized corporate supply chain. CRMSDC Chairman, Roland L. Jones, will be announcing the winners and presenting these awards, at the Council's 35th annual Leaders and Legends Awards Ceremony being held September 30th, at the Clarice Smith Center for Performing Arts, Dekelboum Theater, on the University of Maryland, College Park's campus. This year, for the first time, the CRMSDC is combining the award ceremony with the 9th annual Top 100 MBE Awards. The Top 100 MBE Awards, began in 2007 and evolved through a need to recognize and celebrate the creativity and innovation of regional MBEs who are role models and inspire the entire community. Tony Jimenez, President and CEO of MicroTech, the recipient of the Council's highest honor, the Reginald F. Lewis Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is given to an individual who is considered to most closely walking the path paved by Reginald Lewis, an entrepreneurial legend, brilliant financier and business manager, left a roster of accomplishments that compares to those of any great man in history. Reginald F. Lewis, for whom the award is named after, passed away in 1993 after complications from brain cancer, had a penchant for deal making and an astute business sense. He cemented his legacy with the $985 million acquisition of TLC Beatrice Foods Co. It wasn't long before the new company, TLC Beatrice International, reported gross sales of $1.8 billion, making it the first black-owned company to pass the billion-dollar revenue mark. The deal solidified Lewis' prowess, brought wide media attention, and Lewis became the first African-American businessman to be included in Forbes magazine's list of the nation's 400 wealthiest people.



The Capital Region Council, founded in 1972, serves Maryland, the District of Columbia and Norther Virginia. "The Council acts as a bridge between corporations and MBEs, facilitating the type of relationships that benefit both council members and the national economy," said Jones. About MicroTech: MicroTech, a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) and a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) certified by the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), has had noteworthy success since its inception in 2004. Under Mr. Jimenez's leadership, the privately owned company has experienced exponential growth over the years and is repeatedly recognized as a small business success story. Described as the "hottest Hispanic business in the nation," MicroTech was ranked as the #1 Fastest Growing Hispanic Company in the Nation for three consecutive years by Hispanic Business Magazine. MicroTech was also named one of the Top 10 Fastest Growing Hispanic-Owned Companies in the Nation for five consecutive years and has been repeatedly listed on Washington Technology's annual list of the Top 100 Government Contractors.

MicroTech provides Cloud Computing, Technology Services, Cyber Security Solutions, Products & Managed Service Solutions, Network Systems Integration, Big Data Management, Telecom Solutions & Integration and Financial Services to the public sector, as well as commercial enterprises -- managing more than a quarter of a million technology users daily. A prime contractor of over 100 Federal projects and more-than-25 procurement vehicles, MicroTech offers access to 2500 vendors and a million technology products and services across the government. CONTACT: Jennifer Berman, 703-531-9976, [email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microtech-ceo-tony-jimenez-to-receive-reginald-f-lewis-lifetime-achievement-award-300331774.html SOURCE MicroTech

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[September 21, 2016] videodesk Announces Partnership with SoftBank, Bringing the Human Factor into Digital Experiences for the Japanese Market

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- videodesk today announced a distribution agreement with SoftBank Corp. to bring videodesk's 1-click customer communication and collaboration platform to the Japanese market. SoftBank is always at the forefront of innovation. As such, they recognize the way digital is transforming commerce globally, and the great value of bringing the human factor into those digital experiences through videodesk's messaging, audio, video and collaborative services. Through this agreement, SoftBank will be introducing videodesk to its customers in Japan as the interactive technology to sell more complex products and services online. Moreover, SoftBank is already utilizing videodesk on their own site to provide the innovative robot called Pepper to enterprise customers. Pepper is quite a unique product offering, as it is the first robot who can perceive and react to people's emotions. videodesk's platform is helping SoftBank improve conversions and deliver a better experience for business customers researching and purchasing Pepper online by giving them a real-time, face-to-face channelto ask questions and complete their purchase online. It provides the benefit of real time support for customers to have the option to talk with an expert when purchasing a product of this level of complexity.



"We are very happy to be working with SoftBank, and look forward to extending our global footprint with the addition of the Japanese market. SoftBank's vision of becoming a company contributing to people's happiness and joy makes them a perfect partner for us to bring more human experiences to the digital world," said Olivier Coste, CEO of videodesk. About videodesk

videodesk turns moments into enduring relationships. Our client messaging platform strings messaging, audio, video, screen-sharing and collaborative moments into one single, continuous thread so that companies can communicate over time with their customers in the most personal, convenient and productive way possible. www.videodesk.com About the SoftBank Corp. SoftBank Corp., a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), provides mobile communication, fixed-line communication and Internet connection services to customers in Japan. Leveraging synergies with other companies in the SoftBank Group, SoftBank Corp. aims to transform lifestyles through ICT and expand into other business areas including IoT, robotics and energy. To learn more, please visit http://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/ To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/videodesk-announces-partnership-with-softbank-bringing-the-human-factor-into-digital-experiences-for-the-japanese-market-300331779.html SOURCE videodesk

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[September 21, 2016] Al Jazeera English Expands Digital Access For U.S. Audiences

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Al Jazeera Media Network announced that it has resumed making Al Jazeera English, its multi-award winning news and current affairs channel, available free to U.S. audiences through Aljazeera.com and across a range of digital platforms. Dr. Mostefa Souag, Al Jazeera's Acting Director General said, "Al Jazeera's mission is to provide an unfiltered perspective on the most important events happening around the world, from the viewpoint of the people they impact. Our extraordinarily committed and passionate journalists do this with a tenacity in their search for truth that is remarkable by any standard. Our coverage is unique, critical and sought out around the world." He continued, "New technologies and tools are transforming the news industry. Al Jazeera English, like all Al Jazeera Media Network news platforms, is wholeheartedly committed to the digital revolution of media and bringing our pioneering journalism to people wherever they are and whenever they want it." Al Jazeera English's news coverage, shows, documentaries, and online content are accessible to U.S. audiences through its website Aljazeera.com. Streamed and On Demand video is also available across a range of digital platforms including: IOS and Android mobile apps, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Roku and podcasts on iTunes. Al Jazeera English news can also be read on: AOL, Apple News, Flipboard, Google Newsstand, MSN, News Republic and Yahoo, amongst others. Giles Trendle, Acting Managing Director of Al Jazeera English, added: "Al Jazeera Eglish offers a wide range of news, programmes, and digital content covering critical topics and featuring perspectives rarely  if ever  heard. Our journalism is global in terms of viewpoint, diversity, and reach  reflecting universal themes and issues common to all. It transcends government and corporate interests and challenges established narratives. In a world seemingly beset by rising bigotry and extremism, Al Jazeera English provides a wider scope of information, insight, and understanding. We are delighted to bring this independent and thought-provoking content to the U.S. market."



Al Jazeera English: A Decade of Award-Winning Coverage

Founded by the Al Jazeera Media Network in 2006, Al Jazeera English (AJE) provides the latest news and current affairs coverage, across broadcast and digital platforms, to over 190 countries from nearly 80 bureaus, including in the U.S., with offices in Washington DC, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. AJE is known for its independent reporting and giving a voice to the voiceless around the world. In recognition of this, it has won numerous international awards including Peabody Awards, International Emmy Awards, the WEBBYS, and the Online Media Awards for best website. For a full listing of awards, please visit: http://pr.aljazeera.com/awards. AJE is nominated for two awards at tonight's Emmys. With the resumption of AJE's distribution in the U.S. earlier this month, viewers are able to access livestreamed news coverage from around the world as well as a wide variety of shows covering hard-hitting interviews and debate, investigative reporting, observational documentaries, and magazine programs.

About the Al Jazeera Media Network

Al Jazeera Media Network strives to deliver content that captivates, informs and inspires. Launched in 1996, Al Jazeera was the first independent news channel in the Arab world dedicated to providing comprehensive news and live debate. It gave a global audience an alternative source of news and information, quickly making it one of the world's most influential news networks. Today, the Network reaches more than 305 million homes. Media Contacts

Hasan Salim Patel

T. 97444892609

[email protected] Molly Morse/Anntal Silver

KEKST

212-521-4800

[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/al-jazeera-english-expands-digital-access-for-us-audiences-300331731.html SOURCE Al Jazeera

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[September 21, 2016] Model X Expands Tesla's Reach to a More Diverse Set of Buyers, Says Edmunds.com

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Model X is bringing some much-needed diversity to Tesla's customer base, according to a new analysis from Edmunds.com, the leading car information and shopping network. The analysis suggests that the utility EV attracts a younger, more female, more affluent and less West Coast-centric crowd than Tesla's Model S. Edmunds' study looked at all 5,523 Model X registrations recorded by Polk during the model's first nine months on the market, and compared them to all 4,242 Model S registrations during the sedan's first nine months of sales. Among Edmunds' findings: Model X makes strides with women . In the first nine months of its life, only 14 percent of Model S buyers were women. The Model X, on the other hand, has more than doubled that figure, with women making up 30 percent of its buyers.

. In the first nine months of its life, only 14 percent of Model S buyers were women. The Model X, on the other hand, has more than doubled that figure, with women making up 30 percent of its buyers. Gen X meets Model X. Generation X, the forgotten generation sandwiched between Baby Boomers and Millennials, is the most important demographic for Tesla, but especially for Model X. Three out every five Model X owners are between the age of 35 and 54, compared to only about half of Model S buyers.

Generation X, the forgotten generation sandwiched between Baby Boomers and Millennials, is the most important demographic for Tesla, but especially for Model X. Three out every five Model X owners are between the age of 35 and 54, compared to only about half of Model S buyers. Tesla infiltrates Middle America. The West Coast ( California , Washington and Oregon ), which had accounted for 64 percent of Model S sales, is proving less dominant for Model X; these states accounted for 55 percent of the X's sales. Wisconsin has shown the most notable increase of any state in the U.S. The Badger State, which made up a paltry 0.3 percent of Model S buyers in the sedan's first nine months, accounted for two percent of Model X sales.

The West Coast ( , and ), which had accounted for 64 percent of Model S sales, is proving less dominant for Model X; these states accounted for 55 percent of the X's sales. has shown the most notable increase of any state in the U.S. The Badger State, which made up a paltry 0.3 percent of Model S buyers in the sedan's first nine months, accounted for two percent of Model X sales. The rich get richer. Neither Model X nor Model S falls within the price range of the average car shopper, but Tesla's audience has only grown wealthier since the SUV's introduction. Model X is selling to a slightly more affluent audience, with 87 percent of buyers having reported income in excess of $100,000 , compared to 78 percent of Model S buyers. "If Tesla is going to succed over the long term, it needs to break through to all shoppers and not just rich early adopters who tend to skew older and male," says Edmunds.com Executive Director of Industry Analysis Jessica Caldwell. "The company certainly has a long way to go with affordability, but Model X has undeniably brought in more female buyers and Gen X'ers to the Tesla brand. That's an encouraging sign as Tesla takes a make-or-break plunge into the mainstream market with the upcoming Model 3."



More details of Edmunds' market analysis of Tesla Model X buyers can be found at http://www.edmunds.com/industry-center/analysis/x-marks-a-different-spot.html. Edmunds.com currently owns a Model X as part of its long-term test fleet. Learn about all the good and bad (and everything else in between) that the Model X has to offer on Edmunds' Long- Term Road Test Blog at http://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-x/2016/long-term-road-test/.

About Edmunds, Inc.

Car shopping destination Edmunds.com serves millions of visitors each month. With Edmunds Price Promise, shoppers can buy smarter with instant, upfront prices for cars and trucks currently for sale at 10,000 dealer franchises across the U.S. Shoppers can browse not only dealer inventory, but also vehicle reviews, shopping tips, photos, videos and feature stories on both Edmunds' wired site and on its acclaimed mobile apps. Regarded as one of the best places to work in Southern California, Edmunds.com was also named one of "The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Automotive" by Fast Company. Edmunds welcomes all car-shopping questions on its free Live Help Line at 1-855-782-4711 and [email protected], via text at ED411 and on Twitter and Facebook. The company is based in Santa Monica, Calif. and has a satellite office in downtown Detroit, Mich., but you can find Edmunds from anywhere on YouTube, Pinterest,LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and Flipboard. Contact:

Aaron Lewis

Edmunds.com Corporate Communications

Media Hotline: 310-309-4900

[email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410353-INFO Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130612/MM31390LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/model-x-expands-teslas-reach-to-a-more-diverse-set-of-buyers-says-edmundscom-300331860.html SOURCE Edmunds.com

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Briggs: Elkharts RV workers are only essential until a recession

RV sales are great for job security in Elkhart, yet horrible for human bodies.
How to download iOS 16

Learn how to update your iPhone to iOS 16, to make use of all the latest and best features while ensuring your iPhone is as secure and optimized as it can be
You know what the worst part about talking with someone else is? Actually coming up with your own words or giving any effort. Or at least that's what Google Allo (available for free on iOS and Android), the new chat app from the search king, would have you believe.



We've been testing Allo and found that the combination of pre-baked chat responses and Google Assistant make for an auto-pilot chatting experience, for better and for worse.



After setting up Allo, which requires registering your phone number, you're on your way to care-free conversations, since the app provides a few suggested replies from the start of a conversation. Your friends don't even need to be using Allo to chat with them, as it can also send chats over SMS. On the downside, those SMS-only friends won't see the vibrant interface filled with tons of colors and images  just a lot of links.



MORE: iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus Review: Great Upgrades, But One is Greater

When I chatted with a friend, I didn't need to create any responses; I just choose between the pre-made Smart Reply options above the keyboard. Google says Smart Reply will improve over time and get to know your style, to understand if you're the kind of person who types words, or one that speaks fluent emoji.



You shouldn't try to rely on Allo for too much, as our brief time with the app proved it's not the best at identifying things. When my colleague sent me an image of his french bulldog, Allo suggested I say "Nice boston terrier." That's an All-Nope.

While Allo offers fun distractions like the Emoji Movie guessing game, its biggest strength lies in Google Assistant, a new AI chatbot that does most of the leg-work of researching things for you.

Google Assistant feels like the future of AI.

You can either chat one-on-one with Assistant or summon it to join a conversation by typing @google and asking a question. Users interact with Assistant using natural language and its prompt buttons. Adding @Google to a conversation looks a bit awkward, as it floods the screen with chat bubbles, images and options that may force some to scroll up to remember the context.



Google Assistant can tell you the weather at the moment, the forecast for the weekend and answer the question of if you need an umbrella. It can also help you find nearby restaurants and provide links to call locations, see menus and look at destinations in Street View. Google Assistant feels like what the future of AI should be, which is both speedier and funnier than Siri currently allows.



When I asked when Google Assistant was born, it replied "I try to live every day like it's my birthday. I get more cake that way." Assistant isn't going to book a Comedy Central special off of these yuks, but I chuckled.



Unfortunately, Google Assistant hits a snag on the last yard, as it's unable to do much with the restaurant plans you pick. Despite the fact that Google's Maps service features Open Table integration and Uber, you can't book tables at the restaurants you pick, nor can you arrange for a ride to destinations you find.

If you grow tired of it, you can unregister your phone number by tapping the menu bar, tapping settings and selecting Unregister phone number.

While Allo offers a fun look and Assistant is intriguing view into the future of chatbots and AI, I'm not sure if I'll continue to use it. I already chat in Apple's recently refreshed Messages, Google Hangout, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Slack and Twitter DMs  which makes for a lot to keep track of already. Google just threw another tool into a crowded field, so it'll be interesting to see how much adoption it gets.


After the first day of Samsung's SSD Global Summit, we finally have details about the new 960 series. The 960 series succeeds the 950 Pro with a two-prong strategy that satisfies the needs of both the professional and enthusiast markets. This series brings several advancements of more or less equal importance. Let's dive in.

Technology Advancements

We've tested Samsung's OEM products with the Polaris controller but never managed to locate any concrete details about the architecture. That changed today. Samsung's second generation NVMe controller, Polaris, is a 5-core design that was built to maximize the performance the NVMe specification over PCIe 3.0 with four lanes of connectivity. Samsung's new NVMe 2.0 driver works in conjunction with the hardware to deliver better performance than what we saw on the SM961 (with MLC) and PM961 (with TLC). The new driver further optimizes performance for Samsung NVMe SSDs within Windows.

Samsung is still using 48-layer V-NAND technology with 256Gbit die density on both new 960-series products. This produced some hurdles on the 960 Pro that we will detail in the next section. Samsung has already discussed 64-layer V-NAND at Flash Memory Summit with a projected time to market of 2017. The new flash should be a drop-in replacement in 2017 and give Samsung an easy path to reducing prices while offering higher capacities.

A great deal of thought went into the new 960 series. This is the first time I've ever talked about a product label for more than information, but: This series uses a copper layer in the sticker to aid in moving heat away from the controller. It will be interesting to see a true A to B comparison to determine if a sliver of copper is effective or just a marketing maneuver. Samsung also has a firmware-level protection scheme to combat overheating, called Dynamic Thermal Guard. Using the same base ambient temperature, the 950 Pro can read data for 63 seconds before thermal throttle protections kick in and slow performance. The 960 EVO with the updated feature raises the bar to 79 seconds, and the 960 Pro improves upon that number even more, to 95 seconds.

Samsung 960 Pro

960 Pro 512GB 1TB 2TB Pricing $329 $629 $1,299 Controller Samsung Polaris Samsung Polaris Samsung Polaris DRAM Samsung LPDDR4 Samsung LPDDR4 Samsung LPDDR4 NAND Samsung 48-Layer MLC Samsung 48-Layer MLC Samsung 48-Layer MLC Protocol NVMe 1.2 NVMe 1.2 NVMe 1.2 Form Factor PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 Sequential Read 3,500 MB/s 3,500 MB/s 3,500 MB/s Sequential Write 2,100 MB/s 2,100 MB/s 2,100 MB/s Random Read 330,000 IOPS 440,000 IOPS 440,000 IOPS Random Write 330,000 IOPS 360,000 IOPS 360,000 IOPS Endurance 400 TBW 800 TBW 1,200 TBW Warranty 5-Years 5-Years 5-Years

Samsung's 3-bit per cell V-NAND technology has been so successful at delivering both performance and endurance that the new 960 Pro (with MLC V-NAND) almost exclusively targets the professional market. This series costs significantly more than the 960 EVO (with TLC) but is a no-compromise product that delivers very high and very consistent performance. The 960 Pro is ideal for heavy A/V application use and other high write environments.

In this series, customers pay for increased write performance without the need for an SLC-layer buffer. The rated endurance encroaches on enterprise levels and is class-leading compared to all other NVMe-based solutions shipping today in the consumer/prosumer space.

In order to fit the four NAND packages and the other needed components in an M.2 2280 form factor, Samsung needed to merge both the controller and DRAM die together in a single package with a small footprint. This is a technique Samsung perfected in the 750 EVO (and later in the PM971): a single BGA with controller, DRAM, and NAND in the same chip. Samsung managed to meet the current consumer-standard form factor. It was important to hit the target size in order for the 960 Pro to be a drop-in replacement for products like the Lenovo P700 mobile workstation.

The specifications given to us by Samsung show consistent read and write performance across all three models. Users get a blistering 3,500MB/s sequential read and 2,100MB/s sequential write speeds. There is some slight variation in random performance, but under prosumer workloads we don't expect to see much difference outside of rare steady-state conditions.

The 960 Pro will begin shipping in October and is backed by a Samsung 5-year warranty.

Samsung 960 EVO

960 EVO 250GB 500GB 1TB Pricing $129 $249 $479 Controller Samsung Polaris Samsung Polaris Samsung Polaris DRAM Samsung LPDDR4 Samsung LPDDR4 Samsung LPDDR4 NAND Samsung 48-Layer TLC Samsung 48-Layer TLC Samsung 48-Layer TLC Protocol NVMe 1.2 NVMe 1.2 NVMe 1.2 Form Factor PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 Sequential Read 3,200 MB/s 3,200 MB/s 3,200 MB/s Sequential Write 1,500 MB/s 1,800 MB/s 1,900 MB/s Intelligent TurboWrite(Size) 13 GB 22 GB 42 GB Random Read 330,000 IOPS 330,000 IOPS 380,000 IOPS Random Write 300,000 IOPS 330,000 IOPS 360,000 IOPS Endurance 100 TBW 200 TBW 400 TBW Warranty 3-Years 3-Years 3-Years

The 960 Pro is an exciting product, but we're more enthusiastic about the mainstream-focused (and mainstream-priced) 960 EVO. This product leverages Samsung's 3-bit per cell V-NAND technology to balance performance and cost. Just days ago, we started talking about a new pricing tier for PCIe NVMe and the Intel 600p as the first entry-level NVMe SSD. Samsung has always used the EVO line to combat both entry-level and mainstream products from other companies. The 960 EVO takes arms with the same strategy. This series costs slightly more than the entry-level NVMe 600p but outperforms the drive on every level.

The 960 EVO utilizes only two NAND packages, so surface area is much less of a concern. To aid in minimizing costs, the DRAM and Polaris controller are separated into two packages. The physical layout is identical to OEM PM961 SSD we tested recently in our Samsung 960 EVO Preview with PM961.

Samsung claims peak performance at 3,200MB/s sequential read and up to 1,900MB/s sequential write. The write performance decreases after the SLC buffer, which Samsung calls TurboWrite. The 960 EVO uses a new version called Intelligent TurboWrite, but we don't have much information on the differences. The latest iteration does increase the SLC size and starts at a massive 13GB for the 256GB model. The largest capacity size, 1TB, can fit nearly a full Blu-ray ISO transfer in SLC, a recommendation we often make in our SSD reviews. It's rare for end users to transfer a single file larger than a Blu-Ray ISO.

The 960 EVO delivers more random performance than the 950 Pro, Samsung's only shipping retail consumer SSD. Peak performance for the 960 EVO comes in the largest capacity size, and users get up to 380,000 read IOPS and 360,000 write IOPS (4KB block sizes). That makes the 960 EVO second only to the 960 Pro in performance for (announced) consumer SSDs.

The part that excites us most is the low-cost aspect without severe endurance limits. The 960 EVO starts at just $129 for the 256GB SKU. This series ships in October with a three-year warranty.

Samsung will release a new version of Magician software in October, and it will work with Windows 10. The updated software will feature a GUI facelift that focuses on health, device status, and system compatibility. Existing functions remain for existing products, but the 960 series packs a few more rabbits in the Magician hat.

The first new 960-specific feature is called Secure File Erase. When you delete files from a 960 product through the Magician interface, the software sends a command that ensures the data is destroyed. This isn't a must-have feature for most consumers, but in some circles, deleting data has an elevated level of importance.

The second 960-specific feature in Magician is called Magic Vault. Users can allocate space behind a firewall-like layer where data is stored and accessed only with a user-defined password. Data in this protected area is less vulnerable to virus and hacker attacks.
We were chuffed to premiere the first track from multi-instrumentalist and alt-chamber pop master Vaudreys brand new EP back in June and today were finally unveiling that eagerly anticipated release.

Written and recorded in Brooklyn, New York, Vaudreys carefully crafted indie gems  which combine his sterling cello chops with alt-pop stylings  have managed to cock ears across the pond as well as at home.

Check out the EP in its entirety below and if you like what youre hearing be sure to visit Vaudreys Facebook page for more info upcoming shows and releases.
Weve seen a string of notable Aussie band reunions in recent months. Maybe the governments putting new additives in the water, because so far weve seen the likes of End of Fashion, George, and Killing Heidi get the band back together.

Or maybe its just that, for whatever reason, were all feeling super nostalgic at the moment. Either way, were excited for a Killing Heidi reunion not only because were seeing the return of one of our favourite Aussie bands, but for the memories it brings back.

One of the many memories that come rushing back when we think Killing Heidi is of their appearances at the ARIA Awards, which by the way are just around the corner. The band managed to pick up Album of the Year, Best Group, Best Rock Album, and Breakthrough Artist in their time.

And according to frontwoman Ella Hooper, who recently caught up with Noisey, things got pretty loose during the ARIAs. The ARIAs were my first taste of going to a big event, and to be such a big part of that big event was pretty crazy, she said.

I did drink, but the rules seemed to be looser back then and I had good people around me making sure I didnt Gabriella Cilmi it onstage. I didnt pash anyone, I never really dated in the industry, but I always made a lot of new friends.

I ended up fully clothed in a bath with Missy Higgins in Jets penthouse one year, and helped Kelly Osbourne piff bread rolls at Richard Wilkins head another. But those first few ARIAs, my memory is very blurry.

Speaking to News Corp, Ella Hooper said shed repeatedly turned down offers to reunite, but felt the time was right to look back on that era of her career and celebrate it. Im really glad weve waited this long, she said. Check below for all the bands upcoming shows.

Killing Heidi National Dates

Saturday, 12th November 2016

Handpicked Festival, Lake Breeze Wines SA

Sunday, 13th November 2016

96FMs Kickstart Summer of Music Concert, Houghtons Winery WA

Friday, 25th November 2016

Queenscliff Music Festival, Queenscliff VIC
At Clay Chastain's press conference today he walked to the KC Chamber's office in Union Station and hand deliver a debate challenge to Chamber President Joe Reardon concerning Light Rail Ballot Question #3.

KC Chamber President Joe Reardon, and former president of the city's bus system (ATA), and his board unanimously oppose the light rail initiative (Question #3) on the upcoming November ballot. This ivory tower board told the KC Star that, "it takes too much money from the city's bus system and there is too much uncertainty around the costs of construction and operation of his (Chastain's) proposed system.'Okay Mr. Reardon can you emerge from the protective confines of your posh chamber digs at Union Station and participate in a public debate with Mr. Chastain over the merits of the light rail ballot measure? The KC League of Women voters has already agreed to host the debate.Now, do not expect Mr. Reardon to accept Chastain's debate challenge, which would be very helpful and informative to Kansas City voters, because Kansas City's well-positioned, well-paid insiders are generally afraid of a face to face with Mr. Chastain because of his renown intellectual punching power.P.S. Mr. Reardon, in case you prove me wrong, feel free to bring to the debate with Mr. Chastain Steve Glorioso (this non-engineer said the light rail initiative was "irresponsible"), or David Johnson (this non-engineer, and leader of the KCRTA, supports a dubious streetcar expansion plan over building the people a real citywide rail system) or City Councilman Germaine Reed (this non-engineer is afraid to allow Mr. Chastain to present the light rail initiative to his Transportation & Infrastructure Committee) with you in case you need some additional Kansas City political insiders to hold your hand.Clay Chastain...Degreed electrical engineer, KCMO registered voter, and the leader of Light Rail Ballot Question #3.##########
Another reminder that so-called Conservatives in Kansas don't mind taking advantage of cheap labor in spite of their politics. Given the blame game rush on this story, credit to NBC Action News for focusing attention on the employerswho also benefited from allegedly undocumented labor.And we still our blog community still doesn't understand how it's any better to be killed by a drunken American driver . . . Suspect in JoCo deputy death worked for Overland Park developer
Unsettling story in the urban core for a lot of reasons . . . Anybody who would go to a street hooker probably needs a mandatory health lesson as a public service . . . And remember when they said East Patrol was going to serve as an "economic engine" for this neighborhood? Here's anfeaturing police working to protect the community in the face of some dire circumstances. Checkit: KCPD targets prostitution in East Patrol, offers social services
"On September 19, 2016, three judges from the Court of Appeals for the Western District of Missouri held the fates of more than 100,000 Clay County voters in the 17th Senate District of the State of Missouri. They decided J. Bechtholds name will be placed on the November ballot."

"After J. Bechthold won the Democratic primary nomination, Senator Ryan Silvey sued Mr. Bechthold claiming that Mr. Bechthold was not a resident in the 17th Senate District for a 12 month period be-

ginning in November of 2015. And on this point, the Senator is right  J. Bechthold and his family were not physically living day to day in Clay County Missouri in November of 2015. Reading the Senators Petition, it sounds bad. But there is one important fact that the Senator failed to mention (under oath, under penalty of perjury) J. Bechthold is a soldier, and a combat veteran.





"J. Bechthold was on active duty in the US Army from February 2010 until March 1, 2016. J. Bechthold served at a remote outpost in Paktika, Afghanistan as a company intelligence support team leader, where he earned an Army Commendation Metal and a Combat Action Badge for meritorious conduct under enemy fire. But you wont learn that from reading what Senator Silvey swore to in his petition . . ."

The conclusion and a bit of EXCLUSIVE into this election drama from the Missouri political contender . . .

"This is big money politics. As of September 1, 2016, Silvey received $839,779.44 for this election, and spent over $275,000.00.





"Legal fees have crippled the Bechthold campaign. I have had to spend nearly 12 of my campaign contributions on legal fees. (An estimated $9,000.00 and counting). According to Silveys financial reports, hes spent more money on coffee than he has on attorneys. I really wonder whos paying for his legal fees? . . .





"This is how big money politics works, says Bechthold. And I am running to eliminate the stranglehold that big money has on big time politicians. In the end, I dont believe this case was ever about my qualifications, otherwise Silvey would have disclosed my military service in the first place and would have stood up in open court. He would have been wrong, but at least he would have stood for something.

A crucial Kansas City Northland election fight has implications throughout Missouri and could reveal Republicans afraid of losing ground in the State Senate.To wit and FIRST on TKC, here's latest on a KC residency fight withWe've beenand before any other media outlet . . .Here's a summary of how the debate started according toEvey step of the way,and State Senator Silvey seems to look increasingly desperate as most Missouri Republicans believe don't seem to believe that Trump will help them down ballot.You decide . . .
Northeast News: Prosecutorial Fail

"The shooter was a convicted felon in possession of a gun, we naturally assumed (operative verb) he would remain in custody and be automatically sent back to the big house for five years. Oh, how wrong we were. Not only did that individual roll back out after a 24-hour hold, but the Jackson County Prosecutors office opted, when presented the case by the Police Departments Assault Squad, not to prosecute. Let that sink in for a moment, will you? The top person in charge of making sure bad people go to jail opted not to prosecute a convicted felon, illegally in possession of a firearm, who shot an individual and caused property damage to a nearby building in the process . . ."

Accountability from local elected officials has been hard to come by during this Summer's trendsetting Kansas City crime surge.In this exceptionally brave column, the Northeast News offers their perspective on real life experience with local violence and its consequences or lack thereof . . .Money line . . .Read the column in its entirety.You decide . . .
"We all know to be wary of anything offered unsolicited over the telephone, but the old IRS scam is back. These people target senior citizens. They will receive a recorded message This is your last notice that the Internal Revenue Service is going to file a suit against you. It gives an 800 number to call to resolve the issue. The scammers will try to get bank account numbers and routing numbers and personal information. We received a call two days ago. Please make sure that your elderly loved ones know that this is a scam. The IRS does not call you to inform you that they are going to file suit. If there is a question about your taxes, you will receive a letter from them. In 2015, these scammers collected MILLION$, mostly from elderly people. Tell them to just hang up if they receive a recorded call from the IRS. It is phony."

The. . . Our blog readers simply want to remind locals to tell their loved ones about the fake . . .More in a bit . . .
When most people think of the Big One, they often think about an earthquake caused by the San Andreas Fault. However, theres actually a more dangerous fault called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, also known as the Cascadia Fault, is almost 700 miles long and stretches the west coast of North America from Vancouver Island to Northern California. For some perspective, an earthquake caused by the San Andreas Fault could reach 8.3 on the Richter scale, but a Cascadia earthquake will be more like a 9.2. That means that the quake could shake for up to four and a half minutes.

The odds of a mega earthquake happening in the next 50 years are about one-in-three. If it were to hit tomorrow, these are just 10 of the things that could happen.

10. Aftershocks

Further complicating rescue missions and evacuations are aftershocks, which will continue for days afterwards. This will cause much more destruction and notably, it will be hard to pull survivors from unstable buildings because an aftershock could happen at any moment. This leads to more destruction, and more people buried under rubble.

As a result, the death toll will again rise, either from people attempting rescues, or simply because people cant get to them. Aftershocks are also known for causing landslides, especially in areas with lots of hills. Hills, you probably realize, are found all over the west coast.

9. It Will Cause a Devastating Tsunami For North Americas West Coast

The earthquake will, of course, cause a ton of damage. Then, people along the west coast of northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia will have about 10 to 15 minutes to get to higher ground because a tsunami will be heading their way. Depending on where the wave makes landfall, it could be 20 to over 100 feet tall, carrying debris like boats and cars. Inland, the giant wave will be travelling at 12.5 miles per hour. That may not seem very fast, but a grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water traveling at half that speed. Unfortunately, many people are going to have a hard time getting to high enough ground because a lot of the roadways in the earthquake zone area will be destroyed.

The good news is that only about 71,000 people live year round along the west coast where the tsunami will hit. However, some areas of the coast are popular tourist attractions. So while many people dont live there year round, thousands of people work in the area, and even more visit during the summer months. This will make evacuations much more difficult. For example, when people live in an area where theres some type of an inherent danger, theyre generally more prepared. However, its very doubtful tourists will be prepared. They may not even know how to drive out of town without their GPS, and this will only add more chaos to the already nightmarish scenario.

8. Japan, Indonesia, The South Pacific, and Hawaii Wont Be Safe Either

Not only will the rupture cause problems in North America, but a giant tsunami will also be headed in the direction of Hawaii, Indonesia, the South Pacific, and Japan. Luckily, these places will get a warning because it will take the wave about 10 hours to travel there. However, the wave will still be over 10 feet tall, and millions will be displaced.

Its believed that these countries will be affected because they already experienced it just over 300 years ago. In 2005, researchers found evidence that seven 12-foot waves hit the village of Miho, Japan, in 1700. Those waves were caused by a Cascadia earthquake.

7. Seattle Will Collapse

Seattle has a population of just over 686,000, and a lot of those people will be displaced if the Cascadia Fault ruptures.

When the earthquake starts, Seattle will be devastated by landslides; somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 of them. Another problem that Seattle will face is a phenomenon called soil liquefaction. The process happens when loosely packed and waterlogged sediments that are at, or near, the surface lose strength. Its similar to standing in ankle deep water on a sandy beach. If you wiggle your toes while standing in the water in the sand, your foot will sink. Well, in Seattle, this will happen with soil that has buildings on top of it. Thats obviously not a good thing. In Seattle, about 15 percent of the structures are built on liquefiable soil. This includes 17 daycares and the homes of around 34,500 people.

6. Oregon Would Be Destroyed

One of the states that will be the hardest hit by a Cascadia earthquake is Oregon. The problem is that the Cascadia Fault wasnt discovered until 1970. Oregon didnt have any earthquake measures in place until 1974. As a result, the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries estimates that 75 percent of all the structures in Oregon would fail to withstand a Cascadia earthquake. This includes 3,000 schools, half the police departments, and two-thirds of the states hospitals.

Another problem with Oregon is that many of the cities are fairly isolated. There are also only a few roads in the entire state that lead east, away from the destruction. However, 38 percent of the states bridges will be out of commission, along with the railroads, and airport runways. Another problem is that all liquid gas is shipped in, so fuel shortages are very likely. This will all leave people stranded, making it incredibly difficult for search and rescue workers to reach them.

This could be even worse during the summer months when 50,000 people visit the beaches on Oregons coast. If the earthquake were to happen on a beautiful summer day, when the beaches are packed, it would be utter havoc. Another problem, which faces every state and city on this list, is if the earthquake happened at night. Then, all of these problems would have to be dealt with in the dark.

5. Canadas Worst Natural Disaster

Canada will also be hit hard by a Cascadia earthquake. According to studies, it has the potential to be the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. Vancouver Island, which has a population of nearly 750,000, will have a lot of the problems that the other areas weve mentioned will face. Just like Seattle, buildings will collapse because of soil liquefaction. Like Oregon, the cities on the coast where the tsunami will hit are popular tourist areas. Also, one of Canadas most beautiful cities, Victoria, which is the most populated city on the island with a population of 350,000, is in the extreme zone for the earthquake.

A problem with Vancouver Island is that its, wellan island. The airport is right in the extreme danger zone for the earthquake. And unfortunately, theres no highway to this danger zone. (Sorry, we had to.) The most common way on or off the island are ferry systems, and those would have a two week disruption. This is going to make it incredibly difficult to get hundreds of thousands of people basic supplies like food, water, and medicine.

People in British Columbia are also unprepared. When last surveyed, about 70 percent of them didnt have an emergency kit.

4. The San Andreas Fault May Rupture Around the Same Time

If the earthquake and the tsunami from the Cascadia rupture werent bad enough, there appears to be a link between the Cascadia Fault and the San Andreas Fault. The San Andreas Fault runs 800 miles through California. You may remember that it was the star of its own summer blockbuster. Or maybe you dont, because the movie was so forgettable.

Researchers believe that there is a connection. It turns out, 13 out of the last 15 earthquakes caused by the San Andreas Fault were preceded by a Cascadia earthquake. While a San Andreas earthquake often happens years later, its also possible that it could happen within hours. For this reason, even if it didnt happen immediately, Los Angeles, the second most populous metropolitan area and the city with the second highest gross domestic product in the US, would need to be evacuated because it isnt exactly the most earthquake ready city in the country.

Notably, all of the electricity, gas, and water lines cross the San Andreas Fault. If an earthquake reaching an 8 on the Richter scale happened, Los Angeles wouldnt have any gas, water, or hydro for months. Many of the modern buildings would survive, but older ones would be condemned as structurally unusable. It would take years, and billions of dollars, to restore Los Angeles to resemble a shadow of its former self.

3. Disease Epidemic

This type of disaster will be of unprecedented levels in North America. For example, 400,000 people were displaced by Katrina, but more than six times that amount will be displaced in the wake of a Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. The problem is, with this displacement and the inevitable disruption to essential services, there are often disease outbreaks and epidemics.

This happens because its hard to get access to clean water, overcrowding in shelters, and limited access to healthcare and medication. If the Cascadia earthquake happens before proper safety precautions are taken, there will probably be outbreaks of diseases like Salmonella, dysentery, and typhoid fever in the disaster areas.

2. The West Coast of North America Would Burn

When describing what the west coast would be like after a Cascadia earthquake, the director of FEMA in that area said that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast. And yes, that is literally the term he used.

It may be toast because a major problem with earthquakes is that fires break out. In areas like Seattle and the state of Oregon, fire departments will also be in ruins. If they arent, many roads will be destroyed, making it difficult to travel to fires to put them out. If they get to the scene, if they have an earthquake resistant fire system, like Vancouver, and if it isnt damaged, then they may be able to put out a few fires.

But it will still be very difficult to contain cities full of small fires. These small fires will turn into big fires, and the next thing you know whole blocks are gone. God forbid the fires spread to the forests and the brush that cover the west coast. Which, by the way, are already predisposed to forest fires. Things would be even more dire if an earthquake happens while forest fires were already raging, because resources would be depleted.

Things would only get worse if the San Andreas earthquake happened around the same time. In Los Angeles, hundreds of fires would start. But they wouldnt have access to water to extinguish it, since the waterlines cross the San Andreas.

1. Death and Destruction

As you probably gathered, a Cascadia earthquake would be absolutely devastating to the west coast of North America. FEMAs projections are rather alarming. In the United States alone, they estimate that 10,000 people will die, 30,000 will be injured, and 2.5 million people will be displaced. Theyll need water, food, medicine, healthcare, and shelter. Of course, if the San Andreas Fault was to rupture around the same time, thousands more will be injured and killed. Millions more will be displaced. Even if the San Andreas earthquake doesnt happen, that area may have to be displaced until the cities are more earthquake proof. Following a Cascade earthquake, one is likely to happen soon thereafter. Hopefully, a San Andreas earthquake doesnt happen until many years later.

As for damages, according to FEMA estimates, the earthquake and ensuing tsunami will cause $309 billion in damage. Every city within 100 miles of the coast will suffer blackouts. Inland, power will be restored within days. But it will take months to get hydro and natural gas back to areas near the coast. As for water systems, its estimated that it will take at least three weeks for restoration. It could take seven months, or even up to a year, to repair them. Thats a long time to live in an area without running water, gas, or electricity. Especially if youre trying to rebuild a city.

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The ownership of a television channel by Kalogritsas is "a plan of specific ministers" linked to the SYRIZA party, Potami leader claimed

The ownership of one of Greece's four television channels broadcasting nationwide by the Kalogritsas family is "a plan of specific ministers and specific journalists" linked to the SYRIZA party, opposition Potami leader Stavros Theodorakis claimed in Parliament on Tuesday. He predicted that more will be revealed over the next few days and that "the Kalogritsas family, pressured by the events, will soon reveal who involved them in this comic affair..."

Theodorakis noted that easy bank credit to construction companies like that owned by Kalogritsas was "a well-known trick of ruling parties" in Greece.

"We support some contractors so they will support us, in other words finance us, in their turn," Theodorakis said, adding that ruling coalition SYRIZA had "done the same thing".

"It hands over money, many millions, to its own contractors. We demand that the Bank of Greece report on Attica Bank's financing of various contractors come to Parliament. But the plan for 'Kalogritsas TV' was not the family's. The idea and the plan belonged to specific ministers and specific party journalists of SYRIZA," he claimed.

The Kalogritsas family submitted a successful bid for one of the four television content licences auctioned in recent weeks but questions have since arisen concerning how this money was raised and the involvement of Attica Bank.

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Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias and UN Secretary General Special Adviser Espen Barth Eide have discussed the security aspect of a Cyprus problem, reports said on Wednesday.

Specifically, the two discussed the issue of finding a security agreement that answers the concerns of all the Cypriot people, a solution that does not include the anachronistic system of guarantees, and the presence of foreign troops on the island.

The Greek Foreign Minister has characterised todays meeting with the US Vice President Joe Biden and the Greek Prime Minister as one of the most important as they discussed Greek American relations and the latest developments in the US and Europe.

On Thursday, Kotzias is set to have a meeting with the Foreign Minister of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Nikola Poposki, and be present at meetings the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will have with the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

Kotzias will also meet with the Jewish organisations in the US and take part the meeting of EU and NATO Foreign Ministers.

Source: CNA

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At least 29 people have drowned after a migrant boat capsized off the Egyptian coast on Wednesday

At least 29 people have drowned after a migrant boat capsized off the Egyptian coast on Wednesday, officials said.

The boat was carrying approximately 600 individuals, when it foundered of the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh, Reuters was told by security and local authorities.

"An illegal migration boat has capsized off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh carrying 600 migrants in the largest illegal migration operation through the Kafr al-Sheikh coast so far," state news agency MENA quoted a local official as saying.

Rescue workers have saved 150 people, MENA said. The boat was carrying Egyptian, Syrian, and African migrants, security sources said.

It was not immediately clear where the boat that sank on Wednesday was headed, though some security sources said they believed it was going to Italy.

More and more people have been trying to cross to Italy from the African coastline in recent months as the weather improves, particularly from Libya, where people-traffickers operate with relative impunity, but also from Egypt.

Some 320 migrants and refugees drowned off the Greek island of Crete in June. Migrants who survived had told authorities their boat set sail from Egypt.

Some 206,400 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

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Russia is supporting a solution to the Cyprus problem in the interest of both Cypriot communities without any outside pressure

Russia is supporting a solution to the Cyprus problem in the interest of both Cypriot communities without any outside pressure, a press statement issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

Moscows Foreign Ministry had released the statement after a meeting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had with President Nicos Anastasiades in New York on the side-lines of the UN General Assembly.

According to the press release, Lavrov and Anastasiades discussed current bilateral issues and prospects for the development of Russian-Cypriot cooperation.

Both sides exchanged opinions on important international problems, including Russia-EU relations and the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, the press release mentioned.

The Russian side reaffirmed its unchanged position on the Cyprus settlement, namely that it is committed to a comprehensive, viable and fair solution to the Cyprus problem in the interests of both Cypriot communities and without outside pressure, the press release concluded.

Source: CNA

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A former senior official of a key development body in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE has been arrested in Saudi Arabia over an alleged $1.5 billion fraud, his lawyers said on Wednesday.



Khater Massaad was detained at Jeddah airport, in the west of the kingdom, on Tuesday under an arrest warrant issued by the government of Ras Al Khaimah (RAK), according to a statement from Massaad's legal team.



The arrest was confirmed by a statement from the RAK government, which said it would seek his return to the United Arab Emirates to stand trial.



The move follows what the RAK government described in early August as a breakdown in talks with Massaad in relation to "global embezzlement and mismanagement of $1.5 billion" during his tenure as chief executive of the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (Rakia).



Massaad has continually insisted that the charges brought by the RAK government are unfounded, and that an October 2015 trial at which he was convicted in absentia by an RAK court of corruption and fraud had numerous flaws.



"Massaad is confident that proper judicial review will result in his release, and he will ultimately bring to justice the perpetrators of the judicial fraud conducted against him in RAK," said a statement from his legal team on his arrest.



The RAK government said in its statement on Wednesday that the arrest warrant "included additional allegations of substantial fraud and diversion of public monies in relation to an alleged multi-million dollar fraud regarding his activities when he was CEO of Rakia in relation to Rakia's sale of Poti Sea Port in Georgia".



Rakia is a state body aimed at attracting investment to the emirate of 300,000 people, one of the poorer parts of the UAE.



Massaad ran Rakia from 2007 until 2012. He was also behind the establishment of RAK Ceramics - the emirate's most prominent company and one of the world's largest makers of porcelain goods.  Reuters
The 10th edition of Gulf Industry Fair (GIF) takes place next February at a critical time for the promotion of the economic diversification of the GCC, according to event organiser Hilal Conferences and Exhibitions (HCE).



Gulf Industry Fair 2017 takes place from February 7 to 9 under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, Prime Minister of Bahrain.



Despite a regional economic slowdown caused by low oil prices, ongoing investment in GCC industrial infrastructure remains strong. Notably, the announcement earlier this year of Saudi Arabias long-term 2030 Vision blueprint is likely to be a key driver of the Gulfs industrial ambitions in the coming years as the regions biggest economy accelerates diversification efforts, said Jubran Abdulrahman, managing director of HCE.



Gulf Industry Fair is dedicated to promoting the economic opportunities arising from the march to diversifying the economies of the GCC, he added.



Gulf Industry Fair has built its unique reputation as a one-stop shop for key sectors of industrial development. GIF has concentrated on the aluminium sector, energy and environmental protection, industrial metals, industrial processes and manufacturing, logistics and industrial facilities, industrial security and safety, ports and maritime industries as well as training for industry.



In 2016, GIF proved to be a successful showcase for both the exhibitors and visitors. The event attracted 3,325 unique registered visitors. Analysis of the demographics of the visitors revealed that 15 per cent of the visitors attending came from Saudi Arabia and 43 per cent of the total visitor numbers were decision makers, said Ahmed Suleiman, exhibitions director.



For 2017, we will be looking to add to the large exhibitor participation from Saudi Arabia and build upon the Training for Industry workshops, seminars and conferences which provide an invaluable opportunity to exchange skills and knowledge between the participants, added Suleiman.



Gulf Industry Fair is supported by leading industrial giants in Bahrain, including the National Oil & Gas Authority (Noga) in association with Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco), and Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), both of which are in the midst of major expansion projects.  TradeArabia News Service
Vision-X, an upcoming eyecare trade fair in Dubai, UAE, is expected to attract more than 4,000 buyers from over 70 countries and will showcase over 250 brands, said event organisers.



The 17th edition of Vision-X will run from October 25 to 27 at Dubai World Trade Centre.



The event will feature dedicated areas such as the Future in Focus and Retail Theatre for business owners and managers to improve their operations.



The Vision-X Opticare Conference in cooperation with the International Association of Contact Lens Educator (IACLE) and the European Academy of Optometry and Optics (ECCO) will offer eyecare professionals the opportunity to earn valuable CPD points for their practices.



The results of the GfK report are very promising for the growing number of optical professionals working in the Mena market, said Trixie Loh Mirmand, senior vice president, Events & Exhibitions Department, DWTC.



While the wayfarer frames, most typically associated to the Ray Ban brand, are still the best-selling fashion frames, the rounded styles take the top spot for the best-selling new models. It is also significant to note that while 80 per cent of Middle East opticians core business comes from spectacle lenses and frames, there is a growing demand here for contact lenses, specifically within the beauty sector, demonstrated by the fact 95 per cent of UAE opticians carry the coloured and beauty contact lenses compared to only 52 per cent of European opticians.



The growing and increasingly ageing population of the Middle East is contributing to the anticipated growth forecast of the regions $2.67 billion optical market, as demand for contact lenses and spectacles in particular rises among older consumers.



A report conducted by global market research organisation GfK, which analysed data up to the end of 2015, found that the Mena market offers vast potential to opticians, eyecare retailers and professionals because of the expected 26 per cent increase in regional population by 2030 compared to 2015, according to the UN World Population Prospects.



Coupled with the advances in healthcare which are supporting an ageing population  an increase of 21 per cent for Saudi Arabia and 24 per cent for the UAE by 2050  the report suggests that despite global economic difficulties and challenges, there is a positive outlook for opticians.



The report also underlined the opportunity for the Middle East market to become more innovative and take advantage of the opportunities e-commerce and online presences could make to annual sales. With a 52 per cent online penetration in the Middle East, only 25 per cent of optician outlets in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are currently operating websites with online sales capabilities, representing just 92 opticians.



In 2015, 50 per cent of Vision-X exhibitors generated sales over $200,000, with one of the key highlights being the sale of a unique pair of Bentley frames crafted with titanium, gold and diamond inlays to a private buyer in Dubai for Dh650,000 ($177,000).



This year, the organisers expect to see an influx of new exhibitors to the show this year. Notably, a country like Turkey decided to double up the number of exhibitors under the Turkish pavilion, a first for the show.



Participants can also expect returning exhibitors from Germany, Italy, and South Korea to showcase a range of products. Additionally, many of the major brands and luxury names that dominate the industry will be displaying their latest designs.



Visitors can expect to see the very latest in cutting-edge design, technology and innovation at Vision-X. Returning to the show this year is a host of recognised industry names including Baush & Lomb, Alcon, GKB Hi Tech, and Anesthesia USA, as well as leading fashion brands such as Future Optic, Ata Optic and Dzmitry Samal.



Speakers from International Association of Contact Lens Educators and European Academy of Optometry and Optics will be among the experts addressing delegates from around the world in the Vision-X Opticare Conference, highlighting issues such as myopia, paediatrics, low vision and ophthalmic dispensing.



Celebrating excellence in the eyewear and optical care industry, the Vision-X Vision Plus Awards returns for the third year to provide a platform for leading brands to celebrate the best in business. The ceremony takes place on October25 at the Dubai World Trade Centre.  TradeArabia News Service
EDM, a leading global provider of training simulators to the civil aviation and defence sectors, announced today that Ethiopian Airlines' new Aviation Academy is fitted out with a range of its cabin crew training simulators.



The $100 million state-of-the-art Aviation Academy was officially opened at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa earlier this year by the countrys Prime Minister, Hailemaraim Desalegn, in front of some of the countrys leading business and aviation dignitaries.



Widely regarded as Africas finest airline training facility, the academy will enable 4,000 aviation students to be trained annually. Housed within the facility is the comprehensive range of cabin crew training simulators designed, manufactured and installed by EDM. They comprise:



 B737 / B757 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET) on an electric motion system

 B787 / B777 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET)

 Extended B767 Door Trainer

 Extended Q400 Door Trainer

 A350 Door Trainer



The market-leading simulators will enable cabin crew to be fully trained in cabin service as well as emergency and evacuation safety procedures. EDM was selected by Ethiopian Airlines, Africas fastest growing airline, to supply its crew training simulators after an international tender in 2014. EDM also provided support to Ethiopian Airlines regarding the design and specification of the new Aviation Academy.



Last month, the shipping of the B787/B777 CEET to Ethiopia featured in TV documentary series, Mega Shippers, on Quest TV. The programme followed the journey of the CEET from EDMs manufacturing facility in Manchester all the way to Addis Ababa via the Port of Southampton.



Ethiopian Airlines new Aviation Academy sets a highly impressive new standard in the provision of aviation training, said Tony Bermingham, managing director of EDM. It is one of the best airline training facilities in the world and we were privileged to play a part in this fine accomplishment by Ethiopian Airlines. - TradeArabia News Service


Siemens has manufactured and tested the largest geared compressor rotor in the world at its facility in Duisburg, Germany. The product is for the Jazan integrated gasification combined cycle power plant (IGCC) in Saudi Arabia.



The first-stage impeller with a diameter of 1.8 m is the largest installed on an integrally geared compressor rotor. The STC-GV compressor rotor is part of an order placed last year by UK-based Air Products.



The order comprises 19 STC-GV integrally geared compressors for the air separation unit of the Jazan integrated gasification combined cycle power plant (IGCC) in Saudi Arabia.



The first compressor units have been successfully tested at the Siemens Mega Test Center in Duisburg. These compressors are now on their way to the site for commissioning and erection due to start in mid-2018.



The air separation facility will supply 75,000 tonnes per day  20,000 tonnes of oxygen and 55,000 tonnes of nitrogen  to a facility currently under construction in the Jazan province on the coast of the Red Sea.



The air separation plant, part of what will be the world's largest industrial gas complex, will be operated by Jazan Gas Projects Company, a joint venture between the local company Acwa Holding and Air Products, an industrial gases company headquartered in the US.



Siemens will supply seven model STC-GV main air compressors, six STC-GV booster air compressors and six model STC-GV nitrogen. The nitrogen compressor power is significantly higher than normally seen on high pressure integrally geared compressors, said the statement.



"This project proves that we have the necessary capabilities to provide large air separation plants with the appropriate compression equipment," said Thomas Moenk, head of product development and technology for the Dresser-Rand business, part of Siemens Power and Gas.



"The STC-GV compressors with their customised design are the largest integrally geared main air compressors ever built. This is a tremendous demonstration of our technical expertise."



Each of the rotors that will be assembled inside the STC-GV compressors weighs more than seven tonnes. This impeller was balanced in Duisburg at a speed of 3,970 revolutions per minute. At its average operating speed, the outside diameter of the first-stage impeller rotates at a speed of 1,350 km/h  faster than most jet aircraft, it said.



"We appreciate the ingenuity the Siemens team brought to this project. We especially valued the Siemens and Air Products joint team's dynamic and collaboration throughout the design, manufacturing and testing phases which resulted in a timely delivery," said David Edmondson, vice-president global engineering and manufacturing and Jazan project director at Air Products. - TradeArabia News Service
Breast Cancer Awareness month begins in style at Four Seasons Hotel Bahrain Bay, turning Bahrains private island into a pink shade for the month of October.



The hotel has joined forces with local breast cancer organisation Think Pink Bahrain to raise funds and awareness for breast cancer research. Guests are welcome to support the fundraising effort when choosing different experiences in the restaurants, The Spa, and upon check-out where a percentage of proceeds benefits the local nonprofit.



We are compassionate members of our Bahraini community and we are striving to give back as often as possible. For more than 30 years, Four Seasons has been deeply committed to the cause of advancing cancer research, and now it is our honour to support the same in Bahrain for a full month, said Greg Pirkle, general manager at Four Seasons Hotel Bahrain Bay.



Pink Events Wrapped in Legendary Four Seasons Finesse



Shop to raise funds  welcome to Four Seasons Pink Boutique



In October, the hotel opens its very first Pink Boutique in its Lobby Alcove offering delicacies such as pink macaroons, candies and pink chocolate cookies prepared in the Four Seasons kitchen, along with Think Pink Bahrains cancer foundation products.



Four Seasons Pink Boutique welcomes guests throughout October 2016, every day from 11:00 am to 9:00 pm.



Eat Pink



Pink Brunch at Bahrain Bay Kitchen



Executive chef Stefano Andreoli invites guests to join the hotels buffet restaurant for a breast cancer benefit featuring a Pink Brunch every Friday during October. The popular weekend event will feature pink signature dishes displayed in five live cooking stations on top of the regular brunch offerings.



Pink Brunch at Bahrain Bay Kitchen, served every Friday from 12:30 until 3:30 pm, is priced at BD27 ($71), including soft beverages, or BD37 ($97.4) with an extended beverage package



For reservations: 00973 1711 5500



An Afternoon Tea tastes better with extra pink macaroons



In celebration of the Breast Cancer Awareness month, executive pastry chef Imad Boukly impresses with the lavish Pink Afternoon Tea every day, between 3:00 and 6:00 pm.



Pink Afternoon Tea is priced at BD15 ($39.5), for guests of 2, or BD28 ($73.7)to be shared between a group of 4



For reservations: 00973 1711 5500



Chefs united this October



For those seeking a bite of something extraordinary, on October 14, 2016, CUT by Wolfgang Pucks menu features a seven-course gourmet dinner prepared by outstanding culinary talents from Wolfgang Puck's team, Four Seasons and Bahrains top restaurant kitchens.



Chefs united in CUT by Wolfgang Puck for a good cause:



- Ben Small, executive chef at CUT

- Brian Becher, executive chef at re / Asian Cuisine by Wolfgang Puck

- Pierre Chambon, executive pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck restaurants, Bahrain

- Stefano Andreoli, executive chef at Four Seasons Hotel Bahrain Bay

- Imad Boukli, executive pastry chef at Four Seasons Hotel Bahrain Bay

- Susy Massetti, executive chef at Masso

- Louis Kenji, executive chef at Maki

- Joan Gomez, executive chef at La Vinoteca Barcelona



Chefs Gourmet Dinner at CUT, served on October 14 from 7:00 until 11:00 pm, is priced at BD75 ($197.5). For reservations: 00973 1711 5044.



Drink Pink



Many of the hotels dining outlets will shake up their regular mocktail menus, adding a bit of pink in taste and colour to raise awareness of breast cancer.



Life is pink with Wolfgang Puck



Celebrity chef and world renowned restaurateur Wolfgang Pucks popular lounges Blue Moon Lounge on the hotels 50th floor and CUT Bar & Lounge prepare with a special pink mix Forbidden Kiss, which will be available for guests looking for tasty drinks combined with scenic views of the city skyline throughout the month of October.



Raise a glass to something noble



The hotels lobby lounge Bay View Lounge and its poolside restaurant Vento will prepare a Four Seasons Pink Mocktail, available for purchase for those who are willing to contribute to raising funds for cancer research.



Think Pink



Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer among the female population, and thus, during the Breast Cancer Awareness month, the hotels Spa members as well as its employees will be offered Pink Talks: Frankly Speaking about Cancer  a series of carefully crafted talking sessions hosted by Julie Sprakel, founder and spokesperson of Think Pink Bahrain.



Breast cancer is not race, religion or class orientated. It is only with research, education, early intervention and public awareness that we can fight this disease, says Sprakel. Education is the first step to prevention. When we educate our mothers, daughters, sisters and nieces, we can help them make informed decisions, which may ultimately save their lives.



Stay longer this October



For the month of October, the hotel is offering the Stay Longer - Third Night Free package to raise awareness and funds for cancer research.



Package includes:



- Complimentary third night with two consecutive paid nights

- Complimentary premium high-speed internet access

- 10 per cent off food at hotel restaurants (savings do not apply to brunch)

- 10 per cent off spa treatments

- Luxurious accommodations



The offer applies every day of the week, and requires a three-night minimum and six-night maximum stay. The free night must be used in conjunction with the initial stay. Upon check-out, guests are welcome to contribute with a percentage for the benefit of the local nonprofit.



Stay Longer - Third Night Free package reservations can be made by contacting the Reservations team via email at [email protected] or by calling (00973) 17115000.



Rejuvenate for research at The Spa



The Spa at Four Seasons Hotel Bahrain Bay is offering the Air Essence (Anahata) ritual in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness month. This tender combination of foot wash, scrub and massage uses rose oil and warmed rose quartz to gently reconnect the body and mind to inner peace and stillness. Equilibrium is restored, leaving guests feeling rejuvenated. A pink amenity gift will be given at the end of the treatment.



For reservations: 00973 1711 5000. - TradeArabia News Service
Royal Tulip Achrafieh, part of the Louvre Hotels Group, has opened its doors to welcome its first guests.



Beiruts newest luxury boutique hotel is the first five-star hotel in Lebanon under Louvre Hotels Group. The hotel is located in a strategic location in the heart of Lebanons capital, only minutes away from prime business and leisure attractions, conveniently close to ABC mall, Hotel Dieu hospital, and AUST University, making it the perfect destination for the business and leisure travelers alike.



The Middle East has proven to be an important market for the global expansion of Louvre Hotels, hence the branding and management of Royal Tulip Achrafieh. The owners of Royal Tulip Achrafieh expressed their strong belief in investing in Lebanon and their trust in the success of the partnership they have made to manage the hotel under the Royal Tulip Luxury Hotel brand.



On the occasion, Amine E. Moukarzel, president of Louvre Hotels Group Mena, said: Our growth momentum in Lebanon after last years opening of The Golden Tulip Lili's Resort and Spa Aley, is well complimented by the Royal Tulip Achrafieh opening today, bringing our hotels portfolio to seven hotels in Lebanon, becoming the largest hotels group by the number of hotels, and aiming to open two more in the next two years.



Royal Tulip Achrafieh is designed to meet the practical needs of a modern day traveller with its contemporary design and state-of-the-art facilities, bringing together luxurious comfort and personalised service.



Nicolas Anghelopoulos, Royal Tulip Achrafiehs general manager, said: We look forward to having our guests experience the luxurious, and personalised, service at Royal Tulip Achrafieh that will make their stay a memorable one. The hotel is here to cater to local and international guests, and is also the perfect place for the Lebanese diaspora. - TradeArabia News Service
Zika virus has been feared since its first known case and dreaded by many when the virus started spreading from country to country and with number of confirmed cases increasing. Carried by the same mosquitoes responsible for dengue, Zika virus is more dangerous for it is known to causing birth defects like microcephaly when a pregnant woman is infected, resulting to having a child with head and brain smaller than normal.

This is the main reason why CDC urged pregnant women to avoid traveling to Wynwood. This is the first time the public health agency has warned people to avoid an American neighborhood due to an infectious outbreak, according to CBS News.

In line with this, federal and state health officials has taken actions on controlling or even eradicating the virus by blood testing on Wynwood residents, educating people on how to prevent mosquitoes from increasing their population, and encouraging pregnant women to have themselves tested to assure they re not affected by the virus.

On the other hand, it seemed like the people of Miami-Dade County has had enough of the way the city council took action regarding the prevention of Zika virus from spreading. Protesters demand the city council to stop the spraying of the insecticide naled and suggest to consider using alternatives instead.

The Miami-Dade acounty began spraying the insecticide last week after CDC recommended using it to help kill adult mosquitoes especially ones that carry the virus and stop them from reproducing.

But it seemed like not everyone is on their side because other residents state that spraying of the pesticide naled could mean risking their own health, if not getting infected by Zika Virus. This is supported by studies that shows large doses of such pesticide may harm the health of human beings, in a report by NBC.

Aside from being cautious about the effects of the pesticide to their health, protesters also questioned whether the virus may really cause birth defects on new born children thus, demanding a stop to pesticide spraying on Sunday.

According to CDC medical etmologist Janet McAllister, it is true that pesticide naled may affect human health. But with proper dosage and if used correctly, it won't cause any harm to other living things and human and still prevent Zika virus carrying mosquitoes from spreading and infecting people.

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
Considered as one of the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World, the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing has been rebuilt after it was destroyed more than 150 years ago.

Reportedly, China's richest man, Wang Jianlin has funded the reconstruction of the tower. Located at the newly opened Porcelain Tower Heritage Park, the tower was revamped with steel beams and a futuristic Buddhist-themed museum alongside.

History

In CNN's report, it was constructed by Ming Dynasty's Yongle Emperor during the 15th century to honor his deceased mother. The tower was made of white porcelain bricks with different images on the wall. They used images such as animals, flowers, bamboo, landscapes and Buddhist illustration for the stonework.

The tower became one of the most well-known Chinese buildings and considered as a national treasure for China. It was built with nine floors, a spiral staircase in the middle and a golden pineapple at the top of the tower.

The Destruction and Reconstruction of the Porcelain Tower

In 1801, a lightning bolt struck the tower and damaged the top 4 levels of it. The tower was then immediately restored. During the Taiping Civil War in 1850s, the city was controlled by the rebels. They started destroying the Buddhist images as well as the staircase of the tower. Eventually, they demolished the entire stories of the building.

In 2008, an excavation was done which led into a discovery of the tower's various fragments.

In 2010, reportedly as the single largest personal donation that was ever given in China, a businessman handed out one billion yuan to the municipal government for the tower's funding.

Last year, the Porcelain Tower Heritage Park was publicly opened in December. The park features a reconstructed Buddhist temple with porcelain pagoda and a conservatory that displays the Buddhist relics and other archaeological discoveries.

Today, you can now visit the Porcelain Tower Heritage Park and enjoy the exhibits in the museum like the original blocks of the Nanjing Tower's arched door.

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
Travel flights to United States of America are estimated to be as low as 50 due to emerging markets. According to Advito's 2017 industry forecast report, cheaper airfare is the ticket to expanding business travel in the year ahead. Analysis predicts hotel fares to rise slightly, but airline prices to stay flat for 2017, as reported by PYMNTS.com.

Traveling, which used to be a luxury, is now considered to be a necessity and with all these cheap flights around the corner. Corporate travel will soon be reconsidered and its prices, now being rediscovered.

PYMNTS reports, "At 4.2 percent, growth will surpass the 3.5 percent forecast for 2016," Advito analysts concluded. "This improvement is largely driven by Latin America, primarily due to Brazil, which is expected to emerge from a prolonged recession, but also because of stronger growth from Argentina and Colombia." In addition, the website reported that Europe's business travel budgets will remain economical due to Brexit and other factors such as budget airline growth and lower hotel supply.

Asia will remain the main source of activities within the emerging markets; Indian economy continues to expand while China's GDP growth rates move slowly.

Airfares are expected to stay flat in 2017 while the hotels worldwide will see an increase in its businesses.

Meanwhile, Norwegian airline is a low-cost carrier which will introduce 52 translantic fares once its new aircraft carriers arrives. New flight routes were launched in different cities across the North America, as reported by Telegraph.

100 Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircrafts are set to be delivered to the airline according to its chief commercial officer. These airplanes boast fuel-efficiency and state-of-the art aerodynamic function that will make the flight cost across the Atlantic cheaper. Thomas Ramdahl, Norwegian's chief commercial officer said, "I can promise you that you will see transatlantic flights on the 737 Max next year and that's when you will see the $69 fares."

The planes are projected to arrive early 2017, but further announcements will be made accordingly.

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
Iceland, known for volcanoes, glaciers and the northern lights, is becoming a booming tourism destination as we wrote in the most recent Sojern Data Point column. The country has seen an impressive increase in tourism, with the number of people visiting Iceland each year surpassing its total population. At Sojern, we wanted to focus on Iceland tourism in order to understand its recent successes and the potential causes.

This article was published on September 8, 2016 in the print and online editions of Travel Weekly magazine. It is the thirteenth installment of a series of Sojern-authored columns.

Iceland, known for volcanoes, glaciers and the northern lights, is becoming a booming tourism destination as we wrote in the most recent Sojern Data Point column. The country has seen an impressive increase in tourism, with the number of people visiting Iceland each year surpassing its total population. At Sojern, we wanted to focus on Iceland tourism in order to understand its recent successes and the potential causes.

Creativity drives growth

Our data revealed that Iceland is an emerging market for the U.S., showing a 148% increase in interest for all of the U.S. at the beginning of this year compared with last (January to April 2015 vs. all of 2016) as we reported in our previous column. Comparing the Icelandic Tourism Boards reported growth in U.S. visitors in January and February over the last six years, theres another picture of Icelands emerging status for U.S. travelers: From 2010 to 2015 the increase consistently hovered around 30%, with one minor drop in 2013, mostly likely due to the financial crisis. In 2016, however, travel to Iceland has skyrocketed, increasing 81%.

Seeing numbers such as these, the first questions to ask are Why? And What can I learn to inspire outsize growth in my business? Besides a general upturn in the economy, Icelandair in particular made some creative moves in its campaigns in ways most airlines have not.

Icelandair has run a stopover campaign for the last 56 years, enabling U.S. travelers to stay in Iceland for up to seven nights without any additional airfare costs. Most recently, Icelandair stepped up its advertising for this campaign, including a Stopover Buddy in its promotions.

The Stopover Buddy is an Icelandair employee who will, for no additional charge, take a traveler around Iceland, serving as a personal tour guide. Whats even better is that the airline has classified the guides into categories. Like outdoor adventures? Get a lifestyle guide. Want to take in some great wine and cheese? Get their food guide. No matter what your vacation preference, it will pair travelers with an Icelandic native guide.

The Stopover Buddy campaign ran from February to April 2016 and seems to be in large part responsible for the meteoric rise in travel to Iceland. Is there anything you want to see but dont find offered? If you tell the airline, it will come.

New routes mean big business for Iceland

In mid-March 2016, Icelandair opened a new route from Reykjavik to Chicago. This, coupled with the Stopover Buddy campaign, delivered huge results for bookings to Iceland. The country took the top spot for emerging destinations from Chicago. Not only that, it dominated with an increase in intent of 152%. The next closest, Ukraine, saw an increase of 70%, while the last five spots in the top 10 list all saw around a 30% increase.

Iceland didnt merely shine as an emerging market, but thanks in large part to the new route, it blew the rest of the competition out of the water.

Driving consistent interest and changing the off-season

Icelandairs creativity as well as its well-timed expansion obviously paid off in the opening months of 2016. But how do we know if that will continue?

As it turns out, Icelandair wasnt the only one running campaigns during the off-season. Icelandic low-fare carrier Wow Air also ran a sale for its routes from Los Angeles and San Francisco, offering $99 tickets to Iceland. In order to look at the different effects of both campaigns, we isolated the origin cities of each airline so that we could better understand and contrast them.

The two airlines routes have little overlap: Wow Air only flies to Iceland out of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Washington. Icelandair doesnt fly out of Los Angeles or San Francisco and has dozens more routes to Iceland. Parsing traffic from cities going to Iceland, then, gives us a solid picture of the different impact of campaigns.

Both airlines ran their campaigns in January, and we saw interest grow in both companys origin cities. During the week of their campaigns, Wow cities hit a 70% increase in searches compared with the week before, whereas Icelandair cities only hit a 35% increase. Wows increase in searches, however, only lasted one week, whereas Icelandair maintained its interest for two weeks.

Following the January campaign, up until May 2016, bookings for Wow cities returned to their averages from last year, while Icelandair enjoyed a sustained increase of 18% in bookings. It seems that many travelers were interested when they heard about Wows sales, hence the higher interest in searches. But unlike Icelandairs efforts, it didnt translate into sustained interest in travel.

Learning from Iceland

Sales events are a tried-and-true way of increasing your market share, but they arent necessarily long-lasting in their effects. Doing something truly creative, such as the Stopover Buddy, can produce longer lasting and monumental changes in a market. While everyone doesnt have the time or resources to undertake such an elaborate campaign, there is still something to be learned from it.

At its core, the campaign looked to show tourists the different facets of a culture, to give experiences rather than just amenities. Its also a campaign that is about welcoming tourists and making them feel like they belong.

Using those guiding principles, its certainly possible to create similar, smaller moments in our travel marketing efforts. With the Stopover Buddy campaign coming back in the fall, Iceland is poised to continue its growth and continue enjoying the return from its creative travel marketing.

About Kurt

With more than 15 years of experience, Kurt Weinsheimer is a veteran in e-commerce and online travel. At Sojern, Kurt leads the companys strategic partnerships. Prior to Sojern, Kurt served executive and leadership positions at Netpulse, Spot Runner Inc., Cendant Travel Distribution Services, WorldRes.com, and Patagonia. He was also founder and GM of the hotel division for Orbitz. Kurt received a B.A. from Boston College and an MBA from Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management.

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Ntchisi Forest Lodge, situated at the foot of one of the last remaining indigenous rainforests in an isolated spot of Lilongwe, are hosting Birding Weekend from 7  9 October 2016. Visitors are welcome to the stunning location for a few days of diving into the rich bird life of the reserve.



(TRAVPR.COM) UK - September 21st, 2016 - Ntchisi Forest Lodge situated at the foot of one of the last remaining indigenous rainforests in an isolated spot of Lilongwe, are hosting Birding Weekend from 7  9 October 2016. Visitors are welcome to the stunning location for a few days of diving into the rich bird life of the reserve.

Birds that can be found amongst many others include the bar tailed trogon, the louribird, olive headed weaver as well as the pale billed hornbill, stripe cheeked greenbul and the orange ground thrush.

The Birding Weekend is in collaboration with WESM and will be led by Ken Longden, David Yekutiel and Edward Maferano, all great bird experts and enthusiasts. With the bird counts that will be done during the weekend, scientific knowledge will be gained and there will be specific input for bird conservation. You can be part of this!

Ntchisi Forest Reserve covers approximately 75 sqkm and is surrounded on all sides by rolling hills covered by subsistence farming and dotted with traditional villages. It is an untouched paradise, entirely undiscovered by mass tourism. Bird life is prolific and this is an excellent destination for the professional or amateur bird watcher due to the variety of habitats. Some mammals, butterflies, and strange and unknown plants and orchids are also plentiful.

Besides the birding, you can indulge in delicious home cooked meals every day. Hosts Eduard and Maaike and the team will welcome you and make sure you will have a wonderful stay! The weekend will start on Friday evening 7th October, and will end on Sunday 9th October early afternoon.

Packages are selling out quickly, so book now to avoid disappointment.

Packages:

 110 USD for camping per person

 125 USD for camping with our tent

 140 USD for Luxury tent per person sharing > Fully booked

 170 USD for Ensuite room per person sharing > Fully booked

 190 USD for Ensuite Plus per person sharing > Fully booked

 210 USB for Ensuite Delux per person sharing > Fully booked

 280 USB for Forest Cabin per person sharing > Fully booked

 If not sharing a room 40 USD will be added for your stay

 Possibility to share for two singles

The Birding Weekend packages include:

 Three birding excursions including bird count sessions in Ntchisi Forest Reserve

 An introductory talk on birds of Malawi at the start, and a wrap-up at the end of the weekend

 Two nights of accommodation

 Delicious food: two dinners, two brunches and homemade snacks

Not included:

 Sodas or alcohol (coffee and tea are included in the brunch and filtered drinking water will be provided)

More information on Ntchisi Forest Lodge

Ntchisi Forest Lodge sits on the foot of one of the last remaining indigenous rainforests in an isolated spot near Lilongwe, Malawis capital. Experience the warm-hearted hospitality of a part of rural Malawi where tourists are still a rarity, and enjoy relaxing and walking in the beautiful scenery.

###
So, I just read an article complaining about how the flood of single-use straw bans is "annoying" and doesn't have any impact aside from making "liberal enviros" feel good about themselves. I am pretty sure that the marine animals with straws stuck in their noses might beg to differ, but hey, I'm just a liberal enviro (thank you very much) so what do I know?

What I do know is that plastic pollution is an enormous problem, so regardless of the specific statistics, the war on plastic straws is working double-time as an effective public awareness campaign. Plastic straws are also completely unnecessary for most of us (excluding those who truly rely on straws for physical reasons)  they are a frivolous contraption and can be a great introduction to breaking up with single-use plastic.

(And for the record, an analysis by a group of pollution research nonprofits called Better Alternatives Now estimates that 7.5 percent of plastic in the environment comes from straws and stirrers. Meanwhile, a recently published study estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches That is not nothing.)

But to anyone who is feeling annoyed that they may soon be deprived of the luxury of a plastic straw  even though humans somehow managed to live without them for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the 1960s  you may want to consider that straws aren't just bad for the environment, but may be bad for you as well. (I mean, what's bad for the environment is also generally bad for human health, but I'm talking more directly.)

I have long wondered if sucking on plastic via straws had any health implications, and while my curiosity didn't go much further than the plastic chemicals that might be leaching into one's drink and mouth, registered dietitian and nutrition writer Christy Brissette has been kind enough to lay it all out in an article for The Washington Post.

Here's what she's thinking.

1. Gas and Bloating

Nobody likes gas and bloating. They are uncomfortable, both physically and socially. Brissette says that sipping from straws delivers air into the digestive tract, which can cause uncomfortable digestive symptoms, like, yes, gas and bloating. "When Im counseling clients who are experiencing these symptoms, I always ask them about lifestyle habits, such as whether they drink from a straw often. Some of my clients have experienced significant improvements by ditching straws," she writes.

2. Dental Health

When drinking sugary or acidic drinks with a straw, it acts like a hose hitting a specific area of the teeth with a stream of concentrated sugar/acid, which can lead to the erosion of enamel and cause tooth decay. That said, if you put the straw behind your teeth, it can spare them  and since this will probably excite your gag reflex as well, you won't even want to drink the junky thing in the first place, a win-win!

3. Chemicals

This was my worry, and Brissette confirms my concerns  the fact that straws are made from petroleum, and something about sucking on a petroleum product sends up a red flag somewhere in the heart of my liberal enviro brain. Single-use plastic straws are primarily made of polypropylene, which the over-aloof and industry-lobbied FDA says is food-safe in certain amounts. "But there is evidence that chemicals from polypropylene can leach into liquids and may release compounds that could affect estrogen levels," writes Brissette, "especially when exposed to heat, acidic beverages or UV light."

But wait, there's more! There is so much plastic in the ocean that it is finding its way back to us: We ingest microplastics in things like seafood and sea salt. Fewer straws means less plastic in the ocean means less plastic for us to eat when consuming products from the sea.

4. Excess Sugar and Alcohol Consumption

Brissette notes that the idea of drinking something through a straw has been argued by some to contribute to excess sugar intake and/or faster intoxication (when drinking alcohol). While the jury is still out on those, I know for a fact that when I used to use straws, they encouraged me to drink a beverage much more quickly. Brissette writes that, "The thought is that straws cause you to gulp down a greater volume of liquid more quickly than drinking from a glass or cup. Plus, people arent very accurate about estimating how much liquid theyre taking in, especially if theyre distracted by a movie or smartphone screen."

5. Wrinkles

Because if the environment and health don't convince you, perhaps vanity will! For people concerned about wrinkles, using straws regularly can lead to pucker lines, like the ones smokers get from pulling on a cigarette.

For anyone very attached to their straw habit, there are paper straws and reusable straws. Yes, plastic straws may be convenient, but doesn't it seem strange to use something for five minutes that could pollute nature for hundreds of years to come? You don't have to be a liberal enviro to see that there's a problem in that logic.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 20

There is no let-up in snatching incidents in the city with four more incidents being reported. While three incidents were reported from Sectors 31, 38 and 40 today, one incident was reported from Sector 38 (West) yesterday. Over 100 snatching incidents have been reported from the city this year.

Sources said a gold chain was snatched from a woman, Vijay Laxmi (60), in Sector 40 this morning. Two miscreants riding a motorcycle snatched the gold chain from the victim from near her house. The accused then fled from the spot. The victim raised the alarm after which police teams rushed to the spot.

Another snatching incident was reported from Sector 31 around 10 am. The victim, Jayanti Tripathi, wife of an Air Force officer, had gone to a temple when a motorcycle-borne miscreant snatched her gold chain. The accused fled from the spot. Police teams rushed to the spot and initiated an investigation. Sources said the police scrutinised the footage of CCTV cameras installed near the spot.

Another snatching incident was reported in the evening from Sector 38. The miscreant, who was riding a motorcycle without a helmet, snatched a purse from a woman, Sudesh Gupta, a resident of Sector 49.

Sources said the purse contained Rs 1,300 and a mobile phone. Yet another snatching incident was reported from Sector 38 (West) yesterday. Two motorcycle-borne miscreants snatched a gold chain from a woman near her house. The motorcycle had a registration number of Punjab. A case has been registered at the Maloya police station.

All four snatching incidents were reported from southern sectors of the city.

We are gathering information and CCTV footage is being scrutinised to get clues about the snatchers, said Deepak Yadav, DSP (South).

Mohali: Two motorcycle-borne youngsters targeted a private schoolteacher at Phase III here on Tuesday morning and snatched her chain.

The victim, Harpreet Kaur, was on her way to school when the incident occurred.
Tribune News Service

Mohali, September 21

The Mohali police claim to have worked out some snatching cases with the arrest of two motorcycle-borne snatchers from the Kharar area here.

Those arrested are Lovepreet Singh, alias Lovely (18), and Lovepreet Singh, alias Kaka (20), both residents of Peer Sohana village here. The police have recovered a Splendor motorcycle (PB 65 AC 9426), two gold chains, gold and silver ornaments, purses, cash and mobile phones from their possession.

Mohali Senior Superintendent of Police Gurpreet Singh Bhullar said the snatchers were arrested on a tip-off.

Lovely, who left studies after he failed in Class VIII, used to work at a grocery shop while Kaka, a matric fail, was working with a private factory in Mohali. To make a quick buck, both youngsters entered the world of crime around five months ago and started snatching purses, gold chains and mobile phones from women, said the SSP.

The accused were produced before the court, which remanded them in police custody for two days.

Womans purse snatched

Chandigarh: A snatching incident was reported from the market in Badheri, Sector 41, in which motorcycle-borne miscreants targeted a 53-year-old woman, Shanta Sharma, and snatched her purse containing Rs 1,400 and some important documents. The incident took place around 9.30 pm. The victim failed to note down the registration number of the motorcycle. The police rushed to the spot. A case has been registered.

Snatching bid

A snatching attempt was made on a UT woman constable, Satinder Kaur (23), near her house in Sector 40. The victim foiled the attempt of the snatchers, who were riding a motorcycle. The victim immediately informed the police. Sources said the police analysed the footage of a CCTV camera installed near the spot.
Our Correspondent

Dera Bassi, September 21

A 25-year-old youth sustained bullet injuries when a group of four youths opened indiscriminate fire on him at Haripur Kuran village here today.

The injured has been identified as Dalbir Singh, a resident of Mehmadpur village near Dera Bassi. Dalbir Singh suffered several bullet injuries on his arm and stomach.

He was rushed to the Civil Hospital, Dera Bassi, from where he was referred to the PGI, Chandigarh.

The incident occurred in the afternoon when Dalbir Singh had gone to meet his friend at Haripur Kuran village.

Sources said while Dalbir was returning in his Alto car, the four armed youths, who were in a Ford Figo car, intercepted his vehicle near Haripur Kuran village and started firing indiscriminately at him. Dalbir Singh sustained three bullet injuries on his arm and stomach. Soon after the firing incident, the assailants escaped, the sources said.

The police have recovered an empty pistol, which they believe Dalbir may have used. The police also recovered three shells and a live cartridge from the site.

Deepinder Singh, SHO, said old enmity appeared to be the reason behind the incident. He said they were yet to record the victims statement as his condition was critical. Deepinder said the two groups had fought in the past also. He said they were looking at all angles before registering a case.

Dalbir had a narrow escape in earlier attack

Earlier, on the night of August 13, Dalbir Singh had a narrow escape when at least 12 armed youths opened fire on him on the Issapur road near the railway crossing at Dera Bassi. Dalbir Singh escaped unhurt but his two friends, Parvinder Singh and Gurpreet Singh, sustained bullet injuries. The police had booked 23 persons after lodging separate FIRs in the firing incident. It is learnt that Dalbir Singh was the complainant in this incident.
The 17th summit of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) held last week in Venezuela was proof that it cannot remain immobile in a world consisting of powerful economic and security blocs. There was hardly any high profile turnout and only half the members sent in their representatives. Many of them made it because the Venezuelan Government had written the cheque or were attending the United Nations General Assembly not too far from the venue. The veil of shabbiness over the venue spoke of a country in great pain. But these are passing moments in a countrys existence. It was noteworthy that NAM used the occasion to introspect. The first resolution of the Margarita Declaration talks of revitalising the NAM in a manner that preserves its original core but increases it cohesion.

That is easier said than done. Many of the NAMs objectives are at variance with the interests of the developed world. NAM pushes for easier immigration, greater say in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and reform of the UN Security Council. India and many other countries would have no beef with that. Similar resolutions are passed at G-20 and BRICS summits. But large countries like India, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa who can be the moving spirits behind revitalisation of NAM show only polite interest because many of the non-aligned nations are experiencing troubled relationship with the West.

India and Nigeria have made the first move towards making NAM measure up to its potential. Both wanted NAM to pencil in counter-terrorism among its objectives. Perhaps an organisation of NAMs size, without any representation from the larger powers, can better dilute processes of wars and tensions. The proposal failed to make the cut because of Pakistans opposition. But the process has begun to make NAM more credible and beneficial to all its members. NAM can never match the influence of the United Nations though it remains an important vehicle for placing the priorities and concerns of the South on the global agenda. A more modern agenda will make it more relevant and therefore more influential. For Indias national interests alone, NAM cannot be allowed to slide into irrelevance.
Every loss of life by accident or unnatural reasons is unacceptable and particularly unbearable for the family. But the sorrow increases manifold when the loss is of young lives, and no society can remain unmoved by it. For some inexplicable reasons, Punjab has been shockingly indifferent to accidents involving school buses and the death of children, as demonstrated yet again in Amritsar with the loss of seven children under 12. Three distinct aspects are at play here and all are the direct responsibility of the local administration and the government: Road and bridge infrastructure and maintenance; traffic policing; and school bus regulation.

Among several incidents over the past few years in the region, two that stand out were the death of 40 people when a Punjab Roadways bus plunged into the Bhakra Canal near Sirhind in July 2013; and the loss of 10 lives when a car fell off a bridge in Amritsar district in November 2013. As per a Ministry of Road Transport and Highways report, narrow bridges caused 155 deaths in Haryana and 81 in Punjab in 2015. Complaints and petitions to governments and courts in this regard have gone unheeded because these matters are shrugged off as developmental issues, to be addressed when the time comes. But the figures when collated present a depressingly terrifying picture. We have to become conscious of the cost we impose on ourselves as a society in terms of grief as well as the loss of productive lives and family disruption.

School buses are a phenomenon that has to be considered as apart from regular traffic. Children have no way to question the bus drivers; and there is more to be checked than just traffic rules. Accidents involving school buses in Punjab killed 13 children in March 2013 and four in January this year, among other incidents. After every such tragedy there is a perfunctory inspection of school buses and drivers, and that is the end of the safety drive. The misfortune will repeat itself until the government, schools, and parents all take the guilt for the loss upon themselves.
Vishal Joshi

Tribune News Service

Kurukshetra, September 21

Kurukshetra University has failed to initiate action in a case of alleged plagiarism against an associate professor of the commerce department even after nine years.

Two inquiry panels have indicted Dr Virender S Poonia for stealing a research paper from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. The matter is being dragged in the executive committee (EC), highest decision making body of KU, on various pretexts.

Convinced by the official findings, the EC asked Poonia to retire compulsorily for his alleged academic misconduct.

At its meeting on June 24, 2014, the EC had accepted an inquiry report and observed Poonias conduct of non-submission of reply to the charge sheet issued to him on April 25, 2014.

A one-man panel of Dr RK Behl in 2007 held Poonia guilty of fraudulently getting an article published in his name and two others in the prestigious Indian Journal of Industrial Relations (IJIR).

An article on Dimensions of Strike: A Study of Textile Workers of Punjab has been published in the names of Dr VS Poonia, a lecturer of a private college in Panipat, and Om Prakash, then a GNDU research scholar.

However, Prof Amarjit S Sidhu, a senior faculty member from GNDUs University Business School, complained to the IJIR in 2007 of plagiarism by Poonia. He brought to the notice of the IJIR publishers and KU that the article was originally a research paper published jointly by Dr Sidhu himself, his PhD student Dr Jyoti and GNDU research scholar Om Prakash.

Poonia had reportedly claimed before the Behl panel that the disputed paper was our (Poonia and two others) original work and charged Sidhu of stealing the study material after it was published in July 2006.

Another committee comprising the KU Deans of academic affairs, research and development, commerce and management in 2013 endorsed Behl committees findings. It also concluded that Poonia had been adopting delaying tactics by evading appearing before the panel.

Meanwhile, Sidhu told The Tribune today that he had been waiting for justice for almost a decade. He said Om Prakash had provided the paper to Poonia for publication in a journal under names of original authors. The fact-finding committee was convinced by our original papers published in 2004. But it is unfortunate that no decision has taken against the erring teacher, who has successfully used various tactics to evade action, said Sidhu.

KC Sharma, VC, said the EC passed a resolution on August 28 that a final opportunity would be given to Poonia to explain.
Parvesh Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 21

The Haryana Government is splurging on the states golden jubilee celebrations starting on November 1. How? It is planning to hire luxury vehicles such as BMW, Audi, Chevrolet and Mercedes for the golden jubilee celebrations starting on November 1.

Sources said the Swarn Jayanti Celebrations Authority (SJCA) is in the process of finalising a panel of taxi operators who will provide luxury vehicles to ferry VIPs from Haryana, Chandigarh and New Delhi.

The SJCA has sought vehicles of 2015 make or later. And vehicle should not have been driven more than 30,000 km. This, source said, would make hiring costly.

We will pay Rs 9,500 a day if vehicles are driven for 80 km in 10 hours. Above 80 km, we will pay Rs 85 a km. And for every hour above 10 hours, Rs 1,100 will be paid, said an officer, who works in the SJCAs office.

Besides, the authorities will hire more vehicles for the movement of officers on monthly or daily basis as per the requirement.

The Opposition has taken umbrage to the sheer wastage of public money. They said the government must practice austerity while celebrating golden jubilee year. It should use government vehicles to ferry VIPs and other dignitaries.

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar never misses a chance to show his keenness for austerity. But why public money is being wasted to hire luxury vehicles when the government has its vehicles? said Ran Singh Mann, spokesman for the state Congress.

State Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) chief Ashok Arora said the government must give special incentives to distressed farmers in the golden jubilee year of the state rather than wasting money on luxury vehicles.

Rajeev Sharma, SJCA convener, said luxury vehicles were being hired occasionally during the visit of VIPs. We will pay rent for days vehicles will be used, he added.
New Delhi, September 21

Elderly people, especially those aged above 70, are more at risk of being affected by Alzheimer's disease, an irreversible brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and eventually impairs the ability to carry out even the smallest tasks, say experts.

"The scenario in India is more or less similar to the one in the west. While old people are more vulnerable to be affected by Alzheimer's, in some cases genetic factor also plays a role," President of Indian Psychiatric Society Dr G Prasad Rao said.

Rao says, sometimes vascular dementia is mixed with Alzheimer's, but the two are different ailments. Doctors and health organisations globally are today marking the World Alzheimer's Day.

"Vascular dementia is caused by an impaired supply of blood to the brain, such as may be caused by a series of small strokes or hypertension.

"As per a study conducted a few years ago, people aged above 65 form 2 per cent of the population, those above 70 years 3-5 per cent and people above 75 years roughly 6-10 per cent," he said.

According to World Alzheimer's Report released by the Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI), ten countries were home to over a million people with dementia in 2015 including China (9.5 million), the US (4.2 million), India (4.1 million), Japan (3.1 million), among other countries.

Delhi-based senior consultant psychiatrist at Cosmos Institute of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences, Dr Sunil Mittal, says "World over, 44 million people are living with dementia of some form, with over 4 million Indians contributing to this figure, making dementia a global health crisis."

"Studies show that while 66 per cent of the population living with dementia are from low and middle-income countries, less than 10 per cent of research is carried out in these populations, showing a gap in addressing healthcare needs in dealing with dementia," he said.

He says, dementia is an umbrella term for a condition in which the brain shows an overall decline in functioning, in various domains including memory, attention, cognition and higher mental functions. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia.

"Memory disturbances especially for recent events, difficulty in learning new tasks, difficulty in recalling names of people or objects may be early signs of Alzheimer's disease," Mittal said.

Rao says, unlike in vascular dementia, in Alzheimer's "people suffer hallucinations and even forget to perform the smallest of tasks like sitting on a chair or wearing clothes." "It is exceptional for Alzheimer's to occur before age 60.

The incidence and prevalence increase exponentially with age, essentially doubling in prevalence every five years after the age of 65," IMA President-elect Dr K K Aggarwal said. If left untreated, dementia may slowly progress and the difficulties with higher mental functions may further decline.

Neeraj Agarwal, Consultant Neurology, Columbia Asia Hospital in Ghaziabad, says, "When it comes to Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia, the common mistake people make is to consider the symptoms a normal part of ageing. While it affects the elderly, it is certainly not a normal sign of progressing age."

"Most do not seek medical help until the patient loses a lot of cognitive and intellectual ability," he said, adding, Alzheimer's is a difficult condition for which we are yet to develop a cure.

"Timely intervention in the form of right medications and specific neurocognitive rehabilitation can help slow the degenerative process in Alzheimer's," Mittal said.

Doctors says being a memory-related disorder, patients and families face a lot of stigma.

"There are certain cognitive, emotional, behavioural and biological changes associated with the illness. Clumsiness in behaviour, forgetting events and filling in gaps in memory by false information (confabulation), and also at times lack of urinary control and soiling of clothes: can all lead to misunderstandings, problems in interpersonal relationships," says Dr Sameer Malhotra, Director, Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences at Max Super Speciality Hospital.

According to the World Alzheimer's Report 2015, the number of people affected by dementia worldwide is likely to reach 74.7 million by 2030 and 131.5 million by 2050.

"The estimates for India are mostly based on a few urban studies. But since India is 70 per cent rural, from where there are no data, the national picture is unknown," says Vijay Chandra, Dementia Specialist at Paras Hospital in Gurgaon.

"The disease can manifest as early as 40, but is more common after 60 and increases exponentially after that. It is believed that after 80, one out of three persons will have some kind of dementia," he claimed.  PTI
Our Correspondent

Kangra , September 21

Members of the Kangra Bar Association here today boycotted the work and held a march against the notification of the High Court to shift the complaint cases filed under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instrument Act to the court of the Legal services Authority Secretary, Dharamsala.

Aman Guleria, President of the association, said the lawyers had passed a resolution demanding the withdrawal of the notification. Its implementation could deprive the litigant of getting the justice at their doorstep, he said.

Guleria said the lawyers would request the Himachal Pradesh High Court to revive the closed circuit court of the Additional Sessions Judge at Kangra. He said a copy of the resolution passed by the Bar was handed over to the Judicial Magistrate here for its transmission to the High Court.

The protesters held the march through the main market of the town and raised slogans in support of their demands. The lawyers have decided to boycott the court tomorrow also in support of their demands.

The circuit court of the Additional Sessions Judge was closed in Kangra as the distance between Dharamsala and Kangra was 18 kms, where as for such circuit courts the condition laid down says that the distance should be at least 20 kms.
Tribune News Service

Shimla, September 21

The Himachal Government has decided to regularize the services of part time water carriers (PTWC) and water carriers-cum-peons working on daily wage basis in the Education Department who have completed 14 years of continuous service.

The decision was taken by the Cabinet at its meeting held here today under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh. The decision will benefit over 2,000 water carriers-cum-peons were appointed under 1996 policy prior to July 27, 2001 and have who have rendered 14 years continuous service till March 31, 2016.

The Cabinet also paid tributes to the martyrs of Uri attack on army base by observing silence for two minutes.

The Cabinet gave its approval to Mukhya Mantri Gyandeep Yojna under which interest subvention of 4 per cent would be given to all Himachali students availing educational loan from banks up to Rs 10 lakh, irrespective of income level.

The Cabinet also gave nod for the filling of 108 posts of multi-purpose workers in the Forest Department on contract basis. A decision was also taken to open new Sub-Division Office (Civil) at Nagrota-Bagwan and Shahpur in Kangra district and Kumarsen in Shimla district. It was also decided to create new Sub Division Office (Civil) for Naina Devi at Swarghat in Bilaspur district.

It was also decided to upgrade Dharampur sub-tehsil in Mandi district to tehsil and merge Tihra sub-tehsil with Dharampur tehsil and exclude Patwar Circles Cholthara and Sadhot from Tihra sub tehsil and include it in Sarkaghat tehsil. Further two Patwar Circles of Sandhol Tehsil - Gorat and Kamlah would be included in the proposed Dharampur Tehsil.

The Cabinet gave its nod for inclusion of area of Up-Mohal Kyari (Rajhana) in Shimla into the limits of Municipal Corporation, Shimla.

Approval was also granted for a passenger ropeway project from Kullu by-pass to Bijli Mahadev under public private partnership (PPP) mode. It was also decided to open two new Town and Country Planning Offices at Rohroo in Shimla and Nadaun in Hamirpur districts along-with requisite posts.

The Cabinet gave its approval for opening of new Government Degree College at Chopal in Shimla district from the next academic session 2017-18. It also approved creation of a Primary Education Block office at Sangarh in Sirmour district. Approval was given for regularisation of service of Ayurvedic Medical Officers appointed on contract basis. Approval was accorded to setting up of residential institution for mentally challenged children.

The Cabinet decided to make amendments in Himachal Pradesh River Rafting Rules, 2005. The Cabinet gave its approval for constitution of regional plans of the state. All districts may be taken as a unit for establishment of region strictly in accordance with provisions of 73th and 74th constitutional amendment by Town, Country and Planning department.
Kuldeep Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, September 21

After the state Cabinets approval, Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam Ltd (SJVNL) is the front-runner to execute the jinxed 960 mw Jangi-Thopan power project on the Satluj in Kinnaur.

The Cabinet, which was chaired by Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, today asked the state Multipurpose Power Project Department to negotiate with the SJVNL, the NHPC, the NTPC or others for the project that has been hanging fire for the past 10 years. After Reliance Power rejected the governments offer, the matter was placed before the Cabinet.

The decision is hailed by power project engineers and experts saying that it was the most viable project and would generate good income for the fund-starved state, which always depends on the Centre for funds.

Even if the SJVNL, NHPC or NTPC show their keenness to execute the project, the state government should seek the highest stake in project, said members of the engineers association.

We are wondering why Congress and BJP governments were running after private companies whereas the SJVNL, HP Power Corporation and NHPC have the best engineers who have executed big projects like 1,500mw Nathpa-Jhakri power projects that gives crores of revenue to state, they said.

Though the state MPP Power Department has yet to negotiate with the companies, the SJVNL is set to emerge as the main contender for the project because the Himachal Government has 25 per cent share in the SJVNL-run venture in the country and abroad, including Nepal and Bhutan, and SJVNL gives about Rs 1,000 crore to Himachal on equity basis, 12 per cent free power and other concessions.

All power projects that the SJVNL executes, Himachal would have 25 per cent share in these, revealed an SJVNL official. If the state government chooses to negotiate with the SJVNL to execute the project on MoU basis, the final decision would be taken by the Union Ministry of Power as the SJVNL, the NTPC and the NHPC are governed by the Centre.

The SJVNL will be the main contender as it had asked the state to allot the project to it about five years ago. Himachal had no share in the NHPC-run Parbati II and III, Chamera-I, II, III and NTPC-run 800 mw Kol Dam hence these might not emerge favourite for the state, asserted project engineers.

But Himachal faced uphill task as the Centre had shifted its focus from hydropower to solar and wind energy, which could be tapped in less time. Yet the SJVNL might accept the offer even if Himachal sought more share in this, sources revealed.

The government cancelled the allotment of project to Brakel in 2009. The government had allotted the project to Brakel in 2006, but it did not deposit the upfront premium, revealed sources in the Power Department.
Majid Jahangir

Tribune News Service

Uri, September 21

Surrounded by Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on three sides, Uri on the northern fringe of the Kashmir valley is tense, but calm. Residents continue to grapple with anxiety triggered by the deadly Army base attack.

Life is limping back to normal, but there is fear in the air as relations between India and Pakistan are on a new low after the deadly attack in the border town.

Shops and other business establishments are open in the town, but something is still amiss. Almost every residents can be seen enquiring about the situation. We are really worried as we are the first to suffer if there is escalation in tension or war, said Aziz Ahmed, a local shopkeeper.

Uri has been the favourite infiltration route for militants. It had usually remained calm after the ceasefire was announced along the Line of Control in 2003, which brought relief to commoners.

However, when the mountains reverberated with massive blasts and gunshots on Sunday, fear started creeping in among most people.

We pray that good sense prevails between the two sides so that they avoid bloodshed, said Iqbal Ahmed, a resident of Garkote in Uri.

Another local resident scheduled to travel on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad route next month feared that escalation in tension might affect the biggest confidence-building measure since Partition.

I am in a fix whether or not to travel to Muzaffarabad to meet my family. My wife fears that if tension escalates, Kaman bridge can be shut and I may not be able to return, he said.

A day after the attack, the bus plied across the Line of Control. The other question haunting residents was that cross-border shelling might resume. More than 50 civilians had lost their lives in cross-border shelling in the Uri sector between 1990 and 2003. Hundreds of houses had been razed.

Earlier, we used to have underground bunkers. A majority of them were razed in the 2005 earthquake, said a government employee.

We reconstructed our houses, but did not rebuild bunkers as we thought that there would be peace. Now, we are more vulnerable if tension escalates, he said.

Local MLA and National Conference leader Mohammad Shafi said people were tense after the attack on Sunday. There is tension as residents of border areas are the ones who suffer the most, he said.
Vikram Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, September 21

The state has been put on high alert after the Uri attack. It has led to introspection on the strengths and manoeuvrability of security forces, particularly on the Lakhanpur-Kathua-Samba stretch of the national highway, which has been most vulnerable to terrorist attacks in the past few years.

Many infiltration bids have been successful on the 100-km stretch from Kathua to Samba, with terrorists sneaking in through the porous border and striking on the national highway.

Many persons have been killed and others injured in various terrorist attacks, which are generally carried out during the wee hours. For the past many years, the national highway has been the most vulnerable.

Terrorists sneak in and take advantage of the expanding network of tertiary roads, lanes and bylanes. They can easily reach the national highway without trouble.

Lack of clinical security apparatus and impracticality of putting up nakas in every nook and corner of roads leading from the border to the highway to keep track of terrorists makes the area safe passage for them.

Our mechanism is in place to thwart any terrorist attempt from the border. Since the attack on March 20 last year, there has been no such incident on the international border, said Joginder Singh, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Samba.

I will not go into the details of the security apparatus in place in these areas. The BSF, Army and police are fully geared up and alert, he said.

Neeva Jain, SSP, Kathua, echoed similar views. She said security had been tightened in all aspects of late. Additional deployment of forces has been done at all vulnerable points, she said.

We have made sure that no mischief can be carried out. Our force, in coordination with the Army, BSF and local residents, are maintaining strict vigil in the area, she said.

A police source claimed that though some stringent measures had been taken, keeping the entire stretch under strict surveillance was not practical.

He said nakas put up randomly at certain places gave enough space for manoeuvrability for militants to take optional routes to reach the highway.

There is all probability of Bakerwals and other guides in their groups who give shelter and information to militants to take easy routes to the highway, the source said.

There have been a couple of incidents wherein local guides provided shelter to and arranged Army fatigues for terrorists, who roamed freely and later struck at the highway, he added.

The source further said the Basantar had become the main track for militants to reach Doda via the upper reaches and then enter the Kashmir valley.
Manav Mander

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, September 21

Fiftyfour fresh dengue cases were detected from Ludhiana district today, while 21 fresh cases were detected from other districts and three new cases were detected positive from other states. In all 78 new dengue cases were confirmed positive with dengue today.

With the cases of dengue picking up in the city, several residents are getting tests done. Some are referred by doctors, while others are getting the test done before visiting the doctor to ascertain the reason behind the fever.

In the existing circumstances, it is laboratories that are making quick bucks by charging a hefty amount for tests. While the test is done for free at the Civil Hospital, private laboratories are charging anything between Rs 800-1,000 for the test. Keeping all this in view, the Health Department has issued a notification and instructed all private laboratories and hospitals not to charge more than Rs 600 for the test.

District Epidemiologist Dr Ramesh said instructions have been issued to all private hospitals and laboratories not to charge more than Rs 600 for Elisa test that is done to confirm dengue. The test is done for free at the Civil Hospital and anybody can get the test done even if they are not undergoing treatment at the Civil Hospital, he said.

If any laboratory or hospital overcharges, the patients can lodge complaint at the medical helpline 104. The patients have to keep the bill receipt of the test with them so that the guilty could be questioned by the department.

Monica, a city resident, said last week she got the dengue test done for her mother-in-law from a private lab at Model Town. I was charged Rs 1,000 for the test. I was not aware that the test is also done for free at the Civil Hospital, she said.

There is so much disparity in medical treatment and tests. Rates are different at every laboratory and hospital. Government should streamline the rates and strict action should be taken against offenders, said Gurdev Singh, a senior citizen.

On the one hand patients and their families are going through a tough time and on the other hand laboratories and hospitals are busy making quick bucks. The department has taken a good step, said another city resident, Surinder Jain.
Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 20

Indias most coveted address, 7 Race Course Road, is all set to be renamed 7 Ekatma Marg with the capitals municipal authorities geared to clear a name-change proposal by BJP lawmaker Meenakshi Lekhi.

The change will flow from a resolution the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) is expected to pass at its full meeting tomorrow to rename the capitals iconic Race Course Road, housing the Indian Prime Ministers residence, as Ekatma Marg.

The new name is inspired by the Ekatma Manavavada (integral humanism) philosophy of former Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) president Deendayal Upadhyay whose birth centenary the ruling BJP government is celebrating this year.

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Upadhyays philosophy, We are one, adopted by the Jana Sangh in 1965, is the doctrine of the BJP that plans hundreds of events this year to celebrate the life of its ideologue. So much so, the BJP has chosen Keralas Kozhikode, where Upadhyay was anointed the BJS president in 1967, to host its national council meet from September 23.

Interestingly, Lekhis is not the sole BJP proposal dedicated to Upadhyays memory. Yesterday Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu attended an event held to mark the renaming of capitals famous government complex Paryavaran Bhavan as Pt Deendayal Antodaya Bhavan. Paryavaran Bhavan houses several ministry offices.

So far as Lekhis justification to rename RCR goes, she feels the name RCR doesnt gel with the Indian ethos.

Lekhi recently led a movement to rename the Aurangzeb Road in capitals VVIP zone as Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road. She told The Tribune today, The term Race Course Road doesnt motivate anyone. It doesnt inspire anyone. Its an odd name. Ekatma Marg strikes an ideological chord by reminding us of oneness of all, a philosophy integral to all cultures. Even when I proposed the renaming of Aurangzeb Road, my idea was to see that an important road is remembered not for a religious zealot, but for Dr Kalam, a secular leader who advocated reason.
New Delhi, September 21

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislator Amanatullah Khan was on Wednesday arrested after a sexual harassment complaint by his brother-in-law's wife, police said.

"We arrested Khan today (Wednesday). We had called him for questioning after his brother-in-law's wife filed a complaint," a senior police officer said.

After his arrest, Khan, who represents Okhla constituency in south Delhi, took to Twitter and wrote: "Came here at (the) DCP office Sarita Vihar for general discussion. But they arrested me". Following the complaint by the woman (spouse of his wife's brother), a FIR was lodged against Khan at the Jamia Nagar police station in south Delhi on September 10.

The complainant accused Khan of pressuring her to have a sexual relationship. Khan has denied the allegation, saying he had "no connection with the woman at all".

The AAP leader was booked under Sections 354 (assault or criminal force on woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman), 506 (criminal intimidation), 498-A (relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) and criminal conspiracy, police said.

Khan had gone to the Jamia Nagar police station on Sunday to surrender, but police refused to arrest him.  IANS
Majid Jahangir & Ishfaq Tantary

Tribune News Service

Uri/Srinagar, September 20

Two days after the Uri terror attack in which 18 soldiers in the garrison town of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir were killed, the troops on Tuesday foiled two infiltration bids, one in Uri and the other in Nowgam, barely 20 km from each other, killing at least 10 suspected militants. A soldier was killed in the Nowgam encounter.

A defence spokesman said the operation in Uri sector was underway. A group of 10-12 terrorists, who attempted to infiltrate into Uri sector, were intercepted by the Army. The encounter is on, the spokesman said. Sources said soldiers of 6 Bihar and 17 JAKLI Regiments were engaged in a fierce encounter with the militants at Mayan Katal Lachiora in North Kashmirs Baramulla district. They also said Pakistan had violated the ceasefire by opening fire. "The firing from across the border was clearly aimed at providing cover to the infiltrating militants, the sources said.

"A soldier was martyred in Nowgam operation, a defence official said.The Army had foiled two such attempts on September 11 and 16 in Poonch and Uri sectors. Four terrorists were killed in each of these operations.

According to the Army, infiltration attempts from across the border have increased this year in comparison with the past three to four years. Pointing out that 19 infiltration bids had been repelled so far this year, the Army described it as a "desperate attempt" by Pakistan to create "disturbance and foment unrest" in the Kashmir Valley. The Valley has been on the boil ever since the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
New York, September 21

Strongly condemning recent terror attacks, including in India, the BRICS member nations sought a firm legal framework under the UN for concerted efforts to fight terrorism effectively and called for expediting negotiations to an international accord against the menace.

India along with other BRICS member nations  Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa  at a meeting held here on the sidelines of the 71st session of UN General Assembly on Tuesday expressed concern that continued conflicts in several regions provided fertile grounds for terrorist activities.

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The BRICS leaders called for an early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against Terrorism.

The meeting of BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs also reaffirmed the need for a comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including its Security Council, with a view to make it more representative and efficient, besides calling for collective action to boost world economic growth.

Brazils Jose Serra, Russias Sergey Lavrov, Indias Minister of State for External Affairs MJ Akbar, Chinas Wang Yi and South Africas Maite Nkoana-Mashabane reiterated their strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.

They strongly condemned the recent several attacks, against some BRICS countries, including that in India, a joint communique released after the meeting said.

An Army base in Kashmirs Uri town was attacked on Sunday by heavily-armed militants from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e- Mohammed in which 18 jawans were killed and many left injured.

They urged concerted efforts to counter terrorism on a firm international legal basis, under the UN auspices, and expressed their conviction that a comprehensive approach was necessary to ensure effective fight against terrorism, the communique said.

Expressing concern over continued conflicts in several regions, they said such a situation undermines stability and security and provide fertile grounds for terrorist activities and cause refugee and migration waves.

They also voiced concern over the situation in the Middle East and underlined that the international community should work together to pave the way for the political settlement of conflicts through dialogue and negotiations.

They recognised the efforts of BRICS countries, in particular that of the Russian Federation aimed at achieving a political solution to the international crisis in Syria including Russia-US arrangements agreed upon in Geneva on September 9, the communique said.

Exchanging views on global and regional issues in the economic and political spheres, the ministers said they are determined to continue to contribute positively to the maintenance of peace, security and stability, including by upholding multilateralism.

Welcoming Chinas incoming BRICS Chairpersonship in 2017, they expressed confidence that intra-BRICS cooperation will be further strengthened.

On the current state of the global economy, they noted that global economic recovery continues to be weak and uneven.

They called for collective action to boost world economic growth, macroeconomic policy coordination, improving global economic governance, promoting international trade and investment, addressing income inequality and achieving sustainable development.

Reaffirming that poverty eradication is the greatest global challenge, the BRICS leaders said they are committed to continue to working towards the full implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

They also called upon the international community, especially the developed countries, to fulfill their commitments and provide strong support for developing countries.

They also noted the importance of a common and inclusive approach to development of medicines, research and diagnostic tools to end epidemics and to facilitate the access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines.

The BRICS leaders voiced committed to work towards the entry into force of the Paris Climate Agreement with completion of due domestic procedures and its full implementation.

They emphasised that developed countries shall continue to provide financial, technical and capacity building support to developing countries with respect to both mitigation and adaptation for the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the communique added.

During the day, Akbar held a series of bilateral meetings on the margins of the UN General Assembly session.

He discussed bilateral and multilateral issues with Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, the Indian mission to the UN said.

Akbar also had discussions with Foreign Minister of Denmark Kristian Jensen, Foreign Minister of Colombia Maria Angela Holguin Cuellar, Foreign Minister of Ireland Charles Flanagan besides meeting Vuk Jeremic, candidate of the Republic of Serbia for election as UN Secretary-General.  PTI
R Sedhuraman

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, September 21

The Supreme Court on Thursday described as paradoxical, absurd and regressive the Maharashtra governments new law placing dance bars under CCTV surveillance and banning liquor in the dance area.

There will be a dance bar, but no liquor. This is absolutely paradoxical, a Bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and C Nagappan told Maharashtras senior counsel Shekhar Naphade, who strongly defended the two restrictions.

The Bench questioned the logic behind issuing liquor licence to hotels only to prohibit them from serving alcohol in the dance area. Ban liquor in hotels, then you can do the same in the dance bar, it told Naphade.

Naphade, however, said the governments power to impose prohibition, totally or partly, had been upheld by the apex court. CCTV recording was required for preventing obscenity and collecting evidence in the event of an untoward incident. Disallowing this would amount to denying the police their power to investigate crime cases, he pleaded.

At this, the Bench sought the response of hotel associations senior counsel Jayant Bhushan. Bhushan rejected the logic, contending that violence could take place in hotel rooms as well but CCTV cameras could not be installed in such places.

Naphade said hotel rooms came under the private area, while places like lobbies, dance bars, passages and staircases were public areas and as such were subject to surveillance.

You are going absolutely regressive by centuries. Its not a theatre. It is a dance bar. If there is CCTV, who will go there? You can have CCTV cameras at the hotel gate, it remarked.

Earlier, Bhushan had also pleaded that visitors to dance bars wanted privacy and anonymity and as such CCTV cameras would render such places unviable and uneconomical.

Naphade, however, insisted that CCTV was the only mode by which police could ensure that dance bars complied with the Maharashtra Prohibition of Obscene Dance in Hotels, Restaurants and Bar Rooms and Protection of Dignity of Women (working therein) Act, 2016.

The senior advocate pointed out that the SC had upheld the Kerala governments liquor ban on hotels holding less than five-star ranking.

As the arguments remained inconclusive, the Bench directed the state to allow the existing licence-holders to operate under the old terms and conditions and posted the next hearing for November 24.
Vishav Bharti

Tribune News Service

Chandiagrh, September 20

Former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) state convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur is all set to float a political outfit tomorrow which is likely to be named Aam Lok Party (Punjab). The outfit will forge an electoral alliance with Navjot Singh Sidhu-led Awaaz-e-Punjab.

Chhotepur's associate, a former AAP zone in-charge, said they had earlier decided on naming the outfit Aam Aadmi Party-Punjab. But, we cant do that as a party named thus is already registered with the Election Commission. So, we will form Aam Lok Party, Punjab, he explained.

He said a draft constitution of the outfit was ready and would be finalised at a meeting here tomorrow. "The party will have its offices at Chandigarh or Mohali. Efforts are also afoot to set up district-level committees," he said.

When contacted, Chhotepur, refused to share any details, saying, "forming a party is a long process and may take more time." Another Chhotepur aide, ruling out a merger with Awaaz-e-Punjab, said: They dont have a pan-Punjab organisational structure like we do. Hence, we will forge an alliance with them."

Earlier, to initiate talks with Awaaz-e-Punjab and leaders of other outfits, Chhotepur had constituted a three-member committee comprising Gurinder Singh Bajwa, Col Jasjeet Singh Gill and Hardeep Singh Kingra.
Chandigarh, September 21

Music composer Vishal Dadlani today met Jain monk Tarun Sagar. Hands folded, he apologised to him for his sarcastic tweet about him. The monk asked him to seek forgiveness from the Jains for hurting the community's sentiments. The composer apologised as per the Jain tradition of seeking "Panch Mafee", that includes holding the ears.

Sagar said he had already forgiven Dadlani and would appeal to the community to forgive him and treat the matter as closed. "I have been saying this right from the start when these events unfolded (when controversy broke out after Dadlani's tweet) that personally I don't feel hurt or sad. I was talking to Vishal today and I told him that the Jain community has been hurt, it was their demand that he should come to me in person and apologise after which they will stop protests against him."

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Dadlani had apologised for the tweet on the monk's address to the Haryana Assembly last month. Sagar said, "Anyone can make a mistake, even me, it is not a big thing. But realisation of the same is important and one should forgive such a person." Sagar appealed to those who had registered an FIR against the composer to end the matter.

Dadlani later told mediapersons: "I apologised over Twitter 32 times and Tarun Sagarji also forgave me... I wanted to come personally earlier, but there was an FIR against me. I did not want the people to think I wanted to come here only because a case had been slapped against me.

"I felt it from my heart that my remarks had generated so much controversy and caused so much hurt. What I had wanted to say is that religion and governance should not be mixed. What people understood from that tweet of mine was unfortunate. It was not my intention to hurt anyone's sentiments. What I had said was as per the Constitution, religion and governance should not be mixed because we are a secular nation," Dadlani, who reached the Digambar Jain Temple and held a closed-door meeting with the monk for about 20 minutes, said.

Meanwhile, Ambala Cantt ACP Suresh Kaushik and Ambala (Sadar) SHO Ajeet Singh questioned Dadlani today. They inquired from him about the electronic device through which the tweet was posted. The police will submit its report to the court on September 23.  PTI/TNS
Mukesh Ranjan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 21

On his return from Srinagar, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi on Wednesday briefed Home Minister Rajnath Singh about his interactions with senior officials and his assessment of the prevailing ground situation in the Kashmir Valley, particularly after the Uri terror attack.

Mehrishis assessment, sources said, was based on his interactions with Governor NN Vohra, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and civil, police and intelligence officials. He also conveyed to the Home Minister about the situation prevailing in the frontier areas of the state, particularly along the LoC.

The Union Home Secretary visited Srinagar on Tuesday after the terror attack in Uri in which 18 soldiers were killed.

The Home Minister was also apprised of the steps taken to check infiltration along the LoC and the International Border with Pakistan, official sources said.

Heavily armed militants suspected to be from Pakistan-based JeM had stormed an Army Brigade Headquarters in Uri in Kashmir on Sunday.
Ananya Panda

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 21

Hours after Arvind Kejriwal alleged Prime Minister Narendra Modis hand in naming him in the FIR over alleged recruitment scam in the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), Anti-Corruption Branch chief MK Meena on Wednesday denied the Delhi CMs name in the FIR filed by the ACB.

Rebutting Kejriwals claim, Meena told The Tribune it is the complaint from former DCW chief and Congress leader Barkha Shukla Singh in which Kejriwal has been named, but the investigative agencys enquiry didnt find him accused.

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When asked whether he may be made co-accused in the case in which DCW chairperson Swati Maliwal had been named, Meena said as of date ACB doesnt have any evidence showing Kejriwals involvement in the appointments in the panel under question but Deputy CM Manish Sisodia along with other officials may be questioned, if required.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia gave autonomy to the Deputy Director (Finance) in carrying out the appointments to the DCW and Deputy Director in turn to the DCW, he added.

Earlier, the Delhi Chief Minister said a special session of the Assembly will be called to expose the conspiracy behind the FIR.

Training guns on Modi, Kejriwal claimed that his name was mentioned in the list of the accused even as nowhere in the FIR his role in the case found any mention.

The ACBs investigation report also doesnt mention anything about my role in the case, but has still listed me as an accused. The CMs name cannot figure without orders from the top. It cannot be included without the PMs order, Kejriwal said while addressing the media at his house here, for the first time after his throat surgery in Bengaluru.

Saying the matter needed to be discussed, the Aam Aadmi Party convener said, We will call a special session of the Delhi Assembly and unravel the conspiracy behind the FIR.

Headed by L-G-appointee MK Meena, the ACB lodged the FIR on Tuesday following a complaint from former panel chief and Congress leader Barkha Shukla Singh, who had alleged that AAP volunteers and supporters had been hired without advertisements and proper interviews, something which Maliwal denied, asserting that all appointments were made by following the due procedure.

An FIR has been filed under Sections 13 (1) (d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act and 120-B and 409 of the IPC against Maliwal among others for the alleged administrative and financial irregularities in appointments in the DCW.

Reacting to Kejriwals attack on Modi, Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay slammed him saying he should stop playing the victim card and blaming the PM for everything. Delhi could not be run by Kejriwals dictatorship, he added.

Interestingly, a note issued by the Department of Vigilance referred to a communication received from the Anti-Corruption Branch and FIR No 15/16 dated 19.9.1016 concluding that an examination of the FIR has revealed that a case has been registered at the PS-ACB, GNCTD, against DCW chief and Chief Minister and others.

It is perhaps on the basis of this note that Kejriwal came down heavily on Modi.  With inputs from Prateek Chauhan
Chandigarh September 20

The Haryana Government has decided to transfer the investigation of the case of murder, dacoity and gang-rape of two victims, including a minor girl, registered at the Tauru police station in Mewat district to the CBI.

CM Khattar has approved a proposal to this effect. Keeping in view the demand of the complainant and sentiments of people, it was decided to transfer the investigation to the CBI, he said. Earlier, the case was being investigated by a special investigation team (SIT) of the Nuh police.

An FIR was registered under Sections 459, 460, 302, 376D, 396 and 397 of the IPC, Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and Sections 25, 54 and 59 of the Arms Act on August 25. The BJP government was under pressure from the Opposition, the INLD and the Congress, to hand over the case to the CBI. An all-party delegation comprising leaders from Mewat called upon the CM in the first week of September, demanding that the case be handed over to the CBI.

The Opposition also raised the issue during the monsoon session of the Haryana Assembly last month. It was alleged that the police was acting under the influence of political leaders and not registering a case. A couple was murdered and a minor girl and her married cousin were allegedly gang-raped by robbers at Dingerheri village in Mewat last month.  TNS
Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 21

Afghanistan today came out in strong support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi raising the Balochistan issue and said it was a legitimate concern.

In an exclusive interview to The Tribune, Afghanistans ambassador to India Shaida Mohammad Abdali said, Modi has rightfully raised his voice on the basis of human rights violations in Balochistan.

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He said the people of Balochistan were suffering in a manner similar to Afghan people. I think this is the right and moral obligation of everyone in this region to speak for those who are being oppressed, Abdali said.

The Afghan stand on Balochistan should come as great support for India as it begins its global strategy of isolating Pakistan.

Abdali said Afghanistan sympathises with those who are suffering, whether they are in our neighbourhood or beyond; and it is not the issue of just Balochs, its the issue of Pashtuns and that of the entire neighbourhood suffering from the menace of terrorism.

On the option of using surgical strikes against Pakistan, Abdali was clear that the first preference has to be the political and diplomatic route, but that should also not mean that we should not resort to activities that will bring about a change in the attitude of those who have been perpetrating against peaceful nations in violent ways and means.

For Afghanistan, this indicates a shift in its strategy as it comes onboard for considering surgical strikes against a neighbour where diplomacy and dialogue fail.

While the Afghan envoy said the terrorist act in Uri was unacceptable, he also added that we are happy that we see strong statements, but these statements must translate into practical action. He called for re-visiting the counter-terrorism mechanism in the region since the present one didnt seem to be working.

Abdali repeatedly pointed to a spoiler in the region who has made progress in SAARC and its related activities impossible. The reference is of course to Pakistan and Abdali bluntly said, We should not allow any spoiler in this region to spoil our unified struggle for a better future.

When asked about the functioning of SAARC, he said it has become a dysfunctional organisation as the spoiler in the mechanism has failed the entire mechanism. Maybe it was time to ask whether SAARC should remain as a body for the region or change, he added.

When asked if India was ready to give Afghanistan the military equipment it was seeking, the envoy said absolutely, and pointed to the relationship that India and Afghanistan share.
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 21

To strengthen the Jammu and Kashmir Police, particularly in view of the unrest in the Kashmir valley, the Centre today approved the recruitment of an additional 10,000 Special Police Officers (SPOs) with immediate effect. There are 25,000 SPOs in the state already.

The Centre had information suggesting that thousands of Kashmiri youths had opted for the job, despite a call by Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani to boycott recruitment rallies.

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The government issued a statement which read: The additional SPOs will be utilised especially for security-related requirements. The reimbursement of expenditure to the state government by the Centre in respect of 10,000 SPOs will be as per the existing approved Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Guidelines.

An SPO initially draws a salary of Rs 5,000 per month, Rs 5,300 on completion of one year and Rs 6,000 on completion of three years. The Centre is in the process of providing employment opportunities to 1.40 lakh youths in the state through various means, including skill development. Official sources said one lakh youths, mostly under-graduates, would be given job-oriented training under the Himayat scheme in the next five years.

Were serious about punishing: Parrikar

New Delhi: Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday said the government is serious about punishing those responsible for the Uri attack as it will not sleep over terror being pushed into India from across the border. He also dismissed reports about Pakistans threat of use of tactical nukes, saying that an empty vessel makes bigger noise. tns/pti
New Delhi, September 21

The monthly pension of freedom fighters, including those who were incarcerated in Cellular jail in Andaman Islands or suffered outside British India, was on Wednesday hiked by around Rs 5,000 each.

The decision to give 20 per cent enhanced pension to all categories of freedom fighters, their spouses and dependents was taken at a meeting of the Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The revised scale of pension has taken effect from August 15, 2016 and the revised total amount of pension will be taken as basic pension for the respective categories of freedom fighter pensioners for calculating Dearness Relief, an official statement said.

The existing Dearness Relief system based on All India Consumer Price Index for Industrial workers, which was so far applicable to freedom fighter pensioners on annual basis, is being discontinued and replaced by the Dearness Allowance system applicable to Central government employees twice a year.

This will be termed as "Dearness Relief", the appropriate term in case of pensioners, it said.

Pension for freedom fighters in the category of ex-Andaman political prisoners and their spouses has been enhanced from Rs 24,775 to Rs 30,000 per month.

Pension of freedom fighters, who suffered outside British India, has been raised from Rs 23,085 to Rs 28,000 per month.

Pension of other freedom fighters, including those who were members of Indian National Army (INA), has been raised from Rs 21,395 to Rs 26,000 per month.

Addressing the nation on the 70th Independence Day from the Red Fort, the Prime Minister had announced a 20 per cent hike in the pension for freedom fighters.

Central freedom fighter pensioners and eligible dependents under 'Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension' will get enhanced pension with effect from August 15, 2016.

All freedom fighters and spouses and dependent parents, eligible daughter pensioners of deceased freedom fighters drawing pension under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme, 1980 would be benefited by the decision.

So far, 1,71,605 freedom fighters and their eligible dependents have been sanctioned pension under the scheme.

At present 37,981 freedom fighters and their eligible dependent pensioners are covered under the scheme. Of these, 11,690 are freedom fighters themselves, 24,792 are spouses (widows/widowers) and 1,490 are daughter pensioners.  PTI
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 21

The Race Course Road, where the Prime Ministers official residence is located, was on Wednesday renamed Lok Kalyan Marg after a heated debate in the NDMC council meeting attended by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi among others.

The NDMC has also decided to rename the Gurdwara Rakabganj round-about adjacent to the Parliament complex as Guru Gobind Singh Chowk following representations from various Sikh organisations.

Lekhi who represents New Delhi constituency in Parliament proposed to change the name to Lok Kalyan Marg instead of Ekatma Marg which she had proposed earlier.

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7 Race Course Road is Indias most famous address where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's official residence is located.

A notification will be issued soon to complete the process of renaming the road.

BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi, who is a member of the NDMC Council, had proposed renaming Race Course Road as Ekatma Marg based on the philosophy of the party's ideologue Deendayal Upadhyay but it was not accepted.

In the meeting, Kejriwal proposed to rename the Race Course Road after Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Sikh Guru, but some members were not convinced.

I had proposed renaming of the road after Guru Gobind Singh while Lekhi said it should be renamed as Ekatma Marg. I suggested that the PM should be consulted on this but the council members decided that on the basis of suggestions received from public, the road should be renamed as Lok Kalyan Marg," Kejriwal said.

Once the notification is issued, the PM's famous residential address 7, Race Course Road will be known as 7, Lok Kalyan Marg.

AAP MLA Surinder Singh, also member of the Council, opposed Lekhi's proposal to rename the road as Ekatma Marg.

NDMC chairperson Naresh Kumar said it was a unanimous decision to change the name of the road as Lok Kalyan Marg.

The change of name of Gurdwara Rakabganj roundabout to Guru Gobind Singh Chowk is seen as an effort to woo the Sikh community by both BJP and AAP ahead of the Punjab Assembly polls early next year.

Last year, Aurangzeb Road was renamed after former president APJ Abdul Kalam.

The change was recommended by BJP's Mahesh Girri, who said Mughal ruler Aurangzeb was a "cruel figure in history and does not deserve to be remembered in this way".

The demand to rename Akbar Road to Maharana Pratap Marg was also raised, but the government overruled the same.  With agencies
PK Jaiswar & Charanjit Singh Teja

Tribune News Service

Mahawa (Amritsar), September 20

Seven schoolchildren of MKD DAV Public School in Attaris Neshta village were drowned and more than 15 injured when their school bus fell into a drain near the India-Pakistan border here this afternoon. The bus was carrying 30-35 children.

Eyewitnesses said the speeding bus hit a boundary wall while crossing a bridge and fell into the drain.

Senior student Karanbir (16) claimed he broke open the door of the bus and rescued several children. The bus driver, Nikku, also saved several children. Intimidated by the crowds at the accident site, he later fled.

A group of MGNREGA workers saw the bus plunge into the drain. They raised an alarm following which some youths of Mahawa village gathered at the site to lend a helping hand.

The injured children were rushed to private hospitals in Attari and Amritsar. Five of them were declared 'brought dead'. Six are undergoing treatment. Some were discharged after first-aid.

The deceased, aged between 7 and 12, were identified as Sehajpreet Singh, Anshpreet Kaur, Jaspreet Kaur, all residents of Tibbi Mahawa, Gurnampreet Kaur, Yuvraj Singh, Sejajdeep Kaur and Robin Singh of Mahawa village.

Balkar Singh, a resident of Jathaul village, said his children, Jobanjit Singh (16) and Sehajpal Kaur (14), were among those being treated at the Chheharta hospital. He said two more children, Abhijot Singh (7) and Gurnoor Singh (5), were also admitted there.

Villagers claimed the bridge over the drain was narrow and had a broken railing. They claimed they had approached local MLAs and parliamentarians on the issue but to no avail.

Deputy Commissioner Varun Roojam said a case had been registered against the bus driver, conductor and school management.
Shahira Naim

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, September 21

Hitting out at BSP supremo Mayawati, BJP president Amit Shah said the cost of numerous bungalows she had acquired in Delhi was sufficient to buy an air-conditioner for every Dalit household in Uttar Pradesh.

Alleging that 1,074 Dalits were killed during her 2008-11 regime in UP, Shah said the Dalit community expected Mayawati to give an account of these deaths.

Speaking at the Parivartan rally organised by newly inducted Swami Prasad Maurya at the massive Ramabai Ambedkar maidan, Shah said while BSP governments exploited Dalits, during Samajwadi governments Dalits suffer atrocities.

Contradicting earlier reports that Shah had decided to stay away from Mauryas rally after the lackluster response to the September 16 Dalit rally called by another BJP Dalit leader Jugal Kishore, Shah and BJP UP incharge Om Mathur arrived by a special plane and went straight to the rally venue.

Targeting both the BSP and SP government for corruption and derailing development, Shah said the bua- bhatija governments had together amassed all development money for themselves leaving the common people high and dry.

During the last 10 days the whole world has seen the Mahabharat being enacted in which the chacha-bhatija were fighting for larger shares of the spoils, he said.

Asking CM Akhilesh to explain why Gayatri Prajapati was dismissed for corruption and then a decision taken to reinstate him.

Giving another example to illustrate the SP governments huge corruption from illegal mining alone, Shah said the ill-gotten wealth was enough to buy every UP household a colour television.

Earlier, Swami Prasad Maurya also hit out at Mayawati for derailing the Dalit movement in which the common BSP worker was feeling suffocated and cheated. He said in the BSP today it was Jiski jitni thaili bhaari, uski utni hissedari (Participation is as per the weight of the money bag offered).

Todays rally was announced by Maurya immediately after quitting the BSP in June. As planned, it was organised by the Loktantrik Bahujan Manch launched by Maurya before he formally joined the BJP.
TNS & Agencies

New Delhi/United Nations, September 21

Raking up Kashmir at the UN, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today glorified slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a young leader even as he expressed readiness for a serious and sustained dialogue with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.

Sharif devoted much of his 20-minute speech at the UN General Assembly session to Kashmir and the situation in the Valley and said Pakistan fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination.

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He demanded an independent inquiry into the extra-judicial killings and a UN fact-finding mission to Kashmir so that the guiltyare punished. Insisting that peace between Pakistan and India could not be achieved without solving the Kashmir dispute, he alleged human rights violations in the Valley.

India blames Pakistan for engineering and fuelling the unrest in Kashmir.

Talking about Kashmir, Sharif referred to Wani, who was killed in an encounter with the security forces on July 8, as a young leader and said he had emerged as a symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement.
New York, September 20

A Sikh man in the US is being hailed as a hero for helping the police capture an armed and dangerous Afghan-born American wanted for the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey that injured 29 people.

Harinder Bains, the owner of a bar in Linden found 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami sleeping in the doorway of a bar he owns.

Bains said he was watching news on TV on his laptop from another business across the street.

At first, he thought he was some drunk guy resting in the vestibule but then recognised Rahami and called the police.

"I'm just a regular citizen doing what every citizen should do. Cops are the real heroes, law enforcement are the real heroes," Bains said.

When officers responded, Rahami pulled out a handgun and opened fire, striking an officer in the chest.

A foot chase ensued, during which Rahami shot at a police car, causing a bullet to graze another office in the face.

The chase ended when Rahami was shot multiple times. He was taken to a hospital for surgery. Rahami was not initially cooperative with police who tried to interview him, a law enforcement official said.

Indian-American attorney Ravi Batra said Bains dared to honour his Oath of Citizenship to protect & defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic  and it's turns out that the Chelsea Pressure Cooker Bomber suspect, a naturalised citizen, is caught by another immigrant, an Indian-American Hero-Sikh. In a statement, the National Sikh Campaign said this was brave and courageous act by Bains.

A Sikh helps police get to the terrorist involved in New York and New Jersey bombing over the weekend, it said.

He heroically helped save many innocent lives and yet gave credit to law enforcement officers. Harinder Bains certainly did what every responsible citizen in America ought to do. Brave and courageous act! said the National Sikh Campaign. PTI
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 21

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday admitted that something obviously went wrong in Uri in Kashmir where 18 soldiers died in an attack on an Army camp on Sunday morning.

Parrikar, who has visited Kashmir on Sunday, was speaking today at a function in New Delhi where he said we will find out what went wrong and the government will take steps to ensure there is no repeat of such an incident. How to punish (to take a punitive action)? We will work out, but we are serious about it, Parrikar said.

The Tribune was the first to report about the obvious gaps that could have led to the attacks.

Two news reports on September 19 and September 20 in the newspaper had listed out the possible gaps.

Parrikar said India needs to ensure the errors are not repeated.

The Defence Minister said if required there can be a knee-jerk reaction to the attack that New Delhi says was carried out by terrorists from Pakistan.

India is a responsible power, but that doesnt mean I will sleep over terrorists sneaking into the country, Parrikar said even as India moved to diplomatically isolate Pakistan as part of retaliation to the militant attack.

When asked about the perceived nuclear threat from Pakistan, Parrikar said: Empty vessels make more noise, the stronger man doesnt argue much.

Heavily armed terrorist attacked the army base in northern Kashmirs Uri early Sunday and killed 18 soldiers. The dawn raid surprised soldiers in their sleep as attackers lobbed grenades and set a building on fire.
New Delhi, September 21

India on Wednesday gave Pakistan evidence of involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against it.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlined how terrorists remained active in Pakistan.

Jaishankar provided Basit with the content of GPS recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistan's role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed.

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"If the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," he told the Pakistan envoy.

Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

He also reminded Basit that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India. "The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," he told Basit.

In a release, External Affairs Ministry said this year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

"Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of thirty one terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism.

Foreign Secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing," it said.

Apart from GPS content, India has recovered a number of items that included communication matrix sheets and equipment, other made in Pakistan stuff like food, medicines and clothes, which were shown to Basit.

"We now expect a response from the Government of Pakistan," Jaishankar told him.

Basit's summons came a day after Jaishankar headed a high-level meeting, attended by senior Home Ministry officials and Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), during which the evidence recovered by Indian Army from the terrorists was shared with the MEA.  PTI
Washington, September 21

Two powerful American lawmakers have introduced a Bill in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, in a setback to Islamabad at a time when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is trying to drum up support over the Kashmir issue.

As Sharif held talks with world leaders on the sidelines of the 71st session of UN General Assembly to internationalise the dispute with India, the two lawmakers said it was time that the US stopped paying the country for its betrayal.

The Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act (HR 6069) has been moved by Republican Ted Poe and Democrat Dana Rohrabacher, who is a ranking member of the influential Congressional Committee on Terrorism.

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It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism, said Poe, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years, Poe said.

From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cosy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror.

And its not Americas, he alleged.

Poe said the Bill will require the Barack Obama Administration to formally answer this question.

The President must issue a report within 90 days of the passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said.

Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State (John Kerry) must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation, Poe said.

In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack by Pakistan-backed terrorists.

I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace, he said.

Senator John Cornyn, co-chair of the Senate-India Caucus, tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest setback in a decade.

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Indian-Americans continued to rally behind the call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.

Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state, said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA.

OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan, it said.  PTI
Jitendra K Shrivastava & PTI

Patna, September 21

The first ever three-day International Sikh Conclave will be held at SK Memorial Hall here from tomorrow.

Over 200 scholars, religious gurus, academicians and politicians, including Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, are expected to participate.

The conclave is being held ahead of the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh, whose birth place is in the eastern part of Patna known as Patna Sahib.

Dignitaries from several countries, including Canada, US and New Zealand, would dwell on the life and teachings of Guru Gobind Singh.

The conclave would be inaugurated by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. He said: Bihar is ready to host the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh. We are proud to organise this mega event. The state government will observe three-day holiday during the main function early next year. Despite little Sikh population, the entire state will participate in the mega birth anniversary event.

The state wants the teachings of the Sikh guru to reach the common masses. The Tourism Department is the nodal agency to oversee the arrangements and take help from respective departments to make the event grandeur and fabulous, he said.

Bihar plans Sikh circuit

The Bihar government is mulling to start a Sikh circuit on lines of Buddhist circuit to draw more foreign tourists to the state. To tap the tremendous potential of religious tourism in Bihar, we are also working on Sufi circuit, Ramayan circuit and Gandhi circuit, Nitish Kumar said.
Kulwinder Sandhu

Tribune News Service

Moga, September 20

Three months after a controversy erupted over the allocation of tenders for various development works in Moga city, the Municipal Corporation has secretly assigned jobs to contractors.

The deadlock ended after a patch-up between two groups of the ruling SAD. One group is led by local MLA Joginder Pal Jain, whose son Akshit Jain alias Bablu is the mayor of Moga city, and the other is led by Agriculture Minister Jathedar Tota Singh, whose personal assistant Gurminderjit Singh Bablu is a powerful member of the finance and contract committee in the local body.

A couple of months ago, there had been apprehensions of formation of a syndicate by the contractors and as a result, the tenders of 300 development works were recalled. The Akali councilors loyal to Tota Singh and few BJP councilors did not agree to the allocation of works.

The tenders were again called by the MC and after a series of meetings between the two groups of the ruling party, the finance and contract committee finally agreed to allocate the works.

Both the Bablus have joined hands and the patch-up has been done for vested political as well as monetary interests, a BJP councilor stated.

Akshit is holding the office of Mayor but 26 out of the total 50 councilors supported by Tota Singh have already filed a writ petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court challenging his election. The constitutional bench of the HC accepted the petition and referred it to a division Bench for regular hearing, which is still in process.

However, with regard to the possibility of widespread corruption, nothing much has changed on the ground. A majority of tenders have been allocated on receipt of single tenders.

Gurpreet Singh Sachdeva, a BJP councilor, and another councilor Deepinder Singh Sandhu, who has joined AAP, said there should have been a competitive bidding to save public money instead of going for negotiations with the contractors.

Ravi Grewal, secretary of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC), has demanded a vigilance probe into the allocation of tenders by the local body.

The MC had called the tenders of development works worth more than Rs 22 crore. The Tribune, in its report on June 10, had highlighted a major scam in the allocation of construction works worth crores of rupees, after which, all tenders were recalled by the local body.
Chandigarh, September 21

Former AAP Punjab convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur said on Wednesday he did not have the resources to form a political party, hours after Navjot Singh Sidhu  with whom reports claimed he was hoping to form an alliance  said he had put off plans for a political party.

Chhotepur, who was dismissed as AAPs Punjab convener over bribery charges, said on Friday that although he was disappointed with Sidhus decision, he talk to him on future prospects of Punjab once he returned from Patna Sahib, which he is scheduled to visit on Thursday.

"He (Sidhu) is a big man and it was his own idea. But my search for good people for the betterment of Punjab will continue," Chhotepur said.

I will pay obeisance to Patna Sahib tomorrow and after returning will take next course of action," he said.

He also claimed he was in touch with suspended AAP Parliamentarian, who ha previously announced his own political front  the Punjab Lok Front  which he indicated could fight the 2017 assembly elections.

"He (Gandhi) is committed to Punjab and wants only a Punjabi should lead the people of the state, instead of outsiders," Chhotepur said.

"My supporters and volunteers (in his recently concluded Punjab Parivartan Yatra) have told me to set up a new political "platform" comprising people with clean image and committed to save PunjabI will meet like-minded people and bring them together, and have a political party in order to provide best alternative to people in the upcoming elections.

It is essential to how committed you are to the causes of people in Punjab. Only then they will start supporting you."

Reports said that Chhotepur was to announce his political party likely to be named Aam Lok Party (Punjab)  that was to forge a political alliance with Sidhus Awaaz-e-Punjab.

Sidhu however put off forming his own party saying that the party could not be expected do much in the short time before elections.

AAP replaced Chhotepur as Punjab state convener after a video allegedly showing him accepting a bribe over party tickets to fight Punjabs assembly elections.

Punjab is scheduled to hold elections next year.  PTI
Tribune News Service

Patna, September 21

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said on Wednesday that the state government was considering a Sikh circuit along the lines of the Buddhist circuit to draw foreign tourists.

"The state government is mulling Sikh tourism circuit like Buddhist circuit," Kumar said at an international press meet on the eve of a three-day International Sikh Conclave.

"In fact in order to tap tremendous potential of religious tourism in Bihar, we are also working on Sufi circuit, Ramayan circuit and Gandhi circuit (connected with places in the state linked with Mahatama Gandhi's visit to state)," he said.

He also detailed the arrangements made for the conclave and for celebrating 350th Prakash Utsav early next year.

Bihar government has organised a 3-day International Sikh Conclave, first of its kind in India, in Patna to discuss the life and teachings of Guru Govind Singh.

At least 200 scholars from all over the world are expected to attend the three-day conclave that begins Thursday.

Kumar said: "The state government has already announced 3-day state holiday for the event so that masses could participate the function.

A high-level committee led by Chief Secretary will monitor preparations for the function that Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal is also expected to attend. (With inputs from PTI)
New York, September 21

The Sikh-American who helped the police capture the man wanted for weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey, said he feared he might have been mistaken as the perpetrator because of the misconceptions about his faith.

Harinder Singh Bains, 51, said he does not like being called a hero for accurately identifying 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born American man behind the bombings.

Asserting that he is what America looks like, Bains said he did what any other American would have done.

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When I heard about the attacks and realised the suspect was sleeping in a doorway across the street, I did what any American would do. I called the police. Im not a hero. The police are heroes; the EMTs are heroes; everyone who is working to bring New York and New Jersey together today is a hero, Bains, who owns a bar in Linden, told reporters.

He said as a Sikh-American, he understands that I could have been mistaken for the perpetrator. My faith teaches me justice and tolerance for all and I know that Im lucky to live in a community that shares this view. Bains, who had emigrated from Chandigarh in 1996, stressed that after any attack, Americans should target people based on evidence of their role in the crime and not because of their faith or their country of origin or their accent.

I came to this country from India 20 years ago to create a better life for my family. I am a father of four and a proud American citizen. I am also what America looks like, he said.

Bains said America is strongest when all Americans stand together in the face of violence intended to divide us. On the morning of September 19, Bains unlocked the door of his deli when he noticed Rahami sleeping in a vestibule next to a tavern across the street.

He later recognised Rahamis face from television reports following the failed attacks and contacted police.

When the police arrived, Rahami allegedly shot an officer in the abdomen and began a shoot-out with police that led to his arrest.

Bains had earlier said he thought Rahami looked very familiar and exactly like the guy whose picture is being shown on TV channels.

I kept wondering, is he the same guy, Bains has said, adding he then asked a friend of his who visited him that Rahami looked exactly like the person whose pictures were being circulated by law enforcement agencies in connection with the bombing.

Bains then called the police but didnt not immediately tell them that Rahami was in front of his store.

He initially told the police that there is a guy in front of his bar who looks a little suspicious and does not look good to me and that the police should come and check.

The police then came within 5 minutes and all the while Bains kept an eye on Rahami as he had a strong feeling he is the same person wanted for the bombings.

Im just a regular citizen doing what every citizen should do. Cops are the real heroes, law enforcement are the real heroes, Bains has said.  PTI
GS Paul

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, September 20

After missing several deadlines, the expansion project of the Golden Temple Plaza is now set for completion by October. Official sources say the President is expected to inaugurate it on November 1.

In the first phase, the sprawling 8,250 sq ft marbled plaza opposite the Clock Tower entrance was thrown open to public on Diwali in 2014.

The work on the second phase, which is underway in its basement, has been hanging fire for long. It is being undertaken by the Public Works Department (PWD). JS Sodhi, Executive Engineer, said: We hope to get its major part completed by next month which may be inaugurated by the President on November 1. Once completed, a number of facilities will be available in the basement.

These include a bank, an ATM, air and rail enquiry windows, washrooms etc, will be available.

Four galleries are coming up in the basement which will enrich visitors with the core values of Sikhism. Each gallery will be well-furnished where the visitors can get audio as well as visual detailing on large LED screens.

Sodhi said there would be a separate VIP and VVIP lounge with parking facility for visiting dignitaries and their entourage. A separate conference hall with a capacity of 100-150 seats has also been planned.

The Rs 130-crore plaza project has, however, drawn flak from local residents and experts who believe that it has tarnished the heritage significance of the shrine.

SGPC senior member Kiranjot Kaur, the granddaughter of Master Tara Singh, says by using white marble on the plaza, the Golden Temples splendour has been overshadowed. The plaza has come up like a standout structure. The marbled structure generates heat and reflects a lot of light which is uncomfortable to the eyes, she says.

Prof Balvinder Singh, a heritage expert, says the originality of the Golden Temple has been altered. It does not gel with the basic character of the holy city. It is a sacred place not a recreational spot, he adds.

Balraj Singh, District Tourist Officer, however, says: The plaza project will boost tourism in the holy city. It will facilitate tourists by offering a package of knowledge, information and convenience. The techno-galleries and interpretation centres will provide an altogether different experience not only to the adults but to children also with 3-D effects. They will love to learn about the Golden Temple and the rich Sikh history. Besides, the plaza will offer public utility services such as travel guide, ATMs and a lounge.

Tourists too have given a positive feedback. Ranjit Singh, a tourist from Ayodhya (UP), says: I had earlier come here four years ago. The plaza has enhanced the look of the shrine. The entrance is more neat and tidy with its glittering white marble. A number of facilities are coming up in the basement, which is a welcome move.

Pritpal Singh, a tourist from New York, says: The plaza gives a mesmerising look to the entrance. It was the need of the hour. I learnt about the ongoing project in the basement, including the 3-D gallery which will definitely be a centre of attraction. Services like ATM and tourist information under one roof will facilitate tourists.

Tourists elated, says its grand and better

Ranjit Singh, a tourist from Ayodhya (UP), says: The plaza has enhanced the look of the shrine. The entrance is more neat and tidy with its glittering marble floor. Pritpal Singh, a tourist from New York, says: The plaza gives a mesmerising look to the entrance. I learnt about the ongoing project in the basement, including the 3-D gallery which will definitely be a centre of attraction.

Phase 2 will be visitors delight: Officer

Balraj Singh, District Tourist Officer, says: "The plazas phase 2 project will boost tourism in the holy city. It will facilitate tourists by offering them knowledge, information and convenience. The techno-galleries and interpretation centres will provide an altogether different experience not only to adults but also to children with 3D effects. They will love to learn about the Golden Temple and the rich Sikh history.
Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, September 21

The Punjab government has moved the Supreme Court challenging the Punjab and Haryana High Court judgment quashing the appointments of 21 Chief Parliamentary Secretaries.

Additional Advocate General Ajay Bansal confirmed that the state had filed the appeal. On August 12, a Division Bench of Justice SS Saron and Justice Ramendra Jain of the HC had delivered the verdict on two petitions by advocates Jagmohan Singh Bhatti and HC Arora. The ruling had caused a major embarrassment to Punjabs SAD-BJP government.

In his petition filed more than four years ago, Bhatti had sought directions for declaring as illegal and unconstitutional the holding of Chief Parliamentary Secretaries posts by MLAs in Punjab.

Bhatti had pleaded that the appointment of Chief Parliamentary Secretaries and Parliamentary Secretaries in Himachal Pradesh had been quashed by the Himachal Pradesh High Court.
It is regrettable that crime has been increasing in a majority of provinces of India for one reason or other. The latest report for Behar and Orissa shows that dacoities increased from 93 to 146, burglaries by 3,700 to 29,795, cattle thefts by 360 to 1419 and ordinary thefts by 2650 to 17,490. The chief cause is said to be agricultural depression and poverty. In this connection the low pay of the constables and head constables is said to be an obstacle to the employment of men and a better class who alone can bring about a better co-operation of the people. It is pointed out that the Sub-Inspectors are the representatives of the police force that have a direct contact with the masses and much depends on their sense of duty, ability, impartiality, and regard to social convenience of the people.
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, September 21

Politics seems to have played a big role in denying Dehradun a place in the Smart City project for the third time in a row.

A Congress-ruled state, Uttarakhand, is among the nine states that have not been picked up for the Central Governments Smart City project.

Irrespective of the merits and demerits of the project, no one in the government or in the Congress is buying the Union Minister for Urban Developments statement delivered in New Delhi yesterday that Uttarakhand had been left out due to floods and other natural calamities.

Chief Minister Harish Rawat was the first to fire a salvo. He said, There was nothing wrong in the project. Let the Dehradun Municipal Corporation and the departments concerned decide what they want to do with the project. But the Union minister should tell us where are floods in Dehradun.

However, it is an open secret that none of the BJP parliamentarians showed any interest or keenness in pursuing the matter with the Central leadership.

Further, there was also a tussle between BJP leaders who did not want the Congress to benefit from the project. Though the Dehradun Mayor had pitched for the Smart City project, in an election year senior BJP leaders did not want the Harish Rawat government to take credit for the Smart City project, said a senior BJP leader.

On the other hand, cities of states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, which will also face elections next year, have been selected for the Smart City project. Now, Uttarakhand, particularly Dehradun, will have to wait for January 2017 when the process for the fourth list of the Smart City project will be initiated.

Congress workers protest step-motherly treatment

Meanwhile, members of the state Congress committee today burnt an effigy of the BJP-led Central Government at the Kishan Nagar Chowk against the rejection of Dehradun from the third list of smart cities.

They said the Central Government was meting out a step-motherly treatment to Congress-led states.

Dehradun is much better than many other cities of the country but the Centre has purposely discarded its claim from the list, said Deep Vohra, secretary of the state Congress committee.

He criticised all five BJP MPs and the Mayor for not supporting the state government for the Smart City project. The BJP leaders had no contribution to the development of the state. Instead, they had been creating hindrances in the smooth functioning of the government, he said. Mohan Joshi, Harjeet Singh, Aman Batra, Lal Chand Sharma and Mohan Kala took part in the protest.
SMA Kazmi

Tribune News Service

Dehradun, September 21

The war of words between the Pradesh Congress Committee and the state government has intensified on the issue of ministers belonging to the Progressive Democratic Front (PDF) with state Congress president Kishore Upadhyay taking a tough stand against them.

Upadhyay, who had been opposing the ministers of the PDF, an ally of the state government, has irked Chief Minister Harish Rawat.

Upadhyay wants PDF ministers to be shown the door before the Assembly polls as they would undermine the chances of Congress candidates in their respective Assembly segments. During his Kumaon visit, the state Congress president said he would watch the interests of the Congress workers rather than PDF ministers.

Three Independents, two BSP and one Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (UKD) legislators comprise the PDF that supports the Congress-led state government. Three Independents  Mantri Prasad Naithani, Harish Chander Durgapal and Dinesh Dhania  and UKDs Pritam Panwar are ministers in the Harish Rawat government.

Reacting to the utterances of Kishore Upadhyay, Chief Minister Harish Rawat said that a decision about the future of PDF minister would be taken by party high command and he would advise the party on the issue. He maintained that PDF members had given valuable support to the state government in the past four years and cannot be ditched. He said that he was not bothered about what others are saying on the issue.

On the other hand, PDF ministers took exception to the stand taken by Kishore Upadhyay and demanded that Chief Minister Harish Rawat should restrain the PCC president in publicly talking against PDF ministers. Uttarakhand Education Minister Mantri Prasad Naithani, who is the convener of the PDF, said the utterances of Kishore Upadhyay would harm the alliance and there should be a clarity.

The war of words further intensified today with PCC secretary Girish Punetha, in a statement, claimed that the PDF was a part of the state government and had nothing to do with the Congress party. He warned the PDF ministers for making statements against the state Congress president.

Upadhyay, who is having a feud with Harish Rawat, is miffed since Uttarakhand Tourism Minister Dinesh Dhania had defeated him from Tehri Assembly seat in 2012 polls. He fear that the Chief Minister supports Dinesh Dhania and has been trying to get him a Congress ticket from the Tehri Assembly.

Similarly, Mantri Prasad Naithani had defeated senior Congress leader and former minister Shoorveer Singh Sajwan from Devprayag Assembly segment in 2012. The tug of war between Chief Minister Harish Rawat and state Congress chief Kishore Upadhyay is likely to intensify in the coming days as state Assembly polls are nearing.
Washington, September 21

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has teased his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to "sleep well" ahead of the first presidential debate next week, which is likely to attract a record number of viewership.

Clinton appeared at no public events yesterday with less than two months before the election, and 70-year-old Trump promptly ridiculed her "taking the day off".

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"Hillary Clinton is taking the day off again, she needs the rest. Sleep well Hillary - see you at the debate!" Trump said in a tweet after it was reported that Clinton has taken a day's off from her grilling campaign schedule.

It was only the latest dig on 68-year-old Clinton by Trump, who has repeatedly mocked his rival's 'stamina,' although he wished her well after she was diagnosed with pneumonia after she left the 9/11 commemoration ceremony.

The first of the series of three presidential debates are scheduled for September 26 in New York.

In American presidential election a lot depends on performance of a candidate in these three debates.

Given the sharp polarization of voters during the general elections, the first presidential debate is expected to attract a record 100 million viewership, The Hill newspaper said.

"A debate with an audience that size would be something never seen before in US politics and would be a figure close to what the Super Bowl gets," the newspaper said.

The other two presidential debates have been scheduled for October 9 and October 19.

Their running mates Tim Kaine and Mike Pence would have the sole vice presidential debates on October 4. PTI
Toronto, September 21

More than 19,000 students on the small Canadian province of Prince Edward Island have been evacuated because of a "potential threat." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said today students at more than 60 English language and French language schools are being taken to safe locations by staff outside the schools, where buses are meeting them.

The police provided no other details. Parents and guardians are being asked to wait for further instructions before picking up their children.

Parker Grimmer, the islands director of public schools, says police contacted the school system this morning about a threat that was of a significant nature and asked for the evacuation of all schools. Three schools in the nearby province of Nova Scotia also have also been evacuated due to potential threats. AP
Aleppo, September 21

Intense air raids shook Syria's Aleppo today as increasing tensions between Moscow and Washington poisoned efforts to revive a failed ceasefire.

The UN Security Council was due to meet later for talks on salvaging the truce -- which collapsed on Monday after only a week -- but the mood was likely to be tense after the United States said it held Russia responsible for a deadly air strike on an aid convoy.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are both to address the council, ahead of more talks expected later this week.

Russia and the United States co-sponsored the ceasefire plan, with Kerry warning it could be the "last chance" to try to end Syria's civil war, which has killed more than 300,000 people in five years.

In Aleppo, a key battleground in the conflict, bombardment pummelled opposition-held districts and the city's outskirts into this morning.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said dozens of raids hit the city's east overnight, as regime troops advanced on rebels in Aleppos outskirts.

It was a sleepless night for many Aleppo residents, AFP's correspondent in the city said, with the bombardment continuing until rain broke out over the city at dawn.

In the rebel-held neighbourhood of Sukkari, Abu Ahmad cleared rubble and shattered glass from his doorstep after bombardment demolished the six-storey building next door, killing his neighbours.

Monday's strike on the aid convoy near Aleppo killed 20 civilians, the Red Cross said, and prompted the UN to suspend all humanitarian convoys across Syria.  AFP
United Nations, September 21

In a criticism of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's rhetoric, US President Barack Obama said if America turned away refugees simply because they are "Muslim", it would reinforce the terrorists' propaganda and the "ugly lie" that the US is opposed to Islam.

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Obama, who hosted a 'Leaders Summit on Refugees' during the 71st UN General Assembly session here yesterday, said the world was facing a refugee crisis of "epic proportions" with more than 65 million people having been driven from their homes, more than any time since the World War-II.

"Among them are more than 21 million refugees who have fled their countries - everything and everyone they've ever known, fleeing with a suitcase or the clothes on their back," he said.

"And if we were to turn refugees away simply because of their background or religion, or, for example, because they are Muslim, then we would be reinforcing terrorist propaganda that nations like my own are somehow opposed to Islam, which is an ugly lie that must be rejected in all of our countries by upholding the values of pluralism and diversity," he said at the summit attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Bangladesh Prime Minsiter Sheikh Hasina.

He highlighted that in recent years, the US has put in place intensive screening and security checks to take in refugees as well as ensure the nation's security.

"Refugees are subject to more rigorous screening than the average tourist. We've seen in America, hardworking, patriotic refugees serve in our military, and start new businesses and help revitalise communities. I believe refugees can make us stronger," he said.

"So the challenge to our security is because when desperate refugees pay cold-hearted traffickers for passage, it funds the same criminals who are smuggling arms and drugs and children.

"When nations with their own internal difficulties find themselves hosting massive refugee populations for years on end, it can risk more instability. It oftentimes surfaces tensions in our society when we have disorderly and disproportionate migration into some countries that skews our politics and is subject to demagoguery," he said.

For the past year, Trump has been warning that letting refugees in would make the US vulnerable to new terror attacks. The brash tycoon has sparked a wave of criticism over his comments on race, immigrants and refugees, including calling for a ban on Muslim travelers to the United States.

And this week, one of Trump's sons triggered an online storm with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl containing an assortment of tainted and untainted candies. PTI
Aleppo, September 21

Intense air raids shook Syria's Aleppo on Wednesday as increasing tensions between Moscow and Washington poisoned efforts to revive a failed ceasefire.

The UN Security Council was due to meet later for talks on salvaging the truce  which collapsed on Monday after only a week  but the mood was likely to be tense after the United States said it held Russia responsible for a deadly air strike on an aid convoy.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are both to address the council, ahead of more talks expected later this week.

Russia and the United States co-sponsored the ceasefire plan, with Kerry warning it could be the "last chance" to try to end Syria's civil war, which has killed more than 300,000 people in five years.

In Aleppo, a key battleground in the conflict, bombardment pummelled opposition-held districts and the city's outskirts into this morning.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said dozens of raids hit the city's east overnight, as regime troops advanced on rebels in Aleppo's southwestern outskirts.

It was a sleepless night for many Aleppo residents, AFP's correspondent in the city said, with the bombardment continuing until rain broke out over the city at dawn.

In the rebel-held neighbourhood of Sukkari, Abu Ahmad cleared rubble and shattered glass from his doorstep after bombardment demolished the six-storey building next door, killing his neighbours.

Syrian state media reported the city's government-held west had come under rebel shelling, which killed two people.

A medical aid group said four of its doctors were killed and a nurse critically wounded when an air strike hit a clinic in a village near Aleppo late on Wednesday.

The Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations (UOSSM) said the clinic in the village of Khan Tuman was completely levelled in the 11.00 pm (local time) strike and more dead were feared to be buried under the rubble, the group added.

The Britain-based Observatory said nine medical staff affiliated with the Army of Conquest rebel alliance were also killed while working in the clinic.

According to the World Heath Organisation, Syria is the most dangerous country in the world for health professionals, with 135 strikes on clinics and hospitals last year.

Monday's strike on the aid convoy near Aleppo killed 20 civilians and destroyed 18 trucks, the Red Cross said, and prompted the UN to suspend all humanitarian convoys across Syria.

"There only could have been two entities responsible, either the Syrian regime or the Russian government," President Barack Obama's national security spokesman Ben Rhodes said.

"In any event, we hold the Russian government responsible for air strikes in this space."

Two Russian SU-24 ground attack jets were operating in the area where the aid convoy was struck, another US official said. "The best evaluation we have is that the Russians carried out the strike," he added, speaking on condition of anonymity.  AFP
Geneva (Switzerland), September 21

Members of United Kashmir Peoples National Party (UKPNP) held a protest outside the United Nations (UN) office in Geneva and demanded the formation of a commission by the UN to investigate the killing of Arif Shahid, leader of All-Party National Alliance (APNA), allegedly by Pakistan, for raising his voice for Kashmiris in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The protesters raised slogans Long live Arif Shahid and Stop terrorism in Kashmir, and demanded that Shahid be declared a martyr.

Jamil Maqsood, a leader of the UKPNP present during the protest, alleged Shahid was killed by Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence.

It was obviously the secret agency of Pakistan, the ISI, because the ISI did not tolerate any pro-people voice in PoK; so it is very clear that ISI eliminated Arif Shahid, the leader of Kashmiri People, Maqsood told ANI.

He insisted that the people present were protesting for the arrest of his killers who, he clearly said, was the ISI.

We are demanding the United Nations and the human rights councils and the entire UN body to investigate and to formulate a commission that impartially investigates the killing of Arif Shahid, he added.

Remembering Shahid, Maqsood said, He is the greatest martyr of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Because he was speaking for the rights of the Kashmiri people particularly who are marginalised in PoK. According to reports, Shahid was murdered by the ISI on May 14, 2013.  ANI
This lowboy's deck remains unbowed, but overloading has been known to bend the structure. How do owners repair such damage? Photo: Rogers Brothers Co.

How do you repair a lowboy trailer whose deck structure has bent under overloading and lost its arc? Thats one thing thats not among the ATA Technology & Maintenance Councils recommended practices, and it came up at an exploratory session earlier this week during TMCs fall meeting in Raleigh, N.C.

The session sought to identify trailer-oriented concerns that TMC members might formally explore, said Kevin Tomlinson, a former TMC general chairman and maintenance director at South Shore Transportation in Sandusky, Ohio. His company runs numerous flatbed trailers, and they are what he had in mind when opening the session on Monday, the first official day of the meeting.

The session was not well attended, maybe a half dozen people, and no one was speaking up," he said. "So I figured, Well, OK, there arent any issues and we dont need to go further.' Then someone brought up that question.

"How do you repair something like that? We dont have any gooseneck trailers (at South Shore), and the arcs in our flatbeds stay there for years. But this might be worth looking into.

A new task force might do that. Or an existing task force that focuses on trailers, truck bodies and associated equipment might look into such issues, as it has many others over the years. Tomlinson said it could, among other things, bring in representatives of lowboy trailer manufacturers or specialty shops who can speak to it.

The inquiry came during TMCs new emphasis on trailer maintenance as part of its annual technician skills competition held concurrently at the Raleigh Convention Center. Its called a Trailer Track and was part of the skills testing held over several days, through Tuesday.

The purpose of the new trailer technician track is to showcase the specialized set of skills these professionals use every day to keep North Americas freight rolling and recognize a group of technicians who otherwise may not have a chance to compete at a national level in a technician competition, said Carl Kirk, TMCs executive director and an ATA vice president, in a statement issued by TMC in July.

The technology finding its way on todays trailers is every bit as complex as whats found on tractors and straight trucks.

Winners of the competition, called TMC SuperTech, are to be announced on Wednesday.
The California Energy Commission (CEC) approved a $1 million grant to develop a 12-liter natural gas engine for heavy-duty vehicles that produces near-zero nitrogen oxide tailpipe emissions, the commission has announced.

The grant focuses on existing engine research and consists of engine development and on-road vehicle demonstration. The engine will be offered as an option for fleets with larger vehicles, according to CEC.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District will work with Cummins Westport, Inc., to develop the engine. The development of the natural gas engine will help meet the California Air Resources Board's (CARB) 2010 emissions standards and support efforts to improve air quality in the South Coast and San Joaquin Valley air basins.
WASHINGTON  The CEO of Wells Fargo faced accusations of fraud and calls for his resignation Tuesday from harshly critical senators at a hearing over allegations that bank employees opened millions of accounts customers didnt know about to meet aggressive sales quotas.

Members of the Senate Banking Committee showed bipartisan outrage over the long-running conduct, unsatisfied by Chief Executive John Stumpfs show of contrition.

Stumpf said he was deeply sorry that the bank failed to meet its responsibility to customers and didnt act sooner to stem this unacceptable activity. He promised to assist affected customers.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren flatly told Stumpf he should resign. You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers, she said. You should resign. You should give back the money you took while the scam was going on.

The Massachusetts Democrat, one of the fiercest critics of Wall Street, also advocated for a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and securities regulators.

Stumpf, a 34-year veteran of Wells Fargo and CEO since 2007, earned $19.3 million last year. The bank does have provisions its board could implement to claim back executive compensation.

Wells Fargo sales employees, trying to meet targets that called for every customer have eight products with the bank, opened more than 2 million bank and credit card accounts, regulators said last week in levying a $185 million fine.

Money in customers accounts was said to have been moved to these new accounts without their permission. Debit cards were issued and activated, as well as PINs created, without telling customers. In some cases, bank employees even created fake email addresses to sign up customers for online banking services, the regulators said.

Peppered with criticism for hours, Stumpf at one point stumbled a bit over his words and bristled at Warrens suggestion that the sales practices were a scam.

We recognize now that we should have done more sooner, he acknowledged. I am deeply sorry that we have not lived up to our values in this way. He promised: I will make it right.

The senators asked that he specifically lay out action the bank will take to do so. They also challenged assertions that he and other Wells Fargo senior executives didnt become aware of the problems until 2013  when the sales misconduct was reported by The Los Angeles Times. The practices apparently began at least in 2009.

Wells Fargo has long been known in the banking industry for its aggressive sales goals. Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of the retail banking business, announced in July that she would retire from the bank this year. She is expected to leave with as much as $125 million in salary, stock options and other compensation.

Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said it would be malpractice if the bank doesnt institute the compensation clawbacks, and Stumpf said the board has the tools to hold senior leadership accountable, including himself and Tolstedt.

Questioned again by Warren, Stumpf said the bank had not considered firing her.

Under the settlement with regulators, it neither admitted nor denied the allegations. It later said it plans to eliminate the sales targets by Jan. 1. Some 5,300 Wells Fargo employees have been fired.

Stumpf offered some detail at the hearing about who was fired, saying bankers, bank managers, managers of managers, and even an area president. They ranged in pay from about $35,000 to $65,000.
Mayor Craig Thurmond was honored for his recent award as the states top Mayor for cities over 5,000 in population from the Oklahoma Municipal League during the regular Broken Arrow City Council meeting Tuesday night.

Thurmond not only received kind words from members of the Council and City Manager, but a short video tribute was also shown. Members of the community added their congratulations.

Its humbling to get this kind of award, Thurmond said. I got the award, but its the council and staff that moves the city forward.

Among the congratulations was this from councilman Mike Lester.

To do the job well, it takes 30-plus hours a week, Lester said. You have made strides for the city.

Vice Mayor Richard Carter cut to the chase.

You deserve what you got, Carter said to Thurmond.

In other council business, the intersection resurfacing at Aspen and Kenosha is 40 percent complete, according to Kenny Schwab, assistant City Manager. Schwab added the project on BAs second busiest intersection is a bit ahead of schedule.

City counsel Beth Anne Wilkening gave a detailed presentation about Broken Arrow becoming a Court of Record city. Now, only Tulsa and Oklahoma City are Court of Record cities. This idea would directly concern cases involving driving under the influence (DUI) and actual physical control (APC).

Wilkening explained there would be some added expenses. However, there would be some time saved for the police department not having to drive to Tulsa and keep these DUI and APC cases for Broken Arrows court.

The council will get more details on added expenses versus time saved and fines collected. The council could possibly act on the matter within 60 days.

Fire Chief Jeremy Moore has been busy writing grants to help fund new firefighters. He has been successful, too.

Moore got a Federal grant through Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) to hire 11 new personnel for a two-year period. It will be completely funded by the Federal government without matching dollars from the city.

Moore said a new firefighting class could start as early as December.

The council approved a resolution of support for the Tulsa Regional Chamber 2017 One Voice Legislative Priorities.

Tonya Ellison, Mark Frie, Lori Lewis, Rob Whitlock and Dianna Yingst were reappointed to the Broken Arrow Convention and Visitors Bureau for a two-year term. An at-large position was made for one-year only.

City Manager Michael Spurgeon announced that the water feature at the Rose District Farmers Market Pavilion (400 S. Main) would be unveiled Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. A ribbon will be cut and a few speakers are scheduled before turning on the water and light show.
OKLAHOMA CITY  Injured workers and their attorneys have been successful in knocking holes in a highly touted 2013 workers compensation reform law.

The law, Senate Bill 1062, is mostly known for changing the system from a judicial process to an administrative procedure, but it had other provisions as well.

Republicans touted the measure as a way to reduce premium costs and get injured workers treated quicker and back to work. They also said it would make the state more business friendly.

But 38 provisions have been found unconstitutional, invalid or inoperable following court challenges, said Oklahoma City attorney and author Bob Burke, who represents injured workers. Another 30 provisions are being challenged, he said.

About 20 percent of the new laws provisions dealing with benefits have been found unconstitutional, invalid or inoperable, said Burke, who has filed several successful challenges to the law.

Burke said he initially believed 52 provisions were unconstitutional, but now believes the number is closer to 67.

Earlier this month, the Oklahoma Supreme Court found unconstitutional a key provision in the law that allowed employers to opt out of traditional workers compensation insurance if they provided a separate plan with benefits.

The states high court in Vasquez v. Dillards found that the opt-out component was an unconstitutional special law.

The Opt Out Act does not guarantee members of the subject class, all employees, the same rights when a work-related injury occurs, the ruling states. Rather, it provides employers the authority to single out their injured employees for inequitable treatment.

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, in Torres v. Seaboard Farms, tossed out another provision that prevented workers from collecting on cumulative trauma claims if they had not worked for the employer for at least 180 days.

Cumulative trauma is an injury that is caused by the combined effect of repetitive physical activities over a period of time in the course of employment.

Burke said the states high court ruled that the Legislature must have a rational state interest in cutting benefits and shifting the financial burden to the injured workers and it did not.

A ruling in another case, Maxwell v. Sprint, tossed a provision that said if an injured worker went back to work, he or she could not collect permanent partial disability benefits. The court found it was an unconstitutional special law.

If an employee lost the use of his or her legs in a bad car wreck and the employer gave the employee a desk job, the employee could not collect the benefit under the law as written, Burke said. No other state has that provision, he said.

Burke believes so many provisions have been tossed out because lawmakers didnt get a chance to read the bill before they passed it.

Gov. Mary Fallin defended the law in a statement released Friday.

The National Council on Compensation Insurance just this month filed an overall loss cost level decrease of 10.2 percent for next year, Fallin said. Over the past three years, these annual filings have totaled a reduction of 47.4 percent. The most recent reduction reflects the continuing positive effects of the 2013 workers compensation reforms. We have seen the rate of claims fall by two-thirds, employees returning to work quicker and costs to employers reduced dramatically.

The State Chamber of Oklahoma lobbied hard for the reforms.

I believe Mr. Burke has overstated the level of success attorneys had in their continued assaults on the reforms of Senate Bill 1062, said Jonathan Buxton, senior vice president of government affairs for the State Chamber. The attorneys have a vested interest in maintaining the old system, which was failing injured workers and their employers but benefiting attorneys.

The Legislature, governors office and State Chamber are working to address the concerns raised by the court.

The challenges before the court do not represent the bulk of the reforms of 2013, Buxton said. The law is still standing. It is well designed. And it is our intention to continue to fight against the lawyers trying to overturn the will of the people.

While supporters credit the measure with saving money, Burke said it was done by cutting benefits to injured workers.

Benefits have been cut by 60 percent, unquestionably, giving Oklahoma the lowest workers compensation benefits in America, Burke said.

The issue is expected to be revisited when lawmakers return to the Capitol in February.

Rep. Jon Echols, R-Oklahoma City, is expected to be the key person in the House on workers compensation changes.

He said his goal is to protect the remaining reforms, adding that he has no interest in a tit for tat with the judiciary.

The overall goal is making sure we preserve the reforms that are working, Echols said.
Few would disagree today with the statement - money works wonders. For example, using immeasurable financial investments, it is possible to build a beautiful city in the desolate desert, and do many other things.

Well, if you are engaged in propaganda, promoting some ideas or trying to manipulate history and historical facts on a global scale, then in this field, with solid financing, you can achieve very good results. For example, if you want to present the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire to the world as "genocide", then it will not be enough to buy different historians and MPs, so that the first would write and the latter would vote. You need to reach out to the masses, and how can you do that? For example, by hiring a well-known director and ordering a film about your product.

Just like the Armenian lobby did. With the money of the Armenian billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, they hired a well-known Irish director Terry George, who, with the involvement of famous actors, made the film called "The Promise" for the Armenian side.

Terry George is a director of quite famous pictures, the most famous of which is the film "Hotel Rwanda", the film tells about the genocide in Rwanda. I suppose that this fact played a significant role for the Armenian side in the choice of director. But, unlike the Rwandan genocide, "Armenian genocide" is a moot point. The Armenian lobby and the Armenian Government continue to convince the world that the 1915 events in the Ottoman Empire were exactly the genocide of Armenians".

With Kerkorians money, who by the way didnt live to see the premiere of the film, world famous movie stars such as Christian Bale and Jean Reno were involved, that should provide the additional success of the film, and bring the product to the masses.

In addition, the film has a very solid PR budget, a large number of major media was involved, and also social networks are actively used to promote the film. However, given that the majority of film critics and journalists are not familiar with the history of the Ottoman Empire, and even less so, with what happened there in 1915, many flaws can be found among reviews in the media. For example, Benjamin Lee from The Guardian, writes in his review dedicated to this film - The film starts in Armenia in 1914,and in the same review Benjamin Lee mentions the growing tensions between Turkey and Armenia back then. What conclusion can be drawn from the scribbles of Lee? Either the author, due to his incompetence in the matter, does not know that in 1914 there was no Armenian (the Armenian Republic first appeared only in 1918) and so there could be no tensions between Turkey and Armenia, or the author deliberately (which is not uncommon for the Guardian, because the newspaper is going through hard times) misleads the reader.

Also noteworthy are the statements of Terry George himself. For instance, Bruce Kirkland at "Toronto Sun" (premiere of the film took place in Toronto) quotes the words of the director, in which he encourages to bring the discussion out in the open and think about how do we reconcile these two nations again. It is a bit strange strategy for reconciliation, to be honest, because, as a rule, a person who wants to reconcile the two sides tries to be neutral and impartial. It is difficult to reconcile the two nations if you deliberately sided with one of them, and did so not for free. As for "open discussion", the Armenian side refused from it, when rejected the idea of establishing an international commission of historians to investigate the events of 1915.

Of course from this film the audience will not learn that the Armenian gangs armed by tsarist Russia began a massacre of Kurdish and Turkish peasants already in 1914, nor will they know how it could happen that in the course of the "genocide", the death toll of Armenians was higher than the number of Armenians that ever lived on these territories.

The film The Promise is the next stage in the process of manipulation of history started by the Armenian lobby. It is regrettable that in order to incite hatred against Turks and Turkey, Armenian nationalists have decided to use the cinema, thereby distorting the historical picture and poisoning the minds of people with their propaganda.

Ali Hajizade, a political scientist, head of the project "The Great Middle East"
The CEO of Ramps Logistics says he is "really really disappointed" with the Guyana Revenue A
The lawyer for the family of JonBenet Ramsey is threatening to sue CBS for libel after the documentary

The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey implicated Burke Ramsey for her murder.

I will be filing a lawsuit on behalf of Burke Ramsey, said Ramsey familys longtime attorney, L. Lin Wood. CBSs false and unprofessional attacks on this young man are disgusting and revolting.

In a statement the network said: CBS stands by the broadcast and will do so in court.

As a then-9 year old Burke Ramsey is considered under the minimum age for criminal responsibility in the state of Colorado and remains immune from prosecution. Burke recently spoke to Dr. Phil denying involvement in her murder.

But surviving parent John Ramsey could potentially face charges if Boulder Country District Attorney Stan Garnett re-investigates the case and presses charges as accessory after the fact to murder.

Despite its claims the CBS documentary carried a huge disclaimer as the credits rolled.

Source: Newsweek, Hollywood Reporter
Put aside all notions of keeping yourself nice. MTV has warned Geordie Shore is fast-tracked to screens in late October.

This season is filmed at beach locations in Spain, Greece and Cyprus.

Geordie Shore is apparently MTVs highest rating series no wonder its up to 13 seasons.

Are you ready to get mortal with the world famous Geordies? Theyre back and hitting up some of Europes biggest and best party islands in a brand new radge season premiering Wednesday 26th October at 9am, encoring at 9.30pm, only on MTV. Get ready for sun, sex and even more drama as Geordie Shore gets a Mediterranean makeover!

Last season, we watched as some of the most infamous members of Geordie Shore returned to Newcastle to compete in the Big Birthday Battle. This season sees the cast seek out sunnier climates and skimpier outfits, as they head to the beaches of Magaluf, Ibiza, Kavos and Ayia Napa. Tune in to find out the stories behind all the Maga-drama in those paparazzi pictures.

Wednesday 26th October at 9am on MTV. Repeated at 9.30pm.
US writer / producer/ director Curtis Hanson, best known for LA Confidential has died, aged 71.

He died of natural causes at home in Hollywood. A report said he had retired in recent years due to Alzheimers.

In 1992 he found mainstream success directing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, going on to direct The River Wild, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, In Her Shoes and Chasing Maverick.

Hanson co-wrote 1997s LA Confidential, adapted from James Ellroys novel about crime in 1950s Los Angeles. It won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

For television he directed HBOs telemovie Too Big to Fail, plus an episode of Greg the Bunny and produced Hoke and Three Rivers. He also wrote and directed the telemovie The Children of Times Square.

Russell Crowe wrote on Twitter: Thank you for believing in me & standing your ground. In reality you made my job a career. Love & respect my friend.

Actor James Woods added his tribute. He wrote: This saddens me deeply. Great director and the nicest man. RIP, dear friend.

Rob Lowe, who acted in 1990s Bad Influence, said it was an honour to make Bad Influence with Curtis Hanson. So smart, so kind and a great storyteller. I will miss him.

Source: BBC
By PTI: Dhaka, Sep 21 (PTI) A woman today died and at least 25 others were reported missing after an overcorwded boat with nearly 60 people aboard capsized in south-central Bangladesh.

The ferry sank in Shandhya river in Banaripara upazila of Barisal district, police said.

The body of an unidentified woman has been recovered by rescuers while an operation to locate other missing people was underway, said SM Akhteruzzaman, superintendant of police.

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ML Oishi with around 60 people on board, capsized at Dasherhaat point while its passengers started to get down after it anchored there, the Dailystar online reported citing the police.

Some people are believed to have swam ashore.

Boat accidents are frequent in Bangladesh, through which some of the worlds mightiest rivers - the Brahmaputra and the Padma - flows.

In February last year, 69 people died in central Bangladesh in a boat mishap. PTI ABH

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 21 (PTI) Nearly 18 new judges are likely to be appointed by next week, days after five judges were elevated as chief justices.

Sources said files relating to fresh appointments have been cleared at the highest level and may reach Rashtrapati Bhawan in the coming days.

While most of the fresh appointments relate to Madras High Court, some others belong to Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh high courts.

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There are nearly 74 recommendations of the collegium under process at the governments end. Most of the recommendations are likely to fructify into appointments by the end of September, barring "a few" cases where the executive and the judiciary have "difference of opinion," they said.

Usually, the process of appointing judges takes between 60 to 75 days.

Some 35 files related to elevation of judges as chief justices of high courts and those related to fresh appointments are pending in the "advanced stages" with the government.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had on Wednesday last told the Supreme Court that "there is progress in the appointments... We will see more progress".

Judiciary and executive have seen at variance over appointment of judges in the recent past. PTI NAB ZMN

--- ENDS ---
Four men brandishing guns robbed a man of UAH 2 mn he was carrying in a bag in the Shevchenkivskiy District of Kyiv.

Ukrinform learned the news from the Head of the Communications Department of the National Police in Kyiv, Oksana Blyshchik.

"In Kyiv, four men in black uniforms with the inscription Security Service of Ukraine, making threats with assault rifles, took the victim's bag, which contained more than UAH 2 mn. In response, the victim used a device for shooting rubber bullets. The attackers fled from the scene in a car that police found him near the scene of the crime," the statement said.

According to preliminary information, no-one was hurt as a result of the incident. A team of investigators from Shevchenkivsky District and Kyivs Main Police Department are at the scene. Police are searching for the attackers.

The statement said that the issue of opening of criminal proceedings under Art. 187 (Armed Robbery) of the Criminal Code of Ukraineis being looked into.

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Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman says that in September the special Investment Support Office will be established so that to ease the work of foreign investors in Ukraine.

"We need to stimulate investments in the national economy and thats why this month we will create the Investment Support Office, Groysman said when representing a draft national budget for 2017, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

According to him, this Office will serve as a starting point "from which we will cooperate with every major investor.

iy
By PTI: From Anisur Rahman

Dhaka, Sep 21 (PTI) At least four people were dead and 25 others remained missing after an overcrowded boat capsized in south-central Bangladesh.

There were over 50 people in the boat when it capsized in Sandya river amid strong currents.

"Four bodies have so far been recovered but some 25 passengers of the sunken boat are missing," an official in coastal Barisal district said.

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He said fire service divers with assistance of police and people in the neighbourhood were carrying out rescue efforts.

A fire service official said that their divers have located the sunken vessel and were preparing to look for more bodies feared to be trapped inside.

"Some 25 passengers were rescued or swam ashore as the launch sank near a terminal," a police officer said.

Ferry accidents are common in Bangladesh, criss-crossed by over 300 rivers while many of them turn turbulent during the monsoon time.

In February last year, 69 people died in central Bangladesh in a boat mishap. PTI AR SUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
To continue successfully the course of integration into the Euro-Atlantic space of security and effective response to the hybrid war that is waged by the Russian Federation, Ukraine should quickly do its homework - to create an effective mechanism for the implementation of a comprehensive assistance package adopted at the NATO Summit in Warsaw. Acting Head of the Mission of Ukraine to NATO Yehor Bozhok told in exclusive interview with an Ukrinform correspondent in Brussels about achievement of criteria for NATO membership and a possible intermediate status of the state on this way.

- In late August, Ukrainian President Ukraine Petro Poroshenko held his annual meeting with ambassadors who head Ukrainian diplomatic missions abroad. In it, the President set out specific tasks for Ukrainian diplomats to promote and protect the national interests of Ukraine. Please remind us what the President emphasized in the work of the Ukrainian Mission to NATO, and what are the main priorities and objectives set out in the new political season in the conditions of the hybrid war unleashed by Russia?

- The main domestic and foreign policy course taken by Ukraine today is European and Euro-Atlantic integration. This course is viewed by the state in synergy, as these are interconnected processes. Euro-Atlantic integration is not possible without European integration, and vice versa. Why? European integration is a whole range of issues related to socio-economic and political spheres, while Euro-Atlantic it is the same questions plus defense and the security sector. Thus, full integration into the European space is only possible once European and Euro-Atlantic standards have been attained. This is now one of Ukraines priorities.

But now, finally, we have started to approach this issue carefully and pragmatically, concentrating not on political slogans, and on getting real results. And talk of "applying for NATO membership" or "urgent need for us to become a NATO member" was put aside as being too early and without grounds. Nor does speculation on the NATO membership Action Plan provide any added value. After all, we have all the tools necessary to properly prepare for NATO membership for reform of Ukraine in accordance with the required standards. We need to focus on this work. And in this we have absolutely unprecedented and very significant support from NATO. Today, we have the Annual National Programme, which is the practical part of the Action Plan for NATO membership and a powerful institution of NATO advisers present in Ukraine. At the Warsaw Summit in July we received a comprehensive package of assistance which is a unique NATO tool for giving consultative tool, practical, logistical and financial support to partner countries for the implementation of tasks in the field of European integration. This package covers 40 areas of assistance, mainly oriented to the security sector, including 8 NATO trust funds targeted for Ukraine.

The Warsaw Summit was historic not only for NATO but also for Ukraine and our relations with the Alliance. You know that Ukraine is the only NATO partner country which, within the confines of the summit, had a separate meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission at the highest level. In fact, the results of this meeting enabled us to complete formation of the complete set of political and practical tools for us to effectively implement our Euro-Atlantic integration course in full. In the medium term our "homework" is to attain the security sector standards of a NATO member state by 2020. And the Alliance is helping us more and more in this.

So, today we have a fully-fledged base for quite successfully moving towards our strategic goal, that of attaining all the criteria for NATO membership. We now need to work hard on this in a systematic way.

NATO RETAINS A FIRM AND CLEAR POSITION ON ITS SUPPORT OF UKRAINE

- President Poroshenko also put special onus on consolidating diplomatic efforts in standing up to Russian aggression...

- A paramount task of the diplomatic service, including the Mission of Ukraine to NATO, remains confronting Russian aggression, consolidation of Euro-Atlantic unity on the issue of support for Ukraine and the continuation of political and economic pressure on the aggressor in order to force him back into the framework of international law.

Yes, unfortunately, there has recently been some rocking in Western political circles regarding policy towards Russia. This helps aggressive Russian propaganda, and certain fatigue from the hybrid war unleashed by Moscow as well as the work of the Russian special services in mobilizing protesting electorate, radical forces, the corrupting of European politicians for undermining unity in support of Ukraine in the EU and NATO. But despite the best efforts of the Kremlin machine, for more than two years the Western world has been united in its support for Ukraine, and the rejection as well as non-recognition of aggressive actions by the Russian Federation.

NATO retains a firm and clear position on its unquestioning support of Ukraine, continuing to pressure Russia to compel her to return to the framework of international law.

UKRAINE IS ABLE TO PROTECT ITSELF BUT NATO CAN GIVE WEAPONS IN CASE OF ESCALATION

- You are probably bored of hearing this question, if we can say this. How can we evaluate the current mood among our Alliance partners on the issue of military-technical cooperation with Ukraine? Can we believe that some member states have matured on the topic of giving Ukraine lethal weapons?

- My approach is such: it is better not to feed with fish but give bait and teach fishing. This is the modern philosophy of our practical cooperation with NATO on the issue of raising the defense capability of Ukraine. Yes, lethal weapons are important. But we must look deeper into the roots. Over the past two years, our ability to provide ourselves with weapons has increased several fold, and this is obvious progress.

The issue here is the degree of aggression. Today, Ukraine is able to protect itself, to counter Russian aggression on the current. We continue to systematically expand our defense capabilities with the support of NATO. But of course, if there were to be significant escalation in future, the issue of providing military assistance to Ukraine will be seen through a different prism by NATO. And here we cannot exclude radical solutions, right up to providing Ukraine with lethal weapons as defense against aggression.

- Continuing the topic of practical cooperation with partners: what training exercises involving the Ukrainian military are planned to be held in 2017?

- Ten exercises were planned for this year. Six in Ukraine and four abroad. We try not to miss a single maneuver where we are invited, and which allow us to participate in operational and tactical circumstances in the context of opposition to Russian aggression. After all, objectively, we are not always able to send our troops abroad as Russia continues to increase its military groups in Ukraine and on the border with Ukraine.

At the same time, I want to emphasize that next year at least the same number of exercises is planned under NATO auspices or in cooperation with selected allies. Agreement on this plan is currently being reached.

I also want to remind you that in Ukraine there are currently instructors from the US, Canada, Great Britain and Lithuania, which assist in training new Ukrainian military personnel. Those efforts which we have made together with the Ministry of Defense, the General Staff, our partners from the headquarters and the Command of NATO special operations forces, have already brought results.

ABOUT 500 UKRAINIAN SERVICEMEN HAVE UNDERGONE TREATMENT AND REHABILITATION IN NATO COUNTRIES

- How the cooperation with NATO partner countries is developing on the issue of treatment and rehabilitation of wounded Ukrainian soldiers? How many soldiers have undergone treatment, and how many are planned to be sent for treatment?

- We can positively note this sector of cooperation. As of today, about 500 Ukrainian servicepersons have undergone treatment and rehabilitation in NATO countries, as well as continue receiving treatment. At present another 15 soldiers are on our current list, which was distributed among NATO member states. They [servicepersons] are the representatives of all law enforcement agencies of Ukraine. Hungary has already accepted for treatment four of them. We will discuss with member states the issue regarding other eleven [soldiers]. We monitor this issue at NATO Headquarters every day.

- What is the situation on the implementation of Trust Funds programs? What is the process of their financing from the side of our partners from NATO member states?

- At present Ukraine has eight specialized NATO Trust Funds. Their goal is to assist Ukraine in reforming security and defense sector and resolving urgent critical issues. This concerns the Trust Fund to reform the system of logistics and standardization of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We should separately note the Trust Fund to reform the system of command and management, which now applies not only to the Armed Forces, but also other components of the security and defense sector, in particular, the National Guard, the State Border Service and the Office of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. Then there is the Medical Rehabilitation Trust Fund on heightening Ukraines national capabilities in this sphere. The work is carried out in two directions here: the development of our national capabilities in the sphere of medical rehabilitation of soldiers and prosthetics of wounded Ukrainian soldiers abroad.

The fourth Trust Fund is aimed at developing capabilities of Ukraine in the sphere of cyber defense. Now we are completing the first phase of this program implementation. The fifth Trust The Fund is engaged in the disposal of safe radioactive waste left since the time of the former USSR.

The next Trust Fund promotes social adaptation of servicemen transferred to the reserve - from military to civilian careers. Within this Trust Fund, many training courses for retraining have been created.

The Trust Fund on disposal of obsolete ammunition is the oldest trust which operates since 2004. At present, of course, we have no spare ammunition, but obsolete ammunition that carries a threat must be destructed.

Slovakia became in charge of the eighth Trust Fund at the NATO Warsaw Summit. The Fund is aimed at developing the system of mine clearance and improvised explosive devices disposal in Ukraine.

UKRAINE IS ABLE TO ENSURE STRATEGIC NATO AIR TRANSPORTATION WITHOUT RUSSIA

- NATO suspended practical cooperation with the country-aggressor  Russia. What about the continuation of Ukraines participation in the Strategic Airlift Interim Solution (SALIS) Program, but without the Russian side?

- Ukraine at the highest political level has decided to suspend the cooperation with Russia in the framework of the next phase of the SALIS program. The Alliance has announced a tender for the next stage of the SALIS program implementation, starting from January 2017. Despite of the intensive lobbying efforts by the Russian side, Ukrainian state company "Antonov Airlines" participates in this tender.

The position of the Ukrainian side, which I stress is shared by NATO, is clear: with increasing aggressiveness and unpredictability of the Russian side, it is illogical, impossible and impractical to cooperate with the Russian Federation on the issues of strategic air transportation, which are sensitive in terms of security.

The Ukrainian state company "Antonov Airlines" can independently ensure all the needs of Alliance in the sphere of strategic air transportation. We are sure of this.

SBU TO BE REFORMED IN LINE WITH NATO STANDARDS

- What visits by Ukrainians officials to NATO Headquarters are planned for the near future?

- We have a busy schedule. Our agenda includes an active high-level political dialogue. Were planning to hold a meeting of the NATO  Ukraine Commission by the end of September. The Ukrainian side will be represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystayko. The meeting will be focused on the security situation in Ukraine and development of "Normandy format" in the Minsk process. We constantly exchange this information with NATO on a daily basis in the format of political, military, intelligence contacts. The second issue of the scheduled meeting will concern the implementation of decisions approved at the Warsaw Summit.

Also, by the end of September were planning a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Joint Working Group on Defense Reform. We will discuss two elements of comprehensive efforts in reforming the security and defense sector  reforming the Defense Ministry of Ukraine, as well as reforming the Security Service of Ukraine. We include the SBU reform in the course of our cooperation with NATO. The next step is to reform the National Guard and the State Border Service in line with NATO standards. The preparatory work in this direction is being carried out.

The second issue to be considered at this meeting is the launch of the Ukraine-NATO platform to study the peculiarities of a hybrid war unleashed by Russia. The decision on establishing this platform was also approved at the NATO Warsaw Summit. The platform is expected to start its activities as soon as this year. We expect from the Ukrainian side the project will be coordinated by Director of the National Institute for Strategic Studies Volodymyr Horbulin. Gradually, other Ukrainian and international experts, including from the non-governmental sector will join this platform.

ABOUT OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE MOST COMPATIBLE PARTNERS

- Ukraine will not submit an application for NATO membership before 2020. Today, our level of cooperation with the Alliance is that of "special partnership." Can we consider other, more intense versions of our states partnership with the military-political bloc, as an intermediate step to Ukraine acquiring full membership of NATO?

- If we talk about the criteria for Ukraine acquiring NATO membership, the first is that of reaching certain standards. This issue has not yet been resolved. Therefore, the discussion of other issues - political and security conditions, support from allies is just inappropriate at the moment and has no sense. But in parallel we need to gradually build confidence and strengthen ties with the Alliance in the security field. And to at least get to the level that Sweden and Finland are at.

Andriy Lavrenyuk, Brussels
In the framework of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko held negotiations with Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key.

This has been reported by the press service of the Head of State.

The parties noted the importance of the first meeting at the highest level in the history of relations between Ukraine and New Zealand and confirmed willingness to enhance bilateral relations.

Petro Poroshenko thanked John Key for the firm stance of New Zealand in support of Ukraines territorial integrity and sovereignty, as well as condemnation of Russian aggression against our country.

The President drew attention to the necessity of expanding the legal base of relations.

The two leaders discussed the intensification of interpersonal contacts and prospects of mutual simplification of visa requirements.

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In New York, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin discussed with Foreign Minister of Denmark Kristian Jensen the issue of granting Ukraine a visa-free regime.

Ukrinform learned this from the press service of the Foreign Ministry.

"The sides discussed cooperation between Ukraine and the EU within the framework of entry into force of the Association Agreement and granting Ukraine a visa-free regime," reads a statement.

The ministers also discussed Denmark's support for reforms in Ukraine, in particular the fight against corruption. In addition, they also talked about attracting Danish investments into Ukraine.

The ministerial meeting was held in the framework of participation in the work of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

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Speaking from the rostrum at the UN in New York French President Francois Hollande has once again promised to do everything possible, together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for peace in Ukraine.

He said this during a speech at the 71st session of the General Assembly, an Ukrinform correspondent has reported.

"France, together with Germany in the Normandy format, will try to do everything possible for Ukraine for the implementation of the Minsk agreements and peace," said Hollande.

He expressed the hope that all parties would soon be able to move towards a peaceful settlement, and added that he is relying on atop-level meeting with leaders of the Normandy Four."

It should be noted that "the Ukrainian topic" was only the fourth in the speech of the French leader. Francois Hollande said the priority for France was implementing decisions adopted by the Paris climate conference in combating global warming and ensuring energy supplies in Africa, the conflict in Syria and peaceful settlement of the situation in the Middle East. The French leader focused separately on the need to combat terrorism.

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Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has discussed with his Kazakh counterpart Erlan Idrissov prospects for development of transport connection between the two countries, the Ukrainian foreign ministrys press service reports.

The ministers stressed that one of the top priority tasks for the further development of the Ukrainian-Kazakh cooperation is an increase in transport capacity, in particular via the use of the Trans-Caspian Transport Route, reads a report.

The sides also paid special attention to the issue of trade and economic cooperation development as one of the priority directions of bilateral relations.

In addition, Klimkin and Idrissov discussed the issue of Russias aggression against Ukraine.

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Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman on Wednesday met with World Bank Country Director for Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova Satu Kahkonen, the governments press service reports.

The sides focused on financing by the World Bank of infrastructure and socio-economic development projects, which are being implemented by the government of Ukraine.

Im sure that priorities of our cooperation should be support for projects in energy, transport, municipal and social sectors, agriculture, as well as healthcare and culture", stressed the prime minister.

The sides agreed to engage experts and financial resources of the World Bank to prepare the Strategy of transport infrastructure development in Ukraine. It is expected that the loan portfolio of the World Bank for the implementation of this project will amount US 1 billion.

Apart from that, Volodymyr Groysman and Satu Kahkonen discussed the issues of practical participation of the WB experts in the preparation of a concept of land reform and the healthcare system in Ukraine.

The World Bank Director for Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova presented to the Prime Minister the WBs analysis of energy tariffs and the subsidy programme, as well as proposals on the implementation of it in the near future.

The sides also agreed to continue close cooperation in order to ensure the financial stability of district heating companies and to improve the program of housing subsidies.

In addition, the prime minister emphasized the need to review the current loan portfolio of the World Bank for Ukraine, in particular to study the efficiency of the projects being implemented at slow pace.

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Ukraine together with the European Union should consolidate its efforts to counter Russian aggression.

Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman said this at a meeting with a delegation from the European Parliament, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"There are Russian troops, Russian military equipment and boundary violations. I believe that we must consolidate our efforts to force the aggressor to change his plans. The European Parliament, as well as the European Union, plays a very important role in this," Groysman stressed.

He thanked the MEPs, who visited the Eastern Ukraine, in spite of the undisguised aggression on the part of the Russian Federation.

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Chairman of the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee Andrej Plenkovic says that the European Parliament is ready to assist Ukraine in holding elections in the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

We are ready to render any support and assistance, together with the OSCE, so that these elections, if they take place, can be held in safe conditions and so that safety for all participants in these elections can be initially guaranteed, Plenkovic said at a meeting of the delegation of MEPs with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

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Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman hopes that the European Parliament will take a specific decision on the introduction of a visa-free regime with Ukraine in the coming weeks.

He said this at a meeting with a delegation from the European Parliament, an Ukrinform correspondent reports

"We are ready to make every effort to complete the ratification process with the European Union. And this issue should be number one on the agenda of our bilateral relations. We hope that the European Parliament will take a decision on the introduction of a visa-free regime for Ukrainian citizens in the coming weeks," Groysman said.

He has assured the MEPs that the Ukrainian government is actively working on implementation of reforms regarding European integration.

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Chief of the National Police Khatia Dekanoidze states that the National Police cant work efficiently without the reform of judicial system.

Judges release criminals and National Police cant resist it. The work of the National Police cant be efficient without the reform of judicial system," Dekanoidze said at a meeting of the parliamentary committee on legislative support of law enforcement activities, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The National Police chief added that the legislative base is what the police need the most.

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By PTI: From Youssra El-Sharkawy

Cairo, Sep 21 (PTI) At least 42 people have drowned today after a boat carrying more than 600 illegal migrants capsized off the Egyptian coast, about 140 km north of Cairo.

The boat carrying Egyptian, Syrian and African migrants capsized off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh.

In a statement, the health ministry said that at least 42 people drowned.

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Around 158 people have been rescued and rescue workers are looking for more survivors. About 400 could still be missing.

There were no details about the destination of the boat, although officials said the boat was probably heading for Italy.

Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said all resources possible would be directed into the rescue mission and that those responsible had to be brought to justice.

Todays incident comes two days after Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said at a UN meeting that "illegal immigration" should be at the top of international priorities.

He had affirmed that Egypt will combat illegal immigration through updating already existing anti-human trafficking legislation, underlining that the government is currently working on finalising legalisation to combat illegal emigration from the country.

However, in recent years, several people from different strife-hit countries tried to find illegal methods to escape from their countries and head to Europe in order to find better life. PTI YES ZH NSA

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Since the beginning of the current year, 410,000 criminal violations have been recorded in Ukraine, which is by 25% more than in the previous year.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said this at a meeting of the parliamentary committee on legislative support of law enforcement activities, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

At the same time, according to Lutsenko, the Interior Ministry reports that the number of murders decreased from 2,100 to 1,200 in 2016.

At first glance, it is really so, but if you look [at statistics] in the regions then we see that all the reduction was achieved in Donetsk region - from 1,170 murders to 229 due to the freezing of hostilities. At the same time, the number of murders increased in peaceful Zakarpattia, Kherson, Kyiv regions, the prosecutor general noted.

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With spurt in stalking related murders, it is crucial to understand the psyche of a stalker. Here are a few imperative precautions one must take to keep a fixated stalker at bay.

By India Today Web Desk: After the brutal murder of Infosys professional Swathi in broad daylight at a Chennai railway station, another girl fell prey to a brutal attack in Delhi, when a stalker stabbed her more than 20 times.

Delhi, which continues to have a reputation of the country's 'rape capital', seems to be a breeding ground of stalkers as well. According to National Crime Records Bureau report , 4,700 cases of stalking and 674 cases of voyeurism were recorded in 2014.

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Cases of stalking-related murders in Delhi alone have more than doubled -- from 541 cases last year to 1,124 this year, putting the capital in second spot according to NCRB.

In the wake of such rampant violence against women, it is imperative to be aware of a stalker and ways to fight the harrowing ordeal.

UNDERSTANDING A STALKER'S PSYCHE



"The stalker is usually a shy and reserved person, one who lives alone, lacks any type of important intimate relationship, not just sexual, but friends or family too. There's also a narcissistic personality disorder and very low self-esteem. The stalker feels that he's the most important person in the world," says John Moore, Chicago-based counsellor and author of the book Confusing Love With Obsession.

While stalkers are largely obsessed individuals, they are not a completely homogeneous group. More often than not they are 'rejected' lovers, like in the recent Delhi incident, where the murderer was repeatedly turned down by the girl.

Not all stalkers are in an intimate relationship or psychotic, but they all suffer from some form depression which is mostly fuelled by low-self esteem or narcissism.

Five most common stalkers

Stalkers come from every walk of life and different socio-economic backgrounds.



1) Rejected stalker: This type of stalking is triggered by the end of a relationship. They suffer from narcissism and jealousy. The stalker also may have faced humiliation. Stalkers of this type are persistent and intrusive.

2) Intimacy seekers: They are deluded, seeks to establish an intimate, loving relationship with the person they are following. In such a case, the stalker is often a shy and isolated person and they follow their prey to satiate their need for a company.

3) Predatory stalkers: They usually plan a sexual assault on the victim. This type of stalking involves obscene phone calls, exhibitionism, fetishism, and voyeurism.

4) Resentful stalker: Often torments the victim out of feeling of revenge or spite. They either engage in verbal abuse or physical assault. They suffer from irrational paranoia.

5 Incompetent stalker: They follow the victim to start a romantic relationship and hope for reciprocity. They are mostly narcissistic and believe that anybody can fall in love with them. This type of stalker typically engages in behavior such as repeatedly asking for dates even after being rejected, repeatedly calling on the phone etc.

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Here are a few simple ways in which you can keep a stalker at bay:

1) Be alert, always. Track every encounter with your stalker.

2) Make sure your landline also has caller ID.

3) Keep a record of all calls and e-mails from the stalker.

4) Keep changing the route you take to work/home.

5) Never let the stalker know he is having an effect on you, do not succumb to his threats.

6) Always keep your guard up, carry pepper spray.

7) If you sense danger and feel things are getting out of control, inform friends, family and get in touch with the police.



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By Celine Schmitt and Kate Thompson Gorry in Zongo, Democratic Republic of the Congo | 21 September 2016 | Espanol | Francais | 

When they welcomed newborn babies in this town in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), neither midwife Sister Maria Concetta nor her friend Imam Moussa Bawa cared whether they were Muslim or Christian. In their eyes, these were precious new lives that deserved to be cherished by the entire community.

Now, after the imams death in July at age 74, the message of peace and interfaith cooperation that he preached for over three decades in this war-torn country will continue through his successor, Imam Moustapha Mobito.

A refugee from Central African Republic (CAR), Imam Moustapha has pledged to carry on working with Sister Maria, who arrived in DRC from Italy in 1959 and runs the hospital in Zongo with the help of her congregation.

Sister Maria and Imam Moustapha are continuing to work together in the spirit of peace and cooperation preached by his predecessor.

All refugees from the Central African Republic go there, says Imam Moustapha, whose two daughters were born at the small hospital near the banks of the Oubangui River, which flows between DRC and CAR.

Fatima and Assia were born there. That is when I met Sister Maria. She is really welcoming. We were together  all the children, whether they are Muslim or Christian, are born there.

For over three years, violence in CAR between the mainly Christian anti-Balaka and primarily Muslim ex-Seleka militias has forced nearly half a million people from their homes, with a further half a million displaced inside the country.

As a fragile peace takes hold, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and its partners have renewed calls for increased support for those displaced who remain in need of assistance and healing.

"When I preach at the mosque, I preach patience and peace."

Now 84, Sister Maria recalls the decades she spent working alongside Imam Moussa Bawa assisting refugees, almost 10,000 of whom have found shelter in Zongo since conflict broke out in CAR in 2013.

We communicated a lot, recalls Sister Maria, who, as a midwife, has helped 33,000 babies into the world since 1984. Being the Muslim leader, he had to persevere with his message  the message to leave war, to forgive and to seek peace. Thats what challenged peoples mindset.

Following in the footsteps of his much-loved predecessor, Imam Moustapha continues to go the community hospital to welcome new babies.

Even until the end, Imam Moussa Bawas house was always open to those who sought shelter or moral guidance. He preached forgiveness, patience, peace and reconciliation, and trained Imam Moustapha himself.

Like his predecessor, Imam Moustapha Mobito is determined to preach forgiveness, reconciliation and peace between Central African communities.  UNHCR/Kate Thompson Gorry

Imam Moustapha Mobito, 36, and Sister Maria, 84, discuss their hopes for a peaceful Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the banks of the Oubangui River.  UNHCR/Kate Thompson Gorry

Along with Sister Maria, 74-year-old Imam Moussa Bawa preached peace and forgiveness for more than 30 years in Zongo, Democratic Republic of the Congo.  UNHCR/Kate Thompson Gorry

Imam Moustapha Mobito, 36, fled war in Bangui and found refuge in Zongo, a small town on the banks of the Oubangui River.  UNHCR/Kate Thompson Gorry

The small town of Zongo, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where almost 10,000 refugees have sought shelter.  UNHCR/Kate Thompson Gorry

Its the politicians who introduced the idea of a war between Christians and Muslims in the heads of the Christian and Muslim believers. Before, it was not like this, the imam insists.

We work every day on the peaceful cohabitation between refugees and the host communities of the DRC, and every time we are together with them, whether we are Christian or Muslim. There is no discord between the two religions here in the DRC.

For her part, Sister Maria also looks forward to a positive future. I find Imam Moustapha very gentle and I think we will continue the same dialogue, she says. Imam Moussa Bawa was a great example of faith, as a person, and of collaboration. He was happy when I prayed with him. We gave the good example until the end.

"May peace be between us. Between Christians and Muslims there are no enemies."

When Sister Maria and Imam Moustapha met recently on the banks of the Oubangui River and looked out towards Bangui, the capital of conflict-riven CAR, the nun had just one message for her new ally. I wish you good luck and a good collaboration, she said. When you need to talk to me, come to me.

Even in death, the words of Imam Moussa Bawa will live on in the hearts of his friends and followers.

When I preach at the mosque, I preach patience and peace, the faith leader said, just months before he passed away. May peace be between us. Between Christians and Muslims there are no enemies. We have to stay together.

Read more: The Nun and the Imam
On Monday evening, a fire broke out at the Moria reception centre on the Greek island of Lesvos following clashes between residents. A large number of refugees and migrants were forced to leave the government-run site. Some 4,400 people were accommodated in the facility at the time. Around 95 unaccompanied children were transferred to the Pikpa reception site nearby. Based on initial reports, the fire did not cause any casualties but at least 30 people are reported to have light injuries and have been taken to hospital. Over 50 UNHCR Refugee Housing Units, accommodating some 800 people, were completely destroyed. There were other material damages to the site, including the destruction of tents.

UNHCR is present in Moria and the other reception centres on the Greek islands. We have a team assessing the damage and will put up family tents today as an emergency accommodation measure for those affected. Non-governmental organizations will provide tents, mattresses, blankets and water.

While the cause of the fire has not been determined yet, the incident confirms the critical security situation in Moria and other reception sites. UNHCR has repeatedly been calling upon the security and law enforcement authorities to increase security to protect refugees, migrants, aid workers and civil servants working in these sites. Increasing security would also help decrease fear of insecurity in the Greek population living nearby.

Poor living conditions, combined with a prevailing feeling of uncertainty, regularly fuel despair and frustration among asylum-seekers in Greece. On islands like Lesvos, the capacities for hosting refugees and migrants are overstretched. Lesvos hosts over 5,300 people and has a capacity of only 3,500. To reduce tension and overcrowding, UNHCR is working with the authorities and calls for the urgent transfer of unaccompanied and separated children, one of the most vulnerable groups, to the mainland, shorter waiting periods for asylum claims, particularly on the islands, faster registration and processing of cases for all nationalities and speedier return of those who are not in need of international protection.

UNHCR will continue to support the authorities to find solutions to the overcrowding. UNHCR staff helps identify, inform and transfer asylum-seekers by ferry and bus to mainland. In the case of unaccompanied children, we are helping to find adequate accommodation so that they can be moved to the mainland.

For more information on this topic, please contact:
While the crime took place five days ago, it came to light only on Wednesday.

By Revathi Rajeevan: A 90-year-old cancer patient has been raped her neighbour in Kadakkal in Kollam district of Kerala.

The victim told the media that the accused knew the layout of the house.

"The accused entered my house through the back door. This can be done only by someone who knows the house well," she said.

"I pleaded with him not to harm me but he did not listen... I want the police to arrest the accused," she added.

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While the crime took place five days ago, it came to light only on Wednesday.

A case has been registered under IPC section 377-D and 354

Kollam Rural Superintendent of Police Ajitha Begum told the media that police officials had taken the victim's statement.

"An FIR has been registered. We will probe the incident by speaking to her relatives and those who met her after the incident," said Begum.

WATCH:

ALSO READ:

Kachcha banian gang terror: Dacoits break into house, rape 2 women, murder couple in Mewat

Delhi shocker: Seven-year-old girl raped by piano teacher

Watch video: Confessions of a young man who almost raped a girl



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Like hundreds of men and women in the Zambezi region of Namibia, Jackson and Rosemary Muhanda make their living off of Lake Liambezi. But the remote shores of the lake are far from health and social services, leaving these communities vulnerable to diseases and other health issues. Learn how a new campaign is protecting families like the Muhandas from measles and rubella.



ZAMBEZI REGION, Namibia, 21 September 2016  For the next three weeks, Jackson Muhanda, his wife Rosemary and their three infant grandchildren will camp together along the shores of Lake Liambezi in Namibia. They will be joining hundreds of other men and women who rely on this huge body of water to make a living.

As the earliest rays of the sun break the horizon, Jackson and Rosemary brave the blistering cold waters to go about their work for the day: catching fish and selling wares to the fishermen.

While making his way around the lake, Jackson skilfully identifies hippopotamus spoors and avoids areas where his family will be endangered. But he also knows that protecting his family goes beyond fending off the physical threats of wild animals.

My grandchildren are still very young and their young bodies can easily get diseases, he says.



Countrywide vaccinations

In Namibia, there is an ongoing measles and rubella immunization campaign, and Jacksons three grandchildren were among the first to be vaccinated. He took them to Muyako clinic for their vaccinations before the family embarked on the 30 km trek to camp by the shores of Lake Liambezi.

Our line of work requires that we spend as many days and hours as possible here, but it was more important for me to devote some time to have the children receive their vaccination shots before coming to camp here, he says.
By PTI: Chennai/New Delhi, Sep 21 (PTI) Adani Green Energy, part of the Adani Group, today said it has dedicated to the nation the worlds largest 648-mw solar power plant in Tamil Nadu entailing an investment of Rs 4,550 crore. The solar power plant, producing 648 mw at a single location, was formally dedicated to the nation, a company statement said. "The plant is set up at Kamuthi, Ramanathapuram, in Tamil Nadu with an investment of Rs 4,550 crore. It is part of the state governments ambitious target of generating 3,000 mw as per the solar energy policy unveiled by the government in 2012," it said. The entire 648-mw plant is now connected with Kamuthi 400 kv sub-station of Tantransco, making it the worlds largest solar unit at a single location, it said.

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"This is a momentous occasion for Tamil Nadu as well as for the entire country. We are... happy to dedicate this plant to the nation. A plant of this magnitude reinstates the countrys ambitions of becoming one of the leading green energy producers in the world," said Gautam Adani, Chairman, Adani Group. "I would like to express our deepest gratitude to chief minister and the government of Tamil Nadu...," he said.

The plant consists of 3.80 lakh foundations, 25 lakh solar modules, 27,000 mt of structure, 576 inverters, 154 transformers along with 6,000-km cables. For setting up the factory, the company had sourced equipment and machinery from various parts of the world in a timeframe of eight months. About 8,500 personnel worked for an average about 11 mw of installation in a day to set up the plant in the stipulated time, it said. PTI VIJ RC SID ARD

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8 killed in collision of 2 buses in Jharkhand

Chaibasa, Sep 21 (UNI) Eight people were killed and more that two dozen injured in a collision between two buses today near Burma Mines under Haat Gamharia police station area of this district.

Chaibasa SP Michelle S Raj said the among the injured, condition of 15 was serious and they have been referred and admitted at TMH jamshedpur.

Police sources said two buses, coming from opposite direction collided, resulting in a fire which engulfed both the vehicles.
India to give $500,000 to combat terror 29 Oct 2022 | 11:44 AM New Delhi, Oct 29 (UNI) India will make a voluntary contribution of half a million US dollars in the UN Trust Fund for Counter Terrorism this year, External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar announced here on Saturday. see more..

Delhi govt approves auto, taxi fares hike 28 Oct 2022 | 10:52 PM New Delhi, Oct 28 (UNI) The auto and Taxi fares in Delhi will soon go up as the Delhi government approved the revised fares. New fares will be notified soon. see more..

Delhi Court to hear Satyendar Jain's bail plea on Nov 5 28 Oct 2022 | 4:55 PM New Delhi, Oct 28 (UNI) A Special Court here fixed as November 5 for hearing further arguments in the bail application of Delhi's Health Minister Satyendar Jain, who is arrested under the provisions of Prevention Money Laundering Act. see more..
Afghanistan Vice President Sarwar Danish slammed Pakistan at the United Nations General Assembly and said that the world knew where Taliban leaders lived.

Afghan Vice President Sarwar Danesh addresses the 71st session of the UNGA, Photo: AP

By India Today Web Desk: Afghanistan hit out at Pakistan at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.

The country's second Vice President Sarwar Danish attacked Pakistan and said the "world knows where Taliban leaders live", adding, "Pakistan doesn't act against terrorists."

Also Read: Nawaz Sharif raises Kashmir again and again and again at UNGA

PAKISTAN DOESN'T ACT ON TERRORISM, DIFFERENTIATES BETWEEN GOOD AND BAD TERRORISTS

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Danish said Afghanistan has repeatedly asked Pakistan to act against the terrorists and their safe havens in Pakistan, but they have refused to act.

He cited an instance and said that the "attacks on American Universities were plotted on Pakistan soil."

Danish accused Pakistan of having a dual policy on terrorism and said that Pakistan discriminates between what they call as "good and bad terrorists" which hampers international peace.

AFGHANISTAN SLAMS PAKISTAN, ASKS IT TO STOP SUPPORTING TERRORISM

The statement by Afghanistan comes at a time when India is intensifying its efforts to isolate Pakistan on an international level in the wake of the Uri attacks.

Earlier on Wednesday, Afghanistan's foreign minister Salahuddin Rabbani too asked Pakistan to destroy the "safe havens" for terrorists from its soil.

Rabbani went on to say that Pakistan's "India phobia" was preventing it from dealing with the terror groups. He said Pakistan has reasons for the way they were acting against terrorists.

"The way Pakistan behaves is because they have India phobia, there are military and civilian tensions and there is trust deficit between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Rabbani said.

Also Read: India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh may boycott SAARC to protest against Pakistan sponsored terror

AFGHANISTAN SUPPORTS INDIA IN ISOLATING PAKISTAN

Moreover, the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani too urged Pakistan to end all support, sponsorship and safe havens to terrorists.

On Tuesday, the Afghan envoy to India, Shaida Mohammad Abdali, had also supported India's claim of isolating Pakistan.

Abdali said that Pakistan should be singled out by the South Asian countries because it jeopardizes regional unity and peace.

Also Read:

Pakistan wary as Afghanistan is set to get more arms from India



Nervous Pakistan braces for 'Indian response'; many flights cancelled, highways shut for fighter jets



--- ENDS ---
When Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton recently made her plan public to offer free college tuition from students coming from qualified families, it was received with different reactions.

The former first lady's proposal is well-intentioned. Students from families with an annual income of $85,000 would surely benefit from the program and providing universities tuition subsidies can definitely encourage students to enroll and get their college degrees.

However, in a country where the cost of higher education has dramatically gone up to 74% in the last 20 years, opinion is divided on how offering free education can benefit American taxpayers when tuitions begin to rise with universities having more operating costs and expenses to accommodate students.

The staggering increase in the cost of tertiary learning has been observed by former Education Secretary William J. Bennett back in 1987 in what researchers have now come to know as the Bennett Hypothesis. Sec. Bennett's assumption was that the more colleges and universities get federal subsidies, the more they will feel obligated to expand their programs and create more departments which means hiring more teaching and non-teaching personnel, material resources and infrastructure that literally translates to more expense that makes getting education more expensive and not inexpensive and certainly not free as the federal government would want it.

Economist Trey Miller pointed out that while policymakers are keen on giving subsidies, they lack the demand for productivity and innovation. He observed that education institutions are very receptive of the aid yet they are not responsive in terms of keeping the costs low and raising the quality and credentials of their programs.

Interestingly, Dennis Clayton of The Courier raised some valid points on how states can operate an absolutely tuition fee-free tertiary institution dedicated to the sole purpose of educating students.

If the federal government's aim is to really provide free and inexpensive college education, then there needs to be an overhaul with all the stakeholders - the state governments, the state colleges and universities and the students. The program should be more performance-oriented and education-centric.
During the New Student Convocation held last month, the University Chancellor, speaking in an audience of 5,000, insisted that the faculty, non-teaching staff and students be "mindful of our responsibility to create an environment that is welcoming to all, where each person feels accepted, valued and safe."

Further declaring that, "We do not tolerate actions of hate and disrespect." These so-called "belief statements" has also been published in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's website and particularly spelled out in UNL's Core Values and Beliefs page.

The same message can also be seen in Chancellor Green's welcome statement for this academic year, "our beliefs on diversity and inclusion represent the way we operate. They are not-negotiable."

Green however failed to define exactly in what manner or how an action can be considered as disrespectful.

Without clearly drawing the lines, these values and beliefs about inclusion and diversity which students are expected to subscribe to becomes a rather vague policy in this age when unintentional slights have been frequently taken out of context.

Intellectual freedom activist David Moshman criticized this policy and belief statements that expressly restrict students from thinking and saying otherwise.

Moshman wrote in the Huffington Post, "Chancellor Green has informed UNL's new students that UNL has a non-negotiable list of expected beliefs about matters of diversity and inclusion."

To Moshman, this new policy in diversity and inclusion is saying, "Feel free to politely criticize the ideas of ISIS or the Ku Klux Klan, for example, but make sure not to show any disrespect, much less hatred, for any group, individual, or ideology. If you can't express yourself respectfully, shut up."

Citing that the University of Chicago's 2015 Free Speech Statement "guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn."

Moshman ended his critique noting that, "the First Amendment all require us to tolerate even those we deem intolerant."
The Internet of Things or IoT is a big thing nowadays and has been revolutionizing every industry and sector of the society. Even in education, the Internet of Things is being considered by educators and lawmakers to use it to innovate and improve learning.

With the Internet, learning becomes more dynamic as the traditional method integrates with new and innovative ones. Classroom lessons and discussions have now become livelier and interesting because students are given the opportunity to explore other methods how to learn. For example, students can now watch live lessons at home via live video feeds, engage on hands-on projects, and discuss them in the classroom.

Add to that the rise of modern technology and the IoT isn't limited to just learning but it also enhanced security, wider access to different kinds of information, and ability to keep track of key resources.

The influence of the IoT have more profound effect in higher education as university students veer away from traditional textbooks and use tablets and other mobile devices more. With all kinds of information readily accessible anytime and anywhere, students can learn more.

On the other hand, the IoT has made work more efficient and convenient for educators. For example, they are able to automate tasks which used to be done manually. With the use of cloud, they are also able to gather student data and statistics which give them insight in order to improve their lessons and methods.

As for schools, the IoT has benefited them by reducing operating costs as well as increasing energy efficiency. For example, schools in New Richmonde, Tipp City, Ohio said that they have been able to save around $128,000 every year by using a centralized web-based system to control all mechanical equipment in the school.

There are still a lot of things to learn but as more and more schools utilize the IoT and technology, more and more children will benefit from it as new opportunities are opening up for them.
Shakira has recently been a part of a global initiative along with some of the world's top leaders and businessman that puts some premium on education. The group aims to provide more opportunities for children around the world by investing more in education.

The report called "The Learning Generation: Investing in education for a changing world," said that a $1 investment to every child, especially girls, will generate $10 in earnings and health benefits in low-income countries and $4 in middle-income countries.

"A quarter of a billion children and young people are out of school. Another 330 million are not learning because we fail to invest in them even when they are in school," the report said.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who chairs the meeting, added that 200 million children do not receive proper education in the Middle East and North Africa which is a "recipe for seething discontent."

This discontent, if not addressed earlier and appropriately will have serious implications on security. He also mentioned that Americans should have a better understanding how education plays an important role in geopolitical stability.

His opinion is not supported by all, however. A year earlier, economists from 44 countries called upon the United Nations and demanded that health should be prioritized. Brown argued that health has been the priority for the past 15 years and nothing happened.

"I think we should reemphasize education. It's education that unlocks the gains in health, employment, environment, and quality of life. Education is the key to an anti-poverty strategy," he further argued.

The meeting was also attended and supported by Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma, the prime minister of Norway, and the presidents of Chile, Malawi, and Indonesia. Its commissioners include former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon while some of its directors include Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
The University of Alberta has removed racist posters around its campus after its staff and students spoke out. There were about a dozen of posters showing a picture of a turbaned man of the Sikh faith with the words, "F-k your Turban... If you're so obsessed with your third world culture go the f---k back to where you came from!"

CBC reported that the posters were taped in various locations in the campus. One was taped to the door of the Rutherford Library. The posters were spotted on Monday.

The posters were promptly taken down but a photo of it has been posted on university forums. This led to outcries from the school's students, faculty and even politicians.

"Unfortunately, similar posters have also been found on other Canadian university campuses," University President David Turpin said, deeming the posters as "disturbing." "The University of Alberta is a space that is open to all people and we take pride in the strength of our diverse community."

Turpin added that the administration is currently working with the University of Alberta's Protective Services to find the ones responsible for this campaign. The posters have the same references to Immigration Watch Canada, a Vancouver-based anti-immigration organization and website.

"We do not know who put the posters up on the University of Alberta campus," the university's manager for strategic communications Alison Turner said, via The Toronto Star. "Next steps will depend on the outcome of the investigation."

Immigration Watch Canada wants the country to "drastically reduce immigration," it said on its website. Moreover, it believes that "it should never be a social engineering experiment that is conducted on Canada's mainstream population in order to make it a minority."

Global News noted that similar posters were also found on other Canadian university campuses. The World Sikh Organization (WSO) of Canada condemned "the racist posters... targeting Sikhs at the University of Alberta."

The organization added that similar posters appeared at York University in Toronto and in Brampton, Ont. in 2014.
Expressing its displeasure over the handling of the vector diseases, the NGT said, "Why don't the MCD, DDA, Delhi government and NDMC officials sit together and make an action plan?"

By India Today Web Desk: As Delhi reels under a severe dengue and chikungunya epidemic, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) today slammed the Delhi government and its civic bodies for their "shameful and shocking" response to the outbreak.

Expressing its displeasure over the handling of the vector diseases, the NGT said, "The ground reality is horrible. Don't show us the fabricated registers."

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"Why don't the MCD, DDA, Delhi government and NDMC officials sit together and make an action plan?" the green panel asked.

ALSO READ | Over 1,500 people infected in Delhi: It is high time we know everything about Chikungunya

"What were you doing for two months? Looks like you have no action plan. Everyone in Delhi is getting sick. We can't turn a blind eye," it said as it slammed the civic agencies for inaction.

Delhi has reported over 30 dengue and chikungunya deaths in the last two months while nearly 3000 people are reported to be sick and admitted in various city hospitals.

ALSO READ | Chikungunya goes viral in Delhi and NCR, city reports first fatality

The NGT ordered the formation of a principal committee to tackle the menace. The Delhi government's Chief Secretary, all MCD commissioners, Vice-Chairman of the DDA, NDMC representatives, and senior officers of the health department in Delhi will be a part of the committee.

The green panel also ordered the formation of district-level committees to check the preventive measures being taken on the ground.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court also entered a plea filed by a doctor seeking proper steps to be taken to stop the widespread diseases of chikungunya, dengue and malaria.

ALSO READ:



Is Kejriwal government fudging data on chikungunya cases in Delhi? Yes, say statistics



--- ENDS ---
Among men, bladder cancer (BCA) is the seventh most common cancer worldwide and the fourth most common in developed countries, classifying it as an extremely deleterious disease in need of more research. Although cystoscopy and cytology are the standard diagnostic tools for BCA, the former has low sensitivity for high-grade superficial tumors [i.e., carcinoma in situ] and latter induces poor sensitivity to low-grade tumors.Therefore, there is a growing interest in the development noninvasive, more accurate, and more efficient methods for the detection of BCA. Recent advances on technological and data analysis have enabled the characterization of metabolites in biofluids, leading to a possible correlation with metabolic dysfunction. Metabolomics has been applied increasingly in the field of toxicology and biomarker research, in particular for cancer diagnosis. Our previous metabolomics study using human urine specimens provided the differentiation model with a 91.3% sensitivity and 92.5% specificity (AUC = 0.937) and suggested that the metabolomic profile correlates with BCA-specific survival time (Oncotarget 2014).In the present follow up study, we evaluated the relationship between the BCA-associated urinary metabolites and gene expression associated with relevant biological pathways using bladder tissues derived from BCA patients and experimental controls. Alterations gene expressions associated with the carnitine-acylcarnitine and tryptophan metabolic pathways were determined, as these were the most perturbed pathways in BCA. Recent studies reported that metabolites uniquely detected in urine samples from patients with BCA could be a useful biomarker for BCA diagnosis and prognosis. Because the bladder serves as a temporary urine reservoir, analysis of urine metabolites could provide potential candidates of sensitive and specific biomarkers. We hope to continue this research in order to further evaluate a stronger diagnosis and treatment for BCA. These findings were reported in the Yonsei Med J. in 2016 ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27189278 ).Written By: Jayoung Kim Ph.D.Biography:Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (CSMC) is the largest non-profit hospital in the western United States and an academic medical center with a world-renowned faculty and extensive, highly competitive training programs in more than 50 medical specialty and sub-specialty areas. Cedars-Sinai has one of the largest state-of-the-art research facilities of any private hospital in the nation, housed in over 270,000 sq ft of laboratory and laboratory support space. Dr. Jayoung Kim is a translational scientist with extensive experience in benign urinary tract diseases including bladder cancer and interstitial cystitis, with a focus on molecular mechanisms and biomarker discovery. Dr. Kim is a PI of a NIH funded R01 grant (R01DK100974), DoD (Department of Defense, PRMRP), CDC (U01DP006079), U01 grant (U01 DK103260), the Steven Spielberg Discovery Fund in Prostate Cancer Research Career Development Award and U.S.-Egypt Science and Technology Joint Fund Egyptian Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF).
Our aim was to determine the general knowledge and awareness levels, information sources, and the state of medical check-up for prostate cancer (PCa) and relevant effective factors.

The participants were asked to answer to 14 questions of a questionnaire about age, education, economic and social condition, knowledge about PCa, state of being examined and their related factors. According to demographic characteristics of the participants, levels of awareness about PCa, sources of information, affecting factors and their interrelationships were examined. Two groups were formed according to age (<60 years, >60 years) and variations according to ages were investigated.

Two hundred and ninety-three men with an average age of 57 years (range 40-85) were included in the study. Our findings showed that 68.3% of the participants were thinking that PCa is a frequently seen disease, 88.4% were thinking that it can be treated and 62.8% of men specified that their information sources are doctors. We also found that 60.8% of the participants had not undergone prostate examination and prostate specific antigen (PSA) control. The most reason for not having annual examinations was (44.4%) "negligence". Significantly greater number of men with higher education (high school/university) were highly informed about PCa (p=0.037). Check-up rates were statistically significantly higher among men with intermediate income (p=0.041). Curability of PCa diagnosed at an early stage was acknowledged by statistically higher number of individuals under the age 60 (p<0.05). Health control, prostate examination and/or PSA control rates were higher in men with a family history of PCa and in the group of >60 years.

Although PCa has a high prevalence and mortality rates, personal and social information and sensitivity levels must be increased as it can be treated if diagnosed at an early stage. We think that social and medical impact of the disease can be decreased with the planning of effective methods based on sociocultural and economic factors.

Turkish journal of urology. 2016 Sep [Epub]

Sadi Turkan, Faruk Dogan, Ozan Ekmekcioglu, Aslhan Colak, Mehmet Kalkan, Coskun Sahin

Clinic of Urology, Kastamonu Anadolu Hospital, Kastamonu, Turkey., Department of Urology, Fatih University School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey., Department of Internal Diseases, Fatih University School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey.

PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27635286
At an airfield in Thailand, the locals were surprised. They just watched as the lead mechanic gathered up the team to quickly replace the failing tire on the plane's landing gear. They marveled not at the task but at the managing Sailor.

The locals were amazed that a female was in charge, said Aviation Structural Mechanic 2nd Class Kate Hoover with a big smile. They couldn't believe it. That was neat to see.

August 18, 2016 - Aviation Structural Mechanic 2nd Class Kate Hoover, center, a native of Ashburn, Va., and recruiter assigned to Navy Recruiting Station Huntsville, Ala., speaks with Navy Counselor 1st Class Kevin Barlett and a future Sailor. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Timothy Walter) Hoover just tucked away the memory and moved on the next experience, which in her case was riding elephants the next day. Then it was photographing tigers and finally capping it off with getting her nails done on a beach. It was all a far cry from Ashburn, Va., where she was raised. She left her hometown for the unknown of the U.S. Navy, and now nearly 11 years later, she has seen the world. Each experience in different lands has shaped her and reminded her of how much she wants to give others the same opportunity. It is why she can now be found in the second desk from the window at Navy Recruiting Station Huntsville, Ala. I always wanted to be a recruiter, she said. As soon as she was eligible, she applied for the special duty. Another factor that motivated her career choice was the experience she had with her recruiter. After reading her start guide, she asked her recruiter if she needed to bring a bathing suit to boot camp like the one in the book. His answer: I don't know. So she erred on the side of caution and found the exact suit, ordered it online and then arrived at boot camp. They put it in a box and shipped it all home, she said laughing. First impressions are important to Hoover and she didn't want to see another female Sailor have a bad opinion of the Navy for something that could be avoided. I want my Sailors to go to boot camp prepared and be able to come to back to me later. I want to be more than a recruiter to them. I want to be a mentor. I get letters from boot camp, and I get letters after they leave. That is what I love about being a recruiter. It's been hard but it is rewarding, she said. As the only female in the station, she happily answers questions from any prospective women who want to know more about the Navy. But there is one question that she has trouble answering: What is it like on a Navy ship? Her squadron flew the P-3 Orion and later P-8 Poseidon, both of which are far too large for a ship. So while she worked out of El Salvador, Italy, Malta, France, Portugal, Japan, Peru, the Philippines, and of course, Thailand, she never saw the ocean from the side of ship. I did take a tour of a ship once, she said with a smile. I tell people that we fly overseas on a plane, that I stay in hotels and I get extra money to live there. She leaves the explanation of haze gray and underway to the rest of her fellow recruiters. And they turn to her for every question about naval aviation. In my station they didn't know about aviation. So anytime it comes up, I can use my experience. It's been good and I think it's paid off, she said. Just a few feet from her desk, pictures of Future Sailors are affixed to a corkboard. At the very top in the highest filled position is a woman who will soon become an Aviation Structural Mechanic, just like her. It made me excited to be able to talk to another female joining the same rate, she said. I am always real with them. I tell them that it's not always going to be easy. But being the female and at the same time doing the unexpected is a good thing. Sometimes it's nice to stick out. When Hoover was in Japan, she found another way to do the unexpected  this time by getting into the water. It was 4:45 a.m. and the sun hadn't appeared. The temperature was frigid and she wondered aloud why she had volunteered. After a quick exercise routine, the leader of the group told everyone to get in. It was a boat, powered by people and their paddles. She was confused but willing. Over the next few tryouts, she advanced all the way to the final cut and made the dragon boat team, which consisted of 30 female paddlers. When it came race day, ten people from my squadron showed up to support me. Our race came up and we won overall. All the guys in my shop picked me up on their shoulders to celebrate, she said. She is quick to show photos of her victory and tell stories about the time she was in a boat, even if it wasn't a commissioned Navy vessel. However, her passion remains aircrafts, as one can tell by the scale models of the P-3 Orion and P-8 Poseidon sitting on her desk. She had them personalized in the Philippines. Yet she is still a little surprised by the fact that she works in naval aviation. If I was sitting in the applicant's seat and they gave me the option of being an air framer back then, I would have never taken it. I was not mechanically inclined coming into the Navy. But I'm so glad the way things panned out that way, she said. I've learned everything I needed to inside the military. When she was in boot camp, she was asked to switch from undesignated seaman to undesignated airman. She agreed and that decision changed the course of a career. After that I was assigned to a helicopter squadron. It panned out perfectly; I was able to figure out what job I wanted to do. I'm so glad I chose it, she said. That experience has shaped how she explains every rate to prospective Sailors. She tells them that a job is more than a paragraph description on a website. You can't always go off of what you're reading about a job, because no matter what, it's never the picture that you had when you joined. My experience being an air framer is different than the next person, she said. I tell people not to get stuck on the job. It's more than a job. It's the experience. It's everything it gives you. Even if you get a job around home which pays more, you will never get the experience that you get with the U.S. Navy. NRS Huntsville is part of Navy Recruiting District Nashville, which is responsible for recruiting efforts throughout more than 100,000 square miles of the states of Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Virginia. By U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Timothy Walter

Provided through DVIDS

Copyright 2016 Comment on this article
By PTI: From Sajjad Hussain

Islamabad, Sep 21 (PTI) Continuing with efforts to internationalise the Kashmir issue, Pakistan Prime Ministers Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz has briefed foreign ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland about "human rights violation" in Kashmir.

Aziz, on the sidelines of 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, separately met with the foreign minsters -- Fumio Kishida of Japan, Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland, Pakistans Foreign Office said.

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Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Indo-Pak relations and the situation in Kashmir.

Highlighting "human rights abuse perpetrated by Indian security forces with impunity" in Kashmir, he stated that settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability of South Asia, the Foreign Office said.

It claimed that while acknowledging the "sacrifices" rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three foreign ministers appreciated "successful counter -terrorism operations" conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country.

Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistans economy to grow at steady and sustainable rate.

He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria and Switzerland in Pakistan.

The Foreign Office said that Japan, Austria and Switzerland have underscored commitment to further strengthen existing cordial relations with Pakistan and promote mutual understanding on regional and international issues of common concerns.

Foreign Minister Kishida stated that Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistans power sector.

Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz welcomed the prospects of investment in Pakistan due to improved security situation. He recognised significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy.

Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter stated that Swiss development cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan, the Foreign Office statement said.

Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organisations, Pakistans application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly, the statement said. PTI SH ASK AKJ ASK

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Published: September 21, 2016

UTs Leadership Speaker Series Welcomes Head of Tampa General Oct. 4

On Tuesday, Oct. 4, The University of Tampa will welcome James R. Burkhart, president and CEO of Tampa General Hospital, as part of the TECO Energy Center for Leadership Speaker Series. The presentation, titled Health Care Strategies: The Changing Landscape, begins at 4:30 p.m. in the Trustees Board Room on the ninth floor of the Vaughn Center, and is free and open to the public.



Burkhart was named president and CEO of Tampa General Hospital (TGH) in 2013. TGH is a major tertiary level teaching facility affiliated with the University of South Floridas Morsani College of Medicine.



Since arriving at TGH, Burkhart has focused on developing a new strategic plan, strengthening the hospitals ties with its academic partner, the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, and creating innovative health care partnerships in the community. He was named USF Health Morsani College of Medicines senior associate dean for clinical and hospital affairs in 2014.



Prior to taking the helm at TGH, Burkhart served as president and CEO of University of Florida Health Jacksonville Medical Center, a private, not-for-profit institution that serves as a safety net hospital for Floridas underinsured and uninsured patient populations.



The TECO Energy Center for Leadership Speaker Series is dedicated to bringing outstanding leaders from the private, government and nonprofit sectors to campus to discuss business topics and corporate strategies with students and members of the community.



The University of Tampa is located at 401 W. Kennedy Blvd. in Tampa. Please RSVP by Monday, Oct. 3, at http://www.eventbrite.com/e/leadership-speaker-series-featuring-dr-jim-burkhart-tickets-27133001538. For more information, contact Whitney Vance, coordinator of College of Business operations, at wvance@ut.edu or (813) 257-3782.
Meet a Roadrunner: Adrian Saenz 97 is an aide to President Obama

Adrian Saenz

(Sept. 21, 2016) -- Meet Adrian Saenz. Hes a UTSA alum whos making his mark in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President of the United States and the Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs.

Growing up in Brownsville, Saenz had a strong passion for books, films and music. A creative soul at heart, he originally envisioned a life as a musician or a filmmaker.

I spent four years of my youth honing my craft as a trumpet and French horn player. I was sure I was destined for symphonic greatness, but ultimately spent only one year in the Homer Hanna High School Golden Eagle Band, he jokingly recalls.

More than anything, Saenz craved adventure and wanted to make a difference. When he graduated from high school, he felt unprepared for his future and uncertain about a career path. He knew that despite the choice hed make, he needed a top-tier education. And UTSA was always on his radar.

UTSA proved to be the right choice for me, Saenz said. I learned that balancing the pursuit of a top-tier education and a full-time job, though difficult, could be a foundation for success in complex and demanding career fields.

The intersection of a UTSA political science class and the 1996 presidential election helped Saenz realize his true passion. That path ultimately became the reason he decided to pursue a degree in political science and later a career in public service.

Political science was a requirement that I had no background and little interest in at the time, but one class changed the trajectory of my life, said Saenz.

Saenz began his career in government service in the U.S. House of Representatives, first as a legislative aide and communications director for Texas Congressman Charles Charlie Gonzalez and later as chief of staff to a couple of members of Congress.

Now in his current role as the Special Assistant to the President, Deputy Director and Senior Advisor for Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House, Saenz leads the management of the Obama Administrations relationships with state elected officials. Among his responsibilities is the coordination of the annual meeting at the White House between the President and the nations governors.

Jaime Castillo, assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington D.C., is a close friend to Saenz. They met more than a decade ago when Castillo was a political journalist in San Antonio, covering various campaigns that Saenz worked on.

The special thing about Adrian is that no matter where his political acumen has taken him, he has never forgotten where he came from, Castillo said. He has the brains of a high-powered political operative but the heart of a public servant.

Saenz considers President Barack Obama a personal hero.

President Obama is committed to proactively affecting meaningful change and creating a level playing field where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules. His vision and leadership on the Affordable Care Act is a great example of his commitment to make the system fair for everyone.

Another political figure Saenz looks up to is former U.S. Representative Charlie Gonzalez from Texass 20th District.

His guidance has been invaluable over the years, Saenz said. Ive learned so much by observing his leadership style and from his commitment to being a steadfast advocate for the community he grew up in.

Although life has taken Saenz on a journey he never expected, he says his decision to leave Texas and move to Washington D.C. to work as a legislative aide to then newly-elected Congressman Gonzalez was his greatest challenge and also his most rewarding experience. Saenz advice to students is to be open-minded about exploring areas beyond their initial interest and desired area of specialization.

I fully expected I would return home to Texas after just a couple of years. I had never intended to move to Washington D.C. and frankly, I expected that after graduating from UTSA, I would build a career in politics in Texas. However, working in the U.S. House of Representatives convinced me that my work could be more far-reaching and impactful if I focused my energies at the national level, and I have since worked toward that end in both electoral politics and through my service in the federal government.

-------------------------------

Do you know a Roadrunner who is achieving great things? Email us at social@utsa.edu so that we may consider your suggestion for our next installment of Meet a Roadrunner.

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UTSAs Mission

The University of Texas at San Antonio is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through research and discovery, teaching and learning, community engagement and public service. As an institution of access and excellence, UTSA embraces multicultural traditions and serves as a center for intellectual and creative resources as well as a catalyst for socioeconomic development and the commercialization of intellectual property - for Texas, the nation and the world.

UTSAs Vision

To be a premier public research university, providing access to educational excellence and preparing citizen leaders for the global environment.

UTSAs Core Values

We encourage an environment of dialogue and discovery, where integrity, excellence, inclusiveness, respect, collaboration and innovation are fostered.

UTSAS Destinations

UTSA is a proud Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) as designated by the U.S. Department of Education.

Our Commitment to Inclusivity

The University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution situated in a global city that has been a crossroads of peoples and cultures for centuries, values diversity and inclusion in all aspects of university life. As an institution expressly founded to advance the education of Mexican Americans and other underserved communities, our university is committed to ending generations of discrimination and inequity. UTSA, a premier public research university, fosters academic excellence through a community of dialogue, discovery and innovation that embraces the uniqueness of each voice.
Wyoming Startup Company Hires First President

Don Ray

A Wyoming technology startup company at the Wyoming Technology Business Center (WTBC) has hired its first president.

Don Ray is the new president of LogiLube LLC, a company that develops real-time fuel management systems to control diesel fuel quality, supply, logistics and security for large equipment fleets in mining, and oil and gas industries.

Ray will lead the companys new division called the North American Oil and Gas Division, which will focus on sales in North American oil and gas. The new division focuses on the midstream sector, which involves gathering gas compression, non-gas liquid (NGL) separation, and gas conditioning and processing in advance of handing off through an outward-facing custody transfer to the gas transmission or pipeline network.

Administered by the University of Wyoming Office of Research and Economic Development, the WTBC is a business development program whose main activities is a business incubator that provides entrepreneurs with the expertise, networks and tools necessary for success. The WTBCs main office is on the UW campus, with other incubators located in Casper and Sheridan.

The incubators provide access to office space, shared services and business management advice to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses faster and stronger than they would otherwise.

LogiLube LLC entered the incubator Dec. 1, 2012, and has since doubled its space in 2015 to accommodate new employees.

Ray says he is looking forward to working for the companys new division.

This is a fascinating sector that will continue to grow, to change and to improve. So, LogiLube created this new division to put strong focus on sales and services to this sector, Ray says.

He adds that, during his career, he has served many roles and has been on the front end of technology in oil and gas midstream compression, and with his background in midstream, and in his new position as president, LogiLube is now more aligned with a focus in this midstream sector.

Dons been involved in the oil and gas scene for over 30 years, says William Gillette, LogiLubes founder. Hes served in many roles and worked in Calgary and the U.S. Dons been on the front end of a lot of technology in oil and gas midstream compression, and his experience aligns with our focus in the midstream sector. With him, LogiLube will help the oil and gas industry increase equipment uptime, increase revenue and provide a better service for their customers.

Ray has more than 35 years of sales, sales management and executive-level leadership in startup and publicly traded companies greater than $5 billion in revenue with operations in multinational environments. He specializes in achieving revenue growth with a proven track record of increasing revenue of up to 500 percent a year, Gillette says.

Previously, he served as CEO/president and board member of KW International, a privately held oil and gas production equipment sales and service company. In just two years, he oversaw significant revenue growth, nearly 250 percent, through expanded operations and strategic acquisitions.

I am very excited, Ray says about his new position. Everybody in the industry is cutting costs, but this is a growth opportunity because of the difference LogiLube makes. When I was introduced to LogiLube and to what it can do, I got excited. Then, I saw customers get excited, because LogiLube does what it says it will do. I knew I wanted to be a part of this team. Its fun to help customers.

He says the main reason he joined the company is because in the oil and gas industry, most customers buy or lease equipment because they are required, either by regulation or in order to sell their products. They must buy processing equipment, compressors, equipment to clean the gas -- all types of equipment that are required to run their businesses.

Whats exciting about LogiLube is that they dont have to buy it. But, they will want to buy it. We are truly helping our customers: This is a true win-win, he says. We are offering the future, and customers want to buy it because it will, without a doubt, increase revenue, decrease cost and improve the quality of the service they are giving their customer.

LogiLube employs four UW graduates at its WTBC office: Laramies Chas Ogden, CTO and chief engineer, and LogiLube founding member, received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering; Stephen Bagley, of Laramie, data scientist, earned a B.S. degree in mathematics and physics; Harish Muralidhara, from Karnataka, India, received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering; and Sam Smith, of Monument, Colo., received a B.S. degree in computer science.
India on Tuesday successfully test-fired the Barak-8 long-range surface-to-air nuclear-capable ballistic missile, jointly developed with Israel, from a defence test facility off the Odisha coast.

By Indo-Asian News Service: President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday congratulated the scientists and engineers involved in the successful test firing of 'Barak-8', a surface-to-air missile.

India on Tuesday successfully test-fired the Barak-8 long-range surface-to-air nuclear-capable ballistic missile, jointly developed with Israel, from a defence test facility off the Odisha coast.

"I extend hearty congratulations to you and all those associated with the successful test-firing of the Surface to Air Missile -- 'Barak-8' developed jointly with Israel," Mukherjee said in his message to Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Director-General and Secretary, S Christopher.

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"The nation is proud of this achievement. I am sure that this success will further boost India's defence capabilities in technologically challenging areas.

"Kindly convey my greetings and felicitations to all members of the team of scientists, engineers, and others involved in this Mission," Mukherjee said.

The missile was successfully launched at around 10:15 am from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) launch pad at Chandipur in Balasore district, said a defence official.

The advanced missile was designed and developed by the DRDO and Israel Aerospace Industries and Israel's Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure.

The Long-Range Surface-to-Air Missile (LR-SAM) has the ability to hit targets within radii of 70 km to 90 km. It is designed to defend against any airborne threat, apart from aircraft and helicopters, and can also intercept supersonic aircraft and missiles.

The missile weighs around 2.7 tonnes and is 4.5 metres in length.

Barak-8 is based on the original Barak-1 missile but has a more advanced target-seeker.

The radar system provides 360-degree coverage and the missile can take down an incoming missile as close as 500 meters away from a ship.

Each Barak system, which includes missile container, radar, computers and installation, costs about $24 million.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Bhagalpur, Sep 21 (PTI) The Examination Board of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TMBU) in Bihar today recommended cancellation of the law degree of former Delhi Law Minister and AAP MLA Jitender Singh Tomar, who was arrested on charge that his degree was fake.

The Examination board of the university found true the findings of an interim committee constituted earlier on Tomars degree and recommended cancellation of the degree, Pro Vice Chancellor A K Rai told PTI.

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The Boards recommendation would now go to University Senate for necessary action, Rai said.

If due to any reason the Senate, whose Chairman is states Governor Ramnath Kovind, fails to meet, then the recommendation would go to Syndicate and then to the Chancellor, he said.

The interim committee in its report a few months ago had found the migration certificate of the former Law Minister of the Arvind Kejriwal cabinet wrong and on the basis of it had recommended cancellation of the Law degree.

The controversy relates to the acquisition of Law degree by Tomar on the basis of a doubtful enrollment at Biswanath Law College in Munger in the academic session 1994-95. He had claimed to have passed the law examination in 1998-99.

Tomar was arrested and later released on bail last year in the Law degree issue and had to resign from the Kejriwal ministry. PTI CORR SNS CR KIS PD

--- ENDS ---
When Emma returned recently at a WWE Live event many expected her to make her long awaited television return just days later at Monday Night Raw.

However, as the show drew to a close, expectations turned to doubt and a cryptic tweet posted by the 27-year-old spiraled a number of rumors.

Emma Tweet

Emma returned last week at a house show to be the special guest referee in a match pitting Sasha Banks, Bayley and Alicia fox against the team of Women's Champion Charlotte, Dana Brooke and Nia Jax.

The Australian superstar posted a rather telling tweet during Raw, which considering she was reportedly backstage, makes things even more interesting.

She said "6 weeks ago I was cleared... Each week I wait, the more frustrated I get. I feel sorry for the person who's going to see it's all about me!"

While many believed she was cleared only recently, according to her tweet she was cleared to compete over six weeks ago, but where exactly is she going to wind up?

Emma to SmackDown Live?

Following her absence from the televised Raw episode last night in Memphis, Tennessee, many people believed she would be jumping ship to SmackDown Live.

However, just over an hour ago, Emma posted a second tweet with the words "Then i'm walking in Memphis" accompanied by a photograph showing her next to an Elvis Presley statue in Tennessee.

With tonight's blue brand being broadcast from Alabama, over three hours away from the destination that the picture was taken from, the chances of her showing up on tonight's episode look slim.

Although the photo could have easily been taken a day or even hours earlier and her posting of the image could simply be to throw fans off.

Whatever the case, it seems that the former ECCW Women's Supergirls Champion is bound to appear sometime very soon, but the question is will it be on the blue or red team?

John Cena managed to use his sway to get Nikki Bella over to SmackDown but will WWE officials be as lenient if Zack Ryder comes knocking?


On Thursday, October 10, TAO Group Cares (the charitable arm of TAO Group, including TAO/LAVO/Marquee) hosted its second annual BarQuee event at Marquee Dayclub. 100% of the door proceeds from the event directly supported The Animal Foundation, a non-profit organization that operates Nevadas largest open-admission animal shelter and pet adoption center (Photo credit: Al Powers / Powers Imagery).



Photo credit: Al Powers / Powers Imagery.

The line wrapped around the entrance with more than 400 guests attending the dogs-night-out, including over 200 four-legged companions. After posing for photos on the poly-turf green carpet, owners sipped on specialty cocktails poolside, while mingling and visiting vendor booths.

Photo credit: Al Powers / Powers Imagery.

On the same note, those loveable pets didnt miss out on drinking and socializing either, as Bowser Beer donated their dog friendly, non-alcoholic beer for a tasty dog libation.

Photo credit: Al Powers / Powers Imagery.

Surrounding Marquees pool was a slew of pet-friendly businesses contributing to the event including Doggy Luxe, a high-end dog collar company, Doggie District, a popular local pet daycare, Earth Rated, makers of environmentally-friendly waste bags, and more. Due to the overwhelming success, BarQuee was extended an extra hour.

Photo credit: Al Powers / Powers Imagery.


Thank to Las Vegas photographer Erik Kabik, weve got some great photos of the beautiful ladies who arrived on the green carpet for the 11th Annual Latin Grammy Awards (Pictured above: Miss Universe 2010 Ximena Navarrete  Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com).

The event was held tonight at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

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Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

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Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik/ RETNA/ www.erikkabik.com.


AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada) has received an incredible support this holiday season for its Annual Toy Dive. Over the past month, volunteers and advocates have urged the community to donate a new, unwrapped toy to benefit the organizations children (ages 0-15) affected by HIV/AIDS. Donors also had the option to sponsor a child and an individual wish list or make a monetary donation.

As the drive wrapped up on December 15, the AFAN offices were flooded with gifts, taking up every inch of free space in the building. Thousands of toys were accepted from donors across the Las Vegas Valley, helping this years efforts provide 180 children with a happy holiday season, 80 more than last year.

We are absolutely thrilled with the turnout this year, said Jennifer Morss, executive director of AFAN. We know several toy drives have struggled during these difficult economic times, and we are so thankful our supporters, donors and friends were passionate in contributing to help these children experience a joyous holiday season.

About AFAN

Aid for AIDS of Nevada (AFAN) was founded in 1984 and is the oldest and largest AIDS service organization in the state of Nevada. 2009 marked AFANs 25th anniversary of practicing its unyielding commitment to the community by providing unparalleled health expertise, support and advocacy for adults and children living with and affected by HIV/AIDS in southern Nevada. Over the years, AFAN has created various programs that offer consistent and comprehensive assistance including direct client service programs, food programs, prevention and education programs and community outreach. As part of AFANs mission, these client service programs assist in enhancing the physical health and psychosocial wellness of the individuals they serve, while promoting dignity and improving the quality of their lives. For more information, please visit www.afanlv.org.
While Swaragini actor Mayur Verma has been confirmed for Bigg Boss 10, these other two celebs might also be seen on the controversial reality show.

By India Today Web Desk: The countdown to Bigg Boss 10 has begun and so has the speculations regarding the final contestants. Swaragini actor Mayur Verma is the first actor to be confirmed for the upcoming season of the controversial reality show.

"I have been selected as a contestant for upcoming season of Bigg Boss. Last year, I had been nominated as a wild card contestant, however as it was right after my break-up with Marina (Marina Kuwar), I thought to refrain from sharing same screen space. But this time, I am very much looking forward to being on the show," Mayur said in a statement.

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Also read: New promo reveals Bigg Boss Season 10 will premiere on October 16

Apart from Mayur, VJ Bani has been approached for the show and will most likely be seen in Bigg Boss along with other celebs and commoners. Bani J shot to fame with her stint in Roadies.

Another contestant that might be seen on the show is gender equality activist Trupti Desai, who's the founder of Bhumata Brigade. She said that she is open to participating in the show but on one condition--the voice of Bigg Boss should be female.

Bigg Boss will soon be back on the small screen with its tenth season, and this time the spotlight is on the common man. For the first time, the controversial reality show will open its doors to the common people to appear as contestants along with the stars. The show will air on Colors channel.

(With inputs from IANS)

--- ENDS ---
By: Dezan Shira & Associates

Vietnam has announced that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) will not be submitted to a vote when its National Assembly convenes on October 20th. Overwhelmingly popular in Vietnam and widely expected to pass by authorities, the delay in TPP ratification comes a surprise to experts, and leaves many investors wondering when and if the TPP will come to pass in Vietnam.

Ratification & Implementation

Following the delay, the next session of the National Assembly is unlikely to take place until 2017. However, even if Vietnam ratifies the TPP at this point in time, it will remain impossible for the TPP to come into full effect in the near to medium term. Under the TPPs implementation clause  Article 30(5)(2)  at least 6 members of the original signatories, constituting at minimum 85 percent of the agreements gross domestic product, must have signed the agreement. With TPP ratification stalling in the United States  which makes up more than half of the TPPs total GDP  it is unlikely that a delay on the part of Vietnam will delay the implementation of the agreement at large or within Vietnam itself.

Understanding Vietnams Position

In reality, Vietnams choice to delay a decision can be seen as a shrewd move by policymakers to shore up support for the agreement at home, while tempering expectations of foreign investors. While initially blaming the delay on incomplete planning, officials have become more candid in recent days indicating Vietnams hesitance to ratify prior to larger members such as the United States. Waiting for other members to sign onto the agreement gives Vietnam the ability to attract investment without exposing itself to the risks of capital flight in the event that TPP does not come to pass.

Implications for Investment

Given Vietnams beneficial position within the TPP and the level of domestic support for the agreement, its passage within the National Assembly is only a question of time. Furthermore, although stalling as the result of a heated election cycle, the TPP is thought to have a good chance of passing within the United States, immediately following their election. With full implementation of the TPP still a year out by most estimates, a substantial opportunity remains for investors seeking to optimize entry strategies. For more information on how to tap into the TPPs benefits, the status of the agreement in various signatory states, or general information on investment in Vietnam please contact vietnam@dezshira.com or visit us online at www.dezshira.com



About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email vietnam@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight. 

Annual Audit and Compliance in Vietnam 2016

In this issue of Vietnam Briefing, we address pressing changes to audit procedures in 2016, and provide guidance on how to ensure that compliance tasks are completed in an efficient and effective manner. We highlight the continued convergence of VAS with IFRS, discuss the emergence of e-filing, and provide step-by-step instructions on audit and compliance procedures for Foreign Owned Enterprises (FOEs) as well as Representative Offices (ROs).

Navigating the Vietnam Supply Chain

In this edition of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the advantages of the Vietnamese market over its regional competition and highlight where and how to implement successful investment projects. We examine tariff reduction schedules within the ACFTA and TPP, highlight considerations with regard to rules of origin, and outline the benefits of investing in Vietnams growing economic zones. Finally, we provide expert insight into the issues surrounding the creation of 100 percent Foreign Owned Enterprise in Vietnam.

Tax, Accounting and Audit in Vietnam 2016 (2nd Edition)

This edition of Tax, Accounting, and Audit in Vietnam, updated for 2016, offers a comprehensive overview of the major taxes foreign investors are likely to encounter when establishing or operating a business in Vietnam, as well as other tax-relevant obligations. This concise, detailed, yet pragmatic guide is ideal for CFOs, compliance officers and heads of accounting who must navigate Vietnams complex tax and accounting landscape in order to effectively manage and strategically plan their Vietnam operations.
The CSR Foundation For A Better Life of Dai-ichi Life Vietnam was officially granted the establishment license by the Ministry of Home Affairs on April 6, 2016, and has been acknowledged for its operation eligibility since August 10, 2016.

The foundation, with more than VND20 billion ($913,000) in total asset value, aims at supporting the community in the fields of education, medical and health care, environment and other charitable activities with the noble purpose of improving the life quality of Vietnamese people and the development of human resources for the country growth.

The sustainable business foundation of a company lies in its responsibilities. The responsibilities of Dai-ichi Life Vietnam towards our society are to carry out the sustainable and human community supporting programmes with widespread impact over each year to help improve the life quality of local people.

The Foundation For A Better Life coming into operation will facilitate the implementation of long-term and regular social activities across Vietnam in the upcoming time, contributing to affirm Dai-ichi Life Vietnams reputation, as well as our commitment to sustainable development in the country in the long run, said Takasahi Fujii, chairman of Dai-ichi Life Vietnam and the honorary president of the CSR Foundation.

Besides its business endeavors, throughout more than nine years, Dai-ichi Life Vietnam has been the pioneer in many philanthropic and social programmes with contribution of over VND15 billion ($456,600), such as blood donation, funding scholarships for the needy and hard-working pupils, and granting life insurance policies to disadvantaged teachers.

Dai-ichi Life Vietnam was awarded the Corporate Social Responsibility Award two times by prestigious magazine Asia Insurance Review, the first time in 2013 with the programme For a better life to provide clean drinking water to more than 18,000 pupils of the schools in rural areas of Vietnam, and the second time in November 2015 with the programme A million red bricks, bridging the happiness when 10 bridges were built to facilitate the safe and convenient transportation for villagers in rural areas.

Just after more nine years doing business, Dai-ichi Life Vietnam has built a solid foundation and maintained its position as one of the four leading life insurers in Vietnam in terms of total premium, serving more than one million customers through a staff of 800 employees and 60,000 professional financial consultants.

Dai-ichi Life Vietnam is proud to affirm its third position in network scale with a total of 185 offices and general agencies throughout the country.
DHG Pharmaceutical Joint Stock Company (DHG) sells all its treasury shares between August and September-Photo taichinhplus.vn

After selling the shares at an average price of VND102,977 per share, DHG no longer has any treasury share. The firm said the transaction was undertaken to raise capital.

In July 2015, DHG purchased the treasury shares at an average price of VND78,805 per share.

Based in Can Tho Province since 1974, DHG is one of the leading drug makers in Viet Nam.

Currently, the State Capital Investment Corporation, with 43.31 per cent stake, is DHG's largest shareholder, followed by Taisho with 24.5 per cent, Franklin Templeton Investment funds-Templeton Frontier Markets Fund with 9.44 per cent and Portal Global Limited Holding with 7.7 per cent.

DHG reported marked net revenue of VND3.6 trillion in the fiscal year that ended on December 31, 2015, posting a year-on-year decrease of eight per cent. Of this amount, the company's net revenue in Q4 of 2015 reached VND1.149 trillion.

Following the announcement in May of the 35 per cent dividend for 2015, DHG shares surged by more than 23 per cent from VND82,000 to some VND100,000 per share on the HCM City Stock Exchange.

After the first half this year, DHG's sale reached VND1.7 trillion, an increase of 15 per cent, and profit after tax hit VND300 billion.
By PTI: Patna, Sept 21 (PTI) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today said the state government was mulling to start a Sikh circuit on lines of Buddhist circuit to draw more foreign tourists to the state.

"The state government is mulling to begin Sikh tourism circuit like Buddhist circuit," Kumar said at an international press meet on the eve of three-day International Sikh Conclave which will begin here tomorrow.

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He also announced about the elaborate arrangements for conclave and also for celebration of 350th Prakash Utsav early next year.

"In fact in order to tap tremendous potential of religious tourism in Bihar, we are also working on Sufi circuit, Ramayan circuit and Gandhi circuit (connected with places in the state linked with Mahatama Gandhis visit to state)," he said.

Kumar said the state has made elaborate arrangements for hosting three-day International sikh conclave from tomorrow and also celebration of 350th Prakash Parva from December 30, 2016 to January 10, 2017.

Addressing foreign mediapersons on the eve of International Sikh Conclave, Kumar said detailed preparations have been made to host over 150-200 visitors to the conclave including from countries like the US, UK, Canada, Myanmar and New Zealand.

Though the guest list to the conclave has not yet been made public, there is possibility of participation of Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal, his son and Deputy CM Sukhbir Badal, Congress leader in Punjab Amrinder Singh, former Planning Commission Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Besides, the event could see presence of guests from abroad including Canada Defence minister Harjit Singh Sajjan, Minister of Innovation, science and economic development Navdeep Singh Bains, Baba Singh Jagdeo, Secretary of Sikh council of Australia and Ranjeet Bakshi, President of World Punjabi Organisation.

Flanked by state Tourism minister Anita Devi, Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, state police chief P K Thakur, Principal Secretary of Public Relations Department Brajesh Mehrotra and his counterpart in Tourism department Harjot Kaur, Kumar said meticulous arrangements have been made for stay, movement on roads and parking of vehicles to Guru Govind Singh gurudwara in Patna Saheb.

The Bihar CM lamented that despite writing to the Centre five years back to provide assistance for hosting mega International Sikh event in Patna, no help came.

"We made all the arrangements for the grand event from own limited resources as part of our duty," he said. PTI SNS SUS SMJ PD

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Anh said that not all multi-level marketing firms violated regulations or collapsed. However, the 1.2 million participants in the network could have big impacts on both participants and consumers.

"Multi-level marketing is complicated and has risks if we do not tighten management policies," he added.

"It is the reason that the Government should review Decree No 42/2014/ND-CP as well as investigate shortcomings of regulations on the location and headquarters of multi-level marketing firms," he said.

Trinh Anh Tuan, deputy director of the ministry's Competitive Management Department told the conference held in Ha Noi on Monday to review multi-level marketing activities, and that by this month, the country had 50 licensed multi-level marketing companies.

In the first half of the year, multi-level marketing firms had total turnover of VND4 trillion (US$177.7 million), contributing VND452 billion to the State budget.

Of which, the foreign firms had turnover of VND1.8 trillion, accounting for 45 per cent while the domestic ones had VND2.2 trillion.

The number of people participating in the activities in the six month period was 500,000, a reduction of 57 per cent from the same period last year.

Tuan added that Decree No 42/2014/ND-CP which took effect on July 1 2014 had shortcomings as multi-level marketing had caused problems in reality.

There were nine multi-level marketing companies that had their licences withdrawn and were fined several thousand billion dong.

Check-ups from the departments of Industry and Trade nationwide in the first half of the year showed that 26 out of 48 investigated had signs of violations with total fines of around VND4.5 billion.

The most common violations included operations without licences, and organising large-scale conferences and training without permission from the departments.

Nguyen Thanh, director of Thua Thien Hue Province's Department of Industry and Trade said the regulation allowing multi-level marketing firms to operate without branches and representative offices had caused difficulties in management and check-ups.

The ministry on March 9 2016 promulgated Directive No 02 on enhancing the check-ups and supervision on the activities.

It found that fines in the Decree No 42/2014/ND-CP had not been strict enough to prevent the violations.

The ministry has been collecting opinions from relevant agencies for the revised Decree No 42/2014/ND-CP to submit to the Government for approval.
Nguyen Mai, chair of the Vietnam Association of Foreign Invested Enterprises (VAFIE), said Vietnam should stop licensing projects in three business fields.



First, oil refineries. The projects licensed so far in the field have total capacity of up to 50-60 million tons. It is estimated that petrochemistry and oil refineries can only bring profit of 10 percent. An oil refinery with the capacity of 6-10 million tons needs an area of thousands of hectares, but employs only 8,000-10,000 workers.



Samsung's project has investment capital of $3 billion, but only needs 100 hectares of land and employs 43,500 workers with average pay of VND11 million a month.



Second, cement production. The licensed cement projects have total capacity of 65-70 million a year, which is much higher than domestic demand.



However, the bigger problem is that in order to churn out 65-70 million tons of cement, plants would need 100 million tons of limestone.

Consultants and experts have recommended that Vietnam take measures to prevent foreign-invested projects from using outdated technologies, causing pollution and consuming national resources.

With the current consumption level, Vietnam would consume 1 billion tons of limestone for every 10 years. In addition, cement production causes pollution.



If counting the costs on the environment, cement production wont bring profits, Mai said.



Third, steel projects, which are huge electricity consumers. Vietnams current electricity output is still not high enough to satisfy demand. The Electricity of Vietnam has to make heavy investments every year to increase output by 12-13 percent per annum because the investment rate in the field is high.



And fourth, textile and dyeing projects. According to the Foreign Investment Agency (FIA), the projects in the field by 2020 have had total investment capital of $2.5 billion.



Technical barriers



According to Dang Xuan Quang, deputy head of FIA, a solution which Vietnam can apply is setting up technical barriers, which allows the most suitable projects while it does not break international commitments.



Quang said the criteria Vietnam to set up technical barriers include national sovereignty and security and environmental protection.



If Vietnam wants high-technology projects, it needs to set up high environmental requirements. For example, it can set up requirements on the maximum amount of materials and waste for the production of one ton of steel.



The third criterion could be development planning. The land in the areas which can be used more effectively for clean projects will not be opened for polluting projects.
The partners came together on today in Hanoi to officially sign the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) for implementing two nutrition status improvement projects in Vietnam.

The purpose of the first project - Improvement of nutrition status for pregnant women and lactating mothers - is to enhance the status of maternal and child nutrition. This is the critical healthcare issue that the parties share mutual interests and wish to cooperate to address. These priorities include development of the National Nutrition Guideline for pregnant women and lactating mothers, enhancing knowledge about nutrition for health care staff and members of Vietnam Women's Union through implementation of National Nutrition Guideline for pregnant women and lactating mothers.

The second project - Improvement of clinical nutrition in hospitals in Vietnam - covers areas of cooperation such as developing a quality improvement programme for clinical nutrition to roll out in Vietnams hospitals (VN QIP). The programme includes malnutrition screening tools and nutrition assessment process for inpatients in hospitals in Vietnam; providing training courses for QIP practice and clinical nutrition process for health care professionals in hospitals and implementing clinical nutrition guideline in hospitals in Vietnam.

Vietnam faces public health challenges including malnutrition of in-patients, high rates of mother and infant mortality, stunting children below five years old, anemic and zinc deficiency of pregnant women. According to a report of the National Institute of Nutrition, the rate of child stunting in 2014 is 24.9 per cent, the rate of zinc deficiency in pregnant women was 80.3 per cent and that of anemia was 32.8 per cent.

The two MoUs are aligned with the National Strategy on Nutrition for the period 2011-2020, with vision to 2030 approved by the prime minister and the National Action Plan for Healthcare for Maternal, Infant and Child in the period of 2016-2020.

"The MoH highly appreciates the support from Abbott for the cooperation in implementing the National Strategy on Nutrition. These projects will contribute to the improvement of nutrition status for the people, especially to the faster decrease of stunning malnutrition in Vietnam as well as the enhancement of inpatients health and clinical treatment efficiency in hospitals, said Nguyen VietTien, the MoHs Deputy Minister.

Both MoUs call for collaboration in the form of education and development of national guidelines for the healthcare community such as personnel training, expert delegation exchanges, symposium and workshops for sharing of information and education, which expect to provide healthcare professionals in hospitals across Vietnam with guidelines and protocols to improve nutrition care for their patients that are practical, applicable and backed with strong science researches.

As a science-based healthcare company, we are dedicated to helping people live the best and fullest life possible. The agreements we sign today with the MoH reinforces Abbotts continued commitment to Vietnam  to bring practical and relevant guidelines to healthcare professionals, enhance the quality of life of the community and improve public healthcare in Vietnam in the long term, said Douglas Kuo, general manager of Abbott Vietnam.

The Abbott portfolio in Vietnam includes innovative and high-quality nutrition products and a pharmaceutical manufacturer which the corporate has completed the acquisition early this month. The partnership with the MoH is part of Abbotts commitments to work with the government and local organisations to find locally driven, sustainable solutions to critical healthcare needs for community.
Migrants walk out through a hole in the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos. (AFP/Louisa Gouliamaki)

Speaking at the US-led refugee summit at the United Nations, Obama praised Germany and Canada among other countries for opening up their doors to those fleeing the war in Syria and other conflicts.

"We are facing a crisis of epic proportion," Obama said. "We cannot avert our eyes or turn our backs. To slam the door in the face of these families would betray our deepest values."

Some 50 world leaders took part in the summit, but their participation was conditional on making new commitments to address the world's largest refugee crisis since World War II.

"Collectively, our nations are roughly doubling the number of refugees that we admit to our countries to more than 360,000 this year," Obama announced.

Countries also boosted financial contributions to UN appeals and international humanitarian organizations by about US$4.5 billion over 2015 levels.

The pledges included funds to ensure access to schools for one million refugee children and enabling one million refugees to work legally.

In particular, seven countries - Romania, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, France, Luxembourg - committed to resettle or admit at least 10 times more refugees than in 2015, according to US officials.

Obama's summit came a day after the 193 UN member-states adopted a global plan to confront the refugee crisis that rights groups dismissed as falling far short of the needed international response.

A record-breaking 65 million people are on the move worldwide, including 21 million refugees fleeing the war in Syria and other conflicts.

Now in its sixth year, the war in Syria has displaced nine million people while more than four million have fled to neighboring countries.

DON'T BUILD WALLS

The Obama administration itself has said it will raise the number of refugees entering the United States to 110,000 next year, up from 85,000 this year.

In an apparent swipe at US presidential candidate Donald Trump, Obama said the refugee crisis was a "test of our common humanity, whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls."

Trump has controversially proposed building a wall on the US border with Mexico to keep out migrants.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country has taken in more than 30,000 Syrian refugees since December, said the refugee crisis posed a challenge but also "an opportunity," vowing "there is more to come."

After admitting one million refugees last year, Germany pledged to continue welcoming those in search of refuge.

"I believe we cannot allow ourselves to stop here. We must finally get ahead in tackling this crisis," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's party suffered electoral setbacks this month in the face of a surge of anti-migrant parties.

Obama pointedly noted in his address that "the politics can be hard" for leaders who open up to refugees and migrants.

Only eight countries currently host more than half the world's refugees: Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda.

Six of the world's richest countries - the United States, China, Japan, Britain, Germany and France - hosted only 1.8 million refugees last year, just seven percent of the world total, according to research by the British charity Oxfam.
A proposal to use State funds to settle commercial banks' bad debts, as stated in the draft plan on economic restructuring for the 2016-2020 period, has been met with a cold shoulder.- Photo thoibaotaichinh.vn

Under the plan drafted by the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the feasibility of the proposal is to be studied by the Ministry of Finance and State Bank of Viet Nam. Authorities will have to submit a relevant resolution to the National Assembly for approval next year.

Deputy Chairman of the National Assembly's Economic Committee, Nguyen Duc Kien, said State funds should not be used to deal with bad debts at this time as the money must be used to address other prioritised problems.

"Bad debts are not the State's fault but stem from the commercial banks' wrongdoings so the banks must take responsibility for their operation," he said.

"If they cannot solve the problem, they must file for bankruptcy. The Government only interferes to ensure the stability of the financial and banking market and maintain the interests of depositors," Kien stressed.

In fact, State money funds have been granted to the State-owned Viet Nam Asset Management Company (VAMC) to settle bad debts. Last year, the Government decided to increase the company's charter capital to VND2 trillion (US$89.7 million) from VND500 billion and allowed the company to buy debts by issuing special bonds.

VAMC Chairman Nguyen Quoc Hung affirmed that the company did not need more money now. Instead, it needed more power to settle the bad debts. He agreed that it was not feasible to use State funds with the budget being overspent.

Debt settlement is estimated to range from VND5 trillion to VND10 trillion.

Expert Bui Trinh said that since the State budget comes from tax collection, the Government should not let the people pay for what they do not owe.

Many experts agreed that supplying more money was only a temporary solution, while the more important one was to build a debt market and empower the VAMC to sell collaterals.

Nguyen Tri Hieu, a banking expert, told bizlive.vn that Viet Nam still did not have a debt trading market in the true sense of the word.

The VAMC, a State company, buys bad debts and pays in special bonds, Hieu said, adding that "VAMC just serves as the 'parking lot' for bad debts."

"We need to build a transparent debt market, where banks sell bad debts and receive cash," he suggested.

Hieu said to date, VAMC had bought bad debts at book value. But if buying bad debt with money from the State budget, the price must be the market price, or the real value of the debts, which might be much lower than the book value.

In order to truly solve the problem, bad debts must be bought at real value and commercial banks must suffer losses, he said.

Kien from the NA's Economic Committee said that members of the National Assembly Standing Committee were discussing amendments to the Law on Asset Auction, which would allow the VAMC to auction off asset collaterals without any intermediary.

The State Bank of Viet Nam said the bad debt ratio of the banking system by the end of June 2016 was 2.58 per cent, which was 0.25 percentage point lower than May but higher than the 2.55 per cent of late 2015.
According to the organisers, the event will create a platform bringing together all the key real estate players from inside and outside Vietnam to gain insights and updates on the most recent changes on policy and laws regarding real estate investments in Vietnam.

The symposium will be opened by Vice Minister of Construction Do Duc Duy, who will provide an update on policies and plans for Vietnams real estate market in the next 12 months.

Specifically, the symposium will feature three panel discussions. The first panel discussion will be on the sustainability of affordable housing, to be moderated by CBRE Vietnam managing director Marc Townsend, with panelists coming from Sapphire, Dat Xanh Group, NHO and EZ Land.

The second discussion will cover hospitality trends and recent transactions  sustainability/appetites, to be moderated by ZICOlaw managing partner David Lim, with representatives from the Gaw Capital, Accor and Melia hotels and JLL consultants.

The third panel discussions will center on real estate financing, structuring, and lending appetites, to be moderated by KPMG partner Ninh Van Hien, with panelists coming from HSBC and Hong Leong Bank Vietnam.

There will also be speakers on urban planning and development in Ho Chi Minh City over the next five years, the hottest issues faced by real estate investors in Vietnam, the opportunities presented by the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and other free trade agreements as well as legal, tax and market updates.

The symposium will conclude with a two hour networking opportunity for delegates to speak with key decision makers in the real estate industry.

For further information, please visit AusChams website.

For registrations, please email to events@auschamvn.org.
Workers of Fimex Viet Nam Co in the southern province of Soc Trang process shrimp for export to Japan, South Korea and the US. - VNA/VNS Photo An Giang

This was the assessment of the General Secretary of the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) Truong Dinh Hoe.

In response to the DOC's final decision that Vietnamese products will be taxed at 4.78 per cent during the 10th administrative review (POR 10), Hoe said this was a significant increase compared with previous reviews.

Under the decision, the US had increased the duty rate for Vietnamese shrimp in POR10, from 0.91 per cent in the POR9 to 4.78 per cent at present, for both mandatory and voluntary businesses. Meanwhile, the tariff imposed on other Vietnamese firms or exporters not examined as mandatory or voluntary respondents in the POR10 remains at 25.76 per cent.

Hoe said one of the main reasons leading to the high tax at POR10 was that DOC utilised a zeroing method to determine dumping margins, which many foreign experts consider unfair. This method was inconsistent with the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), in which Viet Nam and the US are both member countries.

With this "chink', Hoe said VASEP was studying the ruling, to possibly issue a complaint to the US State Court of International Trade, in order to require DOC to rethink its calculation method of the anti-dumping tax rate in the POR10.

"We hope that with the WTO's recent verdicts in applying price discrimination, Vietnamese businesses can reach a tax of zero per cent and prove that they have not sold shrimp at dumping prices in the US market," said Hoe.

In the POR10, DOC continued to choose Bangladesh and India as the main reference countries to fix the prices of several input materials. The two countries do not have many similarities with Viet Nam, leading to increased anti-dumping margins, said Hoe.

Chairman and Director of Thuan Phuoc Seafoods and Trading Corporation, Tran Van Linh, said the DOC's increase of the anti-dumping tax rate had caused difficulties for Vietnamese producers and shrimp farmers. With the current conditions, the cost of Vietnamese shrimp resulted in domestic producers is no longer able to compete with its rivals, such as Thailand, Indonesia, India and Ecuador.

He noted that although the country's shrimp industry had been rapidly developing, it lacked independence and remained unsuitable for development because businesses had to import adult shrimp and feed. In addition, the rate of successfully raised shrimp in Viet Nam was 30 to 35 per cent, which is much lower than in rival countries.

As for domestic competition, Linh said Minh Phu Group was a giant in Viet Nam. Its exports of shrimp to the US had accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the country's exports. The group did not have to suffer anti-dumping taxes from the US, making it very difficult for other Vietnamese companies to compete with Minh Phu.

"To maintain market share in the US market, businesses will have to continuously reduce prices, and finally shrimp farmers will have to bear heavy losses," said Linh.

According to statistics from VASEP, Viet Nam has, so far, earned nearly US$600 million from the export of shrimp since early this year, resulting in a year-on-year increase of 14 per cent. The export increased partly because of POR9's lower tax rate of 0.91 per cent.

The US is Viet Nam's largest importer of shrimp, accounting for 22.7 per cent of export market share.

Hoe said the export of shrimp to the US did not only depend on low and high anti-dumping duties, but also other factors, such as quality, supply capacity, market situation and the supply-demand capacity of other export countries.

"Therefore, for the long-term, businesses and shrimp farmers need to set up a systematic plan for production, processing and consumption of high-quality product, as well as maintaining a stable number of customers. With this, it will not likely be affected by an anti-dumping tax or other technical barriers from import countries," said Hoe.

VASEP predicted that the country's export value would reach about US$3.2 billion this year, increasing by 11 per cent, compared with last year.
The issue of intellectual property (IP) is dealt with in Chapter 18 and the annexes of the TPP, which is believed to pose many challenges for Viet Nam, in terms of both legal aspects and IPR enforcement. This article analyses some of these challenges.

Joining IP treaties

Following the approach employed by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), the TPP Agreement requires its parties to accede to or ratify a number of important IP treaties. Based on the time the parties have to perform this obligation, the treaties listed in the TPP Agreement are divided into two groups.

The first group consists of the treaties which the parties affirm they have ratified or acceded to, namely the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT 1979), the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1967), and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1971). This requirement is higher than that of the TRIPS Agreement, as the latter only requires compliance with the economic contents of the above treaties. Viet Nam had joined these three treaties before it participated in the TPP negotiations. The second group comprises the treaties which the parties must ratify or accede to by the date the TPP Agreement becomes effective for each party, taking into account the transitional period applied to some Parties. These treaties include (i) the Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks (1989); the Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure (1977), as amended in 1980; the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (1991); the Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademarks (2006); the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT 1996); and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT 1996).

Among the above treaties, Viet Nam has not yet joined the Budapest Treaty, the Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademarks, the WCT and the WPPT. The time limit for Viet Nam to join the Budapest Treaty is two years, and that for the WPPT is three years.

Transparency in disclosure

Requirements on transparency in the IP field are set out in Article 18.9 and other articles of the TPP Agreement, such as Article 18.73 and Article 18.45. Accordingly, each party must endeavor to make available on the Internet its laws, regulations, procedures and administrative rulings of general application concerning the protection and enforcement of IPRs.

Each party must, subject to its law, endeavor to make available on the Internet information that it makes public concerning applications for trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, patents and plant variety rights. Each party must also make available on the Internet information that it makes public concerning registered or granted trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, patents and plant variety rights, sufficient to enable the public to become acquainted with those registered or granted rights.

Current Vienamese law basically satisfies the TPP requirement on publication of legal documents on the Internet. The 2015 Law on Promulgation of Legal Documents stipulates that all legal documents, excluding those containing state secrets, shall be published in the print and electronic Cong Bao (Official Gazette) (Article 150) and in the national legal database (Article 157).

The 2006 Law on Information Technology also states in Article 28(2) that the websites of state agencies must publish their specialised legal documents and relevant regulations and laws, processes and administrative procedures implemented by their affiliated units, names of persons responsible for implementing these processes and procedures and time limits for completion of administrative procedures. Other legal documents, such as Decree No 64/2007/ND-CP on application of information technology in activities of state agencies, and Decree No. 52/2015/ND-CP on the national legal database also contain clear provisions on this issue.

At present in Viet Nam, information on applications for registration of industrial property objects, and information on titles of protection and other information relating to industrial property rights, such as registration of industrial property rights assignment contracts and industrial property rights licensing contracts, has been published in the Industrial Property Official Gazette and the website of the National Office of Intellectual Property of Viet Nam (NOIP).

In addition, the NOIP has recently launched, on a pilot basis, a Library of Patents of Viet Nam database, a very useful source of information on inventive and innovative activities in Viet Nam. Information on copyright and related rights registration has been also made available on the website of the Copyright Office of Viet Nam. Hence, Vietnamese law has sufficient provisions ensuring the performance of the obligation to disclose IP information.

The problems to be addressed are that the information systems of the NOIP and Copyright Office of Viet Nam are frequently overloaded or suspended from operation and that their databases are inadequate failing to meet the needs of users.

In addition, regarding the obligation to disclose information on specific industrial property objects like patents, marks and geographical indications, Vietnamese law still has some unsuitable provisions. For instance, according to Article 18.45 of the TPP Agreement, for published patent applications and granted patents, each party must make available to the public at least the following information, to the extent that such information is in the possession of the competent authorities and is generated on, or after, the date of the entry into force of this Agreement for that Party: (a) search and examination results, including details of, or information related to, relevant prior art searches; (b) as appropriate, non-confidential communications from applicants; and (c) patent and non-patent related literature citations submitted by applicants and relevant third parties. Regarding the disclosure of patent information, Circular No 01/2007/TT-BKHCN provides details of information to be disclosed on patent applications, covering information relating to valid applications, including split-up applications published on the Industrial Property Official Gazette, including information relating to valid applications' formats as stated in notices of acceptance of valid applications, information relating to valid applications (transfer of applications, splitting up of applications, serial numbers of original patent applications, etc.); summaries of inventions accompanied by drawings (if any) and so on. This circular also states that everybody may access detailed information on the nature of the objects stated in the applications published in the Industrial Property Official Gazette or request the NOIP to supply such information and is liable to pay an information supply fee under regulations.

Compared to the TPP Agreement provisions on disclosure of patent information, it can be said that Vietnamese law lacks specific provisions on the obligation to disclose information in an adequate and detailed manner, as required in Article 18.45 of the TPP Agreement, especially information mentioned at Point A of the Article. Meeting this requirement of the TPP Agreement is truly a challenge for the IP state management agencies, but will bring about practical benefits to inventors and the public.

Protected IP objects

Regarding marks, Article 18.18 of the TPP Agreement states that no Party shall require, as a condition of registration, that a sign be visually perceptible, nor shall a party deny registration of a trademark only on the ground that the sign of which it is composed is a sound. Additionally, each party shall make best efforts to register scent marks. Meanwhile, Article 72 of Viet Nam's IP Law[3] requires one of the conditions for a mark to be protected in Viet Nam to be composed of a visible sign in the form of letter, wording, drawing or image, including three-dimensional images or a combination of these elements, represented in one or more colors." Current Vietnamese law does not yet protect sound and scent marks.

To implement the TPP commitments, Vietnamese IP law needs to be revised toward expanding the scope of protection to sound and scent marks. This expansion would lead to a series of legal changes, especially provisions on the assessment of the distinctiveness of scent marks and sound marks in the substantive examination for the granting of titles of protection, as well as in the determination of infringements upon these marks. Protection of scent marks and sound marks also poses challenges for the IPRs enforcement agencies in preparing their manpower, as the assessment of the similarity or identity of such marks for identifying infringements is very complicated.

Regarding patents, Article 18.37 of the TPP Agreement requires each Party to confirm that patents are available for inventions claimed as at least one of the following: new uses of a known product, new methods of using a known product, or new processes of using a known product. These provisions aim for higher protection of patents in the health sector, especially for pharmaceuticals and methods of disease diagnosis and treatment. However, the TPP Agreement permits its parties to select one of these ways of protection.

Current Vietnamese law does not provide the protection as inventions of new uses of a known product. However, it can protect new methods of using a known product or new processes of using a known product, if such methods or processes are novel, involve an inventive step and are susceptible to industrial application, as prescribed by Vietnamese law. Yet, Article 59 of Viet Nam's IP Law excludes the protection as inventions of methods of preventing, diagnosing and treating human and animal diseases. This exclusion aligns with the TPP Agreement.

Regarding industrial designs, Article 18.55 of the TPP Agreement states that each party must ensure adequate and effective protection of industrial designs and also confirm that protection for industrial designs is available for designs: (a) embodied in a part of an article; or, alternatively, (b) having a particular regard, where appropriate, to a part of an article in the context of the article as a whole.

Concerning this issue, current Vietnamese law grants protection for industrial designs that are outer shapes of articles which are novel, inventive and susceptible to industrial application. In reality, a part of an article, which is detachable, may also have its industrial design protected under Vietnamese law. However, Vietnamese law needs to make clear whether an industrial design which is embodied in a part of an article, but is not a detachable part of the article, can be protected.

The TPP Agreement also provides the term of protection for some IP objects longer than those established by Vietnamese law and the TRIPS Agreement. Under the TPP Agreement, the term of protection of a work, performance or phonogram must not be shorter than the lifetime of the author, and 70 years after his or her death. This term under Vietnamese law and the TRIPS Agreement is the entire life of the author plus 50 years after his or her death. As for undisclosed test or other data for agricultural chemical products, the TPP Agreement requires the parties to set a term of protection of at least 10 years. Under Vietnamese law, this term is five years, counting from the date the applicant is granted a license. Viet Nam has a grace period of five years to fulfill its obligation under the TPP Agreement regarding the protection of undisclosed test and other data for agricultural chemical products.

Terms of patents adjusted

Under Article 18.46 of the TPP Agreement, each Party must make best efforts to process patent applications in an efficient and timely manner, with a view to avoiding unreasonable or unnecessary delays. If there are unreasonable delays in a party's issuance of patents, that party must provide the means to, and at the request of the patent owner, adjust the term of the patent to compensate for such delays. An unreasonable delay at least includes a delay in the issuance of a patent of more than five years from the date of filing of the application in the territory of the Party, or three years after a request for examination of the application has been made, or whichever is later. However, a party may exclude from the determination of such delays periods of time that do not occur during the processing or the examination of the patent application by the granting authority; periods of time that are not directly attributable to the granting authority; as well as periods of time that are attributable to the patent applicant. Particularly for a pharmaceutical product, Article 18.48 of the TPP Agreement requires each party to make available an adjustment of the patent term to compensate the patent owner for unreasonable curtailment of the effective patent term, as a result of the marketing approval process. This provision requires appropriate supplementation of Vietnamese law and the NOIP to stick to the time limit for the examination and grant of patents.

Conclusions

The above analyses show that a number of IP commitments in the TPP Agreement are higher than the provisions of current Vietnamese law, even higher than those of the TRIPS Agreement. The developed countries, in the process of negotiation on free trade agreements, tend to strike out agreements on IPRs protection, which are higher and more adequate than the WTO regulations in the TRIPS Agreement. Therefore, enforcement of IP provisions of the TPP Agreement will require Viet Nam to revise its IP law and to raise the effectiveness of activities of IPRs enforcement agencies. The country needs to also upgrade its information infrastructure to serve the registration of IPRs and provision of industrial property information

By Le Thi Nam Giang, Lecturer, HCM City University of Law
By PTI: Patna, Sept 21 (PTI) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today said the state government was mulling to start a Sikh circuit on lines of Buddhist circuit to draw more foreign tourists to the state.

"The state government is mulling to begin Sikh tourism circuit like Buddhist circuit," Kumar said at an international press meet on the eve of three-day International Sikh Conclave which will begin here tomorrow.

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He also announced about the elaborate arrangements for conclave and also for celebration of 350th Prakash Utsav early next year.

"In fact in order to tap tremendous potential of religious tourism in Bihar, we are also working on Sufi circuit, Ramayan circuit and Gandhi circuit (connected with places in the state linked with Mahatama Gandhis visit to state)," he said.

Kumar said the state has made elaborate arrangements for hosting three-day International sikh conclave from tomorrow and also celebration of 350th Prakash Parva from December 30, 2016 to January 10, 2017.

Addressing foreign mediapersons on the eve of International Sikh Conclave, Kumar said detailed preparations have been made to host over 150-200 visitors to the conclave including from countries like the US, UK, Canada, Myanmar and New Zealand.

Though the guest list to the conclave has not yet been made public, there is possibility of participation of Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal, his son and Deputy CM Sukhbir Badal, Congress leader in Punjab Amrinder Singh, former Planning Commission Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Besides, the event could see presence of guests from abroad including Canada Defence minister Harjit Singh Sajjan, Minister of Innovation, science and economic development Navdeep Singh Bains, Baba Singh Jagdeo, Secretary of Sikh council of Australia and Ranjeet Bakshi, President of World Punjabi Organisation.

Flanked by state Tourism minister Anita Devi, Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, state police chief P K Thakur, Principal Secretary of Public Relations Department Brajesh Mehrotra and his counterpart in Tourism department Harjot Kaur, Kumar said meticulous arrangements have been made for stay, movement on roads and parking of vehicles to Guru Govind Singh gurudwara in Patna Saheb.

The Bihar CM lamented that despite writing to the Centre five years back to provide assistance for hosting mega International Sikh event in Patna, no help came.

"We made all the arrangements for the grand event from own limited resources as part of our duty," he said. PTI SNS SUS SMJ KKB

--- ENDS ---

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Photo by ASSOCIATED PRESS

A slave cabin from the Point of Pines Plantation will be on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. The museum showcases more than 400 years of history.


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[Editors note: US Congressman Alan Lowenthal (Democrat-CA) has served for more than two decades as a city council member and California legislator. He is the House Representative for California's 47th Congressional District, which includes portions of Long Beach - one of the countrys most ethnically diverse cities and home of the largest Cambodian community in the US and estimated to be the largest outside Cambodia. A founding member of the Congressional Cambodian Caucus, Congressman Lowenthal recently introduced a bi-partisan resolution condemning political repression and rights abuses by the Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, and called for free and fair elections. Co-sponsored by 21 House members, Lowenthals resolution was passed on September 12, 2016. VOA Khmers Sok Khemara spoke with Congressman Lowenthal about H.Res.728 - Supporting human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Cambodia and what it means for Cambodia and its people.]

What does the passage of this resolution mean for Cambodia and what is the next step for the United States?

The first thing that it does is that it sends a message to the government of Cambodia, to the ruling party, the CPP (Cambodian Peoples Party), to the prime minister, that the United States wants to hold Cambodias feet to the fire.

That is, we want to make sure that they live up to the reforms that were agreed upon in terms of national elections that were done right after the 2013 national elections.

There were all the irregularities that took place [in 2013]. I guess, at first, the CNRP (Cambodia National Rescue Party) did not want to be seated in their representative chambers. Then they came [together] and they agreed upon what would be the electoral reforms needed for the next elections, which would be both the local election 2017 and national election 2018.

Congress has been watching and seeing really what has happened in the last couples of years. The government now, rather than living up to this agreement, has engaged in intimidation, oppression, trying to make sure that these elections are not going to be free and fair and the Congress has said we are watching very closely these elections. The election must be fair. We are sending a message that the entire Congress has stood up and voted on it and said that, prime minister, you must follow through what you said. You must stop intimidating and harassing the opposition.

Prime Minister Hun Sen normally ignores the actions of the international community. So, what happens then?

I believe in 2014 the United States began to look at some of the congressional aid to Cambodia and predicated that reform should be made in order to continue that aid.

I think the same thing will happen.

Now that the Congress how voted on [the resolution], while there were no sanctions against Cambodia, if in fact the Cambodian elections are not free and fair, I would imagine there would be movements in Congress to limit economic cooperation with Cambodia.

Im not sure what that would take until we have a full discussion of that issue. We are hoping that the prime minister will follow what was agreed upon by both the CNRP and the CPP. But if he doesnt, I will tell you there will be consequences.

Do you think other countries will consider similar action after passage of the resolution?

I think other countries who know that the elections in 2013 - because all the international observers agreed upon that - were highly irregular. I think this will send a signal to other countries that the United States is very concerned that the elections coming up may again be highly irregular. And we are going to try to prevent that from occurring. And I would imagine other countries will begin to follow us also.

Will the executive branch be taking any action after the resolution?

The administration is following up to the Cambodian government on this. The State Department is very much aware, although they didnt take a stand on this resolution, but there are very much aware that there are tremendous irregularities going on right now, and that the government now is trying to intimidate the opposition and to keep from free and fair election.

So our government and our administrative branch knows this.

This is just another kind of tool in our toolbox to tell the Cambodians that we are watching. We are not here to decide which side wins the election. We are not here to engage in any kind of destabilization on the existing government. But the US also wants the government to fulfill its obligation to have free and fair elections and future actions by the United States will be dependent upon whether the government does fulfill its [obligations].

You explained a little already that US and Cambodian relations are based on many factors including respect for human rights. Could you give more details?

We are very, very concerned that, for example, in July the prominent political activist and outspoken critic of the government, Kem Ley, was brutally killed in Phnom Penh.

We are not saying that the government did that, but we are very concerned that he was the greatest challenge and the critic of the government.

We are very concerned that Kem Sokha, who is acting as the opposition partys leader, was placed under house arrest and then the government, last week, tried and sentenced him to five months in jail in absentia.

We are very much concerned that the leader of CNRP. Mr. Sam Rainsy, had a seven-year-old defamation charge against him; they revived that charge, the government, and they expelled him from the parliament, forced him in to self-imposed exile.

This is not the way to have free and fair elections by decimating the opposition party.

So we are not going to stand for that. We are going to speak up, we are going to talk to the world about that, and we are going to tell the Cambodia government to be on guard, that the US is watching.

We have not seen the Cambodian government live up to its obligation for free and fair elections. Actually, it is doing just the opposite. There are more violations of human rights than before.

It seems to be a pattern now in Cambodia, and thats the one thing that the United States can do is to talk about respect for democracy and tell our friends and enemies that we are going to fight for human rights. We are going to stand up for democracy. We are going to stand up for the rule of law.

Right now, we are not seeing that occurring. We are seeing human rights being, not only not observed, but being oppressed in Cambodia. We are seeing a lack of democracy, and the lack of the rule of law. And we are telling the Cambodian government if they want to have a relationship with the United States, that must change.

What is your final message to the Cambodian people?

That we will not forget you. We will continue to fight for free and fair elections in Cambodia. That Cambodia and the United States could embark on a great era of friendship. But that is really going to be dependent upon the Cambodian government allowing the people of Cambodia to speak freely.

Let the people of Cambodia decide what type of government they want not the government of Cambodia nor the US.

It should be the people of Cambodia. And we stand with the people of Cambodia.
The resettlement of refugees from Middle Eastern countries, particularly Syria, has been at the center of a heated political debate after President Barack Obama last year pledged to resettle at least 10,000 refugees from the war-torn country in the United States.

But refugees from Myanmar, whose leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, visited Washington last week, have quietly outpaced Syrian arrivals in recent years, even as Syria's civil war intensifies, with an increasing number coming from the marginalized Rohingya Muslim community, according to State Department figures.

From October 1, 2015, to September 15 of this year, 11,902 Myanmar nationals were resettled in the United States, according to figures from the Refugee Processing Center, operated by the State Department, compared with 11,598 arrivals from Syria over the same period.

That was out of a total of nearly 79,600 refugees who arrived in the United States in that period. The largest group, numbering just over 15,000, was from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Arrivals from Syria, where Islamic State and other radical groups are active, are subject to additional screening processes, according to the White House.

State Department figures show the number of Rohingya arrivals from Myanmar jumped from just over 650 in fiscal 2014 to 2,573 last year. This year, 2,173 had arrived as of September 15.

During a meeting with Suu Kyi in the Oval Office last Wednesday, Obama announced that the United States would remove sanctions originally imposed on the country in 1997, when it was ruled by a military junta that brutally suppressed pro-democracy movements and showed little regard for human rights.

The decision raised alarm among rights groups, who are concerned about the plight of the stateless Rohingya among other ethnic minorities.

Long-persecuted minority

The Rohingya have long been persecuted in Myanmar, where they are viewed largely as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, though many have lived in the country for generations.

Increased freedom of speech since the military stepped back from direct rule in 2011 has allowed for the unleashing of long-held anti-Muslim sentiment.

Around 125,000 remain confined to temporary camps in Myanmar's Rakhine state following waves of deadly violence in 2012 between Buddhists and Muslims. Most were stripped of their ability to vote in last year's election.

Most Rohingya tend to come to the United States after spending years in Muslim-majority Malaysia and being granted refugee status by the United Nations.

Nasir Bin Zakaria, who founded the Rohingya Culture Center in Chicago  home to one of the largest populations of Rohingya in the United States  estimates that there are just over 1,000 Rohingya in the city. He fled Myanmar after being forced to work as a porter when he was 16, he said.

Nasir Bin Zakaria said that the ability to move around freely and legally made life in Chicago far better than in Myanmar and Malaysia, but it is not without its own challenges for refugees. The city of 2.7 million is struggling with a surge of killings, with 509 killings this year, according to the Chicago Police Department.

Newly arrived children from refugee families, unfamiliar to the United States, are an enticing target for gangs looking to recruit, said Melineh Kano, executive director of RefugeeOne, a resettlement agency in Chicago.

"When we are selecting neighborhoods, we have to be very careful about the crime rate and gang recruitment, because the majority of refugees come with kids," she said. "You either join or you get beaten up."
President Barack Obama hosted the worlds first ever Leaders Summit on Refugees in New York City Tuesday, saying the world is facing a crisis of epic proportions. But there was at least some good news for the estimated 21 million people who have had to flee their homes, as VOAs Cindy Saine reports.
Foodie's alert! A new study suggests that those who suffer from a binge eating disorder (BED) may be at a higher risk of getting diagnosed with illnesses such as thyroid, diabetes and hormone-related disorders.

If you suffer from a binge eating disorder, you are at a higher risk of suffering from an endocrine related disorder sauch as thyroid and diabetes. Picture courtesy: YouTube

By Indo-Asian News Service: All of us know what binge eating is. We've given in to it so many times. That sumptuous red velvet cake we can't stop eating, those soul-satisfying French fries... the list is endless. But binge eating once in a while is different from a binge eating disorder, which is a serious eating disorder in which an individual frequently consumes unusually large amounts of food and is unable to stop craving for more.

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Individuals with BED could be at an increased risk--almost 2.5 times--of having an endocrine disorder and 1.9 times of having a circulatory system disorder.

The endocrine system influences heart, bones and tissues growth, and even fertility.

It plays a vital role in determining whether there were chances of developing diabetes, thyroid disease, growth disorders, sexual dysfunction, and a host of other hormone-related disorders.

Also read: This girl's chilling post reminds us all the consequences of binge-drinking

BED is closely associated with hypertension--commonly called high blood pressure--that causes the heart to work harder and could lead to such complications as heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure, among others.

Among individuals with obesity and BED, there is a 1.5-times increased risk of having a respiratory disease and a 2.6-times of having a gastrointestinal disease.

"We encourage clinicians to--have the conversation--about BED with their patients. Accurate screening and detection could solve BED problem with treatment," said Professor Cynthia Bulik, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the US.

"BED afflicts people of all shapes and sizes. The somatic illnesses that we detected were not simply effects of being overweight or obese," Bulik clarified, in the study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

--- ENDS ---
In his final speech as U.S. president to the United Nations annual gathering of the world on Tuesday, Barack Obama stressed the importance of cooperation over isolation. He also brought leaders together at a summit where they made concrete pledges to assist refugees. From the United Nations, VOAs Margaret Besheer has the story.
The 71st United Nations General Assembly is underway in New York. The meeting will include a, first of its kind, summit of heads of state to address the migrant crisis in order to unite leaders behind a more humane approach. Straight Talk Africa host Shaka Ssali is joined by the President of Sierra Leone Ernest Bai Koroma, the Executive Director of the Africa Faith & Justice Network, Reverend Aniedi Okure, and VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer.
War-torn Afghanistan marked International Peace Day Wednesday amid hopes that a widely-anticipated peace deal with a key insurgent group might ease security challenges by encouraging others fighting alongside the Taliban to join the peace process.

Afghan officials have been negotiating for months with Hizb-e-Islami, an insurgent group led by controversial warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Despite repeated breakdowns, both sides are expected to finalize a draft agreement.

Some opposition to the deal reportedly has been inside the Afghan government. However a statement published earlier this week by President Ashraf Ghanis governing partner, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, said that he was not opposed to the peace agreement. That move has now set the stage for the government to sign the landmark truce likely to enhance its political credibility inside and outside Afghanistan.

A member of Hekmatyars negotiating team, Said Naqibullah Hashmi, while addressing a seminar in Kabul in connection with the International Peace Day disclosed that the peace agreement would be announced within 24 hours.

Taliban deal still distant

Despite the reported progress with Hekmatyar, there is widespread skepticism about whether the Taliban is ready to engage in a similar peace effort.

Afghan authorities say they are open to talks with all armed opposition groups but continue to blame neighboring Pakistans military and its spy agency for covertly support to the Taliban and its key ally, the Haqqani Network. They suspect Islamabad is trying to retain influence in Afghanistan to halt rival Indias growing influence there.

We don't expect the violence and terror to subside anytime time soon as the Taliban and affiliate groups are sustained with logistical, financial and material support from elements in Pakistan, Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani said Tuesday in Washington while delivering a public talk at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He again alleged that Pakistan's military offensive aimed at uprooting terrorist groups in the country's tribal regions are sparing some groups that launch attacks in Afghanistan. He said instead, the groups are still being helped to prolong hostilities across the border.

We know that any prospect for the success [of our peace initiative] is strictly contingent on the extent to which the government of Pakistan is willing and ready to clamp down on extremist groups while persuading other groups and individuals ready to renounce violence to engage in direct peace talks, Rabbani asserted.

But Pakistan vehemently rejects the Afghan allegations as an attempt to divert public attention from multiple challenges facing the Kabul government. Officials point to Pakistan's willingness to host around three million Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil for decades, saying insurgents hide among the refugees and use them as cover for their operations.

Pakistan sees risks in broad anti-militant push

Pakistans ambassador to the United Nations, Maleeha Lodhi, told last weeks Security Council meeting on Afghanistan that the international consensus on seeking a negotiated settlement of the Afghan war must be preserved to ensure for long term peace and stability in the strife-torn country.

A military solution [in Afghanistan] is even more unlikely now. Nor should anyone expect that Pakistan would fight Afghanistans war on its soil. Unfortunately, the Afghan parties themselves appear to have moved away from the international consensus that peace can only be achieved through negotiations. Neither side appears willing to talk except on their own terms, insisted Lodhi.

She reiterated that the NATO-led military operations for nearly 15 years in Afghanistan have not helped end the conflict. She said opening a front against the Afghan Taliban on Pakistani soil could force the insurgents to join hands with the anti-state militants hiding in Afghan border areas, threatening Islamabads years of counterterrorism gains.

Mutual counterterrorism allegations and intensified Taliban attacks in Afghanistan are at the center of tensions between Kabul and Islamabad, dampening hopes for cooperation to seek an early revival of peace talks between the Afghan government and the Islamist insurgent group.
Outside the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, a small group of demonstrators demanded the release of Sandy Phan-Gillis, the Chinese-Vietnamese-American businesswoman, who has been in jail in China for more than a year, accused of spying.

China plans to try Phan-Gillis on espionage charges sometime next month, but her supporters in Houston say she is innocent and possibly a pawn in a much larger game between the United States and China.

Her main champion has been her husband, Jeff Gillis, who has hired lawyers, lobbied with the U.S. State Department and tried to rally support for her cause in the United States.

Phan-Gillis daughter, Katherine Phan, came from her home in Seattle to attend Friday's demonstration.

I am here because I want my mom home, she told VOA. I want her back and to not be accused of something she has never done.

She says her mother has done much to bring the people of Houston and the people of China together, not just through business ties, but through cultural programs.

Kevin Klein, who has known both Jeff and Sandy for many years, stood on the curb in front of the consulate building waving placards as cars passed by on the busy street.

It is a shame to be in such a predicament, because, truly, I do not think she did anything wrong, he said.

Proof of innocence

The Sandy Phan-Gillis trial was set for this week, but Chinese authorities delayed its start for at least two weeks, likely pushing it into October.

Jeff Gillis views the delay somewhat favorably.

Having some more time for the defense lawyers is a good thing, he said, "... there is all kinds of evidence that we have that we want to make sure gets into trial.

He said he can prove that his wife was not even in China in 1996 when her accusers say she carried out espionage there.

We have abundant evidence that Sandy was in Houston at the time, he said. We have the evidence of her passport, which has no China visa in 1996, no exit stamp, no entry stamp.

The Chinese also accuse of her of trying to recruit Chinese Americans as spies.

One of the few Asian faces among the protesters was that of a Vietnamese-American named Mary who came to know Sandy Phan-Gillis through a social group and now worries for her safety.

She is in such a dire situation that is why I felt compelled to protest, she said. I am not the kind of person who typically protests anything.

Leaders of Houstons large Chinese and Vietnamese communities have been largely silent when it comes to this case.

Jeff Gillis said many of them are wary of getting involved, either because of business they do with China or because they are worried about reprisals against relatives who still live in the communist country.

Sympathy for the cause

Justin Gardiner is a local investment manager who never met Sandy, but was moved to join her cause by her husbands lonely battle.

It broke my heart that this guy has really been running this thing for the most part by himself, he said.

Using his business contacts, Gardiner hopes to increase support for the cause.

The court of public opinion will demand that the individuals who have the power here in the states (the USA) put pressure on those who have the power in China to do what is right and send her home, he said.

But U.S. influence on China these days is limited as the two nations spar over a variety of issues that vastly overshadow the predicament of one woman.

Secret trial

Jeff Gillis knows what his wife is up against in a country that is routinely accused of human rights violations.

It is still a secret trial, it is closed, there is nobody that is going to be allowed except Sandy and her defense lawyers, he said.

He is encouraged by the U.N. Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions declaration in July that his wifes rights under international law have been violated, and she should be immediately released.

He also cites examples of U.S. business executives, who he said, have had second thoughts about going to China on trade missions or business meetings.

They saw what happened to Sandy, and they decided that they are not going to go until they see what the outcome of Sandys case is, because they just dont want to take the risk for their people, he said.

But very few people, even in her hometown, know about Sandy Phan-Gillis. People coming to the consulate in Houston to obtain a visa were puzzled by the protest and confessed they knew nothing about the case.
Iraqi officials say tens of thousands of refugees from several parts of the country, including Anbar and Salahedin provinces, have returned to their homes after Islamic State militants were pushed out of large swathes of territory by Iraqi government forces and Shiite volunteer militiamen earlier this year.

Iraqi media showed video of dozens of people returning to Anbar provinces second largest city of Fallujah. Families that were forced to leave the city during fighting to expel Islamic State militants earlier this year are starting to trickle back in, albeit under extremely close government scrutiny.

Names were being examined closely at a government security facility at the only entrance to the city.

Fallujah police chief Colonel Latif Jamal told Arab media his forces were just doing their job.

He said that security measures are imposed temporarily until law and order is restored in the city and that security personnel are doing their jobs and are imposing the law fairly, on everyone.

The chief of the refugee return department at the Iraqi Ministry of Emigration and Displaced People, Hamoudi Mahjoub, indicated Tuesday 180,000 people had returned to their homes since their areas were cleared of IS. VOA could not independently confirm the figure.



Skepticism over motives

But many residents in the town of Habaniya east of the Anbar capital of Ramadi, complain that nothing works.

A middle-aged merchant said many residents of Habaniya have returned, despite false promises and exaggerated claims by the government, and they have paid the price for the ongoing refugee crisis, since there is no running water, no electricity and no services to speak of.

American University of Beirut political science professor Hilal Khashan tells VOA he is suspicious about the Shiite-dominated Iraqi governments motives in claiming that large numbers of displaced Sunnis have returned to their homes.

I think that the extent of the return of the refugees is grossly exaggerated. This announcement about the return of refugees is politically driven and characterized by expediency to pave the way for the beginning of the battle for Mosul and for the participation of [Shiite volunteer militiamen] in it.

Khashan argued the impending battle to recapture Mosul from IS is likely to be a major human tragedy, since about one-and-a-half million people are likely to leave the city as fighting to retake it gets under way. He thinks that the Iraqi government is trying to give the impression that refugees are being allowed to return to their homes in order to make the battle for Mosul appear more palatable.

Arab media reports that Islamic State has begun to dig a moat around Mosul to try and stave off an eventual assault by government forces. The Iraqi military and its Shiite militia allies are reported to be close to the center of the nearby town of Shirqat.
Ten people were killed in Bangladesh on Wednesday when a river bank collapsed on top of an overcrowded ferry and sank it, police said, and at least 11 people were missing.

Low-lying Bangladesh, with extensive inland waterways and slack safety standards, has an appalling record of ferry accidents, with casualties sometimes running into the hundreds.

On Wednesday, a steep river bank collapsed and a huge slab of mud fell onto the ferry while it was anchored, Ziaul Hasan, a police official in the southern district of Barisal, told Reuters.

"At least 11 people are still unaccounted for and the search operation is underway," he said, adding that the bodies of 10 people had been found.

"The ferry was overcrowded and carrying about 50 people," he said, adding some passengers managed to swim ashore after the accident.

Overcrowding is a common factor in Bangladeshi ferry accidents but little is done to improve safety even though the government vows to toughen regulations after every big accident.
Climate change and its pressure on agriculture to adapt is adding fresh urgency, say experts, for accurate data amid a fast changing agricultural landscape.

Statisticians and analysts say such issues surrounding climate change are also adding to the challenges posed by food security, poverty, undernourishment and sustainable development.

Globally work is underway, led by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to prepare regions for the World Program for the Census for Agriculture 2020 (WACA).

Officials and statisticians from 21 countries met in Bangkok this week as part of steps ahead of the 2020 global survey.

The global census will also assess aquaculture and capture fisheries and look at the impacts of greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions on agricultural activities.

The bottom-line for policy makers in agriculture and development, rests on the numbers, said FAO senior statistician, Mukesh Srivastava.

The statistics we accrue through this fundamental exercise can serve as building blocks to successful and sustainable agricultural policies and actions for countries, Srivastava said.

The goals and technologies used in the surveys will help to feed and improve the livelihoods of the regions growing population and ensure it meets growing demand, both in the region and worldwide, Srivastava said.

Pressure to reform

Thailands permanent secretary for the ministry of agriculture and cooperatives (MOAC), Theerapat Prayurasiddhi, said climate change is adding pressure on governments to reform policies, and speed up survey programs through applying information technology (IT).

Thailand, in its latest agricultural survey of 2013, made full use of iPad technology during the survey to record data, speeding up the transfer of information to a central data base.

At the same time, Thai authorities created a national agricultural map, or agri-map  assisting policy makers to support farmers to make better use of resources, such as soil type and less water dependent commodities.

Climate change will change many things, especially for agriculture and we need to adapt ourselves to stay with climate change. Some area [face] drought, some area flood. Right now we try to use agri-map to show all the data, Theerapat told VOA.

Development goals

The programs will be key in gauging whether the world remains on target to reach the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030. The global agreement on climate change reached in Paris in 2015 is a cornerstone for agriculture policy.

U.N. FAO Asia Pacific representative, Kundhavi Kadiresan, said statistics from the census will set policy guidelines for the U.N.s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

Commitments made at the Paris Agreement we need statistics. Its all about what was agreed and how are the countries making an effort to reach those targets, Kadiresan told VOA.

For the SDG Goal 2  a world free of hunger  thats an enormous target to achieve  and ambitious one too. But it is possible and thats why knowing the people where they are, the very poor, and undernourished helps governments to target their policies and programs accordingly, she said.

Emerging economies

Accurate data is also a challenge for emerging economies such as Bhutan and Timor Leste. For both countries, the survey will be the first comprehensive assessment of their respective agriculture sectors.

The Bhutan government is already aware of the potential future impact posed by climate change on water and agriculture systems, as well as environmental pressures raised by development.

Chendo Dakpa, chief research officer from Bhutans Ministry of Agriculture and Forests, said the country is on a learning curve after an initial census fell short technically due to human resource shortcomings.

Next years [census] will be vastly improved because the FAO is there to guide, Dakpa said.

The surveys main goals will be to apply the data as a baseline for the programs and projects over the next 10 years and also to see how we have fared so far from the first census, he said.

For Timor-Leste, which gained independence in 2002, the challenges range from topographical to infrastructure with its agricultural economy employing 80 percent of the active population from its total of 1.2 million people.

Elias Dos Santos Ferreira, director general of statistics in the ministry of finance, said it will be important to apply the data for the countrys future development.

When we have the data and we analyze and also disseminate at the national level, at the municipality level in the sub-region level and the village level, Santos Ferreira said.

We need to help them to use the data to do the plan. This is very important because we are the new country  theres still some limit to accessing the municipalities we need to educate them how to use the data, to do the better plan for the future, he said.

In countries, such as Bangladesh, facing high population densities, FAO officials say accurate, detailed information on food supplies is also vital.

Obtaining such data ensures policy makers are ready for any shocks, including prices, the weather  droughts, cyclones, which have the potential to knock a national food system off balance.
Russian and Syrian officials maintained Wednesday their chorus of denials of any involvement in an attack on a humanitarian aid convoy near Aleppo earlier this week that has prompted a suspension of all U.N. aid to Syria. But survivors and emergency responders insist the 31-truck convoy came under a 20-missile barrage and that shelling and missiles launched either from warplanes or helicopters continued for two hours.

Eyewitness accounts include testimony from the brother of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent official overseeing the convoy.



Ali Barakat, also an aid worker, said he threw himself to the ground when the first missile hit, killing his bother, Omar Barakat, a father of nine. Only hours before, Omar had completed the complicated paperwork and complex negotiations with rebels and the government to allow the convoy to move from a government-controlled district in the western half of Aleppo city to the rebel-held countryside.



Barakat told new agencies that more than 20 missiles hit the convoy Monday night in the small town of Uram al-Kubra. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 20 civilians were killed in an attack Russians officials claim was carried out by the rebels and not by their forces or the Syrian governments.

Russian planes spotted above convoy



U.S. officials have told reporters in Washington that two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the sky above the aid convoy at the precise time it was struck.



The Russian foreign ministry rejected the U.S. claim with resentment and indignation. Some Russian officials have suggested the convoy simply caught fire causing the destruction or severe damage to 18 out of the 31 trucks in the convoy.



But Russian and Syrian government explanations do not tally with what bystanders and rescue workers recount of an attack that left them shocked and despaired.



Hussein Badawi, who leads the Syrian Civil Defense in Uram al-Kubra, said the strikes came from helicopters and land-fired missiles. His rescue team arrived soon after the first missiles impacted and he told Reuters news agency that a bombardment was sustained for more than two hours.



There were fires, martyrs, wounded people. We were able to pull out four survivors and five dead bodies at first, Badawi said. The bombardment was continuous, continuous. The rescue teams werent even able to work. Those who arrived in ambulances couldnt come in.





Another witness, Mohammed Rasoul, said the convoy was erased from the face of the earth.



Purported video of the attack posted online shows panic among aid workers and first responders during the attack with several shouting immediately they were coming under an airstrike. Rebel forces have no warplanes or helicopters, a Pentagon spokesman pointed out Tuesday to reporters in Washington.



There are only three parties that fly in Syria: the coalition, the Russians and the Syrian regime. It was not the coalition. We dont fly over Aleppo. We have no reason to. We strike only ISIS, and ISIS is not there. We would leave it to the Russians and the Syrian regime to explain their actions, said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.



Moscow denies evidence



Russia defense ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told the TASS news agency there was no evidence the convoy was hit by missiles.

"Everything shown on the video is the direct consequence of the cargo catching fire, and this began in a strange way simultaneously with militants carrying out a massive offensive in Aleppo, he insisted.



Pictures and video from the scene, though, show crumpled trucks and buildings. And a video shared on the Internet by the Syrian Civil Defense shows not just one fire but several huge balls of fire and trucks aflame as well.



Konashenkov said also only the rebels knew the location of the convoy.

All information on the whereabouts of the convoy was available only to the militants controlling these areas, he said.



But a senior UN official in Gaziantep, Turkey, told VOA the details of the convoys route was known to the Syrian government, with the GPS coordinates being shared. The names of all the drivers and officials were given to the Syrian government as well as the planned route and where loading and unloading would take place, he said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to brief the media. He added that Syrian army soldiers observed the loading of the convoy.



And clearly there was aerial monitoring of the convoy as it arrived in Uram al-Kubra  on Tuesday the Russian defense ministry released surveillance footage from a Russian drone of the convoy to show what officials claimed was a rebel vehicle alongside the aid trucks. Since the release of the footage, the Russian defense ministry said they lost track of the convoy for some time.





Major repercussions



The attack on the aid convoy will likely have major repercussions at a time the United States is trying to revive an ill-fated cease-fire thats been short-lived and violated within days of it starting on September 12, said Western diplomats.

I dont see how this can be put back on track, a senior European diplomat told VOA. The fundamentals for a lasting truce are just not there  the attack has destroyed what little trust remained between Washington and Moscow and aside from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry there is little appetite to start again with a cease-fire.



Other Western officials are not so ready to call an end to efforts to revive a cessation of hostilities. After meetings in New York late Tuesday, the U.N.s special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said he hoped the targeting of the food convoy would act as a game-changerabout how to reinstall the cessation of hostilities [and] humanitarian aid.



The cease-fire is not dead. That I can tell you, the Swedish envoy told reporters.
When NASA scientists talk about finding proof of life beyond earth they often zero in on the term "biosignatures." These are the clues that can be spotted when looking at another planet that strongly suggest 'life' is happening.

Our planet is a great example, according to Victoria Meadows, an astronomer at the University of Washington who spoke with VOA. If aliens were looking at us, she says, "life would be obvious to a distant observer looking at the gases in our atmosphere..."

Hold on a minute!

But it's never that simple. Through her work at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), her team has also shown that "there are a number of different possible ways that a planet, often interacting with the host star, can produce oxygen in its atmosphere without life."

Her point is that as we get better and better at looking for signs of life beyond earth, we're also going to have to get better at making sure it is actually life and not some random geologic process.

A new study published this week in the Journal Nature Communications offers more proof of the need to take a cautious approach.

A team from the University of Colorado Boulder studying giant "mineral deposits that form on ice surfaces" in the Canadian High Arctic found "sulfur-metabolizing organisms" living on the ice. Samples of the sulfur deposits were sent back to the lab and the team looked for 'biosignatures' that could help scientists look for life on Mars or the Jovian moon Europa, or even farther out.

The team found a lot of what they called "extracellular structures" in the sulfur.

But they also discovered, to their surprise, that these microstructures "are capable of self-assembling..." In other words, what they thought was definitive proof of life was a non-biological process that just looked like life.

"It was very disconcerting," according to Julie Cosmidis, the lead author "...to see that the carbon-sulfur structures appear in our tests without biological activity..."

A cautionary tale

There's a moral to this story. It's that as scientists find more and more planets like earth orbiting in our galaxy, the chance that life exists on one of them becomes become more likely. In fact, a number of researchers we spoke with, like Alan Boss from NASA, are optimistic we'll make that discovery in the next few decades.

But this new research suggests it won't be easy.

In fact, scientists will have to assume that any biosignatures they find aren't biological at all, because - according to Alexis Templeton from CU Boulder - "we can create all sorts of biogenic-like materials that have the right shape, structure and chemistry to match natural materials we assume are produced biologically.

And Rory Barnes, who also works at the VPL, says finding biosignatures is likely going to be the easy part. The hard part, he says, will be ruling out "non-biological sources," when we find them.

Guess we'll just have to figure out a way to visit and see for ourselves.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is asking the public for help in locating two men who allegedly found a piece of luggage on a New York sidewalk that contained an explosive device that may be tied to the suspect in Saturday's bombings in New York and New Jersey.

On Wednesday the FBI issued a statement and a photo of two men that was taken on Saturday, September 17, in the same hour an explosive device detonated. The FBI said the men took the luggage, which was located only four blocks or so from the New York bombing site, and left the device behind. That device did not detonate.

Federal investigators said during a news conference Wednesday the men are wanted as witnesses only.

Federal investigators said earlier the suspect in Saturday's bombings in New York and New Jersey has been charged with use of a weapon of mass destruction in the weekend attacks. Investigators said he bought components on eBay and used as triggering devices cell phones purchased from a store 500 meters from an address he once listed as his home.



Multiple federal charges

The details are contained in criminal complaints made public Tuesday spelling out multiple federal charges against 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami. Most of the charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Authorities arrested Rahami on Monday after an exchange of gunfire with police that left him and two officers wounded.

According to the court documents, investigators believe Rahami used an eBay account with the username "ahmad rahimi" to buy citric acid, a circuit board, electric igniters and hundreds of ball bearings between June 20 and August 10. The items were shipped to a business in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where Rahami worked until September 12.

Ball bearings were found in two pressure cooker bombs placed four blocks apart in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York late Saturday. One of them exploded, injuring 29 people, while the other was recovered intact. Investigators said the second bomb had "numerous" electric igniters.

That second device was tested for fingerprints, and the criminal complaint said all 12 prints found were matches for Rahami. The documents say his prints were also found on items inside of a backpack that was discovered late Sunday at a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey, just outside of New York. The bag contained multiple explosive devices, including one that blew up as police tried to disarm it with a robot.

Authorities also tied Rahami to a bomb that blew up in a trash can in Seaside Park, New Jersey, early Saturday.

That link involved one of the cell phones that investigators said were shipped last year to a store in Perth Amboy near the address that Rahami provided as his home in a 2012 passport application. They said a second phone shipped to the same place was used in the bomb that blew up in Chelsea.

A third phone, one found with the other Chelsea bomb, was once registered to one of Rahami's family members, the documents said.



Surveillance video

Investigators also said they used surveillance video to tie Rahami to the Chelsea bombs, with cameras putting him near the explosion site about 37 minutes before the blast and near where the other bomb was found two minutes after the first one went off. That second video, they said, showed him pulling a suitcase and then a short time later walking without it.

The documents contain some pieces of writing from a journal found on Rahami when he was arrested. The messages include praise of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011, and "Brother Osama Bin Laden," the former head of al-Qaida who was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2011.

"Inshallah the sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION," one message reads.

The FBI said Tuesday it assessed Rahami's activities in 2014 after his father told agents he was concerned about his son's possible involvement with extremists.

The agency found insufficient evidence to warrant further investigation.

Rahami was born in Afghanistan, came to the U.S. at age 7 and became a naturalized American citizen.
Biswas, who is under 7-day police custody was arrested on charges of hurting religious sentiments, hate speech and posting offensive messages through communication services.

By India Today Web Desk: A Bengal-based blogger was arrested last week for criticising Islam on social media.

Blogger Tarak Biswas was arrested after TMC leader Sanaullah Khan filed a complaint against him. The blogger was arrested on Thursday night.

7-DAY POLICE CUSTODY FOR BISWAS



Biswas, who is under 7-day police custody was arrested on charges of hurting religious sentiments, hate speech and posting offensive messages through communication services.

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"Sanaullah Khan had filed FIR against Biswas for hurting religious sentiments. Based on the complaint filed, we arrested him. Presently he is in police custody," said a police official.

A rights group has demanded immediate release of Biswas, stating that a person has every right to express himself.

SUPPORT POURS IN FOR BISWAS

Following Biswas' arrest, lot of support has poured in for him over social media sites.

Tarak Biswas' arrest has once again fuelled the debate over freedom of speech and expression in the country.

Also read:

Universities must be the bastions of free speech and expression, says President Pranab Mukherjee



--- ENDS ---
The Turkish authorities are continuing their crackdown on followers of Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is being blamed for a failed military coup attempt. With tens of thousands of people arrested, opposition parties are starting to voice concern that the crackdown is turning into a witch hunt.



According to the latest official figures, more than 100,000 people have been removed from their state jobs and 60,000 detained or arrested since July's abortive coup. The firings and arrests are primarily aimed at followers of Gulen.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is promising no let up in the crackdown. No country or region will be safe for members of the Gulen movement, we will hunt them all down, he told reporters Monday.

Experts say Gulen has hundreds of thousands of supporters in Turkey, who have built a wide network of businesses and private schools and supporters across the country. The government has said it is determined to break up this network, which it accuses of not only supporting the coup attempt, but running a parallel state that favors its supporters and crushes opponents.

Gulen, who lives in the United State, denies all the allegations.

WATCH: Gulen denies Erdogan's claims of coup involvement

Erdogan has said that Turkish citizens have a duty to report friends or family they suspect of being Gulen followers. A pro-government TV station has set up a telephone line for people to report their suspicions.

In an opinion poll conducted via social media last month, 90 percent of the respondents said they backed the crackdown on Gulen and his followers. That popular consensus extends into politics, with the main opposition CHP party in the forefront of supporting a crackdown on Gulen followers, even claiming it should have been done much earlier.

Popular opinion shifting



But cracks in the political consensus are appearing, with questions over its scale and motivation growing.

Youll break the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people if you carry out these prosecutions with the feeling of revenge and hatred, warned CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

The CHP claims it has received complaints from more than 30,000 people about the ongoing purge. The scale of the complaints has led to the party set up a telephone hot line and email desk.

The crackdown is being carried out under emergency rule, which has suspended most of the legal checks on the authorities' actions.

"This is a witch hunt, said Kadri Gursel, a political columnist for Turkeys Cumhuriyet newspaper. He believes the government has lost control.

To please Erdogan, people do compete against each other to hunt more Gulenists, because this purge, this cleansing, is not done according to institutional rules, and due process does not exist," he said. "There are no institutions left in Turkey. There is only fear.



Fear has spilled over into violence. Turkish media reported last week that a police officer shot dead a local official of the ruling AKP, after the official accused the police officer of being a Gulen sympathizer during an argument over who was behind the July coup attempt.

Meanwhile, government ministers have reportedly expressed concern that the crackdown is being used to settle personal scores.

Presidential adviser Ayse Sozen Usluer acknowledged such concerns, but said the country is facing exceptional dangers and will "soon" return to "normal."



Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has announced an appeals process, through which people can challenge dismissals and wrongful prosecutions. But how independent that process will be remains unclear. Observers point out a key test of the governments intentions will be whether it honors its commitment not to extend emergency, rule which comes up for renewal next month.
The second day of the U.N. General Assembly annual meeting kicked off Wednesday with speeches from leaders of China, Japan, Ukraine, the European Union, Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others.

Forty-two leaders are to speak at the 71st General Assembly meeting in New York by the end of the day.

U.N. Secretary General Ban ki Moon cited the day as the International Day of Peace, calling on warring parties around the world to observe a 24-hour cease fire.

Chinese Premier of the State Council Li Keqiang spoke during the morning session, stating China is committed to peace and opening "its door even wider to the outside world".

But on the topic of the disputed South China Sea, Li said China encouraged more discussion, and that it is and has always been committed to peace.

"China also, maintains that disputes concerning territory and maritime rights and interests should be resolved through dialogue and negotiation. We need to expand the common ground to regional peace and stability," he said. "China has all along worked for the peaceful settlement of the hotspot issues."

Afghan Vice President Sarwar Danesh also spoke, reminding world leaders the country still struggles with the constant threat of terrorism, and in particular, seeks to protects journalists.

"Afghanistan requests the United Nations to appoint a special representative for the safety of journalists, focused on the protecting all journalists including those serving in Afghanistan," he said.

Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi and long-time Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe also spoke during the morning session.

Syria, refugee crisis

Many of Tuesday's speeches focused on Syria and the refugee crisis. President Obama said there is no ultimate military victory to be won in Syria and said a diplomatic solution must be pursued.

Obama also warned that the embers of extremism will continue to burn in the world, but that the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall and prevent it from affecting society.

This year marks both Obama and Ban's last U.N. addresses. Obama will leave office in January, and after nearly a decade of leading the international body Ban will step down by yearend.
It was one of those life-altering experiences that happen by chance. Peace Corps volunteer Chase Adam, traveling through Costa Rica by bus, stopped in Watsi, where a woman got on, soliciting donations to pay for her sons health care. People would do this all the time there," Adam recalled. "Theyd get on the bus and ask for donations, but they very rarely raised money. And I quickly noticed how this woman was getting money from almost everyone on the bus."

He wondered why.

And then I found out she had her sons medical record with her. It was in a red folder and she was passing it around the bus, and that really resulted in the trust of all these local passengers. So, I remember making a donation - she got off the bus - and then a few minutes later just thinking: Why isnt there a website for this? Why isnt there a website that makes it really easy for people like this woman to raise money for healthcare they cant afford?'

Healthcare website

So when his Peace Corps service ended in 2011, Adam set one up, and named it after the town where he got the inspiration. Following the model of crowd-funding websites like KIVA, which gives money directly to entrepreneurs to start businesses, Watsi funds medical care. "You go on the website and see photos and stories of patients who need health care, but cant afford it. And, you can donate as little as five dollars and directly fund the cost of their life-changing medical procedures.

Watsi works with a global network of well-respected, non-profit medical organizations. They identify patients in financial need, help them upload their information to the website, and provide the care once it's funded. The doctors and health professionals are in nearly two dozen countries, most of the procedures are for patients in Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala, Nepal and Cambodia.

Adam says the criteria for receiving medical help are simple. "The procedures must cost less than 1500 US dollars and they have to significantly improve the patients standard of living. These are life-changing or life-saving procedures, like cataract surgery, heart operations, cancer treatments, club foot repair, setting bone fractures, and healing burns.

So far, Adam says proudly, Watsi has raised some $7 million for patient care. "Approximately 20,000 donors on our website have contributed to approximately 9,000 patients in 23 countries."

Watsi has a policy of what Adam calls radical transparency. One hundred percent of donations goes to medical providers to cover patient procedures, and donors can follow their contributions from start to finish, as well as their impact. They can also inspect every detail of Watsis financials. The organization's operational costs and all the money it takes to run a high quality program come from a group of fifteen foundations and wealthy individuals.

"When donors can see more into how things work - and we share negative updates as well as positive updates - it builds trust with people, Adam says.

"I'm excited about recovering"

For the past twelve years, Tibesigwa had been living with debilitating uterine fibroids. The Kenya widow and mother needed $250 for a hysterectomy, so she could regain strength to work, potentially start a small business, and raise her family. Watsi co-founder Grace Garey, who helps produce patient stories on the web, says Tibesigwa's surgery was a success, and shes expected to make a full recovery.

Garey read a note Tibesigwa sent to Watsi after the surgery: "I feel much better, although I have pain on the operating area. Im excited about recovering and living without abdominal pain and bleeding. I have six children; five of them dont live with me. In the past months when theyve been coming to visit me, theyve always found me in bed. When I recover, they will find me up or even working. I am sure this will give them joy. Thank you for the help youve given me. God bless you, abundantly!

Another of Gareys responsibilities is to gather patient data: When is a patient admitted to a hospital? What tests are given, and what are their results? What procedure is based on those tests? Outcomes of those procedures? If they are not successful, why not? Based on that information," she says, "weve been able in the past to identify anomalies in data and be able to ask medical partners up front, Hey, weve noticed a surge in unsuccessful outcomes in cervical cancer cases. Is something going on here that we should be looking into, where we can give you extra support?"

That attention to detail has helped Watsi identify best practices and share them among their partners. Garey points to one organization in Guatemala thats doing what she calls 'ground-breaking malnutrition work.' "Through the data were collecting on each individual patient they support, were able to understand some of the mechanisms and strategies and thinking that go into the program that theyre doing thats been so successful and we recently connected them with another partner of ours in the Philippines which is looking to revamp and make stronger their own malnutrition program.

Healthcare for all

Watsi's mission is to provide healthcare for every person in the world. Chase Adam's efforts to do that made him the San Francisco Chronicle newspapers Visionary of the Year for 2016. As the organization works to expand into more countries, his vision moves a step closer to reality.
The international rights group Human Rights Watch publicly criticized a popular British travel blogger for posting a fun and positive review of his recent visit to North Korea, while ignoring what the repressive state does not want the world to see, the countrys widespread poverty and repression.

Louis Cole probably did not expect the level of public anger he would ignite when he posted a series of videos last month about his 10-day trip to North Korea on his Internet travel video blog called Fun for Louis.

Positive things

Cole says he was purposely trying to focus on the beautiful positive things in the video posts that show him at a water park, surfing and sightseeing throughout the country, while not emphasizing that North Korean government officials limited the groups access to only approved people and places.

I am not an investigative reporter journalist. I dont really do political commentary and there are other places on the Internet that you can go to, to find those sort of things, said Cole during a follow-up video about the trip.

Cole has been depicted in the media as either a clueless or willing pawn being manipulated by North Korea to improve its image. The travel blogger had to refute allegations that he was paid by the Pyongyang government to make a promotional video.

Another video blogger Philip DeFranco ridiculed Coles portrayal of North Korea on YouTube saying, its like if you go into a giant mansion and there's like horrible things happening in a ton of the rooms, like people are starving to death, there's rapes, there's murders. But your guided tour only takes you to like the indoor heated pool, and the room with the Xbox.

Harsh reality

Writing in the Seoul newspaper Korea Times this week, Human Rights Watch Deputy Director for Asia Phil Robertson contrasted Cole's picturesque and friendly depiction of North Korea with the documented systematic atrocities that occur in this secretive and authoritarian state, where the media is strictly controlled and individual rights are severely limited.

Our concern was that this guy, who has a huge following on the Internet of over 2 million people on his YouTube and Twitter accounts, was portraying such a relentlessly positive message about North Korea that is completely out of line with what we know about human rights abuses there, Robertson told VOA.

In 2014, the U.N. General Assembly voted to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The referral was based on a U.N. Commission of Inquiry report documenting a network of political prisons in the country and widespread human rights violations, including: forced labor, torture, enslavement, rape and murder.

The resolution has stalled in the Security Council, where North Koreas allies China and Russia would likely veto the measure if brought to a vote.

Making amends

Cole has issued a sort of apology, saying he does not endorse North Koreas ideology and that he should have encouraged his audience to do their own research about conditions in the country.

The assumption I made, which may have been wrong of me, was that people watching my North Korea blogs would have already had a broader perspective on North Korea, he said.

The British blogger also defended his video of the positive side of North Korea as a form of engagement and a way to build peaceful relationships with the isolated state.

Robertson says Cole was not building bridges. He was just being used.

I think the government is getting a lot of free publicity of a very uncritical sort from a guy who didnt do his homework before he went there, and then acted all shocked and surprised when people called him out on it, Robertson said.

Arbitrary arrest

Coles enthusiastic travel blog also downplayed the risk of arbitrary arrest in North Korea, especially for American tourists.

In January, a University of Virginia student was arrested in Pyongyang for taking a poster off a wall in his hotel, while on an organized tour. He was later sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

The government in Pyongyang has in the past used detained Americans to extract high-profile visits from Washington.

At least 14 U.S. citizens have been detained in North Korea in the past 10 years.

In April, the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning advising American citizens to avoid North Korea.
In the Kurdish village of Goma Seydo, high in the mountains of Turkeys Erzurum province, life hasn't changed much in centuries.

Work revolves around caring for the livestock and shepherding them onto new pastures. The houses are built of stone or mud brick . Animal dung is piled in heaps around the village, ready to burn on stoves and open fires when the harsh winter sets in.



For the young men of the village, the lure of a new life in Europe is strong.



Half of the people from this village are over there already. Our friends and relatives are already in France and I would like to go there to join them, says 24-year-old Tugay Korkmaz.



In total more than 100 people from the village now live in Europe, almost half the population. In the 1990s, dozens of boys left the village for France or Germany at the height of the Kurdish PKK insurgency against the Turkish state and tried to claim asylum.



Most failed, but stayed on illegally and married to gain citizenship, later divorcing and re-marrying Turkish women, before returning with their new families to Europe.



A better life



Yavuz Ozer, also 24 years old, moved to France when he was 11. He returned to his home village earlier this month for the Muslim festival of Eid.



Life is comfortable there, there is work and we have jobs," he said. "I have been here for a week now, but I could not live here anymore. I am already bored.



The deal struck between Turkey and Europe in March aimed at stemming the flow of migrants, includes visa-free travel for Turkish citizens to Europe. Keremi Sarac says that would prompt many more people to leave villages like Goma Seydo.



If the visa system is lifted, many people here would go to Europe. Those who have work here and a good profession, they would stay. The rest would leave, he said.



Saracs mother Dilsah has seen four of her children leave the village for a new life in Europe. She too harbors dreams of travel.



I tell my children that I want to go to see them. I want to go to Izmir, and to France. We will see what happens, she said.



Ankara has threatened to tear up the migrant deal if Europe does not grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel in the coming months. Brussels has delayed the move, demanding changes to Turkeys sweeping anti-terror laws, while also voicing concerns over the crackdown on the opposition following the failed military coup in July.



In the peaceful hills of Goma Seydo, the people are watching developments carefully. Many sense an opportunity for a new life.


The deal struck in March between Turkey and the EU to stem the flow of migrants envisages visa-free travel for Turkish citizens to Europe. Brussels has repeatedly delayed the move because of concerns over Turkey's broad anti-terrorism laws and its crackdown after the attempted coup earlier this year. But as Henry Ridgwell reports, many Turks living in the rural east of the country sense an opportunity to escape poverty and start a new life once visa free travel is allowed.
Iraq's military closed in on Wednesday on the centre of Shirqat, a northern town held by Islamic State seen as a stepping stone in the campaign to recapture the jihadists' stronghold of Mosul.

The army, backed by local police and Sunni Muslim tribal fighters, have taken 12 nearby villages since launching the operation on Tuesday morning, said Ali Dawdah, the mayor of Shirqat currently based in Erbil.

With air support from a U.S.-led coalition, the troops are now less than 3 km (2 miles) from the town center, according to Dawdah, who said he expected the campaign to be concluded within 48 hours.

Five security personnel and one civilian have been killed in the battle for Shirqat, where they face hazards including roadside bombs, mortars and snipers, said the mayor and a source in the Salahuddin Operations Command which oversees military operations in the area.

Shirqat, on the Tigris river 100 km south of Mosul, has been surrounded by Iraqi troops and Iranian-backed Shi'ite Muslim militias allied to the government but so far the militias have not participated in the operation.

Tens of thousands of civilians are thought to be trapped in Shirqat and surrounding villages, which have been under Islamic State control since the group seized a third of Iraqi territory in 2014.

Officials have warned for months of a humanitarian disaster inside, where residents living under Islamic State's harsh rule say food supplies have dwindled and prices soared.

There has not been a large-scale displacement of civilians so far. Iraqi authorities hope the course of the battle will allow most residents to stay at home to avoid creating a humanitarian crisis as forces move towards Mosul.

Residents of Shukran and Houri villages told Reuters by phone they had begun waving white flags above their houses on Tuesday evening as the military advanced, but Islamic State punished them with 50 lashes each.

The behavior of the fighters and the treatment of Shirqat's residents will be closely watched by the million or so Sunni residents of Mosul, who have a historic mistrust of the forces of successive Shi'ite-led governments in Baghdad.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have said the push on Mosul could begin in October, though there are concerns that not enough planning has been done for how to manage Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, if and when Islamic State is kicked out.
Air raids hit several rebel-held areas of Aleppo overnight Wednesday, marking the heaviest strikes the city has seen in months, just hours after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for an end to warplanes flying over key areas of Syria.

Opposition activists immediately pointed the finger at Syrian government, though officials have yet to comment on the reports. Heavy fighting flared up along the outskirts of Aleppo Thursday morning following the air strikes.

Air raids in East Aleppo earlier Wednesday killed 12 civilians and presented a major challenge to the cease-fire brokered between the United States and Russia earlier this month.

If the deteriorating cease-fire in Syria is to be salvaged, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday, warplanes must stop flying over "key areas" of the country, including places where humanitarian agencies are trying to deliver food and medicine.

After flagrant violations of the Syrian cease-fire agreement forged earlier this month by the United States and Russia  in particular, the deadly airstrike that destroyed an aid convoy Monday, which the U.S. has blamed on Russia  Kerry said all sides in the conflict are at "a moment of truth."

The top American diplomat's proposal was worded diplomatically, not singling out Russian or Syrian planes, which have been blamed for most of the deadly attacks on civilian areas during the past year of war. Kerry said it would apply to all aircraft in specified areas of Syria, including planes flown by the United States and its coalition partners.

Kerry made his appeal to a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council, saying a limit on flights is crucial to reining in the bloodshed in Syria.

"We must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," Kerry said. "And if that happens, there is a chance of giving credibility back to this process."

Russians dismissive

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who had addressed the Security Council before Kerry, did not immediately respond to the American proposal, although his spokeswoman said later the U.S. was proposing "nothing ... a show."



WATCH: Kerry slams Russia for not adhering to cease-fire pre-conditions

Kerry said his aim is to "prevent Syria from doing what it has done so often in the past, which is to attack civilian targets with the excuse that it is just going after" terrorists and extremists.

Nusra and the so-called Islamic State are the two terrorist groups excluded from the truce in Syria, and the U.S. and Russia are supposed to be cooperating with one another to defeat them.

Kerry said he wanted to emphasize to Russia that Washington still supports finding a diplomatic solution. "The United States continues to believe there is a way forward that, although rocky, difficult and uncertain, can provide the most viable path out of the carnage," he said.

'Even more suffering' possible

A spokesman for the main Syrian opposition group, the High Negotiations Committee, welcomed Kerry's proposal for the grounding of Syrian air forces, which are the leading killers of Syrian civilians." But the spokesman, Bassma Kodmani, said the group was deeply skeptical of "agreements with Russia, which has shown a consistent willingness to violate deals and to flagrantly violate international law."

Kerry said those who believe the crisis in Syria cannot get any worse are "dead wrong," and that while the current cease-fire plan is imperfect, there has not been any "remotely realistic" alternative.

"If we decide not to do what it takes to make this work, this cessation of hostilities," Kerry said, "then make no mistake, my friends, the next time we convene here, we are going to be facing a Middle East with even more refugees, with more dead, with more displaced, with more extremists, with more suffering on a greater scale. That is a certainty."

Russia's 'parallel universe'

The U.S. envoy also took aim at his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, who criticized the United States during his remarks to the Security Council. Kerry said he sometimes feels that Lavrov is in a "parallel universe" when it comes to the facts on the ground in Syria.

While the United States admitted within hours Saturday that it had accidentally hit Syrian military personnel, killing and injuring dozens, Russia has changed its story repeatedly about an attack Monday on an aid convoy that resulted in 20 deaths, eventually suggesting the cargo trucks carrying 100 tons of aid had simply caught fire. Witnesses said the aid convoy was hit by about 20 missiles, and photographs showed the burned wreckage was punctured by hundreds of large-caliber bullets, likely fired by either warplanes or helicopters.

"The trucks, and the food, and the medicine, just spontaneously combusted?" Kerry said in anger and disbelief. "This is not a joke; we are in serious business here." He challenged the Russians to be as truthful as the U.S. was when it admitted its role in Saturday's airstrike.

After the Security Council meeting, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told reporters there were "only two forces capable of having carried out that strike [against the aid convoy], flying in that area. They are the Syrians and the Russians, and we have our doubts about the Syrian capability to fly at night. So you are left with a pretty strong conclusion."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also spoke at Wednesday's Security Council meeting, emphasizing the world is at a "make-or-break moment" in Syria.

"We must remain determined that the cease-fire will be revived," he said, noting that "well over 300,000 Syrians" have been killed in the nearly six-year-long conflict.
An oil tanker left the Libyan port of Ras Lanouf for Italy early on Wednesday with the first crude export cargo from the terminal since at least late 2014, boosting hopes of reviving Libya's battered oil output.

The port manager of Ras Lanouf said a second tanker was preparing to load at the terminal, one of four seized on Sept. 11-12 by eastern Libyan forces loyal to military leader Khalifa Hifter.

Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) has welcomed a promise by Hifter's forces to allow the NOC to control the ports. It said on Wednesday that national production had risen to between 350,000 and 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) from less than 300,000 bpd earlier this month, following the change of control at the ports.

The NOC said last week it would begin exports immediately from Ras Lanouf and Zueitina, and that it would start them as soon as possible from Es Sider. Exports have continued from Brega, the fourth port that was seized and that had remained open.

Together, the ports have a capacity of nearly 800,000 barrels per day (bpd), though Ras Lanouf and Es Sider have been damaged in clashes and Brega has been operating at below its maximum capacity.

Any boost in production through the ports could also benefit the United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli as it tries to unite rival armed factions and stabilize the economy, though Hifter has so far rejected the GNA.

Armed conflict and disputes have left Libya's oil installations under the control of different factions and cut output to a fraction of the 1.6 million bpd it produced before an uprising toppled Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

Haftar's forces seized the ports from a rival armed group that had controlled them for more than two years, and fended off a counter attack on Sunday.

Hifter, a former Gadhafi ally, is a deeply divisive figure whom many in western Libya suspect of plotting to take power nationally.

Factions that support him have tried to export oil from eastern Libya independently, bypassing the NOC in Tripoli, though they have also allowed oil shipments for NOC Tripoli to continue from the eastern port of Hariga.

After Hifter's forces seized the ports the U.S. and major European powers called for them to withdraw, cautioning that they would move to block any shipments that took place outside the authority of the GNA.

The Seadelta tanker that left Ras Lanouf on Wednesday loaded with 700,000 barrels of crude and the second tanker that was preparing to load were both arranged before Hifter's forces seized the ports.
A Brazilian judge has ordered former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to stand trial on charges of corruption and money laundering.

Judge Sergio Moro ruled Tuesday that Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2011, will be tried for allegedly accepting $1.15 million in bribes connected to a sweeping kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras. Also on trial will be the former first lady and six others.

Lula's hand-chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, was found guilty of breaking budget rules and was dismissed from the presidency last month.

Rousseffs successor, former Vice President Michel Temer, has pulled the country to the political and economic right, trying to boost Brazil out of its worst economic recession since the 1930s.

In explaining his decision, Moro said Silva and others benefited from renovations at a beachfront apartment in the coastal city of Guaruja in Sao Paulo state. The improvements were made by the construction company OAS, which is one of those involved in the kickback scheme at Petrobras.

Lula has denied all charges against him, but the decision may prevent Brazil's power player from making a political comeback in the 2018 presidential campaign. It could also derail any hopes the Workers' Party (PT) had of returning to power, according to some experts.

Despite the corruption allegations facing the PT and several of its former coalition parties, the most recent polls have shown Lula remains a leading candidate for 2018.

Lula was charged with three counts each of corruption, which carries a maximum sentence of 16 years per count, and money laundering, with a possible sentence of up to 10 years per count. If found guilty, however, the sentence would be determined by the judge.
Bombay High Court has given a green signal for the demolition of illegal shrines in the next three months, but it will be passing it's judgement in this issue on October 1.

By Vidya : The Maharashtra government still has about 1200 illegal shrines in the state to demolish and that is why sought time of about three more months to demolish them. Public pleader Abhinandan Vaigyani told the court that officers in state were busy at first in drought and then later in floods so the illegal shrines could not be demolished on time even as the Bombay high court set deadline were crossed. This elicited a smirk from the court which nevertheless extended the deadline by three months and asked state to complete the demolition in the meantime.

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The division bench of Justice Abhay Oka and Justice A A Sayed was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by NGO Society for Fast Justice which had alleged that the number of illegal shrines across the state was increasing. During the course if hearing of this petition state government had in 2015 passed a government regulation (GR) according to which state had to demolish all the illegal religious structures constructed after September 29, 2009, within a period of nine months i.e. till August 17, 2016. They said that the government regulation also provided an outer limit of two years for the demolition of structures built before September 29, 2009.

However during successive hearings the division bench was only disappointed with the progress made by state government in implementing it's own rules even as the state reasoned that the locals were protesting and thus it led to the delay. However even as the court asked to go ahead with demolition of illegal shrines for the next three months, it will be passing it's judgement in the issue on October 1.

--- ENDS ---
Hundreds of migrants trying to make their way to Britain from Calais in northern France clashed with French riot police on Wednesday, Reuters witnesses and police said.

Police used tear-gas grenades and led charges to disperse migrants trying to make their way to the approach road for Calais port.

The clashes took place not far from where a British-financed wall is being built to seal off the road, where migrants frequently try to jump on trucks bound for Britain.

Earlier on Wednesday, former President Nicolas Sarkozy was in Calais campaigning to return to the presidency in an election in April, promising to be particularly tough on immigration.

Sarkozy, who signed an agreement in 2003 that effectively put the British border on mainland France, said during the visit it was not up to France "to be England's border guards," and he called for the deal to be renegotiated.

Under the current arrangement, thousands of migrants fleeing war or poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have built a shanty town near Calais known as "the Jungle," which French authorities are currently dismantling.
President Barack Obama hosted the first Leaders Summit on Refugees in New York City on Tuesday, saying the world is facing a crisis of epic proportions.

"We are here because right now in crowded camps in cities around the world there are families from Darfur in Chad, Palestinians in Lebanon, Afghans in Pakistan, Colombians in Ecuador, whove endured years, in some cases, decades, as refugees surviving on rations and aid and who dream of someday, somehow, having a home of their own, the president said.

Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini, a member of the refugee Olympic team, introduced Obama. She told her familys story, saying they were refugees on a boat, and that when the engine failed, she and others had to get out and pull the boat by swimming.

Just a year later, Mardini said, she had the chance to compete in the Rio Olympics on the refugee team. She offered this message: It is not a choice to flee from your home. ... Refugees can achieve great things if given the opportunity.



Praise for Syrian refugee, olympian

Obama told Mardini he could not be prouder of her, "for your courage and your resilience and the great example that you're setting for children everywhere  including your 8-year-old sister, who I know must look up to you. He said she was the face of so many young girls and boys who have had to flee their homes.

The president said the worst global refugee crisis since World War II is a test of the international communitys ability to stop conflicts. He said so many of the worlds refugees come from three countries ravaged by war: Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. Obama said the global refugee crisis poses a security threat because of its enormous scale.

When nations with their own internal difficulties find themselves hosting massive refugee populations for years on end, it can risk more instability, he said.

But the president implicitly rejected criticism by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress.



Many Republican leaders have called for a halt to the admission of refugees from Iraq, Syria and other countries embroiled in conflict, saying they pose a security threat. The president said the U.S. has one of the worlds most exhaustive vetting procedures in place for would-be refugees.

Test of humanity

Obama said he believed the refugee crisis was a test of the worlds common humanity, adding that people simply could not avert their eyes from displaced families.

To slam the door in the face of these families would betray our deepest values," he said. "It would deny our own heritage as nations, including the United States of America, that have been built by immigrants and refugees. And it would be to ignore a teaching at the heart of so many faiths that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Obama was joined in hosting the summit by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and leaders from Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Jordan, Mexico and Sweden.

Companies pledge help

Earlier Tuesday, the White House announced that 51 private U.S. companies had pledged to invest $650 million to help refugees around the world.

The companies include Airbnb, IBM, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Chobani, Uber, Ikea and Microsoft. They have vowed to provide various types of in-kind support to refugees, including Chromebook computers from Google, plus educational, job training and employment opportunities.

Obama had issued a call to action to government agencies, other world leaders and private companies to join together to make a difference in the lives of refugees.

Ban also paid tribute to Mardini, saying she might not have won a medal at the Olympics but was a winner nonetheless. He called on world leaders to show their compassion to the 21 million people across the world like Mardini who are classified as refugees, asking, "If not us, then who can do it?"
While there may be conflicts, poverty and disease in Africa, President Barack Obama says the broader trajectory of the continent is unmistakable: Africa is on the move."

At the U.S.-Africa Business Forum in New York, Obama said Africa is "home to some of the fastest-growing economies in the world and a middle class projected to grow to more than a billion customers - an Africa of telecom companies and clean-tech startups and Silicon savannahs, all powered by the youngest population anywhere on the planet.

One of those young Africans, Frances Udukwu from Nigeria, told VOA what she hopes to highlight during her one-year reign as Miss Africa USA.

So besides exposing the beauty, the talent and the capabilities of the African women in the diaspora, I see my duty as Miss Africa USA as an opportunity to impact where I am from, which is my homeland in Africa. But also to pay respects to where I reside which is the United States.

She added My personal favorite is being able to touch the lives of many young girls and women across not only Africa, but in the States as well, Udukwu said.



Udukwu attended Temple University in Philadelphia and studied public health.

Only 26 years old, she recently founded a non-profit, The Lead Girl Foundation, to help girls and young women make a life for themselves through entrepreneurship and vocational training. She lives in Washington, D.C., plans to go to law school, and travels to Nigeria often.

Seeking trade partnerships

Obama told the business forum that everywhere he travels in Africa, from Senegal to South Africa, Africans insist they do not just want aid, they want trade. They want partners, not patrons.

And that is what Wednesdays forum, hosted by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker was all about - helping investors and entrepreneurs from both continents connect, as Obama explained: This is a U.S.-Africa business forum. This is not charity. All of you should be wanting to make money, and create great products and great services, and be profitable, and do right by your investors. But the good news is, in Africa right now, if you are doing well, you can also be doing a lot of good.

Obama said during his eight years as president, he has sought to transform the relationship between the U.S. and Africa to one of equal partners. He said this is his last U.S.-Africa Business Forum as president, but he will likely be back as a private citizen.

Apart from increased private investment, the U.S. government has also expanded its presence and economic engagement in Africa

Since 2008, the Commerce Department has doubled its presence on the continent, opening new offices in Angola, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, expanding its presence in Ghana, and re-establishing a presence at the African Development Bank.
The next phase of the 2016 presidential election begins Monday in Hempstead, New York, when Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump face off in the first of three presidential debates.

In recent weeks, Trump has narrowed the gap with Clinton in public opinion polls, and the debates could be a pivotal moment before voters cast their ballots on November 8.

Televised presidential debates have a rich history, beginning in 1960 with candidates Republican Vice President Richard Nixon and Democratic Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Kennedy versus Nixon

A youthful, tanned Kennedy took on a haggard, poorly made up Nixon, who was also ill after surgery for a knee injury suffered during the campaign.

Kennedy used the debate to push his message of change after eight years of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

We must give this country leadership and we must get this country moving again, Kennedy told viewers.

Radio listeners gave Nixon a slight edge in the debate, but those who watched on TV preferred Kennedy, whose polished performance against the more experienced Nixon helped shape the election, which Kennedy narrowly won.

The 1960 debates demonstrated the power of television in politics and helped even the playing field for Kennedy against his better-known opponent.

It establishes stature. If you can stand toe to toe and be the equal of somebody who is more well-known, that is one thing that happens in debates, said Jeremy Mayer, associate professor of government at George Mason University in Virginia.

There were no debates in 1964, 1968 or 1972. Neither President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 nor Nixon in 1968 or 1972 wanted to share a national TV stage with their opponents.

Nixon in particular wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1960 event that he believed was at least partly responsible for his loss to Kennedy.

Carter versus Ford

The debates resumed in 1976 and featured the first of what could be considered major gaffes by presidential candidates.

President Gerald Ford faltered against Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter when he was asked about the influence of the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Ford said, though he later acknowledged that was not what he meant.

But Carter pounced, saying, I would like to see Mr. Ford convince the Polish-Americans and the Czech-Americans and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries dont live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.

Ford lost the close race, another example in which the debates mattered, said Stephen Wayne, a Georgetown University professor of government.

Presidential debates are important in presidential elections when the candidates are very close. Most of the people who watch the debates root for their side or for their candidate, Wayne said.

Reagan versus Carter

Four years later, the tables were turned on Carter.

He faced Republican Ronald Reagan in a single debate and challenged Reagan for opposing a plan to expand national health insurance.

Governor Reagan again, typically, is against such a proposal, Carter said, bringing the memorable retort from Reagan: There you go again.

Reagans question to voters at the end of the debate with Carter has also become a standard for presidential candidates, especially challengers: Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Carter was leading Reagan in the polls before the debate. But Reagan easily won the 1980 election after his reassuring debate performance.

The Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in 1987 to ensure that debates are a permanent part of the campaigns every four years.

The commission has organized the debates every election cycle beginning in 1988 and is doing so again this year with three presidential debates and one debate between vice presidential candidates Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, and Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a Republican.

Debate faux pas

Recently, candidates have been more concerned with avoiding mistakes that could haunt them on Election Day. That has led the media to focus on some non-verbal moments, such as when President George H.W. Bush checked his watch in his debate with Democrat Bill Clinton and Independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992.

Some interpreted Bushs glance as a sign he was bored. Clinton went on to win in November.

In the 2000, Democrat Al Gore sighed during his debate with Republican George W. Bush.

The replay of potentially embarrassing moments is what puts candidates on guard, said Mayer of George Mason University.

Debates seem to be getting a little less powerful, he said. People arent watching them as much as they used to. Now that may be ameliorated by the fact that while people arent watching them live, if you make a mistake, everybody watches a clip of it on Facebook or on YouTube.

Four years ago, Democrats began to worry after Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, turned in a strong performance in his first debate with President Barack Obama. But Romneys surge in the polls proved to be short-lived after Obama recovered in the next two debates.

In this years campaign, both Trump and Clinton have turned in strong performances in their primary debates. Trump skewered his primary opponents like former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

Election analysts expect the first Clinton-Trump debate to be the most-watched event of the campaign so far, with enormous political stakes for both contenders.
One of Philippine President Rodrigo Dutertes harshest critics was removed as the chairwoman of the Senate Justice Committee Monday in the midst of an investigation into Dutertes alleged ties to the extrajudicial killings of drug suspected drug dealers and users.

Senator Leila de Lima last week called a former assassin to testify before her committee. During his testimony, the man, Edgar Matobato, said Duterte ordered the killings of more than 1,000 people and was personally responsible for the murder of at least one man.

On Monday, de Limas pro-Duterte colleagues accused her of ruining the countrys reputation with her investigation, and forced her out of her justice committee chairmanship.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch group called de Limas removal a blatant and craven move to derail accountability for the deaths of people killed in Dutertes war on drugs.

The Senate is showing greater interest in covering up the allegations of state-sanctioned murder than in exposing them, it said.

De Lima accused Duterte of being behind her removal. ``I know that the president is behind this,'' she told reporters.

Duterte has also accused de Lima of receiving payments from drug lords, charges she has denied. The Philippines House of Representatives opened hearings into the charges Tuesday.

In an interview with ABS-CBN television, she said she was unsure whether the investigation she launched will be at all credible now that she is gone, and warned other senators would likely try to cover up Dutertes misdeeds.

On Sunday, Duterte asked for a six-month extension for his war on drugs and said the investigations into possible human rights violations would not stop him from continuing to crack down on drug dealers.

I don't care whether there are a thousand hearings everywhere. I will not stop until the last pushers on the street are fully exterminated, he said.
South Africa's Kruger National Park is littered in places with the trunks of trees uprooted and stripped of bark by a surging population of elephants, a frequent sight in the reserve.

Africa's elephants are still threatened by poachers seeking to kill them for their ivory tusks but in several southern states populations have rebounded, helped by conservation policies and the remote locations where many of the herds live.

The numbers are now so big that some countries say the world's largest land mammal is causing too much damage to crops, threatening the livelihoods of poor subsistence farmers and the populations of other species including birds, bats and woody plants in forests uprooted by elephants.

Zimbabwe and Namibia have asked for a global ban on ivory trade to be lifted so that they can use the proceeds of national stockpiles of tusks to fund conservation and support communities living near elephants.

"Elephants are regarded as a liability and economic cost to rural communities, who suffer crop losses, other damages and lose human lives," Namibia's proposal says. Its population has increased to 20,000 from 7,500 the past two decades.

The request to sell stockpiles, collected through seizures of contraband, natural mortality in the wild and the shooting of problem animals, will be considered at a meeting of the U.N.'s Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Johannesburg from September 24 to October 5.

The ban on trade in ivory products was imposed in 1989 in response to a wave of poaching, though domestic trade has remained legal in a number of countries including China. The United States in July imposed a near-total ban on domestic ivory sales within its borders.

Opponents are concerned that if CITES allows ivory to be traded, even from stockpiles and as a one-off, it would send a signal that it is socially acceptable, which could spur demand and further poaching.

Ivory is particularly coveted in Asia where it is used for carving and jewelry. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were given permission to sell stockpiles to Japan in 1999 and were joined by South Africa in 2008 in a sale to China and Japan.

A June 2016 study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research found that the 2008 sale likely led to an increase in elephant poaching.

It noted an estimated 71 percent increase in ivory smuggling out of Africa "while corresponding patterns are absent from natural mortality and alternative explanatory variables. These data suggest the widely documented recent increase in elephant poaching likely originated with the legal sale."

Poaching has skyrocketed in the past decade in much of the continent to feed the illicit market, lending a new sense of urgency to campaigns to completely close the trade for good.

Tough negotiations

For their request to pass, Zimbabwe and Namibia will need the support of two-thirds of the 183 member states of CITES.

South Africa Environment Minister Edna Molewa told Reuters that her country and others in southern Africa would support the Namibian and Zimbabwean proposals because the ivory sales were needed to pay for the ecological and social costs of large elephant populations.

"If you look at the communities that are bearing the brunt of living with these animals, their ecological systems are degraded and they lose food security and grazing lands," she said.

She said "we are quite optimistic" the proposals would pass but expected tough negotiations.

There is expected to be significant opposition from most western countries, some NGOs and African countries including Kenya, which along with others has made a separate proposal to CITES to keep the trade ban firmly in place.

Sport hunting of elephants is permitted in some countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe and hunters are allowed to keep the tusks as trophies.

But in Kenya, where elephants cannot be owned and where any hunting is forbidden, the animals are seen as a bigger draw for tourists wanting to see them in the wild.

Kenya and Gabon, which has large areas of national park and is fighting a growing battle with poachers, have burnt ivory stockpiles.

And while elephant populations are stabilizing in southern Africa where conservation policies are stronger, in east and central Africa, poaching is rife and the numbers are down.

A census by Elephants Without Borders, a conservation group, found numbers of Savanna elephants - which favor more open habitat - fell 30 percent between 2007 and 2014 to 350,000.

Africa's other species, the forest elephant, will need a century to recover from poaching because of its slow birth rate, and numbers around 70,000.

A bit selfish

Zimbabwe says its elephant population has stabilized at 80,000. Its proposal says elephant populations exceeding 0.5 per km have a detrimental impact on woodlands and other species.

However, scientists say the damage done by elephants is being exaggerated and that they are crucial for healthy ecosystems because their dung disperses seeds and fertilizers and they create habitats for smaller creatures through foraging.

"Elephants are a key driver in maintaining biodiversity," said Sam Ferreira, a South African National Parks ecologist. "No species in the Kruger has ever gone extinct because of elephants."

Since culling was halted at Kruger in 1994, the elephant population has swollen from around 8,000 to 17,000 - and other animals have not suffered, he said.

In Chobe National Park in northern Botswana, where the number of elephants has risen to 130,000 from 30 in 1930, scientists say antelope species such as impala have benefited from the removal of trees by elephants as they favor shorter vegetation. This in turn has boosted the populations of predators such as lions.

There is agreement, however, that elephants in Namibia and Zimbabwe are making life hard for the humans living nearby.

Zimbabwe's Campfire Association say elephants eat around 18 percent of the crops in the poor communities where the NGO works. It says people have been killed by then, often when subsistence farmers come across the animals in their fields.

Cash-strapped Zimbabwe, which has a 70 ton ivory stockpile worth $35 million, says ivory trade is the only way to pay for protecting its elephants and to give rural communities an economic incentive for living near the animals.

Nevertheless, conservationists say Zimbabwe and Namibia should not be given special treatment.

"We do recognize that Zimbabwe and Namibia's elephants populations are in better shape than those elsewhere in Africa," said Susan Lieberman, vice president for International Policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. "But it's rather short-sighted and a bit selfish for them to request to sell their ivory, knowing full well that it will further stimulate poaching and trafficking from other populations. The global community needs to see this as an Africa-wide issue."
At all the peace talks Joji Felicitas Pantoja attended in the conflict-troubled Philippines island of Mindanao, coffee was served to put people at ease.

But Pantoja soon realized talking about peace wasn't enough in communities unable to address basic needs like food and health, sparking an idea to use coffee as a vehicle for change.

Setting up "Coffee for Peace", Pantoja worked with Mindanao farmers to revitalize an industry long abandoned for cash crops like rubber and bananas - and her farmers' earnings tripled.

"Peace is not just the absence of war ... if we don't address the economic aspect, it's not complete," Pantoja, 56, a self-described peacebuilder, said by Skype from Mindanao.

Across Asia women like Pantoja are re-examining society's problems through a business lens, playing a more leading role than women in other regions in harnessing the power of markets to tackle poverty and social ills, according to the first experts' poll on the best countries for social entrepreneurs.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of the world's 45 biggest economies found the Philippines was the country where women fared best when taking into account representation in leadership roles in social enterprises and the gender pay gap.

In fact five other spots among the top 10 ranking in the poll of nearly 900 experts in social enterprise were in Asia - Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand.

Russia, Norway, and Canada rounded out the top 10, while Brazil came last and the United States fared badly in the perception poll due to concerns women are paid less than men.

Women interviewed across Asia described a fairer playing field and higher drive to put compassion over valuation as the reason women are doing so well as social entrepreneurs.

Community focus

Overall the online poll, conducted between June 9 and July 15 in partnership with Deutsche Bank, the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network (GSEN) and UnLtd, foundations for social entrepreneurs, found 68 percent of experts said women are well represented in leadership in social enterprises.

A study by Deloitte in 2015 showed that women hold only 12 percent of the world's board seats while data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union shows women account for about 23 percent of all national parliamentarians.

However only 48 percent of experts said women in social enterprises were paid the same as men, with the United States particularly concerned on this issue.

"Whereas men want to be like Mark Zuckerberg, women want to do well for the community," said Peetachai "Neil" Dejkraisak, who founded a rice social enterprise called Siam Organic with a female business school classmate.

"They are more compassionate and want a meaningful life ... Social entrepreneurs are inherently driven by improving people's lives, lifting people out of poverty. Women social entrepreneurs are better at doing this than their male counterparts."

Neil and Pornthida "Palmmy" Wongphatharakul began work on Siam Organic as business school students, not setting out with the aim of building a business seeking to improve society.

"The social impact was tied into the business model - the better the business, the more impact for the farmer," said Palmmy.

With Thai rice farmers earning about $12 per month per acre, they decided to home in on the U.S. market and innovations - mainly the organic purple "Jasberry" rice, high in antioxidants - to boost farmers' earnings and win health-conscious customers.

The company now works with 1,000 farmers and sold about 100 tons of its specialty rice in 2015 to Thai and U.S. buyers - and its farmers earn an average of $180 per month per acre.

"My objective has always been whatever you do, you always have to help the farmers you promised to help. When a decision comes along, you put the farmers first," said Palmmy, 31.

Duped maid takes leadership role

Indonesian former domestic worker Heni Sri Sundani never imagined she would become a social entrepreneur, using education to empower children and families in Indonesian villages.

From an impoverished farming family, in 2005 she went to Hong Kong as a maid to support her family but discovered her recruiter kept half her salary, inspiring her to use any spare time to study for a degree in entrepreneurial management.

She returned home six years later with a degree and started offering free classes to children through her Smart Farmer Kids in Action movement, teaching science and also modern farming.

As the movement grew to include over 1,000 students in eight villages, she began charging a small fee to help cover running costs but most parents, who are farmers, could not afford it.

So she created another community program to help the farmers sell their products online and introduced eco-tourism, boosting their incomes so they could pay for schooling.

"We hope these children stay and empower others in the villages to become educated farmers. We don't want them to go to big cities to become exploited laborers or end up becoming human trafficking victims," said 29-year-old Sundani.

"People I met were amazed what a woman like me can do. More women started to join me because a woman is not just a housewife," she said, adding she raised money via crowdfunding.

Malaysian Mastura Rashid realized it was not enough to give free food to the poor when she was a volunteer handing out meals to homeless people in Kuala Lumpur as this was not sustainable.

So she started working with urban families who earn under $250 a month last year, selling their home-cooked traditional coconut rice and spicy shrimp paste dish "nasi lemak" to office towers and petrol kiosks under "The Nasi Lemak Project."

"We want to help the poor by giving them direct access to the market. Malaysians love to eat, there is no other better product than nasi lemak," Mastura, 26, said.

Mastura said Malaysia's emerging social entrepreneur scene is competitive but a level playing field for women like her, unlike traditional businesses where women face discrimination.

Her project has received grants from two government-linked agencies set up to encourage innovation and startups.

"I don't see gender bias in social entrepreneurship - in politics or marriages, perhaps yes. There is no discrimination towards me as a woman social entrepreneur," Mastura added.
Hundreds of top scientists warned on Tuesday against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's vow to pull the United States out of the Paris climate-warming accord if elected in November.

The 375 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, said in an open letter that a U.S. abandonment of the agreement would make it far harder to develop global strategies to lessen the impact of global warming.

"Thus it is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord," the letter said.

"A 'Parexit' would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: 'The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change. You are on your own.'"

Among the signers are biologist E.O. Wilson, physicists Stephen Hawking and Claude Canizares, astrophysicist Simon D.M. White, and Nobel winners Thomas Steitz, Michael Levitt and William Daniel Phillips.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private society of scholars who advise the United States on science and technological matters.

The signers of the letter said they did so as individuals and not on behalf of the Academy or their institutions.

In Paris last December, almost 200 countries agreed to slash greenhouse gases and keep global temperature rises to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius.

The United States and China, the two largest producers of carbon emissions, ratified the accord this month.

Trump will speak at a natural gas industry conference in Pennsylvania on Thursday. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has dismissed manmade climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese and says he will abandon the Paris agreement if elected.

He has vowed to reverse much of the work the administration of President Barack Obama has done to address climate change, including rules to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The Republican Party platform also questions the legality of Obama's executive order ratifying the Paris deal.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is a strong supporter of the Paris accord.
A non-governmental organization (NGO) in China opened an exhibition in Shanghai this week of paintings by Syrian children to raise awareness about the migrant crisis in the war-torn country.

The Chinese Initiative on International Law, an independent NGO, obtained the paintings when its founder Liu Yiqiang and his team researched Syrian refugees in Greece and Turkey.

Migration flows are not new, but a wave of more than 1 million migrants last year prompted bitter divisions among European countries over how to share responsibility for them.

After a request from a refugee center, Liu's team brought 50 paintings by Syrian children back to China and put 30 of them on display in Shanghai on Monday.

"I was shocked when I saw these paintings," Liu said. "The bright colors used in each one of these paintings and the illustration of every side of the war and of their lives can directly bring you into the world of the children who have suffered the war."

One of the children painted a giant green dinosaur towering over a child running away from it in fear.

At the United Nations General Assembly's Summit for Refugees and Migrants, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced that China will provide $100 million of additional humanitarian aid to help solve problems brought about by the mass movement of refugees and migrants.

"Shanghai received Jewish refugees during World War II. Now as an international metropolis, would Shanghai be able to do something for these refugees?" asked Li.

But one visitor to the exhibition disagreed.

"At this stage ... China itself has many problems in its underdeveloped regions," said Wang Le. "I do not think that China is suitable to receive refugees now."

Another visitor Li Yan said she was moved by the art.

One of the painters "said that she would grow up into a happy woman," she said. "However, they are living far away and becoming refugees now and don't know that many countries are not willing to accept them."

Liu said there will be an charity auction for the paintings in October. Funds raised from the auction will be donated to a special project at the China Children and Teenagers' Fund which aims to educate young people in doing charitable work.

The exhibition will be on display until the end of September.
A Russian banker has reportedly tried to argue that President Vladimir Putin does not have vast secret wealth because he is "very much dedicated to his job."

During an interview in Moscow with CNBC television, part of the U.S. NBC network, Russian banker Andrey Kostin cast doubt on a $2 billion money trail leading to Putin, as revealed in financial documents known as the Panama Papers.

"I don't believe that Mr. Putin has $2 billion, because even if he wanted to have, I don't know how he is going to spend them," Kostin, the chief executive of Russia's state-owned VTB bank, said in a portion of the interview published online Tuesday.

The banker said he does not think that "earning private wealth" is one of Putin's personal priorities, and that no one has ever seen evidence of such wealth possessed by the Russian president.

According to Kostin, Putin is very much dedicated to his job. He really wants to change Russia.

By assets, VTB Bank is Russia's second-biggest, after Sberbank, which also is state-owned. The government has a 60.9 percent stake in VTB, but Kostin denied the Kremlin has influenced his bank's operations.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reported in April that suspicious payments made by Putins cronies may have, in some cases, been intended as payoffs, possibly in exchange for Russian government aid or contracts.

The secret documents suggested that much of the money originally came from a bank in Cyprus, the ICIJ said, that, at the time, was majority-owned by the Russian state-controlled VTB Bank.

The documents also showed dozens of transactions, over more than a decade, involving people or companies linked to Putin, who has been in power at the Kremlin since 2000. Among those identified in the document were Putin's longtime friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin, and the wife of Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.

Putin has admitted there were transactions between him and Roldugin, but said there was no evidence of illegal activity.

Roldugin has dismissed any suggestion that he was either a custodian or a conduit for Putin's money or assets.

ICIJ, in cooperation with the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations, reported five months ago that 11.5 million documents it obtained from Panama's Mossack Fonseca law firm provided evidence that many politicians and public officials worldwide used the firm's offshore entities for money-laundering and tax-dodging. The Panama Papers said 12 current or former world leaders were among those who worked with Mossack Fonseca.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt began dating on the sets of the 2005 film Mr and Mrs Smith. Ten years later, they play a married couple with differences in By The Sea.

By Devarsi Ghosh: In November 13 last year, Angeline Jolie, released her third directorial venture, By The Sea, starring herself and husband Brad Pitt. The leisurely paced drama film revolved around a married couple, Roland (Brad) and Vanessa (Angelina), a successful writer and a former dancer respectively, who are slowly drifting from each other.

Directing her own husband in this film, which was about a doomed marriage, took a toll on their relationship. Angeline Jolie told the press that she knew that making the film was going to challenge her marriage with Brad Pitt and could potentially end it.

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Angelina was quoted by The Express as saying, "It was our way of testing ourselves. We knew that if we could get through this, wed come out even stronger and happier. And we did."

She continued by saying, "Weve always liked putting ourselves through challenges, even though it was maybe a little more dangerous for us as a couple. I dont think we want to go through it again though."

But did Angelina take it too far?







By The Sea is cruelly and almost dangerously reflective of what could happen in a marriage between two very successful people.

In the film, Roland and Vanessa are vacationing in France. They are staying in a coastal hotel. Roland wants to finish his new book here and he is hardly on speaking terms with his wife, Vanessa.

Vanessa is withdrawn and silent most of the time, the reason for which is revealed near the end of the film. Roland finds it difficult to connect with his wife. He drinks a lot and is upset that Vanessa isn't sexually interested in him anymore.

Soon, the couple strikes a friendship with a younger couple. Vanessa ends up cheating on Roland with the man of the second couple, which culminates into a major argument between her and Roland.

The film received middling reviews and grossed USD 3.3 million on a budget of USD 10 million. What was seen as overambitious and narcissistic at one point becomes, perhaps, revelatory with the news of Brad and Angelina's divorce that broke on Tuesday (September 20) night.

Brad and Angelina's romance is a rare one, which started on camera, with the 2005 film Mr and Mrs Smith, and ended on camera as well, with By The Sea.







The two fell in love on the sets of Mr and Mrs Smith, an easygoing, action adventure film, where the two stars played funny, playful individuals, and it was a film that one would want to celebrate, not only because of its nature but of the meaning it held in regard to Brad and Angelina's lives.

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In contrast, By The Sea, is a quiet, sombre film where Angelina is seen slowly slipping into depression while Brad spends his nights drinking in a bar.

Was By The Sea just an artistic statement? Or was it a cathartic endeavour for Angelina? Or was it a cry for help on celluloid?

Roland and Vanessa were seen to be working through their problems in By The Sea, just as perhaps, Brad and Angelina were working through their own. Or was the film just a way for Brangelina to divert themselves from the actual rot in their marriage to a lavish, cinematic simulacrum of their marital issues?

Nevertheless, Brangelina have appeared together on film twice. Now that they are getting a divorce, here's hoping that the couple return again on the big screen. Regardless of whatever has happened in their personal lives, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's on-screen chemistry is like fine wine; it gets better with age.

( The writer tweets as @devarsighosh )



--- ENDS ---
Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science.



Last year's fires in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997, burning about 261,000 hectares of forests and peatland and sending haze across the region for weeks. Many were deliberately set by companies to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.



The study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Harvard and Columbia researchers estimated the amount of health-threatening fine particles, often referred to as PM2.5, released by the fires that burned from July to October and tracked their spread across Southeast Asia using satellite observations.



In Indonesia, a spokesman for the country's disaster mitigation agency said the research "could be baseless or they have the wrong information.'' Indonesia officially counted 24 deaths from the haze including people killed fighting the fires.



Singapore's Ministry of Health said short-term exposure to haze will generally not cause serious health problems. The study was "not reflective of the actual situation,'' it said, and the overall death rate hadn't changed last year.

In Malaysia, Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said officials are still studying the research, which is "computer generated, not based on hard data.''



"People have died but to what extent the haze contributed to it, it's hard to say,'' he said. "If an 80-year-old fellow with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problem and exposure to haze died, what did he die of? This is hell of a difficult question to answer.''



The dry season fires are an annual irritant in Indonesia's relations with its neighbors Singapore and Malaysia and the finding of a huge public health burden has the potential to worsen those strains. The 2015 burning season, which was worsened by El Nino's dry conditions, also tainted Indonesia's reputation globally by releasing a vast amount of atmosphere-warming carbon.



The Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to prosecute companies and individuals who set fires and also strengthened its fire-fighting response. This year's fires have affected a smaller area in large part due to unseasonal rains.



Jamal Hisham Hashim, research fellow with the International Institute for Global Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable.



He said decades of air pollution research that followed London's killer smog in 1952 has established the relationship between fine particulate matter and premature deaths, particularly in people with existing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

"The pollution level that occurred during the haze is severe enough to cause premature deaths. That is indisputable,'' he said. "The study is a wake-up call. We need to be shaken; we have become too complacent with the haze.''



Joel Schwartz, an author of the study who is regarded by his peers as one of the world's top experts on the health effects of air pollution, said authorities in the affected countries have not offered any details of how they reached conclusions critical of the study.



During the haze, Malaysia suffered air pollution at 10 times the level that the World Health Organization says causes premature deaths, he said, while Singapore's claim that short-term exposure does not have serious effects is factually incorrect.



The Singaporean statement that its death rate was unchanged from 2014 did not demonstrate anything, Schwartz said, due to a worldwide trend for declining mortality. The study's premise is that deaths are higher than what they would be without the haze rather than a comparison to a particular year, he said.



Separately, Singapore's health ministry did not respond to a question on why heart disease and pneumonia, both of which can be bought to fatal conclusion by fine particle exposure, had increased as a percentage of deaths in 2015.



Malaysia, meanwhile, does not measure PM2.5 in its air pollution index but has been planning to from next year.



Half a dozen scientists with expertise in air pollution who reviewed the study for The Associated Press said its methodology was sound and its conclusions reasonable. Some cautioned that the estimates of 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, another 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore are invariably uncertain because aspects of the modeling rely on assumptions and the actual figures could be higher or lower.



The study considered only the health impact on adults and restricts itself to the effects of fine particles rather than all toxins that would be in the smoke.



Philip Hopke, director of the Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science at New York state's Clarkson University, said air pollution studies have to overcome several challenges because "no one who gets sick or dies comes to the doctor or hospital with a clear label that says airborne particles or ozone did this.''



Another problem is the studies typically assume that fine particles are the sole cause of illness or death but smoke from fires contains ozone and a variety of volatile compounds that would also affect health.



"A major event like occurred here is extremely likely to have caused adverse health outcomes in terms of both sickness and deaths,'' he said.
While millions of Muslims from around the world travel to Mecca, many Sufi Muslims, especially those who can't afford the trip to Saudi Arabia, instead travel deep into the Egyptian desert to observe their own mystical version of a pilgrimage in Humaithera.
Texas gave notice on Wednesday that it was withdrawing from participating in the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement program, citing security concerns after failing in federal court to halt the inflow of Syrian refugees into the state.

The Texas State Refugee Coordinator sent a letter to the agency, giving 120 days notice of its intention to withdraw, charging the program was riddled with problems that present security risks, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said.

"Despite multiple requests by the State of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people," Abbott said in a statement.

Texas, a bellwether state for conservative policies, has seen other Republican-led states follow its lead in challenging the Obama administration's refugee resettlement plans in and out of the courts.

Officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement were not available for comment. U.S. officials have said refugees are carefully vetted before entering.

The U.S. Justice Department has argued in court filings that the federal government sets policies for international immigration and states do not have authority to halt federal plans.

The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a leading resettlement agency, expressed disapproval of Texas' action.

"The decision to pull out of the refugee resettlement program after nearly 40 years of participation is misguided and inconsistent with that state's proud history of welcoming refugees," it said in a statement.

Since Jan. 1, 2011, there have been 1,104 Syrian refugees resettled in Texas, according to the U.S. State Department-affiliated Refugee Processing Center. That is less than the 1,610 people resettled in California and the 1,515 sent to Michigan.

The Obama administration said on Aug. 29 it would meet its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees during the current fiscal year a month ahead of schedule and was working with Congress to increase the target by a few thousand during 2017.

U.S. admission of Syrian refugees has been a hot-button issue in the 2016 presidential race.

The civil war in Syria has led to a flood of refugees.

The United States has offered refuge to far fewer than many of its allies. Germany has taken in more than a million refugees from Syria, North Africa and Asia in the last year, while Canada admitted nearly 30,000 between November last year and May 1.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday entered the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, hosting a forum at his presidential library extolling his successor's Asian free-trade deal.

Bush, who signed several such accords during his two terms in office, met with U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman before the event to promote the strategic benefits of the agreement.

President Barack Obama is still pushing for Congress to approve the 12-country TPP following the November 8 presidential election, even though both Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton oppose it.

Bush, who has largely stayed out of the campaign  in which Trump's anti-trade rhetoric fueled his rise to the Republican nomination  did not attend the forum at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

"I'm very grateful for him welcoming me to this institute and having the institute host this important conversation," Froman told the audience of largely business people after his meeting with Bush. "And I'm very grateful for his support of free trade as well."

Ken Hersh, director of the Bush Institute, called TPP "a no-brainer on a whole host of fronts."

Baker expresses support

The forum followed a similar event on Monday night in Houston where Froman enlisted the help of another Republican free-trader, James Baker, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as secretary of the treasury and secretary of state, respectively.

"Both major party candidates for the presidency oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. And guess what? They're both wrong," Baker, 86, said at the Rice University institute that bears his name.

"I've often found myself in disagreement with President Obama. But on TPP I am with him, and I am with him 100 percent," Baker added.

In a speech at the Houston event, Froman emphasized the need for TPP as a counterbalance to China's growing economic and political influence in Asia, citing its own regional trade deal and more assertive stance in the South China Sea.

"If we don't act, it will create a vacuum. These economies aren't going to stand still. Beijing will step in to fill the void," Froman said.

At the Bush Institute, Susan Schwab, who served as George W. Bush's last trade representative, said failure to pass TPP would mark an abdication of U.S. leadership.

"There are countries out there that would dearly love to see the United States fall on its face by not enacting, by not ratifying this deal," she said.
Local leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan say they are seeing a resurgence and regrouping of Islamic State fighters in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

Afghan forces, aided by U.S. bombers, reportedly intensified attacks on remote mountainous IS positions Tuesday. More than two dozen IS fighters were killed in air raids in the Achin and Kot districts, according to a spokesperson for the provincial governor and the Afghan defense ministry.

Afghan and U.S. coalition forces recently cleared many areas of IS militants in a number of districts in eastern Nangarhar province. But IS has recaptured several remote villages in Achin and Kot, which border Pakistan, tribal leaders told VOA.

"The government has not built any check posts in remote areas that lie far from the district center, and people in those areas live under IS control," Malek Kamin, a tribal elder in Achin, told VOA.

Malek Kateb, a Kot district tribal elder, said the areas that once were cleared of IS militants have come back under IS's control after Afghan troops pulled back from the remote region. He added that around 250 IS fighters are present in the area. According to the tribal elders, IS militants are oppressing the local residents and limiting their movements.

Provincial officials say they are bulking up Afghan Local police forces to work under the ministry of interior to provide more enforcement and protect remote areas where IS is regenerating. Afghan Local Police, with around 30,000 members across the country, mostly protect remote villages.

Efforts in Pakistan

The regrouping of IS in the border region is accompanied by a threatening IS presence in neighboring Pakistan where, despite the government's previous denials, military officials say IS is attempting to establish a foothold.

IS claimed responsibility over the weekend for the assassination of three Pakistan military personnel in the northwestern city of Peshawar. The attack occurred days after the Pakistani military announced it had "forestalled" IS's attempts to infiltrate Pakistan.

IS "tried to make an ingress and they failed, and they have been apprehended so far," Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa, a spokesman for the Pakistani army, told reporters.

He added that security forces have arrested more than 300 IS-linked militants, including Syrians, in recent weeks. IS was plotting attacks on government, diplomatic and other civilian facilities, including media houses, according to Bajwa.

The threat of IS in Pakistan follows reports and remarks by state officials earlier this year that the group had been attempting to expand in the country. The director general of Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau, Aftab Sultan, earlier this year warned lawmakers that IS was an emerging problem in the country and that hundreds of fighters linked to local banned religious groups had left for Syria to join IS ranks there.

Protecting residents

According to media reports, many of the IS members in Afghanistan belong to the Orakzai tribe in Pakistan, whose militants maintain a presence on both sides of the Durand Line between the two countries.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard this week announced the arrest of two Pakistani nationals with IS, who the Guard said were planning to conduct terror activities.

Near the Pakistan border in Afghanistan, IS militants have been active in parts of Nangarhar province since last year and have launched multiple attacks against government forces and local villages. Afghan and U.S. forces have conducted cleanup operations against IS in Nangarhar and surrounding areas.

Nangarhar's governor, Salim Khan Kunduzi, vowed to stand by local residents against IS militants.

"We promise them [local residents] that, God willing, we would not abandon them. We would protect the areas through local uprising forces and Afghan local police," the governor said to Afghan media.
U.S. presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are clashing over which one could improve the plight of low-income residents in the country's inner cities.

"We're going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they've ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever, Trump, the Republican contender, told a rally late Tuesday in North Carolina, the mid-Atlantic battleground election state that is crucial to both candidates.

You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street. They're worse, I mean honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities, said Trump, a brash real estate tycoon seeking his first elected office.

Trump's assessment of the state of life in the nation's poverty-ridden cities as the worst ever drew attacks from critics on social media who said his sweeping comments ignored the country's history of slavery through the mid-1800s and government-mandated racial segregation in parts of the country that was not overturned until the 1960s.

National political surveys show the Clinton, the Democratic candidate and a former U.S. secretary of state, with a wide edge among black voters over Trump.

But he said that major cities for years have been run by Democratic politicians and that the party's presidential candidates tell inner-city residents "they want your vote and they say, 'See ya in four years.' Hillary Clinton is an example of it."

Watch video report from VOA's Zlatica Hoke:

"I say to the African-American community, 'What do you have to lose?' I'm going to fix it," Trump said. He appeared Wednesday at a black church in Cleveland, Ohio, a Democratic stronghold in a key Midwestern state where both candidates are trying to gain an edge seven weeks before the November 8 election.

Clinton, in an opinion article in The New York Times about poverty in America, vowed that if she is elected "one of my top priorities will be increasing economic growth thats strong, fair and lasting. I will work with Democrats and Republicans to make a historic investment in good-paying jobs -- jobs in infrastructure and manufacturing, technology and innovation, small businesses and clean energy."

She added, "We also need to ensure that our investments are reaching the communities suffering the most from decades of neglect. We have got to acknowledge that even though poverty overall has fallen, extreme poverty has increased."

Clinton, looking to become the country's first female president, said she favors an anti-poverty strategy that calls for directing 10 percent of federal investments to communities where 20 percent of the residents have been living in poverty for 30 years.

"And well put special emphasis on minority communities that have been held back for too long by barriers of systemic racism," she said.

Clinton said Trump "doesnt seem to spend much time worrying about people in poverty. In fact, his economic plans would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans, and would include an estimated $4 billion tax cut for his own family just by eliminating the estate tax. He has actually said that wages are too high."

Trump, a one-time television reality show host, and Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, are locked in a tight contest to become the country's 45th president, replacing President Barack Obama when he leaves office in January.

Clinton held a commanding 8-percentage-point advantage over Trump in early August, but Trump has virtually erased that edge. The RealClearPolitics' average of national polls calculates her lead at 1.1 percent, while The New York Times says it is a bit larger at 44-42 percent.

The candidates are squaring off face to face next Monday in the first of their three scheduled presidential debates.
U.N. investigators looking into the alleged torture and killings of government opponents in Burundi have drawn up a list of suspects who should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, they said Tuesday.

The United Nations has verified 564 executions in the central African nation since April 2015, when President Pierre Nkurunziza sparked protests by saying he would seek a third term, the investigators said, calling that "clearly a conservative estimate."

The government called the report, by the U.N. Independent Investigation on Burundi (UNIIB), biased and politically motivated and denied all its allegations.

The investigators said they had received evidence of rapes, disappearances, mass arrests, torture and killings, and that there were probably many thousands of victims.

"UNIIB found that the large majority of victims have been identified as people who were opposed or perceived to be opposed to the third mandate of President Nkurunziza or of members of opposition parties," it said, adding:

"There are worrying signs of a personality cult being built around the president."

The list of suspects will be handed to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and be available in the event of any prosecutions.

"The charges of the UNIIB investigators are politically motivated and based on anonymous, unverified testimonies," the president's media adviser, Willy Nyamitwe, tweeted.

The government has sent the U.N. rights commissioner a 40-page rebuttal, he added.

UNIIB said a former senior army officer told investigators of the existence of lists of people to be eliminated.

Witnesses named 12 senior members of the security forces  who report directly to the heart of government  responsible for disappearances. Some of the people who said they had been tortured reported being held in secret jails, including at the homes of the president and a government minister.

Denials by government

The government denied the existence of such death lists and said the accusations came from "those who want to sow division and the panic within the defense and security corps."

"It is deplorable that the experts believed such gratuitous and diversionist assertions," it said.

According to the UNIIB report, the bodies of some people who were summarily executed were transported across the Ruzizi River and buried in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It listed 17 types of torture used by the security forces, including attaching weights to the testicles, forcing a victim to sit on broken glass, and forcing a victim to stay next to the dead body of a relative.

Many women fleeing the country were subjected to sexual violence by the members of the youth wing of the ruling party, Imbonerakure, border guards and unidentified men. Women opposed to the president's third term were also subjected to extreme sexual violence, the report said.

Satellite imagery suggested the existence of mass graves, but the government did not respond an offer to investigate the sites, it said.

Burundi has set up three commissions of inquiry to look into human rights allegations, but the report accused the government of "blatantly failing" to investigate.
The U.S. Senate defeated a resolution disapproving an arms sale to Saudi Arabia after hours of contentious floor debate that aired sharp criticism of Riyadh and revealed rifts among lawmakers about America's relationship with its longtime Middle Eastern ally.

Wednesday's 71-to-27 vote to set aside the resolution all but assured that the $1.15 billion arms sale of Abrams tanks and other equipment can go forward without congressional interference.

A bipartisan group of senators opposed the transaction based on Saudi actions in neighboring Yemen and the kingdom's backing of a fundamentalist version of Islam.

Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that with U.S. backing, Saudi Arabia has targeted Yemeni civilian populations in a bombing campaign against Houthi rebels.

"We've begged them to stop bombing civilians, and yet in a 72-hour period earlier this summer, the Saudi-led coalition bombed another Doctors Without Borders facility, a school, and the principal's house next door," Murphy said.

"It [the resolution] is about whether we will be complicit in a war in Yemen," said Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. "There are said to be 3,000 innocent people who have died in Yemen from Saudi bombs.

"When 100 people die at a wedding in Yemen, what do you think happens to those families? Do you think they have a warm fuzzy feeling for Saudi Arabia and the United States?" Paul added.

No evidence of Yemen targets

Resolution opponents said the measure is misguided.

"We've been selling ground combat equipment to Saudi Arabia for decades," said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. "There is no evidence, none, that the Saudis have used the Abrams tank and ground combat [equipment] within Yemen. These systems have been used along the Saudi border to defend against Houthi incursions."

Another Republican, John McCain of Arizona, put the question in geo-strategic terms.

"Let's be clear what the arms sale is all about. It's about giving a nation that's under attack by Iranian-sponsored militia the arms that it needs to defend its people and its territory," McCain said. "Blocking this sale of tanks will be interpreted by our Gulf partners  not just Saudi Arabia  as another sign that the United States of America is abandoning our commitment to the region."

Links to extremism

Beyond human rights concerns, Murphy argued the United States should signal its disapproval of Saudi Arabia's backing of Wahhabism beyond its borders.

"If we remain silent on the primary progenitor of this brand of Islam that feeds into extremism, how can you say you are serious about strangling ISIL when the textbooks that are produced inside Saudi Arabia are the very same textbooks that are handed out to recruit suicide bombers?" Murphy asked, using an acronym for Islamic State.

Issue of alliances

Whatever Saudi Arabia's faults, its defenders in the Senate stressed that the kingdom is a critical ally in a turbulent region.

"If you want to send a signal to the Ayatollah [in Iran] that America is out of the fight and we are no longer a reliable ally, stop helping Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states that have been helping us, as imperfect as they may be," said Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

"Voting against this arms sale is not going to end  it's not going to even permanently damage  our relationship with Saudi Arabia," Murphy countered. "We are allies; we'll continue to be allies."

Proponents of the arms sale noted that the weapons are being purchased entirely with Saudi funds, not U.S. aid, and that Riyadh could buy similar weapons from other nations if the sale were blocked.

The arms sale is not the only issue that has Saudi Arabia under a microscope on Capitol Hill. Earlier this year, Congress passed a bill allowing foreign sponsors of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil to be sued in American courts.

Although the bill specifies no nation, it is widely seen as an effort to end Saudi Arabia's immunity from lawsuits pertaining to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The White House said President Barack Obama intends to veto the legislation, which likely would trigger votes to override in both houses of the Republican-led Congress.
The Dalai Lama on Tuesday met with Wrocaw City Council members, local officials, academics and artists. Representative Tenzin Kunga from the Office of Tibet London told VOA that the Mayor of Wroclaw in his welcome address praised the Dalai Lamas continued leadership on promoting world peace and religious harmony. The Dalai Lama in turn said in his remarks that Poland with its history of living under and resisting communist repression, should continue following the path of leaders like Lech Walesa in making Poland a great democratic society.

Later in the day, speaking to young people at Zajezdnia History Centre, located at the site of mass demonstrations in the 1980s, he urged Polish youth to also carry on the legacy of Solidarity movement leader Lech Walesa and those who fought against Communist repression. On Wednesday, the Dalai Lama will attend an inter-religious meeting at a Church of Peace.

The Dalai Lamas previous visits to Wroclaw was in 2008 and 2010, when he was made an honorary citizen of the city. He last visited Poland in 2013 for a summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Warsaw.
President Robert Mugabe says the West should remove targeted sanctions imposed on him and his inner circle a few years ago, claiming that Zimbabwe wont achieve set United Nations development goals if the restrictive measures are maintained.

Mr. Mugabe made these remarks on Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly at a time when protesters inside and outside the country are demanding that he should step down.

The president said the western nations are punishing his country for possessing a lot of mineral wealth, which they want to exploit for their own benefit.

We are being punished for exercising the one primordial principle enshrined in the United Nations Charter that of sovereign independence. We are being punished for what all other nations have done and still do that is possess  own their natural resources and listen to the basic interest of their people.

Those who have imposed these sanctions would rather have us pander to their interests at the expense of the basic needs of the majority of our people. As long as these economic and financial sanctions remain in place, Zimbabwes capacity to fully and effectively implement Agenda 2030 will be deeply curtailed.

Mr. Mugabe urged nations that imposed the targeted sanctions to remove them for the benefit of his country, which he has ruled since independence from British rule in 1980.

I repeat my call to Britain, Europe and the United States and their allies to remove the illegal and unjustified sanctions against my country and its people.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development comprises 17 goals that officially replaced and expanded the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted in 2000.

As was the aim of the MDGs, the new goals lay out a framework to eradicate poverty and hunger, reduce inequality, enhance access to water, sanitation and education, protect the planet, among other goals and targets, over the next 14 years or 2030.

The president further noted that he is happy with the process of looking for a new United Nations secretary general to replace Ban ki Moon, whose term of office ends soon.

However, he said more still needs to be done in terms of transforming the United Nations Security Council, which noted is being dominated by powerful nations.

African nations have been demanding some permanent seats in the Security Council.

While the president was presenting his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, some Zimbabweans living in USA were protesting outside the U.N headquarters urging him to step down for allegedly failing to properly run the country.

At the same time, members of the December 12 Movement contested for space outside the U.N to show their solidarity for President Mugabe.

The organization supports Mr. Mugabe for what they say is his tough stance against the West and nations with a so-called neo-colonialist agenda.

Back home, some Zimbabweans have been staging protests pressing the president to step down.
The ministers of the five emerging powers -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) -- met on Tuesday on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly to review their strategic partnership and discuss cooperation.

By Indo-Asian News Service: BRICS ministers have condemned recent terrorist attacks against India and other countries and called for speeding up the international pact against terrorism in order to give legal weight to a concerted global effort to counter the scourge.

The ministers of the five emerging powers -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) -- met here on Tuesday on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly to review their strategic partnership and discuss cooperation.

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ALSO READ: Top US leaders move bill to brand Pakistan a terror sponsor



India, which currently chairs BRICS, was represented by MJ Akbar, the Minister of State for External Affairs.

CONCERTED EFFORTS TO COUNTER TERRORISM

A statement issued after the meeting, while strongly condemning the terrorist attacks against some BRICS countries including India, said: "They urged concerted efforts to counter terrorism on a firm international legal basis, under the UN auspices, and expressed their conviction that a comprehensive approach was necessary to ensure effective fight against terrorism."

"They called for an early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against terrorism," the statement said.

India took the lead in proposing the Comprehensive Convention on International Convention 20 years ago. But the convention has faced opposition over who is a terrorist.

Pakistan as well as several other Muslim and Arab countries do not want it to cover organisations that they consider national liberation movements.

While China went along with the sentiments of the other BRICS ministers on countering terrorism, Beijing has been provided cover at the UN to Pakistan and Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar.

STRATEGY FOR BRICS ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP

According to the statement, the ministers mentioned the convening of the BRICS National Security Advisors meeting as well as the constitution of BRICS Working Group on Counter Terrorism and its first meeting in New Delhi.

ALSO READ: Modi raises China's PoK corridor with Xi Jinping, slams Pakistan's terror links



The other ministers at the meeting were Sergei Lavrov of Russia, Wang Yi of China, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane of South Africa and Jose Serra of Brazil.

The eighth BRICS Summit is to be held in Goa next month. China is scheduled to take over as the chair of BRICS next year.

Turning to the state of the global economy, their statement noted that the recovery continues to be weak and uneven and reiterated the need to improve economic governance, promote international trade and investment, and address income inequality and achieving sustainable development.

The statement said they appreciated the progress made by the New Development Bank, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and called for the implementation of the strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership.

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ALSO READ:

India turns up heat on Pakistan: Rajnath Singh to visit Russia, US to discuss its terror export





--- ENDS ---
Law enforcement agencies in Charlotte, North Carolina, are bracing for the possibility of more street protests as they continue to investigate the fatal shooting of an African-American man by a black police officer.

Protesters clashed with police and shut down a major highway Tuesday night and early Wednesday after Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was killed. He was shot by a plainclothes police officer who was looking for a criminal suspect in an apartment complex.

The local police chief, Kerr Putney, said Scott got out of a car holding a gun. Scott's family strongly disputed the claim that he had a gun; they said he was holding a book when he was shot.

Police said they had video from the shooting scene but did not intend to release it to the public at this stage of the investigation. Reporters were told earlier that the officer who shot Scott felt that he was acting against "an imminent threat," and that a gun was recovered at the scene.

The clashes overnight left about two dozen people injured, including 16 officers. Mayor Jennifer Roberts pledged officials would continue to be "thorough and transparent," but she also expressed concern that the protesters included "agitators" who live outside the Charlotte area.

The mayor said she was "calling for peace, calling for calm, calling for dialogue."

Scott's daughter said he was reading a book in his car, waiting for the bus that drops off his son from school, when he was shot. She also said her father was disabled, and that police used a stun gun on him before shooting him four times.

The police chief said her officers did not find a book at the scene. She also declined to identify the make and model of the gun police said they found near Scott's body.

Scott was one of an estimated 702 people who have been shot dead by law enforcement officers in the United States this year, according to the Washington Post, which said 163 of the victims were African-American men.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addressed the issue of police shootings Wednesday at a campaign rally in Orlando, Florida.

"We are safer when communities respect the police and when police respect the communities," Clinton said. She added that "too many people have lost their lives who shouldn't have," and "it's time to turn the tide, stop the violence [and] build the trust."

WATCH: North Carolina Police Shooting Sparks Protest

Protests in Charlotte began shortly after the shooting late Tuesday and extended into Wednesday. Police in riot gear tried to control the crowds and at one point used tear gas. Some demonstrators broke into trucks and stole cargo during a time when all traffic was halted on a major highway (Interstate 85) that runs through the city.

Chants from protesters included the refrain "Hands up, don't shoot"  a phrase that has been repeated by demonstrators in many U.S. communities during the past two years where controversial shootings by police have occurred.

Civil rights activists and ministers called for an economic boycott of Charlotte at a news conference Tuesday.

"We are calling on all black people in the city of Charlotte to keep your money in your pocket and let everybody feel the pain, economically, of what we are feeling physically when you kill us," Nation of Islam member B.J. Murphy said.

This week's incident in North Carolina brought the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department back into the national spotlight. Three years ago, a white officer was charged with manslaughter for shooting an unarmed African-American man; the case resulted in a mistrial, and the officer left the police force after reaching a financial agreement with the city.

Another demonstration took place Tuesday outside police headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a white officer killed an unarmed black man Friday.

An attorney for the officer who killed Terence Crutcher said she feared for her life and fired when Crutcher reached through a window into his car.

Crutcher's family disputed that account and called for action to be taken against the officer. The family noted that video released by police showed the window of Crutcher's car was closed; others have said the 40-year-old man was complying with police orders and placing his hands on the car to show he had no weapons at the time he was shot.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked about the Oklahoma shooting during a campaign appearance Wednesday in Ohio. He said Crutcher "looked like he did everything you're supposed to do [when stopped by police]. And he looked like a really good man."

"This young officer, I don't know what she was thinking," Trump said. "I don't know what she was thinking, but I'm very, very troubled by that," calling the incident in Oklahoma "a terrible situation."

Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany, said she was hopeful that something positive could come out of her brother's death.

"We're hopeful that America will open their eyes  everybody  and see there's an issue, a systemic issue, that needs to be solved," she told a reporter for CNN television. "And we're pleading with the leadership of this country  everyone  just to see that. And let's put some systems in place to prevent this from happening again."
The United States Embassy says the application process for the 2017 Mandela Washington Fellowship opened Wednesday.

In a statement, the embassy said the applications will be processed until October 26th.

Eligible young leaders between the ages of 25 and 35 can apply by visiting https://yali.state.gov/apply/ .

We are excited about this opportunity for young Zimbabwean leaders in business/entrepreneurship and civil society sectors and encourage interested eligible candidates to begin their applications immediately, said Nicole Finnemann, Deputy Public Affairs Officer at the United States Embassy.

Applicants can take their time in making the application and have the ability to save their work as they go along. They can revisit the application later, edit until it is ready for submission, said Finnemann, adding that applications cannot be edited after submission.

Since 2014, 120 Zimbabwean youth leaders have participated in the program. The U.S. Embassy said they represent the extraordinary promise of an emerging generation of entrepreneurs, activists, and public officials.

It further said they have proven track records of leadership in a private, or civic organization; and demonstrate a strong commitment to contributing their skills and talents to building and serving their communities.

Vivid Gwede, a 2016 Mandela Washington Fellow, said, The time I had in the U.S. was a quantum jump in my experience. I would recommend such an eye-opening experience to any young African leader who hopes to grow themselves. Equally any country or society would benefit if it taps into the rich fund that are YALI graduates are.

The Mandela Washington Fellowship is the flagship program of the Presidents Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) and embodies U.S. commitment to invest in the future of Africa.

Participants undergo six weeks of intensive executive leadership training, networking, and skills building, followed by a Presidential Summit in Washington, DC.

Through this initiative, young African leaders gain the skills and connections they need to accelerate their own career trajectories and contribute more robustly to strengthening democratic institutions, spurring economic growth, and enhancing peace and security in Africa.

Upon returning to Zimbabwe, the Fellows continue to build the skills they developed during their time in the United States through support from the Embassy and the YALI Network. Through these experiences, Mandela Washington Fellows have access to ongoing professional development opportunities, mentoring, networking and training, and competitive seed funding to support their ideas, businesses, and organizations.
Marion Louise Dahlke, 86, died on October 23rd at Grace Pointe Crossing in Cambridge, MN. Visitation will be held from 5:00 to 7:00 PM on Friday, October 28th at Anderson Funeral Home.
Kiefer Sutherland stars as Tom Kirkman. Photo: Ben Mark Holzberg/ABC

In many ways, Kiefer Sutherland is the perfect person to star in Designated Survivor. Hes a great, charismatic actor who can convey unease and total competence all at once. Given that hes playing Tom Kirkman, a cabinet secretary thrust into the role of president after a terrorist attack on the Capitol during a State of the Union address, those qualities are crucial.

In the pilot, which airs tonight at ten on ABC, its also clear that determining how America should respond post-attack will be a key part of his new job in the Oval Office. And who is better equipped to go after terrorists than the man who spent nine seasons and a TV movie as Jack Bauer, the 24 CTU agent who knows exactly how to track down terrorists when hes on a hard deadline?

In some ways, though, that 24 baggage detracts a tad from the character Sutherland needs to establish in Designated Survivor. Here, at least in the first episode, hes a more mild-mannered, unimpeachably good husband and father who reacts to his sudden, immense responsibility by running into a bathroom and upchucking. Kirkman has a spine, one that stiffens considerably as the hour progresses. But the tension in this series, especially early on, stems from the idea that Kirkman is a political nobody who has become the leader of the free world and may not be able to handle it. As convincing and grounded as Sutherland is, its sometimes hard to look at him and think anything other than: Nah, everythingll be okay. Hes got this.

Series creator David Guggenheim, who also wrote the pilot, and director Paul McGuigan do everything they can to establish the gravity of the situation, holding on shots of smoke billowing out of a partially destroyed Capitol dome, establishing an adversarial relationship between Kirkman and a military commander, and ensuring that at least one member of Kirkmans family  his teenage son Leo (Tanner Buchanan), the older of his two children  is unaccounted for in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

Given its quick, plot-focused pacing and visual gloss, Designated Survivor is one of those shows that could immediately be identified as a broadcast network series even if you didnt know it airs on ABC. Its smartly made, but it also doesnt linger terribly long on details, including character development. Natasha McElhone plays Toms wife, Alex, but, at least in the first episode, all we know about her are the usual things we know about TV wives: Shes a hard-working attorney, a caring mother, and a gorgeous, gloriously cheek-boned romantic partner for our leading man. Hopefully, as more episodes unfold and she, too, grapples with being shoved into the job of First Lady, some of her more unexpected qualities will be revealed.

The premise of Designated Survivor is a really intriguing one, especially because its based in reality. No one has had to take over the Oval Office chair under the same circumstances, but such a thing could happen. When a Secret Service Agent delivers the news to Tom  The Eagle is gone. Congress, the Cabinet, didnt make it. Sir, you are now the president of the United States  its chilling. You want to see what happens next.

Even though this first episode feels more like a sanitized TV version of that scenario, it draws you in enough to make you continue wanting to see what happens next. If nothing else, there is something satisfying about seeing Sutherland as our president. Even though neither he nor the politicos around him are confident in his abilities yet, you know hes going to be good at this job. During this particular election cycle, watching him prove that may turn out to be as comforting as it is dramatic.
Just one night after delivering his tour de force against Trumps birther lies, Seth Meyers is back for another Closer Look. While news outlets turn their attention to the man who planted bombs in New York and New Jersey, Meyers turned his attention to those reporting the news. Pointing to the coverage of the silly, unimportant details the 24-hour news outlets harped on while the story was still breaking, like the size of the dumpster in the Chelsea bombing, the Late Show host skewered the media for its sensationalizing methods. And while he praised Hillary Clintons response to the news, he compared the method of her Republican competitor to that of a loony, little, old grannie. Watch the segment above.
Pro-Kannada groups are preparing to stage protests across Bengaluru against the Supreme Court's decision asking Karnataka govt to release 6,000 cusecs of water from Cauvery everyday till Sept 27.

By Seemi Pasha: As the Karnataka government mulls over the Supreme Court's decision asking the state to release 6,000 cusecs of water from Cauvery everyday till the 27th of September, pro-Kannada groups are getting ready to stage protests across capital Bengaluru.

There was heavy security deployment outside the Vidhan Souda this morning ahead of the crucial cabinet meeting. Activist Vatal Nagaraj was picked up and taken into preventive custody even before he could reach the gate of the assembly building.

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CALL FOR STATEWIDE PROTESTS



In Gandhinagar in west Bengaluru, hundreds of workers of pro-Kannada group Karnataka Raksha Vedike started gathering outside their headquarters around noon, as their leader Narayan Gowda called for statewide protests.

Also read: Cauvery protests: Businesses hit, infrastructure challenges loom large



Speaking to India today, Gowda, who heads one of the most violent and radical pro-Kannada groups, said, "How can the Supreme Court turn a blind eye to the needs of the people of Karnataka? Are we not a part of India? We don't have water to drink. Why are our needs being ignored?

'SC RULING UNJUST TO KARNATAKA'

The judgment is not an impartial one and has been passed to unfairly benefit Tamil Nadu", Gowda added.

He also demanded that all 24 MPs from the state and 228 MLAs resign to protest against the Supreme Court's order. Gowda, however, denied that his organisation was involved in the violence that the IT city witnessed last week, but said that he would continue with his protests.

As Gowda stepped out of his office, he was immediately taken into preventive custody along with hundreds of his supporters.

Also read: Cauvery: In Tamil heartland, 'victory' has little meaning



--- ENDS ---
Shawty Lo in 2008. Photo: Vince Bucci/Getty Images

There is a CD that still lives in a leather case in my moms trunk that is so scratched it doesnt even skip. I burned this CD early in 2008, in preparation for the next time I came home from college to Atlanta. The CD was a testament to the golden age of sprawling, posse cut remixes that had dominated the previous two years. Included were the Throw Some Ds remix, the We Fly High megamix, and the Im So Hood remix. But the first track  and the most recently released, sending my collegiate life into a whirlwind of homesickness  was the remix to Dey Know by Shawty Lo.

This was the time in which I knelt at the altar of the YouTube-to-MP3 converter. Finding a song wasnt hard, but finding the correct, well-mastered, meant-to-be-played-in-public version of a song often took some time. The remix to Dey Know was a tricky one, because seemingly every rapper threw a verse over the infectious marching-band-heavy beat at some point, generating a sea of create-your-own five-minute remixes.

Eventually, a perfect version surfaced, uploaded to YouTube on March 8, 2008. The audio was clear, it was a little louder than it needed to be, and the order of the verses was exactly how God intended  the official southern remix, starting with Shawty Lo and then going from Ludacris to Young Jeezy to Plies to Lil Wayne.

The remix to Dey Know has, and will always, take a room from a 5 to an 8, or a 9 to a 16. This was the version that didnt mess around with the intro, which was crucial for parties. There were no DJ drops, not an errant half second before the horns began  as soon as you hit play, there were the trumpets that drive the whole song forward. And next thing you knew, Jeezy is delivering perhaps the line of his career, Im in my cool whip, insides jello / hop up out that pretty motherfucker like helllooooooo.

It wasnt uncommon at the time to flip between playing music through a DJ program, iTunes, Grooveshark, and YouTube. If the dorm-room DJ didnt have a song on their computer, the solution was typically to find it on YouTube  which could be treacherous to drop without a preview, since you couldnt be sure which version of the track you were getting. This one was recorded so perfectly, few would be able to tell that some technological maneuvering had been required to make the magic moment possible.

Years later, I was making a playlist on Spotify and noticed that the Dey Know remix was nowhere to be found. I also happened to be home in Atlanta, so I went into my moms trunk and found the old burned CD from 2008. Turning the disk over, it looked like a cutting board. I put it into my computer. From the second track on, all of the songs were unsalvageable.

The Dey Know remix, however  unscathed.

The song is by far the oldest file on my computer. Ive taken it with me everywhere Ive gone, almost like a special wallet keepsake that you keep behind that little flap, that you peek at every now and then, that only you know about.

Shawty Lo died early this morning in a car crash in Atlanta. Although he was successful both as a solo artist and in the group D4L, hes easy to skip over in the pantheon of Atlanta rappers, which is a shame, because hes a legend in the city. His passing will hopefully prompt rediscovery of his full catalogue  from Feels Good to Be Here to Gucci Bandana to Im Da Man  while drawing in new fans.

The Dey Know remix is in no way his crowning achievement  hes only a fifth of this song and is certainly more of a star on the original. But its an anthemic time stamp of a very special moment in the history of a genre of music, of a city and of a region, bringing together three Atlanta rappers, a goon from Florida, and New Orleanss greatest child star to create one of the most formidable musical spectacles of the 2000s.

It was unstoppable then, and it still is now. Just turn it on, slowly and sassily run in place with utter indifference, and see if your day  especially a shit day like today  doesnt turn for the better.
Though the Paris attacks launched heated debates over Syrian refugees, President Obama pledged to accept 10,000 over the next year. Recently, many U.S. officials have had second thoughts, and 31 governors were opposed to the resettlement of refugees into their states. The only problem is that governors dont have this authority, and as Oliver points out, Syrians can just walk between states like anyone else. The lines on maps are not crocodile-filled moats. But U.S. officials still dont seem to understand what theyre doing, because the vetting process is, in fact, extremely thorough. While there is risk in everything we do, Oliver reminds us, You cannot completely eliminate risk. You can only manage it. Refugees may be part of this risk, but theyre also worth it.
Photo: NBC/NBC via Getty Images

If you like political-drama-television-cast reunions, great! If you dont like political-drama-television-cast reunions actually getting political, please stop reading! Numerous cast members from The West Wing will be hitting the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton later this week, with various appearances slated for September 24 and 25 throughout Ohio. Richard Schiff, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Dule Hill, Joshua Malina, and Mary McCormack will be traveling around the state with Clintons campaign, where theyll participate in grassroots organizing events in the Mahoning Valley, Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo, Dayton, and Columbus areas for two days. (Martin Sheen is also With Her, but in a different way.) Additional details will be revealed soon, most likely to confirm precisely how much walking and talking there will be.
Karnataka has decided to put off the release of water from Cauvery river to Tamil Nadu till September 23.

By Rohini Swamy: Karnataka has decided to defer release of water to Tamil Nadu until the two houses of the legislature meet for an urgent session on September 23.

The state cabinet's decision comes in the wake of an all-party meeting which the matter discussed on the floor of the legislature.

The all-party meeting attended by the JDS led by the former prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and the Raitha Sangha, but was boycotted the BJP.

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Karnataka's decision is a defiance in some ways of the Supreme court's order of September 20th which directed the state to release 6000 cusecs of water from September 21 to September 27th.

The chief minister Siddaramaiah had gone on record on Tuesday to say that the order of the Supreme Court was 'unimplementable', because the state had inadequate water in its reservoirs.

The Supreme Court decision to release 6000 cusecs of water was taken after the Cauvery supervisory Commitee had recommended release of 3000 cusecs of water only on the basis of the inflows into Karnataka's reservoirs in he Cauvery basin area as per the data collected by the water resources ministry of the union government.

Former prime minister Deve Gowda told reporters - " The prayer of TN was only to save the samba crop. One does not want to cast aspersions on the bench as one respects the SC, but it is necessary to point out that it's order of Septemberember 20th went beyond the prayer. Karnataka has questioned the entire order of the Cauvery water disputes tribunal, and it is the matter that is coming before another bench on October 18th. "

Siddaramaiah, in an unusual move called on the former PM Deve Gowda after the cabinet meeting in the morning. Soon after this meeting , the all party meeting was held and this was followed by a continuation of a cabinet meeting was held which decided to defer the release of water.



Also read:

Cauvery row: Can't approach the President against SC order, says Karnataka Law Minister

Cauvery row: Pro-Kannada groups to intensify agitation, raise slogans slamming SC order



--- ENDS ---
Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa today inaugurated the second stretch of Chennai Metro connecting Little Mount to the city airport.

By Pramod Madhav: The second stretch of Chennai Metro connecting Little Mount to Chennai Airport was inaugurated on Wednesday, giving residents of the city a reason to cheer.



TRAFFIC TO EASE: JAYALALITHAA



Chief Minister Jayalalithaa inaugurated the stretch through a video conference from Tamil Nadu Secretariat. She thanked the Centre for providing ample support for the completion of the project. Jayalalithaa said, "With the new stretch becoming operational, traffic congestion will reduce in a major way between Little Mount and the Chennai airport."

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Also read: Tamil Nadu govt employees rejoice, Jayalalithaa announces nine months maternity leave

GUINDY, ALANDUR MAJOR STOPS



The second stretch covering 8.6 kilometers will have six stations namely Little Mount, Guindy, Alandur, Nanganallur, Meenambakkam and Chennai airport. Little Mount and Chennai airport will be the source and terminal stations.

The first-ever stretch of Chennai Airport started operating between Koyambedu and Alandur in June 2015, which is a 10-kilometre stretch.

Also read: Extension of Metro Rail services may get underway by Aug end



--- ENDS ---
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said the election was an internal affair of the US but China-US relations will continue to grow.

By Reuters: China and the US will keep developing positive relations no matter who wins November's US presidential election, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told an economic forum in New York yesterday.

Li declined to comment on which candidate he favored.

Republican Donald Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese goods and push for tougher trade talks if elected. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has changed track on trade, backing away from a Pacific trade pact she previously endorsed.

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Also read: China condemns Uri attack, but wants India, Pakistan to have 'dialogue'

Both candidates have been critical of China's assertive pursuit of territory in the South China Sea, a potential flashpoint in Asia and a cause of significant friction in relations between Washington and Beijing.



CHINA OPEN TO FOREIGN INVESTMENT



Li, who was attending the UN General Assembly in New York, said the US election was an internal affair for the US, so what he could say was very limited, but he went on to remark, "No matter who gets elected in the US presidential election, I believe that China-US ties will continue to grow steadily and in a positive direction."

Li responded to complaints from foreign business leaders about restricted access to the Chinese market by saying that China was open to foreign investment, although some economic sectors were not yet mature.

"This process of them becoming more mature is also a process for them to open up and the areas of the Chinese economy open to foreign investment will only increase and China will only open its door even wider. The door will not close," he said.

Referring to a US-China Bilateral Investment Treaty that has been long in negotiation given disagreements about access to sectors the sides deem sensitive, Li said as long as both countries took a strong and pragmatic approach, they would be able to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.

Also read: China media irked by Nepal's PM Prachanda's India visit

As an example of China's willingness to open up its markets, Li said China had decided to designate a Chinese investment bank as a clearing bank for renminbi business in New York and welcomed foreign banks in the city which met eligibility requirements to become clearing banks for the currency.

He also said China would soon allow imports of beef on the bone from the US, now that Chinese quarantine procedures had been completed.



NO DEVALUATION OF CURRENCY



Li pledged that China would not engineer a devaluation of its currency to boost exports for its economy, which is growing at its slowest rate in two decades. Some critics in Washington have charged that Beijing is still manipulating its currency, although the US Treasury says its assessment is that it is not undervalued.

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China's economy will continue its growth momentum this year, Li said.

Also read: China, India remain on path of remarkable growth, says Obama

"I can say here that in the third quarter of this year, or until the end of this year, China's economy will maintain this momentum of steady growth."

China's growth target for this year is 6.5 to 7 per cent. In the second quarter of this year, the world's second-largest economy grew 6.7 per cent from a year ago, according to official data.

--- ENDS ---
Friends of the Hillsboro City Library is sponsoring its annual book discussion and lunch at noon Oct. 3 at Hillsboro Historic City Hall, 127 E. Franklin St.

Rose-Mary Rumbley, a public speaker and author of six books who also has stage and screen credits, will be the keynote speaker.

Tickets cost $20 and must be purchased in advance.

For tickets, visit Hillsboro City Library, 118 S. Waco St., call 582-7385 or email rkeelin@hillsborotx.org.

Coffee and a speaker

Lifelong Learning will have a coffee and a speaker event at 10 a.m. Friday at the Dr Pepper Museum, 300 S. Fifth St.

The event will include a guided tour of the museum and a presentation about the museums 25th anniversary and Dr Peppers Waco history.

For more information, email Lindy_Reamer@baylor.edu or call 710-8334.

CRRC dinner

Community Race Relations Coalition will have its quarterly meeting from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Parish Hall of St. Albans Episcopal Church, 305 N. 30th St.

The program, Racial Reconciliation: What Can I Do? will include interactive activities to help each person assess what he or she can do to promote reconciliation and unity.

Dinner will be provided, with donations accepted.

The event is free, but a reservation is required.

For reservations, call 717-7903 or email Jo_Welter@hotmail.com.

HWF lecture series

Historic Waco Foundations 2016 House and Family Lecture Series will continue with a presentation about East Terrace House at 6 p.m. Thursday at the house, 100 Mill St.

The lecture will focus on newly discovered information about the house and the families that lived there.

Refreshments will be served.

For more information, call 753-5166.

MCC programs

The University Center at McLennan Community College, in partnership with Tarleton State University, will present two information sessions about Tarletons graduate education degree programs Wednesday in Room 235 of MCCs Michaelis Academic Center.

A 6 p.m. session will cover the 72-credit-hour doctorate in educational leadership, a program designed for working education professionals.

A 7 p.m. session will cover the 33-credit-hour masters of educational administration with principal certification and a 15-credit-hour superintendent certification program.

For more information, call Russ Higham at 299-8838 or email higham@tarleton.edu.

Submit items for Briefly to goingson@wacotrib.com.
Owner Mark Nelson said Tuesday he expects to open a new Dunkin Donuts location Oct. 4 at 1200 N. Valley Mills Drive, near Wooded Acres Drive, where construction on the new building is winding down.

The opening will mark Dunkin Donuts return to Waco after a decades-long absence.

Nelson, a Baylor University graduate, said he hopes to open two more Dunkin Donuts locations in the near future, though he has not yet chosen the sites.

Nelson did not place a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor in the shop he will open next month because of its proximity to a Baskin-Robbins at 1547 Wooded Acres Drive.

He said he likely will place Baskin-Robbins parlors in the next two establishments he opens, as Dunkin Donuts and Baskin-Robbins both are owned by Dunkin Brands Group.

Nelson, who grew up in the Houston suburb of Katy, said he became impressed with the rapid growth of retail and commercial development in Waco and decided to pursue a food-related franchise and hopefully contribute to the momentum.

He and a partner, whom he declined to name, secured the rights to place Dunkin Donuts locations in Waco and also have the rights to other markets, including Bryan-College Station, Temple, Killeen, Belton, Copperas Cove and Salado.

We like this area of town, Nelson said of the local site near Burger King, Chipotle Mexican Grill and a new Whataburger. There is a lot of construction activity, and its become a restaurant hub. The traffic flow is made even better by the presence of H-E-B and Target Greatland within just a few blocks.

Nelson said he has hired a general manager and eight shift leaders and is still hiring to fill 40 positions for crew members.

I was looking for business opportunities, and I kept coming back to Dunkin in my mind. They have a great brand name and a quality product, Nelson said. I did my due diligence and I saw no reason this would not fit well in Waco. We will have a full coffee line, full bakery, sandwiches, muffins and bagels.

Schreiber Investments, led by Wes Schreiber, entered into a build-to-suit agreement with Nelson, who is leasing the 2,100-square-foot building with a drive-thru lane.

Were very excited about the use of that property, said Steve Cash, property manager and real estate broker for Schreiber Investments. I think Dunkin will go over very well, if it can carve away business from Shipleys, then create its own fan base. In the Northeast, you see a Dunkin on every corner in the larger cities.

Cash said about $750,000 is being spent to build the Dunkin shop, which is going up where crews leveled Mi Tequila Mexican restaurant.

Phil Adkins, a regional spokesman for Shipley Do-Nuts, the dominant brand in Greater Waco, said he is eager to find out how Dunkin affects the market.

They might want to get the first one open before they think about opening a second, he said, taking a friendly but competitive shot at Shipleys new rivals. I think, for a time, our North Valley Mills Drive store will feel the impact of Dunkin opening, but things soon will get back to normal.

He said Dunkin had a presence in Waco about 30 years ago, but they did not survive for a variety of reasons, and I dont think their new business model is any better.

Dunkin makes its doughnuts at a centralized location and ships them refrigerated to stores, where they are heated and toppings are applied, Adkins said.

I think customers will recognize the lack of freshness, which is why I dont think there will be much interest in their food, he said. Dunkin has spent a lot of time and money developing their coffee business. They are coffee-centric, while we are a very food-centric brand.

Shipley now operates nine locations in Greater Waco, and all prepare their doughnuts and kolaches fresh daily on-site, Adkins said.

Meanwhile, the Dunkin menu includes coffees, including espresso-based drinks, and an array of hot chocolates, among them mint hot chocolate.

Nelson said he has no interest debating the merits of Dunkin versus Shipley.

Were not here to compete with anybody, Nelson said. Were here to add something to the marketplace. Everybody is going to decide for themselves. I know a lot of the Shipley guys, and Im never going to speak negatively about them or the brand.

Dunkin Donuts is more comparable to Starbucks than to Shipley, because of its coffee lineup and baked goods, he said.

Adkins said he can remember when Krispy Kreme entered the Waco market in 2003, locating at New Road and North Valley Mills Drive near the height of its popularity. Lines formed at the front door for weeks after its grand opening. But business slumped, and the shop folded 19 months later.

Some business models work in one part of the country but not another, Adkins said. One of the things Krispy Kreme was betting on was the development of the wholesale side of the business in Texas, which involved selling doughnuts to stores for resale. That worked well in the Southeast but did not translate here.

The new Dunkin Donuts in Waco will operate from 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
A stretch of property between South 10th and 11th streets near Interstate 35 changed hands Tuesday, with developers planning a strip for retail and restaurant development and two hotels, including a four-story La Quinta del Sol, the broker for the sale said.

The transaction completes four years of negotiations and return trips to the drawing board for developers Shane and Cody Turner, Waco restaurateur Sammy Citrano and real estate agent Bland Cromwell, along with others involved in assembling parcels between South Ninth and South 11th streets, from I-35 to Cleveland Avenue.

This effort already has produced a new Raising Canes Chicken Fingers, which opened Tuesday; a new Panera Bread, which opens Saturday; and a Freddys Frozen Custard and Steakburgers. Meanwhile, site preparation has begun on a Waco branch of McGregor-based TFNB Your Bank for Life.

Two dozen boarded-up houses and outbuildings have fallen, and more will give way to bulldozers with Tuesdays sale of acreage near the sprawling Kate Ross Apartments at 937 S. 11th St. Two holdouts remain unwilling to sell their property, Cromwell said.

Their site will become more valuable as the area develops, or they will discover they missed the boat. Well see, Cromwell said.

Deals last week and Tuesday involved 11th Street Partnership, a group that includes Citrano, the Turner brothers and others who sold acreage nearest I-35 to yet another partnership that includes the Turners. Hotelier Raju Patel acquired a tract near Cleveland Avenue on which he will place a 110-room La Quinta del Sol, which he described as a top-tier concept of La Quinta. The dealing means another hotel developer, as yet unidentified, controls a tract next to Patels.

I will have to get the site cleaned up and utilities installed before I begin construction, Patel said.

He also owns Candlewood Suites at South New Road and I-35 and La Quinta Inn & Suites in Woodway. The new La Quinta will replace the corporate-owned LaQuinta on the east side of I-35 near Baylor University, Patel said.

That LaQuinta reportedly will be lost to the widening of I-35 through Waco, which will proceed in the near future.

The Turners did not return calls seeking comment on prospects they may have for the commercial center they plan to create on the interstates west side.

Weve got letters out to a couple of restaurants, but we have no signed leases, Cromwell said. We think activity will pick up as soon as we get everything cleared and people see what were doing. If the building is 10,000 square feet, we might have six or seven tenants. The people were talking to so far are national franchises.

Cromwell would not say how much buyers spent on nearly 8 acres acquired this week and last but said the asking price was a little under $20 a square foot.

Patel said he has heard The Egg & I Restaurant, which has a location at 4600 Franklin Ave., will place a second spot near his hotel.

This has been a great deal to be involved with, said Citrano, who owns Georges Restaurant & Catering on Speight Avenue near I-35. First, I like making things look better as you travel through Waco, and I thought if I was going to have more competition, I might as well get involved on the front end.

Wal-Mart attempt

Investors first began assembling tracts of land with the idea of attracting a Wal-Mart store to that location, possibly one of Wal-Marts smaller neighborhood prototypes that featured a grocery that would serve downtown Waco, Citrano said. But the project took twists and turns, prompting the group to change its approach and to make smaller tracts of land available to multiple developers, some of whom changed their minds and resold their tracts.

For example, Houston-based Gore Creek Partners announced plans to place a 75-unit upscale student housing project along Cleveland Avenue between Eighth and Ninth streets.

But they got a little nervous about occupancy rates and sold their piece of land, Cromwell said, adding the McGregor bank bought it.

We dont believe there is a full-service community bank in that area, though there are branch locations near downtown, bank President David Littlewood said. We want to emphasize this is going to be a full-service location, with eight or 10 employees to start, a four-lane drive-thru, lending processors, tellers and decision-makers on site.

Near this area of development, Dallas-based DuWest Realty has recently attracted a CVS Pharmacy and an In-N-Out Burger. Behind the burger restaurant, the frames of two retail strips have been completed to accommodate Chipotle Mexican Grill, Pie Five Pizza and Smoothie King, among others.

Through it all, historic Greater Ebenezer Baptist Church, 919 Dutton Ave., stood firm and refused to sell.

We made them a great, great, great deal, told them we owned all the property around them and even told them Wal-Mart wanted the property. We actually had Wal-Mart under contract, and they gave us an extension to get the deal closed, Citrano said.

But they said their forefathers had acquired the land for the church and they did not want to sell, which was their decision, and I respect that. I would never say what we offered, but I will say Im pleased were getting restaurants and a lot of other things.

No one with Greater Ebenezer Baptist Church could be reached Tuesday for comment about the proposed sale.

The other holdout in the area is a private resident Citrano did not want to identify because of privacy concerns.
A decision about whether McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna will be disqualified from prosecuting Twin Peaks biker cases likely will be delayed because Reyna refuses to answer questions about who is picking up his legal tab for civil lawsuits.

Attorneys for two bikers indicted in the May 17, 2015, shootout between rival groups filed a motion Tuesday asking 54th State District Judge Matt Johnson to compel Reyna to answer the questions or to hold another hearing to resolve the dispute.

Johnson ordered the parties to get together after a hearing in August to work through questions that Reyna would not answer at the hearing and deferred to his attorney, Thomas Brandt, of Dallas.

The attorneys, Clint Broden and Abigail Anastasio, are seeking to disqualify Reyna from the cases, asserting he has a financial conflict of interest because he is a named defendant in 10 federal civil rights lawsuits filed in Austin by bikers arrested after the Twin Peaks shootout.

Simply put, Mr. Reynas career and financial well-being are in jeopardy because of his flagrant disregard of well-settled law, the motion states. Nevertheless, if he is able to obtain a conviction in this case, he reduces his personal financial exposure for the false arrest he caused when he overruled decisions made by the upper chain of command in the Waco Police Department.

Neither Reyna nor Brandt returned phone messages Tuesday from the Tribune-Herald.

The motion claims that Reyna and Brandt asserted attorney-client and attorney-work product privileges as reasons they would not answer the questions posed during and after the hearing about Reynas potential financial exposure in the civil suit.

It is certainly suspect that Mr. Reyna purports not to know definitively whether he will be covered in full for any civil rights judgments against him, or whether, as he put it during his testimony, he will be forced to take food out of my sons mouth in much the same way his actions took food out of the mouths of sons and daughters of almost 200 motorcyclists, the motion states.

Nevertheless, based on Mr. Reynas repeated claims that the defendants should talk to his attorneys and/or talk to county officials to get definitive answers to simple questions, the defendants attempted to do just that.

Sept. 30 deadline

Johnson has given parties on both sides until Sept. 30 to submit briefs outlining their arguments in the disqualification matter. If he has to conduct another hearing to resolve the motion seeking his order to force Reyna to answer the questions, it likely will delay a ruling in the disqualification dispute.

There are no trial dates set for any of the 154 bikers indicted on first-degree felony engaging in organized crime charges.

I continue to be disappointed with the lack of transparency with the district attorneys office, Broden said Tuesday.

They are straightforward questions with relatively straightforward answers, and they chose to delay and obfuscate.

I think we are going to get the answers at the end of the day. It is just a matter of how many hoops they want us to jump through. Meanwhile, their legal bills are piling up, and courthouse resources are being expended when they cant come up with answers to simple questions, he said.

Broden represents Matthew Clendennen, a Scimitar from Hewitt, and Anastasio represents Ray Nelson, a Cossack from Gholson.

Reyna testified at the August hearing that he is not concerned about the federal civil rights suits because he did the right thing and will continue to do the right thing.

Reyna said he doesnt think he is liable personally for any potential judgments against him or for his legal fees, testifying that the Texas Association of Counties risk pool, of which McLennan County is a member, will pick up the first $500,000 and, presumably, county taxpayers would pick up anything more than that.
In an effort to stave off closure by the state, Marlin Independent School District officials say they will file an appeal against the districts standardized testing accountability ratings and join a Travis County lawsuit looking to declare that the 2016 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness for third through eighth grade did not comply with time completion standards.

The decisions to file an appeal and join the lawsuit came during Tuesday nights board meeting, Marlin Superintendent Michael Seabolt said. Marlin ISD is facing possible closure after it received an unsatisfactory rating for the fifth consecutive year based on STAAR testing, according to preliminary accountability ratings released in August.

Seabolt has been with the district a year and was brought in to turn its performance around and keep it open.

District officials have a Sept. 30 deadline to appeal results to the Texas Education Agency commissioner to see whether it can keep its doors open, TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said.

Seabolt said at the time the ratings were announced that an appeal was a remote possibility but wrote in an email Wednesday morning that the option became more viable after some research.

Several issues made the appeal more viable, including the illegal STAAR exams, Seabolt wrote in the email. There are other issues that will become public once the appeal is released.

He did not say when the appeal would be released but said it would be filed before the deadline, a little more than a week away.

As for the lawsuit, the board voted to join as a plaintiff in a case pending in the 98th Judicial District Court in Travis County because of the belief that this years STAAR tests were illegal and no student or district should be held accountable for the results, Seabolt wrote in his email Wednesday.

The lawsuit isnt the only issue the TEA has faced with this years STAAR ratings and scores, according to multiple media reports and information from the TEA. In March, more than 14,000 tests were impacted because of a computer glitch, affecting fifth- and eighth-grade reading, fourth- and seventh-grade writing and English I and English II End of Course exams.

The results of those tests were to be excluded from all STAAR index calculations, and officials would ensure no district would be penalized or fail a state standard because of affected test results, according to the TEA.

In Houston, school districts sent a letter to state Education Commissioner Mike Morath, citing almost 100 issues with STAAR testing this year, and the Texas Association of School Administrators also wrote a letter to Morath urging this years scores not be used to rate schools or determine whether a child should graduate.

The Travis County lawsuit was filed on behalf of four parents from across Texas, according to the Arnold & Placek law firm representing the parents. The parents are seeking relief from retention standards, accelerated instruction and accountability requirements to the extent that such is based on the results of these invalid assessments, according to information on the firms website.

Earlier today, the Texas Education Agency issued a ruling detaching many of the consequences associated with these STAAR results from grade five and grade eight assessments. Determinations at other grade levels are pending, the firm stated on its website June 10. Nonetheless, the TEA appears to have passed to local districts the discretion to offer accelerated instruction to its students based on these results.

The firm goes on to state that it urges local school districts not to take any punitive or remedial actions against students in those grade levels based on the assessment scores.

Although the TEA has left decisions to local districts regarding the use of the assessments for determining accelerated instruction, any attempt by a district to mandate participation in accelerated instruction or take any punitive or remedial action against a student based on these assessment results would invite affected parents to join the pending litigation and add the local district as a defendant, the firm stated. This would be an irresponsible use of taxpayer money when the TEA has already disclaimed the reliability and validity of these results.

In his email, Seabolt said he hopes the appeal and the lawsuit will help keep Marlin ISD open and give it the time to realize the full potential of the instructional changes put in place for 2016-17.

We started this last year with somebody elses team and somebody elses game plan and we showed improvement, Seabolt said in August. I feel pretty confident that progress was made, and thats what was expected.

Almost every grade level saw progress in reading, which was the biggest weakness the district had in standardized testing, Seabolt said after accountability ratings were released. In fact, eighth-graders passed the state standard score for the first time in years, and the district met student progress and postsecondary readiness standards, Seabolt said at the time.

Abatement agreement

The district already has been saved from closure once, Culbertson said in August. Last November, district officials signed an abatement agreement with the TEA commissioner to keep its doors open for another year, pending several conditions. But the agreement is only valid for the year, Culbertson said.

As of Wednesday, none of the conditions in the agreement had been implemented ahead of the appeal deadline, Seabolt stated.

Some of the conditions included that If Marlin ISD received improvement required in its 2016 ratings, the commissioner would appoint a board of managers to the district, according to TEA documents. The board of managers would exercise all of the powers and duties assigned to the Marlin ISD board of trustees by law, rule or regulation and would govern in the same manner. Texas law states school districts with failing financial or academic accountability scores for four straight years will be closed. Marlin ISD has failed five consecutive years, since 2011.

I have no idea what the states timeline is for the abatement agreement, but I dont intend to sit back and wait for them to make the first move, Seabolt said in his email Wednesday.

Once the appeal is submitted, the district will have to wait on a final decision from the commissioner in December, Culbertson said. Once the appeal is in the commissioners hands, by law the commissioner could do anything from closing the district or merging it with another, to putting in place a conservator or board of managers, Culbertson said.

In the meantime, as the district waits to hear back on both the appeal and the pending lawsuit, district officials will implement an improvement plan for 2016-17, which also was approved at Tuesdays meeting. Student achievement is at the core of the plan, Seabolt stated.

The next step? We teach kids and verify they are learning. Period, Seabolt wrote in his email.
In its first-ever summit on refugees and migrants Sept. 19, the United Nations urged member countries to do more to settle the 21.3 million refugees around the globe. If it could find a way to tackle even one small part of this problem  the large number of available resettlement places that are not filled  that would already be tangible progress.

Just one refugee in need of resettlement out of every 10 is offered a resettlement place, but even that paltry capacity is not being used up. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports that every year since 2009 the resettlement opportunities are being wasted because the resettlement process is riddled with inefficiency.

Resettlement agencies spend weeks screening and interviewing refugees, but refugees are rarely asked about their settlement preferences. Receiving communities are hardly consulted either, leading to widespread mismatches. An engineer from Syria, for example, might be resettled in a tiny village where the potential to eventually use his skills are limited, while a farmer is sent to a busy city where he struggles to cope. This hurts both sides: Refugees are unable to find jobs and access appropriate social services and communities fail to properly integrate their new members.

Research shows that initial matches matter. Refugees who end up in unsuitable communities are more likely to be unemployed and their children are more likely to perform badly at school. When refugee placements fail due to misallocation, the long-term burden on society is much greater than if refugees are smoothly integrated.

The solution to these frequent mismatches is a comprehensive, algorithm-based matching system. In the past half-century, matching systems have been used to match medical residents to hospitals, connect kidney donors with dialysis patients and assign military cadets to branches of service. In our work with the University of Melbournes David Delacretaz and Will Jones from Royal Holloway, we have identified how refugee-community matching systems might improve refugee outcomes by building on the systems many cities use to assign children to schools.

In a centralized refugee match, each refugee family would express preferences regarding the kind of areas it would prefer to live in (urban or rural? close to religious centers? accessible by public transport?). Local communities would also express preferences, perhaps prioritizing refugees who have skills that are in demand in the local economy or who have particular medical or social needs. Refugee and community submissions would then be aggregated by a centralized matching system and used to match refugees to communities.

Also, a good refugee-community match would respect refugees preferences and local communities priorities, without wasting any places. Matching also gives refugees some dignity of choice and provides local communities with a sense of control. And in the long run, by enhancing the quality of refugee-community matches, we may even increase communities overall willingness to take in refugees.

A matching system does not create new resettlement places  politicians do. The United Nations summit will put pressure on member states to expand refugee resettlement, but there will still be a shortage of places; the United Nations has already had to roll back an initial target of resettling 100 percent of refugees in need. But matching can at least help ensure that no resettlement opportunity is wasted.

Alex Teytelboym is an economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Scott Duke Kominers is a junior fellow in economics at the Harvard University Society of Fellows. Previously, he was the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago.
ASHLAND  The tax levy for the City of Ashland remains the same as it has been for more than 10 years.

The Ashland City Council approved the 2016-17 budget and set the tax levy during their regular meeting on Sept. 15. The general fund tax levy is $0.752  identical to the tax rate for over a decade.

City Administrator Jessica Quady said the budget includes several large items, including the purchase of a new rescue squad, repairing intersections at 27th and Silver streets and 28th and Clay streets and adding more holiday decorations for the downtown area.

The city will also pay for the completion of the newest water well and a water source study to look for potential spots for future wells, Quady said.

The 2016-17 budget also includes the $2.9 million project to replace the Silver Street bridge over Salt Creek. Quady said the bulk of the funds will come from the Nebraska Department of Roads. The city will get some funding up front and will put in pay requests as the project continues.

The proposed splash pad at Wiggenhorn Park is also included in the budget, Quady said, although it will be budgeted under special revenue because the funds will be donated.

Another project that will be considered in the new budget will aid visitors to the downtown area who have a hard time negotiating the high curbs on the south side of Silver Street between 14th and 15th streets.

Several months ago representatives from Ashland Pharmacy and Midwest Physical Therapy alerted the council to the problems their patients have getting from their cars to their businesses. Both are located on the south side of the street, where there are high curbs that can be difficult to negotiate for people who are temporarily or permanently disabled and no handicapped accessible parking spaces.

The city looked into adding handicapped parking on the south side, but costs ranged from $35,000 to $40,000. Quady asked the citys engineer, JEO Consulting Group, to look into alternatives. Quady reported that a proposal to cut out the curb somewhere along the sidewalk between Glacial Till Tasting Room and Willow Point Gallery and add hand rails would cost roughly $3,000.

It looks like its definitely doable, Quady told the council. Its more cost effective than any other option that weve looked at.

The parking spot in front of the curb cut out would be striped to deter parking and allow easier access for pedestrians, but would not be marked as a handicapped space because it does not meet the criteria, Quady said.

Earlier in the meeting, physical therapist Karen Still with Midwest Physical Therapy reiterated the need for easier access for her patients and others with physical issues.

I still continue to see people out my window struggle every day to get up that curb and weve had some people fall as well, she said.

The high elevation of the curb on the south side of Silver Street came about when the streets and sidewalks in the downtown area were redone in the mid-1990s.

The 2016-17 budget also includes $25,000 for abatement of nuisance properties, and the council approved moving ahead with abatement at 601 South Eighth Street.

The motion called for scheduling demolition of the vacant house after the first of the year to allow the homeowner more time to remove property from the building. If the property owner can clean up the property before demolition, the demolition will be cancelled.

The council first started nuisance proceedings on the property in 2012.
GREENWOOD  A landmark building that once educated hundreds of children will be used as a school once more.

The former Greenwood Public School building has been donated to a religious organization that will open a school there.

One Whole Heart Ministry plans to begin educating children some time next year, according to president and founder Pastor Chuck DeVetter. However, the building has already begun housing missionaries, its other function for the organization.

Bill Sapp of Ashland purchased the building last year after it sat unoccupied for the last few years. Sapp was originally planning to turn the school into apartments. The previous occupants, Harold and Verna Mae Strode, had remodeled the top floor into living space several years earlier, and Sapp had thought he could carve a total of six or eight flats out of the structure.

But Sapp changed his mind after discovering how much it would cost to convert the building into apartments.

As we got along, I could see how hard it would be to do this, Sapp said. Wed have a lot of costs involved.

It was about this time that Sapp encountered DeVetter and learned of his mission work. He decided to give the building to One Whole Heart Ministry along with its contents.

Hes an awesome man of God, DeVetter said of Sapp.

When Sapp first offered the building, DeVetter was a bit skeptical.

To be honest with you, we werent too excited to come out and look at the building, he said.

His uncertainty continued as he walked in the school.

As I entered the building, I was thinking, no way, DeVetter said.

But by the time DeVetter reached the two-story buildings top floor, his mind had changed.

I knew that we were supposed to receive this building, he said.

One Whole Heart Ministry gave Sapp a proposal of what they planned to do with the building, and he was pleased with their plans to use the building to help others.

I think theyre going to be able to use it in a very good way, Sapp said.

The goal of One Whole Heart ministry is to help people with issues like anxiety, depression or addiction, which are defense mechanisms created when the heart is broken, DeVetter said.

Its about God coming in and healing hearts, he added.

Ministry members meet twice a week for worship and prayer, including services in Greenwood. In the future they plan to hold larger worship-type gatherings with well-known speakers in their new community, DeVetter said.

Shortly after One Whole Heart Ministry took over the building earlier this year they moved missionaries into the apartments. Currently a young married couple and another young missionary are staying there permanently.

The building is also being used to train missionaries, who will stay there on a temporary basis and to house visiting missionaries.

The living space was attractive to us because of the fact we could see lots and lots of ministry going out from here, DeVetter said.

DeVetter founded One Whole Heart six years ago. The religious organization is based out of Council Bluffs but also works in the Omaha area. Recently they have been extending their reach into the Lincoln area, making the Greenwood location a perfect fit.

Quite a few people come from Lincoln, DeVetter said.

Outreach into Greenwood has already begun. Representatives from One Whole Heart attended Greenwood Fun Day last month to introduce themselves to the villagers, who welcomed them warmly.

Their every day interaction with the community has been positive, DeVetter said, with many residents expressing their happiness to see the former school being used again.

The last time classes were held in the Greenwood Public School building was in 1986. The brick school was constructed in 1907 for $10,000 to house the growing school district. Within three years the district added 11th and 12th grades.

However, enrollment began to sag in the mid-20th century. By 1957 the district was forced to merge with Ashland-Greenwood. Their high school students began attending school in Ashland and the building was used for lower grades until the district closed the school for good in 1986.

Shortly after the school was closed, Harold and Verna Mae Strode purchased the building and transformed the upstairs into a spacious apartment with two kitchens, two bedrooms, an office, family room and living room.

The Strodes used the first floor classrooms to open a shop in 1987 called Verna Mae Collectibles, specializing in antique dolls and teddy bears.

In an article published in the Sept. 15, 1999 issue of The Ashland Gazette, Verna Mae Strode said she began collecting teddy bears after her children had grown. Her hobby evolved into collecting antique dolls shortly thereafter.

The Strodes had designed their apartment to highlight Verna Maes doll collection. In nearly every room, a three-foot shelf was built along each wall to display dolls. In the living room, the fireplace is flanked by an enormous wooden surround with shelves and glass cases.

According to the 1999 Gazette article, dolls and stuffed animals could be found not only on the custom-built shelves, but also in every nook and cranny of the apartment. They were on the counters of the kitchens and filled most of the chairs and beds.

When Sapp bought the building last year, many of the dolls were still there. Sapp hauled out truckloads of dolls and teddy bears, with some going to stores in his Sapp Brothers truck stop chain.

When Sapp deeded the school over to One Whole Heart Ministry, thousands of dolls and collectibles remained.

One thing we also ended up inheriting were dolls and bears, DeVetter said.

The ministry plans to sell the collectibles to help fund their mission. Right now they are selling a few on an online auction site, but are considering other methods of liquidating the collection, including possibly going into the retail business.

We have a chance to have a little bit of a store here, DeVetter said.

In the meantime, the ministry is focusing on remodeling the building. After being vacant for a few years, a leaky roof created water damage and mold, DeVetter said.

They have abated the mold and are now focusing on other areas that need attention, including the furnace and central air units, plumbing and water heaters and completing an unfinished bathroom and adding a second bedroom on the second floor. They are also tearing out carpet and staining floors.

Its a very nice building, DeVetter said. It just needs to be finished and put in place where its fully utilized.

The organization is still contemplating what to do with the gymnasium. Added to the school in 1936, the floor remains in tact. The two-tiered wooden bleachers, stage and scoreboard are still in place. Right now the space is filled with furniture, dolls and collectibles.

DeVetter said they will probably keep the gym much as it is and will use it for recreation and as a large meeting space.

Its kind of a cool gymnasium, you now, he said.

The gym may also be utilized when the academy opens next year.

The school will be operated by Rachel Baxter, who established the Valor Christian Academy in Omaha in 2014. The school is associated with One Whole Heart Ministry. Baxter is president of the academy and DeVetter is vice president.

Classes will be taught by missionaries from One Whole Heart Ministry.

A lot of the people at the school are missionaries who have come through and been a part of our ministry, DeVetter said.

The school will have about 30 students in grades kindergarten through sixth or seventh grade, DeVetter said, similar to the Omaha school. They may add seventh and eighth grades at a later time.

When the academy in Greenwood will open depends on funding, DeVetter said. At this time they have not determined if they will also call it Valor Christian Academy or choose another name.
Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP) cadres raised slogans against Pakistan and its national flag along with burning its Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's poster.

By Pramod Madhav: Condemning Uri attack, Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP) cadres raised slogans against Pakistan and its national flag along with burning its Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's poster in front of Coimbatore Government Arts College today.

The city secretary of ABVP, Arun Vignesh said, "We are burning the Pakistan's national flag today, but if wee see anybody supporting terrorism against India or speak against the nation, we'll burn them as well. We warn Nawaz Sharif."

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To avoid any outwardly situation, police intervened and arrested the protesters before any mishap could happen.

THE ATTACK



18 soldiers were killed and as many others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Kashmirs Uri town early Sunday.

US'S SLAP ON PAKISTAN

US Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to prevent terrorists from using Pakistani territory as safe havens, as he expressed strong concern over the violence in Kashmir particularly the terror attack on an Indian army base.



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WAHOO  Area residents, as well as local, state and federal dignitaries, will gather on the lawn of the Saunders County Courthouse on Sunday afternoon.

The time has come for the dedication of the Saunders County Veterans Memorial. The 3 p.m. dedication program will start off with a P-51 flyover and the posting of the colors by the Ashland Color Guard.

Expected among the honored guests will be the Saunders County Supervisors, State Sen. Jerry Johnson, State Lt. Gov. Mike Foley, U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer and U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. Wahoo Mayor Loren Lindahl and Ashland Mayor Richard Grauerholz are also expected to attend.

Speeches will be given by Former Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman and Past American Legion National Commander Mike Helms.

There will also be a reading of names of fallen heroes by Prague Legion Member Larry Mach and a rifle salute and taps by the Wahoo VFW/American Legion.

The new $700,000 memorial is nearly complete. Only a few bronze statues need to find their spots on pedestals. This will happen sometime after Sundays dedication.

A committee comprised of VFW and American Legion volunteers from across the county has been working on the memorial for more than two years. Ground was broken on the lawn of the courthouse in the summer of 2014.
RAYMOND  Those wishing to hustle around with other runners at Raymond Centrals 7th Annual Hustle have until Oct. 2 to register.

By registering early, runners will be guarantee a t-shirt.

The 5K, 10K, 1M run and walk wont take place until Saturday, Oct. 22. The 20K and 5K will begin at 9 a.m. with the one-mile fun run and walk starting at 9:20 a.m.

This years event will be held at Oak Creek Trailhead in Valparaiso with the hustle beginning at the village park.

The course consists of a crushed limestone trail, which is wide and partially shaded. The trail will be marked for all three races including where to turn around as the race will end at the Oak Creek Trailhead.

Registration for the 5K and 10K run is $25 with registration for the one-mile fun run/walk at $15. Registrations are available at www.active.com (selected everywhere for location) or can be mailed with payment to Shelly Dostal, Valparaiso Elementary School, P.O. Box 68, Valparaiso, NE 68065.

Money raise will support the Raymond Central Food Bank backpack program, which is sponsored by the Raymond Central Education Foundation in partnership with the Lincoln Food Bank.

A pancake feed will be held that morning at the Valparaiso fire station from 9 to 11 a.m.
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 21 (PTI) The Apex Council, formed to resolve water disputes between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, today decided to set up a committee to assess availability of water in the Krishna basin to help the river tribunal decide quantum of water to be shared by the states.

Talking to reporters after the meeting, held in the wake of a July 20 Supreme Court order to this regard, Union Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti said the committee will comprise officials from the ministry as well as engineers of the two state governments.

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Besides Bharti, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and his Telangana counterpart K Chandraeskhar Rao attended the meeting.

"They will assess availability of water basin and that report will be sent to the (Krishna Water Disputes) Tribunal, which will decide quantum of water to be shared by them," she said.

The minister, however, did not specify by when the report will be sent to the tribunal.

She added telemetry system will be installed at locations, to be suggested by the two states, to monitor river inflow and outflow, so that there is no dispute on the data.

Referring to disputes between states on sharing inter- state river waters, Bharti advocated formation of a national water policy in agreement with states.

"Some MPs have even suggested including water in concurrent list. We need to figure out ways for sharing river water," she said.

While the two chief ministers did not speak to media, during the meeting, Andhra Pradesh is learnt to have accused Telangana of undertaking two "new" projects, Palamuru Rangareddy and Dindi Irrigation Schemes, on the river "in violation of AP Reorganisation Act, 2014" and demanded to put those on hold until the Council gives them sanctions.

According to the Act, the two can not take up new project without the Councils approval.

Telangana though maintained that the "ongoing" projects were taken up by erstwhile Andhra Pradesh government, which had sanctioned them based on the liberty given by Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal (KWDT)-I and hence, did not violate the law, a source said.

"Andhra Pradesh raised objections over the projects saying these were taken up violating the Act and sans sanctions from the Council. It also claimed that the project will have adverse impacts on water availability of existing projects of Andhra Pradesh (irrigating 45.72 lakh acres) with assured allocations," the source added. PTI ENM ZMN

--- ENDS ---
India is looking to tap the potential of its 7,500 km-long coastline and use it to boost cruise tourism in the country.

By India Today Web Desk: If you have always dreamt of going on a cruise vacation, it might soon come true. No, you won't be needing to travel to other countries to experience the same. This is because India might soon become the hub of cruise tourism.

Yes, you read that right. India is looking to take advantage of its 7,500 km-long coastline and thus tap cruise tourism in a big way.

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Culture and Tourism Minister Mahesh Sharma made this announcement when at the official launch of the 10-week festival Confluence: Festival of India in Melbourne. He said, "Tourism ministry along with Surface and Waterways ministry are taking cruise tourism in a big way".

Sharma said that the main purpose behind this initiative would be to improve the country's image in global tourism market. He said, "At present, we are sharing a very less share of cruise tourism of one per cent. We have 7,500 km of coastal belt with us and both the ministries have a joint group headed by secretary tourism. Very soon we are going to define the path of how to take cruise tourism in a big way," adding that this sector will also include cruise tourism to Australia.

Also read: India's e-tourist visa will now let travellers stay for 100 days



The issue of developing cruise tourism with Australia was raised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Australian government and top industry leaders in Melbourne during his first official visit in 2014.

Sharma said the government was also seriously looking at and addressing the four main issues of cleanliness, hospitality, connectivity and the safety and security to improve the India's image in global tourism market.

When he was in Melbourne, Mahesh Sharma also met his Australian counterpart Richard Colbeck to discuss the areas of cooperation to increase the flow of tourists both ways.

A Memorandum of Understanding (Mou) inked during PM Modi's 2014 Australia visit is being followed, and it has thus resulted in the introduction of big projects like Festival of India in Australia and Oz Fest in India, he said. The number of tourist arrivals from Australia to India and vice a versa stood at over 2 lakh tourists respectively.

(With inputs from PTI)



--- ENDS ---
Duxfords Meet the Fighters  Air Show Review

by Donald Nijboer

Celebrating the 80th year marking the formation of RAF Fighter Command, the Imperial War Museums Meet the Fighters air show over the weekend of September 10th/11th highlighted a wonderful selection of Royal Air Force fighters from World War I to the present day at Duxford aerodrome, near Cambridge, England. Unfortunately, Saturday was a washout due to rain, but Sundays blue skies provided the perfect backdrop for a great aerial display.

Ironically, since the event was ostensibly to commemorate the RAF, the show opened with a pair of naval fighters! Leading the opening formation were Air Leasings Hawker Fury and The Fighter Collections Grumman F8F Bearcat put on a tight aerobatic display. Both fighters represented late war designs, at the peak of piston-engine design. Every time they flew by, the Furys Bristol Centaurus growled against the Bearcats equally formidable Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine, producing the most remarkable sound.

The Great War Display Team provided a multi-aircraft World War I display, complete with numerous bursts of archie over the field. Two scaled-down replica Royal Aircraft Factory SE5s and a BE2C twisted and turned with a brace of Junkers CL1s and a pair of full-scale replica Fokker DrIs in an impressive simulation of a World War I dogfight.

Moving back to the World War II piston engine era, a pair of Spanish-built Hispano Buchons from Spitfire Ltd. and Historic Flying Limited flew a spirited aerobatic display. This was followed by two Spitfire Mk Ias from Comanche Fighters and Historic Flying chasing a single Buchon to honor those who flew and fought over Dunkirk in May/June, 1940.

Inter-war fighters were extremely well represented at Meet the Fighters. The Fighter Collections Gloster Gladiator Mk.I and Hawker Nimrod Mk.I were joined by the Historic Aircraft Collections Hawker Fury Mk.I and H. Davies Hawker Demon.

World War I was again center stage as the WWI Aviation Heritage Trusts Sopwith Snipe was joined by the Shuttleworth Collections Bristol F2B. Shuttle worths Bristol Fighter dates from 1918, and was the only original World War I aircraft flying at the show.

To honor RAF Training Commands wartime and post-war contribution a North American Harvard IV and two de Havilland DHC-1 Chipmunks graced the stage. Working as a tight pair the Chipmunk duo performed loops and rolls as the Harvard did similarly, all in the same airspace.

The Battle of Britain Memorial Flights Avro Lancaster B.I injected a dose of heavy metal, with its four Rolls-Royce Merlins singing a well-known tune to the Duxford crowd.

The Fighter Collections FG-1D is a mainstay at Duxford. Originally paired with M. Davys Yak-3, the Corsair performed solo as the Russian fighter unfortunately had to bow out shortly after take-off due to an engine problem.

One of the more unusual displays of the day was the fighter gunnery training presentation. A Piper Cub towed a drogue on a long cable while the Historic Aircraft Collections Hurricane Mk.XII made repeated firing passes from different angles and heights.

Representing the early Cold War era, three aircraft from the Norwegian Air Force Historical Squadron added the first turbojet roar to the day. First off was the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15UTI followed by the paired-launch of a de Havilland Vampire FB.52 and a Vampire T.55. The MiG provided a solo routine followed by the two twin-boomed Vampires in a two-ship aerobatic display.

Representing the rescue of many downed airmen during World War II, Plane Sailings PBY Catalina (actually a Canadian-built Canso A) put on a vigorous display. With its huge wing, the PBY proved remarkably maneuverable.

The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress known as Sally B is a crowd favorite at Duxford and gave its well-known display. RAF Fighter Command Spitfires often escorted US 8th Air Force B-17 missions in 1942, which explained the heavy bombers appearance at the show.

The highlight of the show was the glorious massed formation of fourteen Spitfires. Duxford is the only place in the world where you can witness this type of historic assembly. Not only is fourteen Spitfires in formation an amazing sight, but also within that formation was the complete history of Britains most iconic fighter: four Mk.Ias, three Mk.Vs, two Mk.IXs, two Tr.9s, a Mk.XVI. a Griffon-engined Mk.XVIII, and a Seafire LF.III. After several passes, the formation broke up into three distinct acts. While six Spits provided a lovely figure 8 tail chase in back from the flight line, two separate flights of three Spits each roared across the center line with each flight coming in from opposite directions, many times simultaneously! Low and fast it was a wonderful display of airmanship and flying prowess that you can only find at Duxford.

And if that wasnt enough, the final act was the world famous Royal Air Force Red Arrows aerobatic display team!

This was a fitting end to the Imperial War Museums flying season. The variety of fighter aircraft from so many eras was truly amazing and is unique to the famed Duxford airfield.

WarbirdsNews wishes to thank Donald Nijboer for contributing this fascinating report on Duxfords closing air show of 2016!

Donald Nijboer is a best selling aviation author/historian/documentary writer-producer/college instructor and Smithsonian Speaker who lives in Toronto, Canada.

Donald is the author of Spitfire Mk V vs C.202 Folgore, The Illustrated History No 126 Wing RCAF D-Day to VE-Day, Gloster Meteor vs. V-1 Flying Bomb, Seafire vs. A6M Zero, P-38 Lightning vs. Ki 61 Tony, No 126 Wing RCAF, Graphic War: The Secret Aviation Drawings and Illustrations of World War II and co-author with photographer Dan Patterson, of Cockpit: An Illustrated History of World War II Aircraft Interiors, Gunner: An Illustrated History of World War II Aircraft Turrets and Gun Positions, Cockpits of the Cold War, and B-29 Combat Missions.

Currently he is writing and producing full-length aviation documentaries for the on-line broadcaster Aerocinema.com. He has also written articles for Flight Journal, Aviation History and Aeroplane Monthly.

Check out his latest book Fighting Cockpits
PRESS RELEASE  The weekend event at Hooks Airport will be led by Texas Raiders  the famed B-17 Flying Fortress. Of the 12,731 B-17s built across the US, only nine are currently flying and Texas Raiders bristles with authentic machine guns and period-specific equipment. She will be joined by the twin-engine B-25 Mitchell bomber Devil Dog, the T-6 Texan Ace in the Hole, the PT-19 trainer and a Navy N3N bi-plane Yellow Peril. All five aircraft are notable for their historic importance and level of restoration. The B-25 Mitchell bomber is a rare example of a Navy PBJ, painted in Marine Corps blue, and the airmen who flew aircraft like her almost universally trained in the T-6 Texan advanced trainer who accompanies her at this event.

Tours of all five aircraft will be available to the public as will the unique opportunity to fly in the bombers and trainers. Beginning each day at 10:00 AM on Saturday October 1st and Sunday October 2nd, the public can visit the aircraft and can, for a nominal admission fee, take a tour onboard that includes crew member commentary. WWII veterans and active duty service men and women with their military IDs may tour for free. Attendees who want the ultimate Living History Flight Experience can make a reservation now for one of the limited number of flights on the aircraft lasting approximately 25 minutes each.

The public is invited to come out to Gill Aviation, 20803 Stuebner Airline Rd, Tomball, TX 77379 to tour all the aircraft and talk with their crews. Admission is $10 for adults, $5 for children under 12 or $20 for a family of up to five members. Flights aboard the trainers begin at $225; flights in the bombers start at $450. For flight reservations go to www.B17TexasRaiders.org or call 855-FLY-A-B17.

About the Commemorative Air Force

The Commemorative Air Force honors the men and women who built, maintained, and flew in these airplanes during World War II. The CAF believes that is best accomplished by maintaining the airplanes in flying condition; taking the airplanes to the people and allowing them to experience the sights and sounds of the aircraft in flight.

Collecting, restoring and flying vintage historical aircraft for more than half a century, the Commemorative Air Force ranks as one of the largest private air forces in the world. The CAF is dedicated to honoring American Military Aviation through flight, exhibition and remembrance. A non-profit educational association, the CAF has more than 13,000 members and a fleet of 165 airplanes distributed throughout the country to 76 CAF units for their care and operation. For more information, visit www.commemorativeairforce.org.

The CAF B-17 Texas Raiders is maintained and operated by the dedicated volunteers of the CAF Gulf Coast Wing. Join us on Facebook at B-17 Texas Raiders and follow us on Twitter @B17TexasRaiders For more information about the Gulf Coast Wing go to www.B17TexasRaiders.org
THERE was a great response to this years Spring Clean initiative in Waterford, as over 50 groups from the county registered to get down and...
Experts discuss causes, triggers and relief tips for potential New Years Brain Fog Most of us will be familiar with that feeling right after Christmas...
The Supreme Court said that installation of CCTVs in dance bars may violate people's right to privacy.

By Indo-Asian News Service: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said dance bars in Maharashtra will continue to operate under the old terms and conditions that permitted serving of liquor with CCTV cameras at the entrance.

Without putting on hold the new rules that limited the timings of the dances up to 11.30 p.m., prohibiting serving of liquor and installation of CCTV cameras in the dance bar itself, Justice Dipak Misra and Justice C. Nagappan said the "persons granted licence should be allowed to continue under old terms and conditions".

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ALSO READ: Don't serve liquor, install CCTVs in dance bars, orders Maharashtra government, SC intervenes



TAKING EXCEPTION TO THE NEW RULES

"You ban liquor in the state," the bench said, taking exception to the new rules that prohibits serving of liquor at the dance bars.

"Somebody has a bar licence and a dance bar. You can't say don't serve liquor," Justice Misra said told the Maharashtra government.

"You fight for the dignity of women. You protect the dignity of women."

Senior counsel Shekhar Naphade told the court: "I have a right to prohibit liquor in the bar and it (right to prohibit liquor) will remain unless it is taken away by the court."

ALSO READ:The dirty picture: NGOs fear trafficking of girls ahead of UP polls



RIGHT TO PRIVACY

Appearing for the Maharashtra government, Naphade also defended the new rule that mandates the dance bars to install CCTV in dance area, saying it was a part of the police power of the state.

"I have a power to regulate and I have a right that my regulations are complied with. The only way I can do it is through CCTV," Naphade told the court.

An apparently unimpressed bench said: "We understand logically and constitutionally the powers of the police."

The bench asked senior counsel Jayant Bhushan, appearing for the dance bar owners, if they could make some arrangements so as to assist the police if needed.

Bhushan told the court that CCTVs had a chilling affect on the people coming to dance bars. "People have some right to privacy."

ALSO READ:

Dance bars: Supreme Court slams cops' take on obscenity

Better to dance in bars than beg on streets: Supreme Court to Maharashtra



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The more the chief executive of Wells Fargo tried to explain, the more sceptical the senators became.

For more than two hours testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, John Stumpf expressed regret that Wells Fargo had created as many as 2 million bogus bank and credit card accounts without its customers' consent. He apologised for failing to stop the illicit behaviour sooner, and vowed to make amends.

Some of the senators on the committee scoffed. Stumpf, they said, was offering little more than platitudes while allowing his top executives to avoid any real consequences - like being fired or having their enormous pay packages clawed back.

Instead, the bank's lowest-paid workers have borne the brunt of the punishment, the senators noted. Senior management, they said, seemed to ignore this practice because it helped turn the bank into a profit machine.
New York: Malcolm Turnbull has described Labor's botched management of the people smuggling challenge under Kevin Rudd's leadership as his "legacy of shame" and the worst policy failure in the country's history.

The fiery outburst came as the Australian Prime minister appeared less confident of progress in peace moves in Syria than he was just 24 hours earlier.

In a spirited defence of his government's recently announced decision to resettle an undisclosed number of refugees from a Costa Rican refugee camp while hundreds of refugees languish much closer to home on Manus Island and Nauru, Mr Turnbull reaffirmed that irregular arrivals to Australia would never achieve their goal of settlement, and slammed Mr Rudd's approach after 2007 as wantonly ill-advised and ultimately as the cause of more than a thousand drownings.

The strength and obvious conviction of Mr Turnbull's comments revealed Mr Turnbull's personal anger at the policy mess that was Australia's border regime, and follow the Prime Minister's decision to block Mr Rudd's bid to head up the United Nations.
By PTI: New Delhi, Sept 21 (PTI) Arvind Kejriwal has been named in an FIR into alleged irregularities in Delhi Commission for Women, triggering a sharp attack by him on Prime Minister Narendra Modi even as the ACB probing the case said the chief minister will not be questioned.

The mention of Kejriwals name came to light after he held a press conference and distributed copies of the FIR. The Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) had yesterday said only DCW Chief Swati Maliwal was named in FIR.

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Reacting strongly, Kejriwal alleged he was named in the FIR at the behest of the PM and that a Special Session of Delhi Assembly will soon be convened to "expose the nefarious design" to destabilise the Delhi Government.

"In the FIR registered by the ACB, my name is also there... But it does not contain any details on my alleged role. One does not put the name of the chief minister in the FIR just like that.

"It cannot happen without the Prime Ministers approval. It is clear that the FIR has the PMs nod. We will soon call a Special Session of the Delhi Assembly where we will expose the conspiracy behind this," the Delhi CM told reporters at his official residence.

When asked why the chief minister has been named in FIR when the inquiry into the case did not find anything against Kejriwal, LG-appointed ACB Chief Mukesh Meena could not give a direct reply, but said he will not be questioned.

"In the FIR, the essence of the complaint is written. If someone gives a complaint, it is written verbatim in the FIR. We dont have any power to manipulate the language of the complaint. This is procedural law," Meena said.

Slamming the ACB and the Centre, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia wondered how an FIR was lodged against the chief minister based on just a complaint.

"A complaint can be filed against anyone. But will an FIR be filed based on a complaint. They must have lodged the FIR after deliberations. But if Meena says that he is unaware, then its clear that the FIR has been lodged at the behest of the Prime Ministers Office.

"Their is nothing in the investigation report. It is the outcome of a deep conspiracy against the chief minister and we will expose it in the special session. Will they lodge an FIR based on a mere complaint? A big conspiracy is afoot to destabilise the Delhi government," he said.

The FIR named Kejriwal along with DCW chief Swati Maliwal as "known/suspected/unknown accused".

The FIR was registered on a complaint by former DCW chief Barkha Shukla Singh.

A case under sections 13(D) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 409 (criminal breach of trust) and 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy) of IPC was registered against Maliwal for the alleged irregularities in DCW, including in recruiting personnel. PTI SBR SLB MPB SC

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Detectives have charged a 17-year-old with murder after the alleged stabbing to death of a man at a Girrawheen home on Tuesday night.

Police were called to the house around 7pm on Tuesday and found a 36-year-old man with serious injuries.

A man has died in Girrawheen after being stabbed.

He was taken to hospital but died a short time later.

The teenage boy has since been charged by police and is due to face Perth Children's Court on Wednesday.
By Ilma Hasan: BJP Mahila Morcha today staged a protest outside the Delhi Commission for Women office demanding its chief Swati Maliwal's resignation.

The protest was held after the ACB filed an FIR against the chief for irregularities in employment in the women's panel. Delhi BJP is now seeking Maliwal's termination with immediate effect.

"Roughly 85 posts were given to supporters of the Aam Aadmi Party, there is no question in mind that she should be removed", said Kamaljeet Shehrawat, member of BJP Mahila Morcha.

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Led by Satish Upadhyay, Delhi BJP has also submitted a memorandum to L-G Najeeb Jung demanding dissolution of DCW and removal of Maliwal as its head.

CASE AGAINST MALIWAL



Delhi Police's ACB had filed a case against Maliwal for giving 'plum posts' to AAP workers in the panel. Maliwal has been charged with corruption by a public servant, breach of public trust and criminal conspiracy.

This comes a month after former DCW chief Barkha Shukla filed a complaint alleging appointments were made in the panel without following due procedure.

Speaking about a list of 85 people, Shukla alleged that almost all of DCW's former female employees were sacked and new male employees recruited. And all these recruits were AAP workers and supporters. No public advertisements on vacancies were made before new people were recruited.

The FIR filed has also mentioned Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Speaking at a press conference, Kejriwal said, "How am I involved in this, why is my name mentioned? A Chief Ministers name cannot be mentioned in an FIR without the Prime Minister's approval"

Meanwhile, Swati Maliwal remains defiant. The panel head has said that she remains unfazed by ACB's FIR and will continue doing her work. Maliwal has been given one week to respond to 27 points raised by the Anti-Corruption branch.

FIR filed against Swati Maliwal over DCW recruitment scam



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Investigation by Mail Today reveals that the Delhi government is clearly under reporting cases of chikungunya as well as dengue.

Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal has been slammed for failing to check spurt in dengue, chikungunya cases.

By Astha Saxena: Is the Delhi government under-reporting cases of chikungunya? Statistics available with Mail Today would surely make one believe that.

As per official data, Delhi has so far reported 2,625 cases of the vector-borne disease this season.

However, private and government hospitals in the city have completely different figures to give.

Also Read: Over 1,500 people infected in Delhi: It is high time we know everything about Chikungunya

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1500 CASES IN APOLLO ALONE, DOCTORS CLAIM EVERYDAY 20 PATIENTS COME

Around 1,500 cases of chikungunya have been reported from Indraprastha Apollo Hospital alone.

Most patients are from Delhi and NCR. "The cases are extremely high this year. On an average, more than 15-20 fresh patients are visiting the out-patient department in our hospital every day. The trend is worrying this year as more and more people are testing positive for chikungunya," said a senior doctor of the hospital, requesting anonymity.

Official data released by municipal authorities on Monday said that the city has reported 2,625 cases of chikungunya and 607 cases of dengue in the national Capital so far.

Last year, the city witnessed 15,867 cases of dengue and 64 chikungunya cases. Chikungunya and dengue have claimed at least 34 lives so far this year. There are around 41 private and 35 government hospitals in Delhi that are treating patients from various parts of the country.

Also read:Delhi: Dengue-chikungunya outbreak worries shoo away tourists

SAME STORY TOLD BY VARIOUS HOSPITALS

"We have seen more than 400 cases of chikungunya this season. Around 10-15 fresh cases are being reported every day," said Dr SP Byotra, senior consultant and chairman of the department of medicine at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH). At SGRH, 75-year-old JD Madan died on Thursday morning - the fifth person to have succumbed to chikungunya at this hospital in the last five days.

The Centre-run Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital has also reported more than 560 cases of chikungunya, and most of the patients were from Delhi and NCR. "Our hospital has reported more than 560 and 250 cases of chikungunya and dengue, respectively. Most patients are from Delhi and NCR," said Dr VK Sinha, spokesperson, RML Hospital.

"On an average, the hospital is witnessing around 600-700 new patients with fever every day. We have allocated 110 beds for dengue and chikungunya patients, out of which 47 are occupied," Sinha added.

The sudden spike in chikungunya cases in Delhi and several other parts of north India has come nearly 10 years after a massive outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease across the country.

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In 2006, more than 13 lakh suspected chikungunya cases were reported across the country, according to the National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP).

The Delhi government will launch a month-long intensive fogging drive across the city from Thursday. It has also asked the private hospitals not to release data on vectorborne disease cases directly to the media.



Also Read:

Exposed: Anti-mosquito drive launched by politicians in Delhi, a mere photo-op

AAP ministers, LG trade charges as chikungunya toll rises to 15 in Delhi

6 questions about Chikungunya you must know the answers to



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From Restaurant Week India, to Oktobeerfest, here are the top three food events you must attend this month.

Head out for some great food, good ambience, and pocket-friendly deals at these Delhi events. Picture courtesy: Instagram/deena_purush_blr

By India Today Web Desk: Finding out just where you want to go for dinner tonight is always a bit of a hassle, especially if you want to spend some time with family and friends over some good food and drinks.

But there are three food events in Delhi this month that you just shouldn't miss. You can get great food, good ambience, and pocket-friendly deals--all the things you need for a good time.

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So, check these out, and make your reservations now!

Restaurant Week India

The largest pan-India culinary event spanning 10 days, across six cities, is back with its 13th edition. The event is on from Friday, 16 September to Sunday, 25 September, 2016, simultaneously across Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune featuring some of the country's finest restaurants.

Restaurant Week India is a pan-nation event that will help you get great meals at your favourite restaurants. Picture courtesy: Instagram/panushwari

The restaurants participating in Delhi are A Ta Maison, Sunder Nagar; Artusi Ristorante e Bar, GK2; Baluchi, The Lalit New Delhi; Chi Ni, Dusit Devarana New Delhi; Dakshin, Sheraton New Delhi Hotel; DEL, Roseate House, New Delhi; DIVA - The Italian Restaurant, GK 2; Diya, The Leela Ambience Gurgaon Hotel & Residences; Dum Pukht, ITC Maurya; Eau de Monsoon, Le Meridien New Delhi; Ek Bar, Defence Colony; Guppy by Ai, Lodhi Colony; Kiyan, Dusit Devarana New Delhi; Neung Roi, Radisson Blu Plaza Delhi; Olive Bar & Kitchen, Mehrauli; Pan Asian, Sheraton New Delhi Hotel; Royal China, Nehru Place; Sakura, The Metropolitan Hotel & Spa; The Grill Room, The Lalit New Delhi; Tian, ITC Maurya; Tres, Lodhi Road; Wildfire, Crowne Plaza Today Gurgaon; Yauatcha, Vasant Kunj; and, Zanotta, The Leela Ambience Gurgaon Hotel & Residences.

There are special offers you can get if you are Ola Prime Customers, apart from the deals available at their main site.

Also read: Set against the background of Old Delhi, this food fair will see a unique blend of street food and whisky



Oktobeerfest '16 at Yes Minister

The much-loved festival from Germany has now spread its beery wings across the world. And you can celebrate it at the same time as people in Germany are! All you need to do is get to Yes Minister at Hauz Khas, between 16 and 25 September, and enjoy as much beer as you want.

Celebrate beer the way the Germans do at Delhi's own Octobeerfest. Picture courtesy: Instagram/bontravel

You can get unlimited beer at Rs. 599 (plus taxes) on all days, and attend some of the other events they have lined up for you (don't miss the RetroBeats on 21 September, and the Beer Pong Night on 23 September).

You can actually live the ultimate German beer dreams, here in Delhi. Click here for reservations and other details.

Pub Foods of the World, Vivanta by Taj

Now we all know about the brilliant simplicity of pub culture and food, espcially in the UK and Europe. And now there's a food fest in the capital that will celebrate pub food, and brings some to your platter from across the world.

Get a taste of pub foods from around the world at this month-long food event at Vivanta by Taj. Picture courtesy: Instagram/vivantabytaj Get a taste of pub foods from around the world at this month-long food event at Vivanta by Taj. Picture courtesy: Instagram/vivantabytaj

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Just make your reservations at Tease, the bar at Vivanta by Taj, Gurgaon, between 2 and 30 September, and you'll get to taste some finger-licking favourites from England, Austria, Spain, Ireland, USA, France and India.

To get some of these pub favourites, from Irish Lamb Pies to American Hot Buffalo Wings, at affordable a la carte prices, click here.



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The aroma, taste and health benefits of drinking infusion tea could make you forget what green tea is all about.

By Nikita Bhalla: If you're a green tea addict, you might not want to budge at the thought of shifting your loyalties to a new superfluid at first but then if good health is of any concern to you, the choice is all yours. What if we tell you that you could still get the benefits of green tea while sipping on what's popularly known as a flavoured tea?

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If the idea interests you, think of drinking a cup of brewed ginger tea in green or black tea base because it is excellent for the throat and treats sinuses too. Now imagine this in chamomile, lemon, mint, jasmine or even fruit flavours like blackberry, acai berry and orange!

Also read: Fights cold and prevents weight gain: Going green does all this and more!



Infusions are teas which have the base tea--typically green or black--mixed with the infusion of a particular flower, leaf or other organic products that could add flavour, taste and enhance the healthy benefits of drinking tea itself.

We spoke to GV Shashidhar, Founder and brew master, Tsakafi, New Delhi, and he told us about the multiple benefits of infusion tea and how it's better than good old green tea.

Shashidhar said, "The idea of drinking tea which benefits you in the best way possible is what we aim for. I want to make an average Indian a brew master, simply by educating people on how the present method of tea cooking in India is very harmful. A cup of brewed flavoured tea, however, is the alternate to regular, run-of-the-mill green tea. Touted to have its own share of antioxidants, infused tea is only going to give you better results, both health and taste wise."

Here are 4 reasons why infused tea should take up space on your kitchen shelves, starting today.

Infused tea gives you the best of both worlds: Green tea is a base tea with leaves which are less oxidised and less fermented, thus making it very healthy but not really tasty. Enjoying plain green tea is an acquired taste that not many can achieve. So, for the taste to stand out and for you to attain the maximum immunity boosting powers of green tea, try a flavour instead. Infusions add taste, colour and flavour in the form of natural ingredients like ginger, mint, jasmine, chamomile to a base tea like green tea or black tea. Infusion teas have additional health benefits: Infusions bring their own benefits, for example, ginger benefits the sinuses, chamomile aids in improving the metabolism, lemon aids in increasing alkalinity in the body. Energy levels go up with infused tea: A sudden energy boost is also what could convince you to pick up infused tea the next time you go grocery shopping. The health benefits of the fruit are additional and provide you with more energy, something that can't be said for most other sugary drinks. You can have it in any form: Infused tea can be consumed both hot or cold but that's not the case with plain green tea.

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NEW Wedding Ideas

Old World Mexico Wedding Inspiration

Old World Mexico Wedding Inspiration

Vintage old world Mexico and the modern 21st century come together at last in this beautiful shoot styled by Trunks & Tales Vintage Rentals at the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park California. The unique mix of culture and style create a unique vibe thats both laid back and sophisticated.

From the gorgeous nearly naked cake, to the adorable potted succulent favors, we hope youll find tons of ideas for your big day. In the full gallery here, you can see every last image for yourself from the talented Olinda Plancarte Photography.

Old World Mexico

From Olinda Plancarte Photography: Lindsay Healy from Trunks & Tales Vintage Rentals styled a Mexican old world inspiration shoot. This shoot took place at the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park California. As soon as you walk in the doors it feels like you stepped inside of an old hacienda in Tlaquepaqque Mexico. The shoot features big bright florals with rich colors and ornate details.

Intricate details

The intricate details are everywhere from the wooden chargers to the delicate silk ribbon tied to the bouquet to the fragile papel picado hanging from the walls. The cake is a gorgeous three tiered semi-naked cake featuring lace and florals. We wanted to bring old world style into the 21st century.
By PTI: Mumbai, Sep 21 (PTI) A container truck driver has been arrested in connection with the rape and murder of a minor girl at Navghar in suburban Mulund, police said today.

Sahil Ismail Choudhary (26), a resident of Satpur in Nashik MIDC area, was arrested yesterday. He has been sent in police custody till September 26, they said.

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He had parked his container truck near the Navghar highway and was detained on the basis of CCTV footage in the area.

The incident came to light when the 11-year-old girl from Navghar area went missing from outside her residence on Saturday night.

Her parents had lodged a police complaint.

She was found unconscious under a truck which was parked by the roadside and was declared dead before admission to a hospital.

After postmortem, it was found that the girl was raped and murdered.

A case under relevant sections of IPC and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act was registered at Navghar police station, police added. PTI DC VT GK BSA RYS

--- ENDS ---
LAKE CHARLES -- United States Attorney Stephanie A. Finley announced that a federal jury found a Florida man guilty Tuesday of sexually assaulting a female officer stationed at the Fort Polk Military Base.

Maurice Antuan Speights, 32, of Tallahassee, Fla., was found guilty of one count of sexual abuse.

United States District Judge Patricia Minaldi presided over the trial, which started Monday and ended Tuesday with the jury returning the guilty verdict after deliberating for 50 minutes.

According to testimony and evidence admitted at trial, the defendant, a civilian, was an acquaintance who was temporarily residing at a relatives home in Leesville.

Speights, the victim and a female friend went out for a night of drinking on Oct. 20, 2013. At trial, the female friend testified about the events of the evening. She stated that the victim was so intoxicated that by the time the three returned to the female friends home, the victim passed out. The female friend and Speights had to carry the victim to an upstairs bedroom.

An FBI agent testified that during an interview, Speights acknowledged engaging in sexual intercourse with the victim but claimed it was consensual.

The victim took the stand during the two-day trial and testified that she had no memory of anything that occurred until she woke up in the middle of the night with the defendant sexually assaulting her.

The case was brought by the U.S. Attorneys Office because the crime occurred on the Fort Polk Military Base where the United States has exclusive jurisdiction.

Speights faces up to a lifetime in prison, life of supervised release, registration as a sex offender and a $250,000 fine. Sentencing has been set for January 12, 2017.

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command and the FBI conducted the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorneys John Luke Walker and David C. Joseph are prosecuting the case.
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By Adam Morton

Sep. 20, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By Adam Morton Sep. 20, 2016 | 07:44 PM | PADUCAH, KY

The Paducah Board of Commissioners is considering doing away with the city's muzzle ordinance for dogs at public events.



The current ordinance requires dogs to be muzzled when in attendance at special community events, such as BBQ on the river, and the Lower town arts Festival. Mayor Gayle Kaler along with Commissioners, City Manager Jeff Pederson, Paducah Chief of Police Brandon Barnhill, and Lower Town resident and dog owner Patience Renzulli brought up several topics related to the dog ordinance. One point of discussion included the difficulty in enforcing the muzzle requirement. It was also noted that public education is needed to make pet owners aware of how bringing any pet to a special event may be stressful to the animal.



The dog ordinance also says dogs that owners bring to special community events are required to be licensed, and must be on a leash that is no longer than three feet.



Only the muzzle portion of the ordinance is under review right now. If passed, dogs would no longer be required to wear a muzzle.



Police Chief Brandon Barnhill said, "Its roughly a twelve year old ordinance. I think it is in time for some review. [It] needs to be a comprehensive review to see what other options or other items need to be included in the overall ordinance. Not just the removal of muzzles themselves."



Barnhill said he would like to see the city look at other types of animals in the review, not just dogs. He said that he is pro animal for Paducah, and even mentioned he had two dogs of his own, but his number one priority is protecting the public.



The Paducah Board of Commissioners will vote on the change at their next scheduled meeting.
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By Tim Brockwell

Sep. 20, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By Tim Brockwell Sep. 20, 2016 | 07:42 PM | PADUCAH, KY

The public got a chance to meet with members of local law enforcement at Law Enforcement Appreciation Day in Paducah Tuesday afternoon.



A large crowd gathered at Heartland Worship Center to hear leaders from the local law enforcement community speak and to interact with them on a personal level. Attendees were treated to a performance of the National Anthem by the Paducah Tilghman Band of Blue, as well as an a capella performance of "God Bless America" by PTHS vocal ensemble Prime Rib.



The event was organized by Commonwealth Attorney Dan Boaz and former Commonwealth Attorneys Albert Jones, Mark Bryant and Tom Osborne, as well as County Attorney Sam Clymer and former County Attorney Michael Murphy and other volunteers.



Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear was in attendance, and thanked members of law enforcement for their hard work and dedication.



"On behalf of my office, and on behalf of my family, thank you for giving every ounce of your ability to protect this commonwealth," Beshear said. "Thank God you are here. Thank God you answer the call."



Beshear said law enforcement are the first line of defense against problems like sexual assault, domestic violence, substance abuse and fraud.



McCracken County Sheriff Jon Hayden said it means a lot when people show there support, and his deputies always appreciate seeing signs of support in the community.



"I can't stress enough how much that means to us in law enforcement, knowing that the people we work for and serve are supportive of our efforts in what we're trying to do." Hayden said.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 21, 2016 | 11:38 AM | MCCRACKEN COUNTY, KY

A Paducah woman was arrested Tuesday night after police said she stabbed her boyfriend.

According to the McCracken County Sheriff's Office, deputies were dispatched to a home on Epperson Road at around 11:30 pm for a report of a disturbance with injuries. The investigation showed that 29-year-old Robyn Smith of Paducah, and her boyfriend, 27-year-old Christopher Flores, also of Paducah, got into a fight.

During the fight, deputies said Smith grabbed a knife and stabbed Flores. Flores was transported to a local hospital for treatment of his injuries.

Smith was later arrested and charged with first degree assault. She was lodged in the McCracken County Regional Jail.
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By Paul Schaumburg, Graves County Schools Sep. 21, 2016 | 08:51 AM | MURRAY, KY

Its a great way to see what is needed, said Graves County High School senior Devin Stroud. I plan to go into the union.

Graves High junior John Holmes said he made contacts based on his interest in a machine tooling career.

Its a great opportunity for all of us to get experience with machine tools, to look at the opportunities we have in careers, and to think about what our lives can be, said Mayfield High School junior Chris Stewart.

They had us make both wooden and metal toolboxes at one of the booths, said Andrew Passwater, a Mayfield High student. That ties into my interest in carpentry!

All four students also take hands-on classes at the Mayfield-Graves County Area Technology Center, as they explore career options. Their comments came from a special event held Thursday, Sept. 15.

This is our sixth year for construction career day, said Chris Nelson, executive vice-president of the Associated General Contractors of Western Kentucky. We started with our group and the Murray State University Institute of Engineering. We have an education committee made up of principals from various vocational schools and contractors. We got together and decided to put this together to attract high school students to construction careers. We started reaching out to various members as vendors within our association. They were excited about it and it was a pretty easy task. They understand the need and want to get out in front of these young people and give them some potential pathways to construction careers.

Nelson continued, We have a national organization in Washington, D.C., and they just completed a survey of approximately 2,000 contractors nationwide and 75 percent of those contractors say they need trade-skilled workers. The work is starting to ramp up and we need more workers! The Baby Boomers are retiring and the average age of a construction worker now is about 48 years old! So, for future projects, we need young people to start coming into the field to take their places.

He added, The survey also indicates theres a need for project managers and other positions that usually require a college education. So, we have a great relationship with Murray State, West Kentucky Community and Technical College, and the local vocational schools associated with high schools. Today, we have 25 high schools feeding into 18 area technology centers coming. From the Mississippi River eastward, we get Kentucky schools as far as Warren East High School. Our program is unique in many ways and draws from a large geographic area. We really appreciate our partnerships with these school districts and with Murray State.

Our primary focus for this event is to help young people see opportunities to go into the skilled trades, said Danny Claiborne, chair for MSUs Institute of Engineering. Ive talked to construction contractors and organizations in this room today who tell me they cant do more work than theyre doing because they need more workers! These are jobs that pay well and can last a lifetime! Some of these students will pursue their interests in a two-year program at West Kentucky Community and Technical College and some then will pursue management careers by getting a four-year degree in engineering technology at Murray State. Theres a three-tiered level. With this as our sixth year of this annual career day, were seeing that process playing out.

My background is in career and technical education on the business side, said Annie Dail, special projects coordinator in MSUs College of Science, Engineering, and Technology. Application-based learning is a great way to connect to careers! This is so cool! For students to come here to see what is available in the working world and in which companies they might find work. In my position, we work to place students in internship programs with companies. We have programs to make that partnership worthwhile for both students and companies.

This construction career day exposes kids to more careers than we can, said Joel Crider, the electricity instructor at the Mayfield-Graves County Area Technology Center. He teaches students from Mayfield, Graves County, and Carlisle County high schools. Weve been coming here ever since this started six years ago. Some of my students from last year connected with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Those IBEW guys came to our school and ended up hosting a competition for our students. Our kids meeting those professionals here really made a difference! A couple of them even got into the IBEW apprenticeship program!

We come out here to show these students there are options besides college, said Jarrod Shadowen of the Paducah Electrical Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee. In our program, we have a five-year apprenticeship. Were a union program, where apprentices go to school one night a week and we make sure they are employed full-time. Over that five years, theyre getting paid every day to go to work and the school tuition costs just $200 a year, $1,000 altogether, and you cant beat that! When they finish, they are licensed electricians in Kentucky and journeymen wiremen through the IBEW, and theyre making $50,000 to $60,000 per year! Were seeing a lot of the younger generation getting interested and involved.

Theres a lot of stuff that pertains to our kind of work, said Kevin Hutchens, carpentry teacher at the Mayfield-Graves County Area Technology Center, but there are so many cool machines to try out! I would have loved this when I was in high school!
By Radhika Bhalla/Mail Today: Nothing is sweeter than victory, and Elena Duggan--the winner of MasterChef Australia 2016--has been enjoying every bit of it after serving her winning dessert, 'Verjus in Egg', in the finale round.

While emotions may have been high in the kitchen, Duggan is on a happy high. Speaking to Femail, she shares, "I have received so many beautiful messages from India, it has been overwhelming." The Sydney based cook has become an inspiration for young professionals across the world who want to pursue their passion and succeed at it.

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"I encouraged others to be brave because when you are, and when you show you are a hard and passionate worker, your work shows for itself. You don't need to do anything," she reveals.

Elena Duggan

Duggan's journey through the MasterChef kitchen is a living example of embracing oneself and being brave enough to express one's inner strength and creativity. The judges--chef Gary Mehigan, chef George Calombaris and food critic Matt Preston--commented in the show on the skills she had picked up along the way and how delightfully bold the flavours became over the course of time.

In fact, during the last round she had stated, "I think self-doubt can get in the way of wanting bigger and better things for yourself and maybe pursuing passions is scary because you don't think you can make a living out of it but I know that's not true now"--and nothing holds truer.

Yet, recounting the high-intensity three-round finale battle that she faced with her friend and co-cook Matt Sinclair, she says, "I was most nervous in the entree course, but a few minutes in between the main course I made a conscious choice to move forward and enjoy, embrace the occasion. I decided to have fun regardless of the outcome, celebrate how far I had come and put my best foot forward." She adds, "Happy cooks make happy food."

The proof was in the dessert that she masterfully created--a chocolate egg shell with a filling of coconut panna cotta, mandarin puree infused with thyme and parfait, placed on a honey tuille nest among others.

Duggan's dessert, 'Verjus in Egg', that won her the title of MasterChef Australia 2016.

Speaking of the judges, she shares, "They are phenomenal guys, truly inspiring, hilarious and cheeky off-camera, which sometimes break the tension and I appreciate that. Each of them has different expertise areas, and gives guidance and encouragement that help and enrichen the experience. I am very grateful for it; they made it a very warm space, made it safe to take risks, be safe to be ourselves, and cook some amazing things."

The environment amongst the contestants was also one of camaraderie, and as she explains, "I think food is at the core of it, and because we are all so passionate about it and same position of being away from our loved ones, with the same masterchef expectations within the kitchen, we were as friendly and respectful as possible. Second, the judges are in that mood, and you want to meet their expectations because you respect them."

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Whether kitchens in the real world are as supportive, especially to women in terms of equal pay, etc, is something that still needs to be tackled and improved and when asked what she thought of the situation, Duggan shares: "Unfortunately it's a worldwide issue where women are not receiving equal pay, but with more women pursuing their dreams and passion and more men encouraging us, we will get there. There are many right people taking action to ensure things continue to improve."

On a final note, the happy cook states, "I would encourage everyone to find an outlet that is satisfying to the soul. You may not find it in your work, but finding your happy place makes it a lot easier to face all the other challenges. Give yourself time and space to find your passion and nurture it, whether you like to paint, love, draw, photograph or cook."

--- ENDS ---

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By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 21, 2016 | 06:53 AM | PADUCAH, KY

One of the proudest moments I have had as attorney general is transferring $4.5 million to the Kentucky State Police crime lab to make sure the backlog never occurs again, Beshear said. Now my office is taking the next step by partnering with victim advocates and law enforcement across the state to help ensure victims receive the justice they so rightly deserve.





Beshears Office of Victim Advocacy and his Department of Criminal Investigations are working with the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs and its 13 rape crisis centers, including PASAC, the Kentucky State Police and local law enforcement and prosecutors to address the backlog and begin to investigate and prosecute the cases in a victim-centered manner.





Rape crisis advocates from across the state, like PASAC, will support local law enforcement to ensure that victims receive the support they need to heal, and, if a case moves forward, to stay engaged in the process.





Beshear applauded PASAC advocates and Executive Director Lori Brown for providing lifesaving services in the Purchase region to adults and children who have been victimized by sexual assault, and for the centers commitment to help end the SAFE kit backlog and bring justice to survivors.





We are grateful to Attorney General Beshear for his commitment to ensure the safety of our communitys most vulnerable populations and his leadership to promote the SAFE Act, Brown said. This legislation is a major step forward in ensuring justice for survivors across the state. PASAC is committed to working with our Purchase area community partners to implement best practices that will ensure the timely analysis of these kits and provide the necessary support for survivors throughout their healing process.

Beshear was joined by local lawmakers, hospital directors and sexual assault nurse examiners in supporting PASAC, prosecutors and law enforcement in the region.





Results of the more than 3,000 backlogged kits are expected to be returning to local police offices across the state in September. As kit results begin to return, PASAC will work with law enforcement agencies in the cities of Paducah, Murray, Benton and Mayfield; in the counties of McCracken, Marshall, Graves and Calloway; and with the Murray State University Police Department and the Kentucky State Police.

I am honored to stand with Attorney General Beshear today as we recognize PASACs efforts in West Kentucky, said Rep. Will Coursey, of Benton. Addressing Kentuckys SAFE kit backlog was a priority of the General Assembly this most recent session, and I proudly voted to support Senate Bill 63. Anything we can do to support the adults and children who have become victims of sexual assault will bring us one step closer to justice for all survivors.





Today brings our focus back to a serious issue in Kentucky  eradicating Kentuckys SAFE kit backlog, said Rep. Gerald Watkins, of Paducah. I stand with the victims and survivors in this state, and I am proud to have supported Senate Bill 63 earlier this year. Id like to thank Attorney General Beshear for working tirelessly with our local PASAC to support advocates, and for generously funding the KSP crime lab in hopes of preventing any future backlog.



One of the core missions of Attorney General Beshears office is to seek justice for victims of sexual assault and end Kentuckys SAFE kit backlog.





Last week Beshears office hosted the SAFE Summit in partnership with the Sexual Assault Response Team Advisory Committee to train nearly 200 law enforcement officers, prosecutors and victim advocates on how to conduct a victim-centered investigation, examine cold cases, notify victims and prosecute sexual assault offenders.





During the 2016 legislative session, Beshear supported the SAFE Act or Senate Bill 63, which was passed unanimously by lawmakers and directed that all kits be tested. Beshear committed $4.5 million in settlement funds from a lawsuit his office settled to be used for testing of SAFE kits and provided an additional $1 million support the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault cases.





Attorney General Andy Beshear visited the Purchase Area Sexual Assault and Child Advocacy Center (PASAC) Tuesday to support law enforcement, prosecutors and advocates in Western Kentucky who are working to end Kentuckys sexual assault forensic exam kit (SAFE kit) backlog.
A couple recently launched an online portal called 'Dalit Foods' to sell grains, pickles and spices. The great initiative aims at challenging caste bias and tackles food adulteration.

By India Today Web Desk:

Part of India's "untouchable" caste and a former rebel fighter with India's Maoist insurgency, 58-year-old Chandra Bhan Prasad, has taken on caste-based discrimination but in the most non-violent way.

Many things, including foods, regarded impure, even decades after India banned caste-based discrimination in 1955, are now coming to take the market by storm. Online portal named Dalit Foods offers packaged foods like grains, pickles and spices.

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THE 'UNTOUCHABLES'

Chandra Bhan Prasad was born into the Dalit Pasi community of pig rearers in northern India, considered untouchable in the ancient Hindu social hierarchy. But Prasad and his wife recently launched 'Dalit Foods' online to sell spices, pickles and grains.

"I was born impure. But I have the right to sell pure," Prasad said.

"I grew up with segregation and untouchability, but India has changed. I want to see how those who are born pure respond to my offering," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.



THE DALIT FOODS DREAM

Prasad started to take interest in food after three members of his family died of cancer. The main aim behind launching Dalit Foods is challenging the caste bias but the vision expands to tackle the issue of food adulteration as well.

"Food adulteration is a big problem, and is probably the biggest reason for our health problems today," he said.

"And yet, I saw 80-year-old Dalits who were healthy and doing hard labour, largely because of what they were eating: pure, unprocessed food," he said.

Dalit Foods sells a small range of spices and grains, including chili powder, turmeric powder, mango pickle, barley flour, and lentils. More products will be added, Prasad said.



CHALLENGING CASTE BIAS

Dalits were barred from public places including temples and water tanks frequented by higher-caste Hindus. Many higher-caste Hindus considered food cooked or served by Dalits impure.

It is this custom that Prasad is taking aim at and trying to fight against by selling foods made by Dalits.

Prasad said that while growing up he and others in his community were forced to eat coarse foods that were reserved for cattle and for servants. These included unpolished rice and millets.

"Millets were considered inferior food then. Today, they are called a superfood," he said.

"We want to make Dalit foods like these popular," he said.

A large hotel chain is buying Dalit Foods on a trial basis, and the number of customers, largely urban Indians, is rising.

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THE ENDEAVOUR

"My business is a social experiment to see if India has really transformed, to see if people are willing to overcome their biases and customs for food that is pure," he said.

--- ENDS ---
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Nick Dear's play starts with Shakespeare on the stand, a witness at a trial for high treason. "What are your ties to the Earl of Southampton?" the judge's voice rings out. That, as they say, is the question.

The third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, was at the heart of the Essex rebellion, a plot against Elizabeth I. Sentenced to death, but let off with life imprisonment, he's a key figure in the Stratford man's mystery. Shakespeare dedicated two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, to Wriothesley. "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end," he wrote for the latter. "What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours."

Was his patron, as some scholars suggest, also the "fair youth" of the Sonnets; their addressee one Mr W.H.? Or were the pair purely professional? There's no concrete evidence one way or the other. Those two dedications are all that remain.

Dear's play cycles through the possibilities. At once historical speculation and a critique of speculative history, Dedication  Shakespeare and Southampton imagines three versions of their relationship, channel hopping between parallel pasts. While Tom McKay's Shakespeare, thick-set and straightforward, stays constant, Tom Rhys Harries, gleaming in white, his hair bottle blond, is the golden boy of Southampton, and he changes in each.

One's flirtatious and haughty, a louche rich kid who picks up a poet. Another's imperious and stern, sought out by Shakespeare as a source of income  maybe more. The third is boyish and bright, a fey thinker and queer radical, prone to cross-dressing. This time, their appreciation  and attraction  is mutual. It's history as told by Goldilocks' three bears: too hot, too cold, just right. As well as the romance, Dedication picks at philanthropy: who works for who, poet or patron? Both men are masters here. One Southampton's demanding, another's awestruck. His money might dictate writing, or might just support it.

Any of these Southamptons would be capable of a coup, but, though Dear shows us three relationships, he doesn't show us three plots. Where Dedication draws nearest to known facts, the three Southamptons combine and Rhys Harries, deftly, nods to them all. The point, as Shakespeare states plainly, is that each version is simultaneously true and not true  a line of thinking Dear extends to homosexuality, rarely found in the record books, but no less a fact of life for that. He doesn't, however, apply the same notion to justice: as speculative and uncertain as history itself. Can we really know Wriothesley's role in the rebellion  or just that he was tried and convicted?

Too often Dear's writing tends towards aphorisms and factualities. At best, it's self-aware; at worst, unconvincing and glib. His Shakespeare never misses a chance to stress his Stratford connection or spell out the play's message. "It's a history play," he says of Richard II. "They're tricky." That's why Sam Hodges puts the pair on a pedestal. Alex Lowde's mirrored in-the-round stage encases them like Crown Jewels: two sparkling national treasures on show. Bissected by arches, it stresses our subjectivity; one's view of events depends on the angle of approach. Reflections bounce off each other, fragmenting the image. It underlines the two men's mutual vanity, but is itself vain: a moving catwalk, outlined in neon, its twin revolve spinning the pair past one another. It adds up, but subtracts: overloading a slight, concentrated play and distracting from it with wobbles, glitches and judders. History's full of them. Theatre probably shouldn't be.

Dedication runs at the Nuffield Theatre until 8 October.
A Brondby fan who had the misfortune of being thwacked in the face by a wayward shot has seen the accident result in a potentially life-saving tumour diagnosis.

In what really is an extraordinary story, David Nielsen was hit in the head by a stray shot from striker Kamil Wilczek that flew into the crowd while Brondby were warming-up before a recent game against Copenhagen back in August.

Nielsen was immediately attended to by Brondbys medical staff, who sent him to hospital for precautionary concussion scans.

However, the X-rays ended up revealing that he had a brain tumour that had gone completely diagnosed and unnoticed.

According to Ekstrabladet, Nielsen subsequently underwent emergency surgery to have the tumour removed and now has a good chance of making a strong recovery.

Nielsen himself then confirmed the good news by posting a message on a Brondby supporters Facebook page on Facebook, thanking the clubs medical staff and even Wilczek for his unwitting part in the diagnosis.

Vild historie. Ramt af en bold i hovedet til #bifvff og opdagede derved tumor i hjernen #Brndby #sldk pic.twitter.com/a8VSPREVbO  Mikkel Davidsen (@mikkeldavidsen) September 19, 2016

The message reads thus:

Hi everybody. My name is David and Im the person who has been hit with a ball during a warm up before the match against Kbenhavn. I want to thank the medical personnel, security and all club employees, and also fans who were standing near me and reacted immediately, because that saved my life. I cant describe how grateful Im for their effort. It turned out that I have a brain tumor and this wouldnt be discovered if Wilczek didnt hit my head with a ball, so Im also very grateful for him for what happened.

How utterly extraordinary! Heres wishing him the very best of luck with his continued rehab.
France has become the first country in the world to ban all disposable plates, bowls, cups, cutlery and other utensils.

The rampant use of plastic items and bags has raised significant environmental concerns. (Image via Twitter)

By India Today Web Desk: France has become the first country in the world to ban all plastic crockery and cutlery, taking a monumental step towards environment conservation.

The ban will come into effect from 2020, after which all disposable plates, bowls, cups, cutlery and other utensils will have to be made of plant-based and domestically decomposable material. It's part of the Energy Transition For Green Growth Bill that France passed in 2015.

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Read: Storing medicines in plastic bottles can cause cancer, birth defects, say doctors



Packaging manufacturers, though, are fighting the ban, saying it violates European Union commerce rules.

Pack2Go Europe, a Brussels-based organization representing European packaging manufacturers, is pushing European Commission "to do the right thing" and sue France for violating European law on free movement of goods. "If they don't, we will," the company's secretary general Eamonn Bates told AP.

He further argued there was no proof that bio-sourced disposable cutlery is more environmentally beneficial, and that the ban "will be understood by consumers to mean that it is OK to leave this packaging behind in the countryside after use because it's easily bio-degradable in nature. That's nonsense! It may even make the litter problem worse."

Even France's environment minister opposed the new law initially, saying it will place excess burden on lower-income families.

Read: Plastic-made national flags to be banned soon



Ecologists, meanwhile, wanted the ban to be introduced as soon as 2017.

The rampant use of plastic items and bags has raised significant environmental concerns. Heaps of plastic waste end up in the ocean and break down underwater, causing great damage to aquatic life. Marine and land animals often end up eating it too, leading to fatal consequences.

Production of plastic also contributes to the climate change phenomenon, using millions of barrels of oil. Workers involved in the manufacturing process are at risk too, being exposed to toxic chemicals, including carcinogens.

Read: By 2050, oceans will have more plastic waste than fish



Various companies are producing alternatives to plasticware, like processed plant starch, bioplastic, and of course, paper.

In India, Hyderabad-based start-up Bakeys is manufacturing edible cutlery made from flours of jowar blended with rice and wheat. Their spoons - costing Rs 275 for 100 pieces - even come in sweet, savoury and plain flavours.

via GIPHY



Read: Edible bowls and cutlery are clearly the new and eco-friendly way to serve food



France had similarly enforced a ban on plastic bags, which came into effect in March this year. Plastic bags have been banned or regulated in Delhi and Mumbai in India.

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Read: Goa to ban plastic items from government offices

Himachal HC bans sale, entry of food items with plastic packaging



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Those good people at English Heritage have paid tribute to Laurie Cunningham by giving the former West Brom and Real Madrid player his very own blue plaque.

Blue plaques are bestowed upon people who are deemed to have excelled in their profession and/or made an exceptional cultural impact. Cunningham, of course, fulfils both criteria.

Cunninghams plaque has been unveiled in north London, on the wall of the house in Stroud Green where he used to live as a child.

Cunninghams plaque is part of English Heritages pledge to increase the number they are bestowing to notable Londonites of black and Asian descent. Currently, only 33 of the 900 plaques dotted around the capital belong to people of said backgrounds.

Lovely stuff. Rarely has a blue plaque recipient ever looked this damn fly

Step this way for 10 Ultra Cool Photos Of Laurie Cunningham In His Pomp
So What Was The Patent?

Battlefield communication Avionics HF Radar  Band L- and S- Missile Guidance Electronic Warfare Identification, friend or foe (IFF)

Remember the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370? Well, it just go a whole lot more weird. In fact, it's actually kind of scary. Four member owners of a very important patent on a semiconductor were traveling on that flight and now that they are gone, it makes the famous billionaire Jacob Rothschild the sole owner of the coveted patent.In what is certainly one of the greatest mysteries of our time, MH370 mysteriously disappeared, which gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories, and understandably so. How can they track cell phones anywhere around the globe, but lose a plane? There is a trillion dollar infrastructure setup in space. It's absurd to believe their lies to say the least.Among the countless theories, are those which stretch beyond the limits of reason and those which seem more possible. But in spite of all the debate, no one has said anything in the media about what could certainly be a motive for the crime. Everyone knows, you always look for a motive or follow the money. In this case, the biggest clue, reads to Rothschild.A US based company, Freescale Semiconductor , which had 20 senior staff on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had just launched a state of the art breakthrough electronic warfare gadget for military radar systems within days of the Boeing 777 going missing.Freescale Semiconductor has been developing special microprocessors, sensors and other technologies for the past 50 years. The technology developed is often referred to as embedded processors, which the firm says are stand-alone semiconductors that perform dedicated computing functions in electronic systems.So why were so many Freescale employees traveling on this one particular flight? What were their jobs exactly? Were they on a covert mission, or at least working on a black project that the public does not even know of, as work of this nature sometimes calls for? Can these employees be the cause of the disappearance of this plane?As you can see, this inspires many other questions which have yet to be answered. Among the 239 people on flight MH370, the Freescale employees were mostly engineers working to make the company's chip facilities in Tianjin, China, and Kuala Lumpur more advance, said Mitch Haws, vice president of global communications and investor relations.He expressed his condolences by also remarking on their expertise:The company also owns Freescale RF which is involved in military and aerospace:To make this even more interesting, Freescale's shareholders include one of the most controversial organizations in the world.... the multi national billiondollar Carlyle Group, which is a collection of powerful private equity investors whose past advisers include ex-US president George Bush Sr and former British Prime Minister John Major.This was a group that came under intense scrutiny after 9/11. Why? Because on the exact day of 9/11, George Bush Sr, and Osama Bin Laden's brother Shafiq Bin Laden were in a meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel together . No, I'm really not making this madness up. Truth really is stranger than fiction.Whatever really happened here we may never know, but it stinks of corruption and conspiracy.
Topeka firefighters are investigating a fire that damaged six apartments and displaced more than a dozen residents early Wednesday.

Fire was called in around 12:25 a.m. at a residence at 1312 SW Western. When they arrived, fire crews noticed heavy smoke and flames on the backside of the building. They got the fire under control, but not before it damaged at least six apartments.

Nobody was hurt, but at least one dog was killed. Two residents had to be rescued from their lower-level apartment after they became trapped in a bathroom. A witness on-scene said they were taking a cold shower, when they felt the wall near them grow very hot. Then they heard the neighbors banging on the wall to be rescued.

13 News spoke with a man who says the fire started in his apartment.

"I looked down and the little skirts on the couch were on fire," said resident Ricky Dobson. "I got up and got some water to throw on them, but then I noticed it went around to the side... and coming up from the back."

Dobson said he and his neighbor tried to get the couch out to the parking lot before the fire spread, but couldn't.

Topeka Fire says the blaze started in Apartment #3, spreading throughout the backside of the structure. Damage estimates total around $150,000.

The Red Cross is assisting the displaced residents.
By India Today Web Desk: She walked the ramp, did promotions, shot for commercials, attended parties... all of it with a baby bump. Kareena Kapoor Khan is not your average Bollywood actor who goes into hiding as soon as they turn pregnant. She flaunts her baby bump like a badge of honour. She doesn't shy away from photogs, isn't interested in camouflaging her pregnancy and is more than happy to go in front of camera while with child. That's Bebo for you.

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ALSO READ: 5 times Kareena Kapoor Khan proved she is Bollywood's coolest mom-to-be

ALSO READ: Kareena Kapoor Khan is pregnant, 10 photos of the glowing mom-to-be to get you through the day



The 36-year-old actor, who is expecting her first child with husband Saif Ali Khan, is breaking every stereotype, and we are loving it.

In the last few months, Kareena has become an inspiration for every woman. Her recent statements on pregnancy and maternity have many women falling in love with this actor.

As Kareena turns 36 today, we bring to you some of her pearls of wisdom that can inspire any woman.

Pregnant, not a corpse

As soon as the news of her pregnancy came out, many were of the opinion that she would soon vanish from the movie scene and party circle for some time. But Kareena shut up her detractors by saying, "I'm pregnant, not a corpse. And what maternity break? It's the most normal thing on earth to produce a child."

Stop making my pregnancy a national casualty

Many were of the belief that Kareena's filmi career is over, as now she would get busy with her baby. But Kareena gave a befitting reply to all talk: "Stop making it (my pregnancy) a national casualty. We are in 2016, not in the 1800s. I'm just fed up of people making it (pregnancy) a death of some sort. In fact, it should be a message to a lot of people that marriage or having a family has absolutely nothing to do with my career."

Pregnancy is the most beautiful thing that can happen to a woman

Kareena charmed everyone when she walked the ramp for designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee at the Lakme Fashion Week 2016 grand finale last month. Seeing a pregnant Bollywood actor being cheered for flaunting her baby bump on the ramp was undoubtedly first of its kind. And this got her a lot of admiration from her peers and fans alike. Kareena, who was glowing in the Sabyasachi outfit, asked people to stop looking down upon pregnancy as a disease. She said, "The most important thing is that pregnancy should not be looked upon as a disease of some kind. It's the most beautiful phenomenon that can happen to a woman. In fact it's a joy."



Won't camouflage my baby bump, I'm proud of it

When many actors hide their baby bumps by opting for loose clothes during pregnancy, Kareena is happily flaunting hers at almost all events. Her maternity style quotient has become the talk of the town. She is soon to face the camera for Rhea Kapoor's Veere Di Wedding, and she is in no mood to camouflage her baby bump. "Whichever role I do, I am not going to camouflage it on screen. I am proud of this phase (being pregnant) that I am in and there is nothing to hide about it. Whichever film I choose to do, you will see me the way I am," said the Ki and Ka actor.

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I am a girl child, I'd love to have a girl

Kareena is set to deliver her baby in December this year and the actor is already fed up of all the questions surrounding the gender of her child. In fact, she feels her privacy is intruded upon when people ask her if it's a boy or a girl. "I am a girl child; I would love to have a girl, what is the difference? Probably I have done more for my parents than a son would," said Bebo.



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Gretchen S. Yeninas, a breast cancer survivor, shares her story and advice for early detection. As a breast cancer survivor, what advice do you have for others in monitoring their own health? I was 41 and just had my second mammogram when my cancer was found. And despite it being
Heavy rainfall is likely to occur at isolated places in Adilabad, Hyderabad, Karimnagar, Khammam, Mahaboobnagar, Medak, Nalgonda, Nizamabad, Ranga Reddy and Warangal of Telangana on today and tomorrow.

By Ashish Pandey: Overnight rain inundated several low lying areas under Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), badly affecting normal life of the people.

The Qutabullahpur division while received 164 mm rain neighbouring Malkajgiri received 91 mm of rain. Srilingampalle division received 74.25 mm of overnight rain.

Flooding and waterlogging in Hyderabad.

WEATHERMAN FORECASTS MORE RAIN

As per IMD, heavy rainfall is very likely to occur at isolated places in Adilabad, Hyderabad, Karimnagar, Khammam, Mahaboobnagar, Medak, Nalgonda, Nizamabad, Ranga Reddy and Warangal of Telangana on today and tomorrow.

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The Rangareddy collector has ordered closer of schools after districts received heavy rain causing inundation of several areas.

In view of the flooding and waterlogging over roads the Hyderabad Traffic police too has placed specific advisory to the commuters.

Hyderabad Traffic police placed specific advisory to the commuters. Hyderabad Traffic police placed specific advisory to the commuters.

Administration has advised, "In case the rain starts around 3.30-4 pm and if its heavy, please do not leave the office routinely at around 5-6 pm because there might be traffic congestions at various places."

The traffic police has, however, assured the denizen that it will keep issuing alerts about traffic position at various places after 5 pm over FB/ What's app/ Mobile app/ FM /TV channels etc tomorrow and day after.

The Qutabullahpur division received 164 mm rain.

Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao, who is in Delhi, called the GHMC Commissioner Janardan Reddy and inquired about the situation. He instructed all the concerned to be alert and provide relief to all those who are in distress.

ALSO READ:

Kolkata submerged for hours due to heavy rainfall



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By PTI: NAM

Porlamar (Venezuela), Sep 19 (PTI) India has raised with Venezuelan leadership the issue of "flagrant misuse" of NAM plenary by Pakistan to make "unwarranted and unacceptable" comments on Kashmir, saying South Asia suffers from Pakistans "dangerous use" of terrorism as an instrument of state policy.

In a strongly-worded letter to the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, External Affairs Minister for State M J Akbar said the South Asia continues to face Pakistans "dangerous use" of terrorism as an instrument of state policy.

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He also said that Pakistan has continued to provide safe havens to internationally designated terrorists and terror outfits.

Pakistan Prime Ministers Advisor on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz, in his NAM address as the Pakistan delegation head, had said, "peace in South Asia cannot be achieved without the settlement of the issue of Jammu and Kashmir in accordance with the resolutions of the UN Security Council".

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has condemned the Uri attack and expressed solidarity with Indian people.

Heavily-armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the Indian Army in North Kashmirs Uri town in the wee hours yesterday, killing 18 jawans and injuring 19 others in the attack in which all four terrorists were neutralised.

In his message, Maduro said, "we are committed along with our brotherly people of the world to get into the depth of this problem that generated proliferation of terrorist movement, which does not respect life and the need for co- existence of people." PTI PYK ZH AKJ ZH

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Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/09/2016 (2231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra kicked off its 69th season with international superstar violinist Joshua Bell, who electrified concertgoers Tuesday night with stunning artistry seldom seen at this level in our fair city.

In the works for two years, the unusual mid-week gala opener led by maestro Alexander Mickelthwate featured the dynamo performing Tchaikovskys Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op. 35, one of the great cornerstones of the fiddle repertoire and an ideal showcase for Bells impeccable virtuosity.

Hes been hailed as One of the most imaginative, technically gifted and altogether extraordinary violinists of our time by the Washington Post. The award-winning artist, 48, has displayed a Midas touch throughout his 30-year career, with everything his elegant bow touches seemingly turning to gold. Critics and pundits the world over regularly tumble over themselves dreaming up new superlatives to describe his deeply passionate performance. Consider yourself forewarned.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS American violinist Joshua Bell rehearses at the Centennial Concert Hall Tuesday morning.

The Bloomington, Ind.,-born Bell, who began studying with famous pedagogue Josef Gingold at 12, marked his professional debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at 14, and his Carnegie Hall premiere came three years later. He continues to crisscross the globe with his solo and chamber performances as well as serving as music director of the celebrated Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chamber orchestras. Bells ever-growing discography of 40 albums includes the soundtrack for Canadian 1998 film The Red Violin, and his eagerly anticipated new recording, For the Love of Brahms, is being released Sept. 30.

Bell immediately asserted his charismatic presence after coming onstage for the programs second half. After the orchestras brief introduction during the Tchaikovskys Allegro moderato opening movement, the soloist provided the first taste of his glorious sound on his fabled 1713 Huberman Stradivarius, with his rich tonal palette as colourful as a summer rainbow. Many violinists before him  and will after  have performed this 19th-century masterwork, but Bells compelling musicality, infused by an utter freedom and ease during his playing, makes you simply forget all others.

We were also treated to the quicksilver runs he often executed with both eyes shut, punctuating the ends of his own phrases with foot-stomps as he became thoroughly immersed in his music-making.

The second movement Canzonetta: Andante provided some measure of repose, with Bells graceful bowing fulfilling every lyrical phrase of its languorous themes. Then it was time for more pyrotechnics during the Finale: Allegro vivacissimo, with the fiddler playing like a banshee as the orchestra firmly kept pace.

As expected, the audience leapt to its feet with loud roars and cries of bravo, leading to an unusual encore: the theme from 2004 film Ladies in Lavender that ended the night on an unabashedly sentimental note.

The concert  and, thereby, the WSO season  opened with brilliant fanfare courtesy of the brass players who performed late 20th century French composer Paul Dukas La Peri, which set a celebratory tone for the evening.

The first half also featured Beethovens Symphony No. 7 in A major, performed with new vigour by the clearly inspired musicians  including at times, an overzealous trumpet section during the opening movement. The maestro guided the players through a buoyant Allegretto still filled with noble pathos. However, by the time we arrived at the finale Allegro con brio, Beethovens work had become blood sport, with its lightning speed tempo risking total derailment while hurtling pell-mell toward the finish line.

holly.harris@shaw.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you want to talk about the notoriously elusive idea of Canadian cuisine, it helps to start with indigenous food. Feast, which opened late last year on the corner of Ellice Avenue and Sherbrook Street, offers a modern take on traditional First Nations ingredients, beautifully showcasing bison, pickerel, corn, wild rice, sunflower seeds and berries, along with some creative adaptations of bannock and fry bread.

Owner Christa Bruneau-Guenther offers up First Nations cooking in an open, airy, light-filled space finished with white-and-black semi-industrial decor. Well-positioned as a West End community hub next to the Adam Beach Film Institute and the Bandwidth Theatre, and across from the West End Cultural Centre  Feast clearly has a lot of regulars, with servers greeting some customers by name.

Theres a lot of locavore-influenced comfort food here, served in hospitable amounts. In fact, if youre eating lunch at Feast, you might want to plan for a light supper.

Feast owner Christa Bruneau-Guenther serves up a twist on First Nations cuisine.

The stick-to-your-ribs chili ($9.75), satisfyingly seasoned but not spectacularly spicy, is made from grass-fed bison and a mix of beans and topped with made-in-Manitoba Bothwell cheddar. Piled-high Indian tacos ($9.25-10.75) start with a plate-sized circle of crisp fry bread, which is then heaped with bison chili or maple-chipotle chicken, shredded lettuce and salsa, and drizzled with lime-inflected sour cream.

The burger ($10.95), served on a crispy-chewy fried bannock bun, offers that genuine mayo-mustard messiness so beloved in our town. (Our server, knowing whats what, brought extra napkins.) Garlicky mushrooms, an optional add-on, were slightly undercooked, but the bison patty was juicy and good. (You can swap in Winnipeg rye or multigrain for your burger or sandwich if the fried option seems too much.)

A very nice house salad ($7.45 or $9.45) is finished with sunflower seeds, dried cranberries and a well-balanced dressing spiked with Saskatoon berry syrup.

The house-made desserts vary day to day. The filling of a strawberry rhubarb pie was delish, fresh and not overly sweet, but the pastry didnt quite match up, being a little soggy. There are also modestly priced baking staples such as blueberry muffins, a moist banana-walnut bread, and cinnamon-sugar bannock, available as coffee-time additions or to take out.

The cafes breakfasts include slight tweaks on standard diner classics, such as the Ellice platter ($7.95), which starts with bannock and intense Saskatoon jam. While the whites of the poached eggs were slightly watery, the bison sausage was lean without being dry, and the squash cakes, made with finely grated butternut, were fried up brown and tender-crisp.

There is also an indigenous take on eggs benedict ($9.95)  the poached eggs are served on bannock with lemon-chive hollandaise  and bannock-based breakfast sandwiches.

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Braydon Kirkness grabs one of the bannock buns served with a few Feast specialties.

During the work week, Feast is a daytime cafe, but it has started staying open on Friday and Saturday evenings. Many of its mains work well for supper, including bannock-based pizza and bison ribs basted with berry barbecue sauce.

Service is helpful, with the coffee pot circulating regularly for top-ups. Feast also offers kids meals, a nice, family-friendly menu option you dont see so much these days.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca
At least 10 people were killed, three went missing and 30 were injured as flashfloods and landslides struck West Java province of Indonesia overnight and Wednesday morning.

By Indo-Asian News Service: At least 10 people were killed, three went missing and 30 were injured as flashfloods and landslides struck West Java province of Indonesia overnight and Wednesday morning, a disaster agency spokesman said.

The flashfloods also left hundreds of others displaced in Garut district as waters in two rivers overflowed due to heavy downpour, Xinhua news agency quoted Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman of the national disaster agency, as saying.

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PLACES AFFECTED

Eight people have been killed, 30 wounded and one has gone missing in West Java, he said.



In Sumedang district, landslides hit two houses, leaving two people dead and two others missing on Tuesday night, Sutopo said.



Also read: Watch: Horrific video shows entire house swept away in China flood



SEARCH OPERATIONS ON

Search operations for the missing as well as emergency relief efforts, involving soldiers, police and those from the local disaster agency and search and rescue office, are under way.

Hundreds of affected people have been moved into government office buildings and military stations, Sutopo added.

Indonesia is frequently hit by floods and landslides during heavy rains.

Also read: 1 missing, 6 injured in landslides in China



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Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/09/2016 (2231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 38-year-old Winnipeg man who tried to slash two officers with a knife on Sept. 19 is now in jail and facing weapons and robbery charges.

After a man robbed two businesses on Sept. 11 and 19, police spotted a suspect matching the description in those robberies at about 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 19.

As officers approached the man, he tried to slash them with the knife. Officers used a Taser to subdue and disarm the man. The officers were not hurt.

Const. Rob Carver, speaking at a media conference on Tuesday, said officers would have been appropriate in a use of force with their firearms as anyone brandishing a weapon at police officers is considered to be a lethal threat.

They attempted to use a Taser. Thats not to say in this case that one officer hadnt deployed a firearm as a backup had the Taser not be effective, Carver said.

The deployment of Conducted Energy weapon (Taser) in this case resulted in us being able to effect the arrest of the suspect without any further injury.

The suspect was linked to a Sept. 11 robbery at about 10:30 p.m. of a convenience store in the 800 block of Ellice Avenue. A man had used a knife to threaten an employee and took off with unspecified items.

The same suspect was linked to the Sept. 19 robbery of a pawn shop at about 4:30 p.m. in the 400 block of Young Street where a man threatened an employee with a knife and stole a cellular phone.

Neither of the employees in the two robberies were hurt.

Charles Wilfred Thompson was arrested and charged with two counts of assaulting a peace officer with a weapon among other charges. He was not injured.

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It seems certain Winnipeg will charge fees on new development, but what the program looks like and when it will be implemented is unknown.

Mayor Brian Bowman and members of his executive policy committee endured more than two hours of criticism from a dozen development industry representatives Wednesday before they voted unanimously to allow more time for discussion around the controversial administrative report on growth fees. But the powerful committee set no timeline on when the report should be brought back or any specific direction to the administration on how to proceed.

Bowman said Coun. John Orlikow, chairman of councils property and development committee, has been charged with continuing discussions with the development industry and members of council and expects him to bring back a series of amendments to the report released last week. Bowman would not rule out the fee program being implemented Jan. 1, as originally proposed in the administrative report and draft bylaw.

KEN GIGLIOTTI / FREE PRESS FILES 'Quack, quack, quack  its a duck,' Michael Falk retorted when Coun. Brian Mayes insisted the fee is not a tax.

Ive said in private and in public, were listening to the concerns that have been raised in the administrative report, and well do what we can do to work as collaboratively as possible, Bowman told reporters following the meeting. Coun. Orlikow will continue to discuss with stakeholders, the public and council what would be the appropriate recommendation for EPCs consideration.

Orlikow (River Heights-Fort Garry) said hell be meeting with all of council in a closed-door session Friday to discuss how they will proceed and what to do with the proposal.

The uncertainty surrounding the future of the fees troubled the industry representatives. Representatives from residential and non-residential developers spent more than two hours condemning the lack of consultation from city hall and said the administrative report was full of errors and assumptions that could not be supported.

The administrative report proposes a fee structure that would result in a charge of $10,160 for every 1,000 square feet of residential space and add 10 per cent to the cost of commercial and office projects. While the fee is supposed to recover the costs linked to new development, the draft bylaw exempts home renovations and affordable-housing projects from the fees, but the administrative report suggests exemptions may be made for government buildings, public schools and universities and colleges.

Homebuilders and local development associations condemned Bowman as disingenuous in his dealings with them during the process and labelled the fee another tax that will slow construction and drive development outside the city.

The industry representatives came from many of the citys builders, including Genstar, Qualico, Ventura and Harvard Developments, and the Winnipeg Realtors Association.

Dana Downey, with Winnipeg Realtors, said Bowman often speaks of moving the city forward but, This is not the way to do it.

The industry appears ready to accept the notion of a fee but only if they and city officials first agree on how it will be applied and agree on a dollar amount. But they said those discussions cant be concluded with a Jan. 1 deadline.

Five weeks between now and the end of October does not enable meaningful, thoughtful discussion, said Mike Moore, president of the Manitoba Home Builders Association.

The anger within the industry toward city hall came out in a brief flash in an exchange between Michael Falk, vice-president at Terracon, a local industrial developer, and EPC member Coun. Brian Mayes. When Mayes (St. Vital) insisted the fee is not a tax, Falk fired back: Quack, quack, quack  its a duck.

Colin Fast, spokesman for the Winnipeg Construction Association, acknowledged other municipalities have similar fees but noted the fee structure proposed planned for Winnipeg would be the most expensive in the country.

Fast said the first tower in the planned True North Square project would face a development fee of $7.7 million, but if was built in downtown Toronto, the charge would be $350,000.

Coun. Russ Wyatt, a critic of the plan, said the time out called by EPC is a ruse to diffuse criticism of the citys approach.

This is just a cat-and-mouse game, Wyatt (Transcona) said. The script has already been written by the mayor. This is an attempt by the mayor to cool off industry for a while so they can bring it back with haste.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/09/2016 (2231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

St. Boniface Coun. Matt Allard is in the drivers seat when it comes to examining the impact of driverless vehicles on civic services.

Allard first raised the issue in July. On Tuesday, the administration agreed with the suggestion and proposed, as a starting point, to conduct an extensive analysis of what other municipalities have uncovered.

This is going to be a hugely disruptive technology, Allard told councillors on the property and development committee, explaining he believed driverless vehicles will dramatically alter land-use strategies.

YONG TECK LIM / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A driver, right, gets his hands off of the steering wheel of an autonomous vehicle during its test drive in Singapore. The city will look to other municipalities to see how the technology will disrupt planning.

Its coming and I dont want Winnipeg to be behind the 8-ball when other municipalities are looking at it, Allard said. Perhaps we can start talking with them, see where theyre going and what might be some of lessons theyre already learning.

Planning director John Kiernan said he believes Allard is correct.

There is a fundamental, generational shift, both from a demographers perspective and from a technology perspective, and how that affects land use, densification, car-share programs, Uber, taxis, Kiernan said. There is a generational shift going on about how we think about transportation and it will shape our city and how we build our cities.

Driverless vehicles are no longer simply a plot convenience of science fiction novels and films. Main stream firms like Google, Uber, Tesla and the Big Three automakers are experimenting with the technology. Allard said the city should be ready for how the technology will transform civic planning for transit, land-use, road design and other areas.

Allard said city officials in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary are looking at the issue. Kiernan said other North American cities are also studying the potential impacts.

Kiernan said his staff will work with officials in the public works department to analyze the research findings produced by other municipalities. The report could be ready in 180 days he said, adding it would be a starting point for the committee, which would then decide what next steps to take.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca
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This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobas oldest mosque is getting a new name for its birthday and inviting neighbours for a party on Sunday.

The Manitoba Islamic Association is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the provinces first mosque, located at 247 Hazelwood Ave. in St. Vital. The building, tucked away in a residential area, was established by pioneering Muslim immigrants in 1976 and has served the community ever since, the association said in a news release. Known to many as the Hazelwood mosque, it will be renamed to honour its founders.

The mosque, small as it is today, is an important piece of Manitobas history and continues to serve Manitobas Muslims as a place for worship and fellowship, association president Idris Elbakri said in the release. It is also a testament to how welcoming Winnipeg and Manitoba have been over the years to people of all backgrounds and traditions.

BORIS MINKEVICH / FREE PRESS Hazelwood Mosque is the oldest mosque in Manitoba.

The mosque is hosting a barbecue for the neighbourhood and there will be a brief program at 5 p.m. with the renaming of the mosque and the unveiling of an honorary street name by Brian Mayes, the city councillor for St. Vital.
Opinion

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This article was published 20/09/2016 (2231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister was going to make sure nobody missed his point.

Pallister convened a news conference Tuesday to comment on a report from auditor general Norm Ricard on the East Side Road Authority, the arms-length Crown agency responsible for managing the construction of an all-weather road up the east side of lake Winnipeg. The report flagged a wide range of accounting and oversight problems at ESRA, which was officially dismantled earlier this month.

Put in the simplest terms, ESRA was good at living up to its obligations under community development agreements and getting money out to contractors and First Nations communities, but very bad at ensuring the money was being spent in the appropriate way. A report like that is dynamite for a man who continues to hold a licence as a financial planner, and who is a self-professed accountability nut. True to form, Pallister wasted no time in leaping on the former NDP government for its incompetence and lack of fiscal accountability.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Premier Brian Pallister speaks about the release of the auditor general's report on the Manitoba East Side Road Authority Tuesday.

Pallister accused the NDP of wasting taxpayer money and squandering opportunities to improve the life of First Nation communities that will be linked by the new road. He went beyond the concerns raised by the auditor general and accused the NDP of political skullduggery by signing a raft of agreements with east side First Nations in the weeks before the spring election without proper consideration or authority.

Pallister said the auditors report represented the harshest condemnation of government practices that he had ever seen.

OK, its time for everyone to take a breath.

There is no doubt that ESRA was a mess. As the auditor general showed, it appeared to have little capacity or enthusiasm for financial control and oversight. Much as has been the case with other partnerships involving First Nations, there was insufficient information showing the money provided to those communities was being used for the purposes for which it was intended. Add to that ESRAs botching of the federal environmental review  Ottawa has refused to approve the East Side Road plan as is  and youve got what appears to be negligence on several fronts.

Does that make this a scandal? No, not really. ESRA is not a role model for best practices in Crown agency operations. But its important to note that the challenge given to ESRA was both unique and enormous.

Building roads in northern or remote regions is more expensive than building in the south. The costs of materials, labour and a difficult environment make it a logistical and engineering nightmare.

As well, the ESRA mandate included funding for First Nations to train individuals and help others start businesses that would provide goods or services to the project. This added a 35 per cent premium to the basic costs of construction. This was an entity that, bottom line, was bad at its job. Pallister is applying a purely partisan lens to represent the auditor generals report as the most damning examination of government spending, ever.

Pallister argued over and over again at his news conference that ESRA was not effective. In actual fact, he does not know whether ESRA accomplished its dual goals of building a road and supporting First Nations to become active contributors to the construction and maintenance.

No one expects the Tory government to spend the money on an audit now to find out whether the money had any impact on the communities affected. However, on a go-forward basis, its important to remember that not knowing whether ESRA was effective is not the same as it being ineffective.

Take away the political hyperbole, and several important points become clear after examining the report and making a commitment to memorizing a dizzying array of acronyms.

First, it was a miscalculation to think the Red River Floodway Authority, the precursor to ESRA, could take on the east-side road project.

The floodway project was primarily a transaction between private contractors, unions and the federal and provincial governments. There were training programs incorporated into the plan, but this was really about getting a bunch of private companies to make a big hole in the ground a little bit bigger.

The East Side Road, on the other hand, was a complex cocktail of heavy construction, economic development and social engineering. ESRA was not just responsible for paying contractors, it was asked to maximize economic benefits for the communities to be linked by the road. It all proved, quite clearly, to be too much for the folks who oversaw the successful expansion of the floodway.

The second point revealed by the report is the enormous cost of doing everything the auditor general has recommended in terms of accounting and oversight. Pallister has promised to get the east-side road built for less money and with greater spinoff benefits for First Nation communities but he has clearly underestimated the cost of proceeding without ESRA.

ESRAs responsibilities have been rolled into the Manitoba Infrastructure Department, and some of the former staff from the authority will be brought in to help move things along. However, blowing up ESRA rather than fixing it will likely drive up the total cost of the project from earlier estimates.

Building an all-weather road to link communities east of Lake Winnipeg is a policy issue now, not a political issue. If the premier can find a way of doing it better, cheaper and faster  and in reality, any of those would do  then he will most definitely deserve all the credit.

If  and its a big if  the road gets built.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
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This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg police said a threat faxed Wednesday to Winnipegs largest school division appears to be unfounded.

Similar threats were faxed to schools and school divisions elsewhere in Canada, including Prince Edward Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a location in the United States

Winnipeg police said they believe the threat is unfounded.

At approximately 8:30 a.m. the Winnipeg School Division received a fax message that contained a threat to all schools within the division, the police said.

The Winnipeg Police Service is working closely with the Winnipeg School Division to ensure all reasonable safety measures are being employed, the police statement said.

The Winnipeg Police Service responds to incidents of this nature with the highest priority, it went on to say: While resources are being deployed to ensure there is no risk to students or staff members, early indications are that the threat is unfounded, the Winnipeg police statement said.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Members of the union representing workers from the Port of Churchill flew to Winnipeg Wednesday, only to discover Omnitraxs chief operating officer would be teleconferencing in.

Union representatives said the first bargaining meeting with the Denver-based railway company  owners of the port  since its closure was originally to be held in Churchill, but was moved to Winnipeg to accommodate Omnitrax COO Sergio Sabatinis schedule.

Workers from the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents employees at the Port of Churchill, rallied alongside representatives from several other unions outside of Omnitraxs Winnipeg office Wednesday morning.

Support our port! the group chanted as they held signs pledging their support to the roughly 60 laid-off unionized workers at the deep-sea Arctic port.

Marianne Hladun, the regional vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, prairie region, said her hope is to hear Omnitrax will reopen the port in 2017 or find an appropriate buyer for the port. The workers, who belong to the Union of Canadian Transportation Employees (UCTE), a component of PSAC, have been without a contract since December 2015.

Omnitrax announced in July it was closing the port for the 2016 grain season, throwing more than 60 people out of work. It also announced it was reducing its rail service to Churchill from twice a week to once a week.

The company tells us they are coming back in 2017, so we are walking in hoping for a collective agreement, said Hladun. We want to have a conversation about how they communicated with the union. They didnt tell us about the potential sale of the port, they didnt tell us about the layoffs.

She said the union feels abandoned by all levels of government, who have refused to meet with them.

A planned meeting with provincial Growth, Enterprise and Trade Minister Cliff Cullen was cancelled and never rescheduled. The unions first contact with the federal government came last night, when Employment, Workforce Development and Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk reached out to the union.

It is concerning that they wont speak with us at this point we have heard nothing from the government about what their plan is, said Hladun. I think the workers are feeling abandoned and the community is feeling abandoned.

The union proposed Tuesday to turn the port into a federally regulated port authority.

BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Union supporters make their presence in front of the Omnitrax office in Winnipeg.

A request for comment from Omnitrax was refused, despite media walking into their office Wednesday.

Hladun said meetings between the union and Omnitrax are expected to continue for the next two days.

At the end of day, the bargaining team will continue with the bargaining process, she said after the meeting. There is non-disclosure issues around (talking) about a potential sale, and we appreciate and recognize that they are pursuing the option of a potential sale, they are also committed to ensuring there is a collective agreement.

kristin.annable@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

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This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada is suffering from a justice deficit  a large and growing gap between the aspirations of the justice system and its actual performance. With few exceptions, it is slow, inefficient and costly. In no other province is this harsh reality more apparent than in Manitoba, which ranked last among all provinces in our new report card on the criminal justice system.

Our inaugural justice system report card, published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute for Public Policy, aims to enhance accountability and transparency, with a view toward ongoing reform and improvement. Using Statistics Canada data and statistical methods, we assessed each provinces criminal justice system based on five key objectives: public safety, support for victims, cost and resources, fairness and access to justice and efficiency.

While the Atlantic provinces and Quebec did well (receiving grades of B+ and B), Ontario and the western provinces did poorly (C+) with Manitoba ranking dead last among the provinces (C). Driving Manitobas poor performance is its high crime rates, substantial costs and significant inefficiencies.

KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Manitoba has among the highest violent and non-violent crime rates per capita of any province.

Manitoba has among the highest violent and non-violent crime rates per capita of any province. Offenders here breach probation and fail to comply with court orders more frequently than elsewhere.

Public perception of the police in Manitoba is among the lowest in Canada, with dismal ratings for enforcing the law, ensuring safety, satisfaction with safety, supplying information, being approachable, being fair and responding promptly. With respect to support for victims of crime, Manitoba has, by far, the lowest proportion of offenders given restitution orders of anywhere in the country.

No other province in the country has a higher per capita cost of public safety and cost of corrections than Manitoba, giving it a failing grade on these metrics.

In terms of efficiency, Manitoba has a high proportion of criminal cases where charges are stayed or withdrawn (30.5 per cent) and a higher-than-average criminal-case length (223 days), which is among the longest delays in Canada. Manitoba has an extremely high number of accused persons on remand per 1,000 crimes, by far the highest of any jurisdiction in the country and also meriting a failing grade.

There are also concerns about access to justice and fairness in Manitobas criminal justice system, with below-average legal aid expenditures on criminal matters per crime and disproportionate levels of aboriginal incarceration.

Its not all bad news, though. Manitoba performs better than most other provinces in a few important areas. Its police are relatively good at solving crime and being productive: they have a higher-than-average violent and non-violent crime weighted clearance rate and a higher-than-typical number of Criminal Code incidents per police officer. Manitoba has fewer accused persons failing to appear for court or being unlawfully at large. The province also has better-than-average referral rates for victim services.

There is a clear need for reforming Manitobas criminal justice system. A top-to-bottom review, focusing on critical problem areas identified in this report card, should be conducted by the provincial government.

It will need the support and involvement of the chief justice of Manitoba and judges, heads of Crown prosecution services, members of the criminal defence bar, chiefs of police, RCMP and corrections system leadership, First Nations organizations and victim-services representatives, as well as public input. Clear and measurable targets for improvement should be set with adequate resources and accountability to see them realized. Manitoba may also look to other provinces that have already started to take action.

Health-care and education systems in Canada and around the world have benefited from regular report cards on their performance, although they were faced with strong resistance at first. It is our hope this inaugural criminal justice system report card will generate tough questions for the many actors responsible for administering the justice system in all provinces and territories, enhance the collection of key data on its performance and spur much-needed reform.

The findings in this report card should be a wake-up call for Manitoba and hopefully a catalyst for improvement.

Benjamin Perrin is a law professor at the University of British Columbia and a Munk senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Dr. Richard Audas is a health statistics and economics professor at Memorial University.

JusticeReportCard_F4
The Indian Army says it does not rule out the possibility of more infiltration in the border areas of Jammu and Kashmir.

By India Today Web Desk: A day after 10 suspected Pakistani trespassers were gunned down in Uri, the Indian Army today said it does not rule out the possibility of more infiltration in the border areas of Jammu and Kashmir.

"The operation is in progress at both places and can't be called off soon. More attempts or the presence of additional terrorists can't be ruled out in the area," a top army official said on Tuesday's encounters in Uri and Handwara.

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The two counter-infiltration operations along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir entered the second day today. "The operations along the LoC in Uri and Naugam sectors continue," an army spokesman said.

One soldier was killed on Tuesday as the army foiled two infiltration bids in Uri and Naugam sectors of Jammu and Kashmir. The bids followed the violation of ceasefire in Uri sector by Pakistani troops.

The infiltration bids and ceasefire violation came two days after four militants of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad stormed an army base in Uri, killing 18 soldiers and injuring several others.

All the four militants were also killed in the audacious attack.

ALSO READ | Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation



--- ENDS ---
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

News from New York City our prime minister and minister of immigration have successfully recommended the adoption of Canadas model for private sponsoring of refugees is as gratifying as it is astounding.

World leaders are gathered for the UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants, and this is the first concrete plan. Our governments news release says Research demonstrates that privately sponsored refugees tend to have relatively early, positive integration and settlement outcomes, thanks in part to the social support provided by sponsors.

They could have said, but didnt, that Canadas private program is also cheap compared with the cost of landing and supporting government-sponsored refugees, and the cost of the panoply of fine agencies, government-funded and spread across this country, tasked to resettle them.

But there is a dark underside, and half-truths, in this easy self-congratulation. And there is more than a bit of do as I say, but not as I do hidden from a first glance.

In the first place, the reality is about 95 per cent of privately sponsored refugees are picked by their Canadian family or friends who came here as refugees before them and are now resettled. It is they who mainly bear the initial costs of support, integrate the arriving ones into their family circle and networks and thus assure the positive outcomes.

It can be said the program, as much as it is for refugee rescuing, is also for family reunification and is the only avenue available in a hard-to-enter country that long ago stopped the sponsoring of ones relatives other than spouses, children and parents.

There is, however, a far more serious limitation: the numbers. Canadas annual Levels Plan pie has only allowed a slice, for privately sponsored refugees, of about 6,000 persons to be landed in Canada. This year, the target number has been increased by the Trudeau government to 17,800.

While the 2016 increase is a welcome improvement, one notes that arriving refugees for Winnipegs Hospitality House Refugee Ministry, which will have landed over 900 by October this year, have been waiting five to eight years since being sponsored to get here  because of the annual limits on numbers.

Back in 2012, the Harper government also started controlling the number of new sponsorships that could be started, so as not to overwhelm the corresponding arrivals intentions. The 2016 cap is 10,500 refugees, and there are sub-caps on some overseas offices (with large backlogs), from a top of 400 to a low of 100.

Actual demand to sponsor new cases is closer to 30,000 persons  not counting Syrian demand. Next year it could be in the order of 40,000 to 50,000. Hospitality House is forced to turn down sponsorship of about 5,000 refugees a year from Winnipeggers because of the caps.

So Canadas private sponsorship of refugees program may be a model for the world, but it is flawed at home by the reluctance of past governments to open it up to new cases in larger numbers, despite admitted resettlement success, cost effectiveness and the worlds refugee crisis.

It will therefore be interesting to see what happens when the current government releases its next Levels Plan, expected in November. Will it put its policy where its mouth is?

Tom Denton is a former chairman of the Manitoba Immigration Council and is executive director, administration and sponsorship, for Hospitality House Refugee Ministry of Winnipeg.
A Winona County grand jury handed down a first-degree murder indictment Tuesday against Kyle Benjamin Allers.

Allers, 24, is accused in the May 12 beating and strangulation death of Tasha Lynn Hanson near Lewiston.

The grand jury indictment carries the designation that the murder was the culmination of a pattern of domestic abuse; Allers and Hanson were in a relationship, shared a home and had two children, ages 1 and 3, at the time of Hansons death.

Winona County Attorney Karin Sonneman said that Hanson was the sixth Minnesotan to die of domestic violence in 2016. Thirty-four people died as a result of domestic violence in 2015.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Allers in May, Allers admitted to family members he killed Hanson, 24, after the two had gotten into a fight. He concealed the womans body in a wooded area near Lewiston.

The investigation began after member of Allers family contacted law enforcement to relay fears that Allers had killed Hanson. According to court documents, Allers had visited family members in the early hours of Thursday, May 12.

At that time he told family members he had gotten into a fight with Hanson. He was shaky and asking for help, and when a family member asked about killing Hanson, he repeatedly said, Shes gone, eventually stating, Shes gone forever, according to court documents.

A family member went to Allers residence the next day, court documents state, and directly asked if he had killed Hanson. Allers nodded, inferring to his family member that he did kill her. The family member subsequently contacted law enforcement.

Allers had discussed disposing of Hansons body with this family member, wanting to find a location where no one else would go, because he was concerned that hunters might find the body, according to court documents. Allers suggested two possible locations and that information was passed along to law enforcement and proved vital to locating Hansons body.

In addition to the first-degree murder count, Allers faces two counts of second-degree murder and one count of first-degree manslaughter. He faces a sentence of life in prison if convicted on the first-degree murder charge.

Allers made his intitial court appearance Tuesday on the charges named in the indictment. He remains in custody in lieu of $1 million bond.
A Winona man is in custody, charged with the Sept.2 burglary of a southeast Minnesota gunshop.

Trinity James Wicka, 19, is charged in Wabasha County District Court with two counts of first-degree burglary and one count of felony theft in the early September break-in in Millville, Minn., that netted thieves nearly 80 handguns and a large amount of ammunition.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Wicka, he and two accomplices forced the front door of the gun shop in the early hours of the morning. Once inside, surveillance cameras captured the images of three masked individuals, one standing watch while the other two filled bags with guns and ammunition, at one point smashing a glass display case, leaving glass shards and blood behind.

Later that day, Winona police responded to a report of an armed robbery and shortly after 10 p.m., stopped a silver SUV and arrested four suspects. Police recovered five handguns, four of which bore serial numbers associated with the Millville burglary, along with a backpack containing shards of glass similar to the shattered glass case.

In subsequent days, investigation by local law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms led to several informants who linked Wicka to guns stolen in the burglary.

On Sept. 10, Wicka was arrested in Austin, Minn., on a felony-hold warrant. At the time of the arrest, he had a cut on his hand that would be consistent with an injury caused by smashing through glass.

Charges in the burglary case were filed in Wabasha County District Court Sept. 16 and a warrant was issued for Wickas arrest and detention. He remains in custody in the Winona County Jail.

In related matters, two Winona men have been arrested and charged in Winona County District Court for possessing firearms stolen from the Millville gun shop.

Cody Charles Dickenson, 19, is charged with receiving stolen property after police were told about a gun in a blue drawstring bag wrapped in a towel that had been hidden by Dickenson and a juvenile accomplice, then thrown in the river.

The Winona County Dive/Rescue team did an underwater search, but found nothing, according to the criminal complaint filed against Dickenson. Subsequent information led police to search near the boat harbor where a small-caliber handgun in a blue drawstring bag was located. Serial numbers on the weapon linked it to the Millville burglary.

Early Friday evening, a tip led police to a Winona apartment building, where they found a handgun stolen in the burglary stuck between a cushion and the arm of a sofa next to Jeremy Wayne Polus, 41, according to the criminal complaint. Polus, who has an extensive felony record, was taken into custody and faces a single charge of being an ineligible person in possession of a firearm.
Winona

Tuesday

8:01 a.m.  A Playstation 4, valued at $400, was reported missing from the living room of a residence on the 350 block of Chestnut Street.

1:23 p.m.  A womans white-and-blue mountain bike was reported missing from a residence on the 400 block of Winona Street.

1:52 p.m.  A maroon Trek mountain bike was reported missing from a rack on the 250 block of West King Street.

2:53 p.m.  Two Winona women were arrested on outstanding warrants and face further charges after police were called to investigate a disturbance on the 100 block of East Third Street. Charges of fifth-degree possession of a controlled substance (heroin), and possession of hypodermic needles were referred against Lindsey Wade Stolpa, 21. Charges of possession of a hypodermic needle were referred against Sadey Rae Stolpa, 21.

4:39 p.m  Cole Robert Sylla, 20, Winona, was cited for no Minnesota drivers license, no motorcycle endorsement, and no proof of insurance following a traffic accident on the 900 block of Frontenac Drive. No one was injured in the crash.

11:51 p.m.  Several items were reported missing from the porch of a residence on the 700 block of West Broadway. The owners were moving and had boxes of items on the lawn marked Free, and suspect that scavengers carried the boxes away.
One month after approving a special election to fill a vacancy in one district, the Sauk County Board voted Tuesday night against doing the same thing in another.

A motion to hold a special election in District 7 next spring died in a 15-15 tie vote. That means newly appointed Supervisor Craig Braunschweig will not have to run for election until April 2018.

Sauk County Board Chair Marty Krueger of Reedsburg selected Braunschweig, the director of the Rock Springs Public Library, to replace former District 7 Supervisor Carol Held of Reedsburg, who resigned earlier this month due to health reasons. She was elected in April, and her term does not expire until April 2018.

Last month, the board was faced with the same question regarding a vacancy in District 11. It voted unanimously to approve Kruegers appointment  Richard Flint of Reedsburg  as a replacement for Joe Fish, who resigned due to health reasons. However, supervisors also voted 16-12 to order a special election in District 11 this coming spring.

Flint will have to win voter approval in order to serve out the remainder of the term, whereas Braunschweig will not.

During last months meeting, Flint was asked to abstain from the debate over a special election. But he participated during Tuesday nights debate, saying it is not fair to force appointees to endure elections within seven months of their appointment.

Flint said he would not have applied for the position if he had known there was a possibility that he would have to run for two elections within a year. He encouraged supervisors to develop rules for when a special election should be held.

Supervisor Andy Andrews of Baraboo noted that Krueger had stated during last months meeting that the six applicants  including Flint  who applied for the District 11 position were asked whether they would be interested in running in a special election, and that they all said yes.

That tells me they all knew it was a possibility, Andrews said.

State law says the county board chairman may appoint someone to fill a vacancy. However, it gives county boards the authority to order a special election if they so desire.

In emails, the Wisconsin Elections Commission advised county officials that a special election could take place as soon as December. But prior to last months board meeting, Sauk County Corporation Counsel Todd Liebman authored a legal opinion in which he stated the next possible date was April 2017.

Several supervisors alleged Tuesday night that those in support of a special election had ulterior motives.

Supervisor Chuck Spencer of Baraboo suggested a special election would undermine the authority of the chair, Krueger, who he said took great care in selecting an appointee.

I suspect that his decision making was better than most people who walk in a voting booth and pull that lever, Spencer said.

Krueger also questioned whether last months decision to hold a special election was an attack on him, rather than about allowing voters to select their representative.

Supervisor Rebecca Hovde of Baraboo took issue with such allegations.

Just because I vote for a special election doesnt mean that Im trying to undermine anybodys authority, that Im undermining the board or the chairman, Hovde said. Im just doing it because I think its fair. Its in the statutes.
Beaver Dam Community Hospitals closed a deal to buy back the former Lakeview Hospital site at 208 La Crosse St. Wednesday.

The Lakeview Hospital property represents a significant piece of history for Beaver Dam Community Hospitals Inc. and health care in our region, Kim Miller, president and CEO of BDCH said in a statement. The BDCH board of directors and I feel a sense of duty to Lakeview, and believe that becoming caretakers of this property is the right thing to do, both for Lakeview and for the community.

Miller did not comment on the sale price due to a nondisclosure agreement with the previous property owners, Eugene Kirschbaum and Mickale Carter. She also said a full development plan is yet to be created.

Carter said they explored several options for sale or development of the property, but thought the hospital was a good fit.

We liked the idea of senior housing and the hospital involvement, Carter said. I think its going to be good for the community.

Miller said it is uncertain if the former hospital building will be demolished.

However, we anticipate developing new housing options for the community which will drive significant aesthetic improvements and employment opportunities, Miller said.

In August the Beaver Dam Common Council went into an agreement with Beaver Dam Community Hospitals to conduct an environmental study of the former Lakeview Hospital. The building has been vacant for more than a decade.

A $150,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation was used to cover the study cost.

Beaver Dam Community Hospitals last owned the site at 208 La Crosse St. in 2005.

BDCH ownership dated back to Feb. 28, 1972. This is when a series of events occurred that ultimately formed what is today the Beaver Dam Community Hospitals organization.

Previously, the La Crosse Street area was the home of the Lamoreux mansion built by Donald Percy Lamoreux. The mansion was constructed in 1909 and the property was sold for $30,000 in 1922 after the Lamoreux family moved to Brantford, Ontario. Lutheran churches in the area and Dr. R.E. Schoen joined to transform the mansion into Lutheran Deaconess Hospital. The Milwaukee architectural firm of Brust and Philipp, which had originally designed the mansion, oversaw the conversion as well. During the 1920s and 1930s, the property saw significant remodeling, including the addition of an elevator and an extension to the west in 1936. Lutheran Deaconess Hospital changed its name to Lutheran Hospital.

Beaver Dam Community Hospital, 707 S. University Ave., was formerly St. Josephs Hospital. In 1968 St. Josephs and Lutheran Deaconess Hospital formed a group to explore consolidation. In 1971 the two entities agreed to merge and formed Beaver Dam Community Hospital. Lutheran Deaconess Hospital became Lakeview Hospital and St. Josephs Hospital became Hillside Hospital. The Lakeview Hospital building was the western extension of the Lamoreux mansion.

Starting in 1972 the mansions utilities were cut off and the building was solely used for storage.

John Landdeck became president of Beaver Dam Community Hospital in 1973 and a few years later the organization began looking into restoring the Lamoreux mansion. It was estimated to cost $400,000 at the time and the project was abandoned.

The mansion was demolished in 1981.

The former hospital acted as a long-term care facility until 1994. Miller wrote that is when residents were moved to the new Hillside Manor on the BDCH campus.

Following that the La Crosse Street building became known as Lakeview Community Wellness Center, according to Miller. The property housed a food pantry, massage therapy, VA clinic office space, youth programs, meeting spaces and other space available for rent to the public.

According to the property deeds in 2005 Dr. Waquar Khan expressed interest in the property. Under the name Bismila LLC, he purchased the entire property, including the adjacent McClure house, from Beaver Dam Community Hospitals.

In April 2008 Dick Powell, under the name Lakeview of Beaver Dam LLC and Powell Real Estate Ventures LLC, bought both properties from Khan. The property was split in two in 2007.

Finally, in January 2010 the former hospital was sold to Kirschbaum and Carter.

It has the best the view of the lake, Carter said.

They held on to the property for about six years until Beaver Dam Community Hospitals bought it.
Billowing smoke, bubbling syrup, childrens laughter and piles of vegetables marked the 2016 Sorghum Fest, held Sept. 17 in Fall River. Thanks to perfect weather, the parking lot and a parking field were full by early afternoon.

Raw sorghum masquerades as wagons full of corn stalks. They belong to the same family of grasses and so look much alike; both can be fed to livestock. But sorghum is also kin to sugar cane. Thick, sweet syrup is the end product for human consumption.

It looks like corn, but it puts grain on top, said Dennis Buchda of Fall River, who emerged from clouds of smoke to explain the sorghum-to-syrup process. This is cane sorghum. We squeeze it through an 1800s mill; the juice looks like swamp water. We bring it up to 180 degrees and then dump it in a milk tank.

Set at an angle, the milk tank allows sediment to settle out, he said, resulting in juice that resembles tea more than swamp water. Laughing at the high-tech tools he uses, he pointed to a simple white bucket with a hole, suspended over a boiling vat.

We drizzle that in so we dont kill the heat, he said. It comes out of there at 220 to 228 degrees, and then we take it down to 180 degrees pretty quick.

Late that afternoon, he and his helpers would be putting the finished syrup in jars, creating the 2016 vintage that will be sold through the Savanna Oaks Community Center. Dark-brown thickness reflects a coppery glow in those jars, indicating high-quality sorghum syrup.

We have to know how sweet it is, Buchda said. Thats measured in brix. Its 15-plus brix coming in. We do an 8-to-1 or 10-to-1 reduction. Its about 115 gallons going in, and about 110 pints coming off.

He said this year the group planted sorghum in an area that is a quarter to a third of an acre, near Fall River. The resulting syrup is a fundraiser for the community center.

This is part of my non-court-ordered community service, he said with a laugh.

The venture began when Lavern Gorman and Claire Robson decided to sell their equipment in 2004. After talking to the would-be sorghum processors, the two decided to donate the mill to the cause.

Its a three-roller sorghum mill, Buchda said. In the old days they would strip all the leaves off the stalks and a horse would power the mill. In the 1920s and 1930s, though, sorghum was cheap -- and kid power was cheap. They often used kids to power it. You can feed (the leftovers) to cows and pigs. When I tasted this in 2004, I realized I had had it before. As a kid on the farm, we had bread and butter with sorghum.

At one point he took a pint to a national contest held in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Initial disappointment at coming in at 31st place changed to pride after long-time sorghum processors told him the Wisconsin sorghum was competing with several-generations-experienced sorghum folks.

I guess we did pretty good, he said.

Visit www.savannaoakscenter.com or call 920-484-6257 to order sorghum syrup or for more information.

Plahnt Farm

Piles of brightly colored vegetables didnt have much to do with sorghum, but offered sweet goodness to fest attendees. Michael Lubenaw of Fall River offered sweet red peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, celery, beets, kale, turnips, collard greens, yellow watermelon, shallots and more. He was filling in for his son Josh Lubenaw, owner of The Plahnt Farm, who was selling down on the square in Madison.

Hes been doing this for 15 years, Michael Lubenaw said of his son. He went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He grows year-round -- vegetables in the summer and medicinal plants all year.

Visit The Plahnt Farm on Facebook or call 608-332-5020 for more information.

Blacksmithing

Centuries-old tradition ruled another corner of Sorghum Fest, marked by yet another cloud of smoke. Louis VanAlstine was there simply to share blacksmithing knowledge with anyone who would listen -- especially kids.

My dad, Victor, would say, Smoke, fire and kids, and youre going to have a good time, he said.

VanAlstine was creating tiny swords and flying birds for children at the event. He said he shares the blacksmithing knowledge so it wont die out.

Its not a difficult process, he said. Its just practice.

Hes an Eagle Scout; his dad was a scoutmaster. He said hes been to every circus show in Baraboo for the past 30 years -- first as a Scout and then to demonstrate blacksmithing. He took Blacksmithing 1 and 2 at Madison Area Technical College and now makes the craft look easy.

My dad was a steamfitter and welder; he learned it in the Navy, he said. He worked metal all his life. I dont want the knowledge to die.

VanAlstine is a member of the Upper Midwest Blacksmithing Association and of the Artist-Blacksmiths Association of North America. Visit umba.name and www.abana.org for more information.

Sorghum Fest will return in September 2017.
What does peace mean to you?

Thats one of the questions Beaver Dam native John Noltner asked people across the country for his second book, A Peace of My Mind: American Stories, as he explored the meaning of peace, one story at a time.

Noltner, an award-winning photographer now living in Minnesota, graduated from Beaver Dam High School in 1985. After graduating from BDHS, Noltner earned a bachelor of arts degree in communication and journalism. Noltner tells stories with words and images for national magazines, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations.

His first book A Peace of My Mind published in 2011, included a foreword by South African peace activist Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi. Noltner gathered most of the stories for that book in Minnesota, and stories and portraits from it were reproduced in two travelling exhibits.

Noltner said his first book included 52 people he spoke to, mostly in my own backyard.

His new book is basically the same premise, but with broader strokes on a bigger scale.

I drove more than 40,000 miles over three years, Noltner said.

Noltner had the new book released today, as it is also the International Day of Peace. The books foreword is written by Terri Lee Freeman, president of the National Civil Rights Museum. The A Peace of My Mind project has been presented at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, the GandhiKing Conference, and the Sojourners Summit for Change, as well as at colleges and community centers across the country.

One person who really resonated with Noltner was Joanne Bland of Selma, Alabama, who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when she was 11. Noltner said he was supposed to talk to someone else, but that interview fell apart. So he sent out a message through Facebook asking if there was anyone else in Selma he should talk to for the book.

Two different people mentioned Bland, Noltner said.

He tracked Bland down, and she was willing to speak to him. Noltner said the interview came shortly after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, and called it a very raw conversation about race and the recognition that we havent achieved equality yet.

In Wisconsin, Noltner spoke to Phillip Schladweiler in Eau Claire, an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq and was wounded in an IED attack and lost the vision in his right eye.

Noltner said he grew up with an interest in the well-being of others, thanks to his mother who worked as an educator, and his father, who was a social worker. He hopes his work can help create a better community, a better country and a better world.

Noltner next hopes to expand to an international version of the project.

To learn more visit www.apomm.net.
WAUPUN  The Christian Home will always be Waupuns nursing home, according to Doug Trost, president and CEO of St. Francis Home, which is part of Agnesian HealthCare.

But according to statements made during a public meeting Tuesday, that may not be the case if an agreement to transfer ownership to Agnesian HealthCare fails.

Waupun Christian Home and Agnesian signed a nonbinding letter of intent that will allow the two organizations to work toward transferring ownership of the Christian Home and Rehabilitation Center, Christian Living Center and Christian Homestead to Agnesian.

Under the letter, Agnesian would assume all assets and liabilities of the Christian Home, which according to Trost includes $3.9 million in debt. Trost and Susan Buwalda, chair of the Christian Home board of directors, outlined some hard fiscal facts that led to the plan during the meeting that was attended by close to 60 people.

Buwalda said that in the past month the Christian Home was down to five days of cash on hand. Agnesian, which joined in a partnership with the Christian Home in 2012, has been helping the home while exploring the new affiliation.

We cannot move forward on our own, Buwalda said. Agnesian has been helping us on a day to day basis.

Beside the continuing struggle with operational revenue, the board also saw the difficulty it was having in raising $3 million in a capital campaign as a sign that there was not enough financial support to build a new facility. A new skilled care facility is needed, according to Buwalda to meet the needs of the community and comply with the regulations and requirements imposed on skilled care facilities.

The transfer is complex, in part because of the unique ownership status of Waupun Christian Home. Founded by local churches, the home is owned by the adult members of the 16 local churches that support the home, according to Buwalda.

The meeting Tuesday and an upcoming vote on the change are required by Christian Home bylaws, Buwalda said. A vote on the matter could be conducted by the end of October, but that will depend on attorneys for both organizations completing their work. In addition, the agreement will have to be published for three weeks in church bulletins of all of the churches.

When a meeting is held, two-thirds of those who attend will need to approve the transfer. Buwalda said those who vote will have to provide their name, address and church membership information so that it can be confirmed.

The goal is to have the transfer to Agnesian completed by Jan. 1, Trost said.

Agnesian is not doing this to make money, Buwalda said.

Trost confirmed that, explaining that Agnesian shares a mission with the Christian Home. He offered as evidence the fact that Agnesian will need to go forward with building a new home if approval is granted. The Christian Home board had been considering a new $13 million facility on the edge of Waupun that would allow for future expansion.

Donations made to that capital campaign are currently in a savings account at National Bank of Waupun, Buwalda said. Both she and Trost emphasized that a capital campaign for a new facility will continue.

There were questions about how the churches that created the Christian Home could remain involved. There are plans to have two Waupun representatives on the St. Francis Home board of directors. In addition, there will likely be a Christian Home auxiliary for volunteers as well as local chaplains and other ways for churches to support the home.

When asked about staffing, Trost said there is a shortage of skilled care employees in the state so it is likely most of the 120 employees would be able to stay. He said there likely would be some consolidation in administration.

Trost also answered a question about whether costs for residents would rise and he said those costs would be determined by market studies and would be competitive with other facilities in the area.

When asked what would happened if there was no change, Buwalda said at some point the Christian Home would close and the community likely would be without the service entirely.

It was a very emotional and very difficult decision, Buwalda said. Keep us in your prayers.
By PTI: Gangtok, Sep 21 (PTI) Sikkim today observed the International Day of Peace through the theme of "Yoga for World Peace"in which enthusiastic school children participated. Multi-faith prayers were also organised. A state level function was organised at Paljor Stadium attended by Governor Shriniwas Patil as the Chief Guest and Chief Minister Pawan Chamling as the Guest Of Honour.

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School students from in-and-around Gangtok did mass yoga demonstrations followed by a therapeutic mass meditation session.

While addressing the gathering, the governor said that Sikkim stands as an epitome of peace in the country.

He highlighted that the state has set extraordinary standards in terms of good governance, cleanliness, harmony and added that this unique celebration of the International Day of Peace through Yoga is another milestone added to Sikkim?s inspiring journey .

The Chief Minister heeded the importance of Yoga and pronounced that this initiative of the state government to solemnize the International Day of Peace through Yoga is directed towards bringing absolute peace and stability in the present world scenario.

While talking about the unifying charm that Yoga holds , the Chief Minister also mentioned that Sikkim is the first State in the country to induct the discipline of Yoga into the educational curriculum.

Around 1.5 lakh school students from all over the state participated in the Mass Yoga Demonstration and Meditation in synchrony . PTI COR MM

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The Columbus Odd Fellows will host their annual Oddtoberfest, an Oktoberfest-themed community celebration, at the Firemans Park Pavilion on Saturday, Sept. 24.

The event will kick off at 2 p.m. with the Odd Brat Trot, a 5K run and 1-mile walk, outside the pavilion and beer, food and fun inside.

The pavilion will be decorated like a German beer hall, with four different types of beer and wine available and a variety of Bavarian-style sausages being served. Music will be provided by Carol and the Keynotes and the Tom Brusky Band until 10 p.m.

Handmade steins and T-shirts will be for sale. A number of 50/50 raffles will also be held throughout the day.

At 6 p.m., the Columbus Fire Department will host a demonstration of its new drone outside the pavilion.

For the kids, local 4-H clubs and the Columbus Club House will have games and activities set up.

Odd Brat Trot

Runners and walkers can register in advance for the Odd Brat Trot. Details and a link to online registration may be found at http://www.wioddfellows40.org/. Participants may also sign up directly at https://runsignup.com/Race/WI/Columbus/TheOddBratTrot2016.

Proceeds from the Odd Brat Trot will be donated to Badger Honor Flight to send veterans to Washington D.C. to see the memorials that have been erected in their honor.

Questions regarding the run/walk may be emailed to oddbrattrot@gmail.com or call 608-444-6171.
Senate Democrats are requesting an extraordinary session to consider immediate improvements to the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King, following reported concerns about staffing shortages, medical care and the condition of facilities.

The Cap Times reported late last month on concerns from former and current employees and residents about the state of the 721-bed home for military veterans and their spouses.

Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers from both parties have called for investigations in the weeks that followed, and the Legislature's audit committee is set to meet Wednesday to consider launching a review of the facility, the largest of its kind in the state.

But Democratic senators said Tuesday that, while they support an audit, additional actions are needed immediately.

"I think we need to come together and recognize the important situation we find ourselves in and offer real solutions to move us past the current state of care," said Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton.

Erpenbach offered a list of improvements he said could be made immediately, including upgrading the home's fire alarm system, lighting, electric system and food service, and hooking up the facility to municipal water.

Signs in the facility instruct residents to run water before using it, warning them of elevated levels of lead.

In total, the improvements Erpenbach listed would cost about $18.5 million. Many of them were included in the state Department of Veterans Affairs' 2015-17 budget request but were not funded in the governor's budget.

The WDVA has denied allegations of poor conditions at the home or health care issues, and has said it has reinvested millions into making the King veterans home a top quality facility. The agency has cited the home's four- and five-star federal ratings, out of a possible five stars, for the last several years.

Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, reiterated several times that Democrats will support authorizing the audit, but noted it would take several months before any results were seen.

"The audit committee is a slow and purposeful process," said Sen. Janet Bewley, D-Ashland, a member of the committee. "It is not the approach that you would take when you really require a rapid response in an emergency."

An extraordinary session must be agreed to by leadership of both the Assembly and the Senate. A spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, did not immediately have a response available.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has yet to lead in a public poll in his re-election fight against Democratic former Sen. Russ Feingold.

Feingold leads Johnson by six points among both likely and registered voters in Wisconsin, according to a Marquette University Law School poll released Wednesday.

Democrats this week seized on comments from a handful of conservative politicians, pollsters and pundits who have indicated they think Johnson is unlikely to win. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee sent a memo to reporters Tuesday with a collection of quotes on the state of the race from people including Republican pollster Gene Ulm and conservative Milwaukee talk radio host Charlie Sykes.

But all of those quotes come with the caveat that the race is far from over.

"If you were going to Vegas and bet, you would bet on Russ Feingold because of past results" in Wisconsin Senate races during presidential years, Ulm told the audience at a WisPolitics breakfast in Washington, D.C. earlier this month.

However, Ulm added, "he's also the only guy Johnson could beat.''

"This race remains as tight as ever and as Wisconsinites realize that Sen. Feingold says one thing and does another on every single issue, we are confident that they will choose to support a manufacturer from Oshkosh instead of a 34-year career politician," said Johnson spokesman Brian Reisinger.

Johnson trails Feingold in every measure surveyed by the Marquette poll. Forty-six percent of voters said they have a favorable opinion of Feingold, compared to 34 percent for Johnson.

Asked whether the candidate "cares about people like me," half of voters said the statement applies to Feingold, while 36 percent believe it of Johnson.

Two recent ads from the Johnson campaign appear to be part of an effort to address that deficit. The campaign launched an ad Wednesday highlighting Johnson's involvement with The Joseph Project, a faith-based employment program set to expand soon from Milwaukee to Madison.

That spot followed one from last week touting Johnson's role in helping a Wisconsin couple complete their adoption of a child from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Russ is maintaining a consistent lead in the polls because he's prioritizing the concerns of middle class and working families across Wisconsin. Wisconsinites know that instead of protecting corporations and multi-millionaires like Sen. Johnson has done for years, Russ actually listens to Wisconsin's families and will fight for their needs," said Feingold spokesman Michael Tyler.

If Feingold were to win, he would be the third former senator to reclaim a seat since 1956.

Feingold, 63, served three terms in the Senate between 1993 and 2011 and was a state legislator before that. Johnson, 61, ousted him with a five-point victory in the conservative wave of 2010.
An assailant at the Israeli embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara shouted "Allahu Akbar", or "God is great", outside the embassy before he was shot in the leg by police.

Police forensic experts examine in front of the Israeli Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. (Photo: Reuters)

By Reuters: A suspected assailant was shot and wounded near the Israeli embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara on Wednesday, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman and Turkish police said.

"The staff is safe. The attacker was wounded before he reached the embassy," the spokesman said in a text message. "The assailant was shot and wounded by a local security man."

Broadcaster CNN Turk said the suspect, whom it described as mentally unstable, had attempted a knife attack.

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Turkish police told Reuters the assailant shouted "Allahu akbar", or "God is Greatest", outside the embassy before he was shot in the leg.

Police were examining his bag but had so far not attempted to detonate it, a Reuters cameraman at the scene said. The area outside the embassy had been cordoned off.

The assailant was apprehended at the outer perimeter of the secured zone around the embassy, the Israeli spokesman said.

Private broadcaster NTV identified the suspect as a man from the central city of Konya.

It was not immediately clear if there was a second would-be assailant, but Turkish media reports had initially suggested that there had been two attackers.

Turkey faces multiple security threats, including Islamic State militants, who have been blamed for bombings in Istanbul and elsewhere, and Kurdish militants, following the resumption of a three-decade insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast last year.



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AmerisourceBergen Corporation sources and distributes pharmaceutical products in the United States and internationally. Its Pharmaceutical Distribution segment distributes brand-name and generic pharmaceuticals, over-the-counter healthcare products, home healthcare supplies and equipment, and related services to various healthcare providers, including acute care hospitals and health systems, independent and chain retail pharmacies, mail order pharmacies, medical clinics, long-term care and alternate site pharmacies, and other customers. It also provides pharmacy management, staffing, and other consulting services; supply management software to retail and institutional healthcare providers; and packaging solutions to various institutional and retail healthcare providers. In addition, this segment distributes plasma and other blood products, injectable pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and other specialty products; provides other services primarily to physicians who specialize in various disease states, primarily oncology, as well as to other healthcare providers, including hospitals and dialysis clinics; and offers data analytics, outcomes research, and additional services for biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturers. The company's Other segment provides integrated manufacturer services, such as clinical trial support, product post-approval, and commercialization support; specialty transportation and logistics services for the biopharmaceutical industry; and sells pharmaceuticals, vaccines, parasiticides, diagnostics, micro feed ingredients, and various other products to customers in the companion animal and production animal markets, as well as demand-creating sales force services to manufacturers. AmerisourceBergen Corporation was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
The following companies are subsidiares of Dover: APM Grundstucksverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH & Co. 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Ltd., Seabiscuit Motorsports Inc., Shanghai RegO Flow Technology Company Ltd., Shine Bloom - ECI A Blocker Corp., Shine Bloom - ECI Blocker Corp., Shine Bloom - ECI S Blocker Corp., Simmons Sirvey Corporation, So. Cal. Soft-Pak, So. Cal. Soft-Pak Incorporated, Soft-Pak, Solaris Laser, Solaris Laser S.A., Somero Enterprises, Sound Solutions, Sound Solutions, Space S.R.L., Spirit, Start Italiana S.R.L., Superior Holding LLC, Superior Products LLC, Swep Energy Oy, Swep International A.B., Swep Japan K.K., Sys-Tech Solutions, Sys-Tech Solutions Inc., Systech, TQC Quantium Quality S.A. de C.V., TTSI III Inc., TWG Canada Consolidated Inc., TXHI LLC, Tartan Textile Services Inc., The Espy Corporation, The Heil Co., Tokheim, Tokheim Belgium, Tokheim China Company Limited, Tokheim GmbH, Tokheim Group, Tokheim Hengshan Technologies (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Tokheim Holding B.V., Tokheim India Private Limited, Tokheim Sofitam Applications, Triton Systems, Tulsa Winch Inc., UPCO Inc., US Synthetic, Unattended Payment Solutions LLC, Unified Brands, Val TemperBent Glass L.P., Vectron Frequency Devices (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vehicle Service Group LLC, Vehicle Service Group UK Limited, Vos Food Store Equipment Ltd., WSCR Corp., Warn Automotive LLC, Warn Industries, Waukesha Bearings, Waukesha Bearings Corporation, Waukesha Bearings Limited, Waukesha Bearings Russia LLC, Wayne Fueling Systems, Wayne Fueling Systems (Rus) Limited Liability Company, Wayne Fueling Systems Australia Pty Ltd, Wayne Fueling Systems Canada ULC, Wayne Fueling Systems Italia S.R.L., Wayne Fueling Systems LLC, Wayne Fueling Systems Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems Sweden AB, Wayne Fueling Systems UK Holdco Ltd., Wayne Industria e Comercio Ltda., WellMark, WellMark, and em-tec GmbH.

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Police arrested Pervez on the night of September 15 from his home in uptown Sonwar.

By Naseer Ganai: Jammu and Kashmir government today imposed Public Safety Act (PSA) against noted human rights defender of the Valley - Khurram Pervez.

"PSA has been imposed against Khurram Pervez. He is to be shifted to Kotbawal jail, Jammu," Deputy Commissioner, Srinagar told India Today.

DETAILS OF THE CASE

Police arrested Pervez on the night of September 15 from his home in uptown Sonwar.



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The police sent him to Kupwara sub-jail after a Revenue Officer (Executive Magistrate South Srinagar) passed order to keep him in detention for five days. As the officer had no judicial powers, the Chief Judicial Magistrate on Tuesday reprimanded the revenue officer for passing the order after Pervez's lawyers challenged the order terming it illegal.

The CJM Srinagar directed authorities to release Pervez. But he was released only to be re-arrested outside the jail.

PERVEZ NOT INFORMED ABOUT PROCEEDINGS: LAWYERS

Pervez's lawyers said he was never produced in person before the Executive Magistrate and in fact was kept in the police vehicle while the Investigating Officer left and returned with some papers. They said he was not informed about the proceedings, despite his repeated request, that he should have a lawyer. Lawyers also said that Pervez was denied a copy of the order.

Chairperson of Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) and Programme Coordinator of J-K Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), Pervez was scheduled to attend 33rd session of United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. However, on September 14, he was not allowed to leave India from New Delhi International Airport. He returned back to Srinagar on September 15 morning and was arrested.

Under the PSA, described by the Amnesty International as "lawless law" the authorities can arrest and imprison a person without trial for upto six months on mere suspicion that he may be threat to "public order and security of the State". The detention period can be extended up to two years.

"300 BOOKED UNDER PSA IN ONE MONTH"

According to sources in the State Home Department, around 300 persons have been booked under PSA in the past one month. Most of the arrested persons are stated to be protesters and activists of different separatist groups, who, police accuses of spearheading present protests.

A post-graduate in journalism from the University of Kashmir(KU), Pervez started working with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), an amalgam of various civil society groups in Kashmir in 2000.

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In 2008, Pervez's APDP came out with a report 'Facts Underground' revealing the presence of hundreds of unmarked graves in Kashmir. In 2009, APDP and International Peoples Tribunal came up with another report about the presence of unmarked graves in north Kashmir district of Bandipora.

Also read:

Kashmir sees surge in youths joining terror outfits after Burhan Wani's death

Kashmir unrest: Curfew clamped in Pulwama, Baramulla districts



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The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. operates as a diversified financial services company in the United States. The company's Retail Banking segment offers checking, savings, and money market accounts, as well as certificates of deposit; residential mortgages, home equity loans and lines of credit, auto loans, credit cards, education loans, and personal and small business loans and lines of credit; and brokerage, insurance, and investment and cash management services. This segment serves consumer and small business customers through a network of branches, ATMs, call centers, and online and mobile banking channels. Its Corporate & Institutional Banking segment provides secured and unsecured loans, letters of credit, and equipment leases; cash and investment management services, receivables and disbursement management services, funds transfer services, international payment services, and access to online/mobile information management and reporting; foreign exchange, derivatives, fixed income, securities underwriting, loan syndications, and mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets advisory related services; and commercial loan servicing and technology solutions. It serves mid-sized and large corporations, and government and not-for-profit entities. The company's Asset Management Group segment offers investment and retirement planning, customized investment management, credit and cash management solutions, and trust management and administration services for high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals, and their families; and multi-generational family planning services for ultra high net worth individuals and their families. It also provides outsourced chief investment officer, custody, private real estate, cash and fixed income client solutions, and fiduciary retirement advisory services for institutional clients. The company has 2,591 branches and 9,502 ATMs. The company was founded in 1852 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
BP, plc, once known as British Petroleum, is one of the worlds 7 oil & gas supermajors with operations spanning the globe. In terms of revenue, it ranks 4th on the list and the company is vertically integrated as well with operations in all segments of the oil and gas sector. Operations are currently underway in 80 countries around the world, the company can produce 3.7 million barrels of oil equivalents per day, and it lays claim to nearly 20 billion barrels in proven reserves. On the retail end of the business, the company operates more than 18,700 fuel stations and its largest segment is in the US.

The company was founded in 1908 with the purpose of exploring for and producing oil in the middle east. The company expanded into Alaska in 1959 and then accelerated its expansion when it merged with Amoco in 1998. Another merger with Burhman Castrol in 2000 created the company that is traded today.

BP, plc rebranded itself in 2000 giving new meaning to its name. The once British Petroleum is now Beyond Petroleum and focused on a major shift in its business. The company is working hard to move away from non-renewable carbon-based energy and into biofuels, solar, and wind. The company hopes to be net-zero in regard to carbon emissions and production by 2050 or earlier and is well on the way to doing so. Among the many avenues of advance are the build-out of solar and wind farms as well as the expansion of a major EV charging network. The network totaled more than 9,000 stations around the middle of 2022 and expansion was ramping in order to meet the goal of 100,000 EV stations before 2050.

BP p.l.c. currently operates through 4 segments including Gas & Low Carbon Energy, Oil Production & Operations, Customers & Products, and Rosneft segments. The company produces and trades in natural gas and oil liquids, offers biofuels, and operates wind and solar power generating facilities. The company also provides de-carbonization solutions and services, such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, as part of its green agenda.

In addition, it produces and refines oil and gas for its downstream operations as well as invests in upstream, downstream, and alternative energy companies including advanced mobility. Advanced mobility is the future of transportation and includes technologies like EV, hybrid, and hydrogen fuel cells. To that end, the company is building 7 hydrogen production and storage hubs in key locations around the world. The company aims to produce blue and green hydrogen for the global transportation industry with production beginning in 2027. Blue hydrogen is hydrogen captured from the companys natural gas deposits using a process that captures the waste carbon.
BT Group plc provides communications services worldwide. Its Consumer segment sells telephones, baby monitors, and Wi-Fi extenders through high street retailers, online BT Shop, and Website BT.com; and offers home phone, copper and fiber broadband, TV, and mobile services in various packages. The company's EE segment offers 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile network services; broadband, fixed-voice, and TV services; and postpaid and prepaid plans, and emergency services network. This segment also sells 4G mobile phones, tablets, connected devices, and mobile broadband devices from various manufacturers. Its Business and Public Sector segment provides fixed voice, mobility, fiber and connectivity, and networked IT services to retailers, utilities, public sector, healthcare, sports, construction, finance, and educational sectors. The company's Global Services segment offers business communications and ICT services comprising BT Connect, BT Security, BT One, BT Contact, BT Compute, BT Advise, and BT for financial markets. This segment serves approximately 5,500 customers in 180 countries. Its Wholesale and Ventures segment enables communications providers and other organizations to provide fixed or mobile phone services. Its ventures provide mass-market services, such as directory enquiries and payphones; and enterprise services comprising BT Fleet and BT Redcare. This segment also provides broadband and Ethernet, voice, hosted communication, mobile virtual network operator, managed solutions, machine-to-machine, roaming, and media services. The company's Openreach segment engages in the provision of services over the local access network; and installation and maintenance of fiber and copper communications networks that connect homes and businesses. The company was formerly known as Newgate Telecommunications Limited and changed its name to BT Group plc in September 2001. BT Group plc was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.
This is a current list of the top 250 companies by market capitalization on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Learn more .

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is one of the largest, and most recognizable, stock exchanges in the world. The NYSE is in New York City, New York at 11 Wall Street. The NYSE has been in existence since the earliest days of the United States becoming a nation, in 1792 and is primarily made up of blue-chip companies with large market capitalizations. In fact, many of the stocks that make up the Dow Jones Composite Index (i.e. The Dow) are listed on the NYSE.

This article gives a brief history of the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, it covers topics such as what kind of stocks trade on the exchange, what are the listing requirements, how trading is performed, and what the daily price movement of the NYSE tells investors about investor sentiment.

What Were the Origins of the NYSE?

Today, the New York Stock Exchange is known as the center of the financial universe. However, the exchanges origin is far more humble. On May 17, 1792, 24 stockbrokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement creating a centralized exchange to help provide order to the securities market in what was still a young nation. The "Buttonwood Agreement comes from the tree of the same name under which the founders signed the agreement.

An initial benefit of the exchange was how it removed the need for auctioneers when trading commodities like wheat and tobacco and to set a commission rate. The exchange initially focused on government bonds.

However, the exchange had no formal home. Business was usually conducted informally in the local coffeehouses. In 1817, the exchange changed its name to the New York Stock & Exchange Board which later became the New York Stock Exchange. At this time, the exchange adopted a constitution that set the rules for trading. A group of stockbrokers met twice a day at 40 Wall Street to trade 30 stocks and bonds.

Over time, the exchange moved became the financial hub of the country and moved to its current location in 1865.

What Kind of Stocks Trade on the NYSE?

As of June 2022, the NYSE includes approximately 2,400 companies with a market capitalization of over $28.2 trillion. Although the NYSE trades stocks of all market capitalizations, its best known for trading the stocks of large cap companies. These have the benefit of being mature companies in mature industries. And many of these companies reward shareholders with dividends.

However, that also means that many of these companies are better suited for value investors as opposed to growth investors. In bear markets this stability can be a benefit for investors as these stocks tend to perform less bad than more volatile stocks. But in a bull market, these stocks are not likely to provide investors with the growth that they look for.

An interesting fact about how the NYSE and NASDAQ operate is that the companies with the five largest market caps on the NYSE are also listed on the NASDAQ exchange.

What Are the Listing Requirements For the NYSE?

The NYSE has strict guidelines that govern the types of companies that can list on the exchange. Here are the major requirements that all companies must meet:

The company must have at least 2,200 shareholders

The company must trade over 100,000 shares per month

The company must have a market valuation of over $100 million

The company must generate more than $75 million in annual revenue

However, there is at least one advantage of having such stringent requirements. That is the companies that meet the requirements generally find it easier to get more investors funds when they hold their initial public offering (IPO).

Once a company begins trading on the NYSE, it must continue to meet these requirements. If it doesnt it can be delisted. In addition to these requirements, the stock must continue to trade above $1. If the price of a stock drops below $1 for more than 29 consecutive trading days, the stock receives an Initial Price Violation Notice.

At that point, the company has 10 days to provide the exchange with a plan for bringing their shares above $1.

How are Trades Executed on the NYSE?

For over a century, the floor of the NYSE was the place for investors to be. This meant trades were conducted by traders who ran buy and sell orders across the trading floor looking to broker a deal for their clients. But with the birth of the NASDAQ exchange in 1971, the New York Stock Exchange began conducting electronic trading.

However, the NYSE continues to conduct trades in an auction style. Brokers purchase stocks on behalf of their clients or firms. Every order features a broker who will enter the order electronically and a specialist who serves as the market maker for that stock. The specialist posts bid and ask prices and manages the actual execution of the trades. And there are still a handful of stockbrokers who still traffic buy and sell orders physically on the floor of the exchange.

How Does the NYSE Signal Investor Sentiment?

Like its counterpart, the NASDAQ, the NYSE measures the risk appetite of investors. When the NYSE is moving higher over a length of time, it signals that a risk on environment. Conversely when the NYSE moves lower over a significant period, it signals that investors are moving to a risk off position.

Some Final Thoughts on the NYSE

Financial news networks plan their programming schedule around the opening and closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Its still considered a distinguished honor when individuals or groups are invited to ring the opening bell. In fact, Warren Buffett is attributed with saying that in the short term, the stock market acts like a voting machine. A fact that many U.S. presidents will attest to.

The NYSE is the oldest and most recognizable of all the stock exchanges. It also has the most stringent requirements for inclusion. And those requirements must be maintained even after a stock begins publicly trading on the exchange.

Although the NYSE still has a small in-person Trading Floor, much of the trading is done electronically to provide traders with the speed to execute trades.
By Mausami Singh: Three days after the Uri terror attack, India Today has learned from sources that Jaish-e-Mohammad's (JeM) Kashif Jaan, Rauf Asgar and Masood Azhar may have masterminded the brazen attack.



Kashif Jaan, the JeM operative who had escorted the Pathankot terrorists till the border, could also have been the handler of the terrorists who carried out the attack in Uri, sources in the National Investigation Agency (NIA) told India Today. The NIA suspects that the JeM handler could have gone underground post the Uri attack.



After a preliminary investigation confirms the role of the three JeM men, India will ask Pakistan to arrest these terrorists and hand them over to India. Not ready to let Pakistan slip away, India, this time, will seek the support of international agencies to force Pakistan to act against these homegrown terrorists.



NIA COLLECTS EVIDENCE

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In another development, the Army has handed over crucial evidences and documents related to the Uri terror attack to the NIA. A team of NIA officials is also collecting evidences and samples from the attack site in Uri to zero down on the perpetrators who carried out one of the most dastardly attacks on the Indian army.

ALSO READ: Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp

Sources said that the NIA is working on different theories and will take the help of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to collect incriminating evidence.



DNA SAMPLES WILL BE THE KEY



The NIA will also collect DNA samples of the slain terrorists. It will seek the help of the Army, IB and RAW to get the identities of the terrorists verified. Sources have told India Today that once the identities are verified, the NIA will identify the relatives of the terrorists in Pakistan and confront its neighbour and ask for the samples of the relatives.



Sources in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said that in the Pathankot terror attack case, despite repeated reminders, Pakistan did not provide the DNA samples of the Pakistan-based relatives of the slain terrorists. The MHA will discuss the matter with the Ministry of External Affairs and try to take it up with Pakistan. The MHA does not want a repeat of the Pathankot case and is keen to not allow Pakistan to sleep over the DNA sample issue in the Uri attack case.

ALSO READ: Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?



TERRORISTS OBSERVED THE CAMP



It is being suspected that the terrorists parked themselves near the camp and observed the activities of the troop possibly for a day or two before carrying out the attack on Sunday.



INTERCEPTS TO BE SOUGHT



The NIA is set to seek the complete intercepts of the Army, the IB and the RAW in and around the Uri sector for the last two to four months.



LEADS ON INSIDER ROLE



Sources have said that the NIA has got some leads regarding the role of insiders in the Uri terror attack which will be probed thoroughly. "The NIA has got crucial information on the role of insiders who provided shelter to the terrorists and also on those who leaked information regarding the troop movements," sources told India Today.

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Navigant Consulting, Inc. provides professional services worldwide. It operates through three segments: Healthcare, Energy, and Financial Services Advisory and Compliance. The Healthcare segment offers consulting and business process management services to healthcare providers, payers, and life sciences companies. This segment helps clients respond to market legislative changes, such as the shift to an outcome and value-based reimbursements model, ongoing industry consolidation and reorganization, Medicaid expansion, the implementation of a electronic health records system, and product planning and commercialization expertise. The Energy segment provides life-cycle solutions that help clients businesses in changing energy environment, manage complexity, accelerate operational performance, and meet compliance requirements, as well as transform its organizations and systems; and various benchmarking, and data and market research services. This segment serves utility and energy companies, government and nongovernmental organizations, large corporations, product manufacturers, and investors. The Financial Services Advisory and Compliance segment provides strategic, operational, valuation, risk management, investigative, and compliance advisory services to financial services industry, including financial and insurance institutions. This segment also offers anti-corruption solutions and anti-money laundering consulting, litigation support, and tax compliance services. Navigant Consulting, Inc. was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Ketchup cake has been a big deal in Canada for a couple of years, and it's going viral all over the world now.

This pretty cake might look like a red velvet, but it's actually a ketchup cake. Picture courtesy: Instagram/domesticphd

By Shreya Goswami: If you think ketchup cake is just one of those things you read about, but aren't true, you're wrong. Ketchup cake is real, and if the growing number of fans across the world are anything to go by, it's here to stay.

The ridiculous bit is, it looks exactly like a red velvet cake. So you might be tricked by the red sponge cake, and the white frosting. But you should know before you take a bite of it, that the red sponge in this case is ketchup flavoured, and the white frosting is actually cream cheese!

Ketchup cake has apparently been around since 2009. Picture courtesy: Instagram/erin_lvs_78

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You might not peg Canada as one of those countries from where such a weird food innovation can originate. But that just goes to show that people, no matter what their nationality, can come up with bizarre dishes that can make you wince.

The original recipe for ketchup cake was first introduced by Heinz Canada in their ketchup bottles way back in 2009. The back label of the bottles came with the recipe for something they called the 'Great Canadian Ketchup Cake'.

The original recipe was put up by Heinz Canada on their ketchup bottles. Picture courtesy: Instagram/amoiraborealis

The list of ingredients can make you feel a little dizzy, because it calls for ketchup, cream cheese, water, red food colouring, and cake staples like flour, eggs, baking powder, and baking soda.

Also read: These amazing facts about ketchup will make your life zingier



When YouTuber Gregory Nuttle came across this strange recipe recently, he decided to give it a try. Once the cake was ready, he shared it with his friends, and even his dog. They all liked it! Nuttle posted his ketchup cake videos on his YouTube account, and they went viral instantly.

Professional bakers are actually getting orders to bake this cake for various occasions. Picture courtesy: Instagram/neighbourhood_bakes

Following Nuttle's brave example, many people across the world tried out the recipe. The cake, weird though it may sound, has become an instant hit with many. Helena, a professional baker from London recently posted a picture of a grand-looking ketchup cake she had to bake because the customers love it. "Anyone that knows me knows how much I hate Ketchup, and I had to make two of these in one day", she wrote in her Instagram post.

People are even trying out ketchup cupcakes at home now. Picture courtesy: Instagram/ennofee

That's just how much the world has been taken by storm by this bizarre cake that looks like a dessert, but tastes like a starter! Would you care for a bite of this cake? If you can't decide, you might want to watch this video posted by Elly, an Australian vlogger, who tried the cake at home with consequences that will startle you:



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Lisa Ray had an amazing time in Lebanon and her Instagram posts will give you major travel goals.

By India Today Web Desk: When Bollywood stars go on a holiday, they usually make sure that they have made the most of their time by enjoying everything that a destination can offer.

After Nargis Fakhri's Greece holiday and Ranveer Singh's vacation on the snowy slopes of Switzerland, it was time for Lisa Ray.

Also see: These pictures from Nargis Fakhri's Greek holiday will inspire you to travel



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Lisa Ray recently went on a trip to Lebanon with her husband Jason Dehni and the pictures she posted on Instagram will give you major travel goals.

Also see: Pictures of Ranveer Singh 'chilling' in Switzerland will make you crave a vacation



Right from spending time at the picturesque beaches to exploring important tourist sites to shopping to enjoying a music festival and a lot more, there's hardly a thing that Lisa has not experienced during her vacation. And these are reason enough to inspire us to plan our next trip. What do you think? Take a look at her pictures and decide:

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Picture courtesy: Instagram/lisaraniray

Click here to see more pictures from Lisa Ray's holiday.

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Concord Scholarship helps Commander relive grandmother's life

The subject of the story Melissa Commander and grandmother Teresa Brandt stop for a photo prior to Commander's Concord Traveling Scholarship presentation on Sept. 19. Photo by Jim Ducibella

Benefactors Dave Gunton '99 and Anne Rivers Gunton '00 have contributed the money necessary to make the Concord Traveling Scholarship a reality. They traveled from Georgia to hear Commander's presentation. Photo by Jim Ducibella

Coming home This is the house in Cuba in which Teresa Brandt was raised. Photo courtesy Melissa Commander

A family affair Melissa Commander (L), with some members of her family: grandmother Teresa Brandt, brother Curt Commander, uncle David Alvarez, her mother, Melinda Commander, and cousin Jorge Leyva. Photo courtesy Melissa Commander

Yummy Melissa Commander and her family sampled many of the delicacies of Cuba, as prepared by relatives still living on the island. Photo courtesy Melissa Commander Photo - of - Hide Caption

Melissa Commander had a vision for herself and her family that came to fruition when she took the stage at Ewell Hall on Sept. 19.

Commander, a senior at William & Mary majoring in art history and minoring in creative writing, set her sights on winning a Concord Traveling Scholarship during her freshman year. She and her Cuban-born grandmother had long been discussing the older womans extraordinary life, something Commander dearly wanted to put to paper. She instinctively concluded that there had to be a way to merge the two.

It happened in May, when Commander learned that she was indeed the recipient of the Concord Traveling Scholarship, which is made possible by a donation from Anne Rivers Gunton 00 and David L. Gunton 99. Each spring, Henry Hart, Mildred and J.B. Hickman Professor of English and Humanities, asks for proposals from students who would like to combine summer travel with a writing project. Faculty who teach creative writing evaluate and vote, seeking topics that are well organized and original. All recipients are required to make a presentation based on their travel and writing.



{{youtube:medium:center|sCoU8o-vecU, Melissa Commander in her own words}}

Commander, grandmother Teresa Brandt and six family members traveled to Cuba for 11 days in July, where in large measure they retraced many of the most important steps in the 72-year-old womans life. They stayed at the family home of Commanders great aunt in Guantanamo.

I knew I had this resource of my grandmother who has always been an amazing inspiration to me, Commander said. Shes always said  and my family has always said  that I should write her story.

What a story it is. Born into a wealthy family that owned a dairy farm  more like a plantation, Commander said  near Guantanamo, Teresa Salas married a United States Marine when she was 16.

Not long after, two American agents came to her grandmothers home. They offered her two choices: stay in Cuba and risk losing her life, or immediately get on a bus for Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and fly to the U.S.

They knew something she didnt know, that no one in Cuba knew, that the U.S. had broken ties with Cuba, Commander said. So it was believed that everything was about to get pretty violent. Because she was married to a U.S. Marine, because her family was wealthy, she was believed to be in danger.

The Castro government confiscated the dairy farm, which is still in existence today. Commander and her family got close to the property in July, but didnt step onto it, unsure of the consequences.

Commanders grandmother had always shared information about her background, and the trip rekindled memories that enabled her to elaborate on pieces of her life in Cuba.

One day the family drove across a grey, weather-beaten bridge that spanned a dry gulch where the Jaibo River once flowed.

This is the bridge! Commanders grandmother cried out then repeated a story Commander had heard before and had tried to envision.

As children, Salas and her two brothers were attempting to go into the city of Guantanamo one day in 1953 and were using the bridge as a gateway. Soldiers serving in the army under President Fulgencio Batista and guarding the city, seeing them from a distance, somehow mistook them for Castros rebels, and opened fire.

They had to run, Commander said. Eventually, the soldiers realized they were just kids and let them pass, and they played in the big river.

Another time, the family visited the grave of Commanders great grandmother, who passed away about two years ago. It was the most emotional moment of the trip.

I think that was the hardest, what touched my grandmother the most, seeing her mothers grave, Commander said. She had been back [to Cuba] a couple of times and seen her, but did not get to see her near the end. That was very emotional.

Brandts life in the United States is testimony to hard work and perseverance. Her marriage ended shortly after she gave birth to her third child. With almost no knowledge of English and desperate to feed her children, she agreed to take on a small sewing job, even though she didnt know how to thread a needle. Ultimately, she purchased a tailors shop and turned it into a highly successful business. Commander made note of it all in her presentation, which she hopes to turn into a book.

One of the things I've admired and strived for, inspired by my grandmother, is her strength, Commander said. Shes an incredibly strong woman. Shes lived through so much and somehow has maintained a level of kindness and generosity that on occasion baffles me. By going there, one thing I saw was how rich a life she had.

Going there also changed  and enriched  an already close relationship.

I do feel like were a little closer, like were two women, I guess, she said. She told me some things about her life that she didnt tell me before, I guess because I was younger and she didnt want to tell me ... We had conversations that were more two women talking than grandmother-granddaughter talking.
W&M Theatre converges in land of the midnight sun

Meet me in Alaska Alumna Amy Altadonna '01 met Matthew Allar, Class of 1955 Associate Professor of Theatre, in a most unlikely place -- a specific production in Juneau, Alaska. Photo courtesy Amy Altadonna

Meet me in Alaska Joseph Biagini graduated W&M in May, but ended up working with and for a professor and alumna in Juneau, Alaska. Photo courtesy Amy Altadonna

Meet me in Alaska Associate Theatre Professor Matthew Allar was working with Altadonna for six months as scenic designer before discovering that Altadonna had W&M ties. Courtesy Matthew Allar

Meet me in Alaska Associate Theatre Professor Matthew Allar was working with Altadonna for six months as scenic designer before discovering that Altadonna had W&M ties. Courtesy Matthew Allar

Meet me in Alaska Associate Theatre Professor Matthew Allar was working with Altadonna for six months as scenic designer before discovering that Altadonna had W&M ties. Courtesy Matthew Allar Photo - of - Hide Caption

A professor and two alumni surprised to run into each other on same production in Juneau

Alaskas state motto might be north to the future, but for three William & Mary people this summer, it was more like north to the theatre.

A theatre professor, a recent graduate and an alumna  unbeknownst to one another  all ended up in Juneau, Alaska, this August, working on the same play.

It spread into more of a William & Mary event than I ever imagined, said Matthew Allar, Class of 1955 Associate Professor of Theatre. The assembly of all of us way up there meant that there was a huge William & Mary theatre presence in Alaska working on the show  in a fairly remote place.

When Allar signed on with Alaska-based Perseverance Theatre as scenic director for its production of Peter and the Starcatcher, he didnt know that the shows sound designer, Amy Altadonna, graduated from William & Mary in 2001. Neither did he know that Joseph Biagini 16, had landed a year-long artistic internship with Perseverance.

Long before the summer, Allar and Altadonna began working together as part of a team scattered across the country, collaborating remotely.

In the early stages, when we were communicating via email and phone, it was just so strange to have these three other visual designers, who were just these disembodied voices, Altadonna said. So I Googled them. And the minute I saw that Matt worked at William & Mary, I was like, I got to meet this guy.

'The Tribe mentality is real'

Altadonna majored in music at William & Mary. But after not landing a seat the pit in Sinfonicron, she was offered an opportunity to do its lighting, introducing her to backstage aspects of performance.

At William & Mary, theres such a vibrant, student-motivated campus life, she said. And the Tribe mentality, its real. I got taken into the fold and taught a bunch of skills and was allowed to grow into the role. And by the next year, I was the master electrician of Sinfonicron.

She got her start as a sound designer the year after she graduated. She was still in town, working at the bookstore, feeling like a loser, when a theatre student asked her to help with his senior thesis directing project. He had attended her senior recital the previous year, so knew she had necessary experience with computer music.

To this day, sometimes I still think its the best show Ive done, she said. There were no rules. I was totally making it up as I went along. And now, 15 years later, Im a professional frickin sound designer. Its just so unbelievably fortuitous.

Over the years she has also done a number of productions with Perseverance Theatre. It was the second for Allar. After working remotely for a number of months, they finally met in Juneau in the run-up to the show.

Allar heard Altadonnas name over the years in the department and knew she had returned to William & Mary to speak to sound design classes. So it was really a rare joy to have this working relationship with her, albeit it took going all the way to Juneau, he said.

'Model W&M student'

Biagini was already in Juneau, working on his full-time artistic internship after graduating William & Mary in May as a theatre and economics major. He had no idea that Allar, with whom he had just finished studying, was working on the same production.

I showed up and looked at the calendar in the office and it said M. Allar arrives this day. So it was quite a surprise, he said. I knew he had connections with the artistic director for the theatre, but I was not aware hed be here.

Allar said it wasnt incidental that Biagini landed the internship. At William & Mary, Biagini differentiated himself from other students by being equally as strong on stage as backstage. He acted, was a carpenter in the scene shop for two years and directed his own senior show (Edward Albees Seascape).

While he was a student here, one of the great things about Joseph was that he was kind of the model of a William & Mary Theatre student, in so much that he really got involved with a lot of different kinds of things, Allar said. Its nice to see the efforts of a student to embrace the idea of theatrical artistry in a very broad context  which is what we hope to impart to our students  to then turn around and be rewarded for that broad liberal arts educational foundation with a great internship.

Biagini was assigned to work for Altadonna as an audio engineer, mixing the actors microphones. It was work hed not done before.

They did a really great job training, he said. Thats part of my whole thing; I like to try out different areas of theatre, just to have a working knowledge. So Im really grateful for the opportunity.

Altadonna said Biagini is too modest; he excelled beyond measure.

If I didnt have Joseph there, I would still be up there, trying to fix the show and crying about it, she said. He has this internal self-leadership, self-awareness. William & Mary students are just the best at saying, OK, Im going to put my nose to the grindstone and Im going to figure this out  That freed me up to be collaborating with the director, Matt and the other people on the show, to be thinking instead about how things sounded. He was such a partner to me, instead of my having to stress out and manage every little creative interaction.

Allar said he and Altadonna spent some time talking about what they perceived to be the particular strengths of W&M students working in the arts.

The ability to discuss and respond to various types of artistry, whether its auditory or visual or text-based, is kind of a complex thing, he said. Its hard to pin down a specific strategy or pathway to do that. That ability is showcased in William & Mary students in that theyre very good at picking up contextual information on the fly in new situations. Since Amy and Joseph share this background, they both have the common vocabulary of how to arrive at a new project or situation and tackle it head-on, knowing that there are new things to deal with but that they are capable of quickly picking things up in the context and finding ways to relate them to each other. This is really a hallmark of what we hope W&M students bring to the table in the working world.

Theres one more William & Mary connection to this story, Allar said. The local newspaper, the Juneau Empire, sent a photographer for its Capital City Weekly arts insert. You guessed it Mary Catharine Martin graduated in 2004.

It was a rare assembly of faculty, recent and not-so-recent alums working together on a professional production in such a unique way, Allar said.




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Troops have escalated anti-infiltration measures in the wake of Sunday's deadly terror raid on the Uri army camp.

By Padmaja Joshi, Jugal R Purohit: A solider peers through nets of barbed wires around his post as men and children walk past in eerie silence.

Some distance behind him an army operation is under way to deal with infiltrators.

At picturesque Lachipora in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri sector, life has turned hard as tensions sour along the Line of Control.

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Home to mostly porters, farmers and small store owners, Uri town and its neighbourhoods are suffering substantial collateral damage from militant intrusions.

Schools are shut, daily businesses have gone down.

Troops have escalated anti-infiltration measures in the wake of Sunday's deadly terror raid on the Uri army camp.

On Wednesday, India Today's crew reached the last accessible point beyond which massive a combing exercise was being conducted following a fierce gun-battle a day earlier with a new group of 10 to 12 terrorists.

Fear pervades through the lush-green mountains standing between residents of this neighbourhood and the LoC, three kilometres away.

For the past few days, the stillness of this serene valley has been punctured by gunshots and loud explosions.

"I heard the booms and then the loud bangs," said an elderly Kashmiri, sitting under a dilapidated, wooden shelter.

Frightened, he locked himself in his house as the deafening noise from Tuesday's shootout with terrorists continued unabated.

"We were scared. We are poor people. Sometimes we just have to run for safety," said the man, perched on a bamboo plank.

A young man sitting around called the phenomenon fairly new.

"This type of situation is happening after almost 15 years. It's scary," he said. "We are left with no option but to leave our homes when firing erupts."

Several children, as young as 10-year-old, were seen walking and playing in the unpaved lanes as unrest prompted authorities to close down schools temporarily.

Senior Kashmiris were worried.

"I want my children to become pen men, not gunmen," lamented an 80-year-old retired schoolteacher. "I hope everything will become normal soon."

In Uri town, markets were open, but largely deserted.

"Our business is badly hurt. We have become poorer than before," said a middle-aged mobile storeowner.

Some residents put a bold face on adversity.

"Why should we be scared? We have the army to protect us," remarked a man.

Up north in Patwari Naogam, a small village of Handwara, people trekked downhill and back up for basic commodities.

Homeowners said they were hit with a double whammy, with chronic poverty on the one hand and prolonged curfews on the other.

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"Ours is a backward village. We are virtually under a siege," said a villager of Patwari Naogam. "We are mostly coolies. There's no work. Now, there's a shortage of food," he added.

Patwari Naogam is the last hamlet before the LoC in Handwara.

None of the villagers India Today spoke with favoured escalation between India and Pakistan.

"It's the question of our livelihood and our lives. Both will be hit if a war breaks out," said a local man.

"Who wants a war? No one. All issues should be resolved through dialogue. Wars are a no solution," added another.

--- ENDS ---
By Jeffrey Mifflin

Dr. John Collins Warren (1778-1856), renowned surgeon and co-founder of the Massachusetts General Hospital, is interred at tranquil Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Mass.; and he is sequestered in a closed, coffin-like box in storage at Harvards Warren Museum. How can that be possible? The disposition of his body was obscure for many years, but recent research has unearthed the facts.

Warren left precise instructions in a letter to his son about what should be done with his mortal remains after the spirit has quitted them. He wanted his body taken to Harvard Medical School (where he taught for 38 years) to be examined or dissected [and] any morbid partscarefully preserved. He further instructed that his bones were to be whitened, articulated, and placed in the lecture room of the Medical College, near [his] bust as a lesson usefulto morality and science. Warrens skeleton is indeed at Harvard in the anatomical museum that he founded, but his descendants allow the box to be opened only for family members. Dominic Hall, curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum, explains that the historical files have no records of how this came to be, but it is a tradition the museum still honors.

A marker in the Warren family plot at Forest Hills bears the names of several famous medical ancestors of JCW, including Dr. Joseph Warren (who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill) and Dr. John Warren (who co-founded Harvard Medical School). The name Johannes Collins Warren also appears, but it was incorrectly assumed by most observers (aware that his skeleton was at Harvard) that the name was merely there as a token of remembrance. My own high school Latin was not equal to the task of translating the inscription on the JCW stone (Animae vestis carnea hoc tumulo conditur), but I now know (with the help of a classicist) that it means: The fleshy clothing of the soul is buried in this grave.

Heather Sanders, an administrator at Forest Hills, dug into the institutional archives at my behest to find out more about who is actually buried in the Warren plot. JCW bought the plot in 1852 and pre-arranged for several long-deceased family members buried elsewhere to be exhumed and re-interred in a newly constructed underground vault beside his own morbid parts. The shuffle occurred in August 1856. All of the remains now in the vault are contained in urnsthe older ones because they were repackaged after decades of moldering in the ground; and JCWs because the dissection and subdivision of his body made the parts destined for Forest Hills amorphous and compact.

Medical historians and other admirers of the famous surgeon can now locate his mortal remains to pay their respects, but one mystery remains: Who determined that his skeleton should remain out of public view?

Jeffrey Mifflin is the archivist of the Massachusetts General Hospital.
By India Today Web Desk: It looked like a scene from a Hindi potboiler. A bullet was headed a woman's way near Gurgaon's Rapid Metro pillar number 55. Fortunately for her, it missed her heart and hit her locket. This is when you'd expect a director to shout cut.

Of course, this was no movie.

MARRIAGE PROPOSAL REJECTED



The bullet was fired by the woman's spurned lover, a 27-year-old deputy manager of an electronics showroom.

The accused, Ashok Kumar, was in a relationship with the victim, a 32-year-old woman from Kolkata, police said. Ashok had been putting pressure on the woman to marry him. The woman, who works in a private company, however, turned down the proposal. The couple called it quits in July.

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ALSO READ: Bengal shocker: Teenaged girl ends life after jilted lover posts intimate pictures on Facebook



LOCKET SAVES THE DAY



Kumar, however, was not one to take no for an answer. He didn't stop pursuing her. On Monday night, the two got into an argument when suddenly Kumar took out a country-made pistol and fired at the woman from close range.

Destiny was on the woman's side. The bullet hit her locket and bounced back. Kumar tried fleeing but was caught by bystanders and handed over to the police.

LOVER WANTED TO KILL SELF



Ashok, however, claimed that his intention was not to flee but to shoot himself, but people caught him before he could do so.

The woman was taken to a hospital. Thanks to the locket, she only sustained minor injuries and was discharged after first aid.

Meanwhile, based on the account of an eye-witness, a complaint has been registered against Kumar under IPC section 307 (attempt to murder) and sections of the Arms Act. On Tuesday morning, a local court remanded him in police custody for a day.

ALSO READ: Tamil Nadu: Jilted lover kills girl, attempts suicide later



--- ENDS ---
Recognition sought for nuclear's unique attributes

21 September 2016

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The economics and financing of nuclear power projects and the markets in which they operate was discussed last week by a high level panel at the World Nuclear Association's Annual Symposium. While some countries are investing in new nuclear capacity, some market conditions are forcing the closure of existing reactors, participants said.

The high level panel at the Symposium (Image: World Nuclear Association)

"The important point is that investment [in nuclear power projects] is not held back everywhere and I think we can learn much from observing where nuclear power generation and program development is proceeding," said Ahab Abdel-Aziz, a partner with Gowling WLG. He pointed to Russia, China, Korea, India and - until Fukushima - Japan as examples.

These countries, Abdel-Aziz said, "have the political capacity, first and foremost, and that means they have political support for the creation of a hospitable environment for the program or project; a hospitable regulatory environment; and they have the economic capacity to dedicate billions of dollars in one fashion or another and wait many years for the return; and again the political capacity to stand behind the completion of that project should things go sideways, where sometimes they do."

He noted that where nuclear projects have stalled, these are "largely Western nations that have advanced economies that should have the economic capacity to make this work, but they don't have the political capacity."

European market

Kirill Komarov, first deputy director general for corporate development and international business at Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, said: "I don't think the European market is so different in comparison with other markets for nuclear. There are a lot of changes that we face everywhere, whether that's Europe, Asia or Africa because if we talk about such things as public acceptance, safety and security, cost of construction, the impact on the environment, these are common things in all potential projects - it doesn't matter where they are."

He said it is important for vendor countries of nuclear technology - such as France and Russia - to continue developing nuclear. "First of all because it's necessary to continue the level of science and technology. It is impossible just to say we will not construct nuclear power plants in our own countries, but we plan to build in other countries. Most of these countries do not do this. We have a lot of projects - eight of them - specifically in Russia." Komarov added, "The biggest challenge for us is just the political issue. We see in Russia and France a willingness for construction of nuclear power plants. If we look at the rest of Europe, usually it is not what we call 'newcomer' countries, the majority of countries realising nuclear projects are countries like Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Belarus and the UK. These are countries with huge experience with the necessary infrastructure, legislation, rules and experienced regulators."

The term 'first-of-a-kind' may put off some investors, Komarov said, "no matter how experienced" the project owners are. First-of-a-kind projects may incur delays, he said, but with a "serial construction project", investors can see "successful examples of how the same design has already been installed".

Market regulation

Edward McGinnis, deputy assistant secretary for international nuclear energy policy and cooperation at the US Department of Energy, said: "Whether it's a regulated market or attributes of a regulated market, I would say attributes, at minimum, are absolutely necessary for the successful involvement of nuclear power, or at least it's exponentially more difficult to do it in a pure merchant market where literally annually, quarterly, price prevails everything.

"The attributes of nuclear energy are seen as unique: 24/7, non-carbon emitting, a 40-60 year (maybe longer) generating asset. It's a key element more and more to environmental security, economic security and energy security."

Nuclear's share in Europe is declining and existing plants are closing because they cannot make a profit in the deregulated market, noted the moderator, journalist Ann MacLachlan. The market, she said, is over-supplied by cheap - because subsidised - generation from solar and wind, which have grid priority. However, because renewable energy sources need fossil fuel back-up, carbon dioxide emissions are rising in Europe.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy president and CEO Jay Wileman suggested "What is really needed from an EU perspective is a comprehensive and integrated energy policy. Something I don't think is there yet. Whether it's an integrated resource plan or just coherent policies in place is really key to start with."

US market

"Certainly without any meaningful credit for the zero emission attributes of nuclear power plants in the United States, you will see a significant amount of closures over the next certainly ten years, but even sooner than that," said Bradley Fewell, senior vice president of regulatory affairs and general counsel at US utility Exelon Generation.

"We were able to get New York to recognize the zero emission attributes of the plants in up-state New York and that was a significant achievement." The New York State Public Service Commission gave its formal approval last month of a Clean Energy Standard that explicitly recognises the zero-carbon contribution of nuclear power plants.

Fewell said he expects the plan will be implemented. "It has the backing of the governor, as well as the Public Service Commission, and therefore I am very optimistic. Even though there will be legal challenges and it will be litigated for a couple of years, it will be implemented on schedule, as well as ultimately upheld in the courts."

But implementation of similar plans in other US states in which the company operates will not be so easy, he said. "In Illinois, where we have announced the retirement of a couple of nuclear power plants, we have to deal with the legislature. And we have to deal with a very divided legislature. We have to deal with a governor who is aided by the leader of the House of Representatives in Illinois. Similarly, in Pennsylvania we have to deal with the legislature. We are making some progress there.

"Maybe the Clean Power Plan will help in particular new build eventually, but its impact for the existing fleet is less certain."

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
The Netherlands is a constituent, and the main, country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The country is located in the Western Europe, and it is bordered by German, Belgium, and the North Sea. Netherlands is one of the countries with the high rate of urbanization in Europe and the world with over 75% of the population living in urban areas. The country has some of the biggest and important cities in Europe. The Dutch cities are important financial, commercial, administrative, political, traditional, and cultural centers. The cities give insight into the level of the development and the expected future trends in Netherlands. The biggest cities in the Netherlands are looked at below.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the most populous municipality in the country. The metropolitan area of Amsterdam has a population of 2,431,000 with the urban areas having a population of 1.3 million people. Amsterdam is found in the province of North Holland in the western part of the country. Amsterdam, as the name suggests, originated from a dam of River Amstel. It began as a fishing village but became an important port in the 17th Century during the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam is the commercial and cultural capital of Netherlands and a top financial center in Europe. The city also has the oldest stock exchange in the world. Some of the Amsterdam attractions include Ann Frank House, Amsterdam Museum, historic canals, and its red-light district among other attractions.

Rotterdam

Rotterdam is located in the South Holland region of the Netherlands. Its history can be traced back to 1270 when people constructed a dam for safety on the Rotte River. The city was given the city rights in 1340 by the Count of Holland. Rotterdam developed into a major economic and logistics center. The city currently hosts the largest port in the whole of Europe. With a population of 1,181,284, Rotterdam is the second largest city in Netherlands. Rotterdam is famous for the vibrant cultural life, the maritime heritage, and the Erasmus University. The city also has some of the worlds famous architecture. The strategic location of the city has facilitated its success in the area of logistics.

The Hague

The Hague is found along the western coast of the Netherlands. The city is the third biggest in the Netherlands with a population of 1,054,793. The Hague is the headquarters for the Dutch government, the Supreme Court, the Parliament, and the Council of State. The city is also home to most foreign embassies and international organizations including the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. The Hague was established in 1230 when the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, William II, began building a palace named Binnenhof there. By the 16th Century, The Hague had become the seat of the government of Dutch republic. After the separation of the Belgium and the Netherlands in 1830, Amsterdam became the capital of the Netherlands while The Hague remained the seat of the government.

Utrecht

The Dutch city of Utrecht is the most populous city in the Utrecht Province. The city is in the eastern corner of the Randstad and has a population of 656,342. Some of the buildings in Utrecht date back to High Middle Ages. The city has been the Netherlands' religious center since the 8th Century. Utrecht City has an important transport system, cultural events, and hosts the Utrecht University. Utrecht was the most significant cultural city in the Netherlands until the Dutch Golden Age when it was overtaken by Amsterdam.
The Republic of the Philippines is an island country in Southeast Asia. It is an archipelago nation consisting of around 7,641 islands. The islands are categorized under three geographical regions including Luzon, Mindanao, and Visaya. The mountainous regions of Philippines are covered in tropical rainforest and volcanic origin. The rainforest and the mountain regions are home to wildlife including birds, plants, and animals. The Philippines is home to over ten mountains exceeding 8,900 feet. The most notable of these mountains are looked at below.

Apo - 9,691 ft

At 9,691 feet, Mount Apo is the tallest mountain the Philippines. Mount Apo is characterized by a tropical rainy climate with rainfall relatively distributed throughout the year. Mount Apo is home to over 272 species of birds of which 111 species are endemic to the mountain. 19 rivers drain Mount Apos eight major watersheds. Six indigenous groups of people including Bagobo, Ubos, and Tagacaol live around the regions of Mount Apo and consider the mountain a sacred place and also a place for worship rituals.

Dulang-dulang - 9,639 ft

Mount Dulang-dulang, or D2, is one of the highest peaks in elevation that forms the Kitanglad Mountain Range with a hieght of 9,639 feet. The mountain is located in the north central part of the province of Bukidnon, Mindanao Island. Mount Dulang-dulang is covered by forest and is home to diverse flora and fauna with 58 species of mammals living within it. The mountain is a major headwater catchment area for several river systems including Maagnao River. Mount Dulang-dulang is also considered a sacred place by Lantapan of the Talaandig tribe.

Pulag - 9,587 ft

Mount Pulag is Luzons highest peak and the third highest mountain in the Philippines with an elevation of 9,587 feet relative to sea level. The mountain is characterized by majestic clouds and the Milky Way galaxy view which are major tourist attractions in the area. Mount Pulag was established as a national park through a Presidential Proclamation on February 20, 1987, to protect the natural features of the area including the vegetation and the diverse wildlife. The climate around the mountain is temperate with an average of 5,000 millimeters of rainfall annually. Mount Pulag host 528 species of plants, 33 species of birds, and several endangered mammal species. The mountain attracts climbers all year round with four major trails up the summit including Akiki, Ambangeg, and Tawangan.

Kitanglad - 9,511 ft

The Kitanglad Mountain Range dominates portions of the northern central province of Bukidnon, and covers portions of eight of the municipalities and cities within the province. The range is characterized by rainforest that hosts diverse species of wildlife. The mountain is a protected area under the Presidential Proclamation of October 24, 1996.

Tourist Attractions and Environmental Threats in Philippine Mountains

Many of the mountains in the Philippines are famous as climbing and hiking destinations. The mountains are also homes to diverse wildlife including a variety of plants and mammals. Human activities such as logging, agricultural activities, and poaching are some of the threats facing these mountains
Hamster (illustration)

By: Wayne Morin

(Scroll down for video) Police in the United Kingdom, warned a man to stop calling the emergency number to report his girlfriend who was overfeeding his pet hamster.

Northumbria Police said that the man, who was not identified, called 101 and told a dispatcher that his girlfriend caused the hamster to look like a fat little pig.

The man told the dispatcher that he was not seeking to cause trouble, but his girlfriend, who has moved out of his apartment, refused to hand over his hamster, saying that she can take care of it better.

The man claimed that the hamster was his pride and joy, and he wanted it back because she left it looking like a little fat pig by overfeeding it.

The man was warned not call police or face arrest. Police also revealed that a woman called police to complain that she was sold an overpriced burger.

In another incident, a man called police to say that he tied his finger to the toilet with a shoelace.
By PTI: Los Angeles, Sep 21 (PTI) Feeling lonely? Blame it on your genes, say scientists who have found that loneliness - a trait linked to poor health and early death - is partially heritable.

Loneliness is linked to poor physical and mental health, and is an even more accurate predictor of early death than obesity, researchers said.

To better understand who is at risk, researchers at University of California San Diego conducted the first genome-wide association study for loneliness - as a life-long trait, not a temporary state.

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They discovered that risk for feeling lonely is partially due to genetics, but environment plays a bigger role.

The study of more than 10,000 people also found that genetic risk for loneliness is associated with neuroticism and depressive symptoms.

Evidence suggested links between heritable loneliness and schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.

"For two people with the same number of close friends and family, one might see their social structure as adequate while the other doesnt," said Abraham Palmer, professor at UC San Diego, who led the study.

"And thats what we mean by genetic predisposition to loneliness - we want to know why, genetically speaking, one person is more likely than another to feel lonely, even in the same situation," he said.

The heritability of loneliness has been examined before, in twins and other studies of both children and adults.

From these, researchers estimated that 37 to 55 per cent of loneliness is determined by genetics.

Previous studies also to pinpoint genes that contribute to loneliness, focusing on genes related to neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, or other cellular systems associated with human attachment, such as oxytocin.

However, these studies mostly relied on small sample sizes, Palmer said.

Researchers examined genetic and health information from 10,760 people aged 50 years and older that was collected by the Health and Retirement Study.

As part of this study, participants answered three questions that measure loneliness.

The study accounted for gender, age and marital status, as married people tend to be less lonely than unmarried people.

Researchers found that loneliness - the tendency to feel lonely over a lifetime, rather than just occasionally due to circumstance - is a modestly heritable trait.

It is 14 to 27 per cent genetic, as compared to the previous estimates of 37 to 55 per cent.

This new estimate of the genetic contribution to loneliness could be lower than previous estimates because the team relied on chip heritability, a method that only captures common genetic variations and not rare genetic variation.

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The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. PTI MHN SAR MHN

--- ENDS ---
The Maratha community has been holding rallies across the state also to demand reservation in education and employment, and scrapping of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

By Kamlesh Damodar Sutar: The Maratha community will hold a silent march in the satellite city of Navi Mumbai as a dress rehearsal for the huge morcha in Mumbai.

The protestors are planning to culminate the protests with a gigantic rally in Mumbai soon that is expected to be attended by more than 25 lakh marathas across the state. Today's morcha in the satellite city of Navi Mumbai is seen as a dress rehearsal for the huge morcha in Mumbai.



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The nearly 6 kms rally is expected to be attended by over five lakh people. To ensure a bigger turnout, the community has decided to keep the Navi Mumbai APMC shut today. A major chunk of the traders and mathadi workers in the APMC are Marathas.

PROTESTS BY MARATHAS

Nearly four thousand policemen will be deployed on the rally route. Furthermore, the traffic has also been diverted between the Utsav Chowk in Kharghar and Konkan Bhawan in Belapur so that traffic on Mumbai-Pune Expressway is not affected.

The protestors, who are demanding strict action against the culprits of Kopardi rape and murder case, will hand over a memorandum of demands to the Collector.

The community has been holding rallies across the state also to demand reservation in education and employment, and scrapping of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Similar rallies have been held in 10 other districts of Maharashtra in last one month and the silent morcha in Beed, Osmanabad, Auranganad had received huge response.

Earlier this week the state also witnessed mammoth rallies in Jalna and Latur.

Meanwhile, calling the protests by Maratha community an outcome of unrest, Former Chief Minister of Maharashtra Ashok Chavan urged for immediate implementation of the demands made by the Maratha community.

ALSO READ:

Maratha protests an outcome of unrest, their demands must be met: Ashok Chavan





--- ENDS ---
As the strike by 4,800 nurses at five Allina hospitals in the Twin Cities metro area enters its third week, striking nurses must make a sober assessment of the corporate campaign launched by the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA).

The campaign has targeted members of the Allina board of directors who represent companies such as US Bank, the financial firm Piper Jaffray, General Mills and Buffalo Wild Wings, and seeks to pressure them into compelling Allina to settle the strike. The MNA has variously described the campaign to these corporate executives to make sure that these decision-makers are accountable to the community they are supposed to serve, to start a public conversation, and to do the right thing.

The campaign is a diversion that seeks to create the illusion that these corporate sharks have morals that can be activated through public shaming. After decades of corporate downsizing, destruction of working conditions, wages and benefits that have created a vast gulf between the working class and the tiny layer of capitalist elites, does the MNA bureaucracy think that nurses will believe that these corporate executives can be convinced to forgo their class interests and talk sense to Allina CEO Penny Wheeler and the negotiating team? If anything, Wheeler and the Allina negotiating team are the puppets of Piper Jaffray and US Bank.

The corporate campaign is not something new, but rather something that has been dusted off from the 1980s. That decade was inaugurated by the Reagan administrations breaking of the air traffic controllers strike that saw firing of 11,000 workers, the illegalization of the union, and several strike leaders sent to prison. The AFL-CIO Executive Council, which was meeting at the time, refused to take any action in defense of the PATCO strikers despite widespread sentiment among rank-and-file workers for a national general strike expressed in the march of half a million workers in Washington, DC on September 19, 1981.

The AFL-CIO faced a number of semi-insurrections against its policy of isolating and sabotaging workers struggles as the union bureaucracy integrated itself into the structure of corporate management. In an effort to undermine the growing class consciousness of workers and block a unified struggle of the working class that would disrupt its relations with the corporations and the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO sought to channel the anger of workers into impotent and meaningless publicity stunts, including protests to CEOs and consumer boycotts.

During that period, the announcement by union leaders of a corporate campaign was the kiss of death to any real struggle. The windy speeches by labor leaders and Democrats against CEOs were well understood by the corporate elite as necessary to deflate the class struggle, all the better to draw strikes out, wear down workers, and continue production with strikebreakers. In the end, strike after strike was defeated.

One of the high points of the rebellions against the labor bureaucracy occurred during the 1985-86 strike by packinghouse workers at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. Again and again, the rank-and-file fought back against the company agents in the unions national leadership of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which used every dirty trick in the bureaucracys playbook to impose managements concessions.

Workers, of whom many were related to the earlier generation of Austin meatpackers who carried out the first sit-down strike in the country, revived tactics of their parents and grandparents. They appealed to workers across the United States who journeyed to Austin or sent financial contributions. They dispatched groups of strikers to other meatpacking plants resulting in sympathy strikes by those workers. They launched mass picketing outside the plant to bar the entry of scabs.

But there were two weaknesses in that struggle. The union adopted a corporate campaign that created widespread confusion and diverted workers. It created illusions in a consumer boycott that was touted as a way of pressuring the CEO, executive board, and Hormels main financial backerFirst Bankto concede to the demands of the workers. The second great shortcoming was illusions in sections of the Democratic Party. In the end, DFL Governor Rudy Perpich played a decisive role in defeating the strike by sending the National Guard to Austin.

The UFCW put the local into trusteeship, removed its elected leaders and then disbanded the local only to set up a new one based on the scabs hired by Hormel.

It is no different today at Allina. The MNA, unable to convince a majority of nurses to accept Allinas conditions for a settlement, are seeking to carry through the same policy as that of the 1980s.

Nurses must begin from the fact that the great division in the United States and across the globe is between the millions and millions of workers on one side, and a tiny layer of millionaires and billionaires on the other. Can the MNA leaders, who have concocted this campaign, point to any example where this capitalist elite has, of its own volition, surrendered its wealth for the betterment of the working class?

Those socialist and left-wing workers who pioneered the labor movement in the 1930s understood clearly that the concessions made by the corporations and the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt only came through the broadest mobilization of the working class in battles that threatened to paralyze the capitalist system unless a limited retreat was made. This included the great Minneapolis General Strike of 1934, led by the Trotskyist movement.

The MNA began 2016 by first settling contracts with the other five hospital systems, thus isolating Allina nurses. It paraded over 100 DFL politicians on picket lines to create a false image of support to nurses. It sought to cover its policy by endorsing Bernie Sanders, who spoke of a political revolution against the billionaire class, only to endorse the billionaires' favored candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Sanders letter of support the previous week to Allina nurses was a pathetic last straw seeking to squeeze whatever illusions in his campaign might be left.

Nurses must draw the necessary conclusion. Their real allies are the tens of thousands of workers throughout the Twin Cities. Nurses should elect rank-and-file committees to send delegations throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul and across the state to build support in the working class against Allina and the corporate and political forces that stand behind it.
By PTI: Kochi, Sep 21 (PTI) Chief of Defence Staff of Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) Maj Gen Ahmed Shiyam today visted the Southern Naval Command here and was briefed on the training activities undertaken by it.

He arrived in the city yesterday on a three-day visit accompanied by his spouse Khateeja Naeem and an MNDF delegation.

The visiting Chief of Defence Force interacted with Rear Admiral R B Pandit, Chief of Staff, Southern Naval Command (SNC), and was briefed on Indian Navys training activities conducted by the SNC, a Navy release said.

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The delegation visited training facilities at Observer School, Indian Naval Air Squadron (INAS) 322 which has Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), Naval Aircraft Yard facilities, Joint Operation Centre and Indian Coast Guard ship C- 421, it said.

Maj Gen Shiyam also interacted with the MNDF trainees, who are undergoing training at the Indian Navy training facilities.

Khateeja Naeem had an elaborate interaction with members of Navy Wife Welfare Association, Southern Region. She also visited Kerala Folklore Museum and appreciated the cultural heritage of Kerala.

Maj Gen Shiyam, Khateeja Naeem and MNDF delegation also had a glimpse of Kerala backwater at Kumarakoram, during the visit, the release said. The delegation would lave here Kochi tomorrow. The Chief of Defence Force, MNDF, is on an official visit to India from September 18 to 23 to consolidate bilateral relationship between the two countries. PTI TGB VS AJR NTR

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The established parties are responding to their catastrophic result in the Berlin state election Sunday with a sharp shift to the right. While the SPD, Left Party and Greens are preparing to continue the programme of austerity, anti-refugee agitation and a build-up of the state apparatus at home and abroad within the framework of a red-red-green coalition, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is ever more explicitly adopting the programme of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) used her partys historic low election result to distance herself from the position of a welcoming culture for refugees, which was falsely attributed to her. Speaking to media representatives in Berlin, she made clear that her statement We can do this never had anything to do with solidarity towards refugees. Much was interpreted or even decoded from this common statement of daily life. So much that I would almost prefer not to repeat it again, the chancellor said.

Referring to the right wing of her own party and the constant criticism from the Bavarian sister party CSU (Christian Social Union), Merkel added, Some felt themselves provoked by the sentenceand that was of course never the intention with the short sentence. Then she went on, This situation should never be repeated like wehad last year, with an at times uncontrolled and unregistered influxI am fighting precisely to prevent that from being repeated Nobody wants this situation to be repeated, myself included.

Merkel openly acknowledged her disappointment that the government had proven incapable of preventing the refugees from the war zones in the Middle East from reaching Germany from the outset. If she could, she would have liked to turn back time by many, many years, so that I, together with the whole government and all of those in positions of responsibility could be better prepared for the situation that hit us in the late summer of 2015, Merkel stated. Then she provocatively added that she wanted to make an offer to the AfD voters.

Merkel has increasingly adopted the rhetoric of the far right within and outside the CDU/CSU over recent weeks. According to a report in Die Welt, she told a parliamentary group meeting at the beginning of September that the most important thing now was to deport asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected. Over the coming months, the most important thing is repatriation, repatriation and, once again, repatriation, the conservative paper cited the chancellor as saying. A few days later, Merkel was cited as having stated, Germany will remain Germany. With everything that is dear and valued to us.

While the bourgeois press is talking of a new tone from the chancellor (Tagesschau), or even a change of course (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Merkel in reality represented a right-wing, inhumane refugee policy from the outset. Merkel and the grand coalition have been working feverishly with the support of large sections of the Left Party and Greens over the past year for a joint European solution in order to prevent new refugees from reaching Europe and brutally deport those who have already arrived.

Significantly, the CDU Bundestag (federal parliament) Berlin deputy and Merkel supporter Karl-Georg Wellmann boasted in an interview with Deutschlandfunk on Tuesday, The flow of refugees has stopped. Why is nobody saying that already this year over 60,000 refugees have returned to their homes? Why is nobody saying that 100,000 deportations have taken place?

The Bratislava Declaration, passed last Friday at the EU summit, gives an indication of Merkels reactionary refugee policy. The section titled Migration and external borders calls for a strengthening of fortress Europe, denies refugees from wars the right to asylum and demands further mass deportations of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. The paper calls on the EU Never to allow return to uncontrolled flows of last year and further bring down the number of irregular migrants and to ensure full control of our external borders.

As concrete measures, the paper calls for a full commitment to implementing the EU-Turkey statement as well as continued support to the countries of the Western Balkans. In addition, a number of EU states had promised to offer immediate assistance to strengthen the protection of Bulgarias border with Turkey, and continue support to other frontline states.

In a summit in March, the EU states secured commitments from the Turkish government to completely close the borders for refugees and intercept boats before they can even leave Turkey in exchange for money and diplomatic concessions. The right-wing Balkan governments built border fences and mobilised the military so as to hermetically seal off the so-called Balkan route to refugees.

This apparently does not go far enough for Merkel and the EU. By the end of the year, the EU must ensure full capacity for rapid reaction of the European Border and Coastguard and negotiate agreements with third countries to lead to reduced flows of irregular migration and increased return rates. In other words, the notorious border protection agency Frontex and other state security forces will launch even more major operations against refugees on Europes external borders. At the same time, the EU intends to expand its collaboration with the authoritarian regimes in North Africa and Turkey to deter refugees and to deport them immediately without any bureaucratic hurdles if they manage to reach Europe.

Merkels statements and the EU paper underscore the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the German government and the EUs claims to defend European values such as freedom and democracy against racism and nationalism. In reality, they pursue an anti-refugee policy that is hardly distinguishable from that of Frances National Front, the UK Independence Party or the AfD and plays directly into the hands of the far right.

The brutal approach to refugees by the ruling elite is directly bound up with the militarisation of Europe at home and abroad, which is above all being pushed by Berlin. The Bratislava Declaration also included concrete measures for the imposition of Europes geopolitical and economic interests against its global competitors. In a changing political environment the European Council should decide on a concrete implementation plan on security and defence at its December meeting, the declaration stated.

Already prior to the meeting, German Defence Minister Ursula Von der Leyen and her French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian called in a six-page paper for an implementation of the new EU global strategy for foreign and security policy. This required a stronger Europe in security and defence affairs, European strategic autonomy and a credible, rapid, effective and reaction ready European military policy, which must now be rapidly translated into concrete plans of action. Among other things, the German-French paper proposes the construction of an autonomous European defence industry, as well as a permanent EU HQ for military and civil missions and operations.

The European working class must decisively reject the agitation against refugees. It must counterpoise to the politics of nationalism, militarism and war, which enjoy the full backing of the entire ruling elite, their own independent strategy: the construction of an international movement against capitalism and war and the unification of Europe on a socialist basis.
Over one million people in Australia are living in poor housing and, of those, more than 100,000 are in dwellings regarded as very poor or derelict.

A report published last month found that 1,093,600 people, or nearly 5 percent of the population, live in poor housing. The health of residents in these households was more likely to be rated as being only fair or poor compared to those living in better quality housing.

The study, entitled Poor housing quality: Prevalence and health effects, was conducted by researchers at the University of Adelaide. They found that official statistics do not account for a hidden fraction of the population that is in dire circumstances.

Many families live in precarious and unstable conditions, due to a combination of unaffordable housing, lack of a secure tenure and poor quality housing, plus inadequate access to social and employment networks. In the major cities, tenants in overcrowded dwellings have a lower health status, and children in poor quality dwellings are more likely to have long-term health issues, including a greater likelihood of asthma and respiratory disease.

When it comes to public housing, only about 42 percent is in good condition. Some 20 percent of public housing tenants live in very poor to derelict conditions. Responding to the report, a public housing resident in Port Lincoln, South Australia, provided a glimpse of the shocking conditions. Identified only as Muzz, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: I live in a Trust home with asbestos and no heating or cooling but its a home nonetheless so many people have no home and will just struggle to exist.

The reports lead author Associate Professor Emma Baker said: There is a strong body of research linking poor quality housing to measureable impacts on mental, physical and general health.

We know that damp, cold or mould in homes can cause or exacerbate respiratory illnesses like asthma, and overcrowding can promote communicable disease, but just living in poor quality housing has been linked to anxiety, depression, and a range of other mental health conditions.

Poor housing makes the already disadvantaged even worse off. Younger people, people with disabilities and ill health, those with low incomes, the unemployed or those in part-time employment, indigenous people, and renters are much more likely to be found in the emerging slums of 21st century Australia, she said.

The largest proportion of poor quality housing is in the rental housing market, both private and public or social housing. Nearly half, 47 percent, of all indigenous Australians, who are among the most exploited and disadvantaged layers of the working class, live in poor quality housing.

Those who owned their own homes or held mortgages accounted for 80.5 percent of those who occupied homes of good to excellent condition. However, many families who have mortgages are teetering on a knifes edge. Couples and families often rely on two incomes to repay mortgages of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Australian housing costs are among the most expensive and unaffordable in the world, and that plays a big role in people not being able to afford the quality of dwelling they need, Baker told Fairfax Media.

Over the past three decades, the cost of private housing has soared. From 1991 to 2011, the average price of houses in Australia grew sharply by 263 percent, compared to an average after-tax income growth of only 95 percent.

This is producing a mountain of debt. In 2014, the mean home equity was at $427,847, compared with a mean home value of $618,276. The mean household debt was $190,429 on unappreciated mortgages. Job losses, or loss of working hours can thrust many families into poverty, when confronted by unrepayable debts.

At the same time, for many the rental market is unaffordable. In Sydney, one of the most expensive cities in the world, median weekly rents range from a low of $400 for a house and $390 for a unit in the outer suburbs to a staggering $1,750 for a house and $720 for a unit in the wealthiest areas.

Hundreds of thousands of working-class families experience housing stressmore than 30 percent of their income is allocated to housing costs. To avoid housing stress, a family or individual living in Sydney would need to earn about $1,800 a week, and in broader NSW, $1,500.

Yet the minimum wage is only $672.70 a week, while the maximum unemployment payment for a single adult without children is just $237 a week. In May 2016, the average weekly pay for a full-time worker in NSW was just $1,160.20.

Home ownership is declining, and is now at its lowest level in 50 years, marking an historic reversal from the post-World War II period of rising ownership. According to the best estimates, home ownership was at 51.7 percent in 2014, down from 57 percent in 2002. These statistics include those paying off mortgages. In 2011-12, outright home ownership was only 31 percent.

The Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, on which the reports data was based, demonstrated the ever-growing gulf between the wealthy and the poor. Between 2002 and 2014, the average net wealth of the top 1 percent of households more than doubled, from $3,905,912 to $8,491,287. By contrast, the mean net household wealth recorded for the lowest 10 percent was $6,148 in 2002 and only $10,820 in 2014.

Report lead author Baker appealed for remedial action, saying: We believe governments need to take steps to ensure the supply of affordable and reasonable quality housing, otherwise we are destined to become a nation scarred once again by slums, reduced life chances and shortened lives.

But despite occasional government lip service to providing affordable accommodation, the housing crisis has continued to worsen. It is driven by soaring prices that are producing a bonanza for property developers, real estate speculators, finance houses and construction giants. Capitalism systematically subordinates the needs of millions of people to the demands of private profit, with a terrible price being paid by the working class, particularly its poorest and most vulnerable members.
Four days after Indias government, without so much as even a cursory investigation, held Pakistan responsible for a terrorist attack on the Uri military base in the disputed Kashmir region that killed 18 Indian soldiers, New Delhi continues to be gripped by war fever.

From the political establishment, military, and corporate media has come a clamour for India to punish Pakistan. The media has enthusiastically reported that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is conferring with the military and intelligence chiefs about possible air and cruise missile strikes. Cross-border raids and the assassination of those responsible for the Uri attacks through covert action are also said to be under consideration.

Yesterday, India charged that Pakistani troops had unleashed a cross-border artillery barrage, violating the shaky ceasefire across the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir. By late afternoon, New Delhi was boasting it had killed 10 armed militants whom it said had recently infiltrated the LoC near Uri.

Such reports, and indeed all the claims and counter-claims of the Indian and Pakistani governments and their militaries should be viewed critically. Indias military has a long and well-documented history of fake encounter killings in Kashmir; just as Pakistans military-intelligence apparatus has a proven record of using Islamist terrorists to pursue its reactionary strategic conflict with India and to manipulate, communalize, and suppress the popular opposition of the Kashmiri people to the Indian state.

Amid the Indian elites clamour for dispensing with strategic restraint and delivering a harsh, demonstrable blow to Pakistan, some voices can now be heard, not least from elements within the Indian military, urging New Delhi to thoroughly deliberate over its battle plan before proceeding.

Far from being advocates of peace, those counselling caution are merely making the obvious, albeit chilling, point that a military strike on Pakistan could quickly spiral into an all-out war and with a nuclear-armed adversary. An adversary, moreover, that has publicly stated the massive strategic imbalance between it and India has compelled it to deploy battlefield, or tactical nuclear weapons, and signalled that they will be used if Indian forces launch or, in the midst of a war, mass for an invasion of Pakistan.

We will avenge the killings of our soldiers, an unnamed top military commander told the Indian Express. But we will do so based on cold-blooded professional military assessment, and a timeline of our own choosing, not one dictated by political imperative or the prime-time news cycle.

Yesterday, the Express and other influential Indian dailies reported that senior military commanders had told the government a swift strike on Pakistan may not be feasible because Pakistan has mobilized forces near the LoC in readiness and because Indian forces are not yet positioned to thwart the inevitable Pakistani counter-strike.

Such reports could well be disinformation. In the run-up to the May 2014 election that brought him to power, Modi pilloried the previous Congress Party-led government for its supposed appeasement of Pakistan. Leaders of his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its close ally, the fascistic RSS, have been leading the outcry for swift and decisive action against Pakistan.

But insofar as there is truth to the claim, India has decided not to immediately take the most incendiary actionsa high-profile cross-border attack or airplane and missile strikespressure from Washington is undoubtedly also a motivating factor.

Washington has deplored the Uri attack and reaffirmed its partnership with India. But it has not joined New Delhi in labelling Pakistan responsible for Sundays assault. In summarizing the outcome of US Secretary of State John Kerrys Monday meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a State Department spokesman said that Kerry had insisted on the need for India and Pakistan to work together to reduce tensions. He added that Kerry had praised Pakistans contribution to the fight against terrorism, while repeating the USs standard call for Pakistan to do more to stop its territory from being used as a safe haven by terrorists.

With the aim of harnessing India to its drive to strategically isolate, encircle, and prepare for war with China, the US under George W. Bush and now Obama has forged a global strategic partnership with India and lavished it with strategic favours, including access to the Pentagons most advanced technology.

Pakistan has warned in ever more shrill language that the Indo-US alliance has overturned the balance of power in South Asia, emboldening India and triggering a weapons and nuclear arms race. But all to no avail. The strategists of US imperialism view India as the crucial south-western pillar of a quadrilateral anti-China alliance, involving its principal Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.

However, Washington, in keeping with the imperialist patron-client character of its relationship with India and to the consternation of the Indian elite, has repeatedly shown that it is not ready to cede New Delhi a free hand in dealing with Pakistan. US strategists are well aware that the Indo-Pakistani conflict could rapidly escalate to war with potentially incalculable consequences for the people of South Asia, and more importantly, from their view, US hegemony over Eurasia. Even heightened tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad cut across the US war in Afghanistan, which remains almost wholly dependent on Pakistan for logistical support.

However, none of this should be interpreted to mean that South Asia is anything but teetering on the precipice of war.

The rival ruling elites of India and Pakistan are primed to dangerously escalate their confrontation in the coming days and weeks. Moreover, the USs reckless drive for global hegemony, which has already blown up the Middle East and brought the world closer to a clash of the great powers than any time since the Second World War, has now sucked South Asia into the maelstrom of imperialist violence and waradding a highly combustible explosive charge to all the regions conflicts, most importantly those between India and Pakistan and India and China.

Even the more measured steps India will reportedly take, should it deem an immediate strike on Pakistan too hazardous, would dramatically escalate tensions and propel India and Pakistan toward a clash. The difference between the two options is at most that between lighting a long or a short fuse to war.

According to the press reports, the measured steps include:

Sustained (i.e. weeks or months) of artillery barrages across the LoC to make the Pakistani military bleed.





Small cross-border raids into Pakistan to kill Kashmiri insurgents and Pakistani troops, but that will be publicly touted as encounters on Indian soil. (According to an article in yesterdays Indian Express, the Indian military used this tactic during the undeclared 1999 Kargil War, seizing and executing seven Pakistani soldiers.)





Expanding Indias military-strategic involvement in Afghanistan, with the aim of countering Pakistans influence and placing pressure on it from the north and west. (Pakistan has repeatedly charged that Indias intelligence agency, RAW, is already using Afghanistan to provide support to both nationalist insurgents in Balochistan and to the Pakistan Taliban.)





Intensifying Indias recently-launched strategic offensive to leverage the Balochistan issue, that is the Balochi nationalist opposition to the Pakistani state in its resource rich, western-most province.

Rattled by the mass protests in Kashmirprotests the BJP government has dismissed as the product of nothing more than the machinations of Pakistani terroristsModi last month launched a major strategic turn, announcing that henceforth India will denounce Islamabads brutal repression in Balochistan at the UN and other international forums. So as to underscore the implicit threat of Indian support for Pakistans dismemberment, New Delhi has also indicated that it intends to give more political space to the Balochi separatists in India.

This strategy would appear to be the brainchild of Modis national security adviser, Ajit Doval, who in advocating a more aggressive policy against Pakistan in a February 2014 speech declared, You do one more Mumbai (a reference to the 2008 Mumbai terror attack), and you lose Balochistan.

While directed first and foremost against Islamabad, Indias new Balochistan policy also targets Beijing. In response to Indias burgeoning strategic partnership with the US, China has moved over the past year and a half to enhance its longstanding all weather friendship with Pakistan.

China is investing $46 billion in Pakistan to build a transit and pipeline corridor stretching from western China to the Arabian Sea Port of Gwadar, in south-western Balochistan. India virulently opposes the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) because it provides a desperately needed shot in the arm to Pakistans economy. But it is also well aware that the CPEC has major strategic implications for China. Were the CPEC to be completed, it would enable Beijing to partially counter US plans to impose an economic blockade on China in the event of a war or war crisis by seizing Indian Ocean and South China Sea chokepoints.

While Washington may today seek to dampen India-Pakistan tensions because they cut across its own predatory designs, its drive to make India a frontline state in its anti-China military-strategic offensive is a hugely destabilizing factor and is whetting New Delhis own reactionary great power ambitions. The logic of the USs actions is to polarize the region, dramatically raising the likelihood that a war between India and Pakistan would draw in other great powers, starting with the US and China.

All sections of the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisie and their political representatives are deeply implicated in the Indo-Pakistani conflict. This is true of the Stalinists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the older, smaller Communist Party of India. The Stalinists have supported the vast expansion of Indias military over the past two decades and repeatedly propped up Indian governments that pursued closer ties to Washington, including the Congress-led government that forged Indias partnership with US imperialism.

The explosive developments of the past three days underscore the urgency of building a working class-led movement against war and imperialism in South Asia, as part of a global anti-war mobilization animated by the program of socialist internationalism.
The arguments advanced by the International Socialist Organization (ISO) to support the US-NATO war for regime change in Syria are virtually indistinguishable from the CIA-dictated propaganda published by the New York Times. A recent and, to be frank, particularly filthy example of the ISOs propagation of the CIA-Pentagon narrative is an article by Ashley Smith, Anti-imperialism and the Syrian Revolution, posted August 25 on socialistworker.org, the ISOs website.

As the WSWS has frequently noted, the ISOs campaign for intensified US-NATO intervention in Syria closely tracks the initiatives of the US government. On August 25, the Times published provocative pieces by two of its leading columnists, Roger Cohen and Nicholas Kristof. These gentlemen specialize in marketing CIA wars as humanitarian interventions to the affluent liberal milieu whose world outlook is greatly influenced by the Times. Cohens essay was titled Americas Retreat and the Agony of Aleppo. Kristof chose an even more provocative headline for his appeal for intensified US bombing: Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl.

Both Cohen and Kristof employed the cynical gimmick of couching their demand for US military escalation in strident moral terms, invoking the specter of past tragedies. While Kristof exploited the memory of Anne Frank, Cohen waved the bloody shirt of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Both columnists postured as lonely prophets appealing to the conscience of an unfeeling world.

Cohen cried out: It [Aleppo] is bombarded: What else is new?  At which dinner parties in London, Paris, Berlin, or Washington is it discussed? Which Western journalists are able to be there to chronicle day after day their outrage at a citys dismemberment? Who recalls that just six years ago, Aleppo was being talked about as the new Marrakesh, a place to buy a vacation home? Aleppo is alone, alone beneath the bombs of Russian and Syrian jets, alone to face the violent whims of President Vladimir Putin and President Bashar al-Assad.

The essay of Ashley Smith, also published on August 25, employed the same propaganda template. He, too, rummaged through the past in search of a historical event that would stir the emotions of a left-leaning audience. He chose to evoke for his pro-imperialist polemic the historic struggles of the coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky!

Posing as the union songwriter Florence Reese, Ashley Smith declaims: Which side are you on? What are the sides? Do you support the popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy? Or are you with Bashar al-Assads brutal regime, his imperial backer Russia, his regional ally Iran and Irans proxies like Hezbollah from Lebanon? Tragically, too many have failed this test.

For Smith, those who have failed the test are those who do not support US-backed Islamist opposition militias in Syria, and oppose starting a broader US war with Russia and Iran. Arguing entirely from the standpoint of the CIA operatives that are supplying Islamist militias with arms, Smith attacks the Obama administration for not giving the opposition enough heavy weapons.

Noting that Obama counted on unnamed reliable pro-Washington figures associated with the uprising, Smith writes: His administration has hoped to use figures on the rebel side to provide a new face for Syrias dictatorship. But Assad held onthanks in no small measure to the fact that the US, while accepting some supplying of the rebels, denied these forces the heavy weaponry they pleaded for to stop the regimes assault.

Smiths brief for war is a pack of lies. It is based on a false dichotomy: in Syria, according to Smith, one either supports a US war for democracy or one supports Assad and the Russian regime, to which he tacks on the label imperialist to try to make it more hateful.

As for Smiths claim that he is backing a popular war for democracy, this has no credibility, especially as he admits that Washington plans to use the opposition to set up a puppet dictatorship in Syria.

Smiths arguments are transparently absurd, but they serve a political function. The ISO provides a left face for the sections of the foreign policy establishment affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Smiths arguments provide them with a ready-made slander against socialist opposition to war: any opponent of the Democratic Partys wars is equivalent to supporting Chinese and, especially, Russian imperialism.

The resemblance between this argument and CIA anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War period is not coincidental. It is rooted in the history of the ISO, which descends from Max Shachtmans break with Trotskyism and Marxism in 1939-1940, which in turn led to his subsequent role as an anti-communist theoretician for the AFL-CIO, supporter of the Democratic Party and apologist for US imperialism.

Shachtman (1904-1972) rejected the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism, and subsequently the Chinese regime that emerged from the 1949 revolution, claiming they were bureaucratic collectivist regimes. Based on this variant of state capitalist theory, Shachtman ultimately supported the US war in Vietnam.

The Soviet Union no longer exists. It was dissolved in 1991 by the bureaucratic Stalinist regime led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The post-Soviet Russian governmentled by Boris Yeltsin, an ex-Stalinist apparatchikmoved brutally and recklessly to reestablish capitalism. The dissolution of the USSR and the reestablishment of capitalism confirmed the Trotskyist analysis of the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste (not class), which lacked any independent historical function. It also refuted the Shachtmanite and myriad variants of state capitalist theory, which portrayed the Soviet bureaucracy as the protagonists of a new world-historic system of class exploitation.

Prior to 1991, Trotskyists called for a political revolution in the Soviet Union, which would overthrow the bureaucracy while defending the nationalized property relations established in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution. This was the revolutionary content of its defense of the Soviet Union. But after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, the policies and political conceptions involved in the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism could not simply be transferred to the new capitalist regime in Russia.

Marxists, however, reject the definition of Russia and China as imperialist, a definition which is false from the standpoint of history, economics and politics. We also oppose the massive US-NATO preparations for a war against Russia and China.

The political descendants of Shachtmanism proceeded to transfer the imperialist label from the USSR to capitalist Russia. The underlying reasons had less to do with theory than with political interests. Despite the dissolution of the USSR, the Russian stateby virtue of its geographical presenceobstructs the projection of US power throughout the Middle East and Eurasia. This is the source of continuous tension between the United States and Russia.

In this situation, the ideological legacy of Shachtmanism still pays dividends. The designation of Russia as imperialist serves a vital role for left supporters of Washingtons foreign policy, who seek to endorse the American geopolitical conflict with Russia and China as a form of anti-imperialism. Moreover, Smithdredging up the Shachtmanite anti-Marxist smears of the Cold War eraportrays opposition to the CIAs war in Syria as a form of neo-Stalinism.

How could opponents of U.S. imperialism end up supporting a dictatorone who has been known to collaborate with the U.S. in torturing war-on-terror prisoners in the CIAs extraordinary rendition program? The answer starts with the Stalinist lefts support of Stalins Russia and Maos China during the Cold War era. It supported those state capitalist dictatorships not only as opponents of U.S. imperialism, but as positive models of socialism. Thus, some of the same currents that today support Assad yesterday defended murderous repression of workers rebellions and even imperialist invasions in the past. They stood with Russias crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Czechoslovakias Prague Spring in 1968 and Polands Solidarity in 1981. They supported Maos China when the regime wrecked workers and peasants lives through the Great Leap Forward and oppressed Tibetans in a decades-long occupation.

There is no legitimate historical and political basis for this slanderous identification of contemporary opposition to US wars for regime change with a pro-Stalinist outlook.

While Smith denounces Russia and China as imperialist, he insists that the United States is an increasingly pacifist, even timid power on the world stage. Ignoring Obamas record of military occupation, armed intervention and drone murder, from Asia and the Middle East to Africa, he proclaims that US imperialism under Obama abandoned aggressive policies.

Left-wing opponents of the US-backed wars for regime change, he brazenly declares, are stuck in the past, trying to find evidence to expose a strategy of regime change that the US has abandoned.

In reality, he writes, the US retreated in general from outright regime change as its strategy in the Middle East after the failure of its invasion and occupation of Iraq. The main priority behind the alternative direction for US imperialism pursued by Barack Obama is that the US should avoid destabilizing regimes for fear of the chaos that ensues in the aftermath.

Such a statementafter the Obama administration bombed and destroyed the Libyan government in 2011, ousted President Ali Salehs regime in Yemen, and spent billions of dollars to arm Islamist militias that have devastated Syriais a stunning falsehood. There is no slander to which Smith will not stoop to attack anti-war sentiment. He even manages to tack accusations of anti-Arab racism on opponents of a new US military escalation in the Middle East that would lead to the deaths of countless thousands of Arabs.

Though he has admitted that Washington is arming the Syrian opposition in an attempt to set up a dictatorship in Syria, Smith denounces anyone who draws the conclusion that the US government is pulling the strings in the rebellion in Syria. He writes, such arguments display an arrogant dismissalnot unlike defenders of imperialismof the capacity of exploited and oppressed people to fight for liberation. Instead, we get a classic Orientalist trope: Western imperialism manipulating the ignorant and reactionary local tribes for its own purposes.

Who does Smith think he is kidding? Such cheap appeals to racial politics are just a clumsy trick to try to give a left face to his pro-CIA apologetics. It is not socialist opponents of war, but the ISO and Mr. Smith who stand exposed as enemies of working people.
Indian supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) are holding a public meeting in Chennai on October 2 to discuss the ICFI statement Socialism and the Fight Against War and to oppose the Indian governments participation in the imperialist war drive.

Fifteen years after the US launched its war on terror, the whole world has been drawn into an ever-expanding maelstrom of imperialist violence that has seen the military devastation of entire countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The US and major European powers are now preparing for war against Russia, while in the Indo-Pacific region, Washington is enlisting allies in its confrontational pivot to Asia against China. These developments, which are driven by the deepening of crisis of world capitalism, underscore the danger that mankind will be dragged into another catastrophic world war and one fought with nuclear weapons.

The US is aggressively pushing India to be a frontline state against China. Since coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has further integrated India into Washingtons military build-up in Asia. Indias increasingly bellicose attitude towards Pakistan is being fuelled by the backing it is receiving from US imperialism.

The Modi governments participation in the US war drive against China is occurring behind the backs of the Indian working class and poor. The so-called left in India, including the Stalinist Communist Party of India Marxist, is covering up the immense dangers arising from Washingtons reckless drive for global hegemony.

The ICFI has called on the working class to oppose the imperialist war drive by build ing a global anti-war movement on the basis of internationalist and socialist principles.

S peakers at the Chennai public meeting on October 2 will analyse the causes and consequences of the rising tide of militarism and war and present the political alternative that has to be fought for by the international working class. We invite workers, young people, students and socialist- minded intellectuals to attend the meeting and participate in this important discussion.

Date: Sunday, 2 October 2016, 10.30 a.m.

Venue: First floor, Periyar EV Ramasamy Nagammai Education Research Trust,

277/2 ChennaiThiruvallur High Road,

Ambattur, Chennai 600053

[Near the Ambattur Telephone Exchange]
The 71st United Nations General Assembly convened this week beneath the shadow of a series of global crises that threaten to throw humanity into a new world war.

This was the backdrop against which US President Barack Obama gave his final address to the Assembly on Tuesday. Obamas rambling speech, which at times appeared to be ad-libbed, was an exercise in self-contradiction and absurd lies, with Obamas depiction of the current geopolitical situation standing reality on its head.

He declared, with a straight face, Our international order has been so successful that we take it as a given that great powers no longer fight world wars; that the end of the Cold War lifted the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; that the battlefields of Europe have been replaced by peaceful union.

With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born liars, others become liars, others have lies thrust upon them, but all three definitions apply to the current president of the United States.

Obamas proclamation that the shadow of nuclear Armageddon has passed flies in the face not only of his own $1 trillion nuclear rearmament program, but the proclamation of the Union of Concerned Scientists that the US and China are a few poor decisions away from starting a war that could escalate rapidly and end in a nuclear exchange.

The president, moreover, did not mention that the peaceful union that replaced the battlefields of Europe was in the midst of dissolution amid growing national antagonisms. Obama was speaking at the first UN General Assembly to take place since the vote by Britain in June 2016 to leave the European Union, giving rise to demands for copycat votes throughout Europe and warnings of a break-up of the entire Eurozone.

As for the battlefields of Europe, NATO is moving ahead with its deployment of 4,000 troops to the Russian border, with high ranking NATO officials announcing this weekend that all of the troops will be in place by May. Behind the scenes, in the documents of military think tanks, such border troops are spoken of as tripwires, creating the rationale for military escalation by NATO in the event of a conflict between the Baltic States and Russia, substantially increasing the chances of a full-scale war between the two most powerful nuclear powers.

A substantial portion of Obamas remarks were devoted to hurling barbs at Russia, tacitly asserting that it is a society that asks less of oligarchs than ordinary citizens and declaring that Russia is attempting to recover lost glory through force. But these declarations would have been directed far more appropriately at the US, the most unequal developed country in the world. The American ruling class has been engaged in unending war in the effort to counter its long-term economic decline.

Obama framed his remarks as a reflection on the past eight years of his administration, as well as on the 25 years that have passed since the dissolution of the USSR. A quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before, Obama declared, adding that the US has been a force for good over this period.

Contrary to Obamas half-hearted declarations, the past quarter century has abjectly failed to live up to the proponents of capitalist triumphalism, who declared that the fall of the USSR would usher in a new era of peace and democracy. The US, far from being a force for good over this period, has been the single greatest purveyor of destabilization, violence and disorder.

Beginning with the First Gulf War in 1991, the US has been perpetually at war, having bombed or invaded Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria, and carried out destabilization operations in countless other countries.

These wars are now metastasizing into an increasingly direct conflict with Russia and China. This is accompanied by the militarization of the major imperialist powers, including Japan and Germany, as ruling classes throughout the world prepare for military conflict.

The General Assembly opened in the aftermath of Saturdays bombing of a Syrian army base by the US military, in a flagrant violation of the ceasefire brokered between the US and its proxies on one side, and the Syrian government, backed by Russia, on the other. The attack led to over 90 fatalities and was carried out with the assistance of British, Australian and German forces, potentially embroiling these countries in a military conflict with Russia.

The bombing took place as Turkish President Erdogan, Washingtons ally in the Syria conflict, said Monday that Turkey plans to dramatically expand the area of Syria under its direct control by more than five-fold, to 5,000 square kilometers. US ground forces are fighting alongside Turkish-backed insurgents, raising the danger of a clash between Russian forces operating in Northern Syria and US ground troops fighting alongside Turkey.

But the conflict in Syria is just one in an innumerable series of global flashpoints throughout Europe and Asia. Last week, Japan announced it would participate in US-led patrols in the disputed South China Sea, sparking condemnation from China, which Japan invaded and occupied in the run-up to World War II.

Meanwhile in Kashmir, 11 more people were killed in recent days following an attack Sunday that left 18 Indian soldiers dead, in the heaviest fighting in years in the region. Were the conflict, escalated to a fever pitch by the US-led Pivot to Asia, to escalate into a war between India and Pakistan, it would be the first ever war between two nuclear-armed powers.

Any one of these or other complex conflictsin which multiple countries are each engaged in low-level proxy fighting and jockeying for their regional interestsrisks sparking an uncontrolled escalation, like the conflict that began in the Balkans in June 1914.

Obama intended to make his speech an account of the progress that weve made these last eight years. In the end, all he succeeded in doing was to emphasize how much closer to global war the world has come during his administration.
As part of its preparations for war against Russia, the Polish government is deliberately strengthening the far right.

Since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) entered government last autumn, the number of attacks of a racist or xenophobic character has risen to its highest level since 1989. This was revealed by investigations by the NGO Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again).

Currently, there are almost daily incidents of violent attacks by right-wing forces.

Widespread attention was given recently to an assault on Jerzy Kochanowski, a history professor at Warsaw University. A drunk right-winger insulted and struck Kochanowski on a tram because he was speaking German with a colleague from the University of Jena. He received virtually no assistance from fellow passengers and was forced to have a head wound treated in hospital.

On the same day, two women of Asian origin fell victim to right-wing violence. In an open letter, university students announced their solidarity with the professor and opposed the growth of racist and nationalist sentiments.

The PiS government is consciously encouraging this development. It is stoking racism and strengthening the influence of the far right with state measures.

In April, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo abolished the Council for the Struggle against Racism and Discrimination, which was established under the previous government. At the same time, she is integrating radical right-wing groups into the state apparatus.

The most well-known example is the ONR (National Radical Camp), whose members have been responsible for several attacks on foreigners and homosexuals. In August, ONR members attacked the leaders of the Komitet Obrony Demokracji (KOD) opposition movement, sending them to the hospital.

Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz has been planning, since the beginning of the year, the integration of the ONR into a new territorial defence unit, which is being expanded into a second army under the direct control of Macierewicz and the PiS government.

Both in terms of its name and programme, the ONR stands in the tradition of the organisation of the same name in the 1930s, which belonged to the so-called Endecja under Roman Dmowski and became a training ground for Polish fascist paramilitary units.

These units were not only responsible for anti-Semitic assaults and attacks on Jewish businesses, but also at times collaborated with the Nazis in the persecution of the Jews during the German occupation of Poland.

Militant anti-Semitism and racism continue to be key planks of the ONRs programme today. Some of their members have been prosecuted for using the Hitler salute. Like its predecessor organisation in the 1930s, the ONR finds support today among academics: their current leader is 27-year-old Aleksander Krejckant, a graduate of European studies.

Another prominent figure is Justyna Helcyk, who has a degree in chemistry.

Catholic priests have repeatedly organised joint events with ONR members over recent years. Jacek Miedlar, a priest from Wrocaw, is an open supporter of the ONR. He compared the organisation, according to Newsweek Polska, to chemotherapy for a malignant tumour that has affected Poland and the Poles.

In the Sejm, Polands parliament, the government also cooperates indirectly with the ONR. The ONR is part of the National Movement (Ruch Narodowy, RN), which supported the Kukiz15 party in the election and was therefore rewarded with five of its 42 seats. This party collaborates closely with the PiS in parliament.

The PiS is itself closely tied to the extreme right. Macierewicz was a leading member for many years of various ultra-right formations and published a radically nationalist and anti-Semitic newspaper, before joining PiS in 2005. After the PiS election victory and assumption of power for the first time in 2005, many members of the right-wing coalition Liga polskich rodzin (LPR, League of Polish Families) joined the PiS, including Jan Olszewski, the official adviser to former President Lech Kaczynski, who died in 2010.

In addition, the right-wing Catholic radio station Radio Maryja is a firm backer of the PiS government. The station has its main influence over sections of the rural population in the east of the country. It is led by priests and media mogul Tadeusz Rydzyk. Rydzyk has enjoyed the official support of the Vatican since the time of Pope Benedict XVI, even though he has repeatedly made anti-Semitic, homophobic and racist statements.

The strengthening of the radical right is part of the militarisation of Polish society with which the PiS government is preparing for war with Russia and a brutal suppression of social protests from the working class.

During its first year in power, the PiS has taken major steps towards the construction of a police state and encouraged a nationalist revision of history. The PiS has increased the defence budget, which had already risen to 2 percent of GDP under the Citizens Platform (PO) government, to 3 percent of GDP. The PiS plans to spend a total of 16.3 billion in the coming years on rearming the military.

Poland will therefore be one of the most important arms markets in Europe, together with the Baltic states, which are also rearming swiftly against Russia. According to arms expert Ben Morris from Jane s, the arms are above all heavy military equipment like tanks that are planned for use in a conventional war on its eastern border.

The US, Polands most important international ally, and NATO support the military buildup and the right-wing forces imposing it.

In the lead-up to the NATO summit, which took place in Warsaw in July, six former Polish defence ministers closely aligned to the opposition PO called for the resignation of Macierewicz. But the conference, where Obama shook his hand, adopted measures closely corresponding to those proposed by Macierewicz.

Macierewicz was therefore able to significantly consolidate his position in the government. After PiS head Jarosaw Kaczynski, observers view Macierewicz as the most influential politician in Poland.

In an interview with the opposition-aligned newspaper Polityka, General a. D. Janusz Boronowicz said that Macierewicz had more power than any other defence minister prior to him. Essentially he can do what he likes. In my view he is the first civilian leader of the armed forces. Boronowicz has played a leading role in the Polish army for close to two decades and was influential in interventions in Afghanistan and Syria. He resigned from the army early this year out of protest at the reforms introduced by Macierewicz.

The interview with the general in Polityka sheds light on the sharp tensions being produced within the ruling elite by the PiS governments political agenda. Boronowicz accused Macierewicz of being responsible for leaving the army leaderless and dividing the army leadership.

With direct reference to Germanys invasion of Poland at the start of World War II, he said, The situation is totally unacceptable. And in the event of a potential conflict it is preparing the way directly to a repetition of the defeat of September 1939. We are on the best path to repeating all of the mistakes of the past.

This general and the liberal opposition fear that the PiS politics are dividing Polish society to such an extent that the stability of the state could be at stake in the event of a war or a social movement of the working class.

The editor of Newsweek Polska and a well-known supporter of the opposition, Tomasz Lis, accused Andrzej Duda (PiS) of being the weakest president since 1989. He warned, Since 1989, Poland has never needed a real president more than it does now, at a time when the position of the state is at risk and the community is more fragile than perhaps ever before.
In an election with notably low turnout, Russias ruling party has won a supermajority in the countrys parliament. In Sundays contest, United Russia (UR) saw its number of Duma representatives rise from 238 to 343, giving the party, which is allied to President Vladimir Putin, control of over three-quarters of the votes in the 450-seat body.

UR garnered just over 54 percent of the total ballots cast. The partys control of the parliament is a product of the fact that election laws were recently changed such that half of the seats are no longer allotted proportionately, but rather in first-past-the-post contests in which UR candidates dominated. Compared to 2011, the ruling party saw its vote rise by just 5 percent. It is down by about 10 points compared to 2007, the final year of the Putin-era economic boom.

The Stalinist Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), led by Gennady Zyuganov, and the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), under the control of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, each commanded about 15 percent of the vote and won 42 and 39 seats respectively. In a major reversal of fortunes, the KPRF lost 50 spots and the LDPR 17 relative to 2011. Speaking of his partys poor performance and near-equal level of Duma representation now with the LDPR, Zyuganov declared, This is not just deception, its a dangerous aberration, which will inevitably end up undermining stability.

The LDPR and KPRF were trailed by A Just Russia, which now has 23 representatives in the Duma, along with a handful of other groups that collectively have three seats. Constituting a loyal opposition, all of these organizations have worked hand-in-glove with UR and the Kremlin for years to pass right-wing policies and promote Russian nationalism to shore up the government.

In a rebuke of the free-market, pro-Western policies of the countrys leading liberals, the two most well known such outfits, Yabloko and PARNAS, commanded less than 1 and 2 percent of the vote respectively, failing to cross the minimum threshold to enter parliament.

Despite securing a significant win, United Russias supermajority does not indicate the existence of deep-seated support for the Kremlin. Overall, turnout fell by about 12 points, falling to just shy of 48 percent from 61 percent just five years ago. It is the lowest it has been since the start of the 2000s.

Indicating widespread disaffection in Russias economic and political centers, participation was worst in the countrys two major cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where just 28.7 and 25.6 percent of the electorate respectively went to the polls. Turnout in the countrys capital has collapsed in the last five years. In the previous parliamentary cycle in 2011, after which antigovernment protests erupted, 66 percent of voters cast ballots in Moscow.

URs popularity in that city is also much lower than in outer-lying regions. This year the Kremlin party won just 38 percent of the vote, far less than the overall total.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov declared that the supermajority meant that the government had received a vote of confidence from the population. While acknowledging that the level of support in the big cities was a bit lower, he insisted that turnout in European elections is usually below that witnessed in Russia this year.

A political scientist speaking to the Russian news outlet TASS sought to make a similar argument, insisting that the fall in voter participation was simply the country catching up to broader global trends.

Putin, however, sounded a more cautionary note. Things are tough but people still voted for United Russia. It means that people see that United Russia members are really working hard for people even though it doesnt always work, he said.

Sergei Mironov of A Just Russia declared that the turnout problem lay in a lack of faith in the electoral system, such that people think their vote wont count.

The far-right nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovksy of the LDPR, denounced the population for abstaining. More than 57 million people didnt go and vote. Its a disgrace, he declared.

Mikhail Kasyanov, the leader of PARNAS, said, Citizens had no faith in elections as an institution. This is the result of government policies. Its their fault. His party, however, was repudiated by the electorate, unable to win voters dissatisfied with the Kremlins policies. Allegations of voter fraud have surfaced. In Moscow, opposition leaders reported so-called carousel voting in which people move from one place to another, casting multiple ballots. YouTube videos taken in some southern Russian cities appear to show ballot stuffing.

In other locales, soldiers not registered to vote were seen lining up in large numbers regardless. One opposition leader claimed that in the Siberian mountain region of Altai, young people were casting ballots in place of older, registered voters. In Dagestan, youth attacked a voting place in anger over alleged ballot stuffing on the part of officials. Issues have also been reported of voting taking place on open tables, as opposed to in curtained booths. The election rights organization GOLOS says it has received over 2,000 complaints.

Ella Pamfilova, the recently appointed head of the Russian Election Commission and a well-established human rights figure, indicated that some investigations were underway. According to her, there are three regions where the vote may be invalidated. The elections were monitored by 264,000 observers, including international representatives.

At the Russian embassy in Ukraine, dozens of right-wing protesters sought to interfere with Russian citizens who came to cast ballots. At least one voter was assaulted. The European Union and the virulently anti-Russian, pro-US government in Ukraine are refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Russian parliamentary vote in Crimea. Moscow absorbed the peninsula after a popular referendum held there in the aftermath of the February 2014 coup in Kiev supported unification with Russia.
US and Russian representatives emerged from a meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) held in New York on the periphery of the United Nations General Assembly session to declare that they were continuing to support a tattered ceasefire in Syria, despite the bloody events of the past few days.

The meeting was convened a day after an attack on an aid convoy in the northern countryside of Aleppo killed at least 20 people and destroyed 18 out of 31 trucks bearing food and other humanitarian relief supplies. Washington quickly blamed the attack on the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and its principal international ally, Russia, both of which denied any role in the attack.

Similarly, the US Central Command said that American warplanes had not been involved.

This attack comes on the heels of the bombing by the US Air Force and allied warplanes of a Syrian army position overlooking the Deir ez-Zor Airport near the Syrian-Iraqi border, which killed as many as 90 Syrian soldiers and wounded another 100. The attack allowed fighters of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) to overrun the position.

Among the contending Syrian forces, the ceasefire has already been declared a dead letter, with Islamist fighters aligned with Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front launching a major offensive in Aleppo, backed by artillery and rocket launchers. The Syrian government, meanwhile, declared the ceasefire over after reporting 300 violations by the rebels. It renewed its airstrikes in an effort to counter attacks by the Western-backed forces in Aleppo and elsewhere in the country.

The ceasefire is not dead, US Secretary of State John Kerry said after leaving the hour-long ISSG meeting attended by 20 foreign ministers. He added that specific steps would be discussed in a subsequent meeting later this week.

His Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who co-chaired the meeting, made no public comment. Early on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared the chances for restoring the ceasefire very slim.

The UN Security Council is expected to discuss the ceasefire on Wednesday, but Washington has stonewalled any council vote on the agreement, whose terms it insists cannot be made public.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura reported that all participants at Tuesdays meeting, which included both Iran, which is providing military aid to the Syrian government, and Saudi Arabia, which has armed and paid Islamist militias fighting against it, had indicated continued support for the truce, despite its unraveling on the ground. The ceasefire is in danger, is being seriously affected, he said, but added that it continued so long as the US and Russia backed it. He described the attack on the aid convoy as a game changer in terms of demonstrating the necessity of bringing an end to the violence.

One thing that the attack, together with the previous strike on the Syrian troops, has definitely scuttled is the provision within the deal negotiated between Kerry and Lavrov on September 9 calling for the setting up of a joint US-Russian center to coordinate strikes on the ISIS and al-Qaida-linked groups. The center was supposed to be established after a seven-day cessation of hostilities and the delivery of aid to besieged populations.

The ceasefire as a whole, and this provision in particular, provoked heated opposition from the Pentagon, with Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter bitterly opposing it in cabinet meetings with President Barack Obama. Top uniformed commanders made statements bordering on insubordination, suggesting that they might not implement the deal.

Also hostile to the agreement were the so-called rebels and their handlers within the CIA. The ceasefire called for the so-called moderate opposition, Islamist militias armed and paid by the US and its allies, to separate itself from the longtime Al Qaeda affiliate, the Al Nusra front, which recently renamed itself. There was no indication that any such separation was in progress, and given the close alliance between the US-backed forces and the Al Qaeda elements, which form the backbone of the armed opposition to the Assad government, it seemed impossible to effect.

Even more decisive from the standpoint of the US militarys opposition to the ceasefire deal is its hostility to any military collaboration with Russia under conditions in which the Pentagons strategic focus has shifted ever more directly toward the preparation for direct military confrontation with the nuclear-armed power.

Washington, without citing any evidence, immediately declared Moscow responsible for Mondays attack on the aid convoy. We dont know at this point whether it was the Russians or the regime. In either case, the Russians have the responsibility certainly to restrainrefrain from taking such action themselves, but they also have the responsibility to keep the regime from doing it, a US State Department statement issued Monday night said.

Meanwhile, according to CNN, a US official acknowledged that there is no intelligence that specifically indicates that Syrian aircraft or helicopters were in position to attack this location when it happened.

The aid convoy, one of the first to be sent into territory held by the Islamist militias, had been approved by and received permits from the Syrian government after several days of delays, largely over Syrias insistence that Turkish officials not be allowed to accompany the aid shipments. From the standpoint of motive, it is less than obvious why Damascus would have decided to bomb a convoy that it had just approved, when it could have continued to prevent it from moving into the area.

For its part, the Al Nusra Front had vowed to block any aid shipments that came through territory held by the government, organizing demonstrations in Aleppo to announce this position.

Russias Defense Ministry pushed back against the charge by Washington and its allies that Russia and/or the Syrian government had bombed the aid convoy. Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that analysis of video footage of the struck convoy displayed no bomb craters nor any damage to the vehicles consistent with aerial bombardment. He also noted that the attack on the trucks had coincided with the launching of a major Al Nusra offensive near Aleppo.

The Russian ministry also released a video showing a rebel truck towing a large-caliber mortar launcher accompanying the UN aid convoy into the Aleppo town of Uram al-Kubra. General Konashenkov said that the vehicle seemed to be using the convoy as a cover for redeploying the mortar.

Most importantly, he added, where did the mortar disappear near the destination point of the convoy and what was the target of its fire during the convoys stop and unloading?

Meanwhile, the United Nations Tuesday revised a statement issued the day before that, like the US State Department, had described the attack on the aid convoy as an airstrike.

In response to the evidence offered by Moscow, the UN replaced the references to airstrikes with the more general term of attacks.

UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke described the earlier reference as an error. We are not in a position to determine whether these were in fact airstrikes, he said. We are in a position to say that the convoy was attacked.

Whatever the source of the attack on the aid convoy, it is clear that the US and its allies have seized upon it to further its propaganda campaign to vilify and prepare for military confrontation with Russia. Washington has also utilized the incident to bury any discussion of the attack two days earlier by American and allied warplanes on Syrian army troops who were confronting ISIS fighters, which raised questions as to whether the US was deliberately aiding the Islamist forces.

In a curious comment on the incident, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday that there should be no rush to judgment on the US airstrike and on the accuracy of US targeting.

Maybe before we start going on a path of what went wrong, lets do an investigation and actually ensure that something did go wrong, the general said. It may be that ... when you do the investigation, the facts would tell you that we would have done what we did again.
The agreement reached by Unifor with General Motors Canada in the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 20 marks a new stage in the corporate-union gang-up against autoworkers. In the wake of the announcement that the two parties had agreed to the framework for a tentative deal covering GMs 4,000 workers, the union is moving as rapidly as possible to push through the deal.

Unifor has scheduled simultaneous votes in Oshawa, St. Catharines and Woodstock this Sunday. Details of the agreementwhich has not even been finalizedhave not been released to rank-and-file workers, yet workers are expected to vote on it in five days.

The speed with which the vote is being pushed through points to the extreme anxiety on the part of Unifor that if workers really familiarized themselves with whatever final contract terms eventually emerge, they would never accept it.

Opposition is already beginning to grow. One worker on the unions AutoTalks16 Facebook page said, I know how it works, you show it to the members, praise it as the best deal ever and scare them to death that if they dont vote for it they will lose their jobs and then make them vote. If anyone wants to leak me the deal send it my way. Id love to see what binding guarantees are for investment. Sounds to me like Unifor and GM are going begging to Wynne and Trudeau for some of that sweet corporate welfare! Sickening.

Rank-and-file workers should demand the immediate release of the full contractnot phony highlightsand two full weeks to study it before any vote. In every factory, rank-and-file workers should elect action committees to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of Dias and the other Unifor bureaucrats, defeat this sell-out and formulate their own demands.

GM workers should appeal to Ford and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) workers for a joint strike action to abolish the two-tier wage system, restore all pensions, win a 35 percent wage increase and defend all jobs. An appeal must also be made to workers in the United States, Mexico and around the world to oppose the attacks of the transnational auto giants and the governments that back them.

Absolutely nothing Unifor President Jerry Dias says can be taken at face value. The intention of Dias and the rest of the executives who run the organization is to conceal or sugar-coat the true nature of the deal and force through the contract before workers have had time to study the hundreds of pages of content and their full implications. This will pave the way for similar rotten agreements at Ford and FCA.

Surrounded by fellow union executives and with a backdrop reading, Invest in Canada, Dias said the four-year deal had turned the tide of job cuts in Canada and won hundreds of millions of dollars in new investments. This included new but unnamed product commitments, he said, for GMs giant Oshawa plant outside of Toronto, an engine plant in St. Catharines and a parts distribution facility in Woodstock.

That Dias can be thrilled by a framework that disposes of almost 800 jobs on Oshawas Consolidated Line is telling. For Unifor, good contracts now consist of plant closures, the destruction of any semblance of defined benefit pensions for new hires, the maintenance of the hated two-tier wage system, paltry wage increases, more speed-up and a signing bonus to bribe hard-pressed workers to hold their nose and vote for ratification.

Indeed, Dias was even reluctant to announce any details of the economic package. The Unifor functionaries are fully aware of the deep opposition from workers who have endured a ten-year wage freeze under conditions where GM has made money hand-over-fist on the back of three consecutive concessions contracts and a near $11 billion government bailout in 2009.

Dias gushed that there will be hiring, both long-term and short-term as new investment in St. Catharines and the Oshawa Flex plant takes hold. Both GM management and Unifor know full well that any expansion of plant volume or new product will be covered by an ever increasing second- or third-tier of workers at inferior wage and benefit packages. For over a year, like a cheap labour contractor, Dias has been touting the high number of veteran workers eligible for retirement as the key to GMs drive for even higher profits for its well-heeled shareholders.

But as veteran autoworkers already know, whatever job security promises are made are not worth the paper (or framework) they are printed on. Unifor and its predecessor, the Canadian Auto Workers, have repeatedly announced such dealsbased on ever-greater concessionsonly to see automotive employment in Canada halved since 2000. At GM alone, the numbers have fallen from 19,000 in 2002 to 4,000.

The 2008 closure announcement of GMs Oshawa Truck Plant is a case in point. At the ratification meetings for the freshly signed GM contract, then union president Buzz Hargrove claimed that the huge array of concessions granted to the company had saved jobs at the Oshawa complex, particularly at the truck plant that was soon to be reduced to one shift. But only months later, GM announced the truck plant closure, citing a standard clausenever discussed at the ratification meetingswithin the collective agreement that allowed them to alter product line allocations should market conditions change.

Hargrove, with his then lieutenant Dias at his side, feigned shock and outrage over the closing of the plant, claiming that the closure was a violation of the newly signed contract. In recent months, Dias has been asked on several occasions to explain those 2008 events. We were too nice. We trusted GM, he has lamely responded. Now Dias and his entire coterie of officials have unanimously endorsednot a contractbut a framework that essentially gives the giant automaker a blank check to do anything it wants.

Even setting aside givebacks and the closure of the Consolidated Line, General Motors workers should reject this contract on straight principle. It is impossible for workers to make an informed vote without at least two weeks to study the full contract and organize meetings of the rank and file, independent of the union bureaucrats, to review and debate its provisions.

Last year, US autoworkers rebelled against the United Auto Workers and defeated the first UAW-FCA contract by a two-to-one margin. This was the first rejection of a UAW-backed national contract in three decades. Rank-and-file workers used social media to organize opposition and circulated and re-circulated copies of the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter, which became the voice of workers and the center of the opposition.

The UAW worked hand-in-glove with the Obama administrationwhich slashed new hires wages in half during the bailout of GM and Chryslerand eventually rammed the sell-outs through by resorting to lies, intimidation and fraud. There remains, however, deep opposition among US autoworkers, which can be rallied if Canadian workers take a stand to fight.

Everything depends on the independent initiative of rank-and-file workers themselves. In this fight, the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter will provide all the assistance possible.
Former Chief Minister of Maharashtra Ashok Chavan has come out in defence of the Maratha community saying that their demands over the Kopardi gangrape case and reservation should be dealt with immediately.

By Kamlesh Damodar Sutar: Calling the protests by Maratha community an outcome of unrest, Former Chief Minister of Maharashtra Ashok Chavan urged for immediate implementation of the demands made by the Maratha community.

PROTESTS BY MARATHAS

For the past few days, Maharashtra has witnessed several mammoth silent protests by the community in different parts of the state. The community is on the streets demanding justice for the Kopardi rape and murder victim.

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The community is also demanding reservation and amendments in the Prevention of Atrocities Act.

ASHOK CHAVAN ATTACKS BJP

"Lakhs of Marathas are voluntarily taking out morchas. There is absolutely no political leadership involved. They want strict action against the culprits of Kopardi rape case. Another important demand is that of Maratha reservation," Chavan said while addressing a press conference in Mumbai.

"The mammoth morchas by the community are not to demand scrapping of the Prevention of Atrocities Act," added Chavan.

Chavan further said "Our government had given reservation to the Maratha community but the present BJP government has failed to tackle the legal hurdles in implementing it. Hence the community has been deprived of reservations. State government should now properly fight for it in the Bombay High Court."

"There is large scale unrest in the Maratha community over all these issues and the huge protests are an outcome of it," said Ashok Chavan.

--- ENDS ---
Under the fraudulent banner of investing in welfare recipients to improve their lives, the Australian government yesterday unveiled an ideological offensive designed to satisfy the demands of the financial and corporate elite for the dismantling of welfare entitlements.

The government is trying to put new window dressing on measures designed to coerce some of the poorest layers of the working class into low-paid jobs. This is under conditions of mounting job losses, driven by the collapse of the mining boom and the global slump, and growing numbers of workers already being forced into insecure and poorly-paid work.

At the same time, the government is targeting the entire welfare system, including disability programs and aged pensions, in a bid to lower taxes further for corporations and the wealthy. Having barely survived the July 2 election, the Liberal-National Coalition government is anxious to demonstrate to big business that it can deliver its requirements.

Addressing the National Press Club, Social Services Minister Christian Porter declared a revolution to eliminate welfare dependency. It was a moral imperative to assist individuals supposedly trapped in a welfare cycle. In reality, the proposals take to a new level the welfare to work drive by successive governments, both Coalition and Labor.

Porter rejected criticism that unemployment benefitskept at below-poverty levels for two decades (currently $38 a day for single adults)push people into poor quality, part-time and low-wage jobs. These types of jobs are far better than 40-odd years inside the welfare system, he declared. Young people were being deprived of the dignity and purpose of employment under such super-exploited conditions.

Porter boasted of the punitive success of the welfare system. By making it challenging to subsist off Newstart (unemployment benefits), the government was already pushing off within six months 96 percent of those relying solely on the benefit. Only 1,500 people remained on the base rate for a long period. The government intended to go further, he insisted, by compelling applicants to wait four weeks before payments began.

Porters cynical declarations about the dignity and purpose of work are based on a false premisenamely that there are jobs available for those who want them. Even according to the under-stated official statistics, more than 720,000 workers are unemployed and there are 18 jobseekers on average per vacancy. Roy Morgan surveys estimate that the real level of unemployment is twice as high as the official 5.7 percent. A total of 2.3 million workers (17.5 percent) are either unemployed or under-employed, a rise of nearly 1 percent over the past year.

Many of those who are driven off unemployment benefits are condemned to a desperate hand-to-mouth existence relying on friends, family and welfare agencies. Others who do manage to find a joboften casual and poorly paidare frequently little better off. In 2014, one-third of those living below the poverty line were working poorthat is, living in households with wages as their main income.

As the governments initial victims, the minister singled out three vulnerable groupsstudents, young carers and young parentsbut made it clear that his initiatives would not stop with them. Citing statistical analysis commissioned by the government from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, Porter produced the misleading claim that the lifetime cost of welfare payments for those currently on benefits would total a colossal $4.8 trillion.

This calculation reveals the actual purpose of the governments plandrastic budget-cuttingbeneath the veneer of concern for the wellbeing of welfare dependants. It is also a confected figure. First of all, the data focusses on alleged forecasts of the future plight of relatively small groups of young recipients. For example, of the 4,370 teenage parents, 12 percentjust 525 peoplewere expected to access income support for the rest of their lives.

Secondly, the biggest and fastest growing categories of welfare dependants are aged pensioners, people on National Disability Insurance Scheme programs and disability pensioners. In other words, it is the basic social right to welfare itself, including retirement pensions, that is being declared unsustainable.

Assisted by the corporate media, which constantly demonises dole bludgers and welfare parents, governments, Labor and Coalition, have already dramatically lowered the proportion of the working age population receiving income support payments, from 25 percent in 1994 to 16.6 percent in 2015.

This has been achieved through punishing measures such as eliminating sole parent payments once the youngest child turns 8 and imposing harsh work tests on dole recipients. By one measure alonecutting off sole parent benefitsa process completed by the Gillard Labor government, the proportion of households receiving those payments halved from 5 percent in 1998 to 2.4 percent in 2015.

Porter signalled an intensification of this offensive. He outlined a new era of mutual obligation for every working age payment. Among his proposals were obligations to refrain from alcohol or substance abuse, attend work appointments on time, ensure children attend school and pay debts owed to the government.

Porter went beyond simply seeking to repackage the welfare to work drive. He advanced an underlying agenda of redefining fairness and dismissing inequality as a social indicator. Fairness now consisted of stopping the mere transfer of money from one group to another. Inequality was just a measure of difference, not of comparative wellbeing. These ideological fixations had to be pushed aside.

Similar nostrums are being brought forward to declare the failure of expenditure on education and health, which is decried as throwing money at the problem. This means nothing less than the gutting of all social spending in order to boost corporate profits and widen the gulf between the wealthy elites and the working class.

According to the most recent estimates by the Australian Council of Social Service, by 2014, 2.5 million people, or 13.9 percent of all Australian residents, were already living below the internationally accepted poverty line of 50 percent of median household income. Among them were 603,000 children, or 17.7 percent of all children in Australia.

By presenting its measures as investing in people, the government is aiming to secure the political assistance of the charities and other groups that vie for ever-dwindling government grants to provide basic social services once delivered by governments themselves. As an initial step in revolutionising welfare, $96 million will be allocated to a Try, Test and Learn Fund to enable such groups to compete with corporate consultants for funding to experiment with programs to create a path out of the welfare system.

Interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporations 7.30 program last night, several representatives from such organisations, including Mission Australia CEO Catherine Yeomans, expressed cautious optimism about the governments agenda.

As for the Labor Party, it demonstrated its basic agreement by last week helping the government push through the first post-election legislation, an Omnibus Bill to cut public spending by $6.3 billion over the next four years. More than half the cuts will come from welfare, including payments to families, students, the young unemployed, newly-arrived immigrants and aged nursing home residents.
On September 20, Naomi Spencer, the Socialist Equality Partys candidate for West Virginia House of Delegates in District 16, filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order against Natalie Tennant, the Secretary of State.

The restraining order request is aimed at halting the distribution of absentee ballots, scheduled for Friday, September 23, which will exclude the names of independent candidates who have been decertified.

The motion was filed in the federal District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, Huntington Division. Chief US District Judge Robert Chambers ordered Secretary of State Tennant to file a response to the motion Wednesday. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday at 1:00 p.m.

The motion follows a lawsuit filed Monday seeking Spencers restoration to the ballot, along with co-plaintiff Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party and other independent candidates who have been removed after being certified to run in the November 8 election.

Spencer is one of 17 candidates who were stripped of their ballot status after meeting all the requirements for independent and minor party candidates on the grounds that they had not met a certificate of announcement deadline of January 30 previously relevant only to candidates of parties holding primary elections.

The brief in support of the emergency motion explains, Until last Friday [September 16], the filing deadline for independent candidates wishing to appear on the November ballot was August 1, 2016. Then, late on Friday evening, the Secretary of State notified the Plaintiffs and other independent candidates that the deadline had moved back in time to January. Because none of the Plaintiffs had met a deadline that no one knew existed, they and at least 15 other independent candidates will be removed from the ballot unless this Court intervenes.

Both the new deadline and its retroactive application to independent candidates are patently unconstitutional and strike at the heart of representative democracy, the brief states.

The brief notes that because the decertified candidates had previously attained ballot status, the ballots have already been printed with the Plaintiffs names on them, but the Secretary of State plans to obscure their names with a sticker. With the absentee ballots slated to be sent out Friday, the motion requests an injunction by Thursday.

The brief also notes that until last week, the ballot access process for independent candidates consisted of filing a nominating petition, a notice of candidacy, and paying a filing fee by August 1. The Secretary of State described the process, including the August deadline, on her website. The page describing these steps has since been taken down, but Spencers motion includes copies of the earlier version. At no time prior to the filing of this action did the Secretarys website mention a January deadline for independent candidates, the brief states.

January 30, the new filing deadline imposed by the Secretary of State following a decision by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, comes 102 days before the May 10 primary election and fully 284 days before the general election. It would be the earliest presidential deadline in the country by far, the brief points out, noting that of all the states only Texas, on May 8, has a deadline before June for presidential candidates.

Numerous courts, including the US Supreme Court, have ruled that deadlines more than 75 days before a primary impose heavy constitutional burdens. Early deadlines cause harm to candidates and voters, because they compel them to make premature decisions and preclude an independent run based on a response to changing political situations in the months before an election.

Voters are harmed by the deadlines because the exclusion of independent candidates leaves only the choice between major party candidates. The public interest in this case is clear, the brief states. The requested injunction will ensure that the citizens of West Virginia have an opportunity to vote for candidates of their choice. Without it, voter choices will be limited. The public undoubtedly has a vital interest in a broad selection of candidates as well as the conduct of free, fair, and constitutional elections.
The morcha in Navi Mumbai started from Central Park in Kharghar and made its way to Konkan Bhavan in CBD Belpaur. Thousands, including women and children, participated in the rally.

By Kamlesh Damodar Sutar: After massive rallies in Nanded, Latur and Jalna earlier this week, thousands took to the streets of Navi Mumbai for the huge rallies that were organised by the Marathas demanding action against the culprits of the brutal rape and murder of a Maratha girl in Kopardi village of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra.

For last one month, Maharashtra's biggest and politically dominant community, Maratha are on the streets over the issue. After the hinterland, the rally has now reached Mumbai.

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The morcha in Navi Mumbai started from Central Park in Kharghar and made its way to Konkan Bhavan in CBD Belpaur. Thousands, including women and children, participated in the rally. The silent march was attended by people of the Maratha community from Navi Mumbai and Raigad area. To ensure a bigger turnout, the community had kept the Navi Mumbai APMC shut today.

READ: Maratha protest intensifies, silent march to be held in Navi Mumbai today



A major chunk of the traders and Mathadi workers in the APMC are Marathas. Though political leaders from different parties were present, they were not the ones leading the rally but remained mere participants.

Elaborate arrangements were made by the administration before the rally. Nearly four thousand policemen were deployed on the rally route. Traffic was diverted between the Utsav Chowk in Kharghar and Konkan Bhawan in Belapur to avoid congestion on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. The protesters handed over a memorandum of demands to the Konkan divisional collector. The prime demand of the community is strict action against the culprits of Kopardi rape and murder case. The community has been holding rallies across the state demanding reservation in education and employment, and scrapping of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Similar rallies have been held in ten districts of Maharashtra in last one month. The silent morcha in Beed, Osmanabad, Auranganad had received huge response. Earlier this week the state also witnessed mammoth rallies in Jalna and Latur. The protesters are planning to culminate the protests with a gigantic rally in Mumbai that is expected to be attended by more than 25 lakh marathas across the state. Today's morcha in the satellite city of Navi Mumbai is seen as a dress rehearsal for the huge morcha in Mumbai.

--- ENDS ---
The Centre has started an intense campaign to end the nexus between land mafias and officials who encroach upon the waqf land in various states in the country,

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, told Mail Today that the ministry had initiated a high-level inquiry into all allegations about misappropriation of waqf land complaints received from several states.

By Siddhartha Rai: The Narendra Modi government has initiated a crackdown against the nexus between land mafia and officials in state waqf boards who have connived with them to facilitate encroachment upon vast swathes of prime waqf land across the country.

To deal with complaints regarding waqf properties, the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs has decided to establish tribunals at the Centre as well as the state level. The one at the Centre would be a single member body headed by a retired Supreme Court judge, while those at the state level would be a three-member body headed by a retired judge of a High Court.

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Union Minister of State (Independent charge) for Minority Affairs, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, told Mail Today that the ministry had initiated a high-level inquiry into all allegations about misappropriation of waqf land complaints received from several states.

WHAT NAQVI SAID

"Serious complaints had been received regarding the mafia grabbing waqf properties in some states in connivance with officials of state waqf boards. In fact, there is a full-blown scam that has come to light in Karnataka. Moreover, we also took note of news reports published in Mail Today. The matter was taken up in the Central Waqf Council and the decision to probe all such complaints was taken. Strict legal action will be taken soon against those involved in this illegal act," Naqvi said.

According to sources in the ministry, the matter of the central tribunal had already been taken up with the Union Law Ministry and the latter had sent names of retired judges to the minority ministry for choosing the tribunal head.

"We are in the process of considering a number of names, but we shall be able to see the tribunals working in about a month," Naqvi added.

"A campaign on war-footing has been initiated by the central government to free waqf properties from the clutches of the mafia across the country so that these properties can be used for welfare of Muslims," he added.

There are 31 state waqf boards and more than 4,27,000 registered waqf properties across the country. Besides, there are many non-registered waqf properties. Several waqf properties across the country are in the clutches of the waqf mafia. Naqvi has already directed that all waqf properties be registered online by the end of this year.

"In cooperation with the state governments, we will construct schools, colleges, malls, hospitals, skill development centres, etc. and the revenue generated will be utilised for educational and other developmental activities for Muslims," Naqvi further said. "Multi-purpose community centres named Sadbhav Mandap will also be constructed on waqf lands, which will be utilised for marriage ceremonies, exhibitions and also relief centres during a natural calamity," the minister added.

Also Read:

Intense campaign on to free Waqf properties from mafia: Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi

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Notices issued to 74 occupants encroaching on Waqf properties



--- ENDS ---
TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) - Florida State University police are on the lookout for a robbery suspect.

Police said the suspect, who they also said may have been armed, was being tracked on campus by a K-9 going west near the Sandels Building around 9 p.m. on Monday.

After an extensive and unsuccessful search for the suspect, police believed that the suspect fled the campus. They have warned people stay alert and to report any suspicious activity.

Police have described the suspect as a Hispanic male, about 5'9 with tan shorts.
TALLAHASSEE, FL (The News Service of Florida) - With a 48 percent increase in the number of students seeking counseling, Florida universities are asking for an additional $14.5 million in the coming budget year to hire more mental health professionals, including psychologists, counselors, psychiatric nurses and prevention specialists.

At least eight out of the 12 universities don't meet staffing standards recommended by experts, because they have more than 1,500 students for each mental health professional on the campus. The inadequate staffing has led to waiting lists, fewer counseling sessions and the need to rely on off-campus services, which are not covered by student health fees.

There is also an increase in more severe cases, with campus counseling centers reporting 4,200 visits in the 2013-14 academic year that were classified as emergency or crisis visits, involving issues like severe depression, acute anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

The counseling centers also reported 300 students had to be involuntarily hospitalized under the state's Baker Act during that academic year.

"The (state university system) counseling centers provide services that are critical to student retention and success and the need to address the mental and behavioral health of SUS university students has never been more critical," according to a report from Christy England, associate vice chancellor for academic research and policy.

The state Board of Governors, which oversees the universities and is meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Sarasota, will review the report and consider the mental health funding as part its 2017-18 budget request to the Florida Legislature.

The data shows that since the fall of 2008, the number of students seeking counseling services rose 48 percent, to 20,495 clients, in the 2013-14 academic year. There were also 163,000 counseling sessions, a 67 percent increase.

The directors of counseling services at Florida State University and the University of Florida, two of the state's largest and oldest institutions, confirmed the staffing challenges.

"Every year our utilization rates go up," said Carlos Gomez, a licensed psychologist and director of FSU's counseling center.

Between the 2014 and 2015 academic years, Gomez said his center saw an increase of 19 percent in student visits, rising to about 3,800, or about 9 percent of the campus' 41,000 students.

Gomez estimated that FSU has roughly one mental health professional for every 1,900 students, well above the 1,000 to 1,500 students per counselor ratio set by the International Association of Counseling Services.

When he arrived on campus two years ago, Gomez said students faced a five-week waiting period for services. He said his center changed its clinical model, allowing immediate evaluations. But he said the staffing problems make it difficult to provide extended counseling services.

"What we can't do is see every student who walks in our door for psychotherapy," Gomez said. "We are referring in record numbers out into the community."

The FSU counseling center has created a "treatment coordinator" position to help students, who get free health care on campus, find and pay for off-campus services.

"Sometimes they (the off-campus providers) give us a break, sometimes they don't," Gomez said. "But that's certainly a challenge."

As for students who can be accommodated on campus, Gomez said the staffing shortages means students are receiving counseling sessions every two or three weeks, rather than the once-every-week standard.

Ernesto Escoto, the licensed psychologist who directs the University of Florida's counseling center, said his school has one mental health professional for every 1,546 students. It means that by roughly mid-October each new academic year, the counseling center is putting students on waiting lists for services, he said.

"The demand for mental health services has increased at counseling centers, not only in Florida, but across the United States," Escoto said.

Escoto said the UF counseling center uses a "triage" system to identify students in the greatest need of services, but like FSU and other universities is also having to refer more students to off-campus services.

In Gainesville, Escoto said students can use an off-campus counseling service provided by Alachua County that only requires a modest co-payment.

"But that is not the case for all the counties in the state," he said.

The counseling directors cited several trends that may be adding to the increased demand for mental health services.

Escoto said effective psychiatric drugs have allowed more students with mental health challenges to attend state universities than did so in the past.

"Now with the care, more and more students are able to enroll and succeed. But at the same time, it's like moving to the major leagues from the minor leagues," Escoto said.

Some of those students find their coping skills "become taxed" by the more intense atmosphere and "they relapse and struggle," Escoto said.

Both Escoto and Gomez cited a "lack of resiliency" among students, as compared to previous generations, when it comes to coping with normal setbacks like a low grade, a relationship breakup or roommate problems.

"A number of the students we see lack the resiliency skills necessary to bounce back from setbacks," Escoto said, saying the situation can be heightened in a competitive university atmosphere. "They have not failed much in life and now they get a 'B' or a 'C' in class and all hell breaks loose."

Under the budget proposal, the $14.5 million would fund 137 positions spread across all 12 state universities. It would allow the schools to hire more psychologists, mental health counselors, psychiatric nurse practitioners, case managers, prevention specialists and office staff.

FSU would receive $1.9 million for 19 counseling positions, with UF receiving $2.2 million for 23 positions.

Gomez and Escoto said the funding would have a dramatic impact on their staffing challenges.

"My hope is then that we won't have a wait list anymore," Escoto said. "We will be able to provide care immediately to students and help them be successful in their studies and complete their education in a timely manner."
The alleged sharp shooter of mafia don Shahbuddin surrendered today. Md. Kaif is also suspected to be involved in the murder of Siwan journalist Rajdev Ranjan.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: Md. Kaif, alleged sharp shooter of dreaded mafia don Md. Shahabuddin, surrendered today before the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court in Siwan. Kaif is allegedly involved in the murder of Siwan journalist Rajdev Ranjan who was shot dead in May this year.

Md. Kaif was spotted with Shahabuddin soon after the RJD strongman was released from Bhagalpur jail on 10th September. He was present with Shahabuddin all along the way from Bhagalpur to Siwan in the cavalcade.

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READ| CBI inquiry in Bihar journalist murder case

SEARCH OPS LAUNCHED TO ARREST THE SHARP SHOOTER



Soon after the police came to know about Kaif' presence in Shahabuddin's cavalcade and later his pictures with Shahabuddin went viral, massive search operation was launched to arrest him but to no avail. The police last week attached the property of Md. Kaif in order to force the sharp shooter to surrender but he did not.

Kaif surrendered before the CJM court today afternoon after which he was sent to 14 days judicial custody.

ALSO SPOTTED WITH LALU YADAV'S SON



It may be remebered that Kaif's pictures with RJD President Lalu Prasad's elder son and Health Minister Tej Pratap Yadav also went viral. However, Tej Pratap dismissed charges of knowing the sharp shooter.

READ| Lalu's son spotted with Shahabuddin's sharpshooter, creates controversy

Kaif's pictures were also seen with the Siwan journalist Rajdev Ranjan. Shahabuddin had also dismissed the allegation of Kaif being a sharp shooter.

Also read: CBI takes over Siwan journalist's murder case after four months delay





--- ENDS ---
China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor focuses on 7 areas China, Mongolia and Russia will cooperate in seven areas to build a trilateral economic corridor, according to guidelines released this week.

China's ODI surges 53.3 pct in first 8 months Chinese companies continued to invest big in the overseas market during the first eight months of the year, the Ministry of Commerce said.
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The Yakima City Council must figure out a way to significantly increase the amount of money the city has in reserves  an effort that may find
By Mayuresh Ganapatye: The Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association has welcomed the Supreme Courts order regarding dance bars. The Supreme Court on Wednesday permitted three dance bars in Mumbai to operate under the old rules, which means they can now serve liquor and operate without a CCTV camera in the dance area.

GOVERNMENT HAD PASSED LAW FOR CCTV SURVEILLANCE, NO LIQUOR



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Sometime ago, the Maharashtra government had passed a law - Maharashtra Prohibition of Obscene Dance in Hotels, Restaurants and Bar Rooms and Protection of Dignity of Women Act, 2016. The new law imposes various conditions on dance bar owners, including putting the bar under CCTV surveillance. The law allows a bar room for dance performances; however, it will be open to the public only between 6 PM and 11.30 PM. No person is allowed to throw or shower coins, currency notes or any other thing which can be monetised on the stage.

HOTEL AND RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION WELCOMES COURT DECISION



This decision is a shot in the arm for us. We welcome this decision and hope that in the final hearing also, we will get justice. Now three of our bars in Mumbai (Uma Palace in Bhandup, Indian in Tardeo and Natraj in Vidya Vihar) will operate without new arbitrary rules of the state government,?? said Adarsh Shetty president of the association.

A petition was filed by the Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association and others against the order. The court criticised the no-liquor rule and also the need for CCTVs near the dance floor.



SUPREME COURT CALLS MAHARASHTRA GOVERNMENT LAW REGRESSIVE



"You ban liquor in the state. You can't say don't serve liquor. Anybody who has a bar licence, you can't say that you can't serve liquor," said the judges. The Maharashtra government had argued that liquor can't be allowed where the dancers perform, and CCTVs are needed to monitor harassment or any other criminal activity that would need police action. "It is regressive. It is not a theatre but a bar. You can have CCTVs at the entrance," said the court.

The bar owners had also told the court that CCTVs had a "chilling effect" on guests and "people have some right to privacy." Passing a temporary order, the court said it would hear the case again on November 24.

Also read: Don't serve liquor, install CCTVs in dance bars, orders Maharashtra government, SC intervenes



--- ENDS ---
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Over the past weekend, 70 to 90 Syrian soldiers were killed in a US-led airstrike, 36 people were murdered in a terror attack in a mosque in Pakistan, 17 Indian soldiers were killed in Kashmir, 29 people were wounded in an explosion in New York , a pipe bomb-style device exploded in New Jersey , a house in central Paris was raided following a warning of a terror attack, and a stabber attacked people in Minnesota while screaming "Allahu Akbar." That's just a partial list.

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All these incidents, or "only" most of them, have something in common: Jihad. This past August, 1,637 people were murdered in jihadist terror attacks. Just terror, not including war. Almost all of them were Muslims. Some of the incidents  which took place in Somalia, Libya and Nigeria  only get reported partially, if at all. So the death toll is possibly much higher.

The stabber from Minnesota, who shouted 'Allahu Akbar,' did not act because of an occupation. He operated as the product of incitement and religionization (Photo: Dave Schwartz, AP)

Why would a Muslim blow himself up in a mosque of all places? My young son asks me, over and over, why? And Over and over again I have no answer. What crime was committed by the small children who went to pray at the mosque? Why did the suicide bomber come to murder them of all people? They were not even Shiites. It was a devout Sunni who murdered devout Sunnis.

At the same time, in Israel, the knife intifada has resumed . More terrorists were killed. They did not go to their death, which they knew of in advance, because of a "protest against the occupation." They are part of a global phenomenon. The main motive, both in Hebron and in Minnesota, is religious invigoration. The global sequence makes it clear that the terrorism of the past few years needs no justifications such as "desperation" and "occupation."

The stabber from Minnesota, who shouted "Allahu Akbar," did not act because of an occupation. He was a refugee from Somalia in the United States. Instead of being grateful, he operated as the product of incitement and religionization. There are hundreds of millions of desperate people with no rights in the world who don't turn to murder and terror. And in general, that excuse is a bit dubious, especially as most of the victims of jihadi terror are Muslims, and in light of the fact that as soon as the Palestinians gain independence they will have much fewer rights than they have today. It happened in Gaza. It may happen in the West Bank as well.

Those who offer explanations and justifications are encouraging terror and pushing more and more young people into the circle of terror. They are not the Muslims' friends. On the contrary, they are their enemies. Those who blame capitalism, Zionism, colonialism and the rest of the "isms," those who blow what the US did to the Muslims or what Israel is doing to the Palestinians to monstrous dimensions, those who fund BDS bodies  the PR wing or terror  are leading to the murder of many more Muslims by other Muslims.

In order to stop the occupation, there is no need for terror. That is a foolish claim which many Israelis even, not just anti-Israel professionals, repeat. It has become a superstition. In order to stop the occupation, there is a need for a Palestinian leadership which will drop the rejectionism of two states for two people. There is a need to stop the incitement. The rejectionism and resentment are not the result of the occupation. On the contrary, the ongoing occupation is the result of the rejectionism. So there is no need to provide "the occupation" as an excuse for hate-drive terrorists.

That does not mean that Israel has no responsibility. There is a lot to do to serve the Israeli interest. For that purpose, we must work to reduce the friction and reach separation. There is no need to wait for the Palestinians. It's not clear that ending the occupation will lead to the end of terror. After all, those who turn to terror are not looking for liberation. So we must look at reality as it is. There is no need for self-deception.
The fight to keep Dafna Meir 's Wikipedia page online went on for days  but eventually, it was removed. Meir was stabbed to death by a terrorist at her home in the West Bank settlement of Otniel in January. One of her six children witnessed the murder.

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Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia founded in 2001, is edited by its userstens of thousands of volunteers from all over the world. Users who prove especially active and contributory to the site are sometimes invited to be editors and receive expanded editing abilities on the site. Israel has about 700 such editors.

Among them there are 180 that belong to a more senior group, which decides if certain pages should be kept online or deleted. These are editors who have edited at least 100 pages in the preceding three months.

Dafna Meir and her husband Natan.

A page about Meir was created after her murder. Meir was an intensive care nurse who also ran a popular blog about women's fertility matters. The editors felt that Meir's status as a terror victim was not, on its own, a sufficient reason to include her in the online encyclopedia.

The logic behind this claim appears to be twofold: First, Wikipedia is not a memorial website, but an encyclopedia. Second, if Meir were to be given a page of her own, that may require  for reasons of fairness  that no other terror victim be denied the right to have a Wikipedia page.

On the other hand, there were editors who argued that Meir's death was especially impactful on Israeli society  as the circumstances of her death set her apart from most terror victims  and that dedicating a Wikipedia page to her is thus justified.

Wikipedia's Israeli editors decided to delete Meir's page by a 39-29 vote.

In the end, 39 editors voted to delete Meir's page, and 29 voted to keep it, leading to its deletion. Meir's widower, Natan , responded to the decision by saying, "First of all it's important to me to say that this is not my way of commemorating Dafna. To me, and to all of us, Dafna was a special person and not a page, so I don't see these things as personal."

Mr. Meir continued, "But I think this is their loss. Dafna (was a significant voice in) the conversation surrounding the topics of fertility and sexuality, especially among the religious public. Her blog had 150,000 visitors. It's obvious that had we had been fortunate to have Dafna still alive, her Wikipedia page would have written itself."
NEW YORK -- U.S. President Barack Obama will raise concerns about Israeli settlement activity in Arab lands during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Wednesday, White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said.

Rhodes told reporters on Tuesday that the United States has discussed its concerns about Israeli settlements and "the potential viability of a Palestinian state in the face of that settlement activity ... I'm sure President Obama will do so tomorrow as well."
Egypt's president has urged Israel and the Palestinians to look to the "wonderful" example set by his country and the Jewish state and agree on a solution that lets them exist in peace as two neighboring states.

Speaking Tuesday to the UN General Assembly, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi described the Israel-Egypt model as "a real opportunity to write a bright page in the history of our region to move towards peace."

He told delegates he was departing from the written text of his speech to make an appeal that will bring "prosperity and peace to both the Israelis and the Palestinians."
The cops believe that Navratri is perfect time when all the gang members visit pandal to offer prayers and meet each other.

By Saurabh Vaktania: This year the Mumbai police officially confirmed that the gangsters own pandals and the officers should keep a close watch on the happenings. The officials are asked to keep watch on the active gang members, how the gang operates and how funding takes place. The cops will enter as devotees.

Navratri festival is widely celebrated by Mumbai's gangsters. Each Pandal has its own speciality and huge fan following. The Pandal, for nine days, attracts huge crowd and Mumbai's several gangsters visit the Pandal. All this years the Mumbai police would secretly keep close watch on theses pandals happening.

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In Mumbai, every gangster has his own Navratri Pandal in his area. Arun Gawli has in Dagdi Chawl, Ashwin Naik in Arthur Road and Kumar Pillai in Bhandup. The Mumbai police recently has issued circular to concerned police station and crime branch officials that they should keep proper watch on Navratri Pandals associated with gangster. The circular has mentioned Arun Gawli, Ashwin Nail and Kumar Pillai. All the gangsters are currently inside jail. Interestingly the cops have not mentioned name of Chhota Rajan.

A very senior police officer said that all these gangsters are currently lodged inside the jail, however the gang is still operating. The cops believe that Navratri is perfect time when all the gang members visit pandal to offer prayers and meet each other. Also the navratri pandal are inside the area of all these gangsters and therefore it is difficult for an outsider to go inside. Sources told that Gawli every year applys for parole for Navratri festival. However for past few years he could not come out. This year too he has applied and expecting to come out for the Navratri festival.

Highly placed sources in Mumbai police said that the cops will pose as devotees and enter the pandals. The cops have even activated their informants to bring information. The main task of cops is to get information on active gang members, how the gang is currently operating and its funding , which is all difficult task.

All the pandals of gangsters have huge decoration set up attracting crowd from all over. This year at Arun Gawli's Dagdi Chawl, decoration replicates Swaminarayan Temple of America.

--- ENDS ---
BEIRUT- The United States on Tuesday blamed Russia for an overnight attack on an aid convoy that killed 20 civilians as the UN announced it was suspending overland aid deliveries in Syria, jeopardizing food and medical security for millions of besieged and hard-to-reach civilians.

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Confusion continued about who struck the convoy, but the White House insisted it was either Russia or Syria. White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said either way, the US held Russia responsible, because it was Russia's job under the week-old cease-fire to prevent Syria's air force from striking in areas where humanitarian aid was being transported.

"All of our information indicates clearly that this was an airstrike," Rhodes said, rejecting the claim by Russia's Defense Ministry that a cargo fire caused the damage. Both Russia and Syria have denied carrying out the bombing.

UN aid convoy attacked in Syria

Within one minute of the strike, the US tracked a Russian-made Su-24 directly over the region of the attack, US officials said. Even that revelation failed to definitively implicate Russia because both the Russian and Syrian air forces fly the Su-24, although the US officials said there were strong indications that the jet was flown by the Russian military.

The officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the incident.

Witnesses described the Monday attack on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent warehouse and convoy in the rebel-held town of Uram al-Kubra in Aleppo province as prolonged and intense, saying the aerial bombardment continued as rescue workers rushed to pull the wounded from the flaming wreckage and rubble.

UN aid convoy attacked in Syria

The convoy was part of a routine interagency dispatch operated by the Syrian Red Crescent, which UN officials said was delivering assistance to 78,000 people in Uram al-Kubra, west of Aleppo city. It was carrying food, medicines, emergency health kits, IV fluids, and other essentials supplied by the UN and the World Health Organization.

Local paramedic and media activist Mohammad Rasoul, who was among the first to arrive at the scene, said over 100 tons of food, medicine, and baby formula had gone up in flames. He said 18 of the convoy's 31 trucks were completely destroyed.

The attack "erased the convoy from the face of the earth," Rasoul said.

"I've never seen anything like this attack," he said. "If this had been a military position, it wouldn't have been targeted with such intensity."

He said the attack began around 20 minutes after sunset on Monday and continued for two hours.

Pointing to the fact that Syria's rebels don't possess an air force, the White House said process of elimination indicated that either Syria's military or Russia's launched the attack. Both Syrian and Russian aircraft operate over the province, while the US-led coalition targets ISIS her parts of the country.

At the same time the attack took place on Uram al-Kubra, presumed Syrian or Russian jets launched a wave of attacks in and around the nearby city of Aleppo, minutes after Syria's military announced a weeklong cease-fire had expired.

A cargo fire would not explain the footage filmed by rescuers of torn flesh being picked from the wreckage, or the witness accounts of a sustained, two-hour barrage of missiles, rockets, and barrel bombs -- crude, unguided weapons that the Syrian government drops from helicopters.

Member of the Syrian Civil Defense search and rescue group at attack site (Photo: AP)

Hussein Badawi, the head of the town's Syrian Civil Defense search and rescue group -- also known as the White Helmets -- said that on the night of the attack he heard the sounds of overhead ballistic missiles, helicopters and fighter jets. He and other witnesses reported seeing a reconnaissance aircraft observing the convoy before the attack.

"There were reconnaissance flights before the airstrikes," said Badawi. "They filmed and combed the area, and they knew there was a Red Crescent (facility). The target was the Red Crescent, central and direct."

Russia's Defense Ministry confirmed Tuesday that a drone had followed the convoy from a warehouse in the government-side of Aleppo to its destination in Uram al-Kubra.

Area of the where the aid convoy was attacked (Photo: EPA)

The International Committee of the Red Cross said that 20 civilians were killed in the attack, many of them killed as they were unloading the trucks. Syrian activists and paramedics had said earlier that the airstrikes killed 12.

Witnesses said some of the remains were charred beyond recognition.

Among those killed was Omar Barakat, 38, the local director for the Red Crescent and a father of nine. His brother, Ali Barakat, who was also present at the attack, said it took him three hours to reach Omar, who was trapped in his vehicle.

"I stayed with my face on the floor for about an hour because of the intensity of the strikes," said Barakat.

Omar Barakat died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital.

One of the U aid trucks in the convoy which was attacked in Syria

The UN stressed that they had "deconflicted" the delivery with all parties before the operation, by obtaining the necessary permits from the government and supplying combatants with the relevant coordinates for the move.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it a "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack," in his address to world leaders at the General Assembly Tuesday. "Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower," he said, describing the bombers as "cowards" and those delivering aid as "heroes."

The UN's humanitarian agency, OCHA, announced earlier in the day it had suspended relief convoys in Syria, pending a review of the security situation. OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke called it "a very, very dark day... for humanitarians across the world."

But the UN appeared to carry on with air drops to government-held areas.

World Food Programme spokeswoman Bettina Luescher said in a statement that the UN food agency had airdropped aid to the besieged eastern city of Deir el-Zour earlier Tuesday "as part of the planned schedule of deliveries."

Reached for clarification, OCHA's Damascus office said only interagency convoys had been suspended, without elaborating further.

A member of the Syrian Civil Defense criticized the UN humanitarian aid agency for suspending the convoys.

Ibrahim Alhaj told The Associated Press that Syrian civilians will pay the price for the decision -- and that the UN should have condemned the attacks on the convoy rather than suspending aid.

UN aid truck waiting to cross into Syria

The UN says over 6 million Syrians are living in besieged or hard-to-reach areas and require humanitarian aid.

Media activist Wassim al-Ahmad sent a text message to The Associated Press from the besieged town of Madaya, outside the Syrian capital, Damascus, saying residents were asking whether the reports were true that the UN was suspending its aid convoys. The town, the scene of some of the most distressing images of starvation to emerge from Syria last winter, was expecting its first delivery since June.

"So, in the end, the burden falls on the besieged," lamented al-Ahmad.
A Rhode Island man charged with conspiring to help the ISIS has decided to plead guilty to charges that he plotted with others to kill conservative blogger Pamela Geller, his lawyer and prosecutors said Tuesday.

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Nicholas Rovinski, 25, is charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.

Prosecutors say the Warwick man plotted with two Massachusetts men to behead Geller. She angered Muslims when she organized a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, in May 2015. The contest ended in gunfire, with two Muslim gunmen shot to death by police. The plot against Geller was not carried out.

Officers at the Prophet Muhammad cartoon event (Photo: EPA)

A document filed in court Tuesday says a change-of-plea hearing for Rovinski is scheduled for Thursday.

Rovinski's lawyer, William Fick, confirmed that Rovinski plans to plead guilty to both conspiracy counts.

In a superseding indictment filed in April, prosecutors alleged that Rovinski  even from jail  tried to recruit people to help carry out plans for violent attacks in the United States, including the beheading of nonbelievers.

But Fick said Rovinski now renounces violence and any allegiance to ISIS.

"Nicholas Rovinski is a vulnerable young man who fell deep into a rabbit hole of extremist ideology," Fick said in a statement.

"Nicholas has unequivocally renounced violence and disavowed any sympathy for ISIL," Fisk said, using an alternate name for ISIS. "Nicholas hopes he will have opportunities in the future to help others reject twisted ideas and avoid making the same mistakes he did."

Airstrike on ISIS militants (Photo: Getty Images)

Prosecutors alleged that Rovinski plotted with David Wright, of Everett, Massachusetts, and Wright's uncle, Usaamah Rahim, of Boston, to behead Geller. Rahim, who had been under surveillance, was killed in June 2015 by investigators who said he lunged at them with a knife when they approached him in Boston. Wright has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

In the superseding indictment, prosecutors said ISIS recruiter Junaid Hussain communicated instructions about the plot to kill Geller directly to Rahim from overseas in May 2015. Hussain was later killed in a US drone strike in Syria after the US military alleged Hussain had been recruiting sympathizers in the West to commit lone-wolf terrorist attacks.

A spokeswoman for US Attorney Carmen Ortiz confirmed Rovinski's decision to plead guilty to the conspiracy charges but declined to comment further.

Geller said she was told by prosecutors that they will seek a substantial sentence for Rovinski. "I'm satisfied that Rovinski, who clearly was the weakest link, will get a lengthy sentence," Geller told The Associated Press. "He has renounced terrorism. ... He clearly was not the ringleader."
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged Israel to "write a bright page" in Middle East history and make peace with the Palestinians.

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Speaking at the United Nations, Sisi said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at "the core of regional instability" and called urged the two to look at the "wonderful" example set by his country and the Jewish state, and agree on a solution that lets them exist in peace as two neighboring states.

President al-Sisi speaking before the UN (Photo: AFP)

"Allow me to deviate from the written statement to address an appeal to the Israeli leadership and Israeli people," Sisi told the UN General Assembly.

"We have a real opportunity to write a bright page in the history of our region, to move toward peace," he said.

The first Arab country to make peace with Israel, Egypt has stepped up its diplomacy over recent months to try to re-start Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

The peace process has been comatose since the collapse of a US-led initiative in April 2014.
Rafael (Raful) Eitan served as IDF chief of staff in the early 1980s, and was one of the greatest fighters and whistleblowers, primarily against his defense minister, Ariel Sharon. But there was at least one point they both agreed on: There is a military solution to terror. They pulled the wool over then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin's eyes, promising to drive terror away from the northern border. Begin, who saw every military person as God's deputy, eventually fell for their lies and ordered the army to go to war.

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At the time, Raful and I developed a friendship based on interests, which stemmed from the need to disrupt Sharon's success story and ended solely because of Raful's blooming belief that there was a military solution to terror. Our arguments ended in a major quarrel when he gave an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth and promised that there was a military solution to terror. Later on, we found ourselves inside Lebanon.

Israel has launched big and small wars and thousands of operations, arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of home, but has failed to find a military solution to terror (Photo: AFP)

Since Sharon and Raful invented the military solution, we have launched big wars and small wars against terror and thousands of operations, we have arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed hundreds of homes, and invented the "encirclement" and the "curfew," but we have failed to find a military solution to terror. The thousands of police officers and soldiers filling the alleys of Jerusalem and Hebron today are evidence of 30 years of terror. If there is a military solution, how can anyone explain the recent stabbing attacks , the many attacks that came before them, and unfortunately, the ones which will likely follow?

How is it possible that the Jews, the persecuted and extremely smart people, have yet to find the right formula for the military solution? Why are tens of thousands of Jews looking over their shoulders to see if there is a Palestinian terrorist lurking?

The reasons are painfully simple: The Palestinians are the active side on this matter. We defend ourselves, they attack. The Palestinians have the goal and the determination, they are the initiators, they choose whether to give up or act, whether to live or die.

They say modern history includes only one or two cases of a military solution to terror, and the Brits in Malaysia are always mentioned in this context. All other attempts  dozens and hundreds  to break the backbone of terror through military measures have been unsuccessful. There have been time outs of a calm, which sometimes lasted years, but the volcano always erupted, and almost always at the wrong time. That's what happened in the first intifada, which broke out while almost all institutional bodies were saying that "our situation has never been better."

The solution to terror will likely not be a military solution. It's a matter of education. We must go on like this for many years, some will say even 30 or 40 years, in order to stop giving good reasons to the terror organizations and to the feeling of suffocation in their lives, in order to remove the looks of murder from their eyes. It's a combination of education and a diplomatic solution, which will only bear fruit in one or two generations. Is that a lot? Certainly, but look, 30 years have already passed since the first intifada.
Avi Cohen was the pioneer who opened Tel Avivs first Japanese restaurant 20 years ago; two years afterwards, he approached the Hilton Tel Aviv with the proposal of opening a branch of Yakimono in the luxury hotel. Now his son Alex is launching the restaurants first tasting menu, to expose diners to the full range of the kitchens creativity.

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Many people always order the same things at Japanese restaurants: only the dishes they are familiar with, Cohen says. The tasting menu is our way of getting them to experience some of our best dishes, which they otherwise would never have even thought to order.

According to Cohen, quality control and using only the finest ingredients is key to Yakimonos success. All of our fish goes through double veterinary checks, he says. And if a type of fish is not up to our standards, it wont be on the menu that day.

All the condiments are made in-house, including the soy sauce and pickled ginger. Their superiority over the commercial products served in most sushi restaurants is evident from the outset.

There are not many specialty cocktails, although we were treated to a delicious blend of sake, choya (plum wine), lemon juice and strawberry syrup. Yakimono stocks a number of premium sakes, including an excellent unfiltered import, the result of tireless efforts to obtain a kashrut seal of approval. The restaurant also serves the Hiltons house wines, from Barkan. A glass of the house red or white is included in the price of the tasting menu (NIS 250).

The new degustation menu starts with kushiyaki, sweet pickled vegetables to stimulate the taste buds. The homemade mixture of cabbage, carrot and cucumber, sprinkled with white sesame seeds, indeed whets the appetite.

The first fish course is maguro pepper: thin slices of seared tuna and lemon, with a soy and ginger sauce and drizzles of mustard. The freshness of the almost raw tuna is apparent from the first bite, and its pairing with the citrus very successful.

Next was Yakimonos dim sum: Hourenson maki mushisteamed spinach dumplings served on shredded raw cabbage in a bamboo bowl, with miso sauce. The spinach in the translucent rice paper bursts with flavor in the mouth, moistened nicely by the mild miso.

A definite favorite of the evening was the Fish wasabigrey mullet gently fried in a tempura batter flavored with a very mild wasabi sauce and served on a bed of crispy rice noodles. The pleasant wasabi sauce enhanced the fish without overwhelming it.

The sushi component of the meal is beautifully presented and consists of exquisite gems of this culinary art. One outstanding example was the Goma sushi morifish-wrapped balls of sushi rice in a special Yakimono chefs sauce: tehina with chili, an interesting departure from what you might expect in a Japanese restaurant.

Other noteworthy sushi delights were the Gonkan salmonsashimi salmon wrapped around rice topped with black snapper tempura in a wasabi sauce; Gonkan tericucumber wrapped around rice topped with grey mullet in teriyaki; Teak makituna and avocado roll topped with scallions; Kawa shakea pyramid-shaped roll of crispy salmon skin and vegetables; and Rainbow makia roll of salmon and avocado wrapped with raw tuna.

The meal culminates with a choice between two entrees: Sakani yakitoriskewer of salmon and sea bass dabbed with teriyaki sauce, or mixed tempura of vegetables and fish. The vegetables lightly fried in the pale tempura batter were Japanese eggplant, carrot, and green pepper.

Yakimono adheres to the Japanese tradition of not offering desserts. As an optional extra, guests may select from the Western desserts on display in the Hilton lobby. As a free bonus, however, parking in the hotel lot will be validated.

Kosher

Hilton, HaYarkon St. 205, Tel Aviv
Today, September 21, is the International Day of Peace. This evening, my colleagues and I the ambassadors of five EU countrieswill be talking to ordinary Israelis at bars in Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba and Haifa about peace in this region and the role of the European Union in supporting it. We are looking forward to the conversation.

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It is no secret that nowadays many Israelis have lost hope in the possibility of ever reaching a resolution to the conflict with their Palestinian neighbors and have adopted a fatalistic attitude. Many in Israel do not understand why the EU, among others, keeps pushing for something that appears to them to be unattainable.

We in the EU have no illusions that attaining peace between Israel and the Palestinians is an easy task. But we certainly do not think that it is an impossible task either. Indeed, compared to other conflicts in the regionfrom Syria to Libyawe believe that it is actually among the more resolvable conflicts. Moreover, there are very good reasons to encourage both Israel and the Palestinians to take confidence building steps, even small ones, that would gradually pave the way back to a credible peace process.

Lars Faaborg-Andersen

Perhaps the most important reason not to give up on peace is that there is no good alternative. Crisis management, otherwise known as the status quo, has an expiration date. Israel has everything to gain from good relations with a stable neighbor, but should fear that Palestinians who believe in cooperation, on anything from security to trade, are dwindling along with their diminishing sense that progress is still possible towards the legitimate aspiration for statehood.

In the longer term, and despite the many challenges, all Israelis who treasure their country as a Jewish and democratic state should be advocating for a negotiated two state solution. For without the prospect of an independent Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel, Israel itself, for demographic reasons, is unlikely to remain both Jewish and democratic.

Peace with the Palestinians also constitutes the key to unlocking strategic relations with many pragmatic states in the region. And a peace agreement that determines final borders would remove from the agenda the issue of the settlementsone of main irritants to Israel's smooth relations with its friends worldwide.

Is peace easy to attain? No, the road is long and hard. Is it nevertheless worth pursuing? The answer is a resounding yes. Do I have all the answers? No, but tonight I hope to listen to yours.
In the absence of a Foreign Minister, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed Tzachi Hanegbi to head the Israeli delegation to a conference on donor countries to the Palestinain Authority, which ended Tuesday in New York.

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Hanegbi detailed the progress achieved in recent weeks between Israel and the PA on a different levels, and asked donor countries to continue to strengthen the Palestinian economy. He listed the projects that Israel is initiating and promoting to better the quality of life for the Palestinian population.

This includes the signing of agreements for the supply of electricity to the West Bank, an agreement for allocating cellular data to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, frameworks which would allow Israeli banks to conduct transactions with banks in the PA, the supply of six million cubic meters of water to the PA, the PA's connection to the natural gas pipeline from Israel, and more.

Tzachi Hanegbi with the Palestinian Minister of Finance

The decision to send Hanegbi to the conference with a benefits package to the Palestinians is a change in policy for the Netanyahu government. The current impasse in negotiations and the fear of political pressure has contributed to Israel responding generously to projects it previously opposed.
OSAN- Two US supersonic bombers flew over South Korea on Wednesday, with one of them landing at an air base 40 km (25 miles) south of the capital, the second such flight since North Korea's Sept. 9 nuclear test.

US Forces Korea said in a statement the flight by a pair of B-1B Lancer strategic bombers based in Guam was a show of force and of US commitment to preserve the security of the peninsula and the region.

The United States, which has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, flew two B-1 bombers on Sept. 13 escorted by US and South Korean fighter jets in a show of solidarity with Seoul.
DUBAI- Yemen's Houthi group said aircraft of an Arab coalition bombed a security compound in the capital Sanaa where suspected al Qaeda militants and foreigners accused of spying, including Americans, are held.

The Saudi-led coalition has been conducting air raids against outposts and military facilities of the Iran-aligned Houthis and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh since March last year in a campaign to try to restore ousted president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The Houthi group, in a statement carried by sabanews.net news agency, quoted a source at the country's national security service as saying that coalition aircraft had caused a number of casualties among residents living in the vicinity of the compound that was bombed.
BENGHAZI- An oil tanker left the Libyan port of Ras Lanuf for Italy early on Wednesday with the first crude export cargo from the terminal since at least late 2014, the port manager said.

The port manager said a second tanker was preparing to load at Ras Lanuf, one of four ports seized on Sept. 11-12 by forces loyal to eastern commander Khalifa Haftar.
Three have been arrested for the murder of a Nigerian drug peddlar in Mumbai

By Saurabh Vaktania: Three people have been arrested in the murder case of a Nigerian national under murder charges and remanded to police custody.



Samsung, a drug peddlar, was stabbed by a gang of three with sharp objects in the wee hours of September 17 in Mumbai.

HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED



Samsung, Nigerian drug peddlar, was selling drugs on bridge at Sandasth road area when the Indian gang members Alam Ali Sheikh, Yusuf Ali Sheikh and Afzal Ali Sheikh reached the spot with sharp objects and stabbed him. He was stabbed over ten times by the three accused who later fled from the spot.

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Samsung with his one friend later went to Vashi area in Navi Mumbai and got admitted in a hospital. However in few hours due to excessive loss of blood, he succumbed to his injuries.

The hospital authorities informed the local Vashi police and informed the Dongri police. Vashi police officials detected the whole case while Dongri police just made arrest.

Nigerian gang drug lord Samsung Chivistian Chidke, 27 had several fights with local Indian gang members over territorial dispute of selling drugs.

DRUG RACKET OPERATION IN MUMBAI



The selling and consumption of drugs in Mumbai is in all time high. MD drug is in huge demand Mumbai and several youths are heavily affected while many have even lost life due to excessive consumption of drugs.

In South Mumbai several gangs operate in selling business of MD drugs. Prime two gangs is one Nigerian gang while other local Indian gang. Nigerian gang drug lord Samsung Chivistian Chidke, 27 had several fights with local Indian gang members over territorial dispute of selling drugs.

Even after all drives and precaution huge drug mafia operates in South Mumbai specially Dongri police officials. The Dongri cops inefficiency has made drug mafia operating without any problem. There are several other gangs still operating openly.

Also read: Delhi Police arrests man for kidnapping six-year-old boy, kidnapper wanted to marry victim's aunt

--- ENDS ---
Israels Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon has announced earlier this week a diplomatic offensive to prevent international financial assistance to the Palestinians from falling into the hands of Hamas.

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Speaking to reporters at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Danon cited repeated instances of humanitarian aid being diverted to help build Hamas terror infrastructure.

Danny Danon at the UN (Photo: Shahar Azran)

The UN and other international organizations must put an immediate end to the exploitation of their funds and resources by Hamas, Danon said. We will not relent until the UN and other aid organizations begin to track and follow every dollar that enters the Gaza Strip.

Danons briefing was timed to coincide with the annual donor conference for the Palestinian Authority and came one month after a Palestinian employee of the World Vision NGO and a Palestinian employee of Gazas UN Development Program were found to have transferred significant amounts of aid to Hamas.

Israel welcomes the contributions of the donor countries and places great importance on these efforts, said Danon.

Mahmoud Abbas and Ban Ki-moon (Photo: AFP)

Danon also noted that he has asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for assistance in creating oversight mechanisms to prevent such transfers from recurring, but Bans office told Tazpit Press Service (TPS) that the world body has sufficient controls in place.

The UN has safeguards in place to track all the aid money it distributes, in Gaza and elsewhere, Ban Ki-Moons office told TPS via email. We will continue to follow this particular investigation and will respond accordingly.

Danon also contacted World Vision, UNRWA, the Red Cross, USAID, AMIDEAST, Mercy Corps, International Orthodox Christian Charities, EU Humanitarian Aid and Development Department (ECHO), Germanys International Aid Agency (GIZ) and the Norwegian Refugee Council, asking them all to improve the level of internal oversight in the provision of humanitarian aid.

The UN and other international organizations must put an immediate end to the exploitation of their funds and resources by Hamas, Danon insisted. The international community cannot continue to believe that it is funding greenhouses while its money is really going towards digging tunnels and purchasing weapons.
Former President George H.W. Bush plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, the niece of President John F. Kennedy wrote in a Facebook posting.

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"The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!" read

the caption of a picture Kathleen Kennedy Townsend posted on Facebook, as she shook the 92 year-old ex-president's hand.

Former President George H.W. Bush (Photo: Reuters)

The news site Politico posted a screenshot of the picture with the comment.

Townsend, 63, is a Democratic former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the daughter of former attorney general Robert Kennedy, assassinated in 1968. Her uncle was President Kennedy (1961-1963).

On Facebook Townsend is identified as Kathleen Hartington, her middle name.

The Bush clan has not offered their support for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

A spokesman for Bush senior, president 1989-1993, was neutral on the subject when asked.

"The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days," spokesman Jim McGrath said in a statement Tuesday.

"He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim."

Neither Bush nor his sonsincluding ex-president George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor and ex-2016 presidential hopefulwent to Trump's nomination at the Republican National Convention in August.
A Syrian monitoring group says a warplane has crashed northwest of the capital, Damascus, as Islamic State group militants claim they downed it.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the fate of the pilot remains unclear. It says it was unclear if the warplane was downed Wednesday or had technical problems.

The Observatory says the plane crashed in the eastern Qalamoun mountains, northwest of Damascus.

The ISIS-affiliated news agency Aamaq says the group's militants downed the plane in eastern Qalamoun, after the aircraft carried out four raids against it. The agency says the plane crashed in an area controlled by either the government or rebel factions, indicating it would not have pictures of the aircraft.
After eleven terror attacks in six daysthe latest spike in violence in a year of stabbings, shootings and car rammingsthe families of the victims have had enough and are now pointing the finger at the Israeli government.

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"This government has completely failed. I've lost my trust in it a long time ago," said Ruth Hasano, whose husband Avraham was murdered in a vehicular attack on October 20, 2015 at the Al-Fawar Junction south of Hebron.

The scene of a terror attack in Bani Na'im on Tuesday (Photo: AFP)

"No one asks and no one is interested (in how we are)," Ruth went on to say. "At first, (the politicians) were all at my house making promises and we were sure we'd be the last ones, but (the attacks) keep happening every day. The prime minister is simply not speaking the truth. We're being stabbed here day after day and we don't hear anything from him. We don't hear anything from the defense minister, either. Where did everyone disappear to? I guess they got used to the fact we can endure. It's a feeling of helplessness."

Avraham Hasano (Photo: Kiryat Arba PR)

Similar criticism came from Dvora Gonen, whose son Danny was murdered in a shooting attack in the Binyamin region in June 2015.

Since the death of her son, Dvora has been leading a campaign calling on the government to increase the deterrence and to change its policy on terrorism.

"After Danny's murder, I promised myself I would be the last mother to have to bury her son. And I'm fighting. But everything that happens around us is not helping," she said.

Danny Gonen

Gonen accused the government of "not doing anything. It's been a year since the beginning of the wave of terrorism and the attacks continue as if there isn't anything to stop them. This government has taken away our hope. The prime minister realized the people can simply endure this terrorism. Families are ruined and fall apartand they remain silent. But I'm here, and I won't be broken. We have to realize we have the power to demand a meaningful change and not let the situation continue as it is. Every attack I hear about takes me back. I'll keep fighting."

Micha Avni, whose father Richard Lakin was murdered in an attack on a bus in Jerusalem, was not at all surprised by the recent escalation in hostilities.

Richard Lakin

"We're in the midst of a global fight that's only growing between radical Islam and the West, which Israel is a part of. The terror attacks are part of a wave that has been growing over the past decade," he said.

Avni also had a message for the Israeli leadership: "Unfortunately, the political leaderswhether they're on the left or rightdon't understand the problem. Radical Islam has taken over the territories, the Palestinian Authority's leaders are using the language of ISIS. As long as our leaders are talking about how many lands to give back, and the arguments between the right and left continue, I expect we'll still have attacks in a month, two months, and even two years. It's a sad situation, but it's a global problem."
BERLIN - Xenophobia is rising in the ex-communist east of Germany and risks tarnishing its reputation as a place to do business, the government said on Wednesday as it published its annual report on the state of German unification.

Far-right violence and attacks on migrants rose dramatically last year, with riots and arson attacks on refugee shelters in the towns of Heidenau and Freital in Saxony state. More than one million, mainly Muslim migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia streamed into Germany over the course of 2015.

"Right-wing extremism in all its forms poses a very serious threat for the social and economic development of the new states," Iris Gleicke, the federal government's commissioner for eastern German affairs, said, referring to the five states that comprised Communist East Germany from 1945 to 1990.
JUBA- The United Nations says some people fleeing South Sudan into Uganda are forced to pay bribes at checkpoints run by South Sudan's government and armed groups. It also says it has received reports of physical and sexual assaults and forced family separations.

More than 100,000 South Sudanese have fled to Uganda after deadly fighting rocked the capital, Juba, in July.

A spokesman for the UN refugee agency, Rocco Nuri, calls the reports of refugees being forced to pay bribes to reach safety "disturbing."
DUBAI- Gunmen abducted an American teacher on Tuesday from an English language school in Sanaa, capital of wartorn Yemen, witnesses said, in the latest of a series of kidnappings of foreigners.

Armed men in civilian clothes entered the school and forced the teacher into their car as bewildered colleagues and students looked on.

"We were shocked when the armed group entered the building. They got to his office and took him to an unknown location," a Yemeni teacher at the school said.
Representatives of Ukraine and separatist rebels agreed Wednesday to pull back troops and weapons from several areas in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to shore up a fragile peace agreement.

Darka Olifer, spokeswoman for ex-President Leonid Kuchma who represents Ukraine in the so-called Contact Group, said that the agreement signed in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, applies to three specific areas and will be monitored by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. She added that the deal was signed by Kuchma, Russian representative Boris Gryzlov and OSCE envoy Martin Sajdik. Rebel representatives in the group said that the separatist leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions would honor the agreement, Olifer added.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatist rebels and Ukrainian government troops has killed more than 9,600 people since it erupted in April 2014, according to the United Nations. A February 2015 agreement in Minsk, which was brokered by France and Germany, helped end large-scale battles, but smaller clashes have continued to claim lives and a political settlement has stalled.
Israel's Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon recently addressed the lack of kosher food in a letter he wrote UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Danon claimed that despite there being many Jewish diplomats working at the UN who keep kosher, the UN headquarters does not offer a kosher meal option.

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Stating he believes that all the world's citizens should be made to feel welcome at the UN, Danon's letter to Ban also stressed the fact that the UN currently only works with one kosher food supplier, which prevents any sort of competition and allows said supplier to charge 40% more than other, non-kosher suppliers when catering a UN event. For this reason, Danon asked that the UN begin working with additional kosher companies.

Danny Danon (L) and Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Avi Dudi)

Sources in the UN said there is a good chance that Danon's request will be granted. Over the last few years, the UN has begun relenting under consistent Israeli pressure, agreeing, for instance, to make Yom Kippur an official holiday in the UN. Additionally, this year Danon celebrated the very first seder for UN ambassadors and invited the representatives of over 70 countries to the Broadway show "Fiddler on the Roof."
The Knessets Constitution, Law and Justice Committee debates a bill on Tuesday that aims to define any organization that spends over 100,000 shekels in an effort to influence the general elections as an active participant in the elections.

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The bill, proposed by MK Yoav Kish (Likud) as well as other MKs, was specifically meant to target the V15 organization, whose stated goal was to replace then and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While the attempt did fail, the organization was nevertheless accused of trying to bypass the Political Parties (Financing) Law, which caps the amount of money a political party can spend and receive in donations that goes toward the elections.





Likud MK Yoav Kish (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

Referring to the Political Parties (Financing) Law, State Comptroller representative Mira Razin said, The issue definitely needs some sorting out. The State Comptroller has been tasked with implementing this law, so it is important to word it in a way that allows us to do so.

Kish himself defended the bills aim to protect a fair election process without trampling on individual rights. This bill carefully moves without harming freedom of speech. We need to separate calling out for or against a certain party and doing the same for an idea. The bill will only take effect for the three months prior to the elections. He added that under said bill, An organization that will seek to identify a group of potential voters and decide to drive them and only them to the polls will be seen as having a partisan identity.

Opposition members were vehemently opposed to the plan. This bill has one goalto keep the Likud in power, said MK Michal Rozin (Meretz). The government wishes to legislate what civilian bodies can and cannot say. It raises critical questions: the womens lobby Women Choose Women would be banned under it. The right-wing government has made narrowing an ideology of equality, peace and alternative policy, in addition to shutting up anyone voicing criticism, a major target of theirs.

Meretz MK Michal Rozin (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

Zionist Union MK Yoel Hasson

MK Yoel Hasson (Zionist Union) also came out against the bill. Theyre trying to stop the Israeli public from voicing their opinions. There isnt a more appropriate mechanism in a democratic country than calling on the public to go vote in order to change their leadership.
India strongly responded to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

By India Today Web Desk: India rubbished Pakistan's claims made at the United Nations General Assembly on Kashmir and said that Pakistan itself glorifies terrorism.



MJ Akbar, Minister of State for External Affairs addressed a press conference late Wednesday night after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif raked up the Kashmir issue at the United Nations in New York.

Responding to Nawaz Sharif's speech, MJ Akbar said "Pakistan at the moment seems to be run by a war machine rather than a government," adding "talks and guns don't go together."

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HERE IS WHAT AKBAR SAID



Burhan Wani is a self-declared commander of Hizbul. The Pakistan Prime Minister today glorified terror.

The glorification of terror by Pakistan PM was self incrimination.



The world also knows that Pakistan has indulged in ethnic cleansing of its own people.

We have not yet seen the first mile (being made by Pakistan), where is the question of the extra mile.

INDIA REACTS



Soon after Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif spoke at the UNGA on Wednesday and raked up the Kashmir issue, calling Burhan Wani a "young Kashmiri leader", India strongly responded.

Vikas Swarup, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, tweeted a series of tweets slamming Nawaz Sharif's comments.

"PM Sharif at UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. India's only condition is an end to terrorism. Is this not acceptable?" Swarup asked.

In another tweet, he said "Pakistan PM Sharif glorifies Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani in UN's highest forum. Shows continued Pakistan's attachment to terrorism."

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday at the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York asserted that foreign forces are trying to destabilise Pakistan. He again raked up the Kashmir issue and said that peace between India and Pakistan is not possible without resolution of the 'Kashmir issue.'



Sharif accused India of putting "unacceptable" conditions on dialogue with Pakistan and said the world would ignore the dangers of rising tensions in South Asia at its own peril.



HERE ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS OF SHARIF'S SPEECH

In many countries the ghost of intolerance has revived xenophobia and Islamophobia.



World still turbulent and chaotic.

No peace when injustice prevails.

My government has moved Pakistan towards robust growth.

We will not allow foreign forces to destabilise the development of Pakistan.

Pakistan itself is a victim of external terrorism.

Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces has emerged as a symbol of latest Kashmiri 'Intifada.'

Peace between Pakistan and India not possible without resolution of Kashmir.



We have gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues.

India posed unacceptable pre conditions to engage in dialogue. Talks are no favour to Pakistan,they are in interest of both countries.

This is an objective evaluation not a partisan position. Our predictions have now been confirmed by events



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Speaking to the annual United Nations General Assembly, Sharif also said Pakistan could not ignore India's "unprecedented" arms build-up and would "take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence."



7 humiliations Pakistan and Nawaz Sharif has faced in last 24 hours US Secretary of state John Kerry to Nawaz Sharif: 'Stop harboring terror' Kashmir issue blocked from United Nations General Assembly China hints that terrorism is threatening China-Pakistan economic corridor India and Afghanistan may boycott SAARC summit in Pakistan in November Baloch leader Brahamdagh Bugti wants asylum in India Pakistan's chief justice: All Pakistan parties support terrorism

Nervous Pakistan braces for 'Indian response'; many flights cancelled, highways shut for fighter jets



--- ENDS ---
New York  US President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations on Wednesday in what is likely their last meeting before Obama leaves office in January.

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At the start of their meeting on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly, Obama told reporters the United States still hoped to help pave a path to Israeli-Palestinian peace. He added that the conversation would bring up Syria and the condition of the West Bank.

Before the meeting, White House advisor Ben Rhodes said that the president would express his concern over construction in the West Bank and clarify that he would not launch a new peace initiative before leaving office.

Obama said a $38 billion US military assistance deal for Israel would ensure that Israel's military has the full capabilities it needs during a time of great uncertainty.

Obama says Netanyahu has "always been candid" with the US.

Obama addressing UN Wednesday

X

The president did not press Netanyahu over Israeli settlement construction as reporters were allowed in briefly for the start of their meeting. Despite this, a US official did add that Obama raised the "corrosive" effect that the settlements have on the peace process.

Netanyahu says Israelis will never give up on the goal of peace. He says Obama will continue to be an influential voice after he leaves office.
Israeli chicken farmers have announced that despite plenty of chickens available for slaughter, the upcoming Jewish holidays will reduce the number of days on which to do so, and so there may be shortage over the holidays as a result.

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The country experienced a poultry shortage last week due to the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which the Muslim slaughterhouse workers had off. Now, with the approaching Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, the shortage of chicken is expected to continue.

Chickens in coops (Archive photo: Amir Levi)

In a press release, the Israeli Poultry Farmers' Association recommended that consumers plan ahead and buy frozen chicken or buy turkey instead, of which there is an abundance.

The association's secretary, Motti Elkabetz, explained that the Jewish holidays' falling this year on weekdays has led to the problem. "The farmers and the sellers are doing everything they can to augment the supply of chicken, turkey and eggs for the holidays and the work days between them, but there apparently won't be enough fresh chicken," he said.
The United States and Russia abandoned diplomatic niceties Wednesday in a fractious public debate over Syria, blaming each other for spoiling the country's cease-fire and offering only temporary patches to stem the bloodshed. Secretary of State John Kerry called for all warplanes to halt flights over aid routes, while Russia's chief diplomat spoke of a possible three-day pause in fighting.

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In a UN Security Council session originally envisioned to enshrine Syria's Sept. 9 truce, world powers rued the possibility of a darker phase in the conflict amid increased attacks on humanitarian workers. The council's nations all sought to revive the US-Russian cease-fire deal, but once again illustrated why they've been unable for more than five years to stop Syria's civil war.

The hit humanitarian aid trucks near Aleppo, Syria (Photo: AP)

"Supposedly we all want the same goal. I've heard that again and again," a visibly angry Kerry told the council. "Everybody sits there and says we want a united Syria, secular, respecting the rights of all people, in which the people of Syria can choose their leadership. But we are proving woefully inadequate in our ability to be able to get to the table and have that conversation and make it happen."

US Secretary of State John Kerry (Photo: Reuters)

While the US and Russia have previously butted heads over several proposed resolutions critical of the Syrian government, Wednesday's agenda didn't even include a suggested course of action. Instead, the two-hour discussion served as a warm-up act for a Thursday meeting blocks away in New York that will include Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their counterparts from more than a dozen European and Arab countries.

Kerry blamed Russia, lambasting what he portrayed as a cynical response to an airstrike on a humanitarian aid convoy this week that killed 20 civilians and raised "profound doubt" about Russia and Syria's willingness to abide by the cease-fire. The US believes with very high degree of confidence that a Russian-piloted aircraft carried out the strike, said a senior American official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.

Russia has denied US claims that it was responsible, but Kerry focused on its shifting explanation of what might have happened.

First, Kerry said, Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary described the attack as a "necessary response" to an alleged offensive by al-Qaida-linked militants elsewhere in the country. Then, a Russian ambassador said forces were targeting another area.

Russia's Defense Ministry followed by saying the aid convoy was accompanied by militants in a pickup truck with a mortar, Kerry said, adding that no such evidence exists. Then, the ministry denied any Russian or Syrian involvement as its spokesman suggested, in Kerry's words, that "the food and the medicine just spontaneously combusted."

"This is not a joke," Kerry exclaimed, urging all to stop the "word games that duck responsibility or avoid the choices ... with respect to war and peace, life and death." His pleas crossed paths with another statement by Russia's government, this time suggesting a US coalition Predator drone was operating nearby when the convoy attack occurred. The Pentagon said no drone was in the area at the time.

It was one of Kerry's most bitter exchanges with Moscow as secretary of state, laced with invective and outrage.

But he also offered one concrete suggestion to revive diplomatic hopes: to ground all aircraft in key areas, focused on protecting aid routes in northern Syria. It was unclear if Russia and Syria would agree.

Kerry's words came immediately after Lavrov's own barbs, underscoring a breakdown in trust since the pair sealed the cease-fire agreement and potential US-Russian military partnership against ISIS and al-Qaida 12 days ago. Much of the international community hailed that outcome, only to watch it unravel amid an upsurge in violence that included an accidental U.S. strike that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers.

Lavrov, whose country has helped the Syrian government shore up its position, said the US bore the biggest responsibility for peace by separating opposition forces from terrorists. He called for the UN to expand its terrorism list to include groups at the fringes of a US-backed rebel umbrella group and called Washington's errant strike an "outrageous violation."

The Russian also cited a series of truce violations by US-backed rebel groups near the northern city of Aleppo. And in a not-so-subtle jab at Washington, he called Syria's conflict, as well as those in Iraq and Libya, the "direct consequence" of foreign military interventions and "political engineering."

Larvov and Kerry's speeches laid bare their widely divergent views of a war that has killed up to a half-million people, contributed to Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II and allowed the ISIS to emerge as a global terrorist threat.

Lavrov on Wednesday mentioned the possibility of a three-day period of "silence."

"We are at a make-or-break moment," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, opening the session.

His peace envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, described his long-delayed plans for a multi-step Syrian peace process and transition that appeared, even by his own admission, untethered to reality on the ground. Wednesday's latest violence included an airstrike in the north that killed five medical staff, according to a relief organization.

"I know, it looks like a dream," de Mistura said.
London  For London rabbi Julia Neuberger, Britain's vote to leave the European Union has had a very personal impact: She has decided to seek German citizenship, laying to rest her family's painful legacy of the Nazi era.

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Neuberger is among a significant number of Jewish Britons whose dismay over Brexit has led them to invoke a German law allowing people stripped of German citizenship by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, and their descendants, to have it restored.

Julia Neuberger with her grandmother's J-stamped passport (Photo: Reuters)

"It was Brexit that tipped me off, but now in my mid-60s I feel like I've made my peace with Germany and this step will only take me closer," said Neuberger, whose mother left Germany for Britain in 1937 to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Now, a German passport holds the promise of a future with full access to the EU and its practical benefits such as freedom to travel, live and work anywhere in a bloc that has 27 other nations - rights that Britons may no longer enjoy after Brexit is enacted.

Some of Britain's estimated 260,000 Jews remain implacably opposed to the idea, and for Neuberger too the decision to apply for German citizenship taps into deep emotional baggage due to the weight of history.

"My daughter asked 'why would you want to do this after all they did to us?'," said Neuberger, senior rabbi at the West London Synagogue and a member of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British parliament. "But there is some German in me after all and it goes very deep."

Neuberger, whose application is being processed, still has her maternal grandparents' old German passports. Their covers bear a black eagle with outstretched wings perched on a swastika, and the first inside pages are stamped with a red "J" for Jew.

It is a remarkable twist of history that Jews who lost family members in the Holocaust are now using such old documents to obtain modern Germany's maroon-colored passports.

Germany's Foreign Ministry said that since the Brexit referendum in June, the London embassy had received about 400 inquiries about how to apply for German citizenship under article 116 of the country's post-war Basic Law, and about 100 applications.

That compares with about 20 inquiries per year previously.

'Turn in her grave'

More than 17 million Britons voted on June 23 to leave the EU for a variety of reasons, including a desire to regain national control over immigration from the bloc.

However, a further 16 million voted to remain and many are anxious about the practical and symbolic consequences of leaving a union that was born out of a post-war determination to bring Europeans together.

Authorities in Dublin also reported a rush of citizenship inquiries from Britons of Irish descent after the referendum.

Like other British Jews seeking German citizenship, Neuberger intends to stay in Britain. She is one of a number of family members who have reached prominence in the nation's public life - her husband is a leading academic and her brothers-in-law include the president of the supreme court.

At a recent gathering of about 100 members of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) in London, called to mark the organization's 75th anniversary, discussion was dominated by the issue of whether to make an article 116 claim.

"The idea shocked many at first," said Michael Newman, 41, chief executive of the AJR. "We all don't know what the future will hold and want to make sure that we, but also mainly our children, continue to have access to Europe."

While it may be a mostly practical step for younger people, the emotional toll is much higher for older people who have vivid memories of their own escape or grew up listening to their parents' painful memories.

"When my son told me after the vote he'd apply I was horrified and said my mother would turn in her grave," said Frank Harding, who is in his 70s. His parents fled to England in the 1930s.

He said his son's decision initially felt like a betrayal of his parents, who boycotted German products and never allowed them in their house.

But he said he now understood his son's decision and thought it important for the younger generations to keep the door to Europe open. "It certainly is also a form of reconciliation, but I still haven't decided if I will apply myself," said Harding.

The AJR estimates that around 70,000 Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived in Britain before World War Two.

Austria has a similar law to Germany's article 116 but authorities in Vienna did not respond to requests for information about applications from Britain since the Brexit vote.

Numbers of article 116 applications from Jewish Britons could increase further. Many of the people interviewed by Reuters at the AJR meeting said they were waiting for the terms of Brexit to become clear before taking a final decision. Negotiations have yet to start and when they do, they are expected to last two years.

"I'm not sure people would have done this at any point under regular circumstances," said Anthony Grenville, an author and the son of Austrian refugees. "It took Brexit to push British Jews to consider this option."
OSAN AIR BASE, Republic of Korea  As part of the continuing demonstration of the steadfast United States (U.S.) commitment to the Republic of Koreas (ROK) defense, a U.S. Air Force B-1B strategic bomber flew from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, landing at Osan AB in the Republic of Korea, Sept. 21.

The bond between the United States and the Republic of Korea is ironclad and the strength of that commitment will not be shaken by North Koreas aggressive behavior, said Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Bergeson, 7th Air Force Commander. What we are showing today is just one tool we have to choose from a wide array of options. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region.

Lieutenant Gen. Lee Wang-Kuen, ROK Air Force Operational Commander, also stressed the importance of the Alliances commitment to the safety and security of the Korean Peninsula.

"The Korean Peninsula Faces a grave security crisis as a result of North Koreas 5th nuclear experiment along with its continued launching of SLBM and ballistic missiles despite the concerns of the International community, said Lee. The ROK-US Combined Air Forces, acutely aware of this climacteric situation, maintains a close information sharing and a robust combined operational capability. Should the enemy provoke us once again, the Combined Air Forces will respond and eliminate their will and capability to fight."

The B-1 Lancer is a four-engine supersonic variable-sweep wing, jet-powered heavy supersonic strategic bomber with Mach 2 speed. The aircraft is capable of carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the Air Force inventory. It can rapidly deliver massive quantities of precision and non-precision weapons against any adversary, anywhere in the world, at any time. The aircraft holds almost 50 world records for speed, payload, range, and time of climb in its class. The Lancers recently deployed to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.

The landing follows a flyover on Sept. 13 and military leadership said these are just the first steps in a further strengthening of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea.
Even though the cockpit of the WC-130J Super Hercules was sweltering in the Mississippi sun, actors Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson sat in the pilots seats, asking questions and reminiscing.

I havent sat in the cockpit of a plane with my dad since I was a little girl, Hudson said.

Hudson and Russell visited Keesler today along with director Peter Berg and several other crew members for a prescreening of their new film, Deepwater Horizon. The movie premiered in New Orleans Monday and will be released to the public in theaters Sept. 30. The film illustrates the tragic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that led to the 2010 BP oil spill. Keesler was a fitting choice for the prescreening because many of its neighbors along the Gulf Coast were affected by the oil spill. Free tickets to Deepwater Horizon were provided to military members and their families through the Army and Air Force Exchange Service. Berg, Russel and Hudson introduced the film and answered questions before the show.

Its important to support all branches of our military, Berg said. We owe so much to these men and women, and were honored to be here.

The group also had an opportunity to tour Keesler and learn more about the 403rd Wing and 81st Training Wing missions. They saw the air traffic control training simulator, watched a drill down demonstration and toured a static display of a 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Hurricane Hunters aircraft.

Its my first time on a military base and its incredibly eye opening for me, Hudson said.

After touring the inside of a WC-130J, Russell, Hudson and Berg posed for photos and answered questions from the crowd of Airmen whod gathered to meet them. They said they enjoyed watching the 336th Training Squadron perform its drill down and hearing about flying into hurricanes, and they thanked the Airmen for hosting them and for all they do.

"Visits like these from celebrities and other influential people not only boost morale, but also give us an opportunity to showcase our Airmen and our missions," said Col. Michael Manion, 403rd Wing commander.
Nazi newspapers, photographs, the center's founding act on parchment and two copies of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf Photo:AP

By AP: Nazi-era newspapers, coins, documents and copies of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" have been found in a "time capsule" that was buried in 1934 in the foundations of a Nazi training center, a Polish town official said Tuesday.

Explorers in Zlocieniec, in northwestern Poland, dug for the copper cylinder at the remains of the former Ordensburg center's foundations after learning it could hold a documentary movie showing celebrations of the town's 600 years, in 1933. At the time, the city was in Germany and was called Falkenburg.

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Sebastian Kuropatnicki, spokesman for Zlocieniec authorities said, that on Tuesday they were curious to see the movie and the town of the time.

When the container was opened on September 13, it held no film but did have the center's 1934 founding act on parchment, a letter from a local banker indicating the location for the center, as well as coins, photos and two copies of Hitler's book.

A video uploaded on Twitter shows all the contents of the time capsule laid out on a table



Kuropatnicki told The Associated Press that although the items document a "time of evil," they have value for the town's historians. Authorities are planning to organize a small museum using the items, but with a critical commentary on the Nazi ideology that led to World War II and the death of tens of millions of people.

Poland lost some six million citizens in the war, half of them Jews. After the war, borders were redrawn and Falkenburg became Zlocieniec.

--- ENDS ---
This has been a long time in the making, but in our continuing pursuit to bring only the best of firearms, 2nd Amendment and defence related news to our readers, we are very excited to announce the next step in our evolution as a company.

As of 2020, Minuteman Review is now the proud owner and operator of Your Defence News, a website with a long history of breaking huge news stories and investigative journalism.

We hope you are equally as excited as us.

This means that now the teams of Minuteman can combine with the firepower of Your Defence News to stay at the absolute forefront for our readers.

Keep an eye. Big things are coming soon. We couldn't be more excited.

In the meanwhile, here are some of our most popular posts and categories to keep you busy.

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A pregnant woman in Odisha died after being carried on the shoulder to the village health centre after failing to get an ambulance.

By Indrajit Kundu: A pregnant woman in Odisha died after being carried on the shoulder to the village health centre after failing to get an ambulance on Wednesday. 35-year old Saraswati nayak died on her way to the hospital carried on the shoulder by her husband for three kilometers.

Failing to arrange an ambulance in his village, her husband Santosh Nayak had to carry pregnant Saraswati on his shoulders after she complained of severe labour pain. A farmer from Nayagaon village, Nayak walked the entire distance to the medical centre with his wife writing in pain on his shoulder.

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However, soon after reaching the health centre, Saraswati was declared dead. Following his wife's death, Nayak staged a demonstration outside the district collector's office by placing the dead body infront of the office.

ALSO READ: Tribal man in Odisha had to walk 10 km carrying wife's body after being denied govt help

Seeing this, local villagers too came forward and joined Santosh in his protest demanding ambulance services in the village. Hours later, the district collector paid a compensation of Rs 10,000 to the bereaved husband after which Saraswati's body was taken for cremation.

EARLIER CASES

Earlier this month, a daily wage labourer from Rayagada district had to carry his ailing wife on the shoulder and walk for three kilometers to the local hospital after failing to get an ambulance in the village. Similarly, in August this year Odisha had hit the national headlines after Dana Majhi, a tribal villager in Kalahandi district carried his wife's dead body on the shoulder for more than 10 kilometers after being denied a hearse by the district hospital.

The incident caused widespread outrage across the country forcing the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) to seek a probe report from Odisha government about the incident. Terming the incident extremely "distressing, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had ordered an inquiry and sought stringent action against those responsible.

With Mohommad WasimOdisha again: Man forced to carry ailing wife to hospital on shoulder

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By PTI: Kolkata, Sept 21 (PTI) As part of its plans to connect more destinations in India, Oman Air would start operating from the city from early next year.

"We are expecting to start operating from Kolkata from early next year. We are waiting for the nod from the Civil Aviation Ministry and hopefully we will get it soon. Kolkata is a potential market and we will be happy to start our operations from this city," Oman Air Regional Vice President Sunil V A told PTI here.

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In fact, besides, Kolkata, Oman Air is also planning to start operations from Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu and Ahmedabad in Gujarat, he said.

Asked whether the commencement of the operations from the other two cities would be at the same time, the Oman Air official said, "Still the talks are on. The operations from these cities may start from the same time but we are surely going to operate from next year."

At present, Oman Air is operating from 11 destinations in India with 126 flights every week, offering onward connections to a number of European and African cities.

Elaborating about the operations from the city, the Oman Air official said, "From Kolkata it (the operations) will be double daily basis to all points in India. We are planning to have flights to Europe and African nations also.

"And with the number of people from West Bengal working in Oman we think there will be a good response. And we are bringing the flights here because lots of Omanis come to India for education, health check up."

Asked whether they have spoken to the state government, Sunil, who is part of a Oman Tourism delegation seeking to woo Indian tourists, said, "Once we finalise the operations we will have a word with them." PTI SCH MM MKJ

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As a homeowner, you probably already know that you should be working to maintain your home. But, chances are, you Read More
The suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, bought bomb components on eBay, made a video of himself testing out homemade explosives, and kept a journal expressing outrage at the US "slaughter" of mujahideen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, federal officials allege.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, is shown in Union County, New Jersey, US Prosecutor's Office photo released on September 19, 2016.

By Reuters: Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged the Afghan-born man suspected of weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey with 10 counts including use of weapons of mass destruction, portraying him as a jihadist who begged for martyrdom and praised Osama bin Laden.

The suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, bought bomb components on eBay, made a video of himself testing out homemade explosives, and kept a journal expressing outrage at the US "slaughter" of mujahideen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, federal officials allege.

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"Inshallah (God willing), the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death to your oppression," Rahami, who came to the United States at age 7, wrote in a journal he was carrying when arrested.

Rahami was apprehended on Monday in Linden, New Jersey, after a shootout with police that left him with multiple gunshot wounds. He was listed in critical but stable condition on Tuesday, and police had not yet been able to interview him in depth, New York Police Commissioner James O'Neill said.

Federal prosecutors from separate districts in New York and New Jersey charged him with four and six counts respectively.

In addition to leaving the bomb that exploded on Saturday evening in the Manhattan district of Chelsea that wounded 31 people, they allege he planted a pipe bomb on the New Jersey shore that injured no one when it exploded on Saturday morning.

He also is accused of planting another pressure-cooker bomb in Chelsea that failed to explode, and multiple devices at a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. One of those exploded as a bomb squad robot attempted to defuse it.

ACT OF TERRORISM

The charging documents and accompanying sworn statements from Federal Bureau of Investigation agents offer the first official explanation of what they believe to be the bomber's motive.

As the charges were made public, the White House for the first time said it appeared the attacks were an act of terrorism. Earlier in the investigation, officials had withheld such an assessment until they could discern a motive.

"It does appear this was an act of terrorism," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during a press briefing in New York City.

At least one victim in the Chelsea blast was knocked unconscious and another hospitalized to remove ball bearings from her body, metal fragmentation from her ear and wood shards from her neck, the charging documents say.

Surveillance video from the bomb scenes and fingerprints on unexploded devices also point to Rahami, according to the documents.

The three counts of using weapons of mass destruction, one from New York and two from New Jersey, each carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

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In addition to the federal charges, New Jersey state prosecutors from Union County have charged Rahami with five counts of attempted first-degree murder for firing at police officers and two second-degree weapons counts.

JIHADI JOURNAL

Other parts of Rahami's journal praise "Brother" Osama bin Laden; Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric and leading al Qaeda propagandist who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011; and Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

"I beg ... for shahadat (martyrdom) and inshallah this call will be answered," he wrote in a passage expressing concern about getting caught.

Video found on a family member's mobile phone dated two days before the bombings and taken near his home in New Jersey showed him lighting a fuse that ignited incendiary material packed in a partially buried cylinder.

An eBay account linked to Rahami a precursor chemical used in explosives, circuit boards and ball bearings that matched the explosives and remnants collected at the crime scenes, the documents said.

Investigators also traced mobile phones used in the bombs to Rahami and said he played jihadist videos from social media.

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PRIOR INVESTIGATION

Earlier on Tuesday Rahami's father said he had reported concerns about his son being involved with militants to the Federal Bureau of Investigations two years ago.

The FBI acknowledged it had investigated Rahami in 2014, but found no "ties to terrorism" and dropped its inquiry.

His father, Mohammad Rahami, briefly emerged on Tuesday from the family's restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, about 20 miles (30 km) west of New York City, telling reporters, "I called the FBI two years ago."

The FBI said in a statement that it began an assessment of the younger Rahami in 2014 based on comments his father made about his son after "a domestic dispute."

"The FBI conducted internal database reviews, inter-agency checks, and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism," the FBI said.

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Latest News

Washington, DC - The Department of State has designated Jund al-Aqsa (JAA) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which imposes sanctions on foreign persons determined to have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States. As a result of this designation, all property subject to U.S. jurisdiction in which JAA has any interest is blocked and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with JAA.

Jund al-Aqsa is a terrorist group in Northern Syria that primarily operates in Idlib and Hama provinces. Formed in 2012 as a subunit of al-Qaidas affiliate in Syria, al-Nusrah Front (ANF)  a State Department designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) group  JAA has since split and now carries out operations independently. However, despite the split it is still openly aligned with ANF. In March 2015, JAA launched two suicide bombings at checkpoints on the outskirts of Idlib. JAA also carried out the February 2014 massacre in the village of Maan in central Hama province, killing 40 civilians.

The imposition of sanctions by the United States against terrorists is a powerful tool. Todays action notifies the U.S. public and the international community that Jund al-Aqsa is actively engaged in terrorism. Designations of terrorist individuals and groups expose and isolate organizations and individuals, and result in denial of access to the U.S. financial system. Moreover, designations can assist or complement the law enforcement actions of other U.S. agencies and other governments.
Latest News

Washington, DC - Secretary Kerry met Monday with Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif to discuss our strong, long-term bilateral partnership and to build upon the U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue. The Secretary commended the Prime Minister for restoring macroeconomic stability to Pakistan over the last three years and expressed appreciation for Pakistans cooperation on climate change priorities.

The Secretary reiterated the need for Pakistan to prevent all terrorists from using Pakistani territory as safe havens, while commending recent efforts by Pakistani security forces to counter extremist violence. They also spoke about regional issues, including recent developments with regard to Afghanistan. The Prime Minister and Secretary Kerry expressed strong concern with recent violence in Kashmir -- particularly the army base attack -- and the need for all sides to reduce tensions.

Secretary Kerry also stressed the need for restraint in nuclear weapons programs. The Secretary praised Pakistan for hosting Afghan refugees for over 40 years and highlighted the importance of continued respect for humanitarian principles.
Latest News

Washington, DC - Theres an upcoming gotta-be-there trade show for your industry. Your company gets a form in the mail from a P.O. box in the Chicago area asking to confirm your address for a trade show listing. You or a staffer signs without giving it a second thought  until you get the surprise of a lifetime.

Thats because buried at the bottom of that routine-looking address confirmation was fine print stating that youve now agreed to pay a company youve never heard of $1,717 annually. Next comes a demand that you wire money to a Slovakian bank account. Businesses that resist the shakedown are threatened with extra charges, blemished credit, and lawsuits.

Thats the scam the FTC says Slovakia-based Wolfgang Valvoda, Susanne Anhorn and Construct Data Publishers (also doing business as Fair Guide) ran on small companies and nonprofit groups. A lot has happened procedurally since the FTC filed the case in 2013, but the good news for businesses is that a federal judge in Illinois entered a default judgment against the corporate defendant and stipulated orders against the individuals that close the book on this group of business directory scammers.

The defendants are banned from the business directory business for good and are prohibited from attempting to collect payment for any of their business directory listings. The order against Construct Data Publishers imposes a $7 million default judgment, including the transfer of $344,000 currently in the courts registry. The order against Valvoda and Anhorn imposes judgments of $2.1 million and $4.5 million respectively, which will be suspended upon payment of $200,000. Of course, if it turns out they misrepresented the state of their finances, the full judgment will become due.

But thats not the end of the story because the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois has indicted Mr. Valvoda on mail fraud charges.

The FTC has warned small businesses and nonprofits about variations on the directory scam, but the announcement is a reminder to mention it to your staff, especially those who answer your phone or open the mail. The best advice is to assume theres no such thing as a routine confirmation of an address, business listing, or office supply order. A signature on a form or even a perfunctory  and secretly taped  uh-huh on the phone can spin your company into a vortex of unauthorized charges and harassment.

An FTC brochure, Small Business Scams, explains the modus operandi of five B2B frauds and offers advice on in-house procedures to throw cold water on con artists. Pressed for time? Watch the Protecting Your Business from Fraud video for the need-to-know basics.
Yuma News

Yuma, Arizona - Aspiring entrepreneurs are invited to attend the following sessions at the Coworking Oasis, Yumas first coworking space! The Coworking Oasis is located on the second floor of the Main Library, 2951 S 21st Drive.

Tuesday, October 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th  1:00-3:00 p.m.

SBDC Mentoring

Counselors from the AWC Small Business Development Center (SBDC) will be onsite to provide evaluation and guidance. If you have an idea and dont know where to start, mentoring can help you fast-track your plans!



Wednesday, October 5th & 19th  1:00-3:00 p.m.

Online Business Video Training

Watch online webinars, video training, and resources covering a variety of business topics in the Coworking Oasis media center. To register, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



Monday, October 10th @ 5:00 p.m.

Meet-up Monday Entrepreneur Network

Meet with other entrepreneurs in the Coworking Oasis. Find out where you are with your small business goals!



Wednesday, October 12th & 26th  1:00-3:00 p.m.

Drop-In Job Help

Get help with online searches, resume writing, and other job search tools. Requests for specific topics can be e-mailed to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



Thursday, October 13th  5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

ASU Startup School  Stage 2 It All Starts with Ideas

This series of facilitated workshops by the Arizona State University (ASU) Entrepreneurship Outreach Network teaches entrepreneurs what they need to do in order to develop a successful venture. To register, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



Saturday, October 15th  10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Introduction to WordPress Workshop

Business Librarian Andrew Zollman shares tips for building a website in WordPress. Participants will create a basic webpage during the workshop. Space is limited to 12 people.



Thursday, October 27th  5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

ASU Startup School  Stage 3 Find your Customers

This series of facilitated workshops by the Arizona State University (ASU) Entrepreneurship Outreach Network teaches entrepreneurs what they need to do in order to develop a successful venture. To register, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



For more information, contact Andrew Zollman, Business Librarian, at (928) 373-6480 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . There is no charge to attend any program.



The Coworking Oasis was funded in part by the State Grants in Aid Program through the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records Agency.
Yuma News

Yuma, Arizona - Thanks to the new Prior-Prior Year policy (PPY), beginning with the 2017-2018 academic year, students will no longer need to wait until January to begin the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process. Thats because theyll be able to file the FAFSA using tax information from two years prior (2015 tax info) and will now be able to apply for FASFA starting October 1, 2016.

In the current college application cycle, students have had to wait until January of their senior year to submit for federal student aid. This deadline was poorly aligned with the college application calendar, creating obstacles for students trying to meet priority filing deadlines and resulting in less informed enrollment choices.

Benefits of PPY:

AUTO-FILL

More students will be able to use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool, which accesses their previously accepted IRS tax returns and auto-fills the FAFSA form, so fewer families will be vulnerable to making mistakes on their applications.

INFO READY

All students will have their prior prior tax information ready when applications for FAFSA open, giving them equal opportunity to be considered for all available funds.

FINISH EARLY

Students who are eager to choose their college and lock in admission with colleges who offer rolling admission decisions can finish early and have peace of mind.

To help students with FASFA, Arizona Western College will be hosting College Goal Sunday on Sunday, October 14 from 3pm-6pm at the AWC Downtown Center (1351 S. Redondo Center Dr. in Yuma). There will also be a College Goal on Friday, November 18 from 3pm-6pm at the AWC San Luis Center. These events are for all new and continuing students that are planning to attend ANY college during the 2017-2018 school year that would like FREE assistance in completing their FAFSA application.

Please visit www.azwestern.edu/enrollment/financial-aid for more information or to find the FASFA application.
Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business.
Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif is said to have talked to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who reportedly asked the Army chief to respond with full force in case of surgical strikes from India.

By Kaswar Klasra: In the wake of Uri attack, a rattled and jittery Pakistan has now resorted to rumour-mongering with reports doing the rounds in the country that India may go for surgical strikes in Pakistan.

READ: Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp



In the background of this intelligence report, Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif is said to have talked to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who reportedly asked the Army chief to respond with full force.



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Following are the actions which Pakistan has taken as of now: All of the air traffic/ flights from Islamabad to Northern areas have been cancelled Pakistan Air Force is on standby Pakistan has closed motorways at some places for all kinds of traffic. These are the sections where, in case of emergency or need, fighter jets can make emergency take-offs and landings.

NAWAZ AT UNGA

Nawaz Sharif spoke to General Sharif regarding the tensions with India in the wake of the Sunday terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir and it is believed that the two have discussed proposals that PM Sharif intends to make during his speech at the UN General Assembly for de-escalating the situation and moving to a dialogue on the Kashmir dispute.

READ: Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?



It said that they discussed the prevailing regional situation. Sharif is in New York to attend the UN General Assembly session.

This was the first conversation between the two since Sunday's terror attack on the Army camp in Uri that left 17 soldiers dead and pushed India-Pakistan relations to a new low.

BSF ON HIGH ALERT

BSF is on high alert after the troops witnessed increased "unusual" movement at the Rajasthan-Pakistan border near Ganganagar and Jaisalmer.

Last night heavy movement was seen at the border. We are alert and prepared. Though we can't ascertain if they are Pakistani Rangers or terrorists," said BSF IG BR Meghawal, Rajasthan Frontier.



URI ATTACK



The Uri incident was one of the deadliest attacks on Indian Army in recent years, as heavily-armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed.

Indias DGMO Lt Gen Ranbir Singh has said the four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings and that initial reports indicated that they belonged to Pakistan-based Jaish-E-Mohammed group.

READ: Uri attack: Bangladesh slams Pakistan, says will stand by India



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Sharif is poised to address the 71st UNGA session in New York later today.

While Pakistan has raised the Kashmir issue at the high-level segments of the General Assembly and other UN platforms in previous years, Sharif appears set to take an even more aggressive stand on Kashmir at the world body, having vowed in Pakistan to "emphatically highlight" the issue and the alleged human rights abuses by India.

Also Read:



Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

Exclusive: Has the Punjab Police learnt no lessons from terror attacks in Uri and Pathankot?

Days after Uri attack, suspicious bag found near Army unit in Pathankot

Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

10 terrorists gunned down in Uri after Pakistan violates ceasefire again



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After the brazen terror attack in Uri by Pakistan-backed terrorists, Rajya Sabha MP Rajiv Chandrashekhar has said that not just the US, even India should declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terror.

By Gaurav C Sawant: Rajya Sabha MP Rajiv Chandrashekhar has moved a private member's Bill asking for Pakistan to be declared a terror sponsor.

After the brazen terror attack in Uri by Pakistan-backed terrorists, the Independent MP has said that not just the US, even India should declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terror.

READ: Nervous Pakistan braces for 'Indian response'; many flights cancelled, highways shut for fighter jets



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The MP has also written to Prime Minster Modi asking the government to withdraw Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to Pakistan, which Pakistan has never reciprocated. "India should put curbs on trade and ties with the country," he said.

"For too many years India now we have been too politically correct on how to Pakistan," Chandrashekhar told India Today.

"India should send strong message to Pakistan and even put an embargo on travel between the two nations," the MP said.

Pakistan should realise India has changed after the Uri terror strike, he added.



WATCH VIDEO





Also Read:

Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp

Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?

Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

Exclusive: Has the Punjab Police learnt no lessons from terror attacks in Uri and Pathankot?

Days after Uri attack, suspicious bag found near Army unit in Pathankot

Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

10 terrorists gunned down in Uri after Pakistan violates ceasefire again



--- ENDS ---
Maharashtra Women and Child development Minister Pankaja Munde today called on former deputy chief minister Chhagan Bhujbal who is admitted in the JJ hospital.

By Kamlesh Damodar Sutar: Maharashtra Women and Child development Minister Pankaja Munde today called on former deputy chief minister Chhagan Bhujbal who is admitted in the JJ hospital. Bhujbal is currently lodged in the Arthur road jail in an alleged money laundering case.

Bhujbal was admitted in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) of the JJ hospital on September 17, after he complained of weakness and headache, and was diagnosed with viral fever when prison doctors examined him.

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PANKAJA-BHUJBAL CONNECTION

Pankaja's visit to Bhujbal in hospital has raised eyebrows as the visit comes at a time when Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is in the US on an official tour. Both Pankaja and Bhujbal hail from the OBC community. Pankaja's father and senior BJP leader Gopinath Munde and Bhujbal shared a good rapport and shared similiar views OBC community upliftment.

Political observers also feel that the visit could be an attempt by Pankaja to send across a message at a time when she feels cornered in her party. The meeting also gains significance on the backdrop of huge rallies by the Maratha community to demand reservations and scrapping of the Atrocities Act.

"Both Munde and Bhujbal shared the common ideology of OBCs. Gopinathji had high regards for Bhujbal as a mass leader of the OBCs."said a close aide of Pankaja Munde about the visit.

NCP's VIEW ABOUT THE VISIT

The NCP took this opportunity to pinch the BJP. "Pankaja perhaps feels that injustice has been meted out to Bhujbal. She should now raise the matter with the Chief Minister, "said NCP Spokesperson Nawab Malik.

Pankaj spend over 20 minutes with Bhujbal where she inquired about his health.

--- ENDS ---
Tripoli: Islamic State group marriage contracts unearthed by pro-government forces battling the group in Libya reveal that the jihadists offered their brides unusual dowries: machineguns and explosive belts.

Forces allied with the country`s unity government discovered the archives as they searched buildings seized during their months-long battle to oust IS from its coastal bastion of Sirte.

The documents belonged to the jihadists` "Judicial and Complaints Department".

Published on pro-government forces` Facebook pages, they include marriage contracts and divorce rulings without any real name or personal information.

In one example from November 31, 2015, Abu Mansour, a Tunisian born in 1977, married a Nigerian called Miriam, in the presence of Sudanese and Malian witnesses.

In contrast to Islamic norms, Abu Mansour did not pay a dowry but vowed to pay compensation in the event of his death or the marriage being dissolved -- in the form of an explosive belt.

Fatima, from Nigeria, was promised a Kalashnikov assault rifle in case of divorce or if her husband, Malian Abu Said, died.

IS jihadists took over Sirte in June 2015 and imposed a reign of terror including executions in public squares.

They patrolled the streets in 4x4s to ensure that men were observing prayer times and women were not venturing out alone.

Forces allied with Libya`s Government of National Accord launched an offensive on May 12 to retake the port city that was the home town of late dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

They cornered the jihadists in a small area in central Sirte but were slowed down by snipers and suicide bombings that have killed some 450 pro-government fighters.
Chatlotte: Tensions flared in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday after police fatally shot a 43-year-old black man who they said was armed with a gun when officers approached him in the parking lot of an apartment complex.

Several hundred people gathered after dark near the site of the shooting to protest against the death of Keith Lamont Scott, with some throwing water bottles and wielding large sticks as they faced off against police in riot gear.

A few hours earlier, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said officers were at the apartment complex searching for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott get out of his vehicle with a firearm.

Officer Brentley Vinson fired his weapon and struck Scott, who "posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers," the department said in a statement.

Vinson, who joined the Charlotte police force in July 2014, is black, according to the department. He has been placed on paid administrative leave.

The fatal shooting came amid an intense national debate over the use of deadly force by police, particularly against black men.

Police did not immediately say if Scott was the suspect they had originally sought at the apartment complex. WSOC-TV reported that he was not.

Detectives recovered the gun Scott was holding at the time of the shooting and were interviewing witnesses, police said.

Protesters and Scott`s family disputed that the dead man was armed. Some family members told reporters that Scott had been holding a book and was waiting for his son to be dropped off from school.

Shakeala Baker, who lives in a neighboring apartment complex, said she had seen Scott in the parking lot on previous afternoons waiting for his child. But on Tuesday, she watched as medics tended to Scott after he was shot, she said.

"This is just sad," said Baker, 31. "I get tired of seeing another black person shot every time I turn on the television. But (police are) scared for their own lives. So if theyre scared for their lives, how are they going to protect us?"

Charlotte police said on Twitter that about a dozen officers were injured during Tuesday`s night protest, with one getting hit in the face with a rock. The agency`s "civil emergency unit" was deployed to disperse the crowd, and reporters saw tear gas being used.

Video footage showed demonstrators kicking out the windows of a police squad car and social media posts reported several vehicles were damaged during the protest.

The crowd swelled to about 500 people at about midnight on Tuesday. Several people suffered non-life threatening injuries, media reported.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts urged for calm.

"The community deserves answers and (a) full investigation will ensue," she said on Twitter, adding in a subsequent post, "I want answers too."

About 200 people gathered earlier Tuesday night for a peaceful protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a white officer killed an unarmed black man last week in an incident captured on police videos.

Lawyers for the family of Terence Crutcher, 40, disputed that he posed any threat before he was shot by Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby after his sport utility vehicle broke down on Friday.
Rio de Janeiro: Brazil`s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption and money laundering charges over an alleged scheme at the state oil company, Petrobras.

Judge Sergio Moro, who is overseeing Operation Car Wash, the investigation into corruption allegations at Petrobras, said there was sufficient evidence of Lula`s responsibility.

Judge Sergio Moro, who has overseen the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation into bribery and kickbacks at Petrobras and other major corporations must now assess allegations that Lula accepted 3.7 m reais (USD 1.1m) in bribes, reports the Guardian.

Lula, who has denied the accusations, has claimed that it is an attempt to prevent him from running in the next presidential elections in 2018.

The trial will take place in the city of Curitiba and comes amid a period of intense political and economic turmoil, which has been exacerbated by the two-year Lava Jato investigation.

Lula had already been charged in August with allegedly obstructing investigations.
New York: The Sikh-American, who helped police capture the man wanted for the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey, said he feared he might have been mistaken as the perpetrator because of the misconceptions about his faith.

Harinder Singh Bains, 51, said he does not like being called a hero for accurately identifying 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born American man behind the bombings.

Asserting that he is "what America looks like," Bains said he did what any other American would have done.

"When I heard about the attacks and realised the suspect was sleeping in a doorway across the street, I did what any American would do. I called the police. I'm not a hero. The police are heroes; the EMTs are heroes; everyone who is working to bring New York and New Jersey together today is a hero," Bains, who owns a bar in Linden, told reporters.

He said as a Sikh-American, he understands that "I could have been mistaken for the perpetrator. My faith teaches me justice and tolerance for all and I know that I'm lucky to live in a community that shares this view."

Bains, who had emigrated from Chandigarh in 1996, stressed that after any attack, Americans should target people based on evidence of their role in the crime and not because of their faith or their country of origin or their accent.

"I came to this country from India 20 years ago to create a better life for my family. I am a father of four and a proud American citizen. I am also what America looks like," he said.

Bains said America is strongest when all Americans stand together in the face of violence "intended to divide us."

On the morning of September 19, Bains unlocked the door of his deli when he noticed Rahami sleeping in a vestibule next to a tavern across the street.

He later recognised Rahami's face from television reports following the failed attacks and contacted police.

When police arrived, Rahami allegedly shot an officer in the abdomen and began a shoot-out with police that led to his arrest.

Bains had earlier said he thought Rahami "looked very familiar" and "exactly" like the "guy" whose picture is being shown on TV channels.

"I kept wondering is he the same guy," Bains has said adding he then asked a friend of his who visited him that Rahami looked exactly like the person whose pictures were being circulated by law enforcement agencies in connection with the bombing.

Bains then called the police but didn't not immediately tell them that Rahami was in front of his store.

He initially told the police that there is a "guy in front of his bar who looks a little suspicious and does not look good to me" and that the police should come and check.

The police then came within five minutes and all the while Bains kept an eye on Rahami as he had a strong feeling he is the same person wanted for the bombings.

"I'm just a regular citizen doing what every citizen should do. Cops are the real heroes, law enforcement are the real heroes," Bains has said.
Washington: A restaurant owner in the US, who had put up a "Muslims get out" sign outside his eatery as he was upset over the recent stabbing in Minnesota, has been invited to a mosque to learn more about Islam and the Muslim community.

Dan Ruedinger, the owner of the Treats Family Restaurant, has said that he had put up the controversial sign because he was upset over the stabbings at a St. Cloud mall in Minnesota.

A man making "some references to Allah" stabbed and injured eight people in the shopping mall, before being shot dead by an off-duty officer.

"We are not targeting the Muslims in general, just the extremists," Dan Reudinger has said. "That's all I can say. It's my right and I'm going to stand up, and I wish more people would do it," CBS Minnesota reported today.

Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota (CAIR-MN), plans to invite Ruedinger to a mosque in Faribault.

CAIR-MN hopes a meeting with local Muslims will change the business owner's view of the state's Islamic community, it said.

"Our experience has shown that interaction with ordinary American Muslims and enhanced knowledge of Islam are key factors in the reduction of Islamophobic attitudes," Hussein said.

Hussein also thanked community members of different faiths and backgrounds who demonstrated outside the Lonsdale restaurant and spoke out against the sign on social media.

Ruedinger's sign drew protesters. They said that while the business owner had the right to say what he wanted, his message reflected badly on the Lonsdale community.
Washington: Members of the US Congress have come down heavily on Sunday's cross-border terror attack from Pakistan on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

"I condemn the horrible terror attack against an Indian Army Base in Uri in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers," Senator Mark Warner (Democrat), Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus said in a statement.

"The terrorists who perpetrated this cowardly act must be brought to justice," he stated.

"I extend condolences to the family and friends of the Soldiers who lost their lives in the attack."

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group for the early morning attack on the sleeping soldiers. All the four attackers were killed.

Though the JeM is yet to claim responsibility for the attack, it had admitted to its role in the cross-border attack on the Pathankot Indian Air Force base on January 2 this year that left seven Indian security personnel dead.

Congressman Ted Poe (Republcian), Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non Proliferation and Trade, described the attack as "the deadliest assault" in Kashmir in over two decades.

"It is a reminder to democracies the world over that terrorism seeks to destroy peace loving societies everywhere," Poe said in a statement.

Stating that though it was not clear which terrorist group was behind the attack, he said one things was certain: "This is just the latest consequence of Pakistan's longstanding irresponsible policy of supporting and providing operational space for all stripes of jihadi terrorist groups. Pakistan's reckless behavior in this regard is a serious security risk to its neighbors - and India unfortunately pays the price all too often."

Condemning the attack, "as well as Pakistan's support for many criminals like the ones who carried it out", Poe said that the US stood firm in its "commitment to our friends in India".

"A threat to democracy in India is a threat to democracy everywhere. And that's just the way it is," he said

In his statement, Senator Tom Cotton (Republican), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Airland, described the attack as "a cowardly act, one that deserves the strongest condemnation".

"I extend my condolences to the Indian government and to the families of the fallen," he said.

"The United States and India share a vital interest in defending our democracies from the threat of radical Islamic terrorism," Cotton said.

"Both our nations must commit fully to deepening our security partnership so that radical jihadists are defeated and stability in the region is maintained."

Condemning the attack, Congressman Pete Sessions (Republican), Chairman of House Rules Committee, said: "We will not let these attacks affect our united fight against terrorism."

In his statement, Congressman Brad Sherman (Democrat), Ranking Member of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, said that the attack was "yet another reminder of the threat international terrorism poses".

"I strongly encourage the governments in the region to make every effort to find the terrorists that carried out these attacks and bring them to justice," he said.

"The United States should continue to assist these governments and ensure they can eliminate terrorist threats."
District of Columbia: Twelve officers have been injured during continuing protests in a North Carolina city sparked by the fatal police shooting of an African-American man, officials said on Wednesday.

Demonstrators gathered late Tuesday near an apartment complex in the city of Charlotte where the shooting occurred, carrying signs that read "Black Lives Matter" and chanting "No justice, no peace!" local television reported.

Media reported that several hundred people gathered to protest after the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, who was reported to be African-American as was the officer who killed him.

"Approximately 12 officers injured. One officer hit in face with a rock," read a tweet posted by the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Department.

A separate police department tweet said the officers were "injured tonight working to protect our community during demonstration."

News reports said an unspecified number of civilians have also been injured.

WSOC-TV reported that police donned riot gear and used tear gas as they tried to subdue the angry crowd, which authorities said attacked and damaged several police cars. The standoff continued, with dwindling numbers, into the early hours of Wednesday.

News reports said the officer involved in the shooting, Brentley Vinson, has been put on paid leave.

The television station said Vinson and other officers were searching for a suspect on an outstanding arrest warrant.

Police encountered Scott -- who was not the person they were seeking -- in a car parked at the building.

Officials said he had a firearm, which is not illegal under local law. A confrontation ensued and police, who said they felt threatened by Scott, opened fire and killed him. News reports gave his age as 43.

The dead man`s relatives, interviewed by local media, said he was not carrying a gun but instead was holding a book in his hands when he was gunned down.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm.

"The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue," she wrote on Twitter.

"Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together."
New Delhi: Even as the Modi government mulls over options to tackle its belligerent neighbour, Pakistan has opened a new front against India.

With just hours to go for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's address to the UN General Assembly, Pakistan's permanent representative to UN Maleeha Lodhi told reporters in New York that Pakistan's nuclear program cannot be restricted.

Lodhi revealed that US Secretary of State John Kerry, during his meeting with Sharif, asked Pakistan to limit its nuclear program. In response, Sharif told Kerry that India should also implement the suggestion.

"The world should first put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India," Lodhi said.

Pakistan Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif, who was consulted by PM Sharif, before he boarded the plane to New York, had on Monday, met his top commanders and said the military was watchful towards the security imperatives of the country in the wake of hostile narrative by India.

Taking note of a hostile narrative being propagated by India, COAS (Gen Sharif) said that we are fully cognizant and closely watching the latest happenings in the region and their impact on the security of Pakistan, the statement said.

Armed forces of Pakistan are fully prepared to respond to the entire spectrum of direct and indirect threat, he said, expressing his satisfaction over operational preparedness of the army.

Pakistans armed forces together with our resilient nation have surmounted every challenge and will thwart any sinister design against integrity and sovereignty of Pakistan in future as well, Gen Sharif said during the meeting.
Beijing: Voicing concern over the "strains" in Indo-Pak ties after the Uri terror attack, China today appealed to the two countries to exercise "restraint" and engage in more dialogue to "properly" deal with disputes while remaining committed to regional peace and stability.

"Recent violent clashes and attacks caused some casualties and strains in India-Pakistan relations," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told media briefing here.

"We are concerned about that. We hope all relevant parties can exercise restraint and avoid escalating tensions," he said about the Sunday attack on an army camp at Uri in Kashmir in which 18 soldiers were killed and several injured.

He was replying to a question about India's charge that the Uri incident was a cross border terrorist attack from Pakistan, and Islamabad's allegation that New Delhi is trying to divert attention from tensions in Kashmir.

In a guarded reply, Lu said "regarding counter terrorism our position is consistent. We oppose all forms of terrorism and believe in enhanced international cooperation to deal with this threat" and safeguard peace.

"Both India and Pakistan are important regional countries and we hope they have more dialogue and properly deal with disputes and remain committed to peace, stability and security of the region," he said.

This is the second time China reacted to the Uri attack.

On September 19, Lu appealed to India and Pakistan to have dialogue and consultation to resolve their differences and "enhance counter terrorism cooperation".

"Only this way can they safeguard peace," he said.

About today's meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Foreign Ministers in New York on sidelines of UN General Assembly - where they called for early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against terrorism, Lu said BRICS countries met to discuss international and regional issues of common interest including the convention on terrorism.

"We believe BRICS will work together and follow this consensus and push forward our common goals," he said.
Cardiff: Khan of Kalat Amir Ahmed Suleman Daud (Balochistan leader in exile) on Wednesday called Pakistan a rogue state.

While lambasting Pakistan, the Baloch leader said Islamabad should be taken to task for its actions.

Exposing Pakistan's atrocities, Khan of Kalat Amir Ahmed Suleman Daud, revealed that not a day passes without Pakistan Army killing Baloch people or burning their homes and property.

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the to human rights violations in Balochistan and the part of Kashmir that Pakistan controls, Baoch leaders in exile have strongly come forward and hit out at Islamabad.

Pakistan's illegal occupation of Balochistan has gained international attention after Prime Minster Narendra Modi mentioned about the struggle of Balochi people during his Independence Day speech from the ramparts of Red Fort on August 15.

Stepping up its offensive against Pakistan on the Balochistan issue at the UN Human Rights Council, India last week said Pakistan is a nation that practises terrorism on its own people and the sufferings of the people of Balochistan are a telling testimony in this regard.

Notably, Days after PM Modi highlighted the Balochistan issue, public broadcaster Prasar Bharati on Friday launched a website and mobile app for All India Radio's Balochi service to reach out to the people who speak the language across the globe.

Notably, Baloch nationalist leader Brahumdagh Bugti, who is the president of Baloch Republican Party (BRP) that is seeking independence for the troubled Pakistani province, has "discussed the terms of asylum in India" with Indian diplomats in Geneva.

Grandson of Baloch leader and Bugti tribe head Nawab Akbar Bugti, Brahumdagh fled Balochistan to save his life after Akbar Bugti was killed in a Pakistan Army offensive in 2006.

He was first given asylum in Afghanistan from where he shifted to Switzerland in 2010.
By PTI: From Sajjad Hussain

Islamabad, Sep 21 (PTI) Pakistans national flag carrier PIA today cancelled flights to northern Pakistani cities due to "air space restrictions" in the wake of Uri terrorist attack.

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) called off flights to Gilgit and Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan- occupied-Kashmir (PoK) and Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

"As per directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the air space over Northern areas will remain closed on Wednesday. Inconvenience regretted," PIA spokesperson Danyal Gilani said on Twitter.

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He did not give any reason for closure of air space but officials said that Pakistani warplanes might be in the air to keep vigil due to Indo-Pak tensions after the Uri attack.

Eighteen soldiers were killed and over a dozen others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the Indian Army in North Kashmirs Uri town early Sunday.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army. PTI SH SUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
Islamabad: Amid escalating tension with India after a deadly terror attack, Pakistan on Wednesday imposed "airspace restrictions" and cancelled all flights to northern areas, including parts of Kashmir under its control.

"As per the directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the air space over Northern areas will remain closed on Wednesday. Inconvenience regretted," Danyal Gilani of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) tweeted.

He said all flights to Gilgit, Skardu and Chitral in the Gilgit-Baltistan region were cancelled.

The spokesperson didn't elaborate why the CAA imposed the airspace restrictions.

But the Express Tribune suggested that Pakistan's warplanes may have been engaged in a takeoff and landing rehearsal at Chitral amid "threats from India".

This followed the Sunday attack at a military base in Uri - close to the de facto border that divides Jammu and Kashmir between the two countries.
Islamabad: Pakistan's national flag carrier PIA today cancelled flights to northern Pakistani cities, including to Gilgit and Skardu in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, due to "air space restrictions" in the wake of Uri terrorist attack.

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) called off flights to Gilgit and Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan- occupied-Kashmir (PoK) and Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

"As per directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the air space over Northern areas will remain closed on Wednesday. Inconvenience regretted," PIA spokesperson Danyal Gilani said on Twitter.

He did not give any reason for closure of air space but officials said that Pakistani warplanes might be in the air to keep vigil due to Indo-Pak tensions after the Uri attack.

Eighteen soldiers were killed and over a dozen others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the Indian Army in North Kashmir's Uri town early Sunday.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army.
Ramallah: A Palestinian court today delayed a ruling on whether to hold municipal elections, making it unlikely the first vote since 2006 to include both Fatah and Hamas will be held on time.

The high court postponed its ruling until October 3, only five days before the scheduled October 8 date for the elections.

Two weeks of campaigning are usually alloted for Palestinian elections and had been set to begin on Friday.

"The decision is postponed until the 3rd of October," said Hisham al-Hatoo, head of the Palestinian high court in the Fatah-led West Bank.

On September 8, the court suspended the elections following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists.

Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012, but it was due to participate this year.

Fatah and Hamas have not contested an election since 2006 parliamentary polls, which Hamas won -- sparking a conflict that led to near civil war in Gaza the following year.

This year's vote was planned with 81-year-old president Mahmud Abbas under heavy political pressure as opinion polls have suggested most Palestinians would like him to step down.

There has been no Palestinian presidential election since 2005 and Abbas has remained in office despite the expiry of his term.

Some analysts saw Abbas's decision to call the elections as a failed gambit since he may have been hoping Hamas would repeat its 2012 boycott.

Abbas is currently in New York ahead of his UN General Assembly address tomorrow.

Despite repeated reconciliation attempts, Hamas and Fatah have failed to bridge their differences and form a unified administration for the Palestinian territories.

The October vote was to choose municipal councils in some 416 cities and towns in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

It is seen by some analysts as a test of whether Hamas and Fatah can take a significant step towards reconciliation.
Jakarta: At least 10 persons were killed, three went missing and 30 injured as flashfloods and landslides struck West Java province in Indonesia overnight and Wednesday morning, a disaster agency spokesman said.

The flashfloods also left hundreds of people displaced in Garut district as water in two rivers overflowed due to heavy downpours, Xinhua news agency quoted Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman of the national disaster agency, as saying.

Eight people have been killed, 30 wounded and one has gone missing, he said.

In Sumedang district, landslides hit two houses, leaving two people dead and two others missing on Tuesday night, Sutopo said.

Search operations for the missing as well as emergency relief efforts are underway, involving soldiers, police, those from local disaster agency and search and rescue office.

Hundreds of affected people have been moved into government office buildings and military stations, Sutopo added.

Indonesia is frequently hit by floods and landslides during heavy rains.
Siwan: Mohammad Kaif, the alleged sharpshooter of controversial RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin, surrendered in a district court here on Wednesday after evading arrest in the case of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan's murder.

Kaif alias Bunty gave himself up before Chief Judicial Magistrate Arvind Kumar Singh and was sent to jail, Superintendent of Police Saurav Kumar Sah said.

Though policemen were present in the court premises, the accused dodged them and appeared in the CJM court which sent him to nine days judicial custody.

Kaif was evading the police dragnet in the murder of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan in May last. He was a suspect along with Mohammad Javed in the case.

However, he was seen in a photograph with Shahabuddin following the latter's release from Bhagalpur jail on September 10.

The Siwan police had on Friday last attached his property at Dakshin tola for not surrendering.

The CJM court had granted property attachment order on the police's request in the case of 'rangdari' (extortion) threat to a private engineering college.

A case of extortion was registered against Kaif and three others with Town police station last month.

Except for Kaif, the other three had surrendered on last Thursday.

Kaif's photograph with RJD supremo Lalu Prasad's son and state Health minister Tej Pratap Yadav last week had triggered a controversy.
Siwan: 'Shooter' Mohammad Kaif, a suspect in the murder of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan's murder, surrendered before the Siwan court on Wednesday, in an extortion case.

He was sent to 14 days judicial custody by the court.

On September 16, the police had attached Kaif's property, in connection with case of 'rangdari' (extortion) threat to a private engineering college

A posse of policemen had reached Kaif's house in Dakshin Tola and had executed the property attachment order of the court.

The process had been carried out in presence of his family members.

"Police initiated action of property attachment in accordance with the court order," Siwan Superintendent of Police Saurav Kumar Sah had said.

A case of extortion was registered against Kaif alias Bunty and three others with town police station last month, the SP had added.

Three others accused in the case have already surrendered but Kaif was on the run.

Siwan police had been on the lookout for Kaif ever since a photograph of his with RJD strongman Mohammad Shahbuddin surfaced in the media, after the latter left Bhagalpur jail.

Kaif is a suspect in the killing of scribe in May this year in Siwan and was reportedly absconding along with Mohammad Javed, another suspect.

The CBI has taken over the journalist's murder case.

(With PTI inputs)
Raipur: A CoBRA commando, who was critically injured in an encounter with the Naxals in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district last week, died at a private hospital here today.

Head Constable Uday Narayan Goud (41), belonging to CRPF's specialised unit Commando Battalion for Resolute Action's (CoBRA) 206th battalion, succumbed this morning at Ramkrishna Care Hospital in Raipur, a CRPF official said.

Wreath-laying ceremony of the jawan will be held at the police battalion camp at Mana in the outskirts of the capital at 4 PM, the official said.

Subsequently, the body will be sent by air to his native place in Buxar district of Bihar, he added.

The jawan had sustained bullet injuries in his stomach during the gun-battle with ultras which took place in the restive Karigundam forests under Chintagufa Police Station limits of Sukma on September 16 while they were returning after an area domination operation in the region.

Soon after the incident, he was airlifted to Raipur for the treatment.
New Delhi: Improving the quality of education is still a major challenge in the country, Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Wednesday.

"There are 270 million students in the country from KG to PG. But quality of education is still a major challenge," he said.

"India was a great power, it was one third of the world trade. But why was it one third of the world trade, because we had Nalandas, Taxilas and Vikramshilas, the great universities of the world at that time.

"If global rankings like QS or Times Ranking existed at that time, these universities would have got the top positions," Javadekar claimed.

"Therefore, those who attacked India destroyed its libraries, because this was its strength. The nation in which education is good along with research and innovation, is the one which is prosperous," he said.

The Britishers provided education to a limited class to serve their administrative purposes but did not want Indians to really learn, he said while speaking at 'Young Makers Conclave'.

About the IT sector in the country, the Union HRD minister said, "While India is called a software power, it is a limited software power. We do it, but we have not come up with Google, Windows, Twitter, Facebook etc which are doing huge business."

About the government's initiatives, Javadekar said that a Higher Education Financing Agency was being set up and he has held a meeting with Canara Bank officials in this regard today.

He also honoured Olympic medallists Sakshi Malik and Mary Kom at the event.

On the sidelines of the event, to a question on political violence in Kerala, Javadekar accused the "one way goondaism of CPM" for it and claimed that in its "draconian rule", nationalist BJP and RSS workers are being attacked.
Srinagar: With all educational institutions closed for nearly three months due to the ongoing unrest, Jammu and Kashmir State Board of School Education (BOSE) on Wednesday rescheduled the annual examination for class 10 and 12 in Kashmir division to November from October.

"In view of the prevailing situation, the BOSE has decided to reschedule the annual examination for class 10 and 12 in Kashmir division. The examination for both 10 and 12 classes will be conducted in second week of November instead the first week of October for 10th class and third week of October for 12 class," an official spokesman said, quoting a notification issued by the Board.

"We shall have to complete the process of conduct of examinations and declaration of results well in time so that the students can prepare for and appear in various competitive examinations, including NEET and JEE, for admission to various professional courses, both within and outside the state," Education Minister Naeem Akhtar said.

In a significant decision, the government has also decided to review the policy of 'No-Detention' at the elementary level to check the deterioration in the quality of education.

The state's education department has decided that, henceforth, State Institute of Education (SIE) would conduct T1 and T2 exams from class 5 to 9 with external evaluation, while BOSE would conduct T2 exam of class 11.

However, the evaluation for all these examinations would be supervised by SIE, while the cluster principals will supervise assessment, evaluation and remedial teaching, the spokesman said.

Meanwhile, the education minister today visited the historic Islamia Hanfia Educational Institute which was gutted in a mysterious fire incident at Lal Chowk in Anantnag district of south Kashmir.

Terming the incident as a "colossal loss" for the state in general and Anantnag in particular, he assured that the government would support reconstruction of the building in tune with its distinct heritage character.

Interacting with the school management and the locals, the minister expressed anguish over the extensive damage caused to the iconic nearly 100-year-old institute and said the it is not only one of the oldest educational institutions in South Kashmir, but also a cradle of learning which has produced some of the renowned literary giants from the area.

It is a matter of great concern for not only the government, but every right-thinking citizen of Kashmir that amid disturbances over the past couple of months several schools have gone up in flames especially in South Kashmir districts of Anantnag, Kulgam and Shopian, he said, adding a place like Kashmir "which has been an epicentre of intellectual and spiritual learning, cannot afford systemic educational disempowerment of its children".

Akhtar said the residents of this place shall have to "seriously ponder over what is going to be the future of our children, if they are forced to stay away from schools like this endlessly".

"The history is witness that even during wars, major conflicts and extended agitations across the world, education was never allowed to get disrupted," he said, adding, "While the affluent class can afford to send their children outside the state for schooling, it is only the middle class and the poor whose children are being denied the right to education in Kashmir".
Shillong: Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday asked the Directors and Chairmen of 20 Indian Institutes of Management to submit plans for expansion of their intake capacity from 10,000 to 20,000 students.

Javadekar`s instruction came during his meeting with the Directors and Chairman of the B-schools, which was held at the Indian Institute Management-Shillong campus on Tuesday morning.

"We have decided to increase the intake capacity of students from 10,000 to 20,000 so that more students will get an opportunity to take part in these best institutes. All (IIM) Directors have also narrated how they are ready for how much expansion and if there are problems they will mention it and submit action plans on expansion of students intake," Javadekar told journalists.

Apart from increasing the B-schools` intake capacity, the minister said, "The IIMs have also decided to expand (the number of) doctoral programmes (PhD programmes) to address the shortage of faculty through creating quality PhDs."

"We also discussed how to expand PhD programmes by offering IIM scholars more fellowships. As in Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) Council, we have decided to give Prime Minister Research Fellowship. We will also take government`s approval for Prime Minister`s scholarship for the best of the best PhD scholars in IIMs. But the final decision will be taken by the cabinet," he stated.

On Prime Minister Research Fellowship for IIT scholars, Javadekar said, "The IITs already have their own funding. Therefore, we also want to provide these benefits for IIM scholars, and necessary sanction will be given to this soon."

Javadekar said the IIMs would also participate in the new initiative of the government to make 20 world-class universities/institutes.

"The government will create world-class institutes -- ten in the government sector and ten in the private sector. Therefore, the IIMs should also prepare themselves because these world-class institutes will be decided finally by challenge mode," he said.

Asked whether any of the proposed world-class universities/institutes will be established in the northeastern states, the Union Minister said, "As I said, everybody will participate... As you know, after Modi became Prime Minister, the whole focus on northeast has increased not only in academic but in every sector. Therefore, this programme will be finalised and declared soon after cabinet approval."

The minister said that the IIMs will create content for the online course `SWAYAM` also.

On the shortage of teaching faculty in the IIMs, Javadekar said, "Unlike in the IITs where we have 30 per cent shortage of teachers, in IIMs it is not much. However, we have also discussed this in our meeting how to inculcate teachership in students, how to promote doctoral research programmes, how to expand it, and how to bring the best of Indian students studying abroad as faculty, which will also be worked out."

Asked if the government plans to have a reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Castes in teaching jobs at IIMs, all set up by the government, Javadekar said, "I do not know who started all this. It`s already in the Constitution, no one can bypass the Constitution. So reservation is already there."

Denying that educational institutions have turned into "hotbed of politics" in India bringing down the quality of education, Javadekar said that the main focus of students is still academics.

"That is why we started national ranking framework which is appreciated and this time will be expanded. So it is evaluating the institutes correctly so that a good national ranking framework (is developed) and we have brought our own national ranking framework and more importantly, we have found out that even in world/international ranking there is weightage of perception, (which) is nearly 40 per cent, perception about the institutes," he said.

He said the government has also decided to start an outreach programmes with alumni and Indian diaspora for their active participation, and to bring more foreign students/foreign faculties, more exchanges between India and foreign countries which would help in creating right perception about the Indian institutes and then we will get right place in international ranking also.

On disturbance in universities campuses, Javadekar said, "I think the collective wisdom will prevail ultimately. The campuses that used to get disturbed over the years are now more disciplined. I believe that collective wisdom prevails."
On Tuesday (September 20) in Delhi, a woman was stabbed 30 times to death by a stalker. In a country so far removed from the discourse of gender violence, how can one blame Amitabh Bachchan's Pink for being preachy?

By Devarsi Ghosh: A lot of people, though not enough to cause a dent to Pink's unavoidable all-round success, are miffed with Amitabh Bachchan's sanctimonious diatribe in the film on how men should understand that a woman's No means NO.







Those criticising Pink for being preachy, sentimental, over the top, and in general, for not being the subtle, sombre masterpiece that could live up to their tasteful standards are far and few. But every time, a 'message movie' is made in Bollywood, this gang pops up to remind us why these films are not really that good and that you are a bit stupid for liking them.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Pink

ALSO READ: Stalking will never stop in India, till Bollywood stops making films like Sultan and Raanjhanaa

They made noise after Udta Punjab's release, they buried the heavy-handed but timely 2016 film Shorgul, they trashed all of Rajkumar Hirani's films, and the next time a Bollywood director uses the commercial film space to make social commentary, they will do it again, because it is not the films they have a problem with, but the language of Bollywood cinema itself.







Herein comes a few questions that need to be addressed:

1. Does Bollywood cinema have different standards than those we set for Hollywood or Western cinema?

2. What is the definition of a well-made film and what is its criteria?

3. While making a socially conscientious film like Pink on such a divisive issue w.r.t Indian society as women's sexual rights, should the makers focus on making a cinematically advanced product or a film that gets the message across to the public?

4. Can a film like Pink, which is essentially a public service announcement masquerading as cinema, not be a 'cinematically advanced product'?

Bollywood films are known to be, and often derided, for being clumsy, melodramatic and illogical. Such criticism is infantile, because when one begins the sentence with "Bollywood films are...", one is suggesting that Bollywood is a genre in itself.







No, Bollywood films are those produced by the Bombay-based Hindi film industry. Indian films, starting from Dadsaheb Phalke's 1913 film Raja Harishchandra, have their roots in folk-theatre such as Jatra and Nautanki. Unlike Hollywood or Western dramas (melodramatic, song-and-dance oriented films are separately slotted as 'musicals'), which are relatively quieter, more sombre, and of course, subtler, Indian commercial films, regardless of the topic at hand, are loud and melodramatic to varying degrees.

And this bombastic cinematic language, that has come to be known as 'Bollywood-ish' over time, is one that the Indian public, from the ricksha-wala to the yuppie multiplex-goer, understands and is familiar with.

To make such a diverse crowd empathise with the perils of curbing your child's dreams (3 Idiots), of not engaging with politics as the country's youth (Rang De Basanti), of singling out dyslexic children and punishing them for no fault of their own (Taare Zameen Par), of drug-abuse (Udta Punjab) and of not seeing your fellow woman as an equal (Pink), the writer/director has to stay from Western cinematic sensibilities that will simply not work their way into the average Indian's brain.



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The eloquent, well-informed and refined critic is either clueless of the Indian pulse, or deliberately does not acknowledge its existence, or simply hates it. This is a country where Salman Khan and Rajinikanth are not just actors but 300-crore-star Salman Khan and Superstar Rajinikanth respectively. To hold somebody's collar in such a country, where people live hand-to-mouth and can barely pause to think about women's rights, and make him/her think is a task in itself.

As such, when Rajkumar Hirani (the Munna Bhai films and 3 Idiots), Sudip Sharma/Abhishek Chaubey (Udta Punjab), Aamir Khan (Taare Zameen Par) and Ritesh Shah/Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury (Pink) successfully do that, their efforts should be lauded instead of being dragged down to show their place by those full of their festival-film acumen.







In all likelihood, Hirani, Sharma, Chaubey, Aamir, Ritesh and Roy Chowdhury have seen more films than their detractors, and yes, they do know how to make films, which is why their work not only connects with a billion Indians, but also pushes them to think in the right direction.

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Neither filmmaking nor film criticism exists in a vacuum. Both the content and the treatment of Pink is a reaction to the society that encircles the film's makers and its intended audience. Therefore, film criticism cannot be responsible criticism without addressing the world in and for which a film like Pink has been made.

And what is this grouse against melodrama? Is it written in stone that melodrama makes a film bad? Some of the best films ever are astute exercises in the melodramatic form. Douglas Sirk's classic films Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959), address relevant '50s issues like class, gender, race while being melodramatic. Ritwik Ghatak, one of India's greatest filmmakers, used melodrama to drive home the brutal experience of Partition in his films. Some of the most commercially successful films of the world are melodramatic, like the 1997 film Titanic.







So, if an Amitabh Bachchan goes on a hammy rant against India's patriarchal and chauvinistic society in a courtroom sequence that is contrived in a way to help the film reach its intended conclusion without hiccups, isn't it an achievement on the filmmakers' part to have pulled it off so effectively?

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A Hirani or a Chaubey or a Roy Chowdhury can easily make money in a country like India by casting an Aamir, Shahid or an Amitabh in the middle of a headless-and-tailless plot. But they don't. They make what they make because they care. Perhaps, Pink writer Ritesh Shah said it best, while discussing this very issue, that "cynics find very ordinary motives behind our choices in films. They will never believe why we do what we do." Probably so.

(The writer tweets as @devarsighosh .)



--- ENDS ---
Ankara: A shooting took place outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara, a Turkish news agency said on Wednesday.

According to initial reports, a man wielding a knife was fatally shot at by the security officials deployed outside Israel's embassy in the Turkish capital.

The man allegedly tried to storm the embassy, the officials said.

However, no one at the embassy was hurt.

Local reports said that the Israeli staff took refuge as soon as the attack began.

Several embassies in Ankara were closed late last week amid reports of a possible militant attack.

Turkey has been caught up in a series of deadly attacks in the past year, by jihadist group Islamic State and Kurdish militant groups.
Junagadh: It is being said that a python can swallow a prey bigger than itself.

A similar incident was caught on camera when a 20-feet long python was seen swallowing a blue bull (Nilgai) in Junagadh district of Gujarat.

The authorities of the Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Junagadh, were informed about the python through a telephonic message by a farmer, who first noticed it.

"Python roams around the wildlife sanctuary and they could rarely be seen. We got a telephonic message of a farmer that a python has swallowed a big animal. We sent a rescue team immediately and found that a python has swallowed a blue bull," said Assistant Conservator of Forest SD Tilala.

Tilala said they would release the python soon after it digests the blue bull.

"It was 18-20 feet long. We have transported the animal to some other place so that it does not injure other people. We will keep it under observation. When it will digest the blue bill, we will release the python in the forest," he added.
Washington: A bipartisan group of two powerful American lawmakers has introduced an act in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a State Sponsor of terrorism.

"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is Ranking member of this influential Congressional Committee on terrorism.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe said.

"From harboring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he alleged.

Poe said the bill will require the Obama Administration to formally answer this question.

The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said.

"Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a State Sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," Poe said.

In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack.

"I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace," he said.

"I support every effort to find out who committed this heinous act, so that the perpetrators are brought to justice. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims," Olson said.

Senator John Cornyn, Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest stack in a decade.

Indian-Americans continued to call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.

"Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state," said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA.

"OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan," it said.
Mumbai: A man has filed an RTI asking the Ministry of Home Affairs whether the Indian government is prepared to face invasion by aliens, zombies, and extra-dimensional beings.

A copy of the query filed under RTI by Mumbai's Ajay Kumar has gone viral.

"I am concerned about the readiness of our government in the event of invasion by aliens, zombies and extra dimensional beings," he said in his RTI application.

"Can we do it without Will Smith?" 26-year-old Kumar wondered. Will Smith is a Hollywood actor who fights zombies in `I Am Legend` and faces aliens on Earth in the `Men in Black` franchise.

Responding to this, the Home Ministry has stated that the query refers to a "hypothetical situation" and therefore does not fall under its purview.

Here is the RTI copy:

The post was originally posted on Facebook by the page Yourti.in earlier this year, but went viral today.
Bhagalpur: The Examination Board of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TMBU) in Bihar today recommended cancellation of the law degree of former Delhi Law Minister and AAP MLA Jitender Singh Tomar, who was arrested on charge that his degree was fake.

The Examination board of the university found true the findings of an interim committee constituted earlier on Tomar's degree and recommended cancellation of the degree, Pro Vice Chancellor A K Rai told PTI.

The Board's recommendation would now go to University Senate for necessary action, Rai said.

If due to any reason the Senate, whose Chairman is state's Governor Ramnath Kovind, fails to meet, then the recommendation would go to Syndicate and then to the Chancellor, he said.

The interim committee in its report a few months ago had found the migration certificate of the former Law Minister of the Arvind Kejriwal cabinet wrong and on the basis of it had recommended cancellation of the Law degree.

The controversy relates to the acquisition of Law degree by Tomar on the basis of a doubtful enrollment at Biswanath Law College in Munger in the academic session 1994-95. He had claimed to have passed the law examination in 1998-99.

Tomar was arrested and later released on bail last year in the Law degree issue and had to resign from the Kejriwal ministry.
New Delhi: Water management boards could be an ideal option for resolving water disputes between the states like that between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka on Cauvery, a top Central Water Commission official said today.

He also said that the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB), which is to be formed by the Centre on the direction of the Supreme Court, will have representatives from both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

"The water management boards could be the ideal option for resolving dispute between the states, including Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) will have representation from both the states," Central Water Commission (CWC) Chairman G S Jha said here on sidelines of an Assocham event.

Emphasising on water storage and its conservation for resolving such crisis, Jha said, "We cannot think of bringing water security unless we are able to create enough capacity for its storage and release it as per requirement."

The Supreme Court yesterday directed the Centre to constitute within four weeks the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) in its award.

It also directed the Karnataka government to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water per day to Tamil Nadu from today till September 27.
New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate suspects that six men from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) have funded terror activities in Kashmir with active involvement of some Hurriyat separatists.

As per a TOI report, three weeks before the Uri attack, the ED had filed a chargesheet in a Srinagar court in which the agency said that an Italian firm, Madina Trading, was used by two Hurriyat separatists, Firdous Ahmad Shah and Yar Mohammad Khan, to accept money from the PoK-based men. Madina Trading is based out of Corso Garibaldi in Brescia, Italy.

Shah is an influential separatist leader and is the chief of Democratic Political Movement  a constituent of Syed Ali Shah Geelani's Hurriyat Conference.

As per the ED, the separatist duo is accused in a money laundering case and are known to have been active in raising funds for terrorist activities in Kashmir.

Shah and Khan have also been accused of waging war against the Indian state.

What is even more shocking in the revelation is that the Madina Trading is the same company that was used to create a VoIP account for 26/11 Mumbai attackers in 2008.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on issued notice to the state government in response to a petition by AAP, which alleged that Surat police are not giving it permission for a rally by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Justice Sonia Gokani issued notices to the additional home secretary, Gujarat, Surat police commissioner and the district collector and adjourned the hearing to September 27.

The rally in Surat to be addressed by Kejriwal, AAP's national convener, is scheduled for October 16.

"This is going to be the first rally of Kejriwal in the state, to be held at Varachha in Surat. Considering that we have to prepare for the rally well in advance, we applied for police permission on August 19, but have not received any confirmation so far," AAP's media convener Harshil Naik said in the petition.

The party leaders have repeatedly approached the police commissioner but got no clarification, it said.

"A party delegation even met Governor O P Kohli on September 6 and requested him to intervene, but nothing has happened so far," it contended.

A few weeks ago, a programme organised by a trade association in Surat which Kejriwal was to attend, was cancelled as Veer Narmad South Gujarat University authorities denied a hall for the programme. AAP had alleged that the university acted under the BJP government's pressure.

The petition claimed that Surat police had allowed rallies by BJP chief Amit Shah, Union minister Smriti Irani and senior Congress leader Shankersinh Vaghela recently.
New Delhi: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday, while addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, not only raked up the Kashmir issue, but also hailed slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani.

Here are some key excerpts from Sharifs speech at the UN:

Sharif said the uprising in Kashmir has been met with "brutal repression by Indian soldiers" and that his country will share a dossier on Indian brutalities with the UN Secretary General.

On behalf of the Kashmiri people and Pakistani nation I demand an independent inquiry into the extra judicial killings and a UN fact-finding mission to investigate brutalities perpetrated by the Indian forces in Kashmir.

Strongly raising the Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly, Sharif hailed Burhan Wani, who was killed on July 8, as a leader of a "Kashmiri intifada".

Sharif also said that Pakistan fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people, adding that their struggle is the legitimate one for liberation from alien occupation.

Sharif, while speaking about the unrest in Kashmir, said, "We demand the immediate release of all Kashmiri political prisoners".

Peace and normalcy cannot be achieved between India and Pakistan without resolving the Kashmir issue.

The Pakistan Prime Minister claimed that he had "gone the extra seeking talks but India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue.

Pakistani premier said that his country has been a major victim of terrorism. He said Pakistan carried out the largest anti-terror operation Zarb-e-azb, of the world, dedicating 200,000 security personnel to fight home grown terrorist outfits.

Claiming that Pakistan is a "responsible" nuclear weapon state, Sharif said his country will continue to cooperate with all international efforts that seek to promote fair and equitable solutions to disarmament and non-proliferation challenges.

Pakistan is fully eligible for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group," Sharif added.

India, on the other hand, has strongly criticized Sharif's speech and said that Pakistan is in complete denial of of its complicity in Sunday's cross-border terror attack on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

Hitting back at Pakistan, India said the "glorification" of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani at the UN showed Islamabad's "attachment to terrorism".

(With Agencies input)
New Delhi: The Centre has informed the Supreme Court that the prestigious 105-carat Kohinoor diamond is Indias property but international conventions as well as the laws restrain it from making a rightful claim for its return from Britain.

In an affidavit submitted to the apex court on Tuesday, the Centre said that it is, however, devising ways and means as to whether the diamond could be brought back based on any agreement with the foreign country.

The Centre further stated that there was no concrete evidence to show that the diamond was validly gifted to Queen Victoria.

However, the Centre admitted that it was fully aware of the Indian public sentiment attached with the precious gem.

Making its stand clear on the issue, the government said that it did not have many legal options and would have to resort to diplomatic relations to seek its retrieval from Britain.

About the applicability of the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972, the government pointed out the country of origin of the antique could not invoke its right of retrieval if the article had left the country before the law came into force.

Also the UNESCO convention, the affidavit said, could not come to the aid since the convention was signed by the two countries much later than the diamond said to have been taken away.

The government said this in response to a notice by a bench led by Chief Justice T S Thakur which wanted to know whether the Indian government was taking any steps to retrieve the diamond.

A PIL had been filed earlier to instruct the government to ask for its return from the British High Commissioner.
The Race Course Road might be changed to Ekatma Marg if BJP's Meenakshi Lekhi's proposal gets accepted. Lekhi, in her proposal, said that the name Race Course Road doesn't match with the Indian culture.

NDMC will discuss the matter, on Wednesday, which is an effort to pay homage to BJP ideologue, Deendayal Upadhyaya who promulgated 'Ekatma Manavvad' philosophy.

By Baishali Adak: In what political observers see as a street-smart move, BJP lawmaker Meenakshi Lekhi has proposed the renaming of the city's Race Course Road as Ekatma Marg to honour the philosophy of her party's icon Deendayal Upadhyaya.

The New Delhi Municipal Council will consider on Wednesday the plan pitched by Lekhi, who is a member of the civic body that has jurisdiction over Lutyens' Delhi and the road on which the Prime Minister's official residence is located.

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The proposal that's likely to spur a political controversy comes about a year after the NDMC renamed Aurangzeb Road as Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road in honour of the late President based on a suggestion from city BJP MP Maheish Girri.

RACE COURSE DOESN'T MATCH WITH INDIAN CULTURE?

The ruling party and its ideological fountainhead, the RSS, have been pushing for a slew of such name changes, terming this a bid to highlight Indian culture and cleanse foreign influence. Critics, however, see it as an attempt to rewrite India's history and extend the Sangh's cultural influence.

"The existing name, Race Course Road, does not match with Indian culture, Lekhi said. "It should be changed to 'Ekatma Marg' as the Prime Minister's Residence, 7 RCR, is here?and it would remind every PM (to care for) the last person in the society."

Race Course Road was named after the Delhi race course, part of the Delhi Race Club, established in 1940. Upadhyay's followers remember him for the concept of Ekatma Manav Darshan, or integral humanism. The Centre will observe his 100th birth anniversary on September 25.

"Many roads/institutions have been renamed in the past to honour our great men and women. This includes Connaught Circus to Indira Chowk, Connaught Place to Rajiv Chowk, Canning Road to Madhav Rao Scindia Marg and Aurangzeb Road to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road recently," Lekhi said.

CULTURAL EVENTS IN CP SOON

Senior NDMC officials told Mail Today that more celebrations are planned across New Delhi. The RSS has sought permission for a programme at Connaught Place's Central Park on September 25. Cultural events including street plays would be held, aiming to make the youth aware of Upadhyaya's thoughts.

Senior BJP leaders are likely to be present. Upadhyay is best remembered for his concept of Antyodaya (serving the last man in the queue), after which the Centre's Antyodaya Anna Yojana, a food scheme, is named. "We have received this request (for name change) from many in the public too. We must respect their sentiments," said NDMC vice-chairperson and BJP leader Karan S Tanwar.

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The city's ruling Aam Aadmi Party, though, has rejected the renaming proposal. Commando Surinder Singh, MLA from Delhi Cantonment and NDMC member, said he would vehemently oppose the move in Wednesday's meeting, and instead proposed that Race Course Road be renamed as Flying Officer Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon Road after the Param Vir Chakra awardee.

"Race Course Road has an Indian Air Force Station and martyr Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon stayed here for a long time," he said. "This camp (on Race Course Road) belongs to him. Governments will come and go but another Sekhon will not come."

Also Read:

AAP opposes proposal to rename Race Course Road as Ekatma Marg

Indian culture is hypocrite when it comes to women: Richa

Chinese scholars reach out to PM Narendra Modi



--- ENDS ---
United Nations: As expected, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday majorly raised the Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly, saying that Pakistan fully supports Kashmiris' right to self-determination and demanded an "independent enquiry" into the "extrajudicial killings" in Kashmir.

Sharif said that Hizbul militant Burhan Wani, whose killing on July 8 sparked off the current unrest in the Kashmir valley, had become "the symbol of the new Kashmiri intifada that was led by common Kashmiris".

He also spoke of "Indian brutalities" and "human rights violations by Indian forces" in the Kashmir valley, and said Pakistan would present a dossier on Kashmir to the world body.

Sharif, whose government has persistently been raising the Kashmir issue at the international fora, said that his country wants peace with India, and has gone the extra mile to achieve that, but India has "imposed preconditions".

Sharif said the "indigenous uprising" in Kashmir has been met with "brutal repression by Indian soldiers" and would "only fortify the determination of Kashmiris to fight for their rights"

"Pakistan fully supports self-determination of Kashmiris' legitimate demand," he said.

He said the UN Security Council should ensure implementation of resolutions on Kashmir.


New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) will soon quiz the captured Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist Bahadur Ali for more leads in the Uri terror attack probe case, said reports on Wednesday.

NIA is seeking Bahadur Ali's help in identifying the four Uri attackers. Ali, who was captured in July, is expected to more light on the modus operandi and future designs of several Pakistan-based terror organisations like Jais-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawaah etc.

According to reports, Ali has reportedly told the NIA investigators about Pakistan-based terror outfits' plans to carry out more open attacks on the Indian Army and other vital installations in the days to come.

The NIA had yesterday lodged an FIR in the Uri attack case and begin to investigate how four Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists managed to sneak inside the Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir and killed at least 18 jawans who were sleeping.

A team of NIA sleuths will also visit the site of the attack shortly to collect evidence.

The investigating agency will also collect DNA samples and finger prints of the slain terrorists.

All materials recovered from the killed terrorists including weapons, navigation maps and GPS will be handed over by the Army to the NIA for further investigations.

The GPS will be sent to the US to decode the route used by the terrorists to Indian territory. The forensic investigation of the device may also throw light on other aspects of the terror operation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is chairing a Union Cabinet meeting today, is expected to decide India's likely response to Pakistan in the aftermath of the Uri attack.

Four Jaish-e-Mohammad militants had stormed an army base in Uri sector of Baramulla district on Sunday, killing 18 soldiers - before they were eliminated.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh yesterday chaired a high-level security review meeting at the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) over the prevailing situation in Jammu and Kashmir post Uri terror attack.

NSA Ajit Doval, Director of Intelligence Bureau, RAW Chief, Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, Minister of State in Prime Minister Office (PMO) Jitendra Singh and other senior MHA and MoD officials were in attendance.

After giving an assurance of going after the perpetrators of the deadly Uri attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday gave the green signal to diplomatically isolate Pakistan at every international grouping.

Director General of Military operation Lt. Ranbir Singh had said that the four terrorists, who attacked the military base in Jammu and Kashmir`s Uri, belonged to Pakistan`s banned terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).

With agency inputs
New Delhi: In a major worry for Indian security agencies, Pakistan-based terrorists are expected to try and infiltrate through Rajasthan and Gujarat border, a report said on Wednesday.

The Border Security Force (BDF) has been put on alert and the villagers living in the border areas are being briefed about the possible infiltration.

According to a AAJ Tak report, the terrorists have chosen to infiltrate through the above mentioned states as the security has been heightened across the border areas in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab.

IG (BSF) Rajasthan Frontier, BR Meghwal on Tuesday said that heavy movement have been noticed in the adjoining areas of Ganganagar and Jaisalmer.

The phone calls from across the border are being tracked and the state police has also been alerted.

The infiltration attempts come as India and Pakistan are locked in a diplomatic war of words over a deadly unrest in the Kashmir Valley and soon after the Sunday attack on military base close to the de facto border that divides the state between the two neighbours.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Army in the recent years, 18 jawans were killed and over 20 others injured as heavily armed suspected Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants, stormed an Army base at Uri town in north Kashmir's Baramulla district in the wee hours on Sunday.
Islamabad: Is Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif likely to unveil at the UN steps to de-escalate the tension with India and launch a dialogue on Kashmir, a media report suggested on Wednesday.

Nawaz Sharif spoke to army Chief Gen Raheel Sharif on telephone on Tuesday night regarding the tensions with India in the wake of the Sunday terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, Dawn reported.

"The Prime Minister and the army chief are believed to have discussed proposals the former intends to make during his speech (at the UN General Assembly) for de-escalating the situation and moving to a dialogue on the Kashmir dispute," it said.

It said the two men discussed the prevailing regional situation. Sharif is in New York to attend the UN General Assembly session.

This was the first conversation between the two since Sunday's terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri that left 18 soldiers dead and pushed India-Pakistan relations to a new low.

Sharif's speech at the UN on Wednesday is likely to focus on the Kashmir issue and Pakistan-India relations, the report said.
New York: Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry on Tuesday raised country`s "serious concerns" over the situation in Jammu and Kashmir with European Union Secretary General for External Affairs Helga Schmid during their meeting on the sidelines of the 71st UNGA session in New York.

Chaudhry briefed his EU counterpart about alleged "human rights violations" committed by India against Kashmiris.

The European Union noted Pakistan`s concerns and inquired about the current state of bilateral relations between India and Pakistan.

According to sources, India is set to raise the Uri attack - in which 18 Army soldiers were killed - at the 71st UNGA session and highlight Pakistan`s alleged involvement in the deadly terror strike.

According to sources, India will raise the matter in the UN General Assembly and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise on Pakistan`s involvement in her speech on September 26.
Islamabad: Continuing with efforts to internationalise the Kashmir issue, Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz has briefed foreign ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland about "human rights violation" in Kashmir.

Aziz, on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, separately met with the foreign ministers -- Fumio Kishida of Japan, Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland, Pakistan's Foreign Office said.

Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Indo-Pak relations and the situation in Kashmir.

Highlighting "human rights abuse perpetrated by Indian security forces with impunity" in Kashmir, he stated that settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability in South Asia, the Foreign Office said.

It claimed that while acknowledging the "sacrifices" rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three foreign ministers appreciated "successful counter -terrorism operations" conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country.

Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistan's economy to grow at a steady and sustainable rate.

He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria, and Switzerland in Pakistan.

The Foreign Office said that Japan, Austria, and Switzerland have underscored a commitment to further strengthen existing cordial relations with Pakistan and promote mutual understanding on regional and international issues of common concerns.

Foreign Minister Kishida stated that Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistan's power sector.

Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz welcomed the prospects of investment in Pakistan due to the improved security situation. He recognised the significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy.

Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter stated that Swiss development cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan, the Foreign Office statement said.

Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organisations, Pakistan's application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly, the statement said.
New Delhi: Former Pakistan president and the alleged architect of the 1999 KargilWar, General Pervez Musharraf, has threatened India of Pakistani counter strike if New Delhi resorted to any military retaliation to the dastardly terror attack in Uri.

The persons who are talking about military retaliation - including your DGMO, your defence minister - should understand the consequences. The DGMO should learn a lesson of military that you have to wargame it till the end, '' Musharraf had told CNN-News18.

If you strike at the time and place of your choosing, we will strike back at the time and place of our choosing as well. It doesn't stop at your action; what will follow should also be considered, he added.

Speaking exclusively from his London residence, Musharraf categorically denied that the Pakistan Army-propped Jaish-e-Mohammed was responsible for the Uri attack.

I don't know the basis of him (Indian DGMO Lt General Ranbir Singh) saying this within hours of the attack. And in any case the statements the DGMO gave were offensive, he said, adding that India always blames Pakistan and its military for any attack in Kashmir.

When quizzed specifically on how Islamabad can wash its hands off the matter since the evidence found at the Uri attack site includes Pakistan Army issue I-com wireless sets, Musharraf claimed they can be "bought from anywhere".

Musharraf also claimed that JeM was not at all active in Pakistan and the establishment there is taking actions as required in accordance with their domestic requirement.

In a big blow for Pakistan, a bipartisan group of two powerful American lawmakers has introduced an act in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a State Sponsor of terrorism.

"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is Ranking member of this influential Congressional Committee on terrorism.
New Delhi: Nowadays, a number of WhatsApp users are getting a message about Indian Army Welfare Fund.

The message has gone massively viral as it talks Narendra Modi government's initiative about how a common man can donate money for purchasing weapons for the Indian Army and providing facilities for war casualties.

But, is it a hoax or genuine message? Here is the truth -

The MESSAGE going viral on WhatsApp:-

"Pay only Rs 1 per day (Rupee one only).

Like never before, the Modi government has started a new scheme exclusively for the Indian Army Battle Casualties and Weapon Purchase. The government has opened a bank account where people can donate funds directly to the Army Welfare Account which will be used for purchasing weapons for the Indian Army and providing facilities for war casualties.

People had suggested to the government to open a bank account to collect funds exclusively for battle casualties and purchasing weapons for the army, the Modi government has accepted the suggestion and opened an account in Syndicate Bank, New Delhi for the same. The most attractive feature of this scheme is that people can donate the smallest amount of ONE RUPEE. This is a Master Stroke by the Modi government.

Our countrys population is 130 crore, even if 100 crore people (70%) deposit One Rupee Each, the ministry will get Rs 100 Crore/day, Rs 3000 Crore/month and Rs 36000 Crore/year.

Rs 36,000 Crore is greater than Pakistans total defence expenditure.

We spend hundreds and thousands of rupees on many unnecessary things, if we can spend ONE RUPEE for the Army, it can surely make India a SUPER POWER.

The money will directly reach the Defence Ministry for the Army's benefit and war casualties.

This is a unique idea to help our Army Jawans who have lost their life in battle.Members of my family and some friends have already made their contribution

Come together, show solidarity with our DEFENCE FORCES, PARA MILITARY FORCES and CRPF.

JOIN THE MISSION TO MAKE INDIA A SUPER POWER !

Bank Details :

BANK : SYNDICATE BANK

BRANCH : SOUTH EXTENSION, NEW DELHI.

A/C NAME : ARMY WELFARE FUND BATTLE CASUALTIES

A/C NO : 90552010165915

IFSC CODE : SYNB0009055

Please circulate as much as you can."

Now, Indian Army has offered a clarification on the viral WhatsApp message on Twitter:-

Clarification on the Issue of Army Welfare Fund Battle Casualties pic.twitter.com/U3BjOcwK5t  ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) September 2, 2016

Syndicate Bank too issued a statement in this regard. Here's the statement:-

TRUTH - Yes, you can help India's war heroes!

Keeping all above aspects of statements issued by Indian Army and Syndicate Bank, we can conclude the account titled Army Welfare Fund Battle Casualties has been opened at Syndicate Bank, South Block Branch, New Delhi (IFSC Code: SYNB0009055), with account number 90552010165915, which has been approved by the Integrated HQ of Ministry of Defence (Army).

The donations received in the fund will be utilized to pay financial assistance/grant to widows of our Battle Casualties, their next of kin and dependents.
New Delhi: Baloch nationalist leader Brahumdagh Bugti, who is the president of Baloch Republican Party (BRP) that is seeking independence for the troubled Pakistani province, has "discussed the terms of asylum in India" with Indian diplomats in Geneva.

"Talks with the Indian diplomats were very fruitful and they were very supportive. We discussed the terms of asylum in India," Brahumdagh Bugti told IANS over phone from Geneva.

He added that that while he cannot disclose certain "sensitive matters" discussed with diplomats, the situation of the "Baloch people in Pakistan-occupied Balochistan" was part of the conversation.

"This was my first-ever meeting with any Indian diplomat, I never approached the Indian embassy before.

"I am very hopeful and positive (for asylum in India)," he said after the meeting, where he was accompanied by another Baloch nationalist, Mehran Marri.

Bugti said the reason he wants to move to India is because he is restricted in travelling out of Switzerland to take the "free Balochistan" movement ahead.

"My entire family is allowed to move out of Switzerland but there are restrictions on me by the Swiss government. There's lot to be done, I have to meet people, senators, diplomats, human right organisations throughout the world which requires travelling," Bugti told IANS.

Grandson of Baloch leader and Bugti tribe head Nawab Akbar Bugti, Brahumdagh fled Balochistan to save his life after Akbar Bugti was killed in a Pakistan Army offensive in 2006.

He was first given asylum in Afghanistan from where he shifted to Switzerland in 2010.
New Delhi: Changing the name of Race Course road to Lok Kalyan Marg sends a message as the Prime Minister's residence is located on it, Union Urban Development minister M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday said.

In posts on twitter, Naidu lauded the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) for its decision.

"Compliments to NDMC, for deciding to change the name of Race Course Road into Lok Kalyan Marg," Naidu said in a post.

"It's a name with message as the PM's house is situated in that road," he added.

The decision to change the name of the road was taken at a high-level meeting of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) presided by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

As a result, the Prime Minister's residential address will now be 7 Lok Kalyan Marg and not the famous 7 Race Course Road.
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 21 (PTI) Concerned over the spurt in dengue and chikungunya cases, President Pranab Mukherjee today asked young doctors to strive for overcoming the deficiencies in the healthcare system so that such vector-borne diseases become a thing of the past.

Noting that the ratio of doctors in the country is far less in comparison to international standards especially in the rural areas, Mukherjee said the cooperation of the young doctors will help the government to build the health infrastructure in the country.

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Recalling his years of growing up in his native West Bengal, Mukherjee while speaking at the centenary celebrations and convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical College here, said he witnessed villages falling prey to epidemics like cholera, small pox, tuberculosis and plague.

"Invariably I used to see advertisements in railway stations and in every post office issued by the public health department of the then state government -- be careful of mosquitoes - mosquitoes are the death symbol. It was so prevelant," he said.

"Of course new situation has emerged. Old diseases are no longer prevailing. Due care have been taken to remove them from the society. Medical research and science has made substantial contribution.

"But at the same time, in the new century and in the new mellinium we have to face new problems. I request you (young doctors) to always keep in mind certain basic facts - our deficiencies. It is on your young shoulders again to substantially meet that deficiency," Mukherjee said.

He said India has one doctor per 1,700 people against international standard ratio of one doctor per 1,000 and the situation is more alarming in the rural areas, where the shortage of surgeons is as high as 83.4 per cent.

"So we can apprehend and also appreciate the huge dimensions of building up the health infrastructure particularly in the rural sector and your (young doctors) cooperation and sympathetic hands will no doubt help the government of the day to overcome the problem," he said.

The President advised the young graduating doctors to be proud of the skills instilled in them by the college to face challenges of the competitive world.

"Be truthful, be virtuous, have compassion and never deviate from your own conviction," he said.

He further asked them to be learners, students, and innovators and researchers as they go forward in their profession.(MORE) PTI TDS PMS RG PMS

--- ENDS ---
New Delhi: The Union Cabinet met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi amid indications that the top leadership is all set to finalise India's response to Pakistan over the Uri terror attack in which 18 Army soldiers were killed.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley were among the ministers who attended the meeting.

Following the Union Cabinet meet, the Cabinet Committee on Security held a meeting to review the situation arising out of the attack.

Importantly, Ms Swaraj is scheduled to head for the United Nations where India will press for isolation of `terror sponsor` Pakistan in the international community.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is also in New York to put forth his country's stand on the issue.

However, in a huge embarrassment for Pakistan, a Bill has been moved in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terror.
Delhi: Three days after the deadly terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri sector, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit was summoned by Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar on Wednesday.

Later, addressing the press, MEA spokesperson said, "Foreign Secretary told Pakistan High Commissioner that even now two encounters between terrorists and Indian Army are underway at the border. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment of not allowing terror against India."

"Uri attack shows that terror machinery in Pakistan is still thriving," he further said, and added, "We have recovered a number of items like Pakistan mark grenades, communication equipment and food and medicines made in Pakistan. India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in Uri."

#UriAttack Foreign Secretary Jaishankar summons Pakistan High Commissioner Basit to MEA  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting & sponsoring terrorism against India #UriAttack pic.twitter.com/fytV5fcgl2  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Uri terrorists cut fence at two places, belonged to LeT: Probe

Meanwhile, four terrorists who stormed the Army base on Sunday killing 18 soldiers belonged to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and managed to sneak in by cutting the perimeter fencing of the highly-guarded army installation at two places, investigations have shown.

In an indication that the terrorists were well-versed of the layout of the Army base close to the Line of Control (LoC), the assailants locked the cooking room and store from outside to prevent the soldiers from leaving before setting them afire, sources privy to the probe said today.

The investigators are not ruling out "insider help" to the terrorists in view of the precise nature of the actions undertaken by the intruders once inside the Army base, the sources said, adding the attackers first cut the perimeter fencing at two places, as per PTI.

After locking the cooking room and store, two of the terrorists started moving towards the officers quarters within the base but they were gunned down before they could inflict any further damage, they said.

The two Global Positioning System (GPS) sets recovered from the slain militants were damaged during the attack and have been handed over to the NIA, which is probing the case.

The four intruders, who had crossed in from Pakistan- occupied Kashmir (Pok) a day earlier, were affiliated to LeT as the terrorist module bore striking resemblance to the group from the same Pakistan-based terror outfit eliminated in Poonch on September 11, the sources said.

Director General Military Operations (DGMO) Lt Gen Ranbir Singh had told reporters hours after the attack that as per initial reports the slain terrorists belonged to Jaish-e- Mohammad(JeM), also a Pakistan-based terror outfit.

"All four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings. Initial reports indicate that the slain terrorists belong to Jaish-E-Mohammed tanzeem," Lt Gen Singh had said.

The terrorists both at Uri and Poonch were carrying small plastic bottles containing a concoction of petroleum jelly and gelatin which was used to set the soldiers' tents on fire, the sources said.

(With PTI inputs)
Kozhikode: A three-day meeting of the BJP National Council dedicated to ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya will begin here on Friday, days after the terror attack on the army in Jammu and Kashmir.

At least 3,000 delegates, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his ministers and BJP President Amit Shah, are set to attend the meet. It will conclude on September 25, the day Upadhyaya was born.

"As the Uri incident has taken place, it will obviously be discussed during the meeting," BJP national Secretary P. Murlidharan, a former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party's Kerala unit, told IANS.

Eighteen soldiers were killed when militants believed to have come from Pakistan attacked an army camp at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday. The killings have sent India-Pakistan relations plunging to a new low.

The BJP has chosen this northern Kerala region for the mega event as Upadhyaya was elected president of the Jan Sangh, the BJP's predecessor, in 1967 at a party conclave in Kozhikode.

Murlidharan said the event will begin with a meeting of national office bearers and state presidents who will finalise the agenda of the council.

He said Prime Minister Modi will arrive in the city on September 24 and will address a rally at Kozikokde.

The National Council is also likely to devise a strategy for upcoming assembly elections in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

Kerala BJP leaders feel the meeting will boost the party's prospects in the state where it has just one member in the assembly and whose politics has for decades been dominated by the Left and the Congress.

In this year's assembly election in Kerala, the BJP opened its account and more than doubled its vote share from 7 to 15 per cent.

During the National Council meeting, the issue of violent clashes between Left and RSS cadres will also be taken up.

According to BJP sources, the party is planning of a get together of all those who attended the session in this coastal city in 1967.

"Deendayal Upadhyaya had then talked about the Jan Sangh's potential to become an alternative to the Congress and energised its cadres to become a national political force," said party veteran O. Rajagopal, the only BJP legislator in Kerala.

Rajagopal was among those who attended the 1967 Kozhikode session.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP veterans L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi also attended the session.
New Delhi: A message has gone viral on instant messaging app WhatsApp, saying that the country will observe September 22 as a national day of mourning for 18 soldiers killed in terror attack at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday.

The message says the country will observe a shutdown tomorrow (September 22, Thursday) to mourn the death of martyrs.

Even the analytics of zeenews.com suggests that people are looking for information on 'Bharat Bandh'.

The veracity of the WhatsApp message has, however, not been verified as yet.

Here is the message:

The attack at an Army camp in Uri on Sunday left 18 soldiers dead. Four terrorists who were killed were carrying food and medicine packets with Pakistan markings on it and a preliminary investigation suggested the terrorists are from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad.

India has launched an effort at the international level to isolate Pakistan for supporting terror.
Srinagar: Curfew was today in force in only three police station areas of Srinagar city in Kashmir, as the curbs were lifted from other parts following improvement in the situation.

However, normal life remained affected in the Valley for the 75th straight day.

A police official said curfew continued in Nowhatta, M R Gunj and Khanyar police station areas of the summer capital today.

The authorities had yesterday lifted curfew across Kashmir except from six police station areas of the city. This morning, the curbs from three areas were lifted.

The official, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people under section 144 CrPC continued to remain in force in the Valley.

Meanwhile, normal life continued to remain disturbed in Kashmir for the 75th consecutive day due to restrictions and separatist sponsored strike.

The separatists, who are spearheading the current agitation in the Valley, have extended the protest programme till September 22.

They did not announce any period of relaxation in the strike for the week.

Shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut in Srinagar and elsewhere in the Valley, while public transport was off the roads.

Schools, colleges and other educational institutions also continued to remain shut.

Mobile internet services also remained suspended, while the outgoing calls on prepaid numbers continued to remain barred across the Valley.

As many as 81 people, including two cops, have been killed in the unrest that broke out a day after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces in South Kashmir on July 8.
Srinagar: Security forces on Wednesday busted a militant hideout in Tral area of Pulwama district in Kashmir, seizing a large cache of arms and ammunition.

"Army along with Jammu and Kashmir Police and CRPF have busted a terrorist hideout in Tral unearthing a large cache of warlike stores," an army spokesman said.

Based on intelligence inputs, security forces launched a joint operation in the Kamla forest near Tral which led to the hideout.

The forces recovered one AK-56 rifle, a sniper rifle, a machine gun and an under-barrel grenade launcher (UBGL) besides a large quantity of ammunition, the spokesman said.

"The recovery of warlike stores and destruction of the hideout close to the sensitive area of Tral has delivered a blow to the nefarious designs of terrorists attempting to reorganise themselves after the elimination of key militants," he added.
Srinagar: In a befitting reply to separatists, Jammu and Kashmir youths turned up in large numbers, to give Army recruitment test in Anantnag district on Wednesday.

Notably, the separatists had asked the youths not to participate in the test.

The youths' positive response is a tight slap to separatist leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Yasin Malik who have advocated for bandhs across the Valley and pushed the next generation to get involved in stone-pelting incidents.

Recently J&K Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti had said that only five percent of the Kashmir population want to incite violence in the state.

Kashmir has been witnessing unending violence since Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani was killed by the security forces on July 08.

A total of 89 people have been killed and over 11,500 injured in the ongoing unrest in the Kashmir Valley that started on July 9.

Curfew was today in force in only three police station areas of Srinagar city in Kashmir, as the curbs were lifted from other parts following improvement in the situation.

However, normal life remained affected in the Valley for the 75th straight day.

Schools, colleges and other educational institutions also continued to remain shut.

Mobile internet services also remained suspended, while the outgoing calls on prepaid numbers continued to remain barred across the Valley.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Army in the recent years, 18 jawans were killed and over 20 others injured as heavily armed suspected Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants, stormed an Army base at Uri town in north Kashmir's Baramulla district in the wee hours on Sunday.
Mumbai (Maharashtra)/Bangalore (Karnataka): The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday urged the Karnataka Government to shed selfish interest and release Cauvery waters to neighbouring Tamil Nadu.

Asserting that there is a need to rise above state politics, BJP leader Shaina NC said, "The Supreme Court has made it clear that the Karnataka government must release the Cauvery water at this juncture. I think we need to rise beyond the selfish interests of particular states and understand that India is one.

"The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed Karnataka to release a further 6,000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu from 21 to 27 September daily.Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has termed the Supreme Court`s order as "unimplementable" and will convene a meeting of his cabinet and preside over an all-party meeting today to chalk out the next step.

State Home Minister G Parameshwara said Tuesday that he was disappointed with the Supreme Court judgement on the Cauvery water sharing issue, even as the apex court also directed the Centre to constitute Cauvery Management Board within a month.

He also directed the state police to conduct flag marches around sensitive areas and also appealled to pro-Kannada activists,farmers` associations to maintain peace. Police was also told to keep ready fire engines and other emergency forces ready in sensitive areas around Cauvery belt, including Bengaluru.

In Karnataka`s Mandya district, a series of pro-Kannada protests were organised on Tuesday, which included protesters eating mud and placing their slippers on their heads as expressions of their disagreement with the Supreme Court order.

On the other hand, in Tamil Nadu, state ministers were seen taking part in a ceremonial release of waters through the Mettur Dam for Samba cultivation in the Cauvery Delta region.The water dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu dates back to the latter half of the 19th century.
Bengaluru: The two main political parties in Karnataka  BJP and the JD-S  have decided to boycott that all-party meeting called by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Wednesday to discuss the future course of action on the issue of sharing Cauvery river water with Tamil Nadu following the recent Supreme Court order in this regard.

News agency ANI confirmed that the two parties will instead skip the crucial meeting.

BJP and JDS decides to not attend the all-party meet called by Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah over #CauveryIssue, today.  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

The Karnataka CM has also convened an all-party meeting today to discuss the pros and cons of the apex court order on the Cauvery issue.

Chief Minister will meet former prime minister HD Deve Gowda to discuss the Cauvery water sharing dispute with Tamil Nadu. He has also appealed to the BJP and the JD-S to attend the all-party meeting called in the evening in this regard.

Asserting that the state was not in a position to implement the apex court order as the water in the Cauvery reservoirs was just enough for drinking purpose till next June, Siddaramaiah said in such a situation it was very difficult to share it as drinking water was a national priority.

"Since we do not have water, it is very difficult to implement the apex court order. It is an unimplementable order," reiterated Siddaramaiah.

"I have also convened an all-party meeting of the floor leaders of both the houses of the state legislature on Wednesday evening to discuss the apex court order and finalise a joint strategy to protest the interests of the state," Siddaramaiah said.

All members of Parliament from the state, including Union Ministers, and state ministers concerned will participate in the meeting to discuss the issue and arrive at a consensus on how to face the situation arising out of the top court order.

A division bench of the apex court ordered the state to release 6,000 cusecs per day from Wednesday for a week till September 27, doubling the quantum fixed by its appointed Cauvery Supervisory Committee on Monday for 10 days till September 30.

The top court's fresh directive comes into force a day after the state completed releasing 12,000 cusecs daily on Tuesday as per the court`s September 12 order, modifying its September 5 order to release 15,000 cusecs daily for 10 days from September 7.

The apex court`s Tuesdays order will be placed at both meetings along with the state`s representation to the supervisory committee meeting and the petitions it filed before thecourt pleading its inability to release any more water for irrigation in the neighbouring state.

The Chief Minister also appealed to the people to remain calm and maintain peace in the hour of distress as the state was going through a difficult period due to deficit monsoon rains.

"I appeal to the people, especially those in the Cauvery basin areas to maintain peace and not get carried away by emotions. We are committed to protect the interest of the state, its people and its farmers. Everyone should cooperate," added Siddaramaiah.

Meanwhile, the farmers continue to protest against the apex court ruling on the Cauvery water sharing issue, which prompted the authorities to tighten the security cover in and around sensitive cities including Bengaluru, Mysore, Mandya etc.

Protest by farmers at Mysore road in Bengaluru (Karnataka), tie noose around their necks #CauveryProtests pic.twitter.com/TOv7kRdjmr  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Several Karnataka Rakshana Vedike activists who were protesting in Bengaluru were detained by the city police.
Bengaluru: The Karnataka government on Wednesday decided to defer release of 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 23, when a special session of the state legislature would take a decision on the Supreme Court direction.

"The Cabinet has decided to defer release of water," Chief Minister Siddaramaiah told reporters in a brief statement after an emergency Cabinet meeting which was preceded by an all-party and council of ministers meetings during the day.

Siddaramaiah said the cabinet decided to convene the special session of the state legislature on September 23 in the backdrop of the apex court order yesterday, ordering Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water till September 27 from today.

He said the all-party meeting had advised the government to call the special legislature session to discuss the Supreme Court's direction and the Cabinet decided accordingly.

The Cauvery Supervisory Committee had on September 19 asked Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs per day from September 21 to 30 but the apex court had yesterday doubled the quantum to 6,000 cusecs from September 21 to 27 after Tamil Nadu pressed for water to save its samba paddy crop.

On September 5, the court had ordered release of 15,000 cusecs of water for the next 10 days to address the plight of the farmers in Tamil Nadu.

The quantum was reduced on September 12 to 12,000 cusecs to be released till September 20.

Karnataka had complied with these directions thought it had been maintaining that the storage in its reservoirs was inadequate to meet the drinking water needs of its people.

Siddaramaiah had yesterday termed the Supreme Court's fresh order on release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu as "unimplementable" and called for the all-party meeting.

A bench of justices Dipak Misra and U U Lalit had also

asked the Centre to constitute within four weeks, the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) in its award.

The all-party meeting was boycotted by principal Opposition BJP which criticised the Siddaramaiah government for not taking any specific decision keeping the interests of farmers in mind despite holding all-party meetings earlier.

It was attended by former Prime Minister and JDS supremo H D Deve Gowda, Congress leader in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and former Chief Minister M Veerappa Moily.

BJP union ministers from Karnataka had conveyed their inability to attend the meet because of the union cabinet meeting, Siddaramaiah said.

"In the backdrop of the interim order of the Honourable Supreme Court dated 20-09-2016, government had today called an all-party meeting and discussed the matter in detail. In the all-party meeting it was unanimously decided to call the joint session of the state legislature.

"In this background, the Cabinet has decided to request his Excellency the Governor to call a session of both the houses of the legislature on 23-09-2016 at 11 am.

"Further, until the session decides on the issue, the release of water has been deferred," the Chief Minister said in a prepared statement.
By India Today Web Desk: Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra's American TV series Quantico's second season will premiere on ABC channel on September 25 and on Star World on September 26, and fans just can't wait any longer to see the first episode of the show. But looks like the stars of the show are as excited (and nervous) about the show's premiere as the fans.

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Also read:After flirting at Emmys, Tom Hiddleston and Priyanka Chopra to team up for Quantico Season 2?



Recently, ABC shared a hilarious picture of the main cast on its official Instagram handle. In the said picture, Priyanka was seen holding hands of other cast members, and by the looks of it, all of them seemed to be praying for a good first reception of the second season of the show.

The picture was captioned as "Everyone has their own way of preparing for the #Quantico premiere. What's yours?"

Everyone has their own way of preparing for the #Quantico premiere. What's yours? ?? @thejohannabraddy A photo posted by Quantico (@abcquantico) on Sep 20, 2016 at 4:11pm PDT

Priyanka even posted a video about Quantico Season 2 on her personal Instagram account, in which she gave a little detail about Alex's struggle, and the plot in general.

If you thought last season was exciting, wait until youve seen what Alex and the gang have got in store for you this time! Trust me you dont wanna miss a minute of #Quantico Season 2, premiering this Sunday at 10|9c on ABC. A video posted by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on Sep 20, 2016 at 6:00am PDT

Quantico Season 1 showed Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra) being wrongly accused of masterminding a terror attack against America. While towards the end of Season 1, charges against Alex was eventually dropped, however she was still asked to leave the FBI.

Quantico Season 2 will see Alex back in action, but in CIA, as she again tries to save everyone from another global attack.

So tune in to Star World on September 26 at 9 pm to join Alex on yet another mind-boggling adventure.



--- ENDS ---
Thiruvananthapuram/Kollam: In two separate incidents, a 90-year-old woman was allegedly sexually harassed by her neighbour in Kollam district even as a minor girl was raped in Thodupuzha in high-range Idukki in Kerala.

According to police, the nonagenarian woman, who is a widow cancer survivor, was attacked and molested by a 63-year-old man after trespassing into her house at Kadakkal in Kollam.

Though the incident occurred a week back, it came to light today.

Based on her statement, the man was arrested and a case registered under Sections IPC 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 377 (unnatural offences).

"According to the woman, the accused intruded into her house, where she lived alone, attacked her and behaved in a manner which amounted to outraging her modesty," District police chief Ajeetha Begum said.

"We have registered the case based on the statement given by the woman. She was sent to the hospital for detailed medical examination," she told PTI.

Meanwhile, the state Human Rights Commission initiated suo moto into the incident based on media reports.

In another incident, a 15-year-old girl, hailing from the state capital, was lured by her lover and taken to a place in Thodupuzha, where he allegedly raped her.

Police said a case had been registered based on a missing complaint, lodged by the girl's parents.

Based on a tip off, the girl was rescued from a house in Thodupuzha today, police said, adding the accused and three others involved in the case were at large and the investigation was on.
Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala government on Wednesday extended financial assistance to a Malayalee youth, who was among a group of Indians returned from Saudi Arabia after losing job.

Asif was the lone Keralite in the batch who reached New Delhi in a flight in the wee hours today.

He was among around 300 Indians, who were employed in a construction company in Saudi and had to leave that country after losing job, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said in a Facebook post.

Asif was received by the representatives of the state government, who took him to the Kerala House in Delhi.

"He will be given food and accommodation in Kerala House till his flight ticket to the state is ready. Besides the ticket fare, Rs 2,000 was granted to him as pocket money also," the Chief Minister said.

Asif was also given details of various skill development programmes which would benefit the Gulf returnees, the post added.

The CPI(M)-led LDF government had earlier announced that it would give ticket fares to Keralites who lost job and got stranded in Saudi Arabia to reach the home state.
Mumbai: Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray on Wednesday said it's time the country gives Pakistan a reply in the language it understands because talks with the neighbouring nation "would not yield any result".

"Talking with Pakistan won't work now. It is now time to answer Pakistan in the language it understands. If war (with Pakistan) is to take place, it should be for well-being of the nation, not for votes. When will we finally understand Pakistan's language," Thackeray told reporters here in the backdrop of the Uri terror strike which left 18 soldiers dead.

Taking a jibe at Narendra Modi when asked if he spoke to the Prime Minister over the attack, Uddhav said, "He must be busy talking to Pakistan right now. When he gets free, we will talk."

He said there is a wave of anger among the masses over the Uri attack and that Modi is well poised to take a definite action against the neighbouring country owing to the overwhelming majority that the BJP enjoys in the Lok Sabha.

"If you keep doing what the previous government did, how can you say there is an atmosphere of change in the country? It seems that the government is of the view that those who want to shed tears may do so, we will continue to go to Pakistan to have tea and continue to welcome their artists and sportspersons here," he said.

He said people entrusted Modi the PM's chair following a series of promises he had made during his Lok Sabha election campaign which now needs to be fulfilled.

"This is not the first time they have attacked us. They recently stabbed us with the Pathankot attack. There is no use of merely harbouring feelings of anger against Pakistan," he said.

Thackeray also called for a special one-day session of Maharashtra Legislature to address the grievances of the Maratha community.

"Maratha leaders should come forward and voice their issues. There needs to be a discussion on the Atrocities Act and their reservation issue. We expect (NCP president Sharad Pawar) to raise this issue in the Parliament while we will raise it in the state Legislature," he said.
Bhubaneswar: The monsoon session of the Odisha Assembly began on a stormy note on Wednesday with ruling BJD legislators raising slogans against the central government over the Mahanadi river water dispute.

As soon as the House assembled, some Biju Janata Dal (BJD) lawmakers shouted slogans against the Centre`s apathy and Chhattisgarh, even during the playing of the national anthem, inviting criticism from the opposition members.

This forced Speaker Niranjan Pujari to adjourn the House till 3 p.m.

The Leader of Opposition Narasingh Mishra said: "The BJD MLAs have shown disrespect to the national anthem at the behest of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who was present in the House during the incident. They have hatched a plan not to allow business in the House."

He said the Speaker allowed the ruling party members to create the ruckus, rejecting a motion to cancel the question hour and discussion on the Mahanadi issue.

Congress chief whip Tara Prasad Bahinipati said that the BJD members have not learned to respect the national anthem.

He also said there should be a "no work, no pay" system in the Assembly for continuous disruption.

However, the BJD tried to downplay the matter. BJD legislator Nrusingh Sahoo said the members shouting slogans were unaware that the national anthem was playing.

After the House was adjourned, the ruling party members took out a rally and submitted a memorandum to Governor S.C. Jamir, addressing the President on the Mahanadi issue.
Chandigarh: The ruling Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab and opposition Congress on Wednesday took a dig at Navjot Singh Sidhu for his decision of not floating a party to contest the Assembly polls, saying he has run away from the fight.

"He has come to know his worth now... A party is like a mother, to ditch her is like ditching a mother," Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal said at Khadoor Sahib in Tarn Taran district, adding, Sidhu is well aware of the fact that people will not support anyone who has "backstabbed his mother party."

"He ran away from the contest by deciding against floating any political party. Sidhu is changing his stands frequently in hope of better bargaining with one or the other party," he alleged.

Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal said, "Let them do whatever they feel like. They may float a party or decide against it, how does it affect us. We know their worth."

Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh asked, "What did he come here for, just to see our faces. Does he not have the guts to even fight election."

"They (Sidhu's outfit) came to know that they will have to bite the dust, which is why they ran away from the contest," he claimed.

Days after announcing the launch of Aawaaz-e-Punjab, former BJP MP Sidhu said they have decided against forming a political party as it is too short a time to prepare for the polls, but added that they are open to "alliance" for betterment of Punjab.
Pathankot (Punjab): Panic gripped Pathankot town in Punjab after an unclaimed suitcase was spotted by some passersby close to the boundary of an army unit at Simbal Chowk here. After being informed, police swung into action and rushed the spot, and called a bomb disposal squad.

Police asked people to clear the area to allow them to examine the suitcase.Later, the bomb disposal squad opened the suitcase, and found some papers and army uniform, which brought a sigh of relief to local residents and security agencies.

Divulging details of the incident, Station House Officer of the Mamoon Cantt Police Station Rajinder S. Manhas told ANI: "We got information that an unclaimed suitcase was found at Simbal Chowk, following which we rushed to the spot and called a bomb disposal squad.

After an examination of the suitcase, the bomb disposal squad found some papers and an army fatigue. Police will further examine the papers as the bag remains unclaimed. "The unclaimed bag has become a matter of investigation for the security agencies, who are yet to establish whether it actually belonged to some army jawan or is part of some conspiracy.Things will become clear after examination of the papers. Security agencies seemed to be satisfied with the fact that no explosive or weapon was found in the suitcase.

Rajesh Kumar, a local resident, said, "There was an unclaimed bag lying here since the morning, but nobody went close to it. When police opened the bag, they seized an army uniform and two or three files."The whole episode brought alive the memory of the terrorist attack at the Pathankot air base on January 2, in which five terrorists and three security personnel were killed, while the gun battle and the subsequent combing operation lasted for about 17 hours.
New Delhi: President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday congratulated the scientists and engineers involved in the successful test firing of 'Barak-8', a surface-to-air missile.

"I extend hearty congratulations to you and all those associated with the successful test-firing of the Surface to Air Missile -- 'Barak-8' developed jointly with Israel," Mukherjee said in his message to Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Director-General and Secretary, S. Christopher.

"The nation is proud of this achievement. I am sure that this success will further boost India's defence capabilities in technologically challenging areas.

"Kindly convey my greetings and felicitations to all members of the team of scientists, engineers, and others involved in this Mission," Mukherjee said.

The nuclear capable Barak-8 missile was successfully launched on Tuesday at 10.15 a.m. from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) launch pad at Chandipur in Balasore district.
New Delhi: A probe team of the National Human Rights Commission has found that many families "migrated" from Kairana in Uttar Pradesh due to threats pertaining to "increase in crime" and "deterioration" of law-and-order situation there.

Based on its findings, the Commission has sent a notice to the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police of the state to submit an action taken report, on the observations and recommendations of the team within eight weeks.

The team also examined relevant witnesses, victims, independent witnesses, police officials concerned and SDM. Copies of relevant records were also obtained and analysed.

"The team also obtained list of 346 displaced families or persons from PS to the MP, Kairana. Out of that list three residential localities were selected and at random at least six alleged victims or displaced families or persons were chosen for verification.

"The team also had telephonic verification from at least four displaced families mentioned in the list who had migrated to distant places such as Dehradun and Surat from Kairana town in Shamli district," the NHRC said in a statement today.

"Most of the witnesses stated that many families migrated due to threats pertaining to increase in crime and deterioration of law-and-order situation," the Commission says, quoting the team's findings.

However, in June, a probe conducted by the Shamli district administration into the alleged migration from Kairana had found that in the list of 346 families, 188 had left over five years ago. The inquiry had then found that only in three cases the families had faced 'rangdari' threats and police took timely action.

A home department spokesman had said that on verification of the list provided by BJP MP Hukum Singh, it was found that 66 families had left Kairana 10 years ago.

The NHRC probe team has also found that in 2013, after resettlement of about 25,000-30,000 members of Muslims community in Kairana town from Muzaffarnagar, the demography of Kairana town changed in favour of the Muslim community", it becoming the "more dominating and majority community".

"Most of the witnesses examined and victims feel that the rehabilitation in 2013 has permanently changed the social situation in Kairana town and has led to further deterioration of law-and-order situation," says the team's findings.

A Uttar Pradesh government spokesperson when today contact, said, "We are yet to receive the NHRC notice. And, we will respond to it only after receiving it."

At least 24 witnesses said the youths of a "specific majority community" in Kairana "pass lewd/taunting remarks" against the females of a "specific minority community" as per the NHRC findings. Due to this, females of the specific minority community in Kairana avoided going outside frequently.

"Some of the displaced persons also verified that it was one of the reasons for their migration from Kairana town," the NHRC said quoting the team's findings.
Kanpur: Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of poisoning the society.

"Modi poisons the society and makes Indians fight each other," Gandhi told a gathering of farmers at Ghatampur in the course of his Kisan Yatra that began at Deoria and will conclude in New Delhi.

Gandhi also raised issues facing the farmers and said if the Congress party was voted to power in Uttar Pradesh, all the loans of farmers would be waived off.

"It is unfortunate that the pain and problems of the farmers are not reaching the Prime Minister," he said.

Describing Uttar Pradesh as a land of unlimited opportunities, the Congress leader accused the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP of doing nothing for the people.

"Their (SP, BSP and BJP) governments have only looted the people and given nothing to them," he alleged.

The Congress wanted to take the state on the path of prosperity, he said.

Gandhi emphasised that he had undertaken the 2,500-km Kisan Yatra only to highlight the problems of farmers.

He, however, refused to be drawn into the ongoing power struggle in the ruling Samajwadi Party.

Asked on his statement that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was a "good boy", Gandhi said he had cordial relations with politicians in many parties and no negative meaning should be drawn from his comment.

"I also respect Mayawatiji, but somehow I don't gel well with Modiji," he said.

The Congress leader is scheduled to hold a roadshow in Kanpur and spend the night in the city.


Kolkata: On the United Nation's International Day of Peace, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today urged people to work together for peace in their homes, in the neighbourhood and for global harmony.

"Today is the UN International Day of Peace. Let us work together for peace in our homes, peace in our neighbourhood, peace in the world," Banerjee tweeted.

"My heartiest greetings and best wishes to all," her tweet read.

The International Day of Peace is observed every year around the world on this day.

The UN General Assembly had declared September 21 as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, both within and among all nations and people.
By PTI: Chandigarh, Sep 21 (PTI) Punjab and Haryana, the grain bowl states of the country, received scanty monsoon rains this year for the second consecutive year, with deficit standing at 25 per cent each between June and September.

Chandigarh, the common capital of the two states, also received poor rains this year, with a deficit of 46 per cent, an official of the Chandigarhs Meteorological Department told PTI here today.

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Between June 1 and September 20 period this year, Union Territory Chandigarh had received a rainfall of 428.6 mm as against normal of 794.7 mm, leaving a deficit of 46 per cent.

Last year, Chandigarh had received 35 per cent less rains than normal while the deficit during the same period for Punjab and Haryana stood at 31 per cent and 38 per cent, respectively.

In the said period this year, Punjab had received a rainfall of 346.3 mm as against normal of 461.5 mm, leaving a deficit of 25 per cent, the MeT official said.

Likewise, Haryana received 331.7 mm of rains against normal of 441 mm, leaving a defecit of 25 per cent, he said.

Among the worst affected district of Punjab which received poor rains included Ferozepur, Patiala, Fatehgarh Sahib, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar and Ludhiana while comparatively the districts which had good rains included Faridkot, Gurdaspur, Ropar and Bathinda.

Similarly in Haryana, several northern districts received poor rains including Ambala, Kurukshetra and Panchkula.

Panipat, Rohtak and Sonipat also received scanty rains while the districts which lie closer to Delhi including Gurgaon, Faridabad and Jhajjar comparatively had good rainfall between June 1 and September 20 period.

In Punjab, Ferozepur had 104.5 mm as against normal of 332.2 mm, leaving a deficit of 69 per cent, Patiala had 240.7 mm as against 571.7 mm, with deficit of 58 per cent, Fatehgarh Sahib had 250.3 mm as against 505.3 mm, leaving a deficit of 50 per cent.

Hoshiarpur had 376.2 mm of rains as against normal of 674.6 mm, leaving a deficit of 44 per cent, Jalandhar had 293.8 mm as against normal of 516.8 mm, with deficit of 43 per cent, Ludhiana had 291.2 mm of rain as against 499.7 mm, with deficit of 42 per cent, Mansa had 173.6 mm as against 310.3 mm, with deficiency of 44 per cent.

Bathinda had 286 mm of rain as against normal of 300.9 mm, with deficit of 5 per cent.

Amritsar received 450.3 mm of rains as against normal of 507.6 mm, leaving a deficit of 11 per cent. (MORE) PTI SUN DIP DV DIP

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Cairo: At least 10 people drowned when a boat carrying migrants capsized off the Egyptian coast on Wednesday, with rescue teams saving at least 150 passengers, officials said.

Search teams were looking for more survivors from the incident which took place off the Mediterranean port city of Rosetta, two police officials said.

"There are 10 dead and three injured," health ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed told AFP.
United Nations: When he came to power, he appeared to imply it was one of his priorities.

In reality, US President Barack Obama has made less headway than many of his peers trying to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Now, with just four months remaining in office, is Obama once again thinking about peace in the Middle East?

No-one in Washington was expecting a sudden breakthrough in the stand-off between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu`s government and Mahmud Abbas` Palestinian authority.

But in New York on Wednesday for the final United Nations General Assembly of his eight-year double term, Obama will meet the Israeli leader, perhaps for the last time.

Will the meeting prove to be another tense footnote to a stalemate, or a last bid to influence a dossier that confronted and disappointed of all his predecessors?

Little public comment is expected from Wednesday`s meeting -- the parties are too far apart -- but some observers expect Obama to enter the fray with a major speech after the November 8 presidential election.

"This would be a declaratory effort to put on record what America believes are the parameters for a solution," argued Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Center.

"And it would be an effort to put the Obama... signature or stamp on an issue that presumably he cares deeply about," the former senior advisor argued.

On January 22, 2009, Obama marked his second day after his swearing in as leader of the Free World by nominating George Mitchell as Middle East peace envoy.

The former senator had been the point man in talks to end Britain`s Northern Ireland conflict, and his promotion had been seen as marking the young US leader`s seriousness.

The president himself, elected on a vague but inspiring "hope and change" ticket, vowed to "aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians."

Eight years later, that has not come to pass. Israel and its neighbors are enduring a rough patch of political violence, despite high-profile international oversight.

Whatever personal tensions undermine ties between Obama and Netanyahu, the leader in the White House enjoys access to a bully pulpit.

Last week, Obama endorsed Israel`s record 10-year, $38 billion US military aid contract -- a predictable result of the talks, but one which emphasized tensions.

Does this gift give Obama leverage to pressure the Jewish state`s government into accepting the groundwork for a future compromise? Well, not quite.

If Obama had left Israel-Palestine at the heart of what he has done or not done in office, the challengers in the race to replace him might have made it an election issue.

Instead, both Obama`s preferred successor Hillary Clinton and his Republican antagonist Donald Trump have limited themselves to a defense of their records as supporters of Israeli security.

In the final month of his presidency in 2000 Bill Clinton had clear goals for the Middle East: two states alongside one another, with a shared capital in parts of Jerusalem, and he met with both sides for a final push.

"This was done in a low key fashion, with very little media visibility because Clinton honestly still believed there was still a chance to get a deal," Miller said.

Obama, however, would have to make a more public impact.

If he chooses to re-enter the debate it would be to lay down the outlines of a future peace deal, binding the parties to a two-state solution that both say they support, but which today seems very far off.
United Nations/Beirut: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry demanded on Wednesday that Russia and the Syrian government immediately halt flights over Syrian battle zones, in what he called a last chance to salvage a collapsing ceasefire and find a way "out of the carnage".

An impassioned Kerry faced off with Russia`s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the U.N. Security Council in New York, in an unusually heated televised showdown, saying the bombing of an aid convoy in Syria raised "profound doubt whether Russia and the Assad regime can or will live up to" ceasefire obligations.

Listening to Lavrov made him feel like he was living in a "parallel universe", Kerry said.

On the ground, rebels battled the forces of the government of President Bashar al-Assad on major frontlines near Aleppo and Hama, and air strikes reportedly killed a dozen people including four medical workers.

"I emphasise this to Russia. The United States continues to believe there is a way forward that, although rocky and difficult and uncertain, can provide the most viable path out of the carnage," Kerry said.

"If we allow spoilers to choose the path for us, the path of escalation ... then make no mistake my friends: the next time we convene here we`re going to be facing a Middle East with even more refugees, with more dead, with more displaced, with more extremists and more suffering on an even greater scale."

He mocked what he described as absurd Russian explanations for an attack on an aid convoy on Monday that Washington says was carried out by Russian warplanes. A Russian statement said the trucks had "caught fire", which Kerry called tantamount to blaming "spontaneous combustion".

"To restore credibility to the process, we must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded, he said.

Lavrov, for his part, called for an independent investigation into the convoy attack, and said all parties needed to take simultaneous steps to stop the war.

The ceasefire which took effect last week is probably the last hope for a settlement on Syria before the administration of President Barack Obama leaves office, and has been Kerry`s main focus for months. But it has so far followed the path of all previous peace efforts: abandoned by the warring parties even as diplomats far away debate it.

Kerry said it was a moment of truth for the opposition, which he said must do more to distance itself from the Nusra Front, long al Qaeda`s Syrian wing, which changed its name and disavowed al Qaeda two months ago.

Nusra is still characterised by both the West and Moscow as a terrorist group excluded from the ceasefire. Other rebels say Moscow and Damascus use this to justify broader attacks.

Overnight fighting was focused in areas that control access to Aleppo city, where the rebel-held east has been besieged by Russian and Iranian-backed pro-government forces and completely encircled for all but a few weeks since July.

Syrian state media said the army had recaptured a fertiliser factory in the Ramousah area to the southwest of the city. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring body, confirmed the advance and said government forces had pressed forward near an apartment complex nearby.

A rebel fighter in the Aleppo area said warplanes had been bombing all night in preparation for an attack. But "the regime`s attempts to advance failed," said the rebel, speaking to Reuters from the Aleppo area via the internet.

A Syrian military source said insurgent groups were mobilising to the south and west of Aleppo and in the northern Hama area. "We will certainly target all these gatherings and mobilisations they are conducting."

The army reported carrying out air strikes on seven areas near Aleppo. The Observatory said one air strike killed four medical workers and at least nine rebel fighters in the insurgent-held town of Khan Touman south of Aleppo.

The medical staff killed were working for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), it said. UOSSM confirmed in a statement that at least four of its staff had been killed.

Syrian government forces also launched a major advance in Hama province in the West of the country.

"It is a very intense attack, for which Russian jets paved the way, but it was repelled by the brothers, praise God," Abu al-Baraa al-Hamawi, a rebel commander fighting as part of the Islamist Jaish al-Fatah alliance, told Reuters.

He said rebels had destroyed four tanks and inflicted heavy losses. Syrian state TV said government forces had killed a number of insurgents and destroyed their vehicles.

Rebel sources also reported an attempt by pro-government forces to advance in the Handarat area to the north of Aleppo, saying this too had been repelled. Pro-government media made no mention of that attack.

The Observatory reported that a Syrian jet had crashed near Damascus, saying the cause of the crash and fate of the pilot were unknown. Islamic State said it had been shot down.

The truce brokered by the United States and Russia took effect on Sept. 12 as part of a deal meant to facilitate aid access to besieged areas.

Washington and Moscow, which back opposing sides in the war between Assad`s government and insurgents, agreed to jointly target jihadists that are their common enemy.

But such unprecedented cooperation, at a time when trust between the Cold War-era foes is at its lowest for decades, was always a risky gamble. Kerry hammered out the deal over months of shuttle diplomacy despite scepticism among other senior U.S. administration figures.

Tensions between the United States and Russia escalated over a Sept. 17 attack by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers in the eastern Deir al-Zor province. Washington said that strike was carried out by mistake with the intent of hitting Islamic State.

Monday`s attack on the aid convoy, which the Syrian Red Crescent says killed the head of its local office and around 20 other people, brought furious international condemnation.

The United Nations suspended aid shipments. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon used his farewell speech to the General Assembly in New York to denounce the "cowards" behind it.

"Just when you think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower," Ban said. The United Nations initially described the attack as an air strike but later rowed back, saying it could not be sure what had happened.

But Washington says it is all but certain the trucks were hit by the air, which could only have been carried out by Russian or Syrian planes, and it suspects Moscow.

Two U.S. officials told Reuters on Tuesday that two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the time it was struck.

Moscow says the convoy was not hit from the air and has implied rebels were to blame, saying only rescue workers affiliated to the opposition knew what had happened.
United Nations/Beirut: The United States believes two Russian aircraft attacked an aid convoy near Aleppo in a strike that shattered a one-week truce, US officials said on Tuesday, but Russia denied involvement.

Despite the military blame game over Monday`s deadly attack, diplomats struggled to save the US-Russian ceasefire agreement that took effect on September 12.

The incident, in which 18 trucks from a 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed, looked likely to deal a death blow to diplomatic efforts to halt a civil war now in its sixth year.

Two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the exact time it was struck late on Monday, two US officials told Reuters, citing US intelligence that led them to conclude Russia was to blame.

Russia`s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman denied the assertion, telling reporters at the United Nations the US administration "has no facts" to support the claim, adding: "We have nothing to do with this situation."

Ben Rhodes, a deputy US national security adviser, said the White House held Russia responsible for what he called an "enormous humanitarian tragedy" but he did not address whether the attack was carried out by Russian aircraft.

Earlier Russia, which denied its aircraft or those of its Syrian government allies were involved, had said it believed the convoy was not struck from the air at all but had caught fire because of some incident on the ground.

The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and "around 20 civilians" had been killed, although other death tolls differed. The attack prompted the United Nations to suspend all aid shipments into Syria.

Senior officials from 23 nations emerged from a one-hour meeting on Syria at a New York luxury hotel with little more than an agreement to meet again, on Friday, about how to end a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions from their homes.

They also differed on the chances of renewing the ceasefire.

"The ceasefire is not dead," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said after the meeting, which he hosted with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"Is there still a chance this ceasefire will be effective? I can`t answer that question," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters. He said that without a ceasefire there would be a "spiral of war, but we have to be honest, the U.S.-Russian negotiation has reached its limits."

The U.N. Security Council is due to hold a high-level meeting on Syria on Wednesday.

The United Nations, Red Cross and United States had all described Monday`s incident as an air strike, implicitly pinning the blame on Russian or Syrian aircraft that fly in the area for breaking the ceasefire with an attack on a humanitarian target.

But the U.N. revised a statement to remove the phrase "air strikes" and replace it with references to unspecified "attacks". U.N. humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said the original reference to air strikes was probably a drafting error, saying the U.N. was not in a position to determine if they were air strikes but was sure the convoy was "attacked."

"WAR CRIME" IF DELIBERATE

The ceasefire was meant to halt all fighting and allow aid to reach besieged areas, at a time when pro-government forces, with Russian and Iranian military support, are in their strongest position for years and civilians in many rebel-held areas are cut off from food and medical supplies.

"If this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime," U.N. aid chief Stephen O`Brien said in a statement.

Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia`s Defence Ministry, said in a statement: "We have studied video footage from the scene from so-called `activists` in detail and did not find any evidence that the convoy had been struck by ordnance."

"There are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air."

He said the damage to the convoy visible in footage was caused by its cargo catching fire. It had occurred at the same time as militants from the group formerly called the Nusra Front had started a big offensive in nearby Aleppo, he said, appearing to point the finger at rescue workers from a group called the "White Helmets" who filmed the aftermath.

"Only representatives of the `White Helmets` organisation close to the Nusra Front who, as always, found themselves at the right time in the right place by chance with their video cameras can answer who did this and why."

Hussein Badawi, head of the White Helmets in the town, said he was 100 metres (yards) from the aid depot when the air strikes took place and was injured by shrapnel in the hand.

"There were fires, martyrs, wounded people. We were able to pull out four survivors and five dead bodies at first," Badawi said. "The bombardment was continuous, continuous. The rescue teams weren`t even able to work. Those who arrived in ambulances couldn`t come in."

DIPLOMATIC GAMBLE

The ceasefire deal was a gamble on unprecedented cooperation between the United States and Russia, despite trust between the two Cold War-era foes being at its lowest point for decades.

They support opposite sides in the war between Assad`s government and insurgents but are both fighting against Islamic State militants. The deal calls for Washington and Moscow to share targeting information eventually.

Following Monday`s attack, there were reports of intensified clashes across Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said clashes took place between the army and rebels in the Jobar district of Damascus and areas northeast of the capital, after the army tried to advance.

Near the central city of Homs, the army shelled one village, while helicopters and warplanes bombed several other places, including the rebel-held town of Rastan, it said.
Osan: Two US supersonic bombers flew over South Korea on Wednesday, with one of them landing at an air base 40 km (25 miles) south of the capital, the second such flight since North Korea`s September 9 nuclear test.

US Forces Korea said in a statement the flight by a pair of B-1B Lancer strategic bombers based in Guam was a show of force and of U.S. commitment to preserve the security of the peninsula and the region.

The United States, which has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, flew two B-1 bombers on September 13 escorted by US and South Korean fighter jets in a show of solidarity with Seoul.

The North condemned the earlier flight as an armed provocation that mobilized "ill-famed nuclear killing tools". It did not immediately respond to Wednesday`s flight.

North Korea has ignored global condemnation since conducting its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, and this week said it had successfully tested a new rocket engine that would be used to launch satellites, again in violation of U.N. sanctions.

The leaders of the United States and China, which is the North`s main diplomatic ally and economic benefactor, condemned the latest nuclear test and pledged to step up cooperation at the United Nations and in law enforcement channels.

UN diplomats say the two countries have begun discussions on a possible U.N. resolution in response to the latest nuclear test, but China has not said directly whether it would support tougher steps against North Korea.

South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn told Parliament it was pushing for tightening existing U.N. sanctions against the North by removing loopholes that allowed it to trade in minerals if it is for subsistence.

North Korea has been testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles at an unprecedented rate this year, beginning with its fourth nuclear test in January and including the launch of a satellite in February that was widely seen as a test of long-range ballistic missile technology.

The North`s test of a new rocket engine for satellite launchers this week was believed to be part of a long-range missile programme, according to the South`s military.

North Korea`s leader, Kim Jong Un, ordered preparations for the launch of a satellite "as soon as possible" on the basis of the successful test, its state media reported.

North Korea this month fired three missiles that flew about 1,000 km (600 miles), and in August tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile that experts said showed considerable progress.

It also launched an intermediate-range missile in June that experts said marked a technological advance for the isolated state after several failed tests.

South Korean Defence Minister Han Min-koo told Parliament the North was developing all types of missiles, from short- to long-range, and its advances were "considerable".
Washington: Questioning the national security and foreign policies of presidential rival Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump said if elected he will stop the policy of regime change overseas and instead focus on defeating Islamic State.

"We are going to stop the policy of regime change overseas, and instead focus on working with our allies on a military campaign to utterly destroy ISIS and defeat Islamic terrorism. This will not only require military warfare, but also financial warfare, cyber warfare, and ideological warfare," Trump said at an election rally in North Carolina.

Identifying radical Islam as a major threat to the United States, the Republican Trump alleged that Clinton of the Democratic Party was not even speaking about the issue.

"My opponent won't even say the words radical Islamic terrorism. In fact, Hillary Clinton talks tougher about my supporters than she does about Islamic terrorists. She calls the patriotic Americans who support our campaign many of them cops and soldiers deplorable and irredeemable," he said.

"Has she ever talked that way about radical Islam, or about those who oppress and murder women and gays overseas? Has Hillary Clinton ever called people who support these practices deplorable and irredeemable? In many countries overseas, non-believers face the death penalty where is Hillary's condemnation here?" he asked.

"Let's ask Hillary Clinton: how many people who subscribe to Radical Islamic views, and support the oppression of non-believers, would you call deplorable or irredeemable ? or are those words reserved only for hardworking Americans that truly love their country and that support Donald Trump?" he asked.

Trump asserted America can never elect a president, like Hillary Clinton, who "with her choice of words, thinks decent American citizens are a bigger threat than radical Islamic terrorists."

"Anyone who cannot name our enemy, is not fit to lead this country. Anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as America's president, he said.

"Her timetable withdrawal from Iraq, her push for regime change in Libya and Syria, her open borders policies these are the actions that unleashed the ISIS disaster," he said.

He also criticized Clinton for her claim that "my opposition to radical Islamic terrorism is a recruiting tool." He said it demonstrated her level of ignorance about the terror threat "that is disqualifying".

Trump alleged that refusing to call out radical Islam will not lessen the danger, it will only increase and embolden the danger ? just like they have seen during her disastrous and failed tenure as secretary of state.

"The rise of ISIS is Hillary Clinton's foreign policy legacy. Secretary Clinton has helped to topple regimes, displace millions, and then opened the door to ISIS to enter our country. How is this a smart policy?" he asked.
While the Punjab Police and BSF claim they are prepared to deal with any situation and have deployed adequate force, no police personnel were found at important police barriers, including Pathankot.

By Manjeet Sehgal: While the Uri terror strike is still fresh, the Punjab Police seems to have learnt no lessons from this and two previous attacks which rocked the state .

While the Punjab Police and BSF officials claim that they are prepared to deal with any situation and have deployed adequate force to thwart any attempt made to disturb peace in the country, the ground report tells a different story.

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The absence of police personnel from important police barriers, particularly in Pathankot, has raised eyebrows.

Also Read: Days after Uri attack, suspicious bag found near Army unit in Pathankot

GROUND REPORT

While no police personnel were found at the Madhopur border, nearly 10 kms from Pathankot, a couple of BSF and police officials were there at the Lakhanpur border connecting Punjab and Jammu.

However, the ones present did not stop any vehicles for checking as was claimed by their seniors.

Moreover, no police officials were present at the entrance of the Air Force station which was attacked by the Jaish terrorists in January this year.

Meanwhile, the BSF appeared geared up to deal with the infiltration threat but the much talked about laser fencing project has failed to take off. This given a blow to the efforts being made by the BSF to check infiltration.

The infiltration threat looms large in Punjab which shares a sizeable chunk of Indo-Pak border.

Recent military reports reveal that Jaish-e-Mohammad is running a terrorist launch pad from a place called Bada Bhai Mansoor. This place is located at a distance of one kilometre from the Simbal border outpost.

Sources say a mosque located at Bada Bhai Mansoor is being used to radicalise and push terrorists in India by top Jaish bosses including Hafiz Sayeed and Masood Azhar .

Attracting criticism after the Pathankot terror attack, the BSF has now installed three-tier security equipment to deal with infiltration including infra red detection system, trip flayers and cobra wires.

It is worth mentioning here that Punjab is vulnerable to terror attacks. Intelligence reports suggest Pakistan-based terrorists may target the Army and police installations soon.

However, the casual attitude of police officials towards the threat may jeopardise the lives of thousands of innocent people.

Also Read:

Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

10 terrorists gunned down in Uri after Pakistan violates ceasefire again

Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?



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The change of the name of the road in Lutyen's Delhi came days after BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi wrote to the NDMC, suggesting the name of the road on which the PM lives should be changed to "match the Indian culture".

By India Today Web Desk: The New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) today changed the name of Race Course Road in central Delhi - with the Prime Minister's official residence being its most famous address - to Lok Kalyan Marg.

The change of the name of the road in Lutyen's Delhi came days after BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi wrote to the NDMC, suggesting the name of the road on which the PM lives should be changed to "match the Indian culture".

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The announcement was made at a press conference attended by Lekhi, NDMC chairman Naresh Kumar, and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, whose AAP had earlier demanded that the road be named after a martyred soldier.

Lekhi had actually proposed to rename the Race Course Road as Ekatma Marg, based on the philosophy of the BJP ideologue Deendayal Upadhyay.

"There were some suggestions in the NDMC meeting, but consensus was that Race Course Road be now called Lok Kalyan Marg," Kejriwal later told reporters.



The British-era Race Course Road was named after the Delhi race course, part of the Delhi Race Club, which was established in 1940.

In August last year, Aurangzeb Road in central Delhi was renamed Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road in honour of the late President.

Also read:

PM's new address may be 7 Ekatma Marg as '7 RCR doesn't match with Indian Culture'

AAP opposes proposal to rename Race Course Road as Ekatma Marg



--- ENDS ---
By Kumar Shakti Shekhar: Though both Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav are the products of the same dynasty politics, the former has, at best, failed to take off while the latter has demonstrated ample signs of a politician who is there to stay on the political horizon for a longer time.

Dynasty in politics is very much akin to that in Bollywood. Several actors were launched but some - such as Rishi Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt and Hrithik Roshan - clicked, while the others - for example Abhishek Bachchan, Rajiv Kapoor, Kumar Gaurav and Neil Nitin Mukesh - more or less flopped.

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Also read: Rahul Gandhi calls PM Modi a selfie-machine, which makes big promises



However, politics is tougher than Bollywood. Here retakes do not take place. The politicians survive in public life. They are constantly under public gaze. Their private life is also under scrutiny. What they speak and how they conduct also contributes to their success or failure in politics.

RAHUL GANDHI

Evaluated on these parameters, Rahul, who was born with a silver spoon, leaves much to be desired. He got the traditional bastion of Amethi to contest Lok Sabha elections but he has failed to even take proper care of his constituency. His victory margin of 3.7 lakh votes in 2009 got reduced to less than half in 2014 against BJP's Smriti Irani. If the trend continues, it will not be a major surprise if he loses in 2019.

The Nehru-Gandhi scion is still being tried and tested despite having been launched in politics 12 years ago in 2004. His contribution to the Congress can well be remembered for visiting the homes of Dalits (that too only in Uttar Pradesh) and coming up with catchphrases such as "suit-boot ki sarkar", "fair and lovely" and "arhar Modi". However, it is also debatable whether these jibes on Prime Minister Narendra Modi were coined by him.

Also read: Rahul is a good boy, we can be friends, says Akhilesh Yadav

But what the Congress would not like Rahul to be remembered for are his mysterious escapes at intervals to undisclosed destinations for holidaying and his image of being a reluctant politician. If Rahul's catchphrases have stuck on Modi and the ruling BJP, his gaffes have become a source of embarrassment for the Congress. For instance, his statement that "a Dalit needs Jupiter's escape velocity to achieve success" or "People call us an elephant... We are not an elephant... we are a beehive" invited immense ridicule.

The Congress vice-president has not yet won the confidence of a crucial section of his party. There is difference of opinion within the party over accepting him as their leader. The old guard in particular is wary of his capabilities and is apprehensive of the party's future under his leadership.

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It is for these reasons that despite Congress president Sonia Gandhi not keeping good health and organisational elections having been postponed, the reins of the party have not yet been handed over to Rahul.

Also, as far as electoral politics is concerned, the Congress does not have anything to boast about any achievement under his leadership. Except for victory in a handful of states such as Karnataka and a few in the Northeastern, he does not have much to his credit. The Congress virtually fought the 2014 Lok Sabha elections with him being its face but it lost miserably, the most humiliating in its electoral history, having been reduced to just 44 of the 543 seats. Rahul, of course, can boast of victory in 2015 Bihar Assembly elections. But here, it is the junior most partner in the Grand Alliance, with Lalu Prasad's RJD and JD(U) as the senior parties.

AKHILESH YADAV

Born on July 1, 1973, the Yadav scion is three years younger than Rahul. However, he is four years senior to the Congress vice-president in politics, having contested the first Lok Sabha election (which in fact was a bye-election) in 2000.

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Also read: UP's warring Yadavs: New state chief Shivpal now sacks 7 Akhilesh Yadav loyalists

Like Rahul, Akhilesh too has won three Lok Sabha elections. However, he quit the Lower House midway in 2012 to take over as the CM of India's most populated state at a young age of 38 - a daunting task indeed. In the process, he became one of the youngest persons to become a CM.

Akhilesh has silently been governing UP for the past four-and-a-half years. He has been focusing on development of infrastructure and modernisation of the state. Roads, bridges and power have shown improvement in his term.

The UP chief minister is a youth icon in his state. He is also popular among the women. His government has also launched several welfare schemes for farmers, labourers, middle and lower middle classes.

However, Akhilesh is constrained on three fronts. But he has accepted defeat despite these road blocks. Firstly, his government has not managed to publicise the initiatives it has taken and the good works it has accomplished in different sectors.

Secondly, the Samajwadi Party government has been beset with law and order problem. This has remained a constant irritant and a source of bad publicity of Akhilesh's governance. The Muzaffarnagar riots, Badaun rape case, Bulandshahr rape case and now the Bijnor murders have robbed some sheen off Akhilesh's good work.

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Also read: Amar Singh back as SPs General Secretary

As if the law and order problem was not enough, the ongoing recent feud in the Yadav clan has sullied the image of the Samajwadi Party as well as the Akhilesh government.

However, this feud has underlined Akhilesh's maturity as a politician. He is fighting against all odds, with both uncle Shivpal Yadav and father Mulayam Singh Yadav taking decisions unfavourable to the state government. Akhilesh has been trying to convey a message to the people that he does not tolerate corruption and inefficiency. While Mulayam and Shivpal's focus is the party and its cadre, the chief minister is targeting all those voters who give thumbs up to good governance. This may help him during the elections.

BATTLING ODDS

Both Akhilesh and Rahul are battling against odds. The Yadav scion has maintained his composure and charm despite adversities. The Gandhi scion has carved a niche of being angry, loud and sarcastic. These attitudes speak volumes about their confidence.

Akhilesh is here to stay. However, the same may not hold true for Rahul. The Congress has already started experimenting on propping up his sister Priyanka Gandhi. Her role in UP Assembly is set to increase. This in itself is a poor reflection on Rahul's image.

--- ENDS ---
McLaren denies a report in the Financial Times that it was in talks with Apple about a possible acquisition

British supercar maker McLaren on Wednesday denied a report in the Financial Times that it was in talks with Apple about a possible acquisition by the US tech giant.

"We can confirm that McLaren is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment," a spokesman for the company said in a statement to AFP.
Zara-owner Inditex posted a rise in first-half profits Wednesday thanks to a well-honed business model allowing the Spanish group to beat rivals in whisking new trends to the shop racks.

The world's largest fashion retailer by turnover, owned by the publicity-shy Amancio Ortega who has become the world's second richest man, said higher clothes sales and a rise in new stores around the globe drove the eight-percent jump.

Profits rose 8.0 percent to 1.3 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in the six months from February 1 while sales were up 11 percent at 10.5 billion euros, said the company which operates eight store brands including Zara, upmarket label Massimo Dutti and teen chain Bershka.

Chief executive Pablo Isla said the main reason behind the sales jump was "the execution of our business model globally," with the opening of more than 80 stores in the first half, including in the new markets of Aruba, Paraguay and Nicaragua.

The company plans to open a total of over 200 new stores this year, including around 60 in China, he added.

While its competitors prioritise low production costs and outsource manufacturing to China, Inditex makes more than half of its clothes in factories in Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Turkey and Eastern Europe -- relatively close to its main markets.

This business model allows it to get clothes to stores much faster than its rivals, thus it is able to quickly react to shifting consumer tastes and avoid excess inventory.

Clothes made for Zara, for instance, can go from the design stage to store racks in a mere two weeks.

By comparison the process takes Inditex's nearest rival H&M six months because it sources its collection further away in China.

- Concern over growth prospects -

While H&M regularly challenges it for the global number one spot, Inditex is currently the largest fashion retailer by sales, based on the two companies' first-half results this year.

But Noel Byrne, a business strategy professor at the Madrid branch of Boston's Suffolk University, warned that the Spanish group was bound to face tighter competition in the coming years as rival retailers adjust their own processes to match its quick delivery times.

Story continues

"When you are making big profits it is one of the most dangerous times in business because the competition want a share of that, and they smell it and they inevitably come," he told AFP.

As Inditex continues its push outside of Europe and plans to ramp up activities in China, it will also need to adapt its business model for Asia by opening design and production centres in the continent, Byrne added.

The company already produces basic items in low-cost Asia where it, like other large textile firms, faces accusations of employment abuses.

A report by Spain's largest union Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) said "work days are never ending" at Inditex's sub-contractors in China.

The company said it participated in the report and stressed that it also pointed out "improvements" at its Chinese sub-contractors, especially in terms of salaries.

International expansion is crucial for the growth of the group, faced with Europe's slow economic recovery.

According to a study by the Barcelona-based EAE Business School, China, Russia and South Korea are the countries where clothes spending has increased the most since 2004.

Spain, meanwhile, only represents two percent of global clothes spending, and its share in Inditex's turnover has gone from 45 to less than 20 percent in just a decade.

Despite the good results, shares in the group closed down 1.6 percent to 32.17 euros due to a mix of profit taking and concern over "growth prospects in the second half that are slightly lower than before," said Manuel Pinto, an analyst at brokers XTB.
Billionaires Ken Langone (left) and Stan Druckenmiller are investors in Relationship Science.

Relationship Science (RelSci), an exclusive relationship network whose investors include several billionaires, just launched a new website thats available to the public.

Until now, the technologywhich could be considered a LinkedIn for the 1%provided access to its detailed database on more than 5 million wealthy and famous people only to corporations through expensive subscriptions.

The new, consumer-facing page, however, will let professionals like financial advisors, investment bankers, brokers, business development people, fundraisers, attorneys, and others gain free access to 10 profiles each month. The database provides details on influential people including their work history, board memberships, charitable donations, personal interests, awards, investments, and more.

Relationship Science

The launch of RelationshipScience.com fills an information gap in the market between LinkedIn and Wikipedia with deep profiles on senior people and organizations, including the large number who dont have any presence across online social networks, said Domenic Graziosi, CEO of Relationship Science. Weve had incredible success helping enterprises of all sizes take advantage of their collective relationships, and now were opening up access to the RelSci platform for anyone.

For $49.99 per month month, users can have unlimited full profile views, relationship mapping, and alerts on people and organizations.

Relationship Science, which took 800 people and almost three years to build, was started back in 2010 by Neal Goldman, whos a former investment banker and founder of Capital IQ, a financial data platform that was sold to McGraw-Hill in 2004.

Relationships are this incredible asset, but the problem is its very messy, Goldman explained.

Relationship Science is a way to navigate your own relationships and increase output by getting the right parties and meetings together more quickly and more efficiently.

Goldmans own experience leveraging relationships led him to create the product.

Story continues

During the September 11 terrorist attacks, Capital IQ lost its offices. At the time, Goldman had to lead a company of nearly 200 people and raise capital in a difficult environment for growing a business. I had a tremendous responsibility to them, he said.

He learned to maximize the effectiveness of selling through his relationship network.

I looked at the relationship stuff and it was really fascinating. I didnt know what other people did. I did what I thought to do. The more I talked to people the more I realized I had done something very different. I also realized what I had done was not that dissimilar to what some of the most effective people in the world had done, Goldman said.

When Goldman showed potential investors mocked up screens of what Relationship Science looked like, he said many of them told him what he was describing is what theyve considered their edge.

To date, Relationship Science has received $120 million in funding from some of the biggest names in finance, including Bill Ackmans TABLE Holdings, Henry Kravis, Ken Langone, Stanley Druckenmiller, MacAndrews & Forbes, C.V. Starr & Co., Hearst Corporation, Ron Burkle, Barry Sternlicht, RIT Capital Partners, Andrew Tisch, Harvey Golub, Reuben Jeffery, David Komansky (Former Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch), Tom Glocer (Former CEO of Thomson Reuters), Randy Lerner (Former Chairman of MBNA), Stephen Luczo (Chairman and CEO of Seagate), William Rudin, and Salesforce.com.

RelationshipScience

RelSci

RelSci

RelSci



Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

Why hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman is warning young people to avoid the fund management industry

Billionaire Rubenstein: These 6 traits will help you succeed on Wall Street

How a $650,100 lunch with Warren Buffett changed one hedge fund managers life

Warren Buffett once said these are 2 of the more important decisions youll make in life

Buffett: Your business will succeed if you execute this 3-word mission

A hedge fund manager gave some blunt advice to a bunch of 9th grade boys
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Lending to Canadian small businesses edged up in July from the previous month, suggesting the prolonged weakness in business investment may be turning a corner, a report from PayNet showed on Wednesday. The PayNet Canadian Small Business Lending Index rose to 118.7 in July from 118.4 the month before. Compared with a year ago, the index was down 11 percent, moderating from an annual decline of 13 percent in June. Business investment in Canada has been hit by the slump in oil prices that briefly put the country in recession last year. "It's a good sign because we're hitting a support level for business investment," said PayNet President Bill Phelan. "When they start to hit a base-line bottom, that at least means we've found the depths of the pullback." By sector, manufacturing was a bright spot, rising to 65.3 from 64.9, while the retail segment pushed higher to 177.5 from 176.9. Both are sectors that have been looked at to lead the recovery, but their growth has not been enough so far to offset a drag from the commodity sector, said Phelan. Lending to medium-sized businesses continued to contract, with the index declining to 192.1 from 211.6. But the yearly rate of decline held steady at 18 percent, suggesting the weakness was finding a plateau. The number of small businesses that were behind on their bills 30 days or more eased to 1.14 percent from 1.17 percent. The amount of firms that were delinquent 90 days or more held steady at 0.35 percent. (Reporting by Leah Schnurr; Editing by Alan Crosby)
(This version of the Sept. 20 story has been refiled to change name to "Barings" from "Baring Asset Management" after company changed its name, in paragraph 11) By Zandi Shabalala LONDON (Reuters) - Tight budgets and nervous investors have convinced major miners that a cheap, timely way to ensure a strong pipeline of quality assets is to team up with junior, more nimble exploration firms. Miners have slashed costs by delaying projects, sold assets and cut exploration budgets to free up cash to pay down debt, much of it acquired during and after the commodity price supercycle, which started in 2002. Now, with prices of commodities such as copper and iron ore at multi-year lows, capital expenditure is expected to remain subdued and investors reluctant to sanction large acquisitions or projects. One option is to buy profitable, low-cost so-called "tier 1" good quality mines, but few are up for sale. A viable alternative is to own mines with small explorers. "Partnering allows us to complement our strengths in big data, technology and research alliances with what juniors can bringideas and projects, boots on the ground and acreage," Stephen McIntosh, Rio Tinto's head of growth and innovation, said. "It will help all of us to accelerate and enhance the discovery of Tier 1 assets." Rio's 2016 capex budget is $150 million, down 74 percent from last year, most of that will be aimed at copper. A favorite with miners and investors, the copper market faces shortages from 2018 onwards. As a result, copper prices are expected to recover from current levels around $4,700, which though up from six and a half year lows of $4,318 in January are far from record highs above $10,000 a tonne hit in February 2011. With that in the background, Rio last year agreed exploration deals with Canada's Avala Resources on a gold-copper project in Serbia and signed a similar deal with Reservoir Minerals on its Timok Magmatic Complex in Serbia. Generally under such deals, the larger miners invest capital to pay for mining equipment and the skills needed to develop the mineral site that is mainly run by the smaller exploring company. "Investing in juniors allows the majors to spread risk," said Clive Burstow, fund manager at Barings, adding that junior partners often bring local expertise. BHP Billiton cut its 2016 capital and exploration budget 42 percent to $6.4 billion. But it has earmarked about $60 million for green field exploration for 2016-2018, BHP geoscientist Laura Tyler said in June. Tyler said BHP sought "projects with junior explorers to derisk projects and secure future options". BHP agreed earlier this year to fund copper exploration by Aston Bay Holdings Ltd , which could see it owning a majority stake in the firm. Aston Bay Chief Executive Benjamin Cox told Reuters his company only bought mineral-rich sites if the deposits were large enough to attract a large mining company to partner with. "We have a high belief that the partnership model is good. A major mining company will test a bigger set of outcomes than a junior company can afford to test. It fast tracks the process." (Editing by Pratima Desai and Susan Thomas)
Roadies star Rannvijay Singha and wife Prianka Singha are soon going to become doting parents to a beautiful child.

By India Today Web Desk: Popular TV personality and film actor Rannvijay Singha and wife Prianka Singha are expecting their first child together. The talented star recently announced the happy news on social media.

Also read:You have to see this super-cute picture of Shveta Salve's newborn



Rannvijay posted an adorable picture on his personal Instagram account of himself with his pregnant wife. The actor wrote, "I love u so much?And u too @priankasingha #satnamwaheguru #babymama."

I love u so much.. And u too @priankasingha #satnamwaheguru ?????#babymama A photo posted by Rannvijay (@rannvijaysingha) on Sep 20, 2016 at 5:21am PDT

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As soon as Rannvijay's fans heard of the news, wishes started pouring in from all sides on the internet.

Rannvijay has been married for two years now. The good-looking actor tied the knot with his London-based girlfriend in Mombasa, Kenya on April 14, 2014.

Rannvijay is currently seen hosting and giving love advice to contestants on the reality show Splitsvilla with former porn star and Bollywood actress Sunny Leone.

Other TV celebrities like Shveta Salve and Roshni Chopra recently welcomed their respective babies into the world by announcing the happy news on social media.

Congratulations, Rannvijay and Prianka!



--- ENDS ---
A Hanjin Shipping Co ship is seen stranded outside the Port of Long Beach, California, September 8, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

By Tom Hals and Jim Christie

(Reuters) - Failed South Korean cargo line Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd has found the money to unload a full container ship waiting outside a New York-area port. But there is another problem: once unloaded, the empty vessel may not be able to go back out to sea.

The predicament of the Hanjin Miami, one of 10 U.S.-bound ships stranded by the Hanjin bankruptcy, illustrates one way that disputes over ships, ocean containers and even truck trailers to haul the shipping boxes have stranded at sea some $14 billion of goods around the world.

Since filing for court receivership on August 31, the world's seventh-largest container carrier has caused chaos for many retailers at a time when they are getting goods for the holiday shopping season.

The National Retail Federation on Tuesday urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to find a way to clear up the confusion. "The impact on small and medium-sized companies could be particularly devastating if this situation is not resolved in a timely manner," the group said in a letter.

Hanjin has the money to dock its Hanjin Miami, Federal Maritime Commissioner William Doyle, whose agency regulates international shipping, told an industry event on Friday.

But the Miami is not being allowed in port because of a dispute about empty Hanjin shipping containers, which the Miami normally would load up as ballast to exit port.

Without those empties, the ship "will not be able to depart the harbor because it would not have the air clearance to navigate under the Bayonne Bridge -- even at a dead low tide," said Doyle. Without a way to leave, the ship could tie up a berth.

"There are so many disputes right now attached to empty containers that the terminal is not going to load the empties back onto the ship," Doyle said.

The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey declined to comment, as did an attorney for Maher Terminal, which operates the marine terminal in Newark where the Hanjin Miami is expected to dock.

Story continues

The Hanjin Miami is currently off the U.S. East Coast, about 300 miles from New York, according to Reuters Eikon data.

The Bayonne Bridge, which held the title of world's longest arch bridge for 45 years after it opened in 1931, presents a unique challenge to Hanjin.

But other ports also are struggling with questions of who pays for terminal charges and what to do with empty containers. The complexity increased on Monday after a South Korean judge told Hanjin to cancel its ship charter agreements and return empty vessels to their owners.

In the wake of the decision by the South Korean judge, an empty Hanjin Miami may become the responsibility of Reederei NSB, which manages the ship on behalf of its owner, an affiliate of Conti Holding of Munich, according to Reuters Eikon data.

A spokeswoman for Reederei and a U.S. lawyer for Hanjin did not respond to requests for comment.

Port terminals, meanwhile, have stopped accepting returns of empty shipping containers because they doubt Hanjin will pay to store them.

"The Hanjin boxes are radioactive. Nobody wants to take responsibility for them," said Mark Hirzel, chairman of the Los Angeles Customs Brokers & Freight Forwarders Association Inc.

As containers on chassis pile up in far-flung storage lots, it has created a shortage of the trailers used to transport containers on land.

Darren Azman, an attorney for Bermuda-based Textainer Group Holdings Ltd <TGH.N> said cargo owners and other Hanjin parties are working out an agreement that they hope will normalize the movement of shipping containers.

But U.S. retailers and manufacturers who own the cargo are caught in the confusion.

Alex Rasheed, president of Pacific Textile and Sourcing Inc, a Los Angeles-headquartered importer and wholesaler of apparel, is anxious to receive $300,000 worth of seasonal fall clothing in two containers on the Hanjin Jungil, which is waiting off the coast of Southern California.

"We're going to start feeling the pressure unless there is some kind of resolution," Rasheed said.

Hanjin's bankruptcy also has U.S. exporters that were relying on the company scrambling to find alternatives, including flying goods to foreign markets at a loss, said Hirzel.

"I've even heard about air transport of agriculture exports," Hirzel said. "Economically, it's a guaranteed loser ... The only reason you would do that is to meet an order to get a contract in the future."

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, editing by Peter Henderson and Alden Bentley)
What Canada can learn from Swedish and German prostitution laws

After the Harper government introduced new prostitution legislation in December 2014 amidst heavy criticism, the Liberal government promised to review the legislation.

But experts are still divided on what should change.

Canada's current legislative scheme follows the Swedish model, where it is illegal to purchase sex, but its sale is permitted.

But some advocates are calling for a complete decriminalization of the sex industry  as has been done in Germany.

Germany: complete decriminalization

Ingeborg Kraus, a psychologist and trauma expert based in Germany who works with sex workers, says this would be a mistake.

"It is a catastrophic situation ... women earn less money and the sex has become more perverse."

Kraus says in the 15 years since Germany decriminalized the sex industry, conditions for women have deteriorated, leading to conditions that have fuelled human trafficking.

"No German woman will work in those conditions anymore ... 95 per cent working in prostitution are women coming from the poorest areas in Europe."

She says the sex workers she sees are not just depressed, they're traumatized.

"We need the Swedish model," she said.

The Swedish model

Sweden became one of the first countries in the world to decriminalize the sale of sex in 1999.

Detective-Inspector Simon Haggstrom, the head of the Stockholm Police Prostitution Unit, says the laws have largely been successful even though nearly 70 per cent of the population was initially against it.

"We've had a lot of challenges," he said. "The biggest challenge was getting the police to actually enforce the legislation."

But attitudes slowly changed, and now his unit is tasked with arresting as many sex purchasers as possible.

He specifically points to the connection between prostitution and organized crime.

"Sex buyers are the crucial sponsors of human trafficking ... By striking on the sex buyers and reducing the demand, you cut the source of income for human trafficking."

Story continues

He says the legislation has been a success.

"What we've seen in 17 years is a huge change in the mindset of the Swedish population," he said. "I would definitely say it's working."

Sex workers' rights

One of the strongest criticisms of the Swedish model is that the law reduces the agency of those who want to willingly engage in sex work on their own free will.

But Haggstrom says they are a small minority within the sex industry.

"The absolute majority of women ending up in prostitution are victims of poverty, sexual abuse, mental illness and drug addiction, and those are the ones we should have laws to protect."

Kraus adds German legislation was premised on the goal of strengthening women's rights and eliminating the discrimination against sex workers.

But she says it has largely failed.

"The attitude [towards sex workers] has changed, but the attitude of the sex buyers also changed. They don't feel guilty anymore. They think it's their right and they want more and more."

Kraus and Haggstrom speak at a panel Tuesday, Sept. 20, 7 p.m. PT, at the Orpheum Annex called "International Approaches to Prostitution: Germany, Sweden & Canada."

With files from The Early Edition

To hear the segment, click on the link labelled How prostitution laws work in Sweden and Germany and what Canada can learn
It was an ordinary day at Walmart for Erika Burch, who was picking up some groceries for her kids when she saw something out of the ordinary.

A man was leading his daughter through the store by her hair, which he had wrapped around the handle of the grocery cart he was pushing, causing his daughter to follow awkwardly alongside.

She [was] begging him to stop! She was saying please stop, I promise I wont do it again please stop! wrote Burch in a Facebook post that has since gone viral.

Burch quickly snapped a few photos and told the man to let the girl go but he told her to mind her own business.

I said no Im not! Right now this little girl is my business and you need to let her hair go now! wrote Burch. He said I grew up just fine! [So] I called the police!

A cop who happened to be in the vicinity heard the commotion and came running but was unable to do anything until his sergeant arrived. When he did, they were told that the man could not be arrested unless there were visible signs of bodily injury to the child. This was despite Burch showing the sergeant photos of the man pulling the girl along.

The sergeant in Cleveland TX said, He has the right to discipline his children! wrote Burch. Dragging a little girl by the hair if [sic] her head is not proper discipline!

Now this baby had to go home with this monster thinking that nobody cared about her and its okay for this animal to pull her by the hair of her head! wrote Burch before urging people to share the post and contact the Cleveland Police Department.

Burchs post, which has garnered more than 7,500 likes and 130,000 shares, has sparked a lively debate, with people weighing in on whether the man was parenting or abusing the child.

This is wrong! No child

If someone would do this in public, what would happen behind closed doors? asked Deborah Simpson.

Story continues



Burchs enraged post also seems to have struck a chord amongst others, resulting in the Cleveland Police Department receiving numerous calls. In a statement published on Facebook, the department assures people that this case is currently being investigated by our Detective Division.

Do you think the man was simply discipling his child or being abusive? Let us know by tweeting us @YahooStyleCA.
Coding

Student Hackers to Tackle NSA Codebreaker Challenge

Student hackers must disarm an improvised explosive device (IED) from a terrorist organization before the device detonates, killing United States troops and civilians. That is the fictional scenario for this years coding challenge from the National Security Alliance (NSA).

The NSA Codebreaker Challenge is designed for college and university students to flex their coding skills and tackle challenges related to national security. Professors are encouraged to participate in the challenge as well, according to the NSA website. The objective is to help individuals develop their reverse engineering skills, which are crucial in the fight against malware, advanced persistent threats and other malicious cyber activities.

This year, participants will use reverse engineering to disarm a virtual IED and complete a total of six tasks. The challenge website offers nine lectures on reverse engineering, so those with little coding experience can participate. As an incentive, NSA is awarding the first 50 individuals to complete all six tasks with small tokens, while some universities and colleges are offering extra credit for completing tasks.

The challenge opened on Sept. 9 and as of today, there are 102 days left before it closes. Students and professors can still register to participate in the challenge.

To learn more, visit the NSA Codebreaker Challenge site.
On Saturday evening, an explosion rocked Chelsea in downtown Manhattan, injuring 29 people. Earlier in the day, a smaller blast took place in New Jersey. The primary suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, has been arrested and faces fives charges of attempted murder, two gun charges, as well as federal charges of use of weapons of mass destruction and bombing a place of public use.

But prior to Rahamis arrest, Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Epstein speculated wildly as to who was behind the attack.

"Are you concerned that this weekends attacks or potential incidents in the coming weeks might be an attempt by ISIS or ISIS sympathizers, or really any other group, maybe the Russians, to influence the presidential race in some way, and presumably drive votes to Donald Trump, who is, as youve said before, widely seen as perhaps being somebody who they would be more willing to  or see as an easier person to be against?" she asked Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Monday.
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 21 (PTI) Top security experts from South Asian countries, except Pakistan, will meet here for two days beginning tomorrow to mull ways to strengthen the anti- terrorism mechanism in the region.

India is hosting the second meeting of the High Level Group of Eminent Experts to strengthen the SAARC anti- terrorism mechanism from September 22-23, an official statement said.

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The meeting was recommended by the SAARC Ministerial Declaration on Cooperation in Combating Terrorism, adopted by the 31st Meeting of SAARC Council of Ministers in Colombo, in 2009.

However, the meeting will not be attended by Director General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan Aftab Sultan, amid the ongoing hostility between India and Pakistan over terror attack in Uri.

It is being hosted by Director of Intelligence Bureau Dineshwar Sharma and intelligence chiefs of all other SAARC nations -- Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Maldives besides India -- will participate.

The meeting is in line with the high priority India attaches for regional cooperation in anti-terrorism activities and given that terrorism remains the single biggest threat to peace, stability and progress in the region and beyond.

The meeting provides a platform for discussing and identifying measures to tackle this menace threatening our societies.

The meeting will review the functioning of the existing anti-terrorism mechanisms in the region including the SAARC Terrorist Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD) and the SAARC Drug Offences Monitoring Desk (SDOMD), intelligence sharing and police cooperation.

It will also discuss related issues such as combating corruption, cyber crimes, terror financing and money laundering. The high-level meeting is expected to draw recommendations to strengthen the existing mechanisms and discuss potential new areas of cooperation. PTI ACB ZMN

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As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ
Salman Khan took a break from his busy shooting schedule and indulged in river rafting in Manali.

By India Today Web Desk: Salman Khan is busy shooting for Kabir Khan's Tubelight in Himachal Pradesh. From the rocky terrains of Leh, the film crew has now moved to the picturesque locales of Manali. And the 50-year-old actor recently took a break from his hectic schedule to indulge in some outdoor activities.

ALSO READ: Salman Khan's Tubelight not original but a copy of Hollywood film Little Boy?

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ALSO READ: Who is Salman Khan's Tubelight actress Zhu Zhu?



The Bajrangi Bhaijaan actor, along with his crew members, enjoyed river-rafting in the white waters of Beas.

His fans on location clicked a few pictures of Salman on a raft. And soon enough his fan clubs started re-posting those pictures.



Salman Khan @BeingSalmanKhan Enjoying River Rafting at Manali pic.twitter.com/9P8CEF1qtK Salman Khan Universe (@salmanuniv) September 20, 2016

My love @BeingSalmanKhan enjoyed river rafting in Manali???????? . . SALLU S MY LIFE ? A photo posted by Insha Sayeed ?Salman? (@salman_khan_tubelight) on Sep 19, 2016 at 11:12pm PDT

Salman is currently wrapping up a schedule of Tubelight before he begins shooting for Bigg Boss next month. The film crew will then move to Kashmir to shoot some portions of the film.

The Dabangg actor is said to essay the role of a man with special needs in the film. She will be seen opposite Chinese actor Zhu Zhu in the film. Tubelight is set to hit the screens on Eid 2017.

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By PTI: Beijing, Sep 21 (PTI) The only son of Chinas richest billionaire reportedly bought eight iphone 7s worth 9,584 USD for his pet dog on the day of its release.

Wang Sicong, 28, son of billionaire Wang Jianlin, the chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, posted two photos of the Alaskan malamute named Coco, sitting on a couch surrounded by iPhones still in their boxes last week, on the verified Weibo social media account of the dog, which has nearly 1.9 million followers.

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Coco, 8, dubbed Chinas richest dog, posed with her black and rose gold iPhone 7 handsets, the South China Morning Post reported.

Wang Sicong, speaking as his dogs voice on the account, writes in the caption: "Not sure what people are showing off on social media about. There is nothing to show off. I was forced to take action."

The post has also gathered thousands of shares and comments.

In China, an iPhone 6 costs 6,988 yuan (USD 1,047), while the larger iPhone 7 Plus goes for 7,988 yuan (USD 1,197).

Forbes has put his fathers net worth at USD 33.3 billion and is the worlds 20th richest billionaire.

This is not the first time Wang Sicong has doted on Coco this way. In 2015, he attracted widespread outrage in China after posting photos of the dog wearing two Apple watches worth upwards of USD 37,000.

Hes part of Chinas second-generation rich, the sons and daughters of tycoons that are best known for flaunting their lifestyles, the report said.

Nicknamed "the nations husband" for his status as Chinas most eligible bachelor, Wang Sicong has come under fire from state media for his display of wealth.

Wang Sicong has also opened an online shop to mark her birthday, called Coco Wang, which sells a line of doggie-inspired toys and accessories, from tote bags, flasks to mobile phone cases. All of them carry cartoon illustrations of the pet. PTI KJ AKJ KJ

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Get ready to be tickled by internet's favourite aunty, Ssumier Pasricha aka Pammi Aunty on Comedy Nights Bachao 2.

By Anvita Singh: Everyone's favourite comedy artist, Pammi Aunty aka Ssumier Pasricha's fans can now rest in peace as the artist will soon be seen on a regular basis on the comedy reality show, Comedy Nights Bachao Season 2.

Ssumier told India Today Online that he will be seen in his beloved Pammi Aunty avatar on the show.

Also read:Comedy Nights Bachao is back with a new gang; check out Season 2's first look



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"I will not be a part of the roasting format of the show. You will not see me insulting anybody, except maybe my bahu," he said, laughing.

"However, you will only see me interacting with the host of the show, Mona Singh, and some celebrity guests who might appear on the show. In fact, I have my own small Pammi Aunty segment, and I am the one who is largey responsible for that particular sketch's script," Ssumier said, elaborating on his role in the second season of Comedy Nights Bachao.

The Comedy Nights Bachao 2 cast. Picture courtesy: Twitter/ColorsTV

Ssumier even revealed something interesting about the show's format.

"I cannot confirm this, but as far as I know, this time around, you will even see celebrity guests roasting other characters on the show."

Ssumier became a household name when his Pammi Aunty videos started going viral, and there has been no looking back for him since then.

When asked about his upcoming projects, Ssumier said, "I will now be flying to Jordan and will be releasing new Pammi Aunty content from there in order to promote Jordan Tourism."

Yayyy ?? A photo posted by Aditi Bhatia ?? (@aditi_bhatia4) on Sep 20, 2016 at 1:40am PDT

Comedy Nights Bachao Season 2 will premiere on September 25 on Colors TV at 10 pm with a fresh line-up of comedians including TV actors Aditi Bhatia, Nia Sharma, Ssharad Malhotra; Sumeet Vyas; Gujarati stand-up comedian Mayank; and of course, internet's latest craze, Pammi Aunty.



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The former deputy CM also questioned why Nitish Kumar didn't pressure Lalu Prasad to remove Shahbuddin from the RJD.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: Former deputy CM and senior BJP leader Sushil Modi has questioned whether Bihar CM Nitish Kumar can stop senior advocate and RJD MP Ram Jethmalani from fighting dreaded RJD strongman Shahabuddins case in the Apex Court. Jethmalani will be appearing for Shahabuddin on Monday to defend the bail granted to him by the Patna High Court.

Speaking to the media, the BJP leader raised the issue of how Jethmalani, who won the Rajya Sabha elections recently with the support of the JD(U), will be defending Shahabuddins bail and fighting against the Bihar government which has challenged his bail.

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Jethmalani became Rajya Sabha MP with support of JD(U). Can Nitish hold him from fighting Shahabuddins case??? questioned Modi.

Modi alleged that the Bihar CM had no problem with the dreaded don and at one point of time, Nitish was also ready to induct Shahbuddins wife Heena Shahab into the JD(U) fold and field her in Assembly elections on a JD(U) ticket.

Had Nitish been averse to Shahabuddin, he would have supported Prashant Bhushan in the court to conduct trial of Shahabuddins cases outside Bihar? Why didnt Nitish pressure Lalu to kick Shahabuddin out of RJD," asked the BJP leader.

Modi alleged that Lalu had got JD(U) MLA Anant Singh thrown out of the party after he was found guilty in a murder case. He also raised the issue of how Judge Ajay Kumar Srivastava, who served life term sentence to Shahabuddin in December last year in the acid attack case, got himself transferred from Siwan to Patna, a day before the don was released from jail.

Siwan is in the grip of fear after Shahbuddins release??, said Sushil Modi.

Also read: Bihar govt fields a weak lawyer to argue Shahabuddin's bail in Supreme Court, says Sushil Modi



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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will spearhead India's charge at the United Nations General Assembly to share evidence of Pakistan state involvement in terror.

By Gaurav C Sawant: India has unleashed a massive diplomatic exercise to isolate and expose Pakistan on the global stage for state sponsored terror.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj will spearhead India's charge at the United Nations General Assembly to share evidence of Pakistan state involvement in terror.

"Sushma Swaraj will very vigorously, effectively and in a forthright manner present India's case against terrorism at the UN. Just wait and watch,'' Gen (retd) VK Singh, minister of state, external affairs told Mail Today in an exclusive interview.

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RAHEEL SHARIF IS ON HIS WAY OUT, HE WANTS TO HEIGHTEN TENSION: VK SINGH

India is also getting support from its neighbours Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who have launched frontal attacks to expose Pakistan's involvement in terror in their countries. New Delhi believes that Pakistan's sudden terror push into Kashmir has to do with the change of guard at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi.

"General Raheel Sharif is on his way out. He wants to heighten tension with India, hoping for an extension. Has he put a gun to Nawaz Sharif's head? Is that the reason that Nawaz Sharif is repeatedly raking up Kashmir internationally,'' Gen VK Singh asked.

The government will also hold bilateral meetings to gather support and it has already received support with Russia, Germany, UK and France among other nations offering support to India.

INDIA HAS STRONG SUPPORT FROM AFGHANISTAN, BANGLADESH

India has found the strongest support from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, both victims of Pakistan terror. The two SAARC nations want to use the regional platform to further expose state sponsored terror.

"There should be a regional conference on state sponsored terror. All regional partners should come forward and expose the one country in our region supporting terror," Dr Shaida Abdali, Afghanistan's ambassador to India told Mail Today.

Bangladesh's High Commissioner to India Syed Muazzem said:

"As a close friend and neighbour we will continue to work together in our common endeavour to eradicate the menace of cross border terrorism.'' Sheikh Hasina and prime minister Narendra Modi will have a bilateral discussion on combating terror, he added.

Also Read:

VK Singh to India Today: Sushma Swaraj will expose Pakistan at UN

India slams Pakistan at UN rights council after Uri attack, rakes up human rights violations in Balochistan



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In a shocking CCTV footage, a woman was seen being dragged out by her relatives from her work place and beaten up brutally.

By Pramod Madhav: In a shocking CCTV footage, a woman was seen being dragged out by her relatives from her work place and beaten up brutally. Divya, who had got married without the consent of her family, was beaten up by her relatives, who were called in by her mother.

THE CASE

Sundar Raj, while working in a garment industry at Tirupur, fell in love with Divya, a colleague who hailed from Thanjavur. They eventually got married and started living together.

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However, there was strong opposition from Divya's family.

Sources claim that the relatives who came to beat up Divya even snatched away her mangal sutra. She was even dragged her out of the premises in an inhumane manner which was all recorded on CCTV.

The police are yet to take up the investigation.

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By PTI: Hyderabad, Sep 21 (PTI) The Telangana Assembly Speaker was today directed by the high court to take within three months a decision on a petition seeking disqualification of Telugu Desam MLAs who have switched over to the ruling TRS.

Justice M S Ramachandra Rao of HC of Judicature at Hyderabad for States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, passed the order on a writ petition moved by Telangana TDP leader Revanth Reddy.

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In the petition, Reddy said the Speaker has allocated seats in the Assembly to TDP MLAs, who have switched loyalties to TRS, without deciding on the disqualification petitions filed by the Opposition party.

After the TRS came to power in 2014 in the new state, as many as 12 of the 15 MLAs belonging to TDP have joined the ruling party citing different reasons.

The Chandrababu Naidu-led party, on its part, filed multiple petitions with Speaker Madhusudana Chary demanding that these legislators be disqualified from the membership of the Telangana Assembly.

Reddy questioned a bulletin issued by the Speaker recognising the merger of 12 TDP MLAs into TRS. The petitioner complained the Speaker had invalidated the disqualification applications filed by TDP by issuing the bulletin.

Jandhyala Ravi Shankar, advocate for Reddy, argued the Speaker does not have powers to merge parties as that authority lies with the Election Commission. PTI COR GDK RSY ZMN

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By PTI: Hyderabad, Sep 21 (PTI) The Telangana Assembly Speaker was today directed by the high court to take within three months a decision on a petition seeking disqualification of Telugu Desam MLAs who have switched over to the ruling TRS.

Justice M S Ramachandra Rao of HC of Judicature at Hyderabad for States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, passed the order on a writ petition moved by Telangana TDP leader Revanth Reddy.

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In the petition, Reddy said the Speaker has allocated seats in the Assembly to TDP MLAs, who have switched loyalties to TRS, without deciding on the disqualification petitions filed by the Opposition party.

After the TRS came to power in 2014 in the new state, as many as 12 of the 15 MLAs belonging to TDP have joined the ruling party citing different reasons.

The Chandrababu Naidu-led party, on its part, filed multiple petitions with Speaker Madhusudana Chary demanding that these legislators be disqualified from the membership of the Telangana Assembly.

Reddy questioned a bulletin issued by the Speaker recognising the merger of 12 TDP MLAs into TRS. The petitioner complained the Speaker had invalidated the disqualification applications filed by TDP by issuing the bulletin.

Jandhyala Ravi Shankar, advocate for Reddy, argued the Speaker does not have powers to merge parties as that authority lies with the Election Commission. PTI COR GDK RSY ZMN SRE

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By PTI: Sikkim

Gangtok, Sep 21 (PTI) Chalit Manityakul, Ambassador of Kingdom of Thailand to India along with his first Secretary Ms. Chettida Kitchaiwat called on Sikkim Chief Minister Pawan Chamling at his official residence Mintokgang, here in the state.

During the interaction on September 19, the Ambassador Manityakul informed Chamling that the purpose of his visit was to enhance the already cordial relations between Thailand and the Indian state of Sikkim, a state goverment press release said today.

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The ambassador also discussed the opportunities through which the bilateral relations between Thailand and Sikkim could be further enhanced through trade and investments.

Manityakul was all praise for Sikkim and was particularly vocal about the cleanliness of the state and its scenic beauty.

On the other-hand the Chief Minister, Chamling informed the ambassador that though Sikkim is a small state, its beautiful and is the safest state in the country.

Talking about the investments Chamling informed the ambassador that Sikkim will welcome investment in agro-based industry and in tourism sector.

During the short interaction Manityakul too felt that Sikkim has a tremendous potential in tourism sector and drew comparison with Thailand when it comes to pilgrimage tourism especially Bhuddhism.

Minister Tourism, Government of Sikkim, Ugen T Gyatso and the Secretary, C Zangpo were also present during the meeting. PTI COR SUS SUS

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Uddhav Thackeray has said that its time for Modi government to fulfill its promises made during Lok Sabha election.

By Mayuresh Ganapatye: Breaking his silence on Uri attack, Shiv Sena Chief Uddhav Thackery took a dig at PM Narendra Modi today. Addressing a press conference in Shiv Sena head quarters Shiv Sena Bhavan, Uddhav reminded PM Modi of his own promises regarding Pakistan made to countrymen during his Lok Sabha campaigning.

"Now time has come to fulfill promises which they made to the people of India during Lok Sabha election," Uddhav Thackery, Shiv Sena Chief said. Questioning Modi, he said "When are we going to give answer to Pakistan in their own language? When such attack happens we condemn it for few days and then forget about them. We have seen how Rajnath Singh was treated in Pakistan. His speech was not allowed to be covered by the Indian media."

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BUCK STOPS AT DELHI FOR UDDHAV

On being asked what does he mean by giving answer to Pakistan, Uddhav Thackery told media that this should be decided by people who are there in Delhi. He said, "If war happens, it should happen for country and not for elections."

'STOP CORNERING PAKISTAN, TEACH A LESSON'

In Samana's editorial, Uddhav Thackery had asked PM Modi to take revenge for the attack in Uri. He wrote that, 125 crore citizens of India are waiting for an action against Pakistan and want action in a language which Pakistan understands. Commenting on India's step to teach Pakistan a lesson, he wrote that India should stop cornering Pakistan in UN by way of dialogue and teach them lesson.

"When Pathankot attack happened, we allowed their investigation panel to come to our soil and investigate. In which one member was ISI agent. Government doesn't care and value for our tears and wants to continue the tea diplomacy with them," Thackeray wrote.



Also read: PoK a thorn in our flesh, would have been India's if we had opted for military solution: Air Chief Raha

Also read: BJP trying to dislodge Shiv Sena from BMC by projecting it as corrupt one

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By PTI: From Aditi Khanna

London, Sep 21 (PTI) British MPs are demanding a "grand strategic revision" in UKs policy to deal with the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group and to ensure it does not spread to Asia and Africa.

The House of Commons Defence Select Committee warned that the terrorist group, like Al Qaeda before it, could transform into an international movement with off-shoots if squeezed out of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

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"The UK and coalitions strategy to counter Daesh [another name for ISIS] is predominately focused on Iraq and Syria and relies on the removal of territory from Daesh in order to eliminate it. That is a necessary, but not sufficient, strategy.

"[If] Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision," the committees report said.

"Our counter-Daesh strategy should be as effective in Nigeria, Afghanistan or Libya as it is in Iraq or Syria. There needs to be a grand strategic discussion about the threat posed by Daesh and how we can defeat it," it added.

The UK has been taking part in air strikes against Islamist militants in Iraq since 2014 and Parliament authorised their extension to Syria last year.

The committee found there had been 550 Royal Air Force (RAF) missions in Iraq since December 2015 and 65 in Syria.

It also called on the government to put more information about the targets for air strikes in Syria into the public domain, in order to "justify and validate" its policy of military action.

Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said the UK must focus on the long-term risks.

"If Daesh transforms itself into an international movement or a network of affiliates - like al-Qaeda before it - which can survive the loss of territory - the UK government approach will need to adapt," he said.

"For example, if Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision. Assuming Daesh is squeezed out of both countries, we have to focus too on what happens next - both in other countries to which Daesh may migrate and in Syria especially where there is no shortage of other Islamist groups, just as dangerous, which are planning to take control," he added.

A UK government spokesperson said: "We have conducted over 1,000 air strikes, which is second only to the US in both countries, and have helped train more than 25,000 Iraqi forces." PTI AK SUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---

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Welcome to today's live chat ... With only 42 days left before the 2016 Election its hard to overlook last night's presidential debate -- even though LGBT issues were completely overlooked. For instance:

We are disappointed that neither Presidential candidate spoke about the need for strong federal nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people. With an anticipated 100 million viewers watching, this would have also been a great opportunity for the candidates to provide clear remedies on how to advance voting rights, secure reproductive justice, and fix the broken immigration system, said Rea Carey, National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund Executive Director.

What's your take on Carey's statement? Are other issues simply more pressing now? Or is this a case of erasure? Something in between? Let me know your thoughts.

And, of course, send in your personal questions.

In the meantime, let me remind you of my new podcast, THE CIVILIST, a flame-free zone to tackle today's toughest political and personal issues. Or, as I like to say, Let's Make America Kind Again. Take a listen. Review. Share. Subscribe on iTunes. Much, much appreciated.
I was also reading some commentary but was 10 to 30 minutes behind for most of the evening. My understanding from the simultaneous commentary and the later analysis is that Trump was considered to be doing very well during the first half hour or so. That may be in comparison to the low expectations, but he seemed to be fine with the trade questions specifically. With the sound off, I couldn't tell that. He was grabbing and leaning on the podium which made his shoulders hunch up around he ears. His eyes were largely shut or squinting and his mouth was sort of pushed out and frowning. He tilted his head a lot and shook it. And it looked like he was interrupting Clinton because she largely looked like she was supposed to be talking when ever she was talking (whether it was her turn or not). He looked around a lot. She had a few headshakes and looked down to write notes a few times, but nothing overwhelming. She seemed engaged in what was going on in the room, and he looked like he wanted to leave. And that started right from the start, even when he was doing the best with his actual responses (as reported by others).
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Ford presents latest Transit and Transit Custom line-up powered by state-of-the-art Ford EcoBlue diesel engine at 2016 IAA Hannover Commercial Vehicle Show

All-new EcoBlue diesel delivers significant cost of ownership and performance benefits with fuel efficiency improved by up to 13 per cent and low-end torque by 20 per cent

Show debut for new six-speed automatic in Transit and Transit Custom; Ford reveals enhanced all-wheel drive system and advanced SYNC 3 connectivity for Transit

Ford strengthens position as fastest-growing and No. 1 selling commercial vehicle brand in Europe, with sales up 18 per cent for August year-to-date

HANNOVER, Germany, Sept. 21, 2016  The advanced all-new Ford EcoBlue diesel engine takes centre stage at the 2016 IAA Hannover Commercial Vehicle Show, delivering improved cost of ownership and performance in Fords latest Transit and Transit Custom models.

The Ford EcoBlue engine powers every vehicle displayed on Fords Hannover stand, and provides commercial vehicle operators with fuel efficiency improved by up to 13 per cent compared with the outgoing 2.2-litre TDCi engine, with CO2 emissions from 157 g/km,* and delivers significant improvements in low-rpm torque for enhanced driveability.

Hannover also marks the show debut for the new six-speed automatic transmission variant of the Transit and Transit Custom, and Ford revealed the introduction of an enhanced all-wheel drive (AWD) system and the new SYNC 3 communications system on Transit.

Two years on from completing the renewal of its Transit line-up at Hannover 2014, Ford is firmly established as Europes fastest-growing commercial vehicle brand. Over the past 24 months, Ford has seen its market share grow from 10.8 to 12.9 per cent as it rose from fourth in the market to become the No. 1 selling brand.**

The growth in Ford commercial vehicle sales is continuing in 2016, with demand for the expanded four-model Transit family and Ranger pickup increasing by 18 per cent for August year-to-date compared with last year, with 208,000 vehicles sold.

Fords EcoBlue engine is a real diesel game changer, combining reduced cost of ownership with outstanding performance and cleaner emissions, said Bernhard Mattes, Chairman, Ford of Germany. As our sales growth shows, Ford already offers the most advanced line-up of commercial vehicles in Europe, and the all-new Ford EcoBlue engine takes it to a new level.

All-new Ford EcoBlue diesel  cheaper to run, better to drive

The all-new 2.0-litre Ford EcoBlue diesel uses a completely new architecture engineered to provide the next-generation of clean, efficient and refined engines for future Ford cars and commercial vehicles.

The 2.0-litre engine has been developed with the latest turbocharging, fuel injection, combustion system, structural design and low-friction technologies to deliver significant improvements in fuel efficiency, performance and operating refinement, while delivering the outstanding durability and low cost-of-ownership demanded for a Transit power unit.

Available now in the latest Transit and Transit Custom models, the 2.0-litre Ford EcoBlue engine is offered in 105 PS, 130 PS and 170 PS power ratings, each of which offers increased power and torque compared with the outgoing 2.2-litre engine. Improved low-end pulling power  with 20 per cent more torque at 1,250 rpm  delivers more flexible and responsive performance in everyday driving.

Lower running costs are supported by significantly improved fuel efficiency. Transit van models equipped with optional Auto-Start-Stop achieve CO2 emissions from 174 g/km and average fuel consumption from 6.6 l/100 km (42.8 mpg)  a 10 per cent reduction over the equivalent outgoing model.

Transit Custom vehicles fitted with optional Auto-Start-Stop deliver CO2 emissions from 157 g/km with average fuel consumption from 6.1 l/100 km (46.3 mpg)  13 per cent down from the equivalent outgoing model.

Ford anticipates a fuel cost saving of up to 1,600 (1,250) over 130,000 km (80,000 miles) for the operator of a new 105 PS Transit Custom van compared with the previous 100 PS model.***

Scheduled maintenance costs are also reduced, with the extended variable service intervals of up to two years/60,000 km (37,000 miles) offering up to an additional 10,000 km (6,000 miles) between services on both Transit and Transit Custom models, intervals that are not exceeded by any competitor.

The Ford EcoBlue diesel engine has been engineered to meet Fords rigorous commercial vehicle durability standards, powering Transit vehicles through the equivalent of 5.5 million km (3.4 million miles) of punishing durability testing, including 400,000 km (250,000 miles) of testing at the hands of real-world Transit customers.

Fords Hannover stand reflects the huge variety of Transit and Transit Custom models available with the EcoBlue engine to suit all business needs, including a comprehensive offering of specialised body options and conversions ranging from tippers and refrigerated vans to minibuses and emergency vehicles.

Smooth-shifting six-speed automatic  specially engineered for Transits

Transit front-wheel drive and Transit Custom customers who require improved comfort and convenience in urban driving can now choose a six-speed SelectShift automatic transmission in place of the standard manual gearbox, for delivery in early 2017. The new transmission can be specified in combination with the 130 PS and 170 PS versions of the Ford EcoBlue engine, and Auto-Start-Stop is standard on all variants.

The transmission has been specially engineered for the Transit applications, including a new torque converter and external casing to optimise refinement, and is based on a highly durable design that has proven itself with powerful front-wheel drive vehicles in North America, with a torque capacity of more than 415 Nm.

A unique calibration ensures that the transmission is perfectly matched to the torque delivery of the Ford EcoBlue diesel engine, providing responsive performance together with excellent fuel economy, and CO2 emissions as low as 174 g/km on Transit Custom. The transmission can detect when the vehicle is on a road with a steep gradient, or carrying a heavy load, and adjusts the shifting strategy for optimal efficiency.

The electronically-controlled transmission delivers smooth and quick gear changes  with typical shift times of less than 0.5 seconds  and the SelectShift facility provides the option of manual shifting for enhanced control using a switch mounted on the side of the gear lever. The Auto-Start-Stop feature has been carefully tuned to suit the needs of commercial vehicle customers, with an on-demand electric pump to maintain transmission pressure so that the driver can pull away quickly as soon as the engine has re-started.

Transit intelligent AWD  lighter and more capable

Fords intelligent AWD system for the Transit model has been re-engineered to deliver improved capabilities in combination with the all-new Ford EcoBlue diesel engine.

The new fourth generation Transit AWD system features an enhanced driveline design that combines the front differential and AWD coupling into a single, compact unit. This revised design reduces weight by 10 kg, and allows the driveline to be packaged more efficiently around the layout of the EcoBlue engine.

Ford engineers have also further optimised the calibration of the Electronic Stability Control and AWD control systems to provide improved traction and stability in all driving conditions.

In combination with the increased low-end torque of the EcoBlue engine, the latest generation system enables drivers to achieve smoother, more confident progress on challenging surfaces, enhancing the already class-leading traction and driving dynamics offered by the system.

The Transit AWD system automatically distributes available engine torque to front and rear wheels using a specially developed electronically-controlled AWD coupling, and can vary the front:rear torque distribution between 0:100 and 50:50. Two modes are provided, with the standard AWD Auto mode suitable for most driving situations, and an AWD Lock mode that enhances traction in more extreme driving situations such as deep sand or deep snow.

Transit AWD models can be specified with the 130 PS and 170 PS Ford EcoBlue engines, which deliver improved fuel efficiency with CO2 emissions from 224 g/km and average fuel consumption from 8.6 l/100 km (32.8 mpg)  an 11 per cent improvement compared with the outgoing model.

The AWD driveline option is available on a broad range of Transit van, kombi and chassis cab bodystyles, and will appeal to customers who frequently face slippery winter road surfaces and light duty off-road situations, such as service vehicles at ski resorts, utility companies in rural areas and maintenance engineers operating in all weather conditions. The new Transit AWD models can be ordered now for delivery in early 2017.



I need fuel  SYNC 3 communications system responds to simple voice commands

Fords latest Transit, Transit Connect and Ranger models can now be specified with the new SYNC 3 communications system, which allows drivers to control their connected smartphones, audio, navigation, and climate functions (where fitted) with more conversational voice commands.

Simply by pushing a button and saying I need fuel, I need a coffee, or find an address, drivers can locate nearby fuel stations, cafes, or the location of their next job. The system then guides the driver to the selected destination via the navigation.

SYNC 3 has a redesigned touchscreen that features larger, easier to operate buttons, and can be used just like a smartphone with pinch-to-zoom and swipe gestures. With a more powerful processor, the system also delivers faster and more responsive performance.

Designed to complement modern smartphones, SYNC 3 provides a powerful set of features for customers who use their vehicles as mobile offices, including phone calls using simple voice commands, audible text messages, and full compatibility with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto functions.

Using the integrated AppLink feature, customers can voice or touch control a wide range of popular apps from a connected Android or iOS smartphone, enabling them to access the latest weather forecast, music services or local parking information. AppLink also provides the opportunity for developers to create tailored apps driven by vehicle data, such as logistics or fleet optimisation tools, which could provide valuable benefits for larger business customers.

Unique OEM rear air suspension and new driver assist technologies

Fords Transit Custom Kombi M1 and Tourneo Custom models are now available to order with a unique-to-segment rear air suspension system, for customer delivery in late 2016.

The system was developed specially for the passenger carrying variants of the Transit Custom vehicles, and meets Fords full commercial vehicle durability standards. The suspension design features an air spring mounted on a trailing arm for each side of the vehicle, with an electronically-controlled air compressor to deliver the required spring rate for the two springs.

Height sensors on the trailing arms detect when the vehicle load changes, such as when passengers enter or leave the vehicle, and the air spring rates are automatically adjusted to suit the new load condition and maintain a level ride height. The air springs, including the profiling of their internal core, are custom designed for the vehicle, with extensive tuning by Ford dynamics specialists to achieve the desired ride characteristics.

The air suspension system is ideal for applications like shuttle and executive travel businesses where loading in the rear of the vehicle can vary by as much as 1 tonne depending on the quantity of passengers and luggage. The system enables the vehicle to deliver a supple, controlled and level ride across a wide range of load conditions, providing improved passenger comfort and vehicle dynamics.

The new Transit and Transit Custom models with the Ford EcoBlue engine also benefit from advanced new driver assistance and vehicle technologies to enhance confidence and comfort behind the wheel.

These include the Pre-Collision Assist emergency braking system  the first in the segment to feature Pedestrian Detection technology  that reduces the severity of some frontal collisions involving vehicles and pedestrians, or helps drivers avoid some impacts altogether.

An upgraded Electronic Stability Control system is fitted to both new models as standard equipment, and provides an enhanced suite of functions to improve vehicle stability in extreme driving situations including Side Wind Stabilisation  a new system that applies the brakes on one side of the vehicle to reduce the effect of a sudden side wind gust on the vehicles path.

# # #

* The declared Fuel/Energy Consumptions, CO2 emissions and electric range are measured according to the technical requirements and specifications of the European Regulations (EC) 715/2007 and (EC) 692/2008 as last amended. Fuel consumption and CO2 emissions are specified for a vehicle variant and not for a single car. The applied standard test procedure enables comparison between different vehicle types and different manufacturers. In addition to the fuel efficiency of a car, driving behaviour as well as other non-technical factors play a role in determining a car's fuel/energy consumption, CO2 emissions and electric range. CO2 is the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

** Ford of Europe reports its sales for the 20 European main markets where it is represented through National Sales Companies. The Euro 20 markets are: Austria, Belgium, Britain, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland.

*** Based on a fuel cost of approx. 1.36 (1.10) per litre

Android and Android Auto are trademarks of Google Inc.
DARPA Aerial Dragnet Program Seeks to Monitor Drones

Although its focus is to protect military troops in urban areas overseas, such a system could be used to protect U.S. cities from terrorist threats.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its Aerial Dragnet program, which is seeking innovative technologies to provide wide-area surveillance of all drones operating below 1,000 feet in a large city. The agency said the program's focus is on protecting military troops operating in urban areas overseas, but the system also might be used in civilian applications to help protect U.S. cities from terrorist threats.

"Commercial websites currently exist that display in real time the tracks of relatively high and fast aircraftfrom small general aviation planes to large airlinersall overlaid on geographical maps as they fly around the country and the world," said Jeff Krolik, DARPA's program manager. "We want a similar capability for identifying and tracking slower, low-flying unmanned aerial systems, particularly in urban environments."

DARPA has scheduled a Proposers Day for Sept. 26 in Arlington, Va.

The agency's announcement said systems are being developed for tracking small drones by extending surveillance methods used in open areas where large line-of-sight buffers mitigate the threat, but such systems are not practical for urban terrain: "Aerial Dragnet seeks to leapfrog these approaches by developing systems adapted to the fundamental physics of small UAS in urban environments that could enable non-line-of-sight (NLOS) tracking and identification of a wide range of slow, low-flying threats. The program seeks an array of innovative approaches, but notionally envisions a network of surveillance nodes, each providing coverage of a neighborhood-sized urban area, perhaps mounted on tethered or long-endurance UAS. Using sensor technologies that can look over and between buildings, the surveillance nodes would maintain UAS tracks even when the craft disappear from sight around corners or behind objects. The output of the Aerial Dragnet system would be a continually updated common operational picture (COP) of the airspace at altitudes below where current aircraft surveillance systems can monitor, disseminated electronically to authorized users via secure data links. Because of the large market for inexpensive small UAS, the program will focus on combining low cost sensor hardware with software-defined signal processing hosted on existing UAS platforms. The resulting surveillance systems would thus be cost-effectively scalable for larger coverage areas and rapidly upgradable as new, more capable and economical versions of component technologies become available."

With this in mind, the program is looking for teams with expertise in sensors, signal processing, and networked autonomy.
Eleven Simple Tips To Increase Press Release Effectiveness

(Updated 7-3-17) Press releases are not as effective as they used to be and there are too many of them. Here is what you need to know to get more viewers to read your release.

The top reasons that press releases are losing impact

1. Choosing the wrong press release service to distribute your release. Press release service companies distribute your release  most let publishers post the release for free. However, some PR distributors charge publishers like us to post them. Im speaking of the distributors that provide releases for the top major (and broad) publications that have millions of readers. So you should also distribute the press release via other press release distribution services that are free to publishers  like A little trick  if your release is not showing up on a particular website, read the other releases on that website to figure out where they source news releases. Also be sure your release is targeted to the right niches. Press release distribution companies usually allow you to choose a number of segments  like retail, computers, Internet, etcchoose wisely. . Press release service companies distribute your release  most let publishers post the release for free. However, some PR distributors charge publishers like us to post them. Im speaking of the distributors that provide releases for the top major (and broad) publications that have millions of readers. So you should also distribute the press release via other press release distribution services that are free to publishers  like Globe (formerly Marketwired) and PRNewswire among others.A little trick  if your release is not showing up on a particular website, read the other releases on that website to figure out where they source news releases. Also be sure your release is targeted to the right niches. Press release distribution companies usually allow you to choose a number of segments  like retail, computers, Internet, etcchoose wisely.

2. Titles contain unusual punctuation. Many companies use some kind of automated system to receive or socially share articles or releases. Those automated systems (computer programs) dont always handle hyphens, @ symbols, pipes | , ampersands & properly. After being shared a few times, the titles are getting altered slightly and that means the URL link wont work! Try to avoid any symbols you need to use a Shift key to include. Strip out the all the currency symbols; dollars, Euros, Pounds, Lira, Shekels as well.

3. Subscripts In The Title Are Killers For Social Sharing



The TM and Copyright and Registered symbols choke various automated systems. Every companys prayer is that their release will be read and shared by thousands. Yet, with hundreds of websites to share on, in dozens of languages, and thousands of software programs handling special characters differently, those subscripts are lost in translation and then the URL wont work. Whether you intend it or not, your release will be shared in various languages and it needs to be compatible.

4. Titles are too long. There are two problems with long titles  one is that some social sharing platforms limit the number of characters you can have, and having an image, or someone re-sharing a post  will truncate the title. A second problem is that long titles wont be fully displayed on many websites. Example Company A and Company B Forming A Partnership For the Betterment Of Payment Integration Systems and Technological Advancement. Yikes. Twitter allows only 140 characters  do NOT try to use them all. Many software platforms want only 60 characters. You should probably stick to around 60 to 80. A better title for the above would be Company A and B Partner For Improved Payment Integration. If you really want to figure this out  count the number of characters that your favorite news websites use for their titles. Or after you publish your press release, figure out where it has been viewed, and see if the title if fully displayed. Remember too, that in our time-compressed world everybody is in a rush. A title that doesnt get to the point quickly may not capture a readers attention long enough to get them to click and read the article.

5. DO NOT SEND OUT TITLES IN ALL CAPS  It looks like youre screaming. Unless the news is about the end of the world its not important enough for all caps.

6. There are too many press releases being sent out. It is a strategy that is being overused. There are companies with only three employees that publish a press release every day. Unless your company is the size of Apple and you actually have something interesting to share every day, dont overdue it. At email them directly to us. If we see the same company name every day, we blacklist it in the automated filter system. We get too many releases as it is, and welcome the chance to trim the influx. By the way  our contact info is at the very bottom of this page and you are welcome to send us press releases directly. It is a strategy that is being overused. There are companies with only three employees that publish a press release every day. Unless your company is the size of Apple and you actually have something interesting to share every day, dont overdue it. At The Point of Sale News , we receive tens of thousands of releases a year. They come from wire services although many companies alsoIf we see the same company name every day, we blacklist it in the automated filter system. We get too many releases as it is, and welcome the chance to trim the influx. By the way  our contact info is at the very bottom of this page and you are welcome to send us press releases directly.

7. Overstuffing of links. A company name does not need five links in one press release. It does not need three, it only needs one. We strip out redundant links, or sometimes, if it is too much work, we dont publish the release. A release is not the same as an advertisement. Legitmate links ARE okay. Twenty links in a single press release are not.

8. Making links blue, bold, underline. These are usually the same releases that overstuff links. One or two are okay. Six or ten are not.

9. Include images. We want pictures. Image size should be small  100kb max!!! Infographics are generally are too large for downloading on mobile devices at the local coffee shop  so we dont recommend those for press releases. PR agencies are not in the habit of including pictures, but I think that is a throwback to the 1900s. Example: back in the 1980s if you wanted to include an image with a press release, it was extra money because the cost of printing an image in a newspaper was more than the cost of printing text. So, press releases almost never included images. Now, in this millennium, you should include a good image with your release. Maybe two. Yes, its more work on your end, but it is effective and will set your release apart. We dont always use it, but there is a good chance that we will. By the way, a logo is NOT an image that gets any reader excited or intrigued.

10. Make The Title Understandable  we cant figure out some titles, because the company name is so bizarre. if you have a company name like Flivver, you better have some relationship to the automotive world. A company name like Peel, or Clpp, or Sliver  we have no clue  and with an Inbox full of hundreds of releases, we are not going to be bothered figuring it out. If the company name is Flivver Labels, or Peel Receipt Technology, or Sliver Product Search, well, now we get a sense of whether the press release is relevant to our niche and whether we should run it. Lest you think were being picayune, just take a look at the endless feed in your Twitter inbox and see how it is you decide what articles to open. If a person cant identify whether an article is relevant to them, they are not likely to read it. Maybe your hot technology company just got $20 million in funding, but trust me, 99.9999% of the world still doesnt know who you are.

11. Dont rely on press releases to grow your business. As per item 6, it is an over-used strategy. True story  back in the 1990s, there was a software company that spent almost no money on advertising, but had eight PR/marketing people on staff. That company played the strategy well, and they were able to get 50% of the total press exposure for their niche. They built their business and sold it to Microsoft for a little over a billion dollars. Maybe you read a case study about this in business school  well, let go of it and move on to a new strategy  thousands of little companies are formed and funded each year. Incubators are turning them out by boatload. They all send out press releases and the strategy wont work now.

Press releases have a short lifespan  a day, a week, a month. (Click for an article that shows  a day, a week, a month. (Click for an article that shows how long a press release will continue to get viewers after publishing .) Good content has a lifespan of years and a long tail of distribution. When properly written, an article or case study can be timeless. Good articles will get more and more views over the years. Readers share them, mention them in blogs, and build links to them. The value of good content grows over time but the value of a press release does not.

To conclude, clean up those small details in the press releases your company sends out. Keep your titles clean, simple and unencumbered by anything that requires a shift key to type. Press releases are important, but they will only take you so far. Keep producing them occasionally, but balance your exposure with advertising and high quality content that will make your company visible 24/7.

PS  if you are sending us press releases directly, please do not send PDF files. It is tricky to cut and paste from a PDF especially one that has embedded images, and sidebars  theres too much HTML. Send your releases in text format, right in an email. Or, attaching a Word document is okay too. Images should be attached to the email and not embedded in a document.



Companies that distribute press releases:

Other articles that may interest you:
TCPOS and PXtech Partner To Bring Hospitality POS to UK

Hospitality business owners across the UK can now benefit from the ultimate POS and business intelligence package thanks to a new partnership between PXtech and TCPOS.

PXtech, who currently develop the acclaimed BI solution Axent, have joined hands with TCPOS, the number one POS solution in Europe, to revolutionise the POS market. Axent is currently used in over 35,000 Subway stores across the world while TCPOS service some of Europes largest hospitality and retail groups.

The partnership allows PXtech to combine Axent with TCPOS, opening the door to a cutting-edge and unmatched solution for the British hospitality sector.

PXtech are providing restaurants, canteens, caterers, stadiums, bars, pubs and clubs with a future-proof, extensible and highly adaptable solution that perfects core competency. The partnership brings the user a hugely flexible solution that allows easy access to real-time data, more accurate information, improved decision-making capability, identification of problem areas and enhanced customer experience.

The advanced software will broaden the market, offering a new solution to restaurant groups of all sizes and will further establish PXtech as a recognised leader in the POS sector.

TCPOS have a great solution for restaurants that has proven itself worldwide, in Europe in particular. I have had previous great experience partnering with TCPOS with a former company and thoroughly enjoy working with their friendly and innovative team, says Laurent Cremaschi, PXtech Chief Business Development Officer. PXtech is the perfect partner for TCPOS in the UK because we are two technology companies sharing the same values and the same best practices. PXtech already have significant reach within the hospitality market in the UK, with over 1000 stores currently being maintained. I believe the TCPOS software will synergise well with our Axent product line to further develop advanced POS solutions for the hospitality sector.

Pamela Niggli, International Business Manager and member of the Board of Directors of TCPOS says, Since our first contact with PXtech, they have shown necessary professionalism, enthusiasm and dynamism. They will make precious allies in our mission to grow internationally as leading providers of POS solutions in hospitality and retail and provide technology that will improve the long-term business of our clients.

By combining experience and expertise, TCPOS and PXtech are taking advantage of the visionary opportunities within the POS market.

ENDS

About PXtech: PXtech is a world leader in live web-based solutions that transform the operational efficiency of businesses in the charity, hospitality and retail sectors. PXtech is a fast-growing innovative IT solutions company focused on technical excellence, comprehensive business intelligence systems and industry expertise. Their solutions already play an integral role in over 40,000 business locations worldwide on a daily basis.

About TCPOS: TCPOS is the worldwide leader in the POS technology sector for the hospitality and retail industries. More than 10,000 customers worldwide rely on their customized IT solutions. They support them in their business management needs by providing extensible, adaptable and future-proof POS solutions. TCPOS is based in Lugano (Switzerland) and employs over 150 employees with offices in Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, China, USA, Canada, Argentina and Mexico.

More point of sale news:
Vietnam will delay ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) until after the US elections, a lawmaker said Wednesday, in the latest blow to the massive trade pact.

Prospects that the 12-country deal could be ratified in Washington this year have dimmed, with US lawmakers casting doubt on whether President Barack Obama's signature Pacific trade deal will receive substantial backing or even come to a vote.

Both US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have said they oppose the TPP, raising questions about the future of the pact come the November ballot.

Vietnam, which stands to gain enormously from the trade deal that spans 40 percent of the world's economy, had set a July target to approve it, according to the government's website.

But a member of the National Assembly, or parliament, told AFP Wednesday the deal would not be discussed in the next parliamentary session that opens on October 20 and runs until mid-November.

"The important issue here is to find a proper time to discuss and ratify the trade deal. Everybody knows that the US is the most important member in this deal and the country is in the middle of an election," Dung Trung Quoc told AFP.

"Therefore, Vietnam pushing back the discussion of TPP is only normal," he said, adding that the pact still had full support from parliament.

Comments on the National Assembly website confirmed that TPP ratification would be delayed.

The trade deal has been a major policy of Obama's administration, and a key component of his "pivot to Asia".

The TPP, which excludes economic powerhouse China, must be ratified by all participating countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.
AFP News

Ukraine's maritime grain exports were halted Sunday after Russia suspended its participation in a landmark agreement that allowed the vital shipments, blaming drone attacks on its ships in Crimea. The July deal to unlock grain exports signed between Russia and Ukraine and brokered by Turkey and the UN, is critical to easing the global food crisis caused by the conflict. The agreement had already allowed more than nine million tonnes of Ukrainian grain to be exported and was due to be renewed on November 19. On Saturday, Russia said it was halting its participation after its army accused Kyiv of a "massive" drone attack on its Black Sea fleet, which Ukraine labelled a "false pretext". US President Joe Biden called the move "purely outrageous" while Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Moscow was "weaponising food". The centre coordinating the logistics of the deal said in a statement that no traffic was planned for Sunday. "A joint agreement has not been reached at the JCC for the movement of inbound and outbound vessels on 30 October," it said. "There are more than ten vessels both outbound and inbound waiting to enter the corridor." Ukraine and the UN have urged that the agreement remains in force. "I call on all states to demand that Russia stop its hunger games and recommit to fulfilling its obligations," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the Russian move "an absolutely transparent intention of Russia to return the threat of large-scale famine to Africa and Asia". "Just today, more than two million tons of food are in the sea. This means that access to food has actually worsened for more than seven million consumers," he said in his nightly address. Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said: "It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative which is a critical humanitarian effort". - 'Peddling false claims' - Sevastopol in Moscow-annexed Crimea has been targeted several times in recent months and serves as the headquarters for the Black Sea fleet and a logistical hub for operations in Ukraine. The Russian army claimed to have "destroyed" nine aerial drones and seven maritime ones in an attack on the port early Saturday. "In light of the terrorist act carried out by the Kyiv regime with the participation of British experts against ships of the Black Sea fleet and civilian vessels involved in the security of grain corridors, Russia suspends its participation in the implementation of the agreement on the export of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports," the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram. Moscow's forces alleged British "specialists", whom they said were based in the southern Ukrainian city of Ochakiv, had helped prepare and train Kyiv to carry out the strike. In a further singling out of the UK -- which Moscow sees as one of the most unfriendly Western countries -- Russia said the same British unit was involved in explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month. Britain strongly rebutted both claims, saying "the Russian Ministry of Defence is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale". Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Saturday Moscow would raise the blasts and the alleged drone attack at the UN Security Council. Moscow's military said ships targeted at their Crimean base were involved in the grain deal. The United Nations Coordinator for the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Amir Abdulla, reported that Russia had notified him earlier Saturday of "its concerns about the safety of movements of merchant vessels" under the agreement. Russia had recently criticised the deal, saying its own grain exports have suffered due to Western sanctions. - 'Massive' attack - Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, said Saturday's drone attack was the "most massive" the peninsula had seen. City authorities said the harbour was "temporarily" closed to boats and ferries and urged people "not to panic". Attacks on Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, have increased in recent weeks, as Kyiv presses a counter-offensive in the south to retake territory held by Moscow for months. Moscow-installed authorities in Kherson, just north of Crimea, have vowed to turn the city into a fortress, preparing for an inevitable assault. In early October, Moscow's bridge linking Crimea to the Russian mainland -- personally inaugurated by President Vladimir Putin in 2018 -- was damaged by a blast that Putin blamed on Ukraine. The Russian fleet stationed in the port had also been attacked by a drone in August. Russia's allegations Saturday came as the Ukrainian army reported fighting in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions in the east, including near Bakhmut -- the only area where Moscow's forces have advanced in recent weeks. Pro-Russian separatists fighting alongside Moscow also announced a new prisoner exchange with Kyiv, saying 50 will return home from each side. bur-gw/bfm/caw/mca-yad/dva
US President Barack Obama today addressed the 71st session of UN General Assembly where he recounted his eight years in office and asked nations to embrace tolerance.

President Barack Obama walks to the podium to speak during the Leaders Summit on Refugees during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters

By Press Trust of India: US President Barack Obama today asked nations engaged in "proxy wars" to end them, warning that if communities are not allowed to co-exist, the "embers of extremism will continue to burn" causing sufferings to countless human beings and export of extremism overseas.



OBAMA ADDRESSES UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY

In his eighth and final address to the UN General Assembly as the US President, Obama admitted that the extremist and sectarian violence destabilising the Middle East and spreading elsewhere "will not be quickly reversed."

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"No external power is going to be able to force different religious communities or ethnic communities to co-exist for long," Obama told the world leaders gathered here for the 71st UN General Assembly session.

"Until basic questions are answered about how communities co-exist, the embers of extremism will continue to burn.

Countless human beings will suffer and extremism will continue to be exported overseas," he warned.

"Across-the-regions conflicts, we have to insist that all parties recognise a common humanity and the nations end proxy wars that fuel disorders," he said.



OBAMA ON INDO-PAK UNREST

India accuses Pakistan of waging a proxy war by supporting, arming and training militant groups like Jaish-e- Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba who launch cross border attacks.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Indian Army in recent years, 18 soldiers were killed by heavily armed Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad militants who stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Kashmir's Uri town early Sunday.



OBAMA RECOUNTS HIS LAST 8 YEARS

Obama's remarks a day after his Secretary of State John Kerry asked Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to prevent terrorists from using his country's territory as safe havens.

In his speech, Obama recounted the progress made in the last eight years of his presidency and said "from the depths of the greatest financial crisis of our times we coordinated a response to avoid further catastrophe and return the global economy to growth."

"We have taken away terrorist safe havens, strengthened the non-proliferation regime, resolved the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy. We opened relations with Cuba...and we welcome a democratically elected leader of Myanmar to this Assembly," he said.

EMBRACE TOLERANCE

Obama said that the international community must reject any forms of fundamentalism, racism or a belief in ethnic superiority that makes our traditional identities irreconcilable with modernity.

"Instead we need to embrace the tolerance that results from respect of all human beings," he said.

He said the collapse of colonialism and communism has allowed more people than ever before to live with the freedom to choose their leaders.

"Despite the real and troubling areas where freedom appears in retreat, the fact remains that the number of democracies around the world has nearly doubled in the last 25 years," he said.

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PUTIN RECOVERS POWER THROUGH FORCE

The US President accused his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of trying to recover power through force.

"In a world that left the age of Empire behind, we see Russia attempting to recover lost glory through force, Asian powers debate competing claims of history. There is no easy answer to resolving all these social forces," he said.

"If Russia continues to interfere in the affairs of its neighbours, it may be popular at home, it may fuel nationalist fervour for a time, but over time it is also going to diminish its stature and make its borders less secure," he said.



PEACEFUL RESOLUTION IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA ISSUE NEEDED

Obama said that in the South China Sea, a peaceful resolution of disputes offered by law will mean far greater stability than the militarisation of a few rocks and reefs.

"We are all stakeholders in this international system, and it calls upon all of us to invest in the success of institutions to which we belong. And the good news is, is that many nations have shown what kind of progress is possible when we make those commitments," he said.

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BRING THE PARIS CLIMATE CHANGE DEAL INTO FORCE

Obama urged the world leaders to bring the Paris climate change deal into force as soon as possible, saying "If we don't act boldly, the bill that could come due will be mass migrations and cities submerged and nations displaced and food supplies decimated and conflicted born of despair."

On the Syrian crisis, Obama insisted that diplomacy is the only way to end the brutal five-year conflict.

"There's no ultimate military victory to be won, we're going to have to pursue the hard work of the diplomacy that aims to stop the violence," he said.

He also called for the international community to step up aid for refugees, saying "We have to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home."

OBAMA ON NORTH KOREA'S NUCLEAR TESTS

On North Korea's recent move to test nuclear bomb, Obama said such steps "endangers all of us" and any country that endangers global security must face consequences.

"Those nations with these weapons, like the United States, have a unique responsibility to pursue the path of reducing our stockpiles, and reaffirming basic norms like the commitment to never test them again," he added.

--- ENDS ---

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One of the three glass cabinets at Baalawie Mosque housing rare Quran copies (Yahoo Singapore photo: Safhras Khan)

Inside a mosque in Singapore, there is a sanctuary of rare Quran copies dating back to the powerful Ottoman Empire in the early 15th century.

Meticulously crafted and handwritten in Turkey, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and China, the copies of the holy book have been progressively stored in a small room in Masjid Baalawie for more than three decades, Habib Hasan Al-Attas, the mosques Imam, told Yahoo Singapore.

One Quran from Turkey, belonging to Habib Muhammad Al-Attas, the Imams late father, is 600 years old, with the borders of each sheepskin-made page intricately drawn in gold. The other Quran copies in the mosque at Lewis Road were also made using various unique materials.

This 600-year-old Quran, made in Turkey, belonged to Habib Hasans late father. (Yahoo Singapore photo: Safhras Khan)

It is more than just a display of the Quran as it also tells the story of the holy book (where it is from). The Quran (copies) were produced using different type of materials, some were written on sheepskin while others were written on mulberry leaves, said Habib Hasan.

The holy books written on mulberry leaves were made in China and Mongolia while those written on sheepskin were mostly from Saudi Arabia, he added.

The task of ensuring that the books are carefully preserved in three tall glass cabinets in the mosque is undertaken by a group of curators.

They are doing it pro-bono and each of the display cabinets are treated with chemicals to ensure that the books are well-maintained. They also come down regularly to check on the condition of the books, said Habib Hasan.

One of the curators, M Razali Mahat, said he has been working with Habib Hassan on the rare Quran collection over the past 10 years. I hope that the Quran exhibit will benefit the next generation, he said.

Rare Islamic manuscripts

Apart from the Quran copies, there is also a collection of Islamic manuscripts housed in the mosque. Habib Hasan pointed to one manuscript from Turkey that was translated from Arabic to Jawi. Another manuscript from Indonesia was written on tree bark and made 350 years ago.

Story continues

A rare Islamic manuscript from Indonesia written 350 years ago (Yahoo Singapore photo: Safhras Khan)

Most of the Quran copies and manuscripts were from the private collection of the family of Habib Hasan while the rest were donated by local and overseas visitors to the mosque.

Habib Hasan said that his late father, who is the founding Imam of Masjid Baalawie, loved to read and was an avid collector of books. In the early 1980s, Habib Hasan decided to move some of his fathers books, including the Quran copies, to the mosque so that people can learn more about them.

The Imam said he has a deep appreciation of the religiously devoted writers who had painstakingly written the holy books and manuscripts over the centuries.

Unlike today, they did not have the capability to print out the pages but had to write the Quran by hand, which was something that required a lot of patience, Habib Hasan said.
After the deadly attack on aid convoy, the UN suspended all humanitarian supplies into Syria yesterday.

By Reuters: The United Nations suspended all aid shipments into Syria yesterday after a deadly attack on a convoy carrying humanitarian supplies, while Washington, expressing outrage at the attack, said a week-old ceasefire was not yet dead.

The attack, described by the UN, Red Cross, Western countries and rescue workers on the ground as an air strike, drew condemnation from much of the world.

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Russia and the Syrian government denied that their air forces were responsible for destroying a convoy unloading aid. Moscow presented an entirely different explanation, saying it believed the convoy had not been struck from the air at all but had been destroyed by fire, and suggesting that rescue workers who filmed the aftermath were somehow to blame.

Also read: Like father, like son? Now, Trump Junior likens Syrian refugees to poisoned candy

The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and "around 20 civilians" were killed. Other death tolls differed.



BLOW TO CEASEFIRE



The incident appeared likely to deliver a mortal blow to the ceasefire, the latest attempt to halt a war now in its sixth year, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and made a mockery of all previous peace efforts.

Still, US Secretary of State John Kerry, who personally negotiated the truce during months of intensive diplomacy with Russia despite scepticism from other senior figures in the US administration, told reporters, "The ceasefire is not dead."

He spoke after emerging alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov from a meeting of foreign ministers of 20 countries, gathered to discuss Syria in New York.

The UN peace envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said the ceasefire was in effect until its co-sponsors Moscow and Washington declared it over, and neither had done so at yesterday's meeting.

The state department said the ministers agreed at the meeting of the Syria Support Group to continue pursuing the ceasefire under the US-Russian plan.

Also read: Putin questions US commitment to Syria cease-fire



Syria's army had declared the initial ceasefire period over on Monday, hours before the attack on the convoy.

US officials acknowledged there might no longer be any agreement left to salvage. If the truce is abandoned, it would most likely wreck the last hope of any breakthrough on Syria before the administration of President Barack Obama leaves office in January.

"WAR CRIME IF DELIBERATE"

The ceasefire was meant to halt all fighting and allow aid to reach besieged areas, at a time when pro-government forces, with Russian and Iranian military support, are in their strongest positions for years and civilians in many rebel-held are completely cut off from food and medical supplies.

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"As an immediate security measure, other convoy movements in Syria have been suspended for the time being pending further assessment of the security situation," Jens Laercke, a UN humanitarian aid spokesman, told a briefing.

The attack on the convoy of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent destroyed 18 of 31 trucks.

"If this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targetting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime," UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien said in a statement. Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called it a "flagrant violation of international humanitarian law".

Among those killed was the head of the Syrian Red Crescent for the area, Omar Barakat. The team on the ground was "in shock," said ICRC's Middle East chief, Robert Mardini.

WASHINGTON "OUTRAGED"

Washington was "outraged", said US State Department spokesman John Kirby. "The destination of this convoy was known to the Syrian regime and the Russian federation and yet these aid workers were killed in their attempt to provide relief to the Syrian people," he said in a statement.

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Also read: Obama policy on Syria, ISIS working: Kaine

The contrast with Moscow's version of the events shows how difficult it has been for the sponsors of opposing sides to agree on what is taking place on the ground.

"We have studied video footage from the scene from so-called 'activists' in detail and did not find any evidence that the convoy had been struck by ordnance," Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Defence Ministry said in a statement.

"There are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air."

He said the damage to the convoy visible in footage was caused by its cargo catching fire. It had occurred at the same time as militants from the group formerly called the Nusra Front had started a big offensive in nearby Aleppo, he said, appearing to point the finger at rescue workers from a group called the "White Helmets" who filmed the aftermath.

"Only representatives of the 'White Helmets' organisation close to the Nusra Front who, as always, found themselves at the right time in the right place by chance with their video cameras can answer who did this and why."

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The UN and Red Crescent spoke of relentless air strikes they were powerless to stop.

"The UN in Syria was informed of the air strikes as they unfolded," the UN Syria and regional humanitarian coordinators Massimo Diana and Kevin Kennedy said in a joint statement.

"Despite our efforts and communications with parties to the conflict, further air strikes continued throughout the night, hampering efforts to reach and attend to the wounded."

Also read: Photo bombed: Video shows Syrian rebel blows himself up with mobile phone detonator while taking selfie



Hussein Badawi, head of the White Helmets in the town, said he was 100 metres (yards) from the aid depot when the attack took place and was injured by shrapnel in the hand.

"There were fires, martyrs, wounded people. We were able to pull out four survivors and five dead bodies at first," Badawi said. "The bombardment was continuous, continuous. The rescue teams weren't even able to work. Those who arrived in ambulances couldn't come in."

DIPLOMATIC GAMBLE

The ceasefire deal was a gamble on unprecedented cooperation between the United States and Russia, despite trust between the two Cold War-era foes being at its lowest point for decades.

The deal called for Washington and Moscow, which support opposite sides in the war between Assad's government and insurgents but are both fighting against Islamic State militants, to eventually share targetting information, the first time they would have fought openly together since World War Two.

Also read: US, Russia reach deal for Syria ceasefire, truce from Monday

Following the attack, a senior Obama administration official said of the ceasefire, "We don't know if it can be salvaged."

"At this point the Russians have to demonstrate very quickly their seriousness of purpose because otherwise there will be nothing to extend and nothing to salvage," the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, added.

--- ENDS ---
"SARS officers are getting rich through their brutality. In Nigeria, it seems that torture is a lucrative business."

'My Body Ceased to Function'

The report also stated that many detainees had been held in horrific conditions, including one detention center known as the "abattoir," where Amnesty allegedly found 130 people living in overcrowded cells.

Evidence collected as part of the investigation found that the police team was torturing and extracting confessions from people without evidence.

Police in Nigeria use torture to extract bribes and confessions, Amnesty says https://t.co/AsQWxIvHAF via @markets  amnestypress (@amnestypress) September 21, 2016

In one case, a 25-year-old fuel attendant in the state of Anambra was arrested and tortured after his employer accused him of burglary at the premises.

"The policemen asked me to sign a plain sheet. When I signed it, they told me I have signed my death warrant," the man told Amnesty.

"They left me hanging on a suspended iron rod. My body ceased to function. I lost consciousness. When I was about to die they took me down and poured water on me to revive me."

While Amnesty's report allegedly contains testimonies from senior officers admitting that torture had taken place, police officials in Nigeria have rejected the claims and denied the allegations of torture and bribery.

UK Support
Unhappy with the Pornhub ban and unwilling to let things slide, Daniel Trabun, Digital Director at the Russian edition of Esquire magazine, came up with an unusual means of retaliating against what he describes as prudishness being enforced by the government agency #Rospornobzor (Russian Porn Review).

The method, promoted by Trabun on his Facebook page, is fairly simple  one merely has to choose a porn video and narrate the lurid chain of events which transpire on camera as a show of frankness and refusal to conform to prudishness.

"A prudish, sterile and conservative attitude is being forced (upon the society) by the government, with no explanation and no opportunity for discussion being offered. This unhealthy duality also manifests in the lack of a neutral lexicon that we could use to talk about sex," Trabun explained.
Until recently, the number of criminal reports of hate crimes has hovered at around 800 a year, College research director Vesa Muttilainen told Finnish national broadcaster Yle . However, police are still lagging behind with respect to their data crunching, as the latest figures available are from 2014. According to police hate crime specialist Mans Enqvist, it is already obvious that the number of reported hate offences is on the rise, citing the recent increase of the number of asylum-seekers in the country as the main reason.

"Of course, one reason is that the climate for discussion in Finland has changed. We are more likely to say anything at all. And this creates a foundation for moving from speech to action," Enqvist explained. "Naturally, the arrival of a large number of asylum seekers last year has intensified the public discussion. It seems that the social climate is now encouraging for this type of crime," he added.

Since Finland's criminal code offers no definition between hate crimes and racially-motivated crimes, police have to resort to scientific explanations. A hate crime is therefore defined based on the motive, which is hatred of the victim's ethnic or national background, religious convictions, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender 'expression', or disability.
BISHKEK (Sputnik)  Kyrgyz security forces have neutralized two improvised explosive devices in the center of Bishkek, Kyrgyz National Security Committee's press secretary said Wednesday.

"A total of two improvised explosive devices were neutralized on September 20 near a municipal shop at the crossroads of Mahatma Gandhi and Pervomayskaya," Rahat Sulaymanov told RIA Novosti.

According to Sulaymnaov, passers-by found two black plastic bags with explosive devices and called the police.
Abe met with UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who said that the United Kingdom would never tolerate North Korean nuclear tests and that the international community should respond to them. The prime ministers agreed to cooperate toward adoption of new sanctions against North Korea by the UN Security Council.

Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida took part in the meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) top diplomats, who stressed their determination to take further measures in response to the North Korean provocations.

On September 9, Pyongyang carried out a nuclear test at its northeastern nuclear test site. The nuclear experiment is believed to be the fifth and the largest since North Korea started pursuing nuclear and ballistic missile programs, drawing condemnation from the international community.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Nauru's President Baron Waqa defended his country's involvement in Australia's program of offshore immigration detention facilities at the Leadership Summit on Refugees held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

"This remote processing model is able to take away the benefit being offered by people smugglers, reduce or eliminate deaths at sea and ensure that states can control their borders And at the same time ensure that people in need are granted protection," Waqa said on Tuesday speaking about the country's refugee policy and its cooperation with Australia, as quoted by the ABC broadcaster.

At the same time, the president called for help in providing more than 900 refugees, which were on Nauru at that moment, with homes.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On September 14, Hanson, who is a leader of the right-wing party One Nation called for a ban on Muslim migration in her first speech in the Senate, the parliament's upper house.

"Our society is diminished by inflammatory rhetoric or appeals to xenophobia. We expect our political representatives to set the tone for our society, not to be targeting particular groups with hostility. We should be forthright in speaking out against political appeals to fear. And we should resist political attempts to divide Australians according to race or religion," Soutphommasanes speech notes said, as quoted by The Guardian.
The senior BJP leader accused the Congress of being selective while attacking the Modi government. (Photo: PTI)

By Kumar Shakti Shekhar: The BJP has taken a strong exception to the Congress launching a frontal attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Uri terror attack, terming it "shameful".

Speaking to India Today Digital, BJP's national spokesperson Syed Shahnawaz Hussain said, "We can still understand when Pakistan attacks us. But Congress speaking their voice is shameful."

After the Uri attack, the Congress targeted Modi, holding him "singularly responsible for the complete disarray" in the government's policy vis--vis Pakistan. Congress' chief spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala had alleged that the Uri attack, which was planned and executed by Pakistan, was the result of "failure" of Modi government's political leadership. He had also alleged that the tragedy was the result of a massive intelligence and operational failure inside the government.



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SEEKING A SOLUTION FROM CONGRESS

Shahnawaz accused the Congress of not trusting our security forces. He asked the opposition party to explicitly state whether it wanted India to go to war. He also asked them to suggest any idea, if they had any, to tackle the issue.

"This is not the time to do politics. The country should repose complete faith in the security forces and the government," he said.



DEFENDING BJP'S ATTACK ON MANMOHAN GOVERNMENT

Reminded that the BJP, as the opposition party, had also indulged in politics, Shahnawaz said they had criticised the Congress-led UPA government when the then prime minister Manmohan Singh compromised India's position on Pakistan in Egyptian resort of Sharm-el Sheikh. The Congress-led UPA government had accepted a reference to Balochistan, emboldening Pakistan to accuse India of involvement in fomenting insurgency in the region.

RESPONDING TO '56-INCH CHEST' AND '10 HEADS FROM PAKISTAN' JIBES



The senior BJP leader accused the Congress of being selective while attacking the Modi government. "They point out incidents like Gurdaspur, Pathankot, Pampore and Uri, but they should also mention the scores of attacks which our security forces have foiled well in time," the former Union minister said.

He was responding to Congress' "56-inch chest" jibe on Modi and "bringing 10 heads from Pakistan" dig on External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. The Congress called these Modi's "jumlas" (rhetorical statements).

As BJP's prime ministerial candidate in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Modi had said it needed a 56-inch chest to turn Uttar Pradesh into Gujarat. However, the opposition parties have been attacking the PM with reference to the terror attacks on Indian security forces.

ALSO READ: - Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp

On the other hand, as the then Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma had asked the UPA government to get at least 10 heads from Pakistan if Indian soldier Hemraj's head could not be brought back from the neighbouring country.



However, the Congress is wrongly attributing this "10 heads" remark to Modi while attacking him over the Uri attack.

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SECURITY FORCES WILL SURELY STRIKE BACK

Shahnawaz hit back at the Congress by saying that the Modi government had indeed been speaking in the same language that Pakistan understands. "Just yesterday, our security forces killed 10 infiltrators... The armed forces and the government will decide when and how to strike at the enemy... We will satisfy the nation, not the Congress," he said.

Asked what lessons had the Modi government learned from terror attacks in Udhampur, Gurdaspur, Pathankot and Pampore, which had taken place before Uri, the BJP spokesperson indicated that a larger plan was afoot to banish terrorism from Pakistan.

READ| Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

"Pakistan is a threat to the entire world. The roots of terrorism in Pakistan will have to be removed to check terrorism... That country is being isolated and exposed... All the countries have sided with India in the ongoing UN General Assembly session... The government won't reveal it but will surely strike at an opportune time," he said.

MODI NOT SOFT ON PAKISTAN

Shahnawaz also responded to the Congress' charge that Modi was soft on Pakistan, having indulged in saree-shawl diplomacy, unscheduled visits to Pakistan to attend wedding celebrations and birthday parties with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif. He said Modi had displayed large-heartedness and maturity by extending a hand of friendship to Pakistan.

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"Humne koshish mein kami nahi ki, unhone badmashi mein kami nahi ki (We were not found wanting in trying to normalise relations, they [Pakistan] were not found wanting in being notorious," Shahnawaz said in an impromptu rhyme.

RJD-JD(U) MATCH-FIXING ON SHAHABUDDIN

The senior BJP leader accused Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad of being hand-in-glove on mafia don-cum-politician Shahabuddin. "It is match fixing between the JD(U) and the RJD," he said.

He took a dig at Lalu and said for the RJD leaders, social service is being convicted, going to jail and getting bail. He said both Lalu and Shahabuddin were out on bail after being convicted by court in criminal cases. He said the Bihar government was forced to challenge in the Supreme Court the Patna High Court's order granting bail to the Siwan don.

Shahnawaz reiterated that 'Jungle Raj' had indeed returned to Bihar. This has been well demonstrated in the case of the Siwan judge who sentenced Shahabuddin to life imprisonment, seeking a transfer from the town as soon as the don got out of jail.

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Also read - Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?

Also read - Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

--- ENDS ---
NEW DELHI (Sputnik)  According to the Hindu newspaper, the agreement was planned to be signed during India's interior minister visit to Russia, which was initially scheduled for September 18 and postponed over a deadly attack on a military base in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir in northern India.

The agreement was planned to upgrade the 1993 deal on the cooperation between the interior ministries of the two countries. In particular, the new agreement would give India real-time access to information from Russia on terrorism and cyber security, the sources familiar with the situation told the news outlet.

In 2002, Russia and India signed an intergovernmental memorandum of understanding on counter-terrorism cooperation.
BISHKEK (Sputnik)  On Tuesday, Atambayev's press service said that the head of state was on a short-term vacation for medical examinations in Turkey and planned to return to work on October 1.

"The president's health condition is stable. He has already delivered a statement," a presidential spokesperson told RIA Novosti.

Earlier in the day, Atambayev approved the draft project on the amendments to the Constitution and called on the parliament to submit it to a national referendum, according to his press service.


NEW DELHI (Sputnik)India is concerned about the increasing cross-border activities in the state of Jammu and Kashmir claimed by Pakistan in the wake of the recent attack on the army brigade headquarters in Uri, Inspector General of Border Security Force (BSF) told Sputnik on Wednesday.

"We have increased our alertness in view of the increase in movement and activities across the border. We have noticed movement across the border in the area around Ganganagar district," B R Meghwal said.

The Inspector General stressed that extra troops were deployed at the border and "we are capable to strike back in case of any eventuality."


New Delhi (Sputnik)India has identified 26 strategically important Islands for development to possibly use for strategic and tourism purposes. The islands stretch from the Bay of Bengal to Arabian Sea.

In a high level meeting chaired by Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it was decided that out of a total of 1,382 offshore islands, 26 could be considered for development.

Government sources told to Sputnik that Smith Island, Ross Island, Avis Island, Long Island, and Little Andaman are identified for development in the Bay of Bengal while Bangaram, Thinnakara, Suheli, Cheriyam, and Minicoy Islands will be developed in Arabian Sea. India has engaged international experts to prepare a detailed development plan to this end.
Senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) Center for Japanese Studies, Victor Pavlyatenko, told Sputnik that many Asian nations bear grudges against each other due to the past history, which is mired in frequent conflicts and mutual mistrust.

"Of course, wars were fought on all continents, but while Russians and Europeans dont bear significant grudges, people in the East possess a different mentality and tend to remember grievances for a long time. During the post-war decades the Japanese politicians on numerous occasions apologized for the actions of the Imperial Armys actions in many Asian countries, but every time that the relations between Tokyo and Beijing take a turn for the worse, the Chinese are keen to remind the Japanese about the past," he explained.

In the meantime, about 80 percent of Japanese respondents and about 60 percent of Chinese respondents expressed concerns that the territorial disputes between Beijing and its neighbors may ultimately lead to an armed conflict.

While the two nations governments continue to profess the desire to forge closer bilateral ties, and despite close economic cooperation and intensive cultural and academic exchange programs, both Chinese and Japanese tend to be reluctant to let go of the negative stereotypes of the past.

"The biggest risk factor in Asia today is a conflict between the economy and security. The volume of trade between China and Japan exceeds $300 billion, which is a pretty hefty sum, to put it mildly. Therefore, I believe that both nations are perfectly aware of the fact that the disputed islands arent worth starting a fight, as losses would be far greater than potential gains," Pavlyatenko remarked.

It should also be noted that according to another Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2015, 91 percent of Philippine respondents, 83 percent of Vietnamese respondents and 78 percent of South Korean respondents expressed concerns that Chinas territorial claims in the South China Sea may result in an armed conflict.


New Delhi (Sputnik)Indian PM Narendra Modi's government has given its approval to a project under which it will start laying an undersea optical fiber cable to strategically important locations in the Indian Ocean region.

Union Cabinet has given its approval for the provision of a direct communication link through a dedicated submarine Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) between India's mainland (Chennai) and Port Blair and five other islands viz. Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Havelock, Kamorta and Great Nicobar, reads a statement released by Indian government.

Geography and the location of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal safeguard India's eastern seaboard. The estimated cost of the project is USD 165 mln, including operational expenses for 5 years. The project is likely to be completed by December 2018.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Indian Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar summoned Pakistani ambassador Abdul Basit on Wednesday in the wake of the recent attack on the army brigade headquarters in India's state of Jammu and Kashmir, allegedly carried out by militants that crossed from Pakistan, the Ministry of External Affairs said in a press release.

"Foreign Secretary Dr. Jaishankar called in the High Commissioner of Pakistan Mr. Abdul Basit today and reminded him that the Government of Pakistan had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India The latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India," the press release read.

According to the ministry, there were 17 attempts to cross the border in 2016 in order to carry attacks on the Indian soil which resulted in death of 31 militants. The Indian government pledged to provide Pakistan with evidences "if the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks."
New Delhi (Sputnik) - Indias Foreign Secretary Dr. S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit to convey strong concern that the infrastructure of terrorism is still active in Pakistan, according to Vikas Swarup, spokesperson of Indias Ministry of External Affairs.

WATCH: MEA Spokesperson Vikas Swarup speaks on Pakistan Envoy Abdul Basit summoned by Foreign Secy S Jaishankar pic.twitter.com/LmPkuX6Xwe  ANI (@ANI_news) 21  2016 .

The latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India, reads a statement released by Indias Ministry of External Affairs.
"The reforms are working, life is getting better and there are already a lot of private cars in the country. There are even traffic jams in Pyongyang sometimes, and there is a construction boom everywhere. As a result, property prices are rising. Elite apartments in Pyongyang can cost up to $200,000, although that's an exception. A nice apartment in the North Korean capital costs $70-$90,000."

"There are rumors, I have heard them from too many different people to ignore them, that Kim Jong-un has given a secret instruction not to ask questions about the origin of funds if someone is planning to invest large sums in an apartment or business."

"We have noted that Kim Jong-un has not issued any law or regulation prohibiting private business. This is a commercial 'gray area' which began to flourish when the new leader came to power, though officially it doesn't exist," Lankov explained.

The country's burgeoning middle class is the beneficiary of the reforms implemented by the North Korean leader since he succeeded his father as leader in 2011. However, their good fortune could still be cut short by the authorities.

"The North Korean middle class is doing great. They live well and eat in private restaurants, they have apartments and there is apparently even an unwritten rule not to touch them. However, all their possessions could be confiscated at any time, they could be arrested, because the unwritten rule is still unwritten," Lankov said.

The economic improvements come despite international sanctions in response to Pyongyang's nuclear testing. These include the freezing of financial assets, an arms embargo, export ban and inspection of all cargo entering and leaving the country.

The country has been subjected to five sets of UN sanctions since it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, and the latest set was announced by the UN Security Council in March, following a nuclear test in March this year.


UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)Chinese Premier Li Keqiang spoke out against the application of racial and cultural double standards in the global fight against terrorism, at the 71st General Assembly of the United Nations on Wednesday.

"Terrorism is the common enemy of mankind and must be combated resolutely. At the same time, double standards should not be applied. Terrorism should not be linked with certain countries, races or religions," Li said, addressing the general debate of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

The Chinese premier also linked terrorism to insufficient development, and stressed the importance of an internationally united and concerted effort to bring an end to terrorism.
The Defence Minister, hinting at intelligence alerts about a possible attack, today said, "Something might have gone wrong in Uri".

Parrikar has sought an explanation from the Army on how the terrorists successfully entered the high security Battalion Headquarters without being spotted.

By India Today Web Desk: A day after Manohar Parrikar sought a detailed report from the Army on the terror attack in Uri which claimed the lives of 18 Army jawans, the Defence Minister, hinting at intelligence alerts about a possible attack, today said, "Something might have gone wrong in Uri".

"It is a sensitive matter. I believe in zero error," Parrikar said while speaking at an All India Management Association event in New Delhi.

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Parrikar has sought an explanation from the Army on how the terrorists successfully entered the high security Battalion Headquarters without being spotted.

"As a nation should ensure this is not repeated again and again, I will take steps to ensure it doesn't go wrong again," Parrikar said.

ALSO READ: Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp

Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?

Reacting to the statement from Pakistan after the Uri attack, Parrikar said, "Sometimes empty vessels make more noise, but India is a responsible power. Not speaking specifically on this incident, but if I want I can have a knee-jerk reaction."

PM Modi's statement where he said "those responsible for Uri will not go unpunished" means something will be done but when and how will be decided by the government, Parrikar said

According to sources, Parrikar is specially concerned about how the militants gained entry to the base completely unchallenged despite timely intelligence inputs on attempts to target military installations.



Out of 18 martyrs, 14 were charred to death as the terrorists used incendiary grenades and targeted a fuel dump to maximise casualties.

THE ATTACK



At 5.15 am on Sunday, four terrorists managed to infiltrate into Indian territory from across the Line of Control and preceded to launch an attack on the 12th Brigade of the Army in the Uri sector.

The terrorists launched 13 grenades in three minutes which caused a massive fire in which 18 jawans were burned alive and 20 others were injured. In the gunbattle that ensued, all four militants were gunned down.

Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

Exclusive: Has the Punjab Police learnt no lessons from terror attacks in Uri and Pathankot?

Days after Uri attack, suspicious bag found near Army unit in Pathankot

Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

10 terrorists gunned down in Uri after Pakistan violates ceasefire again

--- ENDS ---
This is the second such flyover in as many weeks. On September 13, the US flew two nuclear-capable B-1B Lancer bombers over Osan Air Base. While the drill was meant as a message to the North, Pyongyang appeared unphased.

"They are bluffing that B-1Bs are enough for fighting an all-out nuclear war," said a statement from the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

"The US imperialists keep letting their nuclear strategic bombers fly over South Korea in a bid to seek an opportunity of mounting a preemptive nuclear attack."

The statement added that the DPRK would take strong measures against the US if necessary.

"They had better stop their rash actions," the statement said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the ruling, as well as as the legitimacy of the court, calling it "null and void."

The Taiwanese Defense Ministry has not made the purpose of Itu Aba public, claiming confidentiality, but defense experts in the country believe the structure of the installation implies that it is an artillery base.

Former government advisor and scholar Dustin Wang has made regular visits to Itu Aba and said the installation "definitely will be for military purposes, but I cannot tell if it is for defending, attacking or monitoring." He noted that the base could be used for surveillance, given its position facing a main thoroughfare for seaborne traffic.
Aimee Mejia, 21, a highly-intoxicated US Navy petty officer was arrested in June , she was driving in the wrong lane and subsequently collided with two vehicles, injuring three people.

According to media reports, Mejia pleaded guilty and asked for leniency. The judge, Masanori Nagahashi, however, sentenced her to three years in prison, but took her absence of a criminal record into account, suspending punishment under the condition that Mejia maintain good behavior for four years.

Under Japanese law, Mejia could face a maximum of 15 years in prison, but prosecutors asked for a term of 3 years.
"Let us be clear. Talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences especially in Jammu and Kashmir dispute and to avert the danger of any escalation," Sharif added.

Tensions between India and Pakistan entangled in the decades-long dispute over Jammu and Kashmir region have escalated since July after Indian security forces killed Burhan Wani, a renowned separatist commander. On Sunday, a group of militants reportedly crossed from Pakistan into India-administered northern Kashmir territory and attacked the Indian base in Uri, killing 18 servicemen.

In the wake of the attack, Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh called for isolation of Pakistan from the international community as a state supporting terrorist groups avoiding direct allegations of Pakistani involvement in the Sunday attack. Islamabad claimed to be not implicated in the attack refuting New Delhi's allegations as unsubstantiated.

Last month, spokesman for the Indian Foreign Ministry Vikas Swarup said negotiations between the two countries would take place only if Pakistan agreed on the agenda put forward by New Delhi focusing on anti-terrorism effort ignoring Pakistan's territorial claims.
The sites were uncovered around 10 p.m. (PDT) Monday night and exposed by investigators at the source-code hosting site Github, who explained "One of North Korea's top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global [Domain Name System] transfers. This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer request] to the country's ns2.kptc.kp name server to get a copy of the nation's top level DNS data."

The sites were quickly listed on Reddit and include the Korean Central News Agency, Korean Education Funds, an insurance company, a site containing recipes and a site where people can purchase airline tickets.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)On Tuesday, the Bulgarian government approved the bill on financial aid to the NEK EAD to help the company pay debt to JSC Atomstroyexport over the halt of the Belene nuclear power plant (NPP) construction.

According to the BNR broadcaster, the parliament will discuss the draft law at first reading.

The sum of possible financial aid was not revealed, but the media outlet reported citing Prime Minister Boyko Borissov that some 650 million euros ($725 million at the current exchange rates) could be allocated to "Russian companies."


MOSCOW (Sputnik)South Korean companies plan to invest 2.6 billion rubles ($40 million) in priority development areas (PDAs) in the Russian Far East and the Free Port of Vladivostok, the Far East Development Ministry said on Wednesday.

"South Korean businesspeople are planning to use the facilities of PDAs and the Vladivostok Free Port provided to investors. The Far East Development Corporation received at least three applications worth 2.6 billion rubles," the ministry said in a statement.

The Korean investors plan to construct a plant to manufacture polyurethane products and detergents on the Free Port territory. In the Khabarovsk PDA, the investors are willing to build a plant to produce plastic wrap and wicketed bags.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  US multinational aircraft corporation Boeing has received a license to sell jets to Iran, the company announced in a statement on Wednesday.

"We have received that license and remain in talks with Iran Air based on the MOA [Memorandum of Agreement]," Boeing said. "Any final sales agreement would have to adhere to the license weve been issued."

In March, the US Department of the Treasury announced that the United States has issued a general license authorizing US persons to enter into contacts to sell commercial passenger aircrafts, parts and services to Iran.
The prime minister also ruled out a number of potentially dangerous measures, such as nationalization of large companies, economic mobilization, selling government property or "printing money" policy.

"We will not switch on the 'printing press' or unbalance the economy, as people usually end up paying for this kind of measures," Medvedev wrote.

Medvedev stressed that in planning anti-crisis reforms the government should avoid populist tactics, which might lead to the reforms carried out at the expense of people.

Medvedev also noted that the sustainable economic growth in Russia depends on political stability, which the newly elected parliament must ensure.

"Political stability in the country is key to achieving this goal [the growth of Russians' personal wealth]," Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote in his article for a Russian journal "Voprosy Ekonomiki" (Economy Questions) published on Thursday.

Medvedev stressed that the parliament is responsible for providing the proper legal base for economy reforms.

On September 18, Medvedev's United Russia ruling party secured 54.17 percent of votes in Russian parliamentary elections, with the Communist Party coming in second with 13.37 percent and the Liberal Democratic Party third with 13.18 percent, according to preliminary results.
Ultra-savvy at playing mainstream media for invaluable free publicity, elevating Outrageousness to an art form and being impervious to irony and derision, Trump has been a master at tapping wave after wave of anger against the new liberal elite  including a nomenklatura of crypto-intellectual Ivy league-educated experts who could not give a damn about understanding the (real world) consequences of United States Government (USG) policies.

The anger is manifested by declassified blue collars, the unemployed, the functionally illiterate, white trash. Whatever you call them, they are the excluded form the Neoliberal Banquet, not only economically but also culturally.

But this being Trump, a master of self-promotion, the battle is more like Ego against The Establishment.

And it gets juicier when we learn from powerful, discreet New York-based interests  supporters of Trumps platform  about whos really winning:

The Trump campaign is hardly spending any money at all and holding all over. They may use their money in the last month after the debates if Hillary recovers for those debates from what appears to be an attack of Parkinson's. He has a shot though no matter who wins I predict there will be peace with Russia; the oil price will rise; imports from Asia of military parts will be repatriated and rigging of currencies is over; there will be offsetting measures to stop the flood of immigrants and products under mis-valued currencies. The masters do not lose.

The masters are of course the Masters of the Universe who really run the USG.

And heres the clincher on hows in control:

Both sides are controlled and that explains everything. Lenin said that the way to defeat our opponents is to take over their leadership of the opponent. Look at the Moral Majority which Jerry Falwell disbanded when it became too powerful. Look at Ross Perot who exited when he started making a real dent. Both were taken care of and Ross made money out of it.

Their internal lingo for it is the concept of "dynamic silence. This is a technique by the masters to block out all news coverage of let's say a Nazi so that he could gain no following. That they could have done to Trump if he were not theirs. Who could have complained? He was just an apolitical real estate operator that no one was interested in.

So what do we have in the end? An entertaining gladiatorial contest that they control both sides of and the winner gets all the money  as with the Clinton Foundation. And the public is no wiser.

The 24/7 Circus Maximus

There are subtle gradations to this scenario. Rothschild interests are not supporting Trump  according to these well-connected sources, because Trump has not been anointed by the club and is thus unreliable. They recall, for instance, how Greenspan was so incompetent that Wall Street leaders had to give him trades so he could make money before they put him as the head of Federal Reserve. Then he was so out of it that they had to direct his every move as he had no comprehension what they do.

They, of course, meaning Rothschild interests.

On the Cold War 2.0 front, things are even hazier. Since 2010, when Obama was ordered to keep the US nuclear first-strike strategy, Russia and China know where this is heading. Its no wonder Trump is being relentlessly attacked as Putins own Trojan Horse  because hes against Cold War 2.0 and the demonization of Russia.

But the Pentagons strident Ash Carter, soon out of a job, is one thing; another thing entirely is what the Masters of the Universe really want, according to these Trump-supporting sources; Hillary would be following Trump's guidelines should she win, as the US military will explain to her that she has no other options based on Russian military superiority in submarines, and defensive and offensive missiles. Trump's policies are wise.

Theres even a P.R. move that could literally devastate the already wobbly Hillary campaign:

Hillary's reckless threats against Russia, risking nuclear war, could bring back the Lyndon Johnson TV ads against Goldwater by Donald Trump, where we had a little child in a meadow picking flowers while a nuclear bomb goes off. It was an ad of genius and destroyed Goldwater. The first strike nuclear attack policy and the reckless provocations combine to form an excellent Johnson style ad. This time Trump can use it against the Democrats, who have created almost all the wars in the last 125 years.

The daisy cutter ad is here.

A Force for Farce?
By PTI: New Delhi, Sept 21 (PTI) India today told Pakistan that it has seized evidence showing involvement of Pak-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against this country.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active.

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Jaishankar also told Basit about the content of GPS recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistans role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed.

"If the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," he told the Pakistan envoy.

Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

He also reminded Basit that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India. "The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," he told Basit.

In a release, External Affairs Ministry said this year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

"Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of thirty one terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism. Foreign Secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing," it said.

Apart from GPS content, India has recovered a number of items that included communication matrix sheets and equipment, other made in Pakistan stuff like food, medicines and clothes which were conveyed to Basit.

"We now expect a response from the Government of Pakistan," Jaishankar told him.

Basits summoning came a day after Jaishankar headed a high-level meeting, attended by senior Home Ministry officials and Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), during which the evidence recovered by Indian Army from the terrorists was shared with the MEA. PTI PYK SC

--- ENDS ---

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Finland's northernmost region of Lapland is described as one of the last wildernesses in Europe and is home to population of 300,000 wild reindeer . Today, Finland is testing an interactive reindeer warning app, named Porokello ("Reindeer Bell") where drivers can tap their mobile phone screens to register any reindeer and receive warning signals when approaching an area where reindeer have been spotted. A warning reaches all drivers within a radius of 750 meters and is valid for one hour.

In a pilot project, professional drivers were given 600 handsets by the Lapland Center for Economic Development, which were specifically suited for the reindeer warning system. If proven successful, the app will be available for download on smartphones in 2017. In the future, the application is planned for use in bus traffic, taxis, ambulance and heavy transport vehicles.

According to a survey, almost all test users were satisfied with the app and recommend it also to their colleagues, Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet reported. Ninety-four percent of the users were satisfied with the application, 75 percent said the warnings were rightly placed, whereas 95 percent believed that the application could be useful to reduce reindeer accidents. The most common complaint, however, was that the app was too demanding on the battery. The ultimate goal of the "Reindeer Bell" is to halve the number of road accidents involving reindeer, which today are estimated at some 4,000 per year.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The Finnish authorities have taken three children from their mother, a citizen of Russia, and sent them to a childrens shelter, a Finnish human rights activist said.

"The Finnish authorities in the town of Seinaejoki have again extrajudicially taken away without objective reasons three children from Russian mother Viktoriya Medvedeva on the grounds that the mother has allegedly slapped them," Johan Baeckman said in a statement on Tuesday.

He added that the woman was requesting assistance from the Russian authorities, diplomats and Russias new Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights Anna Kuznetsova.
If one side violates, the other side tends to react. But, as I said, these days it has been better. I dont want to point fingers against anybody. I really hope that a few violations can also stop, he explained.

Kiev launched a special military operation in Ukraines southeast in April 2014, after local residents refused to recognize the new Ukrainian authorities, which came to power as a result of a coup.

In February 2015, a peace agreement was signed between Ukraines conflicting sides in Minsk. Despite the fact that the deal stipulated a full ceasefire in Donbas, violations both on the part of Kiev forces and local militia have been reported.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Secretary General Lamberto Zannier told Sputnik that he would not have any bilateral meetings with the Russian delegation on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York.

I am having lots of bilateral meetings, but not specifically on [Ukraine], Zannier said. I was in Kiev last week. The conversation was in Kiev. I saw the Russian Ambassador in Vienna just before coming here. I have constant exchanges and open channels.
BRUSSELS (Sputnik)  Two oil tankers collided in the North Sea nearly 20 miles off the Belgian coast without leaving injuries or causing leaks, the head of Belgiums Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centre (MRCC) shipping assistance division said Wednesday.

"No one was injured. We can only speak about material damage. There were no leaks from the tankers or the threat of flooding as well," Rejane Gyssens told reporters.

One of the tankers was said to be anchored when another transport vessel crashed into it, according to preliminary data. The first tanker was not transporting oil products, while it is unclear what was in the second vessel.
During the elections in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern earlier this month, the AfD managed to get the better of Merkel's ruling Christian Democratic Union party (CDU). Two days ago, the AfD made major gains in Berlin's elections at the expense of the CDU, which suffered its worst-ever results in the capital.

Other parties with similar rhetoric have made gains across Europe, such as France's National Front, the Freedom Party of Austria, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands.

"These parties are supported by those who see that social life is changing as their countries are occupied by foreigners, and who fear losing their social status. Their position leads to a conflict with those who are opposed to them", Turkish foreign policy professor Huseyin Bagci, a panelist from the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank, said.

According to him, Europe's current political landscape is not as stable as it was before, and Angela Merkel, the personification of European stability, may well lose next year's elections. Besides Germany, the migration issue has already split the political discourse in Europe's north and east.

"In Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, the authorities are against any quotas for the reception of refugees, and are trying to prevent the populists' position from gaining strength", according to Stefan Meister, program manager for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

"Developing a dialogue between people with different views is an understandably difficult task", RIA Novosti said regarding Europeans who are trying to follow the debate on migration, now that authorities such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are borrowing arguments from right-wing populists.

As far as the migration crisis is concerned, much will depend on the fate of the agreement concluded between the European Union and Turkey.Ankara describes some aspects of the deal as interference in the country's internal affairs, and the renewed context of the discussion on refuges may reinforce Turkey's reluctance to give in to Brussels' demands, RIA Novosti said.

It quoted another Valdai Club expert, University of Innsbruck political science professor Gerhard Mangott, as saying that Ankara has clearly stated that it will not adhere to the migration agreement with Brussels if the EU fails to grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel by the end of October 2016.

"The EU is unlikely to fulfill this requirement because Brussels insists on the implementation of all the 72 requirements that were put forward toward Turkey. In particular, these include amendments to the country's anti-terrorism legislation, which is unacceptable for the Turkish government,"Mangott said.

Stefan Meister, for his part, believes that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not interested in the complete isolation of his country from the European Union.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to cooperate with Russias Roscosmos on lunar research, Rene Pischel, the head of the ESA's permanent mission in Russia, told Sputnik.

"If the Agencys member states give their go-ahead at the upcoming ministerial conference in December 2016, the ESA will cooperate with Russia in exploring the moon," Pischel said.

Roscosmos deputy chief Sergei Savelyev confirmed earlier that the two space agencies were mulling joint flights to the moon as continuation of their work on the ExoMars program, a joint endeavor to search for traces of life on Mars.
YEREVAN (Sputnik)  French President Francois Hollande reaffirmed on Wednesday his commitment to the Nagorno-Karabakh peace settlement and said that Paris was ready to host the next round of negotiations on the issue.

Let me reaffirm my commitment to finding a fair and lasting settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. As I had the opportunity to tell you during our Warsaw meeting on July 9, I am ready to host a meeting in Paris with a view to consolidating the ongoing peace process and discussing measures for the advancement of this extremely lengthy conflict, Hollande said in a letter to his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan sent on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence.

Azerbaijan's Armenians-dominated breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh proclaimed its independence in 1991. After the military conflict ended in 1994, Azerbaijan lost control over the region.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Czech authorities have not provided any information regarding a Russian citizen wanted by Interpol on the Russian Interior Ministrys request, the head of the consular department at the Russian Embassy in the Czech Republic said Wednesday.

Czech media reported Tuesday about the detention of Oleg Vorotnikov, leader of Russias Voina ("War") art collective, during a routine document inspection in Prague on September 18.

"Our information is the same as in the press. We have not received any official information from the Czech authorities. We are expecting it now," Andrei Vasilyev told RIA Novosti.
KIEV (Sputnik)  The Anti-Monopoly Committee (AMC) of Ukraine said last month it drafted a lawsuit to recover 85 billion hryvnia ($3 billion) from Gazprom for allegedly abusing its dominance in the Ukrainian gas transit market. Both the Kiev Economic Court and the Supreme Economic Court sided against Gazprom in their decisions.

"A ruling was issued yesterday [Tuesday, September 20] on the refusal to open proceedings at Supreme Court deliberations of Gazproms appeal," the official said.

In December 2015, AMC chief Yuriy Terentyev said that Ukraines national oil and gas company Naftogaz had suffered an estimated $6 billion in alleged damages as a result of Gazprom's abuse of its monopoly over gas transit in the country. Gazprom called the move a pressure tactic, arguing that it does not conduct any business on Ukrainian territory because it transfers gas to Naftogaz at the Ukrainian-Russian border.
Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit was reminded that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar today summoned Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit in New Delhi following Sunday's cross-border terror attack on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

According to a statement issued by the External Affairs Ministry, Basit was reminded that the Pakistan government "had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India".

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READ: Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?



"The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," the statement said.

"The latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India."

READ: Uri attack: Bangladesh slams Pakistan, says will stand by India



India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist outfit for the early morning attacks.

The statement said that beginning with the cross-border terror attack in January this year, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the Line of Control (LoC) and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

"Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of 31 terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism," it said, adding that Jaishankar also reminded Basit that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing.

READ: Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp



The statement also listed the items recovered from the terrorists, including GPS, with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site; grenades with Pakistani markings; communication matrix sheets; communication equipment; and other stores made in Pakistan, including food, medicines and clothes.

"If the government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," it stated.

"We now expect a response from the government of Pakistan," it added.

Also Read:

Nervous Pakistan braces for 'Indian response'; many flights cancelled, highways shut for fighter jets



Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

Exclusive: Has the Punjab Police learnt no lessons from terror attacks in Uri and Pathankot?

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Days after Uri attack, suspicious bag found near Army unit in Pathankot

Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

10 terrorists gunned down in Uri after Pakistan violates ceasefire again

--- ENDS ---
The European Parliament set up a special panel, known as the TAXE Committee, to look into tax practices within the union. However, plans to extend its powers to look far wider into how much Juncker and Dijsselbloem knew about the tax practices were overruled.

Juncker was finance minister and prime minister of Luxembourg during the time the special tax deals were made. Dijsselbloem has been finance minister in the Netherlands since 2012.

What is a Tax Haven?

The lawmakers even suggest that drawing up a blacklist of tax havens  which is the eventual intention of the Commission's latest publication  depends on what the definition of "tax haven" is and suggest that its interpretation could depend on the Commission itself.

"What is a tax haven? Is it a country: A. That has issues with tax transparency? B. That provides preferential harmful tax breaks? C. That has a very low or non-existent corporate tax rate? D. A mixture of the above?

"You might have some difficulty answering the question, which would be understandable given there is no internationally agreed definition of what a tax haven is. But remember you have the right to call a friend! That friend could well be the European Commission."

In August, the European Commission decided that Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to US$14.6 billion to Apple. This is illegal under EU state aid rules, because it allowed Apple to pay substantially less tax than other businesses. It has ordered Ireland to recover the illegal aid. Both Apple and Ireland are appealing the ruling.

Strong support from MEPs and @GreensEP to Commissioner @vestager during the #AppleTax debate yesterday. pic.twitter.com/t8EAKTjnGP  Greens in the EP (@GreensEP) 15 September 2016

The landmark ruling followed months of investigations into the "sweetheart deals" offered by countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg which offer benign tax regimes that allow companies  particularly multinationals such as Apple, Amazon, Starbucks and Fiat Finance and Trade  to enjoy special tax arrangements to reduce their tax obligations in other countries.
Although the official conditions of the IMF loan have not been publicized, sources speaking to Ukrainian media have revealed that they likely include increasing the pension age by five years, increasing the amount of time required to qualify for pensions, cancellation of old-age pensions, lifting the moratorium on the sale of agricultural land, approval of a list of state-owned enterprises subject to privatization or liquidation, changes in the law on privatization, and a quarterly upward adjustment of tariffs for utilities.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ukraine's population continues to face a severe decline, falling by 110,000 people between January and August to 42.6 million (it was 45.5 million in 2013). Aside from immigration, the decline has been attributed to extremely low birthrates, with only 66 live births being recorded for every 100 deaths.

Speaking to the independent online newspaper Svobodnaya Pressa, Denis Denisov, director of the Ukrainian branch of the CIS Institute, explained that the fall in living standards has already been "felt very strongly" by the population. Unfortunately, he added, "international practice shows that it is possible to reduce" the catastrophically low wages, and $40 monthly pensions, even further.

"This puts the majority of Ukrainians below the poverty line, and automatically entails an increase in the shadow economy, and an increase in negative tendencies in all areas of life, ranging from rising crime rates and ending with the non-repayment of loans," the expert noted.

"Over the last three years, using different methods of calculation, Ukraine's GDP fell between 20 and 60%Imagine it  we will be able to achieve the indicators we had in 1991 in 15 years at best." Ukraine, Denisov lamented, "has definitively slipped into the third world, without any prospect for implementing an independent economic policy which could bring it out of the category of global outsider, at least to the level of 'developing economy'."
UK Not Learning the Lessons of Iraq

The report says that British policy focused too much on military intervention and not enough on addressing the wider political and social issues in the Middle East, echoing the criticism of previous British military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

It also led to discussion about "changing the way we intervene" in foreign conflicts.

Should the UK bomb #ISIS in #Syria without a clear exit plan or post-conflict strategy? RT if you answer  Russ (@RJonesUX) November 27, 2015

"The argument that it must be a local force  not a western one  which takes and holds territory has been borne out by previous experiences of intervention. Such a strategy (western air power and local ground troops) is reliant on political progress alongside military achievement.

"Whilst the progress in the military campaign to counter Daesh is beginning to gain momentum, the same cannot be said for the progress of political reform. A lack of political reform in Iraq, let alone Syria, may well undermine the military progress to date, removing the threat of Daesh only for it to be replaced by other groups posing similar or even greater threats."

Concerns Over Syria Campaign

On the issue of military intervention, the committee launched strong criticism of the UK's current actions in Syria, noting that only 65 British air raids had taken place in the country since December, while 550 strikes has been carried out on Daesh targets in Iraq during the same period of time.

Furthermore, the report found that "only a minority of the 65 UK airstrikes in Syria appear to be in support of opposition forces on the ground"  which was one of the main premises behind December's argument in favor of military action.

US coalition appears to confirm that it was indeed responsible for airstrike which killed 62+ Syrian soldiers in Deir Ezzor.  Louisa Loveluck (@leloveluck) September 17, 2016

These criticism have been compounded by the news that British aircraft recently took part in strikes that accidentally killed 62 Syrian government soldiers, who were reportedly fighting against Daesh at the time.

The report found that the government's inability to provide detailed information about airstrikes, while understandable for security reasons, "may tend to undermine the government's assertion that the bombing campaign in Syria is in support of credible moderate ground forces (apart from the Kurds)."

#Daesh have been able to skirmish for smaller areas as they lose ground in larger cities due to weaker military presence in said small towns  Integrity UK (@integrity_UK) June 20, 2016

On the issue of moderate, anti-Assad allies in Syria, the committee also rubbished the claims of former Prime Minister David Cameron, who in December said that there were 70,000 "moderate" opposition forces in Syria that needed the UK's military help.

With the UK government not releasing their own list of these alleged groups, the committee sourced information from outside organizations and found that "there was not a consensus on the political or religious motivations of those groups," amid claims that many of the so-called "moderate" fighters were in fact, hardline Islamist militant groups.

PM declines to give details over who are the 70,000 "moderate" fighters in Syria that the UK is supporting  norman smith (@BBCNormanS) January 12, 2016

While concern has been raised about the effectiveness of anti-Daesh operations in Syria, the committee was largely impressed with Britain's actions in Iraq, where UK forces have teamed up with local military groups to defeat Daesh in many crucial areas.

"Whilst substantial progress in eliminating Daesh is clearly being achieved in Iraq, the situation in Syria is far more complex. Assuming Daesh is squeezed out of both countries, we have to focus too on what happens next-both in other countries to which Daesh may migrate, and in Syria especially where there is no shortage of other Islamist groups, just as dangerous, which are planning to take control," Dr Julian Lewis, chair of the committee, said in conclusion.
Old Routemaster bus touring London today encouraging American expats to register to vote  against Donald Trump #HeartNews pic.twitter.com/LHotOFjM58  Four Counties News (@Heart4CNews) 21 September 2016

Sputnik spoke to Colin White, a recent Master's graduate from the US, about his decision to protest and "persuade" expats to "stop Trump."

Mr.White said that Trump's rhetoric was the biggest reason for him to join the "Stop Trump Bus" campaign.

The view for the top of the @Avaaz Stop Trump battle bus in London. American music, balloons, flags & chanting @LBC pic.twitter.com/slsTFdQti3  Rachael Venables (@rachaelvenables) 21 September 2016

"His rhetoric of bigotry and xenophobia is not what America is about," Mr. White told Sputnik.

"Hilary will definitely be a better president, especially when she has served as Secretary of State, that kind of experience could really help America's foreign policy."

Stop trump bus outside @ILAS_SAS. Great cause, questionable music pic.twitter.com/OsCOAtbwut  William Tantam (@WilliamTantam) 21 September 2016

Mr. White said expats needed to be aware that they can vote and have the power to "stop Trump" from reaching the White House.

"I believe this bus will help to increase more votes in an election that is very key," Mr. White said.

While some fans took to Twitter, calling the bus "a great cause," the question still remains if this could potentially be seen as an anti-democratic move?

In the traditional game of politics, a candidate wins over an audience by convincing them that his or her policies are worth voting for, not by their supporters telling others who not to vote for.

In this particular case, it's a no-brainer that if you ask people to "stop Trump," you are asking them to vote Hillary instead.

The 8 million Americans abroad almost never vote. This dead easy tool can fix that but only if we make it famous: https://t.co/z4l7lekdub  Avaaz (@Avaaz) 13 September 2016

Avaaz, who were unavailable for comment, on their website claim that the 8 million US citizens living abroad could "defeat Trump" if they voted against him.
Some Austrians were unsure if England was a country or a city, the Dutch thought that English people were "ugly" and Czech Republic have been telling Google that "Englishmen are sailors."

The Germans do not hold the Brits in high-esteem at all, searching on Google, "Why are British people so stupid?"

Lithuanians are confused as to why British people drive on the left, whilst Hungarians can't seem to understand why people in the UK add milk to their tea.

Some Yorkshire tea with milk no sugar (that's me order) in a British mug bc I'm weak and I miss England so much  pic.twitter.com/gcEWZp9LLQ  sheepishly (@linszani) October 30, 2015

But not worry Brits, the feelings of confusion and dislike are reciprocated. British people Googled, "Why do the Germans stare?" and "What is the Spanish lisp all about?"

So its official, the Brits dislike continental Europe and continental Europe dislike the Brits.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday outlined steps needed to take the edge off the global migrant crisis, including tackling it at its root.

"First of all, we must deal with the cause of the refugee and migration problem. We must find political solutions for conflicts that force millions of people to flee their countries of origin," Steinmeier said at the leaders summit on refugees in New York.
KIEV (Sputnik)  The European Parliament is ready to provide Ukraine with necessary assistance to ensure safety during the potential local elections in Ukraine's eastern region of Donbas, the chair of the delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee said Wednesday.

"We are also ready to provide any help, any support, including in cooperation with the OSCE [The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], to ensure that if these elections are held, they will take place in an absolutely safe environment," Andrej Plenkovic said at a meeting of the European Parliament lawmakers with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman.

He added that the European Parliament was also ready to contribute to safety of all the participants of the elections.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russian Minister Sergey Lavrov and UNESCO head Irina Bokova discussed the selection procedure of next UN Secretary-General on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov briefly met with UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, who is one of the candidates for the post of the UN Secretary-General from the Eastern European regional group," the ministerial statement said.

According to the statement, the discussion was devoted to selection procedure of the head of the United Nations.
Following the end of the two-day summit, the New York Times reported that while EU leaders announced plans for deeper cooperation in security, including a European army, they could not come up with any solutions to the other problems facing the EU.

This has led Europeans to experience a "loss of faith in the EU," the newspaper reported.

According to the newspaper, "populist movements and nationalist politicians" are benefiting from this loss of faith, who "promise to protect their jobs, their way of life and their security by closing national borders and rejecting Pan-European solutions."

The outcome of the Bratislava summit was attacked by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who expressed disagreement with the position of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande regarding austerity.

Renzi has criticized the EU's strict rules on fiscal policy, including the insistence that EU countries must have a budget deficit of three percent or less, or face sanctions.

Ahead of a referendum on Italy's constitutional reform Renzi has called for later this year, the Italian Prime Minister wants to increase Italy's 2017 budget deficit, in defiance of EU rules, to spend more money on cutting taxes, increasing pensions and tackling immigration.

Renzi refused to stage a press conference with Merkel and Hollande at the end of the summit, at which Merkel paid tribute to "the spirit of Bratislava," which was "one of cooperation."

"I don't know what Merkel is referring to when she talks about the 'spirit of Bratislava,'" Renzi said.

"If things go on like this, instead of the spirit of Bratislava we'll be talking about the ghost of Europe."
In three bars across the UK and Ireland, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's likeness has been inscribed on urinal facilities.

Some people have even started to call them "Trumpinals." The elections have got even more exciting and somewhat confusing all at the same time, now that these "special urinals" have appeared the scene.

Here are just a few of the "Trumpinals" that have been spotted throughout the country.
In an interview to a Pakistani TV channel, Musharraf said, "Weapons belonging to Pakistan can't be accepted as evidence as US arms used by Taliban doesn't mean that the US is working with them."

By India Today Web Desk: Former Pakistan president and the architect of 1999 Kargil war General Pervez Musharraf has denied his country's involvement in the attack on the army base in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri last week.

In an interview to a Pakistani TV channel, Musharraf said, "Weapons belonging to Pakistan can't be accepted as evidence as US arms used by Taliban doesn't mean that the US is working with them."

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ALSO READ | India shouldn't fear nuclear reprisal on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism: Defence expert Christine Fair

India has accused Pakistan of sheltering terror groups and has moved a global campaign to isolate Islamabad diplomatically.

Musharraf said India is levelling "false allegations" again Pakistan and trying to "weaken the country on all fronts".

ALSO READ | Exclusive: ISI trains LeT, Jaish terrorists, says Pervez Musharraf

The former Pakistani dictator went on to say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is spreading hatred against Pakistan, "which is unjust".

"India has killed over 100 innocent Kashmiris and injured thousands in Kashmir recently and the international community should take strict action against it," he said.

ALSO READ:

Pathankot-like attacks will keep happening, says Pervez Musharraf

--- ENDS ---
About 15,000 people participated in Brussels protests against TAFTA, a proposed Transatlantic Free Trade Area between the EU and the US, also known as the US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

In an interview with Sputnik, Belgian MP Zakia Khattabi who co-chairs the Belgian Green Party "Ecolo," underscored the importance of continuing to put pressure on the EU in order to prod it to stop the negotiations.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the poll, 64 percent of respondents support the candidacy of Bokova, 23 percent are against and 13 percent have not decided so far.

The poll was conducted after media reported that Bulgaria could turn down the candidacy of Bokova in favor of European Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov announced on September 13 that Bokova remained the only candidate from Bulgaria until September 26, when the next round of voting in the UN Security Council takes place.
In the final report, by Sir John Chilcot, into the run-up to the Iraq War, Blair was savaged. He said the decision to go to war was based on flawed intelligence and its legality was unclear.

The military and the civil service both asked for more clarity on whether force would be legal. Blair's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith then advised that the "better view" was that there was, on balance, a secure legal basis for military action without a further Security Council resolution.

Will it be easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for #TonyBlair to earn forgiveness of British/Iraqi people? https://t.co/lyLfr5o7Zq  Olufemi Okeniyi (@femiokes) 20 September 2016

Chilcot concluded: "The precise basis on which Mr Blair made that decision is not clear. Given the gravity of the decision, Lord Goldsmith should have been asked to provide written advice explaining how, in the absence of a majority in the Security Council, Mr Blair could take that decision."

Chilcot's final condemnation of Blair was clear  although he did not name him. "It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged, and they should have been."


MOSCOW (Sputnik)Xenophobia and racism present a major risk to economic growth in Germanys eastern states a quarter of a century after its reunification, a government report released on Wednesday indicated.

"Xenophobia, right-wing extremism and intolerance is a big threat for social, but also economic development of the new states," the Federal Economic Ministrys report stressed.

Iris Gleicke, federal commissioner for the new states who presented the report in Berlin, said that attacks on refugee shelters could taint the region for business.


ROME (Sputnik)Rome withdrew its bid for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the city's mayor Virginia Raggi said on Wednesday, citing vast expenditures on the sport events as the reason.

"We are not against sport or against the Olympics but it is irresponsible to say "yes" to the bid for the Olympics," Raggi who represents the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) said, adding that the 2024 Games required amount of spending Rome could not afford.

According to Raggi, the city is still paying off debts incurred by the 1960 Olympic Games.
Dominant Pro-Leave Bias

"The research reveals a picture of highly polarized press coverage, reliant on a narrow range of voices," Dr. David Levy, Director of the Reuters Institute and one of the report's authors said, "where coverage was relatively more focused on the contest itself and personalities than any of the complex issues at stake."

In spite of some notable exceptions, Dr. Levy said:

"The press was generally better at reinforcing the views of decided voters than in giving undecided voters, seeking broad facts and high quality information, the evidence to make up their own minds."

Most UK papers belong to just 3 groups owned by #Euroskeptics hence the result  Richard Corbett MEP #EURefMedia pic.twitter.com/TihF0MRPgj  Nikolai Gorshkov (@NikolaiGorshkov) September 20, 2016

Six out of the nine newspapers examined by the report followed the pro-Leave line, with the strongest positions in the Daily Express, followed by the Daily Mail and the Sun. This didn't come as a surprise to Richard Corbett, a Labour MEP who remarked that most British papers are controlled by just three groups whose owners are known for their euroskeptic views.

"Millions of people every day read anti-European propaganda over their breakfast table. Unfortunately we've seen at this event how much of the British media just parrots that line," Mr. Corbett told Sputnik.

An academic working on media research suggested at the presentation that journalists working for some of the tabloids and Leave press felt pressurized to twist their own news stories towards the Leave campaign.

The report didn't assess the quality or accuracy of the press coverage due to limited resources. But Mr. Corbett MEP would have liked to see a more factually accurate campaign.

"Even the BBC, constrained by its 50/50 rule, was giving equal time to both sides but not really questioning the facts on either side, assuming each side would do that."

Asked about the European reaction to the British press coverage of the referendum issues, Mr. Corbett told Sputnik:

"There is shock at the nature of the campaign, the lies that were told. There are a lot of things that leave our friends in Europe perplexed."

Indeed, a representative of the European Commission in the UK made an angry remark at the report's presentation about British journalists habitually "mixing news, opinion and lies in one piece." Will there ever be a reasoned discussion in the British media, he asked.

Differences in Tone

The economy was the most cited referendum issue covered by all newspapers, followed by sovereignty and migration with the latter two skewed heavily to pro-Leave articles.

The report finds marked differences in tone between the Leave and Remain arguments in the press.
Speaking to Sputnik Deutschland, Wimmer, a veteran member of the Christian Democratic Union with over thirty years of experience in the Bundestag under his belt, explained that if it found the political will, the German government could force the US to vacate the base at Ramstein within a two year period.

The politician and former State Secretary of the German Defense Ministry emphasized that instead of continuing to serve as a key logistics point for the coordination of US drone attacks in Africa and the Middle East, the base should be shuttered, with the space used to build housing and industry. All that is necessary is the political will.

A close friend of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who presided over the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, Wimmer emphasized that the legal basis for the continued US military presence in country ran out right about the time that the Berlin Wall came down.
The Paris city authorities have expropriated the property of the Assad family to build social housing, Sputnik France reported on Tuesday.

The house belongs to Rifaat Assad, the uncle of President Bashar and brother of the late Hafez Assad, who was Syrian President from 1971-2000.

It is located in the 16th arrondissement (administrative district) of Paris, on a 780 square meter plot of land, which has an estimated value of 90 million euros ($100 million).
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the survey, the ratio of opponents to migration dropped from 56 to 47 percent in September 2015 after media circulated the image of the 3-year-old Syrian boy's body lying face down in the sand after the shipwreck, however anti-migration sentiments grew stronger again later in the year.

The poll showed, that almost eight respondents out of ten support the government's plan to dismantle the Calais camp sheltering undocumented migrants and refugees.

The camp, also known as "The Jungle" is notorious for its squalid conditions, the numerous attempts of its inhabitants to break into the Channel Tunnel in a desperate bid to reach the United Kingdom and multiple police raids.
The Moria refugee camp had problems before the blaze, including issues of scarcity, squalor and overcrowding. Fred Morlet, director of volunteer coordination at the camp told DW that Moria was "the worst refugee camp in the world."

 LifeguardHellas team (@lifeguardhellas) September 19, 2016

The Holland-based Live for Lives foundation makes 1,500 meals a day for refugees, but founder Ramona Brongers told the German news agency that this often isnt enough. "We are helping as much as we can, but the problems are huge and larger organizations won't take responsibility," she said.

According to Brussels-based European Commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud, there would be very few transfers from Lesbos to the Greek mainland. She said "To avoid secondary movement to the rest of Europe, that means keeping asylum seekers on the islands for the most part.

The refugees are bound by a deal struck in March between Turkey and the European Union, dictating that migrants can only have their asylum documents processed if they stay on one of five Aegean islands. The agreement was a response to more than a million African, Asian and Middle Eastern refugees that have flooded EU member states since 2015.

"They don't know when their asylum claims will be processed. Some people feel they don't have enough information," said Roland Schoenbauer, a spokesman in Greece for the UNHCR, the UNs refugee agency, said that people are "sick of waiting" in the camps.
By Manjeet Negi: Under immense pressure to inflict 'an eye for an eye' like response to Pakistan in the wake of the dastardly terror attack on Uri Army base, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a series of high-level meetings throughout the day today.

On Tuesday, the PM was till late in the night at military operations directorate of the Army in south block chalking out plans of action.

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Today also, he held two CCS meetings in the war room with top ministers and Army chief to discuss the situation.

WAR ROOM DISCUSSION

The "war room", or the "military operations directorate", is an isolated and super secret office in the defence ministry from where the army monitors all security-related movement.

The PM met his top Cabinet colleagues as well as the military leadership to chalk out country's move in response to Sunday's Uri attack in which 18 jawans were martyred.

According to sources, the briefing to the Prime Minister was done through the help of maps, a power-point presentation and sand models.

Something might have gone wrong in Uri, I'll ensure it doesn't go wrong again: Parrikar

The meetings came even as India summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and handed over him ample evidence of Islamabad's role in Uri attack as well as in the Pathankot air base strike.

In a statement, the foreign ministry has said, "This year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India. Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC".

Uri attack: Parrikar seeks report from Army on how terrorists managed to infiltrate camp



Uri attack: India to respond at multiple levels, but will the stand be aggressive?

DEFIANT PAKISTAN

While India sought to garner the international community's support to stifle and isolate Pakistan, the nuclear power neighbour remained defiant.

Despite blunt warnings from the US to shut down its terror shop, Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif is expected to raise the jaded Kashmir issue as he speaks at the UNGA later today.

TOP US LAWMAKERS WANT PAKISTAN LABELLED TERROR STATE

A bipartisan group of two powerful American lawmakers has introduced an act in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a State Sponsor of terrorism.

"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is Ranking member of this influential Congressional Committee on terrorism.

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READ: Uri attack: Bangladesh slams Pakistan, says will stand by India

Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

Exclusive: Has the Punjab Police learnt no lessons from terror attacks in Uri and Pathankot?

Days after Uri attack, suspicious bag found near Army unit in Pathankot

Uri attack: Pakistan can't go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation

10 terrorists gunned down in Uri after Pakistan violates ceasefire again

--- ENDS ---
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Venezuela has demonstrated its opposition at the United Nations General Assembly against the ouster of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in what it has condemned as a destabilizing "coup", Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations Rafael Ramirez told Sputnik.

"We believe that Senator [Michel] Temer is an illegitimate president and for that reason this morning we withdrew from the Hall of the General Assembly because we, along with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, want to raise our concern about this situation in Brazil," Ramirez said Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

During the Tuesday morning speech by new Brazilian President Michel Temer, the Venezuelan delegation to the UN staged a walk-out to protest the ouster of Rousseff.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Canada has already increased its assistance to Iraqi and Kurdish security forces ahead of the pending battle to recapture Mosul from Daesh, but it will not reengage in airstrikes, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters.

"Canada actually has increased its engagement as training and special forces members on the ground in Northern Iraq," Trudeau said on Tuesday in response to a question whether his country would increase military support to Iraqi forces ahead of the battle to retake Mosul.

Asked if Canada would again participate in airstrikes against Daesh as it did before Trudeau took office in 2016, the prime minister firmly stated "No."
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Russia and members of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) may narrow the gap over a number of regional issues and jointly improve the situation in the Middle East, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday.

"We think that we can reconcile our positions over a number of issues and jointly improve the situation in the region, which has suffered from instability enough," Lavrov said at a meeting with the foreign ministers of the GCC members on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

According to Lavrov, Moscow is interested in deepening of the political and economic cooperation with the Gulf States.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Venezuela will affirm its support for President Bashar Assad's government in Damascus and oppose the ongoing foreign military intervention in Syria during a United Nations Security Council debate on Wednesday, Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations Rafael Ramirez told Sputnik.

"We are going to have a debate tomorrow we are going to expose our position, first of all, supporting the legitimate government of Syria, President Bashar al-Assad. Secondly, asking to avoid foreign intervention in the conflict," Ramirez said on Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

The UN Security Council will convene on Wednesday with the conflict in Syria and faltering ceasefire on the top of the agenda.
ALEPPO (Sputnik)  Islamic State (Daesh) militants have executed three residents of Syria's Raqqa, which is a terrorists' stronghold in the war torn country, a spokesperson for the local militia forces said.

"Today, Daesh terrorists crucified three Raqqa residents," the spokesperson told RIA Novosti.

According to the spokesperson, these people were accused of helping local residents to flee Raqqa and go to the northern part of the Raqqa province, which is not under Daesh control.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Syrian Arab Air Force could not have been involved in a recent attack on a humanitarian aid convoy in the vicinity of the Syrian city of Aleppo as it cannot carry out operations after daylight hours, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday.

On Monday, the UN officials said that an aid convoy was hit near Aleppo and there were casualties. Several western officials, including the ones from the White House, have blamed the attack on Russia and Syria. The Russian authorities have refuted the allegations.

"Our military have already made statements that our aircraft did not operate here. The Syrian aircraft could not have operated [there], because the attack against the convoy was conducted in the night time and the Syrian Air Force does not perform flights in this time, it has no such capabilities. The attack took place after humanitarian cargo had already been offloaded in eastern Aleppo," Lavrov said as broadcast on the Rossiya-1 television channel.
According to him, the chances for a lasting truce mainly depend on the Syrian army's success "on the ground", and on whether the participants of the internal conflict are ready for a political dialogue.

Sotnikov said that he is "quite optimistic" about the restart of this process, which he suggested may take place following the swearing-in of the next US President.

"Importantly, Moscow is doing its best to re-launch the peace process and as I understand it, our American partners want the same. So chances remain but much will depend on the situation in Syria," he said.

He praised the political will of Damascus, which is highly interested in the normalization of the situation in the country, something that is regrettably not the case with the Syrian opposition groups, which are still at odds over several key issues.

"The truce process is of paramount importance to the government of Bashar Assad, while the so-called moderate opposition groups remain at loggerheads over the matter," according to Sotnikov.

"As for the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian High Negotiating Committee, they should make more efforts to add to the ceasefire process. They have their own stance on the matter, namely, they still oppose Assad's government and pursue their own interests," he said, adding that these groups are supported by influential international players.

"In addition to the attempts made by Moscow and Washington, much will depend on how actively local actors will add to the peace process," he added.

On September 17, two F-16 fighter jets and two A-10 ground attack aircraft launched airstrikes against Damascus-led forces besieged by Daesh in a strategically important city of Deir ez-Zor, leaving at least 62 Syrian servicemen killed and more than 100 wounded.

The incident marked the first time that the US-led coalition has directly attacked the country's government. Washington insists that the attack was unintentional and that it was carried out by mistake.
ANKARA (Sputnik)  Turkey does not plan to use own infantry in the Euphrates Shield operation in Syria, Turkish National Defense Minister Fikri Isik said Wednesday.

"We don't plan to use our own infantry in Euphrates Shield op., FSA [Free Syrian Army] boots will be on the ground," Isik said as quoted by the CNN Turk broadcaster.

Turkey will keep providing assistance to the opposition FSA, he added.
Kevork Almassian, an analyst specializing in Middle East affairs told Radio Sputnik that the ceasefire agreement with the Syrian government has faced opposition from inside the US administration since the beginning, which has enabled attacks on Syrian forces by rebel groups, and the latest attack by the US-led coalition.

"If we check the date of the (beginning of the) ceasefire, there were more than 300 violations of the ceasefire by the opposition forces. That gives us the impression that the US is either unwilling to impose a ceasefire, or is unable to impose it on its proxies in Syria."

"These people, including al-Qaeda, al-Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army, Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic Army, all these armed groups are funding and supported directly by the closest allies of the US. So either the US is not able to practice pressure on Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, or the US is unwilling to practice it."

Almassian said that recent attacks in Syria demonstrate a lack of political will in Washington for a ceasefire, and splits in the US administration on the matter.

"After the latest attack in Deir-Ez-Zor and also the recent developments in Aleppo, by attacking the humanitarian convoy, it becomes clear that there are parties who are able to damage this ceasefire, and these people are within the American administration itself. These are people who support Hillary Clinton and they are not interested in a peaceful solution now," Almassian said.

While Us Secretary of State John Kerry wants to end Barack Obama's presidency with a peace deal in Syria, the White House is being thwarted by the US defense department and its allies in the region, who "want to prolong this war in Syria until Hillary Clinton comes to power."

"One of the preconditions (for a ceasefire) is that the American administration should be united behind this ceasefire, not that the Pentagon is against and the White House is with the ceasefire. So obviously, there is no consensus within the American administration itself."
The Syrian army and its allies continue to maintain control along the eastern border of Latakia province, keeping their forces out of reach of the militants heavy artillery.

Sputnik news agency was able to capture on video the numerous violations of the ceasefire agreement perpetrated by militant groups which sporadically fired mines and rockets at Syrian army positions long before the truce was officially declared over. These shellings took place in the vicinity of the town of Kabani located in the Latakia province.
As per the Intelligence reports, the terrorists are waiting at an area which is 200 kms from international border from Kathua to Akhnoor sector in Jammu.

By Ashwini Kumar: Following the recent attacks at Kashmir's Uri sector, a red alert has been sounded in Jammu. As per the Intelligence reports, at least 40-50 terrorists are near the launching pads in areas close to Jammu.

As per the Intelligence reports, the terrorists are waiting at an area which is 200 kms from international border from Kathua to Akhnoor sector in Jammu.

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At least 10 terrorists were gunned down by Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir's Lachhipora area in Uri sector yesterday, days after an attack on an Indian Army camp killed 18 soldiers and injured 19 others.



PARRIKAR SEEKS REPORT FROM ARMY



Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has asked for a detailed report from the Army on how the terrorists successfully entered the high security Battalion Headquarters without being spotted. The Defence Minister, hinting at intelligence alerts about a possible attack, today said, "Something might have gone wrong at Uri".

According to sources, Parrikar is concerned about how the militants gained entry to the base completely unchallenged despite timely intelligence inputs on attempts to target military installations.

Also read:

Something might have gone wrong in Uri, I'll ensure it doesn't go wrong again: Parrikar

Uri attack: India summons Abdul Basit, offers evidence of involvement of Pak-based terrorists

Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar among 3 Pakistanis India believes are behind the Uri attack

BRICS ministers condemn Uri attack, call for speeding up global pact against terrorism



New Delhi and Islamabad are locked in a bitter diplomatic war of words following the Uri terror attack, which India has blamed on militants from Pakistan.

PAKISTAN DENIES ALLEGATIONS



Pakistan has denied the allegations even as India claimed to have clinching evidence to support its claims.

The Indian Army has claimed to have recovered arms, ammunition and food and medicine packets with Pakistani markings during the combing operations at the military base in Uri.

--- ENDS ---
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Tehran and Ankara may play a leading role in the fight against terrorism in the region, especially in Syria and Iraq, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said.

"Terrorism endangers both world and region," Rouhani said, as quoted by the IRNA news agency on Wednesday, adding that Tehran "will always stand by its friendly and brotherly country of Turkey."

According to the agency, the Iranian president spoke with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the 71st UN General Assembly in New York.
"This is all part of the US double standards policy. The Americans are well-aware of the fact that the Iranian nuclear program always was and still is peaceful in nature and poses no threat to any nation or country. The US also knows that Iran opposes nuclear weapons, and not just for moral or humanitarian reasons, but first and foremost due to its religious beliefs. Iran rejects weapons of mass destruction of any kind," Zanganeh said.

On the other hand, he argued, Israel, which enjoys absolute US support, constantly threatens other countries in the region, provoking military conflicts and instigating wars against Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

"By threatening us, Israel shows the world the nature of its regime  a policy of terror and threats against the other nations in the region, backed by the ownership of powerful nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, other countries in the region are concerned about this issue," Zanganeh explained.

He also added that while international law condemns any regime that resorts to threats and attempts to build up its nuclear arsenal, in reality this isnt always the case.

"No country in the region can consider this situation satisfactory. In any case, granting absolute support to Israel  in terms of ideological solidarity with its policy of terror and threats, by providing financial assistance and weapons technology, and aiding in specific activity  makes the United States an accomplice. Therefore, the US must also bear full responsibility for the situation at hand," Zanganeh concluded.
In this vein, he mentioned Saudi Arabia initiating a meeting on Syria's political future within the framework of the UN General Assembly session in New York earlier this month.

The gathering was attended by officials from Turkey, Britain, Germany, the United States, France, Qatar as well as representatives of the Syrian opposition.

"Naturally, Syria's future begins with the ouster of Bashar Assad and his entourage. Nothing new forays," Khrolenko sarcastically noted, referring to the meeting.

According to him, the intensity and nature of the fighting in Syria depend on many factors. Thus, he wrote, Turkey's entry into the Syrian war significantly changed the balance of forces in the Aleppo-Raqqa-Mosul triangle, which allegedly helps implement global projects.

"It seems that a new division of spheres of influence is on the cards, and a diplomatic solution [to the Syrian crisis] is becoming more and more unlikely," Khrolenko pointed out.

He referred to a recent working visit to Ankara by Russian Military Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, who is seen by many in the West as the leading theoretician of a hybrid war. The visit further prompted speculations on a geopolitical scenario in light of Syria's future, Khrolenko wrote.

"It's irrelevant to hope the American side [will adopt a] reasonable stance, so the deterioration of Russian-US ties in the future is inevitable. Turkey is not interested in the endless war on its borders, which is why Ankara may prove more realistic and useful. Turkey and Russia are really interested in the joint struggle against a common threat, "according to him.

In this regard, the September 17 air strike on Syrian forces may be described as a reconnaissance by fire against Russia, which has to develop a new military and political line on Syria, Khrolenko noted, adding that he does not rule out that more such "hard lessons" may occur in the future.

He also quoted the Turkish newspaper Milli Gazete as claiming that the death toll from the air strike allegedly included at least three Russian intelligence officers, who interrogated captured members of the Daesh terrorist group Daesh at a reconnaissance point.

It was revealed during the interrogations that Daesh terrorists were collaborating with Washington, which is why the reconnaissance point was bombed out.
BAGHDAD (Sputnik)  The Iraqi parliament has passed a motion of no confidence against Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who is suspected of corruption, one of the lawmakers told Sputnik on Wednesday.

"Parliament voted in favor of no-confidence toward Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari," the lawmaker from The State of Law Coalition, Rahab al-Ubudah, said, adding that 158 out of 328 Iraqi lawmakers voted in favor of sacking the minister.

Zebari, of Kurdish origin, took the finance minister office in 2014. He has also been the Iraqi deputy prime minister since 2014.
Yazidi activist Abu Shujaa Denai has devoted himself to freeing Yazidis held prisoner by the Daesh terrorist group , since they abducted thousands in August 2014 at the town of Sinjar, in north-west Iraq.

On September 20 Sputnik Arabic filmed Abu Shujaa and Um Ali, who had been kept as a slave by the terror group, and her emotional reunion with her family in the region of Sinjar.

Um Ali was abducted by Daesh after its capture of Sinjar. The terrorists forced her to work as a sex slave, and cook and clean for them.
Fish is also on the menu as Russia will export salmon, while Iran will offer rainbow trout in return.

Additionally, Russia has called upon the reconsideration of lifting the ban on Russian imports of wheat to Iran, which adversely affects the growth of mutual trade turnover of agricultural products and foodstuffs. The ban has been is in force since March 2016.
'Predator' drone had taken off from Incirlik air base in Turkey and left Urum al-Kubra area half an hour after the incident with UN humanitarian convoy, Konashenkov added.

According to Konashenkov, "the aircraft was by identified by Russia's air surveillance system as a Predator-type UAV."
Satanovsky recalled that until Saturday's attack, the Syrian Army was living up to its side of the Russia and US-sponsored ceasefire agreement, withdrawing heavy weapons from their positions in Aleppo.

Blasting the US for its cynicism, the expert emphasized the obvious: that Moscow and Washington could not have reached an agreement on a ceasefire in Syria if it included a clause that the US would be allowed to attack Syrian government forces with impunity. Through Saturday's incident, "they immediately, defiantly and blatantly violated the agreement. This demonstration could not have been an accident."

Accordingly, the expert noted, the attack is likely a product of the long-running conflict between the US military and diplomatic establishment on Syria  an effort by the Pentagon to 'show the State Department who's boss'. "Such an attack could not take place without tacit approval from the White House," Satanovsky added.

This is far from the first time that the US has showed contradictions in its priorities for Syria, simultaneously supporting 'moderate rebels' and the Syrian Kurdish forces fighting them in the country's north.

Ultimately, Satanovsky suggested that he is now fully convinced that the sole purpose of the ceasefire agreement was to give the terrorists, particularly those in Aleppo and Idlib, a chance to regroup and resupply.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier in the day that a US Predator drone operated near Urum al-Kubra area north of Aleppo at the time of a recent deadly attack on a UN aid convoy.

"The US-led coalition was not flying in the area around Aleppo, Syria where the humanitarian convoy was struck, Rankine-Galloway stated.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)The Doctors Without Borders (Medicines Sans Frontiers, or MSF) international humanitarian group called on the Jordanian authorities to gain access to about 75,000 Syrian refugees, who have become trapped in an isolated desert area between Syria and Jordan known as "the Berm."

"In light of the current desperate situation in the Berm, MSF calls on the Government of Jordan to remove restrictions on humanitarian aid and to allow its medical team to have access to the Berm, so that they can directly assess the medical needs of Syrians stranded there," the humanitarian organization said in a statement.

According to MSF, the Berm residents have only received limited water distributions and food assistance but did not receive medical care since June at all. The Jordanian authorities gave limited access for some aid groups, excluding medical services.
The NCPCR in a letter to the CBSE has urged that children of Uri's martyrs be exempted from appearing in the exams.

By Atir Khan: The National Commission of Protection of Child Rights has written to the CBSE to exempt children of Uri's martyred soldiers from appearing in the examinations. It has also recommended that children of deceased soldiers should be notified under economically weaker section.

Taking cognisance of media reports of rare grit and composure, three daughters of martyred soldier SK Vidyarthi appeared for their school exams to keep commitment they had made to their father that they would do good in studies, NCPCR has written a letter to CBSE.

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Also read: Was my husband a drunkard who died in a drain? Uri martyr's wife refuses Rs 5 lakh by Bihar govt

The three daughters - Aarti, a student of Class 8; Anshu, of standard 6th and Anshika, of standard 2 student appeared in school examination of DAV Public School, Rotary campus medical unit, Gaya.



APPEARED IN EXAMS



According to the principal of their school AK Jana, the three girls took the exam even while tears kept rolling down from their eyes over loss of their father at Uri in Kashmir on Sunday.

Their father Late SK Vidyarthi of Bihar Regiment hailed from Buknari village of Gaya district and is survived by wife, three daughters and a two-year-old son.

The NCPCR has written to CBSE saying it endorses the school's request and recommends the CBSE to exempt the children from appearing in ongoing exams. In addition, it has also recommended that the CBSE may issue a circular exempting children of other martyred soldiers who are studying in schools from the ongoing exams.

Also read: Uri terror attack: A blind father's second son martyred

Right to Education Act, 2009



The recommendations also say Right to Education Act, 2009 makes education a fundamental right of every child between the age of 6 and 14 years and entrusts the government with the responsibility to pay any kind of expenses which may prevent the child from pursuing and completing elementary education.

As per Section 12 of the RTE Act, 2009, the private unaided schools have to admit at least 25 per cent of children belonging to socially disadvantaged groups or weaker sections at the entry level. However, certain incidents have come to the notice of the Commission wherein the children face problem in continuing their studies in case of death of the earning member of the family. This is significant but often overlooked reason for drop out of children from schools.

Also read: Man claiming to be RJD leader insults Uri attack martyrs, booked for treason

Hence, to prevent the children from discontinuing their studies due to financial crisis, it is recommended that children of such families who lost their earning member, studying in private schools should be notified under EWS category as per Section 2(d) and 2E of RTE Act, 2009. The provision should also be extended to children of deceased soldiers of defence forces.

Section 29(d) states that a child belonging to disadvantaged group means a child belonging to such other group having disadvantage owing to social, cultural, economic, geographical, linguistic, gender or any such factor may be specified by the government by notification. Also Section 2(e) of the said Act defines 'child belonging to weaker section as a child belonging to such parent or guardian whose annual income is lower than the minimum limit specified by the government, by notification.

--- ENDS ---

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UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday asked Iran for help in getting peace process back on track in Syria and Yemen, at a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in New York.

"The Secretary-General stressed the need to find a political solution to the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and sought Irans support in facilitating the resumption of peace talks for both countries," the UN statement read.

Ban said Tehran had to use its influence on the Syrian government and the opposition forces in Yemen and encourage them to engage in talks with rival forces in their respective countries "in a spirit of pragmatism and compromise."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed in a phone call on Wednesday issues of bilateral cooperation and the situation in Syria, the Kremlin said.

"The leaders discussed urgent issues on the bilateral cooperation agenda as well as the progress in Syrian peace process," the Kremlin's press service said in a statement.

According to the statement, Erdogan congratulated Putin on the success of the recent parliamentary elections in Russia where the ruling United Russia party won an overwhelming majority of seats in the lower house, the State Duma.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  UN Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that he would not speculate on who was to blame for the deadly attack on UN aid convoy in Syria, citing the lack of concrete facts.

Casting the blame on anyone without sufficient proof would be a violation of international law, Stoltenberg said following his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

NATO chief stressed the importance of a thorough investigation of the incident.
NEW YORK (Sputnik)  Plans by the United States and Russia to share information on terrorist targets in Syria does not raise concerns but instead reveals a shared interest in defeating extremism, UK Minister for Africa and the Middle East Tobias Ellwood told Sputnik.

The bigger picture is that we have a process in place to share intelligence to make sure that we can defeat extremism in Syria, and that is what we are all focused on, Ellwood said Wednesday at a counterterrorism event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Ellwood, who is also a legislator in the UK House of Commons, stated that he is not concerned that the United States, a key ally of his government, would be sharing intelligence with Russia.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  The meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation scheduled on Thursday in New York aims to unite its members on the issues of Syria, Iraq and the Palestinians, OIC Secretary-General Iyad bin Amin Madani told Sputnik on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

"We have issues that are of concern to us, of course, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, between me and [US Secretary of State John] Kerry and in general, so we try to push forward those issues so that they receive the attention of the General Assembly," Madani said on Wednesday.

Madani noted that he expects the OIC member states to achieve a more coordinated stand on the issues of concern during the meeting.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Joint military exercises between Russia and India, the Indra-2016 , will take place from September 23 to October 2 in the Primorsky Territory, the Russian Eastern Military Districts Black Sea Fleet spokesman said Wednesday.

"The main intent of the exercises is to create combined forces of the Eastern Military District and the Indian Armed Forces units to conduct operations to detect, block and eliminate simulated terrorist and illegal armed groups with the use of aviation and artillery units," Capt. 2nd Rank Vladimir Matveev said.

Up to 500 Russian and Indian troops, 50 pieces of weapons and hardware, a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as the districts attack and army aviation will take part in the drills, he added.
KOSA BILYAUS (Crimea) (Sputnik)  Malakhit design bureau Director Vladimir Dorofeyev told Sputnik at the Army-2016 military forum earlier this month its scientists have developed a concept design for the platform that would enable the use of unmanned underwater vehicles.

"There is interest. Several research institutes of the Ministry of Defense gave positive feedback about the project," the bureaus deputy director, Andrei Kurnosov, told RIA Novosti.

Dorofeyev said on September 6 the platforms wide-ranging tasks dictate its development on nuclear and air-independent propulsion. He explained that the need for the concept arises from the underwater drones low levels of energy autonomy.
According to Tomas Ries, senior lecturer in strategy and security policy at the National Defense College in Stockholm, it is a new Russian tactic to flex its muscles this way.

"The Finnish authorities said off the record that the Russians have become increasingly brazen. They are not so shy anymore, want to prove that they are strong and dangerous, and they want us to respect them," Ries told SVT.

Last week, Sweden's Armed Forces said that foreign spies had been present at an international military exercise in the south of Sweden in August, to "gather intelligence and information."

According to military reports, Swedish soldiers were approached by unidentified individuals even during the recent exercise on Gotland, the Baltic Sea island where Sweden last week decided to permanently station 150 military troops in an attempt to ward off Russian "aggression."

"People in foreign-registered cars approached soldiers and asked different kinds of questions about the operations," lieutenant-colonel Hans Hakansson told the Swedish national broadcaster SVT.
The Russian Defense Ministry officials are considering outfitting the nations fleet of military vehicles with a new type of bullet-proof tires recently developed by the Scientific & Technical Center Kama, which may drastically improve a vehicles chances of survival during combat engagement.

The NU402 tire is fitted with special armored filling which is applied directly to a wheels rim. According to the Russian newspaper Izvestia, this enhancement allows a military vehicle to keep moving if its tires are completely deflated or even on fire.

"The NU402 will be used to outfit the Kornet-E mobile anti-tank missile systems mounted on the Tigr armored vehicle chassis. The factory tests of the new tires resistance to bullets and shrapnel have been successfully finished. The tires will be installed on Kornet-EM vehicle(s) which will then be used during the subsequent army trials," a source in the Defense Ministry told the newspaper.
"You find things early, you fix them, you make the airplane better, you make the weapons system better, and you move on."

As Breaking Defense points out, however, there are far more than just 15 F-35s affected by the insulation problem. Another 42 planes still on the production line will also need to undergo costly repairs.

"The problems with the insulation on the cooling lines inside the planes were caused by a secondary supplier," Colin Clark writes for Breaking Defense.

"They were discovered during depot modification of an F-35A and effect a total of 57 aircraft."

Earlier this week, the Air Force announced that it would also cost millions to upgrade the militarys supply chain for future repairs of the disaster-prone aircraft.
Launching a scathing attack on Pakistan, Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told India Today that Bangladesh will stand by India on Uri terror attack and will never allow Pakistan to use its soil against India. In pics: Martyrs of the Uri attack

Eighteen soldiers were killed and as many others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Kashmir's Uri town early Sunday.

By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: India's effort to isolate Pakistan got a shot in the arm yesterday after Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal stood behind India in its hour of loss following the Uri terror attack.

In pics: Martyrs of the Uri attack



Launching a scathing attack on Pakistan, Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told India Today, "We are against terror, against terrorist country and against any country that supports terror. We will never allow Pakistan to use Bangladeshi soil against India.

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ALSO READ | Uri attack: Pakistan cant go unpunished, PM Modi has approved effective retaliation



In one of the deadliest attacks on the Indian Army in recent years, 18 soldiers were killed and as many others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Kashmir's Uri town early Sunday.

Khan made it clear that Bangladesh will stand by India on Uri terror attack. "Bangladesh will stand by India on Uri attack," he said.

"India has been a friend since liberation of country in 1971," the minister added.



Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said India has been a friend since liberation of country in 1971. (Photo courtesy: www.risingbd.com)

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has also said that Bangladesh firmly stands beside India at this difficult hour.

ALSO READ | India shouldnt fear nuclear reprisal over Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, says defence expert Christine Fair



Bangladeshi capital Dhaka too fell victim to a deadly terror attack a few months back, and the memories of it are still fresh in our minds. On July 1, several foreign nationals and Bangladeshi citizens were killed when Islamic State militants opened fire at the popular Holey Artisan Bakery in Gulshan neighbourhood of Dhaka.



According to reports, India, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh are likely to boycott the upcoming SAARC summit to be held in November in Pakistan.



ALSO READ | Uri attack: India to declare Pakistan state sponsor of terror, may launch punitive strikes



Russia, America, Afghanistan and Bangladesh rallied behind India on Uri terror attack. On the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly, US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to prevent terrorists from using Pakistani territory as safe havens, as he expressed strong concern over the violence in Kashmir particularly the terror attack on an Indian army base.

Without naming Pakistan, US President Barack Obama on Tuesday asked nations engaged in 'proxy wars' to end them, warning that if communities are not allowed to co-exist, the "embers of extremism will continue to burn" causing sufferings to countless human beings and export of extremism overseas.

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ALSO READ:

A slap on the wrist from US: Kerry says Pakistan must stop giving safe haven to terrorists





--- ENDS ---
UNITED NATINS (Sputnik)  It is too early to assign blame for the airstrike on an aid convoy in the Syrian city of Aleppo as the facts are yet to be established, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told Sputnik.

"It was a shocking incident," Bishop said in a brief interview on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York on Tuesday. "It's terrible and the facts are yet to be determined."

Mondays attack forced the United Nations to halt aid deliveries across Syria following the attack that killed at least one aid worker and up to 20 civilians.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  A high level visit to Russia is on Australias agenda but is unlikely to take place this year, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told Sputnik.

"I was in Russia a couple of years ago," Bishop said in a brief interview on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. "I hope to come back at some time."

Asked if the visit could take place later this year, Bishop replied, that such a trip was unlikely.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will meet on Wednesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Nations, Rafael Ramirez told Sputnik Tuesday.

"Tomorrow, the meeting will be between the foreign ministers," Ramirez said.

Relations between Caracas and Moscow are "very strong," Ramirez noted, explaining that Russia and Venezuela have many shared geopolitical interests.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Irelands Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Charlie Flanagan told Sputnik that he would welcome a chance to hold a bilateral meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York if an opportunity arises.

"I havent had an opportunity," Flanagan said when asked whether he has any bilateral meeting planned with his Russian counterpart. "I think if the opportunity presents itself, I would be very happy to engage with him. I think its important that Russian-Irish relations continue to be constructive and positive. In terms of the geographic distance we on the face of it perhaps dont have too much in common. But I would certainly welcome the opportunity of engagement should it arise."

On September 13, the 71th session of the UN General Assembly kicked off under the presidency of Peter Thomson, the permanent representative of Fiji.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)According to a representative of the Ukrainian leader's administration, Poroshenko extended invitations to meet with US presidential nominees Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, but received no response from Trump's campaign.

According to Trumps official schedule he has already left New York City, and will spend the week carrying out rallies in Ohio and Pennsylvania until the end of the UN meeting on September 26.

The president of Ukraine met with former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, on Monday. According to the Ukrainian presidents press release, he thanked Clinton for her support of Ukraine. The leaders also discussed the situation in Donbas and the effectiveness of sanctions imposed against Russia.
In this situation, it's only logical to ask what kinds of changes a Gabriel chancellery might mean, particularly as far as relations with Russia are concerned.

Noting that an SPD-led government might make cosmetic changes to the country's economic policy, as well as corrections to a traditionally liberal migration policy, the journalist recalled that Gabriel has been at the forefront of SPD politicians calling for a review of the current policy for accepting and settling migrants; he has criticized Chancellor Merkel and her party for overestimating the country's resources, and called for a limit to the number of migrants which the country can take in.

As far as European policy is concerned, Narkevsky explained that "for all his criticism of the state of affairs in the Eurozone, Gabriel understands that the European Union project is beneficial primarily to Germany, and that every effort must therefore be made to preserve and strengthen it. This is why the vice chancellor has demonstrated his commitment to protecting the Union from another Brexit," including by his support for measures to force the UK to give up preferential economic relations with the bloc.

As for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States, Gabriel, in his official capacity as German minister of economy and energy, has played an important role in standing up for German interests, perhaps signified most bluntly by his statement last month that the negotiations "have de facto failed."

At the same time, however, Narkevsky also recalled that Gabriel has been not just supportive, but instrumental in convincing fellow SPD politicians to support the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada, in spite of the fact that it poses economic and ecological threats very similar to the TTIP.

"This kind of duality demonstrates that the vice chancellor's anti-American rhetoric may have two reasons, including a) an attempt to counter US pressure, and to carve out certain benefits for Europe under the TTIP, and b) using the situation for a possible future political campaign." In any case, Gabriel refuses to reject future negotiations on the agreement.
At a July meeting of the NATO-Russia Council Moscow came up with the plan meant to reduce tension in the Baltic region . In addition to turning transponders on Russia proposed an exchange of military experts on air safety.

"Russia proposed a way forward on how we can address issues related to transponders and air safety. We stated clearly that we welcome that Russia is ready to sit down and discuss air safety, transparency, including transponders. But we also asked for more details, and I think it's up to Russia to discuss the details of the proposal, but we welcome that Russia is showing more interest on the issue," Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg told journalists following the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council.

The issue was raised following a series of incidents involving US reconnaissance aircraft approaching Russia's airspace and Russian fighter jets.

In late April the Pentagon officials claimed that the Russian Su-27 performed a "barrel roll" "dangerously close" to a US Air Force RC-135 spy plane flying over the Baltic Sea, in close proximity to Russia's border.

It is worth mentioning that the incident occurred after Russia's Su-24 had flown over the US Navy missile destroyer Donald Cook heading on to Russia's waters in the Baltic Sea.

The Pentagon complained that Russian aircraft fly with their transponders turned off.

In response to the US' allegations Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov drew attention to the fact that US spy planes had been repeatedly spotted "creeping" toward Russia's airspace with disabled transponders.
"We have problems in these [UK-Russia] relationships but we want to build on what is positive, where we can find things we can do together in a positive way, we want to build on that", Johnson said. "We have great difficulties over some areas, Ive just been discussing various aspects with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov."

Johnson explained that London and Moscow have disagreements over the crises in Ukraine and Syria as well as over the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
KIEV (Sputnik)  Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has discussed the implementation of the Minsk peace agreements with US President Barack Obama, a statement on the Ukrainian presidential website says.

"We had a long conversation with US President Barack Obama. We had the opportunity to discuss further steps in the implementation of the Minsk agreements, decisive steps on the coordination of our actions with respect to creating a road map on the implementation of these agreements, the security priorities of the Minsk agreements and the place and date of the implementation of the political parts of the Minsk process," Poroshenko said as quoted in the Thursday statement.

Obama and Poroshenko also discussed the reform progress in Ukraine, according to the presidential release.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov could meet with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday evening in New York, a Russian Foreign Ministry source told journalists.

"There is a possibility of holding such a meeting this evening," the source said on Wednesday.

If held, the meeting would be the second between Lavrov and Kerry on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Shiv Narayan Yadav, a man claiming to be an RJD leader, has been booked for treason after he allegedly justified the killing of 17 soldiers in Uri terror attack.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: A case of treason has been registered against a man claiming to be an RJD leader. Shiv Narayan Yadav, a resident of Maner on the outskirts of Patna, allegedly justified the killing of 17 soldiers in the Uri terror attack asserting that they were recruited into the Indian Army after paying a huge amount as bribe. He posted this on his Facebook page. In his post, Yadav added that Pakistan did the right thing by eliminating these soldiers. He claimed that he was the media in-charge of the state unit of RJD.

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RJD DISTANCES ITSELF FROM ROW



Soon after his post went viral, Patna police swung into action and registered an FIR against Shiv Narayan Yadav at the Maner police station. Distancing itself from the controversy, RJD claimed Yadav was not associated with the party.

Also read: RJD MLA's son arrested for stabbing a youth



Facing massive outrage over the post, Bihar RJD President Ram Chandra Purve said that the accused was not even a primary member of the RJD.

ACCUSED TO FACE LEGAL ACTION

"He is not even a primary member of the RJD. We are going to take legal action against him", said Purve.

Another FIR was registered against Shiv Narayan Yadav in Patna on the complaint of RJD leader Dev Muni Singh Yadav at the Kotwali police station.

Also read: Lalu's son spotted with Shahabuddin's sharpshooter, creates controversy



Shiv Narayan Yadav has been absconding after the incident. Police is conducting raids to arrest him.

--- ENDS ---
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  The next International Syria Support Group (ISSG) meeting will be held on Thursday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has confirmed to RIA Novosti.

"Yes, it will be held tomorrow," Steinmeier said on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said after a meeting of the ISSG on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York that the group would reconvene on Friday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Under the package of anti-terror laws passed in June, the Russian telecommunications providers will be obliged to store all users data for at least six months. The law comes into force in July 2018.

Officials from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Ministry of Communications and Ministry of Industry and Trade are exploring the possibilities to decode internet traffic collected under the newly-passed legislation and to decrypt it in order to search words like "a bomb" in real-time mode, the Russian Kommersant newspaper reported, citing its sources.

According to the newspaper, FSB supports the idea of real-time decryption of all the information, while the ministries backed decoding only information from suspicious users.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Warships from Russia's Northern and Pacific Fleets took part in tactical naval drills in the Arctic region, near the New Siberian Islands, a spokesman for the Russian Navy said Wednesday.

"In line with a training plan, a joint tactical exercise of warships from Northern and Pacific Fleets has been held in the area of the New Siberian Islands. After an arrival of a group of Northern Fleet's warships an episode of escorting of ships by Pacific Fleet's Ivan Susanin icebreaker was trained," apt. 1st Rank Igor Dygalo said.

Russia has been stepping up its military, trade and exploration activities in the Arctic region. It has been building transport and energy production infrastructure, as well as installing military facilities and developing the Northern Sea Route linking Europe to Asia.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)Russia will send an aircraft carrier group with the Admiral Kuznetsov cruiser to the Mediterranean Sea to strengthen its capabilities there, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday.

"Presently, the Russian naval group in eastern Mediterranean comprises six warships and three or four support vessels from all fleets. In order to strengthen the combat capabilities in the group, we plan to include the naval aircraft carrier group with the Admiral Kuznetsov cruiser in its composition," Shoigu said.
Izvestia quoted military expert Vladimir Shcherbakov as saying that the 76-mm automatic multi-role naval guns are a universal weapon that actually can destroy a whole array of targets.

"They are capable of destroying not only the enemy ships, but also airborne targets, including drones. Also, these guns can be effectively used to fire on a coast, including on targets located at a considerable distance from the coastline," he said.

The Baltic Fleet small-sized missile ship Passat performed combat artillery firing at sea https://t.co/QiZCy9MA8v pic.twitter.com/IcIhAAyXgw  Russians at NATO (@natomission_ru) 31  2016 .

Right now, the AK-176MA is being tested aboard the guard ship Polyarnaya Zvezda (Polar Star), the flagship of project 22100 Okean (Ocean).
According to Olle Svensson, internal conflicts at Skaraborg Hospital led to the fact that problems and errors could not be discussed openly.

"You must be able to talk to each other in a good and unemotional way, but this was not done," Olle Svensson said, citing Skaraborg Hospital's misuse of antibiotics and painkillers.

According to medical lawyer Mats Wikner, around 100,000 medical injuries are estimated to occur in Sweden every year, of which only 15,000 are reported, Swedish Radio informed.

The ground-breaking Ilizarov method was pioneered by Soviet surgeon Gavriil Ilizarov in the 1950s and became known in Western Europe in the 1980s.

  # #ilizarov       #_ pic.twitter.com/9uJqmkbwLe     (@FuadKHashem) June 24, 2016

Ilizarov developed a procedure based on the biology of the bone and on the ability of the surrounding soft-tissues to regenerate under tension. His technique involved an external fixator and the Ilizarov apparatus, which was structured as a modular ring. Under the Ilizarov method, thin filaments are drilled through both bone and flesh in the damaged area, tensioned with circular frames, and connected by struts. The procedure was inspired by a shaft bow harness on a horse carriage. Originally, bicycle parts were used for the frame. Considered to be undisputedly effective against lower leg fractures with severe soft tissue damage, the Ilizarov method reduces the frequency and severity of the complications, making the surgery safer.

In the 1950s, Ilizarov's growing fame throughout the Soviet Union won him the nickname "magician from Kurgan," a city in the Urals, where the Russian Ilizarov Scientific Center for Restorative Traumatology and Orthopaedics was established.

@charleyboorman is that an Ilizarov frame you have covered up whilst on the wheelchair? pic.twitter.com/EJTi5b8GnS  Dan K (@spikekellyRM) June 14, 2016

In 1968 Ilizarov successfully operated on 1964 Olympic champion Valeriy Brumel, a long-time world record holder in the men's high jump who had injured his right leg in a motorcycle accident. Before coming to Ilizarov, Brumel had spent years on unsuccessful treatments in various clinics and underwent numerous surgeries.

In 1980s, during the Cold War era, Ilizarov treated Italian mountaineer and explorer Carlo Mauri for an incorrectly healed fracture, who later dubbed Ilizarov "the Michelangelo of Orthopedics."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Monday, police arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami in Linden, New Jersey, in connection with three explosions in the New York City area in recent days.

"Terrorism charges filed in Manhattan federal court against alleged Chelsea bomber, Ahmad Khan Rahami," Bharara wrote on his twitter page.

One bomb exploded in Seaside Park, New Jersey and another one in New York Citys Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday. No one was hurt in Seaside Park, but the Chelsea blast injured 29 people.
"Its imminent. Its coming soon," said SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch to Philadelphia news blog Billy Penn, saying that Ultra Ever trials should begin in two weeks.

The site also stated that the paint has been successfully applied in Hamburg, Germany, and San Francisco.
Changa believes that Trump could win because he is not taken seriously. Mainstream media, searching for clicks and profit, give him unbridled' access while other Republican candidates refused to attack him, hoping they would pick up his support base after he dropped out.

As for Trump's phoenix-like comeback after polling very low against Clinton only two months ago, Changa suggests that it's primarily due to the Clinton campaign's inability to reach out to millennials.

"'Donald Trump is evil' is just not enough to motivate people," she said, adding, "If you want to reach people, especially in the time when folks feel like their voice is not even being heard or respected, you really do need to meet them where they are, instead of just continuing to say the same thing. I feel almost like the Clinton campaign and the Democrats are tone deaf."

Changa noted that over the last 7 years the Democrats have not changed their course, and seeing the US heading toward another election cycle with an unchanged policy platform is "disheartening."

"It just seems like we are in a new era and they are not adapting quickly enough. This should not be so difficult for one of the most notable politicians in history She should not be struggling against Donald Trump right now," Changa said.
Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, argued that Pakistan has repeatedly breached trust and sponsored terrorist activities.

By India Today Web Desk: Targeting Pakistan for its soft approach towards terrorist outfits, two powerful American lawmakers have introduced 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) act in the United States House of Representatives to label Pakistan a sponsor of terrorism.

The act has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is a Ranking member of the influential Congressional Committee on Terrorism.

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Congressman Ted Poe, who is the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, argued that Pakistan has repeatedly breached trust and sponsored terrorist activities.

ALSO READ: Pakistan was nearly put on list of state sponsors of terror, reveals ex-CIA official



"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Poe.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe added.

"From harboring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he alleged.

Poe said the bill will require the Obama Administration to formally answer this question.

PAKISTAN IS ON THE SIDE OF TERROR

The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said.

"Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a State Sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," Poe said.

In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack.

"I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace," he said.

"I support every effort to find out who committed this heinous act, so that the perpetrators are brought to justice.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims," Olson said.

ALSO READ: Borderline issues



Senator John Cornyn, Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest stack in a decade.

Indian-Americans continued to call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.

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"Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state," said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA.

"OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan," it said.

ALSO READ:

Uri attack: India to declare Pakistan state sponsor of terror, may launch punitive strikes





--- ENDS ---
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The cousins were preparing an attack on the Joliet base where Hasan Edmonds was trained, The Wall Street Journal reported.

During the sentencing hearing on Tuesday the attorneys office showed a video featuring Hasan explaining to a FBI undercover agent how to stage an attack on the base and saying that his military training would be useful for the Daesh.

Hasan was arrested in March 2015 at the Chicagos Midway Airport when he tried to leave for Cairo  allegedly to join th Daesh.


WASHINGTON (Sputnik)Support among likely voters in the US military for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson is now on par with that for Republican nominee Donald Trump, a poll by Military Times released on Wednesday shows.

Conducted in September, it is the first scientific breakdown of voting preferences among service members, a press release accompanying the poll explained. It shows a very different race than the one playing out on the broader national stage.

Across the United States armed forces, Trump leads Johnson, 37.6 percent to 36.5 percent, which is within the surveys 2 percent margin of error.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)In the 2016 edition of its annual philosophical question, that Gallup has been asking US citizens since 2010, only 21 percent of respondents said the leaders should stick to their principles.

"Americans have favored 'compromise' over 'sticking to principles' in each of these surveys, ranging from 53% this year and in 2013 to 47% when the question was first asked in late 2010 and early 2011," Gallup said in a statement.

The data also showed that the percentage of people who prefer leaders who stick to their guns this year is the lowest recorded since 2010 when the question was first asked, while 28 percent was the highest recorded in year 2011.
The police have video of the incident, but Brentley Vinson, a black officer who fired the fatal shots, was not wearing a body camera at the time. The department maintains that Scott ignored several orders to drop his weapon. The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for the immediate release of the video.

During the ensuing riots, all lanes of Interstate 85 were blocked, and motorists reported being injured and their vehicles damaged as rioters threw rocks, bottles, and traffic cones off an overpass and onto the traffic passing below.

As fires burned in the street multiple rounds of teargas were deployed throughout the night, beginning at around 11:00 PM.

It was reported that 16 officers sustained mostly minor injuries, though one officer was reportedly hit in the face with a rock. Three reporters from local station WBTV were also injured, with one hospitalized.

A Walmart was looted around 3:30 AM, and remained closed and boarded up on Wednesday. At least three tractor trailer trucks were also looted, with some contents burned on the highway.

 The Current Year (@TheeCurrentYear) September 21, 2016

Describing the incident that led to the killing, police claim they had been looking for a man to serve with a warrant when they saw Scott, who was not the person they were seeking. The officers claim they saw Scott exit his vehicle holding a weapon, and then get back into his car. When officers approached, they say that he exited the vehicle again, holding his weapon.

In a statement, the department claimed that he posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers, who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject.

The officers immediately requested Medic and began performing CPR, the statement also noted. Scott was pronounced dead at the hospital.
"Thirty days after that, the secretary of state [John Kerry] must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," he said.

Ted Poe is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade. Dana Rohrabacher is chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe said. "From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's."

Earlier four men conducted a terrorist attack near town of Uri, located in the disputed Indian province of Jammu and Kashmir, killing 18 soldiers. India accused Pakistan of the attack, calling the nation a "terrorist state." The attack has been condemned by a number of countries, including Russia and China.
Clapper claimed that Snowdens theft and release of National Security Agency documents exposing mass global and domestic surveillance programs damaged the nations ability to combat threats.

"I could understand what he did, if what he exposed was limited to domestic surveillance. But he exposed so much else that had absolutely nothing to do with domestic surveillance, where he has damaged our capability against foreign threats. He has taken away capabilities that were used to protect our troops in Afghanistan," Clapper told the Associated Press. "I don't think I could concur in offering him a pardon."

The release of the documents sparked a nationwide conversation about peoples right to privacy.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed with his UK counterpart Boris Johnson the situation in Syria during their first meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

"There was a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and United Kingdoms Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Boris Johnson on September 20, on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York. The parties exchanged their views on the urgent international issues with focus on the current situation in and around Syria," the statement said.

It also added that the ministers discussed prospects for boosting UK-Russian contacts on various levels in the follow up to a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and UK Prime Minister Theresa May that took place on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou on September 4.


ANKARA (Sputnik)Gunshots were heard in front of the embassy building, according to the Daily Sabah English-language daily. Security forces have reportedly "neutralized" one of two assailants, it added. Previous reports claimed the attacker was killed.

The outlet said embassy staff were sent into hiding as a safety precaution, and police units and ambulances were dispatched to the scene.

Ankara israil B.elciligi onunde caddede yatan adam Israil'i allahuekber diye protesto ediyo pic.twitter.com/MWreHWI6qR  kara korsan (@herongoruntusu) September 21, 2016

According to CNN Turk, an attacker has been shot in the leg after a stabbing attempt at the entrance to the embassy.
YEREVAN (Sputnik)  Germany is ready to contribute to the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, German President Joachim Gauck said on Wednesday in a congratulatory message sent to his counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence.

"The settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is of paramount importance to your country. As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE], Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict," the German president said, as cited by Yerevan-based newspaper Aravot.

Joachim Gauck also noted that Berlin intended to support Armenia as a partner nation and encouraged the states will to continue political and economic convergence with the European Union.
                    pic.twitter.com/hhLCBOGC5F  Egypt MFA Spokesman (@MfaEgypt) 17  2016 .

Fevzi Sanverdi, for his part, recalled that right after taking office, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim underscored that it was necessary for Ankara to increase the number of countries which Turkey can consider its friends and partners, as well as bolster cooperation with its neighbors in the region.

"As you know, important steps have been taken to normalize our political, economic, and military ties with Russia and Syria, Yildirim, who is also a member of a parliamentary panel on foreign affairs, said.

As far as Egypt is concerned, the Turkish government wants to return bilateral cooperation to its pre-crisis level, he said, adding that the issue of the normalization of relations is discussed by both sides at different levels, including the Foreign Ministry and other departments, within the framework of international meetings.

"It is safe to say that the restoration of ties with Egypt currently remains one of the key tasks of the Turkish leadership. We are convinced that both sides will benefit from the development of Turkish-Egyptian relations, something that was case with the Turkish-Russian ties. We expect concrete steps in this direction in the near future," he said.

In July, the Egyptian parliament's speaker Ali Abdel Aal told Sputnik that his country is ready to cooperate with Turkey, which has been seeking to improve relations with its neighbors, provided it does not interfere in Egypt's internal affairs.

"My judgment on a matter is taken in balance with the opinion of the Egyptian people. We do not and we would not allow other states to interfere in our internal affairs. If a country respects this principle, we are ready to cooperate with any state, including Turkey," Aal said.
By India Today Web Desk: Music composer Vishal Dadlani today visited the ashram of Jain monk Tarun Sagar in Chandigarh to meet him following a row over the composer's criticism of the address in Haryana Assembly last month.

"Guruji accepted my apology. I think we've also developed a bond of friendship," Dadlani told reporters after his 30-minute meeting with the Jain monk.

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"I came here on a personal note because I myself felt that it was not good on my part (to criticise the Jain monk). My eyes are now opened by coming here and I have learned so much," the composer said.

ALSO READ | Jain monk remark: SC refuses to give protection from arrest to Vishal Dadlani



Dadlani had come under criticism from various quarters, including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, for his tweet on the Jain monk's speech in Haryana Assembly.

The Jain monk, who belongs to the Digambar Jain sect and does not wear any clothes, had delivered a lecture called 'Kadve Pravachan' in the BJP-dominated Haryana Assembly last month on the invitation of the state government.

Dadlani had subsequently tendered an apology for his tweet and later deleted it. He also announced quitting the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over the scandal.

"I was neither forced to join AAP or leave it. What I had said was my own decision. I later realised what I had said does not suit me," he said today.

Meanwhile, a court in Ambala last week asked the music composer to join the investigation in connection with a case against him by the Haryana Police for allegedly hurting the religious sentiments by his "sarcastic" tweet on the Jain monk. The matter will be heard on Friday.

ALSO READ | Vishal Dadlani apologises again for his 'monkery of democracy' tweet, writes open letter to jain muni



--- ENDS ---
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The United States should turn into the worlds "policeman" as it alone has the potential to find solutions to the challenges the international community is facing, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an article.

"From my former positions as prime minister of Denmark and secretary-general of NATO, I know how important American leadership is The world needs such a policeman if freedom and prosperity are to prevail against the forces of oppression, and the only capable, reliable and desirable candidate for the position is the United States," Rasmussen wrote in the article published by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Rasmussen noted that the world in now facing a number of challenges, including the collapse of Libya, Ukrainian crisis, rise of China and North Koreas nuclear program.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)Libya is ready to consider oil output freeze when the national oil output level reaches Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quota, Libya's OPEC envoy Mohamed Oun told Sputnik on Wednesday.

"When the country stabilizes, the situation gets better, we reach the level of the [OPEC] quota, we do not mind [oil output] freezing," Oun said adding that his country "may [then] agree to freeze production levels."

OPEC member states are expected to renew talks on a possible oil output freeze with non-member states at the September 26-28 International Energy Forum (IEF) in Algiers, Algeria, which Libya will be attending.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)The defense ministries of Kazakhstan and the United Kingdom signed on Wednesday a memorandum on defense industry cooperation to expand bilateral contacts and modernize the Kazakh armed forces, Kazakhstans Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Signing the memorandum is an expression of intention of both states defense ministries to establish a basis for mutually beneficial defense industry cooperation, the statement said.

A key area of the UK-Kazakhstan cooperation will be training of the peacekeeping forces. Besides, Kazakh military will have access to education in UK military schools.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)Two out of three Yemenis displaced by the ongoing conflict in the country have been unable to return back home for a period of more than 10 months, the confederation of charity organizations Oxfam said Wednesday citing its own survey.

"Close to one in five people Oxfam spoke to said their homes had been destroyed, and two-thirds had been displaced for ten months or longer. Almost two-thirds of the people Oxfam spoke with said that close family members had died or had been injured as a result of the conflict, and nearly half the families were looking after unaccompanied children," the charity said in a report.

The report was based on a survey, involving 1,000 displaced Yemenis.
A third agent, called Charlie, was set up to imitate a central processing unit through which elements are transferred and are connected to the memory banks  Alice and Bob.

The Chinese scientists teleported cubits, while their Canadian colleagues sent entangled photon pairs, as both teams pursued different aims. The Chinese team teleported no more than two cubits per hour, and scientists from Canada sent about 17 associated photons per minute. Both experiments have strong limitations.

In the coming years, physicists hope for the situation to improve by creating cleaner and reliable single-photon emitters and photon detectors, which will share teleported particles at a reasonable rate.

By 2030, Chinese scientists plan to release a quantum Internet. Chinese engineers have begun to build a quantum network in Hefei district. Users will gain access to the central quantum processor, teleporting the quantum state through an adjacent relay node.


NEW YORK (Sputnik)The Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF) agreed to number of new initiatives aimed at countering violent extremism and reducing terrorist recruitment, the group announced at the end of their 7th Plenary meeting in New York on Wednesday.

"Our work is part of a broader international political dynamic and we are also making progress," Dutch Foreign Minister and GCTF co-chairman Bert Koenders said.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the GCTF adopted a set of initiatives including a US-led dialogue on countering foreign fighters and violent extremism in Central Asia.
And here the gold is left sitting around in open buckets.

The mint, widely described as a fortress, did not notice the thefts. It took an observant bank teller, who became suspicious of Lawrences repeated check deposits for gold sales, noticing that he worked at the mint.

Records revealed 18 pucks had been sold between Nov. 27, 2014 and March 12, 2015. Together with dozens of gold coins that were redeemed, the total value of the suspected theft was conservatively estimated at $179,015, the National Post reported.

His defense maintains that the mint did not even realize the gold was gone, and therefore they cannot prove that it came from there. The gold pucks did fit the mints custom dipping spoon that is made in-house and cannot be bought for commercial use, however.
"A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist.

Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in its 1960 opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC and buttressing The Public Trust Doctrine, Article IX of the Wisconsin State Constitution.
The Delhi Chief Minister said he will call a special session of the state Assembly in a few days to discuss the plot behind the FIR.

By India Today Web Desk: Arvind Kejriwal today asked why his name has been dragged in the First Information Report (FIR) filed by Delhi's Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) against Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chief Swati Maliwal.

"Don't know why my name is in the FIR. What is my role in this? My role has not been mentioned even once in the FIR," Kejriwal said.

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Kejriwal said the FIR could not have been filed without the consent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "A CM's name does not come by itself in an FIR. It can only happen with the PM's consent," he said.

The Delhi Chief Minister said he will call a special session of the state Assembly in a few days to discuss the plot behind the FIR.

ALSO READ | Is Kejriwal government fudging data on chikungunya cases in Delhi? Yes, say statistics



Acting on a complaint filed by former DCW chief Barkha Shukla Singh, the ACB has booked Maliwal for irregularities in recruitments in the women's panel.

In her complaint, Singh has listed 85 people including AAP supporters, who, she claims, got plum jobs "without requisite credentials".

The Delhi BJP has sought Maliwal's removal, while the DCW chief has denied the allegations.

ALSO READ:

FIR filed against Swati Maliwal over DCW recruitment scam

--- ENDS ---
-Diamond Platinumz's wife Zari Hassan is having trouble with her fifth pregnancy

- This has forced her to prolong her stay in South Africa as she is unable to travel to Tanzania

Weeks after famous Kenyan musician Akothee lost her twin pregnancy, another artiste's wife is having trouble with her pregnancy.

Diamond Platinumz's wife Zari Hassan . Photo: Global Publishers.

READ ALSO: So, Diamond Platnumz came to Kenya and had sex with this Kenyan girl (photos)

Diamond Platinumz's wife Zari Hassan is said to be having difficulties with her pregnancy so much that she is unable to travel back home.

Diamond Platinumz with one of his cars

READ ALSO: Kenyan sassy singer hobnobbing with Raila Junior a month after break up

Sources revealed to Tanzania's Global publishers that Zari who is carrying a six-month pregnancy is under duress.

This has made her unable to go back to Tanzania from South Africa.

Diamond Platinumz's wife Zari Hassan and a friend . Photo: Global Publishers.

READ ALSO: After Bahati, comedian Eric Omondi now DESTROYS Kenyas richest singer with just one joke

Diamond n Zari.Image: Chimp Reports.

READ ALSO:Why I attended Jubilee Party launch- ODM Organising Secretary

Zari who is carrying her fifth child is due in December 2016 with the birth of the baby boy expected to excite the Bongo music giant.

She already has one child with Diamond, a daughter named Latifah Dangote who is one-year-old.

Her pregnancy was seen to be too soon with some criticising her for taking too short a break from her previous birth.

Cover image: Global Publishers

Source: TUKO.co.ke
- Four Kenyan long distances drivers are missing after they were attacked by Congolese rebels in Eastern Congo

- Eight other drivers from Tanzania are said to have been released after intervention by the government

- The Mayi Mayi rebels also burnt the trucks belonging to the drivers

Four Kenyan long distances truck drivers are missing after being abducted by the notorious Mayi Mayi rebels of eastern Congo.

The Mayi Mayi rebels also burnt the trucks belonging to the drivers.

READ ALSO: Wife attacks mpango wa kando after recognising her while walking in Kasarani (Photos)

Reports say the rebels attacked the four Kenyan truck drivers and eight Tanzanians around Thursday, September 15.

The rebels burnt several of the trucks belonging to the drivers and also demanded around KSh 40 million in ransom to release the abducted drivers.

Reports say the rebels attacked the four Kenyan truck drivers and eight Tanzanians around Thursday, September 15.

The Tanzanian government is said to have intervened and got four of its nationals released by the rebels.

READ ALSO: Kideros fierce competitor drop from race after challenging kikuyu gods

The rebels burnt several of the trucks belonging to the drivers and also demanded around KSh 40 million to release the abducted drivers.

READ ALSO: Mudavadi to join Raila Odinga before the 2017 General Election

The Mayi Mayi rebels have for years terrorised eastern Congo as they seek to overthrow the government of Laurent Kabila.

The rebels have been accused of rape and murder in the region and have used the forests and hills to run from government forces.

Cover photo: Jami/Twitter

Source: TUKO.co.ke
(Adds details)

By Annabella PultzNielsen

COPENHAGEN, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Denmark's Nets will list in Copenhagen on Friday, four days earlier than planned, after attracting solid interest in its shares, the card payment services company said on Wednesday.

The book on shares in Scandinavia's largest payments processor will close on Thursday at 0900 GMT.

"The early close of the offering is due to the aggregate demand from institutional and retail investors exceeding the expected allocation of offer shares," Nets said in the statement.

Nets has set an indicative price range for its planned initial public offering (IPO) that values the business at up to $4.8 billion.

The company said it expected to price the offering at 130-160 Danish crowns ($19.44-$23.93) per share, but has since narrowed the range to 145-160 crowns, according to local broadcaster TV2 citing sources close to the process.

An IPO has been on the cards since its 17-billion-crown acquisition by private equity firms Advent International and Bain Capital and Danish pension fund ATP in March 2014.

Deutsche Bank (LSE: 0H7D.L - news) , Morgan Stanley (Xetra: 885836 - news) and Nordea have been appointed to act as joint global co-ordinators and joint bookrunners for the IPO.

It comes despite a troubled period for the Danish IPO market, which was rocked by the bankruptcy of ship fuel supplier OW Bunker seven months after its shares were listed in 2014.

Nets said earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) before special items rose 13 percent to 1.2 billion Danish crowns in the first six months of 2016 corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 33.4 percent.

British payments processor Worldpay Group WPG.L was listed on the London Stock Exchange (Other OTC: LDNXF - news) in October 2015 with a valuation of 4.8 billion pounds ($6.34 billion).

($1 = 6.6865 Danish crowns) (Additional reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; editing by Jane Merriman and Jason Neely)
(ADVISORY- Follow European and UK stock markets in real time on the Reuters Live Markets blog on Eikon - see cpurl://apps.cp./cms/?pageId=livemarkets) Recasts, adds details, closing prices)

* STOXX Europe 600 index ends down 0.1 percent

* Caution prevails a day ahead of Fed, BoJ meetings

* Political worries, weak bank stocks weigh on Italy

* GVC Holdings (Frankfurt: 6GI.F - news) top STOXX gainer after target upgrades

By Danilo Masoni

MILAN , Sept 20 (Reuters) - European shares ended little changed on Tuesday as investors remained cautious ahead of monetary policy decisions from the Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan on Wednesday.

Market volatility has spiked this month because of changing expectations over when the Fed could raise rates, but mixed data cast doubt over the health of the world's biggest economy, reducing the chance of a hike this month.

Futures are pricing the chance of a U.S. rate rise this week at just 15 percent, while the chance of a December hike is seen at almost 60 percent, according to CME Group (Kuala Lumpur: 7018.KL - news) 's FedWatch tool.

However, some investors believed there was still room for a surprise rate increase on Wednesday.

"Postponing the decision to December and betting that U.S. macro data will remain positive in the next three months may be a risky bet," Adrien Pichoud, chief economist at SYZ Asset Management in Geneva, said.

"We view the risk of a surprise hike as important and recommend to position portfolios (to) limit exposure to risk assets, especially U.S. and EM equities," he added.

The BoJ will also be closely watched for near-term market direction. JP Morgan analyst Mislav Matejka said earlier this week that the Japanese central bank could disappoint, warning that equities should continue to unwind their summer bounce.

Europe's STOXX 600, which has risen around 10 percent since the end of June but touched a six-week low earlier this month on the back of worries over central bank action, ended down 0.1 percent.

Story continues

Italy's FTSE MIB fell 1.2 percent, making it the worst performing index in Europe. Traders cited growing uncertainty ahead of an upcoming referendum on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's constitutional reform plan.

Credit Suisse (LSE: 0QP5.L - news) said the referendum could cause bigger volatility but did not expect it to trigger any systemic shock. It said that if the "No" front won, there could be a delay in Italian banks' recapitalisation plans but Italian bonds should remain largely protected by the ECB's bond-buying programme.

Troubled Monte dei Paschi (Milan: BMPS.MI - news) bank fell 6.4 percent, the biggest loser in Milan, on fears over the feasibility of its rescue plan.

The STOXX Europe 600 Oil and Gas index dropped 0.9 percent, the worst sectoral performer, as oil prices hovered around six-week lows on global over-supply concerns.

Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) in Royal Dutch Shell (LSE: 0LN9.L - news) , Eni (LSE: 0N9S.L - news) and Total (LSE: 524773.L - news) fell between 0.5 percent and 1.8 percent.

Among other sharp movers, shares in business services firm Regus (Other OTC: RGSJF - news) slumped 6.4 percent after a share placement.

GVC Holdings surged 6.6 percent, the top gainer on the STOXX, following target upgrades at Cannacord and Investec (LSE: INVP.L - news) . (Additional reporting by Atul Prakash in London; editing by Mark Heinrich)
A boat carrying hundreds of migrants has capsized off the coast of Egypt with the loss of 42 lives.

Around 150 people are thought to have been rescued after the vessel overturned shortly after leaving the port of Rashid, near Alexandria.

The migrants, who were described as "illegal" by Egypt's health ministry, were from several African countries and are being taken local hospitals.

: The migrant crisis

Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, Save the Children carried out two migrant rescue missions off the Libyan coast.

Pictures showed the men being rescued from an overcrowded rubber inflatable and transferred from a rescue ship operated by the German humanitarian charity Jugend Rettet, to another run by Save the Children.

It comes months after the head of the EU's border agency warned that growing numbers of Europe-bound migrants were using Egypt as a departure point for the perilous journey.

With the closure of a popular route through Balkans countries, as well as an EU deal to halt departures from Turkey's east coast, asylum seekers are increasingly seeking other routes.

More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year from various departure points but particularly from Libya and Egypt.

This figure is down from the 520,000 that made the journey in the first nine months last year.

According to the UN, more than 10,000 people have died crossing the Mediterranean to Europe since 2014.
AFP

Ukraine's maritime grain exports were halted Sunday after Russia suspended its participation in a landmark agreement that allowed the vital shipments, blaming drone attacks on its ships in Crimea. The July deal to unlock grain exports signed between Russia and Ukraine and brokered by Turkey and the UN, is critical to easing the global food crisis caused by the conflict. The agreement had already allowed more than nine million tonnes of Ukrainian grain to be exported and was due to be renewed on November 19. On Saturday, Russia said it was halting its participation after its army accused Kyiv of a "massive" drone attack on its Black Sea fleet, which Ukraine labelled a "false pretext". US President Joe Biden called the move "purely outrageous" while Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Moscow was "weaponising food". The centre coordinating the logistics of the deal said in a statement that no traffic was planned for Sunday. "A joint agreement has not been reached at the JCC for the movement of inbound and outbound vessels on 30 October," it said. "There are more than ten vessels both outbound and inbound waiting to enter the corridor." Ukraine and the UN have urged that the agreement remains in force. "I call on all states to demand that Russia stop its hunger games and recommit to fulfilling its obligations," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the Russian move "an absolutely transparent intention of Russia to return the threat of large-scale famine to Africa and Asia". "Just today, more than two million tons of food are in the sea. This means that access to food has actually worsened for more than seven million consumers," he said in his nightly address. Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said: "It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative which is a critical humanitarian effort". - 'Peddling false claims' - Sevastopol in Moscow-annexed Crimea has been targeted several times in recent months and serves as the headquarters for the Black Sea fleet and a logistical hub for operations in Ukraine. The Russian army claimed to have "destroyed" nine aerial drones and seven maritime ones in an attack on the port early Saturday. "In light of the terrorist act carried out by the Kyiv regime with the participation of British experts against ships of the Black Sea fleet and civilian vessels involved in the security of grain corridors, Russia suspends its participation in the implementation of the agreement on the export of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports," the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram. Moscow's forces alleged British "specialists", whom they said were based in the southern Ukrainian city of Ochakiv, had helped prepare and train Kyiv to carry out the strike. In a further singling out of the UK -- which Moscow sees as one of the most unfriendly Western countries -- Russia said the same British unit was involved in explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month. Britain strongly rebutted both claims, saying "the Russian Ministry of Defence is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale". Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Saturday Moscow would raise the blasts and the alleged drone attack at the UN Security Council. Moscow's military said ships targeted at their Crimean base were involved in the grain deal. The United Nations Coordinator for the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Amir Abdulla, reported that Russia had notified him earlier Saturday of "its concerns about the safety of movements of merchant vessels" under the agreement. Russia had recently criticised the deal, saying its own grain exports have suffered due to Western sanctions. - 'Massive' attack - Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, said Saturday's drone attack was the "most massive" the peninsula had seen. City authorities said the harbour was "temporarily" closed to boats and ferries and urged people "not to panic". Attacks on Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, have increased in recent weeks, as Kyiv presses a counter-offensive in the south to retake territory held by Moscow for months. Moscow-installed authorities in Kherson, just north of Crimea, have vowed to turn the city into a fortress, preparing for an inevitable assault. In early October, Moscow's bridge linking Crimea to the Russian mainland -- personally inaugurated by President Vladimir Putin in 2018 -- was damaged by a blast that Putin blamed on Ukraine. The Russian fleet stationed in the port had also been attacked by a drone in August. Russia's allegations Saturday came as the Ukrainian army reported fighting in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions in the east, including near Bakhmut -- the only area where Moscow's forces have advanced in recent weeks. Pro-Russian separatists fighting alongside Moscow also announced a new prisoner exchange with Kyiv, saying 50 will return home from each side. bur-gw/bfm/caw/mca-yad/dva
Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) in Majestic Wine (LSE: WINE.L - news) plunged 24% on Wednesday after the company uncorked a profit warning.

The wine retailer said it expected core earnings for the group during the current financial year to be "below current market expectations", but insisted it was on track to meet its three-year plan of 500m of sales by 2019.

The company, which trades shares on the junior AIM market, blamed slower growth in its Majestic Commercial business which supplies wines to pubs and restaurants.

It pointed to flat first-half sales for the commercial business compared to the same period a year ago and a decline in margins.

The company said it had launched a review to identify how it could best achieve profit growth.

Another factor cited by the company was the failure of a direct mailing campaign to promote Naked Wines in the US.

Majestic chief executive, Rowan Gormley, said: "It is very disappointing that two isolated factors are distracting from the great progress across the rest of the group.

"We have always said that we would adopt a test and learn approach, and be quick to redeploy capital from underperforming areas, which is exactly what we are doing.

"While, this approach is delivering good results in the other business units the scale of the US market means that even a test can have a material effect on profits.

"The turnaround plan in Majestic Retail is progressing well, the key initiatives are on track to be delivered on time and on budget, and preparations for peak Christmas trading are well in hand.

"Naked Wines UK, Australia and the underlying US business continue to trade well, and we have managed to restore Lay and Wheeler to growth."

He also confirmed that Majestic still intended to resume dividend payments this year despite the setback.
By India Today Web Desk: A woman in Macedonia has claimed that doctors working on a her colon accidentally ended up connecting it to her vagina.

Jasminka Velkovska was in hospital to have a cancerous tumour removed from her colon. She realized the blunder made by the team of doctors when she started passing gas through her vagina.

The incident took place three years back when she had to get carcinoma removed from her colon. After the botched operation the hospital had agreed to pay 25,700 pounds as compensation to Velkovska, but has now refused to pay the total.

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Jasminka was forced to get in touch with the local media to talk about her condition. She said that they even failed to treat her carcinoma.

According to a British Daily, Hospital Manager said that without a court order they cannot give the compensation and the amount was not fully covered by their insurance.

Velkovska plans to sue the hospital if they fail to pay the amount.



--- ENDS ---
By Ian Simpson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hundreds of top scientists warned on Tuesday against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's vow to pull the United States out of the Paris climate-warming accord if elected in November. The 375 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, said in an open letter that a U.S. abandonment of the agreement would make it far harder to develop global strategies to lessen the impact of global warming. "Thus it is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord," the letter said. "A 'Parexit' would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: 'The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change. You are on your own.'" Among the signers are biologist E.O. Wilson, physicists Stephen Hawking and Claude Canizares, astrophysicist Simon D.M. White, and Nobel winners Thomas Steitz, Michael Levitt and William Daniel Phillips. The National Academy of Sciences is a private society of scholars who advise the United States on science and technological matters. The signers of the letter said they did so as individuals and not on behalf of the Academy or their institutions. In Paris last December, almost 200 countries agreed to slash greenhouse gases and keep global temperature rises to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius. The United States and China, the two largest producers of carbon emissions, ratified the accord this month. Trump will speak at a natural gas industry conference in Pennsylvania on Thursday. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Trump has dismissed manmade climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese and says he will abandon the Paris agreement if elected. He has vowed to reverse much of the work the administration of President Barack Obama has done to address climate change, including rules to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The Republican Party platform also questions the legality of Obama's executive order ratifying the Paris deal. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is a strong supporter of the Paris accord. (Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Leslie Adler)
By Parisa Hafezi UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on world leaders at the United Nations to take measures against a U.S.-based cleric's "terrorist network" that he said threatened their security. "I am calling, from this podium, to all our friends, to swiftly take the necessary measures against the Gulenist terrorist organization for their own safety and the future of their nations," Erdogan said. "It is evident from our experience that if you do not fight the Gulen network at this stage, it may be too late later." Turkish authorities have accused Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating Turkey's failed coup in July. Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania since 1999, has denied involvement in the coup attempt. Accusing Gulen of building up over decades a network of followers inside the armed forces and civil service to take over Turkey, authorities have asked the United States to extradite or detain the cleric. Gulen denies these charges. In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Erdogan said the United States should "not harbour a terrorist" like Gulen and said his activities around the world should be banned. Calling for an immediate political solution to resolve the crisis in Syria, Erdogan said: "Turkey's incursion into northern Syria in early September had led to establishing peace, balance and stability in a region taken over by hopelessness". He added: "We cannot lose more time to realize the political resolution process and end the root of the problem, which is the fighting in Syria, terror and atmosphere of cruelty." Turkey's incursion into Syria came after it had called in vain for several years for world powers to help create a "safe zone" along the Syrian border, with the aim of clearing out Islamic State and Kurdish fighters and of stemming a wave of migration that has caused tension with Europe. Turkey has said it has no plans to stay in Syria. "We respect Syria's territorial integrity," Erdogan said. The president also accused the European Union of not keeping its promises over Turkey's decades-long efforts to join the trading bloc. (Reporting and writing by Parisa Hafezi; Additional reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara; Editing by Howard Goller and Bill Rigby)
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina  Nairouz Baloul escaped the civil war in her homeland to find refuge in Argentina. Now she hopes the South American nation will now welcome many more Syrians like her to begin a new life.

President Mauricio Macri has said he wants to allow more than 3,000 Syrian refugees into Argentina. But the plan has stalled, and organizations and members of Argentinas Syrian community are pressuring the administration to keep its promise.

If he has the key to unlock this, I think he shouldnt hesitate to open the door to other human beings, said Baloul, 29, an English teacher who escaped what she calls a living nightmare in Syria.

One of her brothers was killed by a bomb in Damascus in 2014. She prefers not to speak about it, but since she arrived in Buenos Aires last month with another brother, she has become hopeful that the rest of their family will be able to join them in Argentina.

I feel safe now, but Im not totally happy because I want others to be safe as well, Baloul said.

Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra said Monday that the government is fully committed to bringing in 3,000 Syrians, though a timeline has not been set.

This will not happen from one day to the next, she said. But we have a commitment because Argentina is a country of immigrants, of refugees, and its unlikely that any of us doesnt have a grandfather, a great-grandfather who hasnt escaped a war, a famine.

We believe this is the time to set an example, Malcorra said.

Officials have not explained the reasons for the delay, although Argentinas economy is in recession and Macri has faced unrest for cutting government spending.

While the government decides how to implement the plan, dozens of Argentine families have already volunteered to welcome Syrians into their homes.

Among them is Mariano Winograd, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler who received a young newlywed couple from Syria to his home earlier this year.

I just want to give back what was given to my family, said Winograd, the son of Jewish immigrants who came to Argentina to escape World War II.

Winograd, the head of a local group known as Humanitarian Refuge, works closely with an Argentine priest based in Aleppo, Syria, who helps families desperate to escape one of that countrys fiercest battlegrounds.

Amnesty International on Monday urged Argentina to implement a comprehensive plan for bringing in Syrian refugees.

The human rights group set up a replica of a Syrian home in a busy subway station in the Argentine capital. Images of relentless bombings were projected on screens in its windows in an effort to call attention to the more than 4 million Syrians who have sought refuge abroad since civil war erupted in 2011.

I think the Argentine state has the good intention to help in this humanitarian crisis, but it is limited (by resources). But for us, the economic excuse is not valid, said Leah Tandeter, head of international justice for Amnesty Internationals local branch.

Macri and other world leaders were in New York for the U.N. General Assembly meeting on Monday to discuss the situation of the worlds 65.3 million displaced people. The talks were held as the first summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants.

___

Associated Press video journalist Paul Byrne contributed to this report.
SUTTER, Calif.  One American pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from a U-2 spy plane shortly before it crashed in Northern California on Tuesday morning, the U.S. Air Force said.

The plane crashed shortly after taking off from Beale Air Force Base on a training mission around 9 a.m., military officials said. They did not release the pilots names or any information about the condition of the surviving airman.

The aircraft, assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron, crashed in the Sutter Buttes, a mountain range about 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of Sacramento.

The U-2 Dragon Lady is a surveillance and reconnaissance plane capable of flying above 70,000 feet (21,336 meters), an extremely high altitude thats twice as high as a typical commercial airliner flies. The U-2 is known as one of the most difficult aircraft to fly at low altitudes due to the characteristics that allow it to travel near space, according to an Air Force fact sheet.

Beale Air Force Base is home to the Air Forces fleet of single-seat U-2s and a double-seat variant used for training pilots to fly the specialized aircraft. It also is the base for the T-38 Talon, a training aircraft, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance drone. It houses 4,500 military personnel.

We are saddened by our Airmans death & offer condolences to the family & all who are mourning this tremendous loss, Gen. Dave Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, said on Twitter.

Ejection seats allow military pilots to get out of a stricken plane and parachute safely to the ground. After the death in this instance, military investigators will look into whether the chute properly deployed and whether the pilot hit debris after ejecting, said Michael Barr, an aviation safety instructor at University of Southern California who flew fighter missions in Vietnam.

If the chute didnt properly deploy, that would be fatal, Barr said.

The U-2 is slated for retirement in 2019 as the military relies increasingly on unmanned aircraft for intelligence gathering, though senior U.S. lawmakers from California are pressuring the Air Force to delay the retirement.

A U-2 based at Beale crashed in 1996 and slammed into the parking lot of a newspaper in Oroville, California. The pilot and a woman who had just renewed her newspaper subscription were killed.
Recent revelations into the inner workings of the Syndicato de Nuevo Mexico prison gang show the shocking extent of its resolve to defend its criminal enterprise by any means possible.

Some of the gangs members face federal prosecution as a result of a multiagency racketeering investigation into its activities, including a plot in 2015 to kill New Mexico Corrections Secretary Gregg Marcantel and another top Corrections Department official.

But it seems this band of hard-core criminals is willing to go far beyond what the law allows in response to the charges.

According to recently released court documents in the federal case, gang members have:

 Plotted to have a gang member violate his parole so he could be sent to federal prison, where he could kill a former gang leader who had pleaded guilty in an agreement that implicated a top Syndicato boss.

 Discussed killing FBI agents and blowing up a federal building.

 Targeted for death several victims, witnesses, informants and perceived informants.

 Beat and left for dead a man who was scheduled to testify against a gang member.

 Secretly passed around discovery material from their federal case in an attempt to identify for possible hits people who were cooperating with prosecutors or who were witnesses.

The so-called syndicate has amassed dozens of homicides in furtherance of the gang, according to an affidavit for a warrant to search gang members residences. The affidavit also said the influence of the gang, which arose out of the 1980 Santa Fe prison riot, has spread to the federal prison system.

In response to threats against the FBI and others, law enforcement agents led by the FBI earlier this month raided eight homes in Albuquerque and other locations.

Tactics uncovered in the ongoing investigations illustrate the difficulty in dealing with such violent and dedicated career criminals who are willing to do anything to further their organizations agenda and seem to know every prisoner protection in the book.

These kinds of ultraviolent criminals make a case for bringing back the death penalty in New Mexico for certain crimes, including killing a corrections or other law enforcement officer.

Gov. Susana Martinez has said she will put the death penalty on the call for an expected special budget session. Lawmakers should consider approving limited restoration and send the message that violent crimes have serious consequences and far-reaching criminal enterprises will not be tolerated.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
State Sen. Michael Padilla, D-Albuquerque, has asked the Attorney Generals Office to conduct an independent investigation into the killing of 10-year-old Victoria Martens as well as examine the state Children, Youth and Families Department to determine if all processes were followed, including a supervisory high-level review.

Padilla, the Senates majority whip, made the request in a letter to Attorney General Hector Balderas on Sept. 15.

A spokesman in the Governors Office on Tuesday dismissed Padillas effort as political grandstanding.

In his letter, Padilla asked Balderas to appoint an independent non-partisan blue ribbon commission composed of former members of the state judiciary to investigate CYFD, the state Department of Corrections and any touch points that Victoria Martens had with any government agency, including referrals from Albuquerque Public Schools.

Padilla told the Journal on Tuesday that it was his understanding APS contacted CYFD at least twice with concerns about Victoria and/or her younger brother. He also noted that in a 2014 executive order, Gov. Susana Martinez directed CYFD to perform a supervisory high-level review of any family that has been the subject of two CYFD investigations, regardless if abuse or neglect was substantiated.

Thats the protocol, said CYFD spokesman Henry Varela, but confirming that had been done is prohibited under the Childrens Code, which is state law.

Padilla said the issue is particularly meaningful to him because he and his siblings grew up in foster care.

Balderas responded to Padilla in a letter released Tuesday, saying he agreed there were unacceptable gaps in the system and that New Mexico is not doing enough to protect its children.

Balderas didnt commit to a commission, as envisioned by Padilla, but he did say that staffers are looking at issues surrounding possible points of intervention.

Michael Lonergan, a spokesman for the governor, said its unfortunate that Michael Padilla is playing partisan politics with this tragedy.

While the Governors Office takes every child abuse case seriously, Lonergan said, we dont take the political grandstanding  seriously.

Victoria Martens, a student at Petroglyph Elementary School, was found dead in her familys apartment Aug. 24. Police say they believe the little girl was forced to use methamphetamine before being raped and stabbed. Police found her dismembered and still burning body in a bathtub.

The girls mother, her boyfriend, and the boyfriends cousin have been charged in connection with the childs death.

APS spokeswoman Monica Armenta on Tuesday said Superintendent Raquel Reedy is confident that everyone at the school and district level followed the process.

That process involves contacting CYFD or law enforcement when there is a suspicion of child abuse or neglect.

Varela said the Childrens Code prevents him from confirming such contacts between APS and CYFD. He did say that CYFD has never done an investigation into anything of a violent or sexual nature regarding the Martens children.

Albuquerque Police Department spokeswoman Celina Espinoza said that based on our ongoing, active investigation, CYFD appears to have acted appropriately in their previous interactions with this family. Those interactions are not a factor in our investigation at this time.
For a young woman about to make history, Anissa Martinez was surprisingly calm Tuesday as she took the 72-word oath of enlistment that officially made her the first New Mexico woman to join the U.S. Armys infantry ranks.

Before January, the Armys combat jobs  as with those of most military branches  were closed to women. In 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter reversed long-standing regulations that prohibited women from serving in about 10 percent of roughly 220,000 military positions. The Armys prohibitions included infantry, armor, reconnaissance and some special operations units.

But since January, those positions have been open to all soldiers, regardless of sex.

So, with about a dozen friends, family members and fellow soldiers in attendance, Martinez took the oath, signed her enlistment contract and became the first woman in the state to join the infantry.

Its just something Ive always wanted to do, Martinez said after the ceremony at the Albuquerque Military Entrance Processing Station near Eubank and Interstate 40. The Army was the one (branch of service) that interested me most.

Martinez, 18, graduated from Espanola Valley High School in May. She hails from El Duende, a small village northwest of Espanola.

Other than some great-uncles, no one in her immediate family has served in the military, she said.

Sgt. Eric Louive, a recruiter with the Santa Fe Recruiting Center, said he had been working with Martinez since May to make her longtime dream a reality.

From the first time that we sat down and talked, she told me she wanted infantry, said Louive, an Ohio native and veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As a (fellow) infantryman, that means a lot.

Louive said its rewarding for a recruiter to be able to direct new soldiers toward a job they want to do, so he was happy to see Martinez take that final step.

Shes really motivated, he said.

Martinezs mother, Pamela Atencio, said she wasnt surprised that her daughter joined the Army  or the infantry.

Shes been saying it for last few years, Atencio said. But I thought by this time she would change her mind.

After graduating (from high school) it changes your whole outlook on life, and I thought something else would have come up and change her mind, she said.

Im scared, but I think all parents are, when their children, especially an only-child like Anissa, join the military, Atencio said.

The new soldiers father, Emery Martinez, said he was very proud to see his daughter enter the military.

Martinez will report for basic training and advanced individual training at Fort Benning, Ga., in March.

Between now and then, she said, shell work and start getting in shape for the rigors of infantry training.

Shes never been to Georgia, she said, but added, I really like to travel.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

LAS CRUCES  New Mexicos system of higher education  the most decentralized in the nation  faces stark challenges that the states institutions must work together to overcome, according to Higher Education Secretary Barbara Damron.

Its a tough road ahead for the states nearly three dozen colleges and universities, which are independently run and too dependent on state funding, Damron said at last weeks Domenici Public Policy Conference at New Mexico State University.

No other state in the country has 32 publicly funded institutions that have a board of some type, she said, adding that while this is great for educational access, it may be an obstacle in the current financial climate.

Damron said her department is developing a strategic plan, targeted for September 2017, to address the challenges.

Chief among them: State revenues are shrinking because of a steep drop in oil and gas prices, on which New Mexicos budget leans heavily; enrollment is on the decline from a peak during the recession; and, on a national scale, perspectives are changing about what the goals of higher education should be and how much states should contribute.

Colleges and universities financed with less than 20 percent state funding have a better chance of surviving as state revenues decline, but none of New Mexicos higher education institutions fits that bill today, Damron said, citing global strategic advisory firm Parthenon-Ernst & Youngs 2016 Education Practice report and the states own statistics.

In fiscal 2015, the last year for which full statistics are available, New Mexicos two- and four-year institutions depended on state funding to cover between 20 percent and 61 percent of their budgets.

It is concerning for me that here in our state we essentially have none that are below that 20 percent mark, Damron said. These institutions will not be able to sustain in this matter.

The states three largest institutions by enrollment  the University of New Mexico, Central New Mexico Community College and New Mexico State University  rely on 35 percent to 40 percent state funding, according to state Department of Higher Education statistics.

Bookending the low and high ends of budget dependency are New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs at 20 percent and Tucumcaris Mesalands Community College at 61 percent. Altogether, 21 New Mexico institutions fall in the 30 percent to 60 percent range.

Complicating the financial picture, New Mexicos colleges and universities charge very low tuition compared with other states and peer institutions, Damron said. That was by design, she said, as officials decided to pour resources into higher education.

But as budget pressures intensify, Damron said, We have a constant battle: How do we manage state revenues versus the tuition revenues? Our tuition was set low because our state has put a lot of money into education. It was set up that way with the intent of keeping tuition down. The question comes, as those state revenues decrease, is it on the backs of the students? Or what are the other revenues can we bring in?

According to the Parthenon report, the decadeslong expansion of higher education institutions that followed World War II and continued through the technology boom of the 1990s is over. The analysis finds that hundreds of institutions nationwide face critical strategic challenges because of their inefficiencies or their small size.

The way out, according to the report and Damrons own estimation, is collaboration and, potentially, consolidation.

This new era of cooperation goes well beyond simple agreements between colleges to share back-office operations or cross-list academic courses that often result in good publicity and not much else, according to the Parthenon report. Collaboration in this new era involves colleges and universities coming together as seemingly one institution to change their future direction.

NMSU system Chancellor and former Gov. Garrey Carruthers agrees something has to change.

I think Secretary Damron is trying to get us in a dialogue here that is meaningful that will recognize the financial situation in the state, the declining enrollment, Carruthers said. We have these opportunities for improvement, and how is it that we are going to take advantage of those opportunities? What are we going to do? Because what we are doing right now is not working very well.

Former Higher Education Secretary Jose Garcia, who served under Gov. Susana Martinez, takes a dim view of the potential for collaboration, noting that the states system of higher education has a very poor governing structure in which boards of regents are highly dysfunctional and are not really beholden to the governor.

He also points to a pattern of high cost, low return in administrative costs, despite New Mexicos consistently being near the bottom of the national barrel in terms of six-year graduation rates for bachelors degrees.

Damron did not lay out proposals for consolidating New Mexicos independently governed colleges, universities and branch campuses. But she cited statistics showing that the number of campuses nationwide has grown 9 percent since 2007 even as enrollment has fallen from its peak in 2010 and said, There is potential for consolidation.

The market for students can no longer support the number of institutions we have today, she said, speaking in the context of national trends.

Research has shown that students who live near community colleges are more likely to go to college, according to Ronald Gordon Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

In a state where many of the residents are relatively poor, where they cant go to school full time because they have to work, having a community college close by is important, he said. The campuses matter.

Damron echoed that sentiment, with a caveat about the independence with which New Mexicos institutions operate.

We still have gazillions of square footage in our higher education institutions, she said. Much of that is important. Much of that needs to be there. Certain things can still best be taught in the classroom. You can barely go 40 miles in our state without having access to higher education. We have definitely addressed the issue of access.

But she added, We are definitely the most decentralized. Each one of those entities has a board.

The statewide strategic planning process will focus on stronger attainment goals, capped by a target of 66 percent of New Mexicos population having an associate degree or higher by 2030. That is almost double the current level of 35 percent and well above the national average of 40 percent, Damron said, citing Lumina Foundation statistics.

We are definitely in an imminent era of innovation and adaptation, she said. The fates of universities are to be shaped by political, economic and social factors. Its no longer just the pure beauty of looking for knowledge and science.

Highlight on higher ed

Today Gov. Susana Martinez is scheduled to tout improvements in higher education at 10 a.m. at New Mexico State University.
The number of drug overdose deaths in 2015 declined in 20 of New Mexicos 33 counties in 2015, including several that perennially have the states highest death rates, health officials said Tuesday.

The number of overdose deaths declined by 10 or more in Sandoval, Valencia and Rio Arriba counties in 2015 compared to 2014, the New Mexico Department of Health reported.

The best news came out of Rio Arriba County, which had the states highest rate of drug overdose deaths in 2015 and typically with among the highest drug deaths per capita in the country. The number of overdose deaths there declined from 40 deaths in 2014, to 28 in 2015  a 30 percent decline.

Lauren Reichelt, director of Rio Arriba County Health and Human Services, said distribution of naloxone  an injection or nasal spray known by the brand name Narcan that reverses opioid overdoses  has possibly had the biggest impact in decreasing deaths. But she said she needs to look at a few more years of data to really know if its really making a dent.

You still cant draw conclusions just yet, but the effects of making treatment more available and putting Narcan on the streets is having an affect, Reichelt said. I personally believe that is the case, but I cant statistically say that is the case.

Statewide, overdose deaths declined by 9 percent in 2015, falling from a record-high 540 deaths in 2014 to 493 last year.

Dr. Michael Landen, the states epidemiologist, also credited the growing availability of Narcan and also attributed the improvement in the overdose numbers to tighter federal regulations on hydrocodone, a widely prescribed narcotic painkiller.

The key thing for the entire state was the rescheduling of hydrocodone from schedule III to schedule II, Landen said.

The October 2014 change prohibited health care providers from prescribing hydrocodone with multiple refills. Patients instead must obtain a new prescription by visiting a doctor.

New Mexicos drug overdose death rate was the second highest in the nation in 2014. Nationwide drug overdose deaths for 2015 are not available.

The number of overdose deaths remained largely unchanged in the states three most populous counties: Bernalillo, Santa Fe and Dona Ana.

In Bernalillo County, the death toll rose to 200 in 2015, up from 197 deaths in 2014. Santa Fe went from 45 overdoes deaths in 2014 to 48 last year.

Prescription narcotics continued to claim the highest rate of overdose deaths in 2015. But the rate declined from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2014, to 9.2 in 2015.

Deaths attributed to heroin meanwhile increased from 7.9 per 100,000 in 2014, to 8.4 in 2015.

Jennifer Weiss-Burke, executive director of Serenity Mesa Youth Recovery Center, said the data suggests that tighter regulation of prescription narcotics is driving some addicts to use heroin as a cheaper alternative.

I think that while we put more measures in place to reduce prescribing of opiates, that we will see an increase in heroin-related deaths, Weiss-Burke said.

I hope that with the work we continue to do that well see heroin-related deaths decrease over the coming years as fewer people become addicted to prescription narcotics, she said.
WASHINGTON  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton say they raised record amounts of money in August for their presidential bids  a total of $233 million just in one month. And wealthy donors are pouring millions of dollars more into outside groups involved in the race for the White House and Senate contests.

Many of those groups, along with the presidential campaigns, are due to report the details of their late summertime fundraising and expenses to federal regulators on Tuesday.

Here are some takeaways from the reports:

Clinton spending spree

Clinton matched her best-yet fundraising numbers with her biggest single-month outlay, new documents show. The campaign spent almost $50 million last month, nearly $12 million more than in July, its previous most expensive month.

Nearly $33 million went into advertising and about $5 million on her roughly 800-person payroll.

The campaign raised more than $60 million in August; Clinton also helped raise another $81 million last month for the Democratic National Committee and state parties working to elect her. Trumps campaign had not yet filed its August report.

More big checks

Apart from the campaign, which faces $2,700-per-person, per-election donation limits, Clinton can count on several super political action committees to promote her candidacy. Donors can give those groups as much as theyd like.

The biggest one, Priorities USA, continued to haul in money from wealthy Democratic donors in August. The group raised $23 million last month.

Nearly half came from a handful of big donors. Slim-Fast billionaire Daniel Abraham gave $3 million as did Chicago media billionaire Fred Eychaner. Democratic super donors George Soros and Donald Sussman gave $2.5 million and $2 million, respectively, and Emerson Collective LLC, headed by Steve Jobs widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, contributed $2 million.

Senate cash

Billionaires are writing big checks to outside groups focused on the Senate, the August documents show.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC helmed by a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, raised more than $28 million in August after months of slow fundraising.

More than two-thirds of that haul came from billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, marking their first major investments in the 2016 races. The Democratic counterpart to the group, the Senate Majority PAC, raised $11.6 million last month. Its top August donor was Eychaner, who gave $3 million. Close allies of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid direct the super PAC.

Brace for a flood of new Republican-boosting ads: The Senate Leadership Fund began this month with $40.2 million in the bank. The Senate Majority PAC had a little more than $12 million in available cash as of Sept. 1.

NRA for Trump

One of the most active outside groups backing Trump, the Republican nominee, is the political arm of the deep-pocketed National Rifle Association, which began September with about $10 million in the bank.

Facebook money for Democrats

Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of the social media site Facebook explained in an essay this month that he would spend $20 million to help elect Clinton and other Democrats.
SALT LAKE CITY  Navajo Nation member Davis Filfred prefers casting a ballot the old fashioned way at a polling place. But hes worried he may have to make a three-hour round-trip drive this November to make that happen.

San Juan County in southeastern Utah switched to an all-mail ballot election system in 2014, leaving only one polling place in the northern county seat of Monticello for that election. That meant tribal members who live in far-flung corners of the county had to drive twice as far as white residents, according to a Navajo group that filed a federal lawsuit in February over the new system.

The group urged U.S. District Judge Jill Parrish Wednesday to approve their request for a court order requiring the county to open nine polling places for the November election, three satellite locations for early voting and staff them with bilingual workers who can help Navajo speakers.

Theres no way for us to have a redo of the upcoming election, said attorney Arusha Gordon, represented the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission.

Parrish didnt rule Wednesday, but she questioned why she needs to issue the order if county officials already plan to open three locations for in-person voting on the Navajo Nation to supplement all-mail voting. The county did the same for the June primary election, which came three months after the lawsuit was filed.

Parrish said it seemed the groups argument hinged mainly on the notion the county cant be trusted rather than proof of imminent harm to Navajo voters.

I dont think you can just say, I think theyre liars, we dont trust them,  Parrish said.

Gordon said county officials have failed to come through before, prompting the need for a court-ordered requirement. One such example was the county failing to air ads on Navajo radio ahead of the primary about voting procedures, she said. Their translation of ballots and explanation of mail-in voting has also been haphazard, Gordon said.

Jesse Trentadue, an attorney for the county, said the plaintiffs are glossing over the changes made for the primary election and unfairly focusing on 2014 election. He said county officials take seriously their duty to make sure Navajos have equal opportunity to vote and accused the group suing of wanting special treatment.

They dont get a better opportunity. They get an equal opportunity, Trentadue said.

The battle has reignited long-festering tensions between tribal members and other residents in a rural county that sits in the Four Corners region of the West and covers the northern tip of the Navajo Nation that is mostly in Arizona and New Mexico.

Similar legal clashes have been waged recently in Nevada, Montana and the Dakotas over a variety of issues involving the Voting Rights Act, including access to polling places as well as unreliable U.S. mail service on reservations.

San Juan County, Utah officials defend the new system, saying it led to higher voter participation in 2014. They accuse the Navajo plaintiffs of fabricating the claims in the lawsuit in an attempt to control local politics.

The county lost to the Navajo Nation earlier this year in a different election policy clash when a federal judge ordered San Juan County to redraw the boundaries of its election districts after ruling that it had violated equal protection for American Indians. The tribe argued in a lawsuit filed in 2012 that the countys decision to maintain a decades-old boundary was racially motivated.

In Nevada, tribal leaders asked a federal judge earlier this month to order that state and two counties to establish satellite polling places on reservations where they say Native Americans are being denied an equal opportunity to vote in the November elections.

Two Paiute tribes accuse the secretary of state and the counties of discriminating by illegally refusing tribe members voting access afforded to people in wealthier, mostly white neighborhoods. Members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe living in Washoe County say they must travel 96 miles roundtrip to register to vote or to cast ballots in person.

In 2014 in Alaska, a federal judge ordered the state to do more to help Native language speakers understand their ballots after voters argued voting materials in both Yupik and Gwichin were inaccurately translated and poorly distributed.

Filfred, a member of the Navajo Nation Council, part of tribal government, said many Navajos dont understand the mail-in ballot.

They would rather go to a polling place. Thats what theyre accustomed to, and they want that back, Filfred said. If you take that away from them, youre messing with their voting rights.

___

Associated Press writer Scott Sonner contributed to this story from Reno, Nevada.
BILLINGS, Mont.  Exxon Mobil Corp. has agreed to pay $12 million for environmental damages caused by a pipeline break that spilled 63,000 gallons (238,474 liters) of oil into Montanas Yellowstone River and prompted a national debate over lax pipeline safety rules, officials said Wednesday.

The payment is meant to settle claims from the U.S. and state governments that the crude oil killed fish and wildlife and damaged thousands of acres along an 85-mile (137-kilometer) stretch of the famous river that flows through southern Montana.

Court approval is pending before U.S. Magistrate Judge Carolyn Ostby.

Exxon could face further penalties for violations of federal water pollution laws, a matter not addressed in the settlement.

The pipeline break upstream of Billings, Montanas largest city, required a monthslong cleanup.

A U.S. Transportation Department investigation found Exxon workers failed to adequately heed warnings that the 20-year-old pipeline was at risk from flooding.

Gov. Steve Bullock, Attorney General Tim Fox and representatives of the U.S. Justice Department announced the $12 million settlement at the site of the pipeline break in Laurel. The Associated Press obtained details in advance.

All of us as Montanans lost something when that spill occurred, Bullock said. This money is to make sure not just that were compensated but the pelicans are where they should be, the fish are where they should be.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General John Cruden said restoration of the river is not done.

Were going to work to bring the river back to where it would have been but for that spill event. Cruden said.

Some $4.7 million of the settlement will go to shoreline and channel restoration and improvement, Fox said. Another $3.6 million will be for wildlife habitat restoration, $2.4 million for improving recreational access, $900,000 for restoration planning and $400,000 for improving white pelican breeding areas, he said.

Montana will receive $9.5 million from the settlement, and the federal government will get the remaining $2.5 million.

Exxon previously said it spent $135 million on cleanup and repair work. Separately, the company has paid $2.6 million to resolve federal safety and state pollution violations.

Company spokeswoman Ashley Smith Alemayehu said in a statement that the settlement is an adequate resolution to restore, rehabilitate and or replace injured natural resources and services to pre-spill conditions.

The accident sparked a national discussion over the adequacy of safety rules for thousands of pipelines crossing beneath rivers, lakes and other waterways. Many of those pipelines were installed decades ago in shallow trenches and can be left exposed after floodwaters scour river bottoms.

In the years since the spill  and at the urging of safety regulators  oil and pipeline companies, including Exxon, have re-installed some lines at greater depths to reduce the risk of accidents.

However, there still are no regulatory mandates for lines to be deeply buried. In January 2015, another shallow pipeline broke and spilled 30,000 gallons (113,559 liters) further downstream along the Yellowstone near the town of Glendive.

Penalties against Exxon for possible federal Clean Water Act violations stemming from the 2011 spill have not yet been levied. An investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency continues, agency spokesman Richard Mylott said.

A consent decree detailing terms of Wednesdays settlement was to be filed in U.S. District Court in Montana. The deal will be finalized pending a 30-day public comment period and court approval.

___

Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter at https://twitter.com/matthewbrownap
A civil lawsuit has been filed against the city of Tucumcari by the owner of a hotel burned in 2014 by former Tucumcari police officer Dustin Lopez.

Lawrence and Martha Phillip, Maggie Ventures, LLC, filed the lawsuit on Aug. 31 in the Quay County District Court.

The Phillips are seeking damages for negligence, negligent hiring and supervision, deliberate interference and civil rights violations in connection with the burning of the Payless Inn hotel on Route 66.

The Phillips are represented by attorney Rick Queener of Clovis.

Queener could not be reached for comment.

In the lawsuit, Phillip alleges, the city of Tucumcari knowingly hired Lopez despite a conflict with the citys policies. The Tucumcari Police Department neglected to investigate Lopez for alleged criminal activities while on duty, the suit claims.

The city of Tucumcari was informed about the suit and has begun consulting with the citys attorney, City Manager Jared Langenegger said.

Langenegger declined additional comment.

Lopez and co-defendant Robert Sandoval pleaded guilty on July 24, 2015, to charges related to fires at the Payless Inn on East Route 66 and an abandoned home on Fourth Street.

Lopez was sentenced on Sept. 25, 2015, to 4 1/2 years in prison and Sandoval was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

Phillip said the three buildings on the Payless Inn property, all of which were destroyed in the blaze, were valued at $155,155.

During Lopezs sentencing hearing, Phillip said he and his wife bought the Payless Inn and Apache Hotel with the intention of moving to Tucumcari because they saw potential in the city. He said he spoke with Lopez about keeping the property safe.

Lopez told me that he would personally make sure nothing would happen to our property, Phillip said. It blew my mind when I later found out that Lopez was involved in the fire that destroyed the very building he promised to look after.

Lopez resigned from the Tucumcari Police Department on Oct. 2, 2014, the day after New Mexico State Police searched his home. Lopez did not give a reason for his decision to resign, Police Chief Jason Braziel said.

On Oct. 6, 2015, Lopez and Sandoval surrendered themselves to the Quay County Detention Center. They are serving their sentences in the New Mexico Department of Corrections.



2016 the Quay County Sun (Tucumcari, N.M.)

Visit the Quay County Sun (Tucumcari, N.M.) at www.qcsunonline.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

_____
ORLANDO  Hillary Clinton has decided its about time she do more talking about Hillary Clinton.

After a year and a half of running for president, the Democratic nominee has concluded that many Americans still do not have a clear understanding of what motivates her or what she would do as president. So in the campaigns home stretch, Clinton is trying to reintroduce herself and her ideas to the country.

Clinton has been unable to break through the cacophony of attacks and counterattacks she and Republican nominee Donald Trump have been yelling at each other. But she tried to do just that here Wednesday with a speech about what she envisions as an inclusive economy in which everyone, including the disabled, has a responsibility to contribute and an opportunity to get ahead.

Clintons objective is twofold: To lift her sagging approval ratings as well as build trust in her agenda and earn a mandate that could help her, should she be elected, govern in a divided Washington.

We were hurting in people not understanding enough about her, still, as long as shes been in the public eye, said Jennifer Palmieri, Clintons communications director. People see so much negativity. . . . Its a lot of destruction, and she felt that people needed to see what she believed the country could aspire to.

Whether the new approach will translate into fewer attacks on Trump remains to be seen. Clinton is drawn to Trump-bashing most days she appears in public. She talks about Trump and tweets about Trump and runs advertisements about Trump. Defining him as unfit for office is at the core of her strategy to win.

Yet Clintons strategists believe such messages may not be enough. As David Axelrod, the architect of President Barack Obamas campaigns, put it: The danger of that is if Trump finds a way to normalize himself it can be a trap door.

Clintons event in Orlando, orchestrated to spotlight people with disabilities, whose livelihoods Clinton vowed would be a vital aspect of my presidency, was a deliberate contrast with Trump, who infamously mocked a disabled reporter last year. Yet Clinton never uttered Trumps name, or even allude to him, and instead talked about her own vision for the country.

All month, Clinton has tried to sell herself anew. She published a 288-page book, Stronger Together, listing her many policy proposals. Last week in North Carolina, she reflected upon her lifelong commitment to the fight for children and families. And in an address Monday aimed at younger voters  with whom she is particularly struggling to connect  Clinton detailed her plan for debt-free college as well as motivation to right the countrys wrongs.

Even if youre totally opposed to Donald Trump, you may still have some questions about me, Clinton said at Temple University in Philadelphia. I get that. And I want to do my best to answer those questions. When it comes to public service, the service part has always easier for me than the public part.

Still, Clintons swipes at Trump tend to draw the loudest applause and biggest headlines. At Mondays event, when Clinton said, We have to stand up to this hate, the crowd erupted and stopped her mid-thought.

People dont hear anything but what you say about Trump, Palmieri said. If Hillary Clinton gives a speech thats 75 percent about herself and 25 percent about Donald Trump, [the media] cover the part about Donald Trump.

It is not simply a problem with the media. Clinton and her campaign have focused so acutely on destroying Trump that Axelrod said they have left a gaping hole in their narrative: Who is she? Why is she running for president? Why should people have trust in her? Why should they feel invested in her candidacy?

Axelrod said Clintons Democratic National Convention was successful in part because the speakers answered those questions. But that was July. The impact of it faded away, he said, and theyve had a hard time sustaining that story.

Polling indicates that many of Clintons economic policies  including paid leave for employees with children or caring for sick family members, as well as increased spending to lower public college tuition and build or improve infrastructure  have widespread support. In this months Washington Post-ABC News poll, 50 percent of registered voters said Clinton is closer to them on the issues, while 41 percent said the same of Trump.

But Clinton is a flawed messenger because of deep character doubts. Just 34 percent of voters said she was honest and trustworthy in the Post-ABC survey, the same share that said the same about Trump.

Both campaigns can definitely influence the narrative about the other candidate, said Republican pollster David Winston. What they struggle to do is get control of their own narrative.

Palmieri said Clintons current series of Stronger Together speeches is designed to articulate her values system and vision in a more literal and deliberate way than she has so far. The effort will continue at next Mondays debate, where Clinton hopes to showcase these ideas before a massive television audience.

The country is so sick of the back and forth negativity of the campaign, and I think voters are hungry for her communicating positively about how she wants to lead the country, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg said.

Most Americans by now know that Trump wants to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, deport illegal immigrants and rewrite trade deals. But Clinton lacks a crisp and memorable distillation of her agenda and rationale for her candidacy.

Voters arent going to be able to rattle off her bullet points, said Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic strategist. Still, she said, Were at a point in the campaign where voters want to hear what candidates are going to do  not just whats wrong with your opponent, but why you.

In such a toxic atmosphere of partisanship, some of Clintons allies are also urging her to take her rhetoric to a higher plane and show how she would find common ground with her adversaries. Former senator Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut), the Democratic Partys 2000 vice presidential nominee, said there is a yearning for bipartisan cooperation.

Its conventional wisdom today that negativity wins elections, but it might be a really distinguishing factor if she affirmatively said, Ive got a record that shows I will work across party lines to break the gridlock in Washington, and Im going to focus on this if Im elected,  Lieberman said.

Clintons strategy has implications beyond Election Day, should she win.

If she is able to claim a mandate, as opposed to just skating by because she was considered the least bad of two flawed candidates, she would potentially have leverage with a divided Congress. Its a challenging goal given how much she has framed the election as a referendum on Trump; Clinton risks the result being interpreted as a repudiation of him, rather than a validation of her.

Elections are really contracts between candidates and the American people, and it really matters what the terms of the contract are, said William A. Galston, a policy adviser to former president Bill Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

If you dont say it or you dont say it in a way that people can hear it and remember it, then when you propose it as one of your first pieces of legislation and hope that there will be some resonance in the country, youre likely to be disappointed.

Central to Clintons ability to claim a governing mandate, let alone win the election, is to rebuild her trust with voters. One way she is trying to do that is by humanizing herself.

Clinton rarely opens up about her Methodist faith, but she talked extensively about it in Kansas City a couple weeks ago, and offered humility: Ive made my share of mistakes. I dont know anyone who hasnt.

Then, in a speech in Greensboro, North Carolina, Clinton talked about her friendship with Janelle Turner, a breast-cancer patient who showed up at a Clinton rally last fall in Iowa holding a sign that read: Thirteenth chemo yesterday. Three more. Hear me roar!

Wouldnt you want to meet the woman behind that sign? Clinton said. Well, I sure did. So we got talking, and weve stayed in touch. She keeps promising me shell see me at the inauguration.

In her address to millennials in Philadelphia, Clinton reflected upon her activist roots and the values she learned from an early mentor, civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman, and their work with the Childrens Defense Fund. She said those values  driving progress by changing both hearts and laws  would shape her presidency.

You want something to vote for, Clinton said, not just against.

  

The Washington Posts Emily Guskin in Washington and John Wagner in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

clinton-analysis-1stld-writethru
WASHINGTON  The sculpture was packed in bubble wrap inside a taped-up box and was wheeled on a dolly to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial one day last month by three people who looked to be in their 60s.

They asked Al Gallant, a volunteer guide, if it was OK to leave a memento. Sure, he said. They pushed the cart down the path to the Wall, took the sculpture from the box, and walked away. One of them paused to snap a picture as they departed.

What they had left was an unusual piece  macabre, Gallant called it. And, like many of the 400,000 items left at the Wall since 1982, it had a story.

The object was the painted bust of an American soldier, one side of the face depicting a smooth-skinned young serviceman, the other an aged, long-haired veteran with pocked features and a tearful, staring eye.

On one side, the top of the head was protected by an Army helmet. On the other, the helmet and skull were cut away to reveal the gray folds of the brain, etched with the names of battles and slogans from the war.

The dog tag on the sculpture bore the name, blood type and religion of Army Pvt. Leo C. Buckley Jr., a Vietnam veteran who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 60 in Walterboro, South Carolina.

But the face was that of Samuel Elliott, 73, a church deacon who lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He is the artist who created the sculpture.

Both men served in the war. Both saw combat. Both suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Neither knew the other during the war.

It was Buckleys widow who, with two friends, left the sculpture at the Wall, which bears the names of more than 58,000 men and women claimed by the war. She snapped the photo as she walked away.

Clay Buckley had been a paratrooper with the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade during the war, and was severely injured when he stepped on a land mine, which tore off a chunk of one of his legs.

He spent 13 months recuperating in hospitals.

Elliott served with an Army survey team, which helicoptered into the bush and selected sites where artillery could be placed. He was hit by shrapnel, and lost a revered commander who had served as a father figure.

Following the war, Elliotts life fell apart and he was in and out of a veterans hospital in Georgia for counseling, he said. It was after a final stay in the mid-1990s that he started work on the sculpture as part of his healing.

He had realized the Vietnam veterans dilemma: Were back, but the memories of the war are embedded in our brain so deeply that we cant seem to escape that part of us, he said in a recent telephone interview.

An artist and a writer, he said he did the first version of the sculpture in bronze as personal therapy in 1995. But he produced eleven more versions in high-density plaster of Paris for fellow veterans.

I would hand engrave their name and serial number and all that on the dog tag, to personalize it for them, he said.

He explained the two sides to the sculpture:

First, youre proud to be an American soldier, he said. By God, Im in uniform and Im here and Im ready to do what Ive go to do.

Afterward, you feel scarred, he said. You feel wounded. Youre aged. Youve matured way too fast, came back an old man in spirit. Elliott, a native of Hendersonville, said he was drafted in 1966, and was in a field artillery unit in the 1st Air Cavalry Division. He was in Vietnam from March 15, 1967, to March 15, 1968, and had a job that was often dangerous.

We had to go out in small groups out in the middle of nowhere all by ourselves, he said. Got shot at I dont know how many times. . . . They used us as scouts. . . . It was to position our artillery.

Helicopters would then airlift artillery pieces to sites selected by the surveyors, he said.

His most wrenching experience of the war was the death of a commander, Lt. Col. Robert Whitbeck, to whom he had grown close. He said he often served as Whitbecks jeep driver, and he has an old photo of them shaking hands.

It really affected me, Elliott said. I really loved the guy. He became almost like a father figure. . . . [He had] all the attributes of a great leader. . . . Id have stuck my neck out any time for him.

Whitbeck was killed Jan. 30, 1968. Elliott said his recollection is that the jeep Whitbeck was riding in that day was hit by a mortar during an attack.

After Elliott left Vietnam he stayed in the Army for 15 years, but was medically discharged with migraine headaches. Thats when my life began to fall apart, he said. I was lost.

  

Buckley was originally from Vienna, Virginia, his wife, Susan, said in a telephone interview this month.

She said he joined the Army in 1968, when he was 19, and was blown up in 1969, after being in Vietnam about three months.

His combat injuries were severe.

His leg was badly damaged, she said. They wanted to take it off, but he wouldnt let them. . . . He didnt wear anything but long pants for the longest period of time. . . . Half his leg was missing in the calf.

He had also been peppered with shrapnel. He used to sit at the kitchen table and dig . . . pieces of shrapnel with a knife out of his arm, she said. He was given the Purple Heart and Bronze Star medals, but seldom spoke of the war.

Discharged from the Army in 1970, Buckley, who worked as a truck driver, was reluctant to seek help for his PTSD, his wife said. Finally I convinced him, You do have problems,  she said. He never believed that he did. About 2004 or so he finally went . . . and got treatments and medicines.

It was about that time that Buckley and Elliott crossed paths. Elliott said he was passing through the Washington area en route to an art show, and was introduced to Buckley by a mutual acquaintance.

Buckley, a student of the Civil War, took Elliott on a tour of the Manassas Battlefield, near where the Buckleys were then living.

The two men soon shared their Vietnam war experiences. I think thats why they got along so well as soon as they met, Susan Buckley said.

Elliott told Buckley about his Vietnam sculptures, and Buckley requested one. Susan Buckley said her husband thought it was a perfect rendering of the Vietnam veterans experience.

Elliott personalized the sculpture, adding the 173rd Airborne Brigades blue-and-white winged patch.

Susan Buckley said the bust was prominently displayed in the living room of their home in Manassas, Virginia, and later the sun porch of their home in South Carolina.

Some visitors found it overwhelming, she said. But I guess if youve been there, and understand why it looks like that, its not so hard.

Recently, in the process of moving, she decided to bring the sculpture to the Wall. I was the only one who saw it, she said. I thought other people should see it. . . . I thought maybe it might help somebody else. . . . Its very self-explanatory if youve been in Vietnam.

She typed up a summary of her husbands service and taped it to the bottom of the sculpture. I need to honor my husband somehow, and I thought this is the way to do it, she said.

With the help of friends, she transported the bust from South Carolina.

After she placed the piece at the Wall on Aug. 24, Gallant, the volunteer, left it there for several hours. Later, the National Park Service took custody of it and moved it to the Park Services Museum Resource Center, in suburban Maryland.

There it joined the thousands of other objects left in tribute to those on the Wall, and to the veterans of the war who carried its legacy.

soldier-sculpture
CHARLOTTE, N.C.  The latest on police shooting and protests in Charlotte, North Carolina (all times local):

12 a.m.

Groups of protesters are trying to stop cars driving on the downtown highway loop around Charlotte.

Footage from TV station helicopters showed about three dozen people on Interstate 277 trying to stop cars late Thursday night. Several cars made it through, dodging people.

It was the latest incident in a night of violence in Charlottes normally vibrant downtown. One man was shot and critically wounded, several reporters and people were attacked, windows were shattered and small fires set Wednesday night.

Police have not given an update on the number of people or police officers hurt.

There also were destructive protests Tuesday. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory has declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard.

___

11:30 p.m.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency in Charlotte as protests over a police shooting turned violent for a second night.

McCrory said in a statement late Wednesday he was also sending the National Guard to Charlotte as scattered groups of protesters continued to attack reporters and other people, break windows and set small fires in North Carolinas largest city.

Wednesdays protests started as a prayer vigil, but a group split off and marched through downtown. The march turned violent after a protester was shot and critically injured. City officials say police did not fire the shot.

After the shooting, police in riot gear began firing tear gas and marching through downtown arm in arm.

Keith Scott was shot to death Tuesday. Police say he had a gun, but neighbors and his family say he only had a book.

___

9:50 p.m.

Charlotte officials say a man shot during a protest is in critical condition but was not wounded by a police officer.

The city of Charlotte made the announcement Wednesday night on its Twitter feed, reversing an earlier statement that the man had died.

The man was shot as police in riot gear protected an upscale hotel in downtown Charlotte.

After the shooting, protesters began throwing bottles, dirt clods and fireworks at the officers. The police fired flash grenades and then tear gas back, dispersing the crowd of several hundred.

But groups of protesters kept marching around downtown, followed by police in riot gear who continued to fire tear gas at them.

The protesters were angry about the police shooting of Keith Lamont on Tuesday at his condominium complex. Police said the black man had a gun, while neighbors and his family said he was holding a book.

Video of the shooting has not been released.

___

This item has been corrected to show that the city now says the man is in critical condition, not dead.

___

9:10 p.m.

The emergency medical service in Charlotte says a person has been taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries from an apparent gunshot wound.

Charlotte Medic tweeted that the person was injured Wednesday night but didnt give details.

The service says it has taken eight patients  seven law-enforcement officers and one civilian  to area hospitals during protests over the police shooting of a black man.

___

8:35 p.m.

Protesters have rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.

At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasnt immediately clear how.

Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance.

Officers on bicycles surrounded a pool of blood on the ground and a few people threw bottles and clods of dirt at police.

The tense standoff continued as police fired small canisters of tear gas into the protesters.

___

8:30 p.m.

Groups of college students are descending on the condominium complex parking lot where a black man was shot and killed by a black Charlotte police officer.

One group of students came from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, about 80 miles away. Others came from Guilford College, also in Greensboro.

Meanwhile, students and faculty from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte canvassed the neighborhood, some of them offering words of comfort while others passed out water.

Before nightfall, a memorial was set up at the site where Scott was shot. People prayed and held candles, and flowers were placed beneath a table.

___

8:10 p.m.

A prayer vigil over the fatal police shooting of a black man in Charlotte has turned into a protest march through downtown.

Several hundred marchers have been angry but peaceful Wednesday night as they shouted slogans like Hands up; dont shoot and Black lives matter outside downtown landmarks.

Police blocked off streets, and some protesters yelled and pointed at them, but officers did not react.

The scene was in contrast to Tuesdays protest, which turned violent with protesters threw rocks and damaged police vehicles.

___

6:30 p.m.

The White House says President Barack Obama has called the mayors of Charlotte and Tulsa to get an update on protests after fatal shootings involving police officers and a black victim.

Obama made calls to mayors Jennifer Roberts of Charlotte and Dewey Bartlett of Tulsa.

The White House says Obama expressed his condolences to both mayors and affirmed the administrations commitment to provide assistance as needed.

Obama and the mayors reiterated that protests should be conducted in a peaceful manner and that local law enforcement should find ways to calmly engage those protesting.

The White House says Obama will continue to get updates on the situations from Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

___

3:45 p.m.

The mother of a man shot to death by Charlotte police says he was a family man.

Keith Lamont Scotts mother, Vernita Walker of Charleston, South Carolina, told The Charlotte Observer that her son had seven children.

She told the newspaper: He was a family man . And he was a likable person. And he loved his wife and his children.

Scott has a criminal record in three states, including Texas, South Carolina and North Carolina. Texas records show that he was convicted of evading arrest with a vehicle in 2005, and several months later of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

In 1992 in South Carolina, records show Scott pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Court records also show a misdemeanor assault conviction in North Carolina from 2004.

___

3:10 p.m.

About 100 students gathered at the student union at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to protest the shooting death of a black man by a police officer about a mile from campus.

The students first gathered on a patio behind the student union and were led in prayer. They walked back into the union and held a lay-in by lying on the green-carpeted floor in the rotunda.

Some students wore T-shirts reading Black Lives Matter. Eventually, they began singing This Little Light of Mine.

The schools chancellor was scheduled to speak later Wednesday afternoon.

Police say Keith Lamont Scott refused repeated demands to drop a handgun and was shot. Neighborhood residents say Scott was unarmed when he was shot to death.

___

2:45 p.m.

Court records indicate that the man shot to death by Charlotte police had a criminal record including an assault conviction.

Mecklenburg County records matching Keith Lamont Scotts name and birth date show Scott was charged in April 2004 with multiple counts, including felony assault with a deadly weapon. Records show that most of the charges were dismissed, and he pleaded guilty to a single charge of misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon.

Records from nearby Gaston County show that Scott pleaded guilty to driving while impaired in 2015.

A woman who identified herself as an advocate for Scotts family, Annette Albright, said at a news conference that he shouldnt be re-victimized because of things he did in the past.

She told reporters: What he was doing at the time of the shooting is whats relevant.

___

A woman who identified herself as the mother of a black man who was shot to death by Charlotte police says her son was raised in the Charleston, South Carolina, area.

Vernita Walker told The Post and Courier (http://bit.ly/2dbsqY1) that her son Keith Lamont Scott attended James Island Charter School, but she refused to comment further to the newspaper.

A woman who identified herself as Scotts mother answered a cellphone listed for Scotts sister and told The Associated Press the family was not commenting.

At the Walker residence in a neighborhood of modest ranch homes near Charleston, a man standing in the driveway, who would not give his name, said the family had no comment. He said a statement might be issued on Thursday.

___

12:30 p.m.

The North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urged Charlotte police to release any footage from body or dashboard cameras of a fatal shooting this week.

The ACLU noted that a new North Carolina law restricting release of such footage doesnt take effect until Oct. 1. That new law says footage from police body or dashboard cameras cant be released publicly without a court order.

Karen Anderson, executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina, issued a statement that said the Charlotte police department should release any footage in the interest of transparency.

Charlottes police chief has said the officer who shot Keith Lamont Scott was not wearing a body camera, but chief Kerr Putney also says he cannot release body camera and dashboard camera video from other officers because of the ongoing investigation.

___

12 p.m.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the police shooting deaths in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Charlotte, North Carolina, are highlighting the most vivid and painful divisions that persist between law enforcement and communities of color.

Lynch made her comments at the beginning of her address to the International Bar Association Conference in Washington. She says the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into the death of Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa and the agency is in regular contact with Charlotte authorities as the investigation begins there.

Charlottes police chief says 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott refused multiple warnings to drop a handgun before a black officer fatally shot the black man.

A woman claiming to be Scotts daughter posted a video to Facebook soon after the shooting, saying that her father had an unspecified disability and was unarmed when he was shot.

___

10:45 a.m.

An outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam is calling for an economic boycott of Charlotte after a police officer shot a man to death.

B.J. Murphy called for the boycott Wednesday at a news conference of black leaders, saying if black lives dont matter, black money shouldnt matter.

Murphy and others were reacting to the police shooting of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was killed Tuesday. Authorities say he had a gun and refused officers commands to drop it. The officer who fired the fatal shot is also black.

A woman claiming to be Scotts daughter said in a video posted on Facebook that her father was unarmed and had a book, not a gun. Police say they did not find a book at the scene.

___

10:30 a.m.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney says officers recovered a gun that they say a man had when he was shot and killed by an officer.

Putney said at a news conference Wednesday that 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott had a gun, but no book when officers searched him and his vehicle. A woman claiming to be Scotts daughter said in a video posted on Facebook that her father was unarmed and had a book, not a gun.

The womans claims could not be verified by The Associated Press.

Putney also says several police vehicles were damaged in the protests that followed Wednesday afternoons shooting.

Putney says the officer who shot Scott, Brently Vinson, was not wearing a body camera. Putney says he cannot release body camera and dashboard camera video from other officers because of the ongoing investigation.

___

9:45 a.m.

The Charlotte police chief says officers gave 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott multiple warnings to drop a handgun before fatally shooting him.

Police Chief Kerr Putney said during a news conference Wednesday morning that officers were searching for a suspect Tuesday when they saw Scott exit a vehicle with a handgun. He says the officers told him to drop the gun and that he got out of the vehicle a second time still carrying the gun. He says the man was shot because he posed a threat.

He says officers requested medical help and performed CPR on the black man.

The black officer who shot Scott has been placed on administrative leave while the shooting is investigated.

The chief said 16 officers sustained minor injuries during protests Tuesday night and that one person has been arrested.

___

9:20 a.m.

A civil rights activist says he has a powerful witness to the shooting of a black man by a black Charlotte police officer at an apartment complex.

John Barnett said Wednesday morning that the witness did not see 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott make any threatening gestures toward officers before he was shot Tuesday afternoon. Scott died at the scene of the shooting.

Barnett did not immediately name the witness.

Protests lasted throughout the night, damaging police cars, causing minor injuries to about a dozen officers and closing down a part of Interstate 85 not far from the shooting scene.

Charlottes mayor and police chief also plan to make statements about the shooting Wednesday morning.

___

9:10. a.m.

Charlotte officials plan to release a statement on the latest in their investigation of the shooting of a black man by a black police officer Tuesday afternoon.

The statement was to be released at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if a city spokesman would take questions on the investigation.

Streets in Charlotte were clear Wednesday morning after angry motorists protested over the shooting Tuesday night.

Forty-three-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was shot to death by an officer who has been placed on administrative leave during the investigation into the shooting.

Scotts family was expected to meet with reporters at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

___

5:50 a.m.

The streets in Charlotte, North Carolina, are quiet Wednesday morning after angry protests over the fatal police shooting of a black man left officers injured and shut down an interstate.

Traffic is flowing again on Interstate 85, hours after protesters blocked the highway and television footage showed some apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire.

No protesters could be seen around 5 a.m. but broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized during protests earlier. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance to a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.

The protests broke out Tuesday after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by a black officer at an apartment complex on the citys northeast side.

___

3 a.m.

Demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of a black man by a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina, have shut down a small section of Interstate 85.

TV footage early Wednesday showed dozens of protesters on the highway facing a line of law enforcement officers. At one point a fire flared up.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation website shows a portion of the highway near UNC Charlotte is closed in both directions. The website says the closure is due to police activity.

Neither the North Carolina Highway Patrol nor Charlotte police could immediately be reached for comment.

The protest comes after police on Tuesday fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott. Demonstrators had gathered earlier near the scene of the shooting before a smaller group moved to the highway.
LOS LUNAS  Rio Rancho police officer Gregg Benner wasnt going to survive the shooting.

He sustained unsurvivable injuries, said Dr. Drew Harrell, a University of New Mexico Hospital physician who worked on Benner after the fatal shooting.

Harrell testified Wednesday during the trial against Andrew Romero, who is charged with first-degree murder and lesser offenses in Benners death. The day marked the end of the states side of the case.

Romeros defense is expected to call its first witnesses beginning this morning. The trial may come to a close this week.

Benner was shot three times in a Rio Rancho strip mall during a traffic stop on May 25, 2015. Police said he had stopped Tabitha Littles and Romero, her passenger, while they were on their way to commit a robbery.

Romero is accused of forcing Littles out of the car and then opening fire, fatally wounding Benner. Romero then fled the scene and was arrested hours later in the South Valley.

Harrell said that one of the bullets that struck Benner took a devastating track through the officers body.

It entered Benners left shoulder and then traveled downward, piercing his lungs, heart and liver.

Lori Proe, a forensic pathologist for the Office of the Medical Investigator, said that bullet caused Benners death.

Harrell told jurors that Benner would have lost consciousness shortly after the shooting from a lack of blood flow to the brain.

The jury was seated earlier this month for the trial, which began Sept. 8 in Valencia County. Thirteenth Judicial District Judge George Eichwald moved the trial because of public excitement in Sandoval County.

Jurors on Wednesday also heard testimony from Steve Guerra, a forensic scientist for the state Department of Public Safety.

Guerra said his analysis found that a 9 mm pistol recovered at a gas station where police took Romero and several others into custody is the same weapon that was fired at Benner. He said he can say with practical certainty it was the same gun.
Since June 2015, when Donald J. Trump entered the presidential race, there has been a list of long unseen, unheard or imagined things that have, for the electorate, become real.

But on Tuesday evening in North Carolina, Trumps prevailing sense that oh so much is wrong with America and that he alone can fix it  all of it  may have detached him from reality.

Speaking to a crowd gathered at a Trump rally in Kenansville, N.C., Trump said this:

Were going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape theyve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.

Ever. Got that? Well, those who have cleared the grand bar of eighth-grade history should not.

Political views and goals aside, the facts here simply do not line up with Trumps assessment. Trump not only stood on a stage in an area of the country where Jim Crow policies were the law of the land, but in a town named after James Kenan. Kenan, a sheriff and legislator, was also scion of a major slave-owning family which held other human beings in bondage on a plantation named Liberty Hall.

Someone please show Trump the definition of the word irony. Then provide him with some books on 19th and 20th century U.S. history, stat.

Objectively, Jim Crow was quite bad. Slavery was worse. The inability to defend ones self or demand justice; vote or even register to vote; or make full use of public facilities, transit systems, schools and other public resources for which black tax dollars have always helped to pay, was quite bad. It was sometimes deadly. The wholesale theft of labor, ones children and ones humanity was worse. It was often deadly too.

Trump has one thing right here. We live in far-from-perfect times today, as the police shooting in Oklahoma and subsequent misinformation that followed readily reminds us all. There are indeed poor black Americans, a minority of the total group, but one that also matters. And a look at every measure of socioeconomic well being continues to indicate that racial disparities persist in housing, health care, wealth, education and so on. But missing from Trumps all the blacks are living lives fit for scenes from The Bronx Is Burning  talk is the following reality.

A full 76 percent of black Americans do not live in poverty. Thats the vast majority. Nearly 57 percent of the black population is employed (that same figure is 60.1 percent for white Americans, lest any stereotypes come to mind here). Black Americans shared in the declines in poverty and modest increase in wages announced by the Census Bureau last week, although disparities between groups remain. Health insurance coverage disparities for children have disappeared, due in large part to the Affordable Care Act, and they continue to narrow for adults. Republican lawmakers in states around the country continue to restrict voting rights and early voting options, but voting is not life-imperiling activity. And of course, there is that whole freedom and natural-born citizen thing.

Challenges remain. But there simply is no objective measure in which black life in America today is worse than it has ever been in the past. And its that fact that exposes Trumps ever-more-dystopian descriptions of black life in America for exactly what it is. Trump doesnt aim to speak to the realities of black life or the ongoing challenges in the headlines today which disproportionately imperil black lives. In other words, he does not speak to black voters about their actual reality, and therefore has no need to advance Trump solutions to these actual problems and, in doing so, actually compete for black votes.

As has been said and written many times, this is the way that a man who knows little of black life speaks to white voters who know little of black life and are therefore inclined to find Trumps hyperbole believable, to hear Trumps descriptions as evidence of compassion or cognizance of the way that race functions in American life.

For white voters in need of some assurance that Trump is not racist, this may be sufficient. For white voters in need of no such assurance, Trumps comments also, quite conveniently, manage to affirm an array of racial stereotypes.

And while Trumps acknowledgment that race continues to shape experience in the United States in myriad ways would, on its face, seem like a departure from Republican orthodoxy, in truth it is anything but. Trump rarely ventures into the realm of why racial socioeconomic disparities exist or what policy solutions might be necessary to eliminate them. He only affirms that they exist. He makes vague associations between them and Democrats or, more specifically, Hillary Clinton and President Obama. And in so doing, he leaves space for those voters already in his camp and those contemplating a place in it to fill in those conspicuous blanks.

This is where we are. It is plenty alarming. But it is not worse than ever, ever before.

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He manages simultaneously to embody, and undermine, the art form.

Earlier this year, Trump appropriated Luciano Pavarottis iconic rendition of the Turandot aria Nessun Dorma, or none shall sleep, on the campaign trail. This wasnt entirely surprising; the final lyric is Vincero  I will win  a Trumpian declaration if there ever was one. This pushed Pavarottis family to join a list of popular musicians from Adele to R.E.M.s Mike Mills in demanding that Trump cease playing their music at his odious campaign events. Specifically, the Pavarotti family denounced the Republican nominees call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration as at odds with Pavarottis work, before his death in 2007, on behalf of refugees as a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Theyre not the only ones who wish Trump would desist. Classically trained musician Steven Krage wrote, I am moved to tears because this music, which is my very lifes blood, is being used to bolster the image of a monster. He has defiled the sanctity of art, as he has defiled the rights of women, minorities, and the disabled. The fact that this aria could be playing while Trump ridiculed a handicapped reporter with a nerve condition or telling another to go back to Telemundo! is almost too much for me to bear. Though he cited a Slate piece that explains how Turandot and Puccinis later work have fascist undertones, and that, as Brian Wise notes, playing it at Trumps rallies arouses grand emotions over rationality, Krage insists that its time for the opera community, and the artistic community in general, to speak out as much as we can about Trump glomming onto our lifes work and using it for his smear campaign.

But outrage from the opera world over Trump may be driven more by recognition of the uncomfortable fact that Trump would fit right in as a character in many of the grand works of the genre.

Opera moves us with its combination of parable and sentimentality wrought from music, heightened emotion and narrative exaggeration  it is, in many cases (if youll forgive the anachronistic analogy) the soap opera of its time. It can also inspire and impress with lavish sets and vocal pyrotechnics. Even the often luxurious seating, not to mention those in the seats, can offer visual pleasure, an opulent escape from the everyday. And Trump is the political figure who most resembles all these things. Read any review of his latest faux-roque hotel property, with its $18,000-per-night suites, lavish amenities and Phantom of the Opera-style chandeliers and the word that comes to mind right after gross is, well, operatic.

Trump is a charismatic villain who wields flourishes that almost feel like theyre from another era: bragging to tabloid reporters about his sexual exploits via a made-up spokesman; building gaudy resorts that are seemingly held together by his all-caps surname (which, itself, is an aggressive verb) emblazoned on their facades; the patriarch of a family of adult children both devoted to him and seemingly unable to move out of his ultimately toxic shadow. His brand and arrogant swagger combine in a extravagant pantomime, drawing in his followers and ushering them past his many business failures.

His life story is the stuff of librettos: scion of a commercially ruthless grandfather and overbearing father; a tutelage at the feet of unsavory characters; thorny marriages to glamorous women, now, a quest for power. As in Nessun Dorma, Trump has had his eye on victory at all costs. In some ways, that win has seemed, throughout this campaign, like his only goal, as if he were involved in a meta reality show. He wants, as Seth Grossman writes, to receive a rose, to be president. And the quest, as in Turandot, has been volatile, with violence at his campaign rallies and even a call by one Trump supporter, himself an elected official, that Hillary Clinton be shot for treason.

To be sure, music can convey dread, not just delight, and I wouldnt be the one, like Krage, to argue for the sanctity of art. Yet any association with Trump sullies the loftier aspirations of opera and its exponents, like composer Kurt Weill, who wrote music to confront contemporary ills. Or, much earlier, Mozart, who, in Don Giovanni, challenged the social order of his time. Opera has the capacity to use grandiosity and sentimentality to reveal universal truths. Trump, on the other hand, employs them to obscure truth. He can exclaim Vincero! as many times as he wants, but it wont conceal the truth that the tragedy and menace hes brought to the political sphere mean one thing: Perderemo  if he wins, we all surely lose.

 Hirsch is a musicologist and the author of books including A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League and Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment.

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WACO, Texas  Prosecutors say a Central Texas man who told investigators that his ex-girlfriend killed herself must serve life in prison for the 2014 slaying.

David Zahirniak (zuh-HAR-nee-ahk) was sentenced Tuesday in Waco. The 45-year-old man from West was convicted Monday of murder in the shooting death of 21-year-old Caitlyn Reed.

Prosecutor Hilary LaBorde described Zahirniak as a predator who battered previous girlfriends and also Reed, leading to the victims April 2014 slaying.

Investigators initially thought the woman took her own life at her home in West, based on statements from Zahirniak, then later charged him with murder.
WASHINGTON  A federal judge Wednesday released a list of all sealed requests made in Washington in 2012 for a rapidly growing form of government electronic surveillance, a step toward bringing more public scrutiny to secret law enforcement activities.

The action came in a case brought by a journalist to unseal a much larger collection of information about court-ordered surveillance of Americans telephone and Internet activity in closed criminal investigations in the nations capital.

Legal experts say even the selective release marks the first time a U.S. district court has made a systematic disclosure of how often law enforcement seeks court orders under a 1986 statute to obtain individuals electronic records from communication service providers. The release could serve as a model for court disclosure elsewhere, several legal experts said.

U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl Howell of Washington identified 235 law enforcement applications from 2012 from investigators seeking to collect the time, date, duration and source of communications to and from a targeted person, phone number or email address, or instant messaging or social network identity. The applications for what are known as pen register and trap and trace orders do not allow law enforcement to access contents of conversations.

In a 53-page filing, Howell identified applications by case number, date filed, reviewing judge and whether the request sought information about a cellular number or email address.

We are pleased that the courts seem to be recognizing that they have been, perhaps inadvertently, party to creating a culture of secrecy around the governments use of surveillance tools, said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation a reaction shared by several civil liberties groups.

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips, whose office prosecutes federal and local crimes in the District, declined to comment beyond what the office has said in court filings.

In filings, prosecutors wrote that they agreed in principle that surveillance applications and orders did not necessarily need to be permanently sealed. They also proposed making public some details from a small sample of the 235 applications from 2012 in cases that have ended.

Prosecutors said they would unseal information such as what type of crime was being investigated, but not what agency sought the order, specifics about the case, or material that would identify individuals, targeted numbers, accounts or service providers.

If the procedure here goes well, it may set an important precedent other courts can follow,said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department attorney specializing in computer crimes.

The release responded to a sweeping public-records petition by investigative journalist Jason Leopold of Vice News that was joined recently by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. Leopolds 2013 request sought all government electronic surveillance applications and orders in closed investigations that directed private service providers to turn over users call information as well as information related to tracked devices, stored emails or customer records.

The request to unseal records comes as courts increasingly take up cases testing the constitutional limits of law enforcement searches in an electronic era.

Civil liberties groups and advocates for government transparency have raised alarms that new surveillance methods coupled with computing and storage capabilities enable authorities to use laws that date to a copper-wire and telephone exchange world to sweep up vast amounts of digital data to map much of a persons movements and social relationships without a search warrant.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2014 ruled unanimously that police generally must obtain a warrant to search cellphones. But legal battles continue to work through appellate courts over such questions as whether a warrant is required to collect cell phone information using new technology devices that mimic cell towers. The devices are operated by law enforcementnot communications companies and can covertly capture a targets phone location and other information in real-time.

A Maryland appeals court in March admonished police and prosecutors for deceiving courts by using the 1986 law to justify secretly deploying the tower-mimicking equipment, which are called cell-site simulators and branded under names including StingRay, Triggerfish and Hailstorm.

Police seeking a surveillance order under the statute must tell a court only how the information theyre after is relevant to an investigation. The legal threshold for getting a search warrant is higher and requires law enforcement show a judge they have reason to believe that a particular crime has been committed

The court said using the simulators without first getting a search warrant amounted to constitutionally intrusive conduct.

Courts in recent years have also questioned police requests to use the surveillance orders to collect numbers such as passwords that are dialed after a phone call is connected.

Leopolds request to unseal records is an attempt to find out how often and in what kinds of cases law enforcement asks to track electronic data and to read the facts law enforcement provide to explain why the tracking was warranted.

Information that has emerged underscored how murky the answer is. In a court hearing Friday, prosecutors said that based on a preliminary assessment, applications under the 1986 law quadrupled in the District from 2012 to 2013 alone, climbing from 137 applications to 564. Howells order Wednesday said on more detailed review, the court found 235 applications in 2012, and did not address how many were filed the following year.

Nationwide between 2004 and 2013, the use of such orders by Justice Department agencies climbed seven-fold, to more than 42,000, department records show.

Jeffrey Louis Light, Leopolds attorney, said while all sides in the case have agreed surveillance requests should not be kept secret indefinitely, they rarely become public.

Courts do not file or docket them electronically in any uniform way to help track or identify them. In Houston, for example, surveillance requests are maintained separately from regular criminal and civil dockets, filed on paper, sealed in paper envelopes and tucked away in a vault somewhere . . . so it would difficult to find them even if someone wanted to, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen W. Smith, a longtime advocate for greater openness.

Also, some of the only people outside government who know of the orders  the targets of the investigation often do not have a motivation or the means to unseal the orders.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamela Satterfield said the government continues to view Leopolds request as overbroad, and had not taken a position yet on whether the First Amendment or other law required unsealing of the court documents he requested.

Still, prosecutors and the courts first step in the case is a fantastic and welcome sign of progress toward greater transparency in the courts, said Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Unions speech, privacy and technology project.

Added Kerr: If the government is willing to cooperate, its a positive sign. Theres no downside, and at least some upside.

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SANTA FE  Darryl Blakey has the word Love tattooed on one of his hands, according to documents from the Santa Fe County Sheriffs Office. Now, what Blakey is accused of doing with his fists has him behind bars and his 8-year-old son in the University of New Mexico Hospital with internal bleeding.

Blakey, 41, is charged with child abuse resulting in great bodily harm after his son complained of stomach pain and having trouble breathing while on the bus to Pablo Roybal Elementary School near Pojoaque on Tuesday morning. He had to be carried off the bus by school officials.

After a 911 call from the school, the boy was taken first to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center here before being transported to University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque with cuts to his spleen and liver and internal bleeding.

Emergency room doctors said the injuries had the potential to be life-threatening, according to a statement of probable cause for Blakeys arrest.

The case continues a series of high-profile alleged crimes that have made prevention, reporting and prosecuting child abuse a major issue in New Mexico.

On Aug. 24, 10-year-old Victoria Martens of Albuquerque,was found dead in her familys apartment. Police say they believe the little girl was forced to use methamphetamine before being raped and stabbed. Her dismembered and burning body was found in a bathtub. The girls mother, her boyfriend, and the boyfriends cousin have been charged in connection with the childs death.

In new Pojoaque case, Santa Fe County jail records show that Blakey remained in custody Wednesday evening on $5,000 bail under the name Darral Blakey.

Children, Youth and Families Department spokesman Henry Varela confirmed Blakeys 8-year-old son and another child from the Blakey household were in CYFD protective custody. He said he couldnt release the age or gender of the other child or say whether that child showed signs of abuse.

A school nurse who examined the injured boy Tuesday told deputies that he had fresh redness and bruising on his chest and rib area as well as bruising on his shoulder and back, according to Sheriffs Office documents. At Christus St. Vincents, the boy told deputies that Blakey hit him about 10 times in the stomach Tuesday morning and another 10 times in the back as he was trying to go wash his face. The boy said he got his belongings and walked to the bus stop after Blakey beat him.

Blakey was interviewed at the Sheriffs Office later Tuesday and said, I beat him when asked about what happened between him and his son that morning. Blakey said he was mad at the boy for getting in trouble at school and struck him between 10 and 15 times with an open hand in the chest, back and buttocks area.

Blakey said he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol during the beating but said he may have blacked out for a few seconds while hitting his son. He acknowledged that the punishment went too far and that he lost control of the situation, according to the Sheriffs Office arrest statement.

Court records show that Blakey has been charged in New Mexico with only minor traffic violations in the past.
The small, fragile Bible sat on the top shelf of a dining room closet wrapped in an old cotton dish towel until Wendy Creekmore-Porter pulled it out for historian Rex Ellis.

We dont bring it out much, Barbara Jean Person, Creekmore-Porters mother, told him.

Then I remember her saying, Because theres so much blood on it,  recalls Ellis, the associate director for curatorial affairs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ellis slowly removed the towel and looked for blood. He quickly realized the statement was figurative.

The slightly larger than pocket-size Bible had been in Porters family for three generations. Historians think that Nat Turner, a minister and enslaved field hand, was holding it when he was captured two months after leading a rebellion against slaveholders in Southampton County, Virginia.

The 1831 slave revolt was the bloodiest in U.S. history. It left at least 55 white Virginians dead, including members of the Person family, and was followed by angry retribution. After the revolt, about 200 blacks were killed  some beheaded and their heads put on roadside stakes as a gruesome warning.

In 1912, Turners Bible was given to a member of the Person family by local officials who wanted to turn it over to a family affected by the revolt. The book had been one of the pieces of evidence from Turners 1831 trial. It was passed down to Creekmore-Porters stepfather, Maurice Person, whose great-grandmother, Lavinia Francis, was hidden by house slaves during the rebellion and survived.

Creekmore-Porter, who teaches womens studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, said she wanted the Bible to be in a place that preserved it and honored it. After the PBS series Antiques Roadshow declined to appraise the Bible during a taping nearby, Creekmore-Porter offered it to the African-American museum, where archivists compared markings to photos of a Bible believed to have belonged to Turner and deemed it to be the same.

Its covers are missing. Its pages are yellowed. In some places, there are watermarks and mold. But now the Bible has a new life: as the focal point of the museums Slavery and Freedom exhibit.

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TOWSON, Md.  No one will be charged in the shooting death of a woman during a standoff with police that she posted on social media, a Maryland prosecutor said Wednesday.

A review of the police investigation into the shooting of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines in Randallstown last month found the officer who fired was justified, and the state will not take any further action, Baltimore County States Attorney Scott Shellenberger announced in a statement.

Criminal charges are not warranted, the statement said.

A narrative of the incident provided with Wednesdays statement says Gaines, who was black, was fatally shot on Aug. 1 after she barricaded herself inside her apartment and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant. Gaines 5-year-old son was with her and was injured. The warrant stemmed from a March 10 traffic stop that included disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

The narrative provided Wednesday says that police were told by Gaines fiance after the standoff started that she suffered from a mental illness and had not been taking her medications. The statement says during the standoff there were times when Gaines spoke calmly and others where she screamed and acted irrationally. She said repeatedly that the police had no authority over her and were there to kidnap her. She also said that when she and her son were dead the news would report it and the world would know, and that it would be worth it as she took at least one of the officers with her, the narrative said.

The narrative says she was shot after she stopped communicating with officers and an officer saw her starting to raise the shotgun to a firing position toward officers.

Lawyers for Gaines family have said she was shot because officers ran out of patience during a seven-hour standoff. Gaines posted video of the standoff on Facebook, but her account was taken offline in the midst of the standoff after a request by police. Police Chief Jim Johnson has said that people on social media were encouraging her not to comply with officers.

Shellenberger met with Gaines family before announcing that no charges would be filed. The familys attorney, J. Wyndal Gordon, says the meeting reinforced the familys belief that the officer shot Gaines out of frustration rather than fear. He called the officer a cowboy who wanted to use his weapon. Gordon said Gaines family is frustrated.

Gaines death led to protests affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement. A wrongful-death lawsuit filed last week against the police officer and Baltimore County contends that officers illegally entered Gaines apartment after persuading the manager of her apartment complex to give them a key despite the fact that nobody answered the door when officers knocked.

In a letter to County Executive Kevin Kamenetz on Tuesday, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund called for an independent review of county police department policies, saying Gaines shooting raises questions about policies, including use of force and execution of arrest warrants. Kamenetz said in a statement he has directed the police department to also conduct a review of the case and has asked the police chief to review best practices and procedures utilized by police across the nation in barricade encounters.

The police department has identified the officer who shot Gaines as Officer First Class Ruby, using only his last name and rank, per departmental policy. Ruby was one of two officers who shot and killed 24-year-old Adam Benjamin Rothstein in 2007 after he pointed what turned out to be a pellet gun at the officers.

Armacost said officers received a call on Aug. 19 of that year for a suicidal man who had told the 911 dispatcher that he had guns, knives, pepper spray and a Taser. When police confronted Rothstein, he said he would start shooting if he didnt get what he wanted by 3:30 a.m. At the designated time, Rothstein raised a gun and pointed it at the officers, who both fired. Rothsteins weapon turned out to be a BB gun.
HOUSTON  A law firm thats been representing Texas death row inmates for more than two decades is recommending the state establish a system for condemned prisoners to have better legal help during the initial appeal that follows their trial.

The Texas Defender Service this week released a report that examines whats known as direct appeals in death penalty cases. It cited systemic weaknesses in the way those appeals are handled, contending lawyers are overwhelmed by caseloads and underpaid for the time they spend on these cases, that some attorneys who do accept the cases are inadequately prepared and that no entity in the state is devoted to training or consulting with lawyers handling direct appeals.

The direct appeal framework for Texas death penalty cases is fraught with structural weaknesses, the legal group concluded in its report, adding that those weaknesses heighten the likelihood that convictions and death sentences will be upheld when the appeals are reviewed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the states highest criminal court.

In direct appeals, attorneys review the trial court record for potential errors.

The legal firm is calling on the Legislature to consider establishing a statewide capital appellate defender office to represent death row convicts in their direct appeals, a statewide appointment system with caseload controls and uniform pay rates, and appointment of two lawyers  rather than one now required  to handle direct appeals.

Deficient representation squanders scarce criminal justice resources, undermines the integrity of the Texas criminal justice system and warrants immediate attention from stakeholders, the 56-page report said.

The groups recommendations are based on a review of documents from the 84 direct appeals to the Court of Criminal Appeals during the seven-year period ending Dec. 31, 2015.

In its study, the Defender Service said it found the direct appeal attorneys had inadequate resources, excessive caseloads, inadequate briefing and showed routine avoidance to filing reply briefs and applying for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Capital murder defendants in need of legal help  most of whom are indigent  already have a regional public defender for trials in most rural areas of the state. State lawmakers in 2009 created the Office of Capital Writs to handle later appeals. The Defender Service is recommending such formal legal availabilities be extended to the direct appeals process, where it argues the quality of representation has remained unexamined.

Roe Wilson, who heads the Harris County District Attorneys Legal Services Bureau, which handles capital case writs in the county that has sent the most inmates to death row, questioned the need for two defense attorneys to handle a direct appeal.

In a direct appeal, youre limited to the record itself, theres no outside investigation, Wilson said Wednesday. It literally comes down to reading the record, identifying claims, doing the legal research and writing. I dont know why it would take two people to do that.

The report, however, pointed out that county prosecutors have more ready access to resources, such as auxiliary staff. Of the 84 cases in the study, two-thirds were handled by solo practicing attorneys. None of the 84 convictions was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals. The death sentence was overturned in three of them.

Wilson said defendants have better chances later in the appeals writ process because factual claims outside the trial record can be presented and investigated.

Its very difficult to get any case, not just a capital case, overturned on direct appeal because you are limited to exactly whats in front of you, she said.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

University of New Mexico President Bob Frank announced Wednesday a hiring freeze for staff positions that will last at least six months.

Faculty hiring will also slow, according to the letter sent to all university employees. Frank said the freeze is a response to looming state budget cuts.

All financial savings associated with this moratorium will be swept centrally to offset anticipated current year budget reductions, Frank wrote.

After six months, the administration will consider whether the freeze can be lifted or should remain in place. Frank had announced plans for the freeze earlier this month at a Board of Regents meeting.

The moratorium covers main and branch campuses. Health Sciences Center employees are not included in the moratorium.

Frank said only positions that receive a waiver would be filled.

Please note that while waiver requests will be accepted and considered, they will be limited to those critical to the mission of the university, Frank said.

Otherwise, the freeze applies to vacant staff positions the university is not currently trying to fill. Its not clear how much the university hopes to save with the measure.

Frank also said in the letter that he expects faculty hiring to be reduced as well.

UNM employs about 1,250 full-time faculty on main campus and about 3,000 staff members. The main campus budget for the 2017 fiscal year is about $839 million.

Faculty Senate President Pamela Pyle said she understands the president has to examine all possible options to deal with upcoming budget woes.

The faculty will always be concerned about cuts affecting our ability to deliver all the courses for our students success, and we are keenly aware of the vital role staff plays in this mission, Pyle said.

Danelle Callan, the president of the staff council, said she was waiting to comment until attending Franks forum today regarding the state budget and the universitys plans to deal with shortfalls.

Frank has also told his administrators to prepare for a 5 percent budget cut. Gov. Susana Martinez ordered state agencies last month to reduce their spending by at least 5 percent, but that directive did not apply to public schools and universities around the state.

Still, more spending cuts may well be enacted after a special legislative session that Martinez is expected to call later this month to address the states shortfall, according to news reports.

Some lawmakers have said steep budget cuts for higher education have been discussed, possibly in excess of 5 percent.
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas has sent to Mylan, the manufacturer of EpiPen, an investigatory letter requesting information.

EpiPen is the brand name of an auto-injector used to administer adrenaline to treat anaphylaxis shock caused by a severe allergic reaction. The company has come under scrutiny around the country after it dramatically raised the price of the EpiPen. In 2007, EpiPens retail costs were somewhere around $60 and today sell for more than $600, according to the AGs Office.

The letter seeks information about the number of EpiPens sold in New Mexico and the number of schools in the EpiPens4Schools program, among other information, according to a news release. The letter asks for a response by Sept. 30, after which the AGs Office will determine whether an investigation is warranted.
Donald Trump said Wednesday that he favors using stop-and-frisk tactics to curb violence in black communities, embracing a controversial policy in which police officers are empowered to stop, question and search individuals they suspect have committed crimes or are preparing to do so.

In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News that was recorded Wednesday, Trump made the remark in response to a question from a member of the audience.

Well, one of the things Id do, Ricardo, is I would do stop-and-frisk, Trump said. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind.

Critics have argued that the policy unfairly targets minorities. A federal judge ruled in 2013 that New York Citys law, as it was operating, was unconstitutional and a form of racial profiling.

Shortly after taking office in 2014, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), an outspoken critic of the practice, announced he was ending a legal battle over stop-and-frisk, leading to the appointment of a court-appointed monitor to oversee the NYPDs reform of the policy.

Trump said that stop-and-frisk was so incredible in New York City. But a 2014 New York Civil Liberties Union report found that as the number of stops increased dramatically from 2002 to 2011 during Michael Bloombergs tenure as mayor, the number of guns recovered, shooting victims and murders only changed modestly.

Trumps championing of stop-and-frisk comes at a time when he is trying to improve his poor standing among African American voters, an effort that has been awkward at times, such as when he visited a predominantly black church in Flint, Mich., and was instructed by the pastor to stop giving politically charged remarks.

Stop-and-frisk is not a broadly popular approach among African Americans, so Trumps comments could set back his attempt to win over black voters. Moreover, they come amid a string of high-profile police shootings of African Americans that have angered many black voters and fueled concerns about the police being overly aggressive.

The Fox interview will air Wednesday night. The network released a partial transcript ahead of the broadcast. Hannity openly supports Trump.

The Republican presidential nominee, who has used anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout his campaign, also said that charges that he is a racist are signs of desperation from Democrats.

Its a very interesting phenomenon, but the word racist comes out and that means that youre winning and thats their last chance, and I dont think its working, Trump said.

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Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

New York, 21.09.2016 - Speech by Mr Johann Schneider-Ammann, President of the Swiss Confederation

Check against delivery

Heads of State and Government,

Ministers,

Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Imagine a world where common infections became deadly again. Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest global threats to health. The excessive and sometimes inappropriate use of antibiotics has made a growing number of bacteria resistant to their effect. According to current estimates, without coordinated intervention by states, an additional ten million people a year could die as a result of antimicrobial resistance by 2050.

There is an urgent need for action.

In Switzerland, the goal of stepping up the fight against antibiotic resistance is at the top of the political agenda. Last November, the Federal Council adopted a national strategy that is fully compatible with the WHOs global action plan.

The strategy is built around a One Health approach and focuses on the public health and animal health sectors, and on the fields of agriculture and the environment, where the need for action is equally important. The coordination of action at the international level should also incorporate the One Health approach. It is imperative to restrict the use of antibiotics in order to ensure their long-term effectiveness in maintaining human and animal health.

Switzerland is involved at the international level. In May 2015, it supported the adoption of the Global Action Plan to combat antimicrobial resistance devised by the WHO in collaboration with the FAO and the OIE.

In a bid to strengthen international cooperation against antimicrobial resistance, Switzerland has also joined the Global Health Security Agenda initiative, launched by the United States to combat communicable diseases. It has published a comparative study of the various national strategies for combating antimicrobial resistance, which aims to define best practices.

Switzerland also considers it important that all public and private stakeholders invest more in the research and development of new antibiotics and diagnostic tools. This area has been neglected for too long, primarily as a result of market failures. Switzerland has decided to increase its commitment to innovative public-private partnerships, and has pledged to contribute to the implementation of the GARD (Global Antibiotic Research and Development) partnership launched by the DNDi Foundation. To promote research in this area, Switzerland approved a CHF 20 million national research programme on antimicrobial resistance last year.

Colleagues, Ministers, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

As a minister for agriculture, trade, education, research and innovation, this issue is close to my heart. Together we must continue to raise public awareness of the risks associated with antimicrobial resistance. As heads of state, it is our duty to strengthen political awareness, commitment and leadership in this area by involving all government sectors. If the international community does not come together and act with a united front, we risk returning to the era before the discovery of penicillin in 1928 when so many people died of simple infections.

Let us commit to addressing this major challenge that threatens the achievement of the sustainable development goals in a united and coordinated way, and let us meet again in the near future to take stock of the results obtained.

Thank you.

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Federal Office of Public Health

http://www.bag.admin.ch




We can help you make sense of the agribusiness industry, extending from chemicals and fertilizers used as inputs into agriculture, to the commodities, food and by-products that are an output to farming, with policy and regulation applied at every step of the value chain.
Back-to-school season is often equated with deadlines. Deadlines for homework assignments. Deadlines to have permission slips signed. For those of us in the payments industry, however, a deadline on our minds is that of the October 2016 EMV ATM liability shift.

After October 1, financial institutions (FIs) processing ATM transactions for MasterCard-branded cards will be liable for any fraud occurring on chip-enabled cards at non-chip-enabled ATMs. (The deadline for Visa-branded cards is October 1, 2017.) As FIs prepare to upgrade their ATMs to meet this deadline, there are a few things they should keep in mind. Below are five key steps to readying ATMs for EMV.
A new FBI app may help you catch a bank robber.

The federal law enforcement agency released a smartphone app last month that features bank robbery investigations that involve the most violent and most prolific serial offenders who often cross jurisdictions.

The FBI said public assistance plays a crucial role in helping investigators get these dangerous criminals off the streets.

BankRobbers.fbi.gov, a free app on Google Play or Apples app store, allows users to sort bank robberies by dates, the category they fall under, (i.e., armed serial bank robber), the FBI field office investigating the robberies and the state where the robberies occurred.
Founded in 1818 and looking toward our third century

Combining innovative research, meaningful teaching and a deep sense of social responsibility

Located in Nova Scotia, Canada (Mi'kma'ki) with four campuses in Halifax and Truro, and satellite locations in Yarmouth and Saint John, New Brunswick, our broad range of academic programs attract and retain a diverse mix of incredible students, scholars, researchers and staff who work together with interdisciplinary perspective and a focus on service.

Our 13 academic Faculties expand understanding through teaching excellence and a drive for discovery that results in more than $190 million in research funding each year. As Atlantic Canada's primary research-intensive university and a member of the U15 Group of Canadian Universities, our research and innovation includes world-leading researchers working in labs, studios and in the field.

Building on our legacy of groundbreaking research and outstanding scholarship, we are focused on providing a unique, interactive and collaborative environment that supports all our students, instructors, researchers and staff to achieve excellence.

Dalhousie University is located in Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mikmaq. We are all Treaty people.

Dalhousie at a glance
Whether you're from the other side of the world, across the country, or right here in Nova Scotia, you'll find plenty of things to do on campus and around the city.
Cambridge, Mass. -- A new company will commercialize sensing technology invented at Harvard University that can perform instant, in-field characterization of the chemical make-up and material properties of unknown liquids.

Validere, cofounded by Harvard scientists and engineers, has raised an initial round of seed capital and has entered into a worldwide exclusive licensing agreement with the university to pursue applications in quality assurance and liquid identification.

Validere aims to develop the licensed technology, called Watermark Ink (W-INK), into a pocket-sized device that could be used by first responders to quickly identify chemical spills, or by officials to verify the fuel grade of gasoline right at the pump. Unlike other techniques for identifying and authenticating liquids, Harvard's solution is inexpensive, instantaneous, and portable.

Developed in the laboratory of Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty member of Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the W-INK concept exploits the chemical and optical properties of precisely nanostructured materials to distinguish liquids by their surface tension. Marko Loncar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS, also contributed to its development.

Akin to the litmus paper used in chemistry labs to detect the pH of a liquid, the detector changes color when it comes in contact with a liquid with a particular surface tension. The color-changing strip can be programmed to respond precisely to the unique surface tension exhibited by any liquid of interest.

"This idea advanced swiftly through Harvard thanks to an organic system that facilitates progress from discovery to application," said Aizenberg, who is also Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology. "We first developed the technology from basic research in my lab at SEAS and then brought it for incubation at the Wyss Institute. The Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD) guided and supported our commercialization strategy through its Physical Sciences and Engineering Accelerator. Out of this virtuous cycle of innovation Validere was spun off with a viable commercial product."

The W-INK technology, which received early support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and a proof-of-concept contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation, could have important applications in industry and government.

"Validere translates this technology to create inexpensive, one-time-use test kits that can be used anywhere in the field to visually identify unknown liquids, all without the need for a dedicated power source," said Ian Burgess, co-founder, CEO and CTO at Validere, who co-invented W-INK as a doctoral student at SEAS and technology development fellow at the Wyss Institute.

"Many people focus on making hardware smaller, but miniaturization often turns out to be the easy part," Burgess said. "What's difficult, and what our solution does, is to simplify the readouts to a level that you don't need a technician to interpret the results. Anyone in the field can immediately know, on the spot, how to respond to a sampled liquid."

Harvard's Physical Sciences and Engineering Accelerator provided seed funding that enabled Aizenberg's group to advance the technology from the lab to the pilot scale and attract further investment. The research group continues to refine W-INK to expand its range of applications.

Following a set of original publications describing W-INK technology in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, ACS Nano and Lab on a Chip, in January 2016, Aizenberg, Loncar and Burgess reported improvements that make possible a colorimetric test for determining the volatility of liquids. This capability, described in a paper published in Scientific Reports, is of particular interest to the Department of Transportation. The ability to rapidly profile the volatility of crude oil, which is commonly transported by railroad, means decisions about proper transport containers can be made at the point of extraction in the field, helping to prevent accidental explosions. DOT is also supporting development of test kits for analyzing hazardous spills.

Aizenberg's lab specializes in reverse-engineering nature. W-INK mimics two biological systems to achieve a tunable device with properties that allow it to change colors when it comes in contact with certain liquids. The wings of some species of butterfly owe their brilliant colors to structure rather than pigment; the surface of each wing contains networks of tiny pores, the size of which determines the perceived color. Meanwhile, brittle stars, relatives of starfish, can change color from black to white by modulating the position of pigmented cells inside lens-like, light-focusing structures arranged in an array across the star's back.

By combining both of these mechanisms so that they respond optically to liquid infiltration into chemically modified porous structures, Aizenberg's team developed a liquid decoder that is small enough to fit in the palm of the hand and can function without a power source. Engineered surface properties interact with liquids to change the interfacial chemistry of the test strip, which instantly causes corresponding color changes or markers to appear.

With support from the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration, Aizenberg is now leading research efforts to optimize the sensing capabilities, while Burgess is spearheading Validere's development of software and an interface device that will translate visual test results into recommended action for handling identified liquids. The device will pair with disposable strips to comprise customizable field test kits that can be tailored to identify virtually any liquid or liquid mixture.

"The goal is to remove the element of human error from the identification and categorization of unknown liquids," Burgess said.

In 2013, W-INK was selected to receive the R&D 100 Award--known as "the Oscar of Innovation"--from R&D Magazine. The research underlying Harvard's W-INK technology was supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and DHS.

###
Ricciardos final fling



At the current pace, you would catch him with four laps to go, Red Bull told Daniel Ricciardo on lap 51, at which point the Australian was using his fresh rubber to eat three seconds per lap out of Nico Rosbergs lead. As it happened a combination of traffic and a slight increase in pace from the German meant that Ricciardo didnt actually get to within spitting distance of his rival until the final lap, by which time it was too late to be able to make a move  not that the Red Bull driver stopped trying. Starting lap 61 of 61, Ricciardo was just over two seconds back of Rosberg, but as you can see from the video above, that gap diminished with every passing corner, falling to just 0.4s at the flag. Who knows, had Rosberg caught backmarker Kevin Magnussen at the start of the lap  and you can see the blue flag lightboards flashing all around the lap  then perhaps Ricciardo might have had a chance to pounce

A tale of three starts



After Sundays race, Red Bull revealed that theyd feared Max Verstappen might be sluggish off the line because of an underlying clutch issue  and it was this that kick-started a rapid-fire sequence of events that led to Nico Hulkenbergs Force India flying just inches across the Dutchmans bows and into the wall. As you can see and hear in the video above, were it not for Verstappens lightning quick reactions in lifting off the throttle he might have collected the Germans out of control machine, but as it was he continued on his way without issue. Carlos Sainz however wasnt so lucky. Having jinked to avoid Verstappens slow-starting car the Spaniard then accidentally tangled with Hulkenberg, knocking one of his bargeboards loose in the process. This not only cost him downforce, it also earned him a black and orange flag from the stewards, forcing Toro Rosso to call him in for a race-compromising early pit stop to remove the offending bodywork. Vettel makes short work of Sainz and Gutierrez



Sebastian Vettel has won a record four races in Singapore, but his searing drive from the back of the grid to fifth on Sunday was arguably every bit as impressive as any one of his victories at Marina Bay. At a circuit not particularly conducive to overtaking, the German battled his way up the order, with this double pass of a warring Carlos Sainz and Esteban Gutierrez during his middle stint indicative of his aggressive, no nonsense display. Little wonder then that the fans voted him Driver of the Day for the first time.

Kvyat gives Verstappen a taste of his own medicine...



Max Verstappens hard-nosed approach to defensive driving has caused consternation at times this year (just ask Kimi Raikkonen), but in Singapore it was the Dutchman who found himself on the end of a stubborn rebuttal. Having lost his place at Red Bull to Verstappen back in May, Toro Rossos Daniil Kvyat needed no extra motivation to keep his stablemate behind  something he did with aplomb for several laps in the early stages of the race, as the video above shows. Verstappen eventually won the war, finishing sixth to the Russians ninth, but Kvyats bullish defence was impressive nonetheless.

...before throwing caution to the wind



Lap 19 wasnt the only time Kvyat and Verstappen duelled on the Marina Bay streets. In the closing stages Kvyat was bottled up behind Force Indias Sergio Perez - and the pressure to find a way through only ramped up as Verstappen made his final stop and came out 8s behind the pair. Within two laps he was right on their tail, prompting Kvyat to gamble and throw his Toro Rosso up the inside of Perez at Turn 7. The Russian got through, kept it out of the walls and held the inside line for Turn 8 - but crucially he also ran all four wheels off the circuit, meaning he would have to give the position back. The problem? Verstappen had capitalised with typical brilliance to snatch eighth from Perez around the outside - meaning that when Kvyat slowed to hand the position back to Perez, he also had to let Verstappen through

Verstappens classic switchback fools Perez



Forced to attack following his poor start, Verstappens fight back carried him to the rear of an all-Mexican duel for 10th being waged between Sergio Perez and Esteban Gutierrez at the races halfway mark. Perez tried to make the first move as he looked to the inside of his compatriot at Turn 7 - but as the Haas man defended, Perez found himself on the wrong line heading into the left-hander. The hunter duly became the hunted. Perez tried to block the apex of Turn 8, but Verstappen was at his wily best, swinging wide on approach to cut back and snatch the inside line exiting the right-hander. Momentum - and position - were with Verstappen - not the only time on Sunday that he would pick off Perez through that corner

The Iceman cranks up the heat on Hamilton



By lap 25, it was clear Singapore was not going to plan for Lewis Hamilton - he wasnt just losing touch with the front two; he was also being rapidly caught by Ferraris Kimi Raikkonen. We need to start coming up with a plan to stop me losing third, because this is all the pace I have, he admitted - and while Mercedes did indeed scramble a strategy to rescue third, they had to do it the hard way after Raikkonen snatched the position on-track. The move started with Hamilton getting it wrong on the brakes at Turn 7, but as the defending world champion fought to protect his line through the ensuring right-left, Raikkonen sensed his opportunity. The genius came in Turn 9, as he swung as wide as possible and then jumped on the throttle, wrestling his reluctant Ferrari to obey. It was judged to perfection: he pulled just far enough alongside to deny Hamilton the line into Turn 10; third is - fleetingly - his.

Verstappen picks off Alonso
Several million pounds are to be confiscated from six criminals, five of whom are currently jailed, who profited from scams that saw hundreds of elderly investors sold worthless plots of land and valueless carbon credits.

This marks one of the biggest ever cash seizures for the City of London Police, which is the National Policing Lead for Fraud.

Matthew Noad, 32, Clive Griston, 54, Harry Neal, 31, Kerry Golesworthy, 50, Linda Noad, 59, and Roger Noad, 62, must repay 2.37m to the scams victims or face more time behind bars.

The action comes after the City of London Polices Asset Recovery Team applied to the court to recover the profits of the scams in 2014 after investigations by their Fraud Squad colleagues resulted in the six being sentenced for fraud and money laundering offences.

Between 2005 and 2010 Matthew Noad and Clive Griston ran a London-based boiler room, assisted by Harry Neal, which took in more than 10m from victims conned into believing they would make returns of several hundred percent from sites across the UK that were ripe for housing development.

In reality the land, located in Dumbarton in Scotland, Towcester in Northampton and Collumpton in Devon, had little or no value, with much of it situated in greenfield belts, flood zones or areas of historical or environmental significance with no prospect of planning permission.

The City of London Police, which is the National Policing Lead for Fraud, first got wind of the scam in 2010 when they started seeing more and more reports from people concerned about investments they had made in three companies  Browne Mackenzie, Lawrence Taylor and Charles Barkley.

Having launched a nationwide investigation, supported by local forces, detectives arrested the pair in December of that year in Bromley on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and money laundering.

But once released on bail the two men moved quickly to set-up a new boiler room in the City of London, this time to sell valueless carbon credits.

As with the land banking fraud, potential investors were initially contacted by cold-callers promising high percentage returns, with those expressing an interest bombarded with further calls and sent glossy brochures promoting the benefits of signing up to the scheme.

Between August 2011 and December 2012 Clive Griston and Matthew Noad made another million pounds, all of which was swiftly spent before they were arrested for a second time by the City of London Police in September 2012.

Many of their victims, in both the land banking and carbon credit frauds, were well into retirement with no prospect of ever being able to recoup the money they had lost.

A blind 89-year-old man from Cardiff was reported to have paid 94,000 for plots of land in Dumbarton.

He was told the area was primed for development when in reality it had been earmarked to be designated greenbelt land by the local council.

An 87-year-old retired teacher, living alone, invested 87,000 with Capital Carbon Credits, telling how she was continually pressurised over the phone into handing over more and more of her savings until there was none left to give.
Property funds investing in UK commercial real estate have been through a torrid time since the vote to leave the European Union.

Many funds have shut their gates, either through temporary suspensions or through imposing fair value adjustments on those investors seeking to redeem their holdings.

But what does the post-Brexit vote effect really mean for property funds? Is there still value in the asset class and where should investors go to find it? Does global property really have long-term prospects in terms of rental income growth?

Tomorrow (23 August), FTAdviser will host a live panel debate at 12pm, bringing together experts from across the investment industry to discuss these and other questions.

Jason Hollands, managing director for Tilney Bestinvest; Justin Urquhart Stewart, head of corporate development for Seven Investment Management; and Tom Walker, co-head of the Schroder Global Cities Real Estate Securities fund, will be on hand to answer your questions during the live blog.

Send us your questions via Twitter to @FTAdviser or @FTATalkingPoint using the hashtag #FTAonAir or bookmark the following web page and make sure you add your comments as the live debate unfolds:

http://www.ftadviser.com/2016/08/17/investments/property/property-post-brexit-what-s-in-store-for-investors-nssplxtbjMmuOivEibyOXP/article.html
September 19, 2016 - Wichapiluta Candaleria or Luta, Rumsen Ohlone & Mescalero Apache, activist, musical artist, and current Vice-Chair of Sacred Sites Protection and Rights of Indigenous Tribes (SSPRIT), has defended several Sacred Sites in the Bay Area known as Ohlone Shellmounds. Luta was recently targeted by police while he was offering his support at the Standing Rock encampment/NO DAPL. Luta was singled out as he was standing in a group leading a spiritual song. Luta was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor. He is currently back in his ancestral territory, also known as The Bay Area to assist with Indigenous-led efforts; protecting waterways and sacred areas. Luta has been ordered to go back to Standing Rock North Dakota for court on September 20, 2016. Please donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/2pqg8nv8

Founding SSPRIT CEO, Norman Wounded Knee DeOcampo and Luta left the Bay Area yesterday and are heading to the Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock in North Dakota to stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux/Sacred Stone Spirit Camp. "Its important as California Indians, who are also defending our water and sacred sites; that we stand in Solidarity with our Relatives at Standing Rock. I support Lutas direct action," stated Wounded Knee. Luta took direct action against the Dakota Access Pipeline by offering songs of prayer on August 31, 2016. He is one of eight Protectors that were arrested. Luta works very closely with Corrina Gould, Karkin-Chochenyo Ohlone Woman of Indian People Organizing for Change/Sogorea Te Land Trust. (sogoreate-landtrust.com) Luta often speaks publicly and offers songs of prayer at Ohlone led events. The Ohlone People are currently supporting the Winnemem Wintu's - Run4Salmon, a two week event to bring the Salmon Home, in which Luta participated during the opening ceremony on Saturday, September 17, 2016. ( http://www.run4salmon.org Dixie Pauline, Bay Area Community Activist and SSPRIT Family & Friend, created an initial Call to Action for Luta which states, Attention Friends in the Bay Area/Ohlone Territory; Any financial support that you can give helps! After talking with Luta and finding out about his situation, I asked if I could make this post. Due to support that is really needed for Standing Rock/NO DAPL and the Winnemem Wintus Salmon Run, I know he certainly wasn't going to ask. So, I am putting out this call with his blessing.Your generous donation is appreciated and will help Luta with costs associated with travel & being away from his ancestral homeland. (Including Gas/Toll since he is driving to and from Standing Rock, Lodging if needed while in route, food, and personal items)Thank you for standing in solidarity with Luta & The Ohlone Peoples!Please donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/2pqg8nv8 --------------------------------------------------------------------Eight Arrested after Water-Protector's Direct Action against DAPL:Help spread the word!
Monopolization of mass media market  the course to power usurpation in Moldova by Tommy Inline

Possible adoption of the scandalous amendments to the Code on Television and Radio by the parliament of Moldova on the eve of the presidential elections in the country is subject for serious concern of the international community.

Possible adoption of the scandalous amendments to the Code on Television and Radio by the parliament of Moldova on the eve of the presidential elections in the country is subject for serious concern of the international community.



Contrary to the assurances of the ruling coalition, as well as the Moldova parliament president Andrian Candu, asserting that the document is to yet pass through the reconciliation procedure involving international experts and civil community, there is real anxiety over the adoption, at the final reading, of the Democratic and Liberal parties' legislative initiative providing for the ban on retransmission of the Russian informational and analytical TV programs. According to one of the bills, all the channels, including those transmitted from abroad, are to deliver '100% domestic informational and analytical programs, while 80% of them have to be in the Romanian language'. There are special sanctions stipulated by the bill  starting with $2-3 thousand fines and ending with withdrawal of the broadcasting license - for infringement of this provision.



Not only opposition leaders in Moldova but also the OSCE and Council of Europe experts have repeatedly rebuffed the idea of mass media market monopolization in Moldova as totally inadmissible. In particular, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic made it absolutely clear for the leadership of the Republic that the amendments to the Code on Television and Radio approved by the parliament at the first reading contradicted international standards and threatened freedom of speech and information in the country. The OSCE representative expressed her hope for the amendments to be reconsidered. Tough criticism of the legislative initiatives initiated by Democrats and Liberals was also voiced on part of the deputies representing Gagauzia, an autonomous region of Moldova. They believe that the suggested amendments do not serve the goal of 'ensuring the safe informational space of the Republic' and 'boosting the number of the domestically produced programs'. Moreover, the amendments amount to gross violation of the Constitution, as well as of the norms stipulated in the Law on the Use of Languages on the Territory of the Republic of Moldova and the Law on the Rights of National Minorities. In fact they lead to depriving the Russian speaking population of the access to the alternative information in their native language. Nevertheless, the ruling coalition keeps to 'hushing up' all those critical observations and warnings.



Thus, the leadership of the Democratic Party controlled by the tycoon Plahotniuc, and the Liberal Party leaders speaking in support of the merger engaging Moldova and Romania and blaming the 'Moscow hand' in all the own misfortunes, are nearing the realization of their main goal  the 'cleaned up' media space in the Republic of Moldova to manipulate the social opinion in wake of the presidential election campaign.
Wonders shall never end; some things will always continue to amaze people no matter what. As knowledgeable men are, the occurrence of certain things will defy scientific explanations and leave people amazed.

Some people have little or no hope when it comes to accomplishing their dreams; they live by no faith and do not ever consider themselves good enough for miracles. That is why some give up before the battle ever starts and some simply wait for them to get defeated while fighting.

In as much as there is life, there is hope! Depending on what your school of thought is, things can turn around for you when you do not expect it. Some people get their miracles when the sun is down and the world feel their lives are over.

READ ALSO: These black curvy girls will leave you glued to your screen

Some happen to be unique and have things working for them from the very first moment they try. The story of this 62-year-old woman will get you on your feet and make you trust God more. Who do you say is responsible for acts that the greatest scientists of the world cannot fathom?

Lina Alvarez is a Spanish woman who is expecting a child after receiving fertility treatment. She is a 62-year-old woman who is pregnant despite having reached menopause twenty years ago. Even though the pregnancy is not her first child, it is still amazing to know that she is expecting a baby at that age given the odds.

Alvarez is eight months gone and will be having her baby girl in October; she has two sons even though the eldest requires constant care because a gynaecologist damaged his head during a routine test before he was born. The youngest is 10 years old; seventeen years younger than the first.

She feels like this event is a miracle and cannot get over it; most medical expert thought it was impossible for her to be a mother again even though she desired it. Despite the discouraging things she heard here and there, she finally met a gynaecologist who was willing to work on her.

He conducted the tests and agreed to help her; she was told the chances of the fertility treatment working was six percent. It is intriguing to know that this 62-year-old woman would be expecting her third child and her first baby girl at that age.

READ ALSO: Major struggles of women you need to know as a man

She does not mind the fact that she will be a grandmother and a mother by the time the unborn child clocks thirty. This pregnancy has generated lots of arguments in Spain because some people think the procedure should not have been done because of her age. She is not bothered about this as she looks forward to the birth of her baby. What do you think about this?

Source: Legit.ng
- The Abia state police command has arrested a suspect for unlawful possession of a human skull and bone

- The state commissioner of police, Leye Oyebade, says the skull and bone were suspected to be those of a murdered victim

- The suspect, however, contradicted the police account, saying the items were handed over to him by his late uncle, who was also a native doctor

A 28-year-old man, who claimed to be a native doctor has been arrested by the Abia state police command for allegedly being in possession of some human parts.

READ ALSO: Ekiti court sentence herdsman to 2-years imprisonment

Premium Times reports that the Abia state commissioner of police, Leye Oyebade, told journalists in Umuahia on Tuesday, September 20, that the suspect was arrested for unlawful possession of a human skull and bone.

The police command disclosed that the suspect was arrested in his home in Olokoro, Umuahia south local government area of the state, following a tip-off from members of the public.

The state commissioner of police who alleged that the skull and bone were suspected to be those of a murdered victim, said the suspect could not give cogent account of how he acquired the items, when he was interrogated by the police.

The suspect, however, contradicted the police account that the skull and bone were suspected to be those of a murdered victim, saying that the items were handed over to him by his late uncle, who was also a native doctor.

READ ALSO: Deji Ayoola steals N1,200 during interrogation

It was my people that reported me to the police because I use the skull and bone to perform magic.

Anytime I touch somebody, his manhood will disappear once I have the items on me, he said.

The suspect said that the police succeeded in arresting me because the charm travelled when they raided my house.

He demanded that he should be released and allowed to go home in peace, insisting that his arrest by the police was unlawful.

He said there is no law that allows the police to arrest native doctors.

Meanwhile, the police in Enugu have cracked down on the IPOB, arresting no fewer than 12 suspected members of the outlawed group.

According to Vanguard, Mr Ebere Amarizu, the Enugu state commands spokesman in a statement signed by him and made available to newsmen in Enugu on Tuesday, September 20 said that the suspects were arrested during their sit-at-home campaign at the Ogbette Main Market in Enugu.

Source: Legit.ng
A report by News Telegraph suggests the federal government of Nigeria has concluded plans to sell the nation's critical assets in order to raise $15 billion to rescue the country out of economic recession.

The report quoted the minister of budget and national planning, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, confirming the plan at a cabinet retreat hosted at the presidential villa, Abuja.

Nigeria's tarade and investment minister, Senator Udo Udoma says the government is now considering selling its critical assets to raise money

The federal government has been under pressure for a while to sell of some its assets to raise money to tackle Nigeria's financial crisis.

Three days ago, Africa's richest man, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, joined the calls as he advised the government to embark on a wave of asset selling to boost Nigeria's recession-hit economy.

Alhaji Dangote says selling government assets is the only way to address Nigeria's present condition

This past weekend, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele, joined in the calls.

His words: In the short run, we can sell assets. Before the government came on board, I had opined that there was need for the government to scale down or sell off some of its investments in oil and gas, particularly in the NNPC and NLNG as at that time when the price of oil was around $50-$55 per barrel.

We actually commissioned some consultants that conducted the study and, at the end of that study, we were told that if we sold 10% to 15% of our holding in the oil and gas sector, we could realise up to $40 billion.

Yesterday, September 20, Senate president Bukola Saraki, at the resumption of the red chamber's plenary, urged President Muhammadu Buhari to sell some important national assets as part of efforts to boost the countrys dwindling foreign reserves.

Senate President Bukola urged President Buhari to go ahead and sell the assets

His words: The executive must raise capital from asset sales and other sources to shore up foreign reserves. This will calm investors, discourage currency speculation and stabilise the economy.

The measures should include part sale of NLNG Holdings; reduction of governments share in upstream oil joint venture operations; sale of government stake in financial institutions e.g. Africa Finance Corporation; and the privatization and concession of major/regional airports and refineries.

Legit.ng lists 6 key assets that are being considered for sale.

Read below:

1. Government shares in Joint Venture Companies (JVCs)

2. Government shares in Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG)

3. Some aircraft in the presidential fleet

4. Kaduna refinery

5. Warri refinery

6. Port Harcourt refinery

Source: Legit.ng
There was excitement in Assisi, Italy when the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi met with Pope Francis and anout 450 other religious leaders for the World Day of Prayer for Peace.

It was a three-day event that ended on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 and organised to bring religious leaders from different faiths together in order to pray for the peace of the world.

Sanusi in a warm handshake with the Pope

The Vatican Radio reports that Pope Francis presided over the closing ceremony of the event with the theme: 'Thirst for peace: religions and cultures in dialogue'.

The Pope reportedly said: "We have come to Assisi as pilgrims in search of peace.

READ ALSO: Nigeria's external reserves: Emefiele berates Soludo, Sanusi

"We carry within us and place before God the hopes and sorrows of many persons and peoples: we thirst for peace; we desire to witness to peace.

Emir Sanusi speaking at the event

"Above all, we need to pray for peace, because peace is Gods gift, and it lies with us to plead for it, embrace it, and build it every day with Gods help."

The report said while earlier meeting with leaders from various Christian Churches and ecclesial communities in the Lower Basilica of St Francis, the Pope said: "Before Christ Crucified, the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), we Christians are called to contemplate the mystery of Love not loved and to pour out mercy upon the world.

READ ALSO: Bishop Kukah tells Buhari to stop blaming past leaders

"On the Cross, the tree of life, evil was transformed into good; we too, as disciples of the Crucified One, are called to be trees of life that absorb the contamination of indifference and restore the pure air of love to the world.

Emir Sanusi with Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto Diocese and another top Catholic leader

"From the side of Christ on the Cross water flowed, that symbol of the Spirit who gives life (cf. Jn 19:34); so that from us, his faithful, compassion may flow forth for all who thirst today."

READ ALSO: Emir Sanusi slams big men in Nigeria for flaunting 'loans'

"Here, thirty years ago, Pope John Paul II said: 'Peace is a workshop, open to all and not just to specialists, savants and strategists. Peace is a universal responsibility'.

"Let us assume this responsibility, reaffirming today our yes to being, together, builders of the peace that God wishes for us and for which humanity thirsts."

Source: Legit.ng
In various mobile markets around the world, different mobile brands dominate different regions. So while Apples iPhone is the undisputed champion in America for instance, this is not particularly the case in every other big market.

In South America, Blu owns the biggest market share, while Samsung and Micromax are the most dominant mobile brands in India. The worlds most populous country, China, has Huawei, Oppo and Vivo holding sway respectively in a market that has about the stiffest competition globally. But, how about in Africa? Data from recent research shows that TECNO Mobile has crawled its way up to dominate the African mobile space, doing remarkably well in its ten years of existence to emerge as the local king in Africas mobile industry.

Meet TECNO Mobile

TECNO Mobile needs no introduction, definitely not in Africa. The dynamic mobile multinational has definitely done well for itself in the African market. In 2006, TECNO entered the Africa mobile market sphere and its 10 years stay, has covered more than 35 countries while dominating major markets such as Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana and so on.

However, after the African mobile market dominance, TECNO aimed at expanding this feat to other parts of the world and it succeeded. Today, TECNO has extended its web to more than 48 countries around the world, across the Middle East, South East Asia and South America  this has made TECNO one of the mobile brands to reckon with, not just in Africa but also around the world.

The Market share of TECNO all over the world

Partnership with famous brands all over the world

As a company that thinks outside the box, TECNO strategically partnered with some top-ranking brands such as, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MTN, Tigo, Airtel, Etisalat, Sony, Jumia, slot, Android, Mediatek etc. to continue keeping up with its maxim of giving its esteemed customers the best.

The famous brands cooperate with TECNO

Why has TECNO been so successful in Africa?

Understanding the market is key to a brands success and TECNO brand has understood the need for African consumers. Year on year, the Asian multinational rolled out smartphone products targeted at different market segments and pegged at the right price. Quality is never compromised on TECNO products because at the core to the brands philosophy is innovation that is geared to keep product quality at par with global best as more mobile consumers embrace the brand.

In November 2007, TECNO released Africas first dual SIM phone the T780 to address the then problem of people carrying around several mobile phones due to poor Telecoms network infrastructure in the continent at the time.

Apart from the dual SIM cards, TECNOs smartphones are reliable and the average life span of every TECNO product could last for over three years. With this exploit, in 2010, TECNO was ranked among the top three brands in Africa also, according to a survey carried out in 2011, six out of every ten African use a TECNO dual SIM phone, this further increased TECNOs market share to more than 27% within its dominant markets.

Smartphone tailored for every need

Understanding that several mobile users have specific needs that regular smartphones cannot totally satisfy, TECNO has three mobile series that are tailored to satisfy a special need. They are:

BOOM series (music lovers): TECNO Boom smartphone series liaises with Boom Maxx to provide rich, crispy sound and allows users feel the perfect mega bass. The Boom player on the TECNO Boom smartphone comes with a free digital content (Music & Video) application that allows music lovers to access a huge catalogue of music and videos from their favorite African and International artistes. The Boom player is preinstalled with over 300,000 songs from over 4,000 signed artistes across Africa.

Boom J8, the mega bass music smart phone with Boom MAXX

CAMON series (Photo lovers): TECNO Camon series provides the excellent capture experience. A lot of mobile users face the problem of capturing very high definition pictures in low light environment. Since the release of the TECNO CAMON Series, from the 5MP on the Camon C5, 8MP on the Camon C8 to the dual 13MP on the Camon C9, that limitation has been surpassed as TECNO had up to 500 professional engineers working for more than 285 days to produce the most suitable low-light camera on the Camon.

Camon C9, the first dual 13MP camera in Africa

Phantom series (high-level business consumers): The TECNO Phantom Series, which is one of the best-reviewed annual flagships from the stable of TECNO, always drops with unconventional upgrades on mobile specifications. The TECNO Phantom brands have proven in five years of its official rollout, that the product line is as competitive and appealing as any other top smartphone brand in the African market. And much to the TECNO brands delight, consumers are taking a liking for TECNO Phantom products. In 2014, TECNO Phantom Z was rated the best smartphone in the Ghanaian mobile space; marking the second year in a roll for a Phantom to cart away the same award in Ghana. This years phantom edition, the TECNO Phantom 6, will be launched later this month and is said to be the slimmest smartphone with dual rear lens camera.

TECNO: A brand with the best after-sales service for Africa

For the satisfaction of consumers, there is a special after-sales service center for every TECNO consumer. In the Nigerian market, there are 95 after-sales service centers in more than 60 cities in the country with over 400 local employees, that have been put on standby to attend to any after sale complaint whatsoever.

TECNO consumers who have an issue with their phone after just 3 days of purchase stand a chance of having their phone replaced and if the damage is not serious then, their device would be repaired within 12 hours.

TECNO: The most consumer-centric mobile brand in Africa

In 2014, TECNO won the international quality crown in London

TECNO was placed 15 in The Most Admired Brands in Africa in 2014, closely next to Apple, by African Business

TECNO awarded most popular phone brand; GTA May 2016 on the heels of Phantom5 launch in 2015

The community-centered business takes responsibility for society

As a brand that believes in giving back, TECNO does all it can to take care of its host communities. It takes its various CSR projects very seriously and imbibes the CSR culture in its business module across its markets. Through their various life-touching projects, TECNO has empowered several people. Some of such project is the Light Up Ikeja initiative; a CSR project executed in the first quarter of 2016 where TECNO installed Eighty plus (80+) solar-powered streetlights in the Ikeja electronic market (Popularly called Computer village) and its environs to help with the security challenges faced in the area. Other Corporate Social Responsibility projects executed by TECNO include: scholarships for pupils in public primary schools in Nigeria (Lagos), support of the Michael Essien Foundation in Ghana, amongst others.

TECNO LIGHT UP IKEJA PROJECT

TECNO GIVE CHILDREN A FUTURE SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

Its still a tough road ahead for TECNO, as no brand can survive the future by depending on its past or current accomplishments. By celebrating a decade of insightful leadership, giant strides and deserved successes, TECNO Mobile reiterates its commitment to its promise  African mobile consumers deserve to Experience More, and by offering consumer friendly devices and services through ever evolving innovation and technology, the multinational brand aims to consolidate on its gains and spread its tentacles all over the world. As they would say, its never enough to say, ensure you also show it.

[Sponsored]

Source: Legit.ng
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Sept. 21, 2016)  Donations from National Credit Union Administration staff to the annual Feds Feed Families food drive will provide 57,308 meals in the coming year.

Agency employees donated a total of 68,770 pounds of food during the 2016 drive, which ran from June 1 through Aug. 31. The total includes 13,894 pounds of fresh food from local farms saved by several NCUA employees and family members in a warehouse gleaning operation.

NCUA staff has once again demonstrated generosity and community spirit in giving back to help people in need, NCUA Board Chairman Rick Metsger said. As a result of their selfless efforts, thousands of people in the around the country will be able to sit down to meals they might have missed otherwise.

The annual food drive is part of the agencys long-standing efforts to be a model corporate citizen. In the last four years, NCUA has collected 337,540 pounds of food through Feds Feed Families. Donations this year included fresh food, canned fruits and vegetables, soups and stews, juices, baking goods, whole-grain foods, and baby food. NCUAs 2016 donation is the equivalent of 85,296 bunches of carrots, 169,280 medium russet potatoes, or 550,160 large eggs.

NCUAs Region V office, in Tempe, Arizona, led the agency for the third time by contributing 23,770 pounds of food. The Region III office, in Atlanta, contributed 15,820 pounds. The largest contribution in the agencys central office came from the Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, which collected 11,794 pounds of food.

Fifty-seven NCUA employees reached the Feds Feed Families Hall of Fame this year by making individual contributions of at least 250 pounds of food. Eighteen employees the platinum level (1,000 pounds or more), 23 reached the gold level (500 to 999 pounds) and 16 reached the silver level (250 to 499 pounds).

Donations from NCUAs central office employees went to the Capital Area Food Bank (opens new window). Through direct delivery and partnership with 444 community organizations in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, the organization serves more than 540,000 people annually. Food pantries around the country benefitted from donations from NCUAs regional offices.

Federal workers have donated more than 57 million pounds of food and other non-perishable items to support families in need across America during the annual Feds Feed Families food drives, which began in 2009.
Thank you for reading The Cascadia Advocate, the Northwest Progressive Institutes journal of world, national, and local politics.

Founded in March of 2004, The Cascadia Advocate has been helping people throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond make sense of current events with rigorous analysis and thought-provoking commentary for more than fifteen years. The Cascadia Advocate is funded by readers like you and trusted sponsors. We dont run ads or publish content in exchange for money.

Help us keep The Cascadia Advocate editorially independent and freely available to all by becoming a member of the Northwest Progressive Institute today. Or make a donation to sustain our essential research and advocacy journalism.

Your contribution will allow us to continue bringing you features like Last Week In Congress, live coverage of events like Netroots Nation or the Democratic National Convention, and reviews of books and documentary films.

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After his arrest in Tabriz in 2011 and subsequent imprisonment without a fair trial, Zamani was subjected to continuous torture, including solitary confinement. He was denied basic human rights, such as access to medical care and visitors. He was also not given permission to go to his only daughters wedding or to his mothers funeral, the letter stated.

Left with no other means to protest his condition, Zamani was forced to engage in a hunger strike. The letter reported that during his second hunger strike, which lasted 50 days, he lost 20kg in weight.

The letter praised Zamanis life efforts which he continued to carry out even faced with the shocking conditions in prison. He was said to have been one of the founders of the committee to pursue the establishment of workers organisations. His activities included trying to relaunch the painters union, organising and taking part in illegal May Day celebrations, publishing a journal. These and other acts were deemed as threats to Irans national security, which further highlights further their significance.

He is said to have carried on with these activities while undergoing his prison sentence. According to the letter, he wrote articles, issued statements and inspired people to take action and engaged in other inspiring activities, despite the dreadful conditions which he had to face in prison.

Zamani had allegedly died of a stroke while in the Karaj prison in Tehran, aged 51 while serving an 11-year term. The letter urged that the international labour movement must demand an investigation of the circumstances of Shahrokhs death and the bringing to trial of those responsible.

Following Zamanis death, Amnesty International also released a statement which welcomed an investigation into the cause of his death. However, it reminded that the investigation must be carried out impartially and independently.

The issue of denying medical care to prisoners in Iran is one that affects many and often leads to those prisoners who are not under a death sentence, to suffer the same fate. In the same statement, Amnesty International stressed the importance of tackling this broader issue of prisons in Iran, arguing that the investigation should also trigger action by the Iranian authorities to tackle the deplorable prison conditions in Iran, as well as the practice of denying prisoners access to medical care, a pattern which Amnesty International has documented.
As if the Northern Lights, colorful, autumn landscape and ridiculously beautiful people werent reason enough, Norwegian Airlines fall sale will have you itching to visit Scandinavia this fall. Budget Nordic carrier is offering round-trip flights throughout the U.S. with rates in the uber affordable $300-$400 range, even going as low as $280.

Its no secret Norwegian hopes to disrupt the travel landscape with their supremely cheap flights. Earlier this year, it launched $175 flights to Paris, and, next year, it plans to bring even cheaper flights from the U.S. to Ireland. In the three years since the airline began operations in the U.S., it has become the European airline with the most nonstop routes from the U.S. to Europe, with thirty-eight, and its only projected to grow.

This fall deal comes at the perfect time because, with the Northern Lights projected to dim down for the next decade, theres no better time to head to Scandinavia. To book: Head to the Norwegian Airlines website and search for flights using the Low Fare Calendar.

To give you an idea of how cheap these flights are, some sample fares include:

To Oslo:

New York  $282

Los Angeles  $348

To Stockholm:

New York  $323

Boston  $375

Chicago  $452

Los Angeles  $460

To Copenhagen:

New York  $323

Chicago  $411

Boston  $430

Los Angeles  $460

Washington D.C.  $480

Tom is a travel writer, part-time hitchhiker, and hes currently trying to imitate Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? but with more sunscreen and jorts.
Joe Arpaio, the hero Arizona sheriffAmericas toughest, by his own reckoning, since hes the kind of dude who gives himself nicknameshas a long list of heroic deeds that includes making prisoners wear womens underwear, forcing them into tent cities that he calls concentration camps, ignoring sex crimes, founding a citizens posse to illegally arrest suspected undocumented immigrants, falsely arresting political opponents, racial profiling, and all other manner of impressive strongman feats.

But today, Arpaio has outdone himself. Just days after the coward Donald Trump publicly dropped his claim that Obamas birth certificate was fake, thereby stepping down from the position of de facto head birther chieftain, Sheriff Joe has vowed to fight on.

I dont care where hes from, he said to a group that is hilariously called the Surprise Tea Party Patriots, per The Arizona Republic. We are looking at a forged document. Period.

Thats classic Joe! Here are some other fun things he had to say:

I know all the politicians say, Sheriff, dont talk about it. But how can I back down when we started it? Im not going to just forget it.

And, in reference to The Surprise Tea Party Patriots, who had apparently asked the hero sheriff to investigate way back in 2011:

I had nothing to do with Trump on the birth certificate. We did it on our own, because of you guys.

As for the progress of the now five-year investigation? That part, it will shock you to know, is a little murky:

Im not going to give up, and were looking into it  I dont know how its going to turn out.

Im just glad that theres still one man in this great nation with the courage to insist, absent any proofand in fact directly in contradiction to every piece of available evidencethat our president is not actually American.

We have a word for a man like that, folks. And that word is asshole hero.
VERY REAL WARNING: Do not read this story if you are a) in public, b) wearing eye makeup, c) all of the above. Seriously.

Young couple Katie and Dalton Prager, who both have the genetic chronic illness Cystic Fibrosis, have said their goodbyes via video call as Dalton passed away over the weekend.

The couple got married five years ago, after beginning their relationship online when they were both 18. Theyve been likened to the young couple from John Green book The Fault in our Stars.

Their first meeting was a risk to begin with, due to Cystic Fibrosis patients being prone to contracting bacterial infections easily.

Dalton had Burkholderia cepacia, a highly contagious infection for people with CF, which Katie did not have. Her doctors warned her not to meet other CF patients, but the pair ended up meeting where Katie lives, in Kentucky.

She said this about the reason they decided to meet, despite the risk:

I told Dalton Id rather be happy  like really, really happy  for five years of my life and die sooner than be mediocre happy and live for 20 years. That was definitely something I had to think about, but when you have those feelings, you just know.

Two years later, the pair married at age 20.

He was one of the greatest people Id ever met and not many people like Dalton come around so you got to get him while you can.

The pair waited for lung transplants together in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre; Dalton had his first at the end of 2014, and Katie had hers around 8 months later.

After his transplant, Dalton developed lymphoma. He overcame the cancer, but was recently hospitalised with pneumonia and a viral infection.

Katies transplant was problematic as soon as she had the procedure; she has been in and out of hospital consistently since 2015, and doctors told her earlier this month that there was nothing more they can do.

Dalton had been on a ventilator in an intensive care unit for two weeks before his death. His family had planned to fly him to Kentucky to recover in the same hospice as Katie, but unfortunately he was never healthy enough to fly.

So, the last time the couple saw each other was July 16th  their fifth wedding anniversary. This photo (below) was the last one taken of the couple, on their anniversary:

Katie posted an update to their public Facebook page after Daltons passing, explaining how hard her husband had fought:

He was a courageous fighter and give up wasnt in his vocabulary.

The day before he died, she gave an interview to CNN where she spoke about having no regrets about their decision to meet in person.

It gave me some of the best years of my life. Id rather have five years of being in love and just really completely happy than 20 years of not having anybody.



The couple FaceTimed as Dalton was dying, and the last thing she said to her husband was a declaration of love.

She told him that she loved him, Katies mother said. We dont know if he heard her.

Oh god. This is everyone reading this story, including us:

Daltons funeral will be today (Wednesday) in his hometown of Missouri.

Source: CNN.

Photos: Facebook.
Over the past few weeks I've been talking to Neapolitan trouser makers Marco and Massimo Cerrato, and commissioning the pair in cotton drill pictured here.

I'm pleased to say that it looks like we have a reliable, good-value maker at a very high quality level who - best of all - effectively has a permanent branch in London.

Marco and Massimo come from an old trouser-making family in Naples. There are a lot of these, as you might expect, mostly located around the Spanish quarter. But the Cerrato family are one of the best-known, alongside the likes of Ambrosi and Pasquale Mola.

It was founded by Ciro Cerrato, who began work as a presser in the workshop of Antonio Mola at the age of 13. Ciro would eventually marry one of the hand-sewers there, and the two of them left to set up their own workshop when Ciro was 20.

That same year (1974), their first son Carmine was born. Three more sons would follow - Marco, Massimo and Antonio - with only Carmine not in some way joining the family firm (he became an engineer).

"Back then the workshop was small," Massimo says. "There was just my father cutting, and perhaps five ladies sitting around a table, each doing a different stage of the handwork. They did perhaps 5 or 6 pairs a day."

Today, the workshop is larger. Ciro and Marco do the cutting (Marco mostly new customers, especially international ones), there are seven ladies doing the handwork, two on the sewing machines, and one just doing basting. Uncles, cousins, in-laws - largely family.

Cerrato produces up to 20 pairs a day, both under its own label and for a handful of tailors in Naples. Interestingly, the amount under its own label has increased steadily.

"It used to be that men just wanted trousers with suits and other formal clothing," comments Massimo. "Now more are wearing separate trousers, more casually, so the demand for our work has increased."

Massimo trained as a trouser cutter, but now lives in London. He wanted to travel, to be somewhere other than Naples. So he worked as a chef while improving his English and looking to establish a UK branch for the family business.

It was Massimo that measured me and fitted me for the trousers you can see here. There is clearly a strong link between brother and brother ("we sound so similar - often people can't tell us apart on the phone," Massimo says) because with a few measurements and a phone call, the order was made and the result as good as meeting the cutter himself.

[It's interesting this passing on of measurements from one cutter to another - or indeed from salesman to cutter/shoemaker. Generally it's a bad idea, but when people have been working for a long time together (eg Brian Lishak and Richard Anderson) the result can be seamless.]

So what of the trousers?

They were made in a relatively heavy English cotton drill - 15.5 oz from Drapers' Melrose bunch (6632). It's an olive-coloured cloth that has softened wonderfully in the wearing, and I'd certainly recommend.

They were made with a deliberately broad waistband (partly for aesthetic reasons, partly fit) that is fastened with two buttons, with a 5cm turn-up. The larger, antiqued-brass side adjustors were required to fit the thick cloth.

The fit was superb. Almost no adjustments were needed at the fitting - and those largely around personal taste, eg a tighter waist and slightly slimmer thigh.

As to the make, the obvious comparison is with Ambrosi, whom readers will likely know well and we reviewed earlier in the year.

The construction is essentially the same, with just a few more hand details here and there on Ambrosi.

So there 18 hand-sewn tacks around the top of the Cerrato pair, for example: reinforcing the top and bottom of the side pockets, of the coin pocket, of the join between fly and waistband; whereas Ambrosi has 20.

And those are not necessarily two extra. Rather, they differ in where they put them: Cerrato has one at the top and bottom of the join in the back of the waistband, and Ambrosi only having one.

Inside, the hand-work around the curtain on the waistband is equally neat and all hand-sewn. The significant difference is that the bottom edge of the curtain is all hand-sewn on Ambrosi, and merely folded on Cerrato.

Ambrosi also pick-stitched the external long seam on the trousers, where Cerrato did not, which is a lot of work.

It's important to remember that these are all aesthetic, and relatively small, differences. The work is all far more than you would find on English bespoke trousers, and indeed more than Parisian ones - although the work on Cifonelli, for example, is neater and more precise.

Cerrato can also do the extra handwork (or any designs) if asked. Most Neapolitan trouser workshops are used to working for different clients and have little house style.

For us in London, the most important thing is that Cerrato trousers are relatively cheap (from 550) and with Massimo based here, there is no need to wait for a visit from Italy.

Massimo is currently taking appointments around his other work - so after 4pm during the week, and at weekends. He visits clients in their offices and homes, with arrangements made initially through Naples (Marco at [email protected]).

There are also tentative plans for Marco to come to London occasionally, but for the moment readers can see him during our trunk show in a few weeks.

Note: As with all the photography on this site, the trousers were shot as naturally as possible, after several days wear (sitting down in an office for long periods). I do not believe in shooting freshly pressed clothes, or artificially pulling/tugging/arranging them to make them look perfect. It's not realistic and it's not useful.
Cord Garcia Earns HPT Title, Wins $164,988

September 20, 2016 PokerNews Staff

Lance "Cord" Garcia (also known as Colossus Cord or HPT Cord) started the day as chip leader and made his way to Heartland Poker Tour champion and $164,988 at the Colorado Golden Gates Casino and Poker Parlour final table September 19.

Before receiving a bracelet for winning the 488-entry tournament, Garcia bested Drazen Ilich in heads-up play, after moving all in with both a straight and flush draw on a flop. Garcia held the , while Ilich held a pair, with the , and the same straight draw. The on the turn crushed Ilich, as it gave Garcia the flush and the title.

Ilich didnt give up easily, even during the heads-up play, and he doubled up twice after being down early. However, Garcia was quick to come back and maintain his dominance, forcing Ilich into a second-place finish for $100,861.

Josh Turner busted in fourth and Gary Germann, who won his seat through one of the tour's $380 qualifiers, was eliminated in third.

Garcia had never played at a televised table until this one, but already has $1.4 million in career earnings. The tournament ran September 8th through 19th with a total prize pool of $717,360.

Final Table Results

Place Player State Prize 1 Cord Garcia TX $164,988 2 Drazen Ilich NE $100,861 3 Gary Germann WY $66,858 4 Joshua Turner MO $46,485 5 John Beauprez CO $34,792 6 Bryan Johnson CO $26,901 7 Ryan Gregor MO $21,879 8 Ronald Scott CO $17,934 9 Garrett Crites CO $14,347

Be sure to complete your PokerNews experience by checking out an overview of our mobile and tablet apps here. Stay on top of the poker world from your phone with our mobile iOS and Android app, or fire up our iPad app on your tablet. You can also update your own chip counts from poker tournaments around the world with MyStack on both Android and iOS.
Global Poker League Week 9: Dominik Nitsche, Guo Dong, Maria Ho and Mercier Win Matches

After a post-summer break, the Global Poker League resumed action yesterday with two heats in both the Eurasia and Americas Conference. Dominik Nitsche, Guo Dong, Maria Ho and Jason Mercier won matches. The Moscow Wolverines now have a 17-point lead over the London Royals in the Eurasia Conference, while the Montreal Nationals lead with a difference of just three points over the LA Sunset in the Americas Conference.

Eurasia Conference

Dominik Nitsche Wins GPL Match 117

Dominik Nitsche crowned himself the winner of the first match of Week 9 of the Global Poker League. By winning the first six-max heat, he scored a big seven points for the Berlin Bears. Even with this win, the Bears were still in sixth, last place in the Eurasian Conference. Nitsche beat Dario Sammartino heads up turning a nine with queen-nine to beat the Italian's treys.

Results GPL Match 117

Place Player Team Points 1 Dominik Nitsche Berlin Bears 7 points 2 Dario Sammartino Rome Emperors 5 points 3 Igor Yaroshevsky Moscow Wolverines 3 points 4 Liv Boeree London Royals 2 points 5 Alexandre Luneau Paris Aviators 1 point 6 Guo Dong Hong Kong Stars 0 points

Guo Dong wins GPL Match 118

Hong Kong Stars' Guo Dong won match 118 in the Global Poker League. He won the second six-max heat of the day of the Eurasia Conference by beating Igor Yaroshevsky heads up. Dong recovered very well from an early exit in the first match of the day. He came back and took revenge by raking in seven points for first place.

The second heat looked nothing like the first encounter. Dario Sammartino, second in heat one, was the first to leave, followed quickly by the winner of the first heat, Dominik Nitsche. Liv Boeree scored her second fourth place of the day before Alexandre Luneau was eliminated in third.

Yaroshevsky started the one-on-one battle with 100,000 chips against Guo Dong's 50,000 points. Dong quickly turned the tables and never looked back. The first all in of the heads-up match was the deciding one and Dong got the maximum score, helping his team to a tied second place in the league table.

Results GPL Match 118

Place Player Team Points 1 Guo Dong Hong Kong Stars 7 points 2 Igor Yaroshevsky Moscow Wolverines 5 points 3 Alexandre Luneau Paris Aviators 3 points 4 Liv Boeree London Royals 2 points 5 Dominik Nitsche Berlin Bears 1 point 6 Dario Sammartino Rome Emperors 0 points

The Moscow Wolverines now have a commanding 17-point lead over both the London Royals and Hong Kong Stars.

GPL Eurasia Conference League Standings

Place Team Points 1 Moscow Wolverines 130 2 London Royals 113 2 Hong Kong Stars 113 4 Paris Aviators 108 5 Rome Emperors 101 6 Berlin Bears 100

Americas Conference

Maria Ho wins GPL Match 119

Maria Ho won the first six-max heat in the Global Poker League Americas conference after the summer break. Ho was off to a good start, which ended in her winning the tournament and scoring seven points for the LA Sunset.

Xuan Liu, playing for the Montreal Nationals, was the first to go. She lost a lot of chips to Scott Ball early in the heat and eventually busted to Jason Mercier. The card dead Kitty Kuo was the next one to leave. She first lost a huge pot with against the from Byron Kaverman, who eliminated her a few hands later.

Kaverman was the man in command after busting Scott Ball in fourth when he hit an eight on the river with his ace-eight against Ball's ace-ten. Still, Kaverman was next to go. He was crippled by Jason Mercier and eliminated by Maria Ho.

Mercier took an early lead in the heads up, but still ended up short. He got trapped by Ho and never managed to recover.

Results GPL Match 119

Place Player Team Points 1 Maria Ho LA Sunset 7 points 2 Jason Mercier New York Rounders 5 points 3 Byron Kaverman Sao Paulo Metropolitans 3 points 4 Scott Ball Las Vegas Moneymakers 2 points 5 Kitty Kuo San Francisco Rush 1 point 6 Xian Liu Montreal Metropolitans 0 points

Jason Mercier wins GPL Match 120

This first day of Week 9 of the Global Poker League was a very good day for Jason Mercier. The New York Rounders player finished second in heat one of the Americas conference, before taking home the victory in the second match.

It looked like the second heat would start in the same fashion as the first one did. Xuan Liu was crippled in the beginning of the match, but unlike the heat before, she wasn't the first one to go. She had some luck and doubled up a couple of times before Scott Ball finished in sixth position. It wasn't really Ball's day and his final hand was an example of that. He made the right decision calling Kaverman's all in with queen-five, but still lost to the jack-six of his opponent. Ball only scored two points for the Las Vegas Moneymakers, leaving them dead last in the Americas conference, far away from the playoff spots.

Like Ball, Kitty Kuo couldn't get much going today. She scored her second fifth place finish of the day when her sixes couldn't hold up against Maria Ho's queen-ten. Ho flopped quad tens and Kuo was on her way out. Ho also eliminated Xuan Liu in fourth place. Liu called all in with nine-ten but couldn't beat the queens Ho was holding. Like Ball and Kuo, Liu also scored two points today, but it was just enough to keep her Montreal Nationals on top of the leaderboard.

Maria Ho ended up third after losing two big pots against Jason Mercier. In the last hand, her was no competition for Mercier's when the board ran out .

Mercier was heads up for the second time today. This time, he took home the full seven points by beating Byron Kaverman thanks to a seven on the river. Kaverman got it all in on a flop while holding four-five. Mercier had four-eight and rivered a straight for the win.

Got 1st and 2nd in my GPL 6 max matches while 3 tabling 2/400 mixed on @pokerstars and grinding #WCOOP events #  Jason Mercier (@JasonMercier)

Results GPL Match 120

Place Player Team Points 1 Jason Mercier New York Rounders 7 points 2 Byron Kaverman Sao Paulo Metropolitans 5 points 3 Maria Ho LA Sunset 3 points 4 Xian Liu Montreal Metropolitans 2 points 5 Kitty Kuo San Francisco Rush 1 point 6 Scott Ball Las Vegas Moneymakers 0 points

There are no position changes in the Americas conference after today, but the top four teams are a lot closer together now. The Montreal Nationals hold on to their first position, but only with a three point lead on the LA Sunset. The Sunsets are closing in on the top position, thanks to Maria Ho's 10 points.

Jason Mercier helped his New York Rounders to a tied third place with Byron Kaverman's Sao Paulo Metropolitans. The San Francisco Rush and Las Vegas Moneymakers are falling behind. They have to score big in the upcoming weeks to make it into the playoffs.

GPL Americas Conference League Standings

Place Team Points 1 Montreal Nationals 147 2 LA Sunset 144 3 Sao Paulo Metropolitans 120 3 New York Rounders 120 5 San Francisco Rush 107 6 Las Vegas Moneymakers 97

The Global Poker League will be back today with three heads-up matches from the Eurasia conference. Play will commence at 12 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. CEST) with the heat between the Rome Emperors and the Hong Kong Stars, followed by the Paris Aviators against the Moscow Wolverines, and the battle between the London Royals and the Berlin Bears. You can follow along with Week 9 coverage of the GPL right here on PokerNews.com.

Be sure to complete your PokerNews experience by checking out an overview of our mobile and tablet apps here. Stay on top of the poker world from your phone with our mobile iOS and Android app, or fire up our iPad app on your tablet. You can also update your own chip counts from poker tournaments around the world with MyStack on both Android and iOS.
Professionals and organisations can now access high quality group language training online to develop their foreign language skills and enhance productivity

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***@asianlanguageschool.com Asian Language School

End

-- Language learning can deliver significant improvement in adult learner's attention level better than other types of courses, a study by the University of Edinburgh reveals. Multilingual adults, including those who learn a language in their adulthood, are found to multitask better than monolinguals. The benefits of language learning also extends to improved memory, better visual-spatial skills, and even heightened creativity.Investing in foreign language skills further prepare employees with the language skills and cultural awareness to be ready for global assignments, gain international management experience, and develop their cultural dexterity.Starting this October, Asian Language School will be offering online group lessons for adults wanting to learn Mandarin or Japanese. Classes are conducted in a small group of four guided by an experienced teacher. Lessons are delivered via Zoom, a webinar platform for education, and can be accessed through laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Beginner Level Mandarin Lessons ( https://www.asianlanguageschool.com/ course-chinese ) and Japanese Lessons ( https://www.asianlanguageschool.com/ course-japanese ) are offered every Tuesdays at 7 p.m. EDT for United States and every Thursdays at 7 p.m. AEST for Australia starting in early October 2016. Continuing levels are to be offered in 2017.While the program's syllabus is comparable to the language program offered by higher educational institutions, it has the additional advantage of a small group which means that each learner gets to practice more with their language instructor which is especially ideal for honing learners' speaking and listening skills from the very start. The small group also enables the teacher to provide learning contents that are relevant to the group, be it in terms of their profession or personal interest. Lesson summary is provided after each class and authentic materials in addition to the textbook are used for teaching, making the learning process more efficient and effective.The live group lessons are ideal for learners who want to interact with other people and learn better with others. Private group lessons are also available for those who want to arrange their own group, with the added advantage of flexible scheduling. The latter is better for organisations who are looking to develop their foreign language skills. Those who want to make the most of their online lessons can learn in a private class one-on-one where they can enjoy full customisation of their language course and get undivided attention from their instructor. Private class is an excellent option for learners who want to brush up on their existing language skills.Contrary to popular belief, second language acquisition can be as successful at ages well beyond childhood. Adults have a larger capacity for learning new vocabularies and have a strong motivational factor in mastering a new language. But adults also have other priorities in life that makes language learning more challenging.For that reason, it is important for adult learners to make the most of their classroom hours and have flexibility in those hours. Adults also need to learn what is relevant to them using real life scenarios and engaging contents.Asian Language School is an online language trainer that specialises in teaching adults the languages and cultures of Asia. The school's objectives are to simplify the way Asian languages are taught, support adult learners and organisations in developing their Asian language skills including cultural awareness, through the use of relevant and up-to-date teaching resources.You can connect with us via:Website: https://www.asianlanguageschool.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/AsianlanguageschoolTwitter: https://twitter.com/AlsSydneyGoogle+: https://plus.google.com/+Asianlanguageschool
World's Premier Bioeconomy Consulting Group Also Adds Manager for Biodiesel Team

Mark Farrer

Contact

Wayne Lee, CEO

***@lee-enterprises.com Wayne Lee, CEO

End

-- Lee Enterprises Consulting, the world's premier bio-economy consulting group, is pleased to announce the addition of a new Biogas/AD Team. The consulting group, which now numbers over 100 experts has six divisions - biodiesel, ethanol, emerging technologies, biomass power, renewable chemicals, biogas/AD and business/finance. John Forcier, P.E., a consultant with the group, will lead the new Biogas/AD team.Forcier has a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Vermont, and has more than 43 years of experience in the planning, design, permitting and construction of small through multi-million dollar municipal and private renewable energy, biogas, anaerobic digester, wastewater and composting projects throughout the eastern U.S.A. He was honored as the Vermont Engineer of the Year in 2000 and was inducted into Tau Beta Pi as an Eminent Engineer in 1999. His anaerobic digester/biogas experience includes farm-based, commercial, industrial, municipal and wastewater treatment facility systems utilizing biosolids, manures, food waste, glycerin, SSO, DAF and FOG, and thermal energy. Forcier will lead the Biogas/Team for the consulting group.Lee Enterprises also added Mark Farrer, a respected leader in biodiesel to lead its existing Biodiesel Team. Farrer has a Chemical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech and has been involved in many aspects of biodiesel for over a decade. His work includes research and development of new production methods and processes, including one of the first commercial applications of a solid catalyst used in biodiesel production. Farrer has designed process equipment and managed the construction of biodiesel plants. He has also commissioned and led the operations for two separate biodiesel facilities as General Manager and Director of Operations."I am so pleased to have Mark (Farrer) and John (Forcier) leading two of our teams," said Wayne Lee, CEO of Lee Enterprises Consulting. "These are both imminently qualified experts who will assist in providing the leadership and management to help our consulting group move forward.""Lee Enterprises Consulting is by far the premier alternative and renewables consulting group, both in numbers and in expertise, "says Farrer. "I am delighted to be affiliated with such a prestigious group of folks".: Lee Enterprises Consulting is the world's premier bio-economy consulting group, offering assistance in biodiesel, ethanol, biomass power, renewable chemicals, renewable jet fuels, pyrolysis, hydrolysis, gasification, waste-to-energy, anaerobic digestion, torrefaction, wastewater treatment, butanol, steam reformation, biochar, carbonization and biogas. In addition to its team of over 100 consultants, the group maintains strategic alliances with the leading alternative and renewable fuels companies worldwide, and maintains ongoing relationships with the top alternative fuels law firms, accounting groups, engineers, and fabrication facilities. The group's consultants and strategic partners represent the top talent in bioenergy and biofuels can handle almost every aspect of a project. The group also owns National Business Brokerage, Inc., a full service business brokerage firm specializing in the buying and selling of alternative and renewable fuels plants. Lee Enterprises Consulting, 9821 Brockington Road, Suite 4, Sherwood, AR 72120. (501) 833-8511. www.lee-enterprises.com
British national treasure Joanna Lumley has teamed up with Animal Defenders International (ADI)

By: Animal Defenders International

Joanna Lumley

End

-- British national treasurehas teamed up withfor this month's CITES conference (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) in Johannesburg, to voice her dismay at a proposal to allow trade in rhino horn from the Southern white rhinoceros.The controversial proposal from Swaziland is to amend the Southern white rhinoceros CITES Appendix II listing to allow trade of horns from rhinos which have died from natural causes, or recovered poached horns or horns harvested from live animals. ADI warn this will encourage trade and provide a route for laundering illegal horns.says "We must stamp out the barbaric and cruel trade in rhino horn. This iconic species should not be reduced to a commodity that can be plundered for human indulgence. We must work together to save the beautiful rhino from being butchered and its populations pushed ever closer to the brink".The 183 countries which are signatories to the CITES trade restrictions will decide in Johannesburg which species need further protection, and which species will endure further killing and trade. Species covered by CITES are listed by Appendices I (highest level of protection), II and III, according to the level of risk to survival of the species.says: "Allowing this trade in rhino horn would undermine the international and domestic bans and would complicate current enforcement efforts. It is not possible to prevent illegal horns from entering the legal trade. This proposal should be rejected."Members of the public can make their voices heard by spreading awareness about the danger to rhinos, elephants and other animals through social media, and join ADI's CITES ThunderclapHelp here: http://www.ad- international.org/ conservation/ go.php?id=42... Elephants also need the public's help  a joint proposal supported by ADI from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabweis for a universal listing of all African elephant populations to Appendix I, which would ensure they receive the highest level of protection and therefore greater restrictions on the ivory trade. This would send a clear message that there is now global determination to halt the potential extinction of African elephants.ADI ends the individual suffering of wild animals in captivity, as well as in the wild. A previous investigation by ADI lead to the release of elderly circus elephant Anne from a brutal life of abuse at Bobby Roberts' Circus after ADI released footage of her being beaten while chained to the ground, in 2011. Roberts was subsequently convicted of cruelty to Anne in 2012, and she was removed from the circus.Earlier this year, ADI rescued over 100 animals from circuses and the illegal wildlife trade in Peru and Colombia, including lions, bears, tigers, monkeys and others. ADI and the governments of Peru and Columbia collaborated for the unprecedented Spirit of Freedom operation and the animals were nursed back to health and rehomed in their natural habitats, with 33 African lions returned to their native Africa to start a new life at Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in South Africa where ADI is funding their lifelong care.To donate to ADI, please visit: https://www.ad- international.org/ take_action/ donate.php for more information on CITES, please visit: http://www.ad-international.org/conservation/go.php?id=4197&ssi=14
Perx has signed a master reseller agreement in Australia and hired a veteran regional sales director in Malaysia.

By: Perx Technologies

End

-- Perx Technologies Pte Ltd, the Singapore-based mobile customer engagement and loyalty platform provider, announces it has signed a master reseller agreement with thriving customer engagement and loyalty startup, Complex Interactions, in Australia and hired enterprise sales veteran, N. Vijayan, in Malaysia.With these two developments, Perx's intelligent customer engagement solutions will reach a substantial number of enterprises in the Asia Pacific region to employ an inexpensive plug-in solution to revitalize their customer engagement strategy and in turn, drive their businesses to greater heights.This announcement comes at a very strategic time, on the back of Perx's partnership with Visa Business Hub. With this Visa partnership, Perx helps SMBs to automate their mobile customer engagement and loyalty requirements while cutting costs around their existing business and allowing them to offer value-added services to their customers in real time."We are thrilled to make this double announcement as Perx rapidly expands its regional footprint," said Anna Gong, CEO of Perx. "As experts in digital and brand marketing, loyalty, customer engagement and retail distribution, Complex Interactions will be invaluable to us in the Australian market.""In Malaysia, Vijayan was a great choice with his stellar track record and relevant enterprise experience,"Anna added.Like Perx, Complex Interactions ( http://www.complexinteractions.com.au ) is driven by solving their customers' challenges and gaps. Co-founders, Evgeny Kuznetsov & Sean Andrews, saw that there was no true end to end solution out there that can solve their customers' loyalty and customer engagement requirements in the new digital age where mobile, personalization & proximity marketing is the key to engaging consumers. This common goal paved the way to the partnership."Where technology allows us to automate tangible solutions and deliver smart business intelligence to our customers, Perx and their expertise regarding engagement and customer loyalty will allow us the means to have deeper and more comprehensive metrics to better connect companies and consumers"" Sean of Complex Interactions mentioned.In addition, Sean has a company called New Age Technology that manufactures and distributes smart consumer electronics and educational devices to many retailers. This gives Perx immediate access to a list of clients to work with, including large mall operators, retailers, banks and telecommunication firms.As Perx continues to build quality products and sign up partnerships around the world, it attracts more seasoned industry veterans to join. Vijayan, will bring more than 20 years of experience in strategic partnerships and enterprise sales management to the business.Vijayan brings to Perxvast experience in software sales and is well-known for securing major deals with large MNC's. As Country Sales Head for SAP Malaysia, his longest and most productive stint, Vijay led sales and implementation of ERP solutions to major corporations in the region.With five years of experience in innovating, developing and managing its mobile loyalty and rewards app, Perx understands the needs of SMBs to large enterprises to improve and solve their digital marketing challenges around customer acquisition, engagement, and retention in a real time manner with relevant insights to make informed and impactful business decisions.-XXX-Perx Technologies, the leading Predictive Mobile Customer Engagement Platform, enables organizations of all sizes to acquire, engage and reward their customers or employees intelligently.Perx's Analytics Engine empowers you to create a new, yet unrealized, revenue stream by transforming your customers' big data into a powerful marketing platform for your business ecosystem.With four years of experience in innovating, developing and managing its mobile loyalty and rewards app, Perx is one of a few companies globally that has a personal referenceable implementation, consuming its own enterprise SaaS platform, to prove that what they say they can do works and has helped companies generate unrealized revenue streams with the power of intelligent data analyticsFor more: www.getperx.com Michelle Luciamichelle@getperx.com+65 9027 3984Daniel Miltondaniel@bebop.asia+65 8133 4584
Zakka went missing on the 18th of September last year while visiting Iran for the fifth time. As part of his trip, Zakka had been invited to speak at a conference by the Iranian government and cover topics of entrepreneurship, widening the range of economic opportunities for women and addressing the issue of sustainable development. Zakka has been in custody since the 3rd of November, as reported by the Iranian state television. He was accused of being a spy with clear links to the US.

According to Amnesty International, the Lebanese citizen has only had two court hearings without receiving proper legal assistance. Despite his poor medical condition which is deteriorating, Zakka has also been denied any medical care. Zakkas lawyer Jason Poblete reported that Tehrans Revolutionary Court have declared his sentence in a 60-page document which has not yet been made available. Poblete himself has not seen the document but Zakkas Iranian lawyer has shared its content with him.

The State Department have issued a statement, expressing how concerned they are about Zakkas sentence, drawing upon basic human rights principles. We reaffirm our calls on Iran to respect and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms, cease any arbitrary or politically motivated detentions and ensure fair and transparent judicial proceedings in all criminal prosecutions. The State Department demand for Zakka to be released immediately.

Zakkas sentence is especially troubling, considering that its execution does not appear to be juristically correct or fair. Following the historic US-Iran Nuclear deal which was sealed on the 16th of January 2016, actions like these throw a spanner in the developing relationships between Iran and the international community, making governments around the world question Irans commitment to human rights.

Since the deal was made, a number of citizens with a fairly high profile in the West have been detained in Iran without a fair trial. Among them are Homa Hoodfar, a retired Iranian-Canadian professor who taught in the US; Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman and advocate for a stronger relationship between the US and Iran, and his father Baquer Namazi; Robin Shahini , an Iranian-American who was detained during a family visit to Iran for making online comments against Irans record for human rights.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen was also arrested while visiting her parents in Iran with her toddler daughter. The former FBI agent Robert Levinson has also been missing in Iran since 2007.

The Iranian state media has not acknowledged or reported on Zakkas sentence, and the UN mission in Iran have ignored the request to provide any further comments on the situation.

Zakkas sentence has been criticised by David Ramadan, the co-founder of Friends of Nizar Zakka group who previously acted as the legislator for state Virginia, US. Theres no regard for any international order, any international agreement or any international state of relations that they care about, he commented.
There will be a celebration of everything cassowary in the Daintree rainforest on September 24 when scientists, conservationists, locals and visitors come together for the third annual World Cassowary Day.

By: Tourism Port Douglas and Daintree

Cassowary at the Daintree Discovery Centre.

End

-- World Cassowary Day 2016 will be held at James Cook University's Daintree Rainforest Observatory from 10am till 2pm.It will have a family fun day atmosphere, with markets and stalls from various conservation groups throughout the Far North, a forum for debate, discussion and education on conservation issues, cassowary talks, face painting and other activities for the children, music and food.Tourism Port Douglas and Daintree executive officer Tara Bennett said the community and family fun day provided an opportunity to learn about and support this iconic, prehistoric bird."The Southern Cassowary is listed as endangered, so the focus in 2016 will be on how we can better protect this keystone species from extinction. This is an amazing bird that we have the privilege to live alongside," Ms Bennett said.World Cassowary Day was launched in Kuranda in 2014 and was hosted by the Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation in Mission Beach last year.These two areas, west and south of Cairns, with the Daintree to the north, are cassowary hotspots.This year's event is hosted by the Daintree Marketing Cooperative with support from Douglas Shire Council and Mayor Julia Leu, who is this year's World Cassowary Day Ambassador.Ms Bennett said Tourism Port Douglas and Daintree would celebrate the event with the launch of a national competition to Win a Family Holiday in the Daintree."There will be $1000 vouchers towards flights, and a four-night holiday package, including three nights at Beach House, one night at QT in Port Douglas, and activities including a croc cruise, horse riding, Daintree Discovery Centre, and Jungle Surfing."The competition is open until November 30. More information can be found online at visitportdouglasdaintree.com,"she said.The program for WCD 2016 will begin with a Welcome to Country by Kuku Yalanji Traditional Owners and a welcome from the Daintree Marketing Cooperative WCD team.World Cassowary Day founder Paul Webster will give a history of cassowary conservation, followed by various talks on the world's three cassowary species, the role of the cassowary in dispersing rainforest seeds, conserving and enhancing cassowary habitat, and a history of the Daintree Blockade in the 1970s.The film,(No Rainforest No Food No Cassowary) will also be screened.Australia's Threatened Species Commissioner Gregory Andrews will be special guest speaker as well as entomologist Claire Baker from Bugs 'n Stuff, who will present an interpretive talk for children featuring Insects of the Wet Tropics, from 12 till 12.30pm.Before the start of the day's official program, the Beards On for Conservation group and Rainforest Trust Australia will lead a planting of 1000 trees from 9am till 10am, right next to the Daintree Rainforest Observatory.World Cassowary Day project manager, Josh Harris from the Daintree Marketing Cooperative, said World Cassowary Day was a way to celebrate the uniqueness and importance of the cassowary to the Wet Tropics ecosystem."It is a chance to also raise awareness of the issues these spectacular creatures face and an opportunity for our community to help bring about change to ensure their future," he said.The Daintree Rainforest Observatory is located at 3701 Cape Tribulation Road, Cape Tribulation.Please note this is a free event with all purchases on the day being cash.For more information, please contact:Tara BennettExecutive OfficerTourism Port Douglas & DaintreePhone: 07 4099 4588Email: eo@visitportdouglasdaintree.com Web: www.visitportdouglasdaintree.com ( http://www.tpdd.com.au/ Issued byTanya Snelling,Strategic PRP 0417 202 663M tanya@strategicpr.com.au
Gallery1 at Jackson State University teamed up with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to present the now permanent collection of Patrick Kelly's designs (25 items).There will also be a photo exhibition and fashion show.

By: Gallery1

Contact

Gallery1

***@jsums.edu Gallery1

End

--Patrick Kelly attended Jackson State University and a native of Vicksburg, MS. He was one of the first African-Americans designers whose designs graced the covers of Vogue and draped the bodies of fashion icons Iman, Naomi Campbell, Bette Davis, Princess Diana, Grace Jones, and Madonna, just to name a few. He was not only a native from Vicksburg, MS but also JSU alum.Gallery1 Director, Shon McCarthy says she was inspired by Patrick Kelly, because she was also a designer in New York and when she started her tenure at Jackson State recognized that there was a need for an archival presence of Patrick Kelly here, in order to inspire, expose, and educate the JSU students and the community of our fashion legend. Opening day will consist of a presentation of 25 of Patrick Kelly's original collection, gifted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the owners of his estate. A photo exhibition by Imani Khayyam and a Fashion Show, with inspirational pieces designed by Kami Grim. Patrick Kelly also created T-shirts, and designer Zach Thomas has designed the T-Shirts for the exhibition. Seven middles school students from the Jackson and surrounding area will design the accessories. It is certainly a collaborative effort of artists and students from many generations. The mission is to continue Patrick Kelly's motto to "Make you smile".
By: ADAM Global

Contact

Sony C

***@webmunky.com Sony C

End

-- ADAM Global International Consultant, expert in international business and exports, held its annual meeting in Obidos, Portugal. The 50 partners involved led to possible business references in real estate, hospitality and products such as fruit, wines and personal interest in acquiring properties in the region, Gazette of Caldas President, Dr. Tahir Akhtar said.At this meeting various Portuguese economic agents, as well as representatives of municipalities of Obidos and Bombarral, had the opportunity to make presentations to about 50 members of the partnership to expose the potential of the region and country and for the foreign investment funding, whether for the internationalization of existing products.For Dr. Tahir Akhtar, president of Adam Holdings, the group that owns Adam Global, these presentations have identified business opportunities in real estate, information technology and other services "that may result in future contacts in the region of Obidos and the country".The businessman said that there are talks on hotel projects and others in the field of new technologies. Moreover, one of the entities that had the opportunity to showcase at the event was the Obidos Technology Park. In this field, Dr. Akhtar said that partnership projects can be initiated with Indian companies in the sector. "Many of our partners are from India and we feel that is the first time that Portuguese companies are interacting with Indian companies, which is very interesting."he said.What also attracted the interest of ADAM Global consultants were the wines of the region "Some partners exchanged views with producers because the quality and the price are excellent. There is an opportunity to export these wines and there are possibilities also with fruit and other products", he said.The President of ADAM Global group devalues the financial problems that Portugal has gone through as a deterrent to foreign investment. "Not only in Portugal, many countries have problems," he said. He added that the consultant does not look at the problems, but for the opportunities. "In every problem there is always an opportunity and it is to these that we are looking at,"he stressed.Dr. Akhtar said that these contacts are just the beginning of a relationship with the country and the region. There is a delegation of ADAM Global in Portugal, coordinated by Ana Rodrigues, who is regional president for Africa, with offices in Sintra and Luanda. Starting this link may establish a structure to give local support.In addition to the professional interest, Dr. Akhtar said that several members of the ADAM Global showed personal interest in acquiring properties in the region due to the weather and prices which are "very reasonable."ADAM Global operates in international business solutions with operations in more than 100 countries on all continents.The workshop was attended by the chairman of AICEP (Agency for Investment and External Commerce in Portugal), Miguel Garcia, and the representative of the Small and Medium Enterprises Association (ANPME) in Africa, Fernando Silva, and the Assessor's Office Assistant Secretary of State and the economy, Helga Matos.Miguel Garcia told the Gazette of Caldas the importance of using these opportunities to put Portugal and its products towards people of different nationalities within a network of contacts and information exchange. "You have to show the competitive advantages of Portugal while destination for investment because it creates jobs. Usually companies that not only focus on the local market are the main exporters. " he said.The chairman of AICEP said that the interlocutors felt a positive surprise, because there are "many more opportunities than they would be waiting for" and added that it is the Portuguese authorities "to pursue this interest and create common ground."Fernando Silva, representative of ANPME in the African market, said that Portuguese companies are "a target for foreign investors" and are able to help entrepreneurs with the Portugal 2020 program that allows them to project its business tools, for example, the countries of CPLP.Fernando Silva emphasized that Portugal is well organized in networking in the external level, but there is a lack of knowledge of these means, which can benefit both the large and small companies.To read more, visit http://www.adamglobal.com
Scotlands leading airport has turned to BlipTrack's technology and sensors to gather data about passenger queue and flow. The information enables the airport to streamline operations at security lines and to display real-time waiting times.

By: BLIP Systems

Edinburgh_ Airport_ Wait_ Time_ Sign

Contact

BLIP Systems

***@blipsystems.com BLIP Systems

End

-- With 11 million travelers last year and heading towards 12 million this year, Edinburgh Airport is Scotland's busiest airport. It is crucial that logistics are on point around the airport to keep passengers happy. In July 2016, the airport reported the busiest-ever month after seeing 1,332,282 travelers through its doors  an increase of 9.6% on the same month last year.With the constant increase in passengers, Edinburgh Airport enlisted the expertise of Denmark-based BLIP Systems to design and implement the BlipTrack solution at the airports security lines, to help measure and handle passenger numbers smoothly and efficiently.The solution provides the airport with detailed information about passengers queue times and how they move around the airport. The data gives the airport a clear picture on trends and patterns and how they are performing. It allows them to respond promptly and effectively  if lines are becoming congested  to ultimately reduce processing times. In addition, it also enables the airport to provide optimum service by displaying wait times on signs in the airport and on their website, thereby reducing passengers frustration by creating realistic wait time expectations."With BlipTrack we are able to keep our passengers fully informed 24/7  both in the terminal and online  about what to expect at security. At peak times, up to 3,000 passengers an hour travel through security and our aim is to make that experience as smooth as possible whilst ensuring safety  BLIP Systems helps us do that," says Adrian Witherow, Chief Operating Officer at Edinburgh Airport."In order to improve traveler satisfaction, comply with service-level agreements and evaluate key performance indicators, it is important that airport managers are able to measure passenger queue and flow and subsequently improve waiting times. With our fourth UK installation, we are confident that BlipTrack also will be successful in providing Edinburgh Airport with all the necessary data to both optimize processes and improve the passenger experience,"says Christian Bugislaus Carstens, Marketing Manager at BLIP Systems.Edinburgh joins a host of other leading international airports, including JFK, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dublin, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Auckland, Keflavik and Oslo, who are displaying real-time wait times, using the BlipTrack solution.Edinburgh Airport is Scotland's busiest airport. More than 40 airlines serve over 100 destinations and 11 million passengers travelled through the airport in 2015. In June 2011, Edinburgh Airport was named Best European Airport (5-10 million passengers) by ACI EUROPE. Earlier in the year, the airport was also named as being in the top 5 in Europe for customer service as measured by the ACI's ASQ survey. Edinburgh aims to grow and develop the airport responsibly over a 30-year period while improving the experience for their passengers and enhancing the contribution the airport makes to the regional and national economy.BLIP Systems is a privately-held information technology company with headquarters in Aalborg, Denmark. The company is one of the leading providers of data analytic tools to transform traveler flow into value, and creating easy-to-interpret decision-making tools of end-users. The BlipTrack solution is successfully employed in optimization efforts in more than 30 international airports, including Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, JFK Airport in New York, El-Prat Airport in Barcelona, Sydney, Copenhagen, Oslo, Malpensa and Linate Airports in Milano, Manchester, Brussels, Edinburgh, Dublin, San Diego, Helsinki, Auckland, Montreal, Christchurch, Geneve, Birmingham, Bristol, Cincinnati, Brussels South Charleroi, Keflavik, Billund and Aalborg. The solution is also implemented in road traffic in Switzerland, New Zealand, USA, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Ireland. In recent years, the solution has also been rolled out in ports in Denmark and UK, train stations in UK and Holland, ski resorts in USA, amusement parks, and at events all over the world.
By: America 2030

Contact

America 2030, LLC

***@america2030.net America 2030, LLC

End

-- America 2030, LLC is in the process of signing an agreement on the acquisition of investments for a manufacturer of vegetable oil. This manufacturer owns a trademark known all over Ukraine.The investor is an investment company operating in the markets of North Africa, Europe and Middle East. This project has been recognized by America 2030 as a pilot project, in that there are many other oil manufacturers in Ukraine which have outdated production facilities requiring substantial modernization to improve products' quality and increase production volumes.It is these ready products of agriculture that may improve the image of Ukraine as a competitive world food supplier and serve as an impulse for the interest of foreign investors to enter the Ukrainian market. The professionals from America 2030 believe that attraction of capital will lead other manufacturers to increase their capacity and in turn profits.For more than 30 years, America 2030, LLC has been focused on providing services of various complexity in the area of new capital, real estate brokerage, business brokerage, bankruptcy, investment banking and financial consulting.www.america2030.net
Receive an overview of strategic and tactical airlifts in Europe with topics addressed by senior military, multinational commands and expert industry speakers at SMi's 17th annual Military Airlift and Air-to-Air Refuelling conference.

By: SMi Group

SMi's 17th annual Military Airlift and Air-to-Air Refuelling conference

Contact

SMi Group

vtrinh@smi-online.co.uk

+44 (0) 20 7827 6140 SMi Group+44 (0) 20 7827 6140

End

-- NATO is preparing a major boost to its ability to refuel aircraft in mid-air, with the signature of an agreement between the Netherlands and Luxembourg to acquire two Airbus A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport (A330 MRTT) aircraft. The new tankers will be acquired on behalf of the participating nations and NATO. They can support NATO and European Union operations, as well as multinational and national ones.Air-to-air refueling tankers are critical to long-distance deployments in support of other aircraft. NATO's air campaigns in Kosovo and Libya have identified air-to-air refuelling as a critical shortfall in European military capabilities. Individual Allies, as well as NATO and the EU, have been working to address this shortfall.(Source: NATO, 8 August 2016, 'NATO prepares major boost to aerial refueling capability')Against this backdrop, SMi is proud to announce that the Royal Netherlands Air Force, Airbus Defence and Space and NATO will be providing timely presentations alongside senior military figures, industry experts and leading service providers at the 17th annual Military Airlift and Air-to-Air Refuelling conference, taking place on 29th - 30th November 2016 in Florence, Italy: Update on the A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport (MRTT) ProgrammeColonel Johan van Soest, A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport (MRTT) Programme Steering Group Chairman, Royal Netherlands Air Force Airbus Defence and Space Developing Military CapabilitiesDidier Vernet, Military Affairs, Airbus Defence and Space Satisfying Strategic Airlift Requirements in NATOKenneth Carhart, Consultant, NATOIn addition, there will be a post-conference complimentary site visit to the Pisa Air Force Base, taking place on 1st December 2016, where attendees will have the exclusive opportunity to visit the facilities and aircraft.The Military Airlift and Air-to-Air Refuelling agenda will feature:Military and Government Speakers Laurent Donnet, Programme Manager Airlift and Air-to-Air Refuelling, European Defence Agency Brigadier General Achille Cazzaniga, Commanding Officer of the 46th Air Brigade, Italian Air Force Major General Christian Badia, Commander, European Air Transport Command Colonel Johan van Soest, A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport (MRTT) Programme Steering Group Chairman, Royal Netherlands Air Force Colonel Thomas Torkelson, Commander of 100 Aerial Refuelling Wing, US Air Force Europe Colonel Bjrn Gohn-Hellum, Vice Commander, Heavy Airlift Wing Colonel Torgeir Aas, Commander of the Gardermoen Air Base, Royal Norwegian Air Force Colonel Daniel Lemon, Division Chief, Logistics Operations, United States Africa Command, US Air Force Colonel Eric Renaut, Chief Resources Support Branch, EU Military Staff Group Captain Elizabeth Purcell, Chief AMCC, NATO SHAPE Group Captain Andrew Killey, Assistant Head of DSCOM, UK Ministry of Defence Group Captain Martin Cunningham, Chief of Staff - Air Mobility Headquarters, Royal Air Force (RAF) Michele Rega, Fixed Wing Officer, European Defence Agency Wiek Noldus, Programme Manager, Airlift Management Programme, NATO Kenneth Carhart, Consultant, NATOIndustry Speakers Didier Vernet, Head of A400M Product Marketing, Airbus Defence and Space Pam Valdez, Director, Derivative Fleet Support and Sustainment, Global Services and Support, Boeing James Eisenhart, Director, Sales and Marketing, C2ISR Mobility Platforms, Boeing Paulo Mirpuri, President, Skytech Colon Miller, Global Director, Government & Defense Programs, Volga-Dnepr Oleksandr Kiva, Marketing and Sales Director, AntonovVisit the website to view the full conference programme at http://www.smi- online.co.uk/ 2016military- airlift1.asp
Instant Assignment Help has garnered the reputation of being the most reliable online assignment writing service provider in Australia.

By: Henry Wilson

Contact

Instant Assignment Help Australia

***@gmail.com Instant Assignment Help Australia

End

-- Instant Assignment Help aims at providing the best possible assistance to the students of the Australia who reside in various cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Queensland and many other. The students who study in the top universities of Australia can takefrom the online portal.This has emerged as a leading service provider in Australia and is providing the assistance to the scholars with their. They provide the best platform for the student-expert interaction where the pupils can directly contact theand avail the optimum services.The students are assigned the academic work by their university professor to check their efficiency and performance. By submitting the perfect assignment, the college-goers aim to obtain excellent grades and appreciation from the concerned faculty. They are also expected to complete the writing work within a prescribed deadline. This puts the scholars in much pressure and stress.To provide ease to such ailing candidates, Instant Assignment Help comes to their rescue. With the presence of expert team of writers, it aims to provide the following services to the university scholars of Australia:1) 100% original content with no plagiarism in it. They understand the importance of unique document in a student's life and the expert native writers deliver the same.2) They are deadline specific and present the academic document to the scholars before the stipulated submission date.3) 24*7 presence of the customer care support enables the college-goers to take assistance any time as per their convenience and requirement.4) The availability of highly-experienced and subject-oriented professionals aid the students in submitting an efficient assignment which helps them to earn excellent remarks from their professors.5) Quality check of the final work by the quality assurance team to deliver the most efficient academic work.6) They also provide the services at affordable prices. Special offers and freebies also help the scholars to avail their services.So if you too are in dire need of an effective, then approach the team of Instant Assignment Help. You just have to register yourself on their website and specify your requirements. By providing such ease to the scholars of the Australian universities, they have indeed proved their worth.Contact Information:To get more information, visit our site:E-mail:henrywilson2278@gmail.comPhone: +61 879 057 034Website: http://www.instantassignmenthelp.com.au/
Founder of Barjeel Art Foundation urged students to seek information about arts in the Arab world

Contact

Sara Hassan

Media Relations Specialist

***@zu.ac.ae Sara HassanMedia Relations Specialist

End

-- A large number of students gathered at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi campus to refresh their knowledge on key art periods and learn more about major artworks drawn from diverse corners of the Arab world.Organized by the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises, Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Founder of Barjeel Art Foundation, engaged in an interactive discussions with Zayed University students, fostered a critical dialogue around contemporary and modern art practices, with a focus on artists with Arab heritage, and shared captivating ideas and stories in a lecture held under the theme of "The Politics of Arab Art".The Barjeel Art Foundation was founded with the vision of creating a space where artwork drawn from diverse corners of the Arab world can coalesce in an interactive and communal setting. Art of the Arab world is as nuanced as the nations that comprise the historically, politically, socially, and geographically diverse region.The Foundation also aims to exhibit works of established and emerging Arab contemporary artists in a public display that is unique to the region. Barjeel's guiding principle is to extend the privilege of viewing eminent pieces of Arab art to the community at large.In his address to Zayed University students, Sheikh Al Qassemi said: "I am inspired and impressed by artworks of Abdel Qader Al Rais, one of the most-acclaimed artists from the UAE, for his distinct style. His artwork on the Palestinian Intifada in 1989 showed the struggle that he encountered to no longer draw figures driven by his religious beliefs. Instead, he concentrated more on sweeping landscapes, architectural studies and abstract forms," Al Qassemi said.During the lecture, students were actively involved. They raised many questions about different artworks including paintings and sculptures. The event was also attended by Dr Marilyn Roberts, Provost at Zayed University, Ann-Maree Reaney, Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises, and faculty members.The talk also included a presentation of artworks for famous Arab artists such as Abdel Hadi El Gazzar, an Egyptian painter who occupied a unique position among the artists of his generation, Nouri Al Rawi, who played a pivotal role in the development of modern Iraqi art, Kadhim Haidar, whose work examined important shifts in Iraq's political environment in the 1950s and 1960s, Jawad Salim, an Iraqi painter and sculptor especially known for his Nasb al-Hurriyah (Monument of Freedom), Ragheb Ayad, a pioneer of Egyptian modern art who made significant contributions to expressionism in Egypt, Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese- born Palestinian video artist and installation artist, Dia Azzawi, who is born in Baghdad in 1939 and internationally recognized as one of the pioneers of modern Arab art, Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born British architect and the first women to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, and many others.Al Qassemi, who has been described by numerous media outlets as a prominent voice during the events of the Arab Spring, urged students to research and read more about arts in the Arab world that deserves more respect.
Vita Talalay Makes Falling Asleep a Virtual Dream By: Vita Talalay Vita Talalay Virtual Reality Glasses MAASTRICHT, Netherlands - Sept. 21, 2016 - PRLog -- Radium Foam, makers of Vita Talalay latex foam introduce the first virtual reality experience ever to enhance night-time relaxation for better sleep on 01/12/2016 to retail stores worldwide. The company, which prides itself on providing the healthiest sleep experience, will release virtual reality glasses that put you in a state of relaxation by simulating, through sound and sight, the experience of being in a forest or ocean environment. The glasses will be given with the purchase of Vita Talalay products or can be obtained through their upcoming e-commerce store.



"After a long day of activities it can be hard to 'turn off' your stress and focus on recharging your energies," says Cees Zielman, Vita Talalay General Manager. "Vita Talalay disrupts the industry by creating a natural Virtual Reality Experience for the bedroom. It is an innovative way to bring people into the right state of relaxation before sleeping. The Vita Talalay Virtual Reality Experience reinforces our efforts to bring the healthiest state of sleep to our consumers by transforming their bedroom in a natural oasis, providing a unique state of relaxation before falling asleep."



To see a sample of the experience, visit







According to the Mayo Clinic, the benefits to relaxation can include:



 Slowing heart rate and lowering blood pressure



 Increasing blood flow to major muscles



 Reducing muscle tension and chronic pain



 Improving mood and concentration



 Lowering fatigue



 Reducing anger and frustration



 Boosting confidence





With Vita Talalay, you can achieve high-quality sleep that will help you to eat better, have more energy, and be in a better state of mind. According to the manufacturers, Vita Talalay is the best comfort material in the market, all leading to a better night's sleep.



Radium Foam began producing Vita Talalay latex in 1961 and since have been a benchmark in the production of the most luxurious mattresses, mattress toppers, and pillows worldwide. They attribute this to the production of Talalay latex which provides ventilation, even temperature distribution, durability, and support. Their products can be found in thousands of retail stores worldwide in brands such as Restonic, Carpe Diem, and King Koil. Vita Talalay holds a Gold Certification from Cradle to Cradle, and certificates from Eco Institute and Oeko-Tex Standard 100 verifying them to be safe and healthy for humans and the environment.



Contact

Vita Talalay

Adler Luderer- Channel marketing manager

***@radiumfoam.nl

(+31)0433288707



Photo:

https://www.prlog.org/ 12588603/1 Vita TalalayAdler Luderer- Channel marketing manager(+31)0433288707 End -- Radium Foam, makers of Vita Talalay latex foam introduce the first virtual reality experience ever to enhance night-time relaxation for better sleep on 01/12/2016 to retail stores worldwide. The company, which prides itself on providing the healthiest sleep experience, will release virtual reality glasses that put you in a state of relaxation by simulating, through sound and sight, the experience of being in a forest or ocean environment. The glasses will be given with the purchase of Vita Talalay products or can be obtained through their upcoming e-commerce store."After a long day of activities it can be hard to 'turn off' your stress and focus on recharging your energies," says Cees Zielman, Vita Talalay General Manager. "Vita Talalay disrupts the industry by creating a natural Virtual Reality Experience for the bedroom. It is an innovative way to bring people into the right state of relaxation before sleeping. The Vita Talalay Virtual Reality Experience reinforces our efforts to bring the healthiest state of sleep to our consumers by transforming their bedroom in a natural oasis, providing a unique state of relaxation before falling asleep."To see a sample of the experience, visit https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qYjpqc- dw8g According to the Mayo Clinic, the benefits to relaxation can include: Slowing heart rate and lowering blood pressure Increasing blood flow to major muscles Reducing muscle tension and chronic pain Improving mood and concentration Lowering fatigue Reducing anger and frustration Boosting confidenceWith Vita Talalay, you can achieve high-quality sleep that will help you to eat better, have more energy, and be in a better state of mind. According to the manufacturers, Vita Talalay is the best comfort material in the market, all leading to a better night's sleep.Radium Foam began producing Vita Talalay latex in 1961 and since have been a benchmark in the production of the most luxurious mattresses, mattress toppers, and pillows worldwide. They attribute this to the production of Talalay latex which provides ventilation, even temperature distribution, durability, and support. Their products can be found in thousands of retail stores worldwide in brands such as Restonic, Carpe Diem, and King Koil. Vita Talalay holds a Gold Certification from Cradle to Cradle, and certificates from Eco Institute and Oeko-Tex Standard 100 verifying them to be safe and healthy for humans and the environment. Email : ***@radiumfoam.nl Tags : Mattress , Sleep , Health , Lifestyle , Furniture , Virtual Reality , Relaxation , New , Technology , Industry Industry : Entertainment , Environment , Furniture , Health , Home , Lifestyle Location : Maastricht - Limburg - Netherlands Subject : Projects Account Phone Number Disclaimer Report Abuse Account Email AddressAccount Phone Number Page Updated Last on: Sep 21, 2016 Vita Talalay PRs Vita Talalay: The Secret to a Healthy Life


Together with the patron, the family of Major Krivonosov believes in its future, when Maxim will recover, get an education and will become a full-fledged citizen of Ukraine, healthy, full of strength and energy.

Media Contact

pr@iff-charity.org

End

-- The warm and sincere meeting took place after the next survey of Hungarian doctors for Ukrainian boy from Mykolaiv City, which cares by the patron Iankovskyi, which fully funding the treatment of the child and providing the moral support. At this time, completing the next stage of the Maxim Krivonosov medical survey, the doctors gave a real beam of light - a good hope for the child's recovery. The boy did not give up, together with benefactors;he is fighting for his life.During the period of treatment follow-up the examinations have shown the some progress - improvement, the disease does not progress, and there is a real chance of recovery. In a friendly meeting attended by a special guest - Vadim Merikov, former head of Mykolaiv regional state administration, which, together with Igor Iankovskyi talked with boy, learning about the state of his health, after hearing predictions of doctors, a further course of treatment plans. It is thanks to Vadim Merikov, caring volunteers helped a family from Mykolaiv boy.After all, from the birth date of Maxim suffered a severe illness. The family asked for help to Iankovskyi Foundation, when suddenly lost hope and basic support, a strong shoulder. The Maxim's father - Sergey Krivonosov, the officer of the 79th special airmobile brigade, was tragically killed during the hostilities ATO. The sick boy was a "son of the Hero of Ukraine", the one with his mother and with his illness. On the advice of those who care, Anastasia Krivonosova (Maxim'mother)decided to write a letter to Igor Iankovskyi. The appeal was considered. Since then has passed more than a year - the founder of the Charity Foundation "Initiative for the Future", patron Iankovskyi serves curator of treatment to Maxim boy. Igor Iankovskyi funded the treatment, a trip to Hungary for the survey, providing the necessary medications for a child. After treatment, Maxim Krivonosov undergoing tests in the best specialized clinic in Budapest. Doctors return to the child a chance to live a full life. During this time the family of Mykolaiv, burnt with fire and pain events in the East of Ukraine, in the end, to get reliable help and support in difficult times."I am struck by the boy's resistance. He is seriously ill, but did not give up, and we - are helping to survive in an unequal battle with the disease. Now, after more than 1.5 years of the treatment we see the real improvement. Previously, because of an inoperable tumor in the brain, he had frequent attacks of epilepsy; however, they stopped during the treatment. Now he struggles with the disease. I believe that he will cope. At a minimum, we will do everything possible for that. Today such cases are difficult to treat in Ukraine. In many ways, the significant progress in the treatment of such children was made possible by innovations in the field of medicine outside the country. I am sure, that soon we will be able to provide the all necessary assistance in Ukrainian hospitals too", - says Igor Iankovskyi.Together with the patron, the family of Major Sergei Krivonosov believes in its future, when Maxim will recover, get an education and will become a full-fledged citizen of Ukraine, healthy, full of strength and energy.If you interested about chronicle of events and the history of the treatment of Maxim Krivonosov from the city of Mykolaiv, please, see the links:
The Voice of America article notes that there are between 2.5 and three million Afghan nationals living in Iran and that approximately 950,000 of them are considered refugees. These and other ethnic minorities are routinely denied civil and political rights that are extended to Irans Persian Shiite majority population. In absence of citizenship or residency status, many Afghans are incapable of obtaining jobs in Iran, a situation that Iranian officials and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have exploited to push ethnic Afghanis into volunteering to fight as part of Shiite militias in defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

While this indirect conscription has been presented as a way for Afghanis to receive residency status and work visas, many have died in the effort. Meanwhile, despite the transfer of about 200 prisoners, some 5,000 Afghanis remain in Iranian jails. The prisoner exchange has perhaps temporarily silenced the issue of their mistreatment, but Voice of America emphasizes that the issue is not settled and also that Iran can be expected to use the situation of Afghani expatriates as a bargaining asset when seeking infrastructure and trade agreements with Afghanistan.

The Voice of America report can thus be seen as giving an international dimension to an issue that has been a persistent part of foreign policy dialogue within the United States. That is, it suggests that Tehran is keen to use imprisoned foreign nationals as a source of leverage with regional countries as well as with Western nations that the Iranian leadership accuses of trying to infiltrate the Islamic Republic.

The focal point of that issue in the US has recently been the so-called ransom payment that the Obama administration made in January, with the physical delivery of 400 million dollars and the subsequent transfer of 1.3 billion. These sums were explained as the settlement of a debt that predates the founding of the Islamic Republic, but the White House later acknowledged that the money was used as leverage to make sure that Tehran followed through on its promise to release four imprisoned Americans as part of a prisoner exchange.

The Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday that the latest information on this monetary exchange suggests that the Obama administration made an effort to conceal it while also involving a several different wings of the governments executive branch, including the Departments of State, Treasury, and Energy. The Free Beacon also criticized the administration for reportedly stonewalling congressional efforts to investigate the matter, even as those efforts have steadily intensified with the incremental leaking of information.

The particular concern among many of those investigating the issue is that the supposed ransom payment will set a dangerous precedent, essentially encouraging Iran to regard hostage-taking as potentially lucrative, at a time when the Iranian leadership already appears keen to ramp up anti-Western aggression and push back against expectations of improved international relations. This trend has manifested with the arrests of dual nationals even after the January prisoner exchange. At least three Americans are currently in custody in Iran, and the charges against them are vague or undisclosed.

But the crackdown on Western affiliations has also affected persons who are only citizens of the Islamic Republic. A number of journalists and other professionals have been arrested on unsubstantiated accusations of being part of infiltration networks. One of the latest of these, according to IranWire, is journalist Sadra Mohaghegh. He was seized from his home on Monday after being accused of working with anti-Iranian media outlets based outside the country.

IranWire notes that his case is reminiscent of those against Ehsan Mazandarani and others who were arrested en masse in November. A separate report notes that Mazandarani, whose trial and sentencing were delayed after he was hospitalized for the effects of a hunger strike, has threatened to resume that hunger strike unless Iranian authorities present actual evidence of his and others supposed affiliation with infiltration networks.
By: Rotarex Firetec

Contact

Charles Strobel

strobel.charles@ rotarex.com Charles Strobel

End

-- Rotarex Firetec, a business unit of Rotarex SA, announced today that it will attend the Fire and Security Shanghai 2016 expo to present its complete range of high-quality components for fixed fire protection systems, plus its line of pre-engineered FireDETEC automatic fire suppression systems.The 12th Fire & Security Shanghai Exhibition will take place from the 9th to the 11th of November, 2016 at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center. This years' event will be the largest exhibition of fire protection and security equipment and technology in the history of Shanghai, with hundreds of international companies exhibiting and thousands of attendees coming from around the world.Rotarex Firetec will feature its just-released UL-approved INEREX set of components for inert gas fire protection that can be configured into a complete 200-300 bar total flooding fire system. Charles Strobel, Rotarex Global Marketing Manager, commented: "INEREX components are uniquely easy to configure and install. Plus, we've done all the necessary compatibility and performance testing, so there is no need for additional certification when the components are configured into a system and installed according to NFPA 2001 standards."During the expo, Rotarex Firetec will present its new DIMES digital measurement system for inert gas. An important step forward in fire protection technology, DIMES digitally monitors inert gas fire cylinder contents 24/7/365  ensuring the readiness of the fire suppression system. In case of pressure loss, an automatic alert is sent, making it possible to quickly fix the problem and bring the system back to full capability.Booth visitors will also be able to learn about FireDETEC, a game-changing automatic fire suppression system that protects business-critical objects from the inside. By suppressing fire at its source, FireDETEC minimizes damage to essential machines and equipment  and total-flooding systems will not be activated. Mr. Strobel elaborated: "With FireDETEC, a fire is immediately suppressed within the object protected. And since the fixed fire suppression system doesn't activate, businesses can stay up and running as there's no potential damage to other equipment or extensive clean-up." FireDETEC systems are pre-engineered for fire protection of electrical cabinets, CNC machines, vehicle engines, commercial kitchens and fume hoods.About Rotarex FiretecBusinesses, building owners, engineers and installers worldwide confidently choose Rotarex Firetec systems, components and accessories. The company is a world leader in fire suppression valves thanks to the expertise developed over 80 years and an enduring commitment to quality and technical excellence. Focused on innovation, Rotarex Firetec continues to develop breakthrough products that keep people, buildings and equipment safer from fire. In addition, it creates products and systems that improve productivity, require minimal maintenance and deliver outstanding ROI over time. Rotarex Firetec serves customers worldwide from 23 sales & service locations. For more details visit us at: http://www.rotarexfiretec.com
Easterseals serving Greater Waterbury will host their popular "Ladies Night Out" fundraiser featuring luscious desserts, bountiful hot and cold buffet tables, DJ, door prizes, table games, silent auction and more. Tickets now on sale.

By: Easterseals

EasterSeals' "Ladies Night Out" Fundraiser will feature buffet and flambe tables

Contact

Faith Hull, events coordinator

fhull@eswct.com

203-754-5141x251 Faith Hull, events coordinator203-754-5141x251

End

-- "This event has grown to such enormous popularity women from across Connecticut attend, and look forward to it for months in advance," commented Carolee Kalita, Easterseals Director of Development and creator of the ninth annual "Ladies Night Out" fundraiser to benefit EasterSeals."Ladies Night Out" will be held Friday, November 11, 5:30 to 10:00 PM at La Bella Vista at 380 Farmwood Road in Waterbury. The fundraiser will feature dozens of product vendors for a full night of shopping, a wide array of foods and desserts, special drawings, door prizes, a DJ, dancing, table games with prizes, plus a silent auction."The bountiful shopping experience and luscious desserts," stated Kalita, "are huge draws to this fundraiser. Fifty to sixty vendors will display their products for an exciting night of shopping. The food selections will include a salad bar, 'Tuscan' pasta station, carving station, a variety of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres, and a flaming flambe station." Kalita commented that all the desserts are donated by local area businesses.All proceeds from "Ladies Night Out" will be used for Easterseals to continue to be an indispensable resource for people and families facing disability. Through their work in communities in the Greater Waterbury region, Easterseals is changing the way the world defines and views disability by making profound, positive differences in people's lives every day.Major sponsors of the benefit event are Access Rehab Centers, Agnew Florist, Diagnostic Radiology Associates, and Timex Group. This annual fundraiser is coordinated over the course of many months by a devoted group of volunteers chaired by Donna Johnson, community relations liaison with Diagnostic Radiology Associates (DRA).All tickets are sold in advance with no tickets available at the door the night of November 11. All tickets are $50/person and tables of 10 are encouraged for reserved seating and table organizers will receive a special gift.Tickets can be purchased by U. S. Mail by mailing a check made out to EasterSeals and addressed to "Ladies Night Out", EasterSeals, 22 Tompkins Street, Waterbury, CT 06708.Tickets can also be secured by calling Faith Hull at Easterseals at 203-754-5141x251 to purchase with a credit card. For information on Easterseals serving Greater Waterbury region, visit http://www.easterseals.com/ waterburyct/
New "Work-Life Balance Center" Exemplifies Firm's Culture and Dedication to Employees

By: Southeast Mortgage

Media Contact

Emily Tracy

***@spratlanta.com

404.872.7289, ext. 5 Emily Tracy404.872.7289, ext. 5

End

-- Atlanta-based Southeast Mortgage (http://www.southeastmortgage.com/), Georgia's largest non-bank lender, has unveiled the firm's new transformative headquarters, located at 3575 Koger Boulevard in Duluth, Georgia. The 31,000-square-foot office space that boasts a host of work-life balance amenities will exemplify the firm's culture and dedication to employee health and well-being, serve as a reflection of the firm's commitment to clients and their trusted partners, and function as a conduit to attract and retain talent.With millennials in the workplace continuing to shape a more fluid idea of work-life balance, Southeast Mortgage is adapting to the ever-growing trend of designing functional spaces that bridge the gap between employees' personal and professional lives. In response to the trend, Southeast Mortgage took a critical look at how their office functioned and created a new office that aligns with how they work, their culture and their objective to integrate amenities that enable employees to pursue more balanced lives. The result: An innovative, functional and collaborative office space equipped with full Work-Life Balance Center that serves as a vital tool to improve the lives of the firm's employees while increasing productivity and enhancing the firm's position in the marketplace."We had really outgrown our former facility that gave us the launch pad to create a new space that was truly progressive with an eye toward employee wellness," said Southeast Mortgage CEO Cal Haupt.With substantially more space than the current 12,000-square-foot office in Lawrenceville, Georgia, the new headquarters will support Southeast Mortgage's 12 offices and will house the firm's operations and client-relationship management teams, and corporate executives.Southeast Mortgage is the only mortgage company in the Southeast to incorporate a Life Balance Center for employees. Fully equipped gym including Octane elliptical machines, row machines, recumbent bikes, treadmills, yoga space and weight station Recreational break room featuring a ping pong table, arcade games, dart boards, oversized Jenga, Connect Four, Checkers and three televisions Commercial video recording and photo studio State-of-the art conference rooms and more than seven diverse collaborative areas to accommodate different modes of work from structured to unstructured Six-foot-wide, eight-foot-tall waterfall to foster the atmosphere of a stress-free environment A 400-gallon fish tank to enhance a relaxing ambience for employees Health and wellness exercise incentive programAccording to Haupt, "Our goal was to create a health-conscious workplace that was highly functional, yet offered our employees the necessary amenities they needed for a healthy work-life balance. The new space is more than an attractive office; it embodies who we are as a firm."Southeast Mortgage is a full-service Georgia mortgage lender offering FHA loans, VA loans, and conventional loans. As the largest non-bank lender in Georgia, Southeast Mortgage is committed to assisting clients with their home purchase, refinancing needs or the purchase of investment property. The firm is licensed in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, allowing them to extend their mortgage lending service to out-of-state clients. Southeast Mortgage is one of the few Georgia mortgage lenders with processing, underwriting, and document preparation all housed in Atlanta, Georgia to better serve clients.
You can make a difference too! Every single share & / donation counts!

By: Sandie Riddin

Contact

Kari-anne Myburgh

***@salute.co.za Kari-anne Myburgh

End

-- TWO Pinetown residents are on a fundraising mission to purchase medication to help their mom.Kari-Anne Myburgh and Jessie Riddin have put together a fundraising page, Light Up Sandie's Life, to help their mom, Sandie Riddin, who is facing her fourth encounter with cancer.Sandie narrowly escaped Hodgkin's disease (cancer of the lymphatic system) at the age of 20. She suffered liver disease at the age of 37 as a result of the radiation therapy she underwent earlier in her life. Her body was overcome by leukaemia at age 47, by which time she was unable to have any chemo or radiation. Her body had become too weak to protect her against the side effects. Sandie is currently fighting stage three breast cancer and is unable once again to get treatment from a physician.Kari-Anne said during her mom's battle with leukaemia, her mom was able to improve and beat the disease using only natural medicines. This is currently her only source of relief from pain and the medication is definitely assisting in shrinking the tumor."At the time of discovering the cancer, she had tumors in both breasts but through the use of Seven Point Five medication the tumor in her left breast disappeared completely. But her right breast tumor is not responding to her current dose of medication because of the lack of funds to maintain the required amount," said Kari-Anne.Sandie has been unable to work since September 2013 as moving her right arm had become painful. Simple tasks like washing a dish, sweeping her room, cooking a meal and even ironing an item of clothing had become difficult for her. She has been receiving support through various churches, people and family.Kari-Anne said the reason for the campaign is to reach out to the world, to share her mother's story as it is an inspiration to most and to also appeal to those who are willing and able to assist financially."In the last few months her medication supplies have dropped drastically and we as a family have not been able to keep up with her needs. Her daughters said they are hoping the campaign will help their mom reach her birthday on 3 December without stress of finances for the medication."She is a fighter and a strong woman who is always smiling even in the face of death. Please join my family and I in lifting her up during this scary and trying time in her life. Your contribution will make a difference no matter how small," said Kari-Anne.A target of 2000 dollars will cover the cost of her medications for up to six months. The fundraising page has only raised 12 percent of the target. Those willing to assist can visit the fundraising campaign page, https://gogetfunding.com/ light-up-sandies- life/ to make a donation.Story by Deshni Pillay
Abstract artist Peter Nottrott has launced a new English language website in response to growing international sales

By: Artist Peter Nottrott

Contact

Peter Nottrott

***@nottrott.de Peter Nottrott

End

-- The Flensburg artist Peter Nottrott is now selling his much praised abstract artwork across the globe, to such diverse markets as the USA and Canada, Europe, the Middle East and beyond.Peter prefers to sell his artwork over the internet, as it allows him to reach a global audience, and over the last 20 years he has developed his business and created a well-respected presence online. Initially Peter concentrated on the German speaking markets, but as demand increased, he started to offer his works across the whole of Europe, and now has a truly global audience, and in particular the USA. In recent years the importance of international sales has increased significantly, and now accounts for around 60% of sales.Peter likes to paint in color-rich, dynamic and very large abstract forms with a positive aura. Besides brushes, canvas and paint, Peter takes advantage of the world wide web and its rich multi-cultural nature to inform his work. Both of these themes dominate Peters work, giving it a unique and distinctive style, and he has even sold some exceptionally large format works across the world, for example a more than 5 square meter painting to a customer in Dubai. Peter is always looking for new ways to connect with customers online, for instance through Pinterest and Facebook.The modern, energetic images enjoy high international demand, especially from buyers in the USA and Great Britain, and accordingly, in additional to his presence on the international art portals, Peter has created a new English language online gallery at www.abstractpaintingsnottrott.com . There you can find over 250 originals in various sizes up to 10 square meters in acrylics on canvas, all signed by the artist, Peter Nottrott.It gives Peter great pleasure to put new flags on his map of the world, especially in the more unusual places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Mexico, Lebanon, Estonia and Australia. "There are quite a lot of flags for the various countries and continents  and I find it fascinating that for every flag on the map, there hangs a Nottrott image somewhere in the world", says Peter.About Peter Nottrott:Peter offers over 200 abstract works for sale in his online gallery http://www.abstractpaintingsnottrott.com/. He has been a freelance artist in Hamburg and Flensburg since 1987, after attending the private art school "JAK". He focuses mainly on major works, which may extend up to 5 square meters. His artworks are marked by a colorful and vibrant way of painting, so you may enjoy the powerful and dramatic paintings.
Contact

Fred Saint-Jacques

***@costaricaahorro.com Fred Saint-Jacques

End

-- On Tuesday, Costa Rica Ahorro, a business review, discount and promotional company in Costa Rica announced the winners of its annual Business Excellence Award for 2016.In order to win one of these coveted awards, a business must first be endorsed by over 50 positive reviews. These businesses then go on to the next stage where a three judge panel will decide which business receive an award based on the reviews and by personally using their services.In order for a business to qualify for a Business Excellence Award, it must have an office in Costa Rica and been in business for at least 12 months.This year, they were 207 businesses that were considered for an award with a grand total of 2,691 reviews that were submitted to the CostaRicaAhorro.com website.The big winner this year was U Properties Costa Rica, a real estate company located in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica who won the Best All around Business in Costa Rica Award. This award is only awarded to a company in Costa Rica that not only meets all criteria to be a successful business but also go above and beyond in terms of service, product, friendliness, professionalism and value for your money.Ingrid Ortiz, the owner of http://www.upropertiescr.com was surprised at receiving the award saying, "I never expected my company to be chosen. For me, providing the best service possible is just good business sense and we pride ourselves in doing just that."The other winning companies were: Poas Rent a Car, a car rental company in San Jose and several other locations in Costa Rica. Pop Designs a graphic design company in San Jose, Costa Rica.The winner of each category will not only be known as one of the best companies in Costa Rica, they will each receive one year of free advertisement services with Costa Rica Ahorro.For more information about the awards, please visit http://www.costaricaahorro.com/ en/reviews/stores/ 87-2016-...
Acclaimed Chicago brewery brings a traditional German social custom where friends gather for a Sunday morning beer to their taproom

By: Dovetail Brewery

Dovetail Brewery tap handles. lowres300

Contact

Cindy Kurman

***@kurman.com Cindy Kurman

End

-- Dovetail Brewery, a Chicago-based brewer of authentic continental European style beers using traditional brewing methods, is bringing a German Sunday morning beer drinking tradition to Chicago, at a special event in their taproom, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday, September 25. Dovetail is located at 1800 W. Belle Plaine at North Ravenswood Avenue in Chicago's North Center neighborhood.This German custom, known as Fruhschoppen, is a weekly gathering of friends who come together at a pub or tavern Sunday to enjoy a late morning beer. On September 25, Dovetail Brewery will be joined by Sausage Konig to serve Blaue Zipfel, a traditional Franconian dish of Nurnberger sausages and onions.Chicago's beer lovers can purchase 1/3 liters ($5) or 1/2 liters ($7) of Dovetail's four signature beers on tap, Lager, Hefeweizen, Rauchweizen, and Grodziskie. Dovetail's taproom is a lively, dog-friendly gathering place that has become a popular spot for neighborhood locals as well as Chicago's beer aficionados."My co-founder, Bill Wesselink, and I met when we were both students at the Doemens Akademie in Munich," said Hagen Dost, co-founder of Dovetail Brewery. "There is nothing like getting together on a Sunday morning to have a beer with sausage and great conversation, especially if it's a smoked beer like our Rauchweizen."Currently there are no plans to host Fruhschoppen every week, but if popular demand dictates, it may become a permanent fixture at this fast-growing, critically-praised brewery.Dovetail Brewery, located at 1800 W. Belle Plaine in Chicago, Illinois, is a craft brewery owned by brewers Hagen Dost and Bill Wesselink, specializing in delicious, balanced beers brewed using traditional German and Belgian brewing methods. Signature beers include unfiltered German-style lagers, traditional Hefeweizen, Rauchbier and Lambic-style sour beers. Dovetail Brewery also produces a variety of special seasonal beers.Taproom hours are: Tuesday- 2 p.m. - 10 p.m.; Wednesday- 2 p.m. - 10 p.m.; Thursday- 2 p.m. - 10 pm; Friday- 12 p.m. - 11 p.m.; Saturday- 11 a.m. - 11 pm; Sunday- 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.The 22,000 square foot brewing facility includes an attractive tap room that is open to the public for drinking and retail sales. The tap room and loft area are also available as a rental space for private events.Dovetail Brewery delivers beer by the keg to venues near the brewery and also to some select venues closer to the Loop. All bars, taverns and restaurants in the greater Chicagoland area that wish to serve Dovetail beer on tap are welcome to pick up kegs, in two sizes, at the brewery during normal business hours.For more information about Dovetail Brewery, please visit the brewery's website at http://dovetailbrewery.com (under construction), their newsroom at http://www.newsline360.com/ dovetailbrewery or contact Bill Wesselink by email at bill@dovetailbrewery.com or Hagen Dost by email at hagen@dovetailbrewery.com. For additional information, call 773-683-1414.Follow Dovetail Brewery on Twitter (www.twitter.com/DovetailBrewChi;@DovetailBrewChi)Follow Dovetail Brewery on Facebook (www.facebook.com/DovetailBrewery)
TV commercial fireman's identity revealed: Local Marietta Chiropractor Mr. July reveals his identity as Dr. Jason Pero, D.C., of Marietta, GA By: East Cobb Health Zaxby's commercial screenshot MARIETTA, Ga. - Sept. 21, 2016 - PRLog -- What do chiropractic and acting have in common? Well nothing, but these two worlds have been united by local Marietta chiropractor Jason Pero, D.C.



Dr. Pero went to chiropractic school at Life University in Marietta, GA and then opened his private practice, East Cobb Health. After being in private practice for 4 years, he decided he needed an outlet for his creativity. In 2015, he competed in an NPC Georgia Men's Physique contest and qualified for nationals. With a taste of the spotlight, he took another step and auditioned for a TV commercial. Little did he know the vast impact that landing this commercial would have on both his personal life and his business.



He starred in the Zaxby's Kickin Chicken Sandwich commercial that was seen by millions of viewers across the Southeast region. It has been airing for quite some time now, most notably during the Rio Olympics. The commercial features him as the typical socially-awkward "nerd" who literally transforms into a steaming fireman after a female co-worker takes a bite of the featured Kickin Chicken Sandwich. "Is that hot enough?" We think so.



Dr. Jason Pero is a Marietta chiropractor in the East Cobb area of Marietta, GA. His practice, East Cobb Health, serves patients that live in Roswell, Marietta, Sandy Springs, Kennessaw and surrounding areas. His recent role as a fireman sparked an interest in helping local burn victims. The role as fireman really spoke to him and garnered interest in helping the Georgia Firefighters Burn Foundation. So much so, that Dr. Pero will be contributing a percentage of all new patient visits to the Burn foundation for the remainder of the year. For more information about how to get in touch or schedule an appointment with East Cobb Health, you can visit



Contact

East Cobb Health

***@gmail.com



Photo:

https://www.prlog.org/ 12588761/1 East Cobb Health End -- What do chiropractic and acting have in common? Well nothing, but these two worlds have been united by local Marietta chiropractor Jason Pero, D.C.Dr. Pero went to chiropractic school at Life University in Marietta, GA and then opened his private practice, East Cobb Health. After being in private practice for 4 years, he decided he needed an outlet for his creativity. In 2015, he competed in an NPC Georgia Men's Physique contest and qualified for nationals. With a taste of the spotlight, he took another step and auditioned for a TV commercial. Little did he know the vast impact that landing this commercial would have on both his personal life and his business.He starred in the Zaxby's Kickin Chicken Sandwich commercial that was seen by millions of viewers across the Southeast region. It has been airing for quite some time now, most notably during the Rio Olympics. The commercial features him as the typical socially-awkward "nerd" who literally transforms into a steaming fireman after a female co-worker takes a bite of the featured Kickin Chicken Sandwich. "Is that hot enough?" We think so.Dr. Jason Pero is a Marietta chiropractor in the East Cobb area of Marietta, GA. His practice, East Cobb Health, serves patients that live in Roswell, Marietta, Sandy Springs, Kennessaw and surrounding areas. His recent role as a fireman sparked an interest in helping local burn victims. The role as fireman really spoke to him and garnered interest in helping the Georgia Firefighters Burn Foundation. So much so, that Dr. Pero will be contributing a percentage of all new patient visits to the Burn foundation for the remainder of the year. For more information about how to get in touch or schedule an appointment with East Cobb Health, you can visit www.eastcobbchiropractic.com or call us at 770-509-6755. Email : ***@gmail.com Tags : Chiropractic , Marietta , Back Pain Industry : Health Location : Marietta - Georgia - United States Subject : Deals Account Phone Number Disclaimer Report Abuse Account Email AddressAccount Phone Number


Your Mercy Guest Writers/Artists Include The Brilliance, All Sons & Daughters, Michael Neale, Matt Redman, Andi Rozier

By: Integrity Music

Paul Baloche Releases Your Mercy Oct. 7

Contact

Hoganson Media Relations

***@prodigy.net Hoganson Media Relations

End

-- Worship leader and Dove Award winning songwriterhas been serving the local church on a global scale for almost 30 years, crafting songs such as "A New Hallelujah,""Open The Eyes Of My Heart," "Your Name" and "Above All" that have been recorded in 10 languages and sung by believers around the world. He also has created a variety of training resources for worship teams while mentoring the next generation of worship leaders. Now this "worship pastor of worship pastors" launches his next season of ministry from a home base in New York City with a new album,(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWTqLZbLjzA), filled with songs that reflect his adopted community and God's unwavering grace.Produced by Baloche and longtime collaborator Michael Rossback,delivers 12 songs penned by Baloche with cowriters including(Vertical Church Band),and. The project, which has already received a 5-star review frommagazine, releases globally in stores and on digital platforms through Integrity Music October 7., like all of Baloche's albums, was crafted with the local church and worship leader in mind. The songs were recorded live in a Brooklyn studio over several nights and are congregational in nature with stripped down instrumentation. Baloche describes the album as "honest worship sessions with very few overdubs, a back-to-basics simplicity of worship singing together new prayers and songs as a community to glorify God.""After 26 years of serving in the same church and living in the same community in Texas, my wife and I purged most of our possessions and moved to a small apartment in NYC," he adds. "captures the sounds of our new community from across the city."This community includes labelmates(John Arndt, David Gungor) along with(Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir) and worship leaders/musicians from New York and the northeast. Vocalistsandalso make appearances, and Baloche's wife,, and son,, round out the contributions.Standout tracks include "Your Mercy," ( https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WQ7xzvmAAAQ ) "Found In You," "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus (We Turn)" and "I Will Worship You." The complete tracklist follows:1. Psalm 92 (It Is Good)2. Once For All3. Found In You4. I Will Worship You5. Your Mercy6. Songs Of The People7. We Come To You Jesus8. God Evermore9. Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus (We Turn)10. To The Cross I Come [featuring Jennifer Holm & All Sons & Daughters]11. More Than I Deserve12. Peace On Earth [featuring Madison Cunningham]Baloche will share these songs and others at his "LeadWorship Workshop" in Lancaster, Pennsylvania Sept. 30-Oct. 1 and at a "LeadWorship Workshop" in Modesto, California Nov. 11-12 that is co-sponsored by TheChurchCollective ( http://thechurchcollective.com/ ). His fall tour schedule also includes a worship concert in Marlton, New Jersey (Philadelphia)on Oct. 2, the National Worship Leader Conference in Lenexa (Kansas City), Kansas on Oct. 6, the Christian Musician Summit in Seattle, Washington Nov. 4-5 and the Calvary Chapel Worship Leaders Conference in Murietta, CA Nov 14-17. For more information on Paul Baloche, including tour details, visit http://www.leadworship.com, and for related worship resources including chord charts and tutorial videos, visit http://weareworship.com.Integrity Music is part of the David C Cook family, a nonprofit global resource provider serving the Church with life-transforming materials. With offices in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Nashville, Tennessee and Eastbourne, UK, Integrity is committed to taking songs of substance to the local church and its leaders around the world. Integrity publishes many of the top songs in the Church, including the No. 1 radio hit "We Believe" (Newsboys) as well as church standards "Great Are You Lord," "Revelation Song," "Open The Eyes Of My Heart," "Your Great Name" and "I Am Free." Additional information can be found at www.integritymusic.com.
An evening designed to appeal to absolute beginners and provide a gentle introduction to tango

Contact

Michiel Frishert (President)

***@portlandtangofest.com Michiel Frishert (President)

End

-- Portland boasts one of the largest and well respected Argentine tango communities in North America! The Portland Tango Festival, the longest running US festival dedicated to the authentic social dance and culture of Argentina, has designed a new program "Bite Size Tango" to provide beginners with a gentle introduction to the magic of this passionate and captivating dance.: A Portland Tango Festival program for Absolute Beginners: 8pm, Friday, October 14th & Saturday, October 15th 2016: Norse Hall, 111 NE 11th Ave., Portland, OR: Tickets are sold in pairs: $70/pair Friday, $80/pair Saturday. Register at http://www.portlandtangofest.com/bite-size-tangoThis event sold out last year so the organizers added a second night. This year two evening packages are available for couples. Friday evening package includes an introductory tango class with your partner to learn the basics (no experience necessary), happy hour to socialize with fellow first-time dancers, attendance to the Friday Evening Milonga and performances by professional Argentine Tango dancers. Saturday Grand Ball Package includes an introductory tango class with your partner to learn the basics, happy hour to socialize with fellow first-time dancers, attendance to the Grand Ball, live music by the Alex Krebs Tango Orchestra, and performances by professional Argentine Tango dancers.The Portland Tango Festival is the longest running US festival dedicated to the authentic social dance and culture of Argentina. The festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year on October 13-17 in Portland, Oregon, at the Norse Hall at NE 11th and Couch.Portland, Ore.-based tango instructor Dominic Bridge will instruct the Bite Size Program for 2016. Dominic teaches at the tango school PDX Tango, which offers a variety of intro, beginner to advanced level Argentine Tango classes, private lessons for individuals and small groups. PDX Tango also hosts weekly social dances (Milongas and Practicas) and special events.
Gulf News reports that during that meeting, the six-member organization issued a collective statement condemning Iranian interference in the affairs of Arab states. It was not the first such statement from Saudi Arabia and its regional allies, some of which have actively fought against Iranian proxy forces in Yemen. Irans activities there and in Iraq and Syria have been a consistent source of anxiety among Sunni Arab states that see Iran as being on a quest for regional hegemony or the establishment of a Persian Shiite Crescent across much of the Middle East.

Concerns about this apparent foreign policy aim were expressed in an editorial that appeared in Al Arabiya on Sunday. As one example of that effort, the author highlighted strategies in Syria that appear to be aimed at securing permanent Iranian influence and control over at least a portion of the country. He also notes that Iran recently sought to take representatives of the Houthi rebels it backs in Yemen on a tour of the broader Middle East. Naturally, it is easy for Arab states to see this as an effort to give more of a unified, multinational character to Irans individual acts of intervention in the broader region.

Any such effort would be sure to utilize Shiite religious identity as a unifying force among Iranian proxy forces in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. And by many accounts this is already happening to some extent. Irans strategy in each of those areas, including in its fight against ISIS, depends upon Shiite militant groups, some of which have expressed explicit loyalty to the Iranian supreme leader.

The role of those militias was specifically mentioned in the GCC statement on Monday, noting that even once liberated from ISIS control, some areas of Syria and Iraq have been subject to comparable or arguably worse criminal abuses by the Shiite groups that take over.

Other issues mentions in the GCC statement include Irans occupation of three strategically-located islands that both it and the United Arab Emirates claim as part of their territory. Gulf Business provided more details about this dispute and the recent GCC response, noting that it is such a contentious issue that Iran even threatened in 2012 to cut all diplomatic ties with the emirates if they did not back down.

There is a chance that such a threat will lose its weight if tensions between Iran and the Arab states continue to escalate over separate issues. In January, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Iran after Iranian mobs attacked the Saudi embassy and consulate in retaliation for the execution of a Shiite dissident cleric. Several Saudi allies in the region followed suit by downgrading their own ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran. And although this situation has somewhat stabilized over the past few months, it has arguably set a new baseline for the future development or Iranian-Saudi relations.
Deka Immobilien GmbH has acquired a prestigious office building in the central business district of Oslo. The property was sold by Norwegian Property (NPRO), a real estate company listed on the Norwegian stock exchange, for around 55 million, and will be added to the open-ended real estate fund Deka-ImmobilienEuropa. The

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Men who suffer from anxiety are more than twice as likely to die from cancer as men who don't. However, anxiety is not associated with increased cancer deaths in women, according to a large British and European study presented at the ECNP meeting in Vienna.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common mental health problem that is disabling, debilitating, and leads to increased risk of suicide. Affecting around 5% of the adult population*, it is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable worry about many areas of life, and those affected can experience symptoms, such as, muscle tension, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and restlessness. Previous studies have looked at whether anxiety is associated with early death from major causes of disease, but findings have been mixed or have varied.

Using data from 15,938 British participants from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer-Norfolk study, researchers were able to link men and women with GAD in the 1996-00 period to death records over the subsequent 15 years, thus identifying those GAD sufferers who went on to die of cancer.

They found that 126 out of 7139 men and 215 out of 8799 women had GAD, and over a period of 15 years, 796 men and 648 women died from cancer. Over the 15 year follow-up period, they found that men with GAD were twice as likely to die of cancer as men who did not have anxiety (Hazard Ratio, 2.14 (95% CI: 1.32, 3.46)). This association was not found with women (Hazard Ratio 1.03 (95% CI: 0.60, 1.76)). Future research should determine whether anxiety is associated with specific cancer types in men.

Lead researcher Olivia Remes said: "In the past there have been inconclusive studies of the relationship between cancer and anxiety. However our study is the largest one to look at this relationship. We found that men with generalized anxiety disorder are over twice as likely to die of cancer as men without this condition. This holds true even after taking account of a range of additional factors, such as age, major chronic diseases, serious mental illnesses, smoking, alcohol, physical activity, and medications. Women did not show this association between anxiety and cancer.

The work shows that anxiety is associated with cancer deaths in men. We can't say that one causes the other; it is possible that men with anxiety have lifestyles or other risk factors that increase cancer risk that we did not account for completely however this association does raise questions, and society may need to consider anxiety as a warning signal for poor health. Researchers, policy-makers and clinicians don't give enough importance to anxiety, and this needs to change; a large number of people are affected by anxiety and its potential effects on health are substantial. With this study, we show that anxiety is more than just a personality trait, but rather, it is a disorder that may be associated with risk of death from conditions, such as, cancer."

Commenting, Professor David Nutt Ex-President of the ECNP, (Imperial College) said: "As a psychiatrist who used to run one of the very few clinics in the UK specialised in the treatment of people with severe anxiety disorders these results do not surprise me. The intense distress that these people suffer often on a daily basis is usually associated with a great deal of bodily stress, that is bound to have a major impact on many physiological processes including immune supervision of cancerous cells. As the authors point out other factors such as self-medication with tobacco and alcohol are also likely to be involved. I fully support the authors' statement that much more information and investment need to be given to the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders."

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. Olivia Remes received funding from the National Institute for Health Research.
Scientists have found a group of human sequences -- unrelated to those in mice -- which are capable of producing SINEUPs, which can pair with typical protein-coding mRNAs and enhance their translation.

One of the biggest surprises of the past decade of genomic studies was the discovery that, contrary to previous belief, the majority of the genome is not used to produce proteins. Initially, many scientists thought that these long non-coding RNAs were non-functional "noise," but in recent studies, a growing fraction of these lncRNAs have been found to have regulatory functions.

In 2012, a group from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies, in collaboration with SISSA, an Italian University, discovered a new class of mouse lncRNAs, which are called "antisense" because their can pair with typical protein-coding mRNAs and enhance their translation. The team was surprised to find that pairing these novel antisense RNAs caused the mRNA to be translated more efficiently. This was counterintuitive, because it was generally believed that antisense RNAs always inhibited gene activity. They found that the positive effect on specific mRNA translation was mediated by a sequence embedded in the antisense lncRNA. This element turned out to be a member of what is known as the SINE family, standing for "short interspersed elements," which are very broadly distributed throughout the genome. They were long considered to be part of the "junk" of the genome -- remnants of ancient parasites in the genome capable of making copies of themselves, filling up the genome with junk.

Specifically, the repeat elements discovered during the earlier research belonged to the SINEB2 class, which is present only in rodent genomes. Artificial RNAs containing these SINEB2 elements, which can be made to target any RNA by simply engineering the antisense region, are called SINEUPs (RNA containing SINE elements that UP-regulate translation). Due to the peculiar evolution of the mouse SINEB2 elements, which are thought to have co-evolved from an ancestor sequence similar to tRNAs, natural SINEUPs were thought to exist only in mice.

Now, in a discovery reported in Scientific Reports, the group found a group of human sequences -- unrelated to those in mice -- which were also capable of producing SINEUPs. The group carried out a broad screening of RNA sequences from humans and tested the function of various antisense RNAs to see if they could have SINEUP functionality. Surprisingly, they found that human SINE elements of a very different type from the mouse SINEB2 -- called FRAM and MIRb -- could. According to Piero Carninci of CLST, who led the team, "This was very surprising, because unlike the mouse SINEB2, the human ones resemble unrelated families of non-coding RNAs. We were even more surprised when we looked at the similarity between the mouse and human sequences: the newly discovered FRAM elements share less than 30% of their sequences with the mouse SINEB2 elements, yet they function in a very similar fashion, by enhancing translation of mRNAs they overlap."

"As in the mouse," he continues, "the human elements can be used in biotechnological applications to target mRNA encoding different proteins, by simply engineering the antisense part. Although the primary sequence is so different, the human and the mouse may fold in a similar way and hence have similar function. The structural basis for this functions are yet unknown, and this remains an exciting remaining question."

SINEUPs are currently used in biotechnology applications, to specifically stimulate the translation of mRNAs to produce more proteins both in cell cultures to study gene function and to produce biological proteins in bioreactors. Additionally, laboratories around the world are working to develop SINEUPs to enhance protein translation as a therapy for specific diseases caused by the deficiency of a specific protein, such a haploinsufficiencies, where one of two genes is not functional. According to Carninci, "Our discovery provides one more weapon to the SINEUP toolbox to broaden the scope of gene therapy, as well as to express a greater variety of proteins."
SSRI antidepressants (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, the best known being Prozactm) are amongst the most commonly taken medicines. However, there seems to be no way of knowing in advance whether or not SSRIs will work effectively. Now a group of European researchers has developed a new theory of SSRI action, and tested it in stressed mice. The results, which are presented at the ECNP conference in Vienna, show why the circumstances we find ourselves in may influence whether an antidepressant works or not.

According to researcher, Silvia Poggini (Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome), "There is no doubt that antidepressants work for many people, but for between 30 and 50% of depressed people, antidepressants don't work. No-one knows why. This work may explain part of the reason."

The researchers have proposed that simply increasing the levels of serotonin, by taking an SSRI, does not cause a recovery from depression, but puts the brain into a condition where change can take place -- it increases the plasticity of the brain, making it more open to being changed. "In a certain way it seems that the SSRIs open the brain to being moved from a fixed state of unhappiness, to a condition where other circumstances can determine whether or not you recover" said Ms Poggini. According to the researchers, it is the environmental conditions you find yourselves in at the time of the treatment which determines whether you are likely to get better or worse.

To test this, they took a sample of mice which they subjected to stress for two weeks. They started treating the mice with the SSRI fluoxetine, and split the group. They continued to stress half (n=12) of the group of mice but the other half of the mice were subjected to a more comfortable environment. They then tested all the mice to measure the levels of the stress-related cytokines in the brain. Cytokines are protein-related molecules which aid cell to cell communication in the immune system.

They found that mice kept in a more comfortable environment showed an increase in the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines and decreased anti-inflammatory-related genes, as well as showing fewer signs of depression, whereas those under continuous stress showed the opposite effect (i.e. a decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines, and an increase in anti-inflammatory gene expression, with more signs of depression). The fluoxetine-treated mice exposed to the comfortable environment showed a 98% increase in the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1 while mice kept in a stressed environment and treated with fluoxetine showed a 30% decrease in the pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-.

This indicates that the environment determines the response to antidepressants. According to Silvia Poggini, "This work indicates that simply taking an SSRI is probably not enough. To use an analogy, the SSRIs put you in the boat, but a rough sea can determine whether you will enjoy the trip. For an SSRI to work well, you may need to be in a favourable environment. This may mean that we have to consider how we can adapt our circumstances, and that antidepressant treatment would only be one tool to use against depression."

She cautioned "Our studies have a number of limitations. First of all, we are not explaining the complete range of actions of SSRIs. It's also an animal model, so clinical and epidemiological studies are needed to further test the validity of the hypothesis. Our results are preliminary and we strongly recommend that patients stick to the treatment prescribed by their doctors."

Commenting, Dr Laurence Lanfumey (Centre de Psychiatrie et Neuroscience Inserm, Paris), Member of the ECNP Executive Committee, said, "This original study is a nice model for combined behavioral and pharmacological treatments in depression- like disorders. The idea that environment could impact the output of a pharmacological treatment has been suggested for years, but this work brings direct biological evidences of such an interaction. Although the present work also raised several questions, this kind of experiment is important to do to bridge the gap between behavior and SSRIs efficacy."
Concussions can create a host of symptoms -- headache, dizziness, moodiness, upset stomach and other issues. In most cases, those symptoms eventually dissipate, but about 15% of young people who get concussions struggle with persistent symptoms despite seeing doctors and receiving medical care. The ongoing symptoms interfere with school, social life and physical activity.

Researchers at Seattle Children's Research Institute published a study in the journal Pediatrics showing a new intervention for adolescents with persistent post-concussive symptoms that improved health and wellness outcomes significantly. The approach combines cognitive behavioral therapy and coordinated care among providers, schools, patients and families.

"We were pleased to find that using an approach that adds a psychological care component to treating concussions and providing coordination of care in areas of the patient's life significantly improved outcomes," said Dr. Cari McCarty, a psychologist and researcher at Seattle Children's Research Institute who led the study. "This new approach aims to improve the quality of life for patients who were otherwise left to deal with unrelenting concussion symptoms."

A fall off a horse causes a persistent concussion

Carmen Einmo, 16, loves to ride horses. In November 2014, she fell off her horse and broke her arm. At first, she didn't complain of typical concussion symptoms, but after a few weeks it became clear something was amiss.

"I developed really bad headaches and became very sensitive to light," Carmen said. "I started having memory issues and would forget words in the middle of a conversation."

As her symptoms persisted over a couple months, Carmen's doctor at Seattle Children's, Dr. Elaine Tsao, suggested she sign up for McCarty's study. The family was excited to have found another treatment option to pursue.

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"A lot of Carmen's schoolwork had to be done on an iPad, and spending long amounts of time on it hurt her eyes and head," said Diana Einmo, Carmen's mom. "Some of the teachers didn't understand that Carmen couldn't spend a lot of time on an iPad, and they didn't know what to make of how long her symptoms had been going on."

Carmen's grades had started to slip and she worried about how the persistent symptoms got in the way of schoolwork.

"I entered my second year of high school ready to start off strong, but the concussion set me back," she said. "My PE class was especially challenging because I couldn't run, so I would walk, and I got penalized for it in my grade."

A coordinated approach to concussion care

As a participant in the study, Carmen got support from a research team member that created a coordinated care plan for her. The researcher worked with the school and family on a plan that would allow Carmen to continue school with accommodations as she recovered. The plan included a homework priority list, allowing her more time to finish work and access to another room if she became tired from light and sound in class.

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In addition, Carmen received cognitive behavioral therapy that involved her parents and sister.

"Cognitive behavioral therapy involves changing both behaviors and thinking patterns," McCarty said. "In our study that included relaxation techniques, teaching coping skills and offering pain management. We found that incorporating a psychological care component improved health outcomes and quality of life for these kids."

Only 13% of patients who received the coordinated care and psychological intervention in the study reported high levels of post-concussive symptoms after six months, compared to 42% of patients who received standard concussion care. In addition, 78% of patients who received the specialized care reported reduction in depression symptoms, compared to just 46% of patients who received standard care.

Getting back in the saddle

Carmen is feeling more like herself now and has been cleared to ride horses again. She and her mom say one of the most important things they learned during this experience was to take concussions seriously, especially because the effects and symptoms might not be apparent right away.

"It's especially challenging when a teenager gets a concussion because it's hard to tell if a change in behavior is because of a concussion, or because a teenager is going through a growth and development phase," Einmo said. "We found the therapy to be especially helpful in figuring some of this out."

Carmen adds that having a plan and realistic expectations with school helped immensely.

"I would tell young people struggling with a concussion to stick up for yourself and what you need," she said. "Take it one day at a time and do your best, and ask for the help you need."
In emergency situations such as terrorist attacks, natural catastrophes, and fires, there is always a risk of mass panic leading to deadly crowd disasters. But what causes mass panic and where are the danger zones? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Disney Research Zurich, ETH Zurich, and Rutgers University have examined these questions in a virtual environment. Their results have been published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Why are emergency situations such as evacuations of buildings so often characterized by mass herding and overcrowding? And which areas of a building are particularly dangerous in emergency evacuations? Because these questions are difficult to study in the real world, the international research team exposed 36 participants to an emergency in a three-dimensional virtual environment. Each participant simultaneously navigated an avatar through virtual space on a computer screen. The researchers studied the participants' behaviours in several experiments, setting them various tasks under high-stress conditions.

The researchers were able to show that participants' behaviour in the virtual environment was largely consistent with real-world behaviours. For example, participants were asked to move their avatar through a narrow corridor without bumping into any of the other avatars. The avoidance behaviours seen in the virtual environment were consistent with those observed in a real-life experiment: 95% of participants chose to pass each other on the right-hand side. Previous studies have shown that Europeans tend to intuitively walk on the right-hand side. "Our experiments have shown that virtual environments can help us investigate human behaviour in emergency situations -- something that isn't possible in the real world for ethical and safety reasons," says Mehdi Moussaid, researcher in the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

To find out how the participants reacted in an emergency situation, the researchers simulated an evacuation from a complex building with four exits, only one of which was usable. Although most of the group did not know which was the correct exit, some participants were directed to it by an arrow at the top of their computer screen. Participants knew that some group members were aware of the correct exit, but they did not know who those people were. In addition, the researchers increased the stress level by putting participants under time pressure and monetary pressure: Participants had to escape the building within 50 seconds to avoid a substantial loss of points. At the end of the session, the points won were converted into monetary bonuses. Further stress-inducing elements were poor lighting, red blinking lights, and fires at the blocked exits.

More collisions under stress

The experiments showed that collisions and pushing increased quickly under stress. The most dangerous zones were places where decisions had to be made, areas where bottlenecks occurred and caused congestion, and dead ends where participants were forced to turn around and walk back against the flow of the crowd.

The researchers also looked at group dynamics during the stressful evacuation situation. Their analyses revealed that individuals were exposed to much stronger social signals under high stress and high density levels than in less stressful situations. In other words, they were more aware of where the group was going, what it was doing, and how it was feeling, and were thus more strongly influenced by the group. The study's findings indicate that individuals are more likely to follow a group under the influence of these strong social signals. This can quickly lead to mass herding and dangerous overcrowding.

"Our findings show that human behaviour in virtual environments is consistent with the behaviours seen in real life. Immersive virtual environments are thus promising tools for behavioural research and beyond. For example, urban planners and architects could use them to test evacuation plans," says Mehdi Moussaid.
Like many other insects, vinegar flies produce pheromones to call their conspecifics to an interesting food source. A research team of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, demonstrated in a new study that the flies' frass also contains these pheromones. Fruits that have been covered by the insects' fecal excretions seem to be especially attractive to other flies. These fruits are probably a more easily digestible food after many flies have been feeding on them. The new results are a first step toward understanding the importance of feces in the communication of vinegar flies.

Vinegar flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are able to locate a food source by smelling the odor of overripe fruit. Fruits not only serve the uptake of nutrients, they are also ideal locations for finding a sexual mate and for laying eggs after mating. In previous studies, researchers had noticed that sites that had been visited by many adult flies were especially attractive to their conspecifics. However, the reasons behind this behavior were unclear.

Behavioral assays provided an unambiguous result: The insects are attracted to the smell of their conspecifics' feces. "Even though it is known that some beetle species use their fecal excretions to pass information to their conspecifics, we were surprised about how highly attractive even the smallest amounts of frass were to vinegar flies," reports Ian Keesey, the first author of the study.

The researchers conducted behavioral experiments with traps which contained different odors and were able to quantify the attractiveness of an odor by counting the flies in the traps. On top of that, they applied the flywalk, an analytic device that measures whether an odor is attractive or repellent by recording the behavior of single flies in a glass tube filled with different odors. If a fly moves upwind, towards the odor source, the odor is rated as attractive. If a fly moves downwind, away from the odor source, the odor is rated a deterrent. Interestingly, when fecal odors were tested, the flies always moved towards the source.

Frass contains pheromones

The next step was to chemically analyze the frass to find out which odor components of the flies' feces were appetizing. To the scientists' surprise, the frass contained sexual pheromones. The frass odors are not only species-specific, they are also different in males and females. If many flies visit a fruit, they also lay more eggs on it. Larvae hatching from these eggs might benefit from the presence of the larvae that were there previously: They could process the food more easily when it has been "pre-digested" by microorganisms in the frass of their conspecifics. The presence of frass not only attracts more flies, the flies also eat and excrete more, and this raises the attractiveness of a food source further.

"Frass seems to be an important communication tool between individuals of one species. Surprisingly, it has been neglected in many ecological studies so far," explains Markus Knaden from the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology and head of the study. "Talking about bodily excretions is still a kind of taboo and this may have contributed to the fact that researchers avoided this topic in the past. This is even more astonishing in the case of Drosophila melanogaster, considering the many other ecological aspects that have been studied intensively in this insect."

Means for pest control?

Future studies will be extended to related fly species. These studies will include Drosophila suzukii. Unlike its relative Drosophila melanogaster, which is attracted to overripe and rotting fruit, the suzukii fly attacks fresh or ripening berries and grapes and is a, hard-to-control pest in orchards and vineyards. If this species is as attracted to its own frass in a similar way as Drosophila melanogaster is, new possibilities to effectively control this pest would open up.
A Ludwig Cancer Research study published online September 14th in Nature reports a novel technique to map specific chemical (or "epigenetic") modifications made to the protein packaging of DNA using a small population of cells. Such epigenetic marks play a central role in the regulation of the genome's expression. Led jointly by Ludwig San Diego's Bing Ren and Arne Klungland of the University of Oslo, the authors describe their application of this method to unravel a key mystery of the earliest stage of development. The new technique, named ChIP-seq, is also likely to be of notable relevance to cancer research.

Very soon after fertilization, the control of embryonic development shifts from pre-existing maternal gene products to the products of genes encoded by the early embryo (or zygote). This passing of the genetic baton, called the maternal-to-zygotic transition (MZT), is poorly understood because existing technologies have generally been too insensitive to capture the full scale of the epigenetic changes it entails across the zygotic genome.

The improved sensitivity of ChIP-seq, developed jointly by Klugland, Ren and John Arne Dahl of Oslo University, led to "some remarkable discoveries that have completely changed our view of epigenetic inheritance mechanisms," says Ren.

In the current paper, Ren and his colleagues describe their use of ChIP-seq to investigate how epigenetic information is passed from one generation to the next to orchestrate the MZT. To that end, they examined in mouse embryos the global distribution of an epigenetic mark known to play a critical role in regulating the activity of genes. This mark (H3K4me3) modifies chromatin -- the complex of DNA and its protein packaging -- by adding three identical molecules known as methyl groups at a specific place on a packaging protein known as histone 3.

Dahl, a visiting scholar in Ren's lab and co-first author on the Nature paper, fine-tuned the technique for mapping such epigenetic tags to where only a few hundred embryos or cells were needed for each experiment. Previous methods required up to 10,000 cells to conduct similar analyses. The other first author, Inkyung Jung, a Ludwig postdoc in Ren's lab, contributed significantly to the computational analysis of the resulting data.

When the scientists compared H3K4me3 distribution in immature mouse egg cells they found something unexpected: broad but distinct domains of the immature egg cell's genome, representing some 22% of the whole, are heavily marked by H3K4me3. These domains rapidly decrease in size in 2-cell embryos and eventually shrink to about 1% to 2% of the genome.

"The key lesson we learned was that the genes that are destined to be turned on specifically in the fertilized egg are covered by this unique chromatin domain structure," says Ren. Those marks have to be removed by specialized enzymes to activate the zygotic genome. "This mark is a mechanism for the oocyte to influence which genes in the zygote are activated. It is an epigenetic mechanism for the passage of information from the maternal oocyte to the zygote."

The ability to map "epigenomes" using such a small number of cells will be valuable to cancer research, since the epigenetic landscape is dramatically rearranged in cancer and contributes to phenomena driven by small subpopulations of cells, such as drug resistance and metastasis.

"With a better understanding of the epigenetic landscapes in cancers, we are going to have more tools to study the basis of tumorigenesis," says Ren. "We still have a long way to go, but our goal is to have a thorough understanding of gene regulatory programs so we can use that knowledge to treat cancer and develop diagnostic tools."
A new study shows that rocks formed by the grinding together of other rocks during earthquakes are rich in trapped hydrogen -- a finding that suggests similar seismic activity on Mars may produce enough hydrogen to support life.

Researchers from Yale, the University of Aberdeen, and Brock University studied rock formations around active fault lines in the Outer Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. Their analysis appears in the journal Astrobiology.

"Previous work has suggested that hydrogen is produced during earthquakes when rocks fracture and grind together. Our measurements suggest that enough hydrogen is produced to support the growth of microorganisms around active faults," said Yale geologist Sean McMahon, first author of the study.

While humans and other animals get their energy mainly from the reaction between oxygen and sugar, bacteria use a wide array of alternative reactions to obtain energy. The oxidation of hydrogen gas, for example, generates enough energy for bacteria deep in the Earth's subsurface.

"Mars is not very seismically active, but our work shows that 'Marsquakes' could produce enough hydrogen to support small populations of microorganisms, at least for short periods of time," McMahon said. "This is just one part of the emerging picture of the habitability of the Martian subsurface, where other sources of energy for life may also be available. The best way to find evidence of life on Mars may be to examine rocks and minerals that formed deep underground around faults and fractures, which were later brought to the surface by erosion."

Co-authors of the paper are John Parnell of the University of Aberdeen and Nigel Blamey of Brock University.

"NASA has plans to measure seismic activity on Mars during its 2018 InSight mission, and our data will make those measurements all the more interesting," Parnell said.
Loneliness is linked to poor physical and mental health, and is an even more accurate predictor of early death than obesity. To better understand who is at risk, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine conducted the first genome-wide association study for loneliness -- as a life-long trait, not a temporary state. They discovered that risk for feeling lonely is partially due to genetics, but environment plays a bigger role. The study of more than 10,000 people, published September 15 by Neuropsychopharmacology, also found that genetic risk for loneliness is associated with neuroticism and depressive symptoms.

The research was led by Abraham Palmer, PhD, professor of psychiatry and vice chair for basic research at UC San Diego School of Medicine. In their paper, Palmer and team explain that just as physical pain alerts us to potential tissue damage and motivates us to take care of our physical bodies, loneliness -- triggered by a discrepancy between an individual's preferred and actual social relations -- is part of a biological warning system that has evolved to alert us of threats or damage to our social bodies.

But not everyone perceives loneliness in the same way.

"For two people with the same number of close friends and family, one might see their social structure as adequate while the other doesn't," Palmer said. "And that's what we mean by 'genetic predisposition to loneliness' -- we want to know why, genetically speaking, one person is more likely than another to feel lonely, even in the same situation."

The heritability of loneliness has been examined before, in twins and other studies of both children and adults. From these, researchers estimated that 37 to 55 percent of loneliness is determined by genetics. Previous studies also tried to pinpoint specific genes that contribute to loneliness, focusing on genes related to neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, or other cellular systems associated with human attachment, such as oxytocin. But, Palmer said, these studies mostly relied on small sample sizes.

In their latest research, Palmer and team used a much larger sample size -- they examined genetic and health information from 10,760 people aged 50 years and older that was collected by the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal study of health, retirement and aging sponsored by the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health. As part of this study, participants answered three well-established questions that measure loneliness. The survey doesn't actually use the word "lonely," as many people are reluctant to report feeling that way. Instead, the questions were:

How often do you feel that you lack companionship?

How often do you feel left out?

How often do you feel isolated from others?

The study accounted for gender, age and marital status, as married people tend to be less lonely than unmarried people.

Here's what Palmer's team found: Loneliness, the tendency to feel lonely over a lifetime, rather than just occasionally due to circumstance, is a modestly heritable trait -- 14 to 27 percent genetic, as compared to the previous estimates of 37 to 55 percent. This new estimate of the genetic contribution to loneliness could be lower than previous estimates because Palmer's team relied on chip heritability, a method that only captures common genetic variations and not rare genetic variation.

The researchers also determined that loneliness tends to be co-inherited with neuroticism (long-term negative emotional state) and a scale of depressive symptoms. Weaker evidence suggested links between heritable loneliness and schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. In contrast to previous studies, the researchers did not find loneliness to be associated with variations in specific candidate genes, such as those that encode dopamine or oxytocin.

According to Palmer, these results could differ from previous loneliness findings in part because the team exclusively surveyed older adults in the United States, whereas other research groups looked at young adults in Europe.

Palmer and team are now working to find a genetic predictor -- a specific genetic variation that would allow researchers to gain additional insights into the molecular mechanisms that influence loneliness.
Chemists at The University of Texas at Arlington have been the first to demonstrate that an organic semiconductor polymer called polyaniline is a promising photocathode material for the conversion of carbon dioxide into alcohol fuels without the need for a co-catalyst.

"This opens up a new field of research into new applications for inexpensive, readily available organic semiconducting polymers within solar fuel cells," said principal researcher Krishnan Rajeshwar, UTA distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and co-Director of UTA's Center for Renewable Energy, Science & Technology.

"These organic semiconducting polymers also demonstrate several technical advantages, including that they do not need a co-catalyst to sustain the conversion to alcohol products and the conversion can take place at lower temperatures and use less energy, which would further reduce costs," Rajeshwar added.

Rajeshwar and his co-author Csaba Janaky, professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry and Materials Science at the University of Szeged, recently published their findings in The Royal Society of Chemistry journal ChemComm as "Polyaniline films photoelectrochemically reduce CO 2 to alcohols."

In this proof-of-concept study, the researchers provide insights into the unique behavior of polyaniline obtained from photoelectrochemical measurements and adsorption studies, together with spectroscopic data. They also compared the behavior of several conducting polymers.

The stationary currents recorded after two hours during testing suggests that the polyaniline layer maintained its photoelectrochemical efficacy for the studied time period. While in the gas phase, only hydrogen was detected, but potential fuels such as methanol and ethanol were both detected in the solution for carbon dioxide-saturated samples.

"Apart from these technical qualities, as a polymer, polyaniline can also be easily made into fabrics and films that adapt to roofs or curved surfaces to create the large surface areas needed for photoelectrochemical reduction, eliminating the need for expensive and dangerous solar concentrators," Rajeshwar added.

Frederick MacDonnell, chair of UTA's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, underlined the importance of this research in the context of UTA's focus on global environmental impact within the Strategic Plan 2020: Bold Solutions|Global Impact.

"Dr. Rajeshwar's ongoing leadership in research around new materials for solar fuel generation is vital in a world where we all recognize the need to reduce the impact of carbon dioxide emissions," MacDonnell said. "Finding an inexpensive, readily-available photocathode material could open up new options to create cheaper, more energy-effective solar fuel cells."

Rajeshwar joined the College of Science in 1983 and is a charter member of the UTA Academy of Distinguished Scholars. He is the newly appointed president of the Electrochemical Society, an organization representing the nation's premier researchers dedicated to advancing solid state, electrochemical science and technology.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed new, nonlinear, chaos-based integrated circuits that enable computer chips to perform multiple functions with fewer transistors. These integrated circuits can be manufactured with "off the shelf" fabrication processes and could lead to novel computer architectures that do more with less circuitry and fewer transistors.

Moore's law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years in order to keep up with processing demands. Previously this goal has been addressed by shrinking the size of individual transistors so that more could be added to the chip. However, that solution is quickly becoming untenable, and the semiconductor industry is looking for new ways to create better computer chips.

"We're reaching the limits of physics in terms of transistor size, so we need a new way to enhance the performance of microprocessors," says Behnam Kia, senior research scholar in physics at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work. "We propose utilizing chaos theory -- the system's own nonlinearity -- to enable transistor circuits to be programmed to perform different tasks. A very simple nonlinear transistor circuit contains very rich patterns. Different patterns that represent different functions coexist within the nonlinear dynamics of the system, and they are selectable. We utilize these dynamics-level behaviors to perform different processing tasks using the same circuit. As a result we can get more out of less."

Kia and NC State colleague William Ditto, professor of physics and dean of the College of Sciences, worked on the conception, design, development and fabrication of an integrated circuit chip that contains working nonlinear circuits to perform multiple different digital computations.

Traditionally, transistor-based circuits perform one task each. Computer processors operate by routing each instruction and its operands to the appropriate transistor circuit on the integrated circuit that implements that specific instruction. In Kia's design, the transistor circuit can be programmed to implement different instructions by morphing between different operations and functions.

"In current processors you don't utilize all the circuitry on the processor all the time, which is wasteful," Kia says. "Our design allows the circuit to be rapidly morphed and reconfigured to perform a desired digital function in each clock cycle. The heart of the design is an analog nonlinear circuit, but the interface is fully digital, enabling the circuit to operate as a fully morphable digital circuit that can be easily connected to the other digital systems."

The researchers have produced an alternative approach for computing that is compatible with existing technology and utilizes the same fabrication process and CAD tools as existing computer chips, which could aid commercial adoption.

"We believe that this chip will help solve the challenges of demands for more processing power from fewer transistors," Kia says. "The potential of 100 morphable nonlinear chaos-based circuits doing work equivalent to 100 thousand circuits, or of 100 million transistors doing work equivalent to three billion transistors holds promise for extending Moore's law -- not through doubling the number of transistors every two years but through increasing what transistors are capable of when combined in nonlinear and chaotic circuits."

"We are nearing commercial size and power and ease of programming in our evolving designs that could well be of significant commercial relevance within a few months with our three month design/fabrication cycle of improvements and implementations," Ditto says.

The work appears in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs. Kenneth Mobley of FirstPass Engineering also contributed to the work. The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research grant number N00014-14-C-0033.
The obvious strategy for a clothing retailer is to have as much product on the sales floor as possible to yield high sales. The clothing needs to be available to be bought, right?

For women, it turns out, that's a counterproductive strategy. Research shows that women want to feel a sense of individuality when buying clothes. They don't want to know that hundreds of other women in town also bought that dress.

The clothing store, Zara, capitalized on this instinctual behavior by limiting the quantity of items and regularly moving those items around the store, so each time a woman shops at Zara, she's not sure whether those pants she loved last time will be there or if they'll ever go on sale. This tactic makes her think that she should buy them as soon as possible or they might be gone.

Purdue University Professor Karthik Kannan calls the concept employed by Zara "design for instincts," and it has far-reaching effects, from creating products to developing processes for multinational corporations.

As businesses grow in this age of rapid technology changes, they're having to pivot more quickly as technological innovation happens. Design for instincts essentially tells businesses they need to stop and consider the consumer -- and human nature -- to be successful. This seems obvious, but it can get lost on our "next big thing" technology landscape.

"It's a very simple, but yet profound, concept," says Kannan, a professor in Purdue's Krannert School of Management.

He will explore how the concept may play into the future economy and how to best prepare the next generation for it during his presentation at Dawn or Doom '16, a conference on the risks and rewards of new technology at Purdue University. Dawn or Doom will be held Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 3 and 4, on the Purdue West Lafayette campus.

A focus on human instincts also is important to major companies like General Electric, a big employer of Purdue graduates, both from the perspective of its customers and its employees. To keep up with rapid change, and to attract top talent, GE decided it would have to develop intentional and dynamic processes and policies. This led to the technique called "FastWorks."

FastWorks incorporates a cross-section of departments to form teams that are then in constant communication with the consumer. This way, they're better able to stay on top of what works and what doesn't, regardless of trends.

"It's thinking about what the consumer need is and designing systems with their input," Kannan says. "Before they would do all the deep data dives and then figure out what best to do. They're now saying, 'Let me go ask the consumer;' it's about understanding the end user."

Employee policy-wise, GE is trying something less common in companies of its size and maturity, but in place routinely at some startups in Silicon Valley: unlimited vacation days. The idea is that managers and executives are responsible for seeing that what needs to get done gets done, and as long as it does work schedules are fluid. Kannan says this appeals to an employee's instinctual desire to be independent in their job.

He thinks that soon we'll see many traditional jobs become much like jobs at GE and at tech startups. They'll require a "value-add" component, where employees need to be constantly innovating and finding new ways of reaching consumers, are adept at teamwork and have a level of freedom in their work that would have seemed odd in the past.
Genetic testing of mitochondrial DNA could reveal otherwise unknown ancestry that can influence a person's risk for certain types of breast cancer, a new study finds.

UT Southwestern Medical Center cancer researchers studying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in a group of triple negative breast cancer patients found that 13 percent of participants were unaware of ancestry that could influence their risk of cancer.

"We found 12 differences among 92 patients, a significant amount," said lead author Dr. Roshni Rao, Director of the George N. Peters, M.D. Center for Breast Surgery at UT Southwestern.

"Some patients who self-identified as Hispanic had African-American ancestry. One Hispanic woman was found to be Ashkenazi Jewish. Both African Americans and some Ashkenazi Jewish populations have a higher risk for triple negative breast cancer," said Dr. Rao, Associate Professor of Surgery and with the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Triple negative breast cancer is characterized by tumors that do not express receptors for estrogen, progesterone, or Her2-Neu, and accounts for about 15 to 20 percent of all breast cancer cases. This form of the disease is known to be particularly aggressive, and challenging to treat. Patients with triple negative breast cancer have a higher incidence of metastatic disease -- cancer spreading to other parts of the body -- and an overall higher rate of death from breast cancer, compared to patients with other types of breast cancer.

"This study is the first to perform mtDNA testing for self-described African-Americans, Caucasians and Hispanics with triple negative breast cancer and to identify unexpected mtDNA patterns," said senior author Dr. Barbara Haley, Professor of Internal Medicine, who holds the Charles Cameron Sprague, M.D. Chair in Clinical Oncology. "It is estimated that 10 to 30 percent of Americans may not be aware of their mixed ancestry. This type of assessment has the potential to be informative for other cancers where we see ethnic differences in frequency without understanding the cause."

Patients diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer tend to be younger and are more likely to be African-American or Hispanic. These patients may be less likely to be identified through traditional mammography screenings, which tend to target women 50 and older.

"If you know your ancestry, then you could be included in the group that gets screened at a younger age," Dr. Rao said.

The researchers asked each volunteer -- 31 African-Americans, 31 Caucasians, and 30 Hispanics who are triple negative breast cancer patients -- to come in for a simple test, which collects cells from inside the cheek on a swab. Mitochondrial DNA was then isolated from these samples for comparison. Mitochondrial DNA differs from nuclear DNA because it is maternally inherited so it does not change or mix. Researchers can trace the lineage of mtDNA through multiple generations.

Among 30 Hispanic patients in this study, 22 did not have a family history of breast cancer whereas eight did. These results suggest that further genetic testing can potentially become an important step in identifying those at risk.

Additionally, those of Nigerian, Cameroon, and Sierre Leone ancestry were most strongly associated with triple negative breast cancer, an unexpected finding of this study. This association could indicate that ancestry from specific African countries may predispose an increased risk in the rate of triple negative breast cancer, which does not respond to standard breast cancer therapies, such as tamoxifen, aromatase inhibitors, or trastuzumab.

The study, which appears in the journal Cancer, was supported by Young Texans Against Cancer and the David M. Crowley Foundation.
New research from the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota estimates the impact of traffic congestion on access to jobs for the 50 largest (by population) metropolitan areas in the United States.

The new rankings are part of the Access Across America study, which began in 2013. The rankings focus on accessibility, a measure that examines both land use and transportation systems. Accessibility measures how many destinations, such as jobs, can be reached in a given time.

"Rather than focusing on how congestion affects individual travelers," explained Andrew Owen, director of the Observatory, "our approach quantifies the overall impact that congestion has on the potential for interaction within urban areas."

Top 10 metro areas with the greatest loss in job accessibility due to congestion

Los Angeles Boston Chicago New York Phoenix Houston Riverside Seattle Pittsburgh San Francisco

The study, which is based on data from 2015, also ranks access to jobs by car for the 50 largest U.S. metro areas.

"For example, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area ranked 12th in terms of job accessibility but 23rd in the reduction in job access due to congestion," Owen said. "This suggests that job accessibility is influenced less by congestion here than in other cities."

Top 10 metro areas with the greatest job accessibility by car

New York Los Angeles Chicago Dallas San Jose San Francisco Washington, DC Houston Boston Philadelphia

To measure access to jobs by car, researchers calculated travel times using a detailed road network and speed data that reflect typical conditions for an 8 a.m. Wednesday morning departure. Additionally, the accessibility results for 8 a.m. are compared with accessibility results for 4 a.m. to estimate the impact of road and highway congestion on job accessibility.

Rankings are determined by a weighted average of accessibility, with a higher weight given to closer, easier-to-access jobs. Jobs reachable within 10 minutes are weighted most heavily, and jobs are given decreasing weights as travel time increases up to 60 minutes.

The report -- Access Across America: Auto 2015 -- presents detailed accessibility and congestion impact values for each metropolitan area as well as block-level maps that illustrate the spatial patterns of accessibility within each area. It also includes a census tract-level map that shows accessibility patterns at a national scale.

The research was sponsored by the National Accessibility Evaluation Pooled-Fund Study, a multi-year effort led by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and supported by partners including the Federal Highway Administration and 11 state DOTs.

Accessibility Observatory reports, including the new analysis of job accessibility by auto (Access Across America: Auto 2015), are available at access.umn.edu.
Is there a streetlight burned out on your block? Unless you or your neighbors phone the right city department, there's a good chance nobody knows about it.

Most cities don't have any comprehensive listing or map of where their lights are located, what kind they are, what their expected operational lifetimes are, how high they are, or when they were last replaced. And the prevailing system for answering those questions is to send inspectors out, clipboard in hand, to examine the city's streets one by one -- a slow and expensive process. The result of this inefficiency can be that burned-out lights are not replaced promptly, or that perfectly good lights are replaced unnecessarily as a preventive measure, or that crews are sent out with a 30-foot lift truck to replace a light that turns out to be on a 40-foot pole.

There must be a better way, a team of researchers at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering thought. And after several iterations of software and hardware developed in the lab and field-tested on city streets, the researchers have found that better way, which they reported in a paper in the journal IEEE Sensors. The team includes Sumeet Kumar PhD '14; Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor in Mechanical Engineering and vice president for open learning; and three others.

"The way we measure street lighting is still very primitive," Kumar says. So the team, as part of a collaboration with a Spanish infrastructure contracting company called Ferrovial, set about developing a system that could be inexpensive and highly automated. Ferrovial has contracts with several cities to manage their street-lighting systems, and was looking for more efficient ways of carrying out those tasks. "They were interested in coming up with the most scientific and scalable ways of measuring performance in urban areas," Kumar says.

Car-mounted systems

The MIT team came up with the idea of replacing manual inspections with a set of cameras and sensors mounted on top of a vehicle, in much the same way that Google uses vehicle-mounted camera systems to generate its street views. But in this case, the vehicles would prowl the city's streets at night, picking up the location of streetlights using digital cameras and sophisticated software to distinguish between streetlights and other sources of illumination, and even to estimate the height of each lamp. Other sensors measured the exact level of illumination, in order to determine if lights were failing, or if there were dark areas between lights indicating a possible lamp outage or a need for an additional light pole.

Tying this all together is a system for precisely determining the location of the vehicle as it moves along, thus creating an accurate map and database of positions. This system uses a combination of GPS data and other methods to improve accuracy, and could either record all the data for later downloading or send it in real time to a central facility.

One benefit of such a detailed survey of existing lighting is that it could provide a literal roadmap for potential upgrades of the lights.

Using new, highly efficient and long-lasting LED lights to replace older mercury vapor and other types of lighting could lead to significant savings on the costs of electricity and the maintenance needs for the lights. But, without a monitoring system, Kumar points out, even when such upgrades are carried out, "we don't have good ways of proving whether the upgrade was effective or not." By comparing quantitative before-and-after data collected by the automated system, the improvements could be analyzed with great accuracy.

Rather than deploy a fleet of dedicated vehicles to carry out these surveys, which would be an expensive outlay for cities that are often cash-strapped, the team proposes that portable equipment be mounted on the roofs of city-owned vehicles that would already be crisscrossing the city anyway, such as police cars, buses, or garbage trucks. This could provide extensive coverage of a city at minimal cost. To demonstrate the concept, they carried out field tests in four cities -- Cambridge, Massachusetts; Malaga and Santander in Spain; and Birmingham, UK -- using portable equipment mounted on the roofs of economy rental cars or vans. After each of these tests, Kumar says, "we would disassemble our entire project, pack it up in a suitcase, and get customs clearance" to move on to the next test.

While this experiment was specifically aimed at studying streetlights, Kumar says that much of the basic work on the system, including the precision mapping system, algorithms for interpreting the information captured from the cameras, and ways of capturing and storing data, could also be applied to tracking a variety of other aspects of urban infrastructure, including potholes and other issues in the streets themselves, the location and condition of signs and signals, and so on.

"One interesting aspect of this work was the use of cameras to estimate the heights of the street lamps.  This type of information would be extremely useful for rapid inventory management," says Andrew Smyth, a professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia University, who was not involved in this work. "With the general trend to more efficient and controllable LED street lighting systems, an improved knowledge of the current inventory and its effectiveness is extremely valuable. [This information can be used to not only] improve design of entirely new street lighting configurations but also assess the current performance of the existing systems, which may be under- or over-lighting in places."
Australia has one of the longest histories of continuous human occupation outside Africa. But who exactly were the first people to settle there? Such a question has obvious political implications and has been hotly debated for decades. The first comprehensive genomic study of Aboriginal Australians reveals that they are indeed the direct descendants of Australia's earliest settlers and diverged from their Papuan neighbours about 37'000 years ago (y.a.). The study also uncovers several other major findings on early human populations.

The research is published today in Nature and is the result of a close collaboration between international research teams and representatives of Aboriginal Australian communities. It includes six researchers from the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics -- among whom, lead author Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas and group leader Laurent Excoffier, both from the University of Bern.

The early peopling of Australia and the continent's subsequent population history has been a matter of scientific debate for decades. Until the present study, demographic inference was based on only three Aboriginal Australian genomes; one was derived from a tuft of hair (taken from a deceased individual), and the other two from cell lines whose provenance is somewhat hazy. Recently, with the assistance of Aboriginal Australian co-authors, an international team of scientists sequenced 83 modern Aboriginal Australian and 25 modern Papuan genomes. The research teams used this genomic data and combined it with linguistic data to characterize the peopling of Australia. The work reveals -- among other things -- three key dates.

72'000 y.a.: A common race out of Africa

It has often been hypothesized that the ancestors of modern Papuans and Australians must have left Africa far earlier than any other population if they were to reach New Guinea and Australia ~47'000 years ago, as suggested by the fossil record. The researchers discovered, however, that this is most probably not the case; they estimate that around 72'000 years ago, an ancestral population common to Aborginal Australians, Europeans and East Asians left the African continent. Professor Laurent Excoffier of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Bern explains: "Discussions have been intense as to what extent Aboriginal Australians represent a separate Out-of-Africa exit to those of Asians and Europeans. We find that, once we take into account admixture with archaic humans, the vast majority of the Aboriginal Australian genetic makeup comes from the same African exit as other non-Africans."

37'000 y.a.: Down Under's first settlers diverge from their neighbours

The Aboriginal Australians would have diverged from the Papuans 37'000 y.a., long before New Guinea and Australia became geographically separated (10'000 y.a.). "Aboriginal Australians have been the subject of scientific mystery," notes senior author Professor Eske Willerslev, from the Copenhagen-based Centre for GeoGenetics, Cambridge University and the Sanger Institute.

"How did they get there? What was their relationship to other groups? And how does their arrival change our understanding of how populations spread? Technologically and politically, it has not really been possible to answer these questions until now."

31'000 y.a.: One continent, huge genetic diversity

While the authors found evidence for gene flow between sampled groups, the ancestral population of Aboriginal Australians started to become structured around 31'000 years ago thus creating the genetic diversity observed today. First author on the paper Assistant Professor Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas from the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, the Centre for GeoGenetics of Copenhagen and the University of Bern says: "The genetic diversity among Aboriginal Australians is amazing. Perhaps because the continent has been inhabited for such a long time by Aborginal Australians we find that groups from southwestern desert Australia are more genetically different from groups of northeastern Australia than are for example Native Americans and Siberians, and this is within a single continent."
A study of hundreds of new genomes from across the globe has yielded insights into modern genetic diversity and ancient population dynamics, including compelling evidence that essentially all non-Africans today descend from a single migration out of Africa.

The multinational research effort, led by Harvard Medical School geneticists and published Sept. 21 in Nature, also suggests that no single gene can explain the significant cultural and cognitive progress in human development that occurred about 50,000 years ago.

The study represents the largest data set yet of high-quality genome sequences from understudied populations, adding nearly 6 million DNA base pairs to the "canonical" human genome sequence published in 2001.

The data identify millions of previously unknown population-specific mutations that may help scientists develop precision-targeted diagnostic tests and treatments on their quest to improve the health of the world's underserved populations.

Most genome-wide population sequencing studies to date have focused on a handful of large populations. The HMS-led study, by comparison, sequenced samples from 142 smaller populations, most of which were previously understudied.

"As humans, we are not just the people who live in industrialized countries, and we are not just the people who live in numerically large groups," said David Reich, professor of genetics at HMS and senior author of the study. "If we want to understand who we really are, we have to realize that some of the most interesting aspects of human variation are only present in underrepresented, small populations."

"We wanted to go out into the world and pull together as many of the ethnically, linguistically and anthropologically diverse samples as we possibly could," said Swapan Mallick, bioinformatic systems director in the Reich lab and first author of the study.

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The team's analyses are already answering questions about various populations' genetic origins, but, the researchers note, these insights are only a milestone on a longer journey.

"Of course, there are thousands of ethnically distinct populations in the world, and much more work needs to be done," said Mallick.

Clarifying history

Reich, Mallick and their international team of colleagues began by selecting two genomes each from 51 populations represented in a collection called the Human Genome Diversity Project. Next, they assembled samples from members of 91 other groups, including diverse Native American, South Asian, and African populations not previously included in genome-wide studies, and sent the DNA for sequencing. In all, the project analyzed the genomes of 300 people.

A key conclusion -- that the vast majority of modern human ancestry in non-Africans derives from a single population that migrated out of Africa -- is also supported by two other whole-genome sequencing studies appearing simultaneously in Nature. One, led by an Estonian group, focused on 379 whole genome sequences; the other, led by a Danish group, analyzed 108 Australians and New Guineans.

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Together, the three studies put to rest a lingering question about whether indigenous peoples of Australia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands descend in large part from a second group that left Africa earlier and skirted the coast of the Indian Ocean. They do not, the HMS researchers say.

"Our best estimate for the proportion of ancestry from an early-exit population is zero," said Reich, who is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and associate member of the Broad Institute. "Taken together, all three studies leave wiggle room for, at most, around two percent."

The HMS-led study further revealed that the common ancestors of modern humans began to differentiate at least 200,000 years ago, long before the out-of-Africa dispersal occurred.

"It had been unclear whether the group that expanded out of Africa represented a large subset of the populations within Africa," said Mallick. "This really shows that there was a lot of substructure prior to the expansion."

The additional discovery that genetics alone can't account for the acceleration of cultural, economic and intellectual progress in the last 50,000 years runs contrary to a popular hypothesis in the field.

"There does not seem to have been one or a few enabling mutations that suddenly appeared among our ancestors and allowed them to think in profoundly different ways," said Reich.

Instead, the researchers say, a constellation of factors, including environment, lifestyle, and possibly genes, precipitated the rapid changes that occurred.

"Geneticists often search for examples where genetics is the explanation. Here, paradoxically, genetic data are showing that there will be no clear genetic answers," Reich said.

Overcoming hurdles

Mallick and colleagues overcame significant logistical hurdles posed by sharing and processing an enormous amount of data.

Often, in studies of this size, data are collected in many laboratories that use different sequencing machines and different experimental protocols. This can create so-called batch effects that make it difficult to distinguish true differences among samples. The current study minimized batch effects by sending all of the samples to a single center to be sequenced at the same time.

The team made much of the data set publicly available in 2014; multiple research groups have already used it for their studies.

In a way, the authors say, the findings reported thus far are just the tip of the iceberg.

"It's impossible for our group to analyze even a tiny fraction of what the data represents," said Mallick. "Our goal is to push the data out and let people use it to consider their own questions."

Primary funding for the study, called the Simons Genome Diversity Project, was provided by the Simons Foundation (SFARI 280376) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-1032255).
The same hotspot in Earth's mantle that feeds Iceland's active volcanoes has been playing a trick on the scientists who are trying to measure how much ice is melting on nearby Greenland.

According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the hotspot softened the mantle rock beneath Greenland in a way that ultimately distorted their calculations for ice loss in the Greenland ice sheet. This caused them to underestimate the melting by about 20 gigatons (20 billion metric tons) per year.

That means Greenland did not lose about 2,500 gigatons of ice from 2003-2013 as scientists previously thought, but nearly 2,700 gigatons instead -- a 7.6 percent difference, said study co-author Michael Bevis of The Ohio State University.

"It's a fairly modest correction," said Bevis, the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and leader of GNET, the Greenland GPS Network.

"It doesn't change our estimates of the total mass loss all over Greenland by that much, but it brings a more significant change to our understanding of where within the ice sheet that loss has happened, and where it is happening now."

The Earth's crust in that part of the world is slowly moving northwest, he explained, and 40 million years ago, parts of Greenland passed over an especially hot column of partially molten rock that now lies beneath Iceland. The hotspot softened the rock in its wake, lowering the viscosity of the mantle rocks along a path running deep below the surface of Greenland's east coast.

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During the last ice age, Greenland's ice sheet was much larger than now, and its enormous weight caused Greenland's crust to slowly sink into the softened mantle rock below. When large parts of the ice sheet melted at the end of the ice age, the weight of the ice sheet decreased, and the crust began to rebound. It is still rising, as mantle rock continues to flow inwards and upwards beneath Greenland.

The existence of mantle flow beneath Greenland is not a surprise in itself, Bevis said. When the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites began measuring gravity signals around the world in 2002, scientists knew they would have to separate mass flow beneath the earth's crust from changes in the mass of the overlying ice sheet.

"GRACE measures mass, period. It cannot tell the difference between ice mass and rock mass. So, inferring the ice mass change from the total mass change requires a model of all the mass flows within the earth. If that model is wrong, so is the ice mass change inferred from GRACE," he explained.

Models of this rock flow depend on what researchers can glean about the viscosity of the mantle. The original models assumed a fairly typical mantle viscosity, but Greenland's close encounter with the Iceland hot spot greatly changed the picture.

To the GNET team, the 7.6 percent discrepancy in overall ice loss is overshadowed by the fact that it concealed which parts of the ice sheet are most being affected by climate change. The new results reveal that the pattern of modern ice loss is similar to that which has prevailed since the end of the last ice age.

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"This result is a detail, but it is an important detail," Bevis continued. "By refining the spatial pattern of mass loss in the world's second largest -- and most unstable -- ice sheet, and learning how that pattern has evolved, we are steadily increasing our understanding of ice loss processes, which will lead to better-informed projections of sea level rise."

Computer models can give a good estimate of mantle flow and crustal uplift, he said, and GNET's mission is to make those models better by providing direct observations of present-day crustal motion. That's why the GNET team includes GRACE scientists and earth modelers as well as GPS experts and glaciologists.

The team used GPS to measure uplift in the crust all along Greenland's coast. That's when they discovered that two neighboring stations on the east coast were uplifting far more rapidly than standard models had predicted.

"We did not expect to see the anomalous uplift rates at the two stations that sit on the 'track' of the Iceland hot spot," Bevis said. "We were shocked when we first saw them. Only afterwards did we make the connection."

He added that the discovery holds big implications for measuring ice loss elsewhere in the world.

For instance, GNET has a sister network, ANET, that spans West Antarctica. It employs roughly similar numbers of GPS stations, but spread out over a vastly larger area. Unless more stations are added to ANET, anomalous rates of uplift may go undetected, Bevis cautioned, and analyses of GRACE data will lead to inaccurate estimates of ice loss in Antarctica.

The authors of the paper included Shfaquat A. Khan and Per Knudsen of the Technical University of Denmark; Ingo Sasgen and Veit Helm of the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research; Tonie van Dam of the University of Luxembourg; Jonathan L. Bamber of the University of Bristol; John Wahr (now deceased) of the University of Colorado; Michael Willis of Cornell University; Kurt H. Kjaer and Anders A. Bjork of the University of Copenhagen; Bert Wouters and Peter Kuipers Munneke of Utrecht University; Beata Csatho of the University at Buffalo; Kevin Fleming of the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences; and Andy Aschwanden of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

GNET is an increasingly international project led by the USA, Denmark and Luxembourg. It is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the governments of the partner nations.
Tuesday, 20 September 2016 23:39:23 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

The Chilean government extended for two more months an existing provisional, ad valorem duty already applied to the imports of Mexican rebar , at the same time it reduced the provisional antidumping (AD) tariff from 13.1 percent to 11 percent effective September 17, according to a resolution published at the nations official gazette, Diario Oficial.

The decision followed a recommendation on September 12, 2016, by the nations price distortion commission, CNDP.

The products subject to the 11 percent provisional, ad valorem tariff currently fall under the following HTS codes 7213.1000, 7214.2000, 7227.9000 and 7228.3000.


The thing about Rex is he loves dogs almost as much as people. So when the potbellied ran into a couple of big dogs while ambling around his yard in British Columbia, Canada, in July, he did what came naturally - and sidled right up to them.

It didn't go well. His owner, Dayna Denman, got a call that day from her neighbor. Rex had been badly mauled. "He was found lying and bleeding badly in the middle of thick bush by my neighbor who brought him some blankets and sat with him until I got there," Denman wrote in a Facebook post. Denman rushed to the scene. Despite his grave condition, Rex managed to stir when he heard her voice. Rushed to the hospital, Rex began a long road to recovery.

Along the way, the pig, who was a popular figure in the community, had a lot of friends cheering for him. Many of them pitched in to help pay for his growing medical bills.

Dodo Shows Cat Crazy Fluffy Cat Wants To Sit On His Dad At All Times

Vets couldn't save Rex's ears although his hearing remained intact. And that trademark smile came back pretty quickly. Maybe even a bit brighter than before.

Maybe that's due to how spoiled he's been since his accident. We're talking hand-scooped dollops of yogurt.

This browser does not support the video tag. Facebook/Rex's Road To Recovery

Car rides with carrots on demand.

Pedicures to perish for.

Eternal mud rolls.

Wagon rides.

And all the comforts of home.

As for dogs? Even after his near-fatal encounter, Rex shows no ill will toward the species. In fact, a couple of his very best friends happen to be of the canine persuasion.
What few people know, however, is that there was another elephant who was supposed to be rescued with Raju that same July night. His name is Mohan and he is still in shackles as rescuers fight "downright dangerous" obstacles in an effort to free him from his abusers.

Last July, animal advocates around the world celebrated the rescue of a captive elephant named Raju who wept "tears" after being freed from a half-century of chains in India. The move was seen as a legal victory for elephants across India, as well as a much-deserved retirement for the elderly elephant who had suffered abuse his whole life.

Raju and Mohan met when they were calves in the 1960s, chained and put on display together at cattle fairs in India, according to Wildlife SOS, the NGO that rescued Raju and is leading the charge for Mohan's release in conjunction with the Uttar Pradesh Forestry Department. They were eventually purchased by different members of the same family and subjected to "abuse and beatings during their training process," says the organization. They lived and worked together for years - and were chained next to each other at night.

"The fact that they were chained together at only a trunk's length away from one another for so long makes them brothers in pain," said Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder of Wildlife SOS. "While there is no evidence that they are related by blood, the years of abuse they withstood side by side surely must have bonded them. And each was the other's only witness to the suffering and brutality they endured."

According to Wildlife SOS, Mohan is a 56-year-old bull elephant who is suffering extensively from injuries, dehydration and malnourishment. Based on the group's examination of his dung, Mohan is eating plastic for food.

Wildlife SOS says Mohan continues to live as a working elephant and carry heavy loads.

Although last year's plan was to rescue Raju and Mohan in unison, "tragically, Mohan disappeared without a trace during our final rescue operations," the group wrote on its site.

Since then, Wildlife SOS says it has been working to secure Mohan's release, and recently amped up the effort.

The situation has proven to be tense.
There aren't many wolves left in the Norwegian wilderness Just 68, in fact. But Norway's government has decided even that's too many. Authorities announced plans this month to kill 47 wolves, or about two-thirds of the remaining population.

The move has sparked both intense criticism and praise. Farmers welcome the cull, claiming wolves threaten their livestock, and therefore their livelihood. Conservationists, on the other hand, condemn the move as an attack on a species that's already on unsteady ground. "The wolf population is already very small and critically endangered," Silje Lundberg, a prominent Norwegian environmentalist, told the U.K.'s Express. "To eradicate 70 percent of such a vulnerable species is shocking."

Dodo Shows Adopt Me! Scared Little Dog Is So Full Of Joy Now  And Looking For A Family

In Europe today, there are an estimated 12,000 wolves - a population that has surged in recent years. But only in Norway is the species listed as "critically endangered" due to frequent culling.

Most of Norway's wolves are already clinging to to just one designated habitat in the southeastern part of the country. And reports suggest their threat to sheep farmers has been greatly exaggerated. Most recent reports suggest wolves kill , at most, 1,500 of the country's 2 million grazing sheep annually. Another 100,000 have died from poisonous plants, drowning, traffic accidents and various diseases. Wolves, however, have long suffered for their age-old reputation as killers - even as modern reality pants a different picture.

According to the Norwegian Environment Agency, "relentless hunting" wiped out the wolf population in the 1960s. Today's Norwegian wolves are actually the descendants of stragglers that likely wandered into Norway from Sweden. In 1973, wolves found protection in Scandinavia, with laws making it illegal to kill the animals without a license.

But many Norwegians have embraced the annual culls, which run from October through March. When the government announced plans to hunt 11 wolves last year, no less than 11,571 people signed up to kill them. Or about 700 hunters for every wolf. Scientists, however, contend that taking wolves out of the ecological picture will have a profound effect on all wildlife. As a keystone species, wolves play "a unique and crucial role in the way an ecosystem functions," National Geographic notes. "Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether."
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATESAirbus on Wednesday became the first airplane manufacturer to get U.S. government permission to sell aircraft to Iran following last years nuclear accord, getting final approval for a 17-plane sale thats part of a larger $25-billion (U.S.) deal.

The European aviation companys announcement, coming as Iranian and U.S. leaders are in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, showed that the outgoing administration of President Barack Obama is honouring the economic terms of the pact.

The next administration, however, may change that equation for Airbus and Chicago-based Boeing Co., which has its own $25-billion deal on the line with Iran that would be the biggest for an American company since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and U.S. Embassy takeover.

Though based abroad, Airbus needed the approval of the U.S. Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control for the deal as at least 10 per cent of Airbus components are of American origin.

Airbus applied for two licences to cover its deal with Iran to ensure the fast delivery of some of the aircraft, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon told The Associated Press. The licence announced Wednesday covers the first 17 planes involved in the deal, which will be will be A320s and A330s, he said.

Dubon declined to offer a breakdown of how many of each model are involved in the initial sale, but said Airbus hoped to receive a second license allowing it to sell the remaining planes to Iran.

Irans UN mission did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. State television referred to an Associated Press report on the sale.

In January, national carrier Iran Air signed agreements to buy 118 planes from Airbus, estimated to be worth some 22.8 billion euros ($25 billion U.S.). The deal included 21 A320ceos, 24 A320neos, 27 A330ceos, 18 A330neos, 16 A350-1000s and 12 double-decker A380s.

On Sunday, Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan, a deputy transportation minister, told reporters that he expected U.S. permission for all aircraft purchases by the end of September and that several airplanes would arrive by mid-March. However, he also said Iran would cut the number of Airbus planes it would buy to 112, state TV reported.

Base model A320s are listed at an average of $98 million, while A330s start at $231.5 million. That puts the value of the approved 17 aircraft in the first licence around at least $1.8 billion and possibly much higher based on list prices, though buyers typically negotiate sizable discounts for bulk orders.

Most Iranian planes were purchased before the Islamic Revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Islamists to power. Out of Irans 250 commercial planes, 162 were flying in June, while the rest are grounded due to lack of spare parts.

Irans nuclear deal with world powers, which limits its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions, specifically allowed for the purchase of aircraft and parts. Thats set off a race between airplane manufacturers for the newly opened market, home to 80 million people.

Airbuss announcements will be closely watched by Boeing, which has its own deal on the line. In a June letter to U.S. Congress, Boeing said the deal involves Iran Air buying 80 aircraft with a total list price of $17.6 billion, with deliveries beginning in 2017 and running until 2025. Iran Air also will lease 29 new Boeing 737s.

Iran also has ordered 20 airplanes from French-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR.

In a statement, Boeing spokesman Marc Sklar said his company believed Airbus applied for its licence before it did and that the U.S. government follows a first-in, first-out policy.

We look forward to receiving our licence from the government shortly, he said.

However, the Boeing deal has been criticized by American lawmakers over Irans pernicious behaviour, including launching ballistic missiles, firing rockets near U.S. warships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz and briefly detaining American sailors who strayed into its territorial waters.

The U.S. presidential election could also have an effect on the sales. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to tear up the nuclear deal if elected this November.

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Members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee are demanding that Wells Fargo claw back pay from Carrie Tolstedt, the executive whose community banking unit created two million unauthorized customer accounts. Theyre not likely to get as much as they want.

At a hearing in Washington on Tuesday, senators cited figures eclipsing $100 million (U.S.). During her three-decade career at Wells Fargo and its predecessors, Tolstedt received about $44 million in shares, $34 million in vested options and still more from cash bonuses and stock sales. But the banks clawback policy, like that of most U.S. companies, doesnt allow Wells Fargo to go after those assets unless theres a financial restatement. When the damage is reputational harm, only unvested stock awards can be recouped  in the case of Tolstedt, 56, whose retirement was announced in July, thats about $19 million.

Decisions about clawbacks will be made by Wells Fargos board, CEO John Stumpf told senators. The boards human resources committee, headed by Lloyd Dean, CEO of Dignity Health, a San Francisco-based operator of not-for-profit hospitals, will make recommendations to the board. The Wells Fargo board is actively engaged in this issue, said Stumpf, whos also the boards chairman.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Stumpf should resign and pay should be clawed back. The Massachusetts Democrat accused him of gutless leadership for firing lower-level employees while not holding top managers accountable.

While clawback policies have exploded in popularity  76 per cent of the biggest banks around the world have them, up from 44 per cent in 2010, according to Mercer, a compensation-consulting firm  theyre rarely used. During the past two years, only 10 per cent of companies polled by Mercer in April used such policies to reclaim compensation that had already been paid.

Clawbacks are easier said than done, said Charles Elson, director of the University of Delawares John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance. Once its out the door, its hard to get back.

More common, and easier to pull off, is the cancellation of compensation a company has promised to pay executives and other employees in the future. Even more firms have this type of malus policy  think opposite of bonus, both words from Latin. In Mercers survey, 90 per cent of big banks had some clause to rescind unvested incentives for reasons ranging from misconduct to poor performance. Half the banks polled applied their malus policies in the past two years.

Even in jurisdictions where companies can reach into bank and brokerage accounts, such as the U.S., doing so almost always means lengthy and expensive litigation between the firm and the employee.

I would guess that there are some situations where the board concludes that the expense and energy of a potential legal battle is simply not worth the potential recovery, said Michael Melbinger, a partner specializing in employee benefits and executive compensation at Winston & Strawn in Chicago.

Businesses end up reserving clawbacks for the most extreme circumstances. JPMorgan Chase went after the traders who lost $6.2 billion during the London Whale scandal. In addition to cancelling unvested bonuses, the firm asked them to return some cash they already had been paid.

All but one agreed to do so, and JPMorgan sued holdout Javier Martin-Artajo in a case settled three months later. While the bank didnt reveal how much it managed to recoup from him, the total recovered from those involved exceeded $100 million in cash and unvested stock, according to its 2012 annual report. The figure was equal to two years compensation for the four former employees.

Malus is applied frequently, but clawbacks are very rare, said Vicki Elliott, head of global financial-services talent at Mercer. It has to be a big, transparent blowout for a firm to attempt clawing back money already paid out.

In many European countries, labour laws prevent clawbacks, while in the U.S. the legal process can drag on for years and be costly, Elliott said.

Even the Securities and Exchange Commissions proposed clawback rule, put forward in 2015 to fill a requirement in the Dodd-Frank Act, allows companies to take a pass on recouping pay if legal fees and other costs threaten to become more expensive than the compensation theyre trying to collect.

The worlds largest banks, stung by criticism for pay incentives encouraging risk-taking that led to the 2008 financial crisis, have introduced deferred-payment schemes for most executives, giving boards bigger pots of earned-but-unpaid bonuses to cancel when bad behaviour is discovered and decreasing the need for legal battles. European authorities have gone further, introducing rules extending deferment periods and making sure banks have clawback clauses.

U.K. regulators approved rules last year forcing banks to defer all bonuses for senior management for seven years. Thats much longer than what was proposed by U.S. regulators this year, which would force deferrals of three to four years for top executives. Most big banks had similar schedules in place before the government proposed them. The U.K. rules also allow financial firms to claw back pay for as long as 10 years in cases where material failures are discovered.

Emboldened by the new rule, London-based Standard Chartered said its considering whether to recover bonuses paid to 150 senior managers responsible for losses the bank incurred this year. The bank is still conducting an investigation to determine whos to blame and whether to claw back pay.

Following UBS Groups 2011 rogue-trading scandal that triggered $2 billion in losses, the Swiss bank cancelled all unvested bonuses for the traders involved. The firm also recouped bonuses that had been awarded in the previous year but were still unpaid from top earners in its investment-bank division. Key risk-takers, group managing directors and anyone else whose bonus for 2010 exceeded $2 million had to forfeit half of their share-based bonuses scheduled to vest in 2012.

There were no clawbacks in the case, and UBS doesnt have a company-wide policy. What it does have are performance goals for all departments and executives determining whether stock-based bonuses will vest. That policy, shared by most other top banks, sends a message to employees that when things go wrong, for whatever reason, they might all be on the hook.

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The Philippines deepened a crackdown on its mining industry on Wednesday as worlds top nickel shipper announced it will suspend more than 10 mines in addition to 10 halts that have already been made, saying it wants to surpass Canadian and Australian standards.

The government is finalizing results of an environmental audit and will make recommendations on what companies should do after their suspension, Environment Secretary Gina Lopez told reporters in Manila.

She didnt identify which mines were included in the latest round, with details now due Monday.

The global nickel market has zeroed in on the environmental checkup initiated by President Rodrigo Duterte amid concern that it will constrict the flow of ore to China, the largest metals market.

The country has about 40 metallic mines, of which more than half produce nickel.

Futures rallied in August to the highest level in a year as the early suspensions took effect, and banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., have flagged the potential for further advances.

We should be much better than Canada or Australia because were an island, Lopez told reporters after repeated delays in releasing the audits full findings. The Philippines comprises thousands of islands, with most nickel mining found in Palawan in Surigao provinces. More than 10 mines will be suspended.

In the run-up to Wednesdays comments, Secretary Lopez signalled there would probably be more suspensions, as well as state support for workers laid off. The country will close more mines including some large-scale operations after the audit, Lopez told reporters on Sept. 5. Earlier this week, she said the government could tell more mines to stop operating.

Nickel futures surged to as much as $11,030 on the London Metal Exchange last month as the audit got under way, with 16 teams fanning out across the country to check on the mines for compliance. On Wednesday, the metal pared losses, trading 0.4 per cent lower at $10,265 a ton at 4 p.m. in Manila after losing 1.3 per cent earlier.

Goldman Sachs has warned that further Philippine suspensions may push ore stockpiles to critically low levels.

Its base-case outlook assumed a further 15 per cent of Philippine supply being halted for six months, following the loss of 10 per cent, according to a Sept. 12 note.

The bank said refined nickel may surge to $12,000 a ton by year-end.

Mines that are suspended may reopen if they are able to fix shortcomings, according to Environment Undersecretary Leo Jasareno. The government is optimistic that the drive to clean up the industry will act as lure to stimulate investment, not a deterrent, Jasareno told Bloomberg.

Last year, nickel-ore shipments from the Philippines totaled 32.3 million tons, down from 33.1 million tons in the year before, according to mines bureau data.

Most cargoes go to China to make stainless steel, with the Southeast Asian nation accounting for about 20 per cent of global mined nickel output.

Global nickel demand exceeded supply in the first half, with a deficit of 80,800 tons compared with a surplus of 45,200 tons in all of 2015, according to the World Bureau of Metal Statistics. Stockpiles in LME-tracked warehouses have fallen 17 per cent to 365,784 tons this year, the lowest since October 2014.

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If you brew it, they will come.

Thats what Josephine Fina Uwineza is hoping will happen when she opens Rwandas first woman-owned craft brewery with help from one of Ontarios largest craft brewers, Beaus.

This is something thats very important to me, says Uwineza, a restaurateur in Rwandas capital of Kigali. She is currently in Canada to learn about beer-making at the Beaus plant in Vankleek Hill, about half way between Ottawa and Montreal.

We will be hiring women at the brewery, but this is especially good for rural women in the villages who are less fortunate, she says. Theyll be growing the raw materials for the beer and will be part of this brewery.

Uwineza was put in touch with Beaus CEO Steve Beauchesne through Nancy Coldham, a mentor with the Institute for the Economic Empowerment of Women non-profit that offers support to women entrepreneurs in Rwanda and Afghanistan. Wanting what he calls a legacy project to mark the brewerys 10th anniversary, Beauchesne took it on.

I fell in love with the idea because it helps the global community and it speaks to us, says Beauchesne, who sold ownership of his family brewery to the companys 150 employees this past spring. Were brewers. Its one thing to dig wells and build houses but we dont know how to do those things nearly as well as making beer.

The Rwanda Craft Brewery Project is still in the early stages: the brewery doesnt have a name yet, Uwineza needs to secure a location, and a Kickstarter was launched yesterday to raise $95,000 over the next two months to buy a bottling line. Beauchesne has visited Kigali to do a feasibility assessment to determine if theres enough water, power and government support to open a brewery. So far, its a go. B.C.-based brewing manufacturer Newlands Systems Inc. is donating a brew house and will help with recipe development.

Currently the two biggest beers in Rwanda are Heineken and Skol with little, if any, choices when it comes to independent brewers (Beauchesne compares the current beer scene there to Canadas some 25 years ago). But as demand for craft beer goes up around the world, Uwineza says the thirst for quality beer is growing in her country.

As to what kind of beer theyll be brewing thats still in the works. The goal is to use ingredients already being grown in the country like millet, sorghum, cassava and bananas (banana beer is already a popular drink in East African nations). The beer will be brewed primarily for people in Kigali but Beauchesne hopes a few bottles will arrive in Ontario. Beaus will not own the new brewery.

This is something Ive never done, but Im here to learn so I can go and teach others, says Uwineza. Im going to be part of the countrys development and thats what Im most excited about.

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The University of Alberta moved quickly this week to remove racist posters that showed up on campus featuring the image of a Sikh man in a marigold-yellow turban and the words: If youre so obsessed with your third-world culture, go the f--- back to where you came from!

Twelve identical posters were found on the campus Monday, including one at the universitys main library.

The University of Albertas Protective Services are investigating the incident, said Alison Turner, manager, strategic communications.

We do not know who put the posters up on the University of Alberta campus, she said. Next steps will depend on the outcome of the investigation.

Were obviously all very disappointed by the xenophobic posters, Fahim Rahman, president of the students union, wrote in a statement condemning their placement.

The University of Alberta is an incredibly diverse campus, with students and faculty from all over the world who follow a variety of faiths. Personally, Ive always felt that the U of A is a welcoming and accepting campus, and Im very troubled that someone  whether theyre a student or someone from the surrounding community  feels otherwise.

Rahman said he felt encouraged by the positive, constructive way many students have responded to these posters, organizing events and having conversations about acceptance and diversity on campus.

The poster shows the words F--- YOUR TURBAN across the mans headgear, includes the hashtags #Non-integrative #Invasion and links to an anti-immigration website, immigrationwatchcanada.org

A message posted on immigrationwatchcanada.org stated that the organization condemned the poster, and permission was not sought from Immigration Watch Canada to circulate such a poster.

We strongly believe in dissecting the immigration issue with constructive arguments, supported by irrefutable facts, says the statement. We do not support flyers taking on a strictly vulgar and emotionally-charged narrative!! Using our URL and/or trademark without proper approval will not be tolerated, and violators will be pursued.

Arundeep Singh Sandhu, a former U of A student, along with the University of Alberta Students Union and the Sikh Students Association, plan to organize an event next Tuesday on campus in response to these posters.

At the event, students of other faiths, cultures and backgrounds can have turbans tied, and can pick up books about Sikhism. Education is one of the ways to fight such incidents, he said.

It is a chance to connect one-on-one  ask questions that you didnt feel comfortable asking, he said.

Such incidents have happened before, Sandhu said. But the openness, acceptance and diversity of Canadians has always countered them, he added.

University president David Turpin said the university is open to all people and takes pride in the strength of its diverse community.

The World Sikh Organization of Canada stated in a response on its website that Sikhs are an integral part of the Canadian fabric. Many turbaned Sikhs serve Canada in the federal cabinet, armed forces and many other capacities, it said.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, in a message posted on social media, said he is proud to be Canadian, proud of his service to Canada, and proud of his turban.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also posted a response, using the trending anti-racism hashtag #MakeItAwkward :  and were proud of the enormous contributions Sikhs make to this country every day.

U of A doesnt have any information about religious and ethnic composition on campus, said Alix Kemp, external communications and media advisor for the U of As students union.

According to the 2011 census, there are some 455,000 Sikhs in Canada. The first came to Canada more than a century ago.

In May, Trudeau issued a formal apology on behalf of the Government of Canada for its role in the Komagata Maru incident, in which a ship carrying 376 Indian passengers was turned away from Vancouver in 1914 and, after two months in limbo, returned to India where at least 19 people were killed by British soldiers and others imprisoned.

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OTTAWAThe top-level Trudeau adviser overseeing a possible extradition treaty with China told the previous government that Chinas so-called economic fugitives dont belong on Canadian soil, The Canadian Press has learned.

Then-deputy minister Daniel Jean offered that advice in a 2015 briefing note to the former Conservative government prior to his appointment in May as Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus national security adviser.

Canada does not want to be seen as a safe haven for fugitives and it is in Canadas interest to have such persons removed, said the note, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

In his new role with the Liberal government, Jean was in Beijing last week for the start of a new high level dialogue between Canada and China on national security and the rule of law  talks that include breaking ground on an extradition treaty.

Word of those talks sparked opposition charges Tuesday that the Liberals were abandoning their human rights principles. Two major human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, questioned Canadas pursuit of an extradition deal, saying it doesnt square with Chinas rights record, including its widespread use of the death penalty.

The controversy comes ahead of Wednesdays arrival in Ottawa of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for talks with Trudeau aimed at deepening economic co-operation, following Trudeaus first to China three weeks ago.

China has mounted a vigorous international campaign to hunt down alleged economic criminals on foreign soil it says have absconded with millions of dollars of assets. Human rights advocates say the campaign is a smokescreen for Chinas real intent: to track down and silence political dissidents who have fled abroad.

In the briefing note, Jean further describes Canadas response to Chinas 2014 campaign, dubbed Operation Fox Hunt, an outgrowth of President Xi Jinpings anti-corruption campaign in which he vowed to swat down both tigers and flies, regardless of their level, in efforts to clean up the Communist Party in China.

The targets were corrupt public officials and private citizens alleged to have committed economic crimes such as financial fraud against persons, businesses and banks. The Chinese government estimated in 2014 that 208 people had fled with an estimated $1.93 million.

Over 70 police teams were sent overseas to hunt down these economic fugitives, resulting in the capture of individuals spread out over 69 countries and regions. The heavily censored memo doesnt say if any are from Canada.

Beijing circulated a notice to the Chinese diaspora abroad encouraging fugitives to surrender in return for lighter sentences, Jean writes.

In the notice, family members and friends of overseas fugitives were advised to encourage their loved ones to surrender.

Trudeau, who was in New York for a speech at the UN General Assembly, indicated Tuesday that Canada would not be compromising its own values for the sake of diplomatic expediency.

Extradition is certainly one of the things the Chinese have indicated they wanted to talk about. But as everyone knows, Canada has very high standards in terms of extradition treaties, in accordance with our values, he told a news conference.

But were happy to have a high-level security dialogue that will allow Canadian and Chinese officials to talk about a broad range of issues.

Even if China wants to bring back legitimate economic criminals, there are widespread human rights concerns about the Chinese legal system, said Amnesty International secretary general Alex Neve.

Its impossible to imagine how you would have an extradition treaty that would line up with Canadas obligations to not send people to face the death penalty, Neve said in an interview.

Its very clear that China regularly seeks the return to China of individuals who are wanted for political reasons or religious reasons.

Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said it is peculiar for Canada and to be pursing an extradition treaty with China, because it is one of three countries  including the United States and Australia  that have rebuffed Beijings requests in the past.

I think Chinas particular interest in pushing this with Canada at the moment is to then be able to say to the U.S. and Australia, They did it, why wont you?

With or without a treaty, the standard rules of the road are that you cannot forcibly return anyone to a country where they face a well-founded fear of persecution, or ill-treatment, she added.

During question period Tuesday, Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose told the House of Commons that our openness to China should be about encouraging them to adopt our values for human rights, as opposed to us giving into theirs.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Canada will address Chinas use of the death penalty during future negotiations.

With this dialogue, we will be able to push human rights, he replied. And when it comes to agreements like this, we will be pushing the issue of the death penalty because human rights is an integral part of our governments mandate.

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FORT MCKAY, ALTA.A major study of air quality in a northern Alberta indigenous community surrounded by oilsands development suggests there is a chance ongoing exposure to airborne chemicals may be damaging peoples health.

The study by Alberta Health and the provinces energy regulator has found more than a dozen chemicals push past environmental and odour thresholds at least some of the time in Fort McKay First Nation.

The report did find the air in Fort McKay does, at times, contain substances at levels above what is recommended for human health, said Karen Grimsrud, Albertas chief medical officer of health.

What the report does not answer is how these air quality events might affect human health.

The study, which took 18 months to complete, looked into 172 air quality complaints from Fort McKay, about 50 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, between 2010-2014. Fort McKay is surrounded by seven major oilsands mines within 30 kilometres.

It found few examples of dangerous, short-term releases. But it found a suite of potentially dangerous hydrocarbons that are in the air at levels that pose concerns about long-term and cumulative effects.

Its the intermittent poor air quality, the cumulative effects we need to look at, said Grimsrud.

Using data from a variety of local, provincial and federal monitoring sources, the report found a total of 13 chemicals that breach odour and health-based thresholds.

They include toxins like hydrogen sulphide and carcinogens like benzene. Ozone and sulphur dioxide were frequently above long-term health thresholds.

Yes, we are very concerned, said Jim Boucher, chief of the Fort McKay First Nation.

Its been a cause for concern for the people of this community since 1966. Now we have finally arrived at a process to resolve those concerns.

The report contains 17 recommendations, most addressing the need for better monitoring and more research to track the source of the chemicals.

Monique Dube, chief environmental scientist for the Alberta Energy Regulator, acknowledged her office has to do a better job of tracking whats going on in the communitys airshed.

We identified several technical gaps that we believe need to be fulfilled, she said. We need to gain a better understanding of the emissions sources that are causing some changes in air quality.

Thats good enough  for now, said Boucher.

This exercise we are about to undertake will identify what the sources of odour are and the types of odours, he said. Then we will determine thresholds and standards with respect to what is acceptable in this community.

And then we will ensure that these problems are dealt with.

Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman promised the government would adopt all 17 recommendations. Although environmental monitoring and research is expensive, she said resources would be provided to get the studies around Fort McKay done.

Theres nothing more important than the health and safety of Albertans, she said. This is something we are absolutely committed to and we will make sure that the resources required are aligned with where the need is.

Industry is on board with the need to understand the airborne emissions and how they may be affecting people in Fort McKay, said Terry Abel, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Our industry is 100 per cent committed to supporting all of the implementation associated with those recommendations. We are 100 per cent committed to protecting the health of our public and our good neighbours.

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VANCOUVERBritish Columbia is bombarding the province with thousands of overdose-reversing naloxone kits as part of its all-out assault against a drug crisis that has already killed 488 people this year.

Health Minister Terry Lake announced during an update on the opioid crisis on Wednesday that 13,000 life-saving kits have been distributed across B.C. to sites such as hospitals, jails, and health centres, and so far 2,100 have been reportedly used.

The number of deaths involving illicit opioids decreased to 49 in August from 55 in July, but 488 people have died in B.C. so far this year while 505 deaths were reported in all of 2015, Lake said.

(August) marks the first month of 2016 where the number was reduced over the equivalent month in 2015 but we are very, very cautious about what that means, Health Minister Terry Lake told a news conference. We need more data, more time to see if theres a trend happening.

Over 11,000 people have received training to administer naloxone, which is available at over 300 sites in B.C. including emergency rooms, three jails and one prison, he said.

All ambulance crews and 46 fire departments are now carrying naloxone, he said, adding the B.C. Centre for Disease Control is expanding its take-home naloxone program and the province expects to reach its goal of opening 500 new addiction treatment beds by 2017.

The number of drug deaths where fentanyl was detected between Jan. 1 and July 31 of this year has remained strong at 264, or around 55 per cent of total illicit drug deaths. Thats more than three times the 82 fentanyl-related deaths that occurred over the same period last year.

Thirty-six per cent of fentanyl deaths also involved cocaine, which is frightening, because we know there are people who thought they were taking cocaine and had absolutely no idea they were taking fentanyl, Lisa Lapointe, B.C.s chief coroner, told the news conference.

Fentanyl continues to take an exceptionally high toll, she added.

We must all work together to try and reduce that toll, which is predominantly affecting young people and people who should have many more years of life ahead of them, said Lapointe.

Despite the small decrease in the number of deaths in August, the last thing we would want is for anyone to become complacent or think that the danger is over or that the risks are diminished.

British Columbia has been the epicentre of opioid deaths in Canada, and the province declared a public health emergency in April, after which the coroners service began collecting and releasing monthly statistics on overdose deaths.

While Vancouver has seen the highest number of deaths in the province this year, the fatality rate has remained consistent since last year. The same cant be said for other B.C. municipalities such as Kamloops, where the number of fatalities has spiked more than five times higher.

In June, Premier Christy Clark announced a joint task force on overdose response.

Its a massive effort, Lake said, adding that overdose deaths involving fentanyl have hit communities across North America.

People have been reaching out to British Columbia to learn about what were doing, he said.

Earlier Wednesday, the chief medical health officer of Vancouver Coastal Health said the city could see as many as four new supervised-injection sites by early next year.

Dr. Patricia Daly said the health authority is applying to Health Canada to expand the number of harm-reduction sites in its area, where there are currently two such facilities. Insite, in Vancouvers Downtown Eastside, was North Americas first supervised injection site.

Daly said she hoped the sites will be up and running by early 2017.

Applying to offer safe-injection services became especially difficult in early 2015 after the previous federal government passed a bill that added several prohibitive regulations.

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Everyone suspected the return of Parliament would provide a bumpy ride for a Liberal government still enjoying sustained popularity nearly a year after the election. The surprise is that the turbulence has set in so quickly.

Lets look at two strengths the Trudeau Liberals thought they had, and one weakness they knew would plague them. All have conspired to make the first half of their week lousy.

First, the weakness. Entitlement is our kryptonite, a senior Liberal told me eight months before last years federal election. Liberals know Canadians grow weary of them when they act as though they have always been in power, will always be in power, and are frankly impatient with the short interludes when Canadians get it wrong and elect someone else.

So it must have stung  it should have stung  when Global News reported on Tuesday that a single unidentified staffer in the Prime Ministers Office billed taxpayers $126,669.56 in moving costs to move to Ottawa. A second charged $80,382.55.

Thats a lot of kryptonite.

And it was not helpful to have Bardish Chagger, who is supposed to represent the new face of optimism in her role as government House leader, respond to Conservative questions on the extravagance by blandly reading prepared speaking notes in question period, justifying the cost as the sort of investment thats needed to get the top people into Ottawa to help the boss change Canada.

But its one thing when Liberals get criticized for spending money. To some extent, every government faces the same steady stream of flak from the opposition benches, and there is no way the Liberals can positively gain voter support through ostentatious displays of frugality. They should be more careful than theyve been. But such efforts will always be exercises in damage limitation.

Its quite another matter when the Liberals take criticism, some of it richly earned, on issues they thought would be winners for them. The weeks most spectacular example is climate change.

To some extent, whats happened is simply that Catherine McKenna, the rookie environment minister, has been slow to learn the cost of promising a little extra. When she got her job last autumn, she was eager to proclaim that the carbon-reduction targets set by the Conservatives were a minimum. Surely a Liberal government would go sailing past those targets en route to perfect carbon virtue. McKennas staff tweeted photos of the locally sourced, environmentally conscious household products they were buying as part of their own #ClimateAction.

Then a few more of McKennas briefings sunk in. She realized that this government will be desperately lucky to come anywhere close to meeting Harpers targets. The belated backtracking began over the weekend. The hard work lies ahead. Last year it still seemed the Trudeau government could rely on whatever goodwill contribution each province felt like making toward a low-carbon economy; now it is becoming clearer something a little more bracing will be required. A national carbon price, set in Ottawa, for instance. That may require rolling right over Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who conveniently resides in a province that elected only one Liberal last October. (Sorry, Ralph Goodale. You had a good run!)

But the damage on the Liberals environmental left could be long-lasting. Green Party leader Elizabeth May called McKennas backtracking nothing short of a disaster for the climate.

The second area where considerable effort from Trudeau seems to be paying exceedingly modest dividends is on his much-vaunted reconciliation with indigenous groups. Ottawa has started issuing construction permits for BC Hydros Site C dam, over the objection of First Nations that have taken the government to court over the project. Charlie Angus, an NDP MP whos been quick to praise the Liberals on indigenous issues when he thought they deserved it, called the move a failed test for the Trudeau government.

Trudeau has been used to getting some of his most glowing coverage from news sources outside Canada. But in the U.K.s Guardian newspaper, an article appeared that called his lofty rhetoric on First Nations a cheap simulation of justice. The criticism came from a particular corner: the articles author, Montreal journalist Martin Lukacs, was one of the authors of the Leap Manifesto that has sparked vigorous debate in the NDP. Still, it added to what is becoming a lousy week for the Liberals.

The best remedy for all these ills is concrete progress on these and other files. Promising was easy, consulting not much harder. Now comes deciding.

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OTTAWAThe federal labour minister is looking at whether Canada Labour Code reforms are needed to address harassment issues within the RCMP after hearing from a disgruntled female Mountie.

MaryAnn Mihychuk asked for a briefing from Public Safety officials after receiving a message from an RCMP member who alleged the Mounties had failed to adequately address her complaints of sexual harassment through internal procedures, an internal government memo reveals.

Mihychuk and her officials wanted to know more about the RCMPs policies, procedures and guidelines to gauge the need for possible amendments to Part 2 of the Canada Labour Code, intended to protect employees from violence in the workplace.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale received a copy of the unidentified Mounties email as well as messages and letters from 17 other people, including current and former RCMP members, detailing their experiences of workplace and sexual harassment within the police force, the memo adds.

The Canadian Press obtained a declassified version of the heavily censored February memo under the Access to Information Act.

The RCMP has been grappling for years with complaints from women and men about bullying and harassment.

Just two months ago, the national police force said it would launch a new effort to eliminate sexual misconduct in the workplace after an internal review criticized its response to an egregious case involving nudity and harassment at the RCMP-administered police college.

In response to questions about Mihychuks concerns, Employment and Social Development Canada officials said the minister was working with Status of Women Minister Patty Hajdu to ensure the safety of workers under federal jurisdiction.

Violence and sexual harassment are unacceptable in the workplace, and in any environment.

Employment and Social Development Canada consults with Public Safety whenever needed in order to provide Mihychuk with comprehensive and current briefings, the officials added.

The RCMP did not respond to questions about the government memo.

Scott Bardsley, a spokesman for Goodale, said the minister has taken a number of steps on harassment in the RCMP.

They include appointing a former auditor general to review the RCMPs response to lawsuits from four members of the force alleging harassment.

As a special adviser, Sheila Fraser will provide recommendations on the policies and procedures the national police force pursued after Catherine Galliford, Alice Fox, Atoya Montague and Susan Gastaldo filed legal proceedings against the RCMP.

In addition, Goodale has told the RCMP he expects comprehensive, transparent investigations, serious disciplinary measures, support for victims and concrete action to end toxic workplace behaviour.

He has also asked the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP to look at whether recommendations it made three years ago on harassment have been implemented.

In a 2013 report, the watchdog said the force must take swift and effective action on complaints of harassment and intimidation to restore the shaken confidence of both members and the public.

It called for a more independent process, strict timelines for responding to accusations and force-wide training on the issue.

Since then, new legislation has revamped the way such cases are handled within the force and training has also been stepped up.

The Mounties have pledged zero tolerance for harassment.

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OTTAWAPrime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to name 20 new non-affiliated or independent senators in a matter of weeks.

The government had pledged to fill the remaining Senate vacancies, including six for Ontario, by the end of the year. But a source familiar with the process said the Liberals want to move quickly to fill those 20 seats.

The move would mean that, for the first time in the Senates history, non-affiliated senators will outnumber their Conservative or Independent Liberal counterparts with a plurality of seats. And it will also put to the test Trudeaus gamble to make the upper chamber more respectable in the eyes of Canadians.

Peter Harder, the Liberal governments representative in the Senate, expects recommendations from an arms-length advisory board on Senate appointments to land on the prime ministers desk within weeks.

I think the new senators will give an added impetus of change or reform and renewal to the institution, Harder said in an interview Monday.

This is a change in progress. The modernization of this institution to make it an independent, non-partisan, accountable, transparent and complimentary body is a work in progress. And were looking for opportunities to work with all senators to achieve that objective.

Against the backdrop of the Senate expense scandal in January 2014, Trudeau, then in opposition, announced that Liberal senators would no longer be welcome to caucus with their House of Commons colleagues.

After the Liberals took power two years later, Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef put in place a new arms-length system to appoint senators, rather than picking from the usual ranks of party stalwarts, fundraisers, and friendly journalists or lawyers.

In March, Trudeau appointed seven new senators, including Harder, former provincial NDP cabinet minister Frances Lankin, and Ratna Omidvar representing Ontario.

With the new batch of senators appointed, Trudeau will have appointed 27 to the upper chamber in his first year in power. Former prime minister Stephen Harper appointed 59 over almost a decade in power, but that number was kept low by Harpers steadfast refusal to appoint new senators while the expense scandal embroiled his government.

Conservative Senator Leo Housakos, a former Senate Speaker and chair of the chambers powerful internal economy committee, said that hes heard the new appointments will be made imminently.

Housakos, a critic of the Liberals Senate proposal, said the new dynamic in the upper chamber will make the operations of that place more difficult.

The difficulty, and theyre starting to recognize it themselves, is that its hard to operate in the British parliamentary system without clusters and caucuses, Housakos said in an interview Tuesday.

A lot of the decision (about) who sits on (Senate) committees are taken by caucuses, are taken by collectively within groups of like-minded senators. So when someone says that a senator is independent, do you think that Justin Trudeau is going to be appointing to the Senate right-of-centre politically minded people? Or do you think theres a great likelihood that, like the last batch, he will be appointing left-of-centre, social liberal-minded individuals?

The Star requested comment from the Prime Ministers Office for this article, asking whether Trudeau has made his selections or when those decisions will be made. In response, the Privy Council Office  public servants who support the prime minister  suggested the final decisions had not yet been made.

The process being led by the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments is ongoing, PCO spokesperson Raymond Rivet wrote in a statement.

The government has indicated that it intends to fill the current Senate vacancies by the end of 2016.

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MONTREALComments made by Justin Trudeau to the United Nations on Tuesday shouldnt prevent Donald Trump from working with the prime minister should he become U.S. president, says well-known American magazine publisher Steve Forbes.

Hours before the editor-in-chief of Forbes business magazine spoke to a conference of Quebec financiers in Montreal, Trudeau told the UN General Assembly in New York to reject politicians who exploit peoples fears and anxieties.

While never mentioning Trump by name, Trudeau has often criticized the Republican Partys candidate for president since he became prime minister last year.

Last week during a panel discussion with London Mayor Sadiq Khan in Montreal, Trudeau told the audience in a somewhat mocking tone he looks forward to working with whoever wins the U.S. presidency. The mayors response to the audience  Does anyone believe that?  triggered laughs from the crowd.

On other occasions Trudeau has answered questions about Trump by saying Canadians reject politics of fear and division and also of intolerance and hateful rhetoric.

The Canadian prime minister has also said he wouldnt support Trump and compared him to the late Toronto mayor, Rob Ford.

Trump has called for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and forcing the Mexicans to pay for it, comments that have drawn the ire of people across the continent.

But Forbes said Trumps recent encounter with the Mexican president showed the diplomacy of his preferred choice to become the next U.S. leader.

They had a very good meeting, Forbes said in an interview with The Canadian Press. I think that shows Trump will not let past comments get in the way of doing the business at hand.

The bombastic candidate probably wont forget the things Trudeau has said, however, Forbes continued, saying Trump wont hesitate to take verbal whacks when necessary.

Forbes, who ran for the Republican ticket for president in 1996 and 2000, has compared Trump to the late co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs.

Jobs was known by his colleagues for living through what they coined as a reality distortion field, where he would try to bend the world to fit his ideas and ambitions.

The technological guru often frustrated his employees by pushing them to their limits in order to make seemingly unrealistic deadlines and to create innovative products many thought unrealistic.

In the case of Trump and the goals he wishes to pursue, the drive to make it happen can be very formidable, Forbes said.

The publisher added that Trumps penchant for frequently changing his positions on issues can be an asset because the candidate doesnt let himself be pinned down.

Forbes also defended Trumps recent flip-flop regarding President Barack Obamas birthplace.

For years Trump had claimed Obama was not born in the United States but recently admitted the president was indeed born in the country.

Forbes insists it was not racist for Trump to have tried to delegitimize the first black president of America with spurious claims of his birthplace.

He said Trump had needled Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz for being born in Canada.

So Trump didnt just use it against Obama, he used it against Cruz, Forbes said. He would have used it against anyone in order to discombobulate him.

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MONTREALTwo pythons on the lam in Quebec are in a race against Mother Nature as temperatures begin to dip in the coming weeks.

One expert says its already pretty cold for the two fugitives and that their survival depends on them being found before the first frost, which typically comes in early October in Montreal.

With the first freeze, (theyre) going to freeze, (theyre) not going to make it, said Bry Loyst, curator at the Indian River Reptile Zoo near Peterborough, Ont. If it doesnt freeze to death itll catch pneumonia and die shortly thereafter.

This week, authorities informed residents of a second python on the loose in Quebec  this time in Saint-Eustache, just north of Montreal.

Local police spokesman Normand Brulotte said the orange and beige snake is less than one metre long and is not venomous.

It is believed to be trying to find a warm place to hide.

The specialists have told us that with colder nights, the chances of survival are slim, said Brulotte. They need a lot of heat so it wont survive too long on the streets.

The snake is the second to have disappeared in the Montreal area since late August.

A royal python by the name of Lady was reported missing on Aug. 25 after escaping from a home in the Montreals Verdun borough.

Lady was seen a few days later but gave animal-control officials the slip after they thought they had it cornered under a home.

Royal pythons, also known as ball pythons, are not considered dangerous and often eat small rodents. They are generally kept as pets in a terrarium or enclosure, Loyst said.

When snakes are on the loose, they are not necessarily looking to secure their freedom, Loyst added.

A ball python that gets out doesnt necessarily want to get outside, it just wants to go somewhere that is fairly warm and comfortable and wait for food to come along, said Loyst.

Snakes can go long periods without eating  months and months in some cases. Most pet pythons are fed weekly by their owners.

Even current temperatures are cold for snakes who originate from Africa.

Hes probably not looking to eat, hes probably just looking to hide, Loyst said, referring to the Saint-Eustache snake whose gender has not been identified.

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[September 20, 2016] Fitch Affirms Frederick Memorial Hospital (MD) Revs at 'BBB+'; Outlook Stable

Fitch Ratings has affirmed the 'BBB+' rating on approximately $98.1 million of series 2012A Maryland Health and Higher Educational Facilities Authority revenue bonds issued on behalf of Frederick Memorial Hospital (FMH, or the hospital). The Rating Outlook is Stable. FMH also has $66.1 million outstanding in series 2012B bonds (privately placed with BB&T Bank), which Fitch does not rate but incorporates into the analysis. SECURITY The bonds are secured by a pledge of gross receipts and a mortgage. KEY RATING DRIVERS STABLE OPERATING ENVIRONMENT: The rating affirmation reflects operating and financial stability provided by FMH's participation in Maryland's Global Budget Revenue (GBR) program (effective July 1, 2013) as well as the organization's strong market leadership with 73% inpatient market share in its primary service area. Under GBR, FMH receives fixed annual revenues on its regulated service lines (approximately 76% of gross revenues). RECOVERING PROFITABILITY: Following negative operating performance in fiscal year 2014, FMH posted a balanced 0.4% operating margin ($1.4 million gain) in fiscal 2015 and continued this positive momentum with a 2.4% operating margin in fiscal 2016 (draft audit). Operating EBITDA margin has also continued on a positive trajectory to 9.76% in fiscal 2016 from 8.2% in 2015 compared to 7.4% in 2014 and the median of 8.7%. Improvements primarily reflect strong expense controls as well as decline in bad debt, and a successful negotiation with the state for a rate increase under the GBR. LARGE CAPITAL PLANS: FMH is entering the final stages of Phase 2 of its master facilities plan. Its major focus for this upcoming year will be the construction of a new cancer center at Rosehill. The hospital has budgeted $60 million in capital expenditures for fiscal 2017, a high 2.5x depreciation. Net of remaining bond funds and fundraising receipts, approximately $40 million will be funded out of cash flow and internal equity. SOUND LIQUIDITY: Unrestricted cash and investments were up slightly at $177.6 million as of June 30, 2016, equating to liquidity metrics that compare favorably against Fitch's 'BBB' medians. RATING SENSITIVITIES OPERATING STABILITY: Fitch expects Frederick Memorial Hospital to continue leveraging its stable market leadership and manage its expense base to produce strong profitability and coverage metrics. Successful completion of construction projects, resulting in minimal to no dilution in liquidity metrics and a continuation of positive operating performance could result in upward rating movement. CREDIT PROFILE Located in Frederick, Maryland, FMH is a 312 staffed bed acute care hospital. Total operating revenues were $367 million in fiscal 2015 and $383 million for unaudited fiscal 2016. MARYLAND'S GBR PROGRAM FMH signed onto Maryland's GBR program in February 2014 (retroactively effective from July 1, 2013). Under this five-year program, FMH receives fixed annual gross revenues on its regulated service lines (76% of gross revenues in fiscal 2015) based on factors including service area demographics, utilization trends, and market position. Regulated revenues are adjusted on an annual basis and are designed to incentivize hospitals to reduce avoidable volumes. Unregulated service lines include FMH's radiology, lab, hospice, home health and diabetes center services, among others. Fitch believes that the program should provide stability as FMH navigates operating in a declining volume environment. As part of repositioning the organization for population health management, FMH formed the Frederick Integrated Healthcare Network as well as the Trivergent Health Alliance with two other regional providers. SOLID MARKET POSITION One of FMH's key credit strengths continues to be its operating platform as a sole community provider in an affluent county of Frederick, Maryland (general obligation bonds rated 'AAA'/Stable Outlook). Market share in the primary service area is consistently above 70% and was most recently reported at 73% (2016). Fitch believes FMH's growing physician base and expanding outpaient network, combined with favorable demographics and limited competition, well-positions the organization to pursue population health management to meet the goals of GBR.



In May 2016, FMH's cancer program became a certified member of the MD Andersen Cancer Network(R), the only hospital in Maryland to have this distinction. This affiliation with MD Andersen should support operations in oncology services going forward, which Fitch views positively, especially as FMH embarks on construction of a new cancer treatment facility. RECOVERING PROFITABILITY

Profitability metrics have been on a positive trajectory, since FMH posted a negative 2.2% operating margin in fiscal 2014. Operating margin improved to 0.3% in fiscal 2015 and again to 2.4% in fiscal 2016, which would be the first time in the past three fiscal years that this ratio has exceeded rating category medians. Continued improvement is largely attributable to good expense control and a significant decline in bad debt. In addition, in 2016, FMH successfully negotiated with the state for a rate increase under the GBR. For fiscal 2017, management is budgeting a 1.3% operating margin, which Fitch believes is achievable. SOUND LIQUIDITY Unrestricted cash and investments totaled $177.6 million at June 30, 2016, a $4 million improvement from the prior year. Liquidity metrics of 185 days, 14.2x cushion ratio, and 106.9% cash-to-debt compared favorably against the respective 'BBB' medians of 161.2 days, 11.7x, and 90.8%. SIZABLE CAPITAL PLANS Having completed Phase 1, FMH is now in the final stages of Phase 2 of its master planning, which calls for the completion of the emergency department, imaging renovations, as well as the start of the cancer treatment center at Rosehill and surgical service upgrades and development of the Mt. Airy ambulatory location. A total of $60 million is budgeted for fiscal 2017, a high 2.5x depreciation expense, $36 million of which is for the Rosehill Cancer Center and related oncology projects. FMH has set a fundraising target of $20 million for the capital plan ($17 million raised thus far), most of which will be used to fund the projects in oncology. Net of fundraising and bond funds, approximately $40 million of the capital plan is expected to be funded out of cash flow and equity. However Fitch estimates that this should result in minimal to no dilution in liquidity, assuming operating cash flows remain stable. Moreover, management has a history of conservatively budgeting capital projects and shifting plans based on need. MODERATING DEBT BURDEN FMH's debt burden has moderated over the last three years, and is now favorable to the 'BBB' medians. In fiscal 2016, maximum annual debt service was 3.3% of total revenues and debt-to-capitalization was 47.4%, comparing favorably to the respective medians of 3.6% and 50.2%. There are no new debt plans. DEBT PROFILE FMH has approximately $166.1 million of outstanding debt which is composed of approximately 60% fixed-rate and 40% privately placed variable-rate debt. The private placement has an initial term of 10 years (2022). Further, FMH is counterparty to a $66.1 million floating- to fixed-rate swap with UBS (rated 'A/F1'). As of June 30, 2016, fair market value of the swap was negative $14.1 million. FMH has no collateral posting requirements associated with the swap. DISCLOSURE FMH provides annual and quarterly disclosure to EMMA. Overall, Fitch views FMH's disclosure favorably, which consists of a balance sheet and statement of profitability and loss, cash flow statement, and utilization information. Additional information is available at 'www.fitchratings.com'. Applicable Criteria Not-for-Profit Hospitals Rating Criteria (pub. 04 Dec 2015) https://www.fitchratings.com/site/re/874120 Revenue-Supported Rating Criteria (pub. 16 Jun 2014) https://www.fitchratings.com/site/re/750012 Additional Disclosures Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Form https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=1011933 Solicitation Status https://www.fitchratings.com/gws/en/disclosure/solicitation?pr_id=1011933 Endorsement Policy https://www.fitchratings.com/jsp/creditdesk/PolicyRegulation.faces?context=2&detail=31 ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: HTTP://FITCHRATINGS.COM/UNDERSTANDINGCREDITRATINGS. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON (News - Alert) THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEBSITE 'WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM'. PUBLISHED RATINGS, CRITERIA AND METHODOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE AT ALL TIMES. FITCH'S CODE OF CONDUCT, CONFIDENTIALITY, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, AFFILIATE FIREWALL, COMPLIANCE AND OTHER RELEVANT POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ARE ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE 'CODE OF CONDUCT' SECTION OF THIS SITE. FITCH MAY HAVE PROVIDED ANOTHER PERMISSIBLE SERVICE TO THE RATED ENTITY OR ITS RELATED THIRD PARTIES. DETAILS OF THIS SERVICE FOR RATINGS FOR WHICH THE LEAD ANALYST IS BASED IN AN EU-REGISTERED ENTITY CAN BE FOUND ON THE ENTITY SUMMARY PAGE FOR THIS ISSUER ON THE FITCH WEBSITE. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920006711/en/

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LONDONResearchers have identified a Canadian company at the centre of a small Arab nations online censorship system  a finding that sits awkwardly with Ottawa officials public support for digital freedoms.

Specialists from internet watchdog Citizen Lab said in a report published Wednesday that web filtering firm Netsweeper Inc. is helping block news and opposition websites in Bahrain, a Gulf Arab monarchy which has been wracked by unrest since pro-democracy protests were stifled there in 2011.

Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert said the discovery undermines Canadian leaders forceful condemnations of online censorship.

Canadian policy-makers have been quite vocal about saying that this is wrong, Deibert said in a phone call ahead of the reports release. Yet here we have a Canadian company thats doing precisely that.

Netsweeper, based in Waterloo, Ont., did not return a call and other messages. In 2011, a company spokesman was quoted as saying there was no good conversation for us to have about allegations of censorship.

Citizen Lab said the banned Bahraini sites include ones run by opposition and human rights groups as well as sites critical of Islam. Gambling and pornography sites also were blocked.

Netsweepers suspected role as Bahrains censorship provider first came to light after the firm appeared to win a contract for a national website filtering solution earlier this year. Researchers at Citizen Lab said they confirmed the companys role there by scouring Bahrains internet space for Netsweeper installations and trying to access blocked sites from a server in the country.

The researchers drew on clues such as lines including the words Netsweeper or netsw returned during internet scans and a tell-tale line of code in the web addresses thrown up by blocked sites.

Based at the University of Torontos Munk School of Global Affairs, Citizen Lab has made a specialty of exposing the companies behind surveillance and censorship in the Middle East and beyond. Last month, its discovery of Israeli-made spy software targeting an Arab dissidents iPhone prompted Apple to issue a worldwide security update. Citizen Lab has been tracking Netsweepers work for years .

Bahrains Information Ministry did not reply to emails seeking comment. Canadian officials  who are promoting an upcoming Dubai trade show which Netsweeper is supposed to attend  said in a statement that while they could not comment on specific companies, we expect Canadian businesses to operate lawfully and according to Canadian values.

More on thestar.com:

Canadian Internet-filtering company accused of aiding censorship in war-torn Yemen

Pakistan uses Canadian company Netsweeper to monitor, censor Internet: Study

Canadian software censors the Internet in the Middle East

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Shot in the leg in a brazen midday shooting Tuesday, Toronto criminal lawyer Randall Barrs crawled towards the entrance of his downtown office in a desperate attempt to escape the gunman, a witness to the shooting told the Star Wednesday.

Barrs, a 66-year-old lawyer prominent in Torontos legal community, was shot by a lone gunman dressed as a construction worker in the driveway of his office on Bedford Rd. near Prince Arthur Ave. Tuesday afternoon.

Seconds later, the shooter himself was shot by a plainclothes Halton Regional Police officer conducting surveillance in the area.

The initial alleged shooter has been identified by Toronto police as Grayson Delong, 51. He is facing 15 charges in connection to Tuesdays shooting, including attempted murder and disguise with intent to commit an indictable offence. He is also facing numerous weapons-related charges.

Delong  who has prior convictions including assault, assaulting a police officer, break and enter and mischief  has not yet appeared in court to face the charges because he is in hospital.

The Special Investigations Unit, which probes cases of serious injury or death involving police, is currently investigating the shooting by the Halton police officer.

Sources within the legal community say Barrs did not know Delong and was not his lawyer. Records from Barrs court appearances show Delong had been represented by various different GTA lawyers, but not Barrs.

Halton police released a statement Tuesday night saying the service would not release any information on the shooting due to the ongoing SIU investigation.

The police service would not confirm if Halton officers were conducting surveillance specifically on Delong, who has prior break-and-enter convictions and was due back in court next month on another break-and-enter charge.

Barrs and Delong are recovering from non-life-threatening injuries, SIU spokesperson Jason Gennaro said Wednesday. Staff at Sunnybrook Hospital confirmed Wednesday afternoon that a patient by the name of Grayson Delong was in their intensive care unit.

Peter Schilling, a surgical consultant whose office is next to Barrs, said he watched the shooting through a second-floor window sometime after 3 p.m.

When he glanced outside, he could see Barrs standing near his Mercedes in front of his office; then Schilling noticed a silver Honda Civic pulling up quickly then stopping at the bottom of the driveway.

Schilling said a man dressed as a construction worker then jumped out and suddenly fired four or five shots from a handgun, hitting the lawyer in the lower body.

Barrs dropped to the ground, attempted to stand, but could not. He began to crawl toward the office door, 30 feet away, as the shooter fled back to the Honda, Schilling said in an email to the Star Wednesday. As he got into his car, he fired once more, through his driver side window, shattering it.

Then, seemingly from nowhere, a plainclothes officer approached on foot and shot at the vehicle. I counted at least 5 shots, as the Honda took off south on Bedford road. It then left my sight, Schilling said.

The licence plate on the silver Honda Civic driven by the shooter is registered to Brampton resident Retty Widjaya, 51. She told the Star Wednesday that her silver Honda Civics plates were stolen either Sept. 11 or Sept. 12 while it was in her apartment complex parking garage. Widjaya reported her plate missing to Peel Regional Police.

Criminal defence lawyer Clayton Ruby described Barrs as a very well-respected lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court of Canada and represented clients in many drug and gun cases.

According to Barrs website, his practice includes complex white collar investigations to high profile drug and murder cases. He defended over 20 murder cases within his first ten years of practice, the website states.

In one of his more recent high-profile cases, Barrs defended the operators of a grow-op in a former Molson brewery in Barrie, Ont., following one of the largest pot busts in Canadian history took place in 2004.

Criminal lawyers are very rarely attacked. One of the few times it has happened, Ruby recalled, was when a well-known Montreal mafia lawyer Sidney Leithman was shot and killed 25 years ago, murdered by gunmen in an SUV as he sat in his car at a red light.

With files from Evelyn Kwong, Jackie Hong, Megan Dolski and Peter Goffin

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Make no little plans, visionary Chicago works commissioner Daniel Burnham famously said, they have no magic to stir mens blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work

I first encountered these words, fittingly enough, in Chicagos Millennium Park last year, where they were displayed on a poster. Burnham developed the plan of Chicago that contained the sprawling and justly famous lakefront parks that Millennium Park adjoins. It was his spirit that was invoked when the addition was begun in the 1990s  a plan that decked over rail lands and a station and parking garages to build a park on a platform. A magnificent park featuring magnificent architecture and public art  one that stirs the blood, you could say.

Standing there, in the park, you might look around and say, I want to live in a city that decides to build this park. That thinks that much of itself. That makes things this big.

Theres a bit of the desire to wield that same stir stick, it appears, in the big plan for a downtown park over the rail lands between Bathurst St. and Blue Jays Way, which is currently being championed by Mayor John Tory and Councillor Joe Cressy.

A preliminary report on the 21-acre park proposal, which might cost at least $1.05 billion, will be considered by the citys executive committee this week, and if approved there will go to full city council in early October. It will be complicated to build. It will be expensive. It will take a long time.

It is exactly the type of big thinking Toronto is ready for, Cressy wrote recently in an op-ed piece on the website Torontoist. Lets get it done.

It is a project I want very much to love. I read Cressys and the mayors arguments about how it is entirely feasible and entirely necessary, and a significant investment that will address all the priorities of a livable city and an equitable city. And while I might quibble about the definition of need, I mostly agree, or close enough.

But to be honest, that stuff doesnt fire me up. I want to fall in love with this thing because I imagine in my minds eye what it could be, in a dead zone of the city right now, in the heart of a growing central area, and think: What a kick-ass awesome thing that would be to have in the city.

I want to live in the city that says it is worth it, because we are a wealthy and growing city, and because it would belong to all of us, and because it would be awesome.

And yet

and yet I know this is a city that already has a much larger downtown park  on the Toronto Islands, roughly the size of New Yorks Central Park  and chokes off access to it on aging ferry boats, so that a family of four wanting to visit must pay more than $22 to access the park, and must line up for a long time, crowded into a pen in the hot sun, waiting to board.

and yet I know this a city in which the man who is now deputy mayor launched a crusade to protest the cost of pink umbrella lighting installations in a new waterfront park just a few years ago, and ramped up the outrage over new washrooms at Cherry Beach.

We do not need award-winning toilets, he said. You dont have to spend $12,000 on an umbrella  a councillor who would vote for that would be strung up by their ankles, he said.

That is, I want to live in a city that thinks enough of itself to build the big magnificent park, but I know I live in a city where often those in charge think we dont even deserve a nice place to pee.

This tension comes up a lot lately. You can look at the grand transit-building plans we now have, and you can argue the Scarborough one-stop subway extension is the wrong plan or SmartTrack is still sketchily defined, but you cant argue the network plan is some cheap way out. Meanwhile, next to the unfunded grand vision there, you have nickel-and-diming of the operating budget. You have the slow, aspirational approach to poverty reduction. You have a still-massive unfunded gap in the basic social housing repair and maintenance budget.

We in Toronto may have heard the advice to make no little plans, but you can be damn sure we still obsess about making little budgets.

And the thing about big plans with no big money behind them is they inspire hope and then gather dust on a shelf for decades and then inspire cynicism about the next big plan that comes along. Mark Osbaldeston has done very well for himself (and his readers) in writing two books titled Unbuilt Toronto, about the plans we made and never built.

And theres this voice that says its not even as simple as finding the money for this project  because while its true I think a city needs good parks, and they should be great parks, I also dont think that trumps other needs like housing and childcare and transit service.

A billion-dollar landmark park, to me, should mean weve decided to spend the money we need to spend to build and do all the things the city needs to do and build to be ever greater livable and feasible and equitable, yes, absolutely. But straight-ahead kick-ass awesome, too.

I want us to be that Toronto, where I can fall in love with this park. The thing is Im just not yet convinced we are.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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RIO DE JANEIROFormer President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva must stand trial on charges of money laundering and corruption, a Brazilian judge ruled Tuesday.

Judge Sergio Moro said there is enough evidence to start a judicial process against Silva, his wife and six others in a widening corruption probe centred on the countrys huge state-run oil company, Petrobras.

Prosecutors have called Silva the maximum commander of the Petrobras graft scandal that has rocked Brazil. Prosecutors allege that billions of dollars in bribes were paid to win inflated contracts from the company.

The judges decision had been expected after prosecutors charged Silva last week.

Silva on Tuesday called the accusation a farce, a big lie and a great spectacle.

In explaining his decision, Moro said Silva and others benefited from renovations at a beachfront apartment in the coastal city of Guaruja in Sao Paulo state. The improvements were made by the construction company OAS, which is one of those involved in the kickback scheme at Petrobras.

Moro said prosecutors believe the former president received $1.15 million (U.S.) in bribes from OAS for getting it contracts related to refineries.

The facts and evidence are enough for me to accept the accusation, he said in a document sent to the media. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva allegedly received benefits from Group OAS. According to the accusation, he had knowledge of its origins in the criminal scheme that damaged Petrobras.

The judge gave Silva and the other defendants 10 days to present their defence in court.

Silva, who was a highly popular president in 2003-10, has long been implicated in the so-called Car Wash investigation. But last week, prosecutors raised his purported role in the kickback scheme that goes back more than a decade, calling him the maximum commander.

In a message streamlined on the YouTube channel of the Brazilian unions of metal and bank workers, Silva accused investigators of pushing other suspects in the case to implicate him in exchange for freedom. Many of those implicated have struck plea bargains with the prosecution for reduced sentences.

I have a clear conscience. If they have one single proof against me  one, I am not asking for two  I want to be on trial like any other Brazilian citizen, he said.

Last week, Silva acknowledged having visited the penthouse cited in the accusation but said he never owned it.

He has said prosecutors are trying to undermine his chances for a return to politics. While his Workers Party has lost much support amid corruption scandals in recent years, Silva continues to be a popular possible contender for the presidential race in 2018.

In a statement, defence lawyers Cristiano Zanin Martins and Roberto Teixeira said the allegations against Silva are flawed and lack proof. They accused the judge of being biased against the former president and said they hope a higher court will accept a motion they filed in July seeking to remove Moro from hearing the case.

The Petrobras investigation began more than two years ago and has led to the jailing of dozens of businessmen and top politicians. But the judges decision on Tuesday is taking the case to a new level, analysts said.

Moro has shown that the investigation will only fade away when Lula is behind bars, said Rafael de Paula Aguiar Araujo, a political science professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo.

Silva already had been ordered to stand trial on charges of obstruction of justice in another case related to Petrobras.

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WASHINGTONThe nations top intelligence official said Tuesday that he could never agree with a decision to pardon Edward Snowden.

Snowden was a National Security Agency contract employee when he took more than a million documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas.

I could understand what he did, if ... what he exposed was limited to domestic surveillance. ... But he exposed so much else that had absolutely nothing to do with domestic surveillance, where he has damaged our capability against foreign threats. He has taken away capabilities that were used to protect our troops in Afghanistan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said. I dont think I could concur in offering him a pardon.

Snowdens revelations about the agencys bulk collection of millions of Americans phone records set off a fierce debate that pitted civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism. Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans pushed through a reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year that ended the program.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution. Human rights groups are seeking a presidential pardon, saying he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs.

Asked if Snowden could get a negotiated plea agreement in exchange for information, for example, that he might have gleaned from Russian contacts, Clapper simply replied, No.

The more time that goes on, there is actually, in my mind, less and less incentive for any kind of negotiated plea agreement, Clapper said. At least as far as the intelligence community is concerned, were not in that camp.

Read more about:

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Three of Canadas big banks have registered nearly 2,000 offshore companies and private foundations in the Caribbean tax haven of the Bahamas, according to newly leaked corporate records obtained exclusively in Canada by the Star and CBC/Radio-Canada.

RBC, CIBC and Scotiabank appear conspicuously throughout the database of 175,500 corporate registrations on the island nation, which has earned an international reputation as one of the most secretive financial jurisdictions in the world.

According to the data, RBC registered 847 companies, CIBC registered 632 and Scotiabank registered 481 in the Bahamas between 1990 and this past May.

The leaked records provide never-before-seen details behind the intimate relationship Canadas banks have forged with island tax havens over the past five decades. Some experts even credit Canadas banking industry with helping pioneer offshore wealth movement to no-tax and low-tax jurisdictions in the Caribbean.

There are legitimate reasons for setting up corporations offshore in traditional tax havens. And there is no evidence of any illegal activity in the corporate registration records, which were obtained through a leak to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the Star and the CBC.

It just doesnt make sense, said Richard Leblanc, a leading corporate governance expert and professor at Harvard and York universities. Why are there so many companies registered and such a high volume in a jurisdiction that doesnt have the population base or the economy to support it? Thats a legitimate question.

All three banks defended their Bahamian business by saying they employ strict controls and monitor accounts to detect any sign of illegal activity.

An RBC spokeswoman, Catherine Hudon, wrote in a statement: RBC works within the legal and regulatory framework of every country in which we operate. Tax evasion, fraud and money laundering are illegal, and we have established policies and controls in place to detect and prevent them from occurring throughout RBC.

Venni Iozzo of CIBC wrote: We apply stringent anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing standards in every jurisdiction in which we operate. . . . If we identify any suspicious activity we report it to all relevant regulators, and where suspicious activity is validated we divest the relationship.

Scotiabank said offshore companies and trusts are a small part of their business in the Bahamas.

Our focus in the marketplace is banking in the real economy there and providing services to our client base, said Brendan King, Scotiabanks senior vice-president of international banking.

Peter Slan, senior vice-president of global wealth management, said Scotiabank has very robust policies to ensure clients have a transparent source of wealth.

We regularly have to decline a prospective client. We dont just take all comers, Slan said. We will decline clients; we will close accounts if we are at all uncomfortable with the source of their wealth.

Detecting potential illegality in tax havens such as the Bahamas is difficult because of lax regulatory oversight and a complete lack of transparency, Leblanc said.

Canadian financial institutions are among the best governed in the world, but this is a shady area that is fraught with opaqueness, said Leblanc, who has extensive experience with the Caribbean financial environment having co-authored the corporate governance guidelines for Barbados.

These countries have reputations for lack of regulatory standards, lack of enforcement, lack of internal controls. So why are so many companies and transactions in a jurisdiction that may not have the same risk framework that Canada has?

The leaked Bahamian registry was published online Wednesday in a searchable database to shed light on hidden offshore financial activity. The 1.3 million files include the names of international politicians and business leaders  including former European Union competition commissioner Neelie Kroes and a former prime minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani  linked to 175,480 Bahamian companies registered between 1990 and 2016.

Experts agree that even legal offshore financial transactions have deprived national treasuries of billions of dollars. Illegal tax evasion pushes that number into the trillions.

And the Bahamas has been of particular concern for international watchdogs.

The Bahamas is the worst of the worst, said Mark Morris, an independent tax consultant based in Zurich who specializes in international tax agreements. Theyre a big offshore centre, they havent made any commitments for information exchange (with other countries) and they are one of maybe two countries in the world were tax evasion is not a predicate offence for money laundering.

Unlike 103 other countries, including well-known tax havens, the Bahamas has, to date, refused to sign a global treaty that the OECD calls the most powerful instrument against offshore tax evasion and avoidance.

I just think its strange for financial institutions to have such a presence in countries that are behind in the automatic exchange of information (with other governments), Morris said in response to questions about Canadian banking operations in the Bahamas.

Bahamian authorities told the ICIJ that the country honours its international obligations and co-operates with international authorities. The Bahamas does not tolerate dirty money, authorities said, noting it has in many areas been rated as largely compliant with international standards.

Bahamian officials argue that the cost and administrative burden of automatically exchanging tax details is too high and that client privacy could be jeopardized. They claim the country will instead uphold international rules through bilateral, or one-to-one, agreements such as the Tax Information Exchange agreement signed with Canada in 2010.

The country reassures potential investors it will share tax information later than most other countries. Even then, only with selected governments that meet stringent technical and confidentiality requirements.

The Bahamas is on a par with Panama in terms of its thirst for and tolerance of dirty money, said Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

Many successful tax havens  such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands  are dependencies of rich countries. The Bahamas falls into a small category of free agents that arent dependent on any one western powers, Shaxson said.

Dependencies of rich countries tend to feel they are under more pressure from their sponsoring countries to meet international standards, he said. The Bahamas doesnt have that . . . First World bedrock. It has more of a developing-country flavour about it. It has to look for a niche elsewhere. Its niche has been being more secretive, being more willing to turn a blind eye.

In 2014, the most recent review of the Bahamas anti-money laundering systems by the OECD faulted the country on half of the core measures used to judge countries compliance with international standards.

This included no requirement for banks or financial institutions to know the real identity of a company or trust owner. Although the OECD now considers the Bahamas compliant, in June 2015, the European Union listed the Bahamas and 30 other countries as uncooperative tax havens.

Tax avoidance and evasion are the most obvious concern when secrecy prevails. But there are other more nefarious activities that can easily go undetected, say experts.

If you want to bribe someone, its a whole lot easier to do it offshore through an account that doesnt have high regulatory oversight, Leblanc said.

For more than a century, Canadian bank executives have played an instrumental role in shaping the banking laws in tax havens, said Alain Deneault, a professor at the Universite de Montreal and author of Offshore: Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime.

Starting in the early 19th century and right through to the establishment of the modern offshore system in the 1960s, Deneault said, Canadian banks customized the legislation in Caribbean tax havens for their purposes: They are states made to allow large companies and wealthy individuals to avoid paying tax.

Banks purchase the sovereignty of these countries to have the laws they wish, he said. Its a bankers fantasy. Ask a banker what their ideal country would look like and thats exactly what you find in the Bahamas.

Federal finance minister William Morneau and mining giant Sherritt International are among the prominent Canadian names that appear in the leaked Bahamian corporate registry.

Both say their choice to operate in the Bahamas was for legitimate business reasons.

MORNEAU

Morneau, who was elected to Parliament last October, appears as the director of a Bahamian subsidiary of the human resources firm he headed before being elected. Cabinet ministers, like all MPs, are forbidden from sitting on corporate boards by the Conflict of Interest Act.

Morneaus office provided documentation showing he resigned as director of Morneau Shepell (Bahamas) Ltd. on Oct. 26, 2015, one week after the election and nine days before he was appointed minister of Finance. Almost a year later, Morneaus resignation has still not been recorded in the Bahamian corporate registry because of clerical delays.

Prior to being sworn-in as Minister of Finance, he officially resigned from all boards and has worked with the Ethics Commissioner to ensure all conflict of interest rules are followed, says a written statement from Morneaus spokesperson. He has been open about all activities related to his former role at Morneau Shepell and all its subsidiaries.

The statements adds: Minister Morneau is committed to ensuring that all Canadians pay their fair share of taxes, as he has always done.

Catherine Ronberg, a spokeswoman for Toronto-based Morneau Shepell, said the Bahamian subsidiary was not established to avoid taxes. The company set up an office in Nassau to extend their pension consulting business to governments across the Caribbean. There are two employees in the Bahamas, one of whom was previously a senior actuary with the countrys public pension agency.

Ronberg added that the Bahamian offices annual revenues of approximately $300,000 are not material to the hundreds of millions pulled in from the Morneau Shepells overall activities.

We comply with applicable tax laws, internationally and within Canada. We do not channel revenue or profits from our Canadian-based business through our Bahamas office, Ronberg wrote in an email. We are not repatriating profits tax free from the Bahamas to Canada.

SHERRITT

The fact that Sherritt International can be found in the Bahamian corporate registry is no surprise. The Toronto-based mining and energy company has made no secret of its reliance on tax havens, including the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands and Barbados, all of which are listed in its annual report.

Any change in the laws and agreements that allow this money to flow from the tax havens to Canada tax-free would have a material adverse effect on the Corporations financial performance, it states.

In a 2002 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Sherritt described a business model that uses one subsidiary in Cuba to mine cobalt, and another to refine it in Canada. But its a third subsidiary based in the Bahamas  International Cobalt Company Inc. (ICCI)  that owns the ore and sells it, allowing all profits from the sale to be booked in a tax-free jurisdiction.

Thanks to the Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) between the Bahamas and Canada, profits from ICCI can be repatriated to Canada tax free. As a result, those profits are never taxed.

In a written statement, the company said the Bahamas proved attractive because of its infrastructure and favourable geography for proximity to operations in Cuba and Canada. It says the company did not re-structure any businesses to take advantage of the TIEA with the Bahamas.

Decision-making on the structure . . . was determined in 1995, before the TIEA was brought into effect.

Sherritts latest annual report says the difference between Canadian and foreign tax rates saved the company $16.5 million in 2015.

That tax discount, does not relate to savings from the ICCI jurisdiction in the Bahamas, the company said in its statement to the Star and the CBC.

THE RECORDS

Bahamanian company documents can be consulted in person in the Bahamanian capital of Nassau and through an online registry maintained by the government. But it is often incomplete and accessing the records costs at least $10 per search, in conflict with the recommendation of the international association of company registries, which discourages search fees.

The data includes company names, date of creation, mailing address in the Bahamas and, in some cases, the companys directors.

Bahamian law requires the names of directors, who have complete power over offshore companies, to be filed with the national registrar. Yet the names are not always available online and directors names cannot be searched individually or without preexisting knowledge of the Bahamian companys name. That makes it difficult to check whether a public official or a corporate executive is linked to companies chartered in the Bahamas.

With files from Will Fitzgibbon and Emilia Diaz-Struck of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

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WASHINGTONHillary Clinton spent $645,000 (U.S.) more a day than her opponent, Donald Trump, last month, but even with her $50-million campaign outlay, she has not been able to pull away from him in the race for the White House.

Clintons campaign had its most expensive month to date in August, eclipsing its previous monthly high by more than $12 million. And combined, Clinton and the national Democratic Party paid out $78 million in August, while Trump and the Republican National Committee spent about $47 million.

While both candidates are raising huge sums from donors, their lopsided spending lays bare the difference in the two major party presidential campaigns. Clinton is running a conventional operation featuring multimillion-dollar ad buys and expansive voter outreach. Trump has kept spending down by enjoying seemingly limitless free media coverage and outsourcing the guts of his voter contact duties to the Republican Party.

The spending disparity has also become a favoured Trump boast.

Our expenditures on advertising, our expenditures on people, our expenditures on everything are a tiny fraction. And yet were minimum tied, Trump said Tuesday at a rally in Kenansville, N.C. If you can spend less and be winning, thats a positive thing, right?

Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Trump has been derelict in building a political operation that would help not only himself but down-ballot Republicans.

Four years ago, U.S. President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney each raised and spent about $1 billion, a formidable number that Clintons national finance director has also set as a benchmark.

Much of Clintons spending has been eaten up by advertising, which is costing her about $10 million per week. Through August, she blanketed 11 states with 35,714 broadcast television commercials to Trumps 7,457 in five states, according to Kantar Medias political ad data.

Clinton also has built a robust campaign team of 800 employees who cost a total of about $5 million last month. Even after an August hiring spree, Trump has a far smaller shop of about 130 employees and more than 100 consultants.

Among those consultants: Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. He parted ways with Trump in mid-June  and was immediately hired as a CNN contributor  but his Green Monster firm received a $20,000 payment for strategy consulting Aug. 11, the same amount it has regularly been paid for months. The campaign says it will continue paying Lewandowskis firm severance through the end of the year to honour its contract with him.

The Trump campaigns biggest expense for the month was more than $11 million to Giles-Parscale for digital consulting and online advertising. Like Trump, the Texas firm is new to politics.

The Clinton campaigns August fundraising report shows increases in legal and polling expenses, which appear to reflect those firms billing cycles. The campaign spent about $450,000 on legal bills and almost $1.3 million on polling.

The presidential spending is even more lopsided after factoring in the main super PACs backing each candidate. While the campaigns must adhere to a $2,700-per-person, per-election donation limit, super political action committees can accept unlimited amounts of money.

Deep-pocketed Priorities USA spent $20.6 million last month, almost exclusively on Trump-bashing and Clinton-boosting TV, radio and digital. The group also replenished its war chest with a healthy $23.4 million haul.

Trumps outside boosters have so far raised and spent much less money; for example, one group, Great America PAC, spent just $2.6 million in August. Some late help may be on the way: on Tuesday, a group called Future 45 said it has a $5 million commitment from billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and $1 million from members of the Ricketts family to attack Clinton.

Clintons aides insist their investments will pay off on election day.

Yet if August finance reports are a guide, her heavy spending is only one piece of the puzzle.

The polls have tightened significantly since Clinton benefited from a post-convention bump in early August. Some surveys still show her slightly ahead, but others show an extremely tight race nationally and in key battleground states such as Florida and Ohio.

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The footage lasted for an agonizing 45 seconds.

Captured by CCTV on Tuesday in the streets of Burari, in North Delhi, it began with a man dragging a woman along the sidewalk before throwing her to the pavement.

He pulled out a single blade from a pair of scissors and stabbed her with tremendous force.

Then he continued to stab her again and again. At one point, he paused to kick her in the head.

As the man continued to stab the young woman, who was writhing in pain in clear view of every passerby, several people wandered by. Some ignored the scene entirely, while others glanced over and kept walking.

One man in a backpack and another man stuck around, waving their hands helplessly in the air. At one point, a person on a motorbike stopped and seemed to speak to the attacker as he continued stabbing the woman. But by then, the woman had stopped writhing. She was still.

No one took any action to stop the horror, according to the video. Within seconds, everyone wandered off, leaving the womans body to lie along the street.

In all, she was stabbed 22 times, according to the Indian Express, though some outlets reported that number to be as high as 30.

The womans name was Karuna Kumar, and Indian media outlets report her age as 21 or 22.

The alleged attacker is 34-year-old Aditya Malik, who also goes by Surender Singh, according to the Indian Express. After the attack, the man fled the scene but was finally accosted by several bystanders who held him down until police arrived.

By then it was too late. The woman was rushed to a hospital but was declared dead on arrival.

Violence against women is a major problem in India, and its getting worse, by all accounts, with more than 800 women per day harassed, raped or killed.

Police said the man had stalked Karuna for a year before the attack, and she was well aware of it.

The accused had been troubling the victim for at least one year, Deputy Police Commissioner Madhur Verma told the Indian Express. He committed the brazen attack when the victim was heading towards the Novel Reaches School, where she had been working as a teacher for the last four months.

The two had met about a year and a half earlier at computer classes taught by the man. Karuna, aspiring to be a schoolteacher, had signed up.

At the time, her father, Naresh, had planned to marry her to someone from his ancestral village in the state of Uttar Pradesh. But the man was interested, Karunas family said.

Surender treated her like a regular student for the first few years, but was (attempting to force) her to marry him these past one and a half years, Karunas aunt Chandrawati told the Times of India. Her family asked her to discontinue with the computer classes after this.

After she did and rejected his proposal, he allegedly began stalking her, according to another relative, Nagesh, who spoke with the New Indian Express.

After Karuna refused his proposal, he started following her, Nagesh said. She complained to his father about Surender advances.

Then, in May, the man attacked her with the jagged edge of a beer bottle after following her to a metro station, the Times of India reported.

He accused her of posing for a photograph with his friend and threatened to kill her, Karunas uncle Vina told the Times of India. Karuna had tried to reason it out with Surender, but he was adamant.

Karuna went to the Burari police but, according to the Times of India, the mans relatives intervened before the police took action.

Karunas parents filed (a) police complaint against Surender. After which Surender and his parents apologized for his behavior and requested to withdraw police complaint, Nagesh told the New Indian Express.

According to Nagesh, the police complaint was withdrawn on Surenders parents request.

They promised that he would stop stalking the girl.

But on Tuesday, he found her alone and, with one blade from a pair of scissors, killed her, police said.

I have seen the video and people are standing as mute spectators, Delhis deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia, told the Indian Express. One or two people tried to come forward but no one helped finally. We have to introspect as a society. Criminals do not have fear of the police.

According to the Indian Express, Karuna was the third woman attacked by a stalker in 48 hours in Delhi, Indias capital city. A 25-year-old was thrown from a building after being followed, and a 28-year-old was fatally stabbed at least 10 times.

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The United States and Russia blamed each other for Syrias failing ceasefire Wednesday, illustrating why a fractured UN Security Council has been unable for more than five years to do anything to stop the Arab countrys civil war.

In a public session originally envisioned to enshrine Syrias Sept. 9 truce, world powers were left to rue the possibility of the conflict entering an even darker phase after a series of attacks on humanitarian workers. Washington, Moscow and the councils other nations all sought to revive the U.S.-Russian ceasefire deal, but seemed stuck on fundamental differences old and new: Who bears ultimate responsibility for the war and whose actions over the last days scuttled perhaps the best opportunity for peace?

Supposedly we all want the same goal. Ive heard that again and again, a clearly angry U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the council, referencing oft-repeated international objectives of a united, secular and democratic Syria. But we are proving woefully inadequate in ... making that happen.

Kerry outlined a litany of U.S. complaints against Syrian President Bashar Assads government and its chief backer, Russia. He recited Moscows changing narrative over a deadly attack this week on an aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counterterror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.

This is not a joke, Kerry said, sharply criticizing those who engage in word games to dodge responsibility over questions of war and peace, life and death.

Kerry offered one concrete suggestion to revive diplomatic hopes. Focused on protecting key aid routes in northern Syria, it was unclear if Russia and Syria would agree.

To restore credibility, we must immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded, he said.

The top American diplomat spoke just after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered his own set of barbs, underscoring the breakdown in trust in the 12 days since he and Kerry clinched a ceasefire agreement and a potential U.S.-Russian military partnership against Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, and Al Qaeda. The former Cold War foes and much of the international community hailed the outcome, only to watch it unravel amid an upsurge in violence that even included an accidental U.S. strike that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers.

Unlike Kerry, who stressed the importance of Assads government ending military operations against rebels and allowing in unfettered aid, Lavrov said the U.S. had the biggest responsibility.

The key priority is to separate the opposition forces from the terrorists, Lavrov said.

Responding to the wide criticism of the convoy airstrike, which American officials are blaming on Russia, Lavrov cited various possible explanations. Twenty civilians were killed when the Syrian Red Crescent convoy was struck.

Lavrov was more direct in laying out what he presented as a series off truce violations by U.S.-backed rebels groups near the northern city of Aleppo. And he declared Syrias conflict, as well as that of Iraq, Libya and other instable nations, the direct consequence of foreign military interventions in the region. It was a not-so-subtle finger pointed at Washington.

Larvov and Kerrys speeches laid bare their widely divergent views of a war that has killed up to a half-million people, contributed to Europes worst refugee crisis since the Second World War and allowed Daesh to emerge as a global terror threat. At one point, Kerry said listening to his Russian counterpart was like hearing about a parallel universe.

On Tuesday, the two diplomats met with more than a dozen Arab and European foreign ministers, hoping to hold onto what might be salvageable from a week of relative calm in Syria. No one spoke of any progress, beyond a decision to hold followup discussions later this week.

Lavrov on Wednesday mentioned the possibility of a three-day period of silence being announced.

We are at a make or break moment, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, opening the session.

His peace envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, described his long-delayed plans for a multi-step Syrian peace process and transition that appeared, even by his own admission, untethered to reality on the ground. Wednesdays latest violence included an airstrike in the north that killed five medical staff, according to a relief organization.

I know, it looks like a dream, de Mistura said.

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Parents have always wondered how to build questing children able to absorb the foreignness of the world and emerge as tolerant, intrigued adults. In practice, one drags them through foreign cities in the hope that something, somehow, will rub off. But at what stage of readiness?

That stage is infancy, says documentary filmmaker Alexandre Trudeau in a Tuesday interview. He was in his mothers womb when he first went to China and he has visited at least 10 times since. He and his wife Zoe Bedos have three children aged 9, 7 and 5 and their various China visits are made for a reason: children should see different kinds of faces, be exposed to what their parents do. He hopes to take the family travelling in Africa or India for a year.

For his book, Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China, Trudeau talked to everyone. He claims introversion but I dont see it. Hes extremely well-read, an expansive, articulate talker and listener with no snobbery, no prejudgments. He has a talent for both detail and summary; I do wish the book had been longer in order to display this.

Trudeau meets artist Ai Weiwei, factory owners, brokers, a peasant woman outside Beijing willing to knock together a meal for a traveller and make some money, a factory worker with a mangled arm, a butcher with a filthy bloody home, a failed artist lashing out at the world, a boastful self-loving male journalist, and dozens more. He aims to track glimpses, chosen moments that might reveal the grand affairs that lie beneath, then to sew them all together.

Its difficult to explain to Chinese people what he wants from them: Saying by sleeping in your village we hope to learn about the plight of the Chinese peasant class would come off as deeply offensive, dishonest or crazy. So he simply travels, watches and talks.

He sails on the Yangtze, over the villages that U.S. Peace Corps teacher Peter Hessler described in his books on living in rural China, now deep and forever underwater after the building of the Three Gorges Dam. Its eerie, the thousands of homes and structures now covered in opaque cafe-au-lait waters, writes Trudeau. Three Gorges was a massive vanity project, he says flatly. The Chinese have an addiction to construction.

Is this a form of status anxiety, I ask. Yes, China has a chip on its shoulder. The dam is ungraspably huge, he says and brings up Kants concept of the sublime. We have to invent a new word. Monstrous more than sublime.

Hessler wasnt happy on the river, either; Trudeau feels a malaise coming over him from confinement and enforced passivity. Lifes not just fleeting but empty, he writes. Im wasting it away, steadily proceeding towards death.

Trudeau writes that his fear of death has returned. Even with the loss of my brother and father, I had come to consider human mortality rather dispassionately, as something natural, beautiful even. But now that he has children, it terrifies him again, as it should.

I ask him about Mao, who caused more than 70 million deaths in peacetime, and my discomfort at his huge head on restaurant wallpaper while diners of Chinese origin arent bothered. Theres a reason, Trudeau says. Maos China is gone. When Mao is used as a pop image, his power is removed. To be flippant is a way to disempower him.

Life in China is precarious, Trudeau says of this shifting country with few set rules on matters such as taxation, construction and profit. Even billionaires will say their fortune could be taken, and thats why their hedge is a condo in Vancouver, as we are learning.

On womens rights, Trudeau says China is patriarchal but that is changing. In the West, codes of gallantry may actually mean that women are mere prestige items but China is egalitarian in its own way. Its such a hard life that women are essential and respected. They are seen as partners.

In one restaurant scene, Trudeau chooses a black snake and tries to eat the thing, its organs with country herbs, a brothy soup with its head, and sweet fried snake sections. The skin is like belt leather, he writes, but he pulls it away and nibbles on slivers of meat between the ribs.

An ungenerous animal, the snake is meant to make diners manly, which Trudeau very much doubts. But as a metaphor for the difficulties of entering and ingesting this complex nation, its serves very well.

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[September 20, 2016] Mobile Internet Users in Latin America to Grow by 50 Per Cent by 2020, Finds New GSMA Study

The number of people across Latin America using their mobile devices to access the internet is set to grow by 50 per cent by the end of the decade, according to a new GSMA (News - Alert) study. It is forecast that 150 million new mobile internet subscribers1 will be added in the region by 2020, bringing the total to 450 million and driving economic growth, innovation and digital inclusion. The new report, 'The Mobile Economy: Latin America and the Caribbean 2016', was published at the 'GSMA Mobile 360 - Latin America' event being held in Mexico City this week, which brings together leading mobile executives from across the region. "Latin America has seen rapid growth in the number of mobile internet subscribers over recent years, helping to build an 'app economy' in areas such as mobile commerce and mobile content, and supporting a flourishing local start-up environment," said Mats Granryd, Director General of the GSMA. "This is due in large part to local mobile operators being able to successfully migrate existing subscribers to smartphones and mobile broadband networks, despite dealing with growing competitive and regulatory pressures in many regional markets." World's Second-Fastest Growing Mobile Region The Latin America region will enjoy strong subscriber growth for the remainder of the decade, as large markets such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru add millions of new subscribers. The overall number of unique mobile subscribers2 in Latin America is forecast to reach 524 million by 2020, up from 414 million at the end of 2015, making Latin America the second-fastest growing global region during this period after Sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile subscriber penetration is forecast to increase from 65 per cent of the region's population in 2015 to 78 per cent by 2020. However, the picture varies widely by country, with penetration currently as low as 28 per cent in Cuba, but above 90 per cent in markets such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Smartphone adoption in Latin America has risen sharply in recent years, accounting for half of regional connections3 at the end of 2015. The region is expected to add 262 million smartphones connections4 by the end of the decade. Adoption continues to be stimulated by falling smartphone prices and a growing range of mid- and low-end devices. Smartphones are also driving migration to 3G/4G mobile broadband networks. Ongoing operator investments in 4G mean tat 4G coverage is available to 60 per cent of the region's population today and is set to cover 80 per cent by next year.



Mobile Contributing to GDP, Jobs and Public Funding The use of mobile technologies and services across the Latin America and Caribbean region generated $255 billion in economic value last year, equivalent to 5 per cent of the region's GDP5. This contribution is expected to increase to more than $315 billion by 2020, or 5.5 per cent of expected GDP. The region's mobile ecosystem also supported approximately 1.9 million jobs in 2015 and made a $40 billion contribution to the public sector via general taxation. This contribution excludes government revenue raised via spectrum auctions, which totalled almost $450 million in 2015. Mobile operators in the region are jointly set to invest more than $76 billion in capital expenditure between 2016-2020.

"Our new report underlines how mobile is making a valuable social and economic contribution to the economies of Latin America, fuelling a virtuous circle that reduces poverty, improves infrastructure and services, and further increases internet access and usage," added Granryd. "To continue this growth, the mobile industry and government must work together to tackle barriers to digital inclusion in areas such as network coverage, affordability, digital skills and the availability of locally relevant content." Granryd continued: "Modernising existing regulatory frameworks will be the next challenge in enabling future mobile services growth, fostering industry investment and maximising future digital ecosystem opportunities for Latin American economies. These new ecosystems will be driven by the local, small and medium enterprises that are leveraging increased connectivity to develop the content, applications and value-added solutions that are transforming the lives of consumers and businesses across the region." The new report 'The Mobile Economy: Latin America and the Caribbean 2016' is authored by GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the GSMA. To access the full report and related infographics, please visit: http://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/latam/. -ENDS- About the GSMA The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting nearly 800 operators with almost 300 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces industry-leading events such as Mobile World Congress (News - Alert), Mobile World Congress Shanghai and the Mobile 360 Series conferences. For more information, please visit the GSMA corporate website at www.gsma.com. Follow the GSMA on Twitter (News - Alert): @GSMA. 1 A mobile internet subscriber is defined as a unique user who has used internet services on their mobile device(s) at the end of the period. Mobile internet services are defined as any activity that consumes mobile data (i.e. excluding SMS, MMS and cellular voice calls). 2 A unique mobile subscriber represents an individual that can account for multiple mobile connections (SIM cards) 3 A mobile connection refers to an active SIM card registered with a mobile network, excluding M2M connections. The total number of mobile connections in the Latin America and Caribbean reached 682 million in 2015 and is forecast to rise to 829 million by 2020 4 A smartphone connection is defined as a SIM card registered and used in a smartphone device at the end of the period. It does not represent the number of smartphone devices sold or shipped. 5 GDP total includes contribution from mobile operators (1.0%); related industries such as devices and infrastructure players (0.5%); indirect impact (0.4%); and productivity impact (3.1%) View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920005058/en/

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The Prime Minister has attracted a lot of positive attention at the United Nations this week for Canadas response to the plight of the Syrian refugees. As he told the UN conference, Canada has now taken in 31,000 of them.

The applause Justin Trudeau received was well deserved. But it should not be unreserved.

Overlooked in the refugee numbers game is that, after achieving its initial target of 25,000 refugees admitted by the end of February, the government left thousands of privately sponsored Syrian families in the lurch.

These families have already been matched with sponsorship groups eager to support them. Yet they languish in refugee camps or in limbo elsewhere while awaiting completion of the paperwork that would allow them to come to Canada. Canada4Refugees, an organization that represents sponsorship groups, estimates there are at least 7,500 families in this situation.

Behind these statistics are real people waiting to escape from years of uncertainty and deprivation. For instance, the family paired with our sponsorship group was interviewed by Canadian authorities in the Middle East last February. They were interrogated and fingerprinted, completed their medical examinations, and signed travel documentation. They were told they could expect to arrive in Canada in a few weeks.

On the strength of that undertaking, they sold many of their belongings, paid to get out of their leased premises, and relocated to smaller, more expensive accommodation they could relinquish on very short notice.

Since then their security clearance process has dragged on and on, without explanation.

The father, an experienced interior design consultant, is unable to obtain a work permit and his periodic informal employment has dried up. The family now depends on small remittances from a brother in Toronto and periodic contributions from our sponsorship group to survive. Their two elementary-level children are soon to be joined by a new baby brother. And the political situation in their host country, Turkey, is deteriorating.

This particular familys circumstance is replicated across the country, because last fall the government mobilized thousands of Canadian citizens to sponsor Syrian refugees. These sponsors raised some $25 million to support their families for at least their first year of Canadian residency. These funds are now frozen as the families wait for permission to come to Canada.

Told last winter that the arrival of their families was imminent, many sponsorship groups also rented and furnished apartments for them. Those apartments now sit empty.

Meanwhile, the government sings the praises of the private sponsorship program. Immigration Minister John McCallum calls it a terrific model for the rest of the world.

But after February, McCallums department dramatically reduced the refugee processing staff in Winnipeg and the Middle East. As a result, the flow of Syrian refugees has slowed to a trickle, and the families backed by private sponsorship groups are now on indefinite hold. The timetable for their processing and arrival is constantly changing.

McCallum says the government is committed to getting them all here by early next year at the latest. But he will not commit to adding more staff to process the backlog of families, and without such an increase it is difficult to see how the government can meet that goal.

How disappointing for these refugee families who are depending on us. And what a waste of public goodwill from those thousands of private citizens across the country who responded in good faith to the governments call to action. They are now disillusioned with the broken promises and lack of government support as they anxiously await their adopted families.

We can do better, and the solution is clear. Even as longer term policy discussions continue, the government must redeploy sufficient resources to clear the backlog, and it must produce a realistic timetable that refugee families and their sponsors can depend upon.

Ian Urquhart is a journalist and Ross McGregor is an executive member of Canada4Refugees. They are both members of a Toronto-based private sponsorship group.

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When it came to light in 2012 that the Harper government had instructed Canadas spy agency that it would be appropriate, under certain circumstances, to use information obtained through torture, the Liberals were among the many who expressed outrage.

The law in Canada has been pretty clear that information based on torture, first of all, is not reliable and, second of all, is not permissible, said then-Liberal leader Bob Rae. It wasnt the first time the party had weighed in on the issue. Three years earlier, Liberal MPs on the House of Commons public safety committee had urged the Conservative government to issue a clear ministerial directive against swapping information with torturing regimes. When the Liberals came to power last year, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said he would review the troubling set of issues raised by the policy.

Yet nearly a year into the Trudeau governments mandate, the directive remains on the books. As the CBCs the fifth estate program reported this week, Goodale says he is continuing to assess the issue.

The Liberals had it right before. By welcoming tainted tips, the government actually encourages their extraction. Accepting this type of information creates an incentive for countries that engage in torture to continue to engage in such practices to curry favour with the Canadian intelligence community, wrote Robert Holmes, former president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. Such complicity is both immoral and a violation of our obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Take the case of Ahmad El Maati. In 2002, the Syrian military, armed with questions from the RCMP, tortured El Maati, who eventually confessed to a plot to blow up Parliament Hill. As is often the case with intelligence extracted through force, the information was bad. Moreover, according to El Maati, Canadas collusion contributed to his torture. He is one of three Canadian citizens suing the federal government for $100 million for its alleged complicity.

The tensions involved in such cases are profoundly difficult to resolve. Former CSIS director Richard Fadden acknowledges that declaring Canada open for business from countries that practice torture may well encourage more abuses. But, he told CBC News, I would invite [Canadians] to sit in my chair as director of CSIS and start thinking about a bomb going off in Quebec City or Red River or somewhere else and our sitting on the information because it may have been derived by torture and not doing anything about it.

Sitting in his chair, of course we would feel compelled to act on such information. Of course many would find it absurd that we would do otherwise. But the ministerial directive is really no different from saying to our partners that inflicting abuses is OK if its about saving lives.

It is not  and a policy that in any way condones torture, or worse, creates a market for it and thereby contributes to its use, is a betrayal of our values and our international obligations. In opposition, the Liberals understood that equivocation on torture is wrong. In government, they should put an end to it.

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Viacom (VIAB) , which has lost nearly half its market value over the past two years, took bold steps on Wednesday to give investors a new look.

A week after Viacom's recently-expanded board held its first meeting to discuss the company's weakened film and cable-TV businesses, the owner of Paramount Pictures and MTV said interim CEO Tom Dooley, the longtime right-hand man to departed CEO Philippe Dauman, would be leaving the company. Dooley had been with Viacom for some 30 years.

Viacom also cuts its dividend in half to 20 cents from 40 cents, a move that Wall Street has been seeking for months, to address a capital structure weakened by mounting debt and declining advertising sales at its cable-TV networks, which include Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET, among others. Viacom's debt stands at $12.3 billion.

In a statement, Viacom said it "is reducing its dividend payout to preserve capital and will proceed to access debt capital markets in the near term to improve liquidity."

In a clear rebuke to Dauman and Dooley, Viacom's board said the company was calling off plans to sell a minority stake in Paramount Pictures, the once-dominant Hollywood studio that has suffered through a string of disappointing film releases coupled with the departure of key executives. Dooley is scheduled to leave Viacom on Nov. 15.

Dauman had championed a sale of 49% of Paramount as a way to pay down debt and secure a possible Chinese partner to better expand the studio's presence in the world's second-largest economy. But Sumner Redstone, the 93-year-old ailing controlling shareholder and former chairman, opposed the sale along with his daughter Shari Redstone, a Viacom director and vice-chairman.

Investors have been mixed about the possibility of selling a minority stake in Viacom. On one hand, the company's debt is a drag on operations, preventing Viacom from making investments in digital platforms and the film studio itself. Yet, conversely, a minority sale would complicate the studio's day-to-day operations and could make the entire company less attractive to a buyer interested in acquiring it outright.

The string of announcements -- Dooley's departure, the dividend cut and a no-sale of Paramount -- marked a clear victory for Shari Redstone, who had long been critical of Dauman's management of the company her father acquired in 1986.

"While there is more work to do, the actions announced today are an important first step towards realizing the value of Viacom's exceptional assets and positioning the company for the future," Shari Redstone said in a statement.

Shares of New York-based Viacom were slipping 0.2% to $36.12 after gaining more than 1% in early trading.

The big question for Viacom is who will the board hire to lead the company. It could hire from within Viacom, or tap and executive from one of its chief rivals. CBS (CBS) CEO Leslie Moonves said recently that his company is not in talks to merge with Viacom, a transaction that would combine two companies some 10 years after being split apart.

Shari Redstone's influence over the company is expected to strengthen in the coming months as the board hires a new CEO, and sometime before Viacom's next shareholder meeting early next year, the board reverts to 10 members. As part of a broad settlement executed with Dauman last month, five people whom Shari Redstone had sought earlier in the year to make directors were added to the board in August. They are expected to replace five members seen as loyal to Dauman.

Moody's last month reduced Viacom's rating outlook to negative from stable after the company's earnings for its quarter ended June 30 missed analyst forecasts. Viacom's credit rating, Baa2, stands at the second-lowest for investment-grade debt.

Last year, Viacom paid out $564 million in dividends, and so far this year, its cash on hand has dwindled to $192 million. That's a steep drop from a year ago when its cash holdings stood at $506 million, according to the company's financial filings. The company had nearly $12.4 billion in debt as of June 30.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Microsoft (MSFT) wants to "solve" cancer within 10 years by using computer programming to reprogram diseased cells into healthy cells, the company announced on Tuesday.

Microsoft said it needs to treat cancer like a computer system that it has to debug.

"It's such common sense. They're saying cancer is a computer virus that should be solved by cracking the code, meaning it's computational," Fox Business' Liz Claman said on Wednesday morning's "Varney & Company."

Microsoft is assembling a "small army" of the world's best biologists at its lab in Cambridge, England to work on research for the project.

The tech giant hopes to eventually create a chip out of DNA that can live inside cells, identify cancerous cells and then delete those cells by rebooting the computer.

"This is absolutely science fiction to the highest," Fox Business' Ashley Webster commented.

Using programming to correct the "genetic abnormalities" in cells could work with the high-caliber team Microsoft is putting together, according to Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine in New York City.

"When you put together engineers, mathematicians, programmers and biologists, that's when you end up with models that work," he said on the show.

This announcement is also a "high tech corporate story" as it shows Microsoft "extending its tentacles" into other areas because it has the money to do so, Varney noted.

Apple (AAPL), Alphabet's Google (GOOGL), Amazon.com (AMZN) and Microsoft are four companies with the money to branch out into entirely separate areas, and they're doing just that, he said.

In addition, Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it's planning another $40 billion stock buyback and that it raised its dividend to 39 cents a share from 36.

Shares of Microsoft were higher in early-afternoon trading on Wednesday.

(Apple and Alphabet are core holdings of Jim Cramer's charitable trust Action Alerts PLUS. See all of his holding with a free trialhere.)

(Amazon.com is held in the Growth Seeker portfolio. See all of the holdings with a free trial.)

Separately, TheStreet Ratings objectively rated this stock according to its "risk-adjusted" total return prospect over a 12-month investment horizon. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer's view or that of this articles's author.

TheStreet Ratings team rates Microsoft as a Buy with a ratings score of B+. This is driven by a number of strengths, which we believe should have a greater impact than any weaknesses, and should give investors a better performance opportunity than most stocks the team covers.

You can view the full analysis from the report here: MSFT

MSFT

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Mamie Till Mobley weeps at her son's funeral on Sept. 6, 1955 in Chicago. Till insisted that her sons, Emmett Till, body be displayed in an open casket forcing the nation to see the brutality directed at blacks in the South at the time. (Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

Historian Lonnie G. Bunch III was a teenager when he heard the story of Emmett Till, the Chicago 14-year-old who was beaten and killed in 1955 for whistling at a white woman during a visit to Mississippi.

Like Emmett, I grew up in the North and had Southern relatives. For males of my age, [his] was a cautionary tale, Bunch said. I didnt know the name, but I knew about a Northern kid who went South, ran afoul of the etiquette of the white South and was murdered.

I never forgot that, added Bunch, who would go on to become the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Before he was appointed to that position, Bunch was president of the Chicago Historical Society, where he became friends with the author and historian Studs Terkel, who seemed to know everyone in Chicago, including Emmetts mother, Mamie Till Mobley. Bunch had wanted to meet her, so in early 2003, Terkel set up a lunch.

[Historically Black: Listen to the backstories of objects that represent lived black history]

She was very short. Her feet didnt touch the floor when she sat in the chair, Bunch recalled. She told everything about her fears of letting Emmett go into the South, but she thought she had convinced him how to behave.

After her son was killed, Till Mobley had to fight to get his casket. It arrived in Chicago locked in chains. When it got to the funeral home, she said, Open this casket,  Bunch recalled. By that point, Bunch was crying. Till Mobley, who died later that year, continued on, stoically describing her sons mangled body, which the world would see lying in that open casket.

In 2004, the FBI reopened the investigation into Tills murder as part of a push to bring civil-rights-era cold cases to justice. Investigators exhumed his body for an autopsy, and he was reburied in a new casket. The old one was sent back to a cemetery in Chicago, where it fell into disrepair.

In 2009, Tills family contacted Bunch about taking the casket and preserving it.

At first, Bunch worried that it would be ghoulish to display it in the museum. Then he thought back to his conversation with Mamie Till Mobley.

With her words echoing in his mind, he made it the centerpiece of a display about Till and his mother that beckons visitors to remember the nations history of racial violence.

Item: Emmett Tills casket

Donor:Relatives of Emmett Till

Museum exhibition:Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: Era of Segregation, 1876-1968


A prison cell from inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary on exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Louisiana State Penitentiary is also known as Angola after the country the slaves of this former plantation originally came from. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

The prison cell is 6 feet by 9 feet. Its old metal bars evoke a William Faulkner truism: The past is never dead. Its not even past.

The cell was once on a patch of land owned by the Louisiana State Penitentiary. In the 19th century, that same land was home to a slave plantation. Both the prison and the plantation share the nickname Angola, referring to the African country from which its slaves came.

After slavery was abolished, the Angola plantation was purchased by a major in the Confederate Army who was awarded a lease to operate the states penitentiary. Inmates were housed in old slave quarters and subject to a notorious labor system that allowed private individuals to lease prisoners.

People  mostly young black men  were rounded up for petty crimes, and they were put to work as a way to control the newly free, said Paul Gardullo, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture who organized the Angola exhibit.

[Historically Black: Listen to the backstories of objects that represent lived black history]

Angola would become one of the nations largest maximum-security prisons  and one of its bloodiest. Over the many decades, reforms have been made, but criminal justice advocates continue to push for more. Angola, Gardullo said, is a lesson in the long arc of history and what changes and doesnt change.

To tell the story of Angola, Gardullo and others from the Smithsonian contacted the prisons former longtime warden, Nathan Burl Cain, for artifacts.

It was a process of a little bit of convincing, said Gardullo, who flew to Louisiana several times and visited the prison museum on Angolas grounds. They were open to talking about the past of the prison. They were less thrilled about us connecting that past to the present.

But after a series of negotiations, prison officials agreed to donate a guard tower and a cell from part of the penitentiary no longer in regular use.

Angola is a very historical prison, Cain said in a statement after the donation was made. It has a very colorful past, and a very horrible past as well.

Item: Cell from Angola prison

Donor: Louisiana State Penitentiary

Museum exhibition: Power of Place
Where: The museum is at 1400 Constitution Ave., between 14th and 15th streets NW. The Smithsonian will host a three-day, two-night Freedom Sounds Festival nearby to celebrate the opening. The festival will begin Friday and continue through Sunday on the Washington Monument grounds between 15th and 17th streets NW.

Hours: The museum will open at approximately 1 p.m. Saturday and stay open until 8 p.m., and be open 7 a.m. to midnight Sunday.

Tickets: Entry is only with a timed ticket, and the museum has given away all of them for the opening weekend. It will not make passes available to walk-up guests on those days. There are no timed passes for the rest of the month and all of next month. Tickets remain for November and December, although weekend tickets are gone. The museum, however, will be making limited day-of passes available after opening weekend. Museum officials havent announced how long timed passes will be required for entry. Reserve them at nmaahc.si.edu/visit/passes.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens its doors to the public on Sept. 24. Heres a look at the numbers behind the 19th Smithsonian museum. (claritza jimenez/The Washington Post)

Getting there: Metro will be running during the opening weekend, with the nearest station at Federal Triangle (Blue, Silver and Orange lines), followed by the Smithsonian stop (along the same three). The Orange Line will experience major disruptions in Northern Virginia this weekend because of repair work.

If youre planning on taking a car-sharing service such as Uber or Lyft, be aware that there will be extensive road closings near the museum and that you may experience traffic jams or have to walk farther than you might have expected to reach the festival or museum grounds.

The road closings, particularly on 14th Street NW and Constitution Avenue, will shutter major arteries into the city. If you must drive, consider parking in one of the many garages near Verizon Center or in neighborhoods away from the museum, such as Capitol Hill or McPherson Square, and taking Metro the remainder of the way to the Mall.

Bicycles wont be allowed in the security perimeter around the museum or festival, and organizers wont be bringing in additional racks for those who wish to lock up their bikes outside the gates.

Dedication ceremony: If youre staying home, C-SPAN will offer live coverage of the morning events on the Mall, including speeches by President Obama and museum director Lonnie G. Bunch III. If you want to see it in person, five jumbo screens will broadcast the proceedings on the festival grounds Saturday morning, with entrances on 17th Street at Constitution Avenue NW and Independence Avenue SW and near the Sylvan Theater, at Independence Avenue near 15th Street. Music will begin at 9 a.m., with speakers kicking things off about 10.

1 of 33 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  See images from the African American museum press preview View Photos The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens its doors to the media Caption The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens its doors to the media Sept. 14, 2016 Visitors wait to tour the National Museum of African American History and Culture during a media preview. Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency Wait 1 second to continue.

Food: You can bring food to the Mall, but think along the lines of sandwiches, chips and granola bars to avoid having any items confiscated at security. Three concessionaires will be serving food: KBQBBQ will offer barbecue and soul food; RockSalt, a local food truck, will serve Gulf Coast-style poboy sandwiches; and the catering company Collabo will offer Kenyan curry and Caribbean fare. But food trucks typically parked along 14th Street will not be allowed onto the closed streets.

Weather: Mild rain wont cause organizers to cancel the festival. It could close if a heavy rainstorm with severe wind and lightning strikes. A storm, however, will not affect the museum or its hours.

Organizers advise those planning to attend to sign up for its text alert system, which will dispatch updates Saturday about weather, traffic and any last-minute changes. To sign up (and later, opt out), text MUSEUM to 888777.
[September 20, 2016] Children's of Alabama Seeking Patients for Innovative Phase 1 Trial for Pediatric Brain Tumor Patients

Dr. Gregory Friedman is currently recruiting patients to participate in his innovative phase 1 study that uses a modified virus to attack difficult-to-treat brain tumors. The study is called "Phase I Clinical Trial of HSV G207 Alone or With a Single Radiation Dose in Children with Recurrent Supratentorial Brain Tumors." To participate or refer a patient to the study, the only one of its kind in the U.S., contact the study coordinator, Kara Kachurak, at (205) 638-5840, [email protected] or Dr. Friedman at (205) 638-9285 or [email protected]. Friedman's trial is the culmination of many years of hard work that began when he was a Fellow at Children's of Alabama. He treats patients at The Alabama Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders at Children's of Alabama and is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and a scientist in the Neuro-Oncology Program at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. Friedman's research utilizes an "engineered" virus to target chemotherapy and radiation-resistant pediatric brain tumors. Herpes simplex virus has been genetically altered to infect and kill difficult-to-treat brain cancer cells without harming normal cells. "With viral therapy, we use herpes virus to target and kill cancer cells. The virus also acts as an immunotherapy by stimulating the patient's own immune system to attack the tumor," Friedman said. "The virus killing the cells results in an immune response that kills the tumor as well." Friedman and his team have found that medulloblastoma and other high-grade pediatric brain tumors are highly sensitive to herpes virus which makes it an ideal cancer killer. The virus has been studied thoroughly and researchers know exactly how it works and which genes are involvd.



"The regular virus can damage both normal cells and cancer cells, but by removing specific genes from the virus, it no longer affects normal cells. However, it can replicate and kill chemotherapy and radiation-resistant cancer stem cells," Friedman said. "I think of these cells like a queen bee in a hive. The queen bee gives rise to worker bees, just like cancer stem cells give rise to other tumor cells. You can take out as many worker bees as you want, but if you don't take out the queen bee, the hive will regenerate." Friedman and co-investigators in the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Markert, M.D., professor and chairman of neurosurgery, and Yancey Gillespie, Ph.D., professor of neurosurgery - also continue to work in the lab to maximize this therapy by exploring how pediatric brain tumor cells may avoid detection by the immune system, so that the ideal immunotherapy can be combined with viral therapy to maximize tumor killing. The goal of this therapy is to improve outcomes and quality of life for children with brain cancer while lessening damaging side effects from current therapies.

To learn more about the ongoing study visit the clinicaltrials.gov page (NCT02457845) at https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02457845. Children's of Alabama is the 10th busiest pediatric medical center in the United States. The Alabama Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders (ACCCBD) at Children's of Alabama is the state's only comprehensive center for pediatric cancer and other blood disorders, treating 90 percent of all such patients diagnosed in Alabama. Specialized pediatric services exist for all forms of childhood cancer, leukemia, brain and spinal cord tumors, hemophilia and other bleeding disorders and sickle cell diseases in the state. The center is a partnership between Children's and the UAB Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology. The ACCCBD is home to the only pediatric programs in blood and marrow transplantation, childhood cancer survivorship, developmental cancer therapeutics, pediatric neuro-oncology, pediatric hemophilia and sickle cell disease in the state of Alabama. The cancer program is ranked among the best in the nation by US News & World Report. More information is available at www.childrensal.org, Facebook.com/childrenshospitalofalabama or twitter.com/ChildrensAL. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920006863/en/

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For more than 100 years, advocates have pushed for a museum to honor and explore the contributions of African Americans. They overcame geographic, economic and philosophical hurdles, fierce battles with Congress and multiple design challenges. Here are the some of the twists and turns in the long road from dream to reality.

1868 : The College Museum, the nations first African American history museum, is established in Hampton, Va., on the campus of Hampton Institute.

1929 : President Herbert Hoover appoints a committee tasked with creating a National Memorial Building to commemorate the contributions of black people to U.S. history. Congress passes a bill authorizing the project but fails to fund it.

1953 : The African American Museum in Cleveland opens, becoming the first independent, nonprofit museum of black history.

1981 : Congress approves a federal charter for the creation of the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio, once a stop on the Underground Railroad.

1985: Seeing Congresss support of the Wilberforce museum, the National Council of Education and Economic Development  a nonprofit group that pushed for the advancement of the black community  begins advocating for a black history museum in Washington.

April 1988 : The National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio, opens.

September 1988 : Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) introduces a bill to create a museum of African American history and culture. The cost concerns some critics, and some hope to combine the African American and the proposed American Indian museums. The bill fails. Lewis would continue to introduce a similar bill with every new Congress.

November 1989 : Congress approves the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonians first to document an American racial minority.

December 1989: The Smithsonian appoints a small group to study whether a black history museum would be advisable. The group recommends that a larger commission be appointed and states the importance of having a museum of national importance.

May 1990: Per the small groups advice, the Smithsonian creates a 22-member commission. A year later, the commission recommends the creation of a free-standing museum, and the Smithsonian Board of Regents unanimously endorses the idea.

1992: Lewis and Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) reintroduce a bill to create a museum for African American history. This time it passes in the Senate but fails in the House.

1994: Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) blocks legislation that would create an African American museum, saying it would waste taxpayers money and be redundant given the Anacostia Museum and the National Museum of African Art.

1995: Because of budget cuts, the Smithsonian rescinds support for an African American museum and instead creates a project called the Center for African American History and Culture, angering many museum supporters.

April 1997: The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History opens in Detroit, becoming the worlds largest black history museum .

Feb. 28, 1998: The Smithsonian hosts a fundraiser for the Anacostia Museum and the in-the-works Center for African American History and Culture.

2000: A private group, dissatisfied with the Smithsonians stagnancy, proposes a black history museum across from the Washington Navy Yard.

Dec. 29, 2001: President George W. Bush signs a bill to create a commission to study the need and logistics for an African American museum.

November 2002: The insurance company Aflac donates $1 million to the commission in anticipation that Congress will authorize a museum.

April 2003: The commission recommends a museum be built adjacent to the Capitol Reflecting Pool, between Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues NW and First and Third streets. That location proves to be controversial.

November 2003: After supporters cede the location selection to the Smithsonian Board of Regents, Congress passes a bill to create the museum. Days later, Bush signs it into law.

November 2003: D.C. lawyer Donnette Cooper gives $500 to the museum, becoming its first donor.

March 2005: Lonnie G. Bunch III is named the founding director of the NMAAHC.

January 2006: The Smithsonian announces that the NMAAHC will be built on the Mall between the National Museum of American History and the Washington Monument.

July 2008 : The museum begins soliciting design proposals.

Ja n uary 2009: Curators open the museums first temporary exhibition at the National Museum of American History  The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise.

April 12, 2009: Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup is selected to design the NMAAHC.

August 2009: The museum acquires the original casket of Emmett Till, who was lynched as a teenager in 1955 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.

2010: The museums design is modified, decreasing its size.

Four-year timelapse of the National Museum of African American History and Culture shows the building construction from groundbreaking to completion. (McKenna Ewen/National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Feb. 22, 2012: The museums groundbreaking ceremony takes place on the Mall.

September 2012: Because of costs, architects choose bronze-painted aluminum instead of bronze for the buildings corona structure. Critics argue that aluminum doesnt have the same reflective quality.

November 2012: The first concrete for the museums foundation is poured.

June 2013: Oprah Winfrey donates $12 million to the museum. Added to the $1 million she donated in 2007, it is the largest single donation to the museum. The museums 350-seat theater will be named after Winfrey. (Including later contributions, Winfrey has donated $21 million to the museum.)

November 2013: Large key artifacts  a Jim Crow-era railroad car and a Louisiana State Penitentiary guard tower  are lowered onto the site so the museum can be built around them.

April 2014: After testing coatings that would give the aluminum scrim a stronger luster, polyvinyl difluoride is approved by the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission.

October 2014: The last steel beam is lifted, completing the museums structural framework.

January 2015: The steel-and-concrete superstructure is completed up to the roof.

April 2015: The glass enclosure is completed.

June 3, 2015: A construction worker is fatally injured while working with metal panels.

July 1, 2015: David J. Skorton becomes the 13th secretary of the Smithsonian.

September 2015: Corona panels are installed, and the building enclosure is complete except for the doors.

April 30, 2016: Actor Denzel Washington and his wife throw a fundraising party, raising more than $10 million.

Sept. 23, 2016: Starting the day before the grand opening, Freedom Sounds, a festival-style celebration, will take place over three days on the Washington Monument grounds.

Sept. 24, 2016: The dedication ceremony will be held outside the museum. In the afternoon, the museum will open to the public.


The Batard Folding Picnic Knife. (Goran Kosanovic/For The Washington Post)

SLICE AND FOLD: Every picnic or tailgate worth its salt needs a sharp knife. Enter the Batard Folding Picnic Knife, complete with corkscrew, designed in a collaboration between chef and cookbook author Charles van Over and Massachusetts-based LongCap Lamson Products. (The knife itself, however, is imported from China.) The name, explains van Over in a note included with the product, is in reference to the batard, a type of French bread similar to a baguette but shorter. The knife  shorter and stubbier than the average bread knife  is heavy, clocking in at about 11 1/2 ounces, compared with a five-ounce bread or seven-ounce chefs knife. It feels sturdy, durable and unlikely to be lost at the bottom of a picnic basket or tailgate tote.

 Kara Elder

Batard Folding Picnic Knife, $38 via lamsonsharp.com.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, rehearse for a speech about their new project to eliminate disease by the end of the 21st century. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a goal thats even more ambitious than connecting the entire world to the Internet: He and his wife want to help wipe out all disease by the end of this century.

Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are committing $3 billion over the next 10 years to speed up basic scientific research, including the creation of research tools  from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques  they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA sequencing have in generations past.

The goal, which they are unlikely to live to see accomplished, is to cure, prevent or manage all disease in the next 80 or so years. They acknowledge that this might sound a crazy, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the past century  with vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy and so on  after thousands of years with little progress.

So if you even just assume that well be able to continue to make progress on that same trajectory, then that implies that by the end of this century we will have been able to solve most of these types of things, Zuckerberg said in an interview. He and Chan have spent the past two years speaking to scientists and other experts to plan the endeavor. He emphasized that this isnt something where we just read a book and decided were going to do.

Through their charitable organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the commitment includes $600 million to fund a new research center in San Francisco, California, where scientific and medical researchers will work alongside engineers on long-term projects spanning years or even decades. The goal is not to focus narrowly on specific diseases, such as bone cancer or Parkinsons disease, but rather to do basic research. One example: a cell atlas that maps out all the different types of cells in the body to help researchers create various types of drugs.

Chans work as a pediatrician seems to be a big driver in their couples decision to take up this latest cause.

Ive been with families where weve hit the limit of whats possible through medicine and science, Chan said.

The couple spoke with the Associated Press in their home in Palo Alto, California, where their infant daughter, Max, had just woken from a nap.

Zuckerberg and Chan hope that their effort will inspire other far-reaching efforts and collaboration in science, medicine and engineering, so that basic research is no longer relegated to the margins.

We spend 50 times more on health care treating people who are sick than we spend on science research [to cure] diseases so that people dont get sick in the first place, Zuckerberg said.

Eric Lander, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, said hes had some 20 conversations with Zuckerberg and Chan over the past year about the initiative and called their goal the right kind of goal for thinking about that kind of time frame. He is not involved with the project itself but expressed confidence in it.

Zuckerberg said the couple decided to focus on creating better tools because this is where they see need, based on their conversations with scientists. It will probably take years for the first tools to be developed through this initiative, and even longer before they are used to cure diseases.

Zuckerberg and Chan, who have pledged to donate 99 percent of their wealth, have spent the past two years meeting with experts to come up with the project. The two stressed that they believe that their goal can be accomplished, if not in their lifetime, then in their childs lifetime. It was Maxs birth last November that inspired the billionaire couple to give away nearly all their money to help solve the worlds problems.
A herd of elephants walk past a watering hole in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, in October 2014. The African nation would like to sell its stockpile of ivory to help pay for conservation. (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)

South Africas Kruger National Park is littered in places with the trunks of trees uprooted and stripped of bark by a surging population of elephants.

Africas elephants are still threatened by poachers seeking to kill them for their ivory tusks, but in several southern states populations have rebounded, helped by conservation policies and the remote locations where many of the herds live.

The numbers are now so big that some countries say the worlds largest land mammal is causing too much damage to crops, threatening the livelihoods of poor subsistence farmers and the populations of other species including birds, bats and woody plants.

Zimbabwe and Namibia have asked for a global ban on ivory trade to be lifted so that they could use money raised from the sale of stockpiles of tusks to pay for conservation and to support communities living near elephants.

Elephants are regarded as a liability and economic cost to rural communities, who suffer crop losses, other damages and lose human lives, Namibias proposal says. Its elephant population has increased to 20,000 from 7,500 the past two decades. Zimbabwe says its elephant population has stabilized at 80,000.

A bird flies near an elephant that died in 2013 after drinking from a poisoned water hole in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park. (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)

The request to sell stockpiles, collected through seizures of illegal ivory, natural death of elephants in the wild and the shooting of problem animals, will be considered at a meeting of the United Nations Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Johannesburg, South Africa, from September 24 to October 5.

The ban on trade in ivory products was imposed in 1989 in response to a wave of poaching, though trade has remained legal in a number of countries including China. The United States in July imposed a near-total ban on ivory sales within its borders.

Opponents are concerned that if CITES allows ivory to be traded, even from stockpiles, it would send a signal that it is socially acceptable, which could increase the demand and more poaching.

We do recognize that Zimbabwe and Namibias elephants populations are in better shape than those elsewhere in Africa, said Susan Lieberman, vice president for International Policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

But its rather short-sighted and a bit selfish for them to request to sell their ivory, knowing full well that it will further stimulate poaching and trafficking from other populations. The global community needs to see this as an Africa-wide issue.

Ivory is particularly coveted in Asia, where it is used for carving and jewelry.


Stephen Colbert and Michelle Obama at a Broadway concert she hosted Monday for spouses of global leaders to promote her girls education initiative. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Michelle Obama broke her silence  sort of  on the Melania Trump plagiarism scandal in an appearance on Stephen Colberts talk show Tuesday night.

The first lady, who is now campaigning for Hillary Clinton, rarely sits for interviews that touch on partisan politics. But, Tuesday night she appeared on late night comedy show to discuss her global initiative promoting girls education.

Mostly, it was the usual late-night fare: Obama participated in a skit, did a impression of her husband and dished with the host about her friend Beyonce. But then Colbert gently prodded her to share her thoughts on Donald Trumps wife, who caused a firestorm in July when she lifted parts of a 2008 first lady speech for her own address at the Republican National Convention. A speechwriter later claimed responsibility, but Melania Trump has largely stayed out of view since then.

Melania Trumps speech at the GOP convention in Cleveland is drawing comparisons to Michelle Obamas speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. Heres a side-by-side look at both. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Colbert: We have these candidates out there who have their own agendas and their spouses have to sort of go along with whatever this person is doing. Do you have any sympathy? For the people that have to go there and stand by the person running for president?

Obama: No, not really. No, because you have to be in it. And if you dont agree you shouldnt have agreed before they ran, you know. Bottom line is, if I didnt agree with what Barack was saying, I would not support his run. So I stand there proudly, and I hope they are too standing with their spouses proudly. So, no sympathy.

Colbert: But the things that they have to go through. For instance, Melania Trump was criticized for using what turned out to be a portion of your speech, but do you have any sympathy because there are people around her creating things. And, you know, I have some sympathy for her. Do you understand how that might be? [Are you] sympathetic for what happened to her?

Obama: Yeah, that was tough.

The audience laughed at that.

Colbert: All right, lets move on. Lets move on.

See the video below for all the nonverbal communication and audience reaction that animated their exchange.
CNN commentator and former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was paid $20,000 in August by the campaign for what it described as strategy consulting, raising anew the conflict of interest issue that has dogged the cable networks hiring of Lewandowski.

CNN has said previously that Trumps payments to Lewandowski and his consulting firm were severance for his employment by Trump. It began introducing his appearances on the air last month by mentioning that he receives severance from Trump.

But the payments continued in August, according to Trumps campaign expenditure filing released Tuesday night. The description used by Trumps campaign in the filing  strategy consulting  also suggested that Lewandowski is playing a more active and current role in the campaign than severance would suggest.

If so, it would put CNN in the position of employing a person who is also compensated by the campaign and the candidate he comments on  a conflict that most journalistic organizations prohibit.

Representatives of CNN declined to comment.

1 of 12 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Who is former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski? View Photos The presidential candidate has fired Lewandowski, who was connected to several controversies during his tenure. Caption The presidential candidate has fired Lewandowski, who was connected to several controversies during his tenure. Corey Lewandowski, an unknown political operative before signing on with Trump, saw his star rise with his candidates. Charlie Neibergall/AP Wait 1 second to continue.

In a statement Wednesday morning, Trump press secretary Hope Hicks said, Corey Lewandowski, who is no longer involved in the campaign, continues to receive monthly severance payments. The campaign will continue to honor its contract with Mr. Lewandowski, which stipulates he will be paid through the end of the year. These payments are in no way compensation for services rendered.

Lewandowski has apparently maintained close ties with the campaign despite being fired by Trump and escorted from Trump Tower by security officers in June. Various news reports have described him as an informal adviser to the campaign.

CNN chairman Jeff Zucker has repeatedly defended the hiring of Lewandowski, most recently at an employee town hall meeting on Tuesday, according to the Huffington Post. Zucker has said the network needed to add pro-Trump voices to balance the stable of commentators who support Hillary Clinton and that Lewandowski brought inside knowledge of Trumps campaign.

The networks hiring of Lewandowski in June drew criticism from viewers and journalists because of his overt partisanship and his testy relationship with the news media during the time he ran Trumps campaign. Lewandowski was Trumps manager from the time of his formal announcement in June 2015 until his firing a year later.

During his tenure, Lewandowski oversaw Trumps ban on nearly a dozen news organizations, including The Washington Post, from receiving credentials to cover Trumps campaign events. He also manhandled a reporter, Michelle Fields, as she sought to question Trump after a press conference in March. A Florida prosecutor declined to press charges against Lewandowski.

The new payment by Trump to Lewandowski drew criticism on Twitter when it was disclosed in the filing last night.

This is just indefensible on CNNs part, tweeted Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Obama. Who benefits from this? Not CNN, not the viewer. No one but Lewandowski and Trump. Wrong and stupid.

Lewandowski reflexively defends Trump when he speaks on CNN. He is still apparently bound by a non-disclosure agreement with the campaign that limits what he can say about his time as campaign manager.

Lewandowskis firm, Green Monster Consulting, also received a $20,000 fee from the Trump campaign in July. Under criticism for that payment, CNN began introducing all of Lewandowskis segments with the disclaimer about severance. It typically doesnt disclose the amount of money his firm receives.
A 21-year-old college student from the District who aspired to become a police officer was stabbed to death Monday night in Baltimore.

Marcus Edwards, a student at Morgan State University, was walking to his off-campus apartment about a mile from the school when he was attacked, according to police and his mother.

We dont know what the motive was, said Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith.

He said robbery could not be ruled out. However, Edwardss mother, Nicole Brooks, said she had been told that he still had his cellphone and wallet when found.

The attack occurred in a residential area at Loch Raven Boulevard and Woodbourne Avenue well after dark and apparently was swift. Smith said there had been no major confrontation.

He didnt have any rivalries and got along with everybody, his mother said.

His ambition was to become a D.C. police detective, she said. He really wanted to help at-risk youth, she said.

As a means of reaching his goals, she said, Edwards was working toward a degree in social work at Morgan State, in northeast Baltimore.

He was born in the District and grew up here, living in Northeast Washington and graduating from Cesar Chavez Public Charter School, she said.

He began his college career at Kentucky State University before returning to the D.C. region.

As a teenager, his mother said, Edwards had been enrolled during the summers in a youth program operated by D.C. police.

In addition, Brooks said, her son had been active in the youth ministry at Judah Temple AME Zion Church in Bowie.

Brooks called Edwards a loving, caring son who was well loved in return and never gave us any problems.
These cases were handled by the Washington Humane Society/Washington Animal Rescue League, which operates its shelter at 71 Oglethorpe St. NW and at 1201 New York Ave. NE. For information or assistance, call 202-723-5730 or go to washhumane.org.

Cozy home: Lanier Pl. NW, 1700 block, Sept. 4. An officer captured a mother squirrel and her two babies in the bottom of a tube vent and released them in a nearby wooded area.

Hitchhiker complains: Monroe St. NE, 2800 block, Sept. 4. An officer removed a kitten that was tucked in a ledge under the vehicle engine block and took it to the shelter. The cat was heard crying while the car was being driven.

Slither covered: Douglas St. NE, 4400 block, Sept. 9. An officer picked up a garter snake from a home. It was released in the wild.

Adoptable pet: New York Ave. NE, 1200 block, Sept. 7. An owner surrendered a 3-year-old Labrador mix to the shelter because of landlord issues.
After students piled into their middle school bus for the ride home Tuesday, a noisy chorus began: One, two, three, four, how many n------ are in my store?

The use of a racial epithet shocked a 13-year-old African American girl sitting among her classmates, and she grew upset as it was repeated with apparent glee. She recorded the moment on her cellphone and showed her parents a seven-second clip when she got to her Rockville, Md., home.

The family posted the video on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, decrying what they said was the first time their daughter had encountered racism and expressing dismay that it had happened in the prosperous Washington suburb in Montgomery County.

Our daughter had to experience racism today on her school bus, her father, Brandon Long, wrote of the bus ride from Robert Frost Middle School. I am outraged, and I refuse to let this slide.

In less than 24 hours, the video clip on his Facebook page showed more than 200,000 views.

The family said in a YouTube post  later removed  that the incident was their daughters first brush with racism and that they had moved to the area because of its good schools.

Now we are being forced to choose (quality education or torment), the post said. These children on this bus have learned this behavior from home. . . . Within their homes lie our judges, lawyers, doctors, and police officers.

The phrase students were chanting appears in a popular video clip about racial profiling posted to Vine in 2013, in which four black teenagers are seen in a convenience store under surveillance from a clerk. It has been played more than 10 million times and been remixed and recirculated over the past three years using the hashtag #Iknowyourstealing, including in tweets and in a recent YouTube video that has been seen more than 500,000 times.

Montgomery school officials said Wednesday that the group of students who started the chant on the bus was diverse  including a black, Hispanic and Asian student  and might not have meant it as a racial slur, harassment or a put-down. In a recording of the incident, many students appear to be chanting the words.

[Read the letter to parents from the principal of Robert Frost Middle School]

The video has a statement, said schools spokesman Derek Turner. And they may have been trying to express something expressed in that video. He added that there could be, and there might be, some context to this that is not about intimidation.

School officials said that Joey Jones, Frosts principal, met with the family involved and was investigating the incident. Jones will work with the districts equity unit to turn the incident into a learning experience for students and the community, officials said.

This is a teachable moment to learn about race, diversity and culture in our schools, Turner said.

School officials said they did not believe that the chant was made against a particular student and added that all students identified as participating will face disciplinary consequences.

In a letter home to parents Wednesday, Jones wrote that the bus driver stopped the bus and addressed the students involved in the chant.

The principal said the behavior was both offensive and inappropriate and did not reflect the schools values.

As an African American educator, this incident is personally very disturbing, and we must address this incident and issues of race so we all can move forward, together, Jones wrote.

The girls father said in an interview Wednesday that he was surprised to see how jovial and upbeat the students in the video seemed. He said his daughter recounted how the students continued the chant even after the bus driver first tried to get them to stop.

It shows a lack of empathy to other peoples feelings, Long said. It was a poor choice. They did it again knowing this time that they were reprimanded for doing something wrong and that they were being recorded. To me, if you were reprimanded and you knew you were wrong, to do it again shows a lack of care about consequences.

He said his daughter, who is new to the school this year, came home upset. He said he was shocked. Ive never experienced this in my whole life, so having this happen to my 13-year-old daughter is very hard, he said.

Long said his daughter is aware of the nations racial tensions that have been at the forefront the past two years and has heard her parents discuss issues of race.

She knew that it wasnt right, he said. We teach that if you allow people to get away with it, theyll continue to do it.

He said he hopes that other students will learn from the incident, saying it is important not to shy away from conversations about race.

Her classmates are going to grow up to be influential professionals  police officers, attorneys, judges, politicians  and if they grow up without a strong moral compass, theyre going to continue the same illegitimate practices we see today.

Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
The Marriage of Figaro, a comic opera by Mozart, will be performed at the Kennedy Center this weekend. (Todd Rosenberg)

THU 22

Gabriel Munoz and Melodias Borinquenas The Puerto Rican folk ensemble features Munoz on the cuatro, a stringed instrument similar to the mandolin. Noon-1 p.m. Library of Congress, Jefferson Building, ground floor, 10 First St. SE. 202-707-1736. www.loc.gov. Free.

The Marriage of Figaro Washington National Opera stages the comic opera by Mozart, featuring soprano Amanda Majeski as the elegant Countess Almaviva. Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday and Monday at 7 p.m. Through Oct. 2. Kennedy Center, Opera House, 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600. www.kennedy-center.org. $25-$315.

The Main Squeeze The funk band from Bloomington, Ind., performs. With the Strange Heat. 9 p.m. Gypsy Sallys, 3401 K St. NW. 202-333-7700. www.gypsysallys.com. $15, in advance $12.

FRI 23

The Music of Margaret Bonds Soprano Marlissa Hudson and pianist Marvin Mills interpret music by Bonds, an African American composer who frequently collaborated with poet Langston Hughes. 1:15 p.m. Georgetown University, McNeir Auditorium, 37th and O streets NW. 202-687-2787. www.performingarts. georgetown.edu. Free.

The Little Foxes Emmy-winning actress Marg Helgenberger stars as Regina Hubbard Giddens in Lillian Hellmans drama of greed and betrayal among siblings and heirs. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Through Oct. 30. Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. 202-488-3300. www.arenastage.org. $65-$110.

Preservation Hall Jazz Band The traditional New Orleans jazz band performs. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St. NW. 202-888-0050. www.thelincolndc.com. $35.

Amy Schumer The stand-up comedian, whose frequently raunchy humor has been described by the New Yorker as feminist and a destabilizing mixture of daffy and caustic, performs. Verizon Center, 601 F St. NW. www.verizoncenter.com. $52-$140.

SAT 24

Freedom Sounds evening concerts Two concerts on the Washington Monument grounds commemorate the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. On Saturday, performers include Living Colour, Public Enemy and the Roots. On Sunday, they include Experience Unlimited, Angelique Kidjo and Meshell Ndegeocello. Concessions will include Southern barbecue, po boys, soul food, Kenyan curries and Caribbean jerk specialties. Enter at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW and 17th Street SW near Independence Avenue. Bag checks required for entry. Saturday and Sunday 6-9 p.m. National Museum of African American History and Culture, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. www.folklife.si.edu. 202-633-2240. Free.

Uncorked Wine Festival The traveling wine festival offers tastings from more than 75 wineries, an international wine market, gourmet food vendors and a champagne bar. Cocktail attire is recommended but not required. 6-9 p.m. D.C. Armory, 2001 East Capitol St. SE. www.uncorkedwinefestivals.com. $65.

Death The Detroit trio, which first recorded in the 1970s, is often credited as the first African American punk band. With Rough Francis. 9 p.m. Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. 202-667-4490. www.blackcatdc.com. $25; in advance $22.

Tiger Army The Los Angeles psychobilly band performs songs from its latest album. With Tijuana Panthers and Creeper. 8 p.m. Rock & Roll Hotel, 1353 H St. NE. 202-388-7625. www.rockandrollhoteldc.com. $25.

Barrence Whitfield & the Savages The frantic, screaming vocalist performs 1950s and 60s R&B mixed with garage rock. 9:30 p.m. Hill Country, 410 Seventh St. NW. 202-556-2050. www.hillcountry.com. $12-$15.

SUN 25

Washington Bach Consort The orchestral and choral program includes the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major, two cantatas and the organ work Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. 3 p.m. National Presbyterian Church, 4101 Nebraska Ave. NW. 202-429-2121. www.natpresch.org. $10-$69.

The Black Jew Thing  A workshop production of Stacey Rose and Alexis Spiegels drama, the friendship of two playwrights, one black and one Jewish, is tested as they try to collaborate. Sunday and Monday at 7 p.m. Atlas Performing Arts Center, Lang Theatre, 1333 H St. NE. 202-399-7993. www.mosaictheater.org . $15.

John Scofields Country for Old Men Guitarist Scofields quartet performs jazz interpretations of country songs popularized by George Jones, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and others. 8 p.m. The Hamilton, 600 14th St. NW. 202-787-1000. www.thehamiltondc.com. $25-$58.

MON 26

A Democracy Forum: What Have We Learned From the Ancient Greeks A discussion on the relationship between ancient Greek democracy and our current government. Bill Antholis, a political scientist and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, moderates. Panelists include historians Josiah Ober and Brook Manville, journalist Markos Kounalakis and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis. 6:30 p.m. National Geographic Museum, 17th and M streets NW. 202-857-7700. www.nationalgeographic.com/museum. $25.

TUE 27

Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds The garage and punk guitarist, formerly with the Gun Club, the Cramps and Nick Cave, performs songs from his latest album, La Arana Es La Vida. 9 p.m. Comet Ping Pong, 5037 Connecticut Ave. NW. 202-364-0404. www.sashalordpresents.com. $12.

WED 28

Buzzcocks The 1970s English punk band, featuring original members Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, performs. With Residuels. 7 p.m. 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 202-265-0930. www.930.com. $35.

Protest The Alliance for New Music-Theatre performs the play by poet and former Czech president Vaclav Havel about life under a totalitarian regime. 7 p.m. Woodrow Wilson House, 2340 S St. NW. 202-792-5807. www.mutualinspirations.org . $20.
[September 20, 2016] Oracle Beats Amazon Web Services in Head-to-Head Cloud Database Comparison

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle OpenWorld -- Oracle Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Larry Ellison today demonstrated that Amazon databases are 20 years behind the latest release of the Oracle Database in the Cloud. In his keynote presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2016 in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Ellison shared detailed analysis that showed that Oracle Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is up to 105X faster for Analytics workloads, 35X faster for online transaction processing (OLTP), and 1000+X faster for mixed workloads than Amazon DBaaS. Ellison also showed that the Oracle Cloud is optimized for running Oracle Database while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not. An Oracle Database running on the Oracle Cloud is up to 24X faster than an Oracle Database running on AWS. "Oracle's new technologies will drive the Cloud databases and infrastructure of the future," said Ellison. "Amazon are decades behind in every database area that matters, and their systems are more closed than mainframe computers." Ellison also announced the availability of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 in the Oracle Cloud with the launch of the new Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service. This service provides the full enterprise edition of the Oracle Database running on the database-optimized Exadata infrastructure. Starting at just $175 per month, Ellison showed this Cloud service is lower cost than similar offerings from Amazon. With the launch of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 in the Cloud first, Oracle has demonstrated that the Oracle Cloud is the most optimized, complete and integrated Cloud for Oracle Database. The latest release provides organizations of all sizes with access to the world's fastest, most scalable and reliable database technology in a cost-effective and open Cloud environment. In addition, the world's #1 database includes a series of innovations that add state-of-the-art technology while preserving customer investments and supporting their transition to the Cloud. Ellison shared detailed analysis during his keynote that showed how the new Oracle DBaaS delivers unparalleled performance for analytics, OLTP and mixed database workloads. In a direct comparison between Oracle DBaaS and Amazon databases, Ellison shared the following analysis: Oracle Cloud Database is dramatically faster than Amazon Cloud Databases Oracle Cloud is up to 105X faster for analytics than Amazon Redshift Oracle Cloud is up to 35X faster for OLTP than Amazon Aurora

Amazon is 20 years behind Oracle in database technology Amazon Aurora is missing critical OLTP features that Oracle shipped 20 years ago, including scalable read-write clusters, parallel SQL and the aility to replicate encrypted databases Amazon Redshift is missing critical analytics features that Oracle shipped 20 years ago, including table partitioning, materialized views, support for rich data types and sophisticated query optimization

Amazon databases do not support mixed workloads Oracle runs analytics workloads 1000+ times faster than Amazon Aurora Oracle runs OLTP workloads 1000+ times faster than Amazon Redshift

Amazon databases are more closed than IBM Mainframe databases, and are not compatible with on-premise enterprise database applications Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift and Amazon DynamoDB only run on AWS With AWS, organizations can't use dev/test for on-premises, can't use disaster protection for on-premises, management is incompatible with on-premises Amazon databases are not compatible with existing enterprise database applications such as Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and Teradata and force organizations to throw away decades of on-premises investments





Oracle Database is up to 24X faster for analytics on the Oracle Cloud Platform than on Amazon Web Services

Oracle Database is up to 8X faster for OLTP on the Oracle Cloud Platform than on Amazon Web Services

AWS has limited storage performance: Amazon Elastic Block Storage limited to 48,000 IOPs/nodes, which is 8X slower than Oracle Cloud; Amazon Elastic Block Storage limited to 800 MB/sec/node, which is 19X slower than Oracle Cloud

AWS cannot scale-out Oracle across nodes: AWS provides no support for Oracle Real Application Clusters Oracle is the only vendor with true workload portability across on-premises and Cloud deployments. This helps ensure customers can continue to leverage their existing investment, keep costs down and easily benefit from the efficiency of Cloud. With proven continuous innovations and industry-leading performance across the entire platform from infrastructure to database, including support for mixed workloads, Oracle Data Management Cloud is the leader today and in the future.

About Oracle

Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of Cloud applications and platform services. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. About Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld, the industry's most important business and technology conference for the past 20 years, hosts tens of thousands of in-person attendees as well as millions online. Dedicated to helping businesses leverage Cloud for their innovation and growth, the conference delivers deep insight into industry trends and breakthroughs driven by technology. Designed for attendees who want to connect, learn, explore and be inspired, Oracle OpenWorld offers more than 2,200 educational sessions led by more than 2,000 customers and partners sharing their experiences, first hand. With hundreds of demos and hands-on labs, plus exhibitions from more than 400 partners and customers from around the world, Oracle OpenWorld has become a showcase for leading cloud technologies, from Cloud Applications to Cloud Platform and Infrastructure. Oracle OpenWorld 2016 is being held September 18  September 22 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information; to register; or to watch Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions, and more, visit www.oracle.com/openworld. Join the Oracle OpenWorld discussion on Twitter. About JavaOne

The JavaOne conference brings together Java experts and enthusiasts for an extraordinary week of learning and networking focused entirely on all things Java. With more than 440 sessions covering topics that span the breadth of the Java universe, keynotes from foremost Java visionaries, tutorials, and expert-led hands-on learning opportunities, JavaOne is the world's most important event for the Java community. Join the JavaOne discussion on Twitter. Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Safe Harbor

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oracle-beats-amazon-web-services-in-head-to-head-cloud-database-comparison-300331120.html SOURCE Oracle

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THE DISTRICT

Ex-leader of charity for veterans indicted

Federal prosecutors in the District announced an eight-count indictment Tuesday against Patricia P. Driscoll, charging her with committing fraud and tax-evasion as president of the Armed Forces Foundation, a Washington-based charity that assists veterans.

Driscoll, 38, of Ellicott City, resigned July 12 after 12 years at the military charity. In a December tax filing, the foundation reported it had become aware of suspected misappropriations by Driscoll totaling about $600,000 from 2006 to 2014.

Prosecutors said Driscoll reported sham donors and donations, failed to disclose fundraising commissions and spent foundation money on personal expenses.

Ms. Driscoll denies the unproven allegations that have been made against her, said her attorney, Barry J. Pollack.

 Spencer S. Hsu

MARYLAND

Three men are shot at Suitland complex

Three men were shot Wednesday night at a Suitland apartment complex, a Prince Georges County police spokesman said.

The mens injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, said Cpl. Harry Bond, a department spokesman.

Bond said authorities were called to the 3500 block of Silver Park Drive about 7:50 p.m. for reports of a multiple shooting. Investigators believe the three men were shot outside an apartment complex.

He added that no suspect was in custody.

 Victoria St. Martin

and Clarence Williams

Woman is fatally stabbed during fight

A woman was fatally stabbed during an argument in Prince Georges County early Tuesday, police said.

About 1:45 a.m., Jodi Henry, 35, of Fort Washington and Olayinka Kowobari, 34, got into an argument at Kowobaris home in the 9400 block of Eugenia Park Street in Capitol Heights, Prince Georges police said in a statement. Kowobari stabbed Henry, who died at a hospital after being taken there by a witness.

Kowobari was charged with first- and second-degree murder.

 Dana Hedgpeth

and Justin Wm. Moyer

Two men suspected of murder are arrested

Deputies with the Prince Georges County Sheriffs Office arrested two first-degree murder suspects, including one who was wanted in connection with the 2007 slaying of his roommate.

Elias Reyes, 49 of Hyattsville fought with his roommate Dec. 6, 2007, and killed him, according to a police statement.

Reyes was recently arrested in North Carolina on trespassing charges and extradited to Prince Georges.

Deputies also arrested Anthony Dickens, 46, of Southeast Washington in connection with a homicide in Sept. 13, 2015. Dickens fatally shot a man after the two fought in the 800 block of Southern Avenue in Oxon Hill, officials said.

 Lynh Bui

Judge: Term limits can go before voters

A Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ruled Wednesday that a charter amendment establishing term limits could go before voters in November.

Republican activist Robin Ficker collected more than 17,000 signatures  above the 10,000 required  for a measure to limit the county executive and members of the County Council to three terms. A group headed by Tom Moore, a Democrat, challenged the validity of the signatures on technical grounds.

Judge Robert A. Greenberg said in an 18-page opinion that there was no genuine dispute that the Montgomery County Board of Elections, which reviewed the signatures, had complied with Maryland law.

The charter amendment will appear on the November ballot in any event, because publishing deadlines have passed. The issue is whether votes for and against the measure will be counted.
A Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ruled Wednesday that a charter amendment establishing term limits could go before voters in November.

Republican activist Robin Ficker collected more than 17,000 signatures  more than the 10,000 required  for a measure to limit the county executive and members of the county council to three terms. A group headed by Tom Moore, a Democrat, challenged the validity of the signatures on a series of technical grounds, including evidence that dates beside some of the signatures were filled in by someone other than the signer.

Judge Robert A. Greenberg said in an 18-page opinion that there was no genuine dispute that the Montgomery County Board of Elections, which reviewed the signatures, had complied with Maryland law.

Moore said Wednesday that he would likely appeal.

The charter amendment will appear on the November ballot in any event, because publishing deadlines have passed. The issue is whether votes for and against the measure will be counted.
The Prince Georges County Democratic Central Committee voted on Tuesday night against endorsing a position on ballot Question D, which will ask voters in November to add two new at-large seats to the nine-member County Council.

The elected committee is responsible for printing and distributing the sample ballot  a document endorsing candidates and positions favored by the county party  that is delivered to Democratic households across Prince Georges prior to Election Day. Many voters use the sample ballot to guide their choices in the ballot box.

The proposal  which will be the subject of a 7 p.m. town hall discussion Wednesday night at the Bowie Library, hosted by the Prince Georges County Young Democrats  would change the county charter and enlarge the legislative body to 11 seats.

Although council members would still be limited to two terms in office, that limit would apply separately to district seats and at-large seats, so that the same person could serve in two different positions for up to four consecutive terms.

[Pr. Georges revives decades-old debate on adding at-large seats]

Elected leaders in Prince Georges leaders who are backing the proposal say the county would benefit from having two council members who represent the entire jurisdiction, rather than just one area. They also argue that the county needs more veteran politicians in office to match the level of experience among lawmakers in neighboring jurisdictions.

Neighboring Montgomery County has four at-large council members.

The Prince Georges councils vote to place the at-large measure on the ballot this summer triggered heated opposition from civic groups and citizen activists who say the change is expensive and unnecessary.

Some opponents have organized a No on Question D group and launched a website to sway voters against the ballot question. Progressive Maryland, a large coalition of county political activists, also is campaigning against it.

[Enlarging Pr. Georges Council too costly, opponents say]

Supporters, too, have organized. The ReCharge At-large ballot question committee officially launched in August and has its own website touting the benefits of adding two members who would have to win countywide majorities.

In 2014, the County Council and County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D) tried to extend term limits from two to three through a different ballot question. That campaign failed.

Council members Mary A Lehman (D-Laurel), Obie Patterson (D-Fort Washington), Karen R. Toles (D-Suitland) Andrea C. Harrison (D-Springdale) and Mel Franklin (D-Upper Marlboro) will reach the end of their second terms in 2018.

If the ballot question is approved, any of them could then legally seek two terms as an at-large representative.
Korryn Gaines recorded video of her standoff with Baltimore County police officers on August 1 and posted it on social media. Police say Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, pointed a gun at officers and threatened to kill them before they shot and killed her. Officers had arrived at her apartment to serve warrants. (Instagram @shesyourmajesty)

Korryn Gaines recorded video of her standoff with Baltimore County police officers on August 1 and posted it on social media. Police say Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, pointed a gun at officers and threatened to kill them before they shot and killed her. Officers had arrived at her apartment to serve warrants. (Instagram @shesyourmajesty)

Prosecutors have determined that Baltimore County police were justified in shooting Korryn Gaines during an armed standoff in her apartment and that no criminal charges are warranted against the officer who fired.

The Baltimore County States Attorneys Office announced its findings Wednesday in the case that left the 23-year-old mother dead and her 5-year-old son injured Aug. 1, saying the officer who shot saw Gaines was starting to raise the shotgun to a firing position toward the officer.

Law enforcement told her to put down the gun, but Gaines continued to raise it before an officer fired and she shot back, prosecutors said.

[Korryn Gaines, killed by police in standoff, posted parts of encounter on social media]

The determination from Baltimore County States Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger came in the case that made headlines after Gaines live-streamed the encounter on social media. The shooting of Gaines, who was black, also came amid continued national discontent over fatal confrontations between police and African Americans.

Police had knocked on the door of a Randallstown, Md., apartment at about 9:20 a.m. to serve warrants on Gaines and her boyfriend. After Gaines refused to let officers in, they got a key from management and tried to enter but saw her pointing a shotgun at them, police said.

Over about seven hours of negotiations, Gaines sometimes spoke calmly with police and other times irrationally, prosecutors said. She declared she absolutely was not coming out and the encounter would be worth it if she took at least one of the officers with her, according to prosecutors.

She stated that the police were the devils, that they were crazy, that she had been unjustly kidnapped by the police, that the government had kidnapped her fiance, that the police were only at her apartment because she was black, that when she and her son were dead the news would report it and the world would know, prosecutors said in a letter to a police detailing their findings.

[Lawsuit filed in case of mother, 5-year-old son shot in police standoff]

Police declined to comment on the findings from the prosecutors office.

Earlier this month, police identified the officer who shot Gaines as Officer First Class Ruby, a member of a tactical unit who has been with the department for 16 years. Ruby was part of a police-involved shooting in August 2007, according to the department, which doesnt release the first names of officers involved in shootings because of an agreement with the police union.

Attorneys for Gainess family have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Baltimore County police, saying a neighbor heard Gainess offer to surrender.

The prosecutors findings are flawed because they rely on information from the police department, said Jim Bell, one of the family attorneys. There was no independent investigation, Bell said. The states attorney, he rubber-stamped it.

Shellenberger said several factors fed into the determination that the shooting was justified, including that Gaines declared she had no problem shooting police and then racked her gun and took aim after firing an initial shot.

She obviously showed a propensity to shoot at the police officers by what she said, Shellenberger said.
Prince Georges County police are investigating an allegation of physical abuse on a school bus of a student who attends a special needs school in Mitchellville.

The incident occurred the morning of Sept. 1, outside the C. Elizabeth Rieg Regional School, according to county police spokesman Officer Tyler Hunter.

The police department was notified of the allegations on Sept. 15 and began an investigation, which is still ongoing, Hunter said.

[Feds end Head Start grant after finding schools humiliated kids, used corporal punishment]

The investigation involves an allegation that a person who is not a school system employee abused an adult student, Hunter said. Police declined to say why the person who was not an employee was on the bus.

According to the schools website, the campus offers programs to help students with autism or for those who may need special therapies such as physical or language therapy.

Prince Georges school officials viewed video from the bus camera on Sept. 14 and had it delivered to police for investigation, said Raven Hill, a spokeswoman for the district.

While the police investigation involves someone who doesnt work for the school system, Hill said five county schools employees have been placed on leave as it continues.

[For years, Pr. Georges didnt strengthen school sex-abuse policies]

The allegations come amid a string of investigations of alleged abuse of Prince Georges County Public Schools students.

In February, a former school aide and volunteer at Judge Sylvania W. Woods Elementary School was arrested on child porn and sex abuse charges involving at least 17 children. Some of the alleged acts occurred on school property during the school day.

In August, federal officials announced they would cut more than $6 million in funding for the Prince Georges Head Start program after separate abuse allegations. One complaint involved a mother who said her 3-year-old son was forced to mop up his own urine in front of class. Another involved a 5-year-old who federal officials said was allowed to walk home alone unnoticed.
Police on Friday arrested a second man in an armed robbery this month at a hotel near the University of Maryland campus that critically wounded an unarmed security guard.

[Hotel security guard critically injured in robbery attempt near U-Md.]

On Sept. 6, about 1:10 a.m., a security officer was shot during the robbery at the College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, the University of Maryland Police Department said in a statement. The officer is recovering in the hospital.

Police said the robbers entered the back of the hotel and stole three safes. A D.C. resident, 24-year-old Jamal Ulysses Green, was arrested shortly afterward in the woods across the street from the hotel. He was charged Sept. 7 with armed robbery, attempted first-degree murder and related crimes.

On Wednesday, University of Maryland police said that they had also arrested 35-year-old Jamone Forbes of Bowie. Forbes was charged with attempted first-degree murder, armed robbery, assault and related crimes.
Deputies with the Prince Georges County Sheriffs Office arrested two men wanted on first-degree murder charges, including one who was wanted in the 2007 slaying of his roommate.

Elias Reyes, 49, of Hyattsville was placed on the Office of the Sheriff Most Wanted Suspects list after he got into a fight with his roommate on Dec. 6, 2007, and killed him, according to a statement from the sheriffs office.

Reyes is alleged to have produced an edged weapon with which he struck the male victim in the body and face, the statement said.

Reyes was recently arrested in North Carolina on trespassing charges. He was extradited to Prince Georges after officers discovered an arrest warrant for Reyes on the murder charge, the department said.

Deputies also arrested Anthony Dickens, 46, of Southeast Washington in a killing from Sept. 13, 2015, the sheriffs office said.

Dickens is accused of fatally shooting a man after the two got into an altercation in the 800 block of Southern Avenue in Oxon Hill, Md., authorities said.

Both men are being held in Prince Georges County jail without bail.
Craig John Oliver is a fugitive for violation of his release conditions. On October 3, 2005, he pleaded guilty to defrauding 68 Virginia and Maryland homeowners of more than $2.5 million. (FBI)

Craig Oliver fled Alexandria more than a decade ago, leaving dozens of angry homeowners behind. The convicted con man, who had taken $2.5 million in cash for promised renovations he never delivered, managed to slip away before he could be sent to prison.

This week, the FBI thought they had finally found him in Los Angeles. But by the time agents arrived, Oliver was gone.

Oliver had posed in Northern Virginia as a contractor, offering showrooms, glowing references and even a valid license. The license was stolen, and he would work only until he could cash a clients check.

He was so slick. He would hug you, kiss you, bring his wife over, Shirley A. Campolieto told The Washington Post in 2005. I fell for Craig Oliver.

Campolieto, who was being treated for colon cancer when Oliver approached her, died in 2006. Her daughter, Beth Campolieto Marhanka, doubts the family will ever get back the $71,000 Oliver stole after performing incomplete work so shoddy it had to be redone.

Even if the FBI is able to recover the funds, its too late for my mom, Marhanka said. Craig knew that my mom was struggling with cancer, and it was obvious that she wasnt a wealthy person. He took advantage of her and made her last years miserable. Our whole family was truly put through hell because of his greed and lack of human dignity.

Prosecutors in Alexandrias federal court identified 68 such victims, and in 2005 Oliver pleaded guilty to wire fraud. But he disappeared before his sentencing, let out of jail on a $150,000 bond.

An attorney who represented Oliver at the time of the plea did not returns calls for comment. Oliver is also wanted for violating probation in a 1995 securities-fraud case in Arlington.

This past weekend, Oliver resurfaced for the first time after a new round of publicity from the FBI led to an anonymous tip that he and his wife were working as consultants to a home-improvement business in the Los Angeles area.

Its possible theyve been living here a few years, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said. The tip led agents to a photo of a man believed to be Oliver at a 2014 holiday party, she added.

But when FBI agents went to the business Monday morning, Eimiller said, Oliver and his wife had moved on. An employee told them that the couple had come in to pick up a check and said they were leaving town, possibly headed to Georgia.

Previous tips had led law enforcement to believe that Oliver was in Arizona or San Diego.

In California, Eimiller said, Oliver went by the name Leigh Owsley. His wife, Jennifer Oliver, called herself Tara Jean.

Grace Paik recalls the pair coming to the small bungalow in Alexandrias Del Ray neighborhood that she and her husband, Seung, hired Oliver to expand. Jennifer Oliver would hold her baby, the second of what would soon be three kids.

It was like this loving, older couple who seemed like they really wanted to bless us and help us, she said. It just makes me sick now, knowing what I know.

After Oliver had ripped out their kitchen and their HVAC system  and cashed their check for nearly $60,000  the Paiks got a call from the FBI telling them their contractor was a fraud. Having lost nearly $60,000 to Oliver and more to legal fees trying to recoup their money, she and her husband spent the next nine months slowly rebuilding their home themselves. Stressed and strapped for cash, they nearly divorced.

There was one good thing that came of the struggle, Paik said. During that time, the family ate out constantly, because their kitchen sink and stove were gone. While trying to deal with three young children in local restaurants, Paik came up with a way to keep them from causing too much mayhem: a reusable place mat that has a chalkboard on the back.

She began making them for friends, then selling them at Alexandrias Purple Goose. Her line now includes bags and baby toys and is sold internationally.

My business came out of that ordeal, which is a blessing in disguise, Paik said. She now lives in Germany, where her husband, a colonel in the Air Force, is stationed.

Still, she would like to see Oliver brought to justice. She remembers that when the FBI agent told her husband that the contractor was out on bail, Seung Paik asked if that was a good idea.

Dont worry, she said the agent replied. We have our eye on him.
Electronic surveillance by law enforcement is at the center of legal debates across the country. (Issei Kato/Reuters)

A federal judge released a list Wednesday of all sealed requests made in Washington in 2012 for Americans telephone and Internet activity, a step toward bringing more public scrutiny to rapidly expanding secret law enforcement activities.

The action came in a case brought by a journalist to unseal a much larger collection of information about court-ordered electronic surveillance in closed criminal investigations in the nations capital.

Legal experts say even the selective release appears to mark the first time a U.S. district court has made a systematic online disclosure of how often law enforcement seeks court orders under a 1986 statute to obtain individuals electronic records from communication service providers. The release could serve as a model for court disclosure elsewhere, several legal experts said.

U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the District identified 235 law enforcement applications from 2012 from investigators seeking to collect the time, date, duration and source of communications to and from a targeted person, phone number or email address, or instant messaging or social network identity. The applications for what are known as pen register and trap and trace orders do not allow law enforcement to access the contents of conversations.

[Low-level federal judges balking at law enforcement requests for electronic evidence]

In a 53-page filing, Howell identified applications by case number, date filed, reviewing judge and whether the request sought information about a cellular number or email address.

We are pleased that the courts seem to be recognizing that they have been, perhaps inadvertently, party to creating a culture of secrecy around the governments use of surveillance tools, said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a reaction shared by several civil liberties groups.

[Read the courts order; Read the courts list of cases]

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips, whose office prosecutes federal and local crimes in the District, declined to comment beyond what the office has said in court filings.

In filings, prosecutors wrote that they agreed in principle that surveillance applications and orders did not necessarily need to be permanently sealed. They also proposed making public some details from a small sample of the 235 applications from 2012 in cases that have ended.

[Constitutionality of StingRay use by D.C. police is challenged]

Prosecutors said they would unseal information such as what type of crime was being investigated, but not what agency sought the order, specifics about the case, or material that would identify individuals, targeted numbers, accounts or service providers.

If the procedure here goes well, it may set an important precedent other courts can follow, said Orin S. Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department lawyer specializing in computer crimes.

The release responded to a sweeping public-records petition by investigative journalist Jason Leopold of Vice News that was joined recently by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. Leopolds 2013 request sought all government electronic surveillance applications and orders in closed investigations that directed private service providers to turn over users call information as well as information related to tracked devices, stored emails or customer records.

The request to unseal records comes as courts increasingly take up cases testing the constitutional limits of law enforcement searches in an electronic era.

Civil liberties groups and advocates for government transparency have raised alarms that new surveillance methods coupled with computing and storage capabilities enable authorities to use laws that date to a copper-wire and telephone exchange world to sweep up vast amounts of digital data to map much of a persons movements and social relationships without a search warrant.

[Supreme Court says police must get warrants for most cellphone searches]

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2014 ruled unanimously that police generally must obtain a warrant to search cellphones. But legal battles continue to work through appellate courts over such questions as whether a warrant is required to collect cellphone information using new technology devices that mimic cell towers. The devices are operated by law enforcement  not communications companies  and can covertly capture a targets phone location and other information in real time.

A Maryland appeals court in March admonished police and prosecutors for deceiving courts by using the 1986 law to justify secretly deploying the tower-mimicking equipment, which are called cell-site simulators and branded under names including StingRay, Triggerfish and Hailstorm.

Police seeking a surveillance order under the statute must tell a court only how the information theyre after is relevant to an investigation. The legal threshold for getting a search warrant is higher and requires law enforcement to show a judge they have reason to believe that a particular crime has been committed.

The court said using the simulators without first getting a search warrant amounted to constitutionally intrusive conduct.

[A Maryland court is the first to require a warrant for covert cellphone tracking]

Courts in recent years have also questioned police requests to use the surveillance orders to collect numbers such as passwords that are dialed after a phone call is connected.

Leopolds request to unseal records is an attempt to find out how often and in what kinds of cases law enforcement asks to track electronic data and to read the facts law enforcement provide to explain why the tracking was warranted.

Information that has emerged underscored how murky the answer is. In a court hearing Friday, prosecutors said that based on a preliminary assessment from the court, applications under the 1986 law quadrupled in the District from 2012 to 2013 alone, climbing from 137 applications to 564. Howells order Wednesday said that upon more detailed review, the court found 235 applications in 2012, and it did not address how many were filed the following year.

Nationwide between 2004 and 2013, the use of such orders by Justice Department agencies climbed sevenfold, to more than 42,000, department records show.

Jeffrey Louis Light, the attorney for Leopold, said that while all sides in the case have agreed that surveillance requests should not be kept secret indefinitely, they rarely become public.

Courts do not file or docket them electronically in any uniform way to help track or identify them. In Houston, for example, surveillance requests are maintained separately from regular criminal and civil dockets, filed on paper, sealed in paper envelopes and tucked away in a vault somewhere . . . so it would difficult to find them even if someone wanted to, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen W. Smith, a longtime advocate for greater openness.

Likewise, the Alexandria division of the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria keeps a running list of case numbers for the surveillance requests that is only available in person at the clerks office or upon written request with payment of copying fees, the office said.

The existence of the running list surfaced in a 2013 appeals court order that arose out of a case in which three individuals challenged a government attempt to get their Twitter records.

[Government can get records from Twitter for WikiLeaks probe, judge rules]

Also, some of the only people outside government who know of the orders  the targets of the investigation  often do not have a motivation or the means to unseal the orders.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamela S. Satterfield said the government continues to view Leopolds request as overbroad and had not taken a position yet on whether the First Amendment or other law required the unsealing of the court documents he requested.

Still, prosecutors and the courts first step in the case is a fantastic and welcome sign of progress toward greater transparency in the courts, said Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Unions speech, privacy and technology project.

Added Kerr: If the government is willing to cooperate, its a positive sign. Theres no downside, and at least some upside.
[September 21, 2016] Kalray Works with Automobile Giants to put its MPPA Manycore Processor into Self-Driving Vehicles





Kalray to demonstrate its processor technology at the Autosens Connected Car conference BRUSSELS, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kalray, a world leader in manycore processors, used its participation today at the Autosens connected car conference to showcase its Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) processors for autonomous vehicles. In order to deliver passengers safely to their destinations, self-driving vehicles need microprocessors that are both powerful and reliable, ensuring faultlessly high levels of performance and safety. With a determinist architecture and extremely low latency, Kalray's MPPA is particularly well-equipped for use in autonomous vehicles. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160203/329978LOGO Kalray has begun working with some of the automotive industry' key manufacturers to put its MPPA technology at the heart of the electronics systems of their new fleets of self-driving vehicles. Because the MPPA processor brings together a rare combination of high performance, guaranteed safety and low power consumption, these vehicles are able to perform multiple, diverse tasks in parallel, without sacrificing safety or performance. Kalray's processor performs the following tasks:



sensor fusion

deep learning

network security "We are enthusiastic about introducing our embedded processing technology into the domain of autonomous vehicles," said Stephane Cordova, director of the Embedded Business Unit at Kalray. "It is important that self-driving cars be equipped with the most reliable and highest-performing technology and Kalray is confident that it can provide an unparalleled solution for automotive companies developing autonomous vehicles." Kalray will be showcasing its MPPA technology throughout the Autosens event with a live Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) demonstration.

About Kalray

Kalray Inc., is a fabless semiconductor company and pioneer in manycore processor solutions. Its innovative MPPA architecture delivers real-time processing solutions to the domains of data center infrastructure and embedded technology. To learn more about Kalray and its technology, visit: www.kalrayinc.com Press Contact:

Andrea Busch

Marketing & Communications, Kalray

[email protected]

+33 6 50 27 47 52







[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
After years of budget cuts and tensions between officials and community advocates, Virginias largest library system is trying to reboot itself with a new director and a yet-to-be-written strategic plan.

Were coming out of a difficult time for our system, said Karrie Delaney, the recently elected chair of a 12-member library board that has several newly appointed trustees. This is the change that people have been waiting for.

Jessica Hudson, 30, was hired as Fairfax Countys library director after a search that stretched for more than a year and included several applicants turning down the job or withdrawing from consideration.

[Wanted: Library director able to fix problems in Virginias largest system]

Hudson began her $160,000-a-year position in June, after two years spent running the library system in Contra Costa County, Calif., which has a population slightly smaller than Fairfaxs 1.1 million residents. Her first library directors job was in Tehama County, Calif., where she spent 11 months in 2011 before heading the library system in Nevada City, Calif., from December 2011 to April 2014.

In Fairfax, Hudson finds herself negotiating a sea of doubts and expectations as she attempts to restore faith in a 22-branch system that has seen declines in library-card holders and annual visits. Her goal, she said, is to bring Fairfax libraries further into the digital reading era while preserving the traditional print book model that many residents still treasure.

Were going to have to make sure that whatever areas of growth that we focus on are ones that have really good impact for us, Hudson said. Were not going to have a ton more money in these next few budget years, so we need to be able to prioritize things.

After the 2008 recession, county spending on libraries dropped from about $33 million a year to about $28 million. Last year, county officials added a one-time infusion of $2.6 million for kiosks and other improvements.

The reductions have meant shorter library hours and less money to buy new books, which in turn may have caused a dip in library usage.

[Where are the books? Libraries under fire as they shift from print to digital]

Today there are about 50,000 fewer library-card holders in Fairfax County than in 2013, even as the countys population has increased by about 10,000 residents. The number of total library visits has dropped by about 493,000 since 2013, to roughly 4.7 million last year. Library officials attribute part of that decline to the closure of the Pohick Regional Library in Burke last September for renovations that are scheduled to be finished in March.

This month, the Library Board of Trustees released a report on the system that was based on surveys of residents, library personnel and elected officials. The document is supposed to lay the foundation for the strategic plan that will be developed in coming months.

Among other things, residents expressed a desire for more childrens reading programs, more laptop and tablet computers, and better services for non-native English speakers, the report said.

At the same time, county library officials appear at odds with one another over whether the system should focus on its traditional print model or a model with fewer books on shelves, more digital reading options and more space inside libraries for other community uses.

The report captures the tension that has gripped the system in recent years, characterizing some advocates who have vehemently opposed weeding out outdated books from library shelves as a bullying force within the system, while calling library officials defensive and individualistic, rather than inclusive and collaborative.

Stakeholder groups are more frequently in opposition of each other than in agreement, the report reads. Leadership is needed at all levels.

[As Fairfax library collection shrinks, citizens demand audits, more funding]

Bursting with enthusiasm, Hudson hopes to address that void.

She plans to build on some technological improvements made to the system in recent years, including the addition of 3-D printers, as a way to make the library experience more appealing to tech-savvy users. She said that she also wants to explore the idea of purchasing more laptops and tablets, while leasing more books instead of buying them, to save on costs.

Though Hudson did not rule out program cuts in the future, she said she intends to be strategic about where they are made.

I prefer as much as possible to try and spread out budgetary cuts so were having impact but its not so painful for any one particular group, Hudson said. Every budget dollar that we have goes toward some value for someone.

Longtime library advocates said they are still unsure about the new director and even whether a fresh strategic plan is a good idea.

Everybody wants her to succeed, said Dennis K. Hays, head of Fairfax Library Advocates, a group of county residents pushing for more library funding. We want her to be successful here and do well, but not at the cost of changing how the library operates.
ILLINOIS

Chicago pledges 1,000 more police

Chicagos police department will add nearly 1,000 new positions over the next two years, its superintendent announced Wednesday, saying it will help the city deal with a dramatic increase in shootings and homicides. But it isnt clear where the money will come from in a city that is grappling with financial woes that threaten basic services.

Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at a news conference that he asked for additional officers and Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered. The department presented a plan, which will start in January 2017, to add 516 new officers, 92 field-training officers, 200 detectives, 112 sergeants and 50 lieutenants. The department has about 12,500 officers; Johnson said vacancies will be filled in addition to the new hires.

Chicago has seen a dramatic rise in the number of shootings and homicides this year. In August alone, there were 90 homicides, marking the first time in two decades that there have been that many in a single month. Overall, the city has recorded more than 500 homicides this year  higher than all of 2015  and is on pace to climb past the 600-homicide mark for the first time since 2003. There have also been more than 2,500 shooting incidents so far this year, about 700 more than in the same period last year.

 Associated Press

FLORIDA

Informant released early from prison

A top informant who federal prosecutors credit with leading to multiple arrests and indictments of organized crime figures won a bid Wednesday to be released early from prison.

Gov. Rick Scott (R) and the three members of the Florida Cabinet, in a move that one elected official called unprecedented, voted unanimously to cut short a 24-year sentence for Kevin William Bonner.

Bonner has been behind bars for a string of armed robberies of dry-cleaning stores, but federal prosecutors said he was a crucial witness over a nine-year period in cases that helped authorities in Florida, New York and New Jersey dismantle parts of the Gambino crime family.

This included the successful prosecution of suspected Gambino member Ronald Ronnie One Arm Trucchio and cases pursued against John A. Junior Gotti, the son of one of the most notorious mobsters in the United States, John Gotti.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Trezevant and a former FBI agent who worked in Tampa told Scott that Bonner never participated in any violent crimes.

Bonners attorney, Carter Anderson, said that within 60 days after being released from prison he will remain in the program and be given a new identity and a job in a new location.

Under Florida law, the governor can commute a prison sentence if the decision is also supported by at least two other elected members of the three-member Florida Cabinet.

 Associated Press

NORTH CAROLINA

Magistrates can refused to marry same-sex couples

A federal judge has dismissed a challenge to a North Carolina law that says magistrates with religious objections can refuse to marry same-sex couples.

The judge ruled the three couples who brought the case  two gay and one interracial  lacked legal standing to sue and lacked evidence showing they were harmed directly by the law that took effect in June 2015.

North Carolina and Utah are the only states currently enforcing such religious-recusal laws. About 5 percent of North Carolinas magistrates have filed recusal notices, which prevent them from officiating at all marriages  gay and heterosexual  for at least six months. The law also allows some court clerks to decline to issue marriage licenses because of any sincerely held religious objection.

The plaintiffs argued they could sue because some taxpayer money was being used for travel expenses for other magistrates to come to McDowell County, where all the magistrates had recused themselves. But U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn wrote that they didnt point to any specific funds appropriated by the legislature to implement the laws alleged unconstitutional purpose.

The couples lawyers filed a notice Wednesday saying they will appeal Tuesdays ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

 Associated Press

County approves settlement in Bland case: Leaders of a Texas county have approved a $1.8 million settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of Sandra Bland, who died in jail days after being arrested last year. Waller County commissioners on Wednesday formally approved the Houston-area countys portion of the settlement. An overall $1.9 million settlement was disclosed by Bland family attorneys last week. Authorities have said that Bland, who was from the Chicago area, killed herself three days after being stopped by a white Texas trooper for a minor traffic offense. Trooper Brian Encinia was later fired and charged with misdemeanor perjury related to Blands arrest.

Four bodies found at Michigan home: The bodies of two young children and two teenagers were found at a Detroit-area home early Wednesday after a man called 911 to report that he had killed them, police said. Two girls, ages 4 and 6, were asphyxiated in a car using exhaust, while a 17-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man were fatally shot, Dearborn Heights police Lt. Michael Krause said. A woman was shot and stabbed but is in stable condition and is expected to survive, police said. A man is in custody but has not been charged.

 From news services
Itongadol.-In an attempt to tout its military prowess on Wednesday, Iran threatened to "turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust" during a parade of the Islamic Republic\s armed forces in Tehran.

Iran marked the anniversary of its 1980 invasion by Iraq by parading its latest ships and missiles and telling the United States not to meddle in the Gulf.

At a parade in Tehran, shown on state TV, the military displayed a wide array of long-range missiles, tanks, and the Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system.

In a reference to Iran\s arch-foe Israel, a banner on one military truck shown on state TV read,: "If the leaders of the Zionist regime make a mistake then the Islamic Republic will turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust."

Irans military chief of staff Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri said at the parade that the $38 million, 10-year defense aid package granted to Israel by the United States makes Iran more determined to strengthen its military.

The criminal move [by the United States] to sign an agreement to present a supportive military package to the Zionist regime is a desperate attempt to protect the security vacuum of the regime and makes us more determined to increase our military power, Baqeri said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

At the port of Bandar Abbas on the Gulf, the navy showed off 500 vessels, as well as submarines and helicopters, at a time of high tension with the United States in the strategic waterway.

US officials say there have been more than 30 close encounters between US and Iranian vessels in the Gulf so far this year, over twice as many as in the same period of 2015.

On September 4, a US Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after an Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast-attack craft came within 100 yards (91 meters) of it in the central Gulf, at least the fourth such incident in less than a month, US Defense Department officials said.

"We tell the Americans that it\s better that the capital and wealth of the American people should not be wasted on their inappropriate and detrimental presence in the Persian Gulf," said Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Tasnim news site quoted him as saying: "If they want to extend their reach and engage in adventurism they should go to the Bay of Pigs"  a reference to the location of a botched US attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1961.

In Tehran, the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, declared that Iran wanted peace.

But he also said Iran\s lessons in the 1980-88 war against Iraq now served as a guide for "our brothers in faith" in Syria, "Palestine," Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Bahrain, a checklist of countries where Iran has political, religious or military allies.

The Russian-supplied missile defense system on show in Tehran was deployed last month around Iran\s underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow. Enrichment at the site, around 100 km (60 miles) south of Tehran, has stopped since the implementation in January of Iran\s agreement with world powers to curb its nuclear program in exchange for an easing of sanctions.

Also on display was the Qadr H missile, which has a range of 2,000 km, according to state TV. Iran\s ballistic missile program has been criticized by the West, and the US Treasury imposed sanctions on two Iranian companies in March because of their alleged ties to it.

The Russian-supplied missile defense system on show in Tehran was deployed last month around Iran\s underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow. Enrichment at the site, around 100 km (60 miles) south of Tehran, has stopped since the implementation in January of Iran\s agreement with world powers to curb its nuclear program in exchange for an easing of sanctions.

Also on display was the Qadr H missile, which has a range of 2,000 km, according to state TV. Iran\s ballistic missile program has been criticized by the West, and the US Treasury imposed sanctions on two Iranian companies in March because of their alleged ties to it.
IRAN

Airbus gets permission from U.S. for plane sale

Airbus on Wednesday became the first airplane manufacturer to get U.S. government permission to sell aircraft to Iran in the wake of last years nuclear accord, getting final approval for a 17-plane sale that is part of a larger $25 billion deal.

The European companys announcement showed that the outgoing administration of President Obama is honoring the economic terms of the nuclear pact. The next administration, however, may change that equation for Airbus and U.S.-based Boeing, which has its own deal with Iran on the line.

Though based abroad, Airbus needed the approval of the U.S. Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control for the deal because at least 10 percent of Airbus components are of American origin.

Airbus applied for two licenses to cover its deal to ensure the fast delivery of some of the aircraft, spokesman Justin Dubon said. The license announced Wednesday covers the first 17 planes involved in the deal, he said.

In January, Iran Air signed agreements to buy 118 planes from Airbus, estimated to be worth about $25 billion.

Irans nuclear deal with world powers, which limits its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions, specifically allowed for the purchase of aircraft and parts.

 Associated Press

EGYPT

Boat capsizes, killing

at least 42 migrants

A boat carrying African migrants headed to Europe capsized Wednesday off the Mediterranean coast near the Egyptian city of Alexandria, killing at least 42 people, Egyptian authorities said.

Alaa Osman, an official in Beheira province, said the migrants were from several African countries. He said that 155 people had been rescued but that bodies were still being pulled from the water.

Egypts official Middle East News Agency said the boat was carrying 600 people when it sank.

Thousands of illegal migrants have made the dangerous sea voyage across the Mediterranean in recent years, fleeing war and poverty, mostly via lawless Libya. Thousands have drowned.

The number of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Europe has increased significantly in the

past year, the European Unions border agency said this month. More than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September, compared with 7,000 in the

same period last year, Frontex said.

 Associated Press

IRAQ

Finance chief ousted amid economic crisis

Iraqs parliament dismissed the finance minister after a

no-confidence vote Wednesday, a move that risks further upsetting the countrys precarious economic situation.

Hoshyar Zebari, a former foreign minister and a prominent Kurdish politician, was ousted after weeks of political wrangling over corruption allegations and accusations of misuse of funds. Zebari has denied wrongdoing.

Zebari played a key role in securing a badly needed $5.34 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund

in July. An additional $18 billion could be unlocked, but each step will take longer to implement without a finance minister.

Zebari is the second minister to be dismissed by parliament, which last month voted to fire the defense minister. In July, the prime minister accepted the resignation of the interior minister after a deadly bombing.

Like other oil-reliant countries, Iraqs economy has been hit

hard by plummeting prices since 2014, forcing the government to introduce austerity measures.

 Associated Press

Libya resumes oil exports from key port: Libyas official news agency said the country has resumed oil exports from a terminal seized by troops loyal to a powerful eastern military commander. LANA reported that tankers loaded with crude departed from the Ras Lanuf terminal. Forces commanded by Gen. Khalifa Hifter this month seized Ras Lanuf and two other terminals from a militia aligned with the U.N.-backed unity government in Tripoli. Hifter and authorities in eastern Libya reject the U.N.-brokered government.

Rift Valley fever kills 21 in Niger: Health workers in western Niger are racing to contain an outbreak of Rift Valley fever that has killed at least 21 people the past month, an aid agency said. The contagious disease, which is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes or close contact with contaminated animals, has infected 52 people in Nigers western region of Tahoua since August, the Health Ministry said.

 From news services
Like it or not, the decision we make in this Novembers election will be a choice on behalf of the entire world. How we vote will determine whether the forces of democracy, openness and religious tolerance remain strong, or whether our country throws in its lot with tribalism, prejudice and authoritarianism.

This sounds like melodrama. It isnt. And while it may ring familiar  citizens of other countries always tell us how important our electoral verdicts are to them  Donald Trump requires us to make a judgment more monumental than any we have faced in our lifetimes.

This is the underlying import of President Obamas speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, which may prove to be one of the most important of his presidency. He spoke of a growing contest between authoritarianism and liberalism, and he was not referring to the L-word we fight about here at home, but to the philosophy of free expression, entrepreneurialism and participatory decision-making that has long been our countrys hallmark. Its the philosophy that most Americans, conservatives included, honor.

Obama cast the matter this way: We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.

He criticized a crude populism  sometimes from the far left, but more often from the far right  which seeks to restore what they believe was a better, simpler age free of outside contamination.

And lest anyone miss that he was talking not only about political currents in Europe and elsewhere but also about Trump, he added this: Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself.

Obamas critics have every right to question whether his policies may have hastened this moment of decision. In a normal election, contention over Obamas approach to foreign affairs would be central to our debate.

But this is not, in any way, a normal election. Conservatives who have problems with Obama or Hillary Clinton but share their understanding of the countrys democratic obligations need to recognize that allowing Trump to win would strengthen the autocratic Vladimir Putin in Russia and the far right in Europe with which he is now allied. A Trump victory would also empower violent extremists in the Islamic world that want nothing more than for the United States to cast every Muslim as its enemy.

And it would be a decision in favor of what Obama called the strongman, a top-down model, rather than strong, democratic institutions.

The fact that Trump has been so verbally chummy with Putin should be a key issue in this election. And this underscores the unusual importance of Trumps making his tax returns public, as have all recent candidates. Americans need to know definitively whether he is financially entangled with foreign interests hostile to the United States and to our values, including Russian oligarchs.

There was a second level to Obamas U.N. speech that should affect our thinking after this election is over. After issuing an enthusiastic defense of an open global economy, he was careful not to dismiss those who have risen up in protest against its injustices. He argued that those trumpeting the benefits of globalization have ignored inequality within and among nations and that the existing path to global integration requires a course correction.

He forcefully called for strengthening labor unions, echoed Pope Francis in criticizing a soulless capitalism that benefits only the few and insisted that efforts to curb the excesses of capitalism were designed not to punish wealth, but to prevent repeated crises that can destroy it.

I do not expect conservatives to rally to this part of his case, although I would like them to take more seriously the idea that preserving the very aspects of the system they revere requires more egalitarian public policies and a clear acknowledgment of capitalisms limits.

This, however, represents the sort of healthy quarrel that people of goodwill in free nations can have with each other after the immediate threat that Trump represents to the democratic left, right and center alike has been turned back.

I know it asks a great deal of my conservative friends not only to oppose Trump but also to support Clinton. But she is the only person standing between us and a United States that abandons our shared commitment to the ideals of inclusion, toleration and, yes, democracy itself.

Read more from E.J. Dionnes archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
What a moment for President Obama to deliver his valedictory address to the United Nations on Tuesday  defending the liberal international order at a time when its under severe stress around the world.

Obamas speech was preceded by some sickening reminders of how global security is fraying: The day before, a Syrian, or perhaps Russian, airstrike had ravaged a U.N. aid convoy trying to relieve Aleppo; over the weekend, a suspected lone-wolf terrorist had tried to slaughter innocents in the New York area; three days before, errant American bombs had incinerated a camp of Syrian soldiers and, in the process, torched a fragile cease-fire.

Amid this disordered world, Obama displayed his sterling assets: his idealism, moral clarity and calm intellect. But those good qualities seemed unequal this past week to containing the bad forces that are loose in the world. As this gifted but sometimes vexed leader prepares to leave office, the world seems more disordered than when he arrived. He has been a creature of light at a time when the world has been darkening.

Obamas address was personal and polyphonous: One part was a campaign speech, touting the progress that weve made these last eight years and criticizing crude populism, an obvious reference to Donald Trump. Another part could have been delivered in a Bible-study class, arguing against a world of cynical self-interest and proposing instead that his audience of hardened global political leaders become, echoing Martin Luther King Jr., co-workers with God.

Through the speech, you could hear early soundings of the memoir he must already be starting to compose in his head. He spoke of his multiracial background and his rise to power as evidence that our identities do not have to be defined by putting someone else down. He might have been arguing with the gloomy philosopher Thomas Hobbes when he insisted that each individual or nation can choose to reject those who appeal to our worst impulses and embrace those who appeal to our best.

Discussing the Middle East sinkhole he tried so hard to escape, but that ended up swallowing much of his foreign-policy attention, he was remarkably frank: So much of the collapse in order has been fueled [by] leaders . . . resorting to persecuting political opposition, or demonizing other religious sects, [or] by narrowing the public space to the mosque. Obama said out loud many of the feelings Jeffrey Goldberg attributed to him in his famous Atlantic article.

The centerpiece of the speech was Obamas discussion of the liberal international order. This has become a kind of code-phrase for the American internationalism and global leadership that shaped the decades after 1945. Obama described deep fault lines that have emerged in this structure and societies that are now filled with uncertainty, and unease, and strife.

Rather than simply defending the old regime, Obama rightly argued for a course correction in globalization, so that it is perceived as fairer and more inclusive. Escape, which Trump and others sometimes suggest, is not an option. We cannot unwind integration any more than we can stuff technology back into a box, Obama argued.

The answer is better jobs, higher wages and freer markets around the world. Listening to this change agenda, I found myself wishing that Obama had found the vision and political leverage to get it started four years ago, when there was more time.

The weakening of the old American-led order has been accompanied by the rise of a bullying (but weak) Russia and a strong China. Obama took on both challenges directly, arguing that recent power grabs in Ukraine and the South China Sea will ultimately backfire. Dreams of restored, neo-imperial Russia may be popular there, but they will ultimately diminish its stature and make its borders less secure. And China will lose security, rather than gain it, through militarization of a few rocks and reefs.

Good for Obama, too, in pushing back against Russian propaganda about the evils of U.S. pro-democracy campaigns. The people of Ukraine did not take to the streets because of some plot imposed from abroad. They took to the streets because their leadership was for sale and they had no recourse. This was blunt, undiplomatic language  and much-needed.

Obama didnt talk much about the hard power that would be necessary to roll back recent gains for the autocrats and restore a liberal global order. Such a policy  lets call it Obama Heavy  would be the challenge for a President Hillary Clinton, if she can get past the finish line first in November.

Obama will leave behind the right ideas for restoration of an American-led order but sadly, also, the inescapable fact of its decline during his presidency.

Read more from David Ignatiuss archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
John Koskinen, commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, is sworn in before testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 21. (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg News)

Impeachment is among the most severe and solemn powers Congress has, right up there with declaring war. Not since 1876 has an executive-branch appointee been impeached, and not in the history of the republic has Congress impeached an executive-branch official below the Cabinet level.

Now, Republicans in Congress would change that. On Wednesday, they wheeled out the sacred tool of impeachment  weeks before an election  for the purpose of smearing an honorable public servant, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in service of a lie.

The IRS has been abusing taxpayers and illegally targeting conservatives and getting away with it, Rep. John Fleming, a Republican Senate candidate in Louisiana and leader of the House effort to impeach Koskinen, says in a new radio ad. The head of the IRS ordered 24,000 emails erased before Congress could review them. . . . Im fighting back with an impeachment vote against the head of the IRS.

There are just a few wee problems with the Republicans logic. The targeting of conservative groups ended in 2013. The Treasury Departments inspector general, originally a Republican appointee, reported no evidence of political motivation in the targeting. The Justice Department, too, found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives and no evidence that any official attempted to obstruct justice. The official responsible for the targeting resigned before Koskinen came to the IRS at the end of 2013. And the same IG said last year that no evidence was uncovered that any IRS employees had been directed to destroy or hide information from Congress, the DOJ, or [the IG].

House Speaker Paul Ryan, eager to avoid the spectacle of the House voting to impeach an innocent man based on false charges without a proper hearing, got impeachment advocates to settle for Wednesdays hearing in which Koskinen testified before the House Judiciary Committee. But that hardly improved matters: To say this impeachment inquiry is a kangaroo court would be an insult to marsupials.

The hearing was called without the usual protocol of a vote of the House authorizing an investigation. The accused was not represented by counsel or given the right to present evidence. He was even denied access to the evidence the House Oversight Committee amassed that forms the basis of the charges against him.

Even the kangaroos on the Judiciary court were denied the secret evidence behind the bogus charges. Does the committee majority have access to the unedited transcripts of the interviews conducted by the Oversight Committee? Democrat Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) asked the committees chairman, Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).

We do not think so, Goodlatte replied.

If they lacked evidence, Republicans on the panel compensated with hysteria.

We expect this kind of behavior from dictatorships, announced Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.). It represents a direct attack on freedom of religion  excuse me. It represents a direct attack on freedom of speech and, thus, an attack on our Constitution and our democracy.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) saw a tyrannical abuse of power . . . that goes to the very heart of the rule of law in this republic that so many lying out in Arlington National Cemetery died to preserve.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) took the unusual tack of accusing Koskinen of refusing to testify even as he sat there testifying: You circled the wagons and clammed up, and you took the Fifth, and you destroyed evidence and betrayed the country.

Rather than join in the wild accusations, several Democrats on the panel chose instead to ask Koskinen about Donald Trumps taxes  a line of questioning that brought an objection from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) because it was outside the scope of this hearing.

The chairman let Issa know that he couldnt tell the Democrats which questions to ask; even a kangaroo court has some standards.

Theres no dispute that Koskinen misinformed lawmakers in 2014 when he said that all evidence had been preserved relevant to the targeting. In fact, IRS workers a few months earlier had destroyed backup tapes that contained relevant emails. Koskinen says he didnt know that at the time. The IG spent a year investigating the matter and attributed the erasure to bureaucratic errors, finding no evidence that the IRS and its employees purposely erased the tapes in order to conceal responsive e-mails from the Congress.

But Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of those leading the charge to impeach Koskinen, doesnt believe that.

Thats just a coincidence? he asked Koskinen on Wednesday about the erasures. That just happened by chance?

Jordan is entitled to his beliefs and his conspiracy theories, even if they run contrary to the evidence. But when it comes to the awesome power of impeachment, the burden of proof should be higher than wild speculation.

Twitter: @Milbank

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Cuban President Raul Castro, right, lifts up the arm of President Obama at the conclusion of their joint news conference in Havana. (Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press)

Regarding the Sept. 17 editorial Profits for the Castro regime:

One of the many lessons learned from our history with Cuba is that the economic and social isolation championed by the United States sent the then-fledgling Castro government straight into the arms of the Soviet Union. Perhaps that alliance was bound to happen, but our attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro and isolate the island nation hastened it. What is past is prologue; lets look at the present and to the future.

Let us not overlook the 50-year relationship Russia has had with Cuba. Would the editorial board have us send Cuba back into the arms of Russia or allow the seeds of radical Islam to grow in the rich Cuban soil? Would the editorial board have the U.S. government engage in more textbook regime change, something at which our country isnt very successful? Or would it support the United States providing foreign aid to Cuba?

President Obama is playing the hand he was dealt. Cubas future and its next generation of leaders are in transition. Clearly, economic freedoms and human rights still must be advanced.

U.S. citizens are participating side by side with our government, making foreign-policy decisions with their feet and pocketbooks. Its too bad such a scheme cannot be employed more often around the world.

Philip A. Bangert, Washington

Fifty years of economic and diplomatic isolation of Cuba has been a huge failure. Kudos to President Obama for being brave and wise enough to open travel and commerce to Cuba.

The editorial board took issue with a $50 visa fee Americans pay to travel to Cuba and the $8 million in U.S. revenue it generates for the Castro regime. Where is the outrage over the $140 visa fee 2 million Americans paid last year to travel to communist China? It is worth acknowledging that China is as oppressive on human rights as Cuba and is more of a political, economic and military threat than Cuba.

When I went to Vietnam on a bicycle trip in 2000, the communist government had just started to allow individuals to open up little businesses. As I traveled through the country, I talked with many young Vietnamese people. They did not want to talk about the war we had decades earlier; they wanted to know about life in the United States. The human exchange that takes place with travel fuels mutual understanding.

We should not expect our opening with Cuba to lead to the end of communist rule. We have opened travel and trade with China, Russia and Vietnam, and they are still repressive governments. Why the double standard with a small country such as Cuba that poses no military threat to us?

Frank Walter, Washington
The 2008 financial collapse was eight years ago this month  and the big banks are back to their old shenanigans.

Venerable Wells Fargo has engaged in behavior that would have made a robber baron blush: It pressured low-wage workers with unrealistic sales targets, so these workers created 2 million bogus accounts over five years, causing customers to be hit with fees and damage to their credit ratings. Some 5,300 workers have been fired and $185 million in penalties assessed to the bank, but not a single high-level executive has been sacked or even forced to give back the tens of millions of dollars in pay earned based on the fraud.

When Wells Fargo chairman and chief executive John Stumpf sat before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, he represented a bank too big to fail, too sprawling to manage and too arrogant to own up to its failures.

Cant Wells Fargo take back some of the executive payouts?

Im not an expert in compensation, Stumpf said.

Would he commit to investigate whether the fraud began in earlier years?

I cant tell you that today.

Did he learn about the fraud before reading about it in the Los Angeles Times?

I dont remember the exact time frame.

Did the bogus accounts hurt customers credit scores?

I dont know the algorithms.

Stumpf informed the senators that what Wells Fargo did was not a scam, disputed that this is a massive fraud, and said he had no idea why people did this.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) encouraged Stumpf to make certain that the employees are not the scapegoat for behavior at higher levels.

Stumpf repeated that the 5,300, for whatever reason, they were dishonest, and Im not scapegoating.

The CEO even defended his decision not to tell investors earlier about the widespread fraud, because it was not a material event.

If high-level bankers didnt go to prison for the subprime hijinks that caused the 2008 crash, its a safe bet that none will in the Wells Fargo scandal, either. But if arrogance were a criminal offense, Stumpf would be looking at a life sentence.

The banks fraud, and the executives insolence, may have one salutary result: It takes off the agenda any plan to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the post-2008 regulatory creations and a top target of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. The Los Angeles city attorney and the Los Angeles Times may deserve more credit for exposing the wrongdoing, but the audacity at Wells Fargo shows that the industry isnt about to police itself.

Stumpf also managed to create rare bipartisan unity on the Banking Committee  in condemnation of his actions. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) was stunned, Dean Heller (R-Nev.) compared him to Sgt. Schultz of Hogans Heroes, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) called the actions despicable, and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) told Stumpf: This isnt cross-selling, this is fraud.

Populist firebrand Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the Wells Fargo chief should resign, return his payouts and be subject to criminal investigations. If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the crash drawer, theyd probably be looking at criminal charges for theft, she said. But you kept your job, you kept your multimillion-dollar bonuses and you went on television to blame thousands of $12-an-hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich.

Stumpf blinked rapidly while listening to his accusers, as if sending Morse-code distress signals. His right hand, when he raised it to take the oath, was heavily bandaged. He offered obligatory statements of remorse (I am deeply sorry that weve failed to fulfill on our responsibility. . . . I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices. . . . We should have done more, sooner).

But how is it fair for executives to take home millions after thousands of workers defrauded customers?

Its a good question, Stumpf allowed.

Why didnt he bring in somebody to investigate?

Thats a good question.

Why didnt the bank detect the fraud earlier?

Thats a good question.

Answers, however, were hard to come by. Would he recommend taking back some of the $125 million payout to the head of the division that committed the fraud?

Im not on the human resources and compensation committee.

Was she at least fired over this?

No, Carrie [Tolstedt] chose to retire.

Half a dozen times, Stumpf repeated that the 5,300 workers fired were only 1 percent of his workforce  much like an airline executive arguing after a plane crash that 99 percent of his planes landed safely.

A fraud involving only 5,300 people? Every time you say that, you give ammunition to the folks who want to break up the big banks, Jon Tester (D-Mont.) told him.

And heres more ammo: Stumpf, who presided over the whole thing, took home $19.3 million last year.

Twitter: @Milbank

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Whos to blame for the fact that November is just around the corner and Donald Trump is within shouting distance of electoral victory?

The media, of course. Journalistic institutions stand accused of facilitating Trumps rise, through reportorial lassitude or outright connivance with him for the sake of ratings.

The scapegoating reached its reductio ad absurdum in a recent blog post by Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who labeled the media objectively pro-Trump for allegedly ganging up on Hillary Clinton like a high school clique bullying a nerdy classmate because its the cool thing to do. As if her email issue had not been reported first by the decidedly not-pro-Trump Times itself, for the very good reason that its newsworthy.

This is silly. The media have been very tough on Trump, relentlessly so. To cite just one organization, The Post, our David A. Fahrenthold has been terrier-like in pursuit of the damning facts of Trumps phony philanthropy. A Post team published a critical book about the Republican nominee, for heavens sake. Our editorial board produced one of the first on-the-record interviews exposing Trumps disturbingly cavalier view of the United States NATO commitments, then followed it up with a series of scathing opinion pieces.

[Garrison Keillor: What every New Yorker knows about Donald Trump]

And so on and so on; lets count the parade of anti-Trump messages served up by various Emmy winners during Sundays award show, too. But for those indulging in it, media-blaming does have one advantage. It helps avoid a much more relevant, and sobering, question: Why do so many Americans support Trump despite months and months of negative, truthful coverage about him?

To be sure, there has been too much media puffery about Trump, whether unfiltered live coverage of his rallies by cable networks or Jimmy Fallons sickeningly friendly tousling of the Republican candidates hair on The Tonight Show. Journalists were slow to take him seriously at the beginning of the Republican primaries.

The fact remains, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted in an interview with the Times published Sunday: Nobody is confused about the differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. . . . Is she perfect? Of course not. But youve got enough information to make the choice.

What must be going on is that people  an alarmingly large number of people, it seems  back Trump even though they know, or could easily learn, that he is a charlatan, clueless about policy, bizarrely sympathetic to Russias dictator, disturbingly prone to offending women and minorities, and a serial liar to boot.

Trump is benefiting from the political equivalent of jury nullification. This is the well-known phenomenon whereby a jury returns a not guilty verdict despite its awareness that the prosecution has proved its case.

Jurors do this for many reasons, but generally its a form of protest, either against the law that the defendant is alleged to have violated, the system that the prosecution represents, the prosecutions methods  or some combination of these.

[Greg Sargent: Clinton campaign prods media to hold Trump accountable for his debate lies]

1 of 60 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail View Photos The GOP presidential nominee is out on the trail ahead of the general election in November. Caption The GOP presidential nominee is pressing his case ahead of Election Day. Nov. 7, 2016 Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at SNHU Arena in Manchester, N.H. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

American colonists practiced jury nullification when they stood up for press freedom by acquitting journalist John Peter Zenger of seditious libel in 1735, as law professor Doug Linder of the University of Missouri at Kansas City has noted. Nullification was at work in a Washington jurys refusal to convict the popular African American mayor, Marion S. Barry Jr., of the most serious drug-related charges against him in 1990.

In short, jury nullification happens when people regard accusations as an expression of an illegitimate institution or system and seize their momentary power to thwart it  even at the expense of truth, or, as nullifiers would put it, in service of a higher truth.

To be clear: Theres no moral equivalence between a vote for Trump and the admirable instances of jury nullification in U.S. history, such as the Zenger case or the refusal of Northern juries to convict alleged violators of the Fugitive Slave Law.

There is a psychological similarity, however. Trumps campaign is fueled by a sense among his supporters that America is rigged, as the candidate puts it, against people such as them. Like nullifying jurors, they sense a secret-vote opportunity to vent their grievance about this at little or no immediate personal risk.

Against Trump, the press is a particularly ineffective prosecutor, for the obvious reason that mainstream media enjoy so little legitimacy among his followers. Only 14 percent of Republicans express trust and confidence in the media, according to Gallup. The figure for independents, who also lean toward Trump, is 30 percent. In fact, sticking it to the liberal press is probably one of the things his backers enjoy most.

By and large, the American free press has performed its democratic function with respect to Donald Trump  and then some. Instead of carping about the alleged insufficiency of that vetting, the critics should be reflecting on its futility.

Read more from Charles Lanes archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Hillary Clinton has decided its about time she do more talking about Hillary Clinton.

After a year and a half of running for president, the Democratic nominee has concluded that many Americans still do not have a clear understanding of what motivates her or what she would do as president. So in the campaigns home stretch, Clinton is trying to reintroduce herself and her ideas to the country.

Clinton has been unable to break through the cacophony of attacks and counterattacks she and Republican nominee Donald Trump have been yelling at each other. But she tried to do just that here Wednesday with a speech about what she envisions as an inclusive economy in which everyone, including the disabled, has a responsibility to contribute and an opportunity to get ahead.

Clintons objective is twofold: To lift her sagging approval ratings as well as build trust in her agenda and earn a mandate that could help her, should she be elected, govern in a divided Washington.

We were hurting in people not understanding enough about her, still, as long as shes been in the public eye, said Jennifer Palmieri, Clintons communications director. People see so much negativity. . . . Its a lot of destruction, and she felt that people needed to see what she believed the country could aspire to.

Whether the new approach will translate into fewer attacks on Trump remains to be seen. Clinton is drawn to Trump-bashing most days she appears in public. She talks about Trump and tweets about Trump and runs advertisements about Trump. Defining him as unfit for office is at the core of her strategy to win.

Yet Clintons strategists said they believe such messages may not be enough. As David Axelrod, the architect of President Obamas campaigns, put it: The danger of that is if Trump finds a way to normalize himself it can be a trap door.

[As Trump rises in battleground states, Clinton moves to block his path to 270]

Clintons event in Orlando, orchestrated to spotlight people with disabilities, whose livelihoods Clinton vowed would be a vital aspect of my presidency, was a deliberate contrast with Trump, who infamously mocked a disabled reporter last year. Yet Clinton never uttered Trumps name, or even alluded to him, and instead talked about her own vision for the country.

All month, Clinton has tried to sell herself anew. She published a 288-page book, Stronger Together, listing her many policy proposals. Last week in North Carolina, she reflected upon her lifelong commitment to the fight for children and families. And in an address Monday aimed at younger voters  with whom she is particularly struggling to connect  Clinton detailed her plan for debt-free college as well as motivation to right the countrys wrongs.

Even if youre totally opposed to Donald Trump, you may still have some questions about me, Clinton said at Temple University in Philadelphia. I get that. And I want to do my best to answer those questions. When it comes to public service, the service part has always easier for me than the public part.

Still, Clintons swipes at Trump tend to draw the loudest applause and biggest headlines. At Mondays event, when Clinton said, We have to stand up to this hate, the crowd erupted and stopped her mid-thought.

Voters watch Hillary Clinton as she delivers a speech on her commitment to women and families last week in Greensboro, N.C. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

People dont hear anything but what you say about Trump, Palmieri said. If Hillary Clinton gives a speech thats 75 percent about herself and 25 percent about Donald Trump, [the media] cover the part about Donald Trump.

[Clinton is losing some millennial voters to third-party contenders]

It is not simply a problem with the media. Clinton and her campaign have focused so acutely on destroying Trump that Axelrod said they have left a gaping hole in their narrative: Who is she? Why is she running for president? Why should people have trust in her? Why should they feel invested in her candidacy?

Axelrod said Clintons Democratic National Convention was successful in part because the speakers answered those questions. But that was July. The impact of it faded away, he said, and theyve had a hard time sustaining that story.

Polling indicates that many of Clintons economic policies  including paid leave for employees with children or caring for sick family members, as well as increased spending to lower public college tuition and build or improve infrastructure  have widespread support. In this months Washington Post-ABC News poll, 50 percent of registered voters said Clinton is closer to them on the issues, while 41 percent said the same of Trump.

But Clinton is a flawed messenger because of deep character doubts. Just 34 percent of voters said she was honest and trustworthy in the Post-ABC survey, the same share that said the same about Trump.

Both campaigns can definitely influence the narrative about the other candidate, said Republican pollster David Winston. What they struggle to do is get control of their own narrative.

Palmieri said Clintons current series of Stronger Together speeches is designed to articulate her values system and vision in a more literal and deliberate way than she has so far. The effort will continue at next Mondays debate, where Clinton hopes to showcase these ideas before a massive television audience.

[Clinton to call for workplace improvements for the disabled]

The country is so sick of the back-and-forth negativity of the campaign, and I think voters are hungry for her communicating positively about how she wants to lead the country, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg said.

Most Americans by now know that Trump wants to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, deport illegal immigrants and rewrite trade deals. But Clinton lacks a crisp and memorable distillation of her agenda and rationale for her candidacy.

Voters arent going to be able to rattle off her bullet points, said Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic strategist. Still, she said, Were at a point in the campaign where voters want to hear what candidates are going to do  not just whats wrong with your opponent, but why you.

[Clintons challenge: Become a change agent in a year shaped by voter fury]

In such a toxic atmosphere of partisanship, some of Clintons allies are also urging her to take her rhetoric to a higher plane and show how she would find common ground with her adversaries. Former senator Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), the Democratic Partys 2000 vice presidential nominee, said there is a yearning for bipartisan cooperation.

Its conventional wisdom today that negativity wins elections, but it might be a really distinguishing factor if she affirmatively said, Ive got a record that shows I will work across party lines to break the gridlock in Washington, and Im going to focus on this if Im elected,  Lieberman said.

Clintons strategy has implications beyond Election Day, should she win.

If she is able to claim a mandate, as opposed to just skating by because she was considered the least bad of two flawed candidates, she would potentially have leverage with a divided Congress. Its a challenging goal given how much she has framed the election as a referendum on Trump; Clinton risks the result being interpreted as a repudiation of him, rather than a validation of her.

Elections are really contracts between candidates and the American people, and it really matters what the terms of the contract are, said William A. Galston, a policy adviser to former president Bill Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

If you dont say it or you dont say it in a way that people can hear it and remember it, then when you propose it as one of your first pieces of legislation and hope that there will be some resonance in the country, youre likely to be disappointed, Galston said.

Central to Clintons ability to claim a governing mandate, let alone win the election, is to rebuild her trust with voters. One way she is trying to do that is by humanizing herself.

[Clinton is losing some millennial voters to third-party candidates]

Clinton rarely opens up about her Methodist faith, but she talked extensively about it in Kansas City, Mo., a couple weeks ago, and offered humility: Ive made my share of mistakes. I dont know anyone who hasnt.

Then, in a speech in Greensboro, N.C., Clinton talked about her friendship with Janelle Turner, a breast-cancer patient who showed up at a Clinton rally last fall in Iowa holding a sign that read: Thirteenth chemo yesterday. Three more. Hear me roar!

Wouldnt you want to meet the woman behind that sign? Clinton said. Well, I sure did. So we got talking, and weve stayed in touch. She keeps promising me shell see me at the inauguration.

In her address to millennials in Philadelphia, Clinton reflected upon her activist roots and the values she learned from an early mentor, civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman, and their work with the Childrens Defense Fund. She said those values  driving progress by changing both hearts and laws  would shape her presidency.

You want something to vote for, Clinton said, not just against.

Emily Guskin in Washington and John Wagner in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
More than two months after a rump military group and its backers tried to overthrow the elected government of Turkey  bombing the parliament, sending tanks into the streets and only narrowly failing in an attempt to kidnap the president  the Turkish government last week sent Washington its first evidence that an elderly cleric living in rural Pennsylvania was the mastermind of the coup attempt.

If the information persuades the Justice Department, a federal court will decide whether to accede to Turkeys demand that Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam who has resided under self-

imposed exile in the United States for nearly two decades, be sent home to face charges.

Should the Justice Department or the court be unconvinced, or the process take too long, U.S. relations with the Wests most important Muslim-majority ally are likely to hit new lows.

Already, a surge of Turkish anger about reactions of its NATO allies in Europe and the United States to the failed insurrection has challenged the alliances trust and ties. Even as Turkish authorities express incredulity that President Obama has not taken action against Gulen, who has denied any involvement, they have faced widespread condemnation in the West for a vast purge of suspected coup plotters in the government and beyond.

[U.S. is trapped between its allies ambitions in Syria]

Turkey has not seen the support it expected from its Western friends and allies, Omer Celik, Turkeys E.U. affairs minister, said in an interview. They were not standing by us. Last month, in what was widely seen as an attempt to broaden Turkeys options, the countrys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, jetted to Moscow and patched up a lengthy estrangement with Russia.

But Turkish cooperation across a range of issues  from battling the Islamic State to holding back migrants from European shores  is seen as so important to the United States that the administration, despite its early criticism, now appears increasingly willing to tolerate a partner whose commitment to democratic rule of law has become shaky, at best.

In recent weeks, Washington has moved to mollify Ankara by acknowledging that it initially expressed insufficient outrage and concern about the coup attempt. In a trip to Ankara late last month, Vice President Biden toured the rubble-strewn parliament halls, apologized for taking so long to make a solidarity visit and made no mention of the arrests.

The Justice Department has sent a team of lawmakers to Turkey to help formulate the Gulen request, and the State Department has said it welcomes Turkeys cooperation with Russia.

As a result, the worst tensions seemed to have eased. In addition to Bidens visit, Erdogan and Obama met this month at a summit in China of the Group of 20 major world economies, and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommitted to the close military-to-military and strategic relationship between the two countries during a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Friday, the Pentagon said.

[Turkeys Erdogan pivots to Putin as tensions rise with the West]

U.S. officials said they are confident that Turkey remains firmly anchored in the West. They described Erdogans outreach to Moscow, after a sustained period of alienation when Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet that strayed over the Syrian border, as primarily to solidify economic rapprochement with a large and powerful neighbor and perhaps to tweak Washington a bit.

Many here think Turkey has few other realistic choices than the West for ensuring its own security. Underlining the limits of rapprochement with the Kremlin, the Russian Foreign Ministry recently expressed grave concern about Turkeys recent intervention in Syria.

Undoubtedly, the relations with the United States leave a lot to be desired, but if you look at things objectively, Turkey has nowhere else to turn, said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, in Istanbul.

But tensions remain close to the surface. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim last week said that his government needed no democracy lesson from the United States, after the U.S. Embassy issued a relatively mild statement expressing concern at ongoing strife in the southeast. Police there had dispersed demonstrators protesting replacement of 28 town mayors across the heavily Kurdish region with government-appointed trustees.

Yildirim angrily called the statement unacceptable and said all of the mayors had been providing support to Kurdish terrorists. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said that especially the envoys of countries we define as friends and allies do not have the right to make evaluations on this issue.

Murat Esenli, deputy undersecretary responsible for European affairs at the Foreign Ministry, said, We have no problem being criticized, but it has to be constructive criticism.

Erdogan said he thinks Western powers seek his ouster, Turkish officials familiar with his views said. These officials, and those in the Obama administration, spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide candid assessments of the perspectives from both sides.

That impression was only strengthened by the Western response as the attempted coup unfolded, when Obama and other leaders appeared more concerned about the crackdown after the coup effort than the overthrow attempt itself, in which 241 people died.

Since then, authorities have jailed more than 40,000 people and stripped more than 100,000 of their jobs. Turkish leaders say the purges are needed to defeat a subversive conspiracy, while critics say that the roundups are also entrapping innocents without due process.

More broadly, Erdogans vulnerability to a coup suggested a weakness that surprised many Western allies.

What this showed was perhaps the fragility of a number of Turkish institutions . . . that many of us here and many in the government in Turkey had not necessarily expected, Simon Mordue, who leads the European Unions negotiations over potential Turkish membership in the 28-nation bloc, said at a conference in Austria last month.

A number of programs are already under strain. After the coup attempt, Turkey cut an E.U.-funded scholarship program that pays for Turkish citizens to study in Europe. And the State Department suspended a range of exchange programs for the coming school year because of safety concerns.

On the defense front, Western officials worry that the purge of 40 percent of the Turkish militarys senior officers may have diminished the capabilities of NATOs second-largest fighting force, although they insist that counterterrorism cooperation has not been affected. Several European politicians, meanwhile, have said they cannot imagine Turkish membership in the European Union within their lifetimes.

Beyond the immediate fallout from the coup attempt, the strain between the traditional allies is the culmination of growing mutual mistrust during Erdogans 14-year rule, officials on both sides said. Many Western leaders see him as an authoritarian leader who has sharply curtailed civil liberties. For years, Erdogan has oriented Turkey away from its modern secularist history, reaching back toward the Ottoman past for a more Islamist-inspired form of governance.

This really changed the direction of Turkey, resulting in turning its back to the West. Not moving away from it, but turning toward the Muslim world, said Osman Faruk Logoglu, a longtime leader of the opposition Republican Peoples Party.

[Turkish evidence for Gulen extradition predates coup attempt]

Within Turkey, there are deep divisions between secularists and Erdogan supporters. But there is a near-universal belief, even among government critics, that Gulen, the cleric, was behind the coup attempt and that a wide-scale purge of followers of his movement is justified. His organization  a shadowy, conservative force that for years operated in alliance with Erdogan before a rupture in late 2013  had established a foothold inside the military and civil service, analysts say.

Belief that the United States, at the very least, had to have known about the coup attempt in advance is similarly widespread and has led many Turks to echo the anger of their government. Turkey also has demanded that Gulen be detained in the United States while the extradition case is being considered, a request U.S. officials have said they cannot consider until the evidence is fully examined.

Many Turks described a wave of anti-Americanism they said will continue until the U.S. government begins procedures to extradite the Turkish-born Gulen.

People are united against Gulen, not for Erdogan, said Murat Yetkin, editor in chief of the Hurriyet Daily News.

There are some signs that the government may be growing more anxious about the widening rift. A delegation of elected officials representing Erdogans ruling Justice and Development Party visited Washington recently, meeting with members of Congress in an effort to explain Turkeys position but also to restore good relations, said Ravza Kavakci Kan, a lawmaker representing Istanbul.

The U.S. has been our good ally, and we have had our differences, but we dont need any extra tension, she said. We want to be on good terms with everybody.

And when Turkish officials here are pressed, they are more conciliatory than their fierce public rhetoric might suggest. When asked whether Turkey would kick the U.S. military out of its Incirlik Air Base in retaliation for U.S. support of Syrias Kurds, Celik, Turkeys E.U. affairs minister, said that both Turkey and the U.S. sides know well to consider different files separately.

Still, with such tensions, the less tolerance each side has for the other saying, We have options,  said Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey. The danger here is of a miscalculation.

DeYoung reported from Washington. Kareem Fahim in Washington and Zeynep Karatas in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Read more:

Turkey expands its intervention in northern Syria

Hes 77, frail and lives in Pennsylvania. Turkey says hes a coup mastermind.

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Standing for the Arabic word mukawama, meaning resistance, the graffiti was part of a campaign by Kitaeb al-Mosul, or Mosul Brigades, an underground opposition group in the city. (Mosul Brigades)

Standing for the Arabic word mukawama, meaning resistance, the graffiti was part of a campaign by Kitaeb al-Mosul, or Mosul Brigades, an underground opposition group in the city. (Mosul Brigades)

The graffiti that appeared on a wall near the mosque in Mosul where the Islamic State leader declared his caliphate two years ago was a small but symbolic act of rebellion.

The spray-painted letter m  for the Arabic word mukawama, meaning resistance  was part of a campaign by Kitaeb al-Mosul, an underground opposition group in the northern Iraqi city that released a video detailing their efforts this month.

The Islamic State reacted with swift brutality, executing three young men it accused of being involved. The militants released their own video showing the men kneeling in orange jumpsuits before being shot in the head. The letter m was sprayed on the wall behind them, a reference to their alleged crime. A spray can lay on the ground beside them, surrounded by blood.

In recent months, the Islamic State has carried out more arrests and executions such as these in a sign of desperation as it faces the prospect of losing Mosul, according to reports from inside the city.

Mosul is the largest city under Islamic State control and is central to its narrative of having restored the Islamic caliphate. It was less than a month after Mosul fell in June 2014 that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in the mosque there and called on Muslims to follow him.





The recapture of the city would be a significant step toward depriving the Islamic State of its territory and forcing the group back into an insurgency, U.S. and Iraqi officials say. That is only a matter of time, they add.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has pledged to retake Mosul by the end of the year, and the Iraqi air force dropped 7 million leaflets on the city last week telling residents to prepare for the zero hour.

[The force leading the Iraq armys fight against ISIS]

As Iraqi forces  and the U.S. troops advising them  move closer, making the recently recaptured Qayyarah Air Base, 25 miles south of Mosul, a logistical hub for the impending battle, the Islamic State has also been making preparations.

Daesh is weaker in Mosul, but it is using methods of oppression like random arrests to try and show it is still in control, said a representative of Kitaeb al-Mosul. Daesh is an alternative name for Islamic State. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. He described the atmosphere in the city as tense and said the militants were in a state of confusion.

The Islamic State began carrying out mass arrests after the group began its graffiti campaign two months ago, he said.

The militants have constructed new berms around neighborhoods on the north, east and south sides of the city, he said. In some neighborhoods, concrete barricades have been erected, he said, speculating that the militants are trying to isolate neighborhoods because they are concerned that residents may turn against them if Iraqi forces draw near.

Right now they are making arrests with no investigation, in a way they didnt before, said Sheikh Mohammed al-Jarba, a tribal leader from the city, who said he is regularly in touch with people there.

I know they are digging new trenches around the city, he said. Theyve never stopped digging them.

Internet connections to homes in Mosul have been banned over the past two months, as the Islamic State attempts to prevent information on its positions from leaking out. Cell networks have been largely cut for more than a year and a half.

However, some patches of phone network remain, and those with relatives in Mosul occasionally receive updates from their loved ones, allowing some glimpses of life in the city.

There are no accurate estimates of the number of civilians that remain in the city, but the United Nations has said more than a million people could flee Mosul and its surroundings during the offensive. Some Iraqi officials and relatives of residents say that figure could be even higher because thousands of people have arrived in Mosul after offensives in other Islamic State areas.

[We are desperate: Iraqis flee Fallujah, only to find another nightmare]

Atheel al-Nujaifi, the former governor of the province, who is now based in the northern city of Irbil, said the displaced had come from areas including Qayyarah, which was retaken by Iraqi forces this month. Some civilians from largely Sunni areas fear how they will be treated by security forces after an area is retaken; others may have sympathies or allegiances to the group or have simply been fleeing the fighting in any direction they could.

Nujaifi said people had arrived from as far away as Manbij in Syria, which was retaken by U.S.-backed rebel forces a month ago.

The presence of a large number of civilians complicates the offensive, which is expected to rely heavily on coalition air support. The Iraqi government and humanitarian aid agencies are also attempting to prepare for a huge exodus but have warned they lack resources.

One former Mosul resident said the Islamic State has been seizing empty homes to house those displaced, including the house of her grandmother who had left the city.

The number of people has increased a lot, she said, adding that her friends and relatives had said there had been searching campaigns on houses.

They are paranoid, and the number of searches is way more than before, said the woman, who now lives in the Iraqi city of Dahuk and whose name has been withheld for safety reasons.

In the same Islamic State video that shows the execution of the alleged spray-painters, the group also executed three men it accused of spying.

Send your agents and spies; our swords are ready for them and are thirsty for their blood, a militant said, accusing the men of being the eyes of America.

The U.S. military estimates that around 3,000 to 4,500 militants remain in Mosul. Over the past two months, U.S.-led airstrikes have killed 12 Islamic State leaders in Mosul alone, Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the coalition, said in a recent briefing.

These strikes have a disruptive effect on the enemy command and control, which is important in setting conditions for Mosuls liberation, he said.

Some officials said people who have collaborated with Islamic State are attempting to switch sides.

Their own members are trying to deny them, said Abubaker Kbi, the head of the Sunni Awqaf for Mosul  the official representatives for its mosques. Despite the mosques now being Islamic State controlled, he said he is still in contact with people in the city and has heard from Islamic State members who want to leave.

The former resident said that arrests have also singled out former officers who served in the military under Saddam Hussein.

They know that they still might have connections to some people in the military, and they are afraid that they will cooperate with the army or turn against them, she said.

Another resident who fled Mosul but is still in touch with his brother in the city said former officers had been targeted.

One of his distant relatives  a direct relation of a former army officer  had been randomly arrested five days ago, he said.

All the old officers  they are targeting them and their families, he said.

Nujaifi said there are also signs of disarray among Islamic States ranks, with increasing corruption inside the group. Despite a ban on leaving the city, some residents have been able to escape by paying large bribes.

However, many dont have the means to do so. For them, it is a waiting game.

They say even if it means their houses are destroyed, it will be worth it in the end, the woman in Dahuk said. They might be weaker, but Islamic State have a strong fist and they are being harsher than you can imagine.

Read more:

A walk down one of Baghdads most bombed streets

How corruption helped cause one of Baghdads deadliest attacks

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
A group of 75 retired career Foreign Service officers, including ambassadors and senior State Department officials under Republican and Democratic presidents over nearly a half-century, has signed an open letter calling Donald Trump entirely unqualified to serve as President and Commander-in-Chief.

The diplomats said none of us will vote for Trump. While they said not all of them agreed with every decision made by Hillary Clinton, they said they all supported her candidacy.

Because the stakes in this election are so high, the letter said, this is the first time many of us have publicly endorsed a candidate for President.

[Read the diplomats letter on why they will not vote for Donald Trump]

The letter is the latest in an unprecedented number of joint public statements signed by retired high-level government officials and military officers this election cycle. Most have focused on national security, and most have been against Trump.

The most prominent exception was a letter early this month signed by 88 retired generals and other military officials who endorsed Trump as a long overdue course correction in our national security posture.

Last spring, more than 100 Republican national security experts signed a petition, even before Trump won the GOP nomination, saying they would never work for a Trump administration. Last month, 50 more Republicans, including former top aides and Cabinet members for the George W. Bush administration, signed a letter saying Trump would be the most reckless president in American history and that none of them would vote for him.

Most of the diplomats who signed the new letter have never been publicly associated with a political party. In their letter, they wrote that they have proudly represented every President since Richard Nixon as ambassadors or senior State Department officials in Senate-confirmed positions. We have served Republican and Democratic Presidents with pride and enthusiasm.

They had decided to speak out, the signers said, because very simply, this election is different from any election we can recall. Trump, they said, is ignorant of the complex nature of the challenges facing our country, from Russia to China to ISIS to nuclear proliferation to refugees to drugs, but he has expressed no interest in being educated.

The Trump campaign responded on Thursday that the country needs an America First foreign policy.

How terribly weak and ineffective for a bunch of career overseas bureaucrats to send a letter or cable saying they want to keep things exactly as they are now and that theyre rallying around fellow insider Hillary Clinton, the statement said. The world has become a more dangerous place on their watch and they need to step up and own it.

[Putin wants revenge and respect, and hacking the U.S. is his way of getting it]

1 of 60 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail View Photos The GOP presidential nominee is out on the trail ahead of the general election in November. Caption The GOP presidential nominee is pressing his case ahead of Election Day. Nov. 7, 2016 Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at SNHU Arena in Manchester, N.H. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

Although the idea for the letter was initiated by Nelson Cunningham, a former adviser to Democratic administrations, and James Keith, a former ambassador to Malaysia  both of whom now work for the international consulting firm McLarty Associates  many signers said they first saw it as it was widely distributed from friend to friend among the retired foreign policy community.

In interviews, several diplomats expressed broadly divergent reasons for signing. As a normal issue, former ambassador Ryan Crocker said, generals or their civilian equivalent shouldnt be making endorsements. I served six times as ambassador  three Republicans, three times for Democratic administrations  and Im proud of that.

At the same time, looking at this campaign as I do through a national security optic, I am concerned enough to break my established position as nonpartisan, said Crocker, whose ambassadorial posts included Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. I know Hillary Clinton a bit from my time in Afghanistan. I thought she was a terrific boss. Shes smart, focused, she knows how to make decisions. The next president, he said, is going to be dealing with a world of hurt, quite literally.

I dont know Donald Trump, Crocker said. I dont know what hed do. But based on what hes said, I know I dont want to find out. This is scary.

John Maisto, former ambassador to the Organization of American States, Venezuela and Nicaragua, who also served on Bushs National Security Council staff, said the letter was the first time Ive ever done anything like that. Im a registered independent. His reasons, Maisto said, are pretty straightforward  what the letter says.

The Republican candidate, as so many of my Republican friends have said, does not have the qualifications to do the job, across the board. In any way. And the Democratic candidate does have the qualifications. . . . Shes not perfect, but nobody is, Maisto said.

[Trump met his favorite Middle East strongman. What happened next will not surprise you.]

Some said they signed for specific policy reasons. Edward Marks, the Ronald Reagan administrations ambassador to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, said, I am very upset by the fact that Trump as a candidate has formally said he will use torture [and] . . . collective punishment as elements of U.S. policy. Those two pull him outside the normal U.S. political boundaries.

Dan Kurtzer, former ambassador to Egypt and to Israel, said he objected to Republican support for a measure allowing U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments, which President Obama has said he would veto. He said he signed not for the politics part, but literally for the protection that it [the measure] would strip away from U.S. diplomats working overseas.

Others have already publicly indicated a preference for Clinton, including Laura Kennedy, Bushs ambassador to Turkmenistan, who has volunteered for the Clinton campaign. Nicolas Burns, undersecretary of state for Bush and a former ambassador to Greece, is rumored to be on a short list for Clintons secretary of state.

The letters signees also include Thomas Pickering, a veteran ambassador and senior diplomat who began his government work under President Harry Truman, and Marc Grossman, former ambassador to Turkey, who served as assistant secretary and undersecretary of state under Bush.

In statements about foreign countries, the diplomats wrote, Mr. Trump has expressed the most ignorant stereotypes of those countries; has inflamed their people; and has insulted our allies and comforted our enemies. And shockingly, he has even offered praise and admiration for Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia whose international activities and reported intrusions into our democratic political process have been among the most damaging actions taken by any foreign leader since World War II.

By contrast, they said, Hillary Clintons handling of foreign affairs has consistently sought to advance fundamental U.S. interests with a deep grounding in the work of the many tens of thousands of career officers on whom our national security depends.

Read more:

Former GOP national security officials: Trump would be most reckless American president in history

He was one of the most respected intel officers of his generation. Now hes leading Lock her up chants.

One of Trumps foreign policy advisers is a 2009 college grad who lists Model UN as a credential

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Secretary of State John F. Kerry (third from right at the table) speaks about Russian involvement in Syria during a U.N. Security Council meeting on Sept. 21. (Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency)

Secretary of State John F. Kerry called on Russia and Syria on Wednesday to immediately ground all aircraft flying in key areas of northwest Syria where a humanitarian convoy was destroyed Monday, and accused Moscow of inventing its own facts to explain the air attack for which Russia is responsible.

The simple reality is we cannot resolve this crisis if major parties . . . are unwilling to do whats necessary to avoid escalation, Kerry told the U.N. Security Council. We dont get anywhere by ignoring facts and denying common sense.

Kerrys caustic intervention came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denounced emotional reactions to the strike on the convoy and called for a serious investigation of the incident. After suggesting that the attack was perpetrated by terrorist ground forces active in the area southwest of Aleppo, Moscow newly implied that it could have been a U.S. drone.

Amid the charges and countercharges, speakers to the council pleaded for cooperation that could lead to a genuine cease-fire in the five-year civil war, and excoriated the international community as a whole for not ending the carnage.

The Syrian tragedy shames us all, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in opening the meeting. The collective failure of the international community should haunt every member of this council.

The meeting, called by New Zealand, the current council president, was not on the official schedule but was tacked on to a session called to discuss the recently completed peace agreement in Colombia. Kerry, Lavrov and other foreign ministers quickly took over the chairs that had been occupied by their U.N. ambassadors.

[U.N suspends aid convoys in Syria after deadly attack on convoy]

But while all bemoaned the ongoing strife in Syria, agreed that the crumbling cease-fire was the only way out and pledged to do better at implementing it, attention was focused on the sharp exchange between Kerry and Lavrov. In remarks Kerry described as a parallel universe, Lavrov said that one of the clearest violations of the cease-fire the United States and Russia agreed to nearly two weeks ago was the Sept. 16 attack by the [U.S.-led] coalition against government forces  the apparently mistaken airstrike in eastern Syria that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers.

The convoy attack Monday, Lavrov said, was another unacceptable provocation, which took place west of Aleppo near forces of the Front for the Conquest of Syria, the al-Qaeda affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. On the same day, in the same area, there was a very aggressive attack against government forces, he said. These kind of coincidences require serious analysis and investigation. . . . Many said [the convoy attack] could have been a rocket or a mortar.

He said Russia had presented proof, including real-time video of when this actually happened.

In Moscow, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday that a coalition Predator drone, which it said had taken off from Incirlik air base in Turkey, was seen near the route of the convoy on the day of the attack. Russia has said repeatedly that no Russian or Syrian aircraft was in the vicinity.

The drone was spotted in midair at the height of 3,600 meters, moving at the speed of about 200 kilometers an hour, exactly in this area on September 19, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Defense Ministry spokesman, told reporters at a briefing. The drone, he said, stopped near the area of the populated locality of Urum al-Kubra, where the strike took place several minutes before the convoy caught fire. And it left about 30 minutes later.

This type of drone not only can observe the situation, but also direct ground weapons and autonomously deliver high-accuracy strikes on secure facilities, Konashenkov said.

Capt. Jeff Davis, a Defense Department spokesman, said in an emailed statement, We can confirm that NONE of our aircraft  manned or unmanned, US or Coalition  were anywhere in the vicinity of Aleppo when the strike against the humanitarian convoy occurred.

Kerry also replied scornfully to Lavrovs description of the attack. I dont think we can let anybody here, if were going to deal with this situation, have their own set of facts about Syria, he said. Twenty aid workers were killed in an outrageous, sustained, two-hour attack directed at a fully authorized humanitarian mission near Aleppo.

Pentagon officials have said their preliminary conclusions are that the convoy was hit by a Russian airstrike. Those conclusions, he said, have been supported by some activists and other humanitarian groups. But the International Committee for the Red Cross said it could not confirm the source of the attack.

Just Tuesday night, Kerry said, there were reports of airstrikes on a medical facility near Aleppo, and four medical workers were killed, despite the fact there is supposed to be a cessation. There are only two countries that have airplanes that are flying during the night or flying at all in that particular area: Russia and Syria.

Yes, the coalition did hit people on Saturday, Kerry said. We did it. It was a terrible accident. Within moments of it happening, we acknowledged it. We didnt put out a bunch of obfuscating facts. We said, Yeah, its a terrible thing, it happened. The Defense Department apologized, and we tried to find out how it happened.

But the view from the air of people running around with guns on the ground . . . is a different thing from trucks in a convoy, with big U.N. markings all over them, Kerry said.

Kerrys proposal to ground all aircraft in the northwest area around Aleppo, where government forces and their Iranian and Hezbollah allies are present along with moderate opposition and jihadist forces, is a significant change from the original terms of the U.S.-Russia agreement. It imposed no initial restriction on Syrian airstrikes against Front forces, while saying that once a cease-fire against all but terrorist groups was holding and aid was being delivered, the United States and Russia would take over with exclusive responsibility for strikes against the Front and the Islamic State.

In his remarks, Lavrov repeated Russias insistence that the deal also called for the United States and its allies supporting the opposition to separate rebel forces from nearby jihadist groups. In spite of our appeals on the need to influence the armed opposition, he said, so far the results have been very insignificant.

Kerry acknowledged that for too long some elements of the opposition have relied on an unholy coalition with al-Nusra. . . . Al-Nusra is al-Qaeda, he said. We cant look the other way if groups on the ground are fighting with . . . an enemy of all in this room.

But, he said, its very hard to separate people when they are being bombed indiscriminately and when [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad has the right to determine who hes going to bomb, because he can, quote, Go after Nusra, but go after the opposition all at the same time because he wants to. You create a confusion that is impossible to separate out.

We need to get to the prohibition on flying, Kerry said. That would prevent Syria from doing what it has done so often in the past, which is to attack civilian targets with the excuse it was just going after Nusra.

To restore credibility to the process, we must move forward to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded, he said.

When it signed the most recent cease-fire agreement, Kerry said, Russia said that Assad would live by the cessation of hostilities and would accept the idea of not flying over agreed-upon areas. Although Kerry did not specify, his proposal appeared to include grounding Russian aircraft in the area.

Because of the last few days, he said, we have no choice but to do that sooner rather than later.

Although Kerry offered no public details of the proposal, senior administration officials described it as a confidence-building measure that would prove Russian commitment and could get the cease-fire deal back on track. They said it could apply to all areas where the opposition is massed, including Aleppo, Idlib and as far south as the Damascus suburbs.

Kerry first proposed it in a private meeting with Lavrov Tuesday night. He also informed the Russians that, because of the convoy attack and the lack of secure humanitarian aid flows, conditions had not been met during the first week of the agreement to proceed to the second part of the deal, under which the United States and Russia would begin coordinated counterterrorism attacks.

Russia has given no initial response to the proposal, U.S. officials said. The International Syria Support Group, chaired by the United States and Russia, along with other outside actors in the conflict, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, plans to meet again on Thursday.

Lavrov, who spoke before Kerry, did not respond to the grounding proposal, although Kerry first presented it to him in a private meeting Tuesday night.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addresses a meeting on refugees at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept, 20, 2016. (Andrew Gombert/EPA)

Authorities on Canadas Prince Edward Island evacuated all schools and universities across the small province Wednesday after a bomb threat that forced thousands of students to be moved to protected locations, authorities said.

Search teams found no explosives, but the threat  sent via fax  had been deemed serious enough to put a full-scale evacuation into motion among more than 60 schools, said Sgt. Kevin Bailey, a spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Theres been no threat found. Everybody is safe, Bailey told reporters.

He said the threat suggested bombs had been planted at several schools in the Canadian Maritime province.

Earlier, officials said many of the islands 19,000 students had been taken to safe locations.

Three schools in nearby Nova Scotia also were evacuated due to potential threats. Police were investigating possible links with the Prince Edward Island threats, Bailey said.

Read more:

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Libyan authorities said Tuesday that they were searching for two Italians and a Canadian abducted at gunpoint near the Algerian border, while another official said three North Koreans kidnapped more than a year ago have been freed from Islamic State militants.

Libya slid into chaos after the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi. Much of the country is ruled by a patchwork of militias, and Islamist militants also have gained a foothold.

The Italians and the Canadian were abducted at gunpoint Monday on the highway between Ghat and Ubari, in the southwest desert, according to the Ghat municipal council.

Italys Foreign Ministry confirmed the abduction but declined to elaborate, citing the delicateness of the situation.

Global Affairs Canada spokesman Michael OShaughnessy said, We are aware of the troubling yet unconfirmed report of the abduction of a Canadian citizen in Libya. We are diligently pursuing all appropriate channels.

Hassan Osman Eissa of the Ghat municipal council said the abductors are known to local authorities and have carried out carjackings and robberies in the past. He said local security forces are searching for them and raiding suspected hideouts. He said the abductors left the foreigners Libyan driver behind after handcuffing him.

Another official, meanwhile, said three North Koreans kidnapped by Islamic State fighters near Sirte have been freed by Libyan forces battling to drive the extremists from the central city, their last bastion in the North African country.

Muftah Salem, a Health Ministry official in the eastern town of Jalu, said Tuesday that the North Korean couple and their driver had been heading to Tripoli after finishing a seven-year contract at Jalus hospital.

An English-language local news portal, Libyan Observer, posted a video of the doctor. It identified him as 58-year-old Lee Yong and his wife as Seo Young Ju, 56.

He was freed along with two other foreigners, identified as Indians, and Libyan hostages, according to the Libyan Observer.

Salem said Libyan forces freed them earlier this month.

Also Tuesday, a spokesman for Libyan forces based in the east accused a rival militia allied with a U.N.-backed unity government of carrying out an airstrike Tuesday that killed at least six women and a child.

Ahmed al-Mesmari, a spokesman for forces loyal to Gen. Khalifa Hifter, told the LANA news agency that fighter jets bombed families near the central district of Jufra.
The Tulsa Police Department (TPD) released helicopter and dashboard video on Monday showing the police killing of 40-year-old Terence Crutcher. Crutcher, unarmed and not a suspect in any crime, was surrendering peacefully when police officers simultaneously shot him with a stun gun and a pistol.

The videos show Crutcher with his hands in the air, walking slowly toward his car, as two officers follow him with their weapons drawn. Crutcher places his hands against his cars windows. Immediately after, at 19:44, a single gunshot is heard and Crutchers head slumps. More officers run to the scene and Crutcher collapses.

Three police officers stand over Crutchers body while two others search his car. After the search is over, all five police officers leave Crutcher in a pool of his own blood while they redirect traffic. Two and a half minutes passes before anyone begins to administer medical treatmentand only after they search his pockets.

When reporters asked the TPD why it took so long for police to give Crutcher any help, the TPDs public information officer, Jeanne MacKenzie, claimed that the delay occurred because the police officers didn't know what to do. I dont know that we have protocol on how to render aid to people, she said.

Crutcher was leaving a college class when his car began experiencing mechanical trouble. He left his car in the middle of the road with the engine still running and approached a passerby for help. Two 911 calls were made around 19:30 reporting his abandoned vehicle. He was like, come here, come here. I think its going to blow up, one caller reported Crutcher saying.

The videos disprove the initial police claims that Crutcher had approached the officers, that he was not cooperating, and that he was reaching into his car window when they shot him. We saw that Terence was not being belligerent, said Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney representing Crutchers family. We did not see Terence reach into the car. We did not see Terence attacking the officers.

The TPD claims that no video was recorded from the dashboard of Betty Shelby, the 42-year-old white police officer who killed Crutcher, a black man. Officers have discretion whether or not to turn their light bar on. The dashcam is attached to the light bar, explained MacKenzie. Shelby is a four-year veteran of the TPD and has been placed on paid administrative leave. The TPD has identified Tyler Turnbough as the officer who used the stun gun on Crutcher.

Brady Henderson, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oklahoma, called the actions of the police officers immoral, reprehensible, and outright criminal and labelled the TPDs initial report a bold-faced lie, as were TPDs statements about his transport and death at a local hospital.

Ryan Kiesel, the executive director of the ACLU of Oklahoma, said that Crutcher was murdered in cold blood. Each of the officers present were complicit in the unconscionable, reprehensible, and disgusting killing of this unarmed, defenseless man, by allowing him to bleed to death on the street rather than attempting any immediate medical aid or attention.

The ACLU of Oklahoma is calling for criminal charges against the police officers involved. If this killing is investigated competently and fairly, said Henderson, I believe we will see murder or manslaughter charges against the shooter, and hopefully accessory charges against the officers who treated Terence Crutcher like a piece of meat rather than a human being. The Department of Justice has initiated an investigation into Crutchers murder.

Shelby maintains that she thought Crutcher was high on PCP because he was mumbling incoherently, according to her attorney, Scott Wood. The TPD announced yesterday afternoon that the drug was found in Crutchers vehicle. Police Sgt. Shane Tuell told the Associated Press that Shelby was certified in the use of stun guns.

The TPD and Tulsa officials have attempted to defuse the popular anger surrounding Crutchers murder, promising transparency and asking for protests to remain peaceful. Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan, speaking at a press conference on Monday, assured people across the nation that we will achieve justice, period.

Tulsa Council Member Jack Henderson, recalling the eruption of social unrest in Milwaukee and Baltimore, equated police murder with the protests against it. [W]e dont want to see what happens in other cities here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Weve already got two families [the Crutchers and the Shelbys] lives who will be affected forever. We dont need some more lives to be changed this way.

Crutchers twin sister, Tiffany, drew a connection between Terences death and the scores of other police killings throughout the United States. This is bigger than us right here, she said at a press conference yesterday morning.

She denounced the profiling by the TPD helicopter pilot who was flying over the scene of her brothers murder. You all want to know who that big, bad dude was? That big, bad dude was a father. That big, bad dude was a son. That big, bad dude was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud. That big, bad dude loved God. That big, bad dude was at church singing, with all of his flaws, every week. Crutchers family said that singing was his passion and the subject of his studies at college.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking on the Steve Harvey Morning Show, blamed the bloody wave of police violence on the implicit bias of white people. She concluded by commending the good, honourable, cool-headed police officers serving across the country. Whites make up a plurality of the 1,146 people killed by American police last year.

Crutchers murder comes just three months after the TPDs last two killings, of Michael Ray Ramsey Jr. and Jerry Brimer on July 17 and July 18 respectively. According to KilledByPolice.net, Crutcher is the 825th person to be killed by police in the United States this year. At the time of this writing, another 13 people have been killed by police since Crutchers death.
Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt on Monday, but their split has been a "long time coming," a source tells ET.

Jolie, 41, and Pitt, 52, tied the knot in August 2014, but according to the source, the two have been having problems for the last year.

WATCH: Angelina Jolie Files for Divorce From Brad Pitt After Two Years of Marriage

"They haven't slept in the same bed for a big chunk of that," the source says. "When they were in New York City the last time together, they had separate rooms and were on their own schedules."

The last time Pitt and Jolie were together in New York City was at the 2015 WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards on Nov. 4, 2015.

According to another source, Pitt has also been more "carefree" in recent months. During his visit to NYC in July, people who worked with the A-list star commented that "the old Brad is back," the source says.

NEWS: Brad Pitt Speaks Out on Angelina Jolie Divorce: 'I Am Very Saddened by This'

" ... They said [that] because 'he was back to being totally carefree and easygoing. Back to the aloof Brad,'" the source says. "It was a working trip but he was making the most out of his free time. He was going out to lunch, walking around. It's almost like he didn't care about anything. He wasn't your classic, uptight A-list celebrity walking around with a big entourage."

"Angelina runs a tight ship, and for years, Brad followed her orders," the source further claims. "She always called the shots and he went along with it. In recent months, he hasn't been and has been living his life how he wants to live it."

According to another source, Jolie and Pitt also struggled with issues when it came to agreeing on a parenting style for their six kids -- 15-year-old Maddox, 12-year-old Pax, 11-year-old Zahara, 10-year-old Shiloh, and 8-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox.

PHOTOS: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Most Matching Moments

"Brad has traditional parenting skills -- thinks the kids need structure [like] bed times, consistent schooling," the source says. "Angelina's parenting style is much more freeform. She's not into setting boundaries."

Story continues

Most recently, Pitt took a solo trip to Croatia on Sept. 1, where he met with investors and toured a real estate development. A source tells ET that Pitt "seemed fine" during his recent stay.

As for Jolie, she was last spotted in Syria on Sept. 12, making her fourth visit to the refugee camps in Jordan since the conflict in Syria began.

The last sighting of Pitt and Jolie together before their bombshell divorce announcement was in July, when they took Knox and Vivienne out for a birthday breakfast at the Griddle Cafe in West Hollywood, California.

WATCH: Brad Pitt on Working With Angelina Jolie -- 'She Knows When I'm Faking It Better Than Anyone'

Jolie lists their separation date as Sept. 15 in her divorce filing, and is asking for physical custody of their six children.

--Reporting by Jennifer Peros

For a look back at the pair's fiery relationship over the years, watch the video below:

Related Articles
Cairo (AFP) - A boat carrying migrants capsized Wednesday in the Mediterranean off Egypt's north coast, killing 30 people and triggering an operation in which another 150 were rescued, officials said.

The vessel overturned off the port city of Rosetta, police and health officials said, with the total number of people on board not immediately clear.

The tragedy comes months after the EU's border agency Frontex warned growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.

Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.

"Thirty bodies have been recovered," said health ministry official Adel Khalifa, updating an earlier toll.

Emergency workers had rescued 150 passengers, Khalifa and two police officials said.

The health ministry said earlier in a statement that 29 people had drowned "when a boat carrying illegal migrants capsized off the coast of Rosetta".

Hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties, it added.

More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for Europe since 2014, according to the United Nations.

Asylum-seekers have been seeking other ways to reach Europe since March, when Balkan countries closed the popular overland route and the EU agreed a deal with Turkey to halt departures.

"Egypt is starting to become a departure country," Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.

- 'Deadliest year' -

"The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year," he said.

More than 300,000 migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.

The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015.

Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be "the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea," said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).

Story continues

In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, drowning at least 169 migrants.

Earlier that month, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the Greek island of Crete and the bodies 104 migrants washed up on a beach in Libya.

Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.

Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period in 2015, said the UNHCR.

But Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against 2015 figures.

Arrivals began falling after a March deal between the European Union and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.

The European Union launched "Operation Sophia" last year to destroy smuggler boats that could be used to ferry migrants across the sea.

An EU official told AFP this month that almost 300 smuggler boats had been put out of commission in the past year.

The official, who did not want to be identified by name, said the migrants on the seized vessels were all transferred to the nearest safe ports and will be considered for asylum as refugees.
An 11-year-old girl was arrested at school last week after police say she brought a knife with her to protect herself from clowns.

As reports of creepy clowns menacing children continue to pop up across the South, the little girl in Athens is alleged to have armed herself as she got ready for her day at Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School Friday.

The girl was taken to the principal's office for questioning after the knife was detected.

Watch: Man Arrested for Allegedly Lying to Police About Clown Sighting at His Home

"She said that the reason she had the knife was for protection for her and her family because she had heard the stories about clowns jumping out of the woods and attacking children," according to an Athens-Clarke County police report.

Police reportedly contacted the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice and were instructed to release the girl to her mother on a charge of possession of a weapon on school grounds.

According to OnlineAthens, police that same day investigated a report that children were chased by clowns while leaving an area community center.

The investigation began after an area mother called 911 to report that children had told her they'd been chased by clowns. The children weren't interviewed.

The unsubstantiated incident is one of a slew of clown sightings reported in recent weeks.

The first of these reports came out of South Carolina, where one neighborhood made national headlines following reports from area kids of a group of menacing clowns that attempted to lure them into the woods near an apartment complex by waving large amounts of cash.

The incidents drew enough attention and caused so much public fear that Greenville Police Chief Ken Miller held a press conference on the matter, in which he warned that his officers will arrest and charge anyone dressed up as a clown.

"It's illegal, it's dangerous, it's inappropriate and it's creating community concern so it needs to stop," Miller said.

Story continues

Watch: Man Can't Explain Why He Was Pulled Over in Clown Costume

Last week, Bibb County sheriffs deputies responded to a call early Tuesday of multiple people dressed up as clowns, chasing kids at a school bus stop.

The terrified children said the clowns wore full makeup and carried fake knives, along with what were described as flashlights or laser pointer-type devices.

It was also reported that some of the kids have been getting friend requests on Facebook from people dressed as clowns and messages saying "I will find you."

A day earlier, police in LaGrange, Georgia, reported receiving calls about "clowns in a van and in wooded areas trying to talk to children.

Watch: First Photos Show the Creepy Clown Allegedly Trying to Lure Kids Into Woods

Related Articles:
(CHARLOTTE, N.C.)  A black police officer shot an armed black man at a Charlotte, North Carolina, apartment complex Tuesday, authorities said, prompting angry street protests late into the night.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. Television coverage showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. The protests came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police went to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw the man  not the suspect they were looking for  inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers saw the man get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

The man, identified as 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Detectives recovered a firearm at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Some protesters were heard yelling Black lives matter, and Hands up, dont shoot! One person held up a sign saying Stop Killing Us.

Story continues

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

Earlier, a tow truck was brought in to take another police cruiser away. Local media outlets reported that car suffered damage to its rear end.

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that the community deserves answers.

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Shelbys attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutchers family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.
The Daily Beast

Patrick Pleul/AFP via GettyJust days after he promised advertisers that Twitter would not become a free-for-all hellscape, Elon Musk used the platform he now owns to amplify a baseless conspiracy theory about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosis husband by an intruder.There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye, Musk tweeted Sunday morning in reply to a tweet by Hillary Clinton blasting the Republican Party for creating a toxic environment that lays the gr
We love Olivia Palermos combination of sporty track pants with a feminine sheer blouse, spotted outside Mary Katrantzous show in London. Photo: Getty Images

Two down, two to go! Today, the fashion pack leaves London Fashion Week behind for Milan and Paris. And while their Instagram captions tell you theyre growing weary of the long nights and champagne hangovers, youd never know it to look at them.



Our favorite editors, bloggers, and models are still bringing their sartorial A-game (there are still street style photogs to impress, after all). And while New York Fashion Week show-goers focused on pricey It-bags, the crowd in London let their freak flags fly a little more. Women in suits, super-slouchy and ultra-wide-leg pants, and monster platforms all made appearances, and lent their looks more personality than a $7,000 Gucci bag ever could (not that wed say no to one).

Click on for the coolest, quirkiest street style looks we loved in London.

Yahoo Style is live from London Fashion Week! Keep it here for your front row view of the best looks and buzziest moments.


heather bresch

Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, the company that makes EpiPen, faces Congress on Wednesday. She'll try to answer for why her company raised the price of the life-saving autoinjector 500%, to $608 for two pens.

Based on her opening remarks, which have already been released, she will fail. At least, as long as Americans keep two very important questions in mind.

Who exactly do you intend to pay $608 for a drug that it costs you from $1-$3 to make? And, who else is making money off the EpiPen and how much?

Here's why.

In her remarks, Bresch defends her company by saying that, through its lobbying and marketing efforts, Mylan has increased awareness of and access to the EpiPen and its benefits. She then listed all the measures the company was taking to reduce the cost for patients.

"Looking back, I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients who may have ended up paying the full WAC [Wholesale Acquisition Cost] price or more," She said. "We never intended this. We listened and focused on this issue and came up with a sustainable solution."

We're all bagholders

Which brings us to our first question: Who exactly did you intend to pay for this if not patients?

If your answer is insurers, then that's the wrong answer.

Just because patients don't pay the full price for a drug on their end, doesn't mean their insurers don't have to pick up the tab. That means higher costs for everyone. Out of pocket costs are increasing for Americans across the board, and this is part of the reason why.

In other words, passing costs on to insurers hurts Americans too. The only thing that will really alleviate the cost of EpiPens for Americans is lowering the price, something Bresch has never said she will do even when asked directly.

In a press release after Mylan announced a bunch of measures to help patients, Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) called the discounts a "PR stunt" aimed to "distract from their exorbitant price increases." Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has accused drug companies of not just using to distract from high prices, but as an excuse to preserve them.

Story continues

Feeding a bigger beast

And the preservation of price leads us to our next question: Who all is getting a piece of this $608 here?

In an interview with CNBC last month, Bresch blamed middle men for inflating the price of EpiPen. These middle men are Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs). They're the companies that manage the list of drugs your employer/insurer etc. will or will not pay for, and three of them control over 70% of the market in this country.

In other words, they control distribution. And Bresch says that unless they get a fat cut, they won't put your drug on their lists.

"The system incentivizes higher prices on the band. And if you don't play in the system... you products aren't going to get to patients," she said on CNBC. "Because of the lives covered by all the middle men... patients are paying right now twice."

The PBMs work in a complicated system of lists, rebates, and (sometimes) internal pharmacies that would make your head spin. Some run the patient assistance programs that politicians say contribute to keeping prices high.

Bresch said on CNBC that she wants to change this. Ok, then. Give us names. Give us prices. Tell us how the system works. Because if this is it, then it's time to break to pieces.

For more background on Mylan's mess, listen to BI's Linette Lopez and Josh Barro break it down on their podcast, Hard Pass:

NOW WATCH: Things are getting worse for Wells Fargo and now the FBI is getting involved





More From Business Insider


Many investors like to look for value in stocks, but this can be very tough to define. There is great debate regarding which metrics are the best to focus on in this regard, and which are not really quality indicators of future performance. Fortunately, with our new style score system we have identified the key statistics to pay close attention to and thus which stocks might be the best for value investors in the near term.

This method discovered several great candidates for value-oriented investors, but today lets focus on ABM Industries Incorporated ABM as this stock is looking especially impressive right now. And while there are numerous reasons why this is the case, we have highlighted three of the most vital reasons for ABMs status as a solid value stock below:

Forward PE for ABM Industries

Easily one of the most popular readings for value investors, the forward PE ratio shows us the current price of a stock divided by the full year earnings. Generally speaking, value investors like to see this ratio below 20, though it can vary by industry.

ABM INDUSTRIES PE Ratio (TTM)

ABM INDUSTRIES PE Ratio (TTM) | ABM INDUSTRIES Quote

Right now, ABM has a forward PE of just 22.34, which means that investors are paying $22.34 for each dollar in expected ABM Industriesearnings this year. Compared to the industry at large this is pretty favorable as the overall space has an average PE of 24.39 in comparison.

Price to Forward Sales for ABM Industries

One of the most underrated ratios for value investors is the price/forward sales metric. This ratio shows investors how much they are paying for each dollar of revenues generated. In other words, a lower number is better here while a price to sales ratio of 1 means that you are paying one dollar for each dollar in sales.

With a P/S ratio of 0.42, ABM investors are paying 42 cents in stock price for each dollar of revenue generated by the company. Compare this to the industry average of 1. 2, and it is safe to say that ABM is undervalued compared to many of its peers on this important metric.

Story continues

ABM Earnings Estimate Revisions Moving in the Right Direction

The solid value ratios outlined in the preceding paragraphs might be enough for some investors, but we should also note that the earnings estimate revisions have been trending in a positive direction as well. Analysts who follow ABM stock have been raising their estimates for the company lately, meaning that the EPS picture is looking a bit more favorably for ABM Industries now.

Over the past 30 days, 3 earnings estimates have gone higher compared to none lower for the full year, while we are also seeing that 3 estimate has move upwards with no downward revision for the next year time frame too. These revisions have helped to boost the consensus estimate as 30 days ago ABM was expected to post earnings of $1.60 per share for the full year though today it looks to have EPS of $1.74 for the full year.

Bottom Line

For the reasons detailed above, investors shouldnt be surprised to read that we have ABM as a stock with a Value Score of B and a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

So if you are a value investor, definitely keep ABM on your short list as this looks to be a stock that is very well-positioned for gains in the near term.

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United Nations (United States) (AFP) - At least 30 countries will on Wednesday formally join the Paris agreement on climate change, moving it closer to reality, according to the United Nations.

The global body said 30 states would submit their ratification at the UN General Assembly including Latin American heavyweights Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

Other countries include Bangladesh, Singapore, Thailand and major fossil fuel power the United Arab Emirates.

The Paris accord, sealed late last year in the French capital, commits countries to make plans to keep global warming at no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels to try to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

To take effect, 55 parties responsible for at least 55 of global emissions of greenhouse gases must join the accord.

As of Tuesday, 29 parties behind 40 percent of emissions have given their consent, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The agreement received a major boost earlier this month when China and the United States, the two largest emitters, jointly acceded to the deal during a summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping.

French Environment Minister Segolene Royal told AFP on Monday that she was upbeat the accord would take effect before the next UN-led climate conference on November 7 in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The conference opens one day before the US election, in which Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who rejects mainstream science on climate change, has vowed to tear up the Paris accord.

Brazil's new president, Michel Temer, told the UN General Assembly earlier Tuesday that he would ratify the accord, saying that his biodiverse nation was committed to environmental protection.
Medicine is a challenging career path, but being miserable during medical school isn't a necessary first step. A school's culture is an often overlooked factor in student success, recent medical school graduates say.

Dr. James Martin, a 2016 graduate of Loyola University Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine, says he is glad he chose a medical school with a collaborative school culture.

"I went to a school where everyone was nice to each other and everyone was supportive," he says.

Here are six traits that experts say define a compassionate medical school.

1. Civility: One study of medical students in developed countries, including the U.S. and Canada, reveals that a majority of students -- 59.4 percent -- had experienced harassment during their medical training. Most of the reported harassment -- 63 percent -- involved verbal insults.

"I think the best way for medical students to figure out if a medical school has the right culture is for them to visit the school and talk to the medical students," says Dr. Georgette Dent, the associate dean for student affairs at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill School of Medicine. She says good medical schools are "vigilant" about enforcing anti-harassment policies, and that the best way to figure out if a school promotes civility is to ask students about how supportive their school was.

[Know how to highlight compassion in your medical school application.]

2. Wellness initiatives: Medical school is hard enough, even with abundant emotional support, so a school that provides support is a good option, medical school officials say.

Nancy Harazduk, director of the Mind-Body Medicine Program at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, says group therapy and meditation classes have increased morale at Georgetown.

"You need to take care of yourself before you take care of others," she says.

[Understand the factors behind medical school admissions.]

3. Meaningful accommodations for disadvantaged students: Experts say medical school applicants should look for schools that are inclusive of students with disabilities and students with families.

Story continues

In general, U.S. medical schools have a lackluster record when it comes to integrating medical students with disabilities.

A study published this year showed that the non-academic admissions standards that medical schools use to determine whether prospective students have the physical stamina and emotional stability necessary to be a doctor often lack clarity about what accommodations, if any, will be made for students with disabilities. The study reveals that a majority of U.S. medical schools -- 61 percent -- have admission standards that appear to exclude disabled applicants.

Dr. Philip Zazove, the study's lead author and chair of family medicine at the Medical School at University of Michigan, says students with disabilities should look for medical schools with a track record of educating students with disabilities, and that the best way to identify inclusive schools is through conversations with others in the disabled community and school officials.

Medical students who are parents should look for schools with flexible schedules, according to Dr. Terry Kind, assistant dean of clinical education and associate professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

"Look for medical schools with more flexibility in terms of class and study schedules and rotations and clinical sites, plus a wide range of elective opportunities so that you can have ways to tailor your experience to fit both your learning needs and your extracurricular needs and wants," she says.

[See how extracurricular activities may improve medical school applications.]

4. A variety of extracurricular activities: Martin says a sense of belonging enhanced his medical school experience.

"I know I formed a lot of good relationships," he says. Martin was an active member in his school chapter of the Student National Medical Association, which serves minority medical students.

Martin adds that as an African-American, he found a sense of comfort in the fact that there were organizations for people of color at his school.

"I never felt singled out," he says. "I never felt ignored."

5. A commitment to community service: Some medical students say their education is enriched by community service opportunities.

Aaron Briggs, a second-year student at Dartmouth University's Geisel School of Medicine, says one of the best parts of his medical school experience so far has been his participation and leadership in the school's "Beyond the Books" club. This club does service projects and hosts seminars about poverty's impact on health.

6. Courses on bedside manner: A forward-thinking medical school will emphasize the importance of compassion in medicine, medical school professors say.

Two Harvard Medical School professors say the best medical schools are ones that teach students how to interact with patients.

Dr. Diane Fingold says it is essential for medical students to learn how to cope with emotionally intense moments such as when they have to inform a patient of a critical diagnosis.

Dr. Katharine Treadway says that a medical education without empathy training is an incomplete one. "You really do have to care about the person in order to take care of them," she says.

Searching for a medical school? Get our complete rankings of Best Medical Schools.

Ilana Kowarski covers graduate schools for U.S. News. You can reach her via email at ikowarski@usnews.com.
SAN SEBASTIAN  In a triple triumph for Argentina, Javier Van De Couters 7:35 am, Maura Delperos Hogar and Juan Pablo Felixs Malambo King won the top plaudits at the San Sebastian Festivals 5th Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, now firmly established as a key meet for producers on both sides of the Atlantic working the fertile axis between the two regions.

Produced and co-written by Anahi Berneri, a distinguished director in her own right, whose Aire Libre played in competition at 2014s San Sebastian, 7:35 am marks the second feature from Van De Couter, a co-scribe on Aire Libre.

Set up at Varsovia Films, the film company Berneri heads up with Diego Dubcovsky, Daniel Burmans producing partner for 20 years, it turns on one of the major current themes of Latin American cinema: Violence.

7:35 am refers to the time on Sept. 28, 2004 when a 15-year-old walked into a classroom in Carmen de Patagones, some 600 miles south of Buenos Aires, drew a handgun and shot dead four classmates, wounding five more. Set 12 years later, 7:35 am follows two of the school massacre survivors, one with scars, another with a bullet in one lung, as they attempt to track down the attacker. The film is a journey which may bring some relief, and asks the questions: Why did he do it? Why them? Why him? Van De Couter commented.

Lead-produced by Nico Avruj and Diego Lermans Buenos Aires-based Campo Cine, producer of all Lermans movies, Hogar won two awards, the Arte International Prize, adjudicated by Arte France Cinema, its French co-production arm and offering 5,000 ($5,500) to the projects lead producer; and a special mention from the Co-Production Best Project Award jury.

Co-produced by Italys Vivo Film (Le Quattro Volte) and Disparte. Hogar has already tapped coin from an Argentina-Italy bilateral development fund. Set at Hogar, a Buenos Aires home for teen mothers, Delperos film explores various forms of female desire: One inmates longing for a boy outside the home, and the birth of maternal instinct in a young Italian nun who looks after the this teen mothers baby when she escapes to see her boyfriend.

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The intensity of adolescence plus motherhood all in the same body, this is a problem, Delpero said when presenting the project Monday at the Co-production Forum.

The first feature of Argentinas Juan Pablo Felix, Malambo King took home a new prize: the Efads-Caci Europe-Latin America Co-Production Grant, worth $22,000 and given by the powerful associations of European and Latin American public film agencies respectively.

Set up at Argentinas Bikini Films, the movie underscored how even a debut can now command strong co-production support, Malambo King hitting San Sebastian with strong partners: Veronica Curas Utopia Group in Argentina, Santiago Seguras Bowfinger Intl. Pictures in Spain, and Frances Melocoton Film.

Part road-movie, part father-daughter family drama, Malambo King turns on a con who gains a permit to leave jail for a few days to visit his daughters, but uses it to stage a highway hold-up.

His daughters, however young, are far better without him, they finally decide, positioning Malambo King as a film which talks about the generation disconnect between parents and their children  a major focus of movies this year at San Sebastian.

Related stories

Toronto Film Review: 'Rage'

San Sebastian: 'Rey's Education' Tops Films in Progress

Film Review: 'Colossal'
From Cosmopolitan

After one bomb injured more than two dozen in New York, and others were discovered in New York and New Jersey this week, terrorism is again a fiery campaign issue. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton called her Republican opponent Donald Trump a recruiting sergeant for the terrorists, arguing that ISIS and other Islamic terror organizations want a religious war, and Trump walks right into their hands. They are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists, she said. The kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries. Trump in turn said Clinton was responsible for allowing terrorists to thrive in the United States and reiterated his call for stricter immigration policies, blaming our current immigration system for these latest bombings. These attacks, and many others, were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system, he said.

In typical self-aggrandizing fashion, Trump boasted that he had been right that there was a bomb: I should be a newscaster, he said. I called it before the news. Statements like this are typical for the candidate, who seems to enjoy his own version of reality - including when it comes to terrorism and national defense.

Terrorism is scary - thats the point. It kills innocent people, but it also interferes with our rights to move freely, to feel safe and secure, to go about the normal business of our lives. It terrorizes, physically and psychologically, which is why its such a powerful tool. Its a scourge that our next president will be tasked to fight, and combating it will be difficult and complicated. Which is why our potential leaders should approach our national defense with the gravity and honesty demanded of such grim and serious issues, and why the American people would be best served by an election that pits two thoughtful candidates against each other. Unfortunately, that is not this election. Instead of offering a conservative counter to Clinton, Trump offers vitriol - and, just as often, outright lies. Here are seven of them.

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1. Hillary Clinton wants Americans to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. "Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country, Trump said in a June speech on terrorism, after Omar Mateen went on a shooting rampage at an Orlando nightclub, killing dozens (Trump also claimed he would not use or ever say the killers name, after releasing a statement saying, The terrorist, Omar Mir Saddique Mateen, is the son of an immigrant from Afghanistan).

It should go without saying that a candidate for the presidency of the United States does not in fact want to allow radical terrorists, Islamic or otherwise, to pour into the United States. In fact, Clinton has released a plan that, though vague, outlines a series of steps she would take to counter terrorism threats in the U.S. and abroad. It includes intensifying air strikes against ISIS strongholds, working with technology companies to combat online terrorism recruitment and communications, leveraging diplomatic relationships, building ties with American Muslims and community leaders who can help root out and fight against homegrown radicalism, and boosting the intelligence-gathering capabilities of our law enforcement and national security officers.

For liberals, there are reasons for alarm in Clintons plan - it hinges partly on militarism and surveillance, of which progressives are critical. The left-wing concern, though, is that Clintons plan could be too aggressive, at the expense of civil liberties at home and innocent life overseas. But that Clinton would allow terrorists to enter the country, or even create conditions under which they could pour in is simply false.

2. Refugees present a significant terrorist threat. According to Trump, there is a "tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States and we dont know who they are, they have no documentation, and we dont know what theyre planning.

Altogether, under the Clinton plan, you'd be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children, Trump said. The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to screen who we are bringing in.

If this were true, and the U.S. government were opening its doors to whoever wanted to walk through with no vetting, that would be scary and a terrible immigration policy. Luckily, Trumps characterization of Clintons plan is outrageously false. The U.S. screening process for refugees is detailed and onerous. First, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has to identify you as a refugee; UNHCR works around the world, with missions in war-stricken nations (and some of their neighbors) to help displaced people either go home voluntarily, seek asylum or resettle in another nation, or settle in the country to which they have fled. UNHCR helps to figure out which refugees are eligible to be resettled, and refers some of those refugees to the United States and other countries. Then the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program takes over, screening refugees using intensive biographic and biometric security checks and, if the refugee passes those checks, the refugee undergoes an interview designed to check for fraud and make sure the refugees claim is valid under U.S. law. Syrian applicants have to go through an additional enhanced review process. And when refugees arrive in the United States, Customs and Border Patrol conducts another inspection. This process typically takes between 18 months and two years.

While some refugees do in fact have documentation, contrary to Trumps claim, he is right that many lack it - its easy to lose your birth certificate if your house is bombed or if you take a raft across the Mediterranean with only the clothes on your back. But that doesnt mean its impossible to verify the claims made by refugees.

The current screening process would remain in place with a Clinton presidency. While theres certainly room to quibble about the details, and to suggest ways to make it stronger and better able to serve people in need of refuge, its a lie to say there is no system to vet refugees.

Its also simply not true that Syrian refugees are flowing into the U.S. in tremendous numbers. There are indeed a tremendous number of Syrian refugees: Approximately 5.2 million Syrians are seeking refuge outside of their homeland. But the United States only agreed to take 10,000 of them this fiscal year, a number we just reached at the end of August (the fiscal year ends in September). Thats one-fifth of 1 percent of the number in need - hardly tremendous.

It is true that Clinton wants to increase the number of Syrian refugees the United States resettles, to as many as 65,000. As it stands, most refugees that come to the United States arent Syrian - from October 2015 to May 2016, they hailed primarily from Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Iraq. Syria, which has the highest numbers of refugees in the world, was the sixth-largest sender of refugees to the United States, right behind Bhutan.

And of all the threats facing Americans, refugee terrorists are fairly low on the list. According to the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institution, each year, the chance of any American being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3.64 billion.

3. President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cower to political correctness by refusing to name our real enemy. A favorite Trump talking point is that because Obama and Clinton wont use the phrase radical Islamic terror, they are unfit to hold office. Hillary Clinton - for months and despite so many attacks - repeatedly refused to even say the words 'radical Islam,' until I challenged her yesterday to say the words or leave the race, Trump said. According to him, Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country.

It is true that both Clinton and Obama avoid the specific phrase radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism, which is favored on the American right. They do so at the advice of terrorism experts: One goal of ISIS is to pit what they believe to be true Islam against evil unbelievers, so its strategically smart (not to mention true) for world leaders to reject that binary and insist that a religion practiced by nearly a quarter of the worlds population does not have to be aligned with violence and terror.

"What exactly would using this label would accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans?" Obama has said. "Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above." But it could make many Muslims feel even more marginalized and unmoored - which could in turn contribute to ISIS recruitment, as the group typically recruits angry, unmoored young men who feel rejected and impotent, and are seeking a sense of grandiosity and purpose.

4. Obama and Clinton created ISIS. Trump has toned down his claim that the president is the founder of ISIS and now says, The rise of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.

Its always a challenge to look back at what could have been, but theres a good argument that ISIS would not have existed had the U.S. not invaded Iraq and that its founding goes back to that conflict. About that, Trump says, I was an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning - a major difference between me and my opponent. This is not true: Trump was on record as supporting the Iraq invasion, although he changed his mind when it became clear the war was a pointless quagmire (the Iraq War was also a George W. Bush initiative that Obama had nothing to do with; Clinton did, as a senator, vote to authorize the invasion).

While Trump is correct that some policy decisions made by President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton may have contributed to the growth of ISIS, and that certainly the Iraq invasion and later the war in Syria were major contributors, the question of what caused ISIS is a complex one with no single answer. When it comes to Syria and ISIS, the confluence of events leading to todays chaos is so complex that its difficult to look at the Obama administrations decisions and play out what would have happened if they had been made differently - in any case, it seems unlikely ISIS would have been defeated. Maybe they could have been weakened; maybe the other options on the table would have made them stronger. What we do know is that Trump supported pretty much every policy decision he now says led to ISIS, making it less clear how he would handle similar foreign policy challenges if he were in the Oval Office.

5. Hillary Clinton says the solution to terrorism is to ban guns. Hillary Clinton says the solution is to ban guns, Trump said in his terrorism speech in June. Her plan is to disarm law-abiding Americans, abolishing the Second Amendment, and leaving only the bad guys and terrorists with guns. She wants to take away Americans guns, then admit the very people who want to slaughter us.

Clinton has never said she wants to disarm law-abiding Americans or abolish the Second Amendment. What she has said is that she thinks people on the terrorist watch list shouldnt be able to buy guns - a sentiment with which Trump has agreed.

6. Trumps immigration plan will prevent domestic terrorism. The Trump anti-terrorism plan is directly tied to immigration - even his big speech on terrorism was an address on terrorism, immigration, and national security. To fight the terrorist threat, Trump said, "I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies."

According to Peter Bergen, a national security expert, Trumps plan ignores the reality of terrorism in the United States: Its not carried out by foreigners or new immigrants. Here's the critical question, Bergen wrote for CNN.com. Would this vague plan to suspend immigration solve the problem of terrorism in the States? Hardly. Since 9/11, every lethal jihadist terrorist attack in this country has been carried out by an American citizen or legal resident. Some of these attackers were children of immigrants. But, Bergen writes, For Trump's plan to work, you would somehow have to wind the clock back a half-century and ban immigration from all Muslim countries until now. Since even Trump doesn't claim he can reverse time, his proposal for a temporary ban is fatuous.

If you look at all acts of domestic terrorism, most arent related to Islamic extremists but to right-wing groups, from abortion opponents to white nationalists. Banning immigration from areas of the world with a proven history of terrorism against the United States wouldnt do much to stop terrorism.



7. Average Muslims cover up terrorism and protect terrorists. According to Trump, American Muslims routinely protect their own, having the opportunity to foil terrorism plots but not doing so. He played on this claim during his post-Orlando terrorism speech, saying, The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know whats going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what, they didnt turn em in. And we had death and destruction.

A neighbor saw suspicious behavior, Trump claimed. Bombs on the floor and other things, but didnt warn authorities because they said they didnt want to be accused of racial profiling.

This isnt true - there have been no credible reports that a neighbor saw bombs and declined to tell police because of fear of racial profiling. There is no indication that other Muslims know what the San Bernardino killers were planning.

There is evidence, though, that many jihadist terrorist plots have been foiled because of other Muslims. Around a third of all the terrorism cases investigated since 9/11 originated with a tip from a member of the Muslim community or a family member, wrote Bergen for CNN, citing data from the New America Foundation. In quiet ways far too complex to hold Trump's interest, Muslims in the United States and around the world are helping every day to prevent massacres such as Orlando from happening.

Muslims are killed in terror attacks here and abroad. Muslims routinely work in their mosques and their communities and their families to thwart the extremism that can lead to terrorism, and to work with law enforcement to make sure extremists dont do even more damage. Like most Americans, American Muslims also abhor terroristic violence - the vast majority of American Muslims believe violence against civilians in the name of Islam is never justified - and want to protect themselves, their families, and their country.

The overwhelming majority of American Muslims dont have to work with us. They are us.

Election Day is Nov. 8. If you haven't registered to vote yet, you can do so here.



Follow Jill on Twitter.

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The 7 Wildest Trends From London Fashion Week

Another Fashion Week bites the dust  and only two more to go! Yes, London Fashion Week is over, and what did we learn, fashion lovers? Did Brexit have an impact on the industry, how did the new prime minister do on her first Fashion Week, and was the raw talent everyone so looks forward to seeing here? Who cares  all we want to know is what crazy looks were out there!

Luckily, there were plenty. From Renaissance-inspired collars to motifs borrowed from Chinese contemporary artists, here are the most standout looks of London Fashion Week. We think Kate Middleton should put in an order ASAP.

Yahoo Style is live from #LFW! Keep it here for your front-row view of the best looks and buzziest moments of London Fashion Week.


BEIRUT (Reuters) - An air raid carried out overnight by Syrian or Russian warplanes killed four medical workers and at least nine rebel fighters near Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Wednesday. The raid hit the town of Khan Touman southwest of Aleppo city, an area controlled by insurgents. The British-based Observatory said the rebels killed were from the Islamist alliance Jaish al-Fatah. The medical staff killed were working for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), it said. UOSSM confirmed in a statement that four of its staff had been killed. (Reporting by John Davison; edting by Ralph Boulton)
A 59-year-old man has been charged with abuse of a corpse after police discovered the remains of his deceased father in a deep freezer inside his Mobile, Alabama, home, PEOPLE confirms.



A Mobile Police Department spokeswoman tells PEOPLE that officers were sent to the home of William Gray May on September 15 to investigate a missing persons report filed by one of his relatives  and the missing person was May's 85-year-old father, William May, the spokeswoman says.



After obtaining a search warrant, police combed through the son's residence and happened upon a large freezer in his garage.



Investigators looked inside and allegedly found the father's remains stuffed inside.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



An autopsy is being performed on the corpse to determine the date and manner of death. Blood tests are also being done as part of the ongoing investigation.



May could end up facing additional criminal charges depending on the results of the autopsy and the blood screening, the spokeswoman tells PEOPLE.



May was detained Monday evening, and had yet to appear in court to enter a plea.



Records do not indicate if May has hired a defense lawyer who could comment on his behalf.
Lima (AFP) - An enormous fire is destroying vast stretches of the Amazon rainforest in Peru, threatening natives and wildlife, officials said, blaming traditional slash-and-burn farming.

The fire broke out on September 10 in an indigenous community called Pitsiquia, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, said the National Civil Defense Institute.

It has since destroyed more than 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres) of forest -- an area more than three times the size of Manhattan -- and another 200 hectares of farmland in the Junin region, said the disaster response agency.

"We still have not managed to bring it under control," it said in a statement.

Air pollution caused by smoke is causing eye problems for inhabitants, said local health authorities.

The fire is in an extremely remote region known as VRAEM, an acronym for the Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro river valleys.

The area is known for its isolation, dense rainforest and tropical crops -- coffee, cocoa and the country's largest tracts of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.

Authorities are worried the fire could wreak chaos on a major indigenous reserve, home to native communities that have limited contact with the outside world, and spread to the Otishi National Park nearby.

"The focus of the fire, the most dangerous part, has entered the Ashaninka reserve. It's advancing very quickly," said Jimmy Laura, a spokesman for the Rio Tambo municipal district.

"If the fire crosses the reserve, it will reach the national park," he told AFP.

The reserve is home to some 5,000 people in 10 communities.

Officials said a drought had left the region vulnerable. The fire then broke out when local farmers were burning a pasture to clear it for planting.

"Unfortunately, this practice can get out of control," said Marco Pastor, an adviser at the national parks service.

He said a newly launched Peruvian satellite, PeruSAT-1, was being used to monitor the fire and assess the damage.
I wrote a post yesterday about the wildfire raging along Californias Big Sur coast that has surpassed the $200 million-mark to combatand its only two-thirds contained. A reader in California, Christopher Baker, saw the fire when it started two months ago. He writes:

I saw your article and thought youd find interesting the enclosed photo I took out the window of a Southwest flight on the evening of July 23 flying north from San Diego to San Francisco. It was extremely clear and I saw what I think is the first day of the fire out the window. The fire was very bright but still somewhat small, and I think I could see backfires started by the firefighters. Its a remarkable sight because during my 50 years in California Ive seen many brushfires from the air but never was the view this clear; normally they are obscured by the smoke.

At its peak last month, more than 5,600 firefighters were working to put out the blaze. Its destroyed 57 homes and threatens another 400. And all of this because someone left a small campfire burning while visiting Garrapata State Park.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
From Popular Mechanics

The Antikythera shipwreck is the largest ancient shipwreck ever discovered. Dating to the 1st century B.C., the ancient Roman wreck was discovered by sponge divers in 1900 off the Greek island of Antikythera and has since yielded dozens of marble statues, pounds of ancient coins, and thousands of other artifacts and works of art. The ship also held what is now known as the Antikythera mechanism, a clockwork device of at least 30 bronze gears that was used as an orrery to measure astronomical positions, predict events such as eclipses, and refine calendars to coincide with the night sky-called by many the oldest known analogue computer.

Now, more than a century after the wreck was discovered, we are still hauling treasures up from its remains. On August 31, an international team of researchers and divers led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) retrieved the first ancient skeleton from a shipwreck since the advent of DNA studies. Given the remarkably preserved condition of the skeletal remains-including a skull with teeth and jaws, leg and arm bones, and rib bones-detailed DNA analysis could be possible, which may be able to discover the ethnicity and geographic origin of the person.

Photo credit: Brett Seymour/EUA/WHOI/ARGO

"Against all odds, the bones survived over 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea and they appear to be in fairly good condition, which is incredible," said Hannes Schroeder, an ancient DNA expert with the Natural History Museum of Denmark who traveled to Antikythera to see the remains for himself. After the team makes 3D scans of the skeletal remains and gets permission from Greek authorities, Schroeder plans to have samples sent to his lab in Copenhagen.

Photo credit: Brett Seymour/EUA/WHOI/ARGO

There are still bones embedded in the seafloor that the team of divers will be excavating in the coming days. For the first time, researchers might be able to draw a direct connection between the specific individual on the sunken vessel and the artifacts the ship was carrying.

"Archaeologists study the human past through the objects our ancestors created," said Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist with WHOI, in a press release. "With the Antikythera Shipwreck, we can now connect directly with this person who sailed and died aboard the Antikythera ship."

Source: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

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When couples like Brangelina decide to separate their names and their assets, it can be tricky to keep things private and amicable. Cue the attorneys who live and die by high-profile divorces, like Laura Wasser.

Wasser is representing Angelina Jolie in her divorce from Brad Pitt, which made headlines Tuesday morning. She's no stranger to the process, having repped Jolie in her divorce from Billy Bob Thornton, Johnny Depp in his split from Amber Heard earlier this summer and multiple Kardashians - to name a few.

The Depp-Heard divorce is one of the most recent examples of why celebrities turn to Wasser when they need a tough attorney. Amid abuse allegations, complete with photos, Wasser wasn't afraid to fight Heard's request for spousal support. The parties ultimately settled for $7 million, which will go to charity.

Read more: Hollywood Reacts to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Divorce

She's also handling the other big divorce announced this summer, representing Drew Barrymore in her split from Will Kopelman. In contrast to the ugly and public Depp-Heard divorce, that breakup has moved forward quietly and mostly out of the spotlight.

In April, Wasser talked with The Hollywood Reporter for the annual Power Lawyers issue about the ever-evolving business of professional uncoupling and how celebrities can minimize collateral damage when they split. In the interview, she noted three key trends that could be relevant in the Jolie-Pitt split.

First, divorces are becoming more kid-centric.

"It's almost as though everybody that's now going through the marriage process has some experience with divorce, and they want to do it better than our parents did it," Wasser says. "I think people are trying very hard to maintain their family even when their family isn't living under the same roof. Often in Hollywood, your home is your most valuable asset. [Now we're seeing arrangements in which] the kids stay in the house and the parents rotate out. You can't do that unless you have a civil relationship."

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Second, private judges are in high demand despite their high cost.

"Our court system is so unbelievably clogged up that I will sit there all day long billing at my hourly rate only to have a judge say 'Sorry, we don't have time,'" Wasser says. "A lot of our really good family law judges have now retired. So you can hire a retired judge and he or she will act as your mediator, or you can hire this person as an actual judge. Every document you file in court immediately becomes public, and if you hire a private judge, you can work out the details before you file anything. It keeps it more private, and you have more seasoned judicial officers, as opposed to newbies."

Read more: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: A Timeline of Their Relationship

Third, prenups have more teeth.

"You used to hear about prenups written on cocktail napkins the night before the wedding," Wasser says. "There was a big change in specificity and strengthening of prenuptial agreements in California. The statutory language regarding what was necessary changed. Now there's a really easy-to-follow set of rules. I have not had one of my prenuptial agreements - none of those people have come back to get divorced. I do believe those people stay married longer because they have those conversations that are hard ones to have."

It remains to be seen which, if any, of these trends will be reflected in Wasser's counsel of Jolie - but it is already apparent their children are a priority for both. Jolie has asked for sole physical custody, and Pitt issued a statement asking for their kids' privacy to be respected.

Read more: What Films Are Next for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt After Their Split
Americas favorite A-list couple is coming to an end. In the demise of yet another Hollywood marriage, Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, TMZ reported.

The documents were filed on Monday, citing irreconcilable differences as the cause. A source told TMZ Jolies decision had a lot to do with Pitts interaction with the children. She is asking for sole physical custody of the couples children but wants their father to have visitation rights.

The duo wed just two short years ago in August 2014, but they have been together since 2004. From the adoption of their adorable children to their charity work in Africa, the couple have spent much of their 12 years together visiting many parts of the world.

So, as fans mourn the end of Brangelina, were taking a look back at their life traveling around the globe, to everywhere from Vietnam to Venice. We also cant help but wonder what Jennifer Aniston and her amazing travel shoes think about this turn of events.

Brangelina on vacation

2004: Southern Italy

The couple was seen walking the streets of Southern Italy during the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Brangelina on vacation

2006: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The duo sped through the streets of the city on a motorcycle.

Brangelina on vacation

2006: Mumbai, India

The couple enjoyed a boat ride during a family vacation in Mumbai.

Brangelina on vacation

Brangelina on vacation

2010: Venice, Italy

Lindsey Campbell is the Audience Engagement Editor at Travel + Leisure. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @lyndzicampbell.

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Rethinking the ink? Over the course of their 12-year relationship, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt permanently stamped their love for each other on their bodies.

In 2011, Jolie, 41, revealed a new set of map coordinates on her left arm, right below the tattoos that correspond with the birthplaces of the pairs six kids (Cambodia for Maddox, 15; Vietnam for Pax, 12; Ethiopia for Zahara, 11; Namibia for Shiloh, 10; and France for twins Vivienne and Knox, 8). She later revealed the new art was the latitude and longitude of Pitts birthplace.

PHOTOS: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: The Way They Were

It doesnt take much investigating to figure that one out, the By the Sea actress, who has about 17 tattoos, said in an interview with Extra in May 2011. Its Shawnee, Oklahoma.

Pitt, 52, reciprocated the gesture by getting his own ink. Four years later, in 2015, the Big Short actor was spotted showing off new markings on his arm: a cross with the letter A on one side and the initials of their kids on the other.

PHOTOS: See Every House Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Called Home

As Us Weekly previously reported, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt on Monday, September 19, after two years of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences. The high-profile pair, dubbed Brangelina, began dating in 2004 after costarring in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.



One year earlier, in 2003, following her split from then-husband Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie removed the tattoo of his name from her left arm. She later drew over the spot with a dedication to her kids  and Pitt.



PHOTOS: Brangelina's Most Memorable Red Carpet Appearances

"I love them. They're body art," she has said of her tattoos. "I don't think it's abnormal that someone who spends their life in other skins wants to claim their own by marking things on it that matter to them."





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From Cosmopolitan

Brace yourself: TMZ reports that Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, citing "irreconcilable differences." According to TMZ, Angelina asked for physical custody of the Jolie-Pitt brood, with Brad to have joint legal custody and visitation. Brangelina got married in 2014, but prior to that had been a couple since 2004. They famously became involved after filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith together, while Brad was still married to Jennifer Aniston.

TMZ also notes that Angelina's decision to divorce Brad is entirely due to "the way Brad was parenting the children" and does not have anything to do with infidelity. According to Us Weekly, Brangelina celebrated their two-year wedding anniversary last month with a stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was just the two of them," said Us's source. "They had dinner and spent the night, and that was it." In 2015, they starred together in the film By the Sea, which Angelina directed.

Update 9/20, 11:09 a.m.: A lawyer for Angelina Jolie has confirmed to the Associated Press that she has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt.

BREAKING: Lawyer: Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt - The Associated Press (@AP) September 20, 2016

Update 9/20, 11:25 a.m.: Attorney Robert Offer reiterated in a statement that the divorce is about Angelina's concern for her family. "This decision was made for the health of the family," Offer said. "She will not be commenting, and asks that the family be given its privacy at this time."

TMZ has also updated their post to say that their "sources" claim Angelina was "fed up" with Brad's alcohol and marijuana consumption, as well as what she perceives as his "anger problem."

Update 9/20, 11:49 a.m.: In opposition to TMZ's claim that there was no third party involved in the split, Page Six reports that Angelina decided to file for divorce after a private detective discovered that Brad had been unfaithful. This investigator allegedly found that Brad had been cheating on Angelina with his Allied co-star Marion Cotillard and "Russian hookers while boozing it up with coworkers."

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Hes in the throes of some insane midlife crisis, and Angie is fed up, Page Six's source said. She hired a private eye because she felt that he was fooling around with her on the set, and it turns out, he was. And that was the final straw.



Update 9/20, 1:33 p.m.: Brad Pitt has commented on the news in a statement to People. "I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well being of our kids," he said. "I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."



Update 9/20, 6:00 p.m.: Angelina Jolie's father, actor Jon Voight, has officially spoken out about his daughter's divorce in an interview with Inside Edition. "Something very serious must have happened for Angie to make a decision like this," he said. "I dont know what it is. Its a sad thing. Say a little prayer."

"I am concerned for Angie and the children and hopefully I will be seeing them very soon," he continued.

Follow Eliza on Twitter.



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From the very start of their marriage, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt didn't shy away from conflict.



Just after they wed in 2014, the couple had what Jolie described as an "unconventional" honeymoon  flying to an island off Malta along with their children to scream at one another for weeks while filming By the Sea, which depicted a couple in crisis in 1970s France.



"We may have been having big fights on the set during the day, but at night we were tag-teaming on the bedtime story. As much as we can argue and fight  and we all have our challenges  at the end I say, 'My job is to love him,' " Jolie, who also wrote and directed the film, told PEOPLE last year.



Though they're divorcing now, at the time of the film's premiere Jolie said their relationship was stronger than ever  thanks in part to playing spouses on the rocks.









Angelina Jolie Opened Up About Her Marriage After Filming By the Sea with Brad Pitt: 'We Have Fights' Like 'Any Other Couple'| Breakups, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt



The 41-year-old actress told PEOPLE her on and off-screen disagreements with Pitt, 52, brought them closer together.



"It strengthens a relationship if you can pass those big fights and those big things where you really come head-to-head," she said. "Making the movie, we knew we were beating each other up. We knew we were giving each other tough days. But we agreed to see how far we could push each other."





Angelina Jolie Opened Up About Her Marriage After Filming By the Sea with Brad Pitt: 'We Have Fights' Like 'Any Other Couple'| Breakups, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt



So what inspired them to do the film anyway? As Jolie told The Telegraph, they thought By the Sea might be a similar filming experience to Mr. and Mrs. Smith  "that kind of fun." The pair met on the set of the film in 2003, and started a relationship afterward.



FLASHBACK: Brad and Angelina at the 2012 Golden Globes





"But [we] realized very quickly that it wasn't," she said. "Then we joked that this is what happens after 10 years of marriage."





Angelina Jolie Opened Up About Her Marriage After Filming By the Sea with Brad Pitt: 'We Have Fights' Like 'Any Other Couple'| Breakups, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt



And while the fights they had onscreen were intense, Jolie was quick to clarify the conflict between their characters was by no means autobiographical.





RELATED VIDEO: Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie Divorce: Does Marriage Increase Strain in a Relationship?



"Brad and I have our issues, but if the characters were even remotely close to our problems we couldn't have made the film," she revealed. "To be clear: we have fights and problems like any other couple. We have days when we drive each other absolutely mad and want space, but the problems in the movie aren't our specific problems."



Coming out of the film, Jolie told PEOPLE she was more excited than ever for the couple's future  speaking openly about how much she and Pitt enjoyed growing older together.



Jolie confessed: "We both appreciate the beauty in looking at each other and thinking, 'God, you're just getting stranger as you're getting older.' Brad and I are fortunate because we see the beauty in each other's changes. I'm more interested in his 50-year-old self than his 40-year-old self. And then you look forward to even more years together."



 Reporting by MARY GREEN
LONDON (Reuters) - Activists urging American expats in Britain to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election took to the streets of London on Wednesday in a red open-top double-decker bus adorned with anti-Donald Trump posters. Organisers, online activist network Avaaz, put up flags, balloons and posters reading "American Abroad: Vote to Stop Trump" on the bus, referring to the Republican presidential nominee who faces Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 vote. Some 30 activists filled the top of the bus as it made its way around the British capital, chanting "Stop Trump" and singing along to Bruce Springsteen song "Born In The U.S.A." The bus made stops along the way, with campaigners using tablets to help some expats register for the vote. Some eight million Americans live abroad, of which more than 220,000 live in Britain. However, just 12 percent of them vote, Avaaz said in a statement. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published last week, Clinton leads Trump by 4 percentage points, with 42 percent of likely voters supporting her and 38 percent backing the Republican. (Reporting by Georgina Cooper; editing by Susan Thomas)
Tim Cook

Apple has been considering a purchase of the British automotive manufacturer McLaren Technology Group, and conducted talks with the company, according to a new report from Matthew Garrahan and Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times.

Apple also bounced around the idea of a strategic investment as another option, though the FT's sources say an acquisition was also discussed.

But a McLaren denied that a takeover or investment was currently in the works.

"There's no takeover, no strategic investment," A McLaren spokesperson told Business Insider. "It's completely untrue."

Business Insider has reached out to McLaren to ask whether acquisition or investment talks happened in the past.

The price for McLaren Technology Group? Between 1 billion ($1.3 billion) and 1.5 billion, according to the report.

McLaren makes supercars, and it runs a British Formula 1 racing team. But it also does a fair amount of research and work with manufacturing processes and data collection and analysis.

Earlier this year, F1 blogger Joe Saward floated the possibility that Apple was laying the groundwork to buy the entire racing series.

F1 was eventually sold to Liberty Media for $8.5 billion, although the deal is not final.

McLaren lost 22.6 million on revenue of 265 million in 2014, the most recent figures that are publicly available, according to the Financial Times.

The news of talks between McLaren and Apple will renew speculation about what products and services the technology company is planning in the automotive industry.

Project Titan

McLaren

Apple famously has a car department, codenamed "Project Titan," but the company has never confirmed that it is in fact working on an electric car or self-driving software.

Apple has recently focused its attention on self-driving car software instead of on the manufacturing processes that would go into making its own car, according to a slew of reports.

Story continues

But Apple's core corporate strengths are design, supply chain management, and manufacturing processes, all of which lend strength to the argument that if Apple were to make a car, it would design both the hardware and software, as it does for the iPhone.

An investment or purchase in McLaren would give Apple an injection of racing technology, as well as a team of automotive-focused engineers. McLaren also owns several valuable patents, especially for high-tech materials such as carbon fiber and aluminum. It does manufacturing research and studies materials in its McLaren Applied Technologies group.

McLaren also does substantial work with sensors and data in a department called McLaren Electronic Systems. For example, the company compares real-time data collected during races with historical data, which means that it can solve several problems with dealing with the flood of data that a connected car can generate.

One of the challenges Apple's car project faces is dealing with and analyzing the flood of data generated by its sensor-laden vehicles currently driving around California. Those vehicles can produce 2 GB of data per mile.

Apple has already invested in a transportation company. It invested $1 billion earlier this year in Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing company.

"From a Didi point of view, we see that as, one, a great financial investment. Two, we think that there are some strategic things that the companies can do together over time," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in July.

NOW WATCH: Here's how the iPhone 7 compares to the Samsung Galaxy S7





More From Business Insider


London (AFP) - US tech giant Apple is in talks with British supercar maker McLaren about a possible acquisition, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

The Californian iPhone maker is looking at a potential takeover of or investment in the British-based firm, which could be valued at up to A1.5 billion (1.7 billion euros, $1.9 billion), the newspaper said, citing three unnamed sources.

If it went ahead, the move could be seen as part of a bid by Apple to challenge Tesla, the US luxury electric carmaker founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Apple fuelled speculation about its ambitions in the auto sector this year with a billion-dollar investment in Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that the company was rethinking its strategy, mothballing parts of its Titan self-driving cars project.

Google's parent company Alphabet and San Francisco-based Uber have both been working on getting self-driving cars on public roads.

McLaren also runs a successful Formula One team.
Ariana Grande is selling the cat ear headphones you never knew you needed

Ariana Grande is selling the cat ear headphones you never knew you needed

In addition to her ~high pony~, Ariana Grande frequently dons another fashion statement upon her head: cat ear headbands.

Ariana Grande In Concert - New York, NY

Look at that feline aesthetic.

A photo posted by Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) on Oct 29, 2014 at 9:20pm PDT

So it only makes sense that Ariana would release limited edition cat ear headphones for her devoted fanbase.

arianaears1

The feline-esque music accessories (or meowsic accessories, lolol) are limited edition products that are currently being sold at Brookstone. Where has the cat lovers answer to Beats by Dre been all our lives???

arianaears2

I feel as though you could wear these wireless headphones as a statement piece and not even utilize their music playing features.

Fair warning, though: youre gonna need to save up as these cat ear headphones will cost you a smooth $150.

arianaears3

Now, BuzzFeed does raise an important question. Does Ariana not recall the brainwashing mechanism from the flawless early aughts film Josie and the Pussycats?

catearsjosie

They were cat ear headphones. Should we be concerned, Ariana?!

arianaears4

Theyre super cute, tho!!!!

The post Ariana Grande is selling the cat ear headphones you never knew you needed appeared first on HelloGiggles.
When it comes to posters promoting new seasons of returning shows, we always appreciate a fresh, dedicated photo shoot  as The CWs Arrow has done to tout Season 5.

RELATEDMatts Inside Line: Scoop on Arrow, Supernatural and More

The dramatic poster released on Wednesday via social media features Stephen Amell in a hero shot, clad in the latest upgrade to Green Arrows costume, previewing His Fight, His City, His Legacy.

As revealed in the logline for the new season, Oliver  with Diggle and Thea now out of the mix and Laurel no longer with us (R.I.P.)  takes to the streets solo to protect Star City, with Felicity guiding him from the bunker. Check out the poster then read on for more:

Arrow Season 5 will feature a variety of fresh faces, including Rocky IV opponent Dolph Lundgren (as a Big Bad in the Russia flashbacks), Popular alum Carly Pope (as a Coast City reporter), Chicago P.D.s Josh Segarra (in the series-regular role of D.A. Adrian Chase aka Vigilante), Reapers Rick Gonzalez (as the DC Comics character Wild Dog), The McCarthys Tyler Ritter (as SCPD Detective Malone), Blindspots Joe Dinicol (recurring as Rory Regan aka the vigilante Ragman) and former WWE grappler Cody Rhodes in a guest role TBA.

Arrow returns Wednesday, Oct. 5 at 8/7c.

PHOTOSArrow Season 5 Photos Feature Masked Prometheus, Lotsa Russians

Want more scoop on Arrow, or for any other show? Email insideline@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matts Inside Line.

VIDEO: Team Arrow Previews The End of a Chapter, Olivers

Reaction to a Harsh Truth, Felicitys New (Marked?!) Man

Related stories

Arrow Episode 100: Robert Queen (and Laurel?) 'Resurrected' for 4-Way Xover

Michael Weatherly Eyes Mata Hari Drama Series at The CW

Supernatural Casts Kadeem Hardison as a Man With a Plan for Lucifer
Ashton Sachs, the California man accused of murdering his parents while they slept and trying to kill two younger siblings in 2014 when he was 19, abruptly pleaded guilty to murder on Tuesday.



Sachs, now 22, is expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.



Sachs had a closed-door conference with Orange County Superior Court Judge Gregg Prickett. He then pleaded guilty to special-circumstances murder and attempted-murder charges. He gave no indication why he chose to change his previous not guilty plea.



Sachs shot his parents, Brad and Andra, in their bedroom of their $2.5 million luxury home in the wealthy Orange County enclave of San Juan Capistrano. He then shot his brother Landon, who was 8 at the time. Landon is now paralyzed from the waist down. He tried to shoot his 17-year-old sister, Alexis, but she was unharmed.



He later told authorities that he was angry at his parents for loving his siblings more than they loved him. He blamed them for his depression, and claimed that they hadn't taken his previous suicide attempt seriously.



Sachs had once been a computer whiz and honors student. His ex-girlfriend, Sarah Verbeek, was shocked at the murders, telling PEOPLE in 2015, "He never spoke bad about his family. He never said, 'I hate my mom.' Nothing. "



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



Earlier this month, Sachs' trial was delayed because he let go his attorneys and attempted to represent himself.



Prosecutors are pleased with his guilty plea.



"It is a good resolution," Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Mike Murray tells PEOPLE. "I think it is better for the family [to] just let Sachs fade off into everybody's memory."



"Nothing he does really surprises me," Murray continues, "but I wasnat aware he was going to change his plea to guilty. If there is any silver lining it's that the family didn't have to go through a trial."



The judge ordered Sachs to return for sentencing on Oct. 14. The law mandates that Sachs be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
London (AFP) - Britain's Labour Party faces deadlock in a power struggle between the party's centrist lawmakers and its leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn, as ballots closed Wednesday in a leadership challenge against him.

Corbyn is expected to win by a clear margin when the result is announced on Saturday and award-winning director Ken Loach praised the veteran socialist as he released a one-hour documentary about his campaign.

But experts warn that the rift inside Labour could condemn the party to being in opposition for several more years and increase the chances of a "hard Brexit".

In an eight-hour meeting of party chiefs on Tuesday, Corbyn rejected a plan by his deputy Tom Watson to let the party's lawmakers vote on who should be in the "shadow cabinet" -- its leadership team in parliament.

Watson has also proposed giving the party's MPs and trade unions more power over the choice of future Labour leaders, following criticism of the current process by Corbyn opponents who say that grassroots members and supporters have too much influence.

Corbyn and his backers reject these proposals as attempts to undermine his authority and want Labour members to have more of a say on the running of the party, including being able to vote on the shadow cabinet.

The conflict threatens to overshadow the party's annual conference in Liverpool, northwest England, where the winner of the leadership contest between Corbyn and Welsh MP Owen Smith will be announced.

In the longer-term, the rift could cause even bigger problems as some political commentators predict that Prime Minister Theresa May could call an early general election next year as she launches negotiations to leave the European Union.

Some argue the conflict could make it more likely that May will adopt plans backed by some of her Conservative MPs for Britain to leave Europe's single market entirely -- a move that could have a serious impact on the economy.

Story continues

Corbyn, 67, warned his MPs that Labour could only challenge the government if they united behind his leadership.

"I invite them, if I get a second mandate on Saturday morning to come on board and work together," he told the BBC.

"Despite a lot of very personal criticisms... made about me by a very large number of Labour MPs, I've not replied to any of them, I've taken it all on board, understood what they're saying and asked them to behave in a decent and responsible way and come together so that we have an ability to fight the Tories."

- 'Party at a crossroads' -

Many Labour MPs resigned from the shadow cabinet over the summer in protest at Corbyn's leadership, arguing he had performed weakly in the failed referendum campaign to keep Britain in the EU.

A majority of the party's MPs voted no confidence in him but Corbyn has clung on, saying he has helped boost the party's membership to record numbers and can win a general election.

Some commentators have warned the party could split if Corbyn remains as leader.

"Together we are very, very strong," Corbyn told supporters at his final campaign rally on Tuesday, where he also met volunteers making last-minute calls for party members to cast their postal ballots.

"Whatever the result is, we -- all of us -- have mounted the most incredible campaign, mobilised a lot of people, and we've actually changed the political discourse in this country," Corbyn added.

The polls officially closed at 1100 GMT on Wednesday.

Smith, who has accused Corbyn of lacking leadership skills, also issued a plea to his supporters.

"Our party is at a crossroads, and the choice we face is between renewing our party to pursue unity and power, or satisfying ourselves with ongoing division and opposition," said Smith, who was far behind Corbyn in a YouGov poll published last month.

Corbyn was a longtime critic of party policy under former centrist prime minister Tony Blair and was elected as party leader only last year with support from older leftists and younger anti-austerity campaigners.
HELSINKI (Reuters) - New Basel III banking rules are not expected to raise banks' capital requirements significantly, the European Central Bank's banking supervisor Daniele Nouy told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in an interview published on Wednesday.

The ECB expects the new Basel regulations to be finished by the end of this year, Nouy said.

"Uncertainty is the worst thing for banks. It is very difficult for them to think about their business models, as long as the capital requirements are unclear. We also expect, that capital requirements will not rise significantly from the current level," Nouy said.

The Basel Committee made up of regulators from nearly 30 countries has come under intense pressure from the banking industry and European governments to rein in the reforms it is now completing.

The Basel III rules, which are aimed at making the global banking system more resilient following the 2008 financial crisis, include forcing banks to hold more and different types of capital to insulate themselves during downturns.

(Reporting by Tuomas Forsell)
President Obama and Donald Trump have this in common: both have created a personal brand that tops achievement and defies critics. Obamas appealing image has won him high approval ratings, in spite of multiple administration scandals and a solid record of underachievement. For Trump, a powerful brand has made him a contender, against all odds.

President Obama sees the parallels and is becoming frantic. In a remarkable cri de coeur, he recently told black Americans he would consider it a personal insult if they dont vote for Hillary Clinton. He has taken to calling Donald Trump a bigot and has said the GOP contender is unfit to serve. At the same time, he has become the Energizer Bunny, creating a controversial national monument in Maine, signing into law a GMO labeling bill, freeing dangerous terrorists from Guantanamo, pardoning convicts, creating the first Atlantic marine sanctuary, adding new regulations on industry and more.

Related: Are the Trump Kids Becoming Political Liabilities?

The cause of this frenetic activity? Obama is worried his entire legacy will be undone by Donald Trump, and is desperate to have more to show for his presidency. His anxiety has been fueled by tightening polls, but also the recognition that the GOP candidate has what Obama had four years ago  a near-cult following immune to facts or information.

When the president says, I dont think the guys qualified to be president of the United States, he mimics his critics of eight years ago. They were right. A candidate with few achievements, both in his brief political career or in his years as a community organizer and law professor, Obama campaigned on hope and change. Thats what Trump is doing, and its working for him, just as it did for Obama eight years ago.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is struggling. She may ultimately win this joyless slugfest thanks to a huge money advantage, but she has been utterly incapable of co-opting Obamas popularity. It is not just that her personality is brittle and unwelcoming  that she is not especially likable; it is that Obamas brand is not something he can share, though he is desperate to do so.

Story continues

The Obama White House has worked non-stop to protect the presidents brand through careful message management. Throughout the past seven-plus years, Obama has blamed poor communications for his administrations shortcomings. In late 2015, the president said his low marks on underestimating ISIS were due to poor messaging.

Related: Terror Attacks Trigger a Sticks and Stones Battle Between Trump and Clinton

After being clobbered in the 2014 election, Obama said his administration had done a poor job of communicating his achievements. Faced with criticism for having backtracked on his red line in Syria, the president said his plan had not been packaged properly. Of the shortcomings in his first term, Obama said, But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people

To Obamas circle, the story is everything. A couple of days ago, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest claimed that we are in a narrative fight with ISIS. It was an insulting description of a conflict in which innocents have been burned in cages and mowed down by machine guns, but not an unreasonable one from a White House that has governed by narrative, many of them false.

The prevailing narratives about Obamacare  that it would bring down healthcare costs and that you could keep your existing plan if you liked it  were false. The narrative spun about the Iran deal  that a moderate regime promised better relations with the West  was also untrue.

To the fury of Republicans who view him as a failed president, Obama remains a popular figure with an average approval rating of 52 percent, according to Gallup. Though on average Obamas approval ratings are below the average for all U.S. presidents, (47 percent for his entire term vs. 53 percent), at this point in his time in office he is outperforming his predecessors. Considering that many of his legacy ambitions are on the rocks or held up by the courts, thats a remarkable achievement.

Related: Johnson Says the GOP and Democrats Are Dinosaurs Headed for Extinction

It is also remarkable since a majority of Americans profess their admiration for President Obama while at the same time, 55 percent say in a recent CBS poll that they want big changes and we need to rethink just about everything in the next few years. How does that compute?

How has the president managed to stay popular even as Obamacare is imploding, the Iran deal is unraveling, his immigration efforts have stalled, and he has to embrace an unpopular would-be successor? It is because his brand is, for the most part, untarnished. He has a cool image and an attractive family, and by comparison to those who would succeed him, he looks pretty good. To protect his brand, he has lofted one narrative after another to excuse and explain his shortcomings, and Americans have accepted the story.

His principle line of defense for seven years has been that Republicans in Congress have prevented him from doing all the things he promised. According to the long-running story, thats why we have not achieved immigration reform, stricter gun control, reduced income inequality, changed our education system for the better, adopted a broader climate agenda, made our entitlement programs more sustainable and so on. The president has left a lot of unfinished business. But, to hear the White House tell it, with the full support of the media, the GOP is to blame.

Voters arent so sure. While most exonerate Obama, they are underwhelmed by Hillary Clintons promise of four more years of Obamas policies. Millions are still looking for hope and change; ironically, this time around that may lead them to Donald Trump.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
A nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself.

President Obama was addressing the United Nations General Assembly, but really, he spoke to Republican nominee Donald Trump, and those attracted to an apocalyptic vision of a world in which the United States and other countries retreat behind barriers of isolationism, trade tariffs, immigration control, and class. He represents a threat to the world order, Obama argued  and, it just so happens, his legacy.

When bombs rocked New York, where Obama spoke, just a few days before, and authorities arrested and charged a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent, both Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton sharpened their argument about fitness to be commander-in-chief. My opponent is endangering you, both said, and only I can make you safe.

Even in an election marked by terrorist attacks across the world and in the United States, elevating national security as a campaign issue, their language was stark.

The ratcheting up of fearsome rhetoric is unlikely to fade heading into the first debate and the final weeks of both the election and Obamas presidency. To go by the campaign-trail rhetoric, what lies in store feels very far from hope.

Sign up for FPs Editors Picks newsletter here to receive Battleground 16, our take on the presidential race, each Wednesday through November.

Trump Gives Ukraine Cold Shoulder in New York

Petro Poroshenko sent a request to meet both U.S. presidential candidates. But only Clinton has sat down with the Ukrainian president.

Skittles are candy. Refugees are people.

 Wrigley, the company that makes Skittles, responding to Donald Trump, Jr. Trump tweeted an image of a bowl of the candy with a caption that read: If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? Thats our Syrian refugee problem. The image he used, without permission, was a photograph taken by a refugee.

Story continues

A Nation Ringed by Walls Would Only Imprison Itself

In his final U.N. address, President Obama pleads with world leaders to keep global borders, markets, and minds open.

As the 2016 election fast approaches, President Barack Obama increasingly is looking to  and fighting for  his legacy. He used his last speech before the United Nations to make an impassioned plea for an open world order  even as walls rise against refugees, protectionism makes a comeback, and cold wars with authoritarian states heat up.

Despite Bombings, Advocates Still Hope for More Visas for Afghan Interpreters

A program to speed visas for Afghan interpreters working for U.S. troops during the war may be under threat after New Yorks bomb attack by a U.S. citizen with Afghan roots.

50-45

Hillary Clintons lead on Donald Trump among likely voters, according to an NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll out Tuesday and conducted Sept. 12-18, a period including the attacks in Minnesota, New York and New Jersey.

Trump Invites Himself to Egypt Despite Wanting to Ban Muslims From the U.S.

The Republican nominee takes another swing at being a statesman by meeting with Cairos controversial leader.

Sign up for FPs Editors Picks newsletter here to receive Battleground 16, our take on the presidential race, each Wednesday through November.

Photo credit: Joe Raedle / Staff
While the red carpet pendulum swings toward inclusiveness, one sacred realm of fashion remains ever exclusive: haute couture, a hush-hush private club that's invite-only, strictly nontransferable. There's less than a handful of Los Angeles-based women, out of a global couture customer base of roughly 2,000, who make the biannual trip to shop the new collections in Paris. One of them is Christine Chiu, 33, the wife of prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Gabriel. "It's safe to say that $100,000 is the average price of a dress," says Chiu, "but no one ever asks about price."

Those hefty sums will garner a masterful creation, like the Chanel Haute Couture seen on Julianne Moore during the 2015 Oscars that boasted 80,000 hand-painted flowers and took 27 tailors 987 hours to produce. "It's like watching art in motion," says Marjorie Harvey (the wife of NBC's Little Big Shots host Steve Harvey), who sits front-row at the shows with her daughter Lori. "If an incredible piece comes down the runway that you just have to have, an occasion is never necessary."

A makeup artist touches up a leg on Chiu, who says: "I have to strategize, otherwise I'd buy every sparkly, skimpy cocktail dress. I'm hoping to build a well-rounded collection."

Chiu averages four shows a day over the course of three days. "I buy something at every show," she says. "The ateliers only produce one of each piece, often worldwide, but sometimes by continent or country." The one exception is Hollywood's red carpet: Designers can loan their creations to any A-lister they please. "The first five years of couture for me were about coming to terms with celebrities possibly wearing the same dress that I'm paying a lot of money for," recalls Chiu, who at 26 attended her first Chanel couture show. "A few years ago, there was a Chanel dress that I was putting a deposit on and I saw Jessica Chastain wearing it at an Oscar event and thought, 'I don't want the sloppy seconds.' Not that anyone would call couture sloppy."

Story continues

Read more: Michelle Obama Designer Christian Siriano: How I Beat Hollywood's Body Shamers on the Red Carpet (Guest Column)

Chiu in Louis Vuitton headband; Christian Dior Haute Couture dress; Dior earrings, mink coat and clutch; Yerprem diamond and pearl arm jewelry

Kerry Washington stepped out in frothy Giambattista Valli Couture tulle in November at the Baby2Baby gala - the same frock Chiu donned to meet the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace in June. "I now look at the celebrity photos and ask, 'Can I do it better?' If my answer is yes, I'll go for it, but if Gisele [Bundchen] wore it, then screw that, find me another piece!" laughs Chiu, who serves on 27 boards in town, including the Chinese Children's Initiative with UNICEF and the Children's Institute of Los Angeles and Art of Elysium; she's helping co-chair the latter's star-studded gala in January. On the upside, Hollywood bolsters visibility and helps couture maintain relevance. "Actresses are the reference for customers and create a great window of exposure for the brand," designer Elie Saab tells THR.

At the entrance of the Armani Prive couture show.

When it comes to the secrecy surrounding couture, Helene Farnault, author of Haute Couture Ateliers, notes that designers are simply protecting their ideas from being knocked off. Chiu admits she stumbled initially when it came to couture etiquette: "No one will help you; it's trial and error. It took me a couple of years of offending people." Faux pas include asking about the price (or a discount: "Never! I would seriously die," says Chiu); asking other attendees what they liked (competition for pieces is deadly); and not making a small courtesy purchase, even if you didn't love the collection (which will help hold your front-row seat for next season).

One couture trick that Chiu and her husband have learned is to forecast plastic surgery trends from the runway. Backless gowns mean liposuction of the back bra-line and contouring of the back waist; plunging necklines call for removal of implants; and high-low hemlines result in knee liposuction and a demand for a thigh gap. Chiu says this season's focus on shoulders, neck and decolletage means requests for procedures to eliminate lines, wrinkles and sun damage in those areas.

Front row at Giambattista Valli couture with Gabriel (right).

"Entertainment drives plastic surgery," says Chiu, whose husband's patient roster includes directors, producers and studio execs. The couple recently signed on to executive produce two films with A-list talent attached by Straight Up Films and are working with The Weinstein Co. on TV and film projects. They're also taking meetings with agencies for film finance representation. "We're bright-eyed and not sure what we are doing, but you could say it's a lot like couture," she says. "You just figure it out as you go."

Designer invites at Chiu's hotel: "There aren't any perks to being a couture customer; they aren't trying to wine and dine you."

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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(Rewrites with background on arms sales, Paul comments)

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate will vote on Wednesday on a measure to block the sale of tanks and other military equipment worth $1.15 billion to Saudi Arabia, but the measure is not expected to pass despite lawmakers' growing frustration with the longtime U.S. ally.

The Senate's Republican Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Tuesday he would "aggressively" oppose the effort.

"I think it's important to the United States to maintain as good a relationship with Saudi Arabia as possible, and I hope we'll defeat the resolution of disapproval of the arms sale," McConnell told reporters, calling Saudi Arabia a good ally.

The Pentagon announced on Aug. 9 that the State Department had approved the potential sale of more than 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored recovery vehicles and other equipment to Saudi Arabia. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said General Dynamics Corp would be the principal contractor for the sale.

A bipartisan group of senators, led by Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Chris Murphy, introduced a joint resolution seeking to block the arms deal, expressing concern that Saudi-led air strikes had killed civilians in Yemen, worries that the deal might fuel a regional arms race and concern that Congress was giving up its power to declare war.

"We should be part of the debate over whether or not we go to war. But then we should debate the practicalities of whether or not it's a good idea to be involved in the war in Yemen," Paul told Reuters.

Paul said the conflict could lead to instability and perhaps the rise of a militant group in Yemen, as Islamic State did in Syria.

The resolution also underscores concerns over what many in Congress see as Riyadh's international promotion of a severe form of Islam they view as hostile to U.S. interests.

"We've let them get away with it for years and years. And because they're less bad than other people in the Middle East, we keep giving them weapons," Paul said.

Story continues

Democratic Representative Ted Lieu and Republican Representative Mick Mulvaney introduced companion legislation on Tuesday seeking to block the sale in the House of Representatives.

Lieu in August sent a letter signed by 64 lawmakers asking U.S. President Barack Obama to postpone the sale.

Separately, Congress could vote this week to override Obama's promised veto of a measure allowing relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue the Saudi government.

(Additional reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Eric Walsh, Sandra Maler and Bill Rigby)
New Orleans rapper Big Freedia will hit the road this fall in anticipation of her new album, Pressing Onward, set to arrive next year, Pitchfork reports.

The reigning bounce queen will kick off the trek October 12th at the Saturn in Birmingham, Alabama and wrap October 23rd at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Massachusetts. The trek will feature fellow New Orleans outfit Tank and the Bangs and include stops in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Nashville and Brooklyn. Prior to the tour, Big Freedia will play a hometown show in New Orleans, September 23rd at Gasa Gasa, while on November 4th she'll perform at the Night of the Living Fest in Tuscon, Arizona.



Pressing Onward, meanwhile, has yet to be given a release date, but the LP marks Big Freedia's first since her 2014 official studio debut, Just Be Free. In the two years since, Big Freedia has shared a handful of new songs including last year's "Crazy," and "I Heard," which arrived in February. This year Big Freedia also notably contributed vocals to Beyonce's "Formation."

Along with music, Big Freedia continued to star in her Fuse reality show, Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, which finished its fifth season in August. In 2015, she also published her memoir, God Save the Queen Diva!

This summer, however, Big Freedia avoided jail time but was sentenced to three years probation and fined $35,000 after pleading guilty to theft of government funds. The rapper accepted almost $35,000 in housing assistance checks that she was not entitled to.

Big Freedia Tour Dates

October 12  Birmingham, AL @ Saturn

October 13  Nashville, TN @ Exit/In

October 14  Atlanta, GA @ Afropunk Festival

October 15  Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter

October 17  Philadelphia, PA @ The Foundry at The Filmore

October 18  Washington, DC @ The Howard Theatre

October 19  Asbury Park, NJ @ House of Independents

October 21  Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl

October 23  Allston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall

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MATTOON -- Applying for financial aid just got easier. This year, the online form will be available on Oct. 1three months earlier than in the past.

Why is that important to students who will enroll in college in the Fall 2017, Spring 2018 and Summer 2018 terms?

Most schools award financial aid on a first-come, first-served basis. Completing the FAFSA early will ensure you are in the applicant pool for any awards for which you qualify, Paula Carpenter, director of financial aid and veteran services said.

The FAFSA is the first step in the financial aid process to receive a grant or a loan. Many scholarships also require a student to complete the FAFSA.

We know that next school year seems far away, but we want our Lake Land College students to be first in line to receive any Illinois MAP grant funding that could become available, Carpenter added.

In addition to making the form available earlier, it will be easier to complete the FAFSA, the free financial aid form, as families can use 2015 tax information which should be readily available.

The form is available at fafsa.gov. Lake Land Colleges school code is 007644.

The following information will help families navigate the financial aid process for the 2017-2018 academic year.

TAX INFORMATION

From now on, the FAFSA will ask for older income and tax information that you will already have. This change means you wont have to use estimates anymore, or log in later to update your FAFSA after you file taxes!

Since chances are likely that your 2015 taxes are already filed, you may be able to use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool (IRS DRT) to automatically import your tax information into your FAFSA.

With the FAFSA available three months earlier will give you more time to meet most deadlines and to explore and understand your financial aid options.

BUT WHAT IF MY FAMILY'S FINANCIAL SITUATION HAS CHANGED SINCE OUR 2015 TAXES WERE FILED? CAN WE REPORT 2016 TAX INFORMATION INSTEAD?

No. You must report your 2015 tax information on the 201718 FAFSA. You do not have the option to report your 2016 tax information. If your family has experienced a loss of income since the 2015 tax year, talk to the financial aid office at your school. They have the ability to assess your situation and make adjustments.

Note: The FAFSA asks for marital status as of the day it is completed. So individuals who are now but werent in 2015 (and therefore didnt file taxes as married)will need to add their spouses income to the FAFSA.

Similarly, if an individual filed their 2015 taxes as married but are now no longer married when completing the FAFSA, they will need to subtract their spouses income.

CAN I FILL OUT THE FAFSA BEFORE I APPLY TO COLLEGES? WHAT IF I DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M APPLYING YET?

Yes, you can fill out the FAFSA even before you've submitted your college applications. Add every school you're considering to your FAFSA, even if you haven't applied or been accepted yet. Even if you're on the fence about applying to a particular school, add it. It will hold your place in line for financial aid in case you end up applying for admission at that school. You can always remove schools later if you decide not to apply (but you don't have to).

WILL FAFSA DEADLINES BE EARLIER SINCE THE APPLICATION IS LAUNCHING EARLIER?

We expect that most state and school deadlines will remain approximately the same as in 201617. However, several states that offer first come, first served financial aid will change their deadlines from as soon as possible after Jan. 1 to as soon as possible after Oct. 1. So, as always, its important that you check your state and school deadlines so that you dont miss out on any aid. State deadlines are on fafsa.gov; school deadlines are on schools websites.

For more information on the FAFSA changes, visit StudentAid.ed.gov/fafsa-changes.

For more information on how to complete your FAFSA, visit StudentAid.gov/fafsa/filling-out
LONDON (Reuters) - Extending bank stress testing to the wider financial system could be the next step by regulators to root out weaknesses that undermine stability, a Bank of England paper said on Wednesday. The Bank has been conducting its own stress test of banks since the 2007-09 financial crisis, supplementing European Union tests. The aim is to spot flaws in business models and check if lenders are holding enough capital to withstand big market shocks. The BoE has already spoken about stress testing the asset management sector as well, but in its Quarterly Bulletin published on Wednesday, it went a step further to outline the benefits of system-wide testing given the intimate links between banks and market participants. "While macroprudential authorities are already engaged in analysis of interconnections between different parts of the financial system, no authority has yet undertaken a comprehensive system-wide stress test," a paper in the bulletin said. Such a stress test would add clearing houses, hedge funds, insurers and money market funds to the mix. "Extending the reach of stress testing beyond the core banking sector would help in guarding against any perverse incentives stress tests and broader bank regulation creates for institutions to move activities outside the core banking sector into the so-called 'shadow banking sector'." The Financial Stability Board, the G20 regulatory task force chaired by BoE Governor Mark Carney, suggested last year that regulators should consider system-wide testing. The BoE said a paper from the International Monetary Fund next year will suggest a way forward. (Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by Susan Thomas)
By Alwyn Scott

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Boeing Co <BA.N> said on Wednesday it expected to receive a U.S. license to sell jetliners to Iran soon, after Airbus <AIR.PA> confirmed earlier in the day that it had been licensed for similar sales by the Treasury Department.

"We understand that the U.S. government has issued Airbus a license to sell aircraft to Iran," Chicago-based Boeing said in a statement. "We believe their license application was submitted prior to our similar request and that the government follows a 'first in, first out' policy. We look forward to receiving our license from the government shortly."

Sales to Iran would provide an important boost to the order books of Boeing and Airbus during a year when sales have slowed. Iran has said it needs 400 planes to rebuild its commercial aircraft fleet after decades of isolation.

Boeing and Airbus have reached provisional agreements to sell more than 100 jetliners each to Iran's national airline, a pair of deals valued at more than $50 billion at list prices. The sales follow a landmark agreement on Iran's nuclear program last year.

Airbus Group shares were up 0.74 percent at 52.86 euros. Boeing shares were up 0.9 percent at $128.96.

The sales still face obstacles from bankers, who are cautious because U.S. banks remain barred from doing business with Iran.

(Reporting by Alwyn Scott; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Paul Simao)
She faced one of the most frightening challenges of her life. And he helped her through it.



Before Angelina Jolie Pittfiled for divorce from husband Brad Pitt, the 41-year-old actress said his strength and devotion helped her through two life-changing surgeries and cancer scares.



As Jolie's doctor Kristi Funk told PEOPLE, Pitt was by Jolie's side for every procedure in 2013 when she had preventive double mastectomy  a decision she came to after genetic tests showed she carried a mutated BRCA1 gene predisposing her to developing breast cancer.



He was there too after a 2015 ovarian cancer scare lead her to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes. (Jolie's mother died of ovarian cancer in 2007 at age 56).









How Brad Pitt Helped Angelina Jolie Through Her Cancer Crisis | Breakups, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt

Writing about her decisions in two candid op-eds in The New York Times, Jolie praised her husband for being her no. 1 support.



"I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive," she wrote in 2013. Brad was at the Pink Lotus Breast Center, where I was treated, for every minute of the surgeries. We managed to find moments to laugh together."



"We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer," she added. "And it has."



In her 2015 op-ed, she said she immediately turned to her husband for support after a doctor told her a blood test showed markers that could be a sign of early ovarian cancer. Pitt dropped everything and traveled to be there for Jolie.





How Brad Pitt Helped Angelina Jolie Through Her Cancer Crisis | Breakups, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt

"I called my husband in France, who was on a plane within hours," Jolie wrote. "The beautiful thing about such moments in life is that there is so much clarity. You know what you live for and what matters. It is polarizing, and it is peaceful."



Pitt was just as outspoken about his supportive for Jolie at the time. "Having witnessed this decision firsthand, I find Angie's choice, as well as many others like her, absolutely heroic," he said in a 2013 statement. "All I want is for her to have a long and healthy life, with myself and our children.



"This is a happy day for our family," he continued.



At home "Brad did everything he could to keep things secret and protect Angie," a family insider told PEOPLE.





How Brad Pitt Helped Angelina Jolie Through Her Cancer Crisis | Breakups, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt

Using early-morning appointments and rental cars to avoid discovery, "they really wanted Angie to be able to recover and rest before they shared the story. Brad was very attentive and sweet to Angie. He always dotes on her anyway."



Celebrating special occasions in a big way was a hallmark of their relationship  and one that helped them get through Jolie's health crisis.



"Every event is cherished," Plan B exec Dede Gardner told PEOPLE. "Every birthday is cherished. The holidays are cherished. Events are made of every moment in the most positive way."



"This is an admirable person  a man with a deep love for his family," Pitt's friend and furniture-design partner Frank Pollaro told PEOPLE.



There were elaborate, custom gifts, too: Jolie commissioned a diamond pendant for Pitt engraved with a microscopic love message; Pitt designed a jeweled bracelet for Jolie for a Christmas present.



In the middle of her surgeries, they held a family gift exchange on Valentine's Day and went camping with the kids on Easter weekend for their annual Easter egg hunt.



"We've been through so much," the actress told PEOPLE in 2014. As they raise their six children, "we've gotten a lot closer, which I think naturally happens with raising a family together," she said. "You have history. ... You have this person who really knows you, and you know them so well. You're not lovers or boyfriend and girlfriend as much as you are a family."
Paramount has unveiled a new trailer for its forthcoming WWII drama "Allied," starring the US actor.

The clip shows Pitt, alongside his co-star Marion Cotillard, fighting off the Nazis in their roles as Max Vatan, a British intelligence officer, and French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour. The trailer follows the duo as they fall in love, heading everywhere from the desert to London on their adventure.

The film, directed by Robert Zemeckis, is set for release in theaters on November 23.

To watch the trailer, see https://youtu.be/j9S0qeWm8Zo
By Brad Brooks SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption charges, a crusading federal judge ruled on Tuesday, adding more turbulence to the country's political landscape. Judge Sergio Moro said that Lula, who served as president from 2003-11 and has for two decades been an iconic and powerful political force in Brazil, will face charges of accepting 3.7 million Brazilian reais ($1.14 million) in bribes connected to a sweeping kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras. Moro wrote in his ruling that according to the prosecutors' charges, Lula was a "direct beneficiary" of bribes from OAS SA [OAS.UL], one of the engineering and construction firms at the center of the graft scandal, and therefore must stand trial. The corruption case will also put on trial Lula's wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva; OAS Chief Executive Jose Aldemario "Leo" Pinheiro; Paulo Okamotto, the president of the Lula Institute, and four others. In an emailed note late on Tuesday, Lula's lawyers again said their client had committed no crime and labeled Moro as a "impartial" judge who was on a witch hunt to see the former leader jailed. Lula, speaking via video link, told an event held by his lawyers in New York that the charges were a "farce." "What's happening isn't getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more," said Lula, adding that he "will keep fighting." Tuesday's events capped an incredibly choppy few weeks for Brazil. Lula's hand-chosen successor Dilma Rousseff was found guilty by the Senate of breaking budget rules and dismissed from the presidency late last month. Her successor, former vice president Michel Temer, has abruptly pulled the country to the political and economic right, and is trying to boost Brazil out of its worst economic recession since the 1930s. Moro's decision may prevent Lula from making a political comeback in the 2018 presidential campaign. It could also derail any hopes the Workers' Party (PT) had of returning to power, or possibly even surviving, according to some experts. Despite the corruption allegations facing the PT and several of its former coalition parties, the most recent polls have shown Lula remains a leading candidate for 2018. Lula was charged with three counts each of corruption, which carries a maximum sentence of 16 years per count, and money laundering, with a possible sentence of up to 10 years per count. If found guilty, however, the sentence would be determined by the judge, and Lula and the others to stand trial would have chances to appeal. TURN OF FORTUNES Nonetheless, simply putting on trial the former president who left office with an 83-percent approval rating sent shockwaves across Brazil. Lula was widely adored at home and abroad for his exceptional life story, rising from poverty to the presidency, and of being the charismatic, rough-talking former union leader who led massive strikes in the 1980s that helped topple an entrenched military dictatorship. "It's a huge, grave blow to Lula's myth," said Claudio Couto, professor of political science at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) university in Sao Paulo. "Any condemnation of Lula would also end up being a condemnation of the Workers Party." The decision and the Petrobras probe as a whole make up a watershed moment for the fight against corruption in Brazil, experts say, where for centuries the rich, powerful and politically connected have enjoyed impunity. Now they are the target of this country's most sweeping anti-corruption push ever, which became known to the public two years ago. It has since seen nearly 200 people, including top executives and politicians, facing corruption charges and 83 people already found guilty and jailed. Federal prosecutors leveled charges against Lula last week, labeling him as the "commander" of the Petrobras graft scheme that they say has caused an estimated 42 billion reais ($12.6 billion) in losses to Petrobras shareholders and tax payers. It was the first time that Lula, 70, has been charged by federal prosecutors for involvement in the political kickbacks scheme at Petrobras. He has been indicted separately by a court in Brasilia for obstruction of justice in a case related to an attempt to persuade a defendant in the Petrobras scandal not to turn state's witness. Lula's lawyers have said prosecutors lacked the evidence to back up their accusations and that charges against him amount to political persecution to stop him from running for president in 2018. But experts say that if the prosecutors' charges are proven, the case against Lula is essential to demonstrate a new strength in rule of law and the determination of institutions to prosecute corruption at the highest levels. "It's a crucial and critical juncture for Brazil, to try such a powerful figure like Lula and, if he is guilty, to send him to jail," said Carlos Pereira, a professor of public policy at FGV in Rio de Janeiro and one of Brazil's top experts on corruption. "Voters now see powerful white guys going to jail - not just poor, black Brazilians, as was always the case." But Pereira also warned that the political fallout if Lula were to be found guilty and sent to jail would be enormous, and that the chances of the PT "disintegrating" even more likely. "The PT has been an incredibly important party for the re-democratization of Brazil, being the main force that represents leftist groups and created policies that promoted unprecedented social inclusion in our unequal society," he said. "Without the PT, it may take a long time for smaller, left-wing parties to find a new 'nucleus' to gravitate around, to provide a healthy counterweight within the political system to the more right-leaning parties," Pereira added. (Additional reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasilia and Christian Plumb in New York,; editing by Daniel Flynn, G Crosse)
CHARLESTON -- The city has been given the go-ahead to seek a federal grant that would provide funds for home rehabilitation and improvement on residences within a section of town.

The city, with the Coles County Regional Planning & Development Commission, is applying for the Community Development Block Grant this year for $450,000 worth of work to 10 homes within a small section of Charleston. The application was approved by the city council at its meeting Tuesday.

This section encompasses homes south of Walnut Avenue, east of E Street, west of Illinois Route 130, and north of the Lincoln Prairie Grass Trail running between Charleston and Mattoon. The target area was decided based on a survey done years ago identifying areas with the most need.

The rehabilitation or improvement would cover general maintenance work needed on the houses such as roof replacement, window replacement, electrical and plumbing repairs and other general maintenance work necessary on the typical home.

Cliff Shaw, commission home inspector, said it really all depends on the home what work could be done, specifically, under the grant.

Kevin McReynolds, commission community planner, said the city should know if the grant application for the money is funded in a couple months to the end of the year.

Only 50 percent of the applications from the various towns and cities in the state are funded, said Steve Pamperin, city planner.

We have a 50/50 chance of getting funded, Pamperin said. There is no guarantee. It is a competitive cycle. We compete with everybody in the state of Illinois except for the big cities.

Once the city knows whether it will receive the grant, notices to those in the target area will be sent out, allowing them to apply for funds. Of those applications, homeowners will be prioritized based on a point system of sorts.

There is a point system, McReynolds said. We prioritize very low income. You get more points if you're a senior citizen. You get more points if you're disabled. Large families get more points.

A person can qualify if they are not considered low income or do not fit these other criteria, however, more points are awarded to those who do.

Some 77 homes are located in the target area, and the grant will be focused toward providing money for work on low- to moderate-income homes. At most, $45,000 worth of work will be done on a home. McReynolds said the work needed to be done in the home could be less than that, however, allowing work to possibly be done to a new home.

McReynolds said the work on any given home will be prioritized with bringing aspects of a home back up to code. Once those are covered, some discretionary work can then be done.

Property owners specifically have to be living in the home to be eligible for grant money.

Shaw said work on some of the homes will likely start in a year if the overall application is awarded. However, Pamperin said there might be a hiccup sometime down the line depending on the states financial status. While the grant is awarding federal money, the state has some say in the timing of when the money will be issued.

All of the work on the project has to be done within a one-year period, though.

Also Tuesday, council members authorized the renewal on an agreement with the Illinois Department of Revenue to continue the citys involvement in a state pilot program.

In this agreement, the city, specifically the Charleston police, handle some inspection work of local liquor establishments normally done by the state liquor commission.

As previously reported, the commission is understaffed and sought to opt Charleston into a pilot program in January where the city handles some of the work typically done by those in the liquor commission. This has been done to measure the effectiveness of having a municipality handle specific work regarding liquor establishment inspections.

The pilot program ran from January until June. Naperville was also a part of the pilot program. The approved agreement would extend the citys pact to take on some of this work.

Also agreed-upon in the meeting, portions of Reynolds Drive and McComb Street will be temporarily closed to traffic and parking as needed from 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Nov. 5 for the Charleston Challenge 40-Mile Relay Foot Race.
(Adds finance minister Meirelles's comments and context)

By Rodrigo Campos and Dion Rabouin

NEW YORK, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Brazilian President Michel Temer on Wednesday promised political stability for foreign investors to put their money in a country weathering the impeachment of his predecessor and the worst recession in generations.

Speaking for the first time to investors in New York, Temer said he was confident he will have enough backing in Congress to pass unpopular fiscal reforms needed to plug a ballooning budget deficit and regain the confidence of markets in the once-booming economy.

Temer, formally sworn in three weeks ago, has managed to approve minor bills in Congress after months of political turmoil that led to the impeachment of his leftist predecessor Dilma Rousseff.

However, the 75-year-old constitutional scholar is already facing divisions within his widely diverse alliance in Congress with some lawmakers promising to water down the fiscal reforms.

The head of his economic team, Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles, told investors at the same event that he saw "extremely high chances" of approval for a key proposal to cap public expenditures.

Meirelles said a controversial reform to reduce generous pension benefits and set a minimum age of retirement will most likely be approved next year.

The proposed reforms and management changes in key state-run enterprises are shoring up confidence in Brazil that is on track for a gradual recovery after two years of recession, Meirelles said.

"Our actions aim to reduce the debt burden and increase productivity," Meirelles said.

He added that the government could consider selling debt abroad again this year if market continues remain favorable.

Temer, who was in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly, on Tuesday assured world leaders at the gathering that the dismissal of Rousseff was fully constitutional. However, delegations of some leftist governments walked out of the session to express their objections about his legitimacy.

(Additional reporting and writing by Alonso Soto; Editing by Andrew Hay and Chizu Nomiyama)
New revelations published today by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and news organizations from Europe, South America, Asia and Africa reveal fresh information about offshore companies in the Bahamas.

Alongside detailed reporting, ICIJ, Suddeutsche Zeitung and other media partners are making details from the Bahamas corporate registry available to the public. This creates, for the first time, a free, online and publicly-searchable registry of offshore companies set up in the island nation that has sometimes been called The Switzerland of the West.

We see it as a service to the public to make this basic kind of information openly available, said Gerard Ryle, the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

There is much evidence to suggest that where you have secrecy in the offshore world you have the potential for wrong doing. So let's eliminate the secrecy.

The cache of documents from the island nations corporate registry provides names of directors and some owners of more than 175,000 Bahamian companies, trusts and foundations registered between 1990 and early 2016.

The leaked Bahamian files reveal details of the offshore activities of prime ministers, ministers, princes and convicted felons.

This information has been combined with data from the Panama Papers and other leaked offshore documents to add additional heft to one of the largest public databases of offshore entities in history. The Offshore Leaks Database now contains information on close to 500,000 entities linked to 200 countries and territories. The full dataset is searchable and embeddable via ICIJ's online application  visit the dedicated Offshore Leaks database website for more information about the data, tips on how to search and instructions for downloading a raw copy of the database.

This story is part of Accountability. The latest investigations about waste, fraud, corruption, abuse and mismanagement. Click here to read more stories in this topic.

Don't miss another Accountability investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email.

In the Bahamas, company documents can be consulted in person. While the online registry is designed to serve a similar purpose, the electronic registry information maintained by the Bahamian government is often incomplete. In addition, retrieving one companys documents will cost at least $10, in conflict with the recommendation of the international association of company registries, which discourages search fees.

Story continues

Jason Sharman, who co-authored a survey of information from 40 corporate registers around the world said the names of offshore company directors is basic information that should be easily accessible to the public.

This information has been combined with data from the Panama Papers and other leaked offshore documents to add additional heft to one of the largest public databases of offshore entities in history.

This story is part of Accountability. The latest investigations about waste, fraud, corruption, abuse and mismanagement. Click here to read more stories in this topic.

Related stories

Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
With news of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's divorce breaking Tuesday morning, television's late-night talk-show hosts were primed to tackle the high-profile breakup in their monologues.



Here's are the most memorable quips from the night, courtesy of Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, James Corden and Trevor Noah.



The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon



"Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are separating. It's pretty scary when even Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are like 'eh, I could do better.' "









'This Is a Brexit? Brad-xit?' Late-Night Hosts React to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Divorce| Breakups, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Night, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, James Corden, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert



"I hope everyone at home and everyone here is with a loved one right now. Because I have some terrible news. Angelina and Brad Pitt are getting a divorce. That's right, no more Brangelina. They're just going to be Jolina and Bran right now."



FLASHBACK: Brad and Angelina at the 2012 Golden Globes







"The divorce papers were filed yesterday in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing irreconcilable attractiveness."



Jimmy Kimmel Live!



"You know there are a lot of important and life-threatening and world-changing things going on lately. Sometimes it seems like more than ever. But none of them are as foundation-shaking as the news we received about Brad and Angelina today. As I'm sure you've heard by now, Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt. And of course, all the celebrity gossip magazines are claiming victory. They broke this story. They broke it every week for the last eleven years. Over and over and over again. Until it finally came true."



"Apparently, the reason they're getting divorced is she talked about Fight Club. And he specifically asked her not to do that."





RELATED VIDEO: Brad and Angelina Through The Years



Late Night with Seth Meyers



"That's right Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt. Or as they explained it to their kids [bring out a megaphone], 'Okay everyone, gather around. We've got some bad news.' And I apologize for this joke, I know it's mean, but we've been going through a really rough election. We've just excited this is something people are excited about."



The Late, Late Show with James Corden



"I'm taking this news especially hard, because I named my daughter Brangelina. Feels like a mistake now."



"I don't know what to do. First Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift called it quits. Now Brad and Angelina are breaking up. I'd make a joke, but honestly, I'm too worried about what this means for me and Justin Bieber."



"Angelina filed for custody of their six children. And when Brad heard that, he was like, 'We have six children? Feels like way more.' "



"But this breakup couldn't come at a worse time. In the face of Donald Trump's presidency, Brad and Angelina's marriage was the last hope for immigrants to be welcomed into this country."



The Daily Show with Trevor Noah



"I can't believe Angelina is leaving Brad. So no more Brangelina. Does that mean this is a Brexit, is that what it is? Brad-xit? Ange-leave-a? Is that what it is?"



"But seriously, you guys think you're devastated  think about how Africans are feeling right now. These two were our only way out. How do you think I got here?"
By Tina Bellon LONDON (Reuters) - For London rabbi Julia Neuberger, Britain's vote to leave the European Union has had a very personal impact: she has decided to seek German citizenship, laying to rest her family's painful legacy of the Nazi era. Neuberger is among a significant number of Jewish Britons whose dismay over Brexit has led them to invoke a German law allowing people stripped of German citizenship by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, and their descendants, to have it restored. "It was Brexit that tipped me off, but now in my mid-60s I feel like I've made my peace with Germany and this step will only take me closer," said Neuberger, whose mother left Germany for Britain in 1937 to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. Now, a German passport holds the promise of a future with full access to the EU and its practical benefits such as freedom to travel, live and work anywhere in a bloc that has 27 other nations - rights that Britons may no longer enjoy after Brexit is enacted. Some of Britain's estimated 260,000 Jews remain implacably opposed to the idea, and for Neuberger too the decision to apply for German citizenship taps into deep emotional baggage due to the weight of history. "My daughter asked 'why would you want to do this after all they did to us?'," said Neuberger, senior rabbi at the West London Synagogue and a member of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British parliament. "But there is some German in me after all and it goes very deep." Neuberger, whose application is being processed, still has her maternal grandparents' old German passports. Their covers bear a black eagle with outstretched wings perched on a swastika, and the first inside pages are stamped with a red "J" for Jew. It is a remarkable twist of history that Jews who lost family members in the Holocaust are now using such old documents to obtain modern Germany's maroon-coloured passports. Germany's Foreign Ministry said that since the Brexit referendum in June, the London embassy had received about 400 inquiries about how to apply for German citizenship under article 116 of the country's post-war Basic Law, and about 100 applications. That compares with about 20 inquiries per year previously. "TURN IN HER GRAVE" More than 17 million Britons voted on June 23 to leave the EU for a variety of reasons, including a desire to regain national control over immigration from the bloc. However, a further 16 million voted to remain and many are anxious about the practical and symbolic consequences of leaving a union that was born out of a post-war determination to bring Europeans together. Authorities in Dublin also reported a rush of citizenship inquiries from Britons of Irish descent after the referendum. Like other British Jews seeking German citizenship, Neuberger intends to stay in Britain. She is one of a number of family members who have reached prominence in the nation's public life - her husband is a leading academic and her brothers-in-law include the president of the supreme court. At a recent gathering of about 100 members of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) in London, called to mark the organisation's 75th anniversary, discussion was dominated by the issue of whether to make an article 116 claim. "The idea shocked many at first," said Michael Newman, 41, chief executive of the AJR. "We all don't know what the future will hold and want to make sure that we, but also mainly our children, continue to have access to Europe." While it may be a mostly practical step for younger people, the emotional toll is much higher for older people who have vivid memories of their own escape or grew up listening to their parents' painful memories. "When my son told me after the vote he'd apply I was horrified and said my mother would turn in her grave," said Frank Harding, who is in his 70s. His parents fled to England in the 1930s. He said his son's decision initially felt like a betrayal of his parents, who boycotted German products and never allowed them in their house. But he said he now understood his son's decision and thought it important for the younger generations to keep the door to Europe open. "It certainly is also a form of reconciliation, but I still haven't decided if I will apply myself," said Harding. The AJR estimates that around 70,000 Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived in Britain before World War Two. Austria has a similar law to Germany's article 116 but authorities in Vienna did not respond to requests for information about applications from Britain since the Brexit vote. Numbers of article 116 applications from Jewish Britons could increase further. Many of the people interviewed by Reuters at the AJR meeting said they were waiting for the terms of Brexit to become clear before taking a final decision. Negotiations have yet to start and when they do, they are expected to last two years. "I'm not sure people would have done this at any point under regular circumstances," said Anthony Grenville, an author and the son of Austrian refugees. "It took Brexit to push British Jews to consider this option." (Editing by Estelle Shirbon and David Stamp)
By William James LONDON (Reuters) - Brexit will inspire support for Donald Trump and smooth his path to victory in the U.S. presidential election in November, according to Nigel Farage, an architect of the political uprising that saw Britons vote to leave the European Union. As Britain and the rest of the EU come to terms with the political and economic shock of the Leave vote, the United States is heading into an election with polls showing Trump, the populist Republican candidate, mounting a strong challenge for leadership of the world's largest economy. Farage helped harness British voters' dissatisfaction with EU membership and turn it into a political force capable of defeating the pro-Remain government in the June 23 referendum. He has since turned his attention to U.S. politics, speaking on stage with Trump at a rally in Mississippi last month. Having tested the waters in the United States, he believes the same anti-establishment forces behind Brexit will propel Trump to victory in the Nov. 8 election. "I now strongly think Trump will win," he told Reuters in an interview at his London office. "I think Brexit is the first kickback against the establishment. It's not a British event, it's not a European event. It's a global event and I think it has implications for every Western democracy. In the case of America - absolutely." Trump, a wealthy property developer, reality TV star and provocative political outsider who stunned even his own party by winning the right to battle veteran Democrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, has come from a no-hoper to within a few percentage points of his mainstream rival. Farage is a member of the European Parliament and has stood for election in Britain several times. But his straight-talking views and love of a cigarette and a beer at the pub have helped him become one of Britain's most distinctive politicians. "There are people in America who look at Washington, who look at the lobby and the power of big business, who look at the detachment of a political class from them and their lives in a very similar way to how many of us saw Brussels," Farage said, referring to the EU's seat of power in Belgium. Farage stood down as leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party after the Brexit vote, saying he wanted to get his personal life back, but the lure of getting involved in another insurgent political campaign has proved strong. He explained with a grin the series of events that saw an invitation to speak at a private Trump political dinner escalate into the magnate introducing him on stage at a large rally in Mississippi as "the man behind Brexit". "It seemed to go down quite well. The next day Hillary Clinton was attacking me on a personal basis, so I thought 'Well, I must've got somewhere'," he said. BIGGER THAN BREXIT Critics say both Trump and Farage have massaged fears over immigration for political advantage. Farage appeared in front of a controversial poster during the Brexit campaign showing lines of migrants under the slogan "Breaking Point" - although the photograph was taken in distant southeastern Europe, while Trump has pledged to build an anti-immigrant wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Farage said he and Trump shared a common touch that allows them to connect with voters alienated from traditional politics. "He's not afraid to speak his mind, and yeah, I know that absolutely gets the liberal establishment screaming blue murder, but maybe that's the way politics is going in the west." However, Farage voiced concern about Trump's stated policies on NATO and free trade. "The big question is NATO," he said, citing Trump's doubts over whether to protect NATO allies from Russia unless they cover more of U.S. defense costs. "I would very much hope that Trump, if he saw everyone else pulling their weight, would get a bit more behind NATO than he's been." He also said a Trump victory could see the United States "turn a little bit against" his view that free trade and free movement of capital benefits, rather than harms, society. Farage said he would return to the United States to watch the second and third presidential debates in anticipation of witnessing another victory for the political underdog. "It would be Brexit on a bigger scale," he said. "It would be the outsider who comes into politics, that is loathed and condemned by the professional media and political elite but proved to be a winner." (Editing by Mark Heinrich)
From Town & Country

Bria Skonberg first picked up the trumpet when she was in middle school, but the Canadian-born musician, now 33, had no idea the instrument would come to play such an important role in her life. "I didn't know that I was going to be a trumpet player from age 11," she says with a laugh. "To be honest, it was a gradual thing."

Well, sort of. After graduating from Vancouver's Capilano University with a degree in jazz-trumpet performance, Skonberg spent a few years traveling and managing other musicians but once she relocated to New York City-"I had sort of outgrown Vancouver," she says, "and there are only a few places you can go to make your mark in music"-success seemed to find her. This week she's celebrating a career milestone: the release of her first major-label album, Bria.

"From the get-go, I felt like I had found my place in New York," she explains. "The rhythm of the city was something I really identified with. I liked the mixture of cultures, whether it was music or food or people, and I started to sponge it up." That taste for eclectic influences is apparent on the new record, which references styles from around the globe; the Brazilian-tinged "How Can It Be" is one sterling example.

Skonberg has previously released three independent albums, but this one, she says, stands alone. "I've recorded albums before, but this one was really special because I was ready to find my signature style," she tells T&C. "I met a producer named Matt Pierson and we got to know each other and had very much the same musical vision." The pair teamed up to record the record-which was crowd-funded to start with and brought to the Okeh Records/Sony label, which is releasing it, by Pierson. "I can't think of a better outcome."

And while some might peg a up-and-coming trumpet player as something of a throwback, Skonberg-a co-founder of the New York Hot Jazz Festival who's also been honored with an award by Jazz at Lincoln Center-says there's nothing vintage about her work at all. "It's been important to me to learn about where the music came from and how it came to be," she says, "but through writing original music, I've learned that the thing that keeps music contemporary is putting yourself into it. That's what makes it modern."

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What could make a joyful occasion even more joyful? Puppies of course!

Bride Sarah Mallouk Crain works for dog rescue centre Pitties Love Peace. She decided to share her wedding day in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, with some of the shelters residents.

During the photographs the bridal party swapped out their bouquets for four legged bundles of joy. Just look how happy they are!

The bride holding a puppy named Biggie Smalls who was found on the streets of Booklyn [Photo: carolineloganphotography]

My days are spent rescuing, training or rehabilitating dogs so it only seemed fitting that I needed to include some on our big day, Crain told Huffington Post.



[Photo: carolineloganphotography]

The groomsmen also took turns posing with the furry posse, a litter of five boxer-coonhound named Martha, Abigail, Dolley, Elizabeth, and Louisa after the original First Ladies of the United States.

Photographer Caroline Logan said the relaxing presence of the playful pups meant she was able to capture some candid shots of the party. "Having something to divert attention from that uncomfortable Oh my goodness, Im getting my picture taken what do I do with my hands?! feeling to pure puppy bliss made for relaxed photos, she tole Mashable.

[Photo: carolineloganphotography]



[Photo: carolineloganphotography]



All puppies pictured are available for adoption, though were sure theyll soon find their forever home after all this attention.

Internet applauds marathoner mother for pumping on the run



These incredible sculptures are made entirely of crayons


By Guy Faulconbridge LONDON (Reuters) - The Islamist terrorist threat to the West will endure for years to come because simply taking back territory from Islamic State will not solve the deeper global fractures which have fostered militants, Britain's foreign intelligence chief has said. In his first public comments outside Britain, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service said globalization, the information revolution, a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and failed states would ensure that terrorism remained a threat. When asked by the Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan at a panel discussion in Washington whether the apex of the Islamist terrorist trajectory had been reached, MI6 chief Alex Younger said: "Regrettably this is an enduring issue which will certainly be with us for our professional lifetime." "I would have to forecast that whilst it is wholly desirable to remove territory you will have a persistent threat representing some of the deep fault lines that still exist in our world," he said. Islamic State militants have lost territory in Iraq and Syria though they have claimed responsibility for a range of attacks against the West. His remarks were shown on a recording posted on Wednesday by the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University. Younger, as chief of MI6, is one of the West's most powerful spies and rarely speaks in public. He was appointed in 2014 by then Prime Minister David Cameron. MI6 operates overseas and is tasked with defending Britain and its interests. Younger said terrorism was fueled by a host of fractures across the world. "It is fueled by a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and there are some deep social, economic and demographic drivers to the phenomenon we know as terrorism," he said. At times joking, Younger praised cooperation with allied spy services and also pitched spies as a good key way to keep communication open even with espionage services from nations less friendly with the West. "It is a fact isn't it that a lot of countries are run by people like us. Now that is thankfully not the case in democratically constituted regimes," Younger said after the CIA director raised the subject of communication with Moscow. "We need to find ways of messaging these countries and communicating with them," he said, noting that while communication could be beneficial, "We must uphold the values that we are constituted to defend." Younger said that what he called the information revolution had fundamentally changed the operating environment for spies. "There will be two sorts of intelligence services: those that understand this fact and have prospered and those that don't and haven't. I am determined that MI6 will be in the former category." An economics graduate and former soldier, Younger has worked for MI6 in Europe, the Middle East and Afghanistan since 1991, according to a short biography released by the government at the time of his appointment as MI6 chief. (Editing by Louise Ireland)
London (AFP) - British supercar maker McLaren said Wednesday it was not in talks with Apple about a possible acquisition by the US tech giant, denying a report in the Financial Times.

"We can confirm that McLaren is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment," a spokesman for the company said in a statement to AFP.

The newspaper had cited three unnamed sources saying the iPhone maker was looking at a potential takeover of or investment in McLaren, which could be valued at up to 1.5 billion (1.7 billion euros, $1.9 billion).

A spokesman for Apple said the company would not comment on "rumours or speculation".

A deal would have been seen as part of a bid by Apple to challenge Tesla, the US luxury electric carmaker founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Shares in Apple were down 0.77 percent since opening in New York, standing at $112.70.

"Owning McLaren would be Apple waving a big flag over its intention to enter the car industry," said Jasper Lawler, a market analyst with CMC Markets in London.

"As a high-end technology company, Apple appears to want to be at the high, cutting-edge end of the car industry too."

He added: "An Apple acquisition of Tesla now looks unlikely and Tesla now faces a big new competitor."

Apple fuelled speculation about its ambitions in the auto sector this year with a billion-dollar investment in Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Apple was rethinking its strategy, mothballing parts of its Titan self-driving cars project.

Google's parent company Alphabet and San Francisco-based Uber have both been working on getting self-driving cars on public roads. Uber began testing self-driving taxis last week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

McLaren, which also runs a successful Formula One team, is based in Woking, southern England.

It employs thousands of people and has built some of the fastest and most expensive supercars in the world based on its Formula One technology.
It's nice to know that there are still people out there who have a heart.

And it's easily detectable.

Now, if only public policies were made with a little bit more "heart" and foresight involved, we'd really have something going.

Case in point:

CANONSBURG, Pa. (AP)  A school cafeteria worker has quit over what she considers a "lunch shaming" policy in a Pennsylvania school district.

Stacy Koltiska resigned last week from Wylandville Elementary School in the Canon-McMillan School District after she had to take a hot lunch away from an elementary school student because the child's parent had fallen more than $25 behind in paying for his school lunches.

"His eyes welled up with tears. I'll never forget his name, the look on his face," she said.

The Canon-McMillan School District enacted the policy this year to deal with a backlog of about 300 families who owed tens of thousands of dollars. Students from kindergarten through sixth grade will lose their hot lunch but be allowed to charge a cold sandwich, fruit and milk to their meal accounts if their parents owe more than $25. Older students get no lunch at all if their parents owe more than $25.

District Superintendent Matthew Daniels said the policy has cut down drastically on parents who don't keep current on lunch accounts for their children, and isn't meant to embarrass anyone. The policy doesn't target those who qualify for financial assistance with school lunches, but is meant to make sure parents who have the ability to pay stay current.

"There has never been the intent with the adoption of this polity to shame or embarrass a child," he said.

The 300-plus families who were in arrears before the policy was implemented owed the district between $60,000 to $100,000 annually. Now fewer than 70 families have unpaid lunch tabs totaling less than $20,000, Daniels said.

Koltiska understands the problem the district is trying to address, but argues the children shouldn't be embarrassed or punished if the accounts fall into debt.

Another cafeteria worker noticed Koltiska was mistakenly giving the boy a hot chicken meal last week instead of the cold sandwich he was permitted under the policy. Koltiska said that because the cafeteria was so busy, she didn't realize at the time that the boy wasn't supposed to get the hot meal. That's why she had to go to the boy and take the meal away.

"I'm not saying the parents shouldn't be held accountable, but I think there has to be a better way than involving the children," she said.

***

I would think there could have been a better way to handle this. Koltiska should have had the option to let the child have the hot lunch that one day, since he already had the food on his tray.

I don't know how much "wiggle room" there is in the policy, and it's hard to imagine every possible scenario when making such rules, but enough flexibility ought to be built in so that something like taking a child's food from in front of him wouldn't happen.

If someone did that to me, they might end up with teeth marks on their forearm.

In a school, I suppose I'd then be charged with assault. Maybe the cafeteria workers would have to take me down in a show of force, slamming my school pizza, chocolate milk and green beans aside in the process.

That's how I'll explain it the next time my mom asks if I ate my vegetables for the day.

Ah, but anyway, there are happier stories out there this week, despite what all the politics and terrorism and hatred you hear about might make you think.

At least, here's something more interesting than depressing:

Wireless signals can detect your feelings with new device

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP)  What if your computer or smartphone could tell if you're happy or sad?

A new device developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aims to detect emotions by sending wireless signals that measure heartbeats as the signals bounce off a person's body.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory say their device is 87 percent accurate in using heart rate and what it's already learned about a person to recognize joy, pleasure, sadness or anger, after the device first measures how each individual's body reacts in various emotional states.

It works like an electrocardiogram monitor but without needing a sensor on the body to measure heartbeats.

They say it could one day be used by advertising agencies to gauge audience reaction or in health care to diagnose depression or anxiety.

***

I could see some positive medical applications for this kind of device. It might even help ease the age-old "battle of the sexes."

Imagine what would happen if a man had a device to gauge what a woman was feeling: anger, sadness, happiness. What guy wouldn't want the help in this area? Women are complex enough that the aid should be welcome.

Not to leave you men out, though. Women might need an emotion-detecting device to know when you just want to be left alone and have no emotions. We'd probably think the gadget just wasn't working, then. And we'd get angry. And you wouldn't need a device to tell you so.

I don't know what's taken tech-savvy folks so long to come up with this device, though. Didn't Wonder Woman have a lasso that did the same thing in the 1970s?

On the down side, another electronic device to allow us to be more lazy and reduce real human interaction is just what we need, hm? Why go to the work of actually being interested in people and learning to read their emotions when we may soon have a gadget in the $9.99 aisle to do the task for us?

Good heavens, we can't communicate now as a human race -- how would we be able to if we relegated such a learning process to a machine?

I don't think I want my smartphone to know if I'm angry, happy or sad. I'd like to keep it guessing. Unlike some people -- who broadcast seemingly everything via social media, for example -- I like to keep some things to myself sometimes, thank you very much.

Take my lunch from right in front of me, though, and you'll know just how I feel about it ... no gadget required!
Reporting a car accident became infinitely more complicated for this British woman, who inadvertently called the police department in a town with nearly the same name across the pond.

Read: Las Vegas Taco Restaurant Turns Robbery Footage into Hilarious Ad

"Luckily it was nothing life threatening," Officer Mark McWilliams, who answered the call from the Barnstable Police Department in Massachusetts, told InsideEdition.com.

McWilliams said he was in touch with the woman days later, and discovered Siri on her iPhone misunderstood her when she was trying to contact Barnstaple Police Department in England. Nevertheless, the Barnstable Police Department in Massachusetts had a good laugh before releasing the audio from the call to Twitter.

In audio from a phone call released by the Barnstable Police Department in Massachusetts, a woman sounded frantic when she was attempting to report a car accident.

She explained that the incident occurred between Muddiford and Ilfracombe, towns that neighbor Barnstaple in southwestern England.

McWilliams, the dispatcher responding more than 3,000 miles away, answered in a heavy American accent.

"Wait, where did this happen?" McWilliams said, confused about the names of the towns and road she was providing to him.

Story continues

He later told InsideEdition.com, "I thought it was a joke. Is this one of my co-workers? Is somebody messing with me?"

Partway through the call, McWilliams even clarified, "You've called the Barnstable Police Department."

Read: Would-Be Robber Leaves Empty-Handed After Shop Owner Ignores Gun and Serves Another Customer

Finally, more than two and a half minutes later, the woman on the line bursts into laughter.

"Massachusetts?" she exclaimed in laughter. "[I'm calling from] England."

But, the American police department was willing to lend a hand anyway.

McWilliams even responded: "Our response time is going to be about six hours."

Watch: Woman's Hilarious Interview on Live Local News Has Viewers Laughing Nationwide'

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By Elizabeth Piper LONDON (Reuters) - Thanking grassroots supporters who look set to keep him in charge of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn seems unruffled by accusations from fellow MPs that his left-wing agenda will never deliver election victory. The veteran campaigner is almost certain to see off what his supporters call a "disgraceful" coup attempt by the party's more centrist establishment and win re-election on Saturday, a break with the centre-left path that is mirrored across Europe. "We, all of us, have mounted a most incredible campaign, mobilised a lot of people and we've actually changed the political discourse in this country," Corbyn said to cheers from volunteers helping him in central London on the last night of his campaign to retain the leadership of the party. It has been a bitter struggle for the heart of Labour in which both sides have cited the need to heal the deep divisions in British society exposed by the dynamite public vote in June to leave the European Union. Personal attacks, allegations of anti-Semitism and abuse have become more commonplace than policy debates within Labour since Corbyn beat three more centrist candidates to the leadership last year. The discord has crimped the party's support in the polls and for many Labour MPs the future looks bleak. They say Corbyn is too left wing for voters who returned the Conservatives to power just last year, which means the ruling party will have a free rein to pursue austerity policies and plot a divorce from the EU they fear will push Britain to the right. Corbyn's supporters say the MPs have misread the public mood. They argue that voters' rejection of the European Union was driven by public frustration at inequality and call his expected victory the next step towards a "different kind of politics" to make Britain fairer. "We have been ... involving people in politics that matters," he told his supporters, many of whom had spent hours phoning Labour members to persuade them to back Corbyn in the leadership election just hours before the polls closed. Almost mobbed after speaking, Corbyn commands an affection that verges on hero worship. His supporters want to have selfies with him, to get close to him and many hang on his every word. But the fierce loyalty he inspires, which has helped more than double Labour's membership over the last year to 551,000 people, has a flip side. The almost two thirds of his parliamentary colleagues who say they have no confidence in him have felt the wrath of his supporters. Owen Smith, the Labour lawmaker who is challenging Corbyn to the leadership and looks set to lose, is a major target. "They behaved like traitors, they are corporatists, not in touch with working people," said Mohtashim Shaikh, a 63-year-old retired project manager from southeast London. "The old Labour Party is dead ... Corbyn is the first genuinely honest and honourable leader for decades in this country." TIME TO UNITE? Corbyn, 67, has long sat on the left of the party, voting against centrists such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair and lobbying with others to restore more socialist policies. A peace campaigner, he is opposed to Britain having nuclear weapons. He did not court power, never expected to win it, and soon felt the backlash. Fellow MPs criticised him for a lack of leadership and what they said a lukewarm campaign to keep Britain in the European Union, which he wants to reform. In late June, 172 of his colleagues passed a motion of no confidence. The tussle between Labour's two wings is by no means new, and the groundswell for change that brought Corbyn to power is mirrored across Europe, where centre-left parties have lost support to anti-establishment movements that have emerged since the 2008 economic crisis. Labour, which ruled for 13 years until 2010, was dealt a crushing defeat last year by the Conservatives who cast doubt whether the party's left-wing policies would protect the economy and still lead in opinion polls, by seven percentage points. Both of Labour's wings have appealed for unity and rule out a split while working behind the scenes to try to gain complete control over the party machinery, resulting in hours of talks but no compromises. Discussions will continue at the party's annual conference this weekend in the northwestern city of Liverpool, where the results of the leadership contest will be announced at 1045 GMT. Centrist MPs say unless Corbyn broadens his appeal beyond the young and urban voters they say he relies on, he faces little chance of ever being elected prime minister. "We have to grow the collective and be that big, broad church," centrist Labour lawmaker Chukka Umunna told a panel discussion last week. "I thought that was an argument which was resolved in the party some time ago." Some of those closest to Corbyn doubt the battle is over. "(I) haven't heard many people talking about a coup immediately after this one, so that's an improvement," joked Jon Lansman, an organiser of Corbyn's election bid and chairman of Corbyn-supporting campaign group Momentum. "Things are getting better, but who knows what's going to happen." (Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
By Nigam Prusty

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's cabinet cleared the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from Dassault Aviation on Wednesday, paving the way for signing a deal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is betting on to modernise the air force, a government source told Reuters.

The acquisition is part of a $150-billion military overhaul India has launched, drawing global arms makers into one of the world's most promising markets.

Under the deal, India will get 36 Rafale jets ready to go straight into service. India's fighter aircraft fleet, comprising Russian, British and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force's requirement of 45 to counter a "two-front collusive threat" from Pakistan and China.

The two countries will sign the final deal on Friday, the source, who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media, said.

French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is arriving New Delhi on Thursday, the source said, to sign the deal with his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar. French President Francois Hollande's office confirmed that Le Drian would visit India at the end of the week.

India, the world's biggest arms importer, had intended to buy 126 Rafale planes before several years worth of talks with Dassault broke down and Modi and Hollande stepped in last year to agree on the smaller purchase.

The value of the deal, which had been repeatedly held up as the two sides haggled over financial terms, was not immediately available.

Indian defence ministry officials have earlier said the value of the deal could be $8.5 billion to $9 billion.

The 90 planes not supplied via the original multi-role combat aircraft tender have meanwhile become the target of intense interest from other plane makers such as Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

(Reporting by Nigam Prusty; Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas in Paris; Editing by Malini Menon and Toby Chopra)
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - The mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday called for calm and peace after 16 officers were hurt and police vehicles were damaged overnight during a demonstration against the police shooting of a black man at an apartment complex in the city.

Police Chief Kerr Putney disputed claims made by some protesters that the man killed on Tuesday, 43-year-old Keith Scott, had been unarmed.

"We did find a weapon," he told reporters in Charlotte at a press conference held with Mayor Jennifer Roberts.

(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Cambodia has deported 13 Taiwanese nationals suspected of telecoms fraud to China, the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing has said, ignoring protests from Taiwan asking the Southeast Asian country not to proceed. The public security ministry said on Tuesday 50 Chinese nationals were also sent back with the Taiwanese deportees. They were all arrested in a Cambodian police raid in Phnom Penh and suspected of committing internet and phone extortion fraud. Such scams have cost billions of dollars and driven some victims to suicide. Cambodia, one of China's closest allies, does not have official relations with self-ruled Taiwan. It treats the island as part of "one China" in line with Beijing, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province. Uk Heisela, a senior official in Cambodia's immigration department, confirmed the deportations and said Taiwan had not been in touch with Phnom Penh over the case. "All victims are in China," he said. Cambodia has deported more than 200 people suspected of involvement in the fraud rings to China since November. Taiwan's foreign ministry said late on Tuesday it had protested strongly against the deportation of Taiwanese nationals to China and said Cambodia had been pressured by China. The Chinese public security ministry said the suspects were being brought back to help with investigations and because the victims of the gang-related fraud scheme were from the mainland. They will be tried in Nanjing, the capital of coastal Jiangsu province, it said. The ministry said authorities in Taiwan had been informed of the case. China has cooperated with police in Kenya, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia to break up 65 telecom fraud rings since November, the ministry said, leading to the arrest of 1,168 suspects, including 347 Taiwan residents. Taipei has accused Beijing of kidnapping when such countries have deported Taiwanese people to China. (Reporting by Brenda Goh; Additional Reporting by J.R. Wu in TAIPEI and Prak Chan Thul in PHNOM PENH; Editing by Paul Tait)
Geneva (AFP) - A new campaign group on Wednesday called for a UN probe into the 1988 massacres in Iran after the release of a decades-old audio tape shed fresh light on the alleged atrocities.

From August 1988 to February 1989, Iranian authorities executed nearly 5,000 political prisoners, according to Amnesty International. Iranian opposition groups have given a figure closer to 30,000.

The executions received limited attention at the time, in part because of a media blackout imposed Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had taken charge of the country in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But a 1988 recording released last month by relatives of a late dissident cleric -- which purportedly includes discussion of the killings among top Iranian officials -- has sparked renewed calls for justice.

The new group called "Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran" launched Wednesday at a press conference at the United Nations in Geneva.

Its members include Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate held hostage for years by FARC rebels, and Tahar Boumedra, who served as the UN's top human rights representative in Iraq.

The release of the tape "has re-opened a wound", Betancourt said, with the group urging the UN rights office to initiate an investigation into the executions.

The tape is of Iran's late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's former heir apparent, meeting with top judges and prosecutors.

Montazeri, who had reportedly been critical of the executions, is heard describing the crackdown as "the worst crime committed in the Islamic Republic".

"They'll write your names as criminals in history," Montazeri told his audience.

His family posted the recording on his official website in August.

Montazeri was subsequently sidelined by Khomeini and placed under tight surveillance by the Iranian regime until his death in 2009.

The campaign group said it has documented evidence of at least 12 mass graves across Iran where victims were buried, with relatives of victims increasingly coming forward after the tape's release.

"The impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators must end," said group member Azadeh Zabeti, a British-Iranian lawyer.

Most of those killed in the crackdown were members of the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, a dissident group that had support from former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
VIENNA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Canada's trade minister and the EU trade chief sought on Wednesday to overcome the doubts of Austria and other EU members over a planned EU-Canada free trade deal, with a declaration spelling out the limits of the contentious pact. Canadian Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland, speaking in Vienna, said the legally binding additional declaration on key issues would add no new elements to the deal, which Austria's chancellor opposes in its current form. "What the joint declaration can do is strengthen elements which already exist in the agreement," Freeland told a joint news conference with Austria's Economy Minister Reinhold Mitterlehner on Wednesday. "What it is not able to do is introduce entirely new elements." The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) has been a key target of protests by unions and environmental and other groups who say it will worsen labor conditions and allow big business to challenge governments across Europe. [L8N1BW3TG] European Trade Commissioner Cecelia Malmstrom wrote in a letter to Mitterlehner, published on Wednesday, that the aim of the declaration was to dispel concerns by spelling out what was in CETA. "We intend to clarify all the points that have sparked particular concern in public debate, especially the ability of governments to provide public services and the protection of labor and environmental standards," she wrote. CETA, and a planned EU-U.S. trade deal, will be the focus of a meeting of trade ministers in Slovakia on Friday. The EU-Canada deal could enter into force next year if member states and the European Parliament approve it. The chances of that happening rose on Monday after the German Social Democrats, junior partners in the ruling coalition, gave their backing. However, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia still have reservations. Mitterlehner, a conservative who supports CETA, unlike social democrat Chancellor Christian Kern, said it might take a few weeks for the government to find a common line ahead. European affairs ministers are expected to vote on the deal on Oct. 18 before a planned signing at an EU-Canada summit on Oct. 27. (Reporting By Shadia Nasralla in Vienna, Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels; Editing by Francois Murphy and Toby Chopra)
From Cosmopolitan

In January 2015, Anna Swabey was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. One month later, she met Andy Bell on Tinder, and they fell in love and got engaged. But they never made it to their wedding day; Anna succumbed to the disease one day before they were supposed to be pronounced husband and wife,People reports.



Swabey was diagnosed after suffering a seizure in her bathroom; she was told the tumor was inoperable and that she had three years to live. At the suggestion of her sister, she started a Tinder account to distract herself, and she met Andy. I knew halfway through my third date with Andy that I was going to break his heart, the Brit wrote in an essay for Marie Claire UK. Not because I was going to cheat on him or dump him, but because I knew I was going to die.

Ten months later, Bell proposed to her. As he got down on one knee, I cried and asked if he was sureif we went ahead, hed be a widower before he was 30, she wrote. But he said that hed rather be married to me for a few years than not at all. They have been together through rounds and rounds of grueling chemotherapy. "Anna is so strong but there are times when she breaks down, because she's scared of dying, and of losing her personality and control of her body, as her illness gets worse," Bell told the Daily Mail.

Swabey wrote about her cancer on her blog, Inside My Head. It was important to her to raise awareness of brain tumors, something she knew nothing about before her diagnosis. She started a donation page to raise money to fight brain cancer. I am determined to leave a mark on the world, and I am desperate to make a difference, she wrote on the page.

Meanwhile, she was planning her wedding, which had 160 guests set to cheer them on. But this summer, her condition deteriorated, her sister wrote on Inside My Head. She had a new mass on her brain, and had to undergo surgery, but the original tumor still progressed to stage 4. Earlier this month, her condition deteriorated suddenly, and per her requests, she was given medication to ease her pain and rested at home until she died Sept. 16.



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Thank you to the lovely ladies @LeggsDarlington for helping me find the perfect dress for Cinderella's Charity Ball  pic.twitter.com/xDPwQlgzgD - Inside My Head (@braintumourblog) May 3, 2015

On Sept. 17, the day Swabey and Bell were supposed to get married, the guests still stayed at the lodges they had booked, and took the time to remember Swabeys life and legacy. Before she died, Swabey requested that nobody wear black to her funeral and instead wear bright colors to celebrate her life. Instead of flowers, she has asked people to donate to her ongoing fundraising campaign. So far, that campaign has raised more than 69,837 British pounds ($91,060).

Annas sister, Victoria Cartwright, told Today.com in a statement that she hopes people take away important lessons about courage through hard times from Annas life. Heres the statement in full:

Anna was a truly remarkable person. We all watched, in awe at times, her blunt, practical attitude towards her illness and wondered how on earth she did it. As her family we all took our cue from her, calling her tumor Trev, using our usual family dry wit and humor to make it a part of our lives.



Anna's aim was to raise awareness of and funding for brain tumors, and we are so proud of her achievements in such a short space of time (Nearly $120,000 to date); and doing all this while planning her wedding to Andy, and undergoing sometimes grueling treatments and surgeries to try and prolong her life.



Anna lived. She really lived. We hope she will continue to provide a source of comfort, courage and determination to others fighting a similar fight, and we hope the work she has done in raising awareness of brain tumours and the need for more funding into research is just the beginning. That way her legacy will always live on.

Follow Megan on Twitter.

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It seemed like a routine call for Angel Padilla: The Linden, New Jersey, police officer was dispatched Monday on a report of a man sleeping in the doorway of a bar.



Padilla, a 15-year veteran of the force, "thought he was checking on a homeless vagrant," Linden police spokesman Capt. James Sarnicki tells PEOPLE. In reality, Sarnicki says, "It turned out to be one of America's most wanted."



Authorities say the sleeping man that day was Ahmad Khan Rahami, the 28-year-old suspect in three recent bombings in New York's Chelsea neighborhood and two locations in New Jersey.



According to Sarnicki, Padilla identified Rahami after he roused him and saw his face. When Padilla then told Rahami to put his hands up, Rahami allegedly drew a handgun and fired a shot that struck Padilla in the mid-section, though he was wearing a bulletproof vest, Sarnicki says.



"Thank God for that," Sarnicki says.



Officials say two officers and Rahami were hit in the ensuing shoot-out  and Rahami, who was struck three times, was arrested.



He was later charged with five counts of attempted murder of law enforcement officials, second-degree unlawful possession of a weapon and second-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, according to multiple reports. He will likely face terrorism charges in the coming days in connection with the bombings, NBC News reports.



Rahami has not entered a plea to the charges or retained an attorney. Authorities say they are still investigating a possible motive.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.





'We Caught a Terrorist': How a Routine Call Led to the Capture of the N.Y.C. Bombing Suspect| Crime & Courts, Terrorism, True Crime







In addition to Padilla, fellow Linden officer Peter Hammer responded to the call Monday in his police vehicle, according to authorities. When Rahami allegedly started shooting, two rounds went into Hammer's vehicle, one of which grazed his head.



Hammer and Padilla were both treated and released from the hospital and both are at home, Sarnciki says, adding they will need medical clearance before returning to work.



NJ.com reports a third officer, Mark Kahana, who has been on the force since 1997, responded to the scene and received medical assistance for increased blood pressure.



Sarnicki says the officers' quick response owed to their preparedness.



"We constantly train and remind our officers to be aware of anything suspicious and just basically approach every call with caution," he tells PEOPLE.



Rahamias suspected bombings began Saturday. That night, 29 people were injured after a bomb exploded inside a dumpster in Chelsea, all of whom have since been released from the hospital, according to authorities. Earlier that day, police responded to an explosion before a charity race in Seaside Park, New Jersey, in which no one was injured.



Then, on Sunday night, a bag containing five pipe bombs was found at a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. One device was detonated by a bomb disposal robot Monday morning, a federal official previously told PEOPLE. No one was injured.



The man who called police to the scene, bar owner Harry Bains, said he initially thought the bearded man asleep for hours on the doorstep of his bar was passed out and drunk, he told NBC New York.



Acting Linden Police Chief Jonathan Parham described the shootout to NJ.com as "surreal."



He told the outlet, "I'm just extremely proud of these officers and proud of the way the department worked together. We caught a terrorist. That's no small feat."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared Miamis Wynwood neighborhood Zika-free on Monday. However, the CDC recommends pregnant women and their partners remain cautious about travel within other parts of Miami Dade County. The virus is linked to neurological disorders in the fetuses and newborns of women infected with the virus.

Wynwood, the first US city where Zika was contracted by local mosquitoes, was under a federal and state travel warning for two months. Florida Governor Rick Scott says the state hasnt seen any evidence of mosquito-transmitted Zika in Wynwood for at least 45 days.

Its a striking result, CDC Director Tom Frieden tells Yahoo Finance at the Concordia Summit in New York City. Frieden explains that Wynwood was not an easy place to control Zika because of its many construction sites, vacant lots and hard-to-get-to places. He said weeks of ground-based spraying had little to no impact.

Then they applied aerial spraying, says Frieden, and almost immediately the mosquito counts went to zero and transmission of the disease stopped.

Aerial spraying is controversial because of its possible harmful effects to peoples health and the environment.

Local businesses in Wynwood are cheering about the travel warning being lifted. The Wynwood Business Improvement District estimates that restaurant and retail sales in the area sank 50% year-over-year since Zika transmission first made headlines.

Meanwhile, just six miles away in Miami Beach, the CDC has tripled the Zika virus transmission zone. It now includes a 4.5 square-mile zone running from 8th Street to 63rd Street.

Frieden says a mosquito travels just 500 feet in its lifetime, which is why its possible to declare Wynwood Zika-free, even though nearby Miami Beach is still under threat. Unlike West Nile Virus, where we see it in a whole region, Frieden explains, [Zika] is very focal in the US.
From Cosmopolitan

It appears that last week, Donald Trump suddenly discovered that more than half of voters are women.

Thats the only way to account for the fact that he rolled out two ideas aimed at women - neither of which would solve the problems facing women and families. After spending his entire campaign attacking and insulting women, Donald Trump is desperately trying to pander to them because he cant come close to the lifetime of work Hillary Clinton has done to help women and families.

His half-baked proposal on maternity leave only applies to women who have given birth. This proposal, like his whole campaign, leaves out an entire swath of people in America who dont fit his narrow version of what makes a family. It doesn't respect the needs of fathers, or adoptive or fostering parents, and continues the myth of a 1950s world where women take care of children and men work.

Now, he has a proposal that could make birth control more expensive for millions of women and even eliminate access to some types of long-acting birth control, like IUDs. This is not a solution. Donald Trump is really saying that he wants more than 55 million women to lose coverage for no-copay birth control, which could put it financially out of reach for many.

The reality is that Donald Trump has not only spent his entire career dismissing and insulting women - going so far as to call women pigs and dogs - he has also spent the last 15 months promising policies that endanger and harm them. Hes promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which gives women access to no-copay birth control, saving them an estimated $1.4 billion a year. And hes promised to appoint anti-abortion Supreme Court justices in hopes of overturning Roe v. Wade, striking womens constitutional right to abortion. Hes also promised to block patients who rely on public health programs from going to Planned Parenthood health centers - where an estimated 1 in 5 American women have come for care.

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To see how Trumps policies would play out in real life, we need look no further than my home state of Texas. Women in Texas face barriers to care, some of which are insurmountable, and it is literally killing them. New statistics released last month paint a clear, stark, and tragic picture of what happens when politics trump the needs of women and families.

In 2011, Texas politicians blocked patients who rely on public health programs from going to Planned Parenthood health centers for care. At the same time, they slashed the states family planning budget by two-thirds. More than 80 health centers closed as a result. And restrictions on safe and legal abortion - ruled unconstitutional earlier this summer by the Supreme Court - shuttered more than half of the states abortion providers.

In just one East Texas county where the local health center lost 60 percent of its family planning funding, the number of abortions increased by 191 percent in two years. Its obvious women who did not want to be pregnant didnt have access to the care they needed to prevent pregnancy.

At the same time, between 2010 and 2012, maternal mortality in Texas nearly doubled. And even more alarming, the increase is disproportionately driven by the death of black women. The Texas legislatures actions are undoing decades of work by public health advocates to address longstanding health-care inequity for people of color in this country.

These statistics are staggering. But what is most heartbreaking is that behind these numbers are real women who cannot get the health care that should be their right - mothers working hard to support their families, students preparing to make their place in the world, young women building careers and charting their futures.

While Texas is the most glaring example of Trumps brand of political ambition and division running roughshod over the health and safety of marginalized communities, it is not the only example.

Donald Trump chose as his running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who as congressman led the charge to block patients who rely on public health programs from going to Planned Parenthood health centers for care. And while he was governor of Indiana, Scott County experienced an outbreak of HIV. Pence and his predecessor had cut public health budgets, opposed quality sex education, and then when the outbreak occurred, Pence delayed life-saving action because of his personal beliefs.

Under a Trump administration, anti-womens health policies would go national. And those who would suffer most are women with low incomes, women in underserved communities, and women of color, who face systemic barriers to access the care they need.

Even without decades of examples of Trumps misogyny in his own words, his proposals on womens health are enough to show he does not care about the well-being of women.

At a time when anti-womens health politicians in states across the country are endangering womens lives with harmful laws and policies, we need a champion in the White House. We need to elect the strongest, most qualified candidate in history. We need to elect Hillary Clinton.

Cecile Richards is the president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Follow Cecile on Twitter.

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Charlotte (AFP) - Was the victim carrying a gun, or a book? Was the officer who opened fire black or white? In the North Carolina city of Charlotte, two conflicting accounts of the police shooting of an African-American man took hold Wednesday.

City officials appealed for calm after a night of violence triggered by the shooting, with Charlotte's police chief saying that Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot after officers saw him with a gun and posing a threat to their safety.

Police chief Kerr Putney -- who is black -- identified the officer who fired the shots as Brentley Vinson, also African-American.

But neighbors and people claiming to have witnessed the incident disputed the official account, convinced the shooting is just the latest example of police brutality that has disproportionately impacted black communities.

A climate of distrust has descended on the largely black neighborhood where Scott died, in the wake of several incidents in recent years of African-American men killed at the hands of white police officers.

Community members said Scott was doing what he regularly did on a school-day afternoon: reading a book as he waited for his young son to step off the school bus at the Village at College Downs housing complex.

Two women who claim to have seen the shooting said police leadership lied about the circumstances of the deadly encounter, which along with the recent killing of a black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma has fuelled a fresh burst of nationwide anger about police violence.

Others who gathered at the site of the shooting also were quick to insist that Scott was holding a book, not a firearm, and that the officer who opened fire was white, not black.

Police stated that no book was found at the scene.

But it was a narrative that began taking hold among members of the black community.

"A white officer with a bald head shot that man," insisted Taheshia Williams, whose daughter goes to school with Scott's son.

Story continues

As for Scott holding a gun in the encounter, "It's a lie," she told reporters.

"They took the book and replaced it with a gun so they can look like that man did something that he didn't do."

- Complying will 'get you murdered' -

Williams noted that she believed Scott had complied "exactly" with specific police orders to exit the car and walk to the back of the vehicle.

"Obviously complying is going to get you murdered. Because that is what happened."

Another black woman, who asked not to be named, also insisted that it was a white officer who opened fire, and that Scott had no weapon.

"I saw it from my balcony," she told AFP, pointing to a third-floor apartment within view of the spot where Scott was shot.

"The chief is lying" by saying that officer Brentley Vinson fired the shots, she said.

The contradictions between the police accounts and those of Scott's Charlotte neighbors highlight the tensions that often exist between heavily armed US security forces and African-American communities, whose members complain of unfair racial profiling and decades of police brutality.

"Innocent blood cries from the grave!" declared civil rights activist John Barnett, with a minister and some Scott friends and neighbors at his side, as he called for authorities to sweep the Charlotte police force of "dirty cops" in its ranks.

"We've got a virus, we gotta use some chemotherapy to get that virus or that cancer out," he said.

Barnett led a brief call-and-response of "Hands up, don't shoot," echoing one of the chants that rose up during Tuesday night protests that turned violent, leaving 16 police officers injured.

Some of those who gathered Wednesday at the scene of the shooting appeared shell-shocked in the aftermath of Scott's death.

"He was a sweetheart. I never had any ill feelings about him," Sheila Daniel, 36, said of Scott, who was a regular customer at the shop where she works.

She said the police account was "completely different" from the one put forward by one of Scott's daughters.

Police routinely entered the housing complex on Tuesdays and Thursdays on patrol and should have seen that "this is his normal routine," she said of Scott, who regularly waited for his son at the bus stop.

Daniel, who has a 20-year-old son, said she feared he could fall victim to police discrimination.

"I have to worry about whether I'm going to get that phone call" from authorities about a dead son or daughter.

"If I get that phone call, hell is going to break loose."
Top officials in Charlotte urged the public to stay calm following a night of unrest and violence over the latest fatal shooting of a black man by law enforcement.

Hundreds of people took to the streets near the apartment complex in the North Carolina city where Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot and killed. These demonstrations grew more violent into the night  as rioters lit fires and threw rocks. Police in riot gear retaliated with tear gas.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Kerr Putney said at a press conference Wednesday morning that several orders for dispersal went unheeded. At least 16 officers were injured and several police vehicles were damaged, he said.

Our officers acting heroically were just trying to de-escalate the situation and resolve it as peacefully as possible, Putney said. As always, our officers tried to facilitate demonstrations and protests. They protect the rights of our citizens, but when that behavior becomes violent, aggressive and destructive, we have to act as we did.

Slideshow: Protests erupt after deadly police shooting in Charlotte, N.C. >>>

A protester stands in front of a line of police officers in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday. (Photo: Jeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer via AP)

According to Putney, Scott was armed with a handgun when he stepped out of his vehicle and did not obey loud and clear commands from police that were heard by witnesses. Scotts family, on the other hand, has told the media he was unarmed and reading a book at the time.

The officer who shot and killed him, Brentley Vinson, has been placed on administrative leave.

The investigation is ongoing, and only one person has been arrested so far for participating in the violent protests, he said.

Now we have a challenge here in Charlotte. People are watching how we respond, how we react, he continued. And Im optimistic that the results of our action will be positive, will have positive outcomes. But its time for the voiceless majority to stand up and be heard. Its time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the storys a little bit different as to how its been portrayed so far, especially through social media.

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At the same press conference, Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts said that local authorities have already spoken to many community and faith leaders, who join them in calling for peace, calm and dialogue. She has also been in touch with the White House, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and local elected officials, she said.

Charlotte police work the scene of a shooting on Tuesday in Charlotte, N.C. (Photo: Jeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer via AP)

I want to thank all of them for being part of the collaboration that will help our community move forward in a peaceful manner, she said. I am confident in Charlottes strong police and community relations. There are so many good folk in this community who have been working so hard to keep that dialogue productive and to keep that dialogue open.

Roberts vowed to be thorough and transparent in releasing accurate information to the public as soon as it becomes available, and to dispel any circulating misinformation.

The shooting is the latest in which a black man was killed by a police officer. On Monday, police in Tulsa, Okla., released video footage of Terence Crutchers death, which also resulted in protests.

Willie Ratchford, the executive director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee, offered his condolences to the Scott family and the officers injured in the riots.

As a community, we in Charlotte-Mecklenburg have always worked tirelessly to address concerns surrounding police and community relations, Ratchford said. We have encouraged our citizens to exchange personal stories, experiences and diverse perspectives to foster growth and healing during difficult times.
Washington (AFP) - A rocket fired by Islamic State jihadists at US forces in Iraq may have carried a chemical agent, a US defense official said Wednesday.

No one was injured in Tuesday's blast near an airfield by the northern town of Qayyarah and no one showed any immediate signs of exposure to the suspected mustard agent, the official said.

Several hundred US troops are working with Iraqi partners to strengthen the airfield ahead of a push on the IS stronghold of Mosul.

The defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an incoming round had exploded within the base perimeter during an "indirect fire" attack.

A small team of US troops later inspected the fragmented ordinance and found one bit with a suspicious, tar-like black oily substance that they tested in the field.

That initial test was positive for a "mustard agent." A second test was negative, and a third sample has been sent to a proper laboratory for definitive analysis.

The official downplayed the seriousness of the incident, saying the shell would have been "militarily ineffective."

"Our concern is not much greater after seeing this," he said.

Still, the troops who handled the fragments went through a standard decontamination procedure.

US-led coalition warplanes last week destroyed a factory near Mosul suspected of being used by IS to make chemical weapons.

Observers have repeatedly alleged IS has used chemical weapons, and the Pentagon has confirmed the jihadists have deployed chlorine and sulfur mustard devices.

Iraqi security forces, backed by coalition air power, are in the final weeks of "shaping" operations ahead of an assault to recapture Mosul, which IS seized in 2014 and which remains the jihadists' last main stronghold in Iraq.
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chile's President Michelle Bachelet said during a United Nations General Assembly panel on LGBT rights on Wednesday that she would send a bill legalizing gay marriage to Congress in the first half of 2017. "My government has committed to submit to Congress a bill on marriage equality during the first half of 2017," Bachelet said, according to a transcript of her remarks. "Furthermore, it will also consider governmental support for several measures destined to strengthen the rights of the LGBT community, including reforms to anti-discrimination laws." The move would follow the Chilean Congress' legalization of same sex civil unions in January of last year and comes as many Latin American nations are extending rights to gay and lesbian citizens. Legalizing same-sex marriage would give Chilean couples additional welfare and state life insurance rights, among other benefits, and clarify adoption rules, according to gay rights groups. Same-sex marriage has been legalized in recent years in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and parts of Mexico, despite the powerful influence of the Catholic Church, which opposes such unions. Chile, which returned to democracy in 1990 after a brutal 17-year military dictatorship, is by many measures Latin America's most economically developed country, but is less socially progressive than many of its neighbors. In 2004, it became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce, and it is one of the few that still outlaws abortions in all cases - something that center-left Bachelet is trying to change, against strong opposition. (Reporting by Gram Slattery; Editing by Andrew Hay)
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China had 232 chemical-related accidents from January to August this year, causing 199 deaths and 400 injuries, according to research from the environmental group Greenpeace published on Wednesday. Greenpeace said China needs to "radically overhaul" the way it manages its chemical industry, which is now "appallingly under-regulated". "The government must take urgent action to manage chemicals in a sound manner, provide a safety net for workers and citizens, and protect ecologically important areas across the country," said Cheng Qian, a campaigner with the group. According to publicly available data from 2010-11, the majority of China's 33,625 chemical facilities are located in densely populated eastern coastal regions, Greenpeace said, adding that more transparency was needed to provide a more accurate picture of the industry. China has struggled to enforce its rules on acquiring, producing, storing and disposing of dangerous chemicals, and experts have complained that rules published at the end of 2011 are inadequate and need to be tightened significantly. Last year, 165 people were killed following a series of explosions in a chemical warehouse in the northern city of Tianjin. The government said hazardous materials had been stored illegally at the site. China detained 49 people in connection with the blasts, including port and work safety officials, saying that laws and regulations had been flouted. The firm involved, Tianjin Ruihai International Logistics, was also accused of handling dangerous chemicals without a license. Four workers were also killed in an explosion at a facility run by the Wanhua Chemical Group on Wednesday. (Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Michael Perry)
Beijing (AFP) - The father of a Chinese man killed while driving a Tesla sedan has sued the US electric car maker over an alleged fault with its Autopilot system, the family's attorney said Wednesday.

Gao Yaning, the 23-year-old driver, died in January after his Tesla Model S slammed into a road-sweeping vehicle on a highway in the northern province of Hebei. His father Gao Jubin filed the case against the company in June, lawyer Cui Qiuna told AFP.

The family believed the son was driving in Tesla's Autopilot mode and accused the firm of overstating the function's capabilities, she said.

During the trial's opening session in Beijing Tuesday, Gao applied for an investigation into whether the autopilot was activated when the accident occurred, she added.

Gao has demanded Tesla stop using the phrase "automatic driving" in its promotion of Autopilot, publicly apologise for false advertising and pay 10,000 yuan ($1,500) in compensation for the family's grief caused by the son's death, Cui said.

"Tesla has been contacting Mr. Gao for a talk over reconciliation conditions but has yet to put forward a concrete solution," she said.

Tesla in August rephrased its description of the Autopilot system in some advertisements but "some of their staffers and their pamphlets are still using terms like 'automatic driving'", Cui said.

Tesla officials did not respond to AFP's request for comment on Wednesday.

The company has said the Autopilot system, introduced last year, is not a fully autonomous system and drivers are cautioned that they need to be at the wheel and in control.

The system allows the vehicle to automatically change lanes, manage speed and brake to avoid a collision. The system may be overridden by the driver.

A Florida driver died in May after Autopilot failed to detect a truck and collided with it.

Tesla said last week it was upgrading the software to use more advanced radar technology.
NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - China is set to maintain its economic growth momentum this year, Premier Li Keqiang told an economic forum in New York on Tuesday.

"I can say here that in the third quarter of this year, or until the end of this year, China's economy will maintain this momentum of steady growth," said Li, who was attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week.

China's growth target for this year is 6.5-7 percent. In the second quarter of this year, the world's second-largest economy grew 6.7 percent from a year ago, according to official data.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Writing by David Chance; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Chris Pratt  bonafide action star, devoted husband and father, former television heartthrob andworld's best travel companion?

The star-studded cast of The Magnificent Seven, which includes Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke and Peter Saarsgard, have been on a globe-trotting promotional tour for their new Western reboot with stops in Venice, Toronto and New York, and while this many actors in one room may have their differences, they could all agree on one thing: Chris Pratt is their favorite cast member to travel with.

WATCH: Magnificent Seven Star Chris Pratt on How He's Put His Cowboy Wardrobe to Good Use at Home

"Chris Pratt is about the most fun a human being is allowed to be," Hawke quickly responded at a New York screening when asked who was the most magnificent co-star to travel the world with.

"The guy always has a sense of humor, and he's always gung ho and giving a hundred and twenty percent. I walk away really having a lot of respect for him," he added.

Getty Images

"He's good natured," Sarsgaard said as to why Pratt was also his choice. "The rest of us have temperamental sides. Especially me."

WATCH: Chris Pratt Is the Most Badass Cowboy Ever in Action-Packed The Magnificent Seven Trailer

"He keeps it fun," director Antoine Fuqua explained. "He's always cracking jokes and laughing, he's great to be around."

Washington was quick to admit he didn't travel on the same planes as the rest of the cast all the time, but he did have one standout.

"I've been with Chris most of the time," the Oscar-winner stated. "He's cool."

A simple response, but coming from Washington, that's saying quite a lot.

WATCH: Jennifer Lawrence Seduces Chris Pratt in Space in Intense Passengers Trailer

Vincent D'Onofrio, on the other hand, had just two words to describe everyone's favorite travel buddy: "Handsome and talented."

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"Oh really?!" enthused Pratt, who was actually surprised to hear he was everyone's pick.

The Guardians of the Galaxy actor had a bit more trouble than his castmates when it came to making his choice.

WATCH: Magnificent Seven Director Says Stunt Professionals 'Were in Heaven' Making the Movie

"I had a good time travelling with all of them, you know, it's hard to pick," the actor confessed. "We are all like a big family."

A collective "awe" was suddenly heard around the world.

The Magnificent Seven gallops into theaters on Friday.



EXCLUSIVE: Chris Pratt Reveals His Best Love Advice -- And Totally Melts Our Hearts

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The Christian Broadcasting Network will launch a faith-based news website targeted at millennials Wednesday.

The website, Faithwire.com, will seek to reach young people with a variety of content, including articles, podcasts, and video features.

Were enthusiastic about the vision for Faithwire.com and believe it can reach a whole new generation, Gordon Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network, said in a statement provided to Business Insider. Faithwire.com is well-positioned to meet a growing passion for news within the faith community.

Two alumni of conservative talk show host Glenn Becks media empire will lead the website. Dan Andros, who was Becks head writer for 15 years, will serve as managing editor. Sara Johnson, who spent nearly five years heading social media for Beck, will be director of social media.

Andros and Johnson told Business Insider that the editorial team will initially be nimble and comprised of just one other person: Stephanie Parker, who will be an assistant editor. The website will also accept content from a network of freelancers.

Kirsten Haglund, Miss America 2008, who will cover womens issues and host her own podcast, but not in a full-time capacity.

Screen Shot 2016 09 20 at 4.49.50 PM

On launch day, Faithwire will feature a story about how young people are going to church in one of the trendiest, least-churched sections of Brooklyn, a profile on a drug dealer who escaped from police but later turned himself into authorities after reading the Bible, and an in-depth look at individuals trying to rehabilitate released convicts into society.

We live in the world of Vice News, Serial, Netflix documentaries and all-digital viewing habits, said Rob Allman, president of Faithwire. We have an opportunity to be that for a growing segment of the faith audience.

He added: These are deeper stories, more human and real, and theyre just waiting for someone to cover them in an honest, thought-provoking way. Faithwire.com exists to fill this void and well do so in a way that doesnt depress you but instead leaves you with hope.

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Andros told Business Insider that after 16 years covering politics, he started feeling numb to the non-stop news cycle.

I feel this site is needed because  well, take a look at the two nominees for president, he said, referring to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. One has trouble with the truth. The other has trouble with, well, just about everything. We need to look somewhere else for hope.

The website, which has been in the works for the past three months, will serve a higher purpose than partisan politics, Andros promised.

Johnson agreed, telling Business Insider that the website would lean toward values more than a political ideology.

If there is a devastating storm that hits a community, were not going to write an article telling you how many days its been before a politician has visited or addressed the issue, she said. Faithwire is going to highlight the personal stories of people living through that disaster, whats going on in that community, how people are helping one another, and how you can get involved if you want to as well.

The duo said Faithwire has an incredible opportunity to reshape the way Christians are portrayed in popular cultural.

Were consistently portrayed as combative and bigoted  a one track mind for controversy, Andros said. I dont believe thats who we are. Thats not been my experience anyway.

Disclosure: The author of this story previously worked with Johnson at TheBlaze, a multi-platform media organization owned by Glenn Beck.

NOW WATCH: There's something confusing in the fine print of Donald Trump's new $10 million TV ad





More From Business Insider


For the cover, design icon Christian Louboutin, he of those much-coveted red-soled heels, posed in June with superfan and close friend Kerry Washington, who is expecting her second child, for a series of stunning images photographed by Mary Rozzi at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles. Washington even brought along 2-year-old daughter Isabelle and shih tzu mix Josie to meet the legend. "It was very obvious they genuinely adore each other and have a mutual respect for each other's trade," notes Rozzi of the pair's chemistry. The two then sat down for an interview with THR style editor Carol McColgin.

"Pour my dear Kerry," Louboutin scribbled on a red sole of a pair of embellished sandals, then encircled the inscription in stars and hearts.

"I loved hearing them talk about where they would take each other in their hometowns - Paris versus L.A.," says McColgin. "The thought of Christian and Kerry cafe-hopping around Paris on a Vespa is quite magical." At one point Louboutin whipped out a colorful set of markers and began doodling on shoes as the actress looked on. "He even customized a sparkly pink pair of 'princess shoes' for her daughter," recalls McColgin. "It doesn't get any sweeter."

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Chubb Limited CB recently unveiled its new business owners policy (BOP) to offer unparalleled insurance solution to independent agents and brokers as well as small business clients. The new policy, which will be available across the nation, combines superior coverage and cutting-edge technology.



Chubb BOP is part of a new suite of innovative insurance products launched by Chubbs Small Commercial Insurance division. This division, which was unveiled earlier this year, was established to meet the needs of independent agents, brokers and small business clients.



The new, tailor-made policy for small businesses will provide wide protection coverage for property and liability exposures and a supporting umbrella liability product. Also, the policy will offer the option to add workers compensation, commercial auto, and management and professional liability insurance protection to its coverages.



Apart from the industry standard policies, Chubb BOP comprises more than 80 customized coverages and limits. These include a noteworthy automatic blanket limit of insurance that binds 12 necessary property coverages and enables clients to effectively use their insurance money in case of a loss.



Chubbs Small Commercial Insurance division expects that its offerings will meet the needs of the clients for a BOP. The latest policy is synonymous with the property and casualty (P&C) insurers focus on innovation. The BOP also displays its commitment toward the agency partners and their small business clients.



Small business is the fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy and thus, a strategic move like the nationwide rollout of the new BOP will result in substantial value addition to the products and services of the insurer. Moreover, the newly unveiled policy will further strengthen the insurers position in the P&C space.

CHUBB LTD Price

CHUBB LTD Price | CHUBB LTD Quote

Zacks Rank and Stocks to Consider



Currently, Chubb carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks from the same space are National Interstate Corporation NATL, NMI Holdings, Inc. NMIH and Cincinnati Financial Corp. CINF. While both National Interstate and NMI Holdings sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Cincinnati Financial holds a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Story continues

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Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - Students from a school in northeast Nigeria, from where more than 200 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, will resume lessons next month, more than two years after the mass abduction, the state government has announced.

Chibok became synonymous with the Boko Haram conflict when fighters abducted 276 girls from the Government Secondary School (GSS) on the evening of April 14, 2014, sparking global outrage.

A total of 218 are still being held.

But residents in the town hit out at the plan, calling it unworkable, as it involves sharing an already overstretched building.

Borno state commissioner for education Inuwa Kubo announced late on Tuesday that all public secondary schools would re-open on October 3 after being closed for more than two years.

"All the damages done to the schools' infrastructure have been repaired," he told reporters in the state capital, Maiduguri.

Some secondary schools in areas still deemed insecure because of militant and military activity will, however, be moved to safe areas, he added.

He said the remaining students of the GSS in Chibok would have to share a building with the local primary school, as the secondary school, which was razed during the attack, has not been rebuilt.

Yakubu Nkeki, from a support group for families of the kidnapped schoolgirls, said the plan was "not feasible".

"The (primary school) pupils use the classrooms between morning and noon while the (junior secondary school) students use them between noon and late afternoon," he told AFP.

"So, the structures are already overstretched."

Primary school in Nigeria typically caters for children aged six to 11, while junior secondary teaches 11 to 15 year olds.

- Schools targeted -

Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language widely spoken across northern Nigeria means "Western education is sin", has specifically targeted schools teaching a "secular" curriculum.

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In March this year, the Borno state government said the Islamists had destroyed or damaged 5,335 classrooms and school buildings in 512 primary, 38 secondary and two tertiary institutions.

All schools in Borno were shut after a Boko Haram attack in neighbouring Yobe state on February 25, 2014, when at least 43 students were killed at a boarding school in Buni Yadi.

The UN children's agency has said more than one million children have been kept out of school since the conflict began in 2009, exacerbating already low levels of education in the northeast.

Primary schools in the state were re-opened last year, said Kubo, but security remains an issue in Borno, despite military successes against the jihadists.

Nkeki said 57 primary and nine junior secondary schools in the Chibok area remained shut because of sporadic attacks.

Chibok elder Ayuba Alamson Chibok said the re-opening may even come too late for the kidnapped girls' classmates.

"Some of the girls have grown so big that they may hardly go back to school even if it reopens, as their parents may prefer them to get married once their right suitor comes," he said.

But he added: "It is a good development if the remaining girls can have the opportunity to resume school. Although two years have been wasted, it is better late than never."

Alamson Chibok said university graduates have volunteered to teach primary school pupils during the closure, while some parents have sent their children to schools elsewhere in Nigeria.

"We will be happy if the Borno state government can keep to its word of relocating the GSS students to another school while their school is being rebuilt," he added.
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f219042%2fsyriainstability

The U.S. intelligence community on Wednesday released a new report finding that global warming is already acting as a destabilizing force worldwide, with more serious ramifications to come in the next two decades.

In the report, the National Intelligence Council (NIC)  a group of public and private sector experts who advise the Director of National Intelligence  found that extreme weather events have growing implications for humans, which suggest[s] that climate-change related disruptions are well underway."

SEE ALSO: The Paris climate agreement just took a big step toward becoming international law

The report also states that during the next five years, which will largely fall within the timeframe of the next presidential administration, climate change will cause growing security risks for the U.S. that "will arise primarily from distinct extreme weather events and from the exacerbation of currently strained conditions, like water shortages."

According to Brian Deese, a senior advisor to President Barack Obama, this is the first intelligence assessment to find that climate change is already affecting U.S. national security. Previous reports from the CIA, the Defense Department and other agencies had portrayed climate change as a future challenge.

Navy aircraft carriers USS Harry S Truman (L) and USS George HW Bush rest tied to the pier at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Virginia, May 8, 2013.

Image: Jim watson/AFP/Getty Images

The new intelligence report starkly warns of climate instability-driven migrations in the next two decades and was released the same week world leaders have been meeting in New York City to consider how to increase support for refugees streaming out of war-torn Syria, Somalia, Libya and other countries.

The report states:

The report is illustrated with examples of climate-related security developments that have already occurred, such as insurgents' exploitation of drought-enhanced desertification in a "food for Jihad" movement in northern Mali during 2015.

The report also comes as the White House announced a new policy framework requiring federal agencies to take the impacts of climate change into account when making national security-related policies and plans. President Obama established this framework through a presidential memorandum.

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The NIC report provides more detailed information on how climate change will likely pose national security challenges for the U.S. during the next 20 years, raising the possibility that climate change-related impacts could cause entire countries to collapse.

Members of the Majawa family walk to their church in the village of Mulele, which lies in one of the areas most affected by drought, on Sept. 11, 2016 in Zomba, Malawi.

Image: Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images

It finds that climate change is "likely to pose significant national security challenges for the United States over the next two decades, which includes stressing U.S. military operations and bases. For example, the Navy is facing increasing challenges coping with sea level rise, which threatens to swamp some of its largest bases, including in Norfolk, Virginia.

Globally, the report found that climate-related national security disruptions are already underway, with the potential for global warming impacts to overwhelm country's ability to absorb natural disasters and continue to govern its people.

In addition, the report raises the specter of fights over arable land and usable water as heat waves and droughts cause dramatic shifts in the distribution of natural resources.

One of the problems identified in the report is the tendency for human populations to concentrate in coastal areas, where sea level rise will have increasingly damaging effects, as well as in water-stressed areas, such as South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The White House and intelligence agencies are increasingly seeing climate change-related national security threats worldwide, from the Syrian civil war to insurgencies in Africa.

Scientific studies have shown that a major drought that climate change likely worsened helped spark the devastating Syrian Civil War, which in turn has helped lead to the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.

"The impacts of climate change on national security are only going to grow," said White House Science Adviser John Holdren, on a conference call with reporters.

The White House's actions do not have the force of law, however, and they could be undone by either an upcoming Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump administration.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum at the Plaza Hotel, September 21, 2016 in New York City.

Image: Drew Angerer/Pool/Sipa USA

Todays Presidential Memorandum, while welcome, will need to withstand the transition between administrations to become effective," said David Titley, who retired as a Rear Admiral from the Navy and now directs the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State University, in an email to Mashable.

"It is important for the next administration, no matter who wins the November elections, to continue to recognize climate change as a security risk."

However, Holdren said that with climate science showing such clear warning signs  the Earth has now had 16 straight record warm months, an unprecedented feat  it's not in the best interest of the next administration to tinker with the new policy.

The intelligence report did not come as much of a surprise to the White House, Deese said.

The president directly and his national security team have been making a strong case for years that climate change is having an immediate and growing impact on our national security, he said.

Francisco Femia, the co-founder and president at the Center for Climate and Security, said the presidential memorandum and the intelligence report are both significant developments.

What the memorandum is essentially doing is saying look we need to organize our government at the highest levels of national security planning to manage this risk as a systemic risk, he told Mashable in an interview. Femia said the new actions elevate climate change to the highest level of national security policymaking that it's ever been.

The timescales are short and I think thats unique and I think thats interesting to see the NIC talking about security risks already underway, Femia said of the intelligence report.

The NIC report also considers the possibility of abrupt climate change from unanticipated tipping points in the climate system.

"Even if sudden shifts in the climate do not materialize, gradual shifts in climate could nonetheless spark surprising secondary effects  such as a massive release of gases from melting permafrost, persistent megadroughts, extreme shifts in critical ecosystems, emerging reservoirs of new pathogens, or the sudden breakup of immense ice sheets," the report states.

"The national security implications of such changes could be severe."
Hillary Clinton walks to her campaign plane at Westchester County Airport, in White Plains, N.Y. (Photo: Matt Rourke/AP)

Hillary Clinton expects debate moderators to fact-check the presidential candidates during Mondays debate, according to her campaigns communications director, Jennifer Palmieri.

She thinks moderators should play a role in making sure that the audience knows the truth, Palmieri told reporters Wednesday.

My biggest concern is not a view of any moderator, but just that people [adjust] their questions to suit the candidate in front of them, Palmieri said. The campaign is concerned that Clinton will be held to a higher standard than Donald Trump, who, they say, could face less rigorous questions as a result.

He ends up getting much more one-dimensional, simple questions, and thats not reflective of somebody whos in a debate to be the president of the United States, Palmieri said. I think the moderators need to ask substantive questions, factual questions and keep them on an even playing field.

Clintons campaign sharply criticized NBCs Matt Lauer for his performance moderating a Commander in Chief Forum earlier this month. The Today show host did not challenge Trumps false assertion that he had always opposed the Iraq War.

Fox News Chris Wallace, one of the upcoming debate moderators, also sparked further fact-checking discussion, by saying he believed that it was not his job to be a truth squad. Its up to the other person to catch them on that.

Donald Trump is interviewed by Matt Lauer at NBCs Commander in Chief Forum on Sept. 7. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Clintons focus on the debates moderators constitutes a rare spot of overlap with Trump, who has argued that the moderators will be biased against him. (Wallace, NBCs Lester Holt, ABCs Martha Raddatz and CNNs Anderson Cooper will moderate the three debates.)

Everyones saying that [Lauer] was soft on Trump, Trump said last week on CNBC. Well, now the new persons going to try to be really hard on Trump, just to show, you know, the establishment what [they] can do. So I think its very unfair, what theyre doing.

Trump also falsely claimed that Holt, the moderator of the first debate, is a Democrat. Time magazine reported that Holt is a registered Republican.

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The Trump and Clinton campaigns have also avoided the traditional tactic of playing down their own candidates debate skills in order to lower expectations. Palmieri said Wednesday that she believes Clinton will do well at Mondays debate and that Trump tends to perform worse in one-on-one showdowns.

Im sure shell perform well. She always does, Palmieri said.

She also said that Clinton reviews debate materials every day, and that the Democratic candidate will spend the next couple of days practicing for the debate in Westchester, N.Y. Palmieri further said that Clinton is taking her prep really seriously, to prepare herself for different versions of her unpredictable opponent. Were preparing for different Trumps that might show up, she said. (She would not divulge whom the campaign has tapped to play Trump in Clintons mock debates  a topic of much speculation in the media.)

Trumps campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, meanwhile, mocked Clintons debate performance as lawyerly and longwinded.

Shes apologizing, shes dissembling, shes deflecting. Donald Trumps answers are concise and theyre confident, and theyre pointed the way a leader  the way a leader answers questions, frankly, she said on Fox News radio.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took on the Wells Fargo & Co bogus-accounts case in a letter to the bank's customers to be released on Tuesday, when Wells Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf will testify before a Senate committee.

Clinton, who faced accusations during her party's primary elections of representing Wall Street's interests, said in the letter that Stumpf "owes all of you a clear explanation as to how this happened under his watch."

Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators announced a $185 million settlement with the bank for creating 2 million phantom accounts under actual customers' names in a bid to meet internal sales goals.

In the letter sent to customers, Clinton laid out a three-prong plan to address what she called "the culture of misconduct and recklessness" in the banking system. It included "clawing back" the compensation of individual executives involved in wrongdoing and breaking up big banks that are not managed effectively. She also called for maintaining the CFPB, an agency created in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law that Republican lawmakers would like to reorganize.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Andrew Hay)
DUBAI (Reuters) - Yemen's Houthi group said aircraft of an Arab coalition bombed a security compound in the capital Sanaa where suspected al Qaeda militants and foreigners accused of spying, including Americans, are held. The Saudi-led coalition has been conducting air raids against outposts and military facilities of the Iran-aligned Houthis and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh since March last year in a campaign to try to restore ousted president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The Houthi group, in a statement carried by sabanews.net news agency, quoted a source at the country's national security service as saying that coalition aircraft had caused a number of casualties among residents living in the vicinity of the compound that was bombed. "This apparatus is not a military establishment but a security one concerned with fighting terrorism and to limit the spread of its organizations," sabanews.net quoted an official at the service as saying. "He holds the aggression (the coalition) responsible for exposing those held there to danger, be it terrorist elements or those held for spying from Arab and foreign countries, including Americans," it added without giving any further details. The coalition has made no comment on the report, but officials say aircraft of the Saudi-led alliance only target military facilities in Yemen. Fighting has escalated since U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Kuwait ended without an agreement last month. The United Nations says that at least 10,000 people have been killed since March 2015, including many civilians. (Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari, writing by Sami Aboudi, Editing by William Maclean and Ralph Boulton)
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos applauded the deal to end his country's half-century conflict during an address at the United Nations Wednesday in which he hailed "one fewer war on the planet."

"Today I have come to the United Nations to announce, with my full voice and heart, that the war in Colombia is over," Santos said in an address to the General Assembly of his government's conflict with Marxist rebels.

"There is one fewer war on the planet," he added, striking a bright note amid the world body's deep divisions over how to end the bloodshed in Syria.

Addressing the General Assembly on the International Day of Peace, Santos had earlier presented a copy of the agreement, wrapped in the Colombian flag, to the 15 members of the Security Council, who gave him a standing ovation.

Santos launched negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) after taking office in 2010, with the two sides sealing a deal on August 24 in Havana to end the Americas' longest conflict, which has claimed 260,000 lives.

The agreement will be ceremonially signed on Monday and put to a referendum on October 2, with Colombian voters tipped to approve it.

If approved, the FARC's estimated 7,500 fighters are to disarm under UN supervision.

Santos promised symbolic monuments to the end of the war after rebels give up their arms and are integrated into society.

"The weapons will be melted and turned into three monuments to peace -- in New York and Cuba, which were the seats of dialogue, and another in Colombia," he said.

US President Barack Obama said the peace agreement had taken "a lot of courage" and "hard work," in remarks ahead of his bilateral meeting with Santos on Wednesday.

"I could not be more supportive of these efforts."

"There are going to be a lot of challenges involved in implementation," he added.

Story continues

"But I think this is an achievement of historic proportions. It ultimately will be good for the region as well as the people of Colombia."

US Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Colombia for Monday's signing of the peace deal in Cartagena.

Santos said he expected the agreement to turn the FARC into a peaceful, democratic political force and to lead to a better quality of life for people in the countryside who were most affected by the 52-year war.

The accord is historic for setting up a mechanism for justice involving an armed group not imposed by outside mediators, he said.

"Those responsible for international crimes and other serious crimes will be investigated, tried and punished," Santos said.

The end of the war would also halt the role of drugs in funding the rebellion, he added.

Besides curbing trafficking, he said, the deal will reduce deforestation driven by coca cultivation.
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f217569%2f28bc77d5d7e24c60b880d849eed6102f

Sea lions are pretty cute animals already, but a bunch of them looking curiously at a drone camera? It'll make you squee inside.

It's a sight captured by Australian photographer Jacqueline McGhie, who was in a boat with her boyfriend in Jurien Bay, Western Australia. They often spot sea lions playing in the water, so McGhie knows their behaviour pretty well.

SEE ALSO: Watch Cerro the tortoise eat a watermelon cake for his 50th b'day

"The Sea Lions remind me of puppies, I've swum with these particular sea lions before in the warmer months and they're always so curious and playful. They mimic you and show off with their ridiculously good underwater aerobatic skills," McGhie told Mashable via email.

Image: jacqueline mcghie

But it was the sea lions' eager jostling to get a look at the couple's new drone that caught them by surprise.

"It was really interesting to see them all so transfixed on the drone. I was worried about launching it in case the noise scared them but we kept it far enough away and it doesn't appear it would have bother them anyway.

"They were just so focused and curious about what is was. As soon as we moved the drone they all shifted and followed it until we hovered in one place and then they were pushing over each other to get a better look. Like I said, just like curious puppies!"

No, we're not jealous at all.

[h/t WA Today]
WILDWOOD, FL / ACCESSWIRE / September 21, 2016 / Efuel EFN Corporation, the company stock symbol "EFLN", is providing information to investors in reference to the following events that have been taking place within the last year and currently actives.

1. The Company purchased Hotel Marion with enthusiastic hope, but company management was stuck with regulations, heavily scrutinized by local authorities with taxation, rise of operative cost, and decline of sales, that resulted in closing hotel business for some time. Also, local government, city, county and US Bank stole the Hotel from EFUEL EFN CORPORATION. The company does not have a choice, but to sue Marion City, Grant County and US Bank in Indiana for improperly sizing hotel property and damaged the eFUEL EFN COPERATION business in the amount of $10,000,000.

2. The management posted to OTC Markets its 2015 ANNUAL REPORT and financial report with negative net income to the shareholders. In the 1st quarter of 2016, the company financials explains detailed accounting information on company activities without any confusing understanding. The 2nd quarter of 2016, has shown a 400% increase in net income and increase in revenue. The 3rd quarter has great financial showing so far on the books. Also, the company has $10,000,000.00 credit line with EAFN, INC. and is working on $ 35,000,000.00 construction loan for one CTM (Cherokee Trading Mall) project with BB&T BANK.

3. The company management is working on acquisition additional profitable asset. The eFUEL EFN COPORATION has over $18,000,000.00 in assets and annual revenue of $600,000.00. The company assets are documented by IRS audit fillings, property appraisals, and business holding appraisals on moving assets with mineral rights. Also, the company has 52 operations license filings with State of Florida and OTC Market. The company has great support from privet group, to expend business operation.

4. We have hired a property manager for Georgia assets holdings. Mr. George Jonson has been for many years in the real estate business and has great experience in land development.

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5. The company is looking to negotiate purchasing residential land designed for 160 condominiums units and appropriate construction loan an $6,000,000 to complete residential complex. That can have value of $16,000,000 in sales.

6. eFUEL EFN CORPORATION is looking to employ a Project Construction Manager for CHEROKEE TRADING MALL. The interested person should send Resume to eFUEL EFN CORPORATION, 1212 S. Maine St. Wildwood, Florida 34785 USA.

7. The company is working to find investments or finances for four construction projects (CHEROKEE TRADING MALL) in the amount of $160,000,000 to do construction projects in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Ohio. These projects will create over 1,200 full-time jobs and 700 part-time jobs to the U.S. economy.

8. In January 2017 the company will have a Board of Directors election. The shareholders who have 50,000,000 or more shares are welcome to write the company and express interest in a position. As of today, two persons express interest for Board of Directors position.

The activities are current and present company work in very competitive market to find complimentary investors to support company goals. Shareholders should not look on fest back, it should look into the company's long term objectives. The management is very optimistic about the company's future and 2016 will be a prosperous year for eFUEL EFN CORPORATION.

The additional information you can find in OTC filings, websites www.efuelefncorporation.com and www.efuelefn.com or email to: efuelefn@yahoo.com. Ph.352-399-6278

This press release information contains certain forward looking statement with the meaning of Section 27A of Securities Act 1933 as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act 1954 which are intended to be covered by the safe harbors created in connection with that investors are cautioned that all Forwarding statements involve risks and uncertainties including eFUEL EFN CORPORATION.

eFUEL EFN CORPORATION

Ljubica Stefanovic, President

1212 S. Main St Sut. B. Wildwood, Florida 34785 USA



SOURCE: Efuel EFN Corporation
This Immigrant Doctor Is Reimagining Health in the American City

Beaches around the world are disappearing.

No, the cause isnt sea-level rise, at least not this time. Its a little-known but enormous industry called sand mining, which every year sucks up billions of tons of sand from beaches, ocean floors, and rivers to make everything from concrete to microchips to toothpaste.

In the process, conservationists warn, the sand mining industry is damaging ecosystems, changing coastal water flows, and making beaches and communities less resilient to storm surges and floods as climate change accelerates.

Sand is actually the second-most-used natural resource on Earth, behind water, said Claire Le Guern Lytle, general director of the Santa Aguila Foundation, which was founded in 2009 to focus on coastal preservation. Its a finite resource, and its depleting very quickly, but nobody thinks about it.

No one ever thought wed run out of sand, said Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Its a devastating problem, but nobody in the U.S. has a concept of it because we go to the beach and see this big wide expanse of sand. The problem is worse, he said, in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Theyre basically just sucking the sand up, taking entire coastlines and islands away.

Most of the extracted coastal sand is used to make concrete and glass, the staples of the construction industry. The numbers are staggering, Le Guern Lytle said. An average-sized house requires 200 tons of sand. A hospital requires 3,000 tons. Every kilometer of highway requires 30,000 tons.

A 2014 report from the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that the construction industry consumed 25.9 billion to 29.6 billion tons of sand in 2012. The numbers are based not on reports of extractionthose reports dont existbut on how much concrete was used around the world that year. The U.N. called extraction rates unsustainable and noted that the rate of sand mining far exceeds the ability of natural systems to replenish themselves.

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The problem is only going to get worse. As the human population grows, the construction industry is rushing to fill the need for housing, roads, hospitals, and other structures. As a result, the use of sand has soared. Chinas construction industry has grown so large that it used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did during the entire 20th century.

China is hardly alone. A recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the global construction industry will grow 85 percent between now and 2030. China, the U.S., and India, the report found, will account for 57 percent of that growth. Meanwhile, the U.N.'s World Urbanization Prospects report predicts that the cities will add 2.5 billion residents by 2050, requiring the construction of a lot of new buildings.

RELATED: Louisiana Is Falling off the Map

Its not just construction. Sand is in everything we do, Le Guern Lytle said. Its used in products ranging from microchips to tires. The natural gas industry also relies on sand as part of the fracking extraction process. Sand is used in many, many, many ways that are unknown to most, she said.

Some of the sand comes directly from the beach, which can damage habitats for sea turtles and birds, but much of it is dredged up off the seafloor by large ships. Le Guern Lytle said that destroys critical breeding habitats for fish and other marine life. Extracting sand from the sea bottom just dissolves that ecosystem, she said.

Although much of the industry is legal, sand mining has become so lucrative that illegal activities are rife. Numerous reports out of India carry news of murders and other crimes carried out by sand mafias during the course of illegal sand mining activities. Other countries with recent reports of illegal sand mining include Namibia, Morocco, Malaysia, and Israel. Sand mining is as much a human tragedy as it is an environmental tragedy, Le Guern Lytle said.

Even as many beaches are mined, others need new sand to repair damage from ever more severe storms. Normally that would require trucking in sand from other sites, but that may not always be an option. Beaches are the most effective natural buffer from waves, storms, hurricanes, and tsunamis, said Griggs, who also pointed out their economic and cultural importance. Here in California, almost half of the roughly $45 billion in the coastal economy comes from tourism and recreation.

A recent warning from the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association noted that coastal communities may need to start exploring new and more expensive ways to shore up their shores, possibly by importing sand from faraway sources or turning glass back into beach-quality sand.

Although there is just one coastal sand mine in the U.S.a huge, century-old operation near Monterey Bay that is being targeted by the California Coastal Commission for causing too much erosionother mines are located inland. Wisconsin, for example, has dozens of mines extracting sand for use in fracking. About 60 percent of all sand thats used in fracking comes from Wisconsin, said Bill Davis, director of the Sierra Clubs John Muir Chapter in Madison. It tends to be a real nightmare for the people that live around the mines. The mining process, he said, often releases particulate matter into the air that can choke peoples wells and airways. It can very easily lodge in your lungs, he said.

Le Guern Lytle said that although the sand mining problem is invisible to most people, she has hope. The United Nations report in 2014 was a humongous step, she said. The greatest progress now is bringing more awareness.

Take the Pledge: Be a Voice for Coastal Restoration

Related stories on TakePart:





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Original article from TakePart
Cops say the drug PCP was found inside the car of the Oklahoma man fatally shot by a police officer Friday.

Read: Protesters Swarm Charlotte Streets After Fatal Police Shooting of Black Man

Tulsa police Sgt. Dave Walker told the Tulsa World, that officers discovered a vile of PCP inside Terence Crutchers SUV.

But it is not yet clear whether he was under the influence of the drug when he was shot Friday night. Toxicology and autopsy reports are still pending.

A lawyer representing Officer Betty Shelby, who fired the fatal shot on Crutcher, believes the man was high on PCP at the time of the shooting.

Benjamin Crump, an attorney representing the Crutcher family, told the reporters Tuesday afternoon: Let us not be throwing a red herring, and to say because something was found in the car that was justification to shoot him.

Shelby's attorney said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon.

"He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot," he told the Tulsa World newspaper.

Police say that the 40-year-old was reaching into the driver window of his vehicle for a weapon. Crutcher was unarmed and had his hands on his car after cops drew their weapons on him.

Crump, who also represented the family of Trayvon Martin, said Crutcher had his drivers side window rolled up and that his blood is visible on the glass.

The incident was captured on police dash cam as well as a police helicopter.

In the police helicopter video, one of the men in the chopper can be heard saying: That looks like a bad dude, too.

Read: 13-Year-Old Boy Fatally Shot by Police After He Pointed BB Gun at Officers

Tiffany Crutcher is the dead man's twin sister. She spoke at a news conference Monday, saying: That 'big, bad dude' was a father. That 'big, bad dude' was a son. That 'big, bad dude' was enrolled at Tulsa Community College. That 'big, bad dude' loved God. That 'big, bad dude' was singing with all of his flaws every week."

Story continues

In the wake of the shooting, Hillary Clinton tweeted: This should be intolerable. We have so much work to do.

Watch: 'Black Lives Matter' Chant Erupts as 9 Moms Who Lost Children to Police and Gun Violence Speak at DNC

Related Articles:
Last Friday, actor/musician and former child star Corey Feldman and his backing band, Coreys Angels, delivered an outlandish, Internet-breaking performance on The Today Show, playing Go 4 It, a track off Feldmans fifth album, Angelic 2 the Core. The public reaction was anything but angelic. Journalists and social media trolls alike were vicious, and by Sunday afternoon, a distraught, tearful Feldman had posted a (since-deleted) Facebook video, saying the entire experience had been really painful.

But now Feldman, 45, is having the last laugh. He couldnt have bought this sort of publicity for Angelic 2 the Core (which features guest spots by Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, and Fred Durst, and a cover of John Lennons Working Class Hero). Pop stars like Pink and Kesha have tweeted their support. The Today Show has even invited him back for an encore performance. As Feldman tells Yahoo Music, Sometimes you have to get through the darkness to see the light.

Feldman may have cheered up since the weekend, but in this exclusive Yahoo Music interview, however, Feldman still gets serious. He addresses the hurtful bullying resulting from his Today Show performance; the pedophilia, about which hes been very outspoken, that has run rampant in Hollywood for years; the influence Michael Jackson (whom he insists was not one of his boyhood molesters) had on his music and life; his feelings about Donald Trump; and how there really are two Coreys  the Corey Feldman we see in the media, and the real guy whos a father of a 12-year-old boy, a Mr. Cleaver-style homebody, and an abuse survivor.





YAHOO MUSIC: Were you surprised by the public reaction to your Today Show performance? It was truly crazy.

COREY FELDMAN: Well, I was definitely upset about the initial press reaction. Every single news outlet was reporting the same exact story: Corey Feldmans Bizarre Performance! What Was That? What Was He Thinking? The media ganged up on me from every single outlet. I know its just to sell papers and get attention, but I found it very offensive. Nobody was critiquing what I did. It wasnt like somebody said, I didnt like the song, or His voice was off, or I didnt like the lyrics. If there had been some constructive criticism in there, I would have been very happy to receive it, because every good performer deserves a review. And a well-trained journalist has the right to express their opinion. But when the opinions dont amount to anything other than a personal slam, by calling me names or talking about the fact that I had problems in my past, I take it personally after a while.

Story continues

I feel social media was crueler than traditional media, actually.

Yes, theres also been a movement  I dont know if theres some organization in charge of all this or somebody whos actually paying for an autobot-type service to do a thousand nasty tweets to me, but it seems like every single time I release anything, theres this wave of negative tweeters that comes after me. Its a wave of hate the initial wave [after The Today Show] lasted for about 12 hours, of just people bashing and bashing and bashing. The next wave was all support and love and fans, but then, once I released the Facebook video, everyone was very quick to jump on that and bash that, too.

So why did you respond on Facebook that way? Why not just ignore the haters?

Because I think that enough is enough when it comes to bashing and bullying. I dont think one person should have to endure that just because theyre a public figure. Like, why is that OK? I mean, people were saying things like The wrong Corey died, or You havent done anything since those drugs, or This all happened because you were probably raped as a kid. Just terrible, terrible things that I should never have to see, and that my son should never have to see. The fact that my son comes home to me and says, Yeah, Dad, I read everything  thats awful. I dont want my child to have to look at his dad that way.

Come on, people. Im a human being. I have flesh and blood and I have tears and sweat, just like anyone else. I think thats the message I was trying to convey. I think too many celebrities have gotten too comfortable hiding behind their publicists and their official statements and press releases, without actually showing their emotions. And I think thats what needed and necessary to get the message out to the public that this sort of bullying is affecting people. I wanted people to see how this really affects my emotions.

So why did you take the Facebook video down, then? You deleted it the same day.

Because after it had been up for about six hours and had gotten about 25,000 views, I saw that, even though we had gotten a tremendous amount of love and support from the fans, then all the little hackers and bloggers and haters started coming on. And I thought, Man, if youre that low on the moralistic food chain that you have nothing better to do than go on the video of someone whos already in pain and try to add more salt to the wound and fuel to the fire, then youre really such a disgusting person. You dont even deserve to see my tears! So at that point I figured, Im done. The message got out to the people that it needed to.

Social media can be awful, even for those who arent famous.

Its ridiculous. Its just unnecessary and cruel. I would never take time out of my day to go on somebodys website or Twitter page and be like, Youre ugly and dumb and you smell and youre fat! How would that make me a better person? No one should have to deal with this. Weve seen, multiple times, kids committing suicide because of this stuff. Even with the Trenchcoat Mafia and all that stuff, going back [Columbine] Colorado, its the same mentality. The mentality of beating people up and beating people up until they finally snap. Luckily, I am a very resolved and grounded person, so yes, it hits me on an emotional level, and yes, it affects to me to my core sometimes, but its also something Ive dealt with before and I know how to get through it.

Talking to you, I have to say, you do seemed grounded and sane. You dont sound like the crazy person the media portrays.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

What are some common misconceptions about you?

You know, a lot of times when people meet me and Im cowering in the corner with my sunglasses on, with my hood covering my head, people think, Oh, he must be stuck-up. No, actually, Im incredibly shy. I grew up with a lot of abuse, and if you know anything about psychology, people who are abused and beaten down their whole lives tend to cower. That was, unfortunately, the way that I was built. That was how I was designed: to keep my mouth shut and keep a smile on my face. I was trained that way for many years. It took a lot for me to develop my personality and say to the world, OK, heres who I really am. Now you can see me. It took a long time to get there. But I think now people are starting to realize Im not some egotistical, crazy kid. Im a shy, respectable, honest man. But people have to get to know me before they discover that. The top comment I get from people I meet all around the world is Wow! Youre nothing like I expected you to be. I expected you to be an ahole.

I still live a very normal life. I dont really go out much, and I have my child 50 percent of the time. I always say theres two versions of me. Theres the normal Mr. Cleaver type that stays home and makes my kid lunch every day and picks him up from school and does his homework with him. And then theres the rock-star me, who goes and does the big events and the concerts  and of course, thats the one everyone thinks is the crazy one. But thats all right. I can deal with that.

You seem like you now have a good platform to speak out against bullying. But you have been just as outspoken about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood. Is that a spokesperson role you want to take on?

At some level, yes, because thats why I wrote my book [the memoir Coreyography] and have mentioned it in certain interviews. But I think I have done what I need to do for now. Ive started the conversation. I know theres a least 100 people out there that have the same information that I do. So my pledge to them is: Ive done my part, now lets see about yours. So far I have not seen any follow-up on that. Im still the only guy thats been talking about it.

You never mention the names of any of these abusers in the industry. Why protect people whove committed such horrible acts?

Ive answered that question in the past. Me putting any names out there would just open a wild goose chase. It would not resolve anything. All it would do is put a target on my head, and it wouldnt save anybody. Any time anyone whos powerful is [accused of a crime] in the media, the first thing they do is attack the accuser and discredit them. You wanna see change? Stop asking Corey Feldman where the change should come from, and start talking to your local lawmakers and senators and people who can actually do something about it. Tell California to change the statute of limitations. They need to stop protecting the criminals, period.

I think its good you have started the conversation, and I hope it doesnt end with you.

Well, from what I hear, theres going to be some announcements later this week, or something like that. Im always hopeful that something will break through. You never know.

OMG #EVERYBODY I HOPE THIS STORY IS TRUE! AN END 2 A NIGHTMARE:Revealed! Superstar Actor Raped Child Star Corey Haim https://t.co/xfqkgJRuny  Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) September 19, 2016

Regarding platforms, my platform is my album and to talk about peace and love and spirituality  because those are the things that are the most important, and what the world needs more of is positive messages and positive energy. We need to learn to become more appreciative and respectful of our brothers and sisters on this earth. We need to become more and engaged with one another. I think if a lot of people could be more connected and more positive and more appreciative of our time here on this earth, if people could see that big picture instead of being so selfish, we could serve each other a lot better. Thats my platform.

Theres an old adage that any publicity is good publicity. People are talking about you more than ever after The Today Show. I know you were upset about the reaction, but, being positive, maybe theres a silver lining to all this.

Oh, absolutely! I did a second post, thats still up now, where I say thank you to all the haters! Because at the end of the day, youre talking about us, and youve made us the #1 trending topic on Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, all across the world, for four days straight. So yes, we thank you, because all of your hate has been enough to get even more peoples attention On Sunday, I was low when I made that [Facebook] video, but as the day went on, as I started seeing a half a million views, a million views, 2 million views, 5 million, 7 million, I was like, OK, now Im just counting the change, because every time you watch [The Today Show performance], its racking up my publishing for me as a songwriter. Eventually, I am going to get a check.

I heard you and your Angels were working on a reality show. Is that true?

We did kind of tinker with the idea of doing something like that about a year ago, but I decided not to pursue it because I thought it was going in the wrong direction. I took a step back and decided to focus on the album. At this point, I have no interest in doing that.

Some conspiracy theorists think this whole Today Show thing was a stunt, to get publicity. If so, it seemed to work

Oh, I wish I was that smart! Unfortunately, I didnt think that far in advance. Yes, our Twitter followers and record sales are going up, but that is a fluke. I couldnt have called that in a million years. I certainly didnt think that was going to happen on Sunday. If I had, I wouldnt have been crying!

Do you think The Today Show used you, maybe, because they knew your appearance would go viral?

No, I dont think so, because as a matter of fact, I dont think they did much promotion of the event at all! The only thing they were hyping up that day was Miley Cyrus. They were basically acting like we werent even going to be on. I dont think they were using us as any kind of hook at all. I think it was just the opposite, and they were very trepidatious that people would even care. They figured theyd throw this guy a bone and see if anybody notices. And then it took everybody by surprise.

You have gotten some high-profile support after the backlash.

Yeah, Pink, Kesha  who Ive never even met, but I thought it was really sweet that she came forward and put out such a beautiful public statement for me  my dear friend Sean Astin, Jerry OConnell, even people like Ryan Phillippe. Theres definitely been a support base from the industry itself, which is really nice to see Im very grateful that people still care and are still paying attention. Im like, Wow, if we were able to get this much of a reaction from one silly song, imagine what we could do with a world tour! We could really shake things up. Theres a lot of messages with this album, and I think once people are open to receive something new, theyre going to really get it and digest it and fall in love with it.

Some people who saw your performance noted the Michael Jackson influence. Do you agree?

Sure, if you want to look for that, youll see it. Yes, theres definitely an MJ influence in my music and in my dance and persona, because we were very, very close friends and he was always an influence of mine musically. But if you listen to the album, youll know that there are many different sides and many different shades to the music. Some of it is EDM, some of its hip-hop, some is hard rock, some is pop/R&B. Youll hear all sort of influences on there: McCartney, Billy Joel, some Aerosmith. Its pretty spread across the map.

I know you have made it clear that Michael Jackson was not one of the people in Hollywood who abused you. But your name and his are forever linked in the media and in pop culture. Does that ever bother you?

No, it doesnt bother me. It was a time in my life, and thats not something Im ashamed of at all. Im certainly proud to have known him. He was a great man and a great artist. Sure, he had his eccentricities and his weirdness  but hey, so do I, apparently! Were all a bunch of weirdos!

After what happened on The Today Show, and how much the reaction hurt you, will you be more guarded when it comes to putting yourself and your music out there?

Absolutely not. Im very proud of what we did and especially of what the Angels did. And by the way, to address the rumors: We were playing live. There was no lip-synching, and the girls were really playing their instruments.

OK. Any last thoughts?

Outside of whats going on with me, I just want to say that were in a really dark and scary time, and I really hope people are wise when they go to the polls in November. For Gods sake, dont vote for Donald Trump. Thats about as subliminally as I can put that. Weve got to survive  whats going to happen if this madman is in charge of us? Hes so irresponsible, and so unknowledgeable about whats going on in politics and the world. Its a very, very scary idea that hed be put in a position to control all of our futures.

It is interesting that with everything going on in the world and politics right now, you have been a top trending topic

Right? We have a presidential election going on, thank you. Lets get back to the election now, shall we?

Follow Lyndsey on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Amazon, Tumblr, Vine, Spotify
By Julie Ingwersen CHICAGO (Reuters) - A fungal disease called Diplodia ear rot is lurking in corn fields in portions of the U.S. Midwest, and crop experts and farmers fear lower yields and crop damage that could force growers to accept steep discounts on the cash market. Diplodia, which causes a whitish mold between kernels, is common in corn but its emergence this year appears to be more severe than normal, particularly in central Illinois and western Ohio following rainy summer weather, agronomists in those states said. The fungus has also emerged in parts of Missouri, Iowa and Indiana. Farmers trying to market grain infected with Diplodia face penalties that can top $2 per bushel for the most severe damage. The discounts loom at a time when Chicago Board of Trade spot corn futures are hovering near $3.40 a bushel after approaching seven-year lows near $3 last month, below break-even for some growers. "It's more than a nuisance. It's serious money," said John Werries, who farms about 3,800 acres, mostly corn, in Chapin, in west-central Illinois. Werries said he was docked 80 cents per bushel on a portion of his corn this year that had 25 percent damage. "This is my 52nd crop, and it's the worst I've ever seen," Werries said, adding that he had heard of loads of harvested corn with 80 percent damage elsewhere in his area. Angie Peltier, a University of Illinois Extension educator based in Monmouth, Illinois, heard reports of Diplodia damage ranging from 2 to 50 percent between Henry and Madison counties. Unlike some other corn molds, Diplodia is not poisonous. Grain handlers can manage it by blending damaged kernels with good-quality grain. Greg Luce, a crop specialist with the University of Missouri Extension, said Diplodia was more widespread than usual in his state but not as severe as Illinois, where rich soil allows more farmers plant continuous corn, instead of rotating fields with soybeans. A downside of planting corn-on-corn and reducing soil tillage is that the Diplodia fungus can survive the winter on corn residue. The next year's crop is susceptible to infection, particularly if heavy rains hit in the weeks just after silking. Peltier and others recommend that farmers who find the mold try to dry the harvested grain as quickly as possible. Moldy grain, Peltier noted, will not store well, especially as temperatures warm up in the spring. (Reporting by Julie Ingwersen; Editing by David Gregorio)
In the aftermath of fatal police shootings of black men in Oklahoma and North Carolina, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., emphasized the need to recognize, appreciate and even celebrate the sacrifices police officers make everyday while still acknowledging the gravity of these horrific incidents of police-involved shootings.

Booker, who was speaking in a Wednesday interview with Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga, said, Its not in any way incongruent to be a big supporter of our police,  but also talk about that we have a real problem in this country with issues of implicit racial bias, with challenges when it comes to equal application of the law.

He also slammed GOP presidential nominee Donald Trumps claim that African-American communities are absolutely in the worse shape that theyve ever been in before. Many said Trumps comment ignored Americas history of slavery, segregation and other forms of repression.

Donald Trump is counterfactual, ahistoric  in other words, he persistently lies and has no appreciation of history, Booker said. The way he talks, its a cacophony of painful resuscitation of our past where hes calling out to the lesser angels of our nature.

Trumps name came up again in the discussion when it turned to the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey and the subsequent arrest of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. After Rahami was apprehended, Trump said police forces know who a lot of these people are. They are afraid to do anything about it because they dont want to be accused of profiling.

Booker praised the incredible heroism of the police in capturing Rahami. But he maintained that the key to identifying would-be terrorists is not profiling but recognizing the signs of people who are being radicalized and radical behavior  and that exists both in the Muslim community or somebody who wants to go into a black church and shoot people.

The New Jersey lawmaker also spoke about his efforts, along with some of his Capitol Hill colleagues, to draw attention to voting rights and what he called the unconscionable efforts to suppress voting in some places in the country. He also criticized the massive disenfranchisement of denying felons convicted of nonviolent drug offenses the right to vote. Booker described some of their crimes as literally doing things the last two presidents have admitted to doing.

Booker mostly declined to comment on the upcoming trial of two former aides of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who were caught up in the Bridgegate scandal. Prosecutors recently said Christie knew about the infamous bridge lane closes at the time. But Booker, who sometimes is seen as close to Christie, said, Chris Christies not on trial here. I think we need to deal with it in that context, and if the authorities feel they need to bring charges against the governor, they should do that.
Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain take London!

The previously estranged mother-daughter pair appeared to be in good spirits earlier this week, attending several parties together -- along a few other famous faces!

WATCH: Frances Bean Cobain Covers Jimmy Eat World, Makes Mom Courtney Love Gush: 'Your Father Is Very Proud'

Love and Cobain hit up a Burberry-hosted party on Tuesday night in complementary ensembles. Cobain sported a gold-ornamented dress, for the evening, while Love stuck with a studded black dress. Both opted for suede ankle boots to complete their looks.

Getty Images

The two stayed close the entire night -- even posing together in a video for Burberry -- and Cobain later took a turn as DJ.

#momANDme #burberry @courtneylove @burberry A video posted by Frances Bean Cobain (@space_witch666) on Sep 20, 2016 at 1:42pm PDT

DJ Bean workin' the room #roxymusic A photo posted by Frances Bean Cobain (@space_witch666) on Sep 20, 2016 at 5:31pm PDT

RELATED: Frances Bean Cobain Spotted Out for First Time Since Filing for Divorce -- See the Pic!

But Tuesday night's affair wasn't the first time Love and Cobain had hit the town. They also stepped out on Sunday and Monday, mingling with the likes of Bella Hadid and Stella Maxwell:

 beautiful ladies being hooligans @bellahadid  A photo posted by Frances Bean Cobain (@space_witch666) on Sep 19, 2016 at 3:21pm PDT

FUCK IT @bellahadid @courtneylove A photo posted by Frances Bean Cobain (@space_witch666) on Sep 19, 2016 at 3:43pm PDT

fierce @stellamaxwell @jessejostark @bellahadid @space_witch666 these women are beautiful #luckymom @marcjacobs @themarcjacobs @thelovemagazine @mertalas #lifeisgood #london A photo posted by Courtney Love Cobain (@courtneylove) on Sep 20, 2016 at 3:34am PDT

WATCH: Frances Bean Cobain Opens Up About Kurt for the First Time: 'I Don't Really Like Nirvana That Much'

Cara Delevingne:

Good times @caradelevingne #handkisses A photo posted by Frances Bean Cobain (@space_witch666) on Sep 18, 2016 at 1:31pm PDT

And even Elton John and David Furnish:

Story continues

I mean ..... @eltonjohn A photo posted by Frances Bean Cobain (@space_witch666) on Sep 18, 2016 at 12:51pm PDT

what a magical evening with my incredible daughter @space_witch666 @eltonjohn @davidfurnish #london #uk #fashionweek #lifeisgood  #inspired #eltonjohn A photo posted by Courtney Love Cobain (@courtneylove) on Sep 18, 2016 at 2:46pm PDT

RELATED: Courtney Love's Emotional Message to Late Husband Kurt Cobain: 'What on Earth Were You Thinking?'

Cobain and her mother seem to be joined at the hip ever since she filed for divorce from husband Isaiah Silva earlier this year.

See more on their split in the video below.

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PRAGUE (Reuters) - A Prague court has released an exiled Russian underground artist sought by Moscow and allowed him to stay in the Czech Republic during extradition proceedings, a court spokeswoman said on Wednesday. Oleg Vorotnikov, a founder of the art collective Voina who fled Russia five years ago, might apply to Czech authorities for asylum to avoid facing what he says are political charges against him at home, his lawyer Radim Kozub said. The Russian artist was detained by police in Prague on Sunday after a random document check. Vorotnikov fled Russia in 2011 and is subject to an Interpol warrant due to his group's high-profile stunts that authorities have denounced as insulting and violent. He promised to stay in the Czech Republic during any extradition process, which could last several months, the court spokeswoman said. His group Voina (War) started in 2007 and gained attention in 2010 by painting a huge phallus on a drawbridge near offices of Russia's FSB security service in St Petersburg. It came under more pressure that year after members overturned police cars in a protest against abuse of power by the force. A Justice Ministry spokeswoman said Prague had not yet received an official extradition request, which must be filed within 40 days. Voina has long been under pressure in Russia for its activities and Vorotnikov could face charges of hooliganism, which carry stiff sentences. The group also has links to punk protest group Pussy Riot, whose member Nadya Tolokonnikova used to be active in Voina. (Reporting by Robert Muller; Writing by Jason Hovet; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
On 3-5 October 2017 Kyiv is going to host the Space and Future Forum to network international experts and youth, many of whom will also participate at the first CosmoHack in the world. Joinfo provides media coverage of the Forum, and some of its topics were already discussed ...
HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - Daimler's trucks chief expressed concern on Wednesday about a possible slowdown of demand in Europe for heavy-duty commercial vehicles given growing political uncertainty in the region.

The European market for heavy trucks expanded 17 percent to about 180,000 vehicles in the January-to-July period, Daimler Trucks Chief Executive Wolfgang Bernhard told reporters at the Hanover trucks show.

"There is concern that this (level of) growth cannot be sustained in the same way in the second half of the year," Bernhard said, noting customers are becoming more hesitant following Britain's decision to leave the European Union and the region's refugee crisis.

Separately, Bernhard said the manufacturer is done cutting jobs in Brazil to offset effects on truck demand caused by the slump in Latin America's biggest economy.

Daimler's truck division said in June it would cut a further 2,000 jobs in Brazil, raising the number of people laid off in the country to almost 5,000 since last year.

The executive stood by a forecast that operating profit at the division would decline 10 percent from 2015 results, saying truck deliveries this year will drop significantly below year-ago levels.

Bernhard kept to a target of selling 700,000 trucks by 2020.

(Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach; Writing by Andreas Cremer; Editing by Christoph Steitz)
Interchange, a noir fantasy thriller by Malaysias Dain Iskandar Said, will be the opening film of the Singapore International Film Festival.

The film premiered last month in Locarno and traveled to Toronto. The Singapore screening on Nov. 23 will be its premiere in Asia. The SGIFF runs until Dec. 4.

Interchange, combines Saids skill for genre story-telling with a distinct Southeast Asian flavor to produce a unique thriller that could not have originated from anywhere else, said Yuni Hadi, executive director of SGIFF. Choosing it as SGIFFs opening film shows our commitment to celebrating our own voices, highlighting the capability of our creative industry, and welcoming a wider audience to the promise of Southeast Asian cinema.

The story which is part detective thriller, part shamanistic fantasy, is inspired by real events a century ago when a Norwegian explorer traveled through central Borneo and took photographs of tribal women bathing in a river. The cast includes Malaysian TV personality Shaheizy Sam, (Songlap) Indonesias Nicholas Saputra, rising star Iedil Putra and Indonesian actress Prisia Nasution (Sang Penari.)

Interchange is the third feature by Said, who previously directed Bunohan: Return to Murder, which won eight awards at the 25th Malaysian Film Festival and was selected as Malaysias entry for Oscars.

Related stories

Q&A With Brillante Mendoza

'Fourth Direction' Wins Top Prize at Singapore Festival

Singapore Film Festival Opens With Red Carpet Pageant
Rob Glaser is one of the leading left-of-center campaign donors in America. With a fortune gained as an early employee at Microsoft and then as founder of RealNetworks, Glaser has backed causes including the Democracy Alliance and the early political career of Barack Obama. In this current cycle, Glaser is funding a new kind of political effort: a websitePutinTrump.orgintended to highlight the connections between the Republican presidential nominee and Russias authoritarian president. PutinTrump.org will launch on September 21.

Glaser and I overlapped at Yale University in the early 1980s. I interviewed him by email about his latest political venture.

David Frum: Foreign governments, friendly and unfriendly, often try to influence U.S. politics and elections. Many European leaders made no secret of their dislike of George W. Bush. Israel lobbies Congress, as do the Arab allies. China offers sweet deals to retiring officials. Whats different about the Trump-Putin relationship?

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Rob Glaser: Two fundamental differences, and perhaps a third. The first is that Russia is directly interfering in the U.S. election through a combination of espionage and then leaking the results of that espionage in order to discredit one of the two major presidential candidates. This never happened even during the Cold War. Its a dangerous escalation that threatens the integrity of the U.S. electoral process.

The second is Trump explicitly encouraging Russia to commit further espionage against Clinton. This is also unprecedented. Indeed, its unfathomable to me that the public hasnt universally recognized that this is disqualifying behavior by Trump that borders on treason.

The third possible way this years activities are unprecedented is related to Trumps deep financial ties to Russia and to politically well-connected Russian oligarchs. There is some evidence emerging about these links and our team at PutinTrump.org is trying to ferret out more. What Id say for now is with Trump, every time theres been smoke, theres also been fire.

Story continues

Frum: Mitt Romney sounded the alarm about Putin four years ago. President Obama mocked him then: The 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back. The Cold Wars been over for 20 years. The New York Times editorialized that Romneys comments about the strategic threat from Russia revealed either shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics. Hillary Clinton, still secretary of state, described Romneys comments as dated and looking backwards.

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You are a long-standing supporter of progressive political causes. Whats your answer to those Republicans who might suspect something opportunistic in this sudden alarm about Russia on the Democratic side?

Glaser: I dont think its sudden alarm, certainly not on my part or on President Obamas part. For instance heres a story from over 2 1/2 year ago where President Obama very directly condemns Putins actions in Ukraine. And heres another from a year ago at last years UN Summit when President Obama criticizes Putin for his actions in both Syria and Ukraine.

I do think its fair to say two things:

A) Based on the quotes you surfaced, in 2012 Romney did a better job of predicting Putins turn towards more aggressive behavior than President Obama did in 2012.

B) In the past three or four years, especially in Ukraine and Syria, Putin has been more aggressive and adversarial than he or any Russian leader before him has been in the 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. How to confront and constrain Putins bellicosity and expansionismwhile hopefully preventing the rise of a full-on second Cold Waris one of the hardest and most important foreign policy challenges of our day. Praising Putin and saying that hes a great leaderas Trump has consistently done and continues to dois exactly the opposite of what we need our next president to do.

The damage that could, and I fear would, be done if Trump were elected president would be profound.

Frum: Can you be specific about how your new group perceives the Trump-Putin relationship? How far and deep does it go, in your opinionand with what consequences?

Glaser: Theres frankly a lot we dont know about the relationship between Putin and Trump, especially the financial ties between Trumps business empire and Russia writ largeboth the Russian government itself, and Russian oligarchs who are close to Putin. Were hoping that PutinTrump.org will encourage more reporting and investigation into the troubling links we already do know about. For instance we have a feedback section where people can report scoopsanonymously if they wantand well do our best with our small but talented staff to track them down as well as to pass along anything we learn to other respected journalists.

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Trump isnt a fringe candidate like Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage, hes the nominee of one of the two major parties in the U.S., the most powerful country on earth. The damage that could, and I fear would, be done if Trump were elected president would be profound.

Because were in such uncharted waters its hard to predict exactly what would happen in a Putin-Trump world. Might Putin engage in a full-on invasion of Ukraine thinking he has Trumps blessing or at least acquiescence? Might Putin feel emboldened by his ability to subvert U.S. democracy through cyberhacks that he will go all in on doing so throughout Central Europe until he has re-created the hegemony of the Soviet era?

And back in the U.S., what will Trumps admiration for Putin mean for Trumps willingness to subvert democracy to get his way and to pad his own pockets? Were already seeing an unprecedented lack of transparency by Trumpfor instance him not releasing his tax returns. I think theres a real risk of a Trump presidency turning into a full-on kleptocracy.

Frum: So tell us more about the new project. What exactly are you planning to do? Do you have wider ambitions than collecting and stockpiling information?

Glaser: We have three big goals for PutinTrump.org.

The first is to be the worlds definitive place to find rigorous reporting, lucid analysis, and thoughtful opinions on the dangerous and unprecedented connections between the head of Russia and a major-party presidential nominee.

The second is to raise the awareness of this massive problem to make it one of the defining issues of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The third is that by raising the issue in a thoughtful and rigorous way, and by raising the profile of the issues surrounding the Trump-Putin nexus, we want to persuade as many people as possibleincluding many who might otherwise seriously consider voting for himthat Donald Trumps deep ties with and affinity for Vladimir Putin disqualify Trump from being President of the United States.

How we achieve these three goals may evolve over time (although we recognize that time is short with the election less than 50 days away). For instance, were hoping that PutinTrump.org will encourage more reporting and investigation into the troubling links we already do know about as well as potentially raising new issues.

As far as I can tell, this kind of stuff has never happened before, not even close.

Frum: The conventional opinion holds that foreign policy make relatively little impact on American voters, except in times of outright war. What impact do you hope for from this effort?

Glaser: As you point out, under normal circumstances foreign policy rarely determines elections. But the Putin-Trump situation is so highly abnormal that Im not sure that this rule of thumb applies. Whats the last time a major U.S. presidential candidate ever spoke lavishly about one of our adversaries and urged that adversary to commit burglary against his opponent? Whats the last time that adversary overtly interfered with our electoral system by stealing information and then using that information to overtly try to discredit one of our two major party nominees?

As far as I can tell, this kind of stuff has never happened before, not even close. So were not talking about the normal range of foreign policy disagreementswere talking about a leading foreign power (Russia) trying to disrupt our electoral process, and the potential beneficiary of that disruption (Trump) praising and egging on that adversary. This is a direct threat to the integrity of our electoral system and to our national sovereignty.

If we are able to help get people the facts and raise the profile of the Putin-Trump story, I think theres a good chance we can change the course of this election.

Frum: How seriously do you take the possibility that Trump might actually win? What will happen to this project if he does? Do Trumps periodic threats to wield libel laws against critics concern you?

Glaser: I take the possibility of Trump winning very seriously. I range between thinking its 50-50 and that the odds are slightly in Hillarys favor. Even right after the conventions, when the polls showed Hillary up by several points, I thought it was at best 60-40 for her (if you want to confirm this, feel free check my public Facebook feed). This is so for two reasons:

First, were dealing with two historically unpopular major party nomineesaccording to RCPs average, Hillarys favorability rating is net -13 and Trumps is net -18.8. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Second, in the post-war period its quite rare for a party to get the White House for a third term in a row. In the six instances where it could have happened over the past 70 years, its only happened once (1988). So again, as an empirical matter theres a strong headwind against any Democrat winning a third term in 2016.

PutinTrump.org is designed to run through Election Day. Weve funded and staffed it to a great job between now and then. In the tragic event that our effort were to fail and Trump were to get elected anyway, wed have to figure out where wed go from there.

In terms of possible retribution, sure Ive thought about it. But my parents raised me to fight for what I believe is right and just, rather than to avoid doing so out of fear of retribution. Moreover, now that I have kids of my own, the best way I can pass this value on to them is to lead by example.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Chinese company Twinkle Film Productions has acquired the remake rights of Danish animation film Ronal The Barbarian.

Shanghai-based Twinkle, headed by Sheng Deng (Breakup Buddies) plans a live action version for Chinese audiences.

Ronal was completed in 2011 and directed by Kresten Vestbjerg Andersen, Thorbjoern Christoffersen and Philip Einstein Lipski.

It tells the tale of a weak and skinny barbarian who rises to the occasion when his village comes under attack.

The film was produced by Trine Heidegaard of Selskabet af 28. Maj 2013 (previously Einstein Film,) with international sales to more than 30 countries handled by Denmarks LevelK.

Thats totally awesome. I really hope they will manage to get it financed, I would love a Chinese live action take on our Ronal, Heidegaard told Variety.

We are just now starting the development of the film. It is a good, hero story but in a very funny way, Sheng told Variety. Chinese audiences would not go for it if it were serious.

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Evan McMullin, the independent candidate for president, is running a campaign, but it isnt about capturing the White House in 2016. Rather, McMullins quixotic run is about trying to preserve a breed of Republican ideology that he and many other Never Trump-ers say has been waylaid by the GOP nominees bombastic and scattershot rhetoric, especially on foreign policy and national security.

[Donald] Trump is weakening us, and is doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, McMullin told Foreign Policy, referring to the Republican candidates verbal attacks on NATO, refusal to condemn Russias annexation of Crimea, and repeated adulation of the Russian president.

McMullin also criticized Trumps calls to retrench U.S. overseas commitments and eschew long-standing U.S. policies. For example, Trump has called for allies to financially underwrite U.S. military deployments and has encouraged nuclear proliferation by U.S. allies as a way to reduce Washingtons costly exposure to potential hotspots.

Theres a wave of isolationism that has blown over the country in response to Iraq, [but] its a huge mistake for us to withdraw from the world, McMullin said.

Washington must continuously work with allies to reaffirm the American commitment, backed up by unique American military capabilities, he said. Todays Republican party no longer stands for what Im standing for: we have a leadership role to play in the world.

McMullin is starting to make that case publicly, though the campaign is winding down. During his first national security policy speech at Georgetown University Tuesday, McMullin heaped criticism on both major party candidates, but saved his harshest barbs for Trump.

Trump does not understand what it means to be an exceptional nation, he said, which was founded on the idea that all men are created equal. His affection for the authoritarian, the murderous dictator, and the racist should alone disqualify him.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Story continues

His longshot campaign likely wont make much difference at the ballot box this year: Hes barely registering in polls, even as other small-party candidates, such as Greens and Libertarians, are attracting some support. He entered the race too late to be on the ballot in all states, and his strongest showing has been in his home state of Utah, where hes pulling 9 percent.

But the campaign is meant to help shape a future Republican Party, not save this one.

Im not here to protect the Republican party, he insisted. I havent completely given up on the Republican party, but I dont have a lot of confidence that the Republicans are going to be able to make the changes necessary for the party to exist in its present form.

Photo Credit: George Frey/Getty Images
Copenhagen (AFP) - After a lacklustre recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, Denmark's central bank has warned that the labour market faces a squeeze as unemployment falls, the population ages and young people shun vocational jobs.

At Technical Education Copenhagen, traineeships for another 20 to 30 lorry drivers could probably have been found if only people were interested in them, according to Anders Wendelboe, a head of education at the vocational training college.

In a country where work-life balance is highly valued, a wrongful perception that the job came with irregular working hours was putting some people off, he speculated.

"Young people today would like to have leisure time, they would like to have a family," he said.

A lack of skilled workers was also threatening growth at Teccon Form, a company in the western town of Holstebro making tools for injection moulding, employing around 20 people.

"There has probably been too much focus on having a university education," chief executive Michael Nederby lamented.

"There has been a slightly higher status around that, and we are fighting against that," he said, adding that he had been forced to raise salaries to compete with other employers.

- Central bank warning -

Denmark's central bank last week warned that the country was technically at full employment and that the economy could be hit if the country did not find ways of growing its labour force.

"Unemployment has now reached its 'structural level' ... There are, so to speak, no labour reserves among the unemployed," it said in a quarterly report.

"There are already signs of pressures in the labour market. The clearest indications are reporting of labour shortages in both the construction and manufacturing sectors," it added.

Seasonally adjusted unemployment stood at 4.2 percent in July, according to data from Statistics Denmark based on the number of people on unemployment benefits and in labour market activation programmes.

Story continues

The number rises to 6.2 percent under the so called ILO (International Labour Organization) measure, which is used to compare unemployment in different countries.

Denmark was badly hit by a burst property bubble during the 2008 financial crisis and growth has lagged the economies of neighbouring Sweden and Germany.

The country's central bank believes economic output will edge up 0.9 percent this year and 1.5 percent in 2017.

- No quick fix -

"The problem is the greatest among vocationally trained labour with technical skills, such as electricians, industry technicians and mechanics," said Steen Nielsen, head of labour market policy at the Confederation of Danish Industry.

A previous reform raising the age of retirement, as well as using foreign labour -- mostly from other EU countries -- would help plug the skills gap in the short term, he added.

Still, as Denmark's population ages, that is unlikely to be enough.

"A shift is taking place in the labour market," said Stine Pilegaard Jespersen, the head of labour market and education policy at the Confederation of Danish Enterprise.

"More elderly are leaving the labour market ... and the young who are coming in are much less likely to have a vocational education than those who are leaving," she added.

Two of the country's top markets for foreign labour, Germany and Poland, also have ageing populations and will also see their workforce shrink over the coming decades, she noted.

Denmark received 21,000 asylum seekers last year, and many Danes worry that the new arrivals -- like previous generations of refugees -- will struggle to find work, putting pressure on the Scandinavian country's welfare state.

While some professions facing labour shortages, such as bakers and butchers, could offer opportunities, refugees were unlikely to play a major part in fixing the problem, Jespersen said.

A survey published by Denmark's integration ministry in May showed that 55 percent of newly arrived refugees had only completed primary school, while eight percent had no education whatsoever.

"What we typically see with refugees is that they don't have very strong skills. Many of them are very young and don't have a lot of schooling, and they also don't have a lot of work experience," said Nielsen.

"On top of that there is a big language barrier," he added.
Its ALIVE!!!!!!

By which we mean your home. The walls, the counters and even the showerhead teem with fungi, yeast, bacteria and other single-celled microorganisms  or what scientists call, collectively, microbes. Never mind your OCD cleaning: Your very skin sloughs off millions of microbes an hour as you wander, innocently, from room to room. This might sound gross, but some microbes are very, very good for you.

A growing community of scientists is investigating the microbial ecosystems, or microbiomes, that dwell in homes, offices, hospitals and other man-made structures. Theyve started by cataloging these microbes to understand how different aspects of building design, from lighting to ventilation, can influence the microbiome. Some researchers are unraveling possible links to disease. That might mean designing buildings to promote healthy microbiomes  or even seeding them with living microbes. One day, architects might consider these organisms as much a part of the building blueprint as construction materials and HVAC systems.

Thanks largely to next-generation DNA sequencing, which allows researchers to identify microbes more quickly and cheaply than ever before, interest in the field has grown at a staggering pace. A Google Scholar search of microbiome and built environment turns up about a dozen papers published in 2010. Since then, that number has swelled to more than 600. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundations Microbiology of the Built Environment Program has awarded more than $43 million in research grants since 2004. And the EPA recently charged the National Academy of Sciences with conducting a study on indoor microbiology.

We know nothing about the ecology of the microbes in buildings  despite spending an estimated 90 percent of our lives indoors.

Its all part of the evidence-based design movement, which uses research to inform design that promotes health and well-being. Now, biologists and building scientists wonder whether they should also consider the recent groundswell of microbiome research  including, at times, embracing microbes. Its this paradigm shift [from the notion] that all the microbes in the building are bad and sealing them off, says Gwynne Mhuireach, a graduate research fellow at the University of Oregons Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory. The shift stems partly from studies suggesting that exposure to microbes early in life helps train the immune system, lowering allergy risk, and that disturbances in the gut microbiome could be linked to asthma, depression and other health problems. More broadly, understanding the microbiology of the built environment could help address mounting concerns about antibiotic resistance and help us design healthier cities for growing urban populations.

Story continues

Gettyimages 593392050

Were not the only ones who live here.

Source Pierre Ogeron/Getty

Many researchers have begun simply with documentation. We know nothing about the ecology of the microbes in buildings, says Jonathan Eisen, principal investigator of the Built Environment Network (microBEnet)  even though Americans spend about 90 percent of their lives indoors. So far, studies have found that microbiomes can vary widely even within a building. University of Oregon researchers reported in PLOS ONE that human traffic, building arrangement, space type and ventilation play a major role in shaping the microbiomes in an on-campus building. The microbiomes of restrooms differed drastically from those in other rooms. Spaces ventilated with windows contained microbiomes that resembled those found outdoors, while HVAC-ventilated spaces looked more like those in the human gut and saliva. Researchers have begun to examine how sunlight affects the microbial communities on dust particles. (Most glass in buildings excludes the majority of UV light.)

Some are already exploring health implications. Christopher Lowrys lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, for instance, is investigating the effects of microbes on mental health. Inflammation and urban living have surfaced as major risk factors for psychiatric disorders  could indoor microbes trigger the inflammation associated with mental illness? To find out, Lowry plans to measure stress outcomes of mice after exposing them to a type of soil bacteria that hes shown to have antidepressant-like effects.

Meanwhile, Jordan Peccia of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science led a study comparing fungal and bacterial communities in dust from the homes of children with allergic or nonallergic asthma. Among those with allergic asthma, the amount of fungi in the dust didnt matter as much as the dusts composition  the more allergenic species in the dust, the more severe their asthma. But among kids with nonallergic asthma, the more fungi  regardless of the type  the worse their symptoms. People often track in fungi from their shoes, Peccia says. Some flooring materials might be more likely to waft microbes into the air, but we dont have a great handle on what they are. It seems like carpeting is the worst, and hard flooring is better.

Gettyimages 593567535

Each building, each floor, each room houses a different microbiome.

Source Kiszon Pascal/Getty

Studies have hinted that the microbiomes in the homes of people with asthma might even play a role in the diseases development. In 2013, University of California, San Francisco researchers found that mice exposed to dust from a household with a dog had reduced asthma-like symptoms when exposed to cockroach and egg-protein allergens. In a similar study published in The New England Journal of Medicine this August, another team compared dust in Amish and Hutterite homes. Despite their common genetic origins, Amish children have a lower risk of allergies. Sure enough, mice exposed to dust from Amish households were protected from asthma-like symptoms, while dust from Hutterite homes triggered them  possibly because the Amish live in closer proximity to their livestock, resulting in dust with a richer array of microbes.

The findings hint at an alluring prospect, that we might be able to design buildings that foster healthy microbiomes, or even prevent disease. An alternative approach would involve adding microbes directly to buildings. (Eisen says that several startups have already contacted him about the possibility.) But scientists have many more questions to answer before we begin pursuing proposed solutions. The problem is, we still dont know what the target is, says Noah Fierer, a biologist at CU Boulder. We dont know what a good microbial community is.

For now, scientists continue to forge ahead with basic research. Eisen, for instance, is making the foray into other built environments, including zoos, aquariums  and even the International Space Station. Its an exciting time, Fierer says.

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Almost 48 hours after a deadly attack on an aid convoy in Syria that killed about 20 civilians, Russia still furiously denies that its jets or Syrian regime planes were responsible.

Here is what we know about Monday's attack that forced the United Nations to suspend its aid deliveries inside the war-torn country:

- What happened? -

Trucks carrying food and medical equipment from the United Nations and other agencies were unloading aid into a warehouse in Orum al-Kubra, a town in Aleppo province.

Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA) in Geneva, said: "Every single partner or party to the conflict" was informed in advance about the delivery.

According to the Red Cross, the first report that the trucks and warehouse had been hit came at 8:15 pm (1715 GMT), several hours after the Syrian army had declared an end to a week-long partial ceasefire.

It said "around 20 civilians" had been killed, among them volunteers, as well as Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) staffer Omar Barakat.

Pictures of the convoy published on Twitter by SARC showed several of the trucks draped with blue flags from UNICEF, the UN children's agency.

The raids destroyed at least 18 of the 31 vehicles, the warehouse and much of the aid, the Red Cross said.

The trucks were carrying sanitation and nutritional supplies for 50,000 people, and nine tonnes of medical aid, including antibiotics and surgical materials, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

- Who was responsible? -

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor group, reported Monday night that an air strike had hit the trucks, with a Red Cross spokesman also referring to an air strike.

Although not confirmed, it meant that either Russian or Syrian aircraft were strongly suspected of being responsible as neither opposition groups nor jihadist groups have air power.

Speaking to AFP, an unnamed US official said Washington believed a Russian plane was responsible, saying two Russian SU-24 warplanes had been operating in the area.

Story continues

"We have a very clear picture of what is going on in the skies over Syria," the official said.

"The reported strike occurred when a Russian plane was directly overhead."

But both Russia and Syria have denied responsibility for the attack, with Moscow furious at the "unsubstantiated, hasty accusations" from the United States.

The Russian military has instead appeared to cast doubt on whether an attack took place, saying footage from activists at the scene showed damage to the vehicles that did not appear to be caused by an air strike or other munitions.

Russia said its drones had tracked the convoy until it successfully delivered its load, hours before the attack, saying a "fire" that destroyed the trucks which "strangely" coincided with a jihadist attack in the area.

But Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said it was impossible for Moscow to draw any conclusions from amateur video of the incident and only an investigation "on the ground" could determine what destroyed the convoy.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at the United Nations, said Russia's claims were "contradicted by public information."

Moscow later released drone footage it said showed a vehicle towing a mortar next to the aid convoy, and the Russian military has also claimed a US-led coalition Predator drone was above the area of the convoy attack -- a claim the Pentagon quickly denied.

Russia's military did announce its planes had destroyed 16 rebel vehicles elsewhere around Aleppo as it helped Syrian forces beat back a jihadist attack on Monday evening.

On Tuesday, the Red Cross issued a statement with slightly-altered language which referred to an "attack" on the convoy, and not specifically an air strike.

The main Syrian opposition group said Tuesday it was certain that either Syrian or Russian planes were responsible.

"No one else has aircraft in that area," said leader Riad Hijab in New York.

Hijab said a member of his High Negotiations Committee (HNC) who was escorting the convoy, had provided him with photographs of the attack that he described as "very precise."

International Committee of the Red Cross head Peter Maurer said an investigation was needed into a "flagrant violation of international humanitarian law."

- What is the fallout? -

Laerke said the UN had suspended convoy movements for security reasons, adding that future aid deliveries would depend on a "further assessment of the security situation."

But the Red Cross has not paused deliveries, spokesman Benoit Carpentier told AFP.

Stalled aid deliveries have wreaked havoc across Syria, with the UN, the Red Cross and others repeatedly demanding unhindered access to civilians in desperate need of life-saving supplies.

Even before the strikes, some 40 UN trucks carrying relief supplies destined for rebel-held east Aleppo had remained stuck in a customs zone between the Turkish and Syrian borders since early last week.
According to founder Elliot Grove, the Raindance festivals international submissions have more than doubled in the last year, and its a reflection of this new seam of riches that this years opener, Manu Riches Problemski Hotel, is a very cosmopolitan beast, being a Belgium film shot in English, Russian and Arabic. Says Grove, Its a very gritty look at the problems that an immigrant or a refugee from the Deep South or the Deep East is facing in trying to get themselves to Britain and safer soil. Its very fitting, with all the Brexit stuff and the immigrant crisis going on, and to do that in a non-linear narrative style, with occasional touches of laugh-out-loud humour, is the reason it was selected.

Inspired by the 2003 novel of the same name by controversial Belgian novelist Dimitri Verhulst, Problemski Hotel is the story of Bipul (Tarek Halaby), an immigrant who is happy to stay where he is, in an asylum centre in Brussels, until his pregnant girlfriend Lidia (Evgenia Brendes) announces that she wants to move on, ideally to London. Better known as a documentary maker  his 2012 film Snake Dance told the story of the atomic bomb  Riche worked with British writer Steve Hawes to create a surreal and affecting story about people in transit and the issues of bureaucracy, roots and identity that affect us all.

When did you first decide to make Problemski Hotel?

I read Dimitri Verhulsts novel quite a few years ago, and I started with the project five years ago, more or less. The point was, I felt that [coverage of] the whole issue of migration and the asylum-seeking problem was so biased towards misery tales. Im not saying mine is not a misery tale, but I wanted to make something that would go beyond that, and I found that in the novel. Its not that I completely adapted the novel, but I felt the tone and the atmosphere would be a good starting point for a film.

How faithful is it to the novel?

Its a loose adaptation, because the novel is really several tableaux. Its not a straightforward story, and we had to somehow compose a story out of that. There are some lines that we took right away, but other things were not in the novel. Its not a classic A to B story, its something that slowly grows, just by observing the different characters.

Story continues

How did it come together?

Since Im a documentary maker, it was a very long process  I was really looking for the right people and not only the right actors. My leading actor is a dancer who is from Palestine. He moved to Durban and finally ended up in Chicago, so he already had experience of migration himself. And a lot of the actors did too. The lead actress is more or less telling her own story. So what we did is find the right person  sometimes they were actors, sometimes not  and then we adapted the screenplay for the people that we found. So there was a lot of rewriting. In the novel, the character Mahsun is coming from Pakistan, but the actor we found comes from Kurdistan, so we adapted all these things.

Did you cast many non-professionals? Did your documentary background encourage you to be bold about that?

I think so. I mean, we had a casting director with a theatre background, and she worked a lot with actors from everywhere in Europe. But that was a good starting point. She worked with Palestinians and Syrians, so I met these people and finally made a choice. After a long while, actually.

Was there much improvisation?

Constantly! But on the other the hand it was quite strict. The script was written with Steve Hawes, who is British, and we worked for a long time on it. As a director, I never plan the way Im going to shoot. So in the morning we would start with some scenes, and then we would try different things. Im more of an observer than a director, and I was always interested in seeing what actors and non-actors are capable of. And that was a wonderful process.

Its also quite a funny film. How did you approach that?

Its a tragically humorous film. The whole point of it, and the novel also, is that theres a very bleak humour in it, a very harsh one. Its not about jokes  the tragedy of humanity is that it is very comical, and that is what we tried to show. What I hear from audiences is that when they come out of the cinema, they dont know if they want to cry or laugh. Thats the feeling we wanted to achieve. Theres a lot of humour, but its real humour, not comedy.

Obviously this story is unfolding all the time. Did you have to switch off from the news, or did you incorporate things as they were happening?

Not really. We shot the film three years, and the novel was written in 2001. Already in the novel you had all these problems  they were not new. That was also the reason why I started to make the film, not because of the migration crisis in Europe nowadays. These things were happening long before the media knew about the people that were drowning in the sea. The stories in the news were not the inspiration. Its important to wait a little bit, because the media is jumping on everything, and there is no real reflection on what is actually happening. Im not saying that we dont have to make films about it, we have to make intelligent films about it, and I think its worth waiting.

Did you find it easier to make a fiction film than a documentary?

The reason I didnt make a documentary about this subject is because I could only make a dramatic fiction about it. But it is very documentary in a way  it is a documentary fiction, even though it is a completely scripted story. But I always have two edges in my film, in that sense.

How did you feel about being selected for Raindance?

That was a big surprise! We had some good festivals  Rotterdam and others  and we were surprised to be the opening film, a very nice surprise. As far as Im concerned, a very good choice! On the other, its not an easy film to start a festival with. Thats quite brave of the organisation.

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Netflix has been a dream for many consumers and an absolute nightmare for cable companies. Since the arrival of Netflixs streaming service, cable companies have found their subscribers declining, their business model threatened, and the rising tide of cord-cutters forcing the cost of bundles down. Its why Comcast is getting into selling you mobile plans, and why DirecTV is about to roll out DirecTV Now, their would-be Netflix killer.

DirecTV Now is fairly similar to other services that stream cable over the internet, like Sling or PlayStation Vue. The main lure for many people will be the set of channels, with over 100 promised, and the aggressive price points being offered. Since DirecTV is owned by AT&T, there will also be an aggressive push for AT&T customers to tag DirecTV Now onto their various service plans, especially as streaming TV from it wont ding any AT&T data plan. After all, AT&Ts unlimited data plan requires a subscription to DirecTV in the first place.

The main question is whether this will appeal to cord-cutters. While Sling and PlayStation Vue have undeniably had splashy debuts, they havent caught on as some had hoped. Sling, for example, reportedly has a limit of two million subscribers from its corporate parent Dish, and while its growing, its current 600,000 subscribers are utterly dwarfed by Netflixs 47 million American subscribers. Netflix is growing faster than Sling as well.

Part of this is cost, as Sling is $20 a month, almost twice what Netflix charges for a premium plan, and AT&T is hinting they might get the cost down to Netflix prices. But another factor is likely convenience. One of the downsides of live TV, increasingly, is that viewers seem to prefer watching TV at their convenience, and not being able to stream what shows they want when they want is a major downside these services are struggling to overcome. Unless AT&T can offer some robust video-on-demand offerings, DirecTV Now might not be able to even get Netflixs attention, let alone compete.

(via CNET)
By Ethan Lou TORONTO (Reuters) - The number of disciplinary cases in Canada's main spy agency nearly quadrupled over six years to reach 26 in fiscal 2015, before dropping to 13 the following year, government data showed. Just fewer than half of the incidents in the year ended on March 31, 2015, appeared to involve security issues, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service data that Reuters obtained under access-to-information laws. The data showed just seven disciplinary cases in fiscal 2009. Canada's ruling Liberals ran on an election platform last year to increase oversight of the country's spy agencies and have said they plan to set up a parliamentary committee to do this. Reuters obtained summaries of the 63 CSIS disciplinary cases in the last three of the government's fiscal years. The files were redacted to the extent that some details were unclear or unavailable. For fiscal 2015, at least 12 cases clearly involved security matters. For the three years as a whole, there were 20. They include removing classified material from premises, bringing home "protected and secret" documents and sending classified information through "unsecure email." Another 20 cases involved human-resources issues, such as taking too many breaks, misuse of agency vehicles and taking too many unauthorized sick leaves. The remaining case summaries were withheld or had nearly all of the information removed. The CSIS invoked laws that allow withholding of information if releasing it would be "injurious" to international affairs, national defense or prevention of "hostile activities." A CSIS spokeswoman declined to provide more details on the cases, citing "national security and privacy," and said only that the agency had "strict policies" and "strict disciplinary measures." "I can assure you that these breaches of policy did not have an operational impact," she said. The CSIS did not address follow-up questions on the matter. Penalties in the incidents included oral reprimands for losing a laptop and "accidentally" removing classified material. In a more serious case, an employee was suspended for 20 days in a matter labeled only "misuse of computer systems - breach of security." CSIS also maintains a separate "harassment log" that details matters involving person-to-person interactions. The records showed at least four to six such cases annually over the last three years. (Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
Donald Trump is a racist, abusive coward who would permanently damage the fabric of our society if he became President, says an Avengers-heavy video dropped today by a new Joss Whedon-backed Super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton.

Do we really wanna give nuclear weapons to a man whose signature move is firing things? adds the Whedon-penned spot (check it out above) starring Marvel alums Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson Don Cheadle, Clark Gregg and Mark Ruffalo. The West Wing and Grace & Frankies Martin Sheen, Julianne Moore, Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, Stanley Tucci, James Franco, Rosie Perez, Tarran Killam, Bradley Whitford, Greys Anatomys Jesse Williams, Fresh Off The Boats Randal Park and Keegan-Michael Key are also in the Important spot too. We cannot pretend both sides are equally unfavorable, the former fictional U.S. President Jed Bartlet says in the clearly pro-Clinton spot, which never actually mentions either candidate by name.

joss-whedon-mark-ruffalo

Besides clearly slamming the GOP candidate and past Celebrity Apprentice host, the 3-minute get-out-the-vote plea from Whedons Save The Day group promises that Ruffalo will appear naked in his next movie if you mark your ballot on Election Day.

Having put $1 million behind getting the former Secretary of State back into the White House, Whedon plans on making a series of videos encouraging voter registration and participation leading up to November 8. A longtime backer of the Democrats who called out Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for President, the Avengers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer chief has used various platforms over the years to get his POV across. He announced this latest effort with a return to social media this morning:

Hey! Did I miss anything? Lol jk the world is on fire heres a thing I made https://t.co/g1SE45Rkrv  Joss Whedon (@joss) September 21, 2016

Whedons annual solo appearance at Comic-Com has seen Whedon proclaim America was heading to becoming Tsarist Russia and a country of serfs, as he said in 2013. This year, the blockbuster superhero movie director told the crowd in San Diego that the dialogue between audiences and studios is defaulting and they keep finding a lower common denominator.

Story continues

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRp1CK_X_Yw&w=970&h=546]

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Donald Trump topped Hillary Clinton in a slew of Fox News battleground-state polls released Wednesday, carrying a lead over his Democratic opponent in Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The polls were conducted in the three states, which are widely considered to be crucial to a Trump victory, from Sunday until Tuesday evening.

In Nevada, Trump held a 3-point lead over Clinton among likely voters in a three-way race that included Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee.

The Republican presidential nominee captured 43% of support in the Silver State, compared with Clinton's 40% and Johnson's 8%. The remaining 4% of Nevada voters were undecided.

In North Carolina, Trump was up by 5 points, leading Clinton by 45% to 40%. Johnson carried 6% of support in the Tar Heel State.

And in Ohio, Trump also found favorable results. The real-estate tycoon had a 5-point lead over Clinton, earning 42% of support compared with her 37% in a four-way poll that included Johnson and Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee.

Each of the three Fox News polls had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Those surveys came the same day other polling firms released results from New Hampshire and Wisconsin that found less favorable results for the real-estate magnate.

In the Granite State, Clinton edged out Trump 47% to 38% among registered voters, according to a Monmouth University poll. It had a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points.

Clinton had less of a lead, however, in Wisconsin, a state that has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1984. Marquette Law School's Wednesday poll found she was beating Trump by only 5 points, 43% to 38%, among surveyed registered voters. That poll had a margin of error of 4.8 percentage points.

Nationwide, Clinton held a significant lead over Trump in a Wednesday poll from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, having a 6-point advantage over him in a four-way race.

Story continues

The polls come with only days to go until the first presidential debate. Clinton and Trump are set to square off Monday at Hofstra University in New York.

NOW WATCH: DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: 'Donald Trump is literally making a profit off of his campaign'





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Hillary Clinton is accusing Donald Trump of giving "aid and comfort" to Islamic terrorists, declaring his anti-Muslim rhetoric helps the Islamic State group and other militants recruit new fighters. Trump is insisting the U.S. should "use whatever lawful methods are available" to get information from the Afghan immigrant arrested in this weekend's bombings.

As Trump supporters at a packed rally in Estero, Florida, shouted "Hang him!" the Republican presidential candidate mocked the fact that Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen originally from Afghanistan, would receive quality medical care and legal representation.

"We must deliver a just and very harsh punishment to these people," he said. "These are enemies, these are combatants and we have to be tough, we have to be strong."

Both candidates moved swiftly to capitalize on investigations into a weekend of violent attacks - bombings in New York and New Jersey and stabbings at a Minnesota mall - casting themselves as most qualified to combat terrorism at home and abroad.

Clinton touted her national security credentials at a hastily arranged news conference outside her campaign plane, accusing Trump of using the incidents to make "some kind of demagogic point."

Clinton and her team see her experience and what they say is her steady judgment as key selling points for her candidacy. On the campaign trail, she frequently invokes her role in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, describing to voters the tense atmosphere in the White House alongside President Barack Obama at that moment.

But while much of the foreign policy establishment has rallied around Clinton, Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, promises to close U.S. borders, and vows to aggressively profile potential terrorists have fueled his presidential bid.

On Monday, he called for tougher policing, including profiling foreigners who look like they could have connections to terrorism or certain Middle Eastern nations.

Story continues

"This isn't just a matter of terrorism, this is also really a question of quality of life," he said. "We want to make sure we're only admitting people into our country who love our country."

Pointing to her Monday morning comment that Trump's words give "aid and comfort" to Islamic extremists, his campaign said Clinton was accusing him of treason, going beyond the bounds of acceptable campaigning, and trying to change the subject from her own failures.

She insinuated that Islamic militants, particularly those affiliated with ISIS, are rooting for Trump to win the White House. She said, "We're going after the bad guys and we're going to get them, but we're not going to go after an entire religion."

Trump agreed terrorists have a preference: They "want her so badly to be our president."

Clinton met late Monday with the leaders of Egypt, Ukraine, and Japan in New York City, where they gathered for the United Nations General Assembly. Trump met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Trump has tried to appear more statesmanlike as the November election approaches. Still, he suggested it's fine if some world leaders feel uneasy about him.

"Well, maybe that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Right now the world has no respect for our country, they have no respect for our president, whatsoever," he said in an interview on Fox News.

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As the clock ticks town to the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, network and cable news divisions tasked with moderating the three face-offs between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are girding for an especially tricky candidate in Trump, a likely surplus of animosity from both sides and unprecedented attention being placed on the moderators themselves. "If you look into the abyss of social media, it's just fulminating hate all the time," complains one news executive. "The environment is so toxic."

Moderating a presidential debate should be an honorific, a chance to showcase a network's anchor in front of an enormous TV audience. More than 67 million people across networks watched the first 2012 tussle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, a viewership high not seen since 80 million people tuned in to Jimmy Carter's first debate with Ronald Reagan in 1980 (the last time a candidate with a Hollywood pedigree stepped into the presidential spotlight). This year's numbers could be higher. "It's going to be probably the most watched presidential debate in history," predicts Jim Lehrer, the retired PBS anchor who moderated 12 presidential debates, including the first Obama-Romney back-and-forth in 2012. "We've got two candidates for president who are sharply divided in all kinds of ways. And the campaign has gotten very personal between them."

Read more: Norman Lear on Trump's "Painful" Military Forum: "Matt Lauer Got Taken for a Ride by This Demagogue" (Guest Column)

Trump's TV skills, honed during his years on The Apprentice, as well as his contentious relationship with the press, are putting the moderators under increased media scrutiny. NBC's Lester Holt has the unenviable task of going first. Already, on Sept. 19, Trump lashed out at Holt, telling Fox News' Bill O'Reilly: "Lester is a Democrat. It's a phony system. They are all Democrats. It's a very unfair system." This despite New York voting records showing the Nightly News anchor has been a registered Republican since 2003 and Holt earning positive reviews from both sides of the political spectrum for moderating NBC's only primary debate in January - with the Democrats. Adding to the anxiety at NBC News, Holt is following closely on the heels of colleague Matt Lauer's widely criticized handling of a Sept. 7 forum with the candidates on national security, in which Lauer is perceived to have gone easy on Trump.

The added scrutiny, much of it fueled by social media, means news divisions are on lockdown like never before as they prep for what many assume will be vitriolic exchanges, full of opportunities to fact-check the candidates' statements (especially Trump's). "The process is so buttoned up," says one source at NBC News. "Nothing is coming out of the prep team at all." At NBC, that team includes NBC News and MSNBC chairman Andrew Lack, NBC News president Deborah Turness, NBC's political unit and Janelle Rodriguez, senior vp editorial and a veteran of CNN. Nightly News executive producer Sam Singal also is involved. Holt has announced three broad topics for the debate, to be held at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York: America's direction, achieving prosperity and securing America. Certainly, national security will be top of mind given the terrorist-linked bombings in New York and New Jersey a week before the candidates are to meet.

Much of the criticism of debate moderators is coming from Trump himself, who has hurled personal insults at reporters, banned outlets from events and demanded payment (indirectly) from TV networks carrying much watched primary debates. In a Sept. 14 interview with the Washington Post (a paper once banished from covering Trump events), the candidate claimed moderator Anderson Cooper will be biased. "I don't think he should be a moderator.  CNN is the Clinton News Network." Reps for CNN and NBC News declined comment and refused to make anchors available.

Read more: NBC's Lester Holt Will Moderate First Presidential Debate Between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

At the same time, Clinton supporters have called out the media for "grading [Trump] on a curve," as President Obama put it at a rally in Philadelphia on Sept. 13. He says the media is not holding Trump to the same standard it holds Clinton: "Donald Trump says stuff every day that used to be considered as disqualifying a president, and yet because he says it over and over and over again, the press just gives up."

Cooper and ABC News' Martha Raddatz will co-moderate a town hall debate Oct. 9, while Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace will handle the final debate Oct. 19. Wallace, who is a registered Democrat so he can vote in Washington, D.C.'s Democrat-dominated primaries, is working with his researcher on prep but has said he won't begin to compose questions until after the other two debates. CBS News correspondent and CBSN anchor Elaine Quijano perhaps has the least fraught task: She'll moderate the Oct. 4 vice presidential debate between Republican Gov. Mike Pence and Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.

Insiders note that, more than ever, how moderators craft their questions and, more importantly, their follow-ups, is paramount. "You have to be comfortable enough to make these kinds of split-second decisions, and the only way you get comfortable is to do your homework," says Lehrer. All the moderators will be on guard to halt candidates (and perhaps especially Trump) from eliding past statements and facts. "He just blows by questions," notes one TV news veteran, referring to Trump. For instance, Trump claimed in a bizarre media op Sept. 16 at his new Washington hotel that Clinton started the so-called "birther" movement and he "finished it" by compelling Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. (Politifact has rated this "pants on fire" yarn a "full flop.")

Read more: Donald Trump on Debating Hillary Clinton: "If She Treats Me With Respect, I Will Treat Her With Respect"

It's unclear whether Holt will wade into the renewed controversy surrounding the fictitious birther conspiracy. But if he doesn't follow up on incorrect statements, media watchdogs and social media users will pounce, much like they did on Lauer.

"The debaters should be given the first opportunity to call out their opponent, but if they don't, the moderators must do it, and that is more important than ever because there is so much distorted and just flat wrong information out there," says CBS' Bob Schieffer, who served as a moderator in each of the past three elections. "For example, one in five Americans [incorrectly] thinks the president was not born in America, and nearly 30 percent believe he's a Muslim."

Lehrer, who was criticized in 2012 for letting Romney talk too much, says attacks from either side can't be a deterrent to aggressive questioning: "If you don't want to be criticized, don't be a moderator. There's no way to do it without being criticized."

***

The Battlefield

Sept. 26: NBC's Lester Holt in Hempstead N.Y.

Oct. 4 (VP debate): CBS' Elaine Quijano in Farmville, Va.

Oct. 9 (Town Hall): ABC's Martha Raddatz and CNN's Anderson Cooper in St. Louis

Oct. 19: Fox News' Chris Wallace in Las Vegas

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Read more: 'Late Night With Seth Meyers' to Air Live After First Presidential Debate
The Hague (AFP) - Congolese former rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda has ended an unprecedented hunger strike in his detention cell in The Netherlands after a two-week standoff with the judges at his war crimes trial.

"He has begun to eat again," his lawyer Stephane Bourgon told AFP, adding Ntaganda had decided to end his self-imposed fast late Tuesday after the court granted him some concessions.

The once-feared rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo is on trial at the International Criminal Court where he has denied 18 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But saying he was "ready to die", Ntaganda had decided to refuse food "in the ultimate act of protest" according to his lawyer, after judges maintained tight restrictions on his visitors saying they feared he might tamper with witnesses.

Bourgon told AFP "we won permission to appeal the judges' decision and we have made arrangements so that he can see his wife, this week, with a certain degree of intimacy."

Ntaganda, who has not appeared in the courtroom in The Hague since September 7, has also begun instructing his legal defence team again, Bourgon said.

"He is weak, and has lost weight and you can see it in his face. But there is nothing to be alarmed about," added Bourgon.

Ntaganda was however again not present when his trial resumed on Wednesday afternoon, and the judges granted him permission not to attend the trial in person again until September 29 so he can profit from the visit of his family.

But Bourgon told AFP that for Ntaganda, born in 1972, the "fight is far from over as he wants to prove he is innocent of the accusations of interfering with witnesses."

"The restrictions are just the consequence of the allegations which we believe have been evaluated on an insufficient basis by the judges. These allegations could impact the trial because they concern witnesses who have already testified, or who will do so."

Story continues

Once dubbed "The Terminator", Ntaganda has denied the charges arising out of savage ethnic attacks carried out in the DR Congo by his rebel Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC) in 2002-2003.

His trial opened in September 2015 after he walked into the US embassy in Kigali in 2013.

The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been mired for two decades in ethnically-charged wars, as rebels battle for control of its rich mineral resources.

Prosecutors say Ntaganda played a central role in the Ituri conflict in the far northeast which rights groups believe alone has left some 60,000 dead since 1999.
While music streaming is at an all-time high, vinyl sales have steadily seen growth year to year. With that, more and more artists are pressing their music into vinyls, and Drake is the latest one to embrace the trend.

Come this October, you'll be able to own three of Drake's most recent albumsIf You're Reading This It's Too Late, his collaborative LP with Future What a Time to Be Alive, and Viewson vinyl, The Vinyl Factory reports. The vinyls can currently be pre-ordered from Urban Outfitters, and are expected to ship October 7.

Previously, Take Care was the only Drake album available on vinyl. Hopefully he'll get around to pressing the remainder of his discography soon.

Drake revealed recently that he's been working on the follow-up to Views, telling the crowd that he was "six, maybe seven new songs in" during his tour stop in Seattle. Kanye West has also confirmed that he and Drake have been in the studio together, apparently "working on an album," though there's word as to when we'll get to hear the collaborative project.

Pre-order If You're Reading This It's Too Late, What a Time to Be Alive, and/or Views via Urban Outfitters here.

Continue Reading On Complex
Rosetta (Egypt) (AFP) - A boat carrying up to 450 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean off Egypt's north coast on Wednesday, drowning 42 people and prompting a search operation that rescued 163 passengers, officials said.

The vessel overturned off the port city of Rosetta, police and health officials said.

Five survivors, handcuffed to beds in a Rosetta hospital room, told AFP up to 450 people were on board.

"The boat sunk. My three children died," said Badr Abdel Hamid, 28, before breaking into tears.

"We were 450 people on board. We left at 2:00 am. An hour an half later, it capsized. Whoever knew how to swim, swam. We even abandoned the women and children," said Ahmed Mohamed, 27.

The boat sank some 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) from the coast and the victims included one child, 10 women and 31 young men, a municipal official in the Mediterranean city told AFP.

They were Egyptians, Eritreans, Sudanese and Syrians, said the official, Ali Abdel Sattar.

"I just wanted to reach Europe and live a decent life," said Ahmed Gamal, 17.

The tragedy comes months after the EU's border agency Frontex warned that growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.

Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.

Egypt's Prime Minister Sharif Ismail ordered police to arrest the smugglers responsible, a cabinet statement said.

The military said in a statement that 163 passengers had been rescued so far, adding that they had stopped another boat elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast carrying 294 migrants.

With the search operating ongoing for an unknown number of people, health ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed told AFP that hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties.

- Egypt becoming departure country' -

More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for Europe since 2014, according to the United Nations.

Story continues

Asylum-seekers have been seeking other ways to reach Europe since March, when Balkan countries closed the popular overland route and the EU agreed a deal with Turkey to halt departures.

"Egypt is starting to become a departure country," Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.

"The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year."

More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.

The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015.

- Fatality rates rise -

Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be "the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea," said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).

In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, drowning at least 169 migrants.

Earlier that month, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the Greek island of Crete and the bodies 104 migrants washed up on a beach in Libya.

Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.

Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period in 2015, said the UNHCR.

But Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against 2015 figures.

Arrivals began falling after the deal between the European Union and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.

The European Union launched "Operation Sophia" last year to destroy smuggler boats that could be used to ferry migrants across the sea.

An EU official told AFP this month that almost 300 smuggler boats had been put out of commission in the past year.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he he has no doubt that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would make a strong leader.

In an interview that will air on Wednesday night, CNNs Erin Burnett asked the former military general for his thoughts on Trump, whom he met in New York this week, and the Republicans plan to ban Muslims from certain countries from entering the U.S. if elected.

The United States in general conducts very strict security measures for everyone who wishes to visit it, which has been in place for quite a few years, Sisi said. Its also important to know that during election campaigns many statements are made and many things are said, however afterwards governing the country would be something different. And will be subject to many factors.

Sisi met with both Trump and Clinton, separately, in New York this week. Clinton is not expected to change U.S. policy toward Egypt if she becomes president, but some human rights advocates worry that Trump would forge closer ties with Sisi, whose brutal clampdown on Islamists and political opponents in Egypt has been widely criticized.

Asked if he thought Clinton would make a good president, Sisi voiced back-handed approval. Political parties in the United States would not allow candidates to reach that level unless they are qualified to lead a country the size of the United States of America, he said.

[CNN]
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged Israel to "write a bright page" in Middle East history and make peace with the Palestinians.

Speaking at the United Nations, Sisi said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at "the core of regional instability" and called for a settlement based on a two-state solution leading to a Palestinian state.

"Permit me to deviate from the written statement to address an appeal to the Israeli leadership and Israeli people," Sisi told the UN General Assembly.

"We have a real opportunity to write a bright page in the history of our region, to move toward peace," he said.

The first Arab country to make peace with Israel, Egypt has stepped up its diplomacy over recent months to try to re-start Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

The peace process has been comatose since the collapse of a US-led initiative in April 2014.
A cafeteria worker in Pennsylvania quit her job last week after her school district instituted a new policy of denying hot lunches to students with a negative balance on their lunch accounts.

Stacy Koltiska worked in the cafeteria at Wylandville Elementary School in Eighty Four, Pa., where she said she loved seeing the joy and excitement the younger children got from something as simple as a school lunch. But a new policy recently required her to take a hot lunch from a first-grade boy whose account balance was negative, swapping his chicken for a cold cheese sandwich.

I will never forget the look on his face and then his eyes welled up with tears, she said in a Facebook post.

The school districts new policy restricts hot lunches for students whose parents owe more than $25 on their account. The rule requires students in kindergarten through sixth grade to lose their hot lunch and be charged for a cold sandwich, fruit and milk instead. Students in seventh through 12th grade wont be allowed any lunch.

As a Christian, I have an issue with this, Koltiska said in an interview with the Washington Post. Its sinful and shameful is what it is.

School officials told local news station WTAE that the policy was not intended to shame students and was implemented to cut down on the amount of money that parents owed the district. Superintendent Matthew Daniels said that while more than 300 families owed lunch money previously, that number has dropped to 70 families in the wake of the new policy.

But Koltiska said she disagreed with the districts solution.

Theyre suits at a board meeting, she told the Post. They are not the ones facing a child and looking them in the eye and taking their food away.
Mylan CEO heather Bresch

On Wednesday, Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, which makes the EpiPen, got a grilling in Congress over the 500% increase in the price of her company's lifesaving drug that's used to treat severe allergic reactions.

She did not go prepared.

"You knew what this hearing was about. I'm asking questions that if you're the CEO I think that you would know," said ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland.

One specific question she couldn't answer is one that Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants answered ASAP for more companies than just Mylan.

Cummings asked her how much Mylan spent on patient assistance programs.

Last month, Warren sent an eight-page letter to Bresch signed by 20 senators, including former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), demanding to know more about Mylan's patient assistance programs.

Bresch had said the company would expand these programs to give more people access to the drug  something you see across the drug industry these days.

Warren and a number of other politicians, including Cummings, believe that pharmaceutical companies use patient assistance programs to preserve drug prices. The companies say they're helping people, but it's just an excuse for them not to lower prices.

"These changes will help some customers who are struggling to afford EpiPens. Your discount programs, however, represent a well-defined industry tactic to keep costs high through a complex shell game," Warren wrote in her letter.

"When patients receive short-term co-pay assistance for expensive drugs, they may be insulated from price hikes, but insurance companies, the government, and employers still bear the burden of these excessive prices. In turn, those costs are eventually passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums."

In Mylan's case, Warren wants a breakdown of: how many people have used Mylan's coupons and programs, how much they save, how many people Mylan expects will save money now that the programs have been expanded, how much discounted EpiPens have cost insurers, how consumers are directed to these assistance options, details about its EpiPen4Schools program, and more.

Story continues

But, as we said, Bresch had no specifics on that at the hearing. (She also didn't show up with some of the documents Congress asked for regarding how much Mylan makes on EpiPens.)

That probably means this isn't over for Congress or Bresch.

For more background on the EpiPen mess, listen to BI's Josh Barro and Linette Lopez talk about it on their podcast, Hard Pass:

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elizabeth warren

Sen. Elizabeth Warren praised former President George H. W. for reportedly saying he will vote for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

During a press call hosted by Pennsylvania Democratic senate candidate Katie McGinty, the Massachusetts senator told reporters that Donald Trump's candidacy posed a unique threat to the US that Republicans should not ignore.

"I think he's right to support Hillary Clinton," Warren said of Bush.

"In my view, it's not a hard question," she continued. "Donald Trump should get nowhere near the White House. Hillary Clinton is hardworking, well qualified, and she has run on a very progressive agenda. I feel it's my job and the job of a lot of people across this country to help her get elected and help her be a successful president based on that agenda."

The former president reportedly told several attendees of a recent party hosted by the Points of Light Foundation that he was planning on backing the former secretary of state in November over his party's nominee.

The Bush family has been highly critical of Trump.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush repeatedly criticized the real-estate magnate during his 2016 presidential bid, while his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, said she was "sick" of Trump's bombastic rhetoric.

The former governor, former first lady, and both presidents Bush have declined to endorse the Republican presidential nominee.

Warren's comments came during a call in which the longtime consumer advocate and McGinty discussed Wells Fargo's recent decision to fire thousands of employees for opening fraudulent accounts in order to inflate account sales numbers to meet quotas.

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elon musk mars

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is very worried about the human race's survival on planet Earth.

He's so concerned, in fact, that in 2008 he bet his last millions to keep SpaceX  his then-nascent aerospace company  in business and developing next-generation rockets.

Despite a recent rocket failure Musk has dubbed "the most difficult and complex" in SpaceX's history, next week he'll unveil a secret plan to achieve his ultimate vision: launching a million people to Mars, colonizing the planet, and turning it into a "backup drive" for humanity.

Musk previously intimated the need for a "Big F***ing Rocket" (BFR) to get the job done.

He eventually renamed the hypothetical giant rocket the "Mars Colonial Transporter" (MCT)  and then renamed it again to the "Interplanetary Transport System" (ITS) after his engineers realized it could take people a lot farther than the Red Planet:

Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2016

Still, the world knows next to nothing about the BFR, MCT, ITS, or whatever Musk decides to call it next  only that it must be very big, very powerful, and lean on SpaceX's prior history of rocket development.

Musk has admitted that permanently colonizing Mars and saving humanity is a long-term goal.

He'd first like to land one of his upcoming Red Dragon spacecraft on Mars sometime in 2018:

Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come pic.twitter.com/u4nbVUNCpA  SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2016

That timeline may be more difficult to achieve now, though. Following a recent launchpad explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX now faces launch delays of that system, plus the first launch of its significantly more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket.

Story continues

SpaceX will reveal all during on a live video feed of their big announcement, which is happening Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 2:30 p.m. EDT, during the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico.

According to an event description on the IAC's site:

[D]uring a special keynote entitled "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species", Musk will discuss the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The technical presentation will focus on potential architectures for colonizing the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.

When the time comes, you can watch SpaceX's livestream below, or by clicking over to YouTube.

NOW WATCH: SpaceXs most powerful rocket engine yet just passed a critical milestone





More From Business Insider


Weinstein Television is developing the first-ever scripted Elvis Presley television biopic to be shot at Graceland, the company announced on Wednesday.

The eight to ten part series will explore every aspect of the King of Rock n Rolls life with access to Elvis personal archives including journals, clothing, automobiles and Graceland. The project is based on the 1982 book Elvis by author Dave Marsh.

Priscilla Presley, the former wife of Elvis, is attached as an executive producer, and the production is working in full partnership with the Presley Estate. Harvey Weinstein and Jerry Schilling will also exec produce.

Im a big fan of Harvey Weinsteins independent films, said Priscilla Presley. Im thrilled to have the opportunity to work with him on this show and tell the story of how Elvis changed the culture of music and initiated a revolution that changed the world.

No network is currently attached to this Elvis project, but Weinstein Co. is expected to shop the project around in the coming weeks.

We are excited to work with Harvey Weinstein and the team on this special project, said Jamie Salter, chairman and CEO, Authentic Brands Group, owner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, LLC. Partnering with producers of this caliber enables us to provide viewers with a new and original experience that is as captivating as the King himself.

The president and CMO of Authentic Brands Group added, This project will truly honor everything that made Elvis Presley a central figure of our time. We are thrilled to be working with Weinstein Television and our Executive Producers on this TV biopic. This format enables us to do justice to Elvis rich and compelling story, which will be sure to thrill audiences.

Elvis, who died in 1977, still has a huge follow today with more than 14 million fans on social media, and theres no doubt in todays interest in the musical icon.

To this day, Elvis is one of the few that lives up to the word icon. He is one of the most celebrated entertainers of all time whose influence surpasses the music he created. Peoples fascination with his story goes beyond the stage and this biopic will pay homage to his brilliant legacy and give viewers an in-depth look at how he became The King, commented The Weinstein Company co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein.

Story continues

The Weinstein Company COO and president, David Glasser added, We are thrilled to announce this biopic and our partnership with the Presley Estate. Its an incredible opportunity to be the first-ever scripted TV series to shoot at Graceland and have access to Elvis personal archives. Elvis redefined an entire generations relationship to music and pop culture. This show will be an authentic and riveting look at how that came about from start to finish.

Glasser and Sarah Sobel of TWC, and Authentic Brands Groups Corey Salter, Marc Rosen, and Pamela Bebry negotiated the deal. The project will be overseen by Megan Spanjian who heads scripted television for TWC.

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Surprising Rebound for Catalog Album Sales Thanks to Creative Marketing
Washington (AFP) - Hillary Clinton is revving up her drive to woo young people, a key demographic that is resisting her as she battles Donald Trump tooth and nail for the White House.

The polling numbers are alarming for the Democrat as she seeks to become the first female president of America.

As recently as August, among millennials aged 18-34 Clinton held a 24-point lead over the Republican Trump in a four-way race including two alternative candidates. But in September this margin had dwindled to five points, according to a Quinnipiac poll.

The breakdown now looks like this: Clinton at 31 percent, Trump at 26 percent, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson up from 16 percent in August to 29 percent in September, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 15 percent, according to this poll.

A total of 62 percent of those questioned said they were willing to vote for a candidate other than Clinton or Trump.

Some 90 percent said they consider Clinton to be intelligent and 77 percent find her experienced. But 77 percent said they do not think she is honest, a score that is worse than Trump's at 68 percent, according to the Quinnipiac survey.

A CBS/New York Times poll gave Clinton 48 percent support among millennials, compared to 29 percent for Trump. But 21 percent said they will either not vote or cast their ballot for someone other than Clinton or Trump.

Without the support of young Americans, Clinton could lose in the battleground states of North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, experts say.

Millennials were a huge part of the coalition that brought Barack Obama to power in 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2012 when he won re-election, said Jeanne Zaino, a professor of political science at Iona College outside New York City.

"The millennials are the biggest generation in American history, surpassing now the baby boomers," said Zaino, adding that the group contains 69 million potential voters and Clinton needs their support.

"Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, she has not been doing well with millennials. They are deserting her for people like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein," she added.

Story continues

"She has really got to work hard to call them back into the fold and then get them out to vote in November," Zaino said.

Polls show young people feel Clinton does not put priority on issues that affect them, and that she is an establishment politician who will not bring about change.

What is more, some millennials were born while Bill Clinton was president, from 1993 to 2001, and have only vague familiarity with that period. And what they do know centers mostly on scandals of the Clinton era, Zaino said.

- 'Huge generational gap' -

And when young people learn, for example, that Mrs. Clinton used to be against same-sex marriage, "they cannot fathom it."

"There is a huge generational gap," said Zaino.

Clinton's former rival Bernie Sanders, who electrified young Americans with his pledge to fight income inequality and Wall Street excess and provide free university education, may be older but he spoke to young people in a way that Clinton cannot, Zaino said.

In a bid to remedy all this, the Clinton campaign announced Monday that she would intensify her outreach to young people through round table talks, live discussions on Facebook, events designed to get them to register to vote and sending heavyweight substitutes out on the campaign trail to court them.

Obama, his wife Michelle, Sanders, liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren and Clinton's running mate Tim Kaine all campaigned last week to try win over young people.

In a speech Monday at Temple University in Philadelphia, Clinton spoke about what she called the values that drive her and her early days as a young lawyer working to help poor children.

She also discussed other issues that are important to young people: climate change, sexual violence on US university campuses, and the problem of students having to take out huge loans to pay for college.

She appealed to students to register to vote and then get out and cast their ballots on November 8.

"I need you," Clinton said. "This is going to be close."

The crowd applauded politely.

Clinton also published an open letter on Mic, a website that targets millennials, addressing what she has learned from this group of Americans.

"Your generation is the most open, diverse and entrepreneurial generation in our country's history," Clinton wrote.

She vowed to work with young people to lift what she described as barriers blocking them from realizing their full potential.

"If I'm fortunate enough to be elected, you will always have a champion in the White House," Clinton wrote.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Volkswagen pledged to fix all cars equipped with illicit engine software in Europe by autumn 2017, the European Commission said on Wednesday after talks with the carmaker to ensure it is doing enough for affected clients. At a meeting with consumer Commissioner Vera Jourova, VW board member Francisco Javier Garcia Sanz committed to a plan to inform customers by year's end of the need for a technical fix to bring diesel cars into line with EU caps on toxic nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, Jourova's spokesman said. The German carmaker also committed "to have all cars repaired by autumn 2017," spokesman Christian Wigand said, adding the carmarker would offer clients "proof of conformity." VW has admitted that it installed improper software that deactivated pollution controls on more than 11 million diesel vehicles sold worldwide. EU officials have called on the German carmaker to do more to compensate European clients since its $15 billion settlement in the United States for using the cheat software, saying it is unfair for them to be treated differently. "Volkswagen committed to an EU-wide action plan today, which is an important step toward a fair treatment of consumers," Jourova said in a statement. Volkswagen has rejected suggestions it may have breached EU consumer rules and said it does not see the need to compensate affected car owners. Europe's largest automaker is making slow progress on fixing cars in Europe, having repaired less than 10 percent of the 8.5 million affected models in Europe. It said the majority of the cars in Europe can be repaired this year, but an unspecified number will have to wait. VW group models with 1.2 liter and 2.0 liter engines require only a software update on pollution control systems, but about 3 million 1.6 liter models also require a mesh to be installed near the air filter. (Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Adrian Croft)
By Julia Fioretti and Marilyn Haigh BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission proposed on Wednesday scrapping time limits on charge-free mobile phone roaming included in next year's plan to abolish such tariffs after critics said its initial proposal was consumer unfriendly. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker abruptly ordered the previous proposal to be redrafted two weeks ago to make good on a pledge to end roaming charges. The EU executive is seeking to shore up public support after Britain's vote to leave the bloc and the rise of anti-establishment parties. Europeans, millions of whom frequently cross often nearby borders, have been irritated by charges for making calls or using data abroad that seem far greater than any additional costs required to provide that service. The Commission's initial proposal on the "fair use" of roaming was to allow consumers to roam for up to 90 days per year and for a maximum of 30 consecutive days, while paying only their domestic prices. Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the digital single market, told a news conference that there would no longer be a formal limit on surcharge-free roaming when new rules enter force in June 2017. "We will not put any limit in terms of days... but we decided to put clear safeguards in terms of residency," he said. Operators like Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom will be able to check consumers' usage patterns to ensure they do not abuse the system by buying a cheap SIM card in one EU country and using it permanently elsewhere. "We want to protect both sides," Ansip said. The burden of proof will fall on companies, who will have to demonstrate that a customer is abusing free roaming by comparing their usage abroad to that at home without falling foul of data protection rules limiting the tracking of online habits. "It is an interesting pro-consumer measure against the backdrop of rising anti-EU sentiment in many member states," said Rob Bratby, telecoms partner at law firm Olswang. "However, it feels a little like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic if it is supposed to reconnect EU citizens with Europe." For example, if a person uses their phone a lot more abroad than at home, or if a SIM card is largely inactive at home, operators will be able to apply roaming surcharges. Similarly, if a customer uses multiple SIM cards when travelling then operators would be able to charge for roaming. Operators, though, would have to inform users they were facing surcharges and consumers would be allowed to challenge them. The level of those surcharges is being debated by the European Parliament and member states, with a final agreement expected early next year. Such surcharges would not apply to travellers using SIM cards from countries in which they reside or with which they have a "stable link", which could include work commuters, expats frequently in their home country or exchange students. The Commission said it would adopt its new proposal by Dec. 15 after feedback from member states and national regulators. Telecom and mobile operators' associations ETNO and GSMA, representing companies such as EE , Telefonica and Telia , said they would provide feedback. ROAMING BATTLES For a decade, battles over roaming charges have served as a barometer of EU politics. The Commission, in its role as enforcer of a single market, has long cited its campaign to cap roaming charges, forcing them down by some 90 percent since 2007, in efforts to show voters it works for them. But a rearguard action by phone companies, defending profits and citing big discrepancies in prices from Bulgaria to wealthy Luxembourg, had left consumer groups disappointed. Roaming charges account for a fraction of companies' revenues, typically between 3 and 6 percent. The proposal, seen by Reuters, does give operators the possibility to ask regulators for permission to apply roaming surcharges if they stand to lose at least 5 percent of their mobile revenues when providing "roam like at home". (Additional reporting By Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Alexander Smith)
The EU on Wednesday scrapped a controversial plan to limit its landmark free mobile phone roaming policy to 90 days a year, after an outcry from angry consumer groups.

While doing away with time limits for roaming across the currently 28-nation bloc, the European Commission said it will instead impose checks to curb abuse of the system.

"We will not put any kind of limits on duration or, how many days (travellers) can enjoy no roaming surcharges, but we decided to put some clear safeguards on residency," EU Commissioner for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip said at a news briefing.

The Commission announced the original "free roaming" plans with huge fanfare in early 2015, but when it unveiled the details earlier this month consumer groups were outraged by the limit.

They had assumed the Commission's pledge to end mobile roaming charges -- additional costs when people use their phone outside their home country -- meant exactly that, without conditions or caveats.

As a result, they responded angrily to the 90-day "fair use" limit, charging that Brussels had caved in to the powerful telecoms companies for whom roaming charges have long been a lucrative source of extra income.

The new rules, which require approval by the EU's 28 member states, end roaming "for all people who travel periodically in the EU," said the EU's Digital Economy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger.

But they also ensure "that operators have the tools to guard against abuse of the rules," he added.

Instead of time limits, the new Commission proposal will allow operators to crackdown on people whose phone usage abroad "significantly" outweighs their domestic calls.

It will also allow mobile operators to cancel SIM cards found to be used almost exclusively abroad by customers taking advantage of lower tariffs than those available in their home country.

"If the company has doubts, it notifies the customer who has the right to justify the usage," Oettinger said.

The Commission's proposal now goes to the EU's 28 national regulators for negotiation, in order for the plan to be implemented by June 15 next year as originally promised.

At the heart of the row over free roaming in Europe is the huge discrepencies in prices for phone and data usage across the EU, a market of 500 million people.
DailyFX.com -

Talking Points:

- EUR/USD trades between 200, 500 day moving averages ahead of FOMC

- A hawkish Fed could weigh on the pair for more downside conviction

- EUR/USD Volatility measures extremely subdued

The EUR/USD has found support around the last Daily swing low and its 200-day SMA to start the trading day, as the pair continues its predominate sideways trading movement ahead of todays key event risk.

The Fed Rate Decision is the huge event in front of us, and the FOMC outlook could shape the trend in the weeks (perhaps months) ahead.

Against this backdrop we will form our outlook and look to find short term trading opportunities using different tools such as the Grid Sight Index (GSI) indicator.

EUR/USD Short Term Outlook Ahead of Fed Rate Decision

Click Here for the DailyFX Calendar

The FOMC Rate Decision is to hit the wires at 18:00 GMT, followed by a speech by Fed Chair Jennet Yellen shortly after.

Markets are pricing in a 22% probability of a hike in todays decision, meaning that a shock hike will catch most participants off-guard, implying significant US Dollar strength.

Indeed, while a surprise hike is less likely, there is a case to be made for the Fed to move at this meeting, going against market expectations in the short term to gain credibility for the long game, after Fed members leaned to the hawkish side in recent weeks.

If the fed hikes or goes on a hawkish hold signaling a December move, economic projections could indicate a downgrade to the rates path going forward, potentially limiting fallout in risk assets.

Taken together, risks seem skewed for US Dollar strength on a hawkish Fed, but even a slight dovish lean could see the US Dollar tumble.

EUR/USD Technical Levels:

EUR/USD Short Term Outlook Ahead of Fed Rate Decision

Click here for the DailyFX Support & Resistance tool

We use volatility measures as a way to better fit our strategy to market conditions. The Euro is expected to be less volatile versus the US Dollar than most other majors based on implied volatility measures (only the Swiss Franc less), and 20-day ATR readings as well suggest an extremely subdued levels of realized volatility.

Story continues

In turn, this may imply that the market is not expecting any major swings here, suggesting macro levels could hold if the Fed acts in line with expectations.

EUR/USD 30-Min Chart (With the GSI Indicator): September 21, 2016

EUR/USD Short Term Outlook Ahead of Fed Rate Decision

(Click to Enlarge)

The EUR/USD is trading around potential resistance at 1.1150, with GSI calculating higher percentages of past movement to the upside in the short term from current levels.

The GSI indicator above calculates the distribution of past event outcomes given certain momentum patterns. By matching events in the past, GSI describes how often the price moved in a certain direction.

You can learn more about the GSI here, and download the Trade Station version here.

Other resistance levels to watch in the short term might be 1.1180, 1.1200, 1.1220 and 1.1250.

Levels of support may be 1.1125, 1.1100, 1.1070 and the 1.1050 level.

We generally want to see GSI with the historical patterns significantly shifted in one direction, which alongside a pre-determined bias and other technical tools could provide a solid trading idea that offer a proper way to define risk.

We studied over 43 million real trades and found that traders who successfully define risk were three times more likely to turn a profit.

Read more on the Traits of Successful Traders research.

Meanwhile, the DailyFX Speculative Sentiment Index (SSI) is showing that about 49.0% of FXCMs traders are long the EUR/USD at the time of writing, after trades cut shorts rapidly on the latest decline.

You can find more info about the DailyFX SSI indicator here

--- Written by Oded Shimoni, Junior Currency Analyst for DailyFX.com

To contact Oded Shimoni, e-mail oshimoni@dailyfx.com

Follow him on Twitter at @OdedShimoni



original source

DailyFX provides forex news and technical analysis on the trends that influence the global currency markets.

Learn forex trading with a free practice account and trading charts from FXCM.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The European Union on Wednesday called on President Barack Obama to block a U.S. bill allowing survivors and families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, saying it was in violation of international law. "The possible adoption and implementation of the (bill) would be in conflict with fundamental principles of international law and in particular the principle of State sovereign immunity," the European Union delegation to the United States said in a letter to the U.S. Department of State seen by Reuters. The letter said the EU considers that the bill's adoption and its implementation could have unwanted consequences, as other states adopt similar legislation. Congress has overwhelmingly passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, known as JASTA, in reaction to long-running suspicions, denied by Saudi Arabia, that hijackers of the four U.S. jetliners that attacked the United States in 2001 were backed by the Saudi government. Obama in coming days is expected to veto the bill on grounds that other countries could use the law as an excuse to sue U.S. diplomats, service members or companies. But Congress could have the last word if the Senate and House of Representatives each override that veto by a two-thirds vote. (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Andrew Hay)
By Axel Bugge and Shrikesh Laxmidas LISBON (Reuters) - Europe's largest tech event, the Web Summit, will double in size when it is held for the first time in Lisbon in November to tackle everything from hot new startups to the race to make driverless cars, its chief executive said on Wednesday. Portugal has pulled off a coup by bringing the Web Summit to Lisbon after it was launched and held every year in Dublin since 2010, when just 400 people attended the event. The Lisbon version will have 50,000 participants, jumping from 27,500 last year in Dublin. It will be held at a huge conference venue built for Expo 98 and visitors will enjoy a city full of recently-built hotels that have fed a tourism boom. Portugal's government is hoping the event will help boost funding and other support for technology firms in an economy that is only recovering slowly after a 2011-14 bailout. Apart from tech startups, chief executives from leading companies like Renault Nissan are also taking part this year as the Web Summit becomes a meeting ground for technology and business, chief executive and co-founder Paddy Cosgrave said. "If you track the Web Summit, in 2010 it was a startup conference, the average age of attendees was in the mid-20s. But in 2014 it began to change, the average age is now 36, it has become very much a ... technology business conference." The Web Summit's rapid growth brought it to Lisbon as the venue "had simply run out of space" in Dublin, Cosgrave said. "If you look at Lisbon, something was already happening, and I hope that the Web Summit adds to the growing wave of interest in what's happening in Lisbon and Portugal. It's difficult to explain these things. Historians can look back and explain why a city is cool." He cited a growing number of startups in Lisbon and the decision by the founder of Berlin's co-worker startup campus "Factory" to open in the Portuguese capital as evidence of its growing attraction. The Web Summit's biggest point of interest this year could be in bringing together a large number of experts in the car industry on driverless cars, according to Cosgrave. He said he had a particular interest in driverless cars as he does not have a full driving license, and he believes automated vehicles are just around the corner. "When you see so many large companies in an arms race against each other (on technology for automated cars), that's where things happen." (Reporting by Axel Bugge; editing by Mark Heinrich)
London (AFP) - Former European commissioner Neelie Kroes, once Brussels' most feared corporate watchdog, failed to declare her directorship of an offshore firm, leaked files showed Wednesday.

Kroes was named in a new cache of 1.3 million offshore files, leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, as being a director of Bahamas-based Mint Holdings Limited between 2000 and 2009.

The EU code of conduct states that "commissioners may not engage in any other professional activity, whether gainful or not".

Kroes's legal team told international newspapers, including Britain's Guardian, that their client "agrees that formally she should have declared this directorship".

"Mrs Kroes will inform the president of the European commission of this oversight and will take full responsibility for it," they told the Guardian.

The legal team added that Kroes, a commissioner between 2004 and 2014, had believed Mint Holdings had been liquidated in 2002, and that she had not been paid for her role.

A Commission spokeswoman said that Kroes had now informed them about the directorship, and that "we will check and analyse this information before we decide" what action to take.

The company was set up by a United Arab Emirates private equity boss as a vehicle to potentially secure half the international assets of energy giant Enron, shortly before its collapse, but the $7 billion (6.3 billion euros) deal fell through.

- British minister named -

Kroes, now a paid adviser to Bank of America and Uber, earned a steely reputation in Brussels after taking on Microsoft, E.ON, GDF Suez and other corporate giants in her monopolies-busting role.

British-based campaign group Tax Justice Network said the leaks revealed the Bahamas to be "a global menace" to the international tax system.

"For many of us who study tax havens it was just a matter of time before a major scandal hit the Bahamas," said the group's Moran Harari.

Story continues

New British interior minister Amber Rudd was also named in the leaked data on 175,000 companies as having been a director of two Bahamas-based firms during her pre-political business career, according to the Guardian.

The files revealed Rudd was a director of two companies, Advanced Asset Allocation Fund and Advanced Asset Allocation Management, between 1998 and 2000.

Britain is one of many countries that have vowed to clamp down on the use of offshore tax havens, and revelations that a senior minister may have profited from a regime that imposes no income, corporate or wealth taxes on individuals investing in offshore companies are likely to raise uncomfortable questions for the government.

Rudd, 53, previously defended former prime minister David Cameron when it emerged he had held shares in his late father's Bahamas-based investment fund, which he sold before he took office in 2010.

Rudd, who was energy minister at the time, told the BBC that "the prime minister and his family paid the correct amount of tax that they were due", and said that she personally did not have any money in offshore trusts.
LONDON (Reuters) - Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who built a multi-million pound business network advising multi-national corporations and governments after leaving office in 2007, said on Tuesday he was planning to close his commercial ventures and concentrate on not-for-profit activities. He said he would donate the "substantial financial reserves" of the businesses, Tony Blair Associates (TBA) and his Windrush and Firerush structures, to non-profit work. Blair, 63, was Labour prime minister for 10 years from 1997 and was later a Middle East envoy for eight years. He has been widely criticised for dealing with undemocratic governments, including that of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose human rights records have come under fire. In an email to staff released by his office Blair said the restructuring reflected changes that had been under way in his organisation for the last two years. He did not elaborate. "Over the past nine years we have built a group of organisations employing around 200 people and working in more than 20 different countries round the world," he said in the email. "It is time to take this to a new level." He said he would retain a small number of personal consultancies for his income, but that 80 percent of his time would now be spent on the non-profit side. "I want now to concentrate the vast bulk of my time on the not-for-profit work which we do," he said. "De facto, this has been the case in the past two years but we need to reflect this change in the way we are structured. "The substantial reserves that TBA has accumulated will be gifted to the Not For Profit work." The not-for-profit ventures include Blair's Faith Foundation and the Centre for Geopolitics and Religion, which focuses on addressing the root causes of Islamist extremism. The full extent of Blair's business activities has never been disclosed but 2015 accounts for Windrush published in January this year showed turnover up by more than a third to 19.4 million pounds, while profits trebled to 2.6 million pounds. Blair and his wife Cherie also have extensive property investments in London. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
By Anton Zverev, Gleb Stolyarov and Olga Sichkar SIMFEROPOL, Crimea/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Products for sale in the Crimean stores of two European retailers are being shipped there from Russia via a ferry and port that are subject to EU sanctions, people involved in the transportation said, suggesting companies are finding ways around the punitive economic regime facing Moscow since 2014. Products carrying the brands of Germany's Metro AG and Auchan [AUCH.UL] of France are visibly for sale on the shelves of the retailers' Crimean subsidiaries. People involved in transporting the goods say they arrived via a ferry that serves the Crimean port of Kerch. European companies are banned from doing business with the ferry and the port under EU sanctions imposed on Russia after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Both retailers said they were not violating the sanctions because the stores are operated by their Russian subsidiaries, which are not subject to the EU sanctions. A representative of the Kerch port referred questions about Metro and Auchan to the ferry operator, saying the port only controls shipping, not cargo. A representative of the ferry operator said it does not have contracts with Metro or Auchan and does not know if they use the ferry. Legal experts said the transfer of goods to Crimea may fall in a gray area of the sanctions regime because the relationship between parent companies and sub-contractors is often hard to define. In emailed comments in response to questions, Metro and Auchan did not contest that their goods were being shipped via the Kerch ferry and port to their subsidiaries' stores in Crimea. A spokesman for Metro said Metro stores in Crimea are operated by independent Russian entities and staff that are not subject to EU sanctions. He said Metro is "fully aware of and complies with the EU laws and regulations, and, in this particular case, the applicable sanctions." A spokesman for Auchan, which operates one store in Crimea, said the company always operates within the rules that are in force, including European Union decisions. Asked about the activities of the EU retailers in Crimea, an EU official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "This is against the spirit of the sanctions. But in the absence of a trade embargo, there is always a fine line between compliance and non-compliance." A European Commission spokeswoman, Maja Kocijancic, asked if Brussels was worried about whether the sanctions were being respected, said implementing sanctions was the responsibility of EU member states. The French government had no immediate comment. Germany's Economy Ministry said it could not comment on specifics, but that violators of EU sanctions face penalties. It said in cases involving a German firm, it was up to the German Customs Investigation bureau to asses if sanctions have been breached. The bureau declined to comment. EU SANCTIONS The EU sanctions on Russia do not bar European firms and citizens from doing business in Crimea. They do restrict some new investments and dealings with certain designated people and entities such as the Kerch ferry company - the main transport link between Russia and Crimea - and the port of Kerch. According to several transport companies providing services to Auchan and Metro, as well as sources in the two retailers' Russian units, and a western food company, trucking firms load up at the retailers' distribution centers in Russia. The goods then cross to Crimea on the ferry, then trucks disembark at Kerch, then deliver the goods to the Metro and Auchan stores in Crimea. Reuters has no evidence of any payment from Metro or Auchan to the sanctioned entities. The goods are transported by sub-contractors, and the stores in Crimea are operated by Russian-registered units of Metro and Auchan, not by the parent companies. The Russian units are not subject to EU sanctions. "In general, EU-based parent companies can be held liable if they have instructed their local unit to act in violation of the sanctions," said Artem Zhavoronkov, partner at law firm Dentons. METRO GOODS The two Metro stores in Crimea are operated by Metro Group entities incorporated under Russian law - Retail Property 5 (RP5) and Retail Property 6 (RP6). Metro Group is not involved in "local operational details" concerning the stores, according to the spokesman for the group. Metro said most products in its Crimean stores, including Metro branded goods, were sourced from Russian suppliers. But when a Reuters reporter visited the Metro store in Simferopol, Crimea, in August, she saw on the shelves Italian rice, EU-origin chocolate, pastry, and packaged groceries, all imported into Russia by Metro's Russian unit registered in Moscow, according to their labels. A source at Metro Group Logistic, the retailer's Russian logistics unit, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Metro contracts third-party transport companies to truck goods from its distribution centers in southern Russia via the ferry to Crimea. This arrangement was confirmed by sources at a Metro supplier and at one of the transport companies involved, Transcargo. Aleksey Kormilicyn, CEO at Metro Group's RP6, said by email RP6 was using logistics firms to arrange transportation of goods to Crimea and they were "instructed not to use any sanctioned entity when supplying goods." He did not reply to an emailed question on how the unit ensures the sub-contractors comply with that instruction. Auchan has similar arrangements for supplying some of the goods to its Crimea store, according to transportation companies and a source in Auchan Russia. On the shelves at Auchan's store in Simferopol when a Reuters reporter visited were fruit and vegetable conserve, chocolate, coffee, ketchup, olive oil, crackers and frozen pizza - all carrying the in-house Auchan-BIO brand. The Auchan spokesman said the store is operated by Auchan Retail Russia, the firm's Russian unit. The company did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters about the store's supply logistics. (Additional reporting by Maria Kiselyova, Olesya Astakhova, Lidia Kelly, Anastasia Teterevleva in MOSCOW, Matthias Inverardi in DUESSELDORF, Gabriela Baczynska and Robin Emmott in BRUSSELS, Rene Wagner in BERLIN, and John Irish and Leigh Thomas in PARIS; Writing by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Christian Lowe and Giles Elgood)
By Anton Zverev, Gleb Stolyarov and Olga Sichkar

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Products for sale in the Crimean stores of two European retailers are being shipped there from Russia via a ferry and port that are subject to EU sanctions, people involved in the transportation said, suggesting companies are finding ways around the punitive economic regime facing Moscow since 2014.

Products carrying the brands of Germany's Metro AG and Auchan of France are visibly for sale on the shelves of the retailers' Crimean subsidiaries.

People involved in transporting the goods say they arrived via a ferry that serves the Crimean port of Kerch. European companies are banned from doing business with the ferry and the port under EU sanctions imposed on Russia after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Both retailers said they were not violating the sanctions because the stores are operated by their Russian subsidiaries, which are not subject to the EU sanctions.

A representative of the Kerch port referred questions about Metro and Auchan to the ferry operator, saying the port only controls shipping, not cargo. A representative of the ferry operator said it does not have contracts with Metro or Auchan and does not know if they use the ferry.

Legal experts said the transfer of goods to Crimea may fall in a grey area of the sanctions regime because the relationship between parent companies and sub-contractors is often hard to define.

In emailed comments in response to questions, Metro and Auchan did not contest that their goods were being shipped via the Kerch ferry and port to their subsidiaries' stores in Crimea.

A spokesman for Metro said Metro stores in Crimea are operated by independent Russian entities and staff that are not subject to EU sanctions.

He said Metro is "fully aware of and complies with the EU laws and regulations, and, in this particular case, the applicable sanctions."

A spokesman for Auchan, which operates one store in Crimea, said the company always operates within the rules that are in force, including European Union decisions.

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Asked about the activities of the EU retailers in Crimea, an EU official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "This is against the spirit of the sanctions. But in the absence of a trade embargo, there is always a fine line between compliance and non-compliance."

A European Commission spokeswoman, Maja Kocijancic, asked if Brussels was worried about whether the sanctions were being respected, said implementing sanctions was the responsibility of EU member states.

The French government had no immediate comment. Germany's Economy Ministry said it could not comment on specifics, but that violators of EU sanctions face penalties. It said in cases involving a German firm, it was up to the German Customs Investigation bureau to asses if sanctions have been breached. The bureau declined to comment.

EU SANCTIONS

The EU sanctions on Russia do not bar European firms and citizens from doing business in Crimea. They do restrict some new investments and dealings with certain designated people and entities such as the Kerch ferry company - the main transport link between Russia and Crimea - and the port of Kerch.

According to several transport companies providing services to Auchan and Metro, as well as sources in the two retailers' Russian units, and a western food company, trucking firms load up at the retailers' distribution centres in Russia.

The goods then cross to Crimea on the ferry, then trucks disembark at Kerch, then deliver the goods to the Metro and Auchan stores in Crimea. Reuters has no evidence of any payment from Metro or Auchan to the sanctioned entities.

The goods are transported by sub-contractors, and the stores in Crimea are operated by Russian-registered units of Metro and Auchan, not by the parent companies. The Russian units are not subject to EU sanctions.

"In general, EU-based parent companies can be held liable if they have instructed their local unit to act in violation of the sanctions," said Artem Zhavoronkov, partner at law firm Dentons.

METRO GOODS

The two Metro stores in Crimea are operated by Metro Group entities incorporated under Russian law - Retail Property 5 (RP5) and Retail Property 6 (RP6).

Metro Group is not involved in "local operational details" concerning the stores, according to the spokesman for the group.

Metro said most products in its Crimean stores, including Metro branded goods, were sourced from Russian suppliers.

But when a Reuters reporter visited the Metro store in Simferopol, Crimea, in August, she saw on the shelves Italian rice, EU-origin chocolate, pastry, and packaged groceries, all imported into Russia by Metro's Russian unit registered in Moscow, according to their labels.

A source at Metro Group Logistic, the retailer's Russian logistics unit, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Metro contracts third-party transport companies to truck goods from its distribution centres in southern Russia via the ferry to Crimea.

This arrangement was confirmed by sources at a Metro supplier and at one of the transport companies involved, Transcargo.

Aleksey Kormilicyn, CEO at Metro Group's RP6, said by email RP6 was using logistics firms to arrange transportation of goods to Crimea and they were "instructed not to use any sanctioned entity when supplying goods."

He did not reply to an emailed question on how the unit ensures the sub-contractors comply with that instruction.

Auchan has similar arrangements for supplying some of the goods to its Crimea store, according to transportation companies and a source in Auchan Russia.

On the shelves at Auchan's store in Simferopol when a Reuters reporter visited were fruit and vegetable conserve, chocolate, coffee, ketchup, olive oil, crackers and frozen pizza - all carrying the in-house Auchan-BIO brand.

The Auchan spokesman said the store is operated by Auchan Retail Russia, the firm's Russian unit.

The company did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters about the store's supply logistics.

(Additional reporting by Maria Kiselyova, Olesya Astakhova, Lidia Kelly, Anastasia Teterevleva in MOSCOW, Matthias Inverardi in DUESSELDORF, Gabriela Baczynska and Robin Emmott in BRUSSELS, Rene Wagner in BERLIN, and John Irish and Leigh Thomas in PARIS; Writing by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Christian Lowe and Giles Elgood)
Michael Weatherly's return to CBS is here!

The 48-year-old actor is gearing up for his new legal procedural, Bull, loosely based on Dr. Phil's early days as a trial consultant, and ET's Kevin Frazier was with the star on New York Street on the CBS Radford lot in Studio City, California, to get the scoop.

RELATED: Watch Michael Weatherly Give a Hilarious Tour of the 'Bull' Set

"Some of my favorite moments take place in airports when I hear people say, 'Dr. Bull! Looking forward to Bull!'" Weatherly told ET. "And every once in a while, someone tries to slap my head and I go 'Uh' 'cause Bull doesn't get head-slapped."

Weatherly is referencing his beloved NCIS character, Tony DiNozzo, whom he bid farewell to on the emotional season 13 finale in May. Bull is getting a plum Tuesday lead-in, with NCIS -- TV's most-watched drama -- serving as the evening's anchor.

"I love those guys and I miss them and we're very connected," Weatherly admitted. "I think it's great that we're on [the] schedule together because it's one fluid evening for CBS."

During his ET interview, Weatherly's former NCIS co-star Emily Wickersham unexpectedly called and the two ended up Facetiming.

RELATED: Michael Weatherly Thrilled 'Bull' Is Airing After 'NCIS'

"It's looking fantastic," Wickersham said of season 14, before telling Weatherly: "We miss you a little bit. I'm very excited about your premiere."

Weatherly recalled learning Bull would follow NCIS, admitting he "didn't" see the scheduling move "coming."

"I was in Boston when I heard about the time slot, and I jumped up and down like a kangaroo who had just had three cups of coffee," he hilariously shared. "I think I just kept hopping around and my wife was like, 'What's going on?' Then I had to explain to my wife and TV programming and then it got boring."

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RELATED: Michael Weatherly Talks Bicoastal Living and Being Away From His Kids

On a personal note, the Los Angeles-based Weatherly -- who films Bull in New York City -- will soon be celebrating his seventh wedding anniversary with his doctor wife, Bojana Jakovic. Even though he has the acting thing down, Weatherly proposed a Plan B should the jobs stop coming.

"What I'm thinking is, the acting goes sideways, we're just going to set up a little private practice somewhere and I'm gonna be in charge of how much it costs," he said.

Bull airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

RELATED: Michael Weatherly Leaves 'NCIS' After 13 Seasons: 'It's Been a Fantastic Ride'

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By Laura Zuckerman

(Reuters) - ExxonMobil Corp. has agreed to pay $12 million to Montana and the U.S. government to restore natural resources damaged or destroyed by a pipeline rupture in 2011 that spilled oil into the Yellowstone River, according to a settlement proposed on Wednesday.

ExxonMobil Pipeline Company's Silvertip pipeline burst July 1, 2011 at a crossing beneath the flood-swollen Yellowstone River near Billings, Montana, about 150 miles (241 km) downstream from Yellowstone National Park.

The release of 1,500 barrels of crude oil affected 85 miles of a river known for its near pristine waters, wealth of wildlife and world-class fisheries.

Under the agreement unveiled Wednesday, funds from Exxon would be used to mitigate harm caused by the spill to fish, wildlife, migratory birds and aquatic habitat.

A restoration plan drafted by the state and federal governments would, among other things, seek to restore riparian and terrestrial habitats, stabilize river banks and expand fishing access in and around the river.

The deal struck between the Texas-based oil company and Montana, the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies still must be approved by a U.S. District Court judge in Montana and is subject to 30 days of public comment, legal documents show.

The settlement and proposed restoration plan follow a years-long assessment of damages from the pipeline leak to the river and its floodplains.

Montana Governor Steve Bullock and Attorney General Tim Fox hailed the agreement for holding Exxon accountable and helping to make whole a state that boasts a $6 billion outdoor economy.

But Alexis Bonogofsky, whose pastures along the Yellowstone River were fouled five years ago by oil-tainted water said she was disappointed by the size of the settlement.

"I'm sorry, but $12 million is a drop in the bucket for ExxonMobil and doesn't teach them anything about accountability," she said.

Exxon spokeswoman Ashley Smith Alemayehu said the company was sorry for the accident.

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"We regret this spill happened and are committed to learning from it to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future," she said in a statement.

Under a 2012 deal between Exxon and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the oil company paid a fine of $1.6 million in connection with the spill, the largest penalty ever levied in the state for violations of its water quality regulations.

The same year, Exxon estimated its overall response to the spill, including cleanup, would cost $135 million and said it had reached compensation agreements with more than 95 percent of affected property owners.

(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho and Tim Ahmann in Washington; Additional writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Alan Crosby)
The Detroit Tigers kept second baseman Ian Kinsler and designated hitter Victor Martinez out of the lineup on Tuesday night at Minnesota, with both injured when being hit by pitches in their previous game.

Tigers manager Brad Ausmus said Kinsler still felt "a little foggy" two days after a beaning by Cleveland right-hander Trevor Bauer knocked his helmet off and triggered concussion-like symptoms.

"So clearly we're not going to put him in there," Ausmus said.

Martinez was also hit by Bauer in the same inning Sunday on the knee, which remained purple and swollen. The injury was expected to make moving around difficult over the next few days.

Two Brewers miss game for births: Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun and catcher Manny Pina are away from the team after their families each welcomed a new addition, a daughter for Pina and son for Braun.

Braun and Pina have been ruled out for Tuesday night's game against Pittsburgh. Manager Craig Counsell expects Braun and Pina to return before the end of the week.

Matz returning to New York for Mets: Steven Matz is heading back to New York from Port St. Lucie, Florida, with plans of getting into the Mets' postseason chase by the weekend.

The left-hander, who hasn't pitched for the Mets since Aug. 14 because of tightness in his throwing shoulder, went through a long-toss workout at the team's facility Tuesday. He planned to leave for New York later in the day, with expectations of throwing a bullpen at Citi Field on Wednesday.
Angelo Vermeulens four-month vacation to Hawaii was unlike any other. Rather than splaying out on a beach, he sat locked inside a bubble atop the Mauna Loa volcano. Instead of lounging around in a Speedo, he fumbled around dry lava in a space suit. And forget feasting on juicy tropical fruits; he gnawed on prepackaged instant food. So goes the life of a fake astronaut.

Three years later, Vermeulen  a volunteer crew commander of HI-SEAS, a NASA-funded Mars simulation  has rejoined society and no longer dons a space suit just to step outside. And in the time since his bleak summer getaway, the long-haul race to the real Mars has sped light-years ahead. NASA is shooting for the 2030s, with deep-space habitation facilities, says NASA spokeswoman Kathryn Hambleton. Vermeulen is optimistic on all fronts: It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but its going to happen, says the 44-year-old TED senior fellow in his TED Talk. Yet whether the trip takes decades or millennia, Vermeulens radical pre-enactment in Hawaii may prove more crucial to reaching the big-picture dream of humankind, he says.

Tg14 100714 rl5d1820

Prepping for a journey to Mars.

Source Ryan Lash/TED

Few are space-suited for the dual task of philosophizing about the future of space colonization and ensuring we arent incinerated by cosmic radiation in the process. Vermeulen is a space systems researcher  a biologist whos finishing up research on interstellar travel for his second Ph.D., at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands  and when not digging in on the science of astrobiology, he brings his space passion to Earth, serving as a veritable Marina Abramovic of terrestrial-astral performance. He designs art installations like Biomodd, which uses algae to cool its computer processors, and spacecraft sculptures such as Seeker, a global community project of starship prototypes. His work is exhibited worldwide, from New York to the Philippines, with the goal of encouraging the public to more rigorously explore the future of humans in space.

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Vermeulen is so committed to his interactive art that he once locked himself, along with five other artists, inside one of his creations on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia. We test what we build, he says simply. The European Space Agency came knocking, asking Vermeulen to consult on MELiSSA, an artificial ecosystem for long-term space missions.

Growing up in tiny Belgium, hardly a space giant, Vermeulen never considered a career as an astronaut. But at age 8, when his parents gifted him his first microscope, he started cultivating an interest in ecology. He earned his first Ph.D., in biology, from the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he analyzed the plant and animal specimens he collected during nature walks. Today, Vermeulen has moved well beyond the microscopic, with bigger plans on the horizon. Getting to Mars is merely half the battle, he says. Humans must be psychologically ready to deal with the isolation and limited resources, or even endless boredom. Whats there to do for fun in deep space? How should we spend our time? I really dont think the human mind is ready, Vermeulen says with a shrug.

Neither are our wallets, it seems. Government funding for space has plummeted, from 4.4 percent of Americas federal budget in 1966 to 0.5 percent today. Plus, Mars is such a long-term, expensive project, its vital that the Mars missions are backed not just by dollars but also by public support. Its precisely why we need more scientists  and yes, artist-scientists, says Mark Lupisella, an engineer at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center. Granted, others are already imagining our future in space, including wunderkind Elon Musk, whos planning for a permanent human settlement on Mars by 2025 (SpaceX didnt respond to requests for comment; their heads are probably in the clouds). Creative types like Vermeulen, though, can evince the wonkiness of space habitation and interstellar travel in ways an engineer cant, and better tap into all of the stuff that motivates and moves people, emotionally, philosophically and spiritually, Lupisella says.

Tg14 100714 rl5d1802

Angelo Vermeulen

Source Ryan Lash/TED

Along with his doctoral research on starship development, Vermeulen is pondering not only how to get to the Red Planet but how to live there once landing. For him, its not enough to survive the lethal danger that awaits humans in deep space; the threats to soul and psyche must also be addressed  what, he asks, will humanity do as it redefines itself, its notions of social life, community, identity, leisure and recreation in zero gravity? Vermeulens must-have item for space is a healthy dose of autonomy  thats what makes us human, he says. Ironic, coming from a man who keeps trapping himself inside strange, tiny structures.

But if NASA, SpaceX and the rest of the space-braving crew dont properly prepare for how well stay mentally grounded as well as reorient our social identity (the culture of Earth) in a radically new environment, were doomed long before those spacecrafts ever reach their launchpads. Psychologically, emotionally and socially, this could very well become a big disaster, Vermeulen says.

He would know. Stepping forth from his self-imposed volcanic isolation of 120 days, Vermeulen was blinded by the explosive green and blue hues of life on planet Earth, the beauty of vision, he says. For him, this is home sweet home  if only he could take it with him to Mars.

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By Michelle Nichols and Tom Perry UNITED NATIONS/BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry demanded on Wednesday that Russia and the Syrian government immediately halt flights over Syrian battle zones, in what he called a last chance to salvage a collapsing ceasefire and find a way "out of the carnage". An impassioned Kerry faced off with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the U.N. Security Council in New York, during a tense televised showdown, saying the bombing of an aid convoy in Syria raised "profound doubt whether Russia and the Assad regime can or will live up to" ceasefire obligations. Speaking before Kerry, Lavrov told the 15-member Security Council: "One needs to refrain from emotional instincts, from rushing to the microphone immediately to comment on something; a probe should be conducted (into the aid convoy attack)." Listening to Lavrov made him feel like he was living in a "parallel universe", Kerry said. "To restore credibility to the process we must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," Kerry said. The key areas are places where humanitarian aid needs to be delivered and where Syrian government forces have been accused of targeting civilians. The aim of the ceasefire deal between the United States and Russia, which took effect on Sept. 12, is to facilitate aid access to besieged areas and allow the pair to jointly target Islamic State jihadists. More than 300,000 people have been killed and half of Syria's 22 million people have been uprooted since a crackdown by President Bashar al-Assad on pro-democracy protesters in 2011 sparked a civil war. Islamic State militants used the chaos to seize territory. AID DELIVERIES MAY RESUME The United Nations suspended aid deliveries after the convoy attack two days ago, which the Syrian Red Crescent says killed some 20 people, but the world body said on Wednesday it was gearing up to resume deliveries. On the ground, rebels battled the forces of the Assad government on major frontlines near Aleppo and Hama, and air strikes reportedly killed a dozen people including four medical workers. "I emphasize this to Russia. The United States continues to believe there is a way forward that, although rocky and difficult and uncertain, can provide the most viable path out of the carnage," Kerry said. U.S. officials believe Russian aircraft are responsible for the attack near Aleppo, but Moscow has denied involvement and the Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday a U.S. Predator drone was in the area when the convoy was attacked. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault distributed a document on Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council outlining a new mechanism for monitoring the truce that it wants major powers to discuss later this week. The ceasefire is probably the last hope for a settlement on Syria before President Barack Obama leaves office in January, and has been Kerry's main focus for months. But it has become a repeat of previous peace efforts: abandoned by the warring parties even as diplomats far away debate it. "I call on every country to cease providing support of any kind to any party that is trying to sabotage this plan," Kerry said. The Syrian army is backed by Moscow, Iran, Shi'ite militias and fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah, while the rebels are supported by countries including the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani dismissed Kerry's demand on Wednesday, telling NBC News that such a move would only benefit Islamic State and jihadists Nusra Front. Kerry said it was a moment of truth for the opposition, which he said must do more to distance itself from the Nusra Front, long al Qaeda's Syrian wing but which changed its name and disavowed al Qaeda two months ago. Nusra is still characterized by both the West and Moscow as a terrorist group excluded from the ceasefire. Other rebels say Moscow and Damascus use this to justify broader attacks. Tensions between the United States and Russia escalated over a Sept. 17 attack by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers in the eastern Deir al-Zor province. Washington said that strike was carried out by mistake with the intent of hitting Islamic State militants. BOMBING ALL NIGHT Overnight fighting was focused in areas that control access to Aleppo city, where the rebel-held east has been besieged by Russian and Iranian-backed pro-government forces and completely encircled for all but a few weeks since July. Syrian state media said the army had recaptured a fertilizer factory in the Ramousah area to the southwest of the city. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring body, confirmed the advance and said government forces had pressed forward near an apartment complex nearby. A rebel fighter in the Aleppo area said warplanes had been bombing all night in preparation for an attack. But "the regime's attempts to advance failed," said the rebel, speaking to Reuters from the Aleppo area via the internet. A Syrian military source said insurgent groups were mobilizing to the south and west of Aleppo and in the northern Hama area. "We will certainly target all these gatherings and mobilizations they are conducting." The army reported carrying out air strikes on seven areas near Aleppo. The Observatory said one air strike killed four medical workers and at least nine rebel fighters in the insurgent-held town of Khan Touman south of Aleppo. The medical staff killed were working for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), it said. UOSSM confirmed in a statement that at least four of its staff had been killed. Syrian government forces also launched a major advance in Hama province in the West of the country. (Additional reporting by John Davison in Beirut and Yara Bayoumy, John Irish and Denis Dyomokin at the United Nations; writing by Peter Graff and Tom Perry, editing by Peter Millership and Howard Goller)
Spaniard Nacho Vigalondos first two features, Timecrimes and Extaterrestrial, were notable for ingeniously containing fantastical concepts within very small-scale, low-budget-friendly narrative limits. With Colossal, he actually gets to visualize the more outlandish aspects of a new fantasy tale via the digital effects and crowd scenes that normally come with the territory  whether it be time travel, alien invasion, or (in this case) giant monsters battling it out atop a cityscape.

But if the physical canvas has gotten bigger here, the writer-directors imagination is otherwise in somewhat reduced form. Colossal takes diminishing advantage of an amusing premise, one that seems made for satirical treatment yet is executed with an increasingly awkward semi-seriousness the characters arent depthed (or likable) enough to ballast. Anne Hathaways top billing will make this a bigger commercial prospect than Vigalondo has enjoyed abroad previously. In the end, however, his conceptually eccentric enterprise may be too idiosyncratic for mainstream audiences, yet not enough for arthouses.

After a brief prologue suggesting a giant-monster sighting in the Far East a quarter-century ago, were introduced to the more humdrum catastrophe that is Gloria (Hathaway) as she drags herself in at dawn from another night of reckless partying. Fed up with her excuses, excessive drinking, lack of employment (since she blew her last job a year ago) and other faults she refuses to address, British boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) evicts her from his life and Manhattan apartment until she gets her act together.

Having presumably burnt all other bridges, Gloria heads shamefacedly back to a conveniently empty family home in the small town shed left as a child. There she promptly runs into grade-school chum Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), whos clearly been holding a torch for her despite a complete lack of contact over the interim 25 years. He kindly offers a waitressing job at the local bar he inherited from his parents, and where he seems to spend most of his time hanging with best buds Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and Joel (Austin Stowell).

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As these minor personal dramas go on, however, the worlds attention is riveted to something major: On the other side of the world, a towering scaly monster has mysteriously reappeared after many years in Seoul, where it wreaks Godzilla-style havoc. Glued to the resulting news footage like everyone else, Gloria soon makes a connection that at first seems preposterous: When she makes any particular moves on a local playground at an early-morning hour, the monster duplicates them. In fact, it seems to be precisely following her lead.

This seems like the greatest party trick ever until she realizes that falling down in a drunken stupor under these circumstances can result in hundreds of dead South Koreans. She determines to sober up and spare further innocent lives. Unfortunately, by then Oscar has realized he also has the same baffling ability (materializing in Seoul as a giant robot), and his increasingly possessive attitude towards Gloria gives her little choice but bend to his emotional blackmail  lest there be more inebriated hijinks and a lot more dead Koreans.

It would seem built into this outre premise that these immature people think the world revolves around their petty emotional conflicts  and that the way in which it actually, disastrously does might be taken as a metaphor for Americans often heavy international footprint. But those themes and their rich satirical potential are left entirely undeveloped here. Instead, perversely, Vigalondo takes matters more earnestly even as Oscar reveals himself as a bigger jerk than hapless but essentially harmless Gloria could ever be.

Neither of them are much worth rooting for, so Colossal becomes a movie about small people whose messy personal issues create preposterously huge collateral damage. Thats something that ought to get funnier as it goes along, but despite a relatively satisfying resolution, Colossal instead milks diminishing humor from an inherently absurd conceit.

As she already once played a memorable monster of sorts herself in Rachel Getting Married, one might look forward to perpetual ingenue Hathaway re-inhabiting trainwreck territory. But both Hathaway and her director seem afraid to make her character get (or look) too down n dirty, missing their opportunity for a more grotesquely funny lead. Likewise, Sudeikis is fine, but if Vigalondo was determined to turn the initially amiable Oscar into a snake, he and the actor ought to have taken the figures darkness yea farther. Stevens, Stowell, and particularly Nelson have their resources under-tapped here.

Though most of its progress takes place in the generic small-town setting (filmed in British Columbia), Colossal doesnt stint on the Seoul-shot death and destruction  scenes which are glimpsed with teasing brevity until a climactic effects blowout. Paying homage to classic Japanese tokusatsu cinema, this material is fun; its on the human-scaled plane that Colossal fails to realize its full potential, finally coming off as slick stretch of a joke that neednt have played quite so thinly.

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A fire broke out in a studio of the Swedish Royal Institute of Art, known as the konsthogskolan, on September 21.

According to updates from Stockholm police, the fire had been extinguished at one point, but flared up again sometime later.

Authorities predicted that firefighting would continue through out the night, with a strong smell of smoke descending over the city. Credit: Twitter/Ake Bendel
Havana (AFP) - Granma, the Communist Party newspaper and a source of anti-US tirades since 1965, made history Wednesday by running a US embassy notice for American citizens living in Cuba.

The notice gives information on how US residents can request absentee ballots to vote in the November 8 presidential election.

A US embassy spokesman was happy about the development, the result of restored diplomatic relations between the two former Cold War foes.

"Granma frequently publishes other embassies notices," the spokesman told AFP. "It's possible for us now that we're an embassy. We're happy Granma published it."

As is common practice there was no fee for the ad, the spokesman said.

Embassy officials did not have immediate figures on the number of US citizens living in Cuba.

Washington still bans Americans from visiting Cuba as tourists, although travel is permitted for 12 other categories, including cultural and educational exchange.

Ties between Washington and Havana broke in 1961 following the 1959 revolution that swept Fidel Castro into power. His brother Raul is the current president.

Diplomatic relations were restored in July 2015, and embassies were reopened in Washington and Havana respectively.

Full normalization of relations still faces roadblocks, however, most notably a US trade embargo on the island that began in 1962. The US Congress has shown little interest in lifting the embargo.

Havana also wants to recover Guantanamo Bay, occupied by the US navy since 1903, and the end of immigration rules that encourage Cubans to emigrate to the United States.
Benghazi (Libya) (AFP) - An oil tanker left a key Libyan port early Wednesday with the first crude shipment from the terminal since fighting halted exports there in 2014, an official said.

Oil is war-ravaged Libya's key asset, and rival administrations have been vying for control of territory and oil resources since the 2011 uprising that overthrew dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

"The Maltese-flagged vessel Seadelta has just left Ras Lanuf port with 776,000 barrels of oil, going to Italy. This is the first shipment of oil from Ras Lanuf port since November 2014," said Omran el-Fitouri, oil exports coordinator at the port.

The shipment is the first to leave any of the four ports along Libya's eastern "oil crescent" since they were seized by military strongman Khalifa Haftar last week.

His forces handed management of the ports to the National Oil Corporation (NOC), which said that crude exports would resume "immediately" from Ras Lanuf and another of the ports, Zuwaytina.

The NOC says it is loyal to Libya's Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) but also to a rival parliament based in the east.

The parliament supports Haftar's forces and has refused to give the GNA its vote of confidence.

On Sunday, fighters loyal to the GNA launched an attack aimed at retaking the key eastern oil ports, but were repelled by Haftar's forces.

The fighting had forced the Maltese-flagged Seadelta to turn back out to sea for safety before docking and filling up.

Other ports in the crescent have been operating intermittently in recent years, but major exports from Ras Lanuf could pump desperately-needed revenue into the central bank's coffers.

Despite the fighting for control of the terminals, the GNA said on Wednesday it supported the NOC's efforts to boost exports.

"Oil production and returning Libya to its previous levels of production will support Libya's currency and its economy," said Ahmad Meitig, the GNA's deputy prime minister-designate, after a meeting with NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla.

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That could only have "very positive consequences for the citizens and economy of Libya," he said in an audio message published on the GNA's Facebook page.

- Markets sceptical -

Fitouri told AFP on Wednesday that a second tanker, Maltese-flagged Syra, was preparing to deliver a further 580,000 barrels from Ras Lanuf to Tarragona in Spain.

The latest shipment could also help ease a cash crisis for Libya's strapped banks which are in dire need of hard currency.

Libya has Africa's largest oil reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, but production and exports have slumped dramatically during the years of crisis.

Libya pumped around 1.6 million barrels of crude a day before Kadhafi's overthrow, but the ensuing chaos slammed production, which fell as low as 290,000 in recent months, according to the NOC.

Oil prices rose on world markets on Monday after the tanker was turned back. Prices edged up again on Wednesday.

Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at OANDA, said the Seadelta's successful departure was unlikely to have a dramatic effect given the murky picture for Libyan production.

"The amount of oil coming out of Libya is fairly limited so it won't have a material impact on crude prices today," Halley told AFP. "The fighting means that we don't know how sustained their output can be."

Last week, US envoy to Libya Jonathan Winer told AFP it was essential that money from the resumption of oil exports went only to the UN-backed government.

"Oil needs to be produced throughout the country to generate the revenues necessary to pay for salaries for the Libyan people to have the government be able to function," Winer said.

The GNA is the centrepiece of UN efforts to restore stability in Libya and forge a central authority capable of tackling the twin scourges of the Islamic State group and people-trafficking across the Mediterranean.

But it has struggled to impose its authority amid opposition from the rival administration.
The nation's cattle market celebrated a promise by China's premier to soon resume imports of U.S. beef.

This is great news for Nebraskas farmers and ranchers," Gov. Pete Ricketts said in a statement Wednesday. "The reopening of the beef trade with China will have huge potential to help grow Nebraska and help Nebraskas farm and ranch families thrive in the years to come.

Premier Li Keqiang made the announcements in a speech to U.S. business groups in New York late Tuesday night. China banned imports of American beef in 2003.

This announcement is the product of tireless work from numerous partners," Ricketts said. The governor will head to China on a trade mission this fall.
Some notable fiscal hawks are wondering how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump intend to pay for their proposed federal spending.

Both Clinton and Trump have promised new government programs worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and Trump has pledged to slash taxes on individuals and businesses by trillions of dollars in the coming decade. However, neither has offered a comprehensive plan for controlling the growth of entitlements or slowing the growth of the national debt.

Related: Big Deficits Loom as Candidates Pile on Spending and Tax Cuts

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Monday released an open memo to Lester Holt, the NBC news anchor who will moderate the first debate, urging him to press the candidates to explain how they would go about preserving the countrys entitlement programs and reduce a national debt that recently topped a record $19.5 trillion.

These programs are fundamental components of Americas social safety net, providing economic security to seniors, the poor, and others, the memo stated. However, theyre also the main drivers of our countrys swelling federal debt  In fact, on their current trajectory, entitlements and interest on the debt (which is largely driven by spending on those entitlement programs) will account for 96 percent of all federal revenue in 10 years, according to baseline projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The Congressional Budget Office warned this summer that the national debt is racing well ahead of prior projections and could reach an historic 141 percent of the overall economy by 2046. The CBO now estimates that the fiscal 2016 deficit  the annual shortfall between revenues and expenditures -- will total $590 billion and exceed last years deficit by $152 billion. Part of that increase is due to a shift in the timing of some of the governments payments. But the non-partisan CBO has repeatedly warned that growth in the deficit will gain momentum in the next few years. Without significant action by a new Congress and president, there is danger that the government will return to an era of massive, trillion-dollar annual deficits akin to those of the Great Recession.

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Federal Debt

Related: CBO Warns Congressional Spending Is Driving Up the Deficit

The Chamber of Commerce memo sparked similar calls from Capitol Hill and from government spending watchdogs and anti-deficit groups for Holt to devote at least part of the hour and a half debate to urgent fiscal issues that many voters say are among their top concerns.

Both parties agree that our budget process is broken, and now is the time to fix it, Senate Budget Committee Chair Mike Enzi (R-WY), said in a statement to The Fiscal Times. Instead of the current budget, which is designed to fail both Congress and the public, it is time to put forth a process that is designed to succeed. This is the only tool that Congress has to control runaway mandatory spending. This is one of the most important challenges facing our country because mandatory spending is literally surging out of control, driving future deficits and debt to unsustainable levels.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, noted that the national debt as a share of the economy is at an historic, post-war high. Moreover, interest on the debt is the fastest growing part of the budget and threatens to crowd out other priorities. And yet neither candidate has a plan to put the debt on a sustainable path or devotes even one penny to reducing its growth, she said. The debt touches every part of the budget, and it should receive significant attention in the upcoming debates.

Eager to appeal to liberal Democrats who have been slow to embrace her campaign, Clinton has proposed a raft of plans to invest in infrastructure, revitalize the economy in Appalachias coal country, provide family and medical leave, offer free college tuition to many middle class students, and boost spending for early childhood education. Clinton would offset much of the cost by raising taxes on wealthy Americans by about $1.1 trillion over ten years, but that would still leave a net annual cost of $198.2 billion, according to a tally by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

Related: Trumps Tax Plan Would Cost Trillions, but the Numbers Are a Moving Target

Clinton has also pledged to support an expansion of Social Security benefits, despite concerns about the long-term economic viability of the retirement program.

Trump would spend only a portion of what Clinton has proposed, with much of it going to a robust infrastructure program, a build-up of the military, expanded immigration and customs enforcement, expanded school choice and guaranteed paid maternity leave. Trump has been vague as to how much many of his proposals would cost and how he would pay for them  although he has floated a penny plan to cut non-defense discretionary spending by one percent a year to achieve savings. For now, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation has pegged the annual cost of his initiatives at $18 billion, although that is likely far below the actual cost.

Trump has also proposed more than $4 trillion in tax cuts over the coming decade as part of a revised economic package unveiled last week. Trump argues that his new tax cut will be more than offset by long term economic growth and will not add to the debt. He has also pledged to protect entitlements including Social Security and Medicare from cuts, despite their long-term impact on the debt.

Both Clinton and Trump are touting economic growth and middle class relief over fiscal restraint  an approach that undeniably is good politics if not good management of the budget. The result, according to The Wall Street Journal, is a presidential campaign where neither of the major party candidates is making a serious push to reduce the size and scope of government.

Related: Trumps Penny Plan Has Appeal, but Experts Say Its Unworkable

Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, an anti-deficit group, said in an interview that Whats driving the budget deficit are things like health care costs and the aging of the population, and were just not getting any sort of discussion about those issues  and what it means for the budget. So, I would like to have something like that. But I think so far the debate from both candidates on fiscal policy hasnt been grounded in reality.

The budget really hangs over everything, he added. Whatever policy agenda either of the candidates wants to pursue, it will play out against the current budget situation and should be in some ways constrained by the budget situation. In other words, whether you want an expansive agenda or cut taxes, its going to have an effect on the budget. So its important for the voters to understand whether the candidates have a sense of the budgetary pressures, and hence whether their policy prescriptions are realistic.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Five million people in Somalia, including 300,000 children under five, are suffering from food shortages, according to a new report by the United Nations. Among that estimate  representing over 40% of the population  50,000 children are described as severely malnourished.

The report, released Tuesday, adds that the number of people considered food insecure has increased by 300,000 in the past seven months. The East African nation has long been wracked by violent conflict that has displaced over a million people, and its malnutrition problem has been exacerbated this year by drought conditions that have reportedly lowered crop production by half.

In addition, a Somalian Humanitarian Response Plan has only received 32% of its desired funding, Peter de Clercq, the U.N.s humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, said in a statement.

Additional resources are urgently required to boost response and ongoing efforts to sustainably address malnutrition and access to food, he added.
GARUT, Indonesia (Reuters) - Indonesian search and rescue teams worked on Wednesday to find victims of flash floods that killed 20 people and damaged hundreds of homes, authorities said. The floods hit the Garut area, about 200 km (125 miles) southeast of the capital, Jakarta, on Tuesday after torrential rain. "We've reported that we found 20 bodies and we've identified 15 of them," said Endah Trisnawati, a member of a police disaster victims identification unit. It was not clear how many people were missing but some officials in the area said it could be up to 15. Some media reported 20 people were unaccounted for. Authorities said search and rescue operations would go on. Military personnel and volunteers helped evacuate about 1,000 residents of the area. Debris floated in gradually receding floodwater in inundated villages and there appeared to be widespread damage to vehicles and buildings. Flash floods and landslides are common in Indonesia, often caused by heavy rain at this time of year. (Addtional reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor in Jakarta; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Oh, to be young and in love!

The end of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage will mark the second divorce for the 52-year-old A-list actor, but ahead of saying "I do" to Jolie and Jennifer Aniston before that, he was engaged to another high-profile Hollywood starlet, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Pitt began dating Paltrow in 1994 after meeting her on the set of Seven, popping the question two years later before they broke off their engagement in 1997.

WATCH: Gwyneth Paltrow Dishes on All Her Exes: Brad Pitt Was 'Too Good For Me'

ET caught up with the famous duo in happier times where they both couldn't help but gush over one another in front of the camera.

Pitt told us that the proposal was "one the greatest moments" of his life while Paltrow explained that she did not take their decision to walk down the aisle lightly.

Getty Images

"I take the institution extremely seriously. There are no divorces in my family either -- and in his either, so this is not something -- we've been together for quite some time, so this is not a rash decision," she said.

WATCH: What Angelina Jolie's Divorce Filing Could Mean for Her and Brad Pitt's 6 Kids

The young Paltrow elaborated on how they were making the relationship work and touched on a very common worry for Hollywood couples -- work schedules keeping them apart.

"We're just not doing movies at the same time. So, I finished my last film, Great Expectations, in October and then went with him to Argentina while he did Seven Years in Tibet and I was there most of the time with him and he's gonna have a break while I do my next one and I'm gonna take a break when he does his -- so, you really need to do that I think in order to, you know, have a relationship, you know?" she said. "It's too difficult to be separated, it really is."

Pitt, who is now a dad of six with Jolie, talked even then about what kind of dad he was going to be.



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Getty Images

"I guess I'm gonna be a dad with a lot of kids," he told ET, adding he "better be a good one."

Paltrow, 43, recently spoke out about calling things off with the Hollywood heartthrob.

WATCH: Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals How Pal Mario Batali Really Felt About Exes Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck

"I definitely fell in love with him. He was so gorgeous and sweet and, I mean, he was Brad Pitt, you know?" she told Howard Stern in January 2015.

"I was such a kid," she said. "I mean I was 22 when we met and it's taken me until 40 to get my head out of my a**. You can't make a decision when you're 22 years old ... I think I was a kid and I wasn't ready, and he was too good for me."

Paltrow revealed to Stern that she and Pitt are "friendly" if they ever run into each other but she does not "hang out with him."

Watch the clip above for the full flashback moment with Paltrow and Pitt.

Related Articles
By Anuradha Nagaraj CHENNAI, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nilambar Dhangdamajhi wanted his trafficker behind bars. But his fight for justice ended abruptly on Tuesday night when he died at home in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, apparently of natural causes, three years after traffickers chopped off his right hand for trying to escape debt bondage. Dhangdamajhi's story of abuse made national headlines, raising public awareness of the exploitation of migrant laborers and inspiring many with his determination to seek justice, activists said. In 2014, the Supreme Court intervened in his case, asking the Odisha government to fast track charges against his traffickers and to provide rehabilitation for Dhangdamajhi and his friend Dayalu, whose hand was also cut off. Confirming his death in his village in Kalahandi district, police inspector Sameer Kumar Rout of the Jaipatna police station said Dhangdamaji had been ill with a fever for a few days before he died. His friend Dayalu told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the family probably didn't have enough money for treatment. Authorities have freed around 282,000 bonded laborers in 18 states across 172 districts in India since 1978. The labor ministry said in a recent statement there was "no correct estimation of the extent of bondage", but local authorities say they get calls every week on a helpline. [L3N1BJ2Y9] Dhangdamajhi was 32 when he took a loan of 14,000 rupees ($209) from a labor agent and agreed to work at a brick kiln in 2013. He was one of the 12 laborers who had taken money from Parvesh Duni, the main accused in the case. "At the last minute, they told us that we would have to go to Andhra Pradesh instead of Chattisgarh as promised. We suspected foul play," Dhangdamajhi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in August. "Most escaped en route," the father of two said. "Ten escaped but they found Dayalu and me." The two men were taken to a paddy field, kept under house arrest and made to work, he said. The traffickers demanded that they pay back the advance taken by all 12 laborers if they wanted to go back home. Dayalu, who was 17 years old at the time and today wears a long scarf even in summer to hide his severed limb, said: "We didn't have 200,000 rupees and asked for some time. But one night, they took us to a nearby forest and asked us if we wanted our hands chopped or our legs." The traffickers then decided to cut "the hands that had taken the loans", he said. The two men survived and vowed to take on the traffickers, who operated in the guise of labor agents in the drought-prone regions of western Odisha. Unusually for many trapped in debt bondage, they went to police, pressed charges and attended all hearings in court. "Nilamber's testimony in court was very powerful and we are confident we will win," said prosecutor Dhirendra Nath Patra. "It will be a big win for so many who have been forced into bondage." Of the nine accused, two are in jail and one is still at large. The others are out on bail, including the agent who first approached Dhangdamajhi and lives barely 200 meters from his house. "Nilamber had wanted it to end quickly but he didn't survive long enough for the final verdict," Dayalu said. "I will have to see it till the end alone now." ($1 = 67.01 rupees) (Reporting by Anuradha Nagaraj; additional reporting by Jatindra Dash; editing by Timothy Large; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp <BAC.N> has settled a lawsuit by a former top female banker who had accused it of being a "bro's club" that favored male employees over women, and punishing her because she complained about questionable activity.

Terms of the settlement of Megan Messina's lawsuit were not disclosed in a Wednesday filing in Manhattan federal court. The filing said the case was dismissed and cannot be brought again.

Messina, a former co-head of global structured products, had in May accused the second-largest U.S. bank by assets of underpaying her and other women relative to men.

She also said the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank wrongfully suspended her in retaliation for accusing the other structured products chief, who she said was paid more than twice as much, of improper conduct.

The single mother of three was 42 when she sued, her complaint said.

"The matter has been resolved," Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin said in an interview, without elaborating.

"We settled to the mutual satisfaction of all parties," Messina's lawyer Jonathan Sack said in an interview.

"Financial services firms, large and small, need to take a good look at advancing careers of the best and brightest without regard to gender, and make efforts to be more proactive in promoting women," Sack added.

The lawsuit was the latest of many over the years accusing U.S. banks of favoring male bankers, traders and financial advisers over their female counterparts, and permitting offensive conduct toward women.

Messina accused Bank of America of condoning bias by her boss that made her feel unwelcome in his "subordinate 'bro's club' of all-male sycophants."

She said the boss dealt frequently with the other structured products chief while ignoring her, and subjected her to questions such as "Have your eyes always been that blue?"

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Messina also accused the structured co-chief of having engaged in "front-running" by purchasing bonds for Bank of America that he knew Citibank <C.N> wanted, and rigging a debt auction to favor a hedge fund client at the expense of private equity firm Blackstone Group LP <BX.N>.

Prior to suing, Messina had been offered an "enhanced severance package of $500,000" to leave, so long as she dropped her claims, her original complaint said.

The case is Messina v Bank of America Corp, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 16-03653.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Russia and the United States clashed at the United Nations over the carnage in Syria, as air strikes pounded Aleppo following the collapse of a ceasefire.

An angry US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded at a UN Security Council meeting that Russia force Syria to ground its air force, which Washington blames for an attack on an aid convoy.

Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are to sit down with key players in the conflict on Thursday to try to revive the ceasefire and chart a new course towards ending the five-year war.

"We are at a make or break moment," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the council, urging world powers to use their influence to help restart political talks so Syrians can "negotiate a way out of the hell in which they are trapped."

Russia and the United States negotiated the latest ceasefire plan, but Syria ended the truce on Monday following an apparently accidental US-led coalition strike on Syrian soldiers.

Shortly after the truce ended, the UN aid convoy was hit, killing 20 humanitarian workers and destroying 18 trucks carrying food for desperate civilians in Aleppo province.

On Wednesday, heavy bombardment pummeled Aleppo city and the wider province, key battlegrounds in Syria's conflict, and a raid hit a medical team late Tuesday.

Addressing the council, Kerry said the bombing of the aid trucks raised "profound doubt" about whether Russia and its Syrian ally were committed to upholding a ceasefire.

"We must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and to give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," he said.

Moscow denies that Russian or Syrian planes carried out Monday's strike on the aid convoy.

A Russian military spokesman said a coalition drone was in the area when the aid trucks were destroyed, a claim the Pentagon denied.

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After halting aid operations in response to the convoy attack, the United Nations said it was ready to resume humanitarian deliveries.

- Diplomacy still in play -

Despite the US-Russian acrimony, diplomatic efforts were set to continue in New York with a new meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) to be held on Thursday.

The ISSG, which includes all key players in the Syria conflict, met for an hour on Tuesday, but made little headway in agreeing on the next steps to end the war that has killed 300,000 people.

Sounding a cautious note, Kerry told reporters late Wednesday that "it's going to be difficult. We'll see what people are willing to do."

Moscow meanwhile said it is dispatching its flagship aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to bolster its forces in the eastern Mediterranean off Syria.

In his address to the Security Council, Lavrov declared that there would be "no more unilateral pauses" by Syrian government forces, arguing that opposition fighters on the ground had previously used those ceasefires to regroup.

The foreign minister insisted that all sides must rein in rebel groups on the ground to ensure they comply with the ceasefire and said a list of terror groups not covered by the truce should be reviewed.

Only the Islamic State group and the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front are not covered by the ceasefire, but Russia has long argued that other groups are fighting alongside those jihadists.

"If we can agree on this kind of comprehensive approach, an integrated, multifaceted approach, the chances of a cessation of hostilities surviving and being successful will be better," Lavrov said.

After hearing Lavrov, Kerry said he felt like the Russians were "sort of in a parallel universe" while the Russian foreign minister said it was time to "refrain from emotional reactions."

Syria's Ambassador Bashar Jaafari railed against a "filthy propaganda war" waged by the United States and its allies, insisting his government is fighting "tens of thousands of terrorists" backed by foreign countries.

- Aleppo under fire -

Dozens of raids hit the city's east as regime troops advanced on rebels in Aleppo's southwestern outskirts, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

At least 12 civilians, including two children, were killed, the highest single-day toll since the truce collapsed this week, the group said.

In northwest Idlib province, 18 Syrians were killed during bombings on the town of Khan Sheikhun, according to the organization.

In the village of Khan Tuman, south of Aleppo city, two nurses and two drivers were killed in an attack on two ambulances, the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations said.

Syrian state media reported that the city's government-held west had come under rebel shelling, which killed two people.

The United States holds Russia responsible for the attack on the aid convoy, with a US official saying two Russian SU-24 ground attack jets were operating in the area where it was struck.

The Russian foreign ministry said the "unsubstantiated, hasty accusations" seemed designed to "distract attention from the strange 'error' of coalition pilots."

Dozens of Syrian troops were killed in Saturday's strike by the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State, which Washington said was a mistake.

Russia said it endangered the deal reached with Washington that provides for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid deliveries and cooperation between Moscow and Washington in battling IS and other extremist groups.
Donald Trump narrowly leads Hillary Clinton in the battleground states of Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.

Thats according to Fox News statewide likely voter polls conducted Sunday through Tuesday evenings.

Trump is helped by strong support from working-class white voters, while Clinton is hurt by a lackluster performance among younger voters and women.

In each state, Trumps advantage is within the margin of sampling error. Heres how the numbers breakdown state-by-state:

Trump has a three-point advantage over Clinton among likely voters in the Silver State (43-40 percent). Libertarian Gary Johnson receives eight percent. Nevada voters also can cast a ballot for none of these, and that option takes four percent. Green Party candidate Jill Stein is not on the ballot in Nevada.

Independents back Trump (42 percent) over Clinton (23 percent) and Johnson (21 percent).

The Democrat is trailing expectations among women and younger voters.

Those under age 45 are almost equally likely to back Clinton (42 percent) as they are to back Trump (39 percent) -- and Johnson garners double-digit support (11 percent).

Women in Nevada backed Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 16-point margin in 2012, according to the Fox News Exit Poll. Clintons up by just six points.

Both Clinton and Trump supporters have a high degree of vote certainty (93 percent each).

There is a huge geographic disparity in Nevada, notes Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who conducts the Fox News Poll with Republican Daron Shaw. Clinton is ahead in Vegas and urban areas, while Trump leads outside Vegas and in rural areas -- this is an obvious advantage for Clinton in get-out-the-vote efforts.

The race is mostly unchanged in a head-to-head matchup without Johnson: Trump 46 vs. Clinton 42 percent.

Views of President Obamas job performance are divided: 49 percent approve, while 48 percent disapprove. He won Nevada in both 2012 (by 6.7 points) and 2008 (by 12.5 points).

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In North Carolina, Trump is up by five points among likely voters. He receives 45 percent to Clintons 40 percent, and 6 percent favor Johnson. Stein is not on the ballot.

Whites back Trump by a 31-point margin (58-27 percent), while blacks support Clinton by 82 points (85-3 percent).

Independents favor Trump (41 percent) over Clinton (24 percent) and Johnson (14 percent).

And while voters under age 45 prefer Clinton by 46-32, Johnson gets 11 percent of them.

Ninety-five percent of Trump supporters and 90 percent of Clinton backers feel certain of their vote choice.

In the two-way ballot, Trumps also up five (47-42 percent).

North Carolina was red in 2012 (Romney by two points) and blue in 2008 (Obama by less than one point). By a 50-46 percent margin, more voters disapprove than approve of Obama today.

The Buckeye State is another must-win for Trump, and the poll finds him up by five points among likely voters: 42-37 percent. Johnson receives six percent and Stein gets two percent.

Trumps edge over Clinton comes mainly from independents (+20 points) and working-class whites (+26). Clintons up by just three points among women. Obama won them by 11 in 2012.

Most of Clintons (89 percent) and Trumps supporters (88 percent) are certain they will back their candidate.

Clintons mistakes on the campaign trail have driven many disaffected Republicans into Trumps camp, says Shaw. Just as consequential is the fact Trump is ahead of Clinton among independents by 17-20 points in these states. If that holds, he might actually pull this off.

Meanwhile, by a 58-30 percent margin, voters approve of the job Republican John Kasich is doing as governor. Among those who approve, 45 percent support Trump, 33 percent back Clinton, and 7 percent Johnson.

Without third-party candidates in the mix, its Trump over Clinton by 45-40 percent.

Currently, 47 percent of voters approve of the job Obama is doing, while 48 percent disapprove. He won Ohio in both 2012 (by three points) and 2008 (by almost five points).

Trump has been much more disciplined in his comments recently and is almost certainly benefiting from keeping his attacks focused on Clinton as opposed to other Republicans or Gold Star families, says Anderson.

Meanwhile, Clinton trails Trump by two points among voters living in union households. That voting bloc went for Obama over Romney by 23 points in 2012.

The polls, released Wednesday, also ask about the senate races in these key states, and find the races within the margin of error in Nevada and North Carolina, while Republican Rob Portman holds a double-digit lead in Ohio. In each state, the GOP senate candidate fares slightly better than Trump.

Theres good news for Republicans in Nevada, where they hope to pick up the seat of the retiring Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid. Joe Heck leads his Democratic opponent Catherine Cortez Masto by seven points: 43-36 percent. Independent American Party candidate Tom Jones trails with 6 percent and none of these gets 5 percent.

In North Carolina, incumbent Sen. Richard Burr bests Democratic challenger Deborah Ross by 43-37 percent, with Libertarian Sean Haugh at 6 percent.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman holds a 14-point lead over Democrat Ted Strickland: 51-37 percent. The incumbent senator tops the former governor by 28 points among independents. Portman also garners the support of most Republicans (88 percent), as well as 15 percent of Democrats. He won the seat in 2010 with 57 percent of the vote.

Winning the four-to-five seats needed to regain control of the senate becomes a tricky proposition for the Democrats if the GOP gains the Reid seat and Burr holds on, notes Shaw. The Democrats have to win their tight races in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and even that might not be enough.

Theres also a gubernatorial race in North Carolina. Republican incumbent Pat McCrory tops Democrat Roy Cooper by 46-43 percent. Libertarian Lon Cecil receives 3 percent.

The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R). The polls were conducted September 18-20, 2016, by telephone (landline and cellphone) with live interviewers among a sample of likely voters selected from statewide voter files in Nevada (704), North Carolina (734), and Ohio (737). Bilingual interviewers were used in Nevada. In all three states the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for the total sample of likely voters.

Related Articles
Three Lincoln companies are among eight finalists that will be competing in the Rise of the Rest pitch competition next month.

AOL co-founder Steve Case is bringing his Rise of the Rest Bus Tour to Lincoln and Omaha on Oct. 3. As part of the day's festivities, there will be a pitch competition at the Rococo Theatre in Lincoln in which the winner will receive a $100,000 investment from Case.

Hundreds of companies applied to be part of the pitch competition, and the list was whittled down to eight finalists.

The Lincoln-based companies that will be pitching to Case and other judges are:

* Nobl Health, a company that provides software to improve communication, workflow and processes for health care providers.

* Opendorse, which connects marketers with athletes to secure sponsored social media activations.

* Quantified Ag, which provides wearable devices to keep track of livestock health.

The other finalists, all from Omaha, are Drive Spotter, Gear Supply Co., LifeLoop, Places VR and RaceNote.

To find more information about Rise of the Rest events in Lincoln and to sign up to attend, go to: nvite.com/riseofrest/lincoln.
Paris (AFP) - The family of Jacques Chirac said Wednesday his wife Bernadette had also been hospitalised "suffering" from exhaustion, and quashed rumours that the 83-year-old former French president had died.

"President Chirac is being treated for a lung infection and I want to pay homage to the exceptional quality of the medical teams," Chirac's son-in-law Frederick Salat-Baroux told AFP.

Salat-Baroux, husband of Chirac's daughter Claude, then later Wednesday announced that his mother-in-law Bernadette, also 83, had also been admitted to the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris.

"Bernadette Chirac, profoundly affected by the death of her eldest daughter Laurence (in April) and exhausted for several days following the lung infection of her husband, was hospitalised on Tuesday," he said.

After the public announcement, Salat-Baroux again appealed for "tranquillity" for the couple and "respect for their private life."

Chirac has been hospitalised since Sunday and rumours that he had died were sparked early Wednesday when former housing minister Christine Boutin tweeted "Mort de #Chirac" (death of #Chirac).

She was widely criticised by the Chirac family and others for the false report.

She said in defending her tweet that she had "information that seemed to come from a reliable source. It's information that I believe the French are awaiting... you can see the buzz around this story," Boutin told AFP.

Chirac, who led France from 1995 to 2007, had just returned from a visit to Morocco with his wife when he was admitted to hospital in Paris.

The centre-right Chirac, who served two terms as head of state, is probably best remembered internationally for his opposition to the US military intervention in Iraq in 2003.

A small stroke while in office in 2005 weakened him, and he is now rarely seen in public.

In December 2015, he spent two weeks in hospital, suffering from what his family described as fatigue.

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In recent weeks, his entourage said his health had improved.

Upon his hospitalisation, France's current President Francois Hollande spoke of the country's "support" for the former head of state "in the challenge he is going through."

Boutin, meanwhile, known for fanning controversy, is appealing a 2015 conviction for calling homosexuality an "abomination".
After a summer in which the members of the United States Senate have spent more time on the campaign trail than in Washington, they were hoping to skip town again at the end of this week, not to return until the election. However, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is now promising to keep the body in session into next week, for what might look like a puzzling reason.

McConnell wants to be in Washington in order to try to override an expected presidential veto of a bill that would allow the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over allegations that it provided support to the terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on that day 15 years ago.

Related: Fiscal Hawks: Why Is No One Talking About the Deficit?

That vote will take place just days after McConnell led a successful effort to scuttle a plan to block the sale of arms to ... Saudi Arabia.

Confused?

The bill that would allow federal judges to waive sovereign immunity and allow lawsuits against Saudi Arabia is strongly opposed by the Obama administration for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is that if revoking sovereign immunity becomes an accepted response to conflict, U.S. diplomats and businesspersons working overseas could be hauled into court by citizens of other countries.

However, the anger at the memory of the attacks and at the possibility that high-ranking members of the Saudi royal family might have been involved in helping to finance Al Qaeda, the group behind it, has Republicans in Congress as well as many of their Democratic colleagues, ready to defy the president.

McConnell made it clear that he is ready to oblige them, even at the risk of keeping Republican senators away from the campaign trail and damaging relations with one of the countrys closest allies in the Middle East.

And thats what makes his position on a bill that would bar arms sales to the Kingdom so puzzling.

Related: Abolish Social Security? Gary Johnson's Libertarian Party Gets a Closer Look

Story continues

On Tuesday, he told reporters that he would aggressively oppose a measure meant to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia because U.S.-supplied arms are apparently being used against civilian populations in Yemen, where the Saudis are leading a coalition against the rebel Houthi.

Taking into account McConnells willingness to let Americans sue Saudi Arabia, his defense of the arms sale seems a bit off-key.

The Saudis have in many, many ways been good allies over the years, he told reporters Tuesday.

I think its important to the United States to maintain as good a relationship with Saudi Arabia as possible," McConnell also said Tuesday, according to Bloomberg News.

That apparently doesnt extend to relations in the courtroom.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
(Adds sources saying ship cleared for dock and subsequent departure)

By Tom Hals and Jim Christie

Sept 20 (Reuters) - Failed South Korean cargo line Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd found the money to unload a full container ship waiting outside a New York-area port. But before the vessel was allowed to dock, it faced another problem: a plan to get back out to sea.

The predicament of the Hanjin Miami, one of 10 U.S.-bound ships stranded by the Hanjin bankruptcy, illustrates one way that disputes over ships, ocean containers and even truck trailers to haul the shipping boxes have stranded at sea some $14 billion of goods around the world.

Since filing for court receivership on August 31, the world's seventh-largest container carrier has caused chaos for many retailers at a time when they are getting goods for the holiday shopping season.

The National Retail Federation on Tuesday urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to find a way to clear up the confusion. "The impact on small and medium-sized companies could be particularly devastating if this situation is not resolved in a timely manner," the group said in a letter.

Hanjin has the money to dock its Hanjin Miami, Federal Maritime Commissioner William Doyle, whose agency regulates international shipping, told an industry event on Friday.

But the Miami has not been allowed in port because of a dispute about empty Hanjin shipping containers, which the Miami normally would load up as ballast to exit port.

Without those empties, the ship "will not be able to depart the harbor because it would not have the air clearance to navigate under the Bayonne Bridge -- even at a dead low tide," said Doyle. Without a way to leave, the ship could tie up a berth.

"There are so many disputes right now attached to empty containers that the terminal is not going to load the empties back onto the ship," Doyle said.

By Tuesday evening, two sources familiar with negotiations said that the Miami had been scheduled to dock and that it would pick up empty containers to leave port. Shipping tracking site shipmentlink.com said it was due to arrive on Thursday and depart the next day.

Story continues

An attorney for Maher Terminal, which operates the marine terminal in Newark where the Hanjin Miami is expected to dock, declined to comment.

The Hanjin Miami is currently off the U.S. East Coast, about 300 miles (480 km) from New York, according to Reuters Eikon data.

The Bayonne Bridge, which held the title of world's longest arch bridge for 45 years after it opened in 1931, presents a unique challenge to Hanjin.

But other ports also are struggling with questions of who pays for terminal charges and what to do with empty containers. The complexity increased on Monday after a South Korean judge told Hanjin to cancel its ship charter agreements and return empty vessels to their owners.

In the wake of the decision by the South Korean judge, an empty Hanjin Miami may become the responsibility of Reederei NSB, which manages the ship on behalf of its owner, an affiliate of Conti Holding of Munich, according to Reuters Eikon data.

A spokeswoman for Reederei and a U.S. lawyer for Hanjin did not respond to requests for comment.

Port terminals, meanwhile, have stopped accepting returns of empty shipping containers because they doubt Hanjin will pay to store them.

"The Hanjin boxes are radioactive. Nobody wants to take responsibility for them," said Mark Hirzel, chairman of the Los Angeles Customs Brokers & Freight Forwarders Association Inc.

As containers on chassis pile up in far-flung storage lots, it has created a shortage of the trailers used to transport containers on land.

Darren Azman, an attorney for Bermuda-based Textainer Group Holdings Ltd said cargo owners and other Hanjin parties are working out an agreement that they hope will normalize the movement of shipping containers.

But U.S. retailers and manufacturers who own the cargo are caught in the confusion.

Alex Rasheed, president of Pacific Textile and Sourcing Inc, a Los Angeles-headquartered importer and wholesaler of apparel, is anxious to receive $300,000 worth of seasonal fall clothing in two containers on the Hanjin Jungil, which is waiting off the coast of Southern California.

"We're going to start feeling the pressure unless there is some kind of resolution," Rasheed said.

Hanjin's bankruptcy also has U.S. exporters that were relying on the company scrambling to find alternatives, including flying goods to foreign markets at a loss, said Hirzel.

"I've even heard about air transport of agriculture exports," Hirzel said. "Economically, it's a guaranteed loser ... The only reason you would do that is to meet an order to get a contract in the future." (Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, editing by Peter Henderson and Alan Crosby)
By Tom Hals and Jim Christie

(Reuters) - Failed South Korean cargo line Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd found the money to unload a full container ship waiting outside a New York-area port. But before the vessel was allowed to dock, it faced another problem: a plan to get back out to sea.

The predicament of the Hanjin Miami, one of 10 U.S.-bound ships stranded by the Hanjin bankruptcy, illustrates one way that disputes over ships, ocean containers and even truck trailers to haul the shipping boxes have stranded at sea some $14 billion of goods around the world.

Since filing for court receivership on August 31, the world's seventh-largest container carrier has caused chaos for many retailers at a time when they are getting goods for the holiday shopping season.

The National Retail Federation on Tuesday urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to find a way to clear up the confusion. "The impact on small and medium-sized companies could be particularly devastating if this situation is not resolved in a timely manner," the group said in a letter.

Hanjin has the money to dock its Hanjin Miami, Federal Maritime Commissioner William Doyle, whose agency regulates international shipping, told an industry event on Friday.

But the Miami has not been allowed in port because of a dispute about empty Hanjin shipping containers, which the Miami normally would load up as ballast to exit port.

Without those empties, the ship "will not be able to depart the harbor because it would not have the air clearance to navigate under the Bayonne Bridge -- even at a dead low tide," said Doyle. Without a way to leave, the ship could tie up a berth.

"There are so many disputes right now attached to empty containers that the terminal is not going to load the empties back onto the ship," Doyle said.

By Tuesday evening, two sources familiar with negotiations said that the Miami had been scheduled to dock and that it would pick up empty containers to leave port. Shipping tracking site shipmentlink.com said it was due to arrive on Thursday and depart the next day.

Story continues

An attorney for Maher Terminal, which operates the marine terminal in Newark where the Hanjin Miami is expected to dock, declined to comment.

The Hanjin Miami is currently off the U.S. East Coast, about 300 miles (480 km) from New York, according to Reuters Eikon data.

The Bayonne Bridge, which held the title of world's longest arch bridge for 45 years after it opened in 1931, presents a unique challenge to Hanjin.

But other ports also are struggling with questions of who pays for terminal charges and what to do with empty containers. The complexity increased on Monday after a South Korean judge told Hanjin to cancel its ship charter agreements and return empty vessels to their owners.

In the wake of the decision by the South Korean judge, an empty Hanjin Miami may become the responsibility of Reederei NSB, which manages the ship on behalf of its owner, an affiliate of Conti Holding of Munich, according to Reuters Eikon data.

A spokeswoman for Reederei and a U.S. lawyer for Hanjin did not respond to requests for comment.

Port terminals, meanwhile, have stopped accepting returns of empty shipping containers because they doubt Hanjin will pay to store them.

"The Hanjin boxes are radioactive. Nobody wants to take responsibility for them," said Mark Hirzel, chairman of the Los Angeles Customs Brokers & Freight Forwarders Association Inc.

As containers on chassis pile up in far-flung storage lots, it has created a shortage of the trailers used to transport containers on land.

Darren Azman, an attorney for Bermuda-based Textainer Group Holdings Ltd (TGH.N) said cargo owners and other Hanjin parties are working out an agreement that they hope will normalize the movement of shipping containers.

But U.S. retailers and manufacturers who own the cargo are caught in the confusion.

Alex Rasheed, president of Pacific Textile and Sourcing Inc, a Los Angeles-headquartered importer and wholesaler of apparel, is anxious to receive $300,000 worth of seasonal fall clothing in two containers on the Hanjin Jungil, which is waiting off the coast of Southern California.

"We're going to start feeling the pressure unless there is some kind of resolution," Rasheed said.

Hanjin's bankruptcy also has U.S. exporters that were relying on the company scrambling to find alternatives, including flying goods to foreign markets at a loss, said Hirzel.

"I've even heard about air transport of agriculture exports," Hirzel said. "Economically, it's a guaranteed loser ... The only reason you would do that is to meet an order to get a contract in the future."

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, editing by Peter Henderson and Alan Crosby)
NEW YORK  Gabonese officials announced this week that the countrys Constitutional Court will recount votes from last months controversial presidential election, when incumbent Ali Bongo Ondimba defeated opposition leader Jean Ping by just 5,594 votes.

Now theyre threatening to arrest Ping if he disagrees with the courts results and protests in the capital of Libreville turn violent again.

In an exclusive interview Wednesday with Foreign Policy, Gabonese Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Moussa-Adamo said that Pings goal has been to create chaos so that the international community will step in and rule the country.

Were that to happen, he predicted, Ping would eventually try to organize new elections and take over the presidency. Moussa-Adamos comments, in New York, followed a Libreville press conference Wednesday where government spokesman Alain-Claude Bilie told reporters that if [Ping] crosses the line, he will be arrested.

Gabon has garnered international attention in the past month as protesters have taken to the streets, claiming the August elections were rigged in favor of Bongo, whose family has ruled the oil-rich nation for decades. Bongos camp insists there was no rigging on its side, and has accused Ping of agitating his supporters in order to destabilize the country. Its unclear how many people have been killed in the post-election violence, as the opposition claims upwards of 100 are dead and the government says the real count is a fraction of that. Around 1,000 people have been arrested.

Though Bongos government has agreed that the votes from at least some polling stations will be recounted, its refusing to allow African Union observers to observe the process. Moreover, Moussa-Adamo said, all of the ballots were immediately burned after the vote, so its more of a review and a tabulation than a recount.

He said the burned ballots should come as little surprise. At every single voting station, the results are read out openly in front of everybody, then everything is tallied, theres a tally sheet, and the actual ballots are burned in front of everybody, Moussa-Adamo told FP. Additionally, he said, members of the opposition and ruling parties as well as the independent electoral commission sign the sheets before the ballots are burned.

Story continues

An actual recount of individual votes would be impossible, he said, because the only thing that remains are the tally sheets.

Steve McDonald, a global fellow at the Wilson Centers Africa Program who has observed two elections in Gabon, told FP that he has never heard of burning the election ballots so quickly; in fact, really, never at all until long after the countdown. (A report released by the National Democratic Institute ahead of the election said that Gabonese officials planned to burn them immediately, but recommended they wait until the contestation period was over before doing so.)

Now, McDonald said, by refusing to allow independent observation of the recount, one would get the suspicion that they are trying to rig it.

But Moussa-Adamo compared allowing the African Union to observe the recount to allowing outsiders to observe Supreme Court procedures in the United States. He also said that it is stupid and unfair to compare the unrest in Gabon to other African nations where there have been contested votes or post-election violence over the past year.

When you had a problem here between Bush and Gore, did an observer go to the Supreme Court and see how you do this? he asked. Its not in the law. Are you asking the government of Gabon to break its own law?

The results should be announced on Friday.

Photo credit: MARCO LONGARI/AFP/Getty Images
By Edward McAllister LIBREVILLE (Reuters) - Government officials in Gabon warned opposition leader Jean Ping on Wednesday that he risked arrest if unrest resumes when the Constitutional Court rules on his challenge to last month's presidential election outcome. The central African government said six people died in riots that erupted this month when results from the Aug. 27 vote handed victory to incumbent President Ali Bongo by less than 6,000 votes, extending his family's half-century grip on power. Ping, a former African Union commission chief, said as many as 100 people were killed in the violence and he filed a request for a recount, alleging fraud in one of Bongo's strongholds. "Mr. Ping said clearly that if the constitutional court did not declare him winner that there will be disorder. If he crosses the line, he will be arrested," government spokesman Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze told a news conference. The Constitutional Court has until Friday to decide on Ping's complaint but authorities are already stepping up security in the capital Libreville, epicenter of the violence. Soldiers and police were visible on city streets on Wednesday, taking up positions at major crossroads. "Today we hear of more calls for disorder by certain compatriots. We know who they are. We know where they are. We are not going to let them agitate," Interior Minister Pacome Moubelet Boubeya said at the same news conference. The petition alleges irregularities in Haut-Ogooue province, where Bongo won 95 percent on a turnout of 99.9 percent. A European Union observer mission also noted anomalies in the province's results. Ping's spokesman, Jean Gaspard, told reporters on Wednesday that results in his campaign's possession indeed showed that Bongo had won the province, but by a smaller margin of 89.17 percent with turnout of 81.67 percent. Gaspard said that on a national level, those figures made Ping the poll's winner with 51.17 percent of the vote, ahead of 46.71 percent for Bongo. "In principal, these are the results that must be proclaimed by the Constitutional Court." Bongo's allies submitted evidence to the court rejecting Ping's allegations and countering that the opposition leader had himself orchestrated vote fraud. Ping is a lifelong insider to Gabonese politics. He was a close ally of Omar Bongo and has two children with the late president's daughter, Pascaline. During more than four decades in power, Omar Bongo cultivated close relations with a string of French presidents. However, Ali Bongo's ties with Gabon's former colonial master have been more strained. (Additional reporting by Gerauds Wilfried Obangome and Emma Farge in Dakar; Writing by Joe Bavier; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Prosecutors on Tuesday charged a 43-year-old Lincoln man with first-degree sexual assault of a child after police say he abused a girl younger than 10, according to court documents.

Ezekiel J. McBeth was arrested Friday afternoon.

The girl, who McBeth knows, told her mother earlier in the week that he had done "grown-up things" to her, Lincoln police said in an affidavit to arrest him.

In an interview at the Child Advocacy Center, the girl said he raped her, police said in the affidavit.

McBeth denied the accusation, the affidavit says.

A judge on Tuesday set his bond at $1 million, and he remained in jail Tuesday night.
BERLIN/MOSCOW (Reuters) - German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Wednesday as he headed to trade talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he favored lifting EU sanctions on Moscow but that would require progress on peace in Ukraine. The European Union imposed the sanctions after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014. Soon afterwards, conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine between government forces and separatists, but a fragile ceasefire is in force under the so-called Minsk agreement which Germany helped to broker. "I am doing what I can so that the sanctions, imposed after the annexation of Crimea, can be lifted step-by-step, and in the same measure as there is tangible progress in implementing the Minsk agreement," Gabriel said. "If that succeeds, we can start to ease relations that would help both sides," he said, adding that German-Russian economic ties had great potential. Trade between the countries fell by 13.7 percent in the first half of this year. At the beginning of his meeting with Gabriel in Moscow, Putin said trade between Germany and Russia was disappointing. "Unfortunately, the trade turnover has fallen. Last year it was down 40 percent; in the first half of this year, it is down 35. We are making some efforts - you know that we try on both sides," he said. Putin added that Germany, Europe's largest economy, remained one of Russia's most important trade and economic partners. Gabriel said both Russian and German companies had a great interest in boosting cooperation. Gabriel's Social Democrats are junior partners to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc in the coalition government, with an election due a year from now. He has taken a more conciliatory stance toward Moscow than Merkel, who says Russia must do more to help the shaky Ukraine peace process. The conservatives - Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU) - pushed back after Gabriel's comments. "The CDU/CSU parliamentary group cannot understand the remarks by minister Gabriel on the sanctions against Russia being phased out," said Juergen Hardt, the group's foreign policy spokesman. "We strongly support the view of the G7 countries - that a lifting of the sanctions is coupled with the full implementation of the Minsk agreement." Russia has retaliated against the sanctions by banning food imports from a range of Western countries including the EU. "My trip to Russia takes place when we have a very tense situation with no quick or easy results expected," said Gabriel, who took a business delegation with him to Moscow. "But for that very reason, isolation and confrontation offer no prospects and are not a sensible policy." At the start the meeting with Putin, Gabriel said he also wanted to talk about Syria. Recent incidents there like the attack on an aid convoy had "caused incredible concern" in Germany, he said. Putin assured him they would talk about it. (Reporting by Rene Wagner and Denis Pinchuk; writing by Madeline Chambers; editing by Mark Heinrich)
ACCRA (Reuters) - Cocobod, Ghana's cocoa regulator, signed a $1.8 billion loan with international banks on Wednesday to finance purchases for the 2016/17 season, which is due to open next month, it said. The size of the loan, which was signed in Frankfurt with 24 banks, is equal to the amount secured last year. Ghana, the world's second-biggest cocoa producer, will use the funds to purchase 850,000 to 900,000 tonnes of beans from farmers, Cocobod Chief Executive Stephen Opuni said. (Reporting by Kwasi Kpodo; Editing by Joe Bavier)
New Girl kicked off its sixth season Tuesday night, and one thing quickly became clear: As much as Schmidt, Nick and the rest of the loftmates would like us to think theyve matured, the truth is theyre still just as hapless as the day we met them.

Especially, especially Jess.

RELATEDNew Girl Fall Preview: Nick Returns From His 3-Month Reagan Rendezvous a Super Version of Himself

When last we saw Ms. Day, she had begun to come to terms with the lingering feelings she had for Nick  that is, until she encouraged him to fly to New Orleans with on-again girlfriend Reagan, who would be stationed in Louisiana for three months of pharmaceutical sales.

New Girl Season 6 Premiere

We discover early on that not much has changed with Jess. While Nick has been away from the loft, shes taken up all sorts of hobbies to distract herself from his absence  learning Portuguese, joining a gym, crafting wooden table legs, all the usual pastimes. But try as Jess might to convince herself shes OK with Nicks new relationship, his early return from New Orleans completely throws her off, and she finds she can barely string together a coherent sentence in his presence. (Naturally, she spends most of the episode trying to avoid Nick, which predictably goes super well.)

Once the rest of the loft is looped in about Jess unresolved feelings for her ex  We all need to meet new people, Schmidt correctly observes  she reluctantly attempts to tell Nick whats on her mind. But when she heads into his bedroom to break the deeply awkward news that she still likes him, Nick has a bombshell of his own to drop: He finished his first book while in New Orleans, and as a thank-you for encouraging him to take the trip in the first place, he dedicated it to Jess. (Well, and the Chicago Cubs, because priorities.)

With that sentimental moment hanging between them, Jess opts not to tell Nick about her feelings for him just yet. Settle in, shippers. Its going to be a long season.

Story continues

Elsewhere in the premiere:

RELATEDNew Girl: Staunch Republican Schmidt Is Not Voting for Donald Trump

* Cece and Schmidt, desperate to move out of the loft and start their lives as newlyweds, manage to find a house that wont completely drain their bank accounts. After firing Leslie, their stunningly unintelligent realtor (and the sister of Winstons girlfriend, Aly), Cece and Schmidt take a tour of their dream home  but in order to afford it, theyd have to put Schmidt and Nicks bar up as collateral.

Not willing to take the financial risk, Cece and Schmidt instead settle for a cheap fixer-upper  where you at, HGTVs Chip and Joanna Gaines?  and party it up in their new home with friends, champagne and a little celebratory demolition.

* As for Winston and Aly? Despite the fact that Aly is in Virginia for FBI training, and Winston was forced to spend the summer with her not-so-bright sister, theyre going stronger than ever  even from a distance. We have to tell each other everything, OK? Aly urges Winston during a Skype session, which prompts Winston to confess, I dont know what panache means. Ah, young love. So thrilling. So passionate.

OK, your turn. What did you think of New Girls Season 6 debut? Grade the episode in our poll below, then hit the comments to back up your choice!

Launch Gallery: Fall TV Predictions: <I>Grey's, Arrow, TWD</i> and 27 Others

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Vienna (AFP) - Austria's parliament on Wednesday approved December 4 as the new date for the presidential election re-run in a scandal-ridden race that could usher in the European Union's first far-right head of state.

Initially scheduled for October 2, the government was forced to postpone the vote after it emerged that the glue on postal vote envelopes was not sticky enough, meaning the ballots could be tampered with.

Dubbed "gluegate", this was the latest twist in an embarrassing saga, which erupted in July when the highest court annulled the election result from May after upholding the narrowly defeated far right's claims of procedural irregularities.

The decision has given 45-year-old Norbert Hofer of the popular anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe) another stab at winning the election, which he lost in May by just 31,000 votes to independent ecologist Alexander Van der Bellen, 72.

If he emerges victorious this time, Hofer would become Europe's first far-right head of state since 1945.

Latest polls show the rivals neck-and-neck.

The electoral chaos has left Austria without a president since July 8 when Heinz Fischer stepped down.

Wednesday's bill passed with the necessary two-thirds majority, but the FPOe voted against, demanding that postal voting -- used by 17 percent of voters in May -- be abolished.

The bill also foresees an update of the voter register to include 49,000 newly eligible Austrians, most of them having turned 16, while 45,000 names will be removed because they have died since the last ballot.

Earlier this week, parliament announced that the future president will not be sworn in until January 26, to give authorities sufficient time to investigate any potential new irregularities.

The role of Austria's president is largely ceremonial but not entirely. He or she can in theory sack the government -- something that Hofer has in the past threatened he will do.

Like other populist parties around Europe, the FPOe is currently leading national polls after stoking public fears about record immigration and rising unemployment.
When one Oregon man went to California for a friends wedding, he made a special request to the front desk of the hotel  he wanted Jeff Goldblum photos in his room.

Read: Bored Man Replaces Family Photos in Home With Steve Buscemi to Prank His Parents

When Seth Freedland and his girlfriend, Amy, checked into the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica over the weekend, they saw a collection of framed photos of the Jurassic Park actor around the room.

Even though I knew the frames would be there, it was still somehow shocking. You can't help but laugh, it's just such a surreal thing to see. And then of course I was just following Amy's reaction, which was everything you could hope for, he told InsideEdition.com

He says that the Independence Day star holds a special place in his girlfriends heart as he is her celebrity crush.

After the laughter died down a bit, she grabbed the shirtless Goldblum photo and made a thunderstruck face, he said.

Freedland says Norton, the concierge, asked if there was anything else he would need during his stay, he came up with the idea of the Goldblum pictures.

When I explained my plan to him, I did so pretty apologetically because I thought he might tell me it was overly strange. Instead his response was, Sounds like fun! and asked how many frames I wanted. We settled on three -- felt like the right amount of Goldblum, Freedland recalled.

Freedlands newfound attention has not altered his spirt, saying: The whole "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" thing gets a bad rap. When it's your turn, and you did something nice, it turns out it's actually pretty fun! You get a bunch of texts, the story kills every time. It's great!

Read: James Corden Plays Hide-and-Seek with Beck and Jeff Goldblum

He also joked: That said, I'm quitting my job tomorrow to start making appearances in shopping malls.

Story continues

If he could do it again, the only change they might make would be "replacing the photo of Amy making that exhilarated, shocked grimace after having traveled all day with a photo that shows her normal photogenic smile.

Freedland told InsideEdition.com that his favorite Goldblum flick is The Big Chill, while Amys is Independence Day and cites a specific scene where her crush on the 63-year-old actor began.

When he and Will Smith are victoriously walking away from the smoking wreckage in the desert, smoking cigars and laughing as their women jump into their arms. If this whole thing has an origin point, it's that single scene, he claims.

Watch: For Sheets' Sake! Multiple Hotels Do Not Change Bedsheets for New Guests, Investigation Reveals

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Lesbos (Greece) (AFP) - Greece on Wednesday managed to find shelter for some 5,000 migrants on the island of Lesbos two days after a fire ravaged part of the main asylum seekers' camp, officials said.

But overcrowding remains an acute concern on the island, one of the epicentres of the European migrant crisis, they said.

"The situation is calm but it has not been resolved," Lesbos Mayor Spyros Galinos told AFP.

"The glass has overflown... (the facilities) were built for 3,000 people and there are now 6,000. The locals are worried. There must be immediate steps to address the overcrowding," Galinos said.

Thousands fled Monday when dozens of tents and shelters at the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos were torched, in a blaze sparked when migrants of different nationalities got into a brawl.

According to police, the fire destroyed 60 pre-fabricated shelters, 100 tents and three reformed shipping containers that housed camp services.

The people arrested -- including Afghans, Iraqis as well as one national each from Senegal, Syria and Cameroon -- were taken into custody over the violence that led to the fire, a police source said.

Many had returned to the camp by Wednesday, while vulnerable minors were temporarily lodged in a former children's village already housing migrant families.

Others were shifted to the island's second camp of Kara Tepe and some spent the night in churches, said Efi Latsoudi, a human rights activist who was decorated for her work on Lesbos by the UN refugee agency earlier this month.

"There needs to be a long-term plan. Human lives and our dignity are at stake," she told Sto Kokkino radio.

The merchant marine ministry said a ferry is expected by Thursday to provide additional accommodation.

- EU blamed -

Fights amongst refugees and migrants, who are forced to wait for months for their asylum applications to be processed, are common in the camps.

"Afghans fight Syrians and Africans. We don't have food, we don't have facilities or medicine," said Diego, a 36-year-old Eritrean former soldier housed at Moria.

Story continues

"People in the camp are tired, they are tired of staying in the camp. Everybody wants freedom, everybody want to leave the camp," added Alex, a 19-year-old Nigerian man.

The merchant marine ministry's general secretary Yiannis Yiannelis-Theodosiadis blamed the deadlock on insufficient staff sent by the European Union to help Greece in the registration and asylum process.

"If the European Asylum Support Office could send 150 staff instead of 13, the (refugees) could leave within a day," Yiannelis-Theodosiadis said.

"This is why people are stuck here for two to three months, because cannot get a response to their appeals," he said.


Ms. Koh Mei Lee is the CEO of Malaysia's largest cinema chain, Golden Screen Cinemas (GSC).



21 Sep  Chief Executive Officer of Golden Screen Cinemas (GSC), Ms. Koh Mei Lee will be receiving the Exhibitor of the Year award at the Hong Kong exhibition and conference for the cinema industry, CineAsia, on 8 December 2016 at the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong.



"GSC's innovations in the cinema experience have changed the moviegoing culture in Malaysia and throughout Asia," said Andrew Sunshine, VP of The Film Expo Group, which manages CineAsia.



"They continue to be an industry leader and we congratulate them on this well-deserved honor."



CineAsia is a convention and tradeshow dedicated to the needs of the movie theatre industry, and GSC is recognised for the introduction of many innovations in its facilities including the D-BOX motion seats, Dolby Atmos audio technology, GSC Maxx, GSC MobileApp, and more.



GSC is the largest cinema chain in Malaysia with over 300 screens in 33 locations across the country.



GSC has also partnered with Galaxy Studio in Vietnam, operating screens in seven locations.



The cinema chain is planning to open its first nine-screen cinema in Cambodia in the first half of 2017.



CineAsia is set to take place from 6 to 8 December 2016 at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre.
Alessandro Michele unveiled his most extravagantly flamboyant Gucci collection yet on Wednesday with a pink-hued spectacular on the opening day of the latest Milan fashion week.

The Roman designer credited with reviving the fortunes of what was a flagging brand returned to the themes that have underpinned his turnaround and, it seemed, pushed each envelope a little further.

Androgynous looks were more prevalent than ever, his trademark giant glasses more jewel-encrusted than before, the platform shoes more vertiginous and shimmering with gems.

The idea, according to Michele's notes to a show entitled "Magic Lanterns," was to create a collection in which "the clothes tell a story steeped in wonder, phantasmagoria and unorthodoxy."

That meant, in practice, that the converted railway siding that hosted the show was done up with pink velvet banquettes to create an ambience somewhere between a super-kitsch 70s nightclub and a courtesan's boudoir.

Slippers with platform wedges were said to have been inspired by Venetian prostitutes, gowns were enriched with embroideries and ruffles and there were sparkly gold and purple leggings aplenty.

Wild animals were a theme on bags and on the backs of austere tweedy jackets. Suits on the male models nearly all featured three-quarter length trousers while the bell-bottomed female versions might have been designed for a hairy-chested lothario from the early 70s.

The inspirations for hairstyles were equally eclectic - spanning a range from Mork and Mindy to Marie-Antoinette.

That eclecticism might have been what Michele was referring to in his notes when he explained that he was seeking to "cultivate the unexpected."

He certainly did that and star guests actress Dakota Johnson and the cellist Kelsey Lu looked impressed.

But the initial online reaction was not nearly as rapturous as has been the case for Michele's previous collections.

Has he gone too far this time? Gucci's French owners will not mind as long as sales keeping ticking up as they have done consistently under the designer's artistic stewardship.

Story continues

- Leather bras -

Wunderkind, the youthful branch of German designer Wolfgang Joop's empire, made its Milan debut earlier in the day with a collection featuring long summer, partially transparent dresses over leather bras and transparent plastic trenchcoats with leather collars and cuffs.

Blugirl, the sexy younger sister of designer Anna Molinari's main womenswear brand Blumarine, served up a typically irreverent, mix-and-match collection.

Bohemian romanticism was to the fore in the form of 70s-style off-the-shoulder tops with puffball sleeves.

But the look was hardened sometimes with biker boots and sharp fringes helping to create a 'rock chick' edge, while a military theme was balanced out by ultra-feminine, delicate touches including frilly neckties.

Wunderkind is one of three Milan debutants among the 71 catwalk shows scheduled between Wednesday and Monday.

Paris-based couture star Giambattista Valli has shown his own younger line, Giamba, in Milan before but Friday's show will be the first time it has been included in the official programme.

The other newcomers are Chinese label Ricostru, the latest up-and-coming talent to benefit from the patronage of Giorgio Armani.

They will display their 2017 Spring/Summer collection at the Teatro Armani on Monday, a day which has been entirely given over to young designers in a move that has been branded something of a gamble.

Armani himself usually presents his main collection on the final day of Milan, thereby helping to delay the departure of hundreds of buyers and media for the next leg of the global fashion circuit, in Paris.

This year however the veteran designer is showing his main line on Friday and his Emporio Armani collection in Paris, generating fears the whole circus will decamp to the French capital on Sunday evening, after Dolce and Gabbana's afternoon show.

Carlo Capasa, the head of Italy's Chamber of Fashion, defended the decision. "I have a very high regard for young designers and I think it is right that we have a day just for them: the day of the future," he told reporters.
Marijuana arrests in western Nebraska climbed after recreational use of the drug became legal in Colorado, a new study by the University of Nebraska at Omaha found.

The study confirmed reports from sheriffs and prosecutors that more people were being arrested and jailed for marijuana after the change in Colorado law, but the researchers said they couldn't conclude whether the change was solely responsible for the uptick in arrests.

The increase could be the result of increased enforcement efforts by Nebraska authorities, they said.

"Obviously the decisions and the enforcement by the local law enforcement agencies has a very large impact on these numbers, said Ryan Spohn, director of UNO's Center for Justice Research.

Overall, Nebraska's marijuana arrest rate increased by 11 percent between 2013 and 2014, when pot became legal in Colorado, the study says.

And Nebraska spent an estimated $10.2 million enforcing marijuana laws, an 11 percent increase over the previous year, the study found.

Most of that spending came in counties along Interstate 80.

Counties along the Nebraska-Colorado border, in the Nebraska Panhandle and along the interstate corridor had the highest marijuana arrest rates for the state in 2014, the study found.

If Colorado's policy change was the sole cause, the researchers would expect the arrest data in border counties to be similar, he said, but the rates went in different directions in Deuel and Banner counties.

Banner County, which borders Wyoming, had a pronounced increase while Deuel County had a decrease, even though Interstate 76 comes into the county from Colorado, the study found.

"Theres no question that theres some sort of impact" from legalization, Spohn said.

Marijuana possession and sales arrests both increased in the period, but most of the arrests were for possession, the researchers found.

Possession arrests had been stable before Colorado legalized marijuana but reached a six-year high in 2014, the study found. Sales arrests had been trending downward before increasing in 2014.

Among border counties, marijuana sales arrests increased 39 percent from 2013 to 2014.

The study is a follow-up from a 2015 report examining the effects on Nebraska of Colorado's decision in 2000 to legalize medical marijuana.

Researchers last year found the fallout was less drastic than some expected.

The seven Nebraska counties bordering Colorado saw the largest increases in marijuana-related arrests and jailings, but interstate counties saw only moderate increases and some non-border counties saw marijuana offenses decrease.

The updated study's findings were presented to a legislative subcommittee last week.

"Our research thus far doesnt show the sky is falling or that Colorado is going to lead to Nebraska going to hell in a handbasket, but there does seem to be an impact," Spohn said.

Since legalization in Colorado, Nebraska officials have tried to halt legal recreational use there in court.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by the Nebraska and Oklahoma attorneys general arguing Colorado's legal weed violated each state's "unique, sovereign interests" in preventing marijuana from crossing within their borders.

State officials have since filed briefs asking to join a federal case on appeal in U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. The case combines a lawsuit brought by a group of county sheriffs from Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas and another on behalf of a Pueblo County, Colorado, couple who owns land near a recreational marijuana-growing facility.

A spokeswoman for Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson said he has read the UNO report and will continue to track the researchers' findings.

But Peterson believes the policy change is responsible for increased marijuana use in Nebraska and cited a recently released study by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area that found traffic stop seizures of Colorado marijuana by police outside of the state increased 37 percent after legalization.

There were 21 seizures in Nebraska in 2015, according to that report.
This is what happens when your school lunch favorites become grown-up delicacies

This is what happens when your school lunch favorites become grown-up delicacies

We just published a post of 90s snacks thatll bring back the nostalgia like whoa (along with a craving for Dunkaroos), but we got to thinking: What do you do when childhood cravings strike, but you want something thats not processed and packaged in neon colors and obviously not great for you?

So we compiled a list that will allow you to recreate the essence of your favorite elementary lunches  all grown up.

1. Cheese Straws

A photo posted by Paul Harrison Photography (@paul_harrison_photo) on Aug 18, 2016 at 10:43am PDT

We like to think that cheese straws (also sometimes called cheddar pennies, so adorbs) were the original Cheez-It. Different shape, yes, but same cheesy, umami-laden spirit. Made with little more than flour and a good cheddar (heavy on the cheddar, by the way), theyre the perfect savory, airy cocktail hour snack.

Want to get extra fancy? Use gruyere instead.

2. Adult lunchables, aka Cheeseplates

What youll need:

Cheese

A photo posted by by laura b. (@food.is.all) on Aug 25, 2016 at 2:07am PDT

A softer, creamier cheese like brie (pictured above) is utterly spreadable and a great complement to a crispy cracker. When looking for a great brie, look for a full-fat, high-fat content brie. Because, you know, thats what makes it taste good.

A photo posted by renskevanburen (@renskevanburen) on Aug 25, 2016 at 4:53am PDT

If you like your cheese a little more pungent (read: smelly) like we do, Camembert, pictured above (which looks very similar to brie) is a great option. Of course, if you wanted to stay true to the essence of the venerable Lunchable, you can always go with a high quality cheddar.

Salami

ColumbusSalami

If possible, get a log of salami that is not pre-sliced. Columbus is a pretty decent brand available at most grocery stores (its usually cheapest at Trader Joes) and is a mildly spiced, slightly peppery salami.

Story continues

Prosciutto

prosciutto

Alternatively, if youre looking for something a bit lighter in texture and more delicate in flavor, paper thin prosciutto  cured pork leg  is as seductive as it gets. To splurge on a decently sliced prosciutto, go to Whole Foods or a butcher, if you can, where they can slice it up for your fresh  a few slices are all you need if youre getting the good stuff.

Crackers

carrcrackers

You need a good, crispy cracker for this. Ritz was the heartthrob of our elementary school days, but were going to up the fancy to something a bit more refined. We like Carrs Table Water Crackers because theyre thin, crispy, but still substantial  and theyre distributed at almost all major groceries. Of course, if youre feeling like bagel chips or baguettes, we wont stop you.

3. Grown-Up Carrot Sticks + Dip

A photo posted by Nicole Osinga (@nicoleosinga_rd) on Jul 26, 2016 at 2:08pm PDT

This recipe takes the tenderness of carrots, adds some color by getting the rainbow variety, and throws in some Middle Eastern-influenced flavors (that are great to sprinkle on hummus) like zaatar, a blend of herbs, sesame seeds, and sumac.

And the dip has rosewater. Um, YUM.

4. DIY Fruit Roll-Ups

A photo posted by Zane Ozolina (@ozinaa) on Jun 22, 2016 at 11:42pm PDT

We cant think of a food thats more fun to eat. Except maybe those button candy things. Anyway, these fruit roll ups look a bit labor-intensive to make, but the actual recipe is quite simple.

Ugh, so cute.

5. Mommys Special, Boozy Pudding

A photo posted by @gabycooks on Aug 22, 2016 at 2:22pm PDT

We lovingly dubbed this recipe mommys special pudding because its boozy, NSFW, and represents one of the great privileges of being an adult.

Vegan bonus: if youre looking for a dairy-free pudding recipe, we love this one. It doesnt have booze, but you can drizzle in rum at your discretion. Because, rum.

Eat it with a plastic spoon for maximum nostalgic effect.

6. Healthy DIY Kool-Aid

A photo posted by Farah-Oceane Faivre (@farah.oceane) on Aug 25, 2016 at 8:28am PDT

Bet youre thirsty from that pudding.

Is there a better way to wash it down than with Kool-Aid?! Grown-up Kool-Aid, that is. Were totally impressed with this version, a no-sugar added bevvy thats sweetened with actual stevia leaf and tinted with ruby red hibiscus. Yes, please. We can totally see this being a great base for sangria, too, if you wanted to get a little boozy with this.

Now, were off to make our adult Lunchables!

The post This is what happens when your school lunch favorites become grown-up delicacies appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Fans of the Harry Potter series with a wad of cash to burn can soon live out a fantasy, as the fictional characters childhood home is up for sale in Berkshire, England.

On the market for 475,000 pounds ($620,000), the real world address is at 12 Picket Post Close, about 25 miles outside of London, CNN Money reported.

The house at 4 Privet Drive is where Harry spends his young years in the home of his malicious aunt and uncle. He lives under the staircase in a cupboard until he is sent off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, at the age of 11.

The Picket Post Close property was last sold in 2003 for 249,000 pounds ($325,000), the same year that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the series, was published.

While some Harry Potter fans have been in mourning since 2007 when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last novel in the series was published, author J.K. Rowling recently offered a reprieve.

The new play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, based on a short story Rowling wrote, opened in London in 2016. The story follows Harry as a middle-aged man and explores the fate of his son Albus, who is grappling with his fathers legacy. Playwright Jack Thorne adapted the story to the stage, and his faithful transposition of Rowlings universe has received rave reviews.

Although readers will miss Ms. Rowlings endlessly inventive imagination, which was continually elaborating the universe she had created in the books, Mr. Thorne has a visceral understanding of the dynamics and themes at work in those novels: the complicated equation between destiny and free will, the pull between duty and love, and the role that loneliness and anger can play in fueling hate, read an excerpt from the New York Times review.

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Danny Brown reflects on the trials of his youth on "Tell Me What I Don't Know," a hazy cut from his upcoming fourth LP, Atrocity Exhibition. "Last night, homie got killed at the liquor store," the rapper flows over producer Paul White's sweltering beat, full of droning synths and frenzied percussion.

Brown debuted the track during Zane Lowe's Beats 1 radio show, telling the host about its "old-school Danny Brown signature" vibe. "Talking that all that old-school Detroit shit, coming up in the hood  but still coming at it from a totally different angle than your average hood street rapper would," he said, describing the song.

"It's like karate with me," he continued. "I'm like on black belt status when it comes to beats. I can rap over two pots scraping each other. A lot of people just live behind the production. I can rap over anything, and I'm gonna make it dope  'Tell Me What I Don't Know' is one of those beats that I found, and it reminded me of a scene from The Warriors or something."



Brown discussed the inspiration and creation behind each track from Atrocity Exhibition on Complex. He credited Kendrick Lamar with fleshing out all-star single "Really Doe" (featuring Lamar, Ab-Soul and Earl Sweatshirt) into a finished song. "[Kendrick] went to the studio and heard it and just took it," he said. "Then he came back and he had a hook on it, a bridge ... and then I reached out to Earl and Ab. We threw their verses on it. So it's really his song."

Related Content:




(Mylan CEO Heather BreschReuters)

Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan  which makes the EpiPen  will be testifying in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Wednesday afternoon at 2 p.m. about the drugs price.

The price device, used in emergencies to treat severe allergic reactions, has increased more than 500% since Mylan acquired it in 2007. A two-pack of the EpiPen now has a list price of $608.

In her prepared testimony released ahead of the hearing, Bresch gave a background on Mylan as a company, and addressed some of the controversy around the rising price.

It troubles me greatly that the EpiPen product has become a source of controversy, she wrote.

The congressmen are going to have a lot of questions for Bresch, who will be testifying alongside FDA deputy director Dr. Doug Throckmorton. Here are some of the burning questions that will likely be brought up today:

1. How are executives compensated at Mylan?

Breschs pay is, in large part, tied to the companys earnings, and the executive team could make millions if they hit their earnings-per-share target by 2018. Will that mean that the price of the EpiPen will need to increase even more to hit that target?

2. What role did Breschs mom, Gayle Manchin, play in getting EpiPens in schools?

Her mother, Gayle Manchin, was president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, USA Today reports, when the NASBE launched an epinephrine policy initiative, which was the first time it had addressed food allergies.



This was after Bresch became CEO at Mylan, in 2012.

Shortly after, Mylan launched its EpiPen4Schools program, which is now the subject of an antitrust investigation by the New York attorney general. And in 2013, President Barack Obama signed legislation that helped public schools build up emergency supplies of EpiPens.

There is no truth to the suggestion that the companys efforts were anything but straightforward or that we are aware of anyone advocating inappropriately for the right of schoolchildren to have access to potential life-saving medicine, Mylan told USA Today in a statement.

Story continues

3. Why not just cut the actual list price?

This is a question Mylan has tried to answer in the past. In a letter to Senator Chuck Grassley, who was among the first to ask Mylan for questions, the drugmaker answered the big question:

The short answer is this: Mylan assessed available options under the existing pharmacy billing models to achieve the goal of delivering cost savings for patients with high out-of-pocket expenses and concluded that offering a generic version of EpiPen Auto-Injector would yield significantly greater and more sustainable cost savings for patients than a reduction in [wholesale acquisition cost] of the brand version would.

To fend off public outrage over the EpiPens cost, Mylan recently raised its copay-coupon system to cover $300 of out-of-pocket costs for those with commercial insurance. (A two-pack of the EpiPen has a list price of about $600.) The company has also said it would make an authorized generic version of the EpiPen that would cost $300 for a two-pack. Bresch also said in her testimony that Mylan has made it so families who make less than $97,200 can be eligible for free pens. That's up from $48,600 previously.

Looking back, I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients who may have ended up paying the full WAC price or more, Bresch said in her testimony. We never intended this. We listened and focused on this issue and came up with a sustainable solution.

4. Has Mylan made any improvements to the EpiPen since acquiring it?

Bresch said in her prepared testimony that the company has made two improvements to the EpiPen device: the first, a better EpiPen auto-injector device, and soon, an EpiPen with a longer shelf life. Right now, EpiPens tend to expire after about a year.

But congressmen could press this point, especially since the device only injects about a dollars worth of epinephrine, a hormone that exists naturally in our bodies and used in medical settings since the early 20th century.

NOW WATCH: A Chinese Olympic swimmer in Rio has tested positive for a banned substance

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On September 21, 1780, Revolutionary War hero Benedict Arnold turned his back on his country in a secret meeting with a top British official. So how did Arnold, with his patriots pedigree, become the most-hated man in America?

Where the meeting took place

Historians have several theories about why Arnold became a traitor: greed; mounting debt; resentment over other officers; a hatred of the Continental Congress; and a desire for the colonies to remain under British rule. The September 21 meeting with British Major John Andre was a disaster for both men.

Arnold was descended from of one of the founding families of Rhode Island. The major general led and served with honor at Ticonderoga, Quebec and Saratoga. But Arnold often fought with other officers and Congress. American commander George Washington understood Arnolds shortcomings, but valued his usefulness on the battlefield.

Arnold was wounded seriously at Saratoga and Washington put Arnold in charge of the city of Philadelphia after the British ended their occupation. When Washington then asked Arnold to rejoin his Army as a top commander, Arnold instead requested command of the Hudson Valley region and the facility at West Point, New York.

Andre was a top aide to British commander Sir Henry Clinton. The young major also led the British spy network and had been in secret talks with Arnold for some time.

Within a month of their meeting, Andre was executed under orders from American commander Washington for espionage, while Arnold fled to a British side that didnt exactly welcome him with open arms.

The British, and many Americans, blamed Arnold for the death of the popular Major Andre, and many people resented that it was Andre, and not Arnold, who swung from the gallows.

On September 21, with the help of a loyalist associate, Joshua Hett Smith, Arnold and Andre had met near the Hudson River at Smiths house. The men had corresponded using coded letters. Arnold would arrange for the British to easily take over the key American facility of West Point, which Arnold commanded. The price was 20,000 pounds and a British military command for Arnold.

Story continues

The British believed the acquisition of West Point would give their military control of the Hudson Valley, a potentially important blow to American independence. But fate conspired against both men. The British ship HMS Vulture, which had transported Andre to the meeting, was forced from the scene by American gunfire.

Andre was forced to walk back to the British lines in civilian disguise, but he was confronted by three American militiamen while Andre believed he was on British-controlled territory. The Americans quickly discovered the plot and Arnold was able to flee on the same ship that carried Andre up the Hudson River.

Washington reportedly authorized kidnap plots to seize Arnold to be either returned to American lines for execution, or to be killed on sight. As a British commander, Arnold led forays into Virginia and Connecticut, and he was able to flee to Britain after the war concluded.

Later in life, Arnold failed in several business ventures in Britain and Canada, and he died in England in 1801. One Massachusetts newspaper noted his passing with one line: In England, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, notorious throughout the world.

In popular culture, the words Benedict Arnold became synonymous with treason or becoming a traitor. And at West Point, Arnolds name was erased from a series of monuments that honor the generals of the Revolutionary War.

Back in 1781, Benjamin Franklin wrote to the Marquis De Lafayette about Arnolds treason, after American agents seized a letter that said Arnold only received 5,000 pounds for his acts. Franklin compared Arnold to Judas and said it was a miserable bargain especially when one considers the quantity of infamy he has acquired to himself and entailed on his family.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / September 21, 2016 / Today, Stephan Bogner from Rockstone Research published an update on Commerce Resources Corp. (CCE.V). Last week, the company reported sampling assays from the Miranna Area, located only 1 km east of its Ashram REE Deposit in Quebec. The best results include 5.9% and 4.2% niobium pentoxide (Nb2O5). The 9 selected samples reported by Commerce averaged 2.3% Nb2O5. Of all 64 samples, 40 assayed >0.5% Nb2O5, with 16 surpassing 1%. Sampling also found significant grades of tantalum, phosphate and rare earth oxides (2 samples each graded >1,000 ppm Ta2O5 and 1% Nb2O5, while several samples revealed >10% P2O5).

When comparing these niobium grades with the range of global average mining grades of about 0.5 to 1.5% Nb2O5, and the average grades of niobium exploration projects, Commerce Resources indeed has every reason for being enthusiastic.

Niobium focused juniors seem to be enjoying a recent lift in share prices and market valuations potentially due to positive demand growth for niobium for structural steel for infrastructure projects, as well as for the current lighter and stronger chassis for cars. MDN Inc. has recently seen its' share price appreciate by almost 400% following the announcement of their acquisition of the James Bay Niobium Project, called the Argor Project, which has an historic indicated resource with a grade of 0.52% Nb2O5.

Last year, NioCorp Developments Ltd. (originally structured by Zimtu Capital Corp.) reported an average indicated resource grade of 0.71% Nb2O5 assuming a 0.3% cut-off grade at its Elk Creek Niobium Deposit in Nebraska, USA. Today, NioCorp enjoys a market valuation exceeding $150 million CAD.

The full report can be accessed with the following links:

English (PDF):

http://rockstone-research.com/images/PDF/Commerce20en.pdf

English (web version):

http://rockstone-research.com/index.php/en/research-reports/1628-Commerce-Resources-records-highest-niobium-mineralized-sample-to-date-at-Miranna

Story continues

German (PDF):

http://rockstone-research.com/images/PDF/Commerce20de.pdf

For smartphones, an APP from Rockstone Research is available in the AppStore for Apple devices and in the GooglePlayStore for Android devices.

Recently, Zimtu Capital Corp. launched the Beta Version of its Advantage APP, in which all interlisted stocks (i.e. all public companies listed in Canada and Germany) can be tracked. After a cost-free registration, the full features of the APP are unlocked, e.g. sorting all stocks with the biggest daily trading volumes on all German or Canadian exchanges (see instructions in the section "How To Use"): www.zimtuadvantage.com

Disclaimer: Please read the full disclaimer within the full research report as a PDF as fundamental risks and conflicts of interest exist.

SOURCE: Rockstone Research
A Nebraska State Patrol trooper seized $156,000 from a rental car parked outside a Sarpy County gas station in June, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

The trooper said he was conducting routine surveillance on the Pump and Pantry convenience store near the Nebraska Crossing outlets June 29 when he saw a man smoking outside a minivan parked at a gas pump.

After watching a nervous encounter between the man and another man coming out of the convenience store, the investigator walked up to the van, he said in an affidavit.

He told the men they weren't in trouble or suspected of any crime, he said, but he asked to search the van after becoming suspicious about their travel plans. The men gave permission, the affidavit said.

The investigator found a small amount of marijuana in a bag but no other contraband, he reported.

Then he found a cardboard box holding a large sum of cash in the van's stow and go compartment, he reported. Moments later, he found a second box full of money.

A drug dog indicated it smelled drugs coming from the area where the boxes were found, the affidavit said.

The two men were released after being taken taken to the patrol's Omaha office where the money was counted. It totaled $156,465.

In his affidavit, the trooper said criminal checks showed the two men had been convicted of drug violations associated with conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Their criminal histories, along with their nervous behavior, the drug dog's reaction and the way the money was packaged and hidden led the investigator to believe it is associated with drug dealing, he said.

Neither of the men has been charged with possessing drug money or any other offense, according to state court records.

A patrol spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment on why the men weren't cited and referred for prosecution under state laws outlawing the possession of drug money.

Federal civil asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement to seize suspected drug money without convicting the owners of a crime.

The owner of the seized property can challenge the forfeiture of the property in court under federal law.
donald trump american bridge

Hillary Clinton's top super PAC has some tips for how the former secretary of state  and even presidential debate moderators  could challenge Donald Trump during a debate.

On Wednesday, American Bridge, one of the most influential super PACs backing the Democratic presidential nominee, launched an online guide with tips on "How to Outfox Donald Trump" during the upcoming presidential debates.

The guide includes 13 sections detailing the Republican presidential nominee's evasions on issues such as his previous support for the Iraq War, his questioning of President Barack Obama's birthplace, and his imitation of a New York Times reporter with a disability.

The sections offer sharp rebuttals to Trump  if the real-estate magnate suggests he has not released his tax returns because he is being audited by the IRS, for example, the guide suggests a reply: "But don't you want people to see your success?"

American Bridge President Jessica Mackler said in a statement to Business Insider that the key to besting Trump in the debate is anticipating his response to sensitive questions.

"From his years of birtherism to his support for the Iraq War, Donald Trump hasn't hesitated to distract, distort, and outright lie about his well-documented record," Mackler said.

Mackler added: "Trump dances around the truth and ducks the facts when challenged, but he isn't immune to accountability, so we're here to cut through Trump's smoke and mirrors and let voters know where he really stands  whether he remembers or not  on the issues."

As for the actual debates, the candidates appear to be embracing different strategies, though campaigns often posture about debate preparation in the hopes of manipulating expectations.

The Clinton campaign has acknowledged the difficulty of predicting how Trump will act during the debates, and is preparing for a host of different scenarios, including responding to professional issues like Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and personal issues like former President Bill Clinton's marital infidelities.

Story continues

For his part, Trump has emphasized repeatedly that while he is undergoing some debate preparation sessions, he does not want to spoil his outspoken, candid pitch to voters by sounding scripted.

NOW WATCH: 'PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE': James Carville goes on an impassioned rant in defense of the Clinton Foundation





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Paris (AFP) - The clean lines of Scandinavian style dominate home interiors.

But a new more theatrical, baroque look of curiosity cabinets and sumptuous velvets is set to sweep through our homes if the trends at the big Maison et Objet show (Paris Design Week) in the French capital is anything to go by.

- Less grey, more grigris -

"We live in anxious times. Step out of our doors and we are confronted with fear, insecurity and pollution," design guru Vincent Gregoire told AFP.

"So indoors we want to break free, we want sensuality, theatricality and opulence, even surrealism," added Gregoire, who helped put together this year's show.

With its luxuriant thick shag-pile carpets, marble, velvety taffeta, copper and brass, the look is not all that far from the 19th-century Second Empire style that sprung up from the decadent court of Napoleon III and his big-spending wife empress Eugenie.

The fact that there are so many amulets around also shows the need for more than just physical comforting in these troubled times.

Nomades Authentic, which often works with shells and semi-precious stones, had begun putting Catholic holy medals in bell jars.

But in the wake of the deadly terror attack in Nice -- close to where its creator Evelyne Viladrich is based -- she began adding crucifixes too.

"These are spiritual objects," she said. "We have need of them now."

For Gregoire the look is all about the "spirit of the Victorian curiosity cabinets. We had that a few years ago but it was a little scary, with skulls and that... Now we have funny animals which bring good luck, or bad, and which we can play with."

- Animal kingdom -

The city dweller who longs for nature can also transform their home into a cozy hunting lodge.

If the real thing seems a bit much, why not decorate your walls with fake stag and bulls' heads made of wood you can mount yourself (from the Italian studio Miho Unexpected Things or the Dutch Studio Roof)?

Story continues

They come upholstered or in tartan and can be accessorised with glasses, or hats from the Spanish firm Softheads.

Crockery is getting closer to nature too, with drawings of little wandering insects popping up on plates.

And why not put a peacock in your sitting room? Dutch taxidermists Museumwinkel have everything from (farmed) butterflies starting at five euros euros ($5.60) to a lion (who died in a Belgian zoo) for 22,000.

"People want to get closer to nature and these pieces are unique," said spokeswoman Nicolette Naphausen. "We are giving animals a second life."

Set up six years ago by an accountant, Museumwinkel now employs four full-time taxidermists.

More cutesy are Anne-Claire Petit's knitted animals -- giant lobsters, Bambis, woodpeckers and cats, the nearest things you will get to an adult cuddly toy.

- Child cocoons -

Nature too has found its way into children's bedrooms, where soft hues and light-coloured wood are taking over.

"Ten years ago or so everything was very colouful. Today the kids rooms are getting closer to the adult world," said Sandrine Guigou, co-founder of the brand Lilipinso.

"And when rooms are not in pastels, they tend to have black and white urban graphics," she added.

Cacti, swans, butterflies, flowers and features are the main motifs used by this wallpaper and rug maker which works with around 100 designers from around the world.

For Austrian company VividGrey is it all about creating calm. Their lamps and bedding comes in either grey or blue cotton and linen to create soft and poetic interiors that last.

"There is so much colour in children's toys, (using subtler hues) creates a calmer atmosphere, making the home a shelter, or a cocoon," said Sabine Fajana.

"Before parents would buy a completely designed children's room from a specialist," said Thomas Lepine, of the Paris brand Charlie Crane. "But with the arrival of stores such as Ikea, they pick and chose, maybe getting the basics from Ikea and indulge themselves elsewhere with well-chosen pieces."

His brand's wooden high chairs and loungers have a Scandinavian air while the metal tube chairs for older infants hark back to the designs of French modernist designer Jacques Hitier.

- Hunt for the unique -

A public hungry for novelty, for rarely seen and surprising objects has helped boost the market for artisan creators.

At Maison et Objet, makers come from all corners of the world with their rugs, terracotta cut, rustic and recycled furniture and sofas dressed with kilims carpets.

With everyone looking for the unique, the Dutch firm Doing Goods call themselves modern "treasure hunters", combing the flea markets of New York to the streets Delhi for unusual objects. Snowdrops from Copenhagen even sell old laundry bats which were used to beat the dirt out of clothes.

"A unique piece is also something you can personalise," said Vincent Gregoire.

Although is is not always about luxury, he insisted. Technology is making design accessible to everyone.

"Machines that allow you to print images onto everything from cushions to plates are being sold more widely now," he added.
The Hong Kong Department of Justice failed in its bid Wednesday to have tougher sentences imposed on the youngest legislator in territorys history, and two democracy activists, over their involvement in street protests two years ago.

The public gallery applauded as Nathan Law, who was elected to the territorys legislature earlier this month at the age of 23, was told that his original 120-hour community service would stand.

The 80-hour community service sentence on Joshua Wong  age 19 and a co-founder with Law of the political party Demosisto, which advocates self-determination for the semiautonomous Chinese territory of 7.2 million  was also upheld, along with a three-week suspended prison sentence for student leader Alex Chow, 25.

Prosecutors argued that the trios decision to storm a public plaza outside Hong Kongs legislative headquarters, together with around 100 other demonstrators on Sept. 26, 2014, was a premeditated show of force, and cited injuries received by several security guards in scuffles on that night. A prosecution attempt to bring up precedents related to the sentencing of triad gang members brought guffaws of laughter from the courtroom.

Lawyers for the defense argued that Law, Wong and Chow were willing to bear responsibility and apologized to anybody injured during the storming of the square.

In delivering her ruling, magistrate June Cheung said that the department had failed to provide sufficient evidence for the necessity of a tougher sentence and added that noncustodial sentences were not unprecedented in such cases. The Department of Justice was ordered to pay costs.

Law was convicted in July of inciting unlawful assembly for his role in the 2014 Umbrella Revolution that saw key districts of Hong Kong occupied for nearly 80 days by protesters seeking greater political freedom. Wong and Chow were convicted of the lesser charge of participating in an unlawful assembly.

Story continues

The sentences have been viewed as lenient by establishment figures in Hong Kong. The pro-Beijing legislator Junius Ho, who is a former president of the Hong Kong Law Society, described the penalties as grossly inadequate in an open letter to the territorys Secretary for Justice.

Speaking outside the court, Chow accused the government of attempting to settle political bills with dissidents.

Wong said that the ruling proves that Hong Kong still has approximation of rule of law and judicial independence. In the future, well still commit to the democracy movement to fight for freedom and human rights, and in the future civil disobedience will still be the way for us to fight for the future of Hong Kong.

Veteran pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung, who was present outside the courthouse, accused the government of abusing its power in seeking a review of the sentence. Its a matter for the magistrate to decide whether the punishment is appropriate or not, he told TIME.

 With reporting by Rishi Iyengar and Kevin Lui / Hong Kong
Three young Hong Kong activists who led the city's massive "Umbrella Revolution" pro-democracy protests walked free from court Wednesday after a renewed bid by prosecutors to jail them.

It comes as tensions remain high in the semi-autonomous city with fears growing that China is tightening its grip, sparking a growing independence movement.

Nathan Law, 23, who was recently voted in as the city's youngest lawmaker and wants self-determination for Hong Kong, was one of the trio in court and slammed Wednesday's hearing as a political move.

"The Department of Justice and the government are basically hunting those (who took part in) civil disobedience and those who uphold democratic values," he told reporters.

Law, Joshua Wong and Alex Chow were all convicted in August for taking part in, or inciting others to take part in, a protest that led up to the major pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014 calling for fully free elections of the city's leader.

They were given community service or suspended sentences after the magistrate said she believed they had been "genuinely expressing their views" during the protest, which saw students climb over a fence into the Hong Kong government complex.

But prosecutors sought a sentence review in court Wednesday, asking for jail terms for the three.

They argued the protest they led was large-scale and that the defendants had not shown genuine remorse.

Magistrate June Cheung, who also handed down the original verdict and sentencing, dismissed the review case.

"During sentencing, I already took into account carefully the seriousness of the case, thus imposing community service as well as a suspended sentence -- which can legally replace jail terms -- to the three, who are first offenders," Cheung said.

It is not clear whether prosecutors will try to appeal further.

Law said prosecutors must have come under "huge political pressure" to bring the review.

Story continues

Chow, 25, said it had been brought "to suppress those who oppose the government and ask for universal suffrage through the legal system".

Wong, 19, who became the face of the Umbrella Movement, urged supporters to continue civil disobedience as a way to campaign for freedoms and rights.

Hong Kong has been governed under a "one country, two systems" deal since it was handed back by Britain to China in 1997.

The agreement is designed to protect Hong Kong's freedoms for 50 years, but there are concerns those liberties are already being eroded.

Law and Wong have together set up a new political party calling for Hong Kongers to have a choice over their sovereignty when the handover deal expires in 2047.

Wong is still too young to stand for parliament as the minimum age for candidates is 21.
Hong Kong police Wednesday arrested six people with suspected triad links over death threats to a newly-elected lawmaker who advocates greater autonomy from China.

Eddie Chu was one of several rebel lawmakers to win seats in Hong Kong's landmark legislative elections this month.

He and his family have been under 24-hour protection since the vote on September 4 because of the threats.

Police told AFP six men aged 19 to 53 have been arrested for "criminal intimidation" in connection with the death threats to Chu.

They said initial investigations revealed they were thought to be members of triad organised crime gangs.

Television footage showed some of the suspects wearing black hoods and being led into a police station.

"Though I'm happy to see that the police have carried out the arrests, it doesn't mean the threat to my family has been removed," Chu said in a written response on his Facebook page.

"The power that is manipulating and intimidating behind the scenes and shielding the collusion between officials, business people, village strongmen and gangsters is still controlling Hong Kong's political development and our lives," he said.

Chu is an environmentalist who has campaigned against the destruction of heritage properties to make way for newer developments.

He has sought to expose shady political dealings in rural areas where local strongmen are influential and have been accused of having links to criminal gangs.

Triad gangs have traditionally been involved in drug-running, prostitution and extortion but increasingly operate in legitimate ventures such as property and the finance industry.

Some are believed to have links with the political establishment and there have previously been allegations of triads sending paid thugs to stir up trouble during protests.

Chu was one of at least five candidates in the semi-autonomous city pushing for more distance or even an outright break from Beijing who took seats for the first time in the Legislative Council, as fears grow that China is tightening its grip on Hong Kong.

Story continues

Chu has previously said he was threatened because of his political views.

The legislative elections were the first major polls since the 2014 democracy rallies, with the anti-establishment camp increasing its share of seats in the legislature which is still weighted towards Beijing.

Chu, standing as an independent, emerged as winner in his constituency with more than 80,000 votes -- the most of any candidate.

The election saw the highest voter turnout since Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997 under an agreement guaranteeing its freedoms for 50 years.
During a ceremony Wednesday morning at John Hopkins Hospital, the Pediatric Oncology Division of the Kimmel Cancer Center announced that they received a $50,000 grant from Hyundai's Hope on Wheels. The grant is given to help improve care and increase treatment options for kids with cancer in Maryland. Also as a part of the ceremony were some of the young cancer patients, who left handprints on the Hyundai Hope on Wheels Hero Vehicle to commemorate their fight against the disease.
Each month brings a new reason to visit Austin, and October is no exception. Spanning two weekends, the annual Austin City Limits Music Festival kicks off September 30, and the Kimpton Hotel Van Zandt finished five new presidential suites just in the nick of timeperfect for rockers who prefer a refined space to lay down their guitar. The rest of the property debuted in Austins Rainey Street District last year (a historic area now known for its hopping food and nightlife).

All of the five presidential suites were eclectically designed by Mark Zeff with rock stars in mind, and sport incredible views, hardwood floors, Carrara marble, and wall coverings crafted from Italian wood. Expansive kitchens feature Gaggenau appliances, a Symbol Audio vinyl-record console with a full-album library, high-tech amenities, and a poker table. Choose the Lefty Suite for its upright piano, although all of the suites feature a Bluetooth-enabled Marshall sound system for those who would rather not play their own music.

If you have time in between sessions, check out the rest of the hotel, which was also designed by Zeff. Named after historic Texan Isaac Van Zandt, the Republic of Texas ambassador to the United States, and his third-great-grandson and musician Townes Van Zandt, the property also showcases original artwork by Townes son JT. The 360-room hotel also offers live music nightly, a pool with cabanas overlooking the city, and a lobby bar that serves complimentary wine tastings alongside a blazing fireplace and another Symbol Audio record console. During the day, hop on one of the hotels Public Bikes to ride around Lady Bird Lake (formerly Town Lake) or to seek out the best-roving barbecue truck, La Barbecue. Three of the five presidential suites (Rainey, Van Zandt, and Loretta) are around $2,500 per night, while Lefty and Pancho go for around $2,000. (hotelvanzandt.com)

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Nancy Hicks Reporter Nancy Hicks reports on Lincoln city government, but shes been following the leaders of local and state government for more than 40 years. Follow Nancy Hicks Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

Its been three years since the citys wheel tax went up. And no one is suggesting an increase in the near future.

But people are already whining about one of the least popular local fees and taxes because the probability of an increase is built into the citys long-range transportation plan. A five-year update of that plan is being discussed by City Council and planning commission members.

The plan includes the assumption that the wheel tax will go up on average $5 every five years, said City-County Planning Director David Cary. That assumption is based on the reality that the wheel tax has in fact risen about $5 every five years.

The new transportation plan, now in draft form, continues this assumption. In estimating future revenue, planners built in a wheel tax increase for 2021 and then one every five years through 2040, Cary said.

The city wheel tax for cars is $74 and brings in about $18 million annually, money used for maintenance and new street construction.

Keeping drunks safe

Last weekend, police took almost 90 drunk people to the citys detoxification unit.

Most of them came in after noon on Saturday, when people were partying on a lovely Husker gameday. The detox center was busy through the evening, said Phil Tegeler, executive director of the Bridge Behavioral Health.

On Sunday, staff members were busy discharging people, making sure they were safe as they left and that they had the shoes and socks and clothing they may have lost during the previous days revelry.

Tegeler reported on admissions between midnight Friday and noon Sunday as the Lincoln City Council considered the next two-year contract with the Bridge for what are called civil protective custody services.

Some of the detox guests are out-of-towners. The sheriffs department had a report this weekend of a male with no Nebraska affiliation, who was observed to be extremely intoxicated and trying to get into a vehicle. He was taken to the Bridge with a blood alcohol level of .361 percent.

Last year, the Bridge admitted about 3,900 people under the civil protective custody program.

Being drunk in public is not a crime in Nebraska, so the Bridge offers a place where people who are so drunk they are a danger to themselves or others can be held for 24 hours. Some of them were driving and got ticketed for DUI. Others were on the streets, often downtown, partying. Some people admit themselves or friends admit them so they can be professionally detoxed.

About 450 of those admitted last year were teenagers between 14 to 18, Tegler said. More than 52 percent of the teens had a BAC level of .25 or greater, enough to be concerned about alcohol poisoning and withdrawal.

Without this program, many of the people would have been charged with a minor crime -- trespassing, public indecency, disturbing the peace and put in jail, said City Councilwoman Jane Raybould. Many would have stayed all weekend because judges dont work those days.

Putting all those people in jail for as many as three days would have cost more than $1 million, based on the $95 per day jail cost. The city will pay the Bridge $372,920 next year for the civil protective custody program.

The Bridge has other programs, including short- and long-term treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction. But it is most well known for the detox program, which it has been operating since 1985.

Streets are expensive

The city expects to receive around $2.4 billion in transportation funding over the next 23 years from local, state and federal taxes. Thats a big number, but transportation projects are expensive. And the citys long-range transportation plan gives a few examples of these costs.

* Widening a road -- $12 million a mile

* Adding a new bus route -- $60,000 a mile a year

* Putting in a trail -- $300,000 a mile

Hubka retiring; Herz returning

Steve Hubka, the citys finance director, is retiring at the end of the month, likely before the budget fight of 2016 is finished. Hubka, who has worked for the city for nearly 35 years, announced his retirement last spring before the budget brawl began.

Former Finance Director Don Herz will return as interim finance director while the administration conducts a nationwide search for Hubkas successor. Herz retired in 2011 after 12 years as the citys finance director.

Hubka has held two important city jobs for the past five years. Hes been both the budget director and the finance director, heading the entire Finance Office. Mayor Chris Beutler intends to fill the finance position first, then decide what to do about the budget director.

City Engineer also retiring

Another top city leader is retiring. Roger Figard, who has been the city engineer for 25 years, announced his retirement last week. Figard has also served as executive director of the Railroad Transportation Safety District, which handles construction projects related to rail crossings.

As city engineer, he's been in charge of almost all linear concrete -- streets and sidewalks, but not trails. That means building them, maintaining them, keeping the traffic flowing on them and keeping them free of snow and ice. He is also responsible for most public construction in the right-of-way, which includes water and sewer projects.

Figard started with the city in February 1979 and spent six years as a construction engineer and six years as superintendent of water production and treatment for Lincoln Water System.

Figard wont be leaving until Thanksgiving.
By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. congressional committee has launched an examination of the Food and Drug Administration's criminal office, raising questions about the units management and handling of cases involving food, drugs and devices. The House Energy and Commerce Committee told FDA Commissioner Robert Califf it is "examining management concerns" and "possible morale concerns with the field offices" of the Office of Criminal Investigations. The September 20 letter, signed by committee chairman Fred Upton and Tim Murphy, chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, seeks answers to a detailed list of questions by October 12. Among other issues, the House committee questions why George Karavetsos, director of the Rockville, Maryland-based FDA criminal office, is allowed to run the unit from an office in South Florida, near his home. An FDA spokeswoman said the agency received the letter and will respond to the committee directly. The House questions come two weeks after Reuters reported how some FDA agents complain criminal office managers have forced them to pursue cases involving mislabeled foreign-imported injectable drugs, at the expense of cases with more potential to protect the public health. Current and former agents complain they have turned into the "Botox Police," spending thousands of hours chasing doctors who purchased authentic versions of Allergan's anti-wrinkle drug that were labeled for use in other countries. Some agents say their efforts have done little more than protect the pharmaceutical industry's high drug prices in the United States. Those concerns come as the criminal office has had mixed success in bringing cases. From fiscal year 2008-2015, Reuters found, more than half of all opened OCI cases were closed without action. The House committee asked Califf to explain the process for how criminal cases get opened, and to provide statistics on OCI's arrests, convictions, case initiations and amount of money recovered. Reuters also reported on Karavetsos' relocation to Florida, a move that came less than two years after the FDA paid more than $25,000 to move him to Maryland. Karavetsos, in a prior interview, defended the offices efforts, saying statistics are not a fair measure of OCI's success because public health and safety will "always trump the criminal investigation." FDA Regulatory Affairs Associate Commissioner Melinda Plaisier defended Karavetsos move to Miami, saying it was good for the FDA and his family. The House committee letter also questions how the FDA responded to two prior reports, from the Government Accountability Office and the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General, that were critical of the criminal office. The 2012 OIG report cited problems with how the Rockville-based office is run and concluded that field offices lack the discretion to open cases to address food and drug concerns prevalent in their locales. The report cited a lack of independence within the FDAs criminal office. OCI is housed within the Office of Regulatory Affairs, which is responsible for compliance inspections and helps determine the criminal offices budget. The inspector general recommended structural changes to ensure the independence of investigations. FDA leadership at that time rejected those suggestions. The criminal office headquarters controls the opening of investigations. Some agents have questioned the offices priorities and say they have, on occasion, been told not to open cases involving other federal agencies. A September 2015 email from Robert West, the recently retired Special Agent in Charge of the Miami field office, is one example. West, in the email, contended agencies including the FBI, the HHS OIG and Homeland Security investigators "were riding our coattails and were not bringing anything to the table." Involving those agencies in an investigation from day one, he wrote, "is unacceptable." West previously declined interview requests. Reuters could not immediately reach him Tuesday through an FDA spokeswoman. (Editing by Ronnie Greene)
Several years ago Aurora DeMarco, 53, was having health problems. The divorced masseuse and hospice care provider was stressed, depressed, and overwhelmed by all the upkeep of her three-bedroom condo in the tony Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, known for its majestic brownstones and trendy boutiques. And she hated that simply meeting a friend in one of the nearby artisanal coffee shops had become astronomically expensive.

Life was a grind, says DeMarco. It was a lot of money, time, and effort to maintain that lifestyle.

So two years ago, DeMarco left it all behind.

In the glorious 60s, we might have said that she turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. Or maybe wed just cut to the chase and say that she joined a commune. In fact, DeMarco did the modern-day equivalent: She joined an intentional community, a group-living arrangement that in some ways harks back to the heyday of hippies. Its becoming an increasingly popular lifestyle choice for more mainstream residents as rents, home prices, and the cost of living just keep rising.

She now pays $810 a month for her own room in a 10-bedroom house in New York Citys Staten Island as part of the Ganas community. The 75-member group is spread out over eight buildings in the neighborhood. And the best part for DeMarco, who still works outside the community, is everyone shares in the burden of cooking and other daily chores.

I feel like I have a support network, DeMarco says. Im not so much on the hamster wheel.

An antidote to the stresses of modern life

Members of the Los Angeles Eco-Village having a potluck meal with neighbors Los Angeles Eco-Village

DeMarco is one of a growing number of individuals in recent years who have sought out intentional communities, where people with the same ideals live and work together to achieve them. Some indeed fit the classic 60s definition of communeswhere members have jobs in their communities and share finances, lifestyles, everything. Others are modern varieties of co-housing communities, such as eco-villages where participants strive to be more environmentally friendly.

Story continues

Decades after communes sprang into the public consciousness promoting the ideals of peace, love, and understanding, communities across the country report that interest from potential members is again surging. Cheaper prices tell part of the story. But so does a desire for a simpler, more unplugged lifestyle.

The Fellowship for Intentional Community, a networking and support group for the establishments, says their numbers in the U.S. increased by about 300% from 1990 to 2010 (its most recent data).

There are a lot of people who are pretty disappointed with the way the American Dream worked out. People feel isolated, says Sonoma County, CAbased Realtor Cassandra Ferrera, who specializes in helping clients seeking sites for new establishments. These intentional communities are like social experiments to find a better way to live.

Sure, theres still plenty of patchouli and dreadlocks. But members regularly drive to work or to the movies, surf the web, and enroll their children in public schools.

[These] are not your mamas communes, Ferrera says. Theyre just going to keep growing as a market niche.

Business has been so good the past few years at Green Key Real Estate that Ferrera has had to hire new staffers and closes on several group properties annually. The numbers might be higher, she says, if it werent for the legal complications of group ownership, and zoning and sanitation restrictions in many towns that limit the number of people who can live on the same plot.

The classic commune: No rent, no mortgage, no outside job

Communes like Twin Oaks allow members to get up close and personal with nature. The rest is up to you. Twin Oaks Archives

When people think of the new age of communes, egalitarian communes such as Twin Oaks often come to mind. About 100 members live on the peaceful, 452-acre settlement in rural Virginia, nestled between Richmond and Charlottesville. Everyone is required to work 42 hours a week. This can range from labor in one of the businesses on the property, such as making tofu or hammocks, or cooking meals for the group.

In exchange for their labor, residents never have to worry about having a roof over their heads, enough food to eat, or clothes on their backsall of these are covered. They also get health insurance and a stipend of $102 a month to buy a few things for themselves or go out to dinner.

I wanted that simple life, says Tom Freeman, 52, who sells tofu made at Twin Oaks to health food stores like Whole Foods along the East Coast. I live on a hippie commune, because I dont have to stress about [anything].

The TaChai house is home to the Twin Oaks Communitys hammock shop and has several bedrooms above.

The former lab technician joined the commune 20 years ago after visiting some college friends there. He was enchanted by seeing members growing organic vegetables, milking cows, and making their own cheese.

He now lives in an 18-bedroom house with the same number of inhabitants, including his 13-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son. (He met his ex-wife at the commune.) Everyone, including children, receive their own bedroom within the compounds seven houses. There is also a communal kitchen, a community center, and a childrens buildingand perks like a swimming pond, volleyball court, and sauna.

The stress of a maintaining a household, buying a car, and just living life is very hard, Freeman says. So when the economys bad, we tend to get a lot of interest.

Cheap rent and a light footprint on Earth

Members of the Los Angeles Eco-Village live off the land. Los Angeles Eco-Village

Members of eco-villages focus on reducing their carbon footprint. Theres no free room and board in most of these groupsresidents have external jobs and dont share finances. But the green emphasis is helping make these communities ever more popular, says Lois Arkin, founder and executive director of the Los Angeles Eco-Village.

About 40 members live in individual apartments at the Los Angeles Eco-Village in three buildings spread across two city blocks. They grow much of their own produce, eat less meat, and drive fewer gas guzzlers. Many homes and individual units are also outfitted with solar panels and greywater systems.

Their environmentalism is rewarded with very cheap rents on their studios to two-bedroom abodeswhich range from just $500 to $1,200 a month. (Thats in L.A., where the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city was $1,950 in August, according to Apartment List.) Arkin says she receives double the number of inquiries than she did just three years ago.

The inexpensive housing is possible because the buildings are like group-owned co-ops, and the land they rest on is owned by a community trust.

On the other side of the country, demand is also up at the Ecovillage at Ithaca, in upstate New York. The 25-year-old community has grown to about 240 residents spread over three neighborhoods. The latest neighborhood was completed in late 2015 with 25 single-family homes and a 15-unit apartment building.

When Arlene Muzyka started as the visit coordinator there about a year and a half ago, she received about a half-dozen emails a month from potential members. These days, 15 to 20 inquiries fill her inbox each week.

Are these communities always cheaper?

Play ball! Co-housing appeals to families because the communal space provides a safe place for kids to play. This development is located in Nevada City, CA. Cohousing Association of the United States

Another type of community isnt much cheaper than traditional housing at all, but still offers some of the benefits of communal living. Co-housing is popular in the suburbs and rural areas, says Alice Alexander, executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States, which helps connect people to such communities. These are a collection of single-family homes or townhomes set up around a shared green space and common buildings.

Members usually buy their own homes at market rate prices. But residents can save a few bucks by sharing large appliances such as lawnmowers and buying food in bulk. Neighbors also often help watch one anothers children.

People who move into these groupsbe they communes, artists colonies, or co-housing developmentsarent just looking to cut expenses, says Sky Blue (yes, thats the name he was born with), executive director of the Fellowship for Intentional Community and a resident of Twin Oaks. These individuals are often seeking stronger connections with their neighbors while working toward something largerlike environmentalism or social justice. Or both.

Living in close quarters with others, though, can inflame tensions. Ganas, the New York City community that DeMarco moved into, made headlines a decade ago when an expelled member shot one of the founders, Jeff Gross, six times. He survived.

Life has since settled down. And for DeMarco, the community has become a godsend.

Its social interaction on steroids, she says. But I feel like I have a support network.  Socializing is just leaving my room and hanging out in the dining room with my friends. Its a lot more mellow.

The post With Housing Costs Sky-High, the Commune Makes a Comeback appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.
Hulu is getting two new original series made for virtual reality (VR), courtesy of the Huffington Posts RYOT Studios: Come this fall, Hulus VR app is going to feature a news program called The Big Picture: News in Virtual Reality as well as new VR comedy show called Virtually Mike and Nora starring Nora Kirkpatrick and Mike OBrien.

Hulu has committed to five episodes of Virtually Mike and Nora, as well as ten episodes of The Big Picture: News in Virtual Reality. The shows are exclusive to the platform, and RYOT co-founder Bryn Mooser told Variety that there are no plans to present the footage as 360-degree videos on the web. This is a news show thats really built to the VR headset, he said. Its truly the first of its kind.

Virtually Mike and Nora aims to make the viewer part of the show, said Kirkpatrick, who is known for her parts in The Office and Greek. That changed the shape of our jokes and direction of our stories, she said. I think weve come up with a way to break down the wall between performer and audience member, and explore comedy in 360 degrees.

RYOT Studios has been producing VR programming for partners like the AP and the New York Times as well as Huffington Posts own 360-degree video initiative in the past. Weve been shooting VR for a long time now, Mooser said. Doing a series has always been a dream.

New episodes of the news program will be published on Hulus VR app every two weeks, and each episode will feature three different news segments, said Mooser, who is also acting as the host of the show.

We think really hard what stories lend themselves to virtual reality, he said. Videos that can convey a sense of scale or scope are especially suited for VR, he explained. For example, one of the first episodes will feature a report about a the vast Dadaab refugee camp in Northern Kenya.

Hulu first introduced its VR app for Samsungs Gear VR in March, and has since also brought it to the Oculus Rift VR headset, with plans to launch on additional devices soon. Noah Heller, VP of Emerging Technology at Hulu, said that VR is still very much an experiment for the video service. We want to understand what works, he said.

Story continues

But with Hulus legacy, it was clear early on that those experiments would also include serialized content. To us, its really important to build a repeat audience, Heller said.

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On Sep 21, 2016, we issued an updated research report on Humana Inc. HUM.

The Kentucky-based company is one of the largest health care plan providers in the United States. Last year, this internationally renowned insurer made it to the headlines due to its proposed acquisition by Aetna Inc. The merger, if successful, would have resulted in the formation of the second-largest managed care company in the nation. However, the future of the deal remains shrouded in uncertainty given the objection raised by the U.S department of Justice (DOJ).

Humana has been witnessing strong performances in Individual Medicare Advantage and Healthcare Services businesses over last few quarters. Consequently, it raised its guidance for the full year. Adjusted earnings per share for 2016 are now expected to be at least $9.25. Its Medicare business has also been outperforming over the past few years, primarily due to the operating initiatives that have started bearing fruit through favorable prior period medical claims development and lower current-year utilization.

Humanas financial strength is backed by its solid cash balance. Effective control on debt financing also helped Humana manage its capital. The companys focus on creating shareholders value through several capital deployment activities helped it cement investors confidence and drive long-term growth.

Nevertheless, Humanas public exchange business continues to remain weak. This has compelled it to curtail the sale of Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans and halt the expansion of the business. The companys group Medicare Advantage business has also been affected by low revenues and earnings due to its failure in overcoming the loss incurred on a large profitable account at the beginning of this year.

Moreover, Humanas Individual commercial membership has been adversely impacted by the sudden increases in premiums as well as benefit redesigns effective since the start of this year. As a result, Humana now anticipates membership of this segment to decrease by 200,000 to 300,000.

Story continues

The continuous increase in operating, depreciation and amortization costs that has resulted in higher benefit ratios is another headwind for the company.

Zacks Rank and Stocks That Warrant a Look

Humana currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Investors can also look at some better ranked stocks from the same space like WellCare Health Plan Inc WCG, UnitedHealth Group Inc UNH and The Joint Corp JYNT. All of these stocks carry Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



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Stockholm (AFP) - Nordic nations on Wednesday called for the EU to take "measures" against Hungary over its reluctance to take in registered asylum-seekers.

In a letter dated September 9, seen by AFP, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden expressed their "great concern" at Budapest's refusal to act by the Dublin rules under which refugees must seek asylum in the first EU country they enter.

For several months Hungary and its right-wing Prime Minister and fierce Brussels critic Viktor Orban have opposed receiving back any migrants for whom Hungary was the first EU country in which they registered.

The joint letter, signed by ministers from the five Nordic countries, quotes from a statement sent by Budapest to fellow EU nations in May, which insists that Hungary "cannot accept any incoming Dublin transfers."

The Nordic ministers agreed that this position constitutes "a violation of the EU law and it is not acceptable," and called on EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos to "act promptly."

Earlier this month Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said Hungary should be suspended from the European Union for violating democratic core values and treating refugees like "animals."

Austria has also recently threatened to bring a complaint against its neighbour Hungary to the European courts.

Hungarian also angered its fellow EU member state by issuing a map showing around 900 "no-go areas" in Europe with large immigrant populations, including London, Paris and Berlin.

In July Orban described the arrival of asylum-seekers in Europe as "a poison", saying his country did not want or need "a single migrant."

The Hungarian prime minister has organised a referendum on October 2, seeking a vote against the mandatory division of migrants among EU members.

Hungary has refused to take a single migrant under the EU's plan for coping with the current crisis, and the referendum will ask voters whether they agree with Brussels mandating the relocation of refugees without the approval of national parliaments
The Hague (AFP) - The International Criminal Court will hand down its verdict next month against former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba and four close associates accused of bribing witnesses, the tribunal said Wednesday.

Prosecutors have charged ex-militia leader Bemba, 53, of masterminding a network from his prison cell at the ICC's detention unit to bribe at least 14 defence witnesses to give false evidence during his war crimes trial.

The verdict "will be delivered... on Wednesday, 19 October at 14:30 (1230 GMT) during a public hearing at the seat of the court," the tribunal based in The Hague said in a statement.

"The chamber has ordered that the accused be present at the hearing," it added.

Once the powerful leader of the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), Bemba was sentenced in June to 18 years in jail after being found guilty at the ICC on five charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for a series of rapes and murders committed by his troops in the Central African Republic.

Prosecutors at the opening of his separate bribery trial in 2015 -- the first of its kind at the ICC -- accused Bemba of directing a plan from behind his jail cell walls in a Hague seaside suburb to "ensure his acquittal through corrupt means."

Also in the dock are Bemba's lawyer Aime Kilolo, his legal case manager Jean-Jacques Mangenda, with Congolese lawmaker Fidele Babala and Narcisse Arido, a defence witness.

The four were granted interim release in 2014.

Prosecutors charge that Kilolo told witnesses to give or withhold certain information during their testimony in exchange for money.

Mangenda is believed to have been aware, as Bemba's legal case manager, that Kilolo was allegedly bribing witnesses, and is accused of relaying messages between Bemba and Kilolo.

Babala, deputy secretary of Bemba's MLC party, allegedly handled money transfers including payments to Kilolo, Mangenda and Arido.

Story continues

Arido, who was an expert defence witness on military operations in the Central African Republic, is accused of recruiting witnesses for the defence and instructing them what to say in Bemba's trial in exchange for money.

All five pleaded not guilty to more than 100 combined charges.

"The sentence would be pronounced at a later stage, only if the accused would be found guilty," the ICC statement added.
Washington (AFP) - An influx of immigrants is likely to have little impact on wages and jobs for native-born US workers, unless they have less than a high-school education, according to a study published Wednesday.

The report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine looks at economic and demographic trends in the United States over the past 20 years.

It found that "the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small," particularly when examined over the course of a decade.

"To the extent that negative impacts occur, they are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school -- who are often the closest substitutes for immigrant workers with low skills," it said.

The report also found "little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers."

In fact, an inflow of skilled immigrants may even force wages higher for some subgroups of native-born workers, along with boosting the broader economy.

"Immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the US," said the study.

First-generation immigrants tend to cost state and local governments more than their children.

But the second generation is "among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the US population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population," said the report.

"The panel's comprehensive examination revealed many important benefits of immigration -- including on economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship -- with little to no negative effects on the overall wages or employment of native-born workers in the long term," said Francine Blau, a Cornell University economics professor who chaired the panel that wrote the report.

"Where negative wage impacts have been detected, native-born high-school dropouts and prior immigrants are most likely to be affected."
The war of words between India and Pakistan after Sundays attack at an Indian army base in Kashmir looks set to remain just that for now, with top Indian officials recommending a diplomatic response over a military one.

Whatever decisions [India] takes in this regard will be done with full diplomatic and strategic maturity, the countrys Federal Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told Reuters. While Prasad warned against idle threats of cross-border military strikes, he also said Indias tolerance towards Pakistan is waning amid public outrage over this weeks attack.

The attack by four gunmen took place Sunday in the town of Uri on the Indian side of the border, leaving 18 soldiers dead and several others injured. The four attackers were all killed in an ensuing firefight. No group has claimed responsibility.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the attack it as cowardly and Home Minister Rajnath Singh called Pakistan a terrorist state. New Delhi has launched an investigation into the attack.

Pakistani authorities responded by asking for actionable evidence and rejecting as baseless Indian allegations that they had aided the attackers.

The long-running conflict over Kashmir  which both countries claim in its entirety but divide with a de-facto Line of Control  has come to define their bilateral relationship. Three of the four wars fought between the nuclear-armed neighbors have been over the disputed territory, and attacks like Sundays stoke fears of another conflagration.

But Modi, who has built an image of being a tougher leader than his predecessors, was advised by his military against immediate retaliation, according to the Indian Express newspaper.
An Indian cabinet committee gave its approval Wednesday to a long-delayed deal to buy 36 fighter jets from France's Dassault, as the country looks to bolster its military in the face of China's growing clout.

A senior Indian defence ministry official said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet committee on security had given its green light to the multi-billion dollar Rafale jet purchase at a meeting in New Delhi and the defence ministers of both France and India would ink the agreement on Friday.

"The deal was approved at the meeting in the evening," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"It will now be formally signed by Indian and French defence ministers on September 23 in New Delhi."

The official said that other details including the exact amount and formalities "will become clear after the signing event".

While stopping short of confirming the deal, the French presidency also said that Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian would head to the Indian capital on Friday.

In a brief statement, the presidency said that Le Drian's visit had been "agreed in principle with Prime Minister Modi" when he met French President Francois Hollande at the G20 summit in China earlier this month.

There was no immediate comment from Dassault but a report by the Press Trust of India put the purchase price at around 7.9 billion euros (8.8 billion dollars).

The Rafale purchase was first mooted in 2012 but has faced major delays and obstacles over the last four years.

India entered exclusive negotiations on buying 126 Rafale jets four years ago, but the number of planes was scaled back in tortuous negotiations over the cost and assembly of the planes in India.

Modi announced on a visit to Paris last year that his government had agreed in principle to buy the jets as India looks to modernise its Soviet-era military.

But the deal continued to be held back by disagreements such as Delhi's insistence that arms makers invest a percentage of the value of any major deal in India, known as the offset clause.

Story continues

Hollande again pushed the deal on a visit to India in January, when he was Modi's guest for the Republic Day celebrations, but officials privately acknowledged that price had become a sticking point.

In an interview ahead of that trip Hollande said that India needed new planes and "France has shown that it has the world's best aircraft".

The increasing assertiveness of its giant neighbour China as well as its simmering rivalry with Pakistan have increased India's need to upgrade its military.

- Cutting-edge technology -

Manmohan Bahadur, a retired air vice marshal, said the Rafale would give India's airforce a cutting edge that its rivals lacked.

"It is a deal that should have happened much earlier. The Rafale beats any other fighter jet in the region," Bahadur told AFP.

"Besides having absolutely cutting edge technology, it comes with beyond visual range missiles, which are also better than what both China and Pakistan possess. Its endurance, striking range and power stand out."

Gulshan Luthra, from the New Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, said the planes would deliver an important boost to India's air force.

"The fundamental thing is the air force does not have new aircraft, the old ones need to be replaced and Rafale is a spearhead," he said.

"Unfortunately, we have been very late on this deal. But this has been chosen and it's a very good aircraft."

The highly versatile Rafale is currently being used for bombing missions over Syria and Iraq as part of international campaign against the self-styled Islamic State jihadist group.

It has also been deployed in the past for air strikes in Libya and Afghanistan.

The deal, if confirmed, is a major vote of confidence in the Rafale which had long struggled to find buyers in overseas, despite heavy lobbying efforts by the Hollande administration.

It is the biggest order for the Rafale after Egypt agreed to buy 24 of the jets in 2015 and Qatar purchased the same amount later that year.
By Nidhi Verma

MUMBAI (Reuters) - India is talking to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to fill half of the 1.5 million tonnes (mt) of the Mangalore strategic storage, along with Iranian crude, its oil minister said on Wednesday.

Dharmendra Pradhan told a news conference India is exploring two to three other models for sourcing oil to fill the remainder of the storage.

During Saudi Arabia Energy Minister Kahlid A. Al-Falih's visit to New Delhi in October, India plans to discuss the filling of the Mangalore strategic storage, and investments in refinery and petrochemical projects.

Globally, most of the biggest crude oil consuming countries have a strategic storage capacity of at least 50 days, but India currently stands less than 10 days.

In 2005, the Oil Ministry had set up Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL) to build strategic storages in India. Under phase I of development, the company has built a total of 5.33 mt of storage capacity in three locations  Vizag (1.33 mt), Mangalore (1.5 mt) and Padur (2.5 mt). Only Vizag is currently operational.

(Writing by Promit Mukherjee, editing by William Hardy)
By Nigam Prusty NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's cabinet cleared the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from Dassault Aviation on Wednesday, paving the way for signing a deal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is betting on to modernize the air force, a government source told Reuters. The acquisition is part of a $150-billion military overhaul India has launched, drawing global arms makers into one of the world's most promising markets. Under the deal, India will get 36 Rafale jets ready to go straight into service. India's fighter aircraft fleet, comprising Russian, British and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force's requirement of 45 to counter a "two-front collusive threat" from Pakistan and China. The two countries will sign the final deal on Friday, the source, who did not wish to be named as he is not authorized to speak to the media, said. French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is arriving New Delhi on Thursday, the source said, to sign the deal with his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar. French President Francois Hollande's office confirmed that Le Drian would visit India at the end of the week. India, the world's biggest arms importer, had intended to buy 126 Rafale planes before several years worth of talks with Dassault broke down and Modi and Hollande stepped in last year to agree on the smaller purchase. The value of the deal, which had been repeatedly held up as the two sides haggled over financial terms, was not immediately available. Indian defense ministry officials have earlier said the value of the deal could be $8.5 billion to $9 billion. The 90 planes not supplied via the original multi-role combat aircraft tender have meanwhile become the target of intense interest from other plane makers such as Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co. (Reporting by Nigam Prusty; Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas in Paris; Editing by Malini Menon and Toby Chopra)
An Indian judge will finally deliver a verdict Friday on two men over the rape and death of British schoolgirl Scarlett Keeling in Goa in 2008, after years of delays and controversy.

Fifteen-year-old Keeling's bruised and half-naked body was found on popular Anjuna beach in the north of the Indian resort state eight years ago.

Her death made headlines worldwide, drawing attention to the dark side of a tourist destination that has long been a hangout for Western hippies and later highlighting India's sluggish justice system.

Police initially dismissed the teenager's death as an accident but opened a murder probe after Keeling's mother, Fiona MacKeown, pushed for a second autopsy which proved she had been drugged and raped.

MacKeown also accused local authorities of trying to cover up the death to protect drug gangs operating in Goa, a former Portuguese colony.

Several weeks after the attack, local men Samson D'Souza and Placido Carvalho were arrested and charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, using force with intent to outrage a woman's modesty and of administering drugs with intent to harm.

The move angered the victim's family who had wanted the defendants tried for rape and murder, but officers from India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said they lacked sufficient evidence to indict them on stronger charges.

Police allege D'Souza and Carvalho plied Keeling with a cocktail of drink and illegal drugs, including cocaine, before sexually assaulting her and leaving her to die by dumping her unconscious in shallow water where she drowned.

The trial began at a children's court in Goa's state capital Panaji in 2010 but has been plagued by numerous delays, including infrequent hearings due to a backlog of cases and a public prosecutor withdrawing from proceedings.

- Key witness refused to testify -

Final arguments were heard at the end of last month with the prosecutor arguing that dozens of bruises on Keeling's body were evidence of a struggle. Defence lawyers however said the teenager died an accidental death.

Story continues

Vikram Varma, a lawyer acting for MacKeown, told AFP the prosecution's case was dealt a blow when a key witness, Briton Michael Mannion, refused to testify, but he is hopeful that some justice can finally be achieved.

"It was important for the judge to hear Mannion's testimony to convict. So that was a setback," said Goa-based Varma.

"(But) I'm keeping my fingers crossed that after all this struggle we may get a verdict of guilty," he added.

MacKeown told a British tabloid last month that she feared the men would walk free.

"We were close to putting it to bed once and for all but my heart has been broken again because Mannion cannot testify," she told The Sun newspaper.

The family was on a six-month holiday to India when MacKeown and her other daughters went on an excursion to the southern state of Karnataka, leaving Keeling in the care of a Goan family.

MacKeown, who is due to be in Goa for Friday's verdict, came in for heavy criticism back home for leaving her daughter without parental supervision.

She was only able to bury her daughter's body more than two years after Keeling died, when it was finally returned to her by Indian authorities after a long bureaucratic wrangle.
Mode Media

From the winding freeway that links Silicon Valley with San Francisco, the giant Mode Media sign gracing the company's headquarters was a hard-to-miss proclamation alerting passing drivers to an internet success story with a rich, $1 billion valuation.

But last week, on the 11th floor of the gleaming building, the mood among employees was sour.

Those gathered in the office and patched in through a crackly teleconference suddenly learned that they had no more jobs, no more health insurance coverage, and no more access to the company email system. Mode Media, founded in 2003 and once known as Glam Media, was shutting down. Oh, and please hand in your laptops on the way out.

People were stunned and shocked, and the management team's final Q&A session with the troops didn't help.

Someone asked about severance, one former Mode employee recounted. John Small, the COO, simply responded: "There is no severance. There is no Cobra. There is no company."

"They didn't give us sh--," said another Mode employee.

The end of Mode, which raised over $200 million in funding and was once on track for an initial public offering, stands as one of the biggest implosions of the current tech boom and a reminder of how swiftly the good times can come to an end.

There is no severance. There is no Cobra. There is no company.

Even now, as the company's assets are being liquidated by a restructuring firm, many company insiders, including numerous executives, say they are in the dark about what is happening. The company has not filed for bankruptcy protection, and calls to HR by staffers are not being returned.

According to more than a dozen people interviewed by Business Insider, the story of Mode's demise is less of an out-of-the-blue collapse than the culmination of a long-running struggle against a changing market and bitter infighting that pitted a flashy, smooth-talking founder against increasingly wary overseas investors.

Story continues

Hubert Burda Media, the German firm that poured $45 million into Mode as recently as last year, was very influential in convincing the board to shutter the company, according to multiple former Mode executives. In the months leading up to that point, though, questions about seemingly inappropriate spending by Samir Arora, cofounder and longtime CEO, plagued the company, while layoffs and management changes left the organization in disarray.

Lavish lifestyle

Arora started the company in 2003 with a list of accomplishments already under his belt. The India-born entrepreneur had worked at Apple in the early 1990s and founded NetObjects during the first dotcom boom, creating a seminal web development company that IBM acquired for $150 million.

The idea behind Mode Media, which first gained attention as Glam, was to create an online hub for editorial content produced by freelance bloggers at minimal cost. Glam's content was targeted at women. And Glam combined the content with an ad-serving network that reached a constellation of partner websites, allowing Glam to claim massive reach. In 2015, the company said in a press release that it had "over 400 million monthly users worldwide."

Mode

But as the market shifted to programmatic ad serving, in which online ads are bought and sold on automated exchanges, Mode's business began to suffer.

So Mode began trying to reinvent itself as a company that made its own "advertorial" content, especially videos and native ads. And Arora was leading the charge, with expensive initiatives including launching a printed restaurant guide and videos featuring famous chefs.

Mode's revenue had reached about $100 million annually by 2015, but growth had stopped and the company was losing about $10 million a year, according to one former executive.

All the former employees we spoke to described Arora as having a smooth, salesmanlike personality. He could charm a room and make you believe in whatever his vision was. A penchant for fancy suits and a seemingly lavish lifestyle left an impression on the rank-and-file as well, and rumors circulated about Arora's extravagant personal expenses and his use of company property like houses in the Hamptons and in LA.

When Arora and Burda Media began to clash over the direction of the company in 2015, Arora's lavish lifestyle became a focal point. Mode's board of directors, at Burda's urging, initiated an audit that included the expenses Arora billed to the company, according to two former executives. The audit covered things like the company houses.

"Any reasonable person would think it was unreasonable," one former exec said. "Homes in the Hamptons and LA, I don't see how you would use it for business use. It's impossible."

The audit ultimately cleared Arora of any improprieties, a person familiar with its outcome told us. But the episode underscores the atmosphere of mistrust pervading the company and the power struggle between Arora and Burda.

Even though Burda Media was a minority investor that did not technically control the company, the firm gained enough influence on the board to throw its weight around, according to several sources. In April, Arora was ousted as CEO by the board of directors  a move that many sources said was orchestrated by Burda.

In an emailed statement, Burda said that Arora left the company "by Board Resolution in April 2016." Arora declined to comment.

Marc Andreessen, the internet pioneer who created the web browser and joined Mode's board in 2011 after selling the social network Ning to the company, also left the board in March. Andreessen declined to comment.

Meet the new CEO

Jack Rotolo, a longtime Mode exec, was tapped in April to replace Arora as CEO. He had Burda's backing. But that didn't make his job any easier.

jack rotolo

"Jack was put into a really difficult position," a former exec said. Every time the team turned around, it uncovered another problem regarding the finances and the future.

But still: "No one had any confidence in Jack's leadership ability." He wasn't right for the job, another said.

A wave of layoffs in June, in which 30 people lost their jobs, caused more turmoil.

There was barely any communication. "Senior, senior people in the company were just called into the room with HR and given a packet," a former employee said. "I didn't even see Jack." HR contractors rather than full-time people did the actual firing, the employee said.

Rotolo did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the layoffs and several high-level departures following Rotolo's promotion, no one in leadership gave any hints that the company's future was in question.

True, a plan to file for an IPO that began in 2013 had quietly been put on the back burner. But some explained it away as a reflection of a difficult IPO market, or a view that the cost of building the financial infrastructure necessary to go public was better spent elsewhere.

Another former executive told us that the view inside the company was that the IPO was more of an attempt by Arora to get attention for the company, which was not ready to go public.

Then all of a sudden, in the third week of September, it all came crashing down.

What went wrong

"The general consensus of the employee base is that there was mismanagement of finances," said one former company executive.

But the simplest explanation in the eyes of many is that Burda had lost faith. The firm refused to invest any more money into Mode and ultimately orchestrated the shutdown, according to several insiders.

Burda said in a statement that Mode was shut down "due to its lack of economic prospects" and "drastic changes" in the US advertising market that made it "impossible" to find new investors:

"Mode Media's most serious challenge was the rapidly declining relevance of display advertising in the US. The management didn't succeed in developing further the original business model or to create a promising perspective for the company. Burda and the other investors continuously supported the company. However, the ruptures of the US advertising market were not likely to allow for an improvement of the situation."

Burda noted that Mode had been seeking new investors since fall 2015 with the help of Goldman Sachs. "The request for more capital could not be satisfied," the firm said. As a result, "the management of Mode asked for an ABC  an assignment for the benefit of creditors  in September 2016," it said, referring to an out-of-court alternative to bankruptcy in which a company's assets are sold quickly.

Mode retained Sherwood Partners, a restructuring firm based in Mountain View, California, whose website lists specialties such as ABC shutdowns that it says can be done with "less notoriety than with a bankruptcy."

But there are already questions about one of Mode's main assets: Ning, the social network founded by Andreessen, which Mode acquired for $150 million in 2011. A post on Ning's site last week said that Cyndx, a company led by Mode board member Jim McVeigh, has "entered into an agreement with Mode Media to take over the operations of Ning."

According to one person with direct knowledge of the matter, Cyndx is one of several companies that have put in bids to acquire Ning, but no deal has closed yet. It's expected to close by the end of the week.

Frantic emails

The shutdown decision appears to have happened with almost no notice  even for senior management.

The day after the shutdown announcement, one Mode manager of an overseas office described receiving frantic emails from headquarters requesting immediate transfer of all funds and assets back to the US.

"It was the most unprofessional, unethical experience imaginable. [A] confirmed catastrophe," another exec said about the shutdown. "It's so catastrophically unethical. No one can believe it."

It's so catastrophically unethical. No one can believe it.

Bloggers who relied on Mode's ad network quickly complained on Twitter that they were unable to access their dashboards and that they were still owed significant fees for past work.

How a company that raised more than $200 million suddenly went bust is a question that many are still trying to answer. It's possible that during Mode's years of operation the company burned through a lot more than the $10 million it lost in 2015. Or that the $100 million in revenue Mode once generated has severly declined this year amid the changing ad market. The extent of the creditors, which are likely to emerge soon and to which Mode still owes money, may provide some answers.

Angelica Malin, a blogger who runs About Time Magazine, said her Mode login portal, where she could normally track things like how much revenue she was meant to receive for her work, gently mocked her with the message "Try again in 5 minutes" anytime she tried to access it.

She's not hopeful that she'll recover any money. "I don't think we'll go out chasing it. Would spend more on the lawyer than I'd make, probably," she said.

NOW WATCH: This incredibly simple trick fixes your iPhone if it's acting slow  and it takes less than 30 seconds





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This Immigrant Doctor Is Reimagining Health in the American City

Police brutality, under-resourced schools, and economic inequalitythose are some of the injustices that the Black Panther Party fought against generations ago. Sure, America has made racial and social progress since the group was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Blacks voted at a higher rate than whites did in 2012, and the amount of black legislators is increasing. Overall, segregation and discrimination have declined. But at a time when high school dropout rates skew along racial lines, the names of black people killed by law enforcement officers are turned into hashtags, and the racial wage gap is widening, the issues the Panthers organized around remain as relevant as they were 50 years ago.

Thats why a pair of exhibitsIt Takes a Nation: Art for Social Justice and Silosat the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., are connecting the legacy of the Panthers to modern protest movements. The displays are timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Panthers founding, according to Jack Rasmussen, director and curator of the museum.

[The Panthers] pushed back against the violence that was besetting the African American population. It was really a self-defense organization, Rasmussen said in an interview with TakePart. I think that young people today are also trying to figure out a way to push back.

RELATED: These Fashions Fight Stereotype With Style

It Takes a Nation features artwork created in the 1960s by Black Panther artist EmoryDouglas and five members of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, a Chicago art collective. The exhibit juxtaposes the older works with creations by contemporary artists that reflect the socioeconomic situation black people are in today. Silos shows work from eight artists examining the marginalization, absence, and exclusion that occurs when people self-segregate, resulting in a perception of people from different cultures as other.

The exhibits relevance was highlighted this week as hundreds of American University students protested on campus in the wake of several racially motivated incidents, including rotten bananas being thrown at female black students or placed in front of their dorm rooms.

Story continues

[The protesting] is political. Its exactly why I made this work. It happened in the midst of a show about social justice, about the nature of blacks in this country, on a campus called American University, at that. You couldnt need more potent evidence, Wesley Clark, whose piece, Black Dont Crack is featured in Silos, told TakePart.

Rasmussen, who attended a town hall on campus on Tuesday where students could air their grievances with administrators, said that the protests highlight how much more work has to be done.

I grew up in the 60s. It looked awfully familiar, which is another depressing thing, Rasmussen said.

But he sees a silver lining in the situation: Its bringing the exhibits to the attention of a new generation.

We dont always get student in here, but sure have for this show, he said. The role of the museum was to show how people their own age were responding to a very similar situation, and how artists responded right here in Washington over the next 50 years.

Take the Pledge: Dont Be Silent: Take the Pledge to Be an Ally for Racial Justice

Related stories on TakePart:





 An Exhibit in London Reveals a Different View of British History

 6 Murals of the Black Lives Matter Movement

 Green Army Men Toys Get a Black Pride Makeover

Original article from TakePart
Kim Kardashian-West has temporarily moved to New York City. For the next few months, while Kanye is traveling North America for the Saint Pablo Tour, the West clan will be living in luxury in a $30 million Manhattan triplex Penthouse courtesy of Airbnb.

The exquisite home is complete with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, state of the art kitchen appliances, floor to ceiling windows, its own multiple private outdoor terraces, al fresco dining, rooftop pool and a separate play area for the kids.

Kim Kardashian

Photo: Instagram

Kim isn't the only member of the Kardashian klan who has turned to Airbnb for her getaway needs. Kylie Jenner celebrated her 19th birthday alongside sister, Kendall Jenner, in Turks & Caicos at the exclusive Pearls of Long Bay Estate. The $50 million property, on a six-acre compound, is over 35,000 square feet of pure luxury with a total of three homes and 23 bedrooms.

Kendall also spent Fourth of July weekend in a $30 million Airbnb beach house in Malibu, with three bedroom, three bath, beach house. The waterfront property is situated on one of the most exclusive beaches in Malibu, Broad Beach, boasting neighbors CBS President and CEO Les Moonves, art collector Eli Broad, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, along with actors Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Aniston and Richard Gere.

Check out more pics of Kim and Kanye's awesome Airbnb property in the slide show above.

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The Sept. 8 Journal Star contained an article about a Native American woman, Sherry Wounded Foot, who was found apparently murdered in Whiteclay ("Activists renew call for decisive action"). This is just the latest in the sad story of Whiteclay. No authorities seem to want to take responsibility for cleaning up this mess, which should be a tragic embarrassment to all Nebraskans. The Sheridan County Sheriff's Department and the Nebraska State Patrol seem to point to each other. The Nebraska Liquor Control Commission says it is too complicated. The attorney general and the Legislature seem to be too busy with other things. After so many years of abuse of Native people, the least we can do would be to clean up the abomination that is Whiteclay. Please, someone, grow a heart and do something.
While investing in real estate with an individual retirement account can be done, there are potential pitfalls and hurdles to manage.

"Most of my clients own real estate but outside of their IRA," says Kelly McLean Rindock, a certified financial planner at Steel Valley Investment Group of Raymond James & Associates in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. "There are only certain custodians that allow you to do it because there are so many hoops to jump through."

To do this, investors need to find a custodian, a company that can legally hold their assets, or a trustee who specializes in self-directed IRAs, also called SDIRAs.

[See: 8 Easy Ways to Make Money.]

"It's not for everyone," says Kevin O'Brien, certified financial planner and president of Peak Financial Services in Northborough, Massachusetts. "It's for a savvy investor who has a sizeable net worth and is familiar with rental real estate because it's not a passive investment."

Matt Wilson, CEO of Equity Trust in Westlake, Ohio, whose company serves as a custodian for self-directed IRAs, says the IRAs are primarily used to invest in the rental market, to flip properties (purchasing, rehabbing and reselling in a short amount of time) or loan money to a builder or real estate investor.

Most, Wilson says, are purchasing single-family rental homes in the $50,000 to $125,000 range in smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, or in Florida, Texas or California.

"Investors don't begin with a million dollars," he says, but most look for smaller, more manageable markets coupled with expertise on where to buy and rent.

How does this compare to a real estate investment trust? Unlike investing in a REIT, which is pooled capital, investors directly own or lend money to the real estate project when they invest via a self-directed IRA.

Liquidity is another major difference. REITs are a type of security that can be easily bought or sold on major stock exchanges, as opposed to owning real estate via an IRA that is illiquid and usually held for longer periods of time.

Story continues

While a REIT typically includes a diverse portfolio of properties, O'Brien says real estate held within a SDIRA is usually more concentrated.

"Therefore, a higher degree of risk could be associated with fewer properties, less liquidity, potential vacancies and individual responsibility for maintenance costs," O'Brien says.

On the flip side, he says, there's more freedom in IRA.

"You have more say in what you are investing your money in since you are literally picking the assets," O'Brien says. "That means directly held real estate can give the right investor more control over which types of properties are invested in and their location."

[See: The 10 Best REIT ETFs on the Market.]

A tax deferred strategy. Investors with a high net worth who are looking for tax-deferred income before retirement use this strategy, as well as individuals who want to transfer property tax free inside the Roth IRA.

Investors holding real estate in a traditional IRA pay tax at ordinary income rates when the account is paid out, whether it is the property itself or a cash payment, O'Brien says. In a self-directed Roth IRA, investors are free from federal income tax on withdrawal if it's a qualified distribution -- a five-year holding period and the investor is either 59.5 or disabled.

Potential risks. Investing in real estate via an IRA is not a good idea for the average investor, McLean Rindock says. The tax reporting and administrative requirements are substantial and require a lot of work, she says.

"My biggest concern with owning real estate inside your IRA is how illiquid it can be. Yes, you may enjoy tax deferment, but 99 percent of investors would not be well equipped for this investment," she says. "While commodities and real estate certainly help you diversify, choosing to buy a property inside your IRA should not be a decision entered into lightly."

There are tax tradeoffs, O'Brien says. Beneficiaries do not get step-up in basis -- a readjustment of an asset, typically to the lower price when it was initially acquired -- upon inheriting property in an IRA, he says. Additionally, required minimum distributions may be difficult to meet if the property doesn't have a positive cash flow. Beneficiaries may also be unfamiliar with investment property management.

Understand what is prohibited. "The IRS is very specific about upkeep on a property and who will be using it," McLean Rindock says. "That means you can't use money from your self-directed IRA to buy a rental property for personal use."

A prohibited transaction may trigger an unrelated business income tax, and your entire IRA could become taxable, O'Brien says.

The investor can never use the property, nor can the investor's family or the fiduciary to the plan. Other prohibited transactions include if the property is acquired using borrowed funds, if the investor receives unreasonable compensation or uses the property as a security for a loan.

"You also can't be connected to the company that rents it," McLean Rindock says. "You can't repair the property yourself (or may not be reimbursed) and any and all costs must be paid from the IRA."

Review the fees. Some trustees will charge transaction or asset-based fees depending on the investment. Since there are very few trustees doing this sort of work, there's no incentive to keep fees low, says Warren Ward, CFP for WWA Planning & Investments in Columbus, Indiana.

The trustee will provide a valuation to the IRS each year and must make sure the asset is properly insured, Ward says.

[Read: 5 Ways to Turbocharge Your 401(k).]

"The investor is going to be paying those costs one way or another so, while a brokerage firm might charge $50 or so yearly for a typical IRA, the fee could easily be several hundred dollars for specific pieces of real estate," he says.





More From US News & World Report


While investing in real estate with an individual retirement account can be done, there are potential pitfalls and hurdles to manage.

"Most of my clients own real estate but outside of their IRA," says Kelly McLean Rindock, a certified financial planner at Steel Valley Investment Group of Raymond James & Associates in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. "There are only certain custodians that allow you to do it because there are so many hoops to jump through."

To do this, investors need to find a custodian, a company that can legally hold their assets, or a trustee who specializes in self-directed IRAs, also called SDIRAs.

[See: 8 Easy Ways to Make Money.]

"It's not for everyone," says Kevin O'Brien, certified financial planner and president of Peak Financial Services in Northborough, Massachusetts. "It's for a savvy investor who has a sizeable net worth and is familiar with rental real estate because it's not a passive investment."

Matt Wilson, CEO of Equity Trust in Westlake, Ohio, whose company serves as a custodian for self-directed IRAs, says the IRAs are primarily used to invest in the rental market, to flip properties (purchasing, rehabbing and reselling in a short amount of time) or loan money to a builder or real estate investor.

Most, Wilson says, are purchasing single-family rental homes in the $50,000 to $125,000 range in smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, or in Florida, Texas or California.

"Investors don't begin with a million dollars," he says, but most look for smaller, more manageable markets coupled with expertise on where to buy and rent.

How does this compare to a real estate investment trust? Unlike investing in a REIT, which is pooled capital, investors directly own or lend money to the real estate project when they invest via a self-directed IRA.

Liquidity is another major difference. REITs are a type of security that can be easily bought or sold on major stock exchanges, as opposed to owning real estate via an IRA that is illiquid and usually held for longer periods of time.

Story continues

While a REIT typically includes a diverse portfolio of properties, O'Brien says real estate held within a SDIRA is usually more concentrated.

"Therefore, a higher degree of risk could be associated with fewer properties, less liquidity, potential vacancies and individual responsibility for maintenance costs," O'Brien says.

On the flip side, he says, there's more freedom in IRA.

"You have more say in what you are investing your money in since you are literally picking the assets," O'Brien says. "That means directly held real estate can give the right investor more control over which types of properties are invested in and their location."

[See: The 10 Best REIT ETFs on the Market.]

A tax deferred strategy. Investors with a high net worth who are looking for tax-deferred income before retirement use this strategy, as well as individuals who want to transfer property tax free inside the Roth IRA.

Investors holding real estate in a traditional IRA pay tax at ordinary income rates when the account is paid out, whether it is the property itself or a cash payment, O'Brien says. In a self-directed Roth IRA, investors are free from federal income tax on withdrawal if it's a qualified distribution -- a five-year holding period and the investor is either 59.5 or disabled.

Potential risks. Investing in real estate via an IRA is not a good idea for the average investor, McLean Rindock says. The tax reporting and administrative requirements are substantial and require a lot of work, she says.

"My biggest concern with owning real estate inside your IRA is how illiquid it can be. Yes, you may enjoy tax deferment, but 99 percent of investors would not be well equipped for this investment," she says. "While commodities and real estate certainly help you diversify, choosing to buy a property inside your IRA should not be a decision entered into lightly."

There are tax tradeoffs, O'Brien says. Beneficiaries do not get step-up in basis -- a readjustment of an asset, typically to the lower price when it was initially acquired -- upon inheriting property in an IRA, he says. Additionally, required minimum distributions may be difficult to meet if the property doesn't have a positive cash flow. Beneficiaries may also be unfamiliar with investment property management.

Understand what is prohibited. "The IRS is very specific about upkeep on a property and who will be using it," McLean Rindock says. "That means you can't use money from your self-directed IRA to buy a rental property for personal use."

A prohibited transaction may trigger an unrelated business income tax, and your entire IRA could become taxable, O'Brien says.

The investor can never use the property, nor can the investor's family or the fiduciary to the plan. Other prohibited transactions include if the property is acquired using borrowed funds, if the investor receives unreasonable compensation or uses the property as a security for a loan.

"You also can't be connected to the company that rents it," McLean Rindock says. "You can't repair the property yourself (or may not be reimbursed) and any and all costs must be paid from the IRA."

Review the fees. Some trustees will charge transaction or asset-based fees depending on the investment. Since there are very few trustees doing this sort of work, there's no incentive to keep fees low, says Warren Ward, CFP for WWA Planning & Investments in Columbus, Indiana.

The trustee will provide a valuation to the IRS each year and must make sure the asset is properly insured, Ward says.

[Read: 5 Ways to Turbocharge Your 401(k).]

"The investor is going to be paying those costs one way or another so, while a brokerage firm might charge $50 or so yearly for a typical IRA, the fee could easily be several hundred dollars for specific pieces of real estate," he says.

Dawn Reiss is an award-winning journalist in Chicago who has written for TIME, Reuters, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic and Travel + Leisure and many other publications. Follow her on Twitter, Google+ and Instagram @dawnreiss.
By Greg Lacour

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (Reuters) - Authorities in Charlotte, North Carolina, braced on Wednesday for a possible second night of rioting triggered by the police killing of a black man who refused commands to drop a handgun that officers said he was brandishing.

Sixteen police were injured overnight on Tuesday and one person was arrested as officers in riot gear clashed with demonstrators who hurled stones, set fires and briefly blocked an interstate highway.

Police and protesters offered widely differing accounts of the shooting. Officers said Keith Scott, 43, was armed and ignoring orders, while the victim's family and a witness said he was holding a book. Authorities have not released any video of the incident, but say they plan to.

The trouble in Charlotte unfolded as demonstrators in Tulsa, Oklahoma, demanded the arrest of a police officer seen on video fatally shooting an unarmed black man who had his hands in clear view at the time.

The deaths were the latest to raise questions of racial bias in U.S. law enforcement, and they stoked a national debate on policing ahead of the presidential election in November.

Police shootings in cities including New York, Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri, have sparked more than two years of largely peaceful protests punctuated by days of rioting and arson and given rise to the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement.

U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said such killings were unbearable. Her Republican rival, Donald Trump, questioned what the Tulsa officer was thinking in shooting a man he said seemed to pose no imminent threat.

Criminal investigations have been opened in both cities, and the U.S. Justice Department has started a separate probe into the Oklahoma incident to see if officers' use of force amounted to a civil rights violation.

Charlotte's police chief, Kerr Putney, said Scott was seen on Tuesday afternoon getting into a vehicle holding a handgun. Police surrounded the car, Putney said, and Scott was shot by a black police officer after he exited the car and did not obey orders to drop his weapon.

Story continues

"I can also tell you we did not find a book," Putney told a news conference. "We did find a weapon."

Local resident Taheshia Williams said she saw the incident from her balcony about 100 feet (30 meters) away, and that she watched Scott get out of his car with his hands raised.

"Hands up. No gun. When he got out of the car, a book fell off his lap," Williams told reporters on Wednesday. She said she heard Scott ask police what he had done wrong, could not hear their reply, but then heard four shots.

"It's a cover-up. They made a mistake and they're doing their best to make sure they cover up that mistake," she said.

'OPEN TO SHOWING VIDEO'

Black activists and pastors called for an economic boycott of the city, and a several dozen students held a "lay-in" protest at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina urged the body and dash camera footage be released.

Police said Officer Brentley Vinson was in plainclothes when he shot Scott and was not wearing a body camera.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts told CNN she had not seen any video from the scene, but that Putney told her footage was recorded by cameras worn by other police officers and mounted on patrol cars.

"The chief is very open to showing that video ... not just to elected officials, but also to community leaders," she said. "We have done that in the past. We plan to do that this time."

In 2013 a white police officer killed Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed black man, in Charlotte. Ferrell's family received $2.25 million from the city in compensation.

North Carolina allows for the open carry of handguns, including having a pistol in a vehicle.

A friend of Vinson, Michael Scurlock, told CNN on Wednesday that the officer on Tuesday night.

"I know he's torn," Scurlock said. "No matter if it's justified or unjustified, it's tough when you have to know that you had to take someone else's life."

Protesters in Oklahoma, meanwhile, want Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby, who is white, to be arrested for the killing on Friday of Terence Crutcher, 40, whose sport utility vehicle had broken down and was blocking a road.

Shelby's lawyer has said she feared for her life, believing Crutcher was reaching into his vehicle for a weapon. Lawyers for the Crutcher family released still images from police videos showing the car window was shut and said the use of force was not justified.

Two police videos, one taken from a helicopter and one from a patrol car dashcam, show Shelby following Crutcher as he walked slowly to his vehicle with his hands up. Shelby shoots him as he puts his hands on the car, and he falls to the ground.

Speaking in New York City alongside relatives of Crutcher, civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton urged both presidential candidates to broach the topic of police shootings on Monday at their first head-to-head debate.

"Any debate that does not discuss this issue is a bogus debate," Sharpton told a news conference. "This is a national crisis and it must be addressed."

(Additional reporting by Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton in Tulsa, Okla., Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, N.C., Emily Flitter in Cleveland, Amanda Becker in Orlando, Fla., and Gina Cherelus and Laila Kearney in New York; Writing by Jon Herskovitz and Daniel Wallis; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and James Dalgleish)
Frankfurt (AFP) - Volkswagen investors have filed 1,400 lawsuits seeking 8.2 billion euros in damages over the emissions cheating scandal, a German court said Wednesday, adding to the embattled car giant's legal woes.

Investors say the automaker failed to disclose details of the case in a timely way, leading them to lose money as the group's share price plunged by 40 percent in two days after the crisis erupted last September.

The $9.1 billion in claims are mostly made up of "bundled" actions containing lawsuits from multiple plaintiffs, many of them private investors, according to the court in Brunswick, close to VW's Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony headquarters.

The US government and several German state governments are also among the claimants.

Another claimant is Blackrock, the world's largest fund manager, and a group of institutional shareholders who are suing VW for 2 billion euros.

A spokesman for Volkswagen reiterated the carmaker's position that it "continues to believe that we comprehensively fulfilled our obligations under capital markets law and that the claims are unjustified."

There was little reaction on the Frankfurt stock market to the news, with Volkswagen shares gaining around 0.7 percent by just after 1330 GMT.

- Cars fixed 'within a year' -

Volkswagen's troubles began in September 2015 when it admitted installing so-called "defeat devices" in 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide, which increase exhaust treatment when the car detects it is undergoing regulatory tests.

The software deactivates the emissions system when the car is on the road, leading to levels of harmful nitrogen oxides in the exhaust many times higher than allowed.

Most of the cars affected bear the Volkswagen logo, but vehicles made by the group's Audi, Skoda and Seat brands were also among those equipped with the software.

During talks with a top EU official on Wednesday, Volkswagen pledged to ensure that all cars across the bloc were fixed by autumn 2017, the European Commission said in a statement.

Story continues

"Today Volkswagen committed to a plan of action across the EU which is an important step towards a fair treatment of consumers," justice and consumer protection commissioner Vera Jourova said.

During the talks, the car giant pledged "to ensure all vehicles are repaired by autumn 2017," and to supply consumers with a "proof of conformity" certificate, Commission spokesman Christian Wigand said.

VW faces a string of legal claims and investigations around the world.

The group has set aside 18 billion euros to pay for the legal costs of the crisis and has so far agreed to pay $15 billion in compensation and fines in the United States alone.

Analysts estimate the final bill could reach up to 35 billion euros.

- 'Difficult to prove' -

Investors have rushed to file compensation claims at the Brunswick court ahead of what they believe to be a one-year deadline for lodging complaints. On Monday alone 750 new claims were registered.

The court said it has taken on extra staff and hired additional storage space to cope, with the avalanche representing half the number of cases the tribunal normally hears in a year.

"The complete registration of the claims arrived up to now should be finished in four weeks," it said.

A single plaintiff will be designated "in the fourth quarter of 2016 at the earliest," it went on, to represent all the investors wishing to join forces in a common case designed to save legal costs.

German law does not allow for class-action suits.

The case's prospects for success may be limited, however.

"History has shown that it's very difficult to prove damages of this type in Germany and win a legal case like this," analyst Frank Schwope of Nord/LB bank told AFP.

In a similar case relating to Porsche's failed takeover of VW, a Stuttgart court in 2015 found against investors claiming damages over the timing of the luxury carmaker's communications.

In this case, VW might strike out-of-court settlements with some plaintiffs, while the court is unlikely to award the full amount of compensation investors seek, Schwope said.

The carmaker will not find itself reaching for its pocketbook soon as "the case could last for years," he went on.

Volkswagen's share price remains around 20 percent lower than it was before the crisis broke.

But while the financial pain bites deep for the firm, recent figures show sales are holding up despite the blow to its reputation.
By Babak Dehghanpisheh BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iran marked the anniversary of its 1980 invasion by Iraq by showing off its latest ships and missiles and telling the United States not to meddle in the Gulf. At a parade in Tehran on Wednesday, shown on state TV, the military displayed long-range missiles, tanks, and the Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system. At the port of Bandar Abbas on the Gulf, the navy showed off 500 vessels, as well as submarines and helicopters, at a time of high tension with the United States in the strategic waterway. U.S. officials say there have been more than 30 close encounters between U.S. and Iranian vessels in the Gulf so far this year, over twice as many as in the same period of 2015. On Sept. 4, a U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after an Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast-attack craft came within 100 yards (90 meters) of it in the central Gulf, at least the fourth such incident in less than a month, U.S. Defense Department officials said. "We tell the Americans that its better that the capital and wealth of the American people should not be wasted on their inappropriate and detrimental presence in the Persian Gulf," said Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Tasnim news site quoted him as saying: "If they want to extend their reach and engage in adventurism they should go to the Bay of Pigs" - a reference to the location of a botched U.S. attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1961. In Tehran, the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, declared that Iran wanted peace. "BROTHERS IN FAITH" But he said Iran's lessons in the 1980-88 war against Iraq now served as a guide for our brothers in faith in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Bahrain, countries where Iran has political, religious or military allies. Among the weapons displayed was the new long-range "Zolfaqar" ballistic missile, named after a legendary sword said to have given by the Prophet Mohammad to Imam Ali. It has "a cluster warhead capable of hitting targets spread over the ground", according to Tasnim. A banner on the side of a truck carrying the new missile bore a threat to Iran's arch-foe Israel: "If the leaders of the Zionist regime make a mistake then the Islamic Republic will turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust." The Russian-supplied missile defense system on show in Tehran was deployed last month around Iran's underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow. Enrichment at the site, around 100 km (60 miles) south of Tehran, has stopped since the implementation in January of Iran's agreement with world powers to curb its nuclear program in exchange for an easing of sanctions. Also on display was the Qadr H missile, which has a range of 2,000 km, according to state TV. Irans ballistic missile program has been criticized by the West, and the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on two Iranian companies in March because of their alleged ties to it. (Editing by Andrew Roche)
Baghdad (AFP) - Iraq's parliament voted on Wednesday to remove the country's finance minister, who was questioned over corruption allegations last month, lawmakers said.

The removal of Hoshyar Zebari, who has served in every government since 2003, comes as Iraq faces a major budget shortfall that it is to help address with funding from the International Monetary Fund.

Of 249 parliament members in attendance, 158 voted to sack Zebari, who became finance minister in 2014 after a long career at the helm of the country's foreign ministry, two MPs told AFP.

"The finance minister was removed during a secret voting session," MP Ammar Toma said.

Abdulrahim al-Shammari, another MP, confirmed that parliament had voted to remove Zebari, the most senior Kurdish minister in the federal government.

With Zebari goes a long-standing link between Baghdad and the country's autonomous Kurdish region, the leader of which has called for a referendum on independence, and his removal could signal a further disengagement between the two sides.

Zebari, who denied the corruption allegations against him, is the second minister to be sacked by parliament in less than a month.

Lawmakers voted on August 25 to remove defence minister Khalid al-Obeidi, who had also been questioned over alleged corruption.

Interior minister Mohammed al-Ghabban resigned following a bombing in central Baghdad that killed more than 300 people in July, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office announced that he had also accepted the resignations of six other ministers.

Abadi called in February for the cabinet to include technocrats, but has faced major opposition from powerful political parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

Parliament approved five new ministers in August after months of delay, but the powerful defence and interior posts remain unfilled.

The removal of the finance minister comes with Iraq in economic crisis caused by low oil prices that have followed years of mismanagement and corruption when prices were high and money plentiful.

Iraq has negotiated a stand-by agreement with the IMF under which will provide the country with more than $5 billion over three years, but the shortfall in the Iraqi budget is much larger than that figure.
Washington (AFP) - Iraqi security forces will be ready by next month for an assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, the top general in the US military said Wednesday.

"We assess today that the Iraqis will have in early October all the forces marshaled, trained, fielded, equipped that are necessary for operations in Mosul," General Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a military event in Washington.

"Timing of that operation now is really just a function of a political decision by Prime Minister (Haider al-)Abadi."

Iraqi forces have been moving northwards from Baghdad for almost two years, gradually retaking areas over which IS declared its "caliphate" in June 2014.

Kurdish peshmerga forces to the north of Mosul will also join the assault.

The United States is leading an international air campaign that has been pounding IS targets across Iraq and Syria.

Though the Pentagon does not plan on directly sending American troops into combat, it has thousands of soldiers in Iraq who are training and arming Iraqi partners.

"We will be in a position to provide whatever support, whatever reinforcement, those forces need in order to be successful," Dunford said.

IS seized Mosul, Iraq's cosmopolitan and religiously mixed second city, in a lightning offensive through the north and west of the country.

Mosul had an estimated population of around two million before IS took it over.

Accurate numbers for the population remaining in the city are hard to come by but the United Nations and other officials have said up to one million civilians may still be living under IS rule in the Mosul area.

The Pentagon estimates 3,000 to 4,500 IS fighters are in Mosul.
Sen. Ben Sasse hailed overwhelming House passage of a companion measure to his Senate bill that would give the Government Accountability Office access to a disputed database that would help it audit federal programs.

The House approved the measure on a 404-0 vote.

In May, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted unanimously to send the Sasse bill to the Senate floor, where it still is awaiting action.

"Like we've said from the beginning, this is common-sense stuff that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on," Sasse said. "Let the watchdogs do their job.

"Everyone knows that there's fraud in Washington's bureaucracy -- this is an important way to tackle it so that Nebraskans don't foot the bill."

The legislation would ensure that GAO has access to the National Directory of New Hires database. NDNH was created by Congress in 1996 primarily to assist state-level agencies in enforcing child support laws.

Last March, GAO was unable to comply with Sasse's request to audit school lunch programs to ensure that assistance was targeted to children who needed it most because of a disagreement between GAO and the Department of Health and Human Services over access to the database.
BOLOGNA (Reuters) - Italian prosecutors have dropped a money laundering case against the son of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, their office said on Wednesday. The decision, which has yet to be confirmed by a senior judge - usually a formality - came six weeks after Erdogan complained in a television interview that his son Bilal was being abused by the Italian justice system. "Italy should be attending to the mafia, not my son," Erdogan said, adding that it could "cause problems for our relationship with Italy" if his son returned to the country and was arrested. The allegation that Bilal Erodogan, 35, was involved in money laundering while studying in Italy last year was first made by Murat Hakan Uzan, an exiled member of one of Turkey's richest families and an opponent of the president. Prosecutors had been looking into sums of money allegedly brought to Italy from Turkey while he was studying for a doctorate degree. Bilal Erdogan, who has since returned to Turkey, had denied all charges as completely unfounded. (Reporting by Valentina Accardo; Writing by Philip Pullella; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
PALERMO, Italy (Reuters) - A Sicilian judge on Wednesday ordered a trial for an Eritrean man accused of running a people smuggling network that sent thousands of migrants to Europe and many to their deaths during dangerous sea voyages to the continent. Judge Alessia Geraci said Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhean would stand trial in Palermo, capital of Italy's southern island of Sicily, on Nov. 16 on charges of abetting illegal immigration and engaging in human trafficking. Medhanie was arrested in May in Sudan and extradited to Italy, the European entry point for many migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in rickety boats from North Africa. It was the first time a suspected trafficking kingpin was tracked down in Africa and brought to face justice in Italy since Europe's migration crisis started almost three years ago. However, friends and family of Medhanie say it is a case of mistaken identity, arguing that he was an impoverished 29-year-old refugee with no criminal background, who was living quietly in Khartoum and seeking to join his siblings in the United States when he was arrested in a rundown cafe. Medhanie denies all the charges. His arrest was coordinated by Italy and Britain's National Crime Agency. They maintain they have the right man, but acknowledged that they initially got his name wrong and put out the photograph of another man. More than 300,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean this year looking to reach Europe, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Some 3,210 migrants are reported to have died or gone missing while attempting the journey since Jan. 1. (Reporting by Vladimiro Pantaleone writing by Philip Pullella; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Ivanka Trump has launched the latest initiative for Women Who Work, the platform she created in 2014 to encourage and empower women.



The fall 2016 campaign launched Wednesday features Trump and three other women, including a stay-at-home mom, a CEO and a high school teacher.



Trump, who oversees a fashion brand, a website and executive roles in father Donald Trump's businesses, is sharing stories of women like her who are "multidimensional, modern women doing work they love," according to a press release for the launch.



Cheryl Han, who is the CEO of Keaton Row, has long worked in the luxury consumer products industry. After five years at L'Oreal, Han studied at Harvard Business School before going on to launch Keaton Row, an online shopping service that pairs members with stylists, in 2013.







Kelcey Hix is a stay-at-home mom to three sons: Hudson, Jude and Nolan. Hix opted to stay at home and focus on her family after the birth of her first son, which she says "wasn't an easy decision."



That being said, Hix is quick to recognize her role in shaping the next generation: "I think that motherhood is so important because we are grooming these little ones to live beyond our time and to give back to this world," she says in a press release for the launch. "Sometimes, the little decisions throughout the day don't seem very important, but they all add up and, together, they're helping to mold the character of our children."



Also joining the campaign is Emily Heller, a high school AP English teacher and co-founder of the CAP & Gown project, which aims to prepare underrepresented students to graduate from top colleges.



Ultimately, the four women share a common thread: their work is "mission-oriented, mind-expanding, all-consuming," says Trump, 34, in a video for the launch.



"Ivanka is never satisfied unless she achieves a perfect outcome," chimes in husband Jared Kushner, 35. "She doesn't settle, so I find that when it comes to being a mother, being a wife, being a businesswoman, she gives 110 percent at everything she does."



"I love her very much and I'm very, very proud of her," he adds. "It's not easy to balance all the things she does, but she does an amazing job."
From ELLE DECOR

While it looks like it belongs in the Shire, this enchanting fairytale home actually exists in Japan. Named "Jikka," the home is made up of five small hut-like structures joined together to form a single house. Japanese architect Issei Suma says he designed Jikka to be "something as unembellished as a primitive hut and something as holy as a chapel."

Located at the top of a mountain ridge in Shizuoka prefecture, the hut-like structures were built at different heights to bring to mind the surrounding mountains.

So who are the lucky people who get to live in this amazing home? After the house was finished in 2015, two women in their 60s-a social worker and a cook-moved in with hopes of using it to serve the elderly in their community. The two women not only deliver homemade meals to elderly, but also open up their home to the public every afternoon to serve lunch from 12-4pm. There is also a guest room in the house with a nautilus-shaped bathtub (that's wheelchair friendly!) for any elderly or disabled person who needs nursing care.

Take a peek inside and see more photos of this incredible home below.

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

Photo credit: Takumi Ota

h/t The Huffington Post

For more, follow @ElleDecor on Pinterest.

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From Harper's BAZAAR

Jared Leto's next major project is portraying legendary pop-artist Andy Warhol in an upcoming biopic. The actor will also be producing the film with Michael De Luca (Fifty Shades of Grey, The Social Network) and Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire, The Wolf of Wall Street) will be writing the screenplay. The film will be largely based on the 1989 book, Warhol: The Biography, written by Victor Bockris.

Photo credit: Getty

It's been about a month and a half since Leto's starring blockbuster Suicide Squad premiered in theaters. Currently, he's working on a Blade Runner sequel, which is expected to release in the fall of 2017. He's also in the middle of recording a fifth album with 30 Seconds to Mars and starring in the new (and raunchy) Gucci Guilty ads-busy guy.

The actor has gone great lengths to portray his major roles in the past, from living on the streets for Requiem for a Dream, to dropping 30 pounds for Dallas Buyers Club, to playing tricks on his Suicide Squad cast as the Joker. Who knows what he'll do to get into character as Warhol?

Photo credit: Getty

[h/t The Hollywood Reporter]

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LONDON (Reuters) - British tour operator Jet2.com said it would start flying 21 new routes from London Stansted airport next year in a show of confidence in holiday demand despite an increasingly competitive European flight market.

Low fuel prices have led to a strong growth in capacity on European routes, putting market expansion at a 10-year high on forecasts that airlines will add new capacity of 8 percent over the next six months.

But low-cost carrier Jet2.com, owned by UK-listed travel and logistics company Dart Group (DTG.L), said that it would not struggle to fill planes on its new connections from London's third biggest airport and the fourth busiest in Britain.

"We've aimed for the popular leisure destinations in Europe, in Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands. We feel that some of them are actually underserved from London Stansted so we think there is still strong demand," Jet2.com Chief Executive Steve Heapy said in an interview on Wednesday.

Flying from Stansted will bring Jet2.com into competition with Ryanair (RYA.I), the airport's biggest user and Europe's biggest low-cost airline.

Jet2.com's new base at Stansted will give it a presence in southern England for the first time. In the past, it has served passengers in northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Heapy said Jet2.com's sister brand Jet2holidays, through which it sells package holidays, would help it attract customers and compete with Ryanair.

About half of the passengers travelling on the new Stansted flights, due to start from March next year, will be on a Jet2holidays trip, predicted Heapy.

Jet2holidays, plus larger rivals TUI Group (TUIT.L) and Thomas Cook (TCG.L), say demand for holidays has remained strong among Britons this summer, despite a 10 percent fall in the value of the pound against the euro since the Brexit vote in June.

Some destinations like Turkey have not benefited from this demand because of security concerns there.

(Reporting by Sarah Young; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
By Suleiman Al-Khalidi AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan's moderate Islamist opposition could emerge from Tuesday's parliamentary election with renewed influence after surviving government attempts to ban it as part of a wider crackdown on political Islam, analysts said. The group could win up to a fifth of seats in the parliament after ditching its "Islam is the Solution" slogan and joining with Christians and prominent national figures to create a broad-based civic grouping, The National Coalition for Reform, they added. Officials said turnout was 36 percent of 4.1 million eligible voters at the end of polling, lower than the election in January 2013. This appeared to confirm reports by independent observers who anticipated apathy from many voters with minimal confidence in a parliament dominated by pro-government tribal deputies. Ballot counting went relatively smoothly with results expected on Wednesday. No major incidents were reported in tribal areas where clan fights can occur when results are released. The Islamist-backed National Coalition for Reform said it was cautiously observing the ballot counting, warning of a repeat of irregularities and vote-rigging that Islamists had in past polls accused the authorities of conducting to foil their electoral gains. "The recurrence of negative practices in previous elections could threaten the democratic future in Jordan," the grouping warned in a statement on Tuesday. The election represents a modest step in the democratization process launched by staunch U.S. ally King Abdullah as he seeks to insulate Jordan from the conflicts at its borders. But the vote is expected to show the resilience of Islamists in the face of heavy state restrictions, Western diplomats and analysts said. Electoral laws that favor tribal areas rather than cities, where Islamists enjoy most support, mean they are unlikely to dominate the poll, but they could still shake up Jordan's staid political scene, analysts said. "This will be an extension of previous parliaments created by successive governments. But ... the challenges we face require a brave stance," said Sheikh Hamza Mansour, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure. Vilified by pro-government media, the Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), had boycotted elections for a decade in protest at electoral laws they felt were biased against them, while pressing demands for broader political representation. The Muslim Brotherhood has been allowed to operate in Jordan since 1946. But it came under suspicion after the Arab Spring, in which Islamists pitted against established powers in many Arab countries. Jordan came close to banning the Brotherhood this year in what the Islamists have said was a settling of scores with them for instigating protests that focused on reforming the government and limiting King Abdullah's powers. The protests fell short of demanding the overthrow of the monarchy. Elections are contested under an electoral law that left intact a voting system that favors sparsely populated tribal East Bank constituencies over the densely populated cities mostly inhabited by Jordanians of Palestinian descent, which are Islamic strongholds and highly politicized. The political empowerment of Jordanians of Palestinian origin is a sensitive issue in a country with many citizens of Palestinian origin. But the Islamists have commanded increasing support in rural and tribal areas in recent years. The Islamic Action Front participated in this vote in part to get round legal moves to ban it and the Brotherhood for boycotting elections. Now, the election will test the front's grassroots support. "The IAF's relative skill in organization and messaging ... leaves it well placed to capture a significant number of seats in parliament," said the U.S.-based International Republican Institute, one of several international observers. PASSIVE PARLIAMENT The Islamists' boycott had long reduced Jordanian elections to a contest between tribal leaders, establishment figures and independent businessmen. The Islamic Action Front has fielded candidates in a majority of electoral districts. It hopes to do well by aligning with independents who share an opposition agenda, shaking up a passive parliament packed with pro-government deputies. That passivity has allowed successive governments to enact draconian temporary laws restricting public freedoms and to pass unpopular austerity measures urged by the International Monetary Fund, said Mansour. Showcasing their attempts to unite with other groups for the election, Islamists campaigned with Awdeh Qawwas, a prominent priest, in the affluent Abdoun district of the capital Amman. Crimson posters advertising the coalition have replaced the green Muslim Brotherhood flags, Koranic verses and slogans espousing jihad that were the hallmark of Jordan's Islamists. "If there are real deputies whom our great people can elect, there will be a real parliament able to hold accountable anyone who lays his hand on public funds," said Mansour Murad, a leftist in the Islamist coalition. The comeback of Jordan's best organized opposition has left secular rivals fearing the revival of Islamism in a contest where national politics has taken a back seat. They have responded by demanding the separation of politics and religions and attacking political Islam. "There should be no guardianship over people in the name of religion," said Kais Khalil Zayadin, a young lawyer running on the "Maan" (together) list, whose campaign has resonated in affluent areas of the capital. UNDER-REPRESENTATION For many Jordanians, the fact that elections are being held at all demonstrates their country's stability in a violent region. "The mere fact we are holding elections and going to our homes safely and counting votes instead of counting the dead is a testimony to how Jordan's leadership has steered us away from destruction," said Bassam Haddadeen, a former member of parliament and minister. Others see the election as unjust or meaningless, given rules that ensure Jordanian cities will be under-represented. In one constituency in the impoverished city of Zarqa, 450,000 eligible voters who usually back Islamists have only six parliamentary seats. By contrast, in the southern tribal town of Maan, 59,000 voters choose four members of parliament. More than two-thirds of Jordan's seven million people live in cities but are allocated less than a third of assembly seats. Officials dismissed claims by some international observers that voters are growing apathetic, disillusioned by a parliament unable to challenge governments picked by the king. "The parliament is the gateway to political reform, whether we like it or not. Jordan is on the path towards political reform. Some say we are moving slowly, others say we are moving fast, but it is going forward as it should," said Khaled Kaladeh, head of the government-run Independent Election Commission. (Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Angus McDowall, Giles Elgood, Janet Lawrence and Richard Chang)
Getty Image



Derrick Roses alleged rape saga keeps getting uglier. Last Friday, Rose and his lawyers beckoned a federal court to force his accuser  previously known only as Jane Doe in legal documents  to reveal her identity publicly. The notice they filed claims the woman and her lawyers have attempted to smear Roses name and garner public support via the media.

On Tuesday, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that the woman will, indeed, have to reveal her name publicly during the trial. Via Brian Melley of the Associated Press:

The 30-year-old woman says the former MVP and two of his friends raped her in 2013 while she was incapacitated from drinking. Rose denies her claims and contends he had consensual sex with the woman. Roses lawyer argued his client would be harmed if the womans identity wasnt revealed, and he cited interviews and a press conference she conducted last week as a reason to use her real name.

It bears mentioning that the current case is a civil trial, although Doe and her attorneys are now claiming they have evidence to move forward with criminal proceedings. However, theyve yet to produce such evidence. Its unclear at this point whether that will come to fruition or whether the case might result in a settlement, but revealing an alleged victims identity opens that person up to all sorts of ridicule, public shaming, and character assassinations. This is especially so in this case as Jane Doe has admitted during interviews her family doesnt know shes the plaintiff in the case.

(Associated Press)
Paris (AFP) - The longstanding debate about how many waves of African emigration it took for modern humans to populate the planet revived on Wednesday in diverging genetic studies published in the same science journal.

Two papers carried by Nature said a single exodus from Africa likely resulted in contemporary human populations in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

But a third said it found surviving human DNA from at least one, earlier, Africa migration.

Altogether, the three studies presented data from more than 280 diverse populations around the world, but did not quite agree on what it all means.

The research provided "some missing pieces in the puzzle of human history", Serena Tucci and Joshua Akey of the University of Washington's Department of Genome Sciences wrote in a comment.

But "many fascinating questions remain" and further research was needed "to fully retrace the steps taken by early humans as they explored and colonised the world."

Many scientists hold that all present-day non-Africans trace their ancestry to a single resettling population which left the continent some 40,000-80,000 years ago.

Others maintain there was an earlier migration to southeast Asia and Australasia around 120,000-130,000 years ago, followed by a later one to Eurasia.

Two of the new studies seem to support the first theory.

Genetic data, they said, point to all non-Africans hailing from a single African exodus. But they disagree on what happened later.

According to the one group of researchers, it appeared that on leaving Africa around 72,000 years ago, modern humans soon split into two groups -- one heading north to Eurasia while the other swung east to Australasia.

- Extinct colonisers -

This was evidenced by the fact that Aboriginal Australians share the vast majority of their DNA with other non-Africans, the team said.

Australia and New Guinea have some of the earliest archaeological and fossil evidence of modern humans outside of Africa, and it had been speculated that Aboriginals may have originated from an earlier, Asia-bound, exit from Africa.

Story continues

A second research team agreed there was a single African exodus, but said the first split happened slightly later -- between west and east Eurasians.

Neither team rules out the possibility of multiple Out-of-Africa migrations, but said these would have made very little, if any, contribution to the gene pool of contemporary humans.

The third study took a different tack, more in line with a multiple-wave theory.

At least two percent of the genome of modern New Guineans, it found, came from "an early and largely extinct" group that had diverged from Africans earlier than Eurasians -- about 120,000 years ago.

The ancient DNA may have been preserved in Papuans because of a channel of deep sea separating Asia and Australasia which didn't freeze during ice ages, isolating the population there as others mingled their genes more freely.

"We believe that at least one additional human expansion out of Africa took place before the major one described in our research and others," said study co-author Toomas Kivisild of the University of Cambridge.

"These people diverged from the rest of Africans about 120,000 years ago, colonising some land outside of Africa. The two percent of the Papuan genome is the only remaining trace of this otherwise extinct lineage."
Longtime Nebraska politician Bill Barrett, who helped shape the nation's farm policy during his 10 years in Congress, died Tuesday night at 87.

The conservative Republican was known for seeking consensus and compromise during the decade he represented the western two-thirds of Nebraska in the state's 3rd Congressional District.

Tami Reynolds of Reynolds-Love Funeral Home in Lexington said Barrett died at an assisted living facility in Lexington, his hometown.

Barrett was outspoken on farm issues and helped write the Freedom to Farm Act in 1996 that limited farm subsidies. He also tried to keep the federal government out of local water rights issues.

He served in the U.S. House from 1991 through 2000. Before that, he spent 12 years in the Nebraska Legislature, his final four as speaker.

Nebraska Republican officeholders praised Barrett's service on Wednesday.

Rep. Adrian Smith of Gering, who now represents the 3rd District, said Barrett was "known for being true to his word and bringing people together to get things done."

His dedication to the district and to the state "set a lasting example for me and all who have sought to fill his shoes," Smith said.

Gov. Pete Ricketts said Barrett "built a reputation as a legislator who put Nebraska first during his service to our state in the Unicameral and in the U.S. Congress."

Sen. Deb Fischer described Barrett as "a kind, positive man who was well-liked by those who served with him."

Sen. Ben Sasse said all Nebraskans are "profoundly grateful for his life's example of hard work and public service."

Nebraska Farm Bureau President Steve Nelson saluted Barrett as "a solid voice for Nebraska's farm and ranch families in Washington, especially on major policy issues such as trade, regulatory overreach and tax issues, as well as work on farm bill legislation."

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat, said Barrett succeeded in politics the right way: by building relationships and seeking to understand other people's point of view even when he disagreed.

"He had a phenomenal attitude about life," Kerrey said. "He was always considerate even when someone had a different point of view."

In addition to serving in Congress together, Kerrey worked with Barrett to balance Nebraska's budget when Kerrey was governor and Barrett was speaker of the Legislature.

Barrett graduated from Hastings College in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in business administration. After college, he served in the Navy during the Korean War.

He then worked in the admissions office at Hastings College before returning to Lexington in 1956 to join his family's general insurance, real estate brokerage and appraising firm, Barrett-Housel & Associates. When he retired from politics, he returned to Lexington.

He also served on the Republican National Committee during the 1960s, campaigned for Gerald Ford in the state in 1976 and served as state GOP chairman.
From Cosmopolitan

Congratulations are in order for Kim Kardashian and her right hand. In case you havent noticed, Kim is now the proud owner of two diamond rings from Kanye West. The first is of course her 15-carat engagement ring by Lorraine Schwartz from 2013.

The second is a new gift from Kanye, also by Lorraine Schwartz. The only difference is, the new bling is 20 carats and three times more expensive than its predecessor, according to TMZ. This means that when Kim wears both rings, shes wearing some $5 million on her hands. Kim most recently doubled up Sept. 9 when she attended the Harpers Bazaar party during New York Fashion Week.



An Instagram video of Kims rings also exists on Lorraines official Instagram account:

No word on whether or not ring no. 2 caused Kanye to send emails to Lorraine back and forth like last time. As the jewelers rep previously told E!, Kanye was involved in every single way with the engagement ring. He had a vision from the beginning. He looked at a lot of stones and he wanted only the best ... He wanted the diamond to look like it was floating on air, according to the rep. Everything was his idea from beginning to end.



Follow Peggy on Twitter.

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The next months will be tough as Singapore faces global headwinds.

With the purchasing managers indices of key markets turning south rather than northward, a flat or even disappointing growth in Singapore exports could stay for a while.

According to a report by DBS, some of the global issues could further put pressures on the city-state's exports.

"Indeed, nothing has changed in the external environment to warrant an improvement at this juncture," DBS said.

The report cited the slowdown in China as the main concern, as well as the snail-pace growth in the United States.

"Sluggish growth in the US, combined with the risks of a rate hike by the Federal Reserve and the upcoming US election, will continue to weigh on the global outlook," the report stated.

"You have a potent mix of downside risks to export performance and growth," DBS claimed, pointing out that the uncertainties surrounding a post Brexit Eurozone would likely put downward pressures.

DBS noted that the next few months will be rough for any export-dependent economy, including Singapore.

To recall, Singapore non-oil domestic exports (NODX) decreased by 1.9% in August, following the previous month's same pace of decline.

On YoY basis, NODX registered a flat growth in August, rebounding from a sharp 10.6% decline in July.







More From Singapore Business Review


The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors with insider trading.

The trading allegedly involves Atlas Pipeline Partners, according to the SEC complaint.

The key details from the charges are as follows:

First half of 2010 -"Cooperman reduced his stake in APL, by, among other things, directing accounts he controlled to sell APL stock worth millions of dollars."

July 7, 2010 - "Cooperman expressed to Omega Consultant that APL was a 'shitty business.'"

"Cooperman spoke with APL Executive 1 on the telephone on July 7, 19 and 20, 2010. During these telephone conversations, APL Executive 1 informed Cooperman that APL was negotiating the sale of Elk City and Cooperman asked APL Executive 1 questions about the Elk City sale. In at least one of these conversations, APL Executive 1 told Cooperman that APL was selling its Elk City facility for approximately $650 million."

"During one of these conversations in which APL Executive 1 told Cooperman confidential information about the Elk City sale, Cooperman explicitly agreed that he could not and would not use the confidential information APL Executive 1 told him to trade APL securities. Cooperman, however, did not abide by his agreement to maintain in confidence, and not trade on the basis of, the Elk City sale information."

"Cooperman spoke to APL Executive 1 at approximately 2:06 p.m. EDT for about six minutes. Despite taking a bearish position on APL throughout the first half of 2010 and calling APL a "shitty business" earlier that day, after speaking to APL executive 1, Cooperman began buying APL securities."

"On July 7, 2010, at Cooperman's and Omega's direction, the Cooperman Offshore Account, Hedge Fund Accounts and Managed Accounts purchased a total of 1,966 APL call options with a strike price of $15.00, expiring August 21, 2010. The call options purchases accounted for over 90% of the day's trading volume in that option series. On July 7, 8 2010, APL's stock price closed at $9.66, and the call options the Cooperman Offshore Account, Hedge Fund Accounts and Managed Accounts purchased were significantly out-of-the-money."

July 20, 2010 - "At approximately 9:43 a.m. EDT, Cooperman spoke on the telephone with APL Executive 1 for about seven minutes, while APL Executive 1 was located in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania."

"Almost as soon as his call with APL Executive 1 concluded, at approximately 9:50 a.m. EDT, Cooperman called Omega Consultant on the telephone. During the telephone conversation, Cooperman told Omega Consultant that Cooperman had learned from someone at APL that APL had reached a deal to sell Elk City for $650 million. Cooperman and Omega Consultant discussed how APL's stock price would react to public disclosure of the Elk City sale. Omega Consultant told Cooperman that the announcement that APL was going to sell Elk City for $650 million would cause APL's stock price to increase significantly."

July 22, 2010 - "At approximately 9:40 a.m. EDT, Cooperman called APL Executive 2's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania office telephone line. Cooperman asked APL Executive 2 about the progress of the Elk City sale. APL Executive 2 was surprised that Cooperman knew about the Elk City sale given that APL had taken substantial steps to keep the transaction confidential."

July 27, 2010 - "At approximately 7:52 p.m. EDT, Cooperman spoke on the telephone with APL Executive 1, who told Cooperman that APL' s board had approved the Elk City sale."

"On July 27, 2010, at approximately 8:36 p.m. EDT, Cooperman sent an email to a family member, who also was a hedge fund manager, stating: Good news on APL ... [t]hey sold their ELK City operation for $682mm which will enable them to pay off bank debt, de-risk company because keep whole contracts largely gone and fund their Laurel Mountain obligations. We think stock worth at least $15 in near term---for what that is worth."

"Cooperman's family member forwarded this email to a colleague who replied, in part: "That explains the fishy $17 August calls, etc. I still haven't come across any press release - want to see how it's discussed ...." Cooperman's family member responded: "Somebody should investigate that."

July 28, 2010 - "At approximately 6:59 a.m. EDT, APL publicly announced for the first time that it was selling Elk City for $682 million. As a result, on that day, APL' s stock price increased approximately 31% and other APL-related securities greatly increased in value."

"The Cooperman Offshore Account, Hedge Fund Accounts, Managed Accounts and Family Accounts generated profits of approximately $4.09 million by trading APL securities at Cooperman's direction between July 7, 2010 and July 27, 2010."

"After APL announced the Elk City sale, Cooperman' s hedge fund manager family member 13 emailed APL Executive 3 twice, complaining about APL options activity prior to the public announcement of the Elk City sale, stating: Can you please call me[?] Been trying to get you last few days[.] [T]here had been some fishy options trades in apl [sic] before this that somebody should investigate."

"I also would like to make sure that the sec [sic] looks into the shady option trades and volume in apl [sic] last 2 weeks or so in front of this deal[.] How do I become a whistle blower[?]"

"APL Executive 1 was shocked and angered when he learned that Cooperman and/or accounts that Cooperman managed traded in APL securities in advance of the public announcement of the Elk City sale."
Most child kidnappings happen in broad daylight, out in public places. So how can you keep your kids safe?

The Doctors decided to conduct their very own child abduction experiment with one worried mother. The Doctors will have a stranger approach her daughters, ask for help, and try to lure them inside the car. Elisa, mother of 11 and 9-year old daughters has talked to them about what to do if a stranger approaches but she doesn't know if anything she's said would actually be put into practice in real life.

Watch: How to Avoid Child Abductions

At 2:30 pm in broad daylight the girls are outside of the school. Elise and child psychotherapist Dr. Stacy Kaiser are parked one block away as The Doctors experiment driver approaches the girls. As the driver starts the approach one of the girls steps toward the car and has a full conversation. As the girls start to walk away, the driver begins to back up to follow them and the girls start to run.

Elise joins The Doctors to share what the eye-opening experiment taught her. "It made me very happy that everything I've been trying to instill in my daughters...they were listening!" says Elise.

Stacy shares, "I think your kids did almost everything right." But she shares an important message for all parents: your kids should not talk to strangers if there is not an adult around. Period. Kaiser points out that if the situation had been real, someone could have reached out, grabbed her daughter, and pulled her into the car. The other important thing that Stacy Kaiser wants parents to know is that no adult needs help from a child.

Watch: Warning Signs for Online Child Predators

A major 10-year attempted abduction analysis was recently released by the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children. The head of their prevention unit Ju'Riese Colon joins The Doctors to answer some important questions that parents can use to keep their kids safe.

When are children most at risk for getting abducted?

Story continues

It's when they are going to and from school, when they are alone, walking by themselves or small groups. It's during those key points that they are most vulnerable.

How are abductors luring kids in?

Abductors are asking for directions, or looking for lost puppies, offering candy or treats, and sometimes they use force.

How often does it happen that kids are pulled into a car?

About 70% of the abductions that were reviewed happened just like The Doctors abduction experiment, a driver lures a child into the car.

Make sure to talk to your children about how to stay safe around strangers. For more resources, please click here.
From Town & Country

Women have pushed the pedal to the metal and maneuvered at high speeds with immense skill since the invention of the automobile. In 1929, Helle Nice won a Bugatti and an international reputation as "The Queen of Speed" after placing first at the Grand Prix Feminin. Her high gear career drove her around the globe to race in the Monte Carlo Car Rally and the Italian Grand Prix, and even tour America in a Miller race car.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Sarah Bray

Today "Speed Queens" are still driving in droves and female drivers like Nice and Michele Mouton, Lella Lombardi, and Anny-Charlotte Verney have inspired Viviane Zaniroli to found Rallye des Princessess.

Now in its 17th year, the Rallye des Princesses, sponsored by Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille, has more women than ever to slipping on driving gloves and giving the sport a go.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Sarah Bray

Combining elegance, performance, and fierce but friendly competition in subtle equilibrium, the Rallye des Princesses is a model of civil competition. Behind the wheel, however, the contestants are single-minded in focus: nothing counts but the clock.

Kicking off in Paris and ending in Saint-Tropez (many returning competitors attested the 2016 course was the toughest yet!), this year's competition consisted of 90 all-female crews from around the world. Car collecting drivers from Louisville, London, Newport Beach, Geneva, and beyond shipped their vehicles (pre-war collectors' cars like Austin Healeys and classic category vehicles such as Ferraris, Porsches, and Jaguars were all in the mix) to Paris where the race took off.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Sarah Bray

The well-dressed group (many dressed in Tod's drivers, sleek white pants, Hermes belts and armed with Richard Mille watches) looked at home outside Paris' stylish Plaza Athenee before hitting the road for the first leg to Dijon. But their polished appearances were one-upped by the serious driving and auto mechanical skills that are vital to completing the 1,600 kilometer trek.

Story continues

Photo credit: Courtesy of Sarah Bray

Guided by an old school paper map of the route marked with designated check-points (competitors are not permitted to use Google Maps or any form of GPS), the six day dawn-to-dusk journey through the backroads of the French countryside was not for the weary-though it did allow for scenic lunch breaks and nightly stops at 5-star hotels.

Photo credit: Photo by Sarah Bray

Having absolutely no idea what I was getting into, I met up with the ladies in Courchevel to follow along for the last stretch. The group was worn out from rainy weather they encountered racing down from Paris, so the driver of one of Richard Mille's personal Porsche 956s tossed me the keys trusting that I wouldn't drive their kelly green beauty off the mountainside (A legitimate possibility considering I can't even drive stick, which is Rallye des Princesses 101.)

Photo credit: Courtesy of Sarah Bray

At an elevation of 5,732 feet, I cautiously descended from Courchevel 1850 in the tiny coupe. From there we ran into every adventure imaginable (Wrong turns! Gas on E with no station in sight! Herds of sheep! Roadside wave-downs for directions!) but somehow I and my California-based co-captain Laura made it after night fall to Pont Royal Resort in Provence. The next day we crossed the finish line in Saint-Tropez.

Though we were close to last-and not technically allowed to place because we were just observers-just following the caravan was thrill enough. We felt accomplished for completing even a fraction of the journey. The true athletes were French drivers Marie-Christine Perin and Veronique Morel-Lab (behind the wheel of an Austin Innocenti n 70) who won the overall competition and Servane Gabillon and Chantal Duc Dodon who took first place in the classic category driving a Caterham.

Photo credit: Photo by Sarah Bray

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The wreck of the British warship HMS Warrior  the "last shipwreck" from the Battle of Jutland during World War I  has been discovered near Norway. The marine exploration team that found the shipwreck also recently located the wreck of a World War II-era British submarine in the same region.

The HMS Warrior is the last of the Jutland wrecks to be located, out of 14 British and 11 German warships that were sunk on May 31 and June 1, 1916, as the Imperial German High Seas Fleet tried to break out from the Royal Navy blockade of the North Sea.

"It's the only wreck left from the Battle of Jutland that we can categorically say is completely unspoiled," said Innes McCartney, a marine archeologist at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom. [See Photos of the Search for the WWI-Era HMS Warrior]

"Its completely upside down, and it sank down into an area of very soft seabed, right to the level of the upper deck  so everything inside it is completely sealed in, McCartney told Live Science.

More than 250 warships took part in the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval engagement of World War I, and more than 8,500 men were killed, according to British and German wartime records.

McCartney said the HMS Warrior, an armored cruiser, was heavily damaged during the battle by gunfire from the German cruiser SMS Derfflinger, but it had attempted to make its way back to Britain.

When the ship's engines failed, the Warrior was towed throughout the night by a British aircraft carrier, the HMS Engadine. By morning, however, the Warrior had filled with water, and it was abandoned after its surviving crew of around 700 were taken off, McCartney said.

He added that the final resting place of the Warrior was unknown until the wreck was discovered on Aug. 25, using sonar scans and a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) equipped with video cameras.

Submarine find

The Warrior is the second major shipwreck found in the area within a few months by McCartney and Danish marine exploration firm JD-Contractor AS, which operates the survey ship Vina. The survey is sponsored by the Sea War Museum Jutland at Thyboron in Denmark.

Story continues

In March, the team reported the discovery of the wreck of the HMS Tarpon, a British submarine from World War II that sank with around 59 crewmembers aboard after a battle with an armed German merchant ship in 1940.

"The survey was initially aimed at Jutland, but there were 25 ships sunk in that battle, and we've found 10 times that number," McCartney said. "In the case of Tarpon, it was simply a matter that the direction that we left harbor took us past a potential location for this sub, so I requested we stop and do a survey there. And within about an hour or so we found it." [Sunken Treasures: The Curious Science of 7 Famous Shipwrecks]

Last week, a Danish TV channel broadcast live video from the wreck of the Tarpon as divers from the exploration team were visiting the site.

The submarine is now lying on the seafloor at a depth of about 130 feet (40 meters), located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the north coast of Denmark.

McCartney said the sub had been heavily damaged by the depth charges that sank it 76 years ago, and that two of the submarines torpedo tubes are empty, which suggests the Tarpon had fired twice at the enemy ship.

Wrecks in ruins

Although the wrecks of the Tarpon and the Warrior are legally protected as war graves, McCartney said all war wrecks in the area are threatened by illegal salvage operators, who plunder them for the valuable metals inside.

He said the most valuable items are the bronze condensers that were used in many wartime ships engines, which are worth tens of thousands of dollars as bronze scrap when melted down.

"We estimate that in the last 10 years, anything up to 1.5 million pounds worth of bronze has been ripped out of these [Jutland] wrecks," McCartney said. "And the majority of those wrecks are also the graves of the sailors who died in the battle, and so it's just wrong that they should be doing this."

McCartney said that salvaging naval vessels without permission from the owning navy is illegal under international law, but very little has been done to protect the wrecks.

"There are millions of shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean  it's the world's largest museum. And at the moment it's being trashed just for a want of people standing up to their responsibilities," he said.

He said the authorities in Europe, in particular, should track salvage ships and monitor their whereabouts.

"And when they're stopping over wrecks that they're not allowed to be on, then they need to be [inspected] when they get back into harbor," McCartney said.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Ignoring party labels, Sen. Kathy Campbell of Lincoln has endorsed Lincoln attorney Jim Gordon to succeed her in the nonpartisan Legislature.

Campbell, who will be term-limited out of office at the end of the year after serving two four-year terms, is a registered Republican. Gordon is a registered Democrat.

Suzanne Geist, the other finalist in the legislative contest, is a registered Republican.

"Jim puts people first -- and what they need and what they care about -- rather than partisan politics," Campbell said in a video posted on Facebook announcing her endorsement.

"We need just that type of person in the Legislature," she said.

Campbell has been an independent, nonpartisan voice in the Legislature and has served as chairwoman of its Health and Human Services Committee. She has been an outspoken proponent of expanding health care coverage to the working poor by accessing hundreds of millions of federal Medicaid dollars that are available to Nebraska under the Affordable Care Act.

"I feel that there are three things that people in District 25 are looking for," Campbell said in a telephone interview.

"A good listener; an expectation that you would do your homework and research and be informed; and somebody who can use their best judgment in deciding what's best for Nebraska.

"I'd like to think partisanship does not matter," Campbell said. "George Norris got it right."

Norris was the father of Nebraska's unique nonpartisan, one-house Legislature.

Campbell said she stayed on the sidelines in the May primary race because she knew three candidates in the race. Gordon was one of them, she said.

"Jim has worked with so many people across this community," Campbell said. "I think he'll do a terrific job."

Asked about Geist, Campbell said: "I have not met her."

Geist ran ahead of Gordon in the primary election.
Prisoners, Sabana Larga, Colombia Colombia, Aug. 2011. Establecimiento Carcelario de Reclusion Especial in Sabana Larga is a medium-security prison. The official capacity is 50 inmates, it houses over 100. Many sleep on the floor. (Photograph by Jan Banning)

If we cant come up with anything better than imprisonment, then it is good to be aware of human evolution. A portion of the prison population certainly consists of pathological criminals. But what about all the others?  Jan Banning

_____

In 2008, Dutch photographer Jan Banning gained worldwide recognition with the release of his book "Bureaucratics" (Nazraeli Press), which garnered rave reviews and sold out quickly. Edited by Martin Parr, it contains 50 environmental portraits of civil servants in eight countries: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States and Yemen.

Bannings newest book, "Law & Order: The World of Criminal Justice," is a natural extension of "Bureaucratics." The book is a rare and innovative examination of criminal justice, combining the world of photographic art with that of legal science. Bannings photographs reveal the daily realities of the police, the courts, the prisoners and the often hidden prison conditions in four countries: Colombia, France, Uganda and the United States.

With Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proclaiming himself the "law and order" candidate, and the Black Lives Matter movement urging Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the general public to acknowledge the role structural racism plays in the U.S. justice system, the topic of "law and order" could not be more relevant.

Due to layers of bureaucracy, it took Banning up to five years to gain access to the prisons depicted in this compelling book. At each location, it was his goal to expose the differences and commonalities in the treatment of the prisoners, but without passing personal judgment and avoiding stereotypical prison images.

In an interview with Photo District News, he said, "I was looking for paradoxes and contradictions within the series  to get people to think, and to look for answers." His photographs overthrow many assumptions. For example, they reveal the relatively warm environments of prisons in Uganda, where the prisoners are treated humanely by wardens and guards, in contrast to the more sterile, impersonal settings of prisons in the United States.

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The book includes Bannings reflections on criminal punishment and Michiel Scholtes moving firsthand narrative of being tried and imprisoned in France. Legal specialists from the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (MPI) in Freiburg, Germany, provide brief introductions to the four countries justice systems, plus infographics on crime and criminal justice in them and a selection of other countries. Ulrich Sieber, director of the MPI, contributes a foreword.

This multifaceted collection of photos, texts and statistics provides a fresh perspective on criminal policy that undermines political platitudes and popular cliches. "Law & Order" raises many pressing questions, including: How should humans deal with criminals? What is the relationship between punishment and crime? Is confinement, besides being an instrument of punishment, also effective as a means of correction?

Jan Banning is a Dutch autonomous artist-photographer, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He was born in Almelo (Netherlands) on May 4, 1954, from Dutch East Indies parents, and he studied social and economic history at the Radbout University of Nijmegen. Bannings artwork has been acquired by museums such as the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. His photo series have been published in print media including Days Japan, GEO (France, Germany and International), lEspresso, Newsweek (U.S. and Japan), One World, Sunday Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian Weekend, National Geographic, Time, Vrij Nederland, among many other outlets. Banning has been the subject of a television documentary by Frank van Osch entitled A Touch of Cruelty. (Andrea Smith)

U.S. book launch at Bronx Documentary Center, Sept. 20, 2016. Book available at Bookshop.

See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Tumblr.
Leidos Holdings, Inc. LDOS, a renowned technology services and solutions provider, was among other three contractors that recently won a contract for offering technical solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office (CNTPO). Valued at $480 million, the contract was awarded by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

Whats CNTPO?

The CNTPO is the leading developer of inter-agency and multinational operations to disrupt, deter and deny narcoterrorist activities so as to reduce trafficking of illegal narcotics and materials that support global terrorist activities.

Details of the Contract

As per the terms of the contract, Leidos will provide technical solutions and mission support for command, control, communications, information, detection and monitoring technology and systems in order to counter national security threats posed by drug trafficking, piracy and transnational organized crime. These solutions will also bring down finance networks related to illicit drug trafficking activities. The contract is expected to allow the CNTPO to limit, if not completely stop, international drug trafficking.

LEIDOS HOLDINGS Price

LEIDOS HOLDINGS Price | LEIDOS HOLDINGS Quote

Our View

In the second quarter of 2016, Leidos recorded a 4% year-over-year increase in revenues to $915 million at the National Security Solutions (NSS) business segment. Segment bookings amounted to $520 million. For the third quarter, management forecasts an increase in bookings on the back of several anticipated award decisions, as well as typical seasonality at the end of the government fiscal year.

Being a prominent provider of advanced technical solutions in a number of markets including defense, intelligence, homeland security, civil, and health, surely the latest contract will boost the companys NSS segment.

Meanwhile, in a bid to strengthen its technical services solutions, Leidos completed its merger with defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp.s LMT Information Systems & Global Solutions business (IS&GS) last month. This combination is expected to have brought together a $10 billion portfolio of solutions, mission IT, and technical services under Leidos control, to which the aforementioned contract seems like a meaningful upgrade.

Story continues

Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider

Leidos Holdings currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), while Lockheed Martin has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). A few favorably placed stocks in the aerospace and defense sector include Engility Holdings, Inc. EGL and Ducommun Inc. DCO, both of which sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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Leon G. Cooperman, CEO of Omega Advisors, Inc., speaks on a panel at the annual Skybridge Alternatives Conference (SALT) in Las Vegas May 7, 2015. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors with insider trading.

The trading involves Atlas Pipeline Partners, according to the SEC complaint.

Cooperman is a hedge fund industry legend and manages Omega, an iconic New York fund with about $5.5 billion in assets.

Here's what the SEC's charges are:

Cooperman used his status as one of Atlas' largest shareholders to "gain access to the executive and obtain confidential details about the sale of this substantial company asset."

He and Omega Advisors bought Atlas shares despite explicitly agreeing not to use the information for trading purposes. When Atlas publicly announced the asset sale, its stock price jumped more than 31%.

Cooperman tried to cover his tracks, contacting the executive "to fabricate a story to tell if questioned about this trading activity."

Earlier this year, following notice that Omega was under investigation, Cooperman said he didn't believe his firm had violated any securities laws.

"In short, I don't believe the government investigations will have a meaningful impact on our ability to serve you," Cooperman said during a call with investors in March. "Were I to reach a contrary conclusion, I'd close up shop and give you back your money." He said at the time he had no plans to do so.

Cooperman is considered a legend in the hedge fund industry and has a rags-to-riches story, growing up in the Bronx as the son of a plumber. Today he is worth $3.1 billion, according to Forbes.

Cooperman wrote a letter to investors on Wednesday, defending himself and saying he had not engaged in improper conduct.

CNBC reports that the SEC reached out to Cooperman for a settlement but he turned it down.

Per @ScottWapnerCNBC, Leon Cooperman says the SEC offered a settlement to him & Omega Advisors, but he turned it down  Dominic Chu (@TheDomino) September 21, 2016

Here is the SEC's statement:

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"The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged hedge fund manager Leon G. Cooperman and his firm Omega Advisors with insider trading based on material nonpublic information he learned in confidence from a corporate executive.

"The SEC alleges that Cooperman generated substantial illicit profits by purchasing securities in Atlas Pipeline Partners (APL) in advance of the sale of its natural gas processing facility in Elk City, Oklahoma. Cooperman allegedly used his status as one of APL's largest shareholders to gain access to the executive and obtain confidential details about the sale of this substantial company asset. Cooperman and Omega Advisors allegedly accumulated APL securities despite explicitly agreeing not to use the material nonpublic information for trading purposes, and when APL publicly announced the asset sale its stock price jumped more than 31 percent.

"According to the SEC's complaint, when Omega Advisors received a subpoena nearly a year-and-half later about its trading in APL securities, Cooperman contacted the executive and tried to fabricate a story to tell if questioned about this trading activity. The executive was shocked and angered when he learned that Cooperman traded in advance of the public announcement.

"'We allege that hedge fund manager Cooperman, who as a large APL shareholder obtained access to confidential corporate information, abused that access by trading on this information,' said Andrew J. Ceresney, Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. 'By doing so, he allegedly undermined the public confidence in the securities markets and took advantage of other investors who did not have this information.'

"The SEC's complaint further charges Cooperman with failing to timely report information about holdings and transactions in securities of publicly-traded companies that he beneficially owned, alleging that he violated federal securities laws more than 40 times in this regard.

"The SEC's complaint was filed in federal district court in Philadelphia and seeks disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus interest, penalties, and permanent injunctions against Cooperman and Omega Advisors as well as an officer-and-director bar against Cooperman.

"The SEC's investigation was conducted by Brendan P. McGlynn, Oreste P. McClung, Patrick A. McCluskey, and Polly A. Hayes of the Philadelphia Regional Office, and supervised by G. Jeffrey Boujoukos. The litigation will be led by David L. Axelrod and Mark R. Sylvester. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority."

NOW WATCH: KRUGMAN: Obamacare was done 'on the cheap' and now it is struggling





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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced insider trading charges against hedge fund manager Leon G. Cooperman and his firm Omega Advisors. Essentially, the agency is alleging that Cooperman learned material nonpublic information in confidence from a corporate executive and then traded on it.

In the complaint, the SEC alleged that Cooperman generated substantial illicit profits by purchasing securities in Atlas Pipeline Partners (APL) in advance of the sale of its natural gas processing facility in Elk City, Oklahoma. Cooperman allegedly used his status as one of Atlass largest shareholders to gain access to the executive and obtain confidential details about the sale of this substantial company asset.

ALSO READ: RBC Says These 4 Top Biotechs Could Have Big Upside Potential

Cooperman and Omega Advisors allegedly accumulated Atlas securities despite explicitly agreeing not to use the material nonpublic information for trading purposes, and when APL publicly announced the asset sale its stock price jumped over 31%.

When Omega Advisors received a subpoena nearly a year-and-half later about its trading in APL securities, Cooperman contacted the executive and tried to fabricate a story to tell if questioned about this trading activity, according to the SEC. The executive was shocked and angered when he learned that Cooperman traded in advance of the public announcement.

The complaint further charges Cooperman with failing to timely report information about holdings and transactions in securities of publicly traded companies that he beneficially owned, alleging that he violated federal securities laws more than 40 times in this regard.

ALSO READ: America's Richest (and Poorest) States

Andrew J. Ceresney, director of the SECs Division of Enforcement, commented:

We allege that hedge fund manager Cooperman, who as a large APL shareholder obtained access to confidential corporate information, abused that access by trading on this information. By doing so, he allegedly undermined the public confidence in the securities markets and took advantage of other investors who did not have this information.

Related Articles
Almost 20 years after his first best actor nomination, Leonardo DiCaprio was starting to look disconcertingly like the Susan Lucci of the Academy Awards. But in November 2012 - perhaps as a thoughtful nod to the fact that he'd yet to win an Oscar despite three nominations, but was widely considered to be deserving of one - he received Marlon Brando's best actor statuette for 1954's On the Waterfront as a 38th birthday gift. The gifters were his friends and business associates at Red Granite Pictures, the primary backers behind The Wolf of Wall Street, which had begun shooting that August.

As it happens, he'd be nominated and ultimately lose again for his starring role in the Martin Scorsese film about financial corruption, which DiCaprio also produced, before finally being redeemed this year with The Revenant. Meanwhile, Red Granite's co-founder Riza Aziz and purported financier Jho Low would go on to become central figures in a $3 billion Malaysian embezzlement scandal that has rocked the country, implicated Prime Minister Najib Razak and triggered an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice asset-seizure investigation. The scandal also has drawn attention to DiCaprio's personal and professional ties to the pair, who are alleged to have siphoned money from Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB - meant for in-country economic development purposes - to enrich themselves and advance their own global business interests. (In August, The Hollywood Reporter examined how DiCaprio's opaquely structured eponymous foundation has benefited financially from the relationship as well.)

Brando's Oscar was reportedly acquired in the fall of 2012 for approximately $600,000 through a New Jersey memorabilia dealer. THR has learned this person is Ralph DeLuca, whom DiCaprio previously had developed a relationship with due to their mutual interest in DeLuca's specialty: vintage movie posters. The still-active Red Granite - whose next project is a remake of the 1973 prison-break film Papillon starring Rami Malek and Charlie Hunnam - declined to comment, as did the Department of Justice and DeLuca.

Story continues

An Oscar bylaw, bolstered by a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in 1991 that was affirmed again in 2015, forbids post-1951 honorees or anyone who inherits a statuette to peddle it in any way without first offering it back to the Academy for $10.

But regardless of whether DiCaprio's birthday gift - which he has proudly displayed on the mantel at his Hollywood Hills home - violates Academy policy, the On the Waterfront statuette has other baggage. THR has learned that Brando never sold his award; rather, it simply went missing.

Brando won his first Oscar in 1955 for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront.

Avra Douglas, the Brando estate's executor and archivist (and the star's assistant for 14 years until his death of respiratory failure in 2004 at 80), says the award disappeared while he was alive. "He was trying to track it down and kept hitting dead ends," she says. "There was some rumor that [late actor turned agent] Marty Ingels of all people had it, but that turned out to be untrue. It would be great to get it back."

For years the lore in elite memorabilia circles has been that, in a fit of anger, Brando tossed the statuette out his window, after which his then-young son Christian took it up to his treehouse and, toying with it like a hammer, broke its base. Douglas calls this "undoubtedly hogwash," observing that the late Christian - who later served time in prison for manslaughter - "never had a treehouse."

Regardless, the statuette ended up circulating among private enthusiasts, drawing a public rebuke from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1988 when an auctioneer based out of a storefront just off Hollywood Boulevard sold it for $13,500 on behalf of a Maine collector. Oscars "shouldn't be items of commerce; it's less than dignified," Bruce Davis, the Academy's then-executive administrator, told the Los Angeles Times.

In a statement to THR, the Academy now notes: "We have a long history of enforcing our bylaws against the sale of post-1951 Oscars, and, where possible, even those awarded pre-1951. We have on many occasions prevented the sale of Oscars and enforced the Academy's rights to recover the statuettes."

Indeed, the Academy has aggressively sought to snuff out the rare appearance of Oscars in the memorabilia marketplace, filing roughly a dozen lawsuits in the past three decades and sending out a steady stream of cease-and-desist demand letters in an attempt to keep a lid on the sector, which reliably engenders star-studded intrigue. In 2011, for example, David Copperfield lost out on Orson Welles' 1942 best original screenplay Oscar for Citizen Kane to an undisclosed buyer who paid $861,542. (The following year the magician himself put up for auction the 1944 best director statuette he owned that was won by Michael Curtiz for Casablanca; it sold for more than $2 million.) Meanwhile, in February, Michael Jackson's estate acknowledged that the best picture Oscar awarded in 1940 to Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick, which the late pop star purchased at a Sotheby's auction for $1.54 million, had gone missing.

"The Academy is very much aware of everything" percolating in the marketplace pertaining to its copyrights, according to prominent memorabilia dealer Joe Maddalena of Profiles in History, who told William Holden's family that he'd have to pull the star's 1954 best actor honor for Stalag 17 from an upcoming auction when the Academy produced Holden's signed "winner's receipt." Which is why it's notable that, despite its tenacious track record, the organization apparently has not addressed DiCaprio's ownership of Brando's Oscar. Despite the fact that DiCaprio is both a recent best actor winner himself and a member of the organization (for more than two decades), the Academy's only response pertaining to the subject was to send THR, without comment, a 2012 press release regarding the actor's involvement in the Academy's acquisition of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz for its forthcoming museum.

Also electing to say little about the star's role in the matter is another one of Brando's three estate trustees, Mike Medavoy, the producer of DiCaprio's Shutter Island and a friend who in 2015 donated a week at the eco-friendly Brando Hotel in French Polynesia as an auction item for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation's glittery annual St. Tropez gala. (It went to a friend of Monaco's Prince Albert II for 81,000 euros.) "Mike has been in front of [the statuette] a ton of times; he's very close to Leo," says a mutual friend of both men.

"I don't know anything about it," Medavoy tells THR in an email about the statuette, adding in another: "Marlon was clear: He didn't think awards were that important, ask Sacheen Littlefeather." (Brando, protesting the treatment of Native Americans in the film industry, had civil rights activist Littlefeather accept the best actor Oscar for The Godfather in his stead.)

Alice Marchak, Brando's assistant for decades beginning in 1959, attests to the star's ambivalence toward accolades. "He never displayed any awards," she says. (Marchak never saw the On the Waterfront statuette at his home.) "When he got one he would say, 'Oh, get rid of this!' [In this case] I don't know if he threw it away or if he gave it to a girlfriend or if someone picked it up. I kept his Godfather Oscar in the bottom of my desk drawer for years."

Whether any attempt has been made by either the Academy or Medavoy to address the issue since both parties were made aware of it - at least as early as The Wall Street Journal's initial reporting of DiCaprio's possession of Brando's Oscar on April 1 - remains an open question. DiCaprio himself did not respond to a request for comment.

As it happens, Steven Spielberg - DiCaprio's Catch Me If You Can director - famously made a successful anonymous $607,500 bid at a 1996 Christie's auction for Clark Gable's 1935 best actor Oscar for It Happened One Night in order to immediately turn it over to the Academy. (The organization had unsuccessfully sought to block the sale.) "I could think of no better sanctuary for Gable's only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy," Spielberg said at the time. "The Oscar statuette is the most personal recognition of good work our industry can ever bestow, and it strikes me as a sad sign of our times that this icon could be confused with a commercial treasure." (He subsequently anted up $760,000 in the early 2000s to purchase two best actress Oscars won by Bette Davis for Dangerous and Jezebel. Both were eventually returned to the Academy.)

Of course, for those in Malaysia, the 1MDB situation is immeasurably more consequential than Brando's long-missing relic. "Billions of taxpayers' money has been lost, and people have died," says Pascal Najadi, who has filed a petition with the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the murder in Kuala Lumpur of his whistle-blowing banker father, Hussain. (He and his mother have since relocated to Switzerland for safety.) "It's bigger than an Oscar."

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Hey! Ho! Lets Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk will run at the Grammy Museum through February 2017. (Pictured: Billy Idol, Linda Ramone, Steve Jones. Photo: Getty Images)

This month the exhibit Hey! Ho! Lets Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk, co-curated by the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and the Queens Museum in New York, made its debut in L.A. to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Ramones seminal debut album. The opening gala attracted the likes of Billy Idol, Blondies Clem Burke, the Sex Pistols Steve Jones, and artist Shepard Fairey  and overseeing it all was Linda Ramone, widow of legendary Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone. There at the Museum, Yahoo Music caught up with Linda, who shared her fun stories and personal memories behind her favorite pieces in the exhibit.


Nebraska prison officials will start using newly developed software to calculate inmates' release dates beginning Saturday.

The state Department of Correctional Services has been working on the automated sentence calculation system since spring 2015, a year after miscalculations led to the inadvertent early releases of hundreds of prison inmates.

The new system, estimated at the outset to cost $477,000, moves the calculation from a 360-day year that allows for only 30 days in each month to a true calendar year, and from a mainframe system to a modern, web-based infrastructure, Corrections Director Scott Frakes announced Wednesday.

There's no reason not to calculate how much time must be served based on a 365-day year, or the 366 days of a leap year, he said.

The new method ensures greater accuracy, he said. And sentences can be tracked for changes in law -- such as one last year that created good-time credit reforms -- and any Supreme Court rulings.

The change means about half of inmates could see adjustment to their release dates, ranging generally from two days earlier to five days later.

Eighteen inmates will be released from Nebraska prisons between Saturday and Oct. 4. Fifteen of them will see either no change in their release dates or will get out a day early, one will serve an additional day, one will be in for two days longer and one for a week longer, he said.

Inmates may argue that if their sentences were calculated under the old system -- especially those who may have to serve a few more days -- they should not be changed. And the new system should apply only to new sentences.

But this is not a change in law, simply a change in tools used to calculate sentences, said Corrections spokeswoman Dawn-Renee Smith.

The change to automation is a big deal, Frakes said.

Especially considering what led to the dire need for changes in how release dates are calculated in Nebraska.

In June 2014, a sentencing miscalculation mess was discovered that created upset for inmates, their families, Corrections staff and the public.

It had developed because of bad decisions and an aversion by those in charge to change a nearly two decades-old manner of hand-calculating release dates for inmates with mandatory minimum sentences, even after the state Supreme Court clearly spelled out the correct way in a February 2013 ruling.

Hundreds of inmates were released early and some were held longer than they should have been.

More than a year ago, newly appointed Director Frakes vowed to solve the problem but other issues delayed the fix.

In October 2014, officials had to adjust the sentences of about 425 inmates who were still in prison and 80 who were on parole because of good time that was misapplied to sentences after parole was revoked.

Then in June 2015, officials uncovered more problems that led to the review of 2,000 sentences because some inmates received too many reductions.

Now that it's ready, the new technology will improve efficiency and accuracy, ensuring each individual completes his or her sentence as directed by the courts, Frakes said.

Eliminating the need for manual calculations is significant, he said.

"These are revisions that have made the system more accurate. It truly reflects the sentence given by the judge, jail credits that are authorized by the judge and any adjustments that they had to their good time," Frakes said.

After Saturday, the next step will be to automate the process of combining consecutive and concurrent sentences from multiple offenses and/or cases, he said. Until that function is automated, records management staff will continue to interpret sentencing orders to determine aggregate sentences.

Frakes said he's confident the calculation automation will work, but contingency plans are in place in case some major bug or conflict can't be immediately addressed.

But he is impressed with the quality of work he has seen coming out of the information technology program, he said.

"It's all worked," he said. "Typically at the point at which we go live with whatever project, it's been error-free, and we have not had any challenges."

Extensive testing has been done along the way, said Jeff Beaty, director of planning, research and accreditation for the Corrections Department.

"There's been a lot of time and effort put into this," he said.

Any errors in the system have been small and easy to fix, Frakes said.

It's unknown what the full cost of the changes will be, but that will be determined once the project is fully implemented, said Smith.
ELKO, NV / ACCESSWIRE / September 21, 2016 / Lithium Corporation [OTCQB - LTUM] "the Company" is pleased to announce that it has staked a block of claims on the Buena Vista lithium-in-brine prospect in Pershing County Nevada totaling approximately 8,000 acres. Also the Company has recently received word from American Lithium that they have commenced sonic drilling operations on the north playa at our Fish Lake Valley prospect.

The Company has conducted exploration on the property at various times over the past several years, and has outlined a large geochemically anomalous area where lithium values in sediments are greater than 200 ppm. Additionally although the company has only taken seven near-surface brine samples here in the past, one was anomalous at 10 mg/L, while another was strongly anomalous, returning 20 mg/L lithium.

Company President Brian Goss commented, "Once again we have used our experienced technical team combined with our extensive exploration database to generate a lithium brine prospect that contains highly anomalous lithium and strong exploration potential. We are also very pleased to see the progress American Lithium is making at our Fish Lake Valley Project and look forward to the results generated there."

For further information with regard to Lithium Corporation, or our properties please contact Tom Lewis or Brian Goss at (775) 410-2206 or via email at info@lithiumcorporation.com.

About Lithium Corporation

Lithium Corporation is an exploration company based in Nevada devoted to the exploration for energy storage related resources throughout North America, looking to capitalize on opportunities within the ever expanding next generation battery markets. The Company maintains a strategic alliance with Altura Mining, an ASX listed natural resource development company that is currently developing its 100% owned world-class Pilgangoora lithium pegmatite property in Western Australia.

Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Story continues

This current report contains "forward-looking statements," as that term is defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Statements in this press release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future.

Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Such factors include, among others, the inherent uncertainties associated with mineral exploration and difficulties associated with obtaining financing on acceptable terms. We are not in control of minerals prices and these could vary to make development uneconomic. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and we assume no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although we believe that the beliefs, plans, expectations and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions will prove to be accurate. Investors should consult all of the information set forth herein and should also refer to the risk factors disclosure outlined in our most recent annual report for our last fiscal year, our quarterly reports, and other periodic reports filed from time-to-time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SOURCE: Lithium Corporation
In the course of single day, Ashley Niels learned her beloved dog, Spunky, was quickly and quietly dying.

The 12-year-old husky-German shepherd-chow mix had a fatal and untreatable form of cancer, the vet told Niels last week. He should be put down sooner rather than later, so he wouldnt suffer.

Read: Maid of Honor Carries Her Sister's Dying Dog Down the Aisle

With a leaden heart, Niels scheduled Spunkys appointment with the needle for the next evening.

But first, she wanted her snow-loving dog to get one final storm, even if it was totally manufactured and deep in the heart of Texas.

Her colleagues and friends at the Austin Animal Center, where she works as behavior and enrichment specialist, rented a snow machine and brought it to Niels house, where she sat in the front yard with Spunky and experienced a storm of tiny proportions.

To be honest, he was like, Im not really sure what this is. It wasnt cold snow. I think he could see how excited I was, so he thought it was pretty cool, Niels told InsideEdition.com Tuesday night.

I think he felt all the love we were trying to show him.

His appointment with death was canceled  the vet had a family emergency and Niels couldnt go through with putting him down.

In addition, Spunky was feeling better. He was eating and running and seemed to be in no pain.

The veterinarian said this might happen, that Spunky could rebound if his body absorbed the internal bleeding caused by his cancer.

So Niels is now taking it one day at a time. As long as hes happy, I dont really want to take that from him, she said. It makes me happy to be able to spend more time with him."

She adopted him as a puppy from a local shelter in Wisconsin. They lived there for four years.

He could spend hours in snow drifts and be just fine. He loved it. The colder it is, the happier he is. Unfortunately, Texas couldnt give that to him, she said.

Story continues

They moved to Austin in 2008. Despite developing allergies, Spunky otherwise adapted well. He ran like crazy, bounded up and down the stairs, and charmed nearly everyone he met.

You cant meet Spunky without falling in love with him, declares his owner.

Read: Watch What Happens When a Therapy Dog Wears a GoPro Camera to Children's Hospital

Then came last week, when sudden weakness overcame him, and wouldn't eat. The vet's prognosis followed.

Niels knows, in the far reaches of her heart, that the end is near. But she doesnt want that to spoil the here and now.

I try not to think about it because hes my boy. I get to spend this extra-special time with him  Hes kind of an old soul. Hes gentle, and hell just look at you with pure adulation.

You can just feel the love.

Watch: 9-Year-Old Boy Caught Hugging Dog On Surveillance Camera Just Got His Own Puppy

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LONDON  There's only one thing more entertaining than a police officer dancing in the middle of a busy street, and that's a police officer having a dance off with a giant pig in the middle of a busy street.

SEE ALSO: This strange British police advert for old cell doors has a brilliant twist

Last week, Kingston Police joined in with a 24-hour dance off to raise money for cancer charity Macmillan. Police officer Dan Graham  who has some undeniably badass moves  joined in with the proceedings, and faced off against someone wearing a giant pig costume.

The clip was shared on Facebook and Twitter with the inspired caption, "Couple of pigs having a dance off." At the time of writing it's been shared almost 4,000 times.

That wasn't the only dancing officer Graham did that day, either.

That man needs a career on the stage.
Lupita Nyongo in this lilac gown is maybe the most stunning shes ever looked

Lupita Nyongo in this lilac gown is maybe the most stunning shes ever looked

There is literally no beauty in the world comprable to Lupita Nyongo, and she just proved it once again with this *stunning* look. Yesterday, she headed to Hollywood for the premiere of Disneys Queen of Katwe, a girl-power filled book-turned-movie, and, wow. Theres just no word for how ridiculously beautiful the super talented and lovely lady is! Even her co-star David Oyelowo was freaking out about how flawless she is.

JUST LOOK AT HER.

HOLLYWOOD, CA - SEPTEMBER 20: Actress Lupita Nyong'o arrives at the premiere of Disney's "Queen Of Katwe" at the El Capitan Theatre on September 20, 2016 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Gregg DeGuire/WireImage)

It doesnt get more beautiful than this.

Premiere Of Disney's "Queen Of Katwe" - Arrivals

The gown, designed by Elie Saab, is absolutely STUNNING.

HOLLYWOOD, CA - SEPTEMBER 20: Actress Lupita Nyong'o arrives for the Premiere Of Disney's "Queen Of Katwe" held at the El Capitan Theatre on September 20, 2016 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images)

And she wore a matching lavender gele.

In the past, Lupita has talked about her love of getting ready for the red carpet.

Recently, Lupita told People, Ive always enjoyed playing dress-up before the red carpet and even after, and has become more comfortable and playful with her sense of style. Though we could never find a flaw regarding her style then or now, were SO here for becoming more comfortable with your fashion sense and learning more about yourself in the process.

According to the internet, its unanimous: Lupita Nyongo is perfection.

Lupita nyong'o is the most gorgeous human alive don't fight me on this  Zachary (@zwjohnson98) September 21, 2016

Lupita nyong'o is easily the most beautiful woman alive and im not exaggerating  Griffin (@harryartwork) September 21, 2016

Lupita Nyong'o is the most beautiful woman alive.  bean-bean (@0___bean___0) September 21, 2016

Lupita is seriously a goddess who walks among us. TG for her!

The post Lupita Nyongo in this lilac gown is maybe the most stunning shes ever looked appeared first on HelloGiggles.
2 stars (out of 4)

Remakes of classics are hardly ever classics themselves.

Nonetheless, an all-new take on the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven  complete with an eclectic cast  should have been rollicking good times. Denzel Washington! Chris Pratt! Ethan Hawke! Chris Pratt! But no. This version of The Magnificent Seven (opening Friday, September 23) is a ho-hum slog that, on top of everything else, opens itself up to questions about the usage of the word magnificent in its title.

In a dusty town in 1879, a sinister and powerful industrialist (Peter Sarsgaard) is sending defenseless folks into early graves. He even burns down the local church! Thats why a desperate, recently widowed Emma (Haley Bennett, the lone bright spot) asks a warrant officer (Washington) to round up some outlaws and defend the land.

He does so, recruiting everyone from a wily gambler with a knack for handling dynamite (Pratt) to ... well, the other five guys are too indistinguishable to register. Here's the rundown, per the press notes: a Southern marksman known as the Angel of Death (Hawke), an old mountain man (Vincent DOnofrio), a knife-throwing Korean (Byung-hun Lee), a Native American warrior (Martin Sensmeier) and someone named Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). It's possible that at least two of these characters don't speak more than seven lines put together.

Anna Faris: Chris Pratt and I Dont Know What Were Doing as Parents: Watch

Kudos to director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer) for featuring diversity in the mix  and hey, after all these decades, audiences finally get to see Washington ride a horse. (He's a natural.) Thats not enough. The movie still needs genuine thrills without resorting to dull, mindless violence.

As such, it moseys along at the pace of a long-in-the-tooth horse. Far too much time lapses as the dudes get acquainted and prepare for the climactic battle. Instead of Washington, say, waxing about being an African American making a living in the old West, Pratt mugs for the camera and speaks drivel such as, Whats a syllable? Washington and Hawke fail to share any of their simmering Training Day chemistry. When Hawke ditches the group one night, the impact is nil. A little charisma among any of these men would have gone a long way.

Story continues

By the time the shootout begins, few will care which dude lives or dies. Sarsgaards character is so one-dimensional that hes a hair away from becoming a stock moustache-twirling villain. Of course hes not going to live to see The Magnificent Eight. With onscreen tension reaching disappointingly low levels, theres little doubt we're watching actors dressed up in period garb and playing cowboy as opposed to a showdown between good and evil.

Chris Pratt Reflects on Past Struggles, Homelessness in Inspiring Post: Dont Give Up

In the past five years, Quentin Tarantino has given this genre a tantalizing makeover, thanks to the twofer of Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Witty and energizing originality is the new sheriff in town. A formulaic effort just will not do.













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By Emily Chow

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Malaysian palm oil refiners are facing thinning margins and underutilized capacities, as market supplies of crude palm oil (CPO) tighten in a high price environment, say industry players.

Current low supplies of the tropical oil have been rallying benchmark palm prices, which surged to a five month high of 2,728 ringgit on Wednesday before trading around 0.6 percent higher at 2,708 ringgit ($652) per tonne in the afternoon.

Refiners, who buy CPO to refine it into products like palm olein, stearin and fatty acid distillates (PFAD), have already long called for a restructuring of Malaysia's CPO export tax to improve their margins against their Indonesian counterparts.

Indonesian refiners enjoy an advantage as their $50-a-tonne levy on CPO exports keeps more CPO at home, pulling down domestic prices and improving downstream margins.

"CPO availability is tight, so refiners have been struggling. Refining capacity is underutilized," said a Malaysian trader with a plantations company, estimating his refinery's utilization rate at 55-60 percent.

"Capacity has been reduced but nothing much can be done there."

Palm oil has seen tightness in recent weeks as output remains impacted by the lingering effects of a crop damaging El Nino weather event.

Malaysian production has been rising in line with seasonal trend, but output has been lower on a yearly basis. Production in August rose 7.3 percent from July to 1.70 million tonnes, but were its lowest August levels since 2012. (MYPOMP-CPOTT)

Indonesia, whose palm crops are also impacted by the El Nino, has also been buying CPO from Malaysia to make up for a supply deficit, contibuting to the tightness in the local market, said a local refiner based in the southern region of Peninsula Malaysia.

"In looking at the tightness, it might last until November and only ease in December, as exports would be lower then."

Demand for palm oil usually slows among top consumers China and India towards the year-end, as colder temperatures solidifies palm oil and makes it less appealing to buyers.

"However, when refiner's margins get squeezed, fewer refined products will be available and prices will become high. This will be another incentive for them to keep running," said the refiner. ($1 = 4.1560 ringgit) (Editing by)
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Is India prepared to put up a fight in an event of invasion by aliens and zombies? Can the country win its battle against extra dimensional bodies without the assistance of Will Smith? These are some of the questions the Indian government was asked via a Right to Information (RTI) request.

SEE ALSO: Why the Path to Aliens, Ironically, Depends on Earth

Mumbai resident, Ajay Kumar, filed the RTI application asking the Indian government if it has plans in place for protecting the citizens of the nation when brain-dead walkers begin walking the streets.

"What are our chances again them?" he asked. "What means does the government have at its disposal to defeat them?"

If his caustic tone wasnt already evident, he adds, "Can we do it without Will Smith?" Thats right. He truly implied that Will Smiths skills in science fiction movies such as Independence Day, Men in Black, and I am Legend, in which he battles with mystic creatures, can come in handy.

His questions have since became the talking point among hundreds of thousands of users. So much so, that Kiren Rijiju, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, took the opportunity to remind people that these questions "waste the precious time of office staff." He added, however, "the subject matter is too scientific."

The subject matter is too scientific.

This kind of RTIs will waste the precious time of the office staffs. pic.twitter.com/gVWbqt53PY  Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) September 21, 2016

The government did, however, send a reply to the application saying it did not have any information related to such queries and most of the questions were about hypothetical scenarios.
A Pennsylvania man crawled to the side of a road three days after a car crash killed his girlfriend and hurt his legs so badly that he couldnt move.

Kevin Bell, 39, was driving an SUV that dove down an embankment off U.S. 50 in southeast Indiana and collided head-on into a tree, according to the Associated Press. His girlfriend Nikki Reed, 37, of Seymour, Indiana, was sitting in the front seat and died instantly when the SUV crashed on Saturday.

Bell suffered injuries to his legs in the crash that barred him from leaving Reeds body or the vehicle. He finally crawled to the roadside for help, where Indiana state troopers found him near the scene. Bell was taken to a hospital and is expected to recover.

Police said Bell lost control of the SUV, sending it plunging down the embankment and into the tree. The vehicle was not visible from the roadway, police said.

Reeds family reported her missing on Saturday, and according to police, Bells family said they hadnt been able to contact him since Saturday. According to family members, Reed had traveled to Pennsylvania to pick up Bell.

Authorities are still investigating the incident.
A Florida man faces multiple felony charges after cops say he and accomplices sparked an explosion in his home while trying to manufacture drugs, then fled with the contraband, leaving a 1-year-old boy and two caged dogs behind.

Steven Brown and others were attempting to make a potent form of marijuana called butane hash oil on September 3 when the dangerous process cause an explosion, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office said.

Read: Man Pleads Guilty to Shooting Rampage That Left Parents Dead and Brother, 8, Paralyzed

In the ensuing fire that burned his house down, Brown made the decision to grab his drugs and get out of the house  instead of trying to save two caged dogs that perished in the fire.

Cops say there was also a 1-year-old baby in the house at the time, who was not injured.

Brown turned himself in to investigators on Monday. At the time, he had 12 active warrants for his arrest, which include possession of a place for purposes of manufacturing a controlled substance, arson in the first degree, felonious possession of a firearm, possession of cocaine, possession of suboxone, possession of oxycodone, tampering with physical evidence, manufacture of marijuana, possession of marijuana with intent to sell, aggravated cruelty to animals (two counts) and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Officials said they are still in search of additional accomplices. The exact number of co-conspirators is still under investigation.

Read: Parents and Their 3 Children Found Dead in Multi-Million Dollar Home in Apparent Murder-Suicide

Photos taken by sheriff's office officials show the Port Richey house totally gutted by fire.

Among the photos was one that appeared to be of a nursery, inside of which was a crib and scorched walls.

Pasco County Sheriff's Office officials have not released information on the child because this could still become a child abuse/neglect case.

Watch: Dad Kills Baby Daughter Who Survived Cancer Because He Was Jealous: Officials

Related Articles:
A California man pleaded guilty Tuesday to fatally shooting his parents as they slept in their sprawling mansion before trying to murder two of his siblings, leaving his then-8-year-old brother paralyzed.

Ashton Sachs was 19 years old when he scaled the wall of Bradford and Andra Sachs Ocean County estate and walked through the front door on February 9, 2014, court papers viewed by the Los Angeles Times said.

Rifle in hand, Sachs walked into his mother and fathers bedroom and began firing before moving on to his little brother and sisters bedroom, authorities said.

Twenty-four bullet casings were recovered from the home.

Sachs reportedly walked back to his car and drove to his parents San Juan Capistrano business, where he took a cab to John Wayne Airport to fly back to his Seattle apartment.

He briefly attended college in The Emerald City, but Sachs mostly spent his days smoking marijuana, playing video games and resenting his parents, according to reports.

Read: Parents and Their 3 Children Found Dead in Multi-Million Dollar Home in Apparent Murder-Suicide

Sachs was running on four nights without sleep when he killed 57-year-old Bradford and 54-year-old Andra Sachs, whom he blamed for his lack of direction, he reportedly told investigators.

Sachs believed his parents  who were divorced but still lived and worked together  favored their four other children and hadnt taken his previous attempt at suicide seriously, the Orange County Register reported.

Authorities said his original plan was to kill his parents and then himself, but it was unclear why he shifted his focus to his siblings.

Police arrested Sachs almost a month after the killing of his parents and attempted murders of his brother and sister, testifying they linked him to the carnage when they discovered he researched different degrees of murder and flights out of John Wayne Airport.

Read: Mom Attacked by 2 Sons Begs for Help in Chilling 911 Call: 'My Children Are Trying to Kill Me'

Story continues

Sachs also made arrangements to have his car transported back to Seattle, detectives said. They later found the vehicle and a loaded rifle, court papers said.

Before his arrest, Sachs openly mourned his parents and sat vigil by his brothers side, seeming to genuinely grieve, ex-girlfriend Sarah Verbeek told People.

After their parents murders, Sachs older brother, Myles Sachs, assumed the role of bread winner and caretaker for his siblings, fulfilling a promise made to his mother that he would step in should anything happen to her.

I had a promise to keep and to do whats right, he told the Orange County Register. I didnt think about it. I just did it.

Sachs will be sentenced on October 14, when he is expected to get life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Watch: Dad Kills Baby Daughter Who Survived Cancer Because He Was Jealous: Officials

Related Articles:
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan with their daughter Max

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have announced the next phase of their philanthropy efforts: curing all diseases in the lifetime of their 10-month-old daughter, Max.

At a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday, the couple said they will invest $3 billion into research on curing the world's diseases through their philanthropy organization, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

"By investing in science today, we hope to build a future in which all of our children can build long and rewarding lives," Priscilla Chan said.

Zuckerberg said their organization is already "building a world-class engineering team" to help scientists and medical experts research diseases.

As part of the investment, a $600 million research center in San Francisco called the Biohub will be built in partnership with Stanford, the University of California, and Berkeley. Neurobiologist Cori Bargmann will become the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's new president of science.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

The $3 billion will come from Zuckerberg's personal shares in Facebook  a sum worth more than $45 billion. He and Chan committed to giving away 99% of their wealth through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in December 2015.



Prior to Wednesday's announcement, the couple's organization led investments in an African coding startup called Andela and Byju, an Indian education startup that teaches kids subjects like math and science with a mobile app.

Here's Zuckerberg's full Facebook post on the $3 billion science investment:

NOW WATCH: Here's the first thing Mark Zuckerberg does every morning





More From Business Insider


McLaren has denied a report in the Financial Times that a deal is underway between Apple and British automaker McLaren, which designs automotive software and runs a celebrated Formula One racing team.

"We can confirm that McLaren is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment," the company said Wednesday in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Had the deal been a reality, it would have been be one of Apple's largest forays into the automotive industry, which has seen steadily increasing investment from tech companies like Uber, Google and Lyft. Earlier in the year, Apple made a $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing app and Uber competitor.

The apparent synergies between Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple and Surrey, England-based McLaren are numerous, as Apple has reportedly been trying to enter the automotive space for years and McLaren has been having trouble turning a profit. McLaren was nearly $30 million in the red in 2014.

McLaren specializes in making automotive software, sensors and electronic control systems, which are required of all Formula One vehicles. The company has adapted its technologies for applications in the energy and pharmaceutical spaces, as well.

Rumors have swirled in Silicon Valley about Apple's own secret automotive project, allegedly code-named "Titan" and colloquially referred to as the iCar. Then-board member and J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler said in 2014 that the company's founder Steve Jobs was interested in building and designing a car. In 2015, more rumors circulated about the company taking meetings with the California Department of Transportation.

Apple has never formally acknowledged the program, however. The company also declined to comment for this article.

Total auto tech investment for 2016 is projected to hit a record high in 2016 of $847 million, nearly double 2015's total of $478 million, according to data from research firm CB Insights.

McLaren is owned by its founder Ron Dennis, French entrepreneur Mansour Ojjeh and the sovereign wealth fund of Bahrain.
MOUNT PLEASANT  A home in the 3300 block of Sheridan Road was deemed uninhabitable after crews found poor living conditions and several dead cats Tuesday afternoon.

Police responded to the 3300 block of Sheridan Road in Lake Park at about 9:50 a.m. after a request to check on the status of an 85-year-old woman in the home, police Sgt. Eric Relich said.

The home was in bad shape, with feces and mold seen inside, a strong smell of urine and issues with the homes plumbing and electricity, Relich said. Several people were seen wearing masks and hazmat-type suits and removing items from the home Tuesday afternoon.

Officials had recovered seven cats and three dead cats as of late Tuesday afternoon, he said. The live cats were turned over to the Wisconsin Humane Society.

It was unknown Tuesday if the matter would be referred to the Racine County District Attorneys Office.

In addition to the Humane Society, the county Human Services Department, Central Racine County Health Department, South Shore Fire Department and Racine Fire Bells responded to the scene.

The Health Department determined the home was unfit for habitation, Relich said.
From Esquire

Just a month after being cast in the upcoming sequel to Blade Runner (also known as the most terrifying casting decision ever), Method Actor Jared Leto has signed on to portray famed pop artist Andy Warhol in his self-produced biopic, Warhol.

Sourced from author Victor Bockris' Warhol: The Biography-released two years after the artist's death in 1987-the movie also includes producer Michael De Luca and screenwriter Terence Winter, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Time will only tell how Method Actor Leto will take on this role in his own Method Actor way-though, as he famously quoted Warhol back in 2013, "Labels are for cans, not people." Either way, at least we're pretty sure he won't be sending dead hogs to anyone this time.

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SAO PAULO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - America Movil SAB is interested in acquiring some or all of the operations run by struggling Brazilian rival Oi SA, the chief executive of the Mexican telecom giant said in a newspaper interview published on Wednesday.

Brazilian paper Valor Economico reported that Daniel Hajj, CEO of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's telecom empire, said he was eyeing an acquisition of Oi operations whether or not the company is split up in the midst of an in-court restructuring.

"We are open to looking at anything," Hajj said in the Valor report. "I am very interested in participating in the (market)consolidation in Brazil, but I don't know how it will happen."

America Movil representatives in Brazil did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Oi declined to comment.

Hajj's remarks are likely to renew speculation about merger activity in Brazil's telecommunications market, where four major rivals have struggled to maintain profits in a deep recession while keeping up costly investments in new broadband technology.

Telecom Italia SpA, which controls Brazilian wireless carrier TIM Participacoes SA, engaged Oi in merger talks at the start of the year, but new management at the Italian company has shown less interest in dealmaking.

America Movil and Spain's Telefonica SA, whose Telefonica Brasil SA is the biggest telecom in the country, have never ruled out a deal with Oi, but their scale in Brazil mean tough antitrust hurdles for an outright takeover.

Any dealmaking is expected to hinge on cooperation from the government, Oi's second-biggest creditor, which is reviewing onerous fixed-line concessions and keeping a close eye on licensing and antitrust issues that are key to consolidation.

Oi filed in June for protection from creditors in the country's biggest-ever bankruptcy case, involving 65.4 billion reais ($20 billion) in bonds, bank debt and operating liabilities.

($1 = 3.26 Brazilian reais) (Reporting by Brad Haynes)
(Adds comments from spokeswoman and analyst, share reaction)

SAO PAULO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - America Movil SAB is interested in acquiring some or all of the operations run by struggling Brazilian rival Oi SA, the chief executive of the Mexican telecom giant said in a newspaper interview published on Wednesday.

Brazilian paper Valor Economico reported that Daniel Hajj, CEO of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's telecom empire, said he was eyeing an acquisition of Oi operations whether or not the company is split up in the midst of an in-court restructuring.

"We are open to looking at anything," Hajj said in the Valor report. "I am very interested in participating in the (market)consolidation in Brazil, but I don't know how it will happen."

Oi's preferred shares rose 8 percent in early trading, while America Movil advanced 1 percent.

Hajj's remarks renewed speculation about merger activity in Brazil's telecommunications market, where four major rivals have struggled to maintain profits in a deep recession while keeping up costly investments in new broadband technology.

Telecom Italia SpA engaged Oi in merger talks early this year, but new management in Italy has shown less interest in dealmaking. America Movil and Spain's Telefonica SA never ruled out a deal with Oi, but their scale in Brazil mean tough antitrust hurdles for an outright takeover.

A spokeswoman for America Movil confirmed Hajj's comments, adding that "when we know what is up for sale and what are the conditions, we will evaluate the case." Oi declined to comment.

Any dealmaking is expected to hinge on cooperation from the government, Oi's second-biggest creditor, which is reviewing onerous fixed-line concessions and keeping a close eye on licensing and antitrust issues that are key to consolidation.

"We believe Oi is too large for any of the existing players to acquire it entirely, due to market concentration," Credit Suisse analysts told clients in a note, adding that a piecemeal sale of Oi operations was better for America Movil than a wholesale takeover.

Story continues

The analysts highlighted potential asset sales that Oi outlined in its court recovery plan, including data centers, fiber networks and mobile operations, but added that no deals are likely until Oi concludes its six-month in-court reorganization and Congress passes a new telecom law expected in the first half of next year.

Oi filed in June for protection from creditors in a 65.4 billion reais ($20 billion) bankruptcy case, the country's biggest-ever.

($1 = 3.26 Brazilian reais) (Reporting by Brad Haynes; Additional reporting by Christine Murray in Mexico City and Bruno Federowski in Sao Paulo; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
By Guy Faulconbridge LONDON (Reuters) - The Islamist terrorist threat to the West will endure for years to come because simply taking back territory from Islamic State will not solve the deeper global fractures which have fostered militants, Britain's foreign intelligence chief has said. In his first public comments outside Britain, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service said globalisation, the information revolution, a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and failed states would ensure that terrorism remained a threat. When asked by the Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan at a panel discussion in Washington whether the apex of the Islamist terrorist trajectory had been reached, MI6 chief Alex Younger said: "Regrettably this is an enduring issue which will certainly be with us for our professional lifetime." "I would have to forecast that whilst it is wholly desirable to remove territory you will have a persistent threat representing some of the deep fault lines that still exist in our world," he said. Islamic State militants have lost territory in Iraq and Syria though they have claimed responsibility for a range of attacks against the West. His remarks were shown on a recording posted on Wednesday by the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University. Younger, as chief of MI6, is one of the West's most powerful spies and rarely speaks in public. He was appointed in 2014 by then Prime Minister David Cameron. MI6 operates overseas and is tasked with defending Britain and its interests. Younger said terrorism was fuelled by a host of fractures across the world. "It is fuelled by a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and there are some deep social, economic and demographic drivers to the phenomenon we know as terrorism," he said. At times joking, Younger praised cooperation with allied spy services and also pitched spies as a good key way to keep communication open even with espionage services from nations less friendly with the West. "It is a fact isn't it that a lot of countries are run by people like us. Now that is thankfully not the case in democratically constituted regimes," Younger said after the CIA director raised the subject of communication with Moscow. "We need to find ways of messaging these countries and communicating with them," he said, noting that while communication could be beneficial, "We must uphold the values that we are constituted to defend." Younger said that what he called the information revolution had fundamentally changed the operating environment for spies. "There will be two sorts of intelligence services: those that understand this fact and have prospered and those that don't and haven't. I am determined that MI6 will be in the former category." An economics graduate and former soldier, Younger has worked for MI6 in Europe, the Middle East and Afghanistan since 1991, according to a short biography released by the government at the time of his appointment as MI6 chief. (Editing by Louise Ireland)
First lady Michelle Obama appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday to discuss her Let Girls Learn initiative, with a quick stop by his blanket fort first.

The first topic of discussion in the fort: "If you got stuck on a desert island with one famous person, who'd you pick?"

Colbert immediately picked the president. "How about you?"

"Beyonce."

"Wait, can I change to Beyonce?" Colbert joked.

Read more: Michelle Obama Hosts Broadway Concert With Female-Led Shows 'The Color Purple,' 'Waitress'

He went on to ask, with an added dig at Donald Trump, "Do you know that if you eat too many carrots, you turn orange? And if you turn really orange, you have to start saying crazy things and run for president."

They also guessed at what adults do at work ("probably watch R-rated movies and drink wine") and where babies come from.

Over at the desk, Colbert asked Obama what it would be like to leave the White House, but she wasn't as sentimental as he might have guessed.

"It's definitely bittersweet," she said, before adding, "but I've made my kids start packing their rooms already."

Read more: Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show' Turns One: How Its Ratings Stack Up

Discussing her husband, she said that he is able to get out of work mode when with the kids, and he is "really into gossip" at the dinner table (she even added a spot-on impression of the president). The late-night host also asked about what her friend Beyonce is really like.

"You shouldn't look her in the eye," Obama told him. "She's a special person."

Colbert also pivoted slightly to the election, asking if she was sympathetic to potential first ladies like Melania Trump, mentioning her convention speech that was accused of being plagiarized from Obama herself.

With a deadpan answer, she answered: "Yeah, that was tough."

Story continues

Obama appeared on the CBS late-night show to promote her Let Girls Learn initiative, which brings awareness and resources to 62 million young women who do not have access to quality education.

Garfield / Tony the Tiger 2020 #LSSC pic.twitter.com/GvgSwKrEdQ

- The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) September 21, 2016
First Lady Michelle Obama is the hostess with the mostess.



In support of her Let Girls Learn initiative, which aims to help girls around the world attend school and further their educations, FLOTUS hosted an afternoon event at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Monday for the spouses of government leaders, currently in New York City for the United Nations' annual general assembly.



The First Lady rounded up quite a team to welcome the dignitaries to the city: The event was emceed by Late Show host Stephen Colbert, and featured performances from the casts of the Broadway musicals Beautiful, Waitress, Wicked and The Color Purple  all of which feature strong females in the lead roles.



In between the performances, the audience, which was also filled with school children and Girl Scout troops, heard from fellow champions of girls' education  Queen Rania of Jordan and Gertrude Mutharika, the First Lady of Malawi  as well as Noor Abu Ghazaleh of Jordan, Summyka Qadir of Pakistan and Halima Robert of Malawi, three young women who spoke about the difference education has made in their lives.







Mrs. Obama opened the event (after an introduction from Colbert and a standing ovation) with an appeal to the influential folks in the audience to help further the Let Girls Learn mission, asking them to talk to their spouses and directly to the citizens of their respective countries.



"As spouses of world leaders, so many of us here in this room have a platform that we can use to tell these stories and bring people together to take action for these girls," she said. "Because people will pick up the phone when we call. They will come to a meeting when we ask. Cameras may even show up when we go to an event."



Obama spoke of the impact education had on her own life, and how it "gave her the confidence" to pursue her ambitions: "For me, education was power."



She cited Malala Yousafzai as an inspiration for the initiative, before reminding the audience of the fact that she has no official budget or authority to make laws  and that all the progress Let Girls Learn has made has come from the generosity of others (namely, donations from 80 companies and organizations, as well as other nations like Japan, the United Kingdom and Mexico).





Michelle Obama Gets Help From Royalty (and Stephen Colbert) at Broadway Bash Celebrating Let Girls Learn| Michelle Obama, Queen Rania





Queen Rania also spoke about the importance of education for women, especially in her home region of the Middle East.



"I come from a region where we can't take education for granted," she said. "So many girls in my region don't let conflict define their lives. They defy it. Out of the ashes of conflict, many of our brave girls are rising."



She told the story of a woman in a refugee camp who worked to stop young girls from being married and taken out of school.



"When the power of education is within you, then everything is in your power," she said.



Speaker Halima Robert of Malawi, 17, is living proof of that message: She was forced into an arranged marriage at 15, but through the help of USAID, was able to get out of the marriage and return to school. Now, she aspires to be her nation's education minister.



"I now want to succeed more than ever," she said.



And though her days in office are numbered, Obama insisted that she's hardly done working with Let Girls Learn and furthering the cause.



"More than 62 million girls around the world are counting on us to be their voice," she said. "And I intend to keep speaking out on their behalf not just for the rest of my time as first lady, but for the rest of my life. I hope that you all will join me."
The First Lady visits CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight and talks about life inside the White House, among other topics. Watch the clip above to see Michelle Obamas impression of her husband/POTUS, which might cause a little fracas at the Residence dinner table. Lets just say if one of their daughters should make the mistake of asking Barack Obama about how his day went or to explain something about, say, global warming, theyre likely to endure an exhausting answer/lecture as the food goes cold.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. With guest Michelle Obama during Tuesday's 9/20/16 show in New York. Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS AA2016CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Fun fact about table talk during Dinner with the Obamas: The president is really into gossip. Why? Because he doesnt have a life. Colbert has a strong response to that breaking news, but we wont spoil it. Youll have to watch the clip above.

Sidebar note to late-night hosts nationwide: Please  please  one of you, have Melania Trump on to impersonate the Donald. If so, Mrs. T would be wise to follow George Carlins advice about content over delivery when doing impressions, in his case Ed Sullivan: Dont worry about the voice or the mannerisms, just the acts you introduce. The stranger, the freakier yours acts are, the better your Ed Sullivan will be. Man, George, do we miss you during Indecision 2016 

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Michelle Obama sat down for a fun, light-hearted interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on Tuesday, where she dished on presidential photo shoots, Melania Trump, and first family dinner conversation.

One of the highlights of the sit-down chat, which shied away from politics, was when Colbert asked the first lady about her stunning, romantic photo shoot with her husband, President Barack Obama, for Essence magazine.

Essence

WATCH: Barack and Michelle Obama Open Up About Life After the White House

While the first couple looked very loving in their pics, Michelle revealed that the actual moment being captured on film was decidedly less lovey dovey.

"Barack is horrible in photo shoots, and I hate doing photo shoots with him, so I'm sure right there I was saying, 'Would you just be patient? Don't rush the photographer,'" Michelle said, laughing. "I was trying to convince him to just chill out and relax. So [the photographer] caught that discussion."

WATCH: Michelle Obama Reveals What She Won't Miss About Being First Lady

While they didn't talk too much about the current presidential race, Colbert asked Michelle if she had any "sympathy" for political spouses who have to "stand by" their partners while they run for president, even if they don't agree with some of their political stances.

"No, not really," she replied. "You have to be in it. And if you don't agree, you should have [said so] before they ran. Bottom line is, if I didn't agree with what Barack was saying, I would not support his run. So I stand there proudly and I hope they are too. So no sympathy!"

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Colbert said he felt a little sympathy for Melania Trump, after she was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal at the Republican National Convention, where portions of her speech were reportedly lifted from a speech Michelle had delivered years earlier.

"Yeah, that was tough," Michelle responded, dryly.

PHOTOS: Michelle Obama: First Lady of Fashion

The First Lady, who tied the knot with Barack in 1992, later revealed that she and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia, have developed spot-on impressions of the president after years of listening to him give long-winded answers at the family dinner table.

"Malia will start it, because she usually asked the serious question like, 'Dad, tell us about your day and tell us about that conversation on global warming,'" Michelle recounted.

"Well, I'm glad you asked that," Michelle said, imitating Barack. "Let me just answer that in three points."

"Sasha and I are like, 'Oh god, no. Don't get him started,'" she explained. "Because Sasha and I wanna talk about our favorite song on the Lemonade album."

WATCH: Michelle Obama Rocks Out to Beyonce, Sings With Missy Elliott in Epic 'Carpool Karaoke'

The last time Michelle appeared on a late night talk show, she sat in the passenger seat next to James Corden for a truly epic installment of "Carpool Karaoke," where she performed "Single Ladies" like a pro! Check out the video below to see more.

Related Articles
Its time to get the lead out.

Milwaukee Public Health Commissioner Bevan Baker last week urged city residents with homes built before 1951 to equip their faucets with filters certified to remove 98 percent of lead from household drinking water.

Thats a band-aid for a problem that needs full lateral surgery. Those filters last only 90 days and cost a homeowner $15 to $40 apiece at hardware stores. That may be a temporary fix, but its not a long-term solution.

Milwaukee has an estimated 70,000 properties that have lead water laterals  and the cost to replace them has been estimated between $511 million and $756 million.

The effects of lead  particularly in children  can be devastating, severe and permanent. Elevated concentrations of lead can result in reduced intelligence, learning disabilities and developmental delays in young children and have also been linked to increased behavioral problems and juvenile delinquency.

Thats a high price to pay down the road.

In Milwaukee, 8.6 percent of children, 2,244 of those tested, showed elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to state Department of Health Services statistics for 2014. For comparison, Flint, Michigan, which has been in the throes of a lead poisoning scandal after switching its water supplies, has a rate of 4.9 percent.

And the problem is not limited to Milwaukee. Statewide, nearly 4,000 chlldren or 4.5 percent of those tested, were diagnosed as lead poisoned.

Next to Milwaukee, Racine has the second highest rate of elevated lead levels in children  testing at a rate of 6.2 percent and affecting 153 children of those 2,467 tested, according to those DHS figures.

So, yes, it is a problem here.

Lead in water is, of course, not the only problem. Racine and other cities have long fought the dangers of lead paint  which was banned in the 1970s  dust and other sources.

Lead in drinking water accounts for only about 20 percent of average lead exposure, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. But that agency says as much as 85 percent of the exposure for infants comes from consuming formula made with tap water.

The fiasco in Flint raised the profile of lead problems in water over the summer and health agencies and politicians are reacting. Wisconsins Department of Natural Resources issued grants totaling $14.5 million this summer to 38 communities for full replacement of both the property owners portion and the citys portion of lead service lines. That money, from EPA funds, was boosted by $2.7 million after there was heavy demand.

Racine stands to get $500,000 from those safe water funds next year  and probably another $500,000 the year after that.

Racines plans are to replace private lead water service laterals along streets that are already slated for repaving or reconstruction that will have water main work. City officials said earlier this year that will probably affect 460 properties over the next 12 months.

At an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 per lateral replacement, the citys cost for lateral replacements could total $1.38 million  and thats using the low-end estimate. That will more than outstrip the state and federal grant money.

In announcing the increase in funding to reduce lead problems in water in the state and replace the estimated 176,000 lead pipe laterals this summer, state DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp said, If it costs a lot of money to do that, then it costs a lot of money to do that.

Thats the challenge for state lawmakers as they start to put together next years budget, for our congressional representatives who influence EPA grants, and for city officials  both here and in Milwaukee  who need to prioritize and accelerate the undoing of a problem that stretches back more than a half century.
By Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) - A man suspected of killing his two children and two step-children on Wednesday at the family's home in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn Heights called authorities to report the slayings, police said.

He also attacked the children's mother but she survived with non-life threatening injuries, Captain Michael Petri of the city's police department told a news conference.

The suspect, whose name and age were withheld by authorities, called police at about 1:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday to say he had shot members of his family, Petri said.

According to local media, the man was sitting on the front porch of the house when officers arrived. Police said he surrendered without incident.

When officers entered the house, they found the dead children and their mother. They tried in vain to revive at least two of the children, the Detroit Free Press reported.

The newspaper reported that the woman had filed for divorce in August.

Officials from Dearborn Heights, a community of 56,000, said they have offered psychological counseling to the officers and firefighters who found the bodies.

"This is a very rare occurrence and it's just difficult to understand the motivation ... I dont understand what happened in this household," Dearborn Heights Mayor Dan Paletko told reporters.

Petri said the killings might have stemmed from a domestic violence incident, but he declined to elaborate.

Detroit television station WXYZ and other local media reported that police initially said the man's two teenage stepchildren, a 17-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man, were shot dead, and his two biological daughters, ages 4 and 6, died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The Detroit Free Press reported that police initially said the teens were discovered bound in the basement, where their mother was found with knife and gunshot wounds.

At the news conference Petri declined to confirm the manner of death of the children or the nature of the woman's injuries, although he said she was likely to physically recover. He did not release the victims' names.

The suspect is expected to be arraigned in court later this week.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Louise Ireland, Toni Reinhold)
By Jonathan Stempel

Sept 21 (Reuters) - A mortgage broker who was the middleman in an insider trading ring involving stock tips passed on napkins and Post-its in New York's Grand Central Terminal to a Morgan Stanley stockbroker was sentenced to one year in prison on Wednesday.

Frank Tamayo, 43, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp in Trenton, New Jersey, two years after pleading guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges. The defendant was also ordered to pay $1.06 million in restitution.

Tamayo was sentenced one week after Steven Metro, a former managing clerk at law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett who provided the tips, was ordered to serve 46 months, or nearly four years, in prison.

Vladimir Eydelman, the stockbroker, who made an estimated $5.6 million on his illegal trades, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 30. Tamayo served as a cooperating witness against Eydelman and Metro.

"The sentencing is the last step in Mr. Tamayo trying to put this behind him and move on with his life," Tamayo's lawyer Ross Pearlson said in an interview. "As the government noted, his cooperation was exceptional and helped in securing the guilty pleas of his co-defendants."

Prosecutors said Metro would pass tips about mergers and other transactions that his firm was working on to Tamayo, a friend and law school classmate, who would write relevant ticker symbols on napkins or Post-its.

Tamayo would then pass the tips to Eydelman at Grand Central's main clock and afterward chew up whatever the tips were written on, prosecutors said.

The scheme unraveled in early 2014 after Tamayo began to secretly record the other defendants.

Tamayo could have been sentenced to between 46 and 57 months in prison under recommended federal guidelines. The one-year term reflected his cooperation, prosecutors and Pearlson said.

Neither Morgan Stanley nor Simpson Thacher was accused of wrongdoing.

The case is U.S. v. Tamayo, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 14-cr-00542.

(Editing by Steve Olofsky)
CAIRO (Reuters) - A boat carrying around 600 people capsized off Egypt's coast, killing at least 29, officials said on Wednesday, in the latest disaster to befall migrants attempting to make the crossing to Europe. The boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea off Burg Rashid, a village in the northern Beheira province. Of the 29 bodies found so far, 18 were men, 10 were women and one was a child, local officials said. "Initial information indicates that the boat sank because it was carrying more people than its limit. The boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water," a senior security official in Beheira told Reuters. Rescue workers have so far saved 150 people, officials said. The boat was carrying Egyptian, Syrian, and African migrants, they added. It was not immediately clear where the boat was headed, though officials said they believed it was going to Italy. More and more people have been trying to cross to Italy from the African coastline over the summer months, particularly from Libya, where people-traffickers operate with relative impunity, but also from Egypt. Some 320 migrants and refugees drowned off the Greek island of Crete in June. Migrants who survived told authorities their boat set sail from Egypt Some 206,400 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. More than 2,800 deaths were recorded between January and June, versus 1,838 during the same period last year. World leaders, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, gathered in New York this week at the United Nations General Assembly to discuss the migrant crisis. (Reporting by Mohamed Abdellah, Omar Fahmy, and Ahmed Mohamed Hassan; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Lin Noueihed and Mark Trevelyan)
It would be difficult to overstate the impact that renowned jazz musician Miles Davis had on the trajectory of music in the 20th century. Today in Chicago, a new fine-art exhibition entitled Next Level Badass: Francine Turk & Miles Davis seeks to preserve and translate Miles' legacy for a new generation.

The exhibition features work by visual artist Francine Turk, who joins Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle and Grammy-winning jazz pianist Robert Glasper as one of the few artists granted creative reinterpretation rights by the Davis family.

Much like Cheadle did with his 2015 biopic Miles Ahead, and Glasper did with the reinterpreted sounds of his recent album Everything's Beautiful - for which Turk designed the album art - Turk delved deep into Davis' history to try and do the legendary musician justice.

Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' Remains a Fixture on Vinyl Albums Chart, 57 Years After Its Release

"The plethora of information out there about him had me floored," the visual artist tells Billboard over the phone. "His life was so rich - the relationships with other artists and musicians from Jimi Hendrix to Bob Dylan to Prince, the stories from his family It's quite a tapestry."

Though Turk acknowledges feeling almost overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility to "do right by" the Davis family, Miles' nephew Vincent Wilburn Jr. seems to feel completely at peace with the choices he and the other executors of the estate have made in preserving Miles' legacy.

"I feel my uncle speaks to me; he comes to me in dreams. And I think we're doing right, because we do it tastefully and methodically," Wilburn says on a call from his home in L.A. "It's a spiritual and instinctual process. We don't know where he would be now in his career, but we try to gauge what he would favor and not favor."

Turk's numerous interviews with the family and unprecedented access to Miles' sketchbooks and private journals resulted in the widely varied show opening at Expo Chicago today. While Davis is best known for his instrumental and compositional prowess, the fact that he began experimenting more with visual art later in his life provided plenty of source material for Turk to riff on in her own reinterpretations.

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"He had this very natural ability to compose a page," she explains. "They say that was his best talent, that he was a master composer. He was also known for the way he used space in music - it was very much about the notes he didn't play. So I paid a lot of attention to the areas he left blank on a page."

Listen to Prince & Miles Davis' Never-Released Collaboration

Four distinct bodies of work are represented in the exhibition honoring Davis. One series collages notes Turk took on stationery from the legendary Chateau Marmont, the hotel in which Davis and his first wife Francine lived, with fragments from Davis' sketchbooks. Another riffs on the imagery of Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom Davis shared mutual admiration; a third draws from graffiti imagery and references Davis as the "golden thread" running through many musical shifts and history-altering artistic relationships over the course of his five-decade career. The last body of work in the show is the series of "badass portraits" from which the exhibition derives its name, featuring large-scale portraits of music icons from Miles himself to collaborators and friends like Hendrix and Dylan.

Turk and Wilburn both expressed hopes that the exhibition might serve as a bridge between Davis' extraordinary legacy and a generation too young to remember him. "I would love an 18-year-old to walk into the show and to walk out knowing that To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar exists because of Miles Davis," Turk says. "There are all these themes in his life that are relevant to a young generation - like the fact that Miles was beaten by a New York City police officer and that stuff is still going on today - and I feel like they need to know who this man was, and with any luck at all be inspired by his legacy."

Wilburn concurred that if the exhibition could inspire those who see it, he would consider it a success.

"I hope it inspires kids in Chicago to put down the guns and walk away from all this violence," he says. "Pick up a paintbrush, pick up a book, pick up an instrument, you know? I hope it inspires people of all walks of life - like Uncle Miles' music did, and continues to do."
Milo Ventimiglia has been talking Gilmore Girls and were SO #TeamJess right now

Milo Ventimiglia has been talking Gilmore Girls and were SO #TeamJess right now

We cant believe that in just two months time well have four feature length, brand new episodes of Gilmore Girls. We know that were gonna drinks LOADS of coffee, order too much takeout, brush up on our pop culture quips, and binge watch all four episodes back to back. Were mentally and emotionally prepared to return to Stars Hollowpossibly.

Gilmore girls

While we dont know too much about about the Gilmore Girls revival, which comes to Netflix in November, we do know that each episode will be set during a specific season and that HEAPS of the original cast will be returning to the show.

And we DO know that both Dean, played by Jared Padalecki, and Jess, played by Milo Ventimiglia, will be returning to Stars Hollow to shake things up for Rory.

Now Milo Ventimiglia has been talking all things Jess and were not okay.

Jess Gilmore Girls

Dropping by Collider to talk about his new show on NBC, This Is Us (which is great, btw), Milo also spilled the beans on what it was like to return to the character of Jess.

It was all very much on the page, he said. I didnt have to dream too far about who he was. I definitely went back and looked at the last three episodes that Jess was in, just to see where his head was at when he last left and to understand the dynamic between Rory and Luke and just his own journey in life.

You might remember that the last time we saw Jess he was working at small independent publishers in Philadelphia after publishing his own debut short novel. Compared to where he was when he joined the show, he seemed pretty together.

Jess Gilmore Girls

But what about in the upcoming revival?

I was surprised about where he was, Milo revealed. And then where he is when we pick back up with him.

Omg, this is SO cryptic.

Continuing he added, Id never really dreamed about where he would go or what hed be up to or the shenanigans hed be imposing on anyone else, but I was happy with where they placed him, in relation to everyone else. Jess purpose to being in these new four episodes, I was really happy about it.

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Okay, so we now know that Jess is in all four (!) episodes. Eek!

Jess Gilmore Girls

Continuing on his #TeamJess campaign, Milo told The Today Show that he thought the Jess wouldve made a great father and we need THAT to happen.

Hes someone whos passionate. He has a sense of humor about the world, and he doesnt take himself so seriously, he told the show. He would probably raise a pretty fun little kid. I think hed be a good dad.

While we NEVER would have thought that when he was first introduced, were pretty sure we agree with Milo now.

We now cant WAIT until the reboot starts! Right now were feeling very #TeamJess, but that could all change

Gilmore Girls returns to Netflix on November 25th.

You can catch Milos new show, This Is Us, on NBC Tuesdays 10/9c.

The post Milo Ventimiglia has been talking Gilmore Girls and were SO #TeamJess right now appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Los Angeles (AFP) - US actress Kathy Bates, best known for her portrayal of an obsessed fan in "Misery", accepted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and dedicated the honor to a young girl battling an illness.

The 68-year-old actress spoke emotionally at the ceremony, recounting how she believed her career was over several years ago until she was offered a role on the series "American Horror Story".

She said the award-winning show created by Ryan Murphy had "literally brought me back to life," coming at a time when she was dealing with health issues and the cancellation of her NBC show "Harry's Law".

She also recalled her big breakout in Hollywood at age 42 thanks to her memorable Oscar-winning performance as a deranged nurse obsessed with an author played by James Caan in the 1990 film "Misery", based on the Stephen King novel.

"Sixty years ago I stood not far from this very spot with my beloved aunt Lee," she recalled, speaking in front of the TLC Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. "We were going to see 'The King and I'. And then 34 years later I came back to this very theatre with another king by the name of Stephen with a movie called 'Misery' that changed my life."

Shirley MacLaine and Billy Bob Thornton -- who will share the screen with Bates in the upcoming "Bad Santa 2" -- also spoke at the ceremony praising Bates for her talent and charity work.

"She is the type of actor who is not only loved by the public, the fans and the critics but also actors who know how good she is and what she can do," Thornton said.

"I'm gonna keep this short and tell you that if I could be a woman, I'd be Kathy Bates."

The actress who has survived both ovarian and breast cancer dedicated her star on Tuesday to an eight-year-old girl named Emma, whom she said was like her battling lymphedema, a condition often associated with cancer patients and which causes swelling of the limbs.
Tehran (AFP) - Iran showed off missiles, warplanes, tanks and marching troops on Wednesday in a display of military strength in the face of growing regional tensions.

The Islamic republic used the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war to parade arms including 16 ballistic missiles through Tehran.

A new missile with multiple warheads, called Zolfaghar, was also on show with a threat directed at Iran's arch-rival Israel written on the side of the truck transporting it.

"If the leaders of the Zionist regime make one false move, the Islamic republic will destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa," it said, referring to two Israeli cities.

According to the commander of the air wing of the elite Revolutionary Guards, General Amir-Ali Hadjizadeh, the Zolfaghar has a range of 750 kilometres (466 miles).

S-300 missiles delivered by Moscow this year were also on show in the capital. Other military parades were held elsewhere in the country.

A large maritime display involving 500 fast patrol boats and warships took place in the Gulf, according to Iranian media.

For the first time, Russian-made Sukhoi Su-22 fighter jets flew over the area of Bandar Abbas, a major port on the Gulf coast.

"The recent decision of the American criminals to give military aid to the usurper Zionist regime (Israel), reinforces our determination to increase our defence capabilities," said General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran's armed forces.

The United States and Israel in September signed a record $38 billion 10-year military aid deal, despite increased disagreement over the Middle East peace process.

"The ultimate objective of the United States, the Zionist regime and those who support terrorist groups... is to destroy the infrastructure of Syria and Iraq in favour" of Israel, Bagheri said.

Tehran has advisers on the ground in Iraq and also in Syria to help the military in both countries battle armed groups fighting the national governments.

Story continues

Iran also has fraught relations with its Gulf Arab neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia.

The two countries, the Middle East's foremost Shiite and Sunni Muslim powers, support opposing sides in the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

Tensions between them have also mounted over the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, from which Iranians were excluded this year.
By Liz Hampton

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on Tuesday said problems with its Mitsubishi Regional Jet (MRJ) that delayed a recent test flight to the United States are an easy fix, and it expects to re-schedule the flight in the near future.

The company aborted a test flight to the U.S. in late August following an issue with the jet's air management system. That issue was primarily related to sensors for the system, Chief Executive Shunichi Miyanaga said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday.

He added that the air conditioning system itself was not particularly problematic, and that the company expects to have a test flight from Nagoya, Japan to Moses Lake, Washington, "pretty soon."

The MRJ passenger plane is the first manufactured by a Japanese company in five decades and underscores the country's ambition to re-establish its commercial aircraft industry. But the project has faced a series of delays and setbacks.

The company said its unit Mitsubishi Aircraft Corp is still on track to deliver its first MRJ jet in 2018 after postponing delivery four times.

Mitsubishi also said it is working with customers to address weight issues for its 90-seat MRJ, which is about 600 kilograms too heavy for U.S. regulations. While the company could not comment specifically on those discussions, it said if an urgent solution is required, it could potentially limit seating on the flight or change the arrangement.

It is not uncommon for an aircraft manufacturer to experience excess weight in early design airplanes.

Pratt and Whitney, which is providing engines for the MRJ jet, has also experienced delays.

Mitsubishi said there have been some delays for the delivery of its flight-test engines but this has not been a significant issue for its current production schedule, as it has also experienced delays.

"We will be able to expect that they will be solved in time for commercial delivery," Miyanaga said of the engine delays.

He added that there was some flexibility in the early stage production cycle for jets that will go into commercial service.

(Reporting by Liz Hampton; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
By Timothy Mclaughlin CHICAGO (Reuters) - The resettlement of refugees from Middle Eastern countries, particularly Syria, has been the centre of a heated political debate after President Barack Obama last year pledged to resettle at least 10,000 refugees from the war-torn country in the United States. But refugees from Myanmar, whose leader Aung San Suu Kyi visited Washington last week, have quietly outpaced Syrian arrivals in recent years, even as Syria's civil war intensifies, with an increasing number coming from the marginalized Rohingya Muslim community, according to State Department figures. From Oct. 1, 2015 to Sept. 15, 11,902 Myanmar nationals were resettled in the United States, according to figures from the Refugee Processing Center, operated by the State Department, compared to 11,598 arrivals from Syria over the same time period. That was out of a total of nearly 79,600 refugees who arrived in the United States in that period. The largest group, numbering just over 15,000, were from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Arrivals from Syria, where Islamic State and other radical groups are active, are subject to additional screening processes, according to the White House. State Department figures show the number of Rohingya arrivals from Myanmar jumped from just over 650 in the 2014 fiscal year, to 2,573 last year. This year, 2,173 have arrived as of Sept. 15. During a meeting with Suu Kyi in the Oval Office last Wednesday, Obama announced that the United States would remove sanctions originally imposed on the country in 1997, when it was ruled by a military junta that brutally suppressed pro-democracy movements and showed little regard for human rights. [nL2N1BQ0QI] The decision raised alarm among rights groups, who are concerned about the plight of the stateless Rohingya among other ethnic minorities. The Rohingya have long been persecuted in Myanmar, where they are viewed largely as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh though many have lived in the country for generations. Increased freedom of speech since the military stepped back from direct rule in 2011 has allowed for the unleashing of long-held anti-Muslim sentiment. Around 125,000 remain confined to temporary camps on Myanmar's Rakhine State following waves of deadly violence in 2012 between Buddhists and Muslims. Most were stripped of their ability to vote in last years election. Most Rohingya tend to come to the United States after spending years in Muslim-majority Malaysia and being granted refugee status by the United Nations. Melineh Kano, Executive Director of RefugeeOne, a resettlement agency in Chicago, which is home to one of the largest populations of Rohingya in the United States, said Rohingyas made up more of the total number of refugees arriving from Myanmar to the city recently. "The number has increased considerably over the past year, year and a half," she said. Nasir Bin Zakaria, who founded the Rohingya Culture Center in Chicago, estimates that there are just over 1,000 Rohingya in the city. He fled Myanmar after being forced to work as a porter when he was 16-years-old, he said. Obama has also called for Myanmar to end the persecution of Rohingya in order for it to succeed in its democratic transition, a key achievement of his foreign policy agenda. Nasir Bin Zakaria said that the ability to move around freely and legally made life in Chicago far better than in Myanmar and Malaysia, but it is not without its own challenges for refugees. The city of 2.7 million is struggling with a surge of killings, with 509 murders this year, according to the Chicago Police Department. Newly arrived children from refugee families, unfamiliar to the United States, are an enticing target for gangs looking to recruit, said Kano of RefugeeOne. "When we are selecting neighbourhoods we have to be very careful about the crime rate and gang recruitment, because the majority of refugees come with kids," she said. "You either join or you get beaten up." (Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin; editing by Stuart Grudgings)
By Lewis Krauskopf

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of Mylan NV <MYL.O> are trading at historically low valuations as the company's chief executive officer is set to face a congressional grilling on Wednesday over the price of its EpiPen emergency allergy treatment.

The stock is trading at 7.5 times estimated earnings for the next 12 months, holding near its lowest in at least 30 years and well below its five-year average of 11 times, according to Thomson Reuters Datastream.

Since late August, when the EpiPen price increases came into the spotlight, Mylan shares have fallen about 15 percent. For the year, they are off about 23 percent, against a nearly 4 percent decline for the NYSE Arca Pharmaceutical index <.DRG>, a broad gauge of large and small drugmakers.

A test for the shares looms on Wednesday, when Mylan CEO Heather Bresch testifies before the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee over price increases of EpiPen, an auto-injector of allergy medicine.

The hearing will come the day after West Virginia disclosed an investigation into whether Mylan violated antitrust laws or defrauded the state's Medicaid program. A probe into EpiPen pricing by a U.S. Senate subcommittee was also announced on Sept. 7.

The stock "is just not working because of the overhang from all the headline stuff on EpiPen," said Guggenheim Securities analyst Louise Chen, who rates the shares "neutral".

One concern among analysts is how fallout over EpiPen pricing will affect Mylan's roughly $1 billion in annual sales of the device.

Mylan said last month that it would introduce the first generic version of EpiPen for $300, half the price of the branded product, as it tries to quell the backlash. Further competition looms from Teva Pharmaceutical Industries <TEVA.TA>, which hopes to start selling an EpiPen-like device by 2018.

Chen also said investors were unsure of the benefits from Mylan's recently completed $7 billion acquisition of Swedish drugmaker Meda, which some had deemed expensive.

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Deutsche Bank analyst Gregg Gilbert stuck to his "buy" rating on Mylan stock earlier this month, noting its valuation.

But in a research note, Gilbert cautioned: "Investors will have little patience if execution falters on the base business and/or the newly acquired Meda business."

(Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
Heather Bresch, the embattled CEO of Mylan pharmaceutical company, expressed modest regret Wednesday afternoon to House lawmakers for price gouging on the highly popular EpiPen epinephrine auto-injector that is used to treat life-threatening allergic reactions.

Looking back, I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients who may have ended up paying the [list price] or more, Bresch said in written testimony. We never intended this.

Related: Will Mylans $300 Generic EpiPen Packs Quell Pricing Firestorm?

Bresch has been back-peddling for weeks following complaints from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, lawmakers and consumer groups about a marketing strategy that drove up the list price of the two-pack nearly six-fold since 2007, from $100 to $600.

EpiPen injectors generate a reported $1 billion a year in revenues for Mylan.

Mylan is just the most recent pharmaceutical company to spark a nationwide uproar over excessive drug pricing. These companies have either jacked up the retail list price of drugs that have long been on the market after acquiring their patents, which is what Mylan did with EpiPen, or have imposed sky-high prices on newly developed, highly-effective drugs such as Gilead Sciences hepatitis-C drugs Sovaldi and Harvoni, which retail for roughly $1,000 per pill, or $84,000 for a course of treatment.

Expensive drugs have greatly added to the overall annual cost of U.S. health care and are posing serious economic consequences for consumers, health insurers and federal government agencies and programs.

Medicare Part D spending on EpiPen injectors, for example, grew by an astounding 1,151 percent between 2007 and 2014  from $7 million to $87.9 million while the number of beneficiaries rose by just 164 percent, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation released this week.

Medicare

Moreover, out-of-pocket spending by seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D who didnt qualify for income-based subsidies for EpiPen purchases nearly doubled during that period, from $30 to $56 per purchase. In the aggregate, out-of-pocket spending by all Part D enrollees who used the EpiPen increased more than five-fold between 2007 and 2014, according to the report, from $1.6 million to $8.5 million, reflecting both an increase in the number of users and price increases for the EpiPen. And that doesnt include subsequent price hikes over the past two years that led to the current controversy.

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Related: EpiPen Maker Enters the Pharmaceutical Industrys Hall of Shame

Mylan has sought to quiet the uproar recently by offering consumers and insurers a new generic brand of the EpiPen for half the price  or $300 for a two-pack  which is scheduled to be brought out soon. Mylan also has agreed to bolster its consumer assistance program to cover the drug costs by doubling the income level at which families would still qualify for assistance.

Bresch emphasized in her written testimony that her company donated hundreds of thousands of EpiPen injectors to schools to help safeguard children from potentially fatal allergic reactions. She also noted that her company is engaged in research to increase the shelf life of the product, to save parents and schools money in the long term.

I hope these facts will be considered in the larger discussion about the price, she said in her testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Price and access exist in a balance, and we believe we have struck that balance.

But Mylans latest actions are unlikely to satisfy lawmakers. The EpiPen is a matter of life and death for some patients, and we have heard from far too many over the past several weeks about how patients are feeling forced to go without due to the increased cost, members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations told Bresch in a recent letter.

Related: Two Big Reasons Prescription Drug Prices Are So Much Higher in the US

Earlier this month, New York state's attorney general Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation of Mylan with an eye to possible anti-competitive practices by the pharmaceutical giant in the sale of EpiPen to local school systems. Schneiderman's action Sept. 6 came within hours of Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota requesting that the Federal Trade Commission investigate whether Mylan violated federal antitrust laws to protect Epi-Pen from competition.

Bresch, the daughter of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, worked her way up the ladder at Mylan and was named CEO in 2012. She was one of Fortunes "50 Most Powerful Women In Business" in 2014. Last year, she received a total of $18.9 million in compensation.

According to a new USA Today investigation, the same year Bresch took the reins of the company, her mother, Gayle Manchin, helped pave the way for states to require public schools to keep EpiPen injectors in stock. Gayle Manchin spearheaded that drive after she became head of the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Thanks to that intervention, Mylan secured a near monopoly in school nurses offices, according to the news organizations account. Eleven states drafted laws requiring epinephrine auto-injectors in the schools as a precaution. And nearly every other state subsequently followed suit after President Obama signed the 2013 School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act, which gives funding preference to states that require EpiPen in their schools.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
I Am Not Madame Bovary, the latest drama film from Chinas leading director Feng Xiaogang, has unexpectedly lost its Sept. 30 release date.

While a new date has been announced for Nov. 18, the reasons for the abrupt rescheduling are not clear.

The film had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival where it was screened as a special presentation and went on to win the FIPRESCI prize. This week Feng travelled with the film to the San Sebastian festival.

Neither distributor Sparkle Roll, nor producer Huayi Brothers Media, or Fengs agent CAA have offered any explanation for the delay.

Bovary tells the contemporary tale of a peasant woman who feels wronged by Chinas justice system in her divorce case, and stubbornly attempts multiple appeals through lower courts, with city mayors and onward to Beijing. As she doggedly pursues justice, she wreaks havoc along the ladder of petty bureaucrats and officials who are far more interested in self-advancement and toadying to their superiors, or simply seek to maintain superficial social harmony.

With such an agenda, even state-controlled media have openly speculated that the film had failed to get censorship approval. Sources close to the director, however, tell Variety that it has passed censorship. The film screened in Toronto without displaying the SARFT certificate that would definitively have proved that point.

Even so the flap is difficult to ignore. Not only is Feng Chinas highest profile and most commercially successful director  three of Fengs previous films have earned Chinas selection for the foreign language Oscar, though none received a nomination  Bovary also features superstar Fan Bingbing proving her acting abilities in an astonishingly unglamorous role.

Artistically too, the film is daring. Feng employs top notch cinematography and presents it within a circular frame for most of the films length. Though sometimes he varies it with a square frame and occasionally employs ravishing flashes of widescreen.

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The shift to November has multiple consequences, including cancellation of a planned premiere, and the films ineligibility as Chinas foreign-language Oscar contender this year.

It also removes Bovary from the end of September-early October National Holiday period, when cinema-going typically booms. That avoids a clash with a number of other anticipated titles. And it means Fan no longer has two of her bigger titles going head to head. She also stars in L.O.R.D. Legend of Ravaging Dynasties, by Tiny Times writer director Guo Jingming.

In an interview in Toronto Feng said: Unlike most other directors who have gone from artistic to commercial, I am moving from mainstream to more artistic.

Well Go USA has distribution rights for North America.

Related stories

Toronto Film Review: 'Afterimage'

Stan Lee's 'Monkey Master' set as China-India Coproduction (EXCLUSIVE)

Toronto Film Review: 'Karl Marx City'
NASAs image of a black hole devouring a shooting star is the coolest thing youll see today

Two of the most fascinating aspects of our galaxy are black holes and shooting stars. These scientific wonders provide insight into the incomprehensible power of our universe.

For quite some time, scientists have been aware of the sensitive relationship between black holes and shooting stars.

As Mic succinctly explains, if a shooting star is too near a black hole, it will lead to a stellar tidal disruption. Thats a super cool phrase meaning that a black hole essentially eats up a shooting star in its entirety, leaving dust particles behind.

But research into stellar tidal disruptions has never been too thorough. As you can imagine, its a pretty difficult moment to witness.

But NASA researchers have finally captured the appearance of ~space dust~ around black holes during a tidal disruption! CHECK THIS OUT:

A photo posted by NASA (@nasa) on Sep 18, 2016 at 9:21am PDT

Sjoert van Velzen, who is the studys lead author, said in a statement from NASA, This is the first time we have clearly seen the infrared light echoes from multiple tidal disruption events.

A photo posted by NASA (@nasa) on Sep 9, 2016 at 10:34am PDT

We cant wrap our brains around the expansiveness of the universe  or the fact that scientists now have a clear picture of a BLACK HOLE legit eating a shooting star.

The universe is pure magic.

The post NASAs image of a black hole devouring a shooting star is the coolest thing youll see today appeared first on HelloGiggles.

For more Entertainment Tonight videos visit Yahoo View.
As London Fashion Week wraps up, fashion journalist Natalia Grgona of Paris Modes TV gives us her take on this latest round of catwalk shows, showcasing upcoming trends and new faces to watch out for on the runway.

What were the key trends for spring/summer 2017 in London?

More than in other cities, a catwalk show in London is a chance to express creativity, so every show and all of the pieces really are different. Having said that, flounces were everywhere: added on to dresses of course, but also on blouses. Asymmetric skirts and dresses were also a talking point, notably at the J.W. Anderson and Pringle of Scotland shows, as was silver colored fabric, used in Preen by Thornton Bregazzi and Christopher Kane skirts, and in dresses by Mulberry and Julien Macdonald. Then there was the major trend for chic and elegant silk pyjamas, which was very present at the Mulberry, Burberry, and Paul Smith shows.

What were the key pieces for the spring/summer 2017 season?

Flowers have stolen the show this season, both on the runways and in the streets. Every girl in London has a floral dress, and all of the designers are offering hippy chic and Victorian inspired pieces that can be spiced up when worn with boots and a perfecto.

How has the new trend for buy-now-see-now changed the ambiance at fashion week?

See-now-buy-now was on display right from the start with Burberry. The major English fashion house was the first to declare that from now on its menswear and womenswear collections would be presented together and directly available in stores. Burberry took up the challenge for its Monday night show by making all of the pieces visible on the runway immediately available for sale in 100 countries, at its main store in Regent Street and also in the label's online shop.

Topshop with its Unique Show also created a surprise with a pop-up store at the venue selling pieces that were showing on the catwalk.

Once again, as they were in New York, independent designers either did not embrace the trend or in some cases, like House of Holland, did so for only a limited number of pieces.

Which models stood out as faces to watch for?

There were a number of new faces, notably at the Burberry event, but it really was a Fashion Week dominated by Lineisy Montero. I would not be surprised if she was not in every one of the shows in London.
Donald Trump continues to claim credit for NATOs decision to change its policy and focus more closely on the threat of terrorism. But the head of the worlds most powerful military alliance said in an interview that NATOs policy hasnt changed, and that the Republican presidential nominee is not influencing the alliances decisions.

NATO has been fighting terrorism for many years, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Foreign Policy.

In denying that Trump prompted a new focus on terrorism, Stoltenberg also criticized the real estate tycoons assertion that he, as commander-in-chief, would not come to the defense of European NATO allies if they dont contribute more to the alliances defense costs.

Our collective defense guarantees are not conditional on defense spending, Stoltenberg said. They are absolute and that is why theyve been so successful.

Trump startled NATO officials early on in his presidential campaign by deriding the 28-member alliance as an obsolete relic of the Cold War. But in recent weeks, he has softened his criticisms, saying he would work closely with NATO because it has responded to his criticisms.

I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism, Trump said during his speech on counterterrorism in mid-August in Youngstown, Ohio. Since my comments they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats.

The division Trump is referring to is a new high-level intelligence post NATO created to help combat terrorism. Stoltenberg said Trumps remarks had nothing to do with the creation of the post, and noted the significant length of time it takes the consensus-based organization to make decisions of this nature.

That was a decision that was taken a long time ago but is implemented now, he said.

Beyond the creation of the post, Stoltenberg noted that NATOs biggest military operation at the moment is in Afghanistan, a war that began as a result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Story continues

Its the only time we have invoked our collective defense clause Article 5 and that was a response to a terrorist attack in the United States, he said. Soldiers from Canada and Europe have lost their lives in Afghanistan.

A spokesperson with the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Stoltenberg spoke to FP at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. The annual meeting comes as NATO faces a number of challenges, including a concerted anti-NATO messaging campaign by Russia and political turbulence inside post-coup Turkey, a NATO member since 1952.

The widespread purge of Turkish academics, journalists, judges and military officials in the aftermath of the failed July coup has raised concerns about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans commitment to rule of law. But Stoltenberg said his recent trip to the country alleviated his concerns.

Rule of law, individual liberties and democracy are core values for NATO, he said, noting that he stressed this in his meetings with Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister and the foreign minister. They have assured me they will respect these values.

But other Turkey watchers arent so confident in Ankaras commitment to democratic governance.

NATO is first and foremost a security alliance, said Andrew Bowen, a Middle East expert at the Wilson Center. However, Turkeys descent into deepening and potentially unstable authoritarianism raises genuine questions about its ability to be an effective partner long-term partner, but more broadly, whether Ankaras values are anywhere near those of its other NATO partners.
MIAMI -- It's your move, Max Scherzer.

After Jose Fernandez of the Miami Marlins threw a gem on Tuesday night, beating the Washington Nationals 1-0, now it's time for another star in this series, Scherzer of the Washington Nationals, to try to match.

Scherzer, who starts on Wednesday against Miami, is in the running to win the NL's Cy Young award.

Scherzer (17-7, 2.78 ERA) entered Tuesday tied for first in the NL in wins and sixth in ERA. He also leads the majors with 259 strikeouts.

Fernandez (16-8, 2.86 ERA, 253 strikeouts) is also in the running for Cy Young.

Among the other candidates are three pitchers from the Chicago Cubs -- Jake Arrieta (17-7, 2.96 ERA), Jon Lester (17-4, 2.40) and Kyle Hendricks (15-8, 2.06) -- as well as Johnny Cueto (16-5, 2.86) and Madison Bumgarner (14-9, 2.57) of the San Francisco Giants.

Washington's Stephen Strasburg (15-4, 3.60 ERA) had been in the race until he got hurt. Clayton Kershaw (11-3, 1.73 ERA) of the Los Angeles Dodgers was the favorite until he got hurt.

When you add up all the numbers and all the variables, the Cy Young race is too close to call.

But if you ask Nationals players, they are no doubt backing Scherzer.

"Every out matters to him," Nationals center fielder Trea Turner told the media after his last start. "He goes out every inning and throws up zeroes. He's a competitor."

Scherzer will probably get just two more starts this regular season, so 20 wins do not seem possible. But if he were to get to 19 wins, it would be the second-best season of his career in that category. He won 21 games in 2013 when he finished 21-3 with a 2.90 ERA with the Detroit Tigers.

His current 2.78 ERA is the lowest of his nine-year career.

On Wednesday, Scherzer will face Miami's Tom Koehler, who has a much more modest goal. He has a chance to win at least 10 games for the third straight season. He is 30-35 during that span.

Against the Nationals (88-63), Koehler will try to send the NL East leaders to their fifth straight loss, which would be a bit of an alarming slump just a couple of weeks before the playoffs start.

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"The thing I take out of it is I quit counting," Nationals manager Dusty Baker said of his team's losing streak. "We're just not getting that big hit."

The Marlins (76-75), meanwhile, are looking for their fourth straight win. They are also looking to keep their slim postseason hopes alive while making life more difficult for the teams they are chasing in the NL wild-card race -- the New York Mets, the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals.

"I don't know what the elimination number is," Marlins manager Don Mattingly said. "But I know if we can go about think about putting a win up on the board every day, then it makes it harder (on the teams Miami is chasing)."
Netflix is looking to make this big change to their streaming service, and were not complaining

Netflix is looking to make this big change to their streaming service, and were not complaining

Netflix is one of the most benevolent entities in the world today, lets be honest. They constantly bring joy to our homes and computer screens for a price even college students can afford (although, in the spirit of being honest, most of us just hop on our parents or roommates account) and now, apparently, we can expect even more good things from the Netflix Gods.

Theyre like the gift that keeps on giving, and theyre planning to start giving us a lot more.

Netflix CFO David Wells announced at Goldman Sachs Communacopia, and relayed to us through Variety, that Netflix is working toward having *50%* original programming in the near future.

50%!! Thats HALF of everything on Netflix! Get ready for so many more instantly ~iconic~ shows like Stranger Things  and probably classics like Gilmore Girls, too.

While this doesnt bode well for our productivity in the future, were definitely stoked at the prospect that Netflix will be providing us with more original content, since they already produce so many of our faves.

Whats maybe even more exciting about this mandate is the fact that streaming companies arent as beholden to ratings as traditional broadcast networks are. This means that niche shows like Stranger Things or Arrested Development can thrive in a way that they struggle to do otherwise.

We dont necessarily have to have home runs [with shows],Wells explained. We can also live with singles, doubles and triples especially commensurate with their cost.

emilyratajkowski3

CFO Wells, aka our new crush, also calmed everybodys biggest fear when it comes to online streaming services.

Theres no immediate plans for an ad-supported productThe Netflix brand stands for no advertising.

Swoon. We think were about to enter into a whole new relationshipwith Netflix. Not with Netflix CFO David Wells. Obviously

original

The post Netflix is looking to make this big change to their streaming service, and were not complaining appeared first on HelloGiggles.
From Cosmopolitan

1. XOXO



The main problem with this movie, which follows a group of kids at an EDM music festival, is that the female characters are grossly underdeveloped, either orbiting their more capable, ambitious male counterparts or naively fixating on finding love among them. Sarah Hyland, who executive produced, plays a character named Krystal who gets shamed by her boyfriend for not being DTF, for example, and when she finally dumps him, she immediately falls for another man she meets at the festival. Overall, there's a lot of objectification in service of very little plot.

Bottom line: Skip ... unless you're dying to see a DJ character ("DJ Avilo") berate groupies and "jokingly" demand blow jobs.

2. The Fundamentals of Caring

Paul Rudds character, Ben, is a depressed man training to be a caretaker to cope with his own troubled life. His first client is Craig Roberts, aka the sardonic Trevor, a wheelchair-bound teenager with muscular dystrophy. The odd couple embark on a cross-country road trip as a therapeutic escape, picking up hitchhikers and eccentrics along the way. One such roadside warrior is the leather-jacket-wearing vagabond girl played by a bewitching Selena Gomez. Its the perfect role for a post-Disney actress with a knack for dark humor.

Bottom line: Watch it. The movie is pulsing with heart, and the chemistry between Rudd and Roberts is inspired.

3. The Do-Over

Adam Sandler and David Spade are high-school buddies who have yet to achieve much in life. They decide they want a do-over, so Sandler fakes their deaths in a yacht explosion, drugs Spade, and convinces him to roll with the plan. Its off to a mansion in Puerto Rico. As it turns out, the do-over is a ploy by Sandlers character, whos not who he says he is; by minute 40, the guys are in shoot-outs with 1980s-style action villains. Theres gay joke after gay joke and overall bad humor.

Bottom line: Skip. Its a dated, outrageous, near-unwatchable Happy Madison movie with a story that could have been written by a toddler on a sugar high.

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4. Tallulah

As a big fan of both Allison Janney and Ellen Page, I had high hopes for Tallulah. Unfortunately, the movie falls short. Ellen Page plays the title character, a nomad who lives in a van with her runaway boyfriend, Nico, until he leaves her penniless - at which point she stops into a New York hotel to scavenge for room-service scraps. There she meets a drunk woman who mistakes her for housekeeping and strong-arms her into babysitting. When the mom returns from a date blackout-drunk, Tallulah runs off - and takes the child with her. She turns to Nicos mother (played by Janney) for a place to stay, pretending the baby is Nicos daughter.

There are some heartfelt moments in the movie - but mostly gaping holes in its emotional depth. Plus, the plot dragged and the ending fell flat.

Bottom line: Its not the worst way to spend a couple hours, but you could do better. It might have been more entertaining had Ellen Page and Allison Janney fallen in love. Just saying!

5. Beasts of No Nation

Idris Elba plays the Commandant, the leader of a ruthless African rebel militia who abducts prepubescent boys and forces them to serve as soldiers. Among the kidnapped is a frail child named Agu, whose innocence slowly vanishes as he follows the Commandant on his godless trek to the capital. Elbas character is an unpleasant cross between a diabolical father figure and the monster under your bed.



Bottom line: The movie, directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective season one), is brimming with violence and hard to watch, but it's easily the best film on this list. See if you're up for it.

Follow Jillian on Twitter.

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(Corrects spelling of executives name to Sook in paragraphs 1 and 3)

By Sinead Carew

Sept 21 (Reuters) - Nexstar Broadcasting Group Inc has already has booked orders for more than two thirds of its 2016 political ad spending target, Chief Executive Officer Perry Sook said on Wednesday, but he stopped short of raising the goal.

The company planned to tell investors at an investment conference later in the day that it was standing by the target for $100 million in political revenue for the year.

In a U.S. Presidential election year about half of political ads tend to be booked between Oct. 1 and election day in November, Sook told Reuters in a phone interview. But even though the company is tracking ahead of this so far, Sook told Reuters he was not prepared to raise the company's guidance.

"We're very comfortable with the number we've given to the street," he said. "If you did the math you would probably bet to the upside but we're not guiding to that because you can't use history as your only guide."

He added that the company's political ad revenue will primarily be driven by senate and gubernatorial races rather than the Presidential election.

The comments came the day after shares in broadcasters including Nexstar fell sharply after rival Sinclair Broadcast Group warned its third quarter media revenue would miss its previous forecast because of a political spending shortfall.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by David Gregorio)
LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigeria's army said it had launched an offensive to push Boko Haram militants out of a remote northeast town near the border with Niger, as it fought to end a seven-year insurgency destabilizing the region. The military said it had killed several militants in Mallam Fatori near Lake Chad but Boko Haram had called in reinforcements. "The operation is continuing," said army spokesman Sani Usman. There was no immediate comment from Boko Haram, which does not speak to the media and only releases video statements. But Islamic State, to whom Boko Haram pledged loyalty last year, said militants had attacked an army convoy in the area on Monday and killed 40 troops, in a statement on its affiliated news agency Amaq, picked up by SITE which monitors jihadist announcements. There was no independent verification of either the army or the Islamic State account. Boko Haram controlled a swathe of land in northeast Nigeria around the size of Belgium at the start of last year, but has been pushed out of most of that territory by the Nigerian army, aided by troops from neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad. The militants have nevertheless continued to carry out suicide bombings in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries, in their struggle to set up an Islamist state. The Boko Haram insurgency has killed thousands and displaced more than 2 million people in Nigeria. A U.N. official said on Friday more than 6 million people are "severely food insecure" and 568,000 children acutely malnourished in the nations around Lake Chad. (Reporting by Ulf Laessing and Sami Aboudi in Dubai)
LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigeria's army said it had launched an offensive to push Boko Haram militants out of a remote northeast town near the border with Niger, as it fought to end a seven-year insurgency destabilising the region. The military said it had killed several militants in Mallam Fatori near Lake Chad but Boko Haram had called in reinforcements. "The operation is continuing," said army spokesman Sani Usman. There was no immediate comment from Boko Haram, which does not speak to the media and only releases video statements. But Islamic State, to whom Boko Haram pledged loyalty last year, said militants had attacked an army convoy in the area on Monday and killed 40 troops, in a statement on its affiliated news agency Amaq, picked up by SITE which monitors jihadist announcements. There was no independent verification of either the army or the Islamic State account. Boko Haram controlled a swathe of land in northeast Nigeria around the size of Belgium at the start of last year, but has been pushed out of most of that territory by the Nigerian army, aided by troops from neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad. The militants have nevertheless continued to carry out suicide bombings in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries, in their struggle to set up an Islamist state. The Boko Haram insurgency has killed thousands and displaced more than 2 million people in Nigeria. A U.N. official said on Friday more than 6 million people are "severely food insecure" and 568,000 children acutely malnourished in the nations around Lake Chad. (Reporting by Ulf Laessing and Sami Aboudi in Dubai)
(Reuters) - No charges will be filed against a Maryland police officer who fatally shot an armed black woman during a standoff that she live-streamed over the internet, a prosecutor said on Wednesday.

The officer was justified in shooting Korryn Gaines, 23, and no criminal charges are warranted, Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger said in a statement.

"The state will take no further action in this case," he said.

Gaines died on Aug. 1 after an hours-long standoff that began when officers tried to serve arrest warrants on her and her fiance. He fled the couple's apartment with his infant daughter and told officers Gaines was mentally ill and had stopped taking her medications.

Gaines, who was wanted for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest during a traffic stop, stayed in the apartment with her 5-year-old son and refused to come out. She live-streamed video and took phone calls from family and friends.

Gaines told police that when she and her son were dead "it would be worth it as she took at least one of the officers with her," Shellenberger said in a report on the shooting.

When she raised a shotgun toward officers, one of them opened fire. Gaines was killed in an exchange of fire and her son was struck in a cheek by a bullet, the report said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
Brussels (AFP) - The EU's top court on Wednesday ruled that there can be no exceptions to a ban on animal testing by cosmetics manufacturers in the bloc.

The case arose in Britain after three companies sought to market cosmetics that were developed for sale in China and Japan using animal tests outside the European Union.

The European Court of Justice said EU law bars any cosmetic product containing ingredients which have been tested on animals, wherever that may occur.

"The Court states next that EU law makes no distinction depending on where the animal testing was carried out," the Luxembourg-based ECJ said in a statement.

The law aims to promote the use of alternative methods to meet consumer safety standards and that "objective would be seriously compromised if the prohibitions... could be circumvented by carrying out the animal testing in third countries," it said.

The European Federation for Cosmetic Ingredients (EFCI), which brought the case, had argued that the companies did not break the law since the animal testing had been carried out to comply with regulations in third countries.
North Korea smoke

As more North Korean defectors make their way into their southern counterpart, one would think that that life in South Korea would be rife with opportunity when compared to the North.

A recent parliamentary report from Rep. Kang Chang-il of the Minjoo Party of Korea, however, provided evidence that this may not always be the case. According to Yonhap News, crimes involving drugs have been the number one factor for the incarceration of North Korean defectors.

From the start of this year to July, about 815 defectors were estimated by the Unification Ministry to have left North Korea  a 15% increase from 2015. And as of late-August, 129 North Korean defectors were reported to be imprisoned  a nearly 40% increase from 5 years ago.

Of the 129 imprisoned defectors, 38 of them were convicted of drug-related crimes.

"Under the burden of livelihood difficulties and homesickness, more defectors tend to get involved in crimes with the number of defector prisoners on the rise," Kang said in Yonhap News. "There's pressing need for a system that consistently provides crime prevention education and job consulting to defectors, especially as the population of North Korean defectors in South Korea is nearing 30,000."

In a Wall Street Journal article, North Korean defectors also confirmed accounts of past drug use in North Korea; however, it remained unclear how they managed to refrain from its continued use. Prof. Kim, a former Unification Ministry official, explained that some of the defectors failed to acknowledge the addictive qualities of methamphetamine.

They say you can stop it whenever you want. All you need to do is sleep all day long, for three or four days, Kim stated in The Wall Street Journal.

North Korea

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Traditionally, drug-related crimes in South Korea have been relatively low. Although the US Department of State reports that an undetermined quantity of narcotics is smuggled through South Korea to Japan and other countries, narcotics production and abuse has been deemed not a major problem.

North Koreans, on the other hand, are invested in the proliferation of narcotics. According to a study by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, an illicit hub of activity has emerged beyond the control of the North Korean regime.

Having been originally funded and manufactured by the government after a severe famine and economic hardships, substances like opium were required by the regime to be grown by farmers in the 1970s.

Since then, the country has eased its control by closing state-sponsored labs in an attempt to show the world that it was no longer a player in the production of narcotics. After these reforms, however, private production of the drugs seems to have increased, and what was once a state-run industry is now state-tolerated.

Testimonies from defectors and sources in Pyongyang confirm that methamphetamines have been habitually used by the populace  even going as far to say that construction project managers were issuing the drug, often called "ice," to their workers in order to speed up construction.

Although North Korean officials continue to deny allegations of drug usage and abuse in their country, Dr. Greiten's study and Rep. Kang's report indicate a correlation to a problem that may be bleeding beyond the Hermit Kingdom.

NOW WATCH: A popular Korean dessert is being served at NYC's most diverse food hall





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By Ulf Laessing ZARIA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Riders wearing brightly colored warrior robes and bearing spears were again packing the streets of this northern Nigerian city, greeting their traditional ruler as locals celebrated a thousand-year-old tradition in a region hit by Boko Haram. Last week the traditional ruler in Zaria city rode in a horse carriage to kick off the Durbar celebrations that mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The Durbar is a custom dating back more than 1,000 years which involves warriors from villages and towns in Nigeria's Muslim north traveling once a year to the emir's palace to renew a pledge of respect to their ruler. But the thousands who packed the streets and minarets of mosques to watch were a far-cry from last year when many stayed indoors from fear following an attack by Boko Haram fighters that killed some 35 people in Zaria. Now, following a military crackdown on the militant group, Alhaji Shehu Idris, Emir of Zazzau, rode to his palace. He greeted people lining the pot-holed streets of this dusty city as he passed by, Once at the palace, he watched with officials as each area of his traditional constituency presented their turbaned chiefs and warriors in a mark of respect. Several men -- wearing white, red, blue or yellow robes -- demonstrated their horse-riding skills on the unpaved parade ground. But some women and girls also walked during the procession. The Nigerian military has retaken much of the territory lost to the Boko Haram jihadists. But police cars and gun-wielding police officers posted at the unpaved parade ground in front of the palace were a reminder that suicide bombs by the group remain part of life in the northern region of the oil producer. (Reporting by Afolabi Sotunde and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
It topped the rankings for the third straight year.

Singapores Nanyang Technological University (NTU) remains unparalleled as the best young university in the world.

The latest Quacquarelli Symonds' (QS') rankings of the world's top 50 young universities established 50 years ago revealed that NTU clinched the top spot in an Asian universities dominated global list with the top six places held by universities in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea.

The annual rankings by the London-based QS examined six indicators such as research quality, teaching quality, reputation among employers, and an assessment of the global diversity of faculty and students. This years top young universities are focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) such as NTU which is regularly ranked among the best in the world in engineering.

"NTU is leading the charge of the Asian universities up the young universities table through its focus on science and technology. Being young is an advantage, as it allows us to be nimble and to chart our own dynamic paths without being held back by conventions," said Prof. Bertil Anderson, NTU President.

Earlier this month, NTU was also nabbed the 13th position in this years QS World University Rankings. The universitys back-to-back achievements come as it celebrates its silver jubilee this year.





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By Arshad Mohammed and John Irish UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - In his first major United Nations speech eight years ago, President Barack Obama said he would not give up on Israeli-Palestinian peace. In likely his last U.N. speech, on Tuesday, he spoke little about the conflict beyond voicing the unsurprising sentiment that matters would improve if Israel let go of Palestinian land and if the Palestinians rejected incitement and embraced Israel's legitimacy. While U.S. officials have said Obama could lay out the rough outlines of a deal - "parameters" in diplomatic parlance - after the Nov. 8 presidential election and before he departs on Jan. 20, many Middle East analysts doubt this will have much effect. The result, they say, is likely to be a legacy of failure on an issue Obama made a priority when he came into office in 2009 and declared in his first U.N. General Assembly address: "I will not waver in my pursuit of peace." Obama has little to show for his two efforts - one spearheaded by George Mitchell in his first term and another by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in his second. "He has not made an impact on this issue, at all, and he wants to," said Elliott Abrams, a Middle East adviser to former President George W. Bush, a Republican. "So I think the question that he is asking is really a legacy question, rather than asking a pragmatic question of what will really help the parties." Obama raised concerns about Israeli settlements in the West Bank when he met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Wednesday. A senior U.S. official told reporters afterwards those concerns included the "corrosive effect" settlement activity during 50 years of occupation had had on prospects for negotiating peace based on two states, Israeli and Palestinian. The CIA Factbook online says about 371,000 Israelis live in settlements scattered among an estimated 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Neither figure includes East Jerusalem, which both sides claim. AFTER NOV. 8 White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said earlier that Obama had no plans to pursue a new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative before leaving office, though he could take unspecified steps. A U.S. official who tracks the issue said he does not expect the White House to decide whether Obama might make a speech on the issue or seek to pass a new U.N. Security Council resolution, until Americans elect his successor. "They are waiting to see what they can get the boss to do after the election pressure is over," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They have been toying with the idea for months." The U.S. presidential election pits Democrat Hillary Clinton, Obama's former secretary of state and his choice for the top job, against Republican businessman Donald Trump. Several analysts believe Obama will consult Clinton if she wins. It would not be the first time a U.S. president took action on the Middle East at the end of a term. In December 1988, weeks before leaving office, President Ronald Reagan broke with Israel to authorize the start of talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization. George Bush, his vice president and the president-elect, backed the dialogue. Then in January 2001, just before leaving office, Bill Clinton brought together Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in a failed bid to make peace and laid down his own parameters for a solution. PROGRESS UNLIKELY The acid political climate between Israelis and Palestinians makes progress unlikely. Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have no plans to meet this week at the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders. "We dont expect much from Abu Mazen," Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon told reporters on Monday, referring to the Palestinian leader by his nickname. Palestinians say Israeli settlement expansion in occupied territory is dimming any prospect for the viable state they seek, with a capital in Arab East Jerusalem. Israel has demanded tighter security measures from the Palestinians and a crackdown on militants responsible for a string of stabbings and shootings against Israelis in recent months. It also says Jerusalem is Israels indivisible capital. With U.S. efforts to broker a deal on a Palestinian state on Israel-occupied land in deep freeze for two years, France has tried to revive interest in the issue, with one senior French diplomat arguing that letting matters drift even during a U.S. election year is like "waiting for a powder keg to explode." 'IN YOUR DREAMS' In his eighth speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Obama gave little time to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. "Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land," Obama said in his lone direct reference to the conflict during the 48-minute speech. The lack of progress has frustrated Arab and Western officials, some of whom were not shy about voicing their dismay. "On this issue, you hear everything and nothing from the Americans. One says Obama is ready to do something, another says 'no way'; one says a resolution is the way forward, another says 'in your dreams,'" said a senior Western diplomat. Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington said Obama tends to act as a "mandarin" who offers rational solutions rather than as a politician who moves public opinion. As a result, merely sketching out the contours of a deal would do little to change the political realities on the ground. "What the United States thinks has never been the missing link," he said. "The weak link has often been a question of implementation. The White House hasnt been very good at persuading people to see things their way and act accordingly." (Reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Howard Goller)
By Tatiana Bautzer and Guillermo Parra-Bernal

SAO PAULO, Sept 21 - Canada's Brookfield Asset Management Inc is close to finalizing the purchase of Brazilian engineering conglomerate Odebrecht SA's stake in a water and sewage firm after due diligence procedures slowed the transaction for months, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Brookfield has agreed to buy the 70 percent that Odebrecht SA has in the unit, known as Odebrecht Ambiental SA, according to the sources. The deal will value Odebrecht Ambiental at 5 billion reais ($1.5 billion), depending on final details and adjustments, the people added.

An announcement is due within weeks, the people said.

Brookfield had been in exclusive talks to buy Odebrecht Ambiental since May. The transaction was subject to stringent due diligence procedures over several contracts, according to a third person with knowledge of the situation.

Reuters reported on Aug. 17 that Brookfield had signed a preliminary accord to buy Odebrecht Ambiental. It was not immediately clear whether Brazilian worker compensation and retirement fund FI-FGTS would also sell the remaining 30 percent it has in Odebrecht Ambiental to Brookfield.

Odebrecht, Latin America's largest engineering firm, declined to comment, as did Brookfield. All the people requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

For Salvador, Brazil-based Odebrecht, the unit's sale is key to raise cash after lenders cut access to credit following the group's involvement in Brazil's worst corruption probe ever. Many of Odebrecht SA's 15 subsidiaries are refinancing up to 35 billion reais in loans and selling assets. .

Fallout from the so-called "Operation Car Wash" probe has led potential buyers to step up legal scrutiny of some assets being sold by companies ensnared in the probe. The usual time for due diligence has doubled over the past year or so, especially for those assets, lawyers and bankers told Reuters in July.

($1 = 3.2431 Brazilian reais) (Editing by Christian Plumb)
An Ohio police chief has spoken out against the shooting of an unarmed black man in Tulsa, saying incidents like this give cops a bad reputation.

As an officer I am so sick and drained of some cops doing things like this, wrote Middletown Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw on Twitter. You are making us all look bad. STOP. #TerenceCruthcher

Muterspaw explained to local CBS affiliate WKRC that he has frequently been in situations similar to the one that led to Terence Crutchers death, and that his priority was always to protect everyones life, including the suspect.

Crutcher was shot by a Tulsa officer after complying with requests to put his hands in the air while standing near a car blocking the road. The officer who shot him says she believed he was reaching inside the window of the car and posed a threat. The police department and the Justice Department have each launched investigations of the incident.

Muterspaw later expanded on his sentiments on Twitter, writing, Life is precious man. Sorry we dont all agree. Compassion and empathy is eternally important. Just sick of seeing death & hate. #Life
By Henning Gloystein

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices climbed on Wednesday, supported by a reported draw in U.S. crude inventories and by firm import data from Japan.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were up 1.8 percent, or 81 cents, at $44.86 a barrel at 0403 GMT. The October contract expired yesterday at $43.44 a barrel and the front-month has now rolled over to November delivery.

Traders said that the main WTI price driver had been American Petroleum Institute data showing a 7.5 million barrel draw to 507.2 million barrels in U.S. crude inventories, the third weekly stock draw.

Market participants had expected an increase of 3.4 million barrels, according to a Reuters poll.

Official storage data is due to be published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) later on Wednesday, and traders said they were also eagerly anticipating a meeting by the U.S. Federal Reserves Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) which might influence U.S. interest rates.

"Wednesday has become 'Big Wednesday' for oil traders, with not only the FOMC but also the EIA crude inventory numbers out Should they (EIA) follow the unexpected drawdown like the API and we get no FOMC rate hike, oil bulls may well have reason to be cheering after a tough couple of weeks," said Singapore-based brokerage Oanda.

International Brent crude futures were at $46.47 per barrel, up 59 cents, or 1.3 percent, from their last close.

Traders said that Brent was being supported by firm imports from Japan.

Japan's customs-cleared crude imports rose 0.5 percent in August from the same month a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said on Wednesday.

Japan, the world's fourth-biggest oil buyer, imported 3.38 million barrels per day of crude last month, the data showed.

Overall, however, oil markets remain oversupplied as exporters around the world pump near record amounts.

Oil producers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and also Russia plan to meet in Algeria next week to discuss measures to rein in the oversupply, but analysts said they did not expect significant cuts to production.

Story continues

"OPEC members will not agree on a production freeze at the end of September at the meeting in Algiers. Political tensions will prevent cohesion, and individual members will continue to protect market share from resilient non-OPEC producers," BMI Research said in a note to clients.

"Even if an agreement to freeze production is reached, this will change very little for the global oil market, given that most OPEC members are already producing close to their peak capacity," it added.

(Additional reporting by Mark Tay; Editing by Joseph Radford and Christian Schmollinger)
71st UNGA session underway

The United Nations headquarters in New York, USA, has been lately bustling with activities relating to the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that started on 13 September.
By Susan Taylor TORONTO (Reuters) - The province of Ontario said on Wednesday that it has signed an agreement with equity fund Bedrock Industries LP to restructure U.S. Steel Canada, but the deal still requires approval from other stakeholders and a Canadian court. The plan, in a memorandum of understanding, must still be accepted by U.S. Steel Canada, which has been in creditor protection since September 2014, and the court supervising the company's credit protection proceeding, Ontario's government said in a statement. Bedrock, a private equity fund focused on metals, mining and natural resources, must also complete negotiations for new collective agreements for workers at Hamilton and Nanticoke facilities for the deal to proceed, said the United Steelworkers union. Under the agreement, Bedrock will purchase and continue operating U.S. Steel Canada's plants in Hamilton and Nanticoke, said the union, which has been briefed on the agreement. The province, which made loans to former U.S. Steel Canada parent United States Steel Corp , said terms of the agreement are confidential. U.S. Steel Canada employs nearly 2,000 workers in Ontario and has the capacity to produce 2.6 million tons of steel annually. "The deal announced today is far from perfect, given the challenges that arise from such a lengthy and complex insolvency process," said United Steelworkers Ontario director Marty Warren, in a statement. "However, we believe this could lead to a good final deal for the union's members and retirees." William Aziz, U.S. Steel Canada's chief restructuring officer, said the company welcomed the "constructive engagement." In early August, U.S. Steel Canada rejected a buyout offer from Ontario Steel Investments, a group including shareholders of Essar Global. It said that Essar, an Indian energy and resources conglomerate, failed to demonstrate its financial ability to own and operate the company and did not gain support from all stakeholders. That offer included the assumption of C$954 million ($722.51 million) in liabilities under U.S. Steel Canada's pension plan and a commitment of C$25 million for post-employment benefits for U.S. Steel Canada's staff. (Reporting by Susan Taylor; Editing by Chris Reese)
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lashed out at India over escalating tensions in Kashmir, telling the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that New Delhi was an obstacle to peace.

Gun battles raged Tuesday on the disputed Kashmir border between the nuclear-armed neighbors, two days after 18 Indian soldiers were killed in an attack blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

The Sunday assault was the worst of its kind to hit the divided Himalayan region in more than a decade.

"The international community ignores the danger of rising tensions in South Asia, at its own peril," Sharif warned the General Assembly.

"Pakistan wants peace with India. I have gone the extra mile to achieve this," he told the gathering in New York. "But India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue.

"Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences," the Pakistani premier said.

"We are open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions," Sharif said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed to punish those responsible for Sunday's attack in Kashmir and has faced calls from some within India for military action against Pakistan.

Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. Both claim the disputed Himalayan territory in its entirety and have fought two wars over it.

Several rebel groups have fought an estimated 500,000 Indian forces deployed in the territory, demanding independence for the Muslim-majority region or its merger with Pakistan.

Tens of thousands of people have died in the fighting, most of them civilians.
Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Palestinian municipal polls scheduled for October 8 were postponed on Wednesday after a court delayed a ruling on whether to hold the first vote since 2006 to include both Fatah and Hamas.

The Palestinian high court in the Fatah-led West Bank put off its ruling until October 3, only five days before the scheduled date for the elections.

Two weeks of campaigning are usually allotted for Palestinian elections and had been set to begin on Friday.

In response, the electoral commission confirmed that the October 8 date "is no longer applicable." It set no new date.

On September 8, the court suspended the elections following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists.

It had left open the possibility that they could be re-scheduled for the same date if the dispute was resolved, but Wednesday's announcement by the electoral commission was widely anticipated.

Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012, but it was due to participate this year.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that Wednesday's court ruling amounted to "a cancellation of the electoral process."

Fatah and Hamas have not contested an election since 2006 parliamentary polls, which Hamas won -- sparking a conflict that led to near civil war in Gaza the following year.

Abu Zuhri called the latest move a Fatah ploy "to escape (new) elections."

This year's vote was planned with 81-year-old president Mahmud Abbas under heavy political pressure as opinion polls have suggested most Palestinians would like him to step down.

There has been no Palestinian presidential election since 2005 and Abbas has remained in office despite the expiry of his term.

Some analysts saw Abbas's decision to call the elections as a failed gambit since he may have been hoping Hamas would repeat its 2012 boycott.

Abbas is currently in New York ahead of his UN General Assembly address on Thursday.

Story continues

- Aftermath of 2006 polls -

Despite repeated reconciliation attempts, Hamas and Fatah have failed to bridge their differences and form a unified administration for the Palestinian territories.

The October vote was to choose municipal councils in some 416 cities and towns in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

It is seen by some analysts as a test of whether Hamas and Fatah can take a significant step towards reconciliation.

Their divisions are viewed as among the key obstacles in efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, at a standstill for more than two years.

The Palestinian parliament has not met since 2007, the year Hamas, buoyed by its 2006 election victory, seized the Gaza Strip by force, driving out Fatah in a week of deadly clashes.

Hamas caused a shock by winning the majority of seats in the 2006 polls, which were seen by some as the most transparent to be held in the Palestinian territories.

But the international community refused to accept a Hamas government, demanding the Islamist group first renounce violence, recognise Israel and respect agreements signed between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

The European Union and the United States have blacklisted Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
By Hugh Bronstein NEW YORK (Reuters) - Haiti's economy and democracy must be fortified if the United States is to avoid a new wave of illegal immigrants, Panama's president said on Wednesday, urging fellow leaders to actively manage immigration rather than leave it to human traffickers. Instability in Haiti has increased emigration from the impoverished island nation while Haitians who found refuge in Brazil after the 2010 earthquake are being driven northward by a recession in Latin America's biggest economy. Panama is their gateway from South America to Central America and eventually the United States and Canada, President Juan Carlos Varela said in an interview on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. "We have to pay attention to the electoral process in Haiti, to support its institutions and its economy. If not, there will be the new crisis in America. It's not going to be people from Central America or Mexico any more. It will be Haiti," Varela said. In February, Michel Martelly stepped down as president of Haiti without a successor, but only after a deal was reached for a provisional government. New elections are scheduled for Oct. 9 when Maryse Narcisse, a medical doctor and longtime activist, could become the first woman to be elected Haitis president. U.S. border officials are struggling to find enough space to temporarily hold hundreds of Haitian immigrants. Apprehensions of Haitians in southern Mexico are also on the rise, indicating that the surge toward the United States could grow when those people travel north. Some 3,500 would-be immigrants to the U.S. and Canada are being held in Panamanian refugee centers, 80 to 85 percent of whom are Haitian, Varela said. His government temporarily holds people arriving from Panama's jungle border area with Colombia. Many arrive in bad health, having trudged three days through the Colombian jungle and then six more days on the Panamanian side of the border, the president said. "You don't have cameras from the big TV networks filming what's going on in the jungles between Colombia and Panama. But believe me, what's going on is very sad. We have to do whatever it takes to protect these people's lives," Varela said. Some 2,000 to 2,500 immigrants show up in Panama every month, he said. Three thousand to 4,000 per year come from Africa and other regions outside the Americas, arriving in Panama by way of Brazil and Colombia, he added. "Once they touch Panamanian soil they are protected by the government for the time that we hold them until they can keep making their way north," he said. The centers hold immigrants while they are fingerprinted and checked for criminal records with help from U.S. data banks. The centers hold people for about 30 days, so that no more than 100 are released per day. Varela said he urges other Central American countries to adopt a similar model for handling immigrants, while hoping that a bi-partisan immigration reform bill eventually gets through the U.S. Congress. "I'd rather see governments and heads of state control immigration than see human traffickers and drug traffickers in control of the process," Varela said. (Reporting by Hugh Bronstein; editing by Grant McCool)
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f218395%2fbanunclimate

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is on a diplomatic mission to ensure that the Paris Agreement on Climate Change goes into force before he leaves office at the end of the year. With 31 countries formally ratifying the agreement on Wednesday, that goal took a major step toward becoming reality.

When the agreement was negotiated in France in December, many countries and environmental groups assumed that it would enter into force in 2020. Most international treaties take years, sometimes decades or more, to formally take effect as each nation goes through its own domestic process of ratifying or otherwise formally joining the pact.

However, with the impacts of global warming becoming more apparent and the specter of a Donald Trump presidency looming in the U.S., Ban has dramatically accelerated the timetable for action.

SEE ALSO: 375 top scientists warn against Trump's plan to pull out of climate pact

The Paris Agreement would, for the first time, commit all countries, from tiny Fiji to major powers like China and the U.S.  the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters  to cut emissions and take measures to adapt to climate change impacts.

The Paris Agreement sets a goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels by 2100. It also contains an aspirational goal of limiting warming to at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

China and the U.S. both formally joined the agreement earlier this month.

60 countries have now joined #ParisAgreement representing 47.5%of emissions UNSG Ban Ki-moon announces to cheers from #UNGA hall pic.twitter.com/6Fa5Qp4IBV  United Nations (@UN) September 21, 2016

Previous agreements had placed larger burdens on industrialized nations compared to developing countries, leading to a diplomatic stalemate.

Story continues

At a special event held during the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, leaders representing 31 different countries formally submitted documents legally binding them to the agreement's provisions.

A total of 60 countries have now officially joined on to the agreement, together representing 47.62 percent of global emissions.

The agreement will go into effect as soon as at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions have ratified or otherwise legally joined the agreement.

Major emitters such as India, Russia and the European Union have not yet ratified the treaty.

August was the warmest such month on record, according to NASA.

Image: NASA giss

This means that one of those two thresholds has now been exceeded, years earlier than expected. In fact, the speed with which the agreement is going from initial adoption to potentially entering into force may set a new record for any U.N. treaty in history. Many treaties take years, sometimes decades, to go into force following initial negotiations. And others never go into force at all.

What once seemed impossible is now inevitable," Ban said. "I am confident that by the time I leave office, the Paris agreement will have entered into force."

With 31 more countries joining, it is abundantly clear that support for the Paris Agreement is unwavering. The global community is rallying behind swift and ambitious action to combat climate change," said Paula Caballero, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank in Washington.

"The fact that [the] Paris Agreement will likely enter into force this year took everyone by surprise. This rapid pace reflects a spirit of cooperation rarely seen on a global scale," Caballero said in a statement.

It is not 100 percent assured that this agreement will in fact go into force this year, however. The European Union has scheduled a vote for early October to approve the agreement over the objections of some states, such as Poland, which rely heavily on coal-fired power plants that are significant emitters of greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the E.U. signaled on Wednesday that it will approve the agreement, as has the U.K., whose approval was also uncertain in the wake of the "Brexit" vote on June 23 to leave the Union.

If the agreement goes into force this year, it's possible that a Trump administration could limit U.S. participation or try to nullify the agreement and renegotiate it in some way, as the candidate has said he would do.

Many climate scientists view these temperature goals as increasingly unrealistic, considering that 2016 is on track to have a global average temperature anomaly of at least 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 20th century average.

On Tuesday, 375 prominent scientists  including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking  signed a letter warning against withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, making reference to Trump's desire to pull out of the agreement if elected.

"... It is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord," the letter stated.
Amid successful India visit claim, a section has some concerns

Amid Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahals claim that his visit to India was highly successful, a section in his own party, the CPN (Maoist Centre), does not seem to be in mood to accept that, as some leaders on Tuesday criticised him for being over-confident, saying Indias stance has not changed yet.
The Philippines foul-mouthed President, Rodrigo Duterte, has said F-ck you to the E.U. after it called for a halt to the brutal extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and drug users in the Philippines.

I read the condemnation of the European Union against me. I will tell them f-ck you, he said in an address to government officials Tuesday in the southern city of Davao, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He also raised his middle finger during the speech.

Duterte said that the imperial histories of European nations meant that they had no right to criticize his spiraling drug war.

And then the European Union now has the gall to condemn me. I repeat it, f-ck you, he said, according to the Inquirer.

Dutertes war on drugs has seen more than 3,000 people killed since he was inaugurated on June 30, and has drawn widespread condemnation from global rights groups.

The Philippine leader is known for making deeply offensive remarks. Most recently, he called U.S. President Barack Obama a son of a whore  a slur that led to a cancellation of a scheduled meeting of the two men at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Laos in early September.

[Philippine Daily Inquirer]
Philippines drug war crime vigilante justice extrajudicial killings

National economies, and the investors involved in them, generally do well when public safety and rule of law can be assured.

But amid the Philippines' bloody crackdown on the drug trade and criminality, led by President Rodrigo Duterte, it appears investors and businesspeople inside and outside the country have lost faith that those conditions can be assured.

Since taking office in July, Duterte has exhorted civilians to take the law into their own hands and voiced his support for extrajudicial killings.

The body count has since grown to about 3,800 people, many of whom have been killed by unknown assailants. Duterte has also taken positions hostile to the US, a longtime ally and major economic supporter, and made overtures to China, which has clashed with countries in the region regarding the South China Sea.

As a consequence, the Philippines' economic footing, recently quite strong, seems less assured. "Official data from the Philippine stock exchange shows net foreign transactions on the benchmark index have fallen over the past month," CNBC reported on Tuesday.

"Many investors have been turned off by threatening remarks made by Duterte against the US and China, casting doubt on the future of Manilas foreign policies and his handling of the economy," the CNBC report noted.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks during a news conference in Davao city, southern Philippines August 21, 2016. Picture taken August 21, 2016. REUTERS/Lean Daval Jr

According to The Economist, since Duterte took office, investors have demanded higher risk premiums to hold Philippine assets. "A lot of people are hesitant to put their money into the Philippines at this point," Guenter Taus, who heads the European Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines, told the magazine.

Story continues

Duterte has lashed out at international critics, including the UN as well as the US and President Barack Obama (though Philippine officials have said that deals between the country and the US will remain in place).

His most recent outburst was directed at the EU, which urged his government to curb extrajudicial killings and violence. "F--- you," Duterte replied on Tuesday, adding a raised middle finger for good measure.

In addition to his words, Duterte's deeds have caused worry about his engagement with the international community.

Earlier in September, Duterte skipped several meetings at a summit in Laos, including one on ASEAN and the UN, which, according Prashanth Parameswaran, an associate editor at The Diplomat, has raised concerns about his commitment to multilateralism, which is important not only to the economic relationships in the region, but also to multinational cooperation on security issues in the South China Sea.

South China Sea dispute

While Duterte's stated focus on macroeconomic stability, infrastructure development, and workers' rights was welcomed at the outset of his term, it seems the Philippine president's harsh rhetoric, which has helped drive his popularity sky-high, has more recently stoked worry among businesses and investors.

Duterte has repeatedly made accusations against public figures without substantiation. This month, he said he had a list of at least 1,000 police, local community leaders, politicians, and other officials suspected of links to the drug trade. In August he accused 159 public officials of colluding with the drug trade without presenting evidence.

Duterte's brash pronouncements since taking office may be part of an effort to shore up his base as he finds his footing on the national political stage.

"His tactic of calling out allegedly corrupt officials and business leaders is a way to help him build public support and keep potential rivals at bay," geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor wrote in late August.

As mayor of Davao City, home to 1.5 million people in the southern Philippines, Duterte's brash attitude and harsh anticrime measures won him popularity, and he held high office there for nearly 30 years.

And as president, Stratfor argued, "Over the long term, he thinks voters and foreign investors alike will reward his focus on law and order, even if it brings with it a temporary spike in bloodshed and is enforced with extralegal means."

Philippines drug war vigilante extrajudicial violence Duterte

But Duterte's administration's public denunciations have affected locals and foreigners alike.

Philippine officials have admitted that organized-crime groups have seized on Duterte's call to arms for their own violent purposes, and impunity for police violence has some in the country worried about reprisal killings. A longtime Manila resident told The Economist that some expatriates were thinking of leaving.

In August, just a few days after he was publicly accused of being a drug trafficker by the national-police chief, a Philippine businessman and his wife were gunned down. This month, the daughter of a British baron was killed when she was out on bail after being charged with drug possession, with her body left on a Manila street, adorned with a sign accusing her of being a "drug pusher for celebrities," according to AFP.

Recently, one online-gambling executive saw his company's shares fall 50% after Duterte publicly criticized him for having outsize political influence  the executive resigned the next day.

"Everyone is scared, a corporate leader told The Economist. "None of the big business groups will stand up to him. Theyre all afraid their businesses will be taken away."

NOW WATCH: Obama canceled a meeting with the Philippines president after he called him a 'son of a b----'





More From Business Insider


[Photo: Victor Habchy]

Once a year, thousands of people descend upon the Black Rock Dessert in Nevada to join the community of Burners at Burning Man. Some say the experience cant be described. Perhaps not, but French photographer Victor Habchy has managed to capture some of the magic this unique and surreal transient world has to offer.

Black Rock City is a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. says Burning Man HQ. Youre guaranteed not to be the weirdest kid in the classroom.



Revellers brave the baking sun, chilly nights and sandstorms to see magnificent art instillations, take part in workshops and enjoy the colourful tribes the festival attracts.
Pigeons may be sometimes likened to "flying rats," but these birds are no dummies, according to a new study. Scientists recently taught pigeons to read  kind of.

In a new study, researchers trained pigeons to distinguish real words from gibberish, using 308 four-letter words that baboons had learned in a previous study. Some of the birds learned to identify dozens of words, with the most successful pigeon being able to recognize 58 words, the researchers said.

The pigeons were presented with word and nonword stimuli along with a star symbol on a screen. When a word was shown, the pigeons were supposed to peck the word, and when a nonword was shown, the pigeons were supposed to peck the star. When the birds responded correctly, they were rewarded with treats from a hopper bird feeder. [The 5 Smartest Nonprimates on the Planet]

Four of the pigeons excelled at the word recognition test, and the scientists continued more intensive training with these birds. These advanced pigeons were even able to distinguish correctly spelled words from those with rearranged characters, like "very" and "vrey," or words that were completely misspelled, the researchers said.

"The pigeons performance is actually more comparable to that of literate humans than baboons performance," for the misspelling tests, the scientists wrote in the study.

To determine whether the birds were learning to distinguish words from nonwords rather than merely memorizing the correct answers, the pigeons were introduced to new words throughout the study. According to the researchers, the pigeons correctly identified the new words as words at a rate that was significantly above mere chance.

"This transfer suggests that during training, the pigeons derived some general statistical knowledge about the letter combinations that distinguish words from nonwords," the authors wrote.

The researchers suggest that the pigeons tracked the statistical likelihood that certain pairs of letters, such as "EN" and "AL," were more likely to be associated with words or nonwords.

Story continues

One of the study's authors, neuroscientist Onur Gunturkun of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, said that it's remarkable that the pigeons have the ability to visually recognize words (known as orthographic knowledge).

"That pigeons  separated by 300 million years of evolution from humans and having vastly different brain architectures  show such a skill as orthographic processing is astonishing," Gunturkun said in a statement.

The new study is the first to identify a nonprimate species as having these orthographic abilities. And the researchers said that by studying the pigeons' ability to learn words, they could provide insights into the origins and function of language.

The study also highlights the intelligence of pigeons, which study co-author Michael Colombo, a professor of psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said may spark the need "to seriously rethink the use of the term 'birdbrain' as a put-down."

The findings were published online Sept. 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Carrying her wages in wads of cash across Myanmar was once a risky, onerous but unavoidable ritual for maid Khin Myint Oo.

But now she just pings off a text to move the money to her children back home as mobile banking sweeps into a country whose people have for decades been locked out of basic financial services.

Myanmar is spinning through a thrilling economic revival since shedding junta rule in 2011.

But with an embryonic banking system -- an estimated 90 percent of the population still do not have an account -- the country's new civilian leaders are banking on mobile money as a shortcut.

"People keep money in their homes in a box," explained Khin Myint Oo, who moved to Myanmar's biggest city Yangon to work as a housekeeper and support her children in northeastern Shan state.

With no bank branches nearby, the family faced two options: long trudges to the nearest teller or shipping stacks of tattered notes by bus.

With just some 1,500 branches in a largely rural country the size of France, experts say it will take years to build enough banks to reach the 51 million population.

Many also have bad memories of 50 years of military rule, when bank runs and currency collapses were frequent and painful.

But change is afoot.

Khin Myint Oo now wires home to her children in a matter of minutes using Wave Money, one of the first mobile banking firms to roll out services.

The company, a tie-up between a telco operator and a private bank, has built a network of 4,000 mum-and-pop shops around the country where clients can deposit and withdraw cash by phone.

Referred to as "human ATMS", these stores are far more accessible and numerous than bank branches. Wave constantly monitors their liquidity and dispatches agents to replenish shops running low on cash.

"The advantage is it now takes very little time to transfer money," Khin Myint Oo said from inside the apartment she cleans for $2 a day -- a sizeable raise from her days as a farmhand.

Story continues

- Don't bank on it -

In one of its first moves since taking power in April, the government passed regulations allowing non-banks to enter the e-money market and offer services to the country's oceans of "unbanked".

"In terms of things you could do straight away that would improve people's lives ...this (policy) would float right to the very top," said Sean Turnell, an Australian economist advising the administration.

Mobile money began in Kenya a decade ago and is now used by nearly half the population.

Similar systems have since taken root across Sub-Saharan Africa and in other developing nations, providing millions of people with safe ways to move and manage their money.

Myanmar's promise as a frontier market is beginning to show especially as phone towers are erected.

Just four years ago only 10 percent of the population had a mobile phone -- now it is 60 percent, with most using smartphones.

"Myanmar was always the market that everyone would talk about in mobile money conferences because it was so untouched," said Wave Money CEO Brad Jones.

Yet unleashing the technology's full potential rests on overcoming an age-old obstacle: trust.

During its economic heyday under British colonial rule, Myanmar was home to the highest concentration of foreign-owned banks in Southeast Asia.

But its fortunes swiftly changed after a military clique grabbed power in 1962 and nationalised all banks, the first of many policies that sunk the nation into poverty.

Faith in the financial system tanked after a flurry of demonetisation decrees in the 1980s wiped out nearly two thirds of the cash in circulation, triggering bank runs and driving many people to convert any savings into gold.

- Gold and gem stones -

"Getting people to trust ephemeral monetary value will be the first challenge. If people have any surplus at all they often buy gold and gem stones," said Turnell.

Changing this behaviour is a crucial step on the path out of poverty.

Physical assets like gold cannot be cashed quickly, forcing the poor to turn to loan sharks in times of need.

Mobile money is Myanmar's best bet at swiftly linking its poor to safer, more regulated financial services, said Paul Luchtenburg from the UN's Capital Development Fund in Yangon.

"If it was only bank-led, it would take a long time because the banks are so busy just getting their house in order," he told AFP.

In Dala, a muddy suburb across the river from Yangon, those who want to save money have two options: take the boat to a bank in the city or bury it in the backyard.

Like much of the country, there are zero banks or ATMs in town.

Yet several shops have started offering mobile banking services.

"When this service becomes more popular, it will be so much more helpful to people than banks," said Zaw Zaw Oo, whose small convenience store is now part of Wave's network of "human ATMs".

Until then, they'll have to wait for the next ferry.
By Greg Lacour CHARLOTTE, N.C. (Reuters) - Protesters blocked a highway and clashed with police in Charlotte, North Carolina, early on Wednesday morning after officers fatally shot a black man they said had a gun when they approached him in a parking lot. About a dozen officers and several protesters suffered non-life threatening injuries during an hours-long demonstration near where Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot by a policeman on Tuesday afternoon, police and local media said on social media. Early Wednesday morning, protesters blocked Interstate 85, where they stole boxes from trucks and started fires before police used flash grenades in an attempt to disperse the angry crowd, an ABC affiliate in Charlotte reported. A group of protesters then tried to break into a Walmart store before police arrived and began guarding its front entryway, video footage by local media showed. Earlier in the evening, police in riot gear reportedly used tear gas on protesters who threw rocks and water bottles at them as they wielded large sticks and blocked traffic. One officer was sent to the hospital after being struck in the head by a rock, police said. Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts urged for calm. "The community deserves answers and (a) full investigation will ensue," she said on Twitter, adding in a subsequent post, "I want answers too." Scott was shot by officer Brentley Vinson earlier in the day, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police. The shooting occurred when officers were at an apartment complex searching for a suspect with an outstanding warrant and they saw Scott get out of his vehicle with a firearm, the department said. Vinson fired his weapon and struck Scott, who "posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers," the department said in a statement. Vinson, who joined the Charlotte police force in July 2014, is black, according to the department. He has been placed on paid administrative leave. NATIONAL DEBATE The fatal shooting came amid an intense national debate over the use of deadly force by police, particularly against black men. Police did not immediately say if Scott was the suspect they had originally sought at the apartment complex. WSOC-TV, a local television station, reported that he was not. Detectives recovered the gun Scott was holding at the time of the shooting and were interviewing witnesses, police said. Protesters and Scott's family disputed that the dead man was armed. Some family members told reporters that Scott had been holding a book and was waiting for his son to be dropped off from school. Shakeala Baker, who lives in a neighboring apartment complex, said she had seen Scott in the parking lot on previous afternoons waiting for his child. But on Tuesday, she watched as medics tended to Scott after he was shot, she said. "This is just sad," said Baker, 31. "I get tired of seeing another black person shot every time I turn on the television. But (police are) scared for their own lives. So if theyre scared for their lives, how are they going to protect us?" About 200 people gathered earlier Tuesday night for a peaceful protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a white officer killed an unarmed black man last week in an incident captured on police videos. Lawyers for the family of Terence Crutcher, 40, disputed that he posed any threat before he was shot by Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby after his sport utility vehicle broke down on Friday. (Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
By Jim Day CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island (Reuters) - Canadian police evacuated all schools in the eastern province of Prince Edward Island on Wednesday after a bomb threat, but authorities said the situation was under control after no explosive device was found. About 19,000 students at 62 schools were taken to safe locations in their communities around the island on Canada's eastern coast. It is the country's smallest province with a population of about 146,000. "The minister of public safety just informed me that all of the schools' children and personnel are safe. The situation is under control," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa. The provincial government said in a tweet that information about whether schools would reopen on Thursday would come on Wednesday evening. In Prince Edward Island's capital of Charlottetown, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Kevin Bailey said at a press conference he was aware of separate threats in the nearby province of Nova Scotia and the United States. He said later in a telephone call that police analysts had identified threats against schools in North Carolina, Connecticut and Arizona, but there was no immediate indication that they were linked. Bailey said the threat against Prince Edward Island schools came by fax to the police in Ottawa. "The message stated that the bombs had been placed in a number of schools and would be detonated today but it did not specify the time," Bailey said. "There is an active investigation to identify the person or persons responsible." The University of Prince Edward Island said in note on its website that it was closed for the day, "given the situation happening across the province." "They didn't say there was a bomb threat or any specific threat; they just told us that school had been suspended for the rest of the day," Charlottetown student Peter Keedwell, 17, said in a telephone interview. "It was pretty calm. ... People weren't running out of school or anything." Police in Nova Scotia closed some college and university campuses. A Nova Scotia Community College campus in Halifax was evacuated after an anonymous threat, Halifax Regional Police said in a press release. It said an explosive disposal unit had gone to the scene but found that a suspicious package was only garbage. The college's Marconi campus in Sydney, Nova Scotia, also shut down. Cape Breton University, also in Sydney, said on its website that it closed for the day. (Reporting by Allison Martell and Alastair Sharp in Toronto; Editing by Richard Chang and Alan Crosby)
By Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton TULSA, Okla. (Reuters) - The unarmed black man fatally shot by a white Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer in an incident captured on video posed no imminent threat, lawyers for his family said on Tuesday, disputing an allegation the man was reaching into his vehicle. The shooting of Terence Crutcher, 40, by Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby after his sport utility vehicle broke down on Friday, was the latest in a series of fatal shootings that have raised questions of racial bias in U.S. policing. Two police videos of the Tulsa shooting that have been broadcast widely since their release on Monday have stoked the debate, with U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton calling the contents "unbearable." A lawyer for Shelby has said she acted because she feared for her life, believing Crutcher was reaching into his vehicle for a weapon. Tulsa police have said he was unarmed, there was no weapon in the vehicle, and released the videos showing he had his hands in clear view before he was shot. Shelby has been placed on administrative leave and is under criminal investigation, prosecutors and police said. The U.S. Justice Department has launched a separate, civil rights investigation about the use of force by officers. At a news conference in front of the Tulsa County courthouse, lawyers for Crutcher's family released enlarged still images from the police videos they said showed the vehicle's window was closed and stained with blood after Crutcher was shot. "He is not threatening to anyone," lawyer Benjamin Crump said. "How can he be reaching into the car if the window is up and there is blood on the glass?" Crutcher's family called the shooting a criminal act and is seeking charges. About 200 people gathered for a peaceful protest in front of Tulsa's Civic Center Plaza on Tuesday night, holding signs reading: "Justice 4 Crutch" and calling for Shelby to be arrested. Scott Wood, a lawyer for Shelby, told the Tulsa World that Crutcher ignored repeated commands from the officer. "He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot," said Wood, who could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. Police said they received two calls of a car being broken down and blocking a road. Shelby's unit was one that stopped to investigate. Police also said a vial of PCP was later found in his vehicle. 'BAD DUDE' In one video shot from a police helicopter, a person is heard saying Crutcher is not following police instructions. A voice from the helicopter then says: "That looks like a bad dude too, could be on something." An officer is seen with a weapon drawn before Crutcher drops to the ground, and a female officer can be heard on police radio saying: "Shots fired." The video shows Crutcher on his back with what appears to be blood oozing from his torso. A separate police dashcam video also shows the officer with a weapon drawn and following Crutcher as he walks to his vehicle with his hands in the air. A pop is heard as he appears to place his hands on the vehicle and he falls a few seconds later. Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany, said her brother was a church-going man who had enrolled at Tulsa Community College to better his life. "That big 'bad dude,' his life mattered," she told a separate news conference on Monday. (Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington and Nick Oxford in Tulsa, Okla.; Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Andrew Hay and Peter Cooney)
Jimmy Fallon took a great deal of heat for his soft interview with Donald Trump last week, a reflection of the consternation that even some comedians are having over the influence of humor in this years presidential race.

But its undeniable that much of comedy has been dominated by personalities with a leftward bent.

On the latest PopPolitics on SiriusXM, Evan Sayet talks about his career as a conservative comedian. The former writer on Politically Incorrect just taped an upcoming stand-up special at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, and is the author of The Kindergarten of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks.

Showbiz in general is overwhlemingly liberal because showbiz is a child-like profession, Sayet says. Actors pretend to be. It is very telling to me that the actor who pretends to be a solider votes Democrat. The soldier votes Republican.

Sayet says that he was viewed differently before he switched his political stripes around the time of 9/11, joining other figures such as Jon Voight, David Zucker, and Dennis Miller.

There is an assumption that you are not going to be funny, Sayet says. At a party with liberals, including comedians, if they dont know who I am and we are having a conversation  and it turns to politics and they say, Youre a conservative? But youre so nice. Youre a conservative? But youre so funny. This caricaturing of conservatives is not what is real. It is what liberals tell each other what conservatives are.

He adds, Its funny how I was brilliant when I was a liberal The day that my politics turned conservative, and therefore so did material, suddenly I was no longer funny.

He says he disagrees with Hillary Clinton on every single issue to the nth degree, but he also wasnt a backer of Donald Trump from the start of his campaign.

My Donald Trump joke is this  I agree with Donald Trump about half the time. Unfortunately it is on every issue. It is a political statement that may be true. It is not just, Oh, hes a clown.'

Story continues

He adds, Donald Trump was my 17th choice out of 17. But hes my first choice out of two now that we have this race.

Listen below.

Also:

The Politics of Late-Night: Mary Murphy of USC Annenberg and Tim Naftali of New York University talk about what responsibility late-night hosts have when they feature political candidates as polarizing as Trump and Clinton.

CGI Finale: Craig Minassian of the Clinton Foundation talks about the final Clinton Global Initiative, taking place this week in New York. The event has been an annual meeting place for celebrity philanthropists. Minassian says that it has helped reshape the approach that entertainers take to causes.

And: In case you missed it, here is Samantha Bees biting criticism of Fallon on her TBS show Full Frontal on Monday.

Related stories

Hillary Clinton's 'Tonight Show' Interview Was Less Disliked Than Donald Trump's

Donald Trump Labels Lester Holt a Democrat Ahead of Debate With Hillary Clinton

Jimmy Fallon Defends Softball Trump Interview: 'Have You Seen My Show?'
Ayotzinapa (Mexico) (AFP) - A UN human rights official met Wednesday with parents of 43 Mexican students missing since 2014 and praised the much-criticized authorities for looking into new lines of investigation in the unsolved case.

Jan Jarab, the representative in Mexico of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, met with the distraught families at the students' teacher training college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state.

His visit came days before the second anniversary of the tragedy, which took place in the nearby city of Iguala.

Dozens of students had traveled there to hijack buses for a protest in Mexico City, a common practice in their radical left-wing school, when they came under fire from local police.

The authorities said months later that the officers handed 43 students to a drug cartel, which killed them, incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump and tossed the remains in a river.

But independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued two damning reports rejecting the government's conclusion, saying such a big fire was not scientifically possible.

Last week, deputy attorney general for human rights Eber Betanzos told AFP that the authorities will conduct new searches in other locations using laser scanning technology. They are also investigating the possible role of other local police departments in the disappearance.

"We have seen in recent weeks some indications that they are already investigating other leads," Jarab told reporters.

"It seems like a positive thing to me, although we will obviously follow the process," he said after his meeting with the families in the impoverished southern state of Guerrero.

President Enrique Pena Nieto's handling of the Ayotzinapa case has angered the students' parents and many others in Mexico.

Hilda Rivera, mother of a missing student, told AFP before the meeting with Jarab that Attorney General Arely Gomez has given them "the runaround" about the case, without showing progress in the investigation.

Story continues

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said the Ayotzinapa case shows that Pena Nieto's administration "will stop at nothing to cover up human rights violations taking place under their watch in Mexico."

"From failing to stop the attack against the students, to preventing international efforts to uncover the truth, to brushing off any complaints over the way this investigation has been handled, authorities in Mexico have done all they can to obstruct justice and protect their image," Guevara-Rosas said in a statement.

Jarab gave his backing to legislation introduced in Congress aimed at combatting the large number of disappearances in Mexico.

"There are a lot of missing people and the Ayotzinapa case made it known," he said.

The case has caused international outrage, putting a spotlight on the country's high number of disappearances, with some 28,000 people reported missing since the government launched a drug war in 2006
Blasts outside schools cause panic

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) went off outside two schools in the Capital on Tuesday morning, triggering panic.
Seth Berkley CEO of GAVI Alliance

The US Navy has a fleet of submarines carrying nuclear missiles that are always in place, just in case.

That, GAVI Vaccine Alliance CEO Seth Berkley said, is what the world's response to global health threats should look like.

"The thing that's shocking is that the US has a set of nuclear submarines that we keep underwater that are always there. That's the third line of defense," he told Business Insider.

"You've got your land-based systems, your air-based systems, and then if both of those fail you've got your submarine systems. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing that."

Our level of preparation for clear and looming public health threats pales in comparison.

GAVI is an organization backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that helps get vaccines to children in developing countries. The systems in place for a potential nuclear war are starkly different from the preventive measures that exist for mosquito-borne diseases like Zika  which as of Wednesday still hadn't received funding from Congress. Other outbreaks like yellow fever and chikungunya have posed a huge global health risk in the past few months.

"The likelihood of war is relatively low, and and it's unlikely that you're going to have all the other systems fail," Berkley said. "Here, we have the evolutionary certainty of these outbreaks, and we don't take them seriously."

Instead of drumming up sudden interest in public health problems only when they start to be a problem (think: the widespread panic that came after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and the world's immediate response to Zika), Berkley thinks it would be a much better idea to always have a system in place so that we're not starting from scratch the next time a little-known disease starts to affect a lot of people.

"We need to get a certain level of preparation and work going, and we need to consistently invest in it as a global priority," he said.

Story continues

Berkley isn't the only one who thinks this: In 2015, Bill Gates asked the question: "What's more important, having a standby military or a standby medical corps?" He followed up by saying that the thing that's most likely to kill 10 million people in the next 30 years is an epidemic  not a war.

So why haven't we set up a multi-layered prevention plan for potentially global epidemics? Humans are notoriously bad at figuring out what's actually a risk, Berkley said. It's why people fret about dying in a plane crash but not dying from heart disease, even though the latter is many, many times more likely. It also took us decades to realize that smoking caused cancer and that people should wear seatbelts.

"We're lousy as a species at doing risk assessment," Berkley said.

NOW WATCH: NASA is bringing back one of its most experimental and dangerous programs





More From Business Insider


From Town & Country

The unpredictability of this election is continuing to blur party lines, and now, President George H.W. Bush plans to vote for Hillary Clinton, according to Robert F. Kennedy's daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

"The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!" she posted on Facebook Monday along with a photo of her shaking hands with the former President. The post was not shared publicly, though Townsend confirmed the news in a telephone interview with Politico. She had met with President Bush in Maine early Monday.

President Bush said previously that he was not going to make an endorsement in this election, and Jim McGrath, a spokesman for Bush, did not confirm nor deny Townsend's claim.

"The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days," McGrath said in an email to the New York Times. "He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim."

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Sept 21 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the business pages of British newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

The Times

The prospect of a spin-off of GlaxoSmithKline's consumer healthcare division receded yesterday when the pharmaceuticals group appointed the head of the division to succeed Sir Andrew Witty as group chief executive. (http://bit.ly/2cHRLsP)

Royal Bank of Scotland's sale of a smaller lender to Santander is on the brink of collapse after talks broke down over the price of the business. (http://bit.ly/2cHSkCR)

The Guardian

Amazon has been found guilty of shipping dangerous goods by air. The items included lithium-ion batteries and flammable aerosols, which were flown in and out of the UK between January 2014 and June 2015. (http://bit.ly/2cHS6vR)

The European Commission will direct a further crackdown on tax avoidance by reviving a long-stalled plan to overhaul how companies report their profits, according to Europe's most-senior tax policy official. (http://bit.ly/2cHS72C)

The Telegraph

Bernard Matthews has confirmed that 2,000 jobs will be preserved at Europe's biggest turkey company after a pre-pack deal was reached to offload the business to food tycoon Ranjit Boparan, known as the "Chicken King." (http://bit.ly/2cHRW7x)

Microsoft has unveiled plans to buy back $40 billion of its own stock as part of a long-running programme by the cash-rich firm to support its share price and bolster its earnings. (http://bit.ly/2cHSquj)

Sky News

Sports Direct has bowed to pressure and ditched a plan for its own lawyers to lead a review of the company's working practices and governance. (http://bit.ly/2cHSk5R)

Sky News understands that the owners of Ed's Easy Diner have appointed corporate financiers at KPMG to undertake a rapid hunt for new financing. (http://bit.ly/2cHT37h)

The Independent

More than 5,000 financial services firms are "at risk" if Britain leaves the Single Market after Brexit, a senior Conservative MP has warned. (http://ind.pn/2cHSJWf)

Indonesia's tax authorities are planning to bill Alphabet's Google more than $400 million in back taxes and fines that the search giant allegedly owes from 2015. (http://ind.pn/2cHSqe1)

(Compiled by Vishal Sridhar in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Crosby)
Sept 21 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories in the Financial Times. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

Headlines

* Wells Fargo chief faces lawmakers' fury over scandal

(http://on.ft.com/2d0qgY2)

* Airbus promotes Fabrice Bregier to chief operating officer

(http://on.ft.com/2d0qwGF)

* GSK taps consumer goods veteran Emma Walmsley as new chief

(http://on.ft.com/2d0sXbS)

* 'Significant' Brexit risk for 5,500 UK groups using EU passporting (http://on.ft.com/2cjQi5W)

Overview

The chief executive of Wells Fargo & Co came under attack from Congress on Tuesday for denying that the U.S. bank's phantom accounts scandal was a co-ordinated "scam" and refusing to promise to claw back executive compensation.

Airbus Group Chief Executive Tom Enders plans to complete the integration of the aerospace group by sweeping away overlapping functions and appointing Fabrice Bregier, the head of its planemaker Airbus, as the group's chief operating officer.

GlaxoSmithKline said on Tuesday it had chosen Emma Walmsley, head of consumer healthcare, as its new chief executive, making her the only female chief executive of a major global pharmaceuticals company. The move also raises questions about the future of Abbas Hussain, president of the group's global pharmaceuticals division, who has been leading an overhaul of GSK's core drugs business in recent years.

According to figures published by the UK financial regulator, 5,500 UK-registered companies rely on "passports" to do business in other European countries, which gives an idea about the scale of disruption that Brexit could cause. There is a fear among many that the UK will lose the passporting rights that allow finiancial services companies licensed in one EU state to provide those services across the bloc.

(Compiled by Shivam Srivastava in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Crosby)
Sept 21 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the New York Times business pages. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

- The Securities and Exchange Commission has requested information from Exxon Mobil Corp on the company's longstanding policy of not writing down the value of oil reserves, as other energy companies have done in the recent past, Exxon Mobil confirmed. http://nyti.ms/2cl9XSG

- The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is expected to announce on Wednesday that he has secured enough commitments from world leaders to ensure that the 2015 Paris climate accord will enter into legal force this year, binding the next U.S. president, whoever it is. http://nyti.ms/2clde4v

- For more than two hours testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, Chief Executive John Stumpf expressed regret that Wells Fargo had created as many as two million bogus bank and credit card accounts without its customers' consent. But the more Stumpf tried to explain, the more skeptical the senators became. http://nyti.ms/2cl9QH2

- The judge overseeing the investigation into the colossal scandal around Brazil's national oil company accepted corruption charges on Tuesday against the nation's former president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, setting the stage for a trial of one of Latin America's most influential political figures. http://nyti.ms/2clb3hj

- John Boehner, the former speaker of the House who left Congress and his leadership post last year, is joining Squire Patton Boggs, a Washington-based law firm long known for its lobbying work. http://nyti.ms/2clbiJm

- State-owned Postal Savings Bank of China Co Ltd, one of the country's biggest lenders, on Wednesday priced shares for its initial public offering next week at $0.61 each, valuing the new shares at $7.4 billion, according to a person familiar with the offering who was not authorized to speak publicly about the pricing. But only a fraction of those shares will be held by non-government investors, as Chinese state-run companies have already pledged to buy up most of them. http://nyti.ms/2clbCYp (Compiled by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru)
Sept 21 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the New York Times business pages. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. - The Securities and Exchange Commission has requested information from Exxon Mobil Corp on the company's longstanding policy of not writing down the value of oil reserves, as other energy companies have done in the recent past, Exxon Mobil confirmed. http://nyti.ms/2cl9XSG - The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is expected to announce on Wednesday that he has secured enough commitments from world leaders to ensure that the 2015 Paris climate accord will enter into legal force this year, binding the next U.S. president, whoever it is. http://nyti.ms/2clde4v - For more than two hours testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, Chief Executive John Stumpf expressed regret that Wells Fargo had created as many as two million bogus bank and credit card accounts without its customers' consent. But the more Stumpf tried to explain, the more skeptical the senators became. http://nyti.ms/2cl9QH2 - The judge overseeing the investigation into the colossal scandal around Brazil's national oil company accepted corruption charges on Tuesday against the nation's former president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, setting the stage for a trial of one of Latin America's most influential political figures. http://nyti.ms/2clb3hj - John Boehner, the former speaker of the House who left Congress and his leadership post last year, is joining Squire Patton Boggs, a Washington-based law firm long known for its lobbying work. http://nyti.ms/2clbiJm - State-owned Postal Savings Bank of China Co Ltd, one of the country's biggest lenders, on Wednesday priced shares for its initial public offering next week at $0.61 each, valuing the new shares at $7.4 billion, according to a person familiar with the offering who was not authorized to speak publicly about the pricing. But only a fraction of those shares will be held by non-government investors, as Chinese state-run companies have already pledged to buy up most of them. http://nyti.ms/2clbCYp (Compiled by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru)
A controversial pro-Donald Trump super PAC mistakenly released the personal email addresses and cell phone numbers of hundreds of Trump-loving donors  and some of them are livid.

The email and phone number disclosure came as part a routine campaign finance filing Great America PAC made Tuesday night to the Federal Election Commission.

A Center for Public Integrity review of the document identified 336 people who were affected by what Great America PACs treasurer says was an error that occurred while electronically sending donor information to the FEC.

Trumps campaign formally disavowed Great America PAC in April in a letter to the FEC, but last week, Trumps son, Eric Trump, appeared at a fundraiser for the group. Such a switch underscores Trumps tortured relationship with big-money politics and allied political groups he cant, by law, directly control.

Dan Backer, attorney and treasurer for Great America PAC, vowed to fix the mess.

This story is part of Buying of the President 2016. Tracking the candidates, political committees and nonprofits that are making this presidential election the most expensive in history. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.

Don't miss another Politics investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email.

We will of course be contacting all affected contributors tomorrow to apologize for the error, and uploading an amended report, Backer said.

CMDI, the company that Great America PAC pays for donation accounting services, explained that the client had data entry errors and we're working with them to fix it.

In the meantime, several people who anonymously replied by phone to a Center for Public Integrity email informing them of Great America PACs mistake launched into expletive- and threat-filled tirades.

None of them were aware that anyone could view their email and phone information. They sometimes directed their angst at the Center for Public Integrity for informing them of the problem, and sometimes at Great America PAC for its information disclosure snafu.

Story continues

One woman, who identified herself as a 78-year-old Trump supporter from Georgia, told a Center for Public Integrity reporter she would make sure you never live to see the day that you slander Mr. Trump with your lies, you little s--- a-- liberal Hillary lover.

Reactions of more than a dozen other Great America PAC contributors, who offered more measured responses to the outing of their personal information, ranged from seeking legal relief to begrudging resignation.

I have forwarded your email to the district attorneys office, consumer protection unit, said Terry Raineri of San Jose, California.

Related story: Pro-Trump super PAC wants your money

Not happy as the Clinton Mob may use it against me for harassment purposes or worse, wrote Barbara Troendle of Pensacola, Florida, who has donated $250 to Great America PAC.

Yes, I am concerned, said donor Don Paris of Lynchburg, Virginia. However, there is not much I can do about what is already public. I will make no more online contributions.

Mitch Hanna of Grass Valley, California, who gave Great America PAC $250 last month, wasnt bothered that his email and part of his phone number are a matter of public record. I am fine with it, said Hanna, the CEO of Sutter Auburn Faith Hospital in Auburn, California.

Most of Great America PACs donors make modest contributions, sometimes as small as a few dollars. Many identify themselves in federal disclosures as retired.

Political campaigns and committees are required by federal law to publicly release the names, addresses, employers and occupations of donors contributing more than $200 during an election, something Great America PAC notes on its websites privacy policy.

While political groups, including Great America PAC, often collect supporters phone numbers and email information, they almost never make such personal information public.

Great America PAC  one of several notable pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton super PACs operating this year  formed in early February and originally called itself TrumPAC.

Later in February, the group changed its name to Great America PAC after federal regulators warned the super PAC about incorporating the name of an active political candidate into its own moniker.

Related story: Donald Trump's big money bait-and-switch

Don't miss another Politics investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email.

Great America PAC is technically a hybrid super PAC, meaning it may raise unlimited amounts of money to independently promote or attack political candidates, and separately, raise smaller amounts of money to directly donate to candidates.

It is backed in part by Bill Doddridge, founder of diamond retailer The Jewelry Exchange. And it is led by Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagans presidential campaign manager in 1984.

This year through August, Great America PAC has raised nearly $11.2 million, largely thanks to its aggressive online and telephone fundraising efforts.

Several million of its more than $9.2 million in expenditures this year have funded activities that ostensibly provide Trumps campaign a direct promotional boost: TV and radio spots, online ads, bumper stickers and the like.

But the group has also spent several million dollars on line items that dont directly benefit Trumps presidential campaign  but are certainly good for political professionals.

They include handsome compensation for Rollins (more than $16,000 in August alone), various consulting services, fundraising efforts, payment processing fees and the renting of lists that contain personal information of prospective supporters and donors.

Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone in May accused the group of being a scam.

But Rollins of Great America PAC later that month described the super PACs mission as establishing the largest group of Trump supporters so we can spread Donald's message and ensure he becomes our nation's next president.

Versions of this story appear in TIME and the Huffington Post.

This story is part of Buying of the President 2016. Tracking the candidates, political committees and nonprofits that are making this presidential election the most expensive in history. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.

Related stories

Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
CHC founder Kong Hee (right) arriving in court for the last day of the City Harvest Church appeal hearing. Photo: Sharlene Sankaran/Yahoo Singapore



The City Harvest Church (CHC) appeal hearing ended on Wednesday (21 September) with the prosecution pressing for stiffer jail terms for the six CHC leaders.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Christopher Ong told the panel of judges - Judge of Appeal Chao Hick Tin and Justices Woo Bih Li and Chan Seng Oon  that senior pastor Kong Hee, deputy senior pastor Tan Ye Peng, former fund manager Chew Eng Han, former committee member John Lam and former finance managers Sharon Tan and Serina Wee, were found guilty of misappropriating millions in church funds in October 2015.

The six were given jail terms of between 21 months and eight years by the lower court after they were found guilty on charges including criminal breach of trust (CBT) and falsification of accounts. They were convicted of using $50 million from church funds to aid the pop music career of Kongs wife, Sun Ho, under the churchs Crossover Project.

The prosecution asked for their jail terms to be increased significantly. DPP Ong urged the court to hand out jail terms of between 11 and 12 years for Kong, Tan Ye Peng, Chew and Wee.

CHCs ex-finance manager Serina Wee arriving for the appeal hearing. Photo: Sharlene Sankaran/Yahoo Singapore



He also asked that Lams jail term be increased to between eight and nine years and for Sharon Tan to be jailed for between five and six years.

In his submissions, Ong pointed out that the six had not shown any remorse for their actions and disagreed with the point made by them that the Crossover Project was supported by a vast majority of church members.

The offenders were placed in positions of trust by virtue of their positions in CHC. The offenders abused this trust in committing the offences and lying to cover them up, he said.

Kong Hees deputy, Tan Ye Peng, arriving in court for the appeal hearing. Photo: Sharlene Sankaran/Yahoo Singapore



Story continues

The defence argued that the church leaders had no intention of misappropriating the funds and were not acting dishonestly.

Chew, who is acting as his own lawyer, said that he did everything for the church and admitted that he was biased towards CHC.

All we wanted to do is to help the church and not to cause it to lose money, he added.

Judge of Appeal Chao said that the panel will consider the submissions by the prosecution and defence, and a decision will be made as soon as possible.


Boat operation in Saptakoshi banned for time being

The District Administration Office, Sunsari, has banned the boat operation in the Saptakoshi River for the time being.
Protesters swarmed the streets of Charlotte Tuesday night in the wake of a fatal police shooting of a black man in the city.

Hundreds gathered following the death of Keith Lamont Scott, who was shot by a black officer who says he believed the 43-year-old father of seven was an armed threat to officers.

Read: 13-Year-Old Boy Fatally Shot by Police After He Pointed BB Gun at Officers

Scott was reportedly inside a car outside a Charlotte apartment complex when police responded to a call about a suspect there. Scott was not the suspect, but officers say they saw him get out of the car holding a gun.

Cops say he then got back in the car then got out again while still holding the gun. It was then when officers deemed him a threat and Scott was killed, according to the Associated Press.

The Charlotte mayor's office identified the officer who killed Scott as Brentley Vinson, who is black.

As several hundred gathered to protest Scott's killing overnight, authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters in a chaotic scene that blocked roads and reportedly left about a dozen officers injured.

News footage showed demonstrators swarming a police vehicle and what appeared to be the looting of trucks on Interstate 85 as protestors set fire to the contents.

Read: Trump Doubles Down on Need for Profiling After Bombings: 'We Have No Choice'

As demonstrators vented their frustrations in the streets, local police portrayed some who joined the crowed as aggressors on social media.

"A number of agitators have joined demonstrators," the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted. "Agitators destroying marked police units. CEU continues to work to restore order and protect our community,"

Police said that one of the injured among them was hit in the face with a rock.

The crowds were eventually dispersed with the help of tear gas. By 5 a.m. no protesters remained in sight and I-85 was moving again.

Story continues

Watch: Family of Unarmed Man Fatally Shot by Police Demands Justice: 'It Feels Like a Nightmare'

Related Articles:
Violent protests broke out in Charlotte, North Carolina, Tuesday night after a police officer fatally shot an African American man outside an Charlotte apartment complex.



The protests stretched into early Wednesday morning, leaving more than a dozen officers wounded, multiple police cruisers destroyed and leading to an interstate being shut down, police said at a Monday press conference. Police in riot gear deployed tear gas and SWAT officials were on scene as protesters vandalized cars, threw rocks and started small fires, the Associated Press reports.



The demonstrators took to the streets after Officer Brentley Vinson fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott on the city's northeast side, according to a police statement obtained by PEOPLE.





Protests Break Out in North Carolina After Police Fatally Shoot Black Man| Crime & Courts, Death, Murder, Shootings, True Crime, True Crime



Authorities said Charlotte police were looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott  who was not the suspect  in a vehicle just before 4 p.m. at The Village at College Downs apartment complex.



"The subject exited the vehicle armed with a firearm. Officers observed the subject get back into the vehicle at which time they began to approach the subject," police allege in their statement.



"The subject got back out of the vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject."



At a Monday press conference, police reiterated the allegation that Scott had a gun. They said Vinson was not wearing a body camera. Other uniformed officers on scene were wearing cameras, but the view from their cameras didn't capture everything that occurred, police said.





Protests Break Out in North Carolina After Police Fatally Shoot Black Man| Crime & Courts, Death, Murder, Shootings, True Crime, True Crime



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



Scott was pronounced dead later at a hospital and the officer, Vinson, has been placed on paid administrative leave, according to the statement. (Vinson is also black, according to the Mayor's office, CNN reports.



"Detectives recovered the firearm the subject was holding at the time of the shooting at the scene," police said in the statement.



Authorities said that detectives with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's Homicide Unit are investigating the deadly shooting.





Story continues

I will continue to work with our manager & Chief on officer involved shooting. We are reaching out to community to ask for calm. a Mayor of Charlotte (@CLTMayor) September 21, 2016





Lyric Scott, who identified herself as Scott's daughter on social media, recorded the aftermath of the shooting in a lengthy Facebook video, declaring that her father did not have a firearm.



"The police just shot by daddy four times for being black, "she said.





#KeithScott signs line the road where #CharlotteProtests started. Police say he was armed. His family says he was carrying a book. @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/38Jt6eL7ta a Mark Barber (@MBarberWSOC9) September 21, 2016





One man on scene told WCNC that Scott was in the vehicle, reading a book and waiting for his son to return from school when the officers approached.



Another man, who identified himself as Scott's son, echoed the man's statements to WCNC.



"He was waiting on his son to get from school and police came out with no...he didn't have on no uniform to determine if he was a police or not  he was an undercover and he just jumped out and yelled, 'Gun' and shot at him," he told WCNC.



Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, in a pair of Twitter posts, urged the community to keep calm and vowed to investigate the fatal shooting.



"The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue," she tweeted on Tuesday. "Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together."



The death comes just days after police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, fatally shot Terence Crutcher, an unarmed African-American man, as he stood on a highway with his hands up.
Protests erupt after deadly police shooting in Charlotte, N.C Police and protesters carry a seriously wounded protester into the parking area of the the Omni Hotel during a march to protest the death of Keith Scott September 21, 2016 in Carolina. Scott, who was black, was shot and killed at an apartment complex near UNC Charlotte by police officers, who say they warned Scott to drop a gun he was allegedly holding. (Brian Blanco/Getty Images)

A prayer vigil in honor of Keith Lamont Scott turned into a violent protest Wednesday night in Charlotte, North Carolina, prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency, as riot gear-wearing police fired small canisters of tear gas at bottle-throwing demonstrators while on of the protesters was also in critical condition on life support after being shot by another civilian.

Governor Pat McCrory has declared a State of Emergency upon the request Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney, read a statement from the governors office. The governor has also initiated efforts to deploy the North Carolina National Guard and the State Highway Patrol to assist local law enforcement.

Earlier in the evening, governor McCrory said, Upon a very recent request of Chief Putney, the State Highway Patrol is sending in troopers to further help the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department.

The city of Charlotte initially tweeted that the protester was fatally shot by the other civilian, but later tweeted, CORRECTION UPDATE: Civilian who suffered gunshot wound during protests is on life support, critical condition. Not deceased. The initial tweet also said police did not fire shot at the protester.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department spokeswoman Cindy Wallace said Wednesday night of the shot protester, Officers responded to North College Street and East Trade Street to an ADW [assault with a deadly weapon] call for service at approximately 8:31 p.m. One person was located with an apparent gunshot wound and transported to CMC Main [Carolinas Medical Center]. This is all the information I have at this time.

Scott is the armed man who was fatally shot by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police at an apartment complex Tuesday. His wife issued a statement Wednesday afternoon addressing the protesters, and urging them to exercise restraint against law enforcement officers. (GMA)

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This past Sunday, as most of Russia focused its attention on parliamentary elections, the countrys most popular daily, Kommersant, broke news of a story that, if true, could have consequences that last far beyond this latest round of Duma reshuffling.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Kommersant, is planning a major overhaul of the countrys security services. The Russian daily reported that the idea of the reforms is to merge the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which keeps an eye on domestic affairs. This new supersized secret service will be given a new name: the Ministry of State Security. If that sounds familiar, it should  this was the name given to the most powerful and feared of Joseph Stalins secret services, from 1943 to 1953. And if its combination of foreign espionage and domestic surveillance looks familiar, well, it should: In all but name, we are seeing a resurrection of the Committee for State Security  otherwise known as the KGB.

The KGB, it should be remembered, was not a traditional security service in the Western sense  that is, an agency charged with protecting the interests of a country and its citizens. Its primary task was protecting the regime. Its activities included hunting down spies and dissidents and supervising media, sports, and even the church. It ran operations both inside and outside the country, but in both spheres the main task was always to protect the interests of whoever currently resided in the Kremlin. With this new agency, were seeing a return to form  one thats been a long time in the making.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Russian leaders sought to create a depoliticized security structure. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the reform of the KGB became an immediate, pressing issue. The agency was not reliably under control: The chairman of the KGB at the time, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had helped mastermind the military coup attempt aimed at overthrowing Mikhail Gorbachev that August. But new President Boris Yeltsin had no clear ideas about just how he wanted to reform the KGB, so he simply decided to break it into pieces.

The largest department of the KGB  initially called the Ministry of Security; then, later, the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK); then, even later, the FSB  was given responsibility solely for counter-espionage and counterterrorism operations. The KGBs former foreign intelligence directorate was transformed into a new agency called the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. The division of the KGB responsible for electronic eavesdropping and cryptography became the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information, or FAPSI. A relatively obscure directorate of the KGB that guarded secret underground facilities continued its functions under a new name: the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President, or GUSP. The KGB branch that had been responsible for protecting Soviet leaders was renamed the Federal Protective Service, or FSO, and the Soviet border guards were transformed into an independent Federal Border Service, or FPS.

The main successor of the KGB amid this alphabet soup of changes was the FSK. But this new counterintelligence agency was stripped of its predecessors overseas intelligence functions. The agency no longer protected Russian leaders and was deprived of its secret bunkers, which fell under the presidents direct authority. It maintained only a nominal presence in the army. In its new incarnation, the agencys mission was pruned back to something resembling Britains MI5: to fight terrorism and corruption.

But Yeltsins team never formed a clear strategy for how to transform what had once been the secret services of a totalitarian state into the intelligence community of a democracy. In a 1993 executive decree, Yeltsin lamented, reeling off a list of acronyms for various incarnations of the security agencies, that the system of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-NGKB-KGB-MB turned out to be incapable of being reformed. Reorganization efforts in recent years were external and cosmetic in nature. The system of political investigation is preserved and may easily be restored.

It was a prescient comment: By the mid-1990s, various component parts and functions of the old KGB had begun to make their way back to the FSK, like the liquid metal of the killer T-1000 android in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, slowly reconstituting itself after having been blown to bits.

First to return was the power to conduct domestic investigations. In November 1994, Yeltsin restored the investigative directorate of the FSK and placed the infamous Lefortovo prison, which had once held political prisoners and had been used for interrogations that involved torture, back under its remit. The next year saw a crucial name change: The FSK was rechristened the FSB. The shift from K (kontrrazvedka, or counterintelligence) to B (bezopasnost, or security) was more than cosmetic; with the new name came a broad mandate for the FSB to become the guardian of security for Russia.

Over the course of the next five years, the FSB would win back many of its old functions. It would once again be given responsibility for pursuing dissidents, who were now branded extremists, and would be given its own foreign intelligence directorate, duplicating the SVRs.

When Putin came to power in 2000, he initially appeared to follow the route laid out by his predecessor, Yeltsin. His main concern, at least at first, seemed to be minimizing competition between the secret services; as a result, in 2003, he allowed the FSB to absorb responsibility for the border troops and FAPSI  the electronic intelligence agency  and gave the service expanded powers over the army and police.

But the president, himself a former KGB officer, was too taken in by KGB myths about the role of the Cheka in Russian society to be satisfied with the FSB being a mere security organ. He was determined to see it become something bigger. Putin encouraged a steady growth in the agencys influence. The president began using the FSB as his main recruitment base for filling key positions in government and state-controlled business; its agents were expected to define and personify the ideology of the new Russia. When FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, in December 2000, called his officers Russias new nobility  a nickname that agents in the KGB could have hardly dreamed of being applied to them  he was taking a cue from his boss.

By the late 2000s, it was clear that Putin had bigger changes in store, but it wasnt yet clear whether those changes would elevate the FSB or destroy it. Putin began making it apparent that he wasnt happy with the agencys effectiveness. In 2007, he asked another service, an antidrug agency led by his personal friend Viktor Cherkesov, to look into the FSBs dealings, in the hope, it seems, of bringing it down. The attack on the agency failed utterly  and Putin was forced to fire his friend. Then Putin launched a new agency and gave it enormous powers: The Investigative Committee, a sort of Russian FBI, was tasked with conducting the most sensitive investigations, from the murders of Kremlin critics like Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov to prosecuting political activists. This was accompanied by an expansion of the Internal Troops  army units charged with operating within the country  and the launch of a new Department to Counter Extremism, housed within the Interior Ministry. Finally, this year, Putin created the National Guard, which is a massive and armed-to-the-teeth military force tasked with fighting internal dissent.

Throughout the 2000s, and for much of the 2010s, it looked as if Putins response to concerns about FSB ineffectiveness would be simply to create new agencies. With this weekends news, that strategy appears to have come to an abrupt end. If the Kommersant story is true, it would mean Putin has finally made up his mind about the fate of the FSB: It is to once again be restored to its former glory, as the most powerful security organ in the country by far.

Theres some method at work here. Its been clear for some time that Putin is getting nervous about his political future. With elections pending in 2018, hes started selective repressions, placed governors and officials in jail, and removed old friends from key positions, in moves seemingly aimed at what his role model Yuri Andropov once called improv[ing] labor discipline. Efforts to strengthen the security services fit within this pattern of centralizing control; whats new is that hes decided the best way to strengthen them is to merge them into one gigantic service, with a fearsome name and a reputation that reminds any would-be dissidents of the most frightening days of the Soviet era.

At the same time, the FSB has lost a certain something in this transition: Gone is any talk about a new nobility, and the agency is no longer being used as a recruitment base for other sectors of the government and economy. Putin has made it clear that what he needs is an instrument, pure and simple, to protect his own regime  just like the Politburo had its instrument in the KGB.

Ironically, however, it seems likely that the announced reforms will not actually improve FSB effectiveness  if anything, theyll do the opposite. The agency will now be forced to spend resources to eliminate duplication (over the years, the FSB developed its own strong foreign intelligence branch, and its not clear how it will merge this with the SVRs, for instance), to find new positions for generals who are out of jobs, and to deal with renaming departments, rewriting regulations, and the various other forms of bureaucratic chaos that accompany big mergers. That could paralyze the new mega-siloviki for an undetermined period  just at the time Putin needs it most.

Image credit: YANA LAPIKOVA/AFP/GettyImages
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin wants the United States to protect aid convoys in Syria, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said after meeting him in Moscow. An air strike hit relief trucks near the city of Aleppo on Monday, shattering a ceasefire. The United States believes Russian aircraft are responsible but Moscow has denied involvement and the Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday a U.S. Predator drone was in the area when the convoy was attacked. Gabriel, who spoke to Putin in private for around an hour on Wednesday, said the Russian leader denied any Russian involvement in the attack on the aid convoy and added that Putin signaled he was very interested in re-establishing the ceasefire. It is Putin's wish that "not only Russia is prepared to monitor these convoys with its own forces", Gabriel said, adding that Putin was in favor of the United States doing so as well. "That's one of the big conflicts - that the Americans are not prepared to do that - at least not yet," Gabriel said. Gabriel urged the Russian leader to use his influence on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to bring about a de-escalation in Syria. The United States believes two Russian aircraft attacked an aid convoy near Aleppo in a strike that shattered a one-week truce, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, but Russia denied involvement. The Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday that a U.S. Predator drone was in the area where a U.N. aid convoy was partially destroyed in Syria on Monday and had appeared on the scene minutes before the incident. Gabriel said he told Putin that Germany thought the Syrian army was involved in the attack. "Of course we didn't agree on that," Gabriel said. (Reporting by Rene Wagner; Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by David Gregorio)
At the Los Angeles premiere of Queen of Katwe, which screened at the El Capitan Theatre, star David Oyelowo star talked about how his culture and background made the film resonate with him.

I sort of did it as a love letter for my daughter Zoe, the actor said. Its the first time Ive done a film that I can take my whole family to. For someone of African descent myself to see a positive, life-affirming story like this was something I really wanted to be a part of. I couldnt believe Disney was making a movie like this.

Queen of Katwe is an uplifting story about the underdog. Set in Uganda, the story follows Phiona Mutesi, a young girl who dreams of playing chess. However, the films screenwriter, William Wheeler, comes from a completely different background than the films protagonists.

I didnt grow up in Uganda. Its as much as an empathic leap as Ive ever done as a writer, said Wheeler.

When asked if he had faced criticism regarding his white background, Wheeler said he has faced none.

Ive thought about that because its a relevant question. I trusted the people involved who thought I would be helpful to the story, Wheeler said. I had to trust them  they knew who I was and where I came from and my perspective and those things can be helpful. It wasnt my job to disqualify myself so I figured Id put my faith in them.

Lupita Nyongo, who plays Harriet Mutesi, instantly felt a connection with the material and jumped at the chance to play the role.

I was less than ten pages in when I decided to be part of the film because its a true story, an uplifting one about a young girl with a big dream. The characters that I met in those ten pages were complex and layered and interesting and I wanted to be part of telling this story  it doesnt come around very often, said Nyongo.

Queen of Katwe makes its move on September 23.

Related stories

David Oyelowo to Speak at London Film Festival's Diversity Debate

Toronto Film Review: 'Queen of Katwe'

Toronto Film Review: 'A United Kingdom'
In the digital age, even the most established film festivals are finding the going hard. But as it approaches its first quarter century, Londons Raindance Film Festival is embracing the chaos ushered in by the rise of new technologies. Youd think after 24 years it would get easier, says festival founder Elliot Grove. But it doesnt, it just gets different.

And what was different this year was the festivals global reach: the event received more than 8,000 submissions from over 100 countries. Our programmers were tortured, Grove says. From that [many submissions], how could they pick the 85 shorts, 107 features and documentaries, the VR projects, the music videos, and the web series pilots? In the early [days] of Raindance, all those years ago, when John Major was still [the U.K.s] prime minister, we showed absolutely everything, and now we show practically nothing of what is submitted.

I guess the other hallmark of Raindance over the last three or four years is that we do not show any of the local distributors films, so our films, including opening and closing night, come from the submissions that we get, Grove says. Inexperienced members of the team say, Oh we should call up so-and-so and get a big film, but the older programmers say, The opening film will find us  as it has this year.

This years opener on Sept. 21, Problemski Hotel reflects the festivals international outlook, being a Belgian film shot in English, Russian, and Arabic.

Says Grove: Its a very gritty look at the problems that an immigrant or a refugee from the deep south or the deep east is facing in trying to get themselves to Britain and safer soil. Its very fitting, with all the Brexit stuff and the immigrant crisis going on, and to do that in a non-linear narrative style, with occasional touches of laugh-out-loud humor, is the reason it was selected.

Its an unusual choice, and Grove accepts that there is little rhyme or reason to what constitutes an opening night film for the festival. Raindance isnt so much about precedent, he says. Were more about innovation and responding to stuff we see. I know that sounds extremely pompous, but, historically, that has been the goal of the film festival  our remit, from day one, has been all about discovering new talent, the kind of stuff without stars. Which is a great thing, but its also a marketing nightmare.

Story continues

Nevertheless, Grove believes his festival does have a unique formula. [The films] have an extreme topic, one thats timely and makes audiences uncomfortable. Another thing were looking for is extreme filmmaking technique: how did they put it together? It could be made in a war zone, or with no money, or using different kinds of cameras. And the third thing, and the biggest thing, is that it needs to sell the story and be extremely entertaining. These things do not fit into the so-called Hollywood mold, and most of our filmmakers have had their films turned down by [the major production companies].

Having courted web series in the past, Raindance now, similar to festivals as diverse as Sundance, IDFA, and more recently Venice, has expanded to include Virtual Reality, an innovation that intrigues rather than daunts Grove. The whole industry has really shifted in the quarter century that Ive been doing this, he says. No longer do you get a million dollars, get a camera, shoot a film, be assured of a VHS or DVD release, and then pay your investors back. Those days are long gone.

So how do you use the tool of the internet, how do you use virtual reality or AR? Nobody really understands whats going on, which makes Raindance all the more exciting, simply because the vibrancy and freshness of the work thats submitted.

The innovation that these filmmakers use to get these projects out of their head and onto the screen is simply staggering.

Related stories

Raindance Film Festival: UK-Ibero-American Co-Production Forum Offers 'a Friendly Space of Collaboration'

Raindance Founder on How This Year's Film Festival Reflects Society's Anxieties

Director Manu Riche on Raindance Opener 'Problemski Hotel': 'There's a Lot of Real Humor'
Brazil's ex-president Lula to be tried for corruption

Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption and money laundering charges over an alleged scheme at the state oil company, Petrobras, a judge has said.
Rapper Shawty Lo, best known for his 2008 hit "Dey Know" and member of the hip-hop group D4L who released the 2005 Hot 100 chart-topper "Laffy Taffy", died in a car crash in Atlanta on Tuesday night (Sept. 20). The Georgia native (real name Carlos Walker) was 40 years old.

According to 11 Alive, Fulton County police say the crash happened around 2:20 a.m. when a 2016 Audi caught fire at the Cascade Road exit after crashing onto a guard rail and hitting several trees. Two women were said to be in the car and were also sent to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. A Fulton County rep was not available to confirm the details of the incident at press time.

News of Shawty Lo's death was first reported by radio personality Headkrack, who tweeted that the rapper died in a hit and run though reports say that it was a single car accident.

My brother has passed he is no longer here but his spirit, his kind heart , and his music will live on Long live Shawty Lo King of Bankhead

- SHAWTY LO (@THATSSHAWTYLO) September 21, 2016

Shawty Lo's latest release was 2013's "Bowen Home Carlos." He was also a father to 11 children.

A tweet from the rapper's official handle from his manager Johnnie Cabell read, "My brother has passed he is no longer here but his spirit, his kind heart , and his music will live on Long live Shawty Lo King of Bankhead."

I am so so so devastated that words can not describe how I feel right now. Shawty Lo was not just my artist he was my Brother He was My Friend. I have been Lo MGR for over 10yrs He was Loyal and he had my back when no one else did. I could count on him when I had no one else to turn to. We been thru so much together. If you knew Lo then you know he was genuine He was Real he would do anything he could if he had it. I Genuinely love this man like my blood brother. I Will Keep His Name Alive and and His Music !!!! Please Pray for Us The Whole D4L Family Lo Family His Mom His Kids His Children Mothers We need you all prayers and Support !!!!!!

A photo posted by Johnnie Cabbell (@johnniecabbell) on Sep 21, 2016 at 4:24am PDT

Cabbell also wrote on Instagram, "I am so so so devastated that words can not describe how I feel right now. Shawty Lo was not just my artist he was my Brother He was My Friend. I have been Lo MGR for over 10yrs He was Loyal and he had my back when no one else did. I could count on him when I had no one else to turn to. We been thru so much together. If you knew Lo then you know he was genuine He was Real he would do anything he could if he had it. I Genuinely love this man like my blood brother. I Will Keep His Name Alive and and His Music !!!! Please Pray for Us The Whole D4L Family Lo Family His Mom His Kids His Children Mothers We need you all prayers and Support !!!!!!"
If I could turn back time...

Germanys taciturn chancellor surprised the country this week with an uncharacteristically frank speech apologizing for her handing of the refugee crisis. Angela Merkels contrite comments came after her party suffered dismal results in state elections this month, losing support to the upstart anti-immigrant party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD).

In a 20-minute press conference yesterday (Sept. 19), the chastened chancellor said her government made mistakes in its refugee policy over the past 18 months. More than a million migrants came to Germany last year, five times more than the year before, boosted by the countrys open-door policy for refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war-torn countries.

For some time, we didnt have enough control, Merkel said. No one wants a repeat of last years situation, including me.

She also expressed regret for her go-to mantra over the past year, we can manage this (wir shaffen das). She said she didnt want to use it any more as it was a simple slogan, an empty formula. She acknowledged that some people felt provoked by this sentence, and that was never the aim.

While many took her speech as an apology for her open-door refugee policy, this was not the case. Merkels words were nuanced and her fighting spirit clear. She didnt apologize for her decision to open the borders to refugees last year, which she described at the time as doing what is morally and legally obliged. In retrospect, this was absolutely correct on balance, Merkel said, in typically measured tones. She did admit, however, that the government could have been better prepared for the influx of asylum seekers.

If I was able to, I would turn back time by many, many years, so that I could have prepared the whole government and the authorities for the situation which hit us out of the blue in the late summer of 2015, she said.

Story continues

Merkel cancelled her trip to the UN General Assembly this week to tackle the growing crisis at home, after her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), took a drubbing in the Berlin state election on Sunday. Weeks after the party secured only 14% of the vote in Merkels home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU only managed 18% in Berlin, meaning it may be booted from the governing coalition led by the largest party, the Social Democrats.

It was not only its worst result for the CDU in the capital since the Second World War, but also an indication of how bad things are for Merkels partyeven the countrys most cosmopolitan city has turned against it. Meanwhile, the right-wing AfD gained seats in the Berlin state parliament for the first time. The anti-immigration AfD now has representatives in 10 of 17 German states.

Merkel is also under immense pressure from supposed allies in the CDUs sister party, the Christian Social Union. Its leader, Horst Seehofer, an increasingly vocal critic of the chancellor, wants the number of migrants into Germany to be capped at 200,000 a year. Merkels self-criticism over her refugee policy went over well with the CSU: I consider this a highly respectable act, said deputy leader Christian Schmidt. The Bavarian finance minister, another CSU bigwig, praised it as a course change.

The German media have interpreted Merkels words as a clear indication (link in German) that shes going on the offensive a year ahead of the next federal election, sending signals that she will run for a fourth term in 2017. Of course, Merkel didnt mention that specifically, and likely wont officially announce her intentions until early next year.

A new mix of emotion, understanding and fighting spirit. The signal: She wont be giving up power so quickly, said Bild, Germanys biggest tabloid (link in German).

Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news.

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From ELLE

Two years ago, Emma Watson launched HeforShe at the UN with a history-making speech calling for gender equality (one that has been viewed on YouTube alone over 1.7 million times).

Over a million men have pledged support to the UN Women movement, and while there is still work to be done, Watson is overwhelmed by the progress made in just two years. "We've seen seismic shifts in culture recently," she told a crowd at the New York City Museum of Modern Art last night. Watson was one of the last speakers in a stacked lineup that included speeches by Finland's President Sauli Niinisto, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Watson presented Trudeau a HeforShe pin on stage. She was very excited about it).

Photo credit: Getty

"I couldn't believe my eyes when I turned on the TV to see that Bud Light was pledging gender equality and equal pay as part of their current advertising campaign. We already have some amazing things happening, some amazing female leaders, but I don't know if I would have believed you if you had told me two years ago before I made my HeForShe speech that we might have the first female President of the United States-please don't let me down, America!-a female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and possibly for the first time in history, a female UN Secretary General."

#HE4SHE Champion Pres #Finland, Sauli Niinisto joining forces w/ Emma Watson, Global Goodwill Ambassador of UN Women pic.twitter.com/sMRb37qYM6 - Kai Sauer (@sauerka) September 21, 2016

"While women still only make up such a small percentage of political leadership, to quote the awesome Michelle Obama, 'because of these women, girls and boys all over the world will have real-life examples that women are leaders.' In the last two years if I have learned anything, if they have shown me anything, it is that nothing-nothing-is impossible. And that's why tonight, as well as saying thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have done, I ask you to recommit yourselves to be a part of gender equality. I genuinely feel that we are closer to a gender equal world."

Watson ended on a personal note: "I am proud to have been part of lots of amazing things in my life, but there is nothing that I am prouder of than being part of this."

Photo credit: Getty

Watch and read Watson's full speech below:

Gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. Thank you to everyone that has shared their story tonight and has contributed to what has been the most heart-warming moment of my year. Good evening. Being a part of HeForShe for the last two years has been an incredible learning experience for me. There have been some really hard moments and a lot of amazing ones: ones I never could have imagined. The UN Secretary General, the entire EU Commission, the NATO Secretary General, the President of the International Olympic Committee, numerous heads of state and politicians from around the world, including those that you've heard from tonight, and everyone from Usain Bolt to Tom Hanks are now all HeforShe. We've crashed the UN website on multiple occasions-sorry about that! We have lit up the Empire State Building, seen HeForShe in Times Square, and made it a term in the Urban Dictionary. After two billion media impressions, 1.1 million pledged HeforShes have made practical commitments, as have some of the world's leading universities and companies, to make gender equality a priority in their work and within their communities. Surprisingly though, it was during the hard moments that I made the best discoveries about what it means to be part of this movement. There is genuinely a spectrum of amazing feminists out there who have not only given me invaluable advice but also broadened my perspective and reinforced my belief that we are all linked. We all belong to a long history of people who have made sacrifices, some groups much more than others, in order to make indefinably large contributions to our modern lives.

We've seen seismic shifts in culture recently. I couldn't believe my eyes when I turned on the TV to see that Bud Light was pledging gender equality and equal pay as part of their current advertising campaign. We already have some amazing things happening, some amazing female leaders, but I don't know if I would have believed you if you had told me two years ago before I made my HeForShe speech that we might have the first female President of the United States-please don't let me down, America!-a female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and possibly for the first time in history, a female UN Secretary General. While women still only make up such a small percentage of political leadership, to quote the awesome Michelle Obama, "because of these women, girls and boys all over the world will have real-life examples that women are leaders." In the last two years if I have learned anything, if they have shown me anything, it is that nothing-nothing-is impossible. And that's why tonight, as well as saying thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have done, I ask you to recommit yourselves to be a part of gender equality. I genuinely feel that we are closer to a gender equal world, certainly closer than we were two years ago, and I know that each and every HeForShe has played such a huge part in that. I am proud to have been part of lots of amazing things in my life, but there is nothing that I am prouder of than being part of this. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful night.

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The mounting evidence that the Russian government has at best tolerated and at worst commissioned computer hackers who are actively interfering in U.S. politics has been the subject of much outrage and speculation about motives. Much of the thinking from foreign policy pundits has suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin sees causing electoral chaos in the United States as a power move in a struggle between two nations that want to exert maximum influence around the globe. And if it gets a Kremlin-friendly Donald Trump elected president, so much the better.

But in an article published in The New York Times today, Yale history professor and author Timothy Snyder posits a more insidious goal: undermining public faith in democracy itself, not just in the U.S., but worldwide.

Related: The Battle of the Brands Isnt Trump v. Clinton, Its Trump v. Obama

Putin, Snyder suggests, is taking his cues not from the old Soviet Cold War playbook but from a strain of Russian fascism whose chief proponent, a philosopher named Ivan Ilyin, was expelled from the country in the years following the Communist revolution.

Ilyin, Snyder explains, has been undergoing a years-long rehabilitation in Putins Russia. The president himself had the philosophers body exhumed in Switzerland and reburied with honor in Russia several years ago, consecrating the new grave himself. Ilyins books have been widely reprinted and are often praised by Putin and those close to him. Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, a close Putin ally, has publicly recommended them.

Given Putins record of suppressing dissent and aggression, the ideas that undergird Ilyins political philosophy may not be all that surprising.

The former White Russian was both staunchly anti-communist and anti-democratic, believing that the people cannot adequately rule themselves and that they should be led by a national dictator. Individuality was an evil that prevented citizens from properly subordinating their own needs to the needs of the state. Elections would still be held under Ilyins system, but they would be open, requiring voters to sign their ballots, and would serve only to ceremonially validate the dictators position, not to actually choose a leader.

Story continues

Related: Trump Campaign Struggles to Refute Reports of Charitys Self-Dealing

The Kremlins interference in U.S. elections, Snyder argues, is a way to discredit democracy in general on the world stage.

Having already created a rigged electoral process in Russia, he says, the Putin worldview believes, Democracy is not a means of changing leadership at home, but a means of weakening enemies abroad. If we see politics as Ilyin did, Russias ritualization of elections becomes a virtue rather than a vice. Degrading democracy around the world would be a service to mankind.

From that perspective, Snyder argues, its rational to expect that Russian interference in elections both in the U.S. and elsewhere is likely to be a persistent problem in the future.

From Moscows point of view, it is easier to bring down democracy everywhere than it is to hold free, fair elections at home, Snyder writes. Russia will seem stronger if other states follow its course of development toward a cynicism about democracy that allows authoritarianism to thrive. So we might as well get used to the interference, and take sensible precautions. It no longer makes sense to carry out elections and regulate campaign finance as if such matters were of no interest to hostile foreign powers.

Snyders prescription is a simpler election system, which includes universal paper ballots and public financing of elections, and would be more secure and more exemplary. Unfortunately, in recent years, exemplary is not a word often applied to U.S. politics.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
By Michelle Nichols and Angus McDowall UNITED NATIONS/BEIRUT (Reuters) - The United States believes two Russian aircraft attacked an aid convoy near Aleppo in a strike that shattered a one-week truce, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, but Russia denied involvement. Despite the military blame game over Monday's deadly attack, diplomats struggled to save the U.S.-Russian ceasefire agreement that took effect on Sept. 12. The incident, in which 18 trucks from a 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed, looked likely to deal a death blow to diplomatic efforts to halt a civil war now in its sixth year. Two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the exact time it was struck late on Monday, two U.S. officials told Reuters, citing U.S. intelligence that led them to conclude Russia was to blame. Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman denied the assertion, telling reporters at the United Nations the U.S. administration "has no facts" to support the claim, adding: "We have nothing to do with this situation." Earlier Russia, which denied its aircraft or those of its Syrian government allies were involved, had said it believed the convoy was not struck from the air at all but had caught fire because of some incident on the ground. The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and "around 20 civilians" had been killed, although other death tolls differed. The attack prompted the United Nations to suspend all aid shipments into Syria. Senior officials from 23 nations emerged from a one-hour meeting on Syria at a New York luxury hotel with little more than an agreement to meet again, on Friday, about how to end a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions from their homes. They also differed on the chances of renewing the ceasefire. "The ceasefire is not dead," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said after the meeting, which he hosted with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. "Is there still a chance this ceasefire will be effective? I can't answer that question," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters. He said that without a ceasefire there would be a "spiral of war, but we have to be honest, the U.S.-Russian negotiation has reached its limits." The U.N. Security Council is due to hold a high-level meeting on Syria on Wednesday. The United Nations, Red Cross and United States had all described Monday's incident as an air strike, implicitly pinning the blame on Russian or Syrian aircraft that fly in the area for breaking the ceasefire with an attack on a humanitarian target. But the U.N. revised a statement to remove the phrase "air strikes" and replace it with references to unspecified "attacks". U.N. humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said the original reference to air strikes was probably a drafting error, saying the U.N. was not in a position to determine if they were air strikes but was sure the convoy was "attacked." "WAR CRIME" IF DELIBERATE The ceasefire was meant to halt all fighting and allow aid to reach besieged areas, at a time when pro-government forces, with Russian and Iranian military support, are in their strongest position for years and civilians in many rebel-held areas are cut off from food and medical supplies. "If this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime," U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien said in a statement. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Defence Ministry, said in a statement: "We have studied video footage from the scene from so-called 'activists' in detail and did not find any evidence that the convoy had been struck by ordnance." "There are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air." He said the damage to the convoy visible in footage was caused by its cargo catching fire. It had occurred at the same time as militants from the group formerly called the Nusra Front had started a big offensive in nearby Aleppo, he said, appearing to point the finger at rescue workers from a group called the "White Helmets" who filmed the aftermath. "Only representatives of the 'White Helmets' organisation close to the Nusra Front who, as always, found themselves at the right time in the right place by chance with their video cameras can answer who did this and why." Hussein Badawi, head of the White Helmets in the town, said he was 100 metres (yards) from the aid depot when the air strikes took place and was injured by shrapnel in the hand. "There were fires, martyrs, wounded people. We were able to pull out four survivors and five dead bodies at first," Badawi said. "The bombardment was continuous, continuous. The rescue teams weren't even able to work. Those who arrived in ambulances couldn't come in." DIPLOMATIC GAMBLE The ceasefire deal was a gamble on unprecedented cooperation between the United States and Russia, despite trust between the two Cold War-era foes being at its lowest point for decades. They support opposite sides in the war between Assad's government and insurgents but are both fighting against Islamic State militants. The deal calls for Washington and Moscow to share targeting information eventually. Following Monday's attack, there were reports of intensified clashes across Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said clashes took place between the army and rebels in the Jobar district of Damascus and areas northeast of the capital, after the army tried to advance. Near the central city of Homs, the army shelled one village, while helicopters and warplanes bombed several other places, including the rebel-held town of Rastan, it said. (Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Peter Graff and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Stamp and Howard Goller)
Seoul (AFP) - The Red Cross appealed Wednesday for $15.5 million in emergency funding to help flood-ravaged North Koreans, warning of a "secondary disaster" in the impoverished country unless urgent assistance is provided.

At least 138 people are known to have died and nearly 400 are missing after torrential rain triggered major floods, devastating villages in the country's northeast, the UN said last week.

According to the UN, 140,000 people need assistance. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said that about 70,000 remain homeless after tens of thousands of houses were damaged or destroyed.

"People were vulnerable before this disaster but now they are in danger of reaching tipping point," said Chris Staines, head of the IFRC delegation in Pyongyang, in a statement.

"Winter is on our doorstep and when you add up the impact of the floods and the risks people now face, we could see a secondary disaster here in the months ahead", Staines said, following a visit to the affected areas.

With winter temperatures threatening to plunge to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit), the $15.5-million fund will be used to deliver crucial relief supplies including tents, medicines and coal to 7,000 families.

Images published by state media showed collapsed roads and railways, as well as houses engulfed in a wall of mud, while hundreds of people -- many covered in dirt -- struggled to remove the debris.

It said large numbers of troops and residents from nearby areas had been mobilised for reconstruction, with authorities urging them to "work miracles".

The impoverished and isolated North is vulnerable to natural disasters, especially floods, due partly to deforestation and poor infrastructure.

At least 169 people were killed by a massive rainstorm in the summer of 2012.

However, huge government resources are swallowed up by a missile and nuclear weapons programme widely condemned by the international community.

The North, already under layers of sanctions imposed over past missile and nuclear tests, is facing potentially more sanctions following a fifth nuclear test staged on September 9.
Of the numerous individuals engulfed in the vast Malaysian embezzlement scandal that includes a cameo by Leonardo DiCaprio, Najib Razak undoubtedly is the most prominent. The meek-looking Malaysian prime minister - widely acknowledged to be "Malaysian Official 1" in a record-breaking U.S. Justice Department complaint - is the man at the helm of the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, now alleged to have been used to plunder billions of dollars of public money that lavishly flowed into the U.S., spent on luxury properties, artworks and, of course, DiCaprio's hit 2013 drama The Wolf of Wall Street.

But eyes are increasingly turning to the larger-than-life figure often by Razak's side: his bouffant-haired, Birkin bag-loving wife, Rosmah Mansor. It's Mansor, 64, who, through her first marriage, is the mother of Riza Aziz, the co-founder of Red Granite Pictures and producer of the DiCaprio starrer, and it's Mansor who is the connection to Jho Low, the controversial businessman who helped set up 1MDB and allegedly diverted billions into his own pockets and those of his associates (including Red Granite).

Read more: Leonardo DiCaprio, the Malaysians and Marlon Brando's Missing Oscar

And it's Mansor who many have long suspected to be wielding just as much power - if not more - as her husband. When late Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew made an official state visit to Malaysia shortly after Razak entered office in 2009, he made a point of meeting Mansor separately, explaining that they ran the country as a team.

Reports recently emerged that the first lady of Malaysia (a controversial title Mansor bestowed upon herself, along with her own unit in the PM's office) had racked up at least $6 million in credit card charges in less than seven years, with shopping sprees at Saks Fifth Avenue and Harrods among her purse-busting blowouts.

But the news caused little shock in Malaysia, where Mansor's fondness for diamonds and Hermes bags (she reportedly boasts one of the biggest Birkin collections on the planet, including a bejeweled crocodile skin design costing in excess of $200,000) widely is known and ridiculed.

Story continues

"Imelda Marcos had a fetish for shoes, whereas our friend here has a thing for bags," says Hishamuddin Rais, a Malaysian filmmaker who attended the same school as Mansor. He describes her as a combination of a "femme fatale and Lady Macbeth." Like Rais, Mansor's parents were teachers, but he says she has long since rejected her middle-class roots and even several family members (including her own daughter).

Read more: Robert De Niro on His Connection to the Malaysian Corruption Scandal: "I Don't Give a Shit"

Mansor's first husband, Aziz's father, reportedly was ditched because he "wasn't ambitious enough." And before she hooked up with rising politician Razak in the '80s, there were rumors the social climber had eyes for the Sultan of Brunei. "Anything that comes out about Rosmah is always believable," says Rais.

For political cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Ulhaque - better known as Zunar - Mansor's image is a "godsend." His numerous cartoons depict her as a woman with huge hair and an ever-present sparkling rock on her finger.

"For me, she's the most powerful individual in Malaysia - she's the one who decides on everything," he says.

Malaysian cartoonist Zunar is facing charges of sedition thanks to illustrations like this one depicting Rosmah Mansor on a shopping spree at taxpayers' expense. Credit Zunar/Malaysiakini

Both Rais and Zunar are facing charges of sedition in Malaysia for their outspoken views, with Zunar facing a record nine charges carrying a possible sentence of 43 years in prison.

But while you can get away with cartoons of Prime Minister Razak, he says it's actually Mansor where the line is crossed.

"In Malaysian newspapers, there are two individuals that cannot be drawn. The first is Rosmah, the second is the Prophet Muhammad."

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - Nigeria's military on Wednesday said regional troops had recaptured a town on the shores of Lake Chad from Boko Haram, but the Islamists claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties.

Army spokesman Sani Usman said its troops and counterparts from the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) had "captured Malam Fatori... after a fierce battle" backed by air support.

But "the terrorists reinforced around (the) border with Niger... while the troops were consolidating on this success", he added in an emailed statement.

Several Boko Haram fighters were killed, said Usman, without specifying a number.

Malam Fatori, in Borno state, was liberated in March last year as part of a regional counter-offensive against the Islamists, who had captured swathes of territory in northeast Nigeria in 2014.

But fighters from Boko Haram, which is affiliated to the Islamic State (IS) group and now calls itself Islamic State West Africa Province, reoccupied the town after troops left.

The MNJTF is made up of soldiers from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin.

Northern Borno state, which is near the border with Niger, is inaccessible because of insecurity, with Boko Haram pushed into areas in and around Lake Chad by the military offensive.

There have been an increasing number of attacks in southeast Niger in recent weeks, an indication the rebels have re-grouped and switched focus.

Boko Haram claimed its fighters, which it dubbed "the cavalry of the caliphate", attacked the regional force.

"This offensive led to the death of more than 40 soldiers and left tens of others injured," it said in a statement posted on social media.

There was no way of verifying either the military or the insurgents' claims.

Last month, the IS high command designated Abu Musab al-Barnawi as Boko Haram leader, replacing Abubakar Shekau. Shekau, however, has maintained he is still in charge.

Barnawi has criticised Shekau for his indiscriminate killing of civilians, most of them fellow Muslims.

Security analysts have said the split could indicate a shift in focus by the pro-Barnawi faction away from targeting crowded marketplaces and mosques to hitting military and government targets.
Chance to take centre stage

The goodwill Prachanda received in New Delhi was reciprocation of his new avatar
Leon Cooperman, chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, speaks during the Sohn Investment Conference in New York May 4, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

A family member of Leon Cooperman tried to blow the whistle on trades that the relative described as "fishy."

That's according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which on Wednesday charged Cooperman and his $5.5 billion hedge fund, Omega Advisors, with insider trading.

The trading involves a company called Atlas Pipeline Partners, according to the SEC complaint.

The SEC does not identify the relative, but says they are a hedge fund manager.

Cooperman's son Wayne runs the hedge fund Cobalt Capital Management, which has held positions in Atlas. Business Insider has reached out to Wayne Cooperman but has not received a response.

In a letter Cooperman senior sent to investors Wednesday, Cooperman denied the allegations and wrote that his son is prepared to testify in his defense.

According to the SEC, Leon Cooperman spoke to an Atlas Pipeline Partners executive and learned about an upcoming transaction. On the same day, he purchased close to 2,000 options to acquire shares of the company, and later added more call options and a position in the company's bonds.

He later sent an email to a relative letting them know about the transaction  a day before it was officially announced. When the deal was announced, the family member sent an email to an APL executive flagging "some fishy options trades in apl before this that somebody should investigate," according to the SEC.

"How do I become a whistle blower," the relative asked, according to the SEC.

Here's how it played out, according to the SEC:

"Cooperman spoke with APL Executive 1 on the telephone on July 7, 19 and 20, 2010. During these telephone conversations, APL Executive 1 informed Cooperman that APL was negotiating the sale of Elk City and Cooperman asked APL Executive 1 questions about the Elk City sale. In at least one of these conversations, APL Executive 1 told Cooperman that APL was selling its Elk City facility for approximately $650 million."

"On July 7, 2010, at Cooperman's and Omega's direction, the Cooperman Offshore Account, Hedge Fund Accounts and Managed Accounts purchased a total of 1,966 APL call options with a strike price of $15.00, expiring August 21, 2010. The call options purchases accounted for over 90% of the day's trading volume in that option series. On July 7, 8 2010, APL's stock price closed at $9.66, and the call options the Cooperman Offshore Account, Hedge Fund Accounts and Managed Accounts purchased were significantly out-of-the-money."

"At Cooperman' s and Omega's direction, the Cooperman Offshore Account, Family Accounts, Hedge Fund Accounts and Managed Accounts continued to purchase APL securities between July 21 , 2010 and July 27, 2010. The chart below reflects these purchases:"

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Screen Shot 2016 09 23 at 1.48.50 PM

"On July 27, 2010, at approximately 8:36 p.m. EDT, Cooperman sent an email to a family member, who also was a hedge fund manager, stating: Good news on APL ... [t]hey sold their ELK City operation for $682mm which will enable them to pay off bank debt, de-risk company because keep whole contracts largely gone and fund their Laurel Mountain obligations. We think stock worth at least $15 in near term---for what that is worth."

"Cooperman's family member forwarded this email to a colleague who replied, in part: 'That explains the fishy $17 August calls, etc. I still haven't come across any press release - want to see how it's discussed ...' Cooperman's family member responded: 'Somebody should investigate that.'"

"On July 28, 2010, at approximately 6:59 a.m. EDT, APL publicly announced for the first time that it was selling Elk City for $682 million. As a result, on that day, APL's stock price increased approximately 31% and other APL-related securities greatly increased in value."

"After APL announced the Elk City sale, Cooperman's hedge fund manager family member emailed APL Executive 3 twice, complaining about APL options activity prior to the public announcement of the Elk City sale, stating: Can you please call me[?] Been trying to get you last few days[.] [T]here had been some fishy options trades in apl [sic] before this that somebody should investigate."



"I also would like to make sure that the sec [sic] looks into the shady option trades and volume in apl [sic] last 2 weeks or so in front of this deal[.] How do I become a whistle blower[?]"

NOW WATCH: Nobel prize-winning economist Stiglitz rates Yellens performance as Fed chair





More From Business Insider


As the Republican candidate for Governor of Oregon, Bud Pierce has supported Donald Trump for months. But now he says hes not so sure hell be voting for the presidential candidate.

In a statement to local station KXL, Pierce wrote, I supported Donald Trump in the Republican primary. I was hopeful that Donald Trump would rise to the occasion and unify the party and nation during the general election. As each day goes by, more of the opposite has taken place. At this point in time I need to see more from Donald Trump in the way of specific policy proposals and a more inclusive tone in order to vote for him.

Still, that doesnt mean hes casting his lot with anyone else: I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton or any third party candidates, he continued. Like many Americans, I will continue to watch how Trump conducts himself and his campaign between now and election day.

Jacob Daniels, Trumps campaign director in Oregon told local station OPB the team intends to win Oregon and the presidency, with or without the approval of the Oregon Republican Candidate for Governor.
You NEED to follow this rescue dog who fosters other animals on Instagram

You NEED to follow this rescue dog who fosters other animals on Instagram

And today in your daily dose of cuteness, let us present to you a rescue dog named Pikelet.

According to his Facebook page, at approx 5-6 weeks old Pikelet was saved from a council pound on death row in poor health with deformed legs and a curved spine. Big Dog Rescue (based in NSW, Australia) rescued and placed Pikelet into foster care where one month later, after lots of tender loving care, he was adopted by his lucky foster parents.

He actually, very quickly, became a celebrity in Australia and since his adoption, became Australias most supreme big foster Brother to needy homeless rescue puppies and a voice for those dumped, abandoned or awaiting their fate at council pounds and shelters.

Pikelet lives with an entire family of animals  hes even helped foster little chicks!

This magnificent creature is Pikelet.

Some people call me #Pikelet my parents call me #Perfection #adoptdontshop A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Aug 26, 2016 at 7:54pm PDT

And these are some of his foster brothers and sisters.

Ah, kindness. What a simple way to tell another struggling soul that there is love to be found in this world. - A.A. Malee #internationalpeaceday  A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Sep 20, 2016 at 9:58pm PDT

They spend a lot of time hanging out together. How could you ever not want to play with those cute little pups?

When there are five dogs in the house and four of us over here like.... we all know who farted #Bettyboo A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Sep 14, 2016 at 8:38pm PDT

THEY EVEN TAKE BATHS TOGETHER!

Happy 2nd #GotchaDay to my original classic foster family #bathface sidekick, my little foster bro #Porkchop  A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Sep 5, 2016 at 4:51pm PDT

No seriously, all these siblings literally do everything together. They even like to match!

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THEYRE. SO. CUTE.

It's National Dog Day today... So Patty wants to know, did we win? #rescuedismyfavoritebreed #LifeOfPikelet #NationalDogDay #SecretLifeOfMyPet #dailyfluff A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Aug 25, 2016 at 4:12pm PDT

Pikelet even has a foster pig!

"She was in a class by herself. It's not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good..." #fosterpig. Punk was both. A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Aug 5, 2016 at 4:11am PDT

Pretty sure they just achieved the highest level of #squadgoals as possible.

Knock knock. Who's there? #dontcare A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Jul 28, 2016 at 12:44am PDT

OMG WE CANT WITH THEM! SO CUTE!

#books #hoodies & #rescueanimals A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Jul 8, 2016 at 5:04am PDT

Theyve got Halloween down to a science and know the importance of a solid group costume.

#maythe4thbewithyou #starwarsday I know it's a #Flashback but had to regram it A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on May 4, 2016 at 6:40am PDT

Okay, we have to stop because were literally crying from how cute this is.

LITERALLY. CRYING.

Someone had a few too many tequila shots last night! #ohpatty #thehangover A photo posted by Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll (@lifeofpikelet) on Apr 2, 2016 at 5:12pm PDT

The post You NEED to follow this rescue dog who fosters other animals on Instagram appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Camp Midlife Crisis by Rosecrans Baldwin (GQ)

Agency: UTA

In August, GQ published this undercover magazine account of the latest hipster fad: adult summer camp, where WMDs (wireless mobile devices) are banned and everyone goes by a nickname (Baldwin's was Spoonhead).

The F Word by Liza Palmer (Flatiron Books)

Agency: CAA

The author of Conversations With the Fat Girl centers her 2017 novel on a whip-smart publicist forced to face her awkward, overweight past after her seemingly perfect life and marriage begin to crumble when she runs into her former teenage crush.

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Read more: Rights Available! Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Tells the Tale of Sherlock Holmes' Brother
Moscow (AFP) - Russia's defence minister said Wednesday that Moscow was dispatching its flagship aircraft carrier to bolster its forces in the eastern Mediterranean off Syria.

The Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier would be sent to join Russia's current naval deployment there, minister Sergei Shoigu said during a televised meeting.

"Currently the Russian naval deployment to the east Mediterranean consists of no less than six battleships and three or four support vessels," he said.

"In order to bolster the military capabilities of the group we plan to add the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier to the group," Shoigu said, without specifying a timeframe.

Russia has been flying a bombing campaign in Syria for the past year in support of Bashar al-Assad and has deployed a naval contingent to back up its operation.

This is the first time that the Soviet-era Kuznetsov -- Russia's only aircraft carrier that is part of its Northern fleet based in Murmansk -- will join the Russian deployment after undergoing a refurbishment.

Russia has a base in government-controlled Syrian territory from which it has flown most of its bombing raids in the country.

It has flown long-range bombing raids from bases in Russia and fired cruise missiles from ships in the Caspian Sea and a submarine in the Mediterranean.
By Denis Dyomkin and Angus McDowall UNITED NATIONS/BEIRUT (Reuters) - The United States believes two Russian aircraft attacked an aid convoy near Aleppo in a strike that shattered a one-week truce, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, but Russia denied involvement. Despite the military blame game over Monday's deadly attack, diplomats struggled to save the U.S.-Russian ceasefire agreement that took effect on Sept. 12. The incident, in which 18 trucks from a 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed, looked likely to deal a death blow to diplomatic efforts to halt a civil war now in its sixth year. Two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the exact time it was struck late on Monday, two U.S. officials told Reuters, citing U.S. intelligence that led them to conclude Russia was to blame. Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman denied the assertion, telling reporters at the United Nations the U.S. administration "has no facts" to support the claim, adding: "We have nothing to do with this situation." Ben Rhodes, a deputy U.S. national security adviser, said the White House held Russia responsible for what he called an "enormous humanitarian tragedy" but he did not address whether the attack was carried out by Russian aircraft. Earlier Russia, which denied its aircraft or those of its Syrian government allies were involved, had said it believed the convoy was not struck from the air at all but had caught fire because of some incident on the ground. The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and "around 20 civilians" had been killed, although other death tolls differed. The attack prompted the United Nations to suspend all aid shipments into Syria. Senior officials from 23 nations emerged from a one-hour meeting on Syria at a New York luxury hotel with little more than an agreement to meet again, on Friday, about how to end a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions from their homes. They also differed on the chances of renewing the ceasefire. "The ceasefire is not dead," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said after the meeting, which he hosted with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. "Is there still a chance this ceasefire will be effective? I can't answer that question," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters. He said that without a ceasefire there would be a "spiral of war, but we have to be honest, the U.S.-Russian negotiation has reached its limits." The U.N. Security Council is due to hold a high-level meeting on Syria on Wednesday. The United Nations, Red Cross and United States had all described Monday's incident as an air strike, implicitly pinning the blame on Russian or Syrian aircraft that fly in the area for breaking the ceasefire with an attack on a humanitarian target. But the U.N. revised a statement to remove the phrase "air strikes" and replace it with references to unspecified "attacks". U.N. humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said the original reference to air strikes was probably a drafting error, saying the U.N. was not in a position to determine if they were air strikes but was sure the convoy was "attacked." "WAR CRIME" IF DELIBERATE The ceasefire was meant to halt all fighting and allow aid to reach besieged areas, at a time when pro-government forces, with Russian and Iranian military support, are in their strongest position for years and civilians in many rebel-held areas are cut off from food and medical supplies. "If this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime," U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien said in a statement. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Defence Ministry, said in a statement: "We have studied video footage from the scene from so-called 'activists' in detail and did not find any evidence that the convoy had been struck by ordnance." "There are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air." He said the damage to the convoy visible in footage was caused by its cargo catching fire. It had occurred at the same time as militants from the group formerly called the Nusra Front had started a big offensive in nearby Aleppo, he said, appearing to point the finger at rescue workers from a group called the "White Helmets" who filmed the aftermath. "Only representatives of the 'White Helmets' organization close to the Nusra Front who, as always, found themselves at the right time in the right place by chance with their video cameras can answer who did this and why." Hussein Badawi, head of the White Helmets in the town, said he was 100 metres (yards) from the aid depot when the air strikes took place and was injured by shrapnel in the hand. "There were fires, martyrs, wounded people. We were able to pull out four survivors and five dead bodies at first," Badawi said. "The bombardment was continuous, continuous. The rescue teams weren't even able to work. Those who arrived in ambulances couldn't come in." DIPLOMATIC GAMBLE The ceasefire deal was a gamble on unprecedented cooperation between the United States and Russia, despite trust between the two Cold War-era foes being at its lowest point for decades. They support opposite sides in the war between Assad's government and insurgents but are both fighting against Islamic State militants. The deal calls for Washington and Moscow to share targeting information eventually. Following Monday's attack, there were reports of intensified clashes across Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said clashes took place between the army and rebels in the Jobar district of Damascus and areas northeast of the capital, after the army tried to advance. Near the central city of Homs, the army shelled one village, while helicopters and warplanes bombed several other places, including the rebel-held town of Rastan, it said. (Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Peter Graff and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Stamp and Howard Goller)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives would override any presidential veto of a bill allowing survivors and families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, Speaker Paul Ryan predicted on Wednesday while also citing concerns with the legislation. "I worry about legal matters. I worry about trial lawyers trying to get rich off of this. And I do worry about the precedence. At the same time, these victims do need to have their day in court," Ryan, a Republican, told reporters. Congress has overwhelmingly passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act in reaction to long-running suspicions, denied by Saudi Arabia, that hijackers of the four U.S. jetliners that attacked the United States in 2001 were backed by the Saudi government. Obama in coming days is expected to veto the bill on grounds that other countries could use the law as an excuse to sue U.S. diplomats, service members or companies. But Congress could have the last word if the Senate and House of Representatives each override that veto by a two-thirds vote. "I do think the votes are there for the override," Ryan said. When asked by a reporter if U.S. support for Saudi Arabia was "unconditional," Ryan responded that the country "is a very important and valuable ally" and is helping Washington in the "war on terror." He noted, however, "Our support for any country is not unconditional." (Reporting By Richard Cowan; Editing by Andrew Hay)
Col Lama returns home

The case of Col Kumar Lama, who was acquitted this month by a UK court, is the first war-time crime tried abroad
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f218271%2fryaneva

CORRECTION: Sept. 21, 2016, 5:24 p.m. ET Despite Tuesday's reports, People and TMZ have both stated that sources close to Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes say the two actors haven't officially wed. Mashable has reached out to representatives of both Gosling and Mendes for comment. We regret the error. The original story has been updated, below

Hey girlbrace yourself.

After initial false reports, it is now clear that Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling have not tied the knot.

SEE ALSO: This coloring book is here for all your relationship goals

That means there was no private ceremony for the actors attended by family and friends, as Us Weekly reported. The couple has been dating since 2011, and appeared in The Place Beyond The Pines in 2012 together. Despite the false alarm regarding their nuptials, the couple have gushed about one another in the press in the past.

"I know that Im with the person Im supposed to be with, Gosling told Hello! magazine in 2015. In the same interview, he also told the Canadian publication that his only requirement of a woman is "that shes Eva Mendes. Theres nothing else Im looking for.

The two are fiercely protective about their private lives, which include two children: 2 year-old Esmerelda and Amanda, who was born earlier this year. And while they're probably some of the most beautiful kids on this planet, the couple has only teased some hilarious "photographs" of the kids on The Ellen Show.

Image: The ellen show/youtube

Image: the ellen show/youtube
Safe deposit boxes are a secure place for you to store your valuables  but some recent heists have people wondering if they're really that safe.

Last year, a team of thieves took off with $400 million in loot from a vault in England and earlier this year, there were two safe deposit box heists at banks in Queens, New York.

Read: Woman Abandoned By Her Dad Discovers She is Owed $86,000 From His Bank Account After He Dies

Cathyann Tully lost cash, bonds, jewelry and irreplaceable family heirlooms in the heist in Queens.

We had this impression that we had a safe deposit box  we put our precious belongings there thinking that was a safe place to put them, she told Inside Edition.

She said she regrets ever putting her valuables in a safe deposit box.

It's not the material dollar value of those items; it's more the history behind it, Tully said.

Shes not alone. According to the FBI, there are about a dozen safe deposit box heists per year in the U.S.

But banking experts say despite the risks, a safe deposit box is still the best place to store your valuables. However, some safe deposit boxes are more secure than others.

Before you rent a box, you should ask these questions of your banking institution, according to bank expert Dave McGuinn.

Take his full test below or click here to download and print the PDF.

A few more tips from McGuinn and the American Bankers Association:

1. Safe deposit boxes are not FDIC insured so if there is a heist, your assets in the box may be lost forever. Obtain private insurance to protect your valuables.

Read: Cops: Brazen Bank Robbers Nab $280,000 and Loot Safety Deposit Boxes By Cutting Hole in Vault

2. Floods and plumbing catastrophes are far more common than bank heists. Put your valuables in a sealed container and try to rent a box at the top of the room.

3. Since safe deposit boxes can only be accessed during bank hours, do not store anything you may need at a moments notice such as a passport or living will.

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4. Do not keep your box key on a keychain where it can be easily lost. Instead, store it in a secure place  not in a labeled envelope with the name of your banking institution. If you have more than one key, keep them separate in case you lose them. Banks dont keep a copy of your key and if you lose it, you may be charged a hefty fee to drill out the lock.

For more tips, visit Dave McGuinns website.

See the American Bankers Association's website here.

Watch: Butcher Surprised with $400,000 From Unclaimed Life Insurance Policy

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SAN SEBASTIAN  In a career departure and sign of the growing empowerment of top Latin American filmmakers, Chilean Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Alejandro Fernandez Almendras (To Kill a Man) will direct A Work of Love, a bittersweet dramedy to be shot in Czech in the Czech Republic.

Almendras leapt to fame with two searing social indictments: Man and Much Ado About Nothing, which was selected for 2016s Sundance and Berlin Panorama editions. Set in Almendras native Chile and shot in Spanish, both attacked failings in Chiles justice system.

To shoot in b/w, A Work of Love is produced by Chiles Jirafa Films, the company behind Much Ado and Christopher Murrays Venice competition player The Blind Christ, Guillaume de Seilles Paris-based Arizona Films, a producer on Man and Much Ado, and Veronica Vinkovas Film & Roll in the Czech Republic.

Written by Almendras, A Work of Love turns on Petr, a small-town Czech theater director who determines to stage Georges Perecs Life: A Users Manual to make his name, maybe score a job in Prague. But Perecs novel is vast, encyclopaedic, and unadaptable. containing 100 or so main stories.

The movie takes in the four-week final rehearsal build-up to the plays opening, as the theater director battles to stage the unstageable, react to being dumped by his lover, the plays lead actress who obsesses him, lay off staff, and handle the complaints of his estranged wife who wants to go back to work after having their baby. The opening night is a disaster of sorts: Very few people understand the play or attend its cocktail. But it wins a complement from one of the only people whose opinion Petr values  his father-in-law, a Czech acting legend  and brings him closer again to his baby son and wife, who may be in the process of forgiving him.

After two very political films, I wanted to do some very personal, a movie made from the heart and soul, about love for people, your partner, your children, the work you do, the love of art and theater, Almendras told Variety at San Sebastian, where he presented a second project, Una periodista, a Chile-set true-event-based political thriller which he plans to shoot after A Work of Love.

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Almendras added that A Work of Love is also about growing up, accepting the weaknesses of your partner, the complexities of love. Inspirations include the emotional, family dramas of Cassavetes and Garrel, though my film will be sweeter, he said.

Traditionally, European producers would board Latin American films which depict its still hugely-challenged social realities and score overseas arthouse sales playing off an upbeat reception at an A-grade fest. Following in the footsteps of Cuaron, Del Toro and Inarritu, Latin American directors are, however, increasingly challenging the idea that they should limit their career to observing their own part of the world. Jackie, filmed by fellow Chilean Pablo Larrain, is just one example.

Shooting will take place preferably in February-March or October-November 2017, using a small Chilean-Czech crew. Almendras will compose the films score. Opening credits will be drawn by Almendras six-year-old daughter Julieta, using simple pen on paper.

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Nely Reguera on 'Maria (And The Others), Barbara Lennie and Family Dynamics

San Sebastian: Digital Revolution Favors New Talent

San Sebastian Film Review: 'Porto'
SAN SEBASTIAN The advent of films digital revolution is helping producers to reduce costs and tap new talent but causes distributors to struggle to make achieve visibility for films in the infinite online market.

As was underscored Tuesday at a San Sebastian Festival round table, Digital Talent: New Creators, New Channels, New Audiences, producers now dont need to travel to festivals to discover new talent: Digital natives self-produce short-films and send them to producers.

Avalon, a Madrid-based boutique film distributor-producer, has made a name for itself nurturing young talented directors such as Esteban Crespo, whose feature debut Amar, now in post, is co-financed by Netflix.

The new generation of creators has a more natural relationship with the image than previous generations and use the image better than words to pitch their projects, they are more eclectic and much more flexible, said Avalons Maria Zamora.

When Netflix boarded Amar we told Esteban Crespo that the film will not screen in theaters. Instead of being distraught, he declared: About 60 million people are going to watch my film, she explained.

Vet Spanish director-producer Imanol Uribe (Numbered Days, Far From The Sea), who has used digital formats in his last two films -of a 14 feature career- considered highly attractive and positive the change, an opinion that some of his colleagues in Spain didnt share.

You can make a film with a smartphone. This has led to a situation where many low-budget films are being produced and very few big titles, said Antonio Saura executive director of sales company Latido Films.

Theres paradigm shift, according to Pau Brunet at L.A. and Navarre based-La Panda: There are thousands of people who ten years ago would not have had a chance to make a movie. However, we never will get rich with film.

On the other hand, online content, without marketing, is normally a drop in the ocean.

To get the interest of an internet audience, you must invest a hundred thousand times more than in the past on marketing, Saura said.

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There is so much offer that spectators often get lost. Hence the success of TV series success: The problem of what to choose is solved for a week, said Filmin Juan Carlos Tous at VOD platform Filmin, whose classic film offer has seen an increasing demand among adult clients since the growth of the smart TV device market.

One challenge for the industry is big data: Companies that know so much about us that will give us what we want. This is the next step and there are very well-positioned companies. Amazon knows more about me than I do myself, Saura said.

Moderated by Zentropa Spain producer David Matamoros, the round-table formed part of the 5th Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum. It was backed by Proa, Catalonias Federated Audiovisual Producers, an industry body.

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San Sebastian: Almendras, Jirafa, Arizona, Film & Roll Set 'A Work of Love' (EXCLUSIVE)

Nely Reguera on 'Maria (And The Others), Barbara Lennie and Family Dynamics

San Sebastian Film Review: 'Porto'
The posthumously released projects of recently departed actors can make for discomfiting viewing, not least when the tone of the film is at odds with the viewers still-tender feelings regarding their absence. Thats not the case, however, with Porto, a sad, shimmering American-abroad love story starring the tragically late Anton Yelchin: In artfully deconstructing a one-night stand with one wistful eye on what was and another on what could have been, Gabe Klingers first narrative feature winds up feeling appropriately elegiac in a multitude of ways. Ravishingly shot on location in the eponymous Portuguese coastal city (long deserving of just such a cinematic valentine) in an elegant shuffle of aspect ratios and film stocks, this narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film thats in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.

Yelchins name  plus the involvement of Jim Jarmusch as executive producer  should help secure this refined miniature a level of arthouse distribution it might not otherwise receive, as well as a healthy following on specialist, Mubi-style streaming platforms. Still, Portos exposure is likely to remain at a level befitting its bijou intimacy.

A Brazilian-American academic and former film critic whose 2013 documentary Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater was lauded at Venice, Klinger wears his cinephilic passions very much on his sleeve; his fictional debut is a critics film in every sense of the term, lushly steeped in reverence for past masters in a manner that less embedded viewers could find precious or even exclusive. Those on the films wavelength, however, will delight in identifying and assembling Klingers coterie of directorial influences, some given direct tips of the hat (Chantal Akerman, Manoel de Oliveira, and of course Jarmusch himself), while others (from Linklater to Demy to Resnais to Allen) are more intuitively present. Rather than seeming derivative or stifled, Porto plays as the warm, reciprocal culmination of a lifes viewing.

Porto itself, in all its patinated, out-of-time beauty, may effectively be the third star of this fractured two-hander, but the film is no gilded travelogue. Switching adroitly between Super 8, 16mm and 35mm, each connoting a slightly different quality of memory, Klinger and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield (Mediterranea) shoot its down-at-heel cafes and gull-pitted harbors in watery, overcast tones; certain forms and frames seem to bleed at the edges, as if painted directly onto azulejo tile. This dreamy but disconsolate visual finish aptly mirrors the state of mind of protagonist Jake (Yelchin), a rudderless American drifter in a state of self-exile, who has wound up in Porto perhaps because its the most beautiful European city that still allows ample time and space for the heartsick. Same goes for Mati (Lucie Lucas, winsome in her English-language debut), a French archaeology student with long-nurtured sorrows of her own.

One damp day, Jake and Matis eyes meet across the ravaged site of an archaeological dig; later, they bump into each other in a cafe, initiating an impromptu date that lasts until morning. This brief encounter serves as the skeleton for the screenplay by Klinger and veteran scribe Larry Gross (here claiming his first screen credit since 2009s Veronika Decides to Die), but its bones are disassembled and reassembled three times over a tight, light 76-minute runtime: Told with what appears to be several years of hindsight, first from Jakes perspective, then Matis, then an imperfect fusion of the two, Porto each time identifies subtly different connections that were made and missed on that one swooning night.

Some might deem the films framework slight, as it zig-zags obsessively across hours and years, but Klinger seems acutely aware of the small romantic gestures and errors on which broken hearts can fixate for a lifetime. Certain banal exchanges are rerun at different points in the looped narrative, as if replayed in a mind desperate for a do-over that will never come. The longer the director and co-editor Geraldine Mangenot sift through the events of the past, the clearer it becomes just how contained and curtailed the storys inciting relationship was.

Indeed, theres emotional resonance to many of Klingers most elaborate technical choices, beginning with those alternating types of non-digital film. On the one hand, the granular, lived-in texture of the imagery implies a certain endurance of memory; on the other, the deliberate use of increasingly phased-out film formats (in frequent Academy ratio, to boot) is entirely apt in a film concerned with what is impermanent. As with Ed Lachmans oh-so-finely smudged 16mm lensing of Carol, Portos very beauty is tinged with the threat of evanescence.

Which brings matters, unhappily enough, to Yelchin, whose low-key but soulful turn here is a welcome reminder of what was most delicate and distinctive about him as a nascent leading man: The sparse but particular body language, the mixture of softness and steadfastness in his delivery, the guileless, thoughtful gaze. Porto isnt an unremitting one-man showcase; for a minute or two, in fact, French veteran Francoise Lebrun threatens to poach the entire film in a blithe, burning cameo as Matis straight-talking mother. But in a film that doesnt want for melancholy on its own terms, Yelchins presence inevitably complicates its innate sense of sorrow.

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SAN SEBASTIAN  In a rare double-whammy, Reys Education, directed by Argentinas Santiago Esteves, won both the prizes on offer Wednesday night at the San Sebastian Festivals Films in Progress, one of the highest-profile pix-in-post competitions in Europe.

First conceived as an eight-segment TV mini-series that won a fiction contest at Argentinas Television Digital Abierta, cop thriller-drama Reys Education snagged both the Films in Progress 30th Industry Award, given by a clutch of Spanish distributors and service houses, and the Caci/Ibermedia TV Films in Progress Award.

Esteves first feature, Reys Education kicks off with Reynaldo Galindez, Rey, a 14-year-old petty criminal, pulling his first job. Escaping, he falls into the patio of a retired security guard, damaging his home. The guard proposes a pact: Rey repairs the damage caused to his home in return for not being handed over to the police. As Rey begins working, the guard attempts to tutor him in the lessons of life. But Reys past begins to catch up with him.

Its a classic story featuring one person who is getting to the end of his life and another who is just beginning, said Esteves at San Sebastian, after the Films in Progress award ceremony. He added: This is very common in the crime world. Weve tried to transfer the classic training of a warrior to the west of Argentina, which is rarely seen in Argentine movies.

The Films in Progress 30th Industry Award is supported by companies Daniel Goldstein, Deluxe-Spain, Dolby Iberia, Laserfilm Cine y Video, Nephilim Producciones, No Problem Sonido and Wanda Vision. It covers the cost of a films post-production and offers distribution in Spain.

Backed by Caci, the association of Latin American film agencies, the Ibermedia TV Films in Progress Award consists in a grant of $25,000 for non-exclusive broadcast rights on Ibermedia TV, a program screening movies from Latin America, Spain and Portugal on public broadcasters in the region.

Story continues

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Toronto Film Review: 'Rage'

'7:35 am,' 'Hogar,' 'Malambo King' Win Big at fest's Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum
(Reuters) - Banco Santander SA (SAN.MC) has pulled out of talks to buy Royal Bank of Scotland Group's (RBS.L) Williams & Glyn unit, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday, because of a disagreement over the price.

Santander had made an offer to buy the unit last month, sources previously told Reuters, as the British lender seeks an end to a costly seven-year process to offload Williams and Glyn.

Spokespeople for Santander and RBS declined to comment.

RBS has sought to offload the small business lender as a key European Union condition of its taxpayer-funded rescue at the peak of the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

Santander walked away from a deal to buy Williams & Glyn fours years ago amid concerns about its technology platform, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters earlier this year.

Some investors and legal experts have said the government could scrap the obligation to sell W&G entirely following Britain's vote in June to leave the EU, as the UK would no longer be bound by the EU's state aid regime.

RBS executives and EU officials, however, have said RBS remains fully committed to selling.

European regulators originally ordered a sale of W&G by 2013 to prevent RBS, Britain's largest small-business lender and responsible for 1 in 4 loans in the sector, from having an unfair advantage and posing a systemic threat to its economy.

The Financial Times first reported Santander's pull-out on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Lawrence White in London, Jesus Aguado in Madrid and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; editing by Susan Thomas/Mark Heinrich)
German software company, SAP SE SAP, has undertaken an important step toward supporting the transformation of industrial 3D printing into a seamless distributed manufacturing process. It has joined forces with UPS to launch a website designed to draw other companies into a partner program. The partner program will test new industrial 3D printing methods and assist other companies benefit from a first-mover advantage.

This agreement follows a distributed manufacturing collaboration formed by SAP and UPS. The partnership involves integration of SAP solutions for the extended supply chain and Internet of Things with the UPS additive manufacturing and logistics network.

SAP has taken both initiatives in an effort to expand the number of co-innovation partners working to assess, validate, and improve upon methods to optimize supply-chain production and management.

Sap believes that customers who start co-innovating and streamline supply chains in the early-stage production environment actually get products to market faster and more cost effectively.

SAP Distributed Manufacturing can unlock unique opportunities to transform design, manufacturing, logistics processes and business models.

SAP AG ADR Price and Consensus

SAP AG ADR Price and Consensus | SAP AG ADR Quote

Major 3D printing players have been diligently stepping up their efforts to carve a niche in the industrial market. This follows the gradual shift of the 3D printing industry toward the production of end-use products for industrial clients, in the face of weak demand from the consumer business.

However, the transition of 3D printing, from prototyping to manufacturing, will require integration with business IT systems. In an effort to optimize efficiency and technology adoption through end-to-end integration, HP Inc. HPQ is joining the SAP co-innovation program.

We believe that SAPs initiative and efforts of other innovators in the alliance will help 3D printing move into mainstream manufacturing and streamline supply chains very soon.

Story continues

SAP currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A couple of better-ranked stocks in the same space include Aspen Technology, Inc. AZPN and Callidus Software Inc. CALD, both carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Paris (AFP) - France's presidential race accelerates on Wednesday as the candidates vying for the conservative nomination, including ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, are confirmed in the campaign to try to win back the Elysee Palace.

The stakes are high with polls showing that the winner of a duel between the two leading Republicans party candidates, Sarkozy and ex-PM Alain Juppe, would be clear favourite to win the election next May.

Once the eight candidates are named on Wednesday, the party and its centrist allies will then hold two rounds of voting to select their nominee on November 20 and 27.

National identity and Islam have emerged as key themes in the French centre-right contest, which has echoes of US Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign for the White House.

Sarkozy is a brash right-winger and a divisive figure in French politics, while ex-prime minister and Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppe has styled himself as a unifying force.

"The candidates all agree on the economy," Thomas Guenole, a political scientist and author of a book on Sarkozy's comeback said, referring to their consensus on cutting taxes and relaxing France's 35-hour working week.

"The only issues on which they create divisions are the four Is: Islam, identity, immigration, insecurity," he said.

President Francois Hollande is yet to confirm if he will stand for re-election as the Socialist party's candidate in a bid to defy his historically low approval ratings.

On the far-right, the National Front is prepared for battle, with its leader Marine Le Pen widely forecast to win the first round of voting in April and then fail in the second round against a mainstream candidate.

- Juppe the favourite -

Juppe, 71, France's most popular politician, has been the favourite to emerge victorious from the start, but Sarkozy has nearly closed the gap with hardline proposals designed to woo voters reeling from a string of jihadist attacks.

Story continues

The 61-year-old politician, who led France from 2007 to 2012, has vowed a "merciless" fight against the Islamist extremists who have killed 238 people nationwide since January 2015.

Declaring French identity to be under attack, he has declared war on the Islamic burkini swimsuit, the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in universities and other practices he sees as "un-French".

"If you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French. We will no longer settle for integration that does not work, we will require assimilation," he told a rally on Monday.

- 'Fuel on the fire' -

Juppe, a moderate who served two years as premier under Jacques Chirac and also was foreign minister under Sarkozy, has taken the opposite approach.

Accusing Sarkozy of "pouring fuel on the fire" with his calls for a state ban on the burkini, Juppe has tried to sell voters on what he sees as a "happy", secure French identity.

Vowing to knit together a fractured nation, he has promised to "reach out" to the vast majority of Muslims who adhere to France's strict secular values.

Juppe has undergone a radical makeover from the grey technocrat who spent years in the political desert over a fake jobs scandal at Paris City Hall in the 1990s to benign elder statesman.

He has repeatedly made overtures to centrists as well as to leftists, who can vote in the primary if they pay two euros and sign a charter declaring they adhere to centrist or conservative values.

- 'War chief v wise man' -

For Jerome Fourquet of Ifop pollsters, the choice between "a war chief and someone who is wiser, more reassuring and brings people together" will come down to whether the French believe the country is, as Sarkozy says, "at war".

A Harris Interactive poll last week predicted a tie between the two in the first round of the primary, with Juppe going on to win the run-off a week later by 52 percent to Sarkozy's 48 percent.

Among their other rivals are Sarkozy's former prime minister Francois Fillon, his former agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who made a failed bid for Paris mayor.

For Fourquet "the ideological centre of gravity of the right is closer to Nicolas Sarkozy's positions than those of Alain Juppe."

But Sarkozy is also hobbled by his legacy, seen as underwhelming economically and he is disliked by a majority of French people.

Fourquet warned of a possible bid by leftist and centrist voters to block his return by voting in the primary for Juppe.

Their calculation, he said, could be: "If we don't get involved we could be forced to elect him (Sarkozy) in six months' time" to prevent a National Front presidency under Le Pen.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Two U.S. companies have developed an airline tracking system that they say would prevent planes disappearing in the manner of the Malaysia Airlines MH370.

Instead of sending tracking signals to ground stations - which means planes' locations can be lost over oceans or remote areas - the new system would beam them to satellites.

"It doesn't matter if they're flying over the ocean, desert, or North Pole, we'll know where the plane is," said Daniel Baker, CEO of FlightAware, the internet flight tracking service which is working with Aireon LLC, which has developed the satellite technology.

Aireon's system will place ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance  broadcast) receivers on low orbit satellites operated by Iridium Communications Inc and is due to be operational from 2018. The system was initially conceived to help air traffic controllers route planes more efficiently.

The new tracking system, called GlobalBeacon, will make the location data from the space-based receivers available to airlines so they can track their planes in near real-time on a web-based tool.

After the disappearance of MH370 in March 2014, regulators and airlines were criticized for responding too slowly to French tracking recommendations after the crash of an Air France plane in 2009.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) plans to impose a 15-minute standard for normal flight tracking, or more frequently in case of emergency, by November 2018.

FlightAware said it would reveal the first airline customer for the product next week, to coincide with an ICAO meeting in Montreal.

"We only reached out to a few of our dozens of airline customers to discuss this opportunity and although all are interested in using our space-based ADS-B data, only one could hit the tight timeline for our announcement," Baker told Reuters.

(Reporting by Victoria Bryan; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
CPN (Maoist Centre) summons its secretariat meeting

The ruling CPN (Maoist Centre) has decided to convene its secretariat meeting to explore ways to resolve the partys internal organisational disputes.
Paris (AFP) - Whenever the "widow" spider is mentioned, people tend to sympathise with the hapless male -- best known for its tendency to end up as a post-coital snack.

Well, pity them no more.

Widow spider males have developed a rather gruesome method of saving their own skins, scientists revealed on Wednesday.

To avoid becoming the lunch of adult females, some males have taken to inseminating juveniles which have no external genitalia yet -- penetrating right through their exoskeletons to deposit sperm.

The females retain the sperm and produce offspring later, when they have matured.

Unlike mating with adults, this option "rarely ends in cannibalism" of the males, the research team wrote in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters.

"This means that many males actually have the chance to mate more than once," study co-author Maydianne Andrade of the University of Toronto Scarborough told AFP -- boosting their chances of reproductive success.

Andrade and a team were conducting unrelated research on two species in the "Latrodectus" or widow spider genus, when they observed the behaviour.

In both the Australian redback spider (L. hasselti), and the brown widow (L. geometricus), there is high competition among males for mating rights with females, which are several times larger than them.

Many males get to copulate only once in their life before being eaten -- sometimes even during the encounter.

Females, on the other hand, may mate more than once -- thus reducing their original male partners' chances of fatherhood.

- Precision required -

The researchers noticed that in the laboratory, and in nature, males mounted immature females whose genital organs and openings were still covered by a shell-like exoskeleton, which is shed before the creature reaches adulthood.

It appeared the males used their fangs to cut through the shell, then deposit their seed in the females' sperm receptacles, called spermathecae.

Story continues

"They manage to do this quite carefully, opening only this part of the shell, and as far as we can tell, without causing any injury to the female," said Andrade.

And they had to do it at just the right time -- as soon as the genitalia and sperm storage organs are fully developed but not yet exposed -- just a few days before the final moulting.

The males put much less effort into courting juveniles than adult females, said the researchers -- something that is usually done by drumming messages on the female's web.

The altered mating behaviour did not seem to affect the juvenile females' development or fertility.

The team said theirs was the first study to report successful insemination of immature female animals.

They discovered that as many as a third of widow spider females were being mated as juveniles.

"So even in this extreme system where females usually 'hold all the cards', males have evolved a way to shift the balance to favour their own reproductive success," said Andrade.
(Adds Mylan comment on Kaiser Family Foundation report)

By Brendan Pierson

NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Mylan NV faced new scrutiny over price hikes for its anti-allergy EpiPen on Tuesday, with U.S. lawmakers calling for a probe of oversight of the company's rebates to government healthcare plans, while West Virginia said it was investigating whether Mylan defrauded its Medicaid department.

Mylan is grappling with a growing backlash from U.S. consumers, lawmakers and prosecutors over EpiPen prices, which have risen from about $100 in 2007 to more than $600 for a pair of the devices. The EpiPen delivers a dose of epinephrine, an antidote to a severe and potentially deadly allergic reaction to anything from nuts to bee stings.

The rising cost has made it difficult for many families to afford EpiPens, prompting a public outcry that has resonated with legislators.

Mylan Chief Executive Heather Bresch is to testify about the price hikes on Wednesday before an oversight committee of the House of Representatives. Bresch is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia.

In her prepared testimony, released on Tuesday, Bresch said Mylan was already moving to address concerns about price by expanding discount programs and launching a $300 generic version.

She said that, after rebates, fees and costs, the company makes only about $100 per EpiPen pack, and that a majority of consumers pay less than $50 out of pocket for a pack.

Ahead of the hearing, Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee said they were concerned that Mylan was allowed to inappropriately classify EpiPen as a generic drug, reducing the potential discounts to the government's Medicaid health program for the poor.

"We are concerned that the controls in place, if any, are inadequate to ensure that Medicaid is receiving the full amount of rebates afforded to it by law," the Senate Republicans, led by Orrin Hatch of Utah, said in a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General.

Story continues

Under current law, branded drugs, and generic drugs available from a single source, are subject to a rebate of at least 23.1 percent of the average manufacturer price for Medicaid. Non-innovator drugs are subject to a much lower 13 percent rebate.

The Finance Committee Republicans are asking Inspector General Daniel Levinson to examine the federal health agency's oversight of the rebate program.

Mylan has said it has complied with all laws and regulations regarding rebates.

Also on Tuesday, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said he was investigating the rebates and the possibility that Mylan violated the state's antitrust law when it sued and settled with a would-be generic competitor.

Mylan spokeswoman Nina Devlin said the company was cooperating with the investigation.

EpiPen has also posed a cost burden to the federal Medicare health program for the elderly, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research group. Before rebates, EpiPen costs for Medicare Part D shot up more than 1,000 percent between 2007 and 2014, from $7 million to $87.9 million, the report said.

Devlin, in an emailed statement, said that from 2010 to 2015, rebates to Medicare Part D plans were up 440 percent, which would reduce the increase stated by the Kaiser Family report. She said that any analysis that does not take those specific rebates into account is fundamentally flawed.

While rebates to Medicare, which are not disclosed by the program, would have offset the cost to a degree, it was still far higher than a 164 percent increase in EpiPen prescriptions to Medicare patients, the Kaiser Family report said.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson and Caroline Humer in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler and Alan Crosby)
By Patrick Rucker and Dan Freed

(Reuters) - U.S. Senate lawmakers excoriated Wells Fargo & Co's chief on Tuesday for his oversight of the bank as it opened 2 million bogus customer accounts, potentially laying the groundwork for new rules and reviving questions of whether banks are "too big to fail."

Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that customers who had bogus accounts opened in their name will be made whole and compensated for any damage to their credit rating, but some Democratic senators called for his resignation.

Under fire, Stumpf said he has told his managers to do "whatever it takes" to make customers whole, refunding fees or compensating them for damage to their credit ratings. But he stood behind the former executive who ran the unit that oversaw many of the practices, and at times downplayed the scope of the affair.

In answer to a question, he declined to commit to setting aside mandatory arbitration agreements that prohibit clients from suing Wells Fargo. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has proposed a ban on such clauses that prohibit class-action lawsuits.

Earlier this month, the lender agreed to pay $190 million in penalties and customer payouts to settle the case involving the creation of credit, savings and other accounts without customers' knowledge. About $5 million will directly go to customers, many of whom might have paid a small fee on the unwanted accounts.

The revelations are a severe hit to Wells Fargo's reputation. During the financial crisis, the bank trumpeted itself as conservative, in contrast to its rivals.

Besides potential criminal charges against the company and its executives, Wells Fargo may face pressure from shareholders to change its practices on executive pay and governance.

The scandal also renewed debate over whether U.S. banks are "too big to fail" and need closer government oversight to prevent a massive collapse.

Lawmakers could use the fraud settlement as a springboard for new rules on executive pay, including clawbacks of compensation, and limits on forced arbitration.

Story continues

Wells Fargo has said its board will assess whether to cancel or claw back any incentive compensation paid to a now-retired executive at the center of the scandal, Carrie Tolstedt.

Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for Stumpf to resign, with Warren saying Stumpf should give back his salary and be criminally investigated.

"You should resign. You should give back the money you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated," Warren said.

The bank's board of directors is examining what action it should take against company executives, Stumpf told the committee.

"I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices," Stumpf said, adding later, "I apologize to all of the American people and our customers, and I will make it right."

Lawmakers said the phony bank accounts might have hurt customer credit ratings, increased the cost of a mortgage or car loan. New credit card applications and consumer borrowing trends can weight on an individual's credit.

"WHERE WAS MANAGEMENT?"

Wells Fargo has acknowledged bank employees "inappropriately opened" the customer accounts and that about 5,300 employees were fired over five years.

Former bank employees say they were under intense pressure to add accounts for each customer.

Abuses were found as early as 2011, Stumpf said, but bank executives only realized the scale of the problem early last year.

At that time, Stumpf said, managers came to recognize how a pattern of creating phony accounts could be used to boost unwarranted fees.

It never dawned on us that there could be a cycle, the CEO said.

It just sort of begs the issue of where was management, said Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the senior Democrat on the panel.

Brown said employees were caught "forging signatures, and stealing identities, Social Security numbers, and customers hard-earned cash, so as to hang on to their low-paying jobs and make money for the high-paying executives at Wells Fargo."

Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of the Currency, said the agency is considering action against individual Wells Fargo executives who may have violated laws or regulations.

The U.S. Attorney's Offices in Manhattan and in San Francisco are investigating Wells Fargo, a person familiar with the matter said last week.

While Democratic lawmakers were the most outspoken in their attacks, Republicans also grilled Stumpf.

Louisiana Senator David Vitter pressed the CEO on how customer fraud could persist for years and thousands of employees could be fired before the head of the bank got involved.

Why isnt this crystal clear proof that an entity as big as Wells is not only too big to fail but its too big to manage and too big to regulate? Vitter asked.

Stumpf said the widespread abuse was a problem of focus and not of size.

Stumpf appeared before the congressional panel with a bandaged right hand. He suffered an injury playing with his grandchildren, according to the bank.

Wells Fargo shares rose 2 percent to $46.94.

(Reporting by Patrick Rucker in Washington and Dan Freed in New York; Writing by Nick Zieminski; Editing by Linda Stern and Jeffrey Benkoe)
By Dana Feldman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The lawyer for a woman accusing Bill Cosby of sexual abuse in a California civil suit said on Tuesday she has canceled plans to take a sworn deposition from another woman listed as a potential witness against the comedian in a Pennsylvania criminal case. Attorney Gloria Allred said the criminal sexual assault case Cosby faces in suburban Philadelphia takes precedence over the lawsuit her client, Judy Huth, has brought against the 78-year-old entertainer in Los Angeles and could be undermined by the deposition in question. Former donut shop employee Margie Shapiro, one of dozens of women who have come forward publicly in recent years to accuse Cosby of sexual wrongdoing, had been subpoenaed by Allred to give a deposition this coming Friday in Huth's civil case. But Allred said she decided to withdraw the subpoena after prosecutors included Shapiro in a list of 13 women they have asked the Pennsylvania judge for permission to call as witnesses in Cosby's criminal trial next June. Allred also asked the judge in Huth's civil suit to freeze any further discovery in the case, including a separate deposition of Shapiro sought by Cosby's lawyers, until the criminal case is resolved. Cosby attorney Angela Agrusa opposed that move, and the judge set a hearing for Nov. 4 on the issue. Allowing Shapiro to be deposed in the civil case would give Cosby's criminal defense team a glimpse of what Shapiro might say under oath at his criminal trial and a chance to find inconsistencies they could later exploit under cross-examination. "We think that they are attempting to use civil discovery to get around the limits on criminal discovery in the criminal case," Allred told reporters after Tuesday's status conference on the lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Agrusa suggested Allred had something to hide and accused her of trying to "have it both ways." "Ms. Allred can't go around saying these women's stories are critical to her client's case and then just because they might be called in a criminal case now claim we can't depose them," Agrusa told Reuters. "To take the position that ... their allegations can't be challenged denies Mr. Cosby his fundamental right to ask questions of his accuser." Cosby, who built a long career on family friendly comedy, including his long-running NBC sitcom "The Cosby Show," has steadfastly denied ever assaulting anyone and insisted that all his sexual encounters were consensual. He is charged in Pennsylvania with drugging and sexually assaulting a former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand, at his home in 2004. Huth, now in her 50s, alleges in her lawsuit that Cosby plied her with alcohol and molested her in 1974 at the Playboy Mansion when she was aged 15. (Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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MILAN (Reuters) - Shares in Monte dei Paschi di Siena opened sharply higher on Wednesday, halting a string of losses that have shrunk the bank's market capitalisation to one ninth of the size of a planned 5 billion euro (4.31 billion pounds) share issue.

Shares in Italy's third-largest lender, which must raise cash to clean up its balance sheet and stave off the risk of being wound down, tracked gains in Italian and European banking stocks.

Monte dei Paschi shares fell for eight sessions in a row, shedding 26 percent of their value, after the unexpected resignation of CEO Fabrizio Viola on Sept. 8 added to uncertainty over the lender's future. New CEO Marco Morelli took over on Tuesday and is now expected to present a revised business plan for the bank in the first half of October.

(Reporting by Valentina Za; editing by Agnieszka Flak)
Prithvi Man Shrestha is a political reporter for The Kathmandu Post, covering the governance-related issues including corruption and irregularities in the government machinery. Before joining The Kathmandu Post in 2009, he worked at nepalnews.com and Rising Nepal primarily covering the issues of political and economic affairs for three years.
19nawaz

NEW YORK: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as expected raised the Kashmir issue and also glorified slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani while addressing the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces, has emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement, led by Kashmiris, said Sharif .

Hizbul Mujahideen is a globally designated terrorist organization.

Sharif also said that Pakistan fully supports Kashmiris right to self-determination and spoke of alleged Indian brutalities and human rights violations by Indian security forces in Jammu & Kashmir.

India blasts Pakistan over Sharifs UNGA speech

Soon after Sharifs speech India hit out strongly at the Pakistani prime minister. MoS for External Affairs M J Akbar slammed the Pak PM saying that it was shocking to see the leader of a nation glorifying a self-proclaimed Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist like Burhan Wani. It was self-incrimination by Pakistan PM, he added.

Talks and guns dont go together. Pakistan is holding a terrorists gun while pretending to want talks with India. It seems to be run by a war machine rather than a government. But India wont succumb to blackmail, Akbar said.

Pakistan has been following the policy of ethnic cleansing and the people of Pakistan people paying a price of a malevolent policy, he said.

Akbar also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modis Pakistan policy has been consistent from day one.

Earlier, Indias External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup responded sharply to the remarks and slammed Sharif for to his failure to discuss the recent terror attack in Uri.

PM Sharif at UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. Indias only condition is an end to terrorism. This not acceptable? Swarup wrote on the MEASs Twitter account.

Sharif in his speech had alleged that Pakistan was ready to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute through dialogue, but New Delhi had put forward unacceptable pre-conditions.

Story continues

The MEA spokesperson also said that the Pakistani PMs glorification of Wani showed his countys attachement to terrorism. He also blasted Sharif for his failure to mention the recent terror attack in Uri that led to the death of 18 Indian soldiers. He said Sharif was in complete denial of Uri terror attack.

The MEA spokesperson added: 19 infiltration attempts stopped at LoC this year. Indigenous??!! he asked, pointing to the role Pakistan is widely seen as having played in the attack and countering Sharifs allegation that the unrest in Kashmir was a result of an indigenous movement.

Here are some highlights of Sharifs speech:

Pakistan wants peace with India and it has gone the extra mile to achieve this. But India has posed unacceptable pre-conditions to dialogue.

We are ready to enter into serious and sustained dialogue with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.

We demand an independent inquiry into the extrajudicial killings in Kashmir and an end to the curfew.

Pakistan will share dossier with the UN on human rights violation by India in Kashmir.

Pakistan has been the principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored, financed from abroad.

Talks are in the interest of both India and Pakistan.

Hundreds killed, hundreds blinded by pellet guns. These Indian brutalities are well documented.

No peace between India and Pakistan without resolving Kashmir issue.

Kashmiris are reacting to Indias illegal occupation of Kashmir.

India summons Pakistani envoy, offers evidence to probe Uri, Poonch terror attacks

Earlier on Wednesday, amid escalating tension and rising clamour to isolate Pakistan at all major international forums in the aftermath of the Uri terrorist attack, India summoned Pakistani High Commissioner in New Delhi, Abdul Basit. India said it is ready to provide evidence on Uri and Pooch attacks if Pakistan is ready to investigate them.

Indian Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned the Pakistan high commissioner to the Ministry of External Affairs. Basit was reminded of the solemn commitment Pakistan had made when it signed the Islamabad joint statement in January 2004.

Pakistan had assured under the joint statement  signed between the then Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf  that it will not permit any territory under its control to be used to support terrorism in any manner.

On Wednesday, India stressed that the growing violation of this was a matter of very serious concern. It further noted that the attack on the Indian Army base in Uri highlighted the fact that terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan was active.

India further noted with concern the marked increase in cross-border attacks both from the Line of Control (LoC) and international boundary. It said that there had been 17 such attempts and 31 terrorists were eliminated in the process.

Basit was reminded of the two ongoing Army operations to neutralise terrorist at the LoC. Additionally, India listed the items that have been recovered after the recent attacks:

(a) GPS from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site

(b) Grenades with Pakistani markings

 Communication matrix sheets

(d) Communication equipment and

(e) Other stores made in Pakistan, including food, medicines and clothes.

The Indian government also offered the Pakistani government the necessary fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents, if they wish to investigate the cross-border attacks. India said it expected a response from Pakistani government on this. (ANI, IANS and Agencies)
SAN SEBASTIAN  Actress Sigourney Weaver looked poised, gracious and sharp as she talked about Hillary Clinton, Alien and A Monster Calls in the build-up to her acceptance Wednesday night of a career-achievement Donostia Award at Spains San Sebastian Festival.

Its exciting in the U.S. now that it looks like we are finally going to have a woman president, Weaver said at a brief news conference Wednesday morning, although polls show Donald Trump closing in on Clinton. Its overdue. I think a lot of the progress we made is now coming to fruition. We have women in all walks of life, armed services and other jobs.

That, she argued, was increasingly reflected on the big screen. I dont think Ive ever had more work, she said, calling out a journalist who asserted a lack of great womens roles in Hollywood.

Men have more roles, but I dont think they have better roles. I dont envy Russell Crowe. Great stories have great womens parts, Weaver said, adding to applause from the assembled reporters: Im often asked to play roles that traditionally would have gone to men. I think its a good time for women.

Weaver re-confirmed comments at Julys Comic-Con that Neill Blomkamps Alien sequel has been postponed.

He has got work to do, and I have things going on. I hope we do get to do it, she said. Its one of those things we wanted to do this past year, but I think Ridley [Scott] didnt want them all coming out at the same time.

Juan Antonio Jota Bayona, the Spanish director of A Monster Calls, described Weaver as a perfectionist, recounting how she was concerned with every detail of her performance as Grandma in the film, down to her painted fingernails. Weaver returned the compliment.

Ive been lucky to work with great directors like David [Fincher], she said. Jota is up there with Fincher. He is extraordinary, but he is his own director, very Spanish, filled with passion and honesty. His connection to material is instinctive. Finchers approach is more intellectual.

Story continues

Weaver, who has also worked with directors Peter Weir, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Ang Lee, Roman Polanski and Mike Nichols, paid special tribute to Weir.

Peter helped me understand how to adapt to the chaos of film because Im from theater, she said, adding: It was always to me about the story, and just as important in film. It was to work with a director with a strong vision and who was a fighter. Lots can happen on a film that can try to undo your work. Its the way the business is.

Weaver recalled that she came to San Sebastian in 1979 with the original Alien, at a time when festivals werent so ready as today to accept genre movies.

Sigourney has done everything: comedy, sci-fi, drama. She has done so many films that I asked many times about how she did things on other films, Bayona said.

At the San Sebastian news conference for a A Monster Calls, Bayona also talked about Liam Neesons performance voicing a tree giant.

One of the reasons we chose Liam is because he had done voice work already, Bayona said, adding that the key was not just the quality but how he interprets the giant. We didnt touch it much. We wanted the film anchored in reality.

Produced out of Spain by Apaches Ent., Telecinco Cinema and Peliculas La Trini, and financed and distributed by Focus Features, River Road, Participant Media and Lionsgate, A Monster Calls is slated to open in the U.S via Focus Features on Oct. 14.

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By Nicole Mordant COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - With big mine financing deals off their blistering pace of last year, financier Silver Wheaton is eager to do more transactions with small mining exploration companies, its chief executive said on Tuesday. Silver Wheaton pioneered the concept of "streaming" in the mining industry in 2004, a type of finance where miners receive cash upfront to build mines or reduce debt in exchange for future production at a discounted, fixed price. Most of Silver Wheaton's deals have been $100 million-plus transactions with big global miners, such as Brazil's Vale . But three years ago, it branched out into providing funding to "junior" miners, which do most of the industry's exploration. It is keen to do more of these deals. "I'd be happy if we have three or four more done in the next few months, but I don't know if we have seen that many good ones yet," CEO Randy Smallwood said in an interview at the Denver Gold Forum. "I would love to get some more on the books just because of the optionality they provide," he said, referring to the potential for big financial gains for Silver Wheaton, from a small investment of typically less than $20 million, if the exploration company finds a big mineral deposit. Exploration companies owning base metal deposits with precious metal by-products are Silver Wheaton's preferred investment. With base metals prices, such as copper, remaining at weaker levels, those companies are finding it hard to raise funds, making stream financing more attractive. Silver Wheaton already has two "early deposit streaming" partnerships - one with Sandspring Resources , which is developing a gold deposit in Guyana, and another with Panoro Minerals Ltd , which has a copper deposit in Peru. Turning to large deals, Smallwood said there was about $2 billion worth of streaming transactions up for grabs in the market. That is down from as much as $5 billion a year ago as a rally in precious metals prices this year has cooled miners' appetite for streaming finance as other forms of funding, like share issues, have once again become available. [nL1N19X1WM] The deals available are also smaller in size - around $300 million to $500 million - compared with transactions close to $1 billion last year, he said. (Reporting by Nicole Mordant; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Sirius XM finance chief David Frear is unfazed by competition for his satellite radio company from music streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and Google Play.

"We used to worry a lot about the streaming providers," he told an audience of investors Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York. "But over the past five years, we can't find the effect on demand."

Painting a picture of Sirius XM, which boasts 32 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, as a David amid Goliaths like AM/FM radio and app-based subscription services, both of which number in the hundreds of millions of monthly users, Frear stayed modest about Sirius' technological goals while sounding notes of superiority over smartphone-based rivals.

"We are not a music distribution service," he said, stressing that most Sirius customers use the product in their cars. "We are radio."

Read more: Appeals Court Revives Lawsuit Against Dr. Dre Over Beats Headphone Royalties

Asked to comment on a theoretical merger between Pandora and Spotify, the exec didn't see many advantages to large-scale consolidation in the streaming space.

"One is ad-based, one is subscriber-based. They each pay a huge amount of money to the music industry," said Frear. "There is no advantage to this kind of thing on the content side."

Despite thinking of itself as a radio company, Sirius is still launching a new product that shares a lot of the same interactivity features that music apps use. The New York-based company's new 360L platform accounts for user preferences and behaviors to make suggestions and recommend transactions, just like Google Play or Rhapsody.

"There's nothing about the functionality of these kinds of products that requires us to go out and buy something," Frear observed. "The coding is not an insurmountable task, if we think it's necessary."

He noted that the next benchmark to evaluate the Sirius XM business model will be the success of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, two smartphone platforms for cars currently being developed, which could cut into Sirius' core business.

Story continues

"You know, when BMW put a jack in their cars in around 2005," Frear said, "everybody thought we were going to be dead in a couple years."

Read more: Comcast CEO Touts "Closer" Netflix Relationship, Talks Integrating More Streaming Services
SiriusXM finance chief David Frear is unfazed by competition for his satellite radio company from music streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and Google Play.

"We used to worry a lot about the streaming providers," he told an audience of investors Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York. "But over the past five years, we can't find the effect on demand."

Painting a picture of SiriusXM, which boasts 32 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, as a David amid Goliaths like AM/FM radio and app-based subscription services, both of which number in the hundreds of millions of monthly users, Frear stayed modest about Sirius' technological goals while sounding notes of superiority over smartphone-based rivals.

"We are not a music distribution service," he said, stressing that most Sirius customers use the product in their cars. "We are radio."

Garth Brooks' SiriusXM Channel a Tech Toy With Some Big Advantages

Asked to comment on a theoretical merger between Pandora and Spotify, the exec didn't see many advantages to large-scale consolidation in the streaming space.

"One is ad-based, one is subscriber-based. They each pay a huge amount of money to the music industry," said Frear. "There is no advantage to this kind of thing on the content side."

Despite thinking of itself as a radio company, Sirius is still launching a new product that shares a lot of the same interactivity features that music apps use. The New York-based company's new 360L platform accounts for user preferences and behaviors to make suggestions and recommend transactions, just like Google Play or Rhapsody.

"There's nothing about the functionality of these kinds of products that requires us to go out and buy something," Frear observed. "The coding is not an insurmountable task, if we think it's necessary."

SiriusXM Grows Subscribers, Earnings in Second Quarter

Story continues

He noted that the next benchmark to evaluate the SiriusXM business model will be the success of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, two smartphone platforms for cars currently being developed, which could cut into Sirius' core business.

"You know, when BMW put a jack in their cars in around 2005," Frear said, "everybody thought we were going to be dead in a couple years."

This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Russia did it. The White House, the U.S. intel community, and the Pentagon came together Tuesday to point the finger at the Syria  and more directly, Russia  as being responsible for bombing the U.N. aid convoy near Aleppo Monday that killed approximately 20 civilians.

There only could have been two entities responsible, the Syrian regime or the Russian government, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in New York while attending this weeks United Nations summit. We hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this space, he added, since the Russian and Syrian governments had full knowledge of the convoy, where it was, and what it was doing.

More U.S. officials look at Moscow. Several unnamed U.S. officials told Reuters they had tracked two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes in the skies above the aid convoy at the time it was hit. Unnamed officials also told the Wall Street Journal that the Russians were likely to blame. One person who went on the record  though didnt go quite as far as the unnamed officials  was the U.S. Central Commands Col. John Thomas, who told reporters at the Pentagon, it was certainly not the coalition who struck from the air, and the only other entities that fly in Syria are Russia and Syria.

Getting the word out. Moscow insists it had nothing to do with the airstrike, but just for good measure, the Ministry of Defense released what it says is drone footage of a pickup truck hauling a heavy mortar system past the convoy in the hours before it was hit, though The Interpreter has called the video into question. The Ministry also started livestreaming areas around Aleppo to provide a level of transparency about the ceasefire.

ButSome rebel leaders fighting the Syrian regime warned U.N. officials not to send the convoy, since government forces were conducting airstrikes in the area  warnings U.N. officials in Damascus dismissed, the Journal reports in another story.

Story continues

Think tanked. The Institute for the Study of Wars Genevieve Casagrande writes in an analyst note Wednesday that pretty much everyone managed to benefit from the now collapsed ceasefire. Everyone, that is, save the U.S.-led coalition. Russia and Syria used the cessation of hostilities to consolidate recent gains in Aleppo City and to redeploy military assets to other critical frontlines in likely preparation for upcoming offensives, she writes. Likewise, the more radical segments of the opposition took advantage of the failures of the ceasefire to bolster their standing among mainstream opposition factions, undermining efforts by the U.S. to compel independent opposition groups to distance themselves from al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria.

Ill communication. There have been more incidents in Syria over the past week, of course, including the American-led coalitions airstrike on Syrian troops Saturday that killed as many as 60 soldiers, and wounded about 100 more. FPs Paul McLeary reports that Pentagon officials have admitted that about 30 minutes after the strike started, a Russian official called the coalitions command center in Qatar, but couldnt find his American counterpart to warn the planes off. The Russian had to call back several minutes later, and the Americans eventually called off the strike, which had already been going on for almost an hour.

Trump irks Ukraine again. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump already has a contentious relationship with Kiev, angering the Ukrainian public and government officials with his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow-friendly views on the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine  once he realized, a bit later than most, that Russia took Crimea in 2014. Now, FPs Molly OToole and Reid Standish write, Trump turned down an invitation to meet with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly this week. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton met with Poroshenko in New York on Monday.

United Nations. Elsewhere at the U.N. meeting, FPs Colum Lynch writes that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon delivered a full-throated, and thinly veiled, broadside against a host of world leaders from Syrias President Bashar al-Assad to South Sudans Salva Kiir Mayardit during his tenth and final speech at the U.N. General Assembly. Lynch and John Hudson also dissect President Barack Obamas final address before the assembly, in which he made an impassioned plea for an open world order, even as walls rise against refugees, protectionism makes a comeback, and the West faces the prospect of a simmering cold war with Russia and other authoritarian states.

Good morning and as always, if you have any thoughts, announcements, tips, or national security-related events to share, please pass them along to SitRep HQ. Best way is to send them to: paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary or @arawnsley

Dark side of the moon

By 2020, China plans to be the first country on earth to send an object to the dark side of the moon, marking an important step along its path to becoming a space superpower, according to PopSci. The Peoples Republic has been building up its space program for a generation, and now that work is starting to bear fruit, with the Tiangong-2 space lab scheduled for launch next year, a quantum encryption satellite already in space, and an annual rate of successful space launches this year thats second only to Russia. Chinas annual space budget is less than the NASAs but its continued focus on prioritizing space has launched it into the top tier of space powers.

Taiwan

Satellite imagery shows that Taiwan is building anti-aircraft towers on Taiping Island in the South China Sea, the latest in a series of moves by countries across the region to buttress defenses amidst territorial disputes with China. Taiping Island is located in the Spratly archipelago, where China has been building up man-made islands and deploying arms to buttress its territorial claims. The buildings built by Taiwan house anti-aircraft guns and face west.

NATO

The Atlantic alliance has rejected a Russian proposal to require all planes flying over the Baltic to have their transponders switched on at all times, the Wall Street Journal reports. All NATO aircraft already fly with the transponders on.usually. Some U.S. reconnaissance flights take to the skies with the tracking devices off, and some Russian planes arent even equipped with transponders, NATO officials say. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are scheduled to meet in New York Wednesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Kurds

The Obama administration is considering directly arming Kurdish fighters in Syria, a move that would help in the fight against ISIS, but make Turkey very, very unhappy, the New York Times tells us. Directly providing weapons for the first time to the Syrian Kurds, whom American commanders view as their most effective ground partner against the Islamic State, would help build momentum for the assault on Raqqa. But arming them would also aggravate Mr. Obamas already tense relations with Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The United States and Turkey sharply disagree over Syrias Kurdish militias, which Turkey sees as its main enemy in Syria.

South Asia

The border between Pakistani and Indian-controlled territory in disputed Kashmir is heating up as another attack struck an Indian military outpost. Reuters reports that the attack killed one Indian soldier. Indian military officials say they killed between eight and ten members of the raising party, which they estimate at as many as a dozen members. The attack on Tuesday follows a militant raid which killed 18 Indian troops on Sunday. India accuses Pakistan of orchestrating the attacks; Pakistan denies the charges.

Cybersecurity

Germanys Federal Office for Information Security is warning the countrys legislators that Russian hackers from the APT28 group linked to Russian military intelligence have been targeting German political parties. Suddeutsche Zeitung reports that the cybersecurity agency warned that the hackers have focused on targets from the Social Democrats and Chancellor Angela Merkels Christian Democrats. The hackers targeted party officials with spear-phishing emails purporting to come from NATO and contain information about the recent coup in Turkey and the earthquake in Italy.

Air Force

Its the Air Force Associations annual conference this week, which means lots of hints from senior Air Force brass about the services big ticket acquisition programs and aspirations. On Tuesday, Air Mobility Command commander Gen. Carlton Everhart offered a sneak preview of Air Force thinking about the KC-Z tanker. Defense News writes that Everhart hinted that the next generation of tankers, due out around 2030 at the earliest, might look substantially different than their commercially derived predecessors. While the service is still at the drawing board stage with the KC-Z, Everhart says the tanker could use autonomy software and and stealthy reduced radar cross section design.

Grenades

The Army is working on developing its first new grenade in over four decades, the BBC reports. The new grenade, known as the Enhanced Tactical Multi-Purpose or ET-MP, will be a little easier on lefties, allowing them to throw it in the same manner that right-handed users do. In the past, southpaws have had to use a different arming procedure before letting the device fly. The ET-MP will also allow soldiers to choose between two modes, with a switch for fragmentation and concussion effects.

Photo Credit: OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP/Getty Images
From Cosmopolitan

Donald Trump Jr.'s widely condemned tweet Monday night comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles drew a sharp response from Wrigley Americas, the company that makes Skittles.

"Skittles are candy. Refugees are people," Denise Young, VP of corporate affairs for Wrigley Americas, told The Hollywood Reporter. "We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing."

Thanks to Trump Jr.'s tweet - which carried official Trump/Pence branding - Skittles surged to the top of Twitter's trending topics list Monday night, with many of the tweets pointing out precisely what Wrigley Americas said: Refugees are people.

This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN - Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016

At the same time, Trump supporters rallied behind the tweet. The idea that immigrants from the Muslim world can spread terror in the U.S. is a central theme of Trump's campaign and one he's sought to underscore after the bombings in New York and New Jersey, which authorities believe were carried out by an Afghan immigrant.



But, not only is the idea of comparing humans to candy deeply insensitive and xenophobic, it's also, as the Washington Post pointed out, bad logic. The odds of being killed by a refugee in a terror attack is about 1 in roughly 3.6 billion, a Cato Institute study from last week said. In other words, the bowl of Skittles would have to be huge.

The Skittles tweet comes less than a week after Donald Trump Jr. drew criticism for saying, on a conservative talk radio show in Philadelphia, that the media would be "warming up the gas chamber right now" if Republicans deployed the same tactics that the Democrats have used.

Story continues

Updatd 9/20 at 7:00 p.m.: The BBC now reports that the picture Donald Trump Jr. used in his tweet was taken by a refugee - and he does not approve of how his photography was used.

"In 1974, when I was six years old, I was a refugee from the Turkish occupation of Cyprus so I would never approve the use of this image against refugees," David Kittos, 48, said. "I have never put this image up for sale. This was not done with my permission, I don't support Trump's politics and I would never take his money to use it."

Election Day is Nov. 8. If you haven't registered to vote yet, you can do so here.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

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Employees demand raises fear of NRB not getting fresh blood

NRB employees are seeking annulment of provision, under which they have to retire after reaching age of 58 or after completing 30 years of service, whichever comes first
By Benoit Nyemba and Amedee Mwarabu KINSHASA (Reuters) - Congo's government vowed on Wednesday to hunt down and punish those responsible for riots in which around three dozen people were killed, as small pockets of protest continued in the capital, Kinshasa. Anti-government protesters gathered in parts of Kinshasa on Wednesday, but normal life resumed in most of the capital after two days of deadly riots, residents and witnesses said. The army was dispatched to parts of the city where tensions persisted. "The Congolese national police are actively seeking out the ... authors of these grave acts of murder and plunder," Attorney General Flory Kabange Numbi told reporters in Kinshasa. He also said migration officials would prevent those responsible from leaving the country. Congo has for months suffered simmering anger over what opponents of President Joseph Kabila believe are his efforts to hold on to power beyond his constitutional term limit, either by delaying elections or revising the constitution, as other African leaders have done. The protests on Monday escalated into violent clashes between demonstrators and police, leaving at least 37 protesters and six policemen dead, Human Rights Watch said. The official death toll given by the police on Wednesday was 32, of whom four were police officers. However, Etienne Tshisekedi, among Congo's main opposition leaders, told Belgian television that around 100 people had died. The office of Kabila, who has been abroad during the unrest attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York, issued its first statement on Wednesday condemning the violence and offering its condolences to victims' families. Kabila "makes a call for calm and invites the entire population to go about their daily activities now that security is again fully ensured," said the statement read on state-owned television. On Wednesday morning, angry youths burned tires in one district as police fired warning shots, a resident said, and the army sent trucks carrying around 50 troops to a university campus to prevent any further demonstrations. Kabila is ineligible to stand in the next election after serving two elected terms. Last week, the election commission petitioned the Constitutional Court to postpone the November poll. His supporters deny he is trying to prolong his rule. World powers have become increasingly exasperated with Kabila's administration. French President Francois Hollande has blamed the state for the violence and called upon the government to respect the constitution. The United Nations Security Council on Wednesday called on Congolese authorities to exercise maximum restraint and urged the country's leaders not to exacerbate the situation. The U.S. Special Envoy for Africa's Great Lakes region said on Tuesday that it was ready to impose additional targeted sanctions on individuals who have been involved in abuses or violence. Washington imposed sanctions on a senior police official in June for his role in what it described as the violent suppression of the country's opposition. Exiled opposition leader Moise Katumbi on Wednesday urged new sanctions against security officials responsible for the deaths of protesters this week. "Without sanctions, they will continue killing people like mosquitoes," he said. (Additional reporting by Kenny Katombe in Kinshasa, Michelle Nichols at the United Nations, Jonathan Landay in Washington and Joe Bavier in Abidjan; writing by Nellie Peyton, editing by G Crosse)
"From Coal to Solar & Storage: Education Through Innovation"

VANCOUVER, BC AND SAN DIEGO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / September 21, 2016 / Solar Alliance Energy, Inc. ("Solar Alliance") or (the "Company") (TSX-V: SAN, OTCQB: SAENF) is pleased to announce it has launched a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Commitment to Action called "From Coal to Solar & Storage: Education Through Innovation." CGI - an initiative of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation - convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world's most pressing challenges.

At the 2016 CGI Annual Meeting in New York, Solar Alliance announced its commitment to build an economic 500 kW community solar generation and battery storage project in Southern Illinois that will include a solar industry workforce redevelopment program for unemployed former coal industry workers.

"Solar energy can serve as a vehicle for change, helping transform communities burdened with high energy costs and high unemployment into centers of innovation, prosperity, and hope," said Solar Alliance Chairman and CEO Jason Bak, who has been a member of the Clinton Global Initiative since 2006. "This project will target a community in Illinois impacted by high electricity rates and high unemployment in the coal sector. The pilot project will strengthen the community by providing clean solar power, resilient battery backup, and lower electricity costs, while building capacity and providing a high value skill set to an underemployed workforce."

This commitment addresses several interconnected issues: the high cost of energy, underemployment in the coal industry, air pollution caused by fossil fuel-burning power plants, rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the need to integrate renewable energy sources into utility systems. Among basic necessities, increases in residential energy costs have the most regressive impact on low-income households.

"This commitment represents an incredible opportunity to help transition underemployed coal workers into the solar industry and develop new skills. Solar Alliance believes solar energy - residential, commercial and industrial - will play a critical role in transforming the energy landscape in the United States. Our goal is to is to install solar on every available rooftop in America and ensure everyone experiences the benefits of that solar transformation," concluded Chairman and CEO Bak.

Story continues

Solar Alliance will work with CGI members to garner further support from funding partners, government agencies and community groups interested in supporting this important project.

The Commitment details can be view at: https://www.clintonfoundation.org/clinton-global-initiative/commitments/coal-solar-storage-education-through-innovation

About the Clinton Global Initiative

Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, convenes global leaders to create and implement solutions to the world's most pressing challenges. CGI Annual Meetings have brought together 190 sitting and former heads of state, more than 20 Nobel Prize laureates, and hundreds of leading CEOs, heads of foundations and NGOs, major philanthropists, and members of the media. To date, members of the CGI community have made more than 3,600 Commitments to Action, which have improved the lives of over 435 million people in more than 180 countries. For more information, visit clintonglobalinitiative.org and follow us on Twitter @ClintonGlobal and Facebook at facebook.com/clintonglobalinitiative.

Jason Bak

Chairman and CEO

For more information:

Solar Alliance

Myke Clark

Chief Marketing Officer

+1 (604) 288-9051

info@solaralliance.com

About Solar Alliance Energy Inc. (www.solaralliance.com)

Solar Alliance is a sales and marketing firm focused on residential, commercial and industrial solar installations. Since we were founded in 2003, we have developed wind and solar projects that provide enough electricity to power 150,000 homes. Solar Alliance is committed to an exceptional customer experience, effective marketing campaigns and superior lead generation in order to drive sales and generate value for shareholders. Our passion is improving life through ingenuity, simplicity and freedom of choice. We make solar simple and our goal is to install solar on every available rooftop in America.

Statements in this news release, other than purely historical information, including statements relating to the Company's future plans and objectives or expected results, constitute Forward-looking statements. The words "would", "will", "expected" and "estimated" or other similar words and phrases are intended to identify forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different than those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such factors include, but are not limited to: uncertainties related to the ability to raise sufficient capital, changes in economic conditions or financial markets, litigation, legislative or other judicial, regulatory and political competitive developments and technological or operational difficulties. Consequently, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

"Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release."

SOURCE: Solar Alliance Energy, Inc.
Madrid (AFP) - President of La Liga Javier Tebas announced he will stand for re-election as he resigned from his role to kickstart the process for new elections on Wednesday.

"I have formally presented my resignation as president of La Liga," Tebas posted on his official Twitter account.

"A new electoral process is opened in which I will return to request the confidence of the clubs."

Tebas was elected president in 2013 and is so far the only candidate to announce his intention to run.

The election will take place next month.

Tebas has overseen a significant change in the distribution of television rights in La Liga with a collective agreement far more beneficial to the league's smaller clubs.

La Liga have signed national and international TV rights deals worth 1.48 billion euros a season ($1.65 billion), up from 800 million a season under the old system.

Tebas's other initiatives have included a crackdown on offensive chants and violence from ultras and a series of investigations into match-fixing.
By Renee Dudley NEW YORK (Reuters) - In the days after the redesigned SAT college entrance exam was given for the first time in March, some test-takers headed to the popular website reddit to share a frustration. They had trouble getting through the exams new mathematics sections. I didnt have nearly enough time to finish, wrote a commenter who goes by MathM. Other people I asked had similar impressions. The math itself wasnt the problem, said Vicki Wood, who develops courses for PowerScore, a South Carolina-based test preparation company. The issue was the wordy setups that precede many of the questions. The math section is text heavy, said Wood, a tutor, who took the SAT in May. And I ran out of time. The College Board, the maker of the exam, had reason to expect just such an outcome for many test-takers. When it decided to redesign the SAT, the New York-based not-for-profit sought to build an exam with what it describes as more real world applications than past incarnations of the test. Students wouldnt simply need to be good at algebra, for instance. The new SAT would require them to solve problems in rich and varied contexts. But in evaluating that approach, the College Boards own research turned up problems that troubled even the exam makers. About half the test-takers were unable to finish the math sections on a prototype exam given in 2014, internal documents reviewed by Reuters show. The problem was especially pronounced among students that the College Board classified as low scorers on the old SAT. A difference in completion rates between low scorers and high scorers is to be expected, but the gap on the math sections was much larger than the disparities in the reading and writing sections. The study Reuters reviewed didnt address the demographics of that performance gap, but poor, black and Latino students have tended to score lower on the SAT than wealthy, white and Asian students. In light of the results, officials concluded that the math sections should have far fewer long questions, documents show. But the College Board never made that adjustment and instead launched the new SAT with a large proportion of wordy questions, a Reuters analysis of new versions of the test shows. The redesigned SAT is described in the College Boards own test specifications as an appropriate and fair assessment to promote equity and opportunity. But some education and testing specialists say the text-heavy new math sections may be creating greater challenges for kids who perform well in math but poorly in reading, reinforcing race and income disparities. Among those especially disadvantaged by the number of long word problems, they say, are recent immigrants and American citizens who arent native English speakers; international students; and test-takers whose dyslexia or other learning disabilities have gone undiagnosed. Its outrageous. Just outrageous, said Anita Bright, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Portland State University in Oregon. The students that are in the most academically vulnerable position when it comes to high-stakes testing are being particularly marginalized, she said. College Board CEO David Coleman, the chief architect of the redesign, declined to be interviewed, as did other College Board officials named in this article. But earlier this year, Coleman talked about the importance of creating a test that was fair to students for whom English is not their native language. In a speech in March about ensuring equal access to higher education, Coleman talked about the SATs past emphasis on obscure vocabulary words and what that meant for English-language learners in this country. It would determine who went to college. Now, the new exams wordy math questions  not the obscure vocabulary  have created a similar and unfair barrier for the very group Coleman identified, some academics say. The problem is going to mostly affect English-language learners, said Jamal Abedi, a University of California Davis professor who specializes in educational assessments. He said such students could perform poorly not because of their lack of math content knowledge but by the language burden. Abedi said he was among a group of scholars who recently consulted with the SATs archrival, the ACT, about whether English-language learners deserve special accommodations on test day. English-language learners account for a substantial share of public school students in the United States  9.3 percent in 2013-2014, or 4.5 million kids, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Putting math questions in context makes sense to some testing specialists. Daniel Koretz, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said some professors would want to know whether students can follow university-level math lectures. Some students will be disadvantaged, yes, but thats not necessarily the wrong thing to do, Koretz said. But Portland States Bright said the College Board went too far. Vocabulary and reading are tested elsewhere on the exam, she said. The word problems in the math sections, Bright said, ought to be more succinct. Admissions officers at many U.S. colleges and universities, especially elite institutions, use SAT scores as a means of weeding out candidates. A low math score may cripple an applicants chances of getting into a selective school. College Board spokeswoman Sandra Riley declined to provide statistics indicating how many students have been able to fully answer the math sections on the redesigned test. A College Board analysis of 10 tests given this spring, she said, found that completion rates for English-language learners are similar to what we see for all students. Riley also said the rate of completion of the math section for the SAT given in March met our goals and on average is equal to or higher than the completion rate for the math section of the old SAT. All things being equal, the completion rate across every section of the exam should be higher than it was for the old SAT, testing specialists say. Thats because the old exam penalized students for wrong answers, encouraging them to leave questions blank rather than hazard a guess. The new test contains no penalty for guessing wrong, and the College Board encourages students to answer every question. As it says on its website, On the new SAT, you simply earn points for the questions you answer correctly. So go ahead and give your best answer to every question  theres no advantage to leaving them blank. EARLY WARNINGS To understand how the College Board remade the all-important exam, Reuters reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents, including emails between officials formulating the new SAT; private comments from academics hired to vet potential test questions; items from exams that have already been administered; and hundreds of questions developed for upcoming SATs. The not-for-profit organization has posted a 210-page document online that explains the approach to remaking its signature product. But the vast majority of the documents Reuters examined have never been made public. They offer an unprecedented look at how a standardized college entrance exam comes together. Among the documents examined was the College Board timing study done two years before the release of the new test. That study describes, section by section, the percentage of students who were able to finish a prototype of the redesigned exam. Perhaps most revealing is the confidential feedback of academics who, for a modest stipend, help the College Board review proposed test questions for fairness and accuracy. Some were scathing in their criticism of the new test. They warned early and often that many questions were long and convoluted, and distracted from the skills the math sections should be assessing, documents examined by Reuters show. In a nearly 5,000-word letter from August 2014, one reviewer told College Board officials that he had never encountered so many seriously flawed items in the 20-plus years he had been screening math material for the organization. That reviewer  a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee named Dan Lotesto  wrote of the math questions: Why so many items with vocabulary issues, especially for ELL students? ELL stands for English-language learners. Lotesto proved prescient about the situation the College Board now faces. It would be difficult, he wrote, to create questions that fairly assessed students and were mathematically and linguistically tight as well as doable. Contacted by Reuters, Lotesto said he stands behind the 2014 letter but declined to comment further. He said he still reviews potential material for the SAT. Concerns that the College Board has created an SAT with flawed math sections come as the organization struggles on another front: its inability to safeguard the content of the exam. Last month, federal authorities launched a criminal investigation after Reuters obtained about 400 unpublished questions from the redesigned SAT exam. Some testing specialists called the security lapse one of the most serious in the history of college-admissions testing. On August 26, federal agents raided the home of Manuel Alfaro, a former top College Board executive who was later dismissed and has now become an outspoken critic of the organization. Alfaro, who helped remake the math sections, was fired by the College Board in early 2015, almost two years after he says he was wooed to the organization by CEO Coleman. THE PUSH The new SAT was created on a tight deadline. The exams competitor, the Iowa-based ACT, had surpassed the SAT in popularity in the United States in 2012 and was winning state contracts. Soon after, in October 2012, Coleman took over the College Board. He quickly set a demanding goal for his team: roll out a completely redesigned test in about two years, by March 2015. The challenge was enormous. Developing a single exams worth of questions for an existing SAT format can itself take two years. Internal documents show the growing competitive threat posed by the ACT was one reason for his urgency. In an email to senior College Board executives in August 2013, Coleman wrote that we must deliver the revised SAT by 2015  We cannot afford to let ACT continue to shape the state market. Although the launch was eventually delayed by a year, the push was on. The original formula for the new SAT took shape in early 2013. Thats when the College Board created draft content specifications for the exam, according to an internal document dated April 30. The document's author is Cyndie Schmeiser, the organizations chief of assessment and top deputy to CEO Coleman. The document shows that test developers planned to put a heavy emphasis on students ability to apply math to solve problems in rich and varied contexts. That meant there would be a greater focus on word problems in the math sections. The shift was intended to align the new test with the Common Core, a set of learning standards that many states have adopted and that Coleman helped create. More detailed specifications were circulated within the College Board the next month. They called for half of all the math items  about 30 questions  to be contextualized. These would be the kind of word problems Schmeiser described in the earlier document. Of those 30 questions, the specifications called for 14  nearly half  to be heavy, having more than 60 words. The remaining 16 would be medium  between 40 and 60 words  or light, shorter than 40 words. Problems with those plans became evident in February 2014. That month, the College Board conducted the national study that tested student volunteers at select schools, using a prototype version of the new SAT. The study, marked confidential and restricted, has never been made public. Known as the rSAT Prototype Form Study, the paper includes the proportion of students able to reach, within the tests time constraints, the end of each section of the reconfigured exam. About 5,600 students were given the prototype SAT  which included the reading, writing-and-language, and math sections. The study indicates that the students were clustered into groups  high, medium and low scorers  based not on their individual scores on the old SAT but rather on the overall scoring average of the school where they took the test. That means that, if the average score of students at a school participating in the study was 1350 or lower on the old SAT, all the test-takers at that school were classified as low scorers. The maximum score on the old test was 2400. Only 47 percent of all students finished one part of the math section in the allotted 25 minutes  the 20-question portion during which calculators arent allowed. And just 50 percent of the students completed the longer 38-question math section, which allows the use of a calculator. That compared with 83 percent of students who were able to complete the reading section and 80 percent able to finish the writing-and-language section. According to the study, the inability to finish the math sections disproportionately affected particular students: those from schools where average scores on the old SAT were categorized as low or medium. On the calculator section of the prototype test, for example, 78 percent of students from high-scoring schools reached the end. Only 41 percent of students from low-scoring schools finished. The gap was smaller on the reading test: 95 percent of students from high-scoring schools finished, versus 73 percent from schools where scores were low. The studys results were reviewed by the test development staff in May 2014. By August 2014, the group decided to reduce the number of long-worded math problems to help more students finish the exam, documents show. THE WEARY ALBATROSS The College Boards timing study wasnt the only sign of trouble with the word problems in the math sections. External, independent reviewers who evaluate potential SAT questions for accuracy and bias were spotting potential problems as early as September 2014, around the time College Board officials had decided to reconfigure the math sections. During a meeting of the committee that assessed the math questions, one reviewer tore into a problem that asked students to calculate the time it took a car driver to apply the brakes. It began with a table listing nine speeds, followed by a lengthy description of that table. In all, the item exceeded 200 words. The lead-in, the reviewer wrote, requires A LOT of reading. Do we want that? According to one confidential roundup of reviewer comments, the academics also seized on word problems that had little to do with the math skills supposedly being tested. One question involved a bird on a long flight. I am distracted by the issue of the albatross sleeping, wrote one reviewer, who wasnt named in the summary of comments. If it doesnt sleep at all on the journey, this should be stated. Otherwise the question is unanswerable because it asks for the average speed that the bird flew, which implies only time in motion and not time resting. Academic reviewers were complaining about other kinds of quality problems, too. In a conference call with College Board staff on March 13, 2014, Deborah Hughes Hallett of the Harvard Kennedy School and Roxy Peck of California Polytechnic State University spoke out. Both of our committees have expressed concern about the quality of the items that are being brought to the SAT Committee for review, they said during the call, according to a transcript. These items have included many that are not mathematically sound, that have incorrect answers, or that are not accurate or realistic in terms of the given context. Hallett did not respond to inquiries for this article. Peck, in written response, called the redesign a huge undertaking that required the authoring of a large number of mathematics items in a short period of time. Bill Trapp, a senior director in the design effort, was among those who received the detailed critique written by Dan Lotesto, the reviewer in Wisconsin. Lotesto wasnt an outlier, Trapp wrote to fellow College Board executives. Many of these comments reflect what we have seen from current committee members, Trapp wrote. NEW SAT, NEW PROBLEMS In early 2015, about a year before the test would debut, the College Board offered the public a preview of the types of questions the new exam would feature. The sneak peek prompted a column on The Atlantic magazines website by James Murphy, a tutoring manager for the Princeton Review. In New SAT, New Problems, Murphy focused on a set of sample math questions. His conclusion was summed up by the articles secondary headline: The questions, particularly those in the math sections, could put certain students at a disadvantage. Murphy wrote that the most vulnerable students are those who live in low-income areas or dont speak English as a first language. They would struggle, he reasoned, with the math sections new emphasis on word problems. The day after Murphys piece ran, the College Board set out to look for data to refute the authors claims, according to a Jan. 21, 2015, email reviewed by Reuters. The email was sent to members of the math development team by Laurie Moore, a College Board executive director. Over the next six hours, College Board officials exchanged emails about the Murphy piece. By then, they appear to have set aside their initial concern that Murphy had misrepresented the new exam. Instead, they worried he may have understated the problem. At issue: the length of the math word problems. In her email, College Board executive Moore asked about the length of the word problems in the math sections of four new SAT practice tests the College Board planned to release soon to the public. Alfaro, still employed by the College Board at the time, responded that, of the questions in context, about 45% are heavy and the rest are light/medium. Heavy questions exceeded 60 words in length. Alfaros assessment appeared to surprise his boss, Sherral Miller. Wow, Miller wrote in reply. We had changed that to 10% heavy in the specs given the timing studies. How did we get 45% of them being heavy? Miller was referring to the planned revisions to the word-count mix that the College Board had resolved to make the previous summer. But the College Board never followed through on its plan to reconfigure the exam, despite the timing studys findings and the reviewer complaints. Instead of 10 percent of the math questions being a heavy, greater than 60 words, almost half remained that long, according to the January 2015 emails. Its unclear why the College Board failed to address the issue. The organization wouldnt make the projects top leader, Schmeiser, available for an interview. In a written statement to Reuters, Alfaro  one of the key executives involved in remaking the math sections  said the College Board didnt have the time or resources to rectify the mix of long, medium and short questions. The College Board had already delayed the SATs launch by a year, and had promised universities and school districts the new exam would debut in March 2016. In early 2015, just 14 months remained until launch. The pool of questions for the new SAT wasnt large enough and could not be reconfigured overnight to support new specifications that call for significantly different item distributions, Alfaro said. College Board spokeswoman Riley said Alfaros claims about our internal processes for developing the math section of the SAT are inaccurate. She referred to Alfaro as a former short-term employee, who after being dismissed from his job demanded millions of dollars in payment and threatened to do damage to the College Board. Alfaro was involved in the development of the math sections for 21 months, or more than half the period from the start of the redesign till the new tests debut. HEAVY WORD COUNTS To determine whether the new math test was modified to include fewer lengthy word problems, Reuters analyzed the six practice SAT exams posted online by Khan Academy, the official practice-testing partner of the College Board. The College Board says on its website that questions on those tests are reviewed and approved by the people who develop the SAT, and Khan calls them real, full-length SAT practice tests. Two of the exams, in fact, were administered as actual tests earlier this year before being released as practice material. Reuters counted the number of words in each of the contextualized math questions on the six exams. At least 45 percent of the math word problems in each exam exceeded the heavy threshold of 60 words. That means none of tests met the College Boards revised target specifying that just 10 percent of the questions be heavy  the specs cited by Miller in her January 2015 email. In fact, the math sections of all six exams were consistent with the prototype test  the exam that, according to the 2014 study, fewer than half of test-takers could finish. Alfaro, who was fired shortly after the January 2015 email exchange, wrote about the issue on the social network LinkedIn on August 27, a day after the FBI raided his apartment. He alleged the College Board failed to follow its own specifications for word counts in the new math sections. The formulation of the new exam leaves the College Board with a dilemma, testing specialists say. The new math sections could be reconfigured to contain fewer long questions, in line with the revised specs. But that would create a new problem. Future scores from revised exams may not be comparable to scores from the earlier versions with the lengthier questions, said Koretz, the Harvard professor. Theres no good solution when you come up with a problem like this, he said. (Edited by Blake Morrison)
What's it like to be a Stormtrooper? Thanks to "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," we already know that the iconic footsoldiers can be people like us, and fan film "Jakku: First Wave" takes us deeper behind increasingly relatable enemy lines.

Benjamin Eck has worked behind the scenes on hit webshow "Good Mythical Morning" for the last three years, and here turns his hand to the world of "Star Wars."

The three minute reel features a trio of Stormtroopers readying for deployment on Jakku, the desert planet that provided the opening backdrop for December 2015 feature "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."

And where, in the film, we saw Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) defect from the First Order to join the Resistance, in "Jakku: First Wave," there's an extra insight into the varying but very human motivations of the short's three protagonists.

Appearing in the homage are Joseph Bearor ("Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Double Agent"), Aaron Goddard (Palm Beach IFF winner "A Song for Manzanar"), and Tyler Wolfe (Top Indie Film Awards winner "Extraction.")

Official "Star Wars" franchise entry "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is set for release the week of December 16, 2016.

Watch "Jakku: First Wave" - youtu.be/Rt9l7WdHEZ0, vimeo.com/183507939
This is the meeting that could send the internet into the Upside Down.

The fan theory that Steve (Joe Keery) from Netflix's '80s-inspired hit series, Stranger Things, is the father of Parks & Recreation's Jean-Ralphio (Ben Schwartz) reached its logical conclusion on Tuesday when the actors who play the two characters met up and celebrated their uncanny likeness to one another.

"Dad and son meet because the Internet," Schwartz captioned an Instagram video, where Keery pops out from behind him in a matching outfit before they both mutter, "That's strange."

EXCLUSIVE: 'Stranger Things' Actor Joe Keery on Season 2, Steve's Hair and Justice for Barb

Dad and son meet because the Internet. @uncle_jezzy @strangerthingstv #strangertwins A video posted by Ben Schwartz (@rejectedjokes) on Sep 20, 2016 at 1:44pm PDT

"The Upside Down Parent Trap," Schwartz captioned a follow-up pic.

The Upside Down Parent Trap. A photo posted by Ben Schwartz (@rejectedjokes) on Sep 20, 2016 at 3:44pm PDT

Keery also got in on the fun, captioning a pic of him and Schwartz shaving, captioning it simply, "My son."

MORE: Eleven From 'Stranger Things' Can Incredibly Rap the Whole Nicki Minaj 'Monster' Verse -- Watch!

My son  A photo posted by Joe Keery (@uncle_jezzy) on Sep 20, 2016 at 2:51pm PDT

Now, while on first take, the theory that Steve is Jean-Ralphio's dad may seem completely ridiculous, it is actually eerily possible! Steve was coming of age in the '80s, years before Parks & Rec takes place, AND both shows are located in fictional Indiana towns.

Also, in August, Schwartz did his best to elaborate on the theory for a segment on The Late Late Show With James Corden.

EXCLUSIVE: 'Stranger Things' Star Joe Keery Teases Season 2, Talks Working With Winona Ryder

We've gotta say, we kinda buy it!

Meanwhile, Keery dropped by ET last month, to discuss the breakout Netflix series, his fantastic, ever-taller hairstyle, and how the Duffer Brothers set the tone for their actors when casting the show.

Story continues

Watch the video below!

Related Articles
By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health)  Although removal of wisdom teeth is very common, there are no studies that show a benefit to taking them out when they are not causing pain or other problems, according to a new review of existing research. Third molars, or so-called wisdom teeth, generally emerge fully or partially between ages 17 and 26 into limited space and they are often wedged against the second molars. This can cause swelling, root damage, decay or gum disease, and in these cases experts agree the wisdom teeth should be removed. But if there are no symptoms, it is unclear whether the benefits of surgery outweigh the risks, researchers write in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Given the fact that wisdom teeth are removed on a large scale worldwide, it is surprising that high quality research is lacking, said lead author Hossein Ghaeminia of Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In the USA for instance, the preventive removal of asymptomatic disease-free wisdom teeth is very common, Ghaeminia told Reuters Health by email. In the UK, the NICE guidelines advise not to remove asymptomatic disease-free wisdom teeth. The researchers searched for studies that compared outcomes, such as the likelihood of various dental problems, after disease-free impacted wisdom teeth are either removed or retained. They found just two studies, including one randomized controlled trial from a dental hospital in the U.K., and one prospective study in the U.S. But neither compared most aspects of health-related quality of life after removal versus retention of asymptomatic wisdom teeth. The U.S. study, which involved 416 healthy men, found that men who still had their impacted wisdom teeth may have had a higher risk for gum disease around the adjacent molar over the long term compared to men who had their wisdom teeth removed or did not have any to begin with. The U.K. trial randomized 164 participants to either removal or retention of impacted wisdom teeth and found no evidence of notable differences between the groups in dental health afterwards. The studies did not measure other outcomes like cost, cyst or tumor formation, bleeding, nerve damage or infection. The most common risks of surgery are infection, inflammation of the tooth socket and temporary nerve injury causing impaired sensation of the lip and chin, Ghaeminia said. Surgery is covered by most dental insurance but it generally is not covered by medical insurance, said Martha E. Nunn of Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, who was not part of the new study. We will likely conduct another prospective cohort study to examine risks from retained asymptomatic third molars, Nunn told Reuters Health by email. I personally disagree with surgical removal of third molar tooth buds when an adolescent is young, as I have seen permanent bone damage as a result, she said. Some might say that preventive removal should be stopped since there is no high quality evidence to support this practice, but that may lead to more surgeries at an older age when wisdom teeth do become symptomatic, and surgery has more complications for adults than for teens, Ghaeminia said. On the other hand, preventive removal of all asymptomatic wisdom teeth is also undesirable: if the tooth would stay asymptomatic and disease free during lifetime, the patient might have been exposed to an unnecessary risk of complications and costs, he said. In the absence of evidence, orthodontists, dentists and oral surgeons should discuss the pros and cons of wisdom teeth removal in each case individually. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2d4uZL4 Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, online August 31, 2016.
Heinous act

Swift, stern and well-publicised action has to be taken against the perpetrators
The Supreme Court, acting with no sign of dissent, moved on Wednesday to interrupt at least temporarily a series of lower court rulings that would bar employee-benefits companies from claiming that they operate church plans and thus are exempt from federal regulatory laws  including the one providing birth control access. The Courts order in Dignity Health v. Rollins (docket 16A241) is here.

The order blocks one federal appeals court ruling against such a company, until the Supreme Court can decide whether to hear that firms pending appeal. The Court could decide within a matter of weeks whether to take on the controversy, which could affect the job benefits of many thousands of workers.

Some three dozen lawsuits have been filed across the country against non-profit companies that are affiliated with religious organizations  often, the Catholic Church  and that provide health and pension benefits to workers in hospitals and other facilities that they run and for their own staff employees.

On one side of the dispute is the claim that Congress has never intended to regulate the benefit programs of religiously affiliated plan operators. The other side is the claim that Congress could not have intended a broad exemption because that would be unconstitutional favoritism of religiously affiliated companies.

So far, three federal appeals courts have ruled that those firms must comply with the major federal law controlling employee benefit plans  the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (or ERISA)  because their plans do not qualify as exempt church plans. The Affordable Care Act, the broad new law regulating health insurance, exempts church plans that are under ERISA from its birth control mandate that other employee benefit plans must obey.

This controversy is moving forward in a broad group of lower federal courts. Three appeals have already reached the Supreme Court, including the one involved in the Courts action Wednesday  an appeal by Dignity Health, formerly named Catholic Healthcare West, that has been ranked as the first largest healthcare provider in the nation.

Story continues

At issue in all of the cases is the reach of the ERISA, and, in particular, what kind of benefit plan can be exempt as a church plan. In the three appeals court rulings so far, each has decided that the exemption is available only to a benefit plan that was created in the first instance by a church or a group of churches. Dignity Health and other firms that have been challenged have ties to religious organizations, but were not set up originally by a church or group of churches.

Lawyers for Dignity Health have contended in court filings that two other appeals courts have ruled in their favor, but that point is disputed by lawyers for the challengers, who contend that what qualifies as a church plan was not at issue in those two courts.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave no reason for blocking a ruling against Dignity Health by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Usually, the Court will not take such an action unless there is a fair chance it will later agree to decide the issue at stake, and granting review often depends upon whether the lower courts are divided on the legal question.

The cases around the country have been between present and former employees of the religious affiliated plan providers, and the plans, but womens rights groups have been taking an active interest in the controversy because they view it as a potential threat to health benefits for women workers covered by plans claiming to be exempt from ERISA.

The Court said that its order postponing the appeals court ruling against Dignity Health will remain in effect pending the Justices action on the companys petition for review (docket 16-258). If review is granted, the order will remain intact until the case is decided. If review is denied, Wednesdays order will be lifted.

Among the three cases already pending at the Court, Dignity Healths is not the most recently filed. The case that could be the first ready for the Court to consider involves Advocate Health Care Network, affiliated with the Lutheran Church and the United Church of Christ. The Network operates 12 hospitals and more than 250 other healthcare facilities in Illinois. Its case (docket 16-74), like the one involving Dignity Health, focuses on the scope of its plans pension benefits.

The third pending case involves Saint Peters Health System, controlled by the Catholic Diocese of Metuchen, N.J., which operates a hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. Its pension plan is at the center of that case (docket 16-86).

It could be that the Court will wait until the papers are filed in all three cases, and then decide which, if any, to accept for review. Combining them, however, is not required.

Legendary journalist Lyle Denniston is Constitution Dailys Supreme Court correspondent. Denniston has written for us as a contributor since June 2011. Denniston has covered the Supreme Court since 1958. His work also appears on lyldenlawnews.com, where this story first appeared.
Star Bulk Carriers Corp. SBLK is a Transportation-Ship company that could be an interesting play for investors. That is because, not only does the stock have decent short-term momentum, but it is seeing solid activity on the earnings estimate revision front as well.

These positive earnings estimate revisions suggest that analysts are becoming more optimistic on SBLKs earnings for the coming quarter and year. In fact, consensus estimates have moved sharply higher for both of these time frames over the past four weeks, suggesting that Star Bulk Carriers could be a solid choice for investors.

Current Quarter Estimates for SBLK

In the past 30 days, 3 estimates have gone higher for Star Bulk Carriers while none have gone lower in the same time period. The trend has been pretty favorable too, with estimates narrowing from loss of 74 cents a share 30 days ago, to loss of 66 cents today, a move of 10.8%.

Current Year Estimates for SBLK

STAR BULK CARRS Price and Consensus

STAR BULK CARRS Price and Consensus | STAR BULK CARRS Quote

Meanwhile, Star Bulk Carrierss current year figures are also looking quite promising, with 3 estimates moving higher in the past month, compared to none lower. The consensus estimate trend has also seen a boost for this time frame, narrowing from loss of $2.98 per share 30 days ago to loss of $2.63 per share today, an increase of 11.7%.

Bottom Line

The stock has also started to move higher lately, adding 18.4% over the past four weeks, suggesting that investors are starting to take note of this impressive story. So investors may definitely want to consider this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock to profit in the near future. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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KUALA LUMPUR/ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland said it regrets a decision by Thai authorities not to extradite Swiss national Xavier Justo, a possible key witness in the global money-laundering probe linked to Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Malaysia's 1MDB, once a pet project of Prime Minister Najib Razak who chaired its advisory board, is the subject of money-laundering investigations in at least six countries, including Switzerland, Singapore and the United States. Justo was jailed for three years in Thailand in August 2015 after the police said he admitted to blackmail and attempting extortion of his former employer Petrosaudi, a Saudi Arabia-based oil and gas company and joint venture partner of 1MDB. Justo leaked several confidential documents from Petrosaudi relating to its joint venture with 1MDB that were published by Malaysian and international media groups early last year, and formed the basis for the graft and money laundering probe. His sentence was cut to two years by a royal amnesty in August, prompting the Swiss authorities to request his transfer to serve the remaining term back home. Thai Justice Minister Gen Paiboon Koomchaya was quoted telling Malaysian state news agency Bernama that the decision to deny Justo's transfer was made "in accordance with Thai law". The Swiss foreign office said it took note of the decision with "regret". "Switzerland has not yet been officially informed by the Thai authorities of the decision to refuse the transfer to Switzerland," it said in a statement to Reuters. Justo's lawyer in Thailand, Worrasit Piriyawiboon, said his client was not extradited because he has less than one year of his sentence left to serve. The decision to reject Justo's transfer to Switzerland came shortly after Malaysia's prime minister concluded a visit to Thailand. Both countries have denied any interference. Najib's press secretary said in a statement late on Tuesday that no one from the Malaysian delegation raised any matter relating to Justo during the Thai visit. "Malaysia does not sanction attempts to interfere with the internal affairs or judicial process of other countries," Tengku Sariffuddin said in a statement. The U.S. Justice Department filed lawsuits earlier this year seeking to seize more than $1 billion of assets allegedly siphoned off from 1MDB, founded in September 2009 to invest in strategic property and energy projects. Najib has denied any wrongdoing and said Malaysia will cooperate with the international investigations. More than 200,000 people marched through the streets of Kuala Lumpur in August 2015 calling for Najib's resignation over the 1MDB scandal, and another protest rally is planned for November this year. (Reporting by Praveen Menon in KUALA LUMPUR, Joshua Franklin in ZURICH; additional reporting by Amy Lefevre in BANGKOK; Editing by Michael Perry)
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that the situation in Syria is unacceptable and the world is not as unified as it should be to try to stop the more than five-year-old conflict. A ceasefire in Syria, brokered by the United States and Russia, appears to have collapsed. "We all know that what is happening in Syria ... is unacceptable," Obama told a summit on refugees on the sidelines of the annual gathering of leaders at the United Nations. "We are not as unified as we should be in pushing to make it stop." (Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Howard Goller)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian government forces and their allies launched an attack in Hama province in the west of the country on Wednesday as fighting spread days after a ceasefire collapsed, rebels, monitors and pro-Damascus media said. Clashes between the government side and insurgents were concentrated in the northern Hama countryside. "It is a very intense attack, for which Russian jets paved the way, but it was repelled by the brothers, praise God," Abu al-Baraa al-Hamawi, a rebel commander fighting as part of the Islamist Jaish al-Fatah alliance, told Reuters. He said rebels had destroyed four tanks and inflicted heavy losses on government forces. The fighting had grown more intense through the morning. Insurgents fighting in the area include jihadist group Jund al-Aqsa. Syrian state TV and Al Manar TV, which belongs to Damascus ally Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah, said government forces had killed a number of insurgents and destroyed their vehicles. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported advances by government forces in the area. (Reporting by John Davison and Tom Perry; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - A Syrian warplane crashed north of Damascus on Wednesday, but it was unclear if it had been shot down or came down because of a technical fault, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. The jet crashed in the Eastern Qalamoun area near the Syrian capital, the British-based Observatory said. Islamic State militants, who have a presence in the area, said in an online statement that the plane had been shot down. Syrian state media quoted a military source as confirming a warplane had crashed after targeting Islamic State. It did not give a reason for the crash. It said the pilot had been rescued. Islamic State claimed on Sunday to have shot down another Syrian warplane that crashed near Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria. A number of Syrian jets have crashed or been brought down by insurgent fire this year. Syria's civil war is raging on despite international diplomatic efforts to end it. (Reporting by John Davison and Omar Fahmy in Cairo; editing by Mark Heinrich)
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's defence ministry said on Wednesday it is asking Google to blur satellite images showing what experts say appear to be new military installations on Itu Aba, Taipei's sole holding in the disputed South China Sea.

The revelation of new military-related construction could raise tensions in the contested waterway, where China's building of airstrips and other facilities has worried other claimants and the United States.

The images seen on Google Earth show four three-pronged structures sitting in a semi-circle just off the northwestern shoreline of Itu Aba, across from an upgraded airstrip and recently constructed port that can dock 3,000-ton frigates.

"Under the pre-condition of protecting military secrets and security, we have requested Google blur images of important military facilities," Taiwan Defence Ministry spokesman Chen Chung-chi said on Wednesday, after local media published the images on Itu Aba.

The United States has urged against the militarisation of the South China Sea, following the rapid land reclamation by China on several disputed reefs through dredging, and building air fields and port facilities.

Taiwan's defence ministry and coast guard, which directly oversees Itu Aba, said details about the structures are confidential and have not commented on their nature.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the request.

Defence experts in Taiwan said that based on the imagery of the structures and their semi-circular layout, the structures were likely related to defence and could be part of an artillery foundation.

"I think definitely it will be for military purposes, but I cannot tell if it is for defending, attacking or monitoring," said Dustin Wang, a scholar and a former government advisor who has regularly visited Itu Aba.

Wang said given the structures' location which faces the main seaborne traffic, they may relate to surveillance.

China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei claim parts or all of the South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes.

In July, an international court ruled against China in a case brought by the Philippines that rejected China's claim to a vast swathes of the disputed maritime area. Both China and Taiwan, which China views as a renegade province, vehemently rejected the court ruling.

(Reporting by J.R. Wu; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
Taking selfies can be linked to happiness, says study, so continue snapping away

Taking selfies can be linked to happiness, says study, so continue snapping away

Wanna take a selfie? Go right ahead  we dare not judge you because a new study highlights a link between selfies and happiness. Basically, if youre incessantly camera happy, then youre more likely to become just as cheery when youre not staring seductively into the lens for a fab selfie that shows off your artistic side.

The results of a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, were recently published in Psychology of Well-Being and what it reveals after observing 41 college students for four weeks has us frantically searching for the perfect lighting, squinching and testing out our most flattering angles.

j lo snl

So, the students in the study were tasked with using a smartphone app to report their moods three times a day during the first week, followed by a three-week period in which they were grouped into three categories: those who took smiling selfies; those who snapped photos of something that made them happy; and finally, those tasked with photographing something pleasant and sharing it with someone they thought it would make happy.

One would think the report at least includes one case of selfie elbow, but the results are  you guessed it  overwhelmingly happy.

A photo posted by Britney Spears (@britneyspears) on May 29, 2016 at 12:17pm PDT

Science Daily broke down the selfie study findings:

Researchers collected nearly 2,900 mood measurements during the study and found that subjects in all three groups experienced increased positive moods. Some participants in the selfie group reported becoming more confident and comfortable with their smiling photos over time. The students taking photos of objects that made them happy became more reflective and appreciative. And those who took photos to make others happy became calmer and said that the connection to their friends and family helped relieve stress.

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OK, so can we just stop all the selfie slander? They obviously make people feel good and as long as youre not doing the absolute most to take a standout selfie, its totally fine by us.

The next time you see someone in mid-selfie, resist the urge to smirk. Instead, give em a smile. Odds are you might get one back in return.

The post Taking selfies can be linked to happiness, says study, so continue snapping away appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Sangam Prasain is Business Editor at The Kathmandu Post, covering tourism, agriculture, mountaineering, aviation, infrastructure and other economic affairs. He joined The Kathmandu Post in October 2009.
A cat that was set to tread the boards with a Russian theatre company has disappeared after escaping from his travelling basket.



The U Mosta theatre company announced the disappearance via its Facebook page, appealing for any information about the famous felines whereabouts.

Simeon, a fluffy black and white cat, was due to star in the companys production of black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh.

Missing - Simeon disappeared from his basket when he arrived in Moscow (Pictures: Facebook/U Mosta Theatre Company)

Ironically, the play - based in Northern Ireland in the 1990s - revolves around an argument over a dead cat that later turns out to be alive after all.

But Simeons debut on Thursday (September 22) looked doubtful after the company announced that he had disappeared.

MORE: People are actually bidding on a handbag made out of a DEAD CAT

MORE: Dont give the dog a bone, warns animal charity

In a post on its Facebook page, the company said: Terrible news! Our talented artist and audience favourite Simeon has vanished in mysterious circumstances - or has he defected to our rivals?.

Simeon, described by the theatre company as handsome, talented and charming, apparently disappeared from his case at Yaroslavsky Station when he arrived in Moscow.

The company called for anyone who had seen him - or spoken to him - to call them.


The International Brotherhood of Teamsters will hold its annual Womens Conference in Hollywood this week, titled Lights, Camera, Teamster Women in Action. The three-day conference, which will be attended by IBT general president James P. Hoffa  the son of the late-Jimmy Hoffa  is billed as a time to celebrate sisterhood, but in the movie business, driving big rigs is still largely the brotherhood that the unions name implies.

Were trying to get more women and people of color, said an official at Hollywood Teamsters Local 399, one of the host locals for the conference, but only 13% of the locals members are women, and that includes location managers, animal trainers and casting directors. An even lower percentage of the locals studio drivers are women.

Brita McCollough, who drives a 40-foot, three-axel cast trailer, said that she was recently told by a high-ranking Local 399 official that there are only 155 female drivers in the local, compared to more than 2,000 male drivers  a men-to-women ratio of 13-to-1.

Its a good old boys network, and discrimination against women runs rampant, she said, adding that when a woman is hired, its almost always to drive 15-passenger van. Thats the lowest-paid position, and theyre hardly ever offered to drive anything but that, she said.

The main problem, she said, is that transportation coordinators are allowed to hire whoever they want  and its usually their buddies. When I joined the local in 1993, there were over 700 women drivers, she said. Now I hardly see any women. Women who can drive semis cant buy a job. I know ten women drivers who lost their houses.

RelatedHollywood Teamster Files Assault Complaint Amid Heated Local Election

Rita Lundin, who will be representing Local 399 at the Womens Conference, which gets underway tomorrow at the Lowes Hollywood Hotel, drives wardrobes trailers and generator trucks. Ive been told Im taking a mans job, she laughs. Ive been asked what kind of panties and bra Im wearing. Turning serious, she said shes also had her vehicles vandalized and sabotaged by resentful male drivers. Ive had all kinds of horrible things done to my trucks and trailers.

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Lundin, who says she was raised by cowboys, started out in the business as a horse wrangler, but now makes a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year driving big trucks and operating generators, but adds: Thats because Im ornery.

Transportation coordinators, she said, are always going to ask for men drivers first, and then theyre always going to put the women in the van. And who wants to drive a van? I know I dont. Women drivers, she said, need to be tougher and not be intimidated by the men. And the local should be aware that all the women are being put in vans.

Employment opportunities for women movie drivers are even more scarce in Chicago and New York. The movie division of Teamsters Local 727 in Chicago has never placed a single female on its roster of drivers, and sources say that there are few, if any, female movie drivers at Teamsters Local 817 in New York City.

RelatedLack Of Female Directors Isnt Just An American Problem: Canada Is No Exception  Report

Controlled by three generations of men from the same family, the Chicago locals movie division has an ironclad policy against referring women, according to a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in a recent sex discrimination case there. The court found that some 250-300 drivers belong to the Chicago locals movie/trade show division, but apparently, in its 70-year history, the division has never referred a female driver to any of the movie or television production companies that hire drivers.

Just last month, the Chicago local admitted in court filings that transportation coordinators have not hired women to do bargaining unit work in its movie/trade show division since June of 2008, when the local assumed the movie jurisdiction of Chicago Teamsters Local 714, which Hoffa had placed into trusteeship for, among other things, job favoritism. Prior to that, and dating back to the 1940s, Local 714 had never placed a female on its roster of movie drivers.

Above are the leaders of Local 727. Thats the unions boss, secretary-treasurer John T. Coli in the middle; his son, president John Coli Jr. (third from the left), and the elder Colis brother, recording secretary William Coli (second from the right). They inherited the local from their father, reputed mobster and longtime Local 727 honcho, Eco James Coli, now deceased.

Sources say that Teamsters Local 817 in New York City isnt much better, with few, if any, women drivers on its movie division roster, although that could not be confirmed because the local steadfastly refused to answer any questions. Seen below are 13 men from the locals movie division standing in front of a large production vehicle.

New Mexico Teamsters Local 492 may hold the record for the highest percentage of female movie drivers  21%. Trey White, the locals recording-secretary, said that 64 of the locals 305 movie drivers are women.

At Teamsters Local 270 in New Orleans, fewer than 10% of the movie drivers are women. Stephen Sorrell, the locals secretary-treasurer, said that six or seven of the locals 80 members who work as drivers on movies are women, and most of them are van drivers. We dont discriminate against women, he said. If theyre qualified to do it, Ill give them a shot.

RelatedHollywood Teamsters Boss Warns Drivers About Rise In On-Set Fistfights  Really

San Francisco Teamsters Local 2786 has about 50 members who drive movie trucks, of which 10 are women, according to the locals business agent. Only one of the 18 members on its A List of senior drivers is a woman, however.

Deadline reached out to Teamster locals in Boston, Atlanta and Miami, but got no response, and the IBT said it doesnt keep records on the gender of movie drivers. Until it does, the full extent of the gender-gap in this traditionally male-dominated sector of the industry wont be fully known, although it is clearly very wide.

The IBTs website notes that it has always stood as a bastion of hope for all working people, regardless of gender, race or creed. Founded in 1903, when women couldnt vote, the union, which recently endorsed a woman for President of the United States, certainly does have a proud history of fighting for the rights of working men and women. So perhaps as a first step toward becoming more inclusive, the union might start gathering statistics, as do the DGA and the WGA, on the employment of women in the film and TV industry  and then consider adopting a less gender-exclusive name: maybe something like the International Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Teamsters.

Related stories

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Threats Of Violence Mar Hollywood Teamsters Local 399 Election

Head Of Boston Film Office Suspended After Extortion Indictment
In 2013, Jessica Heeringa, 25, was getting ready to close up the western Michigan gas station where she worked the night shift alone. She hasn't been seen since.



Her case went unsolved until Tuesday, when officials in Michigan announced that they had arrested Jeffrey Willis, 46, on charges of murder and kidnapping in connection with Heeringa's disappearance.



They still have not found her body, police said.



Willis was already being held on charges he allegedly murdered 36-year-old jogger Rebekah Bletsch and attempting to kidnap a 16-year-old girl whose name authorities have not revealed because she's a minor.



"In my opinion, we found Jessicaas killer," Muskegon County Prosecutor DJ Hilson said at a press conference on Tuesday.



"This individual, Mr. Willis, is a monster," Hilson told reporters. "What his total motivation was  thatas only for him to say. Ultimately, I think, this was part of who he was as a person."



If convicted, Willis faces life in prison without parole.





Teen Who Jumped Out of Moving Vehicle to Escape Alleged Kidnapping Led to Arrest in Two Murder Cases| Crime & Courts, Murder, True Crime





A Break in Two Cases

Authorities got a break in two murder cases  Heeringa's and Bletsch's  after a teenage girl allegedly escaped from a moving minivan in April in rural Muskegon County and identified Willis in a photo lineup, say authorities. According to MLive.com, the girl said she jumped from the van after her captor allegedly started to pull a gun on her.



Willis was arrested for the alleged attempted abduction of the 16-year-old girl in May. While investigating the attempted abduction, police searched his home in Norton Shores and his 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan. Inside the minivan, investigators allegedly found a gun, handcuffs, chains, rope, syringes, a mask, rubber gloves photographs of women who had been bound and chained, according to authorities.



He was charged then with the 2014 murder of Bletsch, who was shot in the head while jogging. MLive.com reports that the evidence in Bletsch's homicide included a ballistics match between bullets removed from her body and a handgun allegedly taken from Willis's van.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



Hilson praised the teen who escaped Willis's van. "I consider that young lady a hero," he said. "Her bravery and her willingness to really put her life on the line that fateful early morning has opened the doors to a lot of different things."



Hilson announced Tuesday that Willis's cousin, Kevin Bluhm, 47, was charged with accessory after the fact to a felony, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.



On Tuesday afternoon, Willis and Bluhm were arraigned before 60th District Chief Judge Raymond Kostrzewa. Willis's lawyer, Paula Baker Mathes, entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. Mathes did not immediately return PEOPLE's calls for comment.



The judge denied a bond for Willis. He set bond for Bluhm at $250,000 cash.





'Agony and Anguish'

Heeringa most likely died 24 to 48 hours after her abduction, Hilson told reporters.



Hilson, who met with Heeringaas family Tuesday morning, told reporters that they have endured "agony and anguish" over the past three years.



The Norton Shores police chief, Jon Gale, said the charges are "one step towards justice," but he added that he won't be satisfied until Heeringa's body is found and returned to her family.
By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas gave notice on Wednesday that it was withdrawing from participating in the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement's program, citing security concerns after failing in federal court to halt the inflow of Syrian refugees into the state.

The Texas State Refugee Coordinator sent a letter to the agency, giving 120 days notice of its intention to withdraw, charging the program was riddled with problems that present security risks, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement said in a statement its services to help integrate newcomers into U.S. society are only provided after they complete stringent U.S. security screenings.

"Despite multiple requests by the State of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people," Abbott said in a statement.

Texas, a bellwether state for conservative policies, has seen other Republican-led states follow its lead in challenging the Obama administration's refugee resettlement plans in and out of the courts.

"The security vetting for this population - the most vulnerable of individuals - is extraordinarily thorough and comprehensive," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a joint, five-page letter to Abbott in November which outlined the process.

Since Jan. 1, 2011, there have been 1,104 Syrian refugees resettled in Texas, according to the U.S. State Department-affiliated Refugee Processing Center. That is less than the 1,610 people resettled in California and the 1,515 sent to Michigan.

A Texas withdraw is not expected to impair the work of private relief groups from resettling refugees in the state.

The Obama administration said on Aug. 29 it would meet its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees during the current fiscal year a month ahead of schedule and was working with Congress to increase the target by a few thousand during 2017.

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U.S. admission of Syrian refugees has been a hot button issue in the 2016 presidential race.

The civil war in Syria has led to a flood of refugees. The United States has offered refuge to far fewer than many of its allies. Germany has taken in over a million refugees from Syria, North Africa and Asia in the last year, while Canada admitted nearly 30,000 between November last year and May 1.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Daniel Bases)
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt wont miss their nickname. (Photo: Kurt Krieger/Corbis via Getty Images)

Ever since the days when Ben Affleck and J.Lo first got together and fans affectionately dubbed them Bennifer, the practice of bestowing hilarious monikers on celebrity couples has become a standard part of pop culture. (In fact, celeb relationship nicknames date back even earlier  remember when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz dubbed their television production company in the 1950s Desilu?) It wasnt long after Affleck and Lopez hooked up that Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah Winfreys couch while declaring his love for Katie Holmes, and TomKat appeared on the scene. So when two of the biggest names in Hollywood, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, pledged their romantic allegiance to each other, it was only fitting that they would forego their individual identities and become forever linked as Brangelina.

It all started in 2004 when Pitt (who was married to Jennifer Aniston at the time) and Jolie worked together on the steamy set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Rumors swirled that the two had become romantically involved, and a year later, Pitt and Aniston split. From that moment on, Pitt and Jolie were unstoppable  until they announced their divorce today. Like many relationships in the public eye, the powerful duo had been given their own shiny nickname, Brangelina, a label that was rumored to have been bestowed on them by People magazine back in 2005.

Fans hopped on board so quickly that the term became universally recognized long before it was even confirmed that the two A-listers were shacking up. A few months after the birth of Brangelina, TMZ launched. Celebrity gossip hit an all-time high, and Pitt and Jolie became media perennials as the world watched their every move. And with that, #Brangelina became a regularly trending hashtag.

Related: Tips for Coping With the Brangelina Divorce

Although the world quickly rallied around the name Brangelina, the famous duo reportedly were not fans of their nickname. While Jolie was making her directorial debut on Budapest, which was filming in Hungary, Pitt swung by the set to provide moral support. It wasnt long before he overheard the crew referring to him and his wife as Brangelina. Apparently, the mere mention of the nickname was enough to make him visibly upset. Jolie didnt like it either but opted to brush it off playfully. The actress  who typically introduces herself as Angie  was overheard saying, We dont use that. It just sounds like a breakfast cereal.

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While the couple didnt embrace Brangelina, according to the Sun, they did have their own special pet names for one another. Pitt reportedly referred to Jolie as Kitty, while she showed her affection toward him by calling him Miffy. A source revealed to the paper that these were also the pseudonyms the couple used when they checked into hotels.

Naturally, Pitt and Jolies six kids also have cutesy nicknames. During an interview with BBC Radio 4, Jolie divulged that the family refers to Maddox as Mad, Zahara as Z, and Shiloh is Shi.

But back to Brangelina  with the news of their split, fans are not only mourning Pitt and Jolies relationship but the loss of their favorite celebrity couple name as well.

According to a 2014 poll conducted by Us Weekly, Brangelina is the most popular celeb couple nickname of all time. Forty-six percent of voters deemed it their favorite, with 25 percent voting for Bennifer, and 21 percent for TomKat.

Now, just as the duo has uncoupled, so will their identity. The announcement brought longtime Brangelina supporter Perez Hilton to tears. And fans around the globe are throwing a massive fit about having to say goodbye to Brangelina.

Can you believe that Brangelina are going to just be Brad and Angelina again?  april lavalle (@imatoofbrush) September 20, 2016

Prayers go out to the victims of #Brangelina  Geoff Kinns (@geoffkinns) September 20, 2016

Rest in peace, Brangelina.
(Facebook/Breastfeeding Mama Talk)

Earlier this week, popular breastfeeding support Facebook group Breastfeeding Mama Talk posted this picture of a mom breastfeeding. Not so strange, right? But after reading the caption on the image, the photo quickly went viral, with many commenters voicing their distaste.

In some weird chain of events today I ended up breast feeding my sisters son while she was away, because he would not take the bottle his momma pumped him, reads the caption on the post. In return because my son wont latch and is strictly fed bottles I pump, my sister was able to feed my son her perfectly good pumped milk. Which made for two very happy and content babies.

Thats right, this is actually a picture of a woman breastfeeding her sisters kid.

While the Facebook group prides itself on being, a peaceful parenting page for mommies all over the world to get support, education and advice in breastfeeding and their mommy journey, that support quickly went sour when other moms realized that this was a case of wet nursing.

My boobs and milk are for my children only and I wouldnt feel comfortable seeing another woman feed my child either, wrote one commenter.

Another addressed the safety of such a practice saying, I dont know if I could let another mom breastfeed my child because I dont 100 per cent trust anyone elses blood.

Lets keep in mind these two are sisters.

Page moderator Kristy Kemp quickly stepped in, blocking a number of commenters with unsupportive and hurtful things to say. Some users were even banned from the group.

Doris has been banned, Kemp writes after a user reported abuse for posting her own picture in solidarity with the sisters. Everyone is welcome to post breastfeeding pictures here and anywhere.

The La Leche League (LLL) of Canada, a supporter of human milk for babies points out that mothers in many cultures have been informally sharing breast milk since the beginning of time. In Canada, there are currently four human milk banks operating out of Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. While Health Canada and the Canadian Paediatric Society dont officially support the use of donor human milk (DHM), they do recognize that there are reasons a mother may require DHM and recommend Canadians speak to their health care professional before seeking an alternative source for breast milk.

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As for Kemp, shes most disappointed by the reaction to the photo.

Im not sure where on the post opinions were asked for, she writes in the comments. Wet nursing is supported and encouraged here just like any other form of breastfeeding.

Kemp plans to air a live Facebook video on Sept. 21 to discuss the photo and the reactions in greater detail.

I find it disturbing all the misinformation there is about wet-nursing, she says. Moms get flak over breastfeeding their own child and apparently its ten times worse when its someone elses child. If all parties involved are consenting, no one should have a damn thing to say about it. Its as if people cannot comprehend it.

Let me dumb it down for you. Woman have breast. Breast make milk. Baby need milk. Woman feed milk to baby. Baby happy & healthy. The End.

What do you think about wet nursing? Share your thoughts with us by tweeting to @YahooStyleCA.




Day 1 The couple arrived in style in Ottawa on June 30, 2011, for their nine-day tour of the country. (Photo by Central Image Agency/FilmMagic)

The British are coming!

On Saturday, Sept. 24, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, along with the adorable Prince George and Princess Charlotte, will touch down in Victoria, B.C. for a week-long trip to Canada.

ALSO SEE: Invitation accepted! The Cambridges to tour Canada  and we couldnt be more excited!

Its been just over five years since Will and Kate last set foot on Canadian soil. In July 2011, they embarked on a nine-day tour of the country  their first as a married couple.

In honour of their upcoming trip, we decided to take a look back at their last one. Scroll through the gallery below to see our favourite photos, and let us know what you think about the royals visiting Canada for the second time by tweeting @YahooStyleCA.
IBN to sign Rs8b waste management contract

Investment Board Nepal (IBN) has prepared a draft of the project development agreement (PDA) it plans to sign with two companies that have been approved to manage solid waste in the Kathmandu Valley.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actress Angelina Jolie has filed for a divorce from actor Brad Pitt after 12 years together including two years of marriage, the end for one of Hollywood's most glamorous and powerful couples. Below is a timeline of key moments in the A-list couple's relationship over the years: - January 2005: Brad Pitt and "Friends" star Jennifer Aniston separate amid rumors that he and Jolie had an affair while filming the upcoming spy action thriller "Mr and Mrs Smith." Neither party confirmed the rumors. - April 2005: Photos appear in media of Pitt with Jolie and her adopted Cambodian son Maddox, vacationing together in Kenya. - January 2006: Representatives for Jolie and Pitt confirm to People magazine the actress is pregnant with Pitt's child, the first time the couple acknowledge their relationship publicly. A Los Angeles judge grants Jolie's request for Pitt to become the adoptive father of Maddox and daughter Zahara, changing their last names to Jolie-Pitt. - May 2006: The couple's first biological child, a girl named Shiloh Nouvel, is born in Namibia. - July 2008: Jolie gives birth to the couple's twins Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon in southern France. - September 2011: Pitt appeared on Ellen DeGeneres' show while promoting "Moneyball" to discuss marriage plans with Jolie. "I've said that we would not be getting married until everyone in this country had the right to get married," he said. - April 2012: Jolie and Pitt announce their engagement after she is spotted wearing a large diamond ring designed by Pitt. - May 2013: Jolie reveals in a New York Times op-ed that she underwent a double mastectomy after learning she had inherited a high risk of breast cancer. She said she made the decision in part to reassure her children that she would not die young from cancer, as her own mother Marcheline Bertrand did at age 56 in 2007. - August 2014: Jolie and Pitt quietly marry in a small ceremony at their Chateau Miraval estate in France. All six children took part and Jolie wore an Atelier Versace white dress featuring colorful designs drawn by her children. - November 2015: Jolie and Pitt appear at the premiere of "By The Sea," a drama directed and written by Jolie in which they play a married couple drifting apart. - September 2016: Jolie files for divorce from Pitt in Los Angeles court, citing irreconcilable differences and requesting sole physical custody of the children. Pitt responded with a statement to People magazine saying he was "very saddened." (Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
Beleaguered media conglomerate Viacom has had to contend with ratings declines, executive defections and months of corporate infighting among its leaders and top shareholders. Now the company faces a new hurdle: The executive who many had expected would seize its reins is instead stepping down.

The New York owner of MTV, Nickelodeon and the Paramount movie studio said Wednesday that Tom Dooley, a longtime senior executive who has served in recent weeks as the companys interim CEO, will leave on November 15. Dooley took up the post after Philippe Dauman stepped down as Viacoms leader at the end of the summer following a bruising legal standoff with the companys controlling Redstone family. Viacom also said it would suspend any thought of seeking a minority investor for Paramount and cut its dividend in half.

The maneuvers indicate Viacom faces continued headwinds and could leave investors grasping to understand how the company intends to move forward  it could even suggest Viacoms operating struggles are more severe than most people suspected. Dooley has been involved with the company since 1980, serving in a number of senior executive positions and rising to the chief operating office position in 2010. There were some signals that Dooley, who has strong ties to the Wall Street and technology communities, might remain in place on a more permanent basis.My understanding in talking to people is he didnt want to stay on, said Sal Muoio, an investor who holds 230,000 shares across Viacoms two classes of stock.

While this was a difficult decision for me, I have great admiration for our new board and I feel that they will be best able to execute on their vision for the company in the hands of a new President and CEO, Dooley said in a prepared statement. I am certain that the board will make the most of the companys extraordinary potential. Dooley volunteered to step down, according to a person familiar with the situation, believing Viacom needed a different leader.

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The sale of a stake in Paramount had been a major initiative of Daumans and one opposed by Sumner Redstone, the ailing billionaire whose family maintains a controlling position in Viacom through the National Amusements movie-exhibition chain. Having prevailed against Dauman, Shari Redstone, Sumners daughter, has been making her mark on the company, introducing a series of new board members as she tries to bolster Viacoms flagging share price.

Viacom has been hit hard by the migration of younger viewers away from pay-television platforms to digital and streaming services. That shift has caused ratings and advertising headaches for the company. At the same time, the 93-year old Sumner Redstones health has flagged, as the media pioneer has found himself entangled in a series of lawsuits with deposed board members, Dauman, and Manuella Herzer, a former romantic partner, that have raised questions about his mental competence.

Viacom said the cut in its dividend, to 20 cents per share, arose out of a need to maintain liquidity. It also reduced its guidance for the upcoming quarter due to a $115 million impairment charge related to an unreleased Paramount film.

While there is more work to do, the actions announced today are an important first step towards realizing the value of Viacoms exceptional assets and positioning the company for the future, Shari Redstone said in a statement.

Viacoms board of directors is likely to start a comprehensive search for a replacement, the person familiar with the situation said, and consider both external and internal candidates. Among Viacoms senior operating executives are Bob Bakish, head of the companys international operations; Doug Herzog, who oversees the companys music and entertainment networks; and Cyma Zarghami, who leads its kids and family-oriented networks. This person suggested the board saw opportunity in Viacoms overseas and digital assets. You want someone who creative people can thrive under, said Muoio.

The news is likely to spur speculation about whether board members and the Redstones have lined up a new leader, and could revive Wall Street chatter about combining Viacom with CBS Corp, another Redstone-controlled media company. CBS and Viacom merged just before 2000, then broke up in 2006. At a time when media companies have come under pressure to consider gaining scale to match the leverage of distributors like Comcast and Charter Communications, some think a Viacom pairing with CBS could make long-term sense. On the other hand, Viacoms operating woes are severe enough that CBS management may not believe a tie-up would be in the best interest of shareholders.

If thats the case, Viacoms ultimate direction seems about as discernible as its next chief executive. What we are being given are headlines, but we really dont have the full position on strategic direction, management direction, said Muoio. And so, there are a lot of question marks right now.

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New Viacom Board Faces Huge Questions in Budget Meetings This Week
While hes exercising filmmaking muscles mighty spry for a 90-year-old, no one will mistake Andrzej Wajdas latest feature for an expression of joie de vivre: Afterimage is a somber portrait of a Polish artist who, unlike his portraitist here, was defeated by the fickle shifts of political ideology imposed on art. This respectable if somewhat monotonous drama wont be an easy sell to offshore audiences for whom avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski is hardly a household name, as it references his defining triumphs just in passing, focusing instead on bleak later years when he was persecuted for failing to tow the Party aesthetic line. The result is another significant chapter in Polish history from Wajda, albeit one unlikely to travel as widely as some of his past subjects.

When we meet the Soviet-trained avant-garde painter (played by Boguslaw Linda) here, hes already in autumn glory of a celebrated career: Admired by colleagues, worshipped by his students at the School of Visual Arts in Lodz. Hes rightly regarded as a leader in the Constructivist movement that dominated revolutionary art of the 1920s, as well as a crusading advocate for modern art within Poland. After losing both an arm and a leg in WWI military service, his WWII deprivations were comparatively minor  though by 1948, when Afterimage begins, his marriage with ill-fated sculptress Katarzyna Kobro had become another kind of casualty.

Yet even he is not too illustrious to be spared the petty-minded, punitive policy changes that rain down from on high in this late Stalinist period. Refusing to renounce abstract imagery despite the new official demand for only Socialist Realist art that enthuses the masses  a wellspring for so much propagandic Soviet kitsch, in every medium  he finds himself first stripped of position at the school hed cofounded. Then his works (including the famous, futurist Neo-Plastic Room at the Lodz Museum of Art) are withdrawn from public view or destroyed outright. Finally bureaucracy strips him even of the ability to make a living as a sign-painter, buy art supplies, and collect food stamps. Hes virtually driven into a starving paupers grave by the government that had lauded him.

Its a bitter tale of injustice, certainly, but Afterimage could have been more powerful, not to mention more engaging, with a less limited scope. Though Strzeminski often discusses his influential theories of art, these are rather dry stuff without illustration of how he put them into practice  and we dont see nearly enough of his work here. (When the final credits arrive, their background design of boldly colored abstracts based on his canvases is startling, but too-little-too-late.) As portrayed by Wajda, veteran scenarist Andrzej Mularczyk and their almost equally historied star Linda, the subject is a stubborn yet passive figure. Hes so single-mindedly focused on his craft that he refuses to waste energy protesting the abuses he endures, even when theyre quite literally killing him.

This may be true to the historical record, but it doesnt make for very compelling drama. Nor is there much interest in the human relationships our protagonist absent-mindedly tolerates from the young daughter (Bronislawa Zamachowska) he neglects, or the adoring student (Zofia Wichlacz) whose puppy love he shrugs off, among others. These characters tend to hit the same note over and over, bouncing off a central figure that only muffles their impact with his own emotional tone-deafness towards everything but art.

All too faithfully reproducing the dull grey palette of a repressive era  Strzeminskis penchant for vivid color barely factors  Afterimage is an accomplished dirge whose downfall chronicle marches with unvarying step toward death. While this grim story is one worth telling, its a pity that in relating the bums-rush Strzeminski got in later life, Wadja couldnt have communicated more of what sustains his legacy as a great artist and innovator.

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In late December 2012, 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh was beaten and gang-raped by six men aboard a moving bus in New Dehli, eventually succumbing from her injuries two days later. The incident shook the conscience of a nation, sparking widespread protests across India and a broader conversation about public safety and a culture that foments vicious misogyny. Last year, the acclaimed documentary Indias Daughter offered a comprehensive overview of the assault and its aftermath, and now Deepa Mehtas semi-experimental feature Anatomy of Violence imagines scenes that werent part of the public record. Using improvisational techniques, Mehta dramatizes the backstories of the rapists and their victim, but 96 minutes isnt nearly long enough to place the crime in a credible social context. Despite a heightened awareness of rape culture and its tragic consequences, her catastrophically misjudged film will struggle to add to the discussion.

Sacrificing the visual splendor of her Elements trilogy (Fire, Earth, Water) and her Salman Rushdie adaptation, Midnights Children, for a more urgent, stripped-down aesthetic, Mehta and her cast set about imagining the unimaginable. Without forgiving the men for the crimes (the narrator often throws in a derogatory noun to describe them), Anatomy of Violence strongly indicts the system that breeds them, rooting their actions in poverty, ignorance, and masculine abuse. Mehta has made a thoughtful, responsible, empathetic statement that carefully tiptoes around the cavernous pitfalls of moral relativism. A statement, however, is not easily dramatized.

Broken down into four chapters that detail the past (Lives Lived), the day of the rape (Towards Zero), the immediate consequences (Division of Spoils), and the coda (Aftermath), Anatomy of Violence gets better as it goes along, but it starts at a low place. Harnessing their performances from an improvisatory workshop, Mehtas actors, who share screenplay credit, also play themselves as children, which is the first and biggest of the films mistakes. The spectacle of five twentysomething men, four of them with beards, cowering and crying like little children is a distraction that takes away from the domestic violence that defines their upbringing. (The narrator also has to inform the audience, repeatedly, of a characters age, because there would be no other way to tell.)

Mehta dutifully stages scenes from the lives of all five men  the sixth rapist, the bus driver, does not get a backstory  but she doesnt have nearly enough time to sketch their particulars. From early childhood to young adulthood, their stories coalesce into a harmony of horror: Extreme poverty, a lack of education, petty criminality, and abusive fathers, for starters, along with indicators of misogyny, violence, and sexual deviance. Without absolving these men, Mehta makes a sincere, if regrettably crude, effort to address the social ills that account for their behavior.

Mehta also wants the humanity of the victim acknowledged, too, so the film devotes time to the luminous Janki (Janki Bisht), whose personal and professional ambitions were tragically cut short. Im proud to be a girl in India, Janki says at one point, an indicator of how much the film embraces her image as a martyred avatar of the countrys progressive hopes. As if to preserve that image, Mehta ends Jankis scenes with a freeze-frame on her face, a stylistic tic thats meant to capture a fleeting moment out of time.

Anatomy of Violence improves once it gets to the fateful day itself, though the crosscutting between a blissful Janki on a date and the busload of boozing, womanizing louts destined to pick her up edges into emotional manipulation. Mehta does have a strong sense of the group dynamic among these men, who goad each other into committing an atrocity, and shes perceptive about how the moral gravity of what theyve done doesnt register. Given the insensitive statements from some public officials in the aftermath, they had no reason to believe they were in the wrong.

At a certain point, Mehtas documentary style catches up with real broadcast footage, but not enough to justify the point-and-shoot carelessness that flattens the films visual and dramatic texture. Anatomy of Violence does what its title promises, but the bones of Mehtas argument are missing the flesh and blood of real humanity. Its only persuasive in the abstract.

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The tense, metaphysical drama Blindness finds 73-year-old Polish writer-director Ryszard Bugajski (Closed Circuit) still working at the height of his powers and revisiting some of the same themes and situations of his harrowing masterpiece Interrogation. In Blindness, he visualizes a 1962 meeting between Julia Prajs Brystygier (Maria Mamona, stellar), the sadistic head of Department V in the Stalinist-era Ministry of Information who was in charge of persecuting the clergy, and the Polish Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (Marek Kalita), a man whose 1953 arrest she facilitated. Remarkable for its ability to put viewers inside the head of its complicated protagonist, Blindness is a high quality, old-style arthouse drama that will be most appreciated offshore by older, educated viewers.

By 1962, Brystygier, one of the most infamous people in post-war Poland, has tried to remake her life. She works at a publishing house and has even written a novel. But at the age of 59, a mental crisis strikes, leaving her at a moral crossroads. Can she, born Jewish, a longtime student of philosophy, a self-proclaimed agnostic, an ardent Communist and a person who bears responsibility for some inarguably terrible deeds, find forgiveness and redemption in what life remains to her? She drives from Warsaw to a Church-run school for the blind in Gorki, where, with the help of Sister Benedicta (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska), she hopes to meet the Primate, whose past words made a deep impression on her.

While she waits for her chance of an audience with the Primate, the proud, constantly-smoking Brystygier endures humiliations, large and small. A blind priest (Bugajski stalwart Janusz Gajos), who lost his sight in prison during one of her purges of the clergy, insinuates that her desire to make penance is not sincere and implies that she remains in touch with her former superiors. Someone punctures two tires on her car. The higher-ups on the schools staff dont want to speak to her, but some of the groundsmen are spying on her every move. In a chilling scene that demonstrates Brystygiers still extant sangfroid, two police officers accost her at a bar, demand her identity papers, and leeringly feel her up while patting her down. Shes so cool that youd never know that she was carrying a gun in her purse and using one of many aliases.

As her meeting is continually postponed, thoughts, memories, and hallucinations fill Brystygiers mind. She thinks back to the time she was torturer-in-chief, abusing a young man who gave his name as Jesus Christ, burning him with lit cigarettes and beating him with a whip. She recalls leaving her only child with her mother in order to dedicate herself to her job. She understands too late that the world is not as simple as she once believed and fears to admit that the ideology she used to justify her horrific actions was based on a false premise.

With her elegant clothing, perfectly kempt hair and makeup, and her haunted looking eyes, the amazing Marmona (the directors wife) dominates every frame of the film from the very beginning. You can practically smell her Chanel No. 5 perfume. Even though viewers are privileged to experience her thoughts and visions, they, like the blind priest, must admit she remains something of a mystery. How could a woman who received a doctorate in philosophy from the U. of Lviv, who studied at the Sorbonne and even modeled for Picasso, do the terrible things that she did?

Yet another condemnation of the evils of Communism from Bugajski, his clever screenplay, which could also work as a theater piece, builds sympathy for Brystygier, particularly among those unfamiliar with her reputation, by allowing audiences to experience her present anguish and mortification. The conversations about faith are fascinating, including those that Brystygier has with Sister Benedicta, who, before the war, was a Jewish poet. Bugajski also includes a sharp critique of Polish anti-Semitism.

The films technical elements are outstanding, with cinematographer Arkadiusz Tomiaks intimate camera stealthily tracking around the characters. The period production design and costuming are spot-on, as is the unsettling score by Canadian composer Shane Harvey.

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Shot in the once utopian, now decaying Anglo-Indian community of McCluskiegunj, brittle, late 1970s-set A Death in the Gunj tells the story of a sensitive university student unraveling while on a week-long vacation with a crowd of cocksure relatives and family friends. The indie drama is perhaps of greatest interest as the feature writing-directing debut of actress Konkona Sensharma (Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Omkara, Life in a Metro), daughter of the revered actress-writer-director Aparna Sen, and will resonate most with locals and Indian expats who can appreciate the nuances related to class and family position that outsiders might not catch. After opening the Mumbai fest in October, Gunj should segue to further fest play.

Making the eight-hour drive from Cal  short for Calcutta  to the gracious home of Auntie (Tanuja Mukherjee) and Uncle (Om Puri) in the Gunj in Bihar province are their controlling son Nandu (Gulshan Devaiah), his attractive wife Bonnie (Tillotama Shome), and their whiny eight-year-old daughter Tani (Arya Sharmav). Also along for the ride are Nandus quiet nephew Shutu (Vikrant Massey), a withdrawn 19-year-old student with some secrets, and sexy minx Mimi (Kalki Koechlin, Margarita With A Straw), a friend of Bonnies with a hidden agenda.

Although it takes a little while to figure out who is related to whom and how they connect, its clear from the very beginning that Shutu is treated like a poor relation and subject to casual cruelties. Hes the one that imperious Auntie commands to run various errands, while Nandu and Bonnie apparently expect him to look after Tani at all times. Shutu himself appears more comfortable with the little girl than with the loud, teasing adults, despite his wistful glances toward Mimi, who is rekindling an affair with Nandus arrogant, hot-tempered friend Vikram (Ranvir Shorey), even though he is a newlywed.

While Shutus main secret is not revealed until later in the film, we soon learn that his father is recently deceased and he still grieves for him. His mourning gives him a peculiar outlook on death, afterlife and ghosts, which renders him vulnerable to a mean seance joke played by Nandu and Vikram that proves eerily prescient.

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For the most part, the action hurtles along at a hyperactive pace, although the film is at its best when it takes a minute to breathe and observe the characters quietly as they interact in group situations. One particularly revealing scene involves a New Years dinner to which Vikram brings his new wife Purnima (Promila Pradhan), a traditionally dressed beauty with a glorious singing voice, who is wearing the ancestral anklets gifted by Vikrams mother, the daughter of a local Nawab. As Mimi drinks in the differences that separate her from her rival, she overdoes it with alcohol, smoothing the way for a seduction she will come to regret.

Inspired by a story that her father used to tell her, Sensharmas rather superficial screenplay recreates the incident of a death in the Gunj, but fails to provide any sense of how the characters feel about their role in it  something which should have been at its core. Instead, most of the characters come off as unsympathetic and self-centered. In addition, she uses the tribal peoples of the area, the Adivasi, merely to add local color rather than to reflect any of the themes of the story.

Although Sensharma seems confident behind the camera, she directs her cast of name actors at too high a pitch. It becomes exhausting to watch their near-manic singing, dancing, and playing games. Nevertheless, veteran cinematographer Sirsha Ray makes good use of the decaying melancholy of the McCluskiegunj location to establish mood. The score by Sagar Desai is impressive but a tad overused.

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The fascination of puzzling out a compulsive fire-setters motivations keeps Pyromaniac absorbing, even if the film itself provides precious few answers in that regard. Inspired by actual events in 1978 rural Norway (the source novel here was written by a later resident of the town in question), this straightforward tale maintains interest without paying much of the expected attention to suspense or character insight. While that inevitably makes the results less than entirely satisfying, its an admirably modest, non-melodramatic enterprise from helmer Erik Skjoldbjrg, who won international attention with Insomnia and Prozac Nation.

Nineteen-year-old Dag (Trond Nilssen) has returned from a years military service to again live at home with his parents, machinist/local fire chief Ingemann (Per Frisch) and cleaning woman Alma (Liv Osa). The latter pesters him to get a real job, but Dag is content to please his father and himself by volunteering on the fire brigade, whose truck and equipment are kept in their familys barn. While thats a gig without pay, its one with excitement  frequent excitement, this summer at least, as a series of suspicious fires points toward an arsonist on the loose. While only abandoned shacks and such are torched at first, it seems only a matter of time before the perp begins targeting actual residences.

Finding it unimaginable that a local could do such things, most in the area assume this is the work of some malicious outsider. Only careworn Alma notices Dags curious behaviors, which include unexplained drives in the middle of the night and other secretive activities. Ingemann, whos grooming his son to take over the physically demanding post hes no longer quite young or hale enough to handle easily, flatly refuses to take her worries seriously. But as his problem escalates, Dag  revealed to us as the pyro early on  seems to be deliberately tempting exposure, leaving an incriminating pile of clues in his wake that the areas sheriff can scarcely ignore.

If his actions possibly constitute a cry for help, we nonetheless have zero idea just what pain Dag is expressing. Indeed, he seems quite a giddy, borderline-manic firestarter, relying on his cherubic good looks and deep local roots to render personal guilt unthinkable. Bjorn Olaf Johannessens screenplay just teases some possible explanatory psychological causes, hinting that our protagonist is considered a bit strange even by peers in this close-knit community of 800. (While never scorned outright, he notably appears to have no real friends.) But writer, director, and Nilseens performance avoid any more overt explanation to keep Dag an intriguing cipher  the towheaded boy-next-door inexplicably hiding a monster within.

Pyromaniac is abetted by strong supporting performances and a somewhat raw, docudrama-style presentation. It mightve been even more absorbing had the filmmakers found a way to incorporate (perhaps as a framing device) the real-life storys bizarre aftermath: Found mentally unfit for criminal trial after his 1978 arsonist rampage, the actual Dag who inspired this fictionalization eventually re-settled in his home community, to residents reported great unease.

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Nea chief appointment: SC issues show cause to govt

The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a show-cause notice to the government over the appointment of Kulman Ghising as Managing Director of Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA).
By Rod Nickel (Reuters) - Plunging crop and fertilizer prices may not have hit rock bottom yet, and the market's weakness makes it the right time to merge leading farm input suppliers, the chief executive officer of Agrium Inc said on Tuesday, making his pitch to skeptical investors for a $26 billion union with Potash Corp of Saskatchewan Inc. "Are we at the bottom yet? We don't know. We know there's more upside than downside," said Agrium CEO Chuck Magro, adding that fertilizer demand is growing. "This is the time in the cycle where it makes sense to do mergers and acquisitions." The all-stock deal would combine Potash's crop nutrient production capacity, the world's largest, with Agrium's farm retail network, North America's biggest. Some Agrium investors are concerned the tie-up would leave them with greater exposure to the slumping crop nutrient potash. U.S. prices of potash, urea and phosphate fertilizers sit well below five- and 10-year averages, as do corn and soybean values, Agrium and Potash said in a joint presentation at a Scotiabank investor conference in Toronto. Oversupply of the commodities has weighed down prices. The combined Canadian company would have greater financial heft to accelerate Agrium's strategy to boost its U.S. market share among farm retail providers, currently less than 20 percent, Magro said. The merged company would also look for other acquisitions to expand globally, Potash CEO Jochen Tilk said, adding the combination makes "eminent sense." The companies, who announced their deal to combine last week, released on Tuesday a more detailed breakdown of the expected $500 million in cost savings they expect to realize, including reduced purchasing costs and savings from combining fertilizer operations. U.S.-listed shares of Agrium rose 1.9 percent, with those of Potash up 0.8 percent. The deal is expected to close in mid-2017 after scrutiny by regulators, including in the United States and Canada. The companies are confident that their union does not create fertilizer pricing or competition concerns since the markets are global in nature, Tilk said. Rival U.S. fertilizer producer Mosaic Co, which would be dwarfed by the merged company, is also considering acquisition options, Chief Financial Officer Rich Mack said at the conference. The company, reported for months to be interested in Vale SA's fertilizer business, has the means to make deals if the right opportunity arises, Mack said. (Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Editing by David Gregorio)
From Good Housekeeping

To put it simply, middle school is the absolute worst. Sixth, seventh and eighth grade are nearly synonymous with every child's "awkward years," which usually consist of three grueling years of struggling with puberty, bullies and finding friends in the brutal social hierarchy that exists amongst 11-year-olds.

With all these factors working against them, many preteens and young teens likely wish middle school didn't exist - and now they have scientific research to back them up.

According to a new study published in the American Educational Research Journal, sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are bullied less, don't fight as much and do better in school when they attend K  8 schools than when they attend traditional 6  8 middle schools or 6  12 schools. They also tend to feel safer and more like they belong in K  8 schools, which researchers have attributed to their "top dog" status (versus the "bottom dog" status they hold in other school structures).

The "top dog/bottom dog" theory makes a whole lot of sense (who doesn't like feeling like the Big Kid on Campus?), and it's one that's been researched by other academics in the past, NPR reports. But this study was an absolutely massive one, following 90,000 students in more than 500 New York City schools over the course of three years. Researchers analyzed a wealth of data on each of the students, including information pulled directly from the students, themselves, via annual student surveys - and because of this, they were able to more definitively rule out other potential influences on a child's middle school experience.

For example, the researchers found that even those who transferred to a K  8 school after starting somewhere else had a better experience than those who started (and stayed) in a 6  8 school, so they could rule out being "new" to a school as a cause for student distress.

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They also had access to the students' heights and weights, and as a result, they were able to prove that being tall (and therefore better able to "blend in" with the older kids) does not positively affect a student's experience as a "bottom dog."

Ultimately, the study's authors acknowledge that there will always be a "bottom dog" in any school, regardless of how it's structured. But the three years that make up a traditional middle school career are already the toughest years for growing boys and girls.

[h/t NPR]

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A trio of new travel shows will bring TV viewers onto the decks of some of the biggest and most popular cruise ships in the world in a slate of new programming aimed at pulling back the curtain on the world of cruising and bringing aboard armchair travelers.

The world's largest leisure travel company, Carnival Corporation which owns 10 cruise brands including Carnival, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises and Costa Cruises, has created three original TV series that will air on major US networks beginning next month.

It's a clever communications and marketing strategy, perhaps inspired by The Love Boat which can be credited with first acquainting large-scale viewers to the world of cruising when it aired in the 1970 and 80s.

To inspire interest, the series will feature all of their cruise line brands which will be used as a platform for different travel stories and experiences.

Emmy award-winning TV host Jeff Corwin, for example, hosts Ocean Treks with Jeff Corwin which takes viewers on outdoor adventures at different ports of call. Activities include rappelling down cliffs, glacier landings, mountain climbing, and zip-lining through the rainforest.

The Voyager with Josh Garcia seeks out the locals in seaside ports who share their life stories, exotic foods, and history with viewers.

And Vacation Creation, hosted by In Living Color alum Tommy Davidson and YouTube star Andrea Feczko offers a hard-up family a vacation of a lifetime aboard one of their ships.

All episodes are 30-minutes long and are scheduled to air Saturday mornings.

Between the three series, there are 80 episodes that will rotate over the next 12 months.

Ocean Treks will air on ABC, Voyager on NBC and Vacation Creation on CW, beginning Oct. 1. Local air times are subject to change.
From Esquire

Donald Trump used $258,000 of his charity's money to settle lawsuits filed against his for-profit businesses and properties, according to a report from The Washington Post. Four expenditures from The Donald J. Trump Foundation appear to violate laws against "self-dealing," which prohibit the executive of a nonprofit from using charity money to benefit themselves or their private enterprises. Trump would have particularly stood to benefit because, as the Post reminds us, his charity is "funded almost entirely by other people's money."

In one example, the town of Palm Beach, Florida, fined Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club to the tune of $120,000 over "a dispute over the size of a flagpole." (Palm Beach problems.) The town eventually waived the fines under the condition the club would donate $100,000 to a veteran's charity, but of course that isn't what happened. (Trump has been reluctant to follow through on this kind of thing before.) Instead, Trump cut a check from his foundation.

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In an eerily similar scenario in New York, a Trump club was sued and Trump reached a settlement with the plaintiff where he would make a donation to a charity of the plaintiff's choice. Again, the $158,000 check that arrived was from the foundation, at little cost to Trump beyond the stamp and the envelope that got it there.

But then we get to the really classy stuff.

The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Trump used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Trump spent $10,000 of the foundation's money for a portrait of himself bought at a charity fundraiser. Or, rather, another portrait of himself. Several years earlier, Trump had used $20,000 from the Trump Foundation to buy a different, six foot-tall portrait.

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That's right: Trump's tally of Portraits of Himself Bought With Charity Money is up to two (2). To say this is perfectly representative is to gravely understate the matter. Who knows what will come down the pike next week, considering he also once bought a signed Tim Tebow helmet with nonprofit cash?

These are just the latest shady deals that Post reporter David Farenthold-who's been on Trump's finances like dust on a Cheeto for months now-has found. But the tax experts he spoke to seem to think they're the most egregious.

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"I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I've never encountered anything so brazen," said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, a nonprofit adviser at a Washington, D.C., law firm. "That's about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I've seen in a while." He also described the foundation's expenditures as "really shocking."

"You can't have a charitable foundation paying off Trump's personal obligations," said Rosemary E. Fei, another lawyer who advises nonprofits. "That would be classic self-dealing."

"The foundation wrote a check that essentially bought advertising for Trump hotels?" asked John Edie, the general counsel for the Council on Foundations. "That's not charity."

Neither the Trump campaign nor the New York attorney general's office-which has already opened an inquiry into the foundation-responded to the Post's request for comment.

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ROME  Trevor Noah will be returning to his hometown to host the sixth edition of the MTV Africa Music Awards (MAMA), which will take place Oct. 22 in Johannesburg.

The host of Comedy Centrals The Daily Show is set to conduct the live two-hour telecast of the awards ceremony inside Johannesburgs Ticketpro Dome, Viacom International Media Networks announced Wednesday.

Viacom revived the MAMA in 2014 after a three-year hiatus and retooled the awards show to broaden its appeal beyond an African audience. In the past two years the ceremony was held in Durban, South Africa, and was hosted by Marlon Wayans and Anthony Anderson.

This years MAMA, which will feature performances from African hit-makers such as Alikiba, Babes Woduma, Cassper Nyovest, Nasty C, Ycee and Yemi Alade, promises to be the biggest and the best ever, Viacom said in a statement.

Im a huge fan of African music and achievement, and its going to be a massive pleasure celebrating them both at the MTV Africa Music Awards 2016 in my own hometown of Johannesburg, Noah noted.

Trevor Noah is an outstanding entertainer and testament to the amazing talent that Africa has to offer the world, said Alex Okosi, Senior Vice President & Managing Director, Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN Africa). We are delighted that our first-ever show in Johannesburg will be presented by one of the citys most loved and admired personalities.

The MTV Africa Music Awards 2016 will air live across Africa on multi-platform network MTV Base and MTV in Africa. They will also air globally in full on partner stations and content platforms, while MTV channels around the world will be airing a one-hour MAMA-themed edition of MTV World Stage.

Past MAMA editions have trended globally, including in the U.S., on Twitter, and generated more than 1 million page views on the MTV Base website.

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- NASCAR will not penalize Martin Truex Jr. or Jimmie Johnson for failing inspection after the opening race of the playoffs.

Truex won Sunday's race at Chicagoland Speedway and Johnson finished 12th. Both cars failed the laser inspection with infractions that should have drawn 10-point penalties.

Although the infractions were similar, NASCAR executive vice president Steve O'Donnell said the penalties would not have been equal. Truex advanced into the second round of the playoffs with his victory, but Johnson's chances of advancing would have been hampered by the loss of 10 points.

O'Donnell said not penalizing either driver was the fair decision.

''If we applied those penalties, the post-race penalty really would not treat each competitor fairly,'' O'Donnell said. ''We also saw this as a potential situation that we could see repeating itself for the next nine races of the Chase going forward. So we made the decision coming out of Chicago not to penalize (Truex) or (Johnson) for the post-race infractions we saw in Chicago, which the industry would agree were minor in nature.''

NASCAR didn't budge, though, on the penalties for missing lug nuts. The crew chiefs for Aric Almirola and Greg Biffle were each penalized $10,000 for not having properly installed lug nuts at Chicago. Drew Blickensderfer (Almirola) and Brian Pattie (Biffle) were both hit with P3 penalties on NASCAR's scale.

Also, all 16 teams in the Chase will go through the laser inspection after this Sunday's race at New Hampshire. Only nine were inspected at Chicagoland.

''When we talked to the drivers and the teams shouldn't all 16 (Chase) go through there and that's a very fair point as well,'' O'Donnell said. ''Going forward that will be part of our post-race inspection as well. If we have a field of 16, all cars will go through post-race LIS and go down to 12, eight and four.''

NASCAR is trying to set defined guidelines for penalties to avoid teams manipulating the system to their advantage.

''We don't want to be talking about post-race penalties,'' O'Donnell said. ''Our goal is to never have to penalize anybody and we want to just talk about the action on the track. We felt like that this is hopefully enough of a deterrent not to have teams go there and also to be very up front as to what the consequence would be.''
From Esquire

On Tuesday, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton not once, but twice of copycatting him, because apparently, that's a real attack used in this hellfire of an election.

Clinton holding a press avail now on the tarmac pic.twitter.com/bEi0MJ1Ffh - Liz Kreutz (@ABCLiz) September 8, 2016

Trump took to Twitter this morning to claim that Hillary's not allowed to have a rally in an airport hangar because he did it first. You know, despite the fact that-to name a few examples-Dwight D. Eisenhower, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all gave speeches from similar backdrops.

Do people notice Hillary is copying my airplane rallies - she puts the plane behind her like I have been doing from the beginning. - Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2016

Then, during a rally tonight in Kenansville, North Carolina, Trump predicted that Hillary will use "his" term during next week's first presidential debate:

"Hillary is all of a sudden going to get tough. The debate comes and she'll say, 'I want strong borders.' I believe she meant the term extreme vetting. Where did you hear extreme vetting before? Only from me, because I made up the term...All of a sudden she's got 'extreme vetting' and she's got all these terms...I used the term-I made it up. Now Hillary is copying it!"

Next thing we know, Hillary will steal Trump's animal crackers during recess!

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By Dustin Volz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opposes a long-planned transition of oversight of the internet's technical management from the U.S. government to a global community of stakeholders, his campaign said in a statement on Wednesday. Congress should block the handover, scheduled to occur on Oct. 1, "or internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost," Stephen Miller, national policy director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a former presidential primary foe of Trump's who has refused to endorse the real estate developer, has led a movement in Congress to block the transition, arguing it could cede control of the internet itself to authoritarian regimes like Russia and China and threaten online freedom. Technical experts have said those claims are baseless, and that a delay will backfire by undermining U.S. credibility in future international negotiations over internet standards and security. Publicly proposed in March 2014, the transfer of oversight of the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is expected to go forward unless Congress votes to block the move. A vote to delay the transition may come as an amendment to a temporary spending bill that Congress must pass by Sept. 30 to prevent much of the federal government from shutting down. Congressional negotiators on Wednesday were working to finalize an agreement on the spending package. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supports the Obama administration's planned transition to a global community of technologists, civil society groups and internet users, according to policy positions available on her campaign website. (Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Oli accuses PM Dahal of breaching diplomatic discipline during India trip

CPN (UML) Chair KP Sharma Oli has criticised Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal for 'unnecessarily commenting on other political parties at home' during his recent India visit.
Tunis (AFP) - British energy firm Petrofac is halting work at a gas plant in Tunisia due to protests by local workers demanding improved conditions, the government in Tunis said Wednesday.

"Petrofac informed the Tunisian government that it has begun the process of leaving, including stopping worker salaries and halting technical procedures" at Chergui, in the country's southeast, government spokesman Iyed Dahmani told reporters.

"They began procedures today but if we see any chance of a solution being reached we will do all we can to get Petrofac to stay."

Contacted by AFP, the head of Petrofac in Tunisia, Imed Derouiche, said he had no immediate comment to make on the report.

Protests since the start of the year by workers demanding permanent contracts have halted work at Chergui, which accounts for 12 percent of all Tunisian gas production.

Petrofac works at the site in cooperation with Tunisia's national oil company.

The crisis has hit a programme, largely financed by Petrofac and created in the wake of Tunisia's 2011 uprising, to get unemployed graduates into work, albeit often without permanent contracts or benefits.

Tunisia is battling high unemployment and has been hit by a spate of jihadist attacks in the past 18 months but has largely escaped the widespread unrest experienced by other countries that underwent 2011's wave of popular uprisings.
Ankara (AFP) - Two Turkish opposition journalists who were handed jail sentences in a hugely-controversial espionage case earlier this year went on trial again Wednesday over alleged ties to the group accused of planning the July coup, local media reported.

Former Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Can Dundar and the newspaper's Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul were sentenced in May to five years for allegedly revealing state secrets in a story published a year earlier.

Both men are currently appealing the verdict which related to a story about Turkey allegedly smuggling arms to Syrian rebels that infuriated President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who warned Dundar he would "pay a heavy price" for it.

They were allowed to go free pending the appeal.

Dundar, who fled Turkey and is believed to live in Germany, was not present for the hearing, but his wife, Dilek Dundar, and Gul appeared at the Istanbul court to hear new charges of "knowingly and willingly" helping the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, despite not being a member, Dogan news agency reported.

The charges relate to accusations the two men received some of their information for the story from the Gulen movement.

If found guilty, they could face up to 30 years in jail.

At the hearing, the pair's lawyers called for them to be acquitted, the agency said.

The trial was adjourned until November 16.

A reclusive cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, Gulen has been accused by Ankara of running a "terrorist" organisation and ordering the failed putsch to oust Erdogan.

He has repeatedly denied the allegations.

Following the attempted coup, Turkey declared a state of emergency which remains in force.

Dundar has said he will not appear before the judiciary while there is a state of emergency, saying it would result in an unfair hearing.

He has also complained that his wife has been held "hostage" by the authorities who cancelled her passport after he left the country.
Ankara (AFP) - Turkey said Wednesday that Ankara-backed Syrian rebels would lead any operation to capture a key town held by Islamic State (IS) jihadists well inside the territory of its conflict-torn neighbour.

Turkish Defence Minister Fikri Isik denied newspaper reports that Ankara planned to send in additional infantry Turkish troops to take the IS bastion of Al-Bab, saying that Turkey had "no plans today" to do so.

In an incursion that began on August 24, Turkish special forces, tanks and artillery, backed by coalition air strikes, have supported opposition fighters against IS jihadists.

The pro-Ankara rebels captured the town of Jarabulus from IS on the first day of the offensive and have since also taken several villages around Jarabulus and neighbouring Al-Rai.

But taking Al-Bab, 30 kilometres (18 miles) from Al-Rai on the Turkish border, would be a far tougher proposition.

"Our plan right now would be for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to conduct this (operation) instead of Turkey's own infantry," Isik told reporters in the northwestern city of Eskisehir.

"We give all kinds of support to (Syrian rebels)... and we will continue to do this."

According to press reports, there are already hundreds of Turkish troops and dozens of Turkish tanks inside Syria.

Turkey refers to the pro-Ankara rebels as the FSA, although many analysts see them as a varied collection of various Syrian opposition brigades rather than a single organised force.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said before heading to the UN General Assembly in New York this week that Turkey could push further south to create a 5,000-square-kilometre (1,900 square-mile) safe zone in Syria.

A report in the Hurriyet daily had said earlier that additional Turkish infantry troops would be needed to capture Al-Bab from the jihadists.

A Turkish official told Hurriyet that it was essential that Ankara had "a comprehensive ground force" to push further into Al-Bab city.

Story continues

"Of course, operation plans include ground force elements," the official said.

Military sources also told the HaberTurk newspaper that the Al-Bab operation was slower and riskier compared with the lightning advance in Jarabulus and Al-Rai because there was a higher risk of military losses and mines had been laid by IS.

Ten Turkish soldiers have been killed since the operation began, with the latest deaths coming in an explosion on the border on Tuesday.
By Umit Bektas and Jeffrey Heller ANKARA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A man was shot and wounded by Turkish police outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara after he shouted slogans and wielded a knife on Wednesday, but initial inquiries indicated he had no links to an organized group, officials said. The man, a 41-year-old from the central city of Konya, was carrying a bag and brandishing a 30-cm (12-inch) knife as he approached the embassy, the Ankara governor's office said in a statement. He was shot in the leg after ignoring a warning from police, it said, adding he did not appear to be linked to a group. "According to initial examinations... (the man) appears mentally unstable, no criminal record or organizational links have been found." Turkey faces multiple security threats, including Islamic State militants blamed for bombings in Istanbul and elsewhere, and Kurdish militants following the resumption of a three-decade insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast last year. Police told Reuters the man shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is greatest") outside the embassy before he was shot. Police were examining his bag but had not tried to detonate it, a Reuters photographer at the scene said. The area outside was only briefly cordoned off. A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, said the attacker man was making his way toward a policeman, knife in hand, when he was shot. Embassy staff were secure throughout the incident, he added. Turkish media reports initially suggested that there had been two attackers, but the governor's office and police made no mention of a second assailant. (Additional Reporting by Ece Toksabay in Ankara and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Daren Butler/Mark Heinrich)
By Tim Hepher and Alwyn Scott

PARIS/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States has begun unblocking deals by Western giants to sell jetliners to Iran in a move likely to ease complaints from Tehran over implementation of last year's sanctions deal, but test conservative opposition to the deals in both nations.

Europe's Airbus <AIR.PA> said on Wednesday it had received U.S. Treasury approval to begin exporting jets to Iran, under a deal for more than 100 jets struck in January.

Hours later, its U.S. rival Boeing <BA.N>, which had been behind Airbus in the line for permits because its matching deal for over 100 jets came six months later, said it had received a sales license and remained in talks with IranAir. [nL2N1BX1TJ]

The U.S. Treasury confirmed issuing two licenses.

The move removes a key hurdle to one of the most high-profile deals between Iran and foreign companies since last year's agreement between Tehran and world powers to open up trade in exchange for curbs on the country's nuclear activities.

But major questions remain over the financing of deals between Iran and Western planemakers that threaten to obstruct deliveries of the planes, in what is seen as a test case for Western trade and investment following the nuclear deal.

"This sends a strong signal but it resolves only half the problem. The challenge to raise financing remains," Bertrand Grabowski, a managing director at German's DVB Bank, said.

Foreign banks are reluctant to finance the aircraft deals, fearing they could fall foul of remaining U.S. sanctions that prohibit the use of its financial system for Iranian business, something difficult to avoid in a complex global supply chain.

With U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump strongly critical of the rapprochement, some banks fear they could be left with no insurance if Iran sanctions "snap back".

The deals by Airbus and Boeing to sell or lease over 200 jets to flag carrier IranAir would help modernize and expand the country's elderly fleet, held together by smuggled or improvised parts after years of sanctions.

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But nine months after the first deal was signed, Iranian officials had voiced growing concerns about what they saw as unfair delays in obtaining U.S. licenses or clarity over banking and financing rules.

Tehran's deputy roads and urban development minister told the CAPA Iran Aviation Finance Summit in Tehran this week that failing to clear the jet sales would put Washington in "breach" of the nuclear pact.

OPPOSITION TO DEALS

Diplomats say the new jets will allow pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani to argue the sanctions deal is working, several months ahead of Iranian presidential elections in May next year.

But the deals remain strongly opposed by U.S. Republicans who say the jets could be misused for military purposes and by conservatives in Iran who oppose the country's more open stance and say the purchases will not benefit most Iranians.

As the Obama administration moved to begin allowing the sales, Republicans blasted U.S. policy toward Iran.

Paul Ryan, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said the administration bends over backwards to help Iran.

Airbus said it had been granted an initial license to supply 17 A320 or A330 jets that are slated for early delivery, and that it expected a second license for remaining jets in weeks.

An Iranian official told Reuters this week a deal for 118 Airbus jets had been trimmed by six amid regulatory delays, and that a deal to buy or lease 109 Boeing aircraft, including 80 purchased directly, had been shaved to 108.

Iran has also ordered up to 40 Franco-Italian ATR <AIR.PA> <SIFI.MI> turboprop planes needing U.S. approval.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Yeganeh Torbati, Joel Schectman; Editing by Adrian Croft, Greg Mahlich)
By Se Young Lee

SEOUL, Sept 21 (Reuters) - U.S. carrier Verizon Communications Inc has begun taking orders for Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, after having stopped sales of the device earlier due to fire-prone batteries.

Samsung has recalled about 1 million Note 7 smartphones in the United States, offering to replace or refund the flagship phones. Their susceptibility to catching fire - with more than 100 cases reported across the globe - has damaged the image of the South Korean company.

Globally, the world's top smartphone maker has recalled at least 2.5 million handsets, in a major setback for the company that is looking to claw back market share from rivals, including Apple Inc that recently released its latest iPhones.

Samsung halted new sales ahead of the recall as it prepared replacement Note 7 devices with safe batteries.

The new Note 7 phones have been approved by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission for all purchases and exchanges, Verizon said on its website, adding it has the Samsung device available for sale starting Wednesday.

The largest U.S. wireless carrier warned that initial quantities could be limited.

Samsung said in a statement on Tuesday that it had shipped more than 500,000 new Note 7s to U.S. carriers and retailers and that affected users will be able to exchange their recalled phones starting by Wednesday at the latest. The statement did not specify when new sales would start.

Rival carrier Sprint Corp's website also showed the Note 7 available for order, providing a list of stores where customers can pick up a new handset by appointment.

Samsung did not immediately comment on the U.S. sales plans.

The firm previously said it will resume new sales in South Korea starting Sept. 28 and that sales in Australia and Singapore would resume sometime in October.

(Reporting by Se Young Lee; Editing by Tony Munroe and Himani Sarkar)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leading consumer protection agency has fielded nearly 1 million complaints in a database that helped investigate client abuse at Wells Fargo, the head of the agency told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said the agency expects to reach 1 million complaints by the end of the week.

"I think (it will be) Thursday," Cordray told the Senate Banking Committee of complaints to the public database that was a tool for investigating customer abuse at Wells Fargo.

(Reporting by Patrick Rucker; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)
By David Gaffen

(Reuters) - U.S. crude oil inventories fell sharply last week, the third consecutive week of unexpected declines, while gasoline stocks decreased nationwide but posted record builds on the Gulf Coast amid the shutdown of a key pipeline, data from the Energy Information Administration showed on Wednesday.

Crude inventories (USOILC=ECI) fell 6.2 million barrels in the week to Sept. 16, compared with expectations in a Reuters poll for an increase of 3.4 million barrels.

It marked the third straight week of draws, surprising traders who expected a rebound after a 14.5 million-barrel draw in the week to Sept. 2, the biggest weekly drawdown since 1999.

U.S. crude imports (USOICI=ECI) rose last week 77,000 barrels per day.

Imports to the U.S. Gulf, however, dropped sharply to 2.9 million bpd from 3.4 million bpd the previous week, close to record low rate of 2.5 million bpd hit in the week to Sept. 2 when a Tropical Storm Hermine disrupted supplies.

Gasoline stocks (USOILG=ECI) fell 3.2 million barrels nationwide, compared with analysts' expectations for a 567,000-barrel drop.

Gulf Coast gasoline inventories, however, rose 4.8 million barrels last week, a record weekly build, to the highest level ever for this time of year at 83.7 million barrels, the EIA said, amid the shutdown of the 1.3 million barrel per day Colonial pipeline that runs from the Gulf to the East Coast.

Meanwhile, East Coast stocks posted their largest-ever weekly decline of 8.5 million barrels, slumping to the lowest level since December, 2014 at 55.5 million barrels.

"The Colonial pipeline mess is evident in the gasoline data, which showed supplies stranded in the Gulf and drawn down in the East. We will have to see if the trends normalize next week," said John Kilduff, partner at New York energy hedge fund Again Capital in New York.

Refinery crude runs (USOICR=ECI) fell 143,000 bpdas utilization rates (USOIRU=ECI) fell 0.9 percentage point to 92 percent of total capacity, EIA data showed.

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Distillate stockpiles (USOILD=ECI), which include diesel and heating oil, rose by 2.2 million barrels, versus expectations for a 250,000 barrels increase, the EIA data showed.

Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub (USOICC=ECI) rose by 526,000 barrels, EIA said.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures (CLc1) extended gains after the data. By 11:03 a.m. EDT (1503 GMT), WTI was up $1.05 cents, or 2.4 percent, at $45.10, versus a session peak of $45.49.

(Reporting By David Gaffen; additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Barani Krishnan; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Right to return home must be respected

Foreign Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat has said that rights of return to their homeland of Bhutanese refugees residing in various western countries should be respected.
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that he continued to believe there was a way forward "out of the carnage" in Syria. Speaking at a United Nations Security Council briefing on the Syrian civil war, Kerry said that to save a ceasefire deal, brokered by the United States and Russia, all aircraft must be immediately grounded. He also called on all countries to stop supporting any parties trying to sabotage the ceasefire agreement. (Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Yara Bayoumy and John Irish; editing by Grant McCool)
By Suzanne Barlyn

(Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co customers aiming to sue the bank over bogus accounts opened in their names may be in for an unpleasant surprise: the fine print requires them to take their claims to an arbitrator instead of a court.

Mandatory arbitration rules inserted into account-opening agreements prohibit customers from joining class actions or suing the third-largest U.S. bank in court. Instead, the agreements require individual, closed-door arbitration.

U.S. senators highlighted the issue on Tuesday as they grilled Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf during a hearing.

Asked if he would set aside the mandatory arbitration agreements for customers affected by the phantom accounts, Stumpf demurred.

"I'm not an expert in that," he said, adding he would talk to his legal team.

That was not enough for some lawmakers.

"If we had class action on this in 2010, 2009, 2008, the problem never would have gotten so out of hand," Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said later, when questioning regulators about the practice.

Class actions can be more affordable for unhappy customers, especially those with limited resources, because they can band together to sue, rather than having to hire lawyers individually. Consumers also complain that target companies often choose the arbitrators; proceedings are confidential; and decisions are hard to appeal.

Three Wells Fargo customers filed a lawsuit Friday in a Utah federal court, seeking class action status on behalf of hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide they say were harmed by the San Francisco-based banks fraud and recklessness.

It was unclear whether they could get around the mandatory arbitration clauses, though. Last year, Wells successfully invoked the clauses to defend against a class action suit tied to bogus accounts.

In that case, the judge said customers had to arbitrate because of agreements they signed when opening legitimate accounts at the bank.

Story continues

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a brainchild of Warren, was part of the regulatory group that negotiated a $190 million settlement from Wells Fargo over the bogus accounts.

The bureau is considering rules to ban banks, credit card issuers and other companies from forcing customers to submit to arbitration and waive their right to join class action lawsuits.

Under the proposal, companies could still use arbitration, but would have to tell consumers they could join class action lawsuits instead.

Mandating arbitration when signing up for financial products has become standard practice after a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision validated the practice.

Still, the tide may be turning, said Joseph Peiffer, a New Orleans lawyer who has represented investors and others in class action lawsuits.

"Class actions dissuade companies from ripping people off a thousand dollars here and a thousand dollars there," Peiffer said.

(Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn. Editing by Carmel Crimmins and Jonathan Stempel; Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert and Dena Aubin; Editing by David Gregorio)
U.S. defense officials believe that Russian planes were responsible for the attack on a humanitarian convoy in Aleppo on Monday.

Officials told Reuters that two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the convoy before the attack occurred.

According to the Guardian, at least 20 people, including the local director of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, were killed when 18 vehicles out of a 31-vehicle convoy were hit by an apparent airstrike by either Syrian or Russian forces.

There are only three parties that fly in Syria: the coalition, the Russians and the Syrian regime. It was not the coalition. We dont fly over Aleppo  We would leave it to the Russians and the Syrian regime to explain their actions, Captain Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesperson, said to the Guardian.

During his farewell address to the General Assembly, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, denounced the attack as sickening, savage and apparently deliberate.

The U.N. emergency-relief coordinator, Stephen OBrien, said the attacks amounted to war crimes if the convoy was deliberately targeted.

Moscow has firmly denied involvement in the attacks.

We are considering, with resentment and indignation, attempts by some foreign curators of rebel units and terrorists in Syria to put the blame for the incident on the Russian and Syrian Aerospace Forces who allegedly bombarded a relief convoy, said a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry to the TASS News Agency.

The U.N. later rolled back on claims that the convoy was targeted by an airstrike.

We are not in a position to determine whether these were in fact airstrikes. We are in a position to say that the convoy was attacked, U.N spokesperson Jens Laerke told the Guardian.

The strikes have threatened to derail peace talks and came at the end of a one-week truce brokered by U.S. and Russia that was meant to help administer aid to besieged areas.

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Reuters reported that after the attack, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss the cease-fire before joining a broader meeting of members of the Security Council, the European Union, and Middle Eastern nations to discuss the conflict which has now entered its sixth year.

The cease-fire is not dead, Kerry told media.

Not all officials are as optimistic. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters that U.S.-Russian negotiation has reached its limits.
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f217963%2ftrumpinal

LONDON  Times of great political upheaval tend to inspire great works of art.

Take, for example, Benjamin Franklin's famous political cartoon Join, or Die or the noted works by British graffiti artist Banksy.

In light of the mounting tension created by the upcoming presidential election in the U.S., a new sort of artistic political commentary seems to have burgeoned on the opposite side of the pond: Donald Trump urinals.

SEE ALSO: Dublin pub takes the piss out of Donald Trump, literally

In at least three bars across the British Isles and Ireland  I think that means we can now call it a trend  Republican presidential nominee and business mogul Donald Trump's likeness has been emblazoned on the urinal facilities.

Let us call them Trumpinals.

Raglan Road Irish Bar  Nottingham, UK

The Three Stags  London, U.K.

Calling all Mexicans! Trump can't build a wall around this urinal!#pisspoll pic.twitter.com/CqVXI1spGw  The Three Stags (@thethreestags) February 27, 2016

Adelphi Bar  Dublin, Ireland

Trump first appeared at The Three Stags alongside other Republican nominee hopefuls Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as part of a "piss poll".

Both the Adelphi and The Raglan Road followed suit, perhaps taking their lead from the results of The Three Stags' poll, which landlord Richard Bell told Mashable overwhelmingly pointed to Trump.
London (AFP) - Britain has criticised Hungary's government for a leaflet being distributed there ahead of its referendum on EU migrant quotas which indicates parts of Britain as "no-go areas" due to high numbers of immigrants.

The no-go zones map of Europe came out as a newspaper ad in Hungary several months ago. It has now been included in the 18-page pamphlet posted to millions of people ahead of the referendum next month.

"This leaflet is clearly inaccurate. There are no areas in the UK in which the laws of the UK cannot be enforced," Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in a statement.

The British embassy in Budapest has complained to the Hungarian foreign ministry about the publication.

The Hungarian government said there were around 900 "no-go areas" in Europe with large immigrant populations, including London, Paris and Berlin.

The map showed London marked with a "no-go" sign, which was also placed on five other areas in Britain.

"The so-called 'no-go' zones are areas of cities that the authorities are unable to keep under their control," the leaflet said.

Budapest has said it based the information on openly available data.

"There are no-go zones in Europe and we don't want no-go zones in Hungary," Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the BBC's Newsnight programme.

Hungary has refused to take a single migrant under the EU's plan for coping with the current crisis, and the October 2 referendum will ask voters whether they agree with Brussels mandating the relocation of refugees without the approval of national parliaments.

London was also signalled out in the Chinese national carrier Air China's in-flight magazine whose publisher earlier this month apologised for allegedly "racist" travel advice offered to passengers visiting the British capital.

The latest issue of "Wings of China" ran an article detailing safety tips to travellers based on the race and nationality of local residents.

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"London is generally a safe place to travel, however, precautions are needed when entering areas mainly populated by Indians, Pakistanis and black people," the article said in English translation below a Chinese text, according to a photograph published by CNBC.

"We advise tourists not to go out alone at night, and females always to be accompanied by another person when travelling," it added.

The Chinese version was worded slightly differently, stating that such neighbourhoods were "comparatively more chaotic" -- an adjective often used to describe dangerous areas.

The English translation prompted London MP Virendra Sharma, who emigrated from India to Britain in the 1960s, to complain to the Chinese government.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko railed against Russia at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, urging Moscow to give peace a chance in a more than two-year conflict in eastern Ukraine.

"Never since the end of the Cold War have international norms and principles been unilaterally defied on such a scale and with such brutality," he told the Assembly with rhetorical flourish.

The pro-Western leader called global instability "the biggest threat facing humanity," repeatedly taking aim at Moscow with a war between pro-Russian rebels and Kiev now in its third year.

Russia is directly involved in financing, sponsoring and coordinating "terrorist groups" in Ukraine and "armed to the teeth" around 38,000 troops operating in the east, Poroshenko said.

"Russia keeps sending weapons, ammunition and manpower to Ukraine," he said. "On a daily basis."

"Even hypocrite Soviet leaders could hardly compete with the outright lies and manipulations deployed by the Kremlin," he added, calling on Russia to "give the comprehensive settlement a chance."

"Ukraine has done a lot and will continue doing its part. Now it is time for Russia and its proxies... to start implementing their part," Poroshenko said.

"Set the captives free, stop shooting, withdraw weapons, let the OSCE carry out its mandate and watch over the Ukrainian-Russian border without hindrance, withdraw Russian weaponry as well as regular and irregular military units."

Negotiators sent by Kiev and pro-Russian rebels agreed for the first time to pull back troops from three areas along the front line in east Ukraine, OSCE envoy Martin Sajdik said Wednesday.

It marks a small step forward in Ukraine's stalled peace talks.

The conflict began after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014.

Kiev and the West accuse Russia of fueling the conflict, which has killed more than 9,640 people. Russia denies government involvement.

A peace deal brokered by Germany and France in February 2015 reduced the intensity of fighting but failed to stop it.
Minsk (AFP) - Negotiators sent by Kiev and pro-Russian rebels on Wednesday for the first time agreed to pull back troops from three areas along the battered frontline in east Ukraine.

The sides signed a framework agreement for the pullback in eastern Ukraine, said Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) envoy Martin Sajdik, who is moderating protracted peace talks between Ukraine, the rebels and Russia.

"After three months of insistent negotiations... today we finally agreed a framework document on pulling back forces and equipment," Sajdik told journalists after talks finished in Minsk.

The document represents a small step forward in Ukraine's stalled peace talks and comes several days after German and French foreign ministers made their first ever visit to the eastern conflict zone last week.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised it as "new progress" in comments to Suddeutsche Zeitung daily, adding that "other (measures) must swiftly follow to obtain separation along the entire line of conflict."

The document was signed by Ukrainian and Russian negotiators and initialled by representatives of the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk "republics" before being signed by their respective leaders, said Sajdik.

Ukraine and the rebels pledged to withdraw troops and weapons by one kilometre by each side in three "security areas": Stanytsya Luganska and Zolote in Lugansk region and Petrovske in Donetsk region, said the Ukrainian negotiator Yevgen Marchuk.

"In essence this will create a security square measuring two kilometres wide and two kilometres deep," he told journalists. "This has not happened before."

"In fact, there has not been a pullback of troops before. This is the first attempt. If it works and will be carried out by all sides as agreed then this will take us to another level."

Stanytsya Luganska is about 10 kilometres northeast, and Zolote is 55 kilometres northwest of rebel hub Lugansk. It was not immediately clear which Petrovske, a common village name, was mentioned in the document.

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Russian agencies quoted the document as saying that the pullback would only happen after both sides held fire for seven days.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine began after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014.

Kiev and the West accuse Russia of sending troops and weaponry across the porous border to fuel the conflict, which has killed over 9,640 people, but Russia denies government involvement.

The sides had agreed to a peace deal brokered by Germany and France in February 2015. The so-called Minsk accords reduced the intensity of fighting but failed to stop it.
By Andrei Makhovsky MINSK (Reuters) - Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists agreed on Wednesday to withdraw troops from three small towns on the front line in eastern Ukraine, a pilot de-escalation project that is part of the latest push to get a much-violated ceasefire to stick. Under the terms of the agreement, armed forces from both sides are banned from entering the three areas, which are four square kilometers each in size. The withdrawal must start within a month and be completed within three days. The move follows a new truce on Sept. 15 that spurred hopes for the peace process, although it failed to stem all the violence in the region. The conflict has killed over 9,600 soldiers, civilians and pro-Russian rebels since April 2014. The plan was first announced during a visit by German and French foreign ministers to Kiev last week. The withdrawal will be observed along three sections of the 480 km front line, in the small towns of Stanytsia Luhanska and Zolote in the Luhansk region and Petrovske in the Donetsk region, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed the agreement but said more work was needed. "We have had to learn that neither pronouncements of good will nor commitments about the withdrawal of weapons were sufficient to achieve a lasting ceasefire," he told the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "Additional areas (for withdrawals of troops) must be agreed soon to ensure the disengagement of forces along the entire line of confrontation." Most of the terms of the original Minsk deal, including restoring control of Ukraine's eastern borders to Kiev and holding regional elections, have yet to be implemented. "There are no guarantees even now," Steinmeier said. "If the parties to the conflict are unwilling to stick to already signed agreements, there will be no progress." While limited in geographic scope, the latest agreement is the first time the sides have committed to withdraw light arms. High-caliber weapons are already meant to have been withdrawn to secure holding areas, although the OSCE regularly reports violations on both sides. Separatist officials welcomed the deal, the separatist news website DAN reported. The document could help "shift the situation from truce to peace," DAN quoted rebel envoy Denis Pushilin as saying. (Reporting by Andrei Makhovsky; additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Berlin; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; editing by Matthias Williams, Larry King)
UMB Bank, a division of the UMB Financial Corporation UMBF, announced that it has entered into an agreement with The Bancorp Inc. TBBK to acquire a subset of the latters remaining health savings accounts (HSAs). Notably, the deal value was not disclosed and the transaction is awaiting regulatory approvals.

The divestiture by The Bancorp is in line with its plan to exit HSA business, the initiatives for which began in 2015. In Oct 2015, the company sold approximately 170,000 accounts totaling more than $400 million in deposits to HealthEquity for $34.4 million. Nonetheless, the company is expected to continue its partnerships with non-bank financial service companies in the healthcare sector, including maintaining and growing its card-issuing services for pre-tax benefit programs.

UMB Banks Rationale Behind the Acquisition

In Feb 2006, as a reaction to President Bushs recommendation of a comprehensive agenda to make health care more affordable, portable, transparent and efficient in America, UMB Healthcare Services proposed the agenda for the expansion of HSAs.

The then president of UMB Healthcare Services, Dennis Triplett said, The President proposed an agenda focused on making health care more affordable and accessible. These changes would also open the door to beneficial health care for a vast population who currently has difficulty accessing health care. The reforms the President outlined last night will further accelerate that momentum and eventually help the health care situation in America."

Currently, UMB Healthcare Services is one of the top HSA custodians in the country with 826,000 HSAs and $1.6 billion in HSA deposits and investment assets. Hence, with a view to maintain its goal of improving the healthcare sector in America and gain further market share, the bank inked the above-mentioned deal. Notably, the transaction is expected to add approximately 40,000 accounts with $76 million in deposits and investment assets to the banks portfolio.

Story continues

Conclusion

UMB Financial has the experience, systems backbone, investment options and client base in bringing an integrated solution to the health care industry. Hence, this acquisition will help in maintaining the companys ongoing commitment to its HSA business and further aid its growth and expansion.

In addition, UMB Healthcare Services is focusing on providing a seamless transition to The Bancorps account holders with its user-friendly technology and personalized customer services. Hence, the acquisition is anticipated to be beneficial to both account holders and business partners.

Currently, UMB Financial holds a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) while The Bancorp carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

Stocks Worth A Look

A couple of other favorably ranked finance stocks include Apollo Global Management, LLC APO and Meta Financial Group, Inc. CASH, both sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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Bamako (AFP) - The UN voiced concerns over Mali's shaky peace deal Wednesday following deadly clashes between groups that have signed up to the agreement.

The clashes last week -- between pro-government group GATIA (the Imghad and Allies Tuareg Self-Defence Group) and ex-rebels from the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) -- left around a dozen fighters dead around the flashpoint northeastern town of Kidal.

"These clashes, as well as constituting repeated violations of ceasefire accords, threaten the progress achieved up until now in the implementation of the peace agreement," the UN's mission in Mali, known by the acronym MINUSMA, said in a statement.

The mission expressed "serious concern over the deterioration of the security situation and over reported allegations of human rights violations" and complained the unrest was hampering the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The UN called on parties involved in the peace deal to "take immediate measures to guarantee the protection of civilians and refrain from all action that could unleash a return to hostilities".

GATIA said this week that it had pushed the CMA out of two key villages in the region -- Inekabawatane, and In Khalil, a strategic frontier settlement which sees the transit of all imports from Algeria to northern Mali.

Northern Mali fell into the hands of jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda in early 2012.

Ongoing international military intervention since January 2013 has driven Islamist fighters away from the major urban centres they had briefly controlled, but large tracts of Mali are still not controlled by domestic or foreign troops.

Analysts say tribal rivalries have led to a deterioration of the security situation in the north.
Ruling coalition ready to adopt flexibility

Hinting at the possibility of tabling a constitution amendment proposal in Parliament before the Dashain festival, the ruling coalition has said it is ready to adopt maximum flexibility to address the concerns raised by the agitating Madhesi and Janajati parties.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday warned countries that criminalize homosexuality they were "bucking the tide of history," during the first UN high-level meeting on LGBT rights.

Held on the sidelines of the General Assembly, the meeting was attended by US Vice President Joe Biden and leaders from some 20 countries defending the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people worldwide.

Ban said it was an "outrage" than hundreds are killed in anti-gay violence every year and millions "live their lives in the shadow of discrimination and disapproval."

"Several countries are bucking the tide of history with draconian new punishments for being gay -- or even just talking about being gay," he said.

"There is no room in our 21st century for discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity."

More than 70 countries worldwide still have laws on their books making homosexuality a crime.

In his remarks, Biden singled out Egypt, Russia and Uganda for anti-gay laws and where he said "arrests are on the rise".

Biden, the first high-ranking US official to endorse same-sex marriage, said ensuring the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people was "the civil rights issue of our time".

"No government, no society, no individual, no circumstance should attempt to dictate who you love," Biden told the meeting also attended by Chile's President Michelle Bachelet and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.

Almost 40 countries legally recognize same-sex couples, said Ban, who also praised Mozambique, Seychelles and Nauru for decriminalizing homosexuality this year.

"I ask those who use religious or cultural arguments to deprive LGBT people of their human rights: what do you gain by making others less equal?" Ban asked.

"Is your religion or culture so weak that the only way you can sustain it is by denying others their basic rights?"

Ban himself came under fire from many UN member-states including Russia when he decided in 2015 to extend benefits to the same-sex partners of UN employees.

In another breakthrough, the UN Human Rights Council has appointed the first-ever independent expert to report on LGBT violations worldwide.
Sept 21 (Reuters) - UnitedHealth Group Inc, the largest U.S. health insurer, will stop covering several brand-name drugs as of next year, reinforcing a trend of payers steering prescriptions to lower-priced options.

In a bulletin seeking client feedback by Sept. 28, UnitedHealth said it is changing reimbursement terms for long-acting insulins and will no longer cover Lantus, the main insulin drug sold by Sanofi SA.

The insurer said Basaglar, a cheaper biosimilar insulin sold by Eli Lilly & Co would be covered as "Tier 1," meaning the lowest out-of-pocket costs for members. Levemir, produced by Novo Nordisk A/S, will move from Tier 1 to Tier 2.

Biosimilars are cheaper copies of protein-based biotech drugs such as Lantus, which are no longer protected by patents. They cannot be precisely replicated like conventional chemical drugs but have been shown to be equivalent in terms of efficacy and side effects.

The insurer also said it will exclude from coverage Amgen Inc's white blood cell-boosting drug Neupogen, in favor of Zarxio, a biosimilar sold by Novartis AG.

UnitedHealth last year bought Catamaran Corp for $12.8 billion, making it the nation's No. 3 pharmacy benefit manager after Express Scripts Holding Co and Caremark, which is owned by CVS Health Corp.

(Reporting By Deena Beasley; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
It is aiming for more ways to boost customer engagement.

As it focuses to build more interactions with its customers, Singapore's United Overseas Bank (UOB) has taken one step further towards digital banking with the rolling out of contactless payments and contactless ATMs.

According to a report by research firm UOB Kay Hian, the bank envisions to create more interactions with its customers as digital banking focuses on front-end sale and distribution channels.

"Digital banking creates value by increasing the frequency of interactions with customers. UOB

also makes extensive use of data analytics to understand customers needs and preferences, so as to improve the quality of life for its customers," the report explained.

UOB was the first to roll out contactless payment using Android-based smartphones in the Asia Pacific region with the launch of UOB Mighty.

"To make payments at retail outlets, customers simply have to launch the UOB Mighty app, click the pay function, select the desired credit or debit card, enter the PIN and tap on the NFC-enabled contactless payment terminal using their smartphones," it noted.

With the app, customers may also perform daily banking transactions, pay bills, and transfer funds.

More so, the report pointed out that the bank is also the first in the world to offer instant issuance of digital credit cards through

smartphones. Customers are able to apply and receive digital credit cards in minutes.

In the coming months, UOB will also launch the first NFC-enabled contactless ATMs in Southeast Asia.

With the technology, customers will be able to use ATMs with just a tap using their mobile devices, scanning their their thumbprint and keying in their pin.

The report mentioned that there will be 60 contactless ATMs by January 2017. Eventually, all current ATMs will be replaced by new contactless ATMs by December 2018.





More From Singapore Business Review


An American strategic bomber landed in South Korea on Wednesday in a show of force the US said was aimed at reminding Pyongyang of its powerful military assets in the region.

The move comes a day after North Korea claimed it had successfully tested a new, high-powered rocket engine which the South said was designed to demonstrate progress towards attaining a long-range missile.

Television footage showed two supersonic B-1B Lancers flying low over the US Osan Air Base at Pyeongtaek, 64 kilometres (40 miles) south of Seoul.

One of the aircraft flew back to the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, while the other landed at Osan, Yonhap news agency said.

"The bond between the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is ironclad and the strength of that commitment will not be shaken by North Korea's aggressive behaviour," said Lieutenant General Thomas W. Bergeson of the US Air Force.

"What we are showing today is just one tool we have to choose from a wide array of options. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region," he said.

The US flew two planes over South Korea last week, days after the North's fifth nuclear test, but they returned swiftly to Guam.

Critics dismissed the move as cursory in the light of an apparent quickening in the pace of North Korea's nuclear and missile testing programme.

It was not clear how long the Lancer that landed at Osan would stay.

South Korea is home to around 28,500 US troops and numerous bases.

The B-1 Lancer is a four-engine strategic bomber that can reach speeds of Mach 2.

It is capable of carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the US Air Force inventory.

"It can rapidly deliver massive quantities of precision and non-precision weapons against any adversary, anywhere in the world, at any time," US Forces Korea said in a press statement.
Chicago (AFP) - An American soldier and his cousin were sentenced to jail terms of up to 30 years over a plot to attack a suburban Chicago military base and cause mass fatalities.

The men pleaded guilty in December 2015 to conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State group.

Hasan Edmonds, 24, was a soldier in the US Army National Guard when he began communicating online in January with an FBI agent pretending to be an Islamic State fighter in Libya.

Edmonds admitted to giving the purported militant advice on "how to fight and defeat the US military," the plea agreement said. He said he and his cousin Jonas were ready to conduct an attack in the United States.

Edmonds and his cousin began meeting with another undercover agent in March who pretended to help Edmonds plan a trip to Mosul, Iraq to join the Islamic State group.

They also discussed a plan for Jonas Edmonds, 31, to use his cousin's military uniforms to attack the base in Joliet, Illinois where Hasan Edmonds was assigned.

Jonas said he wanted the undercover agent to help him achieve a "body count" of 100 to 150 people.

In Tuesday's sentencing by US District Judge John Lee, the younger Edmonds drew a prison term of 30 years while the elder got 21 years.

Both men are US citizens.
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about the series premiere of the NBC dramedy series This Is Us.

Dan Fogelmans This Is Us has been tugging at heartstrings ever since the first trailer was released in May, amassing a staggering more than 100 million views ahead of the shows September debut. The dramedys official description: an ensemble  some of them sharing the same birthday  whose life stories intertwine in curious ways, was designed to protect the twist at the end of the premiere. Much like the reveal at the end of the pilot for Modern Family that the characters in the individual storylines are all related, This Is Us connected married couple Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), who were expecting triplets, TV actor Kevin (Justin Hartley), his twin sister Kate (Chrissy Metz), and successful businessman Randall (newly minted Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown), who was looking for his birth father. It turned out that Randall is an adopted brother to Kevin and Kate. Whats more, Rebecca and Jack are the trios parents as they take home the abandoned newborn Randall after one of their triplets dies in childbirth performed by a wise substitute doctor played by Gerald McRaney. In an interview with Deadline, Fogelman talks about the twist, how the multiple-timeframe stories will evolve and intersect, the enormous success of the trailer and more McRaney.

DEADLINE: What was your inspiration for the show and the twist at the end of the pilot?

FOGELMAN: Inspiration for the show  obvious as it sounds  was basically just people. I was in my late 30s and thinking about how many friends I had, all roughly the same age, and how wildly different our lives were. Some were married with kids, other single. Others were satisfied with career paths, some making big changes. Some had lost parents, some had lost friends, some were even sick themselves- and some hadnt been touched by any of that. So I wrote about people I knew, or better-looking versions of them. The twist came as I started writing, honestly. It wasnt part of the conception.

DEADLINE: What happens next? Will Katie, Kevin and Randall interact with their parents in the past or present?

FOGELMAN: Yes, structurally the show is very much the same as the pilot  we move between the lives of all these people. But now, obviously, all the people are connected. And one of those stories is the story of the parents of the other three. And that storyline moves around in time Our second episode picks up 8 years later (in that storyline). Their marriage is in a very different place, the kids are older. Our third episode returns them to the pilots time period, as theyre leaving the hospital with the babies. In the course of the first two seasons of the show, we will be unfolding the big picture story of this family and this marriage  seeing how past informs the present, etc. We even explore time before Milo and Mandy had kids. Its ambitious stuff and explaining it makes my face hurt. You kind of just have to watch and it makes sense.

DEADLINE: Is Randall estranged from his adopted siblings? He seems a lot more successful than them and did not join the birthday celebration.

FOGELMAN: They live on different coasts so there is obviously more distance between them. He stayed closer to his parents while Kevin (and Kate via Kevin) chased his Hollywood dreams. They are definitely not estranged and youll see a lot more of them together as the season moves along. There is a particularly strong rivalry/loaded stuff between Randall and Kevin (Justin Hartleys character).

FOGELMAN: Why do you think the trailer for the show resonated with so many people?

God, I have no idea. I think NBC did a wonderful job with it. With the entire campaign. And I think it might just be the right place and time for a show like this? With everything going on in the world? Or its Milos ass. Or some combination thereof.

DEADLINE: Can we get more of Gerald McRaney?

FOGELMAN: Already did our 3rd episode. Im also trying to convince him to become my primary care physician.

Related stories

NBC Bringing 'Midnight, Texas', 'Emerald City' & 'Timeless' To New York Comic-Con

'This Is Us' Opens To Strong Ratings, 'Bull' Solid As Newbies Continue To Impress

'This Is Us' & 'Pitch' Reviews: Strong Starts For Throwback Tearjerker & Forward-Leaning Fastballs
US election 2016: George HW Bush 'to vote for Clinton'

US Republican ex-President George HW Bush will vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton in November, US news website Politico reports.
New York (AFP) - US media giant Viacom announced Wednesday that it was shelving a plan to sell a stake in Paramount Pictures and that interim chief executive Tom Dooley was stepping down.

Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, MTV and other networks, said it abandoned the Paramount sale "in order to consider all options available to the company."

The move had been favored by former chief executive Philippe Dauman and opposed by Viacom vice chair Shari Redstone and her father, Summer Redstone, a component of a power struggle that engulfed the company for months.

In August, Viacom and Dauman reached an agreement in which Dauman agreed to exit the company for a reported $72 million in severance.

The August agreement also installed Dooley, who said in a Viacom statement that opting to exit was a "difficult decision."

Dooley's departure follows his recent presentation of his strategic plan to the board, "so it could be assumed that his plan was either not well received, or he did not feel he would receive the necessary support to enact it," RBC Capital said in a note.

Dooley's imminent departure "will leave investors worried about the next chapter in corporate development and if/when/how Viacom can make a meaningful turnaround," RBC said.

It added that the absence of a chief executive will fuel talk that the company could merge with CBS, in which Summer Redstone also holds a large stake.

Viacom gave no details about a successor to Dooley beyond saying that he agreed to stay through November 15 to "facilitate an orderly transition."

Viacom meanwhile also cut its dividend in half to 20 cents per share and slashed its fourth-quarter earnings forecast to 65-70 cents per share, below the 89 cents projected by analysts.

The cut in the earnings projection was due to a charge of $115 million related to "the expected performance of an unreleased film," Viacom said.

Shari Redstone, who has assumed a greater leadership role from her ailing 93-year-old father, said the moves were needed to better position the company.

"While there is more work to do, the actions announced today are an important first step towards realizing the value of Viacom's exceptional assets and positioning the company for the future," she said.

Shares of Viacom fell 0.6 percent in midday trade to $40.26.
HANOI (Reuters) - A court in Vietnam sentenced to death a notorious drugs kingpin and eight associates on Wednesday, delivering the maximum punishment in a single verdict over the trafficking of more than half a tonne of heroin. The case centered on Trang A Tang, a 33-year-old leader of a network that trafficked drugs from the infamous Golden Triangle area of northwestern Laos, northeastern Myanmar and northern Thailand, and distributed them in Vietnam. Tang has become well-known for his opulent lifestyle and for managing to evade justice while spending lavishly on big houses and luxury cars. The four-day trial in Bac Ninh province heard how the gang had handled 2,181 heroin "cakes", weighing 350 grams (0.77 lb) each, between 2009 and 2013. That works out to 763 kg (1,682 lb) of heroin. Ton Trong Hung, secretary of the court, said by telephone that nine members of the network had received the death penalty. Tang's wife and father were among three others jailed for life. The judge called Tang "extremely dangerous" and said he "must be permanently removed from society", state-run radio Voice of Vietnam reported on its website. Trafficking of more than 100 grams (3.5 oz) of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment in Vietnam. Vietnam in 2014 condemned 30 people to death and jailed 69 others for trafficking more than 12 tonnes of heroin in a what was the communist country's largest-ever drugs trial, so big that it had to be held outdoors. (Reporting by Mai Nguyen; Editing by Martin Petty, Robert Birsel)
By Jonathan Stempel and Nandita Bose

Sept 21 (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc must face a class-action lawsuit accusing the world's largest retailer of defrauding shareholders by concealing suspected bribery to help it expand faster in Mexico, a U.S. judge said.

In a decision on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Hickey in Fayetteville, Arkansas rejected Wal-Mart's contention that a Michigan pension fund had no standing to lead the case because it had not suffered losses on the retailer's stock.

The decision means shareholders can sue Wal-Mart and former Chief Executive Mike Duke as a group over the alleged cover-up of bribery at Wal-Mart de Mexico. This could lead to a larger payout at lower cost than if individual lawsuits were required.

Class certification "would enhance judicial economy and efficiency," given that many shareholders had small claims, and "concentrating the claims in defendants' home forum with uniform decisions is desirable," Hickey wrote.

Wal-Mart spokesman Randy Hargrove said the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer believes a class action is "not appropriate," and may appeal the certification decision.

The market value of Wal-Mart fell by roughly $17 billion over three days in April 2012, after The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning report saying the retailer paid bribes to Mexican officials for years to speed up store openings.

Shareholders said Wal-Mart knew about the scheme as early as 2005, and downplayed it even after learning about the Times' investigation.

Wal-Mart had argued that a widely-accepted accounting method prevented the lead plaintiff City of Pontiac General Employees' Retirement System from showing it lost money on Wal-Mart stock.

But the judge said the pension fund could show losses under another widely-accepted accounting method, and that Wal-Mart failed to show why its preferred method was better.

The class period runs from Dec. 8, 2011 to April 20, 2012, Hickey said.

In July, a federal appeals court upheld Hickey's April 2015 dismissal of shareholder claims against Duke, his predecessor Lee Scott, and Wal-Mart' board. A Delaware state judge dismissed similar claims by other shareholders in May.

Story continues

Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd represents the Michigan pension fund. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The case is City of Pontiac General Employees' Retirement System v. Walmart Stores Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Western District of Arkansas, No. 12-05162.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York and Nandita Bose in Chicago; Editing by Alan Crosby)
Four teens have been arrested after a disturbing photo of a clown brandishing a bloody knife was posted on Facebook with a threat to Alabama school students.

Read: Man Arrested After He Allegedly Makes False Report About Spotting a Clown

The picture was posted on a Facebook page called Flomo Klown along with messages telling school students: We want to play, See you at school, and It's going down tonight!, which featured gun emojis.

Two Alabama schools were on lockdown earlier in the week due to the threats.

On Tuesday, Geneva police arrested four juveniles in connection to the online clown prank targeting schools and students. They were charged with making terrorist threats and were removed from school temporarily. They were later released into the custody of their parents.

It's the latest in a spate of incidents across America in which creepy clowns are terrifying communities.

Earlier this month, a man in North Carolina was arrested for allegedly lying to police about clown sightings at his home.

Clown sightings have been reported in other parts of the state, including Fayetteville, Winston-Salem, High Point and Greensboro.

Clowns have also been reported trying to lure children into the woods in Greenville, South Carolina. None of the reports have been substantiated.

In Georgia this month, Bibb County sheriffs deputies responded to a call of multiple people dressed up as clowns, chasing kids at a school bus stop. The terrified children said the clowns wore full makeup and carried fake knives, along with what were described as flashlights or laser pointer-type devices.

No one was arrested in connection with the clowns in Georgia.

Now, professional clowns say the reports are deeply upsetting and hurting their business.

Read: Are Sinister Clowns Trying to Lure Kids Into Woods Near This Apartment Complex?

One clown, "Roger," told Inside Edition: It does make our job a little harder and it does make winning over audiences a bit more challenging.

Story continues

Tricia Manuel, who runs a clown school in Minnesota, says professional clowns want to make folks laugh and it's never their intent to scare people.

"It's not funny but we're left to pick up the pieces," she said.

Watch: Man Can't Explain Why He Was Pulled Over in Clown Costume

Related Articles:
Washington (AFP) - A Washington Post editorial arguing for the prosecution of intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has sparked an outcry in the media community -- including from some of the newspaper's own journalists.

The weekend editorial provoked a heated response, with some pointing out the irony that the newspaper was calling for criminal charges against a source who helped it win a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting.

The editorial board "has no say on news, and just showed why," said a tweet from Barton Gellman, the Post reporter who led the team that shared the Pulitzer with The Guardian for the reporting on global surveillance based on Snowden's leaks of National Security Agency documents.

Gellman added that Snowden's "disclosures served the public. WP journalists are proud of our role."

Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said the Post's editorial view comes as a shock to the media community even if there is a separation of the opinion and reporting units.

"It does seem to me that any news organization that is going to rely on a source and potentially imperil that source, really needs to stand by that source," Kirtley told AFP.

"I personally think Snowden should come back and face charges, but I didn't take Snowden's leaks and put them all over my newspaper."

Kirtley noted that prosecuting sources for leaks should be troubling for the world of journalism.

"It is my belief that going after sources for leaks using the Espionage Act is a prelude to going after the journalists who receive that information," she said. "It hasn't happened yet, but it is possible."

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan also broke with the editorial board, calling for Snowden to be pardoned.

"Snowden did an important -- and brave -- service for the American public," Sullivan wrote in a column Tuesday.

Story continues

"Without his decision to bring the information to journalists, it is very unlikely that we would know what we do about mass surveillance in the post-9/11 world."

- 'Ignominious feat' -

A more blunt response came from Glenn Greenwald, a member of the Guardian team that met with Snowden and now an editor at the online news site The Intercept.

"The Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in US media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source -- one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service," Greenwald wrote.

The debate comes amid increasing calls for a pardon for Snowden, who has been living in Moscow out of the reach of US law enforcement.

The Post editorial argued that not only should Snowden not be pardoned, but that he should return to face charges and argue his defense "before a jury of his peers."

The editorial acknowledged that Snowden justifiably exposed violations of law by the National Security Agency which helped lead to reforms.

But it added that Snowden also "leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations" and "disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly 'tremendous damage' to national security."

But Fortune magazine media writer Matthew Ingram said it was troubling to see the comments from the Post, which has a tradition of investigative journalism which dates back to leaks in the Watergate scandal and Pentagon Papers case.

"Attacking and undermining the source that helped the company win a Pulitzer Prize looks hypocritical at best and craven at worst, and is almost certain to make future Snowdens think twice or even three times about going to the newspaper with a leak or a classified tip," Ingram wrote.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's 12-year romance has come to a sad end.



The actress filed for divorce from Pitt on Monday after two years of marriage, multiple sources told PEOPLE. The couple later confirmed the split in separate statements.



With six shared children, high-profile health struggles and numerous glamorous outings, the pair have made headlines throughout most of their relationship.



The two met on the 2004 set of their 2005 action thriller Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Three months later, photos surfaced of Jolie and the now-52-year-old Pitt walking with her son Maddox on a beach in Africa.







He soon supported the actress' adoption of daughter Zahara  featured on PEOPLE's July 2005 cover.





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt



When Jolie, now 41, became pregnant with daughter Shiloh the next year, the couple's new clan was dubbed PEOPLE's "World's Most Beautiful Family."



After Shiloh's birth in a small African clinic in May 2006, a friend told PEOPLE that Pitt was "with Angelina in the operating room the entire time."





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt



Debuting Shiloh's photos exclusively in PEOPLE that June, the couple "couldn't be happier," a source said at the time.





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt



In 2007, Jolie adopted son Pax from a Vietnamese orphanage, just 10 months after Shiloh's birth. The next year, twins Knox and Vivienne joined the Jolie-Pitt clan. Of being a new family of eight, Jolie told PEOPLE, "It is chaos, but we are managing it and having a wonderful time."





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt





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"I couldn't imagine my life without them," Pitt told PEOPLE in 2009.





The Way They Were: A Look Back at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Past PEOPLE Covers| Breakups, Maddox Jolie-Pitt Cover, Movie News, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt





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After seven years, Pitt and Jolie finally made it official, getting engaged in 2012. Pitt's manager told PEOPLE, "It is a promise for the future and their kids are very happy."



Before they could make it down the aisle, though, Jolie faced a health scare: She discovered she had the BRCA1 gene, putting her at a higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer.









After Jolie had a preventive double mastectomy  with Pitt by her side  life soon returned to normal for the actress-director, a source told PEOPLE in a May 2013 cover story.





VIDEO: Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie's Split Has Nothing to Do With His Allied Costar Marion Cotillard, Source Says







Allied Costar Marion Cotillard, Source Says" data-ad-channel="peoplenow" data-ad-subchannel="peoplenowupclose" data-auto-play="no">



But after heartache, came joy: The couple finally wed at Chateau Miraval in France on August 23, 2014. Jolie wore a dress decorated in her children's artwork, and the children took on large roles in the ceremony.



The children will be the pair's continued focus after their split.



"What matters most now is the well-being of our kids," Pitt said in a statement, Tuesday. "I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."
US Secretary of State Kerry wishes to visit Nepal

United States (US) Secretary of State John Kerry has expressed his interest to make a visit to Nepal.
A group of senators just spent about an hour and a half grilling John Stumpf, the CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo, about 2 million unauthorized accounts that were opened under his watch and how Wells Fargo was going to make it up to customers. Stumpf's answers to many of those questions was some variation of, "We're working on it" and "Let me get back to you on that."

It's perhaps unsurprising that the members of the Senate Banking Committee appeared unsatisfied with the answers.

A quick recap: Wells Fargo was fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in early September for opening about 2 million unauthorized credit card and deposit accounts. Wells Fargo previously implemented (and touted the results of) ambitious cross-selling goals, in which a banker gets an existing customer to open additional Wells Fargo accounts. The bank incentivized cross-selling with bonuses. Those who didn't meet sales goals were written up and could ultimately lose their jobs. About 5,300 employees were fired for opening accounts and moving consumers' money to them without the knowledge or consent of the customers. That happened between 2011 and 2015  in 2013, now-retired reporter E. Scott Reckard wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times, giving the practices national exposure.

Now, in 2016, Stumpf testified that Wells Fargo has just begun the process of making affected consumers whole, including refunding customers who were charged fees on unauthorized accounts and confirming with customers that the open accounts in their names are in fact products the consumers want. Wells Fargo will also extend the investigation to see if the practices occurred in 2009 and 2010 (thus far, the probe has gone back only to 2011).

The Far Reach of Damaged Credit

But there's a lot more to making up for what happened, many of the senators pointed out. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said that opening a new account can affect a consumer's credit (true for credit accounts, not for deposit accounts), and he asked Stumpf if Wells Fargo would re-establish the credit of all the people whose credit scores were hit by these new accounts.

Story continues

Stumpf: "I've told our people to go back and make it right."

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, followed up: "How do you do that?" Stumpf's answer: "That is a very good question. We're just starting that process. I don't have enough to give you right now."

It'll likely be complicated. Tester gave the example of someone whose credit score was hurt by Wells Fargo's fraud and then applied for a mortgage with another bank  if that person qualified for a higher mortgage rate because of the credit score damage, how would Wells Fargo make up for the extra interest on that mortgage? Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., demanded a specific answer on that: "Will you pay back every extra dime that these people are going to pay over 30 years?" Stumpf said, "We've been thinking about that."

It can get even messier. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., gave the hypothetical example of someone who was charged a fee on an unauthorized account, causing them to bounce their car payment check and end up with a negative event on their credit report. Unpaid fees on a non-credit account can be sent to a debt collector, and collection accounts can seriously damage your credit standing. Untangling the mess could be quite difficult.

Much of the questioning revolved around three core issues:

How long Stumpf or other executives knew the incentive program was a problem? (Stumpf said it came to his attention in 2013.)

Why didn't Wells Fargo disclose the "dark side" of cross-selling incentives when it reported on its successes? (Stumpf didn't think "it was material.")

Why wasn't the executive who oversaw the retail banking operation, Carrie Tolstedt, fired? (Stumpf told Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., he never considered it.)

Perhaps the most common theme of the interrogation: Calls for Stumpf's resignation, in addition to executives (including Tolstedt) giving back pay they earned while this was going on.

"You should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the [Securities & Exchange] Commission," Warren said. "The only way Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds,"

Stumpf, for his part, said he disagreed that it was a massive fraud. He apologized repeatedly throughout his testimony and said he will honor and respect any decision the board makes regarding his employment and compensation.

Looking Out for Yourself

Unauthorized financial activity is a real threat to your credit standing, which is one of many reasons to closely and regularly review your credit reports for accuracy. You can keep an eye out for unfamiliar accounts by pulling your credit reports for free each year at AnnualCreditReport.com. You can also get a free credit report summary every 14 days on Credit.com to help put a stop to unnecessary damage. If you see something that doesn't look right, be sure to contact that creditor and dispute the information with the major credit reporting agencies. (You can see footage of the testimony on Credit.com.)



More from Credit.com


From Country Living

This autumn marks an important anniversary in the Salem witch trials - 325 years ago, Salem-area residents began harvesting a crop that launched a nightmare. The young girls who accused dozens of men, women, and children of witchcraft might have been under the influence oftainted rye.

In 1976, behavioral scientist Linnda Caporael first suggested the theory. Caporael pointed out how the summer of 1691 had been terribly rainy and wet. A type of fungus, ergot, is suspected to have grown on the rye, a staple crop of the community, which was later eaten by the area residents. Ergot is a hallucinogenic-LSD is derived from the substance-and Caporael suggested the girls who believed they were being taunted by witches were actually under the effects of a common grain fungus.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The grain fungus was so common in both America and Europe that people long thought it was part of the plant, says George Wong, an associate professor of botany at the University of Hawaii.

"They didn't think anything about grinding up [the fungus] and putting it in bread," Wong says.

Caporael first suggested the Salem witch trial accusers were suffering from convulsive ergotism. According to Wong, convulsive ergotism affects the nervous system. "You're getting fits, muscle spasms, hallucinations, and delusions," he says.

Muscle spasms, hallucinations, and delusions are all symptoms of ergot poisoning.

The hallucinations, Caporael suggested, were the reason the Salem witch accusers thought they were being pinched by witches or being forced to sign their name in the Devil's Book.

The theory that the accusers were under the influence continues to gain support. Last May, a study published in JAMA Dermatology argued that the accusers were likely under the influence of tainted rye. The researchers contend the accusers' skin legions were consistent with a common symptom of convulsive ergotism.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Other facts support the idea the accusers were under the influence. For example, most of the accusers lived in the western section of Salem, an area that had swampy meadows where fungi could easily fester. In contrast, most of the accused witches lived in the eastern section of Salem, which seemed to have less contamination.

Story continues

The accusations came from western Salem, where swampy meadows could have allowed fungi to easily fester.

The accusers also tended to be young girls and women. Research suggests that women and children were more apt to be afflicted by the effects of ergotism than men.

When the symptoms first began in December 1691, Salem authorities didn't initially suspect witchcraft. About eight girls, including 11-year-old Abigail Williams, began to wretch and have seizures. The blond niece of the reverend, Abigail had always been a well-behaved girl, and her family was stunned by her new behavior. Abigail claimed someone was pinching and biting her. She yelped like a dog and leapt about, as if she was trying to fly.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Massachusetts Historical Society

Other girls in the area soon followed Abigail's mysterious ways. None of the girls ran a fever, and none were known to be epileptic. At times, they were quiet and reserved. At other times, their speech was garbled and they flailed about in a convulsive fit.

A series of doctors examined the girls and were at a loss. In February 1692, a doctor suggested the girls were bewitched. The suggestion stuck, and the "bewitched" girls accused a slave and two elderly women of witchcraft.

A series of doctors examined the girls and were at a loss. When one suggested they were bewitched, it stuck.

In the following months, the bewitched continued to convulse. Their condition alarmed Salem authorities, who sought to hold the guilty parties responsible. The bewitched were asked to name who hurt them, and dozens of names were offered.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Salem authorities interrogated the accused, questioned the bewitched girls, and created a narrative about an epidemic of witchcraft. In their version, a meeting in a local meadow had occurred. Accused witches flew on broomsticks to worship the devil. At the meeting, some ate red bread and signed their name in the Devil's Book.

The authorities also accused the "witches" of having familiars. Most familiars were described as housecats, although a snake and a few dogs were also accused of being the devil in disguise.

In their investigations, Salem authorities looked for physical evidence of a devil's "teat" that was supposedly used to milk the familiar. The accused were also examined for any markings or deformities that might be seen as a devil's mark.

In court, the afflicted girls claimed they could see the defendants' apparitions of flying into the ceiling rafters.

The physical evidence was enough to arrest a suspect and convene a jury. During the witch trials, the courts primarily relied on "spectral evidence," or claims from witnesses that the accused practiced witchcraft and used their powers to attack villagers.

In the tamer accusations, the bewitched claimed they were poked or bitten by the witches. In the more serious accounts, the bewitched testified that the witches tried to pull out their bowels. A few accusers said they had to fight off a witch's insistence that she sign the Devil's Book and join the growing ranks of devil worshipers.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

In court, the accused witches were stunned as the girls claimed they could see their apparitions flying from the witness stand and into the ceiling rafters.

Some couldn't take the testimony seriously. Susannah Martin, a 70-year-old widow, stood in disbelief as her accusers flailed around the courtroom. One girl seized on the ground. Another pointed at Martin and then began convulsing. A third took off her glove and threw it at Martin.

The glove throwing was ridiculous to Martin and she began to laugh and told the magistrates it was a "folly."

Martin maintained her innocence and was hung in July. Many of the accused witches readily confessed, which proved to be a sensible strategy. Confessed witches remained in jail, but deniers were executed. As the winter faded into a dry summer, a cart rumbled through the village, carrying doomed witches to the gallows. By the end of the summer, 14 women, five men, and two dogs were executed.

Then, the accusations stopped abruptly. The Salem area was in a drought, the type that made it difficult for the fungus to return to the rye crops. The violence was over by September. The apparitions disappeared. No one saw any more witches in the fireplace. The biting, pinching, and poking had ended.

Download the free Country Living Now app to stay up-to-date on the latest country decor, craft ideas, comfort food recipes, and more .

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Start up the motorcade: The cast of The West Wing is reuniting and this time, theyve got a real-life candidate to elect.

Six stars of NBCs Emmy-winning political drama  Allison Janney (C.J. Cregg), Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman), Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler), Dule Hill (Charlie Young), Joshua Malina (Will Bailey), and Mary McCormack (Kate Harper)  will head to the battleground state of Ohio this weekend to campaign for Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign says the actors will attend several grassroots events across the state, encouraging residents to register to vote and explaining why they think Clinton is the right person for the job.

NEW > The gang is getting back together: the cast of The West Wing will campaign for @HillaryClinton in stops across Ohio this weekend. pic.twitter.com/ZwyoIyiIDX  Ian Sams (@IanSams) September 21, 2016

VIDEOSWest Wing Reunion: Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford Walk-and-Talk on The Late Late Show

Throughout its seven-season run, The West Wing always stood as a beacon of high-minded political discourse amid all the partisan bickering in Washington. Maybe C.J., Josh, Toby, and the crew can bring a touch of civility to whats been a very uncivil campaign so far.

Of course, Aaron Sorkin wont be putting words into their mouths this time (we think), but he did make it very clear back in June how he felt about Clintons opponent Donald Trump: I believe were in a terribly dangerous situation right now he doesnt know anything. Even if you dont agree with Hillary Clinton, at least shes a sober-thinking person.

Despite being pictured in the tweet above, President Bartlet himself, Martin Sheen, isnt expected to join his castmates in Ohio  but he did appear in Joss Whedons star-studded anti-Trump PSA that went viral on Wednesday. He even declared, in his booming Bartlet voice: We cannot pretend both sides are equally unfavorable.

Story continues

So it looks like the Bartlet White House might be a clean sweep for Hillary. Does anyone know which way Rob Lowe is leaning?

Do you think President Bartlet would support Trump or Hillary? Pick a side  and be civil!  in the comments.

Related stories

Colbert and Meyers to Trump: 'F--k You' for Blaming Birtherism on Clinton

Samantha Bee Scolds Fallon, NBC for Trump Interview: 'I Guess Ratings Matter More Than Brown People'

Emmys 2016: Transparent's Jill Soloway Labels Trump a 'Dangerous Monster'
The steel industry is poised to benefit from solid demand in the U.S and emerging markets like India. However, steel stocks have to struggle with equity market volatility and a host of other broader factors. Below, we discuss some of the key reasons and what investors in the steel sector can look forward to in the coming months and years.

A Rise in Cheap Imports in the U.S.

A slump in the domestic property market, which accounts for a significant part of Chinas steel consumption, severe credit crunch and weak infrastructure investment are hurting steel demand in China.

Chinas steel exports crossed the benchmark of 100 Mt for the first time last year in the wake of shrinking domestic demand amid a flagging economy. Notably, China is the worlds top steel producer, contributing around half of the total global output.

The country has built up massive excess capacity, posing a threat to the global steel industry. The worsening gap between supply and demand, along with barely any sign of a recovery, further clouds the picture. The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) for the Chinese steel industry has stayed below the mark of 50 for the past two years, indicating a noticeable disparity between supply and demand. These cheap imports hurt the margins of American steel players like Steel Dynamics Inc. (STLD), United States Steel Corp. (X), ArcelorMittal (MT), AK Steel Holding Corp. (AKS) and Nucor Corp. (NUE).

Slowdown in China

As discussed above, demand in China has slowed down due to the country's tepid property market and weaker infrastructure investment. Chinas economy grew at an annual rate of 6.7% in the second quarter of 2016, flat with the first quarter, marking its slowest in seven years. For 2016, the government anticipates the growth rate to remain in the range of 6.57%.

While rebalancing progresses, the Chinese economy continues to slow down. Lower construction activities are leading to a slowdown in the manufacturing sectors, especially metal products. A recovery in the construction sector is not expected any time soon either. In fact, steel demand in China is projected to be in the negative territory with respective declines of 4% and 3% in 2016 and 2017.

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Geopolitical Tensions

Performance of some key emerging and developing economies has deteriorated due to internal structural issues, lower commodity prices associated with Chinas economic slowdown, and escalating political instability. Russia and Brazil are experiencing severe contraction in steel demand. Geopolitical tensions and political instability in the Middle East, Africa continues to have a negative effect. Political uncertainty in the Brazilian economy has resulted in a sharp decline in steel demand. In fact, the countrys steel demand is estimated to contract 8.8% in 2016, followed by a recovery of 3.1% in 2017.

Excess Capacity  a Perennial Problem

The biggest obstacle to persistent growth and profitability in the steel industry is excess capacity. The industry is under relentless pressure caused by years of excess steel-making capacity, further aggravated by weak demand and uneven economic growth.

To solve this problem, steelmaking capacity needs to be reduced for the industrys profit margin to reach a sustainable level, and to raise the capacity utilization rate from below 80% levels. The industry remains highly fragmented compared to other global businesses and the restructuring and consolidation needed to eliminate overcapacity is progressing at a slow pace.

Impact of Low Oil Prices

The energy sector, which was once buoyant due to shale discoveries and rising production of crude oil, accounts for 10% of steel consumption in the U.S. Steel is necessary to make rigs and transport oil. Steel demand from the energy sector is being impacted as exploration companies have reduced their capital expenditure budgets in the wake of tumbling oil prices.

Steel products used by the energy industry are also known as oil country tubular goods (or OCTG). U.S. Steel being the biggest supplier of these goods in North America is bearing most of the impact.

Steel demand from the energy sector could weaken even further in 2016. Falling oil prices would urge energy companies to preserve capital to shore up their balance sheets instead of spending money on new exploration. Thus, leading suppliers to the energy sector, such as United States Steel and Tenaris S.A (TS), could continue to be under pressure throughout the year.

Low Crude Steel Capacity Utilization

The crude steel capacity utilization ratio remained stubbornly below 80% in both 2014 and 2015. The average capacity utilization in the first quarter of 2016 was 67.6%. Excess steel capacity has been a perennial problem for the steel industry as steel prices generally move in tandem with capacity utilization rates. To remain competitive and rationalize operations, some major steel companies have resorted to idling their steel plants.

Increasing Use of Aluminum in Auto Industry

Currently, steel is the major raw material for the auto industry, the second largest steel consumer. However, major automakers like Ford Motor Co. (F), General Motors Company (GM) and others are becoming increasingly aluminum-intensive, given the metal's recyclability and light-weight properties. The global push to improve fuel efficiency in vehicles is expected to more than double the demand for aluminum in the auto industry by 2025. Hence, in order to remain competitive, the steel companies will have to come up with better and lighter varieties of steel.

Falling Iron Ore Prices

In the next few years, a wave of new supply of iron ore is slated to hit the market as the big three producers  BHP Billiton Limited (BHP), Rio Tinto plc (RIO), and Vale S.A (VALE) are going gung ho with their expansion plans to improvement production capacity. Brazil and India will also step up their exports.

The combination of weak demand and oversupply will continue to exert pressure iron prices in the near term. The world's biggest iron ore exporter, Australia has cut its iron ore price forecast for 2016 to $44.2 a metric ton as the market fundamentals -- slow demand growth and a well-supplied market remain the same.

Companies like ArcelorMittal and U.S. Steel meet their raw material requirements through their captive iron ore mines. While the steel operations of these two companies will reap the benefits of falling iron ore prices, profitability of their iron mining operations are likely to be affected by the same.

How to Play the Industry

The short-term prospects are a bit clouded considering the headwinds plaguing the steel industry globally as discussed above. So, it would be prudent to stay away from steel stocks that carry an unfavorable Zacks Rank now. Particularly, we suggest staying away from Zacks Rank #4 stocks including POSCO (PKX), Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (SID), TimkenSteel Corp. (TMST) and Olympic Steel Inc. (ZEUS).

However, investors, who can look beyond the near-term clouds to the industrys bright long-term prospects, may consider buying some steel stocks based on a favorable Zacks Rank. We highly recommend ArcelorMittal (carrying a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Check out our latest Steel Industry Outlook here for more on the current state of affairs in this market from an earnings perspective, and how the trend is shaping up for the future.

Confidential from Zacks

Beyond this Industry Outlook, would you like to see Zacks' best recommendations that are not available to the public? Our Executive VP, Steve Reitmeister, knows when key trades are about to be triggered and which of our experts has the hottest hand. Click to see them now>>



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report



OLYMPIC STEEL (ZEUS): Free Stock Analysis Report



UTD STATES STL (X): Free Stock Analysis Report



VALE SA (VALE): Free Stock Analysis Report



TENARIS SA-ADR (TS): Free Stock Analysis Report



TIMKENSTEEL CP (TMST): Free Stock Analysis Report



STEEL DYNAMICS (STLD): Free Stock Analysis Report



CIA SIDERUR-ADR (SID): Free Stock Analysis Report



RIO TINTO-ADR (RIO): Free Stock Analysis Report



POSCO-ADR (PKX): Free Stock Analysis Report



NUCOR CORP (NUE): Free Stock Analysis Report



ARCELOR MITTAL (MT): Free Stock Analysis Report



GENERAL MOTORS (GM): Free Stock Analysis Report



FORD MOTOR CO (F): Free Stock Analysis Report



BHP BILLITN LTD (BHP): Free Stock Analysis Report



AK STEEL HLDG (AKS): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



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PHILADELPHIA -- If the Chicago White Sox are going to limit their opponents offensively, they're going to need to keep them from running rampant on the basepaths.

In a 7-6 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies on Tuesday night, the White Sox allowed three stolen bases before Cesar Hernandez was thrown out trying to steal second in the eighth inning.

That continues a troubling theme with rookie catcher Omar Narvaez behind the plate. In 215 innings, he allowed 21 stolen bases while catching only two runners, a success rate of 8.7 percent.

Those steals proved troublesome against the Phillies (69-83), with Odubel Herrera (two) and rookie Roman Quinn putting themselves in scoring position for the top four of the Philadelphia lineup that went 8-for-15 on Tuesday.

Manager Robin Ventura, though, didn't seem too worried afterward about the trend, hesitating to put all the blame on the 24-year-old from Venezuela who was first called up in July.

"You're going to need some help from your pitchers," Ventura said. "Those guys are pretty speedy, so it's not for a lack of trying or having the arm to do it. It's just you've got to be able to time it up right."

Stealing bases isn't something new to the Phillies, who are 11th in the majors in steals (87). But the addition of Quinn, a 23-year old rookie, to the lineup -- Phillies manager Pete Mackanin has had him batting second in the order -- gives them another set of afterburners on the base paths.

"Quinn has elite level speed," Jake Thompson said after winning Tuesday's game. "It's fun watching those guys get going out there. There's probably only maybe three or four teams in the league that have someone who can run like Quinn. Whenever he gets his feet going, it's fun to watch."

Ventura has a veteran to help Narvaez out on the mound Wednesday in Chris Sale as the White Sox (72-79) attempt to even the two-game series.

Story continues

Sale (16-8, 3.03 ERA) can equal his career high for wins in a season. He's one behind the 17 he won in 2012, his first season as a full-time starter and first of five straight All-Star appearances.

In three September starts, he's 1-1 with a 2.52 ERA, striking out 30 against two walks in 25 innings.

The Phillies counter with Jerad Eickhoff, who has been steady all season long despite a general lack of run support (3.4 runs per game), going 10-14 with a 3.74 ERA in his first full major league season.

Since the All-Star break, he's 4-4 with a 3.66 ERA, though he's coming off a bit of a rough outing, when he gave up a three-run seventh-inning home run as part of allowing six runs (three earned) in 6 2/3 innings of a 15-2 loss to Pittsburgh on Thursday.

Eickhoff could benefit from the continued surge of center fielder Odubel Herrera, who is 15-for-28 over his last seven games after a 3-for-4, three-RBI performance Tuesday.

"Herrera's swinging the bat very well and that's really nice to see," manager Pete Mackanin said. "We needed him to do that. He looks like he's getting more selective. He's not taking those wild swings and it's paying off."




Theres a lot of star power in Antoine Fuquas new riff on the classic Western The Magnificent Seven, with an ensemble that includes Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke. Theres also a lot of gunpowder as the titular band of cowboys coalesce to save a small town from a merciless madman (Peter Sarsgaard).

So who has the best gunslinging skills among this posse? Whos the last guy in this cast youd want to face in a shootout? Depends who you ask.

If I look at these seven guys, my eye goes to B.H. [Byung-hun Lee], Washington said (watch above) about the South Korean star best known for playing Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies. Cause hes quiet. And you may not know it. Youll wake up dead.

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo also garnered some support, with Hawke declaring the Mexico native the best gunslinger. However, costar Haley Bennett praised the bow-and-arrow skills of newcomer Martin Sensmeier, and Hawke called Sensmeier the best equestrian.

Even goofball-turned-action hero Pratt had his backers. Ive seen Chris, from the hip, fill a playing card, every bullet in the center of the card from six feet, marveled Vincent DOnofrio. Chris is the best outdoorsmen, added the praise-heaping Hawke.

As for how Pratt would do in the actual wild wild West, thats a different story. Im an actor, he said. Look at my fking hands. Theyre soft. I have soft, bitch-ass actor hands. Id get one splinter, Id probably die of an infection.

The Magnificent Seven opens everywhere Friday. Watch the trailer:




Waste-to-power plant set to start operation

The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) says it is all set to operationalise its waste-to-energy project within 10 days.
As someone who examines health on a population level, I have seen how influenza, or flu, sweeps through communities every year. I have also heard reasonable people explain to me why they choose not to get vaccinated. While I cannot persuade everyone to make this personal decision, it is my duty to ensure our community has access to the most accurate information available, so they can make the best decisions for themselves and their families.

I am fortunate to work with world-class researchers and health care providers who dedicate their lives to keeping communities safe and healthy. One recurring theme I hear year after year is: Get your flu shot.

Why is a disease that we can see coming months in advance still hitting epidemic levels every single winter?

[See: How to Disinfect Germ Hotspots.]

Let's examine what we know:

The flu causes millions of missed days of work and school each year. In the United States alone, about 36,000 people die annually and more than 200,000 are hospitalized because of the flu.

We are fortunate to have a vaccine for this disease that is safe and cost-effective. Yet, according to the NYC Health Department, only about half of New Yorkers get vaccinated. Public health officials and those who work in population health, like me, are on a mission to change this.

We want to safeguard our community as much as possible from unnecessary hospital visits and missed days of school, work and fun. Montefiore, the health system where I work, aims to have all patients, staff and community members vaccinated. We do this by analyzing flu data to understand why certain neighborhoods are more impacted, partnering with organizations in the community to hold pop-up flu vaccination events and hosting educational flu workshops. If you don't live in the Bronx, you might consider contacting your local community health center to find out if they have similar initiatives nearby.

We invest so much in helping people get the vaccine because if everyone in the community gets the flu shot, we are protecting vulnerable people who can't get the vaccine, such as infants and the very sick. For people in this category, the flu can cause more serious complications, including pneumonia and even death.

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[See: 10 Cold and Flu Myths Debunked.]

If I had 10 minutes with everyone in my community to discuss the flu, here is what I would tell them:

-- Anyone who spends time with vulnerable people, including caregivers, health care workers and nursing home residents, needs to get vaccinated. Other vulnerable individuals include young children, people 65 and older, those who are immune-compromised and people with chronic health conditions like asthma, congestive heart failure and diabetes. The flu is very dangerous for these populations.

-- Some people think the flu vaccine causes the flu because they once got the flu several days after getting the vaccine. However, it takes about two weeks after vaccination for antibodies to develop in the body and provide protection against the flu. Therefore, you're still at risk of contracting the flu in the two weeks after you have been vaccinated. This why it's better to get vaccinated before the flu season gets underway.

-- You can spread the flu if you're feeling good. Twenty to 30 percent of people carrying the influenza virus have no symptoms.

-- Washing your hands (with soap or using sanitizer) and coughing or sneezing into a tissue or a sleeve (as opposed to your hands) can also help prevention transmission of the flu.

-- The flu vaccine is covered by insurance, often at no cost depending on where it is administered.

-- If you get the flu, it is important to stay home (and not to go to work or school, where the risk of infecting others is high) until you are fever free for at least 24 hours. Getting plenty of rest and drinkings lots of fluids is the best way to recuperate.

-- If you are caring for a vulnerable person and you or they are experiencing flu symptoms, call your primary care doctor immediately to see if the antiviral medication is right for you. Generally, this medication works best if given within the first 48 hours of illness.

-- If you are just feeling sick, it is not advisable to go to the emergency room. Emergency rooms are for people who are very sick. Showing up when you don't need to be there puts you and others at unnecessary risk of infection.

-- There is an exception to my emergency department tip. If you or your loved one is experiencing warning signs like difficulty breathing, bluish skin color, dehydration, lethargy, dizziness, confusion or severe and persistent vomiting, please seek care immediately.

-- Any infant who has symptoms of the flu and is unable to eat, has difficulty breathing or shows a sign of dehydration (e.g., fewer wet diapers than normal, no tears when crying) should also get medical help right away.

[See: Old-School Cold Remedies That Really Work.]

We don't know what this flu season will look like, but we know that if more people get vaccinated and follow the above recommendations, it'll help everyone. Stay well this season!

Amanda Parsons, M.D., M.B.A. is vice president, Community & Population Health, Montefiore Health System. She oversees patient education, employee wellness and community interventions aimed at improving health and wellness. She is also an Assistant Professor of Family & Social Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
From Delish

Often when chain restaurants pull one of fans' favorite items from the menu, outrage ensues online. Same goes for supermarkets when discontinuing certain grocery products (or introducing absurd ones like pre-peeled oranges). Which is why we're waiting for the hammer to fall on Target now that customers are discovering the lack of Miracle Whip on store shelves.

According to Consumerist, Target shoppers are not pleased that the big box store has stopped carrying Kraft's Miracle Whip, the so-called "salad dressing" and "pantry staple," in the mayonnaise aisle. While shelves are jam-packed with traditional mayo and their light versions, plus mayo alternatives, there often isn't any Whip in sight. So of course the immediate question that comes to mind is why?

After reaching out to Target representatives, the consumer news site found that the company has not totally boycotted the stuff. Instead, it has decided to only carry Miracle Whip at locations where there is an overwhelming demand for it.

Photo credit: Consumerist

"It is most widely available in the Midwest, where the demand is the highest. We are continuously evaluating our assortment based on what we hear from our guests and continue to adjust our offerings store-to-store based on guest demand," a spokeswoman told Consumerist.

Of course, the company did not provide a list of locations where you can and can't find the "dressing" but editors at Consumerist did their own search, finding that locations in Virginia, California, and New York were Whip-less while ones in Iowa were well-stocked with it. Essentially it's a toss-up if you live outside of the Midwest, so our best advice is to call your local Target ahead of time if you're looking for this specific brand of faux mayo.

Follow Delish on Instagram.

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If you believe  as I do  that democracy is humanitys best hope, these are discouraging times. China, the worlds next superpower, thinks its found a different path forward. The liberal nations of Europe and North America are gnawed by self-doubt, beset by problems of their own making. Moreover, they now regard their past enthusiasm for nurturing new democracies in the worlds unlikeliest places with an air of embarrassment. In fact, in recent decades, democracy promotion has nearly disappeared from the higher echelons of U.S. foreign policymaking.

But theres one country that, through its example, offers hope  and some crucial lessons. That country is Ukraine.

I fully realize how unlikely this sounds. Having won its independence from Moscow 25 years ago, the country spent most of them sinking into oligarchy and stagnation. Its first major effort to move forward  2004s Orange Revolution  ended in abject failure: The corrupt system swallowed it whole. The Euromaidan revolution of two years ago began more hopefully. But it too, has disappointed in many ways. A panel of experts who were recently asked whether the country had turned the corner gave discouragingly ambiguous answers.

Nevertheless, Ukraines experience gives us reason to take heart. Despite its many political shortcomings, the country has changed. More precisely, it is the Ukrainian people that have changed. And coming to understand the nature of that change  where it came from and what it can do  helps train our focus on the one thing that makes genuine democracy possible: the slow, painstaking growth of democratic human capital. It is this factor, above all others, that has made the difference in Ukraine  and can do so elsewhere in the years ahead.

Nurturing that capital is so important precisely because the limits of revolutions like the Euromaidan are so glaring. Though Ukrainians managed to topple their strongman President Viktor Yanukovych and many of his enforcers, the deep state  the mass of corrupt officials who run the country at the whims of its oligarchs  survived. Thats why the reforms of the last two years have just barely limped along, each tentative step forward provoking a fierce counter-reaction. Theres a fresh, Western-trained new police force, but its powers are useless in the face of the crooked courts. Theres an independent new anti-corruption agency, but its locked in fierce battle with the hugely powerful and utterly unreformed prosecutors office, which is trying to check its every step.

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But if this is all you see in todays Ukraine, youre missing the most important part of the story  whats happening underneath. Like every other post-Soviet republic, the country endured decades of authoritarian Communist rule before gaining its independence. Having eradicated private property and individual initiative, the Soviets rendered the countrys population atomized and politically passive. Lacking the social ties and mental models long taken for granted in the West, Ukrainians have, thus far, been unable to breathe life into the countrys shaky democratic structures.

But  due in large part to its growing contacts with the West  Ukrainian society has not been standing still. Viktor Kompaneyets, a gruff Kiev-based technology investor, first noticed it during a March snowstorm that crippled the region in 2013. As he tells it, Ukrainians reacted dramatically differently than Russians. Both countries capitals were hit equally hard, but while dozens in Moscow froze in the snow, residents of Kiev were largely spared  a fact he attributes to strangers helping strangers. From isolated groups that have no common interests, suddenly, out of nowhere, when the government wasnt doing anything, the people themselves decided to solve their problem, he remembers. Thats when it became clear to me that something had fundamentally changed.

The Euromaidan brought this latent force out into the open. Were definitely living in a different country, says Kompaneyets. I cant say its easier or simpler. But theres some kind of almost spiritual change. If you have a question, you dont hide it inside yourself. You have a community to which you can turn.

Svitlana Zalishchuk, a young journalist and activist elected to parliament after the revolution, describes it a little differently. One of the main shifts [since the Euromaidan], she says, is the relationship between the government and society. Its become more horizontal. The idea of accountability has become normal.

This all has immediate political consequences. Even before the Euromaidan, Ukraines civil society  nurtured by grants, exchange programs, and other contacts with the West  was known for its vigor. In the new Ukraine, independent journalists, civic groups, and non-profit organizations have played a heroic role in pushing the government to fulfill its promises in the face of bureaucratic and oligarchic resistance.

One of the most striking examples is the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR), a remarkable civic organization that unites dozens of independent groups. It was founded in the days after the Euromaidan to redirect activists revolutionary energy from the streets into the halls of parliament.

Thanks to now-overwhelming public pressure to address corruption, eight political parties signed statements of support for RPRs roadmap of reform, which covers 24 distinct areas, from energy policy to the media. Five of these parties ended up making it into parliament after the revolution  and when they formed a governing coalition, they incorporated many of the RPRs priorities into the text of their official agreement. Olena Halushka, RPRs manager of foreign affairs, says that more than 70 members of parliament regularly cooperate with the group, and its website lists 82 bills from its agenda that have been adopted into law.

Of course, that commitment has often been spotty, and some of the bills are worth more on paper than in reality. But consider whats been accomplished. Naftogaz, the notoriously crooked gas company that was bleeding the state dry, is now posting a profit. The state railroad company, now headed by a Polish crisis manger, has turned the corner and is now also making money. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, an independent new agency, is doggedly pursuing corrupt officials. And the beginnings of decentralization have returned more tax revenue to local communities, enabling cities across the country to invest in new infrastructure, from roads and buses to hospitals and kindergartens.

All this demonstrates how far Ukraines civil society has come since the failed Orange Revolution. Back then, says Zalishchuk, we elected [pro-reformist President] Yushchenko, and then we went back to our kitchens and folded our hands. Thats why the revolution didnt work. But ten years later, after the Euromaidan, she says, we [now] understood that electing a new government would not be the end of the story. Changes happen when bottom-up meets top-down.

The indispensable role Ukraines civil society has played in making the Euromaidan count is the most important lesson the country can teach aspiring democrats. Real democracy  democracy thats more than just a hollow institutional shell  cant be built quickly. It takes years of deliberate effort for enough of a democratic mindset to develop among enough people.

But its not hard to see where the resources for building this mindset can come from. Its striking how many of Ukraines young politicians have spent time in the West. Svitlana Zalishchuk, Sergii Leshchenko, and Mustafa Nayyem, three of the most active parliamentary reformers, were all fellows at Stanford Universitys Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law. Olena Sotnik, a lawyer on the Maidan and now a leading parliamentary voice for judicial reform, attended a school run by the Council of Europe to train future leaders in transitional countries. Oleh Berezyuk, the leader of the pro-European Samopomich party in parliament, trained and worked as a biologist in Chicago. There are thousands of others.

The West also has another crucial role  that of pressing the government directly. James Brooke, a former New York Times journalist who is so bullish on Ukraine that hes just moved to Kiev to open a new business magazine, says that international involvement after the Euromaidan has been much more forceful than in 2004. Were hip to your tricks, he says, describing the attitude of the European Union, the IMF, and other international partners towards Ukraines political establishment. By making financial assistance and other goodies, such as visa liberalization, conditional on real change, these institutions have made it impossible for the government not to deliver.

This is a widely held view among Ukrainians. Zalishchuk maintains that 70 percent of whats been accomplished so far has only been possible thanks to international pressure. Sergii Leshchenko, another pro-reform legislator (and a muckraking anti-corruption journalist), agrees, arguing that the only way successful reforms are possible in Ukraine is if international assistance depends on their realization. I can say it as an insider, he says. It works. Both Zalishchuk and Leshchenko emphasized that the West must be even tougher as the oligarchs dig in.

But international pressure, even in tandem with civil society, will only get you so far. The most important and difficult changes  such as revamping the justice system and defanging the oligarchs  can only happen with a critical mass of support in parliament and in the key ministries. For now, Ukraine isnt even close. Leshchenko says that only about 10 percent of his fellow legislators are real reformers.

Thats a battle Ukrainians will have to fight. But we in the West should make sure were providing meaningful, sustained, long-term assistance along the lines of what we already know to work. Exchange programs such as Open World and the International Visitor Leadership Program have introduced hundreds of Ukrainians to American democracy. Funding for such programs  which are relatively cheap and which also benefit Americans who gain exposure to different perspectives  should be doubled and tripled, with a special emphasis on Ukraine. Universities should be encouraged (and, where appropriate, assisted financially) to host Ukrainian students, fellows, and academics.

And the process of getting temporary American visas  currently a major barrier for anyone outside the elite  should be made as easy, painless, and as cheap as possible. As weve seen, developing the democratic mindset that undergirds meaningful change takes years. The sooner we ramp up our outreach, the sooner well see it pay off. In the meantime, Western pressure on Ukraines government to enact reforms should remain relentless.

The geopolitical implications of a democratic Ukraine are huge  this is an opportunity not to be missed. With its large, Russian-speaking population and its strategic location, a Ukraine that  in five or 10 years  is considerably more democratic and successful could begin to show the Russians just across the border that another way is possible. Zalishchuk is sure of this. I think that a democratic Russia could never happen without a democratic Ukraine, she says. Going further, she describes Ukraine as a model for the reformation of all the post-Soviet countries. All the more reason weve got to start now  and to get it right.

In the photo, Ukrainian activists protest against corruption in front of the General Prosecutors Office in Kiev on August 17.

Photo credit: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images
Win an Indian Super Scout Sixty

Test ride the the Indian Scout or Scout Sixty between now and March 31, 2017, and you could win a customized Super Scout Sixty Tank Machine. The build was created by a team at the Tank Machine dealership in France for Indians Project Scout competition last year, but is now up for grabs simply by taking a test ride.

After the ride, entrants will receive a business card with a code to enter on the website www.win-scout-sixty.com. The drawing will be held in April 2017. Test riders will experience first-hand the class-leading handling and performance of the Scout and Scout Sixty cruisers.

Indian seeks to illustrate the customizing potential of the Scout with ready-to-fit parts from the official accessories catalogue. The Indian Super Scout Sixty Tank Machine featured here uses three factory accessories; the 1920 Solo Saddle, bronze clutch and brake lever kit and a bronze speedo ring. The Super Scout Sixty Tank Machine will be on display at the Intermot show in Cologne, Germany, EICMA in Italy and at Motorcycle Live in the UK.

Indian Super Scout Sixty

SUPER SCOUT SIXTY TANK MACHINE DETAILS:

Cost: $21,000

Tires: Metzeler ME888

Exhaust: Supertrapp aluminium dual

Seat: 1920 Solo Saddle in leather

Bars: Biltwell handlebar and grips

Lights: LED front headlight and tail-light

Fenders: Aluminium rear and front mudguards

THE CAVEAT: Residents of Italy, Portugal and Sweden are not eligible for the drawing.
The Best Little Floorhouse in Texas Your choice for flooring in Central Texas! Your flooring is more than just the surface you walk on  it's an integral part of your home. With over 35 years of flooring experience, The Best Little Floorhouse in Texas has the resources and knowled
A woman who applied to work part time at the Body Shop to help cover her grad school costs is instead calling out the company for hypocrisy after she was instructed to wear a full face of makeup for her job interview at the store.

We believe true beauty comes from the heart, reads the mission statement of the Body Shop, founded in England in 1976 by Anita Roddick. For us, beauty is much more than a pretty face. Its about feeling good and doing good, too.

Nevertheless, after Brenna MacPhee, 23, of Toronto, applied to work at the store, she received an email with the time and location of the interview, as well as this detail, according to CBC News: ***DRESSCODE: Please wear all black business attire and a full face of makeup as it is our dresscode in the store.

MacPhee was so stunned, she decided to skip the appointment altogether and email the Body Shop on the matter. She shared her note in a Facebook post. I chose not to come as I was deeply turned off by the prospect of working for your company The fact that you require female interview candidates, not even employees, to wear a full face of makeup is very problematic, she wrote (sending it, unfortunately, to a do-not-reply-email address). The implication behind such a requirement is that women look best with full makeup, and that it is a necessity. If I do not own makeup and cannot afford to invest time and money into the products you deem essential; if I choose not to wear makeup, or wear a lot, it should not have an impact upon my ability to work. After all, I was under the impression that I would be hired based upon my qualifications, not based upon my looks.

Her Facebook post has been shared more than 175 times and has generated both critical and supportive commentary. From someone who wears NO makeup (me!), I find this very upsetting!! one person angrily shared. They are saying Im not fit to go outside unless I transform my face?? Since when is makeup an essential part of life? Wrote another, Remembering when Body Shop first opened in the U.K., it was all about natural products and cruelty free, Anita Roddick would probably turn in her grave hearing that.

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Another commenter offered a different view: Pushing makeup on employees isnt nice, however if you willingly apply to jobs, each place will have its own dress code. She chose to apply to a beauty store, of course the employees will have to wear their products to help sell themNot saying its right, its just thats a part of working sales.

The Body Shop has not responded to a request for comment from Yahoo Beauty. But the Body Shop Canadas vice president of marketing and corporate responsibility told CBC News that the company would investigate the situation. The company also tweeted these responses:

We are sorry to hear of Brennas experience. Our Customer Consultants are at the heart of The Body Shop. As brand ambassadors(1)  The Body Shop Canada (@TheBodyShopCA) September 20, 2016

they need a passion for our products so they can speak about them enthusiastically and knowledgeably to our customers. (2)  The Body Shop Canada (@TheBodyShopCA) September 20, 2016

Unfair as it may be, the Body Shop, at least in the U.S., may be well within its rights to require specific appearance codes for both interviewees and employees. While it is not legal to have dress codes for only one sex but not the other, so far the law seems to allow different dress codes for women and men, as long as they do not put an unfair burden on one gender more than the other, notes the dress codes and grooming section of the website for the nonprofit organization Workplace Fairness.

An organization spokesperson, Paula Brantner, tells Yahoo Beauty, Its probably not that different when [enforced] during an interview, as the law that is going to be applicable when you are working allows it. Its a screening device. And theres no real difference between what they can do in an interview and what they can do on the job.

Even though a required full face of makeup does seem like a clear unfair burden on women compared with the standard male requirement to groom facial hair, Brantner cites several cases as unfortunate precedents to MacPhees experience with the Body Shop.

The clearest parallel is from a decade ago, when Harrahs casino implemented a dress code requiring female bartenders to wear extensive makeup and styled hair. They had this whole process where they did a makeover, then expected you to emulate that look every day, Brantner says. Men, meanwhile, only had to maintain trimmed hair and nails. A beloved, longtime employee who protested the new rule, saying it made her very uncomfortable, wound up fighting it in court, and losing, with a ruling that the company had the right to invoke its appearance standards.

Just last week, an appeals court upheld an Alabama insurance companys right to ban a woman from wearing dreadlocks at work, despite the racial and cultural implications as argued on behalf of the employee by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

How are companies allowed to enforce such rules? Throughout the U.S., we have employment-at-will, meaning a company can hire and fire for any reason, as long as its not illegal, Brantner explains. So the question is, what would make it illegal? Obvious racism and discrimination based on sexual orientation are examples, as is clear gender bias  but proving it effectively in a court of law can be difficult. Companies can require a professional appearance, she says, and they can define it differently for women and for men.

Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The world is facing a "make or break moment" in Syria, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a crisis meeting of the Security Council on Wednesday.

Ban urged world powers to use their influence to help re-start political talks between Syrians and allow them "to negotiate a way out of the hell in which they are trapped."
Berlin (AFP) - Growing xenophobia and rightwing extremism could threaten peace in eastern Germany, the government warned Wednesday, voicing fears over the impact of a series of attacks on refugees in the region.

In a report urging mainstream society to take a stronger stand against anti-migrant action, it highlighted a worrying trend -- that in many demonstrations against asylum seekers, the line between popular protest and far-right agitation was becoming blurred.

"Rightwing extremism in all forms poses a very serious threat to the societal and economic development" of eastern Germany, said Iris Gleicke, who is the government's point person for national unity.

"Determined action from the government, the states, communes and civil societies is necessary to ensure peace in eastern Germany," she told reporters as she presented the latest report examining progress since German reunification in 1990.

The annual report had in previous years been largely focused on industrial regeneration for the region, which has lagged behind the west economically, and experienced a wave of depopulation as mostly younger people left for the west for jobs.

But rising xenophobia has emerged as a key concern this year, as anger over the arrival of around a million asylum seekers in Germany in 2015 is running high in many eastern states such as Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

It has also fuelled a surge in support for the rightwing populist AfD party, which has run an anti-migrant and Islamophobic campaign.

Eastern states have been required to take in relatively few new arrivals compared to western states, under a quota system calculated by the size of the state's population and income.

- Society must speak out -

But arson attacks on accommodation for asylum seekers and assaults on refugees have shot up dramatically in the region, Gleicke said.

"I am disturbed by this rising far-right and xenophobic violence. It is more than an alarm bell if the attacks and violence are backed by or quietly accepted by mainstream society," she said, noting that the incidents had sparked global outrage.

Story continues

Former communist eastern Germany has been the scene of several ugly incidents in which far-right extremists have targeted asylum seekers.

Clashes broke out last week between dozens of asylum seekers and far-right extremists in the eastern city of Bautzen, forcing police to call in reinforcements to quell the violence.

In February, a cheering crowd was seen outside a burning asylum shelter in the same town, clapping and shouting: "Good, that's up in flames."

- An economic toll -

That same weekend, a video emerged of far-right thugs intimidating refugees -- including crying children -- and preventing them from getting off a bus to enter another shelter in the eastern town of Clausnitz.

Gleicke insisted it was not only up to churches or politicians to take a stand against such violence.

"Mainstream society must also do its part. It's definitely uncomfortable. I know what it is to have to fight against neo-Nazis. But I expect companies, too, to give greater support to civil society on this front," she said.

Beyond the potential toll at home, the poisoned atmosphere also risks tarnishing the region's reputation abroad, hurting prospects not just for tourism but also for investment.

Gleicke said that on recent trips to the United States and Japan where she sought to promote eastern Germany as a location for business start-ups, she was asked: "What is the situation when an engineer, who is of colour, wants to come?"

"It's extremely clear that a place that is not open to the world or which is not open to immigration will be disadvantaged economically," she warned.

Germany's top economists echoed the concerns.

Marcel Fratzscher, who heads German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), told Handelsblatt business daily that the lurch towards the far-right could drive away companies or highly-qualified workers from the region.

"The increasing radicalisation and intolerance will severely weaken parts of eastern Germany's economy," he said.
By Gene Emery (Reuters Health) - A new study has confirmed what your waistband has told you all along - you gain weight during the holidays. It also concluded that people who weigh themselves frequently seem to lose those extra pounds faster. The trend was seen in 1,781 Americans, 760 Germans and 383 Japanese, all of whom used WiFi "smart scales" over a one-year period. They had agreed to let the scale manufacturer, Withings, use the data for research purposes. Age, gender, height, country and time zone were collected as part of the registration process. That system avoided limitations of previous weight studies, where people often lie when reporting their weight or they may eat differently knowing that they have to report to a place once a week to be weighed. Under this system, all weights were automatically recorded. Within 10 days of Christmas, the average weight increased 0.4 percent among Americans and 0.6 percent among the Germans. For the Japanese, a 0.3 percent increase came during Golden Week in May, which includes an aggregation of four holidays. For a 150-pound person, that's less than a pound. But one of the authors of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Brian Wansink, told Reuters Health in a telephone interview that the increase was so low because the people using the scales were unusual. The devices cost around $150 and people willing to pay that much are probably more motivated than the average holiday reveler to keep their weight down and lose whatever they've gained. "We're looking at people who are a little richer, maybe a little better educated, a little more health-conscious," said Wansink, professor and director of the Food and Brand Lab at the Dyson School at Cornell University. It demonstrates that even the hyper-vigilant gain weight around the holidays, he said. Previous studies have shown that Americans typically gain 3 to 5 pounds over the holidays. Increases of 0.2 percent were also seen among Germans during Easter and among Americans during Thanksgiving. For Americans, the upward tick on the scales began around the beginning of November and peaked around New Year's Day. For Germans, it began in late November and peaked a little after New Year's Day. The Japanese New Year's spike occurred around the same time as the German spike. Dr. Wansink said the results also reveal that people who weighed themselves most often lost the extra weight more efficiently. "People who weigh themselves three or four times a week had lost the weight they'd gained within a month of the holiday," he said. "The rest of the group typically took five months to get back to their pre-holiday weight." Doctors can urge their patients to exercise more self control over the holidays, the researchers said. But it might be better to remind them that those pounds can persist "until the summer months or beyond." "Of course," they added, "the less one gains, the less one then has to worry about trying to lose it." SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2cxt7YH New England Journal of Medicine, online September 21, 2016.
With a milestone 30th anniversary fast approaching, it seemed that the flagship Ralph Lauren store on Rodeo Drive needed a little work. On Sept. 30, the reimagined 22,000-square-foot space reopens with a new, more casual and coastal aesthetic - think less Dead Poets Society chic than the Manhattan mothership. Originally designed in 1987 by the late famed interior designer Naomi Leff (whose roster of clients included Steven Spielberg and David Geffen), the luxury outpost actually was Lauren's second foray in Los Angeles; the designer originally had opened a women's boutique just across the tony street in 1971.

Why had Bronx-born Lauren, purveyor of a $3,495 cashmere sport jacket, driven his first antique-brass stake in a city where the most powerful men eschewed (and still do) shirts with buttons? The designer, 76, says: "[L.A. is] the home of so many of my dreams, inspired by the art of filmmaking and the glamorous world of Hollywood legends." His Hollywood history kicked off with his wardrobe for 1974's The Great Gatsby. Three years later, Diane Keaton spawned a fashion craze for androgyny by wearing his signature ties, vests and suits in Annie Hall.

The designer in 1971 on the site of his original Los Angeles boutique.

The store's modernized look is much like the classic look, featuring vintage oak flooring, antique fireplaces, a revamped VIP suite and outdoor terrace. But local anticipation is building more around a Ralph Lauren menu than a monogram. "We're all wondering if they will open a Polo Bar, like the one in New York," says Julie Wagner, CEO of the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau. The Fifth Avenue restaurant debuted in the spring of 2015 and is still reigning as one of the hardest reservations to nab in Manhattan (a recent request for a table for four for dinner before 10 was met with, "I have nothing available for the next month"). While the fashion mogul isn't bringing his eatery west as of yet, a full-service concierge (listed on Glassdoor.com as a position involving "hard to get reservations") will serve Polo Bar-derived light snacks and cocktails to VIP shopping clientele.

Story continues

This story first appeared in the Sept. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Dont ignore these symptoms. (Photo: Giphy)

Like a lot of 21-year-olds, Jennifer Gray was feeling a little rough after a night out with friends. According to her mother, the University of West Scotland student woke up the Sunday after a Saturday night on the town with a persistent sore throat, coldlike symptoms, sore joints, nausea, and a headache.

Just another case of too much rose, right?

But throughout the day her symptoms persisted and got worse, prompting her to call her parents and, later, to go to the hospital. That night Gray went into a coma and died. After running a series of tests, doctors concluded that she had been suffering from bacterial meningitis.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes bacterial meningitis as very serious and potentially deadly, saying, Death can occur in as little as a few hours.

While occurrences of bacterial meningitis have decreased in the last 10 years, the spread has long been linked to college campuses because of the community setting and close quarters among students. But another issue is how similar the signs and symptoms are to a hangover.

Meningitis symptoms include sudden onset of fever, headache, and stiff neck, the CDC says. There are often additional symptoms, such as nausea, vomiting, photophobia (increased sensitivity to light) and altered mental status (confusion). The symptoms of bacterial meningitis can appear quickly or over several days. Typically they develop within 3 to 7 days after exposure.

While doctors admit that in Grays case the symptoms moved extremely quickly, being aware of what to look for can help save a life.

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By sharing their story, Grays parents are hoping to spread awareness about this frightening disease.

Meningitis struck my family. It came for us like a bolt from the blue, Edwina Gray tells the Daily Record. It is the worst possible thing to happen to someone who has an only child. Now Ill never be a gran. I selfishly think about that. Ill never see her married. Maybe she was never going to be married because we didnt get to see what the future held.

That opportunity is gone.

Our daughter died after confusing meningitis symptoms for hangover  the Gray family for #MRFAwarenessWeek https://t.co/Q48gAMXWtG  Meningitis Research (@M_R_F) September 19, 2016

In order to prevent the spread of meningitis, the CDC recommends that parents adhere to the full vaccine schedule recommended by their local health authority. In addition, keeping your immune system strong can be vital in building up a defense against the disease.

Maintaining healthy habits, like not smoking and avoiding cigarette smoke, getting plenty of rest, and not coming into close contact with people who are sick, can also help, says the CDC. This is especially important for young babies, older adults and people with weak immune systems, since they are at increased risk for serious disease.

Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
YouTube, as part of launching a get-out-the-vote initiative aimed at young Americans, has set deals to live-stream the U.S. presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from PBS, NBCUniversals Telemundo and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post.

The Google-owned video giants expanded debate coverage means there are more choices than ever to watch the political spectacles without a TV. Facebook has an exclusive deal to live-stream ABC News debate coverage, and Twitter has a similar pact with Bloomberg Media. In 2012, YouTube live-streamed ABC News coverage of the presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

YouTube is presenting the debates as part of its #voteIRL campaign, designed to encourage people to register to vote and take part in the 2016 election. It has teamed with TV personality and producer Ryan Seacrest and YouTube stars including Timothy DeLaGhetto and the Fung Bros. to create videos that last 1 minute and 34 seconds  the amount of time it takes to register to vote, according to YouTube. (Watch Seacrests video above.)

In addition YouTubes live-streams of the debates, top creators including the Young Turks and Verizon/Hearst-owned Complex News plan to use YouTubes mobile live-streaming service to provide on-the-ground reporting from the debate venues.

The first debate between Trump and Clinton is set for Monday, Sept. 26. Each of the three presidential debates and the VP debate will be broadcast live on networks including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN without commercial breaks. The debates are scheduled to run 90 minutes.

YouTubes #voteIRL a campaign will include an anthem video featuring top talent, including Bethany Mota, Hannah Hart, Kingsley and Hank Green, designed to inspire voter participation. The video site also will include voter registration reminders on its homepage, watch page and search results page on Sept. 27 (National Voter Registration Day).

Story continues

According to YouTube, users have uploaded more than 200,000 videos related to the 2016 election each day since the GOP and Democratic conventions in July. Users have watched more than 110 million hours of content related to the candidates and issues on YouTube.

Related stories

PBS Names Ira Rubenstein Chief Digital and Marketing Officer

SAG-AFTRA Covering Telemundo's Latin American Music Awards

Immersive Horror: YouTube, Blumhouse Team With 100 Creators to Create Scary VR Videos for Halloween
For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  September 21, 2016 - Stocks in this weeks article include: Greif, Inc. (GEF), Stoneridge ( SRI) and ARRIS International (ARRS).

Screen of the Week of Zacks Investment Research:

This New Highs Screen Is Crushing the Market This Year

This screen focuses on a powerful concept, and that's buying stocks making new highs.

If somebody were to ask you what your best stocks are, you would likely name the stocks moving up the most in your portfolio. Your worst stocks? The ones going lower, of course.

Simply put, the winners in your portfolio are the ones going up. Period.

If the stock is underperforming the market (or worse, going down), you'll quickly identify it as one of your worst holdings -- and you would be right to do so.

This being the case, it only makes sense that some of these will be making new highs along the way.

Don't Be Afraid of New Highs

I know some are reluctant to buy stocks making new 52-week highs. But there's no reason to be. I suppose some may feel like they've already missed it. Or that now it has more room to fall. But if a stock is making a new 52-week high, that's a 'good thing'. Just like a stock making a new 52-week low is a 'bad thing'.

And I'm pretty sure the person who dislikes buying stocks making new 52-week highs wouldn't be too upset if the stock he already owned, broke out to a new 52-week high. And why should he? As I've mentioned before, statistics have shown that stocks making new highs have a tendency of making even higher highs. These are the stocks we all dream about. Getting in and watching it go up.

Of course, the fundamentals need to be there. And you should keep a watchful eye on valuations. But if you were in a stock making new highs and cheering it on, it seems silly to be afraid of one doing the same just because you haven't bought it yet.

One question I like asking myself just to put things into perspective is: If I was in it, would I be excited and would I still want to be in it? If the answer is "yes" -- then I'll look for the best opportunity to get in. If the answer is "no, I would be looking to take profits" -- then I'll move on.

Story continues

Embrace Stocks Making New Highs

This topic reminds me of a question someone asked me a while ago about a stock I was talking about that was at a new 52-week high. In fact, it was at a new 5-year high.

He said, "Aren't you worried about buying a stock at a 52-week high?" I said of course not. So it just made a new-52 week high. That's great news. Guess what -- last year it made a new 52-week high as well. And the year before that. And the year before that. Can you imagine all the money you'd be leaving on the table if you were afraid of being in stocks every time they made a new high?

Parameters

 Current Price/52-Week High greater than or equal to .80

Stocks that are either at a new 52-week high, or have just hit it and are still trading within 20% of it, or are climbing towards their 52-week high and are within a 20% striking distance.

 Percent Change in Price over 12 Weeks greater than 0

Even though we're looking for stocks trading near their highs, I want to make sure the price momentum over the last 3 months is positive.

 Percent Change in Price over 4 Weeks greater than 0

The same goes for the last month as well.

 Zacks Rank equal to 1

Only Zacks Strong Buys for this one.

 Price/Sales Ratio less than or equal to Industry Median

As mentioned before, the P/S ratio shows how much you're paying for every $1 of sales the company makes. For this screen, we're requiring the P/S ratio to be less than the median P/S for its Industry. Note: different industries will have different averages or medians for different items. A P/S of 1 is not such a great bargain if the median for its Industry is 0.7. But it's a great find if the Industry's median is 1.5. This parameter lets us focus in on 'discounted' valuations germane to their industry. And this allows these stocks to still be considered undervalued even as their stock price continues higher.

 P/E (using F1 Estimates) less than or equal to Industry Median

Just like the P/S ratio, we're looking for stocks whose P/E is below the median for their respective Industry. Including proven valuation metrics when using price momentum screens gives the trader a significant advantage.

 Projected One Year EPS Growth F(1)/F(0) greater than or equal to Industry Median

While the P/S and P/E ratios searched for stocks with valuations below their Industry's median. This item is looking for stocks with projected growth rates above the median for its Industry. In order for a stock to continue to go higher, there needs to be a reason for it to do so. And strong growth of course is an important part of that.

 Current Avg. 20-Day Volume greater than Previous Week's Avg. 20-Day Volume

This helps find stocks where the volume has increased in the recent week vs. the previous week. Once again, if the price is climbing on increased volume, that shows increased demand or buying coming in. And the more buying demand there is for a stock, the more it should climb.

 All of the above parameters are applied to stocks with a Price greater than or equal to $5 and an Average 20-Day Volume of greater than or equal to 100,000 shares.

 Percent Change in Price over 12 Weeks + Percent Change in Price over 4 Weeks equal to Top # 5

The screen is then narrowed down to produce no more than 5 stocks at a time. The way we're doing it with this item is by combining the percentage price change for both the 12-week and 4-week periods to select the top 5 stocks. Why? If the 12=-week % price change is solid, but the 4-week change is relatively weak, that might mean the stock is retreating from its high rather than advancing towards it. On the other hand, if the 12-week gain came largely from just the last 4 weeks-worth of gains; while that's impressive, it shows that the trend prior to the most recent period wasn't as robust. This item tries to find the best gainers on both time horizons in an effort to see that momentum carries forward.

The Results

Over the last 16 years, the New Highs strategy, using a one-week holding period, showed an average annual return of 51.9%.

What's interesting is that, even though this strategy is buying stocks near their highs, the risk/volatility (as defined by its maximum drawdown) was 23% less than the market while generating significantly better returns.

Further analysis of the backtest report shows that during bearish periods, there were fewer stocks (and sometimes no stocks) meeting the 52-week high requirement (let alone the Projected Growth Rate requirement) thus reducing the exposure of this strategy.

In bullish periods, as you would expect, there were more stocks coming through (up to our maximum of 5, of course), allowing for greater participation when the market was up.

How is it doing this year? So far, for 2016 (YTD thru 9/9/16) it's up 62.3% vs. the S&P's 5.8%. Wow!

Stocks

There are 5 new stocks coming thru this screen this week. Here are 3 of them:

(GEF) Greif, Inc.

(SRI) Stoneridge

(ARRS) ARRIS International

Get the rest of the stocks on this list and start looking for the newest companies that fit these criteria. It's easy to do. And it could help you find your next big winner. Start screening for these companies today with a free trial to the Research Wizard. You can do it.

Click here for your 2 week free trial to the Research Wizard >>

Want more articles from this author? Scroll up to the top of this article and click the FOLLOW AUTHOR button to get an email each time a new article is published.

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance.

Zacks Restaurant Recommendations: In addition to dining at these special places, you can feast on their stock shares. A Zacks Special Report spotlights 5 recent IPOs to watch plus 2 stocks that offer immediate promise in a booming sector. Download it free 

Sign up now for your free trial today and start picking better stocks immediately. And with the backtesting feature, you can test your ideas to see how you can improve your trading in both up markets and down markets. Dont wait for the market to get better before you decide to do better. Start learning how to be a better trader today: https://at.zacks.com/?id=111

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

About Screen of the Week

Zacks.com created the first and best screening system on the web earning the distinction as the "#1 site for screening stocks" by Money Magazine. But powerful screening tools is just the start. That is why Zacks created the Screen of the Week to highlight profitable stock picking strategies that investors can actively use. Each week, Zacks Profit from the Pros free email newsletter shares a new screening strategy. Learn more about it here https://at.zacks.com/?id=112

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Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978. The later formation of the Zacks Rank, a proprietary stock picking system; continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Click here for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros.

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Zacks.com provides investment resources and informs you of these resources, which you may choose to use in making your own investment decisions. Zacks is providing information on this resource to you subject to the Zacks "Terms and Conditions of Service" disclaimer. www.zacks.com/disclaimer .

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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GREIF INC (GEF): Free Stock Analysis Report



STONERIDGE INC (SRI): Free Stock Analysis Report



ARRIS INTL PLC (ARRS): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
Madrid (AFP) - Zara-owner Inditex posted a rise in first-half profits Wednesday thanks to a well-honed business model allowing the Spanish group to beat rivals in whisking new trends to the shop racks.

The world's largest fashion retailer by turnover, owned by the publicity-shy Amancio Ortega who has become the world's second richest man, said higher clothes sales and a rise in new stores around the globe drove the eight-percent jump.

Profits rose 8.0 percent to 1.3 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in the six months from February 1 while sales were up 11 percent at 10.5 billion euros, said the company which operates eight store brands including Zara, upmarket label Massimo Dutti and teen chain Bershka.

Chief executive Pablo Isla said the main reason behind the sales jump was "the execution of our business model globally," with the opening of more than 80 stores in the first half, including in the new markets of Aruba, Paraguay and Nicaragua.

The company plans to open a total of over 200 new stores this year, including around 60 in China, he added.

While its competitors prioritise low production costs and outsource manufacturing to China, Inditex makes more than half of its clothes in factories in Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Turkey and Eastern Europe -- relatively close to its main markets.

This business model allows it to get clothes to stores much faster than its rivals, thus it is able to quickly react to shifting consumer tastes and avoid excess inventory.

Clothes made for Zara, for instance, can go from the design stage to store racks in a mere two weeks.

By comparison the process takes Inditex's nearest rival H&M six months because it sources its collection further away in China.

- Concern over growth prospects -

While H&M regularly challenges it for the global number one spot, Inditex is currently the largest fashion retailer by sales, based on the two companies' first-half results this year.

But Noel Byrne, a business strategy professor at the Madrid branch of Boston's Suffolk University, warned that the Spanish group was bound to face tighter competition in the coming years as rival retailers adjust their own processes to match its quick delivery times.

Story continues

"When you are making big profits it is one of the most dangerous times in business because the competition want a share of that, and they smell it and they inevitably come," he told AFP.

As Inditex continues its push outside of Europe and plans to ramp up activities in China, it will also need to adapt its business model for Asia by opening design and production centres in the continent, Byrne added.

The company already produces basic items in low-cost Asia where it, like other large textile firms, faces accusations of employment abuses.

A report by Spain's largest union Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) said "work days are never ending" at Inditex's sub-contractors in China.

The company said it participated in the report and stressed that it also pointed out "improvements" at its Chinese sub-contractors, especially in terms of salaries.

International expansion is crucial for the growth of the group, faced with Europe's slow economic recovery.

According to a study by the Barcelona-based EAE Business School, China, Russia and South Korea are the countries where clothes spending has increased the most since 2004.

Spain, meanwhile, only represents two percent of global clothes spending, and its share in Inditex's turnover has gone from 45 to less than 20 percent in just a decade.

Despite the good results, shares in the group closed down 1.6 percent to 32.17 euros due to a mix of profit taking and concern over "growth prospects in the second half that are slightly lower than before," said Manuel Pinto, an analyst at brokers XTB.
San Francisco (AFP) - Mark Zuckerberg and his wife on Wednesday pledged $3 billion over the next decade to help banish or manage all disease, pouring some of the Facebook founder's fortune into innovative research.

"This is a big goal," Zuckerberg said at a San Francisco event announcing the effort of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative established by the couple.

"But we spent the last few years speaking with experts who think it is possible, so we dug in."

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had their daughter Max late last year. Shortly after, they pledged to donate 99 percent of their Facebook holdings or some $45 billion to "advance human potential and promote equality."

At Wednesday's event, Zuckerberg said their goal is to cure all disease, or at least turn catastrophic illnesses from terminal to manageable or preventable within their daughter's lifetime.

While the funding effort is for the next decade, Zuckerberg and his wife said they hope to achieve their objective of by the end of this century.

Chan, fighting back tears at times, said that curing all disease within Max's lifetime will not mean children won't ever get sick, but it would happen less often and be less severe.

- New tools for researchers -

The first investment being made as part of what the Zuckerbergs hoped would become a "collective" effort will be $600 million for the creation of a Biohub in San Francisco where researchers, scientists and others will work to build tools to better study and understand diseases.

"Throughout the history of science, most breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of some new technology that lets you see things in new ways," Zuckerberg said, mentioning the microscope and DNA sequencing as examples.

"Tools also create breakthroughs in how we treat diseases."

The Biohub will bring together engineers and scientists from three prestigious California universities to help the effort.

Story continues

"We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades," Zuckerberg said.

"But, it will take years for these tools to be built and longer to put them into full use. This is hard and we need to be patient, but it's important."

Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was brought on to lead the project.

Zuckerberg took an engineering approach to the challenge, reasoning that there were a handful of big health culprits including cancer and neurological disease so it was "pretty easy" to imagine what types of tools are needed.

He spoke of the potential to put artificial intelligence to work imaging brains or having machine learning tackling analysis of genomes.

Zuckerberg and Chan also hoped that their project would power a movement to fund more medical research around the world.

Taking part in the event on Wednesday was Microsoft billionaire turned global philanthropist Bill Gates, who has made improving health around the world a top goal at the foundation he created with his wife.

Gates praised Zuckerberg and Chan for taking on a "very bold, very ambitious" challenge.

"I have no doubt they will make progress," Gates said.

"Mark and Priscilla, they are inspiring a whole new generation of philanthropists who will do amazing things."

Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, stood by her husband as she assured the gathering, which included prominent medical researchers and local politicians, that her "heart is full of hope" and that all involved were eager to get started.
12 tiny (but amazing) American towns that were dying to visit

12 tiny (but amazing) American towns that were dying to visit

Sure, weve been to the big cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Franciscobut theres so much more to America. Some of the little towns listed in Country Livings https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/hello_giggles_454/4f2dc639fca6ea996fc303778cc71fe3"http://www.countryliving.com/life/travel/g3557/small-american-town-destinations/?slide=1&thumbnails=">40 American Towns You Havent Heard of But Should Visit ASAP we dont even know how to pronounce, let alone know how to get there. But we sure cant wait to find out. Here are our top 12 picks, for our next https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/hello_giggles_454/4f2dc639fca6ea996fc303778cc71fe3"http://hellogiggles.com/more-road-trips/">American Pie road trip, or maybe https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/hello_giggles_454/4f2dc639fca6ea996fc303778cc71fe3"http://hellogiggles.com/just-dream-places-renew-vows/">our wedding destination? Hmmm.

Damariscotta, Maine







A river town on the Damariscotta (havent heard of it? Either had we.), its shores are lined with oyster shells that historians say are from Native American gatherings 2,500 years ago.

Pella, Iowa







In May, they celebrate the Tulip Time Festival, honoring their Dutch roots.

Welch, West Virginia







A coal mining town where wed for sure get Loretta Lynn songs stuck in our heads.

Keene, New Hampshire







Countryside, lakes and covered bridges. Americana at its prettiest.

Ferndale, California







Called the Cream City, all 1,372 of its population live within one square mile.

Lanesboro, Minnesota







The bed and breakfast capital of America with a population of just 754!

Shelburne, Vermont







A quaint town with a series of barns called Shelburne Farms where people can milk cows and watch cheesemakers make cheddars. YUM.

Fredericksburg, Texas







Wine tasting in Texas? Yep, indeedy  thats what Fredericksburg is known for.

Story continues

Sitka, Alaska







A spruce and hemlock rainforest and humpback whale watching sound like a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Davis, Oklahoma







A 77-foot waterfall that you can swim underneath!! Booking a flight now

Shipshewana, Indiana







We can only imagine the awesome finds at the largest flea market in the country.

Creede, Colorado







Straight out of an Old Western.

The post 12 tiny (but amazing) American towns that were dying to visit appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Molly Guy came up with a creative, clever, and oh-so-fashionable way to support Circle of Health International, a nonprofit that helps mothers and babies in crisis zones get the care they need. (Photo: Instagram)

When Molly Guy, the owner and founder of New Yorks Stone Fox Bride, met Sera Bonds, the founder of Circle of Health International, two years ago, Guy was pregnant with her second child. She was introduced to Bonds through her doula, Domino Kirke. Guy felt an immediate connection with Bonds  herself a trained midwife with a masters degree in public health  and the work Bonds was doing to ensure that mothers and babies in crisis zones had access to essential pre- and postnatal care.



In the 10 years that Circle of Health International has been in existence, it has served more than 3 million women, trained 7,000 health care professionals, and placed 200 volunteer clinicians and health professionals in areas where there are humanitarian emergencies. The nonprofit does everything from delivering birth kits in Sierra Leone to outfitting midwives in Aleppo with medical equipment. It also performs c-sections and runs a clinic on the Texas-Mexico border to serve the women there, often in transit, who might need obstetrics care. By partnering with women-led, community-based health and relief organizations, Circle of Health International is able to support these existing groups with supplies, training, and disaster relief.

Thats why its easy to see how a person could feel immediately compelled to help support the work the organization does. And when Guy found herself throwing a baby shower for a friend, she suggested that all attendees make donations to Circle of Health International. The response she got was so enthusiastic that Guy helped organize a formal fundraiser for the organization with actresses Julianne Moore and Jemima Kirke  and in one fell swoop raised $80,000.

Actresses and moms Julianne Moore and Jemima Kirke (both far left) at a fundraiser for Circle of Health International last year. (Photo courtesy of Molly Guy)

Story continues

Guy then came up with a creative, clever, and oh-so-fashionable way to support Circle of Health International and the needs of mothers in communities less fortunate than her own.

I made these T-shirts this summer, and people think theyre so funny, Guy tells Yahoo Style of her Mother F***ing Hood shirts shes selling once again this week  this time with all proceeds going to the organization. Whenever I post about them or sell them, they sell out. I decided to tie the T-shirts with Sera being in New York this week to try to raise money and awareness for the work shes doing.

The money being raised by the shirts by the end of the week will go directly to a group of 1,000 indigenous women in Nicaragua to fund their attendance at a conference on health and maternity care, and to help them start a clinic of their own.

A photo posted by Sarah Sophie Flicker (@sarahsophief) on Sep 20, 2016 at 3:14pm PDT

Theyre getting the money on Friday, Guy explains. Im so excited that the fruits of our labor will see a turnaround so quickly. The money wont be sitting in some big relief fund on Capitol Hill. Its going straight to these women, and this week.

Guy notes that although the shirts might be a little irreverent or offensive to some, were doing what we set out to do, which is helping women and children in the places that need it.

The United Nations estimates that about half of all refugees worldwide are women, and that 41 percent of all refugees are children. And four-fifths of refugees are in the developing world, where, as the U.N. puts it, they live in nations that can least afford to host them. Furthermore, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 99 percent of all maternal deaths worldwide  that is, death that occurs during pregnancy and childbirth  are in developing countries. Adolescents face the highest risk of complications and death as a result of pregnancy than any other group of women. That said, the WHO also reports that most maternal deaths are preventable, as the health-care solutions to prevent or manage complications are well known. All women need access to antenatal care in pregnancy, skilled care during childbirth, and care and support in the weeks after childbirth.

Guy explains that she and everyone else she knows is constantly focused on their children and how best to care for them. Were concerned with them not eating too much sugar, were concerned with them not watching too much TV, were concerned with them getting too much time on the iPad, were concerned with potty training correctly and weaning them off their pacifiers. These are all First World issues that come up.  Our resources are so vast. Mother F***ing Hood to me means being exasperated with my kids for not wanting to leaving the playground on Sunday at dinnertime  but for other mothers, its making sure they have clean water, that their children are able to thrive in a climate thats not conducive to their needs.

Indeed, for Guy, being critically aware of what motherhood means for others is what motherhood itself is all about.

Minutes after my first was born, I felt my heart had been ripped in half and I felt a deep, cosmic compassion for every living human being, animal, and creature on Earth. Id always prided myself on having a tough shell, for being gritty, says Guy. But once I became a mom, I became much more compassionate and sensitive, especially to other women and what theyre experiencing  and how to help.

For women who want to come up with their own entrepreneurial ways to support the work of Circle of Health International and the challenges faced by mothers in other parts of the world, Guy encourages them to email her or Bonds directly.

Or donate, she says. Or buy a shirt. There are so many things we can do. Just asking questions is so valuable. Information can be shared and women can begin to encourage their friends to think about what they can do.  I think while we all wish that we were on the ground and getting our hands dirty and making change at a grassroots level, thats not realistic for most people. So whether youre using social media to spread the word, telling friends, making things, reaching out to Sera to help with the administrative side of the organization  we all have a skill set that we can lend to the greater cause.

Guy adds: It starts with awareness and conversation. Im here as a resource; Seras here as a resource. And the more women that can unite, the more power we have to heal.

To purchase a shirt in support of Circle of Health International, please visit Stone Fox Bride online.

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HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finland's court of appeal ordered two Uber drivers on Wednesday to give up their earnings to the state for not having a valid taxi license, dealing a blow to the ride-hailing service. Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL], which has faced bans and protests from established taxi operators around the world, is legal in Finland provided its drivers hold a taxi license. But the length of time it takes to get a permit has led some drivers to work without one, leading to a debate within Finland about whether the system should be reformed. The government presented a bill on Tuesday to deregulate the taxi market from 2018, but the initial plan to let drivers earn up to 10,000 euros ($11,150) a year without a permit was dropped due to opposition from the nationalist Finns party, part of the coalition. The appeal court decision, which confirms earlier local court verdicts, confiscates earnings of 12,250 euros and 2,800 euros respectively from the two drivers. Uber's Finland country manager Joel Jarvinen said a police crackdown on drivers without licenses was regrettable at a time when the government was preparing changes in taxi regulation, but declined to comment further on the verdicts. The rulings will likely be followed by several similar cases while current legislation is in force, the police said. "Right now we have around 30 (Uber) cases proceeding to consideration of charges and a bunch of others under investigation," Inspector Pekka Seppala said. According to Uber, more than 100,000 Finns have downloaded its mobile app, and thousands use the service every week. While drivers will still need permits under the government's new bill, annual permit quotas and fare restrictions will be removed, which could help new entrants to the market. "It is positive that the reform goes forward, it allows more flexible traffic solutions ... But it is regrettable that the bill does not take any notice of small-scale ride-sharing," Uber's Jarvinen said, adding the transition period felt long. (Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl and Tuomas Forsell; Editing by Mark Potter)
By Tom Bergin LONDON (Reuters) - The world's biggest central banks have told regulators that banks must tighten security around their SWIFT messaging systems following the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank in February. The SWIFT Oversight Forum, a group of 10 of the biggest central banks, led by the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), has sent an update to bank regulators urging them to scrutinize banks' procedures, according to an undated document recently published on the NBB website. Financial institutions use SWIFT messages to send instructions for transfers worth trillions of dollars each day. Thieves hacked into Bangladesh Bank's SWIFT system in February and sent fraudulent payment instructions to the New York Federal Reserve in an attempt to steal $1 billion. The New York Fed rejected most of instructions but $81 million was paid and has not been recovered. The SWIFT Oversight Forum, which also includes the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, said that in response to "the escalating cyber threat environment" it would consider new security measures that financial regulators could require banks to fulfill. In the meantime, it said banks should follow SWIFT's recommended operating guidance closely and look at new ways to reduce security risks. The NBB declined comment. (Reporting by Tom Bergin; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Google wants you to get a little closer with, well, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) via its newest messaging app, Allo.

Available for download for Android and iOS beginning today, and reaching most users by the end of the week, Allo is designed to compete with messaging apps like Facebook (FB) Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and Apples (AAPL) iMessage. But Allo has an ace up its sleeve: Google. Ive been using Allo for the past week, and its one heck of a trick.

See, unlike Googles current messaging app, Hangouts, Allo lets you chat with Google itself via its new Google Assistant (in addition to chatting with individuals and groups). Google Assistant lets you ask Google questions and get replies within the app itself. Its also smart enough to see what youre talking about with friends and provide relevant recommendations without prompting.

Say, Hello! to Allo

Introduced at Googles I/O developer conference in June, Allo is a mobile-only messaging app, so you wont be able to use it on your work computer to help pass the time like you do with Hangouts or Facebook Messenger. Like WeChat and WhatsApp, Allo requires you to use your mobile phone number to create an account. It literally took me less than two minutes to set up the app.

Once finished, Allo automatically detected which people in my phones contact list also had the app, so I could begin chatting with them right away. If people didnt have Allo, I was still able to chat with them through the app, though the experience was significantly downgrade on their end.

As with most messaging apps, Allo offers group chats, so you can get in touch with all of your friends at once if youre, say, planning a party. Of course, the conversation will likely descend into chaos within five minutes. Then, several people will ask to be removed from the chat, because the notifications are driving them insane. At least thats how my group chats usually go.

Fun with stickers

If youre going to launch a messaging app today, you better be darn sure it has stickers, emojis and any number of other ridiculous features, or you might as well not release the app at all. Okay, goofy add-ons arent that important, but theyre what users want and Allo has them in spades.

Story continues

By tapping the plus sign in the apps text box you can pull up a quick menu that points you to various emojis and stickers you can add to your messages. You can also add photos from your camera roll, take photos for your messages and share your location on a map

Allos stickers are particularly interesting, as well-known artists created them with a little help from Google. According to Nick Fox, Googles VP of communications products, the company used anonymized user data to determine the words and phrases most often used in chats. The company then took the words and phrases to artists who created stickers for them. The result is a library of stickers that are silly, sweet and, often, downright bizarre. My favorite is a sloth riding a slice of pizza, mostly because its appropriate for virtually every conversation.

Photos I sent via Allo also stretched to the edges of the screen. Thats a huge improvement over Googles Hangouts, which presents photos in compressed frames. You can draw directly on your photos in Allo, something you cant do in Hangouts.

Allo also includes a new way to let you yell in your messages when caps lock simply wont cut it. With whisper-shout you can type something into the apps text box then press the send button and slide it up to blow up the text or drag it down to shrink it. If your friends are anything like mine, theyll use the feature to send things like FART in giant letters  and for that alone its worth it.

The secret ingredient: Google

Okay, so Allo lets you send messages, group chat with friends and yell or whisper phrases. Big deal: A lot of other apps can do the same thing and in some cases do better. What makes Google think you should download Allo then? Easy: It has Google baked right into the app in the form of the companys Google Assistant.

Assistant is essentially a super-powered bot that pulls information from all of Googles disparate services and features and presents them to you in Allo. For example, Allo features Google Smart Reply, which allows Google to read texts sent to you. Then, you automatically have the option to send a quick reply at the touch of a button.

If your friend asks where you are, Smart Reply will instantly display chat bubbles with options like Im home, Im at work, and Im here. Tap the bubble that works and thats it. You can almost have entire conversations like this, though eventually youll start talking in circles.

Smart Reply also works with photos thanks to Googles image recognition technology. So if someone sends you a picture of a cat, Allo will provide you with Smart Reply options like Adorable with a cat emoji next to it.

In one example Fox showed me, the app recognized a picture of a smiling child wearing sunglasses and provided Sunny smile as a Smart Reply.

Thats all well and good, but where Google Assistant really shines is when you ask it questions such as, Whats the weather like? Google Assistant will not only provide you with the conditions for your area, but it will also offer you the option to check for the weekend, get daily updates and even change the temperature measurement to Celsius.

Assistant is also intelligent enough to remember what you last asked. So youll be able to ask Whats the weather like? then say, What about in London? and Assistant will give you the weather for London.

Google Assistant can also help you figure out what you want to do for dinner. If youre in a group chat, you can ask your friend if they want to get dinner and the app will automatically provide you with nearby restaurant suggestions. From there, you can narrow your search by cuisine and even check the restaurants location on a map.

Want to go out for a movie? Google Assistant can help with that too.

In fact, you can use Google Assistant to answer pretty much any question you have within your chats by simply typing @Google into the apps text box followed by your question. So expect to settle a lot of arguments with friends.

Thats really only a sample of what Assistant can do, though. You can also use the feature to find nearby gas stations and stores, check traffic in the area, monitor your travel plans stored in Gmail and plan trips with friends.

Assistant is the future of Googles search operation. In addition to Allo, the feature will be coming to Googles upcoming Amazon Echo competitor Home, as well as other devices.

How Allo compares to similar apps

Allo is an impressive app. Google promises to add even more features, including the integration of third-party apps such as OpenTable so you can make reservations at your favorite restaurants.

But Google isnt the only company with a slick new messaging app. Apples own iMessage received a massive update with iOS 10 including funky new stickers, fun effects, and app integration with OpenTable and Fandango among others. You can plan and set up an entire date night from your handset. The update to iOS 10 is worth this alone.

No, iMessage isnt as smart as Allos Google Assistant. It doesnt have built in search and it doesnt offer context-sensitive Smart Replies. But it might not need to in order to keep users happy. And iMessage isnt alone in offering such rich features. Facebook Messenger lets you call an Uber without leaving the app, while Chinas WeChat has become a microcosm of the larger app ecosystem on its own thanks to its litany of third-party apps.

With such competition around, why would Google want to get into the messaging app race? For the data, of course. See, Google has no plans to monetize its new messaging apps, but it can still use the anonymoized data it collects to sell to advertisers. So its sure to pull in a nice chunk of change for the search giant.

Should you get it?

Allo is free, easy to use and has all of the power of Googles vast internet search resources behind it. Its a wonderful app thanks to its intelligent use of Google search and Smart Reply. But its still not quite as polished as Apples iMessage or Facebooks Messenger.

Whether Allo can even reach the kind of massive audiences iMessage, Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat already have is also a major unknown at this point. Google Assistant is certainly interesting, but is it enough to pull users away from the apps their already invested in?

If youre already using either Apple or Facebooks offerings, Allo is certainly worth checking out. You might not get all of the slick presentation and fun features of Apples iMessage or Facebooks Messenger, but Google Assistant easily makes up for it.

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
(Reuters) - Google-parent Alphabet Inc launched Allo, a messaging app that incorporates Google's search feature and a chatbot that uses machine learning to "improve" itself over time. The new messaging service, which was unveiled in May, will compete with Facebook Inc's WhatsApp and Messenger. The much-anticipated launch comes a month after Google rolled out Duo, its video calling app. Allo features a chatbot powered by Google Assistant, a virtual personal assistant like Apple Inc's Siri. Users can call up the assistant in a chat by typing "@google" followed by a search query and the results will be displayed in the chat itself. (http://bit.ly/2dgDr6l) "The more you use it, the more it improves over time," Amit Fulay, group product manager, wrote in a blog post. The app has a "Smart Reply" feature that suggests responses to chats and can be send with just a tap. "If your friend sends you a photo of their pet, you might see Smart Reply suggestions like 'aww cute!'," Fulay wrote. Users can also use stickers and scribble on photos before sending them. Allo will have end-to-end encryption only while chatting in "Incognito" mode. Whatsapp chats have end-to-end encryption. Google has started rolling out Allo and said the app would be available worldwide in the next few days. (Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
Its hard to reconcile the modern world we live in -- where information is readily accessible and flows freely -- with the reality of what life is like for the vast majority of North Koreans who remain under the draconian rule of an oppressive regime that, quite literally, does everything in its power to shield its populace from any information that isnt tailor-made or approved by government officials.

DON'T MISS: All the biggest complaints about the iPhone 7

Because North Korea clamps down on Internet access and purposefully prevents its citizens from communicating with the outside world, theres an awful lot that we dont know about the country. As a result, theres always a high level of fascination anytime someone manages to take and release unsanctioned photos of the country or divulge previously unknown tidbits of information about life there.

With that in mind, GitHub earlier today revealed the full extent of North Korean websites that can be accessed by outsiders, and as you might expect, its a small list consisting of just 28 domains. Now as for how access to that list of domains became possible, heres what happened:

On Sept 19, 2016 at approximately 10:00PM (PST), one of North Korea's top level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers. This allows anyone who performs an AXFR (zone transfer) request to the country'sns2.kptc.kp nameserver can get a copy of the nation's top level DNS data.

And thats exactly what the TL;DR project did.

When the dust settled, the TL;DR project discovered that only 28 sites were found to be using the .KP top level domain. Not surprisingly, a few of them arent even operational though a handful  such as cooks.org.kp  appear to be live for now.The full listing can be read below.

airkoryo.com.kp  for purchasing airline tickets

cooks.org.kp.- for viewing North Korean cuisine

friend.com.kp.

gnu.rep.kp.

kass.org.kp.

kcna.kp.  North Korean news

kiyctc.com.kp.

knic.com.kp.  An insurance company

koredufund.org.kp.

korelcfund.org.kp.

korfilm.com.kp.

ma.gov.kp.

masikryong.com.kp.

naenara.com.kp.

nta.gov.kp.

portal.net.kp.

rcc.net.kp.

rep.kp.

rodong.rep.kp.

ryongnamsan.edu.kp.

sdprk.org.kp.

silibank.net.kp.

star-co.net.kp.

star-di.net.kp.

star.co.kp.

star.edu.kp.

star.net.kp.

vok.rep.kp.

Story continues

If youre a bit nervous about checking out these sites on your own, someone has done the Internet at large a favor by visiting those sites and taking screenshots of what he saw.

Trending right now:

See the original version of this article on BGR.com
Tesla critics dont need to search far and wide for reasons to criticize the company. From complaints that the companys Autopilot software is dangerous to complaints that the fit and finish of the Model S is beneath what one would expect from a luxury car, Tesla is obviously not free from scrutiny.

But if theres one thing that Tesla does right, if theres one thing that even the most vocal of Tesla detractors would have to concede, its that Teslas cars are blazing fast. Teslas most recent Model S P100D, for example, can go from 0-60 in just 2.5 seconds flat. Equally as impressive is that Teslas SUV  the Model X  is no slouch in the speed department either. In short, if there's one thing that Tesla knows, it's speed.

DON'T MISS: iPhone 7 photo samples: Seriously, how does a phone have a camera this good?

That being the case, a peculiar lawsuit emanating out of Norway accuses Tesla cars of not being fast enough. According to a report from Bloomberg, 126 Tesla Model S owners are alleging that the Model S P85D in Insane mode isnt, well, its just not insane enough.

Some 126 owners of the Tesla Model S sedans P85D performance version are seeking unspecified reimbursements after the model only reached 469 horsepower instead of a pledged 700 hp, said Kaspar N. Thommessen, an attorney at Wikborg Rein law firm representing the plaintiffs. The car has too low horsepower, the lawyer said Wednesday in an e-mailed response to questions. And of course, it affects the cars performance, according to the consumers.

Tesla meanwhile is disputing the claims, with a company spokesperson relaying that the 0-60 MPH time of the Model S P85D is commensurate with the companys 3.1 to 3.3 second claims. In turn, Tesla maintains that the aforementioned Model S meets the advertised technical requirements according to the measurement method required by the authorities.

Itll certainly be entertaining to see how this lawsuit progresses, especially because Tesla owners are typically such die-hard fans that the idea of Tesla owners en masse suing the company is downright, well, it's downright ludicrous.

Story continues

Trending right now:

See the original version of this article on BGR.com
Despite the shortcomings that every leader has, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghanas boldest leader to have fought for the freedom of Ghana was an exceptional president; one that Ghana may never have again in a long time.

To this day, some of the groundwork laid by Kwame Nkrumah are still heavily depended on even though the initiative of most of them were rejected by the masses.

Some critics have said, had Kwame Nkrumah had the chance to serve longer, Ghana would have been a much better country today.

Here are seven photos that prove that Ghanas first president was, and will always be the best she ever had.

READ ALSO: There is no Ghanaian that can be called a patriot- Nyaho Tamakloe

1. The only motorway in Ghana was built by Kwame Nkrumah and now serves as the quickest route to travel from Accra to Tema and its environs.

2. The Akosombo dam since its construction in the 1950s remains the main source of electricity for Ghana and neighbouring countries.

3. Kwame Nkrumah was all about uniting Africa and made it one of his Key agendas to help other African countries as well as linking the diaspora back to Africa.

4. Three of the major universities in Ghana were built by Kwame Nkrumah with the foresight of a population increase in these schools. Today The University of Ghana, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the University of Cape Coast educates up to 100,000 students each year.

5. Osagyefo also created major railway lines between Kumasi, Accra and Takoradi to foster the economic trade between regions.

6. Dr. Nkrumah was also the president who built Korle Bu and Komfo Anokye Teaching hospitals that serve as two of the most advanced hospitals in Ghana today.

7. Several communities making up the township of Tema was the brainchild of Dr. Nkrumah. He wanted an ideal location where workers in the ports and factories could reside while developing one of the most important sectors of the nation.

What Nkrumah brainchild are you most thankful for today?

Source: YEN.com.gh
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Residents of Abim district in Karamoja sub region have asked that one ward in Abim hospital be named after former FDC presidential candidate Dr. Kizza Besigye.

They said this would work as an appreciation for his visit in the hospital that forced government to renovate the hospital.

One of the elders Peter Ocheng says if Besigye had not visited Abim hospital during the presidential campaigns late last year, the government wouldnt have thought of renovating the hospital.

Government has finalised renovation works at Abim hospital. The 700-million-shilling contract was awarded to Pal Globe Engineering Uganda limited after Besigyes controversial visit of the hospital.

While campaigning in the sub region last December, Dr Besigye made an impromptu visit to the referral hospital which had not received a facelift since it was built in the 1960s. His visit exposed the rot in the hospital.

It emerged that the hospital had been operating without a resident doctor for nearly three years and three nurses who helped Besigye during his visit nearly lost their jobs.

They were reprimanded by government for taking the FDC candidate around the hospital and exposing the despicable state of the health facility.

Just a month after Besigye visit, government releases she 700million for the renovation of the hospital.

The facility has gone through a major renovation including rebuilding and painting the hospital walls, building concrete seats for patients, opening sewage system, connecting water system, and electricity supply.

However, the assistant chief administrative officer Abim Nelson Olwit said there was no need to name any ward after Besigye saying he did nothing, adding that the government already had plans to renovate the hospital long before his visit.

Story By Steven Ariong
Amnesty International has asked authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo to show restraint in their handling of protests to ensure that they do not inflame tensions in the country.

The rights body is also calling for thorough, prompt, impartial and transparent investigations into killings and violence that took place at opposition rallies in Kinshasa on Monday.

The Congolese government says 17 people, including three police officers, were killed at these rallies but the opposition puts the death toll at more than 50.

Amnesty Internationals Country Campaigner for the DRC Christian Rumu warns that confronting people exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly with excessive force fans the flames of unrest.

The opposition parties are up in arms demanding that elections be held soon to replace President Joseph Kabila whose second term expires on December 19th.

However the electoral commission has failed to call the election, citing lack of funds and insufficient time to update the voting register.

Yesterday was the constitutional deadline for the Independent National Electoral Commission to announce the date for presidential elections.

Story By Ali Mivule
Botswana is to deport controversial US pastor Steven Anderson after he said on a local radio that homosexuals should be stoned to death.

President Ian Khama told the Reuters news agency that he had personally ordered his arrest.

We dont want hate speech in this country. Let him do it in his own country, he said.

Last week, South Africa barred Mr Anderson from visiting because of his critical remarks about homosexuality.

Homosexual acts are illegal in Botswana, as in many African countries.
The Forum for Democratic Change plans to hold a series of rallies in Kampala ahead of the Independence Day celebrations in October.

According to the party spokesperson Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, they plan to hold a public lecture on Ugandas journey to democratization.

He says they also hope to highlight what he describes as extravagant expenditure by government institutions and seek solutions to the problems affecting the country.

Ssemuju says the rallies will be held starting from 7th and be crowned up with grand celebrations in Kawempe on 9th October.

Meanwhile, he also revealed plans to lead a procession to Entebbe Airport on September 29th to welcome back former FDC president Dr. Kizza Besigye from abroad.
The former State Works minister Andruale Awuzu has died at Arua Regional Referral Hospital.

The daughter, Dr Pamela Paparu, says her father passed on aged 75.

Awuzu served as Vurra County MP in Arua district for two terms and Simon Ejua succeeded him both as area legislator and minister in-charge the same Works docket.

Previously, Awuzu served as an Engineer in the Uganda Army.

He is remembered for championing upgrading the Karuma-Pakwach-Nebbi-Arua highway from gravel to bitumen alongside upgrading of local roads within Arua.

As a minister, Awuzu met with transitional government officials in Kinshasa to explore possibilities for improving trade opportunities in the East and Central Africa.

Ayivu County MP Bernard Atiku who chairs the West Nile Parliamentary Group, has described the late Awuzu as a committed person whose foot-marks could be traced throughout the country as he served as minister.

He says the Speaker of Parliament has been informed about Awuzus demise.

Story By Monitor Reporter
By Moha Ennaji

The United Nations World Water Development Report confirms what many already know: hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)  especially in Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen  have faced the worst water shortages in decades in 2016. This is the last thing the region needs, as it works toward economic growth and diversification.

Multiple factors have contributed to the current situation, including climate change, desertification, water pollution, and misuse of natural resources. Inadequate information, education, and communication exacerbate many of these challenges, as it reinforces a lack of awareness of  much less commitment to  environmentally friendly practices. Add to that inadequate disaster-risk reduction and management by governments  many of which are dealing with other conflicts and crises  and the situation has become truly dire.

Algeria, for example, has been experiencing its worst drought in five decades. With much of the country's agriculture relying heavily on rainfall, owing to underdeveloped infrastructure, cereal yields are down 40% this year. Despite its vast oil and gas wealth, Algeria has failed to ensure sufficient affordable water resources for its population, not to mention adequate employment opportunities. As a result, the country is now being rocked by popular protests.

Libya has faced even greater instability, wrought by years of internal conflict. The resultant power cuts and fuel scarcity undermined water distribution in the country. Last summer, the UN had to procure some five million liters of water from neighboring countries to meet the country's needs.

In Jordan, water shortages occur with devastating frequency, particularly in larger cities like Amman. Jordan is estimated to have enough water reserves to support two million people. Yet its population is more than six million, not including the 1.5 million Syrian refugees who currently reside in the country.

In times of shortage, it is the refugees who are likely to be among the first to feel the effects. Water supplies in many refugee camps, in both Jordan and Lebanon, have been cut to a minimum  a decision that affects millions of people who are already enduring scorching temperatures. At Rukban, a refugee camp on Jordan's joint border with Syria and Iraq, more than 85,500 residents each receive barely five liters per day for cooking, drinking, and washing.

The situation in Yemen is similarly grim. Racked by sectarian violence and civil war, the country has no functioning government to manage water resources. The capital, Sanaa, could run dry in ten years. And, with half of Yemen's population lacking access to clean water, crops are failing and disease is spreading. The UN estimates that 14,000 children under the age of five die of malnutrition and diarrhea each year. Meanwhile, farmers are drilling deeper than ever for water  some wells are 500 meters deep  without any regulation.

Effective government intervention may be a long way off in Yemen, but it is feasible  indeed, imperative  in other MENA countries. For starters, national governments must work to modernize agricultural practices, including by training farmers and introducing more efficient irrigation tools. Reducing farmers' dependence on rainfall is essential.

Some countries  namely, Morocco and Jordan  have already taken some important steps in this direction. Morocco's government, in particular, has made substantial efforts to develop its water resources, including through dam-building.

But there is a still a long way to go. Water-distribution efficiency in Morocco remains low  just 60% for irrigation. For a country that has experienced more than 20 droughts in 35 years, that is a serious problem. The good news is that the African Development Bank recently approved a loan of more than 88 million ($98.7 million) to fund a project aimed at improving the quality of water distribution.

This points to a crucial insight: no one country can do it alone. Regional and international cooperation is badly needed. MENA countries must support one another in implementing programs modeled on what has worked elsewhere.

Moreover, additional investment  financed from domestic and international sources  should be allocated to repairing aging water infrastructure, as well as new projects, such as well-designed dams and water reservoirs. And stronger efforts must be made to safeguard existing water resources.

Here, the public has an important role to play. But citizens first must be made aware not only of how to use water more sensibly, but also of how to protect against climate-related disaster risk.

For the private sector and NGOs, upgrading water management in the MENA region presents a major opportunity to invest in water-services delivery and related technology. The regional market for enhanced local sanitation and water-related services is estimated to be worth over $200 billion. Projects aimed at meeting this demand are a smart investment.

But it is up to governments to take the first steps. If they do not take action to preserve water reserves and standardize supply, the most defenseless populations will continue to suffer, a situation that can easily lead to unrest  or worse. Indeed, if nothing is done to address the water challenges facing the MENA region, those challenges may fuel future wars.

At the next meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in Morocco in November , water should be at the top of the agenda. Given that more than 80% of the national contributions to the fight against climate change from the countries of the global South focus on water challenges, coordinated action by governments and international actors can no longer be postponed.
WEST LAFAYETTE  When Hillary Clintons unfavorables are 62 percent, Donald Trumps are 54 percent and Gov. Mike Pence stands at 45 percent, as they were in the WTHR/Howey Politics Indiana Poll released last Friday, the obvious question in this strange, strange election cycle is whether Hoosier voters are open to exploring an alternative. Such an option showed up at Purdue University on Tuesday when Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson had a conversation with President Mitch Daniels, students, the public and press.

There was a fascinating backdrop to all of this, as Daniels will be one of about 15 Presidential Debate Commission members who will participate in a Friday conference call to determine whether Johnson will join Trump and Clinton on the stage Sept. 26 at Tufts University in Hempstead, N.Y., in what many believe will be a critically pivotal event in this unprecedented race. What theyve said is you have to be at 15 percent in five polls, Johnson said after the WTHR/Howey Poll showed Johnson at 11 percent, trailing Trump at 43 percent and Clinton at 36 percent. A wasted vote is voting for someone you dont believe in. We do believe well be in the presidential debate. This is a two-party system that needs crashing. There is nothing to fear of my voice being on that stage.

In the opening 20 minutes of his conversation with Daniels, the former Indiana governor who once pondered a presidential run himself, asked Johnson to stake out positions. What was his political philosophy? Daniels asked.

Were speaking on behalf of 60 percent, who are fiscally responsible, for smaller government, and were socially inclusive. All of us want the freedom and liberty to make choices in our own lives as long as those choices dont put others in harms way. Americans are skeptical of foreign interventions. I cannot think of a single example of it ever working out. I do believe free trade is what most of us really want. Free trade is not crony capitalism. Free trade is absent government interference. Im the only free trade candidate in this race.

Daniels asked about the war in Afghanistan, Americas longest that began in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. We were attacked and we attacked back, Johnson said. In seven months, we wiped out al Qaeda. I think we should get out tomorrow. Tomorrow would be the same if we got out 20 years from now. Johnson also opposed the Iraq War. Later asked by a student about foreign interventions, Johnson said, Were not going to involve ourselves in regime change, adding, Look, if were attacked, were going to attack back.

Your thoughts on Syria, Daniels asked. Thats where that Aleppo is.

Ah, Aleppo, Johnson said with a laugh. Syria is regime change. I opposed regime change. The only way to get out is to join hands with Russia diplomatically. I applaud the work of Secretary Kerry and hope this works out.

How about drug legalization? I said we should legalize marijuana in 1991, adding that 10 million Americans have drug-related criminal records. When we come to legalize marijuana, were going to have a quantum leap in looking at the drug issue as one of health, not criminal justice.

Does he support the 2nd Amendment? I support the right to bear arms, Johnson said resolutely. We should be open to debate on how to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill.

Then Daniels asked Johnson about immigration. Johnson audibly sighed. We should embrace immigration, he began. I am speaking as a border state governor. Mexico is a political bogeyman. They are the cream of the crop when it comes to workers. The reason there are 11 million here illegally is the government has made it impossible to get a work visas for jobs American citizens dont want to do. We should make it as easy as possible to get a work visa; do a background check and given them a Social Security card. Building a wall across the border is crazy. Lets dramatically increase immigration. These are hard-working people who are buying homes, cars, contributing to welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, contributing to Social Security. Its a good thing.

Johnson was asked by a student what his first priority would be if elected. Bill Weld and I in the first 100 days will provide a balanced budget to Congress. We will give them the template on how to do that. We cant balance the budget unless Medicare and Medicaid is reformed. Social Security is another matter, but it is simpler that Medicaid.

Both Daniels and Johnson noted that he vetoed 750 bills, including line item spending, during his two terms as governor. Johnson noted, Just leave the private sector alone. Give them consistency that taxes wont go up, but from a regulatory standpoint, I cant tell you how many bills I vetoed that were just going to add time and money to our lives.

Daniels ended the public proceedings by saying, I want to thank our guest. You just gave a string of intelligent, candid, politically risky, unpredictable answers all apparently grounded in an apparent philosophy.

Daniels then asked, What are you doing in this election?

 The columnist is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find him on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
FORT WAYNE  Carroll senior Andrew Zehr got a taste of college life as a sophomore.

He spent the entire second semester of his sophomore year attending Conserve School in Land O Lakes, Wisconsin. The program is a semester-long immersion in environmental studies and outdoor activities focusing on nature, conservation and meaningful actions as environmental stewards.

It was there where his interest peaked in alternative energy and sustainability, a subject he plans to dive headlong into on a college campus somewhere next fall.

It was amazing. There were about 60 kids from 20 different states and we all had different interests, Zehr said. The campus was beautiful; It was 1,200 acres. The faculty was great. One of the teachers used to work for National Geographic as a photographer and a reporter. They all had different life stories and you got to talk to them and learn new things. Its cool to be able to get away from home and live on your own for a while.

With college on the horizon, Zehr is adding another impressive credential to his resume. On Sept. 14, Zehr was named a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist. Approximately 16,000 semifinalists from all over the country were named and they have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 7,500 National Merit Scholarships worth about $33 million that will be offered next spring.

About 1.6 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2017 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2015 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

I was excited, Zehr said. I dont want to sound arrogant, but I wasnt super-surprised. I knew I did well (on the qualifying test) but I was pleased.

The nationwide pool of semifinalists, representing less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. To become a finalist, the semifinalist and his or her high school must submit a detailed scholarship application, in which they provide information about the semifinalists academic record, participation in school and community activities, demonstrated leadership abilities, employment and honors and awards received. A semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay and earn SAT scores that confirm the students earlier performance on the qualifying test.

Zehr is a member of Carroll cross-country and track and field teams and is also the leader of the Common Sense Club, a political discussion group that meets during the activity period each Wednesday.

Just doing school is boring. Its good to be a part of a team or something outside of school, he said. It forces you to manage your time properly. You cant run and do school if you cant keep track of how much time you have left in the day. It also keeps you focused on something else. Its good to take a mental break from school. Running gives you that mental break and you can be ready to do your homework when you get home.

He said Carroll High School provides a strong learning environment, especially for students taking higher level courses. His favorite teacher is AP U.S. History teacher Leslie Clark.

(Clark) likes to have a personal connection with her students. She doesnt just teach the subject and then you leave her room. She takes an interest in what you are doing outside (of the classroom) and she is passionate about history, he said. The culture (at Carroll High School) is one of learning and all the teachers want to help you learn.

From the approximately 16,000 semifinalists, about 7,500 are expected to advance to the finalist level. They will be notified of that designation in February. All National Merit Scholarship winners will be selected from this group of finalists.

Merit Scholar designees are selected on the basis of their skills, accomplishments and potential for success in rigorous college studies, without regard to gender, race, ethnic origin, or religious preference.

Three types of National Merit Scholarships will be offered in the spring of 2017.

Every finalist will compete for one of 2,500 National Merit $2,500 scholarships that will be awarded on a state-representational basis.

About 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be provided by approximately 230 corporations and business organizations for finalists who meet their specified criteria, such as children of the grantors employees or residents of communities where sponsor plants or offices are located.

In addition, about 190 colleges and universities are expected to finance some 4,000 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for finalists who will attend the sponsor institution.

National Merit Scholarship winners of 2017 will be announced in four nationwide news releases beginning in April and running through July.

In Allen County, 14 other high school students were named a semifinalist.

Recipients include: from Canterbury High School, Deborah Choe, Michael Liu, George Sun and Jonathan Zhou; from Bishop Dwenger High School, Kevin LaMaster and Kyle Weingartner; from Homestead High School, Jordan Bailey, Kolin Davis, Samuel Dvorak, Shriya Jain and Ellis Yoder; from North Side High School, Audrey Scantlin; and from Northrop High School, Alexander Espinoza and Benjamin Yoss.

Locally, DeKalb High School had three students named a semifinalist, Aspen Bell, Nicholas Dye and Hannah Johnston.
The Department of Natural Resources has started its eighth annual Deer Hunter Wildlife Survey, an easy-to-do survey where hunters can record their observations of deer and other wildlife while out hunting. Survey results help track population trends for Wisconsins deer herd and other wildlife.

The DNR asks hunters to record all of their hunting activity throughout the deer season, even if no wildlife sightings were made during a hunt. The observations provide the DNR with an index to abundance for many wildlife species.

At the end of each year, participants will receive a personalized summary of all recorded wildlife from that season. Participants can access the survey by going to the DNR website, dnr.wi.gov, and searching keyword Deer Hunter Wildlife. Tally sheets can be filled out either electronically or printed from the site. The survey period ends January 2016

Hunters can also send in their trail camera photos. The Trail Camera Gallery can be accessed through the Deer Hunter Wildlife Survey webpage. Check back often, as the site is updated as soon as new photos are sent in.
The Winona County Board of Commissioners on Sept.13 approved a half-cent sales tax for road repair and maintenance.

The approval of the resolution was primarily to work toward solving the $3.5 to $4.4 million per year funding gap for roads and bridges in the county. The tax, which is projected to generate $1.68 million per year, will be used solely for county road and bridge infrastructure.

Unlike cities, which need both legislative and voter approval for broader half-cent sales taxes, a county board can approve a transportation-specific sales tax with a public hearing and a vote.

The tax passed in a 3-2 vote, with commissioners Jim Pomeroy and Greg Olson voting against.

Pomeroy said using the tax would not hold the Minnesota Legislature responsible for funding roads and infrastructure throughout the state. He was also skeptical the tax would ever be repealed.

I understand the difficulty were having with county roads, I do believe there have been problems legislatively  but I do believe the gas tax should be the primary source, Pomeroy said. Im going to vote against this in hope the Legislature will get it right.

Olson raised other objections, saying the businesses he had talked to were concerned about the extra costs.

For the other commissioners, the money outweighed any potential problems.

Commissioner Marcia Ward said the Legislature isnt appearing to change, so the county could leverage this money on their own and dissolve the tax if it did receive further funding.

In my opinion, we cannot levy enough local property taxes, Ward said. Thats what our task is, is to maintain county infrastructure.

Commissioner Steve Jacob also supported the tax, which puts Winona County on equal footing with most of its neighbors, who have already implemented it.

Anyone who travels outside of our county is paying for this  meanwhile, transient people who come through our county, theyre not paying, Jacob said. This is one of the few places where Im able to be supportive of a revenue increase.

County eyes 6 percent levy increase

A similar discussion ended the meeting in the boards working session on the proposed budget and property tax levy.

Ken Fritz, county administrator, said that since the previous meeting, the county had been able to lower the projected deficit from around $2.5 million to $1.9 million.

But since that point, theyve run out of things to cut.

We dont have any more rabbits to pull out of our hat, Fritz said.

The discussion ended on the note of looking at somewhere around a 6 percent property tax raise, which would amount to around $18 for a home valued at $130,000 in Winona County. With that, the county would still likely have to spend just less than $1 million in reserves.

But, as Fritz and several commissioners noted, an increase even to that extent would not be more than maintaining the current state of the county government.

The budget does not include any new positions and not every budget expense, including $80,000 for ongoing jail costs, $20,500 in replacement dive equipment, and several other costs in information technology.

A rise in expenses and falling revenue, including money from the state and federal government, make for funding shortfalls.

This is a very conservative budget, Fritz said. Regarding services, if you look at the departments, even in community services, there are only a few areas that are not mandated.

Ward said that was exactly why the budget wasnt something she would call bare bones.

Were not doing anything new, were not doing anything innovative, Ward said. Its nothing to get excited about.

She said she wouldnt vote for an increase while the county has over $17 million in reserves, though that money is part of the countys policy to set aside a set amount of operating expenses for both emergencies and other reasons, including bond ratings that lets the county borrow money at favorable rates.

Jacob spoke of weaning off spending reserves, which was a factor in the budget shortfall for 2016. While he said he would not likely support a tax increase of that proportion, something other than burning through the reserve funds was necessary.

Six percent is the number it takes to stay at zero, Jacob said. Thats not an increase or a decrease.

The board will set the preliminary levy and the date for the Truth-in-Taxation hearing at its Sept. 27 meeting.
The first was released by Education Next, a magazine led by two Harvard professors. The magazines mission statement includes the belief that bold change is needed in American K-12 education.

The second was released by Phi Delta Kappa, an educators organization generally viewed as middle of the road.

Education Next has released a poll annually for 10 years. This is Phi Delta Kappas 48th annual poll.

Each poll asked more than 30 questions. This column summarizes only a few that I think will be especially interesting to families.

Several Phi Delta Kappa questions can be useful to schools that (wisely) survey families. Phi Delta Kappa found that 60 percent of parents polled are either extremely or very satisfied with schools efforts to inform them about how their child is doing.

However, in other questions that schools might use, Phi Delta Kappa found surprising differences between what people wanted from local schools and how well they felt these things were being accomplished. For example, 90 percent of people surveyed want schools to help students develop good work habits, but only 31 percent said local schools were doing this extremely or very well. Eighty-two percent want schools to help students become good citizens, but only 33 percent think local schools are doing this well.

Next, the public has strong, somewhat surprising views about testing. This idea has been very controversial. Some people believe that there is too much emphasis on standardized testing and that we need a broader array of ways to measure student progress.

However, Education Next found that about two-thirds of the public and parents surveyed strongly support a federal requirement that all students take reading and math tests in grades three through eight and once more in high school. Of the public, 33 percent strongly support and 36 percent somewhat support this requirement, compared to only 13 percent who somewhat oppose and 7 percent who completely oppose this. Parents have similar views, with 32 percent completely supporting and 36 percent somewhat supporting annual testing. Only 24 percent of parents somewhat or completely oppose annual testing.

Both polls found that the majority of the public does not favor allowing families to have their youngsters opt out of testing. Phi Delta Kappa found that 59 percent opposed and 37 percent supported this option. Education Next found that 10 percent of the public strongly supported and 16 percent somewhat supported this option, while 24 percent somewhat opposed and 36 percent completely opposed this.

Here in Minnesota, most education leaders have encouraged participation in testing while giving families the choice to opt out. Educators also are trying to use a broader array of assessments beyond traditional standardized tests to help illustrate what students are learning. I think these efforts make sense.

Phi Delta Kappa found big differences in opinions about the main goal of public education: 45 percent believe it is to prepare students academically, while 26 percent think its to prepare students to be good citizens and 25 percent say it is to prepare students for work. Many of us believe public schools should do all of these things.

I wish both polls asked whether a key goal should be to help students identify their strengths and talents and develop those. For me, thats an important, though not the only goal.

Polls dont solve any problems in education. But used wisely, I think that they can help identify whats working well and what needs to be improved. Polls also help educators and policymakers learn what the public thinks of their efforts.

Both polls surveyed families in English and Spanish. View the Phi Delta Kappa poll at http://bit.ly/1V4l6cd and the Education Next poll at http://bit.ly/2c2LozF.
Art Baird has been a member of North Bend Presbyterian Church since he was a teenager.

He got baptized there, was married there, and the 87-year-old hopes the longtime church will be there for more generations to worship in and mark their milestones.

Ive always liked it. Its the only church I ever went to, he said. Id like to see it keep on.

The church last weekend marked its 150th anniversary with a Saturday service and activities to highlight its past and celebrate its future.

The thing that appeals to me is the small-town, community church  we want to make sure it survives, said Lori Stuhr, who became a member in the early 1980s and serves as the churchs clerk of session. To me, its important to keep our church for the next generation to come.

North Bend Presbyterian Church was organized in October 1866 by a three-person committee of Presbytery and 31 members, and its always been at its site at W16088 Highway 54 in the town of North Bend.

The church currently is in a shared ministry, or parish, with New Amsterdam Presbyterian Church in Holmen, and the two are served by Pastor Allen Hanson, who has led the ministries for the past 12 years.

Services at the North Bend church aim to be traditionally Presbyterian but also incorporate humor and laughter. The congregation, which has about 90 members, has a small Sunday school program, a dedicated womens group and activities and also aims to give back through efforts like food drive collections and donations to Christmas charities in Jackson County, Hanson said.

(North Bend) always has been a rural, small church  family, fiercely loyal, said Hanson, whos from Preston, Minn. We were created to be joyful.

That is what I have tried to convey and get people to join me in that.

The church a decade ago conducted some remodeling in its sanctuary, which also is adorned with banners made by women of the church and stained glass pieces.

Membership has seen some decline over the past few years from a high of about 106 members  a trend common in small, rural churches but one Hanson and others in North Bend hope to hold off.

North Bend residents take pride in their community, and its evident through the continuing support of the church, Hanson said.

We very much want to be here for the community, he said. Theres a strong congregation (here) with a determination of keeping the church open.

Baird, too, hopes for future milestones for his hometown church.

Its getting rough with so many people moving away, he said. I hope it goes another 150 years.
Details recently were released in a crash that killed a Taylor woman in Jackson County late last month.

Seth M. Wanty, 19, Independence, was driving a 2003 Cadillac Seville east on Highway 95 in Hixton when the vehicle crossed the centerline and into the path of a westbound 2004 Oldsmobile Alero driven by 31-year-old Ashley M. Tollefson, according to the Jackson County Sheriffs Department accident report.

Wantys vehicle struck Tollefsons on the drivers side and pushed it into a guardrail before it overturned. Tollefson died at the scene of the Aug. 30 accident and Wanty was transported to a hospital for non-life threatening injuries.

Sheriff Duane Waldera said the accident remains under investigation. The Wisconsin State Patrol is assisting with a crash reconstruction.

Both vehicles were totaled and towed. Highway 95 was closed for four hours.
State wildlife officials plan to launch a five-year study this fall they say should provide unprecedented data on how predators and chronic wasting disease affect deer survival in southwestern Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources study will begin by capturing and placing radio collars on deer predators, such as bobcats and coyotes. The agency will start capturing and collaring deer in January.

The collars will be equipped with GPS tracking devices that will record and display information on the animals multiple times per day. Plans call for capturing and collaring 200 adult deer, including bucks and does, 100 fawns and 60 predators annually.

The study should result in unprecedented information on movement, behavior, habitat use and predator-prey survival, DNR Wildlife and Forestry Research Section Chief Scott Hull wrote in a memo to the agencys board.

The study will take place in areas with different CWD infection rates, which will help DNR scientists better understand how the disease may be interacting with predators to affect deer survival, Hull wrote.

Chronic wasting disease affects deers brains, causing them to grow thin, act strangely and ultimately die. It was first found in Wisconsin in 2002 near Mount Horeb. The DNR initially attempted to contain the disease by eradicating as many deer as possible, a plan generated intense public backlash and led to the agency ultimately backing off on eradication.

The DNRs current strategy calls for reducing local herds in isolated areas of infection that appear far from known disease clusters but centers mostly on simply monitoring the diseases spread.

The disease has moved beyond southwestern Wisconsin into 41 of the states 72 counties.

The Natural Resources Board plans to discuss the agencys CWD response plan during a meeting Sept. 28 in Black River Falls.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of Jackson, Monroe and Juneau counties?

Thats what the Civic Forum for Stronger Economies Together is seeking to learn Sept. 27.

SET is a federal program run by the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development, in collaboration with UW-Extension, to strengthen rural counties and communities across the nation to overcome economic and regional challenges.

Monroe County Economic Development Coordinator Steve Peterson said in late July, 7 Rivers Alliance of La Crosse was selected to participate in the program with the three counties under its umbrella.

Our three counties got chosen out of (7 Rivers) pool of counties because we had so many things that were common  from demographics to income levels to economic development growth, he said.

Peterson said hes excited to be part of the program because it promotes regional improvement.

Its collaboration of how to take your weaknesses and strengthen them up for the region, he said. It can be workforce, it could be education, it could be economic development in general, it could be tourism. There are a lot of different components that you could use  whatever can help make your area better.

The forum seeks to get public input on the counties and regions strengths and weaknesses to create an implementation plan, Peterson said.

We need public information  not just from the mayors and the city councils and the county boards  we need to hear it from businesses, we need to hear it from the school districts, we need to hear it from just the general public, he said. If youre a resident in these three counties, wed love your input.

Public feedback is important to the plan, Peterson said, because it helps to get a clear picture of the region.

We actually will discuss what our challenges are and what our opportunities are and strengths, he said. Then we kind of sit back and say, Well heres a snapshot of what the three counties actually look like, and then well readdress what weve initially put down as strengths and opportunities and weaknesses and see if theres tweaking we want to do.

The final implementation plan will be for the three-county region as well as the individual counties, Peterson said.

Peterson expects about 200 people to attend from the three-county area.

The more people involved from each county at all levels makes this program even stronger, he said.

Chris Hardie, Black River Area Chamber of Commerce executive director, encourages the public to attend and provide input.

Im encouraging any Jackson County citizen to attend this important forum, he said. I am representing Jackson County as a team member and its very important that we get a good representation from our county businesses and residents at this event.
The 2016-17 Wisconsin Farm Succession and Estate Planning UW-Extension statewide webinar meeting series continues in September with Tax Implications of Transitioning to a Limited Liability Company (LLC). The program will be held this Thursday, Sept. 22 at 1 p.m. at the Jackson County UWExtension office and various UW-Extension offices across Wisconsin. This webinar is the second in a series of webinars from UW-Extension that focuses on a variety of farm succession topics.

LLCs are business entities that combine attributes of a corporation and a partnership. The LLC provides liability protection of a corporation but with the flexibility and tax advantages of a partnership. Many farm succession professionals suggest LLCs to farm businesses exploring farm succession options.

This workshop is for both the owner and successor generations to learn about the tax implications and succession options of LLCs. Kari Apel, CPA and CEO of Apel Associates, is the guest speaker for this webinar. Webinar topics include:

Why form an LLC?

Choosing a tax structure for an LLC

How an LLC changes the annual tax filing process

Determining which assets to put into the LLC

Transferring LLC interests by sale or gift

Guaranteed payments, owner draws and distribution of profits

There is no charge to attend the webinar meeting. Participants will have the opportunity to ask their specific questions and listen to other questions and comments during the meeting. For more information or to register, call (715) 284-4257.
The Merrillan Police Department started providing law enforcement coverage to the town of Mentor in Clark County this month.

Mentor requested an agreement to contact with Merrillan, and both municipalities boards gave their approval last month.

The Merrillan Department, which also provides coverage to Alma Center, will provide five hours of duty time in a two-week work cycle to assist Mentor with town ordinance enforcement.

I think its a good thing, Merrillan Police Chief Mike Johnson said. Its supposed to be a real positive thing.

Merrillan part-time officer Andy Noack, also a sergeant for the Black River Falls department, will work most of the Mentor contract hours. The contract wont involve the Merrillan department responding to calls but rather being on hand for a designated five-hour block every two weeks, Johnson said.

The Merrillan department also has received some new equipment with assistance from nearly $11,600 in Wisconsin Department of Transportation grant funding. The department now has a new multi-data computer, a thermal imaging printer, squad car video cameras, officer body armor and a portable radar sign trailer.

The department also replaced its aging 2010 Ford Expedition squad this past January, also with help from a United States Department of Agriculture grant. Officers now utilize a 2016 Chevrolet Impala.
La Crosse and Onalaska are among thousands of U.S. cities where drinking water contains a potentially cancer causing but unregulated chemical.

Made famous by the film Erin Brockovich, chromium-6 has been shown to cause cancer in mice and rats and is considered a likely human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Tests conducted between 2013 and 2015 found an average of 0.73 ppb in La Crosse water samples and 1.3 ppb in Onalaskas, according to EPA data. Both measurements are well above the level deemed safe by California authorities, and Onalaskas is one of the highest in Wisconsin.

Other area water systems, including Fort McCoys North Post and Spring Grove, Minn., had measurements above the safe level. Winonas water supply had one sample with 0.03 ppb in 2013.

A heavy metal commonly found at low levels in drinking water, chromium-6 is used in steel production, chrome plating and in cooling towers. It is also found in the ash from coal-burning power plants.

The nonprofit Environmental Working Group says more than 200 million Americans are drinking water with unsafe levels of chromium-6, which is found in about nine out of 10 public water systems sampled.

EWG estimates that exposure could result in 12,000 Americans developing cancer during the next 84 years.

Only California regulates chromium-6, although EWG contends its 10 parts per billion limit is too high. The nonprofit group points to a 2011 report by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which set a public health goal of 0.02 ppb.

That regulation came about after residents of Hinkley, Calif., filed a class-action suit against Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating its drinking water, which the utility settled in 1996 for $333 million. That case was the basis for the movie, which focused on Erin Brockovich, a legal clerk-turned consumer advocate.

After a 2010 investigation by EWG found chromium-6 in the tap water of 31 cities, the EPA began requiring water utilities to test for the compound but has not set a national standard.

The EPA has held off releasing its draft risk assessment until industry-funded studies are completed. The agency expects to release that assessment in 2017.

In a statement, the EPA notes it has a standard of 100 ppb for total chromium, which includes chromium-6, and only one of the nearly 5,000 public water systems exceeded that standard.

Mark Johnson, La Crosses water utility director, said he has not researched potential treatment methods, though he said it would probably involve the addition of a chemical to react with chromium so that it can be filtered out. That would likely entail a treatment facilities at each of the citys 13 wells.

Home water filters said to reduce chromium levels are available for between about $35 and $700. The group did not respond to questions about effectiveness, but EWG provides a buyers guide on its website.

Tests conducted between 2013 and 2015 found an average of 0.73 ppb in La Crosse water samples and 1.3 ppb in Onalaskas, according to EPA data. Both measurements are well above the level deemed safe by California authorities, and Onalaskas is one of the highest in Wisconsin.
A woman suffered serious injuries after rear-ending a vehicle on Hwy. 61 in southern Winona County Wednesday morning.

Samantha Paulson, 23, of Sauk Rapids, Minn., crashed into the back of a second vehicle near Fern Glen Road, a short frontage road that runs alongside Hwy. 61 near Great River Bluffs State Park, just before 8:45 a.m., according to the Minnesota State Patrol.

Paulson suffered injuries that were serious but not believed to be life-threatening, the Patrol said. Her vehicle, a Toyota Yaris, appeared totaled as it was taken away from the scene Wednesday morning, with the front end missing.

The driver of the second vehicle, Randy Wolfe, 50, of Cravitz, Minn., was uninjured in the crash, the Patrol said.

The Patrol continues to investigate, with assistance from the Winona County Sheriffs Department.
The keynote speaker at Wednesdays Downtown Main Street, Inc., Awards Luncheon challenged the community to keep up with global trends facing Americas downtowns.

Errin Welty, a downtown development account manager for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., spoke at the luncheon, which also honored departing and new board members.

DMIs Executive Director Robin Moses also gave an update on the organizations mission to support and promote the downtown and a number of awards were given out.

The Promotions Award went to Fayzes Kelsey Williams for her work in promoting events in the community such as Eat Week, which highlighted downtown restaurants and breweries. The Volunteer of the Year award went to Mike Keil, owner of the Doerflinger Building, for his work on the DMI board, efforts to bring security cameras to the downtown and who Moses said was always willing to give of his time and treasure.

An honorable mention was given to the Cameron Park playground project for the Design and Beautification Award, which went to the Duluth Trading Co., for work renovating the facade and exterior of the first floor of the Doerflinger Building, where the companys store is located. Western Technical Colleges Horticulture Center earned an honorable mention for the Project Development Award given to The Charmant Hotel for its work renovating the historic Joseph B. Funke Candy Co. factory building on State Street.

New this year was the Legacy Award, given to someone who has given a lot to the downtown in their own special way. John Wettstein was chosen for the honor, in recognition of his decades of dedication from sitting through board meetings to his work advocating for the downtown streetscaping project.

In my mind, he is Mr. Downtown, former DMI Executive Director Bud Miyamoto said. Or better fitting, the grandfather of downtown La Crosse.

During remarks at the luncheon, both Welty and Moses highlighted positive aspects of the citys downtown. Moses spoke about the highlights of the past year, which included $65 million in development, 30 new businesses opening downtown and 35 new members of DMI. The downtown has seen 110 new businesses in the past five years, Moses said, with about 90 still operating today.

Welty said cities are facing five global trends, and she urged the audience to make sure La Crosse does more to address those trends in the downtown. Top of her list is the growth of the creative, or gig economy, and said more can be done to attract people in these occupations to live and work downtown.

The arts district in La Crosse is a great example of something the city is doing right, but encouraged the city to do more to make itself unique. This tied in with another trend she listed, where people are looking to have experiences rather than buy things.

Downtowns are competing with services such as Amazon.com and Netflix and said cities need to do more to bring people out of their living rooms and into the downtowns businesses and parks.

We want to be more fun than the couch, she said.

Access and diversity are two other trends cities have to address so that people from different backgrounds and abilities can enjoy the amenities that are available. Entrepreneurship was the final trend she listed, as many aging businesses are in or will be in transition as senior leaders leave and cities need to make sure those businesses and new ones can continue to thrive.

I challenge you to become the city that I know that you can be, she said.
WINONA, Minn.  It was a box of old stuff, just waiting to be thrown away.

Had it been, we wouldnt have John Sheardowns account of an encounter with Jeb Stuarts cavalry on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, or of his romance with Annie Kemp and the subsequent birth of John Henry, or his diary entries about his service with Gen. John Pershing and the American Expeditionary Force in France to end The War to End War.

Fortune favored the letters, diaries, memorabilia and business correspondence of the Sheardown family  prominent members of the Winona community in the latter years of the 19th century, all but forgotten now. The Winona County History Center will feature a presentation Wednesday on the collection, including the journey of how it came to the center.

Last spring, Winona County Historical Society executive director Mark Peterson got a call from a Burlington, Iowa, historical society archivist. Richard Burlingame was on the phone, wondering if the historical society had any interest in a trove of family papers that had been preserved and watched over by his grandmother.

As Burlingame described the contents  diaries and letters from the Civil War, family correspondence dating to the 1820s, memorabilia and business records of life in Winona from 1856 into the early decades of the 20th century, Peterson eagerly accepted.

The collection provides an intimate look inside the lives of the three Sheardown brothers  Samual, Henry and John  and their families. The brothers are three of the 10 children born to the Rev. Thomas Simpson Sheardown and his wife Esther.

The good reverend came alone to New York state from England in 1820 to establish himself before bringing Esther and their two children to a new home across the Atlantic. The three boys who would ultimately make their homes in Winona were born in 1826, 1828 and 1831.

Sam, the oldest, was the first to arrive in Winona. A medical doctor, he would serve as a surgeon in the Civil War and as a Minnesota state senator after. Henry was a millwright and engineer, working the steamboats and local industries. John would see combat as a cavalryman with the 5th New York Cavalry, return to Winona to practice law and eventually serve as clerk of the U.S. Circuit Court.

Winona County Historical Society archivist Andy Bloedorn said it was a stroke of luck that almost simultaneous with the arrival of the Sheardown archive at the historical society, came a new volunteer  Scot Simpson.

Simpson had extensive experience as a researcher with the Onalaska Historical Society, working with funeral home records, and in Monroe County researching the county poor farm and insane asylum. Bloedorn said Simpson appeared somewhat disappointed to learn that the Winona County poor farm records had been lost. We asked if hed be interested in the Sheardowns, Boedorn said. He said, Well, Ill look at it ...

Hes still looking, and Wednesday hell share a portion of what hes discovered lurking in the hundreds of handwritten pages preserved for more than a century.

Its amazing, Simpson said, how prominent they were at the time, and, within a couple generations, left barely a trace in Winona.
So, Donald Trump thought hed have a little fun this weekend with the idea of Hillary Clinton being assassinated.

The Republican presidential nominee suggested that, because Clinton favors restrictions on guns, her security detail should be disarmed. Take their guns away, he proposed. Lets see what happens to her.

There was a time when fantasizing aloud about the murder of your opponent would have been beyond the pale  but not anymore. Absolutely nonsense, Trumps running mate, Mike Pence, told ABC News when asked if such a message could incite violence.

If Trumps lets see what happens to her suggestion were a one-off, there might be an argument for giving him the benefit of the doubt. The tendency to regard each Trump outrage in isolation is what allows him to become normalized. But look at the comprehensive output of Trump  who freely admitted to The Washington Post that I bring rage out in people  and theres no escaping the conclusion that he winks, and sometimes smiles, at political violence.

Does Pence also find it nonsense to question why, on the very day he defended Trumps assassination talk, the Trump campaign posted on its YouTube channel a video featuring rocker Ted Nugent? Nugent earlier this year called for Clinton and President Obama to be tried for treason and hung, and he posted on his Facebook page a spoof video of Bernie Sanders gunning down Clinton.

Did Pence think it poppycock to doubt Trumps intent when he suggested last month that gun owners could murder either Clinton or her judicial appointees? If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks, he said. Although, the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.

Did Pence find it balderdash to question Trumps assertion that you would have riots and bad things would happen if Trump were denied the GOP nomination?

But before long all this baloney and drivel reaches critical mass, and you realize that Trump regards violence as a legitimate political tool.

He defended Vladimir Putin against accusations that the Russian dictator has killed journalists, saying that in all fairness, he hasnt seen proof. He said of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that youve got to give him credit for maintaining power. He saluted the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for being damn good at killing terrorists, and years ago he said the Chinese governments bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square shows you the power of strength.

He said he would bring back waterboarding and much worse, figuring terrorism suspects deserve it. He said that he would bomb the s   out of the Islamic State and that I love war, in a certain way, but only when we win.

Some threats are vague: Were going to have to do something if Muslims in America dont turn over suspected terrorists, and were going to do things to end protests and division. He pretended to consider killing journalists before promising, I would never do that.

His longtime confidant Roger Stone has talked about a bloodbath  rhetorical, he insists  if Trump loses, and Stone has suggested that Clinton should be executed. There have been a score of violent confrontations at Trump events, among supporters, opponents, journalists and staff.

Whats more troubling than what his backers do is how Trump backs them when they do it. He has said of protesters: Maybe he should have been roughed up and Id like to punch him in the face. He has promised to pay the legal fees of supporters who would knock the crap out of anybody getting ready to throw a tomato, and he has spoken fondly of the days when protesters would be carried out on a stretcher.

He said it was very, very appropriate when his supporters hit back at a demonstrator, and he lamented that it takes a long time to eject protesters because nobody wants to hurt each other anymore. He has complained that there arent consequences for the demonstrators, saying we have to toughen up.

After Trump proposed Friday evening that Clinton be denied armed protection, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd told CNN the next day that she had told Trump it was wrong that there was violence being incited at his rallies.

Trump, in Dowds telling, disagreed and said he thought the violence added a frisson of excitement.

Trump, in response, fired off tweets calling Dowd a neurotic dope. At least he didnt propose Second Amendment remedies.
The following editorial appeared in Sundays Chicago Tribune.

At 20, Raheel Siddiqui had his American dream charted: Serve his country by joining the Marines and learning how to be a jet mechanic, then later, he hoped, work toward becoming an FBI agent.

That dream was doused before it could come to life. In March, Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American Muslim from Taylor, Mich., died after jumping into a stairwell and falling 38 feet while at Marine boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. On the morning he died, he had asked his drill instructor for permission to go on sick call because he had been coughing up blood, according to The New York Times. The drill instructor thought Siddiqui was feigning illness and ordered him to run sprints in the barracks. After Siddiqui collapsed and began crying, the instructor slapped him in the face. Thats when Siddiqui raced out and jumped.

What made the episode doubly egregious was that the drill instructor was still on the job after being investigated for hazing another Muslim recruit in the summer of 2015. In that case, the instructor ordered the recruit to do pushups in the shower, called him a terrorist, then ordered him to clamber into a large clothes dryer, the Times reports.

After 30 seconds, the instructor stopped the dryer and asked the recruit whom he was working for. When the recruit replied, Nobody, the instructor turned the dryer back on. He then asked the recruit which religion he followed. When the recruit answered Islam, the instructor resumed the dryer. After some time, the instructor stopped the machine and asked the recruit if he still was a Muslim. When the recruit said yes, the instructor switched the dryer back on. The recruit reported the abuse after completing basic training. An investigation began, but the instructor was allowed to continue training recruits.

After Siddiquis death, the drill instructor was removed from his training battalion post. The battalions commanding officer, a lieutenant colonel who had allowed the instructor to continue training recruits after the dryer incident, has also been removed from his position, as has his boss, a colonel in charge of all training at Parris Island. In all, at least 20 Parris Island staff members face some form of punishment, which can range from administrative discipline to criminal charges.

Thats not enough, however.

Seven weeks ago, America learned about Army Capt. Humayun Khan, a Pakistani-American serviceman killed in Iraq by a car bomb in 2004. His parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, took the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to talk of their sons sacrifice. Their moment served as a potent counterpoint to GOP nominee Donald Trumps anti-Muslim vitriol. Capt. Khan gave his life for a nation that embraces inclusion, an ideal he embodied.

Marine boot camp should be tough. It should challenge, and it should winnow. But hazing motivated by intolerance serves only two purposes: It makes a lie of the American values our military defends, and it supplies the Islamic State with fresh fodder for its global recruitment efforts.

Beyond charging those responsible, the Marines should institute reforms that not only rein in hazing but amplify training to include what ought to be an obvious point: Nobody, recruit or other, wears a bulls-eye solely because of his or her faith, race, gender or sexual orientation.

Military veterans who were tossed together randomly in their service years often speak about their eye-opening discovery that while we Americans dont all look or think or pray alike, we have more in common than we realize. Boot camp is one of many ideal places for young people whove grown up in demographic silos to learn that lesson.
Assembly Republicans said Wednesday they will offer an alternative to Gov. Scott Walkers proposal for the states next transportation budget, which would hold the line on taxes while delaying key road expansions in Madison and southeast Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walker and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos exchanged public letters Wednesday on transportation funding.

It was another sign the two Republicans remain sharply at odds on how to resolve Wisconsins road-funding woes.

Rising road construction costs and stagnant fuel-tax revenues, the main source for the state transportation fund, forced state leaders to increase transportation borrowing and delay highway projects in the last budget. More of the same would be required in the upcoming 2017-19 budget without an infusion of revenue.

Vos and Assembly Republicans have said all options for new revenue must be considered, including raising fuel taxes or registration fees or implementing highway tolls.

Walker says instead of increasing taxes or fees, the state should delay expansion projects and scale back its focus to maintaining existing roads. Last week Walker, while unveiling his administrations transportation budget request, threatened to veto any changes made to the budget that add to the overall burden of the taxpayers of this state.

Walker, in his letter to Vos Wednesday, wrote, I am willing to consider any specific alternatives from Assembly leadership that live within taxpayer means.

Vos responded in his letter that he and his Assembly GOP colleagues would oblige. Vos, R-Rochester, also criticized Walkers plan as too reliant on borrowing and lacking a long-term solution for roads.

Vos emphasized that large highway expansions in southeast Wisconsin, including of the Zoo Interchange and Interstate 94 in Racine and Kenosha counties, would face an uncertain future under Walkers plan.

Under your plan, the unfortunate reality is that these roads may not be done in our lifetime, Vos wrote.

In Dane County, the Verona Road project would be delayed at least two years under Walkers plan. The plan would keep on track expansions of I-39/90 in Rock and Dane counties and of Highway 10-441 in the Fox Valley.

Vos said Assembly Republicans will hold hearings to gather input from the public and experts before offering their transportation budget alternative. Lawmakers will begin debating transportation and other areas of the next budget in early 2017.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The state Department of Transportation wants to manufacture cheaper IDs that could be used only for voting.

Wisconsin law requires DOT to give people free photo IDs for voting. The 2017-19 budget request the agency submitted to Gov. Scott Walker last week notes giving out free IDs has resulted in fewer people paying the $28 fee for an ID card.

Between fiscal year 2010  the last full year before free IDs were offered  and fiscal year 2015, DOT saw its revenue from photo IDs drop from $3.2 million to $437,000.

DOT officials included a proposal in the budget plan to stamp free IDs with voting purposes only and give those IDs fewer standard security features. The agency would spend $2.60 to produce each card, 50 cents less than the $3.10 it spends on each current photo ID card.

The agency estimates about 30 percent of applicants would pay the $28 for the higher-end, multi-purpose IDs, which would generate about $969,000 for the agencys road building and maintenance fund over the two-year budget. The agency would have to spend $164,000 to modify its computer systems to handle the voting-only cards.

The budget proposal doesnt say how the agency would enforce restrictions on how the free voting-only IDs could be used.

Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force, told the newspaper that free IDs have helped poor people who need them for a wide range of purposes, such as proving their identity when they pick up their children from day care.

The only people who get hurt in this are poor people who dont have $28, she said. The government is supposed to be there to help us.

Walker can choose to include the plan, modify it or discard it when he crafts his executive budget. His spokesman didnt immediately respond to messages from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or The Associated Press.
Wisconsins roads need more than engineering and concrete.

They need leadership and courage.

They dont need delays. They dont need answers that only pretend to suit the political whims of today instead of the needs of today and tomorrow.

We need leadership  the type that requires difficult, potentially unpopular decisions if were truly going to serve the future of our states roads and bridges.

If Wisconsin is open for business and tourism, we need to make sure our roads are, too.

Gov. Scott Walker announced plans last week to delay road projects in Wisconsin. Sadly, thats not what our road system needs.

The states Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates the state needs $939 million to pay for projects that have already been approved.

The governor wants to give more money to local governments for road work, but it barely will patch the pothole. Heres an example of his solution and the problem: Under Walkers plan, La Crosse County would receive $127,000 during the next two years. The problem is, La Crosse County has an $89 million to-do list of work that includes failing pavements, bridges in need of replacement, resurfacing and stormwater issues, County Highway Commissioner Ron Chamberlain said.

A bandage and a lollipop wont help.

Lets look at an opportunity weve already lost  and a possible solution going forward.

For 20 years beginning in 1986, Wisconsin raised revenue by automatically indexing its fuel tax each year by a small amount per gallon.

Yes, that raised the tax. It also raised millions of dollars to improve our roads.

In 2005, the Legislature and then-Gov. Jim Doyle agreed to repeal that automatic annual increase. It was an easy, popular quick fix  and even some conservative Republicans said it was short-sighted.

How much did that cost our transportation fund in revenue?

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported in March 2015 that the transportation fund had lost more than $1 billion because of the change, which took effect after April 2006.

So, you do the math: The state needs $939 million to complete approved projects, and weve lost out on $1 billion because we lacked the leadership and courage to continue the adjustment on a tax that is paid by all who use the roads, including tourists and many other non-Wisconsin residents.

Our state has a heritage of appointing bipartisan, blue-ribbon committees to improve operations, such as the Kettl Commission, charged more than 15 years ago with studying ways of restructuring government in our state.

Since Walker has been governor, we havent seen that type of collaborative problem-solving, only divide and conquer.

Now would be an excellent time to pull together businesses and transportation executives to help policy-makers make sound decisions on funding and fixing Wisconsin roads.

Were encouraged that members of both the Republican and Democratic caucuses are unhappy with the governors approach to fixing our road problem.

But will they have the leadership and the courage to do something about it? Will they be able to override a veto from the governor? Will they be able to work together on a solution?

Were not optimistic.

The Transportation Development Authority will convene constituents throughout the state Sept. 29 to call attention to the problem. Its an excellent opportunity to speak out.

TDA Executive Director Craig Thompson said the governors proposal does not provide a coherent plan or vision for the state. It would provide, for the next two years, needed investment at the local level, but at the expense of important economic corridors. Crucial safety improvements called for by WisDOT on some of the busiest stretches of interstate in Wisconsin would not proceed. The question is: If we are not going to rebuild 60-year-old segments of the interstate system now, when are we?

Thats exactly the question: If not now, when?

During a TDA meeting in Onalaska this summer, businesses like Kwik Trip talked about the increased cost of maintenance and replacement caused by deteriorating roads.

Jeff Reichling, Kwik Trips superintendent of petroleum transportation, said during that meeting: This will only continue to grow as a problem.

The safety of our residents and the vibrancy of commerce and tourism are at stake.

Its time to find a long-term solution  even if it hurts.
The Vernon County Censor

Sept. 20, 1916

100 years ago

The section of the state was seriously injured by the blighting breath of Old Jack Frost on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, and the damage is quite general and heavy. All growing vegetation has been seriously touched and withered.

The worst loss the county sustains is to the corn crop. While some fields were fairly well matured, the general run was in the imperfect stage and we shall have again this year much soft corn. Tobacco loss is very heavy. Only a small percent of growers had completed their shedding Hundreds of acres were chopped down, piled and covered on Friday, thus saving it in fair condition. Probably twenty-five percent of the countys acreage stood in the fields.

After years of illness Adolph Galstad died at Coon Valley.

W.C. Franklin is making the surrounding fairs with warm candy and refreshments for the hungry and thirsty.

Alderman Edward A. Schmidt has been notified of his appointment as a government mail agent. He had his try-out some months ago and has since followed his trade.

On her thirteenth birthday, Miss Irma Owen received from her grandmother, Mrs. Frank Owen, a new swing swell buggy and harness with a promise of the horse later on.

Mr. and Mrs. John S. Dregne had their eight children at home with them in this city on Sunday last. Their daughter, Mrs. Yttri came from Minnesota, son Carl from Ladysmith.

Erick Thompson is in the city from Readstown to see his brother Thomas, who is confined to his home by illness.

The Vernon County Censor

Sept. 18, 1941

75 years ago

Hilmer Sinner of Westby was fatally injured when struck by an automobile while attempting to cross the street.

Mr. Vinton, our Farm Forester, will pay $2.00 per bushel for fresh, green, Norway spruce cones. The European supply of Norway spruce seed has been cut off, so we must rely on our own cone crop.

Models of the Ray Slack farm near Liberty Pole will be displayed at the Vernon County Fair. Two models will show the 80-acre farm before and after strip-cropping.

Obituaries: Blaine Cade 58, Inger (Crogan) Quamme 57, George Furman 83, Aslag Albert Natwick 55, Margaret (Knutson) Mason 41.

Marriages: Virginia Williams to Harry Small. Alene Fortney to Robert Johnson.

Mr. & Mrs. Phil Tate drove to Madison to select a part of their Christmas stock.

Fred Tunk reported Lora Jane Whittaker, 15, as missing. She was last seen by Round Prairie school hitchhiking. Her folks are the John Whittaker family at Warrens, WI.

Henry and Nellie (Rabbitt) Turner celebrate their Golden Anniversary.

Mr. & Mrs. Richard Davis left for Burbank, CA, where Richard will be employed at Lockheed Aircraft plant.

Pvt. Adrian Whitney has been transferred from Ft. Logan, Colorado to San Angelo Field, Texas.

The Vernon County Broadcaster-Censor

Sept. 22, 1966

50 years ago

Vernon Countys Fair was blessed with a straight week of sunshine, practically 100 per cent. As a result, the Fair welcomed about 22,000 people during the three big days Friday through Sunday. This meant the best-attended fair since the centennial in 1956.

A delegation from six area school districts was receptive to a student teacher center being established in Viroqua to serve the area. The Vernon County Teachers College steering committee is expected to continue its investigation into that idea along with representatives from Wisconsin State University-La Crosse.

Over 1,500 visited the Vernon County Historical Museum the past year. Many groups, including the Literary Club, the Study Club, 4-H Clubs, Girl and Boy Scouts have toured the Museum.

The Kickapoo-Blackhawk District will hold its fall Camporee at Esofea Park Friday and Saturday, September 30 and October 1. The Camporee is built around a Fitness Meet where Scouts will compete by patrols in nine separate events, including a Potato Sack Race, a Tug-of-War, and a one-mile Scout Pace Race (50 steps running and 50 steps walking).

Deaths: Homer Cunningham, 82; Tollack G. Mageland, 71; Alma (Holte) Hanson, 79; Elmer Stalsberg, 63.

Sunday, September 25, will be the date of the new Lutheran Church in DeSoto. The service will be held at two oclock, led by Rev. H. O. Aasen of Westby, president of the Viroqua Conference of the American Lutheran Church.

Viroqua allowed Reedsburg to have one play too many Friday night and the Hawks took their second straight defeat of this year 13-7. Westby won its 2nd Scenic Central Conference game Friday night by defeating Kickapoo 26-0.

The Vernon County Broadcaster

Sept. 19, 1991

25 years ago

Over 3,200 people attended the Vernon County Fair on September 12 setting a new attendance record for a Thursday.

The Jack and Jill clothing store, owned by sisters Ag Schroeder and Irene Homestad in Viroqua, will be closing their doors, after being in business since 1948.

The Liberty Pole area was saddened by the death of Arnold Cade. He has been the proprietor of the Liberty Pole Store for many years.

Lance Corporal P.J. Patterson of Viroqua has been recognized for special merit by the U.S. Marine Corps.

Will Kilkeary, Post Laureate of the Epitaph News, La Farge, will be featured September 19 in the Dayton Gallery of the Pump House in La Crosse.

Viroqua native Sara J. Graham has recently been promoted at WOLX 94.9 FM Radio in Madison.

Sever Erickson and Hazel DeLap were married September 29, 1921. They will quietly observe their 70th wedding anniversary.

The Vernon County Broadcaster

Sept. 21, 2006

10 years ago

A power outage at the Vernon County Fair Saturday night did not dampen the fun at the 150th annual fair. At about 7:40 p.m., the lights went out at the fairgrounds. A fuse blew in the transformer. The power was out for about an hour. The midway rides and games remained illuminated Saturday night because they were equipped with their own generators.

Students at the Viroqua High School and Middle School were evacuated from the building at about 1 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 19, for about 30 minutes because of a gas leak. School officials said construction workers hit a two-inch gas line in the rear of the building.

For the second year in a row Stand With Your Class signs will line the route along Commercial Street during the big Viola Horse and Colt Show parade on Saturday, Sept. 23. Friends with interest in meeting classmates from Kickapoo and area high schools can find their old (or young) buddies by choosing the appropriate section of the street during the parade.

The 18th Gilman reunion was held Sunday, Sept. 3, at La Farge.

Surrounded by the Hornby family, Vernon County Agricultural Society Secretary Ken Deaver announced Friday that the Plant and Soil Building at the Vernon County Fairgrounds will be known as the Helen Hornby building. Helen passed away in December of 2005 at age 92. She was superintendent in the building for many years. Joanne Hornby carries on the family tradition of serving as superintendent of the building.
SPARTA  Zachary Davis sat calmly next to defense attorneys Chris Zachar and Kenneth Hamm as the prosecution described Davis as a desperate, homeless man who repaid the kind act of a stranger with murder.

Davis trial on charges of first-degree intentional homicide in the death of Derek Magnuson and armed robbery began last week in Monroe County Circuit Court after jury selection resulted in a panel of eight women and six men.

Monroe County District Attorney Kevin Croninger referred to the victim as a man having a rough day who befriended Davis and his girlfriend, Sebastian Martinez, who identifies as Sabrina Martinez, and took pity on them.

The pair left North Dakota after stealing a vehicle, pawning items for cash and stopping at a Cabelas store in Woodbury, Minn., where Mr. Davis looked at machetes and (other weapons) and told Martinez they should get a weapon so they could rob someone, the prosecutor said.

Magnuson invited Davis and Martinez to stay in his room at the Econo Lodge in Tomah on March 11, 2015, where he was staying after a fight with his fiance. There, Croninger said, Davis stabbed an unarmed Magnuson several times with the 14-inch machete he had bought at Cabelas 12 hours earlier, stole his wallet and debit cards, and left him lying there, flopping like a fish.

Croninger discounted the defenses argument of self-defense, citing Davis actions after the crime: wiping down light switches, discarding his bloody clothing and using (Magnusons) debit card nine times over the next 10 hours.

Hamm pointed blame in the direction of Magnuson, who he said had been drinking throughout the day and evening. His bodys blood-alcohol concentration measured 0.23 percent. Magnuson made two trips to an area liquor store and took Davis to a bar, continuing to drink with Davis and Martinez in the hotel room after checking them in as family members.

This is the story of two men who on March 11 were perhaps at the lowest point in their lives, Hamm said, depicting Davis as lonely and ostracized by his family after choosing to date Martinez, adding that Davis intended to pawn the items purchased at Cabelas and that it was Martinez who selected the hatchet.

According to Hamm:

Martinez told Davis that Magnuson made sexual advances, trying to kiss him and touching his breast and groin when the two were alone in the room. Davis suggested leaving, but the pair ultimately stayed and Davis left to shower. After he discovered Magnuson attempting to sexually assault Martinez, Davis intervened, at which point Magnuson straddled Davis on the floor and delivered punch after punch and claimed Im going to (expletive) kill you.

Mr. Davis sees the machete still in that bag, hes struggling to get out and starts reaching for the machete, Hamm said. Davis swung several times, puncturing one of Magnusons lungs.

The physical evidence will show Mr. Magnuson was the initial instigator in this incident, Hamm said.Mr. Magnuson was still on his feet after the injury and continued to fight.

Hamm contends that Davis was terrified after the altercation and decided to flee, knowing he was already in trouble for stealing a car and believing others in the building would hear the commotion.

Davis admits to stealing Magnusons wallet, but Hamm argues the robbery was not premeditated, as Davis had items from Cabelas to pawn and wasnt in desperate need of money. Hamm added that Martinez only changed his statement to depict armed robbery after being pressured by his family and the state.

This was not a homicide. This was not an armed robbery, Hamm said. This was justified, and you will return with the verdict of not guilty.

The trial is expected to take two weeks.
About four feet from where I write this column hangs a photo of me taken when I was 3 years old.

Im wearing a little pink dress and holding a phone  one that plugs into the wall even  and the caption proudly proclaims, Even at the age of 3, Jourdan showed signs of journalistic prowess.

The photo was shamelessly stolen from of my mothers Facebook page, where she posted it a few years ago during a fit of craziness in which she convinced herself people outside of my immediate family want to see my baby pictures. Then, because a fellow reporter will stop at nothing to make his co-workers blush, it appeared overnight as an 8-by-10 black and white photo on the pillar between our two desks.

I must admit, I wasnt too pleased to see little 3-year-old me holding her landline phone when I walked in. I turned a little pink and knew immediately which family member was at the root of that bit of embarrassment, but I laughed it off, figuring it wasnt worth the fight.

An 18-year-old from Austria had a different reaction to her parents sharing her baby pictures on social media. The anonymous young woman filed a lawsuit against her parents, alleging that they posted more than 500 baby pictures of her over seven years and refused to delete them.

I think its safe to say there will be no winners here, even if the suit makes it to a court of law. The case will be heard in November, and regardless of how it comes out, I think its safe to say no one will enjoy the winter holidays in that family.

The teen says her parents have made her miserable by constantly posting embarrassing photos from when she was a toddler, everything from getting her diaper changed to learning how to use the potty.

They knew no shame and no limit  and didnt care whether it was a picture of me sitting on the toilet or lying naked in my cot  every stage was photographed and then made public, she told Austrian news outlets.

Her parents then shared them with their hundreds of Facebook friends and refused years of requests to delete them.

The woman believes it violates her rights to a personal life and privacy, which her lawyer argues trump her parents copyright of the images.

I believe it violates good sense, and Im amazed they have any Facebook friends left after posting 500 baby pictures in seven years.

Im not one of those people who immediately hides the posts of people who become pregnant, though I came close when a high school friend started posting weekly updates on her uterus. I dont mind the occasional cute kid photo popping up in my timeline. But I think when the number of photos you post reaches into the hundreds, you have a problem, and that problem is thinking anyone cares that much about what your child does every single day.

This is clearly a different situation. When they started, I imagine her parents likely saw it as a lighthearted way to poke fun at their teenage daughter, who, like all teenagers, took herself a little too seriously. She would have been 11 or 12 at that point, and I can tell you from experience, 12-year-old girls are the worst and also completely incapable of laughing at themselves. But its also pretty clear these parents crossed the line from lighthearted into mean-spirited somewhere around 2010.

I dont blame the girl for being upset. Being denied that simple request for seven years strikes me as something that would be rage-inducing. I can even see her being pretty hurt by it after it became clear her parents would rather dig in stubbornly than delete photos that continually upset her for years.

At this point, they are choosing being right over having a relationship with their daughter.

But the lawsuit is still ridiculous. Block your parents on Facebook. Move out and stop talking to them. But suing them over toddler photos is the definition of frivolous.

Im tired of not being taken seriously by my parents, she said.

Well, this will certainly help.

Jourdan Vian is a reporter at the La Crosse Tribund and former Tomah Journal reporter.
The bowling shoes were a bit of a surprise, the day Pastor Douglas visited Bonnie Richards Fingerhuts mother in the hospital.

The entire family noticed them while the minister visited, those sporty rental shoes-size 14 , according to the heel counter-so at odds with his usual polished appearance. Only Bonnies son was brave enough to bring them up. Had Douglas walked out of a bowling alley with them by accident? No, Pastor Douglas told him with a smile. Hed bought them directly from the shoemaker.

No doubt, Douglas knew what he was really wearing that day: two well-worn invitations to laugh, even in the midst of struggle.

That was Douglas. Thoughtful, deeply kind, and yes, shamelessly irreverent.

Little more than a month after being diagnosed with liver disease, the Reverend Dr. Douglas Scott Larson-Sell, 59, died Sept. 11, 2016, at UW Hospital in Madison. It was a Sunday morning.

The son of Warren and Phyllis Sell, Douglas was born in Wausau, Wis. He was a smart and funny kid with a broad smile and a long, lanky figure who, to everyones delight, grew into an equally smart and funny man.

Those smarts would take him far, from Bachelor degree studies in Morehead, and Milwaukee, to a Master of arts program at the University of Chicago, where Douglass gifts, that rare combination of intelligence and compassion his friends and flock would mention again and again in the days following his death, shaped his studies.

Led by his faith and the belief that he could help others by learning to understand and treat the human mind, Douglas entered the University of Chicago Divinity Schools doctoral program in 1986. He explored philosophy, theology and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, digging a well of wisdom his parishioners would gratefully draw from over the next 27 years.

In 1990, he met Amy Larson and in a customary display of quiet, good sense, promptly fell in love. The couple married Jan. 25, 1992, and welcomed a son, Jordan, in 2001, a lanky towhead whod grow up wearing his fathers same broad smile.

Through it all, Douglas served. He began at the Bethel and Bethany Lutheran churches just outside Viroqua, where parishioners quickly learned of his love for Christmas music; Douglas would play those bright, sentimental songs all year long. In 1992, he joined the congregation at Trondhjem Lutheran Church in Lonsdale, where hed teach and counsel for 12 happy years. Finally, the Larson-Sells made one last move, to Spring Green, and Christ Lutheran Church.

When your heart was at its fullest, Douglas was there. He presided over countless baptisms, marriages and burials in his time; helping us celebrate new beginnings and bear the more painful endings with his trademark patience, wit and warmth. Hed acquired the knack of towering over everyone without ever talking down to anyone-a gift that served him well as a pastor and an educator.

Douglas loved an open mind and in 1990, he set about making more of them, teaching a class on World Religions at Viterbo College in La Crosse. You can still see the makings of his course syllabus on the dangerously full bookcases that line his study, each wooden shelf near buckling under the weight of Nietzsche and Buddha, Joseph Campbell and the Holy Bible.

There are, in fact, more than 2,000 books in Douglass makeshift library. Chances were good thats where youd find him, writing or reading the New Yorker, listening to something jazzy in his off hours. He was a man of quiet pleasures, a good poem, a shiny BMW, the thrill of sailing, a wine that paired nicely with his wifes famously gourmet meals. And always, always, time spent with Amy and Jordan.

Douglas will be remembered by countless friends and colleagues, and the many parishioners he served and loved right to the end.

He is survived by his wife, Amy; his son, Jordan; his parents, Warren and Phyllis Sell; his sister, Karen Nielson, and her husband, Mark; his in-laws, Jim and Rebecca Larson; and his brothers-in-law, Scott Larson, his wife, Myriam and their son, Evan, and Christopher Larson and his son, Lucas.

Funeral service was held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, at the Christ Lutheran Church, 237 E. Daley St., Spring Green, Wis. Visitations were held Friday, Sept. 16, and Saturday, Sept. 17, at Christ Lutheran Church. Online condolences available at www.staffordfuneralhomes.com. The Richardson-Stafford Funeral Home is assisting the family with the arrangements.
The Chaseburg Sole Burner will be held at the village park, Saturday, Sept. 24, beginning at 11 a.m. The run/walk is a powerful team-building health and wellness event that helps people join the fight against cancer and celebrate survivorship. The event engages business employees, families, friends, students, and local communities to share the benefits that come from supporting one of Americas most unifying causes.

The 2016 honorary chairperson for the 11th annual event is Tom Beck of Genoa, who was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2015 and is currently undergoing post-chemotherapy treatments. He will be joined by a cast of cancer survivors all with their own story of triumph to tell.

Linda DeGarmo, Chaseburg Sole Burner event co-chair, said participation in events like the upcoming run/walk allows the American Cancer Society (ACS) to help people facing cancer today by finding cures to end the disease tomorrow. Last years event raised more than $100,000. Degarmo said it was such a humbling milestone to reach and the perfect way to celebrate 10 years of fighting back. This years organizational committee has another ambitious fundraising goal to raise $90,000.

The 30-plus teams already pre-registered for this year plan to beat cancer one mile at a time and DeGarmo said the generosity of people involved will shine through even brighter than the hundreds of luminary candles that line the walking path every year.

Sole Burner participants and donors remember loved ones lost to cancer and honor those surviving the disease by dedicating luminaries. Each luminary bag is personalized with a name, photo, message or drawing honoring people whose lives were interrupted by cancer. The paper bags containing votive candles are illuminated after dark.

The luminary bags represent our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, friends, coworkers, and so many others who have passed away or are battling cancer one day at a time, DeGarmo said.

Sadly, DeGarmo said, every year the small village of Chaseburg loses one or more of its own residents to cancer or because of the underlying effects of cancer. Earlier this month local businessman Danny Lepke, 60, of rural Chaseburg, passed away. Lepke was diagnosed with cancer just months before his death and although his untimely passing was not listed as cancer, in the end, it was all directly related to his battle with the unforgiving disease.

We have to many good people struggling with cancer. The Chaseburg Sole Burner is our way of letting them and their families know they are not alone in the fight. Way too many Dannys, Jonathans and Bonnies have died from it already, and it is time to win this fight before we lose anymore, DeGarmo said.

The BloodCenter of Wisconsin is once again joining the Chaseburg Sole Burner by hosting a Be The Match national bone marrow registry event. People ages 18-44 can submit to a simple cheek swab and complete some paperwork while attending the Chaseburg Sole Burner to be added to the national bone marrow donation list.

DeGarmo said she wonders to this day that if an organization like Be a Match had been in existence when her own daughter was battling leukemia if Tammi might have had a fighting chance to survive instead of becoming a cancer statistic.

Nothing can bring our Tammi back, but if we can prevent another family from suffering like we have, then any extra effort is worth it, DeGarmo said.

Join the 11th annual Chaseburg Sole Burner as walkers, runners and volunteers come together to honor cancer survivors, raise awareness about reducing cancer risk, and raise money to help the ACS fight the disease. There will be a wine cork raffle, jail and bail, vendor sales, apparel sales, silent auction, raffles, chicken dinners, dessert live auction, kids activities, and so much more. The bucket brigade will also be out in full force collecting donations.

We are a small community with a large heart and hope still lives on in this little town that someday cancer will cease to exist. We wont stop hoping or fighting until cancer is no more, DeGarmo said.

For more information on the ACS Chaseburg Sole Burner run/walk, call Lori Francis at 608-783-5001, ext. 104 or e-mail lori.francis@cancer.org; or contact the 2016 event co-chairs, Linda DeGarmo at 608-452-3367 or Eric Ostrem at 608-452-3135. Information can also be found at http://community.acsevents.org/runwalkofchaseburg. The 2016 registration fee is $30 for adults, and $20 for kids. Register in advance or the day of the event. To pre-register, go to www.soleburner.org/chaseburg.

We are a small community with a large heart and hope still lives on in this little town that someday cancer will cease to exist. We wont stop hoping, or fighting, until cancer is no more. Linda DeGarmo
John W. Vaudreuil, United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, announced that Ricky Olson, 58, Gays Mills, was sentenced Sept. 20 by U.S. District Judge Barbara B. Crabb to 15 years in federal prison, to be followed by 20 years of supervised release, for distributing child pornography. Olson pleaded guilty to this charge on April 6.

The investigation revealed that Olson used a false persona to create fake email addresses and fake accounts on Snapchat.com, which he used to contact a 12-year-old child. Olson then requested and received sexually explicit images and videos of the child via Snapchat and email, which he distributed to others via the Internet. Olson also sent the child obscene images of himself.

The conviction of Olson is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Wisconsin Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Investigation; and Crawford County Sheriffs Office. The prosecution of the case has been handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Pfluger.
I visited a family farm recently. It was small, and local, and certified organic. In theory, it was everything an eco-conscious foodie could want. And yet, it wasnt.

Like every farm family, the couple who runs the farm is constrained by economic factors.

Unfortunately, the measures theyve taken to make their finances work have made their farm less environmentally sustainable.

Their biggest expense is labor, so they do everything they can to reduce the amount of labor they need, including employing machines. A lot of machines. Machines that run on fossil fuels.

They use tractors to plow, plant, and weed the fields. They frequently disturb the soil this way, because herbicides arent organic, and hand weeding is too expensive.

They get a few extra weeks of productivity and added income from extending their growing season by lining the ground with plastic to heat the soil. Then they throw the plastic away.

They dont raise livestock because animals are too risky. A predator or a disease can come in and wipe out your chickens, and there go all of your profits for the year. Since they dont raise their own livestock, they need to get manure from somewhere else. So they buy it and truck it in.

In short, this is not the ideal of Old McDonalds farm.

But theyre not alone. Organic farms across the country face the same challenges they face, and precious few find a way to stay in business while farming in a way thats best for the earth.

And yet, the farmers I met are doing the best they can. Their values are in the right place, even if they end up compromised in practice.

If you saw their produce in the stores, youd see it marked as local and organic, both of which are accurate. And its not overly expensive, either.

This is the heart of the difficulty we face in our food system in the U.S. Our food is cheap, compared to the rest of the world. We like it cheap. We need it cheap.

But because its cheap, our farmers simply cant afford to do some of the things wed like them to do  such as pay farm labor higher wages, or use more sustainable methods.

And yet, if food were more expensive, the rich might complain, but the poor would go hungry. Even now, most healthier, organic, and fresh foods arent affordable for low-income people.

In an ideal word, farmers would be able to practice agroecology, which Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri describes as using a deep understanding of ecology to produce food. In other words, if we can learn to mimic mother nature and let her do the heavy lifting, we wouldnt need to use gas-guzzling machines to try to bend nature to our will.

So while organic farming that cuts out chemicals from fertilizer and pesticides is better for the planet than conventional farming, its not as sustainable as it could be.

But because our economic system squeezes farmers, even the most environmentally conscious among them end up having to compromise their values to stay in business, limiting healthy food to only those who can pay for it.
The trend Ive seen in a couple letters to the editor so far this election season has been for writers to use my past columns regarding the poor leadership of Gov. Scott Walker and project those pieces on our local sitting State Assembly Rep. Lee Nerison.

Ive written reams of paper on how Walkers leadership has hurt Wisconsin. I have not projected Walkers actions onto any other candidate. The difficulty with anybody who thinks one Republican equals any other Republican is the same lunacy that has gotten us into the polarized knot of state and federal government that currently exists.

Ive chosen in my column to give equal access to Democratic challenger Alicia Leinberger and incumbent Nerison prior to the election. I ran a column for Alicia a couple months ago. I ran one for Nerison last week.

My disdain for Gov. Walker has been obvious from the news of divide and conquer. But Ive always supported local government control. I view myself as a local conservative. I supported Lee Nerison in the last election.

Ive already written that I cant support Donald Trump for President. As I said, I wouldnt want him teaching Sunday school to my children. His mouth continually spews hateful, dangerous rhetoric. Hes no president.

Hillary Clinton is no better  perhaps worse. I remember how Bill Clinton tied up the last three years of what could have been the most productive presidency of the late 20th Century as the nation focused on a stain on a blue dress. Bill Clinton is a worse human being than Trump. Who wants to entrust their 22-year-old daughter as an intern for a company whose CEO is going to seek sexual favors from her in the head office? Bill Clinton is a pig.

Donald Trump is a pig, but at least he owns it.

What does this have to do with Hillary? She is as transparent as a brick wall. Shes a non-starter for anyone interested in freedom of the press or protecting the peoples right to know.

This is what happens when America stops seeing its best and brightest choosing public service. Instead the most mouthy and combative must run for office, because thats where our republic has degenerated. The Fourth Estate no longer covers issues, movements or revolutions. It covers hate speech, because that drives Twitter, Facebook and social media. Many people think this is the work of journalists. No, it is the work of publishing companies, who have abandoned journalism for profit, slashed newsrooms by 50 percent or more, and exchanged journalism that makes a difference for website hits.

Here in local, community journalism, positive stories are better received. Id much rather write positive stories discussing Leinberger and Nerison than just come out hammering them. I talked to them about issues and shared that with readers.

Democrats looking for quotes from me to add to their letters to the editor should know on the federal level I support the death penalty, Department of Defense spending, the deportation of illegal immigrants and the Second Amendment.

As for state Democrats, they have been short on answers and large on throwing blame. The best solution Ive heard to correcting Wisconsin school funding came from our own state assemblyman in my column last week. Nerison suggests rewriting the states school funding formula to better fund rural schools. Stop giving equal aid to extremely wealthy public school districts. Invest more money in rural schools that have neither the resources or ability to compete for teachers or the same high-tech learning environments. Thats what Lee Nerison says. I support that.

I say this nonsense with the state funding private schools should stop immediately.

Ive always felt most comfortable when the State Legislature was in a Republican majority and the governors office was held by a Democrat. I felt like the most got done in Wisconsin in the fairest way for rural residents in the state when this was the case.

As for Lee Nerison sitting at the right hand of Gov. Walker and being a Republican insider? What complete baloney. The competition for that spot is ferocious and filled with many wannabee minions whose souls were sold long ago.

I dont think Nerison would sell his soul. I dont think Leinberger would either.
In early August, 25 leaders from 11 locally-led watershed groups in the Upper Mississippi River Basin gathered to participate in a three-day Watershed Leaders Network workshop at Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center near Lanesboro, Minn. Participants included farmers, landowners, watershed project coordinators, community volunteers, consulting agriculture and conservation advisers, and agency representatives.

John Delaney and Shelly Brenneman, Viroqua, represented the Kickapoo River Watershed Initiative, Kickapoo River Basin, at the workshop.

The group focused on real change at the local level, asking: What do we do in our own farm operations, and how do we organize near home to improve water quality and sustain successful farms?

We gathered local leaders from five states to foster collaboration and connect people who often work in isolation; to give them a chance to understand other perspectives and bring information forward through their stories, Nancy North, co-facilitator, said.

The work addresses an issue that has gained national and international attention in recent years. Fertilizer runoff from Midwestern farms is entering local drinking water, Mississippi River systems, and contributing to a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Locally-led watershed groups with strong farmer participation have sprung up in recent years in the basin states of Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin to address water quality concerns in their local areas, as neighbors.

Participants shared stories of what has worked in their own communities, and some of the challenges.

The Watershed Leaders Network is led by Fishers and Farmers Partnership for the Upper Mississippi River Basin, with funding from The McKnight Foundation.

To learn more about the Watershed Leaders Network and Fishers & Farmers Partnership, go to fishersandfarmers.org.
Many Americans will be using use paperless voting machines when they vote in the U.S. elections.

About one-fourth of registered voters are expected to use electronic machines that do not produce a paper backup, according to the Reuters news service.

Some of the touch-screen equipment is over 15 years old.

Security experts say the paperless machines can have issues that result in votes being wrongly recorded. The lack of a paper record makes it impossible to make sure the systems are working correctly, they said.

The Reuters story was based on information from three groups: U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Verified Voting Foundation watchdog group.

Americans will choose a new president, a new Congress and vote on local issues in the November 8 election.

About 44 million registered voters  about 25 percent of the total  live in areas using paperless systems, Reuters said. These include the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Alex Halderman teaches computer science at the University of Michigan. He has helped find security problems with touch-screen voting systems.

Clearly we still have a long way to go to ensure that all Americans have access to a form of voting technology they can trust, Halderman said.

Most of these machines are nearing the end of their life expectancy, he said. This has led to more breakdowns. Repair parts are also not easy to find.

But Matthew Masterson of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission disagrees. He told Reuters that election officials have taken the necessary steps to secure these systems and ensure the integrity of the process.

Some election officials have said a cyberattack involving voting machines is not likely because they are not connected to the internet.

But experts point out that voting data can also be destroyed through memory cards -- with no internet needed. They say the best way to prevent that kind of hacking is to move to a system with a paper backup.

Last week, U.S. defense officials repeated their concerns that cyber attackers might try to disrupt U.S. elections in November. During a Senate hearing last Tuesday, the nations top cyber security official said the issue continues to be of great focus.

The official was Admiral Michael Rogers. He serves as both National Security Agency (NSA) Director and chief of the Defense Departments Cyber Command.

Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee he could not go into detail about the cyber activity. However, he added, I think there are scenarios where you could see capability applied.

Committee Chairman Senator John McCain of Arizona first raised the question about a possible disruption of the upcoming presidential and local elections. McCain identified Russia as one country where cyber attackers are operating.

Russia is using cyber to undermine American national interest, and now it appears our democracy could be the next target.

U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement officials have long worried about the Russian governments possible cyber activities. The officials believe hackers in Russia or elsewhere could enter the computer systems of U.S. states during the voting process.

Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcell Lettre told the Senate panel the government is currently taking these possibilities quite seriously.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports by VOA correspondent Jeff Seldin and Reuters. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Do you think hackers could disrupt this year's U.S. elections? Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

watchdog  n. a person or group that monitors companies or governments to make sure they are not doing anything wrong

battleground  adj. states with very hard fought elections

integrity  n. the quality of being honest and fair

hack  v. illegally gain access to a computer

disrupt  v. make something not be able to normally continue

scenario  n. description of a future situation that may develop

undermine  v. to make something weaker or less effective

life expectancy - n. a measure of the average time a machine (or organism) is expected to continue working

cyberattack  n. an attack on a computer or computer system
Chinese and U.S. officials are said to be investigating a Chinese business with ties to North Korea.

The business is suspected of helping the North Korean government avoid international sanctions. Those measures are meant to punish the North for seeking to expand its nuclear weapons program.

Liaoning Hongxiang Group is a large conglomerate, made up of many companies. It operates six companies that reportedly sold aluminum bars and chemicals to North Korea. Experts say the bars and chemicals have possible military uses.

The companies are suspected of operating 10 ships involved in North Koreas mineral trade, including coal. They also operate a hotel linked to a group of North Koreans who attack computers overseas.

Go Myong-Hyun is a researcher with the Asan Institute for Policy in Seoul. He said the companies are actually selling to the North Koreans dual use goods, which are explicitly forbidden by the United Nations sanctions.

Go is one of the writers of a report about Liaoning Hongxiang Group and its activities in North Korea. The Asan Institute released the report on Monday.

Chinese business group linked to banned trade

The researchers studied blacklisted individuals and companies. They said private businesses like Liaoning Hongxiang Group helped companies on the United Nations sanctions list do business in North Korea.

The value of the trade between the conglomerate and North Korea is estimated to be over $500 million. The report said the trade could provide financing for the Norths nuclear development program.

Part of the conglomerate, Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co., imports almost all of its goods from North Korea.

The report also points to satellite pictures of a ship linked to the group at a North Korean port where coal and iron is exported. Most mineral exports from the North are banned under U.N. sanctions. However, trade in coal or iron not linked to government organizations is permitted as a humanitarian exception.

A company linked to Liaoning Hongxiang Group has ties to a hotel suspected of being the base for a North Korean cyber-attack group.

The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported Monday that police in Chinas Liaoning province are investigating the conglomerate.

The Asan report says Liaoning Hongxiang Group also has done business with at least 15 American companies. Lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice visited Beijing last month to discuss possible legal action against the group.

North Korea has continued its nuclear and long-range missile programs in violation of strong U.N. sanctions.

On September 9th, the country carried out its fifth nuclear test, the second this year. And on Tuesday, North Koreas state media reported that a test of a new rocket engine was successful.

The reports said leader Kim Jong Un ordered preparations for a satellite launch as soon as possible.

Im Mario Ritter.

Brian Paddan reported this story for VOANews.com. Mario Ritter adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Reach us in the comment section below.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

sanctions  n. measures against a country to cause it to obey international law

conglomerate  n. a large business that oversees a number of other companies often in different kinds of industries

allegedly  adv. said to have happened, but not yet known

forbidden  adj. not allowed

blacklisted  adj. placed on a list of people or groups that should be avoided


United States Secretary of State John Kerry has urged North Korea to stop its nuclear and ballistic weapons development programs.

Kerry met with South Korean foreign affairs minister Yun Byung-se and Japanese foreign affairs minister Fumio Kishida on Sunday in New York. He said, Serious negotiations about the future could occur if North Korea does not engage in any more provocative actions.

The three nations are part of a multi-national group seeking to get North Korea to end its nuclear program. The group also includes China and Russia. However, so-called six party talks including all the countries involved have not taken place since 2008.

Satellite images have shown that North Korea is ready to carry out more nuclear weapons tests, which could take place at any time.

South Koreas foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, warned that North Koreas weapons are not only a threat to Northeast Asia, but are a danger to the whole world.

He called for greater sanctions on North Korea and said that the current U.N. General Assembly needs to send out a united and forceful message.

Yun also said South Korea, the U.S. and Japan need to stop North Koreas nuclear program by whatever means we have.

Japans foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, also called for greater pressure, including sanctions, against North Korea. He said the international community is required to initiate a different response accordingly because of the growing threat from North Korea. But he did not explain what actions would be taken.

The three countries released a joint statement after the meeting. It said that the ministers agreed to explore "ways to work together to ensure that all countries fully and effectively implement all their obligations and commitments under U.N. Security Council (resolution) 2270.

That resolution places strong sanctions on North Korea for its nuclear and long-range missile programs.

Im Mario Ritter.

VOA's Steve Herman reported this story from New York City. Patrick Merentie adapted the report for Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

ballistic  adj. able to travel long distances at high speed

occur  v. to happen, to take place

engage  v. to take part, to carry out

provocative  adj. meant to cause a reaction

sanctions  n. measures meant to cause a country to obey international law
The memory of a beloved pet inspires one couple's fight against injustice.
LEXINGTON  Former 3rd District Rep. William E. Bill Barrett, 87, of Lexington died Tuesday in Lexington.

He was a member of the Republican State Executive Committee from 1964-66, Nebraska Republican Party state chair from 1973-75, a member of the Nebraska Legislature representing the 39th District from 1979-90 and speaker of the legislature from 1987-90, and represented Nebraskas 3rd District in the House of Representatives from 1991-2001.

Arrangements are pending at Reynolds-Love Funeral Home in Lexington.

When Barrett decided to retire from the 3rd District seat in 2000, then-U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., described him as totally trustworthy in an Omaha World-Herald story.

Hes not a screamer. He doesnt pound the table, Kerrey said at the time. But whatever he tells you hes going to do, hell do.

Kerrey added that when he served as Nebraska governor, Barrett, then Speaker of the Legislature, was an important ally in overcoming a big budget deficit during the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Kerrey said that Barrett could have made political hay out of the states budget issues, and the painful budget cuts and tax increase that followed, but didnt.

He didnt vote for everything. But he understood that some pretty drastic things had to happen, and he helped me out, Kerrey said.

In 2000, Barrett cited growing frustration with partisanship on Capitol Hill as one of the main reasons he was retiring from Congress. Republicans had recently become the majority in the House, and led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, had become more aggressive, more partisan and less collaborative.

He always said Washington was 10 square miles surrounded by reality, said Bruce Rieker, a former deputy chief of staff who now works for the Nebraska Farm Bureau. He never got Potomac fever.

Jeri Finke, Barrett's former chief of staff, who is now retired in South Carolina, said that Barrett often told her that Nebraska did it right with its nonpartisan, one-house Unicameral Legislature.

Congress was a big contrast from the Nebraska Legislature, Barrett said in a 2000 interview, where elected officials were good friends.

Its part of an overall basket of reasons why its time for me to leave,  he said. I dont have to put up with this.

Officials issue statements on Barrett's passing

Rep. Adrian Smith - Congressman Barrett devoted his life to service. From his speakership in the State Legislature to the years he spent in Congress, he was known for being true to his word and bringing people together to get things done. Serving Nebraskans was his top priority, and his dedication to our district and state set a lasting example for me and all who have sought to fill his shoes.

With the passing of both Bill Barrett and Duane Acklie within days of one another, Nebraska has lost two influential conservative leaders. Andrea and I send our condolences to Bills and Duanes families. These outstanding Nebraskans will be dearly missed.

Gov. Pete Ricketts - Susanne and I are deeply saddened by Congressman Barretts passing. I first met him when I was traveling the state about 10 years ago, and he was eager to offer his insights and guidance. He built a reputation as a legislator who put Nebraska first during his service to our state in the Unicameral and in the U.S. Congress. With his passing, Nebraska has lost a statesman, and I have lost a friend and an advisor. We will lift up Elsie and the entire Barrett family in our prayers during this time of mourning.

Nebraska Farm Bureau President Steve Nelson - Everyone in Nebraska Farm Bureau is saddened to hear the news of Bills passing. Bill Barrett was a statesman who always worked for the betterment of Nebraska and its citizens, whether during his time serving in the Nebraska Unicameral or in representing the interests of the residents of the 3rd Congressional District.

Bill was honored with the Nebraska Farm Bureaus Silver Eagle award in 2000, the organizations highest honor for recognition of service to agriculture. He was truly a solid voice for Nebraskas farm and ranch families in Washington D.C., especially on major policy issues such as trade, regulatory overreach and tax issues, as well as work on farm bill legislation.
Dear Meredith,

My boyfriend of 5 years  the love of my life  broke up with me a month ago. While I was initially shocked (as there was no major fight or disagreement to precipitate the breakup), I now realize that it was not completely unexpected. We had met very early in our careers in Boston, when we were both fresh out of college, and grew together for most of our relationship. However, two years ago, an exciting career opportunity came up for me in New York City and I couldn't resist. So for the past two years, we have been in a long-distance relationship (though I am blessed with a flexible job that allows me to travel up to Boston to see him almost every other weekend).

Things went well during that time. I am now going back to school for my master's degree, and despite applying to all the programs in Boston that would give me the career lift I required, I was unable to get into one. I did, however, choose the program that would give me the closest access to Boston for the benefit of our relationship. We had talked getting engaged about six months ago and it was pretty serious. I would finish my master's and move back to Boston in 18 months. We went on vacation together recently. We had some disagreements over what activities to do, but nothing serious that I felt undermined our good relationship. Our busy schedule  traveling for vacation, meeting with friends when I visit  did, however, put a damper on any intimacy and romance over the past two months. And maybe he felt that I was limiting my post-grad school career search to Boston to be with him and didn't want to impede my geographic freedom.

He broke up with me citing that he "loves me but is not in love with me," but is open to dating again if I end up in Boston after school. We spoke on the phone last night for the first time since the breakup and it felt so great. We laughed and chatted for over an hour. Sparks were flying even after all this time, and this conversation convinced me that if this relationship is at all salvageable, I want to put my whole heart into it. Here's my question, Meredith: What is going on? Does this mean the relationship is shot or is it just a period of boredom due to lack of romance? Is it just cold feet or his fear that I'm not serious about moving back to Boston?

 Brokenhearted in the Big Apple
Ten-year-old Grace Savages dreams came true when she got to meet Winter the dolphin at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Tuesday.

Fisherman who found Winter returns to CMA with niece

Grace Savage, 10, has a chromosomal disorder

But she isnt the first in her family to meet the dolphin. Her great-uncle, Jim Savage, was the fisherman who found Winter in 2005.

"Right when I got up to where the buoy was moving around, Winter just came up from the bottom with the trap totally wrapped all around her, Jim Savage said.

Savage has visited Winter many times since that day, but Tuesdays visit was the most emotional yet.

"Today is my day, today is my pay off day, he said. To have my niece get her wish, so its big for me today, its a game changer today."

Thanks to the Make a Wish Foundation, Grace and her family traveled from Oregon to meet Hope and Winter. Grace has a chromosomal disorder and has relied on Winters story to get her through tough times.

"Shes been talking about coming to Florida to meet Hope and Winter, especially Winter, for like half her life at least, said Graces mom, Katie Savage.

Grace got to interact with the dolphins, petting them and helping them with tricks.

Afterwards, her uncle told her, The next dolphin I find, Ill bring to you.


Mosaic officials apologized Tuesday during a Polk County Commission meeting for not notifying the public sooner about its sinkhole and leak of radioactive waste water.

Sinkhole at plant in Mulberry leaked slightly radioactive water into the ground



200-million plus gallons of the water has flowed from sinkhole in a gypsum stack

Residents opt to have Mosaic test wells by third party

PHOTOS: Phosphate plant sinkhole dumping contaminated water into ground

On behalf of Mosaic and our nearly 4,000 employees in Florida, wed like to express our sincere regret that the sinkhole and water recovery operations on our property have caused concerns for the community, said Walt Precourt, Senior Vice President of Phosphates for Mosaic.

Our Mosaic team continues to work around the clock to review the situation, and our response to it. We continue to analyze the situation, and our response to it, and we realize we could have done a better job in providing timely information to our neighbors and the broader community. I regret and apologize for not providing information sooner, and am committed to providing regular updates to the public as we move forward.

Mosaic admitted it made a mistake about not letting the community know about the massive sinkhole on its property sooner. That decision led county commissioners to review their actions, as well.

County commissioner Melony Bell wishes she had gotten more information about how bad the sinkhole was when she received a phone call from Mosaic on Sept. 15.

If I couldve done it differently, there shouldve been more communication between Mosaic, Department of Environmental Protection and the county of how do we go out and not alarm the residents but keep them on notice that they need to not drink their water and have their wells checked, said Commissioner Bell.

Polk County Commission Chair John Hall said theres still confusion about whether the county was permitted to tell the public.

The board of County Commissioners didnt do any press releases because were pre-empted. Florida Department of Environmental Protection has the responsibility for all surface water, including lakes, streams, rivers and our underground, especially when theres potential for contamination, explained Commissioner John Hall.

Commissioner Bell said the commission, Mosaic and the states Department of Environmental Protection are planning a meeting, so they can discuss protocol and how to prevent this miscommunication from happening again.

I think this is a learning lesson for all of us, Commissioner Bell said.

Since the sinkhole hit national news, Bell said Mosaic is now communicating with her daily. She said her main concern right now is the daily results of citizens wells being tested.

Mosaic has maintained that the leaking radioactive water hasnt left its property. Its currently pumping the contaminated water out of the Floridian aquifer and into a separate holding well.

The company Environmental Consulting and Technology, Inc. (ECT) is testing wells of citizens in the area, at the expense of Mosaic.

It tested nine wells Monday and the results came in Wednesday. The companys Senior Vice President, Gary Uebelhoer said the water in those wells had typical water quality levels, which led him to believe the contaminated water from Mosaics sinkhole didnt reach those wells as of Monday.
St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman placed two city sewer officials on unpaid administrative leave Wednesday.

2 top St. Pete sewer officials placed on unpaid leave

Gov. Scott orders state to investigate sewerage discharges

Rep. Jolly wants EPA investigation



Water Resources Director Steve Leavitt and Engineering Director Tom Gibson were placed on leave as Gov. Rick Scott directed the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to investigate the recent sewage discharges in St. Petersburg.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;

Since August 2015, St. Petersburg has dumped more than 190 million gallons of sewage into Tampa Bay and other local waterways. City officials were warned this could happen when they shut down the Albert Whitted water treatment facility, according to one whistleblower. A permanent fix to the problem is not likely until at least 2018, when major upgrades to the Southwest wastewater treatment plant may be completed.

Additional sewage was released into the Bay during the torrential rains that came with Hurricane Hermine last month. The problems have been caused by a combination of an aged sewer system with low capacity and heavy rains.

While the City of St. Petersburg is responsible for conducting testing in the immediate area of the sewage spill, Scott directed the Department of Health to begin additional testing at this site.

Rep. David Jolly has also asked for an investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Public Works Administrator Claude Tankersley has named John Palenchar the interim Water Resources Director and Brejesh Prayman the interim Engineering Director.

The mayor will address the City Council on Thursday on the issue.
Federal charges are now being filed against Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man believed to be behind this past weekend's bombings in Chelsea and New Jersey.

Ahmad Khan Rahami was seen on video nearh spots where bombs found: Feds

Federal complain: Rahami bought cell phones last year that were used as timers for bombs

Related story: Federal prosecutors file charges against Manhattan bombing suspect

Rahami, 28, is being charged with several counts of using weapons of mass destruction, bombing a public place, causing destruction of property with fire or explosives and using a destructive device to cause crime and violence.

He is still recovering in a hospital in Newark, N.J.

The federal complaint says Rahami was seen on surveillance video near both spots where bombs were placed.

Federal authorities also say they later found his fingerprints on the un-detonated pressure-cooker bomb recovered on 27th Street the night of the Chelsea bombing, which injured more than two-dozen people.

The complaint says Rahami purchased cell phones in 2015 which were used as timers for the explosives.

It says he also bought bomb components online in the months before the attack.

Investigators say the suspect allegedly kept a YouTube account in which he listed two Jihadist anthems in a list of favorite videos.

They also found a journal in which he referred to Osama Bin Laden as "brother."

The FBI has acknowledged it interviewed Rahami's father after he told authorities his son was a terrorist back in 2014.

He said his son was being violent towards their family, even stabbing his brother.

Sources say Rahami's father later recanted the tip and changed his story.

After conducting their investigation, the FBI concluded that it could find no links between Rahami and terrorism.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the father says he contacted authorities because his son was causing trouble and not because of terrorist motivations.

Mohammad Rahami, suspect's father: They checked that almost two months. They said he's OK, he's clear, he's not a terrorist. I said OK. Now they say he's a terrorist. I say OK.

Q: Why did you call the FBI two years ago?

Mohammad Rahami: He doing bad.

Q: What did he do bad?

Mohammad Rahami: He stabbed my son, he hit my wife, and I put him to jail.

Rahami was not prosecuted for the stabbing after a grand jury declined to indict him.

Two officers were injured and Rahami was hit in the leg during a shootout with New Jersey police Monday.

New Jersey prosecutors charged Rahami with attempted murder of a police officer.

Meanwhile, residents in Chelsea are working to get their lives back to normal in the days after the bombing.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with city and homeland security officials, toured the area Tuesday to offer support and listen to concerns from New Yorkers.

The mayor also stopped by "Visions," a support center for the blind close to where the blast occurred on 23rd Street.

Emergency Management Commissioner Joseph Esposito praised the city for moving so quickly after the bombing.

"No city in this country that's more prepared to prevent or react to a terrorist attack. I think we showed that here on 23rd Street  the quick response, the way the street is back to normal two days later  it's just unbelievable," he said.

Officials say 23rd Street was completely reopened to traffic Monday night.
Kaun hai yeh, jisne dobara mudke mujhe nahi dekha?

This highly narcissistic dialogue that Kareena Kapoor (there was no Khan yet, back in 2001) says in Karan Johar's Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham, as her character Poo flips her hair back to check out a nonchalant Hrithik Roshan, is very emblematic of her real life persona.

She's cheeky, full of sass, straightforward and rightly so. She's an actress that an industry like Bollywood makes only once in a generation.

An actress who can straddle the most commercial of films with her stock latkas and jhatkas, and also have active interest in doing a film like Dev and then much later in her career, Udta Punjab. An actress who can make size zero a fad, and then openly speaking about the pleasures of ghee and samosas.

You can't help but be fascinated by Kareena Kapoor Khan.

Among the host of adjectives one would use to describe Kareena, unabashed would be on top of the list. And that is why it gives me immense pleasure in rounding up a list of some of her so-bad-they're-good films, in celebration of the actress' 36th birthday.

These films are memorable because they're illogical, make you want to facepalm, loud, over the top and yet Kareena shines in them. They're the perfect antidote for a bad day (week or even month). So, come down this rabbit hole with us.

Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon

If there was a manifestation of the term overacting, this Sooraj Barjatya film would be it. Everyone from Hrithik to Abhishek to Pankaj Kapur to the VFX parrot, everyone overacts. Kareena, however, takes the cake.

The film traces how an over-enthusiastic suburban family happen to meet the wrong Prem Kumar (Roshan) to set him up with their daughter, and then are faced with a dilemma upon meeting the right Prem Kumar (Bachchan). But Kareena has already fallen for the wrong Prem. Oops.

Yaadein

Cashing into the Hrithik-Kareena chemistry, came Subhash Ghai's Yaadein, a Dharma wannabe set "abroad" (the film was shot in Malaysia and parts of UK, but the film didn't think it important to give us context, as long as it was out of India).

In it, Kareena plays the youngest of three sisters who have their own personal love-hate relationship with the idea of romance. Of course, Kareena at this point, falls head over heels in love with Hrithik and irony takes a big dump on everyone.

Merge in some prepubescent dance numbers ('Eli re eli' and 'Jab dil mile'), more overacting and some class dispute (rich boy-poor girl trope) and you get Yaadein  a typical millenial commercial film. I mean, it's pretty hard to find someone who'd be so happy to be a part of such a film. Kudos to you Kareena.

Jeena Sirf Mere Liye

Remember the time Tusshar Kapoor and Kareena starred in movies together? Yeah, neither did we. Which is why clips from this film, the second one of the two (after Mujhe Kuch Kehna Hai), especially cracked us up.

This film is probably most famous for the song 'Ek baar toh India aake dekho', in which Kareena plays the abla naari, sari and all. She asks people to come visit India by dancing in front of a bad poster of the Eiffel Tower. Just going to put this out there.

Khushi

Good looking "bubbly" girl, good looking (coked up) guy and their inflated egos. What the best millenium Hindi movies were made of. Khushi, released in 2003, where Kareena stars opposite Fardeen Khan, is no less.

The only way we can imagine how this film (whose story is literally the above line) got greenlit, is if the producers decided to cash in on Kareena's Poo image and asked her to overdo it some more. Clearly they (and by extension Kareena) haven't heard of the phrase 'less is more'

Fida

Aah, finally. The token femme fatale role. Someone with as much spunk as Kareena could possibly pull off a grey character very well. Imagine if she played Priyanka's role in Aitraaz? But we digress.

In Fida, she plays a con-woman, who is ultimately shot in the head by the do-gooder hero (Shahid) because what other fate do scorned women have on screen right? [Spoiler Alert] The ending of Fida completely ruined the entire concept of the film, and yet Kareena is a delight to watch.

The film however, is as stale as Kareena's hair highlights.

JK Kareena! Happy 36th Birthday. No matter how bad your films are, you will continue to light up the screen.
As the Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt marriage comes to an end, one of their films is receiving renewed attention  the 2015 release By The Sea.

Written and directed by Jolie-Pitt (that's how Angelina was credited on the film's promotional material), By The Sea was about an American couple in the 1960s, struggling to make their marriage work. Vanessa and Roland (the characters played by Jolie and Pitt in the film) take off for a vacation to a French seaside town; they hope the time off will help repair the cracks in their marriage.

Their own jaded, fading relationship is highlighted even more by the arrival of a young French couple at the hotel  so obviously passionate and in love.

By The Sea was praised for its attention to detail; everything else was panned by critics.

The Atlantic's Sophie Gilbert called it "not so much a film as a 132-minute perfume ad; a two-hour-plus Vogue shoot in stereo".

"An unabashed vanity project that struggles to turn its own beautiful inertia into a virtue," wrote Justin Chang for Variety.

Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone, was more direct: "'I smell fish,' Nessa says, sniffing. Nah. What stinks is the movie."

There was even one reviewer who deemed it simply "boring as f**k".

In the light of news that Jolie has filed for divorce from Pitt, citing irreconcilable differences, By The Sea's depiction of a 14-year marriage in trouble is being looked at less as cinema and more as a mirroring of real life.

In its narrative, By The Sea now seems prescient.

Even more so, are the interviews that Jolie gave at the time: there's this one in The Telegraph that was headlined 'Brad and I drive each other mad'.

Lest the film be thought of as autobiographical, however, the Girl, Interrupted star clarified:

"Brad and I have our issues, but if the characters were even remotely close to our problems we couldnt have made the film. To be clear: we have fights and problems like any other couple. We have days when we drive each other absolutely mad and want space, but the problems in the movie arent our specific problems."

After their separation, By The Sea has been examined with a magnifying glass.

There has also been another film  the only other time the two Hollywood stars starred opposite each other  that has received scrutiny: the decidedly non-arthouse Mr and Mrs Smith (2005).

In that action-adventure, Jolie and Pitt played (once again) a married couple afflicted with boredom and seeking counselling. Their relationship revives when they discover that they're both highly skilled assassins and need to unite against a common enemy who wants them eliminated.

Mr and Mrs Smith was the film that marked the start of the Jolie-Pitt romance (one that was marred by rumours that Brad was unfaithful to his then-wife Jennifer Aniston), the beginning of the global phenomenon known as 'Brangelina'.

Just as its lead pair got together off screen, the Smiths too were shown to reunite by the end of the movie, with their marriage rock solid, and far more exciting than earlier.

By The Sea also sees a reconciliation, of a somewhat fragile sort, between Vanessa and Roland.

Unfortunately, as the statements issued by both Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have shown, this once, life will not be imitating art  or will follow it only to a certain degree.

And when the dust has settled on news of their divorce, all that will be left in the public space is this "lavish portrait of a marriage in crisis".
Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after 12 years of togetherness, two of those as a married couple, citing irreconcilable differences. Jolie cited the date of separation as 15 September 2016, and her lawyer issued a statement to the effect that the decision was taken "for the health of the family".

In the meantime, Pitt issued a statement to People magazine that read:

"I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."

In the aftermath of what is the equivalent of a crisis in celebrity news, there were various attempts to dissect what little was known about the high-profile Hollywood couple's split.

News reports ranged from the prosaic:

To the profound:

There was some analysis:

And several obituaries:

And our personal favourite, because really it says everything we ever had in our hearts about how the world won't ever be the same, because it turned out the truths we took for granted were not the truth, and love was not actually eternal but just a mirage, and so on:

But as the world grappled to put into words its sense of incomprehension and bewilderment at the End of Brangelina, there was one analysis that stood out.

For it sheer succinctness, dry wit and in-depth insight, Booker Prize-winning writer Roddy Doyle's Facebook post on the subject of the Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt separation deserves to be read.

It has been set up as a conversation between two blokes downing a pint of Guinness at their local pub and sadly discussing the end of Hollywood's most golden union (although they don't describe it thus).

A word of caution to the gentle reader: If you're still getting over your shock, perhaps it would be best to wait for a few months before you proceed to read the rest of this.

That  as you may have made out from the curious missing words  was the censored version.

For the uncensored one, go to Doyle's Facebook page.

As for us, we're raising our pints to what was, bidding our adieus too:

Goodbye Brangelina, we never really knew you.
The actor might be only two films old in Bollywood with a third one to soon release, yet Pakistani actor Fawad Khan has already made his presence felt in the industry.

Reports suggest that the actor will now be seen in a Salman Khan production with the superstar himself in a Nitin Kakkar film.

According to an IANS video Kakkar said, We go on floors with Fawad sometime next year. He is locked in. We are currently in the process of getting an actress on board. This is an urbane love story. But more than that, its an interesting take on relationships between a boy and a girl.

Kakkar has earlier written and directed National Award winning comedy film Filmistaan.

A report in The Indian Express indicates that Fawad was earlier in talks for Salman Khan's Jugalbandi, however Kakkar's film came before that.

The actor has also signed up for Dharma Productions Raat Baaki opposite Katrina Kaif. A Bollywood Life report suggests that the film will be directed by lyricist Aditya Dhar and would be a musical love story. The film is expected to begin shooting post November and will release sometime next year.

Currently Fawad fans are waiting to see him in Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Muskil, where he has a cameo.
In the latest development in the Vishal Dadlani-Tarun Sagar row, the Pentagram frontman has apologised to the Jain monk in person.

On Wednesday morning, Dadlani visited Tarun Sagar in Chandigarh at the Digambar Jain temple, Sector 27 , and asked for the monk's forgiveness for his 'hurtful' tweets of August.

Music composer @VishalDadlani meets Jain Muni Tarun Sagar in Chandigarh, reports ANI pic.twitter.com/hP6BMpTwcK  Times of India (@timesofindia) September 21, 2016

The incident occurred last month, when Tarun Sagar had addressed the Haryana State Assembly. Dadlani had tweeted "What sort of monkery is this?" referring to the Jain religious leader's lack of attire.

However, Dadlani's tweet invited a massive backlash  and an FIR for hurting the Jain community's sentiments.

In the aftermath of the controversy, Dadlani resigned from the Aam Aadmi Party, in addition to issuing several apologies for his original tweet. Tarun Sagar himself was quoted by ANI as saying: "I don't think he (Vishal) knows anything about Jainism or our beliefs. Also, the question of apology doesn't arise as I am not angry with him in the first place."

In the meantime, Dadlani's legal woes escalated as the Supreme Court refused to entertain his lawyer's plea for anticipatory bail on 7 September. Instead, it directed him to approach the concerned high court.

Hindustan Times reported that Dadlani reached the Digambar Jain temple at around 9.30 am on Wednesday (21 September) and his meeting with Tarun Sagar lasted over 20 minutes. He also met with the Digambar Jain society in Chandigarh.

Dadlani was quoted as saying: "I regret whatever I had said earlier. Unknowingly, I had commented about guru ji. But after hearing his kadve parvachan (harsh words), I found them sweet."

NDTV quoted Dadlani as saying, "Guruji accepted my apology, he has forgiven me and I think we've also developed a bond of friendship."

There is no information at present on the status of the FIR against Dadlani.
New Delhi: CBI on Tuesday arrested promoter of FTIL and commodity bourse MCX Jignesh Shah in a case of alleged cheating and suppression of facts in getting SEBI extension to MCX-SX to continue as a private stock exchange in violation of norms.

"The Central Bureau of Investigation has today arrested a promoter of two private companies and conducted searches at nine places in Mumbai, including the residence and office premises of the said promoter of Mumbai-based two private companies," said CBI spokesperson R K Gaur on Tuesday.

The move came after CBI searches at nine locations, including the premises of Shah, FTIL, MCX, senior SEBI officials -- Executive Director Muralidhar Rao, DGM Rajesh Dangeti and AGM Vishakha More -- and a former Executive Director of SEBI, J N Gupta, in connection with the case registered two years ago, the sources said.

MCX-SX had started functioning as a stock exchange in 2013 after a long legal battle with SEBI.

Meanwhile, 63 moons (formerly known as FTIL), said in a statement, "Pursuant to the applicable regulations of SEBI (LODR), Regulations 2015, please be informed that Central Bureau of Investigation, Economic Offence Wing, Mumbai, is conducting search in connection with FIR ... relating to

recognition granted by SEBI to MCX-SX (now Metropolitan Stock Exchange of India Limited)."

MCX also gave a statement to BSE, saying the CBI search is going on in respect of recognition granted by SEBI to Metropolitan Stock Exchange of India Limited (formerly known as MCX Stock Exchange Limited) for starting its stock exchange in trading in currency and other segments in respect of case

no. RC 9/E/2014".

CBI had filed the FIR in the case under IPC sections related to criminal conspiracy and cheating besides provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act for alleged abuse of official position.

The agency had alleged that the promoters of MCX-SX had entered into a buy back arrangement with a nationalised bank in violation of Securities Contract Regulation Act, 1956 and Securities Contract (Regulation) (Manner of Increasing and Maintaining Public Shareholdings in Recognised Stock

Exchanges) Regulation, 2006.

CBI had alleged that Shah, in connivance with SEBI officials, deliberately suppressed this material fact while applying for extension of recognition of the stock exchange, to conduct trade in currency derivatives, and fraudulently obtained the extension of recognition of the exchange in the

year 2009 by cheating SEBI.

The agency further alleged that the SEBI officials deliberately did not issue notice to the stock exchange for cancellation of its recognition in the currency derivatives, when SEBI had already rejected request of the same stock exchange for trading in other segments.

Gaur said incriminating documents, including transfer of shares by private companies, FDR, purchase of assets, etc were recovered during searches which are being scrutinised for further investigation.

He said the case was registered on the allegations of connivance of the SEBI officials with private company/stock exchange (MCX-SX) of Mumbai in fraudulently allowing renewal of recognition of said company/stock exchange to conduct trade in currency derivatives in 2009-2010.

The SEBI allegedly rejected the request of private company/stock exchange for trading in other segments in 2010, but renewed the registration granted to said company/stock exchange even though it was not compliant to SEBI MIMPS Regulations.

In a statement, FTIL said the CBI Mumbai has taken Jignesh Shah, Promoter & Chairman Emeritus of 63 Moons Technologies Limited (formerly, Financial Technologies (India) Ltd) into custody relating to investigation in the matter of recognition granted by SEBI to MCX-SX.
On paper, Prime Minister Narendra Modis 100 smart cities plan has impressed everyone from the very beginning. The announcement on Tuesday of 27 new smart cities, takes the total number of smart cities so far to 60.

The latest round includes Modis constituency, Varanasi. The governments plan to make 100 smart cities, out of which 60 announced so far with a total proposed investment of Rs 1.45 lakh crore is ambitious in every sense, for it carries the potential to kick off private investment cycle in Indias urban infrastructure and, if it succeeds,to set an example for other aspiring cities.

What is a smart city

Lets look at what is a smart city. The website of Ministry of Urban Development says, the objective is to promote cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of Smart Solutions. The focus is on sustainable and inclusive development and the idea is to look at compact areas, create a replicable model which will act like a light house to other aspiring cities.

It is an ambitious plan indeed, even though political parties have been questioning Modis smart city scheme with respect to the choice of cities and the fate of existing cities. What one should note is that most experts agree that, at least on paper, Modis smart city project is a much better version of what has been experimented in the past to improve housing and infrastructure facilities in India.

The Congress-led UPA governments years have seen schemes such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and Rajiv Awas Yojana, which were later renamed as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Sardar Patel respectively. Smart cities are the next level of taking this experiment ahead. There is no harm in the repackaging and renaming exercise as long as the job is done in a better way.

The problem, however, is on implementation and how the government will handle the socio-economic-jurisdiction issues that smart cities will bring along in their wake. The past experience, beginning with the PURA (Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas) scheme in 1990s, should make one cautious while embarking on a fresh housing infrastructure revolution.

Execution woes

Consider these points:

For one, the biggest challenge for Modis smart city dream is securing capital from domestic private investors and foreigners. This isnt easy since profit-hungry private investors will be worried about the returns from Day One, which should ultimately come from user fees.

As per the current plan, each new smart city will receive Rs 200 crore in the first year and the Rs 300 crore over the next three years. The state governments and local bodies which will have partnership in the special purpose vehicles (SPVs) at the city level will match the centers contribution. But, the contribution from the state will account for only a fifth of the total fund requirement needed by the Five Year Plan.

According to Deloitte, the 100 smart cities mission will require an investment of over $150 billion over the next few years with private sector contributing $120 billion. In other words, only one-fifth of the total investments in smart cities will come from the government. The rest of the money should come from the private sector. Government funding cannot be sufficient, said Devendra Pant, chief economist at India Ratings and Research. And it is a big challenge to get private investments. When you talk about urban infra projects, recovery will not be immediate. You should find out alternate ways of revenue generation. Can private sector investor get returns to his investments? Nobody will come for charity.

Though big cities still have a better chance to get funds, the smaller ones in the list of hundred, will have to struggle, Pant says.

If one goes by recent reports, the signals so far is that foreign investors, who are supposedly enthused about the prospects of investing in smart cities, havent really put money on the table. A 1 September Hindu Business Line article, which cited an RTI query, said no investment has come from foreign investors ever since Modi embarked on the 100-cities smart city journey some two years back. What does this mean? Foreigners arent as thrilled as us on Indias smart cities.

Secondly, how will the SPVs raise funds is a question. The government has clarified that the Centre's contribution to smart cities will be strictly in the form of grants and the ULB is exercising its own discretion in utilising these funds as its equity contribution to the SPV. The SPV can access funds from other sources including debt and loans besides user charges.

Raising money from bond issuances will not be easy for SPVs considering the experience of municipal bond issuances in the past, said Pant of India Ratings. What will be the revenue model of that SPV? Till now, response to municipal bonds has been lukewarm. Not much money has been raised. It will be a test whether these SPVs will be able to leverage the grants given by central and state governments and raise money in the debt market."

Third, there is a likelihood of new smart city plans clashing with the existing limited infrastructure of cities. In cities, where there already is chaos on account of inadequate infrastructure such as congested roads and land scarcity, how will the designers of new smart cities prepare ground for world-class infrastructure is a question. So is the question, how will these cities accommodate the urban poor and migrant unskilled workers.

One of the ways for investors to recover money they invest in smart cities is through charging inhabitants for better services. This can make smart cities a costlier option for a large section of urban poor and can lead to social imbalance, too.

The bottom line is this: There arent two thoughts on the potential of the 100-smart city plan. It is an idea that deserves attention. But, convincing investors to put money in these new cities will be a huge challenge. Much of its success will lie in the execution. And even if that happens, the government will have to find out an answer to what the new world of smart cities will mean to the urban poor.

(Data support from Kishor Kadam)
Pepperfry, the country's online furniture marketplace, said on Wednesday it had raised Rs 210 crore ($31.3 million) from existing investors including Goldman Sachs Group Inc in a new round of funding.

Other investors that participated in the funding were Bertelsmann India Investments, Norwest Venture Partners and Zodius Technology Fund.

The company said will use the funds to expand its logistics and services network.

Our mission is to help 20 million customers create beautiful homes by 2020. We are doing this through a differentiated, profitable business model and I thank our investors for believing in the team and for being great partners on this journey," Moneycontrol reported quoting Ambareesh Murty, Founder and Chief Executive of Pepperfry.

Ankur Sahu, Co-Head of Private Equity at Goldman Sachs in Asia, said, Over the past year and a half, Pepperfry has continued to successfully innovate, grow its business and deliver on the macro theme of domestic consumption growth in India. In partnership with the talented management team, our goal is to establish a differentiated and sustainable leader in Indias rapidly growing ecommerce industry to stand the test of time.

The latest fund raising exercise, the fifth so far, sees the company raising a total of $160 million so far. This is double the total funds raised by its rival Urban Ladder, which has raised around $80 million from investors such as SAIF Partners, Kalaari and Sequoia Capital India, the Techportal.com report said.

According to Pepperfry's Murty, India's online furniture marketsize is likely to double from the current $300 million to $650 million by December 2017, the Techportal report said.
Mumbai: Walmart India is evaluating policy guidelines to come up with a "food-only" retail model, after the government has allowed 100 percent foreign direct investment in food retail, a top company official said today.

"We are currently evaluating all the policy guidelines and we do not have an 'only food model' anywhere. So, we need to conceptualise, evaluate and come up with a model, which takes time," Walmart India CEO Krish Iyer said on the sidelines of India Retail Forum here.

"It is not something we will jump into very quickly," he added.

On government's move to open up food retail for investment, he said all the stakeholders including retailers, consumers, and farmers will benefit from it, and it will also increase access to capital, which will promote retail enterprise.

For Walmart India, food retail in the cash and carry business accounts for more than 65 percent of business, he said.

"Particularly looking at the importance of food, we do believe that we will continue to focus a lot more on food in our cash and carry stores," Iyer said.

He also noted that resellers, particularly mom-and-pop stores are the most important channel for Walmart.

"Our e-commerce (B2B) experience has been good, and while we do not speak about the e-commerce sales, more than 50 percent of buying is digitally influenced," he said.

Iyer further said that Walmart India is focusing on private labels, however, customer buying proposition is more crucial.

Walmart India has two private labels - Member's Mark and Right Buy.

"The idea of private labels is to support Make in India programme," he said.

Walmart India operates stores in nine states across the country. In the next five years, it is planning to add 50 more stores, taking the total number to 70.

"We continue to focus on Tier II and Tier III cities, and the opportunities here are as good as metro towns," Iyer said, adding that availability of land is a challenge in metros but the company continues to look for good options.
New Delhi: Hours after Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal reacted sharply after an FIR was registered against him in connection with the "irregularities" in the functioning of the DCW, the ACB said it won't probe the case against him for now as his name "doesn't figure in the inquiry report".

ACB chief Mukesh Kumar Meena said Kejriwal, whose name figures in an FIR pertaining to "irregularities" in the functioning of Delhi Commission for Women, is not an accused in the case till now.

"Till now, we are not probing the role of Arvind Kejriwal since his name doesn't figure in the report. As on date, he is not an accused," he said,

"In the FIR, the essence of the complaint is written. If someone gives a complaint, it is written verbatim in the FIR. We don't have any power to manipulate the language of the complaint. This is procedural law," Meena said.

The ACB had taken up the probe on a complaint by former DCW chief Barkha Shukla Singh, who alleged that several AAP supporters were given plum posts in the women's panel since Swati Maliwal was made its chief. Maliwal was on Monday booked by the Anti-Corruption Branch on charges of alleged irregularities.

Singh, in her complaint, had listed 85 names who, she claimed, got jobs "without requisite credentials". Meena said the CM hasn't been named in the inquiry report prepared on the basis of the preliminary inquiry. "He needs to read the report in totality and not in isolation. His name doesn't figure in the inquiry report. The inquiry report will be considered final," he asserted.

He said the inquiry is based on documentary evidence. "Till now, we have found irregularities in appointments made in DCW by Swati Maliwal and others," he said. Earlier in the day, Kejriwal had reacted angrily saying the ACB has registered the FIR against him at the "behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi".

"In the FIR registered by the ACB, my name is also there...But it does not contain any detail on my alleged role. One does not put the name of the Chief Minister in the FIR just like that," he had said.

"It cannot happen without the Prime Minister's approval." ACB has already sent a notice to Maliwal that a team will be interrogating her on 29 September at her office, Meena said. He said other officers will also be probed. "The role of Deputy Director (Finance), Delhi government is also under scanner and he has been summoned to explain why he authorised DCW as a body with financial autonomy," said Meena.
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who had called for a meeting of council of ministers on Wednesday after the the Supreme Court's order to release more Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu, said that the cabinet has decided to defer the release of water. He also said that the cabinet has decided to request the Governor of Karnataka to convene both the Houses on Friday.

The Cabinet has decided to defer releasing of water (to Tamil Nadu): Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah #CauveryIssue pic.twitter.com/PHiOjnhD74  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Cabinet decided to request Governor of Karnataka to convene both the houses on 23rd September 2016 at 11 am: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah.  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

A division bench of the Supreme Court had ordered the state to release 6,000 cusecs per day from Wednesday for a week till 27 September, doubling the quantum fixed by its appointed Cauvery Supervisory Committee on Monday for 10 days till 30 September.

Following the directive, Siddaramaiah said, "Since we do not have water, it is very difficult to implement the apex court order. It is an unimplementable order."

The top court's fresh directive comes into force a day after the state completed releasing 12,000 cusecs daily on Tuesday.

However, the apex court had modified its 5 September order to release 15,000 cusecs daily for 10 days from 7 September.

The chief minister had also appealed to the people to remain calm and maintain peace in the hour of distress as the state was going through a difficult period due to deficit monsoon rains.

"I appeal to the people, especially those in the Cauvery basin areas to maintain peace and not get carried away by emotions. We are committed to protect the interest of the state, its people and its farmers. Everyone should cooperate," Siddaramaiah had said.

With inputs from IANS
Chand Khan, who was acquitted in the attack on Akshardham Temple in 2002, which claimed 32 lives, has landed himself in another case, this time for cow slaughter, reported The Indian Express.

Khan, who also goes by his alias Shan Miya, was sentenced to death, along with Adam Ajmeri and Mufti Abdul Qayyum Mansuri in July 2006 by a special court set up to try the case under Prevention of Terrorist Activities (POTA) Act. Khan and the others had used automatic weapons and hand grenades to carry out the attack, in which three commandos, including an NSG and a constable of state reserve police were also killed.

In 2003, Khan was sent to police custody for 18 days by the POTA court, according The Times of India. Later in 2014, Khan was acquitted, along with five others, due to incomplete evidence which was not enough to uphold the sentence of the accused, added the report. The justices serving in the case had slammed the investigating agency for its "shoddy" work and the Gujarat government for "not applying its mind before slapping the now extinct POTA."

Khan, however, is not a free man anymore.

The Indian Express report mentioned that he has been lodged in Pilibhit district jail for a case filed against him at Beesalpur police station, under the Cow Slaughter Act. The report quoted the police as saying that they had recovered 500 kg of beef while they were on a vehicle inspection drive on 15 June  and arrested three people including Khan. The police further registered a case against them under the Cow Slaughter Act and seized their car  a Maruti Zen. The police also claimed that Khan did not mention the fact that he was involved in the Akshardham attack, while his family alleged that the police were "falsely implicating him".

In a 2003 report, The Hindu mentioned that Khan or Chand Usman Khan was an Anantnag-based car mechanic. In another report in 2006, the paper noted that Khan was originally a resident of Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, and was only running an automobile garage in Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir. The report noted that he was also responsible for the supply of arms and ammunition.
Leave aside for a while the Supreme Courts latest order to Karnataka on the release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu and the uproar it has generated in that state. And also forget for a moment terms like cusecs and tmcft.

The more significant and far-reaching part of Tuesdays ruling by the Supreme Court on the Cauvery dispute was that it ordered the Centre to set up a Cauvery Management Board (CMB) within a month.

If set up, and if allowed to function the way it should be, the board will "manage the waters", though not entirely independent of the states in the river basin, and has the potential to give the century-old dispute a decisive turn finally, ending the water war once and for all.

Or it could be the beginning of an entirely new kind of dispute, considering Karnatakas stand that the constitution of the board will only mean the Centre "takes over" its dams.

Karnatakas fear is unfounded. If the CMB is "taking over" the dams, it wont be a coup d'etat. It will be a democratic operation, at least the way it is designed to be. It will have a chairman and two members appointed by the Centre, and one member each from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, and a secretary. Its decisions will be by majority and seven of them, except the secretary, will have voting rights.

The CMB is not a brainwave that struck the Supreme Court overnight. It was something that the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal "recommended" in its 2007 award. The tribunal considered such a board, under the control of the union water resources ministry, was necessary because, "otherwise, we are afraid our decision (the award on water-sharing) would only be on a piece of paper".

Such a board will, in fact, have the powers to determine how the distress caused by reduced water flow in the river, which is at the root of the latest crisis, as it has been quite often, should be shared.

But the CMB was never set up, because the parties in power at the Centre  first the Congress and then the BJP  were wary of the political price they might have to pay in Karnataka, which was dead set against constituting a board. Both the Congress and the BJP have substantial political stakes in Karnataka. On the other hand, Tamil Nadu has been constantly demanding that the CMB be set up, and Tuesdays Supreme Court order was a huge victory for the state on that score.

Karnataka has been opposing the formation of the CMB on the ground that, by "controlling" its dams through the board, the Centre will impinge on its autonomy. "We'll have no freedom to run our own dams," screamed one leader after another of all parties on Kannada channels on Tuesday. But, of course, they were missing one point, either out of ignorance or by choice.

If the CMB will "run" Karnatakas dams, it will also "run" the dams over the Cauvery in Tamil Nadu and Kerala as well.

The tribunal mentioned the reservoirs at Hemavathy, Harangi, Kabini and Krishnaraja Sagar in Karnataka and Lower Bhavani, Amaravathy and Mettur in Tamil Nadu and Banasura Sagar in Kerala.

As the tribunal envisaged it, all these dams will be "operated" by the state concerned, under the "overall guidance" of the CMB, which will "ensure" compliance of the states in implementing the award. The board will have its own ground staff to work with those of the respective state governments.

The board, in turn, will constitute a nine-member Cauvery Water Regulation Committee, headed by a chairman and consisting of representatives of the states and related organisations such as the India Meteorological Department and the Central Water Commission. This committee will compile "water accounts", which means it will record daily water levels, inflows and storage position at the reservoirs.

The CMB is not a brainwave that struck the Supreme Court overnight

Its the lack of authentic data that has been the cause of trouble in the past. Even in the latest battle, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have accused each other of falsifying data on rainfall deficiency and water utilisation; the reason why the CSC (Cauvery Supervisory Committee, which was set up three years ago in the absence of CMB) was unable to bring about a consensus among the warring states on Monday.

The constitutional jigsaw

The CSC has no legal teeth. It has no powers to enforce what it says.

But will the CMB have the necessary powers? The tribunal said that it must have and that only then can its existence have any meaning. But the real authority of CMB needs clarification because of a constitutional jigsaw.

Article 262 (2) of the Constitution gives the Parliament an exclusive jurisdiction on inter-state water disputes. The Interstate River Water Disputes Act, 1956, is a product of that power. Section 11 of this Act too says "neither Supreme Court nor any other court" could interfere in water disputes referred to a tribunal. But Article 131 (C) of the Constitution includes inter-state disputes in the Supreme Courts original jurisdiction. And while hearing a Cauvery case in 1991, the Supreme Court said it could indeed interfere in water disputes.

If the CMBs decisions will be deemed final, it will be a good thing. That could gradually see the end of this century-old dispute. But if its decisions once again will be open for judicial scrutiny by the Supreme Court, well be back to square one.

Read the second part, Cauvery issue decoder Part Two: SC order to Karnataka goes against ground realities.
The latest war between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over sharing Cauvery is something like this:

Two weeks ago, Karnatakas bucket was half-full. Tamil Nadus own bucket was only a quarter-full. On a petition by Tamil Nadu, the Supreme Court ordered Karnataka to release some water to its neighbour. Karnataka did. Now, Tamil Nadus bucket is half-full and Karnatakas is quarter-full. Yet, Tamil Nadu demands more water, but Karnataka says: Not a drop more. Problem: There isnt enough water to keep both the buckets even half-full. Blame the poor monsoon for it.

This is the reason why Karnataka finds the Supreme Courts Tuesday order, asking it to release 6,000 cusecs for a week, "unimplementable", and the state is even actively considering defying it. But as it happened twice in the past, the state will fall in line even after such a defiance, once Tamil Nadu rushes back to the court with a contempt of court petition.

The Supreme Courts order on Tuesday to force the Centre to constitute a Cauvery Management Board (CMB) is a stroke of exemplary judicial wisdom and will go down in the history of water disputes as a landmark ruling. This is despite Tamil Nadu considering it a "historic" victory, and Karnataka calling it a "big blow" to its autonomy.

But forcing Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water for a week in the present circumstances defies legal logic and clearly goes against ground realities. The court also ignored the recommendation of the Cauvery Supervisory Committee (CSC), which only the previous day said Karnataka should release 3,000 cusecs for 10 days.

The courts directive is especially surprising considering that, in the very same order, it insists on the setting up of the CMB, a body of officials, to end the dispute in the long term. The CSC, even if its a pro-term body formed three years ago in the absence of CMB, is a similar grouping of officials.

Even the CSCs directive on Monday, asking Karnataka to part with 3,000 cusecs for 10 days, provoked immediate objections from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, with the former saying it was too much of water to give and the latter maintaining that it was too little to get. Karnataka hoped that the court would at least stick to CSCs quantum of release.

The CSCs head and union water resources secretary Shashi Shekhar said that the committee had taken into account the rainfall, daily inflow of water into reservoirs, Karnatakas drinking water needs and Tamil Nadus requirement for its samba (paddy) crop.

Though it looks as though the Supreme Court has "doubled" the quantum recommended by the CSC, it hasnt. The SCs order of 6,000 cusecs for seven days means Karnataka parting with 3.8 tmcft over a week. The CSCs order of 3,000 cusecs would have meant 2.7 tmcft in 10 days.

Karnataka finds that its not in a position to release any more water than it already has, whether its 3.8 tmcft or 2.7.

Now lets translate the bucket analogy into some real figures.

On 2 September, Tamil Nadu told the Supreme Court that it had 33 tmcft of water in its main dam at Mettur. On that day, Karnataka had about 50 tmcft in all its four major dams. But on Tuesday, Mettur had 50 tmcft and Karnatakas four reservoirs together had 27 tmcft.

In the last two weeks, Karnataka released some 16 tmcft to Tamil Nadu. And Tuesdays verdict would add 3.8 tmcft more to Tamil Nadus stockpile.

The CSCs 3,000-cusecs recommendation seemed to be the best under the circumstances and fair to both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, but the court raising it by 1.1 tmcft came as a disappointment to dispassionate observers.

Here is what it, of course, means to the two states. Tamil Nadu says this is barely enough for 10 lakh acres of samba crop. Karnataka contends that whatever it is left with now in its reservoirs is hardly enough to meet the drinking water needs of Bengaluru and two other towns, let alone agriculture.

The claim by Karnataka that it has enough water only for drinking purposes should be taken with a pinch of salt. And yet, releasing 6,000 cusecs for a week can make a serious dent on its reserves, especially if you consider that, at the moment, Tamil Nadu is better placed. In normal circumstances, this quantum is not too significant. In fact, the state was letting go of some 4,000 cusecs even before the Supreme Court came on the scene.

The fact is that whichever way you distribute the available water among Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, there isnt enough to meet the requirements of both the states, unless it rains.

The southwest monsoon that, in normal times, helps Karnatakas paddy crop between June and September, and more importantly, adds to the inflow of water to the river, has been deficient. Thats what has precisely led to the present tension. Failure of the southwest monsoon has left the paddy crop literally high and dry and has led to depleted reservoir levels.

Karnataka can still get rains in October. If it does, it can partly ease the crisis in Karnataka, and make it somewhat possible for the state to release more water to Tamil Nadu. If it doesnt, Karnataka has no hope.

But there is hope still for Tamil Nadu: the northeast monsoon. If its normal, it can help Tamil Nadus crops. There is only one way Karnataka can benefit from good rains in Tamil Nadu. It will have less demand from the neighbour.

Right now, the situation is indeed grim in both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, which are terribly short of water for their respective paddy crops. If the southwest monsoon, or whatever is left of it, doesnt produce rains in Karnataka and if the northeast monsoon fails Tamil Nadu too, famine will stalk the Cauvery basin in both states.

Read the first part, Cauvery issue decoder Part One: CMB might 'run' both Karnataka and Tamil Nadus dams.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said dance bars in Maharashtra will continue to operate under the old terms and conditions that permitted serving of liquor with CCTV cameras at the entrance.

Without putting on hold the new rules that limited the timings of the dances up to 11.30 pm, prohibiting serving of liquor and installation of CCTV cameras in the dance bar itself, Justice Dipak Misra and Justice C Nagappan said the "persons granted licence should be allowed to continue under old terms and conditions".

"You ban liquor in the state," the bench said, taking exception to the new rules that prohibits serving of liquor at the dance bars.

"Somebody has a bar licence and a dance bar. You can't say don't serve liquor. Anybody who has a bar licence, you can't say that you can't serve liquor," Justice Misra said told the Maharashtra government.

"You fight for the dignity of women. You protect the dignity of women."

Senior counsel Shekhar Naphade told the court: "I have a right to prohibit liquor in the bar and it (right to prohibit liquor) will remain unless it is taken away by the court."

Appearing for the Maharashtra government, Naphade also defended the new rule that mandates the dance bars to install CCTV in dance area, saying it was a part of the police power of the state.

"I have a power to regulate and I have a right that my regulations are complied with. The only way I can do it is through CCTV," Naphade told the court.

An apparently unimpressed bench said: "We understand logically and constitutionally the powers of the police."

The bench asked senior counsel Jayant Bhushan, appearing for the dance bar owners, if they could make some arrangements so as to assist the police if needed.

Bhushan told the court that CCTVs had a chilling affect on the people coming to dance bars. "People have some right to privacy."
Even as India and Pakistan are at loggerheads after Sunday's terrorist attack on an Army camp in Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday admitted that "something went wrong" at the camp. Parrikar said that he believes in zero error and vowed to take measures so that the incident is not repeated in the future, ANI reported.

JUST IN | Definitely something went wrong, will correct our mistakes: Parrikar on #UriAttack (File Photo) pic.twitter.com/izWARuylpD  News18 (@CNNnews18) September 21, 2016

As a nation should ensure this is not repeated again and again. I will take steps to ensure it doesn't go wrong again: Manohar Parrikar  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

According to PTI, Parrikar further added:"PM's statement that those behind #Uriattack will not go unpunished, will not remain a statement. We are serious about it."

PM's statement that 'those behind #Uriattack will not go unpunished', will not remain a mere statement: Manohar Parrikar  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

On Sunday morning, heavily armed militants had stormed a battalion headquarters of the Army in North Kashmir's Uri town in the wee hours, killing 17 jawans and injuring 19 other personnel in the terror strike in which four terrorists were neutralised. The death toll climbed to 18 on Tuesday after another soldier succumbed to his injuries.

The attack has also led to escalation of tensions along the Line of Control in Kashmir.

As an immediate step against Pakistan, PM Modi has sought a concerted global effort to diplomatically isolate Islamabad, reported IANS.

With inputs from agencies
New Delhi: The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) met on Wednesday in the wake of the Uri army camp terror attack that left 18 soldiers dead.

The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Home Minister Rajnath SIngh.

According to sources, the Uri attack was discussed in the Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

Asked whether the issue was discussed, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley dodged the question and said: "What is discussed is what you have been informed."

Jaitley was speaking at a briefing on the Cabinet decisions.

Asked again, the minister said: "Government reaction to Uri has been stated in last three days very elaborately. Armed forces have expressed their view, which is also the view of the government".

Jaitley added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also already made his views clear.

Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) Lt Gen Ranbir Singh on Monday said India reserves the "right to respond to any act of the adversary at a time and place of own choosing".

A multi-pronged strategy being adopted by the government includes building diplomatic pressure on and international isolation of Pakistan, as well as army action, though it has not been clarified in what form.

Modi and Parrikar have both said that those responsible for the attack will not be spared.

Meanwhile, the government also chose to stay mum on the deal for 36 Rafale fighter jets, which is in its final stage.

Asked if the Rafale deal was discussed, Jaitley said it was not on the agenda for the Cabinet meeting.
Saw some pictures of the honour guard with the coffins of the jawans killed in the Uri terror attack and it seemed so wrong. When a student commits suicide thousands ride with him on his last journey. When a terrorist is hanged a multitude marches in step. When a terrorist leader is shot down a state comes to a halt.

And here are 18 caskets, but are there enough of us to do them reverence? Will we show the world that we cared? How many chief ministers will come forward, how many corporations will offer their kin jobs, which illegal Adarsh housing colony will be cleared for them or made in their name and packaged to others?

These men were killed on duty and there is such a massive difference between the heroes we espouse and the heroes who die unknown.

Will the universities of India spearheaded by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) come forward and light candles and hold vigils or will it be just family and friends and fellow villagers who would be there anyway?

Which rich NRI will offer financial comfort even if it is to see his name in the papers?

A veritable national anthem of our country burnt alive. And the ones saying goodbye are their fellow comrades in uniform.

Against this backdrop comes an article blaming Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag for the Uri attack. Certainly, the author Yatish Rajawat, has the right to his strident opinion, but between the chief and the camp at Uri are several three-star and two-star officers who are on site and do what they can do with what they are given as implements and weapons.

Ask not what they do, ask instead how they manage to keep it goingit could be very revealing.

When you take responsibility and twist it into blame it takes on a personal hue. Accusing Suhag of clumsiness and lack of leadership not only lowers the morale of the army at this crucial juncture, but it is one of those exercises that goes a bridge too far. By that logic the President of India should be forwarded the hot little buck because he is the Supreme Commander of the Indian Armed Forces.

The defence minister, the defence secretary also come into the mix. As does the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and the Ministry of Finance. What are the delays in supplies, where are the shortages, how tightly are the hands of the senior echelons tied and what level of freedom could the Principal Staff Officers (PSOs) of the army have to make unilateral decisions?

We ignore our armed forces in times of peace, many citizens see them as spoilt brats until there is an issue and we try to pull up the slack and make the stench of contempt go away. So poor is our esteem for the men in uniform that there is a current shortage of 15,000 officers.

If the army hierarchy comes off weak and ineffective after the Pathankot attack, one can also ask is it because political command and necessity make them so?

We are still an armed forces under the orders of civilian masters and democratically elected leaders and cannot march to our own drumbeat.

Quonset huts, canvas tents, accordion barbed wire and jagged glass on eight foot walls that crumble because they are made by the lowest bidder are often the only defence and unless stock is taken of the red tape that suffocates procurement for our forces and the civilian mindset which enjoys trimming them at every step and sending the file back apportioning singular blame is a luxury.

While it is a relatively uncharitable approach to blame the Army Chief for being a slob, Suhag can do something to change the sluggish dynamics of the equation between the armed forces and the civilian masters.

If he cannot put forward a charter of demands, he can take the responsibility and do what Admiral DK Joshi did when Indian warships had a series of calamities.

In 2014, as the Naval Chief he walked, put in his papers, put down his four stars, grasped that hot little buck and went home.

If General Suhag did that now he would set a platoon of cats among the pigeons. It would shake the country to its roots, fast-track fulfilling Indias military shortages and that moaning, groaning we can only fight 15 days of war' rhetoric that over-rides the historical fact that when there are no bullets left there is always the sword and the scythe.

Most importantly, the next chief would be empowered to take instant decisions that would impact positively on Indias border security and he would not be beholden to the administrative babus.

This could be Suhags biggest contribution to upgrading the standard of the Indian Armed Forces. To salute and walk is an officer like quality.

You dont take the blame, Sir, you take the responsibilityit happened on your watch.
In what could be an important revelation to prove Pakistan's hand in abetting terrorism on Indian soil, the Enforcement Directorate has uncovered some suspicious bank transactions between bank accounts from Pakistan and Srinagar.

According to CNN-News18, the ED has reportedly filed a chargesheet in a Srinagar court over alleged funds transfer from Pakistani accounts to two Srinagar accounts via Italy. The ED believes that the money could have been used for funding terror activities in Kashmir. The two Indian accounts reportedly belong to two persons, namely Firdaus Shah and Nabla Begum, while the ED is preparing to approach Italy to aid in the probe.

The news channel also accessed a copy of the charge sheet filed in the court and reproduced it in a tweet.

The revelations are important because if the allegations are proved right it will be a huge diplomatic win for India, which has always maintained that its neighbouring state has been promoting proxy wars in Kashmir and has had an imminent role to play behind the ongoing unrest in the Valley.

India has maintained that Indian intelligence has evidence which proves that Pakistan helped the perpetrators of Pathankot terror attacks, 2008 Mumbai terror attack and for providing a safe haven to underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. In all these cases, evidence have been handed over to Pakistani authorities but India still awaits action.

In fact, in the Dawood Ibrahim case, even the United Nations had stamped its approval on Indian claims, verifying six out of the nine places cited by India as addresses of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in Pakistan. In the 2 January attack on Air force base in Pathankot, India had forwarded the complete transcript of telephonic conversation between terrorists and their Pakistani handlers along with crucial forensic evidence, according to a report in The Indian Express. This time around too, in Uri, India has enough evidence that Pakistan was involved in the attacks. According to News18, Indian officials recovered food packets and medicines with Pakistani markings. However, Pakistan has dismissed all claims.

Despite handing over various evidences in the past, Islamabad has denied allegations and rubbished New Delhi's claim of being a state that sponsors terror. In case of the Pathankot attacks, Islamabad has raised its doubts over the nature of evidence and said that anyone from India could have called Jaish-e-Mohammad telephone numbers, a report in Hindustan Times said.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Army in recent years, 18 soldiers were killed and as many others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in North Kashmir's Uri town early morning on Sunday. Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army. And shortly after this, two infiltration bids were foiled in Uri Sector and Nowgam Sector of Kashmir. While the Indian Army and the political leadership of the country has openly blamed Pakistan for sponsoring terror, the Nawaz Sharif government in Islamabad has dismissed the claims as baseless and instead asked for "actionable intelligence" from Indian to back its allegations.

Meanwhile, Indian state's diplomatic push to isolate Pakistan on global stage has already started reaping results as most world leaders have issued strong-worded condemnation for the attack and reiterated the need for "all states" to ensure that terrorists don't find safe havens on their soil. Recently, Washington also issued a "stern" warning to Islamabad, cautioning it against harbouring terrorists on its soil.

Moreover, two powerful American lawmakers have also introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, saying it was time the US stopped paying the country for its "betrayal". "Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," said Republican leader Ted Poe.
New Delhi: In yet another arrest of an AAP MLA, Amanatullah Khan was today held in connection with a sexual harassment case filed against him by his sister-in-law, the second time the legislator has faced action by Delhi Police in three months.

"Khan was called to join investigation at the office of DCP(Southeast) and he was arrested on charges of sexual harassment and criminal intimidation around 2.10 PM today," said RP Upadhyay, joint commissioner of police, southeastern range.

After his arrest on Wednesday, Khan, who represents Okhla constituency in south Delhi, took to Twitter and wrote: "Came here at (the) DCP office Sarita Vihar for general discussion. But they arrested me." After arrest, Khan was taken to a Saket court. The MLA had alleged that he was "being framed by the police" which is "under pressure" to arrest him.

Following the complaint, a FIR was lodged against Khan and the the woman's husband at the Jamia Nagar police station in south Delhi on 10 September.

The complainant accused Khan of pressurising her to establish physical relations. Khan has denied the allegation, saying he had "no connection with the woman at all".

The AAP leader was booked under Sections 354 (assault or criminal force on woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman), 506 (criminal intimidation), 498-A (relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) and criminal conspiracy, police said.

This is the second time in three months that Khan has been arrested by the Delhi Police on complaints by women. Khan was arrested on 24 July on a complaint by a Jasola resident who alleged that he tried to mow her down after she visited his residence to raise the issue of power cuts.

He was released on bail on July 28. The case was registered under Sections 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman or eve teasing) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) at Jamia Nagar police station.

Earlier on 18 September, the Okhala MLA, who is out on bail in another case of molestation and criminal intimidation, had gone to the Jamia Nagar Police station and asked the police to arrest him but they refused.

Fifteen AAP MLAs have been booked by the Delhi Police till now on various charges and 12 have been arrested. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was also been named in an FIR registered by the ACB in connection with alleged "administrative and financial irregularities" in the functioning of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

The Aam Aadmi Party has alleged political vendetta in the action against its lawmakers by the Delhi Police, which comes under the Union Home Ministry.

With inputs from agencies
The Union Cabinet has approved advancing the date for presenting the Union Budget by a month, paving way for one of the major overhauls in the budgeting exercise in the last several years and also in the process taking a step that has the potential to boost infrastructure spending.

The Cabinet has also decided to merge the Railway Budget with the Union Budget, a reform sought by many experts for long. A decision has also been taken to remove the classifications for expenditure to make the exercise simpler.

The proposals were cleared by a meeting of the union Cabinet chaired by prime minister Narendra Modi.

The change has been touted as a break from the colonial past.

Here are the key facts about the entire exercise:

1) The move is aimed at getting all the legislative approvals for the annual spending and tax proposals before the beginning of the

new financial year on April 1. Accordingly, the beginning of budget preparation will be advanced to early October. The government is likely to convene the Budget Session of Parliament before 25 January 2017, a month ahead of the current practice. The pre-Budget Economic Survey will also be advanced.

2) The advance estimates for GDP will have to be made on 7 January instead of 7 February and mid-year review of expenditure by various ministries is proposed to be completed by November 15. However, a report in The Business Standard on Wednesday said the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, which releases the data, has told the finance ministry that it may be able to give only some data that early.

3) Once the rail and general Budgets are merged and the date of presentation is advanced, there will be no requirement of separate Appropriation Bills as well as Vote on Account, as is the current practice.

4) With the advancement of the Budget and completion of the legislative processes before 31 March, the budget cycle will itself will be advanced. This will enable ministries and departments to ensure better planning and execution of schemes from the beginning of the financial year. Until now Budget was presented on the last day of February and it is not until mid-May that the Parliament approves it in two parts. And with the monsoon arriving in June, most of the schemes and spendings by states do not take off until October, leaving just half a year for their implementation. The change in budget presentation date has been decided so that the all proposals can be implemented and expenditure started from 1 April itself. This is expected to ensure better implementation.

5) The government will have to start pre-budget consultations with industry and other stakeholders without much delay as these will have to be ended by 25 December. The ministries and departments will also have to present their detailed demand for grants earlier to parliament.

6) The Cabinet also approved removal of distinction between Plan and Non-Plan expenditure as the present classification resulted in excessive focus on former with almost equivalent neglect to items such as maintenance which are classified as non-Plan. The Cabinet felt it is the total expenditure, irrespective of Plan or Non-Plan, that generates value for the public. Plan expenditure was for the first time presented separately in the budget for 1959-60.

7) Once the rail and general budgets are merged, Parliament will have approve only one Appropriation Bill. Usually, the government introduces the Appropriation Bill, which gives it the authority to incur expenditure from and out of the Consolidated Fund of India, after the debate on the Budget proposals and Voting on demands for grants. This will have to be taken up in Parliament on or before 24 March 2017.

8) The case for abolishing a separate Budget for the Railways has been argued many times earlier. "Like a defence budget or a civil aviation ministry budget, the railway budget does not require a speech to be made, only a set of accounts to be presented to parliament once a year, since the undertaking is owned by the people of India," Firstpost columnist and Swarajya editorial director R Jagannathan had written in this article in July 2014.

"The budget of a commercial undertaking is no different from that of a corporation like Infosys or a public sector company like Bharat Heavy Electricals. There is need for account-keeping, budgeting, and the presentation of annual reports, but there is no need for a railway budget speech or the hype and hoopla associated with such events," he points out.

9) However, according to a PTI report, even after the merger of the railway budget, the Indian Railways would continue to maintain its distinct entity status as a departmentally run commercial undertaking as at present. Also, the Railways would be allowed to retain its functional autonomy with delegation of financial power rules to continue as is the case now. Finance minister Arun Jaitley said in the press conference that Parliament have separate discussion on the Railways.

10) The most important fact is that after the merger, the Railways would not have to pay dividend to the central government and its capital at charge would stand to be wiped off. The Railways used to pay up to Rs 10,000 crore as dividend to the government. The Railway Convention Committee, which reviews the rate of dividend payable by the railways to the government, will be disbanded. Currently, the panel also suggests the level of appropriation to various funds of the railways such as depreciation reserve funds, development fund and pension fund.

11) Explaining the likely impact of the overhaul, DK Srivastava, chief policy advisor, Ernst and Young, said the advancement of the Budget presentation dates and processes will have tangible benefits. According to him, it would enable the govt to release its capital expenditure before monsoons, which is an important development.

"Under the present system, infrastructure spending, which is the government's key spending, usually gets delayed as the rains start soon after the budget is approved. The whole exercise gets delayed 4-5 months as during the rainy season not much work in this sector happens. Under the new system, the funds can be released as early as April. This will give the government at least two-and-a-half to three months to spend on infrastructure, before the rain starts. This is the main advantage and has potential to boost the economic growth in the long run," he said. He also said the move will help improve the quality of revised Budget estimates.

With PTI
New Delhi - Breaking from tradition, the general budget of the union government is likely to be presented on February 1 instead of the last day of the month, as part of an overhaul that would also scrap the practice of a separate railway budget.

The proposal for advancing of the budget and the merger of the railway budget with it will be considered on Wednesday at a meeting of the union Cabinet to be chaired by prime minister Narendra Modi, who has been pushing for it.

The cabinet will also consider the proposal for doing away with the distinction between plan and non-plan expenditure.

According to the proposal, the entire Budget-making exercise will be advanced by 3-4 weeks so as to complete the legislative part of financial business before 1 April, the start of a financial year.

Sources said the government plans to convene the Budget Session of Parliament before 25 January 2017, present the pre-Budget Economic Survey a day or two before the finance minister reads out the Budget on 1 February.

Towards that end, the advance estimates for GDP will now be made on 7 January instead of 7 February and mid-year review of expenditure by various ministries is proposed to be completed by November 15.

The idea, sources said, is to get the Budget passed by Parliament along with Appropriation Bill and the Finance Bill before 24 March as this would ensure implementation of the Budget proposals from April 1.

According to the proposal moved by the ministry of finance, Parliament would take a three-week break -- from February 10/15 to March 10/15 to complete ministerial or departmental scrutiny by various parliamentary committees.

Once the rail and general Budgets are merged and the date of presentation is advanced, there will be no requirement of separate Appropriation Bills as well as Vote on Account, as is the current practice.

Even after the separate railway budget is scrapped and its proposals clubbed in the general Budget, the Railways would continue to maintain its distinct entity status as a departmentally-run commercial undertaking as at present.

Also, the Railways would be allowed to retain its functional autonomy with delegation of financial power rules to continue as is the case now, sources said.

After the merger, the Railways would not have to pay dividend to the central government and its capital at charge would stand to be wiped off.

Like for other departments, the ministry of finance will provide gross budgetary support to the Railways for incurring its capital expenditure.

As regards removing the Plan and non-Plan classification of accounts, it has already been announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget for 2016-17.

According to the proposal, to ensure better targeting of benefits, all concessional railway passes provided to various categories of concessionaires will be linked to Aadhar number.

Also, the Railway Convention Committee, which reviews the rate of dividend payable by the railways to the government, will be disbanded. Currently, the panel also suggests the level of appropriation to various funds of the railways such as depreciation reserve funds, development fund and pension

fund.

Sources said advancement of presentation of the budget by a month and completion of budget related legislative business before March 31 would pave the way for early completion of budget cycle and enable ministries and departments to ensure better planning and execution of schemes from the beginning of the financial year.

Accordingly, the budget calendar would be advanced by about 3 weeks from the current schedule of it starting from the last week of October.

Pre-budget consultations with various stakeholders are proposed to be completed by December 25. Ministries and departments would be asked to present their detailed Demand for Grants to Parliament by February 7, 2017.

After the merger of railway budget with the general budget, one single Appropriation Bill will be presented to Parliament for consideration and voting on or before 24 March 2017.

With the rollout of the goods and services tax (GST), the changes in excise and service tax, which are normally proposed in the general budget, would shift to the GST Council and hence, there would be less onerous Finance Bill for Parliament to debate, sources said.
After failing to extract a single concession on the multiple barrages being constructed by the Chhattisgarh government on the upper reaches of the Mahanadi river at the tripartite meeting brokered by the Centre in New Delhi on 17 September, it is the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) that should have been scurrying for cover.

But instead, the first day of the Monsoon Session of the Odisha Assembly on Wednesday, saw a bizarre spectacle of the BJD going on the offensive and disrupting proceedings in the House from the word go  without even waiting for the customary national anthem to get over  and then rushing to the Raj Bhavan to hand over a memorandum against the Chhattisgarh and central governments addressed to the President.

The Opposition could do no better than crib about the disrespect shown to the national anthem and allege a 'well-planned conspiracy' by the ruling party to disrupt proceedings of the Assembly to hide its failures.

The BJD government, in particular Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who has held on to the Water Resources Department since the day he became CM in 2000, has a lot to explain about the series of projects initiated by Chhattisgarh to harness Mahanadi water for industrial and agricultural use.

When the issue first got traction in June this year, the Odisha government initially sought to play the innocent, unsuspecting victim, accusing Chhattisgarh of keeping it in the dark about these projects. As if on cue, the media, with generous help from the Chhattisgarh government, dug out a series of letters exchanged between the two governments on the issue  some as early as 2006  calling the BJD governments bluff in the process.

From this point onwards, the Opposition should have gunned for the BJD with gusto. But the two principal opposition parties  the Congress and the BJP  have been unable to derive much political mileage out of the BJD governments failures. While the Congress found it hard to answer the charge that it was the UPA government headed by it that gave Chhattisgarh permission to go ahead with the Arpa-Bhaisajhar project, among the biggest of the lot, in 2010, the BJP was caught in a dilemma of divided loyalty, unable to criticise either the Chhattisgarh government or the Centre to prove its pro-Odisha credentials.

A past master in the art of converting adversity into an opportunity, Naveen Patnaik pounced on the BJPs discomfiture to project the BJD as the only party that has the interests of the state in heart and mind. He has announced that the Odisha government would approach the Supreme Court seeking formation of a tribunal under the Inter-state Water Disputes Act, 1956.

Mahanadi is a highly emotive issue in Odisha, since over 60 percent of its population spread over 16 districts, is dependent on it for their livelihood. The Hirakud dam built in the 1950s provides irrigation to thousands of acres agricultural land, besides accounting for a major share of the electricity generated within the state. Any reduction in the flow of water into Hirakud is thus sure to affect agriculture in Odisha in a major way.

On its part, the Chhattisgarh government maintains that it is using just 15 percent of Mahanadi water while 57 percent of it flows into the Bay of Bengal. The water that flows into Mahanadi from Chhattisgarh can fill the Hirakud five times over, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh told media persons in New Delhi after the tripartite meeting, accusing the Odisha government of failing to harness the surplus water for its benefit.

The criticism is not without a basis. The Odisha government has failed to come up with any project to harness Mahanadi water flowing unused into the sea after the Hirakud dam was commissioned in the 1950s. It has toyed with the idea of constructing another dam at Manibhadra at various times, but stiff opposition by local people in view of the vast tract of land that would get submerged in the process has put paid to all such plans.

As the party that has been in power for 16 years at a stretch, the BJD must take a share of the blame of this failure to plan effective use of Mahanadi water. But with some deft positing of the issue, it appears to be winning the battle of perception on the issue.
The Maratha Surajya Sangh, an organisation working for the welfare of Maratha community, has announced that they will hold rallies in three districts in the Konkan region on 27 September to press for various demands.

"We have named this silent rally as 'Maratha Kranti Morcha' and it would be held on 27 September in three districts  Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg. The objective is to sensitise the government and other machinery about our demands," state head of the organisation, Pranay Sawant said.

He holds Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar responsible for the "plight" of the community, which comprises "33 percent of the total population" in the state.

"Pawar is responsible for the backwardness of the community, which comprises one third population of the state. Despite being the most influential leader, he did nothing for his own brothers and the demand for Maratha reservation took a backseat under his regime," he alleged.

National Congress Party president Sharad Pawar, was one of the first few to back the demand to scrap the SC/ST Act, saying it could not be ignored.

He told The Indian Express that behind the Maratha anger was "the BJP governments failure to tackle agricultural problems", and the government's inaction on the demand for reservation by the community.

Former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, also a Maratha leader, said that the government should have taken the Maratha reservation process to its logical end, which is causing unrest in the state.

The community, which is dominant in Maharashtra politics, has been taking out silent marches in various towns in the state over the last one month, following the alleged rape and murder of a girl in Kopardi village in Ahmednagar district, two months ago. The victim was a Maratha, while the accused were Dalits.

The community leaders have been demanding the scrapping of the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, saying it is grossly misused, and also the reservations for Marathas in educational institutes and government jobs.

On 3 September, lakhs of people attended the rally at Parbhani and silently protested against the rape and murder of the 14-year-old Maratha girl that happened on 13 July.

Similar silent protests were held in Jalna and Latur on Tuesday, reportedly attended by several lakhs of people.

A report by The Indian Express suggests that the Maratha anger stems from the belief that they are losing out on jobs, education prospects and their political clout because of SC/ST and OBC reservation.

The Marathas constitute a huge chunk of population in Maharashtra. With around 33 percent of the vote bank, they are a decisive political force in the state.

Alarmed by a slew of rallies by the Marathas, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that his government was taking steps to resolve "various social issues" concerning the politically powerful community.

The rallies have assumed significance in the view of forthcoming elections to civic bodies in state.

"The government has taken a serious note of the morchas being taken out across the state. The morchas are a reflection of the pent up resentment of many years within the Maratha community," Fadnavis told Maratha leaders.

Assuring the community that government was positive towards their demands, the CM said more consultations will be held with legislators, senior leaders, senior officers in the administration, various social organisations and student bodies.

"The government is taking steps to resolve various social issues of the community through dialogue without creating any caste tensions," he said.

Maharashtra BJP President Raosaheb Danve too chimed in and said that the government was in agreement with the various demands of the Maratha community.

"There is no cause for anyone to oppose the demands of the community," he said.

Reports emerged that the BJP is dealing cautiously given that elections to major municipal corporations are due soon.

Another prominent Maratha leader and BJP MLC Vinayak Mete said that the morchas being taken out by the community across were not against the Dalits.

However, to counter rallies by Marathas, many Dalit organisations have begun staging morchas in Nanded and other parts of the state.

Mete clarified that the rallies held by Marathas are not led by any political party or leader. "It would be wrong to say that these morchas are being sponsored by the NCP," he said.

Referring to the SC/ST Atrocities Act, the Shiv Sangram organisation leader said Dalit icon Ambedkar had guaranteed the right to air one's opinion on any Act if its provisions are hurting someone.

Earlier, Bharipa-Bahujan Mahasangh leader and Ambedkar's grandson Prakash Ambedkar urged the Dalit community to exercise restraint and to not carry out any counter morchas. "RSS is deliberately trying to mislead Dalit community by arguing that the morchas being taken out by the Maratha community are against them."

Hinting that some disgruntled Maratha leaders could be behind organising the rallies, Ambedkar said, "The heat of the government probe into cooperative sector is being felt by some. A handful of 159 families control cooperative sector, whereas others from Maratha community have no toehold in cooperative sector."

With inputs from agencies
The "outsider" who was written off as the collateral damage in the Yadav clan clash has returned and emerged victorious. Delivering a stinging blow to his son and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, Samajawadi Party (SP) supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav appointed Amar Singh as party's national general secretary on Tuesday. With the new appointment, which was delivered to Singh in a handwritten note on a SP letterhead, Mulayam has brought Singh at par with cousin Ram Gopal Yadav. Incidentally, Ram Gopal had backed Akhilesh in his recent feud with uncle Shivpal Yadav.

"You have been appointed general secretary of Samajwadi Party. I hope in the coming days you will strengthen the party in Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections," Mulayam said in a handwritten letter to Amar. The brief letter in Hindi, signed by Mulayam on his Lok Sabha letterhead, was sent to media from state SP chief Shivpal Yadav's official e-mail address.

Tuesday's decision may be seen as another snub to Akhilesh in a matter of days as the Chief Minister was only recently made to climb down by Mulayam in his tussle with Shivpal. Akhilesh, who had stripped minister Shivpal of key portfolios, had to restore all but one of those ministries. Incidentally, Shivpal's closeness with Amar Singh was one of the things which had ticked off the chief minister.

During the feud between Shivpal and Akhilesh, Amar Singh was seen as the one who had engineered it. Akhilesh, while apparently referring to Amar Singh, had recently said that "people from outside the household" keep interfering in the Samajwadi Party's affairs.

Ram Gopal Yadav also had made a veiled attack on Amar Singh during the feud, saying they have no love for the party and hence are creating trouble. Commenting on that Amar had said, "Akhilesh is like a son and Mulayam like a brother."

It's safe to say that with this 'surprising' appointment, the ongoing SP saga is far from over. But political observers, who are familiar with 'wheeler dealer' Amar Singh, say this move of SP supremo is hardly surprising. Amar Singh's official return to SP was in May this year when the party "unanimously" declared him as its candidate for the Rajya Sabha elections and speculations have been on since then for his possible return to the party.

Amar Singh's RS nomination and his return as party's national general secretary at this juncture is all about Mulayam's brilliant timing especially with the crucial Uttar Pradesh Assembly Election a few months away. But that aside, the importance of Amar Singh for Mulayam and vice-versa is not just limited to elections. As senior editor Pallavi Ghosh notes in this piece, it was Amar Singh who introduced Mulayam to the glitter and glamour and gave him the image makeover. Known for his clout and connections across all boards, Amar Singh was an important cog when it came to defrosting relationship between Sonia Gandhi and Mulayam.

An article in Catch News said that Amar Singh's greatest achievement during his time in the SP was the transformation of Mulayam's image. "He turned this anti-English, anti-modern regional leader into a major player on the national stage. Amar Singh's lavish lifestyle may have been objectionable to Mulayam's Lohiaite ideology, but the SP supremo had to accept glamour-loving Singh as his most effective translator and intermediary in meetings with business tycoons, film stars and the media," the article said.

When Amar Singh was reinducted into the party in May 2016, Livemint had quoted a senior SP leader as saying, "Samajwadi Party was a traditional party till 1996. The basic organizational network of SP was in rural and semi urban areas, but after Amar Singh joined in 1996, he brought glamour, political connections, Bollywood, network with big industrial houses and bling with him to the party. He managed to change the basic image of the party."

In fact, during the family ordeal that the party went through, Mulayam stood by Amar Singh throughout. "I am not in a habit of ditching friends. He (Amar Singh) stood by me in my worst times and I cannot dump him now," the SP chief was quoted as saying by India Today on Sunday.

In the face of an ongoing power tussle within the family, Mulayam needs a person who gets things done. With Akhilesh and Shivpal not seeing eye to eye, and rivals BJP and Bahujan Samaaj Party (BSP) emboldening, Mulayam also needs Amar Singh who has been an effective political agent and a deal maker. It's not unfathomable that the SP supremo could benefit enormously from Amar Singh's networking skills and the latter's political career is in need of resurrection. The pieces fit, in theory if not in practice.

Amar Singh has played his cards right till now which is why despite facing a major opposition from senior SP leaders, including State Minority Affairs Minister Azam Khan, Jaya Bachchan and Ram Gopal, he has managed to bag a crucial post in the party.



A networker  an ingenious political strategist with friends in right places  Amar Singh is Mulayam's Man Friday. However, the SP supremo will have to carefully carve out a role for Singh to ensure that his relationship with party members  who oppose his presence in the party  doesn't adversely affect the party dynamics and end up harming the party ahead of the elections. "Amar Singh still has a role in the SP. He has got a Rajya Sabha nomination; Mulayam has honoured the old friendship. Unlike in the past, however, Amar Singh cannot aspire to have a say in governance matters in UP," The Indian Express quoted a party insider as saying.

Before being expelled in 2010, Amar Singh was SP's number two man. According to The Indian Express, those backing Singh say his "managerial skills and fund-raising abilities" make him a solid counter to Lucknow MP Rajnath Singh.

Amar Singh's exile did not end with his return as the RS member for the party. In fact, party sources were quoted as saying that Singh was extensively ignored and was told to keep his head down and not interfere in functioning of the party. Could this then be a reward? We cannot speculate that but what most political authors wrote was that Amar Singh was especially recruited to be the bridge between Mulayam and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. "It was easier for Mulayam to interact with the Centre during the UPA rule, as he could directly approach Sonia Gandhi. But now, the SP supremo perhaps needs Amar Singh to initiate a conversation with Modi."

However, adding his silver-tongue spokesperson to the party to get a leg-up in the upcoming polls might not help matters for Mualayam especially when the party is severely divided. And Amar Singh is no uniting factor. Like Sandipan Sharma of Firstpost argues, Amar Singh could easily be Shakuni in SP. It is often said about Amar Singh that a rift is guaranteed when he is around, especially as an outsider meddling in the affairs of a family.
Days after Maharashtra minister Vishnu Sawra faced the anger of tribals over malnutrition, the district administration in Palghar has issued prohibitory orders in two villages on Wednesday in view of Woman and Child Welfare Minister Pankaja Munde's scheduled visit there.

District Collector Abhijit Bhangar directed for orders under CrPC section 144 to be clamped in a radius of one kilometre of Koch and Kalamwadi villages of Mokhada taluka on Wednesday from 7 am to 8 pm, an official release said.

The prohibitory orders have been issued as some local activists may disrupt Munde's visit. The order has been issued due to the visit of Munde to the villages to meet the family members of the two children who recently died due to malnutrition, said the release.

Former chief minister Ashok Chavan condemned the move, saying if Munde was scared of visiting the tribal villages, she should not only abandon her tour but quit the cabinet, reports The Times of India.

Munde, downplaying the issue, has said, "I have not taken this decision. It is the local administration that has taken this decision. This comes under the police, not me. However, I have asked them that there is no such need for the order but police officials want it to be imposed and I cannot interfere in their work," reports India Today.

Last week, Sawra had faced the anger of a tribal woman whose two-year-old son died last month apparently due to severe malnutrition in Palghar district, the video of which went viral on social media.

The tribal development minister had gone to meet the distraught family members, residing in a thatched house at Khoch village and comfort them. However, the woman, overcome by grief, vented her anger at Sawra, who is also the guardian minister of Palghar.

With inputs from agencies
Islamabad: Pakistan's national flag carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) on Wednesday cancelled flights to northern Pakistani cities due to "air space restrictions" in the wake of Uri terror attack.

The PIA called off flights to Gilgit and Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

"As per directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the air space over northern areas will remain closed on Wednesday. Inconvenience regretted," PIA spokesperson Danyal Gilani said on Twitter.

Due 2 northern areas airspace restrictions PIA's 21st Sep's flights to Gilgit, Skardu & Chitral ve been cancelled. Inconvenience regretted.  Danyal Gilani (@Danyal_Gilani) September 20, 2016

He did not give any reason for the closure of air space but officials said that Pakistani warplanes might be in the air to keep vigil due to Indo-Pak tensions after the Uri attack.

Eighteen soldiers were killed and over a dozen others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the Indian Army in North Kashmir's Uri town early Sunday.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army.
If anchors of 24/7 news channels and social media users had their way, India should have by now declared war on Pakistan. They ask that if the US could do it, what stops India. The nation wants to know, is the constant refrain. They can't be blamed, as the nature of political discourse in the past few years has become increasingly shrill when it comes to Pakistan. As prime minister designate, Narendra Modi mustered electoral support across sections of society when he promised to pursue a muscular foreign policy towards Pakistan. His constant jibes at Manmohan Singh government for showing cowardice and lacking courage to respond aggressively to Pakistan support for terror in India won him tremendous political support. "We won't serve them biryani" was a constant reminder of UPA's soft response to Pakistan backed terror.

Today, the Modi government faces a test. In January, when the Pathankot base was attacked, the government sought to differentiate between Pakistan government and non-state actors or terror groups that planned the attack. A team from Pakistan was allowed access to the IAF base to collect evidence against the terror group. Later developments showed that India's outreach had not been reciprocated. Pakistani generals have continued to back and support terror against India and foment unrest in the Kashmir Valley.

How should the Modi government respond to the attack on Uri?

Hawks want a quick military retaliation. But, Pakistan is not Myanmar and India is not the US. Recent army operations to neutralise militant groups along the India-Myanmar border cannot be repeated across the heavily armed Line of Control. Given that Jaish-e-Mohammad or Lashkar-e-Taiba have the patronage of the army and ISI, there are no identified targets that India can attack.

Many of them live in the comfort of safe zones in urban areas. The Indian Army cannot act like US Marines or its Special Forces.

Modi knows that a failure to respond to Uri will have serious political consequences. With Assembly elections to Uttar Pradesh due before March 2017, the government cannot allow the Opposition to make this a talking point. Modi is different from his predecessor/s was the theme of the marketing blitzkrieg that was unleashed from 2013 onwards. He was packaged differently.

With the US in election mode, it does not favour any escalation of tensions in South Asia. The Modi government has already been cautioned against raising tensions further. Post-Uri attack though, the US, UK and Canada have openly supported India with a few countries like Russia and France naming Pakistan or Pakistan-based terror groups in their statements. Germany did not mention Pakistan by name, but asked the country to take out terror groups based on its soil.

Two of the five permanent members of UN Security Council (Russia and France) have made strong statements in Indias favour while the US and UK have supported India while not mentioning Pakistan. In the coming weeks India will host leaders of Muslim countries like Iran, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia who will be briefed on Pakistans expanding terror footprint.

Diplomatic isolation will be pursued more seriously. As reported by Firstpost, Modi will anyway not travel to Pakistan in November for the Saarc Summit.

What are the options?

1. With the UN General Assembly session in progress, all evidence against Pakistan will be collected and shared with foreign governments. This is something that was announced by the government.

2. Efforts will be made to show the world that other than China, no country supports Pakistan. China is an all-weather friend of Pakistan, but it is expected that it would not, beyond a point, like to be seen as the only government that supports Pakistan's adventurism towards India. It knows the security threat its own investment plan in the CPEC corridor faces.

3. Russian support will be sought in isolating Pakistan. Home Minister Rajnath Singh was expected to share information and evidence of Pakistani connivance in terrorist acts on his now-postponed visit.

4. After making a strong case against Pakistan at the G-20 and India-Asean summits, India will try and muster support against Islamabad at the Brics summit in Goa in the coming weeks.

5. Visas to Pakistanis will be curtailed. All those except travellers coming for medical treatment shall face restrictions.

Modi knows that a failure to respond to Uri will have serious political consequences

What about a military response?

No action is no more an option. The BJPs ideological parent, the RSS, is conscious of the political cost of no dramatic response. On its part, the BJP knows that if it stays quiet the electoral campaign of 2014 will come to haunt it in UP and nationally. In three years, Modi will face a re-election in the Lok Sabha polls of 2019. Therefore, statements have been made to keep up the morale of troops and the nation.

However, consultations on options in recent days have again exposed the vulnerability of the army. A shortage of ammunition, lack of preparedness and diversion of troops to retrieve the security situation in South Kashmir makes army operation not so easy. Also, the Pakistan military is on high alert along the Line of Control. Could the use of other arms of the Indian forces be an option? Yes, it is.

Where and when will be decided in the weeks to come. The theatre of action will be different.
Ahead of his address at the UN General Assembly, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif spoke over the phone with Army Chief General Raheel Sharif on the tensions with India over Jammu and Kashmir.

"The Prime Minister and General Raheel Sharif had a telephonic conversation in which they discussed ... the prevailing regional situation," a PM Office spokesperson said on Wednesday.

The Prime Minister and the Army Chief are believed to have discussed proposals that the former intends to make during his speech for de-escalating the situation and moving to a dialogue on the Kashmir dispute.

At the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, Sharif is likely to focus on the Kashmir issue and Pakistan's tense relations with India.

This was the first conversation between the two on Tuesday night since Sunday's Uri military camp attack in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 soldiers were killed, which India has blamed on terrorists from Pakistan.

The talk comes as Pakistani Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry raised his country's concerns over the situation in Jammu and Kashmir with EU Secretary General for External Affairs Helga Schmid. The two met on the sidelines of the 71st UNGA session in New York.

The development also comes as two US lawmakers moved a bill in Congress seeking designation of Pakistan as a 'state sponsor of terrorism' on Wednesday.
New York: Strongly condemning recent terror attacks, including in India, the Brics member nations sought a "firm" legal framework under the UN for concerted efforts to fight terrorism effectively and called for expediting negotiations to an international accord against the menace.

India along with other Brics member nations - Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa - in a meeting held in Ney York on the sidelines of the 71st session of UN General Assembly on expressed concern that continued conflicts in several regions provided "fertile" grounds for terrorist activities.

The Brics leaders called for an early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against Terrorism. The meeting of Brics' Ministers of Foreign Affairs also reaffirmed the need for a comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including its Security Council, with a view to make it more representative and efficient, besides calling for "collective action" to boost world economic growth.

Brazil's Jose Serra, Russia's Sergey Lavrov, India's Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar, China's Wang Yi and South Africa's Maite Nkoana-Mashabane reiterated their "strong condemnation" of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.

"They strongly condemned the recent several attacks, against some Brics countries, including that in India," a joint communique released after the meeting said. An army base in Kashmir's Uri town was attacked on Sunday by heavily-armed militants from Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed in which 18 jawans were killed and many left injured.

"They urged concerted efforts to counter terrorism on a firm international legal basis, under the UN auspices, and expressed their conviction that a comprehensive approach was necessary to ensure effective fight against terrorism," the communique said.

Expressing concern over continued conflicts in several regions, they said such a situation undermines stability and security and "provide fertile grounds for terrorist activities and cause refugee and migration waves".

They also voiced concern over the situation in the Middle East and underlined that the international community should work together to pave the way for the political settlement of conflicts through dialogue and negotiations.

"They recognised the efforts of Brics countries, in particular that of the Russian Federation aimed at achieving a political solution to the international crisis in Syria including Russia-US arrangements agreed upon in Geneva on 9 September," the communique said.

Exchanging views on global and regional issues in the economic and political spheres, the ministers said they are determined to continue to contribute positively to the maintenance of peace, security and stability, including by upholding multilateralism.

Welcoming China's incoming Brics Chairpersonship in 2017, they expressed confidence that intra-Brics cooperation will be further strengthened. On the current state of the global economy, they noted that global economic recovery continues to be weak and uneven.

They called for "collective action" to boost world economic growth, macroeconomic policy coordination, improving global economic governance, promoting international trade and investment, addressing income inequality and achieving sustainable development.

Reaffirming that poverty eradication is the greatest global challenge, the Brics leaders said they are committed to continue to working towards the full implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They also called upon the international community, especially the developed countries, to fulfill their commitments and provide strong support for developing countries.

They also noted the importance of a common and inclusive approach to development of medicines, research and diagnostic tools to end epidemics and to facilitate the access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines.

The Brics leaders voiced committed to work towards the entry into force of the Paris Climate Agreement with completion of due domestic procedures and its full implementation. "They emphasised that developed countries shall continue to provide financial, technical and capacity building support to developing countries with respect to both mitigation and adaptation for the implementation of the Paris Agreement," the communique added.

During the day, Akbar held a series of bilateral meetings on the margins of the UN General Assembly session. He discussed "bilateral and multilateral" issues with Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, the Indian mission to the UN said.

Akbar also had discussions with Foreign Minister of Denmark Kristian Jensen, Foreign Minister of Colombia Maria Angela Holguin Cuellar, Foreign Minister of Ireland Charles Flanagan besidesmeeting Vuk Jeremic, candidate of the Republic of Serbia for election as UN Secretary-General.
New York: China on Wednesday hoped that there will be a better understanding of Pakistans position on Kashmir by the international community and that Beijing attaches great importance to Islamabad's position on Kashmir.

This was conveyed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during his meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the UNGA meet here on Wednesday, Geo News reported.

Chinese Premier said his country would stand with Pakistan. "We support Pakistan and will speak for Pakistan at every forum."

Stating that Pakistan was a victim of terrorism, the Chinese premier hoped the situation between India and Pakistan would not escalate. "We are ready to play constructive role in improvement of relations between Pakistan and India," the Chinese Premier added.

Li said China will stand with Pakistan; we support Pakistan and we will speak for Pakistan at every forum.

"We are thankful to Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif for investing huge resources for the safety and security of Chinese personnel in Pakistan," Li Keqiang said, according to Geo News.

Nawaz said that things are going well in Pakistan-China relations, and that the relationship has entered a different phase.

He thanked China for expressing concern regarding Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir.

He said that Pakistan and China were "iron brothers".

The meeting came ahead of Sharif's address at the UNGA on Wednesday, where he is expected to flag the Kashmir issue.
Karamjit Sangha of Hull, England has given true meaning to the phrase "dont mess with Punjabis". Without using force or violence, she managed to scare away a robber.

No, she does not practice black magic or possess some supernatural power. Her confidence was enough to frighten the robber.

The 49-year-old Sangha, who owns the 'Sangha News and Booze' store in Hull, was threatened by a robber with a seven-inch knife to hand over her cash, The Indian Express reported.

"I was just sitting there having my cup of tea when he came in holding this 7-inch kitchen knife. He told me to give him all the money, but I was relaxed. I told him I was having a cup of tea," News18 quoted her as saying.

It also reported that she picked up a craft knife and waved it at the robber. She said that she wouldnt have hurt him but that he started shaking and ran off.

The robber, Stuart Gleeson, has been sentenced to jail for five years on account of robbery and possession of a knife. The incident was recorded on CCTV, according to Indiatimes.

Gleeson reportedly hung around the store at Beverly Road for several minutes before entering the shop, reported Hull Daily Mail.

In front of the jury at the Hull Crown Court, Gleeson admitted that the man in the CCTV footage was him.

After he was pronounced guilty, Judge Mark Bury told the jury that Gleeson has previous convictions for knifepoint robberies.

Interestingly, while delivering the judgement, the judge also said, The shop worker must have been extremely frightened when you waved the knife at her.

Sangha was delighted with the punishment and said, This sentence is fantastic. The police were really good and they managed to gather a lot of evidence.
Paris: Seven candidates, including ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy were confirmed Wednesday to contest the right-wing primary for France's presidential election next year, officials said.

Sarkozy's main rival will be popular former premier Alain Juppe, with the winner of November's two-round contest expected to be in the driving seat to become president next May.

Also in the running are former prime minister Francois Fillon, the sole woman candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, former ministers Jean-Francois Cope and Bruno Le Maire and Christian Democratic Party leader Jean-Frederic Poisson.

The primary will be held on 20 and 27 November.

With Socialist President Francois Hollande's deep unpopularity leaving the left in disarray, and the far-right National Front flagbearer Marine Le Pen riding high in the polls, the rightwing candidate is thought to stand a good chance of snatching the presidency in a runoff vote in May 2017.

Alain Juppe

Alain Juppe, 71, the current favourite in the primary race, is a former prime minister who is seen as a moderate, notably on immigration, and is campaigning as a unifier.

He is also a former foreign minister  under his arch-rival Nicolas Sarkozy as well as under the Socialist president Francois Mitterrand in a right-left "co-habitation" government.

Juppe returned from political exile after a party finance scandal that saw him convicted in 2004, winning back his long-time post as mayor of Bordeaux in 2006.

Now viewed as an elder statesman, he has become one of the country's most popular politicians two decades after his reform agenda sparked the largest social movement France had seen since May 1968.

Juppe pledges to achieve "full employment" for France and to pull the country out of "stagnation" by tapping its under-utilised strengths and boosting education.

Nicolas Sarkozy

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy, 61, is one of the most divisive figures in French politics.

His tough talk on security and national identity has endeared him to many conservatives but made him a figure of hate on the left.

The son of a Hungarian immigrant father, Sarkozy was elected in 2007 on a promise to reform the ailing French economy.

But his taste for the high life soon cost him support, with voters casting him out after a single five-year term.

Two years later Sarkozy returned to head the opposition Republicans, a position he has used to try win back the presidency.

Since July's terror attack in Nice, he has gained ground on Juppe with a series of hardline proposals, including banning the burkini swimsuit and shutting away all those suspected of being radicalised in detention centres.

Francois Fillon

Prime minister throughout Sarkozy's 2007-12 presidency, Francois Fillon, now 62, became the youngest member of the French parliament at age 27 in 1981 and went on to hold several ministerial portfolios under Jacques Chirac.

He narrowly lost 2012 party elections to head the UMP, now the Republicans party, to Jean-Francois Cope, whom he accused of cheating.

Kicking off his premiership in 2007, Fillon said France was facing bankruptcy after decades of accumulated budget deficits, and he is calling again for a balanced budget.

Bruno Le Maire

Bruno Le Maire, 47, lost to Sarkozy in the 2014 contest to head the UMP. Agriculture minister under Sarkozy from 2009 to 2012, he has struggled to shake off an image as an over-educated technocrat.

Jean-Francois Cope

Jean-Francois Cope, 52, was forced to resign as president of the UMP in June 2014 over a campaign finance scandal that is also dogging Sarkozy.

He was close to former president Jacques Chirac, under whom he was budget minister from 2004 to 2007, among other roles.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet

At 43, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet is the youngest candidate, and the only woman.

An outspoken maverick, she was sacked by Sarkozy as the Republicans' vice president in December 2015 after she criticised his leadership.

Known in France by her initials NKM, she made an unsuccessful bid to become Paris mayor in 2014.

Jean-Frederic Poisson

The head of the Christian Democratic Party, 53-year-old Jean-Frederic Poisson also took a firm stand against gay marriage.
Manila: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has launched a profanity-filled tirade against the European Union, in his latest riposte to international criticism of the rising death toll in his brutal crackdown on crime.

Duterte punctuated his insults with a rude sign  raising his middle finger  after the European Parliament condemned "the current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings in the Philippines".

"I say to them, f**k you. You're doing it in atonement for your sins," he told local officials in his southern home city of Davao late Tuesday in comments filmed by broadcaster ABS-CBN.

The 71-year-old leader had reacted along similar lines to earlier foreign criticism of his drug war, calling US President Barack Obama a "son of a whore" and cursing the United Nations.

Duterte won elections in a landslide in May after vowing to eradicate the illegal drug trade in six months, and promising that 100,000 criminals would be killed in the process.

Since he took office on 30 June about 3,000 people have been killed, about a third of them suspects shot dead by police and the rest murdered by unidentified attackers, according to police statistics.

Duterte said on Sunday he needed to extend his crime war for another six months because the drug problem was worse than he expected.

The EU parliament last week said it was concerned about the "extraordinarily high numbers killed during police operations ... in the context of an intensified anti-crime and anti-drug campaign".

Duterte must "put an end to the current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings ... (and) launch an immediate investigation into (them)", the EU resolution said.

Singling out France and Britain, Duterte said the parliament's members were "hypocrites" whose colonial-era ancestors killed "thousands" of Arabs and other peoples.

"They're taking the high ground to assuage their feelings of guilt. But who did I kill? Assuming it to be true, 1,700, who are they? Criminals. You call that genocide," he said.

"Now the EU has the gall to condemn me. So I repeat it. F**k you," he said, raising his middle finger.

In a separate speech on Tuesday, Duterte also repeated a vow to shield police or soldiers from prosecution.

"If you massacre a hundred and you also number a hundred, why, all of you will get pardons. Restored to full political and civil rights plus a promotion to boot," he told soldiers during a visit to a military camp.
In the wake of the 18 September attack on an Army base in North Kashmirs Uri sector, the Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Vikas Swarup on Wednesday tweeted that Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar has summoned the Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit to discuss the attack.

#UriAttack Foreign Secretary Jaishankar summons Pakistan High Commissioner Basit to MEA  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Jaishankar is reported to have told Basit that even as they were speaking, two encounters between terrorists and the Indian Army were underway at the border. He even said that India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples collected from the Army base.

Reiterating that India has found evidence against Pakistan, Swarup said that the items recovered from the site of the attack like grenades, communication equipment, food, medicines have all been made in Pakistan.

Also, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) uncovered some suspicious bank transactions between accounts from Pakistan and Srinagar. The ED believes that the money could have been used for funding terror activities in Kashmir.

In a media briefing, Swarup said that India wants Pakistan to live up to its public commitment of not allowing terror against India. He further said that Sundays attack is an evidence of a thriving terror machinery in our neighbour country.

We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting & sponsoring terrorism against India #UriAttack pic.twitter.com/fytV5fcgl2  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Persistent and growing violation of Pakistans anti-terror commitment is a matter of concern, the MEA said. It added that beginning from Pathankot air base attack, there have been continuous attempts by terrorists to cross LoC and international borders.

This year beginning with Pathankot airbase attack there have been continuous attempts by terrorists to cross LOC&international borders:MEA  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Pakistan, however, continues to deny any link to the deadly terror attack in Uri. It demanded that India should return to the negotiating table on Kashmir and put an end to its anti-Pakistan propaganda, CNN-News18 reported. The Pakistani army too refuted India's allegations and termed it "unfounded and premature."
Oklahoma (US): Oklahoma police department have released a video showing a 40-year-old black man with his hands raised above his head just before being fatally shot by a white police officer.

Terence Crutcher, was first tasered by officer Tyler Turnbough and then shot dead by officer Betty Shelby during an encounter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at around 7.40 pm on Friday.

The police officers were responding to reports of an abandoned vehicle blocking a road.

Police originally claimed that Crutcher was not cooperating with officers when they arrived and would not raise his hands in the air when instructed to, the Independent reported.

However, in the video, Crutcher can be seen raising his arms in the air in the middle of the street. He stood beside his driver's side window as several police officers stood behind him with their weapons raised.

Tulsa's police chief, Chuck Jordan, said at a news conference on Monday that Crutcher was unarmed and did not have a weapon in his vehicle.

"I'm going to tell you right now that there was no gun on the suspect or in the suspect's vehicle," Jordan said.

He assured people that justice will be achieved.

Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany Crutcher, said the family demands to know what happened and wants charges pressed against Police Officer Betty Shelby, who shot and killed Crutcher, USA Today reported.

"When unarmed people of colour break down on the side of the road, we're not treated as citizens needing help, we are treated as criminals, as suspects," Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney, told The Post.

On September 15, 13-year-old African-American teen Tyre King, was fatally shot by a police officer who had brandished a firearm which was later determined to be an air gun.
United Nations: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has raised the Kashmir issue with almost every world leader he has held talks with on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, but his efforts to internationalise the dispute with India appeared to have gained no traction.

Sharif raised the issue with the leaders of the US, the UK, Japan and Turkey and sought their intervention to resolve the matter. He met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at United Nations on Tuesday.

"PM Sharif briefed Japanese PM about the grave turn that the situation in occupied Kashmir is taking. Reminded him about UNSC resolutions," Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi tweeted.

"PM Nawaz Sharif also apprised his Japanese counterpart of the human rights violations being committed by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir," Lodhi said in another tweet. Erdogan and Sharif "agreed that OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) Comm on Human Rights should send a fact-finding mission" to Kashmir, Lodhi said.

On Monday, Sharif held bilateral talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry and UK Prime Minister Theresa May. According to a readout of his meeting with Kerry by the Pakistan mission, Sharif told him that more than 107 people have been "assassinated" in Kashmir, thousands injured and "worst human rights violations are being committed at the state level."

"I still remember President (Bill) Clinton's promise that US will play its role to help out in resolving bilateral disputes and issues between Pakistan and India," Sharif said, according to the release. "I expect US Administration and Secretary Kerry to use his good offices to help in resolving bilateral issues between Pakistan and India," he added.

In his meeting with May, Sharif urged her to play her role in convincing India to stop the use of force against the people in the region. He said Pakistan's support for Kashmiri people "in their legitimate struggle for self determination and its commitment to the Kashmir cause are non-negotiable." However, Sharif's repeated calls to the UN to help resolve the Kashmir dispute appeared to be gaining no traction as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made no reference to Kashmir in his final speech to the UNGA as the UN chief.

At the opening session of the General Debate yesterday, Ban touched upon a cross-section of global issues including the Syrian crisis, the Palestinian issue, the refugee and migrant movements and tension in the Korean Peninsula. Kashmir will be the focal point of Sharif's address to the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

Tension have heightened between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attack by heavily-armed militants, suspected to be from Pakistan, on an army base in Uri in which 18 jawans died. Ban has repeatedly said his "good offices" are available to help resolve the Kashmir dispute only if both India and Pakistan request for it, a clear indication that the issue is bilateral and should be solved by the two countries only.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday conveyed to the world community that Pakistan accords martyr status to killed Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani while expressing concern over excessive use of force by the Indian military.

"The men, women and children come out to demand freedom everyday and Pakistan stands with the people of Kashmir," Sharif said in his address at the 71st UN General Assembly session in New York. The Pakistan PM went to the extent of calling Wani as a symbol of the latest Kashmiri "Intifada."

Giving a free hand to his vitriol against India, Sharif talked about Pakistan's anti-terrorism plan and said that the country will not allow foreign forces to destablise the development of Pakistan. It is no rocket science that the reference to "foreign forces" was aimed at India. Sharif even said that Pakistan has been the principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored, financed from abroad.

"We will not win the fight of terrorism and violent extremism without addressing the root causes," he said. He added that the the international community must take collective efforts to combat terrorism.

While raising the issue of Kashmir, Sharif said that Pakistan has gone the extra mile to ensure peace with India. He, however, said peace between India and Pakistan is not possible without addressing the Kashmir dispute.

He said that a new generation of Kashmiris has emerged against India's occupation in the state.

Sharif further said that Pakistan will share dossier with the UN Secretary General on Indian brutalities in Kashmir. He also demanded an independent inquiry into the extrajudicial killings in Kashmir and demanded an end to the curfew.

"India posed unacceptable pre-conditions to engage in dialogue. Talks are in the interest of both countries," the Pakistani PM said.

The Pakistan Prime Minister demanded demilitarisation of Kashmir and said that India's unprecedented arms build-up cannot be ignored. He also said that Pakistan is ready to hold talks on Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Calling for peace in war-torn Afghanistan, he said there is no military solution and the only solution is through dialogue.

However, Afghanistan's Second Vice-President Mohammad Sarwar Danish, who is also at the UNGA said that attacks on protesters and American University of Afghanistan in Kabul were plotted on the Pakistani soil and added that Pakistan has failed to take action against the terrorists in their country.

World knows where Taliban leaders live,asked Pak to hit terrorists on their soil,but it dint happen:Afghan VP Sarwar Danish #UNGA (TOLOnews)  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Attacks on protesters and American University in Kabul was plotted on Pakistani soil: Afghanistan VP Sarwar Danish #UNGA  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Earlier, PTI had reported that Sharif raised the Kashmir issue with world leaders on the sidelines of the UNGA. He held talks with the US, the UK, Japan and Turkey and sought their intervention. He also held a meeting with his Chinese counterpart.

Excellent meeting this morning between PMs of Pakistan and China. Both called relations that between iron brothers pic.twitter.com/TuoUb253OS  Maleeha Lodhi (@LodhiMaleeha) September 21, 2016

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said his country would stand with Pakistan. "We support Pakistan and will speak for Pakistan at every forum," he said, reported IANS.

Stating that Pakistan was a victim of terrorism, the Chinese Premier hoped the situation between India and Pakistan would not escalate. "We are ready to play constructive role in improvement of relations between Pakistan and India," he added.

"Sharif briefed Japanese PM about the grave turn that the situation in occupied Kashmir is taking. Reminded him about UNSC resolutions," Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi had tweeted on Tuesday.

"PM Nawaz Sharif also apprised his Japanese counterpart of the human rights violations being committed by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir," Lodhi had said in another tweet.

Erdogan and Sharif "agreed that OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) Commission on Human Rights should send a fact-finding mission" to Kashmir, Lodhi said.

PM Nawaz Sharif also apprised his Japanese counterpart of the human rights violations being committed by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir  Maleeha Lodhi (@LodhiMaleeha) September 20, 2016

PM Sharif and President Erdogan agreed that OIC Comm on Human Rights should send a fact finding mission to occupied Kashmir  Maleeha Lodhi (@LodhiMaleeha) September 20, 2016

On Monday, Sharif held bilateral talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry and UK Prime Minister Theresa May. Ahead of his speech at the UNGA, reports also suggested that Sharif consulted Pakistan Army Chief General Raheel Sharif over Jammu and Kashmir.

The Pakistan prime minister and the Army Chief reportedly discussed proposals that the former intends to make during his speech for de-escalating the situation and moving to a dialogue on the Kashmir dispute.

After his meeting with Sharif, the US Secretary of State asked Pakistan to prevent terrorists from using Pakistani territory as a safe haven. Kerry also expressed strong concern over the violence in Kashmir particularly the terror attack on the Indian Army base in Uri.

According to a readout of his meeting with Kerry by the Pakistan mission, Sharif told him that over 107 people have been "assassinated" in Kashmir, thousands injured and "worst human rights violations are being committed at the state level."

"I expect the US administration and Kerry to use his good offices to help in resolving bilateral issues between Pakistan and India," he added, according to PTI.

Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit on Wednesday to discuss the Uri terror attack, which claimed the lives of 18 Indian soldiers. According to a statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, Basit was reminded that the Pakistan's government "had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India".

"The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," the statement said.

We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting & sponsoring terrorism against India #UriAttack pic.twitter.com/fytV5fcgl2  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

The statement also listed the items recovered from the terrorists, including GPS, with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site; grenades with Pakistani markings; communication matrix sheets; communication equipment; and other stores made in Pakistan, including food, medicines and clothes.

"If the government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," it stated.

"We now expect a response from the government of Pakistan," it added.

With inputs from agencies
Soon after the deadly attack on Sunday at one of the Army bases in north Kashmirs Uri town, Indian intelligence agencies said that Jaish-e-Mohammad militants were behind the attack.

All four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings. Initial reports indicate that the slain terrorists belong to Jaish-e-Mohammad tanzeem (outfit), Lieutenant-General Ranbir Singh said, while briefing the media after the attack.

Based on all the evidences, the Army confirmed that Jaish militants carried out the 18 September attacks.

Since its inception in 2000, the signature of the Jaish-e-Mohammad outfit was attacks on Army bases at Mohra and Tangdhar in north Kashmir, at Kathua and Samba in Jammu region, and at Pathankot airbase in Punjab, as Sameer Yasir points out in this Firstpost article.

After a debilitating period of being infiltrated by Kashmiri police, "the outfit has fast replaced Lashkar-e-Taiba in launching suicide missions on military and other security formations in the state," Yasir pointed out.

Even though there was enough evidence of the outfit's rising popularity and overt threats, it looks like India failed to keep a track of its activities.

The group claimed that it will use violence to force the withdrawal of Indian security forces in Kashmir. After the 2001 attack on the Parliament, the US State Department added it to its foreign terrorist organisation list. India seems to have ignored the cognisance of the group's gradual rise.

Despite efforts, the Indian authorities have not managed to tighten the strings of JeM's activities in India. It continues to grow and create havoc in the country, possibly with the help of Pakistan's ISI.

In 2016, the group carried out the daring attack on the Pathankot airbase. The Indian police even arrested 12 JeM operatives for their involvement in the attack. Offices of the JeM in Bahwalnagar, Bahawalpur, Multan and Muzafargarh were also identified and sealed in January 2016.

Although the Pakistani government too tried to crack down the outfit's militants (or projected to), it operates almost without any constraints in the country now.

Pakistan conducted raids in Gujranwala and Jhelum regions, and questioned the family of one of the Jaish leaders following the Pathankot attack.

The Hindu reported that Pakistan even announced the arrest of several JeM members. Chief Maulana Masood Azhar and his brother Abdul Rehman Rauf were also detained. "Based on the initial investigations in Pakistan, and the information provided, several individuals belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad, have been apprehended," the office of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was quoted as saying in The Hindu report.

Soon after, ANI reported that the mosque-cum-seminary run by JeM was sealed and the Counter-Terrorism-Department arrested 14 people from Mundeyki Goraya village. The Dawn also reported that the police raided and sealed Jamia Masjid and Madressah Al-Noor.

According to PTI, Pakistani authorities also raided and sealed religious seminary operated by JeM. The madrassa was sealed after a thorough search, reported DNA.

In February, the Jammu and Kashmir police busted a module of JeM and three militants were arrested, The International Business Times reported. Mohammad Sadiq Gujjar, a JeM terrorist, who carried out an attack in Kupwara was arrested by security forces towards the end of February.

In May, 2016 the Army arrested a terrorist belonging to JeM in the Baramulla district of Kashmir, The Hindu reported. Abdul Rehman, a resident of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), had infiltrated in January and was engaged in recruiting local youth for suicide attacks, the Army said.

In July, according to reports, the outfit was seeking funds outside mosques in Karachi to send jihadists to fight in India and Afghanistan.

According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, JeM released a video issuing threat against mainstream politicians and Kashmiri 'informers' working for security forces in the Valley on 9 September.

And just days later, it carries out the Uri attack. The JeM has had an adventurous year with arrests and some major attacks. The speedy rise of the outfit becomes a matter of concern for India.

With inputs from PTI
New York: Gone is the exuberant American desire to be peacemaker. Washington now knows that it has been played by Islamabad, it's false ally in the war on terror. With the US more willing to cut Pakistan loose, there is nothing stopping the Modi government from using hard power to dissuade Pakistans terror network from targeting India, experts say.

After the 2008 rampage in Mumbai in which Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) killed 164 people, the Manmohan Singh government considered all options. It weighed in on an air strike to take out the Jamaat ul-Dawa (JuD) headquarters at Muridke, a small town 50 miles from the Indian border in Punjab which was the ideological hub for the Mumbai attackers. It also contemplated bombing terrorist training camps in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir.

US Senator John McCain warned a group of Pakistanis over lunch in Lahore that Singh who was visibly angry and reeling from the shock of the attacks was seriously contemplating the use of force if Pakistan failed to act against the LeT. However, India finally succumbed to US pressure and inched back from military retaliation.

"Pakistan is of far lesser significance to the United States today than it was in 2008. The circumstances are markedly different consequently there is much less interest in coddling Pakistan," said South Asia expert Sumit Ganguly, who holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilisations at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Ever since 9/11, the United States has provided Pakistan with a steady supply of security and non-security assistance. US officials have justified generous transfers worth over $30 billion since 2002 on the grounds that they secure Pakistans ongoing cooperation in Afghanistan and bolster Pakistans ability to fight terrorism. However, Pakistan has played fast and loose, and nothing has convince the Pakistani government to end its long-standing support to terrorist groups.

In a sign of ongoing Washington's frustration with Islamabad for not acting against militants fuelling violence in Afghanistan, the Pentagon on 3 August withheld $300 million in military assistance to Pakistan. Defence Secretary Ashton B Carter had decided against making a certification to Congress citing the continuing operations of the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani militants on Pakistani soil.

India, itself has a few military options that it could consider against Pakistan. India could attempt an artillery strike on Pakistani army positions which are used to help militants cross over into parts of Kashmir, military experts say. Second option on the table would be sending special forces inside Pakistan to attack guerrilla training camps.

"We have to learn the value of hard power  how to acquire it, how to use it, and how to stop browbeating ourselves into inaction," wrote R Jagannathan in Swarajya.

"If the Pakistan-backed terrorist attack at Uri on 18 September, which killed 17 armymen, does not lead us towards long-term strategic action, we might as well resign ourselves to becoming the punching-bag for that terrorist state, with negative consequences for us in the long run."

Sometimes powerful Indian politicians who can afford an army of private guards can be careless about taking a tough stand on terrorism. They nudge India carelessly down the "strategic restraint" path even when it has failed abysmally.

"It is appalling that since the 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament, India has not devised a strategy of striking back against Pakistan in the wake of terrorist attacks which emanate from Pakistani soil. It is mindboggling and shows the callousness of the Indian political class," said Ganguly.

"They are not the usual victims of terror: It is the Indian paramilitary forces, security personnel, it is Indians who are unlucky enough to live near the border or who happen to take public transport. Politicians living in New Delhi with multiple layers of security don't have to fret about the threat of terrorism from Pakistan. If it affected them you can be certain that steps would have been taken to plan a retaliatory strategy which would be commensurate with the periodic attacks from Pakistan."

"What sort of great power are we if we are so terrified of escalation?" he added.

In terms of military strength, India was ranked fifth in the world after US, Russia, China and Japan, according to a 2015 report Credit Suisse based on data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Global Firepower.
Forget Uri attacks, diplomatic offensive at the UN General Assembly to isolate Pakistan or chalking out the modalities of a "befitting reply" to Rawalpindi for its continuous acts of terror against the Indian state. The Narendra Modi government's biggest headache right now is managing domestic expectations.

As the Prime Minister finds out to his discomfiture, there is a sea of difference between passing jumla while in the Opposition and taking credible action during an hour of crisis as the head of the State.

The fidayeen strike on Indian soldiers at the Army headquarters in Uri has resulted in an enraged nation setting asides its myriad differences and clamouring for nothing less than a comprehensive military strike against the repeat offenders. So far under Modi's watch, as Brahma Chellaney reminds us in Livemint, Pakistan has initiated a string of attacks against India including major ones at Gurdaspur, Udhampur, Pathankot and Pampore.

There have been no lessons learnt from any of these attacks with the Modi government alternating between bhashanbaazi, outraged indignation and sari diplomacy when it comes to its Pakistan policy. Pathankot remains a festering wound with its crippling intelligence failures, bumbling up in gathering of evidence and the ridiculous step to invite Pakistan at our airbase to "probe" the crime which it had itself perpetrated.

Patience is running low with the government showing little signs of a hardline approach against the rogue nation for fomenting habitual cross-border terror  which it had promised while sweeping to power in 2014  and relying on empty rhetoric, a series of never-ending "high-level" meetings and a scaling up of diplomatic offensive.

Firstpost has argued here and here why economic sanctions and call for global ostracisation have never worked in the past, nor these will ever deter Pakistan from using terrorism as state policy.

Simple point is, for the Pakistan army generals and deep state, terrorism remains the most fruitful option that brings twin benefits. It ensures a never-ending line of credit from Washington and keeps India bleeding from a thousand cuts. The ISI and the Pakistan army would be utter fools to let go of what Prakash Nanda calls "hybrid war" against India, in his piece for Firstpost.

Pakistan's dependence on terrorism to wage an asymmetric war against its enemies (which largely translates to India) has been explained most succinctly by Georgetown University Professor and author C Christine Fair. In an article titled A New Way of Engaging Pakistan, she writes: "Terrorism under its (Pakistan's) nuclear umbrella is cheap and effective. It has an army that cannot win a war (except against its own civilians) and nuclear weapons it cannot use. Its Islamist terrorist proxies are the most effective tool it has to achieve its interests in Afghanistan and India Taken together, Pakistan has benefited from a simple moral hazard: The US rewards Pakistan for the very behaviours it seeks to curb Pakistan faces no incentive to behave differently."

There have been instances in the past when coalition compulsions have tied the hands of prime ministers from taking hard-nosed decisions. Modi suffers no such compunctions. He has an unprecedented mandate to take firm action against an unstable state that only understands the language of violence. Not only did he rise to power riding such a promise, recent opinion polls show that were he to initiate a military strike against Pakistan, Indians would remain firmly by his side.

The much-discussed PEW Research Center poll proves that Modi remains India's most popular leader by far, with an important caveat  the public is disillusioned with his blow-hot, blow-cold inconsistent Pakistan policy. The survey, conducted among 2,464 respondents in India from 7 April to 24 May, 2016, finds people are unimpressed with Modi's managing of relationship with Pakistan. Allied with this demand for a more muscular approach, the survey also finds a majority favouring military action to solve the menace of terrorism and approves of a higher spending in defence.

It is important to remember that Indians were in favour of military action against terror-perpetrators before the Uri attack took place. Post Uri, as The Times of India online poll finds, two in three respondents feel India must hit back at Pakistan with all the military might at its disposal. Only a quarter of those took part agreed with the idea of building up international pressure and isolating Pakistan for its continued support for terrorism.

Taken together, it means Indians are angry at being at the receiving end of Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks that have resulted in high cost of human capital and would like their prime minister to strike hard at the rogue state instead of wasting time with "diplomatic offensives".

With public opinion firmly behind him, even goading him for a military solution, why is Modi shying away from launching surgical strikes against Pakistan?

The answer is unflattering and severely dents India's pride.

It appears that the Indian Army is ill-prepared to launch an offensive against Pakistan. As Manoj Joshi writes in a piece for Observer Research Foundation in an article titled Uri attack: There are no military options that will give India the outcome it wants, "Proponents of the military strategy must also be aware of the fact that the Indian armed forces are not in particularly good shape for an all out war with Pakistan. The military is short of vital equipment like artillery and air-defence systems, as well as key ammunition. The Air Force is also not in particularly great form given the steady attrition it has faced without getting adequate replacements."

We have been told since the Uri attack that that all options, including military ones, are at the table but crucially, as The Times of India reported on Monday, the government has decided not to press the 'action' button, settling instead for "diplomatically isolating Pakistan on international stage," as decided during a "high-level" meeting chaired by the PM.

If not a deep surgical strike or a hot pursuit to dismantle the terror infrastructure in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, surely India can inflict low-risk controlled aggression and covert ops across LoC?

Here, too, it turns out that Army chiefs have advised the PM against taking immediate military strikes. As Praveen Swami writes in The Indian Express, "Top military commanders (have) warned that Pakistans army had raised its defensive posture along the Line of Control (LoC)." Army chief reportedly based his advice on inputs that "Pakistan had used the time since the Sunday morning strike in Uri to fortify its positions, making a counter-attack risky."

So in absence of a military op, all India can do is to lead a campaign for declaring Pakistan as a state sponsor of terror and calling for its global isolation. Since these are unlikely to bring any result, let's wait for the next terror attack to take place.
Pakistan's Chief Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali has blamed political and religious parties in Pakistan for having backed terrorists to further interests in a public meeting on Monday with the commencement of the new judicial year in the country, according to India Today.

"It is disappointing to see some political parties supporting terrorists for their own interest," Jamali was quoted as saying in Hindustan Times.

Pakistan has always denied links to terrorist attacks in India, and did so again, with regard to the Uri attack.

India on Sunday said the terrorist attack in Uri has highlighted Pakistan's desire to use "poison" instead of dialogue as it lodged a strong protest against Islamabad at the NAM summit in Margarita Island for its "mischievous" and "malignant" support to terror. India has blamed Jaish-e-Mohammad for the attack and called Pakistan a terror state that needs to be isolated. Pakistan, on the other hand, refuted the charges, which they touted as a knee-jerk reaction, not based on "facts."

The Uri attack, described as the deadliest attack on the Indian Army in the last 26 years, has invited censure for Pakistan from multiple countries. "We have noted relevant reports. We are shocked by this attack," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said in reference to Uri attack and India's charge that Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) is behind it. JeM has special significance as Beijing has put a technical hold over India's efforts to bring about a UN ban on the outfit's leader Masood Azhar for his involvement in Pathankot attack.

Two powerful American lawmakers have introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, saying it was time the US stopped paying the country for its "betrayal". Germany, Russia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Algeria, France, Venezuela and UK too have slammed Pakistan for endorsing terrorism.

With potential global isolation seeming likely for Pakistan, CJ Jamali urged various institutions of governance in Pakistan to function properly so Pakistan can become stable and was quoted as saying: "The constitution allows all faiths to practice their religion without fear of being persecuted."

Courts in Pakistan are being persecuted by terrorist groups, he added, to instill fear among lawyers and judges, because of the same internal backing, reported Zee News. He urged Pakistan's security agencies to provide 'foolproof security' to the country's judicial institutions to stop the spread of terror and said that judges were responsible for protecting democracies both from terrorism and from the means the state wants to use to fight terrorism, reports Pakistani daily, Daily Times.

Another Pakistani daily, Dawn, said in reference to Jamali's comments, that it is not only a resolute affirmation of the truth but upholds what many even within Pakistan have been saying for a long time. The daily listed various examples of these liaisons as 'open secrets' such as the presence of the militant wing of Muttahida Quami Movement in Karachi, Pakistan People's Party's patronising of the Karachi underworld and PML-N leader Rana Sanaullah Khan's interaction with banned sectarian groups. Religious parties like Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) have launched opprobrious campaigns against attempts by the state to regulate and register madrassas that have been aligned with hard-line outfits.

Meanwhile, the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag and top officials of the ministries of Home and Defence, paramilitary forces and chiefs of intelligence agencies met to review the situation in Kashmir. Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, Jammu and Kashmir CM Mehbooba Mufti and Governor NN Vohra met to assess the ground situation in the state.

Union Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj will address Pakistan's soft approach on terrorism, going beyond Uri, to list out a number of instances where Pakistan has treated terror groups softly. PM Modi held a cabinet meeting on Uri on Wednesday. Determined to use a strategic, tight and focused response to Uri, India is likely to take Pakistan's case internationally, reports DNA.

With inputs from agencies
Moscow: Moscow reacted furiously to "unsubstantiated" accusations from the United States that Syrian or Russian planes were responsible for bombing an aid convoy in Syria's Aleppo.

At least 18 trucks in a 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed late Monday as they delivered humanitarian assistance to desperate civilians in Orum al-Kubra in the Aleppo region, according to the UN.

Washington said the alleged air strike could only have been carried out by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime or his Russian allies and that Moscow must take responsibility either way.

The Russian foreign ministry said it was watching "with indignation and anger" at attempts by "protectors of terrorists and bandits" to blame Russia or Syria for the attack.

The "unsubstantiated, hasty accusations" seemed designed to "distract attention from the strange 'error' of coalition pilots," said the statement yesterday, referring to the US-led coalition which struck a Syrian army position at the weekend killing dozens of soldiers.

The Russian military, which is investigating the incident, said that footage from activists at the scene showed damage to the vehicles that did not appear to come from an air strike or other munitions.

Instead, the fire that tore through the convoy happened "strangely at the same time insurgents were carrying out a large-scale attack on Aleppo," defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.

Konashenkov said Russian drones had followed the convoy until it successfully delivered its load, but had stopped surveillance after that.

"All information on the convoy's location (after that) was known only to the rebels controlling this area," he said.

Syria's army has also denied bombing the aid trucks, with a military source telling state media that there was "no truth" to media reports that the Syrian army was responsible.

The deadly attack occurred several hours after Syria's military declared an end to a week-long truce brokered by the Moscow and Washington earlier this month in an attempt to end the five-year war.

The United Nations has since suspended all humanitarian aid convoys.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said hope for a renewal of the ceasefire was "for now, very weak", stressing that a truce could only be resumed if "terrorists" halted their fire.

"The conditions are very simple. The shooting needs to stop and the terrorists need to stop attacking Syrian troops," he said.
Hermes-Sojitz International Investment Fund has started the implementation of its boutique hotel chain project in the Northern Italy. The project embraces marvelous antique palaces and palazzos with their unique stories. 10 real estate items have already been chosen to be reconstructed to become a part of the new hotel chain. Now the Fund is to expand its project with new matching items.

Hermes-Sojitz Fund has announced the launch of a boutique hotel chain in the Northern Italy: 17 luxury hotels encompassing 25 to 50 rooms each. The grand opening is planned for late 2017. The Fund has decided on a selection of the real estate items to become hotels. The new boutique hotels will be commissioned stage-by-stage. 10 real estate items in the north of Italy are currently under construction, and Hermes-Sojitz is looking for new pieces to fit the puzzle.

Naoki Matsumura, Chairman of Hermes-Sojitz's Board of Directors, says that the company is planning to create a large chain of boutique hotels. At this stage the Fund is on the lookout for unique real estate in Italy, particularly in its northern part. Old palazzos and ready-made boutique hotels supporting the overall concept are of main interest for Hermes-Sojitz.

A number of major international hotel chain operators express their interest in the project. But it still remains unclear, what will be the brand of this boutique hotel chain. Naoki Matsumura notes that the tourist and commercial appeal of the project is mainly due to its location nearby the world famous resorts of France and Switzerland: Courchevel, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc and St. Moritz, as well as the fashion capital Milan.

Boutique hotels are often opposed to traditional chain hotels. These types of small hotels offer unique settings with upscale accommodations, while traditional hotel rooms lack the personality. The concept of the new boutique hotel chain by Hermes-Sojitz will combine an exclusive design and high standards of service provided by the top international hotel operator.

Tim Zuev

Press Service

Hermes-Sojitz
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As many had speculated  increasingly so since the news of Pin-to Musicas closure in July  the Senado Square-based bookstore Pin-to Livros will shut its doors for the last time on September 30 and relocate to another part of the peninsula. The owner of the bookstore, Anson Ng, initially said that rental costs for the units in Senado Square had reached an unsustainable rate. He later clarified that after a new company acquired the lease to the building, he was notified that his rental contract would be terminated. Ng revealed to The Times in July that he was already looking for a new location to combine books and music under one roof. He has now decided that the shop, which closes at the end of the month, will reopen at Rua de Coelho do Amaral No.41, near Kiang Wu Hospital in January 2017.

Circus Festival charity performance in Macau

The third China International Circus Festival will perform in Macau on November 12, said the organizers on the festivals official website. More than 20 teams will participate in the charity event, including performers from Germany, Russia and France. After their tour in Macau, the artists will head to Zhuhai for another competition. Visitors can enjoy 28 performances from November 18 to 26, including five from China and 23 from other countries or regions.
Cambodia has deported 50 Chinese and 13 Taiwanese citizens to China over an alleged internet scam, complying with demands from Beijing, a senior police official said yesterday.

The suspects were flown out of Cambodia on Tuesday, said Gen. Ouk Haiseila, chief of the Cambodian Interior Ministrys Immigration Investigation Bureau. He said the Chinese government sent a special plane from Beijing to take them back.

In June, Taiwan protested after Cambodia deported 25 Taiwanese internet scam suspects to rival China in the latest snub of the self-ruled island. Cambodia regards Taiwan to be part of China.

The latest group of 63 suspects was arrested late last month in a rented house in Phnom Penh, Cambodias capital. They were accused of defrauding victims in China using phone calls made over the internet.

Since 2012, at least 982 Chinese and Taiwanese accused of taking part in internet scams have been arrested and deported back to China, according to Ouk Haiseila.

Although Taiwans constitution formally decrees that it and the Chinese mainland are part of a single Chinese nation, Taiwan functions like an independent country and does not acknowledge Beijings claim of authority over it.

Rights activists and Taiwanese authorities say such deportations reflect the great influence China exercises over Cambodia through aid and investment.

China is a key ally and economic partner of impoverished Cambodia. It has provided millions of dollars in aid and investment over the past decade, agreed to write off debts and granted it tariff-free status for hundreds of items.

Kenya and Malaysia have also deported Taiwanese internet scam suspects to China despite protests by Taiwanese officials. AP
A Cambodian court has sentenced two Chinese nationals to life in prison after convicting them of production and trafficking of heroin and methamphetamine in one of the countrys biggest drug trafficking cases.

The Phnom Penh Municipal Court found the two men guilty yesterday of smuggling 55 kilograms of methamphetamine and heroin worth an estimated USD3 million from Laos in June last year. The drugs were believed destined for both Cambodia and third countries.

Two Cambodian men involved in the case also received life sentences, one in absentia as police are still seeking him.

A report earlier this year from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described Cambodia as an increasingly important hub for smuggling heroin and methamphetamine as well as chemicals used in their manufacture. AP
At least 20 countries are expected to formally join the Paris Agreement on climate change this week, greatly improving the pacts chances of coming into force just a year after it was negotiated in the French capital, U.N. officials say.

Thats considered a blistering pace in the world of international diplomacy, reflecting a sense of urgency in the fight against global warming and a desire to seal the deal before the Obama administration leaves office.

Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Morocco are expected to hand over documents at the U.N. in New York today to formally complete the ratification process. At least half a dozen small island nations including Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Kiribati will also follow suit.

We are ready. We will announce it in New York, Moroccan Environment Minister Hakima el-Haite told The Associated Press.

After years of negotiations, governments agreed in Paris last December to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say are warming the planet.

More than 170 world leaders have signed the deal, but it wont take effect until 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global emissions have ratified or accepted it through their domestic procedures. That was initially expected to take several years, but 28 countries accounting for 39 percent of emissions are already done, including China and the United States, the worlds top two greenhouse gas emitters.

U.S. diplomats are now pushing other countries to accelerate their ratification efforts so that the deal can enter into force this year. The White House says President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry plan to corner foreign leaders in the hallways during the U.N. gathering to personally pressure them to join this week.

Were very anxious to have it move forward quickly, U.S. climate envoy Jonathan Pershing told the AP. We are talking to everybody about the urgency.

Its possible that more than 55 countries will have joined by tomorrow. It will likely take a bit longer to reach 55 percent of world emissions.

Pershing said the haste comes down to the fact that this is a problem that cant wait.

Others say another factor is the potential of a shift in U.S. climate policy depending on the outcome of the presidential election in November. Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton has said the U.S. must implement the Paris Agreement, but Republican candidate Donald Trump has said he will cancel the deal.

The Obama administration clearly would like to see this done before they leave office, said Alden Meyer, a veteran observer of the U.N. climate talks at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

That doesnt guarantee that the next president will fully implement Paris, Meyer said. But it would take at least four years for the U.S. to formally withdraw.

The Paris Agreement asks both rich and poor countries to take action to curb the rise in global temperatures that is melting glaciers, raising sea levels and shifting rainfall patterns across the globe. It requires governments to present national plans to reduce emissions, though the targets themselves arent internationally binding.

The European Union, which considers itself as one of the architects of the Paris deal, is trying to fast-track its ratification process to avoid the embarrassment of sitting on the sidelines when it comes into force.

The EU, which accounts for 12 percent of global emissions, originally planned to wait for its 28 member states to approve the deal domestically, but now wants to ratify it on their behalf.

Its technically possible, said Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, a spokeswoman for EU Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete. But politically its a decision of the member states.

With or without the EU, theres a chance that the deal can enter into force as early as the next U.N. climate conference, which starts Nov. 7 in Marrakech, Morocco.

U.N. officials said last week that at least 20 countries had indicated they would join today and that they were absolutely certain that the deal will come into force this year.

For some the timing is mostly symbolic, because the first round of emissions targets doesnt start until 2020. For others, like the island nations who face an existential risk from rising seas, its imperative that countries prepare to implement  and improve  their targets as soon as possible.

We cannot wait, said Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim, who chairs an alliance of small island states. We are at the forefront of climate change and we are the people who will suffer if there is no action taken early. Karl Ritter, Stockholm, AP
Around 50 people gathered in a building on Rua de Ferreira do Amaral last night to celebrate the opening of a new design store in the city.

The store, Signums second retail space in Macau, showcases clothing, apparel and interior furnishings by both local and foreign designers from countries such as France, Denmark and Taiwan. The new shop, located near Jardin de Vasco da Gama, is the companys largest.

Among the products offered in the new, two-storied shop are chairs, desk units, light-

shades and lamps, sunglasses, and general ornaments. The company is marketing its products to local residents, tourists, and businesses in Macau, such as large hotel entities.

The opening coincides with the fifth anniversary of Signums first retail space in the territory, which can be found in the Barra area near the A-Ma Temple.

Company owner and local entrepreneur Clement Cheng addressed yesterdays crowd, saying that he hopes that Macau likes the shop and likes what the brand stands for.

At yesterdays ceremony, he unveiled: a mobile app for the company, which is linked to various social networks and allows users to browse Signums products.

At the hosts request, many of the opening ceremonys attendees downloaded the app, and shared their location on social networks, as well as posting on news feeds to get the word out.

Cheng, who has been an interior designer for around seven years, told the Times yesterday that he is on a mission to educate the general public in Macau about the importance of design.

Its not just an ornament, he said, gesturing to an item in the store. These [design] products are meant to change the way that you live your life.

He said that people in Macau are not really aware of this concept, nor is the government, as both groups tend to think of design as a field that focuses mainly on products and graphics, rather than interior design.


The Labor Affairs Bureau (DSAL) released a statement saying that it will not allow local employees to lose their employment rights.

The announcement came out after about ten residents visited the DSAL to report their former employer, the Lisboa Palace, for terminating their employment on unreasonable grounds. The residents said they had been part of the cleaning staff at the Lisboa Palace construction site.

DSAL said it had a meeting with the parties involved in the issue, including the representatives of the sites owners, contractors and those who filed complaints.

The owners representatives promised after the meeting that they would review the numbers and working categories of their local and expat employees. They added that if expat employees work in the same field as residents, the expats will be forced to exit first.

DSAL has helped 86 local employees register their information, and will continue to follow up on the issues in order to ensure that local workers employment takes priority.

The department said it would continue to review the employers expat employment records, pointing out that it will not tolerate a reduction in employment opportunities for local residents in favor of expat workers.

On Monday, lawmaker Lei Cheng I accompanied the group of people to DSAL. According to her, 86 local workers had been fired, all of whom were members of the cleaning staff at the Lisboa Palace construction site. Most had been employed on or after September 12 and were reportedly told to stop working after just two or three days. Some of the former staff voiced their belief that they had been fired to reduce costs.

Lei claims that Lisboa Palace currently has approximately 3,700 expat employees, some of which are also members of the cleaning staff.
The Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) has announced that at least MOP6 million will be diverted toward restoring five of the six former leper colony buildings in Coloane. The work, which is expected to start before the end of the year, will include a study over whether the site could become a tourist attraction in the future, to be conducted by the Macau Government Tourist Office. Several officials, including the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Alexis Tam (front left) also visited the site yesterday to learn more about the state of the buildings.
Wynn Resorts, which opened its second property in the territory last month, saw its shares drop after market analyst Nomura speculated that mass-market gaming volumes at the Wynn Palace are not as strong as expected.

Wynn has indicated that its business levels at Wynn Macau have not been affected by the [August 22] opening of Wynn Palace, Nomura analyst Harry Curtis said in a statement. While positive for Wynn Macau, indications are that mass volumes at Palace are lighter than expected.

Wynn Resorts has declined to directly comment on the matter, saying only that the company will provide actual numbers at the appropriate time.

Despite the opening of Sands Chinas The Parisian last week, Nomura analysts are saying that gross gaming revenues (GGR) are down 14 percent this week compared to the previous week, suggesting that The Parisian may have boosted tourist volumes more so than spending on mass GGR.

Given the successful opening of The Parisian last week, the sequential decline suggests that GGR strength after Wynn Palace opened was primarily driven by VIP revenue, wrote Curtis.

On the other hand, Morgan Stanley was more optimistic in its assessment of the gaming industry, concluding that there is the potential for significant upside to MGM and Wynn as the stock of both companies are now under-owned relative to historical levels.

The companys analysts believe that there is room for incremental buyers, especially as interest in Macau appears to be revitalized given the potential turn in market fundamentals (August GGR growth of 1.1 percent was the first positive monthly growth since May 2014).

Morgan Stanley bases its analysis on a survey of the largest 100 asset managers portfolios, but excludes index fund holdings. DB
Local authorities expressed the hope that the number of Indian tourists visiting the peninsula will significantly increase this year. However, some Indian visitors have been disappointed with how they are being received in the region.

A note received by lawmaker Jose Pereira Coutinho from the Indian community in the region stated that there has been an increase in the number of extra immigration measures specifically for Indian nationals.

The complaint made to the lawmaker noted that such nationals are required to stand in a separate line and asked to show that they bring with them at least MOP5,000 in cash and have return flight tickets. The local immigration services reportedly demand that they show a printed copy of these return tickets.

They still demand a hard copy or else they will not let you enter Macau. Should this continue further, Macau might just lose another tourist market, the complaint noted.

The Times contacted the Immigration Bureau to confirm the allegations, however a spokesperson from the public department explained that such measures are part of the bureaus working guidelines for a number of tourists coming from a number of countries.

No discrimination exists at all. We hope the tourists can understand that this is a normal procedure. [] We have service formalities, the spokesperson said.

The Times interviewed several Indian tourists. Some of them said they entered the region with no hassle, but other visitors confirmed that they faced hurdles. Experiences of having to wait for a long time or being asked to procure the documents mentioned above appear to happen more often to tourists who travel alone.

Preeti Trehan said they did not encounter difficulties when entering Macau and were not interrogated by immigration purposes. There was no trouble at all. It [the process] was very fast, she assured.

Nonetheless, a self-employed tourist who is visiting Macau for the second time claimed that the immigration bureau is only stopping Indian nationals and some from Afghanistan.

You can call it as treating against race, you can call [it as] racism. Its very humiliating. But if the Chinese go there [to India], we treat them well. Chinese tourists are treated well in India, said a man who did not want to be identified.

Another Indian who claimed to be on a business trip explained that they were asked to enter a room for investigation purposes and had their passports, return tickets and hotel vouchers photocopied.

To my knowledge, it was all Indian passports. If theyre coming in families, I guess theyre allowing [them to enter Macau without investigation], he said.

The businessman said he and his wife had to wait for nearly three hours to have their visa issued. He expressed the belief that the flow of Indian tourists to the region may be affected due to possible discrimination.

Another couple that are on their honeymoon trip also revealed to the Times they had been interrogated for nearly an hour.

The couple expressed their disappointment over the matter as they were asked to show pictures of their wedding and their company IDs despite showing officers their return tickets. We are here as tourists and not for business purposes. Why are we getting that? they complained.

The complaint also stated that such situations occur in Hong Kong. A few of the interviewees revealed that they were scrutinized in Hong Kong airport, and were held for more than half an hour.

We came here to spend money, not to take away money from China. Were not taking anything from here. Its only [for] tourism, said one interviewee.

Creating a negative image

Lawmaker Pereira Coutinho believes that the way Indian tourists are being treated when entering Macau is creating a negative image regarding the regions reception of such tourists. According to him, the region is paying closer attention to the Indian tourist market, and as such, they should not be treated with indifference. We think the Macau government should publicize what is the problem [for which they have been] requesting additional proof and return tickets from medium classes, which has created repercussions in the incoming tourists from India he said.

MGTO investing in the Indian market

The Macao Government Tourist Office (MGTO) recently inaugurated its representation offices in New Delhi and in Mumbai in a bid to further promote Macau as a destination for Indian tourists. The bureaus India head during 2015, Arzan Khambatta, said that Delhi and Mumbai along with Bengaluru, Chennai, and Ahmedabad would be Macau tourism target cities in the Indian market during the year. Also in 2015, MGTO promoted Macau at the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Travel Mart 2015, which was held in Bangalore, India. According to data from the bureau, Macau had 167,578 Indian tourist arrivals in 2015.
Julius Baer Group Ltd. said Asia may overtake Europe as its biggest revenue-generating region, as the Swiss wealth manager steps up hiring in Hong Kong and Singapore.

In the next five years, Asia could be the biggest region for us if we grow at double digit rates, Julius Baer Chief Executive Officer Boris Collardi said yesterday in an interview in Singapore. More than half of about 200 new bankers that Julius Baer plans to hire this year will be based in Asia, he added.

Asia contributed about 532 million Swiss francs (USD543 million) of Julius Baers operating income in 2015, small compared with the 2.2 billion Swiss francs from Switzerland and the rest of Europe. But the share of revenue generated in Asia has been growing fast, doubling to about 20 percent of the total last year from about 10 percent in 2011.

Julius Baer is the fifth-largest private bank in Asia in terms of assets under management, according to a 2015 ranking by Asian Private Banker. Its AUM in Asia stood at $75.1 billion, the publication said. Its the third largest in Switzerland after UBS Group AG and Credit Suisse Group AG.

Like UBS and Credit Suisse, Julius Baer has been expanding in Asia, lured by the growing number of rich people. Private wealth in the Asia-Pacific region surpassed that of North America for the first time in 2015, according to a report by Cap Gemini SA.

In general we are following where the market is going. And Asia is our second home, Collardi said in a separate Bloomberg Television interview yesterday with Haslinda Amin. He said the bank has been hiring in Hong Kong and Singapore in a big way.

Collardi said he doesnt rule out the idea of further acquisitions, but for the moment his bank is focused on expansion through hiring. Julius Baer last year completed the acquisition of the Merrill Lynch wealth management business outside the U.S., which it bought from Bank of America Corp.

The acquisition of other private banks can either be expensive, or pose substantial risks at a time of stricter regulation, Collardi said. He noted the case of BSI SA, a Swiss private bank which this year agreed to be taken over by EFG international AG. BSI was subsequently fined by regulators in Switzerland and Singapore for its ties to 1Malaysia Development Bhd., the development fund at the center of global probes into alleged money laundering. 1MDB denies any wrongdoing.

Singapore withdrew BSIs banking license for breaches including failure to conduct due diligence on high-risk accounts and to monitor suspicious customer transactions. Chanyaporn Chanjaroen, Bloomberg
President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi put the Islamic State group on notice that they plan to recapture the city of Mosul within months. If successful, the operation could mark a major turning point in the campaign to defeat the extremist group.

Neither leader glossed over the immense difficulty of the battle ahead as they met in New York on the sidelines of a U.N. summit. Still, Obama said he and Abadi were confident that Iraqs military and the U.S.-led coalition could make progress in Mosul fairly rapidly, adding that he was hoping for progress by year-end.

This is going to be hard. Its going to be challenging. It will require resources, Obama said. But he professed confidence that more territory can be wrested from the militants, in part because he said the Iraqi forces are getting more confident.

Abadi, speaking in English, echoed Obamas timeline for retaking Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city and the extremist groups stronghold in the country. He called the group a huge threat to Iraqs stability.

We hope within the next few months were going to kick Daesh out of Mosul, Abadi said, using an Arabic acronym for the group. He added: They must be crushed on the ground.

The aggressive timeline reflects Obamas hopes of notching another major victory against IS before he leaves office in January and hands the conflict off to his successor. Donald Trump and other Republicans have blamed Obamas decision to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq for fueling the extremist groups formation and its growth into the worlds most serious terrorist threat.

Both leaders want to move quickly in Mosul to take advantage of recent momentum against IS in Iraq and the perception that the extremists morale is waning. In neighboring Syria, the chaotic civil war continues to hamper the fight against IS, but in Iraq, the extremists have lost half the territory they once held, according to the U.S.

Capturing Mosul, the last major city IS controls in Iraq, would constitute both a symbolic and strategic defeat to the militants. The U.S. and its partners hope a successful Mosul offensive will set the stage for eventually ousting the group from Raqqa, the largest IS-held city in Syria and the de facto capital of the groups self-declared caliphate.

Yet military experts have warned that retaking Mosul is an incredible arduous task that plays to the extremist groups advantages, including its ability to embed among civilians. The battle will require huge numbers of troops and street-by-

street combat. In preparation, Iraqs military has been amassing troops and retaking a string of towns in the vicinity of Mosul.

Equally daunting to military planners is the prospect that the battle could displace some 1 million people. AP
William Kuan Vai Lam, member of the board of directors of the Sun Kian Ip Group, said that Ng Lap Sengs vigor is even better than when he was in Macau.

The comments, cited by Jornal San Wa Ou, came during Kuans time spent earlier this week in Hengqin, where he paid a visit to an opening ceremony for a SKY program.

In Kuans words, Ng is waiting for the court to open in January, [] having some blood pressure problems. There are no other health problems. [He] is even more energetic because he doesnt have to bear much mental pressure, and he is taking a good rest.

Ng Kei Nin, son of Ng Lap Seng, while attending the commencement of one of his companys new projects, refused to answer journalists questions twice; once regarding his fathers status in the US and also regarding whether their Hengqin project will be affected by Ng Lap Sengs case.

The opening ceremony of an integrated commercial project by SKY and China Resources Land Limited was not attended by expected guests Zheng Renhao, mayor of Zhuhai, or the Hengqin New Area Administrative Committees director-general Niu Jing. Despite their absence, Ng Kei Nin assured attendees that the Hengqin project is progressing according to the schedule.

Ng Lap Seng was arrested in the U.S. on September 19 last year and was released last October after paying half of his USD50 million bail.

In July of this year, a new charge was leveled against the Macau billionaire. In addition to the bribes allegedly handed to the recently deceased former president of the UNs General Assembly, John Ashe, Ng is now being charged with providing benefits to one or more officials from the UNs Development Program to garner their support for the construction of a conference centre in Macau.
Lawmaker Zheng Anting has argued that residential projects in mainland China should upload legal information on their websites, ensuring that overseas investors can avoid property fraud.

This comes after 77 local residents complained to the Consumer Council over real estate scams involving pre-sale property acquisitions in the mainland during the first half of the year. Speaking to TDM, Zheng Anting said some investors only managed to reclaim their money after more than 10 years, and encouraged developers to be clear and transparent.

Information such as the types of property sites that can be sold and how far [along] the construction [is] must be made available before they are allowed to be sold to outsiders or other buyers in the region, he said.

As cited in TDM, an investor surnamed Lou  along with dozens of investors  claimed to have purchased some 50 residential units in Zhuhai back in 2008, but the project was never completed. According to him, there was no follow-up from the relevant mainland departments.

They said the contract we initially signed with the developer did not meet the legal requirements. That means our contract was not protected, he explained to the media outlet.

Our point is that we really paid for the property. It should be recognized even though the developer received the funds without obtaining the pre-sale permit.

In previous reports, the Zhongshan Administration Bureau for Industry and Commerce had admitted that these incidents are a result of the absence of related laws, and that such things are common in the mainland.
The Macau Federation of Trade Unions (FAOM) informed that all workers involved in the recent Lisboa Palace controversy returned to work yesterday, having signed contracts with the main contractor of Lisboa Palace. According to a statement issued by lawmaker and vice president of FOAM, Lei Cheng I, the result followed a meeting on Tuesday with the owner of the Lisboa Palace, the projects main contractor, FAOM, and the Labor Affairs Bureau (DSAL). The total of 86 Macau resident workers have all been re-employed.

Growth in prices continues to slow

The composite Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 1.65 percent year-on-year to 108.1 in August, according to new data released from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), marking a further decrease of 0.43 percentage points from the 2.08 percent year-on-year growth in the July. Composite CPI reflects the impact of price changes on the general households. DSEC accredits the increment to dearer rentals for parking spaces, higher charges for eating out, as well as increases in property management fees and automobile prices

Bus accident victims and relatives meet with agency

Following a request by some of the tourists injured in the Rua da Entena accident, the Macao Government Tourist Office (MGTO) and the Tourism Crisis Management Office (GGCT) coordinated a meeting between six affected tourists, their families and the travel agency yesterday. During the meeting, the victims families made their requests. Currently, four tourists remain hospitalized and four family members remain in Macau to accompany them. 36 affected tourists have already left the MSAR. Additionally, four other family members of victims travelled to Macau and have had accommodation provided by the travel agency responsible for the bus that crashed at Rua da Entena.
Swiss watch exports fell in August as demand weakened from Japan to the U.S., extending the industrys slump to fourteen months.

Shipments dropped 8.8 percent to 1.4 billion francs (USD1.4 billion), the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry said in a statement yesterday.

The slowdown has spread from Asia to Europe and the U.S. in recent months, leading Cie. Financiere Richemont SA, the maker of Cartier and IWC Schaffhausen timepieces, to cut jobs, buy back unsold inventory from retailers and refocus on more affordable pieces. Richemont warned that first-half earnings will decline about 45 percent, following Swatch Group AGs 54 percent drop in first-half profit. In Europe, terrorist attacks have cut the numbers of free-spending tourists who make up a big chunk of sales.

We remain concerned about continued disruption in Hong Kong, while mainland China continues to show improving trends, albeit at the expense of weaker tourist demand in Europe and Japan, Thomas Chauvet, an analyst at Citigroup, said in a note.

Exports to Hong Kong fell 29 percent, while shipments to Germany slid 15 percent, the federation said. The U.S. and Japan showed declines of 12 percent and 27 percent, respectively. Mainland China saw exports rise by 29 percent, helped by a favorable comparison base from a year ago. One bright spot was the U.K., where shipments increased 24 percent after the Brexit-induced tumble in the value of sterling.

Some brands have already increased prices in the U.K. by at least 10 percent, Citigroups Chauvet said, so the currency effect is unlikely to last. Corinne Gretler, Bloomberg
COLLECTIVE MADNESS



Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
A Thai court found a British labor activist guilty yesterday of defaming a fruit canning company, and gave him a suspended prison sentence in a case that has raised serious concerns among human rights workers and free speech advocates.

The Bangkok South Criminal Court found Andy Hall guilty of criminal defamation against Natural Fruit Company Ltd. in connection with a 2013 report he researched for the Finnish consumer organization Finnwatch that alleged labor abuses at the companys facilities.

The case has underlined complaints by critics that Thailands punitive criminal defamation laws can be used to silence whistle-blowers and social critics. The law carried a maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment.

Hall has been active for several years in Thailand in labor rights advocacy, especially involving migrant workers, who lack protections both in practice and under the law.

He was also found guilty of violating the Computer Crimes Act because the information was posted on the internet.

Hall was given a suspended sentence of three years with a probationary period of two years, and a fine of 150,000 baht (USD4,300). He said he will appeal the ruling. He was allowed to go free after his fine was paid.

Two civil suits by the company against him are pending, as is an appeal against his acquittal on a previous criminal defamation charge.

I dont feel any shame, I dont feel any regret. But I feel it is an injustice, whats happened here today, Hall said. I respect the decision of the court, but I feel real injustice, not for me, its not about me, this case was never about me, it was never about Andy Hall doing research about migrant workers. It was about a human rights activist doing research for the public interest.

The court originally sentenced Hall to four years in prison and a 200,000 baht ($5,715) fine, but reduced the sentence because he cooperated with the proceedings and had no prior criminal record.

Lawyers and right groups have long been critical of Thailands criminal defamation law, which is seen as inhibiting free speech. In a statement earlier this week, Amnesty International called on Thai authorities to remove criminal penalties for defamation and ensure that such charges are not used to restrict the right to freedom of expression.

Sonja Vartiala, executive director of Finnwatch, said her organization was shocked by todays verdict.

The report was authored and published by Finnwatch; we take full responsibility for it, Vartiala said. Andy has been made a scapegoat in order to stifle other voices that speak out legitimately in support of migrant worker rights.

This is a sad day for freedom of expression in Thailand, Vartiala said. We fear that many other human rights defenders and victims of company abuse will be scared to silence by this ruling.

Finnwatch was not sued, nor was the Al Jazeera news network, to whom Hall gave an interview that was the basis for part of the cases against him.

Virat Piyapornpaiboon, the owner of Natural Fruit, said justice was done.

I think that its not important whether he goes to jail or not, but whats important is whether or not what he said was true, Virat said. This is proof that no matter who you are, if you are not just and you make up stories and cause damage to others, you must be punished.

Britains Foreign Office expressed its concern in a statement issued after the verdict.

The UK supports the right of Human Rights Defenders to raise concerns about human rights violations without fear of reprisals or legal action to prevent public participation, it said. We will be raising his case with the Thai authorities and we are ready to provide support to Mr. Hall if requested. Natnicha Chuwiruch, Bangkok, AP
Volkswagen AG investors filed lawsuits seeking a total of 8.2 billion euros (USD9.2 billion) for losses stemming from the companys emissions-cheating scandal.

About 1,400 lawsuits are currently pending at the Braunschweig Regional Court, the district handling legal matters for the region where Volkswagen is based, the tribunal said yesterday. Investors are alleging they suffered damages because the company was slow in disclosing the issue. Volkswagen has rejected the allegations.

Investors have lined up to sue in Germany, where VW shares lost more than a third of their value in the first two trading days after the Sept. 18 disclosure of the emissions scandal by U.S. regulators. Monday was the first business day after the anniversary of the scandal and investors had feared they needed to sue within a year of the companys admission that it had equipped about 11 million diesel vehicles with software to cheat on pollution tests.

The amount is slightly less than the 10.7 billion euros that had been expected based on lawyers statements last week, but more suits could still trickle in because of uncertainty about when the deadline expires. The court may need about four weeks to register all the complaints, according to the release.

The U.S. government, which uncovered the cheating, is also among the investors suing and seeking 30 million euros.

Volkswagen, based in Wolfsburg, has repeatedly said that it had informed markets in a timely manner based on the information available. Karin Matussek, Bloomberg
CAMBODIA has deported 50 Chinese and 13 Taiwanese citizens to China over an alleged internet scam, complying with demands from Beijing, a senior police official said yesterday. Cambodian General Ouk Haiseila said the Chinese government sent a special plane from Beijing to take them back.

INDONESIA Torrential rains triggered floods and landslides on the Indonesian island of Java, killing at least 20 villagers and leaving 14 others missing, an official said yesterday. The worst-hit district was West Javas Garut, where 17 people were found dead and 14 others were missing after two rivers overflowed.

CHINA  N. KOREA Premier Li Keqiang is urging continued international commitment to a Korean peninsula free of nuclear arms, in comments alluding to the recent testing of an atomic weapon by its North Korean ally. Li urged new efforts to reach a comprehensive political solution on the Korean nuclear issue.

PAKISTAN Police say they have arrested a 16-year-old Christian boy on blasphemy charges after he liked an inappropriate photograph on Facebook of the Kaaba in Mecca, one of the holiest sites in Islam. Senior police official Akhtar Ansari said yesterday the arrest was made this week in Pakistans eastern Punjab province.

SYRIA A medical relief organization says an airstrike in northern Syria hit a mobile emergency unit, and not a medical facility. Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, says five staff members were killed when its ambulances were hit.

SAUDI ARABIA The Saudi Civil Defense says a citizen has been wounded by a projectile fired from Yemen into the southern border region of Najran. An official said that emergency forces responded to the incident yesterday morning and that the wounded Saudi man was taken to the hospital for treatment.

TURKEY An attacker armed with a knife tried to enter the Israeli Embassy in Turkey yesterday before being shot and slightly wounded by Turkish security officials, Turkish and Israeli officials said.

ZIMBABWE President Robert Mugabe decried Western sanctions yesterday, urging the United States, United Kingdom and their allies to abolish them. The 92-year-old leader said that his country is the innocent victim of such economic pressure.

EU-AZERBAIJAN A European law and human rights commission yesterday criticized proposed constitutional changes in Azerbaijan that would extend the presidents term, a conclusion that drew an angry response from the ex-Soviet nation.
JEROME  Youth across Idaho will soon have an early shot at waterfowl and pheasants.

Licensed hunters 15 and younger may participate. At least one adult 18 or older having a valid hunting license must accompany each youth hunting party into the field at all times. Adults are not allowed to hunt waterfowl or pheasants during these hunts.

Waterfowl

During the two-day youth waterfowl weekend, Sept. 24-25, duck, goose, snipe and coot seasons are open statewide for young hunters only.

Bag limits for ducks and geese are the same as for the general season. Hunters must have a valid Idaho hunting license and a migratory bird (HIP) Permit. But a federal migratory bird (duck) stamp is not required for hunters 15 and younger.

All other state and federal migratory game bird hunting rules and regulations apply. See the 2016 Migratory Game Bird Seasons and Rules brochure: https://idfg.idaho.gov/hunt/rules/migratory.

Pheasant

The youth pheasant hunt, open statewide Oct. 1-7, opens a half-hour before sunrise  except on the C.J. Strike, Cartier Slough, Fort Boise, Market Lake, Montour, Mud Lake, Niagara Springs, Payette River and Sterling wildlife management areas, where pheasants are stocked, when shooting hours begin at 10 a.m.

The daily limit is three cocks, and the possession limit is nine. At WMAs where pheasants are stocked, the bag limits are two cocks and six in possession.

Youth hunters do not need a WMA upland game bird permit to hunt on WMAs where pheasants are stocked. All upland game hunters are required to wear hunter orange above the waist during pheasant season when hunting on WMAs where pheasants are stocked. A hunter orange hat meets this requirement.

The 2016-2017 Upland Game, Furbearer and Turkey Seasons and Rules brochure: https://idfg.idaho.gov/hunt/rules/upland-furbearer-turkey
TWIN FALLS  A Twin Fall man punched a police officer and sped away in an SUV while the officer hung onto the vehicle earlier this month, police said.

Alan Dean Dry, 27, was originally charged with misdemeanor resisting arrest for the incident, which happened Sept. 8 outside the Twin Falls IHOP near the canyon rim. But prosecutors Friday charged him with an additional count of felony battery on a police officer.

Dry escaped the night of the alleged fight, but deputies with the Twin Falls County Sheriffs Office arrested him on a warrant the next morning.

A bail bondswoman called Twin Falls Police about 8 p.m. on Sept. 8 to report a man with major warrants for his arrest was sitting in a Honda CRV outside IHOP, court documents said. Police later learned an IHOP waitress and manager knew the man, and one of them alerted the bondswoman.

Officer Clint Doerr responded, and after watching the man, later identified as Dry, he approached the SUV from the drivers side, court documents said. Doerr said Dry became extremely nervous, more nervous than the majority of the people I have routine contact with.

When Doerr asked Dry to identify himself, Dry suddenly started the SUV and Doerr reached into the vehicle to stop him, court documents said. A fight ensued.

Dry punched Doerr near his right eye, and as the officer tried pushing Dry away, he rapidly accelerated through the parking lot towards the canyon, Doerr wrote in a sworn affidavit.

I realized I was in serious danger if the vehicle crashed, due to the drivers disregard for his safety, the manner in which he was operating the vehicle, and the speed we left in, Doerr wrote.

The officer tried to push himself out of the SUV and grabbed the door frame.

The vehicle dragged me as I ran, trying to maintain my balance and keep up with the vehicle for approximately 20 or 30 feet, Doerr wrote.

Dry made a sharp U-turn, and Doerr stepped in front of the SUV for a moment, but he had to jump back when he realized Dry wasnt going to stop, court documents said.

As a result of the incident I experienced soreness in my neck, abrasions to my left triceps and right forearm, pain on my upper right cheek bone area, and pain in my right knee, Doerr wrote.

The waitress and manager who knew Dry were not immediately forthcoming with information, but ultimately they offered enough information that police determined Dry was the driver.

Deputies arrested Dry the next day and he was arraigned Sept. 12 on misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest and theft by possession of stolen property. His bond at the time was only $100.

But last Friday, prosecutors charged him with the felony and a judge set his bond at $100,000. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Friday.
TWIN FALLS  The Salvation Army is greeting the upcoming holiday season with new faces and renewed energy.

Lts. Felicia and Troy Cook have run Twin Falls office for more than a year, but when business manager Nicki Kroese resigned early this year, the Cooks absorbed her job into theirs.

Both are recovered substance abusers who went through The Salvation Armys recovery program and are now ordained ministers.

Family services coordinator Dawn Nutting is also a former addict and knows what it is like to be homeless.

Ive been there, wondering where I was going to get my next meal, said Nutting, who has worked for The Salvation Army for two months.

Empathy is an important quality to have in her position.

The homeless or needy dont want your sympathy, she said. They dont want someone feeling sorry for them; they want someone who understands what they are going through.

Nutting is studying to be an addiction counselor to do her part to reduce the homeless population. Many homeless suffer from addiction or mental illness, she said.

The Salvation Army clothes and feeds families in need, but cant house the homeless.

Ultimately, Id like to see a second homeless shelter for families in Twin Falls, Nutting said. Valley House is always full and families need to stay together.

Existing shelters, such as Bills House, Jubilee House, Stepping Stones and New Hope, are for singles.

If someone gets arrested for sleeping on a park bench  well, theres a reason they were on the park bench in the first place, she said. They have exhausted their resources.

The city of Twin Falls needs to address this problem, she added.

Nutting calls herself a resource broker who builds partnerships with other agencies, churches and volunteers.

The Salvation Armys busiest season is just around the corner.

Were in the Christmas mode already, said Troy Cook, who earlier Tuesday had been gathering Christmas kettles from the basement.

We like to start early so things run a lot smoother, his wife said. The two have been married for seven years.

We enjoy having a relationship with the people coming in the door, Troy Cook said. People like to share their stories.

Clients become like extended family, Felicia Cook said. Last year The Salvation Army fed 150 at Thanksgiving.

A lot of people dont realize (The Salvation Army) is a church, she said. She and her husband entered the seminary together in 2011.

Besides taking care of those in need, the Cooks facilitate church services, adult Bible study, a womens program and a summer day camp program  all with a spiritual aspect.

There are many ways folks can help, Felicia Cook said.

We always need volunteers.
TWIN FALLS  Fire officials are investigating the cause of a Tuesday night house fire on Poplar Avenue that caused about $30,000 in damage.

Nobody was injured in the blaze, reported about 9:55 p.m. at 1772 Poplar Ave., the Twin Falls Fire Department said in a statement.

Fire crews arrived five minutes after the call and found moderate to heavy smoke coming from the home, the statement said. They knocked down the blaze by 10:20 p.m.

The fire was contained to one bedroom that was badly damaged, while the rest of the home was damaged by smoke, the fire department said.

The estimated property value of the home is $156,000, and the property and contents damaged in the blaze was estimated at about $30,000.
A cottage industry of apologists for Donald Trump and his supporters has sprung up to excuse, justify, infantilize and pity his core group of white, non-college-educated males who lash out at immigrants and globalism more generally. Victims ignored by elites! The Emmy winners mock them! There are more than a few problems with this.

First, conservatives used to stand up for creative destruction, the rise and fall of businesses and entire industries, which is an intrinsic part of a dynamic free market. If youre not a hard-core Libertarian, the average conservative has considered the solution to this problem to be a safety net and tax, education and other policies that allow workers to rebound; it has never been to halt the marketplace or shift to a government-planned economy. The latter has been tried and has failed, as conservatives are quick to point out when ridiculing Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or other anti-capitalist wags. It also exempts these voters from responsibility for their lives. The coal town is depopulated? Yes, thats sad, but why are they not moving  as immigrants do  to where the jobs are?

Second, the ills about which Trump and his apologists complain have little to do with the plight of many of their supporters (whose average salary is $72,000, much higher than that of the average Sanders or Hillary Clinton supporter). The things Trump demonizes  free trade and immigration  did not cause the decline of low-skilled manufacturing (automation did that); they have, however, contributed to the resurgence of high-skill manufacturing in the United States to such an extent that we have record numbers of unfilled manufacturing jobs. If Trump were railing about the lack of job training programs, that would be one thing, but he is not, of course. Constructive measures that do not involve attacks on others are of no concern to him. Hes simply casting about for targets for white, lower-class rage.

Third, Trumps defenders seem to demand that we treat member of his base delicately for fear of ruffling their feathers and damaging their self-esteem. When you play the Hollywood makes fun of us card, you get perilously close to political correctness and emotional feebleness, not things Trump and his ilk are supposed to promote. Even worse, complaining that other people dont wish them Merry Christmas  and then transforming that into a war against Christianity  is victimology rarely seen outside the safe spaces on college campuses.

Fourth, the pity party for lower-class white males excludes virtually everyone else. Are we expected to turn the economy inside out for the latter, even to the extent that it harms those who have prepared themselves for a competitive workplace  or who simply want to enjoy moderately priced consumer goods not priced out of their grasp by tariffs? Why concern ourselves with the delicate sensibilities of the Merry Christmas-deprived and not with Mexican immigrants (murderers), women (Trump thinks its a mistake to let wives work outside the home), African Americans (whose lives he insists are a disaster), the disabled, etc.?

In elevating one specific group  older white males  Trump fails the test of a leader in a diverse, complex society in which we want to maximize benefits for the largest number of people. He seems not to grasp the demands of living in a prosperous 21st-century society, which demands technical prowess, flexibility, cooperation and respect for others.

It also happens to be dumb politics, as Gerald Seib points out: Suburban women have in the past voted consistently Republican, and this year they are leaning heavily toward Hillary Clinton says GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who works with Sen. Marco Rubio. Says one Trump adviser flatly: Suburban women will decide this election. 

There is no virtue in pandering to Trumpkins at the expense of every other group and the countrys general prosperity. In making these white males (and only them) into victims and encouraging them to blame outsiders or menacing forces beyond their control, Trump does what Republicans used to accuse liberals of doing  pitting one group against another in a zero-sum conception of the economy. It is doing the Trumpkins no favors and it is heightening dissension in a country that needs to rediscover common values and shared endeavors and undertake some systemic reforms in government, education and criminal justice.
Executive Summary

On November 8, Massachusetts residents will vote on Ballot Question 2, a referendum on whether to lift a statewide cap and allow up to 12 new charter schools to launch each year, with a preference given to charters that would open in low-performing districts. Proponents note that charters in the Bay State show some of the strongest academic results in the country and that lifting the cap would allow more disadvantaged students to attend high-quality charters. Opponents argue that the students who enroll in charter schools drain more than $400 million a year in state aid that currently goes to traditional public school districts.

Key Findings

While it is true that, under Chapter 70 of Massachusetts general laws, funding follows students from traditional public district schools to public charter schools, student enrollment in charter schools also effectively increases per-pupil expenditures at district schools. In 2016, charter enrollment had the effect of increasing per-pupil spending in district schools by approximately $85 million statewide.

There is convincing evidence that charter schools have raised the performance of students in them. Multiple gold-standard studies have confirmed that enrollment in Boston charter schools has caused significant increases in students reading and math proficiency.

There is little evidence that the performance of students in charter schools is dragging down the performance of the traditional local public schools. From 2011 to 2015, English and math scores increased in the 10 Massachusetts school districts with the highest local share of charter enrollment.

READ FULL REPORT

______________________

Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The announcement by Clarence House that Prince Charles will be visiting three Gulf countries, including Bahrain, in November has stirred the reaction of human rights campaigners, with some claiming that the visit will serve as an endorsement of the abuses carried out by Bahraini authorities.

Besides Bahrain, Prince Charles will be visiting Oman and the United Arab Emirates at the request of the British Government as his official tour will help to strengthen United Kingdoms warm bilateral relations with key partners in the region.

Spokesman for Campaign against Arms Trade, Andrew Smith, said it is totally inappropriate for any member of the (British) Royal Family to use their position to lend UK support to brutal dictatorships like the one in Bahrain.

His criticisms were echoed by Sayed Ahmed Alwadei, Director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. Alwadei pointed out that the visit highlights that the major human rights violations in 2016 are not in the British monarchys mind. He added that the message being sent is that the UK doesnt care that torture victims are on death row and critics face decades in prison, it actively endorses this repression.

Analysts believe that Charless visit could be part of promoting and sealing arms deals with the Gulf States like in 2014 when he visited Saudi Arabia. During that visit to the oil rich kingdom, Britains biggest arms company reached a multi-billion agreement deal with Riyadh for the sale of 72 Typhoon fighters.

Bahrain is a strategically located Gulf State and it is home to a British Naval base. Manama has been cracking down on protesters demanding political reforms and it has been targeting the Shia majority claiming that they want to destabilize the country and overthrow the government.

A couple of months ago, it dissolved the Wefaq party, largest opposition party with Shia dominance, and also revoked the citizenship of Sheikh Isa Qassim, the spiritual leader of the kingdoms Shias. Majority of the population are Shias but power is concentrated in the hands of the Sunni minority that enjoys the strong support of neighboring Saudi Arabia.
The Iranian Armed Forces held a military parade on Wednesday to commemorate the Sacred Defense Week marking the beginning of their war with Iraq in 1980.

The highlight of the event was the unveiling of Zolfaqar, a new long-range ballistic missile, said to be one of the most precise domestic missiles.

In his speech during the parade, Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Hossein Bagheri stated that the historic $38 billion military aid for a decade reached between the US and Israel only makes Tehran more determined in strengthening the defense power of the country.

The Zolfaqar missile has a cluster warhead and it can hit targets spread over the ground.

Bagheri said that Iran would continue to develop its deterrence power like its enemies in order to be in a position to confront threats and assure its complete readiness in facing possible risks and dangers. He also underlined the importance of the mobilized voluntary forces, known as Basij, by stressing the need for complete readiness against both strategic and tactical operational attacks.

The tone was however different in New York where President Rouhani met with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

During the meeting, the Iranian president focused on promoting trade and economic cooperation stating that the European leaders should provide banks and insurance companies with guarantees and assurances on financial cooperation  with Iran.

He added that the nuclear agreement reached in 2015 with the so-called P5+1 should be beneficiary to our nation and companies as well as the region.

Renzi noted that Italy is ready for any measure to bolster economic relations with Iran. Increasing numbers of Italian investors have been visiting Iran since the beginning of the year.
The Iraqi offensive on Mosul began on Tuesday by attacking the town of Shirqat, 100km south of Mosul, because it is dubbed as a strategic supply line for the army in its bid to take over Mosul.

Joint Operations Command spokesman Yahya Rasool said the troops are making good progress in taking over the important town that has been held by the Islamic State since 2014. The US-led air campaign has carried out airstrikes on the town ahead of the ground offensive and Colonel John Dorrian, spokesman of the coalition, said clearing the area makes sure that their supply lines are protected.

The battle for control of Shirqat is deemed critical because tens of thousands of civilians are living there and in surrounding villages. Officials claim that there is a humanitarian disaster going on in the town due to shortages of basic commodities. The Mayor of Shirqat, Ali Dawdah, is hopeful that the offensive would soon end because government forces are less than 3km away from the town center. Their progress has been however slowed by the extremist groups roadside bombs, mortars and snipers.

Militia groups are helping government forces to battle militia groups. One of the Shia militia groups, Hashed al-Shaabi, said the operation is destined to finish expelling those terrorist gangsters from usurped Iraqi land.

Mosul is the de-facto capital of the Islamic State in Iraq and the battle to retake it is expected to be fatal. IS has been stationed in the area since 2014. Observers think that the group has had enough time to set up a fortress that would not easily bow down to an attack.
A helicopter belonging to the Libyan National Army (LNA) crashed Tuesday, killing several military officers including military adviser to Ageela Saleh, the President of the internationally recognized Tobruk-based parliament; the House of Representatives (HoR.)

The crash, according to a military source, occurred at dawn on Tuesday, 65 km from Tobruk. The aircraft operated by Marshal Khalifa Haftars forces was carrying eight people on board including Brigadier General Idris Younis, military adviser to Ageela Saleh, who is opposed to the UN-backed unity government.

Idris Younis is reported dead along with his son and four other passengers. Two people have reportedly survived the crash. The aircraft was on its way to Tobruk after taking off from Ras Lanuf.

Causes of crash have not been identified, but investigations have been launched, reports say.

The HoR and the LNA are opposed to the UN-sponsored Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli.
The Libyan Foreign Minister of the Government of National Accord (GNA), Mohamed Taher Siala reiterated, on Tuesday in New York, the appreciation of the Libyan people and government of the efforts led by King Mohammed VI of Morocco in support of Libyas stability.

The Support of the Moroccan King for Libya is steady and consistent, the chief of the Libyan diplomacy told the press following talks with Moroccos Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UNGA.

The talks between the two ministers aimed at taking stock of the latest developments in Libya as part of permanent consultations between the two countries.

For his part, the Moroccan Minister said that he thanked Libya for backing Moroccos bid to return to the African Union as well as Libyas support for Moroccos territorial integrity. In this regards, Mezouar voiced satisfaction with regards to Libyas support for the Morocco-proposed autonomy initiative to settle the artificial dispute over the Sahara.

The meeting was also an opportunity to reiterate Moroccos position in favor of the unity of Libya and its institutions and to stress the need for compromise in order to address the current challenges facing the Government of National Accord.
Chicken will be the best-positioned protein due to its low price position in times of pressure on consumer spending power but rises in production costs and the long-term impact of COVID-19 threaten to disrupt the sector, according to Rabobank.
The European Union (EU) will disburse about 50 billion dollars for Africa and the Mediterranean as part of the blocs investment plan aimed at helping fight migration.

According to the EU foreign affairs chief, Frederica Mogherini, Its the biggest investment plan ever proposed for Africa and the Mediterranean, something that only the European Union, with all economic and diplomatic power can put in place.

Ms Mogherini who made the disclosure on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly in New York, told journalists that the EU sees a great potential of growth and stabilization in Africa but there was the need to bring the private sector onboard.

She said the plan would help the EU fight migration and radicalization while empowering young people in the two targeted areas.

That would help us manage migration better, that would help us prevent radicalization and offer a perspective for youth, she said, adding the move means investing in Africa, the Mediterranean and the youth.

She said with this proposal, the European Union is turning principles, visions, words into action. Our money from the EU budget is there and we are going to work now with the private sector to make sure that these investments reach the places where they are most needed, she added.
The National Episcopal Conference of Congo (CENCO) on Tuesday suspended its participation in the national dialogue called by President Joseph Kabila due to the violent events that occurred in the central African nation on Monday.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the Bishops of the Catholic Church said they had opted out of the dialogue in order to mourn after the deadly events of the past two days in the country. The Church has yet to state when they will return to the dialogue.

Reactions have increased across the world since the start of violence on Monday that left 17 dead according to authorities and 50 according to a latest report given by Human Rights Watch.

The CENCO reiterated that whatever the consensus reached by the dialogue team, the incumbent president should not be eligible to stand in the next elections whenever they are due to be held.

In early September, the clergy had threatened that any attempt to extend Kabilas constitutional mandate which ends later this year will end their participation in the Edem Kodjo led national dialogue.

The dialogue which is also backed by the United Nations, the European Union and other bodies is aimed at getting DRC out of a political crisis that has rocked the country since the disputed re-election of Kabila in 2011.

The Catholic Church, the dominant faith in the DRC with some 40% of Congolese being adherents, has played a leading role in the process of democratization in the DRC at the beginning of the 1990s. Its withdrawal from the on-going process might strongly affect the credibility of the dialogue.
A new study from Drexel University College of Medicine suggests all organ transplant recipients, regardless of race, should receive routine, total-body screenings for skin cancer.

Out of 259 nonwhite transplant recipients who were evaluated in the study, 19 skin cancer lesions were identified in 6 percent of the patients. The research was published Wednesday in JAMA Dermatology.

Further, the study shows risk factors for nonwhite transplant recipients likely differ between races/ethnicitieswhich represents an important shift in how dermatologists approach minority patients. Doctors should keep these unique characteristics in mind when examining and counseling nonwhite patients about prevention strategies, said Christina Lee Chung, MD, associate professor of dermatology in the College of Medicine and director of the Drexel Dermatology Center for Transplant Patients.

"Once physicians began to realize there was a significant number of transplant patients dying from skin cancer, there was a push to prevent it. But much of the field has focused on trying to decrease the morbidity of the Caucasian transplant population, which is more susceptible to skin cancer overall," said Chung, the study's principal investigator. "This is the first research of its kind to look at a diverse population of nonwhite transplant recipients and how skin cancer affects them."

Squamous-cell carcinoma of the skin is 65- to 250-times more frequent in patients who have received an organ transplant, due to the side effects of the anti-rejection medications they are prescribed. Skin cancers in transplant patients also tend to be more aggressive and more deadly.

There are currently no guidelines that require transplant patients to be screened for skin cancer pre- and post-operation. At some centers, Chung said, fair-skinned patients are encouraged to receive a full-body evaluation from a dermatologist. While black transplant patients, on the other hand, may only be sent to a specialist if a suspicious lesion is identified. And while a white patient may be screened yearly, a black patient is likelier to either never or only be evaluated one time post-transplant.

"Overall, people tend to believe that dark-skinned patients can't get skin cancer," Chung said. "But they are taking the same immunosuppressant drugs as their white counterparts."

The Drexel Dermatology Center for Transplant Patientswhich opened in 2011is uniquely positioned to track the rates of skin cancer in nonwhite patients. As one of the only models of its kind, the center provides coordinated, post-transplant dermatological care to every single patient who receives a transplant at Hahnemann University Hospital or who is managed by the Drexel transplant program. That means each patient, regardless of race, is screened annually for skin cancer.

With a large African-American, Asian and Hispanic patient population, Drexel researchers were able to perform a retrospective medical record review of 259 nonwhite transplant recipients who had visited the center between 2011 and 2016.

They found six black patients, five Asian patients and four Hispanic patients presented with 19 different cancerous lesions. Interestingly, the predominant type of skin cancer diagnosed within the group was in the "in situ" stage, which means it was caught in its earliest form. No black patients were diagnosed with a late-stage skin cancer.

This suggests that screening for skin cancer early and often can prevent it from becoming more aggressive, which touts the Drexel Dermatology Center for Transplant Patients as a successful model that Chung hopes can be replicated throughout the country.

Finally, the researchers found that the majority of skin cancers in black transplant patients were found in the groin-genital area, and most of those lesions tested positive for high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV). For the Asian population, sun exposure appeared to be the most significant risk factor for skin cancer.

The potential association between HPV and squamous-cell carcinoma warrants careful examination of the groin, genitalia and perianal area in search of early lesions, the study authors write. The finding also suggests there may be significant differences in risk factors pertaining to the development of skin cancer between white and black organ transplant recipients.

"If you're spending all of your time counseling your black patients about sunscreen, you're probably missing more important aspects of skin cancer prevention," Chung said.

Instead, she added, consideration should be given to administering the HPV vaccine to all patients prior to transplantation. In addition, black patients, and especially those with a history of HPV, should be taught how to identify potential cancerous lesions in their groin areas.

"The ultimate takeaway is that though people of color are at decreased risk for skin cancer, but they're not not at risk. And those people have different risk factors," Chung said. "So when you see a person of color who is a transplant patient, you need to approach them differently, depending on their skin type and tone, where they are from and their medical history."

Explore further Inconsistent guidelines for screening transplant recipients at higher cancer risk

More information: Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer in Nonwhite Organ Transplant Recipients JAMA Dermatol. Published online September 21, 2016. Journal information: JAMA Dermatology Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer in Nonwhite Organ Transplant Recipients. Published online September 21, 2016. archderm.jamanetwork.com/artic  madermatol.2016.3328
(HealthDay)New guidelines issued by three leading cancer organizations suggest that more breast cancer patients should get radiation therapy after a mastectomy.

Overall, the guidelines say there's enough evidence to show radiation treatment after a mastectomy decreases the risk of breast cancer recurrence, and that even women with smaller tumors and three or fewer lymph nodes involved can benefit from the therapy.

"The new guidelines say there is clear evidence that the benefit of [post-mastectomy radiation therapy] extends to women with limited lymph node involvement," said Dr. Stephen Edge. He is vice president for health care outcomes and policy at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. Edge was co-chair of the panel that developed the new guidelines.

One radiation treatment expert welcomed the updated recommendations.

"The guideline is timely," said Dr. Janna Andrews, an attending physician in radiation medicine at Norwell Health Cancer Institute, in Lake Success, N.Y. "The field of post-mastectomy radiation is changing. It's always up for discussion now as to who needs [post-mastectomy radiation therapy]."

The new guidelines help clarify what used to be a gray area, Andrews explained. "In the past, if a woman had a small tumor, less than 5 centimeters, and not more than three or four positive lymph nodes, many doctors would say she does not need [post-mastectomy radiation therapy]," she said.

The guidelines don't offer a single formula for which patients need radiation therapy, Edge noted. But they do focus on the group of women for whom there is the most debate about the value of radiation.

"There is a great deal of controversy about whether women with one, two or three lymph nodes [with cancer] have sufficient risk to warrant radiation," he said. "For women with four or more lymph nodes involved, everyone would recommend radiation."

The guidelines also strongly support input from all specialists who treat breast cancer in making the decision about radiation treatment. That typically includes the surgeon, radiation physician and an oncologist.

Doctors need to weigh the risks and benefits, Edge added. Side effects can include redness of the skin, swelling and skin breakdown severe enough to compromise future breast reconstruction, he explained.

Edge said that doctors need to consider patients individually. For instance, he explained, ''a woman 65 who has microscopic involvement in a single lymph node and an estrogen-receptor positive cancer would be very different from a 38-year-old who has three lymph nodes involved and so-called triple-negative breast cancer." The younger woman, he said, would typically be advised to get radiation.

The older woman, because her risk is lower, should have a discussion with her doctor to decide if the benefit outweighs the risk, Edge noted.

Andrews said that one take-home message for patients is to expect the surgeon to have consulted with the radiation oncologist and others on her team. If a woman's doctor tells her she does not need radiation after a mastectomy, the woman should be told why and she should ask if the radiation oncologist weighed in on the decision.

Edge was a panel representative from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which created the guidelines along with the American Society for Radiation Oncology and the Society of Surgical Oncology.

All three groups published the guidelines online this week in their respective journals: the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Practical Radiation Oncology and the Annals of Surgical Oncology.

Explore further Additional radiation reduces breast-cancer recurrence for some patients

Copyright  2016 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
A Spanish nurse who contracted Congo fever while caring for a man who died from the virus, in the first non-imported case reported in Western Europe, was discharged from hospital on Wednesday, officials said.

The unidentified nurse was admitted to the intensive care unit of a Madrid hospital on August 31 where she was treated for the illness, also known as Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, in isolation

The regional government of Madrid said in a statement that she had been discharged and "would not need to be monitored and can lead a normal life".

It said health officials would monitor hospital staff who looked after the patient for 14 days after their last contact with hera period that corresponds with the typical incubation period of the virus.

The nurse became infected while treating a 62-year-old man who died from the virus on August 25.

He caught the virus after he was bitten by a tick while walking in the countryside in the northwestern Spanish region of Castile and Leon.

Spanish health authorities said this was the first time the disease had been found in Western Europe in someone who had not travelled to an endemic area.

The virus has been found among ticks in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe and southwestern Europe.

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a viral haemorrhagic fever transmitted by ticks from a range of livestock and domestic animals. It has a fatality rate of 10-40 percent.

Transmission to humans occurs through contact with infected animal blood or ticks. CCHF can be transmitted from one infected human to another by contact with infectious blood or body fluids.

Explore further Spain screens 200 people after man dies of Congo fever

 2016 AFP
The world has made progress in curbing infant mortality, stunted growth and other poverty-driven problems, while obesity, alcohol abuse and partner violence has risen, a major review of UN health goals said Wednesday.

"Progress varied widely," said The Lancet medical journal which published the assessment of 188 countries' progress since 1990, measured against the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On the positive side, nearly two-thirds of countries have already met the 2030 targets of reducing maternal and child mortality, it said.

But not a single country had met any target on eliminating tuberculosis and viruses like HIV, or reducing weight problems in childhood and partner violence.

Children being overweight "considerably worsened in the past 15 years," the study authors wrote, whereas alcohol abuse "worsened slightly".

The researchers measured performance against 33 health-related SDG targets and ranked countries from best to worstplacing Iceland on top and Central African Republic at the tail.

The biggest improvements were measured in reducing deaths of women and children during birth or shortly thereafter, as well as stunted growth and wasting in childhood due to malnutrition.

"Moderate" progress was recorded in efforts to end epidemics of HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and tropical diseases by 2030, said the report.

Self-harm, childhood obesity

The SDGs, which set aspirational targets for eradicating poverty and boosting human wellbeing, were adopted by the UN General Assembly last September to continue the so-called Millennium Development Goals, which expired at the end of 2015.

The review found that about a quarter of countries have managed to reduce exposure to household air pollution, mainly from wood fires, while less than a fifth have achieved universal access to safe and affordable water and sanitation.

Rich countries, too, had their problems, the researchers foundlisting inter-personal violence, self-inflicted harm, ambient air pollution and childhood obesity.

There "does appear to be a point where the positive effects of higher incomes stop having positive health effects," review coordinator Christopher Murray of the University of Washington told AFP.

"We've yet to crack the code on how to raise levels of income, education, and health in equal measure," he said by email.

The review said the results were "highly clustered" between groups of countries.

Iceland takes gold

Nations mainly in western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia and Australasia performed best, while many of the worst rated were in Africa.

The star performer was Iceland, followed by Singapore, Sweden, Andorra, Britain, Finland, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia.

On the other end of the spectrum, Central African Republic was joined in the bottom 10 by Somalia, South Sudan, Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Mali, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

The United States came in 28th, a "relatively poor" position, according to The Lancet.

This was "mainly driven by deaths due to interpersonal violence, HIV, harmful alcohol consumption, childhood overweight, and suicide," it said in a statement.

"The USA also did badly compared to other high-income countries on maternal, child, and neonatal mortality reflecting the large differences in access and quality of healthcare."

India ranked 143 and China 92. War meant that Syria and Libya performed "much worse than expected," the statement said.

The study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Explore further Unequal access and low quality of maternal health care hampering progress towards SDGs

 2016 AFP
Atomic structure of adhesion G protein-coupled receptors (aGPCRs), including extracellular regions and a custom monobody inhibitor. Credit: Salzman, et al, University of Chicago

Researchers from the University of Chicago have described the three-dimensional, atomic structure of an important cell receptor molecule linked to the development of several diseases, including melanoma, acute myeloid leukemia and bilateral frontoparietal polymicrogyria, a debilitating developmental brain disorder. The study, published Sept. 21, in Neuron, also describes an engineered protein molecule that turns off the receptor. The report lays the groundwork for future development of pharmaceutical treatments that target the diseases mediated by these proteins, called adhesion G protein-coupled receptors, or aGPCRs.

"Given the complicated biology mediated by aGPCRs, particularly in neurodevelopment, we believe our work will pave the way for future studies investigating the molecular details of these important processes, bringing us closer to the ultimate goal of combatting diseases influenced by aGPCRs," said Gabriel Salzman, an MD/PhD student in the Biophysical Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Chicago.

Over the past several years, research groups around the world have discovered a wide array of biological roles played by aGPCRs, many of which are closely linked to human diseases. Members of this group of receptors are closely related to more-widely studied, conventional GPCRs. These aGPCRs are characterized by the presence of a large segment that sticks out into the extracellular space, however, a structural foundation for understanding the function of these extracellular regions has been lacking. Meanwhile, researchers did not know if these regions could be targeted for therapeutic intervention, a critical step toward future pharmaceutical development.

Salzman has focused his PhD thesis on the study of the extracellular regions of aGPCRs, which are thought to molecularly bridge the functions of cell-to-cell adhesion and intracellular signaling. The focus of this current study is the aGPCR known as GPR56 or ADGRG1, which has established biological roles in muscle cell development, several cancers and neurodevelopment. Specifically, GPR56 plays roles in the development of two important cell types in the brain: neurons that make up the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortex, and cells responsible for providing electrical insulation to neurons throughout the brain, known as oligodendrocytes.

To carry out this project, Salzman collaborated with two laboratory teams at UChicago: Demet Arac, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, who studies the structure and function of aGPCRs, and Shohei Koide, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, who specializes in engineering synthetic monobody molecules that work like highly-tailored antibodies but are much simpler. Working jointly in the Koide and Arac labs, Salzman and his colleagues engineered a monobody that binds to the extracellular region of GPR56 and causes intracellular signaling to decrease, establishing that it is possible to change the function of aGPCRs, for example, by targeting their extracellular regions with pharmaceuticals.

Furthermore, they determined the structure of the entire extracellular region of GPR56 at an atomic level, the first such structural description of any aGPCR. In doing so, the researchers identified a unique protein domain called PLL, which, if deleted, corresponds to a naturally occurring variant of GPR56. Salzman and his team went on to show that deleting the PLL domain led to increased signaling, further supporting the key concept that extracellular regions govern cell signaling.

Bioinformatics analysis also identified a particular position in the PLL domain that is highly conserved across species, often a telltale sign of biological importance. Indeed, when this position is mutated, it destroys the ability for GPR56 to mediate the development of oligodendrocytes. This further underscores the key neurobiological role of this newly identified domain in GPR56.

Understanding the biological roles played by aGPCR extracellular regions will give researchers more tools to develop treatments for diseases influenced by these proteins. For example, recent studies have shown that the treatment cocktail for a particular type of leukemia may significantly benefit from a future GPR56 inhibitor, perhaps using a monobody similar to that created by Salzman's team for this study.

"The University of Chicago Biophysical Sciences PhD program challenges students to have dual mentors. The power of combining protein engineering, structure determination, cell signaling analysis and organismal neurobiology is exemplified by our work, which could not have been done without this uniquely empowering educational system," Salzman said. "Our discovery that aGPCR extracellular regions regulate function in a multifaceted and complex manner provides important guidelines for developing therapeutics for diverse diseases in which aGPCRs play important roles."

Explore further Structural changes in taste receptors in the first stage of taste perception discovered

More information: "Structural Basis for Regulation of GPR56/ADGRG1 by Its Alternatively Spliced Extracellular Domains," Neuron, 2016. Journal information: Neuron "Structural Basis for Regulation of GPR56/ADGRG1 by Its Alternatively Spliced Extracellular Domains,", 2016.
In this file photo taken on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014, Yaa Kyarewaa, await clients as she stands next to her makeshift bush meat shop at one of the largest local markets in Accra, Ghana. As the deadly outbreak of Ebola has subsided, people in several West African countries are flocking to eat bush meat again after restrictions were lifted on the consumption of wild animals like hedgehogs and cane rats. But some health experts call it a risky move. (AP Photo/Christian Thompson, File)

As the deadly outbreak of Ebola has subsided, people in several West African countries are flocking to eat bush meat again after restrictions were lifted on the consumption of wild animals like hedgehogs and cane rats. But some health experts call it a risky move.

Ivory Coast, which neighbors two of the three countries where Ebola killed more than 11,300 people since December 2013, lifted its ban on wild animal meat this month.

The meat of squirrel, deer, fruit bats and rats has long been a key source of protein for many in the region, but it is also a potential source of the Ebola virus.

Though bush meat hasn't officially been linked to West Africa's recent Ebola outbreak, the deadliest in history, infections in Africa have been associated with hunting, butchering and processing meat from infected animals, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The Ebola virus is then spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of victims or corpses.

"From a public health standpoint, this decision is unfortunate at best," said Ben Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. "The only source of Ebola in the world is infected animals, and there's good evidence that some of these animals, like bats, can be infected for a long time."

However, not all bush meat is equal, he said. Bats pass on the virus and travel far. Some types of rodents can get the virus. Primate meat is likely not as much of a danger, given that they succumb to Ebola more quickly than people.

"There's a good case for banning the sale of bats as bush meat. The other sources are a lesser risk," Neuman said. "I don't want to see it all legal, but we don't want to see people go hungry, either."

Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana all warned against, or banned, the sale of bush meat in 2014 as the outbreak emerged. They began rolling back those restrictions after the World Health Organization said in March that Ebola was no longer an international health emergency.

Many in the countries are happy that they can now enjoy the meat they have always relied on. Some believe it is tastier than imported meats or chicken, and it's often cheaper.

"We weren't happy that the government banned us from eating bush meat these past two years. But we did what we were told because of Ebola," said Lucien Douhan while shopping for bush meat in the Yopougon suburb of Abidjan.

In the teeming open-air markets, vendors handled the stiffened meat in recognizable animal form. Bat wings competed for space on worn wooden tables with other meat, some tails and claws still attached. Flies buzzed. A machete hacked.

Those who sell the meat say they have been through hard times.

"We couldn't afford for our kids to go to school. It was hard for us. We had to sell frogs so the kids could eat, and we sold snails too," said Brigitte Gahie. "But today, thanks be to God, the meat is back and the people are coming back."

In Guinea, bush meat sales are still illegal, said Mohamed Tall, the minister of livestock and animal production there. Despite the ban, people still consume it.

"We ate it before Ebola. We eat it after Ebola. Nothing can stop me from eating it," said Marcel Yombouno in Guinea.

Liberia issued a warning against the consumption of bush meat during Ebola, but now the meat is being sold openly. In Sierra Leone, a bush meat ban has been lifted.

Ebola first appeared in 1976 in Congo and has caused periodic outbreaks there and in other African countries. Its re-emergence is likely, said Neuman, given the densely populated areas where Ebola has occurred.

"Ebola will come again," he said. "Hopefully we will be ready this time."

Explore further UN: Latest Ebola outbreak in Guinea is now over

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Georgia-China agree on Free Trade after 7 months - Historic deal brings significant benefits, says PM

Georgia has successfully completed free trade talks with one of its closest trading partners, China, and soon the new Free Trade Deal will facilitate increased business and trade turnover between both nations.Georgian wine, mineral waters and agricultural products are among the goods that will be exported to China with zero tariffs and without any transition period.Prime Minister of Georgia Giorgi Kvirikashvili said this was "a historic deal for Georgia and that the talks were finalized in "a remarkably short time.Georgian wine will be exported to China without customs fees and without any transition period. This year we were expected to sell 2.5 million bottles of wine in China however in the first eight months of 2016 we have already exported 3.5 million bottles of wine, said Kvirikashvili.We are developing a network of Georgian wine stores in China and we think China will become one of the most important directions for exporting not only Georgian wine but many other goods. [This Free Trade Deal] is one of the biggest achievements of our government and will play an important role in the Silk Road project, he added.Georgias Economy Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili shared the PMs enthusiasm about quickly achieving a free trade deal with China, and repeated that it was historic for Georgia.This is a historic deal for our country. Georgia is the first country which managed to finalise free trade talks with China in a record time of seven months. For some countries it took 10 years to reach a free trade deal with China, said Georgias Economy Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili.But before Georgian products can be exported to China with preferential conditions, both countries must sign the Free Trade Deal and then the deal must be ratified.Next month, the Minister of Commerce of the Peoples Republic of China will visit Georgia to sign a memorandum on finalising the Free Trade Deal with Georgia.After the agreement is made, the text will be closely examined, which will take about two or three months. Later in December we expect to sign a Free Trade Deal with China, said Kumsishvili.In our opinion the Free Trade Deal will come into play in the middle of 2017 once the deal is ratified by both countries parliaments, he explained.Through the Free Trade Deal Georgia will be able to export its products to China  a market of 1.4 billion customers - without additional customs fees.Kumsishvili said this would have huge benefits for Georgia as it meant the country would no longer have to pay high customs fees when exporting wine to China. This would be one of the main benefits offered by the deal.We have reached unprecedented result in terms of exporting Georgian wine to China, which means that Georgian wine will be exempt from paying more than 40 percent customs fees. This will raise the competitive advantage of Georgian wine in China, said Kumsishvili.Last year Georgia exported more than 2.6 million bottles of wine to China. This year we expect to export more than five million bottles of Georgian wine, he added.Georgia and China began discussing the possibility of establishing a free trade regime in September 2015. The first round of talks were held in Georgias capital Tbilisi in February 2016, while China hosted the second round of negotiations in May.The third round of free trade talks were held in Tbilisi in July and it was here where both countries decided not to hold a fourth round of negotiations but continue the talks in a smaller format in September.The final of these small format meetings was held yesterday in China, where both countries agreed on all rested and unsolved issues.With the Free Trade Deal, Georgia will be able to export its products to China  a market of 1.4 billion customers - without additional customs fees.When the agreement finally comes into play, Georgia will be the first country in the region to have this type of deal with China.
New secretary for National Security Council

By Messenger Staff

The President of Georgia has not yet named the new Secretary of Georgias National Security Council, since the acting secretary Irine Imerlishvili was recently named by the President as a candidate for Constitutional Court judge, together with Giorgi Kverenchkhiladze, who previously served as the Presidents Parliamentary Secretary.Georgian media outlets have speculated that either the current Deputy Secretary of Georgias National Council, Vano Matchavariani, or Georgias ex-Ambassador to NATO, Levan Dolidze, will take the position.The National Security Council shall be set up to organize the military development and defence of the country. The President of Georgia is the head the National Security Council.The National Security Council is an advisory body to the President of Georgia, and is empowered to consider issues determined by the Organic Law on National Security Council of Georgia to draft high political decisions.It is hard to say what type of decision President Giorgi Margvelashvili will make.Member of the Free Democrats opposition party and Georgias former Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Alex Petriashvili, says Dolidze would be an excellent candidate for the Secretary.Vano Matchavariani, who is the brother of one of main figures of the previous ruling United National Movement, Mikheil Matchavariani, has already caused certain strain between Margvelashvili and the founder of the current ruling Georgian Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili.Ivanishvili, whose choice was Margvelashvili to be President, has many times criticized the President for appointing Matchavariani as his advisor in foreign affairs issues.The President dismissed Matchavariani as his advisor, though he later appeared as part of the charity foundation of Georgias opera star Paata Burchuladze.However, this year Margvelashvili returned Matchavariani to his team and appointed him as deputy Secretary of Georgias National Security Council.It cannot be excluded that Matchavariani will be promoted further, as Margvelashvili refuses to cut professional ties with him despite the fact that he was one of causes of dispute with Ivanishvili and some other members of the current ruling team.
The News in Brief

Security Council meeting to be held on September 15



A Security Council meeting will be held on September 15. As President's Spokesperson Eka Mishveladze said, the meeting is scheduled for 16:00.



According to her, Irine Imerlishvili will be the secretary of the meeting.



The reforming of the Ministry of Defense will be the subject of discussion at the meeting. (IPN)







Ivanishvili blasts Burjanadze: Your non-bloc idea is a bluff



Former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili lashed out at opposition politician Nino Burjanadze on Sunday, accusing her of bluffing when she proposed that Georgia should declare a non-bloc status.



Burjanadze, a former Parliament Speaker, proposed in June that Georgia should declare in its Constitution that it will not be a member of any bloc or military alliance.



This would exclude NATO membership, which has been a main foreign policy goal since the 2003 Rose Revolution.



During a TV appearance in Kutaisi, Ivanishvili called the proposal a bluff. He was appearing on his sons TV channel GDS on one of the stops of a tour of the country in connection with the election campaign.



We have chosen a strategic direction and the entire society agrees with it, including Georgian Dream. Our course is Europe, EU and Euro Atlantic space, he said, and argued that Georgia doesnt have any other alternatives than NATO.



Burjanadzes proposal was seen as pro-Russian by most parties in parliament. The speaker made a counter-proposal to write in the Constitution that Georgia should seek integration with EU and NATO. When the initiative came up in the committee that considers citizens initiatives, the other parties failed to show up and both proposals were postponed. This sabotaged the petition drive Burjanadze had planned to make part of her campaign.



During questioning on Rustavi 2s election special, the Democratic Movement leader elaborated that declaring a non-bloc status and opening negotiations with Russia is the only way to remove the Russian soldiers from the breakaway territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia and achieve a reunification of the country. Her proposal says Georgia cannot have foreign troops on its soil, which means Russian soldiers must be withdrawn from the breakaway territories.



The dominating view in Tbilisi is that by becoming NATO member, Western countries will help Georgia reclaim the lost territories.



I dont think Mrs Burjanadze has great chances, Ivaninshvili said during the GDS appearance, adding that Georgian Dream agrees to have relations with Russia but not at the expense of occupied territories.



Chances of Burjanadze joining parliament are very low, in my opinion. (df WATCH)







Georgias top diplomat in Strasbourg to advance Georgias EU visa waiver



Georgias Foreign Minister Mikheil Janelidze is heading to Strasbourg to meet European Union (EU) and European Parliament (EP) officials and discuss the countrys visa liberalisation perspectives.



During his two-day visit on September 13-14, Janelidze was scheduled to meet an EP Vice President and representatives of several fractions and committees. The Georgian Minister will also meet Mariya Gabriel, the EPs rapporteur for a visa waiver proposal for Georgia.



A meeting with EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn is also planned.



Georgias Ministry of Foreign Affairs said all the meetings would discuss Georgias visa liberalisation process.



Janelidzes visit comes a week after the EPs Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) backed plans to grant Georgian citizens the right to travel to the Schengen area without a visa.



The Committee voted and approved a visa waiver for Georgia with 44 votes in favour, five against and one abstention on September 6.



After the voting and the adoption of the regulation by LIBE, the amendment must now be approved by the Council of the EU then at an EP plenary session.



Once the European Parliament as a whole and the EU Council endorse the legislative changes, Georgians will be able to enter the EU without a visa and stay for 90 days in any 180-day period, provided they hold a biometric passport.



Georgia is interested in completing this process as soon as possible so its citizens can travel without a visa to the EU and the Schengen zone. (Agenda.ge)




EU creates online platform to guide Georgian winemakers

New opportunities are opening for Georgian winemakers and wine-lovers through a new European Union (EU)-funded program to spur growth and exports of Georgian wine to the EU market.The new online database, which is currently under development, will provide a range of information about wine producers in Georgia and at the same time, help them to access key information about wine export opportunities to the EU.A hundred companies mainly from Georgias Kakheti and Kartli regions have been selected and interviewed to feature on the new website. The website will share information about these companies production, pricing and availability for export.Baia Abuladze, who produces Georgian wine under the brand name Baias Wine, had high hopes for the new online platform, as she believed local wine producers could gain valuable knowledge about quality international standards and how to market to Europe.We expect once the platform is launched, which is expected in December, all wine producers will be able to access information packages and through better knowledge of safe and quality wine production, more producers will export their products to Europe, Abuladze said.Since Georgia signed its Association Agreement (AA) with the EU in June 2014, new opportunities for local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) opened through the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA), which brought benefits and duty-free trade with the EU.In light of these new prospects, the Georgian Wine Association conducted an assessment of the wine and grape sector and found Georgian wine producers and people involved in the wine tourism sector lacked key knowledge and support for innovative product development, lacked access to finance and had few opportunities to exchange practices with their European counterparts.To solve this problem the EU funded the East Invest 2 regional investment and trade facilitation program that will work to support and develop the SME sector in Eastern Partnership countries, including Georgia.The East Invest 2 scheme, through one of its actions, set out to revitalise the Georgian wine industry by transferring knowledge from Bulgaria in the areas of wine marketing and standardisation.Therefore the Georgian Wine Association (GWA), an independent non-state organisation, has been partnered up with the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI).Taking into account the fact that there was no professional, business and information platform about wine and grape products in Georgia, the East Invest 2 program aimed to create an online platform to fill this missing gap.
The News in Brief

Russia to allocate 15 billion rubles for Georgias breakaway regions



Russia plans to allocate up to 15 billion rubles for Georgias breakaway regions until 2019. According to Ria Novosti, the information was released in a Finance Ministry letter published on its official webpage.



As reported, three billion rubles have been invested in Abkhazias social-economic development and 4.6 billion rubles - for the same reasons for South Ossetia.



Reportedly, 4 billion rubles will be allocated for budget investment support in Abkhazia and 3 billion for the Tskhinvali region. (IPN)







Court Orders CEC to Register Industrialists and Our Homeland Election Bloc



Tbilisi City Court has overturned a decision of the Central Election Commission revoking the electoral registration of the election bloc of the Industrialists and Our Homeland parties.



Chairperson of the Central Election Commission, Tamar Zhvania, deregistered the election bloc on September 11, citing that the bloc missed the deadline for submitting its party list of MP candidates.



The election bloc challenged the decision in the Tbilisi City Court, which ruled in favor of the appeal on September 13 and ordered the Central Election Commission (CEC) to register the election bloc and its MP candidates.



The CEC has yet to decide whether to take the decision to the Court of Appeals.



The Industrialist Party, led by MP Gogi Topadze, is a former partner of the GDDG ruling party in the now-dissolved GD coalition. Our Homeland is led by Zviad Chitishvili, who has dual citizenship of Georgia and Russia and has businesses in Russia; one of his pre-election promises is the distribution of Russian passports for Georgian citizens willing to become dual Russia-Georgian citizens. The party held several protest rallies outside opposition UNM party offices, burning effigies of ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili. (Civil.ge)







Vardzia ancient cave city to become accessible for people with disabilities



The ancient Vardzia cave city in Georgia's south is opening up to more tourists thanks to large-scale renovation efforts to make the site more accessible for people with disabilities.



The 12-13th century cave complex is one of the primary tourist destinations in Georgia and is visited by thousands of tourists every year.



The site features hundreds of rooms and passageways connecting the caves which were carved into rock formations. Residential, storage areas and wine cellars can also be found throughout the complex.



Rehabilitation works have been carried out at Vardzia for the past year to make the site more accessible to people with disabilities. In addition, ramps and other infrastructural necessities will be installed at the site in the near future.



The Director of the National Agency for the Cultural Heritage Preservation of Georgia, Nikoloz Antidze, said the project to adapt the complex for visitors with disabilities was "unprecedented" for Georgia.



On Tuesday, the Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia announced that the current rehabilitation works at Vardzia would improve visitor safety at the site and safeguard the natural rock formations.



These new efforts will include installing safety nets to catch falling stones and strengthen large cliffs with selective drilling done by expert mountaineers.



The ongoing works at Vardzia coincided with the announcement of a new project that aimed to restore Tchatchkari village  a 12th Century settlement  located on the north-eastern slope of the rock formation that houses Vardzia on its southern side.



Tchatchkari village, known as the supplier of wine for storage facilities in Vardzia throughout the Middle Ages, the historic role of the village will be given a new life to connect it with the cave city complex and the general tourist route in Georgias historic Javakheti region. (Agenda.ge)




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Match.com P. O. Box 25472, Dallas, TX 75225 Hello ! Thanks for the answer! My name is Olga. I' m 29 years old. I' m a honest and loyal person. But my life like night sky without

stars! I don' t have love in my life! I went on match.com only for a serious relationship. I think we can learn each other from our letters,

and it' s very romantic. I had relationship on the Internet, but it' s not fun. Because everyone wanted my naked photos. I think those men

didn' t have serious intentions. I stopped talking to them. If you don' t have serious intentions and it' s game for you. I don' t see any

reason to continue our talk. If you do not have serious intentions - Good luck in your search!!! I don' t have time for games! , I' m

looking only serious relationship and true love! , if you have good intentions, I hope





































































, I' m glad to see your latter! Thanks for the answer! I am very glad you' re looking for a serious relationship. Now we can continue our

talking. , I think it' s will fun! I want to learn about you and your life. that has told thanks me about your intentions. I so am

glad to that ours intentions and searches are similar to you. We search practically for one and too. It is remarkable. I seldom saw in

Russia men with thinking as at you. Now more men do not want long attitudes, only sex and all. And it is more than them that does not

interest. At men only animal interest. And it is very bad. I search for serious attitudes. I do not search for the man simply for a

disposable meeting. I' m 29 years old. I was born 25.04.1987. , when is your birthday? I' m 168 cm tall. I weigh 50 kg. My hair is fair. My

eyes is green. I enjoy reading and listening to music. My favorite color is green. I live in Kungur, that' s in Western Urals, Russia. I' m

single never been married, no children and I' m not in relationship now. Because I haven' t found the right men. I was in relationship when I

was student. It was 7 years ago. It' s relationship ended! I had bitter experience! I work for social service! I help retired people and

children from unsuccessful families. My work takes a lot of energy. I' m worry very often. But when I can see result of my work then I become

very happy! I make people happy and it make me happy! It makes me smile! I love to smile. Many people think I' m very happy woman, but it' s

not true! Because, I' m so lonely! I think loneliness and happy it' s different things! , I need in man who can make me happy! I want to

meet man with whom we will have true love! I want to be like a school girl getting that note from the pretty boy that turns her stomach into

butterflies when they meet eyes. I believe I will meet such a person. Because Love it' s very important in our life! I think love will live

forever! What do you think about it? Do you believe in true love? I hope for early reply!! Olga. P.S. I send you my pictures that you could see with whom speak. I hope you also you will send me your pictures to the answer. Hello ! Today I have come to library and have not seen your letter. I very much hope, that with you all is good also you receive my

letters. Only I do not understand why you write nothing to me. I very much hope, that our dialogue will proceed and tomorrow I can read your

letter. I hope for your fast reply. Olga. I am glad to see your answer to my letter. , I had fine day. Today there was a good weather. I very much love, when the sun shines! It

always lifts my mood. , thanks that has not much told about you. It is interesting to me to speak with you and I shall be glad to

continue our dialogue and to learn each other more. I hope that you will support ours with you dialogue. I am glad to see you in a picture.

You nice the man and I shall be glad to continue our dialogue. Before I go on match.com I has read through many clauses about the American

men and the USA. I have been surprised by similarities in searches of the American men and Russian women. In this clause it has been

described, what the American women think about marriage and creation of family. I never could think, that women in your country are

interested in career, instead of family. In my country each woman dreams of family, about marriage, about wedding. But men in Russia for a

long time have lost interest to it! The Most part of men in my country find interest in alcohol and an idle way of life. Therefore I am

lonely. I want with me was reliable the man which loves and respects with the woman. For me it is very important, that the man had only

serious relations! For me it is important that my man was true to me. , I do not wish to spend my life for the person who in any

opportunity can exchange me for other woman. , in my opinion the American men, are closer to that I search in the man. Therefore I have

decided to use Dating Site. , tell to me, please, that in your country think of Russian women? Whether it is valid women in your country

interest only money and career? I hope, that in the following letter we can continue this theme. Your friend Olga.



P.S. About my pictures: on the first I in my birthday with a pie in hands which to me have presented. On the second in a museum, before an

ancient mirror. Speak, that if to look at itself through this mirror you to not avoid a happy life. Hello! , I am glad to see your answer. How there was your day? How is the weather in your city? I had good day. , I am glad, that you

have written to me such greater letters. But you at all have not left to me time to write to you the good letter. But I shall try to have

time to make it and to answer your questions. , it was very interesting to me to read that you have written. I some times re-read your

letters. thanks you that you have more told to me about women in the USA and about a life as a whole. It was very interesting to me to

learn about it. In fact it is frequent in news and magazines write a deceit. And consequently I wished to learn your opinion on it. And me

it is pleasant that you have told to me about it. It is very sad that the majority of women to care of their financial position. It is very

sad. , I have removed my structure right after how you have written to me your first letter. And yes, I remember that you have written to

me after the first letter. You spoke that true love it that you want most of all. I think, that we should write each other more to learn

each other better. Today I wish to tell to you more about my life. I was born and have grown in the city of country side Suksun. In 2003, I

have left school. After leaving school I should choose my trade. I always wished to make the world better and to help people. Having

consulted to mum, I have made a decision to act in Kungur, " The Perm state pedagogical university" , Kungur branch. I have chosen the

sociologist. In 2008, I have ended institute. After the ending of institute I have returned to my native city. I have tried to find work in

Suksun. I wished to be closer to my mum, but could not find work in my native city. After that I have made a decision to come back back in

Kungur. Because in Kungur, I had more chances to find work. I have collected my things and have gone to a way. Having arrived in Kungur, I

was arranged to live in a hostel, after I went on labour exchange and have left there my resume. I long could not find anything suitable,

and I had to work as the waitress in cafe. It was very heavy work. But it allowed me to pay my residing. In four months to me have offered

work in Housing and communal services, on a post " the worker with the public ". I was very glad to this offer and there and then it have

accepted. I worked in this company during six years, before closing. Then I had to search for work again. I have found work in a social

service where I work now. To me brings pleasure my work. I think, that I have very successfully chosen a trade! My trade allows me to be

realized. It seems to me that self-realization is very important thing as it allows to feel a life really. , what do you do? What about

your profession? Do you like your profession? , I hope, that my today' s letter has allowed you to imagine I wash a life is little bit

better. I shall wait for your following letter and I hope, that you also to me will tell your biography. Olga.



P.S. I send you pictures with ours with the girlfriend of walk on autumn park. You like autumn? It is bad, that happens it' s wet and is

frequent it is raining, but what beauty appears around! All trees find various paints, reminding us about the last summer and covering the

ground the foliage. Hello ! Today I very much hoped, that I shall read your letter. But when has come to library has not seen anything on my mail. I very

much hope, that my letters have offended nothing you and our dialogue to proceed. Tomorrow I shall wait your letter and I hope, that you

will write to me it and will tell about what you were so is borrowed, that could not write. I hope, that you have the big day. Your friend Hello ! I hoped, that today you do not work and can write to me your letter. But probably to you not up to me. Tell to me about if you

do not wish to continue our dialogue that I did not spend vainly my time. And if you wish to continue to learn each other please try to

write to me your letters every day that I did not go to library vainly. I hope, that tomorrow I shall see your letter.I hope for your fast

reply. Olga. I am glad to see your letter. , I am very glad that we communicate and we find much in common. I very much would wish to learn you in the

further. thanks that has told to me about you. It was very interesting to me to learn about where you studied and worked. It is very

interesting. And it allows me to learn you better. In fact than more we shall tell about us. That we shall be better to learn each other.

And then we shall know to what will result us our dialogue. You agree with me in it? Today in my letter I wish to tell to you about my

family and about my close people. I was born and have grown in family of the military officer and the dressmaker. My father' s name is

Valentina, and my mother' s name is Alexander. My father has devoted all life to service to the native land. In 1994 during war in the

Chechen Republic he was lost. My mum told about my father much. She told that the father was very strong and brave the man. He did not know

compromises and always struggled for the truth and validity. He was the true patriot of my country. Mum told, when I was born, he has left

military service as very much was afraid to leave us one. But after on war in the Chechen Republic his close comrade was lost, he could not

remain more at home. My father did not sleep at the nights, has ceased to eat! Mine mum saw his experiences as my father suffered from

inactivity. My father could not stand aside, and in December 1994 has gone to the Chechen Republic. He wrote to mum of the letter and spoke

that he' s fine. But in February 1995 to us there has home arrived the chief of a staff and has told, that the father was lost on for special

mission in city Terrible. I have remembered clearly this moment! But I did not wish to trust and constantly repeated to mum, that the father

soon to us will return. Even after we have buried my father, in my heart there lived hope that is all a lie. Only becoming more adult, I

have finally understood, that more never I shall see my daddy. After death of the father, mum long could not come in itself. It was very

heavy period in our life. We with mum madly loved the father, and long could not be measured with loss. But my mum very strong woman! Mum

tried, that our life was adjusted, and tried to make all for this purpose! She has made all to give me good education. I remember, that she

worked at a textile factory! And after work late, mum murder will out clothes for sale. I tried to help with all to her, we together went

with her on the market to sell things which she murder will out. My mum has learned me to be strong and never to surrender, even if it will

be heavy. She always spoke, that the daddy looks at us from heavens and we should be strong. I am madly grateful to my mum because she has

much made for me. She has learned me to much. I know that to her it was heavy, I saw it. She for me always was and will be an ideal of the

true woman. True mum! Now my mother is 61 years old, six years ago she retired. But she continues to work. Mum, often sews dresses for me.

And I am very glad to it. I try to visit my mum more often. My mum the most close and most dear person. I madly love and I respect with my

mum. She not only my mum, she my close friend. I can talk with her on any themes! I know, that she always will support me and will give

correct advice. Now my mum lives, with her senior sister! She is my aunt. My aunt' s name is Irina. Irina, was married, but never had

children! After death of her husband she has moved to live to my mum. My aunt is 67 years old. Irina the fine person also it is very tasty

prepares. I am assured, that you would love her pancakes with a bilberry. I hope, that it was interesting to you to learn about my family. I

hope, that you will tell to me more about your family in following letters. I put a photo on which you can see my daddy to the letter. And

also In the first photo you can see mine mum Valentina and aunt Irina. My mum is on the right in a photo, and the aunt at the left. Then we

celebrated new year. We have perfectly spent time. In the second photo my daddy. Unfortunately it is a unique photo of mine of the daddy

which is at me. It is very important to me. I hope these photos will like you. , I shall wait for your answer. Your friend Olga. , today I had very busy day. In the morning I had adventures! When I went for work at me the heel has broken! I came back home, therefore

I was not late nearly. I do not like to be late. Therefore I had to run to be in time for work. You only imagine it!! In the morning all

people in a dozing condition go for work, and I on heels run by them. Probably passers-by have thought that I the madwoman. , me it was

very ridiculous, but I could not be late. It was mad day! , to me it is very pleasant, that you have written such big letter. But you at

all have not left to me time to write the letter and to answer your questions. But I shall try. Thanks for your pictures. But the some

people and them to me are not clear. I shall explain to you more about my work! I want that you understood, what I do. I already spoke you,

I work in the Social service. I have irregular working hours, sometimes I work from 8.00 to 19.00. I work five days a week. But sometimes I

have to work at weekend. I work as specialist in social work. I should check in-home conditions of a life retired people, if necessary

render them the various help. Sometimes it is cleaning of their house, sometimes delivery of necessary products and medicines, and I

sometimes simply hours sit at my wards and I talk to them about a life. As people whom I visit in are lonely also they have no anybody to

speak. I like to listen to histories from their life, it gives many lessons for me. , I very much love my work because I have an

opportunity to benefit people. Certainly my work, as well as any another has complexities. Many people are not able to appreciate the help

which him appears. For example, today I visited the old grandfather. His name is Valentin. He has very nasty character. He something is

constant is not happy! Today he has started me to abuse because I have not brought to him vodka. I have explained, that our company does not

render such services and that he cannot drink vodka! Because he has very much poor health, and he can die. But he has started to shout at

me. To me it was very insulting, because I care of him, and he does not respect with it. With similar situations, I should collide very

often! First time I often cried. But then I have learned to concern to it little bit easier. v, I hope that you understand what I spoke

you about my job. , are there the Social service in your country? I shall be glad to learn more about your job. I hope for your fast

reply! Olga.



P.S. My first picture as I look for my work. In the second picture we gathered together with children from a children' s shelter to release

all these spheres in the sky in day of protection of children. how there was your day? I am glad to see your answer. I like to talk to you. You very interesting interlocutor. , thanks that has

explained to me your pictures and has written to me the good letter. To me how you speak about my work is pleasant. It is pleasant to me,

that you answer my questions. I am glad, that you such open person. It was interesting to me to learn about your work. You as well as I help

people, only in your case you help them to save their money for their rest. You are right that earlier in Russia was not so a lot of help

for homelesses or for problem families. , I like to communicate with you and I shall be glad to learn you more. , I think, that in a

life there are two most important things it is love and friendship. We test both these feelings to people who in due course appear in our

life. The true love in a life of each person one! I think, that the true friends cannot be much. I have people whom I can name the true

friends. And I am grateful to destiny, that I have the true friends. My best friends name are Natalya, Vera, Svetlana. I am familiar with

Natalya since the childhood. We studied at one school and lived in the neighbourhood. Now Natalya, also lives in Kungur. She married also

works as the teacher at school. I have got acquainted with Vera in institute. We studied with her in one group. Now Vera, lives to Surgut.

She was married twice. her first marriage was unsuccessful because her husband had problems with alcohol. She has divorced from it several

years ago. Now she again married also is very happy. Last time I met with Vera three months ago then she came to me on a visit. With

Svetlana, we together work. She very good and sympathetic person. When I started to work, I had difficult situations, in which did not know

how to act. Svetlana, always gave me advice and supported me. She works in our office as the psychologist. Now she is 37 years old, she

married also has two children, the boy and the girl. , I am assured, if once you can meet Natalya, Vera, Svetlana. You would have liked

them. They really fine people. For me they are very important. I am grateful to them because they can always support a difficult minute of

my life. I hope, that it was interesting to you to learn about my friends. I shall wait for your answer. I shall be glad if you will tell to

me about your friends. Your friend Olga.



P.S. In pictures which I send you today, you see me and my girlfriend Natalya. Earlier we often spent time together, but now at it the

family and not so is a lot of time to lead it with me. But I understand it and I do not think at all to take offence. , with each our letter to each other we all become closer. I very much like that at us dialogue turns out. I am very glad to learn more

about you and your life! I very much hope, that this feeling is mutual. , I am very glad that you have such good friends. In any, even in

the most complex vital, a situation they will not leave you in a trouble. And at any problem they will assist. They are people On which

always it is possible to rely and share all problems and experiences. , I am very glad that you are surrounded with such people. Thanks

for your pictures. To me it is pleasant, that you show them to me. Your son is very similar to you. I thought, that it you in a youth. It is

very interesting to me to read your letter and I am always glad to see your letter and your pictures! I already spoke you I the open person!

I do not love an innuendo in dialogue. I wish to tell to you about my last relations. To me this theme is not pleasant, but I think you

should know about it. , I already spoke you in 2003, I have entered the institute. Then I was 17 years old. Then my friends already had

boyfriends. Sometimes they laughed over me because I never kissed. And I was 18 years old. I did not try to meet the guy, and thought that

it very much early for me. In institute every year we had ball. On these balls chose king and queen. I always was the ferial girl, and never

tried to be the focus of attention! I have been very surprised, when me have chosen queen. First I did not wish to go on a stage, but my

friends have insisted on it. Then sounded the name of the king of the ball, it was Nikita! We should dance. I remember, that I felt

awkwardly because I never danced with the man. I remember, that I have reddened and have escaped therefrom. After that I weigh evening cried

in a room. It was very a shame to me. Vera has calmed me, we long with her talked! Then I have forgotten about this unsuccessful ball. Next

day Nikita, has come to my group with flowers and has invited to appointment, but I have given up to it. After that he long looked after me,

and tried to achieve my attention. Then I was too naive and have thought, that I have fallen in love with him! We have started to meet him,

when I was 19 years old. First in our relations all was good, we understood and about respect concerned to each other. But when we last year

training, he has started to drink often, he shirked lessons. In institute wished him to deduct. Then I have suggested him to correct a

situation and began to help with study. Then I lived in a hostel with friends. Nikita, often came to me to a room, and I helped it with

study. And once having come to my room I have seen Nikita and my friend, her called Oksana! They were together in a bed. My heart has stood,

to me was madly sick from seen. I have escaped therefrom! I did not wish to come back more there and to see their faces. To me was sick to

realize, that he spoke me about love, looking in eyes! To me it was sick that he has exchanged me for my friend. I could not believe that

Oksana, could betray me. In fact we lived together five years, and I always tried to help her with all. I never bore her malice. I long

experienced from happened, I have moved to live in other room and avoided a meeting with Nikita and Oksana. Later week, I have gone home and

have talked about this situation to mum. Then she has given me advice! She has told, that there was no love and friendship. My mum has

advised to forget this situation, and to continue to live further. I have made as my mum has told. But I have solved, that my new relations

will be only with the man who will be more senior than me! Because the senior the man knows as to address with the woman. , for me the

most important in relations, is sincerity, honesty and confidence. , these things also are important for you? What exactly for you is

important in relations? I shall understand if for you it was unpleasant to hear about it. But I want that you knew all about me. I do not

want, that between us there were secrets. I hope, that you with me agree. Your friend Olga.



P.S. The majority of my pictures are taken from walks on open air. I very much like to spend time with advantage. I also like our nature. We

have many beautiful places. Hello !!! How there was your day? , I thought, that you will tell to me about your last attitudes. But you instead of it have started

to correct my letter. , I understand, that I write with mistakes. Simply I very much hurry up, and I print badly and consequently so it

turns out. But I am glad, that you understand that I write to you. It is interesting to me to speak with you and to learn you more. , I

want too you to know more about Russia. In my country there is a saying - in order to understand Russia you need to live in Russia. I will

try to explain to you what kind of life in my country. Russia - it is the biggest country in the world, in my country 83 regions of the

Russian Federation. It is like in your country 50 states. In Russia there are 180 various nations. Each nation has her history, culture,

language and traditions. All together, this is big and great history of Russia. We have are known poets Pushkin, Esenin, Tolstoy. Do you

know about them much? In Russia many various crafts. I send you some photos. The first photo are valenoks. It is Old Russian footwear. The

second photo - it gzhel and hohloma. It a little prophetic which associate with Russia. I hope, that it will be interesting to you. ,

often on TV programs about what foreigners are saying about my country. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Because many are mistaken in his

statements about Russia. Really, Russia has a lot of problems. But Russia is a wonderful country. I love Russia, with all its advantages and

disadvantages. And I think everyone should love homeland! What do you think? am I right? I hope, that it was interesting to you to learn

about my country. You can tell to me more about your country? Yours faithfully Olga.



p.s. I am sending you a poem by Pushkin. " WINTER MORNING "



Frost and the sun; day wonderful!

Still you doze, the friend charming-

It is time, a beauty, wake up:

Open looks are closed by luxury

Towards to northern Aurora,

Star the north be!



Evening, you remember, the blizzard was angry,

In the muddy sky the haze rushed;

The moon, as a pale spot,

Through clouds gloomy turned yellow,

And you sad sat-

And now. . . Have a look in a window:



Under blue heavens

Magnificent carpets,

Shining on the sun, a snow lays;

The transparent wood one blackens,

And the fur-tree through hoarfrost turns green,

And the small river under an ice shines.



All room amber shine

It is lit up. A cheerful crash

The flooded furnace cracks.

It is pleasant to think at a stove bench.

But you know: whether to order in sled

Mare brown harnessed?



Sliding on a morning snow,

The friend the darling, we shall be betraid to run

Impatient horse

Also we shall visit fields empty,

Woods, recently so dense,

And coast, lovely for me how there was you today? How your state of health? , I am glad that you liked history about Russia. Our country has huge and very

interesting history. Probably if we when be we shall meet, then I shall tell to you more about my country, sitting for a cup of coffee. It

would be healthy. I would think we have found themes for conversation and would compare properties of our countries. In fact our countries

are majestic and beautiful. Thanks for your very interesting story about your country and for your pictures. To me it is very pleasant, that

at you on a computer I pictures is visible always. But I have not understood that for an arch and for what it is necessary? What its

function? Today my day has passed very well. Since the morning I had an excellent mood. Having woken up, I have looked in a window, there

was an excellent weather. Speak, that as you will begin day so it and you will lead. I very much love, when my morning begins with a smile.

I read in one very cognitive book, that the person even in a unpleasant situation should speak itself, that could be and worse than now. On

the one hand it looks ridiculously. , but it really helps to motivate itself and to not be upset on trifles. I very much like to read,

and often books in which attitude of people is discussed, their attitude to problems come across to me. , tell, and how you concern to

problems in a life? What helps you to struggle, and to not lose courage in a complex situation? You share with someone the ideas and

experiences? Personally I cannot hold all of a problem in myself. I almost about all talk to my mum, or Natalya. Today I just have met with

Natalya in grocery shop. We were very glad to a meeting, and have gone what to have a bite in cafe. We have talked that new has occured from

our last meeting. Natalya, married, they for a long time with the husband wished to get the child, at last Natalya has become pregnant. It

has told, that already on the second month of pregnancy. I was madly glad to this news, I have congratulated it on so significant event.

Then we long talked and about the past. , I have told Natalya, that I communicate with you. It has started me to ask, about you. I have

told to it, that I very much am pleasant like with you, and that you very decent the man. It has told to me to be cautious and that heard

bad histories about girls who marry foreigners much. It has started to tell to me various unpleasant histories, but I have stopped it and

have asked to not lift this conversation henceforth. I have explained Natalya, that it is not necessary to experience for me, you very good

person, besides we at present simply learn, about each other. , do not take offence on Natalya, it only experiences for me. Natalya, very

good, kind and sympathetic person, it always supports me a difficult minute, and shows care of me. I hope, that you will understand its

experiences. , and you, spoke with someone what you write to me? If yes, I would like to know opinion of your relatives and friends about

ours with you dialogue. Relatives, always care of us, and try to warn us, I always listen to their opinion, but I do how I consider it

necessary. Therefore as it is my life, and to live it to me. I am deeply confident that ourselves we build the destiny. And all in our life

depends only on ourselves! In the end of our conversation Natalya, has invited me on a visit to itself next week. It has told, that wishes

me to treat with a new dish of own preparation. I as very much like to prepare, and we is frequent with it we exchange experience. , I

would like too for something to surprise Natalya, you could tell to me about kitchen in the USA, and give any recipe? I would be very

grateful to you. My pictures, that I send you today, are taken at various times year. In the first picture we with the girlfriend skated. On

the second we is not far from the house of my mum, in a floor where these flowers grow. , you know that it for flowers? On it I shall

finish the letter, I hope, that at you all is good, and soon I shall see your answer. Your friend Olga. , how are you? Today I have received the letter from unfamiliar email addresses. I thought it you have written to me from another email.

But when I have read through your letter I have understood, that it was written by one of those of the man who wrote to me earlier. He again

asked naked photos and called me the robot. I have not understood, that he wished to tell it. I am not interested in it. I have removed its

letter. I hope, that he will not write to me anymore. I am surprised that men happen are very impudent! I do not understand, how they can

ask a naked photo from the girl? Unless the man does not understand, what he offends by it the decent woman??? Probably, I do not understand

something. I am brought well up also I shall never send naked photos. I think that the woman should belong only to one man! I was brought up

by my mum, and I am assured, that it is correct. Much in the world varies, it seems to me, that gradually people go mad. I think that people

lose feelings of conscience, shame, modesty and fidelity! Sometimes I think, that many people have forgot to love. People have replaced

light feelings with false values. People gradually become heartless! , I am very grateful to my mum, that she has given me good

education! Maybe, I am a little old-fashioned, but I know that I have heart! I know, that my conscience is pure. I know, that I have people

who sincerely loves me. And for me it is important!!! I am glad, that you with understanding have concerned to experiences of my friend

Natalia and do not hold on it a harm. It only experiences for me and wishes me is kind, that I was happy. To me it is pleasant, that you are

not one of such men. I trust you and I wish to learn you more. , thanks that has more told about your country and about you. I am glad,

that you as well as to me like to communicate with each other. I hope, that our dialogue will come to something to greater, than simply

friendship. Thanks for your picture. You nice the man. , I shall be glad to any recipe on your discretion and I do not care of how many

money will go on products. The only thing to you needs to be considered, that it will eat Natalya. I hope, that you can choose itself, that

it will be better to prepare. , it is a pity to me, that you spoke with the girl who played with you and your feelings for the sake of

money. I do not understand such people. For what they do it? For the sake of money? Unless in them happiness? I can provide myself with all

necessary independently, and greater it is not necessary for me. Thanks for your pictures. You nice the man and I are glad, that we are

familiar with you. , tomorrow 23 June, my aunt' s birthday. I have taken the day off on work, and I shall go to them in country side

Suksun to make a surprise. I have prepared for a gift for aunt Irina. My gift is the room flower " Eucalyptus. " This flower possesses, bright

aroma and allows to leave air in a room pure and fresh. I think, that she will like this gift! She very much loves room flowers. I hope,

that I was not mistaken with a choice. , I shall finish my letter, I need to go on the bus to go in country side Suksun. Forgive, today I

have no photo to send you! I shall send a photo when I shall return. I shall wait for your following letter. Your friend Olga. , I am glad to see your answer. I spoke you that, I went in country side Suksun. Today I have returned in Kungur. I had a good trip. My

aunt Irina, liked my gift. She said she would put " Eucalyptus " next to the bed. , I was happy to see my aunt' s smile. I think that in a

life very important, to see happiness of close people. I had good time in the house of my mum. We made a celebratory supper. It was

cheerful. We prepared salad " Olivie " , pot roast and cake for dessert. It was very tasty. I liked the cake, we baked it mother' s

prescription. It is called " fallen leaves " . This pie gathers from several cake becomes covered by a special cream. , do you like

sweets? If you love sweet then you would love this pie. , would you like to try it? My aunt very intelligent person. She worked as the

teacher of Russian and the literature at school. She read us poems of Pushkin and Yesenin. Sometimes I think, that she knows all Russian

poetry by heart. My mum and Irina have asked me about my private life. I have told about ours with you dialogue. They have been very

surprised, that there were opportunities to speak with someone from other country! They also have been surprised that I speak with the man

from other country. Mum has started to ask me about you, I have told that you very good person. I have told, that you the sociable, kind and

sympathetic person. Besides very nice the man. That I like to speak with you and to learn you more. I have told that you sincerely speak

about you and your life, and about your ideas. What is the intentions have exclusively kind and serious character. My mum, has told that I

never forgot about education which she have given me!!! She wants that I always remained the decent girl! My mum is glad that I have dared

to build relations and family. She has advised to do, that speaks my heart. She has asked to show your photo next time. I have promised,

that I shall make it. , can I show your photos to my mother? , I do not pay attention to people which ask from me naked pictures. To

me it is indifferent, that they write. At them is not present what cultural wealth. Them it is very a pity to me. I am very glad that you

brought up and polite the man. You differ from these ill-bred people. I am glad that have got acquainted with you. With you it is very

interesting to me. Thanks for your recipe and figures how it to do. I have understood, that it is necessary to divide chicken breast. I

hope, that at me all will turn out. I think, that this very tasty dish. , my mum asked that I spent the night in her house. But I have

returned in Kungur because I do not wish to leave your letter without the answer. , me it is very pleasant, that I am familiar with you!

Your letters and your life are very interesting to me. , I hope to see your answer tomorrow. Olga.



P.S. I send you pictures of how I looked in one of winters. Then to me all spoke, that I am similar to the little girl. how you

consider, they are right? How there was your day? What is your weather like? , to me it is very pleasant that you were interested in a trip from my city in the

USA. But I think, that to us while early to speak about it. We need to learn more each other and then we shall see to what it goes.))))),

thanks for your pictures. I am always glad to read your letters and to look at your pictures. I am surprised, that you have found the

information on our museum in Suksun. I was there and not once. When you look at all the eyes it on much more interesting and you can feel

communication with history of creation of these samovars. , all day I thought of my mother' s words. My mum has told, that when I shall

meet my destiny then my life completely to change. And I should be ready to these changes. Mum has told to me history as she have got

acquainted with my daddy. Then, my mum lived with parents in Orenburg. She worked in a sewing factory. Once, when mum has gone to cinema she

has met the father. Mum speaks, that remembers his image, he was big strong, beautiful the man! She could not take her eyes off him. The

father also noticed my mother and asked her to hold up home. My mother has agreed! Thus began the love story of my parents. My father was 12

years older than my mother. Then he was the officer of the Soviet Army. And after 6 months their dating, he was sent to serve in Suksun. My

mum had to leave parents and work to be together with my father. She has gone together with the father in Suksun. My mother told me that it

is very hard to be an officer' s wife. But my mum never regretted that has left all to be together with my father. Mum was very happy, when

told to me it. Mum has told, that together with the father she was happy every day and every minute. It is really big and complex step to

leave all for the sake of the beloved. Today I spent the whole day thinking would be I able to do also? It is valid not the simple decision!

But I think that I could make it. , can you leave everything for your beloved? Can you start life with a clean slate? I send you my

pictures, where I with different color of hair. Many girls including I, like to change color of hair. How you think, what color to me is

better? I shall wait your letter. I hope, you will answer my questions, it is important for me. Your friend Olga. , I am glad to see your letter! , thanks for such substantial letter. I like to speak with you. It is very interesting to me to learn

about you and your life. you are for me special the man. To me dialogue with you is very pleasant. And I am glad that I have started to

communicate with you, but I think that we should suffer a little and hardly it is better to learn each other. And then we can precisely

learn to what it goes. And then I can tell what feelings I to you I test. I hope you will understand me in it. Also you would will give me a

few time that I have thought of all. , thanks for your pictures. It is a pity to me, that I do not see a picture you today. I write to

you from other library. In their our city a little and only in one I can use a computer. To me it is pleasant, that you answer my questions.

I like to speak with you and to learn you more. , I had very intense day on work today. I went to check Smirnov' s family. It is having

many children and unsuccessful family. I watch this family. I visit their time in two weeks. I check their conditions of a life, health of

children and a condition of mother. They live without the father, he has left them two years ago. Galina it is mum of this family. Galina

had problems with alcohol. It is very a pity to me of her children. I try to explain Galina that she has refused alcohol and have regretted

children! But she never listened to me. One month ago her wished to deprive with the parental rights. But then she has promised that will be

corrected. Today I have been surprised that, all have changed. Galina did cleaning the house, her children were neatly dressed and smiling

at me. She has cooked a tasty dinner and has invited me to have a dinner with them. I have agreed. Galina has thanked me, that I have opened

to her eyes on her problems. She has told to me, that very much worried, when her husband has left them!! She very much was afraid, that

there was one with problems. I am very glad, that Galina have found forces and have solved this problem. After a dinner when I left their

house to me has approached Anna. Anna oldest Galina' s daughter. Anna has told to me, that they are very grateful, because I have returned to

them mum! She has given me the curtailed leaf. She has asked to not forget and visit them. I have promised, that them I shall visit more

often. When I have left the house then I have opened a leaf it there was a figure. On it their family has been represented. On a leaf It has

been written " for Olga " me very much has touched and has forced to shed a few tears! I was very pleased to feel necessary person! Today I

was once again convinced of necessity of my work! I understand that my work is very important for people. I believe that Smirnov' s family is

now all is well. , tell to me about your day? Your friend Olga.



P.S. I send you my pictures. Then we with the girlfriend walked on open air along the river. I like to walk there, where air pure and fresh.

I like to look at the nature and beautiful landscapes which open before you when you leave hardly further from a civilization. Hello dear !!! Thanks for your letter and your words about me and my work. I really like to help to people and I love my work! in

Russia wedding rings carry on the right hand. At me a ring on the left hand. It not a wedding ring. Therefore you do not need to worry

because of it. If I had a husband, I would not search for the man on a site of acquaintances. And the more so would not began to communicate

with other men. My ring, it is simple an ornament. It is a gift of my Mum for my 18 years. She has presented me this ring with words when I

shall meet the man of my Dream, I can change clothes of this ring on the right hand. And it should bring to me happiness in private life. I

hope that now you understand it? My aunt carries that ring on the fourth finger of the left hand because it shows that it the widow and is

still betraid to its husband. If its husband was alive, it would carry this ring on the fourth finger of the right hand. , thanks for

your pictures! I like to look at you and I agree with you, that it would be advisable to you haircut. To me it is pleasant, that you have

become interested in the Russian literature. Yesterday I long could not fall asleep. Because I have met Nikita. When I saw his, my heart is

not trembled. Earlier I very long would think of this meeting. But now I do not wish even to think of those gloomy memoirs. I long thought

that has changed my consciousness??? , many of my coworkers say that to my face smile never disappears, and I became even more

vigorously. , I did not give to it value. But after a meeting with Nikita, I have understood that I very much have changed. if I have

met Nikita earlier, I again would think of those bad memoirs. But now I do not wish to long and think of the past. , you have helped to

forget to me about the last relations. I have learned to see many negative things on the other hand. I am assured, it you have helped me!

, you are open person, you are cheerful and wise. I have learned much at you. Our dialogue to me gives to confidence and allows me to

feel as princess. I never tested such care and man' s attention to me. It is very pleasant! , I am assured, that any woman with you would

be happy. You are an amazing man! I am surprised, that you have great heart. Such people as you very little! I am very happy because I can

communicate with you. My pictures which I send you today, are taken on my work. My girlfriend earlier often came to me for work when it had

a break on its work or the free time is simple. , thanks that you have appeared in my life! I never had such friend as you. You are a

lovely person and a wonderful man. Olga. Hello dear !!! Thanks for your letter and your words about me and my work. I really like to help to people and I love my work! in

Russia wedding rings carry on the right hand. At me a ring on the left hand. It not a wedding ring. Therefore you do not need to worry

because of it. If I had a husband, I would not search for the man on a site of acquaintances. And the more so would not began to communicate

with other men. My ring, it is simple an ornament. It is a gift of my Mum for my 18 years. She has presented me this ring with words when I

shall meet the man of my Dream, I can change clothes of this ring on the right hand. And it should bring to me happiness in private life. I

hope that now you understand it? My aunt carries that ring on the fourth finger of the left hand because it shows that it the widow and is

still betraid to its husband. If its husband was alive, it would carry this ring on the fourth finger of the right hand. , thanks for

your pictures! I like to look at you and I agree with you, that it would be advisable to you haircut. To me it is pleasant, that you have

become interested in the Russian literature. Yesterday I long could not fall asleep. Because I have met Nikita. When I saw his, my heart is

not trembled. Earlier I very long would think of this meeting. But now I do not wish even to think of those gloomy memoirs. I long thought

that has changed my consciousness??? , many of my coworkers say that to my face smile never disappears, and I became even more

vigorously. , I did not give to it value. But after a meeting with Nikita, I have understood that I very much have changed. if I have

met Nikita earlier, I again would think of those bad memoirs. But now I do not wish to long and think of the past. , you have helped to

forget to me about the last relations. I have learned to see many negative things on the other hand. I am assured, it you have helped me!

, you are open person, you are cheerful and wise. I have learned much at you. Our dialogue to me gives to confidence and allows me to

feel as princess. I never tested such care and man' s attention to me. It is very pleasant! , I am assured, that any woman with you would

be happy. You are an amazing man! I am surprised, that you have great heart. Such people as you very little! I am very happy because I can

communicate with you. My pictures which I send you today, are taken on my work. My girlfriend earlier often came to me for work when it had

a break on its work or the free time is simple. , thanks that you have appeared in my life! I never had such friend as you. You are a

lovely person and a wonderful man. Olga. , I very often think that I am tired from injustice. , I wish to create my world together with loved by the man. I want, that in this

world there were only we and only our love. This all that I want in a life. I do not want anything except for the true and sincere love. I

think that the most important in a life is love! I think, that only the love can make the person rather happy. , what do you think about

this? , thanks that has written to me today! I am always glad to read your letters! I as shall be glad to see your pictures! I like to

speak with you! Thanks for your pictures! You very nice and attractive the man! I am glad, that I have such friend as you! It is a pity to

me, that today I have no time to write to you the good letter. But I hope, that you will understand me and will not be angry. Today my mum

will come to visit me. We every year this day we meet mum. Because this day especial for our family. This is the day my parents' wedding.

Now I shall write to you my letter and I shall go to meet my mum. I shall wait for your letter! Olga. , I had fine day! I have woken up in good mood. , you answer the most part of questions. I at all do not understand for what you

asked, if itself have answered? In fact I told to you about my last attitudes. , I did not speak with my was. To me with it any more

about what to speak! Therefore you can not worry about it. As to following questions. I never had intimate affinity with the man. I take

care for the man of my dream! My name is Olga Aleksandrovna. I love pets. I hope, that I have answered all your questions. Yesterday when I

have met my mum we have gone home. We have cooked a supper. We talked about the father much. Mum recollected interesting cases from their

life. After mum has asked about you. I have told to her, that we continue to communicate, and you very much like me. I have told, that we

well understand each other! I have told that we with you have much in common. I have shown mum your photo. , she thinks that you the

darling. Mum has allowed me advice to not lose time! She has told that I should make, that feels my heart! Mum has told that I should not

hide my feelings. After a supper we have laid down to sleep. , I could not sleep for a long time and I thought of my mother' s words. ,

I am valid I think of you much. In my heart you have borrowed very much the most part. I to you did not tell, but I often imagine us

together. I think, that I would be happy to be together with you. I long could not dare to tell to you about it. I am afraid your reaction.

, I very much hope that you understand, that you are very similar to which man I searched for all my life. You the good friend and I am

afraid to lose you. , I do not know, that to me happens, but I think, that I love you!!!! , I have decided to tell to you about it

because you should know about my feelings. , what do you feel for me? Who am I for you? It is very important to me to know it! I with

impatience shall wait for your answer! Yours Olga.



P.S. I shall write not much about my pictures. On the first I am simple. On the second I with a bouquet of colors which to me, as well as

all my colleagues, their female part, have presented for March, 8th. At us on work so it is accepted, that for a man' s holiday the female

part of collective does gifts of a man' s part, and on a female holiday on the contrary. I hope you you understand that I speak. , I today have woken up very happy!!! You came to me in my dream. , we were together. You held my hand and looked in my eyes. It was

very real dream! I have remembered your words. , you have told to me " OLGA I LOVE YOU ". It was perfectly! I did not want, that it came

to an end. But when I have woken up I have understood that it was a dream. This dream was fine!!! Today I have a smile all the day long. I

with impatience waited when I can go to library to read through your letter. Now I read your letter and I have tears in my opinion. , it

is tears of pleasure. I am happy to read your letter. Your letters this all that are at me. But this all finest, that was with me. , I

was never happy, as now. I look forward to your letters like a school girl getting that note from the pretty boy that turns his stomach into

butterflies. , I cannot describe, that I test. I very much wish to shout!!! I very much wish to shout that you have heard me! I want that

you have heard about my love! I LOVE YOU ! I am assured of it! I feel it my body and my soul! I am assured, that you the man which I

waited all my life. I am assured, that only you can make me happy! , your love is necessary to me! You are necessary to me only! , my

black and white world has turned into color. , I never tested such feelings! I understand that, at last the love has come to my life!

This love heats me from within! This love is capable to change all my life! , thanks, that you are in my life! Thanks, that you have

learned me to love! I very much wish to look in your eyes and to tell to you about my love! , do you want that my dream become a reality?

, do you want us to be together? , I with pleasure read your letter and I cannot transfer words that I felt at its reading! You have

written so much, that have not left to me time that I could write to you more. But I hope, that you will like to read my letter! , I the

virgin and consequently about what orgasm can go speech? It is a pity to me, that I have no time to answer all your questions. But I hope,

that you will ask again that for you is important. I send you my pictures from one of many ours with the girlfriend of walks on open air.

That day there was a wonderful flying weather. , MY LOVE I WILL WAIT FOR YOUR LETTER WITH IMPATIENCE! I AM HAPPY, THANKS YOU FOR IT!

Yours and only yours Olga. My love, I am glad to see your letter! I am happy, that my feelings are mutual. I trust, that we shall be the happiest pair in the world!

, we needed to meet. , I am grateful to destiny that she has given us chance to become happy! , we with you have deserved love! We

have deserved the right fortunately! We suffered in a life much! Time for our happiness has now come! , now we shall begin our new happy

life! , I with greater pleasure read your letters! I love your dream!!! I want, that all our dreams were carried out! I do not imagine on

how many I would be happy! I never could forget such put!!! I very much hope, that once all this becomes real and we can embody our dreams

in a reality! I never was on the sea and never saw ocean and everything that you have not shown me, will be greater surprise for me! But how

you describe our first joint day at a meeting, it is simply wonderful! when I read your letter felt a shiver on my body and had a goose

leather!!! , I have good mood. do you know what happened yesterday? Yesterday you came again to me in a dream. It was so beautiful.

, each time my dreams become more and more real! I never was on the sea! , but today we were together on a beautiful beach! It was the

sea, the sun, white sand and we! JUST US! JUST YOU AND ME! We laid and looked against each other! I saw my reflection in your eyes. You

whispered something to me, but I could not understand it. I have come nearer to you to hear, what you speak. And we have merged in a

passionate kiss. You caressed my shoulders and hair!!! You kissed my neck a. Each your kiss burnt me!!! When I have opened eyes I felt this

heat. , it was so fine dream! I have tried to fall asleep again. I wished to appear again together with you! But I could not fall asleep

again a , I very much want that my dreams were carried out! I want that we were together. I wish to be together with you and to feel your

breath. For me it does not matter how and where we will live. , for me it is important that we were together! That' s all I want! , I

wish to roll in your embraces. I LOVE YOU MINE !!! I send you millions air kisses! I hope, my letter will warm you! Yours and only yours

Olga.



P.S. My pictures as it is usual from walks on open air. Then there was an autumn and all around accepted various colors! I like autumn, when

there is no a rain and is yet cold. It is very beautiful. how was your day? I had good day. In the morning I had meeting on work. This meeting was prolonged till a dinner. After a dinner I have

borrowed in detour of my wards. I have visited Smirnov family. Galinas was absent at home, she was on work. But its children have met me.

They were all right, it is very pleased me! I have a little talked to children and have gone further. After I have visited Tatiana Sergeevna

and Nina Yurievna. These are two women who are older than 80 years. The last month we have occupied them in a hostel because in their houses

there were conditions not suitable for residing. I have brought for them products and medicines. I have talked about their health. After

Tatiana Sergeevna has told to me, that I sparkle as a brilliant on the sun! She has noticed, that I am very happy! She has told that never

saw me such! Tatiana Sergeevna has told, that she at once has understood that I have fallen in love. I was surprised and have asked her why

she so thinks? She has told, that enamoured difficultly to not notice. And then I have told to her about you. Tatiana Sergeevna it has been

surprised, that we have got acquainted through internet. She was is very surprised that two persons from the different countries can to

communicate without problems with each other. I have told to her, that I think of a meeting with you. Tatiana Sergeevna has told, that I act

correctly and that I should listen to my heart then I can become happy. But conversation has entered Nina Yurievna. Nina Yurievna has told,

that does not trust, that it is possible to grow fond of the person of whom never met. I have explained to her, that I read your letters! I

have told that I know your ideas and I feel you my heart! I and have enough of it. I have told also have told that for me the soul of the

person is important. Because only the person with the big soul can love really! Tatiana Sergeevna has supported me! She asked that Nina

Yurievna did not give me any advice. Then I have returned for work. When the working day has ended I has gone home! I thought of

conversation with Tatiana Sergeevna and Nina Yurievna. , I think that Nina Yurievna never loved, because she thinks that the true love

cannot exist on distance. I think, that for the true love there is no distance and barrier. , what do you think about this? , thanks

for your letter and your pictures! I with pleasure read your lines! I like your dreams and I very much hope, that once all our dreams can be

carried out in a reality! , I do not think, that mail in Russia should be trusted. We on former works very badly. I would be very happy

to receive from you something by mail. But I shall be upset, if you parcel will not reach me. Here my address: 60a Truda, Kungur, Perm

Region, Russia, 617480. , thanks that has told to me about diamonds and about that. Why in your country it is accepted to give their

women. To me it is very pleasant, as you speak about me! I some times read your letter and now at me not enough time to write to you back.

But I hope, that I have answered all your questions. As to phone I shall try to find an opportunity to call to you. As soon as I shall know

something about it I shall necessarily inform you. My pictures from walks on open air. I like to spend time on the nature. It is a pity just

to time not always on it enough. But I try to get out more often of city and easier to walk and enjoy the nature. I LOVE YOU !!! The

whole! I shall wait for your letter. I miss you! Yours and only yours Olga. , I am glad to see your letter! Your letters warm my soul! , how was your day? What is your weather like? I am very glad to read about

your feelings for me! , I have no the car and I move on foot or on public transport. I am glad, that you like that I tell to you about my

day. Thanks for your letter and your pictures! I like to look at you and to read your lines! , I too wish to speak by with you to phone

and as soon as I shall find an opportunity I shall necessarily call to you! , every day my love to you all becomes stronger. I cannot

think of what except for you. , every minute I think only of you. I very long thought about Tatiana Sergeevna' s words. , I think, we

should meet. In my opinion it is necessary for opinion for us. when we shall meet we we can discuss all event between us! Then we can

understand that we are necessary the friend for the friend. , in my heart there are no doubts about my feelings for you. I am assured,

that we are created the friend for the friend. We can feel all only when we shall meet! What do you think about our meeting?? , I very

much worry that think your close people of me? They will be happy for us, if we are together? What do you think? , very important for me

to know about it! That about my close people, do not worry. , my mom and my friends are very good to you. , for my close people it is

important, that I was happy. I shall be happy only with you!!! Today I send you my pictures, where I with a different hairdress and long

hair. I hope, that you will tell your opinion on how to me it will be better. I shall wait for your letter and answers to my questions! I

hope that we want the same! I LOVE YOU !!! Yours and only yours Olga.



P.S. I send you a verse:



And me in Your kisses to be dissolved a

Snowflake to thaw a

And a match to burn down a

And me tear with cilia to roll down a

Melody of tenderness

In heart clink a

And me in Your embraces to be lost,

Yes so that it is more

Nobody has found a

And in Your bed it to appear to me

And passionately to whisper,

As to me it is good a

And me with You to fall asleep - to not wake up a

On a body shaking

Wave run a

And me to palm with Yours to touch a

And I not I get tired

Of it to dream a



It speaks about my feelings for you! I hope you like it! I am glad to see your letter. That you have written thanks me. , I love you, I miss you, I need you. Only your letters give me a smile.

, forgive, that has not written to you yesterday. In library there was no Internet. But I am happy, that today everything is all right!

Thanks for all your words about me and for your poem. I with pleasure read your letter! I very much like your poem! , I never travelled

earlier and at all I do not know that is necessary for this purpose. I work much and I have no time for travel. I earn 150 dollars a month.

It suffices me on providing itself with all necessary and to make some savings. , I have the passport of the citizen of the Russian

Federation. I shall try to make its copy to send it to you. Only as you can something make? If you speak about any documents I will need to

do them in Russia. You so do not think? In any case I need to learn about all most and then I can tell to you that we need to do to meet.

And in general all over again I need to talk about it to my mum. If it will be against I in general cannot go anywhere. But I hope, that mum

will understand me. Therefore you can not waste time on learning something. As soon as I shall know about opinion of my mum, we can start to

learn about all. Well? , I am glad, that you and native and will not be against we are going to be together. You can not worry for my

work. I think, that we can think up something. , I not absolutely understand why you ask about that site where we have met each other.

From your first letter I am not more there. I could not make my structure from Russia and to me have helped to make it from the USA. For

this purpose I should specify that I live in Tampa. Odelmada is a set of letters which nothing means. I hurried up and have simply typed at

random and have then corrected not much and such word which nothing means has turned out. , tell, you have come across what messages?

Thanks for your picture! The truth you it is badly visible, but to me it is pleasant! I have understood what picture to you it is pleasant

most of all. I hope, that tomorrow I shall read your letter and I shall see your pictures. Today I have woken up early! Then I have gone to

visit my friend. We had a breakfast! Then we decided go shopping. , I wished to make a few purchases to update my wardrobe. I have bought

a dress, jeans and a few shirts. A dress very beautiful, I am assured you will like that. I have bought this dress specially for our first

meeting. , for me our meeting is very important! I want to look good, for you like me. Therefore I very long chose a dress! I tried to

choose the most beautiful dress. Natalya, said she was tired to go shopping with me. She has told, that I never chose things long. I have

told to her that earlier I bought my things for me. Now I want that it was pleasant to you. And consequently the choice became much more

difficult. After we have come into cafe, and had some coffee. Then we have gone home. In my pictures which I send today, I in a dress, which

murder will out for me my mum. It very much is pleasant to me and I often dress it when weather allows. when we shall be together, we

shall be the happiest pair in the world! , I shall make everything that you always smiled. When you smile, you are happy, and if you are

happy, I am happy also! It is the simple formula of our happiness. , tell me how you imagine our first meeting? I with impatience shall

wait for your answer. Yours and only yours Olga. My love ! I am very glad to see your letter! Each your word warms my heart and soul. You can not imagine, how I am glad to read your

letter. I miss you so much when I do not see your letters. That today you have written thanks me! , to me it is very pleasant, that you

have written so much. I very long read your letter. Thanks for your pictures! You very beautiful the man and you should not cry never! And

yes, you have correctly found dormitory in which I live. I rent there not a greater room. , me it is very pleasant, that you offer your

help, but your money are not necessary to me. I am fine with all I consult. Besides I do not know that such the Western union. You are

necessary to me only and only your love ! Money is not the main thing in a life! The main thing people who do you happy! , we with

Natalya cannot choose day when both of us we shall be free. Therefore while all of us still we plan. Thanks for your answer to my question

on how you represent our first meeting! It is very romantic! I with impatience wait that day when we with you for the first time can embrace

you and kiss! how you have written to me in Russian? You know our language? You did not speak it. , I think, that our meeting should

come nearer. In my town there is travel agency. I shall learn more about my trip to you in travel agency. I will need in your information.

Please give me your full name, your address, the name of your closest airport. I think, that it will be necessary in travel agency. I hope

you will give me your information in your letter. , I am glad, that we have found each other. I am assured, together we shall be the

happiest pair in the world. You are necessary to me only and only your love! , I shall soon in your embraces! Then we can carry out all

our dreams. I promise you, you will always have a smile in your face. I shall make everything that you were happy! When I close eyes, I

imagine us together. Only you in my ideas! Only love to you in my heart !!! , very soon we shall together! I think only of it. , I

am so sorry but I should go! Now I shall go to mum in Suksun! I shall inform my mum, that we have decided to meet and soon I shall go to

you. I shall write to you my letter when I shall return. I love you !!! The whole! Yours forever Olga.



P.S. I send you my pictures from one of ours with the girlfriend of walks on park. Then there was an autumn, but was yet cold also we often

went to walk on park. It is very useful for health and besides pleasant. how there was your day? I had good day! I have returned from Suksun. I have told to my mum about my trip to you. , my mum all over

again had tears in her eyes! But then she has told to me that will miss very much. I have told to her, that we necessarily shall arrive to

visit her. Can we do it ??? My mum very much worries, but she has told that she is very happy for us with you. My mum has approved my

step. She has told that together with you I shall be happy. , for me it was very important to know her opinion. I was very much pleased

with her reaction to my news. , you very much like my mum. She responds about you very well. Mum speaks " Hello " for you!!! when I

have returned Suksun, I at once have gone to library to write to you the letter. , I write to you my letters itself and without any help.

That translator of whom you have taken advantage, translated not absolutely correctly and sometimes to me was simply ridiculous to read that

has turned out. I thought of that, whence there was a language. There are many versions of its occurrence. , it is pleasant to me to

learn about your day! That has told thanks about that as well as with whom you live. I am happy to see your pictures! I think, that at you

very cosy house. You very beautiful the man and I like to look at you! , I once again speak, that your money are not necessary to me.

Give I all over again itself about all I learn and I shall tell to you about all. I think, that I without problems can arrive to you and

without your help. To me it is certainly very pleasant, that you wish to care of me and my trip, but I have not got used to take from

someone money! I Hope, that you will understand me and will not be angry. And in the rest it is pleasant to me, that you try to help people.

I think, that when we with you shall be together we can help my mum and aunt Irina. It is very pleasant to me to read as you you speak about

them and that you wish to help them. , I am very grateful to you for that that you help me with our meeting. Thanks you for the

information about which I have asked you. It will accelerate my process of stay to you. Absolutely soon we shall together. , tell when we

shall be together that you would wish to do in our the first weekends? I am glad, that we can soon speak about love looking an eye in the

face. I LOVE YOU !!! I am happy, that soon we shall together! Tomorrow I shall learn what I will need for my trip to you. I send you my

pictures. So I liked to put on earlier. Now I need to put on more strictly that my wards concerned to me yours faithfully and perceived me

as the state worker. I send you millions air kisses! I want that my kisses have warmed you at this night! I very soon can warm you every

night! I cannot wait to read through your letter Yours and only yours Olga. It pains me to talk about it. I can not come to you. , it is very expensive for me. When I found out about the cost of the trip, I almost

fainted. , I asked them why the prices are very expensive? They explained to me that if I make all of the documents themselves, then the

cost will be even greater. So how to get the documents I need more time and money. A travel agency dealing with this for a long time, and

they will be able to make my trip a cheaper and faster. They asked me if I wanted to sign a contract for the registration of my trip. But I

refused. , I am sorry! I am sorry that I told you that soon we will be able to be together. I believe in our love and I believe that all

dreams are achievable. , I do not know what to tell you! I realize that I am guilty before you. But if you' ll forgive me, we can continue

our dialogue. And in the future we' ll see what we do with our meeting. I love you with all my heart! I want to scream about my love for you

is very loud so you hear about it!! I need you and your love!! I beg you, forgive me! I am sorry that I was silly and did not know in

advance of my trip. I thought that my savings will be enough, but it is not enough. I just did not know about it. Forgive me ! You have

an amazing heart! And I hope that you will try to understand me. I very much hope that you will forgive me! My life has no meaning if you

will not be in my life! I love you! , I hope to see your letter! I LOVE YOU! I do not want to live without you! I created only for you!

Your loving Olga Hello my love ! I write to you my letter and my eyes are full some tears! Thanks, that you have forgiven me! Thanks! I cannot imagine my

life without you. My heart is broken off from a pain. I never felt such strong pain in my heart. , you the man of all my life! I love

you. You are necessary to me and now I choke without you and your love! , thanks that you do not leave me one with this problem. Thanks,

that you want that we were together. I love you. , I thought what be fast we can together. I imagined our first meeting, your first kiss!

but when I have learned about cost of a trip to me it became very bad. I could not keep my tears, the pain has filled my heart! I could

not tell words. To me it is very bad! I cannot believe that I cannot make anything to be together with you and to carry out all our dreams!

In travel agency to me have told that I could travel to you to me it is necessary to pay documents and tickets. Cost of documents - 830 US

dollars. In this cost it is included:

Passport 130 of dollars,

The visa of 227 dollars,

Trip to Moscow 205 dollars,

Residing at Moscow 213 dollars,

Medical examination of 55 dollars.

, also to me have told cost of the ticket in Tampa International Airport - 617 US dollars. The total cost of the trip - 1447 US dollars.

, I have only 140 US dollars. It very much a greater sum and I have no means to pay mine a trip. I am very grateful to you that you want

that we were together. Thanks for your pictures! I like to look at you! You very beautiful! I dream that very soon I can embrace you and is

gentle kiss your lips! , I search for an opportunity to call to you and as soon as I shall know something about it at once I shall inform

you! I do not know as to make a copy of my passport, to send it to you but even if I can make it as it will help our meeting? What will you

do with it? I need to do my documents and I can make them only in Russia! You cannot make for me the passport in any way! I hope, that you

understand it. , I understand, that the travel agency has their interest in it. But if I shall do all I should most go everywhere and to

write applications, to receive documents, all! For this purpose I do not have time. I should work! Nobody will give me time for doing most

all my documents for a trip. And the more so I do not know as where is. Therefore most easier to address in travel agency that all of them

have made. if I shall do all, we with you shall save 200 dollars, but I will need to spend a lot of time for making all documents. What

to you is more dear, 200 dollars or I beside? , I did not hope at all that you will help our meeting. In fact you are so far from me. But

even if you have such sum as you can help to be to us together? To send money by mail? It not reliably and very long! It seems to me, that

you can help nothing to our meeting. I shall be glad, if I am mistaken. I do not know what to do! I never can pay my trip!!! In fact if I

had means I could arrive to you in two weeks. In travel agency to me have told that if I can pay my trip that all documents will be ready in

two weeks then I need to pay the ticket and I can fly to you. I do not know that now to me to do! And my heart is broken off from a pain!

, only with you I can become the happiest! I wish to be yours forever!! Now I shall write to you my letter and I shall go home where I am

am waited again with a cold bed, a lonely room, grief, grief and loneliness. . . I very much want that the house in which we shall be

together always have been filled by your laughter and smiles that in our house it was always warm from ours with you of love and passions.

But in fact now it is dreams, I very much want that ours with you dreams became a reality! I wish to live together with you all my life. I

wish to be together with you to my death! To me to become even worse when I start think that I cannot to make anything to embody all ours

with you dreams in a reality, from it my eyes are even more filled with tears, my heart is even more filled with a pain. I very much hope

that tomorrow I can read through your letter, in fact only your letter for me as a beam of the sun in the cloudy sky. I love you with all

heart and with all soul! I yours and only yours forever Olga My love ! Thanks, that you have written to me your letter. But it at all does not please me. You consider each copeck, but you do not

consider that I will not need to search for time to go everywhere, to search for all most. The travel agency independently will make all!

, your money are not necessary to me! They are necessary that I could arrive to you! But if for you to save your money if they to you are

more dear than me more dearly, tone it is necessary to do anything. , that to sense of what you can arrive to me for this money? If you

can, arrive! Only what sense? What shall we do? , I know nothing about Western Union transfer, but I shall try to learn about it

tomorrow! I as shall try to find a way to make for you a copy of my Russian passport. Only all over again explain to me your words in the

end of your letter. That did you wish to tell your words that you require in what- what you do not speak with a wall? How to

understand your words? I very much hope, that you will explain to me all this. I love you ! I trust you ! Only I wish to understand

your words in the end of your letter. Tomorrow I with impatience shall wait that time when I can read your letter! Yours and only yours

forever Olga. My love ! Thanks for your letter! I understand everything, that you write to me. I am glad, that you do not consider each cent.

Understand, that I too wish to be with you as soon as possible! I have found such opportunity, but you do not like it. , tell, what sense

to travel agency to deceive me? In fact not big and many know our city each other! Inhabitants of our city use this travel agency all and at

all all is remarkable! If they deceived someone probably I would know about it! , I send you the information on travel agency. Their

name: Turexpotime. They are to the address of: 48 Sitnikova, Kungur, Perm krai, 617470. The Phone number: (34271 2-57-39. As they have an

e-mail address: turexpotime@yandex.com . I very much hope, that you will be helped by this information. , today I as learned about the

Western union. To me have told, that that you could send me of money, you should know mine a name and a surname - OLGA YANDYGAINOWA. As you

need to know the address of branch Zapodnogo of the Union in which I shall receive your money - Permskiy krai, Kungur, Pugacheva 48, 617470.

That I without problems could will receive your money to me it is necessary to know yours a full name and a surname and as I should know

control number. , I very much hope, that we can solve this problem with you and very soon we shall together! I could make a copy of my

Russian passport and I hope, that it will help you. I love you !!! Understand, that you are necessary to me only and only your love! I

only wish to make all correctly and quickly! On it is fast so much, on how many it is possible! , I trust this travel agency because I

was recommended by its my friends. They have told, that without problems could go on a resort by means of this travel agency. To me have

told, that at them the cheapest prices, concerning other agencies. , I hope, that tomorrow I shall see your letter and you will tell to

me about all! I with impatience shall wait when my working day will end to go to read your letter! I send you my kisses and all my love! I

very much hope, that soon we with you shall together! Yours and only yours forever Olga Hello my love ! Thanks that I can read through your letter. I love you. You the man of all my life, you my ideal. , I am assured that

when we shall be together at us always all it will be good. I searched for you all my life and at last it has come true. I cannot believe to

my happiness!!! I am very glad that you are in my life! I very much very much love you!!!! I would like to shout for pleasure. It so

perfectly that we shall together. , we shall be the happiest pair in this world. , it is a pity to me, that you were deceived many

times by women. But what attitude I have to it? If you doubt of me or do not trust me give nothing we shall do! Your money are unnecessary

me and I do not want, that you thought that I speak with you only because of money! I can provide myself. But I cannot earn in any way such

greater sum for our meeting. I really love you! I wish to be with you! I very much hope, that we can break this barrier! It is specially put

between us to check up sincerity of our feelings! , it is my fault that at once has not explained to you anything. My full name - Olga

Aleksandrovna Yandygainowa. Olga it is my name. Aleksandrovna it is my middle name. Yandygainowa it is surname. (when will you use Western

Union you have to write my full name Olga Yandygainowa) , I shall try to find an opportunity to call to you tomorrow. Today I worked, but

tomorrow I can begin searches with the morning. I very much hope, that I can find an opportunity to speak by with you to phone. I shall

inform you on all tomorrow! , only you can make me happy. I every day imagine that I look in your fine eyes. I cannot tear off a sight

from them, we look each other and we can not come off, to us nothing is important except for us. I look in your bottomless eyes and I see in

them my reflection, in your eyes burns a ray of light which warms me and my heart! , a lot of love is stored in your eyes, tenderness,

caress, kindness. I wish to see your eyes every day I would want that you looked at me and gave me your warm sight. , your eyes the

finest on light. You are the best man in the world! You are necessary to me only!!! I very much wish to be only with you. I would like to

shout from a pain that we not together. But I hope what be very fast we can together for ever. We are created for each other, and we should

be together! I very much hope that tomorrow I can read through your letter. I now would like you to embrace and kiss each centimeter of your

fine body. I love you. I yours and only yours forever Olga. My love ! I was happy to hear your voice! It is a pity to me, that communication has interrupted. Very dear and we could speak a call not

long. , up to library was very far to go and consequently I could not write to you the letter after have called. , I read your letter

and I am happy to see your pictures! I do not understand that excites you in my surname? I have written to you it how to me have told in the

Western Union. , it is very pleasant to me to read your dream! I too very much want, that we with you could embrace as soon as possible

each other and kiss!!! I hope, that we can overcome this barrier that divides us with you! , I am glad, that you have contacted travel

agency. I speak you always only the truth! I did not think, that you will doubt of my words. I do not understand where you have found

distinction? Unless I spoke you what I will need to come back from Moscow? In travel agency to me have told, that that we our city is far

from Moscow, I will not need to go to embassy of the USA to receive the visa. I will need to pass only interview one day prior to flight and

to me this very day will give the visa. They have told, that they for all time of their work yet did not have cases that to someone have

given up in the tourist visa. so you think to do? What shall we do with our meeting? When we can start to approach that day when we with

you can start to carry out all our dreams? I love you ! I wish to be with you! We should meet as soon as possible!!! I am confident that

I can be happy only in your embraces! When I read your letters my heart is ready to be pulled out from a breast and to fly to you!!! if

I had wings I would depart to you right now! But at me they are not present also to us it is necessary for something to do! I very much

hope, that tomorrow I shall read your letter and you will tell to me about all! I hope, that very soon we with you can start to approach our

meeting! If I could find 690 dollars already today I would pay my documents and in two weeks cape you would be together!!! Tomorrow I with

impatience shall wait that time when I can go to read your letter!!! I love you !!! You are necessary to Me only and only your love!!! I

send you the sea of my kisses and all my love!!! Yours and only yours forever Olga. My love ! Thanks that has written to me today! I am happy to read your letter, but I am am upset with that you doubt of my words. It is a

pity to me, but I cannot make for you a picture which you ask. I searched for such opportunity, but nobody can help me with it. The camera

of my friend is broken. More I do not know ways to make for you a picture. But I do not understand why you wish to see such picture? I think

that business not only that you wish to see what are long ask hair. No, I did not reduce them. They on former red color, long and twisted!

, I always speak you sincerely and directly! I wait from you for the same! I as cannot send you any sexual pictures even if I would want.

Understand, that I use a computer in library and here many people. Besides the manager of library helps to send me pictures. What will it

think, if will see that I send someone such pictures? Our city small gossips about me also will very soon go. I do not want, that about me

spoke, that I any prostitute. I hope, that you too do not want it. , I learned more about process of reception of the visa. In travel

agency to me have told, that they will send my application on many how I should go to Moscow. Therefore, when I shall go to pass interview

my visa will be available and me it is necessary to pass only interview that it have approved. Thus I will not need to wait for it. I hope,

that you understand about what I speak. , tell, why you do not send me your pictures? I would be happy to see you! I love you ! I

often dream of us together! I hope, that very soon we with you can break this barrier and we shall start something to do for our meeting! I

with impatience wait that day when we with you can embrace each other and kiss! I am confident, that I can be happy only in your embraces!

Please, do not forget to answer my questions and to explain to me why you you wish to see a picture which you ask. If you will answer me

sincerely and will tell about all that disturbs you, I shall search for an opportunity to make such picture! Tomorrow I with impatience

shall wait that time when I can read your letter! I love you ! I hope that very soon we shall the happiest pair in this world!!! But all

depends on that as when we shall do. I send you all my love and kisses! Yours and only yours forever Olga. My love ! Thanks that has written to me today and has explained, that you only joked of those pictures. But you and have not answered my

questions. Why you ignore them? It is a pity to me, that you do not feel well right now. If I was a number could help to rise to you on legs

by tomorrow . But we I am now far also I can make nothing. But I hope, that soon you will recover. , tell to me, what we shall do? You

speak nothing about our meeting. You speak nothing about that, you will help or not. You as to me have not told anything. I feel, that to

you is what to tell to me. But you for some reason are silent about it. how long we shall suffer from separation? How long we shall not

be together? When we can start to approach that day when we can embrace each other and kiss? It can be simple you do not want of it how I

want? , I very much hope, that tomorrow I shall read the letter in which you will answer all my questions. I love you and often I dream

of us together! Very much I hope, that all our dreams can soon start to be embodied in a reality! Yours and only yours forever Olga. My love ! After yesterday' s ours with you of conversation, I thought that to us to do much. To solve our situation, we need to find the

compromise. We can make so: you will send money, and I shall simply make all and I shall arrive to you. I shall not speak about that. As

where I do. Or on the contrary I shall speak you about everything, that I do. , understand, that if I will have any problems the travel

agency will return to me of money. At me the contract in which all is written will be concluded with them. I shall not lose money in any

case! if you do not trust travel agency trust in me and then very soon we with you shall together! Now we with you simply waste time.

Instead of starting to approach our meeting, we cannot solve at all that we shall do. if we shall not solve this problem I shall think

of how I can make all itself with you! If you do not wish to help our meeting and tell. How many we should wait? How many we should suffer

from separation? How long all this will proceed? What shall we do? I very much hope, that tomorrow I shall read your letter in which you

will answer all my questions. I love you ! All that I now want is to be with you beside as soon as possible! I send you my kisses! Yours

and only yours forever Olga. I am now very bad! I' m very hurt by the fact that I can not do anything to make our dreams could come true! But I promise you that I

will do everything so that our dreams could come true. I only want you. you will tell your histories, only is possible not to our

grandsons. Because I am at present really adjusted to fly to you only that you have looked at me. I am afflicted! But I shall use the best

efforts for our meeting only because I love you! my mom is very worried about me. She tries to support me! Today, my mom came to visit

me! My mom wants to help me find a way to solve my problem. I am very glad that my mother supports me. It would be easier to support

it. what are you doing? Are you worried about our meeting?? I hope so! It will give me the strength to fight and go forward to our

happiness. I' d like to, we were always together, so I always saw my reflection in your eyes. I am with all my heart and soul I love

you. I want to be with you! I only want you. you are my ideal! I will do everything to come to you! I love you! I am sending

you millions of kisses! I really hope that I can kiss you look in your eyes! Your loving Olga. how are you? How is your mood? My mother sends his best wishes! She really wants us to be together! I think about ways to come to

you. For me it is very important your support. please tell me every day that you believe that we will be together. I disagreed

with your plan only because of your mistrust! Now here sit and wait when I shall make all! I shall do the utmost to fly to you! Only the

main thing that was not a shame to you that I do all. I asked sometimes by a question: for what to me it is necessary the man if I do all

also itself about all I care? But it is not so important. I shall continue to do all the same all! today I went to see my friends and I

tried to borrow money, but no one can help me with this sum of money. I believe that we will be together. My friend Natalya, advised me to

get a loan from a bank. I told her that I could not get a loan because I do not have any property. She told me that I try to get a loan. So

that I was able to get a loan I need to get the documents from my job. I hope you understand me and support me in this. I love you very

much! I wish with all my heart that we were together! You' re a man I dreamed of all my life! now we have to believe that all of our

dreams will come true!! Do you agree? Yours and only yours Olga. I miss you. I need you. I can not breathe, because we' re not together. My soul is filled with pain. Only your letters can help me now.

I hope, that you not the idiot. . I spoke you that I have no opportunity to make for you a picture! I am not going to waste time for

proving to you something! I shall make my documents and I shall buy tickets! I shall arrive to you and I shall prove to these, that I am

real! I really want to be near you now. I hope with all my heart that we pass this barrier. Today me and my mom went to my job! After I

went to the bank and wrote a application on a loan. I was told that I could get a loan, no more than 800 dollars. I am very upset. But they

told me that they can give a loan to my mother, because they give loans for pensioners. my mother wrote the application for the loan,

but it should give them the documents, but all of her documents at home. Today she went to Suksun. Tomorrow she will be back. My mother is

trying to help us. I am glad that we have hope that we will be together. Today I was able to smile, my mother said she was very glad

that I got better. but I am very worried that my mother would get a loan because it is a very large sum. If my mother gets a loan, then

we can be together. But when I come to you I will need a job to help pay the loan of my mother. I would be grateful to you if you could help

me get a job in your country. For me it is very important to help to my mother. I hope you can help me to find a job. I look forward to you.

I love you my prince. I really want to be with you. I am ready to do anything for the sake of our love. When we' re together I want to

see you smile every day, I want to hear you laugh every day! I want you to be the happiest man. I love you!! Yours forever Olga. my dear. How your day? Today I did not sleep because I was really worried about getting a loan. My mother arrived early in the morning.

We went to the bank and submitted all the documents to obtain a loan. The bank will give the answer in just two days. I am worried

about getting a loan. I think that this is the only chance for us. I very much hope that we with my mother will be able to get a loan, and

I' ll have funds for my trip. I now do not have time to go to call. As I shall not spend now money. They are necessary for my trip. I

shall seriously think of, whether I shall remain. At present I am measured to arrive only that you have seen, that I real and that because

of your mistrust you have simply lost me! But once again I speak, I shall seriously think of it! I hope, that you understand that I

cannot write greater letters now. If I pass any questions it not because I do not wish to answer them that is why, that I absolutely do not

have time. every day I miss you more. I feel that your soul is close, but the distance between our bodies. I do not lose hope. I am

with all your heart and with all your soul, I hope that we can break down all barriers to our happiness. I really want to be with you.

I love you! I do not understand how I could live without you before? you are the meaning of my life. On my face a smile when I think

that maybe our dream come true and we will be together! I can see your beautiful eyes and your tender smile every day. I dream to wake

up and feel your breath. It would be so great! I now I had a dream when I woke up on my face was a smile. I was very good. We were

together, we were sitting by the fire and watched the fire, clinging to each other, I felt every bump your heart. You gently and sweetly

kissed my neck! We were excited we were surrounded by the atmosphere of romance. do you like to watch the fire? I do like to look at

the fire! Because fire represents life and the family hearth. When we are together I will do everything that we were the happiest couple in

the world. I am all ready for you!!!! Yours and only yours forever Olga. I am glad receive your letter. your letters make me happy! I miss you. I want to be very gentle in your open arms. I think only of you.

I really want to see you. I want to feel your love. I miss your warmth. I do not have time to read your greater letters. I very quickly

read your letter. I shall not call to you only because the call very dear and now is not present time! Soon we shall see each other and then

we can speak with you! I do not play game! I know, that it is our lives! And yes, you are right that I tease you! I am miserable

without you! I really want to be with you !! Oh, I wish that our lips are merged into a hot passionate kisses. I want you to breathe and

passionately told me that you love me. I want you to caress my lips, tongue and ears. My dream is to kiss every inch of your body! I like

your dream, I am ready to do anything to make our dreams come true. I really want to be with you! I need just you and your love. My

heart, soul and body cries out to you all! I love you very much! I want to be with you. I am with all your heart and with all your

soul, I want to make our dreams could come true! Your dreams are beautiful! We' ll be the happiest couple in the world. Our love is growing

every day. Our love is strong and together we can overcome any problems along the way. Love makes people do wonders. I believe in Russian

saying that " Separation for love - like wind is to fire, a little love extinguish and a lot of love inflates!" I think it is very correct

phrase. This reflects a very valid point. our love is strong, and the distance helps to make our love stronger. I can not live apart

from you! My heart cries out in pain. This pain will go out only when we are together!! I hope that soon we will be able to be

together!! I love you! You are to me like a ray of light on the dark sky. You shine just for me and you are the light in my path to our

happiness with you!! I can not live without your love and affection!! I really want to see you. You' re my second half! I want to see

you, hug and kiss! tomorrow I will know the answer to the loan. I really hope that everything will be fine! I very much hope that

my mother will be able to get a loan. I am very worried! Today, I can not sleep because tomorrow is decided our fate. I want to be with you

and give you every day all my love! I BELIEVE WE WILL BE TOGETHER! I hope that tomorrow I will have good news for you. I LOVE YOU !! I

send you a million kisses. Yours and only yours Olga. my dear! I am the happiest in the world. I can not wait to tell you about the good news. Today we went to the bank, I was told that my

mother can get a loan. I am very happy. Are you happy? My heart is bursting with happiness. I am very happy that we were able to solve

this problem. And soon we will be together. thanks that has told to me about your dream! I very much want, that your dream was carried

out as soon as possible! Very soon we with you shall together and we can start to carry out all our dreams in a reality! Tomorrow my mother

will get a loan! When I have money, I will go to a travel agency, and I will pay my trip. the travel agency told me that after I pay my

trip, all my documents will be ready in two weeks . You just imagine that! In two weeks we will be together. I am very grateful to my mother

that she helped us to solve this problem. I kissed my mother, I think that my mother are wonderful person. I have a surprise for you! Now my

mother with me. My mother can not speak English. But I will write you a letter with her words. I think that you' d be happy to receive a

letter from my mother! I really hope that you have a smile reading my letter. I hope that soon our dreams can come true. I will look

forward to your letter. Yours and only yours Olga!



P.S. Below you will read the letter from my mum.



Hello dear !

Olga told us a lot about you. I think you are very nice person. I have never seen my daughter so happy. I am glad that you were able to make

my daughter happy! I hope that you have real deep feelings for Olga, and you' ll take care of her. 
Montanas prisons and jails are over capacity. What changes in statute and/or funding at the state level  if any  do you think are necessary? If no changes, why not?

As a society we need to put more teeth into the restitution part of the criminal process. When a perpetrator commits a crime, the excuses (for why they cant make whole what they destroyed) should be prioritized behind the restoration of the victim. There is always a victim, often including state taxpayers. Stronger laws that put the onus on the criminal to make it right would deter offenders, compared to the current, all-too-common slap on the wrist. Too long the justice system has been trending towards increased sympathy to criminals at the expense of justice to the victims and society.

Has the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission adequately guided the states hunting and fishing concerns, or does the Legislature need to give the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks more specific direction regarding topics such as land acquisition, wildlife management, predator control, and bison?

We need increased access to our public lands. About 10 percent of public lands in Montana are not accessible by public road or waterway (The Environmental Quality Council House Joint Resolution No. 13, 2015-2016).

In the past the FWP has spent millions to purchase small ranches that only produce a few public opportunities. This money should instead be spent to secure private land easements at corner crossings, unlocking more of our current public land. The cost would be substantially lower to just purchase access to already-owned land versus trying to buy entire private ranches. This would increase Montanans access.

Many Montanans depend on the extraction of fossil fuels for jobs, yet there is a strong demand for clean and renewable energy in the region, especially since prices for the latter are falling. How do you propose to help workers in the coal, oil and natural gas industries find jobs in this new economic landscape?

We in Montana can have both, clean energy and fossil fuel. Montana has clean-burning coal. If we were to continue to develop our states coal resources and replace other states' or nations' lower-quality coal with Montana clean coal, pollutants would be reduced.

Renewable energy is currently here in the form of hydrogenation. To state the obvious, hydro power operates on the cyclical weather pattern of moisture falling, running downhill and then evaporating and starting the pattern all over again. It is cyclical, it is renewable. Lets continue to harness that renewable energy.

According to Montana University System records, as recently as 1992, the stated funded 76 percent of the university system. Now, though, state support has fallen to 40 percent, which means tuition funds 60 percent of the system  putting higher education out of reach for some Montana families. Do you as a legislator have a responsibility to help and if so, how? If not, why not?

Yes, the Legislature needs to be part of the solution. The part of the equation that is left out is accountability with each universitys budget. Even if taxpayer funding has gone down in percentage, it could be that the universes budget has irresponsibly grown too fast. The question that the taxpayers and the students need to ask is, Where is all the money going? Before more taxpayer dollars are allocated, the universities need to justify their budget growth.

What do you regard as the most urgent problem facing Montana, and how do you propose dealing with it?

Montana, just like the rest of the nation, is facing a crossroads in our values; do we continue to rely on the principled way of thinking that our country was founded on or embrace the current wave of thinking that produces no boundaries and breaks down our fundamental values? We have a choice between keeping our nations standard of moral right and wrong that produces a logical, safe, societal structure or embracing thinking that has no restraint and produces chaos. Society safety and structure must be a priority. It should not be confusing or unsafe to use a public restroom.
Outdoor adventure books tend to fall into two categories: How I did it or Why I did it.

Few take the trouble to probe What I did, after I did it.

Brendan Leonards Sixty Meters to Anywhere forced its author into Option 3. He tried to explain not just how rock climbing helped him overcome alcohol trouble, but where life when from there.

Id read a lot of substance-abuse memoirs, and they follow a similar pattern: Heres the extent of my problem, then I quit and get better,  Leonard said shortly before coming to Missoula for the Festival of the Book this week. Theres usually a detailed description of rehab, which can be fascinating. But they lacked anybody saying, Look at what my life became after  look what I did next. 

Leonard argues the point isnt escaping a medical or mental malady as much as creating a personal identity. Learning to cling by fingertips to vertical cracks didnt leave the bottle behind. It led the way to a new sense of self.

What we call adventure became that for me, Leonard said. Deciding to try something, with an uncertain result. Being outdoors, developing mental toughness, dealing with fear  it gave me an identity after not being sure what Im supposed to do.

Adventure bears its own potential of abuse, where the adventurer trades the cocoon of booze for the rush of thrill-seeking. Leonard acknowledged that swap, but cast it as a balanced choice.

Substance abuse ends up being a very risky thing, he said. Replacing it with adrenaline, even if what youre doing is dangerous, is better up to a point. I never lowered myself off a rock to a police officer who was there to arrest me.

Time in jail after a couple of DUIs in Iowa laid out the risks of wasting life, Leonard said. In an effort to restart his own story, Leonard moved to Missoula to pursue a masters degree in journalism at the University of Montana. He joked it was lucky the school didnt do criminal background checks on its entering students, or his recovery plan might have stalled.

In a creative writing class with English professor Judy Blunt, Leonard struggled to come up with material. The problem, he said, was that he hadnt done anything notable because he was spending time in jail and rehab.

She said not many people have done those things or seen those environments, he said of Blunts advice. I workshopped some things in class, and those first things became part of the book.

That was in 2003. Overnight success came eight years later, after working day jobs and freelancing anywhere he could. Since then, hes piled up credits in National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Alpinist, and Mens Journal. Scrambling for writing assignments made him adjust the way he looks at storytelling.

A story can be a sentence, a tweet, a paragraph, 2,000 words or 60,000 words, Leonard said. A book is just mapping out a larger story. You have X amount of words  how do you tell the story in those words? Maybe its just a photo and a caption on Instagram.

On his blog, Semi-Rad.com, Leonard stretches out on finer points, like the difference between a vacation and a trip. The entrys title was Your best vacation is someones worst nightmare.

I did a fundraising climb on Mount Shasta a couple years ago with my old high school pal Robb, and he told me that he explained to his dad what we were doing  getting up at midnight, et cetera  and his dad, a sensible man, said: That is the dumbest. Goddamn thing. I have ever heard.

I laughed, because Robbs dad is right. Its absurd what we do for fun sometimes. You could probably say something about the fact that most of us spend 50 weeks a year getting soft behind a desk, and we need visceral experiences to recharge, not more inactivity.
It used to be that getting Montanas lumber mill owners, environmentalists and government officials together in a room to fix forest management was the big problem.

Now, the challenge is getting anyone outside that room to pay attention to the solutions this group of former enemies developed in it.

A decade ago, we probably would have asked for law enforcement, Gov. Steve Bullock told the audience at the Western Governors' National Forest and Rangeland Management Initiative workshop in Missoula. Instead, Bullock said the room was working on ideas to get logs on trucks, reduce wildfire danger and protect places that need to be left alone.

And the U.S. Forest Service stands waiting to act on those ideas, agency Chief Tom Tidwell added.

Our challenge is we have to accelerate, Tidwell said. We need to stop the erosion of our abilities to work with partners and states.

The two-day workshop brought together about 50 forest management stakeholders intent on using past Montana accomplishments to guide national forest policy. Bullock made it the centerpiece of his one-year chairmanship of the Western Governors' Association, which convened the meeting.

Tidwell said his goal was to focus on large-scale outcomes of forest resilience and ecosystem health rather than specific outcomes.

Thats what were really after  thats what produces the economic activity that sustains communities, Tidwell said. And it helps eliminate the conflict were still seeing.

"But the practice of collaboration brings its own problems, Forest Service Region 1 Forester Leanne Marten said. Many participants get exhausted by the amount of time and effort needed to keep a collaborative group together, especially when the final stakeholder agreement doesnt produce prompt agency action.

Tom France of the National Wildlife Federation said several innovative Montana ideas have struggled when they reach the national level. He recalled how the collaborative group Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership moved beyond adjusting regulations to demanding performance standards from the Forest Service, in the form of mandated acreage treatments.

That idea became a cornerstone of Sen. Jon Testers Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, although it also became a prime criticism of the bills break with past forest management. After several attempts to get the bill through Congress since 2009, Tester, D-Mont., did not introduce it in the current session.

Thats where collaboration meets polarization, France said. What we couldnt find was a Republican-Democrat solution. We put the partnership together with all these different groups. Id hope the Western Governors' Association, as a bipartisan group, can think about how to get past that political divide.

Kootenai Forest Stakeholders Coalition member Chas Vincent of Libby said many former timber warriors were now sharing tables working on solutions to keep the timber industry and recreation values alive in Lincoln County. He called on the Forest Service to keep up its responsibility to make those actions reality.

Failure isnt an option, Vincent said. Collaborative fatigue is real, when you cant get real scale-and-scope outcomes. The people involved need to know why they are here.

Tidwell said the agency had been developing its collaborative tools for a decade since he moved from Missoulas Region 1 foresters job to lead the Forest Service in Washington, D.C. The biggest challenge has been moving away from a belief that the agencys scientists and foresters already had all the answers.

It comes down to listening, Tidwell said. We need your help, patience and guidance.
Perennial Libertarian Party candidate Michael C. Fellows, 59, of Missoula, was killed in a two-vehicle crash near Potomac on Monday night.

"We believe he was coming back from a political event," Missoula County Undersheriff Jason Johnson said Tuesday.

Fellows, a congressional candidate, participated in a Monday night forum hosted by the Seeley Lake Community Council.

Fellows has run for office every year since 1996, when he ran for Montana House. He ran six times for the U.S. House between 1998 and 2010; for Secretary of State in 2000, and for the Montana Supreme Court in 2012. He was unsuccessful every time.

Fellows, who chaired the Montana Libertarian party and was on the board of the Libertarian National Committee, wrote on his website that "government is simply force with a little mob rule thrown in."

"As the longest-serving active state chair of the Libertarian Party, he worked tirelessly to advocate the party's message for more than two decades, often on his own dime, on his own time," said a statement released by the Montana Libertarian Party. "... The word dedication doesn't even begin to describe Fellows contribution to and passion for spreading the message of liberty in Montana."

Because of Fellows' work, the Libertarian Party was on the Montana ballot for more than 20 years, "something few third-party state affiliates have been able to accomplish," said the party's statement.

The Montana Highway Patrol reports that the wreck occurred near mile marker 17.

Fellows was driving a Lexus westbound on Montana Highway 200, when he apparently crossed the center line into the path of an oncoming Subaru Forester driven by a 58-year-old woman from Potomac. The driver of the Subaru was injured and taken to St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula. Fellows was pronounced dead at the scene.

Veteran Montana journalist Chuck Johnson tweeted Tuesday that Fellows was the fourth political candidate to die on the states campaign trail since 1988.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Linda McCullochs office did not immediately confirm that tally.

Fellows' House race opponents, Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., and Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau, a Democrat, offered their condolences in a joint statement Tuesday afternoon.

"My sincerest condolences to the Fellows family, his friends and followers. Mike was a true advocate for the Libertarian cause and a good man. He had incredible passion for his platform and he will be missed in Montana," Zinke said.

"I'm shocked and saddened to hear about the passing of Mike Fellows," said Juneau. "My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends. Mike was a passionate advocate for his values, and I have always admired his courage and dedication to serving Montana. He will be missed."

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., extended his sympathies to the Fellows family, adding in a statement that "Montana will miss his contributions to our democracy and our way of life.

His death was met with similar regret by Kay Rabil, who served with Fellows on the board of Missoula Community Access TV.

"Mike was a dedicated member of the MCAT board and he will be greatly missed, Rabil said. His passion for our community was evident in everything he did. He was our friend."

Gov. Steve Bullock and running mate Mike Cooney in a statement thanked Fellows for his service and lauded his commitment to the Libertarian cause.

McCulloch also offered her condolences. She said the Libertarian Party will have until 5 p.m. Monday to provide the name of a candidate to replace Fellows on the upcoming general election ballots.

***

Independent Record reporter James DeHaven contributed to this story.
There are plenty of ways to keep old Maclay Bridge intact and in service, two experts on saving historic bridges reported Tuesday.

Its up to Missoula to come up with a way and a will to do it.

Dr. Jai B. Kim of Pennsylvania and his son Robert of South Carolina presented five options for saving the bridge first built in 1935 over the lower Bitterroot River. They ranged from rehabbing the main span of the existing one-lane bridge to building a new bridge alongside it to accommodate two-way traffic.

The Kims spoke at an afternoon presentation in the new conference room in the Missoula County courthouse and at an evening meeting at Target Range School, one day before the Montana Historic Preservation Review Board meets in Hamilton to consider a nomination to place Maclay Bridge on the National Register of Historic Places.

The nomination would make available federal funding to fix up Maclay Bridge, said Fred Stewart of the Maclay Bridge Alliance, which brought in the Kims to inspect the span and to show Missoula it can be saved.

County commissioners have signed off on a plan to build a modern bridge upstream that would extend South Avenue across the Bitterroot to the west. The plan includes the removal of Maclay Bridge based on safety, functional and environmental concerns.

The county and the Montana Department of Transportation argue that Maclay Bridge doesnt qualify for state or federal transportation funds, the Alliances Bob Schweitzer said after the afternoon presentation.

Were hoping that the county commissioners would reconsider and say, Wait, theres information here that were not aware of. Theres federal funding availability that weve been told all along is not available, and it is available,'  Schweitzer said.

Jai Kim offered no estimated costs for any but the first option, which would rehabilitate the truss bridge with arches to add redundancy to the main span, giving it a live load capacity of 36 tons. The current weight limit is 11 tons, requiring school buses and fire trucks to slow to 5 mph to cross.

Kim equated redundancy to adding a third leg to a person who wont fall if one of the other legs is broken. That would cost up to $1.26 million. A 1A option would rehabilitate or replace the pony truss bridge connected to the main span for up to $800,000.

Stewart said the 1A alternative is the one most consistent with the Target Range Neighborhood Plan and is one that I think many in the neighborhood would prefer.

The cost estimate for a new South Avenue Bridge is $13.1 million.

Don St. Peter, from a group called the Maclay Bridge Common Sense Coalition that favors the removal of the bridge, asked Kim why none of the five alternatives addressed the poorly designed approaches.

All youve focused on is the bridge itself, St. Peter said. Contrary to what Fred said at the beginning, both prior studies (in 1994 and 2013) did look at the bridge and rejected the idea of rehabbing it in place because it didnt address the multiple traffic accident clusters. Your analysis doesnt realign the bridge approaches at all.

St. Peter said the 2013 study showed that four or five houses would have to be eliminated to correctly align the approaches.

Maclay Bridge Alliance paid the Kims expenses to come to Missoula as technical experts to deal with the structural aspects of rehabilitating the bridge, Stewart said.

There are a lot of other issues that they dont address, but one thing that as experts they can tell us is what we can do structurally, he said, adding the other issues will have to be addressed in another format.

But thats a little problematic, St. Peter replied. You cant say there are five alternatives to rehab the bridge in place without addressing those things which caused problems at the existing bridge.
Low-income homeowners in Missoula have come out as winners in the tangled legal mess involving Mountain Water Co.

The Montana Public Service Commission recently delivered a $150,000 payment to the Missoula Human Resource Council as a result of a settlement agreement with the water utility and its owner, Liberty Utilities.

Earlier this summer, Liberty agreed to pay a fine to the PSC due to its unauthorized purchase of Missoulas water utility, because Liberty did not seek regulatory approval before acquisition. The $150,000 represents the statutory maximum in fines the company would pay had the PSCs complaint gone forward in court. The money will come from company profits, not from ratepayers.

Now, the money will go to bolster the Homeowner Rehab and Repair Loan Program that is administered by the Human Resource Council. It will be used to provide low-interest loans for low-income households to upgrade dilapidated water lines and install meters, thereby reducing water usage and costs.

Commissioner Bob Lake of Hamilton, who represents Missoula on the PSC, praised the payment.

Im very satisfied that the commissions settlement with Mountain Water directs much-needed resources to a quality organization in the community rather than to the state coffers in Helena, he said. Those that are most in need will experience a direct benefit from this payment by reducing the financial burden of low-income water customers.

The payment will only go to residents in Mountain Waters existing service territory. Administrative costs or expenses are not to exceed 3 percent of the total payment.

To qualify, residents must make at or below 80 percent of the area median income according to the Department of Housing and Urban Developments standards.

The loan program funded by the settlement will continue after the City of Missoula take over ownership of the water system.

Jim Morton, the executive director of the Human Resource Council, was out of the office on Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

Mountain Water Co. was previously owned by the Carlyle Group, which sold the utility to Liberty last year without PSC confirmation. Then-PSC chair Brad Johnson described that sale as a frontal assault on the bodys regulatory power. According to Montana law, any utilitys sale has to be authorized by the PSC.
Please contact U.S. Sens. Steve Daines and Sen. Jon Tester and urge them to vote for the Family First Act HR 5456, which is currently on the Senate Calendar. The act will direct federal child welfare dollars to improve outcomes of vulnerable children and families through evidence-based prevention focused approaches, according to the Childrens Defense and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Taxpayers should care about this act because it will keep children out of the foster care system, which is extremely costly for the American taxpayer. It is costly in terms of tax dollars spent and the foster care system contributes to the crime rate. Children placed in foster care have arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rates as adults that are three times higher those children who remain at home, according to a study published in 2008 by Joseph Doyle Economics Professor at MITs Sloan School of Management.

Approximately 20 percent of the U.S. children who were removed from their homes by Child and Family Services were removed for sexual or physical abuse. The Family First Act will keep the 80 percent of children who are removed for the subjective reason neglect at home.

Michael Bacon,

Helena
Addrien Marx is a candidate for Montana House District 92. Her commitment to the things Montanans hold dear is deep and strong. She will protect our access to public lands, important to the economy and recreation that are so important in our lives. She is a strong supporter of multiple use of public lands, including sustainable forestry. An experienced businesswoman, Marx understands and will work to support small businesses.
BILLINGS - A 12-year-old Lewis and Clark Middle School student was taken to a Billings hospital Tuesday morning after being hit by a pickup on Broadwater Avenue.

The boy is the third School District 2 student struck on the way to or from school since the school year began Aug. 25, according to an emailed "special edition newsletter" sent out on Tuesday afternoon by SD2 Superintendent Terry Bouck.

At about 7:15 a.m., the collision was reported at the intersection with Eighth Street West. The boy had been waiting with his brother at the southeast corner of the intersection, according to a morning press release from the Billings Police Department. When the boy stepped onto the crosswalk to cross Broadwater Avenue, he was hit by an eastbound RAM 5500's towing mirror, said BPD Sgt. Shane Winden.

The mirror hit the boy's head, and the impact was strong enough to fold the mirror back and shatter the passenger side window. The boy was taken to St. Vincent Healthcare and was in critical condition as of 10 a.m., according to BPD.

Medical response was delayed because American Medical Response's ambulances were already dispatched to other calls. Billings firefighters assisted the injured boy until a Lockwood Fire and Rescue ambulance arrived on scene.

Winden said the 26-year-old Billings man driving the truck reported having sun in his eyes. Witnesses provided conflicting accounts of whether the man had a green light, and it was not immediately known whether citations would result from the incident. No arrests were made or citations issued, as of the morning press release from BPD.

In the email, Bouck states that he and members of my leadership team will be meeting with city and county officials in the coming days to discuss how we as a community can do even more to protect our kids.

The email asks SD2 staff and trustees to remind students, staff and parents of your schools to be very cautious at intersections and near busy roadways. High schools, please be sure to let your student drivers know how important it is to be cautious in parking lots and surrounding areas.

Parents are asked in Boucks email to Please take the time to talk with family and friends about the importance of traffic safety, being alert and protecting all those who journey to, from and around our schools.
A story on Montana campaign finances that appeared in Sundays Missoulian gave an incorrect figure for the amount of money incumbent Attorney General Tim Fox has on hand. The correct number is $209,000.

A story in Tuesdays Missoulian on the debate between Montanas two major-party candidates for governor incorrectly described the work of Americans for Prosperity. The conservative advocacy organization has not opposed gay marriage, passage of nondiscrimination ordinances or supported new abortion restrictions.
BUTTE  The Montana Standard wants a judge to open up negotiations on the Butte Hill Superfund cleanup after 14 years, saying the public and press have a right to keep a watchful eye on the workings of government.

The Standard and the Silver Bow Creek Headwaters Coalition filed papers in federal court in Butte Tuesday seeking permission to intervene in a case between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Atlantic Richfield Co. over cleanup issues left from decades of mine pollution.

If U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon grants the initial request, The Standard and its partner, the Headwaters Coalition, could then formally argue that federal court orders to keep the talks secret block public access to otherwise public information.

The Superfund litigation, which will decide long-term, multi-million-dollar cleanup responsibilities for pollution on the Butte Hill, has dragged on for more than 20 years. The current "consent decree" talks now involve the EPA, ARCO, two state agencies and Butte-Silver Bow County.

There are few matters more important to the people of Butte and Silver Bow County than the environmental cleanup of the Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site  including the manner in which that cleanup is conducted and whether the cleanup proposals will in fact ensure a clean and restored Silver Bow Creek, a brief in support of the motion says.

In filing, The Standard is joined by the Silver Bow Creek Headwaters Coalition led by Buttes Fritz Daily, Ron Davis and Sister Mary Jo McDonald.

The coalition won a lawsuit against the state in 2015 when a state judge ruled that Silver Bow Creek was the official name of the channel running through the center of Butte. They say that bolsters their quest to make the channel a clean, free-flowing creek someday.

The Montana Standard and the Headwaters Coalition is represented by attorney Jim Goetz  who also represented the coalition in their victory last year.

The request to intervene in the suit is aimed just at the secret talks, not the underlying disputes over pollution matters.

At the Montana Standard we believe that when three levels of government  state, federal and local  are holding talks that will affect life in Butte for generations, the public is entitled to know whats going on in real time, Standard Editor David McCumber said Tuesday.

Gov. Steve Bullock also weighed in, saying, Obviously, well do what the judge tells us, but I like sunshine.

ARCO declined comment late Tuesday. The Montana Standard also sought and was awaiting comment from the EPA and County Chief Executive Matt Vincent.

The request comes a day after Bullock withdrew the state from consent-decree negotiations  at least temporarily  because BP/ARCO has refused to permit the state to dump polluted Parrot smelter mine tailings near the Berkeley Pit. Bullock wanted removal of the tailings to start this year.

Vincent also declined to participate in another round of Superfund talks Monday, saying no tangible progress could be made without the state at the table.

In its filing Tuesday, the Standard said Haddons initial order in August 2002 was granted through a single motion by the EPA that was unopposed and contained no substantive reasons why talks should be confidential. The state of Montana agreed to the confidentiality provisions.

ARCO, which inherited the pollution problems after buying the Anaconda Co. in 1977, asked in December 2003 that a provision be added saying communications during negotiations should be kept confidential after the talks were over. The judge granted that request.

Butte-Silver Bow agreed to the terms in November 2004, and just this past June, the state and county denied open-records and open-meeting requests by The Standard. They said the confidentiality order prevented them from complying with Montana access laws.

In its filing, The Standard says courts routinely find motions to intervene timely regardless of time that has passed  in this case 14 years  since an order was made. It says the EPA and ARCO had no right to bargain away the publics rights to know about government dealings that affect Montana.

Some officials have suggested privately in recent months that talks should be confidential because it is the only way negotiators can be frank and reach agreements similar to those on other Superfund matters. But The Montana Standard has rejected that thinking for months.

Does anybody believe that this process could have been any more tortured and less effective if it had been carried out in public? the newspaper asked in a July 24 editorial.
BILLINGS - MT Waterworks LLC, a Billings water pipe supply company, paid a $350,000 fine last week during its sentencing on corruption charges in U.S. District Court in Great Falls.

The company in May admitted criminal charges that it falsely claimed an Indian preference to get federal and tribal contracts, including more than $3.3 million from the Chippewa Cree Tribe for work on a federally funded water project in north central Montana.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris of Great Falls followed a plea agreement during a Sept. 15 sentencing hearing and imposed the fine. He also dismissed an additional charge and three other counts in a separate indictment as part of the plea deal.

MT Waterworks attorney, Mark Parker of Billings, gave the court clerk a check for the full amount of the fine. Kent Boos, the companys president, attended the hearing.

Mt Waterworks pleaded guilty to a scheme to defraud the Chippewa Cree Tribe and to making false and fraudulent statements to the United States.

The company faced a maximum $500,000 fine on each count.

Federal prosecutors said MT Waterworks, formed in 2010 by Boos, convicted tribal official and former state legislator Tony Belcourt and Kevin McGovern, a Billings contractor who is charged in separate indictments, falsely certified it was a minority-owned disadvantaged company and claimed an Indian preference in contracts.

The company, prosecutors said, then used that certification to block legitimate competition and to leverage its Indian preference to secure a majority, if not virtual monopoly of the business in pipe and pipe supplies on the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation, where the Chippewa Cree Tribe is located.

MT Waterworks received more than $3.3 million from the tribes Chippewa Cree Construction Corp., which was headed by Belcourt, for work on the Rocky Boys North Central Montana Regional Water System Project. The project, known as the Tiber project, is a large, federally funded project to bring drinking water to the reservation from the Tiber Reservoir.

MT Waterworks also used its minority-owned status to get special treatment on contracts with the federal General Services Administration, prosecutors said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Bryan Dake of Great Falls said in a sentencing memo that the seriousness of the offense cannot be overlooked.

MT Waterworks clearly took advantage of a preference designed to provide benefits for those who truly meet the requirements, Dake said. Instead, MT Waterworks LLC claimed a preference it was not entitled to receive, thereby improperly obtaining business opportunities, he said.

Businesses attempting to fleece the system and claim benefits for which they should not receive will not be tolerated. Neither will providing false information to the governments, Dake said in asking the judge to follow the plea agreement.

Parker also asked the judge to accept the deal. As a result of the case, he said in court records, the company has largely ceased to exist as a going concern. The principals have reconfigured their enterprise and will hopefully successfully proceed.

This proceeding has been a long, complicated, expensive and harsh four years for MTW and its principals, Parker said in court records.

On Tuesday, Parker said, Were glad its over. As with any settlement, finality eventually becomes the principal metric by which we measure success.

In reaching a plea agreement, the parties agreed to no restitution because determining the amount would have been extremely complicated and prolonged the sentencing.

The federal preference provision provides that contracting officers may include in contracts an incentive payment equal to 5 percent of the contract amount. To claim a preference, a disadvantaged business must be 51 percent owned, controlled and managed by those claiming the entitlement.

The Chippewa Crees Tribal Employment Rights Office and construction company both required contract preference be given to Indian-owned companies, prosecutors said.

When Belcourt, Boos and McGovern created MT Waterworks, it claimed an Indian preference, saying Belcourt had 51 percent ownership. Belcourt bought into the company using $101,000 in federal stimulus money he embezzled with another business partner from the Tiber Project.

In reality, prosecutors said, the three men had equal ownership in the company and Boos, not Belcourt, was responsible for the day-to-day operations.

The MT Waterworks prosecution is part of a massive corruption investigation into activities involving the tribe and has led to convictions of numerous tribal and nontribal members.

Belcourt is serving a seven-year prison sentence and was ordered to pay $667,000 restitution for his conviction on corruption-related charges in other cases.
Copyright  2022 HT Digital Streams Ltd All Right Reserved
My South African friend, Annelien, took this photo the first day that we went to the Maubane Community Centre on our recent trip to South Africa. I think it aptly captures how much I love this place.

I came here in January 2015 and fell in love with these kids  many who come from child-headed households. When Im back at the Maubane Community Centre, my heart feels like it just might burst.

To see that hope and life that is springing up amongst this community. To be surrounded by children who just want to hold my hands, hug me, and sit on my lap. To see how God is raising up leaders from this community who are completely transforming lives.

Its beautiful. Its inspiring. Its heart-warming. And standing on this red, dusty plot of ground among all these children makes me come alive like almost nowhere else on earth. I love this place and I can never get enough of it!

I especially cant get enough of the babies and little kids. Be still my heart.

I held so many babies and little kids on our trip. My heart was broken again over how hungry they are for love.

More than food (which is scarce), more than water (which there is a desperate need for), the kids just want to be held and loved on.





To be in South Africa, to see the babies and children, to see how overwhelming the needs are, reminds me afresh of why I blog.

I cant meet all the needs, hug all the babies, or feed all the children, but I want to be faithful with what God has given me and be obedient to what He has called me to. Most importantly, I want to live my life with arms wide open.

Because, as our trip reminded me again, the seemingly little things really do make a big difference.

You cant change the whole world, but you can love one person today.

Read the Rest of My South Africa Posts Here:
Police reports

MAN CLAIMS HUNGER

Shenandoah Revello, 23, of Brighton, Colorado, was arrested Tuesday for misdemeanor theft after he was seen on video surveillance taking electronic items and attempting to return them at Walmarts customer service counter. Police say he was seen on Monday and Tuesday taking goods valued at about $205. Revello apologized to police, saying he was stranded in Butte and couldnt buy food.

THEFT FROM VEHICLE

Items including binoculars, two pairs of prescription glasses and a spare set of car keys went missing from a silver 2014 Toyota Tundra parked on the 900 block of South Montana Street between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. Monday. Police say the items were valued at $1,165.

DRUG ARREST

Mary Houle, 40, of Butte was found possibly squatting in a residence on the 1500 row of Silver Bow Homes on Tuesday. She was hiding in a closet and talking on a cellphone. Police say she began to cry when they approached her. A metal spoon with possible residue was found on the floor. Police also recovered syringes with clear liquid and several plastic baggies with white crystal residue that tested positive for methamphetamine. Houle was booked on charges of felony criminal possession of dangerous drugs and misdemeanor criminal possession of drug paraphernalia.

TEEN REPORTS ASSAULT

A 15-year-old male reported his parents were fighting in a residence on the 1000 block of Schley Avenue early Wednesday. William Berreth, 40, of Butte allegedly pushed his girlfriend several times, damaged her cellphone and made her sit on the floor. Police say Berreth was intoxicated and accused the woman of lying. He was booked on charges of felony partner or family member assault and misdemeanor tampering with a communication device. He faces a probation violation.
Authorities never got to the bottom of bomb threats that forced six evacuations of the Butte-Silver Bow Courthouse earlier this year, and the state denied a follow-up county request for a new alarm system in the building.

But some valuable lessons were learned and actions taken that should improve responses to future threats.

What did come out of it was a very good discussion and (plan) on who should call whom, who should be responsive, who are the floor monitors and what are the right protocols and procedures, Dan Dennehy, the countys emergency management director, said recently.

He said a protocol was in place but had not been updated since 2011, and Sheriff Ed Lester said some employees who had designated responsibilities were no longer here. That became evident during the six evacuations from Jan. 14 through Feb. 1 this year. Threats also were made to the jail and Butte High School.

We got pretty good at it and it (protocol) was pretty streamlined by the time it was done, Lester said. The plan is now to review it once a year and update it if necessary.

All the threats were computer-generated and phoned in. Police and firefighters searched the buildings each time but nothing turned up.

Police said then that the calls appeared to be from a computer-generated program that was voice-activated with pre-recorded messages and responses.

Theyre not to a cell phone, they arent to a business, they arent to a person, Undersheriff George Skuletich said at the time. Theyre just a number that floats out there.

Lester said similar calls were made throughout the country, including Helena and Missoula. The FBI and federal Department of Homeland Security investigated but were unable to pinpoint a source of the calls, he said. No bombs related to the calls were found anywhere.

The same exact (phone) number had been used in those bomb threats before they started coming here, Lester said. It was likely a Skype number, possibly from Russia. There would be a series of calls to one location and then they would move on to the next.

They became so common at the courthouse here, many of the 100 employees evacuated each time reacted with sighs of not again. But the building was vacated each time.

That might have changed, however, had more threats been made during a second murder trial in early February for Adam Hatfield, who was accused in the beating death of his father in 2008.

Butte District Judge Kurt Krueger issued an order Feb. 4 saying evacuations would not be carried out in the courthouse while that retrial was going on unless authorities deemed them necessary. However, security was heightened, the building was searched each day before it was opened and other steps were taken.

No more calls came in after Feb. 1 and the retrial went on without interruption. Hatfield was convicted of deliberate homicide and was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison.

Dennehy said the step-by-step protocol for evacuations was updated and includes measures to take during threats and other emergencies such as gas leaks or hazardous material spills. A cheat-sheet of sorts on all that was given to all employees in the courthouse and Butte Civic Center, he said.

Dennehy told commissioners last Wednesday night that the county applied for two Homeland Security grants through the state, and it got one for $135,000 to enhance local government protections against cyber attacks.

But one seeking about $100,000 for a new alarm system in the courthouse was denied. The system would have included sirens, special lighting and message boards to tell employees and visitors to leave the building.

Dennehy said a committee that awards the grants stated if one public building got a new system, others should also, and there wasnt enough money to do that.

But the other steps taken since the bomb threats should help, he said, and the recent evacuations were a plus in hindsight.

I think we could evacuate the courthouse in seconds now, he said.
TWIN FALLS  The canyon launch is over, but the rocketeers are still making memories.

Its been three years of agonizing, tears and emotions, said Hollywood stuntman Eddie Braun, who paid homage Friday to his childhood hero, Evel Knievel, by rocketing himself over the Snake River Canyon.

Braun is back home in Manhattan Beach, Calif., taking a well-deserved rest, and rocket builder Scott Truax is at his home in Twin Falls reading some 600 emails he received over the weekend.

I had to shut my phone off, I was getting so many calls, said Truax, whose father, Robert Truax, built the rocket that Knievel attempted  but failed  to pilot over the canyon in 1974.

Scott Truax is promoting his fathers autobiography, American Rocketman: The Amazing Life and Times of Americas Premier Rocket Scientist, available on Amazon.

Television and film director Kurt Mattila and producer Alexander Dervin are finishing a documentary tracing Brauns and Truaxs steps for the past three years. The documentary will be available for purchase when finished, Mattila said.

The rocket was immediately on its way to California after the flight.

Meanwhile, many fans expressed frustration that they werent able to see the launch in person. Others were disappointed that the launch happened Friday, one day before the originally scheduled date.

An explanation was posted Saturday on the rocket teams Facebook page.

Friday the weather conditions were nearly perfect and the rocket was ready, the Return to Snake River team wrote. It was decided to seize this window of opportunity to launch the Evel Spirit.

Braun was supposed to make an appearance Monday on ABCs Good Morning America but got bumped because of Saturdays terrorist bombing in New York City.

Fans had hoped to see exclusive coverage of Brauns flight over the canyon as filmed by ABCs news crews. Now, theyre settling for a stunning online video filmed by GoPro cameras positioned on his steam-powered rocket. The video shows Braun, a stuntman for more than 30 years, adjusting the face shield of his helmet as he waits for the countdown, and then launching himself 2,000 feet into the air before releasing its chutes and floating to Earth.

The Evel Spirit carried Braun three-quarters of a mile from a ramp on the north rim of the Snake and landed in a bean field north of Hansen.

Im scared to death of heights, Braun said. But I can do anything for 30 seconds.

Thats all the time it took for the 10,000-horsepower rocket with 6,000 pounds of thrust to run out of steam and the chutes to deploy.
Its not official yet and still shrouded in secrecy, but the Boone and Crockett Club posted a photo and story on its website Tuesday showing what could be a new world record bull elk shot by a Montana archer.

Views of the posting on Boone and Crocketts Facebook and web page have topped 1 million, said Justin Spring, director of the clubs big game records.

An official measurer scored the bulls antlers at 429-6/8 net and 448-4/8 gross, according to the clubs website. That compares to the current archery world record of 412-1/8 points, based on the Pope and Young Clubs records of an elk taken in Arizona in 2005. Pope and Young is the keeper of archery records. The bull would rank No. 4 in the world when up against Boone and Crockett's rifle hunters. The No. 1 Boone and Crockett typical bull scored 442-5/8 and was shot in Arizona in 1948.

The caveat is that before the Montana bull can be officially scored there is a required 60-day drying period.

They probably wont be quite that big when they shrink and dry, Spring said.

But the likelihood that the antlers would shrink so much that they dont beat the Arizona bull are fairly slim.

The green score of this bull is 4-3/8 higher than the current No. 4 typical bull in Boone and Crocketts All-time Records, Boone and Crockett reported on its website. According to Spring, This bull may well be the largest typical American elk taken in the last 48 years.

In comparison, the highest scoring typical elk ever taken by a rifle hunter in Montana scored 419-4/8 and was shot by Fred Mercer. The largest elk shot by an archer in Montana scored 409-2/8 and was taken by Chuck Adams on a private ranch in Eastern Montana. A typical elk has symmetrical antlers whereas a nontypical elk has antlers that are oddly shaped.

This new elk was shot by a Montana hunter who asked Boone and Crockett to keep his name and where he hunted secret until his buddy can get to the same spot and fill his tag before other ambitious hunters overrun the countryside, Spring said.

What Spring did reveal is that the elk was shot by a good, down-to-earth Montana hunter who was hunting alone on Sept. 10. It took the hunter a couple of days to pack the bull out, making it seem likely the animal was shot on public land.

Generally we dont hear about it so quickly, Spring said, but he happened to know the scorer. You hear those numbers and its something you have to follow up on.

The existence of outstanding specimens like this incredible animal is testament that today's hunters, wildlife professionals, and conservation organizations are achieving tremendous success by practicing sound conservation and wildlife-management programs, said Joe Bell, Pope and Youngs executive director, on the Boone and Crockett website.

Spring said even though he has not filled his elk tag yet this season the Montana archers success gives him a spark of hope.

Theres a chance all of us might bag a bigger bull, Spring said, but I wouldnt hold my breath.

He added, I always thought I was a pretty good hunter until I started working for Boone and Crockett.
Dear Montana Voters,

This November we have the opportunity to vote on some very important issues that will impact Montana and its residents. One such issue concerns the safety and exploitation of our public lands. I am writing to you today in support of Trap Free Public Lands ballot initiative I-177 in effort to explain why it is important to all Montanans. Lately I have seen pro-trapper groups use scare tactics to make people believe that this initiative will go after hunting next. This is absolutely not true and is a diversionary tactic used to misdirect voters to the truth. The best way to explain this is to compare trapping and hunting practices.

Let's consider hunting in Montana. I have lived here all my life and know that hunters do not purposefully shoot an animal to wound it. They sight in their rifles before going out and take great care to make the kill on the first shot. They also wear hunters orange to warn others that they are in the area. I have never seen a hunter lean a loaded weapon against a tree and leave it unattended for days, or even weeks at a time. They pay for a conservation and hunting license and follow the rules and regulations set forth by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. These regulations are very specific and involve the species and sex of the animal.

Now let's take a look at trapping. A license costs $29 and a trapper can set up to 50,000 unmarked traps on our public lands. When a trap is set it does not discriminate between species, age, or sex. These traps do not involve a quick death and are a loaded weapon for our companion animals and struggling species such as the wolverine, pine martin, and otter. The guidelines for trapping in Montana suggest checking these traps every couple of days. but is by no means mandatory. Using a trapper's term, some animals twist off to escape  which means they either chew their leg off or twist until it is free of the trap. Trappers who find animals alive in their traps often times stomp on them repeatedly until they are dead so that the pelt is not damaged by a gunshot or knife. They can leave these traps unmarked where we go for walks with our children and pets.

Trappers say that it is their freedom and right to set traps on our public lands and extract as many animals as they want for profit. What about the millions of other Montanans and their rights and freedoms to enjoy public lands and not have them exploited and devoid of life?

This is not the legacy of Montana.

Lets keep our public lands safe and diverse for all of us to enjoy.

Vote YES on I-177!
BILLINGS  The death on Monday of Mike Fellows, a Libertarian candidate for Montana's U.S. House seat, has triggered a scramble in county election offices to determine how best to update the general election ballots.

In Yellowstone County, the states largest county, officials are considering re-printing about 90,000 ballots at an estimated cost of $30,000.

Chief Deputy County Attorney Dan Schwarz said Wednesday the issue will be discussed with county commissioners Monday.

Yellowstone Countys general election ballots are being printed and list Fellows as the Libertarian Party candidate in the House race.

Fellows, 59, of Missoula, died in a two-vehicle crash near Potomac on Monday night. He had participated in a Monday night forum hosted by Seeley Lake Community Council.

Fellows chaired the Montana Libertarian Party and was on the board of the Libertarian National Committee. He was a frequent but unsuccessful candidate. Fellows ran for office every other year since 1996, when he ran for the Montana House. He ran for the U.S. House in 1998, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010; for Secretary of State in 2000 and for the clerk of the Montana Supreme Court in 2012.

Schwarz said he and Bret Rutherford, the countys election administrator, participated in a conference call with the Montana Secretary of States office and other county election officials late Tuesday afternoon to discuss what to do about the ballots.

Rutherford was out of the office Wednesday.

There were a number of scenarios discussed on how to address the situation, Schwarz said. The consensus was to simply reprint the ballots, he said.

Yellowstone County believes the prudent response is to reprint the ballots to avoid legal problems down the road, Schwarz said.

Secretary of State Linda McCulloch was unavailable for comment on Wednesday.
AMES, Iowa  The Iowa Farm Safety and Health Week will be held Sept. 18-24 in conjunction with the National Farm Safety and Health Week. This years theme is Farm SafetyA Legacy to be Proud Of."

This is the 73rd observance of the National Farm Safety and Health Week that was originally declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt signed the first proclamation for farm safety in 1944 because of the high injury rate in agriculture that was impacting the nations production efforts during World War II.

Nearly 75 years later agriculture still ranks as the most dangerous industry in the United States.

Today, safety professionals use this week to remind those working within the industry to be careful. Agriculture has the highest annual death rates per 100,000 workers in the nation, surpassing all the other industries including mining, construction and manufacturing. Agricultures death rate is more than five times higher than all U.S. industries combined. This high death rate is why Iowans must use safe farming practices during harvest and throughout the year.

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad signed a proclamation Sept. 9 to commemorate the week. The proclamation calls for all Iowans to work together to control and mitigate these farm risks. Working to make farms safer is crucial to a state like Iowa that has more than 90 percent of its land used in agriculture and distributes more than $10 billion worth of agricultural products each year, the proclamation notes.

The Iowa Farm Safety Council encourages Iowans to make better safety and health decisions this harvest season and during the next year. You can prepare to prevent serious injuries and death by:

 cautiously approaching field adjustments or repairs,

 taking precautions to avoid slips and falls,

 making smart decisions while assigning tasks to youth, and

 understanding how physical abilities change with aging.

Join the Iowa Farm Safety Council and the National Safety Council in promoting safety during the 73rd annual National Farm Safety and Health Week Sept. 18-24, 2016. During this time please encourage others to adopt safe practices and behaviors as we prepare to prevent injuries during this harvest season.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Candidates for Muscatine County Auditor, Sheriff, and the Board of Supervisors gathered in the City Council chambers at City Hall Tuesday night for the League of Women Voters candidate forum. A good crowd was on hand to ask the candidates questions.

Leslie A. Soule (R) is running unopposed for Auditor of Muscatine County while incumbent C.J. Ryan (R) faced off against Mike Channan (D) as the two candidates for Sheriff of Muscatine County. The evening rounded out with the four candidates for the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors which included incumbent Scott Sauer (R) and Nathan Reichert (D) in District #3 along with incumbent Kas Kelly and Nathan Mather (R) in District #4.

Sue Johanssen, president League of Women Voters, moderated the event and welcomed those watching at home and those that were in attendance.

As the lone unopposed candidate, Soule opened up the evening with a short biography of her career which includes 21 years as the Muscatine County auditor.

I work very hard to make sure that every election is fair and proper, Soule said. And I offer this reminder that early voting starts on Sept. 29 and continues up until the day before the election.

She concluded by urging all residents to get out and vote on Nov. 8.

The two candidates for sheriff are as different in their approaches to being sheriff as they are in their careers in law enforcement. Ryan started as a deputy in 1986 and was promoted up through the ranks. He has served in a variety of positions within the department and was Chief Deputy for six years before being named Sheriff in 2015. Channan comes from a military background and has 18 years enforcement experience in various departments within Muscatine County.

Channan said there are two areas of primary concern when thinking about the role of sheriff which are gaining the public trust and being transparent as a law enforcement agency.

Body cameras are important due to all the scrutiny nationally," Channan said. They protect both the public and officers.

Ryan did not disagree with the use of body cameras but noted that the county ended the use of body cameras because the county did not have a policy concerning them.

It is a legal issue that we gave to the county attorney to resolve, Ryan said. This office is a very diverse operation and the budget is a high priority. We also have offered education programs for senior citizens so that they can avoid scams and have increased our presence on social media.

Regarding the budget, Ryan noted that it is an advantage to have worked at the sheriffs office for over 30 years in several departments where managing budgets and grants was a big part of his job especially as Chief Deputy. He noted that revenues have increased under his leadership mostly from housing federal inmates and inmates from Johnson County.

Channan said that he didnt think Ryan was doing as well with the budget as he says highlighting the purchase of three squad cars but not from local dealers. Channan added that it is all about the numbers and he would have a good team to help him do that.

One of the questions the audience asked the candidates to discuss was their awareness of the growing debate on the mass incarceration of persons of color. Both candidates were on the same page in saying that when a crime is committed, it doesnt matter the color of skin, sexual orientation, or where they come from, they will be arrested.

Channan added that the problem is not the amount of individuals in jail, it is that law enforcement is not getting out to these people early enough and making sure they feel a part of the system. Ryan also said that the department deals with people who break the law and they broke the law, it is up to a judge and jury to decide their fate, not law enforcement.

Both candidates saw a need for more security at the Muscatine Courthouse but both went different routes to provide that extra security. Ryan noted that the Board of Supervisors has allocated money to upgrade video surveillance but the architecture limits what they can do inside the building. Channon looks to add more personnel to patrol the courthouse citing that the cost of not having extra personnel is too high in the possibility of lives lost.

Both candidates also said that, if elected, they would serve the full four-year term and both said that the new radio system has greatly enhanced the safety of law enforcement personnel and first responders. A question on whether they would hold family and friends to the same standards that everyone else must live up to was answered in the affirmative by both candidates.

Rounding out the discussion was a question on the recent shooting in Tulsa and what, if anything, can be done here to prevent a similar incident.

Sometimes law enforcement gets it right and sometimes not, Ryan said. It is sad that the media hypes when we get it wrong but they dont say much about what we do right. We do have training and we do have great deputies. They are well trained and I respect the decisions they make on the street.

You cannot assume anything will not happen here, Channan said. You have to trust in the decision making of our deputies. Body cameras will stop a lot of the problems out there. We are here to serve and protect but the main objective is to go home to our families.

The supervisor candidates also answered numerous questions from the audience including the opening question on the governors statement that Iowa has too many roads and bridges.

Each of the candidates disagreed the governors assessment noting that he may have been thinking of the western side of the state more than the eastern side.

Reichert noted that there are a lot of roads and bridges that need to remain open and closing roads are a difficult decision to make because citizens rely on that infrastructure.

We need to make sure the folks who are building or repairing the roads and bridges have high skilled workers, Reichert said. They will last longer because they are built better which will mean less cost to the county.

Sauer said it comes down to wants and needs.

Each situation, within reason, needs to be looked at differently, Sauer said. It all comes down to long range planning, determining what is important and what is not. 

The uniqueness of the Muscatine County geographical area was noted by Mather as the county is positioned between two big rivers with a lot of creeks which result in over 100 bridges.

Two thirds of secondary roads are gravel, Mather said. Where we get the aggregate material is important to save money as is making sure we apply solutions to serve all the people and not just the few.

Kelly said there is 611 miles of county roads, 182 are paved, and 105 structures that are classified as bridges that are of a size that they need to be inspected.

We have a five year plan to have roads and bridges maintained, Kelly said. You need to listen to people and do what is best for all. 

Minimum wage was another topic of discussion with two of the candidates against the county implementing a minimum wage policy. Kelly would like to see it called a living wage since there are hardworking people who are still on food stamps while Reichert said that a minimum wage, which has not been updated in 10 years by the state, would benefit the small business owners.

Both Mather and Sauer were on the opposite side of the fence on the subject. Mather noted that a minimum wage increase comes at a cost and Sauer acknowledged that hard working people would either seek the skills they needed for a better paying job or get a second job to achieve the lifestyle they wanted.

There was a consensus of opinion that the regional mental health and disability services system is not really working to the benefit of Muscatine County but that the system is here to stay. They all supported the removal of the levy freeze implemented by the state legislature but there were some difference of opinion on how the system could best serve the people of Muscatine County.

When asked what would happen to an elected official who was chosen from a district but then moved out of the district, each of the candidates said that there needed to be a policy developed to address the issue. Kelly thought that it was covered by the state but the issue did need some research.

The candidates were also asked to explain their budgetary experience, their process for orderly success of department heads, and the importance of open meeting laws.
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
National Treasury is keeping mum over claims that it has recommended the suspension of South Africas controversial set-top box production.

Set-top boxes (STBs) decode digital signals for analogue television sets and government plans on subsidising five million poorer households as part of a broadcast migration process.

Last year, the Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa (Usaasa) appointed 27 service providers in a multi-billion rand deal for the supply of equipment such as set-top boxes.

Production of the boxes, though, has already hit a snag this year.

Usaasa last week said it has suspended production amid Communication Minister Faith Muthambis challenge of a Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) ruling over the encryption of STBs.

But the STB tender risks further complications as Muthambi says, in a speech posted on her departments website, that a Treasury probe has also recommended a suspension of the production amid issues over the tender process and its costs.

Muthambi, in October last year, requested that Treasury probe the procurement of the set-top box tender. And, she now says the findings of Treasurys report have been concluded.

The report recommended that the production process of STBs be stopped with immediate effect and a process that will lead to the integrity and value for money be initiated, said Muthambi in a copy of a speech published on her departments website.

Muthambi further said the recommendation from Treasury was that the process may be faced with the legal challenge and that with the current situation, the programme will not realise its objective of providing five million STB[s] in consideration of the current funding.

In the speech  which Muthambis office claims she read to Parliament last week  the Communications Minister said the probe found that Usaasa allegedly contravened its own supply chain management policy in an appointment of Ernst and Young (EY) by not following a competitive bid.

Muthambi said the probe has further raised issues such as the appointment of companies part of the bid evaluation committee, EY management costs, and the evaluation and adjudication of bids.

Other issues revolve around pricing of the STBs, said Muthambi in the speech document.

When allocating supply volumes by Usaasa, companies that quoted lowest prices were not granted volumes. Instead prices were negotiated upwards and not downwards leaving the cost of set-top-boxes procured at 37% above the market price at retail. This is in contravention of the SCM (Supply Chain Management) and PFMA (Public Finance Management Act) provisions for value for money, said Muthambi.

The National Treasury revealed that Usaasa had already received an amount of R1.6bn in their bank account. Usaasa has earned interest amounting to R127m. The report further reveal[s] that Usaasa spent R10.2m out of the interest earned which National Treasury indicates that it is prohibited to spend interest earned from subsidy funding without obtaining its permission which Usaasa did not obtain, Muthambi added.

Treasury not commenting

Meanwhile, Treasury, its office of the chief procurement officer and its office of the accountant general have refused to comment on Muthambis claims about the findings of the probe.

Their response is that they will not respond and that issues related to this should be forwarded to department of communications, Treasury spokesperson Xolisa Dodo told Fin24 in an email.

Fin24 asked Muthambis office if she would publicly release the full probe, but her spokesperson said she  together with relevant players  are still studying the document.

The department has received the report and recommendations from National Treasury, and is in consultations with Usaasa and the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services (which provides an oversight on Usaasa), Mish Molakeng, ministry of communications spokesperson, told Fin24.

It is only after these consultations that the department will be able to make further announcements on the next steps to be followed, Molakeng told Fin24.

Complicating matters is that while Muthambis department runs South Africas digital migration process, Usaasa reports to Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Siyabonga Cwele.

Usaasa told Fin24 late last week that it cannot confirm or deny the information of the claims contained in Muthambis speech about the probe.

The DoC (department of communication) has recently handed the investigation report to Usaasa and DTPS [Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services], Usaasa CEO Lumko Mtimde told Fin24.

Usaasa is studying the report and will decide on the way forward once the consideration is concluded and the board had deliberated on the report, Mtimde said.

Meanwhile, spokesperson for the department of telecommunications and postal services, Siya Qoza, told Fin24 late last week that the ministry had received the findings of the probe and was studying it.

Call to make probe public

DA MP Marian Shinn on Wednesday also called on Muthambi to immediately release the findings of the probe.

At last weeks joint parliamentary committee hearing into the status of the Broadcast Digital Migration programme, Minister Muthambi  who is the custodian of the programme, neglected to mention in her presentation that the enquiry had been instigated and had finished its work, said Shinn in a statement on Tuesday.

In response to a question from me she admitted that the report had been received and that relevant action was still being considered. She promised to make the report public when the decisions on appropriate action had been taken.

I now call on her to make the full report immediately available, she said.

Amid these disputes, MPs in Parliament last week criticised Muthambi for the slow march to digital migration in South Africa.

South Africa missed an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) deadline in June last year to switch over to digital migration.

But in a statement last week, the communications ministers office said that the Broadcasting Digital Migration Project is well on track with over 30 000 households in the Northern Cape, Free State, Mpumalanga and Limpopo having registered with the South African Post Office to receive set-top boxes.

Fin24

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Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are in charge of technology and related developments in the companies they work for.

The CTO role first became prominent when the IT industry started to grow, and has now become a standard position in most companies.

Most CTOs are involved in making decisions on which technologies to use in their company, creating IT policies, and aligning IT decisions with business objectives.

A top CTO must wield a wide range of skills, including knowledge of IT systems, business principles, and new developments in their field.

Because of the importance of IT in any company, CTOs are part of the executive team  and many South African CTOs earn well over R1 million per year.

The table below shows several of the highest-paid CTOs in South Africa, based on the latest annual reports available.

SA CTO Total Pay Packages Person Company Position Pay Package JA Desai MTN Chief Technology and Information Officer R13,320,000 AN Samuels Telkom Chief Technical Officer R8,131,604 ADJ Delport Vodacom Chief Technical Officer R5,960,419 WH Oosthuysen Altron Executive: Technology and Strategy R5,056,000 Gift Zowa Broadband Infraco Chief Technical Officer R2,251,000 P Maine Sentech Executive Head: Information Technology R1,879,000

More on salaries

How much CEOs earn in South Africa

IT Jobs with the highest starting salaries

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The Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services is planning on taking back spectrum licences issued to mobile operators, according to industry sources.

Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, Telkom, and others will have to give back the spectrum they use for their mobile networks if an unpublished draft spectrum policy is passed.

Their spectrum will be combined with unused frequency bands to roll out a wholesale open-access wireless network for South Africa that all operators will have to use.

The Ministry stated it would recall operators spectrum licences because it does not think the wholesale network will get traction with established operators if it is rolled out in parallel to their networks.

Minister vs ICASA

News of the draft spectrum policy comes after Minister Siyabonga Cwele filed court papers against industry regulator ICASA.

The action followed ICASA issuing an invitation to apply (ITA) for frequency spectrum ideal for LTE and 4G networks.

ICASAs ITA outlines a plan to auction four lots of spectrum comprised of frequencies in the 700-800MHz and 2,600MHz bands. It has kept a fifth lot in reserve.

Each of the four lots has a reserve price of R3 billion.

Impolite ICASA

It is understood that ICASA issued its ITA knowing it was at odds with the Ministers planned spectrum policy.

The Minister shared the policy with ICASA in its draft form, asking the regulator to put whatever spectrum assignment plans it had on hold.

Among the proposals in the policy are:

A wireless open-access network run by a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which has no direct government ownership.

The network is restricted to providing wholesale services only.

All spectrum for mobile broadband access services will be assigned to the SPV.

ICASA extended an impolite middle finger in the Ministers general direction and issued an ITA, said Dominic Cull of Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions.

Cull was addressing delegates at the 2016 iWeek conference.

He said the Minister was not informed about the ITA before it was issued.

If not unlawful, it was certainly very rude, said Cull. The Minister met with ICASA to ask it to take back the ITA. When it refused, he took ICASA to court.

More on South Africas spectrum

ICASA stands ground on spectrum auction, extends deadline

ICASA spectrum fight, the courts must decide: Minister

Why Minister Siyabonga Cwele is suing Icasa
MTN officials have told Parliament that the release of available spectrum would, in theory, lower data costs.

South Africa has yet to migrate to digital broadcasts, a key requirement for opening up radio spectrum for faster and more widespread mobile internet services.

Graham De Vries, head of corporate services, told the portfolio committee on telecommunications and postal services on Wednesday that more frequency would have a significant effect on costs.

It will mean we will not have to roll out further base station structures, he told MPs.

In general, it will lead to a reduction of our input costs, because we can apply it on top of our [existing] network costs.

He was answering a question from DA MP Cameron Mackenzie. The committee was meeting this week to listen to presentations on the cost to communicate in South Africa.

De Vries though did add caution, saying there were other costs involved that were not yet accounted for in the potential release of bandwidth.

In order to bid for the available spectrum, a bidding company needs a R3bn reserve price.

On top of that, there is no way of knowing what the final price for the available spectrum will cost once bidding concludes.

He also said he hoped that government would not experiment with the bidding process, given its importance.

MTN not prioritising Nigeria over SA

EFF MP Fana Mokoena, who had been critical of competitor Vodacom earlier on Wednesday, accused MTN of focusing its efforts in Nigeria more than in its home base South Africa.

But MTN SA Chief financial officer Sandile Ntsele disagreed with Mokoena, saying it is difficult to compare across markets.

We are materially the same on a dollar-to-dollar basis, he said.

In general, we do a comparison across the 22 countries we operate in, and in general we stay the same [with regards to investment].

I can clearly state we operate on a country-by-country basis. Each country has its own board of directors, its own targets etc, Ntsele added.

Ntsele said MTN Nigeria and MTN South Africa contribute approximately 65% of the groups profits.

It would be irresponsible not to have our mindset on these two markets.

Economic challenges

De Vries, meanwhile, who pitched his presentation at a less celebratory tone than competitors Vodacom, admitted there were many challenges amid the data explosion in South Africa.

Our revenues are flat, whilst data costs are increasing on a yearly basis, De Vries said.

There are also external pressures that we cannot control. The devaluation in the currency has been driven down by 40%.

That means if we want to do the exact same thing operationally, it costs us 40% more.

Most of our equipment is imported from overseas, and it is priced in dollars, De Vries added.

He said that despite this, MTN has decreased voice and data tariffs by 58% and 73% respectively in the last five years. The company has also reduced marketing spend by 36% since 2011, he said.

We are in a very competitive market, and there is significant pressure to ensure we satisfy our customers.

But we also need to balance that with our shareholders expectations, and its a fine balancing act.

Presentations continued on Wednesday. The committee was still to hear from Cell C, Telkom and Neotel.

News24

More on MTN

Government wants to take Vodacom and MTNs mobile spectrum back

I bought data bundles from Vodacom and MTN and tried to get a refund
MTN has decreased voice and data tariffs by 58% and 73% respectively in the last five years, despite an increase in costs due to a struggling economy, the company has told Parliament.

The portfolio committee on telecommunications and postal services was meeting this week to listen to presentations on the cost to communicate in South Africa.

Graham De Vries, head of corporate services, told the committee on Wednesday that its consumer charges for both phone calls and data have actually declined in the last half decade, despite ongoing calls for data to fall this week.

We are in a very competitive market, and there is significant pressure to ensure we satisfy our customers, he told MPs.

But we also need to balance that with our shareholders expectations, and its a fine balancing act.

The company has also reduced marketing spend by 36% since 2011, he said.

Spectrum problem

South Africa has yet to migrate to digital broadcasts, a key requirement for opening up radio spectrum for faster and more widespread mobile internet services.

De Vries told the committee that more frequency would have a significant effect on costs.

It will mean we will not have to roll out further base station structures, in answer to a question from DA MP Cameron Mackenzie.

In general, it will lead to a reduction of our input costs, because we can apply it on top of our [existing] network costs.

He did though add caution, saying there were other costs involved that were not yet accounted for in the potential release of bandwidth.

In order to bid for the available spectrum, a bidding company needs a R3bn reserve price.

On top of that, there is no way of knowing what the final price for the available spectrum will cost once bidding concludes.

He also said he hoped that government would not experiment with the bidding process, given its importance.

MTN not prioritising Nigeria over SA

EFF MP Fana Mokoena, who had been critical of competitor Vodacom earlier on Wednesday, accused MTN of focusing its efforts in Nigeria more than in its home base South Africa.

But MTN SA Chief financial officer Sandile Ntsele disagreed with Mokoena, saying it is difficult to compare across markets.

We are materially the same on a dollar-to-dollar basis, he said.

In general, we do a comparison across the 22 countries we operate in, and in general we stay the same [with regards to investment].

I can clearly state we operate on a country-by-country basis. Each country has its own board of directors, its own targets etc, Ntsele added.

Ntsele said MTN Nigeria and MTN South Africa contribute approximately 65% of the groups profits.

It would be irresponsible not to have our mindset on these two markets.

Economic challenges

De Vries, meanwhile, who pitched his presentation at a less celebratory tone than competitors Vodacom, admitted there were many challenges amid the data explosion in South Africa.

Our revenues are flat, whilst data costs are increasing on a yearly basis, De Vries said.

There are also external pressures that we cannot control. The devaluation in the currency has been driven down by 40%.

That means if we want to do the exact same thing operationally, it costs us 40% more.

Most of our equipment is imported from overseas, and it is priced in dollars, De Vries added.

Presentations continued on Wednesday. The committee was still to hear from Cell C, Telkom and Neotel.

News24

More on MTN

Government wants to take Vodacom and MTNs mobile spectrum back

I bought data bundles from Vodacom and MTN and tried to get a refund
A WhatsApp message, sent to a University of Pretoria Engineering group, threatens violence against students who are learning while protests are taking place.

According to an engineering student at the University of Pretoria, the threatening WhatsApp message was sent to the group by a protesting student.

The message states that Anyone who goes to classes, you are going to k*k, we are going to beat you up.

She said: We cant be striking while you are in class learning. We are doing this for everyone  so stay away from class.

The intimidation of hard-working students who only want to learn is but one example of fees protests negatively affecting the countrys academic institutions.

More on #FeesMustFall

The ugly face of #FeesMustFall

University protests have begun  photos show massive destruction at UKZN

How the government gives South African universities less money each year
PriceCheck has released an infographic which highlights the most popular products purchased online since 2006.

The pricing platform was launched in 2006 and supplies information to local consumers who wish to shop online.

The company said one of the major drivers of e-commerce and consumer adoption has been the growth in the range of products sold online.

To date, PriceCheck has had over 47,000,000 products listed and has attracted close to 300,000,000 pageviews, said the company.

The graphic below shows the most popular products purchased online since 2006, as ranked by PriceCheck.

More on shopping

Online shopping fight: Yuppie Gadgets vs Yuppiechef

Crime in South Africa is messing up your shopping experience
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BEIRUT  An airstrike in northern Syria killed five medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, a relief group said Wednesday, a day after an airstrike on a humanitarian convoy prompted the U.N. to suspend desperately needed aid deliveries.

The team had just arrived at the scene of the first airstrike in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman when planes circled around and struck the area again, Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said.

Syrian government forces have been accused of carrying out double tap attacks throughout the 5-1/2 year war, placing paramedics and rescue workers in peril.

The organization, known by its French initials UOSSM, had initially said that the Tuesday night strike leveled a medical triage point it operates in rebel-held territory outside the contested city of Aleppo.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 13 people were killed in the attack, including nine militants, some of them belonging to the Fatah al-Sham Front, an al-Qaida-linked group previously known as the Nusra Front.

Three nurses and two ambulance drivers died of their injuries, UOSSM said.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike. Aircraft from Syria, Russia and the U.S.-led coalition are targeting the Fatah al-Sham Front, which along with the Islamic State group was excluded from a weeklong cease-fire.

An airstrike on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent aid convoy Monday night prompted international condemnation over attacks targeting humanitarian facilities and workers. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the convoy strike as a sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack. The convoy was carrying U.N. aid.

The incident fueled tensions between the two architects of Syrias cease-fire, Russia and the United States. Washington said it believed Russian or Syrian government jets were behind the attack that killed 20 civilians, and that either way it held Russia responsible because under the truce deal Moscow was charged with preventing airstrikes on humanitarian deliveries. Syrias rebels do not have aircraft.

In New York on Tuesday, Russian and U.S. diplomats insisted that the cease-fire, which went into effect nine days ago, was not dead, despite soaring violence.

The Syrian military said the truce expired Monday night, shortly before presumed Russian or Syrian government jets launched a sustained aerial attack on Aleppos opposition-held neighborhoods.

The cease-fire was intended in part to allow humanitarian convoys to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas throughout Syria. Yet following the convoy attack, the U.N. suspended overland aid operations in Syria. Syrians living in opposition areas will be disproportionately affected because the U.N.s major warehouses are located in government-held areas.

The U.N. estimates that some 6 million Syrians live in besieged and hard-to-reach areas.

Elsewhere in Syria, airstrikes on the opposition-run town of Talbiseh, outside of the central city of Homs, killed two civilians and wounded tens of others, according to the activist-run Talbiseh Media Center.

The town is besieged by government forces. The Observatory said government jets subjected the town to heavy bombardment Wednesday morning.

State TV said a Syrian warplane crashed after carrying out a combat mission against Islamic State militants northwest of the capital, Damascus. The pilot was rescued, according to an unnamed military official quoted on state TV.

The ISIS-affiliated news agency Aamaq said the group downed the plane in the eastern Qalamoun mountains after the aircraft carried out four raids. IS shot down a government aircraft on Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.
After 34 years working at General Mills in Minneapolis Steve Heller wondered what he would do with himself when he retired.

I wanted to do something different. This is a second chapter, Heller said.

What he calls his retirement project is now HLR Cellars winery and Heller Family Vineyards.

He and his wife, Joan, knew that they wanted to get out of Minnesotas cold climate and investigated moving to the Carolinas or Florida, but after family trips to the West Coast Steve said they knew they wanted to make the Bay Area their next home.

They found their 15-acre property on Sharp Road in 2009 though Steve wasnt retired yet.

I spent two years commuting here. The last year I worked from home here, he said.

The property, which has been in ag use since the 1800s, was in need of updating. There were blackberry brambles all over, the vines that were there were in poor shape, and there was a permit, but no winery, just a concrete slab with rebar poking up all over the place. But the couple had the imagination necessary to envision what it could become.

They started by improving the vineyard, which was planted in 1993, through upgraded farming practices. They also grafted some of the cabernet sauvignon vines to a second clone, adding 550 vines of malbec and 200 vines of petit verdot. They also have merlot on the property.

Where the concrete slab sat they built a 4,000-square-foot winery with a lab and office, barrel room, and tank room. Here they make HLR Cellars wines.

Heller started collecting wine in 1992 and cut his teeth on Bordeaux varieties, which are the varieties he grows and turns into estate wines  cabernet sauvignon, merlot, malbec, and two blends. The 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon earned a gold medal in the 2016 San Francisco International Wine Competition and the 2013 blends, the current release, both nabbed a silver medal in the 2016 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. They are Hella-licious, which is 64 percent cabernet sauvignon, 29 percent merlot, and 7 percent petit verdot; and the Hella-Nora, which is 56 percent malbec, 23 percent cabernet sauvignon, and 21 percent petit verdot.

All of the current releases are $39 a bottle, and Heller said that when people taste the wine and learn the price, most people walk away with a case, and lots of people walk away with a few cases. And with three cases HLR Cellars offers a free two-night stay in the guest cottage, right across the way from the winery and surrounded by some of the remaining English walnut trees that were once part of an orchard. The guest cottage, with a full kitchen and bath, served as home to the Hellers while they were fixing up the main house above the vineyards that, at 1,300 feet, enjoys stunning valley and mountain views.

Heller knows he could charge more for their wine, but doesnt, at least not yet.

The vineyard location isnt quite in the coveted Diamond Mountain District. Thats about a mile away. Heller Family Vineyards is in the Fountaingrove District AVA, which is Sonoma Countys newest AVA established in March 2015.

But Heller has an interesting way of blurring the lines between Diamond Mountain District  which when it was established in 1999 endured some controversy over being solely located in Napa County even though its peak is located in Sonoma County  and the Fountaingrove District.

When Mt. St. Helena erupted more than 3 million years ago, it didnt know the lava and ash it spewed would cross a county line, or an AVA. The same volcanic soil that is in the Diamond Mountain District is in the Fountaingrove District; the same sun exposure, the same climate, and the same 50-inch average rainfall is found on his property. The difference is in the reputation of the established district, recognition of the two AVAs, and in the price each can command.

When he first ventured into winemaking he partnered with an experienced winemaker, basically exchanging fruit for knowledge and splitting the finished wine. It didnt take Heller long to take over the majority of the winemaking duties, thanks to his background and his Ph.D. in food science.

He already had some knowledge of viticulture, he said, because all variations of fermentation are studied in food science. He has one part-time cellar assistant and a vineyard management company, and does the majority of the work himself  his home-schooled, retirement project as he calls it  though still relies on the refined palette of the more experienced winemaker for guidance and advice.

HLR Cellars was among the wineries that participated in the inaugural Fountaingrove Day, held at Kick Ranch on Aug. 20. The winery does not have a tasting room, but the sales office is open by appointment.
AC Night Out

American Canyon High School will hold its 3rd annual AC Night Out on Oct. 5 from 5-8 p.m. The event will include food trucks, games, rock climbing, performances and more. Admission is free.

ACHS music parking lot sale

American Canyon High Schools Music Department will hold a parking lot sale on Saturday, Sept. 24 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the ACHS parking lot. Proceeds from the sale will support the Music Department and assist students on Southern California tours later in the school year.

Oktoberfest happening Oct. 8

The American Canyon Chamber of Commerce will host its 8th annual Oktoberfest on Oct. 8 from 12-5 p.m. at Spring Hill Suites by Marriott. Entry fee is $5. Food and beer will cost extra. The kinder-spiel (childs) area is free. The event will include contests happening throughout the day, including wiener dog and almost wiener dog races.

Native plant sale

The Napa Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society will have its annual California native plant sale on Oct. 15-16 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Skyline Wilderness Park, 2201 Imola Ave. in Napa. For more information, visit www.napavalleycnps.org.

Free concerts on Friday

The American Canyon Arts Foundation will host a free concert series at Napa Junction Courtyard starting 6 p.m. each Friday in September. The concerts will be held in front of Hilo Hawaiian BBQ. Some seating is available but bring a lawn chair.

Scheduled artists for the free concert series are:

Sept. 23  5 Day Bender (R&B, funk and soul)

Sept. 30  Bo Hammer Skins (Caribbean jazz)

For more information, contact Brenda Knight 319-4773.
The adoption of a local master plan for more visual and performing arts in the classroom has garnered statewide attention and praise for the Napa Valley Unified School District.

They are a model for others in this region to see whats possible when people make a commitment, said Joe Landon, executive director of the California Alliance for Arts Education, a statewide group dedicated to giving kids more opportunities to experience artistic creativity.

The school board adopted NVUSDs arts education master plan in June. The plan, which took almost three years to craft, involved a broad range of people  not just teachers and administrators, but also arts advocates and philanthropists in the Napa Valley  to come together and work to broaden the K-12 curriculum so students could learn more than just math, English, history and science.

The plan will need to be turned into a K-12 arts curriculum and implemented in schools in Napa, American Canyon and Yountville  a process that is expected to take years.

The districts public-private partnership approach to creating this plan started generating buzz among education professionals and arts lovers before the formal adoption, prompting Landons organization to come to Napa earlier this month.

The California Alliance for Arts Education held its statewide summit on Sept. 9 at NVUSD headquarters, where teachers, administrators, and nonprofit leaders from around the state gathered to learn how the school district forged a 5-year plan to provide the arts to every student.

Their plan will lead this district into a new era of access to arts education, said Landon. This is something we want to show to educators across California, so we were particularly interested in telling this story.

Summit attendees included Steve Venz, a visual and performing arts coordinator for the Orange County Department of Education, overseer of 28 school districts, nearly all of which have incorporated arts learning into their curriculums.

Venz said one impressive thing about NVUSDs arts master plan is its level of detail.

It looks good in terms of concrete timelines, said Venz. Most of the plans Ive seen dont [have that].

Robin Hampton, coordinator for the Arts Council Napa Valley Education Alliance, was involved from the very beginning in the master plans development. Exposure to the arts is something every child should have because of the lasting impact it can have on young minds, she said.

The arts arent just an educational value  its a life value, said Hampton. Its not just getting up on stage and singing a song. Its those kids now have more confidence when they do a presentation in their career.

Two early and important players in the arts master plan were Festival Napa Valley and the Arts Council of Napa Valley.

Festival Napa Valley, whose mission is to make the arts accessible to all residents, provided a $50,000 grant to support the early planning work that went into the master plan.

Sonia Tolbert, the organizations general manager, said the goal [of the plan] is for every student to have equal access to arts education.

Thats especially important in a district like NVUSD, which has thousands of low-income kids.

All means all, said Superintendent Patrick Sweeney in reference to his districts goal of equitable access to opportunities.

All students need the arts, he told the summit audience.

The Arts Council of Napa Valley agrees. Its CEO and president, Olivia Everett, said they became involved in the master plan because of the need to create curriculum that is responsive to what students are going to live through and what their lives are because thats how you engage them.

Everett said the plan is to incorporate both well-established art forms as well as those culturally relevant to todays student body, more than half of which is Hispanic.

Thats not to say traditional, classical arts are going out. Those are still fundamentals, said Everett. But how do we blend those with non-traditional art forms, she asked.

You want to meet them [students] where they are and introduce them to new things, she said.

Everett said the arts can play an important role in creating global citizens who can relate to others from all walks of life.

Introducing different cultures and ideologies, thats something the arts do really well, she said.

Out of the mouth of babes

Those attending the one-day summit heard from local students about how important arts education has been for them.

Jori Herman, a Napa High School senior and choir member, gave a speech at lunch time telling how early exposure to the arts changed her life and those of other students.

Arts programs, she said, have provided students with a sense of family, a place of expression as well as providing traveling opportunities for kids to expand their worlds.

As a member of Napa Highs renowned choral program, Herman has had the chance to perform not just in the District Auditorium, but in Carnegie Hall and in Irelands grand cathedrals.

Arts programs are blessed with the brightest students on campus, said Herman, yet they are the silent majority who prefer to lock themselves in a room to work on a violin solo or spend nine hours on a canvas painting.

Herman is an example of why NVUSD wants to expand the availability of the arts before kids reach high school.

The district is committed to creating sequential learning of the arts, so children can have classes at all three levels of their public school education.

There is marching band, said Hampton. Some elementary schools put on school plays, but whats needed is sequential arts education.

Lisa Sullivan, a visual and performing arts teacher at Vintage High School, agreed that arts learning must begin sooner, even as early as kindergarten.

We would not expect our child to walk into a college prep class or a high school English class and expect them to write a 200-page essay or take an algebra test if they didnt know their A-B-Cs or how to add one plus equals two, said Sullivan.

But thats what were asking our children to do at the high school level in many visual or performing arts or the middle school levels, she said, but they cant because they werent taught it at the elementary level.

NVUSD has promised to make the arts a key part of elementary education in part because its top official enjoyed that very opportunity when he was a boy.

Sweeney grew up in Pleasanton, where in third grade he had instrumental music as well as visual arts during elementary school. His middle school made visual arts available for every student, allowing them to take classes in sculpture, drawing and painting.

For many of us who grew up in California in the Sixties and Seventies, which I did, said Sweeney, we had arts everywhere. We had music in the elementary schools, we had robust band programs, we had drama, we had visual arts.

But that changed in the Eighties as a result of Prop. 13.

That was then, this is now

Adopted in 1978, Prop. 13 dramatically reduced property taxes for homeowners and businesses. It also had the related consequence of reducing revenues for government programs, including education.

Arts programs were some of the first ones slashed by school districts in the early 1980s and going forward.

Sweeney noted at the arts education summit that California was once in the top 10 among states for school funding. Were in the bottom 10 now, he said.

But the way California schools are funded changed recently, thanks to a decision made in Sacramento.

Starting in 2013, the California Department of Education was instructed by the Legislature to establish the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which replaced the existing K-12 finance system that had been around for four decades.

LCFF was music to the ears of school district administrators. It granted them more freedom in deciding how to spend the monies they receive from the state for their schools.

The LCFF did two really exciting things, said Sibyl OMalley, director of communications for the California Alliance for Arts Education.

First, it allowed districts to personalize the education they provide to students, according to OMalley. The second was it gave them local control over their resources.

In the old days Sacramento created categorical funds and said, You have this much for this, and this much for that, she said.

Now, districts can spend their state money as they see fit, as long as they meet eight priorities established by the state.

We know the arts can contribute to many of those eight priorities, which include improving school climate, student engagement and academic achievement, said OMalley.

We know it [the arts] improves school climate, we know that students come to school more when they have the arts, she said.

The original posting of this story contained incorrect information about Jori Herman's exposure to the arts.
A statewide shortage of math teachers has the Napa Valley Unified School District scrambling to hire such instructors.

Do you enjoy math? read a recent ad in an NVUSD newsletter. Have you thought about sharing your enthusiasm with students by becoming a math teacher?

Almost a month into the new school year, the district is still short two math teachers, one for River School and one for New Tech High School. Justin-Siena High School is also looking to hire a math teacher, according to the schools administration.

There is always a need for qualified math teachers, said Alejandro Hogan, assistant superintendent of human resources for the NVUSD.

Over the past few years, there have been a lack of applicants for math teaching jobs and a lack of teachers who are qualified to teach math, he said.

The NVUSD employs approximately 1,000 teachers, said Hogan. While two math teachers might not sound like a lot, those two teachers could teach a total of as many as 300 students.

Until those permanent teachers can be hired, substitutes are teaching those math students, said Hogan. Substitute teachers arent always qualified to teach math.

And a substitute can only stay with a class for 30 days before a new substitute must be brought in.

The students are affected by the lack of continuity, said Hogan.

Newly credentialed math teacher Samuel Urena is one of the chosen few.

Urena is a new math teacher at Napa High School, the same school he graduated from in 2005. The first in his family to graduate from college, he said his teachers motivated him to earn his own teaching credential in math.

For me, teaching is not just about numbers, but also use those critical thinking skills that math provides and use those skills in real life, said Urena. Hopefully I can get that message across to my students.

Staying in Napa and working with youth was another goal. I want to help motivate them to go into higher education, he said.

Working at Napa High is a good fit, Urena said. As a Napan and a graduate, I know what these kids are maybe going through, he said.

Urena said he felt reassured knowing math teachers are in demand.

When I was in the credential program, we were told, you math teachers dont worry about jobs. It did make it somewhat more comfortable for us math candidates. But at the same time, my goal was to stay here in Napa and that was a little competitive. I was lucky enough that I had offers from two schools.

Today, Urena is teaching four sections of Math 1 to mostly freshman students at Napa High School. Hes also an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program teacher. The program prepares students for college and other postsecondary opportunities.

Even though he could have made more money with his math degree in a different career, Urena said teaching suits him.

I like being busy, he said. I cant sit down the whole day like at an office job, he said.

The need for math teachers isnt just a Napa problem.

Every district in California is having a hard time finding qualified math teachers, said Alejandro Hogan, the districts assistant superintendent of human resources.

When funds are cut, the universities that prepare teachers to receive their credentials dont always offer strong programs for math applicants, Hogan said.

In addition, there are less people interested in the teaching profession, he said. Other careers and industries can offer higher salaries money and better professional opportunities for those with math skills.

The salary range for an NVUSD math teacher is $55,179 to $85,046.

Hogan said the high cost of living in Napa is also a deterrent. It is very difficult for a new teacher to find adequate housing and housing they can afford, he said.

Last year the NVUSD implemented a $2,000 signing bonus for hard-to-sign positions such as science, math and special education teachers and psychologists. Since the school year has already started, that bonus is no longer available, he noted.

According to a 2016 report from the Learning Policy Institute, increased demand for K12 teachers in California comes at a time when the supply of new teachers is at a 12-year low. Enrollment in educator preparation programs has dropped by more than 70 percent over the last decade, and has fallen below the estimated needed number of hires by school districts around the state.

Although shortages are occurring across a range of subject areas, the problem is most acute in mathematics, science and special education, said the report.

Each of these high-need fields has been marked by a drop in the number of preliminary credentials issued to new teachers and a significant increase in the number of temporary permits, waivers, and intern credentials.

In mathematics and science, the number of preliminary credentials awarded to new, fully-prepared teachers dropped by 32 percent and 14 percent, respectively, over the last four years.

In that same time, the numbers of underprepared mathematics and science teachers (those with temporary permits and waivers and intern credentials) have increased by 23 percent and 51 percent, respectively, said the report.

Teachers are more likely to quit when they work in districts with lower wages and when their salaries are low relative to alternative wage opportunities, especially in high-demand fields like math and science, said the Learning Policy Institute report.
For the second year in a row, the Napa Valley Unified School District is proposing the merger of two schools due to declining enrollment and other critical factors.

But the plan this time involves two very different schools widely separated by distance and learning methods: Yountville Elementary and Stone Bridge Charter in Carneros.

Last year, NVUSD got the school board to approve moving the students and curriculum at Salvador Elementary, a magnet school specializing in artful learning, to El Centro Elementary, another north Napa school with a traditional K-5 curriculum.

These elementary schools, located only a mile apart, are in an area of north Napa where enrollments have been shrinking.

NVUSD has cited fewer students as one reason for wanting Yountville Elementary School, known locally as YES, to become the new home for Stone Bridge Charter, located southwest of Napa in the Carneros region. The two schools would retain their separate curriculum.

YES currently has only 120 K-5 students, making it by far the smallest elementary population in NVUSD, whose primary schools range in size from 300 to 600 students.

YES is a New Tech school that uses Project Based Learning and computers, Stone Bridge uses Waldorf methods that emphasize holistic learning and nurturing childrens imagination. The two schools are 14 miles apart.

Stone Bridge does not lack for students, based on the limits established by its charter. It has reached its cap of 260 students across nine grades (K-8), and has a waiting list.

Together, the two schools would form a campus of nearly 400 students, making it more viable operation for NVUSD from a fiscal standpoint.

Stone Bridge needs to move, according to district officials, because of safety issues stemming from a nearby earthquake fault and a Pacific Gas & Electric natural gas transmission pipeline.

We dont believe it is safe to have a school that close to a pipeline, especially after San Bruno, said Assistant Superintendent Wade Roach last Tuesday in Yountville, referring to the 2010 explosion of a PG&E gas transmission line that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes on the Peninsula.

Roach also brought up the fact that the Stone Bridge campus sits on top of the West Napa Fault, a discovery made after the August 2014 earthquake that left huge cracks in the schools parking lot.

Joining Roach that night in the Yountville Community Center was Don Evans, NVUSDs head of school construction, who told the crowd of nearly 100 parents and local leaders, including Mayor John Dunbar and the Town Council: Having that school that close to that fault line is not a good situation.

PG&E replaced a section of its gas transmission line that runs underneath the Stone Bridge property line following the earthquake. But that wasnt enough to satisfy Evans, he said.

Im concerned after living as long as I have in earthquake country, said Evans, who has lived in Napa since 1952. Im not sure thats enough improvement to make it safe for a school.

If Napa Valley Unified asked me today whether I would recommend that site for a school, the answer would be a flat no, he said.

Stone Bridge was established at the former Carneros Elementary School, which was built in the 1950s and closed five years ago.

Some Stone Bridge parents say they were both surprised and upset by NVUSDs plans to move their school to Yountville.

Laura Jones, co-chair of the Stone Bridge School Parent Council, appeared before the school board last Thursday to complain about the YES/Stone Bridge merger.

Citing Measure H, the $269 million school bond passed by NVUSD voters in June, Jones indicated her school was the victim of bait-and-switch tactics by the school district, which held meetings at numerous school campuses in the spring to garner parent support for the election.

We were told last May by Don Evans at a meeting on our campus that if Measure H passed, there would be dedicated money to rebuild our school structures within our Carneros campus, Jones told the school board during the meetings public comment period.

We were told based on testing and studies done by the state of California, if the facilities were rebuilt from a certain distance from the fault line, our campus would be safe, just as is happening with Snow [Elementary School], which also has the West Napa Fault running under it, said Jones.

She also said that a majority of our parent body want to stay on our current campus, and we are really confused by the extreme change of plans after Measure H has passed.

As Napa families were feeling really confused and upset and slightly misrepresented, said Jones in her concluding remarks. I hope we can create a more open and honest dialogue in the near future.

When asked Monday morning about parents complaints and the change of plans for Stone Bridge, Evans said he would address the matter on Wednesday night, when he and other district officials will meet with the Stone Bridge community beginning at 7 p.m. at their school.

Even if Stone Bridge parents balk at the Yountville relocation, Superintendent Patrick Sweeney indicated the district wants to go ahead.

Speaking to the Yountville audience last Tuesday, Sweeney said the districts goal is to have the school board approve the merger in November.

We want to get the architects started on designs for a remodeled YES campus that would have Stone Bridge operating on it, but separately from the Yountville K-5 school, according to Sweeney.

He also said the final decision may not be popular with all parents, including those at Stone Bridge.

The way charter schools work, said Sweeney, we have to provide a facility  but we dont have to give people their facility wherever they want.

Yountville parents expressed their own worries about the merger, most of which centered around whether their small school would get short-changed by having the larger Stone Bridge on their campus.

How do we know Yountville wont be the loser in this merger, given the differences in enrollment sizes, asked one parent in the audience.

Boyd Dennington, president of the Yountville Kiwanis Club, rose up and told Sweeney, Evans and Roach: I fear youre putting the future of Yountville Elementary in jeopardy.

I feel like in the past Yountville Elementary has been bullied by the district, he said. I feel like their needs have not always been addressed, and theres always been an uphill battle fighting rumors and misinformation about closing down the school.

Denningtons remarks produced the loudest applause of the night.

District officials were aided in their efforts to assuage Yountville parents by Rob Mondavi, whose child attends kindergarten at YES.

Mondavi, the grandson of Robert Mondavi, is helping lead a parent advisory committee thats meeting weekly with the district about the merger.

They cant promise us anything, he told his fellow Yountville parents, but theres an idea that theyll help us one way or another. I feel comfortable with the intent of the team thats over here, he said pointing to district officials.

Evans said the district anticipates greater demand for parking at YES if two separate schools are operating on the same campus.

Mondavi pledged to help raise money for a parking structure, if NVUSD says it cant afford to build one.

If parking is a problem, how do we go vertical with it? he said in an interview following the meeting. If thats too expensive [for the district], how do we do a private fundraise to the school for the community?
Q: Why do some conservationists caution against helping animals in nature? Its so sad to see an animal lost or dying due to natural causeswhat harm could result from saving it?

A: Heres what science has to say:

It can be really hard to see another living thing alone and in pain. But its important to remember that when it comes to nonhuman animals, looks can be deceiving.

A lot of the time, when people think an animal is abandoned or lost, thats not actually accurate, said Steve Monfort, director of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Its hard if you dont know the full context.

For example, a nest of baby cottontail rabbits may seem abandoned if you cant spot an adult nearby. But mother rabbits spend only minutes a day with their young, and thats a good thing. Unlike their offspring, adult rabbits give off a strong scent that predators can track. If the mother stayed in the burrow, she might inadvertently lure a hungry fox or owl straight to it. Shes being the best parent she can be by avoiding her kids entirely.

Another example: Many young birds leave the nest a few days before theyre actually able to fly. A fledgling that seems lost and alone to a human observer may just be going through a very normal phase of growing up. Humans who attempt to rescue these lost animals often end up doing more harm than good.

The best thing you can do for an animal that appears to be neglected, Monfort said, is call someone from an animal welfare service, rather than try to weigh the costs of interfering with the creature on your own.

If an animal is sick or injured, the calculation is slightly different, but Monforts recommendation is the same. Sick animals may carry diseases that can infect humans; moving an injured animal may cause further damage. Its always better to let a professional handle it.

Theres also a difference between animal rescue and conservation, which you mention in your question. Whether you should help a single injured bird in your backyard is an animal welfare issue. But conservation is about saving species, not individuals. And although individual animals die from natural causes all the time, extinctions are almost always driven by humans.

The rates of extinction that are occurring are 1,000 times greater in the world than what you would consider to occur by natural processes, Monfort said.

Conservationists will sometimes rescue and rehabilitate sick members of endangered species, particularly if their ailment is linked to human presenceMonfort called that conservation with a little c. But most of the work of protecting threatened populations is about ensuring that they have the right resources and environment to thrive, despite the incursions of poachers, climate change, deforestation and the like.

Indeed, aiding animals is sometimes antithetical to the notion of conservation. Things like illness, injury and predation can be brutal to witnessbut they are also part of the natural system scientists want to preserve. Thats why conservationists rarely intervene in individual cases, even when they involve creatures the scientists are trying to protect.

Currently, Monfort is helping with a project to reintroduce the scimitar-horned oryxa North African antelope thats been extinct in the wild for yearsto a nature reserve in Chad. The animals are fitted with radio collars and will be protected from human influence, but once we reintroduce we more or less let nature take its course, Monfort said.

Don Despain, a retired ecologist at Yellowstone National Park, has said that the resource is wildnessa quote that the park now features on its website.

The importance of Yellowstone is not in preserving five thousand bison, ten thousand hot springs, or three hundred waterfalls, the park explains. Rather, the parks significance is in preserving natural ecological processes.

In nature, an injured animalsay, the bird in your back yard with a broken wingwill become food for a predatorperhaps an owl. The remains that the owl doesnt eat will go on to feed microbes that fertilize the soil, which, in turn, gives rise to new plants, which will feed the insects that become a meal for future birds. This whole system is the wildness that Despain speaks of. Its worth thinking about the next time you come across an injured bird.
Fernando Valdes Gonzalez might just be Napas bravest little boy.

With the support of his community, he has faced it all: a horrific health diagnosis, family hardship, and the trauma of rigorous medical treatment as he battled a bout of cancer, caught only by some miracle.

And now hes helping his family live out a dream by taking them on a vacation to Hawaii, thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

It started with a normal work day for Napa native and public health nurse Maura Snider, who was visiting with the Valdes-Gonzalez family to check up on 5-month-old Fernando.

As one of three Napa public health nurses, Snider sees up to five families a day for reasons ranging from drug abuse to mental health to medical hardship, or merely support for new families. She often checks on children like Fernando to assess development- but on this visit she noticed some alarming new progressions.

He held his head to the right and was not able to hold his head up, Snider recalled, and knowing something must be wrong, she recommended the family to a doctor.

In March 2013 Fernando saw his first doctor and was given an X-ray that showed infantile scoliosis. This visit prompted an MRI in May as the family prepared to deal with Fernandos serious diagnosis.

It was so scary; I investigated, searching online, and learned that (scoliosis meant that) he would need, eventually, a surgery, said Fernandos mother, Maria Gonzalez.

To the familys horror, this was only the beginning of little Fernandos journey. After his MRI, he was due for another appointment for results in San Francisco.

I recall this moment- I got a phone call from another office saying to come there, and I remember we got there and the office his appointment was in said cancer, Gonzalez remembers. Fernandos father (Luis Valdes) got confused right away and asked if we were in the right place and they said, yes. We just looked at each other and said why?

The MRI on his spine, meant to rule out or confirm scoliosis had, by coincidence, been positioned just so, so that it was possible to see that there was a tumor just at the base of his neck, near the brainstem. Had the tumor been higher up, or the MRI slightly lower, the tumor would likely have been overlooked. And had it not been caught at that time, doctors say it could have easily spread to the rest of his body.

Fernando had surgery to remove his tumor in May of 2013, but surgeons were unable to remove it fully, and by August it had grown back. After the exponential growth, he started an aggressive weekly chemotherapy in January of 2015 in UC San Francisco.

The treatment was, very, very tiring, his mother said. During this time I found out that I was pregnant with my youngest son. I thought, how am I going to do it?

Fernandos father, Valdes, even scheduled his appointments every Monday, so that he could take him to the city on his days off.

This is where Sniders work comes into action. The Public Health Service, she said, is like a tree, connecting and communicating to and between programs to provide a safety net and support for families like Fernandos.

In his case it started with the Care Network at the Queen of the Valley. Other programs such as Napa County Public Health -Maternal Child and Adolescent Health Services, were pivotal as he went through treatment, and services such as physical and occupational therapy were provided by Napa Countys office of California Childrens Services. Fernando also participated in Napas infant and preschool program.

His family qualified for and received housing from Napa Valleys new community housing, and received help with rent from Community Action of Napa Valley. Many others became involved, such as Shannon Raber (Nurse Practitioner), Debbie Duplantis and Kendall Sittler (teachers at the Napa Infant Program and Napa Preschool Program), Barbara Dondero (School Nurse at the Napa Infant Program) and Hilda Guttierrez (Parent Advocate for Parents Can).

An especially helpful program for Fernandos mother was Parents Can, which strives to provide guidance for parents raising sick children.

I got really involved in it and the support groups they offer, she said. I learned about resources, and the best part is that they have child care.

The people at these services become like a second family,

I dont have much family, just my husband- most of the help came from the community, Gonzalez said. Its hard. Im by myself in this country. I consider all these people in all these services my family.

Finally, in February, Snider contacted the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which has granted Fernando a wish beyond what he expected, a wonderful reward for the familys consistent perseverance.

Fernando loves Mickey Mouse, but also wanted to see Hawaii. Make-a-Wish was able to combine his desires, providing a trip to Disneys Aulani Resort on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. His mother said the trip is also a nice treat for his siblings, sister Estrella, 6, and brother Dylan, 2, who have also suffered the strain of Fernandos illness.

Were very excited about it  we talk about it almost every day, his mother said. Every time we see something related to the beach the kids point and say lets take that with us!

The trip was planned for August while Fernando is still in a fortunate spell of good health.

Though there have been tears and triumphs, and Fernandos journey so far has spanned many years, his story is not yet over. His type of tumor has high recurrence within 10 years. He will be closely monitored for any signs and side effects for the rest of his life, and suffers complications to his vestibular system from his tumor removal surgery, such as an eye problem that requires corrective lenses. In four months, he has an appointment for an eye surgery. He also has to continue with both occupational and physical therapy.

Though his trials are not over, as of April, Fernando appeared to be all clear, with no signs of tumor regrowth. Gonzalez credits God for Fernandos second chance at life  and also the numerous services that came to the rescue.

This is truly the amazing part, Snider said, We all work together to provide support. In another city this family might have been lost.
STOCKHOLM

Swedish firefighters battle blaze

at art institute

A fire in a building belonging to Stockholms Royal Institute of Art sent a plume of smoke over large parts of the Swedish capital.

Dozens of firefighters struggled to contain the blaze, which raced through the attic and roof of the building on Skeppsholmen island near downtown Stockholm on Wednesday. There were no reports of injuries.

A thick column of smoke rose from the island and spread out over much of the city center.

The cause of the fire wasnt immediately clear.

The Royal Institute of Art offers undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate studies in fine arts and architecture.

PARIS

French family arrest related

to Paris attacks

French authorities say a sister of a man who claimed responsibility on behalf of the Islamic State group for last years Paris attacks has been arrested with her family on return from Syria.

The Paris prosecutors office said Wednesday that Anne Clain, her husband Mohamed Amri and their four children were transferred from Turkey to France a day earlier.

Anne Clain is a sister of a French convert, Fabien Clain, who has moved to Syria and joined the ranks of ISIS. He was the voice on a recorded, French-language, IS claim of responsibility for the Nov. 13 Paris attacks.

Anne Clain and her eldest, 16-year-old son have been put in custody while Amri, under an international arrest warrant, is being questioned by a counterterrorism judge, the office said.

LONDON

Tate galleries pick up replica of anti-war protest camp

A replica of an anti-war protest camp that stood outside Britains Parliament for a decade has been acquired by the countrys most visited group of art museums, the Tate.

Artist Mark Wallingers State Britain recreates the tent, placards and posters of Brian Haw, who set up camp outside Parliament in 2001 and remained until his death from cancer in 2011.

Haw used the camp to protest British involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Officials repeatedly tried to remove him.

Wallingers prize-winning work is among the new acquisitions announced Wednesday by Tate, which operates Londons Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

Another addition includes Portrait of an Unknown Lady by 17th-century painter Joan Carlile  the earliest work by a female artist in the Tate collection.

KAMPALA, Uganda

Uganda says police will arrest planners of gay pride parade

A Ugandan official says police will arrest organizers who are planning a gay pride parade in the capital, Kampala.

Simon Lokodo, a cabinet minister in charge of ethics and integrity, said in a statement Wednesday that the event had not been cleared by the police and would offend the countrys laws.

Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda under a colonial-era law.

In 2014, Ugandas president signed an anti-gay bill that originally had proposed the death penalty against some homosexual acts, but a court later jettisoned the law as unconstitutional.

Frank Mugisha, a gay rights leader, says he had been awaiting police authorization to hold a parade this weekend at a beach on Lake Victoria.
Marc Thiessen

Hillary Clinton tells us she is recovering from a mild case of pneumonia, but less than half of American voters believe her belated explanation of why she appeared to faint leaving a 9/11 commemoration. If she wants to understand why, she can find the answer in a childrens poem.

In his 1907 classic, Matilda Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death, Hilaire Belloc tells the story of a young girl who told such Dreadful Lies, It made one Gasp and Stretch ones Eyes. One day Matilda calls in a false alarm to Londons fire brigade, and as punishment is left home alone while her aunt goes to the theater:

That Night a Fire did break out

You should have heard Matilda Shout!

You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,

And throw the window up and call

To People passing in the Street . . . but all in vain!

For every time She shouted Fire!

They only answered Little Liar!

And therefore when her Aunt returned,

Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

Today, it is the American people who have been burned, time and again, by Hillary Clintons dreadful lies. Lets review just a few examples of her serial dishonesty:

She lied repeatedly about her emails. She lied when she said she had turned over everything I was obligated to turn over (FBI Director James Comey said the FBI discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not among the group of 30,000 e-mails returned by Secretary Clinton to state in 2014). She lied when she said there was no classified material in her private emails . . . that there was nothing classified at the time . . . and that there was nothing marked classified in her private emailsall of which the FBI director said were untrue.

And, to top it all off, she lied about her liesdeclaring on national television that Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what Ive said is consistent with what I have told the American peoplea claim The Washington Posts Fact Checker gave Four Pinocchios.

Clinton lied to the American people about Benghazi. At 10:08 p.m. the night of the attack, she issued a statement that blamed the attack on inflammatory material posted on the Internet with no mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda. But an hour later, at 11:12 p.m. she emailed her daughter, Chelsea: Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group. The next day in a phone call with the Egyptian prime minister, Clinton said: We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest. Yet two days later, as she welcomed the caskets of the fallen in Dover, Delaware, she blamed that attack on an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.

She lied about a trip she made to Bosnia, claiming that she and her team arrived under sniper fire, skipped the arrival ceremony and just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. In fact, a video shows her being greeted on the tarmac by Bosnian officials and an 8-year-old Muslim girl, Emina Bicakcic, who read a poem in English and told Clinton, There is peace now.

She lied about her family history. In 2015, she said she could relate to illegal immigrants because all my grandparents immigrated to the United States. When BuzzFeeds Andrew Kaczynski pointed out that three of Clintons four grandparents were born in the United States, a Clinton spokesman said her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants.

And her dishonesty stretches back decades. As the late, great William Safire pointed out in a 1996 New York Times column, she delivered a blizzard of lies as first ladyabout Whitewater, the firing of White House travel aides, her representation of a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S&L and how she made a 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading simply by studying the Wall Street Journal. Even back then, Safire concluded, Clinton was a congenital liar.

Today, the American people agree. A recent NBC News poll found that just 11 percent of Americans say Clinton is honest and trustworthy. To put that in perspective, 14 percent of American voters say they believe in Bigfoot. In other words, more Americans believe that a large, hairy, hominoid creature inhabits the forest of North America than believe that Hillary Clinton tells the truth.

So if Clinton wonders why so many believe she is lying about her health, it is because she has lied so many times, about so many things, that most Americans no longer believe a word she sayseven if shes telling the truth.

When she opens her mouth, people look at her like Bellocs Matilda and say, Little Liar.

Marc Thiessen, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute and former chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush, writes an online column for The Washington Post.
An avid reader goes to a bookstore to find something to read. The reader narrows his choice to two books, then decides to purchase the one that best suits his interests. By the standards of the American Library Association (ALA), the reader has just chosen to ban or censor the book not chosen.

Banned Books Week (Sept. 25-Oct.1) is upon us, the annual awareness effort of the ALA to promote the freedom to read. The week features library displays, events and a virtual read-out of banned books on YouTube. ALA states on its website that the week highlights the value of free and open access to information, and provides support of the freedom to seek and express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.

The cause is noteworthy, and the ALAs work to promote intellectual freedom is commendable. The ALA overreaches, however, when it confuses judgment with censorship.

The books on the ALAs list of challenged books are, in reality, not banned or censored. The books are widely available in bookstores and many libraries for any citizen to read. A truly banned book would be eliminated from the public domain by government order, with penalties for offenders who distribute or read the censored material. That does happen in certain nations, but the United States is not one of them.

It is true some schools and libraries decide that certain books are not suitable for their constituencies. But thats not necessarily censorship. That is selection.

The ALA report on challenged books indicates most complaints come from parents or patrons and are directed at school or public libraries, or school curricula. The ALA asserts such challenges are designed to restrict access to this information (the challenged book) by other library users, and that book challenges provide evidence that censorship is still a very serious problem.

Much like an individual reader deciding what to read, librarians and teachers make decisions about what material to include in a library or academic course. Those decisions are based on many factors, including budget, suitability for patrons of the library, and community standards. In short, every book cant be included in every library or on every high schools ninth-grade reading list. When librarians choose to include certain books in the collection and not others, they are not fascists or censors. Neither are local taxpayers who raise questions about why limited public funds were used to purchase certain materials and not others.

There are legitimate reasons why citizens in a community might question the inclusion of violent, sexually explicit or profane content in schools or the taxpayer-funded local library. The First Amendment, which the ALA rightly says protects the right to access a wide range of content, also protects the rights of citizens to challenge the decisions of library personnel.

The Supreme Court tried to deal with this First Amendment matter in 1982, but a fractured 5-4 decision failed to provide definitive guidance, even though it did limit school board authority in certain circumstances. The case involved a Florida school board that sought removal of certain books from the high school library because the books were un-American and just plain filthy.

Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority, affirming the school boards discretion to choose books for schools. But he said the board could not remove books already in the library simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books. The case suggests an implied First Amendment right to read, a value quite fitting for democracy.

But while the First Amendment provides a right to read, citizens should not expect any one library or school is mandated to provide any or all particular reading materials. If the local library determines Fifty Shades of Grey is unsuitable for the community, individuals can still access that book through individual purchase.

Universities pride themselves on being places of broad, intellectual inquiry. Only five of the 14 Big Ten universities, however, have chosen to put emphatic conservative thinker Mark Levins Ameritopia book in their collections, even though the book was at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. This censorship didnt hurt Levin as the book was a commercial success read by thousands.

The ALA should clarify its push for intellectual inquiry by renaming Banned Books Week. Focus on Americans precious right to access whatever books they wish, unhindered by government censorship. Help them understand that a book missing from the public librarys shelf is not banned, just because it didnt meet selection criteria.
If a dangerous street hoodlum demands and then flees with your wallet, the police will call that robbery.

But, if a police officer seizes your cash, car or other property on the mere suspicion that it is somehow connected to criminal activityand without ever convicting or even charging you with a crime  the police will call that a legal civil asset seizure.

According to FBI statistics, the combined value of street, highway, convenience store and bank robberies in California in 2013, topped $62.7 million. California police departments, however, had a much better year netting more than $125.9 million in proceeds from forfeited private property.

Lets take a closer look at this $125.9 million money-from-heaven enjoyed by the California law enforcement agencies. According to the Institute for Justice, a Washington-based public-interest law firm, California state and local law enforcement agencies, on their own, enforcing state and local laws, took in forfeited proceeds totaling $28.1 million in 2013.

In addition, in partnership with federal agencies enforcing federal civil forfeiture statutes, the share of proceeds from private property seized in California going to state and local police agencies totaled $12.3 million from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and $85.5 million from the U.S. Department of Justice.

This backdoor money flow is a blueprint for property rights abuse. Since California laws allow up to 66 percent of these forfeited proceeds to go directly into local law enforcement budgets, the police have a huge, built-in incentive to aggressively target forfeitable assets rather than pursue justice.

How the Civil Forfeiture System Works

Criminal forfeiture laws, but not civil forfeiture laws, require a criminal conviction to deprive people of their property. Under civil laws, however, the seized property itself, not the owner, is simply presumed to be guilty. To get ones property back, property owners in all stateseven if they are not charged or convicted of a crimeare then up against a short time limit to file a claim.

But the procedures for proving your property has no connection to a crime are so convoluted, one needs to hire a lawyer for any chance of success. And, in many states, failure to register a claimoften within 30-90 daysallows the government to permanently take the property by administrative actions.

If the property owner cant afford a lawyer or if the value of the property is less than expected legal costs, property owners walk away. Between 1997 and 2013, 88 percent of all federal Department of Justice civil forfeitures of private property never saw a courtroom.

Two examples show how the system works

While on a five-month, 19 city, U.S. tour to raise money for a Thai orphanage, Eh Wah, the manager of the Burmese Christian rock band, Klo & Kweh Music Team, was pulled over in Oklahoma in February 2016 for a broken tail light on his car.

A sheriffs deputy searched the car and found $53,000 in cash in separate envelopes containing the orphanage donations collected in each city. Suspecting drug trafficking, Eh Wah was charged for being in the possession of drug proceeds.

Attorneys from the Institute for Justice took the case and, after substantial effort and expenses, eventually recovered the seized money.

Zaher El-Ali, a small businessman living in Houston for more than 30 years, did not fare so well. In 2009, another person driving El-Alis Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck was stopped by Harris County police for driving while intoxicated and the truck was seized. The driver was in the process of buying the vehicle from El-Ali but the truck was still titled in El-Alis name.

The driver, found guilty of his third DWI, was sentenced to six years in prison and the County issued civil forfeiture actions against the truck. El-Ali filed a counter claim as the innocent owner of the truck. Under Texas law, it is El-Alis, not the governments, responsibility to prove in court that the truck was not connected to the crime and that he, El-Ali, had no prior knowledge of the crime.

But in the end, the court ruled against El-Ali and the truck was forfeited.

To end this shady practice, federal and state civil asset forfeiture laws need to adopt the same standards now applied in criminal forfeiture cases and also to prohibit law enforcement agencies from benefiting from forfeited proceeds. It is as simple as that.

Only then will property owners in California and elsewhere no longer wonder if their law enforcement officials are following even-handed, due-process procedures, or padding their agencys budgets at citizens expense.

Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.
VALLEJO -- A mysterious odor and possible sheen on the water that prompted shelter-in-place orders overnight in Vallejo has also prompted the halting of ferry service out of the city Wednesday morning.

San Francisco Bay Ferry officials issued an alert at 7:10 a.m. today saying they are assessing a possible oil spill in San Pablo Bay that is affecting the route between Vallejo and San Francisco.

Bus shuttles are being made available for passengers while ferry service is stopped.

At 7:55 p.m. Tuesday, Vallejo firefighters reported on Twitter that a strong odor had been reported in the city's Glen Cove and Beverly Hills Park neighborhoods.

Residents in American Canyon complained on Facebook that they could smell a foul odor, prompting them to close windows and shut off air conditioners.

By 10 p.m., more than 800 calls had been received by dispatch and a number of residents reportedly went to the hospital, city spokeswoman Joanna Altman said.

A shelter-in-place order was issued for the area but was lifted at 6:28 a.m. today.

The U.S. Coast Guard investigated the odor and a sheen was reportedly visible on the water by helicopter and boat.

Coast Guard crews were planning on going back out this morning to further investigate the incident.
This is the first in a series of profiles of the four City Council candidates.

Geoff Ellsworth was raised in a St. Helena where the communitys quality of life was the citys top priority.

He says hes running for City Council because he wants to keep it that way.

This is one of the few places Ive ever been where people raise their kids, the kids go away, and they want to come back here to raise their own kids, said Ellsworth, an artist. Thats pretty unique in America, and I dont want to lose it.

Citizens should have a say in major decisions such as changing the citys regulations on small wineries, leasing or selling City Hall, and approving new wineries and hotels, Ellsworth said. Sometimes the best way to do that is by putting issues on the ballot, he said.

Our elected officials, I hope and believe, are here to serve the community, not rule the community, he said.

Ellsworth hasnt served in elected office, but he said hes been attending city and county meetings for the last three years to understand the dynamics between the city and the county, which I believe are an integral part of solving some of our issues here.

I try to look at problems in a systemic way, he said.

For example, Ellsworth said wine tourism is creeping into the countys Ag Preserve, which draws revenue away from the cities and and puts them under pressure to develop their own tourist-oriented uses.

If we get into a hospitality arms race with other cities and the county, everythings going to spiral. Our roads cant service that amount of business, Ellsworth said. Our General Plans Tourism Element needs to have mechanisms to manage tourism growth, because we can only sustain so much.

Ellsworth said he would like to see the cities and county work together on a revenue-sharing plan in which Upvalley cities like St. Helena, which have limited resources to handle tourism, would collect some of the revenue generated by hotels in places like Napa, which are more capable of absorbing those impacts.

As for other revenue opportunities, Ellsworth supports Measure D, the half-cent sales tax on the November ballot, and said the city should investigate annexing county properties like Meadowood.

Yes, we need more revenue, but we have to be very careful about trying to build our way out of the situation, he said. If we allow three or four hotels and the town becomes so filled with activity from those hotels that residents no longer want to live here, whats the purpose?

Pressure is building to put a hotel on the citys Adams Street property, but Ellsworth said the city should respect the community vision plan from 2009, in which locals endorsed civic uses on the property.

Ellsworth is one of the founders of Citizens Voice St. Helena, a nonprofit advocacy group that sued the city over the approval of the Davies Family Winery on Grayson Avenue. Critics, including Ellsworth, said the city hadnt properly vetted the projects effects on traffic, water and noise, and hadnt fully considered the implications of having a winery and tasting room next to a school.

The city prevailed in court (the applicant covered the city's legal fees), but Citizens Voice has become a political force in town, appealing to people like Ellsworth who worry that tourist uses are being given a higher priority than residents quality of life.

If St. Helena fails to manage tourism effectively, longtime residents will start moving away, Ellsworth said. The loss of their votes will further threaten the policies that protect St. Helenas small-town charm, he said.

How do we keep St. Helena a real town and not just a second-home enclave? he said. Thats a big question.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with several world leaders on Wednesday (21 September 2016) in the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

In talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, Mr. Stoltenberg welcomed Iraqs progress in the fight against ISIL. Both leaders agreed on the importance of NATOs support to Iraq in building more effective security and defence forces. At the Warsaw Summit, Allies agreed to provide in-country training and capacity building support to Iraq, complementing existing NATO training for Iraqi officers in Jordan.

Meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the Secretary General reaffirmed NATOs strong political and practical support for Ukraine. In Warsaw, Allies endorsed a Comprehensive Assistance Package to help Ukraine better provide for its own security.

The Secretary General also held a separate meeting with OSCE Secretary General, Ambassador Lamberto Zannier, to discuss strengthening cooperation between the Alliance and the OSCE. The two leaders exchanged views on the security situation in Ukraine and efforts to modernise the Vienna Document on military transparency.

Later on Wednesday, the Secretary General met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The two leaders exchanged views on a range of issues, including risk reduction and transparency measures between NATO and Russia, the crisis in Syria, and the situation in Ukraine. Both leaders agreed that the NATO-Russia Council is an important forum for increasing transparency and predictability. The Secretary General underlined that NATO remains open to using military lines of communication to address issues of shared concern.

In separate talks with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Mr. Stoltenberg reaffirmed the importance of NATOs cooperation with the UN to improve training for peacekeepers. He stressed that both organisations share a common interest in enhancing the protection of civilians in conflict zones.

The Secretary General also met with UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to discuss the Alliances efforts to build up the defence capabilities of NATO's partners in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and North Africa. They also agreed on the importance of defence spending, and Mr. Stoltenberg commended the UK for continuing to spend 2% of GDP on defence.
YEREVAN. - The knowledge and human resources haven't been properly assessed during the years of Armenia's independence.

Doctor of Economics and Director of Alternativa analytical center, Tatul Manaseryan, said the aforementioned to Armenian News  NEWS.am, talking about his observations in connection with the 25th anniversary of Armenia's independence.

In his words, the first issue is that the human capital wasn't properly assessed, whereas it should be considered the most important resource for any country, let alone Armenia with its limited resources. This results in the issue of emigration, first of all of young professionals, who could have created material values for the country, but left to 'make their bones abroad', not finding application to their skills.

Finally, the cooperation between the state and business is hindered by the wrong realization of the idea of partnership between the state and private sector. This concept with modern sounding was quickly borrowed from the West, but only in word. The distortions in the content gave birth to corruption risks.

''Nevertheless, I am optimistic and hope that the new Government will want and be able to overcome these gaps and corruption, which has nestled all along the vertical of the state system. Hopefully, it will also give proper content to the partnership between the state and private sector, as well as involve in it the public circles, namely economists, with their expert opinion. The state-business-community triangle will be able to regenerate new and useful ideas,'' Manaseryan added.

On September 21 Armenia marks the 25th anniversary of its independence.
Iran accuses Israel of organizing terrorist attack in Shiraz

Reuters: NATO urged Russia to urgently resume grain deal

Guterres intends to achieve resumption of Russia's participation in grain deal

Resistance Movement calls rally on November 5

La Stampa: Italian farmers fear rising cereal prices due to disruption of grain deal

Beglaryan: About 33% of the entire population of Artsakh gathered at the Renaissance Square in Stepanakert

Sweden's new government is ready to supply Kiev with heavier weapons

Babayan: Any proposal in which Artsakh will be considered part of Azerbaijan will be rejected

Biden confuses number of states in U.S.

Peskov: Russia cannot be someone's vassal

Minibus carrying party members overturns in Ankara

Dashnaktsutyun: Any document that will include Artsakh into Azerbaijan must be torn up

Speaker: We hope that no document ignoring the Artsakh issue will be signed in Sochi

Italian MFA comments on Russia's withdrawal from food deal

Economist: High inflation took Western countries by surprise, which were wrong in their forecasts

Artsakh National Assembly issues statement: Artsakh has never been and will never be part of independent Azerbaijan

Parliament of Republic of Artsakh unanimously adopts statements

NA holds extraordinary meeting in Artsakh: Big rally takes place on Renaissance Square (photos)

Lavrov confirms Putin's readiness for negotiations with Ukraine

La Repubblica: Italy supplied Kiev with 20-30 M109L artillery guns and PzH 2000 howitzers

Typhoon in Philippines affects more than 932,000 people

Source: Turkey conducts 'telephone diplomacy' on food deal

Television and partially radio broadcasts will be turned off in Armenia for two hours on October 31

Borrell: The EU urges Russia to revert its decision

Haiti PM Ariel Henry: The leader of a political party was murdered in the republic

Armenia MFA expresses condolences to South Korea over Seoul tragedy

Seoul receives more than 3,700 missing persons reports after crush

Armenian Defense Ministry: Private received fatal gunshot wound

Toivo Klaar: I emphasised the European Unions continued strong engagement in the peace process

Arrested for assaulting Speaker Pelosi's spouse faces charges

Major crush in Seoul: There are victims

Britain needs air defense in connection with war in Ukraine

President discusses latest foreign political developments around Artsakh

Azerbaijan officials considering opening embassy in Israel

Armenia PM, EU Special Representative for South Caucasus discuss regional security and peace

Nikol Pashinyan, Garo Paylan exchange views on Armenia-Turkey normalization process

Quake hits Armenia-Turkey border zone

Armenia ruling party adopting new vision regarding Karabakh conflict settlement

Russia MOD: Ukraine carried out terrorist attack on Black Sea Fleet ships, civilian ships in Sevastopol

Premier: CSTO should plan force operation, restore Armenias territorial integrity

Armenia PM: All countries consider Karabakh to be part of Azerbaijan

Armenias Pashinyan: CSTO does not exist

Kremlin responds to question on extending mandate of Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh

Armenia premier: We need to know, ultimately, what Russian peacekeepers are doing in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia PM: Im ready to sign document, accept that Russian peacekeepers term in Karabakh be extended 10-20 years

Armenias Pashinyan: We are ready to delegate border guard service operation to Russian border guards

Finland, Sweden promise to join NATO together

European Parliament calls on Armenia to consider diversifying its security partnerships

Visiting Armenia MPs brief Canada lawmaker on recent Azerbaijan military aggression

Armenia PM at ruling party congress: We declared repairing states foundation our primary task

Karabakh President: Russia leaders statement inspires certain hopes

Armenia ruling party congress kicks off

Man breaks into US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's home, demands to speak with her, beats husband with hammer

EU-Armenia Joint Committee on Research and Innovation first meeting to be held in November

Provincial governor of Armenias Gegharkunik: EU monitoring mission already started

US accuses Russia of disinformation regarding Washington intentions towards Armenia, Azerbaijan

Mexico fully legalizes gay marriage

Newspaper: Azerbaijan not inclined to sign anything with Armenia in Russias Sochi

Armenia ruling party convening closed convention

Italian prime minister demands that she be addressed as prime minister in masculine form

Pentagon to send Ukraine new aid package worth $275 million

Europe will ban sale of one type of car

European Commission head announces new aid and investments for Serbia

Biden calls Putin's rhetoric on nuclear weapons 'dangerous'

Lukashenko on Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict: What are you fighting for in these mountains, where not even goats walk?

Swedish authorities offer to create united northern army

Lukashenko: Conflict issue between Armenia and Azerbaijan must be resolved now - with Ilham Aliyev

Lukashenko about situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border: Where are we racing horses, where are we rushing to?

Pashinyan: Armenia-Diaspora relations undergo profound substantive changes

Lukashenko to Pashinyan: Sit down with Aliyev and make a decision, if you don't make it today, it will be worse

Bulgarian interim government urges to speed up transition to euro zone

President of Karabakh: It is necessary to unite all national potential and efforts

IMF: China's sharp and uncharacteristic economic slowdown will stall growth in Asia by the end of 2023

Iran: Riots in country were planned by the intelligence services of the USA, England, Israel and the KSA

Steinmeier: Ukraine war caused 'epochal break' in Germany's relations with Russia

Gas prices in Europe remain high in coming years

Ararat Mirzoyan and Toivo Klaar stress importance of hosting EU civilian mission in Armenia

Armenia's ambassador-at-large: Daily false propaganda can't cover up Azerbaijani war crimes

Taiwan MFA outraged by Putin's speech on his status and Pelosi's visit

Armenia gives no response to peace treaty proposals, Bayramov says

Netanyahu expects return to power after 5th Israeli election in 4 years

Armenian gravestone found in Trabzon, Turkey neighborhood

Pashinyan: CSTO Secretary General's report mainly reflects existing realities

Azerbaijan talks possible deliveries of its gas to international Turkish hub

CSTO leaders to meet in late November: Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border will be discussed

Dollar, euro continue falling in Armenia

Pelosi's house attacked, her husband injured

Russias Putin to have private talks with Armenias Pashinyan, Azerbaijans Aliyev

Mher Grigoryan: CIS needs a new scientific and technical agreement

Pentagon strategy doesn't rule out use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear threats

French National Assembly plans to pass resolution proposing certain sanctions against Azerbaijan

Mher Grigoryan: There are no other corridors in the trilateral statement other than Lachin's

Konstantin Zatulin: Russia should have made maximum efforts so that there would be no war in Karabakh

The Hill: The American people deserve to know how the war in Ukraine will end

Sochi to host trilateral talks of Russian, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders on October 31

Poland receives first Turkish drones

Hungarian government may extend price limits on fuel and some basic foodstuffs

Armenias Simonyan attends meeting of heads of EEU countries parliaments

Polish general appointed as head of EU mission to train Ukrainian troops

Russia MP: Karabakh status decision is in fact its Armenians safety guarantee
The trade and economic relations between Belarus and Russia are not at the highest level, stated the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. At the same time, he accuses Moscow of exerting pressure on Minsk, reports the BELTA.

"It has been a couple of months, that we could not have agreed on gas prices. In this regard, Russia has cut the oil supplies to Belarus . We perceive it as a pressure on Belarus. However, neither me, nor the Belarussians will tolerate the pressure, he said.

According to him, Russia banned the exports of some Belarusian goods, especially the food, which goes to the European Union. "In Russia, those products are assessed as of " low quality. " I can understand the reason. When we supply products of high quality and with reasonable prices to Russia, we hit the pockets of the oligarchs who reign in the Russian agricultural sector. They put pressure on the government (I know that there are links), and the government commands the Rosselkhoznadzor officials to attack. "We are fed up with this. It can not go on further. But what I am saying does not mean that we will stop our integration projects. Instead, we will optimize our participation in those projects. We will analyze very carefully our participation, firstly in the Eurasian Economic Commission. If it continues like that, I can hardly continue keeping a pile officials there. Their number already reaches almost a thousand in so-called the government of the Eurasian Economic Commission. Whats the benefit of it? Why should we spend money to keep highly qualified specialists in Moscow, " he said.
Mr Mirzoyan, how successful do you consider the efforts of the Armenian side towards informing the international community on its position?

Great work has been done both here, in Artsakh, and in Armenia. However, despite this, it should be said that there is still a need for more and more work to be done. All the possibilities of the information field should be used. We should be proactive, and lets not be afraid of this word, aggressive.

Considering the signals from Russia and the processes in the region, some experts think that Turkey will try to somehow get involved in the talks with the help of Russia. Do you think such a change in the negotiation format or any change at all is possible?

Currently, the only format of Turkeys engagement in the talks is [restricted to] its participation in the work of the OSCE Minsk Group. The decision on this was adopted back in the initial period of the Minsk process. Turkey continues to remain a Minsk Group member, but I see no serious prospects for Turkey to actively join the settlement process.

Following the April developments, the talks on the possible territorial concessions by the Armenian side dramatically increased. What do you think is the reason behind the activation of such talks?

This question should be addressed to those who disseminate such information. In Artsakh we dont put such an issue for discussion and consideration. Our main task today is to ensure the regular activity of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and contribute to the peaceful settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict. We have no other tasks.

Are there discrepancies between the positions of the Armenian and Artsakh authorities regarding the conflict settlement?

I see no discrepancies. Of course, considering that we are different states, there might be certain differences [between us] - not in opinions but in the way of their expression. Both Armenian states act for a common purpose.

What prospects do you see for NKRs re-joining the negotiation process?

Karabakh will have to return to the negotiations sooner or later, since its long absence is one of the reasons of the unhealthy atmosphere in the negotiation process. I am sure that the representatives of the international community also realize this well. The only obstacle to this is Azerbaijan, which understands that the fully-fledged return of Karabakh to the negotiation table will force it to make serious steps towards the peaceful settlement.

In Vienna the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs stated that they had agreed to introduce incident investigation mechanisms on the Line of Contact and expand the office of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office. What has been done to this end so far and how can these mechanisms be useful?

The Artsakh side has repeatedly come up with such proposals. We are convinced that the fully-fledged implementation of these measures will allow to finally reduce the tension on the Line of Contact [between Karabakh and Azerbaijan], as well as on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. This can create an atmosphere needed for looking for peaceful settlement. Unfortunately, despite the formal agreement of Azerbaijan, both of these initiatives are scarcely implemented. Lets hope that the international community will prove to be consistent, since the important thing here is the international position and the approach. Its role and responsibility is great here. They should be consistent in introducing the mechanisms which they themselves announced about.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence, President Serzh Sargsyan received congratulatory messages from heads of foreign states, international organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, clergy representatives, and individuals.

President Xi Jinping of the Peoples Republic of China sent a congratulatory message to President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Independence Day

Excellency,

On the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence, on behalf of the Government and the people of the Peoples Republic of China, as well as on my own behalf, I offer heartfelt congratulations and best wishes to you and, in your person, to the people of the Republic of Armenia.

During the past 25 years of independence, Armenia has achieved significant success in various fields of activity. Under your leadership, Armenia has maintained political stability, along with developed national economy and increasingly growing living standards. China is sincerely happy for it.

Attaching great importance to the development of relations between China and Armenia, I stand ready to join our efforts toward advancing bilateral ties and cooperation in all areas to achieve new progress to the benefit of our countries and peoples.

I wish prosperity to the Republic of Armenia, and happiness - to its people.

I wish you good health and all the best, the Chinese President said in his message.

President Serzh Sargsyan received a congratulatory message from Federal President of Germany Joachim Gauck. The message reads in part:

Mr. President,

On behalf of my fellow countrymen and myself, I offer heartfelt congratulations to you and your compatriots on the 25th anniversary of declaration of Armenias independence.

German-Armenian ties have developed over the past 25 years to grow into a close and trusting friendship as evidenced by your visit to Germany in April this year. Supportive of Armenias commitment to continue political and economic rapprochement with the EU after joining the Eurasian Economic Union, Germany will back your country as a partner nation.

The settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is of paramount importance to your country. As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict.

In addition to my independence-dated congratulations, I offer my best wishes for your personal well-being, as well as for your countrys peaceful, free and prosperous future.

President Serzh Sargsyan received congratulations and best wishes from Emperor of Japan Akihito, Swedens King Carl Gustav XVI, Belgiums King Philippe, President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo, President of the United Mexican States Enrique Pena Nieto, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, Australian Union Governor-General Peter Kosgrove, Republic of Moldova President Nicolae Timofti, President of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq Haider al-Abadi.

President Serzh Sargsyan keeps receiving congratulatory messages on the occasion of Armenias Independence Day.
YEREVAN.  President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan addressed the participants of the Military Parade of the Armenian Armed Forces dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence.

Soldiers, Officers, Generals,

My sisters and brothers,

I congratulate all of us on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Armenia.

We have made our choice by casting a ballot on this very day a quarter-century ago, but we are well aware that deep in our hearts and in our collective memory we had made that choice much earlier. We chose freedom at the times of Patriarch Haik. We are faithful to the decision that we had made back at the times of a bow and arrow. Today, at the 21st century weapons have changed, but we have not, and we are determined to defend our liberty. And this parade is a testimony to that.

In the ideal world the right, of course, is the source of might. Nevertheless, the contemporary world and our environment are far from being ideal. There are still circumstances, in which the might is the source of the right. We have got both our right and might to defend our freedom. And this parade is a testimony to that.

Freedom and independence need to be defended not exclusively from external threats. The domestic social and political life is no less important and vital to us. Our citizens should be free since a free individual and a free society function way more effectively. We can and we shall continue building an efficient nation, which will defend a free citizen and a free society. Unfree people theoretically can create a lot but not happiness.

In the course of the past 25 years we have registered irrevocable achievements. Occasionally we have made mistakes, occasionally we have run into the extremes, but at the end of the day we have been moving in the right direction. We are building our happiness with free thoughts and free hands, which means we produce peacefully and creatively. And there is only one obvious prescription as to how we shall move forward: it is to work hard, harder and harder.

Indeed, we highly value our achievements since we have paid a dear price for them. We shall multiply those achievements with our hard work and defend  with the might we have accumulated.

Long live our boys that vigilantly guard borders of Armenia: they are the primary guarantors of our freedom. Glory to the immortal heroes who fought in the Artsakh liberation war, to each and single brave fellow of ours. Glory to the young lions of this April, who wiped out all the hostile planning of our adversary. Some months ago at the grave of scout-machinegunner Sasun Mkrtchyan I promised on behalf of all of us that we would continue the sacred mission of Sasun and his friends, we would always keep lit the light that emanated from the new generation of Artsakh and Armenia, that had united all of us during those April days; united as a fist, ready to crush the head of the adversary that threatened our security. And we will keep our word. And this parade is a testimony to that.

Long live the citizen of the Republic of Armenia, a soil cultivator and construction worker, a physician and teacher, a miner and entrepreneur, a civil servant and artist. Glory to the citizen of Armenia, who establishes new values.

Long live the trilateral unity of Armenia-Artsakh-Diaspora: by joining our forces we are getting much stronger than one could imagine.

Long live our brothers and sisters that represent Armenias ethnic minorities, who enjoy equality and share responsibility in the consistent pursuit of the cause for development and defense of our country.

Long live the traditional Armenian family, which in spite of all currents remains the source of warmth that gives birth to heroes and brings up generations thirsting for knowledge.

My fellow compatriots,

I again congratulate all of us and Armenians around the globe with the quarter-century anniversary of the reestablishment of the independent Armenian statehood.

Glory to the Republic of Armenia!

Glory to the Armenian Armed Forces!
The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe has publicized the preliminary opinioon on the amendments to the Azerbaijani Constitution, which are to be put on referendum on September 26.

The Commission criticized the draft Referendum Act, contact.az reports.

According to the document, many of the proposed amendments seriously disturb the balance of power between the two branches of the government, giving unprecedentedpowers to the President.

Pursuant to the Venice Commission experts, the extension of the term of the presidential mandate to seven years cannot be justified, considering the already very strong position of the President who can be reelected for unlimited number of times since 2009.

Apart from this, the President is given power to dissolve Parliament, this negatively impacting thepolitical dissent in ParliamentThis also affects the independence of the judiciary, since Parliaments role in the approval of judges will be reduced.

The Venice Commission is particularly worried by the institute of the unelected Vice-Presidents, who may at some point govern the country, and the Presidents prerogative to declare snap presidential elections. The Commission criticizes the referendum procedure, specifically its implementation without preliminary deliberations in Parliament and among the population, as well as insufficient time given for this.

Due to time constraints, the rapporteurs were unable to visit Azerbaijan and did not benefit from direct consultations with the authorities, experts and other stakeholders. In this context, the Venice Commission regrets that the authorities of Azerbaijan did not consult it prior to submitting the Draft to the referendum, the document reads.

At the same time, the experts have positively assessed the modifications on human dignity and the right to conscientious treatment excluding arbitrariness.

The proposed amendment on the principle of proportionality of restrictions to human rights was also considered positive. However, the experts dont agree on amendments which limit the freedom of assembly and the freedom of association to maintain public order and public morals,since these provisions can be interpreted rather widely. Concern has also been expressed in regard to the proposed amendment on deprivation of citizenship.

The preliminary opinion will be submitted for approval at the plenary session of the Commission on October 14-15.
The Armenian National Congress of America criticized the congratulatory message issued by the White House on Armenias Independence Day.

On the positive side, the letter does note Yerevan's response to the Syrian refugee crisis and its contributions to global peacekeeping operations and nuclear security.

The letter is also notable for what it leaves out, namely any mention of the Armenian Genocide, the issue that the President so very prominently used to secure Armenian American votes in 2008, but that he quickly abandoned once elected, ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian said.

It also does not reference the President's signature Armenian initiative in office, the Turkish-Armenian Protocols. Looking back, it's clear that the President, having secured Armenia's backing for these recklessly flawed (and now demonstrably failed) accords in the first months of his first term, never held Ankara to account for walking away from its agreement to end its illegal blockade of Armenia.

Also, no mention of Artsakh, which, in the context of Azerbaijan's April offensive, represents a missed opportunity to challenge Baku's aggression and press the case for peace. This silence sends a dangerous signal to the Aliyev regime.

Ironic that President Obama's staff, in another context, used the phrase: We remain committed to the promise of those early years, words that can very well refer to his own unfulfilled pledge to recognize the Armenian Genocide.
23:50

As expected Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday raised Kashmir issue at United Nations General Assembly. He also glorified slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "young leader".





Here are some highlights of his speech:





* Pakistan wants peace with India, we have gone the extra mile to achieve this. But India has posed "unacceptable" pre-conditions to dialogue





* Ready to enter into serious and sustained dialogue with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir





* Burhan Wani, a young leader murdered by Indian forces has emerged a new hero of Kashmiri 'Intifada'





*We demand an independent inquiry into the extra judicial killings in Kashmir. We demand an end to the curfew





*Pakistan will share dossier with the UN on human rights violation by India in Kashmir





*Pakistan has been the principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored, financed from abroad





*Talks are in the interest of both India and Pakistan





*Hundreds killed, hundreds blinded by pellet guns. These Indian brutalities are well documented
Artists Tim Berg, Rebekah Myers to visit campus

by Andrea Hahn

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Collaborative artists Tim Berg and Rebekah Myers will visit the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University Carbondale on Sept. 26.

Their art talk begins at 7 p.m. in the John C. Guyon Auditorium in Morris Library. The public is welcome.

These collaborative artists work in ceramics and operate Myers Berg Studios in Claremont, Calif. Their work is, at times, a humorous take on American consumer culture. Many of their high gloss ceramic sculptures are a series showing a change to the original piece. For example, they have several sculptures of popsicles that are whole in the first sculpture, showing a bite missing in the second and then nearly gone in the final sculpture. Others highlight animals, good luck charms and dinosaurs.

Our objective is to distill the stereotypical perceptions and associations within our culture into visually compelling objects, sculptures and installations, they wrote in an artists statement. Whether we are creating an installation describing the impending doom of the dinosaurs or a valise filled with gold lucky charms, our iconography is drawn from the animals, objects or situations that operate as commonplace tropes within our culture.

They have exhibited their work in various shows in the United States, Mexico, South Korea, Qatar and Kuwait, and some of their pieces are in private collections in the United States and Europe. They describe their work as a humorous take on American consumer culture.

For more information or to find out how to participate in a workshop, contact the Jam Lovell at vapsiuc@siu.edu.
As Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif raked up the Kashmir issue in a major way in his UNGA address, and called for an international probe into alleged rights violations in the Kashmir Valley and a plebiscite, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted India's reaction.

"PM Sharif at #UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. India's only condition is an end to terrorism. This not acceptable?" Swarup posted.

Sharif in his speech said that Pakistan is ready to "walk the extra mile" for dialogue with India, but New Delhi imposes unacceptable pre-conditions for talks.

"Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA glorifies Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani in UN's highest forum. Shows continued Pak attachment to terrorism."

"Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA in complete denial of Uri terror attack. 19 infiltration attempts stopped at LoC this year. Indigenous??!!," Swarup tweeted.

His reference was to Sunday's terror attack at an army base camp in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, in which 18 Indian soldiers were killed and four attackers gunned down. India has blamed the attack on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed militants.

--IANS rn/pgh/

( 220 Words)

2016-09-22-01:40:09 (IANS)
Ransomware has emerged as the most dangerous cyber threat for both organisations and individuals, with global losses now likely running to hundreds of millions of dollars, a new study says. Norton by Symantec, one of the global leaders in cyber security software, found that globally, consumers are the most likely victims of ransomware, accounting for 57 percent of all infections between January 2015 and April 2016. Between January 2015 and April 2016, the US -- followed by Canada and Australia -- were the countries most affected by ransomware. Accounting for nine percent of the total infections, India ranked number four globally among the affected countries. "Ransomware can vary from holding treasured family photos, hijacking unfinished manuscripts for novels, and blocking access to tax returns, banking records and other valuable documents to ransom. Moreover, there is no guarantee that paying the ransom will release those padlocks," said Ritesh Chopra, Country Manager, Norton by Symantec. While most major ransomware groups tend to be indiscriminate in their attacks, consumers are often less likely to have robust security in place, increasing the possibility of falling victim. "The average ransom demanded globally by attackers also saw an upward spike this year. The average ransom demanded to date in 2016 more than doubled from Rs 19,670 in 2015 to Rs. 45,428," the study highlighted. The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has multiplied the range of devices that could potentially be infected with ransomware. "New ransomware variants appear on a regular basis. Always keep your operating system and other software updated. Email is one of the main infection methods. Delete any suspicious-looking email you receive, especially if they contain links and/or attachments," said Norton by Symantec. Be wary of any Microsoft Office email attachment that advises you to enable macros to view its content. Unless you are absolutely sure that this is a genuine email from a trusted source, do not enable macros and instead immediately delete the email. Backing up important data is the single most effective way of combating ransomware infection, the study noted. --IANS na/bg ( 354 Words) 2016-09-21-16:24:09 (IANS)
Kent has granted Authority to a Brand Protection Agency to conduct investigation and initiate Prosecution under Criminal legislation to punish the infringers / duplicators.

Following a complaint lodged against Luxmi Enterprises located at Ram Bagh Road, Grain Market, Bhatinda, a team of seven constables led by sub-inspector Sh. Rajpal Singh of Punjab Police of Kotwali Police Station, Bhatinda, seized 13 fake Kent RO's worth 1.82 lakh and 12 fake Kent pumps worth 26,400 rupees.

FIR has been lodged against the owner Jatinder Kumar Bansal of said Luxmi Enterprises, who has been arrested by Punjab Police and subsequently sent to Judicial Custody by the Court.

Commenting on the seizure of fake RO products Legal Head of Kent RO said "Luxmi Enterprises has been selling duplicate Kent Ro products and have been confusing and cheating customers which is illegal and a fraud. KENT is forcefully enforcing stringent legal action by way of lodging of FIR and ensuring arrest against the duplicators who are selling spurious product by illegal copying models and designs of KENT Purifiers as well as using substandard filters and parts in said look-alike purifiers". (ANI-NewsVoir)
Talking about the "Black Panther" solo film, actor Chadwick Boseman says that there are chances that the film may have more panthers (characters). Boseman shared what to expect from the upcoming Marvel superhero film, saying that viewers would "learn about Wakanda, its culture, its traditions, the past". He also hinted at the inclusion of "more Panthers that have existed in the past", reports aceshowbiz.com. "'Captain America: Civil War' was a jumping off point for the Black Panther character," Boseman said. "It's not necessarily an origin story because he remains a mystery through most of the movie. When I take the mask off and it's revealed that it's the Prince of Wakanda, that's the guy whose father was just killed, it's a surprise," Boseman said. He said that there is a lot to "reveal about the character". "There is definitely more of his origin in 'Black Panther'. You're going to learn about Wakanda, its culture, its traditions, the past. You can go through all the comic books and know that there's more Panthers that have existed in the past, that's origin," the 39-year-old added. "Black Panther" is expected to begin production early next year. --IANS ks/sas ( 208 Words) 2016-09-21-08:00:08 (IANS)
Spanish brand Lladro has come up with an exclusive festive collection for 2016 with a depiction of Lord Shiva and Goddess Sri Lakshmi in high porcelain. Nikhil Lamba, COO of Lladro India, says that their Spirit of India collection is extremely popular amongst the Indian segment and hence India as a market is important for them. "India is very important and it can easily be identified by the fact that this year we have High Porcelain product as Lord Shiva, which is a collection from our Spirit of India Range. "Wherein every high porcelain product takes a minimum of a year of ideation and creation, it is very difficult and important for the Lladr family to pick one market and dedicate the key resources to make that one product," Lamba told IANS in an interaction here. For this segment of clients, Lladr introduces new products in Spirit of India collection every year. While high porcelain Ganesha (2010), Goddess Lakshmi (2012) and Goddess Saraswati (2015) were successfully launched in the past, it was time to create high porcelain Lord Shiva, which is a limited edition of 720 units priced at Rs.7,20,000. As for Goddess Sri Lakshmi, it is a smaller 22 cm variant priced at Rs. 90,000 that can be paired with Classic Lladr Ganeshas for the festive season. Talking about price points, Lamba said: "High porcelain Lord Shiva is a limited edition of 720 pieces across the globe. These pieces are high in demand and get completely sold out in a few years if not months. "Goddess Sri Lakshmi is not a limited edition piece and the availability of the same will be for many years to come. The price however could increase on an annual basis." The brand is on an expansion spree in India. "We are happy being present across all Metro cities in India. In Hyderabad we are relocating our store to Taj Krishna Hotel. This new store will be our first new format store of India being inspired by the design of Jaime Hayon, a very popular Spanish designer. We launch in the first week of October," informed Lamba. Talking abour the high point of their brand, the COO says that all their pieces are completely handmade and painstakingly created. "Lladro have only 15 master sculptors who are associated with us from a very long time, we believe in nurturing our relation with our team. Art is all about patience and innovation, which needs self-motivation, and that's what we ensure by restricting entire production at one place. "There is no cut copy paste strategy followed in art. From ideation, to creation everything is done by hand without any technology," said Lamba. --IANS nv/bg ( 462 Words) 2016-09-21-16:22:09 (IANS)
Even as the guessing game is on as to what caused the split of Hollywood's power couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt -- his marijuana and alcohol use, a possible affair with French actress Marion Cottilard or the irreconcilable differences that Jolie stated -- members of the film fraternity and their fans across the globe have expressed shock, sadness and sarcasm. They had been in a relationship for long, but wed in August 2014. According to Hollywood news website TMZ, Jolie cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split, and legal documents reveal she's demanding physical custody of their six children, with visitation rights for Pitt. "I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time," Pitt said in a statement to People magazine. If another TMZ report, quoting a source close to Pitt, is to be believed, he will fight hard for joint physical custody of the children. Multiple sources are conjecturing different reasons for their split, but Jolie's father and actor Jon Voight is sure "something very serious must have happened" that made Jolie take this step. Ever since the split news broke, hashtags #Brangelina, #Brangelexit, #Brangelinacheat and #BrangelinaBreakup started trending on Twitter. Their star friends, including George Clooney, have reacted. "That's a sad story and unfortunate for a family," said Clooney. On Twitter, one user rued: "I feel like my parents have split up Brangelina. Another "genuinely sad" user wrote: "They seemed more than happy, and so accepting and inclusive with their kids. Sad day. Brangelina." The couple met on the set of their spy thriller "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" in 2003, while Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston. He broke up with Aniston in 2005. Later, Jolie revealed that it was Pitt's relationship with her son Maddox, who had "out of the blue called him dad", that encouraged their togetherness. In July 2005, Jolie finalised the adoption of her second child, Zahara, from Ethiopia - as a single parent, and six months later, she revealed she was expecting her first child with Pitt, who also adopted Maddox and Zahara. Shiloh joined the expanding brood. Less than one year later, the couple announced yet another bundle of joy -- they adopted son Pax, then 3, from Vietnam. The duo also took their children -- Pax and Zahara -- for a boat ride during their brief and highly publicised stay in the Indian city Mumbai in 2006, while Jolie was in India to shoot for Michael Winterbottom's "A Mighty Heart". In February 2008, the couple confirmed that they were expecting a baby once again -- and they happened to be twins. The family welcomed Knox and Vivienne in August 2008 in Nice, France. It was after welcoming their fifth and sixth children, the couple became slightly more public about their relationship. In 2008, Pitt said that they had no plans to get married until "it's legal for everyone else. However, in 2011, he revealed that their children were pressuring them to make things official. Still, Jolie maintained they weren't in a rush to tie the knot. Their bond strengthened when Jolie went through a preventative double mastectomy after genetic tests showed that she had a high risk of developing breast cancer. After spending years of knowing and loving each other and raising a family, they finally walked the aisle in an intimate ceremony on August 23, 2014. The fact that the children were an important part of their lives was visible when part of Jolie's wedding dress was scribbled with the kids' artwork. In December, the couple released "By the Sea". Though the movie followed the disintegration of a marriage, Jolie revealed that they were stronger than ever. The Pitt family was last seen together in public in July, when they stopped into a Jamba Juice store in Los Angeles with Shiloh. --IANS nn/rb/bg ( 663 Words) 2016-09-21-20:04:09 (IANS)
Violating the 2003 ceasefire, Pakistani troops today opened unprovoked firing on Indian forward positions in Uri sector, where 18 soldiers were killed and as many injured on September 18 in a fidayeen attack. A Defence Ministry spokesman told UNI that Pakistani troops fired on forward posts with automatic weapons from across the Line of Control (LoC) in Uri sector. ''Our troops also retaliated and the exchange of fire continued for some time,'' he said. Pakistan has been violating 2003 ceasefire agreed by India and Pakistan on LoC and International Border (IB). The ceasefire violation came just two days after JeM militants attacked Army Brigade Headquarters in Uri that left 18 soldiers dead and as many injured. All the four foreign Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militants were also killed in the encounter which began at 0500 hrs.UNI BAS AE RP1610 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-941865.Xml
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Tuesday termed the present unrest in Kashmir valley as a "big political failure" of the BJP-led central government and said the Centre and state government have to take steps to build trust among people. In an interview to CNN News 18 channel, the Aam Aadmi Party leader also rubbished speculation that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal could be the party's chief ministerial candidate for the Punjab assembly elections next year. Sisodia condemned Sunday's terror strike in Kashmir's Uri town in which 18 soldiers were killed and said it deserves a befitting reply. "Violence and terrorism deserve a befitting reply, but that reply should be in action and not just words. At the same time, you also need to solve the internal crisis," he said. "I have covered Kashmir as a journalist, but so much trouble has seldom been witnessed. The trouble has been there since 1989, and 26 years later we are witnessing movements like then (1989). That is a big political failure," Sisodia added. A total of 89 people have been killed and over 11,500 injured in the ongoing unrest in the Kashmir Valley that started on July 9 following the killing of militant Burhan Wani. Sisodia said the Prime Minister should focus on action instead of indulging in "politics of show off". "As a nation we are losing confidence, it happened in Uri, it can happen in Delhi and other places. This is a big failure and the Centre is responsible for this failure. Modi believes in the politics of show off, when it comes to show off, Modi is a big brand. But where are the nitty gritty?" "Having biryani will not solve the Kashmir (problem) or India-Pakistan relationship," he said. The AAP leader said both the Jammu and Kashmir and the central government will have to undertake measures that build trust. "They will have to embrace the people, there needs to be a mutual sense of belonging, which has been destroyed...All political parties should discuss the issue, the Prime Minister should talk to all, discuss what needs to be done in Kashmir, discuss the Pakistan issue," he said. "Modi is the Prime Minister of my country, we belong to different political parties, but if he does anything for the sake of the country, then we will support him," Sisodia added. To a question on speculation that Kejriwal may be Punjab's chief ministerial candidate, Sisodia said: "The problem is the media has now taken up the job of deciding what should be our ideals and principles. Who will be our leader, what would will be his post, the media at once starts speculating. This is not fair." "This is nothing but baseless speculations, media should not put their words in our mouth," he said. --IANS and/ps/rn ( 479 Words) 2016-09-20-21:52:08 (IANS)
France on Tuesday criticised the Uri terrorist attack that claimed lives of 18 soldiers, saying "there are no good terrorists or bad terrorists; there is only bad terrorism". Speaking at a function here, French Ambassador to India Alexandre Ziegler said, "My reaction is to tell you how sorry we are, how deeply-touched we are by this attack, this awful terrorist attack. We strongly condemn this attack as we condemn any kind of terrorists attack. There are no good terrorists or bad terrorists. There is only bad terrorism." "We are standing side by side with our Indian friends combating terrorism and pressing on states to make an end to terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he added. Meanwhile, barely two days after the terror attack in Uri, army foiled two infiltration bids from across the border in Kashmir on Tuesday, killing some of the terrorists while losing a jawan. The attempts to cross the Line of Control (LoC) in Uri and Nowgam sectors came even as Pakistani troops violated ceasefire and fired at Indian positions in Uri sector. An army spokesman said in Srinagar, operations are in progress at both the places, but refused to comment on the number of terrorists killed in the ongoing operations so far. He, however, said one soldier was killed in the operation in Nowgam sector. Army sources in Delhi, which had initially put the number of terrorists killed at 10, later clarified that the extent of casualties can be ascertained only after the retrieval of the bodies from the dense jungles. As per reports, a group of 15 terrorists had attempted to infiltrate into Indian territory through the LoC. (ANI)
The meeting is significant in the backdrop of Uri terror attack, in which 18 army jawans were martyred. The Cabinet Committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi reviewed the situation arising out of the attack.

The meeting was attended by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Minister Rajnath Singh , Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and others.

Meanwhile, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi has reviewed the security situation in Kashmir in the backdrop of the deadly militant attack on an army base in Uri and the ongoing unrest in the valley.

Mehrishi arrived in Srinagar early Tuesday morning and held series of meetings to review security situation across the Kashmir Valley.

He had detailed discussions with top officials from various security forces, police and intelligence agencies.

The international community continues to condemn the Sunday's terror attack in Uri which killed 18 Army personnel. Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and many other countries have extended their support to India in its fight against terrorism.

German Ambassador to India Martin Ney said that every country is responsible for taking decisive action against terrorism emanating from its territory.

Expressing its solidarity with India in the fight against terrorism, Japanese Foreign Ministry said, no act of terrorism can be justified.

In a letter to Prime Minister Modi, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said, her country will continue to work with India to eradicate the menace.

Sri Lanka President Maithripala Sirisena and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called up Prime Minister Modi yesterday and condemned the attack. (ANI)
Members of Pondicherry state Students and Parents Association today observed a fast in front of the head post office here to condemn the failure of the government to release the rank list of Puducherry students who passed the National Entrance and Eligibility Test(NEET). The association members led by its president Y Balasubramanian alleged that the Private Medical Colleges here are functioning against the directions of the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry and the Supreme Court by spoiling the desire of Puducherry students to get admitted into medical courses.The state government is supporting the private medical colleges,they alleged. AIADMK legislature party leader A Anbazhagan, State BJP President V Saminathan and former N R Congress legislator Nehru among others joined the agitators.UNI PAB CS -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-943130.Xml
Nagaland Parliamentary secretary of Municipal Affairs, Economics & Statistics R Tohanba has expressed his delight at the inclusion of Kohima for the Smart City Mission (SCM). In a statement Mr Tohanba said, ''it was a great achievement for the people of Nagaland, particularly for the citizens of Kohima.'' He also said it was through the unflinching support received from the state government and all the stakeholders that Kohima was selected. Mr Tohanba said the competition held on the mission project, conducted by Kohima Municipal Council, proved very helpful where many ideas, suggestions and views have been received. He expressed gratitude to the government headed of Chief Minister T R Zeliang for his continuous effort and support and all stakeholders involved. UNI AS PL PY ADG PM1254 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-943083.Xml
The ongoing agitation against the release ofwater to Tamil Nadu in the river cauvery when Karnataka is in direstraits has been intensified and spreading to other southern districts. Yesterday's Supreme Court directive to the state to release 6000cusecs of water till September 27 in the river had escalated theagitation in Mandya, Mysuru and Ramanagara in the cauvery basin area, besides spreading to Tumakuru and Kolar Districts too. Agitatorsburnt the effigy of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah held a meeting of theCouncil of Ministers this morning to discuss the issue and decideon the next step the state need to take. He had also convened ameeting of all party leaders in the evening. Prohibitory Orders under section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code hasbeen extended till September 23 in five taluks expect in K R Pet and Nagamangala according to a report from Mandya. The Apex court had reduced the quantum of release in itsyesterday's order. In the first instance it wanted Karnataka torelease 15,000 cusecs of water and subsequently it brought it downto 12,000 cusecs per day even after the Cauvery SupervisoryCommittee had recommended release of only 3000 cusecs at theBiligundlu point. Tension prevailed in Mandya and in other parts in the districtand some of the shops, business establishments have voluntarilyclosed. The district administration has declared a holiday today for allschools and colleges owing to the Cauvery agitations in Mandya,Maddur, Pandavapura, and Srirangapatna taluks, and for first gradecolleges in Nagamangala, K R Pet and Malavalli taluks. Several legislators in the basin area had offered to step down inprotest against the Supreme Court Order. The latest to join them wasJanata Dal (S) MP C S Puttaraju who had said that he would tenderhis resignation in protest against the Apex Court's order. Mr D CThammanna, MLA of Maddur, A B Rameshbabu Bandisiddegowda,Srirangapatna MLA, and N Appaji Gowda, MLC, have also decided toresign, according to sources. Karnataka had been repeatedly arguing in the Supreme Court withfacts that the water level had in the cauvery basin reservoirs wasvery poor in view of the deficit rainfall of over 45 per cent andrelease of water would lead to scarcity of drinking water in majorcities in the state including Bengaluru, which is quenched by thewaters of cauvery.UNI TEAM-CNR CS 1217 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0284-943125.Xml
Puducherry unit of the Communist Party of India (CPI) today questioned the new Congress government as to why it had failed to constitute the legislative assembly committees which was mandatory even after 100 days in office. Talking to newspersons here, CPI state secretary R Viswanathan said when the elected government and Puducherry Lt.Governor Kiran Bedi had separately celebrated their respective 100 days in office, the basic steps for Parliamentary democracy was not at all initiated. Mr.Viswnathan charged that the government failed to take proper follow-up action on its announcements. He said though the government had announced rebate on electricity tariff for those who consume less than 100 units per month, no circular in this regard was issued so far and it was not implemented. Similarly, the announcement for the waiver of farm loans was not implemented and farmers are running from pillar to post to get relief, he added. Mr.Viswanathan said any industrial policy must include measures for the welfare of workers as there can be no industrial growth without satisfied workers. However, in the new industrial policy announced by Chief Minister V Narayanasamy recently, there was no mention on the welfare of workers,he added. Stating that traditionally textile is the main stay of industry in Puducherry, the CPI Secretary said the new industrial policy had totally ignored the all important sector. Lamenting that Puducherry could not make it into the smart city list this time also, Mr Viswanathan also charged that it is because of the failure of the successive governments to hold the local body election in the union territory. The CPI leader said that the party would hold an agitation in front of the Pondicherry University here on September 28 to protest against the failure of the university to implement reservation policy. Even the UGC had written to the university to follow the reservation roaster, he reminded and said the party demands 25 percent reservation for Puducherry students in all courses in the university.UNI PAB CS 1301 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-943180.Xml
Four days after the alleged suicide of P Ramkumar, the lone accused in the young woman techie Swathi murder case, the conductof post mortem on his body got further delayed, as a Division Bench of the Madras High Court today referred to the Chief Justice an appeal filed by his father against a single judge order, rejecting the plea for a doctor of his choice to be present during the autopsy. The Bench of Justices Huluvadi G Ramesh and S Vaidyanathan differed in their views on whether or not to allow the presence of an individual forensic expert during the autopsy as per the choice of the petitioner. Following this, the Bench directed the High Court Registry to place the matter before the Chief Justice S K Kaul to finalise the name ofthe third Judge who would independently take a decision based on themerits of the case. When the matter was taken up for hearing, the First Bench comprisingthe Chief Justice and Justice R Mahadevan today said that Mr Justice P Kirubakaran would be the third Judge who would take a decision on whether to allow the petitioner's plea or not. Ramkumar had allegedly committed suicide by biting a live wire at the high security Puzhal Central Prison on Sunday evening, followingwhich Tiruvallur Judicial Magistrate Ms Tamilselvi conducted a probe. She also visited the Government Royapettah Hospital where the bodyof Ramkumar was kept. A three member team of forensic experts was formed to perform the post mortem. However, Ramkumar's father R Paramasivam, filed a petition in the High Court seeking to permit a forensic expert of their choice during the autopsy, besides a CBI probe into the death of his son. However, Judge T S Sivagnanam rejected the plea and appointed forensic expert consisting of professor of forensic expert Prof S Balasubramanianof Government Stanley Medical College Hospital as the fourth member ofthe team. The other three members were Professor of Forensic medicine R Selvakumar and assistant professor Manikanda Raja of Kilpauk Government Hospital along with assistant professor at Royapettah Government Hospital, K V Vinod Kumar. When the stage is all set for conducting the autopsy yesterday and thedoctors were present, the parents of Ramkumar were not present and his father preferred an appeal before the High Court challenging the single Judgeorder which was heard by a two-member Bench and expressed divergent viewsand suggested that the matter be heard by a third Judge. Following this, it was referred to the First Bench which had nominatedMr Justice Kirubakaran as the third Judge to give his decision on whether to allow the defence plea to permit a forensic expert of their choice during the autopsy. Ramkumar, who was accused of killing Swathi in broad daylight at the Nungambakkam Railway station on June 24, allegedly committed suicide by biting a live wire at the Puzhal Prison premises on Sunday. As he fell unconscious, he was rushed to Government Royapettah Hospital (GRH) in the city, where doctors declared him brought dead.UNI GV 1325 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-943227.Xml
Two doctors and their driver were killed when a speeding truck hit their vehicle on National Highway 57 near Piprakhurd village, under Bhaptiyahi police station area in the district today. Police said here that Dr Aditya Kumar Mandal, posted at Purnea Sadar Hospital and his colleague Dr Kabra were killed when their car was hit by the truck from behind near Piprakhurd village in the district. The driver was also killed. The doctors were on their way to Darbhanga from Purnea when the accident took place. The bodies have been sent for postmortem. The truck driver fled leaving behind his vehicle. UNI XC DH PL PY PR1337 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-943169.Xml
A police officer today said that a complaint was filed that one Ghulam Muhammad Mir was missing from his home in Hill Mission Budgam from September 18.

He said a special team was constituted and investigation taken up.

After following various leads, police suspected that the man was murdered, he said, adding the wife of the missing person was questioned.

During questioning, the woman confessed that she with the help of one Ghulam Rasool Parra murdered her husband and later dumped his body near a hillock.

Both the accused were taken into custody, he added.UNI ABS JW ADG PM1402

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0433-943218.Xml
With rains showing no signs of abating, the travails of the people in Telangana, particularly in Hyderabad and its twin Secunderabad, are increasing by the day. Normal life took a beating in the twin cities and the surrounding areas as a majority of roads were flooded following heavy rains since last night. Heavy vehicular traffic came to a grinding halt making lives miserable for thousands of commuters. Rain water entered many residential apartments besides inundating low lying areas causing untold hardships to the people. Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao now in Delhi to attend the Apex Council meeting on water disputes reviewed the situation with officials from the National Capital. He suggested that the Army's assistance could be taken, if necessary, for relief works in the affected areas.Mr Rao said that the services of police could be employed in the relief operations and asked the civic officials to keep a watch on the already brimming Hussainsagar lake and other water bodies in and around the city to meet any eventuality. He instructed the Health Department officials to initiate precautionary measures to prevent outbreak of contagious diseases. Municipal Administration Minister K T Rama Rao had pulled up the engineering officials of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation for their failure to maintain roads properly and to ensure the longevity of the roads. It may be mentioned that most of the roads in the twin cities had been badly damaged following the recent rains resulting in huge traffic snarls which had become a daily feature now. The Minister, at a review meeting, had instructed the GHMC officials to immediately repair all the damaged roads on a war-footing even engaging the services of the staff from other departments. Meanwhile, the Met office has forecast more rains with heavy spells over many places in the state during the next few days.UNI SMS SDR SB 1429 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0431-943305.Xml
The Union Cabinet has given its ex-post facto approval to enhancement of pension for freedom fighters and for the spouses (widows/widowers), eligible daughters and dependent parents of deceased freedom fighters under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme (SSSPS), 1980. The existing pension scheme for central freedom fighter pensioners and their eligible dependents has been restructured as follows:- Ex-Andaman Political Prisoners/ spouses Rs. 24,775 (Present amount of pension per month) Rs. 30,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month) Freedom fighters who suffered outside British India/spouses Rs. 23,085/- (Present amount of pension per month) Rs. 28,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month) Other Freedom Fighters / spouses including INA Rs. 21,395/- (Present amount of pension per month) Rs. 26,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month) Dependent parents/eligible daughters (maximum 3 daughters at any point of time) Rs. 3,380/- (Present amount of pension per month) 50 percent of the sum that would have been admissible to the Freedom Fighter i.e. in the range of Rs. 13,000/- to Rs. 15,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month) (i)The revised scale of pension has taken effect from 15.O8.2016. Further, the revised total amount of pension will be taken as basic pension for the respective categories of Freedom Fighter pensioners for calculating Dearness Relief. (ii)The existing Dearness Relief system based on All India Consumer Price Index for Industrial workers, which was so far applicable to freedom fighter pensioners on annual basis, is being discontinued and replaced by the Dearness Allowance system applicable to Central Government employees twice a year. This will be termed as "Dearness Relief", the appropriate term in case of pensioners. All freedom fighters and spouses and dependent parents/eligible daughter pensioners of deceased freedom fighters drawing pension under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme, 1980 would be benefitted by the decision. Till 2016, a total of 1,71,605 freedom fighters and their eligible dependents have been sanctioned pension under the scheme. At present, 37,981 freedom fighters and their eligible dependent pensioners are covered under the scheme. Out of these, 11,690 are freedom fighters themselves, 24,792 are spouses (widows/ widowers) and 1,490 are daughter pensioners. Instructions have been issued to all the authorized banks for ensuring Aadhar linked disbursement of Freedom Fighter pension as early as possible. (ANI)
In a decision akin to Singur land transferin West Bengal, the Karnataka government today decided to return13,788 acres of farm land which had been notified for acquisitionfor industrial purpose in various districts. Briefing reporters after Cabinet meeting, Law Minister T BJayachandra said the land included fertile farm land and there waspoor demand from the industries to set up units in these identified places. ''This is not denotification of land as final notification was not yet issued. Now with initial notification being issued, the farmers have not been able to till this land nor banks were coming forwardto give farm loans. There is less demand for industrial land, while the farmers had also approached the courts saying that it was fertile land and government should not acquire it,'' he said. This land is part of 1.21 lakh acre land identified by theprevious BJP government intended to form, under Suvarna KarnatakaIndustrial Development Corridor for industrial purpose. Thisdecision was taken after Global Investor's Meet in 2010 and 2012.Final notification had been issued for 39,250 acres. Of this13,788 acres would be kept out of acquisition. Criticising the previous government, the Minister said ''it (theBJP government) had claimed to have attracted lakhs of crores rupeesof industrial investment and wanted to create this land bank. But weknow what happened later. The government already has a land bank ofnearly 39,000 acres. So we are returning this land to originalowners who are farmers.'' The land to be returned comes under Davanagere, Chitradurga,Tumakuru, Vijayapura, Raichur, Chikkamagaluru, Mysuru and Belagavi districts. Mr Jayachandra also said that the Cabinet had decided to announcea 'Neera Policy' to allow farmers to tap neera from their coconuttrees and sell them to village based organisations for valueaddition and sales in the open market. He said neera was a natural health drink and was rich inminerals, salts other healthy ingredients. Value added products likejaggery, sugar, syrup, honey, chocolate, cake, candies, vinegar canbe produced by using neera, he said. Earlier there was restriction on tapping neera under State ExciseAct and today the cabinet decided to keep out neera out of this Act. He said neera was extensively tapped in Kerala state and hadbrought additional income to the farmers. The government would takethe help of Kerala coconut federation and other organisations whichwere putting neera to profitable use by producing byproducts. Neera is tapped from coconut trees and is a healthy drink untilit is consumed before dawn. After the sunrise it ferments andbecomes toddy, an intoxicating drink that has higher amount ofalcohol in it.UNI RS CNR CS 1652 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0284-943658.Xml
Strongly condemning the terror strike on an Army camp in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri, two US Congressmen have introduced a bill to designate Pakistan as a 'terrorist state'. India's campaign to isolate Pakistan on the issue of terrorism received further momentum after several lawmakers of the US Congress and Senate came out in the open to condemn Islamabad's role in sponsoring terrorism and letting its soils used for carrying out attacks against India and other nations. Most vocal opponents of terrorism, including Congressman Pete Sessions, Chairman of House Rules Committee, Ranking Member of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific Brad Sherman, have issued strong statements slamming Pakistan. Condemning the September 18 terror strike at an Army camp in Uri, Mr Sessions said, "We will not let these attacks affect our united fight against terrorism." Congressman Ted Poe, Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non Proliferation and Trade said the Uri attack was the deadliest assault in over two decades. "It is a reminder to democracies of the world over that terrorism seeks to destroy peace loving societies everywhere. It is still unclear which terrorist group carried out this cowardly attack, but one thing is certain. "This is just the latest consequence of Pakistan's longstanding irresponsible policy of supporting and providing operational space for all stripes of jihadi terrorist groups. He said Pakistan's reckless behaviour in this regard was a serious security risk to its neighbours and India unfortunately pays the price all too often. "We condemn this tragic attack, as well as Pakistan's support for many criminals like the ones who carried it out, and stand firm in our commitment to our friends in India. A threat to democracy in India is a threat to democracy everywhere. And that's just the way it is," he said. Congressman Brad Sherman, Ranking Member of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific said that he strongly condemns the terrorist attack on Uri army base on Saturday September 17, which led to the death of 18 Indian soldiers. He said this attack is yet another reminder of the threat international terrorism poses.UNI MK SB RP1730 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0090-943582.Xml
Delhi BJP president Satish Updhayay today demanded Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's resignation on moral grounds for allegedly committing gross financial irregularities in Delhi Commission for Women along with DCW chief Swati Maliwal. Addressing mediapersons at BJP office here, he alleged, ''Ms Barkha Singh, former DCW chairperson has charged that Mr Kejriwal in collusion with DCW chairperson Swati Maliwal gave several AAP supporters plum posts in the women's panel in DCW. As many as 85 people got jobs "without requisite credentials". They were appointed on hefty salaries.'' ''If the appointments are deemed right by the AAP government, then it has to explain whether these posts were advertised, was the procedure in making appointments adopted, whether so many vacanies were required and if prior permission to fill the vacancies was taken?'' Mr Updhayay asked. Mr Updhayay said that by alleging that the Prime Minister was behind the naming of Mr Kejriwal in the FIR, the Delhi Chief Minister would not derive any political mileage. MORE UNI SY SB 1744 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0093-943792.Xml
The dreaded couple Jeetu Savlam alias Jhitru (27) and his wife Sapka Pojje (23), both carrying reward of Rs 8 lakh each, surrendered to Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB-Naxal Operation) at the state police headquarters here yesterday, Special Director General of Police (Naxal Operation) DM Awasthi said today.

According to sources, Jhitru a native of Basaguda in Bijapur district, joined the rebel outfit in 2005, and presently serving as section commander of Naxal Military battalion one. His wife Pojje was also a member of the same battalion.

Besides the Tadmetla massacre, Jhitru admitted to his involvement in three other major Naxal ambushes at Jagargunda, Tongguda and Kasalpad between 2007 and 2014 in which a total of 38 security personnel,including 14 CRPF troopers were martyred.UNI SS BDG SB VN1945

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Gurgaon Police Commissioner Sandeep Khirwar on Wednesday assured an NGO delegation of the effective implementation of the Haryana Right to Service Act (RSA) in his department. A delegation of NGO Manav Awaaj urged Police Commissioner Khirwar to effectively implement the Haryana Right to Service Act in his department. The delegation insisted that the act has the potential to eradicate corruption and increase transparency, responsibility and accountability in the police department. The delegation made a strong appeal to the Police Commissioner to install display boards as directed under the Haryana Right to Service Act in all offices under his jurisdiction. Display boards installed outside police stations would update individuals about the current status of a particular FIR (First Information Report). Khirwar assured the delegation that he would do his best for effective implementation of the act in his department. Manav Awaaj Convener Abhay Jain and Spokesperson Banwari Lal Saini said that the act makes it compulsory for the police to display the board highlighting the services provided by it and the time frame of services. But the police have not even installed the display board even after two years of the implementation of the Act. Retired Session Judge J. N. Yadav who is heading the RTS cell in the NGO said that the board outside each police station would not only guide the layman in getting their rightful services, but would also act as a deterrent to erring and irresponsible police officials. Judge Yadav further added that the provision of penalty of Rs 250/- per day, if the designated officer fails to provide services in the notified time period, is a good step in this direction. The delegation comprised of Chief Engineer (retired) M. S. Yadav, Major General (retired) S. P. Jain, Krishan Murari, Jagan Nath Mangla, R. S. Rathi, Surya Dev Nakhrola, Advocate Ashok Verma, Vinod Gupta, Kailash Gupta, Manish Verma, Gopinath, Ashok Gupta, Ramesh Jain, Devender Jain and S. P. Dharmani. --IANS pradeep/ask/bg ( 335 Words) 2016-09-21-20:12:08 (IANS)
While Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar accused central government of inadequate support for infrastructure development, to bring investment in North-east, NITI Aayog member and noted economist Bibek Debroy advised the left front government to monetise it's human resource to catch investment. Debroy said the country needs educated human resource and record showed Tripura achieved 97.22 percentage of literacy, highest ever in the country. Moreover, the state government has been claiming that the state is having huge potential of tourism and natural resource based industries but it does not have any campaign at national level. "If really, Tripura wants investment, it required selling the potentials dynamically at national level and if the state has really achieved highest level literacy, the industry will come to use them. But the stature of education reported at various levels is not at all comprehensive. So, state to concentrate on better education and health care and investment in manufacturing sector will come automatically later on," Debroy said. He, however, pointed out that geographical bottle-neck of most of the northeastern states including Tripura has been facing and now the situation has started improving. So, big investment will take some more time to take off rather state to concentrate on flourishing tourism industry, education, health and bio-resource based units and sells them at national level. "Railway has reached now only, connectivity with Bangladesh ports and railway is yet to be done, making Agartala airport as international will also take some time and internal connectivity within the state and neighbors has not yet been developed," Debroy stated. Prior to Debroy, Industry minister Tapan Chakraborty and chief secretary Y P Singh sought help from Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and industry (FICCI) for bringing investment at the beginning of a three-day business summit on connectivity of North-East and opportunities in international trade began today. "We have a stable government, assurance of uninterrupted power supply and all other basic amenities for industries in Tripura even then why investment is not coming here, we can't understand it. You help us in bringing industries and investment," Chakraborty said. Besides, representatives of all northeastern states including Chief Minister of Nagaland T R Zeliang, Bangladesh Industries minister Amir Hossain Amu and Consul General of Russian Federation Kolkata Irina Bashkirova, industrialists from Myanmar, Cambodia, Bhutan, Nepal and other South East countries are scheduled to participate in the summit. However, Chief Minister Manik Sarkar in his inaugural speech alleged that central government is responsible for under development of Tripura in terms of infrastructure that resulted poor industrialisation and investment despite having huge potential. "After dissolution of Planning Commission, Tripura has been losing Rs 1,800 crore annually and it was not compensated properly by NITI Aayog. The state like Tripura is looking for support from the centre to bring investment but still it was not happened. Unless central government generously and pro-actively supports the northeastern states, industrial infrastructure will not grow up," Sarkar added. UNI BB AKM SDR SB VN1955 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0213-943847.Xml
Haryana Finance Minister Capt Abhimanyu today said that the Chandigarh airport was the joint initiative of Haryana and Punjab, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had dedicated it to the people. Interacting with media persons here, Capt Abhimanyu said that Chandigarh was a prominent city of north India and the capital of Haryana and Punjab. Therefore, there should be no issue regarding its name. He said that if Mohali was so dear to Punjab, then it should hand over Chandigarh to Haryana. On being asked about the allegations levelled by Congress leaders regarding increasing financial liabilities on the state exchequer, he said that the Congress leaders had no understanding of statistics when they were in power in the state, then how could they be expected to understand them now when they are in opposition. These liabilities on the state have been inherited from the Congress regime, which the present state government has been trying to reduce by implementing better policies, he added.UNI DB RSA AN2112 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0292-944302.Xml
Assam today urged the UK and Australia to immediately rectify their travel advisory to its citizens on Assam. Terming the clubbing together of Assam with some disturbed parts of the country an 'oversight', state Tourism Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma urged the two countries to avoid inadvertently alluding Assam as a forbidden destination. "Assam is a fine abode of natural beauty while its peace loving people give immense love and affection to all those who come here. Any misrepresentation of the actual situation creates unnecessary fears besides impacting the tourism potential of the state, as this can have a spiralling effect", Dr Sarma said in a press statement. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) issued advisory to its citizens saying, "Although the overall security situation in the North-East of India is improving, some areas within the North-Eastern states, especially in Manipur and Assam, still experience sudden and random outbreaks of violence. There have been several incidents of violence in Assam, including a shooting in Kokrajhar on August 5 last resulting in 14 deaths and grenade explosions in Lakhimpur, Karbi Anglong and Guwahati. Review your security arrangements carefully, seek advice from the local authorities and avoid large crowds." Terming the Kokrajhar incident a rare occurrence and one which can sadly be experienced by any modern society, the Tourism Minister said the law and order situation in Assam is perfect and any fear or apprehension is unfounded. The Australian advisory says, "We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to these areas due to the risk of armed robbery, kidnapping, extortion, and separatist and insurgent violence, including in rural areas. Insurgent groups have attacked civilians and bombed buildings in these states. On August 5 last, terrorists attacked a market at Balajan Tinali in Kokrajhar district in the state of Assam killing at least 14 civilians." Dr Sarma said, "I wish to reassure my distinguished friends in the Governments of UK and Australia that Assam is a wonderful land of peace loving people comprising various tribal groups, rich flora and fauna, magnificent cuisines, mesmerizing landscapes and the world famous Kaziranga National Park, which is home to the very rare single horned Rhino." "The diverse ethnic and cultural groups of Assamese society have co-existed with enormous harmony and displayed exemplary bonhomie for decades together. Any representation of minor skirmishes as state wide disturbance amounts to inexplicable exaggeration and causes unnecessary anxiety for our esteemed tourists who wish to visit the state.We shall highly appreciate if the two country immediately withdraws the said advisory," Mr Sarma added.UNI SG BM RSA AN2136 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0214-944277.Xml
Peramisom Marak (19) a Bangladeshi national was nabbed by sleuths of the BSF from Kachhuadogri area in West Garo Hills district based on specific intelligence inputs, BSF Spokesman, Sushil Kumar Singh said.

One 9 mm pistol, two 9 mm magazine, eight 9 mm live rounds and mobile handset with Bangladeshi SIM card were seized from Marak's possession.

Based on Marak's confession, Mr Singh said Marak has been working with ULFA in Bangladesh since last three years and remains in close association with Dristi Rajkhowa, the deputy commander-in-chief of the ULFA and his body guards.

Marak had also told the BSF interrogators that he was also involved in transporting of weapons for the ULFA from Bangladesh to Garo Hills besides assisting the ULFA cadres residing in Bangladesh village Badagazni to cross over to India and vice versa with the help of some Indian associates.

Mr Singh said the nabbed ULFA militant is also wanted in illegal activities in Bangladesh.

Badagazni area in Bangladesh is a safe haven for Indian insurgents as they disguise themselves within local tribal there, to avoid arrest from the security forces. Moreover, these cadres have a good number of sympathizers in that village.

Mr Singh said the BSF is now trying to figure out the Indian associates who are providing assistance to these cadres in the bordering areas.

Meanwhile, the BSF has handed over Marak alongwith seized items to Meghalaya police for legal action. UNI RRK BM RSA VN2205

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Members of the Kangra Bar association here today boycotted the court work, held a protest march in the town against the notification of the High Court to shift the complaint cases filed under section 138 of the Negotiable instrument Act to the court of Legal services Authority Secretary at Dharamshala. Aman Guleria, President Kangra Bar Association told UNI that the lawyers today boycotted the courts and passed a resolution demanding the notification may be withdrawn and cases under Section 138 Negotiable Instrument Act be retained in the Kangra courts as this action would lead to deprive the litigant of getting the justice at their doorstep.Guleria further said that the lawyers also resolved to request the Himachal Pradesh High Court to revive the already closed circuit court of additional Sessions judge at Kangra. Guleria said that the copy of the resolution passed by the Bar was handed over to Judicial Magistrate First class here for its onward transmission to the Himachal Pradesh high court.The protesting lawyers took to the streets and held a protest march through the main market of the town and raised slogans in support of their demands. The lawyers have also decided to boycott their court tomorrow in support of their demands.The circuit court of the Additional Sessions Judge was closed in Kangra as the distance between Dharamshala and Kangra was 18 kms whereas for such circuit courts, the condition laid down says that the distance should be at least 20 kms. UNI XC RSA VN2254 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0292-944306.Xml
US President Barack Obama has called on the countries to open hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for home. "We should all understand that ultimately our world will be more secure if we are prepared to help those in need," Obama said in his final speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Tuesday, adding that pledges of increased assistance made at the meeting should all be welcomed, Xinhua news agency reported. Obama will host a summit on the global refugee crisis on the margins of UNGA later Tuesday, in an effort to galvanize new global commitments to help the refugees. More than 65 million people in the world are displaced, the highest number on record since the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) began collecting statistics, according to the White House. More than 21 million of these people have crossed international borders in search of safety and are assessed as refugees. In his speech, Obama said many nations are "doing the right thing" on the refugee issue, but countries "with wealth and the benefits of geography" can do more to offer a hand to the displaced people. "In the eyes of innocent men and women and children... we have to have the empathy to see ourselves," Obama said. "We have to imagine what it would be like for our family, for our children if the unspeakable happened to us." On Tuesday, the White House announced that 51 American companies have made "new, measurable, and significant" commitments to aid refugees in the US and around the world. In total, the companies have committed to investing, donating, or raising more than $650 million. --IANS pgh/ ( 289 Words) 2016-09-21-04:12:09 (IANS)
Members of United Kashmir People's National Party (UKPNP) on Tuesday held a protest outside the United Nations (UN) office in Geneva, demanding the formation of a commission by the UN to investigate the killing of Aarif Sahid, leader of All Party National Alliance (APNA), allegedly by Pakistan for raising his voice for the Kashmiris in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The protesters raised slogans "Long live Arif Sahid" and "Stop terrorism in Kashmir", and demanded Sahid be declared a martyr. Jamil Maqsood, a leader of the UKPNP present during the protest, said Sahid was killed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. "It was obviously the secret agency of Pakistan, the ISI, because the ISI did not tolerate any pro-people voice in PoK, so it is very clear that ISI eliminated Aarif Sahid, the leader of Kashmiri People," Maqsood told ANI. He insisted that the people present were protesting for the arrest of his killers who, he clearly said, was the ISI. "We are demanding the United Nations and the human rights councils and the entire UN body to investigate and to formulate a commission that impartially investigates the killing of Aarif Sahid," he added. Remembering Sahid, Maqsood said, "He is the greatest martyr of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Because he was speaking for the rights of the Kashmiri people particularly who are marginalised in PoK." According to reports, Sahid was murdered by the ISI on May 14, 2013. (ANI)
U.S. President Barack Obama has called upon International Community to reject all forms of fundamentalism, while saying that nations should stop proxy wars. Delivering his last speech at the United Nations General Assembly on its 71st session, Obama said the international community should reject terrorism and there is need to embrace the tolerance that results from respect for all human beings. "The world is too small, we are all too packed together to be following the old ways of thinking. We must reject the fundamentalism...instead we need to embrace the tolerance that results from respect for all human beings," Obama said. Obama also highlighted the picture of nations struggling with economic inequality, sectarian conflict and rising nationalism. "We cannot dismiss these visions. They are powerful. They reflect dissatisfaction among too many of our citizens," he said. He insisted that all should work together to make sure the benefits of global integration are shared. "The answer cannot be a simple rejection of global integration. We should work together to make sure the benefits of global integration are broadly shared," he said. The US President called on for a reaffirmation of commitments of collaboration on issues like climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. Taking stock of his diplomatic record, he said, "The end of the Cold War may have led too many to believe that all problems were either caused by Washington or could be solved by Washington. Perhaps too many in Washington believed that as well." He also spoke about the sectarian chaos in the Middle East, Russia's aggression toward its neighbours, and China's disputes with other Asian countries in the South China Sea. He also called for progress on Israel-Palestine, saying Palestinians must reject incitement and Israel must realise it cannot criminally occupy Palestinian land. "Our international community must seek to work with those who seek to build, rather than destroy," he said. He added, "In a place like Syria, where there's no military victory to be had.we're going to have to pursue the hard work of diplomacy." Obama emphasized that the US and Europe were dealing with a rise of nativism, spurred by fears of mass migration. "You see people wrestling with concerns about immigration and changing demographics and suggest that people who look different are somehow corrupting the character of our countries," he said. He referred to the futility of nations' building walls and said, "A nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself." He hailed India's economic growth saying China and India remain on a path of remarkable growth. Obama said the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before. (ANI)
Chaudhry briefed his EU counterpart about alleged "human rights violations" committed by India against Kashmiris.

The European Union noted Pakistan's concerns and inquired about the current state of bilateral relations between India and Pakistan.

According to sources, India is set to raise the Uri attack - in which 18 Army soldiers were killed - at the 71st UNGA session and highlight Pakistan's alleged involvement in the deadly terror strike.

According to sources, India will raise the matter in the U.N. General Assembly and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise on Pakistan's involvement in her speech on September 26. (ANI)
United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May has promised that her country would ratify the Paris Agreement by the end of this year. The commitment was given during her maiden speech at the United Nations in New York. "The UK remained determined to play our part in the international effort against climate change . In a demonstration of our commitment to the agreement reached in Paris, the UK will start its domestic procedures to enable ratification of the Paris agreement and complete these before the end of the year," the Guardian quoted her as saying. Her decision to speed up the ratification would relieve green campaigners and charities amid worries that the she could start retreating from Britain's position as a leader on tackling climate change after exiting the European Union. Meanwhile, a UK official said the Prime Minister's announcement was "absolutely a reflection of her commitment to delivering on that international agreement where the UK has been at the forefront of efforts". The UK had negotiated at the Paris climate talks as part of the EU, which is a major emitter but is not expected to ratify this year. Though France hosted last December's summit and ratified in June, French President Franois Hollande has called on countries to redouble their efforts to ratify before the next major UN climate summit in Marrakesh in November. (ANI)
The statement by Prime Minister Sharif's Office spokesman said that conversation took place last night.

"The Prime Minister and General Raheel Sharif had a telephonic conversation in which they discussed ... the prevailing regional situation," Dawn quoted the statement as saying.

Sharif is in New York attending the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly session.

Reports suggest that the conversation was the first between the two since Sunday's terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri region, in which 18 Indian Army soldiers lost their lives.

Sharif would today deliver a speech at the UNGA in which he is likely to focus on the Kashmir issue.

According to sources, India would also raise the Uri attack and highlight Pakistan's alleged involvement in the dastardly terror attack.

According to sources, India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise on Pakistan's involvement in her speech on September 26. (ANI)
Judge Sergio Moro, who is overseeing Operation Car Wash, the investigation into corruption allegations at Petrobras, said there was sufficient evidence of Lula's responsibility.

Judge Sergio Moro, who has overseen the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation into bribery and kickbacks at Petrobras and other major corporations must now assess allegations that Lula accepted 3.7 m reais (USD 1.1m) in bribes, reports the Guardian.

Lula, who has denied the accusations, has claimed that it is an attempt to prevent him from running in the next presidential elections in 2018.

The trial will take place in the city of Curitiba and comes amid a period of intense political and economic turmoil, which has been exacerbated by the two-year Lava Jato investigation.

Lula had already been charged in August with allegedly obstructing investigations. (ANI)
The Presidents of France and South Africa have called for urgent investments globally to create new jobs in the health sector in order to prevent a projected shortfall of 18 million health workers primarily in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and help countries to maximize the social and economic benefits of increased health employment. The High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, chaired by Presidents Franois Hollande and Jacob Zuma delivered its final report and recommendations to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. The Commission concluded that investing in the health workforce is needed to make progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, including gains in health, global security and inclusive economic growth. The commission made 10 recommendations for realising those gains, through appropriate investments in health employment that can power economies, move countries closer to universal health coverage and act as a bulwark against outbreaks such as Ebola. Ageing populations and increasing rates of non-communicable diseases are projected to generate demand for 40 million new health workers worldwide by 2030, which would represent a doubling of the current global health workforce. But most of those jobs will be created in the wealthiest countries. Without action there will be a shortfall, primarily in low- and lower-middle-income countries, of 18 million health workers needed to achieve and sustain universal health coverage. Mounting evidence shows that investments in the health sector pay handsome dividends. The returns on investment in health are estimated to be 9 to 1, and around one quarter of growth between 2000 and 2011 in low-income and middle-income countries is estimated to have resulted from improvements to health. Investing in skills and expanding health employment will also contribute to the economic empowerment of women and youth. "For too long countries have seen health workers as just another cost to be managed, instead of an investment with a triple return for health, economic growth and global health security," said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization. The need for action is urgent. The Commission calls for immediate actions by March 2018 to secure commitments and accountability for accelerated health workforce investments. In response to the Commission's request, the Vice-Chairs of the Commission from WHO, ILO and OECD will convene all relevant stakeholders by the end of 2016 to develop a five-year implementation plan for the 10 recommendations. "The report provides solid evidence that investing in the health economy and progressing towards universal health coverage can strengthen economic growth and make it more inclusive by generating decent jobs in a wide range of occupations," said Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labour Organization. "It offers practical proposals for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, particularly Sustainable Development Goal 3 on healthy lives and well-being for all at all ages, and goal 8 on inclusive growth and decent work." Health is a major and growing source of jobs. Across the OECD, employment in health and social work grew by 48 per cent between 2000 and 2014, while jobs in industry and agriculture declined. "These recommendations will chart the course to achieve greater and more effective investment in the health workforce. This will be a critical element to promote better lives and help our economies flourish and achieve their full potential," said Angel Gurra, Secretary-General of the OECD. The commission's vision is for an expanded, transformed and sustainable health workforce to promote health, prevent disease, meet the needs of populations, and drive inclusive economic growth. The commission's 10 recommendations are: 1. Stimulate investments in creating decent health sector jobs, particularly for women and youth, with the right skills, in the right numbers and in the right places. 2. Maximize women's economic participation and foster their empowerment through institutionalizing their leadership, addressing gender biases and inequities in education and the health labour market, and tackling gender concerns in health reform processes. 3. Scale up transformative, high-quality education and lifelong learning so that all health workers have skills that match the health needs of populations and can work to their full potential. 4. Reform service models concentrated on hospital care and focus instead on prevention and on the efficient provision of high-quality, affordable, integrated, community-based, people-centred primary and ambulatory care, paying special attention to underserved areas. 5. Harness the power of cost-effective information and communication technologies to enhance health education, people-centred health services and health information systems. 6. Ensure investment in the International Health Regulations core capacities, including skills development of national and international health workers in humanitarian settings and public health emergencies, both acute and protracted. Ensure the protection and security of all health workers and health facilities in all settings. 7. Raise adequate funding from domestic and international sources, public and private where appropriate, and consider broad-based health financing reform where needed, to invest in the right skills, decent working conditions and an appropriate number of health workers. 8. Promote inter-sectoral collaboration at national, regional and international levels; engage civil society, unions and other health workers' organizations and the private sector; and align international cooperation to support investments in the health workforce, as part of national health and education strategies and plans. 9. Advance international recognition of health workers' qualifications to optimize skills use, increase the benefits from and reduce the negative effects of health worker migration, and safeguard migrants' rights. 10. Undertake robust research and analysis of health labour markets, using harmonized metrics and methodologies, to strengthen evidence, accountability and action. (ANI)
Strongly condemning the terror attack on an Army Base Camp in Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir's Baramulla district, Sri Lanka on Wednesday said that there is an "urgent need for sustained regional and global cooperation to eliminate the menace of terrorism." Issuing a statement, the Government of Sri Lanka said that as a country, which has undergone the scourge of terrorism for almost three decades, it resents all forms and manifestation of terrorism. "In the hour of grief, the Government of Sri Lanka offers its condolences to the families of the victims of the attack," added the statement. Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena yesterday offered condolences to the families of the victims during his telephonic conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Both leaders also spoke of the need for sustained cooperation among the countries of the region to end the scourge of terrorism. In one of the worst attacks in recent times, as many as 18 soldiers were killed and over 20 others got injured post the terror strike on an army camp close to the headquarters of the 12th Brigade at Uri on Sunday. After giving an assurance of going after the perpetrators of the deadly Uri attack, Prime Minister Modi has given the green signal to diplomatically isolate Pakistan at every international grouping. India is to present all actionable evidence against Pakistan if required at international bodies. (ANI)
Movie director Curtis Hanson, who won an Oscar for "L.A Confidential", was found dead in his California home on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Police Department said. He was 71.Paramedics found Hanson at his Hollywood Hills home at about 5 p.m. local time (0530 IST). Hanson, who was pronounced dead at the scene, died of natural causes, a police spokeswoman said. He had been retired in recent years due to Alzheimer's, according to Variety.com.Hanson, along with Brian Helgeland, won an Oscar in 1997 for best writing for their adapted screenplay of "L.A Confidential," a novel by James Ellroy. REUTERS JW PM0942 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-942956.Xml
China had 232 chemical-related accidents from January to August this year, causing 199 deaths and 400 injuries, according to research from the environmental group Greenpeace published Today.Greenpeace said China needs to "radically overhaul" the way it manages its chemical industry, which is now "appallingly under-regulated"."The government must take urgent action to manage chemicals in a sound manner, provide a safety net for workers and citizens, and protect ecologically important areas across the country," said Cheng Qian, a campaigner with the group.According to publicly available data from 2010-11, the majority of China's 33,625 chemical facilities are located in densely populated eastern coastal regions, Greenpeace said, adding that more transparency was needed to provide a more accurate picture of the industry.China has struggled to enforce its rules on acquiring, producing, storing and disposing of dangerous chemicals, and experts have complained that rules published at the end of 2011 are inadequate and need to be tightened significantly.Last year, 165 people were killed following a series of explosions in a chemical warehouse in the northern city of Tianjin. The government said hazardous materials had been stored illegally at the site.China detained 49 people in connection with the blasts, including port and work safety officials, saying that laws and regulations had been flouted. The firm involved, Tianjin Ruihai International Logistics, was also accused of handling dangerous chemicals without a licence.Four workers were also killed in an explosion at a facility run by the Wanhua Chemical Group today.REUTERS JW PM1019 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-942988.Xml
Israel's defence industry faces layoffs, closures and a scramble to set up shop in the United States following the signing of a new US military aid package that phases out Israel's ability to spend a quarter of the funds on its own businesses. The 10-year, 38 billion dollars agreement, signed on September 15 after a year of negotiations, comes into effect in US fiscal year 2019. It constitutes the most military assistance Washington has ever provided to an ally, but was clinched only after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted concessions. Key among those is the gradual phasing out of a clause allowing Israel to spend 26.3 per cent of the funds on its own defence sector, which competes actively with US firms such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon. That means Israeli defence companies will miss out on up to 10 billion dollars that might otherwise have been spent on home-made drones, missiles, tanks and other equipment, depending on the precise terms of the phase-out, which remain unclear. Once that phase-out is completed, all the funds in the agreement will have to be spent in the United States. "It's quite a problem," said one Israeli defence industry official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. "The bigger companies and most advanced ones with the best technology and capabilities will be able to survive, but the smaller you are, the bigger the problem is." Netanyahu's office declined to comment on the domestic consequences of the aid deal but has said the agreement "will greatly strengthen the security of Israel". Israel has about 700 defence-related firms, most of them with only 50 to 150 employees. They mainly act as subcontractors to Israel's four largest defence companies -- Elbit Systems , Israel Aerospace Industries, Israel Military Industries and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems. Israel's defence exports totalled 5.7 billion dollars in 2015, about 14 pct of all exports and a major driver of the economy. OPTIONS None of the companies asked by Reuters to discuss the aid package were willing to speak on the record, mentioning concerns about future business. But several executives, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that as a result of the deal they were already considering contingency plans. One option would be for larger firms to open subsidiaries in the United States, like Elbit has done, to compensate for the loss of business. They might also acquire smaller US firms. As one executive put it: "This should be translated into an opportunity for the Israeli industry, which should penetrate new markets and improve their competitive ability." "We should face the global trends and the fact that Israel is losing its ability to compete," the official said, adding the company where he works would "accelerate the process" of searching for a US company to buy. Another area of concern is the loss of Israeli know-how, with aerospace engineers and scientists potentially moving abroad if there is a decline in inward spending and investment. The executives said they hoped that when the time comes, the government will find the nearly 1 billion dollars a year extra needed to keep the sector afloat under terms of the agreement, although the sum may be hard to come by given the fractured political environment. According to Israel's Manufacturers' Association, even a 1 billion shekel ( 265 million dollars) cut in the defence budget will lead to the layoff of more than 2,000 workers, mostly from small- and medium-sized subcontractors that have a "to be or not to be" dependence on orders from the Israeli defence establishment. A source close to Netanyahu said the prime minister didn't anticipate any closure of small defence companies, and noted the procurement changes would go into effect only in time. On the domestic political front, the right-wing leader has drawn fire over the new pact from critics, including his former defence minister Ehud Barak, who said that Netanyahu's vocal opposition to last year's US-led nuclear deal with Iran had jeopardised a potentially larger package. However, with uncertainties surrounding a tightly contested election for the White House, Netanyahu was keen to wrap up an agreement, replacing the current 30 billion dollars deal that expires at the end of fiscal 2018. Addressing his cabinet on Sunday, Netanyahu called arguments that Israel was short-changed in the negotiations "distortions and fabrications of parties with political interests". Avraham Bar David, a former general who works with some 200 small Israeli defence contractors through the Manufacturers' Association, predicted that "70 to 100 of them" will not survive the local procurement restriction. "These companies are too small to sell abroad," he said.REUTERS JW PM1108 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-943026.Xml
Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman denied an assertion by US officials' that they believe Moscow was responsible for an air strike on a United Nations aid convoy.Yesterday Maria Zakharova told reporters at the United Nations that the US administration "has no facts" to support the claim, adding: "We have nothing to do with this situation."REUTERS AKC 0407 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-942910.Xml
Gabon President Ali Bongo wants talks with opposition leader Jean Ping to forestall any possible violence when the Constitutional Court makes a crucial ruling on the country's disputed Aug. 27 election, a government spokesman said.The court must rule by Friday on a request by Ping to recount votes in the province of Haut-Ogooue, a Bongo stronghold. The president won 95 per cent there on a turnout of 99.9 per cent, helping him to an overall victory of less than 6,000 votes.Bongo is willing to meet other candidates "in order to avoid the hate, barbarism and violence ... so that no more Gabonese lose their lives," spokesman Alain-Claude Nze said on state television.Nze gave no details of the content or timing of the talks.Yesterday Ping accuses the president of stealing the election. The dispute led to riots that killed at least six people and brought unwelcome international scrutiny on Bongo, whose family has ruled the Central African country for nearly 50 years.There was no immediate comment from Ping on the offer. He has previously said he has no faith in the court because of its ties to Bongo's family. REUTERS AKC 0432 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-942916.Xml
Protesters blocked a highway and clashed with police in Charlotte, North Carolina, early today morning after officers fatally shot a black man they said had a gun when they approached him in a parking lot.About a dozen officers and several protesters suffered non-life threatening injuries during an hours-long demonstration near where Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot by a policeman on Tuesday afternoon, police and local media said on social media.Early today morning, protesters blocked Interstate 85, where they stole boxes from trucks and started fires before police used flash grenades in an attempt to disperse the angry crowd, an ABC affiliate in Charlotte reported.Earlier in the evening, police in riot gear reportedly used tear gas on protesters who threw rocks and water bottles at them as they wielded large sticks and blocked traffic. One officer was sent to the hospital after being struck in the head by a rock, police said.Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts urged for calm."The community deserves answers and (a) full investigation will ensue," she said on Twitter, adding in a subsequent post, "I want answers too."Scott was shot by officer Brentley Vinson earlier in the day, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police. The shooting occurred when officers were at an apartment complex searching for a suspect with an outstanding warrant and they saw Scott get out of his vehicle with a firearm, the department said.Vinson fired his weapon and struck Scott, who "posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers," the department said in a statement.Vinson, who joined the Charlotte police force in July 2014, is black, according to the department. He has been placed on paid administrative leave.NATIONAL DEBATEThe fatal shooting came amid an intense national debate over the use of deadly force by police, particularly against black men.Police did not immediately say if Scott was the suspect they had originally sought at the apartment complex. WSOC-TV, a local television station, reported that he was not.Detectives recovered the gun Scott was holding at the time of the shooting and were interviewing witnesses, police said.Protesters and Scott's family disputed that the dead man was armed. Some family members told reporters that Scott had been holding a book and was waiting for his son to be dropped off from school.Shakeala Baker, who lives in a neighboring apartment complex, said she had seen Scott in the parking lot on previous afternoons waiting for his child. But on Tuesday, she watched as medics tended to Scott after he was shot, she said."This is just sad," said Baker, 31. "I get tired of seeing another black person shot every time I turn on the television. But (police are) scared for their own lives. So if they're scared for their lives, how are they going to protect us?"About 200 people gathered earlier Tuesday night for a peaceful protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a white officer killed an unarmed black man last week in an incident captured on police videos.Lawyers for the family of Terence Crutcher, 40, disputed that he posed any threat before he was shot by Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby after his sport utility vehicle broke down on Friday. REUTERS JW VP1355 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-943262.Xml
New Zealand will go ahead with its first extradition of a resident to China, New Zealand's justice minister said today, after reconsidering its position at the behest of the High Court and maintaining the man should be sent to China.New Zealand agreed in December to extradite South Korean Kyung Yup Kim, who is a New Zealand resident, to China to face charges for the murder of a woman in Shanghai.The High Court later ordered the government to reconsider its decision because of concern Kim might not be protected from ill-treatment and given the right to silence before a trial.Justice Minister Amy Adams said via an email from her spokesman that she had considered the High Court's ruling and had decided that Kim should be surrendered to China.Kim denies the murder charge, according to court documents, and his lawyer, Tony Ellis, told the High Court this week that Kim intended to keep fighting the case up to the Supreme Court.The drawn-out case and the possibility of more court reviews has highlighted the hurdles China faces as it seeks to drum up international cooperation in a campaign to track down corruption suspects who have fled overseas.That was further underscored yesterday when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sidestepped questions on extraditions to China, saying Canada would stick to high standards when deciding whether to return Chinese citizens.China's foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a daily briefing today that Kim's extradition "serves the common interests of China, New Zealand and other countries that cooperate with China in this way"."We hope and are confident that on the basis of mutual respect we will continue to cooperate in the administration and enforcement of the law," Kang said.China has pushed for an extradition treaty with New Zealand since 2014. In April, on a visit to Beijing, Prime Minister John Key said an extradition treaty was "possible", as long as people did not face torture or the death penalty.The High Court also ruled today that Kim, who has spent the past five years in an Auckland prison while the extradition proceedings went on, should be allowed out on bail.REUTERS SDR RAI1424 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-943311.Xml
Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) on Wednesday cancelled its flights to the Northern Areas on the orders of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). "As per directives of CAA, the air space over Northern areas will remain closed on Wednesday, September 21. Inconvenience regretted," the Express Tribune quoted PIA spokesperson Danyal Gilani, as saying in a tweet. Reports suggested that in anticipation of possible strike by India for the Uri terror incident, Pakistan warplanes were practicing takeoffs and landings. Four heavily armed militants had stormed the battalion headquarters of the Army in Uri, close to the Line of Control (LoC), in the wee hours on Sunday, killing 18 Indian jawans and injuring more than 20 other personnel. In the encounter, the security forces neutralised all of them within hours. The terrorists, who attacked the military base in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri, belonged to Pakistan's banned terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). In a series of tweets after the attack, the Prime Minister said, "I assure the nation that those behind this despicable attack will not go unpunished". He added, "We salute all those martyred in Uri. Their services to the nation will always be remembered. My thoughts are with the bereaved families (of the Army jawans)". Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh also branded Islamabad as a terrorist state and said the Asian neighbour should be isolated and sanctioned at international platforms. Pakistan has, however, flatly rejected New Delhi's claims of involvement in the Uri terror attack, stating that the latter has a traditional tendency to point fingers at the former whenever a terror attack takes place on Indian soil. Indian Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh had also warned Pakistan in the wake of the Uri strike and said India reserves the right to respond to any act of the adversary. According to sources, India is set to raise the Uri attack at the 71st UNGA session and highlight Pakistan's alleged involvement in the deadly terror strike. India will raise the matter in the U.N. General Assembly and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise on Pakistan's involvement in her speech on September 26. (ANI)
Haaretz online quoted the Israel Foreign Ministry as saying that a local security guard shot and injured one of two knife-wielding attackers at the embassy.

According to Turkish broadcaster NTV, the attack occurred as two persons attempted to enter the embassy in Ankara, and one person was "injured and neutralised" in the incident.

CNN Turk reported that the incident was a stabbing attack, and the alleged assailant was shot in the leg.

--IANS sm-lok/vt

( 109 Words)

2016-09-21-16:04:15 (IANS)
Nigerian troops have been fighting with the Boko Haram militant group over control of a northeastern town, the army said today.The army had made a push to take Mallam Fatori, a remote town near Lake Chad, when Boko Haram moved in reinforcements, army spokesman Sani Usman said in a statement."The troops killed several of the Boko Haram terrorists in the resulting encounter and subsequently had to withdraw to a vantage position," he said. No more details were immediately available. "The operation is continuing." REUTERS SDR PR1643 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-943644.Xml
A Syrian warplane crashed north of Damascus today, but it was unclear if it had been shot down or crashed because of a technical fault, monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.The jet crashed in the Eastern Qalamoun area near the Syrian capital. The fate of the pilot was unknown, the British-based Observatory said.Islamic State said in an online statement that the plane had been shot down. REUTERS VS AS1605 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0440-943528.Xml
A suspected assailant was shot and wounded near the Israeli embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara today, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman and Turkish police said."The staff is safe. The attacker was wounded before he reached the embassy," the spokesman said in a text message. "The assailant was shot and wounded by a local security man."Broadcaster CNN Turk said the suspect, whom it described as mentally unstable, had attempted a knife attack.Turkish police told Reuters the assailant shouted "Allahu akbar", or "God is Greatest", outside the embassy before he was shot in the leg.Police were examining his bag but had so far not attempted to detonate it, a Reuters cameraman at the scene said. The area outside the embassy had been cordoned off.The assailant was apprehended at the outer perimeter of the secured zone around the embassy, the Israeli spokesman said.Private broadcaster NTV identified the suspect as a man from the central city of Konya.It was not immediately clear if there was a second would-be assailant, but Turkish media reports had initially suggested that there had been two attackers.Turkey faces multiple security threats, including Islamic State militants, who have been blamed for bombings in Istanbul and elsewhere, and Kurdish militants, following the resumption of a three-decade insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast last year.REUTERS VS RAI1621 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0440-943579.Xml
Voters in Switzerland on Sunday are likely to back a law extending the spy service's authority to monitor internet traffic, deploy drones and hack foreign computer systems to combat militant attacks, a survey shows.Switzerland's system of direct democracy gives citizens final say on the law passed in September 2015 which will give new powers to the Federal Intelligence Service, along with rules on when the agency can use them.In a survey last week by polling group gfs.bern on behalf of Swiss state television, 53 per cent were in favour of the law, with 35 per cent opposed. Twelve percent were undecided, gfs.bern said.Though neutral Switzerland has not been targeted by the sort of militant Islamist attacks seen elsewhere in Europe, the Swiss government contends previous intelligence laws are outdated and ill-equipped to tackle threats that have intensified as militants deploy new technology in a tight-knit global network."The Federal Intelligence Service will get modern information-gathering tools, including for surveillance of telephone calls or internet activities," the government said. "These can only be deployed under strict conditions."For instance, the agency must get the government's go-ahead before deploying software to penetrate foreign computer networks. When gathering information, its agents must "employ methods least likely to intrude on the targeted person's civil rights", according to the law.Across Europe, countries including France have expanded spy agency powers, following Islamist attacks that have shifted some governments' priorities from privacy to security.Switzerland has prosecuted several people it contends aided Islamic State and sought to strip citizenship from a man suspected of traveling to Syria to fight with the group.REUTERS SDR RAI1709 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-943714.Xml
Syrian rebels and pro-government forces battled each other on major frontlines near Aleppo and Hama, and air strikes reportedly killed a dozen people including four medical workers, as a ceasefire appeared to have completely unravelled.The renewed battles demonstrated the thin prospects for reviving a truce that collapsed into fresh fighting and bombardments on Monday, including an attack on an aid convoy which US officials believe was carried out by Russian jets. Moscow denies involvement.The UN Security Council was due to hold a high-level meeting on Syria later on Wednesday.Despite accusing Moscow of being behind the bombing of the aid convoy, the United States says the ceasefire agreement it sponsored jointly with Russia is "not dead".But the deal, probably the final hope of reaching a settlement on Syria before the administration of President Barack Obama leaves office, is following the path of all previous peace efforts in Syria: still being touted by diplomats long after the warring parties appeared to have abandoned it.Overnight fighting was focused in areas that control access to Aleppo city, where the rebel-held east has been encircled by government forces, aided by Russian air power and Iran-backed militias, for all but a few weeks since July.Syrian state media and a TV station controlled by its Lebanese ally Hezbollah said the army had recaptured a fertiliser factory in the Ramousah area to the southwest of the city. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring body, confirmed the advance and said government forces had pressed forward near an apartment complex nearby.A rebel fighter in the Aleppo area said warplanes had been bombing all night in preparation for an attack. But "the regime's attempts to advance failed," said the rebel, speaking to Reuters from the Aleppo area via the internet.A Syrian military source said insurgent groups were mobilising to the south and west of Aleppo, and in the northern Hama area. "We will certainly target all these gatherings and mobilisations they are conducting."The army reported carrying out air strikes on seven areas near Aleppo. The Observatory said an air strike killed four medical workers and at least nine rebel fighters in the insurgent-held town of Khan Touman south of Aleppo, saying the rebels were part of the Islamist alliance Jaish al-Fatah.The medical staff killed were working for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), it said. UOSSM confirmed in a statement that at least four of its staff had been killed.Syrian government forces also launched a major advance in Hama province in the West of the country."It is a very intense attack, for which Russian jets paved the way, but it was repelled by the brothers, praise God," Abu al-Baraa al-Hamawi, a rebel commander fighting as part of the Islamist Jaish al-Fatah alliance, told Reuters.He said rebels had destroyed four tanks and inflicted heavy losses on government troops. Syrian state TV said government forces had killed a number of insurgents and destroyed their vehicles.Rebel sources also reported an attempt by pro-government forces to advance in the Handarat area to the north of Aleppo, saying this too had been repelled. Pro-government media made no mention of that attack.The Observatory reported that a Syrian jet had crashed near Damascus, saying the cause of the crash and fate of the pilot were unknown. Islamic State said it had been shot down."BAR OF DEPRAVITY"The truce brokered by the United States and Russia took effect on Sept. 12 as part of a deal meant to facilitate aid access to besieged areas.Foreign ministers of 20 countries including the United States and Russia met to discuss it yesterday and gave the agreement their support. US Secretary of State John Kerry said after the meeting: "The ceasefire is not dead".In the pact, the details of which remain secret, Washington and Moscow, which back opposing sides in the war between President Bashar al-Assad's government and insurgents, agreed to jointly target jihadists that are their common enemy.But such unprecedented cooperation, at a time when trust between the Cold War-era foes is at its lowest for decades, was always a risky gamble. Kerry agreed the deal despite scepticism among other senior US administration figures, and has acknowledged that it is fragile and uncertain.Tensions between the United States and Russia escalated over a Sept. 17 attack by the US-led coalition against Islamic State that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers in the eastern Deir al-Zor province. Washington said that strike was carried out by mistake with the intent of hitting Islamic State.Monday's attack on the aid convoy, which the Syrian Red Crescent says killed the head of its local office and around 20 other people, brought furious international condemnation.The United Nations suspended aid shipments. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon used his farewell speech to the General Assembly in New York to denounce the "cowards" behind it."Just when you think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower," Ban said.However, the United Nations, which initially described the attack as an air strike, rowed back from that characterisation, saying it could not be certain what had happened.Two US officials told Reuters yesterday that two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the time it was struck late on Monday, citing US intelligence that led them to conclude Russia was to blame.Moscow says the convoy was not hit from the air and has implied rebels were to blame, saying only rescue workers affiliated to the opposition knew what had happened. Russia's foreign ministry told reporters at the United Nations the US administration "has no facts" to support its assertions.Aleppo, Syria's biggest city before the war, has been a focal point of the war this year as Assad and his allies have sought to encircle the insurgent-held east and cut opposition supply lines to Turkey.Having blockaded eastern Aleppo, the government and its allies aim to clear insurgents from areas to the south and west, to take back territory including the main Damascus-Aleppo highway. Shi'ite militia from Iraq, Lebanon and Iran play a big role fighting on the government's side.But rebel groups still have a strong presence in the area which abuts the insurgent stronghold of Idlib province. The powerful group formerly known as the Nusra Front has played a big role in fighting against the government.Long al Qaeda's Syrian wing, Nusra has changed its name and disavowed al Qaeda, but is still characterised by both the West and Moscow as a terrorist group excluded from the ceasefire. Other rebels say Russia and the Syrian government exploit this to justify broader attacks. REUTERS VS PR1723 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0440-943779.Xml
Advisor to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Foreign Affairs, Sartaj Aziz discussed the Kashmir crisis today with the Foreign Ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland on the sidelines of 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York. "Acknowledging the sacrifices rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three Foreign Ministers appreciated successful counterterrorism operations conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country. Mr. Sartaj Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistan's economy to grow at steady and sustainable rate. He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria and Switzerland in Pakistan," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan said in a statement. Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Pakistan-India relations and the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, highlighting the current state of violence in the Valley, as he stated that the settlement of Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability of South Asia. Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida stated Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistan's power sector. Encouraging greater interaction of private sectors of the two countries, he welcomed the visit of Pakistan's business delegation to Japan. He also reiterated his invitation to Aziz to visit Japan. Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz of Austria welcomed the prospects of Austrian investment in Pakistan due to improved security situation. He recognized significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy. Foreign Minister (Federal Councillor) Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland mentioned that Swiss Development Cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan. With improved security situation, the prospects of further expanding its work, according of Pakistan's priorities, were positive. He offered Swiss cooperation in Pakistan's water management sector. He appreciated Pakistan's role in hosting Afghan refugees for the last thirty years. Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organization, Pakistan's application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly. (ANI)
Pirates stormed a container ship off the coast of Guinea today, making off with money and some of its cargo but leaving the crew unharmed, the government said.They fired guns and briefly held the crew hostage while they were looting the ship named Wendok, Guinea government spokesman Albert Camara said by telephone.He did not have details of the flag Wendok was flying under, the company running it, what its cargo was nor the nationalities of the crew.He said Guinea's navy had been alerted but that the pirates had escaped before it could catch them.Two security sources confirmed the incident, but likewise did not have further details.Security experts class West Africa's waters, especially off Nigeria where most of the pirates originate, as some of the world's most dangerous, with attackers often targeting oil tankers as well as hostages to ransom. REUTERS SHS VN2117 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-944451.Xml
Abandoning a long-standing reticence, Iranians are increasingly candid about their involvement in Syria's war, and informal recruiters are now openly calling for volunteers to defend the Islamic Republic and fellow Shi'ites against Sunni militants.With public opinion swinging behind the cause, numbers of would-be fighters have soared far beyond what Tehran is prepared to deploy in Syria, according to former fighters who spoke to Reuters, and commanders quoted by Iranian media.Iran has been sending fighters to Syria since the early stages of the five-year war to support its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in the struggle against Sunni rebels backed by Gulf Arab states and Western powers.Once Tehran described these forces as military "advisers" but with around 400 killed on the battlefield, this discretion has slipped and several thousand are now believed to be fighting Islamic State and other groups trying to topple Assad.Many Iranians initially opposed involvement in the war, harbouring little sympathy for Assad. But now they are warming to the mission, believing that Islamic State is a threat to the existence of their country best fought outside Iran's borders."The first line for the security of Iran is Syria and Iraq," a would-be volunteer named Mojtaba told Reuters by email from Tehran. Mojtaba, who asked that he be identified by only his first name, said he had been trying in vain to get out to fight in Syria for the past two years.While Islamic State still holds large areas of Syria and Iraq, it has so far failed to stage attacks in neighbouring Iran like it has in Turkey.Nevertheless, Iranian media have reported the breaking up of cells linked to the jihadist group at home, and the large numbers of people such as Mojtaba willing to join the battle in Syria suggest Tehran has the stamina to pursue its involvement there for years if it wishes."DEFENDERS OF THE SHRINE"Iran alludes to its fighters in Syria as "defenders of the shrine", a reference to the Sayeda Zeinab mosque near Damascus, which is where a granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammad is said to be buried, as well as other shrines revered by Shi'ites.It is casting its recruitment net wide. As well as Iranians, it has gathered Shi'ites from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to battle the Syrian opposition in what has become a sectarian conflict.Brigadier General Mohsen Kazemeini, the Revolutionary Guard Corps commander for greater Tehran, said last month there were so many volunteers that "only a small number of them are sent to (Syria)", according to the Defa Press site.Fighters killed in Syria are praised as heroes on state television and given lavish funerals. Iranian wrestler Saeed Abdevali dedicated the bronze medal he won at the Rio Olympics to the families of "defenders of the shrine" who have been killed.Some volunteers, disappointed at the long waiting list, take a shortcut. They fly directly to Damascus and volunteer at the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, according to postings on Modafeon, a web site dedicated to news and pictures of the "defenders".The potent message of protecting the shrines has drawn in Shi'ite Afghans, some of whom live in Iran and others in Afghanistan. These Afghans fighting in Syria under the supervision of the Revolutionary Guards are known as the Fatemiyoun.SACRED BELIEFSA 26-year old Afghan student living in Mashad in northeast Iran described how he was sent with other Fatemiyoun to fight in Damascus and Aleppo for about 45 days after limited training."My motivation is the same as the Iranians," the student, who asked not to be identified because of security concerns, said. "We are both fighting in Syria, so it shows our cause is far beyond geographic borders. We are fighting to defend our sacred beliefs and Shi'ite ideology."Asked if he thought Iranian society had grown more welcoming to those who fight in Syria, he said "One hundred percent. When I was deployed, people were saying that they were doubtful if our fight would change anything. But now they respect the fighters more, as they are more familiar with the threats the rebels in Syria and Iraq can cause to Iran."He said that pay, or the promise of gaining Iranian citizenship upon their return from the battlefield, are also incentives for some Afghans to volunteer. The Afghan fighters get about 450 dollar a month, according to a Fatemiyoun commander interviewed by the Tasnim news site.Senior officials regularly discuss the role of the Revolutionary Guards and Iranian special forces in Syria in terms of confronting the existential threat that mostly Shi'ite Iran faces from Sunni militant groups such as Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said this appealed more to public opinion than support for Assad."Fighting Shi'ite-hating bloodthirsty ISIS jihadists is easier to sell to Iranians than wasting billions on a ruthless dictator who gasses his population," he said.A video regularly featured on Iranian state television shows a group of children wearing fatigues and combat boots singing about a religious duty to fight in Syria."The red lines around the shrine are made of my blood," they sing. Children under 18 may go to Syria to serve in non-combat support roles as long as they are accompanied by a guardian, according to postings on the Modafeon web site.LESSON FROM EUROPESupreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has described the wars in Syria and Iraq, where Iranian-backed authorities are also fighting Sunni militants, as crucial to the survival of the Islamic Republic. If Iranians had not gone and died fighting there, "the enemy would enter the country", he said,This perception has won over many doubters. Sasan Sabermotlagh, a 34-year-old decorator in Tehran, said he was initially "100 per cent" against the war, but he and many others he knows had changed their mind.Despite Iran's often fraught relations with the West, Sabermotlagh cited attacks staged by Islamic State in Europe in recent months. "Now that people completely know (Islamic State) and after the incidents in France, Germany and elsewhere, you can say that 90 per cent of the people who criticised the 'defenders of the shrine' don't anymore," he said.Sabermotlagh even considered joining the fight. "When I see the videos and the pictures it has a big effect on me," he said. "I think if (Islamic State) or a similar group find their way to Iran then we will suffer similar things."The presumed glory of the war is such that some people invent military service records to gain others' admiration. In August, Iran arrested four men in Mashad "accused of trying to attract young people's attention by putting together fake stories about their presence on the frontline", a local judiciary official was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.REUTERS SHS VN2315 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-944561.Xml
KATHMANDU, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Various national and international organizations have condemned the placement and explosion of bombs at nearly a dozen schools in Kathmandu valley on Tuesday.

Their concern comes following the bomb explosion at the entrance gate of three schools in capital early Tuesday morning while explosive and suspicious objects were recovered from more than a half dozen schools.

According to Nepal police, bombs were exploded at Akash Deep Boarding School and Manakamana Higher Secondary School in Kathmandu. Nepal army's bomb disposal team had diffused the bombs in other schools. However, no human casualties have been reported from the explosions.

Issuing a statement Tuesday, The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) expressed its serious concern over schools and schoolchildren being subjected to violence and threat in various forms.

"Schools are meant to be safe havens, whether in the public or private domains, and must remain as areas where children can learn and grow up in safe and happy environment free from any violence and threats," said Tomoo Hozumi, UNICEF Nepal Representative in the statement.

The statement further said that children should not be victimized or targeted due to differences in ideologies of adults. Condemning the violation of children's fundamental right to education, UNICEF urged all the parties to adhere to the commitments they have made repeatedly to uphold the obligations of the international treaties and conventions on child rights.

"All the political parties in Nepal have signed on a commitment to 'Keep Children Safe' under any circumstances, including the time of political tension, and to let children and schools remain as Zones of Peace," the statement mentioned.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has condemned explosion and planting of bombs in different schools. Issuing a statement, the ministry said getting quality education was children's right and for that schools should be allowed to operate without any obstruction and in a fearless environment.

Condemning the attack, the National Human Rights Commission has also urged the government to take stern action against the culprits behind the bomb explosions. Various other organizations have also condemned the attack demanding safe and peaceful environment for students.

The Nepal Police's Metropolitan Police Office has arrested two persons who were allegedly involved in planting and explosion of bombs in schools.

According to police, the duo tried to extort money from the schools by spreading bomb terror.
MOSCOW. Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Russian war planes in Syria did not conduct any strikes on the UN humanitarian convoy in Aleppo, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said on Tuesday.

"Neither Russian nor Syrian aviation carried out any airstrikes on the UN humanitarian convoy in the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo," Konashenkov said.

"After thoroughly examining the video footages made by the so-called activists on the scene, we found no evidence of any ordnance hitting the convoy of trucks," he said, adding that it is the fire on the cargo together with the large-scale offensive on Aleppo launched by militants caused the consequences.

Konashenkov pointed out that militants from the Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist group launched a large-scale offensive on Aleppo in this particular sector at about 7:00 p.m. Monday.

Referring to who set the fire that the humanitarian convoy caught on Monday, Konashenkov said it can only be learned from the members of the White Helmet organization, which is close to Jabhat al-Nusra.

According to reports, 18 out of 31 trucks carrying life-saving supplies were destroyed by warplanes in Urum al-Kubra, northwest of Aleppo on Monday.

The evening-attack resulted in the killing of at least one senior humanitarian official working for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent as well as civilian casualties and severe damage to key infrastructure including a hospital.
BISHKEK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev took a short leave starting from Sept. 20, 2016 due to heart problems, the press service of the Kyrgyz President reported on Tuesday.

"Presumably, the leave can last until October 1, 2016," it said in a statement.

On Monday, the Kyrgyz delegation headed by President Atambayev was heading to New York to attend the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

On the way to the United States the delegation had to make a change at Turkey's Ataturk Airport in Istanbul as Atambayev complained of chest pains.

After an initial medical examination, doctors detected some heart problems and urged the president to get an in-depth examination. He will be monitored by doctors.

The delegation of Kyrgyzstan will be led by Foreign Minister Erlan Abdyldaev.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday opened its annual high-level General Debate at the UN headquarters in New York, with a focus on pushing for global sustainable development.

Over 140 world leaders gathered in New York to attend the week-long debate. "The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Universal Push to Transform our World" is this year's theme.

President of General Assembly Peter Thomson said he is committed to pushing for the implementation of the global goals to end poverty, inequality and combat climate change.

The SDGs are outlined in a UN-facilitated 2030 agenda for sustainable development, which was adopted one year ago by world leaders at the United Nations.

"Greater public resources must be dedicated to achieving the SDGs, either directly through domestic finance, or through official development assistance such as climate finance," said Thomson.

"We need to create better regulatory environments, and to require the international financial system to ensure finance is increasingly focused on productive, green and socially responsible investment," he noted.

"We must support greater access for poor and marginalized communities and countries to science, technology and innovation, to trade opportunities, and to more sustainable debt solutions," he added.
KIGALI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Low levels of agricultural innovation in Africa have been blamed for derailing agricultural transformation that led to severe food crisis.

Agricultural experts attending a regional forum on agriculture held in Rwanda's capital Kigali made the observation on Tuesday.

The three-day meeting organized by Food Agriculture Organization (FAO) discusses how the principles for sustainable food and agriculture can strengthen the contribution of agriculture, forestry and fisheries to sustainable development.

"One of the most common causes of food insecurity in Africa today is limited agricultural innovations in farming technology. There is lack of innovations in agriculture mobile communication, post-harvest loss reduction and other risk-reducing incentives which have led to poor crop yields in various regions on the continent," said Clayton Campanhola who leads FAO's strategic program on sustainable agriculture.

He called on African governments to fund and support agricultural innovations, especially farming technologies for small holder farmers.

Experts at the conference argued that farmers are facing changes in weather patterns which have spurred them into shifting their farming methods, hence innovations would provide a great deal for positive agricultural yields.

Mbaye Ndiaye, an agricultural plant scientist from Niger, said that innovations in agriculture that provides farmers with up-to-date weather forecasting would enable them know when to plant and harvest on time to avoid crop losses.

"Improved innovation in agriculture is one of the major actions needed in boosting productivity, creating employment and improving food security in Africa," he added.

They pointed out that weak regulatory structures for biotechnology and limited efforts to strengthen science-based, cost-effective regulatory systems have also hampered increased agriculture production on the continent.

According to the FAO, Africa has been experiencing several episodes of acute food insecurity, which caused an immense loss of life and livelihoods over the past decades.

The latest FAO figures indicate that Africa has 16 countries where the undernourishment prevalence rate is over 35 percent.

At the meeting, participants concurred that agricultural scientists need to establish stronger linkages and share ideas and expertise.

The conference has brought together about 40 delegates including senior government officials from agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors from across Africa and beyond. Enditem
AMMAN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- More than 1.5 million Jordanian casted their ballot on Tuesday to elect the 10th lower house of parliament, the Independent Election Commission said.

Jihad Momani, head of the commission, said more than 1.5 million Jordanian voted during the election day.

Voting started from 7:00 am and lasted until 7:00 pm, but it was extended for one more hour to open the door for more voters' turnout.

Results are expected to be announced within 48 hours after sorting of votes started late Tuesday.

Around four million Jordanians are eligible to cast their ballot to elect 130 members for the lower house. The number of candidates running for the seats stands at 1,252.

Minor incidents and clashes between supporters of certain candidates were reported in some parts of the country, especially in the northern and the southern governorates but were put under control by the security forces.

The EU Observation Mission that sent 108 observers on the election day said Tuesday that it noticed a noticeable turnout and all procedures were normal.
ISTANBUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Representatives from the world's postal sector started their 17-day congress on Tuesday, targeting the adoption of significant reforms to compete with the fierce competition.

The 26th Universal Postal Congress, the supreme authority of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), is aiming for a new world postal strategy for the three-year period from 2017 until 2020.

"The congress promises to be a turning point for global postal services," said UPU's Director General Bishar Hussein during his address at the opening session.

"Indeed, rapidly changing technologies have created new market realities, which in turn are driving alternative service options and a whole new set of customer expectations. The Post and the UPU are in the spotlight: they must now, more than ever, evolve to remain relevant," he added.

In his opinion, global postal services need to develop in a manner which enhances network infrastructure inter-operability in order to ensure sustainable and modern products.

He appealed to member countries to encourage the sector towards effective functioning to meet the fierce competition, highlighting the necessity for reforms.

In his speech, Turkey's Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim, additionally called for adopting necessary reforms as motivation for sustainable development.

Citing the Turkish Postal Service's success story, Yildirim noted that the institution was underperforming until it began operations in multiple sectors as per modern-day requirements.

"Now it provides services in the banking sector, information technology and shipment sectors," he said, adding that the Turkish institution is making a profit.

Some 2,000 delegates from 192 UPU member nations will participate in the quadrennial congress event.

As the first environmentally-friendly congress, the meeting in Istanbul hopes to save four tons of paper, Yildirim said.

"The delegates will receive congress documentation via tablets to be distributed during sessions," noted Yildirim.
OSLO, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The latest readership figures show that the trend of declined printed newspaper circulation in Norway continues while the online and mobile editions increase, public broadcaster NRK reported on Tuesday.

During the first six months this year the total readership of Norwegian printed newspaper experienced a decline of 10 percent in comparison to the same period last year, according to TNS Gallup's Consumer & Media survey, the only multimedia survey in Norway.

At the same time, online newspapers increased by almost four percent, while mobile readership remained stable, the survey said.

Last week there were several reports about cuts in Norwegian media houses. Leading newspaper Aftenposten will cut 40 full-time positions.

Adresseavisen, the oldest newspaper in Norway, will remove between 60 and 75 jobs next year. Polaris Media, which the newspaper belongs to, will save 300 million kroner (36.16 million U.S. dollars) in this way, NRK reported.

The cause of the hard times in media houses is the decline in printed media readership, which also led to the decrease of advertising revenues, the survey said. The digital growth, on the other side, is not big enough to contain this leak.

According to the research, eight out of ten Norwegians over 12 years old read news either on paper, online or mobile devices. Randi S. Ogrey, CEO of the Norwegian Media Businesses' Association, showed satisfaction with the results.

"The numbers show that Norwegian journalism stands strong. The paper reading continues to fall, but we see also that online and mobile readership keep up," Ogrey said, adding that the research "shows that the readers are interested in getting Norwegian media content."

Aftenposten is the biggest printed newspaper in Norway. VG is the biggest media house when combining readership of publishing platforms, according to the survey.
DOBOJ, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A ceremony was held here on Tuesday to officially mark the launch of a 300-megawatt thermal power plant in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

The power plant, located in the northern BiH town of Stanari,was built by China's Dongfang Electric Corporation and financed with the help of a 350-million-euro (390.54 million U.S. dollars) loan from China Development Bank.

High-level government officials from both BiH and China, including Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska(RS), an entity of BiH, and Chen Bo, Chinese Ambassador to BiH, attended the ceremony.

At a press conference after the ceremony, Dodik said the fact that 1,000 workers will be employed in Stanari power plant, which will contribute to energy stability of the entity, is of great significance for RS.

Chen Bo, meanwhile, said the plant is the first major joint infrastructure project between China and BiH, but definitely will not be the last one.

The investor of the project is the Britain-based Energy Financing Team Group.
LAGOS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian government on Tuesday said it was working on a plan to generate and inject large amount of funds, principally in foreign currency, estimated at 10 to 15 billion U.S. dollars into the economy.

In a statement made available to Xinhua in Lagos, Minister of Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, said the government has also designed a fiscal stimulus strategy that will help the country to come out of its economic recession.

Udoma said that the Economic Management Team had been working on a plan to generate an immediate large injection of funds into the economy.

The minister said the funds would be generated through Asset Sales, Advance Payment for Licence renewals, infrastructure concessioning, use of recovered funds, among others, to bridge the funding gap.

"To achieve this speedily, we will need to fast-track procedures through Presidential directives and legislation; a bill is almost ready for submission to National Assembly," he added.

The minister emphasized the need for the country to spend its way out of recession through injection of large amount of money into the economy.

According to him, the failure to diversify the economy and implement the national goals due to lack of discipline in the past had made the country witness negative growth.

He said the government had put measures in place to diversify the economy.

He said some of the measures included " tackling challenges inhibiting private sector participation in the upstream petroleum sector and building on the petroleum products deregulation.

This, the minister added will boost agricultural production for food sufficiency, as food imports has the third highest demand for forex.

The minister said another measure was growing non-oil exports in the light of competitive and comparative advantage created by devaluation following the introduction of a market reflective exchange rate.

Nigeria's economy formally entered recession in the third quarter of the year when its Gross Domestic Product in real terms declined by 2.06 percent in the second quarter year on year. Enditem
TIRANA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Albanian government has formally submitted its application to the European Commission to obtain a fund worth 71 million euros (79.21 million U.S. dollars) under IPARD 2014-2020 program, the Ministry of Finance announced Tuesday.

If approved, the Albanian government will use the fund to support the country's agriculture sector, according to the ministry.

The managing authorities in the ministries of finance and agriculture have submitted to the European Commission the request to be entrusted with budget implementation tasks for IPARD 2014-2020.

The program aims at supporting farmers, agricultural and agro-processing enterprises as well as subjects planning to carry out investments for production and processing in the dairy sector, meat, fruit and vegetables, protected plants and vineyards, according to the ministry.

The program also aims at supporting investments in aquaculture, natural and rural tourism and renewable energy production.

The Albanian government also plans to support approximately 2,055 investment projects via the fund.

The implementation of this program is projected to begin in 2017 while it is expected to create about 800 jobs.

In June, the European Union(EU) ambassador in Albania Romana Vlahutin announced that Albania would be entrusted with the management of 71 million euros from the bloc destined for agricultural and rural development.

The EU ambassador urged the Albanian authorities to show that they were ready to manage EU funds, warning that the European Commission has a very strict procedure which allows it to get the money back if it is not properly managed.

Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance in Rural Development (IPARD) is an instrument applied by the EU to assist candidate countries to develop their agriculture sector. Enditem
By Liang Linlin, Pang Yuwei, Cheng Yu

BRUSSELS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A total of 9,000 protesters paraded in the heart of Brussels around the European Union (EU) institutions to demonstrate against the bloc's trade deals with the United States and Canada late Tuesday, fearing those agreements would harm Europe's industries and social benefits.

Two meters-high inflatable Trojan horses, labeled "TTIP" and "CETA" respectively, were placed on a square between headquarters of the European Commission and the Council of the EU, implying the EU-U.S. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada were conspiratorial pacts.

More than 50 groups participated into the march, which occupied some two km of a street toward the square, blocking the traffic at rush time. Organizers expected 10,000 to 15,000 people to attend the demonstrations but police put a "definitive" number at 9,000.

"The agreements will change all the rules in EU countries. We need to take control of our own life," Anastasia, a member of European NGO EuropeanLeft,told Xinhua.

"We have to make a living," a group of farmers yelled. "Pay attention! It's the U.S. that wins in the end, " said Eric Claeys, organizer of these farmers. "The intrusion of American agriculture industry is our main concern. American's standard for agricultural products like meat and vegetable is much lower than Europeans'," he added.

The demonstration, following several such ones in German cities, is part of a series of planned activities against the TTIP and CETA. Another protest is planned in Bratislava on Friday when EU trade ministers are expected to discuss the two deals.

A spokesman of the European Commission, the bloc's executive body conducting the trade talks, said ministers would be briefed on the state of negotiations and discuss prospectives of the trade agreements on Friday.

Europe has recently seen increased anger and resistance toward the two deals from politicians and worker unions. This comes as parties hope to conclude TTIP by the end of this year and gain approvals on CETA from member states and the European Parliament.

French President Francois Hollande earlier criticized TTIP as "clearly unbalanced" and his government refrained support for continuing the talks while German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel believed the deal had "de facto failed" as Brussels and Washington reached no agreement after three years of negotiations.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom earlier defended TTIP and CETA, saying free trade agreements benefited exports and boosted jobs. Particularly, she spoke highly of Canadian deal, applauding it as the best one Brussels had ever negotiated.

For TTIP, which is due to have the 15th round of talks in the first week of October, the commissioner warned that reaching the expected deadline would become "less likely as time went on."

The Commission as well signaled that it did not exclude the possibility of that the lengthy TTIP talks may involve new U.S. president.

"The commission stands ready to continue negotiating with the current (U.S.) administration and with the next U.S. administration,"the European Commission spokesperson Daniel Rosario told Tuesday's routine press briefing.

The EU and the United States have failed to reach even one single chapters in their TTIP talks so far and observers cautioned that the chance of wrapping up the deal by this year was getting more and more slim as the result of lack of support from some members and citizens.

CETA, already concluded between Brussels and Toronto, as well faces some doubts and concerns across the continent.
MINSK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland noted the need to maintain positive dynamics in bilateral relations at a meeting in New York, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

"During the talks, individual attention was given to discussing measures which are extremely important for the full normalization of interaction between Belarus and the U.S. The two sides also exchanged opinions on the situation in the East European region," it said.

In June 2006, the then U.S. President George W. Bush ordered freezing of the financial accounts of President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko and nine other high-ranking Belarusian officials, and banned U.S. citizens from making transactions with them.

In 2007-2008, Washington imposed restrictive economic measures against Belarus' state-owned petrochemical company Belneftekhim.

Starting from 2008, Belarus has no U.S. ambassador. Minsk was forced to recall ambassador to the United States and reduce its diplomatic presence in the country. The number of U.S. Embassy staff in Minsk was reduced by the insistence of the Belarusian side in March 2008.

In recent years, Belarus has improved relations with the West against the backdrop of the role of Minsk in the settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Earlier, the U.S. suspended sanctions against a number of Belarusian enterprises, saying that it could further weaken the sanctions pressure, subject to continuation of democratic reforms.
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt on Monday, ending two years of marriage of the most high-profile and glamorous Hollywood couple.

Jolie, 41-year-old, filed her petition Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences as the reason for the breakup.

Jolie is asking the court for physical custody of the couple's six children and to grant Pitt visitation rights. Jolie is not asking for spousal support. Among their six children, they gave birth to three of them and adopted two from Africa, one from Vietnam.

Pitt and Jolie have been together since 2004 and married in August 2014. According to the court documents, it lists the date of separation of the pair on Sept. 15, two years and one month after they married.

A source close to the couple told People magazine that "The divorce is a complete shock. They have definitely spent more time apart this year, but it's still a shock. They just celebrated their wedding anniversary together."

"I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids," Pitt said in a statement to People magazine. "I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."

"Angelina will always do what's in the best interest to protect her children," Geyer Kosinski, Jolie's manager, told the press on Tuesday. "She appreciates everyone's understanding of their need for privacy at this time."

In addition to being an actress, Jolie also is a filmmaker and humanitarian. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. She also has been cited in the past as Hollywood's highest-paid actress.

Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father, Jon Voight, in "Lookin' to Get Out" in 1982. Her first leading role in a major film came in 1995 in "Hackers."

Jolie won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her performance in the 1999 drama "Girl, Interrupted."

She was previously married to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.

Jolie is represented in her divorce petition by attorney Laura Wasser, who also assisted the actress in her divorce from Thornton and is representing Johnny Depp in his divorce from Amber Heard.

Pitt, 52 years old, was previously married with former "Friends" co-star Jennifer Aniston.

He won an Oscar in 2014 as a producer of best-picture winner "12 Years a Slave." He received Oscar nominations for best actor for his work in "Moneyball" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and was nominated for his supporting role in "Twelve Monkeys" that won him a Golden Globe.

He was also a producer of Oscar best-picture nominees "The Big Short" and "Moneyball."

Pitt and Jolie starred together between 2004 and 2005 when they film "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." At that time, Pitt was married to actress Jennifer Aniston. In January 2005, Pitt and Aniston announced they were splitting and Aniston filed for divorce a few months later. Months later that year, Pitt and Jolie appeared together.

Pitt and Jolie have also been partners in charity. Pitt has worked for years to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And Jolie is a United Nations special envoy for refugee issues, a critical topic at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York this week.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- UN Women on Tuesday launched its first-ever University Parity Report which outlines commitments from 10 universities worldwide to achieving progress on gender equality.

The report noted that universities can address three imbalances: the ratio of men to women represented in university faculty, the fields of study selected by young women versus young men, and the number of female students at universities.

The 10 universities are chosen from eight countries on five continents, including the University of Oxford of the United Kingdom, Georgetown University of the United States, University of Hong Kong of China's Hong Kong, Paris Institute of Political Studies of France and the University of the Witwatersrand of South Africa.

The universities also vowed to work together to combat sexual violence on campus.

The University of Oxford is engaging their whole student community to address campus-based sexual violence including a first response mobile app.

University of the Witwatersrand has created a Gender Equity Office that has developed a comprehensive system to report, predict, prevent and address gender-based harm on campus.

UN Women is the UN entity for gender equality and the empowerment of women. It has recognized that education is one of the most powerful tools for social transformation and to achieve the global goal of gender equality.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Fuji on Tuesday appealed for deeper cuts in carbon emission to reverse the current trend of global warming.

Addressing the high-level general debate of UN General Assembly which started here Tuesday, Fijian Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama said the two-degree cap is not enough.

"We are alarmed by scientific predictions that the two-degree cap on global warming over pre-industrial levels agreed to in Paris is not enough to save us," he said.

The prime minister urged the world to embrace the 1.5 degree cap so as to spare Small Island Developing States from the nightmare scenario in which a single event could wipe out their economy and set the country back for decades.

Small Island Developing States, including Fuji, have long faced existential threat as a warming globe brought about extreme weathers and rising sea levels.

According to a monthly report released recently by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2016 will be hottest year on record, with each of the first seven months setting new temperature records.

In March, Cyclone Winston, packing winds of more than 300 km an hour, killed 44 people in Fuji and left many thousands homeless.

"Mercifully, it spared our main tourism areas -- our principal source of income -- so our wider economy remained intact. But if this is what awaits us as global warming triggers weather events that are more frequent and more extreme," the prime minister said.

"Our message from the Pacific is this: the two-degree cap is not enough ... More decisive global action than we are currently witnessing," he added.

Over 140 world leaders are gathering in New York to attend this year's general debate which lasts from Sept. 20 to Sept. 26. This year's theme for the General Assembly is "The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Universal Push to Transform our World."
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday met with U.S. President Barack Obama, and they discussed the issues of climate change, the Syrian conflict and the current situation on the Korean Peninsula.

During the meeting, the secretary-general thanked the president for the strong and consistent support of the United States for the United Nations on many issues, in particular climate change, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters here.

The meeting took place on the margins of the ongoing annual high-level debate of the UN General Assembly, which opened here Tuesday morning and runs through Sept. 26.

"They discussed ways to end the appalling crisis in Syria and to resume the intra-party talks," Dujarric said, adding that the two leaders discussed the alarming situation on the Korean Peninsula and in South Sudan.

"Turning to Haiti, the secretary-general expressed regret and sorrow at the outbreak of cholera and the profound suffering of Haitians affected," said the spokesman.

"He informed President Obama of the package of material assistance being developed for those most directly affected and said he hoped he could count on the support of the U.S.," he added.
RABAT, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) --The Justice and Spirituality Organization (JSO), regarded as the largest opposition group in Morocco, has called for the boycott of the upcoming parliament election, local media reported Tuesday.

Citing a statement from JSO, the Moroccan daily Al Massae said the Islamist group insisted that under the present constitution and political circumstances, "elections are meaningless and would not bring any difference."

The Islamist group said it will not participate in the polls and incited Moroccans to boycott, the same source added.

The illegal but nonviolent group has repeatedly boycotted elections. It was one of the main components of the February 20th Movement that led the Arab Spring of 2011 in Morocco.

On Feb. 20, 2011, following the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, thousands in Morocco marched across the country in a call for greater social justice and democracy.

After a quick response from the monarchy, a more open constitution was adopted and a general election led to a historic victory for the popular Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD).

Around 15 million Moroccans are registered to vote and 30 parties are due to take part in the election to win seats in the 395-member Chamber of Representatives, or the lower house of parliament. The campaign is to officially begin on Sept. 25.
Angelina Jolie Pitt (L) and actor-producer Brad Pitt arrive for the opening night gala premiere of Universal Pictures' 'By the Sea' during AFI FEST 2015 presented by Audi at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California on November 5, 2015. (AFP PHOTO/MARK RALSTON)

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt on Monday, ending two years of marriage of the most high-profile and glamorous Hollywood couple.

Jolie, 41-year-old, filed her petition Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences as the reason for the breakup.

Jolie is asking the court for physical custody of the couple's six children and to grant Pitt visitation rights. Jolie is not asking for spousal support. Among their six children, they gave birth to three of them and adopted two from Africa, one from Vietnam.

Pitt and Jolie have been together since 2004 and married in August 2014. According to the court documents, it lists the date of separation of the pair on Sept. 15, two years and one month after they married.

A source close to the couple told People magazine that "The divorce is a complete shock. They have definitely spent more time apart this year, but it's still a shock. They just celebrated their wedding anniversary together."

"I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids," Pitt said in a statement to People magazine. "I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time."

"Angelina will always do what's in the best interest to protect her children," Geyer Kosinski, Jolie's manager, told the press on Tuesday. "She appreciates everyone's understanding of their need for privacy at this time."

In addition to being an actress, Jolie also is a filmmaker and humanitarian. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. She also has been cited in the past as Hollywood's highest-paid actress.

Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father, Jon Voight, in "Lookin' to Get Out" in 1982. Her first leading role in a major film came in 1995 in "Hackers."

Jolie won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her performance in the 1999 drama "Girl, Interrupted."

She was previously married to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.

Jolie is represented in her divorce petition by attorney Laura Wasser, who also assisted the actress in her divorce from Thornton and is representing Johnny Depp in his divorce from Amber Heard.

Pitt, 52 years old, was previously married with former "Friends" co-star Jennifer Aniston.

He won an Oscar in 2014 as a producer of best-picture winner "12 Years a Slave." He received Oscar nominations for best actor for his work in "Moneyball" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and was nominated for his supporting role in "Twelve Monkeys" that won him a Golden Globe.

He was also a producer of Oscar best-picture nominees "The Big Short" and "Moneyball."

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the screening of her directorial debut "In the Land of Blood and Honey" in New York December 5, 2011. (REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/File Photo)

Pitt and Jolie starred together between 2004 and 2005 when they film "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." At that time, Pitt was married to actress Jennifer Aniston. In January 2005, Pitt and Aniston announced they were splitting and Aniston filed for divorce a few months later. Months later that year, Pitt and Jolie appeared together.

Pitt and Jolie have also been partners in charity. Pitt has worked for years to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And Jolie is a United Nations special envoy for refugee issues, a critical topic at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York this week.
NEW YORK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- South Africa has committed itself to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, South African President Jacob Zuma said at the high-level debate of UN General Assembly Tuesday.

"We committed ourselves to an ambitious and transformative global development program that seeks to address the triple challenge of this century, which is poverty, unemployment and inequality," Zuma said.

African has made significant strides in the past couple of decades in reversing the impact of underdevelopment, he added.

Meanwhile, Zuma said industrialization is the key to Africa's development and prosperity, adding that Africa's industrialization will contribute to the eradication of poverty, reducing inequality and unemployment, and will also contribute positively to global growth and global prosperity.

He said the availability of resources would be crucial to the successful implementation of such development plans.

Over 140 world leaders gather in New York to attend this year's general debate, which lasts till Sept. 26. This year's theme for the General Assembly is "The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Universal Push to Transform our World."
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Following are quotable quotes from the speakers at the General Debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 20:

"I am struck, today, after several years facing the global war on terror, with the lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam that I find among many Western officials, think tanks, media leaders and policymakers. I find myself starting the obvious again and again: False perceptions of Islam and of Muslims will fuel the terrorists' agenda of a global struggle, by polarising and factionalising societies, East and West -- each side stigmatising the other, each driven deeper into mistrust and intolerance." -- King Abdullah II of Jordan.

"In Syria, Iraq, and many countries suffering in the grip of terrorism and war, hundreds of thousands of children, women, young and elderly continue to be killed. Refugees running away from death and tyranny face the degrading treatment in European cities." -- Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey.

"Sustainable development, human rights protection as well as peace and security -- these are the goals pursued by the United Nations whose achievement has been mankind's yearning. By adopting in the previous year the Agenda 2030 and the new Sustainable Development Goals we demonstrate that we are capable of acting as an international community and attain success, as well as confront new ambitious goals."-- Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland.

"The United Nations was formed because leaders across the world knew that they could only deliver security for their citizens at home if they could cooperate, as a community of nations, to deliver security across the globe." -- Theresa May, the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

"For a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) such as Fiji, this is as pressing as the need to address the challenges of climate change. And deal with the extreme weather events and rising seas that pose such a threat to our way of life in the SIDS and other vulnerable parts of the world." -- Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, the foreign minister of Fiji.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The world is facing a refugee crisis of "epic proportions" and it is "one of the most urgent tests of our time," U.S. President Barack Obama said here Tuesday.

At a summit on refugees held at the United Nations headquarters, Obama called for concerted action from countries around the world to alleviate the refugee crisis that is a test of international system and common humanity.

"This crisis is a test of our common humanity -- whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in another," Obama said.

The U.S. president also urged the international community to make more efforts to end conflicts, as "so many of the world's refugees come from just three countries ravaged by war -- Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia."

"We all know that what is happening in Syria, for example, is unacceptable," Obama said. "We are not as unified as we should be in pushing to make it stop."

More than 65 million people in the world are displaced, the highest number on record since the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) began collecting statistics, according to the White House. More than 21 million of these people have crossed international borders in search for safety and are assessed as refugees.

More than 50 countries in the world have doubled the number of refugees they take in this year to more than 360,000, Obama said.

According to a joint statement issued at the summit, 32 participating countries have contributed this year roughly 4.5 billion additional U.S. dollars to UN appeals and international humanitarian organizations than in 2015.

In future years, the participating countries at the summit will seek a 3 billion dollars increase in global humanitarian financing and commitments to maintain funding to address the crisis.
Chinese pianist Lang Lang (R) receives the proclamation from Fred Dixon, President and CE0 of NYC & Company during the "Ride of Fame" induction ceremony in New York, the United States, on Sept. 20, 2016. Chinese pianist Lang Lang was inducted into Gray Line's Ride of Fame and received a proclamation from the City of New York declaring Sept. 20, 2016 Lang Lang Day in New York City. (Xinhua/Qin Lang)

NEW YORK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Famed Chinese Pianist Lang Lang was named New York City's first-ever Cultural Tourism Ambassador by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday, as part of the U.S.-China Tourism Year events that promote travel and tourism between the United States and China.

Lang was also inducted into the Ride of Fame by the Grey Line Company, which operates the city's iconic double-decker sightseeing buses. He was also presented with a double-decker bus, with a permanent artwork and a special seat decorated with his photo and signature.

"I'm so excited, today will be a very long and beautiful memory that stays in my mind forever," Lang said at the induction ceremony on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street outside Steinway Hall in the Borough of Manhattan.

Lang said as the city's Cultural Tourism Ambassador, he will invite friends from China to New York City and enjoy the best classical music and cultural events.

He will also encourage friends and fans to travel to China and experience the wonderful culture there.

New York City also proclaimed Sept. 20, 2016 as "Lang Lang Day" in the city.

In 2015, 2.67 million Chinese visited the United States. "New York City is definitely the #1 dream destination in 2016 for Chinese travelers," said Pierre Gervois, Publisher of the Shanghai travelers' Club magazine.

He said the attractivity of New York City is extremely strong for all categories of Chinese travelers, from Chinese real estate investors to students.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday called on the international community to adopt comprehensive national action plans to tackle both the causes and symptoms of all extremism.

May made the remarks at an annual high-level debate of the UN General Assembly, saying that the terrorist threats facing the world do not come from one country but exist in a different space.

"These (terrorist) organizations are using our own modern banking networks against us," said May. "So we need to look at our regulations, our information sharing and using our technological capacities to get ahead of them."

"They are exploiting the internet and social media to spread an ideology that is recruiting people to their cause all over the world. So we need to tackle this ideology head-on," she added.

On migration issue, May said the international community must ensure a managed and controlled international migration response and at the same time investing to tackle underlying drivers of displacement and migration at source.

She said there is nothing wrong with the desire to migrate for a better life, "and also that controlled, legal, safe, economic migration brings benefits to our economies."

Over 140 world leaders are gathering in New York to attend this year's general debate which lasts till Sept. 26. This year's theme for the General Assembly is "The Sustainable Development Goals: A Universal Push to Transform our World."
Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO John Stumpf testifies before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the United States, Sept 20, 2016.(Xinhua/Bao Dandan)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- U.S. lawmakers grilled Wells Fargo's chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) John Stumpf on Tuesday over the bank's fake account scandal as he declined to support clawing back executive compensation.

Stumpf was summoned to testify in front of the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday after regulators found that thousands of employees opened more than 2 million accounts without customers' authorization, spurred by the bank's sales targets and compensation incentives.

"I am deeply sorry that we've failed to fulfill on our responsibility to our customers, to our team members and to the American public," Stumpf said, adding that he accepted full responsibility for all unethical sales practices in the retail banking business.

"I am fully committed to fixing this issue, strengthening our culture and taking the necessary actions to restore our customer's trust," he said.

"These were not magically delivered unwanted products. This was fraud. Fraud that you did not find or fraud that you did not fix quickly enough," said Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the committee.

Stumpf frustrated lawmakers during the hearing as he declined to make a recommendation to the board to claw back compensation of former community banking head Carrie Tolstedt, who stepped down from her position in July and decided to retire at the end of this year.

He argued that it's up to the board's compensation committee to decide what should be done to her compensation.

"That's unfortunate," Senator Brown responded. "Senior management and the board of directors apparently agreed once the scandal became public, remedial actions were stepped up against front- line team members, but the praise and performance bonuses continued to be lavished upon Ms. Tolstedt until as recently as two months ago."

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, told Stumpf that he should resign, return money earned during the fake account scandal and be "criminally investigated" by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"You haven't resigned. You haven't returned a single nickel of your personal earnings. You haven't fired a single senior executive," Warren said. "Instead evidently your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low level employees who don't have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It's gutless leadership."

"We are committed to getting it right 100 percent of the time, and when we fall short we accept responsibility and we will do everything we can to make it right by our customers," Stumpf said.

Earlier this month, the bank agreed to pay a 185-million-U.S.-dollar fine with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the City and County of Los Angeles to settle the case involving opening unauthorized accounts, with additional 5 million dollars in customer remediation.
by William M. Reilly

NEW YORK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Following terror attacks over the weekend, barricades were up and access gates down on Tuesday for a beefed up and extended ring of security around UN Headquarters during this year's annual gathering of world leaders for the General Debate of the UN General Assembly.

Local officials pledged even heavier security around the world body's campus in the Midtown East area of Manhattan following bombings Saturday in Seaside Park in the adjacent U.S. state of New Jersey and later that night on New York City's West Side.

The bombings put enormous pressure on the city's law enforcement as about 140 heads of state or government are gathering for this week's event at the United Nations.

"We're going to have more security personnel than ever assembled over this next week during the UN General Assembly," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in interviews with CNN on Monday morning.

City authorities said they had bolstered an already heavy security force with 1,000 more uniformed police officers and National Guard members.

The security personnel were deployed elsewhere around Midtown Manhattan in addition to near the world body's headquarters, running from 42nd to 48th streets along First Avenue.

A suspect, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was arrested Monday in New Jersey after a shootout with police.

The 28-year-old Afghanistan-born American was linked to both the blast that injured 29 people in the bustling Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea Saturday night and the pipe bombing in Seaside Park, New Jersey.

Security around the UN complex not only extends into the adjacent East River but into the air above. A mini-no-fly zone was imposed by aviation authorities for the airspace surrounding the nearly-seven hectare complex.

U.S. Coast Guard cutters and outboard motor-powered runabouts joined New York City Police Department (NYPD) vessels intercepting, turning around, diverting or escorting commercial maritime traffic on the river.

On land checkpoints, male and female agents and officers from law enforcement agencies of the U.S. government, New York State and the city -- many awkwardly wearing flak vests over their civilian clothes -- helped guard some checkpoints. But, dark blue-clad NYPD officers in their bulky flak vests brandishing long automatic weapons dominated the scene.

Checkpoints were mostly a city block away from the UN headquarters.

For locals and the few businesses inside the outer security perimeter, proof of residency or course of business -- sometimes an escort is required -- must be proved before being allowed to pass.

A block away from UN headquarters, at 42nd Street, a young woman caught in the security encirclement asked a police officer at a checkpoint, "How can I cross Second Avenue?"

"Go back to 43rd Street," he replied, pointing the track she had just trod in an indication of the frustrations facing pedestrians, echoed for drivers caught in traffic on East Side sidewalks, streets and avenues. Still, walking at times seemed the speediest way to travel.

On 42nd Street, a Midtown two-way thoroughfare, and Second Avenue, a one way-southbound artery, one lane of traffic was reserved on each for parades of VIP motorcades.

A Subway sandwich shop and a Dunkin Donuts near UN headquarters did a land-rush business of customers taking away their purchases, increased by security officers, many of whom wore civilian clothes but sporting tell-tale radio earpieces.

The Chelsea Bagel Tudor City shop on the Second Avenue edge of the quiet Tudor City enclave across from the United Nations, was populated with a more static civilian clientele, apparently leisurely enjoying the traditional New York coffee and bagel watching the passing scene.

"Business has increased tremendously," said Inez Vera, reveling in the foreign delegates. She's a business associate at UN Plaza Pharmacy, a heavily stocked but tidy and cramped store near the coffee and bagel shop, just a block from the UN headquarters.

"Many of them come here and purchase items that they don't have in their country," she said of the increased clientele. "They buy things in bulk, so that is an increase to our business, which is great."

However, that wasn't all Vera liked about what most people see as the turmoil and inconvenience of the circus surrounding the all-too-serious General Debate.

"The security in the area is fantastic," she said. "There are police cars and the black cars with dark windows, police cars, there are even police dogs. They are all over."

"They (security officers) are very alert which makes you feel safe," Vera said. "Thank God. Unfortunately we have to live like this in this type of world."

"We take our hats off to them," she said. "We enjoy meeting, interacting with different people. They tell us what they use this product for and of course for us it is a business and personal role and we learn from that."

A few blocks away, demonstrators representing a variety of groups packed Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across from the UN campus, running a long block on East 47th Street between First and Second avenues. Each group was encircled by metal barricades -- separating potential rival groups -- and phalanxes of police.
BRASILIA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's industrial sector is feeling optimistic again, with confidence at its highest level since January 2014, said a report released Tuesday.

The Industry Confidence Index (Icei), compiled by Brazil's National Confederation of Industry, hit 53.7 points in September, a monthly increase of 2.2 points and an increase of 18 points over September 2015, when it stood at 35.7 points.

The index rose for the fifth month in a row with an accumulated growth of 16.9 points during the period.

The index ranges from 0 to 100, and anything over 50 signifies a positive economic outlook.

Confidence grew across all industrial sectors in September, including mining and quarries, manufacturing and construction, with rates above 50 points.

Brazil's large industrial companies registered the highest confidence, with an Icei of 55.7 points, while medium-sized firms registered 52.9 points and small companies 50.5 points.

Brazil's industrial output expanded for a fifth consecutive month in July as industry confidence grew on hopes that lawmakers will approve structural reforms, said a Bloomberg report.

However, local media The Rio Times said that the industry's overall results for 2016 would be negative with an 8.7-percent retraction in the first seven months of 2016.
SYDNEY, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) --The Australian Taxation Office has hit BHP Billiton with fresh tax assessments over the mining giant's Singaporean marketing office, pushing the total claimed to more than 1 billion Australian dollar (760 million U.S. dollars).

BHP's Singaporean operation, which employs about 400 people, has been under the microscope in a long-running audit, amid a tax office crackdown on the use of marketing hubs in the tax haven by Australian resources companies, NewsCorp reported on Wednesday.

In a previous audit, BHP was slugged 273 million U.S. dollars in extra taxes, interest and penalties for the period 2003-08. BHP's new bill, revealed by the company in a tax transparency report to be released Wednesday, adds 405 million U.S. dollars for the years 2009 to 2013 and an extra 88 million U.S. dollars in added mining tax.

The tax office last month drew a line in the sand over the use of Singaporean hubs, saying any company showing a profit margin of more than 100 percent in the tax haven would be at increased risk of a full-scale audit or legal action.

ATO's Deputy Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn told NewsCorp at the time "Doubling your money is very generous".

BHP chief financial officer Peter Beaven defended the Singaporean office as a vital link between mines in Australia and customers in China that pumped up the eventual price paid by customers.

"Each step is as important and legitimate as the next, including marketing," Beaven said.

He said BHP was ready to fight the case in court.

"We're very confident of our position," he said.

Legal action to resolve the stoush appears likely because, despite ongoing talks, BHP has so far been unable to strike a deal with the ATO.

Under a deal with the Singaporean government, BHP's marketing arm does not pay any tax in the city state.

However, about 58 percent of profit generated in Singapore is taxable in Australia.

BHP's report reveals that in addition to the Singaporean hub, it has 10 subsidiaries in tax havens including the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, although the company says most of them are legacies of previous acquisitions and are dormant or being wound up.

BHP is keen to distinguish itself from technology sector firms such as Apple, which late last month was on the wrong end of a European Commission ruling that found Ireland had failed to levy 14.5 billon U.S. dollars in tax on the tech giant.

Last year, BHP paid about 1.8 billion U.S. dollars in corporate tax to countries around the world, plus 1.48 billion U.S. dollars in royalties, its tax transparency report shows.

Beaven said BHP supported the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting program, a multinational push to crack down on technology sector tax dodging, being co-ordinated by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The company's global head of tax, Jane Michie, said BHP would not be affected by Australia's new multinational anti-avoidance law, or "Google tax", which is designed to stop companies dodging taxes by pretending sales here actually happen overseas.

Beaven said BHP was "very happy" with the increased level of interest in and scrutiny of multinational tax practices.

"Transparency is absolutely critical to ensure that any public dialogue on the issue is in fact based on fact, not on ... populist misconceptions of who does what and who pays what," he said.

"Public confidence in the integrity of tax rules, both globally and domestically, is a necessary aspect before you can have any meaningful debate about whether a country's tax system is delivering what that country needs." Enditem
TOKYO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Japan logged a goods trade deficit of 18.71 billion yen (184 million U.S. dollars) in August, marking the first red ink in three months, as the stronger yen dragged down value of exports, the government said Wednesday.

According to a preliminary report by the Finance Ministry, the value of exports in August fell 9.6 percent from a year earlier to 52.29 billion U.S. dollars, falling for the 11th straight month.

Meanwhile, imports dropped 17.3 percent to 52.48 billion dollars, down for the 20th consecutive month.

Regionally, trade with China marked a deficit of 3.38 billion dollars, with exports down by 8.9 percent to 9.53 billion dollars, and imports down by 15.4 percent to 12.91 billion dollars.

Trade with the U.S. ran a surplus of 3.56 billion dollars, with exports down by 14.5 percent to 9.56 billion dollars and imports down by 9.5 percent to 5.99 billion dollars.

Trade with the European Union ran a deficit of 811.47 million dollars, with exports slipping 0.7 percent to 5.81 billion dollars, declining for the fourth straight month, and imports dropping 12.4 percent to 6.62 billion dollars, down for the sixth consecutive month.

The figures were measured on a customs-cleared basis.
MELBOURNE, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's brand new ship will launch its first anti-whaling campaign from Australia.

The Ocean Warrior, a custom-built, 9 million U.S. dollar "warship without guns", is on its way to Australia where it will dock at Fremantle, Hobart or Melbourne to prepare to disrupt Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

The vessel, which is Sea Shepherd's first brand new ship, sacrificed a vast majority of its storage space to accommodate bigger engines and long-range fuel tanks.

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd member, said the new ship would not be bullied by Japanese whaling ships which were able to ram the older vessels used by the society.

"Our biggest challenge in our campaigns in the past has been that the Japanese whaling vessels have rammed us with their superior size, and they have outrun us with their superior speed," Hammarstedt told Fairfax Media on Wednesday.

"So this is a vessel they cannot catch."

Japanese whalers killed 333 minke whales, 200 of which were pregnant, in Antarctic waters in summer 2015, the first whaling expedition since the International Court of Justice declared the practice illegal in 2014.

Japan has since excused itself from the court's jurisdiction, instead creating new rules for whaling that doubled the size of hunting grounds in the Southern Ocean.

Australia was one of 95 countries to condemn Japan's continued whaling at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii in September.

"Accountability is important," Hammarstedt said. "The way that we see it is that the international community has now had two years to ensure that Japan complies with the law. They haven't done so.

"Our position is that the international community has failed the whales, so that gives us no other option than to head down (to the Southern Ocean)."
by Liang Linlin, Cheng Yu, Pang Yuwei

BRUSSELS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Europe is facing intensified resistance to its trade deals with its transatlantic partners as a new wave of protests emerged across the continent.

A total of 9,000 people paraded in central Brussels around the European Union (EU) institutions late Tuesday to protest the bloc's trade agreements with the United States and Canada, fearing those deals would harm Europe's interests.

The march came three days after massive protests took place in seven German cities this weekend, in which some 180,000 people participated.

Another protest is planned in the Slovak capital of Bratislava on Friday when EU trade ministers are scheduled to gather and discuss the two deals.

ANGRY PROTESTERS

"I am totally against TTIP," Guillaume, a French sophomore aged 20, told Xinhua, referring to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed trade agreement between the EU and the United States.

Guillaume showed leaflets in his hand and expressed his anger. "It gives much power to lobbies and these lobbies, unexpectedly, will have access to co-write and revise the law."

Like several young people on spot, Guillaume's biggest concern was about job hunting in the future. He feared that TTIP would undermine Europe's already subdued labor market and lower employees' working conditions.

"We are angry," shouted another college student. "Our economies are already so bad and TTIP would only fit multinationals' interests, not ours."

Gaelle Peters, who has protested TTIP and CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) -- a proposed free-trade agreement between Canada and the EU -- for two and a half years, said she did not want public service content in TTIP to add burden to ordinary people.

Many were worried about their own life. "We have to make a living," a group of farmers yelled. "Pay attention! It's the U.S. that wins in the end," said Eric Claeys, organizer of these farmers.

"The intrusion of the American agricultural industry is our main concern. Americans' standard for agricultural products like meat and vegetables is much lower than Europeans'," he added.

TTIP and CETA would change all the rules in EU countries, Anastasia, a member of European NGO EuropeanLeft, told Xinhua. "We need to take control of our own life."

More than 50 groups participated in the march. Protesters placed two- meter-high inflatable Trojan horses, labeled "TTIP" and "CETA" respectively, on a square between headquarters of the European Commission and the EU Council, implying two deals were conspiratorial pacts.

BRUSSELS UNDER PRESSURE

The European Commission, the bloc's executive body conducting the trade talks, is under pressure to conclude TTIP by the end of this year as expected and win long-awaited approval of CETA by the European Parliament and EU member states.

Europe has also seen increased anger and resistance to the two deals from politicians.

French President Francois Hollande earlier dismissed TTIP as "clearly unbalanced" and his government withdrew support for continuing the talks, while German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel believed the deal had "de facto failed."

Earlier Tuesday, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom defended TTIP and CETA, saying free trade agreements benefited exports and boosted jobs.

Malmstrom spoke highly of the deal with Canada, applauding it as the best one Brussels had ever negotiated.

But the commissioner was more wary of TTIP, which is due to have the 15th round of talks in the first week of October. She warned that reaching the expected deadline would become "less likely as time went on."

The EU and the United States have failed to reach even one single chapter in the TTIP talks over the past three years.

Observers warned that the chance of wrapping up the deal by the deadline before U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office in January was getting increasingly slimmer due to the lack of support from some EU members and citizens.

A commission spokesperson did not rule out the possibility of lengthy TTIP talks which may involve a new U.S. president.

"The commission stands ready to continue negotiating with the current (U.S.) administration and with the next U.S. administration," Daniel Rosario said.
HAVANA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Wildlife Fund Netherlands (WWF Netherlands) Tuesday signed here an agreement to support environment protection in Cuba.

The document was signed by Myrta Kaulard, UNDP resident representative in Havana, and Kirsten Schuijt, executive director of WWF Netherlands.

The agreement covers areas such as ecosystem management, water resources, food security, sustainable agriculture, climate change, tourism, energy and transport.

Kaulard said that the new agreement is part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with the priority given to the adaptation to climate change, production and service sectors.

She added that both organizations are committed to strengthening their actions in Cuba to promote and support the sustainable management of natural resources and the preservation of natural heritages within the framework of the National Plan for Economic and Social Development until 2030, promoted by the Cuban government.

The World Wide Fund (WWF) is the largest international conservation organization of the civil society, with presence in over 100 countries and regions.

Its main objective is to achieve the harmonious coexistence of human beings with nature and slow down the degradation of the environment.

Since 2004, the WWF and the UNDP have been working together with Cuba's National System of Protected Areas.
SEOUL, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- South Korea is worried about further nuclear and missile provocations from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), which Seoul estimates have prepared for another nuclear test and the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday citing multiple South Korean government sources.

The DPRK has reportedly covered entrances to two tunnels with large camouflage nets at its main Punggye-ri nuclear test site, an indication which South Korea sees as preparations for a nuclear test in the near future.

The nets have been put up over the entrance to the No.2 tunnel, where Pyongyang conducted its fifth nuclear detonation on Sept. 9, as well as over the entrance to the No.3 tunnel in which the DPRK is highly likely to carry out its next nuclear test.

Seoul's defense ministry said earlier that the DPRK already completed preparations for another nuclear test, which can be carried out at any time at a branch of the No. 2 tunnel or at the No. 3 tunnel.

A South Korean government source was quoted as saying that situations around the No. 2 and No. 3 tunnels in the Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the DPRK has conducted all of its nuclear detonations are identical to those observed right before the fifth nuclear test.

The DPRK's first nuclear test was conducted at the No.1 tunnel in 2006, while the second, third and fourth tests were carried out at the No. 2 tunnel in 2009, 2013 and 2016 each. The fifth test was conducted in a place some 400 meters away from the No. 2 tunnel.

Meanwhile, the DPRK's KCNA news agency said Tuesday that top leader Kim Jong Un had guided a new engine jet test of a carrier rocket for geo-stationary satellite, which South Korea sees as a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The new DPRK rocket was assessed by South Korean authorities as a variant of a long-range Taepodong missile.

Another South Korean government source was quoted as saying that possibility is high for Pyongyang to conduct the sixth nuclear test or launch an ICBM at or around the 71st anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) on Oct. 10.

Pyongyang launched a Taepodong-1 with an estimated range of 2,500 km in Aug. 1998 and a Taepodong-2 with an estimated range of 10,000 km in July 2006, but Seoul assessed both launches had failed.

In February this year, the DPRK launched a Kwangmyongsong rocket to deliver a Kwangmyongsong-4 Earth observation satellite into orbit, which was seen by South Korea as a success.

The three-stage Unha-3 rocket, which Pyongyang blasted off in Dec. 2012 to deliver a Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite into space, was also assessed as a successful launch.

In April 2012 and in the same month of 2009, the DPRK launched Kwangmyongsong satellites, but many countries such as South Korea, the United States and Russia claimed they were failures.
HANOI, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam is expected to earn 900 million U.S. dollars from exporting beverage products by 2035, according to a blueprint by the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) on Wednesday.

Under the new plan to 2025, with an eye to 2035, the MoIT has targeted to reduce the percentage of alcohol and beer products, while increasing non-alcoholic beverage products.

Production of non-alcoholic beverages will be more than doubled to hit 15.2 billion liters during the 2020-35 period.

Meanwhile, beer production output will reach about 4.1 billion liters by 2020, some 4.6 billion liters by 2025 and 5.5 billion liters by 2035, according to the planning. At the same time, liquor output is set to remain unchanged at 350 million liters.

The industry will post a growth rate of 4-5.8 percent by 2035, Vietnam's state-run news agency VNA quoted the blueprint as saying.

According to a recent survey, some 80 percent of Vietnamese men drink liquor or beer, with 13 percent of them drinking it daily. Vietnamese people annually spend some 16,300 billion Vietnamese dong (730 million U.S. dollars) on alcoholic drinks.
Guests press a "launching button" during the opening ceremony of a new branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in Brisbane, Australia, on Sept. 21, 2016. ICBC has opened a new branch in Queensland, Australia, signalling new opportunities for the state's investors and exporters. (Xinhua/Cao Yang)

SYDNEY, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has opened a new branch in Queensland, Australia, signalling new opportunities for the state's investors and exporters.

Queensland state Acting Premier and Treasurer Curtis Pitt said in a statement on Wednesday that the new ICBC branch in Brisbane was a testament to Queensland's strong and growing economy while offering mutually beneficial opportunities to Chinese investors who were interested to invest in the sunshine state.

ICBC is one of the biggest banks in the world, with 5 million corporate customers and 496 million personal customers, and a geographic footprint in 42 countries and regions.

"The new ICBC branch will be able to fully support businesses engaged in trade between China and our state," Pitt said.

ICBC which commenced operations in Australia in 2008 already operates a branch in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and previously held a representative office in Brisbane.

The bank is also the fourth major Chinese bank to establish a presence in Queensland in recent years.

"It (ICBC) will also support Chinese companies seeking mutually beneficial investments in Queensland as well as service Queensland companies doing business in China or interested in entering the market," Pitt said.

ICBC Chairman Huiman Yi said the bank had experienced periods of stable growth and development and has become one of the largest banks in the world with assets totaling 4.4 trillion Australian dollars (1.6 trillion U.S. dollars).

"As part of ICBC's growing confidence in the state of Queensland, we have made the decision to establish a branch in Brisbane," Yi said.

Pitt said China was Queensland's largest merchandise trading partner with exports totalling 11.1 billion Australian dollars (8.39 billion U.S. dollars) largely on coal and base metals and imports totalling 7.2 billion Australian dollars (5 billion U.S. dollars) on clothing, electrical, and manufactured products.

"China is also the largest source of international students studying in Queensland, representing almost 19 percent of enrolments," Pitt said.

"In addition, of the 2.5 million overseas visitors to our state each year China was the largest single source, accounting for almost 20 percent of total international tourists," Pitt said.

"The new ICBC branch will help build on these types of existing bonds and develop new connections that have the potential to generate new business opportunities both here and in China and that means more jobs," he said
WELLINGTON, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand's annual net gain of migrants equalled the existing record in the year ending August, provoking renewed protests that the country is struggling to cope with the new arrivals.

The annual net gain --the number of arrivals minus departures -- of migrants was 69,100 in the August year, which equalled the record set in the June 2016 year, the government statistics agency said Wednesday.

The number was up 8,800 from the August 2015 year, according to a commentary from Statistics New Zealand.

Migrant arrivals numbered 125,000 in the August year -- up 6 percent year on year -- with returning New Zealand citizens accounting for a quarter of all migrant arrivals.

Migrant departures were 55,900 in the same period, with New Zealand citizens contributing 60 percent of all migrant departures.

The biggest rises in migrant arrivals by country of residence between the August 2015 and August 2016 years were in arrivals from South Africa (up 1,600 to 3,700), China (up 1,600 to 12,200), Australia (up 1,100 to 25,600).

The biggest fall was in arrivals from India, which were down 2,100 to 11,900.

About 39,600 migrants arrived on work visas, most of them from Britain, France, Germany and Australia.

Another 15,700 migrants entered on residence visas with most of them from China, Britain and Samoa.

The opposition New Zealand First party said the figures showed "economic policy at its most cynical," accusing Prime Minister John Key's government of using "a never-ending tide of mainly low-skilled immigrants" to depress wages and inflate consumption.

"The Key government know their reckless immigration is artificially inflating the economy to make them look good, while at the same time ordinary Kiwis must compete for jobs, housing and healthcare against this constant competition coming from overseas," New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said in a statement.

Economic forecasts, including those of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, have regularly attributed New Zealand's economic growth to immigration among other factors.

A report from the independent New Zealand Institute of Economic Research last week said a surge in immigrants had prompted economists to revise up their growth forecasts to an annual average of 3.2 percent over the coming year.

The exceptionally strong population growth from the surge in net migration had underpinned continued strength in household spending, which was expected to remain strong, and boosted housing demand, it said.
SEOUL, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- South Korean parliament on Wednesday passed a resolution to denounce the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) over its latest nuclear test, urging the DPRK to abandon its nuclear program.

From the 300-member National Assembly, 203 lawmakers participated in the vote, with 200 voting in favor and three in abstention.

The resolution said the DPRK's reckless provocations will only lead the country to face isolation and pressure from the international community, urging Pyongyang to recognize that it cannot survive with nuclear development and to take immediate and effective measures for the full abandonment of its nuclear development plan.

The passage of the resolution followed the DPRK's announcement on Sept. 9 that it successfully conducted an explosion test of nuclear warhead that can be mounted on ballistic rockets.

Pyongyang had conducted a series of ballistic missile launches since top leader Kim Jong Un gave an order on March 15 to test a nuclear warhead and ballistic rockets capable of carrying the warhead "in a short time."

Earlier this month, the DPRK test fired three Rodong ballistic missiles that flew about 1,000 kilometers and landed near Japan's territorial waters.

On Aug. 24, a ballistic missile was launched from a DPRK submarine off its east coast, traveling 500 kilometers, the longest-ever distance by the DPRK.

South Korean lawmakers urged the military to establish a defense system to respond to the DPRK's nuclear test and submarine-launched ballistic missile.

They also urged the government to make diplomatic efforts at encouraging the DPRK to return to a dialogue table for denuclearization that can lead to peace on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia.
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China's farsighted and pragmatic approach to development planning sets an example for Latin America, a region marked by ideological swings and short-term policies, experts say.

In recent years, Latin America has significantly boosted trade and cooperation with China to drive development in the region. But to make a leap in development, experts say, regional countries also need to learn from China's successful strategies and to adapt them in light of their own needs.

China has proven that it can sustain long-term development without being tied to a single vision for economic growth, and China even invents its own development model when necessary, Milton Reyes, an Ecuadorian researcher at the Asia-Pacific Observatory of the Latin American Integration Association, told Xinhua recently.

"The country has had the flexibility to progress while measuring risk bit by bit, allowing for sustainable economic growth," said Reyes.

Latin America, by contrast, has historically swung between two political and economic ideologies: a centralized government focusing on domestic industries and a neo-liberal growth mode focusing on free trade.

"These purist visions have not allowed for very flexible development and have not allowed Latin American economies to adapt easily to global conditions," Reyes explained.

While Latin America should be careful when exploring which strategies to follow, China's progressive attitude to reform is applicable, as it "undertakes structural reforms step by step" in pursuing development on its own grounds, said Reyes.

Ronnie Lins de Almeida, director of the Brazilian Center for China Studies, agreed.

"Economic development entails adapting the whole economy to a new reality. China has already done so, including reducing demand in certain sectors to strike a balance," he told Xinhua.

The Central American country of Costa Rica, described as "a development success story" by the World Bank, may be unique in the region for practicing a more Chinese-style pragmatism.

In pursuing development, both China and Costa Rica have tweaked policies to fit their needs, instead of hewing to a particular dogma, according to Marco Vinicio Ruiz, Costa Rica's former minister of foreign trade and former ambassador to China.

"I believe we have not strictly followed what others told us (and) neither did China .... They decided what they wanted to do and they have made enormous progress in different areas, especially in lifting many of the people out of poverty," Ruiz said.

"In Costa Rica, we strongly believe that one of the advantages of having ties with China is we can learn a lot from its development," said Ruiz.

Inspired by China, Costa Rica is studying the feasibility of establishing special economic development zones, "similar to the ones China has built along its eastern and southern coasts," said Ruiz.

"That's a good example of how we can collaborate, learning from China's experience," he added.

China's strength also lies in its ability to plan well into the future, an advantage of its political stability.

"They always have a plan and always follow a course of action," said Brazil's Ronnie Lins. "China is now undergoing a transformation phase, which other powers are also facing. China has therefore created a plan for the purpose of fulfilling the 'Chinese Dream', meaning a better quality of life for all Chinese people. This experience would be important for Brazil. Due to its political instability, Brazil has found itself without policies for medium- and long-term planning. Taking advantage of China's experience would be of great importance."

And China's experience is not just for Brazil, he added.

China's "model in general ... can be adapted to any country. Obviously, each country will also have to feature its own adaptations. However, the structure of the model works well. We have seen the success of China over the years, and the country will be able to reach its goals," said Lins.

In the meantime, the outlook for China-Latin American cooperation is promising.

"Brazil is lagging behind in areas where China has substantial expertise, such as infrastructure and railways," said Lins. "We need high-quality transportation, and airports and ports have to be maintained and renovated. That will open a series of business opportunities in Brazil."

Bilateral cooperation is expanding in other areas as well, "including oil and gas," Lins added.

"China has a great contribution to make. Furthermore, bilateral trade in industry and agriculture is growing. Brazil is selling meat to China and China is bringing other products to Brazil," he said.

With Brazil's newly-instated President Michel Temer eager to revive Brazil's flagging economy, now is the time to bolster bilateral exchange, he added.
SEOUL, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. military on Wednesday sent two strategic bombers to South Korea in a show of force against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) over its latest nuclear test.

Two B-1B Lancers flew low over the Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, some 70 km south of capital Seoul, at about 1:10 p.m. local time (0410 GMT), according to local media reports. The supersonic bombers had made a sortie from the U.S. air base in Guam.

One of the two bombers returned to the Guam base after the fly-over, but the other unusually landed in the Osan base. How many days the U.S. supersonic bomber will stay in South Korea is unknown.

On Sept. 13, the U.S. military dispatched two B-1B bombers to South Korea, but all of them returned back to the Guam base right after flying low over the Osan base for about 10 minutes.

The armed protests came after the DPRK said on Sept. 9 that it successfully conducted an explosion test of nuclear warhead to fit on ballistic rockets. The fifth nuclear test was staged just eights month after the fourth in January.

The fifth test was seen as the most powerful nuclear detonation ever by the DPRK as it produced an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, stronger than 6 kilotons recorded in the previous test.

Pyongyang said Tuesday that it tested an engine jet on the ground of a carrier rocket for geo-stationary satellite, which Seoul military saw as a long-range missile.

The DPRK is expected here to launch a new long-range rocket at or around Oct. 10 to mark the 71st anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea (DPRK).
VIENTIANE, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Laos is not at risk of developing into a bubble economy despite the apparent ongoing building boom particularly in the capital, according to leading economists, Lao daily Vientiane Times reported Wednesday.

"This is because overall growth in the real estate sector is actually quite sluggish and most investment is from overseas interests, mainly China and Vietnam," said the report.

"Another factor preventing the forming of a Lao asset bubble is the central bank not offering long-term loans over 10-20 years which are often needed by property investors. However, individual property projects and segments of the industry could suffer if there wasn't sustainable market demand for what they are offering."

An economist from the Faculty of Economics and Business Management at the National University of Laos, Phouphet Kyophilavong, told Vientiane Times on Tuesday that the global economy was still slowing, notably in China and Vietnam.

"The slowdown in China and Vietnam will affect Laos, particularly the real estate sector," he said.

In May of 2016, the Vietnamese central bank imposed more controls on property loans to keep the real estate market from overheating.

The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) was quoted in Vietnamese media that it would raise the risk weight of property loans at commercial banks to 200 percent from 150 percent. The new restriction would take effect on Jan. 1, 2017.

The Vietnamese central bank has also set new restrictions on how banks use their funds. Accordingly, banks will be allowed to use no more than 60 percent of their short-term funds for medium- to long-term purposes including mortgages until the end of this year.

Vietnam is a major investor in Laos with business operators in numerous sectors including real estate such as shopping centers.

A senior economist at the National Economic Research Institute, Leeber Leebouapao, said the real estate sector would continue to grow but at a slow pace due to the economic slowdown in Laos' neighbours.

"One of our problems is that banks here in Laos do not dare to offer long-term loans. Most of the funding to support the real estate sector is sourced from overseas," Leeber said.

However, Lao economists still wonder where all the actual buyers are as several real estate developments have been built but are unable to sell or rent out their space. Perhaps those buildings were not appealing to buyers and some investors failed to take into account market requirements, such as sufficient parking spaces, said the economists.

Vientiane has seen a rapid increase in the number of tall buildings over the last five years driven by foreign investment in the service sector, notably hotels and shopping centers.

The Lao economy grew at an average of 7.9 percent over the past five years which is considered one of the highest rates in the region.

However, Laos' Gross Domestic Product is only 12 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, making it the smallest economy in the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
WELLINGTON, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is talking a big game on Syria at the United Nations, while doing nothing at home to help Syrian refugees, political opponents said Wednesday.

Key used his speech to the UN General Assembly in New York Tuesday to urge the UN Security Council (UNSC) to meet its responsibilities and address the Syria crisis.

"We are deeply troubled to see the council, the pre-eminent body for international peace and security, fail to live up to its responsibilities on the biggest crisis of our time, Syria. Here the council has fallen short," Key said in his published speech.

"Syria is exactly the type of crisis the Security Council was established to address."

Key is also scheduled to chair Wednesday's meeting of the UN Security Council, of which New Zealand holds the presidency this month, following a historic meeting of world leaders to discuss the global refugee crisis.

However, the opposition Green Party said Key could "pay more than just lip service" to the Syrian refugee crisis on the global stage by offering more funding and more resettlement places to refugees in New Zealand.

"The Prime Minister is talking a big game in New York, but resettling more refugees here in New Zealand is a tangible, compassionate move he could make right now to help Syrian families," Green Party immigration spokesperson Denise Roche said in a statement.

"As horrific events in recent days have made very clear, the resolution to the Syrian conflict is still a long way away. In the meantime, tens of thousands of Syrian families are trapped in refugee camps or risking dangerous journeys to try to reach safety," she said.

In June, the New Zealand government raised its much criticized refugee quota from 750 to 1,000 a year.

The rise, to take effect from 2018, was "appropriate" and demonstrated the government's commitment to meet the needs of some of the world's most vulnerable people, Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse said at the time.

The government came under international pressure to double its quota at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis last year, but insisted on sticking to its three-decade-old annual quota of 750 refugees, before it yielded in September and agreed to take extra 500 Syrian refugees over the next two years on top of its annual quota.

Roche said the government's refusal to permanently raise the refugee quota until 2018 showed that "despite our role on the UNSC, he is not fundamentally interested in showing leadership on global issues where New Zealand can really make a difference."

"President Obama's leaders summit on refugees yesterday was a prime opportunity for John Key to commit to the President's campaign to improve the lives of the world's refugees. Instead he has chosen to do nothing," she said.

"As a small country with limited influence, the most practical thing we can do to assist with the crisis is to offer more displaced people a safe place to call home."




Mailis Reps (5th L), chairman of the Estonia-China parliamentary group of Estonia's parliament, poses for a photo with some of the group members and members of a Chinese delegation in Tallinn, capital of Estonia, on Sept. 20, 2016. The cultural exchange delegation from China's Tibet Autonomous Region Tuesday wrapped up a three-day visit to Estonia, which boosted exchanges with the Baltic country. (Xinhua/Guo Qun)

TALLINN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A cultural exchange delegation from China's Tibet Autonomous Region Tuesday wrapped up a three-day visit to Estonia which boosted exchanges with the Baltic country.

Jinmeiwangcuo, head of the delegation and the director of news office of the Tibet Autonomous Region government, said that during its stay, the delegation met with parliament members, government officials, experts and scholars of Estonia.

He said that from the delegation, the Estonian representatives learnt about Tibet's development, inheritance and preservation of its ethnic culture, as well as freedom of religion.

The delegation also talked about the reincarnation system of living buddhas, industrial development, income increases of farmers and herdsmen, the protection of the ecological environment and other issues.

Mailis Reps, chairman of the Estonia-China parliamentary group of Estonia's parliament, expressed her keen interest in Tibet's development and her wish to visit Tibet.

Officials of Estonian Ministry of Culture held in-depth discussions with the Chinese delegation about cultural exchanges in the coming five years.

During the visit, the delegation attended a seminar that introduced today's Tibet and showed to the local people the documentary Roof of the World and a video named the Beautiful Tibet, which were warmly welcomed.

The delegation arrived in Estonia on Sunday after visiting the Czech Republic and will visit Latvia.
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The G20 Hangzhou summit saw a series of agreements reached that would facilitate sustainable and inclusive economic growth. However, words are easy, like the wind; concrete action is needed to deliver on the commitments.

Leaders at the summit, which concluded Sept. 5, adopted a communique on development direction; targets and measures for cooperation; and 28 outcome documents on various issues.

Among the documents, a plan on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was ratified. The agenda, facilitated by the United Nations last year, outlined 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) for green growth and poverty eradication.

Actions speak louder than words.

At the Hangzhou summit, China and the United States, the world's two largest economies, took the lead and formally signed the Paris climate change agreement.

On Monday, local time, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang presided over a round-table meeting on SDGs at the UN Headquarters in New York and released China's detailed measures for implementing the 2030 Agenda.

Li said China will continue to promote South-South cooperation, increase investment and share Chinese experiences. He also promised China's annual total donation to UN agencies on development in 2020 will be 100 million U.S. dollars more than it donated in 2015.

"China is an eminent player in global development; in particular China is a leader in the implementation of the Agenda, emphasizing country-led strategies that are supported by multi stake-holder partnerships," said Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank.

To revitalize the growth engines, leaders at the Hangzhou summit also agreed to formulate a strategy for global trade growth and draft the guiding principles for global investment policy-making, rejecting trade protectionism.

"The direction and course has been set, everything now hinges on how determined countries are to push the policies through," said Liu Zhiqin, an financial analyst from Renmin University of China.

Liu said that protectionism will remain a major block as G20 guideline clauses are non-binding, and some countries may prioritize their own short-term interests over that of the wider international economy.

Earlier last month, China and the United States held their 28th round of bilateral investment treaty talks in Beijing, with the goal of establishing a non-discriminatory, transparent and open investment environment.

The Chinese government recently announced plans to set up seven new free trade zones. In addition, the top legislature has revised four laws to ease restrictions on overseas investment.

As leaders of various countries agreed on innovative and inclusive growth, more concrete measures should be taken to strengthen technological cooperation and help the less developed countries.

In the face of a weak global economic recovery, all countries need to unite with trust and sincerity and take concerted actions to turn growth prospects into reality.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Design Intelligence Award (DIA),China's academy award in the industrial design field, is now collecting submissions from all over the globe.

Sponsored by the China Academy of Art and co-organized by the China Industrial Design Association, the DIA has four categories: cultural innovation, life wisdom, industrial equipment and cutting-edge technology. A total of 100 designs will receive awards next May.

Companies, organizations and individuals can join the competition. Submissions began September 19 and will end early next year.

Liu Ning, head of the China Industrial Design Association, said the award aims to help industrial design promote economic growth.

Qian Xiaofang, Party secretary of China Academy of Art, said the award will be a platform to showcase the excellent design in the world and promote industry and innovation.

This is the second annual assessment for the awards. The first DIA started in January, with 2,511 works from 30 countries and regions joining the competition. The final results came out May 8.

Hang Jian, vice president of the academy, said the award will cooperate with international events such as Milan Design Week, London Design Week and Helsinki Design Week, to enhance communication between Chinese and foreign industrial design.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with French President Francois Hollande in New York Sept. 20, 2016. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

NEW YORK, Sept, 20 (Xinhua) -- China and France pledged here late Tuesday to ensure a smooth implementation of Britain' s Hinkley Point nuclear power plant project, and to enhance cooperation in third-party markets.

The Hinkley Point nuclear project is Britain's first nuclear power plant in two decades. It will be co-built by China General Nuclear Power Corp., which has a one-third stake, and French state-owned company EDF.

The two sides reached the consensus as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met with French President Francois Hollande on the sidelines of a series of UN conferences.

During their talks, Li hoped all those concerned could work together to deliver a smooth partnership on the nuclear power program while at the same time calling for China and France to boost their cooperation.

Beijing attaches great importance to its nuclear power partnership with Paris, said Li.

In response, Hollande said France is ready to step up its cooperation with China in nuclear power and third-party markets.

He also hailed the importance of the Hinkley Point project and expects that all sides can come together to ensure the program's success.

Also in the talks, Li conveyed to Hollande greetings from Chinese President Xi Jinping and said China-France relations have seen sound and rapid development, while urging both sides to continue to respect each other, maintain high-level exchanges and consolidate trust for a stronger bilateral relationship.

Li called on the two countries to continue ratcheting up their coordination in international affairs, and to play positive roles in promoting world peace and development.

For his part, Hollande said his country sees in China a good friend, and has full confidence in the prospects of the Chinese economy.

He also lauded China' s contribution on combating climate change and said France is ready to step up its cooperation with China in agriculture, finance and tourism.




WUHAN, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Organizations representing some of the world biggest rivers adopted a declaration in central China's Hubei Province Wednesday, outlining joint action to protect ecology and enhance sustainable river development.

The declaration was made in the city of Wuhan during a forum focusing on world rivers, attended by delegates of cultural organizations, museums and economic groups representing 15 of the world's biggest rivers: the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Volga, the Yenisei, the Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Mara, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Indus, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Danube and the Thames.

The declaration said management of resources along the rivers should be related to sustainable development.

A set of measures will be adopted to protect the rivers in order to emphasize the harmony between culture and nature, as well as rivers and cities.

The measures will include cooperation in several areas, including riverbank cities, cultural sustainability, science, education, tourism, trade along the rivers and water conservation.

At the forum, authorities also announced that a museum showcasing the diversity of animals and plants on the rivers will open in Wuhan next year.

Covering an area of 29,000 square meters, wildlife and plants specimens from the world biggest rivers will be on show, said Wu Hongtang, who will manage the museum project.

Under the theme, civilization and sustainable development of big rivers, the forum runs between September 19 and 21. About 120 experts from 19 countries and regions are taking part.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Former Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial for corruption, Brazilian courts announced Tuesday.

Judge Sergio Moro, who is in charge of the cases related to the Carwash Operation, on Tuesday accepted the case against Lula presented by the federal prosecution office last week. The prosecution office accused Lula of money laundering and corruption.

The Carwash Operation is investigating a large corruption scheme at state-controlled oil and gas giant Petrobras.

Lula is accused of taking bribes in the form of a luxury apartment in Guaruja, a coastal town in Sao Paulo state.

Seven other people, including Lula's wife, were indicted as well.

The bribes Lula allegedly took amounted to 3.7 million reals (about 1.1million U.S. dollars), local media reported. They were reportedly paid by construction company OAS in exchange of being favored for Petrobras contracts.

However, Lula's defense attorneys believe the former president is being persecuted for political reasons, saying that the accusation is based on "convictions" instead of evidence.

In the prosecution's presentation, Prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol said several times that they did not have definitive evidence of corruption against Lula.

The federal police released last month a report in which they stated that they found no evidence Lula owns the apartment. The former president said he considered buying the apartment, even visited a few times, but in the end decided not to buy it.

Legal experts warned that making accusations against Lula with a lack of evidence would contradict the country's legal principles.

In addition, some of the accused told the police that the corruption scheme precedes the Lula government. Some of Lula's lawyers also expressed doubts over the impartiality of Moro in the case.
CHANGSHA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- An explosion at a chicken farm killed six people in central China's Hunan Province, local authorities said Wednesday.

The blast occurred at around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday at a farm of Langanling village, Yiliu Township of Yizhang County, according to a statement from the county government.

The bodies of three of the deceased were recovered later the same day day. The other three were found Wednesday morning.

An initial investigation showed the explosion was likely caused by materials used in the production of fireworks, which were kept on the property.
SEOUL, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. military on Wednesday sent two strategic bombers to South Korea in a show of force against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) over its latest nuclear test.

Two B-1B Lancers flew low over the Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, some 70 km south of capital Seoul, at about 1:10 p.m. local time (0410 GMT), according to local media reports. The supersonic bombers had made a sortie from the U.S. air base in Guam.

One of the two bombers returned to the Guam base after the fly-over, but the other unusually landed in the Osan base. How many days the U.S. supersonic bomber will stay in South Korea is unknown.

On Sept. 13, the U.S. military dispatched two B-1B bombers to South Korea, but all of them returned back to the Guam base right after flying low around the Osan base for about 10 minutes.

The move came after the DPRK said on Sept. 9 that it successfully conducted an explosion test of nuclear warhead to fit on ballistic rockets. The fifth nuclear test was staged just eight months after the fourth in January.

The fifth test was seen as the most powerful nuclear detonation ever by the DPRK as it produced an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, stronger than 6 kilotons recorded in the previous test.

Pyongyang said Tuesday that it tested an engine jet on the ground of a carrier rocket for geo-stationary satellite, which Seoul military saw as a long-range missile.

The DPRK is expected here to launch a new long-range rocket at or around Oct. 10 to mark the 71st anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea.

Several B-1B Lancers were reportedly dispatched to the Andersen base in Guam in early August from Ellsworth air base in South Dakota to replace B-52 strategic bombers.

The B-1B supersonic bomber, which went into operation in 1980s, is known to be capable of carrying as heavy as 61 tons of weapons, including joint direct attack munitions (JDAM), conventional bombs, air-to-surface missiles and cruise missiles.

The high-speed bomber can fly at a maximum speed of Mach 2, faster than B-2's Mach 0.9 and B-52's 957 kilometers per hour. It can travel as far as 12,000 km without refueling.

Three B-2 stealth bombers also arrived in Guam last month from Whiteman base in Missouri. The stealth bomber, which began to be deployed from 1990s in the field, can be armed with a maximum of 22-ton weapons, including 16 nuclear bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. It can travel as far as 12,230 km without refueling.

The B-52 bomber can travel as far as 16,000 km without refueling, carrying as heavy as 31 tons of weapons including nuclear bombs and "bunker buster" missiles that can destroy underground facilities.

Four days after Pyongyang's January test of what it claimed was its first hydrogen bomb, the U.S. military conducted an armed protest by flying a B-52 strategic bomber over the Osan air base.
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The People's Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, announced on Wednesday it has authorized Bank of China's (BOC's) New York branch to provide Renminbi (RMB) clearing services in the United States.

It is the first time for China to set up an RMB clearing bank in the United States.

The decision was made according to a PBOC memorandum of cooperation signed with the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, according to a statement posted on the PBOC official website.

As the world's largest economy, the United States is a key destination for the RMB in its internationalization process.

Senior Chinese and U.S. officials endorsed a framework for facilitating RMB trading and clearing in the U.S. for the first time during the eighth China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue concluded in June in Beijing.

The BOC New York branch is the largest China-funded finance institution in the United States.

China has vigorously promoted global use of the RMB as the world's largest trading nation looks to lower transaction costs in international trade, which is primarily settled in U.S. dollars.

The IMF has decided to add the RMB to its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) currency basket, making it one of the five reserve currencies fully endorsed by the 188-member organization.

The PBOC's latest report showed that by the end of 2015, the RMB had become the third most-used currency in cross-border trade and financing. It was in fifth place among all currencies for use in international payments and foreign exchange trading.
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Wednesday applauded Cambodia's adherence to the one-China policy and the country's cooperation with China in cracking down on telecom fraud.

Spokesperson Lu Kang's comments came after Chinese police brought 63 telecom fraud suspects back from Cambodia on Tuesday as part of a continued crackdown on such crimes.

The suspects -- 50 from the Chinese mainland and 13 from Taiwan -- are suspected of falsely presenting themselves as law enforcement officials over the telephone to extort money from people on the Chinese mainland.

The suspects were brought to the Chinese mainland in order to protect the interests of the victims, said the Ministry of Public Security. In accordance with the consensus across the Taiwan Strait, mainland police authorities have informed Taiwan through normal channels.

Lu said that relevant departments will deal with the case according to law in order to safeguard the legitimate the rights of the victims. He believes there will be understanding and support from compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as well as the international community.

Since the launch of a special crackdown on telecom fraud in November last year, China has cooperated with police in Kenya, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia, destroying 65 telecom fraud rings, arresting 1,168 suspects, including 347 Taiwan residents.
Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao meets with Tu'ivakano, the speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Kingdom of Tonga, in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Sept. 21, 2016. (Xinhua/Wang Peng)

YINCHUAN, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao met with foreign leaders attending the International Day of Peace event held in the city of Yinchuan in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region Wednesday.

Meeting with Rosana Alvarado, first vice president of the National Assembly of the Republic of Ecuador, Li said China and Ecuador have deepened political mutual trust and conducted fruitful cooperation in finance, energy, mining, infrastructure and diplomatic exchanges.

Li said the Communist Party of China is willing to cooperate with Ecuador's PAIS Alliance movement to enhance the strategic partnership of the two countries.

Alvarado said Ecuador is ready to cooperate with China in various fields.

When meeting Jennifer Simons, chairperson of the National Assembly of the Republic of Suriname, Li hailed the development of China-Suriname ties since diplomatic relations were established over 40 years ago.

Li called on the two sides to enhance political exchanges to boost bilateral ties.

Simons said Suriname is ready to cooperate with China in agriculture, technology, education and personnel training.

When meeting with Tu'ivakano, the speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Kingdom of Tonga, Li said the consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries injected new energy to bilateral ties, and the Belt and Road Initiative opened up prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries.

Tu'ivakano said Tonga-China ties are at a historical high, and Tonga valued bilateral parliamentary communication and cooperation.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (C) addresses a meeting of foreign ministers from the BRICS nations on the sidelines of a series of UN conferences in New York, the United States, on Sept. 20, 2016. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday urged the BRICS nations to preserve world peace and help promote global growth. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

NEW YORK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday urged the BRICS nations to preserve world peace and help promote global growth.

Wang made the remarks while hosting a meeting of foreign ministers from the BRICS nations on the sidelines of a series of UN conferences.

At the meeting, Wang said efforts by BRICS countries in recent years have made a political solution to the crisis in Syria a real possibility.

"We need to continue to be an advocate for using peaceful means, including dialogue and negotiation, to solve global hotspots," he said.

The Chinese minister noted that with the support of the BRICS nations, the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou was a success and provided ample direction for the future development of the world economy.

He said the BRICS nations should take the lead in implementing the agreements reached at the summit while remaining an engine for global economic growth.

Wang said that the G20 Hangzhou summit has endorsed an 2030 action plan for sustainable development and proposed an initiative to support industrialization in Africa and the world's least developed countries. He said the BRICS bloc should urge the developed world to deliver on its promises to developing countries.

Wang said the current system of global governance should better reflect the transformation of the world' s political and economic landscape. He and urged the group to guarantee broader representativeness and give a bigger say for emerging and developing countries.

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar said the BRICS should take a concerted stance against terror attacks and jointly tackle terrorism.

He also called for an early approval of the Paris Agreement on climate change and a commitment to emission reduction targets.

Cooperation within the bloc should deepen, including establishing a BRICS credit rating agency and an agricultural network, among others, he added.

South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane commended BRICS for reaching historic achievements and implementing a sustainable development agenda.

She further appealed for changes to the current system of global governance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposed the BRICS move toward establishing a fairer and more just international order, with better coordination on key political and economic issues.

While expressing hope for BRICS members to work together in coping with global challenges, Lavrov also cited people-to-people exchanges, agriculture, railway transportation and tourism as among the sectors for further development this year within the bloc.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Jose Serra expects to see positive results from the BRICS leaders' summit to be held in mid-October in Goa, India, in bolstering economic partnerships between members.

BRICS members need to increase cooperation in such fields as innovation, digital economy, poverty reduction and public health, he added.

The Brazilian foreign minister also hopes that the 2017 BRICS summit to be hosted by China will continue to promote exchange and dialogue.

During their discussions, the ministers also exchanged views on international and regional issues, including the recent Hangzhou G20 summit, cooperation in fighting terrorism, the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, climate change, Mideast unrest and peacekeeping missions in Africa.
TEHRAN, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Iranians on Wednesday marked the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war with a large-scale military parade that showcased the country's military achievements.

The Iran-Iraq war, which broke out in September 1980 and lasted through August 1988, incurred tremendous loss of lives and economic damage to both countries.

Half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers and civilians are believed to have died during the war, with many more injured.

The armed forces, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), the Basij militia volunteer forces as well as aerospace units participated in the parade during the ceremony.

In the capital Tehran, the parade was held at the mausoleum of the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, was the keynote speaker at the parade in Tehran, according to local reports.

Baqeri said Iran has established comprehensive defensive strategies to counter all threats and that there will be no delay in Iran's military tests and war exercises, reported Tasnim news agency.

The Iranian commander said certain regional countries, supported by the United States and Israel, seek to destabilize Iran and the region, but that the Iranian Armed Forces enjoys powerful defense capabilities against any potential surprise attack.

A similar parade was held in the port city of Bandar Abbas on Wednesday as well, in which over 500 vessels, fighter jets and helicopters participated, Tasnim reported.

Furthermore, the IRGC demonstrated their new locally manufactured ballistic missile, dubbed Zolfaqar, during the Bandar Abbas parade.

Zolfaqar is a long-range ballistic missile with a cluster warhead.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (C) chairs a roundtable on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Sept. 19, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- With the release of a national plan, China has again shown its commitment to fulfilling sustainable development goals.

China released its plan for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development on Monday at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

The plan, which includes China's achievements and experience in implementing the Millennium Development Goals, was unveiled by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang when he chaired a roundtable on the issue. It also covers challenges and opportunities, guiding principles, a roadmap and detailed plans for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The 2030 Agenda, endorsed and launched at the UN Summit for Sustainable Development last year, is a blueprint for eradicating poverty worldwide for the years leading up to 2030.

At Monday's meeting, Li stressed eradicating poverty and hunger as the top priority.

As the world's largest developing country, China's commitment and experiences in these fields not only matter to the country and its people but also carry weight globally.

The premier said that as a responsible developing country, China is willing to cooperate internationally, increase investment in South-South cooperation, and share development experience and opportunities.

Earlier this month, the 2030 Agenda was also among the highlights at the Group of 20 (G20) summit, which was held in the east China city of Hangzhou.

Participants at Monday's roundtable recognized the important role China has played in carrying forward the 2030 Agenda within the G20 framework.

They also agreed that China has played a leading and creative role in areas such as implementing the SDGs, poverty eradication, dealing with climate change, and South-South Cooperation.

Monday's plan comprehensively presents China's development policy and its efforts to help other developing countries move forward in implementation.

With its practical actions, China has proved that talks and pledges are more than just lip service.

Prior to the latest plan, China had included poverty reduction targets in its national five-year plan. It has proposed the five development concepts of innovation, coordination, green development, opening up and sharing.

The progress in carrying out this blueprint is also evident.

Over the past 15 years, China has lifted over 400 million people out of poverty. Conditions for health and education have markedly improved as well.

Moreover, between 2011 and 2015, emissions of four major pollutants in China, including chemical oxygen demand, ammonia nitrogen, sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide, decreased 12.9 percent, 13 percent, 18 percent and 18.6 percent respectively.

These achievements will also inspire the world's confidence.

As the world looks to China for advice and answers, the country is more than willing to work with others and share its wisdom.

China has taken concrete steps in securing sustainable development and bringing common development and prosperity to the world. Hopefully more partners will join the cause.
LHASA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese research has found that low-oxygen environments may promote longevity.

According to research by Zhang Yaping and Wu Dongdong at Kunming College of Life Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, elderly people from the Tibetan Plateau have a longer lifespan than elderly people in other regions of China.

Through examining 2010 census data, researchers found that the proportion of the Tibetan population over 60 years of age was significantly lower than that for the Han population.

However, among Tibetans there is dramatic rise in the ratio of proportion of people older than 91 years old. The proportion of individuals older than 100 years of age was also higher for male (but not female) Tibetans than for Han Chinese.

According to the research findings, published in Cell Research on September 9, elderly people living on the Tibetan Plateau tend to have a longer lifespan than elderly people living at lower altitudes, suggesting an association between hypoxia and longevity.

There have also been reports of a link between longer life expectancy and living in the high altitude Andean region in America, according to the researchers.

Genetic studies showed that low-oxygen environments can accelerate the evolution of aging-associated genes, which might offset the effect of aging and extend lifespan, the researchers said.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) meets with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier in New York, the United States, on Sept. 20, 2016. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

NEW YORK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Tuesday that China is ready for concrete steps to coordinate strategic industrial plans with Germany and enhance cultural and people-to-people exchanges.

Wang made the remarks while meeting with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the sidelines of a series of UN conferences.

Noting that the relationship between China and Germany has witnessed great momentum, Wang said China is willing to join Germany in better coordinating its Made-In-China-2025 plan and Germany' s Industry 4.0, the initiatives by both nations to upgrade their respective industrial systems.

Beijing also supports Berlin plans to host the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the city of Hamburg, he said.

Wang called on Germany to ensure that the EU fulfills its obligations under Article 15 of the Protocol on China's accession to WTO as scheduled.

Article 15 requires WTO members to stop using an alternative calculation method in anti-dumping investigations against China after Dec. 11 this year.

The Chinese minister also stated Beijing' s stance on the Taiwan issue.

For his part, Steinmeier said his country would like to maintain high-level exchanges with China, and enhance ties.

He also said that the G20 Hamburg summit will carry on with the legacy of the Hangzhou summit, something Berlin will work on with Beijing.

The German side hopes that the EU will make the right decision on Article 15 as soon as possible, the top German diplomat said, adding that Berlin' s stance on the one-China policy has remained unchanged.

Also at the meeting, the two ministers exchanged their views on the Syrian issue and the nuclear problem on the Korean Peninsula.


NAIROBI, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama have discussed the global refugee and migrant crisis, regional security, and climate change.

A statement from Kenyatta's office said Wednesday that Obama called Kenyatta on Tuesday in the context of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) currently underway in New York.

"President Kenyatta reiterated his commitment to improving the plight of refugees to the U.S. leader who will host a summit on refugees later this week," the statement said.

During the talks, Obama noted Kenya's pivotal role in securing peace and stability in the region, and encouraged Kenyatta to maintain that leadership role.

Kenyatta assured Obama that Kenya continues to work toward the safe and dignified repatriation of refugees from the Dadaab camp in northern Kenya to Somalia, in accordance with the norms of the international community.

He urged the U.S. President to support ongoing efforts to secure Somalia and create a politically stable environment to which refugees would feel safe to return.

The statement said the two leaders also discussed climate change and Kenya's 2017 elections.
MOSCOW, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The emergency departments of Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran are jointly holding sea rescue drills in the Caspian Sea, the Russian Emergencies Ministry said Wednesday.

The drills, involving more than 600 personnel and around 100 pieces of equipment, will last until Thursday, the ministry said in a statement.

The participants will rehearse joint actions in rescue operations at sea in natural and man-made emergencies, including putting out fire on vessels in high seas, clearing oil spills and detecting underwater objects in emergency zones, it added.

The drills are expected to be followed on Thursday by a conference to be held in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan to discuss personnel protection from disasters in the Caspian Sea region.
A police officer guards outside the Israeli mission in Ankara, Turkey, on Sept. 21, 2016. A "knife-wielding" man was shot and wounded outside the Israeli mission in Ankara on Wednesday, but no one was hurt among the embassy staff. (Xinhua/Zou Le)

ANKARA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A "knife-wielding" man was shot and wounded outside the Israeli mission in Ankara on Wednesday, but no one was hurt among the embassy staff.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has confirmed that a local security guard shot and wounded "a knife-wielding man" near the Israeli mission and that all embassy staff are safe.

"He was shot before reaching the embassy," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Security has been beefed up around the embassy, a Xinhua reporter at the scene said.

Dogan News Agency said the attacker was heard shouting "I will change the Middle East."

The Ankara Governor's Office said the attacker was mentally unstable and that no link with any organization was identified, CNN Turk reported, adding that a suspicious package near the Israeli embassy was being examined.

The attacker was identified as Osman Nuri Caliskan, who was born in 1978.

Some reports said Caliskan is a construction worker from the central Anatolian province of Konya.
NAIROBI, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- An international wildlife body on Wednesday called for international cooperation to tackle illicit wildlife trade as countries will gather in South Africa later this week for a global conference on conservation.

International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said the survival of many species will be affected by decisions taken by the delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), including rhinos, lions, elephants, pangolins, Barbary macaques and African grey parrots.

"Illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade has become such a huge threat to many species that international cooperation between governments, NGOs and other stakeholders is absolutely vital in tackling it," IFAW CEO Azzedine Downes said in a statement received in Nairobi.

CITES will hold its 17th Conference of the Parties from Sept. 24 to Oct. 5 in South Africa where ivory trade, and the proposal by Gabon and others to transfer the African grey parrot to Appendix I will be highly controversial topics.

During the conference, Zimbabwe and Namibia are keen to lessen protection status of their elephant populations in order to be able to sell stockpiled ivory.

But the African Elephant Coalition, comprising 29 African countries, has put forward a package of five proposals for stronger elephant protection -- one of them asks to list all elephant populations on Appendix I, thus prohibiting any international commercial trade.

"Despite public outcry and numerous positive international efforts to draw attention to the elephant crisis, poaching and associated illicit ivory trade continues to escalate," said Jason Bell, IFAW's Elephant Program Director.

According to IFAW, another focus for this conference is the pangolin -- the most illegally traded mammal in the world, with more than a million taken from the wild in the past decade.

Mark Hofberg, IFAW's pangolin expert said the world could very soon see this amazing species disappear, if the unsustainable trade continues.

"All eight pangolin species have to be transferred to Appendix I to ensure maximum protection from further commercial trade in their parts," Hofberg added.
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese and Japanese enterprises have great potential for future economic cooperation as they are highly complementary, a senior official said Wednesday.

Jiang Zengwei, head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, made the remarks at a seminar on China-Japan economic cooperation attended by more than 300 representatives from over 140 enterprises from both countries.

Both the Chinese and Japanese government are working to improve the investment environment, which brings a rare historical opportunity to strengthen bilateral economic ties, said Jiang.

Japanese enterprises can help upgrade China's industrial structure through technical innovation exchanges and personnel training with their advantages in various sectors, including intelligent manufacturing and biotechnology, Jiang told the seminar.

Jiang said both countries can advance cooperation in green economy, modern services, communication and information, and that more Japanese enterprises are welcome to seek market opportunities in China.
A Zimbabwean farmer plows the field and operates a Chinese-manufactured tractor at a local farm. (Xinhua file photo)

KIGALI, Sep. 21 (Xinhua) -- China is playing a significant role towards transformation of Africa's agriculture sector, which has contributed to food and nutrition security and poverty reduction on the continent.

Attaher Maiga, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Country Representative to Rwanda, said this in an interview with Xinhua Tuesday at the African Regional Forum on Agriculture for Sustainable Development in Kigali.

"Agriculture holds the key to economic growth, poverty reduction and food security in Africa. Agricultural growth is an important component of China's economic relations with African countries," Maiga said.

Last December, China promised to offer about 60 billion U.S. dollars to Africa to enhance the continent's economic transformation, industrialization and technological development.

File photo taken on Dec. 19, 2013 shows a Chinese (Front) demonstrating how to cultivate land in Butare, Southern Province of Rwanda. China-Rwanda Agriculture Technology Demonstration Center (C-RATDC) is one of the 14 Agriculture Technology Demonstration Centers that China agreed to adopt for reinforced economic aid to Africa during the China- Africa Cooperation Forum Summit in Beijing in 2006.(Xinhua)

The Chinese government announced that it will roll out 10 major cooperation plans that will strengthen cooperation with Africa within the next three years.

"China is partnering with African economies to transform agriculture into a modern and dynamic sector. Chinese government has supported Africa's agriculture growth through a multitude of activities in areas such as investment, capacity building, infrastructure development, innovations and research," said Maiga.

The three-day conference, organized by FAO, aims at discussing how the principles for sustainable food and agriculture can promote joint action to strengthen the contribution of agriculture, forestry and fisheries to sustainable development.

Africa needs about 400 billion U.S. dollars of investment in food production over the next decade to meet the continent's needs, according to FAO.
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Malaysian foreign ministry said on Wednesday investigators will release the interim results next Wednesday on the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which may contain further information in the criminal perspective.

The decision was made after foreign ministers from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, Ukraine and the Netherlands, where most of the passengers were from, met and discussed in New York about the investigative efforts, which aim to "establish justice with the regard of flight MH17 on July 17, 2014."

All 298 on board lost their lives on the plane while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

The Dutch Safety Board, which led a separate investigation into technical details of the crash, confirmed in last October that the aircraft crashed after being hit by a Russian-made Buk missile system, but it did not pinpoint who should be held criminally responsible for the tragedy.

According to the joint statement, foreign ministers of the five countries reiterated their "strong support" for the independent investigation team, made up of experts from the five countries.

It also said that the countries remain fully committed to take effective measures to hold those who are responsible to account. "There must be justice for the families and loved ones of those killed on MH17," it noted.
by Abdul Haleem

KABUL, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Like other peace-loving citizens around the globe, the war-weary Afghans are marking the International Day of Peace on Sept. 21 with prayers to see the end of endemic conflict and for the restoration of lasting peace in their insurgency-plagued nation.

Each year, the International Day of Peace in Afghanistan is observed by holding conferences, meetings and offering special prayers at the mosques where the war-plagued Afghans call upon militants to give up fighting and help rebuild the country ravaged by war.

Marking the day, the government-backed peace body, the High Peace Council (HPC), in a statement released here described Afghanistan as a "victim of imposed war" and called upon the armed opposition groups to give up fighting and initiate dialogue with the government to find amicable solutions to the country's lingering crisis.

"Availing opportunity on the International Day of Peace, the High Peace Council is calling upon all opposition groups to give up fighting and negotiate with the government to find a negotiated settlement for the country's prolonging problems," HPC urged in the statement.

The protracted war and civil strife have forced millions of Afghans to leave their country for safer places over the past three decades and while more than 5 million refugees have returned home since the collapse of the Taliban reign in late 2001, nearly 4 million Afghans are still living in Pakistan, Iran and other countries, even though the process of repatriation is ongoing.

While Afghans are marking the International Day of Peace, the armed militants including the Taliban and the so-called Islamic State (IS) outfit have been challenging government forces in several provinces, claiming lives including civilians.

The theme of the International Day of Peace for 2016 is The Sustainable Development Goals: Building Blocks for Peace, but many Afghans are skeptical about achieving the noble goals set for the Day in the current year, believing that continued militancy will devour all hope of achieving viable peace in their country.

"To be frank, returning lasting peace in Afghanistan is no more than a dream because since my childhood and particularly since the toppling of the Taliban by the U.S.-led coalition forces and the contribution of billions of dollars to the country over the past 15 years, no horizon for peace is in sight," Sharif Zakria, 23, a Kabul resident, told Xinhua.

"Like millions of Afghans, the lingering instability here will finally force me to leave my homeland for safer places, probably Europe," Zakria said morosely.

Around 104,000 people have reportedly been killed in the Afghanistan war since 2001 and according to media reports, more than 31,000 of those killed were civilians and some 41,000 more civilians sustained injuries.

According to a report from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released in July, 1,601 civilians had been killed and 3,565 others injured in the first six months of 2016, which indicates a four percent increase compared to the same period in 2015.

"Peace means development, peace means prosperity and peace is everything because a peaceful environment is essential to work, to earn a livelihood and finally to overcome poverty," Gul Bakht, a female Kabul resident, told Xinhua.

"My prime objective in my life is to see lasting peace and security restored in Afghanistan," Bakht declared.
NEW YORK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday said frictions represent only a minor part in China-U.S. economic relations, calling upon the two sides to expand common interest and properly handle differences.

Li made the statement when addressing a welcoming dinner party organized by the Economic Club of New York.

When bilateral trade and investment grow from nearly nothing to its current enormous volume, it is only inevitable that frictions might arise, said Li, who is here for a series of United Nations conferences and engagement with a wide spectrum of Americans.

Frictions are not the dominating element in China-U.S. economic relations but just a minor part of cooperation, the premier told about 1,000 elites of American business.

However, they should not be ignored, and the two sides should work to resolve their differences before they spread to others areas of the relationship, Li said.

On China' s business environment, Li said while complaints from some American business people impressed him, he also read a report by the U.S.-China Business Council which told a different story.

In its annual survey, the council found 90 percent of U.S. businesses operating in China were profitable, up from 85 percent in 2014.

The Chinese premier also cited increased investment by U.S. enterprises in China.

China is still working to improve its business environment for foreign enterprises, Li added.

As part of its overall drive to further open up, China has streamlined procedures for foreign investment, said Li.

The gathering came one day after the premier met with U.S. President Barack Obama in New York, during which Li called for concerted efforts to promote economic and trade ties between the world's top two economies.

Economic and trade cooperation is the "cornerstone" and "propeller" of China-U.S. relations, Li said during their talks.

Enhancing China-U.S. cooperation is in accord with the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the common wish of the world community, he said, while expressing China's willingness to deepen bilateral, regional and global cooperation in various fields.

Obama, for his part, reiterated that his country supports China's reform process and hopes that the two sides can make further progress in bilateral investment treaty negotiations.

Li is scheduled to attend the general debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday before heading to Canada to continue his overseas trip, which will also take him to Cuba.
Guests from China and Poland pose for a group photograph to celebrate the success of inaugural Beijing-Warsaw flight of Air China at Warsaw Chopin Airport in Warsaw, capital of Poland, on Sept. 21, 2016. In the early morning hours of Wednesday, the inaugural Beijing-Warsaw flight of Air China landed at Warsaw Chopin Airport. (Xinhua/Chen Xu)

WARSAW, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- In the early morning hours of Wednesday, the inaugural Beijing-Warsaw flight of Air China landed at Warsaw Chopin Airport.

Chinese Ambassador to Poland Xu Jian along with Vice President of China National Aviation Holding Hou Xulun and Chief director of the Chopin Airport Mariusz Szpikowski took part in the official welcoming ceremony.

Hou Xulun said that Air China's Beijing-Warsaw service represents an important move to help build the "Aerial Silk Road" and to better respond to the demands of businessman and tourists of both countries.

Poland's important strategic position makes it a crucial link between the East and the West, Xu Jian said. He also expressed his hope that the new "Aerial Silk Road" would contribute to the social and economic development of the two countries, provide more travel options for passengers between China and Europe and further bilateral cooperation in the fields of education, cultural exchange and science and technology.

Szpikowski said that the establishment of a direct link between two countries' capitals is an important event for Chopin's airport and will bring considerable benefits for Warsaw and for Poland.

Air China announced that the Beijing-Warsaw route is its second nonstop long-haul international service linking China to Central and Eastern Europe. It will be operated four times a week by Airbus A330-200 passenger airplane.
People visit robots during the 5th China-Eurasia Expo in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Sept. 20, 2016. The Expo attracting more than 2,000 exhibitors kicked off here on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

MOSCOW, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The fifth China-Eurasia Expo, which opened Tuesday in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, will help further boost cooperation between Russia and China, Russian Industry and Trade Ministry has said.

"Traditionally, the China-Eurasia exhibition offers the best products, investment projects, and demonstrates the tourism potential of China and Eurasian countries, thus serving as an important platform for the expansion of comprehensive cooperation between China and Russia," the ministry said in a written reply to Xinhua's questions.

As Russia-China relations were characterized by maturity and stability, it said, they were constantly developing at a high level, and have been experiencing the best period in their entire history.

Exhibitions and fairs contribute greatly to the development of economic relations between the two countries, it added.

One of the key themes of the exhibition will be the discussion of China's Belt and Road Initiative.

The initiative, which includes the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, was unveiled by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.

It brings together countries in Asia, Europe and Africa, with the purpose of boosting infrastructure building, financial cooperation and cultural exchanges across those regions.

In 2015, Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to align the Belt and Road Initiative with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union.

The Russian ministry believes that the initiatives of both countries will bring great opportunity for the economic development of countries involved.

"We are certain that the parties will spare no effort to promote innovation, advance practical cooperation in all areas, improve the quality and volume of bilateral trade, which in turn will increase the comprehensive strength and international competitiveness of them," said the ministry.

More than 2,000 Chinese and foreign companies, delegates from 57 countries and regions, and six global organizations are participating in the six-day fair held in the regional capital of Urumqi.

A total of 15 ministerial forums and activities will be held, with about 200 domestic and foreign ministerial-level guests set to attend the event, according to organizers.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (C) chairs a roundtable on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Sept. 19, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's speech on emphasizing sustainable development as a fundamental way to solve various global issues has struck a chord worldwide.

At a roundtable at United Nations headquarters in New York on Monday, Li fully elaborated China's plan for the implementation of the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Analysts recognized China's role in maintaining peace and stability worldwide and praised its efforts to help other developing countries realize sustainable growth.

Rana Mitter, director of Oxford University's China Center, says China is increasingly becoming an important player in UN peacekeeping.

"China has begun to play a much more significant role in terms of sending its own soldiers abroad in Asia, Africa and elsewhere to be part of a wider UN effort to bring peace to areas where there is civil war or other sorts of destruction, and this I think is a very important part of the socialisation of China into the international community," he said.

R.K. Chaudhury, an Indian expert on diplomacy, agreed with Mitter, saying that China has been key in maintaining world peace.

"When world peace and security are threated, China's peacekeeping mission will be on the scene, which reflects that China honors its commitment to maintaining world peace and the UN Charter," he said.

"China is also known to be a peace-loving country and perceived by many as a non-aggressor, and precisely that is the reason why its military might is aimed at keeping the world peaceful," the professor elaborated.

The ultimate goal of China's modernization is for its roughly 1.3 billion people to lead well-off lives, Li said, adding that China has already put the agenda into its national development plans. It aims to eradicate poverty by 2020, ten years ahead of the UN's schedule.

Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow with S. Rajaratnam School at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said it would be amazing if China were to achieve the goals ahead of schedule, something that would provide a boost to global development.

Saleem Khilji, director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute based in Islamabad, said the premier's announcement on poverty alleviation ahead of schedule "showed China's determination, sincerity and passion to achieve its sustainable development goals."

"China has focused not only on its own population, but it has been helping other poor nations," the expert said.

At the sustainable development roundtable, Li said China, as a responsible developing country, has actively participated in global development and will continue to contribute to the South-South Cooperation.

The premier said the China-initiated assistance fund for South-South Cooperation and the China-UN Peace and Development Fund will formally start operations by the end of this year, adding that the China-proposed Academy of South-South Cooperation and Development has also enrolled its first batch of students.

In order to support a bigger UN role in the implementation of the Agenda, China has pledged additional 100 million U.S. dollars in annual aid to UN development agencies in 2020 on top of its amount in 2015, Li said.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said "China is an eminent player in global development, in particular, China is a leader in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda."

"China is also deepening South-South Cooperation to help other developing countries implement the 2030 Agenda, providing support and financing technology capacity building," he said.

Khilji spoke highly of China's contribution to South-South Cooperation, especially in Africa, which "is unique and exemplary in the world."

"The China-initiated assistance fund for South-South Cooperation and the China-UN Peace and Development Fund will further help in poverty alleviation and improve the security situation in the world," he said.

(Xinhua correspondents Ni Hongmei and Shi Xiaomeng in the United Nations, Bai Chun in New Delhi, Bao Xuelin in Singapore and Ji Wei in Islamabad also contributed to the story.)
DAMASCUS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A Syrian warplane was downed on Wednesday while striking Islamic State (IS) positions north of the capital Damascus, state news agency SANA reported.

The pilot was rescued, SANA said.

The plane went downed after completing its mission in striking IS positions in the mountainous Qalamoun region, the news agency said.

Meanwhile, the IS-linked Amaq news agency said the Syrian warplane carried out four airstrikes against IS positions before being shot down and crashed in an area between an IS-controlled region and other Syrian opposition factions.

The aircraft is the second warplane downed this week. On Sunday, a government warplane was shot down by IS militants in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour; the pilot died.
RAMALLAH, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Three Palestinian prisoners ended their 60-day hunger strike in Israeli jails on Wednesday after reaching an agreement with Israeli authorities to not renew their administrative detention.

Eassa Quaraqea', chairman of the Palestinian Prisoners' Corporation in Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), confirmed to Xinhua that the three prisoners, who received medical treatment at Israeli hospitals, ended their hunger strike on Wednesday.

"The three prisoners will be freed right after their Israeli administrative detention expires, as Israeli authorities agreed not to extend their detention without a trial," said Quaraqea'.

He added that one of the three prisoners, Malek al-Qadi, will finish his current Israeli administrative detention term on Thursday.

Quaraqea' added that the other two prisoners, brothers Mohamed and Mahmoud al-Balboul, will be released from Israeli jails by Dec. 8 when their administrative detention term ends.

"Reaching a deal to not renew their administrative detention in exchange for them to end their hunger strike is a Palestinian victory thanks to President Mahmoud Abbas's efforts as well as those of the prisoners' corporation," said Quaraqea'.

Over the past four years, prisoners held by Israel under administrative detention without charges or trial have been protesting against this measure by going on hunger strikes. Most prisoners succeeded to oblige Israel not to renew their detention.

According to the prisoners' corporation, 750 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons under administrative detention, without charges and without even appearing at an Israeli court for trial.
TOKYO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A special Doraemon-themed plane will fly the route between Narita International Airport in Tokyo and Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, starting from Thursday, Japan Airlines announced Wednesday.

The Boeing 767-300, with the image of Doraemon, a popular Japanese cartoon cat, painted on its fuselage, will be the first Doraemon-themed jet to debut on an international flight.

By playing up the popular cartoon cat which also has a large number of fans in China, the airline company aims to attract more Chinese customers, especially in holidays.

The Doraemon jet will be in service till March 2017. Doraemon-themed services and souvenirs will also be provided on the plane.
ANKARA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Two Turkish soldiers and two civilians were kidnapped Wednesday by Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the country's southeastern province of Hakkari, Dogan News Agency reported.

Security forces, with air support, are trying to rescue the four, who were taken by armed PKK militants on the Hakkari-Cukurca road in Hakkari, Dogan said.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Turkey.
URUMQI, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Direct flights between Kashgar in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Kyrgyzstan have begun, the shortest air route between the two countries.

At 11:40 p.m. on Monday, a Boeing 737 aircraft arrived at Kashgar airport after a two-hour trip from Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, the route's first flight.

The plane will leave Bishkek for every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and fly back to the city every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Kashgar, south Xinjiang's largest city, used to be an important staging post along the ancient Silk Road.
BRATISLAVA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Slovakia has committed itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with its parliament approving the ratification of the Paris climate agreement with 106 votes on Wednesday.

"The Paris agreement is the most important international climate agreement aimed at slowing down global warming," said Slovak Environment Minister Laszlo Solymos following the parliament approval.

"Investments are being made in technologies in order to reduce greenhouse gas production. Money is also going towards heat insulation," he said, adding that the Paris agreement would also have an impact on agricultural and transport sectors.

The national ratification process will be completed with Slovak President Andrej Kiska's signature.

Among the main goals of the agreement are to keep the increase in the average global temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels. This would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.

The document will become fully valid only if it's ratified by 55 countries that together account for at least 55 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to a list drawn up in 2015.

Along with the United States and China, the agreement has been ratified by 27 countries that produce 39 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Among EU countries, the document has been ratified by Hungary, France and Austria so far. The agreement was adopted at the Paris climate conference in December 2015, with 195 countries agreeing to the first-ever universal, legally-binding global climate deal.
CAIRO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The death toll of the capsized migrant boat near Egypt's northern coast rose to 30 while rescue efforts are still going on, official MENA news agency reported on Wednesday.

The migrant boat that drowned near the coast of Egypt's northern Beheira province carried about 600 people onboard whose destination was supposed to be Italian shores.

"The boat set off from the Borg Meghizal village in Kafr El-Sheikh province on its way to Italy via illegal migration," MENA quoted a senior security official from Beheira province as saying.

The border guards rescued over 100 people from the drowned boat so far, picked up 30 bodies, sent some of them to nearby hospitals while the rescue process is still going on.

Illegal migration via Egyptian Mediterranean Sea shores rose over the past few years in attempts to reach Europe and flee difficult economic conditions in the most populous Arab country.
YEREVAN, Armenia, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Republic of Armenia held on Wednesday a series of activities across the country to celebrate its 25th anniversary of independence.

The main activities were held in the Republic Square, Yerevan, including a military parade to demonstrate the country's military potential.

A wide range of military equipment and technology was put on display, such as helicopters Mi-8 and Mi-24, multiple rocket launchers, operational-tactical missile complex, and a short-range ballistic missile system.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan, Armenian Apostolic Church leader Karekin II, representatives of foreign missions in Armenia, and high-ranking officials attended the celebration, according to the country's state news agency Armenpress.

Armenia was once incorporated into the Soviet Union. The Republic of Armenia became independent in 1991 through a referendum, in which more than 90 percent of the population voted for independence.

Armenia was the second Southern Caucasus state declaring independence from the former Soviet Union after Georgia.
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has urged a nationwide reform of oversight of markets in a bid to reduce unnecessary interference into normal business operations.

A national conference was held on Wednesday to discuss how to push forward the reform that asks for "random inspections of businesses by randomly selected law enforcement officers or inspectors" and the prompt release of results.

In a written instruction, Li said this is key to the work to streamline administration, transform the functions of the government, improve its performance, and reduce corporate costs and rent-seeking.

That will create a better environment for businesses and start-ups and contribute to sustained and healthy economic and social development, he said.

Chinese authorities seek to reinvigorate the slowing economy through reducing red tape and letting the market play a bigger role in economic operations.

Although China has made progress in streamlining administration, overhauling market regulation and optimizing government services, some measures have not been fully implemented. Unfair law enforcement, arbitrary inspections and inadequate supervision have revealed loopholes in market regulation.
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor Guo Shengkun on Wednesday agreed to enhance law-enforcement cooperation with Vietnam.

Guo, also minister of public security, made the remarks when meeting with a delegation from the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security in Beijing.

The frequent high-level visits between the two countries and the wide consensus reached have laid a solid foundation for deeper cooperation in law-enforcement and security, Guo said.

Guo expressed his hope that the two sides' public security ministries would have closer exchanges and strengthen cooperation in such fields as anti-terrorism and drug control.
Laborers work at a car factory March 22, 2016 in Huanghua City, north China's Hebei Province. (Xinhua/Mou Yu)

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China's farsighted and pragmatic approach to development planning sets an example for Latin America, a region marked by ideological swings and short-term policies, experts say.

In recent years, Latin America has significantly boosted trade and cooperation with China to drive development in the region. But to make a leap in development, experts say, regional countries also need to learn from China's successful strategies and to adapt them in light of their own needs.

China has proven that it can sustain long-term development without being tied to a single vision for economic growth, and China even invents its own development model when necessary, Milton Reyes, an Ecuadorian researcher at the Asia-Pacific Observatory of the Latin American Integration Association, told Xinhua recently.

"The country has had the flexibility to progress while measuring risk bit by bit, allowing for sustainable economic growth," said Reyes.

Latin America, by contrast, has historically swung between two political and economic ideologies: a centralized government focusing on domestic industries and a neo-liberal growth mode focusing on free trade.

"These purist visions have not allowed for very flexible development and have not allowed Latin American economies to adapt easily to global conditions," Reyes explained.

While Latin America should be careful when exploring which strategies to follow, China's progressive attitude to reform is applicable, as it "undertakes structural reforms step by step" in pursuing development on its own grounds, said Reyes.

Ronnie Lins de Almeida, director of the Brazilian Center for China Studies, agreed.

"Economic development entails adapting the whole economy to a new reality. China has already done so, including reducing demand in certain sectors to strike a balance," he told Xinhua.

People enjoy the scenery as their shadows are reflected in a puddle of water in the early morning at the Bund in Shanghai, the landmark of Shanghai, east China, Sept. 22, 2014. (Xinhua/Lai Xinlin)

The Central American country of Costa Rica, described as "a development success story" by the World Bank, may be unique in the region for practicing a more Chinese-style pragmatism.

In pursuing development, both China and Costa Rica have tweaked policies to fit their needs, instead of hewing to a particular dogma, according to Marco Vinicio Ruiz, Costa Rica's former minister of foreign trade and former ambassador to China.

"I believe we have not strictly followed what others told us (and) neither did China .... They decided what they wanted to do and they have made enormous progress in different areas, especially in lifting many of the people out of poverty," Ruiz said.

"In Costa Rica, we strongly believe that one of the advantages of having ties with China is we can learn a lot from its development," said Ruiz.

Inspired by China, Costa Rica is studying the feasibility of establishing special economic development zones, "similar to the ones China has built along its eastern and southern coasts," said Ruiz.

"That's a good example of how we can collaborate, learning from China's experience," he added.

China's strength also lies in its ability to plan well into the future, an advantage of its political stability.

"They always have a plan and always follow a course of action," said Brazil's Ronnie Lins. "China is now undergoing a transformation phase, which other powers are also facing. China has therefore created a plan for the purpose of fulfilling the 'Chinese Dream', meaning a better quality of life for all Chinese people. This experience would be important for Brazil. Due to its political instability, Brazil has found itself without policies for medium- and long-term planning. Taking advantage of China's experience would be of great importance."

And China's experience is not just for Brazil, he added.

Photo taken on Aug. 15, 2016 shows the Train No. G8041 departing from Dalian for Shenyang at Dalian North Railway Station in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua/Ding Hongfa)

China's "model in general ... can be adapted to any country. Obviously, each country will also have to feature its own adaptations. However, the structure of the model works well. We have seen the success of China over the years, and the country will be able to reach its goals," said Lins.

In the meantime, the outlook for China-Latin American cooperation is promising.

"Brazil is lagging behind in areas where China has substantial expertise, such as infrastructure and railways," said Lins. "We need high-quality transportation, and airports and ports have to be maintained and renovated. That will open a series of business opportunities in Brazil."

Bilateral cooperation is expanding in other areas as well, "including oil and gas," Lins added.

"China has a great contribution to make. Furthermore, bilateral trade in industry and agriculture is growing. Brazil is selling meat to China and China is bringing other products to Brazil," he said.

With Brazil's newly-instated President Michel Temer eager to revive Brazil's flagging economy, now is the time to bolster bilateral exchange, he added.
ATHENS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The asylum bids of three out of eight Turkish military officers, who fled to Greece in July after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, were rejected by Greek authorities on Wednesday, according to Greek asylum service sources.

A day after the coup attempt, the eight officers landed at an airport in northern Greece on a Turkish military helicopter and requested asylum.

Ankara asked for their extradition in late August, calling them "traitors" who participated in the coup attempt.

In their statements in front of Greek judges and through their lawyers, the eight men have repeatedly rejected the charges.

They claimed they fled to Greece fearing for their lives when their helicopter came under fire on the evening of July 15 and they were informed by relatives about attacks on military personnel.

Greek asylum sources told Xinhua on Wednesday that the officers can appeal the initial decision within two weeks.

Under the legislative framework, the procedures following Wednesday's decision are lengthy and can take up to nine months, officials said speaking to Xinhua on condition on anonymity.

Their lawyer Stavroula Tomara told Xinhua they intend to appeal any negative ruling and may seek asylum also in other countries.
GENEVA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese expert on Wednesday said China's exceptional development pathway can be of great value to the global community in its bid to implement ambitious development goals.

"China, as the biggest developing country in the world, has developed a unique, effective and remarkable model of implementing the right to development which is worthy to be shared with the international community from the perspectives of its idea and practice," Wang Xigen, Wuhan University's executive director of Research Institute for Human Rights, told a side-event of the 33rd session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) here.

"The right to development is taken as a primary and basic right in the human rights system of China," he added.

Beijing has long supported the unassailable right which was institutionalized 30 years ago following the adoption of the Declaration on the Right to Development by UN member states.

China's unique experience in the past 30 years is viewed by many as a success story whose principles should be explored by other developing nations across the world.

"The practice of the right to development is guided by five ideas: innovation, coordination, green open and sharing," Wang noted.

The academic also reminded that the right to development is broadened by China's long-term plan to promote economic, political, cultural, social and ecological progress.

All this is achieved by respecting clear-cut legal policies which seek to protect the right to development through law-based governance, Wang continued.

"This means that the rule of law, anti-corruption, accountability, judicial relief, and legal aid are all necessary institutional measures to realise this right," he added.

Hosted by the China NGO Network for International Exchanges (CNIE), the event saw some 50 civil society representatives, experts and scholars from China, Russia, South Africa, the Netherlands and other countries discuss China's experience in promoting the right to development and contribution of its civil society.

In a proposal issued Wednesday, CNIE suggested that in light of current challenges and goals outlined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a UN mechanism should be created to review policies and plans which seek to achieve ambitious economic, social and environmental development goals.

CNIE also called for civil society to play a bigger role by creating a platform for dialogue between the latter and the government.

Created in 2006, the HRC is an inter-governmental body working to promote and protect human rights around the globe through thematic discussions and structured recommendations.
LUSAKA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Zambia's telecom regulator has asked dealers of Samsung Electronics to notify it of how the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone will be withdrawn from the market after defects were detected worldwide.

Samsung has called for a recall of the smartphone due to a battery problem.

While acknowledging that the smartphone has not yet been officially launched in Zambia, the Zambia Information and Communication Technology (ZICTA) said it was aware that some Zambian consumers may have purchased the device from other markets where the device had been launched.

"Although the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has not yet been officially launched in Zambia, ZICTA has written officially to Samsung Electronics SA (PTY) LTD Zambia Branch requesting them to come up with interventions and indicate to the Authority how best the device will be withdrawn from the Zambian market," the regulator said in a statement.

The regulator has since urged consumers who may have purchased the smartphone to visit Samsung authorized dealers on how to deal with the defective phones.
LAGOS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian House of Representatives on Wednesday resolved to conduct an investigation into the allegations of tampering with the 2016 budget by some of its members.

The decision followed a point of order brought under Matters of Privilege by the Chairman, House Committee on Rules and Business, Emmanuel Oker-Jev.

A former Chairman, House Committee on Appropriation, Abdulmumin Jibrin, accused the Speaker of the House, Yakubu Dogara and some principal officers of padding the 2016 budget.

Jibrin also demanded that Dogara should resign to allow investigations to be conducted into the matter.

Oker-Jev called for the suspension of Jibrin, describing his allegations as sundry act of misconduct against the members and institution of the House of Representatives.

According to him, Jibrin embarked on campaign of calumny and denigration by making publications in the media and internet against the entire membership of the House of Representatives and the National Assembly as an institution.

The matter was referred to the Committee on Ethics and Privileges for proper investigation and to report back in one week. Enditem
BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Bard of England and the "Chinese Shakespeare" came together this week in the heart of Beijing, 400 years after their deaths.

Students from the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing and the University of Leeds teamed up in a performance to honor legendary dramatists William Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu. Their two-day show, in a theater near the Forbidden City, wrapped up on Tuesday.

"The show, which brings the 'dreams' of the two drama masters together, is a cultural conversation between China and Britain," said Li Jun, who teaches English drama at UIBE.

TWO DREAMS

The performance, "A Midsummer Night's Dreaming under the Southern Bough," is actually a double bill featuring cross-cultural interpretations of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Tang's "A Dream under the Southern Bough."

Tang Xianzu, a contemporary of Shakespeare active in the late 16th to early 17th century, was a prominent Ming dynasty playwright. His major works, the most famous of which is "The Peony Pavilion," are collectively called the "Four Dreams."

UIBE and Leeds launched the project in August 2014 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare and Tang.

"We find it is not only a coincidence that Shakespeare and Tang died in the same year, but their literature also shared similar themes," Li, director of "A Midsummer Night's Dreaming," told Xinhua.

Seven students from UIBE acted in the Shakespeare adaptation that tells a story of modern-day Chinese youth who pursue romance with confusion and hope.

Nine students from Leeds starred in the Tang adaption, in which a discharged British army officer dreams of entering an ant kingdom, marrying the princess and gaining status, only to later be expelled following some unforeseen events.

Both the Chinese and British groups added contemporary perspectives to the plays, while respecting the original works.

A CULTURAL CONVERSATION

After casting and rehearsal, the Chinese and British students performed at the University of Leeds on July 27.

"The response was tremendous," Li Jun said.

In August, the show was staged eight times at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world's leading arts festival.

"The British audience was fond of our performance, which served as a 'cultural passport,'" said Chinese cast member, Chen Ruqing, a junior majoring in English financial journalism at UIBE.

"Everyone there was familiar with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' but they wanted to see how young Chinese people interpret and perform the classic," Chen said, adding that when British audience members flashed a smile from time to time, she knew that they understood and appreciated their performance.

Both the Chinese and British actors were happy to make new friends and showed appreciation for each other's cultures.

"We quickly became friends and talked about everything without any reservations," said Huang Yangxin, a UIBE accounting major, adding that the Chinese and British actors are around the same age and share a lot of similar views.

"Before going to Leeds, we thought that British people were gentle but distant. They turned out to be quite responsive and warm-hearted," said Huang.

WEST MEETS EAST

Most cast members from Leeds had not been exposed to Chinese language or culture before, but they vowed to "break the wall." Before the performance, they stepped into the audience to shake hands. The crowd erupted into applause and cheers.

Speaking with Xinhua, many cast members expressed their interest in China and its culture, mentioning everything from the Forbidden City to Chinese food.

Rachel Turner, who studies theater and performance at Leeds, fell in love with the "amazing cultural experiences in China." Turner has successfully applied for a one-year exchange program with the Shanghai Theater Academy. She hopes to someday introduce Chinese opera to people back home.

George Clifford, who performs in fluent Mandarin during the show, has changed his career plan from the well-paid financial industry and instead hopes to dedicate himself to exchanges between China and Britain.

"Chinese culture is increasingly exciting to the West. It is time for us to do more," said Adam Strickson, a Leeds faculty member who adapted Tang's play.

"The impact of their experience acting in Tang's play will be life-long," said Li Ruru, a professor of Chinese theater studies at Leeds. "Although many of them probably will not work in Chinese studies in the future, cross-cultural exchange will be something they want to explore forever."

Li Ruru argued that the show helps raise the profile of Tang's work and Chinese culture among Chinese people as well.

"Tang Xianzu is far less known in Britain, and the show makes more British people aware of him," Li said, adding that Tang's reputation is not even that widespread in China.

"The fact that even British college students are performing Tang's play may urge more Chinese people to pay attention to their own cultural legacy," said Li.

The Leeds group is scheduled to perform "Dreaming Under the Southern Bough" on September 25 in Fuzhou in east China's Jiangxi Province, Tang's birthplace.
BRUSSELS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU), for the first time in history, will be able to apply sanctions autonomously to Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaeda jihadist groups, as well as persons and entities associated with or supporting them.

Until now, sanctions could only be applied to persons and entities listed by the United Nations or by EU member states.

Sanctions, agreed by the European Council on Tuesday, include travel bans and asset freezing. Individuals and entities involved in any activity or support with Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaeda can be targeted, even if they are not on United Nations blacklists.

According to an EU statement, the broad scope of activities that fall under the sanctions comprises planning or perpetrating terrorist attacks; providing financing, oil or arms; having received terrorist training; and recruiting, inciting or publicly provoking acts, among others.

In a separate area of the new law, serious abuses of human rights, such as abduction and rape, is also listed.

The EU will also be able to impose restrictive measures on terrorist-related individuals, especially on so-called foreign fighters, travelling or seeking to travel both out of and into the EU.

According to Europol, more than 5,000 EU nationals have travelled to Syria, one third of them have since returned to Europe.
KABUL, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- China has offered 69 Afghan students scholarship awards to pursue various degree in Chinese language programs this year, as the two countries seek to boost educational exchanges and cooperation.

On Wednesday, some 56 students of Chinese language major from Confucius Institute at Kabul University, out of total students awarded, flew to China.

Education is one of the important areas of cooperation between the two countries, Raihana Popalzai, vice chancellor academic affairs of Kabul University, told the students at a pre-departure ceremony held for the beneficiaries on Monday.

Expressing gratitude to the Chinese government for extending scholarship opportunity to Afghan students, Popalzai urged the awardees to seize the opportunity to study hard.

She hoped the students could help further enhance the ties between the two peoples by having a good command of the Chinese language.

Established in 2008, the Confucius Institute has enrolled 321 local students learning Chinese and among them, 80 have graduated successfully.

Some 246 students of Chinese Department of Confucius Institute at Kabul University had benefited from scholarship offered by the Chinese government over the past eight years, according to Confucius Institute officials.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang(C on stage) addresses a welcoming dinner party organized by the Economic Club of New York, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the U.S.-China Business Council in New York, Sept. 20, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

NEW YORK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese premier Li Keqiang said on late Tuesday that the Chinese economy needs and is capable of maintaining medium-to-high growth rate.

Li made the statement when addressing a welcoming dinner party organized by the Economic Club of New York, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the U.S.-China Business Council.

Faced with weak global economic recovery and waves of geopolitical conflicts, no countries can stay immune to these unstable and uncertain factors, Li, who is here for a series of United Nations conferences and engagement with a wide spectrum of Americans, told about 1,000 elites of American business.

China' s economy, which has been deeply integrated into the world, is slowing down, but still maintains stable growth, at an annual rate of 6.7 percent for the first half this year, which is not easy for an economy that has reached 10 trillion U.S. dollars, he said.

With an annual growth rate of 6 percent to 7 percent, China' s economy each year can add the volume equivalent to a medium-sized economy, Li added.

The Chinese economy still needs to grow at medium-to-high rates, because every year there are 14 million extra population of labor force in urban areas and China also needs to wage war on poverty which is still plaguing over 50 million Chinese people, the premier said.

China is capable of maintaining this medium-to-high growth rate, thanks to its ongoing efforts to restructure and upgrade its economy and the emergence of new growth driving forces and dynamics, Li reassured the audience.

The great achievements China made in over three decades in the past is attributable to reform and opening up, which is still crucial for today's economic restructuring and upgrading, said the premier.

The gathering came one day after the premier met with U.S. President Barack Obama in New York, during which Li called for concerted efforts to promote economic and trade ties between the world's top two economies.

Economic and trade cooperation is the "cornerstone" and "propeller" of the China-U.S. relations, Li said during their talks.

Enhancing China-U.S. cooperation is in accord with the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the common wish of the world community, he said, while expressing China's willingness to deepen bilateral, regional and global cooperation in various fields.

Obama, for his part, reiterated that his country supports China's reform process and hopes that the two sides can make further progress in bilateral investment treaty negotiations.

Li is scheduled to attend the general debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday before heading to Canada to continue his overseas trip, which will also take him to Cuba.




TEHRAN, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Iranians on Wednesday staged nationwide military parade that showcased the country's military achievements, with the Iranian military commanders vowing to enhance the deterrent power of the country.

Iran's Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, said that Iran has established comprehensive defensive strategies to counter all threats and there will be no delay in Iran's military tests and war exercises, reported Tasnim news agency.

The Iranian commander said that certain regional countries, supported by the United States and Israel, seek to destabilize Iran and the region, but the Iranian Armed Forces enjoy powerful defense capabilities against any potential surprise attack.

He made the remarks in the ceremonies held to mark the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iran-Iraq war, which broke out in September 1980 and lasted through August 1988, incurred tremendous loss of lives and economic damage to both countries.

Half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers and civilians are believed to have died during the war, with many more injured.

The Iranian officials have blamed the West, particularly the United States, for supporting Saddam Hussein, then the ruler of Iraq, for attacking the Islamic republic.

Iran said that the United States and its allies supported "no decision" at UN on Iraq's use of chemical weapons in Iran-Iraq war in 1984.

Instead, the United States directly attacked Iran by hitting Iran's oil platforms in 1987 while Iran was engaged in war with Iraq, they said.

The United States also shot down Iranian civilian airliner in the Iranian territory in 1988.

As a show of emerging power, the Iranian armed forces, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), the Basij militia volunteer forces as well as aerospace units participated in the parade during the ceremony on Wednesday.

The former commander of the IRGC, Mohsen Rezaee, also called for military developments in the Islamic republic, which he argued will discourage the enemies of the country from any raid.

"The longer the range of our missiles, the less probable the war occurrence and the more secure our country," Rezaee was quoted as saying by semi-official Mehr news agency.

In the capital Tehran, the military parade was held at the mausoleum of the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The long-range surface-to-surface guided missile system Emad with a pinpoint accuracy, and a solid-fuel missile system dubbed Zolfaqar with a range of 750 kilometers and with a cluster warhead were among the homegrown systems put on display Wednesday in Tehran.

A similar parade was held in the port city of Bandar Abbas on Wednesday as well, in which over 500 vessels, fighter jets and helicopters participated, Tasnim reported.

On Wednesday, IRGC commander Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari recommended that the United States leave the Persian Gulf for good, since, he said, it is the home for the Iranian nation, Tasnim reported.

"We tell the Americans that they had better stop wasting the American people's assets and wealth by their malicious and harmful presence in the Persian Gulf," Jafari told reporters on the sidelines of the parade in Bandar Abbas.

The U.S. Navy had better go to the Bay of Pigs for adventurism or muscle show, he was quoted as saying.

Earlier this month, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said that the U.S. military forces should leave the Persian Gulf as their presence in Iran's southern waters has no legal basis.

"The presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf lacks any legal and international justification and is against the will of regional nations," Shamkhani said.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Paris Agreement on climate change has moved closer towards entry into force, as 31 more countries joined the agreement on Wednesday at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

At a special event held here, the 31 countries including Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Thailand deposited their ratification of the agreement with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Moreover, the European Union, Canada, Australia and some other countries have promised, through videos, to join the agreement no later than this year.

According to Ban, 60 parties representing over 47.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have joined the agreement, meeting one of the two requirements for bringing the Paris Agreement into force.

The agreement, adopted in December 2015, needs 55 nations that together account for 55 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions to ratify before it can formally enter into force.

In this regard, "I appeal to all leaders to accelerate your domestic procedures to join the agreement this year," said Ban.

On Sept. 3, the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, ratified the agreement, which outlines post-2020 global climate governance.

The much-anticipated Paris Agreement is the third international document on addressing climate change, following the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli (C back) attends a national teleconference on how to push forward the reform that asks for "random inspections of businesses by randomly selected law enforcement officers or inspectors" and the prompt release of results in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 21, 2016. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

BEIJING, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has urged a nationwide reform of oversight of markets in a bid to reduce unnecessary interference in normal business operations.

A national conference was held on Wednesday to discuss how to push forward the reform that asks for "random inspections of businesses by randomly selected law enforcement officers or inspectors" and the prompt release of results.

In a written instruction, Li said this is key to streamlining administration, transforming the functions of the government, improving performance, and reducing corporate costs and rent-seeking.

That will create a better environment for businesses and start-ups and contribute to sustained and healthy economic and social development, he said.

Chinese authorities seek to reinvigorate the slowing economy through reducing red tape and letting the market play a bigger role in economic operations.

Although China has made progress in streamlining administration, overhauling market regulation and optimizing government services, some measures have not been fully implemented. Unfair law enforcement, arbitrary inspections and inadequate supervision have revealed flaws in market regulation.

At Wednesday's meeting, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli underlined the importance of striking a good balance between the market's and government's role in the economy.

He said both the "invisible hand" and the "visible hand" should play their parts in the economy, but they should know where the line is drawn and carefully observe it.

He called for full implementation of random inspections by the end of 2017, putting it as a high priority for authorities.

Efforts must be made to create supervision mechanisms and carry out oversight in accordance with the law, he added.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations and the African Union (AU) has signed two agreements in order to further strengthen cooperation between the two international organizations in the area of peacekeeping support, UN officials said here Wednesday.

The agreements were signed in New York late Tuesday by the UN under-secretary-general for field support, Atul Khare, and the African Union Commission deputy chairperson, Erastus J.O. Mwencha, the officials said.

The first agreement paves the way for the participation of AU personnel in an administration and resource training program designed to foster mission support leadership and technical skills as well as nurture career development, said the officials.

Khare and Mwencha also agreed to establish a pilot staff exchange program related to peace support operations. The agreement allows staff members from both organizations to be deployed in each others' respective headquarters for three months to work on peacekeeping logistics, technology, financial and administrative matters.

Speaking at the signing ceremony, Mwencha said, "The African Union is encouraged by the continued collaboration with the United Nations. This staff exchange and knowledge sharing initiative is particularly significant as it will enhance our collaboration efforts and augment the value derived from the face-to-face interactions between our staff members."

"In today's virtual world, face-to face knowledge sharing is a rarity and at AU we welcome and value the enrichment that this intimate approach will offer to our continued collaboration efforts," he said.

For his part, Khare said, "African peacekeeping contributions are the backbone of our operations. We are committed to strengthening our partnership which enables effective delivery by the African Union for our collective benefit and to reinforcing the operational benefits of cooperation."

"We look forward to also benefitting from the experience of the African Union through the deployment of their staff members in the Department of Field Support," said the senior UN official.

Both initiatives were developed by the UN Department of Field Support as a response to an African Union request to strengthening their capacity in peace operations support.
KIEV, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Contact Group on Ukraine crisis signed on Wednesday a framework deal on separating the conflicting forces in the country's eastern region of Donbas, said a spokesperson for Kiev's delegate.

"The document envisages the de-escalation near the contact line and actually creates the conditions under which small arms cannot be used for attacks," Darka Olifer, spokesperson for Ukraine's representative in the group Leonid Kuchma, wrote on her Facebook page.

At the first stage, the Ukrainian government and independence-seeking insurgents will withdraw their weapons and troops from three clearly-defined sections of the contact line, Olifer said, noting that in the future the separation of forces could be carried out along the entire frontline.

International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will monitor the withdrawal process, she added.

The pullback of weapons from the contact line in eastern Ukraine is one of the key provisions of the Minsk peace deal signed in early 2015, designed to put an end to the conflict, which has already killed more than 9,600 people.

If implemented, the measure could pave the way for a sustainable ceasefire and realization of political steps prescribed in the deal.
WINDHOEK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Namibia's Environment ministry is conducting an elephant census in the north west of the country in order to further understand elephant distribution and density.

Chief public relations officer, Romeo Muyunda on Wednesday said the census which has kicked off last week is expected to end in the second week of October.

Muyunda confirmed that the results from the elephant census are set to help the ministry's approach to human-elephant conflict management.

The move by the ministry comes in the light of claims that the ministry is not attending to cases of human-wildlife conflict which occur throughout Namibia on communal as well as freehold land.

Environment minister, Pohamba Shifeta on Tuesday refuted the claims that his ministry has not been attending to the cases of wildlife conflict.

"We continue to invest resources and time to mitigate the impacts of human wildlife conflicts," he added.

According to Shifeta, environment officials across the country, in particular the Kunene region in the northwest where the majority of these concerns emanate from, are working closely with farmers and communities to bring the situation under control.

He said four elephants have been collared to monitor their movements.

The collar data will be shared with the local farmer's association on a daily basis which they use to inform their members on the movements of elephants in the area to mitigate further losses, he added.

Meanwhile, Shifeta also noted that a relatively high frequency of conflicts involving lion predation on livestock also occurs in specific parts of the Kunene region.

Due to the on going conflict, the ministry recognized the need for new innovation ideas on how to address human wildlife conflict and has initiated the process of reviewing the National Policy on Human Wildlife Conflict Management. Enditem
TIKRIT, Iraq, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces on Wednesday fought the Islamic State (IS) militant and retook control of 12 villages in the northern central province of Salahudin, while the troops freed four villages in the country's western province of Anbar during the second day of offensive aimed at defeating the extremist group in the country, provincial security sources said.

Backed by the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi aircraft, the troops and allied paramilitary Sunni tribal fighters continued their advance toward the IS-held town of Shirqat, some 280 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and managed to free five villages around the town during the day, in addition to seven villages freed during the first day of the offensive, the source from Salahudin Operations Command told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

At least four security members and paramilitary tribal fighters were killed on Wednesday and 12 others wounded, while a civilian was killed and three others wounded when an IS mortar round hit their house at one of the freed villages, the source said.

By the end of the day, the troops took new positions on the edges of the town of Shirqat, and are now stationed about one kilometer away from the central part of the town, where the local government buildings located, he said.

"We expect to free the central part of the town within the coming hours," the source added.

On Tuesday, a military source said the security forces and allied Sunni paramilitary tribal fighters launched at dawn an operation to free Shirqat and advanced toward the town from three directions after heavy artillery and mortar barrage on IS positions.

The liberation of the town, which is the last one under the IS control in Salahudin province, is part of a major offensive to liberate the major IS stronghold in Mosul, the capital of Iraq's northern province of Nineveh.

Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, is the second largest city in Iraq. It has been under the IS control for more than two years since the extremist group took control of parts of Iraq's northern and western regions in June 2014.

Meanwhile, a military source from Iraq's western province of Anbar told Xinhua that the security forces and allied Sunni tribal fighters freed four villages as part of an operation to free sprawling agricultural area of Jazirat Haditha near the town of Haditha, some 200 km northwest of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, and the nearby rural area of Jazirat al-Baghdadi, from IS militants.

The operation in the province came as the Iraqi security forces and allied units are fighting to drive IS militants out of the province after they reclaimed key cities and towns, including the provincial capital of Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad, the source said.

The operations in the two provinces were launched on Tuesday, just hours after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the launching of the two operations in a televised message from New York, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly.

Iraqi security forces and allied units have been battling IS militants for retaking large territories in northern and western Iraq that was seized by the IS since June 2014.
BAGAN, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese archeological expert team will help Myanmar renovate quake-hit ancient pagodas and temples in Bagan, an ancient city in central Myanmar, Chinese Ambassador to Myanmar Hong Liang told a press conference here on Wednesday.

The team arrived in Bagan on Monday for a week-long visit to study the damaged status of the pagodas and temples in order to help repair them in cooperation with the UNESCO and Myanmar team.

The ambassador said that through helping in the renovation work, the ties between the peoples of China and Myanmar will be enhanced.

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar on Aug.24, affecting Bagan where 425 ancient pagodas and temples locate, said U Kyaw Oo Lwin, director general of the archeology department of Myanmar.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos addresses on the second day of the 71st session of United Nations General Assembly general debate at the UN headquarters in New York, the United States, Sept. 21, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Colombia announced here Wednesday that the conflict which lasted about 50 years in the Latin America has ended.

Juan Manuel Santos Calderson, the president of Colombia, made the announcement as he was taking the floor at the General Debate of the UN General Assembly, which entered its second day here Wednesday.

"After more than half a century of internal armed conflict, I come back to the United Nations today, on the International day of Peace, to announce, with all the strength of my voice and of my heart: the war in Colombia has ended," the president said.

The announcement also came on the International Day of Peace, which is observed annually on Sept. 21.

On Aug. 24, the negotiators from the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- Peoples' Army (FARC-EP) declare in Havana, Cuba, that everything was agreed and they adopted the final text of the Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict.

"Five days later, a bilateral and definitive ceasefire and cease of hostilities took place," he said. "Since then, there has not been a single death, a single wound, a single bullet fired, in the conflict with the FARC."

The truce accord will be officially signed in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, on Sept. 26, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to be there to witness the historic movement.

Beginning from Sept. 26, the former members of the guerrilla will start going to concentration areas where they will surrender their arms to the United Nations in a period of six months, and will begin their process of reintegration into society, the president said.

"The arms will be melted and will become three monuments to peace, one here in New York, one in Cuba, where the peace negotiation took place, and another one in Colombia," he said.

"These monuments will remind us that the bullets are behind us and the construction of a new and better country has begun," he said.

Four years ago, the Colombian government and the FARC set out to resolve one of the world's oldest armed conflicts through dialogue.

The conflict between the Colombian government and the leftist rebel group started in the 1960s as an uprising for land rights. It has left about 260,000 people dead, 45,000 missing and nearly 7 million displaced, according to official figures.
KIGALI, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Delegates attending an African regional forum in Rwanda's capital Kigali have advocated for improved livelihood and incomes of small-holder farmers across Africa.

The three-day conference that concluded on Wednesday recommended African governments and development partners to renew and strengthen efforts to support millions of vulnerable small-holder farmers on the continent to improve and diversify their food production.

"Small-holder farmers are the most vulnerable when it comes to poverty, hunger and starvation as they are ill-equipped with knowledge and skills to improve their agricultural practices for increased crop production," said Jean-Marc Faures, senior program officer for coordination of sustainable food and agriculture with Food Agriculture Organization (FAO).

He added that improving the livelihood of small-holder farmers is one of the five goals of the Zero Hunger Challenge, a United Nations program that calls on both public and private institutions to scale up efforts to achieve 100-percent access to adequate food all year round.

According to Geraldine Mukeshimana, Rwandan minister of agriculture, improving farming methods of small-holder farmers should be put at the center of the country's growing economy.

"Rwanda has been investing in key programs along the food value chains to increase farm productivity and incomes for the poor communities while safeguarding the environment," she said.

At the meeting, agriculturalists argued that hunger and poverty in Africa can be eliminated if African economies create better opportunities for farmers and focus on the needs of small-holder farmers.

FAO estimates that 233 million people in Africa were hungry and undernourished in 2014.

According to the World Bank, there are an estimated 500 million small-holder households globally, amounting to more than 2 billion people.

Most small-scale farmers cultivate less than 5 acres and make up a significant portion of the world's poor population, who live on less than 2 U.S. dollars a day.

Jamie Morrison, senior economist in the Trade and Markets Division at FAO, said that improving the lives of small-holder farmers should be a priority in efforts to end global poverty.

"Transforming the lives of small-holder farmers requires enhancing their farming skills in agribusiness and post-harvest management, value addition and marketing," he said.

The meeting, organized by FAO, was aimed at discussing how the principles for sustainable food and agriculture can promote joint action to strengthen the contribution of agriculture, forestry and fisheries to sustainable development. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Finland on Wednesday welcomed a "more transparent and more inclusive" selection process to elect the next UN secretary-general, and also welcomed many female candidates running for the post of the world's top diplomat.

Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland, made the remarks as he was taking the floor at the General Debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly, the week-long annual high-level event which entered its second day here Wednesday.

"The next secretary-general will be a subject of almost colossal expectations," he said.

"Finland welcomes a selection process that is more transparent and more inclusive," he said. "We also welcome the fact that so many female candidates are seeking the position."

There are five female candidates who entered into the race, they were Irina Bokova, head of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Argentina's Foreign Minister Susanna Malcorra, former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who is currently head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Christina Figuers, former executive secretary of the UN Climate Change convention in Paris, and Moldova's Foreign Minister Natalia Gherman.

There are only four on the list at this moment after Figuers decided to drop out of the race last week after a round of secret ballot of the UN Security Council.

The Security Council will have a new round of straw poll next Monday on the current candidates vying to be next UN secretary-general to succeed Ban Ki-moon on Jan. 1.

This year, the 193-member UN General Assembly took a more active role in the selection process, aiming to make it more transparent and inclusive. For the first time in history, the candidates were asked to submit their resumes and to take part in informal briefings with the General Assembly.

It is the duty of the 15-member council to forward its recommendation for the next secretary-general to the General Assembly to vote on.

There are hopes in some quarters for a first-ever woman secretary-general as well as in others quarters for a UN chief from an Eastern Europe country. It is hoped a candidate can be chosen by November.
NEW YORK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has left for Canada after he wrapped up a four-day visit here for UN conventions as well as promoting China-U.S. relations.

During the past several days, world leaders and UN officials discussed important issues such as Syrian civil war, refugee crisis, the nuclear issue in Korean Peninsula and the world's sluggish economy. So naturally, Li's visit has drawn great attention from world's influential media.

Bloomberg focuses on Li's remarks on China's economy. In an article published on Tuesday, the business information provider's news outlet quoted Li's comments on China's economy, and said that "Li's expression of confidence in the nation's economic outlook follows similar signals from the central bank this week."

"China's economy has shown a steady upward trend and has huge room for maneuver," Bloomberg quoted Li as saying.

Screenshot from Bloomberg's website. (Xinhua)

South China Morning Post highlighted important issues that were discussed in this year's UN summit and pointed out that the world is looking closely on how China would react on all the tricky issues.

"China reached a deal with Damascus to provide aid and training to the Syrian government," the newspaper said in an article published on Monday, adding that China may have a "bigger say in both a solution to problems in Syria and also in the Middle East."

Screenshot from the website of the South China Morning Post. (Xinhua)

The Associated Press reported the talks between China and the United States on the nuclear issue in Korean Peninsula. Almost all major media outlets in the United States, such as The New York Times, Washington Post and Yahoo News, have run the report.

"The U.S. and China are vowing to coordinate more closely on addressing the nuclear threat posted by North Korea," AP said.

Screenshot from The New York Times. (Xinhua)

Reuters also ran a similar story, reporting the two countries' cooperation on the nuclear issue in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

"U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang agreed on Monday to step up cooperation in the United Nations Security Council and in law-enforcement channels after North Korea's fifth nuclear test," Reuters quoted the White House as saying.

Screenshot from Reuters' website. (Xinhua)
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Following are quotable quotes from the speakers at the General Debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 21:

"Unfortunately, the world continues to confront challenges to international peace and security all over. Narrow-minded nationalism, racism and violent extremism are on the rise. We must battle these destructive ideologies." -- Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland.

"My country, Zimbabwe, is the victim of spiteful sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western countries for some sixteen years now. As a country, we are being collectively punished for exercising the one primordial principle enshrined in the United Nations Charter that of sovereign independence. We are being punished for doing what all other nations do, that is, responding to and looking after the basic interests of our people." -- Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe.

"Africa does not need your sympathy or Overseas Development Assistance. Africa needs a fair chance to trade with the rest of the world and amongst ourselves. The progress towards the creation of a Continental Free Trade Area (CEFTA) is commendable adn must be fast tracked." -- John Dramani Mahama, the president of Ghana.

"After more than half a century of internal armed conflict, I come back to the United Nations today, on the International day of Peace, to announce, with all the strength of my voice and of my heart: the war in Colombia has enede." -- Juan Manuel Santos Calderson, the president of Colombia.

"The Cold War is now behind us, paving the way for greater opportunities for global synergy. Even amongst the younger nations like Kenya, technological invention, such as MPESA (a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service), are leapfrogging us into the future, promising greater prosperity and integration." -- William Samoei Ruto, the deputy president of Kenya.

"The 21st century has brought with it an ever-complex international arena, when some old conflicts have lingered and exacerbated, while new threats and challenges in the form of violent extremism and terrorism, displacement and migrantion, climate change, and other challenges have emerged, threatening all humanity." -- Sarwar Danesh, the vice president of Afghanistan.
BEIRUT, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- International funding to Lebanon stood at around 1.57 billion U.S. dollars as of August this year, which saw a remarkable rise since June, said a statement released Wednesday.

Among the total 1.57 billion dollars, 1.22 billion has already been disbursed or committed to be disbursed this year, said the statement, released by the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon (UNSCOL).

"This level of funding shows the continued high level of donor support to Lebanon in response to the impact of the Syrian crisis," said the statement.

The funding includes 979 million dollars provided to UN agencies and NGOs in support of activities under the 2016 Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP), which is now 47 percent funded, said the statement.

Philippe Lazzarini, resident and humanitarian coordinator from the UNSCOL, noted that continued support is essential for the country, since more than 70 percent of Syrian refugees live below the poverty line, which is 3.84 dollars of spending per day.

Poverty also hits the Lebanese population, with approximately 32 percent of Lebanese living in poverty, according to the LCRP.

Lazzarini thanked the "huge amount of assistance" from donor countries so far, but also noted that "much more needs to be done," stressing collective responsibility in addressing the refugee crisis.
by Christine Lagat

NAIROBI, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese businessman Frank Yang's sunny optimism about African market was reinforced during his recent visit to the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where an exhibition was held.

The vice general manager of a Chinese manufacturer of agrochemicals is upbeat that venturing into the Kenyan market promises huge rewards.

During an interview with Xinhua on the sidelines of a China-Africa Agrochemical Exhibition on Tuesday, Yang said his company intended to expand its footprint in Kenya where demand for farm inputs is on the rise.

"Kenya is a very strategic market for us and we are in discussions with several local partners to facilitate our entry here," said Yang, adding that his company had already established a strong presence in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.

Forty Chinese firms participated in the exhibition, which was established last year, to showcase their products and explore new business opportunities in Kenya and the larger eastern African region.

Yang said his conversation with Kenyan officials and business executives shone a spotlight on bright prospects for agro-chemical industry in the country as Kenya is fast-tracking the mechanization of agriculture.

"The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in Kenya has grown at an annual average of 10 percent. A majority of farmers are convinced that managing crop pests and diseases alongside adding nutrients to the soils is key to higher productivity," Yang said.

He said that as Kenya and other African countries were adopting highly mechanized farming systems, demand for fertilizers and pesticides would increase.

"So far, consumption of agro-chemicals in Kenya may not be at par with global standards but it will increase tremendously in the near future," Yang added.

Dozens of Chinese businessmen who participated in the exhibition expressed their confidence in the Kenyan market and said they would fast-track negotiations with local partners to facilitate their entry.

James Zeng, the managing director of a Chinese manufacturer of products used in farming, said the Kenyan agro-chemicals industry remained attractive to Chinese investors despite several regulatory hurdles.

"We are already doing business in West Africa and Egypt. And Kenya presents new opportunities to manufacturers of agro-chemicals," Zeng said.

Zeng said his company was seeking a local partner in Kenya to facilitate export of compounds used in the manufacture of farm inputs.

These are signs that more Chinese firms are willing to be part of Kenya's agricultural development. And Kenya's stable food production to meet local and regional demand has led to an attractive market for products used in farming for Chinese businessmen.

Peter Li from another Chinese manufacturer of fertilizers said his company intended to venture into the Kenyan market where he expected good returns.

His company produces and exports water soluble fertilizer that has gained traction across Africa where governments are promoting soil regeneration using organic matter.

Li said water soluble fertilizers promise higher yields without compromising the health of soils, water sources and other vital ecosystems.

"The use of water soluble fertilizers by Kenyan farmers is a brilliant choice since it will reverse salinity in soils and boost crop yield," Li said.

Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Willy Bett, who attended the exhibition, said Kenya had created a friendly policy and environment to attract Chinese investment in the agro-chemicals market.

"Kenya has been collaborating with China in the field of agriculture to enhance productivity of this sector. We encourage Chinese investors to explore our agro-chemical industry that has potential for growth," Bett said.

Kenya is a regional hub for manufacturing and exports of agro-chemicals thanks to its strategic position, supportive infrastructure like roads, seaports and power.

"China is a leading producer and exporter of fertilizers and chemicals for management of crop diseases and pests. The country can help us develop our own agro-chemicals industry," Bett said.

Ma Chunyan, an official from the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a trade body backed by the Chinese government, said that Kenya was among leading importers of products used in farming from China.

"In 2015, Kenya and Tanzania imported from China pesticides worth 900,000 U.S. dollars. This is a clear indication the local and regional market for agro-chemicals is yet to be tapped fully," Ma said.

She added that Chinese firms were ready to offer technical and financial support to catalyze agricultural transformation in Africa.
TIRANA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The European Union's further support to Albania's transport sector through the aid budget of 24 million euros (26.78 million U.S. dollars) is to be allocated over the next three years, EU ambassador to Tirana Romana Vlahutin said on Wednesday.

However, the funds would be awarded on the basis of the government's progress in achieving agreed upon results, Vlahutin told Albanian transport minister Sokol Dervishaj.

The EU ambassador stressed the need for further efforts towards aligning the Albanian legislation with that of the EU, and the development of a network of transport infrastructure that complied with investment priorities, the Albanian transport ministry informed in a press release.

The ministry statement also said Vlahutin urged the Albanian government to continue efforts to increase road safety which, in her view, remained a concern in the country.

Dervishaj highlighted that the transport ministry would continue to achieve investment projects, such as the completion of some main national road axes and increasing road safety.

The European Union has provided over 215 million euros for the transportation and water and sanitation systems under the instrument for pre-accession assistance one (IPA I) program from 2007 to 2013.
BUJUMBURA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Burundian government has rejected a report by three United Nations independent experts on "abundant evidence of gross human rights violations" in Burundi, a senior communication adviser at the Burundian president's office said Wednesday.

"The Burundian government rejects the report written by the so-called independent experts. The report is biased and is not credible. It shows the negligence of the experts during their assignment," said Willy Nyamitwe, senior communication adviser at the office of Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza.

According to Nyamitwe, the UN independent experts "only focused their assignment on anonymous testimonies" instead of doing a "real" research.

"They relied on wrong information circulated on the internet and detractors of the government and security forces instead of coming to Burundi to carry out a scientific work," said Nyamitwe.

However, the three UN independent experts had been to Burundi twice in March 1-8 and June 13-17 separately this year. The third visit due this month could not take place for security reasons.

The report issued on Tuesday in Geneva, Switzerland, bearing on a period ranging from April 15, 2015 to June 30, 2016, documented 564 executions committed by the government and affiliated groups.

It also targeted assassinations, arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence.

According to the report, executions have been committed on a large scale by security forces, often supported by the ruling party's youth wing known as Imbonerakure, adding that the majority of the victims were opposed, or perceived to be opposed, to the third term of Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza.

Burundi plunged in a crisis since April 2015 when Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run his controversial third term in violation of the national constitution and the 2000 Arusha Agreement.

More than 500 people in Burundi have been killed and some 270,000 people fled to neighboring countries mostly Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda since the outbreak of the crisis. Enditem
BEIRUT, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Head of Mission and Force Commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Major-General Michael Beary praised the "calm situation that has been marked on the borders between Israel and Lebanon since a decade now."

Beary made the remarks at a ceremony held at the UNIFIL headquarters on the occasion of the International Day of Peace, stressing that their support help local people "not only survive but also lay the foundations of peace for the coming generations."

"I am glad to say that we are making progress," said Beary, who was at the ceremony by representatives of UNIFIL contingents from 40 countries, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), local government authorities and political, religious and civil leaders from across south Lebanon.

Following the 33-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in July 2006, the UNIFIL's mandate has changed to monitor the cessation of hostilities, support the Lebanese Armed Forces and extending help to ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons.

While paying tribute to the 310 peacekeepers who have lost their lives in the cause of peace in Lebanon, he said "it is our responsibility to continue the struggle for peace in south Lebanon so that the sacrifice of the fallen will not be in vain."

The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 by the UN General Assembly. Two decades later, in 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the Day as a period of non-violence and ceasefire.
JUBA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan on Wednesday marked International Day of Peace as the war-torn African country tried to reignite hopes for peace.

Speaking during celebrations in Juba to mark the day, South Sudan Vice President James Wani Igga urged devastated citizens to restore hope and trust in transitional government as it plans path of implementing a peace pact to achieve everlasting peace.

"Peace is the ultimate desire of human life and we are working hard to bring happiness to our civil population," the VP said.

A new round of fighting erupted in South Sudan on July 8 between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and former First Vice President Riek Machar, which has left hundreds of people dead and sent over 100,000 others fleeing into neighboring countries.

The fighting forced Machar to leave the capital Juba and he has since been replaced by Taban Deng Gai as first vice president, a move that has caused further division among the former rebels known as SPLM/A-In Opposition.

A coalition of civil society including international organizations and government units gathered in the Nyakuron Cultural Center to mark the day under the theme "Together We Can Heal the Nation".

"If the government may use much of its effort in rebuilding national cohesiveness, then we can proudly say peace will return in our country," John Akol, a student from Juba Day Secondary School, told Xinhua.

Akol said the country can achieve relative peace only if the international community can exert enough pressure on Kiir's government to implement the current agreement in good faith.

James Okuk, a political analyst at University of Juba, told Xinhua that the day meant a lot to the war-torn young nation because it reminds leaders of their trajectory to peace and how to envisage total coexistence, reconciliation in the country.

"We don't want any single South Sudanese to live outside the country either as asylum seekers, refugee, internally displaced persons," Okuk said. Enditem
PARIS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Most of French people said they were against welcoming refugees as the country is struggling to handle humanitarian crisis and secularity situation in Calais "jungle" where thousands of migrants are still camping, a poll showed on Wednesday.

An Elabe poll for news channel BFMTV said 57 percent of respondents said opposed to take in more refugees while 43 percent were in favor.

According to Yves-Marie Cann, Elabe analyst said the survey mirrored a return to opinions distribution recorded before publication of the drowning toddler Aylan Kurdi's photograph which has changed the French tune.

The pollster also said eight out of ten respondents backed the government's decision to dismantle refugees camp in northern city of Calais, where up to 9,000 refugees are camping in hope to cross to Britain via the Euro tunnel channel, according to humanitarian organizations

France promises to receive 30,000 refugees over the next two years.

In 2015, European leaders agreed on the EU proposal to redistribute 160,000 refugees across European states in order to help struggling Greece to cope with chaotic flows of migrants at its doors.

Escalating wars in Syria and Iraq, adding to persistent political instability in many African countries and in the Middle East, forced millions of people to risk their lives by boarding rickety boats to seek better life on the other Mediterranean rim.
PARIS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- French Foreign Minister Jean-Mac Ayrault on Wednesday hailed Ukraine and independence-seeking insurgents' accord to withdraw troops and heavy weapons in three hot spots, but said more works were still needed to fully implement Minsk peace deal.

"(The agreement) is therefore not an end, but the beginning of a process aimed at consolidating the fragile ceasefire which came into force on Sept. 1, 2016," Ayrault said in a statement.

The French top diplomat called on rival camps to fully implement the deal aimed at de-escalating violence by withdrawing troops and arms in three towns on the front line in eastern Ukraine.

Paris and Berlin would continue promoting a diplomatic alternative to end the Ukrainian crisis by pressing Kiev and Moscow to respect truce accord signed in early 2015 in Belarus capital, according to Ayrault.

Brokered by France and Germany, Minsk accord demanded a complete cease of hostilities, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, prisoner exchanges and the restoration of the Ukrainian government control over the state border.

However, sporadic violence violated the deal, putting at risk the region's stability.
Survivors of a capsized migrant boat stay at a police station in the port city of Rosetta, Egypt, Sept. 21, 2016. The death toll of the capsized migrant boat near Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday rose to 42, while six were wounded and 35 others rescued after first aid treatment in hospitals, Egyptian Health Ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed told Xinhua. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa)

CAIRO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The death toll of the capsized migrant boat near Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday rose to 42, while six were wounded and 35 others rescued after first aid treatment in hospitals, the Egyptian Health Ministry's official spokesman Khaled Megahed told Xinhua.

The migrant boat that drowned near the coast of Egypt's northern Beheira province carried about 600 people onboard whose destination was supposed to be Italian shores, according to official MENA news agency.

Although other reports said that over 150 people were rescued, Megahed clarified that the Health Ministry's data are restricted to those survivors who received first aid treatment at the ministry's hospitals.

"The total number of survivors can be received from the Interior Ministry, but the Health Ministry's reports are based only on those admitted to hospitals and survived after receiving first aid treatment," he told Xinhua.

The boat set off from the Borg Meghizal village in Kafr El-Sheikh province and was on its way to Italy when it drowned at nearby Beheira waters.

The border guards rescued dozens of people from the boat, sent some of them to nearby hospitals while the rescue process was still going on.

Illegal migration via Egyptian Mediterranean Sea shores rose over the past few years in attempts to reach Europe and flee difficult economic conditions in the most populous Arab country.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during the general debate of the UN General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York Sept. 21, 2016. Premier Li called for joint efforts to address sustainable development, global challenges. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday took the floor at the annual high-level debate of the UN General Assembly to expound China's views on international affairs and proposals to promote sustainable development as well as address global challenges.

This was the first time for Li, who took office as Chinese premier in 2013, to address the 193-member General Assembly.

China attaches great importance to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and will push forward the action plan jointly made by leaders attending the Group of 20 (G20) summit, which was held in the east China city of Hangzhou, said Li.

He called on the international community to jointly address the global challenges so as to build an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive global structure of sustainable development.

The 2030 Agenda, endorsed and launched at the UN Summit for Sustainable Development last year, is a blueprint for eradicating poverty across the world for the years leading up to 2030.

Implementation of the Agenda, including its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, is high on the agenda of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly, which opened last week.

On behalf of the Chinese government, Li released the country's national plan for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the UN Headquarters in New York on Monday when he chaired a roundtable on SDGs.

Li said it is in line with the common interests of the people all over the world and an important guarantee to achieve the SDGs to firmly safeguard the current international system with the United Nations as its core and the international relations norms on the basis of the UN charter.

The premier called on countries to support the United Nations and the Security Council in playing a leading role in international affairs and continue to better the global governance mechanism.

Countries should also stick to the general direction of seeking political solution to hot issues and building a global partnership featuring dialogue rather than confrontation, partnership rather than alliance, he said.

On the current economic challenges, Li said the world economy is facing problems of insufficient demand and prominent structural contradiction.

He suggested countries apply various policy tools to address the economic problems, combining both need-side management and supply-side reform as well as long-term and short-term policies.

All countries need to map out macro policies in a responsible manner and take measures to deal with the impacts brought by economic globalization, said Li.

He urged countries to firmly oppose protectionism in all forms and safeguard the free trade system represented by the World Trade Organization in order to promote the world economy to develop in the path of robust, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth, and strive to create an international environment that is conducive to reduce inequality and imbalance of global development.

As a big developing country with a population of 1.3 billion, China has earnestly carried out its due international obligations, Li said.

China has provided 400 billion RMB (some 59.9 billion U.S. dollars) to 166 countries and more than 30 international and regional organizations, and trained some 12 million personnel in various sectors for other developing countries, said Li.

Besides, China has become one of the first countries to deposit instruments of joining the Paris Agreement on climate change, Li said.

The country will also provide 300 million dollars in humanitarian aid to relevant countries and international organizations to address the refugee crisis, he added.

China stands ready to further deepen reforms and expand opening-up so as to work with the international community to build a better world in which each individual can enjoy the freedom from want, an opportunity to develop and be treated with dignity, said Li.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon attends a high-level meeting on Syria at the Security Council Chamber at the UN Headquarters in New York, Sept. 21, 2016. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday called on the UN Security Council to fully support his special envoy in working on convening formal talks to resolve the Syria conflict. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday called on the UN Security Council to fully support his special envoy in working on convening formal talks to resolve the Syria conflict.

"We are at a make or break moment" in Syria, where the civil war broke out in March 2011, Ban told an open council meeting on Syria.

He also called for the council support for his special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in his efforts to develop proposals for future talks, or risk destroying the international community's credibility in being able to uphold "our common humanity."

The Security Council now has "no higher responsibility" than backing political path in Syria, Ban said.

The council meeting was held on the sidelines of the annual high-level debate of the UN General Assembly, the week-long event which opened here Tuesday.

"We are at a make or break moment," Ban said. "I challenge everyone to use their influence now to restore a cessation of hostilities, enable humanitarian assistance everywhere it is needed, and support the United Nations in charting a political path for the Syrians to negotiate a way out of the hell in which they are trapped."

"You have now no higher responsibility in your service as members of the United Nations Security Council," Ban said.

As a result of the longstanding conflict, more than 300,000 Syrians have been killed, half of the Middle East country's population has been uprooted, and much of its infrastructure lies in ruins, he noted.

In addition, many Syrians fear that fragmentation of their country could follow, with Daesh (also known as the Islamic State) and al-Qaida affiliates poised to exploit further chaos, he said.

"The Syrian tragedy shames us all," he said. "The collective failure of the international community should haunt every member of this Council."

Global norms of humanitarian law have been "flagrantly violated," defying the Security Council's resolutions, he said.

De Mistura has been struggling to keep the stalled peace process alive amid a surge in fighting between Syrian forces and rebel fighters.

At the same time, the secretary-general said that it is known that international unity can make a difference as council unity and resolve has led to the elimination of Syria's previously denied chemical weapons programme and the attribution of responsibility for their use.

Moreover, food and medicines have been delivered to millions of Syrians, also across front lines and via air drops to besieged and hard-to-reach areas. The formation of the International Syria Support Group has also provided fresh momentum to the search for a settlement and paved the way for Security Council resolution 2254, adopted in 2015, the UN chief said.

Meanwhile, Ban also recalled that the cessation of hostilities -- albeit fragile -- that began in late February yielded positive results for a few months.

In that window, the UN intensified humanitarian operations and brought the parties to Geneva for talks, he said.

"But that process was once again overwhelmed by violence," the secretary-general said, noting that the "long-sought" agreement between the Russian Federation and the United States, concluded on Sept. 9 "represents a new opportunity."
OTTAWA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- All schools students have been safely evacuated Wednesday in Canada's Prince Edward Island province after police received a threat claiming bombs were placed in a number of schools, according to CTV Wednesday afternoon.

The island province has 62 public schools and nearly 20,000 students.

No injuries have been reported, nothing suspicious has been found at any of the schools, and no suspects linked to the threat have been identified.

A number of units from both federal and provincial police were involved in the investigation.

Some schools in Nova Scotia province and Manitoba province in the country were also threatened Wednesday, but police were still investigating whether the threats were linked.

At a news conference in Ottawa Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assured citizens that "all local authorities are deploying all necessary resources to this ongoing operation."

"As a parent, I know how worrisome this type of situation can be and I know that the affected parents must be having a very difficult day. We continue to monitor the situation closely."

The bomb threat to island schools was initially delivered to Royal Canada Mounted Police (RCMP) in Ottawa via fax on Wednesday morning.

The threatening message said that bombs were placed in several schools in the island province and would be detonated the same day, but did not specify school names.

All the schools were notified within 10 minutes and evacuations began as quickly as possible. All students are safe and there were no injuries during the evacuations.

Other threats targeted a Nova Scotia community college and some schools in Winnipeg. Police have not yet confirmed that the threats are linked.

Police officers attended each school on the island, but could not confirm that every school was actually searched for explosives.

The police later clarified that police will "investigate any unusual items in Island schools."
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (L) and his wife Cheng Hong are welcomed by Canadian senior officials upon their arrival at Ottawa, Canada, Sept. 21, 2016. At the invitation of his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrived here Wednesday for an official visit to Canada. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

OTTAWA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrived here Wednesday for an official visit to Canada, the first by a Chinese premier in 13 years.

Li, accompanied by his wife Cheng Hong and senior Chinese officials, arrived in Ottawa as the guest of his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau, who just paid an official visit to China and attended the G20 Hangzhou summit from Aug. 30 to Sept. 6.

China-Canada relations are with deep foundation, huge potential and great development opportunity, said Li upon his arrival, and added that the exchange of visits of Chinese premier and Canadian prime minister within one month showed that both sides value the bilateral relations.

Li said his visit will formally launch the annual dialogue mechanism between the Chinese premier and the Canadian prime minister, further exchange ideas with the Canadian side on issues of common concern, and promote exchanges and cooperation in all fields, in a bid to inject strong impetus into the development of China-Canada relations in the new period.

In Ottawa, Li and Trudeau will hold talks and witness the signing of a series of bilateral cooperation documents. Li will meet Canada's Governor General, Speaker of the Senate, Speaker of the House of Commons, and some local leaders.

Li and Trudeau will also attend and address the Canada-China Business Forum to be held in Montreal, and other cultural events.

It is the second stop of Li's trip after he attended the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Li will also visit Cuba later.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong said last week that the premier's visit to Canada showed the importance of the development of bilateral relations between the two countries, and it will inject strong impetus for future development.h China-Canada relations have been strengthened thanks to the joint efforts of the two sides. During Trudeau's visit to China, the two sides announced the establishment of the annual dialogue mechanism.

The two countries also established the China-Canada High-Level National Security and Rule of Law Dialogue during Trudeau's visit, and Canada announced that it had decided to apply for the membership of China-initiated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

China is now Canada's second largest trading partner. The trade between the two countries reached about 67.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, a 10.1 percent increase over 2014, accounting for 8.1 percent of Canada's total merchandise trade, according to Canadian statistics.




A Charlottetown Police vehicle drives into Sherwood Elementary School, which was one of the schools which Canadian police evacuated due to abomb threat, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, September 21, 2016. (REUTERS/John Morris)

OTTAWA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- All schools students have been safely evacuated Wednesday in Canada's Prince Edward Island province after police received a threat claiming bombs were placed in a number of schools, according to CTV Wednesday afternoon.

The island province has 62 public schools and nearly 20,000 students.

No injuries have been reported, nothing suspicious has been found at any of the schools, and no suspects linked to the threat have been identified.

A number of units from both federal and provincial police were involved in the investigation.

Some schools in Nova Scotia province and Manitoba province in the country were also threatened Wednesday, but police were still investigating whether the threats were linked.

At a news conference in Ottawa Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assured citizens that "all local authorities are deploying all necessary resources to this ongoing operation."

"As a parent, I know how worrisome this type of situation can be and I know that the affected parents must be having a very difficult day. We continue to monitor the situation closely."

The bomb threat to island schools was initially delivered to Royal Canada Mounted Police (RCMP) in Ottawa via fax on Wednesday morning.

The threatening message said that bombs were placed in several schools in the island province and would be detonated the same day, but did not specify school names.

All the schools were notified within 10 minutes and evacuations began as quickly as possible. All students are safe and there were no injuries during the evacuations.

Other threats targeted a Nova Scotia community college and some schools in Winnipeg. Police have not yet confirmed that the threats are linked.

Police officers attended each school on the island, but could not confirm that every school was actually searched for explosives.

The police later clarified that police will "investigate any unusual items in Island schools."
SANAA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- A United States citizen working as a teacher in a private English language school in the Yemeni capital Sanaa has been detained, witnesses and a security official said on Wednesday.

"Peter Willems was teaching his Yemeni students in the class when 10 armed men in plain clothes stormed the school and forced him out into one of their cars on Tuesday," a bodyguard of the school said.

A security official loyal to Shiite Houthi armed group, which is controlling Sanaa and government institutions, told Xinhua that "the American teacher was held inside the building of the National Security Service (intelligence) in the old city of Sanaa to ensure that the Saudi-led coalition warplanes will not hit the building or the old city again."

The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

On Monday, fighter jets from the coalition hit the intelligence building 10 times, causing large damage to nearby residents' homes that led to the death of a 50-year-old husband and his wife was fatally injured, according to the residents, medics and officials.

Houthi-controlled Saba news agency cited a security official of the intelligence service as saying that "the service is not a military establishment to be repeatedly targeted by Saudi aggression warplanes, but a security apparatus specializing in combating terrorism and is holding al-Qaida terrorist suspects and foreigners on charges of spying, including Americans."

Security situation in Yemen has deteriorated since March 2015, when war broke out after the Shiite Houthi group, supported by former President Ali Abdullash Saleh, stormed through Sanaa and forced internationally-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour into exile.

The move triggered a military air force intervention by the Saudi-led coalition to fight against the rebels and restore Hadi and his government to the capital.

The outbreak of war prompted foreign countries to close their embassies and evacuate their staff.

The war has killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, injured about 35,000 others and displaced over three million, according to statistics from humanitarian agencies.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday commended the pioneering role El Salvador is taking in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which was approved by world leaders in September 2015 to serve as the blueprint for the global development efforts in the years leading up to 2030.

The statement came as the secretary-general was meeting with Hugo Martinez Bonilla, the foreign minister of El Salvador, on the sidelines of the annual high-level debate of the UN General Assembly, which opened here Tuesday and runs through Sept. 26.

During the meeting, the secretary-general welcomed the government's willingness to seek consensus on issues of national interest and reiterated the UN's readiness to support those efforts, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters here.

"The secretary-general stressed the importance of ensuring that the extraordinary security measures in place in El Salvador comply with international human rights obligations and welcomed the establishment of a high-level commission to strengthen the internal control of the security forces," the spokesman said.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- President Borut Pahor of Slovenia said here Wednesday that his government will continue efforts to translate its "World Bee Day" initiative into reality in order to ensure food security, biodiversity and sustainable development.

The statement came as Pahor was speaking at the General Debate of the UN General Assembly, which entered its second day here Wednesday.

"Slovenia is also continuing its efforts to have 20 May proclaimed as 'World Bee Day'," the president said.

Slovenia expects to present a resolution during the 72nd session of the General Assembly, which will open in September 2017, "as it believes that strengthening common care for bees and other pollinators is needed to ensure food security, biodiversity and sustainable development," he said.

Slovenia recognizes the importance of bees and beekeeping for ensuring food security as well as preserving the entire ecosystem and natural biodiversity. The Slovenian government strives to preserve and protect the bees in our territory and throughout the European Union.

"World Bee Day" is sought in order to raise the global awareness of the importance of bees and beekeeping.

In April 2015, Slovenia proposes to the United Nations that the May 20 should be declared as "World Bee Day." The initiative needs to be approved by the 193-member General Assembly.
MINSK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Special Envoy Martin Sajdik Wednesday welcomed the signing of an accord by Ukraine and independence-seeking insurgents to withdraw troops and heavy weapons from three hot spots as "a big step forward."

"This is a very big and important step forward. This agreement was being waited at the top, not only in Russia and Ukraine, but also in Germany and France", Sajdik told reporters here on Wednesday.

The Contact Group on Ukraine crisis signed on Wednesday the framework deal on separating the conflicting forces in the country's eastern region of Donbas, said a spokesperson for Kiev's delegate.

Earlier, Darka Olifer, the spokesperson for Ukraine's representative in the group Leonid Kuchma, wrote on her Facebook page that "The document envisages the de-escalation near the contact line and actually creates the conditions under which small arms cannot be used for attacks,"

At the first stage, the Ukrainian government and independence-seeking insurgents will withdraw their weapons and troops from three clearly-defined sections of the contact line, Olifer said, noting that in the future the separation of forces could be carried out along the entire frontline.

International observers from the OSCE will monitor the withdrawal process, she added.

The pullback of weapons from the contact line in eastern Ukraine is one of the key provisions of the Minsk peace deal signed in early 2015, designed to put an end to the prolonged conflict, which has killed more than 9,600 people and injured 225,000 others over the past two years.

The next meeting of the Contact Group in Minsk is scheduled for Oct. 5.
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said on Wednesday it would commit 3 billion U.S. dollars over the next 10 years to help cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the 21st century.

An emotional Priscilla Chan, wife of Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer (CEO) of Facebook, Inc., told an event in San Francisco about her educational experience growing up in a Chinese-Vietnamese family, and experience as a pediatrician and as a mother.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, was launched as a philanthropic organization in December 2015 for the birth of the couple's daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.

The new program, called Chan Zuckerberg Science (CZS), will bring together teams of scientists and engineers to build new tools for medical research.

Saying that "as a pediatrician I've worked with families at the most difficult moments of their lives," Chan pledged "we'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease."

"We can do better than that," Zuckerberg said about research funding and the status quo that the United States spends 50 times more on treating people who are sick than on finding cures so people do not get sick in the first place.

Of the 3 billion dollars donation for CZS, 600 million dollars will be for Biohub, a new research center at the University of California, San Francisco, which will be joined by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Cori Bragmann, a neurobiologist, will head the CZS. She told the audience that output from the organization will be available to all doctors and researchers.
SANAA, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- At least 25 people, including children and women, were killed when warplanes from the Saudi-led military coalition hit provincial presidential palace and nearby residential quarter in Yemen's Red Sea port city of al-Hodayda in late night of Wednesday, medics, witnesses and residents said.

"Initial death toll is 25 and 73 others were brought to hospital with various injuries from the airstrikes," a local medic told Xinhua.

Witnesses and residents said the warplanes raided first the presidential palace, then waged other series of strikes on Hunood neighborhood in the vicinity of the palace.

A Houthi official told Xinhua that "all top officials inside the palace have survived the air attacks."

It was the latest of a series of air strikes on civilian targets.

Top officials of the Shiite Houthi armed group attended a public ceremony organized by the group in the port city to mark the second year anniversary of Sept. 21, the date that the group seized power after storming the capital Sanaa and other northern provinces in 2014.

Houthis seized al-Hodayda, the capital Sanaa and half of the country's north in Sept. 21, 2014, forcing internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.

The move triggered a military airforce intervention by the Saudi-led coalition in March 2015, to fight back the rebels and restore Hadi and his government to the capital.

Houthis is still in full control of most northern cities despite intensified 18-month war to roll back their gains.

The outbreak of war prompted foreign countries to close their embassies and evacuate their staff.

The war has since killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, injured about 35,000 others and displaced over three million, according to statistics from humanitarian agencies.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Police in Charlotte, the U.S. state of North Carolina, said on Wednesday a black man, shot dead by a police on Tuesday, was armed and ignored multiple warnings to drop his gun.

The claim by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney was in direct contradiction to accounts of the shooting by the victim's family and protesters.

Speaking at a press conference, Putney said that 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott did not hold a book, as claimed by Scott's family and the protesters, when he exited the vehicle.

"Officers were giving loud, clear verbal commands," said Putney. "The suspect exited the vehicle with a handgun, threatening officers."

While the black plainclothes officer who shot dead Scott was not wearing a body camera, Putney said three other uniformed officers were equipped with body cameras.

However, Putney said he could not release any footage recorded by other officers' body cameras because of the ongoing investigation, a claim soon disputed by a local civil rights group.

According to a statement by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, a new North Carolina law, which will prevent law enforcement agencies from releasing body camera footage without a court order, does not take effect till Oct. 1, 2016.

"What we already know is that far too many people of color are victims of wrongful targeting and excessive use of force by law enforcement officers across the country, and last night we were once again harshly reminded that North Carolina is not immune to that reality," said the statement.
RABAT, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Moroccan police arrested on Wednesday a man with suspected links to the Islamic State (IS) group, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

According to the statement, the suspect, arrested near the northern city of Meknes, was planning to carry out terror attacks against sensitive spots and tourist sites in the country.

The man was engaged in spreading IS ideology and had acquired advanced expertise in using remote explosives, the statement said.

He was about to buy materials used in bomb making, it insisted.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Interior Ministry said it had foiled a dangerous terrorist attack, plotted by the IS group, in the country last Friday.

Morocco is facing a growing threat from the IS. The Interior Ministry revealed that since 2002, more than 160 terrorist cells have been dismantled, which had close ties with terrorist groups active in Iraq and Syria. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) --Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed Wednesday to defeat terrorism in order to achieve its economic development goals.

Pakistan has been the principal victim of terrorism including that was supported, sponsored, and financed from abroad, Sharif said during the high-level debate of UN General Assembly.

"We will not allow externally sponsored terrorism and threats of destabilization to cause turbulence in Pakistan," he added.

Sharif said terrorism is now a global phenomenon, which must be addressed comprehensively and in all its forms. Pakistan has reinforced its resolve to eliminate the source of terrorism.

"Our priority of economic development requires internal peace and stability," Sharif said.

Meanwhile, Sharif said Pakistan agreed the implementation of the Sustainable Development Agenda should be the focus of this session and the country has fully integrated the 2030 Development Agenda into its own economic and social strategy.

Over 140 world leaders are gathering in New York to attend this year's general debate which runs through Sept. 26. This year's theme for the General Assembly is "The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Universal Push to Transform our World."
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The UN Security Council on Wednesday called on all the political parties in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to "refrain from further violence or other provocations and to address their differences peacefully."

The 15-nation UN body made the appeal in a press statement after violent clashes between protestors and security forces took place in Kinshasa and several other locations in the DRC on Sept. 19-20.

The council members "called upon all political parties, their supporters, and other political actors to refrain from further violence or other provocations and to address their differences peacefully," the statement said. "They urged all parties to remain calm and called on the Congolese authorities to exercise maximum restraint in their response to protests."

"They further called on the authorities to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially the right of peaceful assembly," the statement said.

"They also called on all concerned political leaders and their supporters to desist from undertaking any further acts that could continue to exacerbate the situation and heighten tensions."

The Security Council called on the DRC government "to hold accountable those responsible for violations and abuses of human rights," the statement said.

At least three people were killed on Tuesday amid escalating violence in the capital of the DRC. The headquarters of several opposition parties were torched in a riot that followed a mass demonstration staged by the opposition on Monday.

At least 17 people, including three policemen, were killed Monday in heavy clashes between protesters and police in Kinshasa.

The council members of the Security Council "expressed their deep concerns" about the new development in the country, said the statement.

"They strongly condemned the violence, which has already led to the death of at least 32 people, including four police officers in the capital. They expressed their regrets for the loss of lives and requested that those responsible be held accountable."
NEW YORK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday reaffirmed his support to a peace agreement reached between Colombian government and rebels, hailing the deal as "an achievement of historic proportions."

"I could not be more supportive of these efforts. The American people welcome these efforts," Obama told reporters before a bilateral meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

On Aug. 24, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced that they have reached the final peace agreement to conclude their peace negotiations that have been held since November 2012 in Havana.

Obama said the peace deal ended the longest war in Latin America and provided "an opportunity for Colombia to open an entirely new chapter of its history."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Cartagena, Colombia, on Monday, leading a U.S. delegation to witness the signing of the peace accord.

Obama also acknowledged that there will be "a lot of challenges involved in implementation" of the deal, and noted that Colombian people need to "lend their voice" to a referendum in order for the deal to move forward.

Expressing his appreciation for U.S. engagement to facilitate the negotiations, Santos gave Obama a copy of the peace agreement which he called "the most comprehensive peace agreement probably in history."

"You deserve a lot of credit for this very historic agreement which will change not only Colombia, the whole region," Santos said.

The conflict between the Colombian government and the leftist rebel group started in the 1960s as an uprising for land rights. It has left about 260,000 people dead, 45,000 missing and nearly 7 million displaced, according to official figures.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Wednesday urged India and Pakistan to resolve their outstanding issues, including Kashimir, through dialogue.

The UN chief made the remarks when he met here with Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan.

The meeting took place on the margins of the annual high-level debate of the UN General Assembly, the week-long event which opened here Tuesday.

"The secretary-general stressed the need for Pakistan and India to address their outstanding issues, including Kashmir, through dialogue in the interest of both countries and the region as a whole," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

"The secretary-general expressed appreciation to Pakistan for its hosting of one of the largest groups of refugees for decades," he said.

Pakistani and Indian military officials on Sunday established contact on hotline after militants killed at least 17 Indian troopers and injured over 20 others in a suicide attack on an Indian military base in Indian-controlled Kashmir, reports said.

Troops of India and Pakistan Tuesday targeted each other's positions on the Line of Control (LoC), dividing Kashmir, the reports said.

The two sides exchanged fire in village Latchipora of Uri sector in frontier Baramulla district, 125 km northwest of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.
US online social networking service company Facebook Chairman, chief executive, and co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, speaks during a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 22, 2016. The world's biggest mobile fair, is held from February 22 to February 25. (AFP/LLUIS GENE)

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said on Wednesday it would commit 3 billion U.S. dollars over the next 10 years to help cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the 21st century.

An emotional Priscilla Chan, wife of Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer (CEO) of Facebook, Inc., told an event in San Francisco about her educational experience growing up in a Chinese-Vietnamese family, and experience as a pediatrician and as a mother.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, was launched as a philanthropic organization in December 2015 for the birth of the couple's daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.

The new program, called Chan Zuckerberg Science (CZS), will bring together teams of scientists and engineers to build new tools for medical research.

Saying that "as a pediatrician I've worked with families at the most difficult moments of their lives," Chan pledged "we'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease."

"We can do better than that," Zuckerberg said about research funding and the status quo that the United States spends 50 times more on treating people who are sick than on finding cures so people do not get sick in the first place.

Of the 3 billion dollars donation for CZS, 600 million dollars will be for Biohub, a new research center at the University of California, San Francisco, which will be joined by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Cori Bragmann, a neurobiologist, will head the CZS. She told the audience that output from the organization will be available to all doctors and researchers.
U.S. Democratic Presidential CandidateHillary Clintongestures to spectators on the last day of the 2016 U.S. Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, theUnited States, on July 28, 2016. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has formally accepted the U.S. Democratic Party' s nomination for president and pledged more economic opportunities for Americans and "steady leadership". (Xinhua file photo/Li Muzi)

by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- In the wake of recent violent attacks, U.S. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is expected to highlight her foreign policy experience to show that she could make Americans safer from terrorists.

But at the same time, Clinton faces a tough task in convincing voters that she is better qualified in dealing with security threat than her Republican rival Donald Trump, the bombastic billionaire who has never served in any government office.

The weekend saw multiple violent attacks on the U.S. soil, including the bombings in New York City and the state of New Jersey on Saturday, which wounded dozens of people, and a stabbing attack at a shopping mall in the state of Minnesota, in which nine people were injured.

On Sunday, a backpack containing several bombs were found at a train station in the U.S. state of New Jersey.

Each presidential candidate has a different set of strengths and weaknesses, in the eyes of voters, regarding their ability to keep Americans safe from Islamist extremism.

Clinton has decades of experience in government, as a first lady, a senator and a secretary of state, and will use this to convince voters that she knows how to navigate the foreign policy environment and what steps to take to fight against terrorism.

But at the same time, Trump will argue that Clinton has botched every chance she had to fight terrorism.

He will focus on her perceived missteps and muck-ups in Benghazi, Libya, where a terror attack against a U.S. consulate ended in the deaths of four Americans -- including the ambassador.

Trump will also contend that Clinton has treated terrorists with kid gloves, and that what America needs is a leader who will take every measure possible to take down the Islamic State and other terror groups.

Dan Mahaffee, an analyst with the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told Xinhua that Clinton will have to continue to highlight how her experience in this area is key for stability and security, and that Trump's policies threaten to further escalate the issue of terrorism and instability rather than resolve them.

While the Benghazi attack has been constant fodder for Trump supporters, it hasn't resonated to the broader electorate.

If Clinton is going to have an uphill climb on the issue of terrorism, it will be because these attacks -and potential future attacks- are seen as a failure of the status quo to keep Americans safe, Mahaffee said.

Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, told Xinhua that for Clinton, who has a pretty hawkish record, the challenge will be to highlight this record, combined with her experience, without alienating younger liberals who want a different approach to ending this threat.

"To point to her long record in handing these issues, including the killing of Osama bin Laden, to show voters that she in fact could put together a tougher response to these threats," Zelizer added.

Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies of the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua that each candidate has good credentials for the argument that each is making.

Clinton has tremendous foreign policy experience and knows all the world leaders, so she will claim that she can be effective in today's chaotic situation, West said.

Trump will argue that it takes courage to protect the United States and he is better suited on that front, he added.

"The election may come down to which of those arguments carries more weight," he said.

Right now, Clinton has an edge in voter perceptions about her foreign policy experience, but terrorist attacks within the U.S. will alter the dynamic and give Trump "an opening to push his own credentials," West added.

Related:

News Analysis: With Clinton, Trump locked in tight race, upcoming debates could determine the winner

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- With the race between U.S. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump running neck and neck, the upcoming presidential debates could determine who will clinch the White House.

Clinton is now still the favorite to win the presidential race, but now it could become a very tight race," Republican strategist Ford O' Connell told Xinhua. Full story

Newly leaked emails show former U.S. Secretary of State Powell unloads on Trump, Clinton

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- A newly leaked trove of emails by Colin Powell on Wednesday offered a rare glimpse into how the former U.S. secretary of state actually view U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton.
NEW YORK, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday raised "profound" concerns over Israel's continuing settlement construction that has a "corrosive effect" on the peace process of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, U.S. officials said.

Obama held a bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The two leaders also discussed Israeli-Palestinian relations and the recent spike in violence between the two sides, a senior U.S. official told reporters after the meeting.

The U.S. has expressed deep concerns over Israel' s settlement activities and warned that such move undermines the prospects for a two-state solution.

Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip territories, where 5 million Palestinians lived, during the 1967 Mideast War. The last round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority ended in April 2014 with no results.

Since then, the peace process has been stalled due to deep differences over borders and continued Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank. By now, there have been no serious actions to resume the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Before their meeting, Obama and Netanyahu reaffirmed the strong alliances between U.S. and Israel and hailed the massive deal on U.S. military assistance to Israel signed last week.

"It greatly enhances Israel' s security. It fortifies the principle that you' ve enunciated many times that Israel should be able to defend itself, by itself, against any threat," Netanyahu said of the deal that will give the Israeli military 38 billion U.S. dollars from fiscal year 2019 to 2028.

The new 10-year deal, which constitutes the single largest pledge of military assistance in U.S. history, includes 33 billion U.S. dollars in Foreign Military Financing funds and an unprecedented 5 billion commitment in missile defense assistance.

Obama said the deal is indicative of the "unbreakable" bond between the U.S. and Israel.

"What it does is provide an assurance and a foundation for the kinds of ongoing military and intelligence cooperation that has been the hallmark of our relationship," Obama said.
Photo taken on Sept. 20, 2016, shows the scene of the General Debate of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York. The 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday opened its annual high-level General Debate at the UN headquarters in New York, with a focus on pushing for the world's sustainable development. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)
RBL wants FATCA passed

Baptiste shared his thoughts with Newsday after the inauguration of the banks new SouthPark Shopping Centre branch on Saturday last. The branch is a replacement for the companys Pointa- Pierre unit which they closed earlier this year due to health concerns arising out of its proximity to Petrotrins Point-a-Pierre refinery.

Baptiste does not understand what the keep back is in passing the legislation.

The Bankers Association gave this government and the previous government copies of the legislation that was done throughout other Caribbean countries, said Baptiste, who is also the Vice President of the Bankers Association of Trinidad and Tobago.

It is not rocket science.

Trinidad is not the only country, it is not the first country, it is not even the first country in the Caribbean that is looking to pass this legislation. After the Opposition refused to offer the three votes needed for the passing of the FATCA legislation in Parliament with the September 30 deadline drawing nearer, Government announced that it intended to ask the US Treasury for an extension of time to allow for a Joint Select Committee session to be held after the budget.

Baptiste, on the other hand, thinks it is not so serious. We said to them, here, take this legislation, just do a search and replace Barbados with Trinidad and Tobago, what more do you need to do? he asked. Of course, it is not so simple, but we really tend to make a mountain out of a molehill unnecessarily. Other Caribbean countries that have acquiesced to FATCA legislation include Barbados and the Bahamas.

Talking about the implications of FATCA not being implemented, Baptiste said that the air of doom and gloom surrounding the issue is justified. In a best case scenario, our correspondent banks will withhold 30 percent of all of the US inflows into this country if the US does not give an extension. In a worse case scenario, the correspondent banks will decide that it is too much work and just cease the relations with the local banks in which case you have no way of getting any of the money you have outside there into the country.

If that is not doom and gloom, I am not sure what is. He also said that the correspondent foreign banks appear to have no qualms about removing themselves entirely from non-compliant countries, citing Guyana as evidence.

He noted that the potential for US banks being fined an unlimited amount for making any mistakes in the enforcing of the legislation far outweighs any potential revenue the banks are currently earning in Caribbean territories. Still, despite these concerns, Baptiste expressed confidence in the long-term future of the economy.

Now is really the time to do what we have done in previous cycles to reinforce our foundations.

So RBL has been investing in technology, in premises, in people, so that when you come back into the upswing you are not then trying to catch up. According to Baptiste, RBL spent close to $200m over the last two years building five new branches across the country.
BHP begins Angostura production

The Angostura Phase 3 Project has been underway since November 2013, when BHP Billiton and its joint-venture partners, the National Gas Company and Chaoyang (a joint venture established by CNOOC International Ltd and SIN OPEC Overseas Oil and Gas Ltd) signed an agreement with the Government to extend the Block 2(c) production sharing contract for an additional five years.

This effectively extended production from 2021 to 2026. Phase 1 of the Angostura field development consisted of the onset of oil production from 2005, while Phase 2 added the commencement of gas export in 2011.

President of BHP Billiton Petroleum, Steve Pastor, said, The commencement of production from Angostura Phase 3 on time and on budget demonstrates BHP Billitons commitment to safety and efficient delivery. He added, This again shows our confidence in our operations in TT. BHP Billiton Country Manager Vincent Pereira said the company achieved an exceptional outcome on the project.

I am very proud of the stellar performance and world class delivery of this project by our team, he said.
Man riddled with bullets

While police are still investigating the circumstances surrounding what pathologists have described as an execution, detectives have received information the killing may have been carried by two men.

Pathologists at the Forensic Science Centre in St James yesterday retrieved 30 shotgun pellets and several rounds of 9 mm ammunition from the mans body. Newsday was told that the majority of rounds were found in Muhammads head and right arm, leaving pathologists to determine his death was an execution.

The trajectory of the bullets suggested that he was shot from two different angles.

Thanks to the determinations of the pathologists, police are now working on the theory that Muhammad was intercepted by the gunmen, one armed with a pistol and another armed with a shotgun, and flanked while he was still sitting in his vehicle, then shot multiple times. Police sources told Newsday that officers of the Central Division Task Force responded to reports of loud explosions being heard on Clark Road, Charlieville at about 8.26 pm on Monday.

When officers responded, they discovered a grey Mitsubishi Lancer facing in a north-eastern direction in the middle of the roadway, with extensive damage to the front right side of the bumper and fender of the vehicle. As lawmen approached the vehicle, they discovered Muhammads body slumped over on the drivers side of the car, bearing multiple gunshot wounds. He was clad in a white Thobe (male Muslim garb) and a pair of slippers. The scene was cordoned off and Cpl Harripersad and WPC Ransome of the Homicide Investigations Bureau visited the scene. Muhammads wife, who asked not to be identified, yesterday told Newsday that she did not want the media meddling in her familys affairs. I do not want any of this, said his wife. I just want to bury my husband in peace She described him as a private person.

Central Division detectives are continuing investigations.
Nirmal in Massive court win

Nirmal Massive Gosine, through his attorneys Abdel and Shabanna Mohammed, filed a second lawsuit against the State which has failed to abide by a judges order that Gosine be issued a new valid permit and the inaccurate duplicate be taken off the register.

Two years after Justice Charles order, the Licensing Division reissued the new corrected permit which Gosine only received on Monday. Yesterday, Justice James Aboud awarded Gosine damages which are to be assessed. Speaking to reporters at the Hall of Justice in Port-of-Spain, Gosine spoke out about corruption in the Licensing Division and called on Works and Transport Minister Fitzgerald Hinds to begin a through weeding out of the bad elements in the division.

He also said he forgave those who had the worst to say about him when he was first arrested, adding that it was not something he would wish on his worst enemy as the situation severely crippled his activities, including his hosting of his chutney tent over the last decade.

Gosine had, in 2010, commenced proceedings against the State for malicious prosecution which arose as a result of an erroneous duplicate entry of his drivers permit.

In 2014, Justice Joan Charles ordered judgement for Gosine in his malicious prosecution claim and held that his permit (which carried the number 739085F) was valid and lawfully registered but was erroneously registered (as 769925F).

The judge ordered compensation, interest and costs totalling $765,000 and ordered the Commissioner of Transport and the Licensing Authority to return a corrected version of Gosines drivers permit to him within one week of the order at no cost to him. Gosines new claim arose from the States failure to reissue a corrected permit.

He said he wrote numerous letters and made oral requests to have the situation resolved but no response had been forthcoming.

He sought damages in the sum of $100,650 and continuing at the rate of $150 a day until his drivers permit was given back to him. The new award of damages is for the period July, 2015, to yesterdays date.
He didnt deserve this death

Carlene Piango described Joseph as a jovial and friendly person who would do anything for his friends and family.

He was the kind of person who would give his last for people he cared for, said Piango.

He would go out of his way to help people. This is such a shock for me. Up to Sunday afternoon we were talking and laughing like everything was normal. On Monday morning, one of our sons was at home when he got the call saying that he was killed.

This is very hard for his entire family because of the kind of person he was. He didnt deserve to die like this. According to reports, a man dressed in black and with a hood over his head, forced his way into Josephs Moya Trace, Carenage home, at about 3 a.m. on Monday. He approached Joseph, who was lying on a mattress, in the living room of his house, and stabbed him repeatedly.

Relatives heard Josephs screams and rushed to his aid but it was too late. Just as quickly as he entered, the killer slipped out of the house.

An autopsy done at the Forensics Science Centre on Monday revealed that Joseph had been stabbed at least 14 times. He died from massive haemorrhaging from stab wounds to his liver and lungs.

Newsday was told yesterday that Joseph was a father of four and a boat ride party promoter who owned two boats named Top Cat and Super Cat. His company, Island Lime Promotions, specialised in boat ride parties. Newsday understands that he had plans of obtaining and refurbishing a third boat. Piango told Newsday that despite their separation, she remained a close friend to Joseph and his family.

We were together for a very long time since we were in school together, she recalled. He was always someone that would make you laugh. Even on your worst day, when you didnt feel like laughing, he was the kind of person who would always be joking and jovial. He never complained of anyone threatening him, at least not to me. But he was the kind of person that got along with everyone. Detectives still have not identified any in the murder of Joseph or his wife, Andrea Edwards.
Letter to my Son top investor film

Last month his short film entitled, Letter to my Son, won the first prize in a national investor education competition from the TT Securities and Exchange Commission in collaboration with the blink|bmobile Foundation and the TT Stock Exchange.

This evening, his first directorial debut film, Attraction: The Relationship Docudrama premiers at this years Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (ttff).

The competition, Young Investors, Creative Expressions was essentially aimed at educating and empowering students and young adults with investor knowledge enabling them to make more informed decisions about their future. For his creative work, Marcano was awarded $10,000 to be invested in the local stock market.

For Marcano, it was more than just another competition. He wanted to do more than show people the importance of investing, but go a step further and get inside the minds of individuals to find out how they would be motivated to invest.

I wanted them to get out of the mindset of instant gratification and make wise financial decisions for their future. My intention was to change the mentality and feeling towards investing and show how a simple decision can affect your entire future. I wanted the film to be motivational and emotional so people would relate and feel something from the message, Marcano deliberates on every word.

The film is essentially about a man who wanted a way out of financial bondage to give his son a better life.

The ending is a tear-jerker, but there are no spoiler alerts here. Words dont do this translation of talent on the screen justice, you must view the film for yourself. Marcano who has used his time wisely as he perfected his art, holds a BA in Media and Communications from the School of Business and Computer Science, a diploma in Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations from SITAL College and his most recent accomplishment is a diploma in Project Management from Roytec.

He began doing music videos in 2009 and made his first film in 2013 with a school friend, Steve Hernandez.

He explains humbly that the film, Silver Dollar, was nominated that year for Best Short Film at the TT Film Festival (which opened its 2016 festival last night).

Its not just film for me, its storytelling and being creative - a means of getting my ideas out for a practical purpose.

Marcano revealed he was also part. of a boy band called Censud in his. younger years. He performed rap. and hip hop from age 18 until 26. I. remember writing music since the. age of ten and I still want to write and. put my songs into the public domain,. not to sell records or be popular, but. just for the love of it. Film, however, is. another dimension of my creativity,. he beamed.

He said before the competition, he. wanted to start a business that could. help people connect with information. in a fun and real way and impact their. lives directly. But, having won the. competition has inspired him to work. even more assiduously towards his. goals of owning his own advertising. agency.

I want to integrate ads so the companys. audience can relate more readily. to the message. I want to educate,. inspire and make them think deeply.

I dont want to do the same thing that. everybody is doing. I want to create. stories with a deeper meaning.. The greatest challenge Marcano. says is obtaining funding for his films. over the years which impacted the. equipment used. This limited the cast. and crew who all had to pitch in to. ensure quality despite the budget. He. urges corporate bodies to assist local. talent to make quality films for this. billion-dollar industry: Trinidad and. Tobago has a rich source of talent. and a huge potential for revenue right. under our noses waiting to be discovered..

Marcanos Attraction: The Relationship. Docudrama premiers at ttff. at 6 pm at MovieTowne, Port-of-. Spain and September 22 and 24, at 8. pm MovieTowne Tobago. Letter to my. Son can be viewed at investuvatett.com

For more info: jasonmarcano@. gmail.com or Facebook  6 Star Media. Production.

.
Rowley calls in cops

Yesterday, during the weekly Police Service COMPSTAT meeting, Acting Police Commissioner Harold Phillip revealed to Heads of the three divisions that they are to attend a meeting with the Prime Minister and his team. The senior officers to meet with Rowley at the meeting which starts at 9 am are Snr Supt Basdeo Ramdhanie of Western Division; Snr Supt Simboonath Rajkumar of Northern Division and Snr Supt John Trim of Eastern Division. An Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) is scheduled to attend this meeting.

The senior officers were told to prepare all of their statistics and information on whatever anti-crime initiatives which they have been deploying in the fight against crime in their respective divisions. The officers will also present to the Prime Minister - who is the chairman of the National Security Council - a breakdown of the amount of illegal arms and ammunition seized in these three divisions as well as the homicide figure in the division the officers control. A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Rowley summoned all heads of the nine police divisions (Tobago, Northern, North-Eastern, Western, Port-of-Spain, Southern, South-Western, Central and Eastern) as well as heads of Sections and the Executive of the Police Service to a meeting at the Diplomatic Centre, where he mandated the Police Service to come up with new strategies to deal with crime. The PM stated there should be no excuses by the police in their failure to reduce crime.

He also urged the divisional heads to be more proactive and called on each of them to be responsible for their divisions in decreasing crime. Following that meeting, the Prime Minister made a pledge to provide further financial support to the Police Service in the fight against crime. Newsday understands that this support will include acquisition of spy equipment to carry out surveillance. It is further understood that divisional heads will from time to time, be called in to account personally to the Prime Minister.

One of the most pressing concerns by citizens in the first year of the PNM administration has been crime and in particular murders.

The Prime Minister has already indicated that he and his government will do what is necessary to deal with the crime situation and to allay the fears of citizens. Yesterday, senior police officers said that they have no problem with the move by the Prime Minister to call for the crime fight to be widened
US/TT military exercises start Friday

A statement from the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy in Port-of-Spain yesterday announced the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) between the US Southern Command and the TT Defence Force and Police Service, involving increased military training activity from September 23 to September 30.

On Friday, training will take place at Long Circular Road and Queens Park Savannah, Port-of- Spain. Next Monday and Tuesday, maritime training will take place at Westmoorings and Chaguaramas, and from Wednesday to Friday next week, large military aircraft will land at Piarco. JCET is part of a series of engagements planned over the last year which provide opportunities for US and TT elite units to work together, learn from each other, and strengthen relationships, said the statement. The training began on September 5. JCETs are conducted annually with Trinidad and Tobago and similar training exercises are done with other countries in the region.
Petrotrin spared fine for Gulf of Paria oil spill

More crude oil spilled into the already polluted Gulf of Paria after a Petrotrin discharge line from an oil to shore pump of Trinmars Platform 17 developed a leak.

While it is uncertain how much crude oil spilled into the sea, it was cleaned up hours after the incident.

EMA chairman Nadra Nathai- Gyan said they have held meetings with the company and have asked for a maintenance schedule.

There have been no fines at this time because they have been responsive with regards to mopup operations, and addressing the issue in a very urgent manner.

I saw that Petrotrin has already acknowledged integrity issues because of aging assets. They do alert us with regards to every spill that happens, and the EMAs responsibility lies in ensuring that when that happens we are satisfied with the clean up operations, and if there is any impact on the flora or fauna in the environment that it is dealt with in a satisfactory manner. Nathai-Gyan was addressing members of the media yesterday during a news conference at the EMAs head office at Elizabeth Street, St Clair.

She said Petrotrin had made several requests for Certificates of Environmental Clearance (CECs) for decommissioning of wells. She added that was also part of the process and the EMAs role was to monitor what happened in this case.

Giselle Landeau-Birmingham, legal officer III at the EMA, explained that part of the EMAs process was to issue CECs.

Any person or organisation wishing to establish a particular facility which is legislated under the Designated Activities Order has to apply for a CEC from the EMA. Once they put in the application for a CEC, we ensure that mitigation measures are put in to the CEC to ensure that we deal with any environmental impact may occur as a result of the particular activity.

It makes no sense that we simply fine people. Yes, fines are a punitive measure, but we also want to ensure people do not go back and repeat the same mistakes, Landeau-Birmingham said.

Vice-chairman at the EMA, Judy Daniel, said fining was procedural, a legal matter that followed litigation.

She said the Environmental Management Act talks about engaging stakeholders or offenders prior to instituting legal action.

She noted that there must be certain evidence based before any legal action was taken through the court.

The EMA tries to avoid that as a matter of policy because, administratively, legal action takes a long time before it can come to any conclusion, Daniel said.

If we can get the parties who are responsible to come to an agreement and ensure compliance and we institute administrative measures, that would take care of the environmental disturbance.

That is much quicker.
FFOS produces evidence of contaminated fish in south

FFOS advisor, Environmental Engineer Cathal Healy-Singh, made the announcement yesterday at a press conference held at the Caribbean Centre for Human Rights in Belmont, Port-of-Spain.

The tests were commissioned by the FFOS after several dead fish had washed up along the south western peninsula months ago.

It was suggested by the FFOS that Corexit, an oil dispersant used during oil spill response operations, may have caused the fish kill although statements issued by the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) and the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA) in July and August stated that this was not so.

Healy-Singh traced the onset of the fish kills in the Gulf of Paria back to the December 17, 2013 oil spill, the largest in a series of oil spills that Petrotrin grappled with that year.

What happened next is that we saw that Petrotrin was not equipped to respond adequately to the spill, Healy-Singh said.

It didnt have the required equipment and that equipment was brought in from overseas. But what they did do is that they had a lot of dispersant in-house and on land, and they applied the dispersant before they contained the spill. As a result of that, the dispersant was able to find its way into the mangrove and coastal areas.

That was problematic because Corexit is, in fact, only supposed to be used in the open sea. So that created a number of problems that we dont fully understand. But what we do know is that since December 17, 2013, that at the onset of the rainy season, and after rain falls in the La Brea area, we understand that this is what seems to cause the fish kills; or at least the fish seem to wash up after the rains fall and certainly much more so in the rainy season than in the dry season. Nonetheless, Healy-Singh, said based on media reports on the EMA findings, he could only conclude that the Government has been trying to do damage control.

He suggested that Government officials appeared tense when they conveyed to the public that the dead fish were as a result of discarded catch from fishermen.

Three investigations have been carried out by the FFOS with regards to the recent fish kill and while Healy-Singh revealed the findings of their first two investigations, the third is pending.
PM Rowley invited to Chile President Bachelet

This was disclosed by Acting Foreign and Caricom Affairs Minister Edmund Dillon when he addressed a function hosted by the Chilean Embassy at the Living Waters Community Centre in Port-of-Spain on Tuesday night to celebrate the 206th anniversary of Chiles independence.

In revealing that Bachelet recent invited Rowley to visit Chile, Dillon said, We look forward to this visit very much...

bearing fruits for TT and Chile. He recalled that in July, Rowley and Bachelet held discussions on the margins of the Caricom Heads of Government Meeting in Guyana. Dillon also said Foreign and Caricom Affairs Minister Dennis Moses and his Chilean counterpart are expected to hold discussions on the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly which is currently taking place in New York.

Dillon said TT and Chile will engage in the third round of bilateral political discussions in Port-of-Spain in 2017. He also said this country looks forward to the signing of a partial scope agreement with Chile that will have a special focus on energy.

Chilean Ambassador to TT, Fernando Schmidt, underscored the continued friendship between both countries.

Diplomacy today, also requires hearing what does not make a sound. To listen to what our people want from us...to understand changes that we face in our times...to introduce solidarity to our daily endeavours, Schmidt.

The Ambassador identified statistics management as one of several areas where TT and Chile could cooperate. Touching on the partial scope agreement being negotiated between TT and Chile, Schmidt said this was still in its early stages. However he hoped it would lead to the creation of new opportunities and jobs for the people of both countries. Amongst the persons attending the function were Trade and Industry Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon, Senate Vice-President Nigel De Freitas, former Senate president Timothy Hamel-Smith and former government minister Mariano Browne.
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U.S. government using humanitarian smokescreen for failing Syria ceasefire

Washingtons lie about seeking a genuine ceasefire in Syria is in danger of being exposed for the world to see. So, hilariously, a charade is being hurriedly orchestrated in order to hide this ignominy. As usual, the Syrian government is being scapegoated for the real cause of violence in the country. That real cause is Washingtons state-sponsored terrorist-fueled war for regime change.

Article by Tyler Durden

After four days of continuing deadly breaches by US-backed rebels since the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire deal was implemented last Monday, Washington and the dutiful Western mainstream media are preparing the inevitable excuses.

Rather than focusing on ongoing rebel violence in contravention of the truce, US Secretary of State John Kerry fingered the Syrian government for preventing humanitarian access to insurgent-held eastern Aleppo as the reason for why the ceasefire is in danger of collapsing.

Kerry accused the Syrian government of causing unacceptable repeated delays in delivery of humanitarian aid convoys to the northern city. Some 300,000 people are estimated to be stuck in dire conditions in the eastern side of Aleppo, which has become a key battleground in the five-year war.

Western media reports followed suit with Reuters reporting: Syria ceasefire deal in balance as Aleppo aid plan stalls. Another publication, USA Today, made the more pointed claim: The regime has broken its pledges on the distribution of life-saving supplies.

So, in Washingtons artful spin of events, it is the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad which is reneging on the ceasefire arrangement by blocking food and medical supplies to starving civilians. This, of course, plays handily into the broader Western narrative that the Syrian regime is the ultimate villain of the piece. The vile Assad is mercilessly denying children food and water, goes the spin.

Based on that premise, Washington is giving notice that it will not follow through on its ceasefire commitment to join with Russian air forces for targeting terror groups like ISIS (Daesh) and al Nusra Front. Those anticipated joint operations between US and Russian aircraft were supposed to be the highlight of the ceasefire plan worked out last weekend in Geneva by Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

But that supposed breakthrough is now in doubt. McClatchy News reported at the end of the week: US to Russia  Syria military cooperation not guaranteed.

US State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters four days into the truce: If, by Monday we have continued to see reduced violence and no humanitarian access, there will be no Joint Implementation Center [with Russian military].

Washington is mendaciously trying to pretend that there have been no breaches of the ceasefire and that the whole problem revolves around no humanitarian access being granted by the Syrian authorities. If the US does indeed backtrack from its stated prior commitment to cooperate with Russian forces for targeting terror groups then it is safe to assume that the entire ceasefire deal will be dead, even as a rhetorical concept.

Admittedly, the level of violence in Aleppo and across the country subsided when the US-Russian ceasefire pact came into effect on September 12. Russian and allied Syrian forces halted their campaign of air strikes. Opposition violence appeared to abate too. Nevertheless, the truce was reportedly violated multiple times by anti-government militias, not just in Aleppo, but in other locations, such as Latakia, Hama and Homs.

Furthermore, there was no apparent distinction between so-called US-backed moderate rebels and recognized terror groups in carrying out these violations. All insurgents groups were engaging in sporadic attacks  in contravention of the putative ceasefire.

Credible Russian military reports confirmed that Syrian army units had observed the truce and had begun demilitarizing a major access road into eastern Aleppo. Syrian troops are being replaced by Russian units to safeguard the route. However, it is the militants who are refusing to withdraw from the Castello Road area, which would provide the humanitarian aid convoys access to the city.

Indeed, insurgent factions openly declared that they would continue shelling and sniping in the Castello Road precisely in order to prevent the aid convoys arriving because they opposed the ceasefire accord even being implemented.

Russia has correctly criticized the US as using a verbal smokescreen to conceal why the ceasefire is failing. The point is that Washington has negligible control over its declared moderate rebels. In fact, there is no control because in practice there is no distinction between the myriad illegally armed insurgents.

Like the ceasefire called earlier this year in February, this latest one is breaking down because all the militants continue to breach any cessation. As Lt General Vladimir Savchenko, chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria, points out, the US-backed opposition is using the ceasefire simply as an opportunity to rearm and regroup.

And Washingtons policy is impotent about altering that. The CIA and Washingtons allies in Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey armed the anti-government insurgents, including the known terror groups. The regime-change conspirators created a veritable Frankenstein monster over which they now have little control even to the point of getting it to at least appear to be complying with a ceasefire for tactical reasons.

The latest ceasefire is floundering like the previous attempt because Washingtons assertions about moderate rebels dissociating from terror groups is total and utter humbug.

Risibly, as one could have predicted, John Kerrys bombastic appeal last weekend for US-backed rebels to separate from the extremists so that American and Russian forces could then get on with the task of eliminating the terrorists has been subsequently shown to be the consummate delusion that it is.

Washington and its allies are being caught out spectacularly in their lies over the Syrian conflict. The stone-cold truth is that they have been sponsoring terrorist proxies for the criminal purpose of regime change.

So conspicuous and damning is Washingtons nefarious role in Syrias conflict  which has resulted in 400,000 dead and millions turned into desperate refugees  that this crime has to be covered up at all costs. But covering it up is becoming futile because of the increasing glaring reality.

Syrias ceasefire is flawed because Washington, the supposed co-architect of the truce along with Moscow, is not motivated by finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The conflict is all about regime change and deploying terrorist agents to achieve that. That is why the ceasefire is failing  yet again.

The unbearable truth about Washington and its criminal gang of state-sponsors of terrorism has to be concealed from public view. And that is why Washington and the dutiful Western media lie machine are cranking up the explanation for the ceasefire unravelling as being due to the fault of the Syrian regime and its Russian ally for not delivering on humanitarian commitments.

This American smokescreen has been pumped out for nearly six years in Syria. It is really galling to hear the likes of John Kerry and Barack Obama talk about human suffering and the need for humanitarian ceasefires.

The suffering and violence in Syria will stop when Washington is seen for the criminal regime that it is. That day is coming. The American smokescreen is dissipating with each passing day because of its absurd contradictions.

And the terrorists  state sponsors and proxies alike  are finally being exposed.

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President of India attends the centenary celebrations and convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical college

New Delhi, Wed, 21 Sep 2016 NI Wire

The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee attended the Centenary Celebrations and Convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical College today (September 21, 2016) in New Delhi.

Addressing the gathering, the President congratulated the Lady Hardinge Medical College on the occasion of its centenary year celebrations and convocation. He also congratulated all the awardees and said that convocation is an important milestone in the life of students, their parents and faculty members. He appreciated the efforts of Lady Hardinge who had thought of establishing an exclusive college for women in order to provide them modern and scientific medical education.

The President said that doctors should consistently be sensitive and empathetic towards the patients who they cure. A doctor, who is visibly concerned towards his patient, cures half the ailment in his first interaction with him or her. It is this attitude that should always guide them, before the drugs and medicines prescribed by them begin to give their required effect. While clinical detachment is certainly required, this detachment should not lead to taking monetary advantage of a patient and his family who have entrusted their lives in their hands with full faith.

The President said that all doctors have followed an extra-ordinarily arduous academic journey to reach where they are today. However, theirs is a discipline and profession that would require them to be a student, a scholar and an innovator all their life. While the fact that every human being is uniquely made will give them an opportunity to learn with every new patient they see, it should also lead to prescribing customised care and treatment. New developments in medical research will demand of them to be students and learners on a daily basis. In this regard, as physicians they should always keep their minds open to emerging ideas and circumstances around them. While other disciplines may lead to basic education getting separated into professional application and academic research after the qualifying degree, medical education is one discipline where profession and research will have to go hand in hand always.

The President said in a nation like India where public health needs are ever increasing, it will be only one further step in the noble profession that they have chosen, to regularly focus on public health and medical facilities away from the cities, in the smaller towns and villages of India. While the Government does its bit in enhancing health services, a resolve on their part is going to do wonders to the public health infrastructure.

The President said that while against the international norm of one doctor per thousand population, we have only one doctor for 1700 people in our country. The situation is all the more alarming in rural India where the shortage of surgeons is to the tune of 83.4%, obstetricians and gynaecologists 76.3%, paediatricians 82.1% and general physicians 83% at the level of the Community Health Centres (CHCs). The overall shortage translates to 81.2% as of the year 2015. He said that from the above data one could appreciate the huge dimension of building up health infrastructure in our country particularly in rural areas.

The President concluded by sharing a famous quote and said, HE WHO HAS HEALTH HAS HOPE, AND HE WHO HAS HOPE HAS EVERYTHING.

Among the dignitaries present on the occasion were Shri J.P. Nadda, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Shri Faggan Singh Kulaste, MoS for Health and Family Welfare and Shri C.K. Mishra, Secretary, Health and Family Welfare.

Source: PIB
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Delivering enterprise applications to thousands of users across wide geographical locations has many challenges. As more mobile devices become part of the ecosystem and remote work and collaboration continue to be the preferred way in which employees want to work, access to the applications they need is becoming extremely important. With the launch of the Nokia (News - Alert) Mobile Edge Computing-based enterprise applications, large organizations will be able to improve operations and lower costs by taking advantage of applications using low latency and business-critical mobile broadband networks.





Enterprise applications are developed to provide solutions for many different systems within the organization. And as more of these applications are accessed remotely within and outside of the enterprise solutions, Nokia's Mobile Edge (News - Alert) Computing platform can provide more accuracy and transparency in the overall operations while managing costs more effectively by taking advantage of developments in network technology.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) allows enterprises to take advantage of the latest generation LTE (News - Alert) technology, in particular small cells, and real time applications for building complete campus networks. These networks meet the demanding privacy, resilience, and latency requirements set by business-critical applications, extending LTE to new domains, said Dirk Lindemeier, head of Mobile Edge Computing and Wi-Fi products at Nokia.

With the MEC, Nokia will allow warehouses, factories, transportation hubs, campuses and hospitals to connect with personnel and automate workflows to extend the possibilities of the connected world we now live in. This includes keeping track of all assets and personnel, which according to Nokia is to centimeter-level accuracy. The tagging and tracking capability makes it possible for these facilities to have constant visibility, thus lowering the instances of theft and other security risks.

Initially Nokia will be working together with operators to transform some of their 4G networks into discrete private LTE networks, as well as over Wi-Fi networks through its Wi-Fi Controller as a Service offer by enabling connectivity over existing licensed LTE spectrum. However, the company said in the future it will leverage LTE in the unlicensed spectrum using its MulteFire technology.

MulteFire is an international alliance founded by Nokia and others to build a global ecosystem to support the application of LTE and next generation mobile cellular technology in configurations that use only unlicensed radio spectrum.

Nokias MEC can quickly process content at the very edge of the mobile network to deliver an ultra-responsive experience with significant reduction in latency. The company is launching three enterprise-specific MEC applications: object tracking to allow the tracking of assets and personnel, video surveillance extended from the operations room to mobile devices and video analytics, using Mobile Edge Computing to analyze data feeds from security cameras.

The Nokia AppFactory environment will provide the necessary support and integration for existing enterprise applications to the MEC environment for the creation of apps that meet the specific needs of each organization.

Edited by Alicia Young
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American investors are showing an increasing interest in Moroccos renewable energy potential as the North African country gears for the UN summit on climate change in November.

Local daily LEconomiste on Tuesday states that American investors could move on for action before the Marrakesh conference, scheduled for November 7-18, and that partnerships could be announced at this High Mass.

The daily says that operators and officials of the two countries are busy on the eve of the COP22. A Moroccan delegation representing the sector made a trip to the United States last week to brief potential investors about the opportunities offered by the North African country, while US special envoy for Science Daniel Kammen is visiting Morocco this week.

In an interview with the Moroccan daily, Daniel Kammen said the climate conference would enable investors and operators to understand better the initiatives and projects already underway in Morocco.

There is an array of opportunities in the sector of renewable energy where Morocco and the US can develop partnerships, said the US special envoy for Science who held a series of meetings with Moroccan officials in charge of the sector.

The daily listed some niches likely to attract US investors, saying that the development of sustainable agriculture, transportation, clean technology, could serve as accelerators for these future partnerships.

Although few American companies established in Morocco have developed projects in the field, others are showing an increasing interest in renewable energy.

In this vein, Nano PV Global, a US company specializing in solar power technology last month announced it would launch by the end of 2016 a project worth 2 billion dirhams to manufacture solar panels.

Morocco and the US have already launched partnerships in the area of scientific research related to renewable and solar energy.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this month pledged support for a research in Morocco on the integration of solar energy microgrid into smart buildings.
The warning launched last month by Watchwater, Tunisias citizen water observatory, about a thirst uprising is becoming increasingly evident.

The observatory had warned that the failure to find urgent and sound solutions will increase protests across the country.

The authorities are aware of the problem but have no solution at hand.

State Secretary for Water Resources and Fishing, Abdallah Rabhi, raised concerns as rainfall has dropped by almost 30%. In August, the Agriculture ministry also signaled a catastrophic situation if there is not enough rain by the end of the summer to refill the groundwater reserves and reservoirs. Mohamed Dahech, the CEO of the national water supply authority SONEDE, confirmed that groundwater levels in areas without dams have fallen in some cases by 25%.

As early as May, Tunisian authorities had announced that there will be water supply shortages ranging from several hours to three days and that 700 water supply cuts will be effected.

Tunisia Live, a news agency, claimed that some settlements such as Hmaydeya, have not had access to local running water for four months, while Watchwater stated that some regions have been affected by the cuts for almost a month.

Tensions are increasingly growing and at the beginning of the month, protesters threatened to disrupt operations at the pumping station in Femana that supplies water to Tunis, the capital.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Religious Affairs has called on the population to pray for rain as part of the solution but critics are accusing authorities of inactivity to solve the problem. National water consumption has been increasing by 4% per annum.

Water scarcity has long been an issue for Tunisia but the challenge has been exacerbated by demand from agriculture and industry.

Agricultural losses are already estimated to be around $900 million. The situation could get worse as the around 30 dams and reservoirs are filled below 40% of their last years levels. Meanwhile, the Nabhana reservoir in central Tunisia is completely dry.

Cherif Gasmi, manager of the Sidi Salem Dam, said if rain does not come by the end of September we will have to tap the dams strategic reserves and thats a very dangerous situation.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) announced Wednesday it granted a 24 million loan to Elephant Vert, a Morocco-based producer of bio-fertilizers, bio-pesticides and bio-stimulants.

Elephant Vert is the first company in the southern and eastern Mediterranean region exclusively dedicated to the development and production of a full range of these innovative bio-inputs.

EBRD said its loan will encourage use of innovative and environmentally-friendly agricultural inputs. It will enable Elephant Vert to boost the development, output and distribution of these biological products, which are used to increase agricultural yields while remaining cost-efficient and environmentally friendly.

The switch away from chemical fertilizers should lead to significant greenhouse gas emission savings of over 150,000 tons of CO2 equivalents each year in Morocco, host country of COP22 due next November in Marrakech.

Laurent Chabrier, EBRD Director for Morocco, said: We are very pleased to support this innovative and research-intensive project, which proves that Morocco is a fertile ground for new ideas. It comes at a very timely moment, just months before COP22 when the world will gather in Morocco to continue working on viable solutions to fight climate change.

Sebastien Couasnet, CEO of Elephant Vert, said: We have ambitious plans and were looking for a reliable long-term partner to finance our expansion. We found this partner in the EBRD. The Banks support goes beyond what you would expect from a financing institution.

The project will also benefit from a grant under the EBRDs FINTECC (Finance and Technology Transfer Centre for Climate Change) program, which supports the demonstration of climate technologies with low market penetration.

The EBRD started investing in Morocco in 2012. To date, the Bank has invested over 1 billion in 26 projects across the country.
Libyas Government of National Accord (GNA) Tuesday expressed its gratitude to the Moroccan monarch for his constant and firm support to the stability of the North African country, which is going through turmoil.

The support extended by H.M. King Mohammed VI and Morocco to Libya is firm and constant, said the GNAs Foreign Minister, Mohamad Taher Siala, in New York at the end of a meeting with his Moroccan counterpart Salaheddine Mezouar.

The two officials, who are both taking part in the UN General Assembly, discussed the alarming political situation prevailing in the oil-rich North African country.

For his part, Mezouar said the meeting provided the opportunity to renew thanks to Libya for its constant position in favor of Moroccos return to the African Union, as well as for its strong backing to the territorial integrity of the kingdom and to the Moroccan autonomy proposal, reported the Moroccan news agency MAP.

He said he discussed with Taher Siala the latest developments in Libya and reaffirmed, during the talks, Moroccos steadfast support to Libyas unity, stability and institutions.

The meeting also provided the opportunity to renew Moroccos support to the Libyan government of national unity and to stress the need to find a compromise to overcome the outstanding difficulties, Mezouar added.

Morocco last year hosted the Libyan UN-brokered peace talks between rival political and armed groups, which shredded the country following the death of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The talks were crowned by the signing, in the Moroccan city of Skhirat in December 2015, of the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA), which gave birth to the GNA.

Yet, the GNA has been unable to impose its authority across the country. Its influence was dealt a blow over the past week after the Libyan National Army (LNA), headed by Khalifa Haftar and aligned with rival government in Beida, took control of the countrys main oil ports.
French President Francois Hollande publicly threw his full support behind Morocco, from New York Tuesday, saying he has full confidence in Moroccos hosting of COP22.

Speaking to the media following a key meeting on renewable energy, held at the initiative of African countries, President Hollande said France stands ready to make the coming November UN meeting on climate in Morocco successful.

We trust Morocco can host the COP22, the French President said, calling for massive mobilization for the event to take place in Marrakesh, from November 7 to 18.

Hollande announced earlier this month, following a phone conversation with King Mohammed VI, that he would take part in the upcoming event.

During the phone conversation, the two heads of State had expressed satisfaction at the bilateral cooperation and coordination to make of the Moroccan chairmanship of the Cop22 a success.

Morocco is taking over the chairmanship of the UN Summit on climate from France which hosted the event last year in Paris.

Moroccan authorities have rolled up their sleeves to make the High mass memorable and successful.
Moroccan security services said Wednesday they have averted and foiled terrorist attacks in the North African country thanks to the recent arrest of three extremists affiliated to ISIS terror organization.

The three captured men were active in the Northern Moroccan cities of Tangier and Mdiq, said a press release issued by the Ministry of the Interior.

According to investigators, the cell was planning to carry out a series of bloody attacks targeting peace and stability of Morocco, a major ally of the West in the region, which is waging a tireless war against terrorism.

The three jihadists were also planning to create an ISIS province (Wilayat) in Morocco, said Moroccos Central Bureau of Judicial Investigation, the judicial part of the Moroccan domestic intelligence service.

The ringleader of the cell was assigned by a senior ISIS operative to prepare and carry out attacks against Moroccos strategic sites including security buildings, hotels, tourist attractions and foreigners.

Investigators say the cell leader had already acquired some chemical products and lab equipments necessary for making explosives. The dismantling of this cell is part of the tireless war waged by Moroccan authorities against Islamist extremists and fanatics.

As the international coalition intensified its airstrikes against the terrorists in Iraq and Syria, the extremist group started moving to North Africa and particularly to Libya where the jihadists have enhanced their influence and presence.

Neighboring Tunisia and Egypt have already suffered numerous deadly attacks by militants of the Islamic State.

Morocco has worked out a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy that includes vigilant security measures, regional and international cooperation, and counter-radicalization policies.

The North African country has placed counterterrorism at the top of its priorities following the Casablanca terror attacks in 2003 and the subsequent attacks of 2007 and 2011.

In 2015, Moroccos counterterrorism efforts mitigated the risk of terrorism but the country continues to face threats, largely from numerous small, independent violent extremist cells. Moroccan authorities have dismantled multiple groups with ties to international networks that included ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
Thousands of Moroccan migrant workers are facing humiliation in Algeria where authorities abruptly imprisoned or dispossessed them of their properties in a stark violation of international law and Algiers commitment as part of bilateral labor agreements with Morocco.

In this connection, following the arrest of 84 Moroccan nationals by Algerian authorities, Assabah newspaper sheds light on the ordeal of Moroccan artisans in Algeria who have been imprisoned on fabricated charges.

Moroccan artisans and craftsmen are needed in Algeria, yet Algerian authorities imprison them and portray them as illegal immigrants or spies, writes the paper, noting that Algeria has fallen short of honoring agreements on the Moroccan migrant workers.

This is not the first time the Algerian regime violates international law by mistreating Moroccan migrants. In 1975, Algeria dispossessed and expelled 45,000 Moroccan families on the day of the feast of Eid Al Adha.

These families who were expelled without notice are currently staging an international campaign to hold the Algerian regime accountable for the suffering inflicted on 300,000 who were forced to leave their homes.
Lucky for humanity  but unlucky for cable-news ratings  no one was killed in the Chelsea bombing. Photo: Justin Lane-Pool/Getty Images

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the reaction to the New York and New Jersey bombings, the presidential polls, and Jimmy Fallons softball Trump interview.

Writing in the wake of this weekends bomb attack in Manhattan, the media critic Jack Shafer argued that alarmist coverage of the story turned a brush fire into a mighty conflagration, and is part of whats helped make Americans unable to place pressure-cooker bombs of the type that [Ahmad] Rahami is alleged to have built in their proper perspective. Is he right?

Of course Shafer is right. Cable news covers terrorist brush fires, as he calls them, the same way it covers the weather, crime, shootings, and just about everything else: Every potential cataclysm is a 9/11, a Katrina, a Sandy Hook until proven otherwise. It is, of course, serious news that lone wolves with seemingly jihadist aspirations savaged victims in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota over the weekend. But it is not necessarily the apocalypse, or certain evidence that America is under terrorist attack. In these latest instances, we may be dealing instead with unhinged assailants looking for ideological rationales for their violent sprees. If only all terrorists were as stupid as Rahami, who left so many clues to his identity that he could be rounded-up with remarkable dispatch.

Where I part with Shafer is in his conviction that Americans are unable to put Rahamis small-time infliction of violence into a proper perspective. Maybe more and more Americans are gaining that perspective. The news of the bombing did not cause widespread panic in New York, and the story faded fairly fast from center stage nationwide. Part of this was that no one was killed, good news for humanity but bad news for cable news, which doesnt know how to keep exploiting a crime scene when there are no lost lives to be milked for sentimental effect, no surviving relatives to be interviewed on camera. The quick fade may also be because the public is simply inured to most violence at this point. Nothing short of an Orlando or San Bernardino can grab the attention of a citizenry numbed by the daily overload of shootings in a nation where there are more guns than people.

Another reason for the storys short half-life was the predictable responses of both presidential candidates. Donald Trump says that the Rahamis at loose in America can be stopped if we overcome political correctness, legalize ethnic profiling, and stamp out ISIS through magical means yet to be specified. Clinton talks about gathering the facts before lashing out indiscriminately at Muslims. Weve heard it all before from both of them, and we are as numb to their pat responses to terrorist brush fires as we are to the latest bulletin of a mad gunman at the mall.

Hillary Clintons lead in the polls has dropped considerably over the past month or so, both nationally and in some battleground states. Is it too early to panic?

It is never too early to panic, and I panic about a Trump victory all the time. It was inevitable wed get to that postLabor Day point when the Times would run a story about all the Zabars shoppers, a.k.a. Times readers, in full stereotypical dread about the election. Instead of kvetching to reporters, these Democrats might be better advised to urge any lackadaisical millennials in their families to vote  or bribe them to do so  and not for Gary Johnson.

I have a theory about the election that is probably as wrong as every other theory, but here it is: At this late date, there isnt a single Clinton voter who can be persuaded to vote for Trump, and there isnt a single Trump voter who can be persuaded to vote for Clinton. I also have another theory that is not a theory but a fact: People dont change, especially as they hit 70. Trump is going to continue to be a bigot and a bully with no qualifications to be president or even any intellectual curiosity about the issues at play in a presidency. Clinton is going to continue to be an earnest, plodding representative of the status quo, presiding over an incompetent campaign that cant even come clean in a timely fashion about her bout with the eminently treatable ailment of mild pneumonia.

The voters know these candidates, two of the most overfamiliar personalities in American life, all too well. The only question is whose voters will show up on November 8. Demographics and poll numbers suggest there are more Clinton voters than Trump voters. But are there more Clinton voters than Trump voters who are motivated to get to the polls? Or if not, does it really matter, given that the Democrats have (we keep being reassured) a crackerjack, well-financed get-out-the-vote operation and the Trump campaign has almost no ground game whatsoever? All the smart money, all the savviest poll analysts, almost all the political pros (including those of the Republican persuasion) say that Clinton will win. They also said that Trump couldnt win the GOP primary. If you are a Clinton supporter sleeping soundly at night, you know something I dont.

Watching Jimmy Fallons softball Donald Trump interview, one viewer noted that Fallon seems to have created a show aiming only to make wacky celebrity clips go viral online. Fallon, seemingly in agreement, has responded to criticism by asking simply, Have you seen my show? Was Jimmy Fallon just doing his job?

Fallon was doing his job as a late-night talk-show host as he sees it  to generate lighthearted, late-night comedic fun. This did not stop him from looking like a fool toadying before a racist thug. Which raises the larger question: Can entertainers engage in business as usual when someone like Trump, who threatens the Constitution and national security, has a real chance of securing the White House?

Samantha Bee is now arguing that not just Fallon but Saturday Night Live, which enlisted Trump as a host, have contributed to his rise. Further complicating the matter is that both Fallons Tonight Show and SNL are on NBC, which promoted Trump for years on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice. NBC is also the network that fielded the notoriously unbalanced prime-time forum on national security where the Today show host Matt Lauer roughed up Clinton but not Trump, and its the network that allowed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to promote Trump shamelessly during the crucial early primary campaign. (The MSNBC breakfast-show hosts turned on Trump later, but, according to a report by Dylan Byers of CNN this week, are cozying up to him again.) In all of these cases, it was lightweight entertainers or talking heads, not journalists, who allowed Trump to preen in the best light. Its not in their job description to do otherwise. Can we hold them responsible?

To a small extent, sure. And we can also blame cable-news networks that have lavished airtime on Trump when he doesnt merit it (while at times neglecting Clinton when she does), and we can blame journalists who were slow to challenge Trumps incessant lying (though most major news organizations have been crying foul from the start). But what we dont want to face is the fact that there are millions of Americans who know exactly who Trump is and want to vote for him regardless. Few, if any, of them likely watch Fallon or SNL or Morning Joe. The media didnt create these voters, and they are not going to deter them now.
Hillary Clinton. Photo: Kris Connor/Getty Images

Donald Trump is making high-income voters Democrats again. A new poll from Bloomberg Politics shows Hillary Clinton besting Trump among voters with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more by a margin of 46 to 42 percent.

If Clinton maintains that advantage through Election Day, it would mark a new milestone on the Democratic Partys long path to conquering the upscale electorate. In exit polls of 2012, Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama among voters earning $100,000 and more by a ten-point margin. And no Democratic nominee has won that demographic since Bill Clintons reelection in 1996. Before that, the party hadnt won the cohort for decades.

Bloombergs poll suggests that Clinton might not be winning such voters this year were it not for Trumps idiosyncratic deficiencies: Asked which candidate would be better for their own investments, voters making more than six-figures favor Trump over Clinton by 45 to 36 percent.

That perception is in tension with the consensus of investment analysts, who see a Trump victory as one of the gravest threats facing global markets: When the worlds most powerful country elects a racist reality star with few policy convictions outside of general fondness for mercantilism  thats likely to cause some uncertainty.

But Bloombergs poll provides ample evidence that the views of the affluent arent much more reality-based than those of the working stiffs: Upper-income voters said that Trump would be more likely to rein in the power of Wall Street, despite the fact that the mogul has promised to repeal all the post-2008 regulations on the financial industry, and then impose a moratorium on any additional ones. The poll also found these voters saying Trump knows more about what it takes to create jobs and has brought more new ideas to the 2016 debate.

Upscale voters generous view of the Republican nominees platform might indicate that, were he only to tamp down all his transparent misogyny and racism, he could win back the GOPs traditional share of the voting bloc. And this may be true. But its important to note that Trump isnt just a cause of upper-income voters defection for blue America  he is also an effect of that migration.

Last year, Thomas Edsall noted the slow-motion realignment of wealthy voters in a column for the New York Times:

In 1988, support for the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis fell as income rose. Those making less than $12,500-a-year backed him 63-37, while those making more than $100,000 voted against him 67-33.



In 2012, by contrast, Obama won low-income voters, those making less than $30,000, decisively, 63-35, but also did far better than Dukakis among those making more than $100,000, winning 44 percent of their votes. Four years earlier, in 2008, Obama won among voters with the highest incomes, above $200,000, 52-46, and nearly tied among those making $100,000 to $200,000, 48-50.

As the economic elite have become more diverse and highly educated, they have also grown more liberal, particularly on social issues. The GOPs reliance on religious conservatives and racially resentful whites has cost the party an increasingly large share of the ascendant professional class. The exodus of these voters from the Republican coalition is one of the many reasons that Trump was able to win this years primary: As the GOP professional class thins, the partys cultural reactionaries become more influential.

Now, Trump appears to be accelerating this long-term realignment, sending a new wave of upscale Republican moderates to the Democrats, while bringing some of Team Blues remaining working-class whites into the GOP fold.

Should this voter swap hold beyond Election Day, the implications for our politics could be profound: On one side of the aisle, a Democratic Party whose activists are becoming evermore left-wing, even as its voting base is becoming evermore affluent; on the other, a Republican donor class increasingly at odds with a white-working-class base hostile to the Establishments immigration agenda and indifferent to its preferences on top marginal tax rates.

Those tensions should keep American politics weird, long past November.
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

The CEO of Mylan, the pharmaceutical company that sells the emergency epinephrine injector EpiPen, appeared in front of the House Oversight committee today and defended a 500 percent price hike for the decades-old, life-saving allergy drug as members of both parties criticized her and her company.

Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said the price hike was done to get filthy rich at the expense of our constituents. John Duncan, Republican of Tennessee, said, The greed is astounding, its sickening and disgusting.

Meanwhile, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch, the daughter of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, tried to argue that the company was not raking in the profits. I know there is considerable concern and skepticism about the pricing, she said. I think many people incorrectly assume we make $600 off each EpiPen. This is simply not true.

Instead, she said the company makes about $50 off every $608 two-pack after a gaggle of middlemen have taken their cuts. The problem with that argument is that some say its nonsense. One financial analyst told the New York Times that the Mylan unit that sells EpiPen saw its operating profit margin grow by more than 50 percent since the EpiPen price hikes began in 2008.

Another issue that came up is Breschs pay. In 2007, when Mylan bought the rights to EpiPen, she made $2.5 million. Last year, she made nearly $19 million. Thats a 671 percent increase. That might sound like a lot, but as Bresch put it when a congressman mentioned that she was doing pretty good, her salary is just about in the middle compared to other pharma CEOs.
Make America great again, if that is what you feel like doing. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Egyptian president and serial human-rights violator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told CNN that he has no doubt Donald Trump would be a strong leader for the United States.

On Monday, both Trump and Hillary Clinton met with the Egyptian strongman on the sidelines of the U.N. Summit for Refugees and Migrants. The Democratic nominee laced her statement on their constructive meeting with rhetorical wrist slaps about respect for the rule of law and human rights and a call for the release of political prisoners. Trumps statement included no such criticism. Instead, the GOP nominee hailed Sisis Egypt as a loyal friend and promised to invite him to the White House for an official visit, should the mogul win this November.

Exactly what Trump said during his first meeting with a leader of a Muslim nation is not publicly known. But in an interview with CNNs Erin Burnett that will air Wednesday night, Sisi suggested that the Republican nominee doesnt mean what he says about that whole Muslim ban thing.

The United States, in general, conducts very strong security measures for everyone who wishes to visit it, Sisi replied. Its also important to know that during election campaigns many statements are made and many things are said; however, afterwards, governing the country would be something different.

Burnett then asked if Sisi meant that Trump is saying what he needs to say to be elected but that he might not follow through with the plan.

I dont want to be unfair to anyone here. During election campaigns there is a perception based on a certain vision and a point of view, Sisi replied. Then that vision or point of view gets corrected and develops as a result of experience, reports, and advice from experts.

Explaining why he is certain that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would make good presidents, Sisi said, Political parties in the United States would not allow candidates to reach that level unless they are qualified to lead a country the size of the United States of America.

If only we could still see ourselves the way Sisi sees us.
Photo: Ann Hermes/AP

Any time I write about education reform, I am invariably flooded with replies accusing me and my wife, who works for a public charter school, of being nefarious tools of a rapacious industry. And so it went this week, when I wrote about Susan Dynarski and Sarah Cohodess blockbuster study of urban charter schools in Massachusetts. The states legislature has set an arbitrary cap on the number of students allowed to attend charters in each district. As a result, urban districts have to allot space in their charters by random lottery, and the students who win a chance to attend a charter have dramatically better educations across a wide array of measures (test scores, AP classes and performance, four-year-college enrollment, among others) than the students who apply for the lottery and lose. The study is so powerful because it takes advantage of the tragic need for a lottery, which creates an identical population  urban charter lottery applicants  subjected to different kinds of education in a perfect natural experiment. One would think such evidence of life-changing benefits for low-income city kids would move skeptics of charters to reconsider their beliefs. No such reconsideration is evident.

Esquires Charles Pierce, a fervent charter critic, replies in a column headlined, Dont Believe the Charter School Hype: In the end, its about profits. Pierce does not dispute the findings that urban charters in Massachusetts provide dramatic education benefits. He simply doesnt care.

The closest Pierce comes to acknowledging the success of urban charters is in a clause contained within this sentence: If Massachusetts has done charters better than, say, Ohio or Florida, it is because the state has exercised the excellent, rigorous oversight that [Chait] mentions, and the cap has been an essential part of that oversight. The if is Pierces way of subjecting the hard evidence in favor of charters to a hypothetical possibility, and the possibility he hypothetically concedes is merely that Massachusetts charters are less bad than charters in other states. In the sentence, Pierce goes on to assert that the cap on charters serves a vital purpose. But the Brookings study, which I doubt hes read, shows the opposite. Massachusetts does an excellent job of monitoring charters, allowing only strong applicants to open schools and forcing closure of weak ones. There are many qualified operators who have passed the states rigorous criteria waiting to open new urban charters who are not allowed. The cap in Massachusetts is completely perverse, in fact. It allows more students to enroll in charters serving suburban students, where the charters do not outperform the neighborhood schools, and prevents more students from enrolling in urban charters, where the schools do exceed the traditional neighborhood schools.

What concerns Pierce is his belief that charters are evil because they are for-profit corporations. In contrast to his terse dismissal of evidence regarding educational outcomes, his treatment of the profit question is florid and redundant.

Charters are privately run and funded with public money, he writes. Pierce says my wife works for a charter company, that the referendum to let more urban students enroll in charters is being waged to benefit the charter school industry, which wants to demolish that excellent, rigorous oversight with which Chait claims to be so impressed because it stands in the way of that industrys profits. He likewise accuses donors to the lift-the-cap cause of running for-profit businesses that want to increase their profits and, in Massachusetts, they see a chance to make themselves more money. And, lest any of his readers have any remaining brain cells, Pierce hits them over the head again by concluding that charter supporters are campaigning for their own freedom to gobble more and more from the public trough.

This is a morally strange argument to make, is it not? Presented with evidence that certain schools are providing a clearly better education to low-income urban students, Pierce argues that education should be denied because  somebody is making money off of it. It is more important to him to stick it to the capitalists than to allow low-income, disproportionately nonwhite students to have a chance to have a better life. Poor kids in Boston and Lawrence who might have grown up to be doctors and engineers will instead be working at the Dunkin Donuts, but they can take pride in the sacrifice they have made for the cause of sticking it to The Man.

Whats even more perverse about Pierces argument is that it is factually wrong. Charters in Massachusetts are not for-profit vehicles. State law prohibits for-profit operators from running a public charter school:

Persons or entities eligible to submit an application to establish a charter school shall include, but not be limited to: (i) a non-profit business or corporate entity; (ii) 2 or more certified teachers; or (iii) 10 or more parents; provided, however, that for profit business or corporate entities shall be prohibited from applying for a charter. The application may be filed in conjunction with a college, university, museum or other similar non-profit entity. Private and parochial schools shall not be eligible for charter school status.

As even this anti-charter article in The American Prospect concedes, a for-profit company cannot apply for a charter to run a school in Massachusetts. The notion that charters are companies and an industry with profits  that is, the entire basis for Pierces opposition  is a figment of the imagination. Alas, it is a common misconception, promoted by the sadly influential right-wing education fatalist turned left-wing education fatalist Diane Ravitch, who has gained a fervent following despite, or perhaps because of, her fast-and-loose approach to intellectual honesty.

The state of Massachusetts notes  in a message Dynarski sent to me  that some charters contract with an educational management company that is a for-profit to manage some aspects of the school. The Trustees, however, set the budget, hold responsibility for keeping the school faithful to its charter, and can hire and fire the management company. It is important to understand what this means. It does not mean charters are a for-profit industry. Nearly every public school relies on private contractors. The building is probably constructed by privately owned firms. The textbooks, computers, pencils, volleyball uniforms, cafeteria food, and so on are probably supplied by private contractors as well. This is indeed true of a great many public programs. Medicare hires privately owned hospitals and doctors, many of them quite affluent, to provide medical care to old people. Infrastructure spending gives money to private construction firms to build things. Green-energy subsidies give money to privately owned wind and solar firms.

None of these are normally seen as reasons for liberals to oppose Medicare or the stimulus or green energy. It is acceptable for a program to generate profits for privately owned firms if they operate under public oversight and serve a public purpose. The role of private ownership in this argument is for charter critics to create a villain that can manipulate the knee-jerk instincts of sympathetic liberals who dont follow the issue closely but might confuse them with private schools and vouchers  a different thing entirely  or can be persuaded that reform equals corporate equals bad.

Pierce rails suspiciously against the donors to the anti-cap side. I dont think Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family give a rats ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan. I think they are running for-profit businesses that want to increase their profits and, in Massachusetts, they see a chance to make themselves more money. What business? What profits? He doesnt say. He simply dismisses out of hand the possibility that their donation to the education-reform cause springs from conviction. If Pierce believes Michael Bloombergs donations are by definition self-interested, he should also explain not only how he believes he will turn his donations to charter schools in Massachusetts into profit, but also how Bloombergs donations to gun control, same-sex marriage, and the environment will somehow line his pockets.

It is strange to accuse people who are giving away their money to the cause of educating poor children of not giv[ing] a rats ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan, and also to imply that they are going to make money off the donation, without the slightest substantiation for the charge. The people who dont give a rats ass about educating poor children arent the ones who are giving their money away on the issue. They also arent the ones (like my wife) who spend their working days trying to give a better education to low-income city kids. But they just might be the people who publish strong opinions on education policy while treating what is best for poor kids as a complete afterthought.
And Id be like, why are you so obsessed with me? I know, right? Its so embarrassing. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When questions about Donald Trumps failure to disavow birtherism began bubbling up last week, the candidate made a vague statement that unintentionally stirred the pot and his campaigns senior communications adviser Jason Miller released a statement that contained multiple incorrect assertions. The next day, Trump baited the media into covering an infomercial for his new hotel, which culminated in a brief statement in which he repeated the lie that Hillary Clinton is the original birther.



This display of campaign incompetency drew even more attention to the fact that Trump has been peddling a racist conspiracy theory for years, and drove the press to call out his lies more directly. However, as New Yorks Jonathan Chait explained, it worked: Trump supporters and even some Republican officials are now falsely accusing Clinton of inventing birtherism.



Perhaps thats why the Trump campaign is trying the exact same strategy to discredit reports about the unscrupulous and possibly illegal way he used his charity.



For months, the Washington Posts David Fahrenthold has been digging into Trumps claims about his charitable giving. For months, the Trump campaign has said the reports were incorrect, but it refused Fahrentholds multiple requests for information that would explain the activities of the candidate and his foundation  most notably, his tax returns, which list exactly what he gives to charity.



Fahrentholds latest revelation  that Trump used his foundations money to settle lawsuits against his company  drew attention from other outlets on Tuesday. Hours later Trump added fuel to the growing scandal by bragging about using other peoples money at a rally in North Carolina. He wasnt talking about the Trump Foundation, but the remark was notable since it was recently revealed that Trump had not donated to his own charity since 2008.



Were going to get the Gulf states to pay for safe zones [in Syria to house refugees]. Well lead the project like  its called OPM. I do that all the time in business. Its called other peoples money. Theres nothing like doing things with other peoples money, Trump said, repeating, OPM: other peoples money.

Meanwhile on CNN, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway suggested that the takeaway from the latest Post story was that Trump donated $100,000 to a veterans group. In actuality, the city of Palm Beach, Florida, agreed to waive a $120,000 fine over the size of a flagpole at Trumps Mar-a-Lago Club because he agreed to give $100,000 to a veterans charity. Rather than donating the money from his own bank account, the mogul wrote the check from the Trump Foundation, which at that point was funded almost entirely by other peoples money.



Conway went on to claim that she didnt understand how using Trump Foundation money to settle lawsuits against his business could be construed as Trump using his charity to benefit himself, which is against IRS rules.

Well the business of course benefited by the lawsuit going away and being settled, right? said Erin Burnett.

Well, there are many lawsuits every day against people, Conway responded. I think thats a bridge too far. I think youre making things up based on facts as they are not reported in this story, which also used a lot of conditional phrasing I would like to point out.



Conway also claimed that Trump has been incredibly generous in donating his own money to others charities, though Farenthold called 250 charities connected to Trump and found he only wrote a personal check to one.



Finally she dismissed Farentholds reporting, saying he seems a little obsessed with Donald Trump these days. He responded:



This would be so weird if @realDonaldTrump were not a major party's nominee for president. https://t.co/RfSc2JX2ui  David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) September 21, 2016

Then at 10:30 p.m. Jason Miller released an absurd statement attacking Fahrenthold and attempting to shift the focus back to the Clinton Foundation, which presents some ethical concerns, but has yet to be fined by the IRS, like the Trump Foundation.



Trump campaign responds to @Fahrenthold story by attacking him. pic.twitter.com/LGpxm9oP9A  Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) September 21, 2016

The $2,500 fine Trump paid for using his nonprofit to make a political donation disproves the idea that the foundation could not be making improper payments simply because theyre on the public record (Trump claims a donation to Florida attorney general Pam Bondi was misreported as a result of a clerical error).



Journalists particularly enjoyed Millers claim that the Post got their facts wrong, because in addition to refusing multiple requests for details on Trumps charitable giving, the campaign will not explain which parts of Farentholds reporting are incorrect:



.@JasonMillerinDC releases statement accusing @Fahrenthold of inaccuracies and bias, but doesn't list specifics (I have asked.): pic.twitter.com/judRm8V4UW  Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) September 21, 2016

What specifically was inaccurate or omitted? @nbcnews asked the campaign about the reporting earlier and have yet to receive a response. pic.twitter.com/U9VaPvAZaq  Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) September 21, 2016

The statement does contain one line that, if true, is pretty shocking: The Trump Foundation has no paid board, no management fees, no rent or overhead, and no family members on its payroll. Trump has profited from charity events held at Mar-a-Lago and personally accepted awards for merely taking money from one charity and writing a Trump Foundation check for the exact same amount to another nonprofit. Couldnt he figure out a way to make the foundation pay him rent, too?
Angelina Jolie. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

One has to wonder if Angelina Jolie knew that her filing for divorce from Brad Pitt would trigger the soul-searching, self-reflection, and GIF-making that has populated the last 24 hours; given that she has the best publicity game in Hollywood, one would think so. After all, this is a woman who said she would put off formally getting hitched to Pitt until everybody could legally marry, as a show of solidarity with the same-sex-marriage cause. She is one of the worlds biggest celebrities, and so millions of people have a one-sided relationship with her  the movie star, the femme fatale turned patron saint, the U.N. special envoy, the London School of Economics visiting professor. Theres speculation as to whether the divorce is due to Pitts reported anger or weed problems, Jolies reported desires to enter politics and exit acting, or, as is often the case in life, a combination of these and other factors.

While we cant know the cause, we can assess the symbolism  to not only understand why we care so much, but, since celebrities are perhaps our primary cultural text these days, to also come to know what the split means for those of us who will never meet the former couple, and, specifically, what it says about one of Americas primary cultural battlegrounds: marriage itself.

To put the grand institution of marriage into context, its useful to note that till death do us part used to be a lot more immediate. Take, for example, the long premodern sweep between the end of the Black Death and the start of the Industrial Revolution, from 1400 to 1800. In writing about Western family structures of the period, historian Beatrice Gottlieb notes that death was present in life in a way that we can only fathom in the contexts of war and holocaust. With that, the fragility of marriage was something everyone was deeply aware of. If you liked the person you married, youd have to prepare for life without them. Marriage contracts were provisions for widowhood, she writes, and if you didnt like your spouse, you could dream of their dying. The ambiguities of monogamy are not a recent phenomenon, she writes. Law, religion, and literature may proclaim the exclusiveness of the marriage bond and extol the ideal of one man and one woman linked through eternity, but marriage as lived in the real world has always been something else.

Zooming into the United States, the colonial era saw American marriages lasting under 12 years on average: Between childbirth, communicable disease, and natural disaster, people had a habit of dying way younger. One of the great miracles of the 20th century was the increase in lifespan, shooting up over 25 years, on average, in the U.S. Prior to the 20th century, the most common endpoint of marriage was death, notes family psychologist William M. Pinsof in a 2002 paper. During the 20th century, the most common endpoint of marriage became divorce. In 1900, two-thirds of American marriages ended with the death of a partner, falling to under one-third by 1976. In 1867, fewer than 10 percent of marriages led to divorce; by 1985 it was 50 percent  a number that has leveled off slightly, especially for first marriages.

Thanks to increases in medicine and decreases in war, you cant count on death to dissolve a marriage; it comes through divorce. In reviewing the increase in lifespan and the revolution in contraception, liberalizing laws and values around divorce, and the revolution in womens financial independence, Pinsof says that if those trends hold, the 50 percent rate is going to stick around. It fits the evolved human level of monogamous marital stability, he writes.

Though, in the statistical sense, divorce has become the normal outcome of marriage, he argues, American culture still takes a deficit view of divorce. The dissolution of Brangelina is a unions failure to the The Atlantic, a failed marriage to Newsweek and Us Weekly. Trend stories continue to speak of a divorce epidemic, one thats contagious from couple to couple and needs to be vaccinated against. While it might seem nitpicky, the metaphors we use do frame our understanding. (When study participants have crime described to them as a beast, their impulse is to build jails; when its a disease, they want to build schools.) To Pinsof, viewing divorce as a failure exacerbates the trauma of the breakup, doubly for any kids involved. The children of the divorce surge in the 80s and 90s got it especially bad, he said, since there werent any models for good co-parental relationships between exes  the children were traumatized by their parents divorces, he argues, and their own sense of social isolation and shame. It would be more generous to everybody involved to allow that divorce could be a courageous, positive act. To quote Louis C.K., No good marriage has ever ended in divorce. Like Vicki Larson, author of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels, argues, it would be absurd to think that sticking it out in a sexless, alcoholic, and abusive relationship until somebody dies is success, while sharing a respectful, loving bond for 5, 10, or 50 years and then realizing that youve grown apart is failure.

With longer lives, people and their priorities change. If you can only count to living well until 40, then getting hitched at 25 means that your sense of self doesnt have that much room to change. But today, says Pinsof, your sense of your relational future at 35 or 50 is way different than it was before the 20th century. The prospect of another forty to fifty years with decent health and possibilities for individual growth in an unhappy relationship is very different than the prospect of another 10 to 15 years under the same conditions, he writes. You can get a gray divorce, and find yourself a silver fox. There is also the matter of identity, and from examining the gossip columns, this appears to be major factor with the Brangelexit. The psychologist Dan McAdams contends that identity  or personal narratives, self-mythology, and the life story you tell yourself about yourself  is the highest level of personality. Indeed, as Jungian psychology warns, your partner isnt going to do your self-realization for you; thats on you. The relationships most likely to succeed, then, are those where the narratives, worldviews, priorities, and projects are in harmony.

From a distance, this is a satisfying explanation for whats going on with Angelina: She appears to want to be a full-on humanitarian, leaving acting and reportedly pursuing, of all things, a seat in the British House of Lords. It would be awesome if media and society could, as Pinsof asks, view this divorce  and more divorces  as a courageous and positive act. Fittingly enough, you can thank celebrities for bringing this kind of language into the popular lexicon: Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin consciously uncoupled; now theres a whole book on the practice (with five full stars on Amazon!).

While we cant know the full circumstances of Jolie and Pitts dynamic, we do know that, in some cases, staying married shows an incapacity to do whats in the best interest of yourself, your partner, and your kids. And if Jolie and Pitt were to demonstrate effective, compassionate co-parenting of their children, the half of American families that have been long told that theyre broken would have another needed model of something fractured, yet whole.
Photo: narvikk/Getty Images

North Korea is notoriously controlling about what happens online and which websites its citizens can access. (Unless you happen to be a YouTuber who thinks the country is just misunderstood. Then the internet is your propagandistic oyster.) But on Tuesday night, the rest of the world got a glimpse into the North Korea Wide Web, after the websites hosted on the nations servers were suddenly made public. All 28 of them.

The glitch was spotted by programmer Matthew Bryant, who shared all the technical information discovered during the breach, on GitHub. On Sept 19, 2016 at approximately 10:00PM (PDT), one of North Koreas top level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers, Bryant explains.

As for the 28 websites themselves, a new Reddit thread has popped up explaining each site. The list includes an airline-ticketing site; a cooking site for recipes; some sort of social network called Friend; an education site; a site called National Unity (you figure that one out); an insurance site; a tourism board; a charity site for North Koreas elderly; and several news sites, including the Korean Central News Agency, the one site that is always accessible to those outside of North Korea. Not all of the websites hosted on North Korean servers are currently loading, so its still unclear if all 28 of the .kp sites have been locked up again. (Thank you mystery Imgur user for the screenshots that will live on in perpetuity.)

Its unclear whether the incident was intentional or whether someone over in North Korea needs to change their passwords. (Wouldnt be the first time. Remember when that North Korean Facebook clone got hacked by a teen because its password was password. Good stuff.)
Better find a pen, Ivanka. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Much has been made of Donald Trumps paid-leave policy, which his oldest daughter, Ivanka, helped write, and which is pretty much a first for any Republican candidate. But though the fact he has one is a step forward, further investigation into the plan itself has led some to worry it excludes single mothers.

As stated on his website, Trumps policy will let people deduct child-care costs from their taxes and will offer six weeks of paid leave for mothers. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Ivanka Trump clarified, Its meant to benefit, whether its in same-sex marriages as well, to benefit the mother who has given birth to the child if they have legal married status under the tax code.

Which means, as the Washington Post points out, that fathers would not be granted paid leave, nor would same-sex couples in which both partners are male, nor would parents who adopt a child. And thanks to the legal married status under the tax code clause Ivanka referenced, unmarried parents and single mothers wouldnt qualify for paid leave, either.

The campaigns website doesnt mention any such provision  in fact, it compares Trumps plan to a similar program in California, under which, unmarried, nonwhite, and non-college educated mothers receive the most benefit. But a separate fact sheet available through the website states that same-sex couples will be granted leave only if their marriage is recognized under state law.

In response to the policys apparent ambiguity, a Trump spokesperson told the Post that the policy does extend to single mothers, but he couldnt explain why both Ivanka and the fact sheet mentioned a marriage provision.

We dont have the exact legislation written down, he said.
Clooney found out like the rest of us. Photo: Christopher Polk/Getty Images for VH1

The world might have given a collective gasp early on Tuesday, when news of the demise of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolies marriage spread across seemingly every news outlet and social-media platform. Yet, for all the extensive coverage, analysis, mourning, or even I told you sos, it seems there is one person within Pitts inner circle who was not aware of the end of Brangelina. That man goes by the name of George Clooney.

Clooney, who happens to be a longtime friend of Pitt, has CNN to thank for filling him in on one of the biggest breakups in Hollywood history. The news came to him during an interview he gave CNN while he was at the United Nations Global Summit. In what appeared to be the last question from a longer interview, the CNN reporter sheepishly asked Clooney for his thoughts on Pitt and Jolies divorce. Clooney didnt catch on at first.

I didnt know that, Clooney said. I feel very sorry then. Thats a sad story and unfortunate for a family. Then, seeming to think and find the right words, he added, I feel very sorry to hear that. Thats the first Ive heard of it.

Clooney might have found out a little later about Pitt and Jolies divorce, but the man has been pretty occupied with other global, humanitarian issues like the Syrian refugee crisis. The earlier part of his day was spent at a roundtable with his wife, Amal Clooney, President Barack Obama, and CEOs as they discussed pledging money to help with the ongoing refugee crisis. So, all is forgiven, George.


:    9         

         2013 .         9          .    .
I knew sarah paulson was dating an older woman but for some reason I had no idea it was holland taylor/didn't piece it together. loved ha in george of the jungle and legally blonde tbh

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in other news: AfterEllen is shutting down this Friday

lol good



but the rest of this is really cool







Edited at 2016-09-21 01:58 am (UTC)

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I'm still annoyed at how TM and the showrunner (?) responded to criticism re: Delphine.

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i didn't bother to watch this season bc of that and i didn't even like delphine lol

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Same

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You don't like the show? or is something the showrunner said?



I liked the show a lot on S1, but S2 was soo meh and I dropped it.

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I got really overwhelmed when Sarah said that she loved Holland (hollands response on Twitter was so cute!!)

Super proud of all these wonderful people



Wait what happened with afterellen?!

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They couldn't make enough $$$$ for their straight white male owners, so they got shut down

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Thanks, and geez that sucks. I remember lurking on their site and the l chat (I know, I know) when I was discovering that I liked girls and it's just like "oh"



I wasn't an avid reader or anything so idk how they are as a whole but it's still a lil sad

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break it down sis!!!

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Aw, I just looked at Holland's Twitter; how sweet. The way she spoke about love on Death, Sex, and Money made their relationship seem v warm

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I had no idea Clea DuVall was on Veep, also I want to watch Transparent but there isn't a legal way I can, i don't have amazon prime, Jill's speech was amazing !!!



And I'm happy for Kate, and her friendship with Leslie is so cute, I loved her tweets.



This Emmy's were cool, besides GoT winning for writing and best drama of course e__e

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she plays Selena's body double bodyguard and then it goes into hilarity without spoiling too much

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Clea DuVal is only in this past season of Veep so she hasn't been a cast member all along.

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idk if this counts as "legal" lol, but Transparent is on Primeseries http://primeseries.to/serie/Transparent/season-1

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Why is AfterEllen ending?

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It got taken over by straight men

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o



that's unfortunate, i'd rather continue to live with AE's embarrassing "journalism"

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ugh that's fucked.



i didn't care for afterellen but i still read their recaps sometimes. they'd recap the shows that no one else cared about lmao. (hi american gothic.)

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http://trish-bendix.tumblr.com/post/150695653921/eulogy-for-the-living



tl; dr - "Evolve Media purchased AfterEllen from Viacom two years ago. They gave us two fiscal years to become their LGBT property and profit in that space, and they found we are not as profitable as moms and fashion. And, yes, they are mainly white heterosexual men [...]"



Edited at 2016-09-21 02:09 am (UTC) tl; dr - "Evolve Media purchased AfterEllen from Viacom two years ago. They gave us two fiscal years to become their LGBT property and profit in that space, and they found we are not as profitable as moms and fashion. And, yes, they are mainly white heterosexual men [...]"

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what is afterellen?

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Childrens Hospital

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I know afterellen isn't perfect but I got a lot of good gay shows because of it. Recs for sites like afterellen?

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Try Autostraddle? They're not perfect, but neither was AE lol.

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is afterellen where people go to talk after watching ellen's show? theres a forum for everything tbh



Edited at 2016-09-21 02:07 am (UTC)

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No, it's lesbian website about pop culture

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haha no. ellen has nothing to do with the site, i think they just called it afterellen bc ellen's coming out was a seminal moment in terms of lesbian representation in the media. its male counterpart was called afterelton, although they changed it to the backlot.

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for the longest time I thought that is what that site was about.

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lmao same

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yes

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Don't listen to anyone else. Yes. AfterElton is where people review Elton John albums and AfterEllen is the message board for her show.

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lol irl

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Not Lebanese, Blanche

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Jill's speech was good but I'm getting tired of people leaving about people with disabilities when mentioning diversity.

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Ew I just noticed I made a typo in my comment lol

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That is true, and I'm ashamed to say I did not realized, tbh I'm thinking about shows with disabled actors and right now I can only think about Breaking Bad and Switched at Birth, and that's sad, DareDevil could have had a blind actor, it's not like Charlie Cox is a household name and he doesn't do his stunts so idk why they not hired a blind person.

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it happens so often that i just expect it from now on, i assume people don't give a fuck until proven otherwise. ex.: idris elba. i am still SHOOK that he included us lmaoooo

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yeah, i gave up on autostraddle when heather hogan began posting fanfic rec "articles"



like...no

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Yeah afterellen and autostraddle are/were the few places I knew where to find celeb news from time to time, I don't care about either of them besides for that but you know, it was something

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Same, re: AfterEllen and Autostraddle

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I'm kind of hoping someone (or several someones) attempts to fill in the gap AE leaves; I have issues with both sites, but I do think they serve an important function, and I think it'd be a good opportunity for other sites to fill that niche... unfortunately, they'd have to deal with the same financial issues, most likely. :/

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I doubt it. AfterElton was degraded into the Backlot and that was merged into the very lame New Now Next. Now what it represented is basically white washed and drowned. Both AfterElton and AfterEllen good for what they offered back then but straight white corporate guys have a habit of taking things with potential, drowning it, then draining all life and color from it.

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I just took a peek at Holland Taylor's Twitter and it's cute how much she tweets about Sarah.

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Yes I love Sarah's love of dusty puss!

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silencing since that poor woman got cut off when she was simply trying to give a shoutout to her wife Jen! it was a night of lgbtsince that poor woman got cut off when she was simply trying to give a shoutout to her wife Jen! #Justice4JensWife

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I have a hate hate relationship with AE but I'm sad to hear it's shutting down. Reasons?

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Men

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Urgh I just read that post. Ain't it always men. Haven't been on AE in years but this sucks. So all that's left is autostraddle and it ain't shit either

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I honestly like Treat You Better smfh

he has a real cute voice

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so addictive that song.

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right? it's on my warm-up playlist, i can't stop listening to it aaah

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ikr? such a good bop

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I adore him

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I absolutely fucking LOVVEEEE this song!!! It's mu fucking jam right now and ughghg he's such a queen and so adorable, I want to boyffie him up lol

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i genuinely enjoy his music idk what that says about me. his mvs are consistently boring though

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IA w/ his music videos. hopefully the rest of them for the album are better.

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gotta admit I don't get him. at all.

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same esp with that annoying nasal voice

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this video is so basic. i was stressing though cuz aren't you supposed to try to break the window before you're completely submerged??

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yeah it's nearly impossible to break glass once you're submerged b/c of the water pressure but he's ~shawn mendes11!!!1~ he can do it anyways

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You can get a glass breaker tool to put on a keychain or carry around. It's basically like a thin, small pen. All you do is put the point to glass and apply some pressure and the glass shatters. I think he just went to Home Depot before he got in the car LOL

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even after the vehicle is completely submerged in water? i thought you couldn't break the glass b/c of the pressure against the door. once i buy my car though i'm getting a glass breaker to have on me because you never know and drowning is one of my worst fears lol

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Yeah, that's originally what they're made for, since it's impossible to break glass underwater. Where as on dry land, you can usually use just about anything to do it. I think they've started making the fancier Leathermans with it now

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Cool vid

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This cutie

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this was so stressful. drowning is one of my worst fears. he looks sexcii as always tho my precious prince. <3 this song was amazing live too.

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honestly i like his music a lot, i hope he continues to do well. i can't believe he's built a solid career from Vine, has anyone else been able to do that?

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Doesn't he have like 2 songs out already?



STAHHHHHHHHHHHP.

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I want to mention that he's half portuguese. His father is from Algarve, Portugal.

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Why are his MVS so boring?

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BrexPitt, hands down. it sounds really good imo, lol.

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ia ia

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I voted for this one too

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I prefer the Mr. and Mrs. Splitt variation, but I'm glad the superior nickname is leading

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First time in hearing brangeleaveha and I like it

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Me too!

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i love that one

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LOL Same

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idgi Are they saying leave Brad or leave Angelina? Who's ha?

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Op you should not have put that "other" option there lol we will get nowhere with that.

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by the time we decide on a name nobody will care anymore lol

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I agree.

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Idk why the hell the poll I put in there isn't working.

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Oh nvm it looks like it is now...?

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I'm not totally in love with any of these names but BrangeLEAVEha does make me laugh each time I see it.

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Can Americans serve in the House of Lords? Why doesn't she want to be an American politician instead?

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You have to be from the UK or Commonwealth

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if she became a british citizen she could

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Also, does the House of Lords even have any real political power in this day and age? I was under the impression that they just kind of faffed around all day while Commons has all the real power.



Is she even a British citizen? Surely it'd be easier for her to climb the ranks of US politics, she'd have to start out a bit smaller but she could probably get elected as a representative somewhere, serve a few terms, and then maybe try for the Senate.

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they kinda do, but they rarely use it. They did it recently, vhen nev (nov old) government vanted to cut tax credits, and they essentially vetoed it for a bit. It vas a massive thing, though, enough to help force a u-turn on it.

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I feel like Angie would do well as a politician in California. She already has a lot of connections and admirers for her entertainment and humanitarian efforts. It wouldn't take her long to rise to the national level if she worked such a large, powerful state.



Edited at 2016-09-21 07:05 pm (UTC)

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She now is mentored by a British politician and teaches at London School of Economics. Supposedly, she wants to be in the House of Lords. She does not want to be a part of Hollywood.





What? Is that possible? I thought you needed to be British and a Lady in order to be in the House of Lords.

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to be honest i think they mean she wants to be in the house of commons which is the regular politicians, but lainey got the wrong name. i could see her vying for mp possibly

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If there is any truth to this rumour I'm sure she doesn't want to run in an election for a major political party in some random constituency in the UK

I think it's more likely that she just wants the title and prestige of being in the HoL

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If she's a citizen, it's possible. You need to be appointed by the Prime Minister and after that you're styled as a Baron/Baroness as a life peer, which means your children can't inherit the title

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It's not going to win but I'm quite fond of BrangeLEAVEha.

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i vote for this. ha is gender neutral.

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same

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same, I wish it was more popular lol

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My underdog creation!

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Was it you? It was my fav 

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same. its the superior choice.

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+1



My favourites always end up being the underdogs LOL. ):

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I like 'Breaking Brad'

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lol, this one should be in the poll

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We have a poll?

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Lol

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Ohh, I like this one lmao.

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lol i like this one

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This one is great!



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i love it! now im bummed that's not an option lol

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lmao

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Best one yet

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omg

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Lmfao

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HA

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lmao now I like it too

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love it!! done.

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I like it!

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DYYYIIIIING

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Lololol yes

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Brad, get your shit together and reconcile with your wife.



But I wonder if the anger shit is fueled by the alcohol and drugs. And is it just weed or is he into hardcore stuff. So many questions.

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Yeah I don't believe that

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She is rumored to be a heroin user, too

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He doesn't look like he uses anything heavy. But it's easy to confuse haggard old white dude with haggard drug abuser.

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I doubt the politics angle. She's been in the humanitarian aid arena for a while, she knows that becoming a politician won't get things done. She'd have better luck continuing her work with the UN or some NGO that deals with the causes she cares most about.

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Mr. and Mrs. Split because karma.

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Crude oil inventories last week fell by 6.2 million barrels to 504.6 million barrels, the EIA reported, a day after the American Petroleum Institute estimated inventories had dropped by an unexpected 7.5 million barrels. The API report pushed oil prices up, offsetting the news of renewed Libyan oil exports from the port of Ras Lanuf and Nigerias plans to start ramping up its oil production.

In the week before last, oil inventories registered a 600,000-barrel draw, EIA data showed.

Expectations from analysts polled by Reuters were for an inventory build of 2.3 million barrels, while S&P Global Platts estimated stockpiles had gone up by 2.8 million barrels.

Meanwhile, however, a leak in a gasoline pipeline occurred in Alabama last week, sparking a panic in the Eastern U.S. about possible fuel shortages.

The pipeline, operated by Colonial Pipeline Co., is the main artery between the Gulf Coast refineries and the eastern states, and the largest gasoline pipeline in the country. It carries 1.3 million barrels of the fuel a day. By yesterday, the operator had completed a bypass line that allowed the resumption of deliveries.

In its latest report, the EIA said that gasoline inventories in the seven days to September 16 declined by 3.2 million barrels, after in the week before they rose by 600,000 barrels, sparking some bullish attitudes in an overall bearish environment. Still, the EIA said, both crude oil and gasoline inventories remained higher than usual for this time of year. Related: Oil Investment Crash Could Continue For Another Year

Refineries operated at 92 percent of capacity, processing 16.6 million barrels of crude and producing 10.1 million barrels of gasoline daily, a bit more than in the previous week.

Looking forward, the EIA has announced that starting October 13, it wont include the oil lease stocks in the U.S. in its commercial inventory weekly report, which means some 31 million barrels will be deducted from every weekly total.

At the time of writing, WTI was trading up 2.68 percent at US$45.23 per barrel, after yesterday closing up 0.32 percent at US$43.44, and Brent was up 2.2 percent at US$46.89, up from yesterdays settlement of US$45.88.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Amidst Teslas recent bad press, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk prepares for another big week of news. It has been reported that the Prime Minister of India has given Musk land to test his next big idea: the Hyperloop.

The Hyperloop is a transit concept built around creating a system where capsules are propelled, using air, along a magnetic track. Essentially, there is less friction between moving parts because the capsule is levitating between air cushions and can therefore travel at high speeds. A Hyperloop will allow for speeds of up to 700 mph, but the logistics of transporting people at these speeds are daunting. Simple transportation realities like turns, which cause high G-forces, as well as acceleration and deceleration between stops need to be carefully considered with the Hyperloop before it is deemed anywhere near safe for riders. Yet, if the Hyperloop were to only ships goods, then this would not be as big of an issue. The project is moving rapidly, and CNBC suggests that the Hyperloop will be here in the year 2020.

Musk has had difficulty gaining space for the testing, however, after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited a Tesla factory in California recently, he offered Musks other firm, SpaceX, the opportunity to develop Hyperloop operations in India. Pune, 118 kilometers away from Mumbai, is where the Hyperloop testing will be done. The Prime Minister hopes that projects like this in the future can create cleaner transport for India. The Indian government is going to have to focus on utilizing more green transportation options by providing incentives for things like bio-fuels and electric cars in order to avoid the kind of pollution troubles that have befouled much of China.

Indias next move is to work with Tesla to produce batteries and solar panels. Large demand there has created huge potential for Teslas efficient batteries. Musk could possibly set up an entire infrastructure system for India, as the country's current energy and transportation system is neither efficient nor good for the environment. First, though, Modi is trying to induce Musk to bring the Hyperloop to India.

Related: Oil Is Likely To Remain Below $50 A Barrel In The Near Future

Musk is not the only one pursuing the Hyperloop of course  there a couple of other firms that have jumped on the concept after Must initially introduced it, but SpaceX has the resources to take the Hyperloop to commercialization faster than the smaller firms do.

The Hyperloop could change the way we think about transportation. People would no longer have to spend long periods of time on trains, and for cargo the shipping costs could be very cheap. Indias offer could accelerate the development of the Hyperloop in an area of the world that still needs significant transportation infrastructure development. The U.S. has adequate highways and air travel options, meaning that the Hyperloop would be a major development, but not necessarily one that would change the national economic outlook overnight. For countries like India, the Hyperloop would be truly revolutionary if it were successfully implemented.

Unfortunately, SpaceX is not publicly traded so investors cannot capitalize directly on this news, but it is worth watching Tesla to see if they become involved in the project in some way as that could impact investment opportunities in the market.

By Michael McDonald of Oilprice.com

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It is becoming increasingly difficult for the oil majors to discover new sources of oil. The industry is in a state of crisis and could be at a turning point. Low oil prices have made a large chunk of yet-to-be developed oil fields unprofitable. That means that the even more challenging task of exploring for oil in frontier regions and developing those reserves is essentially off the table. Without the ability to grow through exploration, what is an oil major to do?

Wood Mackenzie says in a new report that the largest oil companies are scaling back their exploration budgets and instead shifting their long-term plans towards a strategy of growing by acquiring already producing, or at least proven, oil assets. The consultancy estimates that oil companies will depend on M&A activity to make up about half of their reserve replacement going forward. "Now their reserves replacement will also require inorganic, brownfield or shale investments," Andrew Latham, vice president of exploration research at Wood Mackenzie, told Bloomberg in an interview. "Exploration has become incremental."

Between 2015 and 2020, Wood Mackenzie expects the global oil and gas industry to slash spending on exploration and development by a staggering $1 trillion. That will make it increasingly difficult for oil companies to replace all of the oil they produce in a given year. This so-called reserve-replacement ratio is a key metric for the value of oil companies. A stagnant, or falling reserve-replacement ratio could act as a huge weight on share prices.

In 2014, a year that saw the start of the decline in oil prices, the oil majors posted the worst reserve-replacement ratios in a half decade. But in 2015, as exploration budgets started to see even more severe cuts, the largest companies only replaced about 75 percent of the oil they extracted, the worst result in over a decade. ExxonMobil, for instance, only reported a reserve-replacement ratio of 67 percent last year. Royal Dutch Shell fared even worse, posting a negative 20 percent replacement ratio. Related: Is U.S. Shale Nearing Collapse?

There is little prospect that those metrics will substantially improve this year or next. With exploration budgets cut to the bone, fewer and fewer discoveries will be reported. Last year saw the least amount of oil discovered in almost 70 years, and 2016 will likely be worse.

The inability to produce even some of the proven oil reserves out there has forced companies to issue massive write downs. ExxonMobil is the one exception to that trend  the oil company has not written down any assets over the past two years, a fact that has the New York Attorney General looking into the companys accounting practices, investigating it for fraud. Related: The Next Hot Thing In Oil  Permian Land Rush Continuing Unabated

With no room to discover new oil through drilling, Wood Mackenzie expects the oil majors  always under pressure from Wall Street to continuously grow  to add new reserves not by drilling, but by buying. Royal Dutch Shell, for example, scrapped its ill-advised drilling program in the Arctic, which it had hyped up as a major new frontier for oil exploration. The failed campaign was a shift in focus for the company, and it instead spent more than $50 billion to purchase BG Group, which provided Shell with oil and gas assets in Brazil, East Africa and Australia. Also, Exxon recently spent $2.5 billion on some LNG assets in Papua New Guinea.

Those were some higher profile transactions; Wood Mackenzie sees smaller acquisitions as the most common trend moving forward. The need for M&A in exploration is likely to be here for a considerable time," Wood Mackenzies Latham said. Oil majors will spend money on assets rather than on taking over companies.

The other factor to consider is that so many companies have rising debt levels and limited cash on hand. The oil majors themselves are in the midst of enormous asset disposal programs in order to improve their balance sheets. Shell alone is hoping to sell off $30 billion worth of assets over the next few years. For the lucky companies that have the resources to go on a spending spree, it is a buyers market out there with so many indebted companies looking to offload assets. Exploration is at a standstill, so these asset sales will become more central to the growth prospects of the oil industry.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

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The Seadelta tanker bound for Italy, has finally left the port of Ras Lanuf. This is the first export cargo of crude oil from Libya since 2014, the oil exports coordinator at the port told AFP. The shipment totaled 776,000 barrels. It will be followed by the Syra, which will load 600,000 barrels at Ras Lanuf and deliver them to Italy, another port official told Bloomberg.

The North African countrys oil export terminals were until last week under the firm control of the Petroleum Facilities Guard, an armed militia affiliated with the UN-backed government. Then, control over Ras Lanuf, Zueitina, El Sider, and Al-Brega was wrestled from the PFG by the Libyan National Army, which was quick to invite back the National Oil Corporation.

The loading of the Seadelta was interrupted over last weekend, when the PFG tried to retake Ras Lanuf but the LNA forces managed to stop the attack. The LNA is loyal to the eastern government of Libyan, the House of Representatives, which has no international recognition.

Meanwhile, Libya has been expanding its oil production as well. September has so far seen an average daily output of 450,000 barrels, according to Ibrahim Al-Awami, a NOC official. To compare, in August, the average daily output in Libya was 260,000 bpd. Now, some fields are being restarted after fighting subsided and production is growing.

While this is certainly good news for the war-torn North African country, which has the biggest crude reserves on the continent and before the civil war, pumped 1.6 million bpd, its not as good for traders.

Time and again the market has swung on just the possibility of Libya restarting oil exports. Now that this has become a fact, a drop in prices is also in order. On Tuesday, however, both most popular benchmarks closed with a gain, thanks to a 7.5-million-barrel weekly decline in U.S. oil inventories, estimated and reported by the American Petroleum Institute.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Over 300 of Norways oil industry workers conducted a walk-out on Wednesday after wage negotiations failed to produce an acceptable outcome for the Industri Energi trade union, according to a new report by Reuters.

We strike because the Norwegian Oil Industry Association did not show any willingness to meet us at our moderate demands, Ommund Stokka, a local leader for the trade union said.

A handful of wells on the Norwegian continental shelf will be forced to stop drilling as a result of the worker shortage, according to the oil and gas companies operating in the area.

Supplier companies have been particularly hard-hit by the decline in activity on the Norwegian continental shelf, Jan Hodneland, lead negotiator at Norwegian Oil and Gas, said.

Government-appointed mediator Mats Wilhelm Ruland told reporters that the two sides have not come close to an agreement so far, though not for a lack of trying. The last round of talks lasted four hours longer than scheduled.

"They were too far apart," Ruland said in a statement.

Industri Energi represents 6,500 workers employed by 30 different companies. The union says it will escalate the strikes if an agreeable solution is not found in the near future.

Wednesdays strike included 335 employees of Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Oceaneering and Oceaneering Asset Integrity.

A rise in wages and benefits would put pressure on oil companies already strained budgets due to the ongoing oil price crisis. Keeping wages at the current level would prevent further job losses, oil majors argue.

NOGA negotiated on behalf of oil companies, insisting that the union had proposed unreasonable wage increases during the previous round of dialogue.

"A conflict won't immediately affect the output of oil and gas from Norway's continental shelf, but may do so if the conflict escalates," the association added.

Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The highest court of Ukraine rejected a claim filed by the Russian firm Gazprom, which challenged an anti-trust ruling made by the Anti-Monopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMU) this week.

The Supreme Court upheld a decision by the committee to fine the gas giant $3.4 billion for abusing its dominant position in Ukraines gas transit market.

Having considered the grounds set forth in the claim [submitted by Gazprom] and analyzed the materials attached to it, the panel of judges finds the claim groundless," court documents say.

The Ukrainian government backed the AMUs ruling, which stood in line with related charges filed by the European Commission against the same company for taking undue advantage of its market power in Central and Eastern European countries, violating the European Union's antitrust regulations.

Gazprom lost an appeal in the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine in July. At the time, the $52 billion company described the ruling as a great surprise.

This decision can only be seen as an attempt to put pressure on Gazprom in the higher courts, the company said in a statement after the decision went public.

Ukraine has been mitigating Russian influence in Kiev by building new energy partners in Europe over the past two years.

Direct Russian gas exports to Ukraine fell from 14.5 to 6.1 billion cubic meters in 2015, or some 58 percent.

EU gas consumption is lower than expected, but rising. Conversely, EU gas production is experiencing marked declines. Norwegian output is expected to shrink some 7 percent following record output in 2015.

By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The developers of Schlitz Park announced today that Badger Liquor, Wisconsins largest wine and spirits distributor, has signed a 10-year lease for 24,000 square feet of office space in Schlitz Parks RiverCenter building, 1555 River Center Dr.

Badger Liquor is the first tenant announced for a $6.73 million renovation project Schlitz Park will start this month to convert 80,000 square feet of former warehouse space into office suites. Located on the Milwaukee RiverWalk, the first floor offices will feature large windows and soaring ceilings, and will house tenants expected to bring a total of 350 jobs to downtown Milwaukee.

Badger Liquor, a fourth generation owned and operated company with locations in Fond du Lac, West Allis and Eau Claire, will move 100 sales and office employees to Schlitz Park from its West Allis site. Warehouse and operations employees will remain at Badger Liquors West Allis location.

"Schlitz Park is the perfect site for Badger Liquor to move forward as an organization and for us to stay on the cutting edge of the wine and spirits industry," said John Boulahanis, Executive Vice President of Sales, Badger Liquor. "A centrally located and accessible downtown Milwaukee location will allow us to better connect with our customers and enhance these relationships."

The beverage distributor plans to open a new hospitality center in its Schlitz Park space to train customers. Sales and product education is an essential element of Badger Liquors customer service process. The hospitality center will feature a bar and warming ovens, host tastings and provide customers with opportunities to learn from Badger Liquor staff and local chefs about food, wine and spirit pairings.

Another audience segment Badger Liquor plans to better reach with a downtown location is millennials  "the end users of our products" notes Boulahanis  and a key employee recruitment segment.

"We continually look to grow our talent pool and bring in fresh ideas and perspectives into our industry," said Lindsey Pearson, Vice President of Human Resources, Badger Liquor.

Badger Liquor has 430 employees statewide. Having made a substantial investment in employee wellness, Pearson said the company was excited to see the "top notch" fitness facilities at Schlitz Park and other wellness-related offerings such as Bublr bike share and free daily bike rentals. "We love the idea of our employees going for ride at a lunch. These and Schlitz Parks other health and fitness amenities will be great complements to our existing wellness program," she said.

Badger Liquor will move into its Schlitz Park space in early January. Jenna Maguire and Ned Purtell of RFP Commercial, Inc., representing Schlitz Park, and Sam Dickman and Zachary R. Noble of The Dickman Company, Inc., representing Badger Liquor, negotiated the lease.

The RiverCenter warehouse conversion project is funded with a $1.25 million loan from the Milwaukee Economic Development Corporation and financing from U.S. Bank. Schlitz Park developer Gary Grunau said discussions are underway with two additional possible tenants highly interested in relocating to the space.

"Like Badger Liquor, these are companies that will bring new jobs and new employees to downtown," Grunau said. "Thats why we continue to invest in increasing the value of the economic development asset that is uniquely Schlitz Park."
Did you know Milwaukee Public Schools has what might be the largest group of public Montessori schools in the world? It's definitely the largest in the United States.

Now, led by school board member Tati Joseph, there's a push to add a new South Side dual-language Montessori program to that community, and the district is hosting four public information sessions about it, beginning tonight.

MPS' Montessori programs  some of which are among the top-performing schools in the district, according to state report cards and other measures  are scattered across the Milwaukee landscape, including in Bay View (Fernwood and Howard Avenue), the East Side (Maryland Avenue), the West Side (MacDowell and Highland), the North Side (Lloyd Barbee) and the Northwest Side (Craig).

MacDowell expanded a couple years ago when it moved into the much larger former Juneau High building, which allowed Highland to move into and later purchase the former MacDowell, allowing it to grow, too. Howard Avenue was opened in 2012 to ease some of the immense pressure on the Fernwood waiting list, and now it also already has a waiting list.

Fernwood Montessori opened a new addition on Sept. 1, which will facilitate its growth, and Maryland Avenue Montessori is getting an addition that will open in time for the 2017-18 school year. But that space really is big enough only to accommodate existing enrollment, though the program, at 435 students, has already grown larger than it's ever been (in the district's 2011 long-range facilities plan, the school, which then had an enrollment of 373, was deemed to be at a 147 percent building utilization, which means it was already bursting at the seams).

But since the program at Kosciuszko fell apart on 9th and Windlake on the South Side (I won't bore you with the politics of that here), the near South Side has been without Montessori.

In the past few years, some had talked about a small program launching in the then-vacant 88th Street School, but that never took off and a new program has since moved into that space. Last year, a group of MPS teachers wrote a proposal for a South Side bilingual Montessori MPS charter school, but though that appeared to have legs, it faded due to a lack of funding.

Thanks now to school board member Joseph  who represents the near South Side  and others, there's this effort to open a public dual-language Spanish/English Montessori school somewhere in the neighborhood.

"The dual-language Montessori school is an exciting new project for MPS," Joseph told me this morning. "The school, which will be the first of its kind in Wisconsin, will combine two very strong programs to give children the opportunity to learn a second language in a Montessori setting.

"The dual-language programming will allow children the opportunity to learn a second language, a skill necessary in our current global economy."



But there's a lot to discuss  not the least of which is how to staff such a school and where it will be located. These are not insurmountable issues, nor are they cake.

There are very few open spaces available in existing MPS buildings on the South Side. In fact, there's exactly one that I can think of. So, if I were you, I'd bank on that site being the focus.

"Although a site is not known yet, I want to keep the school in the South Side of Milwaukee," says Joseph.



At the moment, that sounds like it would mean the vacant building on South 10th Street that was formerly home to Hayes Bilingual, which is now located in the former Kosciuszko building on 9th and Windlake.

Secondly, finding trained Montessori teachers has always been a challenge to scaling up the program city-wide. There has been no shortage of ideas over the years for Montessori programs in this building or that one, or expanding existing ones into bigger buildings, but actual growth has occurred only at a pace that availability of staffing has allowed.

That challenge is magnified when you add that a teacher must also be fluent in Spanish (and I'd think a native speaker would be preferred). Luckily, Milwaukee is home to the Montessori Institute of Milwaukee training center, where Allyn Travis  a respected Montessori trainer  has connections with Spanish-language Montessori trainers.

"The district is actively brainstorming ways to recruit teachers who are or are eligible to be certified in Montessori and bilingual education," Joseph told me. "Our advantage is that Montessori training is a global opportunity and countries like Mexico, Spain and Argentina have International Montessori training facilities compatible to the Montessori training we will need.

"Besides looking internationally, we hope to pave the way in understanding and establishing way to create teacher pipelines in Milwaukee where we can recruit and train our own."

Fortunately, this time around, the district appears to be fully invested in the idea.

"Our parents and students have expressed interest in more opportunities to enroll in Montessori schools and in more opportunities to learn languages. This new school offers students the opportunity to access both," said MPS Superintendent Dr. Darienne Driver in a statement that called the proposed program, "part of the districts ongoing efforts to implement its Regional Development Plan to create more enrollment opportunities in high-performing schools."

The same news release suggested that the idea is being fast-tracked, too, so that the proposed school could be available for 2017-18 enrollment during the February '17 three-choice enrollment period.

You can find out more at the information sessions, the first of which is tonight at South Division High School, 1515 W. Lapham Blvd., from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. A morning meeting is slated for 8 to 9:30 a.m., Wednesday, Oct. 12, at the same location.

Two evening meetings  from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.  are also scheduled for Bay View High School, 2751 S. Lenox St.: Wednesday, Oct. 5 and Wednesday, Oct. 19. All are welcome and light refreshments will be served at each of the meetings.
(A PARODY)

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Guiding Principle:

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Sheikh Rashid walked out of PAC meeting

ISLAMABAD: PAC Chairman Khurshid Shah had called the committees meeting over the Panama revelations, but Law Secretary Karamat Hussain Niazi told the committee that discussion on the topic falls outside the purview of the committee.



Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) legislators Mian Abdul Manan and Shaikh Rohail Asghar were very vocal during the whole meeting, and tried to counter Awami Muslim League chief Sheikh Rashid Ahmad and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insafs Arif Alvi and Shafqat Mehmood.



Before staging a walkout, Sheikh Rashid said if the PAC was unable to discuss Panama Papers (according to the law secretary), why the meeting was called in the first place.



On this, Khurshid Shah told the committee that the PAC could discuss any matter, which had financial implications. Anything may be discussed here subject to the provision of evidence.



The PAC was informed that neither the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) nor the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had initiated any investigation into the Panamagate, and only the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) had issued notices to some 230 individuals whose addresses were available with it.



The committee directed the departments concerned to collect more information on the issue, and postponed the meeting for a month.



In the beginning, Arif Alvi compared the response of Indian and Pakistani governments over the issue by saying that in India a few departments quickly made a cell and began investigation into the Panamagate.



He said there were reports that some Pakistanis had purchased properties in Gulf countries: an issue that merits discussion in the meeting.



Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) lawmaker Naveed Qamar said that money was sent abroad for establishment of offshore companies, and asked whether it was moved legally or illegally. He said that the government departments needed to stop the illegal flight of money from Pakistan.



Speaking on the occasion, Sheikh Rashid said that for the first time the PAC had completed its quorum, which showed the interest of legislators in the matter. The PML-Ns lawmaker Mian Abdul Manan kept on interrupting Sheikh Rashid throughout his speech.



Meanwhile, the law secretary told the committee that under rule 203, the PAC could not discuss the Panama disclosures. Responding to him, Khurshid Shah said it has financial implication and the PAC could discuss it. He said that not discussing the Panama disclosures would be tantamount to legalising corruption.



FBR Chairman Nisar Muhammad Khan informed the committee that the board had started issuing some notices to individuals whose names appeared in the Panama leaks. About Pakistani investment in Dubais real estate sector, he said the UAE government was not cooperating in this regard. About Panama Papers, he said there was need for proper laws to check it. We sent notices to some individuals whose names appeared in the disclosures and asked a few questions from them; some responded, while a majority of them is yet to respond.



On the other hand, Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) Chairman Zafarul Haq Hijazi informed the PAC that the commission had not put restrictions on investment abroad. He said that some Pakistani companies had invested in foreign firms, but not in offshore companies.



He said that the SECP was thoroughly monitoring these companies and if found guilty of illegal practices, action would be taken against them accordingly.



State Bank of Pakistan Governor Ashraf Mehmood Wathra told the PAC that establishment of offshore company was a legal business in the world.



He said that even in Pakistan, an investment of around $2.37 billion had been done through offshore companies.
From Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As...
The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher,
Of course. You would have to be be barking mad to want to bring this rabble to NZ. But then socialists are mad by definition. It's not as if we don't have...
Her Excellency Tove Degnbol, the Danish Ambassador to Ghana, has commended Ghana for its religious tolerance and expressed the hope that such mutual understanding would contribute to a peaceful election.



Madam Tove Degnbol said the mutual understanding between Muslims and Christians and the various churches with different doctrines and teachings was the key to national development and cohesion and commended the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) for its pivotal role in helping to hold the country together.



The Danish Ambassador was speaking in Koforidua, at a public forum organized by the CCG and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) on the theme: The Churchs political role in nation building and election 2016.



She commended the CCG for embarking on a campaign to educate the Christian community and other smaller groups on their role towards a peaceful election in December as well as towards nation building.



Madam Degnbol underscored the need for the civil society organizations (CSOs) to focus on the youth on their rights and responsibilities in this election so that they would not allow themselves to be used as tools for political violence.



She pledged the support of her country in every endeavor that sought to make the elections free and fair to sustain Ghanas democratic dispensation.



Madam Degnbol in the company of her husband, Mr Lars Udsholt had earlier joined the General-Secretary of the CCG, Reverend Dr Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong at Akuapem-Akropong to campaign for peace at the coming elections.



Reverend Dr Opuni-Frimpong thanked the Ambassador for the interest shown in the CCG activities towards free and fair election in December and the release of funds from the UNDP to support the activities.



He assured the Ambassador that the CCG and its other religious groups would not relent in ensuring that Ghana goes through the electioneering period free of violence and the results would be acceptable by all political stakeholders.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The New Patriotic Party (NPP) yesterday punched holes into the 2016 manifesto of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) launched in the Brong-Ahafo regional capital, Sunyani, over the weekend.



For the NPP, it is nothing worth banking hopes on and that it is full of grandiose promises to Ghanaians regarding what the NDC would do if re-elected.



At a press conference in Accra yesterday, Policy Advisor and Chairman of the NPPs 2016 manifesto committee, Boakye Agyarko said after critically analyzing the NDC manifesto, one could only conclude that the future under another Mahama term would indeed be bleak, and that from their own resource allocation for the next four years, the likely scenario is that we are not going to have any money to pay salaries next year.



President Mahama said during the manifesto launch that we still have more roads to construct, more houses to build, more food to produce, additional educational and health facilities to provide and most importantly, more jobs to create.



Broken Promises



Mr Boakye Agyarko wondered why the president would take empty pride in his achievements for the past four years when incidents of broken promises, corruption, mismanagement of the economy and high unemployment were rife. For these, the NPP strong man noted, John Mahama is a president who is so out-of-touch with the problems of the average Ghanaian that he sees his non-performance in these sectors as a success.



Mr Agyarko focused his lenses on the four thematic areas around which the NDC manifesto was prepared in assessing the credibility of the presidents intentions, which are Putting People First, Building A Strong Economy For Job Creation, Expanding Infrastructure For Accelerated Development and Advancing Transparent and Accountable Governance.



Question Marks



On President Mahama and the NDCs promise to put people first as contained in their manifesto, the Policy Advisor had this to say, In todays Ghana, with so much suffering and hardship, nothing shows that John Mahama has put Ghanaians first.



That, he said, was due to the fact that after all today, they [Ghanaians] pay more for their electricity than their rent. They bear testimony to how four years of Dumsor has destroyed their small businesses; Ghanas young people have lived the nightmare of searching for non-existent jobs, a situation that has led to nearly half of that population being jobless.



For him therefore, It cannot be disputed that President Mahama has made Ghanaians poorer.

He said the evidence is that the prices of everyday items have skyrocketed under John Mahama. The price of a gallon of petrol has gone from GH3 to GH16; bread has moved from GH2 to GH7; milk from GH1 to GH3; kenkey from 30 pesewas to GH2; fish from 50 pesewas to GH2; sachet water from 5 pesewas to 20 pesewas, and a bag of cement from GH12 to GH32.



Even though President Mahama wants Ghanaians to believe that if re-elected, he would ensure equitable development for all our citizens, Agyarko, who managed the NPPs campaign in 2012, insisted, The reality, however, is starkly different. Even members of his own party realise that the Presidents Better Ghana Agenda has been for the benefit of only his family and friends.



Lies



On the NDCs promise to build a strong economy for job creation, Mr Agyarko quoted a portion of the NDCs manifesto which claims, The Youth Employment Agency is offering employment to over 100,000 youth, saying This is a clever way to hide the fact that the Mahama government has not been able to hit even its modest target of creating 100,000 jobs by the end of this year.



He referred to the Youth Enterprise Agency (YEA) which came to replace the GYEEDA, and said it has become a vehicle to loot over GH1 billion of taxpayers money.



The NPPs National Youth Employment Programme, which became GYEEDA under President Mills, was launched on October 3rd 2006. The pilot project which ushered it in had by this time employed nearly 33,000 youth in community education and agriculture. By the time the NPP left office on January 7, 2009, 110,000 young people were employed under the scheme. In under two years with the right policies in place, a positive change was made, he revealed.



Comparing the two, he emphasized that Immediately the NDC took office, they created a horde of unemployed youth by laying off all these 110,000 young people previously employed.



He thus insisted, What the NPP achieved in under two years, the NDC has been unable to achieve in 8 years; it is not surprising that their greatest achievement in this sector has been the creation of ingenious schemes to facilitate the stealing of over one billion Ghana cedis from the sector and the sharing of this loot amongst themselves and their cronies.



Inflated Project Costs



Tackling the NDCs promise to expand infrastructure for accelerated development as captured in its manifesto, the NPP guru asked President Mahama and his government to let Ghanaians know what the NDC has got to show for the billions of dollars they borrowed in their (Ghanaians) name.



The NPP believes Ghana could and would develop three times as fast, if Ghanaians get rid of President Mahama and the NDC this December because according to Agyarko, who is also a former vice president of the Bank of New York, Today under Mahama, Ghana is spending $1.4 million per km to asphalt roads, against the African average of $600,000.



He noted, While, all this incompetence and corruption is going on, our neighbour Burkina Faso, which is drier than Ghana, through various irrigation schemes is growing big, juicy, delicious strawberries for export and processing strawberries into jam.



Meanwhile, he noted that Here in Ghana, we are subjected to leaders who know how to fly akomfem to Burkina Faso, but do not believe the NPP can provide irrigation to help our poor farmers in the North through its One Village: One Dam solution. For lack of vision, Ghanaians suffer!



Corruption



On President Mahamas promise to advance transparent and accountable governance when re-elected, Mr Agyarko could not but ask rhetorically, How can Ghanaians expect a vice president, John Mahama, who was investigated by his boss, President John Atta Mills, over allegations of corruption, be expected to have the moral authority and desire to fight corruption when he is now the boss?



He again asked, How can we expect a president who admits to accepting a $100,000 gift from a foreign contractor, who was awarded a government contract through the efforts of the president, to have the courage and desire to stop his ministers and other officials from dipping their hands into the state coffers? How can we expect a president who has spent four years to protect his friends who were found to have allegedly stolen public funds through instruments such as GYEEDA and SADA, to allow any case of corruption to be prosecuted?



For him, When it comes to corruption, President John Mahama sees no wrong, hears no wrong and speaks against no wrong. To him that is just the way it is.



Need For Change



We want Ghanaians to think about this: if this has been his attitude in his first full term as President, what then would his actions be if re-elected for his last and final term? What then would restrain President John Mahama and his family of corrupt cronies in his last term from pillaging the national coffers? Let us not make any mistake about it. John Mahama for another four years, unchecked by the threat of losing another presidential election, is an exceptionally frightening prospect.

Source: Daily Guide









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Kofi Adu, aka Agya Koo, an award-winning actor and comedian from Ghana has finally declared his support for Nana Akufo Addo as far as the 2016 presidential elections is concerned. He officially made this announcement when he addressed the media from his private office at Sofoline, a town within Ashanti Region.



According to him, under the leadership of President John Mahama, prices of commodities have astronomically shot up leading to hardships.



He recounted that I have personally sat back and monitored critically how things are going and felt the need to join the crusade for change in the political administration of this country.



As promised yesterday, Peacefmonline.com has added more flesh to story it published concerning the decision by the veteran actor to throw his weight behind the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party- story below.







PRESS STATEMENT BY KOFI ADU (AGYA KOO) ON THE LAUNCH OF AGYA KOO AGENDA 57% FOR NANA ADDO



Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, I wish first of all to express my sincere gratitude to you all for honoring my invitation. I stand before you here today as a concerned Ghanaian who is deeply troubled by the direction this country is going.



I speak the voice of the ordinary Ghanaian who is bearing the brunt of extreme economic hardships which has come about as a result of poor leadership.



I have personally sat back and monitored critically how things are going and felt the need to join the crusade for change in the political administration of this country.



Let me state emphatically clear that I am not here to compete with any individual or engage in any wayward political stunt.



As a movie star, I have travelled far and wide across the country and have seen the conditions many Ghanaians are going through on daily basis trying to acquire one-square meals a day.



Many Ghanaians today face unprecedented precarious economic hardships which have consequently led to job losses and high unemployment rate, poor healthcare provision and cut-throat utility bills.



As a Ghanaian, I feel the pinch of the escalating prices of goods and services on the market and cannot keep quiet. I have therefore decided to join the call for change in the direction of leadership since it is the only way the country can see development and progress.



I am very sure that most of you were around in 2008 and witnessed the economic conditions that prevailed at that time.



I do not want to bore your ears with a reminder but we all were witnesses to the fact that goods and services were affordable and every ordinary Ghanaian could afford it.



One would therefore wonder why conditions in this country have become so deplorable within the spate of eight years.



Today, it is sad to compare how these same prices of goods and services have increased astronomically as a result of poor economic policies and performance of the current leadership.



Now the ordinary Ghanaian cannot afford basic items like Milk, Sugar, Rice, Bread and other household commodities. We have taken the trouble to do a thorough research of prices of goods and services on the market and compared them to the time of the NPP administration.



I challenge anyone who disagrees with me to do his or her own checks from the markets to ascertain the veracity or otherwise of this sad situation.



Apart from being a movie star as many Ghanaians know to be, I am also a parent and know how expensive it is to give your children quality education in this country.



It is for this and other reasons that I have decided to join the voice for change by declaring my support for the Presidential Candidate of the NPP, Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo.



I have therefore decided to launch the THE AGYA KOO AGENDA 57% FOR NANA ADDO to support the campaign of the NPP in order to help bring the much needed change.



My objective therefore is to interact with ordinary voters and share my experience on the need for change in leadership in the country since it is the only way this country can see progress.



Thank you so much for honoring my invitation and God Bless.

Source: Chris Joe Quaicoe/ email: [email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares?



























Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano...



Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos:



Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias.



Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera.



No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje.



En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio.



Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida.



Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella.



Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal.



Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista.



Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen.



Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che?



Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio.



Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora.



Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo.



Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo.



Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania.



No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar.



Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga.





Alguna duda?



Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino



Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia.



OZ1



OZ2



OZ3



OZ4



Homenaje a Jason Galarraga



La Victoria de Samotracia



Odalisca



Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008



























La Sierra Nevada de Merida



Nuestro precioso Churum Meru



Homenaje a Picasso



Autoretrato



Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola?

La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.

Mi profesion?

Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.

Sal en la Coca Cola?

A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.

De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:

Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto

Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)

azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)

Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas

Mucha Cafeina

Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio

Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe

Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion

El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.

Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.

Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.

En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).

Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.

La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.

Bebidas Light?

Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el

Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.



Publicado por loretahur



En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur

MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina:

1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias.

2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina.

3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard.

4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos.

5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla.

6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos.

Ahora... sobre la margarina:

1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) .

2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias.

3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno).

4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer.

5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna.

6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo.

7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina.

Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas:

* No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo).

* No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!!



No a la guerra, Si a la Paz



Misterios de la ciencia...



Los costos de la guerra



medicos y capitalismo...



Capitalismo...



medicos (2)



Quien educa a nuestros hijos?



Los Medios...



Sin Palabras...



Chistes feministas

- Cual es el problema, Eva?

- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz...

- Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.

- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...

- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.

- Que es un hombre?

- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.

- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.

- Cual es el truco?.

- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.

- Cual?

- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.





Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Ellas...



Ellas (2)...



Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1

Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije:

-Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro.

Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria.

Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre?

-Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa!



VENGANZA NUMERO 2

Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris.

A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita:

- Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!!

Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta.

La mujer paso quince dias en Francia.

El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla.

Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es:

- Y amor me trajiste mi francesita??

- Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina.



VENGANZA NUMERO 3

El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion.

- No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo.

- Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz.

Te quiero confesar algo.

- Esta bien, esta bien. Habla!

- He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga.

- Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!!



machismo y cibernetica



Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston.

-Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide.

-Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!.



.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti.

Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos.

Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco.

Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas



Gol !!!!



Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso!



Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy!


Like a cartoon space alien with a dome-like skull, an Airbus Beluga transport plane arriving from Madrid drops from the sky above this village 200 miles northwest of London and taxis to a stop with its front end tucked inside a large building off the runway.

Its bulbous forehead pops open to disgorge massive wing panels - 98 feet long and 20 feet wide - that will soon be assembled by sophisticated robots and about 800 humans into the largest carbon-fiber composite wings now built for commercial aviation.

Ninety minutes later, it's ready to take off for Bremen, Germany, with a new load so large it must be tilted at a 45-degree angle to fit inside: an almost complete A350 wing.

This model of technological prowess, combined with geographical inefficiency, is what Boeing is contending against as it gears up to make its own, even larger composite wings for the 777X in the Seattle-area city of Everett.

Airbus puts together its wings in a $520 million state-of-the-art facility here that John Gillbanks, head of Airbus A350 wing production, says is "specifically designed for automated wing assembly."

On a recent tour of the half-million-square-foot main building, partially assembled wings glided in and out of fixed stations, drilled and fastened mostly by robotic machines. The key pieces were designed and built by Mukilteo engineering firm Electroimpact, a prime supplier to this wing facility that opened five years ago.

Like Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, the A350 has wings, tail and fuselage made from carbon-fiber composites.

The initial A350-900 model, which entered service last year and carries 325 passengers, competes with the 787 Dreamliner.

The larger A350-1000, carrying 366 passengers, is to begin flight tests this fall and will compete against Boeing's 777. It will also go up against the 777X, which will feature new composite wings attached to the traditional metal 777 fuselage.

To build such large composite wings is a major technological undertaking. The parts must first be fabricated from carbon-fiber tape infused with epoxy resin that is baked to hardness in massive high-pressure ovens called autoclaves.

Airbus' composite parts are fabricated at facilities scattered widely around Europe, in England, Scotland, Germany and Spain. The one-piece wing skins are so large they must be flown to Broughton in the ungainly, custom-built Beluga.

The assembly process begins with mechanics stacking the aluminum ribs and composite spars that form the wing's ladderlike internal skeleton onto a movable cart that holds the unfastened pieces in position.

In the first station, this loose assembly is laid horizontally on top of the lower wing skin and the upper wing skin is dropped into place on top.

Movable arms aligned with lasers push and hold the structure into its precise alignment, which includes a twist to the outer end of the wing for better aerodynamics, as the automated machine tacks the structure together with temporary fasteners.

The wing is then moved to the next station, where a big Electroimpact machine drills and fills new holes to permanently fasten the wing skins.

As the machine stitches the wing together, two operators sit underneath it, monitoring the fastening process and controlling it where necessary with handheld triggers.

Creation of the basic wing structure is the most automated piece of the process. After that, it takes a lot of manual work to complete the wing: Altogether, about 800 mechanics and engineers work directly on the A350 wing at Broughton.

When the wing is backed out of the Electroimpact fastening machine and movedalong to the next station, a metal platform closes around it.

Mechanics walk around the wing on this platform, kneeling on pads along the edges to install the final fasteners by hand.

In the last station, mechanics install brackets on the wings' trailing edges.

Each has a kit ready to hand with slots holding every bracket and bolt needed for the job, as well as a drawing showing where each piece goes in the assembly.

The wing then leaves the main building, delivered by transporter to the wing equipping facility next door, for the installation of the leading edge panels, the fuel system and the remaining brackets for wire harnesses.

Before it exits, the wing gets a coat of beige protective paint and the fuel system is tested for leaks.

"Over there, it's a box," said Gillbanks, of the wing-assembly facility. "Over here, it's a wing."

Yet even now, ready to leave Broughton, it's still not a full wing.

The wing is transferred via Beluga to Bremen, where the big trailing-edge flap is attached and the final hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical systems are installed.

Broughton has done most of the work, Bremen has finished it. Only then is the complete wing flown one more time in the Beluga to Toulouse, France, for A350 final assembly.

This year, shortages of interior components have delayed A350 final assembly. Airbus has delivered just 21 of the jets through the end of August, with many more sitting on the flight line awaiting seats or lavatories.

Yet Broughton continues to churn out eight sets of A350 wings per month, with a plan to go to 10 sets per month, then 13 sets per month by the end of 2018.

Boeing's 777X composite wing, including a 12-foot-long folding wingtip extension, is 10 feet longer than that of the A350.

In Everett, Boeing's plan for building that giant wing has one very significant advantage over the Airbus setup in Broughton:

With the large wing parts being fabricated on site in a new, highly automated $1 billion building, there'll be no need for anything like Airbus' expensive parts-delivery operation.

While Airbus has to truck wing spars from England and Scotland, and fly in the wing skins from Spain and Germany, Boeing will simply deliver the big 777X wing parts next door, into the main Everett plant, said Jason Clark, Boeing vice president of 777X operations.

"The entire wing from spar and stringer fabrication all the way through final assembly is going to happen right here on this site," said Clark, in an interview at Boeing Everett.

Yet in trying to emulate the automated efficiency of Broughton, Boeing also has a disadvantage.

Rather than working within a clean-sheet, purpose-built facility like the Airbus A350 wing factory, Boeing must clear space to assemble the 777X wing inside that widebody jet-assembly building in Everett, originally constructed in the late 1960s and expanded in the 1990s.

Although it's the largest building by volume in the world, right now it's filled with equipment for building not only the 777 but also the 747, 767, and 787 jets.

There's room to shift lots of the tooling around, but it won't be as easy as moving into a brand-new space.

Clark said Boeing will reveal details of its plan for 777X wing assembly soon, but for now indicated only a broad outline. He said Boeing has learned both from Mitsubishi's experience building the 787 wings in Japan and from its own highly efficient operation in another Seattle-area city, Renton, for building the 737 wings.

Citing the horizontal-build format in Renton, Clark implied that the 777X wings will be assembled flat to allow both mechanics and robots easy access.

It will be "a very efficient, well-balanced line with automation and manual portions," Clark said. "You'll love it when you see it."

Among the major suppliers of integrated automation equipment involved, Clark mentioned Electroimpact and MTorres.

As noted, Electroimpact supplies key drilling and fastening equipment on the A350 wing assembly. And it supplies to Boeing the carbon-fiber lamination technology that will be used to fabricate the 777X wing skins and spars.

MTorres is a Spanish company that supplies all the carbon-fiber lamination equipment used to fabricate the wing parts of the A350 in Britain, Germany and Spain. It has established an engineering team in Everett and supplies Boeing with integrated manufacturing cells that bond the stringers to the 777X wing skins.

With this degree of cross-pollination, it's not surprising that the Boeing plan - horizontal build, highly automated, common equipment suppliers - sounds like it could be similar to what Airbus is doing in Broughton.

The automation that will do the drilling and fastening likely won't look like the automotive-style robots that Boeing is now introducing, with considerable difficulty, to build the 777 fuselages.

Instead, as in Airbus Broughton, the business end of the robotics will almost certainly travel along the wing on an overhead gantry.

"You'll see a lot of standardization throughout the (aerospace) industry when it comes to structure and wing assembly," said Clark. "We'll never do it identical to Airbus. But there'll be a lot of similarities."

-

Where Airbus builds wings

-About 6,000 people work at the 700-acre Broughton site, building Airbus wings.

-The carbon-fiber wings of the new large twinjet A350 are built in the north factory, opened in 2011.

-Wings for the A320 and A330 jets are built in the east factory that dates back to World War II.

-The wings of the A380 superjumbo jet are built in the west factory, opened in 2003.

Source: Airbus

Explore further Boeing shows off new 777X wing center

2016 The Seattle Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Temporary rivers are watercourses with a varying water regime from abundant flows in spring to seasons of droughts- which makes the diagnoses difficult with common methodologies. Credit: Nuria Cid, UB-FEM

When there are no data due to a lack of hydrometric station, interviews to neighbours and air photographs of water environment are the effective methods to collect information on the water regime of temporary rivers.

This is one of the main conclusions of a study published in the journal Science of The Total Environment and signed by the researchers Narcis Prat, Maria Rieradevall and Nuria Cid, from the Research Group Freshwater Ecology and Management (FEM) of the University of Barcelona (UB), and Francesc Gallart, Pilar Llorens and Jerome Latron, from the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC).

Temporary rivers: from abundant flow to droughts

Temporary rivers are watercourses with a varying water regime from abundant flows in spring to seasons of droughts- which makes the diagnoses difficult to see their ecological status with common methodologies, which are aimed for permanent rivers. Also, the ponds that remain are worth preserving biodiversity reservoirs.

Designing new tools to diagnose the hydrological and ecological status of temporary rivers and improving their management in accordance with the Water Framework Directive of the European Union is the main aim of LIFE Trivers, a project financially supported by the European Union and led by Professor Narcis Prat, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Barcelona.

Improving the management of short-lived rivers in the Mediterranean

"LIFE Trivers aims to fill a space that Mediterranean basin agents find: the lack of tools that allow taking right decisions when deciding, first, whether it is a temporary river, secondly, if its temporality is due to natural or human factors, and thirdly, how to make a right ecology quality diagnose" says Narcis Prat, coordinator of the European Project LIFE Trivers and head of the Research Group Fem-UB. The project also counts with the participation of the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water (IDAEA-CSIC), the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) and the Jucar Hydrographical Confederation (CHJ).

According to the scientific article, mixing interviews to neighbours and series of high-resolution air photographs is an alternative that allows substituting or complementing the registers and assessing the water regime of temporary rivers. In this research, experts used the TREHS system (Temporary Rivers Ecological and Hydrological Status), a new tool developed in the LIFE Trivers framework to characterize the ecological status of temporary rivers. To verify the new methodology, the experts included data from three hydrometric stations- facilities with technological devices to obtain hydrological data- which are now in interior basins in Catalonia, with recurring dry periods. It will be necessary to update these data through professional and expert observation.

TREHS adds historical available data on the flow of each river, as well as data for simulations from water torrent models. In addition, it allows obtaining or completing this information with the interviews done to neighbours and analysis of air photographs.

"These statistics will enable us defining the hydrological status of the river, knowing whether it is temporary due to natural or human reasons, and helping when selecting the sample calendar of reference biological communities in the temporary regime", says Francesc Gallart, researcher of IDAEA-CSIC and first author of the scientific article published in the journal Science of The Total Environment.

In this project, there is also the collaboration of the experts Nuria Bonada, from the Research Group FEM-UB and the Biodiversity Research Institute (UB-IRBio), Pablo Rodriguez-Lozano (FEM-UB), and Dolors Vinyoles and Jaume Cambra, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Barcelona.

First meeting with COST SMIRES work groups

Trivers is also one of the members of the action COST SMIRES (Science and Management of Intermittent Rivers and Ephemeral Streams), financially supported by the European Union to widen and unify the knowledge of temporary rivers and supporting their recognition within the water ecosystem management. On September 12 and 13, the city of Lyon (France) held the first meeting of COST SMIRES work groups, with the participation of the experts Francesc Gallart (IDAEA-CSIC), Nuria Cid (FEM-UB) and Antoni Munne (ACA).

The COST SMIRES initial meeting, led by Thibault Datry from the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, gathered around one hundred experts from around the world. According to Francesc Gallart, who develops the hydrological part of LIFE Trivers, "the main problem in the study and management of temporary rivers is the lack of information, worsened by the fact that when we have hydrometric stations, they don't add information on the presence or lack of water basins when there is no flow".

According to Nuria Cid, member of the Research Group FEM-UB and head of projects in LIFE Trivers, "SMIRES project will contribute greatly to obtain data from biological communities from different areas in Europe with diverse climate characteristics with the presence of temporary rivers, and deepen the study of this ecosystem at a greater scale". The head of the Department of Control and Quality of Waters of ACA, Antoni Munne, highlighted that temporary and intermittent rivers have been given little attention and there is little knowledge in order to allow an accurate management.

According to Munne, who is also member of the management committee in TRIVERS as state representative, COST SMIRES has to allow debating and advancing in effective forms to apply the existing knowledge in management and preservation of these water ecosystems, which are also the available resource for other activities that need to be juggled.

Explore further A plant catalogued as extinct in Catalonia is rediscovered

More information: F. Gallart et al. Validating alternative methodologies to estimate the regime of temporary rivers when flow data are unavailable, Science of The Total Environment (2016). Journal information: Science of the Total Environment F. Gallart et al. Validating alternative methodologies to estimate the regime of temporary rivers when flow data are unavailable,(2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.05.116
Fluorescence-microscopic image of the antennal lobe, the olfactory center, of the vinegar fly: Because the fly has two antennae, the antennal lobe also consists of two parts, a left and right hemisphere. The spherical structures are the olfactory glomeruli; more than 50 glomeruli are found in the antennal lobe of a vinegar fly. Glomeruli are neuronal networks where many synapses form between single nerve cells, which are clearly visible in the image as all synapses are marked with a purple-magenta color. The sensory neurons of one particular glomerulus are marked with the photoactivatable green fluorescent protein (PA-GFP). Olfactory glomeruli have unique architectures which already represent the ecological relevance of the odor they process. Credit: MPI f. Chemical Ecology/ V. Grabe

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now quantified and mapped the functional units of the olfactory center in the brains of vinegar flies responsible for the perception of odors. They found out that the so-called olfactory glomeruli in the antennal lobe, the insect analogue of the olfactory bulb of mammals, differ from each other in their architecture. The morphology and the structure of these spherical brain units provide information about the ecological relevance of the odors they process, especially with regard to the flies' odor-guided behavior.

When insects search for food, a sexual mate or the ideal place for laying eggs  somewhere where the hatching larvae have a good chance to survive  they have to rely on their sense of smell. They use their olfactory organs, the antennae, to detect odor molecules in their environment. These odors are processed in the so-called antennal lobe, the actual olfactory center of the insect brain, which consists of spherical structures: the olfactory glomeruli. Here, inside the olfactory glomeruli, different groups of olfactory neurons form conjunctions or synapses which enable different environmental odors to be processed.

Until now, scientists had assumed that olfactory glomeruli share a pretty homogeneous architecture and that particular functions of the different glomeruli can be attributed primarily to special olfactory receptors on the membranes of the olfactory sensory neurons. A research team of the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology has now shown for the first time that the neuronal composition of each glomerulus is unique and highly specific. "Each glomerulus processes different odors in a unique way. The odors, on the other hand, differ in their impact on the behavior of the vinegar flies," explains Silke Sachse, the leader of the study

The researchers scrutinized the neuronal architecture of the olfactory glomeruli in the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster and linked the morphological differences they observed to the respective functions. They labeled different neurons in single glomeruli, and counted and anatomically described these. In order to achieve this, they used transgenic Drosophila lines which expressed the photoactivatable green fluorescent protein (PA-GFP) in the neurons and high-resolution confocal microscopy.

"As assumed, but until now not experimentally proven, glomeruli which contained many olfactory sensory neurons were generally bigger than were the glomeruli with fewer olfactory sensory neurons. This means that the anatomical shape of a glomerulus already provides information about how sensitive it will respond to a certain odor," Veit Grabe, one of the first authors of the study, reports. The scientists also investigated whether there were any differences between male and female flies: Glomeruli which processed the Drosophila sex pheromones were bigger in males which were able to perceive the female attractants from large distances. Moreover, the researchers counted the so-called projection neurons which are responsible for the transmission of odor stimuli to higher regions of the olfactory system. Glomeruli containing highly specific olfactory sensory neurons  namely, those which process only one single odor  seem to exhibit more projection neurons than glomeruli which process many different odors. More projection neurons make sure that information is transferred to higher brain regions in a faster and more reliable way to result in rapid odor-guided decisions.

In order to link the morphology of a glomerulus to its function, the research team determined another important parameter by means of electrophysiological analysis: "Lifetime sparseness" indicates how many different odors can activate an olfactory receptor. If a receptor is activated by a large variety of odors, it has very low "sparseness" and is therefore a very broad-range receptor. The higher the "sparseness" of a receptor, the fewer odors it is able to perceive. An extreme case would be a highly specific receptor which responds only to a single odor. Odors which are very attractive to vinegar flies include their own pheromones, but also odors which provide clues about where to find a food source, such as overripe fruit. Some of these attractive odors may elicit oviposition in females, because they provide information about a place where larvae can hatch and have a good chance to survive. However, important odors may also be deterrents  and warning signals  because they contain information about lethal dangers, such as toxic substances in a potential food source or parasites.

"The complete quantitative mapping of all olfactory sensory neurons linked together in each olfactory glomerulus helped us to create an extended morphological basis for a better understanding of the role and function these units in the olfactory system have," co-author Amelie Baschwitz summarizes.

Because these new insights are not limited to the vinegar fly, and may also apply to other animals or even humans, they have far-reaching significance.

Explore further Stinky or fragrant? Predicting changing odor preferences

More information: Veit Grabe et al. Elucidating the Neuronal Architecture of Olfactory Glomeruli in the Drosophila Antennal Lobe, Cell Reports (2016). Journal information: Cell Reports Veit Grabe et al. Elucidating the Neuronal Architecture of Olfactory Glomeruli in the Drosophila Antennal Lobe,(2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.08.063
A hand exoskeleton helps stroke patients to integrate rehabilitation exercises into their everyday lives. Credit: Gerber Loesch Photography

Using the power of thought to control a robot that helps to move a paralysed hand: a project from the ETH Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory could fundamentally change the therapy and daily lives of stroke patients.

One in six people will suffer a stroke in their lifetime. In Switzerland alone, stroke affects 16,000 people every year. Two thirds of those affected suffer from paralysis of the arm. Intensive training can  depending on the extent of damage to the brain  help patients regain a certain degree of control over their arms and hands. This may take the form of classic physio- and occupational therapy, or it may also involve robots.

Roger Gassert, Professor of Rehabilitation Engineering at ETH Zurich, has developed a number of robotic devices that train hand functions and sees this as a good way to support patient therapy. However, both physio- and robot-assisted therapy are usually limited to one or two training sessions a day; and for patients, travelling to and from therapy can also be timeconsuming.

Exoskeletons as exercise robots

"My vision is that instead of performing exercises in an abstract situation at the clinic, patients will be able to integrate them into their daily life at home, supported  depending on the severity of their impairments  by a robot," Gassert says, presenting an exoskeleton for the hand. He developed the idea for this robotic device together with Professor Jumpei Arata from Kyushu University (Japan) while the latter was working in Gassert's laboratory during a sabbatical in 2010.

"Existing exoskeletons are heavy, and this is a problem for our patients because it renders them unable to lift their hands," Gassert says, explaining the concept. The patients also have difficulty feeling objects and exerting the right amount of force. "That's why we wanted to develop a model that leaves the palm of the hand more or less free, allowing patients to perform daily activities that support not only motor functions but somatosensory functions as well," he says. Arata developed a mechanism for the finger featuring three overlapping leaf springs. A motor moves the middle spring, which transmits the force to the different segments of the finger through the other two springs. The fingers thus automatically adapt to the shape of the object the patient wants to grasp.

A hand exoskeleton with motors that can be fixed to the patients back: A bicycle brake cable transmits enough force to lift a litre bottle of mineral water. Credit: Stefan Schneller

However, the integrated motors brought the weight of the exoskeleton to 250 grams, which in clinical tests proved too heavy for patients. The solution was to remove the motors from the hand and fix them to the patient's back. The force is transmitted to the exoskeleton using a bicycle brake cable. The hand module now weighs slightly less than 120 grams and is strong enough to lift a litre bottle of mineral water.

Researching brain processes

Gassert is currently driven by the question of what happens in the brain and how commands pass from the brain to reach the extremities after a stroke. "Especially with seriously affected patients, the connection between the brain and the hand is often severely or completely disrupted," Gassert explains, "so we are looking for a solution that will help patients pass on commands to the robotic device intuitively." The idea is to detect in the brain a patient's intention to move his or her hand and directly pass this information on to the exoskeleton. This may also produce a therapeutic benefit. According to Gassert, a number of studies show that it is possible to strengthen existing neural connections between the brain and the hand with regular exercise. An important component for this is that the brain receives somatosensory feedback from the hand when it produces a command to move.

In order to understand what goes on in the brain, Gassert is carrying out fundamental research with clinicians, neuroscientists and therapists. For their research, the scientists can draw on a number of imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allows them to map the activities of the whole brain. While this technology allows them to gain fundamental new insights, fMRI is both very expensive and highly complex and consequently not suitable for therapy. "And of course, it's not portable," Gassert adds with a mind to his project. He therefore focuses on simpler techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG)  and in particular functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the least expensive of these technologies. Gassert is currently engaged in the challenging task of figuring out whether and how fNIRS can be robustly employed. He is working on this together with a group from the University Hospital, who are contributing their experience in clinical application of the technology.

Fundamental insights

Another question that is still not fully understood is how the brain controls limbs that interact with the environment. "Here, robotics is making a valuable contribution to basic research because it is ideally suited for capturing a movement, perturbing it and measuring the reaction," Gassert explains. For example, the robotics experts have developed an exoskeleton that makes it possible to block the knee for 200 milliseconds while walking and extend it by 5 degrees. With the help of sensors, the scientists measure the forces that are involved and use this data to infer how the brain modulates the stiffness of the knee. These findings then flow into applications such as the control of new, active prostheses.

If the researchers succeed in establishing an interaction between the brain and the exoskeleton, the result will be a device that is ideally suited for therapy. If, on the other hand, the deficits are permanent, a robotic device could offer long-term support  as an alternative to invasive methods, which are also being researched. These for instance envisage implanting electrodes in the brain and triggering stimulators in the muscles. However, as long as stroke patients can expect to experience a reasonable degree of recovery, the robot-assisted therapy will be the obvious choice.
In this April 23, 2016 file photo, Elijah Voge-Meyers carries cod caught in the nets of a trawler off the coast of New Hampshire. The United States and Canada have brokered a deal to share what's left of the dwindling North American cod fishing business in the Atlantic next year. The two fisheries overlap in the eastern reaches of Georges Bank, an important fishing area located off of New England. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, file)

The United States and Canada have brokered a deal to share what's left of the dwindling North American cod fishing business in the Atlantic next year.

Both countries fish for cod, which is an important food fish that has declined in population following overfishing and warming ocean temperatures with climate change. The two fisheries overlap in the eastern reaches of Georges Bank, a key fishing area located off of New England.

The countries have agreed to set the total allowable catch at 730 metric tons next year. The U.S. will be allowed to take 146 metric tons and Canada will get the rest.

The agreement comes as cod quotas off of New England, where the fish is associated with fish and chips, have fallen precipitously. The agreement with Canada represents an 8 metric ton increase for the U.S. and a 96 metric ton increase for Canada, leaving some in the U.S. fishing industry irked.

"Cod fish is very important to the United States, as it is to Canada," said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition. "The sharing agreement hasn't worked out very well for the U.S. fishery."

The New England Fishery Management Council approved the agreement for the U.S. on Wednesday. Canada approved it earlier.

The council voted in 2014 to slash U.S. fishermen's total Gulf of Maine cod catch limit from 1,550 metric tons to 386 metric tons. The quota is now 280 metric tons. The council also cut the U.S.'s total Georges Bank cod quota from 1,787 metric tons to 608 metric tons last year.

Atlantic cod remain available to consumers because of fish caught by fishermen from countries such as Norway and Iceland, but the fish's decline off of New England is a major threat to the domestic fishing industry. Some scientists have said warming ocean waters make it difficult for the fish to reproduce enough to recover from fishing pressure.

Explore further Study finds 30 percent of global fish catch is unreported

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The derived elemental abundances for HR8844. Credit: Monier et al., 2016.

(Phys.org)Astronomers from the Paris Observatory in Meudon, France and the Notre Dame University  Louaize in Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon, report that an A-type main-sequence star HR8844, could be a hybrid object between two classes of chemically peculiar stars. The discovery was detailed in a paper published Sept. 16 on arXiv.org.

Previous studies described HR8844 as a slowly rotating, fairly bright (V=5.89), superficially normal A0V star. However, the latest research conducted by Richard Monier of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues sheds new light on the real nature of this star.

According to the paper, the model atmosphere and spectrum synthesis modeling of the spectrum of HR8844 reveals that most of the light elements are under-abundant, while the very heavy elements are overabundant. That means the star should be reclassified as a chemically peculiar star.

"The derived abundance pattern of HR8844 strongly departs from the solar composition, which definitely shows that HR8844 is not a superficially normal early A star, but is actually another new chemically peculiar star," the researchers wrote in the paper.

Chemically peculiar stars, like HR8844, are main-sequence A and B stars with unusually strong or weak lines for certain elements. Besides their chemical composition, they have magnetic fields and experience very slow rotation with an average velocity of 29 km/s, which leads to extremely sharp-lined spectra.

The new findings are based on data provided by the SOPHIE high-resolution echelle spectrograph installed on the 1.93m reflector telescope at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southeastern France. The team has analyzed the SOPHIE dataset and found that HR8844 has under-abundances of light elements like helium (He), carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and oxygen (O) and overabundances of the iron-peak elements and of the very heavy elements such as strontium (Sr), yttrium (Y), zirconium (Zr) and mercury (Hg).

Taking into account a mild overabundance of manganese (Mn), the scientists concluded that HR8844 could be a hybrid object between the HgMn stars and the Am stars. HgMn stars are characterized by abnormal metal overabundances of Hg and Mn, together with under-abundances of light elements like He. When it comes to Am stars, their spectrum showcases strong absorption lines of metals such as Sr and Zr.

Thus, according to the team, HR8844 resembles both a very hot Am star and a very cool HgMn star. Therefore, the star was reclassified as a hybrid object intermediate between these two classes. "Most of the light elements are under-abundant, whereas the very heavy elements are overabundant in HR8844. This interesting new chemically peculiar star could be a hybrid object between the HgMn stars and the Am stars," the paper reads.

However, in order to precisely determine the class of HR8844, the researchers plan further observations of the star that would complement the recent study.

"We are currently planning more observations of HR8844 with SOPHIE in order to complement the abundances derived here and search for line variability. This will help us address the relationship of HR8844 to the two other hot Am stars, Sirius A and HD72660 and constrain the nature of this interesting new chemically peculiar star," the team wrote.

Lately, Monier's team was successful in redefining the status of HD 30963 star. That research and the new study are part of a broader project aiming to reclassify main-sequence stars in the northern hemisphere.

Explore further HD 30963 is a chemically peculiar star, study finds

More information: HR8844: A new hot Am star? arXiv:1609.04915 [astro-ph.SR] HR8844: A new hot Am star? arXiv:1609.04915 [astro-ph.SR] arxiv.org/abs/1609.04915 Abstract

Using one archival high dispersion high quality spectrum of HR8844 (A0V) obtained with the echelle spectrograph SOPHIE at Observatoire de Haute Provence, we show that this star is not a superficially normal A0V star as hitherto thought. The model atmosphere and spectrum synthesis modeling of the spectrum of HR8844 reveals large departures of its abundances from the solar composition. We report here on our first determinations of the elemental abundances of 41 elements in the atmosphere of HR8844. Most of the light elements are underabundant whereas the very heavy elements are overabundant in HR8844.This interesting new chemically peculiar star could be a hybrid object between the HgMn stars and the Am stars.

 2016 Phys.org
Douglas V. Gibbs is a proud member of the American Authors Association

Douglas V. Gibbs is a proud member of the Military Writers Society of America.
CORINTH  A Corinth High School student was arrested Tuesday for allegedly posting a threatening message toward the "school community" on social media, police said.

Emily L. Berard, 16, of Corinth, was charged with making a terroristic threat, a felony, after the Saratoga County Sheriff's Office received a tip Tuesday that she had "posted a message on Facebook which was threatening to the school."

Police did not release any more specifics of the threat other than it included possible violence, but investigators determined there was no indication she planned to act on the threat.

Berard was arraigned in Corinth Town Court and released pending prosecution.

Her status with the school district could not be determined Wednesday morning. School Superintendent Mark Stratton would not say whether disciplinary action had been pursued.

"I think we handled it swiftly and very well. Students were never in danger," he said.
WHITEHALL  The town and village are embracing their inner Sasquatch.

One of the regions hotspots for Bigfoot sightings and a place where hunting Bigfoot is banned by law, Whitehall is celebrating the legendary monster on Saturday. A 1976 sighting on Abair Road, which included a reported observation by police officers, was one of the key events in publicizing the monster in the region.

The first Sasquatch Calling Festival is scheduled for Saturday in Skenesborough Park, and the event will include screenings of two recent films, The Beast of Whitehall and Minerva Monster.

Minerva Monster concerns another Sasquatch sighting in Ohio.

I read somewhere about a mosquito-calling contest, and I figured, well, why couldnt we do something like that? said David Molenaar, a member of the Whitehall Beautification Committee. We wanted to do something to celebrate Whitehall. This could be our Woodstock.

About 400,000 people attended Woodstock. Slightly fewer may be drawn to Whitehall this weekend, although a $100 cash prize in the Sasquatch-calling contest could draw a crowd.

Prizes will also be awarded for the best Sasquatch costume.

Local Sasquatch researcher and author Paul Bartholomew and Vermont researcher Frank Siecienski will give presentations. Brian Gosselin from the Northern Sasquatch Research Society will be a guest judge and speaker.

Gosselin was one of the Whitehall Sasquatch witnesses.

Bill Brann, author of Monsters of the North Woods, will also speak.

Were one of the few places that has an ordinance against hunting Sasquatch, and there have been a number of sightings, Molenaar said.

Last year, two separate film crews visited. The meeting held by a crew from Finding Bigfoot drew several hundred people and lots of stories.

Live music will be played in the amphitheater next to the pavilion all day. Vendors will sell goods, barbecue will be for sale and activities for children will be available.

We kind of dont know what to expect, Molenaar said. We know there is a lot of interest.
Democratic congressional candidate Mike Derrick distanced himself from the comments of a recent speaker at a campaign event who called U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, Elsie the Cow.

My campaign does not condone any language that disparages women. While this comment was not made by an official staffer of my campaign, I do object to it, and I agree that the comment was inappropriate, Derrick said in a prepared statement.

The incident is the latest controversy about civility that has arisen in the 21st Congressional District race between Derrick, a retired Army colonel from Peru in Clinton County; Stefanik, the incumbent; and Green Party candidate Matt Funiciello, a bread company owner and political activist from Hudson Falls.

Ernie LaBaff, speaking at the grand opening of Derricks campaign office in Potsdam on Sunday, said, We do not need a congresswoman like Elsie (sic) Stefanik, or Elsie the Cow, whatever you want to call her, according to a video of his remarks.

Elsie the Cow is the cartoon mascot of Eagle Brand dairy products and previously Borden.

The Stefanik campaign on Monday issued a news release calling the remark inappropriate and disparaging to women.

Derrick agreed.

There is never room for name-calling in our political discourse, plain and simple, he said in the prepared statement. I encourage Congresswoman Stefanik to take her own advice here and repudiate her support for Donald Trump and the sexist name-calling that permeates his campaign.

Stefanik has said she supports Trump as the Republican nominee, but does not agree with all of his policies and statements.

Derrick was busy with campaign events and was not available to comment directly, said Drew Prestridge, his campaign manager.

The incident is the latest of several disputes about civility in the race.

Joe Seeman, a MoveOn.org and Working Families Party organizer who is a Derrick campaign volunteer, objected to a comment Funiciello recently posted on Facebook.

In a Facebook discussion with Seeman about presidential politics, Funiciello wrote, Joe and his Hillary supporting ilk are racists and chauvinists and anti-Semites. They hate Jill Stein because shes a woman, shes Jewish and she has an African-American running mate.

Seeman, in a letter to The Post-Star, said the comment is unacceptable and was particularly hurtful because his parents are Jewish Holocaust survivors.

There is simply no excuse for the depths that Mr. Funiciello has sunk to, he said.

Funiciello said Seeman took his comment out of context.

It was intended as sarcasm, which should have been evident by the winking emoticon symbol he included at the end, he said.

I totally stand by my remarks. He just didnt recognize the irony of it, Funiciello said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Joe states that anyone who supports Jill Stein is supporting Donald Trump. And I said that would be like me saying to you that anybody who doesnt support Jill Stein must be anti-Semitic and chauvinist and racist, because she is a Jewish woman who is running with an African-American vice presidential candidate.

The Greater Glens Falls Democracy for America Chapter, a Democratic political advocacy organization, also criticized Funiciellos Facebook comment.

I personally find it very painful to see the tangent Matt has now gone on, said Larry Dudley, the groups coordinator, in the groups Sept. 9 newsletter.

Derrick would not comment on the dispute, said Prestridge, his campaign manager.

If Matt is picking fights with people in the community, thats unfortunate. But we have nothing to do with it, he said.

In July, the Stefanik campaign criticized the Derrick campaign for republishing on its campaign Facebook page the text of a newspaper letter to the editor that called Stefanik a soulless Wall Street errand girl and questioned if she is seeking proximity to the cologne zone of dream date Paul Ryan.

Prestridge said at the time the letter was a public letter and not a statement from the campaign.
Those who plan to rent boats on Lake George next summer will be required to receive basic safety training before they head out on the water.

The Lake George Park Commission announced this week that a series of meetings prompted by several high-profile rental boat crashes on the lake this summer has resulted in a plan to make sure boat-renters get some instruction.

We have a responsibility to ensure that we are doing all we can to prevent accidents on Lake George, and working with marinas on a standardized and well thought training regimen for all boat renters is a great step forward, Park Commission Chairman Bruce Young said in a news release.

The initiative comes after two high-profile crashes on the lake that involved rental boats this summer, both of which caused injuries, and incidents in which a man drowned while swimming from a rental boat and another man was accused of using a rental boat to drive to island campsites and steal valuables.

The incidents prompted Warren County legislators to discuss the possibility of a local law that would require a training course for boat renters.

State Sen. Elizabeth Little, R-Queensbury, convened meetings that involved the Park Commission, representatives of 20 or so marinas and boat trade organizations. They found that all marinas said they offered some instruction to renters, but there was no standardized program.

State law does not require boat renters or operators born before (corrected) May 1996 to take a safety course, but the incidents on Lake George this year prompted calls for training. Some marinas had concerns that a training requirement might result in fewer rentals.

State Assemblyman Dan Stec, R-Queensbury, said the meetings were productive and it was good to see no resistance at all to expanded and improved training that marina owners provide.

At the minimum, lets standardize it, Stec said.

Studies have shown that rental boats seem to have a much higher rate of accidents than privately owned ones, Stec said.

One of the issues to be confronted, though, is that many would-be renters speak little to no English, so materials in several languages will be needed, Stec said.

Others suggested improvements in buoys and signs to aid boaters who arent familiar with the lake, he added.

Under the Park Commission program, renters will:

Take part in a basic hands-on boat handling skills training prior to departure from the marina.

Watch a short training video.

Be given clear and concise informational materials on each rental boat.

In addition to providing the educational materials to marinas, the Park Commission will offer training next spring to staff at marinas where boats are offered for rent.

Lake George Mayor Robert Blais has arranged for the S.A.V.E Lake George Partnership to pay the cost of developing the training video.

Some marina staff members reached Wednesday had not seen details of the plan, and others declined comment or didnt return calls. But the Park Commission said in a news release that reaction among boat rental businesses and their trade association was positive.

Roger Phinney, executive director of the Eastern Marine Trades Association, praised the initiative in a Park Commission press release.

Scott Olson, manager of Dockside Landing Marina in Hague, said his companys rental policies always include safety instructions similar to those being proposed.

Everything they came up with is something that we are already doing, he said.

But he said those who use the lake all need to play a part in making it safer.
QUEENSBURY  The trial of a Johnsburg man accused of killing his weeks-old daughter has been postponed for nearly two months as lawyers review evidence in the case and await a ruling on whether the murder charge in the case should stand.

Nicholas D. Jones had been scheduled to stand trial Oct. 3 for the death of 22-day-old Gabriella Jones, but Warren County Judge John Hall has adjourned the trial until Nov. 28. Pretrial hearings will likely be held first, but no date has been set for those.

Jones, 25, faces counts of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter for a March 28 incident in which he allegedly shook and threw the infant in the familys Route 28 home, because he was upset about her crying. Gabriella died two days later, with an autopsy finding she suffered severe brain injuries.

State Police said he confessed in a videotaped interview the day the child was hospitalized.

The postponement comes as Jones defense lawyer, Tucker Stanclift, seeks to hire a medical expert for the defense after receiving an autopsy report on the childs death earlier this month.

I dont think either side is close to being ready for trial, he said.

Warren County District Attorney Kate Hogan said the autopsy report was delayed because of specific tests that needed to be performed that took an extended period of time.

She said her office was awaiting a ruling on the legality of the murder charge, which was filed under a theory of law that Jones had depraved indifference to human life when he allegedly injured his child.

Hall heard oral arguments Sept. 7 on a motion filed by Stanclift, asking for dismissal of the murder count because he does not believe there is sufficient evidence to prove Jones had depraved indifference to human life.

In preparing for trial, Warren County prosecutors last week filed court papers asking Hall for permission to use Jones criminal record against him if he testifies.

He has a felony conviction for forgery in 2013, for which he was sent to state prison, and also has misdemeanor convictions from 2012 for petit larceny and a conviction for non-criminal trespass in 2011, according to court records. Whether the information will be part of the case will be determined by Hall before trial.

Jones is being held in Warren County Jail without bail, pending further court action.
FORT EDWARD  A young child was seriously hurt Wednesday and police were trying to figure out how she was injured.

As of Wednesday evening, the child, whose name was not released, was in Albany Medical Center on life support because of an apparent fractured skull, authorities said.

Washington County Sheriff Jeff Murphy said police were working to determine what happened to her, but said the circumstances were unclear and no arrests had been made as of 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.

We are very early in the investigation, Murphy said.

The child was the subject of a 911 call at 603 Lower Wright St. on Wednesday morning. Police have not said who called or what the circumstances of the call were. Neighbors said the child was 4 years old, but police would not comment on his or her age.

The child was initially taken to Glens Falls Hospital, then transferred to Albany Medical Center via helicopter.

Sheriffs officers had cordoned off the property with yellow police tape as of late afternoon, with two deputies guarding the home.

Neighbors said they had no idea what happened at the home, which sits just south of the Hudson Falls village line, and heard nothing unusual before police arrived. A family with several children lives there, and numerous toys and a stroller were in the driveway Wednesday.

Mike Needham, who lives across the street, said he arrived home after a walk around mid-morning to find police cars at the home.

Word filtered through the neighborhood by late afternoon that a child had been injured and was not doing well, he said.

Its just a terrible thing, he said.

Neighbors said the family that lives in the the small, two-story home has been there for about two years.

Ive never heard a lot going on there, Needham said. Every once in a while a dog will get loose but thats about it.

Property tax records show the home is owned by John Bickford III. Neighbors said they believed a relative of his lived there with her family.

The office of Washington County District Attorney Tony Jordan was assisting the Sheriffs Office with the case. Jordan confirmed there is an ongoing investigation.
MOREAU  The fourth-grade students were rapt Wednesday, listening to Tanglewood Elementary School teacher Suzanne Schiavoni read a story about a raccoon who got cocky and lost his ability to run fast.

Schiavoni and the students had their shoes off and were sitting on a rug inside their tepee.

Yes, the school now has a traditional American Indian dwelling set up in its courtyard.

Its comfortable, said 9-year-old Sydney Mallory.

Principal Matthew Conrick said the idea for the tepee came from his desire to dress up the schools courtyard, which is always difficult to maintain. The grass has been removed and replaced by stone and the tepee.

Conrick said he had worked at a summer camp in Vermont where they used a tepee as an instructional space.

The tepee came from a company called Nomadics from Oregon. It was shipped to the school over the summer and a group of about a dozen staff members spent 20 hours putting it together over a weekend, according to Conrick.

The poles are made from a specific type of pine found in Montana and measure between 18 and 20 feet. They fit together in a specific way.

They have to go in a direct sequence, Conrick said.

After the poles are in place, the canvas is attached and unfurled.

The tepee measures 22 feet in diameter and could fit three classrooms worth of students, according to Conrick.

The tepee has a design on the outside that represents black mountains and white lakes. Along the top are depictions of the phases of the moon.

My favorite part is the cool design on the outside, like the moon that goes from crescent to full moon, said 9-year-old Daniel Cormie.

Conrick said the project cost more than $4,000, all of it raised through the Home School Association.

The tepee is a valuable teaching tool, he said. Students have been using it for reading. For example, fifth-grade students have been bringing their younger reading buddies.

Other students suggested using it to camp out or play a game.

It makes it a game-changer, especially for kids who arent as enthused as we would hope for school, he said. This is just enough to engage them, create a learning environment thats different and exciting.

The reaction at the schools open house was fantastic, Conrick added.

People want to see that their kids are happy and learning, he said.
Inventory needs to be managed and managed well, or you are going to get in recurring trouble, and lose your credibility and hard-earned conversions, whether 

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However, Jeremy Moodey, the chief executive of Embrace the Middle East, told Christian Today: Having visited this exhibition myself, I cant really see what all the fuss is about. It is very low-key and simply highlights the daily humiliations and indignities inflicted on the Palestinians by the checkpoints, which incidentally are, along with the separation barrier of which they are part, illegal under international law. This is a matter of fact. It says nothing about the Jewish people, so is certainly not antisemitic.

In a statement, the church said the exhibition had been carefully curated to reflect the issues of divided communities within Israel and Palestine and to promote reflection and prayers for peace.

It said the display seeks to explore aspects of human rights and dignity. It has been put together on the basis of principled impartiality, putting concern for human rights above support of any particular group by referring to international law. There is no criticism or judgement of the Jewish community or faith.

Hinde St had informed a local synagogue about the exhibition but the letter was not received. The church said this was deeply regrettable, as it would have allowed earlier conversation and dialogue which was the churchs intention.

After representations by the BOD and the Zionist Federation, the church agreed to include a table of information prepared by the Federation. In a statement, the two organisations said it was talking to the church about a panel discussion including a pro-Israel speaker.

It said: The church has expressed regret that a letter about the exhibition sent to a local rabbi did not get through, and in future we would hope to see more rigorous consultation around such sensitive events, for the sake of good interfaith relations.

The Jewish community is now seeking volunteers, as well as those who have already signed up over the weekend, to hand out leaflets outside the church explaining the reasons why Israel feels the need for such security measures.

We hope that the event will be conducted in a constructive spirit of genuine dialogue by organisers and visitors alike.

The Methodist Church has had a fraught relationship with the Jewish community over its stance on the occupation and Israels Palestine policy, which it has frequently criticised. It called for a boycott of goods from illegal Israeli settlements in 2010 and considered extending its position on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to the rest of Israel at its 2014 Conference, but resolved to postpone consideration of the issue for two years.








On time, on schedule, just as predicted:





















US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that while the Palestinians should reject terror and incitement, Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.





Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel. But Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land. We all have to do better, the US president said at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.





Earlier on Tuesday, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon told the UN General Assembly that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a two-state solution, and that the one-state option would spell doom for both sides. This is madness. Replacing a two-state solution with a one-state construct would spell doom: denying Palestinians their freedom and rightful future, and pushing Israel further from its vision of a Jewish democracy towards greater global isolation, said Ban.





























United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a two-state solution, and that the one-state option would spell doom for both sides.

Speaking at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York for the final time as UN chief, Ban gave a wide-ranging address focused largely on the Syrian civil war, which has claimed the lives of over 300,000 people since March 2011.





On stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Ban said that prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel are being lowered by the day.

It pains me that this past decade has been lost to peace. Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion. Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness, he said, adding that West Bank settlements were obstacles to progress.





This is madness. Replacing a two-state solution with a one-state construct would spell doom: denying Palestinians their freedom and rightful future, and pushing Israel further from its vision of a Jewish democracy towards greater global isolation, said Ban.









Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon criticized some of Bans comments, charging that the real madness is of the UNs.





Instead of slamming the incitement and the terror [on the part of Palestinians], instead of bringing [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] to the negotiating table, the secretary general has chosen once again to attack Israel, he said in a statement, adding that this is a crazy obsession regarding Israel and it must stop.





At a time when Palestinian terror has returned to Israeli streets, the secretary-general has chosen to attack Israel and not the terrorism and has ignored the direct responsibility of Abu Mazen [Abbas] and the Palestinian leadership who continue to incite terror, Danon added. At least six Israelis were injured in the most recent wave of Palestinian attacks over the past week, one of them seriously.

























Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in New York on Tuesday hoping to convince the international community of the need for one standard in fighting terrorism, only to be greeted by a speech from the head of the UN that slammed Israel and made no mention of Palestinian terrorism.



As a friend of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, it pains me that this past decade has been 10 years lost to peace, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion. Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness. This is madness.









US President Barack Obama, in his farewell address to the UN, also made no mention of Palestinian violence in the one sentence he devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, referring instead to Palestinian incitement.













Netanyahu, just before leaving for New York where he will meet with both Obama and Ban on the margins of the General Assembly meeting that began Tuesday, said Israel expects the international community to have one standard in the war against terrorism, hinting at a double standard the world uses when it comes to terrorism against Israelis.









In a preview of what is likely to be one of the main themes of his address, and in the wake of the recent uptick in stabbing attacks, Netanyahu said he will speak Israels truth there. I will speak about Israels justice and heroism, the heroism of our soldiers, police officers and citizens who are waging an uncompromising struggle against cruel terrorism.









I expect one standard from the international community in the war against terrorism, he said. The international community says there is a need to fight terrorism with determination and in an uncompromising manner.



Therefore they also need to support Israels determined and uncompromising struggle against terrorism. Moral clarity, he said, is essential to fight and defeat terrorism.





Just last week, after Ban criticized Netanyahu for releasing a video accusing Palestinians of attempting to conduct ethnic cleansing of Jews in a future Palestinian state, Danon responded that Ban had a distorted view of the situation in Israel.



Instead of directly condemning Hamas for building tunnels and a terrorist infrastructure, instead of investing resources in stopping Palestinian incitement and terrorism, the secretary-general has chosen to regularly condemn Israel, he added.
























In an address to world leaders that focused heavily on migration, President Mahama said many Africa youth who engage in farming will have "fighting chance" if revenue and non revenue barriers to African products are removed.

He noted that the continent has a "significant share of the world's arable lands, a youthful labour force and a significant share of the world's natural resources."

He also bemoaned the building of new walls by countries due to fear of migrants. He accused extremists of hijacking the discussion on migration and spreading fear to young ones.

Hate speech is becoming common. People complain of being tired of being politically correct. In many places xenophobia has taken over rational thinking. In the vote on Brexit, the spectre of a flood of refugees was used as the instrument for propelling an exit from the EU," he said

"It's a paradox of our world, that nearly 30 years after Reagan called for the Berlin Wall to be torn down, new walls are springing up everywhere, he added.

He said the world has enough resource to guarantee a decent life for everybody, citing how little resources advanced to some African countries have been put to good use in education and halving poverty.

"And yet we have the resources in this world to guarantee each person a decent life. In the implementation of the MDGs, despite the minimal resources injected by the wealthy nations, we managed by prioritizing our spending to put more children in school than ever before in history. We managed to pull more than 40% of the worlds people out of extreme poverty," he said.

President Mahama said Ghanaians who embark on the risky journey to Europe are poultry farmers or entrepreneurs who "sell their shops and undertake the journey because they can no longer compete with the tons of frozen chicken dumped on African markets annually, or the adverse business environment they have to face."

He continued:"Africa does not need your sympathy or Overseas Development Assistance. Africa needs a fair chance to trade with the rest of the world and amongst ourselves. The progress towards the creation of a Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) is commendable and must be fast tracked."

"Raising intra African trade alone from the paltry average of 15% will create better opportunities for Africa's youth.
This is because the Ministry of Finance has approved for the migration of staff of the Colleges of Education (COE) from the Ghana Education Service (GES) payroll to that of the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE) and the payment of the new levels.

A letter signed by the Minister of Finance, Mr Seth Terkper (addressed to the Controller and Accountant-General and copied to all the relevant parties), stated, Following the attainment of tertiary status by the 37 colleges of education, approval is hereby given for staff of the colleges of education on the Ghana Education Service payroll to be migrated onto the NCTE payroll.

Per this approval, salaries, retention premium, critical support allowance and conversion difference are to be paid to eligible staff, the letter said.

Please note that the payment of all other allowances are to be made in accordance with the approved rates of the categories two and three allowances, it added.

READ ALSO: Teachers in colleges of education declare indefinite strike

The Colleges of Education were given tertiary status in 2004 following the Anamuah-Mensah Committees recommendation.

Following that, the teachers have been pushing for the same salary structure with their colleagues in other tertiary institutions.

They claim multiple attempts to get authorities to address their concerns have proved futile.

But the Deputy Minister of Education in charge of Tertiary Education, Mr Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has expressed optimism that the teachers might soon call off their strike action following a meeting between the ministry and the executives of CETAG, upon which the letter containing their new conditions of service was presented to them.

The letter made it clear that not all the existing staff of the COE meet the minimum requirements of the new scheme of service for COE developed by the NCTE.

Thus not all staff of the COE are to be migrated onto the Single Spine Grade Structure of the COE. Staff who do not meet the minimum requirements are subsequently to be placed on the GES payroll, the letter stated.
He opines that the purpose of the new policy is to "exclude" rather than include" some persons from teaching.

At a 'stakeholders' forum yesterday, the acting Chief Inspector of NIB, Dr Augustine Tawiah said new teachers in the country will be licensed before they are allowed to teach in public schools beginning from 2016/2017 academic year.

H added that Professional teachers in the system will also be streamlined while nonprofessional teachers will be given temporal license for three years during which they are expected to acquire the license.

However, speaking on Metro TVs Good Morning Ghana Wednesday, Mr Pratt said the exclusion of nonprofessional teachers, which the policy is aimed at, will affect education in the country.

"The purpose is to exclude some persons from practising the profession on the assumption of inferior quality. That is the purpose," he stressed. "And I will like to pose the question, how many professional teachers to we have? And are the numbers are not adequate? They are not!"

He added, "The number are obviously not adequate and if u exclude nonprofessional teachers, I mean education will suffer a huge drop."

The new policy mandate teachers to renew their license each year, while nonprofessional teachers will be given temporal license for three years during which they are expected to acquire the license.

The licensing of teachers has received massive endorsement by the Ghana National Association of Teachers and other allied teacher unions.

But Mr Pratt, an avowed socialist, believes the licensing of teachers is not the solution to cure the numerous challenges confronting the education sector.

He said: "I am just wondering, really what will it do,? It is just going to be re-training. Do you need a license to be able to retrain teachers? If you want to ensure that the level of absenteeism in schools is cured, is the license the cure for that?

"As we speak, every teacher knows that absenteeism is punishable, every teacher knows that if you absent yourself from a number of days, you are deemed to be dismissed from the public service.
Professional teachers already in the system will also be streamlined while nonprofessional teachers will be given temporal license for three years during which they are expected to acquire the license.

In addition, the license will be renewed each year for the teachers after they have gone through professional development programmes and appraisals to get their licences renewed.

This was made known at a media interaction with journalists on teacher absenteeism and school inspection in Accra Tuesday.

Dr Tawiah explained that the license comes with a criterium teachers must meet before it is renewed.

If you are always fighting and also if you have a criminal record and all such vices, you will lose your licence, Dr Tawiah said.

Touching on teacher absenteeism, Dr Tawiah said the canker has reduced significantly from 27 percent to seven percent.
Agya Koo, who carries massive weight in the movie industry, is set to commence a political campaign dubbed Agenda 57% 4 Nana Addo.

Addressing the press in Kumasi, Wednesday, he said, I have personally sat back and monitored critically how things are going and felt the need to join the crusade for change in the political administration of this country As a movie star, I have travelled far and wide across the country and have seen the conditions many Ghanaians are going through on a daily basis trying to acquire one square meal a day."

"I have personally sat back and monitored critically how things are going and felt the need to join the crusade for change in the political administration of this country."

Below is his full statement:

PRESS STATEMENT BY KOFI ADU (AGYA KOO) ON THE LAUNCH OF AGYA KOO AGENDA 57% FOR NANA ADDO

Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, I wish first of all to express my sincere gratitude to you all for honouring my invitation. I stand before you here today as a concerned Ghanaian who is deeply troubled by the direction this country is going. I speak the voice of the ordinary Ghanaian who is bearing the brunt of extreme economic hardships which has come about as a result of poor leadership.

I have personally sat back and monitored critically how things are going and felt the need to join the crusade for change in the political administration of this country.

Let me state emphatically clear that I am not here to compete with any individual or engage in any wayward political stunt.

As a movie star, I have travelled far and wide across the country and have seen the conditions many Ghanaians are going through on daily basis trying to acquire one-square meals a day.

Many Ghanaians today face unprecedented precarious economic hardships which have consequently led to job losses and high unemployment rate, poor healthcare provision and cut-throat utility bills.

As a Ghanaian, I feel the pinch of the escalating prices of goods and services on the market and cannot keep quiet. I have therefore decided to join the call for change in the direction of leadership since it is the only way the country can see development and progress.

I am very sure that most of you were around in 2008 and witnessed the economic conditions that prevailed at that time. I do not want to bore your ears with a reminder but we all were witnesses to the fact that goods and services were affordable and every ordinary Ghanaian could afford it.

One would therefore wonder why conditions in this country have become so deplorable within the spate of eight years.

Today, it is sad to compare how these same prices of goods and services have increased astronomically as a result of poor economic policies and performance of the current leadership.Now the ordinary Ghanaian cannot afford basic items like Milk, Sugar, Rice, Bread and other household commodities. We have taken the trouble to do a thorough research of prices of goods and services on the market and compared them to the time of the NPP administration.

I challenge anyone who disagrees with me to do his or her own checks from the markets to ascertain the veracity or otherwise of this sad situation.

Apart from being a movie star as many Ghanaians know to be, I am also a parent and know how expensive it is to give your children quality education in this country.

It is for this and other reasons that I have decided to join the voice for change by declaring my support for the Presidential Candidate of the NPP, Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo.

I have therefore decided to launch the THE AGYA KOO AGENDA 57% FOR NANA ADDO to support the campaign of the NPP in order to help bring the much needed change.

My objective therefore is to interact with ordinary voters and share my experience on the need for change in leadership in the country since it is the only way this country can see progress.Thank you so much for honouring my invitation and God Bless.
I am a proud Ghanaian who hails from a remote village in the Ashanti Region.

Every year, Ghanaians commemorate Founders day which falls on the the birthday ( September 21) of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and educate the youth on how his determination, perseverance and true spirit of patriotism helped save Mother Ghana from British rule.

Growing up, I always wondered how Ghana would have been now if Osagyefo were still alive. He fought effortlessly and wholeheartedly for the then Gold Coast (now Ghana) to gain independence on 6th March 1957 primarily so that Ghanaians could live in peace and love with many developmental projects which would improve our standard of living.

I believe he wanted the optimum best for this country as the history about his life and legacy says but Im asking Ghanaians: Is this current Ghana we are living in the same one that Kwame Nkrumah and the Big Six wanted us to live in when they were brutally battling our colonial masters?

Our lands have been blessed; it supports the production of cocoa and other agricultural produce. We are the second largest exporter of cocoa yet the ordinary Ghanaian cant even afford to buy a bar of chocolate. If our businessmen dont import other brands of chocolate, I dont think the average child will ever get to taste chocolate before the end of the year.

During Kwame Nkrumahs era, for instance, there was a one student-one room policy at our public universities but what do we see now? True, we have a much larger population these days but why did we not expand our capacity to accommodate through all those years of growth? Now, our future leaders even in the secondary schools are sleeping in dilapidated facilities while basic level schools continue to be inhabited under trees, pupils walking barefooted to school.

I dont know if some villages will ever get asphalt overlay. Months and sometimes years of hard work goes down the drain when our honourable farmers watch their produce rot because of bad roads to transport their produce to the urban centers. You and I, then expect the prices of food stuffs to be affordable.

After 59 years of independence, we are still experiencing dumsor. It is absurd, to say the least. Did we fail to plan as a country or we are merely victims of uncontrollable circumstances? Out of the millions reasons, dumsor is a major setback for the country. Communication, the least among the effects of dumsor, is always impeded.

Even before a child can learn how to speak and write, they are taught about cleanliness through pictorial drawings at school and practical demonstrations at home. Yet the adults who are supposed to know better ironically have made littering a culture around the entire country.

After a few minutes of torrential downpour, the country can literally be compared to an island in the middle of the sea. To say we are flood-prone would be an understatement. Floods have become second nature even in urban centers like Accra, a whole capital, due to our bad sewage and drainage systems.

Meanwhile, communicable and dirt related diseases are feeding on our brothers and sisters as a result of our irresponsible acts.

Grieving has turned to merry making and helping one another to organise funeral of their beloved ones has become money making. Coffins, the once least expensive thing has turned into a lucrative product on the Ghanaian market.

Whenever rain catches me at the stalls of our market centers, I weep for my life. We all know the state of our markets; wood construction takes 90 percent of it. When it pours , the lives of our market women are endangered and their produce are washed away by the rain. The place becomes muddy and the least slip can land someone at an Intensive Care Unit. Remains of agricultural produce, polythene bags and other waste products are heaped in our market centres which ideally are supposed to be as clean as wool. Are they selling healthy food stuffs or highly contaminated consumables?

Attending a hospital or clinic in Ghana seems to be like shopping at the boutique; it is limited to a fraction of the populace; the well to do. Even when your health insurance card secures you an appointment with a doctor; can you pay for the overly priced drugs?

If classes or distinctions were not important, students wont be graded. I heard that a customer can spend ten times his daily minimum wage when he enjoys some Ghanaian dishes outside his own kitchen in one of our locally owned 3 class restaurants. Of course, a poor man has no choice than to restrict his movement from work to home, no adventure or thrilling experience because his spending power is meagre.

We all know the increase in demand for something triggers its price increase. In Ghana, this price increase is always so substantial. Prices of items in this country are soaring higher than the eagle itself.

These days parents and their children cant watch movies together anymore because of the prevalence of uncensored nudity, violence and provocative language. Childrens educative programs are very scarce on the TV; can we get appropriate telenovelas for kids too? Considering how mainstream ones seem to have entranced adults.

Social media was basically to enhance communication and broadcast news information. But Ghanaians, unsurprisingly, have abused it: now it is a terrain of all sorts of harmful fun, bullying, explicit content and many other things that retard our growth.

Technological devices are gradually eliminating our sense of Africanism and patriotism. Students are using calculators for every arithmetic; some women are blending plantain and cassava to form fufu.

What happened to our resplendent traditional smock? Our beautiful knee-level kaba and slit? While we are busy fidgeting with our mobile devices for style inspiration from the whites, these same whites are sewing our indigenous African print, delighting in its colour and power. The irony is profound.

We can do better, as far as the love and harmony that exist between us as Ghanaians is strived for. Fighting among ourselves and killing each other over lands and power; is it really worth it? No one gets buried with these earthly possessions; so why all the jealousy and backbiting within a population supposed to be channeling its energy into development?
Akua Afriyie had cohabited with her partner Kofi Boateng for over five years. Though they are not legally married under any of the legally accepted forms of marriage in Ghana, they have one child.

The 28-year-old Akua Afriyie who is also pregnant with a second child for Kofi Boateng told Kumasi-based Nhyira FM that she moved out of the house they lived in after the church suspended her partner for fornicating.

READ ALSO: Fetish priest jailed for failing to double money

After delivery, she lived alone but recently visited Boateng. During the visit, they had a sexual affair which led to the second pregnancy. She later learnt that her partner was getting married to another lady.

She immediately went to the church when she heard the news. She carried a bottle of schnapps and invoked curses on Kofi Boateng, the wife-to-be, the pastor, family and friends who would attend the wedding.
According to him, the Western world must acknowledge and appreciate that the various countries in Africa are at various stages of development.

Speaking at the 71st United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, President Mahama said, Africa is making progress and it is happening fast. It is important to note that the various 54 countries on the continent are at various stages of development and growth... And my own country Ghana is an example."

See also: President Mahama calls on US to completely end Cuban blockade

He noted that, I am proud of my country Ghana, it is part of Africas success story, we have not looked back since independence. Ghana has a fiercely independent media and I joke among my colleagues that in Ghana, I have over 27 million presidents each thinking that they know my job more than myself."

He added, "Every morning on radio, you have people calling in and showing me how to run the country. In December, Ghana has yet another election and we will prove to the world yet again that we are a world class democracy.

Meanwhile, President Mahama called on the United States of America to completely end its trade embargo on Cuba.

He also commended the two nations for warning up to each other while calling for steps to remove the last "vestiges" of the cold war.
Well, Kennedy Agyepong has finally indicated that Charlotte Osei is not in his good books because she is plotting to rig the 2016 elections in favour of the governing NDC.

Speaking on Accra-based Asempa FM he said: I hate Charlotte Osei because she is not truthful but I assure them (NDC) that the NPP will win the election and will match them boot-for-boot.

He argued that the EC chair had acquired a house in the United States of America where she intends to move with her family if any chaos erupts during the elections.

READ ALSO: Gender group demands parliamentary action against Ken Agyapong

But Kennedy Agyepong was very optimistic the opposition New Patriotic Party would disrupt all the supposed plans of the NDC and EC ahead of the elections.

This woman and John Mahama dont want fair elections but we will foil all their plans and win the elections free and fair he emphasised.

But in a rebuttal a communications team member of the NDC, Eric Ametor Quarymne said the claims made by the MP are false. He said the NPP is only threatened to make noise because they know they would not emerge winners at the December 7 polls.

Earlier this year Agyepong on a campaign platform accused the Charlotte Osei of having sexual encounters with some bigwigs in the governing NDC to be appointed EC boss.
Honestly I believe that President Mahama has not been very good to us in the sense that even within the NDC, he has not used the capable people He has used basically incompetent people, young people whose only turf is just insulting," he told Accra-based Class FM

He added: "I say that 50 per cent of Ghanaians are NDC and, therefore, there are capable people in NDC. He should not rule with this bunch of incompetent young people And to me it pains me and I hold [President] Mahama responsible because he has all these people who are competent and he has not used them."

This is not the first time Prof Adei has slashed out president Mahama. He irked government officials last month when he condemned president Mahama's appointment style.

Speaking at the "Pearson Olae lectures" organised by old boys of Prempeh College in August, he said the president's appointment style is unacceptable and did not unify the country.

One of the things going on which is totally unacceptable is about why one out of every four public sector appointment comes from the Presidents area of origin.
I feel sad on a day like this. Yes, because there is a tragic contortion of our history. This day should be a day of joy and should be Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah Day, but when you call it Founders Day, you take away that which belongs to so many people including him and give it only to him, he said on Accra-based Class FM.

Ghanaians, today, Wednesday, September 21, celebrate the 107th birthday of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, for his contribution towards the independence and growth of the country.

READ ALSO: Woes of a citizen

The day was made a public holiday by late President John Evans Atta Mills, to enable Ghanaians to reflect on the sacrifices and achievements of the countrys founding fathers.

However, Prof Oquaye believes it is wrong to focus on only Dr Nkrumah on such a Day, as it creates the impression that he was the only one who fought for the countrys independence.
Multiple media reports noted that the event was mired in chaos when she showed up with persons connected to the NDC linked to it.

Nana Akufo Addo lodged the complaint when he visited the traditional council as part of his tour of the Greater Accra region.

He said: Only a few days ago, at Ningo, my wife was present at the Homowo festival to grace the occasion as the Special Guest of Honour. Upon learning of this, the NDC sent thugs to scuttle the event.
The kind of money skewed to a particular section of the wealthy graph. The one that the people in the most high places have access to. Yes, that kind of money in Nigeria. And these people in the most high places are quite a number compared to the ones in Ghana.

Legend has it that the amounts that are deemed surplus by the people who deem it fit to call surplus can fund the main projects when it comes to Ghana. So you see, Nigeria has money. That kind of having money. No one mentioned corruption here. So please move on.

This kind of money has played a huge part in the way Nigerians celebrate their wedding ceremonies.

Lets face it. A wedding is the first biggest loss for a couple before they even try to think about how to run a family. Just like every other entity under consideration, there are exceptions. But on a general note, weddings are losses. Huge money losses to be precise.

Then again, if you have the money, why would you not blow it on your wedding day and justify with the only excuse available, It is a once in a lifetime experience?

Some Nigerians did have the money and boy did they show how weddings could actually be a second heaven on earth.

When social media became social media, these flamboyant weddings in Nigeria began to find their ways across the borders to the pages of Ghanaian social media users.

So the little who did have the gargantuan monies began to emulate these weddings. They invited their friends who also saw that as a wedding goal.

Gradually, it is becoming the order of the day in Ghana. The superfluously rich weddings. Not much can be said if the couple are actually that superfluously rich. It just must be done that way.

The Ghanaian marriage before white wedding invaded

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Traditionally marriages in Ghana were specifically not about that particular day the event took place. It was about how things could be put in place to make sure the marriage lasted for the lifetime could have.

That was why enough time was spent researching on the various families to make sure no family issues could disrupt the compatibility status of the bride and groom after things were finalised and made official.

The items the groom was asked to submit to the brides parents were as a sign of respect and proof of commitment he was ready for the long journey. Various acts were used to signify assurance from both the bride and groom that despite the difficulties that may arise in their marriage, they were ready to see it through.

The fun and celebration part was just a small section of the whole marriage pie.

Weddings and social media, the focus of modern marriages

The traditional side of the marriages is still around. Just modified and upgraded to meet the ever requesting needs of a white wedding. There are also some new and gradually becoming permanent aspects of a Ghanaian marriage.

Pre-wedding photoshoot

Pulse Ghana

So this purpose a few years ago was handled by the respective families of the bride and groom. No. They werent photographers nor did they pose for photos. They went round telling everybody who was supposed to know about their daughter or sons marriage, inviting them and revealing all details about the ceremony. This was aided by a few printed invitations for special guests who could actually give the new couple something little to start life with.

But that was before social media became a major force in how weddings are run.

Of course, somebody has to Save the Date and it has to be a creative reminder. So pre-wedding photoshoot.

The extent some of these pre-wedding photoshoots go and the amount spent on the photographer and location is bewildering. But hey, if the money is there, why not? Right?

The list

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Legend has it the list was the list everywhere for a man who spotted the rib of his ribs and wanted to spend the rest of his life with. The few who had the flexibility to showcase their abundance of wealth added a few goats to show they were the gangalears [gang leaders] in the marriage game. But overall, the list was an untold universal rule that had the specific items.

Not anymore. You are a very lucky man if youre not asked to buy the latest version of all of Apples products for the junior brothers of the bride. An iPhone 7 for the youngest, MacBook for the oldest and an iPad for the middle child. Then again, there are exceptions to the rule but the items the families of the bride are taking is ridiculously scary for young men who want to settle down these days.

Bridesmaids and groomsmen

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To go by the terms politicians are throwing around these days, the rule was One bride, one bridesmaid and one groom, one groomsman. How time flies.

In recent interview by PulseTV, a Ghanaian lady said 8 bridesmaids was her target. Eight!

Can we skip to the next point now? This point has already been made.

Budget for the wedding

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This topic is highly relative. PulseTVs research found it ranged from a minimum of 2,000 Ghana Cedis to how much the couple were willing to spend. The maximum that was mentioned during the interviews was 60, 000 Ghana Cedis but thats surely not the limit. It cant be, considering the wedding videos that have found their way unto social media.

From the suits of the groom to the wedding gowns, the wedding rings, cloths for the groomsmen and bridesmaids, food at the ceremony, gifts to make guests remember the wedding forever, dancing classes for the groom and bride, wedding budgets have never been higher.

Peer Pressure

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Peer pressure is high on social media. No matter how a lot of people may deny, fervently seeking for a high budget wedding is all about what their friends will say and the need to top the last wedding they went to.

Nigerian weddings started this a few years before Ghana. But if you have lived in Ghana for long, you probably know there is nothing so easily achieved in the country than copying what others are doing.

It has gotten so bad to the extent people go for loans in a bid to settle their debt gradually after their I dos so friends will know they did some.

A word of advice though, the secret to spending your life with someone else is not the getting married part. It is about staying married.
Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected!
The incident, according to a Nigerian journalist with DW Radio Hausa Service, Bonne, Germany, Faruk Muhammad Yabo, happened in a village known as Birnin Ruwa in the state, where he narrated how Alhaji Giwa, a highly respected man in the community, took advantage of the girl's situation and defiled her severally till she fell pregnant.

Yabo added that after impregnating the girl, Alhaji Giwa abandoned her and denied the pregnancy when he was dragged to a Shari'a Court in the community, leaving her at the mercy of the villagers who take turns to taunt and make a mockery of her.

Read what Yabo wrote on his Facebook wall here:

"The story of this under-aged Maimuna, an orphan of Birnin Ruwa village in Sokoto State, who was raped, impregnated and abandoned by one Alhaji Giwa of the same village as accused, is very touchy.

Maimuna who is 8 months pregnant, has nobody to cater for her pregnancy at this very young age. She is now helpless; her father died since, and the person accused of impregnating her denied before the Upper Shari'a court in Sokoto, but Maimuna insisted that Alhaji Giwa as accused, was the only one who impregnated her.

The two witnesses from the same village have attested before the court that Alhaji Giwa even told them that he will take Maimuna to a specialist for abortion, but later changed his mind."
ALSO READ: Idol worshippers beat Catholic priest to state of coma

The suspected kidnappers and killers who were nabbed between September 1 and 14, have been identified as Suleiman Goma, 30, leader, Saidu Abdullahi, 28, deputy leader, Aliyu Garba, 26 and Haruna Idi, 27.

The spokesman for the Force, Deputy Commissioner of Police, DCP Don Awunah, while addressing newsmen, revealed that the suspects were picked up in Bauchi, Enugu and Benue states respectively.

Awunah also disclosed that one of the suspects who confessed to the crime during interrogation said that they collected N1.7 million ransom from the family of the deceased before killing him.

He added that, during the course of the investigation, the deputy leader of the group, Abdullahi, confessed to the police that he fired the shot that killed Adeyi.

The suspect led the police to a bush in Orokam area of Benue State where three guns used for the operation were buried,he said.

ALSO READ: Kidnapped catholic priest regains freedom in Edo

Adeyi was on his way to Otukpa, in the Ogbadibo Local Government Area to settle a dispute when he was abducted in April but his body was found two months later.
An Ado-Ekiti Chief Magistrate presided over Mr Adesoji Adegboye, who convicted on Tuesday, did not give an option of fine.

Adegboye, while reviewing the case said the prosecutor, Sgt.Leranmo Caleb, called five witnesses, and the defence counsel, Mr Busuyi Ayeni, called the convicts as his witness.

Adegboye said he was lenient on the convicts because of the plea of their counsel.

The convicts were charged with conspiracy,obtaining money under false pretence and defrauding some people that their brother was a civil defence Officer at Abuja.

Caleb said the convicts committed the crime at Basiri Area between November 2014 and June 2015.

The prosecution said that the convicts under false pretence obtained one million naira from five different people with intent of giving them work at the civil defence.
The spokesperson of the police in the state, Mr Ebere Amaraizu, said that Adamu was arraigned on Sept. 16 and had been remanded in prison custody by Chief Magistrate Denis Ekoh.

Adamu was arrested on August 29, 2016 at Affa in Udi Local Government Area.

He was arraigned on a three-count charge of illegally possessing and having under his control AK 47 rifle with 24 rounds of live ammunition in contravention of the Firearms Act.
ALSO READ: 2 suspected ritualists caught with human parts in Ogun

Speaking with Newsmen on Tuesday, September 20, in Umuahia, the Commissioner of Police in the state, Mr Leye Oyebade, said the suspect was arrested for unlawful possession of a human skull and bone.

Oyebade revealed that a tip-off from the public had led to the arrest of the suspect at his home in Olokoro, Umuahia South Local Government Area of the state.

He added that during the interrogations, the young man was unable to give a logical explanation as to how he got the items. The skull and bone are suspected to belong to a murdered victim.

However, the suspect denied the allegations, claiming that the items were passed on to him from his late uncle who was also a native doctor before his death.

It was my people that reported me to the police because I use the skull and bone to perform magic.

Anytime I touch somebody, his manhood will disappear once I have the items on me, he said.

The suspect who claimed to be a bricklayer disclosed that the police had been able to arrest because the items 'travelled' during the raid on his house.

ALSO READ: Man arrested with human hand in Osun

The suspect whose identity is yet to be disclosed described his arrest as unlawful while demanding for his release on the grounds that there are no laws which allow for the arrest of native doctors.
Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected!
ALSO READ: Body of missing Bayelsa graduate found in Lagos

The Kaduna Sector's Head of Operations of the Federal Road Safety Corps, FRSC, Mr Salisus Galadunci, confirmed the deaths, revealing that the accident took place at about 11 pm on Tuesday, September 20.

Speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, on Wednesday 21, Galadunci said that the 18 occupants of the bus who were all members of the same family, were on their way back to Lokoja from Kano when the tragic accident occurred.

Galadunci also disclosed that there was a sole survivor of the accident and that three bodies have been recovered from the river.

An 18-seater bus travelling to Lokoja from Kano plunged into River Rijana with about 18 persons, all related, returning from Sallah break.

The incident was reported by the only survivor, a woman who manage to report to an FRSC ambulance stationed at Doka unit, along Kaduna-Abuja expressway, around 7 am on Wednesday.

Rescuers from FRSC Doka, Katari and Kakau were immediately dispatched with ambulances, and with support of local divers to search for survivors.

Eventually, only three bodies were recovered, while the remaining persons could not be found, including the survivors daughter, he said.

The Head of Operations added that the survivor attributed the accident to speeding as well as fatigue.

According to Galadunci, the bodies which were recovered have been buried along the river side by villagers in the area.

Among the FRSC rescue team were the Zone 1 Commander, Bulus Darwang, Kaduan State Sector Commander, Francis Udoma and Zone 1 Head of Operations, Yomi Asaniyan, Galadunci added.
She made the remarks on Tuesday during a courtesy visit to her office in Ilorin by the Rotary Club of Ilorin.

Omar, however, expressed optimism in the eradication of Polio in the country.

She also commended the efforts of Rotary for assisting the state government in the areas of provision of water and eradication of polio.

According to her, the state government is having a feel of Rotarys humanitarian activities in the area of health and provision of basic amenities in some communities.

Earlier in his address, the leader of Rotary groups, Olorunisola Julius said the NGO is committed to complete eradication of polio in Nigeria.

He noted that the Club is embarking on vaccination and massive sensitisation programme.

Rotary Club of Ilorin will be willing to assist the state government in the areas of health, potable water supply and education, especially supply of laboratory equipments to schools in the state, he said.

Julius, who noted that the visit was to further cement the relationship between Rotary and the state government, added that Rotary will complement governments efforts and partner with it in some key areas.

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that August 11, 2016 was supposed to be a historic day for the global effort to eradicate the polio virus.

It would have been two years since someone on the African continent last contracted the wild-polio virus; if the continent had made it without a case for a third year.

The World Health Organisation could have certified it as polio-free, and Africa would have joined four other WHO regions  the Americas, Europe, the Western Pacific, and South-East Asia  in eradicating wild polio.

However, Nigerian health officials announced on Thursday, Aug. 11 the same day they expected to celebrate the anniversary; that two children have been paralyzed by wild polio in Borno.
According to Punch, hospital owners, doctors, pharmacists and patients have blamed the increase in service costs on the ongoing recession.

We used to charge N100,000 for emergency Caesarean Section but it is now N150,000. I was shocked when I travelled to Lagos the other day to buy some consumables for the hospital and I found out that their prices had changed. In fact, I could only buy half of what I needed. It was that bad, Dr Segun Adeniran, the Medical Director of the Light Heart Hospital in Ilorin, Kwara State told Punch.

Even the doctor that assists me with the surgery has asked for an increment. The price of the anaesthesia for patients during surgeries has shot up. It is either I increase the price or I shut down my facility, he added.

Segun Adetiba, a pharmacist operating in Lagos also confirmed the situation to Punch.

The prices of drugs are rising. Many are even scarce because the importers cant get enough foreign exchange to bring them in regularly anymore. We do not manufacture many of the medicines we sell in this country, he said.

Patients are complaining bitterly and we cant help them. Some cant even pay, as they beg you to take N200 for N500 for anti-malarials. Pharmacists are really affected because while a doctor can deliver a woman of a baby with just his/her skill, a pharmacist cannot just dispense his drugs, he added.

The crisis has also led to a sharp increase in the price of food items in the country due to a rise in the cost of production.

ALSO READ: Osinbajo says 110 million Nigerians are poor
The Anti-Corruption Unit of the National Youth Council of Nigeria, alleged that Jibrin opened an account in an ING Bank located at Forum House, Grenville Street, St-Heller, Jersey JE2 4UF.

The lawmaker filed a suit against the duo, Ikenga Imo Ugochinyere and Ifeanyi Okonkwo at the High Court in Abuja.

According to Premium Times, Jibrin is demanding:

An order compelling the Defendants to publish in 5 National Dailies an unconditional, detailed apology, and full page retraction of, the statements in newspaper publications titled Jibrin owns E1.558m in UK bank, NYCN alleges implicitly and/or expressly procured, authorized, and or caused to be published by the Defendants against the Plaintiff in page 11 of the PUNCH Newspaper of Monday the 19th day of September 2016 Vol.40 No.21,270 .

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff the sum of N1,000,000,000 (One Billion Naira) as general damages for the Defendants defamation/libel of the Plaintiff under the circumstances of this Suit.

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff the sum of N1,000,000,000 (One Billion Naira) only to the Plaintiff, as exemplary and/or aggravated damages under the circumstances of this Suit.

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff post Judgment interest on Prayers 3 and 4 above at 10% from the day Judgment is delivered to the date the Judgment sums are fully and finally paid by the Defendants.

An order compelling the Defendants, jointly and/or severally, to pay the Plaintiff cost of this Suit estimated at N20,000,000 (Twenty Million Naira).
The two first ladies met during the broadway event which focused on the empowerment of the girl child.

Mrs Buhari met Michelle Obama, who joined broadway stars and Stephen Colbert in a charity event which was created to coincide with the gathering of world leaders in New York for the opening of the 71st UN General Assembly.

At the event, Michelle pledged to keep pushing for women's right even after leaving the White House before an audience of New York schoolgirls and spouses of heads of state.
The CDS made the comments on Tuesday, September 20, while speaking to journalists in Makurdi, Benue state.

To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done. We will use all that we have on any person or group that goes contrary to this. We are using this opportunity to appeal and even warn all those, who are responsible for sabotage of critical infrastructure to channel their energy to developmental issues for the nation, he said according to Vanguard.

And even those, who are also clamouring for secession, I think I want to advise them to channel their effort toward the development of the nation. The indivisibility of this nation is sacrosanct just like the president  Muhammadu Buhari said, and we in the military are poised to ensure that is achieved, he added.
My life is ruined, I have been rendered homeless, I have been told that I have NO rights at all, my family is scared, my crime is journalism, he wrote via Twitter.

"The last one month has been one of the most difficult in my life, the threat to my life is more serious than what is in the public domain.

What kind of Govt will declare a citizen wanted for doing nothing but journalism, ruined my life and that of my family. Govt just said 'it was a misunderstanding,' but to hell with you, you are on your own. What kind of Govt will do this to a harmless patriotic citizen? he added.

Salkida was declared wanted in August following Boko Harams release of a video showing some of the abducted Chibok girls.

ALSO READ: Army releases one of 3 persons declared wanted over Boko Haram link
Mr Femi Adesina, the presidents Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, said President Buhari gave this assurance while addressing a gathering of political and business leaders from the United States, Africa and other regions of the world.

The Second United States-Africa Business forum was organized by the United States Department of Commerce and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

President Buhari disclosed that already his administration had embarked on significant economic reforms aimed at making Nigeria investors destination.

Nigeria remains the number one investment destination in Africa.

He said that the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council headed by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, would soon come out with wide-ranging business environment reforms on ports, visa-on arrival, improving the speed and efficiency of land titling and business registration.

Some fiscal incentives include up to 5 years tax holiday for activities classified as pioneer; tax-free operations; no restrictions on expatriate quotas in Free Trade Zones and a low VAT regime of 5 per cent.

We intend to make Nigeria one of the most attractive places to do business, he declared

President Buhari added that his administration would continue to strengthen government institutions.

We are weaning ourselves from a historical dependence on crude oil, diversifying our economy, and putting it on the path of sustainable and inclusive growth.

According to him, his administration has embarked on policies aimed at establishing an open, rules-based and market-oriented economy.

He stated that Nigerian government would continue to actively engage with the private sector at the highest levels to listen to their concerns and to assure them of our commitment to creating enabling policies in which your businesses can survive and thrive.

He urged participants to take advantage of the Forum to establish and strengthen business relationships, share valuable experience and collaborate for mutual benefits.

The president stressed that enormous potential existed for foreign investment and for the local economy.

He listed sectors which had barely been exploited to include Nigerias 180-million population and abundance of labour; arable land; forest waters; oil and gas; solid minerals; livestock and huge tourist potential.

These are no doubt challenging times for the Nigerian economy.

But let me use this opportunity to boldly affirm our conviction that there is no crisis without an accompanying opportunity.

In our case, we see Nigerias ongoing economic challenges  occasioned mainly by the fall in oil prices  as an opportunity to set the economy firmly on the path of true diversification, sustainable economic growth and shared prosperity, he said.

He said that the reform measures taken by his administration since inception in 2015 had started yielding good fruits, especially in the areas of security, anti-corruption and revamping the economy.

According to the president, the priority investment sectors for his administration now are improving infrastructure, industrial productivity, agriculture, mining and digital economy where young Nigerians are increasingly demonstrating that they have the talent and the passion to leverage.

On United States-Nigeria business relations, he announced the commencement of the US-Nigeria Commercial and Investment Dialogue with a focus on the infrastructure, agriculture, digital economy, investment and regulatory reform.
The president said this while presenting Nigerias statement at the 71th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA71) in New York, U.S.A.

The theme of the ongoing 71th session of the UNGA is Sustainable Development Goals: a Universal Push to Transform the World.

Buhari restated that fighting corruption remained a cardinal pillar of the current administration in Nigeria.

According to him, corruption freezes development and undermines the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

He, however, expressed delight that the anti-corruption campaign of his administration had started yielding positive dividends, including significant recovery of stolen assets.

The recovered funds are being channeled towards the development of critical infrastructure and the implementation of social inclusion programmes for our people, he added.

Buhari said Nigeria remained committed to achieving the SGDs, which underscored the imperative for our collective will towards finding enduring and sustainable solutions to addressing global disparities.

He said Nigeria would continue to call for speedy and unconditional recovery of illicit assets stashed abroad.

Nigeria supports the development of an international legal framework to enforce anti-corruption measures and strengthen existing international institutions to effectively deal with corrupt practices.

While acknowledging that Nigeria is not spared the adverse effects of the current global economic downturn, the president said his administration remained undeterred and had embarked on comprehensive diversification reforms by shifting emphasis to non-oil sectors.

Our strategic objective is to stimulate the economy, restore growth and accelerate recovery.
He also lauded Nigerias relationship with Switzerland.

Buhari made the commendation on Wednesday at separate bilateral meetings he held with President Francois Hollande of France and President Johann Schneider-Ammann of Switzerland.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the meetings were held on the sidelines of the 71st United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Buhari, who welcomed more investment and economic partnerships from France, said that Nigeria was a fertile ground for handsome return on investments.

Apart from your countrys close relationship with us, you have the same with most of our neighbours, Buhari told Francois Hollande of France.

We seek more collaboration, particularly in agriculture, mining and security.

He described the committee as a `one-stop mechanism on development partnership for a zone that had been ravaged for many years by Boko Haram insurgents, and which needed urgent rebuilding.

Responding, President Hollande pledged that France would not only engage with Nigeria on different fronts, but would also provide humanitarian assistance in the North-East.

We will invest in Nigeria, we believe in her, the French President said.

Buhari sought the cooperation of President Johann Schneider-Ammann of Switzerland on speedy repatriation of Nigerias money stashed in that country.

He said that Nigeria needed such resources to develop its infrastructure.

He said that the two countries had agreed on projects the funds would be deployed.

In his response, President Schneider-Ammann promised quick action, as soon as the draft agreement on repartration of the funds was signed.
The breakdown of the Presidents team included the following: A 16 man presidential advance team, 14 presidential aides, 32 ministers and aides, 24 officials of foreign affairs and other MDAs (Ministries, Department and Agencies).

By recession standards, that still appears like some crowd.

Nigerians were outraged when news of the size of the President's delegation first found its way into cyberspace. In a time of recession, most Nigerians spoken to for this story say, the President's delegation should have been leaner.

Quizzed on the size of the President's delegation on Channels Television on Tuesday, September 20, 2016, Kemi Adeosun who is the Finance Minister, said government was indeed cutting cost.

She added that she should have been among the party to the UNGA, if government was still run the way it was in the past.

Former President Goodluck Jonathan once famously made it to the United Nations General Assembly in New York with some 600 persons.

According to Adeosun, a circular was sent to everyone in the bureaucracy that read something like this: "If you don't have meetings at the UNGA, stay back home."

The President's wife, Aisha Buhari, also made it to the UNGA with 22 persons, including wives of Governors. According to media reports, Mrs Buhari funded her delegation from her purse.

But it isn't the size of Mrs. Buhari's delegation that has got everyone talking. Social media users have shared the lead photo for this story of two (?) of the Buharis sharing a spot with their Mom at the UN General Assembly.

It also seemed like the ladies were having a ball, earpieces and all.

Were they part of Mrs. Buhari's or the President's delegation? Did they make any of the delegate lists?

did reach out to Laolu Akande, Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity in the Office of the Vice President, for his reaction, but he hadn't responded to our message at the time of heading to press.

A media aide of Mrs. Buhari's also declined comments on the picture and the role of the First Daughters at the UNGA.
According to Premium Times, Saraki also said Nigerians are hungry and they do not want to know who caused the recession.

The Senate President said the debate on the economic recession should be free of partisan sentiments and blames.

Saraki said It is clear to me that when people are desperately hungry, what they need is leadership with a clear vision; leadership whose daily actions reflect the urgency of the peoples condition.

Therefore, our response to the current challenge must be dictated by the urgency of the hardship that the people suffer on a daily basis.

I say this to urge us that we must have an urgent debate on the way forward, but in having this debate, we must resist the temptation of drowning the debate with apportioning blames that will neither bring solutions nor reduce the cost of food in the market.

Rather, this debate must be solution-driven. It must be people-oriented and less political.

The Senate President also assured Nigerians that the country will bounce back, adding that patience is needed.

He said I bring a message of hope not despair because once again, Nigeria shall overcome. Let no one writes us off. We have done it before, we will do it again.

The world has come to know Nigeria as a people who have formed a habit of proving naysayers wrong and turning adversity into triumph.

Many times, experts have quipped that Nigeria is finished but we come back stronger. This occasion will not be any different, but it will not happen by a slogan! No, it will take positive leadership and unity.

He also said the lawmakers have their role to play to ensure that laws that will improve lives will be passed.

He further gave some guidelines on how the economy can be restored, adding that The Federal Government must consider tweaking the pension funds policy within international best practice safeguards to accommodate investment in infrastructure and mortgages.

The government and the Central Bank of Nigeria must agree on a policy of monetary easing to stimulate the economy and harmonise monetary and fiscal policy until economic recovery is attained.

The Federal Government must retool its export promotion policy scheme with export incentives such as the resumption of the Export Expansion Grant (EEG) and introduce export financing initiatives.
Lemchi, of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), made the call in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Abuja.

He said that President Buhari was on track with the war against corruption, adding that the future is bright.

Corruption has dealt with this country very badly in the past; the government cannot eradicate it easily; it can only be eradicated gradually and patiently.

The President has a good vision for the country; he cannot achieve that vision without eliminating the enemy called corruption, the politician said.

Stressing that no economy would grow under glaring corrupt practices,, Lemchi urged Nigerians to support the war against corruption.

The former gubernatorial candidate congratulated Nigerians for believing in Buharis capability to change the country for the better.

He said that nothing good comes easily; adding that what the country was passing through at the moment was a march towards economic buoyancy.

According to him, Nigeria under Buhari is in safe hands, what he only requires is cooperation.

President Buhari is not a magician; he cannot do it alone, he needs the collective effort of all Nigerians, he said.

Lemchi, who expressed confidence in the APC-led federal government, said it was time for Nigerians to key into the change agenda.
Lakanu gave the warning while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sit at home protest of IPOB slated for Friday.

The groups planned protest is over the detention of its Leader, Mr Nnamdi Kanu.

The commissioner said that the police would resist any attempt by the group to breach public peace or carry out activities contrary to the law.

We will arrest and prosecute any IPOB member if any of their actions leads to breach of security and public peace.

Agitators must find a legal ways of making their grievances known to the authorities and not to create panic in the society.

Police is in charge of any situation in the state, and we are ever ready to ensure a violence-free state, he said.

The commissioner urged members of the public not to entertain any fear over the planned protest, but to go about their lawful businesses.

NAN reports that IPOB, in a recent statement, ordered that those in South-East should sit at home on Friday in demand of Kanus release.

In the statement, IPOB requested that banks and markets in the region should be closed on the day, while road transport workers and others should stay at home.
This is contained in a statement signed by Mr Mustapha Fagge, Public Relations Officer, Office of the Head of Service, and issued to newsmen on Wednesday in Kano.

The statement said the warning was necessary following report that text massage was being sent to the affected workers through the social media to assemble at Audu Bako secretariat on Friday.

The attention of the office of the Head of Service has been drawn to a text message being sent through social media to workers who have not received their salary.

The message calls on the workers to assemble at Audu Bako Secretariat on Friday, Sept. 23 in order to protest, it said.

The statement urged the workers to disregard the text message, adding that those sending the message were workers who had perpetrated fraud in the payment of salaries over the years.

It said that security agents had been alerted to deal ruthlessly with any person or group that participated in the illegal protest.

It explained that all issues of unpaid salaries or outstanding salaries were with the Ministry of Finance receiving attention.

We are calling on affected workers to channel their complaints or grievances through their respective ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).
We are very concerned about the welfare of Nigerians and we are not sleeping; we are working day and night to ensure that the country retraces its step, he said according to The Cable.

Many of our critics have been unfair to us because many of them know that we did not invent the problems we are facing today," he added.

Mohammed also urged Nigerians to work with the government to make the recently launched Change Begins With Me campaign a success.

The campaign became the centre of controversy after it was discovered that two paragraphs in the presidents remarks were lifted from the 2008 victory speech of US President, Barack Obama.
This is contained in a statement signed by its Director of Information, Commodore Christian Ezekobe, in Abuja.

The Chief of Naval Staff, (CNS), Vice Adm. Ibok-Ete Ibas, was represented by the Chief of Policy and Plans, Rear Admiral Jacob Ajani at the handing over and departure ceremony in China.

Ibas, however, conveyed the appreciation of Nigeria Navy to President Muhammadu Buhari, for approving all steps taken toward the departure of NNS UNITY.

He said that NNS UNITY would strengthen the efforts of The Navy against all maritime crimes and illegalities in the nations territorial waters and the Gulf of Guinea in general.

The CNS also added that the areas that were hitherto unable to be covered by other ships would now be covered by NNS UNITY.

This, he said, would no doubt enhance the Navys effectiveness and responsiveness to the maritime security challenges within Nigerias waters.

NNS UNITY enroute Nigeria will pay port calls on some ports of friendly nations before arriving Nigeria.

This will further boost the existing cordial relationship with sister navies around the world and the Gulf of Guinea in particular, Ibas said.

Ibas solicited the maintenance and improved cooperation between Nigeria and China Ship Building Corporation beyond the departure of NNS UNITY.

The ceremony had in attendance: Chairman, Senate Committee on Navy, Sen. Isa Misau, Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Navy, Abdulsamad Dasuki, Representative of the Minister of Defense, Hajia Rabi Tedman, among others.
According to a statement released by his Senior Special Assistant on Media & Publicity, Laolu Akande, Osinbajo said:

"We've watched corruption fighting back, some people even said bring back corruption, but not the man on the street.

No economy can tolerate the level of corruption seen in Nigeria without consequences. Look at the Northeast, while a war is going, Nigerian lives being lost, some local governments had been taken over, and yet people cannot account for $15B meant for security equipment purchases.

The corruption has been so much. Look at the sheer amount of money stolen and decisions taken that fuels corruption, decisions taken just with the sole aim of cornering national resources.

ALSO READ: Osinbajo says 110 million Nigerians are poor
Amaechi stated this when members of the Transportation Growth Initiative (TGI), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), visited him in Abuja.

He stated that the ministry had made a decision to implement projects initiated by previous administrations instead of introducing new ones.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that TGI was led by former Aviation Minister, Mr Osita Chidoka, who is the bodys Chairman, Board of Trustees.

Chidoka is also former Corps Marshal and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC).

He lauded the idea of bringing all transport stakeholders in Nigeria and abroad together to brainstorm on the way forward for the challenges in the sector.

The minister said that he would study the master plan of transportation, non- motorised policy and the rail master plan brought to his notice by the NGO.

He assured that if the master plan is viable, it will be implemented.

Earlier, Chidoka said that the international conference would hold from Oct. 23 to Oct. 25 at Sheraton Hotel, Abuja, with all stakeholders in aviation and transportation participating.

He said that the conference would address the institutional gap between the transport agencies and transport operators.

Chidoka said that the conference, which would be declared opened by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo would involve dignitaries from Ghana, Kenya, The Netherlands, Sierra Leone and several European countries.

He said that the fastest way to diversify the economy was through transportation, noting that transportation would help to facilitate trade.

He further urged parastatals under the ministry to participate in the forthcoming conference to help move the sector forward.

Chidoka said that during the past administration, there were three master plans initiated that needed to be looked into and updated.

He said the master plan of transportation, master plan of rail and non-motorised transport policy should be looked into to help the sector.
The phones have been recalled by Samsung due to a battery fault which has been causing the devices to explode.

The NCAA gave the order via a statement signed by General Manager, Public Relations, Sam Adurogboye.

The statement reads in part:

NCAA is appealing to the passengers responsibilities in relation to ensuring safety and security of air transportation. Importantly, all airlines are hereby advised to emphasize the prohibition of these devices on board during passenger briefings by the Cabin Crew.

Similarly, all those responsible for searching or screening checked-in baggage are expected to intensify the procedures to identify possible checked-in Samsung Galaxy Note 7.
The security agencies are, however, discharging their duties diligently and responsibly.

 However, they should do more and be routinely proactive, to further safeguard lives and property of the law abiding citizens, Tambuwal said.

He spoke in Sokoto when he commiserated with a businessman, Alhaji Nura Gani.

The governor was represented by his Deputy, Alhaji Ahmad Aliyu.

One of Ganis shops located at the old market, Sokoto, was attacked in the early hours of Tuesday.

Although there was no loss of life, the hoodlums carted away an undisclosed amount of money and some wares.

The governor pledged the state governments assistance to all the security agencies.

He expressed the need for community policing, saying,' the provision of security is a collective responsibility of all Nigerians.
In a statement shortly after the apex court affirmed him as elected governor of Kogi, he said the judgment would remain a watershed in the annals of electoral jurisprudence and constitutional law in the country.

It is a long walk to victory which will reshape the nations constitution.

I am humbled and magnanimous in victory; it is a long walk to victory.

The victory belongs to all Kogi people who believe in transforming Kogi State from a potentially great state to a really great state, the governor said.

In the statement signed his Chief Press Secretary, Mr Kingsley Fanwo, in Lokoja, he advised his supporters to guide against wild jubilations but to use the occasion for sober reflections.

He said that he would pursue his cardinal goals of improving education, healthcare, infrastructural development as well as raising the capacity of the citizens to reinvigorate the states economy.

Bello commended the Judiciary for rising to the occasion by standing firm with what is true and just.

In its reaction, the state chapter of the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON), in a statement in Lokoja, described the judgment as a victory for the rule of law.

The Chairman of the group in the state, Mr Taufiq Isa, commended the justices of the Supreme Court for the judgment, saying it had finally settled the contention over the governorship position.

We are calling on stakeholders in the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state to come together and join hands with the administration of Gov. Yahaya Bello in the interest of the development of Kogi, he said.

Contacted on the judgment, Mr Jacob Edi, Media Officer to former Gov. Idris Wada, said that his principal had no comment on it.

According to him, Wada is yet to get the details of the Supreme Court decision and will want to tarry a while before making any pronouncement.

NAN reports that the atmosphere of Lokoja before and after the judgment remained peaceful as residents went about their normal activities.

Heavily armed anti-riot policemen moved about in patrol vans while security was beefed up in and around the Government House and other important public facilities.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the governor was represented by Alhaji Ismail Alli, the Secretary to the State Government, at the event.

The Oyo State Independent Electoral Commission (OYSIEC) will soon roll out its calendar for the election, which will hold before the end of the year, the governor said.

Ajimobi urged the pilgrims to imbibe discipline, hard work, commitment and righteousness they learnt from the 2016 hajj exercise in Saudi Arabia.

The governor said he was excited that the pilgrims prayed for the peace and prosperity of the state and nation at large.

We appreciate your prayers for the state and the 33 local governments.

We also thank you for your prayers on the country in these trying times.

We hope the best would soon happen to the country, Ajimobi said.

He enjoined them to eschew immoral activities, urging them to embrace attitudinal change.

The lesson of hajj is to worship God, who created us all.

We gave all our commitment to worshipping God during the exercise and I think such should be replicated after the exercise.

We are thankful to Almighty God that 176 of our pilgrims have returned safe and sound.

We have a report of a hitch-free exercise and hope to receive another batch of 450 pilgrims on Wednesday, he said.

NAN reports that the pilgrims were led by Sheikh Muyideen Bello.

Earlier, Bello had expressed the pilgrims appreciation for the support of the state government towards a hitch-free exercise in the holy land.

Bello, who is the States 2016 Amirul Hajj, said the pilgrims prayed for the country, state, 33 local governments and a hitch-free local government election.
Adeoye was sent packing after details emerged of a grand plan he hatched at Chief Gabriel Igbinedion's home, ahead of the September 28 governorship election in the State, a source on the ground in Edo has disclosed.

The Igbinedions have long ruled the roost in Edo State.

Lucky Nosakhare Igbinedion was Governor of Edo State between 29 May 1999 to 29 May 2007.

The Esama of the Benin Kingdom, Gabriel Igbinedion, still fancies playing the King-maker role in the South South State.

"Adeoye held this meeting in Igbinedion's home where the plan to rig the governorship election was exposed and reported to the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris", our source added.

"Also in attendance at the very secret meeting in Chief Igbinedion's house were four top INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) officials serving in Edo State".

A top official of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Edo State who craved anonymity for this story, alleged that Adeoye had become too close to the Igbinedions.

"Mr. Adeoye was recently posted to Benin barely three weeks ago and has fallen prey to very corrupt influence of the Igbinedions and their protege Pastor Ize-Iyamu who is confirmed to have bribed the former Edo Police Commissioner with huge sums of money in a desperate bid to rig the coming governorship election in Edo State", said the high ranking APC official.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has however debunked the allegation put forward by the governing APC in the State.

Chris Nehikhare who is the Publicity Secretary of the PDP in Edo State told Pulse that the APC is being economical with the truth.

Mr. Adeoye, who replaced about three weeks ago and was saddled with the responsibility of coordinating the security arrangement for the governorship election which holds on September 28, is said to have been removed over his disagreement with the on the use of police personnel, before and on the day of election.

It is gathered that the Governor had taken offence that the commissioner was not in support of the recent indiscriminate arrests and detention of members of the opposition PDP which is said to have been ordered by the Governor as part of the plan to manipulate the election in favour of the ruling APC.

The commissioners objection to this line of action by the men under his command had drastically reduced the planned onslaught on the members of the PDP and made the release of those arrested, prompt and relatively easy.

The Edo State government has however denied it had any part to play in Adeoye's travails.

Kassim Afegbua who is the Edo State commissioner for Information and Orientation, said: We are not the Nigeria Police Force. The institution has its own command structure under the supervision of the Inspector General of Police. We couldnt have played any role in who becomes Commissioner of Police. It is purely police affairs and please dont drag us into this.

Under the PDP regime of oppression, they bastardised the Nigeria Police and turned it into an arm of the PDP oligarchy. Under the APC change agenda, we are not only allowing the military and paramilitary institutions to run professionally, we are building a new police institution that would be responsive to the challenges of modern policing.

As per the elections, we have nothing to fear because we believe in the sanctity of the ballot box. We are for votes but PDP is for rigging; so only they have cause to fear. We will trounce them silly come Wednesday September 28.

Any attempt for the PDP to exhibit their peculiar traits will be resisted wholeheartedly, Afegbua added.

Reports reaching our newsroom say the deposed Police Boss may be redeployed to another State.
Ogundele said the move by Senators Ali Modu Sheriff and Ahmed Markafi to end the crisis which has been plaguing the party for some months now, saying this has proven that the PDP is one indivisible entity that is ready to re-position to take over the leadership of the country at the centre.

In a statement signed on behalf of Ogundele by the Publicity Secretary of the party in Ogun State, Alhaji Malik Olamilekan Ibitoye and made available to the media, the party Chairman said the reconciliation was long expected, but that it came at the most auspicious time.

"We are really impressed by the meeting between the foremost leaders of our great party. It is the best thing that has happened to the country at this time that she is experiencing the most difficult economic situation occasioned by directionless and ruderless leadership being provided by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

ALSO READ: Fresh reconciliation begins as Makarfi meets Sheriff

"The PDP is now battle ready to contest the next general elections and it is certain that this is what the teeming population of the country was waiting for as our party has the solution to the myriad of problems confronting the nation at this material time. We have gone through the process of rebirth and millions of our members across the nation are ready to Change the negative change that has been fraudulently foisted on Nigerians," the statement read.

Ogundele also enjoined the PDP in the 36 states of the federation to join hands together to move the country forward, adding that the Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government does not understand the dynamics of governance.

Ibitoye further quoted the state party chairman appealing to the leadership of state chapters of the PDP, where factions exist to borrow a leaf from the exemplary and selfless display of political maturity by leadership of the national organ of the party, and join hands to reclaim the position of the party in the country.

The two leaders of the PDP, Senators Ali Modu Sheriff and Ahmed Markafi had earlier today met at an undisclosed location where they agreed to resolve all the issues affecting the party.
In a recent report from the Vice President, Dr. Elijah Brown said, "What is unfolding in northern and central Nigeria is one of the gravest current humanitarian crises in the world.

"Nigeria is a country on the verge of fracturing along religious fault lines," he added.

ALSO READ: New Boko Haram leader targets churches and Christians

This has led the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to plead for aid from the leaders of the world's powerful nations, Vanguard reports.

According to Dr. Samson Ayokunle, the CAN President, this crisis, along with the victims, shows that the country needs "assistance in order to bounce back to life again.

This displacement is regarded today by many international bodies as the biggest humanitarian crisis or disaster in the world. The most disheartening thing about it is that it has not received substantial humanitarian response from the world, especially, the worlds most powerful nations as other disasters of smaller degree in other parts of the world."

"I am therefore calling on the worlds powerful nations to come to the aid of Nigeria in seeing the end of insurgency. Come to the aid of many victims of insurgency in many internally displaced peoples camps or homes who are naked, jobless, orphaned, maimed or windowed," he said.

ALSO READ: Wole Soyinka blames killings of Christians on Northern religious leaders
ALSO READ: Private schools owners decry alleged multiple taxation

The Deputy Governor, Dr Idiat Adebule, said this during the school census programme for private schools at the Adeyemi Bero Auditorium, Alausa, Lagos.

Adebule disclosed that operators of the schools representing over two-thirds of privately-owned schools in the state have refused to register their schools even after the registration procedure was made less complicated by the ministry of education.

Speaking on the theme, Entrenching Best Practices, Adebule noted that the state government would intensify its efforts in providing quality education and learning environment for pupils in the state.

Presenting approval letters for 119 schools to their proprietors during the event, Adebule said,

In essence, about two-third of private schools are operating illegally in the state. About 15,000 private schools are operating in the state and only 4,556 are approved and registered.

No nation or society can develop better than its quality of human capital. Part of the tools required to perform our task as a regulator is accurate and precise data which the proposed school census was intended to provide for the education sector.

Speaking during the event, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, Mr Adesina Odeyemi, in his address, warned proprietors to be wary of people who pretended to be officials of the ministry.
The court must rule by Friday on a request by Ping to recount votes in the province of Haut-Ogooue, a Bongo stronghold. The president won 95 percent there on a turnout of 99.9 percent, helping him to an overall victory of less than 6,000 votes.

Bongo is willing to meet other candidates "in order to avoid the hate, barbarism and violence ... so that no more Gabonese lose their lives," spokesman Alain-Claude Nze said on state television.

Nze gave no details of the content or timing of the talks.
Turning the ship before it hits the iceberg
Finding Peace of Mind: Discover These Five Places in Europe to Unwind
Gary still skeptical of Trump

Donald Trump swooped into Gary, Indiana, on his private jet and pledged to make the down-on-its-luck city great again.

It was 1993, and the New York mogul was wooing officials in the mostly black city to support his bid to dock a showboat casino along a Lake Michigan shoreline littered with shuttered factories. Trump and his representatives later told state gaming officials he would leverage his "incomparable experience" to build a floating Shangri-La, with enough slot machines and blackjack tables to fill city coffers and local charities with tens of millions each year, while creating scores of well-paid jobs for minority residents.

"We are looking to make this a real peach here, a real success," Trump said of the project.

Today, as the Republican presidential nominee pursues black voters with vows to fix inner-city troubles, many Gary residents say his pitch to solve the problems of crime and poverty is disturbingly familiar. Like others who have done business with Trump, they say their experience offers a cautionary tale.

Little more than a decade after investing in Gary, Trump's casino company declared bankruptcy and cashed out his stake in the boat  leaving behind lawsuits and hard feelings in a city where more than one-third of residents live in poverty. Trump's lawyers later argued in court that his pledges to the city were never legally binding. Trump told The Associated Press that his venture was good for Gary.

Trump Jr. defends his tweet

Donald Trump Jr. is defending a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned candy.

Trump Jr. said Wednesday in Salt Lake City that his tweet was spurred by his concern as a father about inadequate vetting of people coming into the United States. His remarks came during a visit with editorial boards from the Mormon-owned Deseret News and KSL-TV.

Trump Jr. said "We've seen what's going on in Europe. We can't be naive to that and pretend that's not happening there,"

Trump Jr. has been widely criticized for his posting this week. It showed a bowl of Skittles, a multicolored candy, and asked: "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?"

Clinton campaign raced through $50 million last month

Hillary Clinton spent $645,000 more a day than her opponent Donald Trump last month, but even with her $50 million campaign outlay, she has not been able to pull away from him in the race for the White House.

Clinton's campaign had its most expensive month to date in August, eclipsing its previous monthly high by more than $12 million. And combined, Clinton and the national Democratic Party paid out $78 million in August, while Trump and the Republican National Committee spent about $47 million.

While both candidates are raising huge sums from donors, their lopsided spending lays bare the difference in the two major party presidential campaigns. Clinton is running a conventional operation featuring multimillion-dollar ad buys and expansive voter outreach. Trump has kept spending down by enjoying seemingly limitless free media coverage and outsourcing the guts of his voter contact duties to the Republican Party.

The spending disparity has also become a favored Trump boast.

"Our expenditures on advertising, our expenditures on people, our expenditures on everything are a tiny fraction. And yet we're minimum tied," Trump said Tuesday at a rally in Kenansville, North Carolina. "If you can spend less and be winning, that's a positive thing, right?"
TULSA, Okla. (AP)  The unarmed black man shot dead in the middle of a Tulsa street last week by a white police officer had run-ins with the law dating back to his teenage years and had recently served a four-year stint in prison.

But those closest to the 40-year-old victim, Terence Crutcher, described him as a church-going father who was beginning to turn his life around. After marking his 40th birthday with his twin sister last month, Crutcher sent her a text that read, "I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna make you all proud."

Crutcher was due to start a music appreciation class at a local community college on Friday, the day he was fatally shot by Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby after she responded to a report of a stalled vehicle.

The shooting was captured in graphic detail by a police helicopter and a cruiser dashcam, though it's not clear from that footage what led Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers gave Crutcher. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Shelby was put on paid administrative leave while local and federal officials investigate the shooting.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad has set a special election for Dec. 27 to fill the state Senate seat left open by the death of Sen. Joe Seng, D-Davenport.

Meanwhile, two Democratic lawmakers, Reps. Jim Lykam and Cindy Winckler, said Wednesday that they plan to seek the party's nomination for the seat.

Seng, who was not on the ballot this year, died Friday after a two-year battle with brain cancer. His funeral will be Saturday.

The governor's office said Wednesday that he preferred to have the special election the same day as the Nov. 8 general election in order to ensure higher voter turnout and save money. Scott County Auditor Roxanna Moritz objected, however.

Roland Caldwell, operations manager for the auditor's office, said that ballots for the general election already have been printed, and a special election on the same date would have forced the office to miss the deadline to mail overseas ballots for the 20 precincts within the 45th Senate District. He also said a Nov. 8 date would have given those voters less time to cast absentee ballots.

Early and absentee voting for the general election begins Sept. 29, and Caldwell estimated the new ballots wouldn't be ready until mid-October.

"We didn't think that was fair," he said.

He also said there were questions about what the nomination deadlines would be.

Branstad's office said that because of a six-week blackout period around the general election, the earliest a special election it could be held was December. The 27th, a spokesman for the governor, Ben Hammes said, would allow maximum time for the auditor to prepare and distribute ballots.

The 45th Senate District is heavily Democratic, and it isn't clear whom Republicans might field as a candidate. Scott County Republican Party chair Judy Davidson said Wednesday the party is working on it and would likely have somebody on the ballot.

The state Senate is nearly evenly divided. Before Seng's death, the Democrats held a 26-23 seat edge.

The Dec. 27 special election date also will allow Lykam and Winckler to seek the Senate seat without any affect on their ability to run for re-election for their House seats on Nov. 8.

Had the special election been set for Nov. 8, they could not have appeared on both ballots, according to the Iowa Secretary of State's Office.

Lykam and Winckler are both running unopposed for their House seats in the general election.

Now, it will be up to the central committee members within each party in the Senate district to choose their respective nominees. It's not clear yet when that will happen.

The 45th Senate District includes much of west Davenport, along with the town of Buffalo. Seng represented the area since 2003.
The Quad-Cities area is crowing for more urban chickens as the movement is picking up steam in both Davenport and Rock Island.

The Davenport City Council will hold a work session to discuss the subject next Tuesday after the city and its aldermen were bombarded with interest from the community.

"We got a ton of requests through the website," City Administrator Corri Spiegel said. "We've gotten a ton of phone calls, 'Can I do this, can I do that.' CSD is starting to have noncompliance so we have the operational side of things, and then some of (the aldermen) have been approached."

Rock Island is further along in its discussion after holding a vote in August in which the resolution did not pass by a necessary margin.

Although the aldermen voted 4-3 in favor of allowing urban chickens, a supermajority vote was needed because the council had voted to suspend the rules to allow a vote to commence.

Originally, Mayor Dennis Pauley indicated the subject would come back this month for another reading, but it has been tabled to a later date.

Meanwhile, Moline approved an ordinance permitting backyard chickens two months ago.

Rock Island

In Rock Island, Lindsay OBrien has been one of voices at the forefront of the push for urban chickens.

OBrien, who has two hens herself, was presented with a letter stating she had to get rid of her birds after the first vote did not pass. She has received a temporary reprieve in the form of an extension until the next vote is taken.

I've had chickens for almost a year, and a couple weeks ago, I received a letter saying that I had to get rid of the by the 9th, but thats been extended until the vote, OBrien said.

Part of the issue for OBrien is the ambiguity in the city code because, as she put it, Theres no ordinance that says you can't have chickens.

As a supporter of the ordinance, Alderman Joshua Schipp, 6th Ward, echoed those comments during Rock Island's Aug. 22 meeting.

Also a supporter, Alderwoman Kate Hotle, 5th Ward, said the ordinance would be a "mechanism to regulate chickens in a safe and clean way."

The other issues ruffling OBriens feathers are the misconceptions among some of Rock Island's aldermen about urban chickens.

Noise and odor are two most cited reasons against chickens, but O'Brien rebutted those claims in her public comments to the council.

O'Brien said hens at their loudest reach 70 decibels, which is less than the noise levels of a vacuum cleaner, car traffic, a barking dog and a crying baby.

Just before the chicken vote came up short, Alderman Virgil Mayberry, 2nd Ward, also questioned what kind of community Rock Island wanted to be.

"I do not believe our city is progressing by bringing chickens in," Mayberry said. "You do not see wealthy, well-to-do communities with chickens there."

But as O'Brien pointed out, 95 of the 100 most populous cities in the country allow urban chickens to some extent.

There's also the health and environmental benefits from getting eggs from backyard chickens.

Besides a better and more nutritious product, it also makes more economic sense as the small fee to have chickens offsets the high cost of purchasing organic eggs in the store.

Even with a $25 fee for backyard hens, its benefiting me more in the long run because Ill be spending more at grocer than I would at home, OBrien said.

Davenport

Although they were not entirely responsible for Davenport taking up the discussion, the group Backyard Chickens - Scott County has attracted a few of the city's alderman to learn about their cause.

Neighbors and co-organizers Julie Urban and Mike Angelos said Moline was the first domino in helping to make urban chickens a reality in the Quad-Cities.

"We're concentrating on Davenport, and hopefully, if that gets passed, we can get somebody to take the lead on the other cities," Angelos said.

Angelos and Urban are far from fanatical and have taken a measured approach to getting Davenport to take notice.

"All we're trying to do is copy and paste what other cities are doing and the ordinances we know have already been successful," Urban said.

Urban said they have tried to stay close to what other Iowa cities are doing, and in their research, many of the larger or comparable-sized cities already allow them, including Des Moines.

It also helps that Iowa is the nation's leading egg producer, and there are more people interested in learning about what goes into the food they eat.

"It's following the trend of giving back to the land," Angelos said. "More and more people are aware of all the additives, coloring, the GMO food and that sort of stuff. They want to know where the food comes from."

Angelos understands Davenport's work session is just the first step in a much longer process, but given the response he's received thus far, he is confident both sides could come find a compromise on an ordinance.

"There's plenty of interest, and I think we have a good chance," Angelos said. "I think the sticking point may be that the ordinance we propose probably won't be acceptable to a few people, so there's going to have to be some negotiation."
I know you are, but what am I?"

Maybe you remember that one from the schoolyard. It was one of those unanswerable taunts -- "I'm rubber, you're glue" was another -- widely favored by smart-alecky kids, a bit of verbal judo that took an attacker's thrust and turned it back against her.

"I know you are, but what am I?"

Most of us outgrew the riposte about the same time we outgrew passing notes in class. Apparently, Donald Trump never did. Far from leaving it behind, he has honed it into a potent political tool perfect for this era of post-factual lassitude and cognitive dissonance. As Campaign 2016 grinds toward a reckoning, we are seeing that tool employed with breathtaking shamelessness.

It works like this: Whatever Trump is called or accused of, he turns it back on the accuser. Did you ever see that scene in "The Equalizer" where a bad guy points a gun at Denzel Washington and, faster than the eye can follow, Denzel snatches the gun and points it back at him? It's something like that, except with words.

So the man who claims that he's always opposed the Iraq War (even though he didn't), the man who said the election is rigged, (even though it isn't), the man who told us Barack Obama founded ISIS (even though -- duh! -- he didn't), the man whose PolitiFact scorecard rules over 80 percent of his rated statements as half-truths and untruths ... that man complains that Hillary Clinton is "a world-class liar."

And the man whose idea of releasing medical information is a brief note from his doctor so loopy, imprecise and filled with wild, extravagant claims (Trump "will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency") that one doctor dubs it "medically illiterate" ... that man tells us it's the mysteries of Hillary Clinton's health we ought to be concerned about.

And the man who said a judge was unfit to judge because he is of Mexican heritage, the man who wants a ban on Muslim immigration, the man who retweets racists and anti-Semites, the man who is openly beloved by white supremacists to the point that former Klansman David Duke seems about ready to kiss him on the lips ... that man condemns Hillary Clinton as "a bigot."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but having Donald Trump lecture you about bigotry, transparency or truth is rather like having Kanye West tell you to stop behaving like a jack--s.

In psychology, they have this phenomenon called projection. The Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology defines it as a "primitive defense mechanism" that involves "the unconscious warding off of negative experiences or emotions by denying an experience, perceiving it in another person and then seeing that negative experience as being directed back at the projector."

Which sounds like what we're seeing here, except there is nothing "unconscious" about it.

No, this is calculated, born of a conviction that there really is a sucker born every minute -- and that an alarming proportion of them vote in American elections. So the challenge here is simple: What will we say in response? How will we answer this insult to intelligence?

Or are we too sick of it all to care? One has a sense of an electorate pummeled into emotional submission. Which is hardly surprising. It's been a long, dispiriting campaign largely bereft of ideas, proposals and uplift. But it is important to remember that November will be a moment of truth in more ways than one. Indeed, November will answer a critical question.

You say Trump is an ignorant narcissist unfit for the White House? Yes, we know he is.

But what are we?
Hillary Clinton can't frighten millennials into supporting her. She can't bully them, either.

The Democratic presidential candidate must actually appeal to young voters on a policy level if she wants to reverse a generational rejection.

Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine, came to Iowa on Monday as part of the Clinton Campaign's "aggressive" push to court millennial voters. Kaine made the campaign's case to Iowa State University students at a time when the under 35 bloc is fleeing Clinton like she's on fire, according to the polls.

Millennials are global, altruistic and embrace diversity, Kaine asserted, claims backed by a slew of polls. That's all well and good. Kaine made a fine case about why the young shouldn't -- and won't -- support Republican Donald Trump. Trump's doctrine of racial and ethnic division, sweeping deregulation and religious intolerance will never jibe with the young. They are global-minded, social libertarians with a fiscal conservatism streak and a distaste for corporate power and influence.

But, on Monday, Kaine did not make the case for a Clinton administration. Clinton herself has struggled with it for months, amid slumping national polls, acknowledging this week that she needs the backing of the voters who propelled Barack Obama into the White House. Only about 30 percent of voters under 35 back Clinton, multiple polls say. That's half the support Obama enjoyed. They're scurrying to third party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein.

While Kaine spoke in Iowa, Clinton was at Temple University in Pennsylvania, another battleground state, making a similar pitch. She remembers being frustrated and disenchanted with government during the Vietnam War, Clinton said. She admitted that her penchant for privacy -- a constant source of unnecessary scandal -- might be feeding millennials' suspicions.

But it's Clinton's history -- including her victories -- that is, in fact, her undoing with the young. Her vote for the Iraq War will never cease to exist. Sen. Bernie Sanders successfully pinned her as just another influence-peddling elitist during the Democratic primary.

And, perhaps of greatest note, the political landscape has shifted in the past decade.

Clinton speaks of her years as an "activist," when trying to sway the young to show up to the polls. But, by and large, Clinton and her ilk have won many of the fights they took up. Women are heading toward economic equality and enjoy full-fledged social agency. She was against gay marriage before being for it. Obama took up Clinton's health care crusade and finished it. The fact is, the once cutting edge and progressive are now accepted norms. Time has, in many regards, passed Clinton by.

And she won't change this by dangling the threat of Donald Trump over the heads of millennial voters, a favorite paternalistic pastime of her older supporters. Shaming them for a potential third-party vote only strengthens their resolve and smacks of entitlement.

Clinton must grapple with her war hawk history and speak to the concerns of those who are sent off to fight. She must outline policy to grapple with the growing number of dead black men, too often shot and killed by police. She must address spending, bloat and federal entitlements that young voters are expected to fund but probably never receive. To be fair, Clinton's plan to deal with $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loans is a start. She must actually address her cozy relationships with big banks, oil and tech executives.

Clinton must accept that her style of mid-century progressiveness doesn't define the very population she needs in order to win in November.

Clinton must realize that she needs millennials more than they need her.
In Editorial Page Editor Jon Alexander's column last week, Who will speak for the non-religious?, his words are what Nietzche called, ...the noise of the grave-diggers who are digging a grave for God...

But to answer his question, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the ACLU, the federal government and academics, who in the name of diversity, actively censor Christianity and assert God is Dead!

You aggregated various non-religious groups, but isolated Christian groups to prove your point. However, aggregating the same data shows that Iowa is 77 percent Christian. Pew's age breakout, shows that 65% of the rising millennial army are actually Christian.

Government socialized schools swelled the nothing in particular ranks by purging Christian thought and replacing it with diversity-- the belief in nothing in particular. A case in point, Iowa State University denied astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez tenure for writing a book discussing the intelligent design of Earth. The state's diversity education convinced some millennials that human rights are not God given and unalienable, but merely conditional entitlements of the state.

While minor doctrines separate Christians, amazingly almost all believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ if not in body, at least in spirit. We respect the moral authority of Christ and seek repentance from sinin ourselves, the world, and our leaders. Though our politics vary, we all pray the same when we are being fed to the lions knowing that Jesus suffers with us. Collectively, we declare, God is alive.

David Hartsuch

Bettendorf
CEDAR RAPIDS  If Gov. Terry Branstad runs for another term in 2018  he hasnt ruled it out  he would start from a weaker position than in 2014, when he ran and won an unprecedented sixth term.

In the spring of 2014, a Quinnipiac University Poll found Iowans approved of the job the Republican Branstad was doing by a 55 percent to 35 percent margin.

A Morning Consult poll published this morning shows the governors approval rating has sunk to 50 percent: 41 percent of Iowans do not approve of the job hes doing, 9 percent are unsure, and the margin of error is 3 percentage points.

Thats slightly better than his position four years ago when Public Policy Polling found Iowans backed Branstad over a hypothetical challenger by a 49 percent to 40 percent margin. In 2014, Branstad defeated Sen. Jack Hatch 58 percent to 37 percent.

In 2014, his plan to privatize management of the states Medicaid program and close two under-utilized mental health institutes. as well as opposition to his school funding level, were cited as reasons for low support among voters. The Medicaid management plan remains unpopular.

Ben Hammes, the governors spokesman, said its not Branstads practice to comment on polls. He did say Branstad is focused on bringing more jobs and higher incomes for working Iowa families, improving our education for Iowa children, and reducing the size and cost of government.

Eight of the 10 lowest-scoring governors were Republicans, with Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback at 71 percent disapproval and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in third place with 68 percent disapproval.

Seven out of the 10 governors with the highest approval ratings are Republicans with Govs. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota at 74 percent, and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland, both at 70 percent.

The GOP holds 31 governors offices.

See the full results at https://morningconsult.com/.
A roundup of state government and Capitol news items for Wednesday:

JEAN SEBERG: Gov. Terry Branstad and the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs announced Wednesday they plan to honor the late Hollywood legend Jean Seberg. The Marshalltown native who became an actress, an activist and a fashion icon will be the focus of the departments next Hollywood Backstories event in Des Moines next month. A free screening of the documentary Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg will be offered as part of Hollywood Backstories: Remembering Jean Seberg at 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22, at the State Historical Museum of Iowa, 600 E. Locust St., Des Moines. Sixty years ago, Seberg won a worldwide talent search for the title role in the movie Saint Joan, which made her an overnight star. Over her career, Seberg, who died at age 40, starred in 34 films in Hollywood and Europe, including Breathless, Lilith, Paint Your Wagon opposite Clint Eastwood, and Airport. For more information, go to iowaculture.gov or call 515-281-5111.

FUEL PRICES: The average price of unleaded gasoline in Iowa fell 2 cents a gallon this week, closing at $2.19 according to AAA. The pump price is 14 cents a gallon lower than a year ago and two pennies below the national average. Retail diesel fuel prices in Iowa were 1 cent lower with a statewide average of $2.36 per gallon, a dime cheaper than a year ago. The national average for diesel also is $2.36 per gallon. The state Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship says propane prices were unchanged from last month with a statewide average of 95 cents per gallon, while home heating oil rose 3 cents from last months figures to a statewide average of $1.89 a gallon and natural gas prices rose 2 cents to end the week at $3.08/MMbtu.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS RELAY SERVICES: The Iowa Utilities Board reviewed and approved a contract with Hamilton Relay Inc. of Aurora, Nebraska, this week regarding its request for proposals to provide Iowas Telecommunications Relay Service  known as Relay Iowa  and Iowa Captioned Telephone Relay Service  known as CapTel  plus associated outreach services. Board officials say Hamilton was selected in accordance with the state Department of Administrative Services formal competitive bidding process. The contract for these services will begin Jan. 1, 2017, and run through Dec. 31, 2019, with a potential three-year extension that may be granted at the sole discretion of the board. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires telephone companies to provide telecommunications relay services throughout the United States. In 1991, the Iowa legislature gave the Iowa Utilities Board the authority and the responsibility to establish and administer the telecommunications relay services for Iowa. Iowas relay services provide individuals who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, deaf-blind or have difficulty speaking the opportunity to participate in two-way communications with hearing persons for everyday calls.

 Times Bureau
DES MOINES  State data released Tuesday showed positive trends toward expanded use of conservation farming practices, but officials say estimated cuts in nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients flowing into Iowa waterways were a drop in the bucket compared to the ambitious goals that have been set.

Iowas ground-breaking nutrient reduction strategy has targets for nonpoint sources statewide to lower the nitrogen loss by 126,000 tons and phosphorous loss by 4,800 tons to attain the goal of reducing nutrient load losses by 45 percent.

Iowa State University researcher Laurie Nowatzke presented data to the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission indicating the estimated nutrient load reductions from practices conducted through cost-share programs totaling $112 million in 2015 were 3,830,000 pounds of nitrogen (or 1,915 tons) and 217,884 pounds of phosphorous.

Nowatzke, the measurement coordinator for the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, offered the caveat that only selected practices could feasibly be incorporated into the calculations in the report available at http://www.nutrientstrategy.iastate.edu/documents, but hoped that improved practice data collection and development of appropriate units for the data will improve future calculations.

While theres progress, there is -- in the wider perspective -- a long ways to go, said Nowatzke, who was encouraged by increased interest by farmers adopting cover crops and in-field nutrient management practices in the three years since the strategy was introduced.

Its promising. It just needs to be much greater, she added. It will need accelerated implementation, accelerated funding and action.

Estimates indicate Iowa will need to invest billions of dollars over a long period of time for conservation measures to improve the quality of Iowas rivers and lakes. Leaders in government and private-sector organizations say the effort is going to require investments of federal and state tax revenues, private sources and farmers to accomplish the goals of reducing rural and urban nitrogen and phosphorus losses that pollute waterways.

Chuck Gipp, director of the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), told commissioners the results showing single-digit changes in reducing nutrient loads show how difficult the task of improving Iowas water quality is and will continue to be.

Were talking landscape scale, Gipp said. Its going to take awhile to get it done. Were an impatient society. We think we can invest a dollar today and get a dollars worth accomplished tomorrow, but its going to take time and effort by a whole lot of people to accomplish this goal.

Nowatzke noted Iowa boosted funding for the nutrient reduction strategy by $10 million to $122.67 million in 2016. The commission voted Tuesday to approve a status-quo state DNR budget recommendation to the governor of $104.1 million that included a $16 million appropriation for REAP but no line item for water quality, which Gipp said usually is included in the state Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardships budget request.

The federal government has ordered Iowa to remove from its waterways harmful pollutants that are flowing into the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, where gulf marine life in large areas is dying because the water lacks oxygen. The state developed a strategy to clean its waters, but the report calls for $4 billion in funding.

In 2010, Iowa voters approved the creation of a constitutionally protected outdoor trust fund for conservation, resource protection and recreational purposes. But state lawmakers and the governor have not enacted a sales tax increase of three-eighths of 1 cent in order to deliver money to the trust fund, so it has remained empty since its creation.

The movement to increase the sales tax and finance the trust fund has gained some momentum among agricultural and business organizations as Iowa has encountered water-quality issues. An analysis by the state's nonpartisan fiscal estimating agency indicated a state sales tax increase of three-eighths of 1 cent would produce $188 million in fiscal year 2018 and surpass $200 million in fiscal 2020.

During the last legislative session, Gov. Terry Branstad proposed sharing future school infrastructure sales tax revenue with water-quality projects as a long-term approach that would not increase current taxes. But that concept garnered limited legislative traction. Since then, Branstad has said he would be open to repurpose the penny sales tax for school infrastructure set to expire in 2029 by continuing the tax and splitting ongoing proceeds, with five-eighths going to education and three-eighths going into a constitutionally protected natural resources trust that Iowa voters approved in 2010.

The GOP-led Iowa House passed an approach that would shift $478 million over 13 years to water-quality projects from a water-metering tax and the gambling-funded state infrastructure account. The Iowa Senate did not take up the measure in 2016.
A good Tuesday to all. Continued sunny skies and warmer temps are on tap for the Quad-Cities and no rain  at least for the next few days. Her
Cabernet Franc, aka Cab Franc, is making a debut on the wine scene. Even though this grape is no newbie, it is finally getting a well deserved spot center stage. If you havent yet been introduced, now is the time discover this hidden treasure.

Originally a native to the southwest of France, this hardworking grape is often overshadowed by its famous offspring, cabernet sauvignon.

As a supporting actor, Cab Franc is most well-known for its part in the reds of Bordeaux, especially the merlot based wines of the Right Bank. These wines from the two major regions of Saint-Emilion and Pomerol are a blend of merlot and cabernet franc. Cabernet franc is used in lesser amounts in the cabernet sauvignon and merlot based wines of the Left Bank as well.

Cab Franc is widely known throughout France, where it commands center stage as a single varietal wine from the Loire Valley. Here Cab Franc stars as a fruity wine with soft tannins in Anjou, Saumur-Champigny, and Chinon.

It grows well in cooler climates, with limestone soil. Outside of France, notable regions for Cab Franc are Washington State, Tuscany, Italy, Chile, and the Fingerlakes region of New York.

Cab Franc ripens earlier than cabernet sauvignon, has thinner skin and lower acidity, and is known for its hardiness making it an excellent insurance grape. Because it is a fairly prolific grape, Cab Franc can result in larger yields.

If picked before full ripeness, its green, weedy, peppery flavors tend to dominate; however, under the right conditions, in the right hands, Cab Franc contributes a wonderful peppery, earthy, and herbaceous component to red blends.

As a stand alone grape, when it reaches its perfect zone of ripeness, CabFranc impresses with a medium-bodied, dry red wine, soft to medium tannins and medium acidity. Its welcoming flavors and aromas of raspberry, cherry, black currant, pepper, violet, fresh herb, and graphite shine through.

With its nice acidity level and medium body, Cabernet Franc can easily share the stage with a variety of foods. Pair it with roast chicken, pork, roasted or grilled beef, sausage, lamb, and hearty fish dishes, as well as soft, flavorful cheeses.

Cab Francs own herb and spice flavors makes it a fun, natural pairing with a variety of herbs. Try experimenting with Cab Franc paired with dishes containing oregano, thyme, rosemary, sage, coriander, and black pepper or warmer spices such as red pepper flakes, jalapeno pepper, and aleppo pepper.

Let me introduce a few of my favorite Cab Francs.

One I particularly enjoy is Tamarack Cellars Cabernet Franc which is made from 100% Cabernet Franc grapes from Washingtons Wahluke Slope region. The 2014 vintage exhibits bright red, tart fruit on the nose including raspberry, cranberry, and currant with leather and smoke.

Another good choice, at a value price point, is Oveja Negra Cabernet Franc/Carmenere blend. Produced in the Maule Valley of Chile this wine displays aromas of red cherries and raspberries, complemented with tobacco and cassis notes.

From Chinon in the Loire Valley of France I recommend Charles Joguet Cuvee Terroir Chinon. It is a classic example of what makes Cab Franc a great stand alone wine. This wine exhibits notes of crushed violet, freshly tilled soil, ashy tannins and vibrant acidity.

Life can easily be a cabernet my friend, especially when that cabernet is a newly discovered friend, Cabernet Franc.
NEW YORK | Brangelina is no more. Angelina Jolie Pitt has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, bringing an end to one of the world's most star-studded, tabloid-generating romances.

An attorney for Jolie Pitt, Robert Offer, said Tuesday that she has filed for the dissolution of the marriage. Offer said the decision to divorce was made "for the health of the family."

The couple has six children together: Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, and twins Knox and Vivienne.

Though together for 12 years, Pitt and Jolie Pitt only wed in August 2014. They married privately in the French hamlet of Correns in Provence with their children serving as ring bearers and throwing flower petals. They announced the ceremony days later.

This is the second marriage for Pitt, who previously wed Jennifer Aniston. It's the third for Jolie Pitt, who was previously married to Billy Bob Thornton and Jonny Lee Miller.

Their initial romance began after the pair starred together in 2005's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." The pair adopted children from Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia.

Governor spotted with Nelson  and his weed

BRISTOW, Va. | Posing for pictures is part of every governor's job. Posing with a can of marijuana  not so much.

But Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe did just that, inadvertently, when he went to greet country music legend Willie Nelson this weekend.

A picture posted on Twitter shows McAuliffe and Nelson, who was performing in Virginia. On the table between them is a can of Willie's Reserve, Nelson's brand of marijuana that's sold in Colorado and Washington. Marijuana possession is illegal in Virginia.

McAuliffe Spokesman Brian Coy said the governor spent about 10 minutes in Nelson's trailer and didn't realize what was on the table.

Coy said McAuliffe wouldn't recognize marijuana or paraphernalia "if it walked up and shook his hand." Coy said McAuliffe may be cool, "but he's not that cool."
BELLE FOURCHE | A 32-year-old Spearfish man has been charged with the Tuesday shooting in Belle Fourche, authorities announced Wednesday.

Clayton C. Maynard was arrested on four counts of aggravated assault, one count of commission of a felony while armed with a firearm, one count of aggravated eluding law enforcement and one count of driving under the influence, according to the South Dakota Attorney General's office.

The charges stem from an incident where the Belle Fourche Police Department responded to a report of gun shots at approximately 4:45 a.m. Tuesday near downtown Belle Fourche.

According to authorities, Maynard rammed into a vehicle with two people in it, forcing it off the street. They fled the vehicle before Maynard fired multiple rounds.

Police said five rounds struck the unoccupied vehicle, but no one was hurt. Police initially said the vehicle was occupied when it was hit. At least four bullet holes were visible in the passenger side window of the white sedan.

Maynard was taken into custody after a short pursuit, according to a news release.

The Belle Fourche Police Department, Spearfish Police Department, South Dakota Highway Patrol and the Division of Criminal Investigation investigated.
PIERRE | South Dakota public university centers in Sioux Falls, Rapid City and Pierre need more financial scrutiny by the Legislature, some state lawmakers said this week.

Rep. Scott Munsterman, R-Brookings, and Sen. Mike Vehle, R-Mitchell, said they want to know whether the centers are financially self-supporting.

The two lawmakers are chairman and vice chairman of the Special Legislative Task Force created by a 2006 state law to oversee the university centers.

The panel met with Mike Rush, executive director for the state Board of Regents, which governs South Dakotas state university system.

The 2006 law detailed what could or couldnt be done at University Center in Sioux Falls.

The Sioux Falls site was the first in what became three centers that were built while Tad Perry was executive director for the regents.

Vehle was a member in the state House of Representatives when the law was passed requiring a review every 10 years.

The concern at that time was we had too many universities. Lets not start another one, Vehle said. Thats why this list of things came about  That was the reason for this. I still have some of those concerns.

Vehle said South Dakota already has enough college campuses and state government is paying substantially for it.

Rush said the law in his opinion applies to all three centers, although Sioux Falls is explicitly listed.

The regents in the past few years have restructured management of the university centers.

The University of South Dakota is now the lead administrator for the Sioux Falls site, while Black Hills State University manages the Rapid City site.

Rush said there now is an emphasis on offering two-year associate degrees through the centers.

Their original intent was to make four-year bachelor degrees available in three major markets that dont have general-purpose state universities.

Students taking courses for two-year degrees at the Sioux Falls center are paying $270 per credit hour. The price is $330 per credit for courses for four-year degrees at the centers.

Munsterman said the centers might have been fine when the concept began a decade ago.

But today is today and it is what it is, Munsterman said.

Rush said the regents are trying to find a model to fit current conditions, especially with the rapid growth in online courses.

One solution might be to create a community college, if you will in Sioux Falls, Rush said.

South Dakota doesnt have a two-year community college system.

Instead there are public technical institutes that offer two-year occupational degrees. Public school boards in Watertown, Mitchell, Rapid City and Sioux Falls operate the tech schools separately from the regents.

Vehle said responsibility for the review could be transferred to the Legislative Planning Committee as a separate report.

That way it would get reviewed every three years, Vehle said.

Munsterman said the term self-support could be defined too.

Munsterman and Vehle are chairman and vice chairman for the Legislative Planning Committee that is engaged in three-year reviews of each department and agency in state government.

The planning committee is scheduled to meet again on Oct. 31.

Vehle asked whether students are paying all the costs for the centers. Rush said, in my opinion, the tuition isnt there yet. Students pay more for classes at the centers than they do for classes at the six traditional campuses.

Rush said one reason is online courses come with services at the center but the students dont attend the center. He said that if the definition is the pricing model from the past, the students arent fully paying their way.

Vehle asked about occupancy at the centers: Is it being fully utilized now? Rush replied, We have room to grow.

At Sioux Falls the courses come from USD, South Dakota State University and Dakota State University personnel. In Pierre, personnel from USD, SDSU and Northern State University provide courses. Rapid City also uses multiple institutions.

Rep. Jacqueline Sly, R-Rapid City, asked what the challenges are to getting students to enroll through the centers.

Im not convinced I have the full answer to that question. Thats one of the things were working on, particularly in Sioux Falls, Rush replied.

He said online availability made travel unnecessary. Thats just having a huge impact, he said. So those on-site centers have become less important.

He added they are important however as sites for counseling, testing and more hands-on assistance. Weve got to figure out how to modify that model, he said.

Vehle asked if associate degrees are self-supporting. In terms of its cohort it will pay its way. The question is whether that cohort will grow enough to pay the expenses of running the whole center, Rush said.

The four-year programs hadnt attracted enough first and second year students to make the centers work financially, he said.
The Rural Law Opportunities Program (RLOP) for Chadron State College and Wayne State College was approved during the Nebraska State College System Board of Trustees meeting Sept. 9.

RLOP, a program patterned after the existing Rural Health Opportunities Program (RHOP), will provide a selected number of students at Chadron State and Wayne State with provisional admittance into the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law. CSC and WSC students would be recruited from rural counties in Nebraska and would be encouraged to practice law in rural Nebraska upon graduation. For purposes of RLOP eligibility and reporting, rural Nebraska is defined as all areas of the state other than Lincoln, Omaha, Ralston, Boys Town, Elkhorn, Bellevue, Papillion, La Vista, Chalco and Offutt Air Force Base.

Also at Fridays meeting, the Board of Trustees approved a revision to Board Policy 4140 that was proposed to the NSCS Chief Academic Officers by the CSC Faculty Senate. Board Policy 4140 deals with Academic Program and Degree Requirements and the CSC Faculty Senate asked to delete the word unduplicated within the topic of subject majors.

I am very appreciative of CSCs Faculty Senate, and especially the leadership of Faculty Senate President Mat Brust and Lorie Hunn, in proposing a change that offers the potential to enhance the integration of courses within subject majors and with the Essential Studies Program, said Vice President of Academic Affairs, Charles Snare.

The bond sale for LB957, as approved by the Board and the Facilities Corporation during the June Board of Trustees meeting, occurred Aug. 17. According to Board materials, the bond sale will yield $21,275,000 of funds for design and construction for the NSCS. The bond sale will provide proceeds for the First Phase of the CSC Stadium Renovation/Replacement in the amount of $6,205,766.

Other agenda items included updates to Board Policies 3401 and 4160, and the impact of the U.S. Department of Labors Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA). CSC employees affected by the FLSA change will be notified.

Board Policy 3410 will now allow for the participation of eligible international students in the non-resident scholars program. Board Policy 4160 now has the current list of CSCs academic programs.

Additionally, other information was presented to the Board of Trustees about the three state colleges student credit hour production for the 2016 spring semester. CSC comprised 32.2 percent of the total for the NSCS. Wayne States student credit hour production was 41.5 percent and Peru States was 25.7 percent. With 12. 6 percent, CSC has the highest level of student credit hour production at the graduate level of the three state colleges.

The Board was informed of the following grant applications by Chadron State: Cosmogenic Dating of Holocene Glacial Advances in the Wind River Range (NASA Nebraska Space Grant, $6,000), Mathematics and Science Partnerships (Nebraska Department of Education, $20,240 sub-award), and Predicting Rock Failure Mode in Drilled Samples (NASA Nebraska Space Grant, $4,000).

The Board was also informed of the following grant awards by Chadron State: INBRE: Nebraska Research Network in Functional Genomics (National Institutes of Health, $35,135 sub-award through University of Nebraska Medical Center), Lights! Energy! Noise! Physical Science on Earth and in Space (NASA Nebraska Space Grant, $7,800), Nebraska Behavioral Health Jobs (University of Nebraska Medical Center, $15,000), and Surveys for the Regal Fritillary in Nebraska (Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, $20,100).

The next Board of Trustees meeting is scheduled for Nov. 10-11 in Lincoln.
CHAMBERLAIN - Rising above the mighty Missouri below her and the rolling prairie around her, Dignity, a 12-ton stainless steel structure, reflects the beauty and strength of the cultures that inspired her, says her creator Dale Lamphere.

Dignity wears the colors of the sky and the waters around her. She allows the sun and the wind to move through her, Lamphere said Saturday during her formal unveiling at the Chamberlain Rest Area.

"She is of the Earth and the sky," said Lamphere standing at the feet of the 50-feet sculpture depicting a young Native American woman with a star quilt.

Lamphere, whose studio is nestled in the Pines just south of Sturgis, says his intent for the project "is to have the sculpture stand as an enduring symbol of our shared belief that we are in a sacred place and that we are all sacred."

Lamphere said Dignity would not have become a reality if it were not for the team of individuals with whom he worked. They included Andy Roltgen, Tom Trople, Brook Loobey, and Grant Standard. He also thanked his wife, Jane Murphy, for all her support and for planning the celebration for Dignity on Saturday.

"I'm humbled and grateful to have this chance to contribute to the future landscape of South Dakota and the Great Plains," Lamphere said.

On Sunday, dozens of people mingled in a grassy area near Dignity taking photos and asking Lamphere questions about his creation.

Debi Ulrey-Crosby of Brandon asked Lamphere if he could take time out from putting finishing touches on Dignity for her to take a photo of him and Trople. They obliged.

She said she and her friends heard about the sculpture and wanted to make sure they saw it on their way back from Spearfish over the weekend.

"We found out that you could see it from the interstate, so the three of us in the car said, 'no more talking we need to keep an eye out for this,'" she said. "As soon as we started up the hill we could see this big structure. As we got closer we realized it was her."

Ulrey-Crosby called Dignity "amazing." She said her favorite part are her out-stretched arms.

"It's like she's encompassing the entire state. She's like Mother Earth," she said.

Ben Potts and his wife, Stephanie, of Des Moines, Iowa, stopped by the rest area and made their way to the sculpture.

"It's large and very cool," Ben Potts said.

"I love the backdrop," Stephanie added.

Also from Iowa, Cindy Liljedahl, said Dignity was "breathtaking."

"To me it's as beautiful as Mount Rushmore. And when you look at it and see the river behind her it's just the perfect place for it," she said.

Liljedahl said she worries that strong Midwestern winds might topple the sculpture.

Lamphere and his team made assurances that Dignity was anchored by putting down pilings 30 feet into the ground.

She is very solid, grounded in the Earth literally and spiritually," Lamphere said.

Chaplain Herb Cleveland welcomed what he termed South Dakota newest citizen -- Dignity -- Saturday, saying the sculpture is what an idea that becomes a dream, that becomes a plan, that then becomes a reality can be.

"What a tremendous gift this is to all the people of the Earth," said Cleveland who spent many years as chaplain at the Fort Meade VA Medical Center.

Cleveland called Lamphere a genius for capturing an idea and making it a reality.

"As you and I go back and forth across I-90 and see this tremendous symbol of Dignity, let it always inspire us and guide us," Cleveland said.

Sen. Troy Heinert, Mission, District 26 State Senator and Rosebud Sioux Tribal member, thanked all those who made Dignity a reality.

Heinert said he was asked to offer comments on how this beautiful creation could improve race relations in South Dakota.

"Being a mix-blood Lakota, I guess they figured I knew a thing or two about it," he said.

Heinert asked those on hand to step back in time 160 years when his grandmother's grandma may have stood at the very bluff overlooking the Missouri River and contemplated how her life was going to change forever.

"Back then life was lived on simpler terms," he said.

The Lakota lived in harmony with all creation, Heinert said.

"They lived with humility, respect, compassion and dignity," he said. "Throughout the years we have lost much of that way of life through assimiliation, government policies, reservation dynamics, prejudice and sadly -- racism."

Heinert says that the country is now more divisive than ever. And, we need to look no further than the current presidential campaign, the battle over the Dakota pipeline in North Dakota and the extremely hurtful remarks made on social media and in the press regarding Native issues to know that we have a long way to go to building good race relations, he said.

"Thankfully, with her (Dignity's) help we can make that change," he said. "I believe that she was sent here to open our hearts and our minds. Her outstretched arms are inviting us into her blanket where we can learn from each other, acknowledge our differences and celebrate our similarities."

Heinert said he also believes Dignity was sent to protect our natural resources and to remind us that everyone in this state relies on the very river she is overlooking.

We are all in this journey together, Heinert said.

"Her presence and spirit will offer a guiding hand on how we treat all of humanity for generations to come," he said. "She will be the catalyst for change and a constant reminder that we all have a unique story that needs to be heard."

Heinert challenged those in attendance that when they see hatred or bigotry at any level to let people know that it is unacceptable.

"Let us come together for the good of our future with dignity in our hearts. What a wonderful opportunity she has given us," he said.

Dick Gowen, former South Dakota School of Mines & Technology president, said the sculpture reminds us all of the place women have in our lives.

"Women bring us life. They are the keepers of the family. They heal the needy, and bring wisdom to guide our future as cultures," he said.

Gowen said Dale Lamphere rose to the challenge of building such an incredible sculpture. He said he wanted to take the liberty as president emeritus to bestow upon Dale and the team members that completed Dignity the title of Genusis of Artistic Engineering.

"What a great testimate to the power of humankind -- to the minds that put this statue together for us," Gowen said.

Gowen commended Dale Lamphere and his wife, Jane Murphy, for their committment to Native people.

"They describe Dignity as a bold proclamation that Native American cultures are alive and with dignity," he said.

Norm McKie, who with his wife, Eunable, donated $1 million for the project, said the sculptor Dale Lamphere has outdone himself with Dignity.

He said everyone has their own interpretation of Dignity and that is the beauty of art.

"To find dignity, right choices must be acted upon," McKie said. "You can't just think about, you need to act on them. It's not easy, but right choices, sweat, toil and tears is the right path to follow to find dignity within our lives."

Faye Bice, Eunabel and Norm McKie's daughter, said Dignity is their family's way of saying thanks to the people of South Dakota.

"Dignity lives. Dignity is alive," she proclaimed.

She said Dignity soars above the river and the Plains for three purposes: To inspire all people to do something special with their lives, to increase tourism and to increase awareness about the effects of suicide on the state's children.
PIERRE | The Legislature would need to spend $3.8 million the first year to cover the first round of additional need-based scholarships for university and technical institute students in South Dakota, but the cost would quickly rise to $10 million a year.

Legislators would need to find more than $10 million annually starting in the third year, according to Paul Turman, the South Dakota Board of Regents vice president for academic affairs.

South Dakota has a relatively small need-based program now that is funded with about $196,000 distributed among 222 students.

Turman presented results from a study that estimated the lowest average costs for one year taking 30 credits of courses from a state university at $19,767 and a public technical institute at $15,568 in South Dakota.

He delivered the numbers in a report to the state Board of Education.

On a yearly basis, the student would be expected to contribute $7,814 to $9,814, with the money raised through summer full-time and school-year part-time employment, plus loans.

The students family contribution would be in the neighborhood of $10,000, with possibly PELL or other federal grant assistance for those students whose family household incomes qualify.

A state-funded scholarship would then help cover the remainder.

Turman said $10.3 million would cover the need scholarships for about 6,000 students.

The state-funded Opportunity scholarships for students with strong academic records in math and science in high school currently cost about $3.3 million for 1,079 students at state-funded institutions.

Several Board of Education members told Turman they hope the funding stays separate for the Opportunity scholarships and the need-based scholarships.

One of my hopes would be the Opportunity scholarship is excluded from the state-needs part, said Don Kirkegaard, the Meade school districts superintendent. He is the state boards president.

Kirkegaard said the Opportunity program has been instrumental in encouraging school districts to offer the extra years of math and science courses needed for students to qualify.

Plus its the students who did the work to get that, board member Glenna Fouberg of Aberdeen, a retired teacher, said about the Opportunity scholarships.

Turman said school districts might slip on availability of higher math and science courses if Opportunity scholarships dont remain a stand-alone program.

We have to find a way for both of these mechanisms to work in tandem, Turman said.
PIERRE | Lake Area Technical Institute received permission Tuesday to start a program for training community health care workers in fall 2017.

The state Board of Education gave its approval Tuesday. The plan calls for the Watertown campus to offer three levels of training. There would be a six-month certificate for registered nurses, a one-year diploma and a two-year associate degree.

The schools officials expect 18 to 20 students in the first year.

Its the first of its kind in South Dakota and possibly in the region, according to Tiffany Sanders, director for the state Division of Career and Technical Education.

Mike Cartney, who is LATIs president, said the federal Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, encourages the use of community health care workers to deliver services that would be more expensive if nurses or doctors performed them.

Those services, such as wellness checks, arranging tele-health appointments and contacting providers, often occur in patients homes rather than a clinic or hospital.

He said the workers would be valuable in rural settings and for Indian Health Service patients.

Other parts of the nation use community health care workers frequently, Cartney said. Its something thats needed in South Dakota.

A community health care worker can bill for services that a registered nurse cannot under Obamacare, he said.

The state Board of Nursing and the state Department of Health would need to set the rules and scope of permitted activities.

The request from LATI featured letters of support from Prairie Lakes Healthcare System at Watertown, Huron Regional Medical Center and Coteau des Prairies Health Care System at Sisseton.

Board member Scott Herman of Mission, who is a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said people are looking to become what he said are called health care representatives back home.

He said EMTs and others involved in healthcare burn out but want to stay involved in other roles such as health care representatives.

There is a need out there for them, Herman said.
241

NOTICE

In the County Court of Dawes County, Nebraska

Estate of Melvin A. Bruns, Deceased. Case No. PR 16-47

Notice is hereby given that on September 1, 2016, in the County Court of Dawes County, Nebraska, Sheryl I. Bruns, whose address is 210 W. 8th St., Chadron, NE 69337 has been informally appointed as Personal Representative of this estate. Creditors of this estate must file their claims with this Court on or before November 14, 2016, or be forever barred.

Clerk Magistrate / Registrar

Patrick M. Marty Connealy #15366

Crites, Shaffer, Connealy, Watson, Patras & Cullers, P.C., L.L.O.

201 East Third Street, P.O. Box 1070

Chadron, Nebraska 69337

Publish Sept. 14, 21 and 28, 2016

250

NOTICE

IN THE COUNTY COURT OF DAWES COUNTY, NEBRASKA

Estate of FRAUNIE LOU TAYLOR, Deceased.

Estate No. PR16-48

Notice is hereby given that on September 6, 2016 in the County Court of Dawes County, Nebraska, the Registrar issued a written statement of Informal Probate of the Will of said Decedent and that Kay Francis Allen, whose address is 915 S. Claussen Ave., Grand Island, NE 68801, was informally appointed by the Registrar as Personal Representative of the Estate.

Creditors of this Estate must file their claims with this Court on or before NOVEMBER 21, 2016 or be forever barred.

SEAL

/s/Lori Miskimins

Clerk of the County Court

451 Main Street, Suite D

Chadron, NE 69337

PREPARED BY:

Cathleen H. Allen #19133

LEININGER, SMITH, JOHNSON, BAACK, PLACZEK & ALLEN

104 N. Wheeler Street

P.O. Box 790

Grand Island, NE 68802

Telephone: (308)382-1930

Fax: (308)382-5521

Publish Sept. 21, 28 and Oct. 5, 2016
Chinese citizen to go on trial in Russia for allegedly hiding gold in forest

MOSCOW, September 21 (RAPSI)  A criminal case against Chinese citizen, who allegedly hid four kilograms of placer gold in Russias Amur Region forests, has been transferred to a court, RIA Novosti reported on Wednesday.

According to local prosecutors, amount of pure gold in the stash is estimated at 2.3 kilograms. Overall, gold in the stash has value of 6.2 million rubles ($95,000).

Allegedly defendant left Russia for China on August 20, 2015 and left gold in the stash. On April 6, while in China, he decided to transfer gold to Blagoveshchensk, the capital of the Amur Region. On April 8 he drove to the stash, collected gold and tried to get to Blagoveshchensk. Later representatives of the local Federal Security Service conducted vehicle inspection and found the gold.

Russian legislation prohibits selling, storing and transportation of raw precious metals, gems and pearls if specific rules regarding these goods are violated. A person found guilty of unlawfully dealing with large amount of these goods may be sentenced up to 5 years in prison and fined up to 500,000 rubles ($7,100).
Bulgarian parliament adopts bill on damage payment to Russian company for abandoned NPP

MOSCOW, September 21 (RAPSI)  The Bulgarian parliament has passed in the first reading a bill on providing financial support for the National Electric Company (NEK) to pay the damages to Russian engineering company Atomstroyexport for the abandoned Belene nuclear power plant project, the parliaments official website announced on Wednesday.

The bill approved on Tuesday by the Bulgarian government stipulates that NEK will receive the sum required for repayment of obligation to Atomstroyexport from the state budget.

Prime Minister of Bulgaria Boyko Borissov announced earlier that around  650 million would be transferred to the Russian company. The money will be granted after the European Commissions approval, according to the local media reports.

A procedure for selection of a contractor for construction of Belene NPP was launched in 2005. It resulted in Atomstroyexport winning the bid for the contract. An agreement on the NPP construction was signed in November 2006. After the project had been approved by the European Commission as meeting technical requirements, the contract for the design, construction, and installation of Belene NPP was signed. Nevertheless, Bulgarian authorities officially terminated the project in March 2012.

Atomstroyexport initiated proceedings in the Paris-based International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in July 2011 requesting a 58,000,000 payment for the works carried out in the framework of the project implementation. In September 2012, the Russian party informed that the compensation it demanded from NEK was raised to 1 billion.

In July 2016, NEK was ordered to compensate the Russian company 620 million. Moreover, the court ruled that a penalty of 167,000 would be charged daily until the full amount of damage is paid.

Atomstroyexport is a leading Russian engineering company and is a subsidiary of the Rosatom state corporation. It is involved in the construction of nuclear power facilities abroad. Atomstroyexport is currently building five nuclear power generating units abroad.
Russian antimonopoly watchdog ready to fine Google every two weeks - report

MOSCOW, September 21 (RAPSI)  Igor Artemyev, the Head of the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) had told journalists that the agency was ready to fine Google every two weeks if the company fails to comply with the regulators orders, RIA Novosti news agency reports on Wednesday.

In case we see the process is dragged out, we will meet every two weeks to impose new fines on them for failing to comply with the order, he said. It will continue until the final victory [is achieved - ed.] and final court judgement [is passed - ed.], according to Artemyev.

The deadline for Google to comply with the FAS order requiring the company to remedy the violation by refraining from installation of its products on mobile devices and allowing installation of applications developed by third parties expired on August 29. FAS has dismissed Googles petition to extend this term.

On August 17 the Ninth Commercial Court of Appeals has dismissed an appeal filed by Google against a ruling that the US company had broken Russian anti-monopoly legislation by abusing its dominance on the Russian market of mobile applications.

In early August FAS announced that it had fined Google 438 million rubles for violating administrative legislation.

On September 18, 2015, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) found Google guilty of violating the legislation.

On March 15, 2016, the Moscow Commercial Court dismissed Googles petition requesting to abolish the FAS decision and order issued in September 2015, which stated that the company had violated the Federal Law on Protection of Competition and accused it of abuse of dominance on the market of preinstalled applications in the Android operating system.
BUTTE - A Butte resident received the dream phone call Tuesday  she had just won $7.5 million.

Better yet, $200,000 was soon to be delivered to her house, then she'd receive $15,000 a week for life. Oh, the caller said, that money would be picked up at the post office when the time came.

And ... she had also won a Mercedes Benz.

All Carol Smith needed to do was come up with $385. The caller, who had a heavy foreign accent, said he'd meet her at the bank with representatives from the FBI and Homeland Security.

Smith, 69, of course, didn't do that. Rather, she said, recognizing the call was a scam, she played along for nearly 30 minutes, before he hung up on her. During that time, she called police, who directed her to the state attorney generals office.

The number, according to the Montana Department of Justice, was from Jamaica.

Smith, 69, said the caller identified himself as James Parker, the "prize director'' for the American Cash Awards Corp. Smith said Parker told her she wasnt the only winner in the area, because two other people won in Butte.

A spokesman with the state office that deals with consumer fraud told Smith these kinds of scam calls are commonplace.

Who doesnt dream of winning big? But for a growing number of Montanans, those words are the beginning of a nightmare. In recent years, reports of fake lottery and sweepstake scams in Montana have ballooned, nearly tripling. Along the way, they have tripped up dozens of unlucky Montanans, some of whom have lost tens of thousands of dollars, according to the state Office of Consumer Protection.

The schemes differ on specifics, but most follow a formula: Offer lots of winnings, but ask for a smaller amount up front in order to access the big prize.

Best advice? Hang up. And for more information, call the Office of Consumer Protection at 406-444-4500 or 800-481-6896.

In Carol Smith's case, the caller, thankfully, hung up on her (he had called her twice). That was after she told him her neighbor worked for the FBI (he doesn't) and that she wanted the FBI guy to accompany her to the bank. She also wanted the newspaper there when she received the big payoff.

"That would really boost the economy of Butte'' if Smith and the others won all that money, she said with a laugh.
Careers in science were once thought to be beyond the abilities of women.

The Life-long Learning Series at the Darby Community Public Library begins with a presentation by scholar and historic interpreter Mary Jane Bradbury as she examines the challenges and successes of four pioneering women scientists.

Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History: Women in Science is the topic for 6 p.m. on Wednesday.

I portray women in history, Bradbury said. Women tried to make changes and people back then thought they were poorly behaved. We would call them brave, courageous and bold.

Bradbury said her presentation looks at women who achieved success despite obstacles.

Science was considered too much for women, she said. At the time they thought women were not smart enough and didnt have the competence or the disposition. The first women scientists were pioneers who overcame fierce opposition.

Bradbury will discuss the lives and writings of science pioneers Martha Maxwell (Rocky Mountain naturalist), Maria Mitchell (astronomer), Ruth Underhill (anthropologist) and Rachel Carson (biologist).

Some of it will be first person but most of it will be about their lives and what they came up with, she said.

Bradbury lives in Helena and is a speaker with Humanities Montana. She does a number of Well Behaved Women programs throughout Montana. She will present at the Montana Historical Societys 43rd annual Montana History Conference in Hamilton on Friday.

Wendy Campbell, library director, said the presentation would be wonderful.

This fascinating look at women who challenged and crossed boundaries in science will be especially interesting to anyone who enjoys learning about history, science or the achievements made by trail-blazing women, she said.

Other presentations in the Life-Long Learning Series at the Darby Community Public Library include additional speakers through Humanity Montana: UFOs and Extraterrestrials in Montana with Joan Bird - Nov. 2, Before the Horse: Northern Rockies Lifestyles with Kae Cheatham  Nov. 16, Developing Community Literary Programs with Tami Haaland  Jan. 11, Life and Loves of a Nuclear Weapons Inspector with Shirley Johnson  March 8 and Cuban-American Relations with Brian Kahn  April 12.

Campbell said she is pleased with the selections for the Life-Long Learning series.

Actually, the feedback we received from events last year informed our decision to bring a greater variety of topics to the community this year beginning with this study on women, Campbell said. Through the Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau, we found speakers matching community interest. The result is a line up for the year that is fun, educational and certainly interesting.

All programs begin at 6 p.m., are free and open to everyone. The Darby Community Public Library is located at 101 and a half S. Marshall St. in Darby.
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Mostly, the Rude Pundit doesn't give a shit what you have to say, but, if you have to say it, you can write to Lee Papa here: rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com
Brahim Ghali seeks desperately to take things in hand in the Tindouf camps, as evidenced by the first restructuring the Polisario chief operated within his team.

The restructuring started with the appointment Monday of Ali Sayed Bashir as Minister of the Interior. Ali Sayed Bashir is member of the Bouihates (Rguibates), a tribe which has been in the forefront of the opposition to the Polisario leadership over the past few years.

The new chief of the Polisario is determined to pull the rug from under the feet of Sahrawi dissidents, who ignited protests in the Tindouf camps before the death of his predecessor. With this in mind, he started reshuffling the cards among the apparatchiks of the separatist front.

The last two years of the rule of Mohamed Abdelaziz had, indeed, been marked by large-scale protests, despite the harsh repression the Polisario resorted to to quell the protests. The demonstrations were fueled by the worsening living conditions in the camps and the scandal of misappropriation of international humanitarian assistance. The embezzlement of the aid by officials of the Polisario, in connivance with Algerian officials, was revealed early 2015 by OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office.

Brahim Ghalis eagerness to draw lessons from the mistakes of his predecessor prompted him to undertake the cards redistribution in favor of the Bouihates, said an informed source in the Tindouf camps. This is Brahim Ghalis first decision since his appointment two months ago at the head of the Polisario.

This decision is understood in the camps as an attempt to appease the Bouihates, who have long been marginalized.

Meanwhile, the new leader of the Polisario tries to show firmness against Morocco, in line with Algerias position on the Sahara issue. Thus, the appointment of Mohamed Lamine el Bouhali as commander of reserve regiment sends a message in this respect to both Morocco and the hardliners within the Polisario.
$25K in Gannett Foundation grants go to central Kansas organizations

Four local organizations are receiving a total of $25,000 as the Gannett Foundation invests in community-building initiatives in north-central Kansas.
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Last Monday night's screening in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto International Film Festival gained a week's worth of notoriety when The Hollywood Reporter announced that three people had fainted during the show and were taken away in an ambulance.

Poorly hydrated? Bad sausage? Or an Exorcist-esque throwback to the days when people could be so overcome by the horrors of a horror movie that they might actually have a real-world physical breakdown?

The film was Julia Ducournau's Raw, a cannibalism horror movie par excellence (or is it a dark comedy?), so the latter explanation isn't out of the question. If you have an even marginally psychosomatic gag reflex, Raw is going to be thumbing it recursively for most of its 90 minutes, starting with a scene that will haunt your nightmares every time you clean out the hair trap in your shower's drain for the rest of your life.

(Shelagh Rowan-Legg reviewed Raw from Cannes for Screen Anarchy here!)

Besides turning itself into this festival's cinnamon challenge (the Saturday repeat screening was packed with wannabe fainters), Raw succeeded as a buzz-generator because it's a generally excellent slice of genre fiction, with a lot more going on under the hood than its exploitation logline initially suggests.

Particularly, it's a terrific little essay on how, with the right grooming and socialization, you can normalize pretty much any behaviour with a group of people. Cannibalism itself might be a stretch, sure... but as a metaphor for destructive behaviour, eating people is about as good as it gets, no?

We meet Justine, a freshman at a veterinary college, whose older sister Alex also attends. Coming from a strict vegetarian family (and surprised that she's flying solo on that front, given that she's at a school for the care and treatment of animals), Justine is horrified that frosh week hazing includes the forced consumption of rabbit kidneys, among other things - and is even more horrified to discover, as the week bears on, that a voracious appetite for meat, and eventually human flesh, has taken hold of her.

The way the culture and people around her proceeds to encourage Justine to tease out those cravings is the heart of the piece.

Raw is obviously playing within the imagery of college hazing for its metaphor of how collectively socialized behaviour, and the mob mentality, can pretty easily lead to things going too far. But the movie's thoughtful eye extends to even more significant things: the way womens' bodies and sexualities can be throttled and controlled through social pressure, for one; and critically to 2016, the way any abhorrent behaviour can be normalized through a program of grooming and desensitization. If anyone asks you why so few people seem to care that Donald Trump is a colossal, on-the-record racist, show them Raw. (And then stand back.)

The vegetarian/veterinarian conflict I mentioned above is a good place to start, as a table-setting poke at the way cultures treat normal/out-of-the-"normal" behaviour amongst their midst. Though Justine's vegetarianism is a plot driver, it is presented as colossally weird that she's the only student at this veterinary college with more than a passing empathy for the feelings of the animals being treated. One group conversation questions whether it's possible to rape a monkey; not physically, but in terms of whether the monkey has rights, feelings, and memories that would lead that to verifiably be called "rape."

It's a no-brainer moment - the film clearly pointing out the eerie hypocrisy not just among the students, but among anyone who subsists on the lives of animals without at least a question about the morality of doing so. Raw goes on to underline the point through subsequent scenes as the students work on various animals with dispassion bordering on boredom.

(One notable conversation with Alex takes place while she has her entire arm up a cow's ass. Real cow, real ass. Raw would be a demonstrably vegan movie in its message, if it wasn't fundamentally exploitative in its production approach.)

Justine develops a terrible, unexplained rash after eating the rabbit kidneys during hazing. Her doctor tells her a story about an obese female patient (this choice very deliberate for what the film is trying to do), who was routinely harassed and abused by medical staff for being overweight but never spoke up about it because she wanted to fit in and be normal... "average."

It's the mission statement of much that will follow. Justine assures the doctor that she is normal, but this betrays the fact that she is also questing for the stability of some particular aspects of agency of her own: what she wants to eat, who she wants to fuck, what she wants to be when she grows up. You can't stand up for those things and blend into the crowd at the same time, and life will be about choosing which flow to go with. Justine's gay roommate will later shout that he didn't spend a lifetime defending his sexuality just to start having heterosexual relationships now, when she crawls into his bed.

Raw's rubber hits its proverbial road towards the end of the first act, in an extended scene that is as sleekly funny as it is stomach-churningly gory. Justine has reconnected with her sister Alex after a week of the older sibling's frustration with Justine for not getting with the frosh week program. (Alex ate Justine's rabbit kidneys for her, before forcing Justine to down a nugget anyway.)

Reunited, Alex teaches Justine how to pee standing up, and then they head back to the dorm for a little amateur Brazilian waxing. (You know, as one does.) We've noticed previously that Justine doesn't shave her armpits, and according to Alex, it's even "worse" down south - and in the tried-and-true shaming/control mechanism of self-reinforced cosmetic beauty standards, Alex assures Justine she'll never get laid if she doesn't start clearing the bush.

A series of events transpires which I won't spoil here, but suffice to say that the wax job goes badly wrong, and eventually leads to Justine - her building meat-craving gone berserk - eating a piece of her sister. Justine is horrified by what she's done, but Alex - who we now see has been easing Justine up to this line for most of the first half of the film - sees the opportunity to solidify the transgression.

Alex stages a car crash, and when she goes to check on the car's occupants, she emerges from the passenger door with their blood dripping from her chin, and calmly invites Justine to join her. It's icky and profoundly unsettling, like watching a sexual predator finally make his move on a victim he's been grooming. As though Alex is saying, it's okay, we've already come this far, and you know you want to.

It's the most significant moment in the film: one character looking at another from the other side of a transgressive line and excusing/facilitating the unspeakable behaviour. With her defenses battered by everything that's come before and her sense of right and wrong, normal and abnormal, pushed headily into "blurry line" territory by the changing social mores around her, it's all too easy for Justine to stumble into her sister's waiting, cannibalistic arms.

And Justine does want to. That's significant as well. Though Raw's eventual diagram of why Justine is drawn to cannibalism is a bit facile, the metaphor still plays just fine: substitute it for any unwelcome social behaviour (violence, transgressive sexuality, racism, texting at the movies), and recognize that these processes of socialization succeed in part because they make "okay" some contradictory impulses that live in just about everyone, but for which social controls exist that hampers (or outright criminalizes) their expression.

The hazing rituals at Justine and Alex's schools include dousing freshmen with fresh blood, or (in a parallel, equally delicious image system) dumping a bucket of blue paint on a boy and yellow paint on a girl, and forcing them into a closet, not to come out until they've turned green. They codify and lubricate social behaviour around class, privilege and sexuality. They can be used to make these people do pretty much anything - to turn freshmen into upperclassmen who (like Alex) will visit the exact same miseries on the new crop next year, and in so doing, enforce their arbitrary standard of "normal." And if "normal" includes eating a finger or two? Hey, who's gonna stop us?



Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on Letterboxd.
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This well-established Blog is worth visiting on a regular basis for a wealth of information of interest to Armenian nationals and to the Armenian Diaspora world-wide. Although it has a particular role in promoting international recognition of the Genocide, the Blog encompasses much more and includes many articles of general appeal to all those concerned with Armenian affairs. Much of the content is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere and the long list of links provided gives easy access to a plethora of material on social, political, religious, educational and cultural matters, and many news items from around the world.




Starship just completed its first official and completely autonomous delivery to a wonderful lady in Richmond district of San Francisco A photo posted by Starship Technologies (@starshiprobots) on Sep 20, 2016 at 2:01pm PDT



While Alphabet is busy drone-delivering burritos to stoned college students in Virginia, a competitor has moved in on the snack-delivery game right here in San Francisco. Dubbed Starship, the autonomous delivery robot doesn't so much fly through the sky as it does plod along the city's sidewalks  with the Chronicle reporting that makers of the cooler-sized device began SF testing yesterday with an inaugural delivery of pastries.

The robot is the work of the London-headquartered Starship Technologies, a company which seeks to "revolutionise local delivery." Starship Technologies, which launched in 2014, requested and received permission from the city of San Francisco to test its robot on our actual streets  and so it did so yesterday, arriving at the Richmond District home of Julie O'Keefe with the aforementioned treat (and throngs of reporters) in tow.

And while the device looks like a little harmless beer cooler on wheels, the company has grand plans for it. "Our delivery platform will launch a new era of instant, unscheduled delivery as well as significantly lower the costs of shipments," marketing copy explains. "Parcels and groceries are directly delivered from stores or specialised hubs, at the time that the client requests via a mobile app. It takes 5 to 30 minutes for the shipment to arrive and the robots entire journey can be monitored on a smartphone."

We first learned about Starship last April, when the company's CEO Allan Martinson spoke with the Chronicle about how his bots will replace some traditional delivery methods. It doesnt make sense to drive a two-ton car to deliver two pounds of something," he noted.

The robots navigate city sidewalks at roughly four miles per hour, and top out at 40 pounds, so don't expect to see these things zipping by you anytime soon. And those hoping that a proliferation of these bots will translate to free lunch for anyone daring enough to try and rob a robot should think again  once the goods to be delivered are placed inside by a business owner, the top locks and can only be opened by the intended recipient (theoretically, at least).

The eventual goal is to have one employee monitoring 100 Starships  only jumping in to take change when something weird goes down  thus so significantly reducing the cost of delivery that business owners "could deliver laundry, wine or even a single packet of light bulbs and still make a profit."

Starship Technologies had to get a one-time permit from DPW to conduct yesterday's delivery test, but company executives hope city officials will pass laws legalizing the bots on a wide scale. It's not a crazy idea, as, according to the Chronicle, at least one US city has already done so.

As such, we may be seeing more of these on our streets in the near future. Either way, yesterday's test proved that the future is here, San Francisco, and that it brought pastries.

Scenic drive in the #ecologypark #london A video posted by Starship Technologies (@starshiprobots) on Sep 14, 2016 at 10:44am PDT



Related: Security Robot Knocks Toddler To The Ground Then Runs Him Over At Stanford Shopping Center
Painful details released in preliminary hearing of 2 drifters accused in #SF, #MarinCounty murders. https://t.co/bS8ATevBtj  ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) September 21, 2016

We are now getting some better detail about what happened last October in the senseless killings of a 23-year-old Canadian backpacker in Golden Gate Park and a 67-year-old tantric yoga instructor in Marin after two of the accused killers appeared for their preliminary hearing in a Marin County court on Tuesday. As the Examiner reports, via testimony from a Marin County Sheriff's detective in the case, 19-year-old Lila Scott Alligood changed her story at least once in the same day that she and her boyfriend, 24-year-old Morrison Haze Lampley, and their fellow traveler, 24-year-old Sean Michael Angold were arrested in Portland, Oregon, at first allegedly claiming that Angold was the shooter in both killings, and then admitting that Lampley was the shooter. The detective, Scott Buer, says that Alligood said she was trying to protect Lampley, whom she had known since she was 12 and who was her longtime boyfriend.

We learn via the Chronicle that the pair had only known Angold for a few weeks, and had met him in San Francisco after hitchhiking here from San Diego up Route 1. Angold allegedly provided them with methamphetamine, and the trio were then noted by other transients reportedly acting "edgy" around the Upper Haight in the days before they allegedly shot and killed Audrey Carey on October 3, 2015, during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.

Angold has since pleaded guilty to murder in exchange for his testimony against Alligood and Lampley, and he will be serving 15 years to life for his role in the killings. The three allegedly stole both a gun and a car in addition to money from their victims, and they were tracked via the car's GPS to Portland.

Buer testified Tuesday  albeit with third-hand information via a cellmate of Alligood's who came forward with an alleged confession by Alligood in order to get her own sentence reduced  that Alligood said "All of a sudden, Lampley jumps up and shoots her and there is blood ... all over." She further said that in the minutes before Lampley shot Carey, Carey was thanking the three of them for being friends. Carey's body was later found to have methamphetamine in her system.

As both papers report, the statement from Alligood's cellmate, Pamela Bullock, constituted much of what Buer told the court in the hearing. Bullock said Alligood referred to Carey as "the bitch," and in discussing the murder of Steven Carter on a Marin hiking trail two days later, she allegedly said, "The old man needed to die."

According to the Chronicle, during the hearing Tuesday, "Alligood appeared teary-eyed as Lampley showed little emotion."

As ABC 7 reports, via Buer's testimony, that "one of the bullets pierced Carter's wallet, put a hole in a credit card, and shredded the cash inside... [and later] Alligood described those bills as wet when the suspects later used them to buy gas in Bolinas."

Defense attorneys appear to want to continue to pin the killings on Angold, per the Ex, questioning Buer about Alligood's initial statement that he was the triggerman, not Lampley.

Alligood's attorney also sought to discredit Bullock's statements, as jailhouse confessions are often called into question when those who received them have something to gain. Bullock apparently wrote in a statement to investigators, "Im fighting for time. Help me so I can help you guys.

No trial date has yet been set for Alligood and Lampley, who are being tried together. Prosecutors have said the death penalty will not be sought.

Previously: Marin Judge In Drifter Slaying Case Reluctantly Allows Media At Hearing
With every great holiday comes great television specials. So it's only fitting that perhaps the greatest holiday gets the best television specials, and the holiday in question is Halloween. On the Sept. 7, we gave you five great Halloween TV specials. Today we'll conclude our list with five more.

5. 30 Rock - "Stone Mountain" (2009)

In an episode in which Betty White guest stars, character Tracy Jordan begins to fear for his life when two other "celebrities" die, prompting TGS writer Frank to tell Tracy that celebrities die in threes. Afraid that he'll be next, Tracy calls White and screams at her in hopes of scaring her to death. Meanwhile, Jack and Liz travel to Georgia to search for a new cast member, finding one (temporarily) in the form of a mysoginistic puppeteer named Rick Wayne (Jeff Dunham).

4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Halloween" (1997)

In "Halloween," the main characters of the Buffyverse are forced to deal with a terrifying fate - literally becoming their Halloween costumes. While this might be great if you're dressed as Kim Kardashian or someone equally wealthy and beautiful, our poor hero Buffy is transformed into a faint hearted 18th century noblewoman. The greatest part of the episode is the irony of Buffy, who is usually kicking the crap out of all the bad guys, rendered too dainty to fight.

3. American Horror Story - "Halloween: Part 2" (2011)

American Horror Story's first season reaches an inkling of genius in its two-parter Halloween episode, which brings the show's fear and intrigue to heights it had not yet reached, while providing some interesting backstory and adding more mythology to the house. I watched this show as it aired, and five years later, the episode still gives me chills.

2. That '70s Show - "Too Old to Trick or Treat, Too Young to Die" (2000)

Halloween just wouldn't be the same without Alfred Hitchcock, which is why this That '70s Show homage to horror's most beloved pervert is so important. The episode's title comes from a line spouted by Eric Foreman when the gang can't figure out what to do for Halloween: "It's like we're too old to trick-or-treat, and too young to die." Another memorable line: "An apple? Give me my candy, you son of a bitch!"

1. The Twilight Zone - "The Grave"

While the series lacks any specifically stated Halloween episodes, "The Grave" comes closest - having originally aired on October 27, 1961, it fits the theme perfectly. The episode tells the story of a gun for hire, commissioned to murder a man, who must stick a knife through his victim's grave once the deed has been done. The wind blows his coat, causing him to pin the coattail to the grave and literally die of fright. But was it really the wind?

So that's our list, and we hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to comment other suggestions, disputes, and personal favorites below.
SIOUX CITY | A former middle school science teacher, Jackson Street Brewing Co.'s Dave Winslow considers himself a student when it comes to beer.

"You'll never know everything there is to know about beer," he said inside his 607 Fifth St. tasting room. "That's what makes experimenting and pushing the envelope so much fun."

Winslow has been busily brewing brand new beers bearing provocative names like Rod the Well Man IPA, Little Wood Stout, Matt's Fat Baby Irish Red and a Woodbury Merlot Infusion, which boasts an alcohol-by-volume rating of more than 11 percent.

"(The Merlot-infused beer) is surprisingly smooth and very tasty," he said, pouring the deep-violet, barrel-aged beer into a snifter. "People seem to like it a lot."

Another fan favorite has been Jackson Street Brewing's Oktoberfest beer.

"Who wouldn't enjoy a malty, full-bodied, German style of lager?" Winslow asked. "This will be perfect for fall."

A home winemaker before he turned to beer, Winslow opened his downtown tap room more than a year ago.

"Personally, I like a variety of beer and I love exploring the flavor of something you make yourself," he said. "While beer-making is a creative process, there's still a lot of grunt work involved."

And until recently, this "grunt work" required Winslow to be on site all the time. This became a hardship since he and his wife Tia have a 19-month-old son, Jackson, and and a 2-week-old son, Pierce, at home.

"I just came to the realization that I needed to be home with my family," he said. "I've have some great knowledgeable employees and that means I can get the occasional day off."

Which isn't to say that Winslow is resting on his laurels. He's already conjuring up ideas for new brews.

"I enjoy having a beer selection that's constantly changing," he said. "I don't like drinking the same beer over and over again, and neither do my customers."

Ordinarily a fan of a hoppy India Pale ale (IPA) and a nice dark stout, Winslow is acquiring a taste for sour beers.

"We had a raspberry sour that was pretty popular," he said. "We're considering a cranberry sour but may end up pairing it with a sweeter fruit. You may think you like sour beers but some fruits may be just too sour."

This may be where Winslow's background in science comes into play.

"There are certain classic styles of beers," he said. "What we're just trying to bring is a new perspective to many of those classic styles."
DAKOTA CITY | A former Lawton, Iowa, city clerk pleaded no contest Wednesday to a charge of trying to set up a sexual encounter with a person he believed to be a teenage boy.

Douglas Furlich, 61, of Lawton, entered his plea in Dakota County District Court to an amended count of attempted sexual assault by use of electronic communication device. District Judge Paul Vaughan found Furlich guilty of the charge and scheduled sentencing for Nov. 9.

Furlich faces a prison sentence of one to 50 years if he is not placed on probation. There is no agreed sentence contained in a plea agreement filed by Assistant Dakota County Attorney Melinda Wicks. The agreement said that the state can recommend any sentence allowed by Nebraska law.

Furlich's amended charge is a Class II felony, reduced from sexual assault by use of electronic communication device, which is a Class ID felony.

Furlich will remain free on bond while awaiting sentencing.

According to court documents, Furlich posted an ad titled "Looking for a younger guy" on Craigslist under the "casual encounters" section.

Pretending to be a minor, Nebraska State Patrol officers contacted Furlich through the ad via text messages. In the text conversations, Furlich discussed meeting who he thought was a 15-year-old for sex, and described in detail his preferences.

According to court documents, Furlich came to Crystal Cove Park in South Sioux City on June 2 after texting the officer posing as the minor that he was picking up condoms.

Furlich was approached by authorities, and admitted he was conversing with the undercover officer, but said he did not think the meeting would actually result in sex.

Furlich was later fired from his position by the Lawton City Council.
STORM LAKE | A 16-year-old Storm Lake High School student was arrested Tuesday after police said he distributed illegal mushrooms to another student at school.

According to a news release from the Storm Lake Police Department, police took a report Friday involving a juvenile male ingesting psilocybin mushrooms while at Storm Lake High School.

Psilocybin mushrooms, also known as "magic mushrooms," are an illegal substance that causes hallucinations.

Upon investigation, police learned he had acquired the mushrooms at the high school from another student, who was identified as a 16-year-old male living in Storm Lake.

The juvenile who ingested the mushrooms was taken to Buena Vista Regional Medical Center Friday afternoon for treatment and was later released, the release said.

Police on Tuesday arrested the 16-year-old male suspect and charged him with delivery of psilocybin, a class C felony.

The juvenile, whose name has not been released, was processed and transported to the Youth Detention Facility in Cherokee, Iowa, the release said. The case has been forwarded to the Juvenile Court Authority.
SIOUX CITY | Sioux City Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Jim Clark said Wednesday he has accepted the fire chief position with the city of Johnston, Iowa.

Clark, who was born and raised in Sioux City, has been with the department for more than 33 years.

"I am going to miss Sioux City Fire Rescue immensely," Clark, 56, said. "It has been a fabulous career for me here. I am certainly going to miss all the people, and all the relationships that I have built in my 33 and a half years."

Sioux City Fire Rescue Chief Thomas Everett said Clark, whose official title was administrative assistant chief, was in charge of the emergency operations center and was the regional coordinator for the hazmat team, "but most importantly, he was helpful to anyone that asked of the department."

Johnston, a northwest suburb of Des Moines, has a population of 17,300.

As fire chief, Clark will oversee the department that serves Johnston, unincorporated areas of Polk County and Camp Dodge. The city also shares staffing with the surrounding town of Grimes.

"I'm excited for the new opportunity, looking forward to the move and seeing what kind of relationships I can build in Johnston and Grimes," Clark said.

Clark's first day is on Oct. 17. There will be a farewell party on his last day of work in Sioux City at noon Sept. 30 at the City Council chambers.

"One of his personal career goals was to be a fire chief somewhere, and we were supportive of him and his endeavors," Everett said. "We are sad to see him go, but happy that he's getting to achieve one of his lifelong goals."
SIOUX CITY | A new Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic will be built on West Anchor Drive in Dakota Dunes.

At a projected 25,000 square feet, the one-story clinic will be three times the size of the existing clinic at 1551 Indian Hills Drive, suite 206, in Sioux City.

"This is the biggest clinic we will have ever built in the Sioux Falls system," Director of the Sioux Falls VA Heath Care System Darwin Goodspeed said Tuesday at a town hall meeting at the American Red Cross in Sioux City. "And it is going to have more services than any other clinic we have."

Along with keeping the remaining primary care, mental health and home-based care services, the new clinic will add services such as optometry and radiology.

"This is going to be the first clinic we've built that you can get an x-ray in the clinic. I'm very excited about that," Goodspeed said. "We are also excited about the location. We also hoped to keep the clinic in Iowa, but in this market, it seems a lot of healthcare is moving to the Dunes. When we started looking at the easy access to the freeway, bus access and proximity to other healthcare facilities that we can work with, this (location) floated to the top."

The current clinic opened in July 2000. Goodspeed said it was designed and staffed to take care of 1,500 veterans. Since that time, the clinic has grown to care for 4,000 veterans a month, and it has more than tripled in staff.

"I use the clinic here in town a couple times a month and it is always packed, but they do a superb job," said Curt Moodie of Kinglsey, Iowa, an Army veteran who served in the 101st Airborne during the Vietnam War.

Goodspeed estimated the new clinic will be able to help 7,000 veterans a month, and the price is estimated to be "in the range of 3 to 5 million dollars."

The contract was signed 10 days ago Tuesday, so no completion date is set yet, Goodspeed said. He hopes it will be up and running in a year.

"I think it is super, it's another 10 miles for me to get out there, but I don't care," Moodie added.

Currently the clinic serves veterans in Woodbury, Plymouth and Cherokee counties in Iowa; Dakota and Dixon counties in Nebraska; and Clay and Union counties in South Dakota.

Goodspeed said the existing clinic will be turned back to the property owners -- Boys and Girls Home and Family Services.
SIOUX CITY | The state of Iowa will soon move to a new statewide radio system, and Woodbury County Sheriff Dave Drew has a plan to get new units as soon as possible.

Drew told the Woodbury County Supervisors during their Tuesday board meeting that he has a plan to get 122 radios within the current fiscal year to jump on the state's new system more quickly. County officials had previously thought the radios would be bought in the next fiscal year of 2017-18, but Drew said he can land no-interest lease that would not require the county to pay anything until after a new year in July.

The supervisors said they liked the proposal, but won't take action until next Tuesday, when a public hearing on the matter will be held.

The agreement will be with Motorola for an estimated $680,596. If the supervisors agree to the plan, the radio units would arrive in December.

"The lease/purchase agreement can then be paid in full, interest free, when CIP (Capital Improvement Program) funding for FY 2017-18 comes available in July of 2017," a Sheriff's Office memo read.

Sheriff's Office Maj. Todd Wieck said the state radio system is coming online more quickly, so the county should ramp up with new units to take part as soon as possible. The current radio system dates to 2004 and Motorola products won't be serviceable with the new system by 2018.

Drew said the new system will be a boon, because it will stretch across the entire Hawkeye State. He said deputies have transported prisoners to distant counties and had trouble reaching Woodbury County. The existing radio system wouldn't always allow that and Drew said the alternative of using mobile phones meant that deputies were at the mercy of spotty cell coverage.

"It is a great system and now it will allow us to talk across the whole state," Drew said.

The Sioux City Police Department is also updating radio units to take advantage of the new state system. With the Motorola incentives, the city's anticipated cost will drop below $2 million.
SIOUX CITY | Sioux City elementary schools without air conditioning will dismiss two hours early Wednesday, according to district officials.

An alert from the Sioux City Community School District Wednesday morning said Bryant, Hunt, Riverside and Sunnyside schools will close two hours early due to the heat.

According to the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls, temperatures will reach the upper 80s this afternoon, with heat indices reaching the low 90s. Thunderstorms are possible this evening.
SAC CITY, Iowa | The Sac County Sheriff's Office has released additional information on the death of a 24-year-old woman after she was shot while in the driver's seat of her car Sunday.

A news release issued Wednesday by the sheriff's office said Megan Quinn Sloss, 24, of Guthrie Center, Iowa, was driving with her brother, 26-year-old Spencer Lee Sloss, also of Guthrie Center, to a family event in Ida County to do target shooting.

The release said around 11:40 a.m., as the vehicle was about two miles east of Lake View, Spencer was talking with his sister and sitting in the passenger seat with his Sig Sauer 9mm handgun. He was demonstrating how to tear down a gun to clean it, when the gun discharged. The bullet struck Megan Sloss in the hip region, the release said.

According to the release, Spencer Sloss told authorities he had to climb over the armrest to bring the car to a stop. He then called 911 and removed his sister from the car. The release said a doctor, who had driven by, stopped and offered medical assistance.

Megan Sloss was transported to Loring Hospital in Sac City and then airlifted to Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines. She died a short time later, the release said.

The release said Spencer Sloss has a valid permit to carry out of Guthrie County. An autopsy for Megan Sloss was scheduled for Wednesday morning at the State Medical Examiner's Office in Ankeny, Iowa.

Megan Sloss was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, the release said.

The Sac County Sheriff's Office and Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation are continuing to investigate the case.
Below are the most recent persons reported missing by the Iowa Department of Public Safety. Find more information at http://www.iowaonline.state.ia.us/mpic/

Elsa L Diaz

Age At Report: 48

Age Now: 48

Weight: 140 lbs.

Height: 5'06"

Race: White

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Brown

Sex: Female

Incident Type: Other adult missing

Brian S Nissen

Age At Report: 14

Age Now: 14

Weight: 135 lbs.

Height: 5'10"

Race: White

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Brown

Sex: Male

Incident Type: Juvenile

Brian Nissen was reported missing to the Clinton Police Department 563/243-1455, in Clinton on Jul 26, 2016.

Steven R Leasure

Age At Report: 52

Age Now: 54

Weight: 200 lbs.

Height: 5'10"

Race: White

Hair: unknown or Completely Bald

Eyes: Blue

Sex: Male

Incident Type: Endangered / physical

Steve Leasure was reported missing to the Burlington Police Department 319/753-8366, in Burlington on May 01, 2015.

___________________________________________________________

If you have information regarding the disappearance of this individual, please contact the Missing Person Information Clearinghouse, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation at 1-800-346-5507. If you recognize this missing person, DO NOT TAKE ANY ACTION YOURSELF. Get as much information as you can (e.g. license number of a vehicle, exact location of sighting, activities the individual was involved in) and then call the number listed above or the ----reporting agency.

Missing Person Information Clearinghouse

The Missing Person Information Clearinghouse was established July 1, 1985 within the Department of Public Safety providing a program for compiling, coordinating and disseminating information in relation to missing persons and unidentified body/persons. Housed within the Division of Criminal Investigation, the clearinghouse assists in helping to locate missing persons through public awareness and cooperation, and in educating law enforcement officers and the general public about missing person issues.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety releases the names of missing persons on a weekly basis. Click HERE for current statistics.

Data on http://www.iowaonline.state.ia.us/mpic/ is updated daily at 9:30 AM Central Time.
The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.
LEONARDTOWN, Md.

Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at so.md/expungeme.

(Sept. 20, 2016)The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office released the following incident and arrest reports.9/16/2016 POSSESSION: Deputy J. Kirkner initiated a motor vehicle stop for erratic driving and crossing the center line several times. The driver of the vehicle,, displayed signs of impairment and a standardized field sobriety test was conducted which Rice completed unsatisfactorily. A probable cause search of the motor vehicle revealed Schedule II Narcotics in Rice's possession. She was arrested and transported to the St. Mary's County Detention Center. Rice was charged with CDS Possession: Not Marijuana, Driving While Under the Influence, and Driving While Impaired by Alcohol. CASE# 1-16-0481989/16/2016 THEFT: Deputy T. Seyfried responded to the Belks Department Store in California for a reported theft. The suspect,, exited the store without paying for merchandise. Simmons was arrested and charged with Theft Less than $1000. CASE# 1-16-0483089/15/2016 ASSAULT: Deputy B. Fennessey responded to the St. Mary's County Detention Center for a reported assault. The suspect,, assaulted two inmates by touching them inappropriately. Chiarizia was charged with Two Counts of Second Degree Assault. CASE# 1-16-0481019/15/2016 POSSESSION: While on patrol in the area of Northbound MD Route 235 in the vicinity of Leland Road, Cpl. J. Sommerville observed a vehicle traveling over the posted speed limit. As Cpl. Sommerville approached the vehicle; he saw the driver toss a clear container from the driver side window onto the road. The suspect,, was detained, and a search of the container revealed several bags of suspected marijuana and an Alprazolam pill. Williams was arrested and charged with Two Counts of CDS Possession: Not Marijuana. CASE# 1-16-048077
GREENBELT, Md.

(Sept. 21, 2016)U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm sentenced Jose Antonio Jaramillo, age 55, of Lusby, Maryland, today to 17 years in federal prison, followed by 15 years years of supervised release, for production of child pornography. Judge Grimm also ordered that upon his release from prison, Jaramillo must register as a sex offender in the place where he resides, where he is an employee, and where he is a student, under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA).The sentence was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein; Special Agent in Charge Andre R. Watson of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Baltimore; Special Agent in Charge Clark E. Settles of HSI Washington D.C.; Calvert County Sheriff Mike Evans; and Colonel William M. Pallozzi, Superintendent of the Maryland State Police.According to his plea agreement, from at least December 2014 through July 2015, Jaramillo, posing as a teenaged male named "Tommy James," "Thomas James Jones," or "Thomas James," used email, applications on cellular phones and social media sites to induce, coerce and entice more than five minor female victims between the ages of 13 and 16 to send him sexually explicit images of themselves over the internet.Jaramillo admitted that, using the "Tommy James" persona, he had or attempted to have sexually explicit conversations with at least 14 minor females and induced at least seven victims to produce sexually explicit images and videos of themselves and transmit those images to Jaramillo.This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc. For more information about internet safety education, please visit www.justice.gov/psc and click on the "resources" tab on the left of the page.United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein commended HSI Baltimore and Washington, D.C, the Calvert County Sheriff's Office, and the Maryland State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force for their work in the investigation. Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ray D. McKenzie and Kristi N. O'Malley, who prosecuted the case.
The most popular celebrity in the alt-right is a gay British college dropout, and hes coming to FAU and UM  even though one of those schools has banned him

If there was a homophobia problem in America, its gone, declared Milo Yiannopoulos as his tour bus rolled out of Houston last week in a thunderstorm.

I cant find any here, he said. I cant find any.

Yiannopoulos and his crew of eight were driving through Texas in his black custom 45-foot bus  with the words The Dangerous Faggot Tour emblazoned on the side in four-foot-high white letters. So he insists its not for lack of trying.

Gay in a different way

The controversial 32-year-old British citizen says he couldnt even find homophobia in Lubbock, where he spoke Sept. 12 at Texas Tech to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 conservative students. (The topic was, Why do so many lesbians fake hate crimes?)

The most homophobic thing he heard: I dont agree with your lifestyle, but I agree with you.

Agreeing with Yiannopoulos would repulse many people, straight and gay. Hes the second-most famous staffer at the hyper-conservative website Breitbart.com. (No. 1 would be CEO Steve Bannon, who has temporarily stepped down to become CEO of Donald Trumps campaign.) In just the past year, Yiannopoulos has written

 In terms of female happiness, womens liberation was probably a mistake , and it was a mistake driven by technology that was, of course, invented by men.

He also launched the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, a scholarship exclusively available to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer and ethnic minority classmates.

Popular for being unpopular

While no one has won his grant yet, Yiannopouloss words have won thousands of fans. Before Twitter banned him in July for mocking Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones  a twisted tale unto itself  he had nearly 350,000 followers. His Youtube channel has more than 277,000 subscribers.

Now hes touring Americas campuses in his shiny new bus, speaking and even performing occasionally in drag. The topics change with each stop, but the purpose is the same: My mission is the destruction of political correctness in America, and everything I do should be viewed through that lens.

Hes booked at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton from 7-9 p.m. next Thursday, Sept. 29 in the Student Union auditorium. He was scheduled to appear at the University of Miami on Oct. 3, but Breitbart reported last week...

University of Miamis College Republicans group received notification that the Dangerous Faggot event set to take place on October 3rd at Bank United Field House was to be cancelled due to security concerns. What these security concerns were exactly was not detailed.

SFGN sought comment from UM officials but has not heard back. Yiannopoulos is undaunted  after his FAU appearance, hell drive south to the private schools Coral Gables campus.

Were gonna take the bus and park it outside the presidents office, Yiannopoulos says. Well ask him about what he believes these security concerns are, and why hes denying students the right to hear from me.

Yiannopoulos says, We only go to schools were invited to. At FAU, that invitation supposedly came from the campus chapter of Turning Point USA. SFGN tried contacting the chapters current and past president, but neither has replied.

What will Yiannopoulos talk about? Certainly not lesbians making up hate crimes. He says he varies his topics.

I havent decided yet, he said last week. I want to make its up-to-date and interesting, so Ill see what happens in the news.

For instance, on Wednesday, Yiannopoulos will pull into Louisiana State University, performing in drag with a Trump-supporting rapper. He says hell be dressed as a patriotic Marilyn Monroe but wouldnt provide other details, lest it spoil the surprise.

The Dangerous Faggot Tour will cover 50 cities in the next six months, but Yiannopoulos has spoken at several U.S. colleges in the past. Hes often been met by protesters.

He insists he doesnt mind  and actually encourages  heated debate on the integrity of his ideas. What ticks him off are attempts to stop his speeches from ever happening. According to Breitbart, at DePaul University in Chicago, protesters stormed the stage, blew whistles, grabbed the microphone out of the interviewers hand and threatened to punch Yiannopoulos in the face.

Yiannopoulos has cleverly undercut one reason to ban him from campus: He pays for everything. Students have often sought to ban controversial speakers based on an economic argument: Schools pay speakers with activities and service fees. These fees are tacked onto tuition and pay for everything from the Student Union to intramural sports.

Yiannopoulos argues that hes revealing a truth many others dont see: Liberals cant handle diversity, while conservatives embrace it.

Homophobia phobia

The left protests me as a human being, Yiannopoulos says. They cant stand my existence as a homosexual who dares to go off script.

As his bus navigated the thunderstorm in southeast Texas, Yiannopoulos boasted about the open-minded people hes met throughout the state.

As a Brit coming over to America, Ive been amazed how lovely and kind and decent these people are, he says. Im pulling up in a bus looking like a faggy Popeye reject, and I do not recognize the world liberals describe.

Yiannopoulos says the homophobia hes faced in this country comes from coastal progressives.

The difference between the spitefulness and vitriol and unpleasantness of the left as contrasted with the warmth and kindness and basic human decency in Texas  its staggering, he says. The nastiest stuff I get is wholly from other gay progressives who make insinuations. Theres been some pretty homophobic stuff said about me  always from the left, never from the right.

With his usual bravado, Yiannopoulos concludes, I, more than any other gay person, is showing how far America has come.
A Tony Award-winning play receiving its regional premiere this weekend offers a potent reminder of the horrors of the 80s AIDS epidemic.

Larry Kramers The Normal Heart will be presented by Outre Theatre Company, Sept. 22 through Oct. 9 at Showtime Performing Arts Theatre in Boca Raton.

While Kramers play is largely autobiographical, documenting the fear that gripped the gay community during the height of the epidemic and the rise of activist groups such as ACT UP, director Doug Wetzel sees it as more than a period piece.

I still have memories of the first time I met someone with full-blown AIDS, Wetzel admitted. At its core, the play is a human interest story that still has a lot of relevance to our community.

While the advent of retroviral drugs brought the epidemic under control more than 20 years ago, the numbers of new infections are rising, especially among young people who might not remember the darkest days.

People are feeling more at ease because of PrEP and medication. Almost 50 percent of all new infections are people who are younger than 34. Theyre not necessarily treating HIV and AIDS the way we did in the 80s as something that was completely unknown and scary. It came out of the blue, Wetzel, 54, explained.

Playwright Kramer was an outspoken activist who founded ACT UP. In his play, activist Ned Weeks struggles to mobilize an organization to raise awareness about the mysterious disease that is killing gay men in New York City. He enlists Dr. Emma Brookner, a physician and polio survivor bound to a wheelchair, to help him promote abstinence until the cause is determined. He also calls on his lawyer brother, Ben, to help form and fund his organization.

Through the course of the play, they must confront homophobia and political inertia, all while watching their friends succumb to the disease. During the Broadway run, Kramer passed out leaflets before the performances commemorating the real people who inspired his characters.

To prepare his cast, many of whom are in their 20s and early 30s, Wetzel took them to the World AIDS Museum in Wilton Manors.

They were a little younger than I wanted them to be. It was great to have the museum educate them on the events and the chronology of how it all unfolded. The museum is amazing and their help was invaluable, he said, adding a portion of proceeds from the Sept. 30 performance will be donated to the museum.

Im so excited about the talent, the actors. South Florida has some very good actors and they are really paying attention to the motivations to their roles, he said.

In addition to the 2011 Broadway production, The Normal Heart was also adapted into a critically acclaimed film broadcast on HBO three years later.

Wetzel is not concerned that audiences already know the story.

I cant say thats affected how Im interpreting it on stage, he said. In fact, theatergoers generally enjoy going to see something that they know, which is exactly what this play is. Its a powerful story and they will come to see it.

Wetzel noted that Outres artistic director Skye Whitcomb and the entire team were very supportive of the decision to produce The Normal Heart.

Its not a typical play that everyone loves like a comedy, but it plays to what Outre likes to do: It gets people thinking, he concluded.

Outre Theatre Company presents Larry Kramers The Normal Heart, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., Sept. 22 through Oct. 9 at Showtime Performing Arts Theatre, 503 SE Mizner Blvd. in Boca Raton. Tickets are $40 at OutreTheatreCompany.com.
Check out the latest news from around the world!

Pride Fund to End Gun Violence Endorses Patrick Murphy for U.S. Senate

(SFGN) The Pride Fund to End Gun Violence announced their endorsement of U.S. Senate candidate Patrick Murphy last Tuesday.

Im so proud to receive the endorsement of the Pride Fund to End Gun Violence and I am grateful for their important work to protect our families, said Rep. Murphy (D).

The Pride Fund launched in August after the Orlando Pulse shootings.

After the tragic mass shooting at Pulse, Pride Fund helped the LGBT community heal and brought a powerful new voice to the fight for gun policy reform. Floridians are ready for a Senator who stands with Pride Fund to fight for reasonable measures like expanding background checks and closing the terrorist gun loophole. I look forward to being that Senator, said Murphy.

Murphy, represents House District 18 which includes parts of Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie counties. The Palm Beach County Human Rights Council endorsed Murphy last month.

Patrick has been a vocal advocate for Orlandos LBGT community and continues to demand commonsense gun violence prevention measures, said Pride Fund Executive Director Jason Lindsay.

From fighting to prohibit suspected terrorists from purchasing guns to joining his colleagues for a sit-in on the House floor, Patrick is a consistent voice in the fight for gun violence prevention. Pride Fund stands with Patrick in this campaign and looks forward to working with him as Floridas next Senator.

Murphy is campaigning for U.S. Senate against incumbent Senator Marco Rubio (R), and Iraq War Veteran Paul Stanton (L) and nine independent write-in candidates for the Nov. 8 election.

Youth Health Survey Finds Gay/Bi Teens at High Risk

(EDGE) Sexual minority youth have substantially higher rates of behavioral health risks compared to heterosexual youth, according to a report from CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. The report, Sexual Identity, Sex of Sexual Contacts, and Health-Related Behaviors Among Students in Grades 9-12  United States and Selected Sites, 2015, analyzes data gathered through national, state, and urban-area Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBSs) for 2015.



For the first time, the 2015 YRBSs included questions to ascertain the sexual identity and the sex of sexual contacts for the students surveyed. This made it possible for researchers to calculate the prevalence of specific risk behaviors among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth compared to heterosexual youth.



The researchers found that sexual minority youth had a comparatively high prevalence of health risks in the risk categories of sexual behavior, violence, tobacco use, and drug use:

 Of six sexual risk behaviors surveyed nationally, the prevalence of five was higher among sexual minority youth than among heterosexual youth.

 Of 18 violence-related risk behaviors surveyed nationally, the prevalence of 16 was higher among sexual minority youth than among heterosexual youth.

 Similarly, across 13 tobacco use-related risk behaviors, the prevalence of 11 was higher among sexual minority youth than among heterosexual youth.

 In addition, of 19 alcohol or other drug use-related risk behaviors, the prevalence of 18 was higher among sexual minority youth than among heterosexual youth.



The researchers concluded that, " agencies and organizations, including schools and youth-friendly health care providers, can help facilitate access to education, health care, and evidence-based interventions designed to address priority health-related behaviors among sexual minority youth."

Utah State Senator's Summer Visit to Iran Sparks Firestorm

(AP) A Utah state senator who traveled to Iran last week has set off a firestorm there, where hard-liners accuse him of being "part of a major Western project to infiltrate" the country as authorities imprison others with ties abroad.

And that was even before knowing that Sen. Jim Dabakis is gay - a crime in Iran that can carry the death penalty.

For his part, the Salt Lake City-based art dealer said such cross-cultural exchanges will help relations between Iran and the U.S., which have been tense since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

"You don't make peace with your friends," Dabakis told The Associated Press on Monday. "Rather than rubbing up against each other in the Strait of Hormuz and having tension because of domestic political affairs in both countries... let there be this people-to-people beginning of understanding."

Dabakis said he and his partner traveled to Tehran and Isfahan for six days after being invited by the Iranian travel industry. He said he got a visa through the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, which handles Iranian affairs. He added that he listed his occupation on the application as both an art dealer and a state lawmaker in Utah's part-time legislature.

"Sometimes diplomacy is too important to be left up to the diplomats," Dabakis said.

But things have grown rather undiplomatic since Dabakis returned home and gave an interview about his trip to local Salt Lake City television station KUTV .

The semi-official Iranian news agency Tasnim, which is close to the Revolutionary Guard, seized on the interview. It quoted a hard-line lawmaker on Sunday who described Dabakis' visit as "part of a major Western project to infiltrate into the country."

New Chairman Takes Over Wyoming's Largest Gay Advocacy Group

(AP) The new chairman of Wyoming's largest gay advocacy group hopes to revitalize the organization after high-profile victories led to decreased funding and membership.

The Casper Star-Tribune reports that John King of Laramie is the new leader of Wyoming Equality, which has 300 members. He says people think the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has equal rights because now that gay marriage is legal, but Wyoming's estimated 11,600 LGBT residents still face many struggles.

King says he hopes to convince more of those people to join Wyoming Equality and will focus on making sure the organization is running as efficiently as possible.

King says other board members, including the former chairman, will focus on advocacy work.

Police Cordon Off Central Belgrade for Pride March

(AP) Thousands of Serbian riot police have cordoned off central Belgrade for a gay pride march amid fears of attacks from extremists in the predominantly conservative Balkan country.

Helicopters flew above the downtown area which was sealed off for traffic early Sunday, hours before the planned start of the gathering.

Authorities have cancelled several pride events in the past after massive clashes with extremists in 2010 when more than 100 police and extremists were injured.

Serbia has since sought to boost gay rights as part of its bid to join the European Union, including appointing an openly gay minister in the current government.

Baltimore Police: Transgender Woman Found Fatally Shot

(AP) Police are asking residents of a northwest Baltimore neighborhood and members of the LGBT community for information on the fatal shooting of a transgender woman.

Police spokesman T.J. Smith spoke at a news conference Friday in the area where 32-year-old Crystal Edmonds was found. Smith says she was found about 3 a.m. with a gunshot wound to her head, and died about 11 a.m.

Smith says investigators don't have much evidence, and urged anyone with information to call police. He says "tips work," and notes that information from residents led to two arrests after a man was stabbed and robbed in northeast Baltimore earlier this week

Police say area residents have complained about illegal activity, but there is no evidence that Edmonds was involved in criminal activity.

Soldier Accused of Killing Transgender Woman in West Texas

(AP) A soldier is accused of killing a transgender woman in West Texas, and the FBI is investigating whether it was a hate crime.



Police arrested 21-year-old Anthony Michael Bowden on Tuesday and charged him with murder.



The El Paso Times reports that the FBI civil rights squad is working with police in El Paso to determine whether the slaying of 36-year-old Erykah Tijerina on Aug. 8 was a hate crime.



Police say several pieces of forensic evidence led investigators to Bowden. The case remains under investigation.



No information about Bowden's assignment at Fort Bliss in El Paso was immediately available.



Bowden remains jailed on a $750,000 bond. Court records did not list an attorney for him.
Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme  La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza.



Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres.




Early Milky Way Remnant ESO

Using ESOs Very Large Telescope and other telescopes a fossilised remnant of the early Milky Way harboring stars of hugely different ages has been revealed by an international team of astronomers.

This stellar system resembles a globular cluster, but is like no other cluster known. It contains stars remarkably similar to the most ancient stars in the Milky Way and bridges the gap in understanding between our galaxys past and its present.

Terzan 5, 19,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) and in the direction of the galactic center, has been classified as a globular cluster for the forty-odd years since its detection. Now, an Italian-led team of astronomers have discovered that Terzan 5 is like no other globular cluster known.

The team scoured data from the Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator [1], installed at the Very Large Telescope, as well as from a suite of other ground-based and space telescopes [2]. They found compelling evidence that there are two distinct kinds of stars in Terzan 5 which not only differ in the elements they contain, but have an age-gap of roughly 7 billion years [3].

The ages of the two populations indicate that the star formation process in Terzan 5 was not continuous, but was dominated by two distinct bursts of star formation. This requires the Terzan 5 ancestor to have large amounts of gas for a second generation of stars and to be quite massive. At least 100 million times the mass of the Sun, explains Davide Massari, co-author of the study, from INAF, Italy, and the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

Its unusual properties make Terzan 5 the ideal candidate for a living fossil from the early days of the Milky Way. Current theories on galaxy formation assume that vast clumps of gas and stars interacted to form the primordial bulge of the Milky Way, merging and dissolving in the process.

We think that some remnants of these gaseous clumps could remain relatively undisrupted and keep existing embedded within the galaxy, explains Francesco Ferraro from the University of Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the study. Such galactic fossils allow astronomers to reconstruct an important piece of the history of our Milky Way.

While the properties of Terzan 5 are uncommon for a globular cluster, they are very similar to the stellar population which can be found in the galactic bulge , the tightly packed central region of the Milky Way. These similarities could make Terzan 5 a fossilised relic of galaxy formation, representing one of the earliest building blocks of the Milky Way.

This assumption is strengthened by the original mass of Terzan 5 necessary to create two stellar populations: a mass similar to the huge clumps which are assumed to have formed the bulge during galaxy assembly around 12 billion years ago. Somehow Terzan 5 has managed to survive being disrupted for billions of years, and has been preserved as a remnant of the distant past of the Milky Way.

Some characteristics of Terzan 5 resemble those detected in the giant clumps we see in star-forming galaxies at high-redshift, suggesting that similar assembling processes occurred in the local and in the distant universe at the epoch of galaxy formation, continues Ferraro.

Hence, this discovery paves the way for a better and more complete understanding of galaxy assembly. Terzan 5 could represent an intriguing link between the local and the distant Universe, a surviving witness of the galactic bulge assembly process, explains Ferraro while commenting on the importance of the discovery. The research presents a possible route for astronomers to unravel the mysteries of galaxy formation, and offers an unrivaled view into the complicated history of the Milky Way.

Notes

[1] The Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) is a prototype multi-conjugate adaptive optics system which aims to demonstrate the feasibility of different MCAO reconstruction techniques in the framework of the E-ELT concept and the second generation VLT Instruments.

[2] The researchers also used data from the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NIRC2 (the Near-Infrared Camera, second generation) at the W. M. Keck Observatory .

[3] The two detected stellar populations have ages of 12 billion years and 4.5 billion years respectively.

Reference:

The Age of the Young Bulge-like Population in the Stellar System Terzan 5: Linking the Galactic Bulge to the High-z Universe, F. R. Ferraro et al., 2016, Astrophysical Journal [http://apj.aas.org, preprint (PDF): http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1630/eso1630a.pdf]. The team is composed of F. R. Ferraro (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita degli Studi di Bologna, Italy), D. Massari (INAF  Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy & Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Netherlands), E. Dalessandro (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita degli Studi di Bologna, Italy; INAF  Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy), B. Lanzoni (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita degli Studi di Bologna, Italy), L. Origlia (INAF  Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Italy), R. M. Rich (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, USA) and A. Mucciarelli (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita degli Studi di Bologna, Italy).
This rendering shows a snapshot from a cosmological simulation of a Lyman-alpha Blob similar to LAB-1. This simulation tracks the evolution of gas and dark matter using one of the latest models for galaxy formation running on the NASA Pleiades supercomputer. This view shows the distribution of gas within the dark matter halo, colour coded so that cold gas (mainly neutral hydrogen) appears red and hot gas appears white. Embedded at the centre of this system are two strongly star-forming galaxies, but these are surrounded by hot gas and many smaller satellite galaxies that appear as small red clumps of gas here. Lyman-alpha photons escape from the central galaxies and scatter off the cold gas associated with these satellites to give rise to an extended Lyman-alpha Blob. Credit: J.Geach/D.Narayanan/R.Crain. ESO

An international team using ALMA, along with ESOs Very Large Telescope and other telescopes, has discovered the true nature of a rare object in the distant universe called a Lyman-alpha blob.

Up to now astronomers did not understand what made these huge clouds of gas shine so brightly, but ALMA has now seen two galaxies at the heart of one of these objects and they are undergoing a frenzy of star formation that is lighting up their surroundings. These large galaxies are in turn at the centre of a swarm of smaller ones in what appears to be an early phase in the formation of a massive cluster of galaxies. The two ALMA sources are expected to evolve into a single giant elliptical galaxy.

Lyman-alpha blobs (LABs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman-alpha_blob) are gigantic clouds of hydrogen gas that can span hundreds of thousands of light-years and are found at very large cosmic distances. The name reflects the characteristic wavelength of ultraviolet light that they emit, known as Lyman-alpha radiation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman-alpha_line) [1]. Since their discovery, the processes that give rise to LABs have been an astronomical puzzle. But new observations with ALMA may now have now cleared up the mystery.

One of the largest Lyman-alpha blobs known, and the most thoroughly studied, is SSA22-Lyman-alpha Blob 1, or LAB-1. Embedded in the core of a huge cluster of galaxies in the early stages of formation, it was the very first such object to be discovered  in 2000  and is located so far away that its light has taken about 11.5 billion years to reach us.



This diagram explains how a Lyman-alpha Blob, one of the largest and brightest objects in the Universe, shines. Credit: ESO/J. Geach.

A team of astronomers, led by Jim Geach, from the Centre for Astrophysics Research of the University of Hertfordshire (http://www.herts.ac.uk/research/centres-and-groups/car), UK, has now used the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Arrays (ALMA, http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/alma) unparalleled ability to observe light from cool dust clouds in distant galaxies to peer deeply into LAB-1. This allowed them to pinpoint and resolve several sources of submillimetre emission [2].

They then combined the ALMA images with observations from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE, http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/vlt/vlt-instr/muse) instrument mounted on ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT, http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/vlt), which map the Lyman-alpha light. This showed that the ALMA sources are located in the very heart of the Lyman-alpha blob, where they are forming stars at a rate over 100 times that of the Milky Way.

Deep imaging with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (https://www.spacetelescope.org) and spectroscopy at the W. M. Keck Observatory (http://www.keckobservatory.org) [3] showed in addition that the ALMA sources are surrounded by numerous faint companion galaxies that could be bombarding the central ALMA sources with material, helping to drive their high star formation rates.

The team then turned to a sophisticated simulation of galaxy formation to demonstrate that the giant glowing cloud of Lyman-alpha emission can be explained if ultraviolet light produced by star formation in the ALMA sources scatters off the surrounding hydrogen gas. This would give rise to the Lyman-alpha blob we see.

Jim Geach, lead author of the new study, explains: Think of a streetlight on a foggy night  you see the diffuse glow because light is scattering off the tiny water droplets. A similar thing is happening here, except the streetlight is an intensely star-forming galaxy and the fog is a huge cloud of intergalactic gas. The galaxies are illuminating their surroundings.

Understanding how galaxies form and evolve is a massive challenge. Astronomers think Lyman-alpha blobs are important because they seem to be the places where the most massive galaxies in the universe form. In particular, the extended Lyman-alpha glow provides information on what is happening in the primordial gas clouds surrounding young galaxies, a region that is very difficult to study, but critical to understand.

Jim Geach concludes, Whats exciting about these blobs is that we are getting a rare glimpse of whats happening around these young, growing galaxies. For a long time the origin of the extended Lyman-alpha light has been controversial. But with the combination of new observations and cutting-edge simulations, we think we have solved a 15-year-old mystery: Lyman-alpha Blob-1 is the site of formation of a massive elliptical galaxy that will one day be the heart of a giant cluster. We are seeing a snapshot of the assembly of that galaxy 11.5 billion years ago.

Notes

[1] The negatively charged electrons that orbit the positively charged nucleus in an atom have quantised energy levels. That is, they can only exist in specific energy states, and they can only transition between them by gaining or losing precise amounts of energy. Lyman-alpha radiation is produced when electrons in hydrogen atoms drop from the second-lowest to the lowest energy level. The precise amount of energy lost is released as light with a particular wavelength, in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, which astronomers can detect with space telescopes or on Earth in the case of redshifted objects. For LAB-1, at redshift of z~3, the Lyman-alpha light is seen as visible light.

[2] Resolution is the ability to see that objects are separated. At low resolution, several bright sources at a distance would seem like a single glowing spot, and only at closer quarters would each source be distinguishable. ALMAs high resolution has resolved what previously appeared to be a single blob into two separate sources.

[3] The instruments used were the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS, http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/instruments/stis) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (https://www.spacetelescope.org) and the Multi-Object Spectrometer For Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE, http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu/inst/mosfire) mounted on the Keck 1 telescope on Hawaii.

PIO Contact:

Richard Hook

ESO Public Information Officer

Garching bei Munchen, Germany

+49 89 3200 6655, cell: +49 151 1537 3591

rhook@eso.org

Science Contacts:

Jim Geach

Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire

Hatfield, UK

j.geach@herts.ac.uk

Matthew Hayes

Stockholm University

Stockholm, Sweden

+46 (0)8 5537 8521

matthew@astro.su.se

Reference:

ALMA Observations of Lyman-alpha Blob 1: Halo Substructure Illuminated from Within, J. Geach et al., 2016, Astrophysical Journal [http://apj.aas.org, preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02941, preprint (PDF): http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1632/eso1632a.pdf].

The team is composed of J. E. Geach (Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK), D. Narayanan (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Haverford College, Haverford PA, USA; Department of Astronomy, University of Florida, Gainesville FL, USA), Y. Matsuda (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan; The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan), M. Hayes (Stockholm University, Department of Astronomy and Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics, Stockholm, Sweden), Ll. Mas-Ribas (Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway), M. Dijkstra (Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway), C. C. Steidel (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA, USA), S. C. Chapman (Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada), R. Feldmann (Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley CA, USA), A. Avison (UK ALMA Regional Centre Node; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK), O. Agertz (Department of Physics, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK), Y. Ao (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan), M. Birkinshaw (H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK), M. N. Bremer (H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK), D. L. Clements (Astrophysics Group, Imperial College London, Blackett Laboratory, London, UK), H. Dannerbauer (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Universidad de La Laguna, Astrofisica, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain), D. Farrah (Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA, USA), C. M. Harrison (Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK), M. Kubo (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan), M. J. Michalowski (Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK), D. Scott (Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada), M. Spaans (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands), J. Simpson (Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK), A. M. Swinbank (Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK), Y. Taniguchi (The Open University of Japan, Chiba, Japan), E. van Kampen (ESO, Garching, Germany), P. Van Der Werf (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands), A. Verma (Oxford Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK) and T. Yamada (Astronomical Institute, Tohoku University, Miyagi, Japan).

Photos of ALMA:

http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/category/alma/

Photos of VLT:

http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/category/paranal/

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of ESO, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the worlds most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the worlds most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the worlds largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become the worlds biggest eye on the sky.
Arctic NASA

NASAs IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, flew over the Helheim/Kangerdlugssuaq region of Greenland on Sept. 11, 2016.

This photograph from the flight captures Greenlands Steenstrup Glacier, with the midmorning sun glinting off of the Denmark Strait in the background. IceBridge completed the final flight of the summer campaign to observe the impact of the summer melt season on the ice sheet on Sept. 16.

The IceBridge flights, which began on Aug. 27, are mostly repeats of lines that the team flew in early May, so that scientists can observe changes in ice elevation between the spring and late summer. For this short, end-of-summer campaign, the IceBridge scientists flew aboard an HU-25A Guardian aircraft from NASAs Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Credit: NASA/John Sonntag Larger image
The hazy globe of Titan hangs in front of Saturn and its rings in this natural color view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. NASA

The puzzling appearance of an ice cloud seemingly out of thin air has prompted NASA scientists to suggest that a different process than previously thought  possibly similar to one seen over Earths poles  could be forming clouds on Saturns moon Titan.

Located in Titans stratosphere, the cloud is made of a compound of carbon and nitrogen known as dicyanoacetylene (C4N2), an ingredient in the chemical cocktail that colors the giant moons hazy, brownish-orange atmosphere.

Decades ago, the infrared instrument on NASAs Voyager 1 spacecraft spotted an ice cloud just like this one on Titan. What has puzzled scientists ever since is this: they detected less than 1 percent of the dicyanoacetylene gas needed for the cloud to condense.

Recent observations from NASAs Cassini mission yielded a similar result. Using Cassinis composite infrared spectrometer, or CIRS  which can identify the spectral fingerprints of individual chemicals in the atmospheric brew  researchers found a large, high-altitude cloud made of the same frozen chemical. Yet, just as Voyager found, when it comes to the vapor form of this chemical, CIRS reported that Titans stratosphere is as dry as a desert.

The appearance of this ice cloud goes against everything we know about the way clouds form on Titan, said Carrie Anderson, a CIRS co-investigator at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study.

The typical process for forming clouds involves condensation. On Earth, were familiar with the cycle of evaporation and condensation of water. The same kind of cycle takes place in Titans troposphere  the weather-forming layer of Titans atmosphere  but with methane instead of water.



This graphic illustrates how scientists think solid state chemistry may be taking place in ice particles that form clouds in the atmosphere of Saturns moon Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC.

A different condensation process takes place in the stratosphere  the region above the troposphere  at Titans north and south winter poles. In this case, layers of clouds condense as the global circulation pattern forces warm gases downward at the pole. The gases then condense as they sink through cooler and cooler layers of the polar stratosphere.

Either way, a cloud forms when the air temperature and pressure are favorable for the vapor to condense into ice. The vapor and the ice reach a balance point  an equilibrium  that is determined by the air temperature and pressure. Because of this equilibrium, scientists can calculate the amount of vapor where ice is present.

For clouds that condense, this equilibrium is mandatory, like the law of gravity, said Robert Samuelson, an emeritus scientist at Goddard and a co-author of the paper.

But the numbers dont compute for the cloud made from dicyanoacetylene. The scientists determined that they would need at least 100 times more vapor to form an ice cloud where the cloud top was observed by Cassinis CIRS.

One explanation suggested early on was that the vapor might be present, but Voyagers instrument wasnt sensitive enough in the critical wavelength range needed to detect it. But when CIRS also didnt find the vapor, Anderson and her Goddard and Caltech colleagues proposed an altogether different explanation. Instead of the cloud forming by condensation, they think the C4N2 ice forms because of reactions taking place on other kinds of ice particles. The researchers call this solid-state chemistry, because the reactions involve the ice, or solid, form of the chemical.

The first step in the proposed process is the formation of ice particles made from the related chemical cyanoacetylene (HC3N). As these tiny bits of ice move downward through Titans stratosphere, they get coated by hydrogen cyanide (HCN). At this stage, the ice particle has a core and a shell comprised of two different chemicals. Occasionally, a photon of ultraviolet light tunnels into the frozen shell and triggers a series of chemical reactions in the ice. These reactions could begin either in the core or within the shell. Both pathways can yield dicyanoacteylene ice and hydrogen as products.

The researchers got the idea of solid-state chemistry from the formation of clouds involved in ozone depletion high above Earths poles. Although Earths stratosphere has scant moisture, wispy nacreous clouds (also called polar stratospheric clouds) can form under the right conditions. In these clouds, chlorine-bearing chemicals that have entered the atmosphere as pollution stick to crystals of water ice, resulting in chemical reactions that release ozone-destroying chlorine molecules.

Its very exciting to think that we may have found examples of similar solid-state chemical processes on both Titan and Earth, said Anderson.

The researchers suggest that, on Titan, the reactions occur inside the ice particles, sequestered from the atmosphere. In that case, dicyanoacetylene ice wouldnt make direct contact with the atmosphere, which would explain why the ice and the vapor forms are not in the expected equilibrium.

The compositions of the polar stratospheres of Titan and Earth could not differ more, said Michael Flasar, CIRS principal investigator at Goddard. It is amazing to see how well the underlying physics of both atmospheres has led to analogous cloud chemistry.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASAs Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The CIRS instrument was built by Goddard.

For more information about Cassini, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
Thu, 27.10.22 - 11:04

The temperatures will fall in the Murcia Region but the weekend still promises to be warm and sunny Autumn has ye...
Margarita (Venezuela), September 19, 2016 (SPS) - The 17th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement has reaffirmed support for all resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Security Council on Western Sahara, calling for the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination, in accordance with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and resolution 1514 of 14 December 1960.

In its final statement, the Non-Aligned Movement reiterated its support to the efforts of the UN Secretary General and his Personal Envoy to achieve a mutually acceptable political solution guaranteeing self-determination of the people of Western Sahara.

The NAM Heads of State and Government affirmed that all options for self-determination is legitimate as long as they comply with the will of the peoples concerned to freely determine their future and in accordance with the principles clearly defined in resolutions of the UN General Assembly.

They also called on both sides to continue to show political will and work in a propitious atmosphere for dialogue to enter into a more intensive phase of negotiations to ensure the implementation of Security Council resolutions.

The summit discussed several issues including ways to achieve peace and security, including the fight against terrorism, the right to self-determination, sustainable development, cooperation on development, disarmament, situation in Middle East, climate effects, migration, and UN reform.

The heads of state and government also expressed their support for the Republic of Cuba against the blockade as well as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. (SPS)

062/090/TRA
Spider Man Hanover will return to the site of his most memorable 2015 performance, the Delaware County Fairgrounds, when he races in Thursdays Little Brown Jug. Last year, Spider Man Hanover won a division of the Standardbred Stakes at the fairgrounds in a then-world-record 1:51.4 for two-year-old male pacers on a half-mile track.

The colt was in the fairgrounds-based stable of trainer Brian Brown last year and into 2016 before heading to Ron Burke in August. He was purchased Sept. 14 by trainer Nick Surick and Howard Schneidlers KDM Stables Corp. with an eye toward competing in the Jug.

Im glad to be in it, Surick said. I like to have fun and I try to support these races, especially a race like this. Youre going to get 40,000 to 50,000 people here that truly love harness racing. Its a fun week. Hopefully we can do a little good. Out of all the horses in the Jug, Ive got a horse that knows how to get around this track. Hopefully hell be OK.

Its a tough spot. Were going against really good horses. Were definitely coming in as a long shot, but thats what makes horseracing and thats why they race these horses. Anything can happen in a horserace.

Spider Man Hanover and driver Andy Miller will start from post five in the second of the two opening heats and are 20-1 on the morning line. Spider Man Hanover, a son of Western Ideal, has won one of 10 races this year after earning $221,355 last season.

Surick said Spider Man Hanover has battled issues with tying up this year. The colt prepped for the Little Brown Jug by qualifying in 1:52 at half-mile Freehold Raceway on Sept. 15.

He just got tired a little late, but that was a lot more than we thought hed go anyway, Surick said. We were happy with that. Hopefully we can make him a little better. We got here Sunday and he trained really good Monday morning. I was pleased with him.

Were not going in with high expectations. We just want to have some fun. But hopefully he can do a little more than that. Andy could have stayed home, but hes coming here just to drive that one horse, so I think hes got a little confidence in the horse too.

Below are the fields for the Little Brown Jug first-heat eliminations. The eliminations are races 13 and 14. The second heat is race 18.

First elimination-Purse $92,320

HN-Horse-Driver-Trainer-Morning Line

1. Dr J Hanover-Scott Zeron-Tony Alagna-6/1

2. Stolen Glimpse-Matt Kakaley-Ron Burke-15/1

3. Lyons Snyder-Sylvain Filion-Jimmy Takter-8/1

4. Check Six-Yannick Gingras-Ron Burke-2/1

5. Betting Line-David Miller-Casie Coleman-3/5

6. Fernando Hanover-Tim Tetrick-Ron Burke-12-1

Second elimination-Purse $92,320

HN-Horse-Driver-Trainer-Morning Line

1. Western Fame-Mark MacDonald-Jimmy Takter-4/1

2. Racing Hill-Brett Miller-Tony Alagna-3/5

3. Big Top Hanover-Yannick Gingras-Ron Burke-15/1

4. Manhattan Beach-Matt Kakaley-Ron Burke-6/1

5. Spider Man Hanover-Andy Miller-Nick Surick-20/1

This story courtesy of Harness Racing Communications, a division of the U.S. Trotting Association. For more information, visit www.ustrotting.com.
Jeff Snyders first trip to the Little Brown Jug didnt go as hoped, but the longtime owner has enjoyed his share of successes at the Delaware County Fairgrounds since then.

Snyders first Jug was in 1994 with favourite Cams Card Shark, who was scratched from the race because of lameness and never raced again.

Cams Card Shark, the 1994 U.S. Horse of the Year, has sired three Jug champions, though, including Snyders first winner of the event, Million Dollar Cam. Snyder also was co-owner of 2009 Jug winner Well Said and the breeder/owner of 2012 champion Michaels Power.

On Thursday, Snyder will hope a son of Well Said -- Lyons Snyder -- can give him a record-breaking fourth victory in the Little Brown Jug. Snyder is tied with George Segal and Stanley Dancer for the most wins by an owner with three.

Theyre all pretty special wins, Snyder said. Weve had good luck at the Jug, even when we didnt win it. Hopefully, that will continue. You never know what can happen when you go to the Jug.

Lyons Snyder, co-owned by Snyder and Geoffrey Lyons Mound, races in the first of two opening-round heats Thursday. He will start from post three in the same division as Betting Line and Check Six and is 15-1 on the morning line. Sylvain Filion will drive.

The colt, making his third start for trainer Jimmy Takter, has won five of 14 races this year and earned $212,268. His victories include a division of the Somebeachsomewhere Stakes, where he defeated Control The Moment, and he heads to the Jug off a second-place finish to Betting Line in the Simcoe Stakes.

We think a lot of him, Snyder said. He had some issues earlier, but he came out of his last race very sound. He just got beat on the wire to Betting Line. Were hoping that hell do well.

Win or lose, we go out there to have a good time. Thats the main thing. Weve had lots of fun out there.

Segal also has the opportunity to win his fourth Little Brown Jug. His Brittany Farms is co-owner of Dr J Hanover and the breeder/owner of Western Fame.

The fields for the opening heat of the Little Brown Jug appear below.

First elimination-Purse $92,320

HN-Horse-Driver-Trainer-Morning Line

1. Dr J Hanover-Scott Zeron-Tony Alagna-6/1

2. Stolen Glimpse-Matt Kakaley-Ron Burke-15/1

3. Lyons Snyder-Sylvain Filion-Jimmy Takter-8/1

4. Check Six-Yannick Gingras-Ron Burke-2/1

5. Betting Line-David Miller-Casie Coleman-3/5

6. Fernando Hanover-Tim Tetrick-Ron Burke-12-1

Second elimination-Purse $92,320

HN-Horse-Driver-Trainer-Morning Line

1. Western Fame-Mark MacDonald-Jimmy Takter-4/1

2. Racing Hill-Brett Miller-Tony Alagna-3/5

3. Big Top Hanover-Yannick Gingras-Ron Burke-15/1

4. Manhattan Beach-Matt Kakaley-Ron Burke-6/1

5. Spider Man Hanover-Andy Miller-Nick Surick-20/1

This story courtesy of Harness Racing Communications, a division of the U.S. Trotting Association. For more information, visit www.ustrotting.com.
The Fall Extravaganza Mixed Sale that was scheduled to take place on Sunday, October 16 has, unfortunately, been cancelled.

The cancellation has come due to a lack of entries and an industry-wide shortage of racehorses.

"Unfortunately we have to have a certain number of horses to break even and we will keep tabs on everything for a mixed sale next year," said SC Sales Manager Heather Reid.

Standardbred Canada apologizes for any inconvenience this has caused.
Faith-based Groups Bring Hope for a Fast-track HIV Response

Contact: Media Office , +41 79 507 6363





Photo: Debora Birx, United States Global AIDS Ambassador.  Freddie Allen/AMG NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- "If there ever was a time to change words into action, it is today", said U.S. ambassador-at-large Deborah L. Birx, M.D., coordinator of the United States Government Activities to Combat HIV/AIDS and U.S. Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy, at an interfaith prayer breakfast held during the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 20 September.Photo: Debora Birx, United States Global AIDS Ambassador.  Freddie Allen/AMG

The event was promoted by the World Council of ChurchesEcumenical Advocacy Alliance (WCC-EAA), in collaboration with UNAIDS, the United States Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the United Nations Interagency Task Force on Religion and Development as an opportunity to strengthen relationships and forge new partnerships.

For Peter Prove, director of the WCC Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), the group of co-sponsors of the interfaith prayer breakfast is "self-expressive of the forms of partnership the WCC seeks to promote and encourage between FBOs and faith communities of all religious traditions, governments and the UN," he said. "The WCC seeks to model a strong, proactive, collaborative and compassionate response to HIV and AIDS and to move together from this commitment to action for the elimination of AIDS as a public health threat by 2013."

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have played a critical role in responding to HIV since the start of the epidemic more than 35 years ago. Many faith-based organizations have been delivering effective, high-quality HIV services, complementing national public health programmes in the countries most affected by HIV. Their position of trust at the heart of communities allows faith-based organizations to provide services and support that extend beyond the reach of many public sector health systems.

Luiz Loures, deputy executive director of programme, UNAIDS, and assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, stressed that faith communities are on the front of the struggle against the pandemic. "You are the ones who bring us hope. Your capacity needs to be incorporated in our way of work," said Loures, who leads UNAIDS' efforts in leveraging critical support to countries to end AIDS by 2030.

"At the end of the day our destiny is one and the same," said Imman Abdul-Malik, president, NYC Family Day Inc., speaking on the need for stronger common actions by FBOs to end HIV.

In his address, Monsignor Robert J. Vitillo, general secretary of the International Catholic Migration Commission, expressed concern about the vulnerability of children facing HIV. "Children cannot speak for themselves. They need us to speak for them," said the health representative of the Holy See.

Kalvin Leveille, health educator and HIV-positive speaker for Love Heals, offered a strong testimony to the participants of the prayer breakfast. "Ten percent of life is what happens to us; 90% is what we do about it," he said. "We have to own where we are, successes and failures, in order to move forward. All of us need to be at the table if we want to overcome this epidemic."

The engagement of the faith community is paramount to achieving the UNAIDS Fast-Track Targets and the Sustainable Development Goal target of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Countries, faith communities and other partners recommitted to these targets during the June 2016 United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS in New York. Countries adopted a Political Declaration on Ending AIDS and the faith community issued a call to action to ensure that no one is left behind.

In the call to action, faith leaders pledged to take significant and sustained action during the next five years in four particular areas: reducing stigma and discrimination; increasing access to HIV services; defending human rights; and ensuring treatment for children. They called on all faith leaders to join them.

Participants included faith leaders from a multitude of religions, all of whom agreed to support a coordinated faith-based effort in responding to HIV. The call to action issued in June was reiterated and wide-ranging discussions were held that resulted in a number of strong follow-up recommendations and commitments to action over the next five years to ensure a fast-track faith-based response to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

Azza Karam, senior advisor on Culture at the United Nations Population Fund, stressed the exceptional number of side events that are taking place during the United Nations General Assembly. "It is an exceptional time to build stronger connections between the UN and faith-based organizations," she said.

Related inks:

WCC-EAA Live the Promise: HIV Campaign

More than showing up to sing a song: Building understanding and joint action between people living with HIV and religious leaders - WCC feature article by Callie Long (19 September 2016)
ACLU Files Hail Mary Request on Kim Davis Case

Contact: Liberty Counsel Action, 407-875-1989, Media@LCAction.org

ASHLAND, Ky., Sept. 20, 2016 /Standard Newswire/ -- The ACLU has filed yesterday a "Hail Mary" request for attorney's fees in the case of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who won her fight for religious freedom after a federal judge issued an order dismissing all three 2015 marriage license lawsuits against her. U.S. Judge David Bunning dismissed in their entirety, Miller v. Davis, Ermold v. Davis and Yates v. Davis, which brought to an end the trial proceedings against her arising from the 2015 Obergefell decision. At the request of Liberty Counsel on behalf of Kim Davis, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously dismissed the pending appeals.

Despite the ACLU's attempt to continue the case against Kim Davis and assess damages against her, the federal district court dismissed the case, closed the files and ordered all the pending cases to be removed from the docket.

Now the three plaintiffs have each filed separate and coordinated requests: One filed with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals asking the Court to reverse its dismissal ruling; one filed in the district court asking Judge Bunning to reverse his dismissal ruling; and the ALCU filed a third pleading before Judge Bunning asking for an award of attorney's fees.

"The plaintiffs have filed 'Hail Mary' requests to reverse the Court of Appeals and the district court, but both courts have dismissed the cases and closed the files on the Kim Davis case," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. "The ACLU is not entitled to attorney's fees. Kim Davis won the case and the case is closed. County clerks are now able to perform their public service without being forced to compromise their religious liberty. The case is now closed and the door has been shut on the ACLU's attempt to assess damages against Kim Davis," said Staver.

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin signed an executive order creating one marriage license form which does not require the county clerk's name and title. The Kentucky General Assembly made Governor Bevin's changes permanent with a bill that passed the State House with a 97-0 vote followed by a 36-0 vote in the State Senate. Bevin said his signature on the unanimous bipartisan legislation brought "statutory finality to the marriage license dilemma."

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.
Surviving Ebola -- Franklin Graham's Gripping Documentary 'Facing Darkness' Pits Faith Against Fear

Contact: Michael Conrad, 214-616-0320, Michael@Lovell-Fairchild.com BOONE, N.C., Sept. 21, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- FACING DARKNESSa new documentary from Samaritan's Purse and Executive Producer Franklin Grahambrings to vivid life the true story of two American aid workers in West Africa stricken with the deadly Ebola virus and the race against time to get them home and get them treated."Samaritan's Purse workers were holding the last line of defense in a crisis the world was largely ignoring," said Graham, president and CEO of the relief organization. "Hundreds were dying and it was only growing worse. When the disease struck Dr. Kent Brantly and hygienist Nancy Writebol, we knew we had to get them home for treatment. It was their only chance, yet it was something no one had ever done."Featuring interviews with those who fought the outbreak first hand, FACING DARKNESS was filmed on location in Liberia and the U.S. where the events took place. It is a story of true heroes, risking their lives in an effort to stem one of the deadliest epidemics of the century. Ebola infected more than 28,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and the disease claimed more than 11,000 lives.FACING DARKNESS premieres in select U.S. movie theaters for one night through Fathom Events on March 30, 2017.View trailer here: FacingDarknessMovie.com The Ebola outbreak began in March 2014, and by June it was a raging epidemic. Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were in an ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, fighting the surge of the killer virus when they caught the disease themselves.The team at Samaritan's Purse worked around the clock toward the only hope for Brantly and Writebol. It was something that had never been doneevacuate the Ebola patients to the U.S. for treatment and cure.MORE THAN A MEDICAL STORYThe true story of Brantly and Writebol's evacuation, treatment and eventual cure unfolds side-by-side with an inspiring story of faith facing and overcoming fear."Faith is not something that makes you safe," Brantly said, describing his decision to stay in country and fight the disease. "You had to face death in the eye and decide, 'Who am I going to be today?'"Complicating the situationafter years of civil war, the people of Liberia deeply distrusted any authority and went so far as to blame the aid workers for spreading the disease. Hospitals and people were attacked. Yet the Samaritan's Purse team continued to serve."I think when there's a crisis, God wants us to be there," Graham said of the organization's commitment to stay in Liberia. "He doesn't want us to run away. God has put us there for a reason, and he expects us to do something about it."Eventually, a change in culture stemmed the spread of the disease, accomplished through a massive public health education program, in which Samaritan's Purse reached 1.5 million people. One year later, Liberia was declared Ebola free.FACING DARKNESS not only tells the story of saving Brantly and Writebol, it shows what happens when people choose compassion over fear in service to others.FACING DARKNESS is directed by Arthur Rasco. It will premiere at the Heartland Film Festival, and has received an Award of Excellence from the Accolade Global Film Competition.For interviews, contact: Michael Conrad Michael@Lovell-Fairchild.com 214-616-0320For press material, visit: Lovell-Fairchild.com About Samaritan's Purse International ReliefSamaritan's Purse works to meet the physical and spiritual needs of individuals in crisis situations. Led by Franklin Graham, Samaritan's Purse works in more than 100 countries to provide aid to victims of war, disease, disaster, poverty, famine and persecution. For more information visit www.samaritanspurse.org
Er is iets heel griezeligs aan de gang in Nederland. Dat wij geleidelijk aan in een totalitaire 'democratie' wegzinken wordt steeds ...
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Domains purchased with payment plans are not eligible to transfer until all payments have been made. Please remember that our 30-day money back guarantee is void once a domain has been transferred.

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It's Election season and our editor's mailbox is overflowing. Who do your neighbors support? Read about it here.
Forrest Holly Bishop, whose involvement and volunteer work with the Longview Kiwanis spanned more than half a century, died last week at Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver. He was 89.

As Kiwanis oldest and longest-serving member, Bishops favorite project was the K9 Fund he and his daughter Heather started in 1997 to obtain police dogs for local law enforcement agencies.

I view civic clubs as a fill-in, a step to fill in where government and others have not trodden before, Bishop told the Daily News in 2011. Bishop saw clubs like the Kiwanis as the backbone of the community.

The club raised $40,000 toward the purchase of the first six dogs, three for Longview, two for the Cowlitz County Sheriffs Office and two for the Kalama Police Department.

He was the senior statesman, the senior member of the club, said Longview City Council member Scott Vydra, who is also active in Kiwanis. As one of the oldest members of the club in recent years, Bishop became the go-to man for club history and reasoning behind club tradition.

Born in 1926, Bishop grew up in Longview and his parents worked at the Columbia River Mercantile., the store of the Long-Bell Lumber Co., which founded the city. He graduated from R.A. Long High School in 1944 and subsequently joined the Navy, where he was assigned to the public relations mobile command unit.

Bishop served in Okinawa, where he would transmit news from the battle front to KFRC in San Francisco, which was later broadcast to the rest of the country.

Bishop shared his war stories with KEDO 1400 AM as part of the stations special veterans day broadcast in 2015. Marketing manager for the station Bruce Pollock revisited the recording after hearing of Bishops passing.

It was fun to hear his voice again, Pollock said. He would always want to come over and talk radio.

On the show, Bishop recalled his love for the job. I was in heaven as far as I was concerned, he said.

Bishop also holds the unique distinction of being the first to transmit the announcement of the Japanese surrender to the United States. Bishop sat at the feet of Gen. Joseph Stilwell on Sept. 2, 1945, and held the microphone as Stilwell announced the news, beaming it to San Francisco and then the rest of the country.

After coming home, Bishop married his high school sweetheart, Roberta, or Bobbie, in 1949. They were married for 63 years until her passing in April 2012. The couple had five children and many more grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Bishop was also an active member of the Longview community, serving on the Longview City Council from 1968 to 1973. He was also president of the R.A. Long Booster club, secretary of the Longview Planning Commission, and chairman of the Law Enforcement and Firefighters pension committee.

A jack of all trades, Bishop started and sold two commercial radio stations, ran a grocery store and started a ships chandler service before he bought his bail bond business in 1980.

Vydra remembers Bishop fondly. (We were) both in those business where people look at you funny, said Vydra, who operates a pawn shop business. He was always helpful to me in that sense.

Bishop was also a wealth of knowledge when it came to local politics.

When I chose to run for office I reached out to him and sat down with him, Vydra said. I looked to Holly as a mentor.

The Longview Kiwanis will be holding its meeting this Thursday at noon at Teris Restaurant, where members will swap their favorite stories about the groups long-time member.

Holly was a generous man, read a post on the groups Facebook page. He gave a tremendous amount of time and talent back to our community and the kids who live here.
The increasing issues of pre-birth gender analysis have turned out to be a key concern for India. While the ratio of girls in comparison to boys are kept on decreasing in several states, a number of feminist organizations all around the world have raised their voice against it. To take the criticism of pre-birth gender test a step forward and bring equilibrium to male and female ratio, the lead tech giants have come to the forefront and have agreed on taking notable initiatives against the pre-birth sex test.

Leading Search engines like Google and Yahoo and the leading tech conglomerate Microsoft are reported to inform the Supreme Court about the blockage of Pre-birth femininity test ads. On Monday, all three companies have agreed on taking initiatives to block all information relating to gender determination before the birth of a child.

To remind, this agreement between the Supreme Court and all three major tech companies is the reply to a continuing legal case where a PIL was filed against the search engines for advertising pre-birth gender test. The recorded claim is against the search engines showing the advertisements of sex determination kits and clinics in their several pages, which in other way fueling the diminishing ratio of male and female. The matter has been scheduled for removal on 16 November.

On the basis of this agreement, search engines from now will remove certain keywords like Gender selection and prenatal sex determination from their keyboard search listing. As per the submitted reports by the search engines, all of the three including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have agreed to remove a list of 22 words which are related to the pre-birth gender test. These 22 terms are the most common keywords related to this illegal activity. The removal of these words in another sense signifies that a searcher while typing keywords like gender selection, gender selection kits, prenatal sex determination clinics, will not get any search result on Google. Though all the information about sex-determination clinics and tools will still be available on the internet, yet it will be too hard to find them on Google, Microsoft or Google. Furthermore, the web searchers will now get a notice on searching of terms related to any sex test process, clinics, or kits, which will demonstrate that this issue is disregarding laws in India.

The Supreme Court has initially passed the laws of prohibiting the pre-birth sex determination ads on search engines in January 2015. Since that time, the issue kept on becoming denser and currently, ads identifying with any pre-birth femininity test have been forbidden completely from the search engines. Sabu Matthew George, a well-known gender activist, was the first person to file the PIL in Supreme Court in 2008. As the issue of sex determination and female foeticide is in India is boosting up gradually, the PIL was a noble step to prevent the mounting pace of this concern. According to the census reports of 2011, the sex ratio of India in this year was 944 females for every 1000 males in India.
tech2 News Staff

Google has been teasing Allo, an instant messaging platform since their I/O conference for developers earlier this year. Allo launched earlier today, and is available on the Play store as of now. The disruptive new addition is an intelligent agent called Google Assistant. Addressing the Assistant through the chat in the Allo app, by sending a message to @google allows for richer and faster conversations.

As against chatbots in other messaging platforms such as Telegram or Messenger, everyone in the chatbox can see the results of a Google Assistant query. This makes planning trips or deciding a movie to watch easier. Anyone in the group can click through and select from a range of results, instead of the agent delivering a range of results, out of which one is picked to be put into the chat. These search results, and the constant interaction with Google Assistant is meant to improve the experience of using Google. Google Assistant is soon going to be available in more products, and in languages other than English.

However, the machine learning being used to improve Google Assistant means that the database of conversations between users are encrypted and saved in Google servers. This is used by the neural networks at Google to improve the experience, deliver better results, and display more targeted ads. The fact that these conversations are saved in Google servers is a departure from prior plans, announced at I/O, that Google would not be persistently saving these conversations.

According to a report in the Verge, this decision was taken by Google engineers after balancing the advantages of machine learning against the disadvantages of reduced privacy. For users, this means that Google will be able to comply with requests of interception of the data by official Government agencies. There is an incognito mode, where the messages are not persistently stored on Google servers. Users can also manually delete chats to remove them from Google's database.

For those concerned about security and privacy, Google's Allo has a less private implementation than other messaging services. For example, recently, WhatsApp told the Delhi High Court, that they do not have access to user data, as the conversations have end to end encryption enabled, and are not stored on WhatsApp servers.
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Netflix Inc is expanding its Polish service to include more content subtitled or dubbed in Polish and plans to produce local shows before the end of the decade as the U.S. service seeks more subscribers away from its home market. Netflix, which first launched in Poland in January, said on Tuesday that 80 percent of its streamed content available in central and eastern Europe's most populous country now has Polish subtitles or lectors.

Founded nearly 20 years ago, the distributor of popular series such as House of Cards and Narcos is boosting its subscriber base by expanding throughout the world to offset slower growth in its U.S. home market. Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said Netflix also planned to produce content in Poland in a push to promote local movies that may be of interest to a global audience.

"A show that is interesting to Canadians, Norwegians, that shows human things," Hastings told reporters after the official launch of the Polish Netflix version, adding that local production could be about Polish history, for example. Asked if local production could be launched before the end of the decade, Hastings said, "If I look at other markets it has been three years, so hopefully before then".

Netflix started streaming TV in the United States nearly a decade ago and has now launched in almost every country but it faces the task of adapting the service to different markets and cultures as competitors rush in. In Poland, for example, Netflix is up against two local services as well as HBO GO. "I watch a lot of Netflix movies without subtitles already, but the introduction of the Polish version will definitely broaden their viewers' base in Poland," said Jacek Sledzinski, a 42-year-old lawyer from Warsaw.

Hastings also said Netflix had made no progress in its plan to enter the potentially lucrative Chinese market as it still needs a government licence. Content providers in the world's most populous country face stringent regulations and censorship challenges. "We are continuing to work on it. Same (problem) as it has always been - government permissions, we have to get a specific licence in China," Hastings said, adding that he could not give a specific time for when Netflix might get permission.

Reuters
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Announcing its first move on the Indian government's Smart City project, the $37-billion tech giant Oracle Corp has chosen Maharashtra to accelerate the state's digital transformation and set up a Centre for Excellence there.

Towards this, Oracle Global CEO Safra Catz has signed a pact with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on the sidelines of the onging Oracle OpenWorld conference here, it was announced on Wednesday.

According to the pact, Oracle will create a cloud-based Centre of Excellence (CoE) to help accelerate Maharashtra's 'Smart City' programme and modernise technology solutions. Catz said the project is the most expansive and biggest of its kind.

It will be likely replicated across the country, if successful, she said. However, refusing to give its financial details, she also said the investment will be completely scalable because the focus will be to use the cloud technology for immediate uptake.

"We are thrilled to further our commitment in India by working with the Government of Maharashtra and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help position India as a world-class design and manufacturing epicenter," Catz said.

"The Cloud Center of Excellence powered by Oracle will play a key role in improving the lives of the people of this state," she said. The company recently set up nine incubation centers in the country, a massive campus in Bengalaru and launched an annual training initiative for 500,000 students.

"By moving to the Cloud, the government has the opportunity to create a digitally empowered society and a growing knowledge economy. We look forward to making this partnership a success," she added.

According to Fadnavis, the aim is to connect Maharashtra's 29,000 villages by December 2018 to digitally empower gram panchayats, schools, primary health centres and other institutions.

"The entire infrastructure creation for this will require investments to the tune of $1 billion," Fadnavis said.

"We would also like to create virtual agricultural markets or e-markets along with the supply chain. To transform the agriculture market, accessibility is the biggest challenge. Using the technology, every single village will be a connected market and health, education and agriculture will come under this," the chief minister added.

"The cities in the state will be covered by optic fibres in less than two years' time which will enable smart transportation, parking and other citizen-related services," Fadnavis announced, adding that the state government will enable 1,200 hotspots in cities, out of which 500 will be ready by November this year.

"Cloud computing has changed the landscape of governance. It has the power to enable inclusive growth and to transform the state into a digitally-empowered society," Fadnavis said.

The proposed projects, to be finalized before the end of the calendar year, include:

- Smart city in a box

- Mobile platform for service questions

- Unified app development for services like drivers license renewals or property tax payments

- Digital platform to deliver smart city services across the state

- Connected infrastructure across all devices, kiosks and citizens

- Infrastructure services for equipment and IT

- Resources to manage transportation logistics, including analytics, asset tracking, fleet management

- Resources to manage utilities, including water and power.

IANS
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Shares of MGT Capital Investments, led by anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee, dropped 21 percent on Tuesday after it said the New York Stock Exchange denied approval of the listing of shares for a planned merger with anti-spyware company D-Vasive Inc. The steep plunge in MGT brings its losses over two days to about 40 percent after the company said on Monday it had received a subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In May, MGT surged more than 1,200 percent after the mobile gaming company announced it would transform into a cybersecurity company and be led by John McAfee. As part of the deal, MGT said it would issue 43.8 million shares to acquire assets from McAfee's D-Vasive Inc. McAfee would become chief executive and MGT would change its name to John McAfee Global Technologies, Inc.

MGT said it was exploring alternatives and remained committed to the deal. McAfee is currently MGT's executive chairman and he has been the company's main voice in press releases and on Twitter since May. MGT's stock was down 55 cents on Tuesday at $1.97 and its market capitalization was at about $50 million. The former penny stock remains up over 500 percent from the end of April.

Under NYSE rules, already-listed companies that merge may be required to meet the standards required of companies wishing to list their shares for the first time. The NYSE did not give MGT a specific, formal reason for denying the share listing, company spokeswoman Tiffany Madison told Reuters by email.

The New York Stock Exchange does not comment on specific share listing applications, NYSE spokeswoman Kristen Kaus said. Chipmaker Intel bought McAfee Inc for $7.7 billion in 2010, long after its founder had left the company. John McAfee was the subject of a media frenzy in 2012 when he fled his home in Belize after police sought to question him about the murder of a neighbor. They ultimately said he was not a suspect.

MGT's stock was down 55 cents on Tuesday at $1.97 and its market capitalization was at about $50 million. The former penny stock remains up over 500 percent from the end of April.

Reuters
tech2 News Staff

In an interesting move, Facebook has gone ahead and acquired a 'modular electronics platform' that can be used to build gadgets  Nascent Objects. This California startup has earlier worked with Ammunition, which is also responsible for designing Beats products.

It's a software program that basically accelerates the process of building gadgets. The team will become a part of the Building 8 Lab.

Building 8 is led by Regina Dugan. Dugan earlier was a part of Google's advanced technology and products team that worked on modular phones. She has also shared a video (above) sharing the first glimpse of Nascent Objects. In the past we've heard Google go all out with its plans to build a 'modular' device. Recently, we've seen LG come up with a modular battery in its newest device. However, it is still unknown how Facebook plans to leverage this bit.

"Nascent is likely a good fit for this part of the social networking giants operations, as it will provide the resources and funding to help expand Objects modular system, while also giving it a home where it should be put to fairly consistent use across a range of different types of projects, without the startup having to focus on customer acquisition," explains TechCrunch.

The financial details of the deal haven't been disclosed yet.
Xiaomi announced today that it is bringing its very first smart home product to India, Mi Air Purifier 2. Priced at INR 9,999, Mi Air Purifier 2 is an intelligent product with smart features that make using it to clean the air simply effortless.

Mi Air Purifier 2 seamlessly connects to the cloud via Wi-Fi, enabled by the Mi Home app (Android and iOS), which acts as the central hub for a range of smart home products from Mi Ecosystem and other third-party companies. The Mi Ecosystem sub-brand covers a range of products manufactured by Xiaomis ecosystem partners.

The Mi Home app transforms the smartphone into a remote for users to control Mi Air Purifier 2. When in Auto mode, the speed of the air purifiers motoris automatically adjusted according to the air quality  measured using built-in sensors  so users never have to worry about tweaking settings for clean air. The Mi Home app also monitors the filters lifespan and sends a reminder when it needs to be replaced.

With the launch of Mi Air Purifier 2 in India, Xiaomi is poised to play a part in increasing awareness about air pollution in India and how technology can be applied to better peoples lives.

According to the World Health Organization, 22 of the worlds 50 most polluted cities are in India, contributed significantly by industrial and vehicular exhaust. Particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5)  air pollutants with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less  are small enough to enter even the smallest airways and could result in respiratory and cardiovascular illness.

To increase awareness about air pollution, Xiaomi has now become the first smartphone brand in India to integrate Air Quality Index (AQI) data  which also reflects the measurement of PM2.5 particles in the air  into its MIUI 8 Weather app.

Mi Air Purifier 2 quickly removes PM2.5 particles, dust, indoor plant pollen, pet fur and more. With its high 310m3/h CADR (Clean Air Delivery Rate), Mi Air Purifier 2 takes just 10 minutes to circulate purified air in a 21m2 room. Even so, the motor is extremely energy efficient with a low power consumption of 4.8W, while advanced aerodynamics reduce noise and wind resistance, resulting in a noise level as low as 30dB in Night mode.

The 360 cylindrical filter on Mi Air Purifier 2 takes in air more efficiently from every direction compared to conventional air purifiers. Its triple-layer design removes particles larger than 0.3 microns with a high-density EPA filter, while an activated carbon filter removes formaldehyde, bad odour and other harmful substances.

Hugo Barra, Vice President, Xiaomi, said: Air pollution is becoming an alarming public health concern in India. It is heartening to see more conversation around the situation, but there is still a big gap when it comes to consumer awareness. We believe that we are able to play a role in increasing awareness about air pollution by including AQI data into our MIUI Weather app, and by introducing Mi Air Purifier 2 to India. At this game-changing price, Mi Air Purifier 2 is set to disrupt the air purifier category in India, enabling us to bring these technological innovations to everyone.

Mi Air Purifier 2 will be available on Mi.com starting 26 September at 12 PM, at a price of INR 9,999. It will also be available on Flipkart (exclusive partner) from 2 October.

Here are some key features of Mi Air Purifier 2:



 Real-time AQI monitoring, Wi-Fi connectivity

 Mi Home app smart controls (Android and iOS)

 Aerodynamic air vortex, up to 37m2 (400 sq. ft.) coverage

 310m3/h Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR)

 360 triple-layer filter, removes harmful PM2.5 articles

 4.8W energy saving, ultra-quiet 30dB noise level

 Compact form factor: 520mm tall and base area smaller than an A4 sheet of paper

 Replacement filter available online at INR 2,499

Check out this all-in-one smart trash can for a better life.

@Technuter.com News Service
About me I'm Avi Green

From Jerusalem, Israel

I was born in Pennsylvania in 1974, and moved to Israel in 1983. I also enjoyed reading a lot of comics when I was young, the first being Fantastic Four. I maintain a strong belief in the public's right to knowledge and accuracy in facts. I like to think of myself as a conservative-style version of Clark Kent. I don't expect to be perfect at the job, but I do my best. My profile

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Barisal launch capsize death toll climbs to 14; 13 missing

File Photo

The death toll from the launch capsize in the

Sandhya River in Banaripara upazila of the district on Wednesday rose to 14 with the recovery of 12 more bodies.



Mustafizur Rahman, deputy director of River Security and Traffic Department of Bangladesh Inland and Water Transport Authority (BIWTA), said divers retrieved the 12 bodies from the river in the

afternoon.



Three of the deceased were identified as Sukhdeb Mallik, 35, of Ujirpur, Sagar, 15, and Monwara Begum, 45, of Banaripara upazila in the district.



Earlier, divers recovered the body of Kohinur Begum, 40, hailing from

Banaripara, in the morning, while Saleha Begum,60, who was rescued

from the river died at the upazila health complex.



However, some 13 passengers are still missing, he said.



Earlier in the day, the Uzirpur-bound launch `ML Oishi` from Banaripara, with 60-70 passengers on board sank in the river in Banaripara upazila of the district as a heavy chunk of mud from the

erosion site on the riverbank fell on the vessel just after it reached Dasherhat Launch Terminal around 11:15am, said officer-in-charge of Banaripara Police Station Ziaul Islam.



Of the passengers, 7-8 managed to swim ashore after the incident.



Deputy Commissioner of the district Dr Gazi Saifuzzaman visited the

spot and announced to provide Tk 10,000 to the families of each of

the deceased. -- Barisal, Sept 21 (UNB)
Drug peddler held with 3000 yaba tablets





Chittagong Metropolitan Police (CMP) arrested a drug peddler with 3000 pieces of yaba tablets from city's Ekkilometer area under Chandgaon thana on Monday.

The arrested person was identified as Mohammad Sohel, 19, son of Mohammad Oliullah, hailed from Teqnaf Upazila of Cox's Bazar district. On a tip-off, a team of Chandgaon thana police detained the drug peddler in front of Mohona community center of Ekkilometer area under Chandgaon thana and recovered the contraband drugs from his possession, police said.

A case was filed with Chandgaon Thana under Narcotics Control Act in this regard.




Newly -elected Organising Secretary of Swadhinata Doctors\' Parishad Dr A M M Minhaz Uddin greeting CCC Mayor A J M Nasir Uddin at his office recently.
RMG workers empowered, but face new forms of vulnerability: Study

Economic Reporter :

Garment industry has socially empowered women workers in Bangladesh to have better control over their own lives, while it has brought newer forms of vulnerability to them, especially in their work and living environment, according to a study organised by Bangladesh Mahila Parishad.

The study tilted "Vulnerable Empowerment: Capacities and Vulnerabilities of Female Garments Workers in Bangladesh" was released at a function in Dhaka on Tuesday.

Ayesha Khanam, president of Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, presided over the function.

Zahid ul Arefin Choudhury, associate professor of Peace and Conflict at the University of Dhaka, Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Dhaka, and Kaberi Gayen, professor of Mass Communication and Journalism at the University of Dhaka, jointly conducted the research.

According to the findings, 60%-70% workers think their lives have improved due to employments in the garment industry. The women workers who are 26 years old or more, widow and illiterate are the most vulnerable, the study said.

The workers are satisfied with those factories that are structurally safe and most of the workers said the workplace safety is better now than earlier.

"Garment sector has brought significant changes, both economically and socially, to the lives of rural women, However, this is normal that workers in all industries may have vulnerabilities. But we have to consider how much the coping-up capacity has increased," said Mustafa K Mujeri, executive director of the Institute for Inclusive Finance and Development, speaking on the research paper.

He added: "It is not possible to end women deprivation only through economic empowerment. We have to change our male chauvinistic attitude."

Economist and ex-adviser to a caretaker government, Wahiduddin Mahmud said garment industry is an alternative mean of women empowerment. "Through this industry, rural women get an identity and opportunity to lead an independent life. Living standard of workers has improved, but due to some vulnerabilities, it cannot be described as a big one."

He said the workers still have to work for additional hours to meet family expenses and remain in pressure. Wahiduddin Mahmud laid emphasis on workers' training to increase their productivity and efficiency, which in turn can help owners raise wages.

Nazneen Ahmed, senior research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, said there should have a clarification on vulnerabilities as the competitors of Bangladesh will take it as an opportunity to downgrade Bangladesh.

In her feedback to the book, she said: "There are vulnerabilities in other industries too. So, we can better understand if there are comparisons with other sectors in this respect."

The research was conducted on the basis of two questions: Are the women garment workers vulnerable? and Have the women garment workers gained capability? The research has broadly focused on theses issues based on the interview of 1,014 garment workers.

The garment industry in Bangladesh is perceived both as an empowering sector as well as a sector cursed with accidents and deaths. The literature shows immense vulnerabilities in the lives of women who work in the sector.




US ties will develop no matter who wins election: China's premier

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a High Level Leaders meeting on Refugees on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday.

Reuters, New York :

China and the United States will keep developing positive relations no matter who wins November's U.S. presidential election, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told an economic forum in New York on Tuesday.

Li declined to comment on which candidate he favored.

Republican Donald Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese goods and push for tougher trade talks if elected. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has changed tack on trade, backing away from a Pacific trade pact she previously endorsed.

Both candidates have been critical of China's assertive pursuit of territory in the South China Sea, a potential flashpoint in Asia and a cause of significant friction in relations between Washington and Beijing.

Li, who was attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York, said the U.S. election was an internal affair for the United States, so what he could say was very limited, but he went on to remark:

"No matter who gets elected in the U.S. presidential election, I believe that China-U.S. ties will continue to grow steadily and in a positive direction."

Li responded to complaints from foreign business leaders about restricted access to the Chinese market by saying that China was open to foreign investment, although some economic sectors were not yet mature.

"This process of them becoming more mature is also a process for them to open up and the areas of the Chinese economy open to foreign investment will only increase and China will only open its door even wider. The door will not close," he said.

Referring to a U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty that has been long in negotiation given disagreements about access to sectors the sides deem sensitive, Li said as long as both countries took a strong and pragmatic approach, they would be able to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.

As an example of China's willingness to open up its markets, Li said China had decided to designate a Chinese investment bank as a clearing bank for renminbi business in New York and welcomed foreign banks in the city which met eligibility requirements to become clearing banks for the currency.

He also said China would soon allow imports of beef on the bone from the United States, now that Chinese quarantine procedures had been completed.

Li pledged that China would not engineer a devaluation of its currency to boost exports for its economy, which is growing at its slowest rate in two decades. Some critics in Washington have charged that Beijing is still manipulating its currency, although the U.S. Treasury says its assessment is that it is not undervalued.
US bombers fly over South Korea for second time since North's nuclear test

A US B-1B Lancer - aiming at reinforcing the US commitment to its key ally South Korea - makes a landing at the Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek on Wednesday.

Reuters, Osan :

Two U.S. supersonic bombers flew over South Korea on Wednesday, with one of them landing at an air base 40 km (25 miles) south of the capital, the second such flight since North Korea's Sept. 9 nuclear test.

U.S. Forces Korea said the flight by a pair of B-1B Lancer strategic bombers based in Guam was a show of force and of U.S. commitment to preserve the security of the peninsula and the region.

The United States, which has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, flew two B-1 bombers on Sept. 13 escorted by U.S. and South Korean fighter jets in a show of solidarity with Seoul.

The North condemned the earlier flight as an armed provocation that mobilized "ill-famed nuclear killing tools". It did not immediately respond to Wednesday's flight.

The U.S. Air Force said the Wednesday flight was the closest ever to North Korea by a B-1 bomber.

"Today marks the first time the airframe has landed on the Korean peninsula in 20 years, as well as conducting the closest flight near North Korea ever," the U.S. Air Force said on its website which also showed a B-1B bomber landing at the base in South Korea.

The South's Yonhap news agency said the aircraft flew over a U.S. live-fire training site in the Pocheon area bordering the North.

North Korea has ignored global condemnation of its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, and this week said it had successfully tested a new rocket engine that would be used to launch satellites, again in violation of U.N. sanctions.

The leaders of the United States and China, which is the North's main diplomatic ally and economic benefactor, condemned the latest nuclear test and pledged to step up cooperation at the United Nations and in law enforcement channels.

U.N. diplomats say the two countries have begun discussions on a possible U.N. resolution in response to the latest nuclear test, but China has not said directly whether it would support tougher steps against North Korea.
Raids shake Syria`s Aleppo as peace efforts falter

The UN Security Council was due to meet later for talks on salvaging the Syria truce -- which collapsed after only a week.

AFP, Aleppo :

Intense air raids shook Syria's Aleppo on Wednesday as increasing tensions between Moscow and Washington poisoned efforts to revive a failed ceasefire.

The UN Security Council was due to meet later for talks on salvaging the truce-which collapsed on Monday after only a week-but the mood was likely to be tense after the United States said it held Russia responsible for a deadly air strike on an aid convoy.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are both to address the council, ahead of more talks expected later this week.

Russia and the United States co-sponsored the ceasefire plan, with Kerry warning it could be the "last chance" to try to end Syria's civil war, which has killed more than 300,000 people in five years.

In Aleppo, a key battleground in the conflict, bombardment pummelled opposition-held districts and the city's outskirts into Wednesday morning.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said dozens of raids hit the city's east overnight, as regime troops advanced on rebels in Aleppo's southwestern outskirts.

It was a sleepless night for many Aleppo residents, AFP's correspondent in the city said, with the bombardment continuing until rain broke out over the city at dawn.

In the rebel-held neighbourhood of Sukkari, Abu Ahmad cleared rubble and shattered glass from his doorstep after bombardment demolished the six-storey building next door, killing his neighbours.

He had tea with the two brothers who lived in the building late the previous night.

"Just an hour after I left, a missile destroyed their whole building and they both died under the rubble," Abu Ahmad said.

Syrian state media reported that the city's government-held west had come under rebel shelling, which killed two people.

A medical aid group said four of its doctors were killed and a nurse critically wounded when an air strike hit a clinic in a village near Aleppo late Tuesday.

The Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations (UOSSM) said the clinic in the village of Khan Tuman was completely levelled in the 11:00 pm (2000 GMT) strike and more dead were feared to be buried under the rubble, the group added.

The Britain-based Observatory said nine medical staff affiliated with the Army of Conquest rebel alliance were also killed while working in the clinic.

According to the World Heath Organization, Syria is the most dangerous country in the world for health professionals, with 135 strikes on clinics and hospitals last year.

Monday's strike on the aid convoy near Aleppo killed 20 civilians and destroyed 18 trucks, the Red Cross said, and prompted the UN to suspend all humanitarian convoys across Syria.

"There only could have been two entities responsible, either the Syrian regime or the Russian government," President Barack Obama's national security spokesman Ben Rhodes said.

"In any event, we hold the Russian government responsible for air strikes in this space."

Two Russian SU-24 ground attack jets were operating in the area where the aid convoy was struck, another US official told AFP.

"The best evaluation we have is that the Russians carried out the strike," he added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Britain not turning inward, says Theresa May

AFP, United Nations :

Britain will remain open and active on the global stage despite its shock vote to leave the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May told the United Nations on Tuesday.

May, who took office in July after the "Brexit" vote led her predecessor David Cameron to resign, said that Britain "has always been an outward-facing, global partner" in international affairs.

"And that is how we will remain. For when the British people voted to leave the EU, they did not vote to turn inwards or walk away from any of our partners in the world," May said in an address to the UN General Assembly.

May said that Britain, one of five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council, would remain a player on major issues including fighting poverty, terrorism and climate change.

She pledged a particular focus on preventing human trafficking, saying that criminals had created a modern form of slavery.

"We need to be smarter and even more coordinated than the criminal gangs in our efforts to stop them," she said.

May said that she committed to Nigeria the first five million pounds ($6.5 million) from a new fund that aims to help stop human trafficking from countries to Britain.

The United Nations estimates that nearly 21 million people around the world are victims of forced labor, with more than half of them women and girls.
Consultant for rail bridge over Jamuna River underway



Appointment of the consultant for the Railway Bridge over Jamuna River is underway, as the negotiation is progressing, a Bangladesh Railway official said.

He said the government would appoint the consultant to design and prepare of the tender documents for construction of the much talked about Rail Bridge over the Jamuna River. "We have already selected a company from the short list for appointing the consultant. At this moment the Bangladesh Railway (BR) has been negotiating for appointing the consultant," the official told BSS here yesterday. According to the project details, the BR has selected Oriental Consultant Global Company Limited, as a consultant along with Design Development Corporation (DDC) Chodai Company Ltd, a joint venture company.

The proposal for appointing consultant would be sent to the Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase for approval after negotiation, the project details said. It said a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed this year between Bangladesh Bridge Authority (BBA) and Bangladesh Railway (BR) for necessary land requisition to construct a separate railway bridge over the River of Jamuna.

The details said the BR already conducted a feasibility study with financial support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for undertaking this project. The Railways Ministry already proposed a draft project to this end, titled "Jamuna Railway Bridge Construction Project", to the Planning Commission. An official of BR said that the BR would implement the proposed mega project at an estimated cost of Taka 10,055.18 crore, of which Taka 1,964.98 crore would come from the government exchequer while the rest of Taka 8,090.20 crore as project assistance from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The proposed project is also included in the 37th Official Development Assistance (ODA) loan package signed between Japan and Bangladesh on June 29 this year, he said. Talking to BSS Railways Minister M Mazibul Hoque said that the government has undertaken a project to construct a separate railway bridge over the Jamuna River parallel to the Bangabandhu Bridge to facilitate smooth railway communication.

"The proposed bridge will ensure smooth railway communication both inside and outside the country. Once the bridge is completed, dedicated railway network would be set up between the North and the rest of the country," he said.

The minister said the railway bridge would also have a positive impact on the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and the government has also approved a 20-year master plan to improve the railway sector.




Saving refugees to save Europe

George Soros :

The refugee crisis in Europe was already pushing the European Union toward disintegration when, on June 23, it helped drive the British to vote to Brexit the EU. The refugee crisis and the Brexit calamity that it spawned have reinforced xenophobic, nationalist movements that will seek to win a series of upcoming votes- including national elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in 2017, a referendum in Hungary on the EU refugee policy on October 2, and a rerun of the Austrian presidential election on December 4.

Rather than uniting to resist this threat, EU member states have become increasingly unwilling to cooperate with one another. They pursue self-serving, beggar-thy-neighbor migration policies - such as building border fences - that further fragment the Union, seriously damage member states, and subvert global human-rights standards.

The current piecemeal response to the refugee crisis, culminating in the agreement reached earlier this year between the EU and Turkey to stem the flow of refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean, suffers from four fundamental flaws. First, it is not truly European; the agreement with Turkey was negotiated and imposed on Europe by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Second, it is severely underfunded. Third, it has transformed Greece into a de facto holding pen with inadequate facilities.

Most important, the response is not voluntary. The EU is trying to impose quotas that many member states strenuously oppose, forcing refugees to take up residence in countries where they are not welcome and do not want to go, and returning to Turkey others who reached Europe by irregular means.This is unfortunate, because the EU cannot survive without a comprehensive asylum and migration policy. The current crisis is not a one-off event; it augurs a period of higher migration pressures for the foreseeable future, due to a variety of causes. These include demographic shortfalls in Europe and a population explosion in Africa; seemingly eternal political and military conflicts in the broader region; and climate change.

The agreement with Turkey was problematic from its inception. The very premise of the deal - that asylum-seekers can legally be returned to Turkey - is fundamentally flawed. Turkey is not a "safe third country" for most Syrian asylum-seekers, especially since the failed coup in July.

What would a comprehensive approach look like? Whatever its final form, it would be built on seven pillars.

First, the EU must take in a substantial number of refugees directly from front-line countries in a secure and orderly manner. This would be far more acceptable to the public than the current disorder. If the EU made a commitment to admit even a mere 300,000 refugees annually, most genuine asylum-seekers would view their odds of reaching their destination as good enough to deter them from seeking to reach Europe illegally - an effort that would disqualify them from legal admission.

Second, the EU must regain control of its borders. There is little that alienates and scares publics more than scenes of chaos.

Third, the EU needs to find sufficient funds to finance a comprehensive migration policy. It is estimated that at least 30 billion per year will be needed for a number of years, and the benefits of "surge funding" (spending a large amount of money up front, rather than the same amount over several years) are enormous.

Fourth, the EU must build common mechanisms for protecting borders, determining asylum claims, and relocating refugees. A single European asylum process would remove the incentives for asylum shopping and rebuild trust among member states.

Fifth, a voluntary matching mechanism for relocating refugees is needed. The EU cannot coerce member states to accept refugees they do not want, or refugees to go where they are not wanted. A scheme like the one used by Canada could elicit and match the preferences of both refugees and receiving communities.

Sixth, the EU must offer far greater support to countries that host refugees, and it must be more generous in its approach to Africa. Instead of using development funds to serve its own needs, the EU should offer a genuine grand bargain focused on the needs of recipient countries. This means creating jobs in refugees' home countries, which would reduce the pressure to migrate to Europe.

The final pillar is the eventual creation of a welcoming environment for economic migrants. Given Europe's aging population, the benefits migration brings far outweigh the costs of integrating immigrants. All the evidence supports the conclusion that migrants can contribute significantly to innovation and development if they are given a chance to do so.

Pursuing these seven principles, described in greater deal elsewhere, is essential in order to calm public fears, reduce chaotic flows of asylum-seekers, ensure that newcomers are fully integrated, establish mutually beneficial relations with countries in the Middle East and Africa, and meet Europe's international humanitarian obligations.

The refugee crisis is not the only crisis Europe has to face, but it is the most pressing. And if significant progress could be made on the refugee issue, it would make the other issues - from the continuing Greek debt crisis to the fallout from Brexit to the challenge posed by Russia - easier to tackle. All the pieces need to fit together, and the chances of success remain slim. But as long as there is a strategy that might succeed, everyone who wants the EU to survive should rally behind it.

(George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations).

Courtesy: Project Syndicate


There will be no refugees if Assad is not protected but ended

UN MEMBER-STATES adopted a non-binding political declaration on Monday to tackle the biggest refugee crisis since Second World War amid dire warnings about rising xenophobia in Europe and the collapse of countries bordering war-shattered Syria. According to media report, world governments adopted New York declaration pledging to uphold the rights of refugees, help them to resettle and ensure that they have access to education and jobs. The firstever UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants kicked off after a week of high-level diplomacy when the world leaders are taking part in the UN Annual General Assembly meeting. The NY summit was dominated this year by the conflict in Syria. The crude reality of today is, a record-breaking 65 million people are on the move worldwide, fleeing from wars such as the carnage in Syria, repression and poverty, including 21 million refugees competing for too few resettlement opportunities. The war in Syria alone, now in its sixth year, has driven nearly nine million people from their homes, while an additional four million have fled to neighbouring countries and are making the perilous journey to Europe.



Media report says, speaking at the summit opening session UN Human Rights Chief insisted that the present day refugee crisis stemmed from the world's failure to end the war in Syria. We agree with his remark that the defenders of what is right and good are being out-flanked in too many countries by race-baiting bigots, who seek to gain or retain power by wielding prejudice and deceit at the expense of those most vulnerable. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not limited only to be so-called third world countries. Foul-play, in the name of national interest or strategic interest by the champions of human rights, has created volatile situation in various parts of the world and innocent people are the worst sufferers of these, being compelled to sacrifice almost everything only to survive.



The massacre of Syrian people is continuing as a result of big power politics. It is most shocking that Iran is also collaborating with Russia in the killing of Syrians and destroying the country itself just because Russia jointly with Iran is thinking its geo-political influence in the war. Human consideration has no place with them.

America is a great nation for its commitment to human rights and value of life. Russia is only a great power. America and the Western alliance have to be bold in saving lives and tragic fate of Syrian refugees. The human crisis for Syrian refugees is not their own creation. They will be too happy to go back to their country.






Understaffed CMCH

CHITTAGONG Medical College Hospital (CMCH) -- one of the largest hospitals in Bangladesh -- is running with acute manpower shortage, hampering medicare system there. Why this tertiary level hospital is struggling with huge staff crisis is a big question. It appears that the hospital is not hospitable to the patients like others around the country as mismanagement in almost all hospitals in both urban and rural areas has become visible.



As per a report, 230 full-time doctors and 437 nurses are working in this 1,313-bed hospital, which has to provide service to over 2,500 patients on an average every day. Teachers of the medical college and some postgraduate trainees also serve in the hospital but to operate at full capacity CMCH needs 1,500 doctors. 437 nurses work in three shifts, which means 2,500 patients get only 145 nurses to attend them in each shift. This poor staff provision in such a big public hospital is worrisome. It needs immediate step from authority concerned to relieve the patients from medicare hassle and sufferings. Notably, absence and negligence of doctors and proper treatment often lead to the forlorn death of patients across the country.



According to WHO, one nurse is required for every four patients. But CMCH cannot provide a nurse even for every 15 patients. Besides, over 250 patients get admitted to the orthopaedic ward per day. But the hospital management can deploy only three nurses per shift. More importantly, over the years, the number of beds has increased but the workforce size remains the same. Currently 41 departments are providing services to patients round the clock. Most of the 41 wards do not have any post of consultant. Moreover, the posts of assistant registrar, resident surgeon and physician are vacant.



However, for stop gap arrangement those posts are being managed with the postgraduate trainees. As a result, when the trainings conclude, those posts fall vacant again. At present, around 40 such posts remain vacant. Sources said that medicare services are also hampered to a great extent in CMCH for absence of senior doctors in different wards.



The overall situation of CMCH illustrates the total negligence of authority concerned. It can't go for long. It needs immediate corrective measures. The Health Ministry cannot ignore the patients who are at life-risk seeking medical reliefs from the public hospitals like CMCH. All public hospitals should have the required workforce to ensure smooth health services delivery system.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina addressing the UN at world leaders summit on Refugee Affairs presided over by US President Barack Obama on 20th September.
Businesses push for FTA with KL

Staff Reporter :

Business leaders on Wednesday urged the government to sign a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Malaysia to boost trade and economic ties between Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur.

"We must work for a greater economic and trade cooperation with Malaysia, and a Free Trade Agreement between the two countries could be a

catalyst in this regard," Mahbubur Rahman Sumon, Secretary General of Greece-Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told The New Nation yesterday.

He added: "It will benefit our exporters through the preferential treatment and market access to Malaysia."

Mahbubur Rahman Sumon said the Malaysian authorities have already shown keen interest in signing a FTA with Bangladesh to explore their trade and investment opportunities here.

The total volume of the two-way trade between Bangladesh and Malaysia reached US$ 1,314.60 million, according to the Bangladesh-Malaysia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BMCCI).

Bangladesh's export is only $114.60 million against Malaysia's $ 1.2 billion export to Bangladesh for the fiscal year 2014-2015.

"Bangladesh considers Malaysia as one of major sources of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) with increasing volume of bilateral trade. The country has been significantly lagging behind in the export department that has widened its trade gap with Malaysia," Md Alamgir Jalil, President of BMCCI told The New Nation on Wednesday

"We need to take steps to boost our exports to Malaysia. Signing a FTA with Malaysia can help increase our exports manifold narrowing down the existing trade gap between Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur," he added.

He also pushed for a closer cooperation between the two countries in various fields so that entrepreneurs from Bangladesh and Malaysia could achieve a win-win situation.

"A closer tie with Malaysia could also help increase Bangladesh's manpower export to the country," he added.
Written exam a must at public varsity recruitment

M M Jasim :

The candidates, who are interested to be teachers and officials of public universities, have to sit for written examination for the first time in the history of the country's public universities.

Not only that, the administration will have to wait for positive verification report from police and intelligence agencies before issuing appointments.

Presently, the teachers and the officials are appointed on the basis of their results.

The Education Ministry issued the directive upon the instruction received from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), the official of the ministry said.

The ministry sent a letter to the University Grants Commission (UGC) to implement the decision of the ministry.

The letter said that the PMO observed that there were many irregularities in appointment of teachers and officials.

"The public universities do not receive police or intelligence verification before appointing teachers and officials. As a result, the anti-government men and women get chance to be teachers and officials. So it should be mandatory in future," the letter said.

It also said, "The candidates can be teachers and officials facing viva voce only. The existing system of the appointment helps creating anomaly and the talent candidates face injustice. So, the irregularities will be quashed if the authorities take written examination."

Meanwhile, Vice-Chancellor of Dhaka University Professor AAMS Arefin Siddique told The New Nation on Wednesday that he did not get any direction from ministry or the UGC.

"No direction has been received by the Dhaka University. After receiving any letter the university will take its decision," he said. The VC also said that the ministry did not take any recommendation from the university.

"It was good if the ministry discussed with the varsity authorities. But unfortunately the ministry ignored it," Arefin Siddique said.

A VC of a public university wishing anonymity told this correspondent that the ministry took the decision whimsically. It would have been better if the ministry sat with the VCs of the public universities.

Terming the decision of the ministry 'unwise' some top bosses of the public universities said that the ministry tried to impose its decision. But the varsities are not bound to follow his direction, as the institutions are autonomous.


New partnership needed to tackle migration issue

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has called upon UN member states to take a new path of constructive cooperation. She observed that the international community had struggled to govern migration effectively 'for far too long'.



She also urged the international community, through an opinion piece, to consider "new partnerships" in addressing migration and large movements of people to keep up with the rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. "The time has come to set the world on a new path of constructive cooperation, instead of populists' preferred path of destructive unilateralism," she wrote in Project Syndicate, known as world's opinion page where prominent political leaders and policymakers write. The prime minister also urged UN member states to acknowledge the gap between their pledges of last year and the harsh realities many migrants and refugees continue to face today. More than 4,300 migrants have died this year trying to reach their destinations.

In the Mediterranean Sea alone, 3,200 people have perished, and in the Andaman Sea, just east of the Bay of Bengal, thousands of migrants have been stranded on boats with nowhere to land, or have been held hostage by their traffickers. Hasina's write-up was posted on the day of the UN summit on migration and refugees in New York on Sep 19 when she called for global consensus to protect the rights of migrants and refugees.



Bangladesh spearheads migration issues at the global level as it is the current chair of the Global Forum for Migration and Development or GFMD. Dhaka has always made a pitch for a new governance mechanism for migration as the current mechanism was developed at the end of World War II, considering the perspectives of the time.



In those days, after the war, there were mostly refugees, not migrants. Now the perspective has changed. The world has now more migrants than refugees. Besides, migrants are becoming refugees and refugees are becoming migrants. The issue also received global attention after the recent migration crisis.



The prime minster highlighted the benefits of migration and said these benefits are "easily squandered" if migration is not governed "responsibly and cooperatively", as the world has seen in the recent crisis.



She said without global governance institutions and legal frameworks to guide international cooperation, most countries must resort to "unilateral" management of their own migration flows.



"When states fail to govern migration effectively, they create a vacuum that is filled by unscrupulous actors: smugglers, traffickers, and organized-crime. Meanwhile, countries, migrants, and host communities all lose out as they bear the costs of migration without realizing its benefits," she said. At last year's UN General Assembly summit, world leaders promised to cooperate on ensuring safe, orderly, regular, and responsible migration.



"This year, they need to do more to realise that pledge," she said as in this year's summit world leaders for the first time will make a "political commitment" for a better international response to the challenges emerging from large movements of people around the globe. She also criticised the UN for "falling short" of providing effective support to member states, migrants, and the societies that host them.



"Its member governments need to agree on universal principles to establish an international framework for dealing with migration, and the UN itself should make governance of migration one of its central missions, rather than scattering the task across different agencies," she wrote. "We need only recognise that migration benefits us all to maximize the gains and minimize the pain," she said, adding that effective migration governance requires "institutional and legal frameworks that can reconcile sometimes conflicting considerations."
Probe report won`t be published right now: Muhith

Staff Reporter :

Retreating from his previous position, Finance Minister AMA Muhith said on Wednesday that publishing of the Bangladesh Bank's cyber heist probe report would take time.



"We (government) will not publish the report right now. More time is needed to publish it," Muhith said this while talking to journalists at the Secretariat.He said: Recovery of the stolen fund will be delayed if the report is made public," adding that Law Minister Anisul Huq had called him from Texas on Tuesday and asked him not to publish the report.



"We are optimistic about recovering most of the stolen fund as the President of the Philippines assured us. I hope that most of the $81 million stolen money will be recovered from Philippine within five months," he said.

Earlier, Muhith said that the investigation report would be published on the central bank and Financial Institution Division websites on Thursday.



A three-member government-formed committee led by former Bangladesh Bank governor Mohammed Farashuddin submitted the report to the finance ministry on April 30 in 2016.



A Philippine court on Monday ordered its central bank to return to Bangladesh a portion of recovered fund stolen from Bangladesh central bank's reserve account maintained with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.



The court also declared Bangladesh as the rightful owner of the funds, totalling $15.25 million.



Muhith on Tuesday said $15.25 million would be returned to us by the Philippines in a day or two and would be deposited in the central bank's reserve account.



Unknown hackers tried to steal nearly $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank's account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in early February. They succeeded in transferring $81m to four accounts maintained with Rizal Commercial Banking Corp in Manila.
Father dies after burn injury

Staff Reporter :

The father, who was set ablaze by his devil son in Kamlapur area of Faridpur district town, succumbed to his injuries at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) on Wednesday morning.



The son identified as Fardin Huda committed the crime as his father refused to buy a new motor bike for him.



The deceased has been identified as ATM Rafiqul Huda, 48, from Faridpur district, said Partha Shankar Paul, resident surgeon of the Burn Unit of DMCH.



Ill-fatted Rafiqul received 90 percent burn injuries and died at the burn unit of DMCH around 5:00am, the doctor said. Quoting the family members, Faridpur Kotwali Police Station Officer-in-Charge (OC) Md Nazim Uddin said, "The-17-year old Fardin Huda alias Mugdho demanded a new motorcycle from his father on September15. When Rafiqul refused to buy the motorcycle, Mugdho locked an altercation with him. At one stage, he set fire to them by pouring petrol, leaving Rafiqul and his mother Silvia Akter critically burnt."



"Local people brought the couple to Faridpur Medical College and Hospital instantly. The mother took primary treatment there. But when Rafiqul Huda's condition deteriorated, he was shifted to DMCH. He died at about 4:00am," the police official said.



The accused person is the couple's only son and the police will file a case accusing the lone assailant, the OC said.



Mugdho is currently on the run and police are trying to arrest him, he said.


47 fishermen abducted from 25 trawlers looted

Khulna Correspondent :

Some 47 fishermen were abducted by forest bandits from the West Sunderban's Kateswar and Sapkhali areas Shyamnagar upazila of Satkhira district on Tuesday night. The robbers also looted 25 fishing trawlers from the spot, said few fishermen who escaped.

On condition of anonymity, they told this correspondent that a group of fishermen were catching fishes in Kateswar and Sapkhali canals on Tuesday night. Two gangs of forest bandits named Jahangir Bahini and Noa Bhai Bahini suddenly attacked the fishermen, beat them mercilessly, abducted at least 47 of them and looted 25 fishing trawlers, demanding ransom of taka 30 thousand each. Five fishermen managed to flee the scene by any means.

Residents of the abducted fishermen are from villages Shora and Napitkhali under Shyamnagar upazila of Satkhira district.

When contacted, Md. Jahiruddin Ahmed, Conservator of Forest (CF) of Khulna region told this correspondent that he had not heard anything about the abduction, but he had watched the news in a TV Channel.

It is mentionable in this connection that on September 9, 14 and 17, forest robber gangs Jahangir Bahini and Sagor Bahini abducted 23, 20 and 12 fishermen from Dhansiddhirchar

and Bhaizora areas adjacent to the Sundarbans who were not rescued till filing this report at 1.45 on September 21, 2016.

It is notable here that in 12 days 102 fishermen were abducted from Sundarbans by the gangs of forest robbers.

Sources of coastguard and forest divisions said, rescue operation is going on in the areas adjacent to the Sundarbans.


Chinese President due likely Oct-13

UNB, Dhaka :

Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to arrive here on a two-day visit in the second week of October when Dhaka is expected to seek financial support for over two dozens of mega projects.

"I can tell you the visit is taking place," a diplomatic source in Beijing told UNB mentioning that the Chinese President might arrive here either on October 13 or 14. The source, wishing to remain anonymous, said Dhaka and Beijing are considering the visit as a very important one. Officials at the Foreign Ministry here, however, is yet to declare the date officially saying that they are in discussion for the visit. Chinese Embassy officials also said nothing is finalised yet about the visit. The Chinese President may announce a package involving several billion dollars for the next couple of years for Bangladesh development projects, said the source.

China is also willing to sign a number of deals but are yet to finalise those. After the Dhaka visit, the Chinese President will leave for India to attend the BRICS Summit which will be held in Goa, India on October15-16.

Meanwhile, Chinese Ambassador in Dhaka Ma Mingqiang on Tuesday met acting foreign secretary Rear Admiral (retd) Md Khurshed Alam and discussed various issues of mutual interest.
14 bodies found, 35 missing

A launch with 80 passengers sank in Barisalas Sandhya River on Wednesday. Divers recovered about 14 bodies. This photo was taken from Banaripara area.

Staff Reporter :

At least 14 people died and about 35 others remained missing when a launch carrying nearly 80 passengers capsized on Wednesday in the Shandhya River in Banaripara upazila, some 12 kilometres from the Barisal district town, police said.



"I managed to swim ashore but my husband along with 50 other passengers have remained missing. I fear all of them have died. It was not a launch at all but a trawler," Aleya Begum, a survivor told The New Nation.



She added it was raining when the launch sank in the river. "As it was raining, most of the windows of the vessel were shut. As a result, most of the passengers got trapped inside the deck and they might have died," Aleya said as wailing. The deceased were identified as Saleha Begum, 60, Kohinur Bagum, 60, Sagar Mir, 25, Shukhen Mallik, 40, Hira Begum, 26, Mozammel Mollah, 60, Rabeya Khatun, 45, Rehana Begum, 30, Firoza Begum, 50, Joynal Hawladar,60, Razzak, 60, Shanta, 10, Mohamma Sattar, 25, and Shahana Begum.



All the victims were residents of Swarupkathi and Banaripara areas and they went to visit their relatives' houses during the Eid holidays.



The death toll may rise, as many passengers have remained missing.



When contacted, SM Akhteruzzaman, Superintendent of Police of Barisal district told The New Nation on Wednesday afternoon that at least 14 bodies were recovered from the river near the spot between 2pm and 5pm.



He said the deceased included seven men, six women and a child. At least 35 passengers were still missing till 5pm when the report was filed yesterday.



"The launch, 'ML Oishi', sank in the river around 12:15pm while it was heading towards Uzirpur from Banaripara upazila. When the vessel reached Dasherhaat launch terminal and anchored there, a large chunk of earth, caused by erosion, fell on it. Being panicked, as soon as the passengers started to get down hurriedly, the launch sank in the river," the police super, who was on the spot, to supervise the rescue operation said.



He added that local people rescued some passengers while 15 others managed to swim ashore.



"Besides, about 35 passengers of the launch could not be traced yet after the incident," SM Akhteruzzaman said, adding rescue operations by police, coast guard personnel, fire fighters as well as local people were still underway till filing of this report yesterday evening.



When contacted, Ziaul Hasan, Officer-in-Charge of Banaripara Police Station said that ML Oishi with around 80 people on board capsized at Dasherhaat point when its passengers started getting down after it anchored there around 12:15pm.



He said the Uzirpur-bound launch 'ML Oishi' from Banaripara reached Dasherhat Launch Terminal around 11:15am.



Locals started the rescue operation soon after the launch sank at Dasherhaat terminal in the Shandhya River. Later, divers from Fire Service and Bangladesh Coast Guard joined the rescue operation.



However, there was no official confirmation as to how many passengers were aboard the launch but survivors said it was carrying at least 80 people in excess of licensed capacity.



Faruk Hossain Sikder, Assistant Director of Fire Service, said the rescue operation is being hampered due to rough weather and strong currents in the river.



"The locals recovered the body of Kohinur from the river soon after the accident and rescued Saleha, who later died at the upazila health complex," he said.



Family members of the dead and missing passengers gathered on the riverbanks and wept as they came to know that their loved ones either died or remained missing.



When the bodies were recovered, a shadow of shock engulfed the whole area.



A nine-member probe committee headed by Zakir Hossain, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Barisal, was formed to investigate the incident.



Meanwhile, Gazi Mohammad Saifuzzaman, Deputy Commissioner of Barisal, announced Tk 10,000 as compensation for each of the victim's family.
The former Knight Oil Tools employee whose threats to an ex-coworker broke the case wide open will testify against his alleged co-conspirators.

"[Russell Manuel] does look forward to atonement by assisting in the prosecution of the law enforcement agents and businessman involved in this torrid affair, Lafayette criminal defense attorney Pat Magee says of his client.

Photo by Robin May

It is possible  even likely, some would argue  that had former Knight Oil Tools employee Russell Manuel kept his mouth shut last year, law enforcement may never have known about the conspiracy to plant illegal drugs on Bryan Knight in 2014 and have him arrested.

Now Manuel, who pleaded guilty late last week to his role in the 2014 plot, will have an opportunity to tell a jury exactly what happened two years ago when he testifies against his alleged co-conspirators.

The case began to unravel in March 2015 when Manuel, after being fired from the company for reasons that have not yet been publicly disclosed, threatened with physical harm Knight Oil Tools IT Director Barret Lemaire, whom Manuel learned had failed to delete some files associated with what was referred to as "the operation." The operation was the name of the aforementioned cockamamie scheme to get Bryan Knight in enough of a legal quandary that he would stop causing trouble for his older brother, who at the time was running the family-owned oilfield service company.

At Manuel's direction a year before, Lemaire had placed an order for the vehicle tracking device and magnetic box that law enforcement officials now say was later filled with drugs and planted under Bryans car to frame him.

Lemaire, who says in court documents Manuel threatened him and his family if Lemaire talked, was never charged in the case, and it remains unclear what he knew about the scheme and when he knew it.

Within days of the threat, however, a frightened Lemaire did indeed turn to law enforcement officials, who began piecing together the riveting made-for-TV drama. Allegedly Manuel had worked closely with Bryans older brother, oil patch millionaire Mark Knight, the longtime top executive of the company and respected businessman, and two law enforcement officials to set Bryan up for the 2014 arrest. The drug possession charges against Bryan were never pursued because the flimsy, questionable case against him eventually fell apart, even though he was a suspected drug user who had been on law enforcement's radar for some time, according to a local police department official. For starters, among the relatively small number of drugs police found were 25 Lortab pills; Bryan Knight had a prescription for Lortab.

All along, Bryan insisted that he'd been framed, mentioning immediately to the officer who pulled him over the family strife and explaining that he'd just left a mediation session in the Oil Center over the direction of the company, according to information later revealed in Manuel's arrest affidavit (though not included in Bryan's arrest affidavit). Bryan, according to his own arrest affidavit, also told law enforcement that he had recently loaned his Cadillac Escalade to a friend and thought the friend may have set him up.

With the help of his criminal defense attorney, Pat Magee of Voorhies and Labbe law firm, last year Russell Manuel was able to secure from the district attorney derivative use immunity, according to Kip Judice, who led the investigation for the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Department before leaving to become Duson's police chief. By way of that agreement, any information Manuel provided independent of what investigators had already been able to gather could not be used to build the criminal case against him.

Russell Manuel

Late last week Manuel  whom the man he threatened had referred to as Mark Knights right-hand-man and henchman  and his attorney tied a bow around the agreement, securing Manuel's get-of-jail-free card via his promise of cooperation and guilty plea to conspiring to commit corrupting influence, intimidating a witness and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methadone and hydrocodone.

Manuel's 10-year prison sentence was suspended by 15th Judicial District Court Judge David Smith, and he was given supervised probation in exchange for his testimony against Mark Knight, former Lafayette Parish Sheriffs Deputy Jason Kinch and ex-Louisiana State Trooper Corey Jackson. Like Manuel, all three were indicted in July 2015 by a Lafayette Parish grand jury.

Manuel will now help prosecutors prove what they allege  that Mark Knight paid all three men to plant drugs on Bryan and have him falsely arrested.

Russ is sorry for his actions as they pertain to Bryan Knight, and he regrets his lapse in judgment, Magee tells ABiz. He does look forward to atonement by assisting in the prosecution of the law enforcement agents and businessman involved in this torrid affair. Mark Knight, Kinch and Jackson are charged with racketeering, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years and a fine of up to $1 million.

The Advocate reported Thursday that the next scheduled hearing in the case is Feb. 16. No trial dates have been set.

Bryan Knight has since filed a federal lawsuit against his brother, Manuel, Jackson and Kinch, alleging they violated his civil rights.

Learn more about the bizarre Knight saga, which wreaked financial havoc on the behemoth oil services company and reads like a soap opera script, by clicking here.
USGS/Wikimedia

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it's focusing conservation programs along the Gulf of Mexico in a $328 million plan to help recovery from the 2010 oil spill.

Undersecretary Robert Bonnie says the agency will use that focus through 2018 as it helps coastal producers plan improvements to improve water quality and improve coastal ecosystems under several Farm Bill programs.

The oil spill tie-in is a new twist to existing programs and will bring in a broader audience, Louisiana State University AgCenter Associate Vice President Rogers Leonard said in an email. Gulf Coast farmers will be interested in the amount of money available, he said.

Bonnie described the plan Monday at a Mississippi timber plot where the owner has worked with USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service to help improve downstream water quality.

"We're working side-by-side with farmers, ranchers and forest landowners to improve their operations while taking care of natural resources in the region," Bonnie said. "With most of the land in the region privately owned, working lands on the Gulf Coast are pivotal to the region's recovery."

The money covers five programs: $129 million under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, $102.9 million through the Conservation Stewardship Program, $57.1 million from the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, $29.6 million as Targeted Funding in Priority Watersheds and Landscapes, and $9.3 million under the Regional Conservation Partnership Program.

It includes $11.3 million to restore longleaf pine forests, $3.8 million to improve water quality and enhance habitat in Florida's Everglades, $3.2 million to reduce runoff in nine watersheds around the Gulf, and $460,000 to plant wildflowers and native grasses that would attract bees, monarch butterflies and other pollinators in Alabama, Florida and Texas.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday that he supports an immediate infusion of flood aid to Louisiana as part of a temporary government-wide spending bill that's the top item on the congressional agenda before lawmakers leave Washington for the fall campaign.

The bill also provides more than $1 billion in long-delayed funding to battle the Zika virus. Ryan predicted that negotiations on the measure will be wrapped up this week, though the pace of talks has been slow and Wednesday produced no visible breakthroughs.

President Barack Obama has heeded calls by Louisiana's governor and congressional delegation and requested $2.6 billion to help Louisiana rebuild from last month's devastating floods. Ryan didn't volunteer how much money he supports. But the Republican speaker is opposed to a key demand of Democratic negotiators: money to help Flint, Michigan, repair its lead-tainted water system.

The flood aid question is one of a handful of unresolved issues involving the stopgap funding bill, which would prevent a shutdown next week and keep the government running through Dec. 9.

Meanwhile, the Senate rejected a resolution to block the Obama administration from selling more than $1 billion worth of American-made weapons to Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. Lawmakers backing the measure, including Rand Paul, R-Ky., are critical of the kingdom's role in Yemen's civil war, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposed the resolution, which was killed by a 71-27 vote.

"I think it's important to the United States to maintain as good a relationship with Saudi Arabia as possible," McConnell said Tuesday.

The other big item on the Capitol Hill pre-election to-do list is an override vote on President Barack Obama's anticipated veto of legislation that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. Ryan predicted that "the votes are there for the override." The vote is expected next week.

The Zika-fighting portion of the pre-election spending bill is nearly complete. Republicans have dropped language to block affiliates of Planned Parenthood in Puerto Rico from receiving funding for prevention and treatment of Zika in the territory. Zika, which can cause grave birth defects, is often transmitted by sexual contact, and women are being advised to delay getting pregnant if they live in an area where Zika is widespread.

Negotiators on the measure hope a deal might be reached Wednesday, but negotiators have blown through several earlier deadlines.
"I'm not going to allow the oil and gas industry to decide who represents the state of Louisiana in litigation against the oil and gas industry."

Defending his administration's legal contract with a top fundraiser, Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday accused Louisiana's attorney general of fabricating politically motivated reasons for rejecting the lawyer's contract to represent the state in litigation against oil and gas companies over coastal wetland loss.

Edwards said Attorney General Jeff Landry either doesn't understand or is intentionally misrepresenting the contact that his administration signed with Natchitoches attorney Taylor Townsend, a former lawmaker and top fundraiser for the governor.

"Anybody who suggests that I'm picking my friends in order to do this rather than looking for the most experienced, most qualified people to bring this litigation, I would just tell you I dispute that," Edwards said during a press briefing in his Capitol office.

Edwards claimed the oil and gas industry is financially backing other critics of the contract.

"I'm not going to allow the oil and gas industry to decide who represents the state of Louisiana in litigation against the oil and gas industry," he said.

Before Edwards took office in January, Cameron, Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes sued oil and gas companies in state courts over environmental damage that the suits attributed to drilling and dredging work. Vermilion Parish filed a fourth such lawsuit earlier this year.

Edwards said his administration will be taking a more active role in the litigation.

"It's about the survival of our state and restoring our coast," he said. "I don't think anybody  not even the oil and gas industry  denies that they've caused unrepaired coastal damages. In fact, their own studies show it."

But the governor, a Democrat, said the state's Republican attorney general lacks the authority to reject his pick of lawyers.

In a letter to the governor's office dated Sept. 6, Landry's chief deputy counsel rejected the contract as "unacceptable on multiple grounds" and said the scope of it is "entirely too vague and overly broad." The letter also claimed the contract created "an illegal and unconstitutional contingency fee arrangement" for Townsend.

Edwards said there's nothing "untoward" or "improper" about the contract.

"And if I were trying to enrich these lawyers, why would I in the contract have a $225 hourly fee when the amount approved by the Legislature and in the law that governs this is $500 an hour?" he asked.

Edwards said he is willing to meet with Landry to discuss and possibly resolve their differences.

"But it's going to require some good-faith effort on his part, I believe, to not cry politics every time something doesn't happen just the way he wants it to," Edwards added.
Pre-purchase property inspection is a relatively new thing in the United Kingdom. Its not something that most people have heard about, but it has become increasingly popular over the last few years with the rise in property prices and increased demand for high quality homes.

What are the benefits of pre-purchase building inspection? What can you expect to find out when you pay someone else to inspect your home before you buy it? And what should you look for during an inspection?

Many people want to know if theyre buying a house thats been well maintained or if its had any serious problems. If youve found a place on the market that seems attractive, but then discover some issues after moving in, you may not be as excited about buying it as you thought you were.

Its important to do your due diligence when looking at properties. A lot goes into making a property appealing to potential buyers, from the landscaping to the flooring to the kitchen appliances. The same applies when inspecting a property  there are many things that need checking over to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Here are some of the benefits of performing a pre-purchase inspection:

You get to see exactly what will happen to your money

When you go shopping for a new car, youll probably be shown several different models. You might even be shown one that looks like a great value, but doesnt fit around all of the extra features that you want. When it comes time to actually buy the vehicle, however, you wont have seen how your money will be spent on it once you drive it off the showroom floor.

Likewise, when you shop for a new home, you dont really know what youre getting yourself into until you move in. In order to get a feel for whether the home youre considering is what you want, you normally have to spend quite a bit of time inside it. This allows you to learn more about everything that youre going to be spending your hard-earned cash on.

A pre-purchase building inspection gives you much the same kind of experience without having to spend thousands of dollars. Since youre paying for the service, you can expect to see exactly what youre paying for, instead of just seeing a vague idea of what you might end up with.

You find out about potential major repairs

Some buildings are very expensive to maintain, which means that owners often neglect them for the sake of saving money. While youre paying for a building inspection, youre also paying for a professional who knows how to spot signs of trouble and repair work that needs doing.

If you notice that a particular area of your new home needs fixing right away, you can call in an expert to take care of it quickly. If you find that theres something wrong with your boiler, you wont have to wait weeks for a plumber to come over and fix it. Instead, youll have access to a solution immediately.

You can save hundreds of pounds by finding out about potential problems early on

One of the biggest expenses when you first buy a home is the cost of moving in. Many people dont realize this until its too late. Buying a home involves not only paying for the actual house, but also for moving costs, furniture, and other items that have to be moved along with the home.

Having a good idea ahead of time of what youre likely to encounter can help you avoid these kinds of costs. If you know youll need to replace the plumbing system, for example, youll be able to put together a budget for the expense and plan accordingly.

You can protect your investment by finding out if the homes been well cared for

While there are plenty of people who think that houses always look better when theyre newly built, youd be surprised at how well maintained older residences can still look nice. Sometimes, though, those homes need some additional maintenance to keep them looking their best.

This could involve repairs that arent so noticeable or small improvements that you wouldnt consider otherwise. Even worse, some houses have fallen into disrepair without anyone noticing. This is why having a professional perform a building inspection prior to purchasing a home is such a big benefit.

Not only will it give you insight into the state of the property, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing youre not getting taken advantage of. As long as youre aware of the potential pitfalls, youll have less reason to worry about the state of your new home.

You can use information gathered during a building inspection to negotiate a lower price

If youre worried about buying a home because you suspect that it may need extensive renovation work, you may already have a rough idea of how much work youll need to do to bring it up to scratch. That knowledge can come in handy if you decide to buy the home.

You can use all of the details that you gather during a building inspection to present a realistic picture of what the home is worth to prospective buyers. If a potential buyer thinks that the home is worth more than what you paid for it, you can try negotiating a lower price.

You can sell your home faster and for more money

If you decide to list your home on the market soon after buying it, youll need to price it accurately in order to attract buyers. But if youve already done a thorough building inspection, youll know exactly what work is needed and what the current market conditions are.

In other words, youll be able to make a more accurate estimate of the amount of money youve invested in the home and how much its worth. If you find that youre selling your house for close to its full market value, you can use this information to convince the potential buyer that your home is worth the asking price.

Even if youre planning to stay in the home for a while before you decide to sell, the fact that you did a thorough building inspection will give you more confidence when listing it. Prospective buyers will know exactly what theyre paying for.

Your home will hold its value longer

As mentioned earlier, the value of a home depends heavily upon the condition of the building itself. If your home is in bad shape, potential buyers wont be interested in buying it. On the other hand, if youve performed a thorough building inspection and know what sort of repairs are necessary, you can offer your prospective buyer a compelling reason to invest in your property.

When you buy a home, youre essentially agreeing to have it inspected periodically to ensure that it stays in top shape. Not only does this allow you to avoid expensive repairs down the road, but it can also increase the value of your home.

You can make smart decisions about property investments

Buying real estate isnt as simple as just driving a couple of minutes to pick up a house. There are lots of considerations involved, ranging from location to cost. The same is true when youre investing in property.

If you find a house that meets all of your requirements, youll want to make sure that you have a solid understanding of where it stands with regards to the rest of the market. If you havent spent enough time researching the area, you could inadvertently end up with a bad deal.

There are lots of resources available online that can help you determine the overall level of competition in your area. They can also help you figure out if there are any properties that meet your requirements that you didnt know about.

If you own rental property, you can use the information to identify tenants who might cause damage

If you own rental property and youve noticed that certain tenants consistently cause damage, you can use the results of a building inspection to identify them. You can then contact them directly to let them know that youre watching them closely and that you dont appreciate the problem theyre causing.

They might start taking better care of their homes, which would be good news for everyone. It could also be the case that youll find out that theyre responsible for previous damages that werent caught during a previous visit.

You can make smarter decisions about hiring contractors

If youve hired contractors to build or repair your home, you might want to ask them for references. However, unless you perform a thorough building inspection, you might not know exactly what to look for.

For instance, maybe you only checked the roof for leaks or the walls for cracks. You might not have looked underneath the foundation for anything that could cause a future issue. By performing a building inspection, you can ensure that you hire reputable contractors who will be trustworthy with your money.

You can avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition

Of course, the main benefit of structural inspections perth is that it helps you avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition. Before you make the decision to buy a home, you should do whatever you can to find out about the state of the building.

You can also ask your realtor about what sorts of inspections are typically recommended. Some agents say that its standard practice to check the heating system, the roof, the electrical wiring, and the floors. Others will tell you that they recommend that you check the entire structure.

Either way, if you choose to hire an inspector, youll find out exactly what needs to be fixed and how much it will cost to do so.

As a result, it can be concluded that a pre-purchase building inspection is highly important for the buyers because it provides transparency regarding the current conditions of the structure. Additionally, the building owner is made aware of any upgrades or repairs that are required, which could lead to a fair deal throughout the purchasing and selling process.
President Joe Biden has decided to ban Russian oil imports, toughening the toll on Russia's economy in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine. The United States generally imports about 100,000 barrels a day from Russia, only about 5% of Russia's crude oil exports, according to Rystad Energy. Last year, roughly 8% of U.S. imports of oil and petroleum products came from Russia. Gas prices have been rising for weeks due to the conflict and in anticipation of potential sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The U.S. national average for a gallon of gasoline soared 45 cents a gallon in the past week and topped $4.06 on Monday, according to auto club AAA. Should the US ban Russian oil imports over Ukraine war?

You voted:
The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now.

Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market.

In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender.

India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex.

Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted.

But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted?

Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner.

If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems.

I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now.

I want more variation in masturbation

I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own.

If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end.

What is sex toys for Indian?

Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation.

It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms.

They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable.

Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner.

The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner.

It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past.

In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping.

Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order.

In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing.

Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome.

Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own.

But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance.

More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around.

Sextoy situation in India

Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years.

In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India.

Mumbai

Kolkata

Bangalore

Delhi

Chennai

Hyderabad

These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India.

In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well.

If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too.

If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it.

What are Sextoys for beginner?

Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms.

Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy.

I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion.

I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy.

If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma.

Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it.

Advantages of using sextoy for Indians

There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians

You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways.

Can have stimulating sex

Can develop new sexual zones

If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern.

However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways.

You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation.

Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever.

There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure.

This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it.

When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems.

It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms).

For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles

[Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou...

Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India.

Sextoy for beginner men in India

So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners.

For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men!

The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men

Masturbator

Cock rings

Love Doll

Sex Lubricants

Toys for the prostate

Lets check each one in detail.

Masturbator

The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products.

It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands.

Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands.

They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.)

Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much.

Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! !

Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa   SEXToys India PR  (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018

Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood.

If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here

Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ...

[For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien...

Cock Ring

A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis.

It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow.

It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber.

In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection.

Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction.

It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it.

Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time.

Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function.

Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy.

You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect.

[Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat...

Love Doll

Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex.

There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women.

Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price.

The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true.

You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste.

There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice.

You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls.

If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here

Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to...

Sex lubricants

Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules.

It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution.

Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse.

There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent.

Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent.

If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here.

What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many...

Toys for the Prostate

Another sextoy for men is prostate toys.

The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line.

Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men.

Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men.

What is the prostate?

The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm.

You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus.

By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms.

Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.)

The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation.

Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure.

sextoy for beinner women in India

The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy.

The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy.

Vibrator.

Dildo

Electric Masserger

Lets check out what each one is in detail.

If you want to check out womens toys, click here.

[BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm...

Vibrators

A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator.

Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy.

It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy.

Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women.

For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators.

Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex.

Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself.

This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual.

Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men.

When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons.

Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most...

Dildo

A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis.

It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass.

A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it.

They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well.

It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device.

A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo.

Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands.

For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis.

This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one.

To learn more about dildo, please click here.

What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th...

Electric Masserger

A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores.

It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low.

Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels.

Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation.

It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure.

For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm.

It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out.

If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager?

To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here.

What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th...

How to choose a sextoy for Indian

Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one.

Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points:  Does the size fit you (the partner)?

Does the size fit you (your partner)?

Is the environment able to produce sound without problems?

Price range

First of all, the choice of size is quite important.

Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women.

For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage.

Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems.

Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise.

If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level.

Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it.

Finally, there is the price range.

The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest.

Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy.

Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy?

I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance.

For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics.

If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out.

How to buy sextoys in India

The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping.

For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below.

Sextoy is one of them.

Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping.

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SPRINGFIELD  In many ways, Gov. Bruce Rauners Tuesday question-and-answer session had the feel of a typical news conference.

The first-term governor made an announcement, in this case the appointment of an executive director to oversee Illinois 2018 bicentennial celebration, and followed it up by fielding a series of questions, often steering the answers back to some of his go-to subjects: the burden of high property taxes, the need for better funding and relief from state mandates for local schools, and the importance of term limits and legislative redistricting reform to restoring faith in state government.

But rather than standing in front of a bank of TV cameras and a half-dozen reporters, Rauner was seated in front of a webcam in his Capitol office, addressing a few hundred viewers on Facebook Live. It was the governors first use of the live-streaming service, which became available to all Facebook users this spring, and he promised more to come.

The event allowed Rauner to bypass the traditional media to speak directly with the audience. Experts say its a strategy that brings both potential benefits and possible pitfalls for someone facing low approval ratings.

Nathan Carpenter, assistant director of convergent media at the Illinois State University School of Communication, said holding an event like this sends a signal that Rauner doesnt feel his message is getting across to the public and that hes not getting the kind of news coverage hed like.

You dont have to look far for evidence to support that assessment.

During a July conversation with the editorial board of The (Champaign) News-Gazette, Rauner vented his frustration with what he sees as the news medias failure to convey his message about his turnaround agenda to the public.

I underestimated how much most of the standard media just doesn't care about this and ignores it and won't send our message out, he told the newspaper. We've been too slow in creating our own media channels through social media and other outlets. We're doing that now.

Carpenter said one benefit for Rauner in doing things like answering questions from the public on Facebook is that it creates an image of transparency and draws a stark contrast with his chief political rival, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Chicago Democrat with no social media presence to speak of.

But thats also where the potential pitfalls come in, Carpenter said.

Because the questions were submitted ahead of time and screened by Rauners staff, it can prompt criticisms about the authenticity of the exchange, he said.

The purpose of live-streaming technology is to feed off of the audience, Carpenter said, but as Rauner responded to the pre-submitted questions, comments and questions posted in real time went unaddressed.

In this case, it becomes just another broadcasting tool, he said, and if you run counter to peoples expectations with how the medium works or counter to what are the norms for the medium, you can really turn off and frustrate a lot of users.

Chris Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, said efforts like this are an extension of the bully pulpit that comes with the governors office.

Anything he does is going to get covered, Mooney said. The governor, especially in the state of Illinois, is a big deal.

As for the format, Mooney said it would be a risky proposition for most politicians or public figures to field unscreened questions from an audience in real time.

Pope Francis could be flustered if he got the wrong question, he said.

A recording of the 26-minute event is online at facebook.com/govrauner.
CHARLOTTE, N.C.  Police officers gave a black man multiple warnings to drop a handgun before one of the officers opened fire and killed him, Charlotte's police chief said Wednesday, hours after protesters and police clashed in unrest that saw tractor-trailers looted and set on fire.

More than a dozen officers were injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. Authorities had to use tear gas to disperse the protests in North Carolina's largest city, which joins Milwaukee, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, on the list of U.S. cities that erupted in violence over the death of black men at the hands of police.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said during a news conference that 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was shot because he was armed and posed a threat. But a woman who said she was Scott's daughter posted a video on Facebook soon after the shooting, saying that her father, who had an unspecified disability, was holding a book, not a gun.

"My daddy is dead," the woman says, screaming and crying on the video.

The police chief said the black officer who shot Scott was a plainclothes officer wearing a vest with "Police" on it. The officer did not have a body camera, but three uniformed officers who engaged the suspect were required to wear body cameras.

The North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urged Charlotte police to release any footage of the shooting, but Putney said he couldn't because of an ongoing investigation.

The ACLU noted that a new law restricting release of such footage doesn't take effect until Oct. 1. That new law says footage from police body or dashboard cameras can't be released publicly without a court order.

The chief said officers were searching for a suspect when they saw Scott exit a vehicle with a handgun. He said the officers told him to drop the gun and that he got out of the vehicle a second time still carrying the gun.

"It's time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the story's a little bit different as to how it's been portrayed so far, especially through social media," he said.

His comments were an apparent reference to the profanity-laced, hourlong Facebook video, which was taken down Wednesday. In the video, the woman appears to be at the shooting scene, which is surrounded by yellow police tape, as she yells at officers.

The woman did not respond to Facebook messages, and her claims could not immediately be verified by The Associated Press. It also was not clear if she witnessed the shooting.

The black officer who shot Scott, Brently Vinson, has been placed on administrative leave as is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Police said the protests broke out around 7 p.m. Tuesday, about three hours after the shooting. TV footage showed dozens of protesters on Interstate 85 apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire on the highway, shutting the highway down.

The police chief said 16 officers suffered mostly minor injuries and police cars were damaged after people began throwing rocks.

By 5 a.m. Wednesday, the streets were quiet and I-85 was moving again. Broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance of a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.

Detectives recovered a gun at the scene and were interviewing witnesses.

"The officers gave loud, clear verbal commands, which were also heard by many of the witnesses," the police chief said.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm while B.J. Murphy, an outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam, called for an economic boycott of the city. He said if "black lives don't matter, black money shouldn't matter."

The protest in Charlotte came hours after hundreds of people rallied outside Tulsa police headquarters, calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Shelby's attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he were carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department was in regular contact with Charlotte officials.

"These tragic incidents have once again left Americans with feelings of sorrow, anger and uncertainty," she said at the International Bar Association Conference in Washington. "They have once again highlighted - in the most vivid and painful terms - the real divisions that still persist in this nation between law enforcement and communities of color."
The last few years have not been kind to John A. Logan College in Carterville.

John A. Logan has long been viewed as a crown jewel in Illinois community college system in terms of facilities, programs, community involvement and educational opportunities. And, through the years, John A. Logan College has been viewed as a stellar corporate citizen, playing host to health conferences and the Southern Illinois Celebration of National Hunting and Fishing Days.

The school's reputation has been sullied in the past few years as the result internal and external influences, including allegations of nepotism.

Like all other institutions of higher learning, John A. Logan College has been hit hard by Illinois budget woes. The state's financial crunch has forced Logan to make difficult choices regarding class choices and laying off faculty and staff.

Those layoffs resulted in student protests last year.

Earlier this summer, the John A. Logan College Board of Trustees announced Illinois stopgap budget funding would be insufficient to see the school through the 2016-17 term.

Predictably, tuition increases and falling enrollment have resulted. To be fair, most of these issues have been beyond the schools control.

But, John A. Logan has also suffered some self-inflicted black eyes.

Former student trustee Brandi Husch filed a complaint with the Attorney Generals office last year alleging intimidation by board members during an executive session. The colleges response: Ms. Husch had violated the sanctity of an executive session.

And, there was the snafu resulting in the college being stripped of $1.7 million in tuition reimbursement tied to the use of the Community Health Education Complex.

JALC was back in the news last week when it was announced that Glenn Poshard had been named to the schools board of directors. Poshard was appointed to finish out the term of Bill Alstat, who died earlier this summer.

Poshards appointment isn't a silver bullet. John A. Logan, like all Illinois institutions of higher learning, still faces troubled financial times. On the other hand, the appointment appears to be a positive step for the beleaguered school.

As former president of Southern Illinois University, from 2006 to 2014, Poshard brings a wealth experience to the board. Poshard joins Ray Hancock, former John A. Logan College president, on the board of trustees. Having two board members with practical knowledge of the day-to-day workings of an institution of higher learning should be invaluable.

And, Poshard is something of an outsider at the school  something many in the region view as a major plus. Although he's certainly familiar with John A. Logan College, its mission and its importance to the community, there dont appear to be any intimate links to the institution or the board.

As a former university president, senator and congressman, Poshard won't be intimidated by his newcomer status.

Finally, political connections that come from serving as a state senator and U.S. congressman cant be overlooked. Although its been more than a decade since Poshard served in the U.S. Congress, Poshard still has contacts at the state and federal level.

Poshards appointment should be a benefit to the college and the community at large.
The adage is that neither rain nor any other weather can stop the U.S. Postal Service. The same can be said of Branchville and its famous Raylrode Daze Festivul.

Few of South Carolinas celebrated festivals can match the tradition and longevity of Raylrode Daze  a reunion that is taking place during the last full weekend of September for the 47th year. The big days are upcoming  and it wont matter about the weather forecast.

Consider the past.

In 1989, 27 years ago, Hurricane Hugo delivered its blow to South Carolina. It was a time of recovery after the overnight storm of Sept. 20-21. Many people were without power. Damage in Branchville and surroundings was very real.

But the festival, albeit in an abbreviated and different form, went on anyway that Saturday.

Call it the spirit of Raylrode Daze, that kinship that makes the festival one of the largest and most popular in what is a sea of festivals in the state.

Fast forward to July 18, 1995. In the early morning hours, tragedy struck in Branchville when fire ravaged the historic railroad depot that is the symbol of the town's claim to fame as "The World's Oldest Railroad Junction."

Again, even the loss of the festival's very symbol did not spell demise for Raylrode Daze. Thanks to the leadership and continuing involvement of a long line of Branchville citizens, rebuilding ensued and the festival went on that September.

Another huge test came in March 2008 when a tornado went through the town. The twister left major destruction, including at the festivals center, Branch Junction. But by the time for Raylrode Daze in September, even though rebuilding and repair were not complete, the show had to go on.

Branchville is not going to miss Raylrode Daze. The town and its people are proud of their festival and their railroad history, which began in 1832 when the South Carolina Railroads tracks reached the settlement. It became the worlds first railroad junction when the company extended tracks that paralleled the Indian trails to the west and north. The western route reached Hamburg, a small town outside of Augusta. The other track went north to Orangeburg and Columbia.

Today Branchville is not daily the hub of activity it came to be more than 150 years ago via the railroad, but if you want to experience a festival with the hometown feel of a reunion, complete with lots of people who want to be part of it, check out Raylrode Daze this weekend.
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CARROLTON, TX  Thomson Reuters today announced the results of its summer-long fundraising campaign benefitting the American Heart Association (AHA), which culminated with the AHA Heart Walk in Dallas on Sept. 10. Since June, the team of over 1,000 employees based in the companys Carrollton, Texas headquarters, organized and participated in more than 27 separate fundraising events and activities in support of AHA.

Our outstanding team in Carrollton activated in force to far surpass our original fundraising goal of $100,000, said Brian Peccarelli, president of the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters. Heart disease touches every one of us directly or indirectly, and its up to each of us to do our part to bring an end to it by supporting the education and research efforts of AHA.

This years fundraising efforts included auctioning off of coveted parking spots; a karaoke contest; a school pride contest; a heart-healthy cooking contest; snack sales; $5 shorts and flip flop Fridays; and donations in exchange for professional headshots.

This years contribution amount, which currently stands at $145,960, placed Thomson Reuters among the Top 5 local fundraising companies ahead of the Dallas AHA Heart Walk.

Since Thomson Reuters launched its partnership with AHA in 2013, the company has contributed more than $236,000 to the non-profit. Last year, the Carrollton teams efforts yielded more than $61,000 in donations to AHA, exceeding the 2015 goal of $50,000.

Thomson Reuters is the second-largest software provider in the DFW area; the companys Carrollton campus is home to operations and support teams for areas of its corporate functions and business units, including Tax & Accounting, Legal, and Finance & Risk.

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the worlds leading source of news and information for professional markets. Our customers rely on us to deliver the intelligence, technology and expertise they need to find trusted answers. The business has operated in more than 100 countries for more than 100 years. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges. For more information, visit www.thomsonreuters.com.

CONTACT

Laura Rojo-Eddy

Public Relations Manager

Tel: +1 972 250 8556

Email: laura.rojo-eddy@thomsonreuters.com
Ramblings of a badly aged Baby Boomer who went from Rebel Without a Cause to Bozo Without a Clue in, seemingly, the same afternoon.
By Azertac





Azerbaijans Energy Minister, Commissioner of the national section at Astana EXPO-2017 Natig Aliyev, who is in Astana to attend a meeting of the Azerbaijan-Kazakhstan Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, has met chairman of the Board of Astana EXPO2017 Akhmetzhan Yesimov.





At the meeting the sides discussed prospects for the development of relations between the two countries.





Natig Aliyev provided an insight into the organization of Azerbaijans pavilion at the EXPO-2017 exhibition.





The Azerbaijani Minister described the three-month exhibition as an important event in terms of demonstrating Kazakhstans potential.
By Azernews





By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijans state energy giant SOCAR has not abandoned any of its planned projects, despite the falling oil prices in the world market.

President of SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev announced about this, while addressing the event dedicated to the Day of Oil Workers in Azerbaijan.

One of such projects is modernization of Baku Oil Refinery Plant named after Heydar Aliyev. We are intended to continue implementation of the project and carry out reconstruction of four rigs. We are planning to construct 12 additional rigs, while capacity of the refinery will reach the level of 7.5 million tons per year, he said.

Abdullayev emphasized that projects realized by SOCAR are expected to yield an income worth several billion of dollars.

Gradual reconstruction and modernization plan, which is expected to be continued until 2019-2020 includes implementation of technical servicing operations and analysis of conditions of equipment.

Catalytic cracking, primary processing, coking and catalytic reforming facilities have been commissioned, following the successful implementation of maintenance operations at the refinery.

Heydar Aliyev Oil Refinery, which is engaged in the production of light petroleum products, is processing 21 out of 24 grades of Azerbaijani crude and 15 different petroleum products.

The plant completely meets the entire demand for petroleum products in the country, while 45 percent of its petroleum products are exported.

Continuously declining oil prices, which are believed to have been triggered by oversupply and glut in the market, hit many major energy companies of the world, forcing them to cut down some expenses and take certain measures to maintain their financial strength.

SOCAR has also identified a number of measures and pursued a belt-tightening policy directing financial resources to more lucrative areas where expenditures are low, while trying not to harm the company's technical activities.

The volume of proven oil reserves of the country currently stands at approximately 2 billion tons, while the volume of gas reserves amount to 2.6 trillion cubic meters. Forecasted volumes stand at 4.5 million tons and 5.4 tcm of oil and gas respectively.
By Azertac





"AZAD Systems Co" production branch of the Ministry of Defense Industry has presented "Zarba" unmanned aerial vehicles which has a modern intelligence element base and a tactical pernicious attack system.





President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev attended the event.
By Azernews





By Rashid Shirinov

French President Francois Hollande has expressed a willingness to host the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan, in the framework of the negotiation process on the settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, RIA Novosti stated.

Hollande announced about this in his letter to Sargsyan in connection with the Independence Day of Armenia.

Let me reaffirm my commitment aimed at a just and stable settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations. I am ready to host a meeting in Paris to discuss measures for the advancement of this extremely lengthy conflict, Hollande noted.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia still controls fifth part of Azerbaijan's territory and rejects implementing four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.
By Azernews





By Laman Ismayilova

Landslide zones in Azerbaijan will become more active due to the expected rainfalls.

"In general, 25-26 percent of the country's territory is favorable for occurrence of landslides. The relative activation of landslide areas is being observed today. However, in case of precipitation, the situation will get worse", Deputy Director of the Institute of Geography Elbrus Alizade said in his interview with echo.az.

Areas that are prone to landslide hazards in Azerbaijan include such regions as Ismayilli, Shamakhi, Shabran, Khizi, Siyezen, Guba, Gusar and Lankaran.

Baku also has its landslide zones, including Masazir, Bail, Zikh, Hovsan, Yeni Gunashli, Ahmadli. Now the landslide process is active in Zikh area.

"Lokbatan, Gurd Gapisi, Sulutepe, Sangachal and their surroundings, as well as Alat are potentially risky landslide areas. The activation of landslide processes is a quite natural. It always rains in autumn which leads to the increasing water level in rivers. Moreover, as a result of heavy rainfall the soil is saturated with moisture, which creates a favorable situation for the activation of landslides", said Alizadeh.

He also stressed that about 58 percent of country's territory is mountainous. So, this problem is actual for Azerbaijan.

"About 350 settlements in the country are located in danger zones. In Baku the main factor of landslides is associated with human activity. Landslides appear due to road construction without using of supporting structures, cattle grazing on the slopes as well as the construction of tourist facilities. It's necessary to take into account such factors as the risk of landslides, and to consult with geologists prior to construction", he added.

The number of areas that are prone to landslides in Azerbaijan has increased by four times in the past 24 years.

Landslides occur frequently in the foothills of Azerbaijan. Many landslide zones exist in Lerik, Yardimli, on Shamakhi Road, and in the Absheron Peninsula.

Scientists believe that people are behind 80 percent of the landslides due to agricultural activity, which increases the risk of landslides.
Fan Comment

You don't have to be a great player to be a great manager of Everton - but it helps

Paul Newton 21/09/2016

Nobody would argue that great players necessarily make great managers  the list of managerial casualties who used to be great players is too long for that. But at Everton

A quick survey of the last 50 years or so shows an interesting correlation between the player and the Everton manager he became

Harry Catterick (1961-73): We cant really judge Cattericks ability as a player because he signed for Everton age 18 in 1937 and we all know what happened 2 years later. During the war he played 71 games as centre forward for Everton and scored 55 goals, so he clearly had potential. However because of the war he was unable to make his league debut until 1946, by which time he was 26. After this he went on to make 59 appearances for Everton, scoring 19 goals. He was certainly a great Everton manager, winning 2 first division titles and the FA Cup once. Arguably he is second only to the great HK, of whom more later. Verdict: Player ? Manager: Great.

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Billy Bingham (1973-77): The peaks of Binghams playing career were playing 86 times for Everton 1961-63, during which he scored 23 times, and his 56 appearances for his native Northern Ireland. As a player he would fall into the category of good, but not great. As manager of Everton he was ultimately a disappointment  league positions of 7th and 4th were followed by 11th place in his third season. (11th in his third season? Where have I heard that before?) Verdict: Player: Good. Manager: Good?

Gordon Lee (1977-81): Lee spent most of his playing career at Aston Villa, where he made 118 appearances during 1955-66, a good steady professional. The peak of his accomplishments as Everton manager was a 3rd place finish in the league, season 1977-78. There were also several good cup runs, but his final 2 seasons were disappointments, finishing 19th and 15th, resulting in the sack. Verdict: Player: Good. Manager: Not so good.

Howard Kendall (1981-87; 1990-93; 1997-98): Our most successful manager ever. He built an almost entirely new team which was one of the finest of the 1980s. Two league titles, a second place, one FA Cup, one European Cup Winners Cup, several cup final appearances, only prevented from greater heights by the ban on English teams playing in Europe. But what of Kendall the player? The Kendall-Ball-Harvey axis was one of the greatest ever to grace Goodison Park. Inexplicably, he never played for England  but then at international level so much depends on who else happens to be around at the time. As a club player, and certainly for Everton, he fits the great category. Verdict: Player: Great. Manager: Great.

Colin Harvey (1987-90): Again, obviously one of the Kendall-Ball-Harvey midfield. This in itself classifies him as great where Evertonians are concerned. Like Kendall, the lack of international call-ups is strange  just one appearance for England. As Everton manager he tried to arrest decline after the departure of Kendall. His record is respectable  league positions of 4th, 8th and 6th, although by the Everton standard of the time this was poor. He also took the club to the FA Cup Final of 1989, about which the less said the better. Verdict: Player: Great. Manager: Good.

Mike Walker (1994): The peak of Walkers playing career came at Colchester United, where he was inducted into their Hall of Fame. It is a pity for Everton that he didnt stay there. A contender for our worst manager ever, he took Everton to the brink of relegation, from which we were only rescued by that famous victory over Wimbledon in the last game of the 1994 season. Verdict: Player: Average. Manager: Poor.

Joe Royle (1994-97): Another player like Kendall and Harvey who is viewed as a great by Evertonians even if he isnt seen as such elsewhere. 102 goals in 232 appearances is some return. He also did a great job for the club as manager, rescuing us from the horrors of Walkers reign with his dogs of war, and winning the FA Cup in 1995. Verdict: Player: Great. Manager: Great.

Walter Smith (!998-2002): Hardly a great player, Smith spent his entire career in the Scottish League with Dundee United and Dumbarton. Hardly a great manager for Everton either. His time was spent selling top players to balance the books  in the case of Duncan Ferguson, against his will - and fighting relegation. To be fair, it cant have been easy working under the circumstances at the club at the time. Verdict: Player: Average. Manager: Poor.

David Moyes (2002-13): A good professional as both player and manager, but hardly a great. He steadied the ship after Smith and achieved consistently respectable league positions, but he was never able to get success against the top clubs of the time. As season followed season it was as if he had gone as far as he could go, and by 2013 the time was ripe for him to leave. Verdict: Player: Average. Manager: Good.

Roberto Martinez (2013-16): Like Moyes, a good pro as a player and nothing more. And as a manager? A good first season, which we now know was very much built on the defensive solidity established by Moyes. After that, the slide  only arrested by his dismissal, which should have come much sooner. Verdict: Player: Average. Manager: Poor.

Ronald Koeman (2016-): Undoubtedly a great player. 192 appearances for Barcelona, scoring 67 goals (and he wasnt even a striker!) says it all, not to mention 78 appearances for Holland. So, certainly a great player. But as an Everton manager? Early signs are good (apart from the Norwich result), but only time will tell  Verdict: Player: Great. Manager: ???

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A new initiative to encourage Bahraini and expatriate businessmen to reinvest their profits locally was has been launched to boost the national economy, reported the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication.



To read further, please visit GDNonline.






Oman's manufacturing sector, which has been helping power economic growth, create jobs and raise living standards, will be the focus of discussion at today's Inside Stories session organised by Ithraa, the sultanates inward investment and export promotion agency.



Manufacturing is the engine that drives innovation, it transforms research into new products and production processes that generate profits and make the world a better place. It has created new and vital industries and products ranging from PCs and mobile phones to biotechnology and solar power, said Ithraa.



Today, Oman is benefiting from a surge in manufacturing and production of world-class and highly sought after goods is soaring. Amongst them are batteries, plastic, marble, cables, fragrances, steel, hand-made chocolates, ceramics, womens fashion and precision engineering.



The Sultanates non-oil exports hit $8 billion up from $650 million in 2002 and locally produced goods are today exported to 140 countries worldwide, it said.



We see a promising future for Omani manufacturing. In fact, many believe Oman made products have the perfect trifecta of quality, safety and good value for money, said Taleb Al Makhmari, Ithraas acting director general of marketing and media and organiser of the annual Inside Stories initiative.



Given our geographic position and advantages in logistics, talent and infrastructure Omans manufacturers are well positioned to compete internationally. Our manufacturing sector is a truly global business that is essential to the long-term health of the Sultanates growing economy, explained Al Makhmari.



Generously supported by BP Oman, Bank Muscat, Al Wisal, Merge 104.8FM, Al Roya and Times of Oman, Ithraas Inside Stories initiative has been designed to discuss the opportunities and trends that are redefining what it means to be in, and start, a business today.



Held at Bank Muscats Head Office in Airport Heights, the session begins at 7:30 pm and will be moderated by Dr Wail Al Harrasi, corporate technology advisor, Petroleum Development Oman, and panelists include: Shadya Al Ismailiya, founder, Deema Oman; Nicolas Barakat, CEO, Octal; Eng Abdullah Al Wahaibi, business development manager, Voltamp Energy; and Shatha Abbas, director, The Nejd.



Along with examining the use of sensors, intelligent robots and big data analytics, the session will also consider the rise of middle class consumers in the emerging markets of Asia and Africa.



Research estimates that by 2030, Asia will represent 66 per cent of the global middle class population and 59 per cent of middle class consumption. In addition to Asia, the number of middle class households in 11 key Sub-Saharan African countries  excluding South Africa  are set to triple to 22 million by 2030. This offers Omani manufacturers huge export opportunities, pointed out Al Makhmari.



The session will also focus on the publics perception of manufacturing, one that still often involves large factories, long production lines and heavy machinery.



Rather than a dirty, dangerous and disappearing industry, Omani manufacturing must be seen as a mechanism for driving innovation. It is a sector that should be viewed as smart, safe, sustainable and surging. One that is attracting significant inward investment, powering exports and creating jobs, stressed Al Makhmari. - TradeArabia News Service












The UAEs role as a major trade gateway for Chinese businesses and investments coming into the region and expanding towards various European and African markets was stressed by a senior official.



Abdullah Bin Ahmed Al Saleh, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Economy for Foreign Trade and Industry, pointed out that solid economic relations exist between the UAE and China, which the UAE considers its second largest trading partner.



Al Saleh was speaking at a forum organised as part of the 5th China-Eurasia Expo which began yesterday and will run for six days until September 25 in Urumqi, the Capital of Chinas Xinjiang Province.



The forum dealt with investment and trade development opportunities offered by countries involved in the Belt and Road which focused on the textile and clothing sectors, in particular.



Al Saleh said the volume of trade exchange between the UAE and China, including oil and free zone trade, stood at around $54.8 billion in 2015, representing a 16 per cent annual increase over the past six years. He added that China topped the list of Dubai's trading partners at a value of approximately $1.2 billion during the first quarter of 2016.



Al Saleh said the UAE recognises the important role of the textile industry in supporting the UAEs economic growth and non-oil trade, providing job opportunities and increasing foreign currency earnings. He said the UAEs total textile trade was at around $15 billion in 2015 to top all Arab countries. The figure accounted for about 25 per cent of total Arab textile trade last year, with the UAE ranking 11th globally in textile imports with a 2.3 per cent share of total worldwide imports.



He further noted the importance of cooperating with China in this sector, as it exports a third of the world's textiles. China is the largest provider of such goods to the UAE, accounting for as much as 36.6 percent of the states total fabric imports. He also referred to the important role played by the Xinjiang region in support of this industry, which provides 60 percent of the total cotton crops produced by China.



Al Saleh emphasised the UAEs full commitment to actively contributing to the Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road initiatives. - TradeArabia News Service
Agility chief executive Tarek Sultan was named Industry CEO of the Year at the CEO Middle East awards, an annual ceremony held in recognition of the regions most successful and innovative corporate leaders.



Since Sultan joined Agility in 1997, it has grown from a small Kuwaiti warehousing company to the largest logistics provider in the Middle East and one of the worlds top 10 providers of integrated logistics. The company now has $4.3 billion in annual revenue, 22,000 employees and offices in more than 100 countries.



I am honoured to be recognised by CEO Middle East as Industry CEO of the year, Sultan said. This award recognises the importance of innovation, and responding to the market and customers needs, while also adding tangible value to shareholders and employees.



Agility is still growing its global presence, Sultan said. As we evolve as a company, our social commitments will keep expanding in parallel with our operations, particularly in emerging markets.



The CEO Middle East awards recognises business leaders in 14 categories based on their performance over the past year, focusing on outstanding financial results and contributions to the regional business climate.  TradeArabia News Service


Qatari telecom operator Ooredoo said on Tuesday it had no intention of selling any of its interest in Indonesian subsidiary Indosat Ooredoo.



"Indosat Ooredoo is Ooredoo's biggest international market and is strategically important to Ooredoo's corporate strategy given its long-term growth prospects," a company statement said.



There had been media speculation that it was considering a stake sale to focus on Middle Eastern markets.  Reuters
Collaboration, Management and Control Solutions (CMCS), a leading project management information systems (PMIS) solutions provider, has signed an agreement with Altus Group, a leading provider of independent advisory services, software and data solutions to the global commercial real estate (CRE) industry.



The agreement will allow for joint business development and sales of Altus Groups Argus Developer products in the Middle East and North Africa region (Mena) and India.



Over the last three decades, CMCS has empowered organisations from all over the world with its diverse portfolio of innovative solutions that aims to help them make the best informed decisions possible when selecting, delivering, governing and auditing multi-billion-dollar construction programs.



Under the newly signed agreement, CMCS expertise, combined with Altus Groups many years of experience in providing industry leading technology for real estate investment, asset management and development lifecycle management, will result in a unique offering to the Mena and Indian CRE and construction markets.



Bassam Al Samman, CEO, CMCS, said: The companys continuing success and growth is predominantly attributed to its clients, partners and team membersall of whom have relentlessly strived to deliver a successful and valuable customer experience. Were excited by the formalisation of our relationship with Altus Group, which I am confident in seeing great benefit to us and the Indian and Mena markets.



Argus Developer is a comprehensive single platform to model, forecast, manage, analyse and report on CRE development project cost and cash flows, from project inception and feasibility through to planning, execution and completion.



To support our continued growth in the global CRE market, the Altus Group is delighted to align with a strong, regional partner in the Middle East. CMCS proven track record of streamlining project management for construction industry customers and using data to deliver transparency and governance aligns perfectly with the capabilities of Altus Analytics, said David Oates, senior vice-president  international, Altus Analytics, the software and data solutions business unit of Altus Group.



Meanwhile, CMCS has announced that it will be running a series of training days in Dubai in December, tailored specifically for the development sector. The sessions will focus on feasibility analysis and development monitoring, and are designed for anyone looking to expand their knowledge and skills in these areas. - TradeArabia News Service
Researchers at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology have developed a novel type of buckypaper  a thin film composed of carbon nanotubes  that has better thermal and electrical properties than most types of buckypaper previously developed.



Researchers believe the innovative buckypaper could be used to create ultra-lightweight composite materials for numerous aerospace and energy applications, including advanced lightning strike protection on airplanes and more powerful lithium-ion batteries, said a Masdar statement.



Masdar Institutes associate professors of mechanical and materials engineering Dr Rashid Abu Al-Rub and Dr Amal Al Ghaferi, along with post-doctoral researcher Dr Hammad Younes, developed the buckypaper with carbon nanostructures provided by global security, aerospace, and information technology company Lockheed Martin.



A paper on their research was published earlier this year in the journal Diamond and Related Materials. The paper was co-authored by Masdar Institute PhD student Mahfuzur Rahman and Mechanical Engineering MSc alumni Ahmed Dalaq.



The black, powdery flakes provided by Lockheed Martins Applied NanoStructured Solutions (ANS) contain hundreds of carbon nanotubes, which are one-atom thick sheets of graphene rolled into a tube that have extraordinary mechanical, electrical and thermal properties. Lockheed Martins carbon nanostructures are unique because the carbon nanotubes within each flake are all properly aligned, making them good conductors of heat and electricity.



Lockheed Martins carbon nanostructures have many potential applications, but in its powdery form, it cannot be used. It has to be fabricated in a way that keeps the unique properties of the carbon nanotube, explained Dr Al Ghaferi. The challenge we faced was to create something useful with the carbon nanotubes without losing any of their unique properties or disturbing the alignment.



Dr. Younes said: Each flake is a carbon nanostructure containing many aligned carbon nanotubes. The alignment of the tubes creates a path for conductivity, much like a wire, making the nanostructure an exceptionally good conductor of electricity.



The Masdar Institute team mixed the carbon nanotubes with a polymer and their resulting buckypaper, which successfully maintained the alignment of the carbon nanotubes, demonstrated high thermal-electrical conductivity and superior mechanical properties.



We have a secret recipe for self-aligning the carbon nanotubes within the buckypaper. This self-aligning is key in significantly enhancing the electrical, thermal and mechanical properties of our fabricated buckypapers, explained Dr Abu Al-Rub.



Despite their microscopic size  a carbon nanotubes diameter is about 10,000 times smaller than a human hair  carbon nanotubes impact on technology has been huge. At the individual tube level, carbon nanotubes are 200 times stronger, five times more elastic, and five times more electrically conductive than steel.



Because of their extraordinary strength, thermal and electrical properties, and miniscule size, carbon nanotubes can be used in a number of applications, including ultra-thin energy storage devices, smaller and more efficient computer chips, photovoltaic solar cells, flexible electronics, cancer detection, and lightning-resistant coatings on airplanes.



According to a report by Global Industry Analysts, the current global market for nanotubes is pegged at roughly $5 billion and its market share is growing sharply, reflecting the rising sentiment worldwide in carbon nanotubes potential as a wonder technology.



Masdar Institutes efforts to capitalise on this emerging technology have resulted in several cutting-edge carbon nanotube research projects, including an attempt to create carbon nanotube-strengthened concrete, super capacitors that can hold 50 times more charge, and a membrane that can bind organic micro-pollutants.



As the UAE moves towards a clean energy future, innovations in renewable energy storage systems and other sustainable technologies are crucial for the countrys successful transition, and researchers at Masdar Institute believe that carbon nanotubes will play a huge role in achieving energy sustainability.  TradeArabia News Service


The Energy Institute's (EI) upcoming event in Abu Dhabi, UAE, will focus on health and safety issues in the energy industry as well as the increased emphasis on environment.



The EI's Middle East HSE Forum "Effective management of health, safety, environment and sustainability", will be held from October 17 to 19.



Engineer Suhail Mohamed Faraj Al Mazrouei, UAE Minister of Energy, will give the keynote address at the event.



The global energy sector operates within a hazardous environment. Health and safety is therefore crucial to the effective management of energy production, delivery and use, and the efficient management of operations. This, combined with an increased emphasis on delivering environmental targets to improve widespread sustainability, provides the focus for this event, said a statement.



Over three days, participants will benefit from sharing good practice to help improve the safety performance of organisations, foster a healthy and accident-free work culture, and ensure a sustainable environment, it said.



Dr Mark Scanlon, HSE team manager, Energy Institute, says: "For over 75 years, the EI has produced safety guidance for the energy sector. In todays world, there are more technologies and complex processes than ever before and the need for relevant and up-to-date best practice is ever growing. This event, organised in association with EI Middle East, provides a platform to discuss health, safety, environment and sustainability in a more holistic manner. The forum will provide opportunities for open discussion and, most importantly, the chance to exchange ideas with the international HSE community."



The conference programme will feature, among others, speakers from Bapco, Emirates National Oil Company, Health and Safety Executive, Qatar Shell, and the United Nations Environment Programme.



The event will cover communicating HSE issues, provide responses to key challenges, identify improvements and enhance competency of industry personnel within the Middle East and the rest of the world. The event also will include technical workshops that will explore a particular topic in more detail. These will be based on EI technical publications and, in a participative manner, the workshops will focus on practical applications, operational experience and case studies. - TradeArabia News Service


Two US companies have developed an airline tracking system that they say would prevent planes disappearing in the manner of the Malaysia Airlines MH370.



Instead of sending tracking signals to ground stations - which means planes' locations can be lost over oceans or remote areas - the new system would beam them to satellites.



"It doesn't matter if they're flying over the ocean, desert, or North Pole, we'll know where the plane is," said Daniel Baker, CEO of FlightAware, the internet flight tracking service which is working with Aireon LLC, which has developed the satellite technology.



Aireon's system will place ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance - broadcast) receivers on low orbit satellites operated by Iridium Communications Inc and is due to be operational from 2018. The system was initially conceived to help air traffic controllers route planes more efficiently.



The new tracking system, called GlobalBeacon, will make the location data from the space-based receivers available to airlines so they can track their planes in near real-time on a web-based tool.



After the disappearance of MH370 in March 2014, regulators and airlines were criticised for responding too slowly to French tracking recommendations after the crash of an Air France plane in 2009.



The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) plans to impose a 15-minute standard for normal flight tracking, or more frequently in case of emergency, by November 2018.



FlightAware said it would reveal the first airline customer for the product next week, to coincide with an ICAO meeting in Montreal.



"We only reached out to a few of our dozens of airline customers to discuss this opportunity and although all are interested in using our space-based ADS-B data, only one could hit the tight timeline for our announcement," Baker told Reuters.  Reuters
Dubai Duty Free has received two prestigious awards at the recent Gulf Business Industry Awards, which was staged at the Taj Hotel Dubai earlier this month.



The operation beat major competition to be named Retail Company of the Year while its executive vice chairman and CEO, Colm McLoughlin, was named Business Leader of the Year  Retail.



Organised by Motivate Publishing, the annual Gulf Business Industry Awards recognise the most successful companies and industry leaders across nine categories including IT, banking, real estate, aviation, retail, media, tourism, healthcare and energy. The awards were adjudged by the Gulf Business team and a special independent panel of judges, as well as through public voting.



Commenting on the awards, McLoughlin said: I am delighted to accept the Retail Business Leader of the Year award and dedicate this to our chairman, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who is himself an excellent leader. The Retail Company of the Year award is also fantastic recognition for the continuous hard work and dedication of our team and also the significant investment that we continue to make across our whole business.



The two awards were presented to McLoughlin by Donal OLeary, director of Faithful+Gould in front of high-profile audience of 300 guests. McLoughlin was accompanied by Salah Tahlak, executive vice president  Corporate Services and Sinead El Sibai, senior vice president  Marketing, Dubai Duty Free.

A total of 25 awards were presented, which also celebrated the 20th anniversary of Gulf Business magazine. - TradeArabia News Service
Wyomings unemployment rate fell in August for the first time in 18 months, the Department of Workforce Services reported Tuesday. The shift from 5.7 percent unemployment in July to 5.5 percent last month is not a statistically significant drop, but it offers hope that the state economy is stabilizing.

Natrona County had the fourth-largest decrease in joblessness, with unemployment falling from 7.3 percent in July to 6.8 percent in August.

The news of an uptick in jobs comes weeks after Casper City Manager V.H. McDonald told the city council that based on August numbers, local sales tax revenue appeared to be stabilizing.

It does represent a bit of a change from what weve seen recently, workforce services economist David Bullard said. Unemployed people went back to work.

The statewide unemployment rate remains slightly higher than the national rate of 4.9 percent.

While the summer months often see an uptick in employment numbers due to hiring in the construction and tourism industries, Bullard said the state accounted for seasonal changes in their calculations. The real Wyoming unemployment rate in August was just 4.9 percent compared to 5 percent nationally  however, the reported 5.5 percent unemployment rate came after accounting for seasonal changes.

In a positive sign for the prospects of Wyomings energy industry, Campbell County reported the largest decrease in jobless numbers, down from 7.5 percent to 6.8 percent. The county is home to some of the states biggest coal mines.

Charlene Murdock, executive director of the countys chamber of commerce, said large-scale layoffs at mines had ceased and that some were hiring back employees.

Some of our mining companies are bringing people back on, Murdock said. I see some movement.

There is often a lag in both layoffs and hiring decisions, Murdock said. Industries serving the energy sector suffer from layoffs like those that took place at Gillette-area coal mines in the spring, but the negative impact often does not show up until weeks or months after the initial layoffs. When it comes to hiring, companies often do not bring new employees on board until well after they have decided to grow their workforce.

Were holding our own and it seems to be stabilizing, Murdock said. People are finding the new norm.

Unemployment fell in 21 counties in August and remained unchanged in Laramie and Carbon counties.

Despite the slight uptick in employed Wyomingites during August, the state remains well behind where it was one year ago. Statewide unemployment was 4.3 percent in August 2015 and as low as 3.6 percent in Campbell County; last year Natrona County had a 4.8 percent unemployment rate.

Bullard, the state economist, urged caution in interpreting the unemployment rate drop.

This is a slight indication of improvement in the economy in August, Bullard said. But, you know, that may be it.
Thursday clubs and meetings

Alcoholics Anonymous: 6:30 a.m., 917 N. Beech; 8:30 a.m., 500 S. Wolcott; 10 a.m., 328 E. A; noon, 500 S. Wolcott; 2 p.m., 917 N. Beech; 7 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, closed; 7 p.m., Shepherd of the Valley, public welcome; 8 p.m., 328 E. A; 8 p.m., 4600 S. Poplar, closed; 8 p.m., 917 N. Beech. Douglas: 7:30 p.m., 628 E. Richards (upstairs in back). Unless otherwise noted, all meetings are open. Casper info: 266-9578; Douglas info: (307) 351-1688.

Al-Anon: 7 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, Ste. 200; 7:30 p.m., 328 1/2 E. A (upstairs).

Narcotics Anonymous: Noon, 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club; 8 p.m., 4700 S. Poplar (church basement). Web site: http://www.urmrna.org.

Muni ladies golf pairings

Sept. 22, playing Park and Links, 9 a.m., shotgun start, please check in 15 minutes prior to tee time. Park #1 McCarrel, Sanford, TBA; Links #9A Bain, Boyle, Ortiz; Links #9B Pfiefer, Fancher, Farmer; Links #8A Meyer, Schmidt, Watters; Links #8B Haydel, Hill, Dressor; Links #7A Wheatley, Warren, Clark; Links #6A Marsh, Balas, Hansen. For changes or additions, please call pro shop at 233-6620.

Five Trails hears eclipse

The Five Trails Rotary Club will hear from Anna Wilcox at noon at the Casper Petroleum Club. Community members are welcome to attend this presentation as guests of the Five Trails Rotary Club.

Wilcox brings over 15 years of experience within the corporate, special events and festival planning to the Wyoming Eclipse Festival. In her time in Iowa, she planned and executed 14 events annually and created extensive multi-platform marketing plans to drive attendance and awareness.

If you or someone you know of would like to present at a future Five Trails Rotary Club meeting, please contact Chad Cundy, 307-680-8812.

Concert at Mountain Plaza

Mountain Plaza Assisted Living welcomes Band of Lovers at 1 p.m. The band is an acoustic folk trio, originally from upstate New York but touring full-time for three years. All are welcome.

Strider Camp starts

Two of the Casper Recreation Centers most popular classes will be starting soon. Strider Camp for 3-5 year olds will begin September 22.

Strider Camp gets 3-5 year olds ready for riding a bicycle by teaching balance, leaning, and steering while propelling the bike in a natural way. The Strider bikes with no pedals to get in the way are provided, helmets are required. This camp meets on Thursdays from 4:15 to 5 p.m. for five weeks.

Dont delay, class sizes are limited, so register today. For further information, or to register for any of our upcoming classes, please call the Casper Recreation Center at 235-8383. Information is also available at www.activecasper.com or stop by 1801 E 4th Street.

KW 67 meets

Kelly Walsh Class of 1967 will be holding another organizational meeting for the 50-year reunion to be held on July 21, 22, and 23, 2017. We hope you can join us at 6:30 p.m., at 5409 East 21st Street. For more information, call Barbara at 237-7885.

Stammtisch on Thursdays

The Casper German Stammtisch is meeting weekly back at the Wonder Bar each Thursday from 6:30 to 8 p.m., usually in the restaurant area. New this year  on the second Thursday of each month we will focus on speaking German! All ability levels are welcome, as long as they are eager to hear German.

History buffs meet

The September meeting of the Natrona County Historical Society will be held at 7 p.m. at the Oil and Gas Commission Bldg., 2222 King Blvd. The program consist of several parts: President Kem Nicolaysen will lead a discussion of the July trek to the Bates Hole area followed by a Bring Your Own History segment, where members and guests can display and talk about items they bring from their School Daze. The six students from Natrona County who won awards at the state History Day and had the opportunity to go to the national competition in Washington, D.C. are also invited to share information about their winning projects.

The Natrona County Historical Society meets monthly during the school year except in November, when the regular meeting night falls on Thanksgiving. Meetings are traditionally held at the Oil and Gas Commission Building on the fourth Thursday except for the months of December and April, when the group joins the Oregon-California Trail Association for annual dinners. For more information, call Robin at 259-4174.

Free personal and professional development classes

Are you making the income you want? Are you achieving your goals? Want more connection in your relationships? Want more friends, career opportunities, abundance in your life? Tired of feeling tired and defeated? If youre looking for tools to help you get ahead in your life, I have some for you. Join me in class, 7 to 9 p.m. County Extension Bldg., Midwest room, 2011 Fairgrounds Rd. Eighteen and older, no children, be ready to play at 100 percent. Contact Amanda Steed Helm on Facebook or ahelm232@gmail.com
The owner of Caspers UPS store has been identified by a family member as the second motorcyclist involved in a Sunday crash in Montana that killed K2 Radio broadcaster Brian Scott Gamroth.

Bill Spicer remains in a Billings, Montana, hospital, where he is critical but stable, according to Julia Spicers niece Jamie Loveall, who spoke Wednesday with the Star-Tribune.

Loveall said Spicers injuries include a hole in his lung, lacerated liver, five broken ribs, a broken clavicle and numerous cuts, scrapes and bruises, including on the inside of his mouth, which makes talking difficult.

Gamroth and Spicer were attempting to pass slower vehicles Sunday near Lewistown, Montana, when the crash happened. Sudden oncoming traffic forced the two men to veer back into their lane, and the motorcycles collided. Gamroth, who was one of Wyomings biggest media figures, was killed at the scene.

Spicer is out of the ICU and his prognosis is very hopeful, Loveall said. In the short term, medical staff are working to get Spicer walking and to improve his condition enough that doctors can remove his chest tube. Once that occurs, he will be able to be moved from Billings to Casper.

Loveall said Spicers wife, Julia, is very appreciative and humbled by the response she has received from the community, and she greatly appreciates everyones support.

Gamroth, 51, hosted a popular morning show for K2 radio and gained a wide following that extended across the state. He was also known for supporting community organizations and the arts, and frequently served as an emcee at fundraising events.

A public memorial for Gamroth will be held at 3 p.m. Monday at the Casper Events Center.
Sweetwater County authorities charged an imprisoned serial killer with murder Tuesday in connection to the 1977 killing of a 28-year-old woman whose remains were found years later on public land in southwest Wyoming.

Rodney James Alcala, now 73, was charged with first-degree murder in connection to the death of Christine Ruth Thornton, court records show.

Investigators believe Alcala killed Thornton in Sweetwater County based on a photo that shows her on a motorcycle on what appears to be remote public land northeast of Granger. Her remains were found a short distance away, said Detective Joe Tomich of the Sweetwater Sheriffs Office. Authorities found the photo while searching Alcalas possessions during a previous investigation, according to court documents.

In a Sept. 6 interview with investigators, Alcala said he had been in the Granger area before, met Thornton and took the photo of her on the motorcycle. He told detectives that Thornton did not leave the area with him and said, She was alive before I left her, according to court documents.

Alcala has been found guilty of killing six people in two states, though authorities estimate Alcala may have killed up to 130 victims across the U.S., authorities in Sweetwater County say. He is known as the Dating Game killer for appearing on the popular television program in the late 1970s.

Solving the case after more than 30 years took a little luck, Tomich said.

A rancher found Thorntons unburied human remains near a two-track dirt road on the land in 1982, Tomich said. The road, identified as Lombard Road in court documents, is about 6 miles north of Interstate 80 and 1.5 miles east of U.S. Highway 30.

The remains couldnt be identified for decades, though it was determined they belonged to a homicide victim who was about six months pregnant when she died, court documents show. A gold ring and a small watch with a leather band were found near the body, which were similar to the ones Thornton wore in the photo.

Investigators submitted a tissue sample to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for DNA analysis in 2013 and inclusion into a database of information on missing people, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

Thorntons family had searched for her since she disappeared from San Antonio, Texas, in 1977. In 2013, Thorntons sister happened to spot a photo of Thornton in a collection of Alcalas photos that had been released to the public in 2010 in the hopes of identifying more of his victims. After contacting police, two of Thorntons sisters submitted DNA samples to the missing persons database.

The database alerted the Sweetwater County Sheriffs Office in July 2015 that Thorntons remains had a possible match. Detectives were later able to confirm the remains were Thorntons and contacted her family shortly after.

A sister told the detective that one of Thorntons former boyfriends had previously told her that the couple took a trip to Green River in 1977 to pan for gold, but the pair parted ways after a fight. The family had last seen Thornton when she visited her uncle in Biloxi, Mississippi, in June 1977, the documents state. She was notably pregnant at the time.

Alcala was traveling the country during the summer of 1977 after his parole officer granted him permission to drive from California to the East Coast to visit family, court documents show. He left California on July 2 and returned on Aug. 6. He later traveled from California to Mexico from Aug. 11 to Aug. 20 that same summer.

Court documents do not state why Alcala was on parole at the time.

Investigators reviewed the other photos found in Alcalas possession and determined that the same motorcycle Thornton is pictured riding  a blue and white Kawasaki  was also present in the photos of Alcalas other victims. During previous investigations, the motorcycle had been found disassembled in Alcalas Seattle storage unit, according to the documents.

Alcala is on death row at the Cocoran State Penitentiary in California for previous murder convictions. If convicted of the Wyoming charge, he could face additional charges of life imprisonment or death.

The California courts will determine whether Alcala should be extradited to Wyoming to face the charge in person, Tomich said. Its unknown whether Alcala will remain in California or be moved to a Wyoming prison if convicted of the murder charge.

Alcala was convicted of murder in California in 1980 in the killing of Robin Samsoe and in 2010 for the killings of Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau. In 2012, he was convicted of murder in New York for the killings of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover in the 1970s.

Alcala was known to approach victims by pretending to be a photographer and asking them to pose for him before physically assaulting and strangling them, documents show. All of his victims were female.
Nearly half of likely Wyoming voters have an unfavorable view of Republican U.S. House candidate Liz Cheney, but almost 50 percent had never heard of her Democratic opponent, Ryan Greene, according to a poll commissioned by the Greene campaign.

The poll, which the Greene campaign shared with the Star-Tribune, showed that 41 percent of respondents viewed Cheney favorably, compared with 46 percent who viewed her unfavorably. Forty-nine percent had never heard of Greene.

Greenes poll asked respondents more than a dozen questions on topics including the presidential race and views on the direction of the state and country.

Some of the questions were phrased to leave a favorable impression of Greene, such as, All things being equal, would you prefer a candidate who had a house in McLean, Virginia, Rock Springs, Wyoming, or does it make no difference in your vote? Greene as well as Cheney's primary opponents have attacked her credentials as a Wyomingite.

Cheney also owns a house in Wilson, which she calls home. She and her husband purchased it in 2012.

Max Weiss, Greene's campaign manager, described the survey as a message-testing poll. It was not a push poll, he said, because those are disguised to spread misinformation about opponents.

"Were going for complete transparency for a reason here, he said.

Cheney campaign officials dismissed the poll before the newspaper shared results with them.

"It's no surprise Ryan Greene would rather peddle phony poll results than explain to the people of Wyoming why he supported Bernie Sanders for president, believes there is no war on coal, no need to repeal Obamacare, and why the taxpayers should continue funding Planned Parenthood, said Bill Novotny, the campaign manager. The people of Wyoming know we need a representative who will fight every day to undo the damage of the Obama years, not someone who supports Obama/Clinton policies."

Novotny did not respond to the Star-Tribunes questions about how he could dismiss the poll before seeing it.

The newspaper asked Novotny about the high number of people who hold an unfavorable view of Cheney and whether he has research showing a higher favorable rating. He did not respond.

DFM Research of St. Paul, Minnesota, interviewed 402 likely Wyoming voters on cellphones and land lines between Sept. 6 and Sept. 11. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.9 percent.

The poll asked respondents twice who they would vote for -- at the beginning of the poll, and at the end, after the questions about home locations, jobs of spouses and public lands.

Despite Cheneys unfavorable rating, she was in the lead at the beginning of the poll with 46 percent of the vote, followed by Greene with 30 percent of the vote. Sixteen percent were unsure who theyd vote for. When the same question was asked at the end, Greene had 54 percent support and Cheney had 30 percent.

The third-party candidates in the race had less support: 5 percent said theyd vote for Libertarian Lawrence Struempf and 4 percent would vote for Constitution Party candidate Daniel Cummings when the question was asked in the beginning. That dropped to 2 percent and 3 percent, respectively, when the question was asked at the end.

Greene said he needs to increase his name recognition. He's buying television, radio and newspaper ads. Currently, the campaign is on a tailgate tour of the state -- using his pickup as a centerpiece, along with a 4-foot by 8-foot signs that say, Im Ryan Greene. Im running against Liz Cheney. Lets talk.

Were going into the communities with three things in mind, he said. The idea of meeting with voters, listening to voters and talking about the issues.

The Rock Springs welder confirmed he did caucus for Sanders, the Vermont senator who won the popular vote in Wyomings Democratic caucuses. Greene said independent experts say that the war on coal is being caused by low natural gas prices, he believes Cheneys rhetoric about Planned Parenthood trafficking human body parts is not true and that its not realistic to repeal Obamacare. Greene wants to improve the Affordable Care Act, he said.

Wyoming Republican strategist Kristin Walker wasnt surprised by some aspects of Greenes research. Walker advised the campaign of state Sen. Leland Christensen, a Cheney opponent in the GOP primary for the House, and worked for U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi when Cheney challenged him in 2013.

While I can't speak to the legitimacy of the poll, I'm not surprised that Cheney's unfavorables are so high, she said in an email. There are still many Republicans across the state who are skeptical of Cheney and the motivations behind her run. She ruffled a lot of feathers in her run against Sen. Enzi two years ago and I think there is a level of uncertainty as to how she will work with the congressional delegation now in D.C. Her support among Wyoming Republicans seems to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

However, Walker said Greene still has an uphill battle, even if Cheney is unpopular.

The Greene campaign's claim that Cheney's name ID alone can't translate into a win was proved false in the primary, she said. Given the tremendous amount of frustration with the Obama administration and Democrats in Washington, I think Wyoming voters will ultimately rally behind Cheney in November.
CHEYENNE  The downturn in Wyomings economy has affected many state agencies, resulting in cutbacks and the end of some services.

But some agencies like the Wyoming Department of Transportation arent feeling the same pinch.

In fact, WYDOTs fiscal year 2017 operating budget, which was just approved by the Wyoming Transportation Commission last week, isnt much different than the current year, at least in terms of revenue and expenses.

Thats because only a small part of WYDOTs budget  about 2 percent  comes from the state general fund.

The general fund is where most other state agencies get a significant amount of money, and that fund has also seen some of the worst effects revenue-wise of the economic downtown.

For drivers, that means Wyoming will still have a robust road improvement program for the next fiscal year, said Dennis Byrne, WYDOTs chief financial officer.

Impacts to projects or other services at WYDOT should be minimal at this point, Byrne said.

WYDOTs main source of money is the federal government, with federal agencies providing about 47 percent of the departments revenue for FY 2017.

Another 18.6 percent comes from fuel taxes and about 11 percent is from vehicle registrations.

Smaller percentages are from drivers licenses and other vehicle fees.

WYDOT also receives money from mineral royalties, which is down this year.

However, the Legislature appropriated more Abandoned Mine Lands funds to WYDOT to make up for the difference.

Last December, Congress restored more than $500 million in AML funds to Wyoming over the next few years as part of the federal transportation bill.

Because a small part of WYDOTs budget comes from the general fund, Gov. Matt Meads 8 percent cuts earlier this summer didnt have a major effect on the department.

The department had to cut more than $1.6 million from its budget, and those cuts were mostly to air service programs  delaying some air projects and one surface transportation project.

Still, WYDOT expects to see some other reductions.

Total gasoline revenues are projected to be down about $4.4 million from the current year, from $85.6 million to $81.2 million.

Diesel taxes are projected to be down about $2 million, from $94 million to $92.1 million.

WYDOT gets a large chunk of both of those tax sources.

Interestingly, the total fuel tax collected is projected to decrease even as gasoline prices are down.

Normally, lower gas prices translate into higher gas tax revenues, Byrne said, as people purchase more gasoline.

At the same time, WYDOT is saving some money.

Bids for road work are coming in lower than expected, in part due to lower oil prices, Byrne said.

Anything that has to do with oil, those things are down, he said.

In addition, WYDOTs stability is allowing the department to hire state workers who have been displaced from other state agencies due to budget cuts, Director Bill Panos said last week.

WYDOTs FY 2017 operating budget will begin in October, which coincides with the beginning of the federal fiscal year.
Greene a better choice than Cheney

Editor:

I am a senior citizen and I live in Princeton, New Jersey. I proudly served in the military. For 40 years I owned a business. I consider myself a loyal American and patriot.

I am aware that Liz Cheney, Vice President Cheneys daughter, is seeking election to the U.S. House, representing Wyoming. Perhaps as an outsider, I have no right to offer an opinion, but I think Liz Cheney is a dangerous choice. Her father used five deferments to avoid military service. When he was asked why he did not serve, he responded, I had other priorities! Tell that to the 59,000 Americans who died in that futile war.

Cheneys remark is the height of arrogance. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, happened under his watch. He spearheaded the war of choice in Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the U.S. I would like for Richard Cheney to explain what was the mission and what was accomplished. In a recent TV appearance Richard Cheney stated that President Obama has rendered our country unsafe. This coming from a former vice president whose foreign policy was appalling.

Liz Cheney is a clone of her father. They have similar philosophies. If Liz Cheney is elected to Congress, she will beat the drum to take our country to another unnecessary war in the Middle East. She will demonstrate fiscal irresponsibility. If Cheney is elected, I would worry for our country and for the people of Wyoming.

Democrat Ryan Greene is running against Cheney. He does not have the recognition or the resources of Cheney. Greene is a good man. He was born, raised and educated in Wyoming. He works in Wyoming. His family lives in Wyoming. He has been endorsed by former Gov. Freudenthal. He will work hard to represent the good people of Wyoming.

Cheney does not live in Wyoming. Her family lives in Virginia. Her husband is a partner in a law firm in Washington, D.C. She will not work as hard for Wyoming as will Greene. I encourage the people of Wyoming to vote for Greene to represent your state in the House.

HOWARD SILBERSHIRE, Princeton, New Jersey
Subashini Furman educates her patients on cancer so they know what theyre fighting.

The first thing I tell a patient  and it applies to breast cancer or any cancer  is that cancer is one of your family of cells, she said. I have a lot of patients that have curable cancers that can virtually kill them, but they feel well.

The medical director of radiation oncology at Cheyenne Regional Cancer Center is a proponent of screening exams, such as mammograms, to find cancers before they cause symptoms.

You cannot wait until you get a symptom, because cancer is part of your own family of cells, so your body doesnt see it as a threat, said Furman.

Early detection  when cancers are found when they are small and havent spread  leads to better outcomes, she said.

But education also plays a role. Furman has discovered many patients go online and self-diagnose their symptoms. The hazard there, Furman cautions, is that often patients compare symptoms in dissimilar situations.

You have to compare apples to apples, Furman said. But you also have to compare the same apples. You have to compare a Golden Delicious with a Golden Delicious. If you dont, there are huge problems. No two patients will be treated the same way.

That misunderstanding is one of the reasons Furman prioritizes education. The other is to help alleviate fear.

People fear the treatments more than the disease, Furman said.

Worry about the potential side effects often keeps patients from seeking treatment. But, Furman said, those side effects do carry significance.

We want to see some effects that show that the treatment delivered is working, she said. So side effects are important and necessary, because the body is responding.

As a radiation oncologist, Furman seeks to give her patients information to combat myths. For instance, many patients believe they will lose their hair during radiation treatment.

Radiation is a local treatment. Its impossible for someone to lose their hair if I direct radiation at the breast, she said, explaining that hair loss is a systemic effect from chemotherapy that transmits through the blood.

The way we treat cancers  we have to attack cancer smart, not necessarily big, she said. Thats why routine mammograms and annual pelvic exams are key in early detection for women.

Often, a breast cancer diagnosis or even the fear of one clouds reasoning.

You dont have a mastectomy because you think youre going to cure breast cancer. Cancer wants out. So taking out the breast, you can change the biology, Furman said.

Since cancer wants to spread, when the breasts are removed, it can reach the vital organs.

You dont change the biology by doing a radical surgery. The question becomes: How can you change the biology? she said.

The answer, Furman says, is systemic treatment therapy. Any treatment that enters the bloodstream, such as a daily pill, is systemic. Maximizing systemic therapy is a common treatment with breast cancer.

According to Furman, surgery and radiation are finite, but systemic therapy isnt.

A cancer cell is immortal. If you want someone to be cured, you cant get rid of 90 percent or 99 percent  you cant leave any cancer cells behind. Curing cancer means you have sterilized 100 percent of the cancer cells through systemic therapy, she said.

However, if a woman with breast cancer had to have radiation, she wouldnt have to leave Wyoming to receive quality care, Furman said.

Radiation is very precise, she explained. I have the technology in Cheyenne. Cancer treatments are standardized. You get the same amount of radiation as you would in Denver, Casper or Cheyenne. The radiation dose is standardized. It is illegal and unethical to take a cancer and treat it any way than the proven way. Your cure rate is identical here as it is at John Hopkins.

Breast cancer is highly curable  even stage four. Its not a death sentence,

She also noted that one important part of the process is selecting a cancer care team.

Find someone you trust that will be a partner with you, she said. And understand your diagnosis, so you can make the very best decision for yourself.
PHOENIX  Arizona companies have no duty to protect family members from exposure to toxic materials their employees bring home on their work clothes, the state Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.

In the first ruling of its kind in Arizona, the judges rejected the contention of survivors of Ernest Quiroz that his fathers employer, Reynolds Metal Co., should be held legally responsible for the sons mesothelioma, a form of cancer frequently associated with asbestos exposure, and eventual death.

Appellate Judge Jon Thompson, writing for the unanimous court, acknowledged that some states have allowed lawsuits based on take-home exposure. But Thompson said thats not the way Arizona laws are written.

Court records show Quiroz lived in his fathers house in Maricopa County from 1952 to 1966, during which time his father worked for Reynolds Metal. Quiroz moved to California in 1966 for a decade and then to Michigan until his death in 2014.

In the lawsuit, survivors claim that Quirozs father was exposed on numerous occasions to asbestos-containing products and machinery. That, the claim says, resulted in the release of respirable asbestos fibers which contaminated the employees clothing, tools, car, body and general surroundings.

Quiroz breathed these fibers as result of direct and indirect contact with those items, the survivors say.

Attorneys for the family contend Reynolds, which has since merged with Alcoa and now operates under that name, had a duty to avoid creating hazardous conditions on its property that would cause injury to people off the property. But Thompson said thats not the law in Arizona.

A landowner owes invitees a duty to provide reasonably safe premises and reasonably safe means of ingress and egress, the judge wrote. He said that duty generally ends when a person leaves the property.

Thompson said there is no claim that Quiroz was on the property of Reynolds or that any injury he suffered was the result of being on that property.

The appellate judges rejected the claim that there are reasonable expectations of the parties and society to require Reynolds to be responsible for the effects of the asbestos at its Arizona operations on others, including family members.

The appellate judges also openly worried about what kind of precedent it would set to make companies responsible for the injuries that were the result of second-hand exposure to their chemicals or toxic products.

They said it could open the door for claims by people who came into contact with asbestos-tainted clothing in a taxicab, grocery store, dry cleaner, convenience store or laundromat.

Appellants offer no way to limit the duty they seek either to employees family members or to asbestos exposure, Thompson wrote.

Absent these constraints, any company that made or used a potentially hazardous substance could be liable to anyone who ever came into contact with an employee who arguably could have carried said hazardous substance offsite, he continued. Such a dramatic expansion of liability would not be compatible with public policy.

Thompson also brushed aside court rulings from other states that have allowed lawsuits in cases of take-home exposure.

He acknowledged the Tennessee Supreme Court found Alcoa owed a duty of care to an employees daughter who contracted mesothelioma as a result of regular contact with her fathers work clothes.

But Thompson said the law in that state recognizes a general duty to refrain from engaging in affirmative acts that a reasonable person should recognize as involving an unreasonablerisk of causing an invasion of an interest of another, or acts which involve an unreasonable risk of harm to another.

In Arizona, by contrast, the foreseeability of risk to another is legally irrelevant in these kind of cases.

Ditto, he said, of similar rulings in New Jersey and elsewhere. Instead, Thompson said Arizona is more in line with rulings out of Georgia, New York and Michigan.
Kneaders No. 3 is opening in Oro Valley next weekend, and it has some surprises to encourage folks to drop by.

On the opening weekend, Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, the first 100 guests in the door each day get a free Chunky Cinnamon French Toast meal made with Kneaders in-house, scratch-made cinnamon bread and caramel syrup.

The restaurant will donate 10 percent of its opening weekend sales to a school in Oro Valley and will donate all its unsold bread to Catalina Community Services and Canyon del Oro High School at the end of each business day.

The Oro Valley Kneaders, at 9600 N. Oracle Road, is the third Kneaders to open in Tucson since the chain made inroads with its first restaurant at 135 S. Wilmot Road in July 2015. A second restaurant opened at East River and North Craycroft roads in August.

The Oro Valley restaurant will be open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays; its closed on Sundays.
Heres the thing about Kander and Ebbs Cabaret:

It drips with horror.

Today, the rising threat from hate speech, bigotry and intolerance echo pre-World War II Germany, when the Nazis began to take power and the time period of the play.

Cabaret reminds us of the dangers of allowing the venom to flow freely.

The Roundabout Theatre Companys production of the now-50-year-old play is on the Centennial Hall stage, courtesy of Broadway in Tucson.

This roadshow is a revival of a revival of a revival. In 1993, Sam Mendes directed a bold new version of the musical in London, brought it to Broadway in 1998, and staged it again in 2014.

His 93 version was dark and decadent and underscored the story of 1930s Berlin, when debauchery was a way of life and the Nazis were beginning to assert themselves. Mendes subsequent productions of Cabaret did the same.

The musical has the limber Kit Kat girls twisting and back-bending across the nightclub stage where Sally Bowles, a London gal who has little talent but lots of ambition, croons her tunes.

Watching over it all, directing it, really, while serving as a sort of Greek chorus, is the Emcee. He guides us through the sex and slime, as well as the passivity and ignorance that made it so easy for the Nazis to take power and kill six million Jews.

Randy Harrison steps into the Emcee role. He is leering, lusting, lecherous. We love him. We are repelled by him. While Harrison seems confined by having to mimic the role that made Alan Cumming famous in Mendes earlier versions, he still fascinates and disturbs.

Sally Bowles is a character that cant, wont, drop her cheery front, but who has rivers running just under the surface. Andrea Goss didnt give us much of that undercurrent until late in the second act. But when she finally showed us that Sally knows what she has lost while she searched for fame, for a purpose, it was powerful. Watch her sing Cabaret in the second act and you see her jolt of waking up, and the realization that its too late.

The most moving moments in this Cabaret came from Mary Gordon Murray in the role of Fraulein Schneider, an older woman who has a chance for love but recognizes the obstacles a romance with a Jewish man presents. Her rendition of What Would You Do? the song that tries to explain why she cant take the chance on love, is heartbreaking.

There at times when this production feels tired, as though the actors were walking through the play, rather than living it.

Nevertheless, it packs a punch.

When Mendes version of the musical first opened in 93, it made it clear that we are all culpable; that our inaction can allow something like the Nazis and their genocide to happen.

Seeing it again in 2016, its hard not to think of the Islamophobia that becomes more pervasive each day. And you cant help but wonder if history is about to repeat itself, with our own country playing the role that Germany did in the 1930s and 40s.

And that is the real horror.
A free forum later this month will focus on life along the U.S. Mexico border.

The September 29 event, sponsored by Arizona Public Media and the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, is designed to be a live, interactive event and will feature four journalists who work along the border.

Organizers aim to take the discussion beyond the often-debated topics of drug violence and illegal immigration. For example, panelists will discuss such issues as U.S.-Mexico trade relations and initiatives, as well as the ways political and cultural perceptions vary north and south of the border.

The journalists also will discuss Donald Trumps and Hillarys Clintons positions on border and immigration issues  and how those positions could impact business, trade and life along the border.

Panelists include:

 Javier Garza: The longtime Mexican journalist has worked extensively to protect reporters working in Mexico, who are often targeted by drug cartels. Garza is a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Mexico.

 Nancy Montoya: Arizona Public Medias border reporter has 35 years experience in broadcast news in the United States and Latin America. With the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, her familys ranch went from being in Mexico to being in the United States almost overnight.

 Curt Prendergast: The Arizona Daily Stars border reporter has lived in South America and covered the border for the residents of Santa Cruz County from 2012 to 2015 as a reporter for the Nogales International.

 Fernanda Santos: The Phoenix bureau chief for The New York Times hails from Brazil and contributed to Latinos in the United States: A Resource Guide for Journalists. She is the author of The Fire Line, a book about the Granite Mountain Hotshots killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire.

Moderating the panel will be Maria Hinojosa, anchor and executive producer of the long-running weekly NPR show, Latino USA.

The event is free, but tickets must be reserved in advance. (See accompanying box)
Tucson police arrested the second suspect in a south side home invasion Tuesday night, hours after the incident, authorities said.

Steven M. Bracamonte, 25, was located late Tuesday night, and booked into the Pima County jail on suspicion of armed robbery, aggravated assault, kidnapping and burglary, said Sgt. Pete Dugan of the Tucson Police Department.

Bracamonte was arrested with a gun that police believe was also used in the home invasion, Dugan said.

A woman was injured during the incident when two armed men broke into her house and roughed her up.

The woman was treated at a hospital for minor injuries and released, Dugan said.

James A. Palomarez, 28, was arrested at the scene and booked into the Pima County jail on suspicion of armed robbery, aggravated robbery, kidnapping and burglary, Dugan said.

At 11:25 a.m., a 911 caller reported seeing a man grab a woman and forcing her into a house in the 6000 block of South First Avenue, which is in a neighborhood near South Campbell Avenue and East Bilby Road.

When police arrived at the house, one man ran away and the other ran inside the house, Dugan said. Police surrounded the house and saw one man exit through the back of the house and jump over a wall.

That man, later known as Palomarez, was taken into custody and booked into jail, Dugan said.

The victim came out of the house and told officers that at least two men armed with guns kicked in a door and made their way into the house. She said the men demanded money and narcotics, but she told them that no narcotics or money were in the house.

She told police that the men forced her around the house. Dugan explained that is how the woman received minor injuries.

Officers with police dogs, hostage negotiators and the Special Weapons and Tactics team responded to the scene to contain the house. Police also combed the neighborhood in search of the second man who ran from the house.

Detectives searched the house and saw no evidence of narcotics or narcotics sales, said Dugan. He said the address also has no history of drug activity.

A vehicle near the scene that belonged to a suspect in the crime was also searched, Dugan said.

Neighborhood streets in the area were blocked off for about five hours. Sierra 2-8 School and Sunnyside High School were put on lockdown for several hours. The schools are in the Sunnyside Unified School District.
The Arizona Department of Education received nearly $650,000 in federal grant funds to help students in need pay for advanced placement exams.

The U.S. Department of Education gave out about $28 million to 41 states and Washington, D.C., as part of an effort to make college-level exams, which cost money to take, more accessible. The grant given to the states is a reimbursement for students who qualified in the 2015-2016 school year, of which there were 517 in Arizona.

Advanced placement exams, which cost $93 per exam, are a way for high school students to earn college credit while they are in high school.

The exams are offered by the College Board, which also administers the SAT. The grant money also covers other high-level exams, including ones administered by the International Baccalaureate Organization and Cambridge International Examinations.

The high costs of the exams are a barrier to students who come from lower-income families, the federal education agency said.

The cost of a test should never prevent students from taking their first step toward higher education through advanced placement courses, said James Cole Jr., general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education, in a news release.

The aid is distributed to state education agencies, which then reimburse individual schools, according to Alexis Susdorf, a spokeswoman for the Arizona education department.

At Desert View High School, students who qualify for the free- or reduced-lunch program pay about $20 out of pocket per exam, said Mario Castro, assistant principal of curriculum and instruction. More than half of the 304 students who took 471 AP exams last year qualified.

The College Board has fee waivers that reduce the exam fees to about $50 for students who qualify for free or reduced lunch. That fee is further reduced with efforts such as the federal grant given to state education departments.

Desert View also offers installment programs for parents who cannot afford the entire amount of exams up front and facilitates a club where students raise funds for exam fees, Castro said.

Money should not be a barrier to a students success, he said. Research has shown that students who enroll in advanced placement courses and take the exams are more likely to graduate and go to college.

Every kid who wants to take the test, we want them to take the test, he said.
Heres the choice for voters in Legislative District 10: a longtime Democratic party leader and advocate for children, or a Republican newcomer who is a citizen soldier and an advocate for veterans.

Democrat David Bradley is seeking a third term as state senator, and Republican Randall Phelps is running for the first time.

Bradley has raised about $35,900, with large donations from Pinnacle Wests political action committee and from Daniel Ranieri, CEO of LaFrontera Arizona. Phelps has raised about $2,935.

MEET THE CANDIDATES

Bradleys political life began when he was a teenager; his father ran for a State House seat and lost by 10 votes.

His political career has included serving as chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, four terms as a state representative, a lost race for Corporation Commission, and two terms as a state senator.

Bradley says the job is often about answering constituents requests for help with regulatory red tape, such as problems with professional licensing. He tries to look at every bill through the lens of how kids would be affected, Bradley said.

One of the cooler moments of his career came on the last day of the most recent legislative session, when a bill hed worked on for a year and a half to expand school choice vouchers for disabled kids up to age 22 from the current limit of age 18 became the center of a storm of hubris.

A measure to reinstate KidsCare was tacked on to the bill, leading to a close vote that restarted the KidsCare Medicaid program for about 30,000 children.

Phelps said he, too, would have voted for KidsCare.

Phelps grew up with Mike Oxley, who went on to become an Ohio congressman. They imagined a future in which Oxley was president and Phelps was the Air Force One pilot. When Oxley died on Jan. 1, it was a turning point for Phelps, whod been on the periphery of politics as a pilot for a number of candidates, and he decided to get involved.

Hes had mixed results in his dealings with politicians in his personal life.

When he got turned down for a V.A. home loan and lost an appeal, he wrote to his then-senator and got dismissed. But Sen. John McCain helped him get his benefits back when he retired one day short of his 20 years in the Army Reserves, and McCain also helped him resolve a spat with the IRS, he said.

But why do we have to go through a senator to get anything done in the government? Phelps wondered aloud.

Its just a stalemate. Its just sad whats going on, he said. Blue or red, people want politicians to work together, Phelps said.

VETERANS ISSUES

Phelps, who served in Vietnam and in Operation Desert Storm, said his top issue is helping veterans get jobs and start businesses.

Phelps said the average age of a military retiree is 47. We need to keep veterans here and working in the aviation industry for employers such as Raytheon, he said. Whether hes elected or not, he said he plans to work with Startup Tucson to help veterans start their own businesses.

He supports exempting $5,000 of military retirement pay from state income taxes, up from the current $2,500.

Bradley, who served in the Navy for eight years as a cryptologist, warned against a piecemeal system of tax cuts and exemptions.

EDUCATION FUNDING

Phelps supports more funding for K-12 schools and career and technical education. He said the Legislature should look for efficiencies in state government to pay for teacher pay raises.

Bradley supports more funding for early childhood education programs and community colleges. He said for-profit colleges need more oversight by a state agency.

He proposes making a portion of in-state college tuition tax deductible. Phelps agreed that proposal should be on the table.

Bradley also proposes replicating the community schools model used by Flowing Wells to add existing social services and nonprofit resources to schools. He said hes trying to get conservatives to buy in by demonstrating long-term savings and teacher retention.
PHOENIX  The mayor of Colorados second-largest city is urging Arizonans not to legalize recreational use of marijuana, even as he admits voters in his state want to keep their nearly 4-year-old law.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers said the law approved by voters there has had dire consequences, including increased teen use and more criminal activity.

He said there is probably less support for the measure than when it was approved in 2012 by a margin of 54.8 percent to 45.1 percent.

But not that much less.

Do I think that the citizens of Colorado would repeal it tomorrow? Probably not, he said.

Suthers said Proposition 64 remains popular in his home state because voters are uninformed.

People in law enforcement, people running a city, things like that, theyre going to see the neighborhood problems, theyre going to see the increase in DUIs, theyre going to see the school problems and things like that, he said. A lot of the average citizens are not going to see all that.

Suthers and a police officer from Colorado were brought to Arizona by foes of Proposition 205, which is on Arizonas ballot in November. The measure would allow anyone 21 and older to possess and use up to an ounce of marijuana as well as grow their own plants.

It clearly will make our roads more dangerous, and Prop. 205 will clearly endanger Arizonas children, said Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk. She chairs Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, the group working to defeat the initiative.

This is clearly not guesswork, Polk continued. Colorado passed a similar initiative for recreational marijuana in the year 2012 and is now suffering a whole host of negative consequences.

Suthers, under questioning, acknowledged that not all the claims can be linked to that law.

For example, he is not disputing statistics from the Colorado health department that show teen use of marijuana has not increased since recreational use became legal after the 2012 vote. Instead, he said, the big jump came after the 2006 vote to legalize medical marijuana  a law similar to what Arizona already has.

But Suthers said Arizona faces a bigger risk because its teen drug use now is lower than Colorados was in 2012.

He said Arizona voters should wait until the Colorado law has been in effect for five full years  meaning two years from now  to see whether they still believe recreational use of marijuana is desirable.

Thats also the message from Jim Gerhardt, an officer with the Thornton Police Department and vice president of the Colorado Drug Investigators Association. He said legalizing recreational use did not reduce crime as had been advertised.

Theres absolutely no reason to rush into this, Gerhardt said. He said its easy for voters to adopt laws allowing recreational use but its very, very difficult to undo what weve done.

As bad as they say the Colorado law is, Polk and other foes say there are some substantial differences that make the Arizona proposal worse.

For example, the Colorado law makes the presence of five nanograms of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, a permissible inference for jurors to conclude a motorist is impaired.

Proposition 205 does say driving while impaired remains illegal. But there is no similar language, meaning prosecutors would have to prove, on a case-by-case basis, that an individual was impaired while behind the wheel.

In Colorado, cities can refuse to allow marijuana dispensaries. There is no such option in the Arizona measure.

Proposition 205 would allow for home delivery of marijuana.

And the Arizona Constitution sharply restricts the ability of lawmakers to make changes in the initiative if there are unanticipated problems.
Three candidates are battling for two seats in the Arizona House of Representatives in Legislative District 9.

Democrats Randall Friese and Pamela Powers Hannley have a lot of ideas in common while Republican Ana Henderson is offering voters a different choice. The three have different priorities, with incumbent Friese focusing on safety, Henderson on education, and Powers Hannley on the economy.

District 9 will have at least one new representative next year. Victoria Steele left the job in January to run for U.S. Congress but lost in the August primary. Matt Kopec is doing the job as an appointee, but he also lost in the primary.

Henderson and Powers Hannley are both first-time candidates.

Each of the candidates voted against Prop. 123, the controversial voter-approved measure meant to increase teacher pay, saying it was a dangerous move that would hurt the education system in the long run. But they all have different ideas about how to solve the education-funding problem.

Henderson wants to host an education committee to represent each of the five school districts in District 9 and talk to parents.

The Democrats support legislation to address teachers pensions and reduce college tuition. Friese said he would look for Republican collaboration.

MEET THE CANDIDATES

Henderson said the moment she realized she wanted to be involved in politics was when she watched a trial with an unjust outcome.

Her husband encouraged her to run for office after he saw how much education issues meant to her, she said.

Henderson hopes to bring the voice of the community to the capitol.

Friese said he had a slow process of becoming involved in politics but wanted another way to serve the community. He took a three-month candidate training course before he ran the first time.

He was encouraged to run when U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords resigned after the 2011 shootings. He was asked to run for Congress but decided not to because he still has a lot to learn.

Friese said he wants to address access to health care and public safety issues and to help create jobs.

As a physician who has treated patients who were injured in shootings, he said he supports new legislation related to background checks before buying firearms. He said 40 percent of Arizonans purchase a gun without a background check.

More background checks would make it harder for criminals to get guns and make it harder for someone to sell a firearm to someone who would do harm with it, he said.

Powers Hannley, a self-described progressive Democrat, said she has been involved in politics since she was a kid watching her dad run for president of a local labor union.

She knew she wanted to run for office once Steele ran for Congress and told her husband, This is it.

Powers Hannley has been a political blogger for 10 years and said a win would show her message is popular. Some of her top issues are economic reform, economic equality and refocusing the war on drugs.
Help India!

By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,

New Delhi: That a good portion of employed Muslims are in the unorganized sector in the country gets evident once one enters predominantly Muslim market areas or Muslim ghettoes in any city, including metro cities like Mumbai and Delhi and state capitals like Patna. The National Capital Delhi has thousands of roadside Muslim vendors, with their thick presence in Jama Masjid area, Chandni Chowk and Jamia Nagar.

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In the shadow of historic Jama Masjid in Muslim-dominated Walled City (Purani Dilli) of the National Capital you can find hundreds of them  poor and landless, primary or high school dropouts and internal migrants  selling various items from caps, scents and Quran to dates, biryani and kabab to rings, combs and sunglasses. They  some for their own family while the younger unmarried ones to assist their family  are doing it to keep their kitchen fire burning.







When you enter Jama Masjid complex from the eastern gate overlooking the Red Fort you have already faced long rows on either side up to the mosque dotted with vendors spreading their merchandise on the pavement. Just steps away from the main mosque you have on your left a long white bearded man in late 60s or early 70s. Muhammad Islam has witnessed about 25 winters at the same place, selling Muslim caps. A quarter century couldnt change his fortune.

Someday I have good earning but on others its hard to get what could be said sufficient for two meals, says original Dilliwallah Islam, father of four grownup children  all unemployed.

But the local municipal body Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), it seems, has been hostile to him since 1970s. His shop was demolished in 1976 in the neighboring Turkaman Gate area. He is yet to be compensated. And again in 2004 in a special drive for beautification of the Shahjahani Jama Masjid, his shop in the vicinity, along with 300 others, was removed.

Meet Zafar Khan, 45, of Saharanpur. For five years he has been sitting on the steps of the mosque, selling rehals (a wooden stand on which Quran is put while reading. Father of five children  three of them studying  Khan is doing a family business. Earlier his family of artists would make rehals, now he buys from the market and sells, earning around 100-150 rupees a day. He is also the victim of the MCD drive.

This is Irfan Khan, a Delhi native whose father and grandfather moved to Lahore in 1947 only to return to Delhi after a few months  when communal tension in the city had cooled down. Irfan, 40, sells items suitable to seasons. Nowadays he is selling winter caps and in Ramzan his space of business area is packed with Muslim caps, lungi and kurta-pajama. Despite his meager income of Rs 100-150 daily he is happy he is able to send their five children to school.

It is a fact as revealed by a draft report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector released by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) in 2007, that if Muslims are not getting good job it is because of three reasons. The report had identified them as three levels of vulnerability coming in the way of Muslims getting a good employment. They are low levels of education, poor access to land and their socio-religious identity.

When we talk to Muslim vendors we find them little educated (4.1 years of schooling is an average for non-agricultural Muslim workers in the country according to the NCEUS report) and landless. They are residing in Delhi either on rent or have left their family back in their native town.

Muhammad Aslam, 35, is 8th class pass-out. He has been selling dates for 15 years near the mosque. Earlier he had a shop that was removed by MCD, and now he sells dates on a hand-pulled cart. As he doesnt earn much he has his family in Ghaziabad, his native town of Uttar Pradesh. He earns as much to make ends meet but is determined to educate his children who arent now of school-going age.

Teenager Abdul Jabbar has never been to school. He has done nazra  means he has learnt to recite Quran. He can read or write nothing else. Native of Godda in Jharkhand, Abdul Jabbar, the youngest child of the family, works as a salesman for a sunglasses vendor on the steps of Jama Masjid. He gets just Rs 600 monthly, with lodging and food facilities being provided by his employer.

Similarly little educated is 24-year-old Muhammad Shahzad who sells Muslim caps and scarves at Jama Masjids southern gate overlooking the Chitli Qabar lane. The 5th class pass-out Shahzad, a Saharanpur native whose family has now settled in Delhi, has been sitting on the shop for some years. Unmarried Shahzad is doing it to assist the family.

These vendors are different from their counterparts in Mumbai in two aspects. First most of them had once shops in the vicinity of Jama Masjid. They were removed by MCD as it chalked out a multi-million plan for the beautification of Jama Masjid and infrastructural development of its surrounding. These shopkeepers were allotted space in outer Delhi, mostly deserted and devoid of business activity. So they preferred to be vendors here than to be shopkeepers there.

And second  which is very much because of the first  that these vendors, unlike those in Mumbai, are little disturbed by the police and municipality. They know they are in pitiable condition as their flourishing businesses were given a break by the MCD move. The MCD plan is yet to see the light of the day.
Help India!

Agartala : The student bodies affiliated to the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) swept the Student Council polls in all 22 government-run degree colleges in Tripura, an official said on Wednesday.

Of the 22 colleges, candidates of the Students Federation of India (SFI) and Tribal Students Union (TSU) were earlier elected unopposed in 13 Student Councils in as many colleges. Elections were thus held for only nine councils.

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Elections were held on Tuesday and results were declared late Tuesday night. The SFI and TSU candidates got a majority of the seats in all the nine councils, an official of the Education Department said.

According to the official, in contests for five seats as Class Representatives, three were won by independent candidates and one seat each went to the BJP-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and National Students Union of India (NSUI) of the Congress party.

The Student Council elections were fiercely contested, forcing the state government to deploy huge security forces in most of the colleges.

The student wing of the opposition Trinamool Congress, the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad, had boycotted the elections alleging misdeeds by the SFI.
The Fall season has always great surprises in store.Cinema welcomes plenty of buzzed and anticipated movies. Let's have a look at the 10 most interesting movies that will debut before the Academy Awards. It's an odd list: it contains a fantasy movie as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a sci-fi spin-off as Star Wars: Rogue One, emotional dramas as Jackie and Manchester By The Sea and hilarious comedies as Bridget Jones's Baby.

Lions emotional ride and Bridget Joness hilarious journey

Lion: it is the story of an Indian boy who gets lost on a train and he is unable to find his family again.

He is adopted by another couple, but he doesn't give up on his origins. The cast stars Dev Pavel, Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara. Embrace yourself for so many tears. Have a look at Lion trailer:

Bridget Jones's baby: Bridget Jones in back! After 12 years from the Edge of the Reason, Renee Zellwegger reprises her role. She will have to deal with two lovers, and.. an unexpected pregnancy. The Film is already out, have a look at the hilarious trailer:

Tom Fords thrilling Nocturnal Animals, Star Wars and Harry Potter spin-off

Nocturnal Animals: the eclecticTom Ford directs his second feature film. It stars Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal and it will be two stories in one. A breakup, two estranged lovers and lots of plot twists.

It will be released in November. The trailer looks thrilling and visually stunning:

Moonlight: critics are raving forthisfilm directed by Barry Jenkins, which stars Mahershala Ali in a coming of age story of a black american man who grows up and discovers himself and his homosexuality.

Star Wars Rogue One: after the extremely successfull VII chapter, the Star Wars saga returns with this spin-off.

It will include a beloved character: Darth Veder! It will be out on December 16. Have a look at Star Wars Rogue One trailer:

Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them: the Harry Potter saga continues with this spin-off that will tell the story of a different magical world: New York in the '20s. It stars our beloved Eddie Redmayne and Colin Farell.

It will be released on November 18th. Have a look at Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them trailer:

Critical darling Jackie, Manchester by the Sea andLa La Land

Jackie: Natalie Portman stars as Jackie Kennedy, in this biopic set during the following days of Kennedy's assassination. Pablo Larrain directs this emotional movie which has already won a Venice Film Festival's prize.

Manchester by the Sea: critics loved this emotional journey that tells the story of Casey Affleck's character who has to deal with his nephew after his brother's death. The movie will include Michelle Williams and both the actors seem strong Academy Awards contenders. The world premiere is set during the BFI. Don't miss Manchester By The Sea trailer:

Arrival: this sci-fi movie stars Amy Adams as a linguistic who is hired in order to get in touch with unexpected guests.

It will be out in November. This is the trailer of Arrival:

La La Land:Damien Chazelle returns to direct another incredible musical movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. It set in L.A. in the world of showbiz and it tells the story of two people who fall in love and has to deal with the consequences of change and success. Emma Stone has won the Coppa Volpi in Venice, the movie has been chosen as Tiff People Choice Awards. You just need to watch it, that's it. It will be out in December. Have a look at La La Land Trailer:

Honorable Mention: Certain Women

Certain Women: Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern are the protagonists of this female-driven story about three difficult and ordinary lives.

Certain Women trailer looks emotional:

These are the 10 most interesting new movies that will be part of this autumn and winter movie season. Some will likely get a nod at the Oscars, others will be snubbed, but you just have to give them a chance and go to the movies. Don't miss follow up articles, the next one is about Star Wars Rogue One.
When an epidemic breaks out in the US city of Atlanta, a cordon sanitaire is instituted in an attempt to stop the unknown virus from spreading. However, events rapidly spiral further out of a control, as people both inside and outside of the cordon discover a conspiracy reaching the highest echelons of government. Police officer Lex Carnahan (David Gyasi) struggles to maintain the peace on the outside, as his girlfriend Jana (Christina Moses) and best friend Officer Jake Riley (Chris Wood) are trapped on the inside.

'A multitude of storylines'

containment is an American remake of the Belgian Flemish-language show Cordon, first broadcast in 2014.

The thirteen-part series plays out a multitude of storylines, both inside and outside of the cordon, developing a variety of characters from a pregnant teenager, Teresa (Hannah Mangan-Lawrence) to Leo Green, a journalist who works with Lex Carnahan to discover the truth behind the origins of the virus. However, perhaps the most important character is the virus itself, a disease passed through the transfer of bodily fluids, and in the words of the Dr. Victor Cannerts of the CDC (George Young), is fatal in one hundred percent of its victims. The virusis of course the central tenet of the storyline, uniting some, but equally dividing others, on both sides of the cordon.

Conspiracy theories

But Containment is more than just a disaster series.

The lies and secrecy surrounding the virus origins enshroud the show in political conspiracy as the plot progresses, and those who viewers originally thought had nothing but good intentions began to look increasingly guilty. There are also romantic undertones within the show, between Jake Riley and teacher Katie Frank (Kristen Gutoskie), Teresa and her boyfriend Xander (Demetrius Bridges), and Lex and Jana, separated by the cordon.

'Patient Zero'?

As the truth about the virus and the real Patient Zero is revealed in the final few episodes, we as viewers have become increasingly invested in the characters, and watch with growing anxiety at any point where they come into contact with someone infected with the virus. With only three episodes remaining to be aired in the UK (E4, Wednesdays, 9pm), dedicated viewers can only wait to discover the fate of the characters, and the conspiracy that threatens them all.
AltiGen Communications Releases New Cloud Call Center

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By Casey Houser

Contributing Writer By Casey HouserContributing Writer

AltiGen (News - Alert) Communications has announced the commercial availability of its new hosted contact center software, AltiGen UC Cloud. The new product combines the capabilities of the companys own MaxACD Cloud Contact Center and Microsoft Skype (News - Alert) for Business to make something original.





AltiGens predecessor from which UC Cloud is build  MaxACD  already offers business customers a number of call queuing and routing tools that help shape their incoming and outgoing communications to consumers and other businesses. It has the ability to route calls based on the skills of call center representatives while also paying mind to the presence status of such employees. It can be run on a customers premise or in the cloud, which suits this latest pairing with Skype.

Customers can expect to get the most out of their contact centers and Skype by accessing UC Cloud in remote servers. The monthly packages mean to make it easy for clients to avoid capital expenditures and pay for only the service they need. Meanwhile, clients can take full control over their deployments by managing UC Cloud through a web-based administration portal.

David Tang, the vice president of AltiGens cloud solutions division, commented on the additional features MaxACD brings to a hosted Skype service:

With more and more organizations adopting Skype for Business to replace their proprietary PBX (News - Alert) systems, there is a growing demand for business-critical features like advanced auto attendant along with intelligent routing and queuing capabilities, Tang said. Delivered as a fully managed cloud solution, MaxACD integrated with Skype for Business provides the business critical communications capabilities required to meet the needs of both SMBs and large enterprises.

With that statement alone, it is clear that AltiGen intends to reach a wide range of enterprises. Since Skype does not require that businesses be large nor begin to freeze with a number of concurrent users, it can fit equally well at global enterprises as well as five-man shops. For AltiGens aims, this is perfect, since its MaxACD cloud capabilities can do the same. In the end, customers receive a product made to fit their needs, no matter their size.

Interested businesses in the U.S. can now find UC Cloud through direct AltiGen sales and through Microsoft (News - Alert) partners. The pair also has plans to expand to the U.K. and the rest of Europe, so this journey is far from complete.

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Edited by Maurice Nagle
In what has become a continuing trend in recent years, another act of terror carried out by an Islamic extremist has rocked the West. While the most recent attack was not as successful as those before it, it's still a clear reminder of the new reality in the war on terror.

What happened?

Shortly after 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, an explosion went off injuring 29 people. By the next morning, only one person injured by the blast was still in the hospital, and the manhunt was on for the person behind the attacks.

In less than 24 hours, the authorities released information about their prime suspect, 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Afghanistan.

Who Is Ahmad Khan Rahami? https://t.co/1b84qX9NTY  The New York Times (@nytimes) September 20, 2016

Just hours after releasing his photo, a local bartender recognized Rahami who was reportedly sleeping in nearby doorway, before notifying the police. Law enforcement quickly rushed to the scene where they engaged in a shootout with the suspect, which ended after Rahami was struck in the leg by a bullet and taken into custody.

Suspect history

Rahami was currently living in an apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, located above his family-owned restaurant, "First American Fried Chicken." According to interviews with his family, Rahami had become more vocal in his opposition to American culture after making several trips to Afghanistan in recent years.

Rahami was questioned by law enforcement upon his return from each trip, which is the normal procedure, but his answers and behavior never raised questions for the authorities to step in.

New details about NJ, NYC bombing suspects foreign trips https://t.co/RnV5q3IX1s pic.twitter.com/fv2d62TFsR  CBS News (@CBSNews) September 20, 2016

In addition to traveling to Afghanistan, Rahami also spent time in Quetta, Pakistan, which is known as a hotbed for the Taliban.

During his trip Quetta in 2011, Rahami was married to a local woman. Rahami would made several trips back to Pakistan in the years that would follow, telling immigration officials that the reason for his trip was to renew his visa and visit family members. Due to Quetta being a stronghold for terrorist activity, Rahami was questioned in further detail during each return visit.

Family and friends speak out

Rahami's father suspected that his son had become radicalized in 2014, prompting him to inform the authorities of the information. In addition to his family members, friends of Rahami also noticed a change. Long-time friend Flee Jones said Rahami "got more religious" following his trips to the Middle East, not just a change in attitude, but also in how he would dress. When Rahami was finally taken down during the shootout, he was carrying Islamic terrorism propaganda, including writings from the now deceased al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as others.

Current status

As of press time, Rahami is believed to have acted alone and not with groups like ISIS, though the FBI and other law enforcement outlets are still questioning other individuals, including family members of the suspect. Rahami is currently in custody and has been charged with five counts of attempted murder due to the shootout with police.
When President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama were about to meet in the California desert resort of Sunnylands in June 2013, the US government had worked hard to paint China as a villain in cyberspace.

The revelation made by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden just days before the shirt-sleeves meeting, however, shocked the world. It showed that whatever other countries had done in cyber-surveillance and spying was really nothing compared to the massive scale of operations by the NSA, often labeled as No Such Agency.

To the rest of the world, Snowden is undoubtedly a whistleblower and a great hero because he revealed the US government secret scheme to spy on people all over the world, including foreign leaders who are US allies.

Such spying, which violates people's privacy and civil rights, often involves willing and unwilling collaboration with several major US tech companies.

In the US, debate about whether Snowden is a hero, patriot or traitor is still a divisive issue, despite that his revelation has resulted in the US government and Congress correcting many mistakes.

For example, the panel appointed by Obama to review NSA surveillance programs made dozens of reform recommendations. A federal appeals court has found NSA's call-tracking program revealed by Snowden illegal. The USA Freedom Act passed by the US Congress ended the bulk collection of phone data by the government.

In the past week, Snowden has again been in the spotlight. The German-American movie, Snowden, directed and written by Oliver Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, hit US theaters on Sept 16.

Meanwhile, Snowden has pleaded for a pardon from Obama, arguing that his massive leak of NSA surveillance programs was "not only morally right" but also "left citizens better off".

On Sept 14, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Executive Director Anthony Romero called Obama to pardon Snowden by launching the Pardon Snowden campaign that will last untll the end of the Obama administration.

"Thanks to Edward Snowden's act of conscience, we've made historic strides in our fight for surveillance reform and improved cybersecurity," he said.

The ACLU campaign was joined by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a list of more than 100 legal scholars, former national security officials, business leaders, human rights activists and artists.

Romero believes the Espionage Act, which the US government used to charge Snowden, is a World War I era law that doesn't distinguish between selling secrets to foreign governments and giving them to journalists in the public interest.

Most of the people who believe that Snowden is a traitor and should spend the rest of his life in prison argue, as I heard in the latest C-SPAN Journal on Sept 16, that he broke an oath and put the US national security in danger.

It is true that Snowden broke trust, but it occurred in a situation where he found serious wrongdoing by the US government, which is a much more serious crime that people should care about.

Even former US attorney general Eric Holder said that "we can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made".

However, the US House Intelligence Committee unanimously signed a letter to Obama on Sept 15 not to pardon Snowden, describing his action as causing huge damage to the US intelligence community.

While Obama has commented that the debate triggered by Snowden "will make us stronger", it does not look likely that he will have the guts to pardon Snowden.

Both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are clearly against a pardon. Trump has repeatedly called for execution of Snowden although he said back in 2013 that he might become a major fan if he could reveal Obama's records.

Clinton has said that Snowden "stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands" while some of her fundraisers are calling for pardoning Snowden.

The only 2016 presidential candidate who supported Snowden has not become a party nominee. Bernie Sanders said "the information disclosed by Snowden has allowed Congress and the American people to understand the degree to which the NSA has abused its authority and violated our constitutional rights.

Contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com
Pianist Lang Lang named New York's cultural envoy Updated: 2016-09-21 11:55 By China Daily(China Daily USA)

Lang Lang, the virtuoso Chinese pianist known for his long-time love of New York's rich and diverse culture, was named the city's first-ever "Cultural Tourism Ambassador" on Tuesday by NYC & Company, the city's tourism agency.

Inducted into the city's Ride of Fame, Lang was presented with a double-decker sightseeing bus decorated with his photo. He then inscribed a personal message on one of the seats, with his autograph and a smiley face.

"I'm so excited, today will be a very long and beautiful memory that stays in my mind forever," Lang told Xinhua News Agency at the induction ceremony outside Steinway Hall, where he delivered a crowd-pleasing live performance of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue".

Earlier this year, New York City tourism officials announced a two-year city-to-city partnership with Shanghai, marking its first such alliance in China. Coinciding with the 2016 "US-China Tourism Year" designated by Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama, the partnership includes exchanges and the "sharing of best practices in tourism marketing," according to NYC & Company's website.

Christopher Heywood, the company's senior vice-president, said China was New York City's second-largest source of visitors (next to the UK) and a "crucially important market" for the city's tourism industry.

"We are confident that Lang Lang's ambassadorship will accelerate the growth even more," he said.

On Sept 16, Lang released his new album New York Rhapsody in homage to "the great city and the music it has inspired," according to Sony records.

Lang Lang said he would seize this opportunity and invite more friends from China to New York, a city that he said reflected a unique fusion of different cultures.

"We should put a piano here on the bus," said Lang. "And some Chinese barbecue!"

New York also proclaimed Sept 20, 2016 "Lang Lang Day."
Demand for Mandarin rises in UK as China's influence grows Updated: 2016-09-21 17:31 By WANG MINGJIE(China Daily UK)

British students sing a Chinese song during the opening ceremony at the Confucius Institute (Classrooms) annual conference in London. [Photo by PANG XINGLEI/XINHUA]

China's growing global influence is being fueled by the expansion of Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms in the UK, as more and more students start learning Mandarin.

According to Pearson, the British multinational publishing and education company, the number of students sitting Mandarin exams this year as part of the General Certificate of Secondary Education was up by 10 percent year-on-year, or 3,438 entrants,with a75 percent increase in entrants over the past five years.

More than 81 percent of students gained A* and A grades in their GCSE Mandarin exams this year.

This compares with an overall fall in the number of students taking GCSE modern foreign language exams,with the numbers taking exams in French down by 8.1 percent,and a fall of 7 percent in those taking German compared with last year.

Wang Yongli, minister counselor for education at the Chinese embassy, said the expansion of UK Confucius Institutes and Classrooms plays an important role in the rise of Mandarin in the country.

Speaking at a celebration to mark the 10th anniversary of the Confucius Institute for Scotland in Edinburgh this week, Wang said: "They are seen as centers of excellence to provide great support to teachers and schools in Mandarin teaching through a wide network. To date, there are 29 Confucius Institutes and 134 Confucius Classrooms in the UK."

Katharine Carruthers, director of the UCL Institute of Education Confucius Institute, said,"Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms have played a key role in the increase of Chinese teaching in England and subsequent growth in entrants for the GCSE."

Mark Herbert, head of the schools program at the British Council, said Mandarin is viewed as one of the most important languages for the UK's prosperity over the next 20 years.

Herbert said increased investment in opportunities to support Mandarin teaching in the UK has helped to make the language a more realistic option for more schools.

The British government recently launched a 10 million pound ($12.96million) Mandarin Excellence Program, designed to make teenagers fluent in the language by 2020.

The program has been introduced in secondary schools nationwide, with hundreds of pupils having already begun intensive lessons.

Minister of State for School Standards, Nick Gibb, said, "A high level of fluency in Mandarin will become increasingly important in our globally competitive economy."

However, despite Mandarin growing in popularity among British students, experts say it is a relatively difficult language to master for nonnative speakers.

Zhou Fang,Chinese co-director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Southampton, said, "Children need to learn four different tones for each syllable, which could have a completely different meaning."
Activists: remove link in "comfort women" lessons Updated: 2016-09-21 11:55 By Lia Zhu In San Francisco(China Daily USA)

Activists in California are demanding that the California Board of Education remove a "misleading" link in its recently approved curriculum that includes teaching about "comfort women" of World War II.

California, after New Jersey in 2004, is the second state in the US to include the topic of "comfort women" in the history-social science framework for public schools, which provides guidance to teachers, administrators and publishers.

"Even though we thank the state Board of Education for including the curriculum, we think it's very, very wrong to sneak in the link," said Lillian Sing, a retired San Francisco Superior Court judge and co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, a San Francisco-based advocacy group for "comfort women".

The link she referred to is to an agreement between Japan and South Korean in December last year, under which Japan pledged to pay 1 billion yen (about $8.3 million) from its state funds to build a "comfort women" foundation in South Korea, and Seoul, in return, agreed on a "final and irreversible" resolution on the wartime sex slavery issue.

The activists objected to the inclusion of the deal, arguing that the state Board of Education violated due process and transparency by "sneaking something in" at the last minute after the period of public comments was over.

"They sneaked in a link that they claimed was an agreement between Japan and South Korea as if the issue was resolved," said Sing, adding that the "comfort women" issue involves not only South Korea but other countries such as China, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Julie Tang, another retired judge and co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, told reporters on Sept 16 in San Jose, California, that the problem was "lack of notice", which is a violation of the US Constitution and "secret behind closed-door chambers".

"By that time, the public had no chance to protest or give information to convince the commissioners to vote against that," she said. "So without the information, the commissioners voted unanimously on the curriculum framework along with this link."

The activists said that they were told the foreign governments contacted Tom Adams, deputy superintendent of the Instruction and Learning Support Branch at the California Department of Education, to put the agreement in the curriculum. Adams couldn't be reached for comment.

"I think the judges are right. There's a violation of process," said Congressman Mike Honda, who joined the activists at the press conference. "(If) The Japanese government wants to continue the issue, then they should stand in the line and follow our process here, but not do it under a cloak of secrecy."

He encouraged the public to write to the state Board of Education and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson to review the situation and remove the link from the books.

The Japanese-South Korean deal immediately sparked debate after it was announced last year, as activists called it "narrow" and "limited" and criticized the two governments for failing to consult the victims.

Among the activists is Yong-Soo Lee, 89, a South Korean "comfort woman" survivor. She joined Honda and the activists to protest the board, including the agreement in the new curriculum.

"I am the living proof of history. I'm testifying what I experienced and what I saw myself," Lee said through a translator.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com
Whether you are looking for a scenic farm, historical inn or a cozy bed & breakfast, there are many great choices within a short drive from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stay in a country inn modeled after the Southern plantation home in "Gone with the Wind", explore Pennsylvania Dutch Country, or check into an inn near Gettysburg's famous attractions.

We recommend that you call the attractions and restaurants ahead of your visit to confirm current opening times.

1. Tara - A Country Inn - 1 hour 15 minutes from Pittsburgh  Tara - A Country Inn

A stay at Tara - A Country Inn will have guests not giving a damn about much of the outside world once they have enjoyed its charms. Modeled after the Southern plantation home in Gone with the Wind, this inn offers guests the chance to stay in one of 27 themed rooms and enjoy the decadence of that time period. All rooms feature modern amenities including gas fireplaces and specialty tubs. Breakfast for overnight guests can be served in-room continental style or as a hot, gourmet affair served in the dining room. Sundays find guests with the option of a full Sunday brunch buffet. 2844 Lake Rd, Clark, PA 16113, 800-782-2803

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2. Swiss Woods Bed and Breakfast - 3 hours 45 minutes from Pittsburgh  Swiss Woods Bed and Breakfast

Located in Amish Country, the Swiss Woods is an oasis of hospitality, charm and a little bit of European flair. The 7 rooms of the inn each include a private bath and are uniquely decorated. Cuisine is a priority at Swiss Woods and that means great food for the included breakfast. Fresh quiches, cobblers, fried hash browns, and baked oatmeal  all made with ingredients from the property  are all favorites that are offered. Afternoon snacks of homemade baked goods and a selection of tea and coffee are available in the afternoons. The town of Lititz boasts a chocolate factory, a pretzel factory and many other fun and funky shops. 500 Blantz Rd, Lititz, PA 17543, 800-594-8018

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3. Weekend Getaways Near Me: Pheasant Field Bed and Breakfast - 3 hours  Pheasant Field Bed and Breakfast

Pheasant Field is a beautifully decorated and comfortable bed and breakfast that caters to hikers, horses and everyone in between. With 8 rooms to offer, this bed and breakfast is perfectly located for hikers as it is a half a mile from the Appalachian Trail. They also offer a horse hotel for guests traveling with their equine friends. The 1802 house and barn are completely renovated and allow visitors to relax in a peaceful country setting while enjoying a bit of history. Breakfast is a central event and includes signature items made with locally grown or made ingredients. 150 Hickorytown Rd, Carlisle, PA 17015, 877-258-0717



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4. Weekend Getaways Near Me: Inn at Herr Ridge - 3 hours 20 minutes from Pittsburgh  Inn at Herr Ridge



The Inn at Herr Ridge offers history buffs the opportunity to sleep practically on the field where the battle of Gettysburg took place. A roof-top terrace provides sweeping views of the battlefield and surrounding area. History aficionados, or those simply seeking time away, will find the 14 rooms of this Inn offer casual, period appropriate comfort with plenty of modern amenities. Room styles include a rustic cabin decor in a space that overlooks the battlefield and an attic room with a balcony, fireplace and 2-person jetted tub. Dining needs can be met without ever leaving the property either with fine dining in The Tavern or casual dining at the Sharpshooter Grille. 900 Chambersburg Rd, Gettysburg, PA 17325, 800-362-9849

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5. BF Hiestand House Bed and Breakfast - 3 hours 30 minutes from Pittsburgh  BF Hiestand House Bed and Breakfast



Located in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the BF Hiestand House is a 6 room bed and breakfast in a lovingly restored Victorian home. Virtually on the banks of the Susquehanna River, and surrounded by wineries and breweries, this inn is a delight for outdoor and indoor enthusiasts alike. Each period-decorated room has its own attached, private bathroom, flat screen television and access to wireless Internet. There are several spacious and well-decorated common areas throughout the inn. Breakfast includes fresh fruit and baked goods, as well as several choices of hot entrees. The innkeepers also arrange winery and brewery tours for interested guests. 722 E. Market St, Marietta, PA 17547, 1-717-426-8415

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6. Short Trips from Pittsburgh: Carlisle House  Carlisle House



The Carlisle House is a quiet getaway conveniently located within driving distance of many major cities, including New York, Atlantic City and Pittsburgh. The inn stands in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near shopping, restaurants and historical sites such as Dickinson College. There is also skiing, hiking and fly fishing nearby. Each of the inns tastefully decorated rooms features a private bath with either a whirlpool tub or jetted shower. A delicious breakfast featuring homemade quiche is served each morning, and a guest kitchen with free beverages is available 24/7. Two electric vehicle chargers are also available at the inn. 148 S Hanover Street, Carlisle, PA 17013, 717-249-0350

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7. Weekend Getaways Near Me: Brickhouse Inn Bed & Breakfast  Brickhouse Inn Bed & Breakfast

The 15-room Brickhouse Inn Bed & Breakfast puts guests in the heart of Gettysburgs history and charm. Whether visiting the historic battlefield or the local art galleries and shops, the Brickhouse Inn is a great home base. The Inn is actually two renovated buildings from the 1800s, one of which was a feature of the fateful battle for which the town is famous. Updated to include loads of modern amenities, this bed and breakfast successfully highlights the best things about past and present. Guests enjoy a hot, delicious breakfast served seasonally on the patio or in the two common dining rooms. 452 Baltimore St, Gettysburg, PA 17325, 800-864-3464



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8. Weekend Getaways Near Me: The Reynolds Mansion Bed and Breakfast  The Reynolds Mansion Bed and Breakfast

Each of the 8 rooms in this 130 year old mansion is decorated with charm and beauty and include such modern luxuries as private bathrooms with jetted tubs and fireplaces. The Reynolds Mansion is a completely renovated 19th century home with 13 foot ceilings, original woodwork and 13 working fireplaces, all of which leads to a romantic and soothing atmosphere. Breakfast is included with the rate and is a hot 3-course meal with numerous menu options, many of which are made from locally sourced ingredients. The innkeepers offer many extras for special occasions including private yoga sessions and massages. 101 W. Linn St, Bellefonte, PA 16823, 814-353-8407



9. Short trips from Pittsburgh: Springfield House  Springfield House

Located just minutes from Penn State University, the Springfield House Bed and Breakfast is a cozy, comfortable retreat located in Boalsburg, in the heart of the Happy Valley area of Pennsylvania. Shops, restaurants and historic sites are all within walking distance of the inn. The Springfield House was built in the 1840s, and its quaint, comfortable guest rooms offer modern amenities such as flat-screen TVs, free Internet access and private baths. Breakfast is served each morning and the innkeepers are always glad to suggest a restaurant or a local attraction to make your stay in Boalsburg truly special. 126 East Main Street, Boalsburg, PA 16827, 888-STAY-N-PA (782-9672)



10. Weekend Getaways Near Me: Baladerry Inn  Baladerry Inn

Located on the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, The Baladerry Inn is the ideal place for visitors to stay and experience the history of the area. The inn was built in 1812 and still retains much of its historic charm, as well as beautiful landscaped grounds. Each room has comfortable, cheerful country furnishings, a private bath, free wireless Internet and complimentary beverages all day and night. The inn serves a delicious country breakfast each morning and is in close proximity to the historic sites of Adams County. Shopping, restaurants, theaters, wineries and golf courses are also nearby. 40 Hospital Road, Gettysburg, PA 17325, 717-337-1342



11. Romantic Weekend Getaways Near Me: Inne at Watson's Choice  Inne at Watson's Choice

Visitors to Frank Lloyd Wrights Fallingwater or the Laurel Caverns will find a peaceful respite at the Inne at Watsons Choice. The grounds of the inn are both scenic and rustic and opportunities to enjoy the beauty abound. All 12 bedrooms are individually themed and include their own private, modern bathrooms. Breakfast is served in the Great Room and includes in-season fruit, juice and homemade pastries as well as a variety of hot entrees. Seasonally, the innkeepers provide homemade ice tea, lemonade and/or hot mulled apple or cranberry cider, along with homemade cookies as an afternoon treat. 234 Balsinger Rd, Uniontown, PA 15401, 888-820-5380



12. Romantic Weekend Getaways Near Me: Hickory Bridge Farm  Hickory Bridge Farm



The Hickory Bridge Farm is a private, cozy retreat that offers lovely accommodations, fantastic food and an overall charming environment. Guests can stay in the Old Farmhouse  a structure dating back to the 1700s  or the new farmhouse. Both of these options provide access to a large deck overlooking a creek and covered bridge. There are also accommodations in The Cottages, which feature private bathrooms and wood burning fireplaces. A full, hot breakfast is included and served Monday  Saturday. Sunday breakfast is continental and served in guests rooms. While nestled in a bucolic country setting, the Farm is only 9 miles from downtown Gettysburg. 94 Hickory Bridge Rd, Orrtanna, PA 17353, 717-642-5261

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13. Romantic Weekend Getaways Near Me: Campbell House Bed and Breakfast  Campbell House Bed and Breakfast



Campbell House Bed and Breakfast is the place to be for romance! They specialize in weddings and elopements, and will do everything they can to make your special day unforgettable. The inn is housed in a city cottage built in the late 1800s and is decorated in an eclectic mix of Victorian style and modern conveniences. Breakfast is available each morning and complimentary snacks and beverages are available all day in the Strawberry Pantry. The Campbell House is located in Ligonier, Pennsylvania and is the perfect place to rest after checking out the nearby historical sites and outdoor attractions of Pennsylvanias Laurel Highlands. 305 East Main Street, Ligonier, PA 15658, 888-238-9812

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14. Romantic Weekend Getaways Near Me: Battlefield Bed and Breakfast Inn  Battlefield Bed and Breakfast Inn



Most people visiting Gettysburg, PA are there for the Civil War history, making the Battlefield Bed and Breakfast Inn a perfect place to stay. During the War of the States, this Inn was the home of prominent abolitionists and it is steeped in their history. The inn offers 10 rooms in the farmhouse, one room in the barn and one cottage. All rooms are Civil War themed and include private bathrooms, mini refrigerators and wireless Internet. Also offered are specialty packages such as North vs South Paranormal package and Complete Gettysburg package that features a tour by a licensed guide. 2264 Emmitsburg Rd, Gettysburg, PA 17325, 717-334-8804



15. Romantic Weekend Getaways from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Olde Square Inn  Olde Square Inn



This Inn, located in the middle of many of Pennsylvanias most frequently visited attractions, sits in the town center of the charming village of Mount Joy. Offering 6 rooms and one cottage for guests to choose from, the Olde Square Inn is a renovated Colonial Revival home. Each room includes a private bath and a 3-course, freshly prepared breakfast delivered to the room each morning. One suite is offered for additional privacy. The Inn boasts a rare bed and breakfast treat with an in-ground swimming pool, as well as a sitting porch and grand balcony. 127 East Main St, Mount, Joy PA, 17552, 17-653-4525

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16. Romantic Weekend Getaways Near Me: Rocky Springs Bed and Breakfast  Rocky Springs Bed and Breakfast



Located on 17 acres of a once popular local amusement park in Lancaster, PA, Rocky Springs Bed and Breakfast is perfect for a getaway. Guests staying in any of the 4 Mansion House rooms or the Cottage will enjoy quiet, comfortable and beautifully appointed accommodations in this Pre-Victorian Era home. Each room has a private bath and offers views of the well-maintained grounds and even the namesake spring itself. The inn also has a quarter-mile frontage along the peaceful Conestoga River. Breakfast is included in the room rate and is a freshly prepared, generously portioned affair served in the dining room. 1441 Millport Rd, Lancaster, PA 17602, 717-509-6800



17. Romantic Weekend Getaways from Pittsburgh, PA: The Gaslight Inn  The Gaslight Inn



The Gaslight Inn is a comfortable, romantic retreat in the heart of Gettysburg. The staff prides itself on providing outstanding service, and are always ready to arrange a private tour or recommend a restaurant for dinner. The inn has three sitting rooms and three porches overlooking the beautifully landscaped grounds. The inns elegant rooms have private baths, comfortable bedding and free wireless Internet. A three-course breakfast featuring local ingredients is served each morning, and complimentary snacks and beverages are available 24 hours a day. The inn is just a short walk from Lincoln Square and East Confederate Avenue, and is also close to other historic sites, shopping and restaurants. 33 East Middle Street, Gettysburg, PA 17325, 717-337-9100



18. Romantic Weekend Getaways from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 30 Timber Road Bed and Breakfast  30 Timber Road Bed and Breakfast



30 Timber Road is a secluded woodland retreat near Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Each guest room includes a king size bed with memory foam mattress and luxury linens, a fireplace and a private bath with a whirlpool tub. A hearty breakfast featuring local produce and meat products is served each morning, and complimentary wine and snacks are available each evening. Outdoor adventure is all around the inn, including fly fishing, golfing and hiking along the Appalachian Trail. 30 Timber Road is also close to several museums, shopping, dining, theaters, playhouses and arts and crafts galleries. 30 Timber Rd, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050, 717-766-9123

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19. Romantic Weekend Getaways from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: The Gage Mansion Bed and Breakfast  The Gage Mansion Bed and Breakfast The Gage Mansion is a stately brick Queen Anne Victorian home built in 1896. The home maintains much of its original Victorian architectural details such as ornate woodwork, fireplace mantels and stained-glass windows. However, the guest rooms offer modern amenities such as luxury linens and toiletries, individual climate control, private baths and free wireless Internet. A gourmet breakfast is available each morning. The Gage Mansion is located in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, in the beautiful Allegheny Mountain range. Outdoor activities such as hiking, biking, cave exploring and water sports on the 8,000 acre Raystown Lake are all nearby. 317 Penn St., Huntingdon, PA 16652, 814-599-2803



22 Perfect Romantic Weekend Getaways from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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This post is part of the Verastic In Nigeria series.

Going to Nigeria is something that I have been wanting to do since I arrived in America. Every year, I was sure that that was the year I would finally make it to Nigeria. In 2014, I was very sure that 2015 was definitely the year Id be in Nigeria, but then Ada Verastic was in my tummy, so that plan changed.

At no time did I ever imagine that it would be 16 long years before my feet touched Nigerian soil again, nor did I ever think that whenever I did touch Nigerian soil, I would be doing it with a baby strapped to my chest. Not just any baby, but my own baby, one that I carried and gave birth to. Insane.

I cannot explain it, but when my feet touched Nigeria, there was a kind of peace and familiarity that overcame me. I know, I know, peace isnt something that people generally relate to Nigeria, but please, indulge me. There were lots of disappointments and frustrations in Nigeria, and there were many, many things I did not like, but they all felt like organized chaos. I did not like them, but I knew them.

I spent one month in Nigeria and my life changed in ways that I did not plan or expect. I had many, many deep and revealing conversations with my parents where I found out things about me and my family that I never knew  like how as a baby, I was knocking very hard on deaths door. In the exact words of my daddy, You were not to live. I cried that night. I woke up the next morning, and I cried some more. I was so grateful to God for keeping me, and at the same time, I was remorseful for the countless times I felt like He was not with me. Even as I type this right now, I dont know how many battles Hes fighting for me.

And I wept because as a mother now, I began to imagine the pain and panic my mother was facing when she thought her one-week-old baby was going to die. I have always thought my mommy was a strong woman, but now I know shes stronger than I thought.

Maybe its because of this news of how I was not to live, or maybe its because of my mommys early-morning gospel music, or perhaps, just the Hand of God, but I know for a fact that He drew me closer to Him. I found myself being in His presence a lot more often. I felt wholly surrounded by Him. I was not afraid.

There were other less dramatic changes like my decision to become a stronger and more vocal cultural ambassador because as a Nigerian who has spent most of her life in America (16 years in America; 11 years in Nigeria), I was disappointed that I sounded and acted more Nigerian than some Nigerians in Nigeria  who have never even left Nigeria. I was disturbed that people were impressed by my insistence on eating Nigerian foods and buying local Nigerian products like Dudu Osun soap. No, they were not impressed; they were shocked. And so now, more than ever, I have decided to be even more Nigerian, to use my platform and my influence to expand and appreciate the Nigerian/African brand because we are truly amazing.

Too many times, I was in awe of my people. Our infrastructure sucks; our government sucks. Our economy  what economy? But the average Nigerian still finds a will to live. And in spite of the difficulty, they still get up every morning and hustle. And hustling, there are levels to it. The man who is hustling for a fifty million naira contract is not on the same level as the man who is hustling to sell five oranges in one day. And the question that rang in my head all day, the calling that God put on my heart was how can I make a difference? Id like to think that I made a difference in the lives of the people that were around me, but only God can confirm. What I know for sure is that I have only just started.

I recorded myself a lot while in Nigeria. At first, it was awkward for me because I thought I looked really strange talking into the camera all the time. But then, when I got home, I would replay some of the videos and I would be really glad that I captured that moment. The more I recorded the videos, the more I wanted to record them. Videos have a way of preserving the moment and telling the story  in a way that words and pictures cant. And after a while, your mind might forget little details, but the videos remain the same. Videos breathe life. I imagine Ada Verastic and her confusingly identical twin brothers gathered around the screen one day, watching their early lives and the time their mothers boobs were perky.

Soooo  it is with shaky fingers and an excited and nervous mind that I announce that starting next week Wednesday, September 28th 2016 (and every Wednesday after that), I will post a weekly vlog about my life. Think of it as a Verastic Lately kind of update. Sure, Ill still blog about my life, but the videos will give you (and me) something that my words cant. Am I so afraid of what I just committed to that I think I might faint? Yes. Absolutely. But Ill do it anyway. And Im blogging about it today because if I wait any longer, I might change my mind.

I have much to learn about YouTube/vlogging, but we can learn together. And if theres something you want to suggest that I do to make my videos better, Im all ears (or eyes). Meanwhile, if you click the image below, itll take you straight to my YouTube page where you can subscribe and be first to know when I put more of my business on the internet of things. Because if theres anything the internet needs more of, its Veras life. Click below.
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HA NOI  Certification for fisheries exports to Korea and China will be expanded nationwide starting next month under the National Single Window (NSW), the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said.

Issuance of export certificates for fisheries products has been under pilot implementation since May 16 for several companies exporting to Korea and China in the National Agro-Forestry-Fisheries Quality Assurance Departments (Nafidad) branches 4, 5 and 6.

This is one of the efforts by the Nafidad to improve one-stop access to the ministrys services.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on July 18 issued Document 6057/BNN-TCCB on the implementation of the national single window at the ministry which targeted that nine administrative procedures will be conducted via the one-stop system by as early as October 1. No paper documents will be accepted after September.

Under the new initiative, Nafidad will coordinate with the General Department of Customs and Viettel ICT to provide training to staff and firms.

Firms said the one-stop procedures are more convenient now, compared to the pilot phase. But upgrades are still needed.

The ministry plans to connect four more administrative procedures to the national single window by the end of the year.

During 2016-20, the ministry plans to implement 30 procedures on the national single window system.

So far, the ministrys national single window system has received 25,513 files, more than 77 per cent of which were handled as of August 31.

To date 33 administrative procedures of nine ministries were conducted via the national single window system, the General Department of Customs said. - VNS
HA NOI  The Ministry of Industry and Trade will accelerate the completion of management policies and documents to tighten multi-level marketing regulations while limiting licensing for the activity, said minister Tran Tuan Anh.

Anh said that not all multi-level marketing firms violated regulations or collapsed. However, the 1.2 million participants in the network could have big impacts on both participants and consumers.

"Multi-level marketing is complicated and has risks if we do not tighten management policies," he added.

"It is the reason that the Government should review Decree No 42/2014/N-CP as well as investigate shortcomings of regulations on the location and headquarters of multi-level marketing firms," he said.

Trinh Anh Tuan, deputy director of the ministrys Competitive Management Department told the conference held in Ha Noi on Monday to review multi-level marketing activities, and that by this month, the country has 50 licensed multi-level marketing companies.

In the first half of the year, multi-level marketing firms had total turnover of VN4 trillion (US$177.7 million), contributing VN452 billion to the State budget.

Of which, the foreign firms had turnover of VN1.8 trillion, accounting for 45 per cent while the domestic ones had VN2.2 trillion.

The number of people participating in the activities in the six month period was 500,000, a reduction of 57 per cent from the same period last year.

Tuan added that Decree No 42/2014/N-CP which took effect on July 1st 2014 has shortcomings as multi-level marketing has caused problems in reality.

There were nine multi-level marketing companies that had their licences withdrawn and were fined several thousand billion ong.

Check-ups from the departments of Industry and Trade nationwide in the first half of the year showed that 26 out of 48 investigated had signs of violations with total fines of around VN4.5 billion.

The most common violations included operations without licenses, and organising large-scale conferences and training without permission from the departments.

Nguyen Thanh, director of Thua Thien Hue Provinces Department of Industry and Trade said the regulation allowing multi-level marketing firms to operate without branches and representative offices has caused difficulties in management and check-ups.

The investigations on the companies have encountered difficulties especially in remote and mountainous areas, Thanh added.

The ministry on March 9th 2016 promulgated Directive No 02 on enhancing the check-ups and supervision on the activities.

It found that fines in the Decree No 42/2014/N-CP have not been strict enough to prevent the violations.

The ministry has been collecting opinions from relevant agencies for the revised Decree No 42/2014/N-CP to submit to the Government for approval.  VNS
A proposal to use State funds to settle commercial banks bad debts, as stated in the draft plan on economic restructuring for the 2016-2020 period, has been met with a cold shoulder.  Photo thoibaotaichinh.vn

HA NOI  A proposal to use State funds to settle commercial banks bad debts, as stated in the draft plan on economic restructuring for the 2016-2020 period, has been met with a cold shoulder.

Under the plan drafted by the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the feasibility of the proposal is to be studied by the Ministry of Finance and State Bank of Viet Nam. Authorities will have to submit a relevant resolution to the National Assembly for approval next year.

Deputy Chairman of the National Assemblys Economic Committee, Nguyen uc Kien, said State funds should not be used to deal with bad debts at this time as the money must be used to address other prioritised problems.

"Bad debts are not the States fault but stem from the commercial banks wrongdoings so the banks must take responsibility for their operation," he said.

If they cannot solve the problem, they must file for bankruptcy. The Government only interferes to ensure the stability of the financial and banking market and maintain the interests of depositors, Kien stressed.

In fact, State money funds have been granted to the State-owned Viet Nam Asset Management Company (VAMC) to settle bad debts. Last year, the Government decided to increase the companys charter capital to VN2 trillion (US$89.7 million) from VN500 billion and allowed the company to buy debts by issuing special bonds.

VAMC Chairman Nguyen Quoc Hung affirmed that the company did not need more money now. Instead, it needed more power to settle the bad debts. He agreed that it was not feasible to use State funds with the budget being overspent.

Debt settlement is estimated to range from VN5 trillion to VN10 trillion.

Expert Bui Trinh said that since the State budget comes from tax collection, the Government should not let the people pay for what they do not owe.

Many experts agreed that supplying more money was only a temporary solution, while the more important one was to build a debt market and empower the VAMC to sell collaterals.

Nguyen Tri Hieu, a banking expert, told bizlive.vn that Viet Nam still did not have a debt trading market in the true sense of the word.

The VAMC, a State company, buys bad debts and pays in special bonds, Hieu said, adding that VAMC just serves as the parking lot for bad debts.

We need to build a transparent debt market, where banks sell bad debts and receive cash, he suggested.

Hieu said to date, VAMC had bought bad debts at book value. But if buying bad debt with money from the State budget, the price must be the market price, or the real value of the debts, which might be much lower than the book value.

In order to truly solve the problem, bad debts must be bought at real value and commercial banks must suffer losses, he said.

Regarding the empowerment to VAMC, Kien from the NAs Economic Committee said that members of the National Assembly Standing Committee were discussing amendments to the Law on Asset Auction, which would allow the VAMC to auction off asset collaterals without any intermediary.

The State Bank of Viet Nam said the bad debt ratio of the banking system by the end of June 2016 was 2.58 per cent, which was 0.25 percentage point lower than May but higher than the 2.55 per cent of late 2015.  VNS
HA NOI  Higher anti-dumping duties on Vietnamese frozen warm-water shrimp exports levied by the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) will affect the psychology of businesses and shrimp farmers in Viet Nam.

This was the assessment of the General Secretary of the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) Truong inh Hoe.

In response to the DOCs final decision that Vietnamese products will be taxed at 4.78 per cent during the 10th administrative review (POR 10), Hoe said this was a significant increase compared with previous reviews.

Under the decision, the US had increased the duty rate for Vietnamese shrimp in POR10, from 0.91 per cent in the POR9 to 4.78 per cent at present, for both mandatory and voluntary businesses. Meanwhile, the tariff imposed on other Vietnamese firms or exporters not examined as mandatory or voluntary respondents in the POR10 remains at 25.76 per cent.

Hoe said one of the main reasons leading to the high tax at POR10 was that DOC utilised a zeroing method to determine dumping margins, which many foreign experts consider unfair. This method was inconsistent with the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), in which Viet Nam and the US are both member countries.

With this chink, Hoe said VASEP was studying the ruling, to possibly issue a complaint to the US State Court of International Trade, in order to require DOC to rethink its calculation method of the anti-dumping tax rate in the POR10.

We hope that with the WTOs recent verdicts in applying price discrimination, Vietnamese businesses can reach a tax of zero per cent and prove that they have not sold shrimp at dumping prices in the US market, said Hoe.

In the POR10, DOC continued to choose Bangladesh and India as the main reference countries to fix the prices of several input materials. The two countries do not have many similarities with Viet Nam, leading to increased anti-dumping margins, said Hoe.

Chairman and Director of Thuan Phuoc Seafoods and Trading Corporation, Tran Van Linh, said the DOCs increase of the anti-dumping tax rate had caused difficulties for Vietnamese producers and shrimp farmers. With the current conditions, the cost of Vietnamese shrimp resulted in domestic producers is no longer able to compete with its rivals, such as Thailand, Indonesia, India and Ecuador.

He noted that although the countrys shrimp industry had been rapidly developing, it lacked independence and remained unsuitable for development because businesses had to import adult shrimp and feed. In addition, the rate of successfully raised shrimp in Viet Nam was 30 to 35 per cent, which is much lower than in rival countries.

As for domestic competition, Linh said Minh Phu Group was a giant in Viet Nam. Its exports of shrimp to the US had accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the countrys exports. The group did not have to suffer anti-dumping taxes from the US, making it very difficult for other Vietnamese companies to compete with Minh Phu.

To maintain market share in the US market, businesses will have to continuously reduce prices, and finally shrimp farmers will have to bear heavy losses, said Linh.

According to statistics from VASEP, Viet Nam has, so far, earned nearly US$600 million from the export of shrimp since early this year, resulting in a year-on-year increase of 14 per cent. The export increased partly because of POR9s lower tax rate of 0.91 per cent.

The US is Viet Nams largest importer of shrimp, accounting for 22.7 per cent of export market share.

Hoe said the export of shrimp to the US did not only depend on low and high anti-dumping duties, but also other factors, such as quality, supply capacity, market situation and the supply-demand capacity of other export countries.

Therefore, for the long-term, businesses and shrimp farmers need to set up a systematic plan for production, processing and consumption of high-quality product, as well as maintaining a stable number of customers. With this, it will not likely be affected by an anti-dumping tax or other technical barriers from import countries, said Hoe.

VASEP predicted that the countrys export value would reach about US$3.2 billion this year, increasing by 11 per cent, compared with last year.  VNS
HCM CITY  Pollution in HCM City canals is worsening as large quantities of household and industrial wastewater, as well as rubbish, are being discharged or dumped into city canals, according to the citys Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

A rapid increase in population, a lack of public awareness about environmental protection, and drainage of rainwater and wastewater into the same systems have contributed to the worsening pollution.

Wastewater from households and industrial production is not being treated at all or is being treated improperly, according to the department.

The department said the canals were also being polluted by large amounts of waste from neighbouring provinces.

The Nhum  Xuan Truong and Cai springs and Ba Bo Canal, for example, receive a large quantity of waste from households and industries in Binh Duong Province.

Similarly, Thay Cai  An Ha canals receive waste from households and industries in Long An Province.

Nguyen Thi Thanh My, deputy director of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment, said the department would more strictly inspect production establishments that release wastewater into canals, especially in areas that are pollution hot spots.

The production workshops would be required to build a wastewater treatment facility and operate according to regulations, she said.

Enterprises with wastewater treatment facilities that release more than 1,000 cu.m of wastewater a day must use an automatic wastewater monitoring system. Data from the system will be sent to the department.

Enterprises that continue to pollute will have to relocate or stop operation.

The department is also working with neighbouring provinces to draw up regulations to control wastewater discharge from enterprises located near the citys borders.

Drainage inspections

On Monday, the deputy chairman of the HCM City Peoples Committee, Huynh Cach Mang, inspected water drainage systems in Binh Tan and Tan Phu districts.

In Binh Tan, a project to upgrade more than 3.5 km of Kinh Duong Vuong Street to prevent flooding is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to the citys Steering Centre of Urban Flood Control Programme. The project costs about VN800 billion (US$36 million).

Nguyen Ngoc Cong, director of the citys Steering Centre of Urban Flood Control Programme, said the flooding situation at Kinh Duong Vuong Street would continue as water drainage systems along the street were being affected by housing encroaching on the land.

The drains that carry water to Le Cong Phep, Ba Tieng and Nhay canals are blocked.

Ba Tieng Canal, for example, is blocked by rubbish, even though the Steering Centre dredged the canal in July.

In Binh Tan, three canals, a water drainage gate, a water drainage sewer and six manholes have all been affected by housing built illegally in certain areas, according to the city Steering Centre of Urban Flood Control Programme. In Tan Phu, two water drains and six manholes have been affected as well.

Manh told local agencies to dredge blocked canals and relocate households that have illegally built housing or structures near canals in Binh Tan and Tan Phu.

He also told districts to launch a public campaign to educate local residents about the environmental damage caused by throwing rubbish into canals. VNS
HCM CITY The Prime Minister has approved a project to preserve the Oc Eo- Ba The archeological site in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta province of An Giang.

Funded by the provincial budget, the project will cost VN6.74 billion (US$300,000) and will be carried out between 2016 and 2020.

The work will include upgrading infrastructure and completing a dossier to submit to UNESCO for recognition as a world heritage site.

In 2012, the sitewith its millenia-old pottery, tools, and other remainswas recognised as a national cultural relic.

The Oc Eo Cultural Relic Management Board, in coordination with the Viet Nam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies, held a press meeting Monday to launch the book Di san van hoa Oc Eo- Ba The tinh An Giang (Oc Eo- Ba The Cultural Relic in An Giang Province).

The 780-page book is a collection of documents and research on the relic from foreign and domestic experts. VNS
HA NOI  Dancers and choreographers from European and Asian countries will be performing together at a festival series in Ha Noi kicking off tonight.

Contemporary dances will be performed by artistes from Germany, France, Israel, Japan, Austria and Viet Nam in Ha Noi from Wednesday through to Sunday, and in HCMC from September 25 to 27.

A piece entitled Laundries in Ha Noi, has been selected to open the festival at Ha Nois Youth Theatre tonight and at the HCM City Opera House on September 25 at 8pm.

The piece is a co-production by German choreographer and dancer Riki von Falken and Vietnamese Nguyen Trinh Thi, and is a joint project carried out by the Goethe Institute in Ha Noi.

Under the project, von Falken had three weeks to research the images and movements in Ha Noi followed by an intensive work process in Berlin.

Born in 1954, during her childhood in the 1960s, television brought the images of the war into German living rooms. Whilst the media artist Thi was born in Ha Noi in 1973 shortly after the last big US bombardments.

Both of them still carry those pictures within themselves. Even if the images of war have been eliminated, they have still consciously and unconsciously influenced the context of the life of both artistes.

The artistes take the audience on a journey of transformative experience and its influence on images of the present.

Von Falken will dance with a background of images and video by Thi.

"Europe meets Asia in Contemporary Dance" has been an initiative of the European Union Network Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) and embassies in Ha Noi since in 2011. It is an artistic and cultural event to promote and enhance the value of contemporary dance in Viet Nam, creating a bridge for artistes to exchange and to share experiences, as well as an opportunity to bring Vietnamese audiences closer to the diverse expressions of contemporary dance.

The host country Viet Nam will be represented by Tran Ly Ly and her team from HCM City Dance College. They will perform their Yes Yes No No dance, which follows the first version last year. They will perform on Thursday in Ha Noi and September 26 in HCM City.

This is the third time Ive been invited to take part in the contemporary dance festival. It is a pride and also a pressure for me, said choreographer Ly at the press conference held yesterday at the Goethe Institute in Ha Noi.

Six dancers will perform Yes Yes No No with live music played by Phu Pham.

The Roof is a contribution by the HCM City Ballet Symphony and Orchestra taking part for the first time at the festival. They will play in Ha Noi on Friday and HCM City on September 27.

From Israel, choreographer Idan Sharabi will present Interviews at the festival in Ha Noi on Saturday.

In July 2014, during the Gaza conflict, I started creating Interviews. I interviewed several people I met while sitting in different shelters as well as the dancers from the company, said Sharabi.

From their responses, I learned a lot about humanity in relation to violence, power and communication. These topics evoked even more questions in me, which soon enough, became strong pillars in the construction of the dance.

The festival will also see performances by Austrian, Japanese and French dancers.

In Ha Noi the festival will take place at the Viet Nam Youth Theatre, 11 Ngo Thi Nham and Star Galaxy Theatre, 87 Lang Ha. In HCM City it will be held at the municipal Opera House, 7 Lam Son Square.

For more information please go to www.hanoidancefestival.com. -- VNS
HA NOI  Some 50 artists are participating in an exhibition that opened today in downtown Ha Noi to showcase 30 years of the countrys renewal policy.

Its not an ordinary exhibition, art critic Nguyen uc Binh, a curator of the Mo Cua (Open Door) event hosted by the culture ministry, told Viet Nam News. It aims to pay tribute to artists who have made considerable contributions to the countrys fine arts through the past 30 years. The public and the art circle will see the change in the field of fine arts as well as many other areas of our society.

Vi Kien Thanh, head of the culture ministrys Department of Fine Arts, Photography and Exhibition, said the artists were selected by three officials from the department, who acted as curators, namely art critic Binh, painter Nguyen Hai Ha and Thanh himself.

Each of us drafted a list of artists with new creative thoughts and strong personal marks, and then we met and discussed, he said. Each of us explained why those artists were considered. We had to defend our choices before making the final list.

The panel then asked each selected artist to send one work.

The oi moi [renewal] policy launched in 1986 brought along a good opportunity for artists to create, curator Ha said. But each artist renews him/herself in each new creation, every day.

Vuong Duy Bien, deputy minister of culture, said he was satisfied with the list.

It will be very difficult for them to select the best 50 artists meeting all the requirements, Bien said, The final list may be not totally perfect for everyone, but I think it was well picked.

There is no division of artists according to localities or forms of art. The 50 artists include painter Tran Luu Hau, who is the oldest (born in 1928). He now still continues to work on his art.

The youngest is sculptor Thai Nhat Minh (born in 1984).

Painter Vu Tan Dan (1946-2009) is among the familiar names and among the pioneers in practising contemporary art in the country.

At this event, I want to introduce a public work of art, since hardly anyone in Viet Nam is interested in this kind of art, painter Ly Hoang Ly said. I dont want my work to be seen as an ordinary statue, instead I want it to directly communicate with the audience.

Mentioning the 30-year period since the renewal, painter Le Anh Van admitted that there have been several artists trying to express their thoughts in different ways.

In 1977, when we were still studying at university, we felt the desire for change, he said. The reunification in 1975 was an important factor leading to the renewal of art in the next few years. Painter Tran Luu Hau, at that time our teacher, instilled in us similar feelings.

Painter Ha Tri Hieu believed that the revitalisation of fine arts stemmed from the 1970s and the renewal policy started in 1986 affected the arts and produced quite a few names.

That period may be dubbed as the season of fine arts, he said. People such as Nguyen Bao Toan can be considered a pioneer in installation, then came Tran Luong and Truong Tan. Since 2000, a new generation of painters of the contemporary arts has emerged. Its regrettable they havent been promoted enough.

Binh said the organisers hoped the event would make people think about the first phase of the renewal period, reflect on quiet moments in the art field and find a new way to further nurture the countrys fine arts in its international integration process today.

The exhibition is underway at the Viet Nam Fine Arts Museum on 66 Nguyen Thai Hoc Street until September 28.

A book on the artists will be published after the event, in which each artist will introduce three of their works to the public.  VNS
HA NOI  The annual Oktoberfest returns to the cities in seven days, promising great beer and premium cuisine under an authentic German atmosphere.

The festival for beer lovers will be organised in Ha Noi for three days starting from October 6, while it will be a four-day event in HCM City from September 29 to October 2.

Co-hosted by the German Business Association (GBA), the event is a replica of the worlds largest beer festival, which has been taking place in Munich, Germany, for hundreds of years.

Oktoberfest Ha Noi 2016 will again replicate the original atmosphere with a large tent on an open ground -- the Festzelt as we call it in German - along with an authentic German buffet, free flow of Konigs Pilsener and other beer specialties. We are proud to say that its one of the largest and the most awaited social events in town this year, Roman Kuebler, GBA vice-chairman said.

According to organisers, the Oktoberfest has become a unique and popular landmark event for locals and the entire foreign community in Viet Nam for years. This event bridges cultural gaps and brings people together for this much-awaited festival.

This year, the Oktoberfest in HCM City and Ha Noi will replicate the authentic atmosphere of the original event in Munich, with large venues and seating, delicious German cuisine, premium imported German beers and a great party mood under a huge Bavarian beer tent.

Traditional German music will be played by the Anton and the Funny Guys band, which will rock both cities in the evenings.

Guests will once again "go loud" with rock and pop hits, popular Bavarian folk music, singing and swinging of beer mugs, as well as hold hands and dance together, Kuebler said.

Fun games and lucky draws will be organised during the event.

In Ha Noi, GBA is collaborating with the JW Marriott Hanoi Hotel, while the 24th edition of the festival will take place at the Nikko Saigon Hotel in HCM City.

More information on the festival and tickets can be obtained from the JW Marriott Hanoi Hotel, 8 o uc Duc St, Nam Tu Liem District, Ha Noi, Tel: (04) 38335588, and the German Industry and Commerce Vietnam office , 5th Floor, Somerset Chancellor Court, 21-23 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai St, District 1, HCM City, Tel: (08) 38239772.  VNS
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has asked the southernmost province of Ca Mau to devise effective measures for comprehensive reform to make the locality rise strongly in the Mekong Delta region.  Photo baophapluat.vn

HA NOI  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has asked the southernmost province of Ca Mau to devise effective measures for comprehensive reform to make the locality rise strongly in the Mekong Delta region.

At a working session with key officials of Ca Mau yesterday in Ha Noi, the PM asked ministries and sectors to work closely with the province in the implementation of the measures, while supporting Ca Mau to overcome difficulties, especially climate change impacts, to boost socio-economic growth.

Lauding the development of the provinces aquatic farming with many major Vietnamese firms in the field, the PM held that the province should promote this outstanding strength and make the sector a spearhead part of the economy.

He also praised Ca Mau for good performance in ensuring security and social order, as well as in implementing directions and policies of the Party and State, especially in the building of new-style rural areas.

The Government leader directed the province to undertake more comprehensive and effective restructuring of agriculture, focusing on products of high quality and economic value.

Ca Mau should plan to make itself the countrys leading shrimp farming area with green energy and high efficiency for better competitiveness, he suggested.

He also asked the province to make plans in response to climate change, while maintaining its achievements in building new-style rural areas, prioritising human resources development and administrative reform to attract investors and boost local businesses production.

At the same time, he also pointed to the need to ensure good security for fishermen in their activities, support small and medium-sized enterprises, and back start-ups to increase the number of firms.

At the session, the PM also approved in principle the investment in building climate change adaptation works to meet the immediate need in easing drought and saltwater intrusion and ensuring water supply for locals.

With a coastline of 254km, Ca Mau has a massive fishing ground of over 100,000 square kilometres and rich fishery resources. It has also been the leading locality in seafood farming and processing for exports for many years.

Currently, the province is also among the top localities building new-style rural areas, with the majority of communes fulfilling 13.3 out of 19 criteria of the programme, despite a loss of 53,000 hectares of rice farms due to severe drought and saltwater intrusion.

However, its administrative reform speed is now ranked 59th among 63 localities nationwide. At the same time, climate change has caused serious landslides in the province.

High-tech agriculture in Bac Lieu

Also yesterday Prime Minister Phuc gave a nod to the Mekong Delta province of Bac Lieu to set up a high-tech agriculture zone aiming to make shrimp breeding a locomotive of local agriculture.

At a working session with the provincial authorities, the PM urged Bac Lieu to accelerate the disbursement of capital for infrastructure, encourage start-ups and heed human resources development.

The province should roll out both short- and long-term solutions to cope with climate change, he said, requesting the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE) to set forth comprehensive solutions to assist the Mekong Delta region and the province in particular.

To spur economic growth and generate jobs, it is necessary to speed up land clearance for processing and industrial projects, the leader noted, asking the ministry to reduce salt output, avoiding overcapacity of the sector.

The Ministry of Transport was required to coordinate with Bac Lieu in seeking capital for local road transport. Other ministries were also asked to help the province attract major projects promoting the local economy.

Bac Lieu is one of the Mekong Delta localities most affected by climate change, which has prompted the province to make aquaculture an economic spearhead over years.

The province boasts the largest aquaculture area in the region with nearly 1,280 sq.km, equivalent to nearly half of its natural land. Its seafood export is expected to hit US$3.2 billion this year.

Of note, the locality earns about $500 million each year from shrimp farming. With an annual output of some 105,000 tonnes, Ca Mau has become the second largest shrimp producer nationwide with diverse breeding models.

The provinces economy grew by 5.09 per cent in the first half of this year. Due to its dependence on agricultural production, the local economy has been seriously affected by the lingering drought and salt water intrusion which have damaged 1,300 hectares of rice and 14,000 hectares of shrimp.

The local rice sector is facing a myriad of difficulties due to fierce competition with Thai rivals. Climate change has also exerted serious impacts on the local salt industry. VNS
Chairwoman of the Justice Committee, Le Thi Nga (R) delivers speech at the third session of the 14th National Assembly yesterday. Photo quochoi.vn

HA NOI  The Law on State Compensation Liability should clarify damages and determine the level of compensation while simplifying procedures and shorten the time of resolution.

This would raise the responsibility of officials on duty and ensure the rights and legitimate interests of affected organisations and individuals, NA deputies said at the third session of the 14th National Assembly yesterday.

Commenting on the amended Law on State Compensation Liability, Chairwoman of the Justice Committee, Le Thi Nga, said the law was extremely difficult. The law-making process must be implemented step-by-step and take into account all the cases to ensure the rights and legitimate interests of those affected by the States decisions.

However, if regulations are inadequate, it would affect citizens rights or delay agencies proceeding.

Citing specific cases such as Luong Ngoc Phi in northern Thai Binh Province, Huynh Van Nen in southern Binh Thuan Province and Nguyen Thanh Chan in northern Bac Giang Province, Nga asked the drafting agencies to clarify regulations on cases that would and would not be given compensation.

Previously, there was only Decree 47 concerning compensation cases in general, and Resolution 388 on compensation for those wrongfully convicted in legal proceedings. In 2009, the Law on State Compensation Liability was issued.

Nga also said that in reports on wrongful conviction cases, agencies responsible for compensation were still acting irrationally and being slow on compensation levels. She added that there were cases that took such a long time to overturn a wrongful conviction, making a great injustice but receiving only a public apology.

Regarding claim procedures, Nga said that the law requiring invoices as a way of proving damage was not reasonable or practical, adding that those who were wrongfully convicted and put in jail and their families were miserable enough.

She also said that the public complained about the large amount of State money used for compensation, but the law did not mention the compensation responsibilities of officials on duty who made wrongful convictions.

In reply to Ngas comments, Minister of Justice Le Thanh Long said that he did not make sure the amended law would solve all the problems. The distance between reality and the content of the law became possible when the law was put into practice, and that law enforcement was not good enough.

In terms of calculating damages for compensation, Long said that the loss of materials was easier to calculate than that of mental damage. The drafting committee had tried to set up criteria to quantify mental damage.

On principle, all civil servants involved must pay compensation, he said, but the law would be reasonably designed to give them a sense of compensation for damages caused by them, but it would not be so horrible that civil servants did not dare do anything.

Deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Peoples Court, Tong Anh Hao, said that most cases of wrongful conviction faced slow compensation due to difficulties in identifying the agencies responsible for compensation.

Moreover, most of the victims could not prove their damages, which remained the most difficult task.

Deputy Director of the Peoples Supreme Procuracy, Le Huu The, said that it was necessary to have a benchmark to calculate the level of compensation. Regulations on compensation were not clear, causing inconsistencies between compensation agencies and compensated persons.

Legal aid

Later the same day, NA Standing Committee members discussed the revised Law on Legal Aid.

The deputies agreed on the importance of revising the law to tackle existing shortcomings in legal aid activities and create a legal framework to make legal aid activities more professional and sustainable while effectively utilise resources when providing legal services for those in need.

Minister of Justice Le Thanh Long said the law had revealed shortcomings in the context of the issuance and adoption of many new laws and policies, as well as the new development demand of the country.

The number of people entitled to legal aid was not sufficient, he said. A number of people who have financial difficulties in paying for legal services have yet been able to get access to legal aid services to protect their legitimate rights and interests.

Legal aid activities are mixed up with other activities while many legal aid activities were of low quality, he said.

Regarding the beneficiaries of legal services, the lawmakers recommended that all people entitled to legal aid should be included in the law to ensure citizens rights.

Deputies also focused on the need to review practical demands, anticipate the resources for law enforcement in accordance with the countrys socio-economic situation, and ensure the regulations feasibility.  VNS
Nguyen Thien Nhan (L), Chairman of the Fatherland Front Central Committee, has urged the Viet Nam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) to better protect the interest of workers ahead of pressures from upcoming free trade agreements.  Photo VGP

HA NOI  Nguyen Thien Nhan, Chairman of the Fatherland Front Central Committee, has urged the Viet Nam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) to better protect the interest of workers ahead of pressures from upcoming free trade agreements.

The VGCL should forecast and confront challenges that may face workers during the integration process, and it should organize measures for better adaptation, Nhan said at a working session with the VGCL yesterday.

As upcoming trade changes loom, trade unions should also focus on promoting movements to increase production and improve workers productivity, he said.

Nhan added that the VGCL needs to continue developing trade union organization, expanding membership with small- and medium-sized businesses and developing a qualified trade union staff who are pioneers in building a harmonized relations between workers and their employers.

He affirmed that the Viet Nam Fatherland Front will continue coordinating with the VGCL to review the adoption of regulations on social insurance by businesses and to contribute opinions to the process of amending the Labour Law, which plays an important role in the nations social life and legal system.

The VGCL proposed that the Fatherland Front collaborate closely in building laws and regulations that work for workers, and also increase supervision over issues relating to social and health insurance.

The VGCL reported that it has more than 9.2 million members as of May this year. In the first seven months of the year, trade unions at all levels carried out more than 11,300 inspections over the implementation of worker-related policies and organized law consultancy for over 141,000 workers.

Trade unions at all levels worked with relevant agencies to quickly deal with emerging issues in labour relations and to tackle difficulties in production and trade activities. The goal is to stabilise employment and income for workers, it said.

Social security co-operation

Viet Nam Social Security (VSS) will provide data as evidence for labour unions to sue enterprises that tried to avoid paying insurance for their employees.

This is part of a cooperation agreement signed yesterday by VSS and the VGCL to ensure the rights and benefits of employees.

Every enterprise with more than 10 employees is supposed to jointly pay for their workers three types of insurance, namely social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance.

However, insurance debts have been reported as enterprises delay or avoid paying insurance for their employees.

VSSs statistics shows that accumulated insurance debt by the end of July was some VN14 trillion.

Last year, insurance debt in Viet Nam reached more than VN7.6 trillion (US$339.2 million).

Bui Van Cuong, president of the VGCL, said 102,900 enterprises and organisations across the country were reportedly in social insurance debt, affecting 2.66 million employees.

He said labour unions, on behalf of the employees, could sue employers who did not pay for insurance under the Civil Procedure Code approved last year, which came into effect in July this year.

Data provided by VSS included the list of insurance debtors and their debts, which could be used as evidence to sue employers violating rules, Cuong said.

Previously, social security agencies were empowered to sue insurance debtors, but under the Law on Social Security 2014, which came into effect in January this year, the social security agencies could no longer do so.

Accordingly, in the first six months of this year, almost 1,400 cases related to insurance debts of some VN300 million were taken to court by VSS but had not been resolved.

VSS General Director Nguyen Thi Minh said suing insurance debtors was an effective measure to curb violations and ensure employees rights.

The courts had helped insurance agencies collect 16.3 per cent of insurance debts from enterprises, she said.  VNS
Ha Noi authorities are planning a campaign to crack down on thousands of taxis that have licences from other provinces but operate in the city, the municipal Department of Transport has said.  Photo anninhthudo.vn

HA NOI  Ha Noi authorities are planning a campaign to crack down on thousands of taxis that have licences from other provinces but operate in the city, the municipal Department of Transport has said.

Chief inspector of the department, Tran ang Hai, said that currently about 3,000 taxi cabs were operating without the required licences in Ha Noi, contributing to traffic chaos and unhealthy competition among taxi drivers.

In 2010, the department blocked taxi firms from adding to their fleets to curb the rapid increase in the number of taxis on the citys streets. More than 17,000 taxis had already been licensed in the city by that time.

In order to skirt the law, many taxi firms registered their number plates in Ha Noi but got their taxi licence badges registered in surrounding provinces. Those taxi cabs with badges from other provinces would reportedly operate in the city instead of their registered locations.

Thus, the number of taxis operating in the city continued to rise in the past several years although the authorities ceased granting licenses to new companies, according to the department official.

These taxi cabs were from Bac Ninh, Vinh Phuc, Hung Yen, Hoa Binh, Nam inh and Ha Nam provinces, the official said.

In Bac Ninh Province, 870 taxi cabs licensed by the province are operating in Ha Noi. Le Ngoc Tuyen, director of the provincial Department of Transport said that police could not give penalties on these taxis as there were no regulations limiting their location of operation.

He said the department would set up an interdisciplinary team to inspect the operation of local taxi firms. He also suggested that Ha Nois transport sector should work with the transport departments of surrounding provinces to draft solutions.

Major Nguyen Tuan Anh, deputy head of Ha Nois Police Departments Dissemination Unit said the high number of taxis caused traffic problems in the city, adding work for police at key traffic points during peak hours.

"It is necessary to set penalties for taxis licensed by other provinces but operating in the city as the traffic pressure on the city is quite high," said Tuan Anh.

Currently, roughly 600,000 cars, 5.2 million motorbikes, 100,000 electric motorbikes, and 17,000 taxis are operating on Ha Nois roads.

Nguyen The Hung, vice chairman of the citys Peoples Committee said the city assigned the Department of Transport to quickly set up a roadmap to give fines for this kind of violation.  VNS
HCM CITY The partnership between Government, enterprises and civil society is vital to achieving the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in Viet Nam, experts have said

The SDGs were adopted by 193 countries a year ago with qualitative objectives across the social, economic and environmental dimensions to be achieved by 2030.

They are 17 goals with 169 targets and 231 indicators, Jasmine Jaruphand, the Asia Pacific Regional Lead for the Sustainable Development Goals Action Campaign, said.

It is the time to build new partnerships and alliances to make sure the SDGs are a reality for everyone, everywhere by 2030, she told a workshop held in HCM City yesterday (September 20).

The UN will play a key role in co-ordinating new partnerships for action with governments and the private and public sectors.

The campaigns methodology includes building public awareness and partnerships, developing creative and innovative communication tools and fostering citizens action and SDG solutions in the community.

Generating citizen-driven data for the SDG tracking process and facilitating inclusive dialogues for policy change are also included, she said.

Phil Maclaurin, business unit manager of Premier Oil Vietnam, said, UN Sustainable Development Goals make good sense for strong businesses.

As a business leader, I believe most of my team can work within four to six goals,

The 17 sustainable development goals are well-chosen and visionary. They are visions that Government and big agencies like the UN seem best able to deliver.

SDGs impact the economy, politics, society, education, quality of life and environment.

STAI Incubator

Young talented people aged from 18 to 30 can participate in the 2016 Sustainable Tourism Awareness and Ideas (STAI) Incubator, part of efforts to implement the SDGs in Viet Nam.

The competition aims to increase community awareness to protect marine life and eco-systems as well as develop ideas about sustainable coastal tourism among young Vietnamese, ao Manh Hung, chairman of the Vietnam Tourism Education Association, said.

"It is a forum for young people to contribute to tourism development," he said.

With a coastline of more than 3,000 kilometres, a total of 125 beaches and thousands of islands, Viet Nam has huge potential for coastal tourism, which accounts for 70 per cent of the tourism sectors revenues, he said.

The contest is jointly organised by Sustainable Development Goals Action Campaign, Asian Development Bank, Publication and Social Development Engagement Centre, and Sea Media Co., Ltd.

In the first round titled Creator held from June 25 to September 25, contestants will present proposals on promising projects to tackle problems related to sustainable tourism in Viet Nam.

Fifteen teams with the best ideas will be chosen to enter the Ideation round in October from which six will be selected for consultancy from experts from international organisations.

The Integration round in November will further whittle down the number of projects to four for financial support from investors to implement them.

The contest is part of a community project to implement the UNs SDGs in Viet Nam between 2016 and 2030.

It targets making 50 million people, or 50 per cent of the population, aware of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2020, Hanni Tran, head of the contest organising board, said.

Thirty million people would serve as advocates for SDGs, articulating them and doing related tasks, she added. VNS
Delegates attend the conference sharing international experiences in developing local healthcare systems held in the central city of a Nang yesterday.  Photo VGP

A NANG  Local authorities play a particularly important role in implementing health programmes at their localities as well as co-ordinating with different sectors to help people easily access and efficiently use quality healthcare services at a reasonable cost.

Minister of Health, Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, said this at a conference sharing international experiences in developing local healthcare systems held in the central city of a Nang yesterday.

Addressing the conference, Tien stressed that in order to take good care of and protect peoples health in Viet Nam, besides the efforts of health workers, it was necessary to have the support of local governments at all levels in administering and organising health programmes.

In recent years, the health sector in Viet Nam has made great progress in the process of international integration, brought back positive changes and made important achievements, she said, naming some achievements of the sectors including mobilising enormous resources, both financial and technical, applying and deploying more advanced techniques and modern technology in diagnosis and treatment, effective disease prevention, production of many vaccines and the successful implementation of the Millennium Development Goals.

The health minister noted that health insurance in the country had been expanded to 76.52 per cent of the population while the programme to ease overloading at hospitals was being implemented effectively.

She hoped to learn about the experiences of other countries and from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The WHOs Regional Director for the Western Pacific, Dr Shin Young-soo, who is in Viet Nam from September 18-21, praised Viet Nam for its substantial achievements in the healthcare sector but also pointed out that rapid development exposed the weaknesses of the health system.

There are symptoms that show that the health system is not coping or is not meeting the needs of the country, he said to representatives from the health ministry and authorities from 19 provinces and cities, adding that local governments were charged with the responsibility of policy implementation.

You need to look at how to prioritise your investment in the health system, he said.

It is not news to you that hospitals are overcrowded and grassroots services are being bypassed. But overinvestment in hospitals and high technology services and underinvestment in grassroots services, cannot solve this problem, he added.

The WHO official stressed the new challenges facing Viet Nam such as non-communicable diseases and an aging population, which would further constrain the health system without attention to prevention.

He said that as Viet Nam developed further and industrialised rapidly, environmental pollution and occupational illnesses and injuries would increase.

This means attention must be given to health protection, with strong regulatory measures and a sound surveillance system, he said.

Dr Shin also said local governments in Viet Nam had to ensure national policies and programmes were enforced and implemented.

They have the authority and the responsibility to ensure basic services are delivered to meet peoples needs, he said.

Participants at the conference discussed, exchanged and shared experiences on the development of health systems in their localities and the important role of local government in the sectors development.

A resolution signed by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc late last month on 21 targeted development programmes in 2016-2020 promised to invest VN22.5 trillion (roughly US$1 billion) to develop local health systems throughout the country.  VNS
A student receives eye examination in Ha Noi. Doctors have warned of possible outbreaks of seasonal diseases such as pinkeye, viral fever and respiratory tract infections.  Photo anninhthudo.vn

HA NOI  Doctors have warned of possible outbreaks of seasonal diseases such as pinkeye, viral fever and respiratory tract infections.

The Ha Noi-based Paediatrics Hospital has recorded more than 30,000 patients this month. It sees an average of 3,000 children patients a day, approximately 25 per cent higher than normal.

The young patients are often reported to suffer respiratory diseases, as well as pneumonia, gastrointestinal disease, viral fever and dengue fever.

Similarly, the Paediatrics Department of Bach Mai Hospital has lately received an increased number of patients for the treatment of respiratory diseases. It has reported receiving about 400-500 patients per day, with more than half of them suffering diseases related to respiratory problems and viral fever. Many children have been hospitalised several times in a short time because of re-infection.

Doctors of the two hospitals explained that the reason behind the increasing number of paediatric patients was because the weather in the North was in a transition period with hot weather in the daytime and chilly weather at night that reduced the resistance of children.

Besides, the concentration of bacteria and increasing viruses in the air made children susceptible, they said.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Healths Department of Preventive Medicine has warned that erratic weather would enable bacteria that cause pinkeye disease.

Doctor Le Xuan Thuy from the department said that pinkeye is a very contagious disease and spread easily in the community.

From mid-August until now, the number of patients diagnosed and treated for pinkeye at hospitals in Ha Noi has reportedly increased and exceeded normal days.

At the Central Eye Hospital, the number of patients suffering pinkeye coming in for diagnosis and treatment accounted for about 11-12 per cent of the total number of all patients.

Thuy said the main causes of pinkeye disease are adenoviruses or bacteria such as streptococcus, staphylococcus and pneumococcus.

A dirty environment, poor sanitation, contaminated water use, and shared living supplies such as towels and pillows are favourable conditions for developing the disease and spreading outbreaks, Thuy said.

Thuy noted that pinkeye could spread through the respiratory tract, tears, and saliva, as well as by shaking hands, holding, touching items contaminated with pathogens such as door handles, stair knobs, telephones; shared objects and the personal belongings of the patients, such as towels and washbasins.

He said any suspected case of pinkeye disease should go to medical facilities for examination, counseling and treatment and should not be treated by traditional Vietnamese methods such as applying leaves like betel leaf and mulberry leaf onto eyes.  VNS
VUNG TAU  Southern coastal Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province is planning to relocate its airport from the central area of Vung Tau City to the suburb due to safety reasons and usage inefficiency.

Vung Tau Airport covers 172ha in Ward 9 of Vung Tau City, which is a crowded residential area. The airport, managed by the Southern Service Flight Company under the Ministry of Defence, hosts helicopter flights to serve oil exploration and exploitation activities at sea.

At a meeting yesterday afternoon, the provincial authority said the airport at its existing location would affect the citys space development plan and the flights posed threats to the lives of the locals.

The province plans to move the airport to a less-populated area at Go Gang in Long Son Commune, some 12km away from the centre of Vung Tau City. The cost for building a new airport is expected to be over US$1 billion.

According to the provincial Peoples Committee, the relocation project has been approved by the Prime Minister.

The province will propose the project to the Ministry of Defence and ask it to come up with a detailed plan. The new airport will be built for both civil and military purposes, with funds coming from the national budget and investors.  VNS
QUANG NAM  The investor of a hydropower plant in central Quang Nam Province has refuted the local authoritys claims of wrongdoing following an accident last week that left two workers missing.

A water valve at the Song Bung 2 Hydropower Plant broke on September 13, with water from the plants conductor tunnel sweeping away two on-duty workers, destroying two houses in La Ee Communes downstream area and flooding some roads in nearby communes.

Speaking to the media yesterday, Nguyen Quang Thu, director of the provincial Department of Industry and Trade, said the plant investor did not follow proper procedures for water storage.

Thu said although the provincial Peoples Committee had issued a document allowing, in principle, the plant to store water, the committee had asked the plant investor to undertake some measures beforehand.

After finishing these steps, the investor needs to inform the provincial Peoples Committee and related parties. Only after being granted official approval can they store water, Thu said.

Before the accident occurred, the Department of Industry and Trade had not known that the plant was storing water. There are problems in this process.

Ngo Viet Hai, general director of Power Generation Corporation 2, which has invested in the plant, however, refuted Thus claim.

Before storing water, we followed all the necessary procedures and were granted permission by the local authorities, Hai said, adding that they had fulfilled all the requirements of the provincial authorities as stated in the document that Thu mentioned.

According to Hai, after meeting all the demands, the investor sent a notice on the water storage activity to the Provincial Peoples Committee, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment and the peoples committees in related districts and communes on August 24, one day after the document of the Peoples Committee was issued.

The storage of water is under the supervision of the Department of Natural Resources, so we informed them directly, not the Department of Industry and Trade, Hai said.

Regarding the two missing workers, Hai said the body of Nguyen Minh Luan from Hai Phong City had still not been found. Earlier, the search and rescue team had found the body of ang Van Tuyen from Hai Duong Province in a lake close to the Song Bung 4 Hydropower Plant.

Currently, the lake was full of wood and firewood, making it difficult to search for the other victim. He said the company would reward VN20 million (US$896) to anyone who found Luans body.  VNS
A people living with HIV receives medical consultation in ha Long City.  VNA/VNS Photo Duong Ngoc

HA NOI  Those most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS will have the opportunity to receive free legal counsel, for example in employment and marriage issues, in a national pilot project kicking off soon.

The project will be undertaken by the Vietnam Lawyers Association (VLA) and the Global Fund Supported Project on HIV/AIDS across Ha Noi, Quang Ninh and Thai Binh Provinces in the north together with HCM City and ong Nai Province in the south.

The project plans to provide free legal aid to those already infected with HIV and those who are particularly vulnerable to being exposed to the disease, including drug users, sex workers, transgender and homosexuals.

In Viet Nam, HIV transmission through sexual intercourse has become the most common method of transmission, with the number of new cases due to sexual activity surging from 12 per cent in 2000 to 45 per cent in 2013, according to the Ministry of Health.

Vulnerable groups tend to have little legal knowledge so they easily fall prey to abuse without even knowing about it. Even if they do, they dont know where to seek help because of severe social stigma and discrimination, the Centre of Legal Consultancy and Medical and HIV/AIDS Policies Director, Trinh Thi Le Tram, said at a conference on the issue last week.

A survey by the centre shows that about 75.9 per cent of HIV-positive people never sought public legal consultancy services, offered by the Government under the Law on Legal Aid issued in 2007.

Reasons for the low figure of people seeking help at public legal aid centres might lie in their stringent rule requiring the publication of personal identities, or their locations.

Public legal aid centres also lacked either separate rooms in which to offer services or legal consultants qualified in working with HIV-infected patients and HIV-vulnerable groups who suffer heavily from social stigma and discrimination, Tram said.

Moreover, drug users, sex workers and homosexuals are not subject to free legal support from the Government, she said.

The demand for legal aid of those groups was real and has been increasing throughout the years.

Tram said that while there were only 1,900 phone calls to her centres hotline (18001521) asking for help with HIV/AIDS and other legal matters, the number increased to more than 3,000 in 2014.

However, the number is still very small compared to the total of HIV-infected people across the country, she said.

Viet Nam identified some 227,154 HIV patients by the end of 2015, and estimated that there were about 254,000 HIV-infected people in the country.  VNS
BRASILIA  Brazils former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva must stand trial for corruption, a judge ruled on Tuesday, after prosecutors accused the popular leftist of masterminding the large-scale plundering of state oil company Petrobras.

The crusading judge behind the Petrobras investigation, Sergio Moro, accepted charges filed last week by prosecutors investigating Lula  making him the highest-profile figure to face trial in a case that has taken down some of the countrys most powerful business executives and politicians.

"Given that there is sufficient evidence of (Lulas) responsibility... I accept the charges," Moro said in his decision.

The charges allege that Lula, 70, received the equivalent of 3.7 million reais ($1.1 million) in bribes.

Among the accusations are charges that the former union leader and his wife received a beachside apartment and upgrades to the property from a major construction company, OAS, which was one of the players in the Petrobras scheme.

More broadly, prosecutors last week singled out Lula  who was president during much of the time that Petrobras was being fleeced of billions of dollaras the schemes "supreme commander".

"I am sad because I just learned (Judge) Moro accepted the charge lodged, even though it is all a farce, a huge lie," the ex-president said from Brazil by videoconference to New York where his lawyers held a solidarity event for him.  AFP
PARIS  Frances presidential race accelerates today as the candidates vying for the conservative nomination, including ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, are confirmed in the campaign to try to win back the Elysee Palace.

The stakes are high with polls showing that the winner of a duel between the two leading Republicans party candidates, Sarkozy and ex-PM Alain Juppe, would be clear favourite to win the election next May.

Once the eight candidates are named today, the party and its centrist allies will then hold two rounds of voting to select their nominee on November 20 and 27.

National identity and Islam have emerged as key themes in the French centre-right contest, which has echoes of US Republican nominee Donald Trumps campaign for the White House.

Sarkozy is a brash right-winger and a divisive figure in French politics, while ex-prime minister and Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppe has styled himself as a unifying force.

"The candidates all agree on the economy," Thomas Guenole, a political scientist and author of a book on Sarkozys comeback said, referring to their consensus on cutting taxes and relaxing Frances 35-hour working week.

"The only issues on which they create divisions are the four Is: Islam, identity, immigration, insecurity," he said.

President Francois Hollande is yet to confirm if he will stand for re-election as the Socialist partys candidate in a bid to defy his historically low approval ratings.

On the far-right, the National Front is prepared for battle, with its leader Marine Le Pen widely forecast to win the first round of voting in April and then fail in the second round against a mainstream candidate.

Juppe the favourite

Juppe, 71, Frances most popular politician, has been the favourite to emerge victorious from the start, but Sarkozy has nearly closed the gap with hardline proposals designed to woo voters reeling from a string of jihadist attacks.

The 61-year-old politician, who led France from 2007 to 2012, has vowed a "merciless" fight against the Islamist extremists who have killed 238 people nationwide since January 2015.

Declaring French identity to be under attack, he has declared war on the Islamic burkini swimsuit, the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in universities and other practices he sees as "un-French".

"If you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French.

We will no longer settle for integration that does not work, we will require assimilation," he told a rally on Monday.

Fuel on the fire

Juppe, a moderate who served two years as premier under Jacques Chirac and also was foreign minister under Sarkozy, has taken the opposite approach.

Accusing Sarkozy of "pouring fuel on the fire" with his calls for a state ban on the burkini, Juppe has tried to sell voters on what he sees as a "happy", secure French identity.

Vowing to knit together a fractured nation, he has promised to "reach out" to the vast majority of Muslims who adhere to Frances strict secular values.

Juppe has undergone a radical makeover from the grey technocrat who spent years in the political desert over a fake jobs scandal at Paris City Hall in the 1990s to benign elder statesman.

He has repeatedly made overtures to centrists as well as to leftists, who can vote in the primary if they pay two euros and sign a charter declaring they adhere to centrist or conservative values.

War chief v wise man

For Jerome Fourquet of Ifop pollsters, the choice between "a war chief and someone who is wiser, more reassuring and brings people together" will come down to whether the French believe the country is, as Sarkozy says, "at war."

A Harris Interactive poll last week predicted a tie between the two in the first round of the primary, with Juppe going on to win the run-off a week later by 52 per cent to Sarkozys 48 per cent.

Among their other rivals are Sarkozys former prime minister Francois Fillon, his former agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who made a failed bid for Paris mayor.

For Fourquet "the ideological centre of gravity of the right is closer to Nicolas Sarkozys positions than those of Alain Juppe".

But Sarkozy is also hobbled by his legacy, seen as underwhelming economically and he is disliked by a majority of French people.

Fourquet warned of a possible bid by leftist and centrist voters to block his return by voting in the primary for Juppe.

Their calculation, he said, could be: "If we dont get involved we could be forced to elect him (Sarkozy) in six months time" to prevent a National Front presidency under Le Pen.  AFP
NEW YORK  The United States on Tuesday charged an Afghan-born American restaurant worker, who was critically wounded in a police shootout, with detonating and planting bombs in New York and New Jersey.

US prosecutors said Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, carried out twin bombings on Saturday in Manhattans Chelsea neighborhood and along the route of a US Marine Corps run in the New Jersey town of Seaside Park.

The 13-page indictment slapped him with four charges, including use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use and destruction of property by means of fire or explosives.

He was captured on Monday while carrying a handwritten journal that lauded Osama bin Laden and US-born Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, and criticized US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, it said.

He will be transported to Manhattan to face the charges, said federal prosecutors in New York. If convicted, he risks spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Prosecutors said 31 people were wounded in the Chelsea attack, including a victim from Britain, a driver knocked unconscious and a woman whose body was pierced with ball bearings, metal and wood.

The bomb was a pressure cooker device, packed with ball bearings and steel nuts, placed in a dumpster and detonated by a timed device  similar to a second pressure cooker bomb discovered four blocks away.

Five pipe bombs found in Rahamis hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey and the second device safely defused in Chelsea, were covered in the suspects fingerprints, the indictment alleged.

Surveillance footage also put him in Chelsea, and Rahami bought the ingredients for the bombs from eBay over the summer, prosecutors said.

Video on relatives phone

A video recovered from a relatives cell phone also allegedly showed Rahami igniting an incendiary device just two days before the bombings in or near his home in Elizabeth, the indictment alleged.

Rahami was shot and captured on Monday in Linden, New Jersey, just four hours after the FBI released his mugshot and sent an emergency cellphone alert to millions of people.

He has been charged separately with unlawful weapon possession and five counts of attempted murder of a police official.

Rahami, who was operated on after sustaining multiple bullet wounds, is in "critical but stable" condition, police said.

The terror charges come after the FBI admitted that they investigated Rahami for terrorism in 2014 following a complaint from his father, but found no link despite alleged acts of violence.

Mohammad Rahami, an immigrant from Afghanistan who brought his children to the United States, said he warned the FBI that his son was a danger and a terrorist in 2014.

"He doing bad, he stabbed my son, he hit my wife," he told reporters on Tuesday, explaining why he had alerted agents two years ago.

In August 2014, Rahami was accused of stabbing Nasim Rahami in the leg, and charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a knife.

He reportedly spent three months in jail but was never prosecuted.

"The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks, and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism," the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.

Year in Pakistan

It still remains unclear how and why exactly Rahami allegedly become radicalised, and whether he definitively acted alone.

Officials say so far they have found no connection between Rahami and any militant groups, raising the possibility that the weekend bomb attacks could be another lone-wolf-style operation.

Officials say Rahami traveled extensively to Afghanistan and spent around a year Pakistan, where he married and his wife became pregnant.

Albio Sires, a New Jersey congressman in the US House of Representatives, said Rahami had sought his help to obtain a visa for his heavily pregnant wife to travel to the United States in 2014.

She left the United States shortly before Saturdays attacks and was stopped in the United Arab Emirates, US media reported.

He worked at the familys fried-chicken restaurant, where The New York Times quoted friends as saying that he started praying and wore traditional clothes after returning from Afghanistan.

He was also father to a child with his high-school girlfriend.

Another line of inquiry may be whether the familys tussles over their business could have played a role in radicalizing Rahami.

His family sued the city of Elizabeth in 2011, accusing it and local police of discrimination because they were Muslim and Afghans, in ordering them to close their restaurant by 10:00pm. The suit was settled in favor of the city.  AFP
The Commonwealth of Virginia is taking an important step to develop the workforce needed to keep data and systems safe from cyber threats.

Working with eight other public institutions of higher education across Virginia, Virginia Tech is leading an effort to create a state-of-the-art platform for cybersecurity education. The Virginia Cyber Range will provide advanced cybersecurity training exercises for high-school and college students, revolutionize cybersecurity education within the commonwealth, and position Virginia to become a leading source of critical cybersecurity expertise for the nation.

As online attacks on financial, research, and consumer data become more sophisticated and unpredictable, the need for leaders and innovators in the field of cybersecurity becomes ever more urgent. Cybersecurity is a key driver for the New Virginia Economy and we must ensure that Virginia has a pipeline of industry-ready cyber talent if we are going to be competitive, said Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, speaking at the Virginia Cyber Physical Systems Summit in Newport News, Virginia. The Virginia Cyber Range provides a cutting-edge environment where students can hone their cyber skills.

The Virginia Cyber Range will work to produce more well-prepared graduates to enter the cybersecurity workforce. The projects initial focus will be on serving community colleges and four-year institutions with offerings that will include modules for use in college courses, laboratory exercises and projects, and realistic tactical cybersecurity trials that can supplement existing courses. Students will gain knowledge of digital forensics, network defense, how to secure critical infrastructure and the internet of things, malware detection, usability and privacy issues, and secure coding practices. The project is expected to evolve to also serve K-12 students and other groups within the commonwealth.

The Cyber Range will largely operate as a virtual center. Offerings will be crafted and hosted in the cloud, where they can be accessed by participating schools and agencies. This approach will allow for easy customization, scalability, and responsiveness, while minimizing costs.

The Virginia Cyber Range brings together faculty from George Mason University, James Madison University, Longwood University, Norfolk State University, Virginia Tech, and Radford University, as well as faculty from Lord Fairfax Community College, Northern Virginia Community College, and Tidewater Community College. These institutions were selected based on their federal designation as centers of academic excellence in cybersecurity or digital forensics.

Virginia Cyber Range Director David Raymond said, "We are excited to build an innovative, statewide resource that will be a game-changer for cybersecurity education across the commonwealth. I am honored to work with the partner institutions to chart the way forward for this important project." Virginia Techs IT Security Office is coordinating the development and use of the range platform.

It is exciting to see the Virginia Cyber Centers of Excellence come together to create a hands-on cyber training environment that will enable students across the commonwealth to obtain the skills they need to move directly into the workforce, said Karen Jackson, Virginias secretary of technology.

A demonstration of cyber-range capabilities was provided at the Virginia Cyber Physical Systems Summit. The Virginia Cyber Range will offer a limited number of classes beginning in January 2017.
Unequal Budget funding for the Yes vote wont give Australians equal say If you seek to ensure not all Australians get an equal say in the debate about an enshrined voice, then dont be surprised when millions of them cry foul about the integrity of the result.

ISIS brides and children repatriated from Syria should be in a jail forever 04:45 Iraqi refugee Salam Qaro says all ISIS brides and their children who have come from Syrian detention camps should be in a jail forever".

Australian killed in South Korea stampede 00:12 It has been confirmed an Australian citizen has been killed in the Halloween stampede in South Korea.

Federal government warned to act quickly on power prices 02:54 The federal government has been warned it must act before the end of November to stop power prices from climbing another 50 per cent next year....
Buggy driver killed in crash

LIME SPRINGS  A Lime Springs man died when the horse-drawn buggy he was driving was struck by a car Monday evening in Howard County.

John Borntreger, 57, died at Regional Health Services of Howard County. The crash was reported about 7:10 p.m. at 45th Street and Timber Avenue, east of Lime Springs.

The driver of car was identified as Sharla Lieder, 57, of Lime Springs.

The Iowa State Patrol said Lieder was westbound on 45th Street when her vehicle collided with the rear of the buggy.

The crash remains under investigation.

Man pleads

to gun charge

WATERLOO  A Waterloo man has been sentenced to prison for possessing two handguns, one of which had been stolen from a police officer.

Judge Linda Reade sentenced Tearon Kenyage Jackson, 39, to two years and six months in federal prison during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday. Jackson pleaded guilty to being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm and possession of a stolen firearm. Jackson was prohibited from handling firearms because he was using marijuana, court records state.

He will have to serve three years of supervised release following prison.

Authorities said Waterloo police found Jackson when they were called to a report of suspicious activity on Dec. 17. Officers later found a 9 mm Ruger pistol and a .380-caliber Walther handgun in a bag under a parked car in a nearby parking lot where Jackson had been seen. The Walther had been reported stolen from a Chicago police officer, according to court records.
WATERLOO  Two historic renovation projects by AHTS Architects of Waterloo were honored by Preservation Iowa at the 2016 Preservation at Its Best Awards.

The awards were presented Thursday at the Preserve Iowa Conference in Davenport.

JSA Developments Walden Block won in the Small Commercial category. It involved four of the oldest buildings in downtown Waterloo, some built in the 1880s. At the projects start in 2012, the buildings were vacant and a potentially dangerous eyesore.

The buildings would have been knocked down if we did not do this.  (now) theyre good for another 150 years, said Jim Walsh, JSA Development president.

A primary goal was to uncover and retain original design elements, such as tin ceilings and a glass block wall, while modernizing the space. The result was a block of six upper-level updated apartments and four main level commercial areas, including Basal Pizza.

The entire project speaks to the power of partnerships: a private developer with vision and willingness to take a risk, architects who appreciate the beauty of past era design elements, the states financial resources offering historic tax credits and the hard work of contractors, said Mardy Holst, AHTS architect.

The city of Cedar Falls and Cedar Falls Development Groups Old Cedar Falls Post Office won in the Adaptive Reuse category. The Cedar Falls Post Office was built in 1918. But in 1961 when the U.S. Postal Service moved to a new location, the building went through many adaptions that compromised its style.

In 2012 the city decided to demolish it, but the Cedar Falls Development Group convinced them to partner in an effort to salvage the building. As renovation to restore its original features neared completion (revealing marble wall panels, a glass and wood vestibule and a rich wood floor), Bike Tech was identified as the new tenant.

To prepare for Bike Techs relocation in May 2015, features such as a floating high-abuse flooring system and well-placed signage were added to accommodate the needs of the business while preserving historic features and providing versatility for any future uses.

In March the former post office was listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places marking a successful end to a project four years in the making.

What I love about this project is it is a preservation success story where the threat of the buildings demolition spurred local citizens to polish an architectural gem and keep a part of the historic downtown Cedar Falls from becoming another parking lot, said ATHS architect Andrew Bell.
CEDAR FALLS  Two Cedar Falls high school students are back home safe following a weekend in New York that coincided with a terrorist bomb plot and manhunt.

It was really an amazing experience for these Iowa girls, and we are so blessed that they are safe and sound, their mother, Kellie Leasure, said Tuesday. They are so lucky they decided to stay out an extra hour.

Elise and Annabel Leasure, 16-year-old juniors at Cedar Falls High, were treated to a trip to New York with friends of the family.

They flew out Friday with a group of seven others from Iowa, Minnesota and Colorado, friends their mother had met through a breast cancer survivors group. The agenda included Broadway musicals and Times Square, and they were to stay at an apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood.

By Saturday night, one bomb exploded a few blocks from the apartment, injuring 29 people. A second device -- apparently made from an explosives-packed pressure cooker -- was discovered in front of the apartment building where they were staying on West 27th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues.

The Leasure sisters and their group was out taking in the hit musical Hamilton and seeing the sights when everything started to unfold.

We were out to dinner and, luckily, my daughter-in-law wanted to show us this fun, old hotel where she and my son had their honeymoon, said Amy Grady, a Bloomington, Minn., resident who organized the trip.

During the taxi ride back to the apartment for cake -- it was Gradys birthday -- one of the women got a text message from her husband back in Iowa. He had seen a news account about a bomb found on 27th Street. When they arrived, they discovered the apartment building was inside the area police had cordoned off while they dealt with the unexploded pressure cooker.

There were tons of police lights and security trucks and fire trucks, Grady said. They were basically just shooing away anyone on the sidewalks.

Meanwhile, mom Kellie Leasure was back in Cedar Falls. She was unable to make the trip because of a recent surgery, and she woke Saturday night for a round of medicine and something to eat. She saw news of the Chelsea bombing on her phone and frantically tried to find more about the blast.

To have these girls gone and not be able to get hardly any news coverage, and their cell phones were dead, and to know they were in the exact block of the apartment. Its been a long few nights, Kellie Leasure said.

We didnt hear from them for, it must have been about three hours, she said.

Finally, mom received a text. The girls were OK. Blocked from their apartment, they had taken refuge in a 24-hour McDonalds restaurant.

Back in Chelsea, Grady and the group eventually broke camp at the Golden Arches and went in search of a hotel to spend the balance of the night. The first four they came across were full, but the clerk at the fifth found them a room and brought extra blankets and pillows.

As some of them drifted off to sleep, Grady turned on the TV to get caught up on developments.

A pipe bomb had blown up earlier that day along the route of a 5K race path in Seaside Park, N.J., and a backpack bomb found in Elizabeth, N.J., exploded as a police robot tried to dissect it.

And then there was the mass stabbing at a mall back in St. Cloud, Minn.

The following day, after even more waiting, police allowed the group back into the apartment to retrieve their belongings, and they were able to make their flight back to the Midwest.

The twins deferred comment to their mom.
WATERLOO  A Waterloo man has been sentenced to prison for possessing two handguns, one of which had been stolen from a police officer.

Judge Linda Reade sentenced Tearon Kenyage Jackson, 39, to two years and six months in federal prison during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday. Jackson pleaded guilty to being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm and possession of a stolen firearm. Jackson was prohibited from handling firearms because he was using marijuana, court records state.

He will have to serve three years of supervised release following prison.

Authorities said Waterloo police found Jackson when they were called to a report of suspicious activity on Dec. 17. Officers later found a 9mm Ruger pistol and a .380-caliber Walther handgun in a bag under a parked car in a nearby parking lot where Jackson had been seen. The Walther had been reported stolen from a Chicago police officer, according to court records.
UPDATE: This story has been updated to correct the address of the incident.

WATERLOO  Three teens were detained after they allegedly broke into a Waterloo home while the resident was inside sleeping Tuesday night.

The trio used a blowtorch-like cigarette lighter to burn a hole in a kitchen window screen to gain entry to 2202 Westview Ave., said Capt. David Mohlis with the Waterloo Police Department.

A neighbor who was familiar with the 70-year-old resident called 911 after noticing the youths at the home at about 11:45 p.m. The teens fled shortly before officers arrived, and police woke the homeowner when they arrived, Mohlis said.

A witness gave police a description of the getaway car and a license plate number, and authorities stopped the vehicle at Grandview Avenue and Kern Street at about 12:11 a.m. Wednesday.

Officers found some of the items taken in the robbery on the teens, and a laptop computer from the Western Avenue home was recovered from another house, Mohlis said.

Two 16-years-olds and one 17-years-old were taken into custody for second-degree burglary, third-degree criminal mischief and reckless use of fire. No names were released per a change in law on naming juveniles.
DES MOINES  Leaders of a new coalition Wednesday called for a statewide moratorium on construction or expansion of large-scale livestock feeding operations until Iowa takes action to lower the number of impaired rivers, lakes and waterways to fewer than 100.

With over 9,000 factory farms in Iowa, we say with conviction  enough is enough, said Francis Thicke, a Jefferson County farmer. He is part of a new coalition of more than 20 national, state and county environmental, family farm and community advocacy groups called the Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture.

Dozens of members held a Statehouse rally before delivering a letter to Gov. Terry Branstad calling for a freeze on any new commercial feeding operations with more than 1,250 animals.

Branstad spokesman Ben Hammes rejected the alliances proposal, calling it an extreme plan that would hurt agriculture and Iowas economy.

IARA leaders pointed to a 2014 report that listed 754 Iowa waterways as being impaired under federal clean water standards. They said tougher action is needed to bring that number below 100.

Its time Iowa had source water protection with industrial agricultural accountability, said Bill Stowe, head of the Des Moines Water Works. The utility has filed a federal lawsuit against three northwest Iowa counties over agricultural runoff it alleges is polluting the Raccoon River.

Iowas water quality gets progressively worse every year, Stowe said, and the corporate livestock industry plays a significant role in that deterioration. Its imperative we have a factory farm moratorium so we can begin to repair the damage inflicted on our water.

Alliance members said Iowas livestock industry produces nearly 22 billion gallons of liquid manure spread on farmland without treatment, and the state has had more than 800 documented manure spills since 1996 that have polluted Iowa waterways. A record 37 beach advisories were issued at state parks and preserves this year due to algae blooms from excess phosphorous associated with animal waste, they added.

Joyce Otto, a Grinnell nurse and president of Poweshiek Cares, said the construction of a hog confinement operation near her home was a life-changing experience accompanied by odor and health issues. Gary Netser said two hog confinement buildings erected near his Iowa County family farm have basically ruined our lives.

Its changed everything for us. We have no quality of life, said Netser. Its horrible out there.

The corporate takeover of the pork industry  once the mainstay of family farms  also has resulted in the loss of local infrastructure, population declines in rural communities, school closings and costs all Iowa taxpayers bear, according to alliance members.

Cheap meat is anything but cheap, said Deborah Bunka, a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and the Iowa Farmers Union.

From the time the state Legislature eliminated local control in House File 518, it has been a race to the bottom, said Bunka, in referring to 1995 legislation that granted large-scale livestock operations legal protection from lawsuits in exchange for new regulations dealing with siting and permitting requirements, manure management plans and other environmental safeguards.

Adding insult to injury, Iowa residents are left to pick up the tab for the costs of factory farming, she added.
DES MOINES -- Gov. Terry Branstad is embarking on fall reading tour this month to highlight school districts successes in improving third-grade reading skills.

Branstad will visit three Iowa school districts in Urbandale, Denison and Keystone to learn about how they have improved students reading skills by the end of third grade. The governor says assuring that students read proficiently by the end of third grade has been a top priority of his administration.

State funding decisions for the reading initiative going forward are expected to be discussed by the governor and legislators during the upcoming 2017 session. In 2012, the governor proposed and the Iowa Legislature adopted early literacy legislation to identify struggling readers starting in kindergarten and require schools to provide intensive assistance.

That legislation also created the Iowa Reading Research Center, which supports improving students reading skills in a variety of ways from conducting research on high-quality literacy instruction to providing other resources for educators as well as for parents to help their children at home: www.iowareadingresearch.org.

Public input

Iowa Department of Education leaders will hit the road this fall as part of a statewide tour to gather public input for a plan to meet the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

ESSA -- which replaces the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and will be implemented starting in the 2017-18 school year -- provides a balance between the role of states and the federal government in accountability for the success of all children.

Under the reauthorized law, officials say the federal government sets expectations, and states determine how schools will reach them. Nine public input meetings will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. from September through November at the following locations: Johnston, Monday; Council Bluffs, Tuesday; Elkader, Oct. 11; Sioux City, Oct. 20; Bettendorf, Oct. 25; Storm Lake, Oct. 26; Cedar Rapids, Nov. 2; Ottumwa, Nov. 7; and Cedar Falls, Nov. 9.

For more information on Iowas plans to meet the Every Student Succeeds Act, visit https://www.educateiowa.gov/pk-12/every-student-succeeds-act.

EPA grant

Iowa State University is one of six U.S. universities to receive a federal EPA research grant funding for a project to better quantify the economic values of improved water quality and, in turn, help decision makers consider the benefits of investments in water quality improvement efforts.

The Environmental Protection Agency research grant of $800,000 will fund efforts by researchers at ISU to quantify the value of water quality improvements in Midwestern ecosystems. It is part of a $4.8 million package of grants being issued to six universities across the country.

Chemical and microbial contaminants continue to reduce water quality, and EPA officials say the research grants will help communities and experts conduct benefit-cost analyses for actions that protect our waterways.

History award

The State Historical Museum of Iowa has received a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History, which recognizes achievement in preservation and interpretation of state and local history.

The association honored the Iowa museums First in the Nation: Shaping Presidential Politics Since 1972 exhibition with an Award of Merit during its 71st Annual Leadership in History Awards banquet and 2016 Annual Meeting in Detroit.

Overtime rule

Gov. Terry Branstad said Tuesday he has joined a coalition of 21 states and governors in filing a federal court complaint challenging the U.S. Department of Labors new overtime rule. If implemented, he said, the new rule would more than double the minimum salary overtime threshold for public and private workers without Congressional authorization.

He also contends the rule will force many state and local governments to substantially increase their employment costs and services, including educational costs for students and parents.

That could mean some governments could be forced to eliminate some services and even lay off employees. The complaint urges the court to prevent the implementation of the new rule before it takes effect Dec. 1.

In addition to Iowa, other states and governors who joined this filing include: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, according to Branstads office.
WATERLOO -- The city has reached a $33 million cost-sharing agreement with the Iowa Department of Transportation to complete the reconstruction of U.S. Highway 63.

Waterloo City Council members voted 6-0 Monday to approve the design details and funding estimates to rebuild the state highway from Jefferson Street downtown north to Newell Street over the next three years.

A key change involves replacing the flood-prone Canadian National Railway underpass on U.S. 63 between Dane and Newell streets with an overpass. The railroad tracks and an existing pedestrian highway crossing would become "tunnels" through the new mechanically stabilized earthen walls of the overpass.

Other work includes a new storm water pump station to alleviate flash flooding along the highway on the west side of downtown, replacing 100-year-old sanitary sewer lines, adding new trails and sidewalks and decorative lighting features.

State transportation officials have earmarked $22.4 million toward the estimated $32.7 million overall cost of the project. The city has secured another $7.2 million in federal aid.

Finally, the city is projecting $2 million in general obligation bonds repaid with property taxes and $1 million in local sewer revenue to complete the financial package.

"I think we're well funded for the project," said City Engineer Eric Thorson. "They're large numbers, obviously, but it's also a very important project for the city."

The DOT is projecting a December bid opening for the segment of U.S. 63 from Jefferson Street, near the Cedar Valley SportsPlex, across the river to Franklin Street. The highway is split there on First Street and Mullan Avenue so work can be done without major detours.

The second "overpass" phase from Franklin to Newell is expected to be let in March or April next year, and work would require a detour for through traffic.

A final contract covering enhancements, including some trail and lighting features, would be bid by the city in December 2017 or early 2018. Much of that work can't be done until the highway reconstruction is nearing completion.

Council members voiced few worries about the agreement during a work session Monday. But one area of concern was safety the 20-foot by 12-foot box culvert that will serve as a pedestrian tunnel through the overpass.

Councilman Steve Schmitt said he was concerned the tunnel could be a hangout for criminal activity.

Thorson said the tunnel will be at street level and well-lit, so it could be easily viewed by those passing by. It was not feasible to put the pedestrian crossing over the highway in that location.

IDOT reconstructed U.S. 63 from Newell north to Donald Street over the past two construction seasons, a project that involved buying out several homes. No buyouts are expected during the new construction phase.
CEDAR FALLS  The University of Northern Iowa School of Music will celebrate the lifetime achievements of the most recent School of Music Hall of Fame inductees this month.

An award ceremony and induction will take place during the Scholarship Benefit Concert on Friday in the Great Hall at the Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center.

The Hall of Fame honorees for 2016 will be Susan Rider and Therese Fetter.

Rider is a 1989 UNI alumna and currently serves at the rank of master gunnery sergeant performing in The Presidents Own United States Marine Band.

Fetter, a native of Dublin, Ireland, began her violin studies at the Irish College of Music. She received a master of music degree in violin performance from UNI. Fetter joined the faculty of the UNI Suzuki School in 1978, served as director from 1986-2000, was named artistic adviser in 2010 and retired from teaching in 2016.
When the dust swirling around the employment status of Waterloos director of safety services finally settled, Dan Trelka was still standing as leader of the Waterloo Police Department.

It had been a tumultuous several days since it was reported last week Trelka had told some of his officers he had been asked to resign. Mayor Quentin Hart was out of town at the time, and when reached declined to comment on personnel issues.

It quickly became obvious Trelka had a lot of support throughout the community. There was an immediate outcry from residents who supported Trelka, much of it on social media.

We also have been supporters of the police chief throughout his tenure. The passion Trelka has exhibited in bettering community relations in Waterloo has been palpable since his arrival in 2010.

During a press conference Monday, Hart said Trelka was being assigned for the next year to focus solely on police issues, removing him from his dual role of overseeing Waterloo Fire Rescue as well. This may have been a good face-saving move for both men, but we feel its also good strategy. Let Trelka focus on the police department and let Pat Treloar, director of fire services, handle fire issues.

In recent months, the citys police force has faced complaints of racial bias and accusations officers are not being held accountable for their actions. An officers recorded comments disparaging a homicide victim were exposed during a murder trial that ended in an acquittal. Video was released of another officer pulling the hair of a suspect following a high-speed car chase and subsequent crash. And the city settled lawsuits from residents  one just 13 years old  who complained of excessive force. Those settlements have reached a total of $2.7 million.

If it is true Hart asked Trelka to step down  and we have no reason to believe its not  it was apparently done without conversations with City Council members.

Were all aware of the high-profile instances of the mistreatment of suspects nationally, many of them minorities. High-ranking police officials have lost their jobs in some cases. Understandably, that may have played a part in Harts thinking. However, we dont believe this was a situation that called for a unilateral decision.

In Harts short tenure as mayor, this was easily his most scrutinized hour, and the spotlight was shining directly upon him Monday.

Fortunately, Hart apparently took some time to comprehensively review the situation and came through with reasonable actions.

I believe that Dan Trelka is the one that can help us to address the myriad of challenges internally and externally that we face, Hart said at Mondays press conference. Chief Trelka and I, through community meetings, outreach, best practices, conversations and passion for this community have begun a process of a communitywide policing plan that will work toward regaining public trust that has been lost due to some of our shortcomings.

But this just isnt a plan to hold accountability to our public safety officials, he added. It will also send a message to any perpetrators of senseless violence that takes place in our streets that enough is enough.

Trelka said he would be working with Hart.

Weve got some challenges we face, weve got some adjustments to make, Trelka said. Were having great conversations. All of this is for the betterment of Waterloo, and Im optimistic for the future of all of us.

Even after the press conference earlier in the day, residents packed Mondays City Council meeting in strong support of Trelka, some carrying signs stating We got your six, Dan and Dont scapegoat Trelka.

One twist here is Trelka has been working to get body cameras on all police officers and working on a council directive to get cameras set up in parts of the city. We are behind those efforts because these devices help get to the truth in many sensitive situations. It would have been painfully ironic to send Trelka packing because cameras recorded evidence of a few officers actions. This gives him a solid base to work from. From here on out, we hope each and every officer also has his six.

We believe the city has the leadership to bring about positive change. Now it's up to Mayor Hart and Chief Trelka to forge better relations between police and the community.
Evansdale man wins $10K prize

CLIVE  A Black Hawk County man has claimed a $10,000 lottery prize.

Steven Mummelthie of Evansdale claimed the third of eight prizes of $10,000 available in the lotterys $125,000 Cash scratch game.

Mummelthie bought his winning ticket at Caseys, 5202 Lafayette Road in Elk Run Heightsand claimed his prize Monday at the lotterys regional office in Cedar Rapids.

The game is a $10 ticket.

Ras Smith sets event Thursday

WATERLOO  Democratic Iowa House District 62 candidate Ras Smith will hold a fundraiser Thursday.

The event will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Volks Haus Pub, 324 E. Fourth St. It is free and open to the public.

Waterloo Democrats state Sen. Bill Dotzler, Rep. Timi Brown-Powers and retiring Rep. Deb Berry will host the fundraiser. Smith is seeking Berrys seat in House District 62.

2016 Safety City

event held in C.F.

CEDAR FALLS  The 2016 Safety City program will be held this week at the Target Distribution facility in Cedar Falls.

The Cedar Falls Police Department, Cedar Falls Fire-Rescue, Wheaton Fransican Hospitals and Cedar Falls Utilities work in conjunction with Target Corp. to put on this safety event for kindergarten children from all Cedar Falls schools.

The Safety City program was started in 1968.

More than 500 children attend the safety program, learning about fire safety, calling 911, first aid, stranger danger, electrical safety and several other safety facts. Target team members also completed a child ID kit with fingerprints on every child which was sent home with the children.
Q. When the Waverly veterans were asking for approval for their building they told the City Council it was for veterans use only. In the Sept. 10 Courier article it said anyone could use the facility. Did the City Council approve that?

A. Waverly Area Veterans Post board member Hank Bagelmann responded, "I don't know precisely when this question was clarified, but I do know that the leadership of WAVP views this project as a community effort and that the resulting facility would be a place 'where patriots gather,' thereby open to all who share a love for country. Funding for the project has been received from the state of Iowa (via Vision Iowa), from the city of Waverly and from the people of Bremer County through the Bremer County Supervisors."

Q. What are trick or treat hours in Waterloo this year?

A. Halloween trick or treat hours will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 31.

Q. Since when has a sitting president been able to go out and campaign for a presidential candidate at taxpayers expense?

A. When the president is on a campaign trip, the Democratic National Committee or the Clinton campaign reimburses the federal government at rates based on what it would cost to charter a plane to carry campaign travelers. Sitting presidents always have been able to campaign for their would-be successors, but their help is not always sought. Ronald Reagan endorsed George H.W. Bush, but didn't actively campaign for him. Al Gore kept scandal-plagued Bill Clinton far away from his 2000 campaign, which many commentators considered a mistake. John McCain was endorsed by George W. Bush in 2008, but with the president's popularity plunging as the Iraq War still raged, McCain didn't seek his help on the campaign trail.

Q. What is a Libertarian? And why is Aleppo important to them or should it be more important to all of us?

A. Libertarians believe all individuals should be responsible for their own lives and live however they choose as long as they do not interfere with the right of others to do the same. They oppose as much as possible government interference in individual lives. Aleppo is a 7,000-year-old besieged city -- Syria's largest -- where rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad's government forces have dug in. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped, enduring the government's (and Russia's) bombs and alleged chemical weapons.

Q. My Covenant family physician recently retired. Due to my insurance I need to find another Covenant family physician. After calling around to the local Waterloo-Cedar Falls offices I can only find one family physician accepting new patients. Will Covenant be recruiting new physicians in the near future?

A. Covenant responds: Covenant Clinic continually works to recruit health care providers to meet the health care needs in our community. For assistance in finding a provider that best meets your needs, call Patient Engagement (formerly Nurse on Call) at 272-2600.

Questions are taken on a special Courier phone line at 234-3566. Questions are answered by Courier staff and staff at the Waterloo Public Library.
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Yesterday, I sat with about five people, all Russians and all villagers

They are very upset at the state that America has become. So many Russians have in the past adored the USA. It has ideas and democracy sounds so wonderful too so many in the world. But!

What is happening now is Americas own fault. Russians listen to news from all over the world, not just, as is supposed by the west, just Russian news outlets. Someone like my buddy Vova has satellite TV and he can see news from all over the world. Several others have the same and being a Russian, they only believe half of what is said by their governmental services. Russians are smart and know crap when they see it. They also know crap when it is excreted from mainstream media out of the west. There are still wannabe believers. But they see the light at the end of the tunnel

Obama has definitely become a very hated individual, for his lies and games have permeated the world and have destroyed all goodwill that was left in the world, toward America. Russians know that it is not the people in America like them that are doing this destruction, but they also know that sometimes you have to rise up above the leaders and dance upon their heads. The point has to be made and when enough is enough, change things. Russians do have a history of being patient for long times, but when the need arises, they will come out in the streets. Not the paid lackeys, but the regular people. They will stand and fight for what is right

When they are happy with their leader, they support that leader and do not question why things are done the way they are. Russians are very trusting and very happy with long term leaders. The issue is, Do not break that trust!

No one, but no one running for president of the US, is considered worth a hill of beans and Obama and his administration have become akin to the the devil himself. This is what comes from illegal sanctions and the repercussions of such sanctions will mar the future deals for many years. The US has lost the worlds trust and we can not count the paid lackeys such as Britain and Israel. These bought puppet scared countries, have to do what is said, or suffer and loose what goodies they have. Rule by bully is a bad way to run the show

Then as I was sitting there and listening (?) to what was said. They all turned to me and I realized that they had asked me something. I was in thought and did not catch it

I was asked what will I do? I was confused and then after a few more words of where will I go and what happens to me, if war breaks out? AND they do expect and understand that America is pushing for war! They understand that America and the west is in deep issues and war is basically the only way to clean the slate

Russians know war. War has been on their doorsteps too many times in their history and they know what they see happening is real. Not a made up game of thrones to have a good time with. These people wanted to know if I would go back to America if forced or would I stay with them? Vova said something like, Boza sleeps on couch and you have a bed in my room, if needed. Kommuna (Tiny Russian Village) is small and safe!

I sat and thought about what was said

They switched subject as if they understood I was thinking. They talked about who was thinking of staying in the village all winter this year. Several people are working on their places and we may just have five or six people this winter staying. Then a guy named Nikolai asked me, What is wrong with Americans!

That is a good question and surprised me. I have said many times that Russians are intellects and they want to know about why things happen

I said one word,  or in our letters  lenivyy. (idle, indolent, slothful, work-shy, shiftless, inactive, underactive, sluggish, lethargic; remiss, negligent, slack, lax, lackadaisical)

Hate me all you want, but most Americans I know fit the above. Some dont, but many more do than not. And it seems that the only thing that gets them off their ass, is to have those words above threatened

The above word,  is what becomes of a society that has too much handed to them. Too much food, too much free, too much money, to much anything. When you buy off the people through entitlements, that you really do not have a right to have. You have been paid to be what they want you to be

Much of the world is bought and paid for through glorified entitlements, it keeps the masses happy. The kings can party in splendor and caviar, while the peasants party with beer and hotdogs. All are happy until the hotdogs and beer disappear

Enough of that sidetracking

Russians understand this word () well!

It is very looked down upon! The Russians still feel that you must walk in your own shoes and make your own way. The difference in west to east is that family and friends are expected to help make your way. Not governmental services and not state services. But simply, you do what you have to do to make it in the world and when you do? You are a better person for it!

If that means leave the country? Then leave! If that means pull up old railroad steel ties, then sell them! Then do it. If that means to steal a bridge to use somewhere else? Then do it. But do what it takes, for survival is the number one issue and Russians are survivors

Everything is fair game in Russia and it is the true wild west at times. Just a wild west with intellects. They will punish their own, when needed and ignore everything if needed. They will stand up and fight when needed, but they will give you every chance to alter your path of destruction

This my friend is what America sees as weakness in Russia. The Russians keep trying to work with America on the world stage and America, who is slapping Russia on purpose, sees only that Russian is weak. The opposite is a fact and we have woke the Russian Bear and she has cubs and will do what it takes to protect them

My single word gave them a pause in thought. I could see the gears turning and the thinkings about who they know the same way. Russia has its share of stupid also. In fact Russian actions within their world, can seem pretty stupid to outsiders. At least until you live with them and see their existence firsthand

Then you realize that Russians live life and many stand on their own feet and are proud of that fact. With that life come stupidity. I call it thinning the weeds!

* * * * * * * * * *

I had to smile watching this video! Let the girl dance and who cares what anyone thinks

Ignore the few huge cities and realize that Russia still has her roots, This is so Russian that I am amazed. This what the Russians kids that live around these villages where I am, look like. They are good looking kids and very smart. They are not rich by any means, but yet they are! They live life in freedom

The boy has several videos on his channel and he is not bad playing. I am guessing the little girl is his sister and I thought about how many times I have watched Russians play their music. They play with spoons, instruments and even just their hands, as they slap at the wall. It is all soul release and it is good for you

Made me genuinely smile and so does the fact that the villagers want me in their life

WtR
Kazakhstan extends links with Ukraine

21 September 2016

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Askar Zhumagaliyev, chairman of KazAtomProm, and Igor Nasalik, Ukraine's energy and coal industry minister, have held their second meeting on future cooperation in the nuclear energy sector. The world's biggest uranium producer said in a statement yesterday the meeting focused on production of fuel for Ukrainian nuclear power reactors.

According to KazAtomProm, Nasalik had "assured the delegation from Kazakhstan that Ukraine has genuine interest in mutually beneficial cooperation" in the production of fuel assemblies for use in Ukrainian nuclear power plants. Zhumagaliyev had added that KazAtomProm has the "strategic objective to diversify production", according to the same statement.

Nasalik noted that Ukraine also has the strategic objective to diversify the supply of nuclear fuel and its components. KazAtomProm said this "means that Kazakhstan has the opporunity to become a reliable partner of enriched uranium supply".

The two sides have agreed to arrange working groups to "analyse the economic viability of the project". The two men also discussed "the possibility of mining and supplying enriched uranium and ion exchange resin to Ukraine".

A delegation from Nasalik's ministry visited state-run KazAtomProm's headquarters last month to discuss cooperation in the nuclear energy sector.

Uranium production

The world's biggest uranium producer, Kazakhstan has 12% of the world's uranium resources and an expanding mining sector, producing about 23,800 tonnes in 2015.

Zhumagaliyev told delegates at the World Nuclear Association's 41st Annual Symposium in London last week that current uranium spot market conditions do not justify further Kazakh production increases.

"KazAtomProm's cost of uranium production is one of the lowest in the world. However, taking into account the realities of market, which is currently over-supplied, we do not see any need to increase our production volume," Zhumagaliyev said.

"In my opinion, it's much better to leave this valuable asset in the ground and realise its great influence in future," he said.

Under the current rate of production, uranium reserves in Kazakhstan will last for more than 60-70 years, he said, adding that these reserves represent "valuable future supply" to the 59 reactors presently under construction globally, and the additional 168 new units planned, or on order.

"We are confident KazAtomProm will play a very important role in supplying future plants," Zhumagaliyev said.

In May, KazAtomProm and Canadian uranium producer Cameco agreed to restructure the Inkai joint venture, extending their cooperation in the Kazakh in-situ leach (ISL) uranium project until 2045. The agreement will see Kazatomprom increase its share of the joint venture to 60% with Cameco becoming a minority owner. Inkai, in southern Kazakhstan, is owned and operated by Joint Venture Inkai, currently owned 60% by Cameco and 40% by Kazakh state-owned KazAtomProm.

Diversification

Zhumagaliyev met with the head of China's CITIC Group in July to discuss attracting investment to the Central Asian country's nuclear energy sector. CITIC Group, formerly the China International Trust and Investment Corporation, is a state-owned investment company established in 1979. The talks build on agreements KazAtomProm signed with Chinese companies at the end of last year. These include one for the development of Kazakh uranium mines and the construction of a nuclear fuel plant in Kazakhstan.

Earlier this month, Kazazh and Chinese companies signed an agreement on nuclear fuel pellets supply. KazAtomProm's Zhumagaliyev, the chairman of CGNPC Zhang Shanmin, the CEO of Ulba Metallurgical Plant (UMP) Yuri Shakhvorostov, and the general manager of CGNPC-URC Cai Yusheng, signed the agreement during Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev's working visit to China. According to the agreement, Kazakhstan will supply 180 tonnes of nuclear fuel pellets to Chinese utilities in 2016-2018.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Low Enriched Uranium Storage Facility - or 'bank' - is scheduled to be ready for operations by September 2017, following the conclusion of a partnership agreement between the IAEA and UMP. The agreement was signed on 27 May in Vienna by IAEA LEU Bank project executive Mark Bassett and UMP sales director Alexander Khodanov.

In April, KazAtomProm and ConverDyn of the USA signed an agreement whereby the world's largest uranium producer and the "leading provider" of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) conversion services will jointly and immediately offer uranium in the form of natural UF6 to global utilities. UF6 is the natural uranium feedstock for the enrichment step in the nuclear fuel cycle. The agreement was signed by Zhumagaliyev and Malcolm Critchley, president and CEO of ConverDyn.

In July last year, KazAtomProm signed a contract with India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to supply 5000 tonnes of uranium over the following four years.

The contract was signed by Zhumagaliyev and DAE head Anil Shrivastava during a meeting between Nazarbayev and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in Astana.

In October the same year, KazAtomProm said it plans to follow the example of other major uranium mining companies and create a trading subsidiary. This plan, it said, is part of its "transformation" strategy.

Umirzak Shukeyev, chairman of Kazakhstan's sovereign wealth fund, said the key objectives of the strategy include "trebling the company's value" by 2025. Samruk-Kazyna, which is KazAtomProm's sole shareholder, was launched in 2008 to modernize Kazakhstan's economy and help attract foreign investors. It has influence over hundreds of state companies in the country, including KazAtomProm and KazMunayGaz.

Zhumagaliyev added that the company plans "to become the leading supplier of natural uranium on the world market, to diversify production at the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle, in particular, to start production of fuel assemblies".

"A lot of attention will be paid as part of the transformation to strengthening [KazAtomProm's] marketing operations," Zhumagaliyev said.

At the Symposium last week, Zhumagaliyev stressed the importance of KazAtomProm's transformation, adding that he had held a series of working meetings at the event with the CEOs of "major industry companies" and had "discussed issues of further cooperation".

This year, about 600 delegates from 35 countries participated in the Symposium.

Written and researched

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Laura Sparks, executive director of the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, has been elected president of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, effective January 4, 2017. Sparks will be the first woman to lead the institution.

Sparks is a leader in the field of community-focused philanthropy. At the William Penn Foundation, a leading philanthropy with an endowment greater than $2 billion, she was responsible for numerous initiatives addressing social and environmental challenges in Americas fifth largest city and for designing programs in education, public space, the arts and the environment.

Under her guidance, the foundation launched and refined new strategic priorities, focusing its $115 million grant budget on improvements in urban education for economically disadvantaged children, protection of the water resources serving 15 million people across four states, development of world-class urban parks and trails in underserved communities and cultivation of a vibrant cultural sector. A magna cum laude graduate of Wellesley College, Sparks holds an M.B.A. and a J.D. with honors from the University of Pennsylvania.

The Cooper Unions Board of Trustees, advised by a search committee that represented the four faculties, the student body, alumni and the trustees, unanimously approved Sparks appointment, which follows the conclusion of an extensive search process. More than 300 applications were considered, and 59 dossiers were reviewed in depth. Eleven of these candidates were interviewed at length; five of them were invited to return to make detailed presentations to the committee, including proposals for returning to full-tuition scholarships.

We are so fortunate to have identified a new leader who brings substantial executive-level experience from the non-profit sector as well as industry, said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., Cooper Union trustee and co-chair of the Presidential Search Committee. We wanted someone who valued Cooper as a first-class, unique educational institution, and also had significant experience leading a large, complicated organization through challenging financial circumstances. Laura Sparks has both skill sets.

Sparks spent six years of her professional life in New York City, having served as senior vice president for community development at Citigroup. There she worked to develop programs to increase affordable housing and eliminate barriers to opportunity for low-income families. During the financial crisis, she played a critical role in coordinating Citigroups relationships with other stakeholders, including Fannie Mae, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and other government entities.



Sparks has served on a variety of boards and advisory committees, including the Credit Committee and the Capital Formation Committee for Living Cities, a philanthropic collaborative of 22 of the worlds largest foundations and financial institutions, focused on improving the lives of low-income people and the urban areas where they live. As a member of the Governors Advisory Board for Community Development, she has advised Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf on issues pertaining to public safety, crime, urban development, revitalization and disaster preparedness. She currently sits on the board of Aeris, a nonprofit information service for community investors who champion economic justice in underserved markets.

Top image courtesy of The Cooper Union

> via The Cooper Union




Canl Bahis siteleri sektoru son derece onu ack ve farkl ozelliklere sahip bir sektordur. Elbette bahis secenekleri arasnda yuksek kazanc getiren alan kuskusuz canl bahistir. Peki, canl bahis nedir?

Canl Bahis Nedir?

Canl bahis adndan da anlaslacag gibi devam eden musabakaya bahis yapmaktr. Bu bahis musabaka devam ederken de yaplabilir olmasdr. Basta futbol olmak uzere voleybol, tenis, hentbol, basketbol, buz hokeyi ve masa tenisi gibi spor organizasyonlarna canl bahisler yaplabilmektedir. Canl bahis siteleri bu oyunlarn hepsine yuksek oranlara bahis yapmanza imkan tanr. En fazla tercih edilen futbol canl bahisleri diger alanlara gore daha fazla on plandadr. Siteden siteye degisen sartlar ve uygulama esaslar soz konusu olsa da kurallar sabittir.

Canl bahisi populer klan ve heyecan katan en onemli ozellikle musabakann basladg ana dek bahis yapabilmedir. Canl bahis icerisinde yer alan secenekler kazanma sansnz da dogrudan arttrmaktadr. Ilk korneri kim kullanr, ilk tac, gol, sar kart, krmz kart gibi futbol musabakas icerisinde olabilecek hemen hemen her seye bahis yaplabilmektedir. Normal bahisegore de son derece yuksek oranda olmas avantajl yonlerini ortaya koymaktadr. Nitekim dogru secenek ksa surede kazancl ckmanza etki edecektir.

Strateji ve dogru analizle 90 dakika gibi bir surede anaparanzkatlayabilirsiniz. Tabi bunu basarabilmek icin mutlaka musabakaya dair ayrntlar iyi degerlendirmek gerekir. Soz konusu musabakann detaylarn inceleyip, cezal, sakat oyuncu veya performans dusen takm oyunu gibi detaylar bilmek canl bahiste kazanc belirleyen onemli unsurdur. Guvenilir Canl bahis hem heyecanl zaman gecirmeyi hem de musabakalar takip ederken para kazanmay saglamaktadr.

Canl Bahis Nasl Oynanr?

Bahislerinizi guvenilir sitelerden gerceklestirdiginiz zaman herhangi bir sekilde para cekme de sorun yasamazsnz. Guvenilir bahis siteleri tespit edip sonrasnda da uyelik islemlerini tamamlamanz gerekmektedir. Belirlenen uyelik sartlarn yerine getirip hesabnza da paray aktardktan sonra bahis islemlerini sorunsuz yapabilirsiniz. Peki, canl bahis nasl oynanr?

Oncelikle bahis konusunda mutlaka dogru site arastrmas yapmalsnz. Yapacagnz arastrma neticesinde buldugunuz site uzerinden canl bahisislemlerini gerceklestirebilirsiniz. Bunun icin uye olup, hesaba para atp, canl bahis bolumune girmelisiniz. Sonrasnda dahil olmak istediginiz musabakann saatini ogrenip, gerekli analizleri yapmalsnz. Tahminlerinizi belirledikten sonra karsnza ckacak olan bahis sayfasndan istediginiz hamleyi yapmalsnz. Bahis tutarn belirledikten sonra musabaka baslayacaktr.

Canl bahis diger normal bahis esaslarna gore farkllklar icermektedir. Bunlardan en onemlisi musabakann gidisatna gore islem yapabilir olmaktr.Ayrca musabakann 2. Yarsna gore hamle yapp ayr bir bahisin soz konusu olmas da ciddi avantajdr. Dogru hamle ile sizde istediginiz bahisi yapp kazanc elde edebilirsiniz. Nitekim canl olarak yapacagnz bahis icin mac oncesi raporlara gore hareket etmek onemlidir. Cunku takmlarn durumlarn analiz etmek tahmin gucunu arttracaktr. Misal tamnn en iyi oyuncusu sakat ya da kart cezals ise takmn performansnda dusus yasanacaktr. Buna ek olarak takmn deplasman performans ile evinde ki performans ayr olacaktr. Burada da takmn musabakay nerede yaptgna bakmak gerekir. Bu ayrntlar da iyice analiz ettikten sonra bahsinizi yapp kazanmann keyfini yasayabilirsiniz.

Canl Bahis Siteleri

Son derece yuksek getiriye sahip bahis sektoru uzun zamandr faaliyet gostermektedir. Cok ciddi rakamlarn soz konusu oldugu bu sektor zamanla sanal ortamlara donusmustur. Elbette guvenli ve bir o kadar da avantajl olan bu siteler cok yonlu frsatlar sunmaktadrlar. Canl iddaa siteleri gerek yeni uyelere gerekse de hali hazrdaki uyelerine bolca bonus frsatlar vermektedir. Yatracagnz tutara gore belirlenen bonuslar site icerisinde rahat hareket etmenizi de saglayacaktr.

Canl bahis sitelerini kullanmadan once mutlaka guvenli olup olmadgna goz atmalsnz. Zira baz kullanclar guvenli olmayan sitelerden yaptklar islemlerden dolay magdur olmaktadrlar. Nitekim guvenli ve sorunsuz hizmet sunan yurt ds site tercih etmek en dogru secenektir. Sektorde uzun yllar faaliyet gosteren siteleri tercih edebilirsiniz. Bu alanda yer alan yabanc siteler musteri memnuniyetine onem vermektedir. Oncelik site kullanclarn sorunsuz sekilde bahislerini yapabilir olmasn saglamaktr. Bahis sitelerinde amac hem daha fazla kullancya hizmet vermek hem de sektorde emin admlarla ilerlemek onceliklidir. Dogru site tercihi ile sizde canl bahislerinizi sorun yasamadan gerceklestirebilirsiniz. Sizler icin hazrlams oldugumuz canl bahis siteleri listesi su sekildedir;

Mobilbahis Tempobet Bets10 Bahigo 1xbahis Betboo Youwin Superbahis

Sralams oldugumuz bu siteler sektorde basarl islere imza atms sitelerdedir. Canl bahis konusunda beklentileri karslayacak olan bu siteler sizlere kolaylk sunmaktadrlar. Bol bonuslu secenekle de sizlere farkl bahis yonlerini sunacaklardr. Sistemsel etki icerisinde her zaman etkin sonuc alabilmek icin surekli olarak faaliyet icerisindedirler.

Canl Bahis Taktikleri

Bahis sektorunun en fazla dikkat edilmesi gereken hususu dogru taktik ve dogru tahmindir. Elbette dogru tahmini yapabilmek icin analizi cok iyi yapmak gerekir. Canl bahis taktikleri arasnda ilk sra analiz gelmektedir. Analiz yapamadgnz zaman basarl tahminlerde bulunmanz pek de mumkun degildir. Cunku bahiste onemli olan konu musabakann analizini cok iyi yaplmas gerektigidir. Canl bahisin ozelliklerini iyi bilmek ve nasl bir hamle yapacagnz bilmek gerekir. Ozellikle riskli maclarda yaplacak degerlendirmeler cok daha onemlidir.

Canl bahis yapacaklarn takip edecegi degerler takmlarn durumlar ile alakal olmaldr. Performans uzerine kurulu bahis sisteminde takm degerlendirmesine iyi bakmak gerekir. Iki takmn son 5 macta nasl bir sonuc ortaya koyduguna bakarak hareket etmek onemlidir. Ayrca hangi takm evinde daha iyi performans sergiliyor diye de ayrca bakmak gerekir.

Analizlerle alakal puan durumlarna da goz atmak cok onemlidir. Puan degerlendirmesinde oncelikle takmlarn ihtiyaclar ile dogru orantl hareket etmek gerekir. Cunku olusturulan performans takmn da durumunu ortaya koymaktadr. Nitekim istenilen sonucu elde edebilmek icin tum ayrntlar bilmek gerekir. Takm ici duzenden tutunda da takmn son durumuna kadar her ayrnt onemlidir. Iki takmn birbirleri arasnda ki sonuclar da incelemek gerekir. Burada dikkat edilecek detaylarn basnda maclarda kac gol oldugu ve gollerin hangi dakikalarda atldgdr. Cekismeli gecen musabakalarda bazen goller ilk yarda daha fazla olurken baz maclarda da ikinci yarda daha cok gol olmustur. Iki takm arasnda ki maclarda gollerin cogunlugu ilk yarda geliyorsa buna gore bahis yapabilirsiniz.

Canl Bahis Siteleri Bonuslar ve Kampanyalar

Bahis yapanlar veya yapmay dusununler sitelerin sunmus olduklar frsatlar merak etmektedirler. Cunku siteler daha fazla kullancya erismek icin her donem kampanyalar duzenleyerek kullanc odakl hamleler yapmaktadrlar. Canl bahis bonuslar ve kampanyalar oldukca populer olup, siteler bu konuda adeta birbirleri ile yarsmaktadrlar. Birbirinden farkl ozelliklere sahip olan kampanyalar size frsatlar sunmaktadr. Daha cok kazanma ihtimalinizi arttran bu bonuslar daha cesur olmanza da dogrudan etki edecektir. Nitekim bonuslar sitelerin cekiciligini ve avantajlarn arttrmaktadr. En cok kazandran canl bahis siteleri bedava bonuslar ve kampanyalar icin http://www.milano2018.com/canli-bahis-siteleri-2022/ linkinden yardm alabilirsiniz.

Hos geldin bonusu ile baslayan ve sonrasnda para yatrdkca bonus veren cok sayda site bulunmaktadr. Canl bahis bonusu veren siteler yeni uyelere sunduklar frsatlar farkl kampanyalarla mevcut uyelerine de sunmaktadrlar. Hali hazrda siteyi kullananlarn da bonus frsatlarndan yararlanmalar icin donemsel kampanyalar olusturmaktadrlar. Boylece baska sitelere gidisler olmayacag gibi site de daha keyifli zaman gecirmek mumkun klnmaktadr. Bu tur eklentiler yapan sitelerde musteri memnuniyeti daha fazladr.

Bahis siteleri ozellik ve uygulama bakmndan farkllklar bunyelerinde bulundurmaktadrlar. Verilen bonuslarn olusturulmas ve kullanclar aktarlmasnda yatrlan para miktarlar belirleyici olmaktadr. 1.000 TL yatran bir kullanc yuzde 20 bonus frsat olan bir kampanyadan 200 TL bonus kazanabilmektedir. Yatracag tutar 10.000 TL oldugunda bu bonustutar 2.000 TL olabilmektedir. Gerceklesen ve uygulanan esaslar tamamen donemsel olarak yaplan kampanyalarla alakaldr. Iyi Canl bahis siteleri bonuslar ve kampanyalar icin sitelerin vermis oldugu oranlar takip edebilirsiniz.

Canl Bahis Siteleri Para Yatrma

Online Canl bahis yapacaklarn merak ettigi konulardan bir digeri de para yatrma islemleridir. Oldukca onemli olan bu konuda hata yapmamak cok onemlidir. Canl bahis sitelerine para yatrma islemi sanlann aksine son derece basittir. Oldukca basit ve uygulama esas dogru etki olusturan bu yapda sizde islemi rahatca tamamlayabilirsiniz. Para yatrma konusunda su yolu izleyebilirsiniz.

Guvendiginiz ve herhangi bir sekilde aklnzda soru isareti kalmayan bahis sitesine uye olmanz gerekmektedir. Uyelik islemini sorunsuz sekilde tamamladktan sonra para yatrma islemine gecebilirsiniz.

Kullanacagnz siteye uye olduktan sonra karsnza kullanc ad ve sifresini gireceginiz yer gelecektir. Buraya giris yaptktan sonra site icerisine islemlere devam edebilirsiniz.

Sitede yer alan para yatrma sekmesine tklayp sonrasnda karsnza gelen sayfay inceleyebilirsiniz. Para yatrma bolumunde yer alan ksma ne kadar para yatracagnz yazp devam tusuna basmalsnz.

Yatrmak istediginiz tutar girip sonrasnda da devam tusuna bastktan sonra karsnza kart bilgilerinizi gireceginiz sayfa gelecektir. Kredi kart kullanarak para gondermek isteyenlerin tercih ettigi bu sayfa tum bilgiler girilip islem onaylanmaldr.

Canl bahis sitelerine para yatrma islemini gerceklestirmek icin hesaba havale secenegini de kullanabilirsiniz. Site icerisinde musteri hizmetleri ile iletisime gecerek banka hesap numaralarn ogrenebilirsiniz. Belirtilen IBAN numarasna istediginiz tutar havale edebilirsiniz. Havale ederken acklama ksmna yazlacak bilgilere dikkat etmelisiniz.

Kredi kart veya banka havalesi ile gerceklesen para yatrma islemi sonucunda site hesabnzdan bakiyenize bakabilirsiniz. Bakiyenize gore dilediginiz sekilde bahislerinizi gerceklestirebilirsiniz.

Canl Bahis Siteleri Para Cekme

Canl bahiste dogru hamleler ve dogru tahminler sonucunda kazandgnz bedeli geri almak isteyebilirsiniz. Kazanclarnz istediginiz banka hesabnza cekebilmek icin uymanz gereken kurallar soz konusudur. Oncelikle bahis sitelerinden para cekebilmeniz icin uye olurken dogru bilgi paylasmnda bulunmanz gerektigidir. Cunku canl bahis sitelerinden para cekme islemi icin kullanc hesab ile talep edilen banka hesap bilgilerinin ortusmesi gerekir. Yani uye olurken verilen bilgi ile banka hesab kime ait ise o bilgiler ayn olmaldr. Bu uygulama sitenin hem kullancsn hem de kendisini guvene alma politikasdr. Ayrca frsatclarn onune gecerek yeni bir uye olusumunun da onune gecmek amac gutmektedir. Uye olan kisi farkl para cekilme talebi verilen hesap farkl oldugunda para cekme islemi gerceklesmeyecektir.

Bahisleriniz sonucunda kazanc elde edebilir ve bu kazancnz da hakknz olarak almak isteyebilirsiniz. Burada son derece basit uygulama soz konusu olurken siteler aras farkl gorunumler soz konusu olabilir. Fakat yine de tum sitelerde uyenin site icerisinde para cekme bolumune girmesi yeterlidir. Burada cekilecek olan tutarn belirlenmesi ve hesap numarasnn girilmesi ile birlikte islem onay gerekecektir. Para cekme taleplerinde sizden gerekli bilgiler istenmekte ve havale islemi istenilen bilgiler esliginde yurutulmektedir. Dogru bilgi paylasmak sorunsuz para cekebilmeniz en onemli kuraldr. Istenilen bilgiler girildikten sonra site sorumlular gerekli kontrolleri yapp herhangi bir sorun yoksa ksa surede hesabnza gerekli paray aktaracaklardr.

Canl Bahis Sitelerinden Para Cekmek Icin Istenen Belgeler

Bahis sitelerine uye olduktan sonra baz kullanclar para cekme taleplerinin karslanmadg konusunda sikayetlerde bulunmuslardr. Bu sikayetlersektorde uzun zamandr bulunan guvenilir bahis siteleri de yer almaktadr. Fakat sikayetlerin dayanaklarna bakldgnda ise islerin tamamen farkl oldugu gorulmektedir. Yasanan bu durum kullanclarn hatal bilgi girmesi ve uyelik bilgileri ile banka bilgilerinin uyusmamas ile dogru orantldr. Birde canl bahis para cekmek icin istenen belgeler eksik ya da hatal olarak sunulmus olabilir. Ortaya ckan karsklar neticesinde para cekme talebinde bulunan kisi istedigini alamadg icin sikayetci olmaktadr. Oysa ki istenilen bilgiler dogru ve istenilen evraklar eksiksiz sunulsa para cekme islemi sorunsuz olacak.

Sitelerin para cekme konusunda dikkatli hareket etmesi hilelerin ve illegal faaliyetlerin onune gecmek adnadr. Cunku baz kullanclar farkl bilgiler vererek ikinci hesap acabilmektedirler. Bazen de bilincsizce hatal bilgi girilebilmektedir. Hatal islemlerin cozumu konusunda islem yaptgnz sitenin musteri temsilcileri ile gorusebilirsiniz. Talepleriniz dogrultusunda para cekme islemlerinde ki sorunlar giderilecektir. Canl bahis para cekmek icin istenen belgeler listesi su sekildedir;

Kullanc bilgileri ile banka bilgilerini karslastrmak icin kimlik fotokopisi

Banka hesap bilgileri

Ikametgah ve kisiye ait herhangi bir fatura.

Kacak Iddaa

Turkiyede dogrudan bahis yapmak icin resmi kanallar kullanlabilmektedir. Fakat tercih edilen ve oran olarak cok daha fazla frsatlar sunan kacar iddaasiteleri bulunmaktadr. Bu siteler kanunlara aykr sekilde yaplmakta olup, yasal bir dayanag yoktur. Elbette bu sitelerin kurulus merkezi Turkiye olmayp, ds ulkelerdedir ve faaliyetler belirlenen siteler uzerinden yaplmaktadr. Kacak Iddaa oldukca riskli olup, cok dikkatli olunmas gerekir.

Kacak Bahis

Kanunlar cercevesinde istediginiz gibi bahis yapamayabilirsiniz. Bahis yapabilmek icin ya kanuni olarak sorun olmayan ulke dsnda ki kumarhanelere gitmeniz veya kacak bahis sitelerinden islem yapabilirsiniz. Zira bu durum tehlikeli olsa da cok sayda site guvenli sekilde bu alanda hizmet vermektedir. Kacak bahiste oldukca fazla secenek bulunurken yuksek oranda kazanc sunuyor olmas da ragbeti arttryor.

Illegal Bahis

Bahisin bircok alanda yasak oldugu Turkiyede bu alanda cok sayda yabanc merkezli siteler hizmet vermektedir. Illegal bahis sektorunde faaliyet gosteren siteler guvenli hizmet anlays ile kullanclarna frsatlar sunmaktadr. Yurt ds merkezli bu siteler sorunsuz sekilde hizmetlerini surdururken bulunduklar ulkelerde kanunlara uygun sekildedir. Elbette faaliyet noktasnda bulunduklar ulkelerde sorun teskil etmese de Turkiyede faaliyet gostermeleri kanunin yasaklanmstr.

Yasads Bahis

Gerek olusturulan etkenler gerekse de ortaya konulan riskler yasads bahis de oldukca tehlikelidir. Kanunlarn mudahil olduklar bu alanlar da hem kullanclar hem de populer bahis yaptranlar tum riskleri goze almaktadrlar. Fakat yasaklardan uzak sekilde guvenli hizmet sunan siteler de bulunmaktadr. Takipler neticesinde kapatlan sitelerin muhakkak alternatifleri kurularak yollarna devam etmektedirler.

Canl Iddaa Siteleri Nelerdir?

Dunya genelinde kabul gormus cok sayda guvenli hizmet veren populer bahis siteleri bulunmaktadr. Elbette bu siteler dunyann bircok ulkesinde faaliyet gosterse de Turkiyede yasaktr. Sektorde yer alan cok sayda legal iddaa siteleri bulunmaktadr. Herhangi bir kanunsuzlugun olmadg bu sitelerden hzl ve guvenli islem yaplabilmektedir. Tabi bu sitelerde uygulanan oranlar yasal olmayan sitelere gore daha dusuktur. Illegal sitelerin tercih edilme sebeplerinin en onemli etkeni de olusturulan oranlardr. Peki, Iddaa siteleri nelerdir? Faaliyetleri ve uygulama esaslar nelerdir?

Turkiyede faaliyet gosteren yasal iddaa siteleri listesi su sekildedir;

Iddaa

Bilyoner

Tuttur

Birebin

Oley

Nesine

Misli

Iddaa

2004 ylnda hizmet vermeye baslayan Iddaa Spor toto tarafndan kurulmus olup, ilk etapta bayilik seklinde calsmaya baslamstr. Elbette zamanla gelisen teknolojiye ayak uydurarak internet uzerinde de populer bahis severlerin hizmetine sunulmustur. Kuruldugu donemde devletin resmi kurumu olarak faaliyet gosterirken gelinen yeni donemde ozellestirilmistir.

Bilyoner

Turkiyede faaliyetine 2006 ylnda baslayan Bilyoner ilk ozel yasal bahis sitesi olma ozelligine sahiptir. Guvenilir bahis siteleri Turkiyede bunlardr. Ksa surede populer olan site halen faaliyetlerini sorunsuz sekilde surdurmektedir.

Tuttur

Ksa surede adndan bahsettirmeyi basaran Tuttur 2009 ylnda faaliyetlere baslamstr. Guvenilir bahis siteleri arasnda yerini almstr. Gunumuze dek bircok alanda populer bahis yapanlara frsatlar sunarken avantajlar ile de begeni toplamstr.

Birebin

Kullanc odakl calsmalar surdurse de 2011 ylnda sektore giren Birebindiger sitelere gore daha az ragbet gormektedir. Bahis oynamak ise bu sitede oldukca kolaydr. Elbette farkl yaklasmlara sahip olmasndan dolay ilerleyen sureclerde adndan sklkla bahsettirecek gibi gorunuyor.

Oley

2009 ylnda Dogus yayn gruplarnn istiraki olarak kurulmus olup yasal olarak herhangi bir sorunu olmayan sitelerdendir. Bahis siteleri arasnda hzl cks yapms bir sitedir. Oley yapms oldugu yenilikler ile kullanclarn da dikkatini ksa surede cekmeyi basarmstr.

Nesine

Birbirini takip eden surecte Nesine de yine 2006 ylnda hizmet vermeye baslamstr. Yasal bahis siteleri arasnda yerini almay basaran firma ksa surede sevilen ve ragbet goren bir site olmustur.

Misli

2009 ylnda sektore cok hzl giris yapan Misli cok sayda reklam filmi ile on plana ckmay basarmstr. Internet uzerinden hem yasal hem de sorunsuz hizmet veren bahis sitelerinden bir tanesi olmustur.

Canl Bahis Siteleri Kayt ve Uyelik Islemleri

Her zaman populerligini koruyan ve surekli gelisim gosteren canl bahis gun gectikce daha da gucleniyor. Bahis oynamak icin ise sitelere uye olunmas gerekir. Yuksek getirisi ve begeni toplayan faaliyetleri ile cok sayda site bu alanda faaliyet gostermektedir. Elbette sorunsuz sekilde uye olmanz ve faaliyetler gostermeniz de oldukca kolaydr. Canl bahis siteleri kayt ve uyelik islemleri dakikalar icerisinde gerceklestirilecek yapya sahiptir.

Uye olacagnz siteyi belirledikten sonra siteye girmeniz gerekmektedir. Girdiginiz sitenin ana sayfasnda uye ol ya da kayt ol bolumu bulunacaktr. Siteler arasnda degiskenlik gosteren bu alanda temel unsurlar bulunmaktadr. Elbette farkllklar olsa da temelinde benzer bilgiler uye olmak isteyen kisilerden talep edilmektedir.

Uye ol bolumune tkladktan sonra karsnza uyelik bilgi formu ckacaktr. Bu formda sizin kim oldugunuzu ogrenmek ve sitenin guvenligini saglamak adna islemler yaplmaktadr. Uyelik formunda yer alan ad soyad bolumunu eksiksiz ve dogru sekilde doldurmalsnz. Sizden bu formda istenen bilgilerin tamamn girmeniz istenecektir. Istenen bilgiler mutlaka dogru ve eksiksiz sekilde olmaldr. Eksik veya hatal bilgi uyelik islemlerinde sorun teskil edebilir. Yine de yanls bilgi girisine ragmen uyelik islemleri tamamlanabilir. Fakat boyle bir yol izleyenler sonrasnda buyuk skntlarla karslasabilirler. Bu skntlarn basnda da para cekme islemlerinde yasanan sorunlardr.

Uyelik islemleri dikkatli ve ozenle doldurulmas gereken yapdadr. Canl bahis siteleri kayt ve uyelik islemleri gerceklestirilirken verilen bilgiler site yonetimi tarafndan muhafaza edilmektedir. Herhangi bir sekilde 3. Sahslarla paylaslmas gibi bir durum soz konusu degildir. Bu faaliyetleri surduren sitelerin guven unsurlar arasnda bu nokta onceliklidir.

Bahis sitelerine uye olurken hatal bilgi paylasmnda bulunmak size faydadan cok zarar verecektir. Diyelim ki bilgileri hatal girdiniz ve uyelik onayland. Uyelik tamamlandktan sonra siteye para yatrdnz ve kazanc elde ettiniz. Kazancnz sonrasnda hesabnza almak istediginizde karsnza banka bilgileri bolumu gelecektir. Para cekme talebi gerceklestikten sonra site uyelik bilgileri ile banka hesap bilgileri ortusmez ise paranz alamazsnz. Boyle bir durumla karslasmamak adna bu hususa ayrca dikkat etmelisiniz.
LOS ANGELES, CA, September 21, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ --



1) Attempts to revive the current UN brokered Skheirat agreement has failed due to poor preparation and lack of understanding of how dynamics of political, cultural and tribal factors are interlinked in Libya.



2) UN, the six principal European backers of the agreement and the US had imposed a non compromising single track direction which helped alienate rather than unite differing partners. Key players and proposals which could have facilitated correction of deviations on the spirit and words of the Skheirat agreement were ignored.



3) The Agreement could not be adopted by the internationally recognized House of Representatives (HoR) in its current form. Reiterations and the lack of transparency in addition to its appeasement of illegitimate power brokers, have led to loss of confidence in the Presidency Council and its appointed head. Furthermore the influence of militias in Tripoli thwarts any chance for a government to work objectively, independently and on its free will on behalf of all Libyans.



4) The lack of substantial delivery of institutional and humanitarian support by the international community in the months following the signing of the agreement together with the continuation of control of day to day currency manipulation, human trafficking and street crimes, in the absence of proper law enforcement institutions, has led to worsening of the conditions of living and collapse of human security of Libya.



5) Attempts to recommence sale of Libyan oil at the cost of allying with Ibrahim Jadhran, an embezzling local warlord, was the last straw that broke any remaining confidence in the nation building values premised within the UN brokered agreement and advocated by the international brokers and attenuated the will of Libyan nationalist to unite under a compromised solution.



6) While successes have been made by Libyans and internationals in the specific objective of eradication of the IS terrorist base in Sirte, it has come at the high expanse of life, limb and material of mostly the sons of the city of Misratah with thousands of casualties whom were poorly attended to by the unprepared international advocates of this war against terrorism.



7) The swift take-over of oil export terminals by the Libyan National Army and the subsequent hand-over of oil export responsibility to the Libyan National Oil Company is a welcome step in assuring increase in the production and export of oil, the principal source of income for the whole of Libya.



8) Rather than supporting this action, the UN representative to Libya was quick to act in a negative manner followed by a hasty non constructive joint statement by the US and its principal European allies on Libya,



9) The NCUSLR sees the current situation as an opportunity to reach out to all Libyan players and to include all in a transparent process which would replace the terribly failed Skheirat agreement.



10) A new lean and effective technocratic executive council should be agreed upon to effectively expedite the arrest of the spiraling economic and human security conditions in Libya. The selection process should be impartial and based on qualifications and avoid the error of appeasement as previously experienced.



11) HoR should seek to activate the existing Libyan constitution promptly with minor modifications as a temporary five year measure to stabilize the country until it is capable of a thorough revision.



12) Internationals should conference to rally around support of the existing Libyan executive council and national army and to call upon all members of the HoR to immediately return to their functions so to allow conduct of daily affairs and implementation of a newly proposed agreement.



13) The National Council on US Libya Relations with its experts on Libya stands ready to provide any assistance to all parties interested in resolving the current conflict and to engage in whatever capacity deemed necessary to mediate and build confidence among Libyans, and to participate in rebuilding Libya.



The mission of the National Council on US-Libya Relations is to disseminate information about Libya and to strengthen relations between the United States and Libya.



National Council on US Libya Relations (NCUSLR)'s mission is designed to better educate the US public on Libya and to promote relations between the people of the two countries. NCULSR was recently established as a non-profit organization with a tax exempt status.



Relations between USA and Libya encompass many essential facets which include education, culture, trade and many others for which the key for its success is good information -- which is terribly lacking today.



Since Libya's independence in 1951, the USA has prided itself in its ability to design and implement a mature and well executed foreign US policy in its relation to Libya.



More recently, and in particularly over the last ten years, it appears that the National Security Council, State Department, the US media and the public have become indented with misinformation about Libya, mostly fed by foreign interest groups and governments, to the detriment of the development of a sound US policy on Libya and its interests in the region at large.



Many have expressed concern with the continuation of the infiltration of such dangerous misinformation and its negative influence on US interests for so many years.



Libyans and American, individuals, government and Non-government organizations have often expressed opinions to this matter but in the absence of a focused effort, have not been effective in providing the necessary educated opinion on Libya to the US public.



NCULSR aims to be the focal point to these opinions which represent a most significant proportion of the Libyan people and their future.



CO-FOUNDERS

Hani Shennib, M.D., Chair, NCUSLR

Clinical Professor, Department of Surgery

University of Arizona, College of Medicine, Phoenix

602-540-7577

[email protected]



Hassan Sassi, PHD

Vice Chair, NCUSLR

Walnut, California

213-663-8927

[email protected]



# # #
Sep 21, 2016 | By Tess

A 3D printed replica of the Triumphal Arch of Palmyra, which was unveiled earlier this year in London, has just made its first appearance at New York Citys City Hall Park, where it will remain on display until the end of the week. The technologically remade replica of the ancient monument, which itself was destroyed in 2015 by ISIS, was created through a collaboration between the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) and UNESCO.

The original Monumental Arch was built in the ancient Semitic city of Palmyra, Syria, where it stood from the 3rd century until October 2015, when it was destroyed. Historically, the arch was built as the entrance to the Temple of Bel, and later served as a Christian place of worship, and then an Islamic mosque. More recently, in the 20th and 21st centuries, the ancient ruins, marked as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were a popular tourist attraction in the region. Unfortunately, however, the original monument was destroyed by ISIS militants, who blew up the ancient ruin with explosives just a year ago.

photos from Digital Archaeology Twitter

In an effort to reclaim the lost monument and show that history and culture can live on despite terror, the Institute for Digital Archeology and UNESCO have created a two-third scale replica of the Triumphal Arch of Palmyra as part of their Million Image Database, a program through which volunteers are provided with 3D cameras so that they can digitally capture images of threatened cultural or architectural sites within conflict zones.

As Roger Michel, the IDAs executive director explains, We hope to signal the potential for triumph of human ingenuity over violence and celebrate images from the past that unite the cultures they represent. We also hope that visitors to the installations will consider the role of physical objects in defining their history and weigh carefully the question of where precisely history and heritage reside.

photo from Digital Archaeology Twitter

The replicated arch was made based off of 3D models, which were generated from a number of 2D photographs of the actual arch. The final product is a 25 foot tall, 30,000 pound replica arch made from Egyptian marble that looks just like the original ruin. For the production process, two robots in Carrara, Italy (a region known for its marble quarries), were able to create the archs blocks based off of the finely detailed 3D model, which were then assembled on the spot, first at Londons Trafalgar Square, and more recently in New York City.

At the replicated monuments unveiling in NYC, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen expressed the political significance of the arch, saying that it is an act of solidarity with the people of Syria as well as an act of defiance that conveys the following message: we will not stand for acts of terrorism, we will not stand for people murdered and thrown out of their country. A message, which not only reverberates within the Middle East conflict zone, but also within the United States own borders.

After being displayed in New York City for the next week, the Palmyra Arch will then be transported and assembled in Dubai. Ultimately, the IDA hopes that it will be able to bring the 3D modeled arch back to its home in Palmyra, close to where the original arch was destroyed.

Ruins of the Monumental Arch in Palmyra circa 2010

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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Sep 21, 2016 | By Tess

With the benefits of 3D printing construction becoming increasingly apparent, a number of companies have dedicated themselves to developing the technology and making it a viable option for construction projects. Among these companies is France-based XtreeE, which since its founding in July 2015 has focused on the integration of digital technologies into architectural and construction practices through consulting, manufacturing, and new technologies.

On the technological front, XtreeE, is working on developing a functional 3D printed construction system, which includes raw 3D printing concrete materials, a robot capable of extruding the material and a specialized software program. To develop its 3D printing construction solution, XtreeE has been working closely with a number of partners, including building material manufacturer LafargeHolcim, multinational corporation ABB, and 3D software company Dassault Systemes.

Xtree3s president Philippe Morel credits his companys potential to the interdisciplinary team working for him, which includes experts in the field of architecture, civil engineering, materials science, and robotics. Together, they are developing a 3D printing construction system that will not only allow for virtually limitless design opportunities, but that will help construction firms and companies to cut back on both construction time and material costs. These of course, are the three most significant benefits of additive manufacturing within the field of construction, along with a more sustainable approach to building.

In an interview earlier this year, Morel explained, The advantage of this technology lies in the possibility to make previously unimaginable structures, with complex geometries and an accuracy within one millimetre3D printing will revolutionize the construction industry by reducing very significantly the cost and time of implementation and by manufacturing custom structures for the same cost of standardized structures.

XtreeEs ultimate goal is to develop a file to factory process in which 3D designs can be sent directly to the factory where they will be 3D printed in a timely manner. Recently, the French startup completed a print of a 4 meter tall cement post, which will be installed in Aix-en-Provence to support an awning at a small tertiary. The post, which was made from a 3D printed formwork and then filled with Ductal, was only partially 3D printed, but the company is hoping to soon produce fully 3D printed structures as well through direct 3D printing.

Looking to the future, XtreeE is hoping to continue its development of 3D printed construction methods with the creation of large multi-scale materials, and is hoping to create Frances first 3D printed house. The company is also seeking to raise funds in order to take their technology abroad, specifically to Asia and Africa, where 3D printing could present an opportune method for creating much needed housing.

Posted in 3D Printer Company

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Sunil.Alex.Vacha wrote at 9/28/2016 7:56:27 AM:congatulations and all the Very Best Wishes .




Sep 21, 2016 | By Alec

3D printers are increasingly finding their way to schools all over the world, as education boards have started to recognize the immense added value that 3D printing and 3D modeling courses bring to a childs future career. Importantly, early exposure to 3D printing can increase the likelihood of kids opting for STEM education in the future. But 3D printer adoption rates differ from school to school, depending where you live. As a result, many people wont be surprised to learn that schools in Nigeria (with a 34.1 percent poverty rate) do not have access to 3D printing. But that is about to change, as the Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF) has just revealed plans to bring courses in 3D printing and digital skills to 6,000 Nigerian girls.

If successful, this would be a huge opportunity for so many girls who would otherwise not have the opportunity to pursue a technological career. In fact, educational 3D printing is mostly limited to a handful of schools in several western and Asian countries. Just a few months ago, a British government report called for 3D printers in all schools across Britain, while Hungarian 3D printing specialists are working hard to bring 3D printers to every school in in the country.

Yet few people wouldve guessed that Nigeria could find its own place on the 3D printing map. The country is rich in oil and gas, and yet is home to one of the worst levels of income inequality in the world. A third of the population is living in poverty, and the Youth for Technology Foundation knows it well. The foundation was actually founded in the Niger Delta region in 2000, the most undeveloped part of Nigeria that is ironically home to the largest national deposits of gas and oil as well. Unemployment, pollution a chaotic local economy is absolutely normal there, leading to youth unrest, HIV/AIDS epidemics and a total lack of governance and social services. Due to high mortality levels, 62 percent of the population there is aged thirty or younger.

Especially young women are virtually unemployable in the region, in part due to terrible education. Since its foundation, the YTF has been working hard to improve living conditions and services in the region, and has since exported their educational programs to comparable regions all over the world. Economic empowerment increases womens access to resources and opportunities, including jobs, financial services, property and other productive assets, skills development, and market information. Investing in women and girls has a multiplier effect on productivity, efficiency and sustained economic growth, they say of their services.

Learning valuable skills is an important aspect of economic empowerment, and YTF will therefore start offering 3D printing training courses at YTF digital hubs in Nigeria. The courses will be taught by YTF master trainers, female stem professionals and industry experts. Also involved will be grassroots organizations that provide education on sexual and reproductive health rights. Apprenticeships at local companies will also be provided.

Whats more, the girls will learn other employment-ready digital, business and entrepreneurial skills as well, and receive education on basic literacy, math, and finances if necessary. All courses will be relying on human-centered and problem-solving education principles. The girls will also be awarded certifications they can use in later life.

Education, YTF argues, is key in lifting up impoverished girls and break the endless cycle of poverty. Especially the STEM fields holds plenty of opportunities, says YTF president and CEO Njideka Harry. Every day, we see first-hand that technology levels the playing field for girls, the CEO said. Technology provides equal access to in-demand 21st century jobs. Our commitment includes training in 3D printing, an industry forecasted to grow as much as $30 billion by 2025. We believe this is a powerful catalyst for girls to create their own online businesses to market their digital skills or products, access employment globally, escape poverty and experience true financial freedom.

This ambitious plan will be presented at the 2016 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, and is scheduled to launch in the first half of 2017.

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

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Tunji wrote at 9/23/2016 1:32:27 PM:This is a good initiative. Perhaps you can partner with Akinwole from Stampar3D who is already offering 3D Printing courses and workshops to individuals. Not sure but I think to schools as well. Anything that increases awareness of this will surely be beneficial to everyone! Well done!




Sep 21, 2016 | By Alec

A load-bearing post 3D printed by XtreeE and assembled by Fehr Architectural, with a height of 4 meters (about 13 feet), being used to support the playground roof of a middle school in Aix-en-Provence in France.



As the material and financial benefits of construction 3D printing are becoming increasingly apparent, more and more startups are experimenting with huge concrete 3D printers. Especially in China this concept has taken flight, where companies like WinSun are already 3D printing entire homes, apartments and courtyards. But other parts of the world are not far behind. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is also looking into 3D printed homes, while Swiss construction giant LafargeHolcim has just realized a very important step towards 3D printed buildings as well. Together with French startup XtreeE, they have just successfully 3D printed Europes first structural element in concrete  paving the way for anything from homes to office blocks.

This breakthrough is unusual in at least one respect. By and large, small startups are the ones pushing the concrete 3D printing wagon, while most established construction companies are still waiting for the research results to come in. LafargeHolcim is one of the exceptions to this rule, as they are an absolutely gigantic construction company, with over 100,000 employees present in 90 countries around the world. In 2015, LafargeHolcim achieved combined net sales of CHF 29.5 billion (about $30 billion USD). They also cover the complete spectrum of construction work, from urban homes to trendsetting architecture.

However, LafargeHolcim is also a company that is constantly looking to innovate, and they can boast about having the worlds largest construction materials R&D center, with more than 200 employed researchers and a portfolio of 1,750 patents. This focus brought them in touch with 3D printing. Specifically, they see 3D printing as a tool for building complex geometric structures at high speeds and at a reasonable cost. In fact, they are already looking to bring the technology to three specific market segments: high value-added architecture, individual, affordable homes, and the production of prefabricated building components.

To gain access to the necessary expertise, they set up a partnership with French startup XtreeE, which is known for developing large-scale concrete 3D printing systems. And the fruits of that partnership have already been harvested, as the collaborators managed to build Europes first concrete 3D printed structural element.

Of course this wouldve been impossible without the expertise of XtreeE, which has only been around since July 2015. Over the past year, they have focused on the integration of digital technologies into architectural and construction practices through consulting, manufacturing, and new technologies. Their custom 3D printing robot has been developed with help from ABB, Dassault Systemes (of SolidWorks) and LafargeHolcim, and can already 3D print various raw concrete materials.

The element itself was 3D printed in LafargeHolcims R&D center in LIsle dAbeau near Lyon, France. Leveraging their technological and material expertise, they 3D printed a 4 meter tall load-bearing post, that can support the playground roof for a middle school in Aix-en-Provence. The post (hollow and filled with Ductal) is technically Europes first structural element and has been assembled by Fehr Architectural. A more complex pavilion for the Ile-de-France regional government, developed in collaboration with Dassault Systemes and ABB, is also on the 3D printing agenda.

As LafargeHolcims Group Head of Growth & Innovation Gerard Kuperfarb explained, these advances will greatly help the companys efforts to bring innovative solutions to their clients. Innovation is part of our DNA in order to respond to the trends in tomorrows construction market, Kuperfarb, said. We are therefore proud to be positioned as a pioneer in 3D printing, a revolutionary technique that brings greater accuracy while considerably reducing construction times.

So whats next for LafargeHolcim? While the company did not go into detail, it is expected that their collaboration with xTreeE will continue to grow. And that company is currently looking to realize Frances first 3D printed house through multi-scale material 3D printing. LafargeHolcim will doubtlessly support that effort as well, so we could be reporting on Europes first 3D printed house in the very near future.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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Your guide to the tastiest foodie happenings going down this week. Bon appetit!







Powder Shaved Snow Opens

Taiwanese powder is quickly becoming the trendy new dessert around San Francisco. A delicious cross between ice cream and shaved ice, the pop-up-turned-brick-and-mortar Powder takes it one step further by using top-notch ingredients such as Straus Family Creamery and organic, locally sourced produce to produce flavors like black sesame, horchata, and matcha green tea. Cool down with this creamy, delicate and airy dessert at the opening on Friday, September 23rd. // Open daily, 260 Divisadero (NoPa), powdershavedsnow.com





Minnie Bell's Soul Movement at Bon Marche

The recently shuttered Bon Marche space will play host to a slew of pop-ups in the coming months while the Mercer Restaurant Group tries to sell the space. First up is Minnie Bell's Soul Movement. Run by local chef Fernay McPherson, a Cocina member who was born and raised in the Fillmore and Western Addition, the menu is largely comprised of soul-food recipes that have been cooked in her family for generations. Specialities include a 'soul sandwich' stuffed with buttermilk and hot sauce-brined rosemary fried chicken or smothered tri-tip. // Open Mon.-Wed., 11am-2pm, 1355 Market St #120 (Mid-Market), minniebellssoul.com





Hillside Supper Club x California Olive Ranch



Join Hillside Supper Club for a special four course meal with California Olive Ranch, who pioneered innovative methods of cultivating and harvesting olives in order to make affordable, high quality, extra virgin olive oil. Expect dishes like olive oil confit lamb shoulder and olive oil lemon pound cake to showcase the high quality oil. // Wednesday, Sept. 30, 6pm-9pm, 300 Precita Ave. (Bernal Heights), Reserve here.









WhiskeyFest at Elixir

Get whiskeydrunk at Elixir this Thursday, September 22nd with guest whiskey-tenders Bernie Lubbers and Dennis Potter from Heaven Hill. They'll be pouring $5 shots, whiskey sours, and old fashioneds while taking about their signature productsElija Craig small-batch American whiskey, Larceny Kentucky Straight, and Sacred Bond. Sounds like a dangerously good time. // Thursday, Sept. 22, 4pm-2am, 3200 16th St. (Mission), elixirsf.com





The Dorian Celebrates 1 Year

The Dorian is celebrating their one year anniversary this Thursday. There'll be live music and passed hors d'ourvres in The Study, and if you get there early, you can take advantage of their killer happy hour featuring $1 oysters and 1/2 off bottles of rose and champagne. // Thursday, Sept. 22, 8pm-12am, 2001 Chestnut St. (Marina), doriansf.com









A Fundraiser for Amatrice, Italy

Last month, the city of Amatrice was leveled by a devastating earthquake, and dozens of SF's best restaurants are rallying together this weekend to host a fundraiser. There'll be negronis, antipasti, pinsas, and of course, Amatrice's namesake dish pasta all'amatriciana. Participating SF restaurants include: 54 Mint, Montesacro, Acquerello, Locanda, Zero Zero, and more. // $75, Sunday, Sept. 25, 12pm-8pm, 16 Mint Plaza (SoMa), Get tickets here.
Survey findings show that Michigan small business owners and decision makers (those with 1-100 additional employees) agree that saving for retirement through work is important. Over half (55%) of respondents expressed concern regarding their employees having enough retirement savings, and about three in four agree that the state should do more to encourage residents to save for retirement.

Key findings include:

Two-thirds support a privately managed, ready-to-go state retirement-savings plan that would help Michigan small businesses offer employees a way to save for retirement.

A majority of Michigan small business owners agree that being able to offer a retirement-savings plan provides a competitive edge.

Three in five Michigan small business owners would offer employees a state retirement-savings plan if available.

The AARP 2016 Michigan Small Business Owner Work and Save Study was a telephone study among 450 small business owners or decision makers about employee benefits at companies with 1-100 additional employees within the state of Michigan. Interviews were conducted April 18-May 5, 2016. Respondents were offered a $5 check in appreciation for their participation. Sample, including owner names and companies, came from a Dun & Bradstreet business list.

For more information contact Mark Hornbeck, AARP Michigan, (517) 267-8935 or Brittne Nelson PhD, AARP Research, (202) 434-6307.
Get to know the candidates seeking three spots on Brown Co. Commission


Gold Price Risk Management

Perth, Sep 21, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - The Board of Blackham Resources Ltd ( ASX:BLK ) ('Blackham' or 'the Company') is pleased to advise that it has forward sold a further 34,250oz of gold at an average price of A$1,774 per oz. Blackham is currently mining at its Matilda Gold Project and wet commissioning the Wiluna Gold Plant.



With production imminent the Board believes it is prudent to lock in responsible proportions of its short to medium term production so that the company can optimally manage its operations and risk exposures in the current volatile price environment. Being able to lock in close to record high AUD gold prices allows even modest hedge commitments to create a high degree of predictable cashflow at this crucial time in the company's transition to being a significant gold producer.



The hedging facility was undertaken with Investec Australia Ltd to be delivered over the next 18 months of production. Investec and the Company's debt provider, Orion Mine Finance, will share the first ranking security interest in all of the material assets of the Company including the Matilda Gold Project.



The Company still has in place the initial 20,000oz hedge programme at an average price of approximately A$1,704 per oz, announced to the market in May 2016, which is expected to be utilised over the next 3 months.



Blackham's total gold hedge commitments represent 35% of the forecast production over the next 18 month period and can be viewed in the table following (refer to link below).



Blackham has engaged Noah's Rule to assist in the structuring and execution of its gold price risk management policy and strategies.



To view tables and figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/4YX10R37





About Wiluna Mining Corporation Ltd





Wiluna Mining Corporation (ASX:WMC) (OTCMKTS:WMXCF) is a Perth based, ASX listed gold mining company that controls over 1,600 square kilometres of the Yilgarn Craton in the Northern Goldfields of WA. The Yilgarn Craton has a historic and current gold endowment of over 380 million ounces, making it one of most prolific gold regions in the world. The Company owns 100% of the Wiluna Gold Operation which has a defined resource of 8.04M oz at 1.67 g/t au. In May 2019, a new highly skilled management team took control of the Company with a clear plan to leverage the Wiluna Gold Operation's multi-million-ounce potential.


ALTECH - HPA Project Detailed Design Update

Perth, Sep 21, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Altech Chemicals Limited (Altech/the Company) ( ASX:ATC ) is pleased to provide an update on the detailed design and engineering work that is currently being undertaken by German firm M+W Group in Stuttgart, Germany, for its proposed Malaysian high purity alumina (HPA) plant.



Highlights



- German M+W Group well advanced on HPA plant detailed design and engineering



- Leading global engineering and construction firm with extensive Asian experience



- Established Singapore and Malaysian offices, with extensive Malaysian construction experience



M+W Group is a leading global high-tech engineering firm with around 6,000 employees worldwide. Established in 1912, M+W Group has a strong presence in Asia with regional offices is both Singapore and Penang, Malaysia. The firm manages projects of all dimensions on behalf of clients from various sectors, including electronics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, energy and information technology. It has completed over 700 projects in the Asia Pacific region, where it employs around 2,200 highly skilled and experiences staff. M+W Group was appointed as Altech's Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contractor in March 2016 and it commenced detailed design and engineering of the Company's proposed HPA plant in June 2016.



Detailed design and engineering is the final planning phase for the HPA plant prior to the actual commencement of construction. It involves the complete definition of every aspect of the plant including detailed diagrams and drawings for construction, civil works, instrumentation, control system, electrical facilities, management of suppliers, schedule of activities, costs, procurement of equipment and management of environmental impacts. Once completed and subject to funding, the Company and M+W Group will be in a position to order long lead time capital items (subject to finance) and finalise contractual arrangements with the various suppliers and sub-contractors for the commencement of construction activities.



Altech is in the fortunate position of having been able to fast track detailed design and engineering, primarily because of the comprehensive engineering work undertaken during the bankable feasibility study (BFS) phase of the project. M+W Group lead process engineers conducted a pre-commencement detailed review of BFS engineering and only minor changes were identified. Consequently engineering drawings such as process flow diagrams and piping and instrument diagrams were imported directly into M+W Group's systems without re-drawing, saving considerable time and expense. The selection and pre-appointment of critical equipment suppliers such as SGL Group (HCl equipment) and Drytech (kilns) during the BFS gave Altech early access to their equipment specifications enabling incorporation into BFS engineering and thereafter directly transferred to M+W Group for final design and engineering.



M+W Group (Singapore), with its extensive South East Asian operating experience has been engaged to manage all Malaysian permitting and project approvals. This office will also co-ordinate instrument and electrical detailed design and the management of supervision of construction activities.



Detailed design and engineering activates are expected to continue until the first quarter of 2017 and will overlap the expected commencement of construction, which remains subject to the finalisation of project financing.



To view tables and figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/WURH74K7





About Altech Chemicals Ltd





Altech Chemicals Limited (ASX:ATC) (FRA:A3Y) is aiming to become one of the world's leading suppliers of 99.99% (4N) high purity alumina (Al2O3) through the construction and operation of a 4,500tpa high purity alumina (HPA) processing plant at Johor, Malaysia. Feedstock for the plant will be sourced from the Company's 100%-owned kaolin deposit at Meckering, Western Australia and shipped to Malaysia.



HPA is a high-value, high margin and highly demanded product as it is the critical ingredient required for the production of synthetic sapphire. Synthetic sapphire is used in the manufacture of substrates for LED lights, semiconductor wafers used in the electronics industry, and scratch-resistant sapphire glass used for wristwatch faces, optical windows and smartphone components. Increasingly HPA is used by lithium-ion battery manufacturers as the coating on the battery's separator, which improves performance, longevity and safety of the battery. With global HPA demand approximately 19,000t (2018), it is estimated that this demand will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30% (2018-2028); by 2028 HPA market demand will be approximately 272,000t, driven by the increasing adoption of LEDs worldwide as well as the demand for HPA by lithium-ion battery manufacturers to serve the surging electric vehicle market.
ACAs library of educational tools help members improve their business practices. ACA also holds the most popular industry conferences and offers credentialing for collectors, attorneys, and more. ACAs Training Zone subscription gives agencies access to almost all of our education for one low cost.
Siena College in Albany, N.Y. announced a new accounting program for bachelor's and master's students this week, dubbed the"3+1" program. Participating students will now be able to achieve bachelor's and master's degrees in four years' time, as opposed to the more standard five-year period.

Accredited by theAssociation to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the 3+1 program will allow students to earn a Bachelor of Science in Accounting in three years, with Master of Science in Accounting in the fourth. Upon graduating with their master's, they will be eligible for New York's Certified Public Accountant Exam.

"The courses taken will be exactly the same as those in a traditional five-year program," stated Charles Seifert, dean of Siena's School of business, per a release. "It's compressed into a shorter period of time for students who are especially motivated and want to begin their careers a year earlier."

"Obviously, we're putting more people in the marketplace more quickly to fill positions that are greatly demanded," Chester Brearey, associate professor and director of Siena's accounting program, toldAlbany Business Review. "Our accounting students don't get jobs; they get careers."

Seifert added that Siena's program has a 100 percent job placement rate and estimates that approximately 75 percent of accounting graduates work in the Albany area upon graduating.

For more on Siena and the 3+1 program, head to the College'ssite here.
IMGCAP(1)]In a few months, businesses and some white-collar employees may be feeling some changes to their pocketbooks. In May, the Department of Labor published the final rules revising the white collar overtime exemption regulations. Since then, HR experts across the country have been scrambling to help their stakeholdersbosses, clients and employeesfigure out what this means to their business, and more importantly, how it will be implemented.

The new rules dont apply to non-exempt, hourly workers, who are eligible for overtime no matter their earnings.

On September 20, the great state of Texas partnered with Nevada to lead 21 states in filing suit against both the Labor Secretary and the Department of Labor to try to stop the implementation of the overtime rules. The suit outlined the extreme monetary impact it will have on entities, including state and local governments, and even public universities. The lawsuit requests a declaratory judgment that the new rules are unlawful to the named states and seeks to prevent immediate implementation of the rules by the federal government.

The case currently resides in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, with the Honorable Judge Ron Clark presiding. As it is unlikely the court will hold an injunction hearing and issue a decision before the Dec. 1, 2016 deadline, businesses are being advised to continue making any necessary changes to comply.

The Facts

All changes will be effective Dec. 1, 2016.

1. White-collar exempt employees must earn at least $913 per week ($47,476 annually) to be disqualified from overtime pay (time-and-a-half in excess of a 40-hour work week). The old threshold was $23,660.

2. Nondiscretionary bonuses can satisfy up to 10 percent of the new salary requirement as long as they are paid on a quarterly or more frequent basis.

3. Highly compensated employees must be paid at least $134,004 annually to be disqualified from overtime pay.

4. Automatic updates to these salary level requirements will now occur every three years, beginning Jan. 1, 2020.

The Warning

1. Given the December 1 deadline, HR and legal professionals highly recommend that companies implement any changes resulting from the new regulations a month or two before the deadline to iron out any kinks in the new system. Penalties will apply for those out of compliance.

2. Many companies have not budgeted for such a significant payroll increase, nor can they necessarily afford it. They will have to assess their workforce strategy and make adjustments.

3. Salary level requirements are new terms in our business lexicon for many business owners and employees alike. Much like cost-of-living adjustments, salary requirements for exempt employees will change on a periodic basis, and will impact employee salaries and company budgets.

The Plan

As overwhelming as it might seem, businesses shouldnt be doomed to financial ruin due to these changes. Here are some immediate steps companies can take:

1. Assess your current job descriptions and their salary levels.

a. Which exempt positions are close to the new salary level?

b. Which positions should be reclassified as non-exempt?

c. Move people as appropriate.

2. Choose wisely and creatively from the following options based on the economics of your business:

a. Raise exempt employees to the new levels or pay no overtime.

b. Leave exempt employees salaries below the new levels and pay time-and-a-half for overtime worked.

c. Limit workers hours to 40 hours per week by reorganizing, adjusting schedules or hiring additional people.

d. Combine some of the above suggestions.

3. Develop, implement and train time-keeping processes and procedures for any affected employees. For those not used to tracking their time, there will be a learning curve. Ensure you allow sufficient adoption time.

4. Communicate. Any change to your employees pay, even if it is an increase, will be a sensitive matter. More information can provide for an easier transition.

5. Get help. New rules can be complicated, and the downside of getting it wrong may be costly. If you dont have onsite staff to help you or if youre not sure, contact a trusted advisor to help you work out the details.

The Aftermath

According to the DOL, these changes will result in $1.2 billion in extra earnings, either through pay raises or overtime compensation, across the country. In Texas alone, it is estimated that 370,000 employees will be affectedthe second highest impacted workforce just behind California.

As you move forward, help employees keep an open mind about any new timekeeping procedures and policies. Whether theyre fast food employees or retail workers, lawyers or consultants, exempt and non-exempt employees alike track their time. Also, be clear about responsibilities, job positions and hours, especially if there is movement. Try to be transparent throughout the process and provide employees with as much information as possible. It might alleviate uncertainty and provide for a much smoother transition.

Debbie Roos is the chief operating officer for ATKG LLP, a San Antonio, Texas accounting firm.
(Bloomberg) Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen expressed regret Wednesday that the agency failed to preserve all the information congressional investigators sought in a 2014 probe of the agency, but told federal lawmakers it would be improper to impeach him.

During a 3 1/2-hour hearing dominated by partisan exchangeswith Democrats aiming barbs at Republican presidential nominee Donald TrumpKoskinen, 77, sought to persuade members of the House Judiciary Committee to stave off an impeachment drive by the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus.

Koskinens appearance was arranged last week; congressional leaders promised the hearing after Freedom Caucus members backed off their demands for an immediate impeachment floor vote.

Democrats on the Judiciary panel heaped disdain on the hearing; Representative Jerrold L. Nadler of New York called it an obvious sham. Representative John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who serves as the Judiciary panels ranking member, decried partisan attacks that he said were doomed to fail because of a lack of evidence of wrongdoing.

But Republicans, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, said Americans are frustrated by what he called a double standard. If taxpayers lost tax-related documents that the IRS sought, theyd be subject to consequences, he noted. All were asking is that this guy no longer hold this office, Jordan said. In light of this fact pattern, I think this is the least we can do.

Expressing Regret

Koskinen told the panel he regrets failings by himself and IRS staff members related to allegations that the agency destroyed e-mails sought by congressional investigators and that Koskinen misled Congress about those records. He said he didnt try to be misleading. I responded honestly and in good faith as events unfolded, he said.

I accept that it is up to you to judge my overall record, but I believe that impeachment would be improper, Koskinen said. It would create disincentives for many good people to serve. And it would slow the pace of reform and progress at the IRS.

The House hasnt impeached an appointed executive branch official in 140 years, and it has never impeached any official below the rank of cabinet secretary.

Agencys Scandal

Koskinen, who took office in December 2013, was almost immediately mired in the agencys response to a scandal that predated his tenure; IRS officials had acknowledged that they gave extra scrutiny to conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status beginning in 2010. Congressional subpoenas to the agency sought all communications sent or received by Lois Lerner, the agencys former director of exempt organizations.

Despite the pending subpoenas, IRS employees in West Virginia magnetically erased 422 backup tapes, which eliminated as many as 24,000 of her e-mails, in March 2014. Subsequent investigations by the Justice Department and the Treasury Departments inspector general found that the destruction was accidental.

Regardless, Koskinen testified to Congress in June 2014 that since the start of this investigation, every e-mail has been preserved. Nothing has been destroyed. He has said since that his testimony reflected his understanding at the time.

Trump Questions

Several Democrats used Wednesdays hearing to ask Koskinen questions about tax matters related to Trump, who has departed from four decades of tradition for presidential nominees by declining to release his tax returns.

Trump has said hes under an IRS audit and wont release his tax returns until the audit is concluded. In response to members questions, Koskinen said theres no law to prevent individuals from releasing their tax returns, even if theyre under audit. While he didnt discuss Trump individuallyand he made clear repeatedly that the IRS doesnt discuss individual taxpayersKoskinen said a taxpayers advisers might warn against releasing returns that are under audit.

Others, including Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, asked about Trumps foundation. The Washington Post reported this week that the foundation had paid more than $250,000 to various parties to settle legal disputes related to his for-profit business interests. Koskinen said its illegal for insiders to benefit from their charities spending, but added that he couldnt discuss individual cases.

Impeachment Resolution

Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, filed an impeachment resolution against Koskinen last year. He and other Republicans say Koskinen failed to make sure the IRS produced a full record of the subpoenaed e-mails and misled Congress about a hard-drive crash that lost some of Lerners e-mails, as well as the subsequent destruction of the backup tapes.

Chaffetz told Koskinen on Wednesday that he had been frustrated by what he called the commissioners failure to acknowledge to Congress that his June 2014 testimony wasnt true. This is the first time, said Chaffetz. He added that he believes Koskinen should be held accountable.

Federal Investigations

A series of federal investigations into the IRS scandal faulted the agency for ineptness, but cleared it of criminal wrongdoing. In January 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had found no evidence of bias that would warrant criminal charges. The Justice Department last October ended its probe, which found substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment, and institutional inertia, but resulted in no charges.

Wednesdays hearing is the third that the Judiciary panel has held on the allegations against Koskinen this year, but its the first where Koskinen has given sworn testimony. The panel hasnt yet undertaken formal impeachment proceedings, which typically begin only after the House has passed by simple majority a resolution authorizing them. What follows, at least in modern times, has been a fact-finding process by the committee.

Under congressional tradition, both House leaders and the target of any impeachment proceeding would be allowed to make opening and closing statements, to examine and cross-examine witnesses, to offer evidence and to make objections.

Show Trial

Wednesdays hearing wasnt designed that way; instead Koskinen gave a prepared statement and then took questions from the panel. His lawyers said beforehand that they were worried that some members would try to treat the hearing like an actual impeachmentmaking it resemble what they called a foreign show trial.

We are concerned that some may believe that Commissioner Koskinens voluntary appearance at this hearing is an appropriate substitute for regular order and the traditional approach to addressing impeachment proceedings, his lawyers wrote to Representative Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who chairs the Judiciary panel.

Whether the hearing will prevent the House from moving toward impeachment remains to be seen. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, which had pressed for a faster floor vote, said last week that todays hearing would give every American the opportunity to hear John Koskinen answer under oath why he misled Congress, allowed evidence to be destroyed, and defied congressional subpoenas and preservation orders.

Goodlatte signaled during the hearing that the Judiciary Committee will continue to gather evidence, telling members theyd have five days to submit additional questions. Also, Koskinen said he would comply with a new committee request to turn over all written communications from IRS officials about how to retain and preserve the e-mails that were sought under earlier subpoenas.

Regular Order

House Speaker Paul Ryan has said he prefers for matters to make their way to the floor for votes in regular orderthat is, by way of consideration by committees of jurisdiction. Still, Representative John Fleming of Louisiana, who spearheaded the drive for a floor vote, has said the Freedom Caucus could still try to bring an impeachment resolution to the floor in November if regular order is not followed through with.

And one caucus member, Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who lost his primary race for re-election, said Wednesday morning that he is still weighing whether to force a vote on the House floor.

It depends on how todays hearing goes, he said.

Democrats Letter

On Tuesday, several Democratic members of the Oversight committee and the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee wrote to Goodlatte criticizing Fleming for campaign advertisements he has aired while running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana.

Specifically, one of his radio ads claims: The head of the IRS ordered 24,000 emails erased before Congress could review them, making sure the American people will never know the real truth, said the letter, which was signed by 32 Democrats, including the ranking Democrat on the Oversight panel, Elijah Cummings of Maryland.

The fundamental problem with this accusation is that there is no evidence to support it, the representatives letter says. It notes that the U.S. Treasury Departments inspector general concluded that no evidence was uncovered that any IRS employees had been directed to destroy or hide information from Congress or other federal investigators.

With assistance from Erik Wasson
IMGCAP(1)][IMGCAP(2)]Win or lose, CPAs providing financial and tax advice to their clients might be in treacherous territory.

Providing solid, accurate advice to these clients might not suffice. Theres trouble brewing even if the CPAs advice is correct, as it could run afoul of securities administrators who might view the providing of financial and tax advice more broadly.

In addition, a CPA who provides erroneous financial and tax advice might be subject to malpractice claims. Through it all, the parameters of providing financial advice remain uncertain.

Turf Battle

Theres a turf battle brewing between state securities administrations and federal administrators. CPA firms find themselves on the short end of the stick. A virtually unknown but powerful financial administrators group sets professional-client relationships, the North American Securities Administrator Association, or NASAA.

Virtually every U.S. state and Canadian province that administer securities functions, along with Mexico, work together in the NASAA context. This organization sets rules limiting the provision of financial advice to customers.

NASAA sets up the rules, while the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, implements NASAAs rules, but FINRA provides waivers to certain financial professionals. The Chauncey Group International, Ltd. in Princeton, N.J., actually provides the certification and licensing examinations for NASAA and FINRA.

FINRA and NASAA exercise control over persons who provide investment advice by mandating that advisors pass a qualifying examination, called Series 65, the Uniform Investment Adviser Law Examination. The exam includes professional registration issues, securities markets, professional ethics, economics, investment strategies and financial analysis.

In February 2016 FINRA added new content to Series 65 for private equity funds, exchange traded notes, leverage, inverse funds and structured products. Congress treats an advisory firm as acting with the scope of the Uniform Securities Act where that firm makes investment recommendations, provides investment advice, or an individual holds herself or himself out as providing investment advice.

FINRA does not exempt CPAs providing investment advice from having to meet the Series 65 requirements. In contrast, FINRA exempts individuals who meet the following professional designations from the Series 65 examination requirements:

 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA)

 Certified Financial Planner (CFP)

 Personal Financial Specialist (PFS)

 Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC)

 Chartered Investment Counselor (CIC)

According to Mark Kokalowski in his blog, the Balance, these Series 65 activities would include a CPA who seeks to offer investment advice in return for a fee. He was previously with Touche Ross, now Deloitte, and then with Merrill Lynch, where his activities included transfer pricing. Providing transfer pricing in particular might create a NASAA/FINRA liability issue as transfer pricing specialists analyze the same comparable database as would investment firms.

When CPAs Provide Bad Advice

There is a risk that clients might sue their CPAs for giving bad advice, and some might sue a CPA for omitting a commentary in effectuating a transaction. Consider this sampling of seven cases, many of which involve major CPA firms:

 A client asked a CPA whether the stock redemption was free of tax. The CPA provided the client with an affirmative answer. The CPA forgot about Section 304 of the U.S. Code, which covers redemptions through use of related corporations, and the IRS imposed taxation on the transaction. The client then sued the CPA firm. See Bancroft v. Indemnity Insurance Co. of North America, 203 F. Supp. 49 (1962), affd 309 F.2d 959 (1962).

 A brokerage firm sought Section 1236 capital gains treatment where the brokerage firm had three accounts with differing tax determinationscapital gains account, inventory account and short sales. The brokerages CPA firm provided accounting, business planning and tax services. The IRS denied the brokerages capital gain rates, and the brokerage sued the CPA firm for that result. See Vernon J. Rockler & Co. v. Glickman, Isenberg, Lurie & Co. 273 N.W. 647 (1978).

 A CPA firm assisted a client in making a Section 1031 like-kind real property exchange, expressing its concerns about the tax-free nature of the transaction. The IRS denied Section 1031 like-kind treatment. The client then sued the CPA firm despite its uncertain response to the inquiry. See Mills v. Garlow, 768 P.2d. 554 (1989).

 In another redemption fact pattern, the CPA firm provided defective advice to the business under a Section 351 asset transfer situation. The asset transfer caused the corporation to fail to redeem at least 80 percent of its outstanding preferred stock. See Snydergeneral Corporation v. KPMG Peat Marwick (unpublished, Dallas, Texas, 1990). The jury awarded the company $10.9 million in actual damages and $2.3 million in exemplary damages.

 Code Section 103, as it existed during the 1980s, provided for industrial development bonds with a $10 million capitalization amount. A medical doctors partnership owned real estate in conjunction with its clinic. The doctors proposed to liquidate the partnership under Section 331 and build a larger facility financed by issuing Code Section 103 industrial development bonds. The doctors retained Peat Marwick Main & Company (now part of KPMG) to provide tax and accounting advice. The IRS claimed that reorganization constituted a capital expenditure, which then precluded the benefits. The doctors sued the CPAs and the law firm. See Billings Clinic v. Peat Marwick Main & Co., 244 Mont. 324, 797 P.2d 899 (1990).

 A company faced inventory recapture when it sold its business. The CPAs ignored the inventory recapture issue, and the company brought suit against the CPAs. See Deloitte, Haskins & Sells v. Green, 198 Ga. App. 849, 403 S.E.2d 818 (1991).

 A company owner contemplated exchanging his preferred stock in exchange for cancellation of his personal debt to the corporation. The company owner sought advice from his CPA firm. The IRS viewed the transaction as a constructive dividend. The company owner then sued the CPA firm. See Lien v. McGladrey & Pullen, 509 N.W. 2d 421 (S.D. 1993).

CPAs face many potential issues with legal liability, whether the financial and tax advice they give clients is good or bad. The phrase damned if you do, damned if you dont comes to mind.

Robert Feinschreiber and Margaret Kent are attorneys and counselors with TransferPricingConsortium.com.
By Rainey Reitman

The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? Its not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. Its a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court proceduresand if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December.

The proposal comes from the advisory committee on criminal rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States. The amendment [PDF] would update Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, creating a sweeping expansion of law enforcements ability to engage in hacking and surveillance. The Supreme Court just passed the proposal to Congress, which has until December 1 to disavow the change or it becomes the rule governing every federal court across the country. This is part of a statutory process through which federal courts may create new procedural rules, after giving public notice and allowing time for comment, under a rules enabling act.

The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure set the ground rules for federal criminal prosecutions. The rules cover everything from correcting clerical errors in a judgment to which holidays a court will be closed onall the day-to-day procedural details that come with running a judicial system.

The key word here is procedural. By law, the rules and proposals are supposed to be procedural and must not change substantive rights.

But the amendment to Rule 41 isnt procedural at all. It creates new avenues for government hacking that were never approved by Congress.

The proposal would grant a judge the ability to issue a warrant to remotely access, search, seize, or copy data when the district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means or when the media are on protected computers that have been damaged without authorization and are located in five or more districts. It would grant this authority to any judge in any district where activities related to the crime may have occurred.

To understand all the implications of this rule change, lets break this into two segments.

The first part of this change would grant authority to practically any judge to issue a search warrant to remotely access, seize, or copy data relevant to a crime when a computer was using privacy-protective tools to safeguard ones location. Many different commonly used tools might fall into this category. For example, people who use Tor, folks running a Tor node, or people using a VPN would certainly be implicated. It might also extend to people who deny access to location data for smartphone apps because they dont feel like sharing their location with ad networks. It could even include individuals who change the country setting in an online service, like folks who change the country settings of their Twitter profile in order to read uncensored Tweets.

There are countless reasons people may want to use technology to shield their privacy. From journalists communicating with sources to victims of domestic violence seeking information on legal services, people worldwide depend on privacy tools for both safety and security. Millions of people who have nothing in particular to hide may also choose to use privacy tools just because theyre concerned about government surveillance of the Internet, or because they dont like leaving a data trail around haphazardly.

If this rule change is not stopped, anyone who is using any technological means to safeguard their location privacy could find themselves suddenly in the jurisdiction of a prosecutor-friendly or technically-naive judge, anywhere in the country.

The second part of the proposal is just as concerning. It would grant authorization to a judge to issue a search warrant for hacking, seizing, or otherwise infiltrating computers that may be part of a botnet. This means victims of malware could find themselves doubly infiltrated: their computers infected with malware and used to contribute to a botnet, and then government agents given free rein to remotely access their computers as part of the investigation. Even with the best of intentions, a government agent could well cause as much or even more harm to a computer through remote access than the malware that originally infected the computer. Malicious actors may even be able to hijack the malware the government uses to infiltrate botnets, because the government often doesnt design its malware securely. Government access to the computers of botnet victims also raises serious privacy concerns, as a wide range of sensitive, unrelated personal data could well be accessed during the investigation. This is a dangerous expansion of powers, and not something to be granted without any public debate on the topic.

Make no mistake: the Rule 41 proposal implicates people well beyond U.S. borders. This update expands the jurisdiction of judges to cover any computer user in the world who is using technology to protect their location privacy or is unwittingly part of a botnet. People both inside and outside of the United States should be equally concerned about this proposal.

The change to Rule 41 isnt merely a procedural update. It significantly expands the hacking capabilities of the United States government without any discussion or public debate by elected officials. If members of the intelligence community believe these tools are necessary to advancing their investigations, then this is not the path forward. Only elected members of Congress should be writing laws, and they should be doing so in a matter that considers the privacy, security, and civil liberties of people impacted.

Rule 41 seeks to sidestep the legislative process while making sweeping sacrifices in our security. Congress should reject the proposal completely.

Read EFF and Access Nows joint testimony on Rule 41.

Rainey Reitman is the Activism Director for EFF.org, where this article first appeared.
Vodafone U, a-first-of-its-kind lifestyle proposition for youth, has associated with the much awaited musical drama Rock On 2 to offer exciting experiences to its customers and music lovers. The partnership with Rock On 2, starring Farhan Akhtar, Shraddha Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kohli and Prachi Desai. Vodafone U will engage with youngsters through a series of fun initiatives.

As a part of the association music fans can look forward to groovy evenings with Vodafone U  Rock On 2 concerts. These are multi-city concerts, exclusively for Vodafone U customers. The customers participating in the contest will get a chance to be up close and personal with Farhan Akhtar and the Rock On 2 band with their buddies. The details for the concert will be announced soon.

Fun will continue with Vodafone U customers getting an opportunity to attend special Rock On 2 screenings, win movie merchandise and much more! A rocking experience awaits U! Get a chance to #JoinTheBand and keep the fun always on.

Since its launch through a collaborative content by leading youth icons- Kanan Gill, Raftaar and TVF, Vodafone U has continuously engaged with youngsters to stay always connected with friends and fun via the world of internet, voice, music plus exciting digital offers and experiences. Recently Vodafone U conducted Back to Campus campaign that promised a Million Fun Experiences to users and participants. This campaign gave the students an opportunity to win an all expenses paid trip to the popular Tomatina Festival in Spain and the iconic Ultra Music Fest in Singapore.
A Harley-Davidson is more than a motorcycle. It is a symbol of Americana, built from the ground up by founders Walter and Arthur Davidson and their friend Bill Harley. But the road to success was not exactly smooth  filled with innumerable obstacles, ruthless competitors and extraordinary risks. Together these three young men, the sons of blue-collar immigrants, gave everything they had to ensure the survival of the company they founded. But just how far would they go to reach the ultimate American dream?

Discoverys highly-anticipated miniseries HARLEY AND THE DAVIDSONS will premiere on Friday, October 14 at 9 PM . The three-part series will air on three consecutive Fridays - 14th Oct, 21st Oct and 28th Oct at 9 PM.

Based on a true story, HARLEY AND THE DAVIDSONS charts the birth of this iconic bike during a time of great social and technological change beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Walter, Arthur and Bill risked their entire fortune and livelihood to launch the budding enterprise. Each of these men faced very different challenges, but it was the motorcycle that united their dreams and ambitions. For Walter Davidson, the venture was a chance to escape from the confines of society  to ignore the rules and build a bike that could go anywhere and ride hard. For Arthur Davidson, it was an opportunity to finally make good on his name. And for Bill Harley, the bike gave him hope to break free from his overbearing parents and apply his talent as an engineer.

Built in a shed out of Milwaukee, these motorcycles were able to survive nearly every condition imaginable. And Walter certainly put the bikes to the test. His ferocious ambition propelled him to become a top motorcycle racer while competing in the deadly competitions sweeping the nation. Walters daredevil exploits put Harley-Davidson on the map  and while risky  pushed the company to eventually overtake their archrival competitor, Indian, which had a stronghold on the market.

But the founders also faced an underlying moral question  just how much would they risk to become successful? Racing could often have deadly consequences, especially with the rise of the hazardous motordrome competitions sweeping the country.

Fuelled by ingenuity, innovation and design, the founders of Harley-Davidson faced off against their much bigger rivals. If things couldnt get any more difficult, the Great Depression hit and the motorcycle industry was decimated. But Harley-Davidson continued to defy the odds with their forward-thinking business ideas.



HARLEY AND THE DAVIDSONS looks at how the founders continued to grow its loyal following like no other competitor whether it was securing the American Army contract and teaching riders how to make repairs on the field to embracing boisterous motorcycle clubs across the nation. They would eventually channel all their resources with their biggest risk yet  creating the worlds first superbike, a state-of-the-art racing machine for the masses.

Walter, Arthur and Bill cemented Harley-Davidsons reputation as a builder of bikes that goes anywhere, could ride hard and ignored all the rules. Its a legacy that has endured over 100 years  and at the heart of the brand and its loyal riders.



The series is led by an all-star cast including Michiel Huisman (Game of Thrones) as Walter Davidson, Robert Aramayo (Game of Thrones) as William (Bill) Harley and Bug Hall (The Little Rascals) playing the role of Arthur Davidson. Other cast members include Stephen Rider (Daredevil), Jessica Camacho (Sleepy Hollow), Daniel Coonan (EastEnders), Annie Read (Awkward), Wilson Bethel (Hart of Dixie), Dougray Scott (in Mission: Impossible 2), Gabe Luna (Matador), Alex Shaffer (Win Win) and newcomers Essa OShea and Sean Scully.

Scoring high on charts, the series has already been a success in the US. Premiering in the first week of September, it was watched by 4.4 million (P2+) viewers, making it the most watched single-network cable miniseries the US in the last 3.5 years. This is the first miniseries for Discovery under the leadership of Rich Ross, Group President for Discovery, Animal Planet and Science.
Blood Banking, an initiative by the Indian Red Cross Society which was conceptualised and created by J Walter Thompson, has won a coveted Pencil at the D&AD Impact Awards. The award ceremony will take place on September 27, 2016 at PlayStation Theatre, New York City.

Blood Banking revolutionised the way people look at blood donation with one simple change  people could now save their own blood, just the way they would save money in a bank. And just like a savings account, one could withdraw their units whenever required, or transfer to someone in need, all at the click of a button  through the Blood Banking App. With an interface similar to that of net banking, all account holders enjoyed a familiar and seamless experience.



After launching on April 3, 2016, the initiative had a positive response with the opening of over 132,000 Blood Banking accounts. Mobile Blood Banks went deep into rural areas and helped raise a collection of over 100,000 units of blood.

Commenting on the win, Tarun Rai, CEO, J Walter Thompson South Asia, said, Im extremely proud of this achievement for two reasons. Weve won recognition in promoting an extremely important cause. And we have won it for work thats primarily on the digital platform. Ive always maintained that as an agency our focus should be Digital First and this is exactly what weve delivered on. Kudos to Senthil and team.

Previously this year, the initiative also celebrated a moment of glory at the Cannes Lions 2016 festival, after being the only entry this year from India to take home a Silver Lion in the Design Lions category.

We are very proud of this human idea that has the potential to impact a billion people with the simple solution of starting a savings bank account for blood, shifting the needle from the donor to the receiver. Countering the selfish nature of mankind with an appeal for self interest. A truly noble meeting of technology and real life problem solving. The Cannes Silver Lion and now a coveted D&AD Impact pencil are proof that this idea can be universally applied in any country to resolve the blood shortage issue forever. Godspeed, remarked Senthil Kumar, Chief Creative Officer, J Walter Thompson South Asia.

Only 1 per cent of the Indian population donates blood, and meanwhile every two seconds someone needs blood. The Blood Banking APP has impacted the shocking statistics of blood donation and requirement in the country. By giving people the opportunity to save their own blood, the initiative has helped saving lives and bringing an end to the frantic searches and pleas for blood during dire medical situations.
 Langoor, the leading digital agency has announced new additions  to its leadership team. Creative technologist Vignesh Iyer joins the team at Langoor as the Executive Creative Director and Ramprasad Srinivasan joins them as the Senior Vice President of India operations.

Vignesh Iyer has worked on both offline as well as digital advertising at agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi Focus Network and Push Integrated Communications for over 10 years. His experience includes branding, strategy, content and campaigns for B2C and B2B clients including Mead Johnson, Kalyan Jewellers, The Leela Palace, Siemens, Bosch, Microsoft and Infosys to name a few.

Ramprasad Srinivasan, has 16 years of expertise in consulting services and will bring in strategic insights and technology transformations that will build customer delight for across all accounts in Langoor. With over 16 years of Experience in the services industry and spending 6+ years of his career in the US driving sales and delivery lead growth, he comes with tall expertise in delivering large to medium programs.

Kishore Karumbaiah, CCO & Partner, Langoor says on the new additions, Vignesh and Ram bring in strength in experience to our business. Their insights and their individual set of expertise will add value during our growth. We are very excited to have them in the business and take over some of our key business funcitons.

Commenting on his new role, Vignesh Iyer, Executive Creative Director, Langoor says, Working with Kishore, one of the best creative minds in the industry, is an opportunity that should excite anyone in the advertising business. Unlike any other agency Langoor speaks the language of solving business problems, with an arsenal that includes creative services, design thinking, performance marketing, and technology solutions. Being an engineer and an ad man, the Langoor philosophy of being a creative technologist really resonates with me. I look forward to working with a young and dynamic team to help brands connect with their audiences in ways that are exciting, relevant and human.

Ramprasad Srinivasan, Senior Vice President, Langoor adds, Joining Langoor was a likely choice , as I personally wanted to get out of the typical technology service organizations and explore my abilities adapting to new domain  Digital Marketing and challenge my skills. Langoor has grown exponentially in the last few years with leaders successfully managing to shape brands uniquely and position Langoor to be well sought Digital Agency across APAC. This truly helped me make the decision to join this team, my primary focus at Langoor would be to improve Service delivery, drive technology transformation and customer success management.
Mobivista today announced the launch of Mintegral, a native and video ad mediation platform. This powerful mobile Supply-Side Platform (SSP) developed by Mobvista provides developers a global monetization solution for maximized revenue. Smart algorithms and mediated top quality international ad sources combine with customizable native ad formats for optimal performance.

Launched today in Beijing, by Robin Duan, founder and CEO of Mobvista, the Mintegral kick-off ceremony also saw Erick Fang, Chief Product Officer of Mobvista, and leaders from top app partners Camera360 and SHAREit in attendance.

Touted as the first of its kind platform in China, Mintegral also promises to be an important milestone for the Indian market. After having set-up its India operations in 2015, this move will help Mobvista establish itself very early in the programmed purchase ad market, which is still at a nascent stage in India.

Easy to Use for High Revenue, Seamless Integration & Low Maintenance

Mintegral is a comprehensive monetization system, including native ad resources mediation, intelligent ad targeting, a complete operation dashboard, dedicated account teams and more. According to Erick Fang, Chief Product Officer of Mobvista, High revenue, low maintenance and ease of use make up the DNA of Mintegral.

First, Mintegrals mediation concept is more advanced than traditional platform-based mediation, and solves the problem of higher quality traffic wasted when allocated to lower quality campaigns. Mintegral first mediates campaigns on all platforms and retrieves the optimum ad sources through smart and dynamic cross-locking algorithms. This is based on developers requirements to match each ad spot with the right ad for maximized benefits.

Today, Mintegral mediates over 60 industry leading ad platforms and enables the classification and retrieval of native ads. Eliminating risks and traffic waste, in trials for developers on multiple platforms Mintegral delivered a 100% fill rate of ad spots in apps.

Erick also mentioned, Secondly, developers have traditionally had challenges to efficiently monetize without compromising the user experience. Mintegral enables smooth integration with the UIs of developers products for truly seamless integration and minimal disruption. We have invested heavily in optimizing our SDK and have designed a wide variety of UI templates, to address the various ad demands in line different app scenarios.

Mobvista has partnered with over 1000 apps from all over the world, with 180 million daily active users from our SDK with partners like Camera360, SHAREit, 360 Security, and Clean Master.

We are positioned as the monetization team for developers, which determines the way we think, act and work with a developers best interest at heart. Erick Fang said some of the developer-friendly services provided by Mintegral include: a monetization solution customization by a senior monetization consultant and design team, an estimation of ad revenue, technical support and bridging tests from senior experts (including former Baidu Fengchao team), as well as data optimization support from our operation team.

Integration of NativeX Video Ad and GameAnalytics Data Analysis

Video advertising is one of the trump cards for Mintegral. NativeX, a US-based pioneer in mobile video ad industry with their Lightning Play Video solution, was acquired by Mobvista in February. After the business integration, NativeXs high quality video ad technologies are integrated into mediation platform. Through an easy to integrate SDK, developers can easily implement various rich media ad formats, enabling higher conversion rate and benefits for developers while ensuring positive user experiences.

GameAnalytics, a respected European mobile game data analytics company acquired by Mobvista in July, also enhances the data analytics capabilities of Mintegral. By providing a powerful data analysis service for developers, GameAnalytics can deliver more precise advertising at the monetization stage to improve eCPMs and relevance.

Build Full-Stack Products from SSP and Mobile Productivity Engine

In the future, only full-stack service providers can survive, Robin Duan, founder and CEO of Mobvista, revealed as he explained the company vision.

Programmatic ad buying and native advertisement is the general trend of advertising industry. SSP, DSP, DMP, and Ad Exchanges are major builders in this ecosystem. Digital Advertising spends will account for Rs 12.7% of total spends at around Rs 7,300 crore. With the gradual evolution of mobile ecosystem, the stock proportion of programmatic advertising buys in mobile platforms is now rapidly increasing. With 1 billion mobile connections and counting, mobile is now emerging as the gateway to the connected world, driving awareness, engagement and commerce for advertisers, leading to a lions share of the digital marketing mix.



Therefore, Mobvista is committed to taking comprehensive efforts from DSP, Ad Exchange, DMP and SSP. From a business perspective, Mobvista is building up its data capabilities and providing developers with one-stop solutions for everything from promotion, statistics to monetization.



In closing, Robin Duan said, Mobvista is more than just a top advertising network. We are also a data-driven service company for developers. And we look forward to continuing the strong growth and success of our developer partners with Mintegral.
Presidency University has empanelled Rediffusion Y&R for handling its creative mandate for the celebration of its 200 years. The account win is a result of a multi-agency pitch in Kolkata. While the names of the agencies in the fray are not known, the final round included presentations from several renowned agencies of Kolkata and Mumbai. The agencies were asked to make a strategy-cum-creative presentation on how the agency can take the legacy and heritage of the institution forward as they approach towards the completion of 200 years.

Presidency University is one of the most prestigious and heritage institutions of India. Its alumni include Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Subhas Chandra Bose, Satyajit Ray and Indias first President, Rajendra Prasad.

The bicentennial celebration of the University will be a national as well as an international event, with seminars in India, Britain and in the US. There will be academic workshops, debates, international seminars, lectures by distinguished academicians, Nobel laureates and Oscar winners, as well as cultural events, among others. The events will start from the first week of January 2017.

Anuradha Lohia, The Vice Chancellor, Presidency University, commented, While we celebrate 200 years, we aim to strengthen the legacy of this heritage institution in the future. Our criterion for short listing our agency was based on the enthusiasm and love displayed by the agencies for our prestigious institution. The creative concepts of Rediffusion Y&R team were insightful and passionate as befits our hallowed institution.

Commenting on the win, Dhunji S Wadia, President, Rediffusion Y&R, said, It is an honour to be the agency of choice for Presidency University, which has a unique place in history. To be able to together celebrate the 200 years that have refashioned its venerable traditions and continuing strengths into a leading institution of the future.

Suparna Mucadum, Vice President, Rediffusion Y&R Kolkata, added here, Presidency University has a unique significance in history. The university boasts of several eminent scholars and Nobel laureates. We are glad to be a part of this celebration and believe that the future belongs to those who prepare for it today. Through this festival of 200 years, we aim/ endeavour to support the institution as it creates a stronger foundation for the generations ahead.
Ace Producer Rashmi Sharma, who made her debut in producing films with Shoojit Sircar's and Amitabh B achchan starrer PINK has now come together with National Award winning filmmaker Vibha Bakshi whose film 'Daughters of Mother India' won the National Film Award for explicitly and determinedly turning the spotlight on the burning issue of gender violence and bias - have joined hands for a common mission to create awareness on the issue with the help and support from the Police. The two powerful women who have achieved great success in their respective fields recently held a special screening of PINK at a multiplex in Mumbai for the Mumbai Police Department.

The special screening was attended by top officials of Mumbai Police Department, from Mr. Dattatray Padsalgikar, the honorable Police Commissioner of Mumbai to Joint Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners and Senior Cops, all were seen gracing the event with their respective families. Producer Rashmi Sharma who has been depicting several women issues prevailing in the society through her television serials and now film PINK has come together with Vibha Bakshi who is best known for her documentary Daughters of Mother India to screen together their films to further the momentum for change.

Talking about its future, producer of PINK, Rashmi Sharma said, "My motive of associating with PINK was to convey a strong message to the society. With all the injustice happening with women, it is important to make people realize their humanity and responsibility towards every individual and raise a voice against gender discrimination. Vibha who has worked on very powerful films dealings with gender equality and women empowerment, having her besides us is a privilege. After this screening, we are confident that the Mumbai Police will stand alongside us to spread the message of NO MEANS NO."

Adding further Vibha Bakshi, director/producer of the National Award winning film 'Daughters of Mother India' which also sensitively deals with the issue of gender violence and bias said Films like PINK are a powerful medium to bring about change and we need more such fire power to come together. Daughters of Mother India has screened for over 150,000 police officers - who are the front line for justice. Proud to now join hands with Rashmi Sharma, the outstanding PINK team and grateful for the Police support to take the dialogue on gender bias forward. It will keep the movement going".
Social Media Week (SMW), the international conference held in more than 40 countries, concluded last week in Mumbai. Hosted by R Square Consulting, the conference this year sported the theme of The Invisible Hand: Hidden Forces of Technology (and how we can harness it for good) and brought together well-known digital experts.

Social Media Week is a leading news platform and worldwide conference that curates and shares the best ideas, innovations and insights into how social media and technology are changing business, society and culture around the world. Human connectivity is being reimagined and SMW seeks to understand how humanity and technology will come together to change the ways we live, work and create.

We are excited to see the traction which SMW Mumbai could bring for the marketing and advertising community. The audience was able to learn, engage and converse with speakers and peers who have similar passions. Passions include excelling in marketing through the use of social media, remarked Rohit Varma, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, R Square Consulting and Founder, Social Media Week.

In conversation with Adgully, Rohit Varma sheds more light on the Social Media Week, the major issues highlighted, social intelligence, growth of social media and more. Excerpts:

What is the genesis behind Social Media Week?

Social Media Week started in New York eight years ago. We brought Social Media Week to India in 2013 because we felt the philosophy was great, it is a crowd sourced platform, which means the content comes from the communities, organisations or individuals and thus the content is different and very original. The content at Social Media Week is very relevant for everyone  be it brands or agencies talking about new platforms, new ideas, and analysing what is right for you and what is not right for you. Thats how Social Media Week as a platform works.

What were the issues and topics highlighted during the Social Media Week this year?

The biggest part that we are looking at to address right now is how effectively different new platforms can be worked looking at the analytics. Hence, the last session was specifically on analytics and explored whether analytics is the new way of doing research to figure out how consumers are behaving today and how to engage with them and how brands should see is consumers are getting into the mode of conversion and how they are looking at buying a product. Whatever marketing that we do, be it in mainstream media or online media, the whole effort is to get the mind share in terms of business. That is very critical and that is what we are looking at. The next part is content  figuring out the right content for your audience. So, it involves going back to the specific audience and finding out what they are looking for and setting your content accordingly. And it that way, your audience can be very helpful in giving you the content, which is what we call user generated content (UGC).

Could you shed some light on the theme  Invisible Hand: Hidden forces to Technology. What, according to you, are those hidden forces?

When we talk about hidden forces, we largely talk from the data perspective  how do I read the data which is coming, how do I use that effectively, how do I decide my marketing campaigns looking at the data that I am getting? Today, we are all heavy users of mobile phones to be on social media. So, largely today, social media is driven from mobile phones. Thus knowing consumers behaviour on mobile phones is critical here, based on which you can start doing very targeted marketing, and that is what we call re-targeting marketing or programming or behavioural marketing. So data is something that helps a lot today in deciding on your marketing efforts, and that is what we addressed in this edition of SMW Mumbai.

How much social media is good for business? Do you think there is an over-reliance on social media today?

No, I dont think so. You look at the amount of investment that is happening on social media or say same digital media itself, which sums up to around 13 per cent of the overall marketing budget. You still have a lot of investment going on in traditional media. The expectations that we have from social media is way high because that is social in nature, so you expect that you will get a large amount of response. However, you need to understand that it is a medium. Unless you understand how to interact, how to converse, you will not be able to drive that. Some brands have understood it and have figured out how to fuel and to do the right conversations and they have seen the returns.
Vodafone, one of Indias leading telecommunications service providers, has launched Vodafone FLEX, a revolutionary new concept for Prepaid customers that comes with no pre-fixed quotas for Voice, Data or SMS. This revolutionary new concept, gives power to you, each individual customer to use as per his/her preference and needs, Flex for voice, data, roaming or SMS - all with just a single recharge.

Background

Every prepaid user is familiar with situations in which he runs out of data while there is still talk time balance or vice versa. Additionally he also has to keep track of the amount and different validities of the various recharges and bonus cards he purchases for data, talktime, SMS etc. All of this makes his life inconvenient and full of hassle. Till date however, there has been no other way to use prepaid in the Indian telecom market at a national level.

The Brief to the Agency

The brief to Ogilvy was to bring alive the product proposition which liberates you from not being stuck with any kind of pre-defined quotas while assuring you of great value.

Advertising Campaign

A high decibel, 360, multi-media creative campaign will propagate the launch and introduce the innovative, new concept of Vodafone FLEX - Prepaid bana very very aasan, to audiences across the country. The advertising and promtional camaign is being led by popular film stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Bobby Simha, who are relatable and can truly live up to Vodafone brand values. This highly vibrant and impactful campaign will be seen across mediums - TV, Print, OOH, Radio and Digital.

Television Commercials

Vodafone believes in delivering simple propositions to consumers and communicating them simply and effectively. The two TVCs are centered around two core themes on how a consumer gets stuck due to pre-defined quotas that exists in current prepaid products and the other on a continuous dilemma that our consumer has to face while choosing his telecom packs to meet his multiple needs.

Siddharth Banerjee, National Head, Brand Communication and Insights, Vodafone India, said, Vodafone Flex is a path-breaking product since it guarantees making consumers life simpler while assuring them of great value for money. Vodafone Flex - Prepaid bana very very aasan campaign talks about simplifying lives of the prepaid consumers. It marks the return of a common man spokesperson approach, which Vodafone has done successfully in the past for the iconic Chotta Recharge campaign led by Irfan Khan. For this campaign, the spokesperson had to be authentic, relatable and could truly live up to brand values. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, man of the Hindi heartland and Bobby Simha with popular following in the Southern states have explained the consumer propositions in their own authentic narrative style to connect strongly with the target audience.

Agency Credits: Team Ogilvy

Link to the TVCs:

ATAKNA 45SEC HIN HD : https://youtu.be/7OU0lcvE9nE

ATAKNA 25SEC HIN HD: https://youtu.be/oBQMe1oWrGc

SOCHNA 45SEC HIN HD: https://youtu.be/KzIHeYH2kaQ

SOCHNA 25SEC HIN HD: https://youtu.be/9Xdb7lWSPOs
Elisha Kotadia from Mumbai and Indever Karsjia, from New Delhi, are the lucky Vodafone U customers who will sway to some of the best EDM music at The Ultra Music Fest in Singapore. Elisha and Indever garnered the maximum likes for their GIF to be declared winners of Vodafone U Back to Campus campaign that promised a Million Fun Experiences to users and participants.

Earlier, Mandeep Ramna of Panjab University, another winner of Vodafone U Back to Campus Million Fun Experiences initiative, flew to the Tomatina Festival in Spain, with a friend. Being physically present at the Tomatina, an annual Spanish ritual drawing visitors from across the globe, was a dream come true for Mandeep.

For Elisha, Inderver and Mandeep, the most delightful part of winning with Vodafone U, was that each of them got to take a friends along with them on their all expenses paid trips, gifted by Vodafone India.

Vodafone U Back to Campus was a month long campaign created with the objective of engaging with youth in 400 leading colleges across 50 cities in the country and on the digital platform through the Vodafone U website and Vodafone U Facebook posts. This campaign gave the students an opportunity to win an all expenses paid trip to the popular Tomatina Festival in Spain and the iconic Ultra Music Fest in Singapore. To win these exciting experiences, youngsters had to click a GIF with their buddies, upload the GIF on social media and tag their friends with #FunWithU@Vodafone.

Thanking Indias youth for making the smart choice with Vodafone U, Pushpinder Singh Gujral, Business Head  Mumbai, Vodafone India, said, Vodafone U is a one of its kind telecom offering created specially for the youth of India. Through the Back to Campus - Million Fun Experiences initiative, Vodafone U invited youngsters to create memorable moments with their buddies and get the opportunity of winning trips to globally popular events like the Tomatina in Spain and the Ultra Music Fest in Singapore. It is indeed a good feeling to have received a more than enthusiastic response from Mumbaikars to Vodafone U Back to Campus and we believe it is testimony that Vodafone U has made headway in being seen as the preferred mobile youth brand. I congratulate Elisha and wish her a memorable experience at the Ultra Music Fest, Singapore. Vodafone will keep coming back with more exciting and fun experiences to delight our customers.
EDM announced today that Ethiopian Airlines' new $100 million Aviation Academy is now fitted out with a range of its cabin crew training simulators.

The $100 million state-of-the-art Aviation Academy was officially opened at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa earlier this year by the countrys Prime Minister, Hailemaraim Desalegn, in front of some of the countrys leading business and aviation dignitaries. Widely regarded as Africas finest airline training facility, the Academy will enable 4000 aviation students to be trained annually. Housed within the facility is the comprehensive range of cabin crew training simulators designed, manufactured and installed by EDM. They comprise:



 B737 / B757 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET) on an electric motion system

 B787 / B777 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET)

 Extended B767 Door Trainer

 Extended Q400 Door Trainer

 A350 Door Trainer







Above: The B737 / B757 Cabin Emergency Evacuation Trainer (CEET).

Courtesy EDM



The market-leading simulators will enable cabin crew to be fully trained in cabin service as well as emergency and evacuation safety procedures. EDM was selected by Ethiopian Airlines, Africas fastest growing airline, to supply its crew training simulators after an international tender in 2014. EDM also provided support to Ethiopian Airlines regarding the design and specification of the new Aviation Academy.





Above: The B767 Door Trainer, left, and A350 Door Trainer right.

Courtesy EDM



Last month, the shipping of the B787 / B777 CEET to Ethiopia featured in TV documentary series, Mega Shippers, on Quest TV. The programme followed the journey of the CEET from EDMs manufacturing facility in Manchester all the way to Addis Ababa via the Port of Southampton.



Ethiopian Airlines new Aviation Academy sets a highly impressive new standard in the provision of aviation training, said Tony Bermingham, Managing Director of EDM. It is one of the best airline training facilities in the world and we were privileged to play a part in this fine accomplishment by Ethiopian Airlines.
NZ Dollar Falls After Dairy Prices Rise Less-than-expected

(RTTNews) - The New Zealand dollar weakened against the other major currencies in the Asian session on Wednesday, after dairy product prices rose less than expected in the latest GlobalDairyTrade auction.

In the latest GlobalDairyTrade auction held by New Zealand's Fonterra Co-operative Group, the world's biggest dairy exporter, the GDT price index rose 1.7 percent to $US2,975, much lesser than the 5-to-10 per cent gain anticipated by futures traders. Meanwhile, the whole milk powder slipped 0.2 percent to US$2,782 a tonne, snapping four successive gains.

A total of 35,086 tonnes were sold at the latest auction, falling 4.5 percent from the previous auction.

Tuesday, the NZ dollar rose 0.43 percent against the U.S. dollar, 0.30 percent against the yen, 0.49 percent against the euro and 0.24 percent against the Australian dollar.

In the Asian trading, the NZ dollar fell to more than a 3-week low of 73.88 against the yen; a 1-1/2-month low of 1.0356 against the Australian dollar; and a 2-day low of 0.7278 against the U.S. dollar, from yesterday's closing quotes of 74.36, 1.0326 and 0.7314, respectively. If the kiwi extends its downtrend, it is likely to find support around 72.00 against the yen; 1.04 against the aussie; and 0.72 against the greenback.

Against the euro, the kiwi dropped to 1.5289 from yesterday's closing value of 1.5240. The kiwi may test support near the 1.55 region.

Looking ahead, U.K. public sector finance data for August is due to be released at 4:30 am ET.

In the New York session, Canada wholesale sales data for July and U.S. weekly crude oil inventories data are slated for release.

At 2:00 pm ET, the Federal Reserve will announce its decision on monetary policy. The Fed is expected to hold its Federal Funds rate in the range of 0.25-0.50 percent.

Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved




BEIJING, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Air China announced that its inaugural Beijing-Warsaw flight would take off on September 21 at a press conference held in Beijing on September 20, 2016.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141017/152745LOGO

Warsaw sitting on the bank of the Vistula River is Poland's capital and political, economic and cultural center. It's a quaint, uplifting city. Both Warsaw and Beijing boast rich historical and cultural heritage. Despite their turbulent past, the two cities are still shrouded in poetry and are pulsing with life, like Chopin's music. Statistics show that 106,000 people traveled between China and Warsaw each year from June 2015 to May 2016, up 8.4% over the previous year. After the start of Air China's Beijing - Warsaw nonstop service, in order to meet the ever increasing demand for travel, Air China and LOT Polish Airlines, which are the member airlines of the world's largest airline alliance - Star Alliance, will start code share cooperation, bringing more benefits to Chinese business and leisure travelers to and from Poland and offering more travel options to connecting passengers of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and Oceania to Central and Eastern Europe.

The Beijing - Warsaw route is Air China's second nonstop long-haul international service linking China to Central and Eastern Europe following the introduction of the carrier's Minsk - Beijing - Budapest nonstop route. It not only expands Air China's global route network with its hub in Beijing, but also is a worthy addition to its route network linking China to Central and Eastern Europe.

At present, Air China is the largest carrier between China and Europe, offering nearly 200 flights per week. The Beijing - Warsaw service brings the number of Air China's routes between China and Europe up to 24, serving 19 important European cities including London, Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome and Milan.

Flights

The flights, CA737/8, are operated four times a week on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The outbound flight departs from Beijing at 02:30 and arrives in Warsaw at 06:20. The return flight departs from Warsaw at 14:10 and arrives in Beijing at 04:30 the following day. Airbus 330-200 is operated on the route, featuring full-flat seats in Business Class and personal AVOD in all classes of service, guaranteeing passengers truly pleasant travel experiences.










LONDON, Sept. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- With the Fukushima accident in 2011, the global nuclear industry has come under the spotlight as governments worldwide discuss the pros and cons of nuclear power. Regardless of the safety concerns of nuclear power, there is no doubt that nuclear power is here to stay. While many countries have put in motion plans to phase out nuclear power, there are many who are actively boosting the growth of nuclear power.



With the recent spate of nuclear accidents, the global nuclear power industry has seen deterioration over recent years, but nevertheless, the industry is expected to expand and post a strong growth rate in the years to 2020. There are over 400 civil nuclear power reactors in operation around the world today, with the US accounting for nearly one third of the world's nuclear electricity.



Aruvian Research analyzes the Global Nuclear Power Industry in this in-depth research report. The report begins with an analysis of the industry statistics. We analyze the global nuclear power industry through an industry overview, industry statistics from 2011-2015, industry segmentation, amongst others. We also look at price trends for nuclear power, industry trends, a look at the expansion of nuclear power capacity, addition of new capacity and the public acceptance of nuclear power. A Porter's Five Forces Strategy analysis of the Global Nuclear Power Industry is also carried out.



We analyze the economics of nuclear power through capital costs, operation costs, system costs, external costs, economics of nuclear power versus other forms of electricity generation and the cost competitiveness of nuclear power in the future. Investment incentives for nuclear power are also looked at.



Climate change is an integral part of the energy industry today and we look at the global climate change and impact of nuclear power on this. Furthermore, we also look at the challenges and barriers facing nuclear power.



Global regulatory initiatives that govern the nuclear power industry such as the U.S. Clean Air Act, Nuclear Power 2010, International Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and others are analyzed in the report.



Outlook for the global nuclear power industry to the year 2020 is included in the year, as well as a comparison of nuclear power to other power resources is included in the analysis of the Global Nuclear Power Industry.



Following this, we move on to the analysis of the key nuclear power markets worldwide. We analyze many nuclear markets worldwide including Japan, China, India, the US, Ukraine, Russia, etc. For each market we analyze the industry through an overview, nuclear capacity, fuel cycle details, regulatory framework governing the industry, research and development efforts, nuclear waste management and nuclear non-proliferation.



Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Mexico, North Korea, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.



No industry analysis is complete without a look at the major industry players and we analyze the leading players in the Global Nuclear Power Industry through a business profile, financial analysis and a SWOT analysis. The analysis looks at both nuclear power companies as well as nuclear power utilities.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p0197880-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



http://www.reportlinker.com



__________________________

Contact Clare: clare@reportlinker.com

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-nuclear-power-industry-2016-300331488.html

SOURCE Reportlinker
Japans talent mismatch has once again been ranked one of the most acute in the Asia Pacific, according to the 2016 Hays Global Skills Index released today which assesses the efficiency of skilled labour markets in 33 countries.

Japan received a score of 9.8 for talent mismatch  a slight decline from last years highest possible score of 10, but is now positioned behind only the USA, Ireland, Portugal and Spain (all scored 10) for the severity of its talent gap. This shows that there is a significant gap between the skills that businesses are looking for and the skills available in the labour market, says Marc Burrage, Managing Director of Hays in Japan.

The Hays Global Skills Index, produced in collaboration with Oxford Economics, ranks Japan 10th on the list of 33 countries, with an overall score of 6.0 down from 6.1 in 2015. Seven indicators, or points of potential pressure, make up the ranking and each received a score out of 10. A score close to 0 indicates little to no pressure, while a score close to 10 shows severe pressure.

Labour market reforms and initiatives of recent years are slowly leading Japan in the right direction, demonstrating improvements in overall labour market participation particularly increased female participation in the workforce, says Marc. Yet, despite the slight reduction from the highest possible score of 10 last year to 9.8 this year, talent mismatch continues to be one of the key challenges in Japan.

Japans high score for wage pressure in high-skill occupations is also of concern at 7.1, a jump from last years score of 6.2. Wages are rising more quickly in high-skill than low-skill occupations relative to the past, which signals that high-skill occupations are experiencing shortages of talent.

The consistently high talent mismatch in Japan attributes to wage pressure in high skill occupations, causing increasing unfilled job vacancies  a vicious cycle that continues to affect businesses and potential for the economy to grow, says Marc. We continue to emphasise that salary increases are not necessarily the solution to alleviate skills shortages but further attention is required to address ongoing structural challenges.

While the government continues to struggle to fix and revive the economy, competition for talent will remain fierce in this challenging labour market, concludes Marc.

About the Hays Global Skills Index

The Hays Global Skills Index assesses the efficiency of the skilled labour market in 33 countries, or its ability to supply skilled labour. It is a composite figure based on seven indicators, each with their own score. Three indicators explore the supply of talent, namely education flexibility, labour market participation and labour market flexibility. One looks at talent mismatch. The final three are wage pressure indicators, looking at overall wage pressure, wage pressure in high-skill industries and wage pressure in high-skill occupations.

The Hays Global Skills Index can be viewed at www.hays-index.com.

About Hays

Hays is the leading global specialist recruiting group. It is the expert at recruiting qualified, professional and skilled people worldwide.

Hays Specialist Recruitment Japan KK ("Hays") is the largest foreign recruitment company in Japan and operates across the private sector, providing services for permanent recruitment, contract and temporary roles, RPO (Hays Talent Solutions) and IT Solutions. Hays operates four local offices, serving the Kanto region from 2 offices in Tokyo, Yokohama, and West Japan from central Osaka.

Hays is the only foreign recruitment company in Japan to operate specialist business units composed of professionals with experience and expertise in the sectors they cover. Hays Japans thirteen specialisms span Accountancy & Finance, Banking, Finance Technology, Human Resources, Information Technology, Insurance, Legal, Life Sciences, Office Professionals, Property, Sales & Marketing, Supply Chain and Manufacturing & Operations.

Hays Japan is the local representative office for Hays plc (the "Group"), a leading global professional recruiting group. The Group is the expert at recruiting qualified, professional and skilled people worldwide, being the market leader in the UK and Asia Pacific and one of the market leaders in Continental Europe and Latin America. The Group operates across the private and public sectors, dealing in permanent positions, contract roles and temporary assignments. As at 30 June 2016 the Group employed 9,214 staff operating from 252 offices in 33 countries across 20 specialisms. For the year ended 30 June 2016:

 the Group reported net fees of 810.3 million and operating profit (pre-exceptional items) of 181 million;

 the Group placed around 67,000 candidates into permanent jobs and around 220,000 people into temporary assignments;

 22% of Group net fees were generated in Asia Pacific, 45% in Continental Europe & RoW (CERoW) and 33% in the United Kingdom & Ireland;

 the temporary placement business represented 58% of net fees and the permanent placement business represented 42% of net fees;

 Hays operates in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, the UK and the USA

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005576/en/

For further information please contact

Hays in Japan

Yuki Noro, +81 (0) 3 3560 1529

Public Relations

hays-pr@hays.co.jp
Ten captains have been selected to attend the 2017 Inter-American Squadron Officer School at the Inter-American Air Forces Academy here in fiscal year 2017.Selected to attend are Capts. Ruben Adornorodriguez, Ricardo Basora-Rovira, Edward Camacho, Nathan Elowe, Patricia Encarnacion-Miranda, Ruben Gomez, Aisha Lemos, Christian Martinez, Jose Torres, and Angel Vazquez-Pagan. Twelve alternates were also selected.The ISOS program is designed to develop dynamic Airmen ready to lead air, space and cyberspace power in an expeditionary war-fighting environment, said Capt. Brian Gunn, officer workforce development support chief. Students practice leadership and managerial skills, using lessons in military ethics, Air Force core values and human rights.Students also develop their knowledge of the use of airpower, including basic theories of warfare and the increasing role of aerospace and information systems in the joint environment, Gunn said.ISOS mirrors the Squadron Officer School in-residence course at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, but includes additional objectives such as developing inter-American awareness and a cadre of potential Latin American regional affairs specialists, Gunn said. Program graduates will also earn primary developmental education credit through Air University.For more information about Air Force personnel programs, go to the myPers website . Individuals who do not have a myPers account can request one by following these instructions on the Air Force Retirees Services website
An explosion of training

The 4th Civil Engineer Squadron hosted a joint-service explosive ordnance disposal exercise Sept. 13-15 on the EOD range here.



EOD Airmen assigned to the 4th CES organized the three-day exercise to familiarize EOD technicians of the munitions involved with the F-15E Strike Eagle. To maximize the effectiveness of the exercise, organizers invited their counterparts from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, to participate.



The importance of the exercise was to gain familiarization and training on the F-15E, and all the ordnance that we would usually take care of at Seymour Johnson AFB, said Senior Airman Christian Hulsey, a 4th CES EOD technician.



The exercise consisted of two stages. The first stage took place over the course of the first two days and consisted of F-15E familiarization. During this stage, EOD teams trained and exercised on a multitude of scenarios, including responding to improvised explosive devices and unexploded ordnance threats, basic demolition techniques and reacting to several simulated F-15E munitions emergencies.



Chemical operation training is important just in case a situation similar to this should happen, outstanding units could come in and be able to perform the appropriate procedures, Hulsey said.



According to Marine Corps Sgt. Kyle Kazmierczak, an EOD technician assigned to the 2nd EOD Company, the exercise scenarios were beneficial to their understanding of the F-15E and its munitions



We have never done any work on the F-15E before, so it was very helpful to be able to ask questions about it, Kazmierczak said.



On the final day of training, Airmen from Seymour Johnson AFB and Joint Base Charleston simulated a chemical spill situation, and performed the necessary procedures for the situation.



The whole mission for the last day of the exercise was for the teams to render the chemicals safe and dispose of them properly, Hulsey said.



Kazmierczak and Hulsey felt the training benefited the units and assisted with chemical operations.



This particular exercise helped immensely with chemical operations, Kazmierczak said. There are quite a few things the Air Force does that we dont. I think if we could take that back to our shop it would help us with a few of our procedures, and maybe even be more effective with our job.
Reserve commander discusses shaping the force for the future

Lt. Gen. Maryanne Miller, the Air Force Reserve Command commander and chief of the Air Force Reserve, said the legacy of citizen Airmen of the past helped strengthen and shape the dynamic force that serves and defends the nation today during a session at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber Conference here Sept. 20.



Addressing the audience, Miller said since 1948, Reserve Airmen have chosen to balance successful civilian careers with military service, defending the nation when called upon. She recalled the service of World War II-era Airmen including actor Jimmy Stewart, who enlisted in the Army Air Corps, flew B-17 Flying Fortresses in combat, and later became commander of Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia; Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean; and Jackie Cochran, a pioneer pilot who urged the military to use female pilots to support the war effort in non-combat roles,and later served in the Air Force Reserve before retiring at the rank of brigadier general. Referencing these Airmen, Miller said, (They) shaped our legacy and laid the foundation for who we are as citizen Airmen.



Like those who came before, todays reservists have a critical role in taking the fight to the enemy.



As one Air Force, we are bound together as Airmen, as citizens and as Americans, Miller said. As one team, you have fought harder and your families have sacrificed more than most will ever know.  As citizens we are fully vested in our communities, raising our families, immersed in our civilian careers, and yet intimately feel that profound calling to do more, to serve and defend our great nation.



Miller said the strength of todays and tomorrows Air Force Reserve lies in the strategic depth provided by a predominantly part-time force of diverse and experienced Airmen, many of whom have come from the active component but have chosen part-time military service for reasons, such as wanting to start a new career, put down roots and raise a family.



This force remains an affordable, cost-effective option in the fiscally constrained environment we live in today, Miller said. A force that can be fully called upon when needed.



The Reserve provides daily operational capability and a surge capacity to the active component, Miller said, which requires a balance between assured access through mobilization and sustained readiness through reserve administration control and voluntary participation.



We strive for missions that enable our citizen Airmen to maintain a balance between civilian and military careers. We desire sustainable mission sets to provide some predictability for our force even though our history demonstrates that our Airmen are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to continue serving.



Because the Air Force Reserve is a steadfast and reliable component of nearly every mission the Air Force executes, Miller said it is critical to continue modernizing legacy systems and platforms; invest in Airmen to develop them and help them remain resilient; and pursue policies and programs that not only support a part-time force but develops future organizational structures that will enable readiness accountability and effective force management.



It is not enough to just preserve that foundation, Miller said. We must also build on our current capabilities for the fight today.  With todays complex global environment there is no indication that the demand for Reserve forces is going to decline.



Preparing for the future requires change and looking for new options. With that in mind, Miller said the Air Force Reserve is committed to looking for opportunities for growth in space, cyberspace and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It also means looking to industry experts, particularly in space and cyberspace, to leverage their civilian experience in order to increase the forces effectiveness.



The world is unpredictable, but we can help the Air Force Reserve be postured to meet any threat, Miller said. We do that by allowing every citizen Airmen the ability to answer the call to serve and defend our country to the best of their ability.
Get AfricaFocus Bulletin by e-mail! Format for print or mobile USA/Africa: From #BlackLivesMatter to #StopTheBleeding Africa AfricaFocus Bulletin

September 21, 2016 (160921)

(Reposted from sources cited below) Editor's Note The direct and indirect toll resulting from illicit financial flows reflects the unequal value today's world places on human lives by race and place ... Reflecting the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, the African continent and Black people around the world are disproportionately located at the bottom of a global system that systematically sucks wealth upward, toward the top "1 percent." ... there can be no doubt that the number of deaths caused by these structural economic inequalities rivals or likely even exceeds those lost due to bombs, guns, or machetes. This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains an article published today in Praxis ( http://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/), an on-line publication of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College. The article, written by Emily Williams and William Minter, seeks to do the following: 1) introduce readers to the #StoptheBleeding campaign and make the tremendous loss of resources from African countries via illicit financial flows more visible; 2) begin to make the case for linking #BlackLivesMatter and #StoptheBleeding with the understanding that the same system of (mis)appropriation of wealth is hurting people in Africa and elsewhere in the world including the US; and 3) offer several domestic and global policy changes that could make a difference on both sides of the Atlantic. For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on illicit financial flows and related issues, visit http://www.africafocus.org/intro-iff.php In addition to links in the article below, additional newly published resources include: From the US-Africa Network "Top 10 Questions About Illicit Financial Flows and Africa"

http://tinyurl.com/zz4xr53 "Resources about Illicit Financial Flows from Africa"

http://tinyurl.com/jsyg8el From AfricaFocus Bulletin Top Ten Books on Illicit Financial Flows, Tax Justice, and Africa

http://www.africafocus.org/iff-books.php ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++ Making Violence Visible: From #BlackLivesMatter to #StoptheBleeding Africa By Emily Williams and William Minter [Emily Williams is an educator and organizational development consultant. William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin ( http://www.africafocus.org) and author of numerous books and other publications on African issues and international relations. Both authors are members of the coordinating committee of the US-Africa Network (http://www.usafricanetwork.org). The authors are grateful for the skillful editing of Alice Kim, which has contributed immensely to the development of this article.] In June 2015, a coalition of six Pan-African activist networks launched #StoptheBleeding Africa (http://stopthebleedingafrica.org/faqs/) in Nairobi, Kenya to curb the hemorrhage of resources from the African continent. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement continued to gain strength in the United States, this Pan-African coalition came together to expose and mobilize global support to end illicit financial flows  money that is illegally earned, transferred or used. Estimates of illegal transactions in Africa show a loss of at least $50 billion to $80 billion in wealth every year, a figure that would be incalculably more if transfers made legal by loopholes and unfair treaties were included. Some flows are only seen as "legal" because the laws are written and interpreted by those profiting from the system. Nevertheless, even the outflow of clearly illegal funds is far greater than the estimated $40 billion a year that Africa receives in official development assistance. As explained in this 16-minute video from the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lenH1SaOcIA), the #StoptheBleeding campaign includes official commitments by African governments. However, implementing these commitments depends on large-scale mobilizations within Africa and around the world. Unlike the pillage of Africa in earlier periods of the slave trade and colonial rule, these illicit financial transactions are most often hidden from public view. They happen through fraudulent invoicing of trade, "creative accounting" by multinational corporations, tax giveaways by African governments, and the use of shell companies based in tax havens around the world including Delaware, Luxembourg, Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Liberia, and Mauritius. Despite repeated revelations, notably the recent #PanamaPapers (https://panamapapers.icij.org/) scandal, the public eye glazes over at billions of dollars cited alongside obscure company names and a complex web of financial links across national and continental borders. This article seeks to do the following: 1) introduce readers to the #StoptheBleeding campaign and make the tremendous loss of resources from African countries via illicit financial flows more visible; 2) begin to make the case for linking #BlackLivesMatter and #StoptheBleeding with the understanding that the same system of (mis)appropriation of wealth is hurting people in Africa and elsewhere in the world including the US; and 3) offer several domestic and global policy changes that could make a difference on both sides of the Atlantic. The Looting Machine As South African student activist Pearl Pillay noted, "it is a common error of thought that violence is only what you can see" (http://tinyurl.com/jtk3hzy). Violence that stems from decisions made in boardrooms, city halls, and the offices of high-paid international accounting and law firms can be harder to see than violence on the streets but is deadly nonetheless. In the US, economic violence is carried out through systemic public disinvestment in health and education as we've seen in Flint, Michigan's water crisis and the closure of public schools in Chicago and Detroit, not to mention below-poverty-level wages paid by corporations such as Wal-Mart and McDonald's. In African countries, capitalist enterprises suck resources out of the continent via traditional industries like oil and minerals and rapidly expanding economic sectors like telecommunications and retail: In Nigeria, Shell, Chevron, and other companies from Europe and China share oil profits with corrupt Nigerian officials. The Panama Papers reveals that "three oil ministers, several senior employees of the national oil company and two former state governors" were "convicted of laundering ill-gotten money from the oil industry" ( https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160725-nigeria-oil-mogul.html). One prominent Nigerian oil trader is accused of cheating the Nigerian government out of 1.8 billion dollars in oil sales.

In Angola, an oligarchy headed by the president's family presides over oil riches in alliance with companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and a Hong Kong-based international network of companies known as the Queensway Group (http://tinyurl.com/n5bn5gn).

In South Africa, the mobile phone company MTN is able to avoid paying taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars from its subsidiaries in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, and other African countries, it was revealed last year, by channeling most of its profits through "management fees" to its subsidiary tax haven in Mauritius (http://www.africafocus.org/docs15/td1510.php).

Walmart, which has controlled the South Africa-based Massmart since 2011, hides an estimated $76 billion of its foreign earnings through subsidiaries in Luxembourg, where it owns no stores ( http://tinyurl.com/hmhg24t). By hiding these earnings stored in Luxembourg, Walmart avoids paying taxes on the funds. These financial practices can be as, if not more, deadly than police violence due to the sheer number of people impacted as resources needed for health, education, and other public services, as well as for private and public investment in development, are siphoned out to multinational corporations and overseas bank accounts. The ensuing competition for scarce resources fuels local and national conflicts, often heightened by demagogues channeling the frustration into hostility toward ethnic "others." The direct and indirect toll resulting from illicit financial flows reflects the unequal value today's world places on human lives by race and place; and, in fact, not only parallels the violence of terrorism but also reflects its disproportionate toll on the Middle East, Africa, and Asia than in Europe and the Americas (http://tinyurl.com/hlsbj8b). Reflecting the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, the African continent and Black people around the world are disproportionately located at the bottom of a global system that systematically sucks wealth upward, toward the top "1 percent." Whether this system is best called capitalism, neoliberalism, global apartheid, white supremacy, kleptocracy, or something else, there can be no doubt that the number of deaths caused by these structural economic inequalities rivals or likely even exceeds those lost due to bombs, guns, or machetes. Stop the Bleeding (4-minute music video) Financial Flows and Tax Losses With the #PanamaPapers leak in April 2016, illicit financial flows momentarily gained international media attention. This is in part because rich as well as poor countries are affected. A recent calculation (http://tinyurl.com/holnnc5) estimated that illegal tax evasion costs US taxpayers $35 billion a year, with an additional $130 billion a year lost to technically legal "tax avoidance." Even without any changes in tax rates for the rich, these "lost" funds could add $165 billion a year more in public funds and be invested in health, education, and other public goods that benefit Americans. The losses to sub-Saharan Africa from illicit flows, however, have an even more significant impact given the smaller size of African economies and the urgent need for investment in basic services. According to World Bank estimates (http://tinyurl.com/hw7b8t3) for 2014, while the United States and other rich countries on average spend over $9,000 a year per person on public health, South Africa spends a little less than $600 a year per person. Meanwhile the average for all African countries together is less than $100 per person per year. As the wealthy evade taxes in both richer and poorer countries, it is always the most vulnerable in society who suffer most from budget cuts. On a global scale, African countries and African people suffer disproportionately, reflecting the global hierarchy of wealth and power ( http://www.africafocus.org/iff-inequality.php). Watch this 3.5 minute video on how Zambia Sugar evades taxes. Making Connections Across Geographic and Mental Distance Although #BlackLivesMatter and #StoptheBleeding were born out of distinct geographic contexts, highlight apparently different social problems, call for varying solutions, and have diverging levels of visibility in the global media, they are inextricably and deeply linked. Thanks to #BlackLivesMatter the pervasive systemic violence against Black people by police and the criminal justice system in the US is now more visible. Names like Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile have not been forgotten because activists have strategically used social media, street protests, and behind-thescenes organizing to force the media, the public, and politicians to pay attention. In the U.S., increasing economic inequality has led to the criminalization of the poor and can be directly connected to police violence. For example, in the cases of Alton Sterling and Eric Garner, their attempts to make money in the street economy (selling cd's and loose cigarettes respectively) is what preceded their interaction with police that ultimately ended in the loss of their lives. U.S. activists are intentionally making economic justice fundamental to the message of #BlackLivesMatter in initiatives like the Agenda to Build Black Futures (http://agendatobuildblackfutures.org/) released by Black Youth Project in January 2016 and the Vision for Black Lives (https://policy.m4bl.org/) released by a coalition of Black organizations in August 2016. Notably, #BlackLivesMatter interventions in numerous cities were integral to pushing Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, which appealed to a growing segment of the American population because it called for a more progressive and populist economic agenda, to (belatedly) acknowledge the relationship between racial justice, gender justice, and economic justice. But the violence plaguing Africa remains far too invisible to most Americans. It is more difficult to #saytheirnames when the report is of 44 killed at the #Marikana mine in South Africa, 147 students at #Garissa in Kenya, or hundreds of men, women, and children at #Baga in northeastern Nigeria, places most Americans have never visited and can't find on a map. Although the Nigerian-launched campaign to #BringBackOurGirls won international fame, few Americans (beyond African immigrants and others with close personal links to the continent) are attentive to other struggles in Africa. Hashtags like #StoptheBleeding, #OccupyNigeria, #MinersShotDown, #FeesMustFall, and #RhodesMustFall echo faintly, if at all, across the Atlantic. Making the connections between what is happening "here" and what is happening "there" is not easy  #StoptheBleeding can feel less tangible because the violence being contested is hidden in a tangle of economic statistics, anonymous shell companies, and accounting tricks  but it is fundamental to addressing the obstacles that must be overcome to make a different world possible. It is imperative to address the roots of injustice that connect #BlackLivesMatter and #StoptheBleeding by fostering a collective process that builds solidarity between movement forces in the US and Africa. Follow the Money When policymakersin Chicago, Washington, Pretoria, Nairobi, or anywhere else ask "Where is the money?" to pay for health, education, and infrastructure, the answer should be, in the words of the African Union Panel on Illicit Financial Flows: "Track it! Stop it! Get it!" (http://tinyurl.com/zvwn5p5) The debate must go beyond the very real issues of setting different budget priorities to raising the basic question of who pays and who is evading their duty to pay their fair share. The first step is to ensure that there is full information available on income and wealth of those who have the most money, including the ultra-rich, the well-known giant companies, and also the obscure shell companies that both use to hide their wealth from public view. The United States and other rich countries are the home countries for the majority of multinational corporations involved in the looting of the African continent. They also provide convenient facilities for African elites to hide their riches. In a report published in January 2016, Global Witness documented with video interviews their undercover investigation of 13 leading New York law firms (https://www.globalwitness.org/shadyinc/). "We said we were advising an African minister who had accumulated millions of dollars, and we wanted to buy a Gulfstream Jet, a brownstone and a yacht. We said we needed to get the money into the U.S. without detection. ... the results were shocking; all but one of the lawyers had suggestions on how to move the funds." On the African continent, #StoptheBleeding activist groups and many public officials at continental and national level are working to identify the money that pours out of the continent. They have identified specific measures to improve tracking of fraud in trade invoices and are campaigning against tax treaties with foreign investors with massive giveaways. They are working with international partners to train journalists in investigations such as those in the Panama Paper, and with tax specialists to improve capacity to track overseas bank accounts. Implementation depends on mobilization of public pressure and political will in each individual country. Since the system is global, however, it also depends on international collaboration, particularly from the countries where the money is hidden. And that's where the connection to the United States becomes essential, and the agendas of #BlackLivesMatter and #StoptheBleeding Africa potentially converge. The ultra-rich and multinational corporations operate on a global playing field. Using secret bank accounts, lawyers, and accountants spread around the world, money can be transferred with a click of a mouse from Nairobi or Chicago to the British Virgin Islands to London, with stops along the way in Panama, the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, Singapore, and Samoa in the Pacific. If tax authorities are going to track down the money they should be getting, activists and honest public officials around the world must also find ways to collaborate to change the laws and implement them (see the text box for a few examples of key policies that could make a difference). ++++++++++++++++ Key Policy Changes Needed for Tax Justice 1. Beneficial ownership in the US Over two million corporations, LLCs, and other business entities are formed in the United States every yearand almost every state collects less identifying information from the individuals forming these entities than from people applying for a driver's license or registering to vote. Indeed, many states rank among the easiest places in the world in which to form "anonymous shell companies" or "phantom firms" - business entities that exist solely on paper with no obligation to list the real people who actually own or control them, otherwise known as the "beneficial owners." If they remain hidden, it is not possible to find and to tax the assets, whether they come from drug dealing or simply from rich people trying to avoid paying taxes. Relevant federal legislation proposed: The Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act (S. 2489 and H.R. 4450) 2. Public Country-by-Country Reporting Currently, multinationals are able to exploit loopholes in domestic and international tax laws to shift profits from one country to the next, often through tax havens (or "secrecy jurisdictions"), with the end goal of reducing or even eliminating the tax they pay to governments. Without leaks and whistleblowers, even governments only see a small window into the inner workings of companies, which makes proving tax avoidance or evasion nearly impossible. Although MNCs report on their profits, revenue, taxes paid, and number of employees, the global numbers they provide are for the operations of all of their subsidiaries bundled together. Multinational corporations should be required to submit individual reports with basic financial information such as revenue, profits, taxes, and number of employees for each jurisdiction in which they operate. These country by country reports should be made available to the public. Public country-by-country reporting strengthens the financial system for everyone. New regulations on country-by-country reporting by corporations were issued this year by the Treasury and the IRS, and are also under consideration by the Security and Exchange Commission. However, these do not yet meet the standard of public disclosure demanded by tax justice advocates. 3. Financial Transaction (Robin Hood) Tax Simply put, the big idea behind the Robin Hood Tax is to generate hundreds of billions of dollars, through a small tax of 0.5% on all financial transactions such as sales of stocks and bonds. That money could provide funding for jobs to kickstart the economy and get America back on its feet. It could help save the social safety net here and around the world, and it will come from fair taxation of the finance sector. The revenue raised would be enough to protect American schools, housing, local governments and hospitals, to pay for lifesaving AIDS medicines, to support people and communities around the world, and to deal with the climate challenges we're facing. Relevant federal legislation proposed: The Inclusive Prosperity Act (H.R. 1464), introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Keith Ellison and 36 co-sponsors and in the Senate (S. 1371) by Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 1 co-sponsor. +++++++++++ Action at the federal level can have the widest effect, given the size of the U. S. economy and the impact of U.S. policy on international action. But given that corporations are registered at the state level and also pay corporate taxes at the state level, states also have the capacity to take the lead and set a precedent for national action. If the political will and the technical legal and financial expertise are available, similar laws could possibly even be implemented at city levels, as were divestment measures in the anti-apartheid era. Solidarity between #BlackLivesMatter and #StoptheBleedingAfrica is crucial. Via weak corporate tax law, the U.S. gives license to corporations to hoard profits and withhold their fair share of taxes from the societies and countries which allow them to become prosperous. By standing in opposition to tax injustice, activists can push back against an aspect of U.S. capitalism that contributes to increasing wealth inequality. By staying informed, building relationships, and working in solidarity, we begin to create better conditions for Black lives across the globe. Incremental policy change will not be enough. We must confront the legacy of centuries of systemic injustice and end society's denial that this past still shapes the present. The violent inequality of today's world is not new, despite dramatic changes in the technologies of both physical and economic violence. Making that violence visible also requires making full use of new technologies, from cellphone videos to big-data journalism. But above all, it depends on forging links between activists engaged on these different fronts in different places, who together can build the political will to act and thus make new futures possible. For More Information Africa-specific Tax Justice Network - Africa

http://www.taxjusticeafrica.net/en/blog/ AfricaFocus Bulletin

http://www.africafocus.org/intro-iff.php US-Africa Network

https://usafricanetwork.org/home/issues/stop-the-bleeding-africa/ USA and Global FACT (Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency) Coalition

https://thefactcoalition.org/blog/ ActionAid International

http://www.actionaid.org/tax-power Global Alliance for Tax Justice

http://www.globaltaxjustice.org/en/resources Tax Justice Network

http://www.taxjustice.net/reports-2/ AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter. AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin, or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see http://www.africafocus.org
There is more to the visit than it meets the eye says political analysts.



Women and Children Welfare Minister Pankaja Mundes visit to JJ hospital for meeting former Deputy Chief Minister and Senior NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal has raised speculations in political circles about whether there would be a consolidation of Other Backward Caste outfits to counter the protests held by Maratha community. Even though Munde had met Bhujbal to inquire about his health political analysts are terming it as political visit. She had visited Bhujbal prior to leaving for her scheduled tour on Mokhada in Palghar where large number of tribal children had died due to malnutrition. Their meeting lasted for 10 to 15 minutes.

Both Pankaja and Bhujbal belong to Vanjari and Mali communities which are included under the Other Backward castes (OBC) category. Pankajas father late Gopinath Munde had championed the cause of OBCs in the state. He also was known as a trouble shooter who could broker peace between various outfits and bring them on a single platform. Both Munde and Bhujbal had come together on a common platform to fight for the rights of OBCs despite political differences.

According to political analysts, The protests held by Marathas across the state has worried OBCs as they are feeling sidelined. The meeting between Pankaja and Bhujbal may pave way for the coming together of OBCs in the state. There is more to this visit as it can be termed as a political meeting between two leaders.

Maratha activists have been demanding reservation for people belonging to their community. If Marathas are granted reservation in the OBC category then it will shrink job opportunities of the latter. Therefore OBC leaders are keen to indulge in a show of strength to bargain for their rights, they added.

Right now even Pankaja Munde is being sidelined by senior BJP leaders in the state. The Chikki scam and tribal children death incident had further dented her image. Through this meet she wants to project herself as the powerful OBC leader in the saffron party. After Khadses resignation OBC leaders are worried.

Munde must have realised about the injustice done to Bhujbal. She should now convince the CM and help in getting the OBC leader bail, said NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik.

Bhujbal has been lodged in Arthur Road jail in the city since March this year after the ED arrested him in Maharashtra Sadan scam and other cases. He was admitted to J J Hospital from Arthur road jail, as he complained of high fever, diabetes and blood Pressure. A team of J J Hospital examined Bhujbal in the jail, and advised to admit in the hospital.
A bill has been introduced in the US Congress describing Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, even as members of the US Congress come down heavily on Sundays cross-border terror attack on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

The bill, HR 6069 or the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act, enjoins the US administration to make a formal call on the matter within four months of its passage.

Congressman Ted Poe (Republican), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (Republican) on Tuesday introduced the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act.

Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the United States for years, Poe said in a statement.

From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And its not Americas, he said.

According to Poe, the bill will require the US President Barack Obamas administration to formally answer this question.

The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, the Congressman said.

Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is state sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation.

Poe said it was time the US stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism.

In a separate statement, Poe described the attack as the deadliest assault in Kashmir in over two decades.

It is a reminder to democracies the world over that terrorism seeks to destroy peace loving societies everywhere, Poe said in a statement.

Stating that though it was not clear which terrorist group was behind the attack, he said one things was certain: This is just the latest consequence of Pakistans longstanding irresponsible policy of supporting and providing operational space for all stripes of jihadi terrorist groups. Pakistans reckless behavior in this regard is a serious security risk to its neighbors  and India unfortunately pays the price all too often.

Condemning the attack, as well as Pakistans support for many criminals like the ones who carried it out, Poe said that the US stood firm in its commitment to our friends in India.

A threat to democracy in India is a threat to democracy everywhere. And thats just the way it is, he said

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group for the early morning attack on the sleeping soldiers. All the four attackers were killed.

Though the JeM is yet to claim responsibility for the attack, it had admitted to its role in the cross-border attack on the Pathankot Indian Air Force base on January 2 this year that left seven Indian security personnel dead.
Nowadays earthquake is occurring at regular intervals in almost every part of the world. Each year some region has to face the horrific face of destruction due to earthquake. Especially, in the last eight to ten years, the increase in seismic events is a big concern for the whole world and living beings. If we observe the statistics of last ten years i.e., from 2006 to 2015, we find that our earth has faced 392 big earthquakes in this particular period of time. All these are those big earthquakes which are measured between 6.5 to 9.0+ magnitude on the Richter scale. According to scientists, earthquakes of 6.5 to 9.0+ magnitude are undoubtedly capable to bring big destructions. In this case also the graph of 2016 looks very close and similar as compared to the last 10 years. The earth shook 30 times till now this year. But the shocking fact is that among these 30 earthquakes, 10 have occurred only in month of April.

On April 25 last year Nepal was hit by a devastating earthquake. Few months back South American country Ecuador had witnessed earthquake and recently New Zealand was affected through this calamity which is enough to tell us that in future if similar incidents occur then it will certainly be catastrophic for us. Primarily, to India and Himalayas, many geologists around the world on a number of occasions have predicted about the chances of higher magnitude seism in the Himalayan region. In this regard, not only Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir but also highly populated states of our country like Bihar and Delhi including neighbour countries like Nepal and Bhutan are in the danger zone. According to archaeologists, Himalayan region is still moving. There is always a collision between the plates under this region. One plate pushes the another and if a plate goes up than second one have to go down. It is a natural process. These stirs in Himalayas become the reason for landslide and earthquakes. Archaeologists also believe that Indian subcontinent is moving towards rest of Asia at a rate of two centimeter per year. The inner terrain of central Himalayan area cannot afford pressure of more than 13 centimetres. Therefore, the energy consumed due to the pressure within the earth is now ready to come out bitterly and which can cause earthquake of about 9.0 magnitude at any time in Indian subcontinent and Himalayas. Seism witnessed last year in Nepal has proved this prediction right to some extent. But the question is, are we ready for that day when we again will see the holocaust similar to the one that occurred in Nepal? Is the technique of our disaster management so strong and developed that these earthquakes could be dealt in shortest time?

Nepal is smaller and backward country as compared to India. In such situation if the nation lacked enough resources to deal with the seism, then it is understandable. But if such calamity occurs in India and if we remain unprepared for it then there will be more causalities. Prior to 1991 and 2001 we have suffered big disaster precipitated by seism in Uttarkashi and Gujarat. But now we must wake up from sleep before it is too late. People need to remain alert during earthquake for rescuing their lives. Although we cant put brake on disasters like earthquakes but its effects can be reduced. We just need to remain alert about it and create awareness among others.

Vivekanand V. Vimarya

(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
A mentally disturbed Turkish man wielding a knife tried to storm the Israeli embassy in Ankara on Wednesday but was shot before reaching the building, Turkish and Israeli officials said.

The man, armed with a 30-centimetre (12-inch) knife, ran towards the embassy shouting slogans and was shot in the leg, the governors office in the Turkish capital said in a statement.

It said initial investigations showed that the man, named as Osman Nuri Caliskan, appeared to be mentally disturbed and had no record of links with any militant group.

Suat Gencer, a florist working nearby, said he heard four shots and then ran to the embassy to see what had happened.

I saw a man who had been shot in the leg. I didnt see a knife but other witnesses said he had a knife and he would set a bomb off, he told at the scene.

Israels foreign ministry said the assailant was shot by a local guard and that all its embassy staff were safe.

The assailant was wounded in the foot. We dont know if he was attacking police officers or the embassy itself, foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in a statement.

He added that the man reached the outer perimeter of the embassy and investigations were ongoing.
Two US supersonic bombers flew over South Korea on Wednesday, with one of them landing at an air base 40 km (25 miles) south of the capital, the second such flight since North Koreas September 9 nuclear test.

US Forces Korea said in a statement the flight by a pair of B-1B Lancer strategic bombers based in Guam was a show of force and of U.S. commitment to preserve the security of the peninsula and the region.

The United States, which has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, flew two B-1 bombers on September 13 escorted by US and South Korean fighter jets in a show of solidarity with Seoul.

The North condemned the earlier flight as an armed provocation that mobilized ill-famed nuclear killing tools. It did not immediately respond to Wednesdays flight.

North Korea has ignored global condemnation since conducting its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, and this week said it had successfully tested a new rocket engine that would be used to launch satellites, again in violation of U.N. sanctions.

The leaders of the United States and China, which is the North`s main diplomatically and economic benefactor, condemned the latest nuclear test and pledged to step up cooperation at the United Nations and in law enforcement channels.

UN diplomats say the two countries have begun discussions on a possible U.N. resolution in response to the latest nuclear test, but China has not said directly whether it would support tougher steps against North Korea.
In 1914, the Great War broke out in Europe.

Soon, the entire world was enveloped in the conflict in one way or another. In 2014, Chiles Museo Historico Nacional (National History Museum) and the Instituto de Geografia of the Universidad Catolica de Chile staged an exhibition marking the 100th anniversary 
Turkey Accuses Kurdish YPG of Crimes At UN

Turkey called on the United Nations on Monday to investigate crimes of ethnic cleansing it alleges Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) had committed in Syria. Permanent Representative of the Mission of Turkey to the UN in Geneva Mehmet Ferden Carikci gave a speech at a UN Human Rights Council meeting, according to the Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency. The Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria Paulo S
September 21, 2016

On Sept. 3, the Egyptian armed forces issued a statement announcing their intention to import the first shipment of baby formula, just one day after citizens cut off the road to protest the shortage of fortified baby formula. On Sept. 19, the first shipments arrived from France.

In his statement, the military spokesman warned citizens of being misled by rumors, saying, Citizens must realize that the armed forces exert all efforts to ease the burden on ordinary citizens.

This stirred a campaign of sarcasm and mockery on social networking sites criticizing the armys repeated intervention in civil life sectors, including the education sector through Badr International Schools (BIS).

On its official website, BIS identifies itself as one of the goals that the Egyptian armed forces has had for years now, and that is finally being implemented successfully by the primary decision-maker and supervisor himself, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The website adds, We proudly follow the Egyptian armed forces code of conduct in order to pave the smoothest educational ways for each of our students.

The Third Field Army Command has been involved in the schools management to the extent that the Third Army commander himself is referred to as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of BIS on the schools Facebook page.

Several photos were also posted on BIS Facebook page showing the visit of Fayza Abul Naga, Egypt's national security adviser to Sisi, in the company of a number of military leaders. The Ministry of Education had issued a decision in June 2016 to stop accepting new applications for licenses to establish international schools, a decision that must be analyzed in regard to the armys intervention in the field of private education.

The successive news about the armys economic intervention in civilian life was met with broad dissatisfaction in the streets and on social media, which reached the point of mocking the military institution.

Gamal Eid, the director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, said on Twitter, Since the army is carrying out an economic activity that relates to the community and not to military soldiers, it shall be criticized like any economic player, and when an army rules at the political level, it shall be criticized as a ruler.

The Institute of Arab Studies published a research paper in which it indicated that the armys economic expansion strategy is based on securing market shares and does not aim to dominate the economys sectors. The paper noted that the original motive behind the armys creation of a parallel civilian economy is the need to provide the necessary logistics for the armys large staff so as to continuously meet investments and consumer needs.

The researchers concluded that the problem lies in securing the economic rent and not competition in production. Even if the army does not have the ability to dominate as an economic player, it enjoys a broad and unique fundamental influence represented by the regulatory and legal powers conferred to it in terms of public land planning, allocation and management.

This is the main problem in the army's involvement in economic activities, because this influence affects the growth capacity of the private sector and the economy as a whole. The army uses its legal powers and its control of public lands, especially desert lands, to generate various forms of economic rent.

Last year the economic scope of the army expanded in a number of sectors, most notably the government contracting sector, through the assignment of business management to authorities or companies affiliated with the army.

The armed forces are also working in various other fields such as health, energy, education, roads and bridges, and a number of commercial projects related to food, fish farming and the production of air conditioners.

The armed forces have a number of legislative and political advantages. In April 2012, the Egyptian parliament approved amendments to the Code of Military Justice issued under No. 25 of 1966 granting the military courts exclusive jurisdiction to examine illicit gain action against armed forces officers. It should be noted that numerous army facilities are exempted from taxes by virtue of decisions issued by the Ministry of Defense.

On the other hand, most governors in Egypt are retired army officers, and numerous private sector companies and other large public institutions employ retired major generals. More than 80 major generals, including those who retired from the police service, are members of the Egyptian parliament.

The armys intervention stirred a notable wave of anger in Egypts streets. Yet following the departure of Minister of Civil Supply Khaled Hanafy from the ministry in the wake of a corruption scandal related to wheat silos, a retired army general who was responsible for the supply department of the military was appointed in his place on Sept. 7.

In November 2015, Transparency International gave Egypt a grade of F in its Government Defense Anti-Corruption Index. According to the organizations website, this index assesses the existence, effectiveness and enforcement of institutional and informal controls to manage the risk of corruption in defense and security institutions.

Transparency International indicated that the defense sectors involvement in the private sector leads to the risk of corruption in a number of countries in the region, including Egypt, Iran and Yemen, since the profits reaped by the Defense Forces (or their members) are rarely known, which is exacerbated in light of no available details on defense spending.

It also noted that the lack of transparency in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Qatar, Syria, Yemen and Jordan allows senior staff in defense institutions to reap large benefits from the private business sector.

It noted that the Egyptian armed forces since 1979 was allowed by law to have commercial bank accounts and their budget is independent of the rest of the government.

This comes following fears of diminished oversight, after Sisi issued a decree in March 2016 relieving Hisham Geneina of his post as head of the Central Auditing Organization, the largest state watchdog agency.
September 20, 2016

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  The parents of many students of Al-Razi Primary School for Girls in Rafah province were surprised on the first day of school on Aug. 28 to see that their daughters' names were missing from the schools enrollment lists. The director of the school, which is affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, suggested they go to the UNRWA-affiliated Rafah Elementary C Boys School to see if they had been transferred there. They found the students registered at the boys' school, where each class had grown to include around 30 boys and between five and 10 girls.

Later that day, the parents staged a sit-in at the school to protest the decision to move the girls without their knowledge and to the mixing of the genders.

Adding insult to injury, the school's administration could not give clear reasons why some female students were transferred to an all-boys school, saying only that it's trying to end the double-shift system currently operating in 94% of UNRWA schools for refugees. The same building in Rafah accommodates two schools  al-Razi primary school and Rafah elementary school  operating on double shifts: one full school day in the morning and another for different students in the evening.

The father of one of the 250 students who were transferred, Abdel Menhem Zaareb, told Al-Monitor, I registered my daughter in first grade in 2015 at Al-Razi Primary School for Girls, and I did not see this coming. Students are normally promoted to the next class in the same school.

He added, On the first day of school, I went with my daughter and was surprised that she had been transferred to a mixed school. I rejected this, and I staged a sit-in in Al-Razi's playground.

Zaareb was soon joined by the parents of 120 other transferred students. They voiced their objection and threatened to shut down the school if their daughters were not restored to its records.

Although the girls who were transferred were in the first and second grades, parents reject mixing students at any grade level. Zaareb said, Nobody has the right to transfer a student without informing their parents and getting their approval. Even if the UNRWA has the authority to move students, it has to contact the parents first and respect their decision not to mix girls and boys in the same classroom. Parents must be given the choice to transfer their children or not enroll them at school.

Zaareb explained the transfer, saying, The UNRWA announced that it was seeking to eliminate the double-shift system for schools in Rafah province [and in doing so], all primary schools would become mixed.

He was surprised that the idea could not be implemented without mixing girls and boys, and he added that he prefers that his daughter study at an all-girls school with the double-shift system rather than at a mixed school with one schedule. Only 6% of UNRWA schools in Gaza operate in a single shift, as two shifts are needed to serve the overpopulated districts.

Zaareb told Al-Monitor that a week later, on Sept. 4, the UNRWA gave in to the pressure from the parents sit-in and submitted a proposal under which any parent objecting to the transfer should petition the UNRWA education directorate in Rafah and give reasons for the objection. The requests would be examined and responded to as soon as possible, yet there would be no guarantees that the students would be transferred back.

Zaareb added, The UNRWA approved my request on Sept. 13 and I returned my daughters file to her school. The same worked for 30 other students.

Nidal Abu Nuqeira, the father of another transferred student, told Al-Monitor, They chose the students whose parents do not have any connections at school. He denied the directors claim that the transfer affected the girls who were late to register, saying that he had registered his daughter on the second day of registration.

Abu Nuqeiras daughter is still at home, as her father refuses to enroll her in a mixed school and awaits the directorates approval of his request. He said, My daughter is devastated, and every day she asks me to allow her to go to school. They took away her happiness about enrolling in school for the first time.

Al-Monitor tried to contact the UNRWA for comment, but there was no response.

More than 70% of government schools in Gaza also operate on the double-shift system because of the lack of schools.

Also on Aug. 28, the parents of the students at the government-run Jarar al-Qudwa school in al-Mawassi in Khan Yunis protested that schools decision to mix boys and girls in the same classroom and eliminate the double-shift system. Previously, female students and staff had attended the morning courses, while the male students and staff attended in the evening. Like elsewhere, the double-shift system was a way to get double service out of the sparse schools in the area.

The parents, who staged a protest in front of the school, asked the government to build another school. Young female students held banners reading, We want gender segregation at school. Parents also expressed their concern that their children would interact between the two shifts.

The protest angered many citizens who accused the parents of backward thinking and complained that girls of this age should not be fed such ideas. Activists spoke out, saying that gender separation should not reach the point where people are concerned about boys and girls sharing a bench or using the same entrance at school.

The general director of international and public relations at the Ministry of Education in Gaza, Motasem al-Minawi, denied that the ministry had received complaints about mixed-gender schools and asserted that any complaint would be addressed immediately.

Journalist Khouloud Nassar posted on Facebook Aug. 28, How can a little girl who does not know anything about life hold a banner demanding the separation of boys and girls? She accused the campaign organizers of exploiting and isolating the children.

Walid Chbeir, a lecturer in the Social Service Department at the Islamic University, asserted that there is no problem with mixing students at this age. He asserted that emotions and sexual urges awaken at a later stage. Chbeir told Al-Monitor he was surprised with the campaign and asserted that workshops and forums must be held to raise awareness among parents about the advantages of mixing genders at an early age.

Back in 2013, the Ministry of Education in Gaza issued new rules forbidding men from teaching at girls schools and assigning girls and boys to separate classes at the age of 9. Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip is somewhat isolated from the outside world under 10 years of Hamas influence, values and principles, which limit mixing genders and segregate them wherever possible.
September 20, 2016

Iranian authorities appear to be stepping up their crackdown on media workers amid President Hassan Rouhanis just-concluded tour of Latin America and his arrival in the United States to address the UN General Assemblys annual meeting. On Monday, reports surfaced of the arrest of Sadra Mohaghegh, the society editor of the Reformist Shargh Daily. His sudden detention has caused an outcry among journalists, activists and Iranian netizens, who have turned Mohagheghs name into a hashtag  especially after Mohagheghs Twitter account was taken down on Tuesday for unknown reasons.

According to Basij News, Mohaghegh was arrested during an intelligence operation by security forces, without specifying which agency was responsible for his arrest. Media reports accuse him of having collaborated with "counter-revolutionary" foreign media. The detention comes only days after the arrest of another Iranian journalist, Yashar Soltani, who is in charge of Memari News, a website that focuses on urban news and architecture.

The two arrests appear to be related. Mohaghegh and Soltani had both recently published a set of declassified reports involving Irans General Inspection Office, an organization linked to the Judiciary. The reports focused on the transfer of property held by the Tehran Municipality to a number of cooperatives and select managers below market value.

Soltanis lawyer announced on Saturday that the plaintiffs against Memari News, which broke the story of the property deals, are Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Tehran City Council Chairman Mehdi Chamran. Soltani was reportedly imprisoned for not being able to provide a $57,000 bail.

According to his lawyer, Soltani faces judicial action over three complaints. The first complaint is related to the news of Ghalibafs daughters wedding, which took place in Lavizan Park. The second complaint is connected to the news published on the activities of Chamrans son and his involvement with a renovation company, and the third and final complaint is related to the published news of the mayors office and the release of the housing estate transfer list.

The reports of corruption involving Ghalibafs office come at a time when the Rouhani administration is under heavy fire for complying with the guidelines of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental body established to promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering. Collaboration with FATF is a priority for the Rouhani administration, which is keen on normalizing banking relations with the world. In this vein, the refusal by two Iranian banks to provide services to a blacklisted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked entity has sparked furor among conservatives, who charge that FATF is compelling the imposition of internal sanctions.

Sept. 20 was also marked by reports of the sentencing of Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen and US permanent resident who was imprisoned last September. According to his US-based lawyer, Zakka has been sentenced to 10 years over spying allegations. The verdict was reportedly handed down by Tehrans Revolutionary Court and notably coincides with Rouhanis two-day visit to New York.

Zakka was arrested while on his way to the airport to leave the country after participating in the 2nd International Conference & Exhibition on Women in Sustainable Development, which he received an official invitation to attend. The Lebanese businessman is an advocate for internet freedom and heads a nonprofit group that has worked with the US government. The secrecy and lack of information surrounding Zakkas arrest last year led to countless speculation in local media.

So far, the news of Zakkas verdict has not made it into Iranian media  most likely because Sept. 20 is Eid al-Ghadir, a national holiday.
September 21, 2016

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in New York on Sept. 20 for his fourth  and perhaps last  address to the UN General Assembly as president of Iran. At home, expectations are high about his speech, conduct, improvement of economic ties and management of tensions with Arab states.

In an editorial published Sept. 20, Javan  a media outlet close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)  wrote that as opposed to the three previous years, domestic media has this year not paid much attention to Rouhanis visit to New York, concluding that the trip has become trivial as Iranians have lost hope for improving relations with the United States.

In the opposite camp, Sadegh Zibakalam  an outspoken professor at Tehran University known for his critical views on Irans regional policies  published an open letter on his website Sept. 21 addressed to Rouhani.

In the letter, Zibakalam acknowledges the complex position Rouhani finds himself in and asks the president not to buy into the harsh tone of others when they talk of intimidation and clash of civilizations  an apparent reference to both domestic and regional critics of the Iranian government.

While Zibakalam calls on the Iranian president to refrain from voicing threats, humiliation, insults, hatred and death on the UN tribune at a time when regional tensions are piling up, he adds, I do not think I exaggerate when I say that the animosity between Sunnis and Shiites is at a historical high level, since the establishment of Safavid Shiism became the official religion of Iran 500 years ago. In this vein, Zibakalam also urges Rouhani to be polite and respectful when addressing the Arabs" but perhaps most importantly the Westerners  especially the Americans and even the Israelis.

This is far from the first time Zibakalam has urged the Rouhani administration to build on the current limited dialogue between the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the US State Department. He often publicly advocates the expansion of US-Iran dialogue beyond the framework of the nuclear deal and to include the United States in solutions to regional issues.

In contrast, Javans editorial echoed the domestic opposition to the nuclear deal voiced primarily by conservatives, and also skepticism about any negotiations with the West, thus expecting Rouhani to be tough on the United States in his address to the UN General Assembly.

Supporters of the Rouhani administration anticipate not only the maintenance of the current dialogue with the United States, but also an improvement of economic ties with Europe  especially as many Iranians have yet to see the dividends of the economic opening Rouhani promised with the signing of the nuclear deal.

Despite his defiant words, Zibakalam is seen as one of the most prominent supporters of Rouhani. Indeed, he ends his open letter to the president by saying, For the sake of prosperity and long-term national interests of the country, seek friendship instead of boasting of power. Moreover, effectively urging Rouhani to press ahead with his agenda of opening up to the world without looking in the rearview mirror, Zibakalam ends his letter by bluntly stating, They [Rouhanis domestic opponents] will never forgive you for ratifying the bill to counter money laundering [Financial Action Task Force guidelines], encouraging Westerners to invest in the country, attempting detente with the West and the United States and normalizing Iran's relations with the world.

In an apparent breakthrough  and perhaps a great victory for Rouhani  Airbus and Boeing announced Sept. 21 that the US government had provided licenses for the sale of jetliners to Iran. In January, Iran had announced a deal to acquire 114 aircraft from Airbus, but the deal had stalled amid a lack of response from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, which must license sales of planes containing US components. Iran Air and Boeing had also signed a memorandum of understanding in June on sales of more than 100 planes.
September 20, 2016

TEHRAN, Iran  You must understand that they [Iranians] are not Muslims, they are sons of Magi [Zoroastrians], and their hostility toward Muslims, especially the Sunnis, is an old one. These are the words of the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, delivered Sept. 6. The unprecedented remarks are said to have been a response to the hajj message the Iranian supreme leader released the preceding day. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had stated, Saudi officials are trying to cover up their enmity and hatred of the faithful and revolutionary people of Iran by talking about politicization of the hajj. They are small and pitiful devils who are very afraid of jeopardizing the interests of the big Satan, the United States.

Although Iranian President Hassan Rouhani came to power in 2013 with the promise of easing tensions between Iran and other countries in the region, what is currently taking place between Tehran and Riyadh cannot in any way be considered a de-escalation. In his first press conference after being elected, Rouhani emphasized that Iran and Saudi Arabia are neighbors and brothers and therefore should forge closer relations. This ideal scenario remains an ideal. Exchanges between Iran and Saudi Arabia show that far from brotherly relations, the two sides openly consider the other the enemy.

The regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia is at a point where the two countries no longer even enjoy diplomatic relations. The immediate incident leading to this point was the January execution of the Saudi Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and the subsequent attacks on Saudi diplomatic facilities by Iranian protesters. Other contributing factors include last year's hajj stampede, which left hundreds of Iranians dead, the sexual molestation of two Iranian youths while on the same pilgrimage and the Saudis' military intervention in Yemen.

Al-Monitor spoke with Javid Ghorban-Oghli, former director general of Middle East affairs at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, about these tensions. The root of this conflict is the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Ghorban-Oghli said. This process began after the [2003] downfall of Saddam Hussein and the regional imbalance that it created. The rivalry started between Iran and Riyadh in their neighboring regions, and after the Arab Spring, the rivalry transferred to Syria, and it intensified.

Ghorban-Oghli believes it is not helpful to try to determine which side is perhaps more responsible for escalating tensions. We will not achieve anything by trying to look for the guilty party, he said. We should look for a win-win pattern of engagement similar to what was used during the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1. When a house is burning, we should first try to put out the fire and then look for the responsible person.

Saudi arms purchases have recently dramatically increased. According to an estimate by the firm IHS, Riyadh planned last year to buy defense equipment worth close to $10 billion, a whopping 42% increase compared to 2014 purchases. One of the reasons for the increase is the kingdom's military intervention in Yemen, but given the staggering size of the increase, is it conceivable that Saudi officials have another possible military conflict on their minds, that is, one with Iran?

No Iranian officials, including military commanders, have publicly broached the idea or possibility of armed conflict with Saudi Arabia. The closest to such a statement was a rare warning, on June 20, by Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of external operations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to the Saudi-allied rulers of Bahrain. Soleimani said, The supporters of Al Khalifa should know that insulting Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim and the continuation of pressure on the people of Bahrain is the beginning of a bloody uprising, the consequences of which will be the responsibility of those who legitimize the arrogance of the rulers of Bahrain. This message, Soleimanis harshest to a neighbor to date, implicitly targeted Saudi Arabia in light of Riyadh having dispatched troops to crush Arab Spring protests in Bahrain.

Earlier, on April 5, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the IRGC, had asserted, The IRGCs answer regarding Saudi audacity in Bahrain is awaiting an order. The most recent comments regarding this issue were made by Ali Fadavi, commander of the IRGCs naval operations. On July 16, Fadavi rejected the idea of enmity between Iran and Saudi Arabia, saying that it was the enemys plan to pretend as if Iran now considered Saudi Arabia, rather than the United States, as its main adversary. Fadavi also emphasized, however, that if necessary, Iran could deliver irreparable blows to the Saudis.

Nosratollah Tajik, Iran's former ambassador to Jordan, told Al-Monitor, As far as domestic affairs are concerned, especially given the generational gaps and new demands, the Saudi government is walking on a minefield. Iran should plan for an active and influential foreign policy by avoiding policies driven by slogans and adopting a coherent, comprehensive and intelligent strategy.

There is, of course, the question of whether war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a credible possibility. In this regard, Ghorban-Oghli said, I hope that this is not the case, and I hope that wise people on both sides will step forward and prevent a war from taking place. He added, It is probably better if a mediator manages the [dialogue] process. We should remember that these tensions neither benefit Iran nor Saudi Arabia, only arms dealers, and more so, Israel.

At a meeting at the Center for International Research and Education of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sept. 13, Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, former commander of the IRGC (1997-2007) and now special adviser to Khamenei, said, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States are aware of Iran's geopolitical importance. They want to create tension in order to diminish our successes in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. We should avoid tension as best we can. I also suggest that Iran expand its relations with Oman, Kuwait and even Qatar. We should additionally exercise patience regarding the Saudis. We should not, under any circumstances, look for more tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
September 21, 2016

BAGHDAD  Although the Islamic State (IS) lost 50% of the territory it had taken control of since June 10, 2014, some of the groups members who are still at large have succeeded in launching occasional attacks on security units in the country. Most recently, on Sept. 15, IS launched an attack targeting the Ajeel oil field, east of the city of Tikrit in Salahuddin province.

It seems the Iraqi security units and forces supporting them have not completely cleansed the areas that have been under the control of IS for the past two years, since their liberation. There are still some IS enclaves leading occasional surprise attacks against government forces in control of the liberated areas.

The attack on the Ajeel oil field  which the security forces regained control of on April 16  points to an organized movement of IS fighters in the city of Salahuddin that was liberated more than a year ago. Also, these IS fighters  whose numbers are unknown  used heavy weapons in the attack, which shows that there may be arms storage sites that the Iraqi government forces have yet to find.

On Sept. 13, IS fighters tried to infiltrate Ramadi city, the center of Anbar province, but Iraqi security forces managed to stop them. Anbar police chief Maj. Gen. Hadi Razij said during a press conference on the same day, The joint operations room is preparing a plan [to be implemented] by all security units in Anbar. The Anbar police will participate in the liberation of Ramadi, as well as al-Qaim, Anah and Rawa.

Razij continued, It is well-known that the Rutbah district in Anbar province is surrounded by deserts, open spaces and valleys, and some [IS] cells are concentrated in these areas. These fighters are facing our forces that are present in Rutbah city and its surroundings, but the security forces are able to confront them.

For his part, Iskandar Watout, a member of the security and defense parliamentary committee, told Al-Monitor, IS is seeking to destabilize the situation in the liberated areas by attacking the security units. But the failure of these attacks has proved that IS is no longer able to withstand in the face of any military operation launched against it.

He added, IS sought to find enclaves in the areas it lost to destabilize the Iraqi military units and alleviate [some of the burden] its members are suffering in military operations that are ongoing in other areas close to Mosul.

On June 17, Haider al-Abadi, the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi armed forces, announced the liberation of the Fallujah district in Anbar, confirming that IS is no longer [back then] in control of Fallujah. The province has been completely liberated except for some small enclaves. Abadis statement proves that following its liberation, Fallujah was not the only area where IS had established enclaves and cells.

On Sept. 6, IS launched a suicide fighting attack against the Iraqi National Border Guard headquarters in Rutbah district, using Katyusha rockets. On the same day, the Emergency Response Unit repelled an IS attack against the Kilo 110 area in the eastern desert of Anbar.

Security expert Omar al-Hamdani, who served in the former Iraqi army prior to 2003, said IS cells are present in the liberated areas, as the group took advantage of the presence of Iraqs security forces in the liberated cities centers and in government buildings and headquarters, to deploy its members in the outskirts of these cities.

He told Al-Monitor, The Iraqi security forces need to come up with a cleansing plan regarding the remaining IS enclaves in the liberated areas before the organization reshuffles its cards and gains the support of the people [present in the liberated areas] who are not on good terms with the government forces given the behavior of some security members.

In Anbar province, IS is taking advantage of the large desert areas to establish its enclaves, through which it can lead attacks against the security forces or civilian areas in the liberated regions.

The Iraqi security forces, which are concerned by this situation, launched a crackdown campaign against IS enclaves in Qayyarah, in Ninevah province, with the aim of completely cleansing the district. But this campaign requires major military and intelligence efforts on the part of security forces, according to security expert Imad Alo.

Alo told Al-Monitor, IS is taking advantage of the deserts and outskirts of cities in the liberated areas to launch its attacks against the Iraqi security forces. IS is depending on its cells and enclaves present in the areas where it lost control to launch military attacks aiming at weakening the Iraqi security units.

As IS continues to attack the Iraqi security forces, it seems IS members are still moving semi-normally in the liberated areas. The attacks also prove that communication channels used by IS with members in the cities that are still under its control continue to operate.

IS enclaves and cells will keep raising the concerns of the Iraqi security forces as long as military operations do not target the cities outskirts, where it seems IS is concentrated.
September 20, 2016

A religious and political dispute continues to brew in Jordan over a controversial move by the Ministry of Education to revamp the curricula of the three elementary grades. According to Deputy Prime Minister Jawad Anani, the changes are part of the government's strategy to combat extremism in society.

Changes to school textbooks introduced this year involve coverage of Islam, history, Arabic and civics. For example, in civics, reference is made to acknowledge Christians as a demographic component of the population with pictures of churches as well as mosques. In religion, entire verses from the Quran and sayings by the Prophet Muhammad have been removed, while in Arabic literature, a picture of a veiled woman was replaced with one showing an unveiled woman. In Arabic-language textbooks for the third grade, a Quranic verse was replaced by a text on swimming. No changes were made to books on the sciences, mathematics and art.

The issue of extremism in the school curricula and the reforms proposed are dividing the country. Conservatives, including the Muslim Brotherhoods Islamic Action Front (IAF), which contested the Sept. 20 Lower House elections, have denounced the move as an affront to our heritage and values aimed at distancing future generations from its religion, its Arab identity, its history and traditions. An IAF spokesman urged the government to cancel negative alterations and focus on genuine scientific developments introduced by Jordanian academics.

The uproar has drawn in various sectors of society. On Sept. 18, the Jordan Medical Association, whose council is almost entirely controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, issued a statement cautioning the government about tampering with curricula that affect the societys Arab and Muslim values. It also said, We warn the government of those who have [a] hidden, outside agenda against the country.

Education Minister Mohammad Thuneibat has defended the changes. He told the daily al-Ghad on Aug. 18, Reforming school curricula and books is the result of a joint effort by specialized teachers and academics, including university professors. On Sept. 11, however, it appeared that Thuneibat might be re-evaluating the situation somewhat, requesting that the head of curricula at the ministry provide a detailed report on the alterations that had been made. The report has not been made public. In an interview with Al-Monitor, Thuneibat continued to defend the changes.

[Those who made] rash judgments should consider that the new books aim at developing thought and analytical skills and avoid filling the heads of students with raw information, Thuneibat said.

He also attacked critics who want to politicize the issue and misinform the public, stating, We want to reform our education system, which has produced thousands of students who do not know how to read or write.

According to Thuneibat, the new books, which were introduced in the public and private school systems, will instill the values of human rights and respect for women and children, pointing out that they do not contradict Islamic values. Is religion only about growing a beard or covering a womans head? he asked.

Education reform in Jordan has found a champion in Queen Rania, who on Sept. 5 delivered a scathing critique of the kingdoms education system. She remarked that in 2015, 100,000 students entered 12th grade, but only 60,000 of them sat for the secondary certificate exam, and among those only 40% passed. She also noted that Jordan lags behind in education in comparison to other developing countries and said that education reform should be a national priority.

One critic of the present system is Thogan Obeidat, who supervised the curriculum while at the Education Council from 1991 to 1998. In a July 1 al-Ghad article, he claimed, Daesh [Islamic State] can easily manipulate our books and curricula to influence students, suggestive of religious references and Quranic verses creeping into subjects unrelated to religion. Our curricula promote IS thinking at heart, and this process has been ongoing since the 1980s, facilitating political and religious extremism, he explained.

His article elicited angry reactions, prompting the Ministry of Education to respond on July 8, emphasizing, Curricula are based on centrism, moderation and the values of the constitution.

Obeidat also wrote, Arabic and history books contain many passages that have little credibility and invite ignorance. He told Al-Monitor that his position remains firm. Our curricula are designed by teachers who have self-serving goals, he said. In regard to religious texts, he asserted, There is a tendency to ignore non-Muslims in society and to denigrate women by emphasizing their obedience to men. Is that the kind of society we are building?

The religious conservatives believe that there is an attempt underway to secularize school curricula and enforce a secular agenda. Hussein al-Rawashdeh, an Islamist, told Al-Monitor that education reform is needed and should be a comprehensive process. What we see, however, is that superficial changes have been made in closed rooms by people we dont know and [who] targeted religion and history books only, he claimed.

In Rawashdeh's view, [The changes] aim at fulfilling a secular agenda, and some have gone as far as calling for the replacement of religion books with art and philosophy. That said, according to Rawashdeh, Jordan is not a religious state, and it has achieved a delicate balance between the states religion being Islam and being a civil state.

The government insists that it is moving to combat extremism, and that includes education reform and managing mosques. The latest row over school curricula, however, has raised fears about the broader consequences of such steps on a largely conservative society.
September 21, 2016

Is Israel on the brink of a new wave of terror? According to senior Palestinian security officials, the writing was on the wall from the minute Avigdor Liberman assumed office in late May as Israels defense minister and dictated a carrot-and-stick policy of rewards and punishments for Palestinian villages, depending on the origins of Palestinian assailants.

Following five months of relative calm, 10 terror attacks and attempted terror attacks occurred in the past week. On Sept. 19, adjacent to Herods Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, a youth from East Jerusalem's Ras al-Amoud neighborhood stabbed and wounded a policewoman and a soldier. The policewoman sustained serious wounds, while the soldier was moderately injured.

On Sept. 16, three terror attacks took place: a Palestinian stabbed a soldier in Hebron; a Jordanian citizen tried to stab soldiers at the Damascus Gate of Jerusalems Old City, but was shot and killed; and in the Jewish settlement town of Kiryat Arba, a couple from the Palestinian village of Bani Naim tried to run over Israelis with their car at the Elias junction. The driver was shot dead by soldiers and his fiancee was seriously wounded. On Sept. 17, a soldier was slightly wounded at a checkpoint near Hebrons Tomb of the Patriarch, and over the past days, some attacks took place at the Tel Romeidah Hebron neighborhood and in the Etzion settlement bloc. All in all, five police officers and two soldiers were injured in five days. On the Palestinian side, six were killed and three seriously injured, all of them suspected terrorists. Several weeks ago, Israeli security officials warned that in the runup to the Jewish High Holidays, starting Oct. 2, the likelihood of renewed terror attacks increases.

A Palestinian security source who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity said that months of efforts to restore calm had gone to waste and that virtually not a day goes by that special units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raid Palestinian villages in the area of the West Bank under Palestinian security and civil control, designated Area A, clashing with local residents. Instead of understanding that these raids are the main cause of renewed tensions, theyre talking about Jewish holidays? Whats that got to do with it and why are they the cause? he asked, chuckling.

Even as we spoke, the security official received an update saying that Israeli military forces had entered Dheisheh, southwest of Bethlehem, to carry out arrests in the refugee camp that has recently become a focal point of almost daily violence.

On Aug. 30, local residents who spoke to Al-Monitor complained that the IDF was frequently going into the refugee camp, shooting in the air, breaking into homes, conducting arrests and appropriating residents property. One of the camp residents warned that additional pressure on this and other Palestinian camps and villages could rekindle the anti-Israel violence. Judging by events of the past week, his predictions have been borne out.

The IDF argues that the calm of recent months was preserved due to intensive operational activity and effective cooperation with the Palestinian security forces in arresting terror suspects following precise intelligence information. In fact, this has been the leading strategy since the second intifada (2000-2005): a proactive strategy of preventive arrests of potential terrorists, rather than military activity in reaction to terror attacks.

But as has already been illustrated, the wave of terror that erupted a year ago, on Oct. 1, 2015, with the murder of the Henkin couple is different than the previous intifada. Analyzing Palestinian attacks indicates that most of the assailants in the terror attacks documented over the past year decided to act shortly before they carried out their plan, often acting impulsively with no organizational direction. Therefore, the IDF and other defense agencies concluded that unnecessary friction with the Palestinian population does more harm than good  except for a "ticking bomb" situation, when precise intelligence is obtained about a planned terror attack, in which case the Palestinian security forces do not oppose Israeli operations.

According to the Palestinian security source who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, the decision to replace the IDFs policy of restraint with Libermans carrot-and-stick policy has fueled tremendous rage in the refugee camps. One need only see the many bandaged young Palestinians injured in clashes with Israeli troops to understand where this is going, he said.

On Aug. 16, a young resident of the Fawwar refugee camp was shot dead during an IDF operation. An investigative report issued by the BTselem human rights group said he was shot in the back even though he posed no threat to the soldiers. That night, 32 Palestinians were also injured in IDF operations. What contributed to the anger and tensions on the ground was an incident filmed by one of the camp residents and distributed by the Palestinian Maan news agency. It shows IDF soldiers shooting at young Mohammed Amassi on the roof of his house and his relatives trying to get him off the roof and provide medical care. Every incident that results in injuries, and certainly one documented on video, wipes out all the attempts to instill calm and teach restraint that were initiated at the start of the wave of terror by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas tightened security cooperation with Israel and, according to the security source, he instructed the head of Palestinian intelligence  Majid Faraj, whose family resides in the Dheisheh refugee camp  to arrest anyone identified by intelligence information as intending to act against Palestinian interests. Palestinian policemen, together with educators, fanned out in schools across the West Bank in an effort to convince young students that their lives are dear and they must rely on the presidents diplomatic activity to improve their lives in the future. But then came the new Israeli policy that was implemented despite a significant decline in the extent of terror attacks.

Now that the wave of terror has re-emerged, no one will remember what came first: IDF activity that fueled the motivation to carry out terror attacks or terror attacks that resulted in IDF retaliation, including friction with civilians. Either way, the result is clear: Libermans carrot-and-stick policy has ignited a blaze. One can only hope that the new defense minister has another contingency plan for dousing the flames.
September 20, 2016

The Obama administration has remained determined not to deploy regular land forces in the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, forcing the Pentagon to work out creative solutions in a battlefield that is growing more complicated, more crowded and more entangled by the day. The most remarkable of those solutions recently has been the use of the American flag, very much in the way a maestro would use his baton to prevent a cacophonic band from descending into full chaos.

The United States had to put this motley band together to advance its political agenda, which, in Syria, is topped by the priority to degrade and destroy the Islamic State (IS). The musicians who produce the cacophony, however, have their own agenda and political objectives. And who are they?

First, there are the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the Peoples Protection Units (YPG). True, they are fighting IS, but they are doing so in the hope of obtaining an autonomous Kurdistan at the least.

Then, there is President Recep Tayyip Erdogans Turkey. True, Turkey has finally begun to fight IS, but Erdogans essential goal in rolling tanks into Syria and pushing IS to the south is less to degrade and destroy IS and more to prevent the Kurds from securing territorial contiguity and ultimately autonomy in Syria. He might also believe that thanks to Operation Euphrates Shield, he has regained a place for himself in the Syrian equation after being shut out by Russias intervention last year.

Finally, there is the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the name given to a bunch of anti-regime jihadi groups. Which factions precisely make up the FSA and by what nuances they differ from each other is a matter of field expertise, which only a small community of experts and intelligence officers command. And because the factions are in a perpetual process of breaking up, merging and rebranding, the FSA remains the most convenient label to describe them. According to the US State Department, the FSA members are moderate Islamists. Obviously, the FSA is also fighting IS in northern Syria, but a better description perhaps is that they are fielded to fight IS by those who nurture and equip them. The FSA groups that Ankara has engaged in Operation Euphrates Shield are said to have US approval and CIA support.

So these are the so-called US allies against IS, for which the Pentagon is using the American flag  sometimes to prevent them from destroying each other and sometimes to protect them against the attacks of non-allies.

An intriguing episode of the Pentagons flag solution unfolded Sept. 15 in Tell Abyad, the Syrian border town facing Akcakale on the Turkish side. Watching from Akcakale, observers noticed that PYD banners on some roofs and positions were replaced with American flags, which was initially interpreted as a sign that the PYD feared a Turkish military intervention and sought to deter it by flying the US flag. Two days later, however, it turned out that US special forces based in Tell Abyad had hoisted the flags. A senior Pentagon official told Hurriyet that the special forces had raised the flag in line with the Geneva Convention to declare their positions, and that immediately afterward fire was opened in their direction from the Turkish side. There were no casualties.

The YPG had wrestled Tell Abyad from IS in June 2015, reducing significantly IS control along the border, which became limited to the 95-kilometer (60-mile) stretch between Azaz and Jarablus. Both the PYD and the United States were happy, but for different reasons. The Americans were pleased that IS had been weakened, while the Kurds were happy to have linked territorially their cantons on either side of Tell Abyad.

The US flags were a clear message from Washington to Ankara: We are here. If you have any plans to capture Tell Abyad and separate the cantons, please review them. When the Pentagon feels the need to hoist the US flag as a way of disciplining quarreling allies, the task is, of course, up to US soldiers on the ground. The troops in Tell Abyad were special operations forces, whose mission is not to fight on the front lines but to help those who do.

In a similar incident in August, when clashes broke out between the YPG and regime forces in Hasakah, the Pentagon used the presence of US special forces there as a pretext to shield its Kurdish allies against Syrian airstrikes, warning Damascus to keep its jets away from the area.

In the coming days, the US special forces could again take the Stars and Stripes out from their backpacks and fly them to protect allies. The Pentagons exercise of hoisting the flag to steer the war on the ground could this time be prompted by the al-Bab stage of Ankaras Operation Euphrates Shield, which has been afoot since Aug. 23.

Having ejected IS from the Azaz-Jarablus line, the FSA groups, advancing under the cover of Turkish tanks and special forces, were expected to move southward from al-Rai to take also the IS-held strategic city of al-Bab. But just then, an intriguing video hit the internet Sept. 16. The footage showed FSA members shouting hostile slogans, including death threats, at about 30 US special forces, who had arrived with armed off-road vehicles in al-Rai to back Euphrates Shield.

One reason for this protest, which forced the Americans to leave al-Rai, was the support the United States provides to its other ally against IS, the YPG. A contradiction that still begged explanation, however, was the claim that those FSA elements had been vetted by the United States, presumed to be moderate Islamists, and were seen brandishing American weapons in various videos. The matter seemed to be settled when three FSA factions opposed to US involvement in Euphrates Shield pulled out from the operation and the booed US soldiers returned to al-Rai.

Whether the undisclosed parts of the latest US-Russia deal draw any boundaries for Operation Euphrates Shield remained unknown at the time this article was written. Yet if the operation expands toward al-Bab as expected and FSA units come under any regime threat, the United States is likely to do what it did in Hasakah  hoist the American flag to say We have soldiers there as a means of warning Damascus and protecting the FSA fighters.

By drawing Turkey into the battlefield, the United States appears to have increased the number and strength of its allies on the ground, but this combination of allies is so complicated and explosive that it requires an utterly superior genius to manage. Its already well known that the US-backed moderate Islamist FSA elements are actually no friends of the United States. Yet they are friends of Ankara, another US ally in the field. And in Ankaras eyes, Washingtons third ally, the PYD, is an enemy. The FSA is also hostile to the PYD, and if Ankaras enmity is one reason for that, the others are the PYDs secular worldview and its perceived collaboration with the Damascus regime.

This cacophonic band of allies brings to mind the town musicians of Bremen. Its a bizarre ensemble in which the burliest member, the United States, has assumed the role of the rooster at the top due to its no-boots-on-the-ground policy. The rooster is able to manage the situation for the time being. So far so good  of course, as long as the donkey doesnt kick and the dog and the cat dont get to fight each other.
September 20, 2016

Having cleared the Islamic State (IS) from its border with Syria by leading groups of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Turkey is now preparing for the next phase of its Euphrates Shield operation, which involves moving south against the IS stronghold of al-Bab.

Turkish military planners were encouraged by the success of wresting the towns of Jarablus and al-Rai from IS with minimum clashes and casualties, but are aware that liberating al-Bab will be a tougher nut to crack and will require cooperation with US forces on the ground and in the air.

The fact that such cooperation is already underway was highlighted last week when certain elements under the FSA banner protested the presence of US special forces embedded with Turkish forces in the town of al-Rai (Cobanbey in Turkish).

Video footage shows protesters calling the US soldiers dogs and pigs and shouting Christians and Americans have no place among us. The incident is embarrassing for Turkey because it has been arguing that the FSA is made up of moderate Islamic forces, which wasnt the impression given by the protesters.

The US soldiers, whose numbers were said to be around 30, initially retreated but came back later after the Turkish military intervened on their behalf. Annoyed with their return, some of the protesting groups withdrew from the FSA, and according to some accounts, went to join Jabhat al-Nusra, which recently changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. This group is designated by Washington and Ankara as a terrorist organization.

The Turkish military said in a statement after the incident that US forces attached to the anti-IS coalition had assisted Turkish forces in operations conducted between Azaz and al-Rai in northern Syria.

The state-owned Anadolu News Agency quoted Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis saying that the request for the US special forces had come from Turkey. US personnel operating with Turkish forces and Syrian opposition forces will provide the same train, advise and assist support they have been providing to other local partners in Syria fighting [IS], Davis said.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, blamed the United States over the incident at al-Rai.

"The [US] special forces were not wanted by the FSA. The US authorities' approach toward the FSA pushed the process in this direction, Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul before flying to New York for the UN General Assembly meeting.

His remarks, which suggested sympathy for the protesters and overlooked the fact that most groups in the FSA also get military assistance from the US, are unlikely to have gone down well in Washington. Turkey and the United States are already at odds over US-support for the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of the Syrian Kurds and its armed wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG).

Ankara says the PYD and the YPG are terrorist organizations linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It is nevertheless clear that Turkey will depend on US support as it pushes south toward al-Bab.

Erdogan also remains keen on establishing a safe zone in the region. "As part of the Euphrates Shield operation, an area of 900 square kilometers [some 350 square miles] has been cleared of terror so far. This area is pushing south," he said. "We may extend this area to 5,000 square kilometers as part of a safe zone."

The United States, however, remains cool toward the idea of such a zone. Military analysts say Turkey cannot secure such a zone on its own. Nihat Ali Ozcan of the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation told Bloomberg that Erdogans vision would require deployment of thousands of Turkish soldiers in Syria for several years.

This is something that Ankara is neither prepared for nor capable of doing. Turkey cant move toward al-Bab without US support either, according to retired Brig. Gen Naim Baburoglu.

This is why it requested US forces in al-Rai, he told Al Monitor. The operation for al-Bab is fraught with risks. It will most likely have a high cost in lives. IS will resist with heavy artillery, including with those it brought from Jarablus before Turkish forces and the FSA took back the town, Baburoglu said.

He added that the FSA  which is nothing without Turkeys support  could not be relied on as a viable force against IS in al-Bab. Reminded that the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), comprised mostly of YPG fighters, has also expressed its determination to capture al-Bab before Turkish forces and the FSA get there, Baburoglu said he did not believe the United States was keen to see the YPG in al-Bab.

The US is happy so far about Turkeys military operation in Syria. It has done nothing to harm its interests. The chances of a confrontation between the YPG and the Turkish military has also been significantly diminished, Baburoglu said. He added that another reason why Turkey wants US forces to be embedded with its own forces in Syria is to prevent attacks by the YPG against the Turkish military.

Baburoglu also suggested that Turkey, in what appears a quid pro quo for support in al-Bab, has given up on trying to get YPG forces to leave Manbij  the strategic town liberated from IS by the SDF earlier this summer  even though this was one of Ankaras strong demands until recently.

Ozcan Tikit, a commentator for the daily Haberturk, also believes moving on Manbij to clear it of YPG fighters could be counterproductive for Turkey, given that it is clear at this stage that the United States will not give up on its support for this group, which also enjoys a degree of support from Russia.

If fighters supported by Turkey were to move toward Manbij, the international support that Euphrates Shield has received could drop, Tikit wrote, also suggesting that concentrating on liberating al-Bab was more crucial now because this would clear the path to Aleppo, a much more strategic target for Turkey and its allies.

Not everyone in Turkey, however, is happy to see increased cooperation between Turkish and US forces in Syria. Ibrahim Karagul, the editor-in-chief of the Islamist daily Yeni Safak, argued that operation Euphrates Shield should not be made a hostage to the US.

Karagul said every US intervention in the region over the past 25 years has worked against Turkeys interests and brought chaos step by step to its borders. While fighting IS, or being pushed into this fight, Turkey must not fall into the trap of those who are trying to open space for the PKK/PYD, Karagul said.

Reflecting a gradual change of view regarding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad among some Turkish Islamists, Karagul also recommended more cooperation between Ankara and Damascus. Turkey should distance itself from getting stuck on Assad, and encourage groups that it has influence over for a solution [to the Syrian] crisis, he said, suggesting the United States was the real enemy.

Baburoglu also says it is time for Ankara and Damascus to cooperate. Turkey insists on the maintenance of Syrias territorial integrity, so why does it refrain from this cooperation? Especially when it is clear that Syrias territorial integrity is the guarantee of Turkeys territorial integrity, Baburoglu told Al-Monitor.
Macy's

Macy's is hiring 83,000 seasonal workers nationwide. (Contributed by Macy's)

Here are the top stories in Alabama business for Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016:

Jobs galore in Montgomery: Alabama State University is hosting its fall career fair in Montgomery on Sept. 29. The fair's open to the public as well as ASU students and alumni.

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Interstate 565 in Madison got environmental approval for some big changes. The Alabama Department of Transportation and U.S. Federal Highway Administration have authorized the Environmental Assessment Document for the interchange, allowing leaders to move forward on the final design with construction slated to begin in January.

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A new Chick-fil-A will open Oct. 6 at 6 a.m. in Hoover. The first 100 people in line will get free meals for a year.

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Talladega Plaza Shopping Center has a new owner and will soon get a facelift. The center's occupants currently include H&R Block, Sherwin Williams and Baptist Health.

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Huntsville's CFD Research Corporation has promoted its vice president and COO to the company's CEO. Sameer Singhal's responsibilities will include the technical development and commercialization for a portfolio of technologies, developed with the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and NASA.

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If you're looking for some seasonal work in Birmingham, Macy's might be able to help you out. The company's hosting a national hiring event Sept. 30.

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Follow all of Alabama's business news here anytime.
Pope Francis today appointed an Auburn University graduate as coadjutor bishop in Louisiana.

Bishop David Prescott Talley, who is currently auxiliary bishop of Atlanta, will be in line to succeed the current bishop of the Diocese of Alexandria, La., Bishop Ronald Herzog, when he retires. Herzog reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75 on April 22, 2017.

Talley, 66, was born in Columbus, Ga., on Sept. 11, 1950. He was raised as a Southern Baptist, but has said he left as a teenager over issues of racial segregation. He converted to Catholicism after meeting Catholics and reading the writings of the Catholic monk Thomas Merton while studying at Auburn University, according to the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. He was 24 when he joined St. Mary Catholic Church in Opelika.

Talley has family members who remain faithful Southern Baptists, including a brother who is a deacon. "I do know a faith across the spectrum," he told The Georgia Bulletin.

Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory said that the pope has given the people of the Diocese of Alexandria a "tremendous pastoral gift," according to a statement from the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

"Bishop Talley is a servant minister of our church, who is graced with extraordinary wisdom, patience, kindness, and dedication," Gregory said. "He developed those gifts as priest and bishop here in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, where he always cared for our people as a true minister of mercy and kindness...Thus he now begins this new appointment with exceptional credentials."

The Mass of Welcome in Alexandria is planned for Monday, Nov. 7.

Talley was ordained as a priest in 1989 and as a bishop in 2013.

He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Auburn University, then went on to Sacred Heart School of Theology and the University of Georgia, where he earned a master's degree in social work. He also attended St. Meinrad School of Theology, earning a master of divinity degree. He then earned a licentiate and doctorate in canon law from the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome, Italy.

He continued his studies in Spiritual Direction and Spirituality at Spring Hill College in Mobile.

The Catholic Diocese of Alexandria, La., consists of 13 counties, about 50 parishes, 22 missions and more than 44,000 Catholics.

"We will sorely miss him in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, even as we thank him sincerely for sharing himself with us over these years, but we will gladly accompany him with our prayers and warmest best wishes as he starts his service to Bishop Ron Herzog and to all of God's people in the Diocese of Alexandria," Archbishop Gregory said. "May the Lord watch over him and all those entrusted to his pastoral care."
Gadsden police are investigating a burglary Tuesday morning where a woman reported a clown breaking into her home.

The incident happened at the same time people reported a female clown harassing others in the neighborhood.

The break-in happened at 2:45 a.m. Tuesday in the 3500 block of Ivy Place, according to Gadsden police reports.

A 33-year-old woman was awakened by a loud noise in the living room of her home. When she went into the room, she saw a white female dressed in "clown attire" with white facial makeup and black markings around her eyes.

"They sent me!" the woman reportedly said. "I thought this was my mama's house!"

The two women scuffled, and the homeowner called for her 22-year-old nephew to assist her, as there were children in the house. The victim said she struck the intruder several times before the "clown" fled.

The intruder was described as a woman standing 5 feet 8 inches tall with long brown hair. The burglar dropped a bag that was taken into evidence.

At around the same time, dispatchers received several reports of a woman in clown makeup "harassing people." She may have been accompanied by a man, witnesses said.

Capt. Paul Cody of Gadsden police said the incidents appear to be "a series of pranks that are getting out of control."

"People need to be careful," he said. "Not everybody finds this kind of thing funny, and if you engage in this kind of behavior, you may find yourself in a situation that you can't control. We take this very seriously and we will investigate accordingly."

This is the just the latest in a series of incidents in schools and communities across Alabama. Threats at schools were reported in Montgomery, the Birmingham area, Mobile and other communities, many dealing with social media posts and no actual sightings of clowns. Two teenagers were arrested in Calhoun County in connection with a school threat.
A Birmingham police officer was rushed to UAB Hospital this morning after he flipped his SUV.

The officer was conscious and talking when he left the scene, said East Precinct Capt. Allen Treadaway.

The crash happened about 9:30 a.m. in the 6500 block of Georgia Road. The officer was heading westbound, possibly responding to a call, when he struck a telephone pole and then overturned. The utility pole was broken in half upon impact.

The East Precinct officer, still in his seatbelt, was pulled from the SUV. About a half dozen police cruisers escorted the Birmingham Fire and Rescue unit transporting the officer to the hospital.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Colonial Pipeline announced Wednesday that the company has restarted its Line 1, which had been shut down for more than 12 days, causing gasoline shortages and price increases, felt most in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Though the pipeline that caused those shortages is now flowing again, Colonial warns that it could be "several days" before supplies catch up, and that price increases and shortages could continue in the meantime.

The line was shut down after a leak was discovered that spilled an estimated 336,000 gallons of gasoline into an inactive coal mine site in Shelby County, Ala., about 20 miles south of Birmingham.

Colonial said the pipeline is operating at full capacity with a temporary bypass line diverting flow around the leak site. The line normally transports 1.3 million barrels (or 54.6 million gallons) of gasoline per day from refineries in Houston to distributors throughout the Southeast and East Coast. The line runs through distribution centers in Atlanta and Greensboro, N.C. before stretching up the Eastern Seaboard to New York Harbor.

Fortune magazine described that 36-inch pipeline as "the largest gasoline conduit in the United States," and it has been estimated to carry around 40 percent of all gasoline sold on the Eastern Seaboard.

Since the line went out of service, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has issued an order to limit gas price increases, and North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said his state was currently only receiving "about one third" of its usual amount of fuel.

Patrick DeHaan, an analyst with fuel tracking web site GasBuddy, said gas prices could take two to four weeks to return to normal.

Colonial had originally planned to dig out and repair the leaking gas pipeline, but hazardous fumes from the spilled gasoline kept workers away for days at a time.

On Saturday, the company announced its decision to build a bypass line around the spill site to allow their workers to operate in safe conditions. The bypass section, about 500 feet long, was completed Tuesday, with stress testing and connection to the main line happening today.

After the bypass pipe was connected to the main line, Colonial removed temporary plugging devices that had been installed on either side of the leak site and restarted the line.

The Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration signed off on the decision to restart before Colonial operators flipped the switch.

Clean-up and remediation work at the site is ongoing. With the bypass work complete, Colonial employees and contractors can now focus on the remediation and on digging out the leaking section of pipeline to determine the cause.

The approximate location of the leak is shown in the Google map below.
A Walker County man has died from several gunshot wounds after trying to chase down two males who allegedly burglarized the victim's home on Tuesday.

Coroner Joey Vick identified the victim as Lyle Guthrie, a 32-year-old business man who Vick knew well.

"He was a really good guy and a really talkative guy," Vick said. "It's a terrible, terrible tragedy."

Walker County Sheriff's Department said Guthrie caught two people breaking into his Oakman home on Providence Loop Road at 4 p.m. Deputies said the suspects fled from the scene in a vehicle. So Guthrie chased after them.

Deputies said the suspects shot the victim during the chase. The suspects' vehicle wrecked soon afterward.

Deputies were able to detain the suspects by 5:30 p.m. One man was arrested at after the vehicle crashed. The other man fled from the car wreck, but was soon found hiding in the woods near the scene by a German Shepard K9.

The homeowner was airlifted to UAB Hospital with three gunshot wounds. The victim died after arrival.
Jefferson County Courthouse

The Jefferson County Courthouse is reflected in a fountain in Birmingham, Ala., Monday, August 5, 2013. (Mark Almond/malmond@al.com)

(MARK ALMOND)

By Kyle Whitmire and Kent Faulk

Jefferson County personnel records show an employee in the county's information technology department confessed in July to stealing at least 200 cellphones from the county and selling them on the black market. The employee, Denise Trimmier, was put on leave and terminated after an investigation by the county, the records show.

Trimmier's scheme, which began in 2014, is the subject of a federal investigation, sources at the county have told AL.com on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the matter.

"I am not able to comment on any investigation," County Manager Tony Petelos told AL.com last week. "We will always work with any agency with any investigation, and take appropriate action."

Efforts to reach Trimmier by email and by phone were unsuccessful.

In a two-page signed declaration and a three-page handwritten letter to Petelos, Trimmier explained how she executed the scheme.

As the county information technology department's communications coordinator, Trimmier says, she ordered phones from Sprint on the county's account when the company offered upgrades. Rather than using the phones at the county, Trimmier says she sold the phones to a South Carolina company, Redevice LLC.

"Although I cannot recall the exact number of phones I sold to Redevice, to the best of my knowledge, I sold over 200 new Sprint phones that I had ordered on the Jefferson County Sprint account."

Trimmier said the Redevice paid her $20 to $40 more per phone than what the county paid to Sprint.

In the letter to Petelos, Trimmier said she had been consumed by guilt while she was caught up in the scheme and expressed relief at being caught.

"I have felt nothing but guilt over my actions for two years and the shame has nearly destroyed me physically and emotionally," she said. "This was not only an affront to you and the County but also to my faith and God and has been a burden to my soul."

In the letter, Trimmier said she had been dealing with family issues, including a separation from her husband. Court records show she sued for divorce from her husband in August.

Despite confessing to the thefts, she seems to have held out some hope of saving her job.

"If there is some way to allow me to continue with you, I will promise to pay you back if allowed from my checks," she wrote. "I also promise to be the best county employee and to work until proven so."

Trimmier wrote the letter to Petelos on July 14.

County personnel records show she was fired on July 18.

While a federal investigation is believed to be ongoing, Trimmier has not yet been charged with any crimes.

Jefferson County Trimmier termination documents by Kyle Whitmire on Scribd
A 28-year-old Center Point man went on a crime spree over the weekend, carrying out home invasions in separate Jefferson County cities, authorities say.

In one of attacks, police said, he beat, bound and fired a shot at an elderly man. The victim wasn't wounded by the gunfire but was hit in the head with the shotgun.

Edwin Gabriel Hosea Conley has been charged with multiple crimes by Irondale police, Fultondale police and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. He is also facing charges in other crimes, including two Birmingham break-ins.

The attack in Irondale happened at 12:20 p.m. Saturday in the 4000 block of Nichole Drive. Police say the intruder - later identified as Conley - was brandishing a shotgun when he kicked open the basement door. He confronted the homeowner, a 52-year-old woman, who was home alone at the time, said Irondale police Det. Sgt. Michael Mangina. "He said, 'Where is the safe? Give me the money,''' Mangina said.

The victim as able to run out of the house and sought help at a neighbor's home. Conley fled with the victim's purse, and witnesses told police they saw him leave in a gray Chevrolet Tahoe.

About six hours later, authorities say, Conley struck again, this time in Fultondale. Police Chief D.P. Smith said the 81-year-old male victim was at his home in the 2400 block of Walker Chapel Road. His adult son was also there.

The suspect kicked open the back door and burst inside. The intruder - also believed to be Conley - fired a shot at the victim with a shotgun, beat him with the gun and tied him up. He demanded the victim's wallet and other items in the home and then fled.

The victim was taken to the hospital and is now recovering at home. "He's a very strong individual mentally and physically,'' Smith said previously. "We're glad he wasn't hurt worse than he was."

Prior to that break-in, Smith said Conley broke into a home next door to the elderly man but no one was home. At that home, the chief said, Conley shot a dog. As of Tuesday, the dog was still recovering.

Late this afternoon, Fultondale obtained the following warrants against Conley: two counts of first-degree robbery; three counts of burglary; two counts of kidnapping and misdemeanor charge of cruelty to an animal. His bond in the Fultondale charges totals $800,000.

"There was only one person involved in these crimes and we're certain we've got him,'' Smith said.

Conley was taken into custody apparently as he fled the scene. Jefferson County sheriff's deputies about 7 p.m. responded to a report of a single vehicle accident at the intersection of Main Street and Third Avenue S.W. in Graysville, said Chief Deputy Randy Christian.

They arrived to find a gray Chevrolet Tahoe had left the road and struck a billboard. The driver was checked by paramedics and found to be uninjured.

Edwin Gabriel Hosea Conley was arrested after this gray Chevrolet Tahoe struck a billboard in downtown Graysville on Saturday night. He was later charged with multiple crimes in Irondale, Fultondale and Jefferson County. (Photo courtesy Debbie Alexander)

As deputies began their investigation of the accident, Christian said they found several televisions, a shotgun, checks from several account holders and money scattered about the interior of the SUV. The driver simply said, "That ain't all my stuff in the back of the car."

Deputies called the telephone numbers listed on the checks and learned they had been taken during a burglary in Birmingham. They also discovered a wallet and credit cards belonging to an Irondale resident. A call to Irondale police, he said, confirmed that the wallet had been stolen during a burglary in their city.

Conley admitted to deputies that he knew the items were stolen, but said he had gotten them from a friend to take to a pawn shop to sell. Deputies arrested Conley and put him into the patrol car. At that point, Christian said, Conley "began cussing and kicking the window." The window and door were damaged.

Deputies charged Conley with first-degree receiving stolen property, disorderly conduct, illegal possession of prescription drugs, third-degree criminal mischief, and driving without insurance. He posted bond on those crimes and was released.

While at the magistrate's office obtaining warrants for the charges on Conley, a deputy overheard a Fultondale detective talking about a burglary that had occurred in their city limits. The detective said the suspect was driving a gray Tahoe and had taken two televisions, a shotgun and had shot the victim's dog during the burglary.

The deputy spoke with the Fultondale detective and exchanged information about his case with him. They realized Conley was a suspect in all of the cases, and he was re-arrested on Monday.

Conley's bonds in Irondale are set at $300,000 on the charges of first-degree burglary and robbery. Birmingham police said they are investigation two burglaries possibly linked to Conley that happened in the city on Saturday.

Authorities don't yet know how the suspect chose his victims, and court records don't reflect any previous criminal arrests for Conley as an adult.

"Thanks to the deputy and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, this dangerous thug was taken off the streets,'' Mangina said. "He worked the traffic crash and happened to see, in plain view, the stolen property that was loaded up in his SUV."

"Great police work, and attentive victims and witnesses, have contributed to a solid case against this bad guy,'' Mangina said.

Updated at 5:33 p.m. to include formal warrants by Fultondale police.
With the Chinese economy faltering, entire neighbourhoods have become ghost towns, industrial companies sit idle and the unemployed are growing desperate.

One of the challenges of filming in China is dealing with the dreadfully long traffic jams. It is a reality many of us are used to in the worlds most populous nation.

So you can imagine how surreal it feels to be walking down a silent eight-lane highway, devoid of life during rush hour.

Our cameraman and I were in Shenfu, a city in northeastern China that has come to symbolise the countrys faltering economy.

Shenfu is a ghost town sprawling over 22sq km. Where there once was farmland, abandoned buildings now litter the landscape.

It is one of hundreds of deserted cities across China where construction has ground to a halt.

Walking through some of these failed projects, we find many with their skeletal concrete structures still waiting for polished veneers to be put on.

Inside we stumble across discarded hard hats, machinery and unused raw materials still in their packaging  signs of unrealised promises.

Local officials spent hundreds of millions of dollars building Shenfu, in anticipation of it attracting some of the growing number of people flooding into the neighbouring cities of Shenyang and Fushun. China, after all, is undergoing the biggest rural-to-urban migration humankind has ever seen.

But what planners didnt anticipate was that the countrys economy would slow down dramatically. The jobs dried up and the people never came.

And in Shenfu, that has meant that money to build has run out.

WATCH: The End of China Inc?

In a rare admission, government advisers say local planners from as far south as Yunnan province to as far north as Heilongjiang have made monetary missteps.

Economist Anne Stevenson-Yang says it is more like monumental missteps: Wet your finger and stick it in the air and youll find a useless project in China.

Over the past 20 years, Stevenson-Yang has travelled the country. Those travels took her through many outlandish developments including replicas of Manhattan and Paris, and hectares and hectares of empty high-rises.

Its a craziness on a level that you havent seen elsewhere in the world and you have to think that thats going to create a crisis on a level that hasnt been seen elsewhere, she says.

What worries her and a growing chorus of economists is that all this building is sinking China under a mountain of debt.

Potential for a serious crash

In our own travels we came across a fake Dubai Palm island. Unlike the original, it was built far from the sea, using old farming irrigation canals to pump water into the development. It was going to be a retirement complex but construction has stalled there, too.

Developers ran out of money, a grumpy manager told us at the gate.

In Shenfu, local planners spent $16m building a 60-storey steel structure called the Circle of Life. It was meant to attract tourists, but so far, no one has come.

Chinas Premier Li Keqiang says his government is addressing the debt issue. In March, he told the world not to worry, saying the economy was not headed for a hard landing.

But since then, rather than rein in spending, the government has encouraged banks to continue funding infrastructure projects.

With two billion square metres of residential space already lying empty, that has some economists fearing the worst.

If China had been willing to give up that hyper growth, then it might have avoided the potential for a serious crash and a serious debt crisis. But it didnt and it wont, says Stevenson-Yang.

As we found, it is workers who are feeling the pain, and theyre not happy about it.

In 2015, China witnessed the highest number of demonstrations in its recorded history, mostly by labourers.

In Sichuan province, we met a group of coal miners who recently went on strike.

Meeting with us in secret, many of the miners told us they feel left out of Chinas economic boom.

We citizens all work and are supposed to be the same in China, but in reality, others drive Mercedes Benzs and BMWs, and we dont even own a bicycle. Thats our reality. Were stuck in this mine, wondering how we will endure the next 30 years, says one miner.

READ MORE: Inside the world of Chinas ultra rich

Officials acknowledge the countrys rise from an agrarian society to the worlds second largest economy has left many have nots and that development has been extremely uneven.

But they insist that reforms are under way and that they will prove critics wrong.

What does it all mean for China Inc? One thing is for sure it will be a rocky ride before we find out.
Giuseppe, son of murderous Sicilian Mafia boss Toto Riina, says the mob is misunderstood and his father innocent.

Padua, Italy  It is a particularly warm Monday morning in Padua, a small picturesque city in northern Italy close to Venice. Caffe Pedrocchi is still waiting for customers.

Giuseppe Salvatore Riina stands at the entrance of the cafe wearing a white T-shirt and beige trousers. The 39-year-old looks no different from many other young Sicilians  a rather small man with dark hair and olive skin, a pair of black sunglasses that hide his gaze, and a proud pose.

He has lived in Padua since 2012, working as a secretary at Noi Famiglie Padovane, a social service organisation that helps drug users, immigrants, and people who have recently been released from prison.

But in Sicily, where he was born, he is better known as Riina Jr, or Salvuccio, son of the notorious Sicilian mafia boss Salvatore Toto Riina. Riina Jrs 86-year-old father was head of Cosa Nostra from 1982 to 1993, the year of his final arrest and conviction. Many still think of him as the head of Cosa Nostra, although he is imprisoned and serving multiple life sentences for his crimes.

Life on the run

Together with his mother, Antonietta Bagarella, his older brother, Giovanni, and sisters Maria Concetta and Lucia, Riina Jr had been in hiding until his fathers arrest. He was 15 at the time.

The whole family had been moving from one Sicilian town to another under a fake family name, living in what he describes as a game in which each of them had to play a precise role in order to avoid detection.

In 1993, the family was living a regular life in Palermo, Riina Jr recalls.

I had a group of friends who were ignorant of our real name. I spent a lot of time with my brother, Giovanni, on our scooters or at the cafe. I was with him when a friend announced to the group that Toto Riina had finally been arrested. He was so excited, but had no idea he was telling [Riinas] own sons, he says.

Because the family lived on the run, the Riina siblings were home-schooled by their mother, a former schoolteacher. The children had never been to the hometown of their parents  Corleone. But once uncovered, Antonietta Bagarella returned to Corleone to seek the support of her family, also known for its connections with Cosa Nostra.

Riina Jr spent the nine years after his fathers arrest at his grandmothers house in Corleone, surrounded by a web of mafia connections.

His mothers brother, Leoluca Bagarella, was arrested in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. Bagarella was involved in the Corleonesi branch of the mafia organisation and was complicit in crimes and murders committed over the course of his 40 years in the mafia. He was often compared to the boss, Riina, for the cruelty of his crimes and is believed to have murdered more than 100 people, including a child.

In 1996, Riina Jrs brother, Giovanni, was arrested and later convicted to a life sentence for committing several murders and following in his fathers footsteps in Cosa Nostra.

In 2002, at the age of 25, Riina Jr was arrested as well.

He was sentenced to eight years and 10 months in prison for his association with the Cosa Nostra and taking over Toto Riinas role within the organisation. Phone conversations wiretapped by anti-mafia police provided evidence of Riina Jrs role as the head of an illicit structure, which linked mafiosi from Corleone and corrupt entrepreneurs from Palermo, all connected to Cosa Nostra.

He was released in 2011, however, but kept under special surveillance until 2014. He is now serving the last of his two years of probation in Padua.

READ MORE: The most powerful mafia youve never heard of

A murderous past

In recent months, Riina Jr attracted media attention in Italy after the publication in April of an autobiography in which he tells of his life on the run with his family, until his fathers arrest.

I felt the need to tell the story of my family from my point of view. It is not my job to judge my fathers actions. I wrote this book because I want people to know what a great father he was for us, Riina Jr tells Al Jazeera at the cafe.

In the book, Riina Jr portrays Toto Riina in a positive light  a loving father and husband, who is always there for his family and never disappoints.

This is a portrait that clashes uncomfortably with The Beast Italy has painfully known and feared for years, responsible for the murder of people the memory of whom is still fresh in Sicily.

During his 50 years of criminal activity within the mafia, first as a member of the faction of mafiosi from the town of Corleone in Sicily, and then as boss of the bosses of the Cosa Nostra Sicilian Mafia pyramid, Toto Riina committed and ordered numerous attacks, leading to the murder of at least 60 people both among rival mafia families and representatives of legal institutions.

The murders reached their peak during the 1980s and 1990s, when several among both rival mafia families and representatives of legal institutions were murdered in an aggressive attempt to stop all anti-mafia activities.

Before his arrest, Toto Riina ordered the deadly attacks against two well-known Sicilian anti-mafia judges  Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino  in May and July of 1992 respectively.

They were killed in car bomb attacks, together with Falcones wife and eight bodyguards. These incidents are still remembered as two of the most brutal attacks conducted by Cosa Nostra.

Palermo was in total chaos in those years. It was like living in the middle of a warzone. Police sirens were constantly on, and the news was reporting on assassinations every two days, recalls Riina Jr.

But Riina Jr prefers to see his fathers violent actions differently.

He never came back home with blood on his clothes. I wasnt there when those crimes were committed. He always claimed his innocence, and I have no reason not to believe him, he says.

Standing up to the mafia

The Italian public, however, was not as forgiving. Riina Jrs interview on national TV in promotion of his book was decried as an atrocious choice, an offensive popularisation of the mafia, and an insult particularly to the families of Riinas victims.

Numerous bookshops in Italy have refused to sell the book.

Riina Jr is unrepentant.

I am disappointed and angry with the institutions. Boycotting my book is just one example of how people in Italy, beginning with the police, have decided to label me as the bad guy with no possibility of redemption, he says.

One of Riina Jrs critics, Giovanni Impastato, condemns his words and actions, saying he is spreading an ambiguous message about the mafia [by] describing his father as a victim of institutions 

WATCH: A Very Sicilian Justice  Taking on the mafia

Impastato, 63, was born into a family of mafiosi like Riina Jr. Everyone should be clear that Cosa Nostra is made of criminals to be punished, Impastato says.

Unlike the Riinas, he took the decision to publicly denounce his family and take over the anti-mafia campaign initiated by his brother Peppino, who was brutally assassinated by Cosa Nostra in 1978 in Cinisi, their hometown in Sicily.

Giovannis and Peppinos father, Luigi Impastato, was a mafioso affiliated with the mafia in Cinisi, headed by boss Gaetano Badalamenti. The Impastatos also had strong family links with the Sicilian-American Mafia.

But after Peppino was killed for his anti-mafia efforts, Giovanni and his mother Felicia, who died in 2002, decided to send a clear message to the mafia community by denouncing it and transforming their house in Cinisi into an anti-mafia association, today named Casa Memoria Peppino e Felicia Impastato.

On the day of Peppinos funeral, she invited our mafiosi relatives to leave our home and never come back. The door of this house has remained open ever since, and today we are here to spread awareness and help anyone in a similar situation to ours, says Impastato in his office in Casa Memoria in Cinisi.

He speaks of Riina Jr, and of other sons and daughters of Cosa Nostra, as people who were born on the wrong side but who have a choice  no matter how painful and difficult that choice may be.

He and his mother are a rare case in Italy. They had to fight on three fronts simultaneously: against their own family, unscrupulous criminals, and corrupt institutions.

Sicily was very different in the 1970s. First of all, Cosa Nostra was different from today, following precise codes of conduct which have been totally challenged by the mafiosi from Corleone, like Riina, Impastato explains.

Secondly, the major institutions such as politics and the church were colluding with the mafia. Peppino was killed in 1978 by the men of boss Badalamenti, but the Italian government only condemned the boss for his murder in 2002. My mother and I finally found peace, but it took 24 years, he says.

READ MORE: Taking from the Italian Mafia to give to the poor

The misunderstood mafia?

Riina Jr, however, feels he and his family have been unfairly victimised by society.

I am paying for my fathers mistakes just because my name is Riina. How many from my generation will have to be punished? he asks.

According to him, this is also the reason why he requested to be moved away from Corleone in Sicily when he was released from prison in 2012 to serve his probation.

Everybody knows my name and my family in Sicily. Corleone, where my mother and youngest sister still reside, is a small town, Riina Jr says.

He insists he was living what we call a white life sentence, meaning that anyone could go to the police and accuse me of anything because the police would always assume I am a criminal and I act as such.

It was a nightmare. I wanted to go away from years of wiretapping, observations, false accusations and ignorance, he says.

Despite evidence of his involvement in illicit activities with other mafiosi, Riina Jr maintains both his own and his fathers innocence after all these years, arguing that such evidence was based solely on verbal accusations made by supergrasses  criminals who chose to become informers for the police and judges after their arrest, in exchange for legal benefits, such as a reduced penalty.

He goes on to argue that the popular image of the mafia does not correspond to the truth. I dont want to say too much about this as I know I would be misunderstood. What I can say is this: Had the mafia not been there, who would have helped Sicilians find jobs?

I do not remember the exact moment I realised who my father was, who we all were. It was a gradual and slow process. I was never angry with him  why should I be? All that matters to me is that we are family; he is family, says Riina Jr before leaving Caffe Pedrocchi, refusing to comment about his fathers victims, saying that it is because what I say would be used against me.

Giovanni Impastato remains baffled by Riina Jrs words. I am not against Riina Jrs book. Anyone should be free to write and publish. However, I feel angry and hurt by his failure to stand against the mafia, against his father, he says.

I never stopped loving my own father, but I had to publicly say he was a criminal. It was my duty towards my brother and society. Why doesnt he do the same? Casa Memoria will be open to support him in that case.

READ MORE: Mafia and media  The reporters working a deadly beat
At his last UN General Assembly, US president calls on member states to step up commitment to accept and help refugees.

New York  Calling the refugee crisis one of the urgent tests of our time and a test of our common humanity, US President Barack Obama kicked off his Leaders Summit on Refugees.

The meeting came a day after member states at the UN General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration on Refugees , which ultimately gives them two more years to negotiate their strategies and obligations on the refugee crisis.

Some 50 world leaders took part in Obamas summit on Tuesday. Their participation was conditional on making new commitments to address the global crisis.

The detailed list of who pledged what has not been released, but a White House statement issued early in the evening said that the cumulative commitments amounted to a $4.5bn increase over 2015 levels and participating countries doubled the number of refugees they resettled or afforded other legal channels of admission. It also said that access to education and legal work for refugees was improved.

I do think theres a general feeling that things have hit some sort of a tipping point  the combination of events around the wold, and the fact that Syria keeps getting unbelievably worse said Kate Phillips-Barrasso, senior director for policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee.

As world leaders took the podium to speak, each defended his or her own countrys track record in dealing with the 65 million people who have fled their homes around the world.

The United States itself has been accused of being slow to step up its efforts in taking in Syrian refugees, but has been making strides  in the 2016 fiscal year it took in 10,000 Syrians , a significant increase from 2015, when it took in 1,862.

Like governments in many other countries, the Obama administration is dealing with domestic political resistance  more than half of US state governors said in 2015 that they did not want Syrian refugees settled there.

OPINION: UN refugees and migrants summit  All talk, no action

Some Eastern European states have sealed borders, asking their neighbouring states to do the same. There is a push in France to empty the Calais Jungle  the encampment holding at least 7,000 migrants and refugees, including 900 unaccompanied minors  into the UK, which, in turn, has expressed an interest in walling off the port to keep migrants out.

Australia wants the refugees and migrants detained and resettled off its shores. Most of Europe wants Turkey to keep the 2.5 million refugees it is hosting there, and is willing to give financial incentives to make it happen.

According to the UNs refugee agency , after Syria, most refugees come from Afghanistan (2.4 million)  with the majority ending up in Iran and Pakistan, where they are vulnerable to abuse , exploitation and deportation .

Pledges, and then ?

It is too soon to say whether Obamas summit will mean the international community has met the challenge of the refugee issue, said Josephine Liebl, who leads Oxfams UK policy and advocacy on humanitarian crisis.

The UN Summit gave us [the] NY Declaration  these were nice words but what we actually need is concrete action, she told Al Jazeera.

The next two years will be key  We would have wanted this to be the start of a more sane and humane approach to the crisis. But we need to wait to see whether governments will actually go back home and practise what they signed up for, said Liebl.

Employing the same pay-to-play strategy he used at last years UN General Assembly, when he called member states to the mat for peacekeeping pledges, Obama drew 52 nations and organisations into the room on Tuesday.

Although the 2015 peacekeeping summit seemed to yield significant pledges for peacekeeping troops, equipment and other support, fulfilment has been an issue.

The bulk of the 47 countries making pledges in 2015 have failed thus far to meet those obligations.

The possibility of member states not honouring their pledges is an important question, said Brooke Lauten, humanitarian policy and protection adviser at the Norwegian Refugee Council.

There are mechanisms to monitor and pressure states to follow through with their pledges. But real consequences are few, she said.

Will the wrath of the world community come down on them? No, said Lauten.

The likelihood of member states throwing money at the refugee issue rather than committing to accepting and resettling refugees is a huge, huge concern, she said.

The EU-Turkey deal is essentially the commodification of refugees, said Lauten.

They have become a commodity that you can buy and sell on the market  its about the externalisation of borders, she added.
If only world leaders would stop sacrificing people for their own glory, the world would be a far better place.

Its like David Beckham meets Luis Suarez. Out of all the speakers and their litanies at the United Nations, US President Barack Obama and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stood out with their contrasted worldviews, styles and perspectives.

Obama  like Beckham  sounded more like a brand than a political player. Hes preoccupied with his legacy and far more interested in looking good than in scoring points. Hes above the fray, tired of all the tackling and kicking and just wants everyone to get along.

So, in his last speech to the UN, the US president spoke in historic rather than political terms, lecturing the world body about the blessings of free trade, technology and globalisation, while warning against aggressive nationalism and crude populism.





If there was no place for the Middle East tragedies in Obamas panorama, the in-your-face Turkish president made the Syria, Iraqi and Palestinian tragedies central to his speech.

Erdogans was an outright diplomatic offensive; he scored points against the hypocrisy of the West and the negligence of the rest at the UN Security Council.

Since the failed military coup against his government, hes clearly in no mood to play with those ignoring the plight of those in the Middle East and seems ready to bite off the heads of those messing with Turkey.

Different perspectives

Obama and Erdogan presented different perspectives, but werent necessarily playing for opposite teams. It is the sobering glass-half-empty argument completing the glass-half-full picture.

READ MORE: No to partitioning Syria

And yet, seen from the Middle East, and indeed from the rest of the world, Obamas claim that the world is in far better shape today than during the 20th centurys world wars, while not incorrect, smacks of sloppiness and indifference.

He knows better than most that even in the US, his promise to bridge the gap between blacks and whites, red states and blue states, and pull the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan have led to more  not less  racial and ideological tensions.

And he has expanded the landscape of military conflict, albeit with less US troops on the ground in the Middle East.

He spoke of accountability, but not a single banker or politician was held accountable for the financial crisis and the illegal war in Iraq during his tenure.

In comparison to 20, 15, 10 and even five years ago, the world continues to heat up, and its not just global warming. Despite much progress over the past half-a-century, the international political pressure cooker is gathering steam and theres no cooling down.

Conflict and bloodshed

Ive witnessed this first hand over the past few years, travelling through different continents, countries and communities. I spoke to countless people but found little optimism and much scepticism about the future.

Despite much progress over the past half-a-century, the international political pressure cooker is gathering steam and there's no cooling down. by

The enthusiasm that followed WWII, the liberation from colonialism, the end of the Cold War, the expansion of democracy and the various popular upheavals in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East have diminished if not vanished altogether.

Its a big mess out there; loss of compass, absence of leadership and little or nothing to believe in. To quote the eminent Irish poet, WB Yates: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

All of which begs the question: Whats next for a world in trouble? Because it feels like the rise of aggressive nationalism in the beginning of the 21st century is looking more and more like that of the early 20th century  the same century that gave us some of historys worst atrocities from world wars to colonial wars.

After half a century of change

The establishment of the United Nations and the creation and independence of new states that make up the majority of todays UN was supposed to usher in a more humane and equitable phase in human development.

READ MORE: Syria: Finding opportunity in a post-ceasefire crisis

But the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States brought us nuclear proliferation, proxy wars and the clash of ideologies that exerted a huge cost on human development.

The end of that hot Cold War should have been another cause of celebration as numerous states were freed from the tyranny of dictatorships and war.

But the wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, Somalia, Angola, and Rwanda cast much pessimism as never again was repeated again and again, not in Germany but throughout the world, especially in Syria, Iraq and the greater Middle East, where millions of civilians died in the process.

And yet, people looked forward to the expansion of democracies and human rights in their societies. Eastern Europe was freed from Soviet totalitarianism and client regimes; Latin America freed itself from US domination and client autocrats; and Africa began to find its way to representative government. Even the Arab world followed suit in 2011.

But as ideologies like communism, which inspired people, failed to meet the challenges and peoples needs in the 20th century, the triumphant Western liberalism opened the 21st century with horrific wars and a global financial crisis. Throughout Europe and the United States, inequality has skyrocketed, middle classes are suffering and racism is mounting.

After a decade of failures

The past few years have witnessed the retreat of democracy, return of autocracy and the rise of popular nationalism. To paraphrase the words of the UN general secretary, citizens distrust their leaders in a world of us vs them.

You might say theres nothing new here; its always been like that. But there was always a vision of sorts; a way forward, a promise of better things to come; but not this day.

READ MORE: Americas war for the Greater Middle East

Countries big and small seem to embrace, coercively or willingly, demagogic populism and nationalistic autocrats. From the rise of Russias Vladimir Putin through the ascendance of Chinas Xi Jinping, the election of Indias Narendra Modi, and even the Philippines Rodrigo Duarte.

Unfortunately, the Russian and Chinese alternatives to US leadership (imperial or otherwise) are lacking at best, and at times scary. by

In Latin America, leftist leaders have failed to meet peoples expectations. The Bolivarian revolution is on its knees in much of Central America as Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American nations suffer from corruption and misrepresentation.

Western Europe and the US arent spared by the waves of nationalist populism as the radical right continues to make major strides.

And these trends are not ideological with coherent worldviews; rather voiced through empty slogans and even 140-characters-or-less tweets about Islam and defeating evil (Islamists, immigrants, and minorities) that are bent on ruining the glorious (Christian) Western civilisation.

The alternatives

It must be said, love him or hate him, we will miss Obama once his successor takes over in a few months, just as Erdogan wouldve been missed if he was removed by a military coup. Its both their blessing and curse that their immediate alternatives dont look so promising.

If theres a judgement or comparison to be made, its certainly not between Obama and Erdogan. Its rather between Erdogan and his neighbours, and between Turkey and other developing/developed nations.

Its with Egypts Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Syrias Bashar al-Assad, Irans Ali Khamenei; and between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Kazakhstan, Malaysia, etc.

And the comparison is between Obama and Putin, and the US and China  over who provides a better vision for the future. Unfortunately, the Russian and Chinese alternatives to US leadership (imperial or otherwise) are lacking at best, and at times scary.

There is no point in searching for  or looking up to  the one-der leader or visionary. Not today, not ever. Certainly not in the real world. Progress comes through collective, civilisational and generational struggle that is earned tooth and nail.

Fortunately, as the US president argued, the new generation is better than his generation. But not when its subject to war, violence, racism and alienation. They are more likely to end up in prison or as potential recruits for criminal and violent groups than community organisers and enlightened leaders. And yet, even in times of war,= and conflict, we see countless youth sacrificing their lives and freedom for the lives and freedom of others. One such silver lining appeared in Syrias dark days in recent years, called White Helmets.

If only political leaders would rise to the level of their peoples sacrifice; if only they would stop sacrificing people for their own personal glory, the world would be a far better place.

If only the UN secretary-general could act like a referee and start slapping down each and every one of these rogue political players with the yellow and red cards they deserve.

Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. Follow him on Facebook.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
The failure of the latest ceasefire in Syria must inspire more concerted and imaginative attempts at finding success.

James Denselow is a writer on Middle East politics and security issues and a research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre.

When it comes to Syria it is easy to despair and hard to find solutions. The failure of the second US-Russian attempt at a ceasefire came a lot quicker than the first and was perhaps best symbolised by the images of the remains of 18 aid trucks burning just north of Aleppo.

As all the main powers in the conflict blamed each other, the United Nations announced that it would be suspending its supply of aid to the country. As ever, civilians continue to carry the burden of the failure of political actors in what Samer Abboud calls in his new book Syria the civilianisation of violence in the conflict.





While the loss of face to Washington and Moscow may result in a fudge to save a semblance of respect over the failure of the ceasefire, the reality is that more radical ideas over what needs to happen in Syria should be put into play.

Safe zones

The long debate about safe zones in Syria has been made somewhat defunct by Turkeys Operation: Euphrates Shield.

While this was ostentatiously concerned with going after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, Anakaras fears over the advance of Syrias Kurds saw them take large amounts of territory in the north of the country. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week that they have already secured 900 sq km and may extend this area to 5,000 sq km as part of a safe zone.

OPINION: Inside Bashar al-Assads mind

Whatever the rights, wrongs and interesting legal questions that surround Turkeys manoeuvres, could it be adopted by other actors to finally create an area in which fleeing Syrian civilians would be safe from harm?

Whatever the rights, wrongs and interesting legal questions that surround Turkey's manoeuvres could it be adopted by other actors to finally create an area in which fleeing Syrian civilians would be safe from harm? by

The need to prioritise civilian protection in Syria could form the basis of a serious discussion about the UNs role in the country. Before the failure of the ceasefire and its suspension of aid, the UN had been under increasing pressure to explain the imbalance of where its agencies were delivering aid.

In June, the Syria Campaign accused the UN of delivering 99 percent of its aid to government-controlled territories, and called on it to restore its impartiality.

A wider audit of the UNs approach to the politics of aid in a conflict dominated by the civilianisation of violence is long overdue. This should recognise that aid is being used as a weapon and a source of income.

As a recent European Council on Foreign Relations report explained, the supply of humanitarian aid to besieged areas is a particularly important source of revenue for militias and their business cronies, who use their presence on the ground to oversee or block the distribution of goods.

Also as a largely symbolic, but nevertheless important, part of this audit, the UN should make good on promises to deliver aid from the air to besieged communities.

Justice whatever price

Following the attacks on the aid convoy in Aleppo, Stephen OBrien, the UNs emergency relief coordinator, said: Let me be clear: if this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime.

Notions and norms of international law seem to have vanished when it comes to the Syria conflict, with ramifications that go beyond the war itself. Amal Clooney sprinkled some high-profile stardust on the role of law in Syria this week when she said that if there is a prosecution of President Assad, Id be delighted to work on it.

Following the destructions of schools, hospitals, and bakeries by weapons of all sorts, there needs to be some sense from the international community that accountability still exists and we have not slipped back into the law of the jungle.

The case of this weeks UN convoy is as good a starting point as any. The International Committee of the Red Cross described it as an attack on humanity and if a greater good could come of it, it would be a testament to the aid workers who died in the attack.

OPINION: Syrias Civil War: One conflict, multiple battles

So what needs to be done? The protection of Syrian civilians, giving them access to desperately needed humanitarian aid and ensuring accountability for crimes committed in war.

Where there is a will, there is a way and the failure of the latest ceasefire is nothing but a test of the international communitys will.

James Denselow is a writer on Middle East politics and security issues and a research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Courtesy Barney Taxel/Judson(CLEVELAND) -- Tiffany Tieu is a 26-year-old graduate student living in a retirement home.



And she loves it.



Tieu is one of the current residents of the five-year-old program at Judson Manor, part of a network of retirement communities in Cleveland, Ohio. Her closest friend at the home is 80-year-old Laura Berick.



At first, Tiffany was just walking Lauras dog. But then they got to talking -- about everything -- the way friends do.



Seattle Preschool in a Nursing Home 'Transforms' Elderly Residents



"Tiffany told me about a recipe of her mothers that she wanted to cook, but she didnt have an oven," Berick told ABC News. "So I said she could use mine. That turned into dinner parties and cooking together. And then clothes and what people are wearing. All the things Id been removed from."



The program started with students from the Cleveland Institute of Music performing in The Manors performance ballroom that has a grand piano, Rob Lucarelli, Director of Communications for Judson said.



"But we also had efficiency apartments that werent a good fit for the current market [of retirees]," he told ABC News. "At the same time, the school was looking for alternate housing for students."



Tieu said that shes now fully integrated into the home that started out as place to perform and sleep. "It was surprisingly easy to become a part of the community," she said. "We have so much in common. People here have had incredible life experiences and I have day-to-day access to 200 of those lives [to draw on]."



Berick said her appreciation of young people has also increased. "Tiffany and the other young people, they light up the room when they walk through. The whole mood changes. The conversation turns to what Tiffany is wearing or the performance coming up. And for the kids, it becomes normal to see someone in a wheelchair, to realize that theres a person who can talk and communicate and is alive."



"We learn to see each other just as people," Tieu added. But there are some unusual aspects of living with people 60,70, even 80 years older than her, she said.



"Its totally silent here on a Friday night."



Both women agreed that its the everyday exchanges - the conversations and hellos in the elevators and hallway - that truly make the residents of all ages a community. And that translates to the world outside of Judson Manor.



"A mutual appreciation of music has made all these other things possible," said Tieu. "Just one thing in common can lead to so much more."

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Amal and Zaytouna, a flotilla of two boats with all-women crews and passengers, set sail from Barcelona en route to besieged Gaza in another maritime attempt to break Israels illegal blockade on the tiny strip of Palestinian coastal territory.

This is a place where 1.7 million Palestinians have been locked for nearly a decade in what many describe as the worlds largest open air prison, a human laboratory that Israel uses periodically to test its weapons.

As with previous civilian voyages to Gaza, these boats are carrying prominent international figures who hope to use their stature to focus international attention on continuing Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

There are 11 women in each boat, including Malin Bjork, the European Parliament member, Mairead Maguire, the Nobel peace laureate from Northern Ireland, Fouzia Hassan, a doctor from Malaysia, and retired US army colonel Ann Wright.

Carrying a message of hope

There have been more than two dozen such voyages since 2008, with only five actually making it to Gaza. The rest have been intercepted by the Israeli military, which often confiscates the boats and other equipment, and arrests passengers.

And while the boats do often carry aid, including medical, building and educational supplies, organisers regard these costly and risky endeavours as largely symbolic. Spokeswoman Zohar Chamberlain Regev told Al Jazeera, Mainly we are carrying a message of hope and solidarity [for the people of Gaza].

It is perhaps difficult to see the real and material impact of international activists setting sail to try to visit Gaza, only to be intercepted, arrested and deported. But the significance of these endeavours becomes apparent when viewed in the wider context of popular movements taking root around the world.

The theft of Palestine and destruction of its native society is the world's last vestige of settler-colonialism. It is the link between that ignominious era and contemporary neoliberal destruction of life, lucrative war-making, and wholesale destruction of our planet for the profit of few. by

One of the most visible current examples is happening in North Dakota. As the Womens Boat makes its way to Palestine, an epic battle is being waged by the Standing Rock Sioux nation to halt construction of an oil pipeline that threatens the integrity of their land and water.

They have been joined in their struggle by more than 60 Native American tribes. First Nation peoples from around the world have expressed solidarity, and statements of unqualified support have been issued by the National Lawyers Guild, prominent Palestinians, the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Nation of Islam, among others. And rallies of support have been held in cities throughout the US and elsewhere.

Violence breeds global solidarity

As in the case of Standing Rock, such immediate coalescing of leftist movements in common cause has been a powerful reinforcement to the Palestinian struggle against Israels settler colonialism. Further, the traditional response of power  namely, the use of violence  has proved ineffective.

For example, when Israel boarded and attacked the Gaza Flotilla in 2010, killing 10 unarmed passengers, the Free Gaza movement was flooded with requests from around the world to join their cause.

Overnight, the coalition grew from six to 20 organisations, including groups from Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and more.

Likewise, when the Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners used attack dogs on unarmed protectors of the land, the resolve of the Sioux peoples was further galvanised and activists around the country took to the streets in solidarity.

Predictably, power  whether corporate, state, or both  has thus turned its attention to preventing the dissemination of information.

One of the most powerful tools available to activists recently has been the relative ease in accessing news that bypasses traditional gatekeepers of information, such as mainstream newspaper editors and corporate television producers. Social media, independent news outlets, and citizen journalists have effective forums of communication with the world.

READ MORE: All-female flotilla aims to break Israeli siege of Gaza

So it came as no surprise when North Dakota issued an arrest warrant for Amy Goodman, whose Democracy Now news report showing corporate security unleashing attack dogs on unarmed protesters went viral.

Israel, on the other hand, has taken the unprecedented step of concluding deals with social media giants, such as Facebook, to censor Palestinian voices, in particular video evidence of persistent Israeli war crimes.

Towards a new concept of citizenship

The theft of Palestine and destruction of its native society is the worlds last vestige of settler-colonialism. It is the link between that ignominious era and contemporary neoliberal destruction of life, lucrative war-making and wholesale destruction of our planet for the profit of few.

Two boats with 11 women each and a few hundred people encamped on their land to stop a pipeline might appear only symbolic in the face of the overwhelming power of corporate and military states, but they are more.

They give cause to the global discontent of an increasingly informed public. They represent a popular awakening, where citizens are moved to protect each other from predatory power. They are the righteous agitators we all need in these desperate times of state violence and unprecedented global wars, pollution, food and water insecurity.

Their actions blur the boundaries of nation-states, race and class, shifting loyalties towards universal rights. They build global networks of activists. They help to change the prevailing narrative by injecting words like occupation, siege and dignity into popular discourse.

The women on the Amal and Zaytouna are mostly from powerful nations, or at least stable ones. They are using their privilege and access to resources in the best possible way: to lend solidarity with the struggle of a besieged people and to help forge a new concept of citizenship.

Susan Abulhawa is an international bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist. Her latest novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water is translated into 26 languages.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Residents tell of horrific humanitarian situation as food and medical assistance have been lacking for months.

A United Nations decision to suspend all aid convoys to Syria has come under fire from Aleppo residents who say that they have not had access to basic humanitarian supplies such as food in months.

Today the UN stopped the aid to the Syrian people. Our people are dying. We have not had aid come in for a very long time, Ibrahim al-Hajj, a member of the all-volunteer rescue team known as the Syrian Civil Defence, who spoke to Al Jazeera from Aleppo. My family and I have one weeks worth of stored food left, and after that, we will run out.

Al-Hajj is just one of 300,000 Syrians who live in Eastern Aleppo, which has been under a renewed government-imposed siege since earlier this month.

Since mid-2012, the city has been divided between regime control in the west and opposition control in the east. It has come to symbolise the devastation wrought on Syria and its civilian population.

READ MORE: Syria civil war  Why Aleppo matters?

The UN decision came in response to the targeting aid lorries operated by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC). Some 20 civilians and one SARC staff member were killed as they were unloading trucks carrying vital humanitarian aid.

They showed us the Eid ceasefire, and on Monday, they showed us hell. It was horrific. by Marwa Taleb, a resident of Aleppo

The attack deprives thousands of civilians of much-needed food and medical assistance, said a statement issued by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The statement described the incident as a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.

The Syrian Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, recorded about 40 civilians wounded in the attack.

The eight-day fragile ceasefire, brokered by the United States and Russia, came to an end on Monday evening. Reports of civilian deaths and heavy bombardment came shortly after. At 7pm the regime announced the end of the truce. At exactly 7:10pm, Aleppo and its countryside were hit with more than 100 raids of rockets, barrel bombs, cluster bombs and vacuum missiles, said al-Hajj.

At least 47 Syrian civilians were killed on Monday: women, men and children as young as eight years old, added al-Hajj, who accompanies rescue workers to the scene of every attack to document the details.

On Tuesday, ground battles between pro-government forces and rebel fighters raged on the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo City. Air raids also targeted a 31-lorry UN convoy carrying humanitarian aid on Monday at Urm al-Kubra, a town west of Aleppo.

Aleppo, Syrias largest city, has been a particularly bloody arena in the war between the armed opposition and the government forces.

Marwa Taleb, a mother and resident living in the east of the city, says she wishes the ceasefire was never implemented. They showed us the Eid ceasefire, and on Monday, they showed us hell. It was horrific. They were vicious and fanatic with their use of cluster bombs. You cannot imagine how much they bombarded us with cluster bombs, Taleb told Al Jazeera, saying that the attacks took place on the street adjacent to her home.

The ceasefire was good for the children because they were able to rejoice in Eid. But I wish it was never implemented. We became so desensitised to the bombardment that it has become a regular part of our lives, continued Taleb. So, when the shelling started again, the children became very aware of the difference.





Aleppo residents say the effects of the siege have been reflected in the high price and scarcity of food in the markets, no available cooking gas or fuel for the cars. They are relying on firewood for cooking and eating mainly grains such as rice, lentils, bulgur, and herbs that can be grown.

Food prices doubled after Eid. There are only some vegetables in the markets such as eggplant, and zucchini. There is also some parsley and yoghurt, but that is about it, Zouhir al-Shimale, a local journalist in the city, told Al Jazeera. One kilogram of meat used to cost $14. Now, it costs $32.

With the siege securely in place and government forces making all exit routes out of the city inaccessible, residents such as al-Hajj who are trying to leave are unable to find a way out.

All the roads are blocked. I am trying to get my son and my wife out  somewhere, anywhere  but I am not being able to, said al-Hajj. Why is everyone attacking us? Why cant my son live safely like every other child in the world?

We die a thousand deaths every day, and no one cares.
Campaigners urge removal of Indian social activists statue from university, saying he was racist towards black people.

A group of Ghanaian academics, students and artists is calling for the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus, saying that the leader of Indias independence movement was racist towards black people.

The statue of Gandhi, who spent 21 years (1893-1914) in South Africa and fought for the rights of Indians living there, was erected at the University of Ghana in mid-June during a visit to the country by Indias President Pranab Mukherjee.

In an online petition, professors at the university cited a series of Gandhis own writings during his time in South Africa to illustrate his racist identity.

They quoted several references in which he depicted Indians as being at a higher level than black Africans, and used the racist pejorative kaffirs to describe them.

One of Gandhis writings cited in the petition reads: Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

Protests in South Africa

Born in 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became internationally known for his legacy of non-violent resistance and for being at the forefront of Indias independence movement after nearly two centuries of British rule.

In the eyes of millions of his compatriots, Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, is known as the Mahatma, or great soul, an iconic figure who achieved political and social process through peace.

But the petitions authors said that they could not recognise such a title for a man they accused of actively siding with British colonisers to ensure the interests of South Africas black population were put down during his time in the country.

How will the historian teach and explain that Gandhi was uncharitable in his attitude towards the Black race and see that were glorifying him by erecting a statue on our campus? senior lecturer Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua wrote in the campaign letter, co-signed by four other petitioners.

In South Africa, Gandhis legacy has also been called into question recently.

Last year, an online campaign using the #GandhiMustFall hashtag gained traction, while a statue of his in Johannesburg was vandalised during a rally attended by protesters holding placards reading Racist Gandhi Must Fall.

Ela Gandhi, the social activists granddaughter and a former MP for South Africas ruling African National Congress party, argued that while the term kaffir was not considered as derogatory or [a] swear word at that time compared with its highly offensive meaning today, Gandhis reference to African people as savage and inferior to Indians could not be justified.

While this was within the context of an application to retain the qualified voting rights that Indians had, today, when we look at it indeed we feel disgust, she told Al Jazeera.

We ask why should we be critical of others to establish our own stature. There can be no justification for that. In later life, that was one of the ideals Gandhi propagated in respect of caste, class and race, Ela said, adding that there were many other quotes from his later years which point to the exact opposite of what he is being accused.

If they do not want his statue, then by all means remove it. But I would suggest, very humbly, do not discard the notion of non-violence, of compassion, of Ubuntu, and of respect for fellow human beings, and for nature and the whole of the universe, simply because these were the ideals Gandhi stood for and was assassinated for.

Uncomfortable truth

Ashwin Trikamjee, president of the South African Hindu Maha Sabha, said allegations of racism against Gandhi were not new.

We have heard of them before, Trikamjee told Al Jazeera.

What is significant is that Gandhi chose to live with black South Africans and fought a common struggle against apartheid. He earned the respect of all South Africans and was particularly honoured and revered by none other than [former] President [Nelson] Mandela and the ANC.

Pointing out that a street has been named after him in Durban, and describing him as an inspiration to all South Africans, Trikamjee argued that Gandhis philosophy of non-violence certainly made a huge impact and certainly inspired the fight against apartheid.

But Ashwin Desai, a sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, told Al Jazeera that Gandhi never acknowledged nor appreciated the long struggle of African people against dispossession and their dragooning into mines under slave-like conditions.

There is a misrepresentation of Gandhi by court historians who want to present a largely sanitised and universalist Gandhi; as South Africas first and foremost anti-apartheid fighter, he said, adding that his racist views towards black people had widely been chronicled.

The hagiographic version must be challenged. The truth about the South African Gandhi is uncomfortable, Desai said.

Those who seek to remove the statute of Gandhi have rightly focused on a man who spat on the struggles of Africans in South Africa.

Honouring Africans

Using the online hashtag #GandhiForComeDown  pidgin for Gandhi Must Come Down  the campaign in Ghana has drawn comparisons with last years Rhodes Must Fall initiative in South Africa, which called for the removal of a statue of British coloniser and imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town.

In their petition, which had gathered more than 1,030 signatures by Wednesday morning, the Ghanaian campaigners also cited a number of world class institutions that were removing racist symbols to urge educational authorities to pull down the statue from the University of Ghanas Legon campus.

In the short term  we would like to have the statue [removed], Obadele Kambon, research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, told Al Jazeera of the campaigns aims.

In the longer term, we would like to show the connectedness of various related movements throughout the world for African/Black dignity, he added, citing online campaigns such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe and #ColinKaepernicks national anthem protest, among others.

We see them as interconnected throughout space and time.

The university campaigners, who are backed by the ACCRA dot ALT art collective, said they had not been consulted about the installation of Gandhis statue on the campus, and called for its replacement with memorials honouring Africas heroes and heroines.

Why should we uplift other peoples heroes at an African university when we havent lifted up our own? the petitioners said.

We consider this to be a slap in the face that undermines our struggles for autonomy, recognition and respect.
Iraqs military advances near the centre of Shirqat as it moves to secure supply lines before the battle for Mosul.

The Iraqi army has closed in on the centre of Shirqat, a northern town held by ISIL seen as a stepping stone in a military campaign to recapture the armed groups stronghold of Mosul.

The army, backed by local police and tribal fighters, took 12 nearby villages since launching the operation on Tuesday morning, Ali Dawdah, the mayor of Shirqat currently based in Erbil, said on Wednesday.

READ MORE: Messages from ISIL territory ask forgiveness for murder

With air support from a US-led coalition, the troops are now less than 3km from the town centre, according to Dawdah, who said he expected the campaign to be concluded within 48 hours.





Five security personnel and one civilian were killed in the battle for Shirqat, said the mayor.

The town lies on the west bank of the River Tigris in Salaheddin province, 260km northwest of Baghdad and around 80km south of Mosul.

We are making good progress, Yahya Rasool, Joint Operations Command spokesman, told AFP news agency earlier on Wednesday.

Shirqat is important, he said. We cant move on Mosul and have terrorists control Sherqat.

Tens of thousands of civilians are thought to be trapped in Shirqat and surrounding villages, which have been under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) since the group seized a third of Iraqi territory in 2014.

Officials have warned for months of a humanitarian disaster inside the town, with residents facing food shortages.

There has not been a large-scale displacement of civilians so far.

OPINION: Iraqs regional decentralisation debate is heating up

Residents of Shukran and Houri villages told Reuters news agency by phone that they had begun waving white flags above their houses on Tuesday evening as the military advanced, but ISIL punished them with 50 lashes each.

Mosul push in October

Meanwhile, a top US official said on Wednesday that the push on Mosul could begin as early as next month.





We assess today that the Iraqis will have in early October all the forces marshalled, trained, fielded, equipped that are necessary for operations in Mosul, US General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a military event in Washington.

Timing of that operation now is really just a function of a political decision by Prime Minister [Haider al-]Abadi.

Though the Pentagon does not plan on directly sending US troops into combat, it has thousands of soldiers in Iraq who are training and arming Iraqi partners.

We will be in a position to provide whatever support, whatever reinforcement, those forces need in order to be successful, Dunford said.

ISIL seized Mosul in a lightning offensive through the north and west of the country, in 2014.

Mosul had an estimated population of around two million before ISIL took it over.

Accurate numbers for the population remaining in the city are hard to come by but the United Nations and other officials have said up to one million civilians may still be living under ISIL rule in the Mosul area.

The Pentagon estimates 3,000 to 4,500 ISIL fighters are in Mosul.
Killing in North Carolina of 43-year-old said to be unarmed and disabled follows fatal shooting of black man in Tulsa.

A US police officer has shot a black man at a housing complex in Charlotte, authorities in North Carolina say, prompting street protests late into the night.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) said on Twitter on Tuesday that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured.

Witnesses contradicted police reports that the man killed was armed, saying that he was unarmed and disabled, according to reports.

The man has been named as Keith Lamont Scott, said Al Jazeeras Alan Fisher, reporting from Greensboro, North Carolina.

He said at least one protester was also injured in the protests.

The police officer was named as Brentley Vinson. Associated Press news agency said Vinson is black.

Tense situation

Television coverage showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd protesting against police brutality.

It is tense. There are still people on the streets, our correspondent said.

Police killings of black men over the past few months have seen anger swell as many fear civil rights are being eroded.

READ MORE: Video shows US police shoot and kill unarmed black man

According to a tally being kept by the Guardian newspaper, police have killed at least 193 black men so far this year. In all of 2015, police killed at least 306 black men.

The protests came only hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police went to the complex about 4pm looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw the man  not the suspect they were looking for  inside a car, police said.

Officers saw the man get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, police said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again.

At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon.

Scott, the victim, was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Officer Vinson, who shot Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Stop killing us

Detectives recovered a firearm at the scene and were interviewing witnesses.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night.

Here's the man's sister. She says he did not have a gun. @CMPD says he did. @WBTV_News pic.twitter.com/JwHMixy9m7  Sarah Blake Morgan (@StorytellerSBM) September 20, 2016

Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Some protesters were heard yelling Black lives matter, and Hands up, dont shoot! One person held up a sign saying Stop Killing Us.

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot Terence Crutcher, 40, on Friday in a confrontation that was captured on police dashboard camera and helicopter video.

Shelbys lawyer has said that Crutcher was not following the officers commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon.

A lawyer representing Crutchers family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.
Nigerian and regional forces clash with Boko Haram fighters for control of Malam Fatori town in northeast Borno state.

Fierce clashes have been reported and claims of casualties as Nigerias military backed up by a multinational force battled Boko Haram fighters for control of a town in the countrys northeast.

The fighting on Tuesday and Wednesday around the town of Malam Fatori in Borno state, near the border with Niger and Chad, was the latest in the area which has changed hands many times in Boko Harams seven-year armed campaign that has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced more than two million in Nigeria.

Nigerian army spokesman Sani Kukasheka Usman said government and troops from the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) captured Malam Fatori on Tuesday and killed several Boko Haram members.

But, Boko Haram fighters regrouped and counterattacked, according to the Associated Press news agency. On Wednesday, Reuters news agency quoted Usman, the Nigerian armys spokesman, as saying the operation is continuing.

Al Jazeeras Ahmed Idris, reporting from the capital Abuja, said government troops had ousted the armed groups fighters from areas around Mallam Fatori on Tuesday, but then retreated when Boko Haram regrouped with reinforcements and mounted new attacks.

Although there is so much propaganda on both sides, the army came clean this time around saying that it has lost its position before and it has withdrawn tactically to vantage positions to try to take back the town, Idris said. Meanwhile, fighting is ongoing in that particular area, he added.

Boko Haram also claimed to have killed 40 troops involved in the operation, our correspondent said.





Amaq, a site affiliated to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), said that its fighters had attacked an army convoy in the Malam Fatori area on Monday killing 40 troops, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors the groups announcements.

Boko Haram pledged loyalty to ISIL last year.

The armed group controlled a swath of land in northeast Nigeria around the size of Belgium in the early part of last year, but has been pushed out of most of that territory by the Nigerian army, aided by MNJTF troops from neighbouring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

Boko Haram have nevertheless continued to carry out suicide bombings in the northeast and in neighbouring countries.

The UN Childrens Fund estimated in a recent report on Boko Haram violence that 475,000 children across the Lake Chad region  which borders Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger  will suffer from acute malnutrition this year.

An estimated 38 children have been used to carry out suicide attacks in the Lake Chad basin so far this year, bringing to 86 the total number of children used in suicide attacks since 2014, the report said.
Imprisoned group says it was asked to raise cash through drug sales to fund Senate campaign of Leila de Lima.

Convicted felons in the Philippines have testified before a Congress hearing that they had bribed a former justice minister and fierce critic of President Rodrigo Duterte.

The group of imprisoned gang leaders claim they were asked to raise cash through drug sales to fund Senate campaign of Leila de Lima, justice secretary in Benigno Aquinos government and currently a senators then senatorial campaign.

The testimonies dealt another blow to de Limas efforts to investigate the countrys extrajudicial killings.

She is now facing a hearing in Manila in response to the corruption accusations.

The hearing was held a day after de Lima, who is widely recognised as Dutertes main political opponent, was removed from a senate commission looking into extrajudicial killings during Dutertes war on drugs.

The controversial campaign has killed at least 3,000 people in the past three months.

The senate inquiry, led by de Lima, included an account by former death squad member Edgar Matobato, who testified that Duterte was responsible for killings during his time as mayor of Davao City.

Duterte called Matobatos testimony a lie and de Lima was toppled from chairing the inquiry the following week.

L ong and lonely battle

Herbert Colanco, one of the witnesses testifying against de Lima, says he received special treatment after paying her money earned through drug deals.

For the 2016 elections, they [people working for de Lima] asked me to collect 30 to 50kg of crystal meth from Chinese druglords inside the prison, Colando said.

Antionio Trillanes, commision member, says the Senate should continue its hearings into Dutertes drug killings, although he admits this will be difficult.

Youre up against a president who has authoritarian tendencies and who is a self-confessed mass murderer, Trillanes said.

De Lima called the hearings on her alleged involvement in drugs trade a sham, and refused to attend. She accused Duterte of trying to silence her.

Im about to be crucified by the house of representatives, de Lima said.

I knew this was going to be a long and lonely battle. But I will continue.
At least 43 people die and 154 rescued after boat carrying hundreds of refugees sinks off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh.

At least 43 people have died and 154 have been rescued after a boat carrying hundreds of refugees capsized off Egypts coast.

State news agency MENA reported on Wednesday that the boat, believed to be carrying around 600 people, capsized off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh governorate, about 140km north of Cairo.





Officials said 31 bodies had been recovered  20 men, 10 women and one child. A correspondent for Reuters news agency later saw a fishing boat bring in 12 more bodies, bringing the total to 43.

At least 154 people had been saved, according to officials, who said that search teams were looking for more survivors.

Initial information indicates that the boat sank because it was carrying more people than its limit. The boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water, a senior security official told Reuters.

The boat was carrying Egyptians, Syrians and people from African countries, security sources told Reuters.

Mohamed Nasrawy, an Egyptian fisherman, said that he knew seven people on the shipwrecked vessel, two of whom were still missing.

Tonight more people are going to set sail, he told Reuters.

The poverty that they are living in is what is pushing them. Although we are not Europeans, they take good care of people, while our country doesnt.

Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said all resources possible would be directed into the rescue mission and that those responsible had to be brought to justice.

It was not immediately clear where the boat was headed, though some security sources said they believed it was going to Italy.

More and more people have been trying to cross to Italy from the North African coastline in recent months as the weather improves, particularly from Libya, where people-traffickers operate with relative impunity, but also from Egypt.

Some 206,400 refugees have crossed the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

More than 2,800 deaths have been recorded between January and June this year, against 1,838 during the period last year.
US calls for the grounding of aircraft in key areas of Syria as air strikes pound the Aleppo region killing 13 medics.

The United Nations says it is ready to resume the delivery of life-saving aid to Syria, days after an attack on a humanitarian convoy killed 20 people and triggered the suspension of much-needed relief operations.

The preparation for these convoys has now resumed and we are ready to deliver aid to besieged and hard-to-reach areas as soon as possible, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement on Wednesday.

The United Nations continues to call for safe, unconditional, unimpeded and sustained access to all Syrians in need, wherever they are, it said.

Jens Laerke, the spokesman for OCHA, said that several convoys were expected as early as Thursday, but did not specify where. He said the convoys would not go to the besieged city of Aleppo in northern Syria.





The announcement came shortly after the US and Russia faced off over the conflict in Syria at a UN crisis meeting discussing the situation in the country following the collapse of a nationwide ceasefire.

Russia and the US negotiated the latest truce plan, but Syria ended the week-long ceasefire on Monday following a US-led coalition strike on a Syrian army post.

Shortly after the truce ended, a UN aid convoy was hit in an air strike that US officials have blamed on Russia, the key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Moscow has rejected the allegations that Russian or Syrian warplanes carried out the attack.

Addressing the UN Security Council on Wednesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry called for the creation of no-go areas for aircraft in northern Syria to facilitate the delivery of aid, and demanded that Russia forced the Syrian government to ground its warplanes.

OPINION: A world of dark clouds and silver linings

Kerry said the attack on the aid convoy raised profound doubt as to whether Russia or Syria would live up to ceasefire obligations.

How can people go sit at a table with a regime that bombs hospitals, drops chlorine gas again and again and again and again, and acts with impunity? What kind of credibility do you have? Kerry said.

Supposedly we all want the same goal  a secular united Syria  but we are all proving to be woefully inadequate to come to the table and have that discussion.

Kerry said that listening to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made him feel like he was living in a parallel universe.

Make or break moment

Lavrov, for his part, called for a very thorough and impartial investigation into the convoy attack to determine what had happened.

Many have said it could have been a rocket or an artillery shelling, he told the Security Council meeting.

I think we need to refrain from emotional reactions and instead investigate and be very professional.

Al Jazeeras James Bays, reporting from UN headquarters in New York, said it looked like after years of negotiations with Lavrov, Kerry had finally cracked.





Ever since hes been secretary of state, Kerrys felt his personal cooperation with Lavrov, a man hes known for a long time, was the way forward. Theyd come up with repeated deals in Munich earlier this year and even 10 days ago.

Hes placed his trust in Lavrov despite many, including those in the US administration, questioning that trust and feeling that Kerry has been humiliated repeatedly.

Now it seems that Kerry has finally cracked, our correspondent said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the meeting this was a make or break moment for Syria, urging world powers to use their influence to help re-start political talks so Syrians can negotiate a way out of the hell in which they are trapped.

Russia and the US co-sponsored the fragile ceasefire plan, with Kerry warning that it could be the last chance to try to end Syrias civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in five years.

Despite the tensions, Kerry insisted that efforts to salvage the truce were not dead, after a short meeting of the 23-nation International Syria Support Group in New York, where world leaders have gathered for the UN General Assembly.

Kerrys spokesman John Kirby said it had been agreed that despite continued violence, diplomats would use the agreement between the US and Russia as a basis for more talks.

The deal foresaw an end to fighting between Assads forces and moderate rebels, aid deliveries to besieged areas and, if the ceasefire was held for seven days, cooperation between Moscow and Washington in battling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and other groups.

Air strikes pound Aleppo





On the ground, meanwhile, heavy bombardment pummelled the city of Aleppo and other areas in the province on Wednesday.

At least 13 medics were killed in a series of air strikes in Khan Tuman, a village south of Aleppo city, on Wednesday, according to the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations.

The group said air strikes killed four of its staff, two nurses and two ambulance drivers, as they were evacuating victims from an earlier raid, which had killed nine other medical personnel.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks daily developments in the Syrian conflict, said seven civilians, including three children, were also killed in separate air raids in the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhun.

The monitoring group said dozens of raids hit the citys east overnight, as Syrian government troops advanced on rebels in Aleppos southwestern outskirts.
Attacker appeared to be mentally disturbed and has no links with organised groups, according to Ankara officials.

Police have shot and detained a knife-carrying Turkish man who tried to force his way into the Israeli embassy in Turkeys capital Ankara.

The man, armed with a 30cm knife, ran towards the embassy shouting slogans and was shot in the leg, the governors office in Ankara said in a statement on Wednesday.

Officials said initial investigations showed that the man, identified as 41-year-old Osman Nuri Caliskan from the central Anatolian city of Konya, appeared to be mentally disturbed and had no record of links with any organised group.

OPINION: What the Israeli-Turkish reconciliation says about Gaza

A man approached the embassy with a knife and was shot by a local guard. Everyone on our side is safe, Emmanuel Nahshon, spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said in a statement.

The assailant was wounded in the foot. We dont know if he was attacking police officers or the embassy itself.

He added that the assailant only managed to reach the outer perimeter of the building, but said the incident was still being investigated.

READ MORE: Turkish aid flows into besieged Gaza Strip

Israels embassy in Ankara said in a statement that the suspect tried to stab a Turkish police officer in front of the mission.





The embassy trusts the Turkish forces to control and investigate the incident, it added.

Turkeys NTV television said employees of the embassy took refuge in a shelter during the incident.

Caliskan was taken to Ankaras Numune Training and Research Hospital, according to Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency.

Roads around the embassy were closed after the incident and specialist police officers were sent to the scene.

The Hurriyet daily reported that the attacker told police officers interrogating him at the hospital that he did this to stop the bloodshed in the Middle East.

READ MORE: Four held for alleged UK, German embassies plot in Turkey

Foreign missions in Turkey have been on a state of high alert following a spate of attacks across the country this year blamed on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Kurdish separatist groups.

The British embassy in Ankara was closed on Friday over security concerns.

Three months ago, Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship that left 10 Turks dead.

Under the deal, the two countries are to begin the process of exchanging ambassadors to fully restore their diplomatic ties, although this has yet to formally take place.
Opposition says two days of violence in Kinshasa left more than 100 dead, while the police put the death toll at 32.

The United Nations has called on authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to exercise maximum restraint following deadly anti-government protests, as conflicting reports emerged over the number of people killed in the violence.

Police said on Wednesday that 32 people had been killed during clashes in the capital Kinshasa on Monday and Tuesday, but the opposition contradicted the death toll, saying at least 100 people were killed when security forces fired live ammunition at protesters.

The different figures came as DRC officials vowed to hunt down and punish those responsible for the violence.

Investigations will spare no one, police spokesman Pierrot Mwanamputu was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

If police or soldiers violated ethics or the law, measures will be taken.





Later on Wednesday, the UN Security Council urged leaders in the country not to exacerbate the situation, while the office of President Joseph Kabila accused protest organisers of trying to incite bloody riots.

Angry protests

Thousands took to the streets of Kinshasa on Monday to oppose an election delay which some call a plot by Kabila to stay in power after his mandate expires in late December.

Kabilas political future has been a source of tension in the country for more than a year.

The president has yet to announce whether he will pursue another term in office, though the constitution prohibits it.

Earlier this year, the Constitutional Court claimed that Kabila could remain in office in a caretaker capacity until an election is held, triggering a wave of angry protests.

Kabila was catapulted into power as a young soldier by Kinshasa politicians, a day after his father was assassinated in 2001.

In 2006, three years after multiple peace deals ended a bloody war that embroiled troops from at least six foreign countries, Kabila won the first free, democratic presidential poll since independence from Belgium in 1960.

The overarching consensus was that these elections were fair. But when Kabila won a second and final five-year term in 2011, his victory was disputed by domestic and foreign observers.

Opposition parties accuse Kabila of conspiring to extend his mandate by delaying general elections, initially due to take place in November, until next year at the very least. Government supporters deny the claims.
Senators call for Stumpfs head in Capitol Hill grilling as bank admits creating two million bogus customer accounts.

John Stumpf, Wells Fargo chief executive, has been asked to resign after being grilled on Capitol Hill following a massive bogus accounts scandal that involved the bank opening up two million bogus customer accounts.

Tuesdays grilling of Stumpf, for his oversight of the banks actions, potentially laid the groundwork for new rules and reviving questions of whether banks are too big to fail.

Wells Fargo has acknowledged that bank employees inappropriately opened the customer accounts and that about 5,300 employees were fired over five years.

Former bank employees say they were under intense pressure to add accounts for each customer.

Abuses were found as early as 2011, Stumpf said, but bank executives only realised the scale of the problem early last year.

Bogus accounts

Stumpf told the Senate Banking Committee that customers who had bogus accounts opened in their name will be compensated for any damage to their credit rating.

He said that he told his managers to do whatever it takes to make customers whole, refunding fees or compensating them for damage to their credit ratings.

But customers aiming to sue the bank over bogus accounts opened in their names may be in for an unpleasant surprise: the fine print requires them to take their claims to an arbitrator instead of a court.

Mandatory arbitration rules inserted into account-opening agreements prohibit customers from joining class actions or suing the third-largest US bank in court. Instead, the agreements require individual, closed-door arbitration.

If you missed my questions for @WellsFargo CEO John Stumpf on his gutless leadership earlier today, take a look. https://t.co/5brb1ARRqC  Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 21, 2016

Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for Stumpf to quit, with Warren saying Stumpf should give back his salary and be investigated.

You should resign. You should give back the money you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated, Warren said.

Earlier this month, the lender agreed to pay $190m in penalties and customer payouts to settle the case involving the creation of credit, savings and other accounts without customers knowledge.

About $5m will directly go to customers, many of whom might have paid a small fee on the unwanted accounts.

Criminal charges possible

The revelations are a severe blow to Wells Fargos reputation. During the financial crisis, the bank trumpeted itself as conservative, in contrast to its rivals.

Besides potential criminal charges against the company and its executives, Wells Fargo may face pressure from shareholders to change its practices on executive pay and governance.

The banks board of directors is examining what action it should take against company executives, Stumpf told the committee.

I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices, Stumpf said.

I apologise to all of the American people and our customers, and I will make it right.

Regulators fined Wells Fargo $185m last September for opening some two million customer deposit and credit card accounts without customer approval.
Prosecutors implicate Afghan-American man in explosions in New York and New Jersey that left many injured on Saturday.

US federal prosecutors have charged an Afghan-American with detonating and planting bombs in New York and New Jersey that left at least 31 people wounded.

The prosecutors said on Tuesday that Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, carried out two bombings on Saturday in Manhattans Chelsea neighbourhood and along the route of a US Marine Corps run in the New Jersey town of Seaside Park.

A criminal complaint was unsealed in Newark, New Jersey, shortly after a virtually identical filing was unsealed in New York.

The Afghanistan-born American restaurant worker, who lives in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was critically wounded in a police shootout on Monday.

Two officers were shot in the encounter, but suffered non-life threatening injuries.

Chris Bollwage, the mayor of Elizabeth, said Rahami had also sustained shots and had been taken away by ambulance. Rahami underwent surgery on his wounds and remains in hospital.

The 13-page indictment laid four charges against him, including the use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use and destruction of property by means of fire or explosives.

He will be transported to Manhattan to face the charges, said federal prosecutors in New York.

If convicted, he risks spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Prosecutors said 31 people were wounded in the Chelsea attack on Saturday.

The bomb was a pressure-cooker device, packed with ball bearings and steel nuts, placed in a dumpster and detonated by a timed device, similar to a second pressure cooker bomb discovered four blocks away.

Five pipe bombs found in Elizabeth and the second device safely defused in Chelsea were covered in the suspects fingerprints, the indictment alleged.

Surveillance footage also put him in Chelsea, and Rahami bought the ingredients for the bombs from eBay over the summer, prosecutors said.

The indictment says video recovered from the mobile phone of a relative of Rahami shows him lighting incendiary material in a cylindrical container two days before the bombings.

The charges come after the FBI admitted that they had investigated Rahami for terrorism in 2014 following a complaint from his father, but found no link despite alleged acts of violence.
We follow two Syrian refugees who part with large sums of money to embark on clandestine journeys fraught with danger.

Filmmaker: Fakher Alayoubi

The refugee crisis triggered by the continuing conflict in Syria has reached epic proportions in 2016. The death toll in the Mediterranean has risen steadily in recent years; and according to a UNHCR report, reached the 10,000 mark in the two-and-a-half years up to June 2016.

But the numbers succeeding in completing the hazardous sea journey and landing in Italy, largely on the island of Lampedusa, have also continued to increase  and this has challenged Italys preparedness to accept, process and accommodate them.

Dublin is like a coastguard that protects the rich European countries. by Karl Kopp, PRO ASYL, the German immigration advocacy organisation

While the Mediterranean crisis has deepened, the numbers fleeing Syria and taking the land route through Turkey have also mounted.

The powerful images of homeless adults and children queuing and camping at the borders of eastern Europe meant the world could no longer ignore the scale of the refugee crisis.

This human fallout was too much for many of these countries that were simply not prepared  practically or politically  for the nature or numbers of the tens of thousands of displaced people. The way the European Union deals with fingerprinting and asylum applications was also seriously challenged.

This film follows two Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe  one by sea, the other by land.

The filmmakers use hidden cameras to observe people smugglers doing deals with desperate refugees in both Libya and Turkey.

Muhannad Ahmed pays them to travel on an overcrowded boat from Zuwara on the Libyan coast to Italy.

The small fishing vessel has a capacity of 300 passengers  but on this trip 1,068 refugees were on board, including 193 children. No surprise, then, that it leaked and almost sank in the Mediterranean before being rescued by Italian coastguards. Muhannad secretly films the harrowing journey, aware that his phone may be confiscated if he is spotted, meaning clear evidence of the blatant exploitation by the people-smugglers would be lost.

Muhannad manages to travel on through Italy, filming as he goes, and then though France to Germany. Exhausted and running out of money, he abandons his plan to get to Sweden and applies, successfully, for asylum in Germany.

The films also follows Wail Azraq who has already tried six times to get to Europe by sea and now tries the overland route via Turkey and Bulgaria. But he is foiled by Bulgarian border police and deported back to Istanbul.

He [the smuggler] said walk and youll arrive in an hour. We walked two hours and crossed the Bulgarian border. Then we waited in the forest. Wed walk a hundred metres out, then go back and wait longer. The first patrol didnt spot us but the second one did. They took us to the checkpoint and asked where wed come from and where we were going. They beat a lot of people but they didnt beat us. They took the phone Id been filming with and sent us back to Turkey, Wail says.

The filmmakers continue on the route Wail would have taken, through Hungary and Austria, stopping at refugee camps and hostels on the way. Refugees in different stages of their journeys to safety in Europe tell stories of money stolen, border beatings and forced fingerprinting  a process used under Europes Dublin Regulation requiring refugees to be fingerprinted in the first country they arrive in.

The producers also directly confront people smugglers in Turkey accused of defrauding refugees of tens of thousands of euros.

Shot in 2014 but just as resonant today, the film concludes with updates on Wail and Muhannads journeys. Its visceral in the way it tells the refugee story from the inside  and hard-hitting on the failure of the international community to deal with both the refugee crisis and its root cause in the continuing conflict in Syria.
In early March 2016, Hondurass most prominent and outspoken environmental activist, Berta Caceres, was killed in her home. While shocking, her murder did not come as a surprise to her colleagues or family.

For years, Caceres had received thousands of threats because of her work, fighting for the rights of indigenous communities and for her attempts to stop a hydro-electric dam from being built on indigenous land.

She by Gustavo

is not the only one, there are so many imprisoned, tortured, persecuted, threatened. Theyve had to leave their families resisting and defending their land. They are fighting against these projects that are an accumulation of capital and land. Its the most dangerous job there is.]

Our Mother Earth  militarised, fenced in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated  demands that we take action  The river is like blood running through your veins. Its unjust. Not only is it unjust, its a crime to attack a river that has life, that has spirits, Berta Caceres said.

Her death is the latest in a string of assassinations that have made Honduras one of the worlds most dangerous places for environmental activists.

Knowing what my mum was fighting for, I always understood that there are dangers because there are bad people, business and powerful economic interests, Laura Zuniga, Caceress daughter says.

In 2013, Caceres told a reporter from Al Jazeera that she believed the army had a hit list of activists with her name at the top. She did not take any of this lightly and repeatedly asked the Ministry of Security for protection. But the government didnt seem to take her request seriously.

Just before midnight, on March 2, 2016, Caceres was shot dead inside her home.

So why was she killed? And what makes Honduras one of the most dangerous countries in the world for activists?

Fault Lines travels to Honduras to investigate the reasons behind the murder of Berta Caceres and to examine what is fuelling the war against land rights defenders and environmental activists.
A UF professor is looking for a new treatment for liver cancer by using a bodys molecule like a drug.

Thomas Schmittgen, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics, is studying a cellular ribonucleic fragment, RNA, and how it contributes to the development of cancer. Schmittgen said he wants to find a natural treatment for the cancer.

The main goal of our work is to develop better treatment for liver cancer, he said.

Schmittgen, who has been studying cancer for 10 years, has been researching ways to find a more natural alternative to chemotherapy. Schmittgen and his team have been studying how the cellular fragment, microRNA, impacts liver cancer.

With his approach, Schmittgen said hes hoping to reverse the cancer by restoring the level of microRNA in the body.

The American Cancer Society found the number of liver cancer cases has more than tripled over the past 36 years.

Dhruvit Sutaria, a UF pharmacy graduate student who has been helping Schmittgen since he began the project, said the professor eats, sleeps and drinks data when it comes to studying the cancer.

He said Schmittgens passion for the research is evident in the way he spends late nights collecting information and devotes some weekends to further their findings.

When you look at anyone in academia, I think its driven by personal interest, Sutaria said, adding that he once thought he had cancer when he found a mass on the base of his throat. When Sutaria found out he didnt, he felt relieved, but the close call drew him to learning more about cancer, he said.

Sutaria said Schmittgen has a more intimate connection with his students than any other personal investigator.

All of us are from different places, and its amazing to see how we all work as a team, said Sutaria.

Schmittgen said the research hes been able to do so far is a result of the effort the seven others working with him in the lab and other collaborators around the country.

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You need to establish collaborations with people, both within the University of Florida, in the country or the world, said Schmittgen.
A UF professors book was named a National Book Awards finalist for nonfiction on Thursday.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is a 592-page comprehensive history of racist ideas from their origins to the present, said Ibram X. Kendi, the books author and a UF history professor. The book explores how racist ideas are spread and embedded in society.

Despite the books length, Kendi said he made the books language simple so the average person could read it. During a book tour that started this month, Kendi went to Greene Correctional Facility in New York to discuss it with inmates.

Kendi started researching the book three years ago before publishing it this year, he said. He researched the book using publications from historical figures including Thomas Jefferson, W. E. B. Du Bois and Angela Davis.

This is the second year in a row the National Book Foundation named a UF-affiliated author a finalist, UF President Kent Fuchs wrote on Twitter.

One of the reasons why Im so excited about this award is that its not only an award for me, not only did I get the book on the shortlist for the National Book Award, but the University of Florida did as well, Kendi said.

Gigi Bermudez, a 23-year-old UF alumna, said seeing minority professors like Kendi succeed makes her proud to have attended UF. She said it also reinforces how essential a diverse teaching staff is.

Bermudez, who is Puerto Rican, took Kendis History of Hip Hop class last Spring. She said Kendi always made his class a safe environment for discussing current events, some about race relations.

It is a constant reminder that UF needs to start recruiting more faculty of color at the University of Florida, because the representation of black faculty really matters, Bermudez said.

For Kendi, the nomination came as a pleasant surprise. The final winner for the award will be announced in the middle of November at a ceremony in New York City.

I knew it was a possibility, but you never think something like that is going to happen to you until it does, unless you have a huge ego, Kendi said, and I dont.

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U.S. marshals arrest suspect in sexual assault incident near Midtown

On Monday afternoon, U.S. marshals arrested the man suspected of sexually assaulting a woman near Midtown last week.

Christopher Noel Gonzalez Cruz, 24, is accused of kidnapping and then assaulting a 19-year-old woman on Sept. 11 after the two met at Midtown, according to Alligator archives.

After the assault, which took place inside Cruzs car, the woman began to scream, so Cruz quickly drove away. University Police eventually pulled him over for speeding, at which point the woman reported the sexual assault, according to archives.

Cruz then ran from police, and he remained on the run until marshals found him in Eagle Lake, which is located in Polk County, Florida, according to a statement issued by GPD.

A warrant was issued for Cruzs arrest, and he was considered to have fled to the Winter Haven, Florida, area. The Gainesville branch of the U.S. Marshals Florida Regional Fugitive Task Force then asked the Tampa branch for help, according to the statement.

Cruz was considered dangerous and likely to run away, according to the statement.

Marshals found Cruz as he left his brothers house in Eagle Lake, and four vehicles blocked his vehicle so they could arrest him, according to the statement.

Authorities arrested Cruz on charges of sexual battery and kidnapping and nonrelated charges of trespass and burglary. They took Cruz to the Polk County Jail where, as of press time, he is awaiting transfer to the Alachua County Jail.

Man found with morphine

A Fort Myers, Florida, man was found in Gainesville on Tuesday with a bottle full of morphine pills and other narcotics, Alachua County Sheriffs Office authorities said.

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At about 3 a.m., deputies with the sheriffs office found Robert Hunter Beal, 35, hunched over a curb in the 600 block of NW 69th Terrace, according to a police report. Crushed pills laid by his feet, and a pill bottle bearing someone elses name sat beside him.

With his legs stretched out and his head down by his lap, Beal appeared to be sleeping when deputies approached him, according to the report.

Inside a bag he carried, the deputies found a pill bottle containing several different types of narcotics, including 16 morphine tablets, 18 Alprazolam tablets and 11 acetaminophen and oxycodone hydrochloride tablets, according to the report.

Elsewhere in the bag, deputies found a silver scale and a glass smoking pipe, according to the report. In his wallet, they found a Suboxone sublingual film, which is used to help treat opioid dependency.

Beals told the deputies most of the pills were prescribed to his wife but that he uses them to treat pain in his back and hand, according to the report.

Deputies arrested Beal on four charges of possession of a controlled substance and one charge of possession of drug paraphernalia.

Authorities took him to the Alachua County Jail where he remains, as of press time, in lieu of a $14,000 bond.

Man stole car to make court appointments

A Florida man was arrested Monday after stealing a brand-new Buick to go to court, Gainesville Police said.

At about midnight Sep. 9, Marquis Donison Gross, an 18-year-old Micanopy, Florida, resident, stole a white 2016 Buick Enclave SUV from a Gainesville car dealership and later posted a Facebook video of him driving it, according to a police report.

A confidential source reported the stolen car to GPD on Sept. 13 after seeing Gross drive it through Southern Pine Apartments, according to the report.

On Sunday, the Santa Fe Police Department found Gross getting into the car, according to the report. Gross told police that he knew the car was stolen but that he didnt steal it  he needed the car to make court appointments, he told police.

Gross has been arrested four times before for stealing cars from the Gainesville Buick GMC Dealer, located at 2101 N. Main St., according to the report.

Gross has stolen between five and seven cars from the dealership, according to the report.

Police arrested Gross on a charge of grand theft auto and two charges of burglary. Authorities took him to the Alachua County Jail where he remains, as of press time, in lieu of a $100,000 bond.
With flu season almost here, the Florida Department of Health in Alachua County is now offering vaccines.

The department began offering flu shots Tuesday and will continue offering them on weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. until supplies run out, according to a county press release.

The shots, which cost $25 each, are available at three locations: the departments main clinic at 224 SE 24th Street, its southwest clinic at 816 SW 64th Terrace and its Alachua clinic at 15530 NW U.S. Highway 441.

Appointments are required at the southwest clinic and the Alachua clinic, according to the release.

People between the ages of 6 months old and 18 years old who have no insurance  or who have Medicaid or an insurance provider that does not cover the vaccine  may receive the shots for free, according to the release. Residents with Medicare Part B can get their shots for free if they bring in their Medicare B cards and any other supplemental insurance cards.

Private and public schools in the county will provide free flu shots to students this fall, but students must complete consent forms prior to receiving the vaccines, according to the release.

In addition to getting a flu shot, staying home when ill, practicing proper cough etiquette and washing your hands are effective personal means to protect yourself and the community from a variety of illnesses, said Paul Myers, a department administrator, in a written statement.
Recently our opinions editor was walking by Tijuana Flats on University Avenue and saw pink ribbons scrawled in paint across the windows. These ribbons, obviously symbolizing the global fight against breast cancer, really resonated with him. His mother is a breast cancer survivor. Also, his love of burritos is unparalleled.

Perhaps, he thought to himself, he could help fight the disease that once riddled his mother while also eating a delicious burrito filled with Monsanto food products.

Now there is plenty to be said about those pink ribbons. Those ribbons  and even the color pink that they have printed on them  are trademarked property of the Susan G. Komen organization, which donates less than a dime per dollar to actual breast cancer research. Most of the money, unsurprisingly, goes to making sure pockets stay heavy. But this editorial is not about the corrupt nature of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Its about that undeserved and arguably hypocritical feeling of happiness and pride you get when youre purchasing something and, for a dollar more, donating to (insert charitable cause here).

We assume, dear reader, that like us, you exist in this paradoxical reality where you are fully and entirely aware of your status as a capitalist consumer while also trying to consume modestly or even not consume at all. This used to be a motivation behind charitable contributions. Perhaps, some think, if I donate to such-and-such cause, I can counteract the inherent consumerist I am and do some good in the world.

But economics and psychology have advanced since then. Now, like at Tijuana Flats, that feel-good response you get comes automatically with your purchase. You are not only purchasing a Bangin Chicken Burrito; you are also buying into the ability to excuse yourself from that subconscious yet undeniable guilt you feel about being the purchaser.

Such phenomena are everywhere. When you go to Publix and hit the checkout line, the cashier might ask you if you would like to donate a dollar to Childrens Miracle Network. When you purchase something at H&M, the store gives you eco-friendly bags and assures you all the stores fabrics are created sustainably. (So f--- the gas emissions from transporting the products; so long as a tree was saved, you did a thing.) At the bank, if you make a deposit, the teller asks if some of your deposit can go in a college scholarship fund for a brilliant high-school student who would otherwise not be able to afford an education.

The truth is we are surrounded by sad, scary and harsh facts. Something does, in fact, need to be done. But rather than putting $1 Band-Aids on the severed limbs of our society, we should have the courage to address these diseases head on. We ought to move our society in a direction that does not try to simply help poverty; rather, we should make poverty impossible in the first place. It is fundamentally immoral to use consumerism as a way to remedy the problems that consumerism itself perpetuates.

Let us be clear, dear reader. We are not against charity. For the love of God, do as much good as you can in this life. However, we are against ignorance. There is no shame in acknowledging the inevitable hypocrisy in our lives. If anything, lets use this acknowledgement as a way to change it so we dont have to be hypocritical.
On 12-14 October, [the Annual Powering Africa: Nigeria Investment Summit](http://www.energynet.co.uk/event/powering-africa-nigeria-2016?utm_campaign=Press%20release&utm_medium=PAN_PR2&utm_source=PANigeria) ([http://APO.af/yCRRej](http://apo.af/yCRRej)) will be hosted under the Official Patronage of Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing and with the endorsement of the Bayelsa State Government, Read more on http://energynet.africa-newsroom.com/press/power-investment-meeting-in-abuj...Source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Appa-sourceTheAfric...
Older depositors are an important market segment for community banks.

Americans age 50 and above own 67% of all bank deposits and control 70% of the nation's assets, according to AARP.

Yet reaching this critical group of customers is a significant challenge for banks across the country.

Digital channels have become the go-to vehicle for client communication at a time when branch transactions continue to decline; however, the digital strategy doesn't work well for reaching older customers.

Most community banks don't have the email addresses for half of their clients, and the percentage is even higher for those 65 and older.

The reasons are varied.

According to the Pew Research Center, four in 10 U.S. adults over the age of 65 don't use the internet at all.

Some older customers, meanwhile, may simply prefer not to divulge their email addresses because they don't intend to conduct bank transactions online or because they are afraid of a security breach. Indeed, when the customer experience management company PeopleMetrics asked consumers of all ages what topics they want to know more about, the only major issue popping up for seniors was how to protect their online identities.

Regardless of why, an inability to communicate with customers digitally is compounded by a broad decline in lobby traffic. We, as an industry, can't engage with a group of people who aren't coming into the branch. So to reach an older demographic, we need to search for another solution.

At Liberty Bank in Chicago, we have gone retro. In April 2015, we went back to the pre-digital era of printed newsletters. We created a custom biannual newsletter and two VIP letters that thank our top customers for their business. Each physical letter offers a little gift for coming into a branch and includes a gentle product pitch.

The decision to bring back paper was driven by disappointing results of an email campaign. The email format was attractive: It was populated with a series of interesting headlines linked to well-written syndicated articles. Two years into the program, however, we conducted a readership and engagement analysis and the results were disappointing.

The open rate per emailed newsletter averaged 7.2%  significantly less than a typical bank email average open rate. Also troubling was how each story was read by just about 1% of the entire customer base and that Google's search algorithm dropped our organic ranking because it recognized the syndicated articles were not original content.

Now that we have returned to paper, a cursory review suggests the strategy is working in keeping us in touch with our customers, reinforcing the brand, cross-marketing products and generating lobby traffic.

Other community banks face similar issues and will likely need to fine-tune their marketing strategies in order to reach an audience that could be offline or reluctant to engage with the bank online. To reach seniors, banks should consider returning to direct mail marketing.

At the very least, one benefit of reintroducing physical mail is that the communication method virtually ensures that recipients spend a few moments reading the message even if it ultimately ends up in the wastepaper basket.

As members of Gen X and baby boomers age, we expect seniors to become more receptive to digital communications. However, for the here and now, bombarding them with email  if we even have their addresses  won't mean our messages are read. Direct mail may remain the channel of choice to reach affluent customers.

Kevin Tynan is senior vice president of marketing at Liberty Bank in Chicago. He can be reached on Twitter @kevintyn.
The scandal over Wells Fargo's falsified accounts is another sad commentary on the business ethics of American companies and the field of financial services. But more alarming than how employees were trying to meet and surpass sales goals was how the bank's leadership responded to the controversy.

How did Wells Fargo's brass, including Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf, explain the wrongdoing? It was the employees' fault. Yes, you read that right. The bank blamed employees  not leadership  for the fact that the company was in violation of banking standards and ethics and was fined hundreds of millions of dollars.

The bank has also explained that it will address the problems that led to the penalty by eliminating sales goals at the branch level, thereby removing the incentives for employees to market additional products to customers.

While I was dismayed by the revelations of the unauthorized accounts, I was more shocked by Wells' response. Is it really the employees' fault? Absolutely not. What happens on an executive leader's watch starts and stops with that executive. That is especially true when it comes to sales and sales leadership.

Wells clearly had (and potentially still has) a sales leadership problem. Sales goals and the strategy for meeting those goals are nothing without leadership from the top laying out how best to execute that strategy. If Wells Fargo had had strong sales leadership in place, this never would have happened. A sales leader would not only be aware of sales goals that were being met and those that were not, but also how employees were meeting them.

More engagement between sales leaders and on-the-ground employees would have quickly identified problems that led to the Wells fine. Working one-on-one with employees and talking to them about their customer relationships can easily uncover who is legitimately meeting goals and who is doing something underhanded. A lack of sales leadership can result in employees taking unfortunate measures to achieve goals. There was clearly fear and a lack of help in the Wells Fargo culture. When you have sales goals without sales leadership, you open the door to suspicious sales practices.

Wells' chosen response  eliminating sales goals and cross sales at the branch level  seems misguided. While those goals had serious consequences at Wells, sales metrics are still crucial to ensuring that employees focus on building customer relationships, customers hear about and get the services they need, and that investors see the growth they are expecting.

Goals, sales and incentives are not the issue here. Without sales goals, the very act of proactively talking to customers about products and services will surely shut down. This means customers will not be served and company growth initiatives will not be met.

Wells Fargo's employees reported that they met, sometimes several times a day, with their supervisors to report their sales progress. But, since those meetings obviously did not put an end to the falsified accounts, the sales leaders were apparently just focused on the result, not on the behavior that led to the result. A strong sales leader is focused on both behavior and results.

Strong sales leaders also know that the buck stops with them. To ensure that a bank's culture is development-based rather than fear-based, the leader should take ownership of both the success and failure of the team. Wells Fargo dropped the ball big-time here by placing responsibility for the scandal squarely on the backs of its employees. That's not leadership.

Meridith Elliott Powell is a strategist who advises on relationship skills and is the author of three books, including "Winning in the Trust & Value Economy."
It might be the digital age, but it still can take days, if not weeks, for banks to onboard new customers.

That needs fixing.

It might be the age of stricter Know Your Customer compliance standards, but new customers are still having their identity verified by going to a branch.

That also needs fixing.

Although branches remain the primary place where sales are made, the manual requirements made of digital applicants could ultimately hamper banks' ability to woo prospects.

"Financial institutions have reported to have taken weeks to onboard new clients and expect it go up in the future," Celent analysts Arin Ray and Neil Katkov wrote in a recent report. "Some are concerned that a prolonged and cumbersome onboarding process could become a competitive disadvantage."

But this process need not be so unwieldy.

Onfido, a U.K. company that formed in 2012, is one of the latest tech companies with ambitions to sell technology to U.S. banks to quicken the hello process via the smartphone.

"We want to help banks onboard more users," said Husayn Kassai, chief executive and co-founder of Onfido. "At the same time, [we want] to help them reduce fraud."

The startup, among other things, vets identity by using facial recognition technology to compare selfies and images of consumers' ID documents submitted during the sign-up process as well as verify the authenticity of the documents within seconds.

Onfido counts Monzo (formerly known as Mondo) in the U.K. and an undisclosed bank in the U.S. among its clients. And last month it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Salesforce Ventures, Talis Capital, as well as two former Microsoft executives to expand its product for financial services companies.

Onfido's planned expansion in the industry represents part of a trend in which tech companies such as Mitek, Jumio and Bottomline Technologies' Andera are aiming to help banks onboard new customers digitally.

Rather than perform what many analysts and techies consider security theater  where a branch employee looks at a person and compares his or her image against a physical ID  tech providers like Onfido are relying on the smartphone's camera to collect the ID documents, automatically fact-check them and populate the data into an application.

Tech that recognizes the patterns and characters in identity documents and facial features is more accurate than a human assessing whether someone is an impersonator or not, Kassai said.

"For every fraud document we identify, we're able to use the fraudulent patterns or anomalies we've spotted to trigger alerts the next time they appear on a document," Kassai said. "For each check we process, our software gets better at identity, more sophisticated levels of fraud and more minute fraudulent patterns or anomalies."

To be sure, there will likely never be a cure-all for fraud committed by customers in or employees, regardless of the channel. However, the need to improve the account acquisition process is obvious. Consumers, especially millennials, have come to expect to accomplish any chore within a few clicks.

"Consumers have short attention spans," said Mike Senechal, chief product officer at Zenbanx.

"The more work they do ... the higher the drop-off," he said.

Zenbanx, which offers a mobile-first product in the U.S. and Canada, is among the firms already using the camera to aid customer acquisition. Similar to Onfido, the onboarding technology used by Zenbanx  in this case, supplied by Jumio  scans ID documents to assess the likelihood that someone is who he says he is.

However, in some instances, Zenbanx still has to vet documents manually on the back end.

That manual work highlights a problem here to stay: false positives.

"It's the nature of identity," said Julie Conroy, a research director at Aite Group. "There's so many elements of that change. You have addresses that change. You have phone numbers that change. You even have names that change."

Still, using the camera to onboard customers should be part of the banking mix, especially for banks that hope to increase their originations through the mobile channel, Conroy said.

As Conroy sees it, mobile imaging and verification technology can improve the user experience by eliminating keystrokes, and at the same time, help prevent fraud. The software can also create operational efficiencies for the bank.

Conroy recalled a recent conversation with a large bank that has 350 full-time employees who review application exceptions for fraud. The bank is implementing software to automate some of the tasks and is expecting to cut the number of people dedicated to this review in half, she said.
John Stumpf may have hoped that Tuesday's hearing on Capitol Hill would mark a key turning point in Wells Fargo's blossoming scandal, but his harsh questioning by lawmakers  and his struggle to answer many of their questions  suggests that the embattled megabank's problems are just beginning.

"We believe this went worse than expected for Wells Fargo," wrote Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Cowen Washington Research Group, in a note to clients. "We had thought that the change in tone over the last few days and the repeated apologies suggested the bank understood its precarious political position. We were wrong."

And there appears to be plenty more to come, including the results of criminal probes, another hearing this month by a different committee, and a search for additional victims who may have been harmed by Wells employees opening phony accounts.

Following is a guide to what's still coming.

Criminal probes

Federal prosecutors in New York, California and North Carolina are all reportedly investigating how Wells Fargo employees set up as many as 2 million sham accounts between 2011 and 2015.

The Justice Department, which has been criticized for failing to prosecute big-bank executives in the wake of the financial crisis, last year laid out a series of measures aimed at strengthening its pursuit of individual corporate wrongdoing.

The Wells Fargo case is shaping up as a test case for the effectiveness of that new guidance.

More scrutiny by regulators

Comptroller Thomas Curry said at Tuesday's Senate Banking Committee hearing that his agency, which hit Wells Fargo with a $35 million penalty, is not finished with the case. Curry said that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is now focused on possible civil enforcement remedies against individuals.

"That would be personal cease-and-desist orders, civil money penalties against individuals, or ... prohibition from banking," he said. "That process is ongoing now."

In addition, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley asked the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday to investigate whether Wells Fargo violated certain provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by not recognizing and stopping widespread fraud among its employees. An SEC spokesman declined to comment on that request.

Lawmakers also probed whether Wells should have disclosed the investigation as part of SEC filings. Stumpf claimed the phony account openings were not material, but lawmakers and regulators disagreed.

Wells' board makes decisions about whether to claw back pay

Stumpf came under heavy fire Tuesday for refusing to state an opinion about whether top executives should have bonus pay rescinded.

Stumpf is chairman of the Wells Fargo board, but he said that he is not a member of the firm's compensation committee, which is looking into the question of potential clawbacks.

"I'd want to be respectful of the committee and respectful of their process, and not in any way bias their decision," Stumpf said.

He also said that any actions that the company's 15-member board takes regarding named executive officers will be "appropriately disclosed."

The pressure on Wells Fargo to claw back bonus pay is coming not only from lawmakers, but also from investors.

Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at CLSA, said Tuesday that clawbacks are warranted, based on the policy the company laid out in its proxy statement.

"It says if there is significant reputational harm, that's grounds," Mayo said in an interview with Bloomberg News. "So if it doesn't apply now, when would it apply?"

More scrutiny by lawmakers

The House Financial Services Committee is planning to hold its own hearing on Wells Fargo later this month. Stumpf, the company's embattled chief executive officer, is expected to be called to testify again.

House lawmakers will likely have more information at their disposal than their Senate counterparts did. The House committee, chaired by GOP Rep. Jeb Hensarling, has asked for interviews before the end of the month with Wells Chief Financial Officer John Shrewsberry, Chief Operating Officer Timothy Sloan, Chief Risk Officer Michael Loughlin and the former community banking chief, Carrie Tolstedt.

"The stakes will be even higher when the House Financial Services Committee holds its hearing," Seiberg wrote. "The issue will be whether the bank has answers on claw backs, bonuses and employment that can satisfy lawmakers."

The Senate Small Business Committee, chaired by Republican Sen. David Vitter, also launched an investigation on Tuesday, even though no evidence has emerged that Wells Fargo employees established any phony business accounts.

In addition, the California Assembly's banking committee is planning to hold its own hearing on Oct. 11 in Los Angeles. Stumpf said Tuesday that while the problems uncovered at Wells occurred in different parts of the country, they were focused in the Los Angeles area.

Wells looks back even further

The San Francisco-based bank initially determined, based on the work of a consulting firm, that as many as 2 million sham accounts may have been created by Wells employees between 2011 and 2015. The firm agreed to $5 million in remediation to customers.

But at Tuesday's hearing, Stumpf pledged to extend the company's account review and remediation process two years further to include 2009 and 2010.

That announcement prompted Sen. Sherrod Brown to ask Stumpf why the bank is stopping at 2009. The Ohio Democrat alluded to allegations that Wells Fargo has had a pressure-filled sales culture for an even longer period of time.

"We agreed with our regulators in our agreements to go back to 2011," Stumpf responded. "We made a decision to go back to 2010 and '09, and we want to make it right by any customer."

"Does that mean you're willing to go back earlier than 2009?" Brown asked.

"I can't tell you that today. I have to talk to our folks. I don't know about  records and so forth," Stumpf responded.
WASHINGTON  For the second time, a federal judge has ruled that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network must withdraw a rule designed to cut off the Tanzanian bank FBME from the U.S. financial system.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said Fincen had still not shared enough about why it was targeting FBME, which the agency designated under Section 311 of the Patriot Act as a potential money laundering concern.

"This statutory authorization obviously clashes with the goals of transparency and public participation that underlie the notice-and-comment process," he said. "Taken to the extreme, requiring the agency to share only the most critical information could license it to share almost nothing publicly, despite nominally proceeding through notice and comment."

This was the second rebuke from Cooper to Fincen. The agency first targeted the bank in July 2015, issuing a rule directing U.S. institutions to cut off correspondent banking ties with FBME. But the bank fought back, saying the order relied on classified material that the institution was not allowed to see.

Cooper ordered Fincen to withdraw the rule, which it did. But the agency issued a new one in March that was designed to be more transparent.

In his latest opinion, Cooper argued that Fincen's Section 311 authority was inherently problematic, because it allowed the agency to issue a rule based on classified information.

Cooper instructed the agency to address the opacity of its Section 311 measures by publishing the unclassified material that participated in the agency's decision, and also explaining its reasoning, even if that means alluding to classified information.

"If the agency wants to act  on the basis of some key fact (even if the fact is stated in more general terms than in its classified form), that fact must have been disclosed in time for commenters to challenge its veracity and weight," the judge said.

Cooper also ordered Fincen to respond to specific comments on its use of aggregate Suspicious Activity Report data in the FBME case, which was disputed on several grounds by the bank.

For instance, FBME argued that the SARs data used by Fincen included "perfectly legitimate" transactions and that it represented only a fraction of the bank's activities. FBME also claimed Fincen did not take into account the Cypriot financial crisis, which could have caused an increase in SARs, and did not compare the bank's transactions against those of other similarly situated institutions.

Fincen responded to these claims with what Cooper called "hollow generalities" and unresponsive comments.

The judge, however, sided with Fincen on many of the specifics of the case, questioning FBME's right to due process and its claims that the agency had failed to sufficiently communicate the reasoning for its decision and allow the bank to respond.

Cooper also affirmed that Fincen's Section 311 authority had a legitimate purpose  fighting terrorism and crime. "Fincen's exercise of its Section 311 powers is critical to drying up the flow of financial support for terrorist and international criminal organizations," he said.

The judge declined FBME's request to vacate the rule entirely, instead allowing the agency to respond to some of the deficiencies identified in the ruling.

"This is not a free pass for Fincen, however," he said.

In a statement, FBME said it was satisfied with Cooper's latest ruling. "All along, FBME has contended that FinCEN failed to provide proper notice and substantively justify its damaging measures against FBME," the bank said.
This is a rant for the faithless. I'm railing against you. I'm railing against me. But mostly I'm railing against them.

The finger is pointed at judicial and presidential rogues and their radical activism. Their "we the people"-defying ways are why such formerly vital entities have now become our greatest adversaries. They are driving us past desperation and over a suicide cliff. It is why we are constantly on the defense as we cling to the lesser evil.

Where on Earth is Congress? Seemingly, they are active only when confirming radical leftism. They stopped working for us a long time ago. Their perpetual neglect of the will of their constituents is all the proof we need. Our representatives are bought and paid for by those who own this country, and their wills must ultimately align.

And what's going on with the American mainstream media? They either bury the essential stories or ignore them altogether. Where is the separation between unbiased reporting/investigative journalism and politically driven media manipulations? The Hillary health scandal is a perfect example of the mainstream media being last on the scene while leaning heavy on the "conspiracy" smokescreens. As for Obama, he is Nixon on steroids; just ask any of a number of whistleblowers whose lack of silence earned them a swift, senseless prison sentence.

The same people who own and control our government officials also own the media. How many government officials have strong personal ties to the networks and vice versa? The relationship between big government and big media is beyond incestuous. The next step in blurring reality and fostering deception is to control the internet, which is essentially the last true source of fact-based investigative reporting we have left. It's not as if the corruption is ever going to reveal itself.

We need more transparency and moral consciousness and fewer CIAs and Homeland Securities. Everything should be localized. The Constitution was most effective and faithfully upheld when the culture and the state were lockstep. It is why classical liberalism worked and our nation flourished. The Church was the main influence and authority on the culture.

A well intended, over-compensative reaction to a lost land with no moral compass cannot make things right. A conned and conflicted culture is the real issue at hand in the battle for the heart and soul of America.

Early America was in nowise theocratic, but it worked, and the founders knew that it would eventually cease to be if we surrendered God's natural law and moral order as the foundational source of true liberty and equality.

We should ask, how is a society where freedom of speech and religion is increasingly compromised a free society? A wholly secularized society is eventually a Bible-banning society.

On the flip-side, blind and baseless acceptance has morphed into a lack of scrutiny and discernment between religious tolerance and religiously cloaked existential threats. In this country, each and every citizen has the religious liberty to worship any way he sees fit as long as he does not act lawlessly in doing so. But we mustn't forget that our laws are derived from a Judeo-Christian foundation of morality. Not everyone must be Christian, but everyone must be lawful. Our laws are derived from what is good and healthy for society. "Rights" are good as opposed to "wrongs," which are obviously bad and ultimately harmful.

Ultimately, I'm all for free speech mixed with proper discernment. I'm glad groups like the Westboro Baptists and the Black Panthers are on record revealing what they are really about. Those who soften these groups' intent on account of their own ignorance are to be lamented. Many have earned their designation of "useful idiot." They are guilty of a soft bigotry of low expectations. They are expendable, exploitable tools of those with greater intentions.

Global elites and their plans for global domination in the form of borderless purposelessness ripe with population control and rationed health care should fully reveal themselves. Instead, they'd rather take a sinister foothold via political and monetary manipulations.

The ways of integrity and transparency are foreign to the corrupt and morally bankrupt. They know only how to plot and scheme in the darkness and behind the scenes. Expose the light, and the masks come on. They are the utter dark side of humanity disguised as a better way. They are the seducers of mankind.

Mankind's fallen nature and natural depravity confirm our need for godly leaders to preserve the righteous standard. This is no longer the reality; rather, evil is perpetuated, protected, and accommodated by those in a position to know better.

I'm not saying we must severely punish all forms of sin, but we must uphold good standards if we are to avoid widespread societal ruin. Tragically, it is the direction of our modern culture that makes evil rule most attractive. This is why our country has become ripe for infiltration.

How can a righteous man even tolerate Washington? From all appearances, it's a dirty, evil place

If you take away morality and ethics, which are based in religion as revealed in God's law, eventually a form of arbitrarily blind atheism conceived by those drunk with power will lead us into a perpetual darkness. Who is most threatened by this brave new world  a world in which our records and our allegiances are no longer personal or private, and religious conservatives are deemed "bigots" and "haters" just for recognizing the sin inherent in mankind?

This is not just a matter of religion. The importance of personal virtue and sound civil authority is transcendent. We needn't waver when presented with opportunities to stand our ground, but continue to stand we must.

Religious humanism serving as the default belief system is repressive because it ultimately diminishes human autonomy and accountability, and eventually morphs into a form of repressive socialism. We may initially earn the type of freedom that enables us to "live as thou wilt," but where shall we find true fulfillment? Income distribution and thought policing are integral tenets of the dogma of the statist. So we needn't be surprised that our wealth and privacy are so highly coveted by the tyrannical powers seeking global uniformity and ultimate control.

As we speak, our Judeo-Christian principles are being swiftly subdued by radicalism and assimilation-defying multiculturalism. If ideology foreign to national freedom starts taking over pockets, regions, and territories, and infiltrates our government, which is already happening, freedom of religion will become freedom of state control to keep us from destroying each other. The heat has been applied, and our melting pot is boiling over.

It's a game-time decision: roll the dice with Republican nominee Trump or send a message with the Constitution Party's Castle. We the people are tired of playing this twisted game by its distorted rules. If our political system is unwilling to come back to us, maybe we can refuse to have any part of it, truly unify, and wholly start anew.

Most folks are more than happy to settle for a Cyrus, but what this nation really needs is a Saul traveling the road to Damascus. Can Trump be knocked off his high horse and become a true public servant for the good of one nation under God, or will he go the way of Patty Van Pelt and embrace the perpetually left-leaning status quo? We've finally reached a point where Charlie's not going to play anymore.

In the end, where we find ourselves as individuals and a nation must ultimately go the way of sovereign decree. We should proceed to stand on principle and be ready for anything.
On September 17th, the DC Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals halted construction of the Dakota Pipeline following two weeks of protests by Sioux tribes complaining that the pipeline encroached on their lands, joined by myriads of the usual suspects mobilized by means of social media.

Is it possible to turn a spade of dirt anywhere west of the Mississippi without being told youre desecrating land sacred to Indians?

Is there any land that is not sacred to Indians? Think about the words sacred and desecrate, words that carry a scent of religion, of holiness at risk. Do these Indians really believe in the animist spirits that make every wasteland holy? We palefaces barely blink at paving our forebears' graveyards to build a new Costco. So why should we go full Iron-Eyes-Cody over a desert with Indian bones buried in some corner of it?

But let's put those questions aside. The pipeline hoopla isn't really about Indians. It's really about a certain species of social-media user whose sympathetic clickings turned this story into front-page news.

It's a ragtag group of aging hippies, wine-and-cheese ladies in Volvos, and earnest collegians still smarting from the defeat of Bernie Sanders, still sad over Cecil the Big Fluffy Lion. Someone among them saw an obscure report about Indians and a pipeline and said, hey, now there is an issue for us. Out went the call to arms. To most people, the twitterings that followed were just an annoying distraction. But to President Obama, a tsunami of Facebook posts from the tattoo-and-piercing set is an order from God. Obama heard, and he obeyed.

The faith that the pipeline's builders reposed in courts, rules, and due process is quaint, even touching, in its civics-class naivete. The builders patiently navigated the labyrinth of procedures specified by our laws, obediently sought permits from all the necessary agencies, met their every demand, plotted the pipeline's route adjacent to existing, established lines, repeatedly consulted the affected tribes, kissed the rings of tribal elders whenever those elders bothered showing up, changed the route 140 times to accommodate tribal whims, installed every safety feature anyone could think of, and, when all this still wasn't enough, got a green light from a judge, appointed by Obama, who weighed the tribes' objections and found them wanting. The builder followed all the rules and, if rules mean anything, earned the right to build the pipeline.

But following rules is so 20th century! Today, that's not the way we roll. Due process, they tell us now, is just a game for suckers. Every poli-sci prof assures us that every agency is corrupt, every legislator on the take. And everyone knows that courts aren't as good as getting at the truth as enraged, internet-driven wikis are. Trayvon and Michael Brown proved that. Right?

So forget votes, laws, and judicial decisions. In our groovy new wikiocracy, what matters is what agitates the people who click on online petitions. And the most avid clickers are sophomores who've been fed environmentalist dogma since before they could toddle. All they care about is that it's a pipeline for oil, that oil is bad, and that stopping it is a swell opportunity to do the civil disobedience stuff they've always read about, a great chance, in the phrase drilled into their heads nonstop, to "make a difference." And, dude, it's been scientifically proven that an increase of one ten-thousandth part of CO2 in the air means the end of the world, so we've just got to stop the pipeline. See?

While the rising generation of Peter Pans fill Facebook with their freakings-out over the awfulness and carbon-ness and whiteness of it all, we grownups have a country to run. It's a country with lots of fridges, cars, and furnaces that all need energy. Some of those fridges are in homes with money to spare, homes that can absorb the higher costs of boutique energy from solar and wind and the vagaries of dependence on Saudi gasoline. But a lot more of those fridges are in homes with a single, one-legged parent and thirteen children, homes barely squeaking by, homes that need a higher energy bill like they need a hole in the roof. The Dakota pipeline and others like it would give those homes a lower bill by connecting Bakken gushers with the teeming millions in America's Midwestern heartland, and by taking a lot of expensive, diesel-belching tank trucks off our highways in the bargain.

But now the pipeline may never be finished. And even if it does get finished, it may well be the last pipeline. After ANWR and Keystone, this Dakota pipeline fracas makes the pattern for the future all too clear. A lot of soon-to-be-dead white males may think that the rule of law requires governments to evict trespassers and to enforce court orders, but the ranks of people who think that way are getting thinner all the time.
There was a well-publicised (by the BBC, etc.) demonstration in London on Saturday, September 17th. The theme of the demo, Refugees are welcome here. (Interestingly enough, the last refugees welcome here demo in London was on the 12th of September; only five days before!)

Various Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and/or charities attended. They included Oxfam, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Amnesty International, the Refugee Council, and the Stop the War Coalition. The actual demo was organised by a charity coalition called Solidarity with Refugees.

The protestors pointed their fingers at the British Prime Minister, Theresa May.

They chanted: "Theresa May, you will say, refugees are welcome here". Various refugees, celebrities, and religious leaders also spoke at the rally in Parliament Square.

The end result of protests like this is that the UK is now going to accommodate another 20,000 refugees. This will need financing. By the evil rich? Well, not entirely.

According to the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, local authority housing departments have promised to house -- under the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme -- the said 20,000 refugees,

In terms of each refugee, the government will spend 8,500 on each refugee. That will include housing, health care, etc. So that's 8,500 times 20,000; which is 170 million pounds.

But all that, apparently, is not good enough. It's never good enough. You attack the state at every opportunity. You even demand the impossible in order to create instability and radicalisation. Thus Solidarity with Refugees director, Ros Ereira, has complained about the state of things regarding refugees. She seems to see this in geopolitical terms. That means that she wants UK PM to play "an important role on the global stage" (at next week's UN Summit for refugees and migrants in New York) by helping as many refugees as possible.

On the charities or NGOs which collaborated on the demo, such institutions can be deeply political entities. Don't let talk of 'charity' or 'humanity fool you. Helping refugees isn't always an act of moral selflessness: it can be an action carried out to bring about certain political results. In addition, as the revolutionary Left puts it: political activity and conflict radicalises. Amnesty International, specifically, is well-known for letting left-wing politics pollute its actions and statements.

It was also interesting to see the many Socialist Workers Party banners on this protest. At least one in three were trademarked with the 'Socialist Workers Party' logo. You see, tapping into the revolutionary potential of refugees is almost as good as tapping into the revolutionary potential of Muslims. In fact, it's often the very same thing.

It is no surprise that the SWP was there is large numbers -- even the BBC tells us that Stop the War Coalition collaborated for the demonstration. The StWC is a child of the SWP. Nonetheless, it has made a pathetic attempt to hide its true revolutionary nature simply by pretending to be a single-issue group: a group which simply wants to stop war. But the facade is ridiculous. The StWC and the SWP are run by similar types of people, politically. Sometimes they're literally the same people! As I said, major instability -- caused by refugees and mass immigration -- will be a godsend to StWC and the SWP. After all, the worse it is, the better it is for the revolution.

Actor and campaigner Vanessa Redgrave was there too. She's been a lifelong revolutionary Marxist and she was a well-known activist in the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970/80s. She's another upper-middle-class individual hooked on Trotskyism and the idea of transforming the working class -- and others -- into better, more revolutionary people.

What did she have to say? Something predictably political; but with a hint of lawfare thrown in. Thus:

"The present government and previous governments, both Labour, coalition and Conservative, have been breaking international human rights law. We must hold them to account."

Let's analyse that phrase refugees are welcome here.

The demonstrators -- made up almost exclusively of students, professors, those with a charity to sell (not forgetting a few refugees/immigrants) -- don't look like the sort of people who would welcome refugees here -- if 'here' means in their own homes. No, they want the state to deal with the problem. And that means putting them in homes which have often been taken from working-class English families and which are in areas in which mainly poorer people live. In other words, this is helping refugees at a distance.

Will members of the middle-class Left want their taxes to rise in order to pay for all this? Of course not! They want the platonic rich to pay for it. The rich are sometimes only marginally better off than they are, but without the Stop the War t-shirts and jeans.

Finally, it may seem heartless and cruel not to care about refugees. By we should also care about our own people and the conflicts -- even civil wars -- which will happen in the future. These are the very high prices to pay for grandstanding piety and being self-indulgently nice. This isn't to say that the said charities never do any good. They no doubt do. However, this fusion of charity/NGOs and revolutionary Leftism can only be a bad thing for the working class and the indigenous English generally.
While speaking at the United Nations Tuesday and advocating more Muslim migration into the West, Barack Obama likened a refusal to accept the Muslims to the "turning away [of] Jews fleeing Nazi Germany," which he called "a stain on our collective conscience." But while Obama sought to lecture us, he actually condemned himself.

Of course, there is no equivalence between the WWII-era Jews and the Muslim migrants, as no one had to worry about terrorists embedded among the former. In contrast, we know for a fact that terrorists are among the Muslim migrants. Without comprehensive Western-style databases in Syria (which is supposedly the focus) and with bribery getting you official government documents saying you're whoever you want to be in that nation, there simply is no way to vet these people.

But that Obama would attempt a flawed analogy isn't his real shame here. It's that the real analogy isn't between the WWII Jews and today's Muslim migrants. It's between the WWII Jews and another persecuted minority: the Middle East Christians.

You know, the people who multiple sources say face genocide, as Christianity is gradually wiped out in the Mideast.

They're also the people Obama won't lift a finger to help.

In fact, while Christians are 10 percent of Syria's population and are being targeted by the Islamic State, only one half of one percent of Obama's Syrian migrants have been Christian.

That translates into 56 out of 10,801 "refugees."

It's so astounding that even liberal Newsweek ran an article titled "The U.S. Bars Christian, Not Muslim, Refugees From Syria." Really compassionate guy, that Obama, huh? Have any more lectures for us, Barry?

Since it's clear Obama couldn't care less who lives or dies in the Middle East, the question is raised: what is his real agenda?

Try this on for size: the vast majority of U.S. Muslims now vote Democrat, with Obama having gotten 89 and 85 percent of their votes in, respectively, 2008 and 2012. In contrast, believing Christians are known to support conservatives. And it isn't as if Obama doesn't know this. He said last year that immigration was making America "more and more of a hodgepodge of folks" who he was "hopeful" would drown out conservatism (hey, didn't you always want to live in a hodgepodge?).

Of course, this works only if you have the right hodgepodge. And with 70 to 90 percent of today's immigrants voting Democrat upon being naturalized, liberals love the mix. Just keep the Christians out.

This is what Obama and his ilk mean when saying, "Our strength lies in our diversity": "Our [Democrat political] strength lies in our [orchestrated] diversity." They're just not as blunt as was Andrew Neather, ex-adviser to former British prime minister Tony Blair, when he admitted that the massive third-world immigration into the U.K. was designed "to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date." Hey, it doesn't matter if it destroys Western culture. Why serve in Heaven when you can reign in Hell?

The reality, again, is that Obama cares as much about Mideastern lives as he does about Hillary's emails. Immigration, "refugee" acceptance, family reunification, etc. are all about one thing and one thing only: importing voters. If most new immigrants would support Republicans, we'd have about as much immigration as North Korea. And the border? There'd be an impenetrable wall, sunk down 100 feet into the earth, with an electrified fence on top of it and organ-disrupting sound wave weapons mounted on turrets every thousand feet of its length.

Oh, and drones with heat and motion sensors would be buzzing about, monitoring it 24/7/365.

Obama would have many stains on his conscience if he actually had a conscience. But possession of such generally eludes twisted, evil, vile men.

By the way, below is a great 2015 interview with Dr. Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian academic and Muslim refugee living in the U.K. He explains why the notion that the current Muslim migrants are "refugees" is a con and issues a warning: keep the Muslim migrants out of the West.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.
Once elections are done, whoever wins, there will be nothing to keep Obama from poking his finger into the eyes of detractors and cementing his legacy as the only anti-American president to occupy the Oval Office. Three likely scenarios among many:

Guantanamo Bay

In a treaty signed in 1903 and ratified again in 1934, Cuba agreed to perpetually lease the area to the U.S. Only by mutual consent can this arrangement be terminated. Once remaining detainees are dispersed, could the president normalize relations with Cuba by ignoring Congress and signing an executive order abrogating the treaty? Some constitutional lawyers claim he can, though such an action might provoke a constitutional crisis, which Obama would relish.

However, theres another, simpler way to the same end. From Article III of the treaty: So long as the United States of America shall not abandon [my italics] the said naval station of Guantanamo or the two Governments shall not agree to a modification of its present limits, the station shall continue to have the territorial area that it now has. Whos going to stop the commander-in-chief from simply ordering the evacuation of all personnel from the base by Inauguration Day?

The Blind Sheikh

Tied to conspirators planning to bomb high-profile targets in New York City in 1993 (including the WTC), Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman was arrested, convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1995, and subsequently sentenced to life without parole. His imprisonment has become a rallying point for various groups seeking his release.

Ostensibly for humanitarian purposes, Obama may well commute the Sheikhs sentence before he leaves office. The real reasons would be to show solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood and to flip a bird at National Reviews Andrew McCarthy, who headed the prosecutions team in Sheikh Abdel Rahmans trial.

Bears Ears National Monument

President Obama is poised to use his unilateral authority to protect (read: make inaccessible) approximately 1.8 million acres of federal land in Utah, a state for which the president feels contempt. Of course, Romney payback is a factor, too.

Steve Grammatico is the author of You Hear Me, Barack? PC-Free Conservative Satire. He blogs at youhearmebarack.blogspot.com.
I expect the mainstream media to drop the anti-Trump foray into stigmatizing Donald Trump as a racist for noting the anomalies in the then-public documentation of Barack Obama. Pinning leadership of the birther movement (how come I never got invited to any of their events?) on Trump sounded good at first. But as I explained four days ago, it was a trap, because hacked emails reveal consideration of exploiting Obamas otherness and concluded that no fingerprints should be visible, and because close associates of Hillary peddled the story to the media back in the 2008 nomination fight.

And among Hillarys male associates, nobody is closer than Sidney Blumenthal, who went on the Clinton Foundation payroll at ten grand a month as a consultant on Libya. And now the birther trap is closing on Blumenthal, as his evasions and lies are demolished. Mark Hemingway has done a lot of research in a masterful debunking in his Weekly Standard piece, Someone Isn't Telling the Truth About Sidney Blumenthal and the Clinton Campaign.

Over the last few days, the Clinton campaign's been on the defensive. The reason is James Asher, the former Washington bureau chief of McClatchy, has publicly claimed that Clinton aide and confidant was spreading the rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not eligible to be president. Blumenthal actually admits he was pressuring McClatchy to investigate rumors related to Obama's family in Kenya but claims he never went so far as to push the dreaded birther rumor. A second McClatchy reporter in Kenya, however, confirms he was asked to look into the birther issue, and everyone concedes Asher and Blumenthal were in contact. Ultimately there's no paper trail that establishes Blumenthal was pushing the birther rumor explicitly. It's Asher's word against Blumenthal's. Except that Blumenthal's word is worthless, and there are absolutely no comparable reasons to doubt Asher. Blumenthal is an entirely discreditable political operative. In 2008, other Democrats reported that Blumenthal was spreading rumors of similar dubiousness as the birther accusations regularly. "They aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address," wrote Occidental professor Peter Dreier in 2008. "Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers  including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers."

That is just for starters. He moves on to the evasion Blumenthal and cooperative media have generated, the claim that Blumenthal had no official role in the campaign. He demolishes it.

I expect that the Clinton campaign and mainstream media will now drop the entire birther offensive against Trump, though it would not surprise me if black-oriented media kept the meme in circulation with no attention to the trap.

Scott Johnson at Powerline recalls and documents a dramatic and, at the time, influential lie that Blumenthal told during the Lewinsky investigation in 1998. After receiving a subpoena to testify before a grand jury, he stepped out of the court and lied about his testimony and the behavior of the prosecutors. This was part of the successful campaign to demonize those who were investigating Clintons lies under oath about his sexual adventures in the Oval Office. If you dont remember the details, or if you just want to be appalled at Sidney Blumenthals ethics, Scott will reward you richly. Read the whole thing.
Regardless of who wins the presidential election, it appears likely that in order to save what's left of Obamacare, some kind of "public option" will be proposed in Congress next year.

We've documented the death spiral of Obamacare over the last few months as the co-ops continue to fail, insurers run away from the state exchanges, and premiums spike at unbearable levels. Even with the government subsidies for most consumers, the few plans available to many Americans have higher deductibles and less coverage than plans in the past.

This has led Democrats running for every office from top to bottom to call for a radical fix for the law  the public option that would force most of the remaining private insurers out of the market and complete a government takeover of the health care system.

Washington Times:

Its just been an awful summer for Obamacare, Robert Laszewski, a health care policy consultant in Alexandria, Virginia, said of the shift back to the public option. I think whats really intriguing is that the most committed Obamacare supporters are coming to the realization the exchanges are unsustainable and not working, and are in need of a fundamental fix. That realization has been fueled by a spate of bad news. Health Republic of New Jersey, one of the nonprofit cooperatives set up instead of government-run plans, said it is shutting down operations. That leaves just six of the original 23 coops still running, despite more than $2 billion in federal loans to keep them afloat. Meanwhile, major insurers such as UnitedHealth Group and Aetna have withdrawn from all but a handful of states, leaving nearly a third of U.S. counties with only a single company offering plans on their exchange markets next year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Republicans say those problems, along with skyrocketing premiums, are signs that the Affordable Care Act has failed and must be repealed. Democrats, though, say its time to go bigger and give the government a more forceful role in providing coverage. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat with a commanding lead in his Senate bid, says a public option is the next logical step in health care reform as Mr. Obama falls short of his dream of universal coverage before leaving office. This would be an important step toward creating a Medicare for All System, Mr. Van Hollen says on his campaign website. More than six years ago, as Congress debated Mr. Obamas health care reforms, the House passed a bill that included the public option, but the idea was stripped by centrist Senate Democrats, who feared the party was trying to do too much or that a public plan would break the federal budget. The final Obamacare legislation, written by the Senate, had the government set standards and organize markets but relied on private companies to provide the choices for consumers. The hope was that companies would compete for business, lowering costs for Americans even as they covered millions more people.

That "hope" never came to pass. And as numerous critics pointed out, it never had a chance of working. There was no incentive for young, healthy people to purchase insurance from the exchanges because the penalty for not doing so was less than the cost of buying an Obamacare policy. Instead of a mix of healthy and sick customers, most insurers were stuck with older, sicker Americans buying their policies who caused a tsunami of red ink.

So what would the public option look like?

One proposed version is akin to federally run Medicare: The government acts as an insurer, and patients choose their providers. Another version would have the government contract with private companies to set up doctor networks or handle other aspects of running the plan, said Elizabeth Carpenter, senior vice president at Avalere Health, a Washington-based consultancy. There are a lot of details yet to be determined, she said.

How many Republicans would join with Democrats to save Obamacare by imposing a public option on consumers? Unless the GOP can come up with its own alternative that would maintain coverage for the millions of people who have purchased policies while removing many of the more onerous requirements of Obamacare, there are likely to be a significant number of Republicans terrified of throwing millions of Americans off their health insurance plans and who might vote with the Democrats.

But that probably won't happen. The GOP has been hammering out an Obamacare alternative for the better part of two years. Reports indicate that it would eliminate most of the mandates in Obamacare, maintain most of the subsidies, reform other anti-market aspects of the health insurance industry, and keep the Medicaid expansion. The package would be acceptable to a majority of Republicans, and at least some Democrats might climb on board to prevent a total meltdown by Obamacare.

Currently, Obamacare is not sustainable in its present form. No matter who controls Congress, big changes are going to have to be made to the law, or the entire health insurance industry could collapse.
The two police shootings, in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Charlotte, North Carolina (where serious riots erupted overnight), seem to spell opportunity to Hillary Clinton. She desperately needs for African-Americans to be angry  angry at police and angry at white people. Following the Tulsa shooting and before the Charlotte incident, she took to a syndicated radio show aimed at black people and implicitly blamed white people for the shooting:

On Tuesdays episode of The Steve Harvey Morning Show, the former secretary of state and current Democratic presidential nominee said she wanted to speak directly to white people and let them know that this is not who we are. How many times do we have to see this in our country? Clinton said. In Tulsa, an unarmed man with his hands in the air. This is just unbearable. And it needs to be intolerable. Maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, look, this is not who we are, she continued. We have got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias. By saying that it is necessary for her to speak directly to white people and telling them, this is not who we are, she implies that white people otherwise would think that police shooting allegedly unarmed black people is exactly who we are. Can she find one white person who believes that police shooting unarmed black people is a good idea?

She seems to be implying that white people are collectively willing black people to be shot. Otherwise, why would it be useful for her to tell Caucasians that this is not who we are?

This is ugly racial stereotyping. For political gain.

By seemingly placing herself in the position of the powerful white person telling other whites to stop shooting blacks, Hillary demeans both races.
A riot broke out in Charlotte, N.C. late last night after police shot and killed a man who they say was armed with a gun.

But the family of Keith Lamont Scott says he was carrying a book when he emerged from a car at an apartment complex where police were serving a warrant on another man,

The officer who shot Scott is black.

CNN:

Several hundred people gathered outside the complex Tuesday night, chanting "no justice, no peace!" and carrying signs that said "Black Lives Matter." While some threw bottles and rocks at officers working to control the protesters, others implored them to stop. "That's when things really started to pick up. I would say not long before 11 p.m., police deployed tear gas ... as they tried to clear the streets," said Adam Rhew, associate editor for Charlotte magazine. After a brief lull, the crowds regrouped early Wednesday and blocked Interstate 85. They started a fire at the center of the highway, forcing vehicles and tractor-trailers to stall as far as the eye could see. Police cars with flashing lights hovered nearby. Some protesters removed boxes from the back of semitrailers and set the items on fire. Police in riot gear formed a line and forced crowds away from the highway. Shortly after, the highway partially opened, but some protesters remained in the vicinity and continued chanting. Others jumped on top of a police van and stomped on it, breaking the windshield and other windows. At least seven people were transported to the hospital with minor injuries, CNN affiliate WSOC reported. It said five others have been arrested. The man shot by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Tuesday afternoon has been identified as Keith Lamont Scott, Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts said. Brentley Vinson, the officer involved in the shooting, has been placed on paid administrative leave, according to the mayor. His race is not known. Racial tensions are high nationwide following other officer-involved shootings. The fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sparked protests after video of the killing appeared Monday. Charlotte's is the latest case involving an officer-involved shooting, and protesters are demanding justice and an end to police brutality for months.

At the very end of the report, CNN says 12 officers were injured in the riot.

At least 12 officers suffered injuries during the protests, the police department tweeted. It did not provide details on the nature and severity of the injuries, but said one of its officers was hit in the face with a rock.

So, to sum up:

1. Rioters attacked police, injuring at least 12 cops

2. At least one police vehicle was destroyed.

3. Rioters broke into trucks on the highway, setting their contents on fire.

4. At least 7 civilians were injured in the melee.

But the incident was described from coast to coast as a "protest." And the Daily Caller has some additional information that CNN apparently didn't find interesting enough to include:

We out like the Taliban! one rioter could be heard crying on a Facebook Live broadcast of the protests, shortly after tear gas canisters were fired into the crowd. After 11 p.m., the situation grew more severe, with several people successfully trashing a police SUV. We aint playin no motherf**kin games, nigga! another demonstrator yelled on the Facebook broadcast, trying to fire up other protesters. This aint no one-day action! another cried. This is the first time people standing up!

I'm sure a thorough investigation will be undertaken. But it hardly matters what they find out about this tragedy. The narrative is set  more "unarmed" blacks being shot down in cold blood. The coming protests, or riots, will all be based on that.
The Senate will remain in session through next week to deal with an expected veto by President Obama of the bill passed last week that gives families of 9/11 victims the right to sue the government of Saudi Arabia for being complicit in the attacks.

The president has until Friday to veto the bill, and the White House has made it clear that this is the president's intention.

The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both the House and the Senate, so getting the two-thirds majority from each chamber should be relatively easy. But some Democrats are listening to administration arguments that passage of the bill could lead to retaliatory suits against Americans.

The Hill:

If Congress were to leave Washington for the campaign trail this week, as many had expected, the administration might have had a better shot at convincing Democrats to uphold an Obama veto in a lame-duck session after the elections. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday vowed the Senate would stay in the Capitol to deal with the issue, as well as a separate push to deny an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Both of those well have to deal with before we depart, McConnell told reporters. The leader offered a similar message in private, telling rank-and-file Republicans during their lunch that they will reconvene next week if Obama waits until the last minute to veto the popular bill. The expected vote on the veto override will give Senate negotiators a few more days to reach agreement on a stopgap funding measure to keep the government open past Election Day, likely until Dec. 9. The Senate voted Tuesday night to advance debate on the measure, but negotiators are still hashing out details over the funding. I think we are close to finalizing an agreement that we can go to the floor on, McConnell said Tuesday. He acknowledged the talks have dragged on for longer than he expected and pledged to brief his members on any deal before bringing it to the floor. The fight over Saudi Arabia has emerged as the more dramatic congressional issue to be dealt with before the elections. Obama has taken his time to veto the bill, something Republicans hoping to return to the campaign trail have noticed. The fight is taking place against the backdrop of a pitched battle for the Senate, with Democrats needing to hold the White House and gain four seats to retake their majority. Veto the bill if thats what youve decided to do, Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (Texas) said at a press conference. We hope you wouldnt, but if youre going to veto it, veto it and send it back to us so we can have the vote to override that veto.

The administration has refused to negotiate with Senate Republicans, so the GOP has little choice but to carry on with the override attempt.

As for the Democrats, they're not only getting pressure from the White House to uphold the veto, but also hearing from 9/11 families who have put on a full court press to lobby Democrats who voted for the bill.

Politico:

I think it would be incorrect for any member to think this is a very simple issue, that it may not have ramifications for the United States in other venues around the world, Hoyer said. Having said that, I will reiterate, I share and there is great sympathy among the Senate, the House, bipartisan, to assure that the American families who have suffered great grief and loss have an avenue to address their grievances. But their public trepidation is going up against relentless lobbying from family members of the Sept. 11 victims, who have proved to be a powerful force. When Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina began expressing their qualms with the legislation and suggesting that a veto override should be held off until the end of the year, the families fired back, saying the Republicans are asking far more than the families and survivors should ever be asked to accept. That ferocious push continued into Tuesday, as Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) met privately with 9/11 families in his office and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) held a news conference outside the Capitol with victims of the terrorist attacks. Another enemy working against the White House is simple: time. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday he plans to hold the override vote before senators leave Washington to campaign, dramatically cutting down the time the White House has to coax enough senators to sustain Obamas expected rejection of the 9/11 legislation. McConnell said he assumed the veto will be overridden.

Republicans are complaining that Democrats are slow-walking the veto to keep incumbent GOP Senators in Washington rather than out on the campaign trail, where several close races will probably decide who controls the Senate next year.

No vote is expected in either the House or the Senate until late next week.
Noticing and mentioning terrorist attackers is now considered  by the left and Hillary Clinton  giving comfort to the enemy. Where in the history of the world has this ever been true?

Hillary and the left are pouncing on the alleged impact of Donald Trump mentioning radical Islam in discussions surrounding the recent bombings and attacks on our citizenry. The suggestion is that Trumps choice of words recruits more terrorists.

Playing nice with your enemies and guarding their feelings now takes its place next to microaggressions, safe zones, and multisex bathroom usage.

File this idiocy with the rhetoric surrounding the closing of Gitmo, that Gitmo is a recruiting tool for ISIS. The skewed logic concludes that by closing the facility, the acrimony will abate, that recruitment for ISIS will decline, and that the placation will have the desired effect.

Lost on the left is the cold, hard fact that as the population of Gitmo declined, the recruitment and the terrorists attacks of ISIS have ramped up significantly. To spell it out for the left, their ideas have had precisely the opposite effect from what they claim. It will also be so with any gentle and politically correct labeling of terrorists. No impact.

What is missing is a dividing line, a delineation between good Muslims and Islamic terrorists. That line must be drawn, and the difference must be emphasized by the peaceful Muslims who are appalled by the actions of the radicals. The silence is deafening; the lack of effort in this is glaring.

The left, Obama, and Hillary make the accusations that mentioning radical Islam is to paint Muslims with a broad brush. But it is they who might be painted that fail to distinguish themselves from the radicals. The palette is blurred.
Google has fully adopted USB-C or USB Type-C, with some manufacturers following their lead, USB-C is still a very new standard. But it is great to see more and more products supporting this standard. There are many accessories already available that support USB-C, and today, Google added one of those accessories to the Google Store. This time its from Belkin. Its a USB-C car charger and itll cost you $45. Which may seem a bit much for a car charger, and thats because it is. Accessories sold in the Google Store are typically a bit more expensive than youd find over on Amazon or many other places. Its not known why that is, however.

In the box, youll find the car charger, as well as a USB-C to USB-C cable. Google lists that it supports the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Pixel C and the Chromebook Pixel. That is all of their devices that support USB-C. But dont forget that itll work perfectly fine with the HTC 10, Samsung Galaxy Note 7, LG G5, LG V20, and even the new Sony Xperia XZ that was announced earlier this month in Berlin. If, perhaps, you use Apple products, the 12-inch Apple MacBook will also work perfectly fine with this car charger. Which makes it a pretty impressive car charger, to be honest. Being able to charge your laptop, or Chromebook Pixel from the car is pretty neat.

USB Type-C is what the industry appears to be moving towards, and leaving USB Type-A and even micro USB in the dust. USB Type-C features all sorts of advantages over micro USB and USB Type-A, like the fact that it is truly reversible. Additionally, it does also sport faster read and write speeds. Making it great for not only mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, but also for laptops and desktop computers. USB-C is being used in more and more smartphones, and is forcing many of us to buy new accessories. Since our current car chargers, wall adapters and even portable battery packs are not compatible with the new standard (unless of course youve bought a new one recently). There are other options for USB-C car chargers, but if you do like this Belkin model here, you can grab it from the link below.
This Tuesday, the president of the United States Barack Obama made his last speech at the United Nations General Assembly during which he talked about the ways the world has changed during his last two presidential tenures which will soon span eight full years. Obama said he strongly believes hes leaving the world in a better place than he found it and advised other world leaders to let the past stay in the past and go forward from here on out. As to what forward exactly means in this context, the US president stated that while no one can predict the future, theres no doubt in his mind that forward is closely connected to the Internet and technology in general.

Obama remembered how the iPhone was still a novelty when he moved into the Oval office in 2009 while Android devices were still getting a foothold in the market. He reminisced about the time when Facebook and Twitter didnt have a global appeal and the likes of WhatsApp and Instagramboth of which are Facebook-owned todaydidnt even exist. After this short daydreaming sequence, Obama made his point: the power of social media in 2016 is so incredible that social networks alone can facilitate a revolution, educate the masses, and empower citizens in a lot of other ways regardless of where in the world theyre located. Regardless of that, the US president noted that theres a dark side to social media, citing numerous examples of terrorist cells recruiting Western youth on social media. He still finished his speech on a positive note and concluded that a connected society offers way more benefits than drawbacks.

Obama was then replaced on stage by Ban Ki-moon, the main UN secretary whose tenure is also coming to an end this year. Curiously enough, the Secretary-General spent a good portion of his speech talking about contemporary technology, as well. More specifically, he called smartphones both a lifeline and the bane of our existence, adding that the smartphone revolution connected the entire world in a way he deemed impossible when he assumed office in 2007.

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In related news, it was just yesterday that Obama reflected on another branch of the tech industry. In an article published in the latest issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Obama praised autonomous vehicles and industrys efforts to bring self-driving cars to the market as soon as possible but added that new regulations are a necessity in this time of rapidly changing technology.
With many of its Galaxy Note 7 handsets reportedly catching on fire, Samsung Electronics conducted an internal investigation, which apparently revealed that batteries manufactured by its sister concern, Samsung SDI, was to be blamed for the critical flaw. The company, however, announced that the units meant for China were fully safe as they were carrying batteries from a Chinese firm called Amperex Technology Limited (ATL) instead of Samsung SDI. Even as the company announced a complete recall of all Galaxy Note 7 units sold around the world, it left out China from its ambit for that very reason. Only 1,858 devices that were imported into the country for testing purposes were recalled, leaving the rest untouched. However, reports in the Chinese media over the weekend suggested that multiple Galaxy Note 7 units in the country had caught on fire.

With several images of apparently burnt out Galaxy Note 7 handsets doing the rounds of the Chinese social media, Samsung Electronics and Amperex Technology, both came out and issued separate statements, saying that the fires were caused by external heating rather than overheated batteries. However, with more reports and graphic visuals of burnt out Galaxy Note 7 smartphones coming out of China on a daily basis, some observers are cautioning that the situation may create a trust crisis that could well prevent the South Korean company from reclaiming its position of predominance in the country. Thats according to Canalys research director, Ms. Nicole Peng, who says that people in the country have already started doubting the trustworthiness of Samsung as a brand. According to her, the reports of Galaxy Note 7 fires will push buyers away from Samsung and towards brands such as Apple, Huawei and OPPO, all of which are locked in a severe tussle over market share in the country.

In fact, a recent study conducted by Guangdong-based consultancy iiMedia Research, found that around 37% of Samsung smartphone users in the country would rather buy Apples iPhones next time around, while 26% said that theyll go with Huawei rather than stick with Samsung. With its market share in China falling from the highs of 21% in late 2013 to just 8% this year, Samsung Electronics can ill-afford any more missteps in the largest smartphone market in the world. However, the controversies surrounding the Galaxy Note 7 already means that demand for its premium devices are likely to be on the lower side, with the company likely to drop down to the 8th place among all smartphone vendors in the country. According to Ms. Peng, It will take two flagship product updates for consumers to regain their confidence in Samsung.
Facebook hasnt been just a social media company for quite a while now and after investing in a wide range of industries ranging from gaming to virtual reality, facial recognition, and apps, the Menlo Park-based company is now also allegedly dabbling in  modular smartphones. Facebook isnt a complete stranger to making phones as the company collaborated with HTC to release the infamous HTC First back in 2013. That device wasnt exactly showered with praise and the firm reportedly gave up on making branded phones last year but recent reports from the US suggest its stance towards smartphones may be changing once again.

Namely, sources claim that the social media giant has recently completed the acquisition of Nascent Objects, a Californian startup thats manufacturing computers, cameras, and other consumer electronics using contemporary techniques such as 3D printing. Since being established in 2014, Nascent Objects presented numerous prototype of modular consumer electronics though none of it have yet made it to the market. Certain sources from the industry claim that Facebook is considering investing in modular phones because thats one of the few areas where its fierce competitor Google has failed. For the uninitiated, a report from earlier this months suggested Google is on the verge of cancelling the project despite not completely giving up on the idea of creating a modular smartphone. Interestingly enough, Dr. Regina E. Dugan who was one of the key people involved in Project Ara left Google for Facebook in April. Coincidentally, thats around the time the higher-ups at Google unofficially decided to cut their losses with Ara.

Back to Nascent Objects, sources claim that the Californian startup will work on Facebooks so-called Building 8 Project which is headed byyouve guessed itDr. Regina E. Dugan. Not much is now about this research and development initiative funded by the social media giant but given the fact that Nascent Objects founder Baback Elmieh also has a background in Googles Advanced Technology and Projects group just like Dugan, it wont be surprising if the two end up reconnecting. Several days ago, Dugan revealed that one of the goals of the Building 8 Project is to design and manufacture hardware at software-like speeds. Back in April, she stated that she couldnt be happier about joining Facebook because the company gave her the opportunity to do what she loves the most  tech that is infused with a sense of our humanity.
The latest Samsung devices provide some great security options that offer an ideal balance between protection and convenience, such as authentication via fingerprint or iris scanning. Soon, the company will offer additional methods of authentication: face and voice recognition. While similar features already exist in Android, Samsungs solution will be developed by Sensory using TrulySecure technology, and will be highly accurate and compliant with FIDO standards. And rather than being a method for unlocking the device, Samsungs face and voice recognition will be capable of securing applications and authenticating mobile transactions.

While facial recognition and voice recognition each provide security individually, this implementation will increase security by requiring both to authenticate actions on the device. While this adds a layer of security, it doesnt make the authentication process more difficult, as users can simply look at their devices camera while speaking the pre-defined passphrase to verify both at the same time. If the user prefers convenience to heightened security, settings can be changed to only require one or the other, so that if only one is recognized, it passes the verification process without the need for the other. This could prove to be more practical in situations where the devices camera is having trouble recognizing the users face, or when using verbal commands is not possible. Mobile payment solutions are slowly gaining traction, but due to their need to be both convenient and secure, it can be a challenge to find the right balance. This solution may provide an option that increases security without discouraging users from taking advantage of it by slowing them down.

Although this implementation will likely be more seamlessly integrated into the device, Sensory has offered similar security in the form of an app, called AppLock Face/Voice Recognition, for some time. The app also uses voice and facial recognition to authenticate the user, and, when installed, is required in order to allow them access to certain applications on the device. Samsung has had an ongoing relationship with Sensory, and already uses their technology in the Galaxy S7 for TrulyHandsfree, which provides users the ability to interact with their devices using only their voices. Going forward, it appears that their technology will take a more prominent role on Samsung devices, providing the primary layer of security to protect sensitive data.
Sprints Chief Executive Officer, Marcelo Claure, has been discussing their network strategy on a call with investors. During the call, Marcelo commented on Sprints current strategy of investing into small cell sites in order to densify its network, which follows comments and observations taken from the start of the year. Indeed it was back in January that Sprint started talking about its radical overhaul of its network, with significant cost savings through using many small cell sites. This network policy included moving existing network infrastructure away from established masts (typically leased from Crown Castle and American Tower) to less expensive land. As to how much cheaper things are: earlier in 2016, Sprint lowered its capex estimate from $4.5 billion to $3 billion, a significant reduction.

Capex, that is capital expenditure, is an important part of the cellular carriers. The majority of a carriers capex is spent on improving the cellular data network and the classic rule of networking is the less a network spends on the cellular towers and equipment, the less able the company is to improve their network. Sprints expected capex for 2016 was already low in the context of the industry and the reaction was one of caution, even despite Sprints assurance that it was smartly densifying the network differently to the competition. Marcelos comments today discussed some aspects of Sprints networking plan: during the second quarter of 2016, Sprint invested $376 million into its network compared with $1.6 billion in 2015. Some industry analysts point toward Sprint facing financial difficulties investing the same sum into the network for 2016 and this is difficult to ignore: Sprint is the least able carrier to invest a significant sum into its network. However, parent SoftBank invested $31 billion into buying British chip designer ARM Holdings, rather than pumping more cash into Sprint: this illustrates that SoftBank is at least comfortable with Sprints position.

Where Sprint is different to its competitors is how much spectrum the carrier has, which is allowing the carrier to build its network in a different way to other national carriers. Sprint has significant holdings available at the 2.5 GHz frequency point and has elected to sit out the 600 MHz auction that the FCC is currently staging. This gives the carrier the flexibility to use wireless backhauling (that is, using the wireless network to send data from the tower to Sprints core network), which cheapens the installation of the small cell sites as well as densify its network. However, looking forward, Marcelo is expecting Sprint to increase both capital and operational expenditure as the carrier densifies its network but compared with previous years, things will be different: Sprint is able to use different and new technologies that it did not have access to before. Marcelo did not state how many sites Sprint has installed across the county but said that he would when the time is right. He also mentioned that going forward, Sprint should be in a good position for 5G network plans: If you look at the foundation of 5G, its pretty clear that its also having a very dense network and suddenly this strategy that we started discussing a year, a year and half ago that everybody made fun of and now everybody is chasing.
Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7 over a month ago and it received great response from consumers, with millions of units being sold within a short period of time. However, things started to go downhill for the South Korean company when reports regarding explosions of Galaxy Note 7 units while being charged started to emerge. This forced the company to launch an official investigation and through its findings, it was discovered that a faulty battery was to blame. An official recall of all affected units has since been put into effect, but some Galaxy Note 7 owners who still have affected units, have not given up their faulty device for a new unit.

As Samsung wants to avoid any further incidents, the company is now working with carriers in the US on a software update which will allow users to tell if their Galaxy Note 7 device is safe for use. The update will show a green battery indicator on the new units, while the battery indicator will remain white on all affected units. In order to get all affected users to return their units to Samsung, a warning which urges users to power down and stop using their device will pop up on the device. This warning will be shown whenever the device is turned on or put to charge. Before Samsung issued the worldwide recall, more than 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 devices were sold worldwide, with one million units having been sold in the US itself. Unfortunately, it has been reported that less than 15% of those one million units have been exchanged or returned by users.

If you own an affected Galaxy Note 7, do return your device to your point of purchase, be it Samsung, a retailer, or a carrier, and get an exchange as soon as possible, to avoid any incidents which may cause bodily injuries or damage to property. As for those currently returning their devices for an exchange, Samsung plans to move 500,000 unaffected units to retailers and carriers by this Wednesday. The Galaxy Note 7 exchange program has also been kicked off in other parts of the world, including Samsungs home country of South Korea, where the program is slated to end on September 26th.
British carrier, Vodafone, has integrated a new spam call blocking technology into its network, which should result in a significant reduction in nuisance calls. These spam or nuisance calls are sometimes businesses trying to sell a product, such as a mis-sold PPI claim, but can be intimidating and downright frustrating for customers. Vodafone reports that in earlier testing, the system blocked over 400,000 spam calls in one day. Furthermore, during the week long trial, it cut the total number of spam calls that customers received across the entire network to under one thousand although it is not clear how Vodafone measured this data. However, Vodafone did explain that the spam callers realized their calls could not enter the network. One would hope that over time, spam callers would stop trying.

The United Kingdoms telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, and the Information Commissioners Office have already been working on reducing the problem of nuisance or spam calls. The UK already benefits from the Telephone Preference Service that customers can subscribe their mobile numbers to. To use the TPS, send the word TPS plus an email address to 85095 and once a number is on the list, its illegal for this number to be used for spam calls. Since May, businesses have had to show their number when calling and may be fined up to 2 million for hiding the caller ID. These two measures, which may be combined with on-device applications designed to filter spam calls, will help either ensure that customers do not receive calls, or can identify the business calling them. However, these solutions cannot help solve the very serious issue of nuisance calls being placed using databases of mobile numbers sourced from other means, usually from online databases  which Vodafones new technology can. Sophisticated criminal gangs use dialer machines to place many hundreds of thousands of calls in a day from a premium number and can generate a considerable sum should a customer call them back from a missed call.

Vodafones changes at the network side of things should immediately help their customers and may also encourage the other British wireless carriers, Three, EE and O2, to introduce a similar technology themselves. Vodafone are keen to explain that the new technology does not block all calls but should block the majority. Mark Hughes, Vodafones head of corporate security, explained: The protection of our customers is paramount and we have been investing heavily in our network and technology to help stamp out this practice.
Chinese tech company, Xiaomi Inc., may be known outside its homeland primarily for its smartphones, but the company is far from a one-trick pony. Founded by Mr. Lei Jun back in 2010, the company originally started its journey with Android smartphones, but has since diversified into a number of different sectors, including laptop computers, smart home automation and IoT products. Within a span of just six years since its inception, Xiaomi has quickly grown to become one of the largest and most well-respected tech firms in China alongside the likes of Lenovo, Huawei and Alibaba. While smartphones still contribute the lions share of its revenues, the company has been tying up with local firms in recent times to release smart air-conditioners, smart bedside lamps, smart umbrellas and a whole host of other interesting but niche little products.

The company apparently also has big plans for virtual reality as well as drones, and has already unveiled its first Android TV box at the Google I/O developer conference back in May, 2016. While that device is expected to hit the U.S. market later this month, there are a few other Xiaomi products that have already been available for purchase in its homeland, including the Mi Band 2 fitness tracker and the Mi Air Purifier 2. The company has now launched both these devices in India at fairly attractive prices. While the former has been priced at just Rs. 1,999 ($30), the latter comes with a price-tag of Rs. 9,999 ($150), making it the only mainstream HEPA air filter in the country to be priced at that level. While the Mi Band 2 will go on sale on Xiaomis official website on September 27, the Mi Air Purifier 2 will be available for purchase in the country from September 26.

Taking a quick look at some of the features of the two devices, the Mi Band 2 comes with a 0.42-inch OLED display with scratch-resistant glass and anti-fingerprint coating. The device comes with a sleep tracker, a pedometer and a PPG (heart rate monitor). It also comes with an IP67 rating that denotes water and dust resistance. The band has a 70mAh battery that the company claims can go on for 20-days on a single charge with moderate usage. As for the Mi Air Filter, the device, as mentioned already, has a HEPA filter as well as an activated carbon filter. The device supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n on the 2.4Ghz band and can be synced with Android smartphones with the help of the Mi Home app that allows users to monitor the air-filtration data remotely.
Mireya Acierto/WireImage"La di da di" -- for the first time ever, Slick Rick will perform on stage in the U.K. Slick's Coming Home Tour will begin November 25, with the rapper stopping in five cities in England and one in Ireland.

The last time Slick landed in London was in 1985 for an appearance alongside Doug E. Fresh on the British music television show Top of the Pops.

The entertainer was born and raised in the Southwest London district of Mitcham, but immigrated to the Bronx with his family in 1976.

The Grammy-nominated artist is now able to travel freely between the U.S. and the U.K., following a 23-year struggle to gain citizenship in America.

Here are the dates for Slick Rick's Coming Home Tour:

11/25 -- Manchester, UK, Mantra

11/26 -- London, UK, 02 Forum

11/27 -- Bristol, UK, 02 Academy

11/28 -- Birmingham, UK 02 Institute

11/29 -- Dublin, Ireland, The Sugar Club

11/30 -- Brighton, UK, Concorde 2

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
(ANSA) - Paris, September 21 - OECD Chief Economist Catherine Mann said Wednesday that, even though Italy had made "notable progress" in changes to labour-market regulations, the effects had been disappointing this year. "This (reform) had an effect on the recovery of the employment rate, giving new momentum. The idea was that this momentum would continue in 2016 but our hopes were disappointed," she said. Mann said this was down to factors including low confidence and "political uncertainty" over the results of this year's referendum on the government's overhaul of Italy's political machinery.


(ANSA) - Rome, September 21 - Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti on Wednesday praised Italian soldiers serving in Afghanistan on a visit to the country's troops in Herat.

Italian troops are in the country as part of Operation Resolute Support. "We have consolidated a presence that enables us to have higher levels of security than what we did a few years ago," Pinotti said, citing the operation's training and educational activities in support of Afghan institutions and security forces. "This is useful in building stability in this country and at the same time ensuring the security of Italy, since threats to the international community come from crisis areas," the minister said.

The Italian mission is responsible for Herat province, which now has the highest education and the lowest infant mortality rates in the country, Pinotti said.

"This is due in part to how we operate - Italy is truly proud of what you do," she said, thanking the troops for their service.


(supersedes previous)(ANSA) - Rome, September 21 - Premier Matteo Renzi said Wednesday that his government's Industry 4.0 national stimulus plan could turn Italy into the land of opportunity. "We have to change the mindset and say that Italy is the land of possibilities and opportunities," Renzi said after Industry Minister Carlo Calenda unveiled the plan earlier in the day.

Calenda said oversight of the new plan - a mix of tax breaks and other incentives as well as measures to make sure all startups and businesses have access to the Internet - will be "ruthless" and that its watchdog panel will work "like a shareholders' meeting". "It will meet every six months or once a year to verify what works and what doesn't, whether or not the objectives have been reached, in a pretty ruthless way," Calenda said.

The minister added "we want to mobilize an additional 10 billion euros in private investments in 2017" and that Industry 4.0 is "built on horizontal tax incentives" and no longer on allocating public funds and inviting bids from startups and others in the private sector.

"I'm not doing the bids anymore," Calenda said. "We've learned it's the way not to spend any money".

The plan would also extend the time limit on the government's so-called super amortization program for companies investing in capital goods, and incremental tax incentives for research and innovation, with credits ranging from five to 20 million euros. The Industry 4.0 plan also calls for making sure all companies and startups have access to Internet and broadband technology. "All small and medium businesses will have access to technologies that were previously rationed," Calenda said.


(ANSA) - Rome, September 20 - It is "too soon" to "define the circumstances and real matrix" of the kidnapping of two Italian workers in Libya, the head of the foreign ministry's crisis unit, Claudio Taffuri, said Tuesday.

He said the "dynamic" of the abduction "is unfortunately the usual one: cars that block the target's car and make off with the kidnapped".

Taffuri added that the Italian government had advised companies working in Libya to equip themselves with security and noted that, in the part of southern Libya where the kidnapping took place, tribes "have been fighting one another for years".

Taffuri spoke amid reports that the abduction of Bruno Cacace and Danilo Calonego may have been an act by common criminals who wanted a quick pay-off.

Cacace and Calonego were abducted near the southern Libyan city of Ghat Monday evening together with a Canadian national.

Ghat is controlled by the Tripoli-based government of national unity. All three kidnapped people worked for a company that performed maintenance operations at Ghat airport - Con.I.Cos, which is based in Mondovi, near the northern Italian city of Cuneo. Cacace is a 56-year-old from Borgo San Dalmazzo, near Cuneo, and Calonego is a 66-year-old from the province of Belluno.

Local media said the abduction was not carried out by al-Qaeda. Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Rome-based daily la Repubblica that it was too soon to know what sort of group the kidnappers are. Two Italian workers who were taken hostage in Libya last year were killed in circumstances that have not yet been fully clarified in a firefight in city of Sabratha in March.


Bosnia: Serbian referendum, tension amid threats of clashes Belgrade worried over statements made by ex-Bosnian forces chief

(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, SEPTEMBER 21 - Serbian leaders reacted yesterday with great concern but extreme firmness at statements described as 'warmongering' made by a former Bosnian general.



Sefer Halilovic, commander of the Bosnian forces during the armed conflict in 1992-1995, spoke about a controversial referendum to be held next Sunday in the Republika Srpska (Rs, the Serbian-majority entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina) on the institutionalization of the national holiday of January 9 of the Rs. The holiday was deemed unconstitutional by the High Court of Bosnia and the referendum is perceived by Sarajevo and the international community as a first step towards the Serbian entity's separation from Bosnia-Herzegovina.



If the vote takes place - said Halilovic - the Dayton agreements will be violated, there will be clashes and the Republika Srpska will disappear. The words were interpreted by Belgrade as open military threats, as a language going back to the dark past of the conflict in the 1990s. ''Serbia will not allow a military aggression and the destruction of the Republika Srpska. Serbia is strong enough to defend itself and will not allow the destruction of Republika Srpska in case of attack'' said Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic from New York, where he is attending the UN General Assembly with Premier Aleksandar Vucic.



''We want to preserve peace, we respect the integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina but what I can certainly say is that Rs will not disappear'', said Vucic, who did not rule out returning to Belgrade ahead of time due to the delicate situation concerning the referendum. ''We need peace at all cost'', he added.



The case and the renewed nationalistic rhetoric, which is top news in Serbia, is further heightening tensions around the referendum Sunday in the Republika Srpska. (ANSAmed).




Migrants: Tunisian navy rescues 14 Algerians, one dead They were trying to reach Italy's coast

(ANSAmed) - TUNIS, SEPTEMBER 21 - Units of the Tunisian coast guards in Biserta on Tuesday afternoon rescued 14 Algerian nationals aboard a vessel off Sidi Mechreg, not far from the Algerian border, according to local media, adding that one body was discovered on the boat.



The migrant reportedly died of fatigue and hunger after the migrants lost themselves during the crossing, which lasted several days. Officers questioned the migrants, aged 20 to 35, who said they were trying to reach Italy illegally. (ANSAmed).




First Libya-to-Italy oil tanker since 2014 sets off Ship carrying thousands of barrels of crude oil

(ANSAmed) - CAIRO, SEPTEMBER 21 - A tanker carrying thousands of barrels of crude oil has set off towards Italy from the Libyan port of Ras Lanuf, Libyan sources said on Wednesday. It is the first such voyage since 2014. Ras Lanuf is one of four ports that in recent weeks were the scene of clashes between the forces of Tobruk General Khalifa Haftar and the facility guards loyal to the UN-recognized Tripoli-based government of national unity. (ANSAmed).




Attack against Israeli embassy in Ankara, assailant killed Two armed with knives, one injured, no Israeli wounded

(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, SEPTEMBER 21 - The Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey, has been attacked. Two assailants armed with knives targeted the embassy exchanging gunfire with police. One of the two attackers was killed while the other was wounded and arrested, according to Turkish media reports.



Local media reports said the pair tried to get into the embassy before they were stopped by security personnel who opened fire. No diplomat nor embassy personnel were involved or injured in the attack, the spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, said. (ANSAmed).




CAIRO - The satellite channel Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday that a boat carrying at least 300 migrants had capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh, about 140km north of Cairo.

News agency MENA quoted the mayor of the city of Motobas as saying that there were 600 onboard and that 150 had been rescued thus far. "At least 29 bodies of migrants tha drowned have been recovered by the shipwreck that happened off the northern coast of Egypt," state TV quoted the health ministry as saying. According to the chairman of the investigation office, Mohamed Kharisa, "the boat was headed to Italy and it departed from the city of Kafr el Sheikh, in the Delta Nile".
Libya's Haftar resumes advance westwards, takes Harawa 50 km from Sirte where Jedran's top guard sought refuge

(ANSAmed) - CAIRO, SEPTEMBER 21 - After an attack in Libya's oil-rich crescent, the forces under General Khalifa Haftar on Wednesday resumed their advance westwards and have reportedly taken the village of Harawa about 50 kilometers east of Sirte. They are thus moving closer to a city where Misurata militias linked to the Tripoli government are fighting against the Islamic State (ISIS). Harawa was where Ibrahim Jedran, the head of the guards Haftar chased out of the country's oil terminals, had taken refuge, reported military sources on their website.



''Infantry Brigade 152, led by Abdel Hakim Emmezab and backed by the Ajdabiya counterterrorism organization, has announced control of Harawa, east of Sirte,'' the Facebook page of Haftar's forces stated. Well-informed military sources added to the Afri Gate News website that a large number of armed individuals linked to Ibrahim Jedran had handed over their weapons and vehicles to the armed forces and that the military operations in Harawa had not targeted Misurata militias operating in Sirte against ISIS. They stressed that the operations were against a common enemy and that there would never be any clash with any military force in the Sirte region. (ANSAmed).




World's largest Sachertorte in Slovenia's Vienna Days 600 kilos, pieces to be handed out for free

(ANSAmed) - LJUBLJANA, SEPTEMBER 21 - Pieces of what has been called the largest Sachertorte in the world will be handed out to visitors on Wednesday as part of Vienna Days celebrations in the Slovenian capital. A group of Austrian and Slovenian pastry makers had started work on the 600-kilo cake at dawn. The final coat of icing will be layered on in the late afternoon on a platform built for the event. The idea is part of a festival dedicated to the city of Vienna - Ljubljana's twin city - and organizers hope to enter the Guinness Book of World Records with it. The pastry makers say that some 2,000 eggs, 50 kilos of flour and butter, 40 kilos of sugar, 45 kilos of chocolate, 80 kilos of marmalade and 200 kilos of icing were needed to make the gigantic Sachertorte. (ANSAmed).




ANSAmed - Today's events in the Mediterranean

(ANSAmed) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 21 - These are some of the main events scheduled for today in the Euro-Mediterranean area: NEW YORK - UN, high-level meeting of the Security Council to discuss the conflict in Syria and perspectives to end fighting that started six years ago.



NEW YORK - US-Africa economic summit, for the General Assembly of the United Nations, with Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi.



FRANKFURT - ECB, board meeting.



PARIS - Council of Europe, meeting of the Commission on social issues, health and sustainable development.



NAPLES - Week of Jewish culture (until September 25).



(ANSAmed).




(by Mohammad Ben Hussein)

AMMAN - Jordan elections concluded late Tuesday amid dismal participation in main cities, as unofficial figures showed voters turnout 37 percent, amid wide spread allegation of police voting and vote buying.

Meanwhile, results are expected to be officially announced within the coming 24 hours, amid expectation that traditional powers of tribal men, former security officers, businessmen to dominate the scene. The Islamist movement is expected to win up to 30 seats out of the total 130 seats of the parliament. This is the first time the Islamist movement takes part in the elections after more than a decade of boycott in protest against vote rigging and the previous elections law. Observers said the Islamist movement has been forced to participate in the elections by security agencies and hard-line politicians after they were warned against further targeting. Earlier this year, the government shut down the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters, and all its offices across the kingdom, after it was outlawed. Some offices of the Islamic Action Front (IAF) the political wing of the MB were burnt by unknown people and others were closed without legal grounds, according to the IAF officials. Last year, the deputy chief of the MB was imprisoned for two years over a post on Facebook, while assets of the MB were frozen.

Eye witnesses told ANSA that vote buying was evident in many parts of the kingdom, including Amman, Irbid (60 km north, Salt (30 km west) and the southern region. Some candidates paid up to JD 70 $100 per vote). A source also told ANSA that police had cast their votes in some parts of the country. This is not the first time that the government and security apparatus interfere in the elections as previous polls saw flagrant vote rigging.

Authorities are keen to control the parliament as they are concerned about the rise of powers that could challenge the government fiscal policies as well as the king's ultimate authority and ties to key western allies, in a country that has been suffering from chronic corruption, favoritism, nepotism and rising unemployment.

In central badia region, south Amman, eight ballot boxes disappeared after polling stations were attacked by unknown gunmen. The Independent Commission for Elections (IEC) said it will conduct re-vote in the district and ordered an- investigation.

Security forces had to deal with minor clashes in some election centres, but the elections went incident free as authorities were concerned about possible attacks by the Islamic State (IS). Jordan plays a central role in the US lead coalition to fight IS in Syria and Iraq, providing on ground military assistance, intelligence and logistic support. Jordan also sponsors several groups in the southern city of Deraa that fight IS and has sent dozens of intelligence officers to oversee military plans and development in Syria.
(by Valeria Robecco)

NEW YORK - An increase of 4.5 billion dollars in global humanitarian funding in 2016, along with maintaining such a sum unvaried in the following years is the pledge made to the UN by countries that organized a summit on refugees in New York on the sidelines of the General assembly of the UN, sponsored by US President Barack Obama.



The American president has also announced an agreement among 50 countries to double the number of refugees welcomed, bringing them to more of 360,000 already this year.



Together with the United States, the summit was organized by Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Jordan, Mexico and Sweden.



Italy was among participants, with the speech made by Premier Matteo Renzi, who announced that Italy will increase substantially its funding for humanitarian aid, upping the budget by 30%.



"Over 2016 - according to a joint statement - the 32 donor countries that take part in the summit have contributed with some extra 4.5 billion dollars to the calls of the United Nations compared to 2015".



Obama, who in his address at the General Assembly urged to do more, promised that the over 50 nations taking part in the summit will double the number of refugees welcomed from war zones, welcoming 360,000 this year. The US president then launched an appeal to keep the engagements taken as far hosting refugees is concerned, citing countries including Germany, Canada and Austria.



Obama said countries needed to recognize that refugees are a symptom of a wider failure, of tensions and persecutions. He said the United States are determined to play their part, increasing the number of refugees resettled to 85,000 this year and 110,000 by 2017 and that everyone needs to do more.



In a joint statement released on the sidelines of the event, the organizing countries stressed that "this crisis, although it is determined in a disproportionate way by the conflict in Syria, is of a global nature and thus requires a global answer and political solutions.



"We must seek to increase international funding and humanitarian assistance, offer opportunities to resettle refugees and alternative legal routes for the admission, facilitate the access of the refugees to education and regular jobs", they also said, noting the importance of increasing the number of countries providing significant levels of humanitarian assistance and resettlement".


Migrants: Renzi, EU has done too little for Mediterranean Premier at UN thanks Obama for 'his great legacy'

(ANSAmed) - NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 21 - Italian Premier Matteo Renzi said in his address at the UN General Assembly that ''thousands of people escape to the Mediterranean. Increasingly we have to shoulder the burden for this area of the world''. ''There have been steps forward in Libya but there is still lots to do. The challenge of liberty is at stake, but the EU has done too little in that area'', Renzi also said.



The premier cited the ''concrete gestures of Italians who every day save human lives that would otherwise be condemned to desperation'' and announced that ''the G7 in Taormina on the Mediterranean will focus on the themes of increasing money for cooperation in development and investments on education, because terrorism comes from the abandoned suburbs of cities''.



He proposed that, ''for every euro invested in security, one euro must be invested in culture''.



Renzi then thanked Obama for putting the refugee issue on the agenda of UN talks.



''We are very grateful to Obama for this initiative that will help each one of us to understand the importance of the refugee issue. As he said in his speech this morning, it is necessary to choose between fear and courage: this is his great legacy not just for the United States but for everybody'', he stated.



(ANSAmed).




Agriculture officials from APEC member economies and industry representatives are partnering to reduce a costly explosion in food waste in the Asia-Pacific that could jeopardize the future of global food security.

Technical discussions between these groups in Taipei took forward measures for improving food waste assessment and controls in the region of 3 billion people. Focus is on closing troubling gaps at the retail and consumer level that are feeding the problem. The dialogue was held as part of a multi-year, public-private sector project in APEC to reduce food losses across supply chains.

Ministers from APEC economies will review the progress of this work to continue this week in Piura, Peru and decide the next steps when they convene there on 26-27 September for an APEC Food Security Ministerial Meeting. A study conducted as a part of APECs project to mitigate food losses underscores the need for greater collaborative action.

APEC research shows that about 40 per cent of food waste in member economies occurs at the hands of retailers and consumers, revealed Perus Vice Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation Juan Carlos Gonzales, who is Chair of the APEC Policy Partnership on Food Security. Within the region, the total amount of food wasted annually could sustain 800 million people who still fall below the poverty line for 16 months.

Food losses are piling up as incomes and consumption in the Asia-Pacific rise which presents a real challenge to food security, added Dong-Chong Hsiou of Chinese Taipeis Council of Agriculture which is an overseer of APECs related project work. We are building our industry collaboration to ensure there is adequate tracking data on food waste which can be elusive.

Officials and industry representatives have set their sights on the design of a coherent quantification methodology as well as support for expanded use of mobile technology and apps for data collection in the retail and hospitality sectors.

They are also targeting greater engagement with supply chain actors and consumer education. This involves a particular emphasis on changing behavior among supermarket procurement managers, chefs, households and school children.

These measures seek to accommodate an expected 30 per cent jump in the worlds population to 9.7 billion by 2050, increasing food demand. They could also mitigate decreases in arable land in the region due to urbanization and environmental stress, including climate change, which threaten the sustainability of food supplies.

The collaborative actions being pursued in APEC to reduce food waste could go a long way to ensuring food security in the worlds most populous region, noted Tony Nowell, Vice Chair of the APEC Policy Partnership on Food Security and APEC Business Advisory Council representative from New Zealand. The economic and social incentives for supporting more efficient industry supply chains and consumer habits are considerable.

Potential benefits range from bolstering workforce productivity, household savings and poverty alleviation, to reduced carbon emissions and pressure on landfills.

# # #

For further details, or to arrange possible media interviews, please contact:

David Hendrickson +65 9137 3886 at [email protected]

Michael Chapnick +65 9647 4847 at [email protected]

More on APEC meetings, events, projects and publications can be found on www.apec.org . You can also follow APEC on Twitter and join us on Facebook and LinkedIn
The airline was nominated in two categories - Airline of the Year  and in a special category for Travel Company of the Year, where Etihad Airways was the only airline mentioned. The entry mechanism for the award was redesigned for 2016 as only the agents best-rated supplier in each of the 15 categories was shortlisted.



James Harrison, general manager for Etihad Airways in the UK, said: I am delighted that we have won this prestigious award for the third time as it recognises the airlines world-class product and service, as well as our strong commercial relationships with the trade.



Additionally, the award recognises the hard work thats been put in, not just over the last 12 months, but over a prolonged period. Alongside the introduction of Edinburgh and the expansion of our A380s into London, it has helped to increase our brand awareness with the trade and our guests.
Pegasus guests can fly to Kashgar every day of the week with connections from Pegasus Istanbul-Bishkek route.
Current Archaeology Live! 2017 returned to the University of Londons Senate House, on 24-25 February (Friday/Saturday). We heard from the foremost archaeological experts on the latest finds and ground-breaking research, and we had an entertaining, stimulating, and enjoyable two days!

Timetable for CA Live! 2017

Archaeology Awards

The results are in, and having counted your votes, we are pleased to share the winners of this years CA Awards, as announced on Friday 24 February at Current Archaeology Live! 2017.

Archaeologist of the Year: Mark Knight

Book of the Year: Images of the Ice Age by Paul Bahn

Research Project of the Year: Rethinking Durrington Walls: a long-lost monument revealed  Stonehenge Riverside Project / Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project / National Trust

Rescue Project of the Year: The Must Farm inferno: exploring an intact Late Bronze Age settlement  Cambridge Archaeological Unit / University of Cambridge

Archaeological Innovation of the Last 50 Years: LiDAR, as exemplified by the New Forest National Park Authority

Every year, the Current Archaeology Awards celebrate the projects and publications that have made the pages of Current Archaeology, and the people judged to have made outstanding contributions to archaeology. These awards are voted for entirely the public  there are no panels of judges.

To find out more about the nominees in each award category, click on the links below:

Archaeologist of the Year

Book of the Year

Rescue Dig of the Year

Research Project of the Year

Archaeological Innovation of the Last 50 Years

Current Archaeology Live! 2018  save the date!

The next CA Live! conference will be held at Senate House, London, on 23-24 February 2018. We hope to see you there for another incredible two days pack full of the latest discoveries!

Previous conferences  and what to expect next year!

Neil Faulkner, Contributing Editor of Current Archaeology and Editor of Military History Monthly, guides us through a snapshot of the Current Archaeology Live! 2015 conference, which was held in February at Senate House, London.

Our previous conferences have been great successes  below are a few of your comments. We look forward to seeing you all again at this coming one!

[quote]Exceeded expectations. I was expecting a lot and got more  its good to have access to good speakers and key personnel in the projects.[/quote]

[quote]I flew all the way from Dubai for the conference and thoroughly enjoyed every presentation. It was an excellent weekend in a superb building with great biscuits.[/quote]

[quote]Ive been to every conference: I always expect to enjoy it, and I always do.[/quote]

[quote]The event exceeded our expectation. We have an amateur interest in archaeology, mainly through television, and did have a concern that the event might be overly academic. This was not borne out, and we thought that all the speakers delivered interesting sets with Time Team presentation skills  and I mean that in a good way![/quote]

[quote]The organisers are to be congratulated for putting on a stimulating and wide-ranging programme.[/quote]

[quote]It entirely lived up to my expectations. The venue was excellent; a magnificent art deco building. The awards ceremony and drinks reception (with nice pastries, rather than just crisps)  and the rock group  was an enjoyable way to close the first day.[/quote]

[quote]It was my first attendance and I was highly impressed. The organisation was very smooth and professional, the content of excellent quality and superbly presented, the venue accessible and comfortable.[/quote]

[quote]Excellent speakers and presentations. Also met up with old friends and made new ones  a friendly atmosphere.[/quote]

[quote]Event was excellent value for money![/quote]

[quote]It was very interesting to hear current updated views from the contributors, all people qualified in their own disciplines. The event was well organised and gives one the opportunity to attend a centre where like-minded people can congregate and listen to current debate on topics.[/quote]

[quote]Well-organised, well-run, and a superb range of speakers.[/quote]

[quote]I have been to every conference since they began, and the range and variety of topics has been superb I can offer no improvements.[/quote]
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. President of France Francois Hollande expressed readiness to host a high-level meeting in Paris aimed for the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, Hollande said it in the congratulatory message addressed to President Serzh Sargsyan on 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence.

Let me reaffirm my commitment to finding a fair and lasting settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

As I had the opportunity to tell you during our Warsaw meeting on July 9, I am ready to host a meeting in Paris with a view to consolidating the ongoing peace process and discussing measures for the advancement of this extremely lengthy conflict, the message of the French President says, the message says, reports Armenpress.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. US President Barack Obama thanks Armenia for responding to the Syrian refugee crisis and for its input in global peacekeeping operations, Obama said it in the congratulatory message addressed to President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of independent Armenias 25th anniversary.

We thank Armenia for its support of our shared goals, particularly its response to the Syrian refugee crisis and its contributions to global peacekeeping operations and nuclear security. We will continue to work together to help Armenia realize its full potential, the message reads, reports Armenpress.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Germany supports Armenias readiness to continue political and economic rapprochement with the EU after joining the EAEU, President of Germany Joachim Gauck said in a congratulatory message addressed to President Serzh Sargsyan on the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence, reports Armenpress.

Supportive of Armenias commitment to continue political and economic rapprochement with the EU after joining the Eurasian Economic Union, Germany will back your country as a partner nation, he said.

Referring to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, Joachim Gauck said the conflict is of paramount importance for Armenia.

As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict, he said.
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An Introduction to Doing Business in Singapore 2022 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in Singapore, compiled by the professionals at Dezan...
by Nirmala Carvalho

Rev Prashant Bhatnagar was abducted, beaten, and threatened with death. One attacker urinated on his wounds. Unconscious, he was dumped on a road. His wife too endured physical and verbal abuse. Their fault was handing out leaflets about a religious service. A case has been filed against the attackers.

Mumbai (AsiaNews)  A Pentecostal clergyman and his wife were beaten in Maharashtra by men from the Shri Ram Pratishthan, a local Hindu educational institution, as they handed out leaflets.

The Hindu radicals objected to the fact that the two Christians were distributing religious material inviting people to attend the Sunday service.

"The Pentecostal Christians were not engaged in any illegal activity, said Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC). They were handing out leaflets in a peaceful manner, but were beaten and accused of forced conversions. However, In secular India, spreading ones faith is a constitutionally guaranteed."

The attack took place last Friday (16 September) in the town of Taloja. Rev Prashant Bhatnagar and his wife Manisha were approached by members of the Hindu group. The latter grabbed the pastor and took him to a place near the city jail. Here they pointed a gun at him and threatened to kill it if he continued to distribute religious materials.

Rev Bhatnagar told police that he was violently beaten, and that one of his attackers urinated on his wounded body. After the beating, he was brought back to the place where he had been taken and dumped on the asphalt still unconscious.

Meanwhile his wife was also physical and verbal abused. The extremists did not spare her, said the GCIC president. This is a disgrace for our society, when women are not respected and are instead beaten up.

The clergyman was taken to hospital and later filed a complaint. The Kharghar police station registered the complaint as a case of unlawful assembly (sections 143, 144 and 149 (A) of the Indian Penal Code), wrongful confinement (sect. 342), outrage against a womans modesty (sect. 354), kidnapping or abduction (sect. 365), intentional insult (sect. 504), criminal intimidation (sect. 506), voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means (sect. 326), and uttering words with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of any person (sect. 298).
The population of reptiles, up to three meters long, is out of control. No longer manageable, they roam Lumpini park scaring and threatening pedestrians and cyclists. The authorities have organized a task force to reduce the number of specimens. Those caught will be moved to a nearby nature reserve.

Bangkok (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Frightened visitors, injured cyclists and devastated fauna: Bangkoks Lumpini Park - the largest green area in the center of the Thai capital  is being put to the test by an invasion of giant lizards. Called "hia" by locals, these reptiles have lived in the park for several years, but in recent times their number has ballooned to around 400 specimens. This is also due to their long life: 20 years on average.

Up to three meters long, these lizards roam the park indifferent to what is happening around them, scaring passers-by and hunting for fish, birds and turtles.

Tawee Somnamee, a 49 year-old who works in the 57-hectare park, said: "In the past, hia used to steal food from the people, and for this they were cursed." But now there have been several accidents in which cyclists have collided with the lizards getting hurt.

The situation is getting out of hand so the authorities have decided to set up a task force to reduce the number of reptiles present at Lumpini. "The time has come for us to control them," said Suwanna Jungrungrueng, director of the municipal department for the environment. As of yesterday, 12 members of the park staff are armed with fishing rods, ropes and sacks. The strategy is to attract the reptiles with bait, to lure them out by canals and pools where they hide.

Once captured, the "hia" will be transferred to a nature reserve in nearby Ratchaburi province. Although these reptiles are not loved in Thailand, some say they bring good luck: "If a hia is in someone's home - Tawee says - he will become rich." The worker adds that not all of the lizards will be removed from the park: "Some have to remain to be admired by tourists."
by Christopher Sharma

Those responsible are part of a Communist cell led by a fugitive Maoist leader. For some time, the group has extorted money from private schools. The bombs were placed against those who refuse to pay. Now parents do not want to send their children to school.

Kathmandu (AsiaNews)  Two young Communists and former Maoist guerrillas placed explosive devices in ten private schools in the Nepalese capital. Two bombs exploded; the other eight were defused. No one was injured.

The motivation appears to be criminal. According to police, the two had tried to extort money from the schools.

"The blast has sown terror the private education sector, said Lacche Bahadur KC, president of the Private Schools Association. We cannot run schools under the threat of terrorism.

If the government doesnt take some serious action, we will hand over our schools to the government for security reasons.

Nepals National Human Rights Commission has called on the government to take immediate action since the incident has breached students right to study in a secure and peaceful environment.

Issuing a press statement today, the Commission has urged all political parties to abide completely by their commitment that schools be treated as 'Zones of Peace'.

The blasts occurred yesterday. The two arrested were identified as Chandra Bahadur Tamang and Shankar Lakhe. Both stated that they belong to a sister organisation of a group called Young Communist Force and All Nepal Maoist Centre.

Kathmandu Metropolitan Police Division Chief Pratap Singh Thapa said that some of the suspects are at large.

We found documents in the blast area and interrogated the arrested, he added. We found that both were former Maoist fighters. They learnt to make bombs during the Maoist insurgency and brought raw material for bomb making from India."

The investigation shows that Chandra Bahadur Tamang went to Malaysia to work, but returned to Nepal five years ago.

Both bombers are thought to belong to a cell led by former Maoist deputy commander Devendra Singh Mahat, who is currently on the run.

The police said that the terrorist act was criminal, not political. The group is known for targeting private schools to exhort money.

The schools were bombs were found yesterday had been subjected to extortion demands, but they refused to pay.

Now the parents of children attending the schools are terrified and refuse to send their children to school.

"We do not feel safe, said School Guardian Association president Dharmaraj Devkota. We ask the government to ensure our safety."

UNICEFs Nepal Representative Tomoo Hozumi, condemned the incident and said that children studying in public or private schools should be allowed to learn and grow in a secure environment. "Schools are meant to be safe havens, he said.
"In war, everyone loses, including the victors" is the message that ended the day in Assisi where religious leaders of most of the world prayed again for peace. We do not have weapons. We believe, however, in the meek and humble strength of prayer. In the appeal for peace 2016, men and women of various religions called for encounters through dialogue, [. . .] to oppose every form of violence and abuse of religion which seeks to justify war and terrorism

Assisi (AsiaNews)  Pope Francis on Tuesday said that that there is no tomorrow in war and reiterated that the name of God cannot be used to justify violence because Peace alone, and not war, is holy.

The pontiffs message in Assisi ended a day that saw religious leaders of most of the world pray again for peace and ask policy-makers to defuse the causes of war: the lust for power and money, the greed of arms dealers, personal interests and vendettas for past wrongs.

In the square in front of St Francis of Assisi, 30 years after John Paul IIs historic World Day of Prayer for Peace, religious leaders came to utter their cry on behalf of those who suffer violence. Standing next to Francis were Rabbi Abraham Skorka, rector of the Marshall Meyer rabbinical Seminary (Argentina); Abbas Shuman, deputy dean of Al-Azhar University (Egypt); and the Very Venerable Gijun Sugitani, chief adviser of the Tendai Buddhist School (Japan). Also present were war victim Ms. Tamar Mikalli, who fled from Aleppo (Syria) and bore witness to the many ills of war before the intervention of Patriarch Bartholomew I, Israeli Rabbi David Brodman, Koei Morikawa, patriarch of Tendai Buddhism and Din Syamsuddin, chairman of the Indonesian ulema Council.

In his address, the pope called for action to overcome what is closed, and become open to God and to our brothers and sisters. God asks this of us, calling us to confront the great sickness of our time: indifference. It is a virus that paralyzes, rendering us lethargic and insensitive, a disease that eats away at the very heart of religious fervour, giving rise to a new and deeply sad paganism: the paganism of indifference.

We cannot remain indifferent. Today the world has a profound thirst for peace. In many countries, people are suffering due to wars which, though often forgotten, are always the cause of suffering and poverty. In Lesbos, my dear brother, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and I saw the sorrow of war in the eyes of the refugees, the anguish of peoples thirsting for peace. I am thinking of the families, whose lives have been shattered; of the children who have known only violence in their lives; of the elderly, forced to leave their homeland. All of them have a great thirst for peace. We do not want these tragedies to be forgotten. Rather together we want to give voice to all those who suffer, to all those who have no voice and are not heard. They know well, often better than the powerful, that there is no tomorrow in war, and that the violence of weapons destroys the joy of life.

We do not have weapons. We believe, however, in the meek and humble strength of prayer. On this day, the thirst for peace has become a prayer to God, that wars, terrorism and violence may end. The peace which we invoke from Assisi is not simply a protest against war, nor is it a result of negotiations, political compromises or economic bargaining. It is the result of prayer (John Paul II, Address, Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, 27 October 1986: Insegnamenti IX,2 [1986], 1252). We seek in God, who is the source of communion, the clear waters of peace for which humanity thirsts: these waters do not flow from the deserts of pride and personal interests, from the dry earth of profit at any cost and the arms trade.

Our religious traditions are diverse. But our differences are not the cause of conflict and provocation, or a cold distance between us. We have not prayed against one another today, as has unfortunately sometimes occurred in history. Without syncretism or relativism, we have rather prayed side-by-side and for each other. In this very place Saint John Paul II said: More perhaps than ever before in history, the intrinsic link between an authentic religious attitude and the great good of peace has become evident to all (Address, Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, 27 October 1986: Insegnamenti IX,2, 1268). Continuing the journey which began thirty years ago in Assisi, where the memory of that man of God and of peace who was Saint Francis remains alive, once again, gathered here together, we declare that whoever uses religion to foment violence contradicts religions deepest and truest inspiration (Address to the Representatives of the World Religions, Assisi, 24 January 2002: Insegnamenti XXV,1 [2002], 104). We further declare that violence in all its forms does not represent the true nature of religion. It is the antithesis of religion and contributes to its destruction (Benedict XVI, Address at the Day of Reflection, Dialogue and Prayer for Peace and Justice in the World, Assisi, 27 October 2011: Insegnamenti VII,2 [2011], 512). We never tire of repeating that the name of God cannot be used to justify violence. Peace alone, and not war, is holy!

Today we have pleaded for the holy gift of peace. We have prayed that consciences will be mobilized to defend the sacredness of human life, to promote peace between peoples and to care for creation, our common home. Prayer and concrete acts of cooperation help us to break free from the logic of conflict and to reject the rebellious attitudes of those who know only how to protest and be angry. Prayer and the desire to work together are directed towards a true peace that is not illusory: not the calm of one who avoids difficulties and turns away, if his personal interests are not at risk; it is not the cynicism of one who washes his hands of any problem that is not his; it is not the virtual approach of one who judges everything and everyone using a computer keyboard, without opening his eyes to the needs of his brothers and sisters, and dirtying his hands for those in need. Our path leads us to immersing ourselves in situations and giving first place to those who suffer; to taking on conflicts and healing them from within; to following ways of goodness with consistency, rejecting the shortcuts offered by evil; to patiently engaging processes of peace, in good will and with Gods help.

Peace, a thread of hope that unites earth to heaven, a word so simple and difficult at the same time. Peace means Forgiveness, the fruit of conversion and prayer, that is born from within and that, in Gods name, makes it possible to heal old wounds. Peace means Welcome, openness to dialogue, the overcoming of closed-mindedness, which is not a strategy for safety, but rather a bridge over an empty space. Peace means Cooperation, a concrete and active exchange with another, who is a gift and not a problem, a brother or sister with whom to build a better world. Peace denotes Education, a call to learn every day the challenging art of communion, to acquire a culture of encounter, purifying the conscience of every temptation to violence and stubbornness which are contrary to the name of God and human dignity.

We who are here together and in peace believe and hope in a fraternal world. We desire that men and women of different religions may everywhere gather and promote harmony, especially where there is conflict. Our future consists in living together. For this reason we are called to free ourselves from the heavy burdens of distrust, fundamentalism and hate. Believers should be artisans of peace in their prayers to God and in their actions for humanity! As religious leaders, we are duty bound to be strong bridges of dialogue, creative mediators of peace. We turn to those who hold the greatest responsibility in the service of peoples, to the leaders of nations, so that they may not tire of seeking and promoting ways of peace, looking beyond their particular interests and those of the moment: may they not remain deaf to Gods appeal to their consciences, to the cry of the poor for peace and to the healthy expectations of younger generations. Here, thirty years ago, Pope John Paul II said: Peace is a workshop, open to all and not just to specialists, savants and strategists. Peace is a universal responsibility (Address, Lower Piazza of the Basilica of Saint Francis, 27 October 1986: l.c., 1269). Let us assume this responsibility, reaffirming today our yes to being, together, builders of the peace that God wishes for us and for which humanity thirsts.

The day ended with an "Appeal for Peace 2016" signed by all those present and "handed over" to a group of children. In the statement, "men and women of various religions" said that "war harms the world, leaving in its wake a legacy of sorrows and hate. In war, everyone loses, including the victors." Hence the desire to "bring about encounters through dialogue, and to oppose every form of violence and abuse of religion which seeks to justify war and terrorism."

We have prayed to God, asking him to grant peace to the world. We recognize the need to pray constantly for peace, because prayer protects the world and enlightens it. Gods name is peace. The one who calls upon Gods name to justify terrorism, violence and war does not follow Gods path. War in the name of religion becomes a war against religion itself. With firm resolve, therefore, let us reiterate that violence and terrorism are opposed to an authentic religious spirit.

We have heard the voice of the poor, of children and the younger generations, of women and so many brothers and sisters who are suffering due to war. With them let us say with conviction: No to war! May the anguished cry of the many innocents not go unheeded. Let us urge leaders of nations to defuse the causes of war: the lust for power and money, the greed of arms dealers, personal interests and vendettas for past wrongs. We need a greater commitment to eradicating the underlying causes of conflicts: poverty, injustice and inequality, the exploitation of and contempt for human life.

May a new season finally begin, in which the globalized world can become a family of peoples. May we carry out our responsibility of building an authentic peace, attentive to the real needs of individuals and peoples, capable of preventing conflicts through a cooperation that triumphs over hate and overcomes barriers through encounter and dialogue. Nothing is lost when we effectively enter into dialogue. Nothing is impossible if we turn to God in prayer. Everyone can be an artisan of peace. Through this gathering in Assisi, we resolutely renew our commitment to be such artisans, by the help of God, together will all men and women of good will.
Istanbul (AsiaNews / Agencies) - A Turkish court sentenced 45 students to four years in prison for participating in demonstrations in 2012 against the then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The university students had joined the protests, organized during a visit of the former Prime Minister to their university. This morning the court handed down 10 months in prison to each one of them.



According to the court of the students are guilty of breaking the law, by impeding Erdogans political and institutional functions. The reference is to the visit of the then Prime Minister to the Middle East Technical University, to watch the launch into orbit of a Turkish spy satellite, aboard a Chinese rocket, live via video link.



At the time the police intervened to disperse the mass student protest, using tear gas and water cannons. The opposition had strongly criticized the police intervention, judging it too harsh for such a small demonstration.



Aykan Erdemir, former deputy of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), condemns the judges decision: "It is sad to note he told AFP - that prison sentences are the answer always used by the government toward protesters and critics. "



The sentences come in the context of a series of purges, convictions and attacks against critical voices, dissent, opponents, intellectuals, military, public officials and ordinary citizens launched by Ankara following the failed coup of the night between July 15 and 16 . The attempt is still shrouded in mystery but it has allowed the Turkish leadership - and Erdogan  to launch a cleanup campaign that has resulted in the arrest of tens of thousands of people.



In recent days, Ankara has released updated data relating to these "purges". At least 76 thousand people were detained and other 16 thousand arrested for alleged ties to the Gulen movement. In total the number of persons under interrogation has exceeded 100 thousand.

Thousands of people have been driven from their jobs; of these, the majority were employees in the public education sector. Moreover, they are still at least 20 thousand vacancies among the army ranks following the arrest or killing of officers and soldiers involved in the coup.



Activists and human rights organizations have accused the Turkish government of using the pretext of terrorism and failed coup to strike at the opposition, dissidents and the Kurdish minority. Ankara is also reported to have used violence and torture on suspects, against whom there was no evidence of involvement. Young people still in school have also been detained because of suspected links with the movement of the spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen.
A study by researchers from Harvard and Columbia University shows the damages caused by last years haze emergency in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. The study presents data on excess adult mortality caused by PM 2.5. Indonesias Environment Ministry has not yet commented. Malaysia has rejected the finding. We didnt find any increase in the number of acute respiratory ailments.

Jakarta (AsiaNews/Agencies)  A haze outbreak in South-east Asia last year may have caused over 100,000 premature deaths, this according to a new study conducted by researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities that was released on Monday.

The new study, to be published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, combined satellite data with models of health impacts from smoke exposure and readings from pollution monitoring stations. it estimates there were 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore.

From September to November 2015, haze caused by illegal fires in many parts of Indonesia badly affected the population. Transport was interrupted, schools were closed and in some provinces the pollution level was 10 times higher than the limit.

Large swathes of forest were burnt to make way for palm oil trees. According to Health Ministry data, 27 million people were affected and at least 425,700 have had respiratory problems due to the haze.

Compounded by the effects of El Nino weather system, last years disaster was the worst since 1997. Fires generated 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gas (equivalent to Germanys entire annual output).

Indonesian authorities acknowledged only 19 deaths from pollution damage. Indonesia's Environment Ministry has not responded to the new study. In recent months the government has adopted measures to prevent a recurrence of such an emergency.

The figures cited by Harvard and Columbia researchers could however prove worse. The study, in fact, only examined the impact of (particulate matter) PM 2.5 on adults. No data are available about its impact on children or about other particles.

Malaysian authorities have rejected the findings, reporting no haze-related deaths. We didnt find any increase in the number of acute respiratory ailments from the haze, said Deputy Health director-general Datuk Dr S. Jeyaindran.
By Jagdeesh Mann,

Special to The Post

Though I have familys roots in B.C. going back a century, I stumble when cataloging the unique values underlying Canadian culture.

The default list reads like a dating ad: Canadians are compassionate, polite, enjoy nature. These, however, are hardly unique to Canada and when stirred together in our post-national pot, the parts fail to congeal into a distinct culture, complete with unwritten rules on family and community interactions.

The sad reality is that Canadians are increasingly a world unto themselves. According to the 2011 census, for the first time ever there were more households of people living alone than there were of couples with children.

If there is a social fabric in this country, it is a giant sheet of bubble-wrap stretching from sea to sea, as both young and old increasingly live, consume and exist in their own disconnected worlds.

Kellie Leitch, a Conservative MP from Ontario, however, disagrees with these cold statistics and trends of social fragmentation. For the former labour minister and minister for the status of women, there is one Canada with one set of distinct values.

The aspiring candidate jockeying for Stephen Harpers vacated office as Conservative leader wants to test all immigrants for anti-Canadian views that include intolerance toward other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms.

The statement reads so smoothly it is difficult to discern any sinister edges, such as whether one can wear a burkini at a beach or paddle a canoe in a turban. The ambiguity, however, is reaping rewards for Ms. Leitch.

The dark-horse MP has surged ahead of the Conservative Party leadership pack and into the eye of the news-cycle. The media attention has already started pulling the leadership contest to the right  Tony Clement is now also calling for enhanced screening as part of his national security platform.

Ms. Leitchs policy position, however, is flawed on many counts, starting with redundancy. New immigrants are already subject to numerous checks through an arduous process that can take years. In addition to this, the immigration process intensely screens for any links to criminal or terror groups.

Once an application has been approved, immigrants swear a citizenship oath to uphold Canadian laws  again duplicating Ms. Leitchs statement.

A robust values-screening test would require exhaustive probes, interviews, possibly polygraph tests and yet, these measures may still fall short in detecting thought crime. Of course, a practical shortcut would be to racially profile applicants but that would be distinctly un-Canadian by Ms. Leitchs standards.

Based on an orthodox interpretation of Ms. Leitchs statement, few of Canadas 300,000 annual immigrants who currently are admitted as entrepreneurs, investors, tech workers, caregivers, grandparents and so forth would make it into the country. Any followers of a faith that does not endorse same-sex marriages, for example, could be labelled as an intolerant, including not only Muslims, but also Jews and Christians.

Suddenly the Mexican farm worker or the Filipina nanny are potential pariahs because of their Catholic faith. The Indian or Pakistani IT engineer may not be welcome given the practice of female infanticide in those countries.

This absurdity cuts to the heart of the flaw with Ms. Leitchs proposal. Placed under a microscope, every culture across the globe will reveal underlying streaks of intolerance.

Ms. Leitch has conflated cultural values with Canadas secular ideals. Her formula for Canadian values is a mission statement for the modern secular state  it is not a living, breathing, organic culture.

But the Conservative MPs intent was never a sincere effort to strengthen our sense of national unity as much as it was to divide it. Her statement was an act of feigning concern for national security to wink at Mr. Harpers power base of old stock Canadians. This is Part II of the Conservative Partys barbaric cultural practices tip line.

Across the West, candidates with far greater ambition than scruples are skillfully wielding tools invoking fear to carve out voting blocks. Ms. Lietch is not the first Canadian politician to cloak discriminatory aims under the guise of a benevolent policy.

But when Ms. Leitchs subterfuge is rejected for a serious candidate, she may be the first to learn the one true Canadian value is that we can all be one and yet be different  without having to be different in the same way.

This piece was originally published in The Globe & Mail.

Follow Jagdeesh Mann on Twitter.
Across Asia women are re-examining society's problems through a business lens, playing a more leading role than women in other regions in harnessing the power of markets to tackle poverty and social ills, according to the first experts' poll on the best countries for social entrepreneurs.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of the world's 45 biggest economies found the Philippines was the country where women fared best when taking into account representation in leadership roles in social enterprises and the gender pay gap.

In fact five other spots among the top 10 ranking in the poll of nearly 900 experts in social enterprise were in Asia - Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand.

Russia, Norway, and Canada rounded out the top 10, while Brazil came last and the United States fared badly in the perception poll due to concerns women are paid less than men.

Women interviewed across Asia described a fairer playing field and higher drive to put compassion over valuation as the reason women are doing so well as social entrepreneurs.

Overall the online poll, conducted between June 9 and July 15 in partnership with Deutsche Bank, the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network (GSEN) and UnLtd, foundations for social entrepreneurs, found 68 percent of experts said women are well represented in leadership in social enterprises.

A study by Deloitte in 2015 showed that women hold only 12 percent of the world's board seats while data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union shows women account for about 23 percent of all national parliamentarians.

However only 48 percent of experts said women in social enterprises were paid the same as men with the United States particularly concerned on this issue.

"Whereas men want to be like Mark Zuckerberg, women want to do well for the community," said Peetachai "Neil" Dejkraisak, who founded a rice social enterprise called Siam Organic with a female business school classmate.

"They are more compassionate and want a meaningful life ... Social entrepreneurs are inherently driven by improving people's lives, lifting people out of poverty. Women social entrepreneurs are better at doing this than their male counterparts."

Neil and Pornthida "Palmmy" Wongphatharakul began work on Siam Organic as business school students, not setting out with the aim of building a business seeking to improve society.

"The social impact was tied into the business model - the better the business, the more impact for the farmer," said Palmmy.

With Thai rice farmers earning about $12 per month per acre, they decided to home in on the U.S. market and innovations - mainly the organic purple "Jasberry" rice, high in antioxidants - to boost farmers' earnings and win health-conscious customers.

The company now works with 1,000 farmers and sold about 100 tonnes of its specialty rice in 2015 to Thai and U.S. buyers - and its farmers earn an average of $180 per month per acre.

"My objective has always been whatever you do, you always have to help the farmers you promised to help. When a decision comes along, you put the farmers first," said Palmmy, 31.

Indonesian former domestic worker Heni Sri Sundani never imagined she would become a social entrepreneur, using education to empower children and families in Indonesian villages.

From an impoverished farming family, in 2005 she went to Hong Kong as a maid to support her family but discovered her recruiter kept half her salary, inspiring her to use any spare time to study for a degree in entrepreneurial management.

At all the peace talks Joji Felicitas Pantoja attended in the conflict-troubled Philippines island of Mindanao, coffee was served to put people at ease.

But Pantoja soon realized talking about peace wasn't enough in communities unable to address basic needs like food and health, sparking an idea to use coffee as a vehicle for change.

Setting up "Coffee for Peace", Pantoja worked with Mindanao farmers to revitalize an industry long abandoned for cash crops like rubber and bananas - and her farmers' earnings tripled.

"Peace is not just the absence of war ... if we don't address the economic aspect, it's not complete," Pantoja, 56, a self-described peace builder said by Skype from Mindanao.

Malaysian Mastura Rashid realized it was not enough to give free food to the poor when she was a volunteer handing out meals to homeless people in Kuala Lumpur as this was not sustainable.

So she started working with urban families who earn under $250 a month last year, selling their home-cooked traditional coconut rice and spicy shrimp paste dish "nasi lemak" to office towers and petrol kiosks under "The Nasi Lemak Project".

"We want to help the poor by giving them direct access to the market. Malaysians love to eat, there is no other better product than nasi lemak," Mastura, 26, said.

Mastura said Malaysia's emerging social entrepreneur scene is competitive but a level playing field for women like her, unlike traditional businesses where women face discrimination.

Her project has received grants from two government-linked agencies set up to encourage innovation and startups.

"I don't see gender bias in social entrepreneurship - in politics or marriages, perhaps yes. There is no discrimination towards me as a woman social entrepreneur," Mastura added.

 Thomson Reuters Foundation
Broken BowThis week, Jason Aldean lives up to his ACM Entertainer of the Year title, debuting at number one on both the country albums chart and the all-genre Billboard 200 ranking. But the Georgia native says winning the coveted ACM crown didnt really affect the recording of They Dont Know.

Every time you go in to record an album, obviously you want to go in and make a great recordfinding songs andthat's always kinda been the way I've approached it. I didn't really approach it any different. Actually, part of the record was done before the award actually came about, he recalls.

Jasons seventh studio effort is actually the first time this year a country album has been number one on the all-genre tally. The last to accomplish that feat was Chris Stapletons Traveller, which shot to the top spot after last years CMA Awards.

You just try to go and get creative and find great songs and try to make an album that's cool that you feel like isdifferent but also sort of similar to what it is that kinda got you to the dance, Jason says. So I feel like that's something that we were able to accomplish in a big way on this record.

Jason managed to sell the equivalent of 138,000 albums the first week They Dont Know was out.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Guest Commentary

By Alex Hemingway

For families seding their children back to underfunded and overcrowded classrooms, its no secret that BCs public education system is stretched to the breaking point. Yet our Premier and Minister of Education like to brag that provincial education funding is at "record levels, pointing the finger at local school boards as the culprits for school closures and other cutbacks. But the governments claims simply dont add up.

At least half of the province's school districts faced budget crises this spring, forced to make impossible trade-offs between shutting schools and axing vital programs and supports. These crises are the direct result of chronic underfunding by the provincial government, not a failure on the part of individual school boards.

Public funding for elementary and high school education in BC fell by 25% as a share of the provinces economic pie between 2001 and 2016  from 3.3% of GDP to a projected 2.5% in 2016. BC has the second-lowest level of public education funding the country  nearly $1,000 per student below the national average. To top it off, hundreds of millions of public taxpayer dollars are diverted into private schools every year.

The provincial government has also fobbed off a whole array of rising costs to local school districts. These are costs the government largely controls but doesnt provide sufficient funding to coverincluding substantial increases in BC Hydros electricity rates, Medical Services Plan premiums, WorkSafeBC rates, and the carbon tax, along with provincially mandated computer network upgrades.

When costs are increased without enough compensating dollars flowing into our schools, the system is left under enormous pressure.

According to an estimate released under Freedom of Information legislation, cost pressures on school districts amounted to a province-wide total of $192 million over the 2012-13 to 2014-15 school years.

Even the legislatures majority-Liberal Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services admits the funding shortfall in the public education system. In its recommendations the Committee recognizes that additional funding is necessary to ensure the provision of quality public education and to properly meet the increased cost that schools are currently facing.

But the government has used all sorts of sleight-of-hand to obscure this fact.

Sometimes it points to a decline in overall school enrolment in BC. But the funding crunch has hit school districts with growing enrolment as well as those seeing declines. And governments own data show that declining enrolment is largely a temporary issue, with an increase in enrolment of almost 40,000 students projected by 2024.

The government also talks about the target of having schools 95% full, but many dont realize that in their calculation, dedicated art, computer and music rooms are considered empty.

Back in the spring, the government announced $25 million in funding as a reinvestment of administrative savings. But the devil is in the details: the government had previously mandated $54 million in administrative cuts over two years, and the announcement simply scaled back part of the original cut. There was no new money at all there.

Theres no question BC can afford to reinvest in public education. This year alone the provincial government declared a $730 million budget surplus, and stashed away another $300 million in a prosperity fund. It also sent over $310 million in public tax dollars to fund private schools  a practice opposed by three quarters of British Columbians, according to recent polling.

In fact, if we dedicated the same share of our economy (GDP) to public education today as we did 15 years ago, wed have nearly another $2 billion at hand. That much additional funding might go beyond whats necessary, but it tells us whats in the realm of the possible.

The economic returns to education spending are also enormous and widely recognized. A strong public education system is not just "nice to have"  it's an essential, long-term investment that pays big social and economic dividends. Short-changing the system may yield some minor "saving" in the budget now, but only at a much larger long-run cost.

We also know from the education research that investment in smaller class sizes, for example, substantially improves outcomes for students overall  and helps disadvantaged students the most. In an era of growing inequality, education is one of the great remaining equalizers.

The truth is that we could invest substantially more in public education in BC, but weor rather our government leaderschoose not to. And its a choice that will cost us all.

Alex Hemingway is the Public Finance Policy Analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives  BC Office.
Photo caption: China's literature doesn't need wizards or dragonseveryday life is surreal enough already. (Courtesy of Monte Clark Gallery and Greg Girard)

By Adrienne Matei,

Special to The Post

Traditional literary tropes have struggled to describe Chinas day-to-day corruption, warp-speed modernization, supersonic development, and political oppression. Mystery, satire, horrornone feel quite expansive enough to begin encompassing the stories of the worlds most simultaneously populous yet secretive country.

To help bridge this gap, Beijing-based novelist Ning Ken has created a new literary genre to properly convey the absurdity of modern life in China: choahuan. Meaning ultra-unreal, this contemporary mode of literary expression is intended to reflect the modern Chinese zeitgeist in all its dark oddity.

In June of this year, Lit Hib published a translated essay of Kens in which he explained the political and artistic rationale behind his creation. Ultra-unreal shares similarities to magic realism, which is a genre characterized by the portrayal of fantastical occurrences in otherwise mundane, rational worlds. A universally adopted literary style that was invented by Germans and made popular by Latin Americans, magic realism has been used to comment on the surreal state of contemporary society over the past century. Some of its most famous authors include Gabriel Garcia Marquez (whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in a world where mythology is considered historically credible) Franz Kafka (whose The Metamorphosis describes a human protagonists transformation into a bug), Salman Rushdie (whose Midnights Children features a group of telepathic characters), and Haruki Murakami (whose Wind Up Bird Chronicle sees people mysteriously transcending the dimensions of reality).

Like magic realism, the ultra-unreal reflects the experience of daily life in communities often dominated by centralized powers, wherein bizarre events become normalized. However, rather than introducing actual magic into its narratives, the ultra-unreal focuses on real-life events, not supernatural occurrences.

Life in contemporary China is often just about beyond belief, says Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Beijing-based media and internet research firm Danwei, and co-host of the Sinica podcast on Chinese current affairs. As the writer and linguist David Moser has observed, its difficult to write fiction if you live in China, because you cant make up anything to rival what you see before your eyes.

One example of this real-life magic realism is the existence of rural villages that have been abandoned, save for young children and their grandparents. (UNICEF estimates 29 million children in China have been left behind by factory-working parents.) Another is the explosive development of urban centers, which evoke a sense of fragile, transitional space as seen in Canadian photographer Greg Girards photo collections Phantom Shanghai and Kowloon Walled City (above). In this way, Ken says that Chinas recent history has seemed like a hallucination.

These kinds of strange, otherworldly phenomena provide the perfect backdrop to reflect on (and subtly critique) the issues currently affecting Chinese citizens. For example, inspiration for Kens 2015 novel, Sange sanchongzou (Three Trios), came from the scandals unearthed by the launch of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign in 2012. As of 2016, more than 100,000 peopleincluding more than 120 high-ranking officials such as military officers, senior executives of state-owned companies, and five national leadershave been indicted for corruption. However, the campaign has failed to have a meaningful impact on Chinas poor score on the global Corruption Perceptions Index due to its use of unreliable methods, which include forced confessions, as well as a lack of an independent judiciary.

The campaign has resulted in numerous surreal situations, such as the case of Guo Boxiong, a retired general in the Peoples Liberation Army who was arrested with literal tons of money. When Guo was investigated for corruption, Ken writes, they found so much cash in his home that they couldnt even try to count it with a currency-counting machine. They had to weigh it by the ton. They needed a truck to haul it all away.

By using events ripped from the headlines, Kens ultra-unreal work attempts to engage the present in a philosophically speculative way and give it emotional depth. One such plotline in Three Trios involves the former CEO of a large, state-owned company who discovers he is about to be investigated for corruption. He flees to a seaside town with his illicit wealth and (unsuccessfully) attempts to return to ordinary life and rediscover what it feels like to be human.

Kens ultra-unreal style represents a new mode of frankness that surreptitiously allows for closer examination of Chinas silenced oppression; a genre of human-focused narratives hiding its candid critique of modern Chinese life in plain view. Science fiction, magic realism, surrealism, multi-layered word play, and Ning Kens ultra-unreal certainly offer possibilities of criticizing the government in oblique ways, Goldkorn says.

It is yet to be seen if Kens literary style will be considered provocative by the Chinese government. And thats a real concernChinese creatives who openly expressed political objections have been arrested in the past, such as author Liu Xiaobo, contemporary artist Ai Wei Wei, and poet Liao Yiwu.

A light fictionalization of Chinese reality, the ultra-unreal treads a fine line. When the aforementioned Xiaobo, a Chinese author and political dissident whose writing openly denounces political authoritarianism, won the Nobel Peace prize (from prison) in 2010, the award greatly angered Chinese officials. On the other hand, author Mo Yan, who imparts his socio-political critiques through tales of small-town bullies and mystical demons, was embraced by the Chinese government after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012.

No matter the potential consequences, Kens literary innovation may become a significant cultural and creative channel for the next generation of authors. The solidification of a distinctly Chinese genre could encourage a chorus of contemporary local writers to record their perspectives on modernity in China, in all its surrealistic oddity.

The photograph for this article is titled Kowloon Walled City, 1987 and originally appeared in the book City of Darkness Revisited, published by Watermark UK in 2014.

Adrienne Matei is an editor at Canada's NUVO magazine. Her words have appeared in Kinfolk magazine, ELLE Canada, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

This piece was originally appeared in Quartz (qz.com).

See http://qz.com/782940/a-new-literary-genre-critiques-the-scariest-most-unbelievable-part-of-life-in-china-reality/
Photo caption: Photo Credit: Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0

By Madeleine Thien,

Special to The Post

Imagine that I took all the e-mails and messages that I have ever written, as well as recordings of all Skype calls that I have ever made, and gave them to a group of strangers.

Since the strangers assemble this information digitally, their work is invisible to me. I don't, for instance, see a man in an overcoat sitting beside me in my bedroom or at my kitchen table, photocopying everything I type, recording my phone calls, and leaving each day with all my papers in his briefcase. If I did, I would surely be incensed, for he would be gaining entry not only into my intimate life, but into the private life of every person with whom I correspond. These include researchers, writers, journalists, and editors in other countries, including Burma, Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and, of course, Canada. My life is a tiny window connected to a larger world.

These strangers, the National Security Agency (NSA) says, are not reading my papers  only collecting them.

According to their own arguments, in the best case scenario, they will read my life only when and if they perceive me, or anyone with whom I'm in contact, as a threat to security. However, the worst case scenario is also easy to picture.

Historic parallels

A recent, acclaimed documentary, The Act of Killing, portrayed the Indonesian government's massacre of alleged Communists in 1965. Within a single year, an estimated 500,000 to one million Indonesians were killed, often sadistically, by militias and assassination squads. The word communist was applied to anyone deemed a personal or political threat, including Indonesians of Chinese ethnicity. Over a million were imprisoned, some for decades. Disturbingly, former American embassy staff have said that they compiled lists of targets and furnished as many as 5,000 names to the Indonesian government. Referring to financial and equipment aid, Marshall Green, the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia at the time, wrote in a cable to the CIA: The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be.

For five years, I researched and wrote about the Cambodian civil war and genocide. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were obsessed with the network of relations between people: who a person knew, in the past, even decades before the Khmer Rouge came to power, was the sole indication of that person's present guilt. If anyone (man, woman or child) was named by three different people who had, themselves, been named, that person was automatically killed. Pol Pot believed that the enemy had infiltrated the country, and could be traced by revealing the societal and familial ties  the correspondences and friendships  between individuals. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians lost their lives.

Cambodians and Indonesians may seem very far away but, for me, they are not. Indeed, the histories I mention are part of my generation. The foreign other is not as distant as we sometimes wish to believe, and the past is not all that different from the present: as a novelist, I've committed my life to this truth. The ever-expanding past is a continuous mirror to the here and now.

The stranger in my room, reading my private messages, carries an implicit and far-reaching threat. Today, I am not saying anything untoward (at least, I don't think I am) but perhaps, tomorrow, or someday in the future, I will be at odds with my government, the American government, or an ally of these two. Perhaps someone with whom I correspond will be in this position. Indeed, this is not merely a likelihood, but a certainty.

Deciding for the many

We entrust our governments with specific powers, but we don't hand them our lives. However, these strangers are already in our rooms. Should we trust the priorities these strangers will have in 10 years, or 20 or 50? Should we trust that this immense cache of data will not become a commodity, traded to other governments that exist now, or will exist in the future? Democracy, as a system, was intended to prevent the few from deciding, unilaterally, on behalf of the many. State scrutiny of our inner lives is not democracy, for such scrutiny claims our thoughts  the place in which we debate, consider, rage, reflect and be  as state property. In my own life, and in the months I've spent in places where internet censorship is inescapable, I have become acutely aware that freedom of thought requires privacy. Privacy is an irreplaceable refuge that allows us to breathe, to recover and to grow.

Not of all us may believe that our own e-mails, letters, telephone calls, and internet habits need privacy or protection. But to give up these rights on behalf of those who do, who courageously challenge the fear, corruption and intimidation in their own countries and in mine, is something I'm unwilling to do.

This essay originally appeared in the Globe & Mail on December 10, when more than 500 international writers signed an appeal calling for an International Bill of Digital Rights. The appeal was published in 30 countries around the world. The appeal can be signed at: http://www.change.org/petitions/a-stand-for-democracy-in-the-digital-age-3.

Madeleine Thien is the author of three books of fiction, including her most recent novel, Dogs at the Perimeter. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Granta, PEN America, The Walrus, Five Dials, Brick, New American City, and the Asia Literary Review, and her books have been translated into 18 languages. In 2010, she received the Ovid Festival Prize, awarded each year to an international writer of promise. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine has lived in the Netherlands, Quebec City, Montreal, and Berlin, and has travelled widely in Southeast Asia. She is currently writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University.

This piece was originally appeared in New Canadian Media (newcanadianmedia.ca).

See http://newcanadianmedia.ca/item/11421-privacy-is-an-irreplaceable-refuge
By Victor Ing,

Special to The Post

Immigration has been a popular subject in the news in the past several weeks since Conservative leadership candidate, Kellie Leitch, suggested that potential immigrants should be screened for anti-Canadian values.

This suggestion has been heavily criticized and dissected in the media. Some have dismissed the idea as being anti-Canadian in itself, while others have criticized the idea as simply unworkable. We can likely all agree that there is such a thing as Canadian values, but is the idea of screening for them really unworkable or just unpopular, or both?

Here are some considerations from an immigration processing standpoint.

Every immigration application involves one or more visa applicants and an immigration officer that makes the decision. From a processing standpoint, applicants are expected to provide all of the necessary information to an immigration officer to make the decision. This usually includes the submission of application forms and supporting documents such as employment letters.

In addition to what is submitted to them, immigration officers will often need more information or documents from the applicant and will give him or her an opportunity to provide it before making a final decision.

Sometimes immigration officers will even conduct interviews with the applicant to gather the information they need. All of this takes time and adds costs to the decision-making process.

What some people may not know about the lifecycle of an immigration application is that immigration officers are required to record, in detail, the reasons that led them to make their decision. What is required, at a minimum, is that immigration officers show transparency and justification in the decision-making process.

They achieve this by setting out and explaining how they considered and weighed the evidence against the requirements for visa approval. This is an important step in the lifecycle because visa refusals are often successfully overturned in court based on what was said or not said in the reasons for decision.

When defending her position, Kellie Leitch said in an interview with CBC that immigration officers already screen immigrants for other requirements, inferring that it would not be unworkable to also screen for anti-Canadian values.

She gave two specific examples of immigration officers screening for security purposes and for income requirements, but are these really appropriate comparisons?

When immigration officers screen for security purposes, applicants are required to produce police reports issued by official government agencies about their criminal history.

Likewise, when immigration officers screen for income requirements such as to determine whether a person is eligible to sponsor family members to come to Canada, applicants are required to produce official tax documents issued by the Canada Revenue Agency.

Neither of these scenarios can be directly compared to screening for anti-Canadian values.

Firstly, applicants are able to provide objective, government-issued reports to demonstrate that they pass Canadian security and income requirements. Obvious conclusions can be drawn from these reports since an applicant either has or does not have a criminal record and they either meet or do not meet income thresholds based on the documents.

There is no comparably objective document that will conclusively demonstrate whether a person holds anti-Canadian values. Without objective documentation, immigration officers may rely on conducting in-person interviews more frequently if they were required to screen for anti-Canadian values.

This leaves the immigration decision-making process in a very subjective place where immigration officers have to make important and hard decisions based on imperfect evidence.

The related issue is that immigration officers are expected to record their reasons for decisions. What would that look like? What kind of factors or evidence should be taken into account and on what standard of proof should they be considered?

These are issues that the courts have wrestled with in the past for other immigration requirements.

Ultimately, even if we could agree on a set of Canadian values, Canadians should care about screening for anti-Canadian values because it would likely be time consuming and expensive. On the flip side, immigrants should be aware that they have the right to challenge visa refusals and other immigration decisions and that immigration officers are required to record the reasons for their decision, even though the full reasons are rarely disclosed to the applicant.

If you do not agree with a decision that has been made in your case, you should consider contacting an immigration lawyer to obtain the full reasons for decision and to speak about the legal methods to challenge the decision.

Is Kellies Leitchs screening proposal unworkable? This article outlines some of the many logistical, legal and financial challenges to make it work.

If when the dust settles there is enough demand for screening, Canadians will have to decide whether it is important enough to justify the effort.

Victor Ing is a lawyer of Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre. He provides a full range of immigration services.

For more information go to www.canadian-visa-lawyer.com or email victor@canadian-visa-lawyer.com.
Roxannas well-coordinated outfit stood out on Georgia St. She had recently returned to Vancouver after spending time in Europe, Australia and California. Shes an Architecture student. However the inspiration for her outfit was a model she follows on Instagram. She added elements of her own style and created a nice look. I personally like how she chose a light blue shirt to contrast with the cream and tan colors of her outfit.

Roxannas wearing:

Hat: Purchased in a boutique in Paris

Jacket: H&M

Blouse: Polo Ralph Lauren

Belt: Hermes

Purse: Marciano

Shorts: Boohoo

Heels: Spring

Visit R!c's website: www.SidewalkRunway.com or follow him on instagram.com/sidewalkrunway_com or Twitter @RunwaySidewalk

All images are copyright protected. Re-posting or re-production of images is strictly forbidden without written consent.
Map Points Out The Most Naughty-Sounding Town Names In Each State

Trending News: These Are America's Most Giggle-Worthy Town Names

Why Is This Important?

Because these names bring out your inner eight-year-old.

Long Story Short

A real estate blog has accumulated the funniest and most giggle-worthy town names across America, including such wonders as Sugar Tit, Kentucky and Blue Ball, Arkansas.

Long Story

It's the weekend and you and your buddies hop in the car and just drive. With the blowing in your hair, blasting your favorite tunes, you pass by the town of Blue Ball (Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Delaware or Maryland)  and you giggle. Don't feel bad, it's a pretty funny name, and there are many more like it, as pointed out by Estately blog.

The real estate company composed a list of some of America's lewdest and most sexualized town names, because well, we're all eight-year-old children inside.

Estately



Before I get to some of the best ones, I need to point out something  some of these just aren't funny. Sure, Essex has the name sex in it, har har. But that comes from the freaking historic British county name, come on now. Beaver city? The beaver is a proud animal (as any Canadian can attest). Happytown? They're just happy there. But worst of all, they think Balsam, Minnesota, is funny. You've got a problem with my last name, huh? It's a freaking name of a kind of tree (Christmas trees, in fact) and refers to nice smelling things like shampoo in many languages.

Now that we've got a few of those out of the way (and I cool down a bit), let's dive into some of the most head-scratching names shall we?

One of the names I personally didn't think was rude was Felchville, Massachusetts, and Felch, Michigan until I looked up the word "felch." Felch: verb. "The act of sucking or licking ejaculate (or other substances mixed with ejaculate) out of the orifice in which they were deposited," as pointed out by Urban Dictionary. Wow, and I used to think the name Massachusetts was funny (massive-two-sh*ts).

Some others, in no particular order, are: Three Way, Arizona; Rough and Ready, California; Sugar Tit, South Carolina; and Cheat Lake, Wisconsin. But if you want the most bang for your buck in terms of giggles on your next road trip, take a drive through Michigan. It has names like Climax, Colon, Dick, Felch and Sac Bay.

For the full list of names, head over to Estately's blog.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Were all of these town names big coincidences or were our ancestors some naughty mofos?

Disrupt Your Feed

Here's hoping dirty-sounding town names never stop making us laugh.

Drop This Fact

There's a place named Shit in Iran.
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Photos and descriptions of each bite in this year's 50 Bites+ promotion. Go to AtlanticCityWeekly.com/50Bites to purchase your pass, so you can try all these delicious bites.

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Australian therapeutic reforms announced by minister





A raft of recommendations to reform Australias regulation of medicine and ingredients used in medicinal products has been accepted by the Australian Federal Government.

Minister for Health and Aged Care, Sussan Ley, announced on 15 September 2016 that the government had accepted 56 of the 58 recommendations of the Expert Review of Medicines and Medical Devices Regulation (the Sansom Review).

The Sansom Review was initiated in 2014 to identify areas of inefficiency and duplication in Australias therapeutic goods regulation, and to recommend ways that Australian regulation could better respond to global trends.

According to Minister Ley, bringing medicines into the Australian market quicker will be achieved, in part, by greater use of assessment of medicines by comparable overseas regulators like the US FDA and the European Medicines Agency.

This will be achieved by allowing greater recognition of approval by foreign regulatory authorities when approving medical products and devices for use in Australia. The Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) will also adopt a risk-based approach to variations of medicines.

Key reforms for sponsors of novel foods

The reforms place an emphasis on minimising application times for novel medicines and novel ingredients used in complementary medicinal products. Specifically, the reforms will include:

Allowing sponsors of novel ingredients seeking assessment for their use in medicinal products in Australia to submit an evaluation from a comparable foreign regulatory authority, together with the data submitted to the foreign regulatory authority

Allowing sponsors seeking registration of medicinal products on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG) to self-declare or self-assess the safety and quality of the product in certain circumstances. Sponsors seeking to self-assess must also receive an assessment of the efficacy of the product by the TGA

to self-declare or self-assess the safety and quality of the product in certain circumstances. Sponsors seeking to self-assess must also receive an assessment of the efficacy of the product by the TGA Introducing legislative timeframes for assessing new ingredients used in listed medicinal products and publication of finalised compositional guidelines for newly approved ingredients

Adoption of a risk-based approach by the TGA to managing variations to medicines and complementary medicines listed in the ARTG

Encouraging sponsors to list on their website the evidence used to support indications included on the product

Establishing more comprehensive post-market monitoring, including the use of electronic reporting and increased collaboration with foreign regulatory authorities

Allowing greater self-regulation in advertising therapeutic goods, but increasing and broadening the enforcement powers of advertising regulators

The Sansom report also recommended a wholesale review of the Therapeutic Goods Act. The government accepted this recommendation in principle, however, deferred any comprehensive review of the Act until after the effects of the other recommendations are assessed.
Coca-Cola releases new Lift formulation just for Australia





Coca-Cola South Pacific has changed the formulation of its Lift lemon flavoured soft drink.

The beverage has also been given a new name, Lift Hard Hitting Lemon, with Coke saying it helps communicate the new recipe has a sharper taste and more bite. The new formulation contains 8.4gms of sugar per every 100ml.

The new Lift is made specifically for the Australian market and will be primarily marketed at men aged 35 and above.

A multi-million-dollar marketing campaign will help launch the drink along with partnerships with the AFL and Triple M radio. Samples will be offered at upcoming major sporting games including the AFL grand final.

Brand Manager of Lift, Ramona Spiteri, said the launch of Lift Hard Hitting Lemon provides an opportunity to grow the soft drink category in Australia.

We have conducted research into consumer tastes and attitudes and were confident that we have formulated a product that will drive wider appeal to Lemon consumers and beyond, Spiteri said.

Lift Hard Hitting Lemon is available in a variety of packaging sizes ranging from 250ml to 2 litre. It will be available at supermarkets, convenience and petrol stores.
New coding saves leading herb producers 5 hours a day





An expanding value-added fresh produce business wanted to increase productivity by removing manual coding.

Theyre now saving five hours a day with a solution from Matthews Australasia, which has the ability to scale up with further automation when the company needs it in the future.

Heres how they did it.

The Torrisi family established FNQfresh at Mareeba in Far North Queensland in 1991. Their on-farm processing facility allows the leading Australian herb growers to process produce within two hours of harvest, maintaining top quality and freshness.

FNQfresh supplies the food service and manufacturing industries across Australia and New Zealand with purees, pestos, and pizza toppings of basil, baby leaf spinach, rocket, coriander and parsley, as well as fresh mangoes.

In 2012, second generation in the business Sebastian Torrisi and his wife Cyrene, decided to use the familys expertise in value adding and expand into the consumer retail market with cubes of frozen herbs. After a couple of years of testing both the product and the market, Adfresh Farms launched its first commercial products last year. Their painstaking R&D paid off, with Coles in Mareeba and Cairns region  among others  picking up the line.

Sebastian says, To satisfy retailer and food industry requirements, we needed to place barcodes on our shelf-ready outer cartons. At the same time, we thought wed take the opportunity to upgrade our completely manual labelling process for the FNQfresh bulk packs, by automating it. For all that, we needed equipment that could be flexible and suited each of our products.

After researching options, they chose to work with Matthews Australasia, who recommended a Linx CJ400 continuous inkjet printer and Intermec desktop printer.

Versatile with back-up support

We compared equipment from other suppliers, but decided that this equipment would suit us best especially with the extra back-up support Matthews offers.

We wanted equipment that was versatile, so could quickly and easily adapt to any part of our business  whether it was our Adfresh retail lines or FNQfresh bulk product lines. Adfresh is in early days, so we needed to meet the retailers coding requirements now, but not overstretch ourselves, yet still give us capacity to expand down the track. These printers do all that.

It was very important that the equipment was reliable, but probably just as important that we have back-up service, training and support. Matthews ticks each of these boxes. Its really good to know assistance is a phone call away, reducing any downtime during peak production times.

The two coders are used across both businesses.

For the Adfresh Farms business, we use the Linx printer to code product name, batch numbers and best before dates onto 110-gram packs. Were printing up to 1,800 units per hour, eight hours a day, which is around 14,400 units a day. Because this is a new business starting out, at the moment were working the printer one to two days a week.

For the FNQfresh range, the Linx CJ400 codes the product name, an ingredients list, storage requirements, FNQfreshs name and address and Product of Australia onto the regular 15-kilogram and 20kg tubs, and occasional 1kg tub as per client needs. In the future it will also code the batch and best before dates. Depending upon customer orders, FNQfresh codes up to 1,000 items a day over eight hours.

Efficiency drives vast savings

Sebastian says, Previously, we manually applied sticker labels with all this information, so automating it has vastly improved productivity. We used to have two people setup just doing that for a couple of days. Now we dont need to do that, so were saving four to five hours a day; at $21 a staff member, thats $210 a day for two staff. It is a very big difference.

The Torrisis use the Intermec desktop printer for barcodes; information is entered on a PC through the Labelview software, with the required barcode stickers then printed for that days pack out.

The Linx CJ400 printer sits inline after the packaging has been filled with product, and before final lidding and heat sealing, while the Intermec printer sits close by, ready to print when needed. Sebastian says the operators find both simple to use and quick to switch over to different formats when required.

I like how easy it is that to adjust and change information, just on a laptop or PC, for whatever were producing on that day. Thats also really useful for product development.

Currently, were only selling domestically, but weve had some interest from the Middle East, and are negotiating with a company there. In Australia, we put a batch code and best before date, but most export markets require extra information, such as date of manufacture. So thats very easy to add with the coders weve got.

Sebastian says the Adfresh and FNQfresh coding solutions are flexible, so can integrate with further automation as the new company grows.

Once the products are proven, well mechanise further to improve our productivity even more  thats the great thing about what we have.

Because our state-of-the-art processing equipment enables to process herbs so quickly, we needed coders that were just quick and easy to use so they didnt hold back that process in any way. These coders are efficient, effective, reliable and quick, which means we can keep achieving our production targets.

Both coding solutions have helped in different ways to improve the businesses, and since installing them, theyve helped us in growing our markets while improving production efficiencies.

Matthews has a whole resource library, full of case studies, whitepapers, articles from our thought leaders, presentations, infographics, our YouTube channel and so on. All material from our resource library is free to download.
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Subscribe to our FREE newsletter service and well keep you up-to-date with the latest breaking news, cutting edge opinion, and expert analysis affecting both your business and the industry as whole.

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by Michael MataIn 1979, 19-year-old David Szach was sentenced to life for the murder of his lover, 44-year old criminal lawyer Derrance Stevenson. Fourteen years later, Szach was unexpectedly released from prison. While Szach has always maintained his innocence and set about trying to clear his name after his release, he has been repeatedly denied his legal right to an appeal.Szach is afflicted with motor neurone disease, a progressive disease that attacks the motor neurones in the brain and spinal cord. Before this disease ultimately claims his life, Szach wants his 1979 murder conviction officially quashed.Szach is now challenging his conviction under recently introduced South Australian legislation that permits criminals to launch a second appeal if there is compelling new evidence. He will be represented at his appeal by Tony Kerin, a managing partner of Maurice Blackburn South Australia.While the case has always been dogged by circumstantial evidence and allegations of bias from law enforcement and the judicial system, the appeal will rest on the forensic evidence presented at the trial by Dr. Colin Manock. By modern standards, Dr. Manocks forensic pathology was incorrect.After Stevensons home freezer was forcibly opened and his corpse discovered, Dr. Manock inserted a thermometer into the victims liver, conducted a series of equations, and deduced a time of death. His evidence placed Szach at the scene of the crime when the murder supposedly took place.Aside from the alleged flawed forensic evidence used to convict Szach, witnesses said more than one man visited Stevensons home on the night of the murder. Theres also the compelling story of an unidentified man who showed up on the steps of the South Australian Legal Aid Commission the morning after the murder.Kerin will focus on Dr. Manocks time of death estimate, which was used to convict Szach."Anyone who spends 14 years in jail or more on a conviction that is faulty or inappropriately recorded or unfairly recorded has suffered a great [injustice], even if he's done the matter," said Kerin. "If the evidence isn't there to convict you, in our society that's sufficient to acquit you and that's what should occur."
By Michael Westaway, Senior Research Fellow, Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

Preben Hjort, Mayday Film

Understanding the history of Aboriginal Australians, their origins and how their population changed over some 50,000-plus years has always been an enormous challenge.

Many Aboriginal people have their own origin stories. Gudjugudju, a Gimuy Yidinji Elder from the rainforest people around Cairns, says:

The story which has been passed down from generations tells of three migrations that have occurred over many thousands of years, one of us coming to this ancient land first, then another at a period after the last Ice age which saw the formation of the Great Barrier Reef, the other is of a migration out of Cairns that went back through the Cape into the Torres Strait to PNG and further.

Equally, scientific narratives of Aboriginal origins have presented different accounts. But these have been difficult to establish in part due to the difficulty and limitations of the science involved.

Its also because of the social context that both science and archaeology work in within Australia.

The first few decades of modern archaeological research into Australias ancient past was conducted with very little to no involvement of Aboriginal Australian people.

This was followed by decades of debate over ownership of the past. Initial DNA research proposals floundered because little to no consultation was undertaken.

A new period of community based research with Aboriginal people was forged through the sensitive and highly consultative approach pioneered by geneticist Sheila Van Holst Pellekaan. Her work with Aboriginal people set the standard for later scientific studies in Australia.

We can now provide an example of work undertaken in partnership with Aboriginal Australian people from all parts of Australia, from the deserts to urban and regional centres. The details of the research are published today in Nature.

The First Australians

Our results show very clearly that Aboriginal Australian people living today are the descendants of the First People to enter Australia, who lived between 25,000 to 40,000 years ago.

There is substantial evidence of admixture or intermixing with Asian, Oceanic and European people within the last 200 years. But in the Aboriginal DNA is an ancient story of migration into this continent, far deeper in time than any other population group has so far revealed.

It shows ancient contact and gene flow between the ancestors of the First Australians and now extinct populations of Neanderthals and Denisovans. This is very similar to the gene flows reported between Neanderthals, Europeans and Asians.









Tom Cebula, Wall to Wall Media





Our paper supports the results of earlier genomic research. This includes the foundational study on the first Aboriginal Australian genome from Western Australia and ancient DNA recovered from fossil remains from Lake Mungo.

Our research discounts the political agenda of some individuals who have claimed that Aboriginal Australians may not have been the First Australians.

The research also helps clarify a number of key points that archaeologists have been debating since the 1960s, such as where the ancestors of Aboriginal Australian people likely first entered the continent.

The first migration

There has been considerable debate as to whether the First Australians took the northern route (through Papua and then down into Cape York) or a more southerly route, crossing from Timor into north-western Australia.

Our evidence reveals a picture of population expansion from north east Australia.

Around 10,000 years ago, sea levels rose and the land bridge between Papua and Cape York was flooded. Based on this, the genetic separation of Papuans and Aboriginal Australians was generally believed to have been initiated after this time.

But using large-scale genome data from Australians and Papuans we estimate the time of divergence between the two groups to be 37,000 years ago. This is much earlier than previously predicted.

This also suggests that barriers to intermarriage between Australia and Papua occurred much earlier than the creation of the barrier of Torres Strait.

Interestingly a significant barrier to gene flow within Australia also seems to have occurred at the time of the last great ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).

East and west Australians

We see significant divergence between Aboriginal Australian people of north east and south west Australia. These groups are more genetically different than, for example, Native Americans and Siberians are from each other.

They are all Aboriginal Australians of course, but the onset of the LGM seems to have limited gene flow between east and west. As a result, the formation of a different population structure began some 31,000 years ago.

Further subdivisions among eastern and western Aboriginal Australians appeared to have occurred later. The phylogenetic relationships based on our genetic data correlated well with the divisions based on the Aboriginal (Pama-Nyungan) languages spoken by the people.

Some researchers have maintained for many years that the archaeological record shows significant population expansion in the last few thousand years before the arrival of Europeans.

Other archaeologists have disagreed, stating that demographic expansion can be a very difficult thing to prove from a record of carbon dates, stone tools and shell middens.

These signatures are very prone to destruction by such things as erosion and sea level change. Much of the first coastline initially colonised by the First Australians now lies beneath the waves, locked in a drowned landscape.

The genetic evidence for population increase in north east Australia, one area that some archaeologists have argued was subject to significant population expansion, is actually earlier than expected. It seems to begin some 10,000 years ago, which is several thousand years earlier than evidence provided by archaeology.

Also our genome data do not show any significant gene flow events into Australia from India around 6,000 years ago, suggested by previous research.

Desert life

What we did find was unique genetic variations specific to Aboriginal Australians that might have given them an improved ability to withstand cold and dehydration  potential adaptations to life in the desert.

Previous studies have shown the potential of DNA in understanding the ancestral relationships of Aboriginal Australian people. Genome sequencing in the past few years has revealed a far more complicated picture than first thought.

We can now tackle questions that have been debated for decades using the actual evidence from the biology of the First Australians.

It is crucial that we continue to make sure that such research is done in partnership with Aboriginal Australian people.

As noted by one of the key researchers in the project, Dr Craig Muller, who said:

We have developed close relationships with many individuals throughout the project, and collaborated closely with Aboriginal Elders in each language group who provided important cultural information. The Elders also guided us to the appropriate people to participate.

A great example of how things have changed since the early years is that there are now new generations of young Aboriginal Australian researchers undertaking DNA research.

In parallel is the interest shown by many indigenous groups who are interested in this research and keen to partner with us. This suggests a wonderful future might lie ahead.









Renee Chapman





Aboriginal leader Gudjugudju co-authored this article.

Michael Westaway receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Claire Bowern receives funding from the USA's National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council.

David Lambert receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Human Frontier Program, the Marsden Fund of New Zealand and the Australia India Research Fund.

Sankar Subramanian receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Joanne Wright does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Originally published in The Conversation.
So glad to be here..i am a web developer from Nigeria, i also blog about jobs and jobs tips..i want to move to Australia soon
Bundeskanzler Nehammer: Einen gemeinsamen Gaspreisdeckel der EU definieren  Erstes Treffen der "Europaischen Politischen Gemeinschaft" und informeller Gipfel der EU-Staats- und Regierungschefs in Prag - "Kein Embargo uber die Hintertur"
The Classic version of the Spark GT, manufactured at the Talegaon plant in India, scored zero stars for adult and child occupant protection.

The Made-in-India Chevrolet Beat, which is sold as the Spark GT in Latin America, has scored a zero-star rating in the latest round of crash tests conducted by the New Car Assessment Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean (Latin NCAP).

The Classic version of the Spark GT, manufactured at the Talegaon plant in India, scored zero stars for adult and child occupant protection. The Spark GT is a popular model in Mexico and Colombia and GM India had recently started its exports to Argentina as well.

Expressing disappointment over the latest results, Maria Fernanda Rodriguez, president, Latin NCAP, said, Once again, we are very disillusioned by General Motors. As a global brand, they offer good safety levels for other regions. They should show that all consumers, regardless of geography, are valued the same when it comes to safety. We expect GM to follow other brands, which have made progress in equalising safety. GM has said that they aim to improve the safety levels of their cars in the future. Change needs to come faster as we are very concerned about the number of consumers who are today travelling in unsafe cars and will continue to do so without change in the upcoming years. Long-term measures are not good enough; Latin American consumers need safer cars now.

The poor crash results of the India-made GM car will not only dent the companys reputation, but also the countrys Make-in-India campaign. Historically, India-made cars have not been known for their quality and this will further hamper the global appeal for cars made in the country. Heavy under-utilisation of the 130,000 unit per-annum capacity at the Talegaon plant, due to the sluggish domestic demand for GM cars in India prompted a change in the companys strategy after which it had ramped up exports to Latin America.

GM India exports the left-hand drive version of the Beat to Mexico, Chile, Peru, Central American and Caribbean countries and Uruguay.

Test Results

Latin NCAP comments on the crash test of the Chevrolet Spark GT are reproduced as under:

Adult occupants

The protection offered to the drivers head and chest was poor while neck protection was weak due to the high chest deflection caused by its contact with steering wheel as well as the head impact with the steering wheel. For these reasons the star capping was applied. Passengers head protection was good, chest protection was poor. Both passengers' knees could impact with dangerous structures in the dashboard. The body shell was rated as stable. Footwell area was also stable. Side impact test was not performed because the capping was applied in the frontal test. The car did not have side airbags, but had side impact structural reinforcements in the doors. The car was not equipped with ABS and/or ESC as standard. Side pole impact test was not performed; the models did not offer side head protection airbags as standard.

Child occupant

The child seat for the three-year-old child was not able to prevent forward movement during the frontal impact despite being mounted with the ISOFIX anchorages, while top tethers were not used due to their location. Both results explain the low score in dynamics for child occupants. Many of the CRS that were assessed for installation failed due to the limited instructions in the manual. The marking and instructions in the car in relation to CRS use as well as ISOFIX use were poor which explains the low score in vehicle assessment.
The Volkswagen Beetle LSR has set the record as the world's fastest Volkswagen Beetle, at the Bonneville Salt Flats

The world's fastest Volkswagen Beetle set a new land speed record at the World of Speed at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, America, last week.

During the record attempt on 12 September the Beetle reached an average of 330kph across a one-mile stretch  with a maximum of 335kph achieved.

The car features the same turbocharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder powertrain as the 2014 Turbo R-Line model, but it has had a complete overhaul to boost power from 207hp to 535.5hp, with a peak torque of 571Nm.

Labelled the Beetle LSR (Land Speed Record), the car was modified by Californias THR

Manufacturing. The car was has uprated turbochargers and pistons, as well as other changes including modified suspension for a lower stance and a front air dam to help control air flow.

Modifications need to be in line with official speed record rules, so extensive changes to the exterior allowing for more aerodynamics were not permitted. The Beetle was also equipped with special wheels, complete with high-speed racing profile tyres that were suitable for driving on salt.

A limited-slip differential was also used to improve traction, while a safety package provided the necessary driver protection, including a roll cage, a new racing bucket seat with five-point harness and a fire extinguishing system.

The fastest-accelerating cars in the world have been ranked here

The record-setting car also had two brake parachutes that were used to slow down the Beetle.

The record was officially recorded at the event sponsored by the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association (USFRA), and was set with Automobile Magazine's contributing editor, Preston Lerner, at the wheel.

Danni Bagnall (Autocar UK)
Case in point with the Kia test car you can see in the spy video at the bottom of the page. The machine, which follows the footsteps of the GT four-door concept that was dropped back in 2011 and could use the Stinger production name, has been spotted dropping Nurburgring laps this week.Ironically, so has the 2018 Audi A7 (we showed you a massive image gallery of the 2018 S7's Nordschleife adventure earlier today).Sure, the GT (Stinger) will probably need a pair of quotes when being called an Audi A7 competitor (think: a considerably more affordable approach), but the two pre-production vehicles testing on the Green Hell virtually at the same time means the point made in the title above stands.The pre-production Kia model we see here seems to pack plenty of the concept's stunning features, from the swooping roofline to the rear window profile, but the heavily cloaked prototype won't let us zoom in on too many of its details.However, if we take a look at the dimensions of the concept mentioned above, we'll notice its 4,960 mm length (184.6 inches) would make it an Audi A5 Sportback rival.While the A5 battle would see the production model riding on the platform of the 2018 Genesis G70 (Genesis is Hyunday's premium sub-brand), the A7 hypothesis would bring a 2017 Genesis G80 base for Kia's sleek proposal.In the tech department, the GT (Stinger) should pack a 3.3-liter twin-turbo V6, sending its 390 hp and 394 lb-ft (534 Nm) of torque to the rear axle via an 8-speed automatic. The carmaker should also offer less potent engine options and, aside from the obvious combustion-only expectations, the rumor mill also talks about a possible hybrid mixing a 2.0-liter turbo four with an electric motor.Until we get to see more of the probably-eye-catching GT (Stinger), we're inviting you to also pay attention to the image gallery here, which mixes the spied vehicle with the gorgeous 2011 concept car previewing it.
Since the Genesis name is not that new on the market, we have to explain what the G70 will represent . While the G90 is the flagship sedan of the range, the G80 is slightly smaller, just like the discontinued Hyundai Genesis saloon . Meanwhile, the G70 will not be an E-Segment car, but an even smaller car, which will compete with the BMW 3 Series.In a way, Genesis seems to have arranged its portfolio in a way that the trio of cars will be easy to understand for most, once everyone gets used to their naming scheme and strategy. Fortunately, Genesis is sold in the USA, so ambitious advertising projects should be expected.Until then, it looks like the G90 is the rival of the S-Class and 7 Series, while the G80 will slide as the 5- Series and E-Class competitor. Their smaller brother, pictured in prototype form in the photo gallery of this article, will be the rival of the Audi A4, BMW 3 Series, and Mercedes-Benz C-Class, among others.The new G70 will have to face serious competition, as the segment has entrants from Jaguar, Lexus, Cadillac, and Infiniti, which are brands with a better image and greater awareness. At first, it might look like Genesis has an impossible mountain to climb, one that is built on brand image and first impressions.Some believe that Hyundai Motor Companys new division will get customers interested in pinching the pennies, but others are aware that the South Korean brand could also get clients from the ranks of those that were not interested in traditional premium automakers.As Tesla Motors has already shown, you can compete with traditional premium automakers even on price concerns if you show up with the right product. We will let you analyze the extensive photo gallery to see if the G70 would fit your bill.
In fact, the Angelholm people are pretty good at the PR job, too: "No, we're not doing a completely stripped Koenigsegg track car. This is a Regera in skeletal form, showing why the car is both so light and so strong in the one photo,"Now, before you start asking questions about the surprisingly skinny rear tires (they have to channel the hybrid's 1,500 hp, remember?), you shouldn't know there's a reasonable explanation for this. And while zooming in on the profile of the tires should be enough of a clue, the K people anticipated the internet's lack of focus and kindly provided one extra detail: " Winter tyres are fitted simply so we can roll the chassis where we need it,"And, to help you get an idea on how the gas-electric powertrain components fill out the skeleton seen here, we've added a pair of technical images to your right. Also provided by the Swedish automaker, these dissect the innovative powertrain of the Regera, with its transmissionless nature - here's a detailed explanation on the hardware, in case you missed it.On a more practical level, check out the piece of footage below to see what happens when all these bits and bobs work together to deliver a monster burnout.P.S.: We can help but think of the 2016 Nurburgring testing season's ending when seeing that winter rubber - will Koenigsegg manage to complete the rebuild of the wrecked One:1 and return to the Ring in time for another lap record attempt? Here's to hoping the answer is positive, since Pagani is already on the Nordschleife, dropping spicy laps in the Huayra BC
According to insiders, the battery maker would provide the American automaker with batteries for its electric vehicles . The Korea Herald notes that the $2.4 billion deal was signed in August, but it has not been declared yet because of the THAAD System, which is an acronym for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system that is designed to operate against rockets, and has affected Chinese- South Korean relations, as the source explains. LG Chem representatives refused to comment on the potential deal, but sources close to the matter claim that the batteries will be made in China, at Faraday Futures new factory, which is located in Huzhou. The South Korean supplier reportedly invested in the facility, which could produce electric vehicles with batteries made by LG Chem.At the moment, Faraday Future is on a hiring spree, which has led to the hire of many talented and experienced executives from other automotive companies. Their first electric car is years away, but the investment made by a Chinese billionaire could go a long way for Faraday Future.LG Chem has recently posted an operating loss because of declining sales so that the deal would bring new opportunities to the company. It is essential to remark that neither party confirmed or denied the agreement, which is a sign that discussions have taken place between the two potential business partners.Faraday Future is also building a factory in the USA, which they said will be ready in 2018 . The company is well funded, and it plans to use the best eco-friendly and sustainable materials and solutions to construct the plant.At the same time, they want to finish the build as soon as possible, so that the factory could deliver the first production units by the end of the same year.We believe that Faraday Future will succeed in delivering the first units to customers in 2019. The assumption is based on the fact that funding should not be a problem for Faraday Future, and that no other delays will come to the development process, but do not bet on that today, as the automotive industry has a way of crushing dreams from time to time.
As you can observe in the low-resolution photos found in the gallery (we are happy they exist, though), the van had a cannon-shaped device. While never seen in action, it is presumed that it shot packages of drugs (unintended pun) over the border, straight into the USA The Federales found the van parked in the Agua Prieta municipality, which borders Arizona and New Mexico. It attracted attention as it did not have license plates and had its doors open. Even a rookie cop could investigate the matter, so it was a matter of seconds until Mexican police officers inspected the vehicle.The canon was operated with an air compressor, which was powered by a gas-fueled generator. There was also a tank to store air, and the tube you can see in the two photos.We are not experts in physics, but a system like this must have been carefully designed to operate efficiently, which involved using projectiles that would keep the tube almost airtight, while also capable of flight and carrying a package.This is not the first reported use of such a cannon, Business Insider notes. Drug traffickers employed similar vans in 2012, and the Mexican Police had found one van just like the one in the picture two days before this one. Mexican newspaper Reforma claims that projectiles can be launched from up to 200 meters inside Mexican territory and still fly over the border.In theory, the cannon is more efficient than a catapult or a trebuchet, but nobody on the right side of the law has seen these in action. On the other hand, the method seems to work, since it has been used for many years by various cartels. When compared to the traditional method of a tunnel, it suddenly becomes affordable, as all the vans were stolen.
HP

The resulting model was named Seven, after the Austin Seven that existed in 1959 and is the predecessor of the classic Mini . The MINI Seven is a high-end version of the hatchback model , since the regular car is already a premium model, and it features extra style elements and design features, but without an orientation towards performance, like the Cooper S and John Cooper Works variants have.Instead, the Seven focuses on the British origins of the MINI brand, and it underlines the distinctive character of these cars, which have grown, but have not lost spirit.The British brand will offer the Seven in both three-door and five-door variants, and four engine options will be available in the range, which will have outputs from 116to 192 HP.The Seven will be available for order in a body finish named Lapisluxury Blue, but three alternative finishes are available (Midnight Black, British Racing Green, and Pepper White). The roof and side mirror caps are painted Melted Silver, while the 17-inch light alloy wheels have a two-tone design.The MINI Seven logo is present on the door sills, side scuttles, and the rear hatch door. The hood has stripes painted in the same tone as the mirrors and the roof, but clients can also get them with Malt Brown surrounds.Inside, the British brands latest design statement comes with the optional MINI Seven Chili package, which involves LED headlights, LED fog lamps, white direction indicators, digitally adjustable air conditioning, MINI Driving Modes, the MINI Excitement Package, and many other features.MINI first showed the Seven at this years Goodwood Festival of Speed , but the British brand will also exhibit the car at the 2016 Paris Motor Show . It is already available for order at dealers in Europe, and we now have a generous photo gallery of the hatch from Oxford.
Bikers who take a test ride on a new Indian Scout or Scout Sixty will be entered in to a draw to win a custom Super Scout Sixty Tank Machine made by a French dealership for Indians Project Scout competition of last year.The contest is open from now to 31st March, 2017, and all you have to do is make an appointment with your dealership to try out one of the two models. At the end of the test ride you will receive a business card with a code, which you have to enter it in the competition on the official raffle site The draw will take place in April 2017 and the lucky winner will start a new riding season on one of the coolest Indians around. The 18,980 Super Scout Sixty Tank Machine comes with Metzeler ME888 tires, Supertrapp aluminum dual exhaust, 1920 leather Solo Saddle, Biltwell handlebar and grips, LED front and rear lights as well as aluminum rear and front mudguards.Performance wise, the Scout Sixty is powered by a 1,000 cc fuel-injected V-twin putting out 78 hp and 89 Nm (66 lb-ft) of torque at 5,800 rpm. The Scout comes with a bigger 1,130 cc engine that cranks 100 hp and 97 Nm (71 lb-ft) of torque at 5,900 rpm.Only individuals being legal residents of France, Germany, Spain, Norway, United-Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Switzerland who have reached the age of majority and who own a EU riding license may take part in this contest.
Automotive Fleet's Mike Antich with Ron Shoemaker. Photo courtesy of AFLA.

The three newest members of the Automotive Fleet Hall of Fame were inducted during a ceremony at the 2016 Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association (AFLA) Conference in San Diego, Calf. Sept. 20.

Phil Procida, Ron Shoemaker, and the late Michael Braude joined a group that now includes 75 honorees.

Procida

Procida retired as VP of international operations and GFS president for ARI in 2005 after being with the company since 1960. His initial positions with ARI included working for operations and administration, in sales, and handling major corporate accounts.

He eventually moved to developing the Midwest market in 1973, and was in charge of the companys home office as a regional manager until 1982. In 1989, Procida took on responsibility for global operations. For the remainder of his career, Procida traveled the globe to find fleet companies outside the U.S. helping ARI establish and introduce Global Fleet Services.

Shoemaker, a 27-year industry veteran, incorporated Flexco Fleet Services in 1992. The company has helped its clients better understand remarketing as a major part of fleet vehicle lifecycles. In 2009, Shoemaker co-founded Innovative Funding Services, a finance company working with Fortune 100 companies, banks, and OEMs. He joined AFLA in 1992 and has served on its board as director of remarketing.

Braude

Braude, the founder and first president of EMKAY, Inc, began operations inside Midway Chevrolet in 1946. The car leasing company started as a business venture from Midway Chevrolet, and the owners named Braude as its president.

The company grew under Braudes direction, requiring EMKAY to move to its own building. Braude grew the business from Chevrolet cars to leasing multiple automobile brands. He helped grow the company through the 1950s with steady growth and saw EMKAY buying out the accounts from Chicago-based Wilson Leasing.

AFLA is the exclusive sponsor of the Automotive Fleet Hall of Fame.
Zipcar and Zagster have teamed up to launch Zipbike on college campuses. Photo courtesy of Zipcar.

Zipcar and Zagster, a provider of campus bike sharing, have announced their partnership to launch Zipbike, the first national, sponsored bike-share program for universities.

Zipbike aims to redefine campus mobility by accelerating access to  and adoption of  bike sharing at U.S. colleges and universities.

Zagster, which operates 140 bike-share programs across North America on nearly two dozen college campuses  will manage the Zipbike systems at all participating universities.Zipcar will launch at participating Zipbike campuses if they don't already have Zipcar programs, according to the company.

"We know that today's mobile-first, app-centric students value on-demand access over ownership," said David Piperno, Zipcars vice president of finance and strategy. "Zipcar programs on campuses improve the quality of life for students, faculty, and staff alike by making it easy to access a car only when they need one, and our partnership with Zagster will allow us to offer that same access to bikes."

According to a recent Zipcar and University of California, Berkeley study of more than 10,000 university Zipcar members, nearly 60% take public transit once a month. And after joining Zipcar, 81% of university Zipcar members bike the same amount or more, and 86% walk the same amount or more.

Zipbike offers a bike-share system, bundled with Zipcar carsharing, at a fraction of the cost that universities typically pay for such programs, according to the company.

"With this partnership, we've been able to do something that no one else has done  secure a national sponsorship for an entire category of bike sharing," said Timothy Ericson, Zagsters co-founder and CEO. "The process of securing sponsorship and underwriting is a time-consuming process for universities and can set back the launch of bike-sharing programs. Because we've solved that problem upfront, Zipbike can be deployed seamlessly and quickly. We expect Zipbike to become the leading national collegiate bike-sharing brand, and ultimately become synonymous with the category."

Zipbike will be available later this year to campuses that want to launch or expand shared mobility services. Zipbike includes everything involved in bike sharing  hardware, software, maintenance, rider support, and local promotion, according to the company.
Jolene Culler is the new senior operations manager at Conrac Solutions. Photo courtesy of Conrac Solutions.

Conrac Solutions, a provider of rental car facility operations, has named Jolene Culler as its new senior operations manager.

Culler will help increase Conrac Solutions service levels to provide the best value to the car rental industry, according to the company. She will work with Anthony Criddle, vice president of operations, to increase site-level effectiveness at all eight operational locations in Alaska, Washington, California, Utah, North Dakota, Texas and Illinois.

Culler will be based at Conrac Solutions corporate office in Renton, Was.

We are looking forward to Jolenes contributions to the company, said Desiree Pfeffer, CEO of Conrac Solutions. Her industry experience makes her an invaluable asset, allowing Conrac Solutions to bring our already strong service offerings to the next level.

With more than three decades of working for the Port of Seattle in property management and leadership positions, Culler has a background in facility management, lease negotiation, and tenant/landlord account and relationship management.

During this time, she worked on projects with both the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and rental companies. She also played a role in the process of negotiating concession and lease agreements regarding the migration of rental car companies from the SeaTac International Airport to the Seattle conrac facility.

I am very excited to start a new challenge and work with the talented team at Conrac Solutions, said Culler. I look forward to further developing innovative approaches to Conrac Solutions DBE outreach program, ensuring optimal site-level operations and growing airport relationships.
The 2018 Jeep Compass has been caught without camouflage for a few photos in Sao Paulo, Brazil after a private official photo shoot for the cars presentation and subsequent advertising campaign. The future Jeep Compass will be mounted on the Small Wide platform and is expected to rival the Honda CR-V.

This is why more and more car advertisements are computer generated, to avoid the prying eyes of carparazzis everywhere. But who are we to complain right? Checkout the undisguised photos here.

Bearing The Compass Name

It is no coincidence that the 2018 Jeep Compass was spied in Brazil as it will the venue for its official debut later this month or early October and will likely be seen in the US at Los Angeles Auto Show on November. Then the Jeep Compass will hit the market early next year.

Early reports say that the FCA group is still unsure on what name to give this mini SUV. The company is choosing either Compass or Patriot and it seems that Compass was now chosen because it is more familiar to buyers around the globe.The images under the light of day without camouflage also clearly shows that Compass was the chosen name as it is plastered on the flanks of the vehicle as well as on the side of the doors.

All About The Compass

The exterior of the new Jeep Compass looks like a 'baby Grand Cherokee'. Aesthetically it is a very interesting product because it keeps intact all the powerful image of a Jeep but encapsulated it in a smaller, more versatile product with exclusive elements such as contrast black roof and chrome on both the grill and the rest of the body.

It is also confirm that the 2018 Jeep Compass will be using jeep Renagade platform having the same engines, transmissions and other items. This means that the Compass will come with front wheel drive, but with an option of an all -wheel drive and will receive 2.0 liter petrol and diesel engine option where in the petrol can reach 160 hp and the diesel at 170hp. Transmission options include 9 speed auto or a 6 speed manual.

Interiors are still a closely guarded secret but sources say that it will feature soft touch materials large TFT screen in the center, chrome inserts, etc. Hopefully will soon know all the details including the Jeep Compass price and release date. We are excited for this one!
There's only a few days before October 1 and that means that the Paris Motor Show will be opening its doors soon. As one of the frontrunners in the automotive industry, much is expected to be seen at the Toyota Booth. This year, Toyota will travel 9,600 kilometers from its headquarters in Japan to present the Toyota Prius Prime, Toyota CH-R, Toyota FCV Plus and some surprises.

Let's take a preview at what Toyota has in store for us.

Toyota Prius Prime: A Plug-in Hybrid Set To Impress

The Toyota Prius Prime was seen for the first time in the Hall of New York. It has twice the autonomy that the first generation plug-in version of the Prius has thanks to its lithium-ion battery with higher capacity. The new flagship of Toyota's hybrid technology in electric mode now has a range of over 50 km and is capable of reaching 135 km/h. Its average consumption is less than 1.0 liter/100km and emissions remain below 22 g/km.

Despite its greater autonomy, Toyota says it takes only two hours to recharge the battery. As a novelty, the car also includes solar panels on the roof to charge the battery when the sun shines and a heat pump that allows the air conditioning to function without using up the battery when driving in electric mode.

Truly, the Toyota Prius Prime is a must-see at the Paris Motor Show.

Toyota C-HR: The Main Attraction

If you are a Toyota fan, then you should know that the Toyota CH R will be the main attraction. The Toyota C-HR is a midsize crossover - slightly less than 4.5 meters long, 1.8 wide and 1.5 high - that was developed on the platform Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA).

Its design concept is born 'Sensual Speed-Cross' and is the result of cooperation with design centers on three continents, all led by the head of Design, Kazuhiko Isawa.

In some markets, the C-HR is available with the 1.2-liter turbo that we have seen in the Toyota Auris engine. With an output of 116 hp, it generates CO2 emissions from 125 g/km and has a combined fuel consumption from 5.5 l/100 km.

But the star of the Paris Motor Show will undoubtedly be the vehicle's hybrid version. With an output of 122 hp, this new hybrid engine is not only more efficient and lighter than the previous hybrid system Toyota full hybrid, but also offers a more agile performance.

Toyota FCV PLUS: The Future

In any self-respecting car manufacturer, there must be a prototype and at the Paris Motor Show, the Toyota FCV PLUS is Toyota's bet for a concept. With this prototype, Toyota analyzes how future vehicles on hydrogen can contribute to society. When the car isn't in use for transport, it can be used as a generator to make electricity for the driver's home.

At 3800mm long, the FCV Plus is slightly smaller than a Yaris, but bigger than an Aygo. It's a little wider and taller than both of these models, at 1750mm across and 1540mm tall. The design is truly modernized with its blue glasshouse dominating the exterior.

Check out the awesome might be future of hydrogen power cars in this video.

It is reported that Toyota may fire up surprises along the way but with these 3 main showcase at the Paris Motor Show, it seems that things will be very interesting at their booth. Are you excited or disappointed? Sound off in the comment section below.
Chinese company BYD might not ring a bell to most of the people, but it is a formidable car manufacturer in China. BYD was lauded as the automaker that sold the most plug-in electric cars last year as compared to other leading brands in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

However, there is another car company that wants to challenge them. General Motors plans to surpass BYD in China - which might mean selling more than 60,000 EVs.

Notably, the success of BYD captured GM's attention, according to GM China Deputy Director of Electrification Engineering Martin Murray. He said in one interview that it motivated them to compete.

First, he commended BYD Qin and Tang plug-in hybrids in China. Then he stated General Motor's aim to be the new leading brand when it comes to selling electric cars.

"We are looking at GM technology which has the safety and performance people like, and GM's affordable models, and putting the two together in China," he said, as quoted by China-EV Blog.

"The object is to make these high volumes. We are going protect these (GM) brands; these are going to be super high-quality products."

Murray may not say it outright, but they are confident that General Motors can produce a better line of car models than BYD. So far, however, the Chinese firm has been producing high-quality models with improved features over the years. Hence, the competition may be tough.

According to Green Car Reports, the local company was able to sell 11,129 Qin sedans and 19,134 Tang SUVs within the first 6 months of this year. Thus far, those two models the most popular plug-in cars in China.

The outlet somewhat noted that the locals tend to trust foreign companies more than their own, and that could be one of General Motor's advantage. GM plans to produce the Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid, Buick LaCrosse Hybrid, and Cadillac CT6 Plug-In Hybrid sedans in the Asian country.

Do you think General Motors will win in the competition versus Chinese BYD? Let us know in the comments below.
Tesla has been facing issues regarding the Autopilot system. But the latest news could possibly be an eye-opener for the company. A group of Chinese security team was able to infiltrate one of their Tesla Model S units, even if it is parked or moving.

A motive for hacking into one of the company's units is yet to be determined, though it is possible that the hackers are trying to prove to the automaking giant that a part of their units are faulty.

But there are requirements before they can hack the system. The driver would have to connect to a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot, and then use the web browser in order to be able to gain access.

The Keen Security team at Chinese company Tencent warns Tesla owners to be proactive:

"PLEASE DO UPDATE THE FIRMWARE OF YOUR TESLA CAR TO THE LATEST VERSION TO ENSURE THAT THE ISSUES ARE FIXED AND AVOID POTENTIAL DRIVING SAFETY RISKS," as written on the company's blog.

They then reported to Tesla about its security vulnerabilities. The automaker has acknowledged the said reports and has allegedly promised to fix the loopholes within a week, according to CNBC.

The car company issued a statement regarding the news report. Tesla made it clear that they already took action right after the notification. Below is an excerpt of the statement:

"We engage with the security research community to test the security of our products so that we can fix potential vulnerabilities before they result in issues for our customers. We commend the research team behind today's demonstration and plan to reward them under our bug bounty program, which was set up to encourage this type of research."

This could be a wake-up call to Tesla. The automaker has been in the headlines as of late due to car incidents allegedly caused by its Autopilot.

The Florida car crash is one of them. A Tesla Model S collided underneath a truck after the system was not able to detect the incoming huge vehicle. Meanwhile, watch the video below:
The Weekender plans to take in a variety of classic planes, cars and historical attractions found on SocialFlight.com.Head to Santa Rosa, California, this weekend for the Wings Over Wine Country Airshow, presented by the Pacific Coast Air Museum. See demos for aUSAF F-22 Raptor Stealth Fighter,Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornet andUnited States Navy F-18 Super Hornet, plus aerobatic performers, warbirds and a tour of the USAF C-17 transport.

Beech River Regional Airport Fly-In & Car Cruise takes place Saturday in Darden, Tennessee. The event will featurevintage and homebuilt aircraft, classic cars, a B-17, C-47, Lockheed Electra and other historic aircraft, plus food and music.

Sundays SpectaculAir fly-in at Rushford Municipal in Minnesota will offer a full day of World War II aircraft and history talks, classic car displays, aircraft rides, live music, lunch in the mess hall and shopping at the PX, plus drawings for warbird rides.

Also Sunday, the Simsbury Fly-In & Car Show, the largest in the northeast, will featuredisplays of more than 750 airplanes and aviation displays, automobiles, along with kids activities, live music, food and free seminars.
Armenia demonstrated on Wednesday Iskander tactical missiles and other advanced weapons acquired from Russia recently as it marked the 25th anniversary of its independence with a military parade held in Yerevan.

Hundreds of Armenian troops marched through the citys central Republic Square, followed by columns of tanks mounted on heavy military tracks, armored vehicles, artillery and air-defense systems, and ballistic missiles. They were joined by a company of Russian soldiers from Russias military base headquartered in Gyumri.

A dozen MiG-29 fighter jets of the Russian base and Armenian Su-25 attack aircraft roared overhead during the parade watched by Armenias political and military leadership.

The participating troops also included soldiers of an Armenian peacekeeping brigade. They carried the national flags of the United States, Germany, Italy, Poland and Greece symbolizing the brigades past and present involvement in multinational contingents led by those NATO member states.

President Serzh Sarkisian praised the Armenian military as he addressed the troops lined up at the sprawling square. We have the power to defend our freedom and our rights, he said. This parade bears testimony to that.

During the course of the past 25 years we have achieved irreversible successes, added Sarkisian. Sometimes we made mistakes and sometimes we went to extremes, but by and large we have followed the right path.

The Armenian military used the occasion to put on display several Russian-made weapons that appear to have been supplied to it this year. The most important of them are Iskander missiles that have a firing range of up to 300 kilometers and are known for their precision. A public announcer commentating on the parade said Armenia can use them to destroy strategic facilities of its enemies.

In particular, the sophisticated missiles developed in the 1990s and first acquired by Russias armed forces in 2006 should make Azerbaijans vital oil and gas installations more vulnerable to Armenian missile strikes.

Yerevan has made no secret of its readiness to launch such strikes in the event of a full-scale war for Nagorno-Karabakh. Its ballistic missile arsenal until now included only Soviet-era Scud-B and Tochka-U systems, which were also demonstrated during the parade.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan has said in the past that its oil and gas infrastructure and key military facilities are protected against these missiles. The Azerbaijani armed forces are equipped with Russian S-300 air-defense systems which may be able to intercept Scud-Bs. In recent years, Baku has also reportedly purchased from Israel similar surface-to-air missiles as well as a missile defense radar.

Iskander is thought to be capable of overcoming just about every missile defense shield currently existing in the world. Armenia is the first country other than Russia which is known to have obtained such missiles.

Citing two senior Russian defense industry executives, the Russian daily Vedomosti reported at the weekend that Moscow supplied Armenia with at least four Iskander launchers that simultaneously can fire two missiles each. The unnamed sources also said that the delivery was not covered by a $200 million Russian loan which Armenia is to spend on the purchase of more Russian weapons.

In February, the Russian government disclosed the types of military hardware which Yerevan can buy with the loan disbursed in 2015. They include Smerch multiple-launch rocket systems with a range of up to 90 kilometers.

Wednesdays parade featured Smerch rockets as well, suggesting that Armenian army got hold of them earlier this year.

Yerevan pressed Moscow to speed up the implementation of the $200 million arms deal following last Aprils outbreak of heavy fighting around Karabakh which nearly escalated into an all-out Armenian-Azerbaijani war. It also used the escalation to renew its criticism of at least $4 billion worth of offensive weapons which the Russians have sold to Azerbaijan since 2010.

Among other newly acquired weaponry demonstrated at the Armenian parade were modernized variants of the Buk medium-range air-defense system and Infauna electronic warfare vehicles that use advanced technology to jam enemy communications.

Armenia also plans to buy soon Russian-made TOS-1A heavy flamethrowers using thermobaric rockets and Kornet anti-tank systems.
21 September 2016 10:40 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijan`s Embassy in Beijing has prevented another provocation of Armenians, who this time attempted to mislead the Chinese society, Azertac reported.

Armenians attempted to arrange a lecture titled Faith and tradition: Armenian Apostolic Church, Community-building in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh" as part of The basics of Christianity" seminar organized by the Russian Research Center and the East China Normal University in Shanghai.

The lecture was supposed to be delivered by Kimitaka Matsuzato, a Japanese specialist, and a lecturer of the Armenian origin Stefan Danielyan.

Azerbaijanis, who live and research in Shanghai, have informed the Azerbaijani Embassy of Armenians` plans.

Thereafter, the Embassy sent a letter to rector of the university, requesting the removal of the lecture from the seminar`s agenda. In the letter, the Embassy said Armenians want to propagate their illegal territorial claims but not to promote high religious ideals.

The embassy said this lecture runs contrary to the spirit of the Azerbaijani-Chinese bilateral relations. The Embassy also informed the rector of the history of the activities of the Armenian Church in the Caucasus.

The management of the East China Normal University removed the lecture from the agenda of the seminar. In his response letter, the rector of the university said the lecture was replaced with another one, and thanked the Embassy for cooperation.

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21 September 2016 17:30 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

The Armenians have turned into a nation of "traders and farmers" over the past 25 years of independence of Armenia, News.am reported citing Director of the Center for Sociological Studies Sociometer Aharon Adibekyan as saying.

After the collapse of the USSR in Armenia, thousands of factories, 250 design bureaus and 900 farms stopped operating. We got a 1.5-million army of unemployed, most of whom were professional employees, Adibekyan told reporters on September 20.

The sociologist noted that the main problem was the fact that Armenia was deeply integrated into the Soviet economy; therefore, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the crash. He believes that it has no sense to restore these businesses in Armenia, as there are their equivalents in Russia and Ukraine, and Armenian products will be uncompetitive in international markets.

Today, 65 percent out of 2,741 companies operating in Armenia are reprocessing (mainly food), 20-25 percent service energy and gas sector, only 15 percent are industrial companies, mainly mining. And only about half of the 400,000 farmers receiving land cultivate it, Adibekyan said.

Since the country has gained independence, Armenia has lost 2.5 million of human potential, the sociologist noted. "In 25 years, our population was meant to grow up to 5 million, but today the real population makes up about half of it."

He also recalled that according to UN forecast, the population of Armenia can reduce to 1.7 million people at the end of the century.

The reduction in the total population leads to a decline in domestic consumption, which makes Armenia unattractive for foreign manufacturers.

On January 1, 2016, the resident population of Armenia made up less than 3 million people, making a decrease of 12,000 people compared to the previous year. Another noteworthy fact is that since the proclamation of independence in 1991, the Armenian population has decreased by 634,700 people.

In the meantime, the volume of unemployment in the first quarter of 2016 made 19.3 percent of able-to-work population in the country, and due to the wrong structure of national economy, new vacancies do not seem to come up soon.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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21 September 2016 10:05 (UTC+04:00)

By Jim O'Neill and Eric Goosby

We often take it for granted that any infection we encounter can be cured, and that all-powerful modern medicine will do precisely what it is supposed to do.

But imagine an alternative scenario: You are diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening infectious disease that was once treatable in weeks or months, but you are told that your treatment will take at least two years, and will involve months of daily injections and some 14,000 pills, with severe side effects. You are one of a lucky minority to have been diagnosed and treated at all, but your odds of beating the disease are still only 50-50.

Most of us would not associate this scenario with modern medicine, but it is a tragic reality for the ranks of people  500,000 and growing  suffering from multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. MDR-TB is what happens when drugs lose potency against new strains of previously treatable infections. TB is now the worlds deadliest infectious disease, killing well over one million people every year, and MDR-TB continues to spread in low- and middle-income countries as health-care providers struggle to combat it.

MDR-TB imposes a massive burden on countries public-health systems and economies, and it is a harbinger of what rich and poor countries alike can expect as antimicrobial resistance (AMR) becomes more prevalent. Without concerted action, drug-resistant strains of other common infections such as Staphylococcus Aureus or E. coli will become ever more common, with seismic effects on global health and health-care systems worldwide.

As AMR renders established antibiotics ineffective, untreatable infections will make relatively routine procedures such as organ transplants or cancer chemotherapy increasingly risky. The human and economic toll of rising AMR could easilyspiral out of control: left unchecked, drug-resistant infections could claim ten million lives annually by 2050, with the cumulative cost in terms of global GDP reaching $100 trillion.

Only by launching an effective response immediately can we avert a bleak future. Fortunately, at the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, earlier this month, world leaders put AMR on the groups agenda for the first time, signaling that the international community recognizes AMR as a real threat to global economic development and prosperity. The G20 also made the largest effort to date to replenish stalled pharmaceutical-development pipelines for new antibiotics (which are urgently needed to replace drugs that have become ineffective) and to roll out diagnostic tests enabling clinicians to use the drugs they have more effectively.

This weeks United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York presents another opportunity for global leadership on AMR. There, too, the issue will be on the agenda for the first time, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and world leaders set to pledge to confront rising drug resistance at a major high-level meeting.

To stymie AMR, the UN must build on the work that the G20 started. As the largest, most inclusive global-governance forum we have, the UN is the only institution that can marshal the resources and leadership commitments the problem demands. But the UN will be effective only if it takes some crucial steps.

First, UN member states should begin to integrate their responses to AMR across all regulatory bodies and relevant sectors, including health care, agriculture, and finance. The UN is uniquely positioned to help countries do this. It can convene the worlds leaders and foster international and inter-organizational cooperation on global economic and social problems; and it can tap the power of its own agencies to mobilize global resources against AMR.

Second, to keep things on track, the UN should establish clear benchmarks, based on measurable outcomes, and it should commit to putting AMR back on the General Assemblys agenda every two years. This would create a framework for measuring global progress, while also sending a strong message that the UN is in it for the long haul, and that AMR should be a high priority for the next secretary-general.

Finally, the UN should appoint a Special Envoy for AMR to ensure continued progress in the coming years. The envoy would need to be defined as a high-level position, authorized to work with countries and multilateral governance bodies to maintain momentum in the battle against AMR.

We can now be cautiously optimistic that AMR is finally getting the global attention it deserves. But the worlds attention can be all too fleeting, as those of us who have lived through previous and current debates about infectious disease know all too well. If we fail to hold our leaders feet to the fire, the consequences for everyone could be deadly.

Copyright: Project Syndicate: On Antimicrobial Resistance, Its Now or Never

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21 September 2016 11:43 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Hasanova

India is interested in the opening of direct flights to Azerbaijan.

Indian Ambassador Sanjay Ranani made the remark during his meeting with Azerbaijani Culture and Tourism Minister Abulfas Garayev, the ministry reported on September 20.

The ambassador noted that his country is also interested in deepening cooperation with Azerbaijan in the fields of culture, art, film, and tourism.

Moreover, Minister Garayev invited the India envoy to participate in the IV Forum on Intercultural Dialogue to be held in Baku in April 2017.

The current state of cooperation existing between Azerbaijan and India and its prospects were discussed at the meeting.

India and Azerbaijan have age-old historical relations and shared traditions. The bilateral relations and cultural ties between the two countries are very close.

Indias bilateral trade with Azerbaijan has been growing steadily in recent years. The trade turnover between India and Azerbaijan amounted to $142.36 million in January-June 2016 (compared to $180.89 million in the same periof of 2015), according to Azerbaijans State Statistics Committee.

The items of direct and indirect imports from India are clothes and textiles, information technologies, food items and heavy machinery.

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21 September 2016 11:00 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijans Energy Minister, Commissioner of the national section at Astana EXPO-2017 Natig Aliyev, who is in Astana to attend a meeting of the Azerbaijan-Kazakhstan Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, has met chairman of the Board of Astana EXPO2017 Akhmetzhan Yesimov, Azertac reported.

The sides discussed prospects for the development of relations between the two countries.

Aliyev provided an insight into the organization of Azerbaijans pavilion at the EXPO-2017 exhibition.

The Azerbaijani minister described the three-month exhibition as an important event in terms of demonstrating Kazakhstans potential.

Yesimov stressed the importance of Astana EXPO-2017, and noted that the event as a significant platform for joint participation of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in the solution of energy problems.

Yesimov also added that President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev expressed intention to hold the presentation of Astana EXPO-2017 as part of his visit to Baku in October.

Expo 2017 is an International Exposition scheduled to be held from June 10 to September 10, 2017 in Astana, Kazakhstan. The expo's official theme is "Future Energy", and it is designed to create a global debate between countries, nongovernmental organizations, companies and the general public on the crucial question: "How do we ensure safe and sustainable access to energy for everyone while reducing CO2 emissions?".

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21 September 2016 11:58 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijan and Iran, the two neighbor countries are currently considering the issue of implementing a number of joint projects and expanding bilateral ties.

Iranian ambassador to Azerbaijan, Mohsen Pak Ayeen said that the Azerbaijani-Iranian automobile plant is planned to be constructed by May 2017, mentioning that construction operations are being carried out successfully.

Pak Ayeen, who will soon complete his diplomatic mission in the country, made the remark while addressing the Azerbaijan-Iran business forum on September 20.

I hope the plant will be constructed in time  before May 2017," he said.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the Azerbaijani-Iranian car plant was held in Azerbaijans Neftchala industrial district in August 2016.

The total cost of the plant is $15 million, while some 25 percent of the cost will be provided by the Iranian side. The plant, which is a joint project of Azerbaijans AzEuroCar LLC and Irans giant automaker, Iran Khodro, will cover an area of 10 hectares.

The plant is expected to provide jobs for 300 people at the first stage, with the further increase up to 500. Twenty percent of the produced cars will be exported. The cars produced at the plant will meet Euro 5 standard. Four Iranian car brands  Dena, Runna, Soren and Samand will be produced at the new plant, which will have a capacity of 10,000 cars a year. The project is being implemented on the basis of a memorandum of understanding signed in April.

The incumbent ambassador also said Iranian companies are planning to build a pharmaceutical plant in Azerbaijans Pirallahi settlement.

The Iranian side is currently in talks with Azerbaijans Azrsun Holding Company.

Pak Ayeen noted that the plant will be constructed in three stages.

"The necessary medicines will be imported from Iran to Azerbaijan within the first stage, while Iran will provide all necessary technology for the production of drugs in the second stage of the project, he clarified.

Moreover, Azerbaijani Matanat-A Company, one of the leaders for construction materials production in the country, is planning to build a plant for production of gypsum in Iran.

Jafar Sarghini, Irans deputy industry minister for mining and mineral industry said the Azerbaijani company has already obtained a license to operate in Iran.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Iran amounted to $105.7 million in January-July 2016, more than $77 million of which accounted for imports from Iran, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee. Azerbaijan's exports to Iran almost doubled to $14.4 million in the first quarter of 2016, while imports increased from $19.4 million in 2015 to $27 million in 2016.

--

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21 September 2016 15:31 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Bulgaria seeks to expand cooperation with Azerbaijan in all spheres and considers the country as a transit route to Central Asia.

"Azerbaijan has great potential in the transport sector, which presents broad opportunities for Bulgaria to enter the Central Asian markets," Azerbaijani Ambassador to Bulgaria Nargiz Gurbanova said.

Gurbanova further told Trend that entering the Bulgarian market and further to the European markets is meanwhile interesting for Azerbaijan, mentioning that developed transport infrastructure is required to fulfill these intentions.

Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR has recently voiced its interest in entering the Bulgarian oil products market. The company is holding talks on the possibilities of benefiting from Bulgarias gas and oil products markets.

Bulgaria has an intention of becoming main gas transit country for South Eastern and Central Europe.

The talks on delivering Azerbaijani gas via the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) are currently underway. IGB is expected to be connected to the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor.

The project will allow Bulgaria to receive Azerbaijani gas, mostly from the second stage of development of Azerbaijans Shah Deniz gas and condensate field. The IGB will connect to the Trans-Adriatic pipeline, providing a steady flow of natural gas from Shah Deniz in the Caspian to European markets. Bulgarian government plans to buy 1 billion cubic meters of gas per year with the possibility of increasing the volume in the future.

The cooperation opportunities between the two countries will be discussed during the talks between the two governments within the framework of the next meeting of the Azerbaijani-Bulgarian intergovernmental commission on trade-economic and scientific-technical cooperation in Baku in late September, the envoy said.

The top issues to be discussed during the meeting include exchange of opinions on strengthening of cooperation between the two countries, implementation of joint projects, expansion of commercial-economic ties and consideration of perspectives for cooperation in the spheres of energy, transport, culture and other priority areas.

The Azerbaijani-Bulgarian intergovernmental commission on trade-economic and scientific-technical cooperation was established in 1995.

The trade turnover between the two countries amounted to $16.5 million in January-July 2016 compared to $6.6 million in the same period of 2015, according to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee. Such a growth has been achieved through an increase in import operations by 2.5 times.

The diplomatic relations between the two countries were established in June, 1992. The embassy of Bulgaria in Azerbaijan was opened in December 1999.

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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

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21 September 2016 17:19 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Roughly 1,500 families will be able to use a program of self-employment in Azerbaijan until the end of this year.

Minister for Labor and Social Protection of Population Salim Muslimov made this statement on September 21.

Muslumov emphasized that in some regions of the country, employment centers staff have already examined the unemployment rate, composition of the unemployed and areas, in which they would like to work.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) immediately began to cooperate with us in this direction, because Azerbaijan is the first country in the world, which began the implementation of program [of self-employment] on such a scale and at the state level, he said.

ILO will provide a broad support to Azerbaijan in this matter, according to the minister and has already sent its experts so that they conducted training here.

Some 75 people have already taken place in training. In total the ILO will train 142 people, which, in turn, will provide training to the unemployed, he said.

We will choose approximately 1,500 people who meet our requirements. Within two months, they will receive training and knowledge on how to maintain small and medium business, become familiar with the financial and other business aspects, Muslumov said.

Only those who will be able to justify their business plan will benefit the program, the minister noted.



We will provide all participants of the program with all necessary for the business organization. If at the end of the year their business is successful, then we will give them all the materials that they have received for the organization and conduct of business for free. To date, 367 families have already been selected from 19 regions, which are passing training, he added.

This July, President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on additional measures in the field of self-employment.

We need to create more opportunities for people to ensure their self-employment, the head of state said at the meeting of Cabinet of Ministers on results of socio-economic development in first half of 2016 and future objectives. In the near future, we will probably see the results of the first experiment. I think that the self-employment approach should prevail.

Experts claim that the decree is an important support to the involvement of able-bodied members of low-income families in active labor market and ensuring their self-employment.

To this end, 6 million manats ($3.649 million) have been allocated from the Presidential Reserve Fund to the Ministry.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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21 September 2016 17:15 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Baku Museum Center has hosted a presentation of "Electronic catalogue of composers and musicologists ", Trend Life reported.

The presentation was held in the framework of the 8th Uzeyir Hajibeyli International Music Festival.

The festival that made a great contribution to Azerbaijans musical traditions kicks off annually on the National Music Day, dedicated to the birthday of the legendary musician.

Electronic catalogue was prepared on the basis of brochures published under the project of Azerbaijan Composers Union.

The project Azerbaijani composers and musicologists has been supported by the Culture and Tourism Ministry.

Secretary of the Union, honored art worker Zemfira Gafarova stressed the importance of publications.

"The idea originated a few years ago. About 34 booklets have been already published. The booklets provide information not only about the classics of musical art, but also modern composers and musicologists. The preparation of 18 booklets is currently underway ", she said.

The publication provides information about such prominent national composers and musicologists as Ashraf Abbasov, Shafiga Akhundova, Elsa Ibrahimova, Emin Sabitoglu, Ismail Hajibeyov, Dadache the Dadashov, Faiq Sujaddinov and others.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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21 September 2016 12:07 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

The exercises conducted by Armenian Armed Forces with involvement of artillery and heavy equipment in the occupied Azerbaijani region of Aghdam is another serious provocation of Armenia that threatens the mediation efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group.

Hikmet Hajiyev, Spokesman of Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry made the remark while talking to APA.

This Armenian provocation is nothing but an insult to the peace initiatives put forward at the highest level by the co-chair countries. This behavior of Armenia calls into question the sincerity of Armenian leadership towards the peace talks and the MG co-chairs, Hajiyev noted.

In the meantime, Armenian Armed Forces continue their provocative actions on the front line. On September 20, the Armenian armed units, using large-caliber machine guns, 21 times violated the ceasefire on different areas of the front line, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry reported.

Armenian armed forces, stationed in Armenia`s Vazashen village in Ijevan region, Mosesgekh village in Berd region subjected to fire the positions of Azerbaijani Armed Forces located in Bala Jafarli village in Gazakh region, Alibayli village in Tovuz region.

The ceasefire was also violated in Horadiz, Garakhanbayli villages in Fuzuli region, Kuropatkino village in Khojavand region, as well as nameless hills in Goranboy and Jabrayil regions.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a lengthy war that ended with the signing of a fragile ceasefire in 1994. Since the war, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

While the OSCE Minsk Group acted as the only mediator in resolution of the conflict, the occupation of the territory of the sovereign State with its internationally recognized boundaries has been left out of due attention of the international community for years.

Armenia ignores four UN Security Council resolutions on immediate withdrawal from the occupied territory of Azerbaijan, thus keeping tension high in the region.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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21 September 2016 12:15 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

French President Francois Hollande has expressed a willingness to host the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan, in the framework of the negotiation process on the settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, RIA Novosti stated.

Hollande announced about this in his letter to Sargsyan in connection with the Independence Day of Armenia.

Let me reaffirm my commitment aimed at a just and stable settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations. I am ready to host a meeting in Paris to discuss measures for the advancement of this extremely lengthy conflict, Hollande noted.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia still controls fifth part of Azerbaijan's territory and rejects implementing four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.

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21 September 2016 13:22 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Germany is ready to facilitate a quickest and peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, said Germany's President Joachim Gauck in his letter addressed to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of the countrys Independence Day.

In the message, Gauck noted that the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is of great importance, RIA Novosti reports.

As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict, the president noted.

Armenia broke out a lengthy war against Azerbaijan laying territorial claims on its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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21 September 2016 11:14 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Hasanova

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is to send a seven-member assessment mission, headed by Aleksandr Nikoloski to the September 26 referendum on amendments to the Constitution of Azerbaijan, following an invitation from the countrys authorities.

The PACE reported that the delegation is due to meet the president of Azerbaijan, the speaker of Parliament (the Milli Majlis), the head of the Central Electoral Commission and members of Azerbaijans delegation to PACE, as well as civil society and media representatives.

On the day of the referendum, members will be present in polling stations.

The delegation is composed of Andrea Rigoni (Italy), Yanaki Stoilov (Bulgaria), Antonio Gutierrez (Spain), Dominik Tarczynski (Poland), Stefan Schennach (Austria), and Cezar Florin Preda (Romania).

September 26, 2016, was set as the date for the referendum on proposed changes to the constitution of Azerbaijan.

The Electoral Code of Azerbaijan indicates that the day of the popular vote should be non-working.

In a bill recently sent to the Constitutional Court, President Ilham Aliyev proposed amendments to 29 Articles of Azerbaijans current constitution. The changes envisage the extension of the presidential term from five to seven years, the establishment of the first vice-president and vice-president positions in the country as well as the abolishment of minimum age limit for presidential candidates, dissolution of parliament by the president.

The Central Election Commission (CEC) has so far registered 846 observers for the upcoming referendum. The district polling stations have registered 37,429 observers.

Final results of the Referendum will be announced until October 21.

The last time changes to the Constitution were made seven years ago, following Constitutional referendum held in 2009.

---

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21 September 2016 12:24 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Relations between Azerbaijan and the European Union were on the agenda of talks in Baku on September 20, as a delegation of the EU- Azerbaijan Parliamentary Cooperation Committee paid a visit to Azerbaijan.

At first, the European delegation was received by President Ilham Aliyev, who criticized the resolution adopted by the European Parliament on Azerbaijan a year ago.



President Aliyev said this caused a serious regression in relations and it will be difficult to move forward and plan future activities without clarifying this matter.

This came out as a surprise, said the head of state. We, in Azerbaijan, consider this as a step based on a very hostile, inaccurate, false information and bias and as an attempt to harm our countrys reputation.

The president said some members of the European Parliament have warned the organization not to adopt the document.

I heard one of them saying, We will lose Azerbaijan. Maybe that is so. A commissioner of the European Commission spoke as well, made warnings, but they werent heard. And what happened as a result? There are no ties, no contact, he added.

Ilham Aliyev went on to add that Azerbaijan didnt create a working group in its parliament. We discontinued our activity in the Euronest. This is the situation. We cant act as if nothing has happened. We have to clarify this. We have to look at what we can do to address this. What can we talk about if this remains the same, if nothing happens? said the president.

On the same day, the 13th meeting of the European Union (EU)-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Committee (PCC) was held in the capital city.

The European Parliament (EP) delegation chaired by the co-chair of EU-Azerbaijan PCC and head of the EP delegation Sajjad Karim (ECR, UK) included Heidi Hautala (Greens/EFA, FIN, co-president of EURONEST PA), Ramona Manescu (EPP, RO), Alberto Cirio (EPP, IT), Andrejs Mamikins (S&D, LV) and Iveta Grigule (ALDE, LV).

At the meetings held at the Azerbaijani Parliament, Samad Seyidov, Chairman of the International and Interparliamentary Relations committee stressed the commitment of Azerbaijan to pursue cooperation with the EU.

Sajjad Karim, for his part, highlighted that the EU considered its relationship with Azerbaijan as a very important and mutually beneficial one.

There is substantial potential to deepen and strengthen the bilateral relationship, he added. It is essential that the EU-Azerbaijan relationship, which has many aspects, is structured to deliver constructive progress for the people of the European Union and Azerbaijan on an equal basis.

As part of the visit, the EP delegation also has meetings with economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev.



The delegation also visited an EU-funded project of modernization of public service ASAN, an innovative Azerbaijani model of public service delivery. The Service, established in 2012, provides opportunity for state agencies to render their services in a uniformed and coordinated manner.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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21 September 2016 16:54 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Hasanova

Azerbaijan has all conditions and democratic environment for conducting a free, fair and transparent referendum at a high level, Chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC) Mazahir Panahov said at a meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Baku Robert Cekuta on September 21.

Cekuta expressed his satisfaction with the close cooperation between the structure he heads and the CEC.

Moreover, he expressed gratitude to the CEC Chairman and inquired about the work done regarding the preparation for referendum to be held on September 26.

Panahov said the CEC is always open to cooperation with international organizations, and these relations play an important role in the further improvement of the election and referendum practice.

The CEC chair further spoke about the large-scale projects implemented in order to better ensure the country's electoral law, the principles of election commissions activities and the rights of citizens.

The sides also exchanged views on possible prospects of cooperation between structures in different areas and issues of mutual interest.

September 26, 2016, was set as the date for the referendum on proposed changes to the constitution of Azerbaijan.

The Electoral Code of Azerbaijan indicates that the day of the popular vote should be non-working.

In a bill recently sent to the Constitutional Court, President Ilham Aliyev proposed amendments to 29 Articles of Azerbaijans current constitution. The changes envisage the extension of the presidential term from five to seven years, the establishment of the first vice-president and vice-president positions in the country as well as the abolishment of minimum age limit for presidential candidates, dissolution of parliament by the president.

The Central Election Commission (CEC) has so far registered 846 observers for the upcoming referendum. The district polling stations have registered 37,429 observers.

Final results of the Referendum will be announced until October 21.

The last time changes to the Constitution were made seven years ago, following Constitutional referendum held in 2009.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
21 September 2016 18:34 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Hasanova

Malta will host one of the next high- level meetings of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center.

The issue was mulled in New York, where a delegation of the Center met with Prime Minister of Malta Joseph Muscat, the State Committee of Azerbaijan for Work with the Diaspora reported on September 21.

Following the discussions, the parties agreed to hold the high- level meeting of the Center in Malta under the auspices of the Prime Minister in 2017.

The activities of the Centre, the new cooperation opportunities, challenges, future plans and V Global Forum in Baku were also discussed at the meeting The sides also exchanged views on regional and global issues.

The meeting was attended by board members of the Center - Former President of Serbia Boris Tadic, former Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov, former President of Finland Tarja Halonen, Chairman of the State Committee for Work with Diaspora Nazim Ibrahimov, former Prime Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina Zlatko Lagumdzija, former first lady of Ukraine Kateryna Yushchenko and Secretary General of the Centre, Rovshan Muradov.

Nizami Ganjavi International Center was created with the multiple aims of preserving the reach cultural heritage of the past as well as encouraging and fostering current scholarship, research, cultural activity, and social outreach.

The Center moves forward to build, an institution worthy of bearing the great name of Nizami Ganjavi with a hope it will become a source of pride for Azerbaijan and the world.

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21 September 2016 16:52 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

A memorandum of cooperation was signed between the Geology Institute of Azerbaijan and Michigan University, Trend reported.

The researches of both structures will jointly study the geological history of the Greater and Lesser Caucasus and seismic hazards. The memorandum also provides training of young people and sharing of experiences .

The agreement was undersigned by Director of Geology and Geophysics Institute of the National Academy of Sciences Akif Alizade and representative of Michigan University's project Ryan Lenkton.

The Azerbaijani National Academy of Sciences is the main state research organization and the primary body that conducts research and coordinates activities in the fields of science and social sciences in Azerbaijan. It was established on 23 January 1945.

The Academy closely cooperates with different foreign research institutions and organizes international scientific workshops and conferences in Azerbaijan.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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21 September 2016 18:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

The European Union is keen on establishing excellent relations with Azerbaijan, said Sajjad Karim, the head of the delegation of EU-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Cooperation Committee as he met with Speaker of Azerbaijan's Parliament Ogtay Asadov on September 21.

Head of the EP delegation praised the negotiations they held in Baku, noting that both sides had obligations to their people, Azertac reported.



That's why in order to advance, without going back to those in the past, we must conduct sincere dialogues and look forward to the future with hope. There are common values that unite both Azerbaijani and European peoples. Azerbaijan is an important country for Europe and we are keen on establishing excellent relations with this country, Sajjad Karim said.

Hailing the importance of the visit, Asadov noted that it would contribute to restoring relations between Azerbaijans parliament and the European Parliament, which suffered a major setback a year ago.

He said the EU-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Cooperation Committee is the only platform for cooperation on the bilateral basis at the level of legislative bodies. He underlined the Azerbaijani Parliament's interest in advancing ties with the EU in both bilateral and multilateral formats.

The development of relations based on mutual respect and equality is of pivotal importance. The relationship that features biased resolutions and attempts to put pressure on Azerbaijan is unacceptable for us. Our cooperation must be based on mutual respect and equal treatment, Asadov added.

Deputy speaker of the Azerbaijani Parliament Valeh Alasgarov, in turn, spoke of Azerbaijan-EU relations. Recalling the European Parliament's biased decisions against Azerbaijan, Alasgarov noted that this kind of behavior did not serve the interests of the peoples of Azerbaijan and Europe.

He said that double standards within certain organizations as well as among the members of the European Parliament towards the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict also did not contribute to regional development and peace.

Member of the European Parliament Iveta Grigule, for her part, hailed Europe's interest in cooperation with Azerbaijan and apologized on behalf of the group, which she represented for the European Parliament's biased resolutions on Azerbaijan.

She expressed her hope that cases of such kind would not be repeated in the coming years. The interests of both sides require this, she added.

Head of the Administration of Azerbaijan Parliament Safa Mirzayev, Chairmen of the Parliamentary Committee Samad Seyidov and Fuad Muradov, Head of the country`s delegation to the European Union Fuad Isgandarov, as well as Head of EU Delegation in Azerbaijan Malena Mard and other officials were also present at the meeting.

Yesterday, the 13th meeting of the European Union (EU)-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Committee (PCC) was held in Baku.

As part of the visit, the EP delegation also had meetings with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev and Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
21 September 2016 12:51 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijans state energy giant SOCAR has not abandoned any of its planned projects, despite the falling oil prices in the world market.

President of SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev announced about this, while addressing the event dedicated to the Day of Oil Workers in Azerbaijan.

One of such projects is modernization of Baku Oil Refinery Plant named after Heydar Aliyev. We are intended to continue implementation of the project and carry out reconstruction of four rigs. We are planning to construct 12 additional rigs, while capacity of the refinery will reach the level of 7.5 million tons per year, he said.

Abdullayev emphasized that projects realized by SOCAR are expected to yield an income worth several billion of dollars.

Gradual reconstruction and modernization plan, which is expected to be continued until 2019-2020 includes implementation of technical servicing operations and analysis of conditions of equipment.

Catalytic cracking, primary processing, coking and catalytic reforming facilities have been commissioned, following the successful implementation of maintenance operations at the refinery.

Heydar Aliyev Oil Refinery, which is engaged in the production of light petroleum products, is processing 21 out of 24 grades of Azerbaijani crude and 15 different petroleum products.

The plant completely meets the entire demand for petroleum products in the country, while 45 percent of its petroleum products are exported.

Continuously declining oil prices, which are believed to have been triggered by oversupply and glut in the market, hit many major energy companies of the world, forcing them to cut down some expenses and take certain measures to maintain their financial strength.

SOCAR has also identified a number of measures and pursued a belt-tightening policy directing financial resources to more lucrative areas where expenditures are low, while trying not to harm the company's technical activities.

The volume of proven oil reserves of the country currently stands at approximately 2 billion tons, while the volume of gas reserves amount to 2.6 trillion cubic meters. Forecasted volumes stand at 4.5 million tons and 5.4 tcm of oil and gas respectively.

--

Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

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21 September 2016 13:48 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Camal

Representatives of Italian Snam are expected to arrive in Athens for talks with the Greek government over the privatization of the national gas transmission system operator DESFA, Greek media reported.



Italian company appears to have reached an agreement with SOCAR to purchase 17 percent of DESFA, according to a report in Ta Nea,.



SOCAR won a tender in 2013 on the purchase of a 66-percent stake in DESFA for 400 million euros ($446.3 million) but the acquisition was stalled, when SOCAR faced EUs anti-trust concerns and was ordered to sell 17 percent of DESFA to a third party, so that its stake drops to 49 percent and satisfy EU competition authorities. Greece passed a law in July which raised DESFA's gas tariffs, further complicating the sale.

SOCAR hopes it can overcome the EU obstacles, as Italys Snam SpA may purchase at least required 17 percent of shares.

Sale of DESFA is part of a privatization programme required under Greece's three international bailouts since 2010.



In July 2016, Greek Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change Panos Skourletis accused the European Commission of delaying the deal on selling a share in Greece's DESFA to SOCAR.

Skourletis said that a number of conditions, set by the European Commission, greatly slowed the privatization process of the gas operator.



In particular, the company will become a passive shareholder, not entitled to vote in the management of the company, as a result of decreasing SOCARs share in DESFA up to 49 percent.

--

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21 September 2016 10:34 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Military parades were held in various cities of Iran including the capital, Tehran on September 21 on the occasion of the "Sacred defense" week.

All units of Iranian Army as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) participated in the parade, Iran's State IRINN TV reported.

In Tehran, the parade was held in front of the mausoleum of the past Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iran's military officials, military attaches of foreign missions in Iran, and prominent public figures attended the event.

Generally Iranian president participates in the event in Tehran and delivers a speech, but this year Hassan Rouhani was not present as he is in New York to attend UN General Assembly.

The latest achievements of the Islamic Republic in the military sphere were demonstrated during the parade.

Each year, from the 1980's, the day of Iraq's attack on Iran is marked as the "Sacred Defense" week in the country.

The Iran-Iraq war began on September 22, 1980 with the attack of Iraqi army on Iran's Khuzestan province. The war ended on August 20, 1988 with the signing of a ceasefire agreement and the borders of the two countries remaining in a pre-war state.

---

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21 September 2016 18:05 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Hasanova

Russia and the countries of the Cooperation Council of Arab Gulf states can bring their positions closer on a number of issues and work together to improve the situation in the region, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting with the foreign ministers of the Arab Council countries, RIA Novosti reported.

He stressed that Moscow is interested in the development of political dialogue with the region.

"We believe that we can bring our positions closer on a number of issues and work together to improve the situation in the region, which has suffered enough from instability," said the Russian minister.

Lavrov added that another topic of discussion is "the deepening of economic and trade cooperation.

"We have a lot of different projects, including joint investment platforms. We appreciate this format of communication," said the Russian minister.

In turn, Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, Adel al-Dzhubeyr stressed that the Cooperation Council of Arab Gulf states "want to maintain closer cooperation with the Russian Federation."

"We are ready to discuss cooperation with your country in the sphere of security, as well as trade," he said.

Historically, Russia and Arab Gulf states had warm relations. As a result, Russia and other CIS countries are increasingly seen as attractive emerging markets by Gulf states, in which to invest, particularly due to their huge potential in bringing an abundance of raw materials to the international markets.

Russia-CIS and the Gulf are now established as the worlds primary energy-producing regions.

In 1992, the then Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev visited all of the GCC countries in a series of official visits. It was the first official visit to the GCC states as a whole, and a sign of Russian willingness to develop full-fledged relations with the group.

In May 2004, Russia and Oman signed a protocol on the completion of bilateral talks on Russias admission to the World Trade Organization. The delegation from the Sultanate of Oman participated in the joint meetings of the Russian-Arab Business Council. Oman and Russia expressed their readiness to establish a bilateral Russian-Omani Commission in the framework of the Council.

In 2008, Russia and the GCC states started preparations for strategic dialogue.

In November 2011 a memorandum of understanding was signed during a meeting in Abu Dhabi, establishing a formal mechanism for consultations and cooperation between the GCC as a regional organization and the Russian Federation. It was an attempt to try a new path of cooperation after a long period of mutual neglect.

Moreover, in February 2014 the third ministerial meeting for GCC - Russia strategic dialogue was held in Kuwait.

Hence, the will of two sides to cooperate closer in different spheres may serve as an intensive to move the relations between Russia and GCC to a more positive phase.

---

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21 September 2016 15:04 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The latest achievements of the Islamic Republic in the military sphere were demonstrated during a parade that is held annually to mark the 1980s war with Iraq.

High on the showcase was Zolfaqar, Irans most recent 1,600 kilometer range missile, Tasnim news agency reported on September 21.

The showoff comes in the face of a growing campaign from the West that tries to restrict Irans missile program. Iran, however, says is ready to do everything to ensure it enjoys reasonable deterrence in a region abrim with unrest.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a recent address to military officials once more reiterated Tehrans commitment to its military program. The enemy has to understand that if it attacks, it will receive a hard blow, he underlined.

During the parade, Irans military forces also showcased the Russian-made S-300 defense system. Iran just recently received the first consignment of the missile system from Russia although it had paid for them in 2007. The implementation of the deal had been hampered by Western countries.

Each year, the day of Iraq's attack on Iran is marked as the onset of the "Sacred Defense Week in the country.

The Iran-Iraq war began on September 22, 1980 with the attack of Iraqi army on Iran's Khuzestan province. The war ended on August 20, 1988 with the signing of a ceasefire agreement and the borders of the two countries remaining in a pre-war state.

---

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21 September 2016 16:20 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Turkey has no plans to send infantry to Syria as part of the Shield of the Euphrates operation, Sabah newspaper quotedcountrys National Defense Minister Fikri Isik as saying on September 21.

Turkey will fully support the Free Syrian Army within this operation. But there are no plans to involve the infantry of Turkish armed forces in these operations, added Isik.

Earlier, Hurriyet newspaper reported citing a military source that Turkish armed forces are working out various plans to liberate Syrias Al-Bab city from the Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) terrorist group.

Sending Turkish special forces and infantry to Syria is among those plans, said the newspaper.

On August 24 morning, the Turkish Air Force, with the support of the coalition aircraft, launched an operation to liberate the city of Jarabulus from the IS militants in northern Syria, near Aleppo.

The operation was dubbed Shield of the Euphrates.

Syria has been suffering from an armed conflict since March 2011, which, according to the UN, has so far claimed over 500,000 lives. Militants from various armed groups are confronting the Syrian government troops. The IS, YPG and PYD are the most active terrorist groups in Syria.

---

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21 September 2016 17:52 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Iran and Canada, the two countries, which broke off relations more than four years ago, are currently considering the issue of restoring diplomatic contacts.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his Canadian counterpart Stephane Dion met in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The sides discussed mutual relations, regional issues, and consular affairs, ISNA news agency reported.

Dion earlier said many areas of the Canadian economy would benefit in a renewed relationship with Iran, underlining that resumption of ties will be done step by step.

The current Canadian government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has already expressed willingness to improve relations with Tehran, by lifting a broad ban on financial services, imports and exports.

A reciprocal diplomatic presence was maintained until September 2012, when Canada closed its embassy in Tehran and expelled Iranian diplomats from Ottawa for various reasons, including Irans non-compliance with United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding its nuclear program.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper then called Iran the worlds most serious threat to international peace, the statement, which became one of the main reasons for a halt in diplomatic ties between Tehran and Ottawa.

Canada announced its willingness to resume discussions with Iran, including on the possibility of restoring diplomatic contacts, following adoption of JCPOA.

--

Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Sr. (formerly known as Louis X) tore into President Barack Obama over the weekend, saying that the President has favored Israel and the gay community while sidelining Black Americans.

In his Sunday sermon. Farrakhan said the presidents legacy is not with the Affordable Care Act, but is instead in the street with your suffering people. Farrakhan went on to say Obama didnt earn a legacy with the black community, even though we put you there. You fought for the rights of gay people; you fought for the rights of this people and that people, he said. You fight for Israel. Your people are suffering and dying in the streets.

The Muslim leader urged Obama to come on back to the hood after leaving the White House and become a community organizer once again.

Farrakhan has not supported President since 2014 when he called him thefirst Jewish president, due to Obamas support for the 2011 military intervention in Libya, which Farrakhan strongly opposed due to his own support for Muammar Gaddafi

In recent years, the embrace of Dianetics under Farrakhan has drawn much criticism that the Nation of Islam is becoming too close to the Church of Scientology and the ideas of its founder L. Ron Hubbard, whom Farrakhan has said he respects. Farrakhan has praised Hubbard, saying he was exceedingly valuable to every Caucasian person on this Earth. Of followers of Scientology, he stated You can still be a Christian; you just wont be a devil Christian. Youll still be a Jew, but you wont be a satanic Jew!

The Nation of Islam has repeatedly denied charges of both Antisemitism and homophobia.

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TIMELINE

Accusations of sexual misconduct against Bobby-Scott Campos Perigo span eight years, according to Delano Police Department reports. Police arrested him for the first time last month.

Summer 2008: A 16-year-old girl told police she and Perigo had sex multiple times. He was 22. Perigo, a volunteer baseball coach at the time, denied those accusations, and the girl refused to undergo a forensics exam. He was not arrested.

Aug. 21, 2009: Perigo told detectives that on July 4, 2009, he groped and fondled a 17-year-old girl in his personal vehicle while she was completely naked, but stopped short of having sex because he did not have a condom. He was a CHP Academy cadet at the time of the incident.

Aug 24, 2009: Perigo resigned his position as a CHP officer in the Newhall area just five days after Delano police launched an investigation into a report Perigo committed lewd and lascivious acts with a couple of teenage girls from Delano.

March 2016: Perigo, now 28, admitted to detectives he carried on a sexual relationship with another 17-year-old student while employed as a student affairs specialist at Delano High School. During a phone call monitored by detectives, he told the girl it wasnt just about hooking up.

Sept. 2016: Perigo, now 29, was arrested for violating a court order barring him from contacting any of the three underage girls with whom he allegedly had sexual relationships. A Tulare County Sheriff's deputy found Perigo and one of those girls in his car in an orchard near the county line late at night Sept. 2.
10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW: Todays guide to the obscure, the possibly relevant and things in between
You can smell the Wonder Bread in Lenexa, KS, again. And its been joined by the delicious aromas of Natures Own, Sunbeam and Cobblestone Bread Co. breads and buns. After a lengthy two-year period of inactivity and an intense four-month renovation by new owner Flowers Foods, the 137,000-sq-ft Wonder Bread bakery in a western suburb of Kansas City is busy once more supplying the central Midwest.

We are pleased to announce the startup of the bakery, and hiring is underway, said Paul Frankum, president of Flowers Baking Co. of Lenexa, in April 2015 when news of the opening became official. Over the past few months, weve been making significant improvements to the facility, including the installation of state-of-the-art baking equipment.

Lenexa was one of 20 closed bread and bun production sites and 36 depots acquired by Flowers Foods, Thomasville, GA, through the 2013 bankruptcy-forced auction of the assets of Hostess Brands (formerly Interstate Bakeries Corp.). The $355 million deal included five bread brands including Wonder Bread. Flowers has been strategic about reopening the shuttered sites to build out its coverage by expanding from its core markets. First was the Henderson, NV, bakery in 2013, followed by Knoxville, TN, a year later. Now, it is Lenexas turn.

It happened fast once the decision was made, said Robert Benton, Flowers senior vice-president and chief manufacturing officer. We went through a construction phase and an equipment phase. We started January 2015 with a 90-day timetable to rebuild and restart the equipment. The plan grew a bit, so we extended it by an extra 30 days. We started the bread line up in early summer 2015 and the bun line 60 days later.

Cluster buns emerge from the high-speed conveyorized proofing-and-baking system .

Location, capacity, markets

Theres no secret about why Flowers was interested in Lenexa. We saw a great location with numerous transportation and product quality synergies, Mr. Benton answered. Additionally, we saw future market expansion and production capabilities.

Establishing a new bakery hub in metropolitan Kansas City made sense. A distribution network was already established in the region. Flowers products were already in the market, but it was a far reach from our Batesville, AR; Atlanta; Bardstown, KY; and Denton, TX, bakeries that were supplying goods here, Mr. Frankum explained. This involved burning a lot of fuel and driving a lot of miles, according to Mr. Benton.

Lenexa gives us the ability to get the pans close to the shoppers, in other words, to be freshest to the market, and we are having a lot of success here, Mr. Frankum added.

The bakerys independent distributor partners currently supply grocery stores and supermarkets primarily, with limited service to private label and foodservice customers. The Lenexa site sits adjacent to I-35 that links the central region of the US from north to southwest. Goods baked here move on tractor trailers and through a DSD network of independent distributors reaching west to Topeka and Wichita, KS; north to Lincoln and Omaha, NE; south to Springfield and Joplin, MO; and east to St. Louis and eastern Illinois.

A lot of our market didnt exist until we opened this bakery, Mr. Frankum observed.

Now, a year after startup, Flowers decision has really paid off, especially the choice to maximize output of buns. Our distributor partners could not have served the market over the Fourth of July holiday without this bakery, Mr. Frankum said. And were able to supplement product to Denton to fill a temporary production gap there.

Flowers sifted through the Hostess assets carefully, selling some locations and transferring equipment to its other bakeries as needed. We knew that Lenexa was one of the best plants Hostess had as far as equipment and location, Mr. Benton said. Thats why we chose it.

Mr. Frankums management team at Flowers Baking Co. of Lenexa includes Todd Hamann, vice-president of sales; Amber Mangiaracino, director of manufacturing; Brian Rutecki, director of engineering; and Damien Butler, director of human resources.

With a total of 137,354 sq ft under roof on 10.2 acres, the facility uses 50,190 sq ft for processing, 13,776 sq ft for packaging and 54,360 sq ft for warehousing. The office and ancillary facilities cover 19,028 sq ft. The bakery employs 160 company staff members and has 142 outsourced associates, including sanitation through Ambassador Services. Approximately 125 independent distributor partners sell fresh bakery foods to retail customers in the market every day.

Lenexa houses two processing lines, one for bread, the other for buns, and it has seven packaging lines, four for bread and three for buns. Packaging will soon expand with the addition of two bulk bun packers. Product styles comprise round-top bread, giant and king sandwich loaves, cluster and individual hamburger buns, and cluster hot dog buns. Bread is offered as single loaves and in 2-packs, while buns go out in 8-, 12- and 16-packs.

Four exterior silos, with more than 400,000 lb total capacity, supply flour needs at Lenexa. Mr. Frankum noted with pride, The wheat is grown in Kansas, milled in Kansas and baked in Kansas. We like it that this bakerys supply chain is so close to the farmers field.

(From left) Robert Benton, senior vice-president and chief manufacturing officer; Ken Buxton, vice-president of project management; Amber Mangiaracino, director of manufacturing at Lenexa; and Tim Gentry, vice-president, compliance and field service .

Brownfield investment extended

Flowers original plan for reviving Lenexa was to invest $10 million in modernization. That changed, and the timetable was adjusted, too. For the most part, we stayed on schedule, Mr. Benton said. Although we have exceeded the projected cost, we also expanded the scope of the project, including the addition of a $1 million tray washer project. That project, which included both a tray washer and installation in a room separated from the production area, was completed during July.

In many ways, the baking industry is a large, friendly community. While competition can bring out the sharp elbows, theres plenty of mutual respect. Mr. Benton and his colleagues readily acknowledged the effort that went into Hostess design and layout of the original plant, a brownfield site that previously served as an English muffin processor and before that as an automotive parts supply facility. They put together a great plant, he said, but we made a lot of changes to make it ours.

Ken Buxton, vice-president of project management for Flowers Foods, agreed, Every project involves some curve balls. We learned that from Henderson.

Mr. Frankum noted, We got good value for what we spent on the bakery and the renovation.

Flowers redid several systems to match technologies at the companys other bakeries. The bread oven, for example, was fully refurbished, and packaging operations were increased. Further developments included the addition of an in-floor conveying system and the redesign of the existing tray stacking system to handle a common basket size. In other situations, such as the mixing and batching system, engineers completely replaced the existing setup and also redid the mixer room with a new foundation and mounting pads and mixers repurposed from the Biddeford, ME, bakery, acquired in the Hostess deal and sold later.

The company operates a proprietary batching system developed and maintained by Higgins Electric. It synchronizes with the companywide SAP enterprise resources planning system and is implemented in every other Flowers Foods bakery. This plant was SAP from day one, Mr. Frankum said.

Being a brownfield project with the existing processing equipment left in good shape made Lenexa somewhat different from the typical Flowers bakery project. Since we were not partnering with the equipment manufacturers to build new technology equipment, we used the best solutions from our existing bakeries, Mr. Benton explained.

Cost and speed-to-market are usually the biggest advantages to brownfield sites, he added. However, retooling and adding automation to an existing bakery to meet our current operating standards is still expensive.

Perhaps a better question might be, What is the difference from when the plant closed to today?  Mr. Benton asked. The answer, of course, is that we invested the necessary capital to fully modernize the plant, making it much more efficient and a better place to work.

What would he do differently on the next such project? In future projects, we should consider bringing the people on earlier in the project to allow them to train, develop and create a greater pride of ownership, Mr. Benton said.

Twin makeup lines assure a steady supply of buns, important to near-term as the bakery gears up for foodservice clients with installation of two bulk bun packagers .

Revive and update

When Tim Gentry, vice-president, compliance and field service, Mr. Buxton and Mr. Benton sat down with the Flowers engineering and operations teams, they knew Lenexa would present a few challenges. You have to deal with whats in front of you and deal with it fast. What we had at Lenexa was four months to restart the equipment, not 18, Mr. Benton said.

Earlier projects with existing buildings, notably Newton, NC, and Denton, had land available to extend out the walls; Lenexa did not. The company prefers straight-line layouts with processing lines installed in parallel and separated by a wide aisle, usually painted red. This building, however, is more square than rectangular, so lines are shoe-horned in. Still, a large red aisle runs between them, although following a slightly zig-zag path.

Flowers dramatically revamped the mixing area that supplies sponges and doughs for bread and buns. Four of the five original mixers were changed out for ETMW (now AMF Bakery Systems) horizontal systems  each capable of turning out 2,500 lb of dough. Flowers completely rebuilt these mixers.

The original layout installed mixers in a deep, below-grade pit to give operators better access to the tops of bowls for hand-adds, but maintenance access to motors and gear boxes was difficult. Flowers pulled out the old mixers and completely replaced the foundation so that the new mixers sit on sturdy, reinforced concrete footings. We poured a lot of concrete, Mr. Frankum recalled.

Engineers also moved the mixers forward and away from the wall that separates the mixing area from the fermentation room. This vastly improved access to the mixers for preventive maintenance and servicing, as well as the inevitable replacement.

Additionally, Flowers brought in Workhorse Automation to update the existing Woodson multi-tier fermentation room located immediately behind the mixer battery. Another project doubled the size of the glycol cooling system that served the mixers. Workhorse also refurbished the existing Emtrol multi-tier pan storage-and-retrieval system and redid its controls.

Flowers updated all four slicer-bagger bread lines to keep up with the bakerys increasing speeds and customer demand .

Reworking, automating

Changes for the bread line were simpler, although Mr. Buxton noted that Flowers took care to rebuild the APV Baker 175-ft tunnel oven with new chains and drives.

To supplement the MAC and Shick bulk flour set-up, the company added a large Laramore dust reclaim system to the bread line, one of many steps to improve the work environment and plant sanitation.

The APV Baker (now Baker Perkins) proofer, Sasib (now Stewart Systems) depanner and pan stacker/unstacker machines along with Newsmith pan cleaner were also repaired and updated. The overhead bread and bun coolers were rebuilt. Basically, we went through the bakery as if we were doing a major PM, Mr. Benton explained. And the time to do that was when we were still down.

Bun operations here put two AMF AccuPan systems to work. This dual line layout is typical of other Hostess plants we have redone, Mr. Benton said, noting that for new installations, Flowers prefers single, larger capacity lines.

Metal detection, using Fortress Technology systems, was replaced or updated in both wrapping departments.

The big changes here involved much more automation for packaging of bread and buns. Matt Stanford and the team from Bettendorf Stanford provided great support and were key to getting both our bread and bun wrapping departments going again, Mr. Benton noted.

Bringing up the output speeds for both lines meant adding extra capacity for backup and to avoid slowing during changeovers. Two new AMF bulk bun baggers have been recently installed in response to anticipated growth in the foodservice market.

Post-packaging operations, however, got a substantial upgrade with installation of a Cannon in-floor basket stack conveying system. Micro-loaders at the end of the wrappers mechanically fill waiting delivery baskets, which move into AMF automatic basket stackers and out onto the in-floor conveyor. Each stack gets a date- and time-stamped bar-coded tag that displays the run information, as well as distribution information.

The tray handling system makes this operation much more efficient, Mr. Buxton observed.

In Lenexas shipping department, a Pcdata Distrib Put to Light paperless dispatch system now manages order assembly. The in-floor conveyor moves stacked baskets to the distribution department, where distribution employees arrange the stacks in the pack-out square, customer trailers or inventory, based on the pcdata tag information.

We know exactly where every product is, in here, in the truck, in the distribution location and at the customer, Mr. Frankum said. This is all done in real time. We can see at any moment where we are. The distribution system is tied into the production system. Together with the basket loading, stacking and conveying system, this drives labor efficiencies. It also helps our independent distributor partners maximize their sales and service.

This is possible because Flowers uses a common tray size throughout its 49-plant system. Hostess operated with multiple basket sizes and flat tray configurations. With the addition of tray washing in the immediate future, basket handling will become a closed loop. Some aspects, such as automatic basket loading, had been done in this bakery before.

Fortunately, this bakery is not located in an environmental containment area, so no oxidizers are required for the oven stacks. However, it does operate a wastewater treatment system, which Flowers started up again when it took possession of the plant. No water or air permitting issues were involved.

New controls now integrate the bakerys 3-tier robotic pan storage-and-retrieval system into its enterprise resource planning system .

A technician labor plant

Behind all this effort was the need to bring Lenexa into the Flowers system of technician labor plants. This operating philosophy emphasizes automation that wrings out manpower costs and speeds up output but, in turn, requires a technically knowledgeable staff capable of working with the HMI control terminals and other advanced systems. The upgrades we put in here meant that we needed a more technical level of staffing, Mr. Benton explained.

Flowers has an active internship program that helps it recruit individuals educated at Kansas State University (KSU) and AIB International. Ms. Mangiaracino, Lenexas director of manufacturing, joined the company after graduating from KSU and began working during the startup at Denton and other new Flowers bakeries. She interned at the company as an undergrad. Drew Ladd, a superintendent at Lenexa, was a KSU freshman when he landed a Flowers internship after attending an American Society of Baking meeting. Following graduation, he worked at both the companys Denton and Oxford, PA, sites.

For operators, the technician labor approach starts with the recruiting effort. At Lenexa, initial recruiting efforts were, in large part, managed by Ambassador Services. Technical expertise, whether in the food industry or not, was particularly valued. The bakery works with local technical schools and community colleges to recruit mechanics, electricians and engineers, a project directed by Larry Brewer, Flowers vice-president of engineering.

The Kansas City region has a very low unemployment rate, so we had to work extra hard to make sure we offered competitive pay and benefits programs,

Mr. Frankum said. And we have a unique culture in Flowers that we work to instill in our associates.

To support this quality of staff, Flowers manages the bakery environment to make it as comfortable as possible. Nothing can alter the 100F outside temperatures of a Kansas summer day, but Flowers bakery engineers radically improved the air handling system within the plant, completely replacing the ventilation and opting for an environmentally friendly AC system for the sales and administrative offices. Flour dust collection was another priority, to mitigate sanitation problems and potential airborne health hazards. Plant lighting now uses LEDs to markedly brighten the interior.

Baking is a tough, hot business. We made the effort to improve and increase the airflow in the plant, Mr. Benton noted. The bakery set up hydration stations consisting of a water cooler and supply of cups at each work station.

Adding to employee amenities, the company converted the thrift shop into a break room. Large exterior windows let in plenty of daylight, something the old break area lacked. The human resources office is conveniently located just down the hall. Even the old break room, now used for training (and as a tornado shelter), was upgraded with a new coat of paint, better lighting and a kitchen. There was a lot of focus on making Lenexa a good place to work, Mr. Benton said.

With a technology-savvy workforce in place, Flowers is getting ready to launch continuous improvement programs. It will extend 5S, a workplace organization method, to Lenexa. This is a corporate initiative with a methodology of sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain. Safety is also a critical component.

Regulations enforcing the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) go into force in September, and Lenexa is ready with a new manager overseeing food safety. Charlie Moon, Flowers vice-president of technical service, QA and regulatory, has been working with the staff here and at other company bakeries to get them ready in time. This plant is in good shape with regard to FSMA, Mr. Benton noted.
iStock/Thinkstock(LONDON) -- A photographer who says he took the Skittles photo used by Donald Trump Jr. in a tweet on the "Syrian refugee problem," tells ABC News that he is himself a refugee.



"Im really really appalled by having my image, you know, on Twitter used against the refugees," said David Kittos, 48.

Trump Jr., the eldest son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, posted a graphic on Twitter featuring an image of a bowl of Skittles, with a caption equating Syrian refugees to poisoned candy, which sparked outrage among many on social media.

This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN  Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016

If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? the tweet's graphic says, "That's our Syrian refugee problem."



David Kittos, 48, who told ABC News he took the photo and who has what appears to be an identical image posted on Flickr from 2010, said, "How someone could twist things, and I dont know, use my image to compare some sort of poor refugee to a poison sort of Skittle, that is just really beyond belief."



Kittos, who said he lives in the United Kingdom and left Cyprus as a refugee when he was 6, claims that he was not asked permission for use of his photo.



"I havent put the image for sale, and it was all rights reserved, so no, I wasnt really expecting anyone to want to take it," Kittos said. "I have had stuff stolen before but when I got an email from some news website I was sort of really annoyed and disgusted to be honest."



Kittos told ABC News he does photography as a hobby and took the Skittles photo while experimenting with different flash techniques in his living room six years ago, never expecting it to become part of a political campaign.



The plight of refugees is an issue close to Kittos, who recalls fleeing Cyprus as a child.



"We all had to kind of just take our stuff and run away. It was quite frightening for all people who had to do it, especially for the people who actually lost family and not just their belongings," he said.



If he could talk to Donald Trump, Kittos said he would ask him to apologize to Syrian refugees. "But I dont expect he will do that," he said.



The Trump campaign responded to a question about the photo with a more general comment on the controversy over the tweet.



"America has become less safe under Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Clinton's planned 550 percent increase in Syrian refugees is a dangerous proposal that will put American lives at risk," the campaign's senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, said in a statement.



"Speaking the truth might upset those who would rather be politically correct than safe, but the American people want a change, and only Donald Trump will do what's needed to protect us," the statement said.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
State Attorney General Pam Bondi is talking about a contribution from Donald Trump's foundation.

Bondi scrutinized for receiving $25k from Trump

State AG denies she did anything wrong

She says her office only received one complaint at the time of donation

She defended the donation on Tuesday, saying it wasnt a payoff to keep her from investigating Trump University.



Bondi spoke of her respect for Trump and his family, noting that while she knew his family during the 2013 campaign, she didnt solicit money specifically from him.

"I respect him, I respect his family, and I was calling friends and family and many people because I was running for re-election, Bondi said.

Im a career prosecutor, she said. I am proud and I will never let any money or anyone effect what I do.

This comes after Bondi was scrutinized by critics for receiving $25,000 from Trump around the same time his institution Trump University came under legal question.



I would never, ever trade any kind of campaign donation, thats absurd, for some type of favor to anyone, Bondi said. He donated to multiple candidates, Republican and Democrats.



Bondi continued to deny she did anything wrong and points out the complaints made against Trump University in the past have been sent to New York. Its attorney general is taking legal action.

She also said her office had only received one complaint at the time of the donation.


Andres Arauz, 18, has a prosthetic arm  but that hasnt stopped him from discovering his impressive musical talents.

Andres Arauz was a longtime Tampa Shriners patient



18-year-old Ecuadorian has had arm prosthetic adjusted yearly

He marked final fitting with a musical performance



Arauz has been a patient at Tampa Shriners Hospital since he was a toddler.

Doctors there said a condition called amniotic band syndrome caused him to be born without his left arm.

With occupational therapy and yearly adjustments to his prosthetic arm, Arauz was still able to learn to play both the piano and guitar.

"It's great to just play, Arauz said.

The young musician lives in Ecuador with his family but travels to Tampa for appointments with a doctor. Because he's now 18, Tuesday marked his last one.

"It's kind of sad to see him go, prosthetist Bryan Sinnot said. It's like your own kid graduating from high school. You know he's moving out into the world."

As a farewell, Arauz played for staff and patients one last time. The young man said he is sad to say goodbye but eager to move forward.

Arauz said he has one semester left at the conservatory he attends in Ecuador and then plans to attend college.
Federal officials have charged the suspect in Saturday's bombing in Manhattan with planting bombs in both New York City and New Jersey.

Ahmad Khan Rahami faces federal charges for planting bombs in New York City, New Jersey

Rahami also faces 5 counts of attempted murder of a police officer

RELATED: Man in NY, NJ blasts charged with attempted murder

According to the criminal complaint, Ahmad Khan Rahami faces charges of use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use, destruction of property by means of fire or explosive, and use of a destructive device in furtherance of a crime of violence.

The news comes hours after law enforcement sources say the suspect's father alerted authorities about his son's potentially destructive path.

Law enforcement sources say two years ago, Rahami's father told police his son was a terrorist, which put him on federal agents' radar.

Sources say the father later recanted the statement to the FBI.

According to law enforcement sources, the FBI stopped looking into Rahami after full background and database checks yielded no evidence.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the father says he contacted authorities because his son was causing trouble and not because of terrorist motivations.

Mohammad Rahami, suspect's father: They checked that almost two months. They said he's OK, he's clear, he's not a terrorist. I said OK. Now they say he's a terrorist. I say OK.



They checked that almost two months. They said he's OK, he's clear, he's not a terrorist. I said OK. Now they say he's a terrorist. I say OK. Q: Why did you call the FBI two years ago?



Why did you call the FBI two years ago? Mohammad Rahami: He doing bad.



He doing bad. Q: What did he do bad?



What did he do bad? Mohammad Rahami: He stabbed my son, he hit my wife, and I put him to jail.

New Jersey State Police got into a shootout Monday with the 28-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen after receiving a tip about a man sleeping in a bar doorway in Linden.

Two officers were shot. Both have been released from the hospital.

Rahami remains hospitalized. He faces five counts of attempted murder of a police officer.

Surveillance video allegedly shows Rahami on 23rd Street in Chelsea Saturday night, just hours before the explosion that injured 29 people.

The FBI says he is also directly linked to an explosion earlier in the day in Seaside Park, N.J.

Officials say they believe Rahami acted alone.

Officials are trying to understand how and why Rahami, who emigrated to the U.S. as a child, allegedly became radicalized.

A federal complaint filed Tuesday says that when he was captured by police in New Jersey, he had a handwritten journal in which he praised terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born al Qaeda figure killed in a U.S. drone strike.

But there are still plenty of other questions about Rahami that law enforcement needs answers to, including whether anyone helped him, or even knew he was plotting an attack.

"We need to speak to everybody involved. Anybody in his circle, we need to speak to," said Police Commissioner James O'Neill. "This is all an important part to figure out why he did this."

One focus is on trips he took to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Faiza Patel, the co-director of the national security program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, says it is not easy for the FBI to pinpoint people who are becoming so radicalized that they will commit violence.

"This is not the only case where that has happened," Patel said. "The older Tsarnaev brother who carried out the Boston marathon bombing also investigated by the FBI."

She says along with investigations, authorities must connect with members of various communities to find out who the terrorists are.
Donald Trump returned to North Carolina's voter-rich Piedmont Tuesday, but he's also making a stop where presidential candidates aren't normally seen, in the rural East.

Donald Trump made made campaign stops in North Carolina on Tuesday

The campaign stops focused on national security, immigration

FLORIDA DECIDES COVERAGE: Latest headlines | How to vote in Florida

The Republican nominee scheduled two rallies in the battleground state Tuesday. It's his seventh visit to this state since winning his party's nomination in July.

Trump kicked off the first of two stops in North Carolina with a mid-day rally at High Point University.

He started his speech by talking about national security, referencing the bombings in New York and New Jersey over the weekend. He says the country must protect itself from and defeat radical Islamic terrorism.

"Immigration security is national security," Trump said. "It's just a plain fact that our current immigration system makes no real attempt to determine the views of the people entering our country. We have no idea who they are (or) what they think."

He also blamed Democrat Hillary Clinton's actions while secretary of state.

"She allowed thousands of criminal aliens to be released into our communities because their home countries would not take them back. They were too bad, they didn't want them, so we took them," Trump said.

Trump promised to cut taxes, renegotiate trade agreements, and create more jobs.

"My economic agenda can be summed up in three beautiful words: jobs, jobs, jobs," Trump said.

He also renewed his appeal for African-American voters' support.

"What do you have to lose? Your education is broken, your communities are unsafe. There are no jobs," Trump said.

While the rally was going on, hundreds of High Point University students, alum and professors held a peaceful protest outside. Protesters said they don't want to see hateful rhetoric or spite in their home.

One protester says she feels the school's decision to host Trump doesn't align with a philosophy of diversity.

"If you go to this school you know that diversity is slipping further and further down on their list of priorities, and it's sad. I want to see a diversity of thought and ideas and races and creeds but that's not the environment we have here," said Liz Reichart, HPU Student Diversity Council.

From High Point, Trump headed east and made a stop in Kenansville to speak at the Duplin County Events Center, commonly a locale for agricultural shows and festivals.

During his rally in Duplin County, he was quick to take jabs at Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and he discussed his stance on everything from national security to employment.

Trump has been coming to North Carolina nearly every week for public events. North Carolina is considered a must-win for Trump on the path to get enough electoral votes to win Nov. 8.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton visited Greensboro last week.

The latest Elon poll shows Donald Trump with a slight lead over Hillary Clinton in North Carolina.
Originally posted: Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 at 5:05 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be in Orlando Wednesday for a rally and a fundraising event.

Hillary Clinton coming to Orlando Wednesday

Rally to focus on the economy

FLORIDA DECIDES COVERAGE: Latest headlines | How to vote in Florida

Clinton will talk to supporters at Frontline Outreach Center on CR Smith Street in Orlando at 2 p.m. Doors open at noon.

The Clinton campaign says the candidate will talk about her plans to build an "inclusive economy," which welcomes people with disabilities.

The campaign has long touted the candidate's decades-long work with the disabled and increasing access for the disabled.

Clinton's plans include eliminating subminimum wages for disabled workers, creating new business partnerships and increasing integrated employement. She also will talk about an initiative to connect people with Autism with jobs.



Those interested in attending the rally can sign up on the Clinton campaign website.

The Frontline Outreach Youth and Family Center is one of Orlando's oldest early learning centers. The center also provides after school programs, family education and adult education and career training programs.

2016 campaign stops along the I-4 Corridor

Click on the red dots to see campaign stops by Republican Donald Trump. Click on the blue dots to see campaign stops by Hillary Clinton.


Stacy Koltiska said that she will never forget the look in the little boy's eyes. As an elementary school lunchroom staffer, her job was to work the register for the children when they paid for their meals.

But the boy had a negative balance on his account, and a new policy in the Canon-McMillan, Pa., school district this year prevents cafeteria workers from serving a hot meal to students who owe more than $25. Koltiska said she had to follow the policy and was ordered to refuse the boy his hot meal because he couldn't pay for it.

"As a Christian, I have an issue with this," said Koltiska, of Canonsburg, Pa. "It's sinful and shameful is what it is."

Rather than continue to enforce the policy at Wylandville Elementary School in Eighty Four, Pa., Koltiska tendered her resignation last week. Koltiska said in an interview that she had worked for the school district for two years. She said she was stunned by the new policy, which began this fall.

Students who were refused the hot meal instead got a sandwich made of two slices of wheat bread and a single, cold slice of "government cheese," Koltiska said. The contents of the hot lunch, such as chicken nuggets or corn dog bites, were thrown away, Koltiska said, even though parents would still be charged the full regular price of $2.05 for the meal. Koltiska said that she resigned out of a moral obligation.

"God is love, and we should love one another and be kind," Koltiska said. "There's enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong."

The Canon-McMillan school district's superintendent, Matthew Daniels, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. He told Action News 4 WTAE that the policy has cut down on the number of parents who don't keep current on their lunch accounts, and that the policy does not target those who qualify for financial assistance.

"There has never been the intent with the adoption of this policy to shame or embarrass a child," he told Action News 4, noting that more than 300 families owed the district between $60,000 and $100,000 annually before the policy was put in place; now there are 70 families who owe the district a total of $20,000.

Koltiska said that she knows what it's like to feel hunger. She grew up north of Pittsburgh and survived on food stamps and free lunches at school. "I know the shame I felt, and it was of no fault of my own," Koltiska said, noting that when she was young, she got a job reading out bingo numbers and saved up enough money for a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

"I thought if I could dress like the other kids then they wouldn't know I was poor," she said.

Since resigning, Koltiska said that she has received messages of support from inmates in a nearby prison who want to donate their food to the schoolchildren and a nun who told Koltiska that she started a revolution "with a cheese sandwich."

Koltiska said she believes the school administration made a mistake with the new policy. "They're suits at a board meeting," she said. "They are not the ones facing a child and looking them in the eye and taking their food away."
Ryan Pelham

After more than three years of legal wrangling, Beaumont ISD has settled a civil case brought against the district by a former Central High School student who contended her grades were altered by former administrator Patricia Lambert.

Both the district and plaintiff C'Brionne Hendrix agreed to settle last month, according to an Aug. 19 filing submitted by a U.S. Court of Appeals clerk.
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Beaumont officials are considering off-loading three large city-owned properties, including the old health department building on Washington Boulevard and a downtown lot that once housed the famed LaSalle Hotel.

Council huddled in a closed session on Tuesday, presumably to come up with asking prices for the properties.

The city's former public health department at 950 Washington Boulevard is actually a collection of perhaps four buildings.

In late 2015, the city moved into its new Public Health Department building at 3040 College St., collecting all of the city's public health units under one roof.

(Story continues below)

From the street, the old health department complex looks like a grand old home that could be someone's dream fixer-upper. Inside, the 50-year-old structure is a rabbit warren of rooms.

>> Take a look at other historic homes in Southeast Texas in the gallery above

The Jefferson County Appraisal District values the land on which the old health complex sits at $113,880 and the buildings at $106,700 for a total of $220,580.

That, however, is just a placeholder valuation because it's been city-owned for the past half-century, meaning the value could increase.

The city also would like to find a buyer for a 1.9-acre lot at 320 College St.

The lot has lain empty for 21 years, just west of the main library after several demolition charges brought down the 12-story LaSalle Hotel in mid-November 1995, an event called the Beaumont Big Blast.

Now, its space is a nicely manicured empty lot flanked by Cathedral Square townhouses to the west, Richard Design Services engineering firm to its north and the 40-year-old library on its east.

The third property, a warehouse at 125 Magnolia Ave., is also located downtown.

When the city took ownership, it planned to use the warehouse to store police and other city fleet vehicles. Just to its east is the city's Event Centre complex with its lake, all-access playground, skateboard park and soon-to-built Best Years Center.

DWallach@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/dwallach
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The rust-colored, smelly water coursing through Bridge City residents' pipes for the past two years will likely remain that way until at least spring, an environmental investigator told a large crowd during Tuesday's city council meeting.

Bob Bowcock, who works with famous environmentalist activist Erin Brockovich, was in the small Orange County town to offer his input on the city's long-running water issues, which city officials announced earlier this year would be resolved with the installation of a new $1 million filtration system.

Work on the filters was halted earlier this month when it surfaced that the city's contractor had not secured state-required approval for the project.

City Manager Jerry Jones said in a previous interview that there was confusion about whether filtration is considered water treatment, which is regulated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Bowcock, who said he is working with the city to fix the water problems, said he came to Bridge City after receiving a number of complaints from the city's residents. He spoke before a community comment portion of the council meeting, which was standing room only.

While no residents spoke after Bowcock detailed how an enhanced filtration system would be put in place to remove excess chemicals and contaminants from the water, several thanked him after his presentation.

Jones said he is heading to Austin today to meet with TCEQ officials about the city's filtration system.

In a Sept. 8 statement, TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow said Bridge City bypassed the submittal process and failed to comply with state requirements when it began construction on its new filtration system.

Morrow said the city and the contractor were notified that the state agency would work with them once the proper documents were submitted.

The filters, which are supposed to clean out excess iron and manganese found in Bridge City's water, are near completion, Jones said earlier this month.

City Council approved the project last year as a fix to a years-long water discoloration issue that culminated in an accidental overuse of a treatment chemical in 2014. The extra chemicals turned the water brown, staining clothes, bathtubs and sinks.

In June, TCEQ notified the city it had violated maximum contaminant level for trihalomethanes, a byproduct of chlorine used to disinfect water.

Bridge City officials sent a letter to around 3,400 water customers stating the substance, if consumed in excess, could cause liver and kidney problems.

As of early September, the trihalomethanes levels were back down, and the well site where it was detected was offline, Jones said in a previous interview.

City officials have said the water is still OK to drink.

SFlores@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/_saraeflores
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This presidential campaign season has been filled with plenty of outrageous remarks and the latest political commentary came not from Donald Trump, but his son, Donald Trump Jr.

In a tweet on Monday, Trump, Jr., posted a photo of a bowl of Skittles, which read, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?"

"That's our Syrian refugee problem," the photo concludes.

In the accompanying message, he wrote: "This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first."

Twitter reacted immediately. Some posted memes and photos mocking the analogy with humor and derision. Others simply posted graphic photos of Syrian children from the news, with the word, "Skittles."

The tweet follows the arrest of New York and New Jersey bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, an immigrant from Afghanistan. Rahami was charged with five counts of attempted murder, stemming from a shootout with police officers during his capture Monday morning.

Update: Wrigley America, the company that owns Skittles, issued the following statement in response on Tuesday:

Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it is an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing.

Scroll through the slideshow above to see a variety of reactions to the Skittles tweet from Donald Trump Jr.
Popular "YouTube" physician Mike Evans, MD, will have a huge affect on family medicine after accepting a new role with Apple, according to CBC News Toronto.

So who is this physician Apple is trusting to help develop the future of "worldwide health innovation"?

Dr. Evans is a Toronto-based physician known as "DocMikeEvans" online and formerly on staff at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. Here are five things to know:

1. Apple and Dr. Evans partnered previously on a new line of digital healthcare. He is known for his YouTube videos. The videos are cartoons featuring Dr. Evans' voice to explain common medical problems.

2. He currently serves as the lead of digital preventative medicine at Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute in Toronto and is an associate professor of family medicine and community medicine at the University of Toronto. He will remain in Toronto and commute between there and Cupertino, Calif., in his new role.

3. In addition to his regular practice, Dr. Evans was a physician at the Sochi Olympics and has been profiled in both professional journals, including JAMA, and publications such as Readers Digest. "Orange is the New Black."

4. The Canadian Medical Association named him among the top 10 innovators in health and he has been listed as one of the top 45 Canadians over 45. The Royal Society of Canada recognized him with the 2015 McNeil Medal for outstanding communication of science and medicine to the public. One of his videos about the health benefits of exercise was even referenced in "Orange is the New Black."

5. Dr. Evans believes physicians will prescribe apps in the future and phones will be able to assist patients in making healthier life decisions.
Despite average prices dropping to meet a narrower market and hospital systems partnering to increase purchasing power while reimbursements are cut, the GI/endoscopic device market is expected to grow.

Here's what you should know.

1. Growth is expected because of the prevalence of GI-related conditions and the massive adoption of colorectal cancer screening programs.

2. The flexible endoscope makes up one of the largest portions of the market because its high average selling price and its low lifespan dictate a constant renewal cycle.

3. The majority of devices are sold to hospital systems and ASCs.

4. The anti-reflux market is the fastest growing segment, and that growth is expected to continue because of the disproportionate number of people who suffer from the disease and who get care for it; 22 million and 12.1 million, respectively.

5. Boston Scientific followed by Olympus are the leading competitors.

More gastroenterology and endoscopy news:

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Chinese billionaire Tianqiao Chen has a more than 12.9 percent stake in Community Health Systems after recently buying nearly 3.5 million more shares of the Franklin, Tenn.-based for-profit hospital operator, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Mr. Chen and his group of companies paid just over $9 on average per share, bringing the total price of the transaction to $31.94 million.

A pioneer in China's online gaming industry, Mr. Chen's net worth is estimated by Forbes to be at more than $1 billion.

Mr. Chen, who began buying CHS at the end of the second quarter, upped his stake in the company as it is exploring options with financial sponsors. Private equity firm Apollo Global Management is reportedly in discussions to acquire CHS' assets. Some real estate investment trusts are also interested in the company's assets, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

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Close to 18,000 people gathered at Epic Systems' headquarters in Verona, Wis., this week for the vendor's annual Users Group Meeting. Hospital and health system leaders shared their experiences with Epic's platform, and Epic leaders discussed new developments and offerings in its software suite. This idea of collaborating to build on successes, and doing so with a humanitarian mindset, was the underlying theme of Tuesday morning's executive address, delivered by Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner.

Dressed like the Mad Hatter in brown boots, a coat jacket with coattails and a top hat, to fit with UGM's "Adventures in Wonderland" theme, Ms. Faulkner outlined milestones for Epic and Epic customers present. She also shared plans for the future, all while underscoring the importance of working together.

"We're not going to be the best at everything, and that's whycollaboration amongst health systems is so important," Ms. Faulkner says.

Here are eight takeaways from this year's UGM executive address.

1. Users from 13 countries gathered in Verona for the UGM, which began Monday and runs through Thursday. In the past year, users from two new countries  Finland and Lebanon  joined the Epic community. The past year marked a number of international go-lives as well, including in the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Denmark and Singapore.

2. Ms. Faulkner mentioned 25 hospitals  more than 7,000 providers  joined the Epic community in the past year through Epic Community Connect, a program that enables enterprise hospitals and health systems to extend their software license to affiliated practices. For example, Tewksbury, Mass.-based Covenant Health and Chesapeake (Va.) RegionalMedicalCenter are implementing Epic via Bon Secours Health System in Marriottsville, Md., and Southeastern Health in Lumberton, N.C., will implement via Charlotte, N.C.-based Carolinas HealthCare System. Ms. Faulkner said 70 percent of Epic customers are part of the Community Connect program.

3. Ms. Faulkner identifies Epic as a programming shop  the company spends just over 50 percent of operating expenses on research and development each year, and the vendor does not acquire outside systems or platforms. She said this helps ensure the Epic platform is natively integrated and the patient is at the center of everything, no matter what the module. "When you build [a product], then you have to think of the whole frameworkand the whole framework around that product. When you acquire something, you acquire something that was built as a standalone and wasn't there to optimize the whole," she said.

Instead, Ms. Faulkner said Epic seeks to harmonize all elements of patient care. Just like population health platforms like Epic's Healthy Planet pull information from other sources to give providers one comprehensive view for case management, Epic is leveraging a design philosophy called "Happy Together" that draws information from various data sources and points of interfacing  like patients using MyChart and affiliates using EpicCare Link  to aggregate and present that data in one place chronologically.

"You don't need multiple MyCharts," Ms. Faulkner said.

4. Carl Dvorak, president of Epic, took the stage after Ms. Faulkner's address to discuss upcoming initiatives and research and development. Included among the developments he discussed, Mr. Dvorak outlined how Epic is trying to address the growing opioid epidemic. Epic data indicates about 20 million patients have 39 million prescriptions for opioids. Mr. Dvorak said Epic is working to integrate prescription drug management programs in different states to help deal with the crisis.

Additionally, Epic is analyzing medical chart data, such as how often a patient clicks the pain pump button, to determine predictive models to help manage opioids. "We're using that information and their information from the chart to build out predictive models to help you help the patientin controlling and managing opioids," Mr. Dvorak said.

5. In her address, Ms. Faulkner announced four key upcoming programs and initiatives. First, she introduced a new approach to installing Epic, one that intends to be faster and cheaper. Epic employees will do a portion of the installation for clients and provide technical support staff. Ms. Faulkner said this model should prove less costly than hospitals deploying their own IT teams for installations. "We think that's less expensive because since our folks do this repeatedly, they'll be able to [complete an installation with less labor]," Ms. Faulkner said. "You can reduce your staff, reduce your costs." What's more, Ms. Faulkner said this could especially benefit smaller, prospective customers who were unsure if they could afford Epic because of costs associated with hiring people.

6. Second, Ms. Faulkner discussed Cosmos, a research network drawing all customers' data into one giant repository for clients to access for research purposes. Right now, given the number of patient records in Epic's platform, the data of 180 million patients  deidentified  would be in one place for analysis.

7. The last two initiatives embody a much broader and humanitarian essence of collaboration. "What are we doing to help the world?" Ms. Faulkner asked.

Epic partnered with AmericanUniversity of Beirut in Lebanon to help refugees with their healthcare. There are 1.2 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which has a population of 4.5 million. Nearly one in five people living in Lebanon is a refugee. "It's very challenging to take care of refugees," Ms. Faulkner said.

Epic and AUB are planning a system in which patients in Lebanon would receive their basic health information on a thumb drive and be able to share that information with other providers and organizations in other countries.

8. On a domestic scale, Epic is launching an initiative to support federally qualified health centers. Epic will offer free licenses and maintenance to healthcare systems that supply tertiary, specialty and inpatient care to local FQHCs. For FQHCs that can't afford or are too busy to install Epic, Epic will be available to help with the installs. For health systems and hospitals that have already extended Epic to an FQHC, Ms. Faulkner said Epic will work with them to potentially reduce the cost of software maintenance.

9. Epic continues to grow year after year. Whether in terms of new clients, new countries or new initiatives, Ms. Faulkner said the company will continue to look at the past to help inform the future.

"I admire and honor what you all do," Ms. Faulkner said. "I consider it a privilege for our company to try and be helpful to you."

After speaking for slightly more than an hour, the Mad Hatter bid adieu.

"It's late, it's late, and there's a tea party I have to get to," she said.

More articles on Epic:

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Nebraska Medicine selects Epic's Healthy Planet population health platform

21 hospitals, health systems seeking Cerner, MEDITECH, Epic talent
As hospitals and health systems embrace technology to achieve improved quality of care and greater access and convenience for patients, they have begun developing and implementing telemedicine programs. Dave Skibinski, President and CEO of SnapMD, knew this when he co-founded the health IT company in 2013.

Glendale, Calif.-based SnapMD positions itself as a virtual care company in the telemedicine space.

"We view telemedicine as point of care, so as a result we have developed a complete virtual care management platform with a superior clinical experience," Mr. Skibinski says.

Mr. Skibinski recently spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about how SnapMD started and why its focus is telemedicine.

Note: Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Question: How did the company start?

Dave Skibinski: We're a spin-out from the University of Southern California's Master of Medical Management program. Rustin Morse, MD, one of our co-founders, was the chief of the emergency department at Phoenix Children's Hospital and was pursuing his master's degree, and as part of that program he had to develop a new product or service concept in healthcare. I happen to have an MBA from the University of Southern California, and I was volunteering as a mentor within the program, and Dr. Morse had a very clear and concise value proposition. He wanted to offer a video triage service to the parents of the greater Phoenix area so they could have their child assessed prior to coming to the emergency department. The idea was for a parent to go online before they ever left home, say, "This is what's going on with my 4-year-old daughter," and have a member of the emergency department staff triage that. In at least half the cases, they would be able to tell those folks, "This is not a medical emergency. In the meantime, here's how to handle it before you go to see your primary pediatrician."

We took his kernel of an idea and examined the market. We noticed there was an opportunity for a private label platform company to come into the market. We found that the early entrants in the market, in part due to market conditions, opted to become service providers on top of having their telemedicine platform. And their primary value proposition has been to offer to health plans and self-insured corporations virtual care visits for their employed individuals or insured lives as an alternative to urgent care and emergency room visits. Our view is that while we can enable what those companies offer for our clients, the higher value of telemedicine will be in the management of the chronically ill and in the management and follow-up care of those patients going through acute treatment.

Q: Why did SnapMD choose to focus on telemedicine?

DS: We had a team of people that were in a business consulting firm and branding agency at the time, and we had a very good boutique business. But it had not scaled into a very large business. So we were looking for a great business opportunity. The interesting thing about the Medical Management program at USC that I participated in is all 40 doctors get up and present a new product or service concept in healthcare, and each of these physicians has been in practice on average 15 or more years. They then do a feasibility study and a business plan on their concept. What was amazing to me is all the doctors in the room said telemedicine would be part of the standard delivery of healthcare within the next 10 years.

After hearing that, I asked Dr. Morse if he was going launch this service and he said "no" as he was moving forward in his career and accepted a position as the chief quality officer at the Children's Medical Center in Dallas. The company's co-founders then took his idea, included him as a co-founder and did our own feasibility and market research over a nine-month period and assessed the marketplace. That's when we saw the structure of the telemedicine market at the time, how business models functioned, what the needs of the customers were and more importantly what the landscape was going to look like over the next three to five years.

The good news was that the early entrants in telemedicine had set the stage because they had started to acclimate the market to broader forms of reimbursement for telemedicine visits. When we saw that trend in place, we knew it was going to provide a tailwind behind a model like ours, which was to help the existing health systems. Major health systems across the country have strong brands and they are trusted as providers in their marketplace. We want to empower those kinds of health systems to offer virtual visits the way they need to deploy them, as a complement to their current methods of care. The reason they all need to do that is today's marketplace  the consumer in healthcare, the new patient and the new mindset  needs greater convenience and greater access to care. With the shortage of primary care doctors in America, one of the ways we can leverage those assets in the healthcare system is through telemedicine.

Q: What other benefits are there to fixing the telemedicine problem?

DS: For instance, we can address problems of patients going through acute treatment. Patients commute long distances to reach National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers. A patient is more than likely willing to do that to have their diagnosis made and their treatment plans developed, but a significant amount of their care, especially the management of the patient after they started their regimen and the side effects related to their conditions, can be done remotely. This can also be done within children's medicine. For instance, there's an autoimmune disease calledepidermolysis bullosa that causes children's bodies to reject their skin. The families must become caregivers for children with this disease. Through telemedicine and an android tablet with a telemedicine platform such as SnapMD, for about $500 you could have a remote clinic in the home of every one of those children. One of the things we're proudest of at SnapMD is that we have more than 40 clinical use cases on our platform today, everything from managing adolescent type 1 diabetics to elderly patients that are part of the chronic care management program within Medicare to urgent care operators who simply want to offer the convenience of virtual visits to the patients they already serve. We also have two clients that are in the business of offering lactation counseling 24 hours a day to mothers who are having problems nursing their newborns. The mother can go online and in the security and privacy of her home and speak to a lactation counselor.

Q: What's in the works in the next year for SnapMD?

DS: We have some very exciting new things we are doing with our platform. We have recognized in the market the innovative nature of how health systems and other healthcare providers are responding to the current market conditions. Not only are they working hard to become in-network providers with health plans, but in some cases they are also contracting directly with their customer, such as an employer, a city school system or a city workforce of some sort. As a result, they are setting up their own direct contracts with groups of patients that need to be serviced. So we are building a financial services engine that will allow our customers to put the terms of their agreements into our tool. Our customers will also be able to recognize the patient as they enter our platform and apply those terms of service and service requirements directly to that patient. This allows the customers to uniquely create contracts to meet the needs of the employer and deliver valuable services to those patients from those employers.

We will also continue to enhance our powerful scheduling system that allows patients and staff to set appointments with specific providers. We are marrying this system with a refined routing engine to route patients to specific services or providers based on a health system's criteria. We will also ensure these systems are easily integrated with the other systems operated by our clients such as EHRs and billing systems.

Our team is also focused on providing the best-of-breed digital examination room. We already use web services, and we are going to be expanding these services so that all the tools required to assess patients and manage their care are at the clinician's finger tips. For instance, today a very common task in telemedicine is to write a prescription. What we will do in the very near term is be able to launch additional services such as lab orders and patient assessments. We think by building this entire examination room experience, where the physician in one interface can do all the things they need to do to assess and develop treatment plans and execute those treatment plans with patients, we will provide that full capability and make it even more robust than what we have today.
These 10 hospital CEOs are relinquishing their posts in 2017 after years at the helm.

1. Rex Conger will retire from his post as president and CEO of Perry Memorial Hospital in Princeton, Ill., on Jan. 15, 2017. Mr. Conger has served as president and CEO for more than nine years. Annette Schnabel, PMH's current COO, will take over in January.

2. Michael Connelly, current president and CEO of Cincinnati-based Mercy Health, plans to retire on Jan. 31, 2017. Mr. Connelly became CEO in 1995. John Starcher will serve as the organization's new president and CEO.

3. Philip Gustafson, current president and CEO of Mt. Vernon-based SSM Health of Southern Illinois, plans to retire on Feb. 3, 2017. Mr. Gustafson has been at the helm since 2008.

4. Thomas Hall, the current CEO of Lewisville, Texas-based Adeptus Health will retire in 2017. Mr. Hall took over as CEO in 2012, and will stay on as CEO and chairman of the board through mid-2017.

5. Mark J. Mundy, will retire from his post as CEO of New York City-based New York Methodist Hospital.

6. Gary Passama, Fairfield, Calif.-based NorthBay Healthcare's current CEO, plans to retire from the independent nonprofit health system in March 2017. He has served as the health system's CEO for 35 years.

7. Kevin Schoeplein, who has been the CEO of Peoria, Ill.-based OSF Healthcare since 2011, announced his retirement set for the end of 2017. OSF Healthcare plans to appoint Bob Sehring COO in January 2017 and then CEO once Mr. Schoeplein retires.

8. William P. Thompson, who serves as president and CEO of St. Louis-based SSM Health, plans to retire in 2017. He has been with the hospital for more than 36 years, and at the helm since 2011.

9. Gary Ulicny, PhD, will retire from his role as president and CEO of Shepherd Center in Atlanta on March 31, 2017, ending his 22-year run. Sarah Morrison, MBA, will take over as CEO of the 152-bed, private non-profit spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation hospital beginning April 1, 2017.

10. Michael D. Williams, who has headed Community Hospital Corp., in Plano, Texas, for 20 years as president and CEO, is set to retire. Mr. Williams became the hospital's founding CEO in 1996. The hospital plans to fill the role by the end of June 2017.





For additions, questions and comments on this list, contact Megan Wood at mwood@beckershealthcare.com.
Integrated Health Network of Wisconsin, an accountable care organization based in Brookfield, has laid of 21 employees as a result of a decision to shift certain functions from ACO administrators to participating healthcare organizations, according to the Milwaukee Business Journal.

"IHN is in the process of adjusting operations and staffing across the organization to most efficiently and effectively meet the network's evolving strategic needs," Kathy Allen, vice president of marketing and communications, said Tuesday in an emailed statement to the Milwaukee Business Journal.

The job cuts, which affect 40 percent of employees, are the result of recent strategic planning sessions with the ACO's board of managers. IHN now has 29 employees remaining at its Brookfield office.

"It was determined that owner-member health systems and health plans now have the capabilities to absorb many functions IHN provides as they continue the transition to value-based care," Ms. Allen said, according to the report. These functions can be performed by the health systems, some of which operate their own health plans and population health management programs.

Staff reductions began in early September and affect all levels and departments of the ACO. Many of the employees' whose positions were cut are being considered for other jobs within health systems that are members of the ACO, according to Ms. Allen.

IHN anticipates additional workforce adjustments, with final counts to be determined as a new operating model is implemented over the next nine to 12 months, Ms. Allen said, according to the report.

IHN CEO Kurt Janavitz was not available for a comment Tuesday, Ms. Allen told the Milwaukee Business Journal.
A strong chemical odor coming from paint used at a nearby parking garage caused Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha to evacuate about 350 people due to eye and lung irritation, Omaha World-Herald reports.

Emergency dispatchers were called to the hospital campus at 9:50 a.m. Tuesday to investigate a possible natural gas leak. Emergency responders traced the odor to chemicals and sealant painters used in a parking garage near the Durham Outpatient Center.

Officials evacuated about 350 staff members and patients from the outpatient center. All Tuesday afternoon appointments at the center were canceled, according to the article.

Hospital officials expect operations to return to normal Wednesday.
Anthem's acquisition of Cigna and Aetna's takeover of Humana would impede insurance market competition across 24 states, according to newly updated market analyses released by the American Medical Association Wednesday.

"The AMA analyses show that Anthem-Cigna and Aetna-Humana mergers would significantly compromise market competition in the health insurance industry and threaten healthcare access, quality and affordability," AMA President Andrew W. Gurman, MD, said in a statement. "With existing competition in health insurance markets already at alarmingly low levels, federal and state antitrust officials have powerful reasons to block harmful mergers and foster a more competitive marketplace that will operate in patients' best interests."

The study presents new data on the degree of competition in health insurance markets for 388 metropolitan areas. It is based on 2014 data captured from commercial enrollment in fully and self-insured health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations and point-of-service plans, and includes participation in consumer-driven health plans. The study also includes newly available data from the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces.

The U.S. Department of Justice and attorneys general from several states have filed lawsuits against Anthem and Aetna out of concern their proposed acquisitions would impede health insurance competition. The AMA applauded the lawsuits against proposed Anthem-Cigna and Aetna-Humana deals, stating decreased competition in the health insurance market would harm patients. At this time, all insurers intend to fight the lawsuits and argue the deals are not anticompetitive.

Now, the AMA said it hopes the new analyses will help federal and state regulators as they try to identify markets where mergers may cause competitive harm to the local health system.

Here are four study findings:

1. Seventy-one percent of the health insurance markets for 388 metropolitan areas were highly concentrated, largely the result of consolidation.

2. In nearly all (91 percent) of the 388 metropolitan areas, at least one insurer had a commercial market share of 30 percent or greater, the study found.

3. According to the study, a single insurer's commercial market share was at least 50 percent in 40 percent of the 388 metropolitan areas.

4. The study also found 14 states had a single health insurer with at least a 50 percent share of the commercial health insurance market. Those states are Alabama, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont and Wyoming.

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After a months-long review process that sparked a heated internal debate, the Food and Drug Administration Monday approved eteplirsen as the first treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare disease that causes muscle weakness, loss of movement and eventually death, reported the Chicago Tribune.

The approval set a new precedent for the development and regulation of drugs for rare diseases, the merit of which is also up for debate.

While FDA staff who reviewed the drug's application opposed approval saying there was no proof of the drug's efficacy, Janet Woodcock, MD, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, overruled the group. The agency approved eteplirsen under an accelerated approval program that requires Sarepta to conduct another clinical trial to validate the drug's efficacy. The move followed an intense and emotional campaignfrom patients, parents and physicians calling for the drug's approval.

"It sets a precedent for patient advocate involvement and potential power; it sets a precedent for the degree of flexibility that FDA can show if they want to," said Wall Street analyst Ritu Baral. She believes the decision makes rare disease drug development more unpredictable, the report states.

In contrast, Ellis Unger, MD, the FDA executive who led the drug's review process said, "this decision could be precedent-setting," as it lowers the standard for effectiveness "to an unprecedented nadir." He said it could also be the first time a center director overruled a review team and an outside advisory committee on the issue of whether a drug's effectiveness was demonstrated, according to the report.

FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD, said the industry should not read too much into the decision.

"Our understanding about how to include patients in the regulatory process is evolving," he said in a statement. "Serious shortcomings in the eteplirsen development program should not be allowed to establish broad precedent for therapeutic development in rare diseases."





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Keith Berend, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at the New Albany, Ohio-based Joint Implant Surgeons, discusses joint procedures in the United States.

Question: Could you speak a bit about your involvement with the charity Operation Walk USA?

Dr. Keith Berend: My partner Dr. Adolph Lombardi and I worked through cofounding an organization called Operation Joint Implant, which was the predecessor to the national organization Operation Walk USA. I had done Operation Walk Mooresville, which is an organization out of Indianapolis, with my brother Mike Berend, where we went to Guatemala and Nicaragua to provide free hip and knee care to needy folks in Central America. We brought Dr. Lombardi with us, and he has been participating with us for several years. When we returned from one of those trips Dr Lombardi said: "why can't we do this for people in the U.S.?" We first went through the process of defining what "need" is  there's a lot of access to care within the United States, access to government subsidized care through Medicaid and other programs. We found the true need was in the "working poor": the people who don't have the money to afford expensive healthcare, but who make too much money to qualify for significant government assistance. We created Operation Joint Implant as a local program, where we provided free hip and knee care to people in need, here in New Albany. When Dr. Lombardi became president of the The Hip Society, his vision was to develop a nationwide program and to expand Operation Joint Implant into what is now Operation Walk USA, and I was happy and excited to participate in its launch.

Q: Are you working on any research projects?

KB: We're constantly working on research projects. We've got everything from FDA trials to long-term follow-up of patient outcomes. Our biggest efforts currently are focused on outpatient joint replacement research: we've been looking at our readmission rate and looking at the things that have been going on with CMS' bundled payments. We saw one recent publication that showed that bundles, and moving to a support system care pathway, reduced readmission rates from 16 percent to 9 percent. It was our belief that our admission rate or readmission rate in our ambulatory surgery center was much lower than that. We wanted to look at our acute complication and readmission rates, looking at transfers to the ER or subsequent hospitals  and we found that, when we looked at the more than 3,200 outpatient joint replacements that we've done, we had a transfer of care rate of only 0.3 percent. We feel like that's an incredibly low number, and it proves that outpatient joint replacement is very safe, if less than half a percent of people required acute care following a joint replacement at our ASC.

Q: How has joint surgery changed since you graduated from medical school?

KB: There's a pattern of rapid recovery, leading to short stay, leading to outpatient  that's certainly the most profound thing. Looking back at the care of the patient 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and seeing how long they were in the hospital and all of the things we did to patients when they were coming in for an elective, quality of life procedure  it's very remarkable to me how we've moved into an era where outpatient joint replacement is becoming the norm. I think, in my own practice, I've also seen the use of partial knee replacement go from 6 percent to becoming more than half of the knees that I do. I think that we're going to see that as a trend that's going to ramp up nationwide, and worldwide. We're in an era where the old dogma that all total knees do well is being questioned. We're seeing people really believe that we can do a partial knee, but take care of the whole problem. I see the trend, although it's been slow to date, and I think we're really at a turning point in terms of worldwide acceptance of partial knee replacement not being an alternative to total knee replacement, but the correct operation when we shouldn't be doing a total knee replacement. It is clear that total knee arthroplasty carries a higher risk of complication and even death, thus partial knee replacement is not only a faster recovery with better function than TKA, but is also safer. We dont need to over treat people with total knee arthroplasty when partial can do the job.

Learn more from Dr. Berend at the 15th Annual Spine, Orthopedic & Pain Management-Driven ASC Conference + The Future of Spine in June 2017! Click here for more information.

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COLOGNE-Irish public broadcaster RTE took the plunge into native branded content several months ago to provide a more immersive experience for advertisers like the Irish Tourism Board. But as the broadcaster continues to expand its reach across devices, it faces the same gremlin as its competitors: accurate audience measurement.

Were primarily a broadcaster and weve been very strong in terms of our position online and our video on demand content, RTE Commercial Director Conor Mullen says in an interview with Beet.TV. Weve always tried to differentiate our product from basically everybody else.

The broadcasters native content efforts draw upon its deep production experience, using modern-day features like HD and drone footage. Its work with the Irish Tourism Board, a seamless blend of animation and on-location footage that encapsulates 5,000 years of history, is titled Irelands Ancient East.

One of the pitfalls RTE has avoided as it watched native branded content evolve over the last couple of years is content recommendation engines. Mullen describes them as not somewhere we want to go because you can have difficult content appearing against quite sensitive storylines in that regard, and some of it is quite click-baity.

As viewing fragments across screens, The big challenge still remains with regard to measurement, Mullen says. Because quite a lot of the data thats used to measure attribution can be questionable.

For its video ads, RTE has been using FreeWheel, whose automated ad technology platform enables publishers to monetize video inventory across traditional direct-sold and market-demand sources.

While acknowledging that ad-blocking technology is always going to be there, its less of a concern for RTE than other content providers.

If you look at Ireland specifically, ad blockings running at about 30 percent, Mullen notes. Ad blocking for us is running at less than 10 because we have a low ad load.

We spoke with Mullen this week at the FreeWheel European summit in Cologne presented along with StickyAds.tv. Please visit this page for additional videos from Beets coverage.
A study into road rage in the UK's 14 biggest cities found Glasgow motorists topped the table

Drivers in Glasgow have the worst level of road rage in the UK, according to a new survey.

A study into road rage in the UK's 14 biggest cities found Glasgow motorists topped the table and were on average the angriest, most impatient, anxious and stressed.

Liverpool was the calmest driving city, with just 16% regularly feeling angry behind the wheel, compared with 35% in Glasgow.

Newcastle ranked second for road rage followed by Sheffield while London placed seventh.

The YouGov poll commissioned by Ikano Bank surveyed 2,086 UK drivers and compared them with their counterparts across Europe.

The study found Swedish drivers were the calmest and Italians the most prone to road rage, with UK drivers coming second.

Simon Ripton, head of direct to consumer at Ikano Bank, said: "In the UK, we have long been famous for our capacity for waiting patiently in queues but these results show that we could learn something from Sweden."
Expats come to Britain because they believe it will enhance their career prospects, new research shows

The UK is among the best destinations for ambitious expatriate employees looking to boost their careers while working abroad, a global report has found.

The research showed that alongside London, Bristol, Leeds, Birmingham and Edinburgh are also hotspots in terms of the lifestyles they can offer to expats working in the UK.

More than three-fifths (61.5%) of expats living in the UK said the country was a good place to progress their career, compared with a global average of 43%, the survey from HSBC found.

The UK was ranked third for expat career progression behind Singapore in second place and Hong Kong in first place. In Singapore, 62% of expats believe the country is a good place to progress their career and in Hong Kong 68% of expats agree with this statement.

The research was carried out in March and April, before the EU referendum took place, and is a snapshot of expat views at that time.

More than a third (35%) of expats said they decided to move to the UK specifically to boost their career opportunities. And 64% of expats in the UK believe the chance to acquire new skills is better than in their home country.

Two-fifths (40%) of expats living in London said the desire to improve their job prospects motivated their move. More than seven in 10 (71%) of expats living in London agreed that their time in the city would improve their job prospects when they moved back home or to another country, compared with 46% globally.

Some 60% of those working in London rated the working culture as being better than at home.

Just under half (47%) of expats living in the UK reported having a better work/life balance than they would in their home country, rising to 60% of expats living in Bristol. More than three-quarters (76%) of expats in Bristol enjoy immersing themselves in British culture, compared with 71% across the UK generally.

More than half (52%) of expats in Leeds feel their quality of life is better there than at home, compared with 43% across the UK as a whole.

In Birmingham, 58% of expats said their work was more fulfilling than in their home country, compared with a global average of 47%.

Meanwhile, 57% of expats living in Edinburgh found it easy to make new friends, compared with 48% across the UK generally.

The Expat Explorer survey took the views of more than 26,800 people working abroad, including more than 4,700 expats living in the UK. Some 45 countries were included in the 2016 survey.

Dean Blackburn, head of HSBC Expat, said: "The UK strongly appeals to expats, whatever their ambitions or motivations are, and each city has something great to offer.

"While London emerges as a hotspot for those looking for a career boost, cities such as Bristol or Edinburgh give expats a great chance to immerse themselves into the rich and friendly British culture."

Across the survey as a whole, Singapore was named as the best country for expats to live, work and bring up their children. The UK was ranked 22nd out of 45 in the overall survey.
Economy Minister Simon Hamilton visiting Wickeder Westfalen Stahl. He is joined by chief operating officer Andreas Braun and Carina Franken

Economy Minister Simon Hamilton has travelled to Dusseldorf to learn more about the successful German Mittelstand.

The Mittelstand are a large group of small and medium sized enterprises known for innovation, exports and growth - and credited with keeping the Germany economy buoyant.

Mr Hamilton received a tour of cladding materials firm Wickeder Westfalen Stahl, where he said: "Over the last two days I have had a tremendous insight into the hugely successful German Mittlestand.

"There is much for the Northern Ireland economy to learn from this model, at a time when the Executive is completely committed to the continued development of a strong, competitive, regionally balanced economy.

"Almost all German businesses are small to medium-sized enterprises like Wickeder, which employs more than 300 people."

And he said most of the Mittelstand were family-owned, adding: "The Mittelstand is very important to the education and training system in Germany and has contributed to a higher skills economy.

"It also accounts for an estimated 52% of the country's economic output, as well as generating approximately 3trn in turnover annually."

Mr Hamilton also met representatives of the Dusseldorf Chamber of Commerce, the North-Rhine Westfalia Department for the Economy and the Federal Association for the German Mittlestand.

Mr Hamilton said Germany was the "most successful exporter" in the G7.

And he added he hoped to apply his vision for the economy in Northern Ireland by building on lessons learned in Germany.

The Minister said he would seek to introduce "more and better jobs, improved skills and a better economic infrastructure".
Northern Ireland must work to transform its economy and aim to create thousands of new jobs despite ongoing uncertainty over Brexit, an industry expert has warned.

CBI chairman David Gavaghan was speaking to more than 500 business leaders during a lunch at Titanic Belfast yesterday, which featured Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary as its guest speaker.

"Regardless of the uncertainty caused by the EU referendum, we need to transform our economy and work doubly hard to create more than 50,000 new jobs over the next five years," Mr Gavaghan said.

"To do this, we must demonstrate ambition and a new-found focus on delivery."

Speaking about Danske Bank chief economist Angela McGowan, who will soon replace former CBI director Nigel Smyth in the role, he added: "I think both our organisations will gain with Angela's appointment".

He said several key areas needed to be tackled in Northern Ireland, including the low rate of productivity.

"However, the good thing is we know what we need to do," he said. "The most important driver of a region's productivity is the skill levels of its school-leavers. Good results at 16 equals good productivity within a region.

"Therefore, to have a successful economy and greater social justice, we must improve educational outcomes.

"The issues resulting from the EU referendum every day reveal ever more complexity - for example, the state of origin rules, energy regulations, even defining the circuitous phrase 'Brexit means Brexit'".

Mr Gavaghan added that the decision to leave the EU "was not Northern Ireland's decision". "Whatever the outcome of that might be, and currently none of us know what the detail might be, nor how the rest of the EU might respond, it is now up to all of us to work together to make the best of this decision," he said.

He said major questions still remained, including whether the UK can hold on to some form of free trade with the EU, and what can be done to ensure that funding is not lost.

"The added burden for our politicians, civil servants and businesses as they seek to understand the potential implications of our future relationship with the rest of Europe is currently impossible to estimate," he said.

"Regardless though of this backdrop, we must keep our focus on the existing challenges and opportunities facing our domestic economy if we are going to improve the lives of our citizens."

In his speech, Michael O'Leary said the UK would get "screwed" in the Brexit negotiations. "Nobody in the airline industry knows what the outcome of Brexit is, which puts us in exactly the same situation as most of the Cabinet of the Government of the UK, since they haven't a clue either," he said.

He said Ryanair intended to pivot business away from the UK as the carrier waited to see the outworking of Brexit.
French Connection has slumped to another loss for the first half of the year, flagging a "difficult retail environment".

The 7.9 million loss, which mirrors last year's figure, came alongside an 8.7% fall in sales to 69.2 million as the firm continued to close under-performing stores.

However, like-for-like sales at its shops rose 6.5% and boss Stephen Marks said: "Although the overall performance for the first half has been disappointing, the retail result has been particularly pleasing when compared to last year, in what has been a difficult retail environment.

"There is still much work to do in the rest of the year to move the business forward significantly but we believe the team we have in place, and momentum we are seeing, will help us to achieve this."

French Connection said that its wholesale operation has been "much more challenging in both UK/Europe and especially in North America".

The group, which has clocked years of losses, has come under recent pressure from an activist investor, the US hedge fund Gatemore Capital Management, urging Mr Marks to give up his double role as chairman and chief executive and shake up the board.

Julie Palmer, retail expert at Begbies Traynor, said: "Despite accelerating its turnaround plans of closing unprofitable stores while moving away from its well-known FCUK label, French Connection is still clearly struggling to stem the flow of losses.

"After one major investor recently called for chairman and chief executive Stephen Marks to surrender his dual role in the struggling fashion chain, it remains to be seen how much longer French Connection's other investors will wait before joining the coup."
Greencore chief financial officer (CFO) Alan Williams is to leave the Irish food company to take up the same position at UK building materials group Travis Perkins

Greencore chief financial officer (CFO) Alan Williams is to leave the Irish food company to take up the same position at UK building materials group Travis Perkins.

Mr Williams, who has spent nearly six years at the company, is to be replaced by Eoin Tonge, who has overseen the firm's UK grocery business since 2014.

He will take up the role on October 3, when he will also be appointed as a director of the company. Greencore said his predecessor would stay at the firm until the end of 2016 to ensure a smooth transition.

The appointment comes 10 years after Mr Tonge joined Greencore as capital markets director with responsibility for treasury, investor relations and communications.

In 2014 he was made managing director of the firm's UK grocery division and has been a member of the executive board since its inception in 2012.

Greencore chief executive Patrick Coveney praised his new CFO.
B&Q owner Kingfisher has reported a rise in first-half profits following a "productive" six months, adding that there has been no clear evidence of a Brexit-induced slowdown in demand

B&Q owner Kingfisher has reported a rise in first-half profits following a "productive" six months, adding that there has been no clear evidence of a Brexit-induced slowdown in demand.

Pre-tax profits at the group, which also owns Screwfix, increased 10.6% to 427m during the period.

Like-for-like sales grew 3.3% across the company, driven by another strong performance by Screwfix, where comparable sales rocketed 14.7%. B&Q's like-for-like sales rose 4.6%.

Group sales also grew by 2.7% to 5.75bn on a constant currency basis.

The company has five B&Q stores in Northern Ireland, after closing four around the province.

However, it recently confirmed that it would be keeping open its Sprucefield store, despite earlier planning to shut it down alongside branches on the Boucher Road in Belfast and in Ballymena, Craigavon and Londonderry.

It also has stores in Holywood Exchange, Newtownabbey, Newry and Coleraine.

The company additionally has nine branches of its trade outlet Screwfix around Northern Ireland.

Chief executive Veronique Laury said: "It has been a productive first half.

"We have delivered a good 'business as usual' result with both sales and profit growth.

"In the UK, the EU referendum has created uncertainty for the economic outlook, even though there has been no clear evidence of an impact on demand so far on our businesses. In France we remain cautious on the short-term outlook."

In France, where it trades as Castorama, Kingfisher has been hit by industrial action and wet weather, and the firm said it remained cautious on the country's short-term outlook.

George Salmon, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, added: "So far this year, the French businesses have disappointed, but the group's UK performance is strong and momentum is building in other international markets, particularly Poland. In the longer term, however, it is the relative success of Kingfisher's own DIY improvement plans that will dictate the group's future."

As part of her revival plans, Ms Laury is aiming to boost profits by 500m a year by 2021.

B&Q announced in July that it would be keeping its Sprucefield store open - although the closures of Craigavon, Londonderry, Ballymena and Boucher Road went ahead.

A spokesman said: "In 2015, we announced that B&Q is reshaping our store network to ensure that our estate reflects changing consumer needs and behaviours, and announced a number of store closures.

"Since this announcement, we have continued to review our plans and can confirm that we have let our 72 employees at B&Q Sprucefield know that their store will no longer be closing.

"We have a fantastic team at our Sprucefield store and their passion to serve our customers well will help us to now grow our business in Sprucefield.

"We look forward to meeting our local community's DIY needs in the future."
Matthew from Priory Integrated College in Holywood launches the Carson McDowell lawyer training workshop with Jacqueline McAleese from Carson McDowell, Anne Rice from Lawyers in School and Priory Integrated College principal Jacqueline McGennis

Northern Ireland law firm Carson McDowell is to become the first practice to deliver the Lawyers in Schools programme to young people here.

Nine solicitors from the Belfast-based company will help young people learn about rights and responsibilities in areas such as social media, employment law, intellectual property and police powers.

A spokesman for Carson McDowell said the firm had volunteered its time to adapt the programme to the Northern Ireland legal system, and is now supporting the delivery of a pilot at Priory Integrated College in Holywood.

Managing partner Michael Johnston added: "This initiative is the perfect example of how solicitors should be engaging with young people."
Workers have revealed pressure to dress in a more appealing way, a survey said

Employers regularly tell women to put on more make-up, wear high heels and short skirts, according to new research.

Women workers said they felt targeted with 86% saying they felt pressured to dress "sexier" in order to protect their careers while 7% said their bosses had urged them to wear high heels in the office or with clients because it made them "more appealing".

The survey of 2,000 employees was commissioned by employment lawyers Slater and Gordon who noted "a rise" in the numbers of clients complaining about comments their bosses were making about their looks.

With women workers, 19% said they felt more attention was paid to their appearance by their bosses than to their male colleagues while 48% of men felt their dress code was more clearly defined and less likely to draw comment.

Josephine Van Lierop, of Slater and Gordon, described the results as "very disappointing but not surprising" adding remarks about a woman's appearance tended to come from sectors such as financial services, hospitality and the City.

The survey claimed 28% of women reported they had been advised that changing their appearance would be "better for business" while 13% said they had decided to flaunt more flesh at work after suggestions by more senior employees to vamp up their appearance.

In contrast 54% of men said their appearance had never been commented upon although 3% said they had been told to dress more smartly by their more senior colleagues. Male employees did say they had been told to remove hair dye, jewellery and cover any visible tattoos.

Wearing the same outfit often seemed to be frowned upon, according to 52% of women and 37% of women also said they felt expected to "refresh" their wardrobe on a regular basis.

Current UK employment law states a dress code can be used but this is usually imposed for health and safety reasons, or to promote a particular image, for example, of smartness and efficiency.

A dress code must not be discriminatory on protected grounds such as gender or religious belief, and disabled employees have the right to have adjustments made to alleviate disadvantage.

Ms Van Lierop said: "Under current UK employment law employers cannot treat one person less favourably because of their gender but there is no legislation to prevent employers from treating men and women differently in relation to dress code.

"Employers will argue that men and women must be dressed smartly or well-groomed for a person of their gender.

"However, in 2016 there is absolutely no expectation that women in business should wear make-up or high heels in order to be smartly dressed. Imposing this expectation on women only is arguably unlawful sex discrimination."
David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o at the LA premiere of Queen Of Katwe (Invision/AP)

David Oyelowo has admitted he was surprised Disney decided to set his latest film in the slums of Uganda.

The British actor stars alongside Lupita Nyong'o in Queen Of Katwe, which is based on the true story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi.

At the film's premiere in Los Angeles, Oyelowo said it was rare to see a "positive, life-affirming story" from Africa on the big screen and the movie was a "love letter" to his daughter Zoe.

He told the Press Association: "From page one when I saw Disney on the cover, I just couldn't believe Disney were making this movie.

"That in and of itself caught my attention because these kind of films are normally independent movies that are a real struggle to get made."

He added: "A story about this young girl from a slum in Uganda who becomes a champion. I haven't seen that kind of story coming out of Africa.

"The last film I did in Uganda was The Last King Of Scotland, a very different kind of film. As someone of African descent, to see a positive life-affirming story like this was something I really wanted to be a part of."

Oyelowo, who now lives in Los Angeles, said he had brought his family to the premiere, adding: "My daughter - who I did this as a love letter to - is here as well. My little Zoe.

"It's the first time I've ever done a film that I can take my entire family to."

Nyong'o, who stars as Phiona's mother, said the film was about a "small girl with a big dream".

"At the end of the day it doesn't take big people to make big things happen," she said.

"It takes regular folk and Phiona is one of those people. She's just a regular girl living in abject poverty and she makes some out of herself by playing chess and she's given me a job."

Queen Of Katwe is released in UK cinemas on October 21.
He's predicted the winning lottery numbers, played Russian roulette on TV, and coerced a member of the public to think they'd pushed a man to his death.

Derren Brown is the ultimate showman, working his mind games and hypnotic magic on audiences in his sell-out shows every year, his name synonymous with the art of psychological manipulation.

Yet away from the stage and screen, the 'entertainer' persona is pared right back, and in its place is a more reflective character who admits, given half the chance, he could easily be a recluse.

Now living in Surrey with his partner - who he reveals is in show business but refuses to name - and a Basset Beagle-cross puppy called Doodle, he has just launched Happy, a rather intellectual book about, naturally, happiness.

He quotes a variety of philosophers, from the Stoics, the Greek school of philosophy founded in the third century BC, to Nietzsche and Freud and, after reading extensively on the subject, has come to the conclusion that it's pretty difficult to define happiness.

"We see happiness as this thing that we're entitled to, but we don't really know what it is. All the things we think will supply it - the goals we set, or the wanting to be a millionaire, or to retire - don't. They rarely end up supplying the goods when we get there.

"Rather than seeing it as a thing, we should see it more as the absence of disturbances or anxieties.

"The pre-Christian ideal which pervaded philosophy is that people used to see happiness as tranquillity, as calmness that remains when disturbances are avoided."

So could he be turning into the new Paul McKenna - showman, hypnotist and self-help guru who, coincidentally, brought a book out a few years ago called I Can Make You Happy?

Brown says not.

"I certainly wouldn't want to be a self-help guru - and I'm not talking about Paul McKenna because I haven't read his books - but much of my book says why the self-help culture is part of the problem and part of why we miss what can make us happy.

"The idea of positive thinking and goal-setting and all the things that we take for granted are actually very counter-productive. That self-help world is not helpful."

How does he practise what he preaches away from the spotlight?

"I am quite Zen in real life, to the extent that I have difficulty feeling emotionally engaged with things when I should be.

"I fall into the category of 'avoidant personality'. People tend to meet stress either by becoming anxious about it or simply removing themselves from it.

"I don't go out a huge amount, I like being on my own, I love writing, painting and taking photographs, and these are quite private things that put you in a creative space."

Brown admits he can seem quite emotionally detached, but points out: "I cry at sentimental movies and am probably a lot more childish than people imagine, but I'm not anxious."

He's been with his partner, an actor-performer, for a year, although they haven't seen much of each other because Brown has been on tour a lot of the time.

"We haven't quite settled into daily living yet but I know I calm him down and he helps me find more attachment. We complement each other."

He believes there's a value in how others can change you.

"Left to my own devices, I could imagine becoming quite reclusive. Having a partner who's not like that is a useful, lovely thing because you become more rounded and more conscious of your own madnesses and massive gaps and experiences. That other person changes and complements you and softens you up."

Brown grew up in Purley, Surrey, attending the school where his father was a swimming instructor. He was clever, unpopular and craved attention, he has admitted.

"A lot of performers are shy, which makes sense because if you don't feel very impressive, magic is a great way of appearing impressive.

"You are literally hiding behind a prop which does all the work for you, and then people go, 'Wow. You're amazing.'

"Before I found magic, I had this need to impress and was fixated on being liked. I still like being liked but before, I had a mixed-up need for attention and validation, and one nice thing about performing properly is that it can take care of all of that. It clears that clutter out of the rest of your life and you don't contaminate everything else by desperately needing attention."

Yet he claims he never had any ambition.

"Goals can be quite useful in the short-term, but I've never had ambition as a life urge. I never wanted to be on TV or to be particularly successful beyond being happy and earning a living."

Easy to say when you have a hugely lucrative career and massive fan base, which he's likely to be enhancing even further next year when he embarks on a Broadway show in America, where he is relatively unknown.

"I had no desire to conquer America," Brown adds. "I'm going to Broadway because it feels like it will be a fun thing to do and it's an amazing opportunity to live in New York for a bit."

He's reluctant to say what he thinks of magic shows today or fellow illusionists. He's met Dynamo, but doesn't have a TV and says he doesn't enjoy watching magic. "If it's something you have very high standards about, it's difficult to watch with any kind of objective balance. You get annoyed by things that aren't that annoying to anyone else."

From playing Russian roulette on TV and his Channel 4 show Pushed To The Edge, where he coerced someone into pushing a man off a high-rise building - seemingly to his death (it was only revealed to be an 'experiment' afterwards, testing the powers of social compliance), Brown is no stranger to controversy.

"People who take part in the shows go through a huge amount of psychological evaluation beforehand," he says. "We make sure those people are going to be robust enough to do it. There's a duty of care which is taken seriously with all those things.

"I try to find a really important point I want to make and then find a dramatic hook for it.

"The Russian roulette was an early show to draw attention to myself. It was designed to put me on the map. The reality is, although I do these things, weirdly, I don't always like the attention that much, so I don't court it with everything I do."

After seven new stage shows and 14 years of touring, it seems he wants to create material with a message.

"Experiments do show us what our potential for behaviour is. It's not just about making someone do something horrible."

Happy: Why More Or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine by Derren Brown is published in hardback by Bantam on September 22, 20
This years National Eczema Week (until this Sunday) aims to highlight the often hidden side of living with a skin condition  the emotional and psychological impact.

As with many skin diseases, or indeed any form of physical scarring or changes, as well as symptoms like discomfort, pain and irritation, these things can affect self-esteem, relationships, careers, and even be linked with depression and anxiety.

In the UK, around one in five children and one in 12 adults have eczema  also known as dermatitis  according to the National Eczema Society  more than six million. Severe eczema can affect large areas and result in inflamed skin that cracks and bleeds. Dry skin is a very common problem caused by skin dehydration and loss of natural skin oils, which can be due to many factors, including a lack of humidity, using harsh soaps, the ageing process and medications, explains Dr Noor Almaani, consultant dermatologist at The Private Clinic of Harley Street.

Dr Almaani notes there are a number of types of eczema, the most common being atopic eczema. This usually occurs in genetically susceptible individuals and is commonly associated with asthma and hay fever. It usually presents itself during childhood, she adds. Other types include asteatotic eczema, which often occurs in the elderly and typically over the shins; allergic contact dermatitis, where eczema is at the site of contact with a substance an individual is allergic to; irritant contact dermatitis, flaring up on areas that come into contact with irritant substances  such as certain cosmetics or washing powders; and pompholyx eczema, which causes an itchy, bubble-like rash on the hands and sometimes feet that worsens in hot weather.

Some people may require treatments and medications, including suitable moisturisers and steroid creams. Very severe flare-ups may need to be protected with a suitable dressing too.

Steroids are a valuable tool in the treatment or control of eczema, giving it a chance to heal, says Dr Friedmann of the Harley Street Dermatology Clinic.

As with many long-term conditions, indentifying triggers and finding ways to avoid them is important. Living with a skin allergy can be difficult, especially when there are so many irritants which can exacerbate symptoms in everyday household items, says Dr Friedmann, whos teamed up with sensitive laundry and washing up brand Surcare (surcare.co.uk), whose range of household products have been approved by the charity Allergy UK. I recommend regularly moisturising to retain skins moisture, avoid irritants such as soap, wipes and fragrances and wash with creams such as aqueous cream or Dermol.

Dr Almaani adds that avoiding overheating can help too  so stay clear of hot baths and wearing too many layers. Weather and central heating may also be factors. If certain foods are a trigger, a food diary might help.

Finding time for relaxation and hobbies shouldnt be dismissed either. Its a fact that stress and exhaustion lower the immune system and make most rashes worse, so its advisable to get plenty of sleep and de-stress when possible, notes Dr Friedmann.

For more information and advice, visit www.eczema.org
Officials revealed "about 80 further outbreaks" had been recorded so far this year, and warned that the disease was "still spreading"

Around 80 new outbreaks of a deadly tree disease have been found in Northern Ireland so far this year.

Ash dieback has decimated forests since arriving in the UK in 2012.

It is still wreaking havoc in Northern Ireland, with dozens of fresh cases identified here in recent months.

Officials revealed "about 80 further outbreaks" had been recorded so far this year, and warned that the disease was "still spreading".

Ash dieback causes leaf loss and crown dieback in ash trees and can also cause an infected tree to die.

The disease was first discovered in Northern Ireland in the autumn of 2012.

It was initially linked to trees that had been imported.

By December 2015, infected ash trees had been identified at a total of 110 sites with recently planted ash.

The disease was also identified in hedgerow ash at three locations in proximity to infected recently planted sites, raising fears it could be more widely dispersed.

Kaye Coates, from the Woodland Trust conservation charity, warned it was "extremely likely" that the disease would spread, adding that it would have a devastating impact.

"Ash is one of the most common trees in our Northern Ireland hedgerows, which are havens for wildlife," she said.

"It has been used widely for making furniture and hurling sticks, as well as providing exceptional firewood.

"This disease poses a serious threat to the species and has the potential to change the face of our landscape."

Ms Coates said it was not the only threat to Northern Ireland's forests, citing Phytophthora ramorum. Commonly known as Japanese larch, it was first found in Northern Ireland in rhododendron plants more than 10 years ago and has now been identified in larch trees right across the region.

Thousands of infected trees had to be felled at Belvoir Park Forest in Belfast in 2014, and more recently the disease was detected at Cairn Wood in Craigantlet.

"One important lesson learned is the long-term need for resilient landscapes," Ms Coates said.

"The planting of native trees must continue in an attempt to expand and bolster Northern Ireland's limited and fragile woodland resource.

"And, to become more resilient, our woods should contain a mixture of trees of different species and of different ages. Therefore, the trust will continue with its tree-planting efforts, substituting ash tress with other native species."

The loss of ash trees could have a significant impact on the environment here.

Our current tree coverage level is 8%, compared to the UK figure of 13%, and the EU average figure of 37%. The ash tree is also the most common deciduous tree found here.

Details of ash dieback cases in Northern Ireland emerged in a document prepared by researchers at the Assembly and published this week.

It warns: "The plant disease and invasive species threat posed to the environment in Northern Ireland is increasing.

"It is likely to continue to do so due to factors such as increasing world trade and the potential impacts of climate change.

"These factors also increase the potential risk of the threats that we face diversifying and affecting a wider range of plant species."
Michael Gallagher (right), whose son Aiden, 21, was killed in the Omagh bomb attack with Stanley McCombe who lost his wife Ann Pic Paul Faith

Claire Radford, whose brother Alan was killed in the Omagh bomb, examines a new stained-glass window in the town's library with her daughter Mia.

The secret email which shows intelligence bosses knew that Omagh was a prime target for a terrorist attack weeks before the car bomb that devastated the town

Donna Marie McGillion, who was seriously injured in the Omagh bombing

The happy couple  Ryan and Claire Bowse on their wedding day, nine years after Claire lost her sight due to injuries suffered in the Omagh bombing

Man United manager Sir Alex Ferguson has a chat with Claire Gallagher, who lost her sight in the Omagh bomb, before a friendly against Omagh Town in aid of the Omagh Bomb Fund.

The scene of devastation in Omagh Town centre where upto 25 people have been killed in this afternoons blast. PACEMAKER BELFAST 15/08/98

The bomb attack was the worst ever atrocity of Northern Ireland's decades of violence.

Spaniard Gonzalo Cavedo poses with a child on his shoulders beside the car carrying the bomb that seconds later killed 29 people, including the photographer

The impact of meeting the victims of the Omagh bomb "has never left me", former Policing Board chair Sir Desmond Rea revealed as he launched a new book on the atrocity.

Co-written with former PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde, Bear In Mind These Dead: The Omagh Bombing And Policing, aims to be a "thoughtful look" at the policing operation following the 1998 bomb which killed 29 people.

Both men played significant roles in the aftermath of the bombing.

However, no one has ever been brought to justice for the atrocity, although the victims' families won a civil action against four men.

Within the course of the book the authors examine "two searing questions (that) have bedevilled all discussion on the Omagh bombing" - whether any information or intelligence was available to the then RUC which could have prevented the bomb, and was the investigation following it as robust as it should have been.

The foreword to the book - the title of which is taken from John Hewitt's poem of the same name - warns that while direct answers to these questions are not supplied, the authors map out in detail the work of the PSNI and Policing Board.

It is the second book co-authored by Mr Rea, following Policing In Northern Ireland, Delivering The New Beginning, published in 2014.

Mr Rea told the Belfast Telegraph his memories of meeting victims of the Omagh bomb when he was chair of the Policing Board have never left him.

He said the 1998 bomb presented the PSNI with challenges of "considerable complexity".

Referring to his first book, Mr Rea said he identified the Omagh bomb investigation overview, the scrutinising of the current inquiry, the review of murder investigations in general, the management and dissemination of intelligence, the monitoring arrangements and communications with victims of the bombing as stories within themselves.

Expand Close Sir Desmond Rea (right) and Sir Hugh Orde at the launch of their book / Facebook

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Whatsapp Sir Desmond Rea (right) and Sir Hugh Orde at the launch of their book

"In doing research for my first book, I was very aware of the sort of issues that were there and I knew they made a fascinating story," he said.

"It was important to bring Hugh Orde on board, because he brought the policing perspective."

He said he considered families, friends of those killed, as well as those who came to the rescue as victims, adding meeting the victims had moved him. "It has never left me - the meetings with the Omagh victims and self-help group," he said.

Dennis Bradley, former vice-chair of the Policing Board, and QC Sir Keir Starmer, were among those at the launch of the book last night in south Belfast.
He was granted bail on condition that he reports to police daily.

A north Belfast taxi driver allegedly agreed to store 45,000 worth of cannabis resin in a bid to reduce his own drug debt, the High Court heard today.

Colin Pilson's lawyer described him as "a perfect patsy", desperate to pay off a 1,600 bill from an addiction to cocaine.

The father-of-two, from Forthriver Link in the city, is charged with possessing Class B drugs with intent to supply following the seizure made last week.

He was granted bail on condition that he reports to police daily.

Officers recovered nine kilos of cannabis during searches of a property linked to Pilson in the Glencairn area of Belfast on September 13.

He handed himself in at a PSNI station early the next morning after taking time to "get his nerve up", the court heard.

Prosecution counsel said Pilson told police he owed 1,500-1,600 from his own cocaine addiction, paying it off by 100 a week.

The accused claimed a man he refused to name offered to cut the debt and repayments by around a half if he would store cannabis.

According to Pilson's account someone was to phone him and arrange to collect the packages from him.

"He said he had not been threatened to store the drugs, however he did feel he would come under pressure with regards his outstanding debt," the prosecutor added.

Defence barrister Richard McConkey argued that his client was not on the police radar.

"He's a perfect patsy for drug dealers; a debt accrued and someone completely desperate to get out of that debt who is the easiest person to store the drugs."

At one point Pilson, who appeared via prison video-link, broke down as it was revealed that his wife had tragically died when she was in her thirties.

Granting bail, Lord Justice Weatherup said Pilson would now be watched closely by police.

He ordered the accused to report to the PSNI daily and surrender his passport
A former MLA has vowed to "break the legs" of any drug dealers he catches selling killer substances to children.

Former Ulster Unionist MLA and councillor Adrian Cochrane-Watson delivered the threat after a young relative collapsed in the street in Antrim after taking an illegal substance.

Mr Cochrane-Watson, well-known for his no-nonsense comments, also hit out at the response of police to last week's shocking incident.

He said: "What kind of scumbag sells drugs to children? I make no apology for saying that I would break any drug dealer's legs if I caught them selling drugs.

"If I could have got my hands on the dealer, I would have broken the scumbag's legs - and I would probably have got away with it too, because the police were nowhere to be seen."

A 13-year-old boy related to Mr Watson bought cannabis with friends last Wednesday night and went to the grounds of a health centre where they smoked it together.

However, the schoolboy became unwell and stumbled away in the direction of the town's train station, disorientated and deeply distressed, before he was found by members of the public.

They rang for an ambulance and Mr Watson and other family members were alerted to the emergency.

Mr Cochrane-Watson explained: "By the time I got there he was lying on the ground. He was confused and frightened.

"It had been 15 minutes since the ambulance had been rung, so we rang back and asked where it was, only to be told we were in a queue. At that stage, I rang the police - basically to get someone with a bit more knowledge about first aid on the scene - but they told me that there were no officers available.

"This was at 10pm on a Wednesday evening, not closing time on a Saturday. Is this what we have become? Are we a third world country now?"

Mr Cochrane-Watson then rushed his relative to Antrim Area Hospital in the back of his own car.

The outspoken businessman said he was so concerned for the safety of the other teenagers who had taken the drug that he asked some employees to search the area to make sure no one else had fallen ill.

"This all went on very close to where a 16-year-old, Macauley Higginson, collapsed and died a few years ago," he said. "I had no idea what this young lad had taken on Wednesday and I had no idea who else had taken it, but for all I knew it was a bad batch of something and there could be any number of kids out there falling about or even dying on the street. I rang the police the next day to say I was disappointed with their response and I was told that if I didn't like it I could ring the Ombudsman.

"I don't want to do that - I support the police and I don't want to be tying up more time or using public money to investigate a complaint made by me - but at the end of the day I had information about who had taken this drug and who had sold it, and they weren't interested."

Mr Cochrane-Watson said he was contacted by police yesterday after his complaint appeared in a local newspaper.

The father of three, also criticised the boys who bought the drug. "No one forced them to go out and buy the drug and no one forced them to smoke it," he said.

A spokesman for the Ambulance Service said that from the information they were given about the incident, it was prioritised as category B.

He said a crew arrived at the scene just 90 seconds after the 21-minute target to attend category B call-outs.

PSNI Superintendent Emma Bond said police in Antrim and Newtownabbey were "fully committed to dealing with the issue of drugs".

"The circumstances relating to the matters raised by Mr Watson will be reviewed and any learning will be applied in the future," she added.

"The efforts of local police, supported by colleagues in the serious and organised crime branch, are all contributing towards keeping the community in the area safe and drugs being taken off the street."
The programme is being piloted across 71 primary schools with the goal of rolling it out in every primary in Northern Ireland

Primary school teachers in Northern Ireland are to receive specialist training on how to teach children about keeping safe from abuse as part of a ground-breaking trial project.

The initiative commissioned by Stormont's Department of Education has been hailed as the first of its kind in Europe.

The Keeping Safe programme provides school staff with a package of e-learning, face-to-face training and school-based support to teach and embed its key messages in all aspects of school life.

It is being piloted across 71 primary schools with the ultimate goal of rolling it out in every primary school in Northern Ireland.

Education Minister Peter Weir said: "The overall project is a key component of my department's contribution to a number of executive strategies including tackling domestic and sexual violence, suicide prevention and child sexual exploitation.

"This project is of strategic importance to my department's child protection agenda. It is vitally important that we educate our children in a sensitive, age appropriate way and that they are equipped with the knowledge and skills to keep themselves safe.

"Thank you to everyone involved in the project. I look forward to hearing the outcome of the pilot when work has concluded."

The programme will be piloted from 2016 to 2018 and will involve 13,200 children and their parents and carers, as well as around 550 teachers and a similar number of other school staff.

The NSPCC developed the teaching materials being trialled.

Phyllis Stephenson, education advisor for NSPCC Northern Ireland, said: "We know that preventative education is key to giving children the knowledge and skills they need to keep themselves safe.

"Research carried out with 1,700 seven to 11-year-old children in our project schools in June 2016 highlighted that there are still gaps in children's knowledge around what abuse is and who can pose a threat to them. Effective early education can help children to disclose abuse earlier and get the help they need to recover sooner.

"We know that school staff don't always feel confident in talking to children about the topic of abuse. So we have developed a range of interactive teaching resources which teachers will be able to access at the touch of a button in their classroom."
Artist impression of a meteor impacting Earth, as research points to Lairg in northern Scotland as the location of a vast crater

A scientist claims to have discovered exactly where the first meteorite to hit the British Isles landed.

Palaeontologist Dr Mike Simms believes he has found the 25 mile-wide impact crater under the small town of Lairg in northern Scotland.

For years scientists have been studying green rock fragments found sandwiched between 1.2 billion-year-old sandstone near Ullapool, 30 miles to the west of Lairg.

For decades this layer was thought to be a volcanic mudflow until, in 2008, geologists from Oxford and Aberdeen proved that it actually had been formed by a giant meteorite impact.

But the location of the impact itself remained a mystery.

"When I visited the area on holiday in 2011 I found clues that the source of this unique layer - the impact crater - actually lies to the east," Dr Simms said.

"That raised the possibility that the crater might still exist somewhere on the Scottish mainland."

Dr Simms said geophysics helped lead him eastward to Lairg, using the principle that the sediment that filled the crater, and the fractured rock beneath it, would have a weaker gravitational pull than denser rock around the crater.

He said geophysical maps of Scotland indicated a large gravity anomaly centred on the town.

The scientist, who is curator of Palaeontology at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, said its similarity to gravity anomalies associated with impact craters around the world suggested that a vast crater was buried several miles beneath Lairg.

Dr Simms estimates the size of the crater at 25 miles across, which would make it one of the 15 largest craters on the planet.

He said the meteorite would have been around two miles in diameter and 13 billion tonnes in weight and would have penetrated five miles into the earth when it struck at 40,000 mph.

The story behind the discovery will be told on Saturday in Walking Through Time at 8pm on Channel 4.
BEIJING - The Chinese government on Tuesday announced measures to stimulate venture capital (VC) in an effort to sustain the ongoing entrepreneurial wave.

To increase investment in cash-starved startups, China will nurture more VC investors, strengthen policy support, diversify corporate financing channels and allow in more foreign capital, according to a guideline released by the State Council.

Industrial leaders, business incubators, wealth management companies and other institutional investors will be encouraged to make investment, as well as individuals, such as angel investors, said the guideline.

State-owned companies will be allowed to set up VC funds or invest in new firms.

Venture loans will also be promoted in an orderly manner.

The official policy support will focus on taxation and coordination between VC investment and government projects.

China will attract foreign VC by granting easier access and simplifying procedures. Domestic companies will be encouraged to invest in foreign startups.

In addition, the government will enhance supervision, create a withdrawal mechanism and help set up an industrial association for venture investors.

Robust VC will help generate new growth impetus and stabilize the economy, the guideline said.

Confronted with a prolonged economic slowdown, policymakers are promoting mass entrepreneurship and innovation to sustain growth, rolling out preferential policies for people to establish their own businesses.

New business registrations jumped 28.9 percent in the first eight months of 2016.
A former IRA member has claimed Gerry Adams sanctioned the 2006 murder of Denis Donaldson, the senior Sinn Fein official who was working as a British spy.

Mr Donaldson was killed by a shotgun blast in April 2006 as he opened the door to his cottage in Glenties, Donegal. He was in hiding after being outed as a British agent of nearly 20 years.

The IRA denied his murder at the time, but a BBC Spotlight investigation broadcast last night said security forces still believed the IRA was responsible.

Another former IRA member who was recruited as an agent by RUC Special Branch, identified only as 'Martin', told the programme he knew personally that Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams sanctioned the killing.

Spotlight said they understood Gerry Adams had stepped aside from the IRA army council in 2006, but according to Martin "he is consulted in all matters".

"I know from my experience in the IRA that murders have to be approved by the leadership, the political (and) military leadership of the IRA," said Martin.

Asked who he was referring to specifically, he said: "Gerry Adams, he gives the final say."

A statement from Mr Adams' solicitor has denied the allegations.

He said his client "had no involvement and no knowledge whatsoever in Denis Donaldson's killing. He categorically denies he was consulted on what he calls an alleged IRA army council decision or that he had any final say in the matter being sanctioned."

Spotlight said security sources told them the South Armagh IRA commissioned the killing, something they learned from agents and covert surveillance. They added that South Armagh IRA leader Thomas 'Slab' Murphy "insisted that Donaldson be killed in order to maintain army discipline" and that the IRA in the area commissioned the execution. Mr Murphy's solicitor was contacted by Spotlight but they have received no response. Martin said he had informed his Special Branch sources about what he learned about the murder. "Not too long after Denis was murdered I was told by an active member of the IRA that the IRA had killed him, not anybody else," he said.

"I gave that information to the Special Branch. They were just totally mute, there wasn't any acknowledgement of what I had said. The subject was changed to something else."

Asked if he was surprised, he said: "No I think they knew themselves. I just think that they had seen Donaldson's death as internal housekeeping, they were happy enough to put up with that." He said they chose at times not to act on information as "it was too politically sensitive to do so."

The dissident group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for Donaldson's killing in 2009 - something Martin dismissed. "I believe the Real IRA claimed it three years later for the kudos in the hope that someone might take them more seriously."

A Garda investigation into the murder is ongoing. In July a 74-year-old man was charged in connection with withholding information in connection with the murder.

Spotlight said they understood the investigation is now focused on a separate individual outside the Irish Republic described as "sympathetic to dissident republicans." Martin stopped working for Special Branch in the years after Donaldson's death.

"I felt I had nothing left to give them," he said.

"It came to an end at my request. They were quite happy about that and thanked me for years of service. I've absolutely no regrets about my time working as an agent for the State. I'd do it tomorrow if I had to."

A journal written by Denis Donaldson is currently being held by Garda investigators. He was encouraged to write it by republicans as part of his debriefing process.

Material in the journal has been shared with PSNI Police Ombudsman investigators, who are expected to publish a report later this year.
Former Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson and the current Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness are to be invited to appear before TDs to be quizzed on Nama's Project Eagle.

The meeting is being held by the Dails Public Accounts Committee (PAC) which is probing the deal to sell Namas Northern Ireland loan book.

Both Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness were participants in a January 2014 phone call with Finance Minister Michael Noonan where the controversial deal was discussed.

PAC chairman, Fianna Fails Sean Fleming, also confirmed that the date that Mr Noonan has agreed to appear before committee members is October 6, just days before he announces the Budget.

Mr Fleming this afternoon outlined the agenda of PACs examination of the Comptroller and Auditor Generals (C&AG) damning report on Project Eagle.

The C&AG found that Nama incurred a potential loss to the taxpayer of 190m (223m) in the Project Eagle sale.

Nama rejected the C&AGs findings claiming its based on an incorrect assumption of the discount rate used in the sale and that the probe was carried out by staff with no market experience of loan sales.

Mr Fleming said that the C&AG will appear at the committee on Thursday September 29, as will Nama chairman Frank Daly and chief executive Brendan McDonagh.

Mr Noonan will appear the following week.

Also we are going to invite people who are involved in the phone call with Minister Noonan in early January 2014, Mr Fleming announced. He said this included Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness.

He said that the PAC intend to invite the current and former secretaries general of the Finance Department before further meetings.

Sinn Fein TD Mary Lou McDonald asked that Mr Noonan be requested to make a further appearance if required.

She said that Nama officials should be told that there appearance next week may not be a one-off.

Its their first appearance and were now engaged in what will be an extensive examination of the C&AG report, added said.
Boris Johnson has insisted it is "too early" to make "conclusive judgments" about who was responsible for an attack on an aid convoy in Syria.

Mr Johnson has met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for the first time to discuss the attack, which left 20 civilians dead and which the US has said it holds Russia responsible for.

US officials have told the BBC that two Russian jets were in the sky above the convoy at the moment it was hit. But Moscow has rejected the accusation.

The Foreign Secretary said Russia and Syria were the only two potential "culprits" and the UK had "doubts" that Syria would be able to carry out such a strike at night.

Mr Johnson told the BBC that "this is not a civil war going on in Syria, this is a proxy war" as he was asked whether the suggestion that Russia may have committed a war crime made the prospect of reviving a ceasefire more difficult.

He said: "I think it's too early to say anything about criminality and that kind of thing, or indeed to make conclusive judgments about responsibility.

"But, put it this way, when you look at what happened to the aid convoy, there are only two possible culprits, only two forces that are capable of having carried out that strike flying in that area - they are the Syrians and the Russians, and we have our doubts about the Syrian capability to fly at night.

"You are left with a pretty strong conclusion as you'll have been hearing."

Mr Johnson met Mr Lavrov on Tuesday while the pair were in the US for the United Nations General Assembly.

Their face-to-face meeting in New York was their first since Mr Johnson was appointed, and came days after talks between Theresa May and Moscow over Russian president Vladimir Putin's support for Bashar Assad's Syrian regime.

Mr Johnson said the "overwhelming responsibility" for the failed ceasefire in the country rested with the Assad regime and its sponsors.

He said: "Everybody in that room knows that and it's up to people in that room to create the conditions for a ceasefire - they have done it before, they can do it again - and we know that the overwhelming responsibility for the failure to have a ceasefire, the overwhelming responsibility for the breaches in the ceasefire that we have seen lies with the Assad regime and indeed its sponsors."

But Mr Johnson said "we shouldn't give up" on the prospect of a resolution with negotiations in a "pretty critical state but it is not yet terminal and it can be revived".

While the US has blamed Russia for the attack on the aid convoy, Peter Ford, the former British ambassador to Syria, said there is "clearly much doubt" over who carried it out.

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "The United Nations, having initially spoken about air strikes have significantly rowed back, they now just talk about attacks of uncertain provenance.

"And the only evidence we have is what opposition spokespeople say."

He said the accidental bombing of Syrian regime forces by US troops just days ago shows that its intelligence can be wrong.

He said: "The United Nations has not come down on the side of saying they were air strikes, we just don't know."
The Duke of Cambridge has talked about the sad, dark moments of his job as an air ambulance pilot  while a colleague joked he was a source of good tips on parenting.

William also revealed he enjoys working as part of the four-strong helicopter crew in contrast to his sometimes solo role as a member of the royal family.

The future king made the comments during an online BBC documentary chronicling his work as a pilot with East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA) and the service the charity provides.

Sat in the open side door of an air ambulance with captain James Pusey, the Duke described the most difficult emergency he has attended since he began the job last summer.

He said: I think my most challenging one was to do with burns.

Theres one job in particular that was really quite nasty and I dont know how the medical crew dealt with it either because they came to the rescue and did everything they (could) and sadly the casualty was beyond help.

Yeah, there are some very sad, dark moments and you know we talk about it a lot.

Thats the best way of dealing with some of the situations is you talk.

William juggles his role as a pilot with his royal duties and on Saturday will travel to Canada with wife Kate and their children, Prince George, aged three, and 16-month-old Princess Charlotte, for an official eight-day trip.

The Duke and the captain shared a joke, with Mr Pusey saying about his colleague: Hes very good with advice and parenthood  in terms of good tips.

William laughed and replied: Dishing out parent advice.

The documentary has been released during National Air Ambulance Week and is described as a multi-media portrait of the EAAA and its staff. It has been produced by BBC Future, which provides in-depth coverage of science, health and technology stories.

The piece also features still photographs of the Duke at work and he is filmed refuelling a helicopter and helping to take equipment on board.

He also talks the audience through the process he and the captain follow once in the air as they work out how best to reach someone in need.

The Duke and Mr Pusey also talked about the importance of banter during the working day. William said: It helps de-stress and it also brings us together.

Because if you share the same, in some cases, sad incidents then, if you can get over it together, by being able to talk about it in the future, being a close team you come away with a collective way of dealing with it together and (it) helps you move on to whatever youve got to do next.

The Duke spoke about the value of his work with the charity  something that was different to his role supporting the Queen and his charitable interests as a member of the royal family.

He said: Its rewarding when I come here to do this job and I really look forward to coming here every day, whether its at 5.30am or going to bed at two in the morning.

The shift work is still exciting and challenging for its variety more than anything and the fact that I love working in a team.

And thats something that my other job doesnt necessarily do.

Youre more out there on your own a little bit but I very much enjoy working with the likes of James and the team and its good fun.
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, his wife and six others will face charges

A Brazilian judge has ruled that former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on charges of money laundering and corruption.

Judge Sergio Moro said there is enough evidence to start a judicial process against Silva, his wife and six others in a widening corruption probe centred on the country's huge state-run oil company, Petrobras.

Prosecutors have called Silva the "maximum commander" of the Petrobras scandal which has rocked Brazil.
The United Nations has said it will resume aid convoys within Syria after an attack on a convoy killed 20 people and prompted a temporary suspension.

Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian aid agency, said "several" convoys are expected as early as Thursday, but did not specify where. He said the convoys would not go to Aleppo.

Monday night's attack in Aleppo province on a Red Crescent warehouse where UN aid was delivered killed 20 people and destroyed most of the goods.

In response, the UN suspended overland aid operations to priority areas in Syria pending a full security assessment.

Mr Laerke acknowledged that a full assessment had not been completed, but said the planned deliveries would take place now on a case-by-case basis.

Meanwhile, a n air strike in northern Syria killed five medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, a relief group said.

The team had just arrived at the scene of the first air strike in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman when planes circled around and struck the area again, D Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations, said.

Syrian government forces have been accused of carrying out "double tap" attacks throughout the five-and-a-half-year war, placing paramedics and rescue workers in peril.

The organisation, known by its French initials UOSSM, had initially said that the Tuesday night strike levelled a medical triage point it operates in rebel-held territory outside Aleppo.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 13 people were killed in the attack, including nine militants, some of them belonging to the Fatah al-Sham Front, an al Qaida-linked group previously known as the Nusra Front.

Three nurses and two ambulance drivers died of their injuries, UOSSM said.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike. Aircraft from Syria, Russia and the US-led coalition are targeting the Fatah al-Sham Front, which along with the Islamic State group was excluded from a week-long ceasefire.

AP
John McCain warned blocking the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia would be interpreted as the US 'abandoning our commitment' to the Gulf region

The US Senate has backed the Obama administration's plan to sell more than 1 billion dollars (770 million) worth of American-made tanks and other weapons to Saudi Arabia.

The vote defeated a bid to derail the deal pushed by politicians critical of the kingdom's role in Yemen's civil war.

Senators who supported the sale said the US cannot deny its Middle East allies the weapons they need to combat Islamic State extremists and monitor Iran's aggression in the region.

"Blocking this sale of tanks will be interpreted by our Gulf partners, not just Saudi Arabia, as another sign that the United States of America is abandoning our commitment to the region and is an unreliable security partner," said Republican Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Although a resolution against the sale failed to advance on a vote of 71-27, the measure's sponsors said the debate demonstrated that congressional support for arms sales - even to a long-time and important Middle East ally - is not automatic.

They also insisted that Congress play a larger role in foreign policy decisions, especially those involving the use of military force.

The war in Yemen is pitting the country's internationally recognised government and a Saudi-led coalition against the Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who are allied with army units loyal to a former president.

The Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out air strikes in Yemen since March 2015 and thousands of civilians have been killed in the fighting, according to the UN human rights chief.

The US is supporting the Saudi-led coalition with intelligence and logistical support, including refuelling aircraft, according to senators opposed to the sale.

Most Americans are unaware of how involved their military is in Yemen, they said, adding that politicians have never fully discussed whether the participation advances US national security interests.

"Should Congress just lie down and be a lapdog for the president?" asked Republican Senator Rand Paul, a sponsor of the resolution. "Everyone should understand that this is a proxy vote for whether we should be at war in the Middle East."

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who also opposed the sale, said the Saudis have bombed areas that the US has asked them to avoid.

At the same time, IS and al Qaida are growing "by leaps and bounds," Mr Murphy said, because the Saudis are hitting primarily Houthi and civilian targets.

"Let's press the Saudis to get serious about spending more time as firefighters and less time as arsonists in the global fight against terrorism," Mr Murphy said.

The American Bar Association said last week there are credible reports Saudi forces have used American-made military equipment to carry out "indiscriminate and disproportionate" attacks on civilians.

The US should suspend further security assistance to Saudi Arabia "at least until such time as it can be credibly determined" that the allegations have been investigated and the kingdom is abiding by the law of armed conflict, the director of the bar association's governmental affairs office said in a September 14 letter to Mr Murphy and Mr Paul.

The Defence Department informed Congress of the proposed 1.15 billion dollar (882 million) sale to Saudi Arabia on August 8.

The deal involves more than 100 main battle tanks, machine guns, smoke grenade launchers, night-vision devices, vehicles to recover damaged tanks from the battlefield, and thousands of rounds of training ammunition.

The primary contractor for the equipment is General Dynamics Land Systems of Sterling Heights, Michigan.

UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein last month called for an international investigation of rights abuses and violence in Yemen. His Geneva office released a 22-page report that chronicled abuses on both sides in the conflict.

Roughly 3,799 civilians have been killed since the air campaign began, according to the report.

The UN and rights groups estimated at least 9,000 people overall have died. Nearly three million more people have also been displaced inside the Arab world's poorest country.

Air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition were responsible for 60% of the 2,067 civilians killed in the conflict over a year-long span starting on July 1 2015, according to the report.

Just under a quarter - 475 - of the civilian deaths were attributed to rebel forces such as those loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and 113 to affiliates of al Qaida and IS.

AP
Every Friday, the Belfast Telegraph publishes people and businesses that have gone bankrupt. Most are decent people, but for some reason  usually cashflow  their ideas did not work.

Then look at Derry City Airport. The argument is that business and tourists will not go to Londonderry if they do not have a nearby airport. However, there is an airport under an hour away  its called Belfast International. This distance is comparable with and, in most cases, better than most other regional airports.

Over the years, 14m of public money has been pumped into this white elephant. Why does no one want to fly there? It is because Londonderry is not a city, but a small town? The hinterland of Donegal is sparsely populated.

The solution is to close this airport and put on a regular, hourly, subsidised bus service to Belfast International, thus saving millions. It is nothing more than a vanity project.

TREVOR COOK

Portrush, Co Londonderry
Indonesian health officials on Tuesday downplayed a scientific study projecting that haze from last years peatland and timber fires could lead to as many as 100,000 deaths.

It must be understood, this figure represents deaths before the age of life expectancy, not at the time of the fires. The prediction comes from a study model, Oscar Primadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian Health Ministry, told BenarNews.

Further research is needed to test the validity of the model, he added.

Mohammad Suboh, the Indonesian governments director general of disease control and environmental health, called the studys estimate overblown.

That figure, in my view, is overblown, and its difficult to know where it came from. All the deaths were documented with death certificates, he said, according to Tribunnews.

According to the data that we have, from the health ministry, only 19 people died, and not as a direct impact of the smoke. They were already sick and their condition worsened due to the smoke, Suboh said.

Mortality burden

In a study published Monday in Environmental Research Letters, scientists from Harvard and Columbia universities used computer modelling, satellite data and population information to locate the fires in Indonesia in 2015, gauge toxicity of emissions and estimate the resulting morbidity and premature mortality in downwind populations.

The researchers concluded that excess deaths linked to the 2015 haze could be 91,600 in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore.

Those deaths would likely occur within a year of exposure to the haze, Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University, one of the study authors, told BenarNews.

Buonocore said could not comment on Indonesian government statistics because he did not have information about how they were collected.

It is important to note that the deaths we estimated are not just due to acute smoke inhalation. The health effects of air pollution can include other illnesses like respiratory disease, heart attack, and stroke, among others, which can lead to death, he said.

Using our model calculations of the contribution of fires to air pollution in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and the large body of research on air pollution and health, our results are able to capture this mortality burden. The approach used here is standard for estimating the health burden of air pollution sources such as this, and is used by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, among many others, he said in an email.

Everything wrong

2015 saw the worst Southeast Asia haze crisis since 1997. Smoke from the fires choked nearby countries for weeks, including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, and sent Indonesias greenhouse gas emissions soaring.

The fires, set to clear land for economic activity, burned 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) between June and October and cost Indonesia an estimated U.S. $16.1 billion, the World Bank said its Indonesia Economic Quarterly report issued in December 2015.

Mukri Friatna, an activist with the environmental group Walhi, said that while the death toll was debatable, last years fires created a tremendous disaster risk.

The government did everything wrong. It didnt call the incident a national disaster, with the excuse that it didnt want corporate fire setters to escape responsibility, but at the same time law enforcement did not do its job, he told BenarNews.

Not a single company was punished. No corporate entity was convicted and sentenced for knowingly burning the forests, or due to negligence. This is a bad precedent in law enforcement, he said.
Migrant rights defender Andy Hall speaks to reporters at the Bangkok South Criminal Court after he was convicted of criminally defaming a Thai pineapple processing company, Sept. 20, 2016.

A veteran campaigner for migrant-worker rights in Thailand said Tuesday he would appeal his conviction by a Bangkok court on charges that he criminally defamed a Thai pineapple processing company through an online report alleging workplace violations at its factory.

The Bangkok South Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced labor activist Briton Andy Hall to three years in prison and fined him 150,000 baht [U.S. $4,316], after finding him guilty of defaming the Natural Fruit Co. and violating Thailands Computer Crimes Act.

I/my legal team will appeal todays decision in line with Thai justice system. Still fully confident our team/I will receive justice in end, Hall said via Twitter.

The firm sued Hall for defamation over the online publication of a survey that he had helped put together. For the survey, he interviewed workers at the firms plant in southern Thailand about labor conditions at the factory, which employs 800 people who are mostly from Myanmar.

The court handed him a four-year sentence, but reduced it to a three-year sentence along with the stipulation that he could begin serving his term in two years, his lawyer said.

I respect the courts decision, but am rather shocked and confused with the verdict [that] I was guilty of defamation [under] the Computer Crimes Act, Hall told reporters outside the courthouse.

Just involved in research

Hall undertook the research for Finnwatch, and Tuesday reiterated that he was merely relaying the information he had collected for the Finland-based NGO that advocates global corporate responsibility. In 2013, Finnwatch posted its report on the internet based on Halls work.

In fact, I did not put the data online myself. I was just involved in research for report, Hall said.

According to the survey, workers at the plant in Prachuap Khiri Khan province complained that Natural Fruit violated Thai labor law through paying them salaries that were below minimum wage, not giving them sick and holiday leave, and employing children, among other allegations.

In its findings, the court noted that Hall failed to provide evidence that he had interviewed employees at the factory by entering tape recordings of those conversations into the courts record.

Wirach Piyapornphaiboon, the companys owner and president, said the court had vindicated the Natural Fruit Co. through its verdict against Hall.

This is proof that we  did not do that [violate labor rights]. Today, I am thankful to the court for justice, he told reporters.

The court proved that he violated my rights, and, no matter who you are, you will not stand above Thailands sovereignty, Wirach said, adding that his company had lost 100 million baht (U.S. $2.8 million) in revenue as a result of publicity around the Finnwatch survey.

A distinctly chilling effect

The courts decision, however, represents a blow to the rights of more than 3 million migrants who work in Thailand, representatives of Finnwatch and international human rights organizations said.

We are shocked by todays verdict. The report was authored and published by Finnwatch; we take full responsibility for it. Andy has been made a scapegoat in order to stifle other voices that speak out legitimately in support of migrant worker rights, Finnwatch Executive Director Sonja Vartiala said.

This is a sad day for freedom of expression in Thailand. We fear that many other human rights defenders and victims of company abuse will be scared to silence by this ruling, she added.

The U.N.s human rights office for Southeast Asia also weighed in about Tuesdays verdict.

Just a day after world leaders committed to a landmark U.N. declaration to strengthen the positive contributions made by migrants to economic and social development in their host countries, this court decision is very disturbing, said Laurent Meillan, the acting regional representative of the Office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Instead of prosecuting Mr. Hall, it would have been more appropriate to conduct an independent and thorough investigation into the serious allegations raised in the Finnwatch report.

Earlier this week, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch issued a statement voicing concern about Halls trial.

Andy Hall coordinated important research about abuses of workers rights in Thailand and he should never have been prosecuted for his actions, Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Whatever the verdict, the long and intensive court fight has had a distinctly chilling effect on other activists pressing for the protection of workers rights in Thai companies, many of which export their products to foreign consumers.
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For Immediate Release, September 21, 2016 Contact: Loyal Mehrhoff, (808) 351-3200, lmehrhoff@biologicaldiversity.org Five Samoan Animals Gain Endangered Species Act Protection HONOLULU In accordance with a landmark agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today protected five animals in the U.S. territory of American Samoa under the Endangered Species Act: two birds, two tropical snails and the only insect-eating bat in Polynesia. I worked on early efforts to get three of these species protected  more than 20 years ago  so Im very glad these unique animals from American Samoa are getting the protection they need to survive and recover, said Loyal Mehrhoff, endangered species recovery director at the Center. Like too many species from the Pacific Islands, these animals are threatened by habitat destruction and invasive species. But with protection under the Endangered Species Act, which has been more than 90 percent effective at saving species from extinction, they have a real shot at survival." The two birds proposed for protection include the friendly ground dove and the mao. The mao is a large, vocal, nectar-eating bird that lives in mature, high-elevation forests  habitat that has almost entirely disappeared on the Samoan archipelago due to logging and from cyclone damage to the habitat remnants. The high-quality, protected habitat in the National Park of American Samoa may play an important role in recovery of the mao if this spectacular bird can be reintroduced from dwindling populations in other parts of the territory. The friendly ground dove also faces destruction of its tropical forest habitat and, like many ground-nesting birds, egg predation by non-native rats. The Pacific sheath-tailed bat once numbered as many as 11,000 in American Samoa, but a 2008 survey found none. The two snails proposed for protection are both threatened by the non-native, predatory rosy wolf snail, introduced to Tutuila Island in 1977. Snails like these are typically very slow growing, live about five years and produce only a few young per year (fewer than 20)  a very low reproductive rate  which makes them particularly vulnerable to introduced predators. Several of the species have been waiting decades for protection; the Center petitioned for protection of four of the five in 2004. Today's decision is part of a historic settlement agreement between the Center and the Service that expedites decisions on 757 species around the country and has so far resulted in endangered species protections for 152 species and proposed protection for another 40. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.1 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.


For Immediate Release, September 21, 2016 Contact: Brett Abrams, Courage Campaign, (516) 841-1105, brett@unbendablemedia.com

Ileene Anderson, Center for Biological Diversity, (323) 654-5943, ianderson@biologicaldiversity.org Federal Court Denies Request to Turn Off Nestle Spigot Despite Decades of

Water-taking in San Bernardino National Forest Despite Expired Permit Harming Strawberry Creek, Court Allows National Forest,

Nestle to Continue Business as Usual RIVERSIDE, Calif. A federal court today declared Nestles reliance on a long-expired permit valid, ruling in favor of the U.S. Forest Service for allowing the Swiss conglomerate to continue its use of a four-mile pipeline that siphons water from the San Bernardino National Forest despite the Forest Services lack of action on any permit renewal for 28 years. The court has just confirmed what many Americans fear, massive corporations play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. Nestle has been pulling a fast one for nearly 30 years, taking a public resource, depriving plants and animals of life-sustaining water, and selling that water at an obscene profit without the right to do so, but apparently our justice system is OK with that, said Eddie Kurtz, executive director of Courage Campaign Institute. Were shocked by the courts decision to let Nestle continue its operations, and we will continue to stand with hundreds of thousands of Californians and people across the nation to take back control of this public water. This fight is far from ove, said Michael OHeaney, executive director of the Story of Stuff Project. The courts decision is disappointing, but the real tragedy lies in the fact that Strawberry Creek is drying up, dooming the plants, fish and animals that have relied on it for tens of thousands of years, said Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. Bottling water is not worth sacrificing Strawberry Creek, so were considering our options for appeal. In 2015 alone an estimated 36 million gallons were piped away from the forest to be bottled and sold under Nestles Arrowhead brand of bottled water. The permit expired in 1988, but the piping system remains in active use, siphoning about 98,000 gallons of water a day out of the forest last year. Reports from the end of 2015 and the summer of 2016 indicate that water levels at Strawberry Creek are at record lows, threatening local wildlife that are already dealing with the ongoing drought in Southern California. In October 2015 Courage Campaign Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Story of Stuff Project jointly filed a lawsuit claiming that the Forest Service allowed Nestle to continue using its siphons to collect millions of gallons of water for 28 years after its permit had expired. The lawsuit spurred the Forest Service to open a review of Nestles application for a new permit and the State Water Board to conduct an investigation into the validity of Nestles claimed water right. In June activists from the Story of Stuff Project, the California-based Courage Campaign Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity rallied outside the U.S. District Court building in Riverside, Calif., as Judge Bernal considered a challenge to Nestles four-mile pipeline. For more information, or for interviews, please contact Brett Abrams at (516) 841-1105 or by email at brett@unbendablemedia.com. ### CourageCampaign.org fights for a more progressive California and country. We are an online community powered by more than 1.3 million members. The Story of Stuff Project (www.storyofstuff.org), a California-based nonprofit organization, facilitates an global online community of more than 1 million members working to transform the way we make, use and throw away Stuff. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.1 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Mewing is a TikTok trend that has blown up in the last few months. It is claimed that it can help shape your jawline as well as cure other ailments by actively pressing your tongue to the roof
In today's world of ever-shrinking resources and ever-mounting constraints, we need creativity more than ever before. - David H. Cropley.

This elusive and sought-after skill has piqued the interest of researchers and professionals from various backgrounds, locations, industries and expertise for decades. Having worked in the advertising industry for nine years, I have been fortunate enough to be exposed to creativity at its best, and worst.

The reality is that from a young age we are taught, and somewhat socially conditioned, to understand the world in which we live through various constructs and schemas. We know what works, we like what works, and we dont like to deviate. We are told to think differently, but not too differently. But, we also know that an uncomfortable period of change means growth, development, innovation, and a new perspective.

To innovate and create, things have to change. And such is creativity.

In a sense, non-creative behaviour is learned. The majority of careers require specific types of thinking based on set theory and methodology. And so, over time, the application of these thought patterns is solidified. Unless you purposefully diversify your thinking.

We are inundated with information every day, so much so that our brains automatically block out irrelevant information so that we dont waste precious energy. It means we are filtering so much information to fend off unwanted information that we sometimes miss something great.

In a post by August Turak on Forbes.com, creativity is aptly described as, a skill that can be developed and a process that can be managed." Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking. Contrary to popular belief, this is the combined work of the left and right brain. Research by the University of Tsukuba in Japan on neural networks for in artistic creativity confirmed that training (the focus of attention, belief, action) brings balance to the brain's hemispheres and increases creativity via reorganised hemisphere communication.

In branding we have the opportunity to explore, learn, understand and immerse ourselves into our clients' businesses and use creativity to change perceptions, push boundaries and turn convention on its head to elicit change that makes a difference, fosters advancement and answers relevant business problems. Progress is, in essence, disruptive. The creative process can be uncomfortable, daunting and uncertain, yet at the end worthwhile and rewarding.

For those forging the way and coming up with the ideas and striving to push the boundaries, and for our clients who trust us, creativity is an agile process, a journey and discovery. Creativity requires bravery and the mindset to forget (even if just for a little while) what you once thought you knew. In its process, it teaches you and humbles you  and if you refuse to give up until the end; you have an incredible result that at the outset could not have been imagined.

I often find myself revisiting the creative process and how to get the best out of my ideas and my mind's inner workings. Its one thing to have access to data, information and knowledge; it's an entirely different thing to humanise the data and make it useful. It's the ability to achieve the right connections and synthesis of what our minds are continually filtering  that is creative ability.

Myth or talent, given only to the select few? While many people have plenty to say about creativity, not as many can tap truly into it because its difficult, its messy, and it takes guts, and not everyone is willing to risk that.

Creativity demands tenacity and intelligence. Creativity also calls for conscience. It is the driver that has the power to influence and change perceptions, behaviour and beliefs. It can instil hope and mobilise a community. It asks that we question everything and be open to it.
A complaint about latent vulgarity in a TV ad featuring a train and using the word "motherbuffer" has hit the buffers.

Three consumers went to the advertising standards watchdog about an MWeb commercial featuring a superhero racing to the rescue of a damsel in distress, only to be thwarted as the screen buffers.

MWeb was advertising its highspeed fibre network by illustrating the slow speed of lower-tech alternatives - summed up in the damsel's one-word exclamation as the train approaches: "Motherbuffer!"

Pieter Pretorius, Irma Erasmus and Andrew Kaye complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the expression was "an attempt to hide vulgar language" and was being emulated by children.

They also said the scene showing a woman tied to a railway track was "unsuitable for children".

MWeb told the ASA buffering was one of internet users' main bugbears, saying the advertisement "makes reference to these concerns in a playful manner".

It added: "Only people familiar with the well-known expletive would understand the reference, meaning that uninformed children remain unharmed by the term 'motherbuffer'."

The ASA agreed, saying the word would not be interpreted by the "hypothetical reasonable adult as anything but a tongue-in-cheek reference to 'motherf***er'."

As far as the damsel in distress was concerned, "the mood and setting ... is no different to superhero cartoons and is not violent, frightening or aggressive to an extent that children are likely to be harmed".

Source: The Times
The world average of doctors to population stood at 152 per 100,000 in 2013. In South Africa it stood at a paltry 60 per 100,000. The reason are not unfamiliar in the South African context - large inequalities in the distribution of resources between the public and the private sector, as well as between rural and urban areas.

The Hospital Association of South Africa (HASA)  the body that represents the private hospital groups in the country  commissioned a Econex study to highlight this shortfall in light of the proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) plan, as well to plead the case for private medical schools.

Given the envisioned re-engineering of primary healthcare in South Africa, the NHI will require greater numbers of clinical and non-clinical professionals with different skills and competencies. Minister of health, Aaron Motsoaledi, has stated that he plans to triple the number of medical graduates to at least 3,600 doctors per year in preparation of implementing the NHI, the report says.

Emigration and foreign doctors

Training capacity will have to be increased substantially in order to achieve this goal. The emigration of healthcare professionals and restrictions on foreign doctors working in South Africa contribute to the doctor shortage.

The most significant factor that limits the supply of doctors from meeting demand, however, is the number of doctors being trained at the moment at the eight faculties of medicine at South Africas public universities. These medical schools carry the full responsibility for training doctors, but cannot deliver enough doctors to respond to the countrys demand and large disease burden.

The prohibition on establishing private medical colleges in South Africa limits the private sectors ability to help lift this burden, and leaves training in the public sector constrained by limited funding and resources, the report says.

Training in China and Cuba

National or provincial governments, universities and the private sector have tried different approaches to address the lack of training capacity for healthcare professionals in South Africa. One such policy is to send students to countries like Cuba and China for medical training.

We argue that the long-term effectiveness of such policies needs to be weighed against counterfactual scenarios and the quality and suitability of medical education received.

Training doctors abroad is at best a temporary solution to doctor shortages in South Africa. Instead, partnerships between universities and provincial governments, as well as (limited) partnerships between universities and the private sector have been proven to help lift the burden, albeit only marginally, and should be further encouraged. The structural shortage of doctor training capacity will best be solved through a combination of initiatives.

Initiatives of other developing countries

The rise of private medical schools in India, for example, has retained medical students who might otherwise have studied abroad. Brazil relies on both public and private medical schools to provide training, and uses both of these platforms to provide healthcare services to communities while students are in training.

Indeed, research shows that private medical schools are common internationally and as a rule provide high quality education. Other important lessons can be drawn from African countries like Malawi, which has increased its training capacity with the help of international volunteer doctors. Zambias experience illustrates that exposure to rural areas during training needs to be complemented by adequate mentoring in order to provide healthcare practitioners in these areas with the necessary skills.

Greater participation by the private sector can thus play an important role in the provision of medical education. This study considers two possible avenues of participation:

allowing the establishment and accreditation of private medical colleges, and

encouraging greater participation by private hospitals and specialists in the clinical training of undergraduate students studying at South Africas public universities.

South African landscape

Econex says that rather than posing a threat to the public sector, the private sector can strengthen South Africas medical workforce by helping government achieve many of its stated healthcare objectives.

In the first instance, the accreditation of private medical colleges can allow a greater number of doctors to be trained at minimal cost to the public purse.

However, the perceived inequality in the distribution of resources between the private and public healthcare sectors creates the concern that private medical colleges will exacerbate current inequalities and give rise to elitist private training facilities. This history of antagonism in South Africas healthcare suggests that while private medical colleges provide a structural long-term solution, it will not be easy to implement in the short term.

In the second instance, the role that greater participation by private hospitals can play in doctor training. There are already examples where the private health sector and public universities have collaborated effectively to lessen the training burden on public medical schools.

Local initiatives

An initiative between Mediclinic South Africa (MCSA) and Stellenbosch University (US), where internal medicine students in mid-rotation complete a portion of their clinical training at a MCSA hospital, suggests that the private sector can contribute to the training capacity of public universities. It provides an easy and cost effective way of increasing the number of doctors in South Africa, without skewing the distribution of healthcare resources.

Netcare and Life Healthcare also contribute to lifting the training burden of the public sector through making funding and scholarships available for specialist and sub-specialist training.

Greater involvement by the private sector in medical training should therefore be investigated and encouraged as a matter of priority, especially in light of the demand that the NHI will create for more doctors.

The private sector can also be used to help address the need for more healthcare resources in rural areas, where South Africas doctor shortage is especially acute. More doctors will be available for community service and internships in rural areas if larger numbers of students are trained. Strategic agreements between (public or private) universities and rural clinics could also be tailored to increase the propensity of medical students to practise in these areas.
SAN FRANCISCO: Google late Monday sent out invitations to an event on 4 October, hinting that the internet titan will show off a new smartphone powered by its Android mobile software.

Emailed invitations revealed only the time and place for the gathering in San Francisco, the message topped by blue, red, yellow, and green dots of color. Google fired off a Twitter message with hashtag #madebygoogle and a video of what appeared to be a long rectangular search term box morphing into a silhouette of a smartphone.

Industry trackers have been expecting Google in October to show off its own smartphone, showcasing the prowess of its new Nougat version of Android software. Google may stamp its latest smartphones with a 'Pixel' brand instead of the 'Nexus' name it has used in the past for Android smartphones it has made in collaborations with partners.

iPhone 7 mayhem

A Google smartphone would be fielded as a standard to which other's making Android devices should aspire, and would come just weeks after Apple's began selling new iPhone 7 models. An enticing Google smartphone could also prove a contender for the attention of buyers during the prime year-end holiday shopping season.

Scenes in Apple stores around the world on Friday were reminiscent of days before online ordering became a norm and people camped out for days to be first to get hands on the California company's iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Enthusiasm was peppered with disappointment due to shortages of the large-screen iPhone 7 Plus and a jet-black iPhone 7, but it was unclear if the shortages were the result of strong demand or limited supply.

The devices chart a new path for the tech giant by eliminating headphone jacks, a move seen as setting a trend for a wireless future The iPhones also boast Apple's freshly-released iOS 10 mobile operating system. While the company has touted total iPhone sales of one billion, the number sold in the quarter ending June 25 fell 15% from a year earlier, highlighting concerns over growth for the key profit driver.

Saturated market

Growth has become challenging with many mobile phone markets saturated, with Apple rivals producing a wide variety of devices powered by Android software that Google makes available for free.

Apple faces stiff competition from traditional rival Samsung, although the South Korean giant is currently on the back foot after being forced into a massive recall because of exploding batteries of its flagship Galaxy Note 7.

Source: AFP
Edcon has proposed a R14.4bn overhaul of its capital structure, to cede control of the clothing and footwear retailer's holding company to two other companies majority held by its creditors.

If the deal passes regulatory muster, two newly established companies, HoldCo 1 and HoldCo 2, are expected to take control of Edcons operating subsidiaries from Bain Capital, as the debt-laden retailer seeks to relieve its debt burden.

HoldCo 1 will issue about R2.2bn in new dollar-denominated notes to refinance and pay off existing debt. Some of the cash will also be used to inject liquidity into the group.

HoldCo 2 will issue two different notes  denominated in euros and dollars  worth a collective R12.2bn to refinance existing debt.

Edcons empowerment trust and managers will receive economic rights to distributions from HoldCo 2.

This important milestone in the history of the Edcon Group follows the recent payment deferral implemented in May 2016 and the securing of R1.5bn of bridge financing, Edcon group CEO Bernie Brookes said in a statement.

The group successfully deferred payment to December 2016, making R1.6bn in cash available to it. The bridge financing was made available in two equal tranches.

Brookes said the deferral, bridge finance, and the proposed restructure all indicate the significant support we are receiving from our creditor base to ensure that we have a strong, robust and re-energised Edcon going forward.

Taken private in a highly leveraged R25bn buyout by Bain in 2007, Edcon has struggled to grow at a fast enough rate to pay down debt.

We have been living beyond our means, expenditure was more than our income, Brookes told a news conference.

New owners of the company, which also sells household goods and footwear, are Standard Bank, Barclays Africa Group, FirstRand, Standard Chartered and Investec. Others are Franklin Templeton and Harvard Pension Fund.

The retailer has been grappling with an over-leveraged capital structure for several years, after troubles in its credit business in 2014 coincided with an economic slowdown and weak consumer spending in SA.

Brookes said Edcon reached a catastrophic situation in March and had to choose between business rescue or not paying debt holders.

With Reuters
South African Scotch whisky imports decreased 9% during the first half of 2016 to 18.7m bottles but SA moved one spot higher to being the seventh-largest export market for the product, according to the Scotch Whisky Association.

SA spent 39.9m on Scotch imports in the first half of the year which is down by 19% in cash terms compared to the same period last year.

Overall global export volumes grew for the first time since 2013, by 3.1%, for the first half of the year with 533m bottles shipped, compared to 517m bottles in the first half of 2015.

But in value terms, total Scotch exports fell by 1% to 1.70bn, which is less of a decline compared to the 3% drop the market experienced during the same period last year.

For the first six months of this year the top ten export markets by volume were: France, USA, India, Spain, Brazil, Germany, SA, Singapore, Mexico and UAE.

The association predicted that the drop in the value of the pound, which fell against other major currencies after the British public voted to leave the EU in June, would boost revenues from exports in the short term.

The growth of exports to India drastically increased, by 41%, compared to last year, while the association said the full potential of the Indian market would only be realised if the countrys 150% basic customs duty was relaxed.

Sales of Scotch are regarded by some economists as a useful barometer of economic prospects. During the period under review the USA, SA, Mexico, Australia, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy and Turkey all noted a reduction in import volumes.
African countries, through their participation in the CITES CoP17 , have the potential to influence the negotiations, says Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa.

Speaking at the official opening of the seventh People and Parks Conference held in Midrand, on Tuesday, 20 September, Minister Molewa said more than 120 documents will be considered during the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES CoP17).

Among these documents, 60 are proposals to amend the lists of species subject to CITES (@CITES) trade controls. This includes proposals submitted by South Africa.

South Africa will support proposals and working documents that promote sustainable use of natural resources, provided they have a scientific basis and are aimed at securing the long term conservation of the species, said Minister Molewa.

South Africa will from 24 September to 5 October 2016 host the CITES CoP17 at the Sandton Convention Centre, where CITES Parties and observers are expected to engage in the robust discussions and come up with resolutions that take forward the work already underway around the trade in flora and fauna.

Minister Molewa said that CITES CoP17 affords South Africa an opportunity to showcase the countrys rich biodiversity and successful conservation initiatives based on sustainable use management practices.

This has resulted in us becoming one of the leading conservation countries in the world today; having saved species such as the black and white rhino and elephant from near extinction in the past century, the minister said.

She added that South Africas commitment to conservation includes the sustainable utilisation of natural resources, which contributes to socio-economic development of poor and rural communities.

These are priorities outlined in our National Development Plan (NDP).

She also highlighted that controversial and thought-provoking topics, such as interventions to address the poaching of elephant; the proposed listing of elephant, lion, rosewood species and sharks; as well as the illegal trade in rhino horn and pangolin, are probably the areas that will receive the most international and national attention.

The conference will also deliberate on the role of CITES in securing the livelihoods of people living with wildlife and ensuring communities are considered in terms of interventions implemented in terms of the Convention.

Other issues to be discussed include the legal and sustainable wildlife trade, measures to tackle illicit wildlife trafficking, and enhanced enforcement, the minister said.
Professor Anna Tibaijuka, former executive director of the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN HABITAT), is the first woman to receive the 'H.R.H Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa Award for Sustainable Development'.

H.R.H Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, presented Professor Anna Tibaijuka with the Bahrain Medal of Honour in recognition of her commitment to sustainable human settlements development in 2009.

The award is given to individuals or institutions who are actively involved in actualising the Sustainable Development Goals and is meant to motivate them to commit extra efforts at national, regional and international levels to achieve the awards humanitarian goals.

Advancing sustainable urban development

Professor Tibaijuka was selected in recognition of her role and contribution, through the posts she has held previously, that have advanced sustainable urban development, in addition to efforts she has championed in consolidating cooperation among various countries across the world, which have seen her recognised by governments, and international and academic institutions.

These achievements tie with the awards objectives of achieving development projects by individuals and institutions and succeeding in providing creative solutions that contribute to achieving sustainable development.

I thank Your Royal Highness for this recognition and promise that in return I shall continue to work hard in pursuit of the noble goals of the award, namely helping communities attain sustainable development, said Professor Tibaijuka on receiving the news.

Official ceremony

The award will be presented to Tibaijuka during a ceremony to be held at the United Nations headquarters in New York on 23 September on the sidelines of the 71st UN General Assembly session, under the theme: The Sustainable Development Goals: a universal push to transform our world.

Previous winners of the award include The Green Brigade Project in Burkina Faso in 2008, an initiative that has sought to improve the city environment while providing secure employment to a group of more than 1200, majority of who are breadwinners, through cleaning of streets and public places.

In 2010, the Brazilian Bento Rubiao Foundations Right to Land and Right to Housing programme in 2010 was recognised for its role in offering construction skills to residents especially women who have gone on to obtain formal employment in the construction industry.
Bayer recently opened its first SeedGrowth Centre in Africa with the aim to provide farmers with innovative products that suit their specific needs. Dr Klaus Eckstein, CEO and head of the Crop Science Division for Bayer in Southern Africa, said "We have the opportunity to provide the latest in research at a local level to support our farmers to compete globally. We believe that through Seed Treatment we now have the tool to truly add value to the developing farmer through an innovation such as seed treatment which can comfortably increase yields by 30 % per hectare and more, specifically in the Southern African region." We spoke to Dr. Eckstein to find out more.

Dr Klaus Eckstein

Tell us about Bayers history in Southern Africa and how this positions the organisation to help farmers overcome the challenges they now face.

Klaus Eckstein: Bayer is a world-class innovation company with a more than 150-year history and competencies in the fields of health care and agriculture. Our core focus is on developing new molecules for use in innovative products and solutions to improve the health of humans, animals, and plants  with our research and development activities based on a profound understanding of the biochemical processes in living organisms.

However, to be able to do this appropriately and sustainably, we also pride ourselves on having a deep understanding at the molecular, biochemical and behavioural level of the ecosystems and environments in the regions in which we operate. In particular, in the agricultural space, we understand that there cannot be a 'one-size-fits-all' solutions for farmers and agribusinesses because they operate in very different natural climates and typographies, and face different challenges based on their environments.

We have a long history in South and Southern Africa where we have spent time understanding the natural environments and challenges faced in various regions and, based on this, we continuously look to adapt our innovations and products to be conducive to the local environment. Our goal is to operate in a manner that will ensure the sustainable supplies of safe, nutritious and plentiful food sources.

Bayer recently opened the SeedGrowth Centre in Johannesburg. Why is this significant?

Eckstein: For us, this is the first of its kind facility that we have opened on the African continent  and is one of only 16 other such centres in the world. This is a clear commitment to the agricultural industry in the region, considering that the SeedGrowth Centre has the potential to help farmers in the region to not only secure but significantly increase their yields in key crops. The SeedGrowth Centre has been designed to support seed companies and farmers to improve their production efficiencies by addressing issues related to seed treatment. This includes:

 Optimising plantability of seed.

 Improving the stewardship of seed treatment by managing dust

 Ensuring that seed is treated accurately

Customers will now be able to test their recipes in our experimental seed treatment facility. This means that they do not need to stop their factories to refine their recipes resulting in better efficiencies. This whole programme is linked to our four competency areas which include:

 Seed treatment equipment to apply seed treatment products

 Products that add value to the grower and how they perform on seed

 Film coatings to reduce dust, improve plantability and benefit responsible use

 Ensuring the service that is required to optimise seed treatment process

Tell us about the science and technology behind the SeedGrowth centre as well as the scope of research that will be conducted there

Eckstein: Our SeedGrowth Centre brings together significant technological, scientific and manufacturing resources to support sustainable agricultural initiatives and global product stewardship. Not only will this facility enhance research and development efforts, but it will also be of benefit to the entire agriculture community for sustainable future growth.

As one of our key strategic initiatives to promote sustainable farming in the region, the SeedGrowth Centre will provide a host of advantages for every player in the seed treatment value chain, including high-quality coatings, innovative products, and powerful application equipment all linked to services and advice tailor-made to specific customer needs. Additionally, our ongoing research and development (R&D) through this facility will enable us to provide customised solutions to seed companies as well as provide crop benefits such as improved plantability and pest/disease management to farmers that will be based on data of the local environments and/or natural climates.

How will farmers in the region benefit, as well as the entire agriculture industry, from this centre?

Eckstein: Through this SeedGrowth centre, we will have the opportunity to provide the latest in research at a local level to support our farmers to compete globally. It is our intention that the benefits of the R&D undertaken at the facility will result in higher productivity, profitability and sustainability of farming  where innovations such as seed treatment can comfortably increase yields by 30% per hectare in the Southern African region.

In addition to this, we will also be able to bring added value to all stakeholders in the seed treatment business, including; breeders, seed companies, research facilities, advisors and of course farmers. We believe that growing Seed Treatment throughout Africa is critical in order to support farmers to be commercially viable and, by taking a holistic view of the seed treatment business, we can offer customers added value that will grow their business.

Will small-scale farmers also benefit from the innovation and technology that the centre brings to the region?

Eckstein: Absolutely. We understand the incredible and potential roles that small-scale farmers have to play in the region, not only from a food security point of view but also in terms of sustainable employment and contributing towards gross domestic product (GDP) growth. We believe that with this SeedGrowth Centre and the benefits it will bring to local farming industries in the region  we now have the tool to truly add value to the developing farmer. In fact, we are evaluating specific Seed Treatment products that we believe will improve yields of cotton and maize significantly making emerging farmers more efficient in their specific environments

In a landscape currently characterised by low yields, drought, and uncertainty, innovation is becoming increasingly important, especially considering the pressure the agriculture industry is under to meet a growing demand. How does Bayer approach innovation and change, not just in the organisation itself, but also with the farmers and agribusinesses that Bayer helps and serves?

Eckstein: The challenges facing farmers in Southern Africa today are not only increasing but are complex. As a result, new and innovative approaches have become necessary to maintain productivity and ensuring that only high-quality produce and safe foods reach the end consumer. This is intrinsically a part of our science for a better life DNA.

As a socially responsible company, our mission is to use science to improve life. We are committed to the future of farming in Southern Africa and leveraging our years of local research and development together with our expertise we to continue to work with local farmers and agribusinesses to help tackle their challenges through science-led innovations and a holistic, responsible and sustainable approach to farming. It is our intention to ensure that we develop products that will make farming more efficient - as we want to partner with all farmers to realise the full potential of their land and yields.

How will Bayer further support and encourage innovation in the industry?

Eckstein: We understand that the science communities have an instrumental role to play in cultivating solutions that will yield a more sustainable supply of safe, nutritious and plentiful food sources for years to come.

Within the Crop Science Division, in particular, we are driven by the urgency of the challenges facing agricultural sectors and farmers and remain committed to doing everything possible to support farmers. Our values run deep, as does our sense of responsibility and commitment to making the world a better place for all. We demonstrate this commitment every day through community partnerships, investments in education and philanthropic support for programmes and institutions that share our vision and hopes for the farms of the future, including for instance our partnership with the Future Farmers Foundation. Added to this, we continue to invest in research and innovation into seed growth, crop protection solutions and services to maximise farm yields, secure harvests and drive sustainability.

Bayer is also a global leader in crop protection and non-agricultural pest control, where the focus of our products, pioneering innovations and activities cover the areas of Crop Protection, Environmental Science, and Bioscience.
"Take it to the farmer". Those were the last words of Dr. Norman Borlaug, as remembered by his granddaughter Julie Borlaug in her opening speech at the Africa Green Revolution Forum in Nairobi. The man whose improved wheat varieties sparked the Green Revolution in Asia during the 1960s had dreams to take new and improved agricultural technologies to Africa to spark a similar revolution here, but he died with "unfinished business".

That challenge now lies with us.

Data revolution key to solutions for nuanced African agriculture

I believe that if Africa can have a Green Revolution, central to it will be a data revolution.

That's down to the fact that we live in such a diverse continent, with many different environments and cultures. It's something to embrace and celebrate. But it also means that blanket solutions to agricultural challenges - like single new crop varieties - won't work here. There is too much nuance. There is too much complexity. Instead, African agriculture needs site-specific solutions. And key to that is the collection, sharing, and analysis of farm data from all over the continent.

We need African farmers to monitor their farms like never before - recording rainfall, fertiliser use, the crop varieties they sow and the yields they produce, and sharing their results with scientists. We also need research organisations, universities, and governments to share the data they have generated over the years, with the global scientific community. By making data open access, we could trigger a bonanza for farmers.

Where data becomes intelligence

The CGIAR Big Data Platform will play an important role in this. When it launches in January 2017, it will be the largest convenor of big data experts in agriculture in the world. It will also collate and crunch data from organisations globally. Then thousands of computer modelers, GIS experts, and statisticians from the public and private sectors will mine it for patterns, trends, and anomalies.

The platform will be the place where data becomes intelligence, giving us unprecedented insights for improving agriculture. These will be shared directly with policymakers and governments so that intelligence becomes action on the ground. It will help farmers make better decisions about what to plant, when to plant and how to manage their crops in the best possible way. They will help make agriculture much smarter and much more precise.

And smart, precision agriculture is much more resilient to unpredictable weather, to pests and disease outbreaks and other challenges that affect African farmers every day. It will help take some of the huge risks out of farming, boosting food production, and helping protect soils and ecosystems. It will also ensure that agriculture is more responsive to new technologies, new practices, and emerging market opportunities. That will not only improve productivity and boost yields, it will enable farmers to grow and feed their own families more nutritious food.

Take the message to the farmer

Of course, when you improve smallholder farming in Africa, you also improve the lives of women. We need no reminding that they are the ones who put the food our tables here.

We've already seen how collecting and sharing high-quality data can help us achieve incredible, things, very quickly. In Colombia recently, rice producers saved millions of dollars by delaying planting until a dry spell had passed. This was the result of CIAT and the Colombian government working together with shared information and shared goals. I want to see these kinds of innovations and these kinds of impacts here in Africa.

We accept there will be challenges. But these shouldn't stop us. When Norman Borlaug sent his improved wheat seeds to India, it wasn't a smooth ride. They were held up at customs, denied permits and the first batch was entirely destroyed. But that didn't stop him eventually getting them to farmers.

We should draw inspiration from this. It will require hard work, significant funding and global cooperation. But I firmly believe big data has the power to transform and revolutionise African agriculture. We need to seize the moment and take that message to the farmer.

Dr. Debisi Araba: Regional Director for Africa, International Center for Tropical Agriculture

The CGIAR Big Data Platform is jointly led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). For more information click here.
Two of China's top steelmakers announced plans Tuesday, 20 September, to merge, creating the world's second-largest manufacturer of the commodity as markets struggle with a glut caused by Chinese overcapacity.

The world's second largest economy is trying to overhaul its lumbering state sector and especially its steel industry, by using mergers and restructuring to cut chronic overproduction and create world-beating mills.

Baosteel Group, China's second-largest steelmaker, will issue new stock to existing shareholders of Wuhan Iron and Steel Group to absorb the other company, the state-owned companies said in separate statements to the Shanghai bourse, where they are listed.

They did not give details. The two firms rank fifth and 11th respectively in world production capacity.

The merger will form a new firm called China Baowu Iron and Steel Group, China Business News reported late Monday, 19 September, adding the state asset watchdog had already okayed the plan and submitted it to the State Council - China's cabinet - for final approval.

The combined production capacity of the two firms reached 60.7 million tonnes last year, data from the World Steel Association showed, which would make the new entity the world's second biggest producer by capacity - behind ArcelorMittal.

Chinese steel demand has slumped as economic growth slows and the global steel industry is assailed by overcapacity. The crisis has seen manufacturers in Asia, Europe and the US suffer huge losses and led to political rows and accusations of dumping.

Shanghai-based Baosteel's net profit plummeted 83 percent to 1.0 billion yuan ($150m) last year, while Wuhan Steel lost 7.5 billion yuan, compared with a 1.3 billion yuan net profit in 2014.

An analyst said the merger between Baosteel and WISG was "merely the beginning" of more such moves in China's steel industry.

"Restructuring in China's steel industry is the trend and it's an unstoppable one," Chen Bingkun, an analyst at Minmetals and Jingyi Futures, told AFP.

Restructuring of another two Chinese steel giants both based in northeastern province of Liaoning - Ansteel and Benxi Steel Group - is next on the agenda, Shanghai Securities News reported Tuesday. It quoted Chi Jingdong, vice secretary general of the China Iron and Steel Association.

Ansteel is the world's seventh biggest mill and Benxi Steel ranks 21st. The listed arms of the two groups suspended trading in Shenzhen on Tuesday pending statements on the report.

Investors in Hong Kong cheered the news, with Angang Steel (Ansteel) shares jumping 2.81% on Tuesday afternoon.

Analysts said the mergers would help China deal with overcapacity that has long plagued manufacturers. Beijing has vowed to eliminate 100-150 million tonnes of capacity - out of a total of 1.2 billion tonnes -- by 2020.

"China is now trying to cut down its steel production through policy. And restructuring of the industry is a second way to help. Once the merged giants form a monopoly in the market, it will start to control production," said Minmetals's Chen.

"The result of this restructuring is to integrate China's steel industry and pave the way for China to export its steel capacity."

However, another analyst said the merger would not give Chinese mills an edge over global competitors like ArcelorMittal and US Steel.

"I don't think these mergers will be able to change the current market status of the world's steel industry," Qin Jiawei, Hangzhou-based analyst with Xinhu Futures, told AFP, adding that high-end markets would still be dominated by foreign companies.

"China's high-end steel products don't have the competitiveness in the international markets. It's not the size of the company that counts. You can't change the global steel market by just adding them up."

Source: AFP
On track with its R1.4 billion tug building contract, Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA) launched the fourth of its nine new tugs being built in Durban. Named OSPREY in honour of the fish eagle, the tug will serve at the Port of Saldanha. In line with maritime tradition, the duty of officially naming the vessel was carried out by Lady Sponsor, Thandeka Mabija, who earlier this month was appointed general manager for Human Resources at TNPA.

Osprey tug launch

TNPA chief operating officer, Phyllis Difeto, said: The work by Durban ship builder, Southern African Shipyards, on this project has helped to cement the marine shipbuilding and support industry locally. Having a local manufacturer also promises excellent after-sales support for the 35-year service life of these vessels. Local ship building expertise is exactly what the governments Operation Phakisa initiatives aim to leverage in unlocking the potential of the Ocean Economy.

This is the largest single contract TNPA has ever awarded to a South African company for the building of harbour craft. Nine new tugs are being built over three and a half years, as part of a wider fleet replacement programme that covers tugs, new dredging vessels, and new marine aviation helicopters. The programme - aimed at improving operational efficiency in the ports  sits within TNPAs R56 billion contribution to Transnets R300 billion-plus Market Demand Strategy. Five tugs are under construction simultaneously at any given time due to the projects tight deadlines.

Tangible proof that South African shipbuilders can deliver

To date, two tugs  MVEZO and QUNU  have been delivered to the Port of Port Elizabeth. Saldanha took delivery of CORMORANT in August and OSPREY will be delivered in December, followed by the ports third tug next year. The Ports of Durban and Richards Bay will also receive two new tugs. Handovers will occur every three months until the last tug is launched in early 2018.

Southern African Shipyards CEO, Prasheen Maharaj said the launch of OSPREY to TNPA has yet again demonstrated the capabilities of the South African shipbuilding industry. This is the fourth tug that has been completed on time and within specifications. The OSPREY is tangible proof that South African shipbuilders can deliver technologically advanced, world-class products and can build, support and sustain the technologically superior capabilities of these tugs. Southern African Shipyards is well on its way to delivering the remaining five tugs to TNPA within the timelines agreed upon. While celebrating this significant milestone we implore South African parastatals to continue to support the local shipbuilding industry, he said.

Continued investment in new ocean economy

Karl Wiesner, chief commercial operations officer at Southern African Shipyards, agreed. South Africa is investing to secure trade through our ports through the TNPA tug programme and to continue to transition to our new ocean economy. The governments significant investment in our shipbuilding industry will support long-term highly skilled jobs in building, maintaining and sustaining cutting-edge ships for Transnet, he said.

Wiesner said a vibrant and strong local shipbuilding industry would promote innovation and technology and provide advanced manufacturing jobs for South Africans for decades to come. We encourage government to continue with these investments in the shipbuilding industry for the continued development of appropriate levels of skills and technology transfer to our workforce, he added.

TNPAs new fleet of nine tugs iseach 31 metres long with a 70-ton bollard pull. The older fleet of 29 tugs has 32.5 to 40-ton pulls. The increased bollard pull of these new generation tugs meet international standards and they also feature the latest global technology such as Voith Schneider propulsion which makes them highly maneuverable and able to change direction and thrust almost instantaneously while guiding large vessels safely into South Africas ports.
Students are adamant that free education is feasible as university protests enter their third day, despite the Treasury saying those who can afford to should pay fees.

Image source: @FeesMustFallWC on Twitter

Yesterday saw tense stand-offs between students and police and university security at Wits University, with 31 students arrested.

Rocks flew on the steps of the Great Hall, resulting in windows being smashed.

Classes were also disrupted at Tshwane University of Technology and the University of the Free State.

In Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal students marched to the provincial legislature. University of South Africa students have vowed to join the fee-free protests. Some analysts have described free education as unrealistic.

The nationwide protests, which threatened to rival those of the #FeesMustFall campaign a year ago, were triggered by an announcement on Monday by Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande that fee increases for next year would be decided by individual universities, but that they must be capped at 8%.

Students already on financial aid will pay no increases and the government will assist those whose families earn less than R600,000 a year to ensure that they, too, do not have to foot the bill for the increases.

A presidential commission on the feasibility of free university education is scheduled to deliver its interim report in November.

Call to scrap fees

However, protesters insisted on the scrapping of fees entirely, with some student leaders yesterday referring to the fee-free university education report commissioned by Nzimande in March 2012 as justification for their call.

The report of the working group chaired by Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University vice-chancellor Derrick Swartz, concluded that free higher education for the poor was feasible but would require significant additional funding of both the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and the university system. Its preliminary calculations of the cost of introducing free university education is between R100-million and R1-billion based on 2013 prices and 160,000 students.

Free higher education activist and student at Tshwane University of Technology, Elias Modiba, said it was insulting for the government to plead poverty when R700-billion had been lost to corruption in 20 years.

"We have a report, from a panel of experts, which says free education is feasible. The problem is not money, it is lack of political will," he said.

Banele Malefe, Tshwane University of Technology's Pretoria West campus SRC president, said corporates and mining companies that extracted billions of rands worth of minerals, must be taxed to fund free education.

Unrealistic

However, Ronen Aires, CEO of Student Village, a student development group, said students' demands for free education were unrealistic given South Africa's economic structure. He said free higher education could not happen overnight.

"It is a complicated process that requires a long-term lobbying process. Young people are looking for immediate solutions. The fee-free revolution will take years to achieve its goals," he said.

Aires said the suggestion that less corruption would translate to availability of funds for free education was a bit off the mark, saying education was getting a huge proportion of the budget as it was. South Africa could not be compared to developed countries like Denmark, which has free higher education.

"The structure of the economy is different. For instance, a third of our taxes go to social grants. Increasing taxes would hit the man on the street really hard and companies are already heavily taxed, with the recent introduction of the skills levy," he said.

The Department of Higher Education and Training has estimated the cost of the shortfall for 2017 fee increases for the poor and middle class was at about R2.6-billion and the Treasury had to find the money somewhere.

The Treasury yesterday said it found itself in a "constrained fiscal environment that is extremely challenging".

"The Treasury has been exploring different mechanisms of finding the money to pay for the subsidy. The department is embarking on a prioritising drive and working with various departments and agencies to address the shortfall," spokesman Xolisa Dodo said.

Political economy analyst Daniel Silke said unless drastic improvements in the economy were made, free tertiary education remained an illusion. "The economy has to grow beyond the present 0.1% or 0.3%." said Silke.

Source: The Times via I-Net Bridge
From 20 to 25 September, digital spectators can enjoy a live streaming of the wildebeest migration via Facebook and YouTube in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, made possible by a partnership between WildEarth and HerdTracker.

Wildebeest crossing the Mara River in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve. Image: Stuart Price

The live broadcasts will be hosted daily on HerdTrackers Facebook page and WildEarths safariLIVE YouTube channel between 4pm to 11.30pm EAT (East Africa Time) and will centre around the wildebeest migration crossing the Nile crocodile-infested Mara River as well as predatory action of lions hunting at night in the Masai Mara.

WildEarth will also be broadcasting live from South Africas Sabi Sand Game Reserve in South Africa, an excellent Big Five safari destination which shares a border with the Kruger National Park.

Authentic African safari experience

Graham Wallington, CEO of WildEarth hopes to show viewers who tune into the live broadcasts an authentic African safari experience.

One of the scenes that is brought to mind when people think of Africa, are the vast expanses of open land and myriads of different herbivorous species streaming across these great plains as they follow the torrential rains, always seeking out the best grazing areas. Of course, this is an absolute feast for the predators who really get their claws stuck in after sunset.

After the sun has gone down, we are going to be using infrared lighting and thermal imaging for the very first time during our live safaris, so dont miss out on a second of the action.

Encouraging international travellers to visit Kenya

Andre Van Kets, creator of the HerdTracker web-app which tracks the wildebeest migration in real-time and removes the fear that travellers have when planning a migration safari, hopes that by broadcasting the wildebeest migration live, it will encourage more international travellers to make Kenya their chosen holiday destination and to experience this natural phenomenon for themselves.

The wildebeest migration is one of natures greatest spectacles. The river crossings are the main reasons why thousands of travellers flock to the Masai Mara every year. We want to show the world just why they need to witness it for themselves here in Kenya.

In October 2015, HerdTracker in partnership with Make It Kenya hosted #MaraLive - the worlds first live web broadcast of the great wildebeest migration from the Masai Mara, Kenya via Twitters Periscope app.
KAMERS/Makers returns in September following its first show at St Johns' College in April. The show will take the ever-growing community of the country's creative, innovative and exciting 'makers' to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria.

This new Spring show is a response to the ever-growing demand in Gauteng for hand-crafted, passionately made products - bought directly from those who make them.

As SAs most dynamic pop-up retail platform, KAMERS/Makers will once again bring brand new creative entrepreneurs into the retail world in a uniquely supportive and nurturing environment.

The Johannesburg show will take place at the brand new Galleria venue in Kramerville, Sandton. The Galleria show will be followed by the Winelands show, which is moving from Webersburg (its home of the past three years) to a new space at Anura Vineyards near Klapmuts  just 500m off the N1 and 15 minutes from Stellenbosch.

KAMERS/Makers will close the year with their signature show at the Open Window/Southdowns College venue in Irene, drawing the curtain on their 14th year.

The sponsor, Absa, will partner with the show in a cashless system - the future of pop-up retail. Absa will also be showcasing their new banking technologies at KAMERS.

Attendees may also expect to meet Incub8 traders, young entrepreneurs who are mentored through the launch of their fledgling business into the mainstream by KAMERS.

KAMERS 2016 Joburg - Spring

28 September-2 October 2016

Galleria, Kramerville, Sandton

9.00-17.00 daily

KAMERS 2016 Stellenbosch

1-6 November 2016

Anura Vineyards

9.00-17.00 daily

KAMERS 2016 Irene, Pretoria

28 November-4 December 2016

Open Window, Southdowns

9.00-17.00 daily

Ticket details:

Tickets R50 at www.plankton.mobi and R70 at the entrance  includes a KAMERS/Makers shopper bag, hand-printed by Breytenbach Centres community project in Wellington, and new magazine.

Five-day passes available at R100.

Discount available for students and pensioners.

Free entry for under 18s (not including shopper bag and magazine)

kamersvol.com
Eleven projects were honoured at the 19th Annual BASA Awards, partnered by Hollard and Business Day, during an arts-filled event attended by representatives of the business and arts community, and by the Minister of Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, as well as the Minister of Tourism, Derek Hanekom.

These prestigious awards celebrate exceptional projects that demonstrate the positive and sustainable impact of dynamic business and arts partnerships. It is also a moment for Business and Arts South Africa (BASA), which turns 20 next year, to reflect on the realisation of its core mandate, which focuses on change-making, connectivity and sustainability, underpinned by a body of research that grows every day, as well as diverse public, private and civil society programmes.

Winners in this years award categories provided inspiring and compelling insight into the role that the arts play in connecting people and enabling transformation  and the different ways that business can support this.

As we move towards celebrating two decades of BASA 2017, I am proud of what we see coming out of the Awards. BASAs support and involvement in the public and private sector demonstrates what can be done when we all work together, commented Michelle Constant, CEO of BASA.

We would like to congratulate this years winners and finalists, added Heidi Brauer, Chief Marketing Officer at Hollard. Its always so rewarding to see the unique ways in which businesses partner with artists and art organisations to contribute toward a better society and were thrilled to play our part in celebrating these collaborations.

The shared value of the partnerships awarded tonight is visible for all to see and I hope that more businesses are now encouraged to partner with arts projects in the year ahead, said Tim Cohen, Business Day Editor.

The 19th Annual BASA Awards, partnered by Hollard and Business Day, were held at Shine Studios in Braamfontein against the spectacular backdrop of the city. The evenings performances and proceedings were propelled by this years theme of creative furnace and each winner received a unique ceramic fynbos artwork that emerged from a project that harnesses the transformative power of art and fire.

Under the guidance of artist Belinda Blignaut, the artworks were created by a group of amateur artists: Lucy Africa, Martha Nero, Jason Jack and William Jack. Blignaut explains that these artists are part of a group that is using art therapy as a fine art, giving shape to the urgency for protest that so many communities are expressing on our national stage.

Special thanks were extended to this years judging panel, which comprised Gianni Mariano, co-founder and CEO of the Mastrantonio group of companies, BASA board member and BASA Awards Chairman; Dali Tambo, media and heritage-tourism entrepreneur; Mandie van der Spuy, arts consultant and BASA board member; Kojo Baffoe, founder of Project Fable, Director at Kwaya Holdings and entrepreneur; Nicolette du Plessis, CEO of the Field Band Foundation; Theresho Selesho, Director, Business Development at Boondoggle SA and entrepreneur; Christina Kennedy, arts and culture journalist and commentator; and Fikile Moeti, 5fm DJ and social entrepreneur.

The 19th Annual BASA Awards, partnered by Hollard and Business Day, really did showcase how the arts can be a tool for bringing about transformation, and how business can assist them in doing so, concluded Constant. Congratulations to all our winners and nominees.

19th Annual BASA Awards, partnered by Hollard and Business Day Winners Innovation Award

Nandos Chickenland (Pty) Ltd  Nandos Heartfelt Celebration of South African Design

First Time Sponsor Award

SA Taxi Foundation  SA Taxi Foundation Art Award

Increasing Access to the Arts Award

SAMRO & Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs  Concerts SA

Beyond Borders Partnership Award

ABSA  Barclays LAtelier

Long Term Partnership Award

TOTAL South Africa (Pty) Ltd  The Buskaid Academy of String Teaching and Performance

Media Sponsorship Award

Radio Sonder Grense (RSG)  RSG Kunstefees 2015

Strategic Project Award

PPC Ltd  PPC Imaginarium

Small Business Award

Kirchhoff Professional Surveyors  Eland and Benko 2015 (#firegrazer) by Hannelie Coetzee

Sponsorship In Kind Award

Meropa Communications  Moving into Dance Mophatong

Development Award

Distell (Pty) Ltd  The Magnet Theatre Educational Trust Fulltime Training and Job Creation Programme

Cultural Tourism Award, supported by Nedbank

Transnet SOC Ltd  National Arts Festival

About BASA:

Business and Arts South Africa (NPC) is an internationally recognised South African development agency with a suite of integrated programmes implemented nationally and internationally. BASA encourages mutually beneficial partnerships between business and the arts, securing the future development of the arts sector in South Africa and contributing to corporate success through Shared Value. BASA was founded in 1997 as a joint initiative of the Department of Arts and Culture and the business sector as a public/private partnership. For more information on BASA contact us on 011 447 2289 or visit our website: www.basa.co.za




On 1 September 2016, international space exploration company SpaceX suffered a failure during the static test fire of the Falcon 9 rocket. Designed to transport satellites, Falcon 9 was scheduled to haul the Amos-6 satellite into geostationary orbit. The rocket suffered an unspecified failure in the second stage's LOX tank during the test, and both rocket and satellite were destroyed.



It takes pioneers and brave entrepreneurs to open new markets, to push new limits and reach new frontiers. These individuals are responsible for innovations that change the world for the better and offer long term benefits to humanity. Dave Pollock, CEO of Spacecom, and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, are two examples, and must be commended for their visionary work and steadfast execution.

Narrowing Africa's digital divide

Todays hyper-connected world has ignited the satellite industry, which is changing and adapting to meet the ever increasing demand for connectivity which will exceed the collective capabilities of fibre, satellite, Wi-Fi and all other technologies. Current satellite technology is already capable of delivering impressive 100GBps payloads through high-throughput satellite (HTS) services, and many operators are invested in bringing satellite connectivity to the public.

Different space operators are following different architectures. Spacecom designed the Amos-6 satellite specifically to empower Africa with broadband connectivity. The value of this strategy was quickly realised by Facebook who has secured dominant access to this satellite in order to further Facebooks drive to close the digital divide.

Now with the loss of Amos-6, all industry parties will have to reconsider and reposition. Replacing satellites is a not quick job and takes typically three to five years, subject to any other plans that can be leveraged and repurposed. Amos-6 included a particularly strong focus on South Africa and had the potential to deliver broadband at an impressive R0,05c/MB (current LTE services are typically 18c/MB). Thats satellite connectivity at 30% of LTE pricing. It is possible and it will be a reality in the near future.

Here's picture of Falcon 9 with Spacecom's Amos-6 telecommunications satellite on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. pic.twitter.com/EuHGIGQYqy  Peter B. de Selding (@pbdes) September 1, 2016

Need for collective support

However, the effective delivery and successful market development of such inexpensive satellite connectivity services will require more than the most advanced satellite technologies. It will require the collective understanding and support by all role players including regulators, service providers, distributors and end-users. It will require service providers experienced in taking niche technologies to the market, who can provide on-site customer support and service delivery for large-scale deployments.

In the short term, the loss of Amos-6 leaves a very really gap in the market and will definitely result in some delay in the market growth for broadband satellite services. Without Amos 6, the market demand will have to be serviced from the current spectrum of available satellites and those planned for deployment in the near future. However, none of the current or upcoming satellite can really step into the gap and execute on the vision of Dave Pollack. It will take some time for the industry to fill this gap.

The good news is that Africa is innovative and Africa has tenacity. I have no doubt that collectively as an industry we will work harder toward meeting market and technology demands and use the time to improve service delivery capabilities on all fronts. In future, HTS services will undoubtedly shift the horizon for connectivity services. HTS services have real potential to meet the promise of anywhere, anytime connectivity' and will change our perspective on what can be done, and at what possible costs. HTS will do for IP what DStv did for broadcast.
Ethiopian taxi hailing startup RIDE has pivoted away from its SMS-based functionality to a mobile application, with a relaunch planned for early next year.

Image by 123RF

Disrupt Africa reported earlier this year on RIDE, a project under Addis Ababa-based software development company Hybrid Systems launched in December 2014.

Though ostensibly based on the Uber model, the startup was different as it allowed users to request taxis via SMS.

That has now changed, with RIDE pivoting and adopting the more common mobile app approach to taxi hailing. Founder Samrawit Fikru told Disrupt Africa the change in direction had been prompted by the increasing internet coverage and usage of smartphones in Ethiopia.

Also, SMS was too slow to connect the driver with the customer, she said. We have done with the application, we are now working on integration with the technology in the car, like the meter and GPS.

RIDER will relaunch in the new year after signing an exclusive deal with local taxi firm Ze-Lucy Meter Taxi, which will see RIDE technology deployed in cars.
SYDNEY - The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has opened a new branch in Queensland, Australia, signalling new opportunities for the state's investors and exporters.

Queensland state Acting Premier and Treasurer Curtis Pitt said in a statement on Wednesday that the new ICBC branch in Brisbane was a testament to Queensland's strong and growing economy while offering mutually beneficial opportunities to Chinese investors who were interested to invest in the sunshine state.

ICBC is one of the biggest banks in the world, with 5 million corporate customers and 496 million personal customers, and a geographic footprint in 42 countries and regions.

"The new ICBC branch will be able to fully support businesses engaged in trade between China and our state," Pitt said.

ICBC which commenced operations in Australia in 2008 already operates a branch in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and previously held a representative office in Brisbane.

The bank is also the fourth major Chinese bank to establish a presence in Queensland in recent years.

"It (ICBC) will also support Chinese companies seeking mutually beneficial investments in Queensland as well as service Queensland companies doing business in China or interested in entering the market," Pitt said.

ICBC Chairman Huiman Yi said the bank had experienced periods of stable growth and development and has become one of the largest banks in the world with assets totaling A$4.4 trillion ($1.6 trillion).

"As part of ICBC's growing confidence in the state of Queensland, we have made the decision to establish a branch in Brisbane," Yi said.

Pitt said China was Queensland's largest merchandise trading partner with exports totalling A$11.1 billion ($8.39 billion) largely on coal and base metals and imports totalling A$7.2 billion ($5 billion) on clothing, electrical, and manufactured products.

"China is also the largest source of international students studying in Queensland, representing almost 19 percent of enrolments," Pitt said.

"In addition, of the 2.5 million overseas visitors to our state each year China was the largest single source, accounting for almost 20 percent of total international tourists," Pitt said.

"The new ICBC branch will help build on these types of existing bonds and develop new connections that have the potential to generate new business opportunities both here and in China and that means more jobs," he said.
The Director-General expressed appreciation for State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi's call for restoration work in Bagan, an outstanding complex of 11th century Buddhist temples, to be carried out under UNESCO's technical guidance, the UN Body said in a statement. State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi stressed the importance of research, including on white-washing, to conduct renovations with professionalism in order not to repeat past practices such as the use of concrete.

Noting that UNESCO deployed a team to Bagan 48 hours after the August 24 earthquake, the Director-General indicated that a comprehensive plan for restoration has now been prepared. We are extremely committed to support the process of inscription of Bagan as a World Heritage Site and will send a strong message that we are not going to rush with safeguarding and restoration but look with the greatest care for authenticity and use of traditional materials, she said.

In discussing the challenges of managing the transformation, State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi shared her interest in bringing museums up to standards so they can be places where young people can meet and learn about their common past. We would like to use cultural heritage as a binding force rather than a divisive force. The Director-General praised this approach, referred to UNESCO's work to put heritage in young hands, and indicated readiness to contribute.

She also affirmed UNESCO's support to education reform, including through strengthening teacher education. State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi reiterated that education is a priority for the Government, indicating the establishment of a National Advisory Education Council to coordinate policy.

Finally the Director-General commended the State Counsellor and Foreign Minister for her participation in World Press Freedom Day and the country's work with UNESCO on media legislation and capacity building for journalists. The Minister emphasized the importance of professional standards and countering hate speech, in particular through social media. With freedom comes responsibility, we have to keep emphasizing this, she said.
Prithviraj Chauhan Tomb in Afghanistan insulted by spitting, stabbed with shoes by locals to avenge killing of their sultan Muhammad Ghori. Sher Singh Rana, prime accused in Phoolan Devi murder case, escaped from Tihar Jail and brought back remains of Kings grave to India.

After killing Ghori, Prithviraj and his poet friend Chand Bardai killed each other and their graves were made outside Muhammads grave.



Prithviraja III (11661192 CE ), popularly known as Prithviraj Chauhan or Rai Pithora was a king from the Chahamana (Chauhan) dynasty. He ruled Sapadalaksha, the traditional Chahamana territory, in present-day north-western India. He controlled much of the present-day Rajasthan, Haryana, and Delhi; and some parts of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. His capital was located at Ajayameru (modern day Ajmer).

Prithviraj was born to the Chahamana king Someshvara and queen Karpuradevi. Both Prithviraj and his younger brother Hariraja were born in Gujarat, where their father Someshvara was brought up at the Chalukya court by his maternal relatives. According to Prithviraja Vijaya, he was born on the 12th day of the Jyeshta month. This book does not mention the year of his birth, but provides some of the astrological planetary positions at the time of his birth, calling them auspicious. Based on these positions and assuming certain other planetary positions, the year of Prithvirajs birth was calculated as 1166 CE (1223 Vikram Samvat).

The same book states that he mastered 6 languages; while Prithviraj Raso, written by his friend poet Chand Bardai claims that he learned 14 languages.

He was master of history, mathematics, medicine, military, painting, philosophy (mimamsa), and theology. Both the texts state that he was particularly proficient in archery and learned the art of Sabda-Bhedi (hitting a target by concentrating on sound, while being blind-folded) during his childhood.

His father died when Prithviraj was around 11 years old and he ascended throne with his mother as the regent.

The biggest mistake in Indian History

Indian kings have been fighting within themselves and couple of times, they let invaders attack their own country men.

First was Jarasandha, who brought KalaYavan to attack Krishna in dwaraka to avenge his son-in-law Kamsas death. But he failed a Yavan was burnt alive by Muchukunda.

Second attempt was made when Alexander was helped to cross Khyber Pass, when he bribed King of Taxila with gold.

But Alexander failed to conquer India and left back.

Third attempt was made by Jai Chandra Rathod and that left India suffering for almost 1000 years.

Jai Chandra Rathod, the Gahadvala king of Kannauj of the Gujjar ethnic group, had a beautiful daughter named Samyukta.

She fell in love in Prithviraj Chauhan after hearing about his heroics. She was secretly communicating with him and this angered her father.

To stop their love, Jai Chandra announced Samyuktas swayamvar and invited every eligible prince in the country, except Prithviraj.

To insult Chauhan, Jai chandra installed a life size statue of Chauhan at the gate of the Swyamwar arena , dressed up as a doorman.

Chauhan was provoked and he decided to elope with Samyukta.

During swayamvar, Samyukta walked through the court holding the ceremonial garland, ignoring the gazes of all her ardent suitors. She passed through the door and put the garland around the neck of Prithvirajs statue, declaring him her husband.



Chauhan who was hiding in disguse nearby, immediately ran in scooped her inn his arms put her on his fast steed and made a daring getaway.

Jai Chand felt humiliated but he did not have enough strength to attack Chauhan.

So, he gave a Supari to Muhammad of Ghori, outside India with information as to how to enter India via the treacherous Khyber pass and attack Prithviraj.

First Battle of Tarain in 1191 CE

In 1191, Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghori, leading an army of 120,000 men and horses, invaded India through the Khyber Pass and was successful in reaching Punjab. Chauhan had a larger army of 20000 men and 300 elephants. The two armies met at the town of Tarain, near Thanesar, in present-day Haryana, 150 kilometres north of Delhi.

Ghori could not handle Prithvirajs forces and was captured as a war prisoner after being defeated.

Prithviraj showed mercy on him and let him return to Afghanistan, much against the wishes of his wife Samyukta and his ministers.

Infact, Prithvirajs mother had warned him about her dream of an invader.

This one mistake made India ruled by invaders until 1947 CE.

Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 CE

An year later in 1192 CEat the Second Battle of Tarain, Ghori defeated Chauhan with a stronger and wiser army.

This time, Jai Chand was asked for help by chauhan but the angry father-in-law did not listen.

Prithviraj was chained and brought as a prisoner.

Ghori ordered him to lower his eyes, whereupon a defiant Prithviraj declared that the eyelids of a Rajput are lowered only in death.

Ghori made his men put red hot burning rods in Chauhans eyes and blinded him.

Later, Samyukta and women in fort burnt themselves as they did not want to be captured by Ghori and his men.

The trend of royal women burning themselves started after invaders starting raping even dead women, who committed suicide by consuming poison.

So, these women used to first burn their genitals and then burn entire body, to escape from the lust of invaders.

Jai Chand in remorse later drowned himself in the river Yamuna.

Thousands of hindus were forced to convert their religion.

Prithviraj wanted revenge and his only chance was created by Chand Bardai.

He provoked Muhammad of Ghori that Chauhan can hit a target by sound, despite being blinded. Ghori did not believe that a human can posess such talent and ordered for a demonstration.

Chand said to Prithviraj : Char bans, chaubis gaj, angul ashta praman, Ta upar sultan hai, Chuke mat Chauhan

This was the poem recited by Chandbardai for Prithviraj Chauhan to kill Muhammad Gori. .

Translation: Four Bamboo lengths in front, then twenty four hands and eight fingers in height, the sultan is sitting. Dont miss him Chauhan.(Prithviraj was blinded then so Chandrabardai gave him the hint about Sultanss exact location through his poem).

An arrow was shot by blind Prithviraj and Muhammad Ghauri died on the spot.



After killing Ghouri, Chand and Prithviraj stabbed each other to death, to avoid further humiliation by sultans men.

Later, these two were also laid to rest along with Ghori at the outskirts of Ghazni, at a small village called Deak in Afghanistan.

Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti planned Ghoris attack on Prithviraj

12 years before Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti came to India, Prithvirajs mother had a dream of an invader attacking their country.

Her son did not pay attention to this intuitive dream and paid the price.

Moinuddin Chisti had told his followers that at Mecca, he was instructed by Mohammed the Prophet in his dream to convert Hindus into Islam.

His men poisoned lakes of Pushkar and Anagasar, to weaken Chauhans army.

Historians have written that Prithviraj was captured and killed by Ghori but the later went on to rule for few more years, which is false.

If that was true, why would Prithviraj and Chands graves be kept outside Ghoris grave and why would Afghans and Pakistanis spit and kick Chauhans tomb saying that this Kafir killed our Sultan..

Ex-Prime Minister of India and his men visited Afghanistan in August 2005. They visited invader Baburs tomb but neglected Prithviraj Chauhan tomb.

They named the mountains in Afghanistan-Pakistan as Hindu Kush, as Kush means Genocide and it meant deliberate killing of a large group of Hindus.

Sher Singh Rana brought soil from Prithviraj Chauhan Tomb in 2005

Sher Singh Rana, the prime accused in the Phoolan Devi murder case, escaped from the jail two years earlier. He had a national mission in his mind, he wanted to bring the ashes of Rajput King Prithvi Raj Chauhan back to India whose ashes were buried in Afghanistan.



Rana brought relics and sand from the kings grave in Ghazni and also had a memorial built in Etawah in UP.

He got a fake passport from Ranchi and flew to Afghanistan on a student visa in early 2005 about 10 months after his escape from Tihar. Subhash Thakur, whom he had first met in Tihar jail, financed his trip.

During his three-month stay in afghanistan, Rana went searching for the kings grave.

After finding Prithviraj Chauhans tomb, Rana convinced the locals that he had come from Pakistan to restore Ghoris tomb. On the sly, he dug Chauhans grave and collected sand from it.

In April 2005, he was back in India. He sent the ashes through courier to Etawah and organised a function there with the help of local politicians.
WOW fellow helps refugees find a new beginning

Photo/Mike Lovett Emilie Kahn-Boesel 18 (fourth from left)

Emilie Kahn-Boesel 18 developed a greater sense of empathy for refugees this summer as a World of Work (WOW) Fellow.

Through her fellowship, Kahn-Boesel, who is from Needham, Massachusetts and majors in politics, worked at the International Institute of New England, where she helped refugees from around the world acclimate to American life and find jobs.

I was so happy and thankful to have the opportunity of being a WOW fellow, said Kahn-Boesel, who also minors in economics and education studies. It definitely enhanced my experience at Brandeis and really opened my eyes to something new.

Brandeis University's WOW fellowship program, which is administered by the Hiatt Career Center, is a competitive program that awards stipends to undergraduates who pursue summer internships with organizations that are not able to provide a salary.

The International Institute of New England, which is located in downtown Boston, welcomes refugees and helps immigrants along the pathway to citizenship.

During her time as a WOW fellow, Kahn-Boesel served as a Workforce Development intern, which meant she helped refugees apply for jobs, train for interviews, and improve their financial literacy.

I was nervous about teaching at first, but eventually I was able to even lead a class about proper interview etiquette as well as one on American culture orientation, she said.

Kahn-Boesel worked with refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Haiti, Cuba and El Salvador. All of them  Kahn-Boesel said  were simply grateful to escape dire situations at home and have a chance to start fresh.

This experience was very rewarding, Kahn-Boesel said. I connected with these people on a personal level and Im more passionate now about bringing refugees into the United States from other areas of the world.

These people are fleeing terrible situations, she added. They just want jobs so they can have a new life.

Kahn-Boesel was a Social Justice WOW recipient, which is sponsored by the Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice, which was established by Jules Bernstein '57.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Brandon University researcher has received a grant of nearly $570,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for her project dealing with postpartum depression.

Penny Tryphonopoulos of BU and Nicole Letourneau of the University of Calgary are leading the project, which uses video feedback to help women with postpartum depression see and understand how positive interactions benefit their babies.

Postpartum depression is experienced by about one in five mothers and also affects their families, Tryphonopoulos stated in a press release.

Submitted Penny Tryphonopoulos has received a grant of nearly $570,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for her project to help new mothers form bonds with their babies.

Research has shown the early months of babies lives are extremely important in their development. By encouraging and enabling positive interactions between moms and their babies, we can help to foster a new generation of happy and healthy children.

Postpartum depression can begin at any time from pregnancy up until a child is one-year-old, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. It lasts longer than the baby blues, which are often gone in a couple of weeks. Babies are able to perceive the stress, which releases hormones that decrease brain volume, which over the long term can lead to behavioural and cognitive problems.

According to Brandon University, the project is a large-scale exploration of a successful trial for Tryphonopoulos dissertation for her PhD, which was supervised by Letourneau.

Nurses use a video system Tryphonopoulos has dubbed Vid-Kids to record interactions between mothers and their babies.

In a supportive fashion, a nurse can review the footage with a mother to show her the signs of healthy interaction.

This can benefit not only the child but the mother as well, said Tryphonopoulos, who earned her doctorate last spring before joining BUs faculty of health studies last fall as an assistant professor.

The babies get the valuable stimulation that supports learning and growth. When their moms see them react with smiles and noises, it can help to alleviate the stress that is caused by their depression.

Trials will take place at Calgary Public Health facilities, where Tryphonopoulos built many contacts while working on her PhD.

If the trials are successful, the researchers hope to expand the system, and Tryphonopoulos would love to make it available to mothers in Brandon and the surrounding area.

Due to the widespread nature of postpartum depression, this research has the potential to have an incredible impact on families across North America, said Dean Care, BUs dean of health studies.

This project is an excellent example of co-operation between institutions producing positive results for their communities. At BU, were proud of Pennys role in this project.

 The Brandon Sun
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Where many travellers spend their summers camping, Gorman and Anita Orsted have spent 20 years welcoming them.

The couple volunteers as tourist greeters, a group of about 30 to 40 members who, in addition to manning Brandon tourism booths and helping out with fundraising events, run the camping greeting program.

The program started almost 30 years ago, said Lois MacDonald, manager of tourism services in Brandon. They go basically every day, six days a week, to Meadowlark Campground and welcome all new campers who have just checked in and provide them with an information package, visit with them, really with the goal of providing a warm welcome to Brandon.

Erin DeBooy/The Brandon Sun Anita and Gorman Orsted both received tokens of appreciation for 20 years of volunteering as tourist greeters in Brandon during an appreciation dinner on Monday night. The greeters, a group of 30 to 40 members, staff tourism booths, help out with fundraising events and welcome visitors staying at Meadowlark Campground.

While there are still members volunteering since the beginning, the Orsteds were two out of five volunteers who received gifts for 20 years of service at an appreciation dinner on Monday night.

Its interesting because we get to meet people from all over the world, Gorman said. Weve seen people from Germany who bring their own motorhome  some people bring their own motorcycles, people come up from the U.S., theres a lot of people who travel from coast to coast.

The majority of travellers, 99 per cent, Gorman said, are happy to see them and welcome the visit. Many tourists say they have never seen a program of its kind before, he added.

People really appreciate it, theyre so happy that we come and greet them, Anita said. Some people havent really spoken to other people since they left home.

Its not only the tourists that the Orsteds enjoy meeting, but also the people they volunteer with, Anita said.

We get to know the volunteers, we often get to work with them, she said. In the spring, we get to visit with returning and new volunteers on sign-up day, they give us coffee and cake or pie, so they feed us well and look after us pretty good.

Ill be 83 years old this fall, so Im no spring chicken  but we really enjoy doing it and well keep doing it, Gorman said. It feels pretty good. There are some wonderful people (volunteering) and they keep coming back, health permitting.

With long-term members growing older, entering their golden years as Gorman likes to call it, recruiting new members is becoming more important to keep the camping greeting program going.

Its a bit of an older demographic  We always try and recruit some younger folks, but it tends to be a group of people who have time throughout the day. But they keep us young, thats for sure. Theyre a very dedicated group, MacDonald said.

We always work to bring new people in and lots of existing tourist greeters also bring friends in  but its an ongoing process, she added.

Anyone interested in volunteering for the camping greeting program can stop by the Riverbank Discovery Centre or call 204-729-2141.

 edebooy@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @erindebooy
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It could have been a bumper crop in portions of Westman, but the rain  as it so often does  had other plans.

A dumping of rain and hail in a late August storm, along with intermittent rain since, has dampened expectations of near-record yields this harvest season. But even so, many farmers have pulled solid yields, particularly with their cereal crops.

Definitely a month, month and a half ago, we were looking at above average yields in pretty much all the crops, said Lionel Kaskiw, a farm production adviser in Souris for Manitoba Agriculture. The weather is a big thing this year  the high rainfall amounts, high moisture amounts.

File A wheat crop matures in a field near Rapid City last month. The spring wheat yield has been strong, averaging 55 to 65 bushels per acre in areas north of the Trans-Canada Highway.

Until about three weeks ago, you could look at every location where we had weather stations and we were anywhere from 20 to 60 per cent higher than our average normal rainfall, he added.

Though farmers could be asking themselves what could have been, many are pleased with what they have put in the bin.

Amir Farooq, a farm production adviser working in Manitoba Agricultures Hamiota office, said the spring wheat yield has been strong, averaging 55 to 65 bushels per acre in areas north of the Trans-Canada Highway, with some varieties getting close to 75 bushels per acre. Canola has yielded 40 to 45 bushels per acre, he said.

Farooq said peas have suffered as a result of excess moisture. One farmer he spoke with usually averaging 40 bushels per acre of peas was only producing about 25 bushels per acre this season.

Ron Krahn, who is farming wheat, canola, peas and sunflowers north of Rivers, described this years harvest as successful in spite of high expectations after seeding.

The crop hasnt been as good as what it looked like in June and July, he said. Our crop is still good, but its not great like the way it looked.

Rain particularly walloped the southern reaches of the province, notably around Boissevain and Killarney, where Kaskiw said precipitation has been about 150 per cent higher than normal. Diseases have also harmed some crops.

One of those farmers coping with wetter conditions is Darren Peters, who owns a grain operation north of Boissevain.

The rain hasnt been relentless but enough sporadic sprinklings have done damage.

The harvest has been a challenge most of the way, said Peters. We thought it would be an early harvest, but we are much later than we expected with the rains coming down every second or third day.

The pea crop is among the most affected by the rain, though that crops success has varied depending on where the farmer grew it. Peters said water-logged conditions on his land produced a yield well below normal.

Added Kaskiw, We had some areas where (pea) yields were less than 10 bushels an acre.

But Peters noted hes enjoyed above average yields, too. Within an acre his wheat was producing 60 to 70 bushels, while his canola was around 50 bushels  all higher than his farms average.

The growing conditions through a lot of the summer did work really good for a lot of crops, Peters said. It was a bit cooler for a bit of the flowering season  and thats a big part of why they were good this year.

Kaskiw said most corn, soybean and sunflower harvests likely wont begin for another week to 10 days.

 ifroese@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ianfroese
A day after China and Georgia announced they would sign a free-trade agreement late this year, Georgia's agriculture minister said the two countries' wine industries would be big beneficiaries very quickly.

"Our countries have a special relationship that goes back to the Silk Road era and before," said Levan Davitashvili, who took a break from Georgia's ongoing election campaign to discuss the news with a group of visiting Chinese journalists.

"Today the tariff on wine imports in China is 48.5 percent, but after the FTA goes into effect next summer, it will be 0," he said.

"But there will be big benefits for both countries, especially for Chinese producers who will be doing joint ventures in Georgia. We have free trade agreements with one-third of the world, including the EU, Turkey and Russia, so 'Made in Georgia' products will open a great window for Chinese companies."

For Georgia companies, he noted, the wine industry has a big head start, thanks to an investment of about $500,000 his country has made to tell the story of Georgia wine in China.

"Four years ago, we had a target to become 1 percent of total Chinese wine imports, which at that time was about 300 million bottles," he said. "We have already reached that goal, selling 5 million bottles to China last year. Our target now is to be selling 20 million bottles annually five years from now."

While Georgia may be most famous in Europe for its quality white wines, he says, exports to China are 80 percent red wine, as China is the world's largest consumer of red wine. Sparkling wine and brandy make up the remaining exports.

Georgia claims the title of the "cradle of wine," with a tradition of winemaking that archaeologists have documented going back 6,000 years. The country also has 525 recognized grape varieties, but the bulk of wines that go to China are the rich, red-black vintages of Saperavi.

"We have been eager to develop this agreement," he told China Daily, noting that it fits very well with the One Belt One Road initiative of President Xi Jinping.

Wine, agricultural produce and commodities and the chemical industry are all areas that will benefit, he said.

Tourism is expected to grow as well, he said, citing statistics that show Georgia is the third-safest country in the world.
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A chief statistician who does not direct his own data processing department cannot be sure the reports he issues are accurate.

Wayne Smith, Canadas chief statistician, tried to make that simple point to his masters in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau  but they didnt get it. They required him to continue using the inefficient and unreliable information technology service of Shared Services Canada.

In an email to members of his advisory board, leaked to the Reuters news agency, Mr. Smith said Shared Services Canada, the computer department for the whole government, had been given an effective veto over many of the chief statisticians decisions, including collection, analysis and dissemination of data.

Rather than preside over the decline of a world-leading statistical office, Mr. Smith quit.

Mr. Trudeau announced Mr. Smiths departure Friday and appointed Anil Arora in his place. (Mr. Arora was a senior executive at Statistics Canada from 2000 to 2010.)

In February, it became clear Shared Services Canada was not equal to the task it had been given. The agency, invented by the former Conservative government to centralize computer services of federal departments, supposedly to save money, has been trying since 2013 to create a single email system for 43 departments and agencies and bring all their data processing into its machinery. Auditor General Michael Ferguson found the centralized operation was providing poor service and likely not reducing expense.

At that point, the government should have recognized it was steering its ship onto the rocks. It should have listened more closely to the many arms of government that were asking to be spared from inclusion in the dysfunctional family of Shared Services Canada client agencies.

Among others, it should have recognized Mr. Smith had a perfectly valid point. All economic decision-makers in business, government and universities  in Canada and around the world  rely on Statistics Canada to tell them, in a timely way, what is happening in the Canadian economy.

The same is true in all countries, but in some countries, the statistical reports are torqued to prove what the government of the day wants to prove. That was one reason Greece got into economic trouble 10 years ago.

Canada should not even think of following in Greeces footsteps. It should ensure the chief statistician directs his own information technology department and he is not waiting to be informed by the computer geeks in another agency what data he should collect, how it should be analyzed and when and how it should be disseminated.

That way lies economic misinformation or even, in the event of data tampering, disinformation.

The government should have learned from the debacle of its centralized payroll system that grand schemes to build new digital empires need to be treated with great skepticism. If it is going to persist with the centralized IT project, it should find some modest task Shared Services is likely to complete successfully and build from there. It should certainly not sacrifice the integrity and credibility of Canadas leading economic information source.

The Conservative opposition is ill-placed to complain about Liberal mismanagement of Statistics Canada because it lost the previous chief statistician (Munir Sheikh) by ignoring his advice about the long-form census and then misleading Canadians about it. They also started the IT centralization. The Liberals should not mimic the Tories.

They should do better.

 Winnipeg Free Press
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/09/2016 (2230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I hope we Canadians are resisting feelings of superiority while watching the horror show unfold before our eyes that is the U.S. election. If we havent done it ourselves, Im sure weve seen others wag their fingers or click their tongues at that pitiful excuse for a commander-in-chief, Donald Trump. And rightly so.

But make no mistake, he has his supporters right here in Canada, too. I just read a letter to the editor from a fellow Manitoban, for example, which loudly proclaims I think we desperately need a Donald Trump here in Canada!

Odd, isnt it? Those words are eerily similar to these: I think Donald Trump would be best for the job. Who said that? That was the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S.

Beating the drum, as Trump does, for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and a ban on Muslims, he wears his racism on his sleeve like a badge of honour. How this hateful, lying demagogue can attract supporters here in my country, or anywhere for that matter, leaves me truly gobsmacked.

Trump is a man who is immune to evidence, facts or truth. Up until today, at least, he has clung to the lie he helped manufacture, that President Barack Obama is a Muslim who was not even born in the States. After sowing those toxic seeds (fuelled, no doubt, by the fact that Obama is black) and unleashing the kind of harm only such conspiracy theories can do, hes had a death-bed repentance. Yes, Obama was U.S.-born, Donald proclaims! I guess, just because Trump has now said it, Obama is finally qualified to carry on in his post! But Trump followed up immediately by launching another bald-faced lie: that Hillary Clinton had started the whole, ugly birther controversy. This man does not know when to quit. He is pathological.

And Canada, of course, once belonged to the U.S. and ought to be returned! Trump actually said that? He sure did!

He has also labelled the now well-founded science of manmade climate change as a hoax, having been created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. He actually promises to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the last bastion shielding the American people, their health and their environment, from unbridled destruction by soulless corporations bent on mining and polluting the Earth (and its oceans) to death.

While Trump may have dreamed up his own personal, perverted brand of climate denial, he has plenty of company right here in my country, too. Trust me, that denial, in one form or another, runs deep. Its even ingrained to some degree in our educational, journalistic and faith communities.

Not many may come out publicly, as that letter writer did, to proclaim their support for this wart on the rump of history. But I fear they still privately share way too many of his dangerous, misguided beliefs.

Please dont let another Donald Trump slither into a position of power in Canada. If we do, we should all be afraid. Very afraid.

Larry Powell

Neepawa
A full inquiry into all of sales made by Nama could take up to 20 years to complete, the Taoiseach has warned.

Enda Kenny has said that he wants a forthcoming Commission of Investigation to focus solely on the sale of Nama's Northern Ireland loans.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has categorically rejected new claims that he authorised the murder of an IRA double agent Denis Donaldson in 2006, writes Daniel McConnell of the Irish Examiner.

Mr Donaldson was killed in Co Donegal shortly after he publicly revealed he was a British agent, a move which led to the collapse of the institutions in Stormont.

The fresh claims were contained in a BBC Spotlight programme broadcast last night.

The programme included testimony from an anonymous IRA agent referred to as 'Martin' who himself worked as an RUC agent from 1997.

In a series of meetings with the makers of the programme over a series of months, Martin claimed that the killing was sanctioned by Mr Adams.

Martin told the programme that he had been told that the IRA had killed Donaldson, despite the organisation's denials at the time.

The programme claimed that it was sanctioned on foot of a request from republican Thomas 'Slab' Murphy and other leading republicans in South Armargh for the purpose of maintaining army discipline.

Martin claimed that murders had to be approved by the political and military leadership of the IRA which meant Mr Adams.

In a statement to the programme, solicitors for Mr Adams said he totally rejected the claims insisting he had no knowledge of or involvement in the killing outside Glenties.

He denied he had the final say in sanctioning the murder.

No one has ever been convicted of Donaldson's killing.

Earlier this year, two men were arrested in connection with the murder of Mr Donaldson. He was shot dead at Cloghercor, Doochary, Co Donegal, in April 2006, in a killing claimed by the Real IRA.

Months earlier it had emerged that the Sinn Fein member had worked as an agent for the police and MI5 for 20 years.

Both men were arrested in the Donegal area and are currently being detained at Letterkenny garda station under the provisions of Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act.
Transport Minister Shane Ross has said that the Dublin Bus dispute will not be resolved by him.

His comments come as the company writes to staff saying the strikes are having a catastrophic effect on its finances and undermining efforts to get over the financial crisis.
A detective inspector has told the Jobstown trial that he did not mention the teenage accused in his original statement as there were hundreds of people around, writes Tom Tuite.

The 17-year-old boy denies falsely imprisoning the former Tanaiste Joan Burton and her advisor Karen O'Connell in two garda cars during the demonstration at the Fortunestown Road in Jobstown in Tallaght, on Nov. 14, 2014.

The hearing resumed for its third day at the Dublin Childrens Court where Judge John King was shown footage of the Jobstown protest obtained from YouTube, RTE and a garda 4X4 which had been carrying the former Labour leader and her advisor.

Detective Inspector Derek Maguire told Judge King the 17-year-old boy who cannot be named because he is a minor can be seen at various points in the footage.

At one stage he is holding a megaphone and at another he is standing in front of a Garda 4X4, which Joan Burton was in, as the public order unit tried to clear the crowd. He agreed that another man was the first to sit down in front of that vehicle.

He said the defendant appears to be clapping in another part of the footage and is gesturing to the crowd with arm movements.

In cross-examination with Giollaoisa O Lideadha SC, defending, Det Inspector Maguire said he did not mention the teenage defendant in his original statement as there were hundreds of people around at the time.

He agreed that in parts of the footage some protesters were calling on the crowd not to throw things.

The court also heard the teenage defendant may have said into the megaphone at one stage joany in your ivory tower  this is called people power.

He agreed that it was a reasonable proposition that when the boy was seen holding his hands up, this was consistent with encouraging others to do the same. He agreed that when the public order unit moved in, the boy had his hands in the air.

He also identified the teen in front of Joan Burton as she walked from An Cosan eduction centre to nearby St Thomas's Church for the conclusion of a graduation ceremony. He accepted that the teenager who was holding a phone was backing up at this point.

He did not accept that later on gardai later made an agreement with protesters to let them slow march the garda 4X4 carrying the Tanaiste away.

It was put to him that a Garda superintendent thanked the protesters at that point but the Inspector said the protesters would not co-operate and dictated events.

He said gardai had been protecting the two cars from being attacked and they were not in a position to use physical force because they were outnumbered.

On Tuesday he had told the court it was like a rugby maul when he tried to escort the then Tanaiste and her advisor through an angry crowd.

The former Labour leader and Minister for Social Protection had been attending a graduation event at 11.30 am at An Cosan adult education centre.

It is alleged trouble broke out and she and her entourage were trapped in cars surrounded by protesters for about three hours. She was struck with a water balloon, had abuse shouted at her and gave evidence that it was not safe to get out garda cars when they were surrounded by protesters who banged on the roof and windows. Ms O'Connell said someone hit her and she was in a state of shock for some time.

Prosecution barrister Tony McGillicuddy has said that the prosecution case is that the former Tanaiste and her advisor were detained by the actions of the teenage defendant in conjunction with the actions of others.
The National Bus & Rail Union is to ballot its members at Bus Eireann for industrial action, it was announced today.

The move is in reaction to proposed changes to Bus Eireanns Expressway service.

NBRU general secretary Dermot O'Leary said: "Trade Union representatives attended at the WRC [Workplace Relations Commission] today in order to begin discussions on a long overdue pay rise for staff at Bus Eireann after eight years of pay stagnation.

The company not alone indicated that it would not be in a position to contemplate any pay rises but also dropped an industrial relations bombshell in relation to the future of the Expressway service, threatening the livelihoods of 800 Bus Eireann workers.

The NBRU will not tolerate the imposition of a Low Wage Bus Transport Service as a solution to a problem which has directly resulted from Department policy.

"The current Dublin Bus Dispute and this crisis at Bus Eireann are not unconnected, there are huge question marks over the Department of Transport and its stewardship of the State owned public transport services, cutting off vital financial support and overseeing a licencing regime which has now led to the potential decimation of an Expressway Service that connects into every nook and cranny in rural Ireland.

It is now time for politicians from across all parties and none to step up to the plate on behalf of the communities they purport to represent.

The Irish electorate can be extremely unforgiven [sic] to those they elect who fail to protect vital social services."

Bus Eireann responded to the statement by insisting that it cannot afford to offer a pay increase for staff.

The company stated that it has incurred a 5.6m loss in 2015 and is forecasting a similar loss for 2016, mainly due to losses on commercial Expressway services.

Expressway must now be positioned to compete more intensively in a low margin market, the Bus Eireann statement read.

Any further increase to our costs, increases the risk for all employees, so the business must urgently address its losses to survive.

In 2016 the financial position has worsened due to a number of factors, including increased competition by low-cost operators on commercial routes.

The business requires immediate cost savings of 7m and our existing commercial Expressway services - which are not State-subsidised  need to generate an annual profit to survive.

These cost savings must be achieved internally and not through any cuts to service which would impact our customers.

Management have prepared a plan to transform and restructure Expressway into a sustainable business as part of an overall strategic plan for the company.

We need to introduce a new competitive model with a new structure and reduced costs.

While this is a major challenge for all employees at Bus Eireann  who we recognise as fully committed to the company  our plan needs to address the urgent financial challenges facing the business.

It is imperative that talks with unions continue, on the substantive issues of the financial crisis facing Bus Eireann.
The Citizens Assembly will begin its deliberations on whether to liberalise the country's abortion laws on October 15, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has revealed.

Daniel McConnell of the Irish Examiner writes that at a briefing this morning for political correspondents, Mr Kenny set out his key priorities between now and Christmas.

But he confirmed the Assembly will hold its first meeting under the chairmanship of Justice Mary Laffoy and the abortion issue will be the first item on the agenda.

He signalled a report from the Commission will then be put to discussion within the Oireachtas before any decision on a referendum to repeal the controversial 8th Amendent, which gives equal status to the right to life of the mother and her unborn child.

Pro-choice advocates have been deeply critical of the delay in addressing the country's abortion laws, which sees thousands of women travel every year to the UK to have abortions.

Mr Kenny was asked about the recent hospitalisation of Finance Minister Michael Noonan.

He said he had been given assurances by Mr Noonan as to his ongoing health issues.

Mr Kenny said Mr Noonan rang him and told him of his cellulitus and assured him of his fitness to continue in office. He added that Mr Noonan said that if at any stage he was told by his doctors that he wasn't able to continue he would tell him, and Mr Kenny said he accepted that.

The Taoiseach said that Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone was told to go back and further develop plans to advance suppports for childcare. He said it was a work in progress and was speaking in the context of Fine Gael TDs seeking more supports for the squeezed middle.

Mr Kenny also said that the October 11 Budget will be Brexit-proofed and he said it was his impression that British Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger the exit process sometime in January or February 2017.

It is strictly a matter for the Prime Minister but it is my impression from discussions is that it will happen sometime toward the end of January or early February, he said.

He said the Government is focusing now on its preparations for the Budget 2017, which will be held on Tuesday, October 11.

He said the Budget will contain about 1bn in extra spending including provision for 650 extra teachers and 800 more gardai, but these are largely to deal with the increasing population.

He said he expected the supply and confidence agreement with Fianna Fail to be honoured.

The Taoiseach said Fianna Fail have agreed to facilitate the minority Government, and said that discussions will take place between the Government and Fianna Fail.

However, he said it will be a Government Budget.

Mr Kenny was critical of Fianna Fail's u-turn on water charges, saying it was a reversal to old school populism.

We in Fine Gael are totally united on the issue of water charges. Fianna Fail have no idea how they could pay for it, he said.

The Taoiseach said he expected the Commission on water to report by November.

Tomorow, Housing Minister is to launch a plan to end the use of hotels as a means of emergency accomodation.

Simon Harris will announce details on mental health in homelessness and Katherine Zappone will discuss the impact of homelessness on children.

In relation to Nama, Mr Kenny said the sale of assets by Nama should not be suspended.

He said the Government fully accepted the report from the Comptroller and Auditor General but that he had confidence in Nama.

There is a difference of opinion here, the Government decided to set up a commission of investigation. But it has to work, he said.
Police have used tear gas to disperse protesters after officers were injured and a major road was shut down during a demonstration over the latest fatal shooting of a black man by US police.

The protests broke out on Tuesday in Charlotte, North Carolina, after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was shot at an apartment complex in the north east of the city. Police said he was armed and posed a threat.

The demonstration continued into Wednesday morning when TV footage showed dozens of protesters on Interstate 85 facing a line of law enforcement officers. At one point a fire flared up.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation website showed a portion of I-85 was closed in both directions due to police activity.

Earlier in the night, a larger group of demonstrators gathered near the scene of the shooting.

Agitators destroying marked police units. CEU continues to work to restore order and protect our community. pic.twitter.com/ZSYSt374w0  CMPD News (@CMPD) September 21, 2016

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and about 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock.

Approximately 12 officers injured. One officer hit in face with a rock  CMPD News (@CMPD) September 21, 2016

Photos and TV video showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Some officers were in riot gear.

The unrest in Charlotte came hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police officers went to the apartment complex looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Mr Scott - who was not the suspect they were looking for - inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said.

Officers saw Mr Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Mr Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again, at which point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon.

Mr Scott was taken to Carolinas Medical Centre and pronounced dead.

Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Mr Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. He has been with the department for two years.

Detectives recovered a gun at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Mr Trietley said.

Police blocked access to the area, about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Some protesters were heard shouting "Black lives matter" and "Hands up, don't shoot". One person held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us".

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex.

Charlotte mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that "the community deserves answers".

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Ms Shelby's lawyer has said Mr Crutcher was not following officers' commands and Ms Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon. A lawyer representing Mr Crutcher's family said he committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are continuing.
A woman stabbed her boyfriend to death with a kitchen knife after he told her of his plans to end the relationship, police said.

Ellishia Allen, 28, had been with 39-year-old Karl Bloxham for around five years when she stabbed him in their shared flat in Spruce Grove, Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
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The Australian National University has risen five places to be ranked 47th in the world's most prestigious university rankings list, the latest report from Times Higher Education has revealed.

The University of Canberra has been ranked in the 401-500 band in the 2016-2017 THE World University Rankings, up from last year's position in the 501-600 band. This achievement places UC as the 24th ranked institution in Australia, up from 28th last year.

The ANU remains in second place behind The University of Melbourne.

Acting Vice-Chancellor of ANU Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington said the ranking was a great outcome for ANU.
It was too wet on Wednesday for a broomstick, a bubble or even a balloon. So the witches of Oz, Glinda and Elphaba, made do with a helicopter at Snowy Hydro Southcare for the launch of Free Rain Theatre Company's Canberra premiere production of the musical Wicked.

Based on the novel by Gregory Maguire with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman, Wicked is an alternative telling of The Wizard of Oz from the perspectives of the so-called Wicked Witch of the West, here given the name Elphaba  after the original Oz author L. Frank Baum's initials  and Glinda the Good Witch. Director Shaun Rennie said Wicked "asks the questions, 'What is good? What is evil? Do they actually exist?' "

Loren Hunter, as Elphaba and Laura Murphy, as Glinda, at the media preview for Free Rain Theatre's production of Wicked. Credit:Rohan Thomson

Maybe, he said, it was all a matter of perspective and the stories people believed, whether in Oz or in the here and now.

Rennie, a professional actor and director who played Bert the chimney sweep in Free-Rain's Canberra premiere production of Mary Poppins last year, saw the original production of Wicked on Broadway in previews over a decade ago as a guest of Schwartz. That was "musical theatre heaven" for the then 21-year-old, who is now excited about bringing Wicked to the Canberra stage, flying effects and all.
YIKLA (C8) was an Australian Antarctic Division telegraphic code for "THIS IS THE LIFE" explains Ron Smith, Orange, and many others. "The codes were used by expeditioners to reduce telegraphic traffic, when telegrams were the only form of communication. I served at Mawson in 1968 and my most used code was WYSSA, ie "ALL MY LOVE DARLING", to my then fiancee."

A hefty bag about junk mail (C8). "I am happy to receive all the junk mail," says Tim Bowra, Rozelle. "It is the only reading of interest delivered these days and it doesn't share the threats that pervade in their fellow occupants that have windows in them." He is alone. "Fight back," suggests Tony Hunt in Brisbane. "Put the leaflet into an envelope and post it back - without a stamp. Buy cheap envelopes from a bargain store." Similar from John Swanton, Botany and Adrian Connelly, Springwood.

James Prior (C8) wants to know where old fashioned telephone directories have gone. "Well, so would the lovely physiotherapists in our local rehab team," says Catherine Hurst, Terrigal. "Apparently they are the right shape/size for 'stepping' practice." David Dolphin, Summer Hill says, kindly: "If you had asked earlier, I could have given you the new White Pages dropped on my doorstep yesterday. Unfortunately tonight is recycle bin night..." And, helpfully, from Allan Gibson, Cherrybrook: "I have a recently delivered copy of the 2016/17 Sydney Residential Directory and on page 1203 there is no listing for a 'Prior' of Sylvania Waters."

Can anyone enlighten me if scarecrows are still effective in scaring crows and other birds? asks Manbir Singh Kohli, Pemulwuy. "I'm sure they served a purpose for farmers years ago but one doesn't see scarecrows now. What happened to make them ineffective?"

"My poor other half, who is also saddened by the Americanisation of our language (C8), appeared following morning ablutions, horrified that we are now being sold 'bathroom' tissue. Another race to the bottom." From Sue Ryan, Hamilton East.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull spruiks Australia's credentials during the Summit for Refugees and Migrants at the UN. Credit:Seth Wenig Michael Healy East Maitland Good news that Malcolm Turnbull has announced a permanent increase in the regular humanitarian intake of refugees to 18,750 in addition to the 12,000 Syrians announced a year ago. But I'll believe it when I see it. Not even half of the promised Syrian refugees have been given visas. In 2014, the Safe Haven Enterprise Visa was also announced, but only a small proportion of the more than 2000 applications have been processed. Even the previously existing procedures have not been delivering  for example, three humanitarian visa applications submitted in mid-2014 by our organisation (Armidale Humanitarian Settlement) are still awaiting decisions.

Unless more priority is given to the immigration part of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, this announced increase will be yet another hollow promise. Jeff Siegel Armidale Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton lecture the UN on how to manage the flow of refugees in order to protect one's borders. If they are so proud of their management plan, they should have no hesitation inviting the world leaders to visit Nauru and Manus to show them how this success has been achieved. Corrado Tavella Rosslyn Park (SA) It is good news we are settling 19,000 refugees a year in Australia. However, we need to wipe the slate clean and release the current detainees into the community. The arguments about people smugglers and arriving by boat are now historical issues. We need to move on from our cruel past and embrace a positive future. Peter Dutton will be able to have a smile on his face.

Bill McMahon Lennox Head How wonderful is our Prime Minister's new refugee promise. A magnanimous $130million towards helping refugees, while we are to have a non-binding plebiscite costing $185 million. Now, with the imminent arrival of all these refugees from Central America, it's time to stop 417 visas. We can train and employ our own workers, both refugees and locals. Barbara Grant Baulkham Hills Good news that Malcolm Turnbull is increasing our refugee intake. Better still, can he find some room in Potts Point, instead of pushing them out to the crowded western suburbs as usual?

Joe Payne Coogee Much as I agree with John Christie about Malcolm Turnbull's hypocrisy in lecturing the UN, he has mixed his idiom, "More front than a Bondi tram." He means, I think, "More front than Myers." There are two (that I know of) idioms relating to the Bondi tram: "Shoot through like a Bondi tram" and the rather derogatory (or possibly admiring) "more bangs than a Bondi tram". My other personal favourite relating to a Sydney suburb is "getting off at Redfern". Come to think of it, that may be an apt description of Turnbull's prime ministership. Sally Kay Orange Are we now going to be overrun by Aztecs?

Andrew Young Port Macquarie Health minister is turning a deaf ear to western NSW So, the flat dosing cancer treatment scandal has broadened beyond St Vincents and now into Western NSW Local Health District ("More underdosed cancer patients face uncertainty", September 21).Both these local health districts were the worst performing in a recent survey of clinician/management engagement conducted by the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation. The Minister for Health, Jillian Skinner, should take notice. If both clinicians and the ministry have identified problems with St Vincents, what about western NSW? Out here in Orange, we have had votes of no confidence in administrators, calls for a caretaker administration, petitions, public rallies, and yet the minister has not answered the calls for help.

Perhaps she is listening to the wrong people? Her usual response  "that is a matter for the local health districts"  is hardly reassuring to the public if the problem is the local health district's management style itself.Could the minister avoid a few scandals and tough question times in Parliament by listening to clinicians and the public, and by performance managing the poorly performing local health districts? The AMA survey identified Sydney as a high performing local health district, which is a testament to the quality of the management there. Can we have some quality health management too, please? Andrew Rawson Orange Knowledge is power, but time is money It is hardly surprising that many electricity consumers do not participate in the market ("Zap to it: power play offers huge savings", September 21). Those of us who recall that once electricity was something we could take for granted  it worked and we paid a reasonable price for it  have better things to do with our time than haggling with companies we know nothing about over the price of an essential service. Still less do we have time to spend listening to young men haranguing us on our doorsteps about the virtues of changing our electricity plan when our dinner has been interrupted.

Your story notes that electricity prices have risen "7 to 15 per cent since July"  presumably to pay for the advertising, which is the inevitable concomitant of the market. Energy Minister Roberts is quoted in the same article as saying "Government reforms have boosted competition and lowered prices." Has he even read his own report? Free market ideologues fail to understand that there are diseconomies associated with replacing a government monopoly with multiple suppliers who waste money marketing their services. Expecting the rest of us to research and chop and change adds insult to injury. Peter Cockcroft Corrimal If Energy Minister Anthony Roberts and his state and federal counterparts in the telecommunications, health and other industries really want to help consumers, they would provide an industry "template" for pricing information, which every company had to comply with. The difficulty with comparison shopping is that the energy companies, telcos, etc each provide their own pricing structures and the average person cannot sort through the detail and compare apples with apples. Geoff Marles Avalon Beach

Super-high fees Reduce the fees paid on superannuation accounts  what a great idea ("Radical plan to shake up super", September 21). A super statement for the last financial year for my student daughter shows an opening balance of $285 and a closing balance of $164  an earnings rate of 2.7 per cent and fees of 45.3 per cent! Super started with noble intentions but has become a tax haven for the wealthy and a source of wealth for the finance sector. This government has recently shown its hand on the former. What chance it will find some policy backbone to do something about the latter? Simon Lambert Downer (ACT) Imagination the best mathematics formula

What an inspiring piece by Marcus Strom ('If you do the math you can scale the ladders of human imagination", September 21). Confirmation of Albert Einstein's remark: "Logic will take you from A to B but imagination will take you everywhere." Peter Thomas Rose Bay Studying HSC maths might not be essential for the success of an individual but it is to the success of Australia (Letters, September 21). So the drop in candidates remains of concern. Michael Payne West Pymble Robyn Lewis (Letters, September 21) has neatly explained why the NSW HSC is all about jobs and has little to do with education.

Anne Powter Dapto I disagree with Robyn Lewis. As global citizens, we have a duty to develop our problem solving and critical thinking skills. I suspect if everybody had studied science in the HSC, we would have voted for a government with a coherent policy on climate change (among other things) a long time ago. Dan Howe North Sydney Less safety for more Another day and another revelation indicating that the the NSW government process of privatisation has resulted in poor practices and questionable safety and quality, as well as eventually costing more taxpayer money ("Ineffectual: Apartment safety checks condemned", September 21).

Having recently taken on a owner-builder project to accommodate an ageing mother, I have been amazed at the new world order of regulating building work quality. I see a definite difference between the way council inspectors did their job in comparison with the private certifier I have had to contract at substantially higher cost. It is little wonder the attempt to privatise every service is resulting in poor quality building construction and putting future lives at risk. Robert Mulas Corlette Travesty of the tolls

Ross Gittins and Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher have a point: Trucks and cars should be paying a road-user charge ("Minster's bold call needs to be bolder", September 21). That's not brave, nor outrageous, it's obvious. The various taxes raised from road users currently are discriminatory, and that includes road and bridge tolls. Why is somebody who travels from the west via a freeway, keeping his car off suburban streets  where they would clog up local traffic  slugged with a charge? The warped logic is that they pay for the convenience, whereas a straight logic would be to charge a toll for using local streets and thus funnel traffic to the freeways. Similarly, why is a driver from North Sydney, who has business in the city, forced to contribute up to $8 of bridge toll (if they use a taxi) to building and maintaining the nation's roads, whereas his colleague from the eastern suburbs enters the city free? The only equitable way to cover the road costs is by kilometre travelled and by weight of the vehicle; all other tolls should be abolished. Carsten Burmeister Mosman

Busting the myth of the welfare trap The dishonesty and perfidy of politicians ("Welfare reform fair enough if the design is right", September 21). People are caught "in a welfare trap" is their mantra. Like the Freudian interpretation of dreams the opposite is true  poverty is the trap, welfare the relief. But the system is abused, they say. Was there any group or system, high or low, anywhere, from monarchy to mothers' meetings, free of abuse? Julian Woods Tarago Too hard to watch Howard on Menzies (Letters, September 20)? Couldn't bring myself to watch it. Sounded like Brokeback Mountain with doilies and white picket fences.

Craig Henderson Woollamia It's Packer's path The new Wynyard pedestrian path recently opened by Premier Baird should be named Packers Parade ("Workers line up for taste of tunnel vision", September 21). John Brett Miranda Dangers of the web
The appearance of our Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the US, speaking at the Barack Obama-curated summit on dealing with the current level of refugee displacement around the world, was a proud moment for everyone who really, really doesn't like foreigners.

While explaining that Australia's policies of not-processing asylum seekers in Nauru and Manus Island, while also forcibly turning back boats on the open ocean, had been a great success in um, stopping the boats which we're still apparently turning back? How does that even work?

"I'll thank all the representatives here to stop humming the 'those who've come across the seas' bit of our national anthem, thanks." Credit:AP

Anyway, while encouraging countries that aren't entirely surrounded by water to adopt Australia's approach to border protection  just stop those boats from walking over your borders, Germany!  our elected leader made the equally-insightful point that "Australians support these actions because they have confidence that our migration system is well managed.

"This confidence is a key pillar on which our successful multicultural society is built  Allow public trust to erode and the mutual trust that binds us will similarly falter. As leaders, we must always choose laws and policies that develop strength and unity over weakness and division."
Since Donald Trump finally abandoned the birther nonsense he had long indulged, the big question has been whether he will apologise to Barack Obama.

But that's not the right question. The real issue is this: Will he apologise to the citizens of the US for degrading democracy and discourse by trafficking in absurd, irresponsible, racially tinged conspiracy theories designed to kindle suspicions that a popularly elected president was somehow illegitimate?

And this should matter as much to those who once harboured doubts about Obama's birthplace as it does to Obama supporters. If you fall in the former camp, Trump owes you an apology too, for helping sow those doubts, for leading you to think that there really might be something to the supposed story.

Let's review the history here: In 2011, when he began toying with a 2012 presidential campaign, Trump seized upon an issue that had been the stuff of fringe conspiracy theories and took it mainstream. He said there was real doubt about whether President Obama was born in Hawaii. (There wasn't.) He even claimed to have sent investigators there to check things out.
Maybe it's Brando, and the regret "I coulda been a contender".

Or maybe it's Batman, and "what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object".

While we're recalling famous movie quotes, it's certain both men see the other as a Joker.

The battle pitching Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull and relentless ambition has returned for yet another episode.
It is a custom-made warship without guns, pimped out with bigger engines and a long-distance fuel tank.

Anti-whaling activists Sea Shepherd have a brand new, $12 million custom-built ship they boast will for the first time match the speed and endurance of Japan's whaling fleet.

And with Japan's defiance of an international court ruling about to be in the spotlight at a global summit next month, the activists plan to sail the new vessel to Australia, before launching south in a bid to disrupt the summer whale hunt near Antarctica.

"Our biggest challenge in our campaigns in the past has been that the Japanese whaling vessels have rammed us with their superior size, and they have outrun us with their superior speed," Sea Shepherd's Peter Hammarstedt told Fairfax Media.
Over the past 15 years, Angelina Jolie has become as well known for her humanitarian work as her work on screen.

As a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the actor has travelled to Iraq, Turkey and Syria, witnessing first-hand the appalling conditions in refugee camps and the desperate lives led by those displaced by war.

So, why did she drop the huge news that she had filed for divorce from fellow actor husband Brad Pitt at the same time as the UN refugee summit currently taking place in New York?*

This was the question asked by several social media users after news broke that the couple had decided to end their 12-year romance on Tuesday night.
In an age where too many celebrities are famous for little more than being famous, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt occupy a spot in the Hollywood firmament matched only by the stars of yesteryear  Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, even Burton and Taylor. The married couple are equals in the way few movie stars are.

Jolie and Pitt are accomplished actors  gilded by Oscar, firmly on the A-list  but both have also transcended their acting. She has segued into directing, him producing, and they've both become champions for social causes at home and abroad. Through a careful management of their image and social media footprint, they conjured the glamour of the movie stars of old.

So when Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt in a Los Angeles court early on Wednesday (AEST), even those who usually steer clear of such tabloid fodder took notice. Pitt, 52, and Jolie, 41, aren't your average Hollywood celebrity couple falling out of love.

"They came from an era before celebrities were doing their own social media," said Vanessa Diaz, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles and assistant professor at California State, Fullerton who specialises in pop culture.
In a world intent on demonising Islam, positive stories about Muslims are all too rare. How refreshing then, to see last weekend's Sunday Life profile on one half of Australia's most famous Muslim couple, the academic and writer, Susan Carland.

First, let me say that I applaud wholeheartedly such initiatives to combat the pervasive stereotype of the passive Muslim woman, and I think Susan Carland is a national treasure.

Susan Carland in her Sunday Life shoot. Credit:Bec Parsons

Nonetheless, this story highlights that there is something missing in our current discourse on the role of women in Islam. Namely, when we talk about the pressure on women to conform, we tend to focus only on whether they are physically forced, threatened, or otherwise explicitly told what to do. What we overlook is that sometimes women make certain choices out of love and the need to be loved.

Allow me to backtrack for a moment. As someone raised in one of Islam's many minority sects, but who stopped practicing religion many years ago, I have always been intrigued by those who, like Carland, convert to Islam as adults.
If they take their case to the Valuer-General in NSW they can face a financial hit of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Your rights For those living under the cloud of compulsory acquisition what can be done? Manisha Blencowe, property acquisition lawyer, Slater and Gordon, says once a government decides to compulsorily acquire a property there is little the owner can do about it. Notices are served on property owners and when a notice is published in the government gazette, the property belongs to the government.

The process can be initiated by Commonwealth, State or Territory governments, or a local government authority. The entire property may be acquired or just part of it. What follows is a process of negotiating compensation for the loss suffered. This includes compensation for the market value of the property. "Beyond market value the other categories of compensation for losses that people suffer include what are called disturbance losses," says Blencowe. "They are the losses that people suffer as a consequence of the property being taken from you and the need to replace that property so things like stamp duty, transfer fees, conveyancing costs, removal costs." People can also claim professional expenses: lawyers, valuers and other professional advisers that they consult because of the acquisition. "Those costs are generally recovered in full from the acquiring authority." Be aware, though, some categories of compensation vary from state to state.

For instance, in Victoria the compensation for the emotional impact of having your property taken from you is called solatium. It can be up to 10 per cent of the market value of the property. "The amount that you're entitled to varies depending on the circumstances of your connection to that property," says Blencowe. In NSW, however, the entitlement is a lump sum payment of about $25,000. "So it's clearly nowhere near the 10 per cent of the market value of a property which can be claimed in Victoria." Blencowe recommends getting legal advice early, ideally as soon as you're notified your property might be compulsorily acquired or when a public acquisition overlay is placed on the property. "The way in which acquisitions take place and compensation entitlements are triggered varies in different states," says Blencowe. "In some cases, in NSW, it's very common for the authorities to really jump the gun and acquire properties before the planning approvals are even in place whereas in Victoria it's more common for there to be a planning process which is well-advanced and plans approved before the acquisitions take place." Once the process starts to unfold there are timelines for the authority to make an offer of compensation and the property owner to respond. "You only get one chance at that response and it's important that the response is based on the right valuation evidence and claims all of the entitlements that you have."

It can make a significant difference, Blencowe adds. "If someone has been living in a property for a very long period of time and has an extensive history with the property they are likely to get a very high allowance for solatium whereas the government's offer will quite often be quite measly." The legislation also requires that the land is valued based on its highest and best use. For instance, if someone owns a small cottage on a large piece of land, the value could be far higher if it was sold to a developer. If the property owner thinks the value is unfair they can choose to have it determined by a court or tribunal. Kim Sun was one of the North Strathfield home-owners affected by WestConnex compulsory acquisitions. By October 2015, the offer from the acquiring authority, Roads and Maritime Services, (RMS) was still about $200,000 below what his valuer said was the $1.65 million market value of his property. "We negotiated for about two years and then I just gave up negotiating with RMS and went to the Valuer-General," he says. "He was the one that gave us the final agreement of $100,000 below market value and I ended up having to pay $25,000 in solicitor's fees as well." They have bought another house. "It's on a very busy road. Ours was in a cul-de-sac. I've moved to a smaller place, further out in Enfield. It's on a smaller block of land, further away from the station and I had to pay on top of that an extra $30,000 from what they gave me." His son also had to change schools.
The findings and recommendations of a controversial $300,000 review of special religious education and ethics classes in schools has been kept under wraps by the NSW government for up to nine months.

The review was a recommendation of a 2012 upper house inquiry into ethics classes in NSW schools, which found they should be retained as an option for students who do not want to take part in special religious education.

The inquiry recommended the Department of Education publish the number of students taking part in ethics (SEE) and special religious education (SRE) classes, or neither, and that both types of class be reviewed in 2014-15.

The review, by ARTD Consultants, cost $295,988. Submissions closed on July 31 last year and the review was due for delivery to the NSW government shortly after the contract period ended on December 31.
The former chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney and other church figures have been investigated by police over the question of whether they failed to report allegations related to convicted paedophile priest John Joseph Farrell, a royal commission has heard.

Monsignor John Usher told a public inquiry he was interviewed by detectives from Strikeforce Glenroe, dedicated to investigating Farrell's alleged abuse of children over decades, in May this year.

Monsignor John Usher gives evidence at the royal commission.

"They told me that the Director of Public Prosecutions had asked them to investigate this Farrell matter to see whether I and others had failed to report matters to police," he said.

Monsignor Usher told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse he believed Farrell had committed "boundary violations" with children and "never should have been made a priest".
Crocodiles are protected in Australia. These impressive, if dangerous, animals are icons of the north. But it wasnt always so. Crocodiles used to be hunted freely in northern Australia, an activity that led to their decline and eventual protection.

There have been calls to cull crocodiles to improve safety, but experts argue that this will make little difference to the risk. Besides, crocodiles are already sustainably farmed for leather products.

A group of men and boys posing with a dead crocodile, 1907. Credit:State Library of Queensland

However, there are also calls  for instance, from federal MP Bob Katter  to allow crocodiles to be shot for safari. Selling hunting licences worth thousands of dollars to rich shooters, the argument goes, could provide vital income.

But this ignores Australias history of crocodile hunting.
Tiahleigh Palmer's mother Cindy waits with supporters outside court earlier this week. Credit:Glenn Hunt "In my submission it couldn't be said he's an unacceptable risk of any of the things that's asserted by the prosecution." Sergeant French told the court Mr Thorburn had denied any involvement or sexual conduct with Tia on five separate occasions and colluded with his family to mislead police. Former foster carers Cameron and Wayne Pemberton speak to media outside court. Credit:Glenn Hunt "Eventually the defendant has admitted to the authorities that he had lied on multiple occasions in order to conceal the sexual intercourse between himself and Tiahleigh," she said.

A friend of Tia's told police the young girl had approached her about a month before her alleged murder, saying "Trent tried to touch me", Sergeant Ellen alleged. Cindy Palmer arrives at the Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday morning. Credit:Jorge Branco "She further said that the victim claimed to have disclosed this to her foster mother," she said. Mr Thorburn has been charged with incest, perverting the course of justice and two counts of perjury relating to Crime and Corruption Commission hearings in July and September this year. Slain schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer.

Prosecutors argued he was "highly likely" to interfere with witnesses and "would attempt in every way shape and form to evade and avoid every risk" of imprisonment. Magistrate Pamela Dowse kept Mr Thorburn behind bars, saying he was "not a candidate for bail at this point in time" but another application could be made in the future. Richard Thorburn has been charged with the murder of his foster child. Credit:Jorge Branco Outside court, Mr Ide said he would consider applying to the Supreme Court for bail. Police allege Mr Thorburn's father, Richard Thorburn, killed Tia in an attempt to cover up his son's alleged crime.

Josh Thorburn will be sentenced in 2017. Credit:Glenn Hunt The alleged killer was remanded in custody after his matter was heard on Wednesday morning as he remained in an induced coma in hospital after collapsing in the watchhouse on Tuesday. EARLIER The man accused of murdering Queensland schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer and dumping her body in a Gold Coast river is in an induced coma and won't appear in court before a crowd of her mother's supporters. Foster father Richard Neville Thorburn, 56, was due in the Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday morning, ahead of an application for bail by his son on related charges.

But the father remained in the intensive care unit at the Princess Alexandra Hospital on Wednesday, after collapsing in the watchhouse on Tuesday afternoon. Defence solicitor Kelly Thompson, from Robertson O'Gorman solicitors, told the court she'd spoken with doctors at the hospital. "He's currently in an induced coma and there's no indication as to when he might be brought out of that at this stage," she said. A crowd of people expecting the appearance packed Beenleigh courtroom, leaving standing room only for a host of people due to appear on other matters, with supporters flanking Tia's biological mum, Cindy Palmer. Among them were Tia's former foster father Wayne Pemberton and his son Cameron, who paid tribute to the "good girl".

Wayne said the "feisty" 12-year-old lived with them for two and a half years and described his "total shock" at hearing the man who cared for Tia after him had been accused of her murder. "You don't expect that from a carer," he said. "That's not what you're here to do. "To hear that and for everyone in the family to (allegedly) be involved it's just unthinkable." Ms Palmer declined to comment as she made her way into the courthouse in suburban Beenleigh, just off the highway roughly halfway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Wayne, who remembered Tia's love of waterskiing and other watersports, said it couldn't be said Ms Palmer was happy but she was glad of an outcome. Trent Jordan Thorburn, 19, has been charged with incest, perjury, and attempting to pervert the course of justice. He's due to appear in court on Wednesday. He was set to apply for bail after midday in a hearing his lawyer indicated would take about 45 minutes. Richard Thorburn's hearing went ahead without him and was adjourned for a committal mention on December 21. He won't be required to appear, meaning Ms Palmer again won't have a chance to come face to face with her daughter's alleged killer.

Mr Thorburn told police he dropped his foster daughter off at school about 8.10am that morning but police will allege that was a lie. They'll allege he instead murdered the 12-year-old at the family home in the Logan suburb of Chambers Flat on the night of October 29, before dumping her body in the river that night or the next. The killing was sparked by a discovery made that night, which led Mr Thorburn to kill the girl in an attempt to cover up a crime Trent had committed against Tia, police will allege. The younger brother was charged with incest, among other alleged crimes. A missing person alert for Tia wasn't put out until November 5, hours before her badly decomposed body was found on the banks of the Pimpama River.

The delay drew criticism, sparked wide-ranging changes to authorities' responses to missing children in care and further condemnation from Wayne Pemberton on Wednesday as "very frustrating". "It's not a good thing to have to wait around for someone to put an alert out but it finally got done," Cameron said. "It should have got done quicker. It shouldn't have taken so long." Another supporter, who didn't know the family, said she was "disillusioned" with the government's handling of children in care. Loading
The foster parents of slain Logan schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer were allowed to operate a family day care business until April, it has been revealed.

Tiahleigh, 12, was last seen on October 30, 2015, and her body was found six days later on the banks of the Pimpama River.

On Tuesday, Tiahleigh's foster father, Richard Neville Thorburn, 56, was charged with her murder.

Child Safety Minister Shannon Fentiman said police in April notified her department and the Education and Training Department of "alleged criminal activity".
A father of two who was in a relationship with a troubled 16-year-old girl and pimped her out for sex has been jailed.

Glen Jeffries, 42, must spend at least 16 months in prison for forcing the teen into prostitution, even when he knew she was under 18.

Glen Jeffries refused the girl's plea she didn't want to meet other men again. Credit:Tamara Voninski

Following a split from his wife and children, Jeffries met the girl on Facebook in September, 2014 and soon after met her in person to use drugs and begin a sexual relationship, the Victorian County Court heard on Wednesday.

When Jeffries ran out of money for food and rent at his Frankston home, the girl offered to engage in sex work and he escorted her as security, judge Meryl Sexton said.
You have to wonder sometimes about why some of Australia's places were named that way.

How does New South Wales resemble the old South Wales? When it came to Western Australia and South Australia, did they just run out of ideas?

Australia has some odd places to visit. Credit:ST&G

Australia is chock full of odd names and a new map is aiming to, well, put them on the map, especially the naughty sounding ones.

The Marvellous Map of Actual Australian Place Names, created by Strumpshaw, Tincleton & Giggleswick (ST&G) shows all of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more place names dotted right around Australia, with our state of WA having some of the best:
They say you should never meet your heroes.

Well, one lucky journalism student from Perth ran into one of hers - British documentary maker Louis Theroux - while she was hunting down a story on the census and got to tick far more boxes than she'd ever set out to.

Louis Theroux interviews journalism intern Stephanie Garnaut in Perth. Credit:ABC News

Stephanie Garnaut is a Broadcasting student at Edith Cowan University and is currently placed as an intern at the ABC, having also written for WAtoday.

She was asked to interview people in the street about what they thought of the recent census, and when she'd wrapped up the work in the city centre on Wednesday, she spotted a big crowd gathering around an unmistakeable spectacled figure.
Washington: US President Barack Obama railed against political "strongmen", nationalism and isolation in a farewell address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, taking his campaign battle with Donald Trump to the podium of the world's foremost international institution.

Obama's speech in New York was a defence of globalism and an attack on authoritarians, tribalists and populists in which he never mentioned the Republican vying to succeed him in office. But the subtext was impossible to miss, and could also be interpreted as a criticism of the UK's decision this year to exit from the European Union.

After extolling the expansion of democracy across the globe and a reduction in extreme poverty, Obama warned of "a crude populism, sometimes from the far left but more often from the far right, which seeks to establish what they think was a better, simpler age free from outside contamination."

"A country ringed by walls would only imprison itself," Obama said.
It was the day for final speeches and both Ban Ki-Moon and Barack Obama grabbed the opportunity with both hands when they each took a turn at addressing the UN General Assembly for the last time.

The UN Secretary General took aim at the Assad regime and its partners in a rare outburst when he accused them of being "cowards" and "having blood on their hands" for bombing aid convoys, causing the death of thousands of civilians and inflicting systematic torture on their adversaries.

Shortly after, US President Barack Obama served up a classy speech compared to those by his aspiring successor Republican Donald Trump. He condemned strongmen, nationalism and the isolation walls bring, and did not mention Trump once.

Predictably, class was absent in the latest comments made by Philippines firebrand President Rodrigo Duterte. You must read Lindsay Murdoch's report of Duterte's reaction to European critics to believe a head of state could actually say that. Openly, at least.

Other stories not to miss today:
Sign up to our daily newsletter for the latest local and breaking news in Bristol.

Residents of a street in Bristol linked arms to prevent a landlord and a bailiff gaining access to a house.

They say they were protecting a mother-of-five from becoming the victim of a 'revenge eviction', after she complained about damp in her rented home.

People living in York Road, Easton, came out from their homes after hearing that their neighbour of 12 years was being kicked out of her home because she complained about the damp conditions inside.

They were joined by tenants' campaign group Acorn Bristol, who said so-called 'revenge evictions' were increasingly common as unscrupulous landlords kick out tenants who complain about conditions, and bring in new ones without dealing with the original issues.

The privately-rented house in York Road, where Nimo Abdullahi and her husband have raised their five children since 2004, was riddled with damp in upstairs bedrooms, and had regular problems with heating, electricity and hot water.

But whenever she complained to her landlord, he would threaten her with eviction  and now he has finally gone through with it.

So at 11am yesterday - the deadline Mrs Abdullahi was given to get her and her family out of her home - neighbours linked arms across the entrance to her house to prevent anyone gaining access.

Since moving to Bristol from Holland, the house in York Road has been the only home the Abdullahis have had.

"It has a big problem with damp," Mrs Abdullahi said. "This is bad for us, because my children have asthma and it is not a good place. Until recently, the carpets everywhere were very old and dirty and we would ask the landlord to improve things, but he was difficult.

"Many times I asked him, and a lot of times he would threaten us. He would say that we were going to be evicted, and once he came round with his wife and she said that if we didn't move out they would call the police to get us out. But this is our home."

"I don't want to move, I've lived here 12 years and my children go to the local school. I have three boys and two daughters. My eldest was two when we moved in here, and the others have only ever lived here," she added. "Sometimes my landlord would ignore me, other times he just said 'no' he wouldn't sort things out."

Mrs Abdullahi said she was stunned when she went outside to find her neighbours had gathered to give her support. "I was shocked. I went out and came running back in because I was so stunned. I've had great support from Acorn and now to see my neighbours outside supporting me is amazing," she added.

What is a Revenge Eviction?

"Revenge evictions are an eviction process started by a landlord in response to a complaint of some sort by a tenant," explained Nick Ballard, from Acorn Bristol.

"That could be their boiler is not working, damp or disrepair throughout the property in general. Rather than sort out the problem, address the issues and do the works that need to be done, the landlord decides that, you know what, it'll actually be a lot easier if I just kick this person out and get new people into the property.

"They have now been made illegal, but that only applies to tenancies that started from October 2015, so anybody who is on a rolling contract  which is 11 million private renters in the UK at the moment  they are sadly not covered by the changes in the legislation as of yet," he added.

Neighbour Jenny Ross said she came out to protest about the treatment of the Abdullahis and against the wider issue of 'revenge evictions'. "We don't want people in our community treated like this," she said.

"It's a revenge eviction and people deserve decent rented accommodations. This landlord, and all landlords, need to know there are people in this community who won't ignore it. We live in this street and it's a close community. It's amazing how many people have turned out," she added.

All morning, more neighbours joined the blockade, and a newlywed couple living opposite the family kept the protestors sustained by cutting up their wedding cake and distributing it to those who gathered.

Campaign organiser Nick Ballard, from Acorn Bristol, said what has happened to Mrs Abdullah was typical of the problems faced by tenants with unscrupulous landlords. "There's a history of this happening, where she makes a complaint and within a few weeks she's hit with an eviction notice," he said.

"We've successfully stopped that in the past because the landlord hadn't followed the correct legal procedures, but this time they have. What we're trying to do is send a strong message to landlords and to the wider community that revenge evictions aren't going to be tolerated. Because this is people's lives at stake here  people are being made homeless  Nimo and her family are being made homeless by this," he added.

Another neighbour, Kirsten Parton, said people in the street wanted to show their support. "I'm here because of the way she's been treated by her landlord, it is simply not on. She and her family are part of the community and have been here for quite some time."

In the end, the presence of the neighbours' blockade dissuaded any attempt by the bailiffs to gain access to the property.

The Abdullahi family are currently working with Bristol City Council to avoid ending up on the streets, after housing officers decided they were being made unintentionally homeless.
Seventy-nine projected have been selected out of over 360 entries for the 2016 AkzoNobel China Student Sustainability Award, according to AkzoNobel.

The Award include: the gold, silver and bronze awards, the MCA special award, the Intersleek special award, the Elotex special award, the Armeen special award.

The Interpon special award, sponsored by AkzoNobel Powder Coatings, has also reached the final stage of selection.

The China Student Sustainability Award, under the guidance of the School Department of the Central Committee of the China Communist Youth League (CCYL), is the first award in China to recognize university student groups' contributions to communities. Since its launch in 2011, it has received more than 1,400 entries from over 1,000 student groups at 220 universities in 88 cities and engaged more than 15 million people across China.

2016 marks the fifth anniversary of the China Student Sustainability Award and this year has seen a record number of cities, universities, student groups and entries participating in the award selection process. More than 360 entries were received from 340 student groups at 164 universities in 69 cities, covering a wide variety of education related programs.

Over the past five years, the China Student Sustainability Award has helped encouraged Chinese college students to participate in social responsibility projects. As of 2016, nearly 280,000 students have provided education-related support to nearly 2.6 million teachers and students across 97% of provincial-level administrative regions on the Chinese mainland, totaling 119,615 days of work. As many as 787,169 students and 94,568 teachers from various localities have directly benefited while another 18.77 million people indirectly benefited from their inspirational efforts.

Lin Liangqi, president of AkzoNobel China, said: "The Award shows the core values of our Human Cities initiative in action. We want to work with and for society to help make people's lives more livable and inspiring. We are thrilled to see a record number of universities and entries taking part in this year's China Student Sustainability Award. Young college students in China are becoming increasingly creative and socially responsible."

This year, AkzoNobel will continue to deepen its partnership with the School Department of CCYL. Under the guidance of the CCYL, AkzoNobel joined hands with the China Youth University of Political Studies to conduct a nationwide survey on college students' involvement in community services. This has allowed the firm to gain insights into the status quo of students' participation and coordination, as well as the resulting impact, in order to build a comprehensive set of metrics to guide future efforts.

Li Ji, deputy director of the School Department of the Central Committee of the CCYL, said: "Young people provide the hope and foundation for China's future development. We have been continuing to guide and support college students to participate in community services as a way to cultivate their patriotism and to give back to society. As a key part of the CCYL's College Students Education Support Program, the China Student Sustainability Award has been providing students with tremendous support to help them become involved in community services and encourage them to be creative in their approach over the past five years. This year, the Award will also support the survey on Chinese college students' participation in community services with the aim to build a comprehensive set of metrics to guide future development. We hope to see more companies participate and help the younger generation play a significant role in realizing the Chinese dream."

For the complete list of finalists, please visit the AkzoNobel China Students Sustainability Award official website. Winners will be announced in November 2016 at the award presentation ceremony.
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Shes taking country back to its roots.

This weekends Brooklyn Americana Music Festival will celebrate the sounds of folk, country, and early blues for a hootenanny good time. And when one self-described Black Americana artist plays the festivals opening night on Sept. 23, she hopes to re-introduce country fans  who are predominantly white  to the musics origin among black artists like herself.

I dont know what people are thinking of when they see me, but Im true to myself and Im singing songs that are reflective of who I am and where Im from, said Queen Esther. I want them to understand that Im not an anomaly  and while that requires a larger history lesson than Im capable of doing in a song, I want people to be moved and get inspired to keep listening.

In the early 20th century, said Esther, the elements that became country, rock, and blues were all mixed up together, and black and white musicians played the same type of tunes.

Once upon a time when there was no music industry  down South, there were socials, picnics, church, juke joints, and everyone played in everyones band, said Esther. There is a certain twang inherent in black music.

But music industry commercialization divorced the styles of music, and black music lost much of its twang during the Great Migration, when many African-Americans moved to northern states, said Esther  but she retained that original sound from growing up in Georgia.

I think me being from the South, with a lot of twang in my background  I do traditional things in country, said Esther. I held on to that twang and I never let go.

Esther will debut some new songs on the festivals opening night, as well as tunes from her latest album On the Other Side. And she is looking forward to hearing new bands as much as playing herself.

Itll be great to hear every artist and hear them live, said Esther. As a musician you get no chance to hear new artists. Which is why Im thrilled to be running around this festival.

Brooklyn Americana Music Festival, Sept. 2325 at various locations and times, www.bkamf.com.

Jalopy Theatre [315 Columbia St. between Woodhull Street and Hamilton Avenue in Red Hook, (718) 3953214, www.jalop y.biz ]. Sept. 23 at 8 pm. $30.

Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6 [Atlantic Avenue at Furman Street in Brooklyn Heights, www.bkamf.com]. Sept. 24, 28 pm. Free.
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84th Precinct

Brooklyn HeightsDUMBOBoerum HillDowntown

Run over

Police arrested a man who they say sped off after he allegedly ran over a cop with an all-terrain vehicle on Hicks Street on Sept. 17.

Authorities said the suspect was riding his unregistered Yamaha vehicle near Old Fulton Street at 5:15 pm, causing cars to swerve to avoid a collision. The suspect then smashed into the officer responding to the trouble, causing him to loose control of his two-wheeled police scooter and fall on the pavement.

The suspect then ran over the cop with his vehicle, making no effort to avoid the officer as he was lying on the ground, according to a report. Police later apprehended the suspect, who they say was also in possession of marijuana, in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Followed

A trio of teenage goons robbed a 14-year-old boy at knifepoint on Dean Street on Sept. 13.

Police said the three baddies followed the victim to his doorstep as he was walking home from the Bergen Street train station at 3:15 pm. One of the nogoodniks snarled, Give me your f phone or Ill shoot you, and proceeded to take a knife out of his hoodie, according to a report. The victim then handed over his phone and the louts fled, authorities said.

Wallet woes

An opportunistic thief swiped a students wallet from a table at MetroTech Center on Sept. 13.

The pupil told authorities he was studying in the library near Jay Street at 5 pm and left his wallet on the table for a minute while he walked away. But when he returned, it had vanished, said a report.

Expensive wheels

Some sneak stole a pricey bicycle chained up on Bergen Street on Sept. 12.

The owner had locked up his Gray VanMoof two-wheeler near Court Street, but when he returned to give it a ride at 7 pm, it was gone, said authorities.

Sports sneaks

A crew of teenagers stole assorted jerseys and shirts from an Atlantic Avenue store on Sept. 16.

The shopkeeper told police he was helping other customers when several of the filchers wearing sport jerseys removed the duds and fled.

 Lauren Gill
latest news

October 3, 2022

Dee Gambit

Hundreds  if not thousands  of new and returning TV shows and movies are released every month  your options of what to watch are endless. Variety, they say is ...
NCIS: Los Angeles is moving to Sundays for its eighth season, and its kicking things off with a two-hour premiere, High-Value Target and Belly of the Beast. The mole is still out there, the teams heading overseas and someones about to get hurt.

In these first two episodes, after the agency fails to locate the mole, Under Secretary of Defense Corbin Duggan (guest star Jackson Hurst) insists on new leadership and takes over the LA unit from Hetty and Granger. Also, the team travels to Syria to apprehend a High Value Target, but one of them is severely injured when the mission goes awry.

NCIS: LA Interview: Eric Christian Olsen and Daniela Ruah on Kensi and Deeks, the Mole and More>>>

Watch the promo for the two-part premiere:

Its mostly about the shows move to Sundays, but as you can see from the end of it, Hettys something wrong may be an understatement when it comes to the trouble the teams in.

Check out a sneak peek as the team gets eyes on the target:

Once the team confirms they have eyes on Asakeem, it would be easier to shoot him, but Sams more focused on whats important: getting out of there alive. (But its not like grabbing him is going to be safe.) Callen tells Kensi and Deeks to get out of there if things go south, but theyre not going anywhere. (No, Deeks, not even if it goes really south.)

Which NCIS: Los Angeles Character Are You?>>>

See how the mission goes awry in the NCIS: LA season premiere:

Even when theyre transporting a guest, theres still time for some of that good ol team banter when Deeks takes his shoes off. When Kensi agrees that his feet actually never smell (but theyre the only part of his body that dont), he turns the tables on her. Dont make me stop this chopper, Callen interrupts them.

But just as theyre feeling good about putting their target out of the terrorism business, disaster strikes, in the form of a ground-to-air missile fired right at their helicopter.

Are you worried about the team in the helicopter? What are you hoping to see when it comes to the mole hunt?

NCIS: Los Angeles season 8 premieres Sunday at 8:30/7:30c on CBS. Want more news? Like our Facebook page.

(Image courtesy of CBS)
Justice Samuel Alito to speak at UB School of Law event in downtown Buffalo

For us as lawyers and legal educators, its important to be in touch with the workings of the Supreme Court, the most closely watched judicial body in the United States. 

BUFFALO, N.Y.  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. will be speaking in Buffalo. The University at Buffalo School of Law is hosting Alitos Oct. 20 appearance at Sheas Performing Arts Center. Before an invitation-only audience, the justice will respond to questions from the UB School of Laws interim dean, SUNY Distinguished Professor James A. Gardner, and Hodgson Russ Chairman Daniel C. Oliverio.

Were glad to have this opportunity for dialogue with Justice Alito, Gardner said. For us as lawyers and legal educators, its important to be in touch with the workings of the Supreme Court, the most closely watched judicial body in the United States. I anticipate a lively and rewarding conversation with the justice.

Alito has served on the nations high court since 2006. He was a Third Circuit Court of Appeals judge when nominated by President George W. Bush, following a distinguished career that included positions in the U.S. Department of Justice and as a U.S. Attorney in his native New Jersey. A graduate of Yale Law School, he filled the position vacated by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day OConnor.

Alito is generally considered to be part of the Courts conservative wing, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas. However, his opinions in several key cases have diverged from those of his conservative colleagues. He is also known as a fierce critic of reliance on legislative history in statutory interpretation.

Since its founding in 1887, the University at Buffalo School of Law  the State University of New York systems only law school  has established an excellent reputation and is widely regarded as a leader in legal education. Its cutting-edge curriculum provides both a strong theoretical foundation and the practical tools graduates need to succeed in a competitive global marketplace, wherever they choose to practice. A special emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, public service and opportunities for hands-on clinical education makes UB School of Law unique among the nations premier public law schools.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UBs more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.
Whats happening beneath Greenland?

Animation of rising Greenland bedrock as ice melts away and the surface load decreases. Note, the animation is strongly scaled. Credit: Ioana S. Muresan

A study that describes the Earths activity below the Greenland Ice Sheet is a valuable contribution to climate science, one expert says

This research is a great first step toward better understanding how geologic processes below the surface of the Earth influence ice loss and, ultimately, sea level rise. 

BUFFALO, N.Y.  A new study on the Greenland Ice Sheet provides valuable insight on climate change, using unique research methods to establish new estimates of ice loss for both modern and ancient times, says University at Buffalo geologist Beata Csatho, one of more than a dozen team members on the international project.

The research was published on Sept. 21 in Science Advances.

It was led by Shfaqat A. Khan, PhD, of the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space).

The study improves estimates of past and present-day ice loss by going deep  by exploring the Earths activity beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, says Csatho, PhD, a professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

This research is a great first step toward better understanding how geologic processes below the surface of the Earth influence ice loss and, ultimately, sea level rise, she says. It opens up new opportunities for better understanding how the ice sheet is changing and interacting with the rocky layers of the Earth below it.

She explains that the ice sheet sits on the Earths solid crust, which is in turn perched atop a softer layer of rock called the mantle. When the ice sheet loses ice, the crust underneath rises up (similar to the way in which a compressed spring will bounce up when pressure is removed).

This uplift, called postglacial rebound, means that scientists cant measure how much an ice sheet is shrinking by simply tracking changes in its surface elevation. They must also figure out how much of that elevation change is caused by the bedrock rising.
the view

Whats happening beneath Greenland?

Animation of rising Greenland bedrock as ice melts away and the surface load decreases. Note, the animation is strongly scaled. Animation: Ioana S. Muresan

By CHARLOTTE HSU

This research is a great first step toward better understanding how geologic processes below the surface of the Earth influence ice loss and, ultimately, sea level rise. 

A new study on the Greenland Ice Sheet provides valuable insight on climate change, using unique research methods to establish new estimates of ice loss for both modern and ancient times, says UB geologist Beata Csatho, one of more than a dozen team members on the international project.

The research was published today in Science Advances. It was led by Shfaqat A. Khan of the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space).

The study improves estimates of past and present-day ice loss by going deep  by exploring the Earths activity beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, says Csatho, professor of geology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

This research is a great first step toward better understanding how geologic processes below the surface of the Earth influence ice loss and, ultimately, sea level rise, she says. It opens up new opportunities for better understanding how the ice sheet is changing and interacting with the rocky layers of the Earth below it.

She explains that the ice sheet sits on the Earths solid crust, which is in turn perched atop a softer layer of rock called the mantle. When the ice sheet loses ice, the crust underneath rises up  similar to the way in which a compressed spring will bounce up when pressure is removed.

This uplift, called postglacial rebound, means that scientists cant measure how much an ice sheet is shrinking by simply tracking changes in its surface elevation. They also must figure out how much of that elevation change is caused by the bedrock rising.

The new research uses data from GPS stations fixed on bedrock to capture the uplift process in unprecedented detail, showing that earlier studies may have underestimated past and present-day mass loss, Csatho says.

The paper also hints that the mantle beneath Greenland is not uniform: The ice sheets southeast region has experienced unexpectedly rapid uplift rates of about 12 millimeters per year, suggesting the mantle may be hotter and less viscous here, making it springier.

Its a very exciting study, Csatho says. Its a new and different way of understanding the ice sheet and this critical process of uplift.
Where are the Phillies' players from 2008 World Series title team?

The 2022 Phillies are back in the World Series against Houston but where are the members of the 2008 team?
Construction services business SPIE UK, the UK subsidiary of French firm SPIE Group, has been sold to UK mechanical and engineering (M&E) specialist Imtech in a deal worth 43.4 million. SPIE UK, which operates from its base in Urmston, near Manchester, generated turnover of around 200 million last year. SPIE UK is one of the UKs top 10 M&E firms, providing a range of specia...continue reading
63 Moons Technologies, formerly Financial Technologies (India), said it would commercialise its intellectual property rights (IPRs) and move towards expanding its horizons beyond finance-led verticals to becoming a technology-led enterprise. In a communication to shareholders, Venkat Chary, chairman, said the company had the foresight of creating disruptive ventures to help businesses globally.
An overwhelming 94 per cent of commuters feel they are harassed by refusal of kali-peeli (black-and-yellow-painted traditional autos and taxis) drivers, while 80 per cent are of the opinion that app-based Ola and Uber offer better options for travel. A total of 76,169 commuters participated in an online perception survey of app-based taxis conducted by Mumbai Grahak Panchayat (MGP) during August 27-31.
India Ltd has closed Rs 270 crore equity investment from its existing investors, WestBridge Capital Partners LLC and India Financial Inclusion Fund, a fund advised by Caspian Impact Investment Advisers.

The company today said that WestBridge Capital, which has earlier invested around Rs 100 crore into the company in in fiscal year 2014-15, is infusing around Rs 245 crore, while around Rs 25 crore will be infused by India Financial Inclusion Fund (IFIF), which has invested into the company in the first round of funding, in fiscal year 2012-13.

International Finance Corporation (IFC) has also committed infusion of Rs 100 crore into the company, in debuntures.

"The fund raising is to help the company to improve its capital, which would boost its ratings. Majority of the funds would be used for expansion of its network and assets under management (AUM), while the rest would be used for technology development and upgradation," said M Anandan, founder and CEO, Aptus Value Housing. Around 60 per cent of the equity is currently owned by private equity players.

The company focuses on catering informal income category or the self employed category of customers, at a ticket size of Rs 5-15 lakh. The cumulative disbursement for the fiscal year 2015-16 was Rs 700 crore, which has grown to Rs 850 crore till date in the current financial year. The company is expecting an AUM of Rs 900 crore during the current fiscal year, with a growth from Rs 475 crore during the previous year. It is targeting a portfolio of Rs 5,000 crore in the next four years.

It currently has around 76 branches, of which around 42 are in Tamil Nadu. Plans are to increase the number of branches to 80 soon and to around 100 by end of March, 2017.

The Economically Weaker Section (EWS) and Low Income Group (LIG), which are up to Rs 20 lakh, has been growing over a period of time, he added.
Financed by Tata Industries, Tata ClassEdge is the Tatas attempt at delivering or improving the quality of education provided by schools with the use of technology. Started in 2011, the interactive content developed to help teachers teach better soon spread to 2000-odd schools.
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After eyeing South Africa for coal blocks through a foreign joint venture, state-owned miner has now set its sights on Indonesian coal and is considering to enter that country.
is planning to resume flights to the US because of high demand. It is evaluating a non-stop and an one-stop flight to New York.
The promoters of spice and foodgrain exporter are in talks to sell their stake to the firm's Malaysian partner MAP Enterprises, the company said in a notice to the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Mumbai-based online furniture marketplace has raised Rs 210 crore (approx 31 million) in fresh funding from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Bertelsmann India Investments, Norwest Venture Partners and Zodius Technology Fund, as it looks to expand into tier 2 and tier 3 towns in India.
With 18 soldiers dying in a pre-dawn terrorist attack in North Kashmirs Uri area on September 18, 2016, the armys combat death toll in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is 64 this year (until September 18), the highest since 2010, when 69 soldiers died, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP).
Music composer Vishal Dadlani on Wednesday said that Jain monk Tarun Sagar had forgiven him for his comments on his speech in the Haryana Assembly.

Dadlani said that he found his comments against the saint unnecessary and is glad that the Jain guru has accepted his apology.

"Guruji has forgiven me and I think we have also developed a connection between us. We both are blunt. He said that whenever I am free and he has time I should visit him. I felt very nice after meeting him," said Dadlani.

"The main thing is that he has forgiven me. I did not expect him to be so nice with me. The case is a different thing; judiciary will take its own course. However, this was my attempt to seek apology from Muni ji as I felt that the statement I made was not necessary," he added.

Dadlani, who was lacerated for his sarcastic tweet on Jain monk Tarun Sagar last month, met the spiritual leader at his ashram to deliver his latest apology.

Dadlani had described Sagar's speech in the assembly on August 26 as "monkery" and later deleted the tweet and added that the monk "has no clothes on", which reflected an unhealthy trend of religion colouring politics.
The Narendra Modi government on Tuesday continued with its efforts to bring down the domestic political temperature over Sundays terror attack in that killed 18 Indian soldiers, but also worked to isolate Pakistan internationally. This included presenting Pakistan with the evidence that the terror attack had indeed emanated from its territory.
Karnataka has deferred release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu and has asked the governor to convene a one-day assembly session to seek legislators view to decide on next steps as the state stares at drinking water shortage to its capital Bengaluru.
All central government employees have the right to represent and air grievances against the awards of the (7th CPC) to an Anomalies Committee set up for this purpose  all except the military, which ironically constitutes the bulk of central government employees and pensioners.
NDTV Limited has withdrawn its case before the Green Tribunal against the government's project. It had filed the petition claiming that indiscriminately building new ports under the scheme would damage the Indian shoreline further.
Kerala Chief Minister on Tuesday sought the intervention of the Centre to bring back 72 Indians, including Keralites, who have been stranded at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

In a letter to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, he said the stranded Indians were now living in labour camps. They were brought from Dubai for an Economic City project.

They have not been getting salary for the past one year and are unable to go out of the camp, he said.

The workers are also not being provided with food and drinking water at the camps, the Chief Minister said and called for urgent steps to bring them back home safely.

Even though they lodged acomplaint with the Indian embassy, no steps have been taken, Vijayan added.
The has decided to hear a public interest litigation (PIL) asking the Delhi government to take adequate measures to control the spread of vector-borne diseases- chikungunya, dengue and malaria- in the city.



The apex court division bench, headed by Justice Anil R. Dave, will hear the plea on September 26.

The PIL, filed by a Delhi-based doctor, Anil Mittal, raises the issue of the national capital being used a dumping ground and implicates the South Delhi Municipal Corporation and other wards as parties in the case.

The Delhi Minister, Satyendra Jain had aprrised the state Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal about a Delhi High court order that had asked the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to take preventive measures to help control the spread of these diseases last year.

Kejriwal has charged the MCD for not carrying out fogging properly and has asked the state minister to see to take adequate measures in the matter, said Jain to ANI.

Meanwhile, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia held a press conference announcing that he will ensure dengue, chikungunya and malaria are kept under check through intensive fogging throughout the city.

Sisodia added that fogging will be carried out till October end to remove all mosquitoes. He also made assurances of the state government co-operating with the municipal authorities reminding however that the work is under their jurisdiction.

Several cases of dengue and chikungunya have been reported from all over Delhi in different hospitals. At the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, 100 patients have tested positive for chikungunya, while 39 others have tested positive for dengue.

Five deaths from chikungunya complications were reported till yesterday at the Apollo Hospital, most of whom were aged 80 or above.

AIIMS laboratories have tested 1,443 chikungunya blood test samples positive till September 13. At the Centre-run Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, 425 chikungunya cases have been reported this season while 112 have been diagnosed with dengue. Safdarjung Hospital, which is also Centre-run institution, have confirmed 536 cases of chikungunya and 342 patients suffering from dengue.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India on Wednesday summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit over the Uri terror in Jammu and Kashmir, in which 18 Indian Army soldiers were killed.

"#UriAttack Foreign Secretary Jaishankar summons Pakistan High Commissioner Basit to MEA," Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in a tweet.



#UriAttack Foreign Secretary Jaishankar summons Pakistan High Commissioner Basit to MEA

 Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Earlier, Director General of Military operation Lt General Ranbir Singh had stated that the four terrorists, who attacked the military base in Uri, belonged to Pakistan's banned terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

Following the tragedy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had strongly condemned the "cowardly terror attack" and assured the nation that those behind the "despicable attack" will not go unpunished.

Sources state that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise Pakistan's involvement in the attack during her UNGA speech on September 26.

Pakistan has, however, flatly rejected New Delhi's claims of involvement in the Uri terror attack, stating that the latter has a traditional tendency to point fingers at the former whenever a terror attack takes place on Indian soil.

Meanwhile, the investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the terror attack in Uri Sector of Jammu and Kashmir, will be seeking the help of the Army, Intelligence Bureau and RAW to get identities of the terrorists verified.

The agencies will be asked to provide the NIA with intercepts of the last two to four months in the region.

According to sources, Kashif Jaan, who had escorted the Pathankot terrorists till the border, could also have been the handler of the slain terrorists in Uri.

The NIA sources say that the may have been masterminded by Kashif Jaan, Rauf Asgar and Masood Azha.

The NIA on Wednesday filed an FIR in the Uri terror strike case and a six-member team will soon visit the site of the attack to collect the evidence in the matter.

According to sources, NIA will collect the blood samples and finger prints of the four killed terrorists in Uri.

The Army is set to handover all items recovered from the killed terrorists including weapons, navigation maps to the NIA for further investigation.

The NIA will also send the GPS and icon satellite set to the United States for forensic investigation to find out what route the terrorists chose and when and how they entered Indian territory.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Wednesday, said the state government was mulling to start a Sikh circuit on lines of Buddhist circuit to draw more foreign tourists to the state.

"The state government is mulling to begin Sikh tourism circuit like Buddhist circuit," Kumar said at an international press meet on the eve of three-day International Sikh Conclave which will begin here on Thursday.

He also announced about the elaborate arrangements for conclave and also for celebration of 350th Prakash Utsav early next year.

"In fact in order to tap tremendous potential of religious tourism in Bihar, we are also working on Sufi circuit, Ramayan circuit and Gandhi circuit (connected with places in the state linked with Mahatama Gandhi's visit to state)," he said.

Kumar said the state has made elaborate arrangements for hosting three-day International sikh conclave from Thursday and also celebration of 350th Prakash Parva from December 30, 2016 to January 10, 2017.

Addressing foreign mediapersons on the eve of International Sikh Conclave, Kumar said detailed preparations have been made to host over 150-200 visitors to the conclave including from countries like the US, UK, Canada, Myanmar and New Zealand.

Though the guest list to the conclave has not yet been made public, there is possibility of participation of Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal, his son and Deputy CM Sukhbir Badal, Congress leader in Punjab Amrinder Singh, former Planning Commission Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Besides, the event could see presence of guests from abroad including Canada Defence minister Harjit Singh Sajjan, Minister of Innovation, science and economic development Navdeep Singh Bains, Baba Singh Jagdeo, Secretary of Sikh council of Australia and Ranjeet Bakshi, President of World Punjabi Organisation.

Flanked by state Tourism minister Anita Devi, Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, state police chief P K Thakur, Principal Secretary of Public Relations Department Brajesh Mehrotra and his counterpart in Tourism department Harjot Kaur, Kumar said meticulous arrangements have been made for stay, movement on roads and parking of vehicles to Guru Govind Singh gurudwara in Patna Saheb.

The CM lamented that despite writing to the Centre five years back to provide assistance for hosting mega International Sikh event in Patna, no help came.

"We made all the arrangements for the grand event from own limited resources as part of our duty," he said.
The civic authority has expressed hope that the city will be developed as an "innovative manufacturing hub" under the smart city mission.

made it to the the third list of the smart city project announced by the Centre in New Delhi on Tuesday. Under the mission, the government aims to have 100 smart cities by 2022.

60 cities have been chosen so far. 20 were selected in January and 13 in May. The remaining will be picked by 2018.

City Municipal Commissioner Dr Vinod Rao said, " aspires to become an innovative hub for manufacturing by leveraging its economic strength and transforming itself into a cleaner and greener city by introducing a smarter way of living."

The final upgraded Smart City Proposal (SCP) submitted to the Urban Development Ministry has been developed keeping in view this objective, he said.

"The city would be developed as a smart city at an estimated cost of Rs 2,010 crores. According to the smart city guideline, two types of project based on coverage of city shall be prepared. First, a PAN city project which covers entire Vadodara and second, Area Based Development (ABD) which covers specific area of the city," he said.

Rao informed that the civic body had prepared the revised proposal through audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers India.

Data collection on various aspects such as water supply, power supply, sanitation including solid waste management, mobility and public transport, affordable housing, IT connectivity and digitisation, health and education was taken into account to prepare the proposal.
Apex Council Meeting Decides to Set up Telemetry System and Joint Teams for River Basin Study Setting up of National Council for River Ganga is a Turning Point in Ganga Rejuvenation Programme of the Government: Uma Bharti

The Apex council meeting on Krishna river held in New Delhi today decided for setting up telemetry systems for water gauging on river Krishna to provide upto date data on flow of water in the river. The council under the Chairpersonship of Union Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Sushri Uma Bharti also decided to constitute joint teams for river basin study of both the states. The joint teams will have experts from both the States and Centre. The teams will give their report about water sharing which will be forwarded to Krishna tribunal for speedy decision. Briefing media after the meeting Sushri Bharti said the meeting was held in a very cordial atmosphere.

She said both the states will continue consultation on official levels on other related issues. The meeting was attended by Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Shri N Chandrababu Naidu and Chief Minister of Telangana Shri K Chandrashekar Rao.

Referring to todays cabinet approval for setting up of National Council for River Ganga, the Minister called it a turning point in Ganga Rejuvenation programme of the government. Sushri Bharti said this decision will give more teeth to the NMCG for environmental protection of river Ganga. The Minister said in order to ensure transparency and cost effectiveness, a provision for concurrent audit and safety audit has been made. She said this move will ensure effective abatement of pollution in Ganga and will help in maintaining ecological flow of the river. The Minister informed that by next week tenders will be issued for taping 22 major drains of 11 towns which account for 90 per cent of sewer flow into Ganga on hybrid annuity mode.

Samir/jk
Brazilian Agriculture Minister, Shri Blairo Maggi Calls on Shri Radha Mohan Singh India-Brazil Agree to Promote South-South Cooperation in their Basic Requirements

The Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Shri Radha Mohan today held a meeting with the Brazilian Minister for Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, Shri Blairo Maggi.

Both the Ministers discussed on various issue related to Agriculture, Livestock and Trade during the interaction. Shri Blairo Maggi is visiting India for the BRICS Agriculture Ministers meeting to be held on 23.9.2016.

The two Ministers committed to further develop friendly and cooperative relations between the two countries and to promote South-South cooperation in order to assist developing economies in meeting their basic requirements, and also to forge closer relations, cooperation and coordination in the multilateral arena.

They also agreed that both countries need to work together to explore ways and means for enhancing bilateral trade between the two countries and committed to work expeditiously for early resolution of sanitary and phytosanitary issues for providing the required boost to bilateral trade.

Indias request for Market access of seeds of pearl, millet, sorghum, corn seeds, rape seeds and cotton for which technical information for conducting pest risk analysis was already submitted in July, 2012 as well as Brazils request of market access for cotton, maize, soybean, grapes, apples, oats and avocado into Indian market were also discussed.

The proposed MoU between agencies of the two countries on sharing technical information on Indian cattle breeds that form the mainstay of the Brazilian livestock population, was also discussed and it was agreed, that a technical group can sit together to resolve outstanding issues.

The two Ministers agreed to get pending market access request expeditiously examined and, if necessary utilize existing for a such as the already constituted Joint Working Group, for such technical discussions as well.
Dr Jitendra Singh releases first-ever NEC '?offee Table' book on Northeast

Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh released here today the first-ever Coffee Table Book on Northeast published by the North Eastern Council (NEC).

The hard-cover Coffee Table book, consisting of 180 pages, is mainly a pictorial and visual depiction of the various facets of Northeast with messages from President of India, Prime Minister and DoNER Minister in his capacity as Chairman NEC as well as from the Governors and Chief Ministers of all the eight States of North-Eastern Region.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Jitendra Singh said, in the last two years, the development activity in the North-Eastern Region has made rapid strides, primarily because of the personal interest and high priority accorded to the region by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. This is evident from the fact that no Prime Minister had attended a plenary meeting of the NEC at its Headquarters in Shillong in the last 40 years before Shri Narendra Modi addressed the 65th Plenary Session of NEC on 27th May this year, he added.

Dr Jitendra Singh said, it is his considered belief that in order to make Indias Act East Policy" more effective and fruitful, we will also have to strengthen and reinforce our resources proximal to the eastern borders. In this regard, he referred to the currently under construction rail-link to Bangladesh from Tripura, which is being funded by the Ministry of DoNER on the Indian side from Agartala to Akhaura.

The Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh accomplished by the present Government is also something which could not be achieved in the last 45 years since the Independence of Bangladesh, said Dr Jitendra Singh, adding that by doing so, there is not only ease of travel on the eastern borders, but it would also benefit bilateral trade and business.

Dr Jitendra Singh also disclosed that beginning October 3, 2016, two new flights will be introduced between Guwahati and Aizawl, and Guwahati and Silchar. This, he said, will be in addition to the first-ever flight from New Delhi to Dimapur in Nagaland started from April 1, 2015 and later, the first-ever direct flight to Aizawl, also started by the present government.

While Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya emerged on the Rail map of India for the first time, Dr Jitendra Singh said, most of the North-Eastern States will get a broad-gauge rail track in the next few years, while Sikkim has achieved the distinction of becoming Indias first Organic State" and also the first state with 100 percent sanitation coverage.

He also expressed satisfaction that in the Smart City list released yesterday by Union Minister of Urban Development, Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu, two cities of Northeast namely Kohima in Nagaland and Namchi in Sikkim have found a place. He hoped that all these unique distinctions achieved by Northeast in the last two years will be showcased for a wider awareness and publicity through the Coffee Table book released today.

Among those present on the occasion were Members of Parliament Shri Ramen Deka and Shri Jitendra Choudhary, Secretary DoNER Shri Naveen Verma, Member NEC Shri C. K. Das, Secretary NEC Shri Ram Muivah, Joint Secretaries and Senior Officers of Union Ministry of DoNER and NEC.
President of India attends the centenary celebrations and convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical college

The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee attended the Centenary Celebrations and Convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical College today (September 21, 2016) in New Delhi.

Addressing the gathering, the President congratulated the Lady Hardinge Medical College on the occasion of its centenary year celebrations and convocation. He also congratulated all the awardees and said that convocation is an important milestone in the life of students, their parents and faculty members. He appreciated the efforts of Lady Hardinge who had thought of establishing an exclusive college for women in order to provide them modern and scientific medical education.

The President said that doctors should consistently be sensitive and empathetic towards the patients who they cure. A doctor, who is visibly concerned towards his patient, cures half the ailment in his first interaction with him or her. It is this attitude that should always guide them, before the drugs and medicines prescribed by them begin to give their required effect. While clinical detachment is certainly required, this detachment should not lead to taking monetary advantage of a patient and his family who have entrusted their lives in their hands with full faith.

The President said that all doctors have followed an extra-ordinarily arduous academic journey to reach where they are today. However, theirs is a discipline and profession that would require them to be a student, a scholar and an innovator all their life. While the fact that every human being is uniquely made will give them an opportunity to learn with every new patient they see, it should also lead to prescribing customised care and treatment. New developments in medical research will demand of them to be students and learners on a daily basis.

In this regard, as physicians they should always keep their minds open to emerging ideas and circumstances around them. While other disciplines may lead to basic education getting separated into professional application and academic research after the qualifying degree, medical education is one discipline where profession and research will have to go hand in hand always.

The President said in a nation like India where public health needs are ever increasing, it will be only one further step in the noble profession that they have chosen, to regularly focus on public health and medical facilities away from the cities, in the smaller towns and villages of India. While the Government does its bit in enhancing health services, a resolve on their part is going to do wonders to the public health infrastructure.

The President said that while against the international norm of one doctor per thousand population, we have only one doctor for 1700 people in our country. The situation is all the more alarming in rural India where the shortage of surgeons is to the tune of 83.4%, obstetricians and gynaecologists 76.3%, paediatricians 82.1% and general physicians 83% at the level of the Community Health Centres (CHCs). The overall shortage translates to 81.2% as of the year 2015. He said that from the above data one could appreciate the huge dimension of building up health infrastructure in our country particularly in rural areas.

The President concluded by sharing a famous quote and said, HE WHO HAS HEALTH HAS HOPE, AND HE WHO HAS HOPE HAS EVERYTHING".

Among the dignitaries present on the occasion were Shri J. P. Nadda, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Shri Faggan Singh Kulaste, MoS for Health and Family Welfare and Shri C. K. Mishra, Secretary, Health and Family Welfare.
President, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, inaugurates Centenary Celebrations and presides over Centenary Convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical College 'Health for all' is a national goal and a priority for the Government: J P Nadda

The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, here today, inaugurated the Centenary Celebrations of Lady Hardinge Medical College and presided over the Centenary Convocation of LHMC in the gracious presence of Shri J P Nadda, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare and Shri Faggan Singh Kulaste, Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare. Shri C. K. Mishra, Secretary (HFW) and Dr. Jagdish Prasad, DGHS were also present at the convocation ceremony

Addressing the participants, the President, Shri Pranab Mukherjee said that centenary celebration is just not any occasion but an important milestone to reflect about your achievements and challenge. It an important milestone in the life of students, faculty and the Institute, he said. Congratulating the awardees, the President added that this speaks of their devotion to studies and academic excellence. This will also give an opportunity to provide solace and relief to the most needy. The President advised the young graduating doctors to be proud of the skills instilled in them by the College to face challenges of the competitive world. Be Truthful, be virtuous, have compassion and never deviate from your own conviction," the President advised the students. He further asked them to be learners, students, and innovators and researchers as they go forward in their profession.

The President termed doctors as the most important component of the society, who have a tremendous burden on them to provide healthcare to the needy. He asked them to focus on providing their services in the rural and far flung areas to strengthen the medical infrastructure in the country.

Speaking at the function, Shri Nadda stated that 'health for all' is a national goal and a priority for the Government.

The Health Minister further added that ensuring the highest standards of medical education is a top priority and AIIMS-like institutions in different parts of the country are being established to set standards of medical education and healthcare at par with the best institutions in the world. Existing premier medical colleges are also being upgraded with top class infrastructure and facilities. Medical teachers will also be closely involved in policy planning, regulation and enforcement of standards in medical education," Shri Nadda added.

Appreciating the Contribution of Lady Hardinge Medical College, Shri Nadda said that 'Beti Padao, Beti Bachao' is the passionate initiative of the Hon'ble Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi Ji, that is closest to his heart. This historic institution of Lady Hardinge Medical College has been at the forefront of this movement for education and emancipation of women over a century - more than probably any other single institution in this country," Shri Nadda elaborated.

Addressing the participants, the Health Minister stated that the Government has grand plans for redeveloping and modernizing Lady Hardinge Medical College, to make it comparable with the best institutions in the world. Shri Nadda further added that the redevelopment plan with the super speciality block and other associated structures on completion will decongest the present campus; provide enhanced infrastructure for teaching and research, and wholesome environment for patients.

Shri Nadda urged the students to not forget the larger purpose of always working to improve the health of the poor, the needy and the underprivileged. No patient should be denied treatment on account of being poor or belonging to lower strata of society and I am sure, the students now being conferred degrees, in this Convocation, would carry forward this legacy of their predecessors and make their own name in the field of medical sciences and make the institute proud," Shri Nadda said.

Lady Hardinge Medical College is a landmark institution of this country. Being one of the oldest medical colleges for girls in India, its establishment predates the construction of Connaught Place, Parliament house and the Rashtrapati Bhavan. At the time of independence, and for many years after that, it was the only medical college in Delhi. The foundation stone of this institution was laid down by Lady Hardinge on 17th March 1914. The college has come a long way in the last 100 years, retaining its unique character, still marching ahead with the times and is upgrading itself dynamically in all its fields of activities. The institution is celebrating its centenary year with number of academic activities by each department. This will be followed by Founders day celebration on 23rd September where a commemorative stamp will be released by Shri Manoj Sinha, MoS Communications.

Also present at the function were Dr. Jagdish Chandra, Director, Lady Hardinge Medical College & Associated Hospitals, Faculty Members, Doctors, Senior and Junior Residents, Students and other senior officers of the Ministry.
Second Meeting of the High Level Group of Eminent Experts to strengthen the SAARC Anti-Terrorism Mechanism begins in New Delhi tomorrow

India is hosting the second Meeting of the High Level Group of Eminent Experts to strengthen the SAARC Anti-Terrorism Mechanism from September 22-23, 2016 in New Delhi.

Meeting of a High Level Group of Eminent Experts to strengthen the SAARC Anti-Terrorism Mechanism was recommended by the SAARC Ministerial Declaration on Cooperation in Combating Terrorism (adopted by the 31st Meeting of SAARC Council of Ministers in Colombo, February 2009). India had hosted its first meeting in New Delhi from 9-10 February 2012.

Hosting the meeting for the second time, it is in line with the high priority India attaches for regional cooperation in Anti-Terrorism activities and given that terrorism remains the single biggest threat to peace, stability and progress in the region and beyond. The meeting provides a platform for discussing and identifying measures to tackle this menace threatening our societies.

The meeting will review the functioning of the existing anti-terrorism mechanisms in the region including the SAARC Terrorist Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD) and the SAARC Drug Offences Monitoring Desk (SDOMD), intelligence sharing and police cooperation.

It will also discuss related issues such as combating corruption, cyber crimes, terror financing and money laundering. The High Level Meeting is expected to draw recommendations to strengthen the existing mechanisms and discuss potential new areas of cooperation.

Nominations have been received at senior levels from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives (led by Deputy Minister for Home Affairs), Nepal and Sri Lanka, while Pakistan is represented by two officials at the rank of Counsellor from their High Commission in New Delhi.

As in the previous meeting, Indian delegation is led by Director, Intelligence Bureau, who is also the Chairperson of the Meeting. Senior officials from Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of External Affairs and related agencies are also participating in the meeting.
Swachh Bharat progress in Karnataka reviewed

The Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Shri Parameswaran Iyer made a one day trip to Bangalore today to review and discuss progress of Swachh Bharat in rural Karnataka. He called on the State Minister, Rural Development and Panchayat, Shri H. K Patil and held discussions with him.Shri Patil mentioned that the State is on its way to becoming open defecation free (ODF) and seven districts will be ODF by March 2017. The State was converging resources through bank loans to households for toilet. The construction of bathroom along with toilet was also being encouraged. The Minister also highlighted the need to focus in special needs for elderly people and promote use of commodes for their convenience. Shri Iyer assured the Minister of full support from Centre.Later, Shri Iyer held a meeting with the State officials and also held a video conference with CEOs of Zilla Panchayats.

He listened to the progress being made in the districts, their strategy and challenges. He emphasised the role of leadership and capacity building to achieve the task of swachhta. It was agreed that focus of monitoring would shift to ODF achievement rather than construction of toilets. He also underlined the importance of foolproof verification and appreciated the social audit mechanism adopted by the State. It was also agreed that all other development schemes, as feasible, will be prioritised in ODF villages. On capacity building, the State assured to carry out trainings in districts with the help of UNICEF. The State was also advised to take advantage of virtual trainings being organised by the Centre. The Principal Secretary Ms Nagambika Devi presented the State strategy for making Karnataka ODF. It was mentioned that making a village ODF was included in the Directive Principles of panchayats through an amendment in the Karnataka Panchayat Act.
Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption and money laundering charges over an alleged scheme at the state oil company, Petrobras.

Judge Sergio Moro, who is overseeing Operation Car Wash, the investigation into corruption allegations at Petrobras, said there was sufficient evidence of Lula's responsibility.

Judge Sergio Moro, who has overseen the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation into bribery and kickbacks at Petrobras and other major corporations must now assess allegations that Lula accepted 3.7 m reais ($1.1m) in bribes, reports the Guardian.

Lula, who has denied the accusations, has claimed that it is an attempt to prevent him from running in the next presidential elections in 2018.

The trial will take place in the city of Curitiba and comes amid a period of intense political and economic turmoil, which has been exacerbated by the two-year Lava Jato investigation.

Lula had already been charged in August with allegedly obstructing investigations.
is working towards creating one the largest trading block in history spanning from India to Japan, a top US trade official has said.

US Trade Representative (USTR) Mike Froman said that not signing Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) would be akin to conceding the Asia Pacific space to .

" is executing on its regional strategy: the One Belt, One Road initiative, the Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the challenges in the East and South China Seas, and its push to conclude the regional comprehensive economic partnership, or RCEP," Froman said on Tuesday in his address at the Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Dallas Texas.

"RCEP is a mega-regional trade agreement with 16 countries, spanning from India to Japan. It would be the largest regional trading block in history. Russia too has an active regional strategy, signing partnership agreement with countries in the region and through its Eurasian economic union," Froman said.

Observing that China is posing a major challenge to the US, Froman said that answer to this challenge was to put TPP in place as soon as possible.

"China is not our adversary. But it is a competitor that in many respects holds very different views of its role and responsibilities than other major powers," he said.

"There is a perception that China doesn't play by the same rules that we and much of the rest of the world do, that it's taking advantage of us, and that it's asserting its interests in the Asia-Pacific region, and more generally, at the expense of ours and at the expense of its neighbours," he added.

What is interesting about this debate is that while the diagnosis might be right, many have come to exactly the wrong prescription. The answer to this challenge is not to allow China to write the rules of the road for trade, but for the United States to lead that effort, he said.

"The answer is not to allow China to carve up the markets of the future, but to level the playing field and give American workers and businesses a shot to compete and win. The answer to China's challenge is not to withdraw from TPP, but to put it in place as soon as possible," Froman said.

He said that at a time when political discourse in the US was increasingly turning inward, it is worth recalling what's at stake in the Asia-Pacific.

The US is a Pacific power with a long history of leadership and deep interests in the region, he asserted.

Forman warned that for the US turning inward meant turning away from this century's greatest economic opportunity.

The Asia-Pacific is one of the world's fastest-growing

regions, home to nearly half of humanity and over one-third of the world economy. In less than 15 years, two-thirds of the world's middle class will call the Asia-Pacific home, and they will want more of everything that America is great at making, Forman argued.

"From cars to cosmetics, from apps to streaming movies, from beef and pork to fresh fruits and vegetables. And their governments and businesses will be among the fastest-growing investors in everything from infrastructure to aircraft to satellites - all of which we lead the world in producing. TPP puts us at the center of that growth story," he said.

It brings together 12 countries comprising nearly 40 per cent of the global economy, countries large and small, developing and developed, to define high standard rules of the road for the future of trade, Froman said.

He said it cut or eliminates over 18,000 foreign taxes or tariffs on US exports, making it easier for American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses of all sizes to compete and win in the global economy.

Froman said the RCEP kinds of arrangements present a very different future than that envisaged by TPP. Unlike TPP, these agreements do not raise labour and environmental standards.

They do not ensure that government owned corporations have to compete fairly against private firms. They do not protect intellectual property rights and they do not maintain a free and open Internet, he said.

According to Froman, without TPP, US' partners in the region will question the wherewithal of America as a Pacific power.

"If Congress fails to follow through in a timely fashion, they will have no choice but to question the reliability of our commitment to the region. And failure to lead in the Asia Pacific will have broad spillover effects around the globe," he warned.

"Whether it's negotiating other trade agreements, leading economic policy, or making commitments to countries outside of the economic realm, turning inward and failing to deliver on our promises undermines the credibility of the United States more generally," he said.
French President today appealed for an end to the carnage in Syria, telling the United Nations: "Enough is enough".

"The Syrian tragedy will be seen by history as a disgrace for the community if we do not end it quickly," Hollande told the General Assembly.

The French leader described Aleppo, which has once again come under a barrage of air strikes, as a "martyred city" and blamed the Syrian regime for the collapse of a US-Russian ceasefire.

"Thousands of children have died in bombings, whole populations are starving, humanitarian convoys are being attacked, chemical weapons are being used."

"I have one thing to say here: enough is enough," he said.

The war in Syria, now in its sixth year with over 300,000 dead, is dominating this week's gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.

US President Barack Obama earlier took the podium to declare that diplomacy was the only way to end the devastating war.

The United States and Russia, the regime's ally in the war, earlier chaired a brief meeting of the 23-nation group backing the Syrian peace process, but there was no breakthrough.

Tomorrow, the UN Security Council is to meet to discuss the Syria crisis, with distrust between Washington and Moscow running high.

Addressing Russia and Iran, President Bashar al-Assad's backers, Hollande said they must compel the regime to make peace, warning that "if not, they will also, alongside the regime, bear the responsibility for the division and chaos in Syria.
A group of students and academics at the Ghana University are demanding the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, acccusing him of racism.

Students and teachers argue that Gandhi's reference to black Africans as "kaffir" in some of his early writings reflected his 'racist' mindset.

Gandhi's statue, which was a gift from the Indian President Pranab Mukherjee during his recent visit to Ghana, is currently installed in the premises of the varsity.

The campaign has been led by Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo, former director of the Institute of African Studies. The students and teachers have also launched an online petition, asking authorities to facilitate "the removal of the statue of Gandhi" at the earliest.

"How will the historian teach and explain that Gandhi was uncharitable in his attitude towards the black race and see that we're glorifying him by erecting a statue on our campus?" wrote a professor in the petition.

The campaigners have been raising slogans like 'Gandhi Must Fall' and 'Gandhi For Come Down'.

Ampofo is urging members of the University of Ghana Council to take heed of the petition, arguing among other things that, Gandhi was a racist as he was prejudiced against black people and honouring him will set a wrong example for students, as per local media in Ghana.

But there have been voices which oppose the demand.

Ocqauye, a professor of political science and a lawyer, said a decision to demolish the statue might have implications on diplomatic ties between Ghana and India.

"It will be most unnecessary, most uncalled for and not in the supreme interest of Ghanaians and we must know what serves our interest best," he said.

The petitioners referred to Gandhi's open letter to "The Natal Mercury" in 1894, where he used a the tem "kaffir", a derogatory term for black people, for dark-skinned Africans.

"A general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir," they quoted Gandhi as saying in the letter.
Russia poses the most dangerous threat to the US with China being a close second, a top Pentagon general has said, a viewpoint also echoed by a prominent American lawmaker.

"The way I look at the threats across the world. I think that Russia's the most dangerous threat, China's a close second, but the most likely threats and the most concerning are North Korea and then Iran, because North Korea is very unpredictable," General John E Hayten said in his confirmation hearing to be the Commander of the Strategic Command.

"It's hard to tell exactly what they're going to do, but I do want to caveat the unpredictability of North Korea a little bit, because if you look at what they are doing with their missile programs, as well as the nuclear testing programs, and you compare it to where we are today, it looks very beginning," he said yesterday.

China and Russia have been looking at themselves for the last 20 years in relation to the US which has developed an incredibly powerful, conventional military that can dominate any battlefield in the world, Hayten said, adding so they have taken those lessons and started building capabilities to respond to that.

"One of those lessons is in the electromagnetic spectrum, they see us dominating the electromagnetic spectrum. They see us using GPS, satellite communications, they see us basically conducting information aged warfare where at  in a not-too distant past it was industrialised warfare," he said.

"So they're developing layers of capabilities, in the electromagnetic spectrum, in cyber, in space, to try to gain a strategic advantage in those areas. Our job is to make sure they never get an advantage in those areas. But it's clear that that's what they're trying to do," Hayten said.

Senator John McCain, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said North Korea's fifth nuclear test earlier this month was the latest reminder that it's "corpulent boy dictator" remains intent on developing the capability to strike the US with nuclear weapons.

"And then there is China, which continues to modernise its nuclear forces while placing a new emphasis on mobile missiles and submarines," he said, adding but perhaps the most pressing challenge is Russia.

Russia's aggression in Ukraine and destabilising actions in Syria take place under a nuclear shadow, he said.

"Russia is threatening our NATO allies with nuclear strikes, modernising its strategic nuclear forces, developing a new nuclear ground launched cruise missile capable of ranging most of Europe, and has fired air and sea launched cruise missiles against targets in Syria, missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads and flown against European and US targets," McCain said.

McCain also expressed concern over modernisation of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan.

"Pakistan has rapidly expanded its nuclear arsenal and reportedly developed new tactical nuclear weapons. Not to be outdone, India continues to modernise its nuclear triad. Even under the best of circumstances, the Iran nuclear deal gives Iran a free hand to develop nuclear weapons in a decade," he said.
Hundreds of top scientists have published an open letter warning against claims by Republican presidential nominee that if elected he would advocate US withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Accord on climate change.

"Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy. It is a physical reality," said Tuesday's letter, signed by 375 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel laureates and renowned scientists such as Stephen Hawking.

The withdrawal would "send a clear signal to the rest of the world that the US does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change", Xinhua news agency cited the letter as warning.

The letter also said the consequences of opting out of the Paris agreement would be severe and long-lasting for our planet's climate and for the credibility of the US.

"The US can and must be a major player in developing innovative solutions to the problem of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases," it wrote.

"Walking away makes it less likely that the US will have a global leadership role, politically, economically, or morally. We cannot afford to cross that tipping point."

Trump has called climate change "a hoax" and said the Paris Accord was "bad for US business".

"We're going to cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programmes," he said on May 26 this year.
The (UN) has cut an estimated Rs 338 crore from its two-year reimbursements to India, saying that the Indian government provided faulty or missing equipments to the soldiers who were on peacekeeping missions to Sudan and Congo, said an Indian Express report.
Monsanto, which has withdrawn a new technology for BT cotton, has decided to continue research in India on other genetically modified seeds and crop protection.
A two-day special meeting on improvement and promotion of pulses cultivation in North-Eastern Region (NER) concluded here at the Pragya Bhavan yesterday.

Organised by ICAR in collaboration with the Tripura government's agriculture department, the meeting was inaugurated by Tripura Minster of Forest and Rural Development Naresh Jamatia, Dr S V Ngachan, Director, ICAR Research Complex for NER, Meghalaya and scientist and lecturers of various agriculture universities and colleges of the region.

Along with the discussion, a state-level farmers' meet on promotion of pulses and exhibition of various crops and technology was also held to encourage farmers.

Dr S V Ngachan said, "India including the Northeast has acute deficiency in pulse production; however, the Northeast region particularly has huge potential of promotion and production of various varieties of pulses. Only 5000 MT pulses are coming out of Tripura state, it is too less in comparison to the requirement which is very high."

He suggested that pulse crop has to be promoted in the NER for not only to fetch the demand but also to protecting the soil fertility and address other environmental issues and for which the various state and central government organizations have to work together.

"Our farmers should go for double the crop so that pulse can equally be grown for sustaining our agriculture - for the soil, for food and so many other environmental reasons. We are seriously thinking how further seed requirements can be meet, how production can be enhanced, what are the programs those can already be promote. State government's involvement also has to be there and all the state government of the Northeast has been invited so how we can convergent work together," said the director, ICAR Research Complex for NER.

He also suggested for resistant variety pulse seed and according to the soil and environmental condition of the region.

Low genetic yield of Indian pulses and their vulnerability to pests and diseases is a major hindrance to adoption of pulses by farmers. Being rain-fed, pulses often experience drought at critical growth stages. The risk of low productivity and income is too high for farmers to bear. The lack of drought- and disease-resistant varieties of pulse seeds is alarming.

The union government has taken a number of steps to boost the production of pulses, such as expanding the Food Security Mission (NFSM) from 16 to 29 states including North-Eastern states, hilly states, Kerala and Goa. Under NFSM the pulses programme is being conducted in 638 districts of 29 states.

During 2016-17 under NFSM a sum of Rs 1100 crore has been earmarked as the central share for pulses programmes out of the entire allocation of Rs 1700 crore.

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The Union Cabinet has given its approval for the signing and ratification of an agreement between India and Samoa for the exchange of information with respect to taxes.

The agreement will stimulate the flow of exchange of information between India and Samoa for tax purposes which will help curb tax evasion and tax avoidance.

There are no financial implications at present. Only in the event of extraordinary costs exceeding USD 500, the same will be borne by India. India has similar provisions in other such tax information exchange agreement.

Salient features of the agreement:

1. It enables the competent authorities of India and Samoa to provide assistance through exchange of information that is foreseeably relevant to the administration and enforcement of the domestic laws of the two countries concerning taxes covered by this agreement.

2. The information received shall be treated as confidential and may be disclosed only to persons or authorities (including courts or administrative bodies) concerned with assessment, collection, enforcement, prosecution or determination of appeals in relation to taxes covered under the Agreement. Information may be disclosed to any other person or entity or authority or jurisdiction with the prior written consent of the information sending country.

3. The agreement also provides for a Mutual Agreement Procedure "for resolving any difference or for agreeing on procedures under the agreement.

4. The agreement shall enter into force on the date of notification of completion of the procedures required by the respective laws of the two countries for entry into force of the agreement.

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The Union Cabinet has given its ex-post facto approval to enhancement of pension for freedom fighters and for the spouses (widows/widowers), eligible daughters and dependent parents of deceased freedom fighters under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme (SSSPS), 1980.

The existing pension scheme for central freedom fighter pensioners and their eligible dependents has been restructured as follows:-

Ex-Andaman Political Prisoners/ spouses

Rs. 24,775 (Present amount of pension per month)

Rs. 30,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month)

Freedom fighters who suffered outside British India/spouses

Rs. 23,085/- (Present amount of pension per month)

Rs. 28,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month)

Other Freedom Fighters / spouses including INA

Rs. 21,395/- (Present amount of pension per month)

Rs. 26,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month)

Dependent parents/eligible daughters (maximum 3 daughters at any point of time)

Rs. 3,380/- (Present amount of pension per month)

50 percent of the sum that would have been admissible to the Freedom Fighter i.e. in the range of Rs. 13,000/- to Rs. 15,000/- (Enhanced amount of pension per month)

(i)The revised scale of pension has taken effect from 15.O8.2016. Further, the revised total amount of pension will be taken as basic pension for the respective categories of Freedom Fighter pensioners for calculating Dearness Relief.

(ii)The existing Dearness Relief system based on All India Consumer Price Index for Industrial workers, which was so far applicable to freedom fighter pensioners on annual basis, is being discontinued and replaced by the Dearness Allowance system applicable to Central Government employees twice a year. This will be termed as "Dearness Relief", the appropriate term in case of pensioners.

All freedom fighters and spouses and dependent parents/eligible daughter pensioners of deceased freedom fighters drawing pension under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme, 1980 would be benefitted by the decision.

Till 2016, a total of 1,71,605 freedom fighters and their eligible dependents have been sanctioned pension under the scheme. At present, 37,981 freedom fighters and their eligible dependent pensioners are covered under the scheme.

Out of these, 11,690 are freedom fighters themselves, 24,792 are spouses (widows/ widowers) and 1,490 are daughter pensioners. Instructions have been issued to all the authorized banks for ensuring Aadhar linked disbursement of Freedom Fighter pension as early as possible.

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The Union Cabinet has approved a proposal of the Department of Heavy Industry for enabling M/s Richardson and Cruddas Limited, a Central Public Sector Enterprise, to come out of purview of Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR).

For this purpose, the Cabinet has approved the conversion into equity of the Government of India loan of Rs 101.78 crores given to the Company, along with the interest amounting to Rs 424.81 Crore accrued on this loan.

The Cabinet further approved in principle, the strategic disinvestment of Nagpur and Chennai units of the company and shifting of operations from Mumbai land to other locations of company.

However the company's land at Mumbai will be converted from lease hold to "Occupation Class II" so as to enable the company to identify the best use of this piece of land for optimal utilization as per Government guidelines.

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The Baloch National Movement (BNM) has said that Beijing is supporting Pakistan in the mass killing of the Balochi people courtesy the China Pakistan Corridor Project (CPEC).

"China is Pakistan's strategic partner in the economic plundering and mass murder of Baloch civilians particularly in the coastal belt of the Makran region of Balochistan. The deep sea port of Gwadar has been sold to China for military buildup and expansion into the Arabian Sea," read a statement issued regarding the joint protest of Baloch and Sindhi activists held outside the United Nations to condemn the Pakistani atrocities and the 'ongoing military operations' in Sindh and Balochistan.

The statement further said, "The 47 billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a death trap for the Baloch people in the name of development. An estimated 300,000 Baloch tribal and coastal population has been forced out of their ancestral lands and fishing villages to make room for the Chinese and their security establishment."

Highlighting the rampant human rights violations in the region, the statement said, "Since 2003, more than 20,000 Baloch political activists have gone missing, illegally abducted by the Pakistani state security forces and their death squads. The victims of enforced disappearances are being tortured and executed in custody in thousands and their lifeless, mutilated, bullet-riddled bodies are then dumped in the fields."

"The Pakistan army soldiers and helicopter gunships attack civilian settlements and villages on regular basis across Balochistan and entire populations are forced to migrate leaving behind a trail of burned down houses and bodies of executed youth," it added.

The protestors appealed to the United States and the international community to support their demands for freedom, peace, and justice.

They also condemned the recent terror attack on an Indian Army base camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir and alleged that Pakistan is responsible for the incident as well as for the Pathankot air base attack that happened earlier this year in January.

"We condemn the barbaric terror attack on the Uri camp in Jammu and Kashmir in which 17 soldiers of the 12th Brigade of the Indian Army lost their lives. The recent attack and the earlier one at the Pathankot Indian Air Force Base in January 2016 are part of Pakistan's policy of aggression, employing terrorist methods and outfits to escalate war in the region," it said.

They also thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying, "The Baloch people have welcomed and are grateful for the support extended by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at such a critical juncture when our nation is struggling to be free from the illegal military occupation of Pakistan since 1948.

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The Janata Dal (United) and Congress on Wednesday backed the Centre's move to diplomatically isolate Pakistan, saying they would support the initiatives of the ruling dispensation at the Center which are in interest of the nation.

The comments came three days after the Indian army faced one of its biggest attacks on its units in recent times, the Uri terror attack, leaving 18 army jawans dead and shocked the entire country.

Congress leader P.L. Punia told ANI that the Pakistani Army is completely involved in the Uri incident and if, Indian Government takes any action against them, they are right.

"Whatever happened in Uri, where 18 brave soldiers got killed, is a very saddening situation and even more tragic is that Pakistan Government is directly involved. This topic in itself is a very serious issue as Prime Minister Narendra Modi also chaired a high-level meeting and whatever would be the decision should be in interest of nation and security of the nation and Congress party will always support these initiatives," Punia said.

"After the Uri incident, whatever steps the government would initiate, be it at diplomatic level or bilateral relations with other countries.they should try to isolate Pakistan, which should be their priority and after that the most rigid step should be initiated. If we look at the entire incident, terrorists came and Pakistani Army is fully involved in the same," he added.

Resonating similar sentiments, JD (U) secretary-general K.C. Tyagi said that Pakistan government is responsible for the dastardly incident.

"Behaviour of Pakistan Government and its army indicates as if they are preparing for some war. In 48 hours, their army or their terrorists, who so ever it is, are working according to the directions of the Pakistan Government," Tyagi said.

"They are challenging our democracy and now whatever steps the government takes for the security of our country, we are with them," he added.

Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday gave an assurance of going after the perpetrators of the deadly Uri attack and further gave the green signal to diplomatically isolate Pakistan at every international grouping.

According to sources, India is to present all actionable evidence against Pakistan if required at international bodies.

The Indian Permanent Mission is to issue a statement taking on Islamabad soon after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will make his speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Evidence of Pakistan's hand in Uri attack i.e. GPS tracker movements that go back to starting point in Pakistan, Pashto literature, Pakistan Army marked arms will be given to Islamabad at the DGMO level, sources add.

Pakistan has, however, flatly refused New Delhi's claims of Islamabad's involvement in the Uri terror attack, stating that it has become India's traditional tendency to point fingers on them after each terrorist attack.

Director General of Military operation Lt. Ranbir Singh yesterday said that the four terrorists, who attacked the military base in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri, belonged to Pakistan's banned terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

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The Congress party on Wednesday said Pakistan is terrorism exports exceed their economic goods and services.

Lauding the international community for supporting India and condemning Pakistan for being a terror safe haven, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Sighvi told ANI, "Pakistan is world's worst terrorist exporting country. There, terrorism exports exceed their exports of economic goods and services. They've given themselves a bad name as a country by exporting and encouraging this kind of non sense."

Another Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit said "The army and the internal security and the external security is completely under the dominance of the Pakistan Army. So, it is much better if Mr. (John)Kerry or anybody else put pressure on the Pakistan army," he added.

Dikshit said terror has given itself a bad name as a country by exporting and encouraging this kind of nonsense.

The comments came three days after terrorists attacked an army base in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, killed 18 soldiers and injured 20 others.

Two American lawmakers Republican Ted Poe and Democrat Dana Rohrabacher have moved a bill to designate Pakistan as a 'state sponsor of terrorism' stating that it is time to stop paying Islamabad for its repeated betrayal.

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Looks like the King of romance Shah Rukh Khan is brushing up his skills with the help of teen aged-son Aryan.

Story does not end here. He is even re-learning the 'Temple Run' game from his tiny tot.

The 50-year-old actor, on his official Instagram handle, posted a short video of himself learning 'Temple Run' from little AbRam.

In a much adorable caption with the video, King Khan wrote, "Relearning temple run from lil one. Relearning pickup lines from older one. Good combo...if the lines backfire at least I can run away fast!!"

On the work front, the actor is in Amsterdam presently shooting for Imtiaz Ali's 'The Ring,' alongside Anushka Sharma.

he will also be seen in Gauri Shinde's 'Dear Zindagi,' slated for a November 25 release. And Rahul Dholakia's directorial action thriller 'Raees,' scheduled to release on January 26.

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President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday called on doctors to be consistently sensitive and empathetic towards their patients, adding that following such a practice cures half the ailment.

Addressing faculty of Lady Hardinge Medical College on the occasion of the institution's centenary celebrations and convocation, President Mukherjee said, "Doctors should consistently be sensitive and empathetic towards the patients who they cure. A doctor, who is visibly concerned towards his patient, cures half the ailment in his first interaction with him or her."

"It is this attitude that should always guide them, before the drugs and medicines prescribed by them begin to give their required effect. While clinical detachment is certainly required, this detachment should not lead to taking monetary advantage of a patient and his family who have entrusted their lives in their hands with full faith," he added.

He further said, "All doctors have followed an extraordinarily arduous academic journey to reach where they are today. However, theirs is a discipline and profession that would require them to be a student, a scholar and an innovator all their life."

"While the fact that every human being is uniquely made will give them an opportunity to learn with every new patient they see, it should also lead to prescribing customised care and treatment," he added.

"New developments in medical research will demand of them to be students and learners on a daily basis. In this regard, as physicians they should always keep their minds open to emerging ideas and circumstances around them," he said.

"While other disciplines may lead to basic education getting separated into professional application and academic research after the qualifying degree, medical education is one discipline where profession and research will have to go hand in hand always," the president said.

He further said that in a nation like India where public health needs are ever increasing, it will be only one further step in the noble profession that they have chosen, to regularly focus on public health and medical facilities away from the cities, in the smaller towns and villages of India. While the government does its bit in enhancing health services, a resolve on their part is going to do wonders to the public health infrastructure.

The President said that the international norm is one doctor per thousand population, India has one doctor for 1700 people.

"The situation is all the more alarming in rural India where the shortage of surgeons is to the tune of 83.4 percent, obstetricians and gynaecologists 76.3 percent, paediatricians 82.1 percent and general physicians 83 percent at the level of the Community Health Centres (CHCs). The overall shortage translates to 81.2 percent as of the year 2015," he said.

He said that from the above data one could appreciate the huge dimension of building up health infrastructure in our country particularly in rural areas.

The president congratulated the Lady Hardinge Medical College on the occasion of its centenary year celebrations and convocation. He also congratulated all the awardees and said that convocation is an important milestone in the life of students, their parents and faculty members.

He also appreciated the efforts of Lady Hardinge who had thought of establishing an exclusive college for women in order to provide them modern and scientific medical education.

The pPresident concluded by sharing a famous quote and said, "He who has health has hope, and he who has hope, has everything."

Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare J.P. Nadda, MoS for Health and Family Welfare Faggan Singh Kulaste and Secretary, Health and Family Welfare C.K. Mishra were among the others present on the occasion.

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Asserting that a new Cold War threatens to engulf Europe, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said intolerance has revived the ghosts of xenophobia and Islamophobia in many countries.

"A new Cold War threatens to engulf Europe. The momentum there towards "greater union" has already reversed. Barricades and walls are going up, especially against the tide of misery flowing out of a turbulent Middle East. In many countries, intolerance has revived the ghosts of xenophobia and Islamophobia," he said in his remarks at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

He further said the is at a historic inflection point, adding the international order established after the Second War is passing away but a new order has yet to emerge.

"Competition between the major powers is becoming more confrontational. This can pose serious threats to peace across Asia," he said.

Sharif stressed that turmoil is intensifying in the Middle East and international efforts to defeat Daesh are, therefore, urgent.

"For this, it is essential to reconcile the divergent objectives and priorities of regional and external powers," he said.

Further talking on terrorism, he said that Pakistan has long been a victim of terrorism, adding that his nation has a vital stake in fighting the menace.

"My country has been the principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored and financed from abroad," he said adding, "We will not allow externally sponsored terrorism and threats of destabilization to cause turbulence in Pakistan. Tens of thousands of our citizens and thousands of our security personnel have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks."

He said that Islamabad's comprehensive strategy of law enforcement and targeted military operations has produced remarkable results and enabled Pakistan to turn the tide against terrorism.

"Pakistan's Zarb-e-Azb Operation is the largest, most robust and most successful anti-terrorism campaign anywhere in the world, deploying 200,000 of our security forces," he said.

He also called upon the international community to collaborate in the fight against terrorism, saying it is now a global phenomenon.

"The international community must coordinate its efforts to accomplish this. These efforts should be taken collectively and not unilaterally by the passage of any laws with extra-territorial application targeted against certain countries," he said.

Talking about the peace process in Afghanistan, he said, "After 15 years of the current war in Afghanistan, the international community agrees that the only road to a lasting peace in that country is through a dialogue between the Government in Kabul and the Afghan Taliban," adding that Pakistan has long proposed this as the most viable course to end decades of conflict in Afghanistan.

He said that Islamabad has been facilitating the process of reconciliation in Afghanistan but there have been setbacks.

"Progress will be assured only when the Afghan parties themselves conclude that there is no military solution to the Afghan war and work assiduously through a meaningful dialogue process for achieving reconciliation and peace at home," he said.

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Union Science and Technology Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan has adopted 'Dheerpur Village' and 'Ghoga' the last village under the North Delhi under the 'Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana', which is one of the major and flagship schemes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Harsh Vardhan had an intense visit of 'Ghoga' village along with the senior officers of MCD, Delhi Jal Board, BSES, Delhi Police, Delhi Traffic Police and Flood Control, Irrigation and Revenue Department of Delhi Government.

During this visit, there were a large number of people apart from the Local Councillor Mohan Bhardwaj and Vinod Sehrawat, president, BJP, North West District Delhi.

The Minister has given instructions to the senior officers of the irrigation and flood control and revenue department keeping in view the dilapidated condition of the community hall situated in this village populated by around 10,000 people to get this community hall renovated at the earliest.

Apart from this, it has also been ordered to renovate 'Harijan Chopal' building which is also in a very dilapidated condition.

Apart from this, Shiv Mandir, Cremation Ground, Bus Stand, Phirni Road, Homeopathic Dispensary and Brahmin Chopal of this village were also inspected and instructions were issued to the concerned officials by the Minister to prepare a Blue Print for the development of the 'Ghoga Village' in next 2-3 weeks so that plenary development of the village could be ensured.

Dr. Harsh Vardhan also directed that the park of the village be developed immediately and arrangements be made for the gym for the youths. Orders were also given to implement the schemes for the village development initiated by the Prime Minister.

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HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, India's leading private sector General Insurance Company, showcased the new comprehensive web enabled HDFC ERGO Community portal - accessible at https

This first-of-its-kind community website for general insurance in India will serve as a channel for its users to research, get advice, discuss and share their experiences and knowledge on non-life insurance products with others registered users within the community.

With the plethora of promoted material freely available all around, consumers find it difficult getting the right information regarding products, and more so in the case of Insurance products which are intangible in nature.

Consumers, therefore, rely on age old methods of seeking advice from family and friend and most often, consider their opinion as the final word while taking a decision.

Addressing this fundamental issue the HDFC ERGO Community, an innovative portal, was launched as an online discussion forum for existing and potential customers, product experts as well as seeker of information on General Insurance.

Speaking about the community portal, Ritesh Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, said, "We have taken the initiative of providing consumers with the knowledge of general insurance products and thereby set best practices within the insurance sector. The community portal has been conceptualized with the objective of helping users take informed decisions for their general insurance requirements and will be a one-stop-shop for comprehensive information about non-life insurance products and services. Over time, the Community portal will be enriched with quality content by the users and may provide inputs on how to improve and extend new product offerings."

The HDFC ERGO Community portal offers users a peer-to-peer channel to get advice, discuss their experiences and share information about anything and everything related to general insurance. Setting itself apart from company website, the portal is a user driven platform that provides relevant information they seek.

The main objective of the community portal is to provide authentic, value-added and usable information to its users. Users can register and log in to the community portal to seek answers to their queries from fellow users and also share their own experiences with the others users. The portal focuses on delivering a seamless and meaningful cross-channel engagement model for the stakeholders. Some of the key elements of the portal are insightful articles, trending topics, tips on buying insurance, product information and polls.

Digitalisation of products and services is the new frontier which HDFC ERGO is strategically aiming to approach. The community portal - a part of HDFC ERGO's digitalisation process - is poised to provide new avenues and value-adding opportunities for both the company as well as the subscribers of general insurance products and services.

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Hitting out at Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for 'glorifying' slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani at the United Nations, India has asserted that his statement only proves Islamabad's attachment to terrorism.

Taking to Twitter, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said that Sharif glorifying Wani in his address at the United Nations General Assembly, which is one of UN's highest forum, shows Pakistan's continued connection with terrorism.

"PM Sharif at #UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. India's only condition is an end to terrorism. This not acceptable? Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA in complete denial of Uri terror attack. 19 infiltration attempts stopped at LoC this year. Indigenous??!!," Swarup said in a series of tweets.

Earlier in his address at the 71st UNGA in New York, Sharif invoked Wani, who was slain by the Indian security forces in an encounter, and branded him as a young leader saying that he has become the face of the Kashmiri movement.

"Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces, has emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement, led by Kashmiris," said Sharif.

He said Pakistan fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination, as promised to them by several Security Council resolutions and urged the United Nations to intervene and assist in solving the Kashmir dispute.

"The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self- determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under UN auspices. The Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions," he said.

He further demanded an independent inquiry and a UN fact finding mission to investigate the situation in Kashmir.

Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani (22) was killed by the Indian security forces in an encounter on July 8. He was prolific on social media and used the same to reach out to the youth while spreading the message of jihad.

His killing triggered massive protests in Kashmir that injured hundreds of civilians as well as security personnel.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the United Nations that his country wants peace with India but asserted there can be no peace and normalization of relations between the two Asian neighbours until the Kashmir issue is fully resolved.

"Peace and normalization between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. This is an objective evaluation, not a partisan position," said Sharif while addressing the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

He said that talks are necessary for solving all pending disputes including Kashmir with India while adding that Islamabad would accept any pre-conditions.

"Talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to avert the danger of any escalation. But India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue," he said.

He further extended his support to Kashmiris and went on to glorify slain Hijbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani as a young leader, who has become the face of the Kashmiri movement.

"Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces, has emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement, led by Kashmiris," said Sharif.

The Prime Minister said Islamabad fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination as promised to them by several Security Council resolutions and urged the United Nations to intervene and assist in solving the Kashmir dispute.

"The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self- determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under the UN auspices. The Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions," he said.

He further demanded an independent inquiry and a UN fact finding mission to investigate the situation in Kashmir.

The dialogue between both sides was suspended after an attack on an Indian air base at Pathankot earlier in January which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

Of late, the tension between the two sides escalated to a new level with India demanding that Pakistan be "isolated" globally post the terror attack on the army base camp in Uri Sector, close to the Line of Control (LoC).

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South African President Jacob Zuma addresses the United Nations General Assembly in the Manhattan borough of New York, US, Sept 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

NEW YORK - South Africa has committed itself to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, South African President Jacob Zuma said at the high-level debate of UN General Assembly Tuesday.

"We committed ourselves to an ambitious and transformative global development program that seeks to address the triple challenge of this century, which is poverty, unemployment and inequality," Zuma said.

African has made significant strides in the past couple of decades in reversing the impact of underdevelopment, he added.

Meanwhile, Zuma said industrialization is the key to Africa's development and prosperity, adding that Africa's industrialization will contribute to the eradication of poverty, reducing inequality and unemployment, and will also contribute positively to global growth and global prosperity.

He said the availability of resources would be crucial to the successful implementation of such development plans.

Over 140 world leaders gather in New York to attend this year's general debate, which lasts till Sept 26. This year's theme for the General Assembly is "The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Universal Push to Transform our World."
Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung and all officers of his secretariat on Wednesday visited seventeen garbage points and inspected the status of garbage collection, general cleanliness across the capital.

The inspection was initiated by Raj Niwas to take stock of cleanliness, keeping in view the rising cases of chikungunya, dengue and malaria.

Jung has directed the civic agencies to lift garbage from garbage points regularly and keep surrounding areas clean and sanitized

"Officers from Raj Niwas shall be making regular visits to the dhalaos in the coming days; civic agencies need to be vigilant," he said.

Earlier this morning, cracking its whip on the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and other civic and sanitary authorities in New Delhi, the Green Tribunal (NGT) pulled them up for their failure in not implementing strong measures to control the spread of mosquito-bred diseases like chikungunya and dengue.

The NGT ordered the formation of a district level committee to be headed by deputy commissioner, MCD zone to check all preventive measures being taken by concerned officials on ground and submit its report within 15 days.

As per reports, at least 34 people have lost their lives due to chikungunya and dengue which have affected close to 4,000 people in the capital this year.

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A man was injured during an attempted attack on the Israeli Embassy in Ankara on Wednesday, Israel's Foreign Affairs spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said.

Nahshon said the attacker, who appeared to have a weapon, was shot by a security guard and was lightly wounded, reports the CNN.

Reports suggest that the assailant reached the "outer perimeter" of the embassy.

According to local Turkish media, two people tried to enter the tightly guarded embassy, with employees taking refuge in a shelter.

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The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Pakistan has removed the London-based coterie of MQM founder Altaf Hussain from the top decision-making forum of the party after coordination committee convener Nadeem Nusrat said that the supremo was still the party's uncontested chief.

Nusrat, who was until recently recognised as the convener of the MQM coordination committee at a programme held to celebrate the 63rd birthday of Hussain, said that no one could separate the Mohajir community from Hussain as he was the one who gave them a separate identity.

"Altaf Hussain himself is the MQM," Dawn quoted Nusrat as saying.

The MQM leader's speech has been blocked in Pakistan since Hussain's August 22 tirade which put the Dr Farooq Sattar-led MQM-Pakistan in an awkward position.

The party wrote Hussain out of the party constitution, but retained Nusrat as the party convener.

The MQM-Pakistan, in a statement, said that it had unanimously dissociated itself "from London" after the Aug 22 incident.

After the statement was issued, the coordination committee went into an emergency session at the temporary headquarters in Karachi's PIB Colony.

Presided over by Sattar, all members of the coordination committee in Pakistan then decided to remove four London-based members from the committee.

According to another statement, London-based MQM convener Nadeem Nusrat and members Wasay Jalil, Mustafa Azizabadi and Qasim Ali Raza have been expelled from the party.

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The investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the terror attack in Uri Sector of Jammu and Kashmir, will be seeking the help of the Army, Intelligence Bureau and RAW to get identities of the terrorists verified.

The agencies will be asked to provide the NIA with intercepts of the last two to four months in the region.

As per sources, Kashif Jaan, who had escorted the Pathankot terrorists till the border, could also have been the handler of the slain terrorists in Uri.

The NIA sources say that the Uri attack may have been masterminded by Kashif Jaan, Rauf Asgar and Masood Azha.

The NIA yesterday filed an FIR in the Uri terror strike case and a six-member team will soon visit the site of the attack to collect the evidence in the matter.

According to sources, NIA will collect the blood samples and finger prints of the four killed terrorists in Uri.

The army is set to handover all items recovered from the killed terrorists including weapons, navigation maps to the NIA for further investigation.

The NIA will also send the GPS and icon satellite set to the United States for forensic investigation to find out what route the terrorists chose and when and how they entered Indian territory.

In one of the worst attack in recent times, at least 18 soldiers lost their lives and over 20 others got injured post the terror strike on an army camp close to the headquarters of the 12th Brigade at Uri in Baramulla district.

Director General of Military operation Lt. Ranbir Singh has said that the four terrorists, who attacked the military base in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri, belonged to Pakistan's banned terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

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Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in his address at the United Nations said that Islamabad "is fully eligible" for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group.

"Judged on the basis of objective criteria and without discrimination, Pakistan is fully eligible for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group," he said in his remarks at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

"We have introduced state of the art measures to strengthen the safety and security of our nuclear materials and facilities. We have adopted a comprehensive export control regime that is fully consistent with international standards," he said.

He also asserted that Pakistan is not engaged in an arms race with India.

The Prime Minister, however, added, "We cannot ignore our neighbour's unprecedented arms buildup and will take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence."

He further said Islamabad is ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty.

He said Pakistan is open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with New Delhi in any forum or format and without any conditions.

"We have consistently urged the conclusion of bilateral arms control and disarmament measures between Pakistan and India to prevent conflict and avoid wasteful military expenditures," he added.

Pakistan and India are the two non-NPT states aspiring for the membership of the 48-member international nuclear trade body.

Many countries, including China, had opposed India's bid to join the NSG at its last meeting in June citing that the latter has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is the basic criteria to enter the NSG.

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Member of Parliament Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Wednesday said it is high time that Pakistan is declared a terror state post Uri Attacks.

"We are witnessing a global condemnation of Pakistan and all the nations of the world look at Pakistan with the view of a terror state. In America, two lawmakers have introduced a Bill to declare Pakistan a terror state. I also think and I submitted a resolution to be passed in the Winter Session of Parliament, which unambiguously states that Pakistan is a terror state," Chandrasekhar told ANI.

Chandrasekhar advised the government to review its relationship with Islamabad in the wake of the increasing terror attacks from the other side of the border.

"We are suffering these terror attacks of Pakistan for many years... We need to review all these and all Pakistan whatever it really is, that is a terror state," Chandrasekhar said.

"A message will also be then sent to the selective few who consider Pakistan something other than terror state, that all of us countrymen consider Pakistan a terror state," he added.

Chandrasekhar talked about how the world is becoming increasingly concerned about Pakistan being a terror state.

"This shows the increasing concern of the whole world that Pakistan is not a failed state, it is now a terror state," he said.

Two infiltration bids were made from across the border in Kashmir on Tuesday just days after the Uri terror strike, but they were foiled by the Army in an encounter in which 10 terrorists and a jawan were killed even as the Pakistani troops violated ceasefire and fired at Indian positions.

The infiltration bids and the ceasefire violation came after four Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad militants stormed an army base in Uri Sector of Jammu and Kashmir's Baramulla district, killing 18 soldiers and injuring several others.

All the four militants were killed in the gun battle.

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Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and army chief General Raheel Sharif had a telephonic conversation about Kashmir issue, prior to former's speech at the UN General Assembly today.

The statement by Prime Minister Sharif's Office spokesman said that conversation took place last night.

"The Prime Minister and General Raheel Sharif had a telephonic conversation in which they discussed ... the prevailing regional situation," Dawn quoted the statement as saying.

Sharif is in New York attending the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly session.

Reports suggest that the conversation was the first between the two since Sunday's terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Uri region, in which 18 Indian Army soldiers lost their lives.

Sharif would today deliver a speech at the UNGA in which he is likely to focus on the Kashmir issue.

According to sources, India would also raise the Uri attack and highlight Pakistan's alleged involvement in the dastardly terror attack.

According to sources, India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise on Pakistan's involvement in her speech on September 26.

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United Kashmir People's National Party (UKPNP) chairman Shaukat Ali Kashmiri on Thursday criticised Nawaz Sharif for glorifying slain Hizbul Mujahidden commander Burhan Wani as a 'young symbol' of 'Kashmiri freedom movement' and said Pakistan's Prime Minister does not understand the ground realties of Kashmir.

He said that it was wrong to call Wani as the 'symbol' of' freedom movement' as he was carrying out communal activities in a multi religious Kashmir society.

"It is undisputed that Burhan Wani was the commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, all his details are available in Facebook and other social media websites. Wani also claimed that he was fighting to uphold Islam," Ali told ANI.

"Kashmir society is demographically a multi cultural and multi religious society. Burhan Wani carried out communal movement, you cannot call it as a national liberation movement and I don't think PM Nawaz Sharif understands the ground realities of Kashmir which is why he is unable to explain it," he added.

Ali also said that Sharif should rather think about the atrocities in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Gilgit.

While addressing at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Sharif said, "Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces, has emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement, led by Kashmiris."

The Prime Minister also extended support to the demands of Kashmiri people for self determination and called on the UN Security Council to hold free and fair plebiscite.

"The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self- determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under the UN auspices. The Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions," he said.

He further demanded an independent inquiry and a UN fact finding mission to investigate the situation in Kashmir.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said that the slain Hijbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was a young leader and has become the face of the Kashmiri movement.

"Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces, has emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement, led by Kashmiris," said Sharif while addressing the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

The Prime Minister, who earlier declared Wani a 'martyr' post his death even as India branded him a terrorist, said Islamabad fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination as promised to them by several Security Council resolutions and urged the United Nations to intervene and assist in solving the Kashmir dispute.

"The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self- determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under the UN auspices. The Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions," he said.

He further demanded an independent inquiry and a UN fact finding mission to investigate the situation in Kashmir.

Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani (22) was killed by the Indian security forces in an encounter on July 8. He was prolific on social media and used the same to reach out to the youth while spreading the message of jihad.

His killing triggered massive protests in Kashmir that injured several civilians as well as security personnel.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Lashing out at Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for talking about Kashmir at the United Nations when there are grave human rights violations in Balochistan, Baloch activist advocate Mohammad Anwar said that the former should have instead talked about Balochistan.

"He should have talked about Balochistan instead of Kashmir. The world knows what is happening in Balochistan currently, where houses are being looted and razed, the people are being kidnapped and murdered," said Anwar.

He added that Pakistan has nothing to do with Kashmir.





ALSO READ: 'Puppet' Nawaz Sharif working at Pakistani army's behest: Baloch activist

When asked about Sharif's claim that Pakistan is a victim of sponsored terrorism, he said, "Terrorists there are not being funded from abroad, Pakistan is itself supporting them and everyone knows it."

He added that involvement of Pakistan is always found in every terror attack around the globe.



Read India's reaction to Sharif's speech: India reacts strongly to Nawaz Sharif's speech at UN

"Whenever there is a terror attack anywhere in the world, Pakistani people are always found behind it which proves this fact," he said alleging that Islamabad was behind the recent Quetta bombing that killed dozens of lawyers there.

He added, "I think Pakistan was also behind the latest attack on an Army base camp in India that killed 18 of its soldiers."

Earlier, Sharif in his address at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly said that Pakistan has been the principal victim of terrorism, including that supported, sponsored and financed from abroad.

He also raked up the Kashmir issue and said that peace and normalisation between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute.
Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry yesterday raised country's "serious concerns" over the situation in Jammu and Kashmir with European Union Secretary General for External Affairs Helga Schmid during their meeting on the sidelines of the 71st UNGA session in New York.

Chaudhry briefed his EU counterpart about alleged "human rights violations" committed by India against Kashmiris.

The European Union noted Pakistan's concerns and inquired about the current state of bilateral relations between India and Pakistan.

According to sources, India is set to raise the Uri attack - in which 18 Army soldiers were killed - at the 71st UNGA session and highlight Pakistan's alleged involvement in the deadly terror strike.

According to sources, India will raise the matter in the U.N. General Assembly and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasise on Pakistan's involvement in her speech on September 26.

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Defence expert Major General(Retd.) Ravi Arora on Wednesday said it would be a good idea to organize a SAARC sans Pakistan, where Indian proposals and SAARC countries as a whole could benefit without Islamabad acting as an obstacle.

"Perhaps it is a good policy to organize a new SAARC minus Pakistan where Indian proposals and SAARC countries as a whole can benefit without Pakistan being on the Table," he said.

"Pakistan has always seen the SAARC summit and its success as India's success. India is the big brother in SAARC, but other countries do not see it that way" he added.

"India has announced so many benefits for SAARC member countries like the SAARC satellite, SAARC connectivity corridors ,railways, highways and energy sharing but Islamabad doesn't want Indian proposals to see the light of day, or be successful," he said.

Major General Arora said that if the nations boycott the SAARC summit then it will be the first step to exclude Pakistan from the SAARC.

"They have always raised bilateral issues and SAARC has always said that this is not the place for bilateral issues. Whereas, terrorism is a concern affecting all SAARC nations, and India has said that we can discuss terrorism and particularly terrorism emanating from Pakistan," he clarified.

India, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are likely to boycott November SAARC summit Islamabad. The neighboring countries may also boycott the global summit in protest against Pakistan's alleged state sponsored terrorism.

The South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is a grouping of eight countries which strive to promote peace, stability and progress in the South Asian region.

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Advisor to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Foreign Affairs, Sartaj Aziz discussed the Kashmir crisis today with the Foreign Ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland on the sidelines of 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York.

"Acknowledging the sacrifices rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three Foreign Ministers appreciated successful counterterrorism operations conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country. Mr. Sartaj Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistan's economy to grow at steady and sustainable rate. He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria and Switzerland in Pakistan," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan said in a statement.

Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Pakistan-India relations and the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, highlighting the current state of violence in the Valley, as he stated that the settlement of Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability of South Asia.

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida stated Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistan's power sector. Encouraging greater interaction of private sectors of the two countries, he welcomed the visit of Pakistan's business delegation to Japan. He also reiterated his invitation to Aziz to visit Japan.

Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz of Austria welcomed the prospects of Austrian investment in Pakistan due to improved security situation. He recognized significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy.

Foreign Minister (Federal Councillor) Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland mentioned that Swiss Development Cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan. With improved security situation, the prospects of further expanding its work, according of Pakistan's priorities, were positive. He offered Swiss cooperation in Pakistan's water management sector. He appreciated Pakistan's role in hosting Afghan refugees for the last thirty years.

Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organization, Pakistan's application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly.

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Bangladesh High Commissioner to India Syed Muazzem Ali has said his country's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is yet to take a decision on whether to attend or not to attend the upcoming South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Summit to be held in Pakistan capital Islamabad in November.

"Well as you know the SAARC Summit is a major SAARC event, and heads of governments normally attend this. So, if there is not enough participation of heads of governments, obviously you know that it did not get the full attention and full importance of the other member countries. So, we will see as we come to that particular situation. As of now, the SAARC Summit scheduled to be held in sometime in November and no final decision has been taken by our Prime Minister regarding her participation, but as soon as the decision is taken, I certainly can tell you," Ali told ANI here.

"My Prime Minister (Sheikh Hasina) is coming to India to attend the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) Summit that would take place on October 16, only a few days from now, and she would have a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I am sure that there would be a discussion on this. Perhaps, at the Goa event, our two Prime Ministers can also discuss regarding their attendance at the forthcoming SAARC Summit in Islamabad," Ali added.

When asked if he thought that Pakistan-sponsored terrorism was a major disruption in the region, the Bangladesh High Commissioner said, "In the Bangladeshi terrorist acts, we have so far investigated all aspects of the matter, and those are home-grown terrorists, but those were receiving support and assistance from abroad. But as regard to this particular cross-border terrorism (Uri), it is obvious that in that particular militarised zone nobody can come to this area without coming from the other side.

"So, basically we are exploring different options. As you know that the Government of India yesterday (Monday) discussed about various options that are on the table, and once the decisions are taken, I am sure, there will be high level consultations between the two Prime Ministers (PMs of India and Bangladesh)."

Reacting to the Uri terrorist attack, Ali said his prime Minister had on Monday in a message to Prime Minister Modi had categorically stated Bangladesh's position and went on to quote Prime Minister Hasina as saying: "Bangladesh strongly condemns terrorism and violent extremism in all its forms and manifestations in line with the zero tolerance policy against terrorism and violent extremism, Bangladesh firmly stands besides India at this difficult hour as a close friend and neighbour. We would continue to work together in our common endeavour to eradicate the menace of cross-border terrorism from this region and beyond."

"So, basically, as I mentioned, she has very categorically condemned this act of terrorism and she has maintained that Bangladesh has zero tolerance policy towards terrorism, is the main basis on the basis of which we have been cooperating with our government and we are prepared to cooperate fully with the Government of India in our common drive to eradicate this particular menace," Ali added.

When asked that India had decided to expose and isolate Pakistan globally and would Bangladesh join India in this endeavour, he said, "Both Bangladesh and India right now are engaged at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which is beginning Tuesday (today), and I think the General Assembly is the main forum where we voice all international concerns and we try to take joint action over there.

"Since my Prime Minister is already in New York and your Foreign Affairs Minister would also be there soon, I am sure there will be very high level of consultations, and we will act together at the UN."

Asked what actions are required to be taken against terrorism, he said, "There are various options, which are on the table and Prime Minister Modi himself also considering various consequences and various implications of the various courses of action. So, it is quite possible that she (Prime Minister Hasina) might be able to take a comprehensive package of taking actions on several fronts. So, we will have to wait for a final decision to be taken on the matter, and then there will be high level consultations between us, but we are prepared to cooperate with India."

Ali also expressed his deep condolences to the members of the bereaved families and whished wounded soldiers' early and complete recovery.

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The Presidents of France and South Africa have called for urgent investments globally to create new jobs in the health sector in order to prevent a projected shortfall of 18 million health workers primarily in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and help countries to maximize the social and economic benefits of increased health employment.

The High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, chaired by Presidents Francois Hollande and Jacob Zuma delivered its final report and recommendations to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

The Commission concluded that investing in the health workforce is needed to make progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, including gains in health, global security and inclusive economic growth. The commission made 10 recommendations for realising those gains, through appropriate investments in health employment that can power economies, move countries closer to universal health coverage and act as a bulwark against outbreaks such as Ebola.

Ageing populations and increasing rates of non-communicable diseases are projected to generate demand for 40 million new health workers worldwide by 2030, which would represent a doubling of the current global health workforce. But most of those jobs will be created in the wealthiest countries. Without action there will be a shortfall, primarily in low- and lower-middle-income countries, of 18 million health workers needed to achieve and sustain universal health coverage.

Mounting evidence shows that investments in the health sector pay handsome dividends. The returns on investment in health are estimated to be 9 to 1, and around one quarter of growth between 2000 and 2011 in low-income and middle-income countries is estimated to have resulted from improvements to health. Investing in skills and expanding health employment will also contribute to the economic empowerment of women and youth.

"For too long countries have seen health workers as just another cost to be managed, instead of an investment with a triple return for health, economic growth and global health security," said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the Health Organization.

The need for action is urgent. The Commission calls for immediate actions by March 2018 to secure commitments and accountability for accelerated health workforce investments. In response to the Commission's request, the Vice-Chairs of the Commission from WHO, ILO and OECD will convene all relevant stakeholders by the end of 2016 to develop a five-year implementation plan for the 10 recommendations.

"The report provides solid evidence that investing in the health economy and progressing towards universal health coverage can strengthen economic growth and make it more inclusive by generating decent jobs in a wide range of occupations," said Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labour Organization. "It offers practical proposals for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, particularly Sustainable Development Goal 3 on healthy lives and well-being for all at all ages, and goal 8 on inclusive growth and decent work."

Health is a major and growing source of jobs. Across the OECD, employment in health and social work grew by 48 per cent between 2000 and 2014, while jobs in industry and agriculture declined.

"These recommendations will chart the course to achieve greater and more effective investment in the health workforce. This will be a critical element to promote better lives and help our economies flourish and achieve their full potential," said Angel Gurria, Secretary-General of the OECD.

The commission's vision is for an expanded, transformed and sustainable health workforce to promote health, prevent disease, meet the needs of populations, and drive inclusive economic growth.

The commission's 10 recommendations are:

1. Stimulate investments in creating decent health sector jobs, particularly for women and youth, with the right skills, in the right numbers and in the right places.

2. Maximize women's economic participation and foster their empowerment through institutionalizing their leadership, addressing gender biases and inequities in education and the health labour market, and tackling gender concerns in health reform processes.

3. Scale up transformative, high-quality education and lifelong learning so that all health workers have skills that match the health needs of populations and can work to their full potential.

4. Reform service models concentrated on hospital care and focus instead on prevention and on the efficient provision of high-quality, affordable, integrated, community-based, people-centred primary and ambulatory care, paying special attention to underserved areas.

5. Harness the power of cost-effective information and communication technologies to enhance health education, people-centred health services and health information systems.

6. Ensure investment in the International Health Regulations core capacities, including skills development of national and international health workers in humanitarian settings and public health emergencies, both acute and protracted. Ensure the protection and security of all health workers and health facilities in all settings.

7. Raise adequate funding from domestic and international sources, public and private where appropriate, and consider broad-based health financing reform where needed, to invest in the right skills, decent working conditions and an appropriate number of health workers.

8. Promote inter-sectoral collaboration at national, regional and international levels; engage civil society, unions and other health workers' organizations and the private sector; and align international cooperation to support investments in the health workforce, as part of national health and education strategies and plans.

9. Advance international recognition of health workers' qualifications to optimize skills use, increase the benefits from and reduce the negative effects of health worker migration, and safeguard migrants' rights.

10. Undertake robust research and analysis of health labour markets, using harmonized metrics and methodologies, to strengthen evidence, accountability and action.

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The Union Cabinet will be meeting under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Wednesday morning.

Though the Cabinet meeting on Wednesday is a routine affair, it is significant in the sense that it is being held in the backdrop of last Sunday's terror attack in Uri in which 18 army soldiers were killed.

The Cabinet Committee on Security is also expected to hold a meeting to review the situation arising out of the attack.

Meanwhile, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi has reviewed the security situation in Kashmir in the backdrop of the deadly militant attack on an army base in Uri and the ongoing unrest in the valley.

Mehrishi arrived in Srinagar early Tuesday morning and held series of meetings to review security situation across the Kashmir Valley.

He had detailed discussions with top officials from various security forces, police and intelligence agencies.

Mehrishi also called on Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti to discuss the prevailing situation in the valley. He left for New Delhi in the evening.

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The meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security held at the PMO ended here on Wednesday afternoon.

The meeting is significant in the backdrop of Uri terror attack, in which 18 army jawans were martyred. The Cabinet Committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi reviewed the situation arising out of the attack.

The meeting was attended by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Minister Rajnath Singh , Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and others.

Meanwhile, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi has reviewed the security situation in Kashmir in the backdrop of the deadly militant attack on an army base in Uri and the ongoing unrest in the valley.

Mehrishi arrived in Srinagar early Tuesday morning and held series of meetings to review security situation across the Kashmir Valley.

He had detailed discussions with top officials from various security forces, police and intelligence agencies.

The international community continues to condemn the Sunday's terror attack in Uri which killed 18 Army personnel. Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and many other countries have extended their support to India in its fight against terrorism.

German Ambassador to India Martin Ney said that every country is responsible for taking decisive action against terrorism emanating from its territory.

Expressing its solidarity with India in the fight against terrorism, Japanese Foreign Ministry said, no act of terrorism can be justified.

In a letter to Prime Minister Modi, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said, her country will continue to work with India to eradicate the menace.

Sri Lanka President Maithripala Sirisena and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called up Prime Minister Modi yesterday and condemned the attack.

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Veteran Pakistani batsman Younus Khan is recovering from a severe bout of influenza, which has been troubling him since last week.

The 38-year-old, who is being treated at a private hospital in Karachi, has been cleared of dengue symptoms after he undergone tests to clear suspicions of a viral attack.

Confirming the news, Younus's associate said that the right-hander had shown signs of improvement in last two days and that he was expected to recover fully ahead of the three-match Test series against the West Indies, starting from October 17 in Dubai.

Younus was recently declared as 'Man of the Match' for his brilliant 218-run knock in the fourth and the final Test against England last month,the Express Tribune reported.

However, he had struggled with the form prior to his double century, scoring 33 and 25 at Lord's, one and 28 at Old Trafford, and 31 and four at Edgbaston .

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Tolexo, India's largest online marketplace for goods and supplies has recently added another service to its online platform that makes it more attractive for India's SME merchants to buy online. It now offers buying on credit to its growing buyer base.

The move aims to further improve the customer experience for Tolexo's buyers by providing them with an offline-like credit purchase experience combined with one-of-a-kind services such as, one-click checkout, documentation-free credit and post-delivery payment options.

The partnership is in line with Tolexo's overarching aim of making the B2B e-commerce experience as convenient and sustainable for India's growing SME businesses as possible.

Tolexo aims to generate an experience similar to offline shopping through the use of credit-based buying. SME buyers will be given 100 percent interest free credit period ranging from seven to 23 days to make payments, which is in line with how offline B2B trade is executed.

By emulating the traditional ways of doing business, Tolexo aims to further enhance the propensity of India's B2B players to leverage the benefits of technology and online commerce by enabling an experience similar to offline transactions.

"Our new offering is in line with Tolexo's on-going innovations towards making the B2B e-commerce ecosystem as sustainable and lucrative as possible for all stakeholders. The unique payment solution will also facilitate the buyers by featuring a simple, one-click checkout and offering aggregated payment options to club their multiple purchases and make a single payment. This is extremely important for frequent buyers whose propensity to purchase increases with such convenient modes of transaction," said Founder and CEO Tolexo, Brijesh Agrawal.

To launch the credit-buying facility, Tolexo has tied up with credit facilitator ePayLater. The company combines alternate and traditional data to provide real time sanctioning and disbursal of credit by performing quick assessment of the credit worthiness of individuals and businesses and that too in the least intrusive way.

"We all know how significant and game-changing role Tolexo has and continues to play for the future of B2B e-commerce in the country and we are privileged to be a part of the journey. We are happy that we have been able to provide a solution to the online B2B buyers of Tolexo, which satisfies a hitherto unmet demand for credit-based buying opportunities online. We do this through our unmatched fraud and credit assessment technology," said Co-founder ePayLater, Akshat Saxena.

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The Union Cabinet under the Chairmanship of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given its approval for signing and ratification of Agreement between India and Samoa for the exchange of information with respect to Taxes.

The Agreement will stimulate the flow of exchange of information between India and Samoa for tax purposes which will help curb tax evasion and tax avoidance.

There is no financial implications at present. Only in the event of extraordinary costs exceeding USD 500, the same will be borne by India. India has similar provisions in other such tax information exchange agreement.

Salient features of the Agreement:

1. The Agreement enables the competent authorities of India and Samoa to provide assistance through exchange of information that is foreseeably relevant to the administration and enforcement of the domestic laws of the two countries concerning taxes covered by this Agreement.

2.

The information received under the Agreement shall be treated as confidential and may be disclosed only to persons or authorities (including courts or administrative bodies) concerned with assessment, collection, enforcement, prosecution or determination of appeals in relation to taxes covered under the Agreement. Information may be disclosed to any other person or entity or authority or jurisdiction with the prior written consent of the information sending country.

3. The Agreement also provides for Mutual Agreement Procedure "for resolving any difference or for agreeing on procedures under the Agreement.

4. The Agreement shall enter into force on the date of notification of completion of the procedures required by the respective laws of the two countries for entry into force of the Agreement.

Background:

The Central Government is authorized under section 90 of the Income Tax Act, 1961 to enter into an Agreement with a foreign country or specified territory for exchange of information for the prevention of evasion or avoidance of income-tax chargeable under the Income-tax Act, 1961. Negotiations for entering into an Agreement for the exchange of information with respect to Taxes were finalized between India and Samoa in June, 2016 and both countries have agreed on the text of the Agreement.

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The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has approved viability gap funding / partial capital grant at 40 percent (Rs. 5,176 crore) of the estimated capital cost of Rs. 12,940 crore to GAIL for development of 2539 km long Jagdishpur-Haidia and Bokaro-Dhamra Gas Pipeline (JHBDPL) project. Government of India has taken this historic decision to provide Capital Support for developing this gas pipeline. JHBDPL project will connect Eastern part of the country with National Gas Grid.

It will ensure the availability of clean and eco-friendly fuel i.e. Natural Gas to the industrial, commercial, domestic and transport sectors in the States of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal.

This Capital Grant will encourage the supply of eco-friendly fuel at affordable tariffs to industries and will encourage industrial development in these states.

Further, the CCEA has approved the simultaneous development of City Gas Distribution (CGD) networks in cities namely Varanasi, Patna, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Cuttack etc. en-route of JHBDPL project. These distribution networks will be developed by GAIL in collaboration with the concerned State Governments.

It will bring clean cooking fuel at the door step of Domestic households as well as provide clean fuel to transport sector in the eastern region. About 1.25 crore population living in these cities will be directly benefitted by the establishment of these CGD networks. All these projects will generate direct as well as indirect employment for about 21,000 people and will boost socio-economic development in the eastern part of the country.

Cabinet earlier had approved the revival of three Fertiliser Units (FCIL- Gorakhpur, HFCL- Barauni and FCIL-Sindri) along the route of this pipeline project. On revival, these units will be the anchor gas customers for JHBDPL project and gas to these plants will be supplied under the Gas Pooling Scheme for urea sector at pooled price.

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The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, has approved the proposal to extend subsidy support of Rs. 1,250 crore to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) from Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), as compensation for deficit incurred by BSNL in operating the Rural Wire-line connections installed prior to 1st April, 2002. The eligible rural wire-line connections installed prior to 1.4.2002 is 32.32 lakh, across India as on 31.3.2014.

The Cabinet also approved that the above subsidy support would be the last and final payment and no further request from BSNL for financial/subsidy support from USOF on this count shall be considered.

In order to make Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) eligible for subsidy funding on nomination basis from USOF, amendment will be required in Rule 526 of the Indian Telegraph Rules (ITRs), 1951. It stipulates that the criteria for selection of Universal Service Providers shall be made by bidding process from amongst eligible entities for implementation of USOF schemes.

Corresponding Amendment in Rule 525 will also be required.

Full/lump-sum amount of Rs. 1,250 Crore shall be disbursed, consequent to necessary amendment of the ITRs and signing of USOF agreement with BSNL. Utilization certificate of' the USOF subsidy disbursed towards operation and maintenance of the rural wire-line connections would be submitted by BSNL.

Background:

USOF since its inception in 2002 has been providing subsidy for BSNL for the rural wire line connections installed prior to 1.4.2002. A total of Rs. 8,692 crore has been extended as USOF subsidy support till date, for the rural wire-line connections, installed by BSNL prior to 1.4.2002. The details are as follows:

RDEL-D Difference between regulated rental and actual rental 1192 1st April 2002 to

31st January 2004

RDEL-P TRAI recommendations dated 27.03.2008 6000 18th July 2008 to 17th July 2011 RDEL-P TRAI recommendations dated 14.05.2012 1500 18th July 2011 to 17th July 2012

The TRAI in its report dated 14.05.2012 had recommended amount of subsidy support-of Rs. 1,500 crore for the period 18th July 2011 to 17th July 2012 and Rs. 1,250 crore for the 18th July 2012 to 17th July 2013.

Telecom Commission, in its meeting dated 11.12.2012, considered the views of the TRAI and USOF and directed that an assessment be carried out of the current status of the infrastructure.

Telecom Commission/EFC in its meeting dated 14th July 2015 considered the findings of the evaluation/assessment study conducted by National Institute of Communication Finance and recommended the subsidy support of Rs. 1250 crore to BSNL from USOF, as compensation for deficit incurred by BSNL in operating the Rural Wire-line connections installed prior to 1st April 2002 Telecom Commission also recommended that the subsidy support of Rs. 1250 crore would be the last and final payment and no further request from BSNL for financial/subsidy support from USOF on this count shall be considered.

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Signs technology agreement with Advanced Technologies, Israel

Gujarat Alkalies & Chemicals has signed an agreement with Bateman Advanced Technologies, Israel for procuring technology & license, basic engineering, proprietary equipment and technical services for the establishment of 21000 TPA (on 100% P2O2 basis) Food Grade Phosphoric Acid Plant at Dahej.

The plant is expected to be operated by the second quarter of FY 2019-20.

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For setting up 345 MTPD Purified Wet Lime Project

Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilisers & Chemicals has signed a joint venture agreement with Santosh Agrochem LLP for setting up of about 345 MTPD Purified Wet Lime Project in a phased manner at Bharuch to be implemented through a JV company in the name of Calciwell Chemtech at an estimated cost of Rs 50 crore.

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Intake capacity of IIMs to be increased

IIMs shall be forerunners in developing world class education system in the country. This was stressed by the Union Minister of Human Resource Development Shri Prakash Javadkar during an interaction with the Press after the meeting with Chairpersons and Directors of IIMs in Shillong today. He said that few important decisions have been taken during the meeting to cater to the increasing demands of quality education in the country.

Firstly, IIMs will submit plans for expansion of their intake capacity, so that more students get opportunity to enroll themselves in the best institutes. Directors of IIMs pondered upon the possibility of the extent of increasing the intake capacity in their respective institutes and assured of submitting the proposals at the earliest.

The Union HRD Minister also said that possibility of expansion of Doctoral programmes was discussed. The Union Minister expressed that creating more quality Ph.D programmes will address the issue of shortage of faculties in institutes. And for creating more PhDs, the Minister said that, better avenues of fellowship will be offered to willing candidates. The Minister also said that in line with the IIT Council, where it has been decided to award PM's scholarship for Ph.D programme, government approval will be sought for PM's scholarship for best of PhD scholars in IIMs. Final decision in this regard will be taken with Cabinet approval, the Minister said.

Also, it was decided that IIMs will participate in a new initiative of government to make 20 world class universities/institutes. Of these 20 world class institutes that the government wishes to build, 10 institutes will be in government sector and 10 in private sector. IIMs will actively participate in creating contents for SWAYAM which is an Information Technology platform hosting Open Online Courses and will provide high quality education on various subjects from 9 to Under Graduate and Post Graduate students -- covering all disciplines. SWAYAM is a free course which can be availed online and shall be a complete channel of new Open Learning system comprising of lectures, reading materials, tutorials, mid exams, final exams and certification.

While replying to one of the query of the reporters regarding reservation in education policy, the Minister reiterated that as far as reservations are concerned, it is the constitution which provides for it and the government has no plans to make changes in reservations.

Earlier in the morning the Minister interacted with the students of IIMs. Remembering the great teacher Late A.P.J Abdul Kalam, the minister said that there is a need to inculcate the willingness for adopting teaching profession among students as the country requires 10 million good teachers to improve the quality of education from primary to higher education; and from higher education to research and innovation. While reiterating the fact that India is the youngest nation with the youngest population, he said that unless there are good passionate teachers to educate these young minds they would not turn into be dividends. He ended his interaction with an appeal to the students to ponder upon the need for research and innovation for developing good quality education.

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In Brazil

Mahindra & Mahindra and Mahindra Overseas Investment Company (Mauritius) has executed a Quota Assignment and Transfer Engagement for acquiring 100 Quotas (shares) aggregating 100% of capital stock of CMN Solutions Q013 Participacoes (NewCo) to enable NewCo acquire assets of a tractor distributor in Brazil viz. Bramont Montadora Industrial e Comercial de Veiculos S.A. The cost of the acquisition would not exceed USD 8.02 million. The consideration as mentioned above would be paid upon receipt of approval from RBI. The transaction is expected to close in October 2016.

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Multi Commodity Exchange of India rose 1.77% to Rs 1,026.95 at 14:55 IST after the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding with and Mozambique Commodities Exchange for strategic co-operation.

The announcement was made during market hours today, 21 September 2016.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 19.02 points or 0.07% at 28,542.22

On BSE, so far 61,000 shares were traded in the counter as compared with average daily volume of 46,235 shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 1,038 and a low of Rs 1,005 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 1,115.90 on 28 July 2016. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 726 on 12 February 2016. The stock had underperformed the market over the past 30 days till 20 September 2016, rising 1.62% compared with 1.92% rise in the Sensex. The scrip also underperformed the market in past one quarter, gaining 3.55% as against Sensex's 6.57% rise.

The mid-cap company has equity capital of Rs 51 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX) and the Mozambique Commodities Exchange (also known as Bolsa De Mercadorias De Mocambique, or BMM), yesterday, 20 September 2016 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for strategic co-operation. BMM envisages to develop Mozambican commodity markets ecosystem consisting of energy, base metals and agricultural products in an endeavor to deliver better value to the stakeholders. MCX intends to work with BMM to help Mozambique realize its potential behind its resource rich economy through sharing its market, institutional, and capacity development expertise. The exchanges aim to continue facilitating potential collaboration in areas such as sharing of knowledge, research, experiences etc., which is expected to result in opening up of new avenues of mutual cooperation.

Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX)'s net profit rose 54.55% to Rs 32.81 crore on 23.13% rise in total income to Rs 93.79 crore in Q1 June 2016 over Q1 June 2015.

MCX is India's first listed, national-level, electronic, commodity futures exchange with permanent recognition from the Government of India.

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NBCC (India) has secured contract worth approximately Rs 440 crore from ESIC, Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India for construction of 100 bedded hospital(s) at Haridwar and Dehradun (Uttarakhand) and 300 bedded hospital at Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016.

Wipro announced global partnership with Witbe, a leading innovator in the field of test automation and services quality of experience (QoE) monitoring robots for broadband, voice and TV triple-play monitoring. This partnership is of strategic importance to Wipro, and will offer integrated test automation and video services monitoring solutions for customer deployments across set top box, mobile platforms and other handheld devices. These solutions will benefit new and existing customers of Wipro and Witbe including semiconductor players, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) and service providers in the media industry. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016.

In a separate announcement after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016, Wipro announced that it has joined Oracle's newly announced Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) Program. Wipro is a Diamond level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) and has an OPN Cloud Select designation. The Wipro Boundaryless Data Center (BLDC) offering is based on an innovative IT transformational approach that enables enterprise ITaaS (IT as a Service) through a universal marketplace. BLDC is integrated with Oracle IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) services, and provides a unified platform to drive hybrid IT journey for enterprises by enabling dynamic sourcing, automated provisioning, monitoring and management. In collaboration with Oracle, Wipro will build standard reference architectures, workload blueprints and continuous deployment solutions for accelerated cloud transformation.

Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) announced regarding incorporation of a subsidiary company in Brazil namely CMN Solutions Q013 Participacoes Ltda (target). M&M along with its wholly owned subsidiary Mahindra Overseas Investment Company (Mauritius) (MOICML) would acquire 100% of the capital stock of the target which would further acquire assets of a tractor distributor in Brazil viz. Bramont Montadora Industrial e Commercial de Veiculos S.A. (Bramont). The target is a shell company engaged in tractor distribution and has no operations till date. The cost of acquisition would not exceed $8.02 million out of which M&M would pay a consideration not exceeding $8 million for its stake in the target. The consideration for acquisition in cash would be paid upon receipt of approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The indicative time period for completion of the acquisition is October 2016. The announcement was made before market hours today, 21 September 2016.

IRB Infrastructure Developers (IRB) said that it has emerged as a preferred bidder for the project of six Laning from Kishangarh Udaipur Ahmedabad section of around 125 kilometres in Rajasthan. The project is on design-build-finance-operate-transfer (DBFOT) (Toll) pattern, under NHDP's Phase V (Package-V). The concession period of the project is 20 years including construction period of 910 days. The company will get tolling rights on project from the appointed date. The company has offered premium of Rs 228.60 crore to National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) in terms of the concession agreement. Upon award of this project, IRB's construction order book will stand to increase to approximately Rs 11300 crore, to be executed in the next four years. This will boost the company's construction orderbook visibility for next three to four year. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016.

Piramal Enterprises said that the duly empowered Committee of Directors has approved a proposal to down-sell a part of the company's lending portfolio, forming part of its financial services business, to its wholly owned subsidiary Piramal Finance, for a net consideration of Rs 1450 crores. Relevant agreements to give effect to this would be executed. This proposal is expected to be completed by end-October 2016. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016.

TeamLease Services announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Nichepro Technologies (Nichepro). The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. TeamLease will acquire Nichepro for an enterprise value of Rs 29.5 crores through its wholly owned subsidiary, TeamLease Staffing Services. The transaction, which will be immediately accretive to TeamLease's earnings per share, will be financed with existing financial resources and is expected to close before the end of October 2016. Nichepro is a Tier 1 staffing provider to reputed MNC'S and niche product companies. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016.

Vardhman Textiles said that a meeting of the board of directors of the company will be held on 24 September 2016, to consider proposal to buy-back the fully paid-up equity shares of the company. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 September 2016.

Shares of Inox Leisure will be in focus after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) notified that Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs)/Registered Foreign Portfolios Investors (RFPIs) from default can now invest from existing 24% up to 49% of the paid up capital of Inox Leisure under the Portfolio Investment Scheme (PIS). The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has stated that the company has passed resolution at its board of directors' level and a special resolution by the shareholders, agreeing for enhancing the limit for the purchase of its equity shares by FIIs/RFPIs. The purchases could be made through primary market and stock exchanges.

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On 20 September 2016

Techno Forge will hold a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company on 20 September 2016 to get approval of the Board for seeking extension of time from Registrar of Companies, Ahmedabad Gujarat for holding Annual General Meeting of the Company.

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Rs.2,520 cr to be spent on rejuvenation of ghats, infrastructure, e-governance to turn Smart

One of the ancient cities of the world, Varanasi seeks to acquire smart city features through retrofitting of an area of 1,389 acres in the iconic old city area along the Ganga River besides enabling e-governance for the benefit of the people of the entire city. Based on the Rs.2,520 cr Smart City Plan submitted by the city government, Varanasi was yesterday declared by the Minister of Urban Development Shri M.Venkaiah Naidu as one of the new batch of 27 cities selected for financing smart city development plans.

The Smart City Plan of Varanasi aims at turning the city into a 'Suramya, Samunnat, Surakshit, Sanyojit, Nirmal and Ekikrit Kashi' by addressing the present bottlenecks in infrastructure and city governance.

After considering nine locations of the city and based on voting by over four lakh citizens old city with Ganga as its pivot and Kashi Vishwanath Temple defining the awe, ethos, beliefs and the preferences of the masses, emerged as the forerunner for Area Based Development said the city government in the smart city proposal. E-governance and integrated traffic management were prioritized for technology based Pan-city solutions.

The old city area chosen for area based development accounts for 7% of city's geographical area, 31% of population and 38% of city's GDP. Rs.1,659 cr will be spent on area development and Rs.618 cr on Pan-city solutions. The rest includes technical and administrative expenses and other contingencies.

With about 65 lakh tourists visiting the city every year, the proposal for Varanasi seeks to leverage the city's rich cultural heritage by enhancing the city's presentation and appeal (Suramya) to take full advantage of tourism potential and ensure socio-economic growth (Samunnat) for increased employment opportunities, ensuring security (Surakshit), enabling hassle free movement (Sanyojit), cleanliness (Nirmal) and integrated, technology based governance (Ekikrit) for Simple, Modern, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent services.

Under retrofitting of the area chosen for development through necessary interventions, works proposed to be taken relate to rejuvenation of ghats and temples, ensuring assured supply of power and water, waste management, improvement of waterways, development of 11 parks, smart multi-level parking spaces, cultural-cum-convention centre, Kahsi Kala Dham, Town Hall, Silpi Haat, Centre of Excellence with Hall of Fame, Light and Sound Show, Night Bazar, rejuvenation of water bodies, pedestrian pathways, Non-motorised transport, Energy Efficient Street Lighting etc, underground cabling, improved sign boards etc.

With citizens voting for improving of city governance and quick urban mobility as the two priorities for technology based Pan-city Solutions, the Varanasi Municipal Corporation has proposed Optic Fibre Connectivity across the city, online payment of utility bills and service delivery, intelligent traffic management systems including GPS on buses, e-booking of boats, guides, taxis etc, CCTV based monitoring and surveillance, e-Suvidha centres, information delivery on Mobile Apps, Smart Card for all services etc.

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model has been proposed for smart multi-level parking spaces, upgradation of stadium, Internet Modal Hubs, battery operated buses, e-auto for last mile connectivity etc.

The Smart City Plan of Varanasi aims at increasing tourist inflow by over 25% and increase in revenue generation from international tourists and pilgrims by over 30%.

In addition to the support from central and state government, costs of Varanasi's smart city proposal are to be met with resources of Rs.1,290 cr through convergence of various schemes, Rs.505 cr from the Corporation's own resources and Rs.140 cr from PPP.

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Rome, Sep 20 (AKI) Italian police in the northern city of Brescia on Tuesday arrested 99 people in an operation that smashed a major Greek-Albanian cartel supplying Italian mafia organisations with drugs.

Finance police seized some five tonnes of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and hashish in raids, as well as assets worth over a million euros including cash, vehicles and boats.

Five crime gangs were targeted in the operation and four of the suspects were detained in Greece, Belgium and Albania on European arrest warrants, police said.

The drugs were smuggled in to Italy from Spain and the Netherlands aboard food trucks operated by road haulage firms set up by the drug traffickers in Belgium, Greece and Bulgaria, according to police.

Marijuana grown in Albania reached the Italian coast on speedboats or fishing vessels and was delivered around the country by large camper vans and orange trucks, said police.

Albanian mobsters sold their narcotics to Italian clans with links to the Naples mafia or Camorra, to the Sacra Corona Unita in the Puglia region and to the Calabrian mafia or 'Ndrangheta, according to Italian officials.

The probe began in 2012 when investigators monitored the illegal drugs market in Brescia.

--IANS

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Title: Beads of Arunachal Pradesh--Emerging Cultural Context; Authors: Sarit K. Chaudhuri and Sucheta Sen Chaudhuri; Publisher: Niyogi Books; Pages: 159; Price: Rs 995/$25

Beads are an integral part of tribal day-to-day wear and costumes for special occasions, but the sheer variety and spectrum of colours found in Arunachal Pradesh are mind boggling.

To that extent, the painstakingly-researched "Beads of Arunachal Pradesh-Emerging Cultural Context" is a scholars' delight and serves as a definitive work on the customs and traditions of a northeastern state about which little is known outside the region.

The northeast, particularly Arunachal Pradesh, has a special place as far as beads are concerned, the authors say in the introduction. The state's geo-political location, with 26 major and several smaller tribes and their innumerable migration stories added a new dimension to the tradition of beads.

"Beads are part of the oral tradition of every tribe. Beads talk about their historic linkages across the political and cultural boundaries through trade, economic status of an individual in a society, as well as medium of exchange, and obviously help identify the tribe to a great extent," say the authors, Sarit K. Chaudhuri and Sucheta Sen Chaudhuri.

Sarit K. Chaudhuri is Director of the National Museum of Mankind, IGRMS, Bhopal, with nine books and 52 research papers to his name. Sucheta Sen Chaudhuri is Dean of the School of Cultural Studies and head of the Centre for Indigenous Culture Studies at Ranchi's Central University of Jharkhand with four books and several research papers to her credit.

In most tribes, say the authors, "there is a distinct gender variation in using beads for personal adornment. A few beads are, however, used by (both) male and female members. Largely, beads are related to women and are important items of exchange during marriages. Even today, original beads are considered highly-valued movable property which, by and large, is inherited through the female line. Most tribes are guided by their customary laws where we find small variations from tribe to tribe in such laws of inheritance".

Noting that there is a strong perception of fake and original beads among the tribes, the book says most tribes have people, generally the elderly, who can distinguish between the two varieties.

"This differentiation is very important as it has a direct relation with their pricing. The originals are old beads which the community acquired through trade or obtained from countries like Tibet, Burma, Bhutan or China. These could also have been obtained from the plains of Assam by trade or bartering with local products of hill tribes.

"Such trades, especially with other countries, came to a halt with a change in the political climate of the region and due to relocating the political boundaries in the post-colonial northeast. This also means that no original beads can be obtained. Currently available beads circulate among families or between generations through marital relations or kinship bonds," the authors say.

There are also some tribes, such as the Wanchos, Noktes, Tangsas and Tani, which believe in life after death. "When somebody dies, they bury his or her personal belongings along with the body. This causes disappearance of the original beads and ornaments from the collective possession of the communities."

This has resulted in a situation where the Tangsas of Changlang district "hardly have any original bead though people claim that they used to have a huge collection of original beads at one point of time", the book notes.

What might come as a surprise is that the concept of fashion shows is integral to the state, cutting across communities or cultural boundaries.

"In contemporary Arunachal, while celebrating tribe-specific popular festivals, one can see such fashion shows or walking on ramps across the rural-urban divide which has gained huge popularity, especially among the younger generation.

"This has created a huge new cultural domain where traditional costumes, especially textiles and beed ornaments, have received a new meaning in the form of innovative designs while most tribes try to maintain their tribe-specific identity markers by using tribal motifs or wearing traditional bead ornaments or even using other forms of traditional body arts (tattoos)," the book says.

The book is undoubtedly an anthropologist's delight but there is much for the lay individual too in its profusion of images.

(Vishnu Makhijani can be contacted at vishnu.makhijani@ians.in)

--IANS

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A bill has been introduced in the US Congress describing Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, even as members of the US Congress come down heavily on Sunday's cross-border terror attack on an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 Indian soldiers lost their lives.

Congressman Ted Poe (Republican), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (Republican) on Tuesday introduced the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the United States for years," Poe said in a statement.

"From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he said.

According to Poe, the bill will require the US President Barack Obama's administration to formally answer this question.

"The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism," the Congressman said.

"Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is state sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation."

Poe said it was time the US stopped paying Pakistan "for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism".

In a separate statement, Poe described the attack as "the deadliest assault" in Kashmir in over two decades.

"It is a reminder to democracies the world over that terrorism seeks to destroy peace loving societies everywhere," Poe said in a statement.

Stating that though it was not clear which terrorist group was behind the attack, he said one things was certain: "This is just the latest consequence of Pakistan's longstanding irresponsible policy of supporting and providing operational space for all stripes of jihadi terrorist groups. Pakistan's reckless behavior in this regard is a serious security risk to its neighbors - and India unfortunately pays the price all too often."

Condemning the attack, "as well as Pakistan's support for many criminals like the ones who carried it out", Poe said that the US stood firm in its "commitment to our friends in India".

"A threat to democracy in India is a threat to democracy everywhere. And that's just the way it is," he said

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group for the early morning attack on the sleeping soldiers. All the four attackers were killed.

Though the JeM is yet to claim responsibility for the attack, it had admitted to its role in the cross-border attack on the Pathankot Indian Air Force base on January 2 this year that left seven Indian security personnel dead.

Condemning the attack, Senator Mark Warner (Democrat), Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus said in a statement that "the terrorists who perpetrated this cowardly act must be brought to justice".

"I extend condolences to the family and friends of the Soldiers who lost their lives in the attack," Warner said

In his statement, Senator Tom Cotton (Republican), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Airland, described the attack as "a cowardly act, one that deserves the strongest condemnation".

"I extend my condolences to the Indian government and to the families of the fallen," he said.

"The United States and India share a vital interest in defending our democracies from the threat of radical Islamic terrorism," Cotton said.

"Both our nations must commit fully to deepening our security partnership so that radical jihadists are defeated and stability in the region is maintained."

Condemning the attack, Congressman Pete Sessions (Republican), Chairman of House Rules Committee, said: "We will not let these attacks affect our united fight against terrorism."

In his statement, Congressman Brad Sherman (Democrat), Ranking Member of House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, said that the attack was "yet another reminder of the threat international terrorism poses".

"I strongly encourage the governments in the region to make every effort to find the terrorists that carried out these attacks and bring them to justice," he said.

"The United States should continue to assist these governments and ensure they can eliminate terrorist threats."

--IANS

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Talking about the "Black Panther" solo film, actor Chadwick Boseman says that there are chances that the film may have more panthers (characters).

Boseman shared what to expect from the upcoming Marvel superhero film, saying that viewers would "learn about Wakanda, its culture, its traditions, the past". He also hinted at the inclusion of "more Panthers that have existed in the past", reports aceshowbiz.com.

"'Captain America: Civil War' was a jumping off point for the Black Panther character," Boseman said.

"It's not necessarily an origin story because he remains a mystery through most of the movie. When I take the mask off and it's revealed that it's the Prince of Wakanda, that's the guy whose father was just killed, it's a surprise," Boseman said.

He said that there is a lot to "reveal about the character".

"There is definitely more of his origin in 'Black Panther'. You're going to learn about Wakanda, its culture, its traditions, the past. You can go through all the comic books and know that there's more Panthers that have existed in the past, that's origin," the 39-year-old added.

"Black Panther" is expected to begin production early next year.

--IANS

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Radha Krishna Saraf, former Director of Gagan Sponge Iron Private Ltd (GSIPL) and an accused in the Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block allocation case, died here of a heart attack on Tuesday.

After retiring from public sector undertaking (PSU) Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) as the Executive Director, Saraf served as the Director of Gujarat State Petronet Ltd (GSPL) till December 2008.

In April 2015, he was named as an accused in Amarkonda coal block case in a CBI charge sheet.

Since then, his health had been deteriorating, and this was his third heart attack, according to family sources.

Saraf was admitted in a local private hospital here for hypertension, where he suffered a heart attack. Soon after, he is said to have undergone dialysis for both kidneys.

He lived in Ahmedabad and was given exemption from personal appearance in the case. However, his petition to travel to Canada to meet his son and family was declined by the Patiala House Court of Delhi in July 2015.

Having completed Mechanical Engineering in 1959, Saraf had joined BHEL, which he served for 33 years. Later, he also served on the board of Jindal Power Ltd and GSPL.

As a technocrat, he was an expert in setting up and managing thermal power plants.

--IANS

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Curtis Hanson, who directed the Oscar-winning film "L.A Confidential", was found dead in his Hollywood Hills home here, a spokesperson of the Los Angeles Police Department has said. He was 71.

Hanson passed away on Tuesday afternoon, reports variety.com.

The police officer said that the paramedics responded to a call of an unconscious man at Hanson's home at about 4:52 p.m. on Tuesday. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Earlier it appeared in reports that Hanson died of a heart attack; while the Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson could not confirm that specific information, he said Hanson died of "natural causes."

Hanson retired in recent years and was reported to be suffering from Alzheimer's.

The director has films like "The River Wild", "Wonder Boys", "8 Mile" and "In Her Shoes" to his credit.

The director's last film was "Chasing Mavericks", a biopic of surfer Jay Moriarity starring Gerard Butler, but Hanson had to leave that production toward the end of shooting in 2011 due to what was said at the time to be complications following his recent heart surgery.

Hanson is survived by his wife - film producer Rebecca Yeldham - and a son.

--IANS

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Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday admitted that "something must have been wrong" because of which the Uri terror attack took place, and added that if required India is capable of "knee jerk reaction".

The minister, however, did not speak about the nature of reaction and added that the government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will take a call on it.

He stressed that the government "is very serious" about it.

"Something must have been wrong... Though I will not go into details of it because it is a very sensitive matter. When something goes wrong while you try to correct it you should also ensure that it does not happen again," Parrikar said at an event here.

"I will not go into the details of what we are going to do. But if required I can have a knee-jerk reaction also. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction is also required," the minister said without elaborating.

"This country is a very responsible power, that does not mean I will sleep over this kind of terrorism that is being pushed across the border. How I do it, is entirely for the government and Prime Minister to decide," said Parrikar.

"We will take a proper reading of everything," he said.

Parrikar also quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi as saying those behind the Uri terror attack will be punished and said: "We will look into how to punish. We are quite serious about it."

Eighteen soldiers died in the terror attack on an army camp in Uri, in Jammu and Kashmir, on Sunday. Four terrorists who attacked the camp were also killed.

The terrorists were said to be carrying food and medicine packets with Pakistani markings, and Director General of Military Operations Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh has spoken to his Pakistani counterpart expressing concern over the incident.

--IANS

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The Congress on Wednesday condemned the attack on a 21-year-old woman in Delhi and slammed the central government, dubbing Delhi as "stalking capital of India".

"We express grave concern, sorrow and anger at the kind of situation developing in Delhi and in India regarding the stalking of women," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters here.

"Delhi is being talked of as the stalking capital of India. It is a title that it can do without," he said.

The Congress leader's remarks came a day after a young woman was brutally attacked and killed in broad daylight in north Delhi's Burari area by a jilted lover.

The assailant identified as Surender Singh, 34, stabbed the woman with a scissor on Tuesday morning for over 22 times in full public view.

A 28-year-old woman, a mother of two, was stabbed by a 26-year-old jilted lover in west Delhi's Inderpuri area on Monday.

"What is happening is shocking and brutal. It's occurring in broad daylight," he alleged.

Taking a dig at the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) states for leading in crime against women, Singhvi said, "Figures suggest three worst areas in crimes against women are in NDA-governed state."

"Maharashtra and Telengana follow Delhi in crimes against women. In Delhi, crimes of stalking have doubled," he added.

--IANS

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Hindi playwright Shankar Shesh's sons have established a foundation in the famous playwright's name as a tribute to his works, and to foster original creative writing in Hindi, as well as to provide a platform to amateur artists.

Shankar Shesh was a prolific playwright, who wrote 22 original Hindi plays in a short span of 12 years between 1969 and 1981. His plays are marked by the ease with which they can be performed.

"The foundation was established to promote and reward original and creative play writing in Hindi and to provide a platform to amateur artists," Sanjay Shesh, the Managing Trustee of the foundation, told IANS.

"Our father passed away at a very young age of 48, he created so much in such a short span. It was about time we took his work forward," he said.

The foundation is staging two of his most performed plays -- Komal Gandhar and Raktbeej -- on October 2 at the NCPA Experimental Theatre in Mumbai to commemorate him.

"Our father believed that plays are not meant to be just literary works, which adorn libraries and book shelves, but are a medium to express," Shesh said.

"While his plays touched upon complex subjects ranging from the Mahabharata to more contemporary themes like exploitation of rural poor," Shesh said, adding: "His writing was simple and easy to comprehend, giving enough leeway to performing actors and directors to leave an impression on the audience."

His plays have been performed on stage, television, streets, in colleges, by professionals and amateurs. Some have even been adapted as screenplays for films.

Shankar Shesh Foundation is a non-profit organisation which will encourage and reward, besides producing creative and original Hindi plays.

"We plan to organise competitions and workshops in a hackathon format to revive older Hindi plays and to bring newer context and experimentation into performance. They will also be translated in English and other foreign languages," Sanjay said.

--IANS

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The central government has directed procurement agencies Food Corporation of India (FCI), NAFED and SFAC to publicise their procurement activities among farmers through various modes in pulse producing states so that farmers get the benefit of Minimum Support Price (MSP).

The central government is procuring pulses form farmers as it wants to encourage them to grow lentils in the ensuing winter/rabi season beginning October, an official source said.

On September 15, addressing a two-day conference, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh had urged states to promote pulses even in the winter or Rabi season beginning next.

Singh had also said unless farmers get the MSP they will not be encouraged to plant pulses in the Rabi season.

An official source said here on Wednesday that the government agencies have procured 3273.16 million tonnes of Moong dal benefiting as many as 330 farmer. The state-run agencies -- FCI, NAFED and SFAC -- have set up about 200 centres to procure Moong directly from farmers at MSP.

The government had earlier fixed Rs 4,800 per quintal as MSP rate and bonus Rs 425 during Kharif 2016-17 season. The procurement of Moong started in the second week of September in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

The government started procuring pulses at the MSP plus bonus rate after prices fell. The procured pulses are kept as buffer stock, which the government aimed at expanding to around two million tonne this year.

The country's pulse output is targeting bumper 20-21 million tonne in 2016 after a good monsoon following two straight years of drought.

The sources said the drought in 2014 and 2015 had brought down the pulse production to 16.47 million tonne in 2015-16 and 17.15 million tonne in 2014-15.

The country recorded a 19.25 million tonne of production in 2013-14.

--IANS

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Best known for his work in Tamil films such as "Poriyaalan" and "Vil Ambu", actor Harish Kalyan is gearing up for his Telugu debut with a modern-day love story. The yet-untitled project will be directed by Pattabhi.

"It's a contemporary love story. I play a guy who gets a kick out of small things he does. It's an interesting role and quite contrary to what I've done in Tamil so far," Harish, who will start shooting for the project from month-end, told IANS.

Excited about venturing into a new industry, Harish said he is keen on learning the language and exploring a variety of roles.

Presented by Suresh Babu and co-produced by Anand Ranga, the film also marks the debut of the leading lady Pooja Doshi.

Sai Ronak plays the second lead.

--IANS

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India stepped up its diplomatic offensive against Pakistan by summoning Islamabad's envoy here on Wednesday to hand over a list of evidences about his country's complicity in a cross-border terror attack on an army base in Kashmir that killed 18 soldiers.

Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar summoned High Commissioner Abdul Basit to remind him of his government's "solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India.

"The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," a statement from the External Affairs Ministry said.

"The latest terrorist attack in Uri underlines the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India."

India has said that the four terrorists who attacked the military base and were killed in a gunfight came from across the Line of Control (LoC) -- the de facto border dividing Jammu and Kashmir between the two countries.

The statement also listed the items recovered from the slain terrorists, including GPS devices, grenades, communication equipment, food, medicines and clothes made in Pakistan.

The GPS devices have coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration, and have recorded the route to the terror attack site in the garrison town of Uri, near the LoC.

"If the government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed," the statement said, expecting "a response from the government of Pakistan".

Pakistan did not react immediately to Basit's summoning that came hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a security review meeting with his top cabinet colleagues, including Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Home Minister Rajnath SIngh.

There were no details about the meeting. But sources said the Uri attack was discussed.

Defence Minister Parrikar at a separate event here said India was capable of a "knee jerk reaction" if required to hit at Pakistan.

"I will not go into the details of what we are going to do. But if required I can have a knee-jerk reaction also. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction is also required," the minister said.

"This country is a very responsible power. That does not mean I will sleep over this kind of terrorism that is being pushed across the border. How I do it, is entirely for the government and the Prime Minister to decide. We will take a proper reading of everything."

He admitted there may have been some security lapses within the army camp that allowed the Uri assault to take place.

"Something must have been wrong... I will not go into details of it because it is a very sensitive matter. When something goes wrong while you try to correct it, you should also ensure that it does not happen again."

Amid the tension, Pakistan closed its air space in northern areas.

State-run airline cancelled all flights to Gilgit-Baltistan after the aviation regulator's order. "As per the directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the air space over Northern areas (was) closed on Wednesday," Danyal Gilani of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) tweeted.

All flights to Gilgit, Skardu in the Gilgit-Baltistan region and Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province were cancelled.

The Express Tribune suggested that Pakistan's warplanes may have been engaged in a takeoff and landing rehearsal at Chitral amid "threats from India". Geo News said the Pakistani armed forces were "on high alert".

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is set to address the UN General Assembly on Wednesday during which he is expected to focus on the Kashmir situation and relations with India.

--IANS

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Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa on Wednesday expressed the hope that the underground section of the Chennai Metro Rail project will become operational this year.

Inaugurating passenger services on the 8.6-km second elevated corridor of the Chennai Metro Rail between Chennai Airport and Little Mount stations, the Chief Minister said, "Like other residents of the city, I also look forward to the commencement of operations of the underground section of the Metro Rail, which I am confident will happen before the end of 2016."

She said passenger operations on the 1.28-km stretch from Alandur to St. Thomas Mount here will also be started soon after obtaining clearance from the Commissioner of Metro Rail Safety.

"With that, the entire 20-km elevated section of the Chennai Metro Rail project would become operational," Jayalalithaa said.

Thanking the Japanese government for its support to the development programmes in Tamil Nadu, she hoped that the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) will continue its support for the Metro Rail project extension, desalination project near here and the Ring Road project.

"Over the years, JICA has provided 383,314 million Yen as Official Development Assistance (ODA) loans for all-round development in Tamil Nadu," JICA said in a statement.

The ODA loan assistance includes various projects in the state, like Tamil Nadu Investment Promotion Programme (TNIPP), Tamil Nadu Urban Healthcare Project, Tamil Nadu Transmission System Improvement Project, Tamil Nadu Biodiversity Conservation & Greening Project, Hogenakkal Water Supply & Fluorosis Mitigation Project, Tamil Nadu Urban Infrastructure Project and others.

According to JICA, it has also facilitated technical cooperation for improvement of Chennai Port operations and Master Plan study of Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor, among others, and extended grant-in-aid for enhancement of facilities at the Institute of Child Health & Hospital for Children (ICH) in Chennai. ICH is expected to be opened in the near future.

--IANS

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Authorities on Wednesday booked a prominent Kashmir human rights activist under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) that allows jailing a person without trial for two years on a mere suspicion.

A government official here said Khurram Parvez, detained by the state police last week from his Sonwar residence, is likely to be shifted to a Jammu jail after the PSA was slapped against him.

Parvez was released from the detention after a court order on Tuesday, but was rearrested immediately.

The PSA is an administrative detention law that allows for people to be arrested without charge or trial.

Activists have been demanding revocation of such laws in the restive state because they believe that these have often been used to hold individuals in arbitrary detention on vague grounds for long periods of time, ignoring regular criminal justice safeguards.

Rights group Amnesty International condemned the arrest.

"Detaining a person right after he is released, without any intention to charge him or bring him to trial, amounts to using a revolving door of persecution," said Aakar Patel, Executive Director, Amnesty International India.

"This kind of arbitrary use of the law suggests that the Jammu and Kashmir police are determined to lock up Khurram Parvez at any cost."

Parvez, 39, is the programme coordinator with the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). He has been an active rights activist for nearly 15 years in the state.

He is also the chairperson of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) -- a Manila-based conglomerate of rights groups.

Earlier before his arrest on September 16, the activist was stopped at the Delhi airport from boarding a flight to Geneva where he was to the attend a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

According to JKCCS, Parvez had planned to submit a report to the rights council on the situation in the Kashmir Valley, which has seen nearly 90 deaths in over two months of civilian unrest, triggered by the July 8 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

--IANS

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Delhi Chief Minister on Wednesday blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi after his name was included in a FIR regarding alleged illegalities in the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

"Don't know why my name is in the FIR," said the Aam Aadmi Party leader. "Without the Prime Minister's approval, a Chief Minister's name doesn't comes in an FIR."

Kejriwal remarks came after the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) of the Delhi government slapped an FIR against DCW chief Swati Maliwal on Monday night over complaints of alleged irregular recruitment.

"What is my role in this?" Kejriwal asked. "My role has not been mentioned even once in the FIR (First Information Report)."

Kejriwal said a special session of the Delhi assembly would be called to discuss the issue.

The complaint against Maliwal was filed by former DCW chief and Congress leader Barkha Singh Shukla. Maliwal has denied the accusations.
Delhi Lt. Governor Najeeb Jung and his team of officials on Wednesday visited 17 'dhalao' (garbage dumps) in the national capital to take stock of their functioning.

Jung and his team -- comprising senior officers of the Lt. Governor's Office -- issued directions to officials concerned on collection and disposal of garbage during their visits.

Jung personally visited the garbage collection sites at 'Angoori Khatta' on Asaf Ali Road and Bela Road near the Trauma Centre.

He inquired about the frequency of garbage collection and instructed supervisory officers to keep a close check on cleaning operations and make regular visits to the sites themselves.

"Officers from the Raj Niwas will make regular visits to the 'dhalaos' in the coming days; civic agencies need to be vigilant," Jung told Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) officers.

He instructed the staff to ensure that garbage did not spill on to the roads during sorting.

Members of his team visited the garbage sites on Captain Gaur Marg, Tara Apartment, Lajpat Nagar and Gulabi Bagh, among others. They pointed out the lapses and issued instructions accordingly.

"Such visits will continue as the city fights the menace of vector-borne diseases and ensure cleanliness," a statement issued by the L-G Office said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A resident of Amritsar has filed an FIR against the oncology department of Max Superspeciality Hospital, Saket, in south Delhi, alleging negligence after he was operated upon for cancer and reconstructive plastic surgery, only to learn later that he did not have cancer at all.

Rahul Talwar was first told he had cancer by the Mumbai-based Metropolis Healthcare.

Talwar has lodged a first information report (FIR) against the doctors of Max Superspeciality Hospital, Saket, and Metropolis Healthcare.

The FIR was registered on the direction of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Sandeep Garg.

The court allowed Talwar's plea seeking action against the head of the Oncology department of Max Hospital, Saket, Dr Harit Chaturvedi, other doctors, and Metropolis Healthcare for endangering his life by wrong treatment.

"From the perusal of allegations levelled in the complaint, a prima facie case for commission of cognizable offences is made out," the court said in its September 19 order.

"I have been a victim of criminal acts of cheating and others, by the team of doctors of Max Hospital, Saket, Delhi (Oncology Department) and Metropolis pathology lab in Mumbai, which resulted in injury and permanent disability to both of my legs," Talwar said in the complaint.

According to Talwar, he discovered a swelling on his right thigh in April this year. He approached a local hospital in Amritsar, which removed the swelling and sent the lump for biopsy to Metropolis Healthcare, Mumbai, which in its report said it was a cancerous tumour.

On June 10, Talwar consulted Dr Harit Chaturvedi, who asked him to get admitted immediately. Chaturvedi had doubts over the Mumbai lab report, and sent the biopsy to the Max Hospital laboratory for further evaluation.

Chaturvedi told the complainant that the Max lab report had confirmed cancer and he would have to undergo surgery on the same day.

The surgery went on for five hours. The complainant had to immediately undergo reconstructive plastic surgery on his right leg.

After both the surgeries, late on June 10, a pathology report of Max Hospital was handed to Talwar where it mentioned that he was suffering from myositis ossification and not sarcoma.

"My family was shocked to learn that the testing of sample began at 1.02 p.m. on June 10 as indicated by the collection team, which meant that the surgery team had no iota of idea of the result of this histopathology report before surgery," the complainant said.

On June 14, Talwar received a second biopsy report from Max hospital where it was clearly indicated that there was no definitive tumour and gave a diagnosis of "fat necrosis with lymphohistiocytic cell infiltration, fibrosis and foreign body granulomas".

"It was at this moment that I became certain that the surgeries performed on me were not actually required but conducted with sole intention of cheating and extracting money," Talwar said.

The patient's brother questioned Harit Chaturvedi who in his response said the surgery had been conducted on the basis of the Metropolis Healthcare report.

"The entire picture became crystal clear to me and my family wherein we understood how we have been treated merely as a commodity only for monetary gain and probably to fulfill targets," Talwar said.

He said that due to the criminal act of cheating by doctors of Max Hospital and wrong report of Metropolis Healthcare, his life has come to a standstill.

The police has booked unnamed doctors of the oncology department, Max Hospital, Saket, and Metropolis pathology lab, Mumbai, under Section 336 (act endangering life or personal safety of others) and Section 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code.

Max Hospital, when contacted, said they are looking into the matter and will give their statement later.

(Amiya Kumar Kushwaha can be reached at amiya.k@ians.in )

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of poisoning the society.

"Modi poisons the society and makes Indians fight each other," Gandhi told a gathering of farmers at Ghatampur in the course of his Kisan Yatra that began at Deoria and will conclude in New Delhi.

Gandhi also raised issues facing the farmers and said if the Congress party was voted to power in Uttar Pradesh, all the loans of farmers would be waived off.

"It is unfortunate that the pain and problems of the farmers are not reaching the Prime Minister," he said.

Describing Uttar Pradesh as a land of unlimited opportunities, the Congress leader accused the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BJP of doing nothing for the people.

"Their (SP, BSP and BJP) governments have only looted the people and given nothing to them," he alleged.

The Congress wanted to take the state on the path of prosperity, he said.

Gandhi emphasised that he had undertaken the 2,500-km Kisan Yatra only to highlight the problems of farmers.

He, however, refused to be drawn into the ongoing power struggle in the ruling Samajwadi Party.

Asked on his statement that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was a "good boy", Gandhi said he had cordial relations with politicians in many parties and no negative meaning should be drawn from his comment.

"I also respect Mayawatiji, but somehow I don't gel well with Modiji," he said.

The Congress leader is scheduled to hold a roadshow in Kanpur and spend the night in the city.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ahead of his address at the UN General Assembly, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had a telephone talk with Army Chief General Raheel Sharif on the tensions with India over Jammu and Kashmir.

"The Prime Minister and General Raheel Sharif had a telephonic conversation in which they discussed ... the prevailing regional situation," a PM Office spokesperson said on Wednesday.

The Prime Minister and the Army Chief are believed to have discussed proposals that the former intends to make during his speech for de-escalating the situation and moving to a dialogue on the Kashmir dispute.

At the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, Sharif is likely to focus on the Kashmir issue and Pakistan's tense relations with India.

This was the first conversation between the two on Tuesday night since Sunday's Uri military camp attack in Jammu and Kashmir in which 18 soldiers were killed, which India has blamed on terrorists from Pakistan.

The talk comes as Pakistani Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry raised his country's concerns over the situation in Jammu & Kashmir with EU Secretary General for External Affairs Helga Schmid. The two met on the sidelines of the 71st UNGA session in New York.

The development also comes as two US lawmakers moved a bill in Congress seeking designation of Pakistan as a 'state sponsor of terrorism' on Wednesday.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Is Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif likely to unveil at the UN steps to de-escalate the tension with India and launch a dialogue on Kashmir, a media report suggested on Wednesday.

Nawaz Sharif spoke to army Chief Gen Raheel Sharif on telephone on Tuesday night regarding the tensions with India in the wake of the Sunday terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, Dawn reported.

"The Prime Minister and the army chief are believed to have discussed proposals the former intends to make during his speech (at the UN General Assembly) for de-escalating the situation and moving to a dialogue on the Kashmir dispute," it said.

It said the two men discussed the prevailing regional situation. Sharif is in New York to attend the UN General Assembly session.

This was the first conversation between the two since Sunday's terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri that left 18 soldiers dead and pushed India-Pakistan relations to a new low.

Sharif's speech at the UN on Wednesday is likely to focus on the Kashmir issue and Pakistan-India relations, the report said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Union Cabinet on Wednesday did not discuss the issue of advancing the winter session of parliament, according to Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

Last week, government sources had indicated that instead of the usual third week of November, this year the winter session could be pre-poned to commence on November 12-13.

However, talking to reporters after the Cabinet meeting, the Finance Minister said, "There was no discussion on the winter session of parliament today. It will be discussed at an appropriate time."

The government is also likely to issue a circular on advancing the budget session. Jaitley said that the dates would be finalised only after considering the poll dates for assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Punjab and Goa.

"The government in principle is in favour of advancing the budget date and finishing the entire financial business before March 31. But the actual dates will be decided after due consultations depending on the calendar of state elections," he said.

Meanwhile, Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das has said that the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) would provide provisional Advance Estimates of the National Income by January 7, 2017, so that the data could be made use of while preparing the budget.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New York-based designer Prabal Gurung will visit India in October to present his line that will be launched at Mumbai's Le Mill fashion concept store. This will be the first time in eight years that the designer's line will be available in India.

Le Mill is known to showcase some of the best names in fashion and next month they are hosting an evening with Gurung, who is scheduled to come to Bombay around third week of October, said a statement.

With a focus on quality and innovation, Gurung is at the forefront of American fashion with designs worn by leading ladies including First Lady Michelle Obama and The Duchess of Cambridge.

Even Bollywood ladies like Deepika Padukone, Sonam Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Katrina Kaif are known to love the designer's collection.

At the first ever Le Mill trunk show, the designer is going to present his Fall/Winter 2016 collection that will include dresses, separates and cocktail gowns.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Announcing its first move on the Indian government's Smart City project, the $37-billion tech giant Oracle Corp has chosen Maharashtra to accelerate the states digital transformation and set up a Centre for Excellence there.

Towards this, Oracle Global CEO Safra Catz has signed a pact with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on the sidelines of the onging Oracle OpenWorld conference here, it was announced on Wednesday.

According to the pact, Oracle will create a cloud-based Centre of Excellence (CoE) to help accelerate Maharashtra's 'Smart City' programme and modernise technology solutions. Catz said the project is the most expansive and biggest of its kind.

It will be likely replicated across the country, if successful, she said. However, refusing to give its financial details, she also said the investment will be completely scalable because the focus will be to use the cloud technology for immediate uptake.

"We are thrilled to further our commitment in India by working with the Government of Maharashtra and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help position India as a world-class design and manufacturing epicenter," Catz said.

"The Cloud Center of Excellence powered by Oracle will play a key role in improving the lives of the people of this state," she said. The company recently set up nine incubation centers in the country, a massive campus in Bengalaru and launched an annual training initiative for 500,000 students.

"By moving to the Cloud, the government has the opportunity to create a digitally empowered society and a growing knowledge economy. We look forward to making this partnership a success," she added.

According to Fadnavis, the aim is to connect Maharashtra's 29,000 villages by December 2018 to digitally empower gram panchayats, schools, primary health centres and other institutions.

"The entire infrastructure creation for this will require investments to the tune of $1 billion," Fadnavis said.

"We would also like to create virtual agricultural markets or e-markets along with the supply chain. To transform the agriculture market, accessibility is the biggest challenge. Using the technology, every single village will be a connected market and health, education and agriculture will come under this," the chief minister added.

"The cities in the state will be covered by optic fibres in less than two years' time which will enable smart transportation, parking and other citizen-related services," Fadnavis announced, adding that the state government will enable 1,200 hotspots in cities, out of which 500 will be ready by November this year.

"Cloud computing has changed the landscape of governance. It has the power to enable inclusive growth and to transform the state into a digitally-empowered society," Fadnavis said.

The proposed projects, to be finalized before the end of the calendar year, include:

- Smart city in a box

- Mobile platform for service questions

- Unified app development for services like drivers license renewals or property tax payments

- Digital platform to deliver smart city services across the state

- Connected infrastructure across all devices, kiosks and citizens

- Infrastructure services for equipment and IT

- Resources to manage transportation logistics, including analytics, asset tracking, fleet management

- Resources to manage utilities, including water and power.

(Meghna Mittal is in San Francisco at the invitation of Oracle Corp. She can be reached at meghna.m@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will continue visiting Goa regularly and the constant criticism on social media of his repeated visits here is pre-planned by members of a political party and social media users from outside the state, Goa BJP chief Vinay Tendulkar said on Wednesday.

Addressing a press conference here, Tendulkar also said that the former Goa Chief Minister Parrikar, would campaign in every village in the poll bound state ahead of the state legislative assembly elections in 2017.

"We have checked the Whatsapp accounts of one party. 90 per cent people are from outside Goa and this is pre-planned, not even 10 per cent of the critics are from Goa," Tendulkar said, when asked about the flak faced by Parrikar on social media.

Tendulkar also said that central ministers leaving the national capital for their respective home states was nothing new.

"Parrikar will visit every village in Goa ahead of elections. Every effort will be made to ensure that the BJP wins," he said.

"He is here on Saturdays and Sundays because his home is here. Every minister leaves Delhi (on weekends) ... for their respective homes on Fridays and returns on Sundays," Tendulkar said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
After US lawmakers moved a bill to declare Pakistan a terrorist nation, Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Wednesday that he will submit a private members' bill as well as a resolution to declare Pakistan a terrorist nation in a "couple of days".

Chandrasekhar, an independent member of the upper house of parliament, told IANS he will submit the bill to Rajya Sabha Secretariat in a "couple of days" and has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking action in this regard.

"The bill seeks to declare Pakistan a terrorist state and break all trade, economic and other relations with it," Chandrasekhar told IANS.

The bill and resolution are titled "Pakistan State Sponsor of Terror".

"I will be submitting the bill in a couple of days. Basically, Pakistan has put itself in a position similar to North Korea by exporting terror. It should be boycotted," he said.

Chansekhar also wrote to Prime Minister Modi on Wednesday, urging him to take action.

"As the world condemns Pakistan today, US lawmakers have also introduced a bill," Chandrasekhar wrote in the letter.

He urged the government to consider his private members' bill and resolution, and said: "It would be speedier and more efficient if the government takes the necessary executive and legislative steps to do the same."

"Pakistan currently enjoys the MFN (Most Favoured Nation) status with India and also has reasonably unfettered travel and economic access," he said and urged the government to suspend these and use "economic" and "trade" tools along with diplomatic and military options to isolate Pakistan.

"The bill will be taken up in parliament in winter session, which will be in November, so I have urged government to act," he said.

Chandrasekhar also feels that there is a large consensus in the nation and parliament against Pakistan, and added that the bill will "expose" the parties which may still have a "soft corner" for the neighbouring country.

US Congressman Ted Poe (Republican), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (Republican) on Tuesday introduced the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act.

In India, members of parliament other than ministers are called private members and bills presented or moved by them are private members' bills.

If a private member bill is passed in one of the houses, it has to go to the other house for approval, and then for President's assent. This procedure is also what is followed for the bills brought by the government.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Baloch nationalist leader Brahumdagh Bugti, who is the president of Baloch Republican Party (BRP) that is seeking independence for the troubled Pakistani province, has "discussed the terms of asylum in India" with Indian diplomats in Geneva.

"Talks with the Indian diplomats were very fruitful and they were very supportive. We discussed the terms of asylum in India," Brahumdagh Bugti told IANS over phone from Geneva.

He added that that while he cannot disclose certain "sensitive matters" discussed with diplomats, the situation of the "Baloch people in Pakistan-occupied Balochistan" was part of the conversation.

"This was my first-ever meeting with any Indian diplomat, I never approached the Indian embassy before. I am very hopeful and positive (for asylum in India)," he said after the meeting, where he was accompanied by another Baloch nationalist, Mehran Marri.

Bugti said the reason he wants to move to India is because he is restricted in travelling out of Switzerland to take the "free Balochistan" movement ahead.

"My entire family is allowed to move out of Switzerland but there are restrictions on me by the Swiss government. There's lot to be done, I have to meet people, senators, diplomats, human right organisations throughout the world which requires travelling," Bugti told IANS.

Grandson of Baloch leader and Bugti tribe head Nawab Akbar Bugti, Brahumdagh fled to save his life after Akbar Bugti was killed in a Pakistan Army offensive in 2006.

He was first given asylum in Afghanistan from where he shifted to Switzerland in 2010.
Angelina Jolie's father and actor Jon Voight has expressed his sadness and concern after the actress filed for divorce two years after getting married to Brad Pitt.

Voight thinks "something very serious must have happened" that made Jolie take this step.

Jolie filed for divorce from husband Pitt, citing irreconcilable differences, on Monday.

"It's very sad. Something very serious must have happened for Angelina to make a decision like this," Voight said.

Voight expressed his views to Inside Edition, reports thewrap.com.

"Anaconda" star Voight added that he didn't know why his daughter took the decision to end her marriage to Pitt, but said that "It's a sad thing. Say a little prayer."

"I am concerned for Angie and the children, and hopefully I'll be seeing them very soon," he said.

Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt after just over two years of marriage and 12 years of being together as a couple. They were officially married in August 2014.

Jolie listed their official date of separation as September 15. She is asking for physical custody of the couple's six children.

Pitt officially adopted three of Jolie's children, while Jolie gave birth to three more children of their own over the course of their relationship.

"Brangelina", as they were dubbed by the media, met on the set of the film "Mr. and Mrs. Smith".

There was widespread speculation at the time that their relationship began onset and that Pitt divorced actress Jennifer Aniston so he could be with Jolie.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Wednesday said that the state is fully prepared to celebrate the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Sikh Guru, in January 2017.

Nitish Kumar also announced a three-day state holiday during the festival, known as 'Prakash-Parv', and which will be celebrated at Takht Sri Harmandir Patna Sahib, the birthplace of the 10th Guru.

"It is going to be a grand and memorable celebration and we are working for it. There will be no lack of coordination and Sikh pilgrims from across India and the world will not face any problem.

"It is our duty to provide every possible facility and to ensure their visit in this religious festival is a smooth one," the Chief Minister told a press conference here.

Nitish Kumar said the government has already developed the infrastructure for the celebrations by widening roads in Patna Sahib, sprucing up the Ganga riverfront and making arrangements for safe shelters for Sikh pilgrims.

"The government will set up a 'tented city' for the celebrations in view of the expected massive participation of Sikhs".

The government has also decided to work on crowd management for the safety and security of the Sikh pilgrims. "It is the duty of the state government to make all arrangements," he said.

Lakhs of Sikhs from across the world are expected to congregate here, officials of the Takht Sri Harmandir Sahib said.

Guru Gobind Singh's message of tolerance and respect to all religions is relevant and important even today, said Nitish Kumar.

Guru Gobind Singh was born in Patna in 1666 to Guru Teg Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru and Mata Gujri.

Takht Sri Harmandir Sahib, widely known as Patna Sahib, was built in remembrance of the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh, by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the late 1830s.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Hyderabad High Court on Wednesday directed the Telangana Assembly Speaker to dispose off within 90 days petitions seeking disqualification of rebel legislators of TDP, who switched loyalties to the ruling TRS.

Justice M.S. Ramachandra Rao passed the interim order on a petition filed by Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader A. Revanth Reddy, challenging the Speaker's action in merging TDP with Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) while keeping the petitions seeking disqualification of rebel MLAs waiting for action.

In March, Speaker S. Madhusudhanachary had merged the group of 12 rebel MLAs of TDP with the ruling party.

B. Ravishankar, the counsel for Revanth Reddy, told reporters that the judge asked the Speaker to dispose off the petitions in three months' time. They challenged the Speaker's move on the ground that he has not taken any decision on petitions seeking disqualification of the rebel MLAs, he added.

The counsel also argued that only the Election Commission of India has the power to take a decision on merging one party with the other.

Welcoming the court order, TDP legislator Revanth Reddy said at least now the Speaker should take action on their petitions.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Bangladeshi national said to be a close associate of Dristhi Rajkhowa, one of India's most wanted rebel leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), was arrested on Wednesday from western Meghalaya, an official said.

Peramisom Marak was arrested from Kachhuadogri area in Meghalaya's West Garo Hills district bordering Bangladesh, Border Security Force (BSF) spokesman Sushil Kumar Singh told IANS.

The troopers also seized one .9 mm pistol, two .9 mm magazines and eight rounds of ammunition of the same calibre and a mobile phone with a Bangladeshi SIM card from him.

"Marak told interrogators that he has been working with ULFA in Bangladesh for three years and maintains close association with Rajkhowa, the deputy chief of ULFA's military wing and his bodyguards," Singh said.

The BSF official said Marak also confessed to smuggling arms and ammunition from Bangladesh through the Garo Hills, besides assisting ULFA cadres in Bangladesh's Badagazni village to criss-cross the India-Bangladesh border with the help of some Indian accomplices.

Singh said Marak is also wanted by the Bangladesh government for his illegal activities.

Meghalaya shares a 443-km border with Bangladesh, part of which is porous, hilly, unfenced and thus prone to frequent infiltration.

"We are trying to find the Indians providing assistance to the ULFA rebels in bordering areas," Singh said.

The troopers have since handed over Marak to the Meghalaya Police for further action.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A three-day meeting of the BJP National Council dedicated to ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya will begin here on Friday, days after the terror attack on the army in Jammu and Kashmir.

At least 3,000 delegates, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his ministers and BJP President Amit Shah, are set to attend the meet. It will conclude on September 25, the day Upadhyaya was born.

"As the Uri incident has taken place, it will obviously be discussed during the meeting," BJP national Secretary P. Murlidharan, a former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party's Kerala unit, told IANS.

Eighteen soldiers were killed when militants believed to have come from Pakistan attacked an army camp at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday. The killings have sent India-Pakistan relations plunging to a new low.

The BJP has chosen this northern Kerala region for the mega event as Upadhyaya was elected president of the Jan Sangh, the BJP's predecessor, in 1967 at a party conclave in Kozhikode.

Murlidharan said the event will begin with a meeting of national office bearers and state presidents who will finalise the agenda of the council.

He said Prime Minister Modi will arrive in the city on September 24 and will address a rally at Kozikokde.

The National Council is also likely to devise a strategy for upcoming assembly elections in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

Kerala BJP leaders feel the meeting will boost the party's prospects in the state where it has just one member in the assembly and whose has for decades been dominated by the Left and the Congress.

In this year's assembly election in Kerala, the BJP opened its account and more than doubled its vote share from 7 to 15 per cent.

During the National Council meeting, the issue of violent clashes between Left and RSS cadres will also be taken up.

According to BJP sources, the party is planning of a get together of all those who attended the session in this coastal city in 1967.

"Deendayal Upadhyaya had then talked about the Jan Sangh's potential to become an alternative to the Congress and energised its cadres to become a national political force," said party veteran O. Rajagopal, the only BJP legislator in Kerala.

Rajagopal was among those who attended the 1967 Kozhikode session.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP veterans L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi also attended the session.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Filmmaker Shoojit Sircar led the cast of "Pink", including megastar Amitabh Bachchan, and the media here in observing a minute's silence on Wednesday in memory of the Indian soldiers martyred in the terrorist attack at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir.

"It's a bad and a painful incident that has happened and we are with the soldiers and their families. Let's wait (for India's decision). We really didn't like what happened... It was really horrible," Sircar said at a promotional for "Pink".

Directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury and co-produced by Sircar, the film, which released on September 16, also features Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Andrea Tariang, Angad Bedi, Piyush Mishra and Dhritiman Chatterjee in key roles.

Taapsee, Roy Chowdhury and Bedi, who were present at the media meet, stood up with the rest of the crew in attendance.

Eighteen soldiers were killed when militants believed to have come from Pakistan attacked an army camp at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday. The killings have sent India-Pakistan relations plunging to a new low.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New York bombing suspect Ahmad Rahami's ex-girlfriend has asked a court to give her full custody of their nine-year-old daughter and issue a restraining order against him.

In a filing on Tuesday, Maria Mena cited Rahami's arrest as the basis for her petition, NBC News reported.

"Defendant has been charged with police attempted murder and currently under protective services after possible terrorist-related activities in New York," Mena wrote in the petition filed in a New Jersey court.

It's unclear how active 28-year-old Rahami had been in his daughter's life. Mena claimed in previous interviews that she hadn't seen him in two years, after seeing him become more anti-American.

"He seemed standoffish to American culture, but I never thought he would cross the line," she said. "I never thought he would do something like this."

"I think he was brainwashed," Daily Mail quoted Mena as saying.

He was also heavily critical of the military, once pointing out a military character as "the bad person" to his young daughter.

Court records show that as of last year, Rahami owed Mena more than $3,000 in child support.

The two reportedly met while they were both students at Edison High School in the mid-2000s. Rahami is now married to a woman who was not in the country when he allegedly planted bombs in New York and New Jersey.

Rahami's current wife, Asia Bibi Rahimi, was interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday and said she had no knowledge of her husband's alleged plot, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News.

She spent the summer in Pakistan and was planning on returning to the US this week, but the FBI had her stopped in the UAE in order to question her more quickly, the official said, and she will resume her travel home.

Rahami faces further charges for the the bombings in New York City and Seaside Park, New Jersey, on Saturday.

Twenty-nine people were injured in the New York City bombing while no one was injured in Seaside Park, where a military charity race was due to take place. Rahami is also considered a person of interest for the five pipe bombs found near the Elizabeth, New Jersey, train station on Sunday.

--IANS

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Pakistan won't limit its nuclear programme, its UN envoy Maleeha Lodhi said on Wednesday, a day after Washington urged Islamabad to curtail its atomic activities.

Lodhi told reporters here that such proposals of nuclear restraint should be first implemented by India before Pakistan does it.

"Pakistan's nuclear programme cannot be limited," Lodhi said at the joint press conference with Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry.

"The world should first put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India."

The remarks came a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to limit Pakistan's atomic programme.

US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said at a briefing on Tuesday that Kerry and Sharif discussed "our strong, long-term bilateral partnership and to build upon the US-Pakistan Strategic dialogue".

"Kerry also stressed the need for restraint in nuclear weapon programmes. The secretary praised Pakistan for hosting the Afghan refugees for over 40 years and highlighted the importance of continued respect for humanitarian principles."

--IANS

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The organisers of an insurance conference in Mumbai to which the Maharashtra governor was invited appeared to suddenly turn patriotic. Not only did they play the National Anthem over the loudspeaker system at the beginning of the event, they also decided to play it at the end of every session.
I want to draw the attention of the authorities concerned through your section to the plight of children admitted to private schools in Delhi under the quota for economically weaker sections.
Ordinary citizens are not the only ones worrying about running up a huge mobile bill when travelling abroad; even Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha is concerned and thus tries to limit calls.
The Paris Agreement on climate change will come into force when it is ratified by at least 55 signatories accounting for 55 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. As of mid-September, 28 countries accounting for 39 per cent of emissions have signed. This includes only two of the largest emitters, China and the US, who announced their ratification at the G20 meeting in early September this year. India has not yet indicated when it will ratify, though the process is simple and only requires a Cabinet decision.
Former Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa on Wednesday termed the Supreme Court's order on the Cauvery issue as unfortunate and accused the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government in the state of not taking up the issue properly.

Yeddyurappa told ANI, "We are not happy. We never expected such a verdict from the Supreme Court. This has happened because of the failure of the chief minister, the (state) government did not take up this issue properly. The Supreme Court verdict is most unfortunate."

The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu from 21 to 27 September daily.

The SC gave this verdict just a day after the Cauvery Supervisory Committee, headed by Ministry of Water Resources Secretary Shashi Shekhar ordered Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu from 21 September to 30 September.
Over 80,000 villages across the country have achieved the target of constructing 100 per cent toilets while 21 districts have now become open defecation free, the government said today.

"I am happy to share that with the work done by the state government, civic bodies and the Centre, 21 districts have become Open Defecation Free. This is the figure until yesterday," said Union Drinking Water and Sanitation Minister Narendra Singh Tomar.

"Work of constructing 100 per cent toilet in 80,282 villages has been completed. This has happened in some 287 development blocks," he said, addressing students from seven countries at an event organised by Sulabh School Sanitation Club.

Tomar also urged students to ensure 100 per cent sanitation by 2019, a dream programme of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He said under the Swachch Bharat Mission, the Prime Minister has asked to identify 100 iconic places in the country and have exemplary sanitation levels there.

Accordingly, the government has identified such places where sanitation should be ideal. These include Kamakhya temple in Assam, Golden Temple in Amritsar, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, the shrines of Vaishnov Devi and Tirupati Balaji and Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan.

"The pilot project would start at the Kamakhya Dham. I met the Assam Chief Minister (Sarbananda Sonwal) and we discussed a 12-month plan on how to implement it and also what would be done at a gap of every three months," Tomar said.

Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh Sanitation Movement, said, "We often talk about children as agents of change but do not give them the space or the opportunity to get involved in the movement.

Noting that young girls around the world face multiple problems due to non-availability of proper sanitation facilities and lack of menstrual hygiene is the main concern for them, Pathak said it has a direct impact on not just their health but also access to education.

"Failing to address this issue is undermining girls' education because, if they lack access to proper sanitary products and private bathroom accommodations, they are more likely to miss school during their periods.

"Even if they do attend classes when they are menstruating, their ability to participate in class is often severely compromised," he said.

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Twelve officers were injured during violent protests in a North Carolina city sparked by the fatal police shooting of an African-American, officials said.

Demonstrators gathered late yesterday near an apartment complex in Charlotte where the shooting occurred, carrying signs that read "Black Lives Matter" and chanting "No justice,



reports said the man shot by the



Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer, identified as Keith Lamont Scott, was African-American, as was the officer who killed him.

"Approximately 12 officers injured. One officer hit in face with a rock," read a tweet posted by the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Department.

A separate police department tweet said the officers were "injured tonight working to protect our community during demonstration."



reports said an unspecified number of civilians were also hurt.

WSOC-TV reported that police donned riot gear and used tear gas as they tried to subdue the angry crowd, which authorities said attacked and damaged several police cars.

reports said the officer involved in the shooting, Brentley Vinson, has been put on paid leave.

The television station reported that Vinson was among the officers searching for a suspect on an outstanding arrest warrant.

Police encountered Scott -- who was not the person they were seeking -- in a car parked at the building.

Officials said he had a firearm, which is not illegal under local law. A confrontation ensued and police, who said they felt threatened by Scott, opened fire and killed him. News reports gave his age as 43.

The dead man's relatives, interviewed by local media, said he was not carrying a gun but instead was holding a book in his hands at the time he was gunned down.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm.

"The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue," she wrote on Twitter.

"Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together.

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Eighteen Sri Lankan nationals, arrested in June in Kanyakumari district on the charge of embarking on an "illegal" voyage to Australia, were today granted interim bail by the Madras High Court bench here.

Granting the relief, Justice CT Selvam directed them to stay at the Special Refugee Camp in Tiruchirappalli.

The 18 were arrested on June 26 by the Q Branch police under various statutes, including the Foreigners Act, the Passport Act and IPC sections 370 (trafficking of persons), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 420 (cheating).

They were charged with attempting to flee to Australia with the help of some refugees, including one Balaji.

The petitioners, including Gopinath, had submitted that they had come to Tamil Nadu from Sri Lanka as pilgrims and not refugees as alleged by the police. They had valid passports and visa.

But, the police arrested them alleging that they were refugees involved in human trafficking and produced them before a court which had remanded them to judicial custody.

Their bail applications were dismissed by the Sessions Court at Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district.

The petitioners had sought bail on the ground that they were sole the bread-winners of their respective families.

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Nearly 18 new judges are likely to be appointed by next week, days after five judges were elevated as chief justices.

Sources said files relating to fresh appointments have been cleared at the highest level and may reach Rashtrapati Bhawan in the coming days.

While most of the fresh appointments relate to Madras High Court, some others belong to Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh high courts.

There are nearly 74 recommendations of the collegium under process at the government's end. Most of the recommendations are likely to fructify into appointments by the end of September, barring "a few" cases where the executive and the judiciary have "difference of opinion," they said.

Usually, the process of appointing judges takes between 60 to 75 days.

Some 35 files related to elevation of judges as chief justices of high courts and those related to fresh appointments are pending in the "advanced stages" with the government.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had on Wednesday last told the Supreme Court that "there is progress in the appointments... We will see more progress".

Judiciary and executive have seen at variance over appointment of judges in the recent past.

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Two former Maoist guerrillas have been arrested by Nepalese police in connection with planting and exploding bombs at a number of schools here.

Police identified the suspects as Shankar Lakhe, 31, of Ramechhap and Chandra Bahadur Tamang, 24,of Sindhuli. The duo were paraded by the police during a press meet in Kathmandu.

They were involved in exploding minor bombs in two schools and planting bombs in nine other schools of Kathmandu Valley yesterday.

According to Assistant Inspector General of Police Pratap Singh Thapa, the duo were affiliated with theMaoist Communist Centre Nepal, a lesser known Maoist faction, which was formed by former Maoist rebels who had fled along with arms.

Police claimed the duo intended to extort money from the schools through bomb terror.

Thearmed outfit had officially surrendered its arms two years ago to the government's talks team led by Ananda Prasad Dhugana.

Theduo, however, resorted to intimidating operators of private schools and colleges in the Kathmandu Valley in their bid to extort money, according to AIGP Thapa.

Lakhe was among eight persons who were held on charges of arson attack on a school van at Dallu in Kathmandu on July 1.

He was presented before the Kathmandu District Court and released on bail.

Police have confiscated some documents of the Maoist faction from their possession.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has condemned explosion and planting of bombs in the schools in Kathmandu.

Expressing serious concerns over such violent activities, the ministry said it was inappropriate for anyone to attack schools and use them as a shield in order get their demands, including forceful donations, fulfilled.

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At least four people were dead and 25 others remained missing after an overcrowded boat capsized in south-central Bangladesh.

There were over 50 people in the boat when it capsized in Sandya river amid strong currents.

"Four bodies have so far been recovered but some 25 passengers of the sunken boat are missing," an official in coastal Barisal district said.

He said fire service divers with assistance of police and people in the neighbourhood were carrying out rescue efforts.

A fire service official said that their divers have located the sunken vessel and were preparing to look for more bodies feared to be trapped inside.

"Some 25 passengers were rescued or swam ashore as the launch sank near a terminal," a police officer said.

Ferry accidents are common in Bangladesh, criss-crossed by over 300 rivers while many of them turn turbulent during the monsoon time.

In February last year, 69 people died in central Bangladesh in a boat mishap.

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At least 42 people have drowned today after a boat carrying more than 600 illegal migrants capsized off the Egyptian coast, about 140 km north of Cairo.

The boat carrying Egyptian, Syrian and African migrants capsized off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh.

In a statement, the health ministry said that at least 42 people drowned.

Around 158 people have been rescued and rescue workers are looking for more survivors. About 400 could still be missing.

There were no details about the destination of the boat, although officials said the boat was probably heading for Italy.

Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said all resources possible would be directed into the rescue mission and that those responsible had to be brought to justice.

Today's incident comes two days after Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said at a UN meeting that "illegal immigration" should be at the top of international priorities.

He had affirmed that Egypt will combat illegal immigration through updating already existing anti-human trafficking legislation, underlining that the government is currently working on finalising legalisation to combat illegal emigration from the country.

However, in recent years, several people from different strife-hit countries tried to find illegal methods to escape from their countries and head to Europe in order to find better life.

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Five Indians who were recently caught carrying cocaine in on Wednesday pleaded innocence, saying they were merely couriers transporting consumer goods between Kolkata and Kunming and may have been cheated by drug gangs.

The five men who were caught in two batches in the last few weeks at the Kunming airport were on Wednesday provided consular access with Indian officials in Kunming city during which they sought Government of India's support to get them repatriated.

They have been transporting goods between the two cities as couriers for some time and they claim they have no inkling that some of the food packets and laptop bags they have been carrying were stuffed with cocaine, officials told PTI here.

They said the goods were procured from different markets in Kolkata but did not disclose any specific details or names.

The five men, all residents of Kolkata, were identified as Sheikh Ahmad Ali (46), Akrar Khan (33), Feroz Khan (31), Sheikh Ismail (24) and Maqsud Alam (24).

Ismail is reportedly a student in one of the colleges in Kolkata.

It appears that they were caught because of extra security mounted ahead of the G20 summit held Hangzhou city on September 4-5.

Security was beefed up all over during that time with airports equipped with special scanners.

The five will face investigations followed by court proceedings.

Besides them, seven Indians are being currently held in prions at Guangxi and Guangzhou cities on drug smuggling charges.

Drug trafficking is a very serious offence in which in some cases even resulted in death penalties or long periods of imprisonment.

Also, India and China have no prisoner swap agreement for the five to be repatriated to Kolkata to serve their prison terms there.

In July, a Colombian model was sentenced to 15 years in jail for drug smuggling in China. She was arrested last year at Guangzhou airport over allegedly attempting to smuggle drugs in her laptop bag.
Six policemen, including two officers, were injured when sand mafia attacked them during a raid at Gandrao village in Shamli district, police said today.

The incident took place yesterday when a police team seized seven tractor-trolleys loaded with sand, they said.

Sub-inspectors Aadesh Kumar and Bachchu Singh and constables Ankit, Vikas, Shahzad and Dipanshu were injured in the incident and shifted to a hospital, police said.

Police have registered a case against 150 people and named 19 in the FIR, they said, adding the accused are absconding.

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A 90-year-old woman living alone was allegedly assaulted and harassed by her neighbour after he trespassed into her house at Kadakkal in Kollam district.

Police said the nonagenarian woman, a widow and a cancer survivor, was attacked by the 63-year-old man last week.

"The man intruded into her house and attacked and behaved in a manner which amounted to outraging her modesty," District police chief Ajeetha Begum said.

He was arrested today and charged under IPC Sections 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 377 (unnatural offences).

"We have registered the case based on the statement given by the woman. She was sent to the hospital for detailed medical examination. The accused was arrested and IPC 354 and 377 were charged against him according to her statement," Ajeetha Begum told PTI.

However, police dismissed reports aired by some television channels that the old woman was brutally raped.

Meanwhile, the state Human Rights Commission initiated suo moto into the incident based on media reports.

A few months back, a Dalit law student was brutally raped and killed by a migrant labour in Perumbavur in Ernakulam district, triggering heated debates on the safety of women in the state.

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In yet another arrest of an MLA, Amanatullah Khan was on Wednesday, held in connection with a sexual harassment case filed against him by his sister-in-law, the second time the legislator has faced action by Delhi Police in three months.

Earlier on September 18, the Okhala MLA, who is out on bail in another case of molestation and criminal intimidation, had gone to the Jamia Nagar Police station and asked the police to arrest him but they refused.

"Khan was called to join investigation at the office of DCP(Southeast) and he was arrested on charges of sexual harassment and criminal intimidation around 2.10 PM today," said R P Upadhyay, joint commissioner of police, southeastern range.

Khan claimed that he was called for a "general discussion" at the DCP office but was arrested.

"Came here at @DCP OFFICE sarita Vihar for general discussion.But they arrested me #Delhi Police (sic)," he tweeted.

After arrest, Khan was taken to a Saket court.

The Okhla MLA had alleged that he was "being framed by the police" which is "under pressure" to arrest him.

On a complaint by Khan's sister-in-law, a case under IPC sections 354A (sexual harassment), 506 (criminal intimidation), 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 498A (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) was registered at the Jamia Nagar police station against him and the woman's husband.

This is the second time in three months that Khan has been arrested by the Delhi Police on complaints by women.

Khan was arrested on July 24 on a complaint by a Jasola resident who alleged that he tried to mow her down after she visited his residence to raise the issue of power cuts. He was released on bail on July 28.

The case was registered under Sections 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman or eve teasing) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) at Jamia Nagar police station.

Fifteen MLAs have been booked by the Delhi Police till now on various charges and 12 have been arrested. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was also been named in an FIR registered by the ACB in connection with alleged "administrative and financial irregularities" in the functioning of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

The Aam Aadmi Party has alleged political vendetta in the action against its lawmakers by the Delhi Police, which comes under the Union Home Ministry.
Refusing to grant police custody, a Delhi court today sent AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan, arrested in connection with a sexual harassment case filed against him by his sister-in-law, to judicial custody till tomorrow.

Metropolitan Magistrate Vijeta Singh Rawat remanded the legislator to judicial custody after he filed a bail application, which would be heard tomorrow.

Police sought two days custody of Khan, who was arrested this afternoon, saying he was required to be interrogated.

The court, however, refused to grant police custody for the time-being and sent him to jail for a day.

The MLA has been arrested by Delhi Police for the second time in three months on separate complaints of women.

On September 18, the Okhla MLA, who was out on bail in another case of molestation and criminal intimidation, had gone to the Jamia Nagar Police station and had asked the police to arrest him but they had refused.

Police said Khan was called to join investigation at the office of DCP (Southeast) and was arrested on charges of sexual harassment and criminal intimidation.

However, Khan tweeted claiming he was called for a "general discussion" at the DCP office but was arrested. He had alleged that he was "being framed by the police" which is "under pressure" to arrest him.

On a complaint by Khan's sister-in-law, a case under IPC sections 354A(sexual harassment), 506(criminal intimidation), 509(word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman), 120B(criminal conspiracy) and 498A(husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) was lodged at Jamia Nagar police station against him and the woman's husband.

He was earlier arrested on July 24 on a complaint by a Jasola resident who alleged that he tried to mow her down after she visited his residence to raise the issue of power cuts. He was released on bail on July 28.

That case was registered under Sections 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman or eve teasing) of the IPC at Jamia Nagar police station.

Fifteen AAP MLAs have so far been booked by the Delhi Police on various charges and 12 have been arrested.

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Austria's parliament today approved December 4 as the new date for the presidential election re-run in a scandal-ridden race that could usher in the European Union's first far-right head of state.

Initially scheduled for October 2, the government was forced to postpone the vote after it emerged that the glue on postal vote envelopes was not sticky enough, meaning the ballots could be tampered with.

Dubbed "gluegate", this was the latest twist in an embarrassing saga, which erupted in July when the highest court annulled the election result from May after upholding the narrowly defeated far right's claims of procedural irregularities.

The decision has given 45-year-old Norbert Hofer of the popular anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe) another stab at winning the election, which he lost in May by just 31,000 votes to independent ecologist Alexander Van der Bellen, 72.

If he emerges victorious this time, Hofer would become Europe's first far-right head of state since 1945. Latest polls show the rivals neck-and-neck.

The electoral chaos has left Austria without a president since July 8 when Heinz Fischer stepped down.

Today's bill passed with the necessary two-thirds majority, but the FPOe voted against, demanding that postal voting -- used by 17 percent of voters in May -- be abolished.

The bill also foresees an update of the voter register to include 49,000 newly eligible Austrians, most of them having turned 16, while 45,000 names will be removed because they have died since the last ballot.

Earlier this week, parliament announced that the future president will not be sworn in until January 26, to give authorities sufficient time to investigate any potential new irregularities.

The role of Austria's president is largely ceremonial but not entirely. He or she can in theory sack the government -- something that Hofer has in the past threatened he will do.

Like other populist parties around Europe, the FPOe is currently leading national polls after stoking public fears about record immigration and rising unemployment.

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Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh today decided to institute a national award in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's mentor and RSS leader late Laxmanrao Inamdar to recognise the work of agri-cooperatives in the country.

Singh said the national cooperative award will be given every year to a primary agriculture cooperative society in every state, to one best district cooperative bank of five states and one state cooperative bank, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.

The Minister made this announcement at an event organised by Sahkar Bharati to celebrate birth centenary of its founder late Laxmanrao Inamdar, also a full-time worker of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

"...Efforts are being made to transform Sahkar Bharti into a wider network. Late Shri Laxmanrao Ji is a source of inspiration to the people associated with cooperatives," he said.

Most of Inamdar's time passed in Gujarat for the cause of RSS. He passed away in 1985 in Pune at the age of 67.

Talking about agri-cooperatives, Singh said India has initiated substantial and concrete measures for the revival of cooperatives so as to enable them face challenges emerging out of competitive global economy.

Keeping in view the paramount importance of cooperatives in rural economy, the government is committed to take them forward through various programmes, he noted.

The minister also shared that four additional development projects have been launched to bring women in cooperatives in four cooperative developed states -- Shimoga (Karnataka), Aska Berhamapur (Orissa), Imphal (Manipur) as well as Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh).

A sum of Rs 111 crore has been provided for cooperative education and training in 12th Five Year Plan, he added.

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Students of AIIMS today held a candlelight vigil on its campus to pay tribute to the 18 soldiers martyred in the terror attack at Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir.

The students began their march from the boys' hostel and walked up to the Jawahar Lal Nehru auditorium showing solidarity with the bereaved families, an AIIMS official said.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Army in recent years, 18 jawans were killed and 19 injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in Uri town in the wee hours on September 18.

The attack has left the nation benumbed and prompted tributes to the fallen soldiers from various parts of the country.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army.

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Telecom operator Bharti Airtel today said it plans to soon launch 4G services in over 100 towns across Himachal Pradesh.

Customers can also upgrade their existing 2G/3G SIMs with 4G ready USIMs completely free of cost at any Airtel retail store, a company statement said.

Airtel 4G is currently available to customers in Shimla, Baddi, Mandi and Solan.

Manu Sood, Hub CEO - Upper North, Bharti Airtel said, "We are inviting data savvy customers across Himachal Pradesh to be 4G ready with a simple upgrade to an Airtel USIM. We look forward to serving our customers with world-class services on Airtel 4G network.

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Andhra Pradesh today accused Telangana of constructing two irrigation projects on Krishna river illegally and contended these will will "adverse" impact on its existing projects, a charge denied by the latter as "baseless".

Andhra Pradesh made the allegations at the first Apex Council meeting held here under the chairmanship of Union Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti and attended by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and his Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao.

During the meeting, Andhra Pradesh stated that two "new" projects of Telangana, Palamuru Rangareddy and Dindi Irrigation Schemes, are being constructed on the river in "violation" of Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 and demanded the Council to put those on hold until it receives sanctions.

According to the Act, the two cannot take up new project without the approval of the Council.

Telangana though maintained that the "on-going" projects were taken up by erstwhile Andhra Pradesh government, which had sanctioned them based on the liberty given by Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal (KWDT)-I and hence, did not violate the law.

Meanwhile, the Council decided to form a joint committee to assess availability of water in Krishna basin to help Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal to decide quantum of river water to be shared by the two states.

The committee will comprise officials from Centre and both the state governments.

Noting the meeting is taking place in the wake of disputes between Odisha and Chhattisagarh over sharing Mahanadi river water and Cauvery water by Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, Bharti also pitched for formulating a national policy in consultation with states to deal with water crisis.

"During the meeting, Andhra Pradesh raised objections over the projects saying these were taken up violating the AP Reorganisation Act and sans sanctions from the Council.

"It also claimed that the project will have adverse impacts on water availability of existing projects of Andhra Pradesh (irrigating 45.72 lakh acres) with assured allocations," a source said.

Andhra Pradesh observed that Telangana has already accomplished its utilisation to the extent of 295.86 TMC as against 299 TMC of its Krishna river water share, to claim there is "no further quantum of water is available in Krishna basin" for Telangana to take up "additional projects"



In its part, Telangana stated the two projects were taken up erstwhile undivided Andhra Pradesh government, based on the "liberty" given by KWDT-I.

(REOPENS DEL 86)



"It stated that the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh government Palamuru Rangareddy had received administrative approval for detailed survey and preparation of detailed project report on August 8, 2013.

"Similarly, the administrative approval was given for preparation of detailed project report for Dindi irrigation project on July, 2007. So, these are not 'new' projects it claimed," the source said.

A senior Union Water Resources Ministry official though said that the role of the Council, which met following a Supreme Court order dated July 20 this year, was limited to dispute redressal which could be done only based on right data to help the tribunal arrive at appropriate decision and hence, the committee is being set up.

Speaking to media persons after the meeting, Bharti claimed the two states discussed the issue "amicably" and added the joint committee will be formed comprising engineers from both the states and also the Water Resources Ministry.

"They will assess availability of water basin and that report will be sent to the tribunal which will decide quantum of water to be shared," she said.

The Minister, however, did not specify when the report will be sent to the tribunal.

Among other, she added the telemetry system will be installed at locations as agreed by the two states to monitor river inflow and outflow, so that there is no dispute on the data.

Referring to disputes between states on sharing inter-state river waters, Bharti advocated formation of a national water policy in agreement with states.

"Some MPs have even suggested including water in concurrent list. We need to figure out ways for sharing river water," she added.

Meanwhile, a source said that a meeting will be held in Maharashtra's Pune next month to discuss water crisis in states and ways out at the Union Ministry-level.

According to the Krishna tribunal order, the truncated Andhra Pradesh and Telangana account for 512.06 TMC and 298.96 TMC of the river water out of the total 811 TMC entitled by undivided Andhra Pradesh respectively.
After months of delay, State Secretariat will finally start its full-fledged functioning from its Transitional Headquarters at Velagapudi in the capital region Amaravati from October 3.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu will formally move into his office chambers on the auspicious day of Vijaya Dasami, which falls on October 11.

A central Command and Control Centre is also being set up in the first block at the Transitional Headquarters for the Chief Minister for live monitoring of various activities of the government from across the state.

"Since the five blocks in the Interim Complex are ready for occupation, it has been decided by the government to commence full-fledged functioning of the Secretariat from October 3.

All departments of the Secretariat are requested to issue necessary instructions with a direction to the employees that they should report to their respective departments at Velagapudi in the forenoon of October 3," Chief Secretary Satya Prakash Tucker said in an internal communication to all Special Chief Secretaries, Principal Secretaries and Secretaries.

A clear timeline has been drawn for the shifting from Hyderabad to the establishment of new offices at Velagapudi between Wednesday and September 30, he said.

"As October 1 and 2 are holidays, the full-fledged functioning should start from October 3," the Chief Secretary added.

The Chief Minister had first set June 15 as the deadline for relocation of offices from Hyderabad to the Amaravati region and later deferred it to June 27.

But with the buildings under construction, the government repeatedly put off the relocation process from July to August and then September.

Almost all ministers checked into their new chambers in the Transitional Headquarters at Velagapudi but only Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu has been functioning from here for over 10 days now, said Tucker.

Offices of the heads of departments and various commissionerates and directorates moved to the capital region in June-July but they have not actually been functioning as the staff remained in Hyderabad.

With the Secretariat finally opening at Velagapudi, it is expected that HoDs too will function completely from the capital region.

The Central Record Room in the Secretariat at Hyderabad will be moved after a similar facility is created at Velagapudi. A committee under the chairmanship of General Administration Department Secretary (Political) has been constituted to look into this.
Assam government today appealed to UK and Australian authorities to immediately withdraw their travel advisory terming the state as a forbidden destination.

In a statement, state's Tourism Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the travel ban advisory for Assam by UK and Australian authorities was a "careless oversight" and asked the two countries to "avoid inadvertently alluding Assam as a forbidden destination".

"Assam is a fine abode of natural beauty while its peace loving people give immense love and affection to all those who come here. Any misrepresentation of the actual situation creates unnecessary fears besides impacting the tourism potential of the state, as this can have a spiralling effect," he said.

Sarma said he wished to reassure all concerned in the governments of the UK and Australia that Assam is a wonderful land of peace loving people comprising various tribal groups, rich flora and fauna, magnificent cuisines, mesmerising landscapes and the world famous Kaziranga National Park, which is home to the very rare single horned Rhino.

"We shall highly appreciate if the two country immediately withdraws the said advisory," he said.

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Aurobindo Pharma and Cadila Healthcare have recalled over 25,500 bottles of two different drugs in the US due to presence of foreign tablets and failed dissolution specifications.

Aurobindo Pharma USA Inc is recalling 23,016 bottles of Pantoprazole Sodium delayed-release tablets USP, 40 mg as the firm "received a market complaint stating the presence of one foreign tablet (Montelukast Sodium Chewable tab 4mg) in the product bottle of Pantoprazole," the latest enforcement report on the USFDA website said.

Pantoprazole Sodium delayed-release tablets are used for treatment of erosive inflammation of the esophagus due to acid reflux.

The product was manufactured at Aurobindo Pharma's Mahaboob Nagar plant.

According to the report this is a Class II recall by Aurobindo Pharma.

Amerisource Health Services is recalling 2,626 bottles of Bupropion Hydrochloride extended-release tablets USP (XL), 300 mg manufactured by Ahemdabad based Cadila Healthcare.

The recall is due to "failed dissolution specifications - specification result for dissolution was identified during 3 month stability testing," the enforcement report by the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) said.

Cadila Healthcare's voluntary ongoing Class III recall is nationwide and in Puerto Rico, USFDA said.

Bupropion Hydrochloride extended release tablets are used for treatment of major depressive disorder.

The Class II recall is initiated in a situation in which use of or exposure to a violative product may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences or where the probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote.

A Class III recall is initiated in a "situation in which use of or exposure to a violative product is not likely to cause adverse health consequences.

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British Airways today launched a scheme offering free upgrade to First Class for its Business Class passengers flying from the city to London.

Under the scheme, the airline is offering an all-inclusive return fare on the Mumbai-London sector starting at Rs 2,13,179.

The offer is available on flights booked in Club World from Mumbai for sale period until September 30 and for outbound travel until November 30, 2016, the airline said in a statement.

Moran Birger, British Airways' regional general manager for South Asia, said Mumbai is a key market in its South Asian network and forms a critical part of its India strategy.

"The offer is to provide an opportunity for our customers to enjoy a taste of luxury and our award-winning onboard services at a lesser price," Birger said.

The offer also includes access to the First Lounge and The Concorde Room at the Heathrow Terminal 5, which is exclusive to the airline and its subsidiary Iberia Airlines, along with the Elmis Travel Spas.

British Airways, which has been flying to the country for over 90 years, currently operates 49 flights a week from New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, while globally it connects over 200 cities in 75 countries.

From October last, it has been operating Dreamliners from Delhi.

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Polling closes today in the contest to lead Britain's Labour, with Jeremy Corbyn tipped to defeat the challenge from Welsh MP Owen Smith amid deep divisions in the centre-left opposition party.

In an eight-hour meeting of party chiefs yesterday, Corbyn rejected a plan by his deputy Tom Watson to let the party's lawmakers vote on who should be in the "shadow cabinet" leadership in parliament.

Watson has also proposed giving the party's MPs and trade unions more power over the choice of future Labour leaders, in response to criticism of the current process by Corbyn opponents who say party members and supporters have too much influence.

Many shadow cabinet members resigned over the summer in protest at Corbyn's leadership and a majority of the party's MPs voted no confidence in him but the veteran socialist has clung on, saying that he has helped boost the party's membership to record numbers.

Some commentators have warned the party could split.

"Together we are very, very strong," Corbyn told supporters at his final campaign rally on Tuesday, also meeting volunteers making last-minute calls for party members to cast their postal ballots.

"Whatever the result is, we -- all of us -- have mounted the most incredible campaign, mobilised a lot of people, and we've actually changed the political discourse in this country," Corbyn said.

The polls officially close at 1100 GMT today.

Smith, who has accused Corbyn of lacking leadership and failing to rally Labour supporters against Brexit, also issued a plea to his supporters.

"Our party is at a crossroads, and the choice we face is between renewing our party to pursue unity and power, or satisfying ourselves with ongoing division and opposition," said Smith, who was far behind Corbyn in a YouGov poll published last month.

The party's National Executive Committee held an eight-hour meeting yesterday where Watson put forward his plan for the shadow cabinet as part of efforts to heal deep rifts between Corbyn and his supporters and the MPs, who tend to be more moderate.

Corbyn has instead put forward a plan for party members to have a say on shadow cabinet elections.

Under the current rules, the party leader has the responsibility for appointing shadow cabinet members.

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Keeping in view passenger safety, the Bombay High Court today asked the railway authorities to consider the possibility of putting up iron barricades to prevent commuters from crossing railway tracks at stations in Mumbai.

The high court made the suggestion after being informed that around 150 persons had died after being run over by trains while crossing the tracks in the last one year in the megapolis.

The advice to erect barricades was given by a division bench of Justices V M Kanade and Swapna Joshi which was hearing a PIL filed by an activist highlighting rise in deaths of pedestrians who are forced to walk across the railway tracks at Sandhurst Road station here after the old Hancock nridge was razed recently on the ground of being unsafe.

The court had earlier directed Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) to seek the help and expertise of the Army "by way of last resort" for the construction of a temporary foot-over bridge (FoB) at the site of the demolished Hancock bridge near Sandhurst Road station.

This is because the Army had the expertise to construct FoB in a short duration, the high court had said.

Additional Solicitor General Anil Singh, on behalf of the Army and Union government, told the court that the Army in Mumbai did not have technical expertise and hence it had written a letter to the Centre to offer this technology.

The response from the Centre is still awaited, he said. The judged then asked the Centre to take a quick decision on the issue.

The railway authorities said that around 150 people had died in the last one year after being run over by trains and hence they had put up barricades wherever possible to prevent people from crossing the tracks.

The bench asked the railways to consider the possibility of putting up iron barricades at all the stations in Mumbai to deter people from crossing the tracks.

The division bench also asked the railways to file a reply on the issue within four weeks.

Earlier, the superintending engineer, design circle (bridge), Public Works Department and the railway authorities had stated that it was not feasible to construct the temporary FoB.

The PWD, along with MCGM and railways, had conducted a joint site inspection on June 30, after the opinion of a government expert body was sought during an earlier hearing.

The team, however, concluded that due to "lack of space and several high tension wires existing at the proposed site and security concerns," constructing the bridge was "impossible.

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The archdiocese of Bhopal has strongly condemned the recent militant attack at Uri in Kashmir and asked the world to stand united against terrorism.

Archbishop Leo Cornelio appreciated the Army's willingness to sacrifice their lives for the country and offered special prayers for the martyred soldiers, a statement said.

Archdiocese PRO Father Maria Stephen also expressed his deep condolence to the family members of the deceased soldiers and asked the youth of the country to come forward to defeat the terrorism that halts the progress of the country.

Heavily-armed militants, suspected to be from Pakistan-based JeM, had stormed an Army Brigade Headquarters at Uri in Kashmir on Sunday, killing 18 jawans.

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Maharashtra Congress leaders today expressed fear that the BJP-led state government might "misuse" the machinery to "influence" the local body polls scheduled in December.

The polls are scheduled to be held in over 200 municipal councils across the state.

At a meeting chaired by state unit chief Ashok Chavan here, Congress leaders appeared confident of a "good show" by the party, capitalising on the "dissatisfaction of the rural masses" with the state government.

However, they felt that confusion was "deliberately" being created over the election process of the municipal council presidents.

Party spokesman Sachin Sawant said a government resolution (GR) recently said municipal council presidents would be elected directly. But, he added that there was a speculation that the GR will be withdrawn and the previous system of election of presidents by elected councillors would continue.

Sawant said the party leadership felt that the government was "deliberately prolonging the dilemma" and there could be "political interference and misuse of government machinery" in the election process.

When contacted, senior Congress leader Narayan Rane said the meeting was called to discuss the party's preparations for the polls, adding that it was decided to identify the probable candidates.

When asked about an alliance with the NCP, he said the proposal could be considered if it was on "respectable" terms.

The party leaders also discussed the Maratha community morchas being taken out in different parts of the state.

Chavan alleged that the government was "not serious" in addressing the issues raised by the community and implementing the reservation in jobs and education.

Former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, who too was present at the meeting, said the proposal for an alliance with the NCP for the state legislative council polls was also discussed and the party was "open" to an alliance if there was an "honourable pact" and it would like to contest from at least three of the total vacant seats.

Sawant said the leaders expressed resentment over NCP leader Praful Patel's recent criticism of the Congress and felt that the former ally needed to be told to refrain from making such comments.

Former minister Patangrao Kadam was also present at the meeting.

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The BJP-PDP "experiment" has "totally failed" in Jammu and Kashmir and the coalition partners don't trust each other, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh alleged.

"Totally failed. They don't trust each other. They are clinging on to power just for the sake of power," he alleged, adding PDP is against BJP's stated position on Article 370 of the Constitution and "other issues".

To a question if Congress favoured imposition of President's Rule in Jammu and Kashmir as suggested in some quarters, Singh said, "Basically, we don't support promulgation of President's Rule because it has been misused in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand (recently) but then the Government of India has to take a stand."



The Congress general secretary alleged that in dealing with Pakistan, the Narendra Modi government has made a "complete U-turn".

"We don't approve the way Narendra Modi and his government have been dealing with Pakistan and the Kashmir issue. These are both contentious issues and in fact, it is the reverse of what Modi and BJP promised in their poll manifesto," he told PTI.

Accusing BJP of "reversing all their public stance" after coming to power, Singh said Congress does not support the way the Modi government deals with the country's neighbours.

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Prepping up for the Assembly polls in Punjab next year, the state unit of BJP today said it will reach out to Deras to "get their blessings" for the hustings.

"We will go to Deras ... And we will go to them openly," Punjab BJP president Vijay Sampla said here when asked whether the party will approach the Deras in the wake of Punjab polls.

"Where even four people are standing, we will meet them. They may have their issues," said Sampla, who is also a Union Minister.

Notably, political parties in Punjab woo Deras or sects near elections as many of them have a sizeable number of followers in the state. There are around 10,000 Deras in Punjab alone.

Asked about the swapping of seats with BJP's ally SAD, he said a meeting with the Akalis in this regard will soon be held.

"We will sit and decide (on swapping). There should be a consensus on what they (Akalis) want and what we want," he said. However, he evaded a reply on the number of seats to be swapped.

Notably, BJP is seeking Batala, Barnala, Garhshankar and Mansa and it is ready to leave Amritsar East, Abohar, Rajpura and Ludhiana West.

As per the alliance between SAD and BJP, the saffron party contests on 23 seats out of 117 assembly constituencies.

Asked whether the party will change its candidates in the upcoming polls, Sampla said it is the prerogative of the party high command to take a decision in this regard. "However, there may be the possibility of changing (candidates)," he said.

Asked whether BJP will also ask its ministers and MLAs to wear 'Lotus' badge like SAD leaders wear 'Akali' badge, Sampla said, "We will tell them that it is good if they wear the badge. But it will not be made mandatory."



However, he added that he would not wear the badge of the party symbol when attending any government meeting. "I shall wear the badge if there is a political meeting," he said.

Notably, Congress members had objected to the wearing of 'Akali badge' worn by Akali MLAs Iqbal Singh Jhundan and Gurpartap Singh Wadala who chaired the seat of the Speaker during the monsoon session of Punjab Vidhan Sabha this month.

(REOPENS DES31)



Meanwhile, Sampla said he has given a call to the party leaders and cadres to carry out a statewide 'Sampark Abhiyan' from September 25 to 30.

He said the campaign will be dedicated to Guru Gobind Singh, Bhim Rao Ambedkar and Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay to commemorate their 350th, 125th and 100th birth anniversaries, respectively, wherein the workers will pass on the message of unity to each and every household in the state.
The Bombay High Court has refused parole to former don Arun Gawli for taking care of his wife during her surgery at a Mumbai hospital.

A division bench comprising justices Bhushan Dharmadhikari and Atul Chandurkar yesterday disposed of a petition in this regard filed by Gawli observing it was unclear whether she would need surgery at all.

However, the bench allowed Gawli to approach the court again if a date for the surgery was fixed.

The Maharashtra government opposed granting of parole to Gawli arguing that his wife was not very serious for which he had to visit Mumbai.

Gawli had approached the high court after his plea for parole, citing his wife's critical illness which required surgery, was recently rejected by Divisional Commissioner Anup Kumar.

Before rejecting the plea, Kumar had sought opinion from Mumbai police.

The Mumbai police informed that Gawli's return to his residence in Dagadi Chawl might affect law and order in the state capital and this led to the rejection of his plea.

Gawli is currently serving life imprisonment in Nagpur Central Prison here for murder of Shiv Sena corporator Kamalakar Jamsandekar.

The former don was brought to Nagpur Central Prison in March last year.

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Ending a nearly century-long practice, the Cabinet today decided to scrap a separate budget for railways and merge it with general budget, presentation of which will be advanced to spur spending and boost economy.

As part of a major overhaul of the budget process, the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi also decided to do away with classifications of expenditure into Plan and non-Plan, making the exercise simpler.

Briefing reporters, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the Cabinet has in-principle decided to end the colonial-era tradition of presenting Budget on last day of February and advance it to help complete the legislative approvals for the annual spending plans and tax proposals before the beginning of the new financial year on April 1.

But the actual date of presentation of the Budget for 2017-18 will be decided later keeping in mind the schedule for assembly elections in crucial states like Uttar Pradesh, he said.

The Finance Ministry had proposed to the Cabinet that the annual Budget presentation be fixed for February 1 and complete the budget exercise by March 24.

Presently, the Budget approval process happens in two parts extending to the second or third week of May, hampering early implementation of schemes and spending programmes.

"While we in-principle are in favour of advancing the budget date and finishing the entire financial business before March 31...The actual dates will be decided after consultations depending on calendar of the state elections," he said.

To facilitate early presentation of the Budget, his ministry had proposed that the Budget Session of Parliament be convened sometime before January 25, a month ahead of the current practice.

Consequently, the preparation for the Budget would start now in early October and GDP estimates made available on January 7 instead of February 7.

The government, he said, is keeping itself in a "state of readiness" to advance the Budget presentation.

A separate Budget for Railways has been presented to Parliament since 1924 even though neither the Constitution nor legal requirements call for a separate Budget.

With the merger of the Railway Budget there would be a single Budget which would holistically depict the financial position of the Government of India.

Rail Minister Suresh Prabhu said the merger of rail and general budgets will not impact the functional autonomy of the railways but help in enhancing capital expenditure.

"One single budget will mean railway and general budget will work in harmony," he said, adding railways will not have to pay dividend to the government.

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Columbia Asia sets up first of its kind continental specialty clinic in Kenya

Asias fastest growing healthcare entity Columbia Asia has set base in Kenya as it looks to extend its foot hold in Africa.

In what industry players interpret as growing preference of Kenya by multinationals due to its strategic location and burgeoning middle class, the opening of a new facility by Columbia Asia is touted as one among many expected in coming months.

The Kenyan facility by Columbia Asia is the first one in Africa and is a 5,300-square-foot multi-specialty clinic and diagnostic center operating under a new brand, Columbia Africa.

Columbia Asia, part of Seattle-based Columbia Pacific Management, has 27 hospitals and one clinic in India, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, built with an innovative business model focused on serving a rapidly growing middle class with modern and efficient multi-specialty facilities located close to where patients live and work.

The new clinic in Nairobi specializes in family medicine, internal medicine, paediatrics, gynaecology, general surgery, orthopaedics, ophthalmology and dental care.

The facility offers health checks, as well as telemedicine to allow patients to consult with specialist doctors at Columbia Asia hospitals.

Kenya is the economic, commercial and logistical hub for all of East Africa, with Nairobi as a major centre of growth and foreign investment, so the city was a great fit for our first Columbia Africa facility, John Northen, Group Chief Executive Officer of Columbia Asia.

The Nairobi clinic also has a patient services centre to facilitate patients travelling for surgery at Columbia Asia hospitals in Asia, which had already been receiving a significant number of patients from East Africa.

Africa has become a growing market for us, as patients are increasingly seeking multi-specialty, affordable healthcare services delivered at international standards, Northen added.

Columbia Asia opened its first hospital in Malaysia in 1996 and over two decades has developed one of the largest hospital companies in Asia, with a focus on high-quality, affordable, standardized care.

With the addition of the Columbia Africa clinic, the company has 10,000 employees serving more than 2.5 million patients a year, with 2,200 beds across 27 hospitals and two clinics

www.columbiaasia.com
A businessman accused of stealing USD 1.5 billion while working in the United Arab Emirates could face extradition to the Gulf nation after being detained in neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Khater Massaad at one point ran the sovereign wealth fund of the small Emirati sheikhdom of Ras al-Khaimah and had ties to the man who is now the emirate's ruler. He also helped set up a major ceramics business in the northern sheikhdom.

Ras al-Khaimah last month accused him of stealing while heading the fund. A report carried on Emirati state media alleged he fled the country after questions about his business activities arose in 2012.

A statement released to The Associated Press on Massaad's behalf today said he was taken into custody the previous day in the Red Sea city of Jiddah based on a UAE arrest warrant.

Massaad holds Swiss citizenship and has business interests in several countries, including Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. He strongly denies the charges against him.

His statement alleges the legal action is part of a long-running dispute with the emirate linked to his compensation while working there. He alleges the arrest warrant is based on a Ras al-Khaimah court decision that is "unsupported by any true evidence" and which was made before he was notified of the investigation.

The government of Ras al-Khaimah said today the warrant follows Massaad's conviction in absentia last October for fraud and other criminal activity. The sheikhdom is also seeking his arrest on additional charges of fraud and diversion of public funds in relation to a seaport project in the country of Georgia.

It said it will work with Saudi authorities to ensure he is returned to the Emirates to stand trial.

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The government on Wednesday approved to initiate the process of winding up Hindustan Diamond Company Pvt Ltd (HDCPL), a 50:50 joint venture of the government and De Beers Centenary Mauritius Ltd (DBCML).

The decision was taken in a meeting of Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), which was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

CCEA "has given its approval for initiating the process of winding up of HDCPL," the commerce ministry said in a statement.

It said that the winding up of is not likely to affect supply of rough diamonds to Indian diamantaires as domestic diamond industry has grown in these years and several Indian players are sightholders with top diamond producers now.

The objective of formation of the company was to supply rough diamonds to diamond processing industry in India, particularly to small and medium diamond jewellery exporters, who had no direct access to rough diamonds from Diamond Trading Company (DTC), London.

The DTC is the marketing arm of De Beers which held a very large chunk of world's rough diamonds market.

The statement also said with the objective to facilitate the constant supply of rough diamonds and to make India an International Diamond Trading Hub, the government has created a Special Notified Zone (SNZ) at Bharat Diamond Bourse, Mumbai last year.

At present viewing operations are being carried out in the SNZ at Mumbai wherein Foreign Mining only display their rough diamond lots to the Indian manufacturers and then take them back.

Thereafter the sales are carried through e-auction from offices situated in other countries to Indian manufacturers.

This facility has enabled even smaller Indian players to have direct access of supply of rough diamonds.

The was incorporated under the Act, 1956 in 1978.
Cambodia has deported 50 Chinese and 13 Taiwanese citizens to China over an alleged internet scam, complying with demands from Beijing, a senior police official said today.

The suspects were flown out of Cambodia yesterday, said Gen. Ouk Haiseila, chief of the Cambodian Interior Ministry's Immigration Investigation Bureau. He said the Chinese government sent a special plane from Beijing to take them back.

In June, Taiwan protested after Cambodia deported 25 Taiwanese internet scam suspects to rival China in the latest snub of the self-ruled island. Cambodia regards Taiwan to be part of China.

The latest group of 63 suspects was arrested late last month in a rented house in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital.

They were accused of defrauding victims in China using phone calls made over the internet.

Since 2012, at least 982 Chinese and Taiwanese accused of taking part in internet scams have been arrested and deported back to China, according to Ouk Haiseila.

Although Taiwan's constitution formally decrees that it and the Chinese mainland are part of a single Chinese nation, Taiwan functions like an independent country and does not acknowledge Beijing's claim of authority over it.

Rights activists and Taiwanese authorities say such deportations reflect the great influence China exercises over Cambodia through aid and investment.

China is a key ally and economic partner of impoverished Cambodia. It has provided millions of dollars in aid and investment over the past decade, agreed to write off debts and granted it tariff-free status for hundreds of items.

Kenya and Malaysia have also deported Taiwanese internet scam suspects to China despite protests by Taiwanese officials.

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In an effort to reach out to people of Jammu and Kashmir, the Home Ministry has approved recruitment of additional 10,000 Special Police Officers (SPOs) in the state police force.

There are 25,000 SPOs in Jammu and Kashmir.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh has given his approval for the engagement of the SPOs, especially for the security related requirements, a Home Ministry spokesperson said.

The order will come into immediate effect and the additional number is over and above the existing strength of the SPOs.

The move came in the wake of reports which suggested that thousands of Kashmiri youths have opted for SPO job defying a call of Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani to boycott the recruitment rallies organised for it.

An SPO will initially draw a salary of Rs 5,000 per month, Rs 5,300 after completion of one year and Rs 6,000 after completion of three years.

The reimbursement of expenditure to the state government by the Centre in respect of 10,000 SPOs will be as per existing approved Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Guidelines.

The central government is in the process of providing employment opportunities to 1.40 lakh youths in the state through various means, including skill development training and jobs in police and paramilitary forces.

Official sources said around one lakh youths, who are mostly under-graduates, will be given various job oriented training under a centrally sponsored scheme called Himayat in next five years.

The youths will be provided short-term training for at least three months, in a range of skills for which there is good market demand.

At the end of the training, the youths are assured of a job and there is one year post-placement tracking to see how they are faring.

The sources claimed that since inception, 60,000 youths were given training under Himayat.

Another undergoing programme is called Udaan, which was launched in 2013 aiming to provide skill development training to 40,000 youths, mostly graduate and post graduate, of the state over a period of five years.

The sources claimed under Udaan, so far 21,000 youths were given training and many of them got jobs in corporate sectors.

The central government is also in the process of recruiting 5,000 youths in five newly created India Reserve battalions in Jammu and Kashmir. 60 per cent recruits of the IR battalions will be taken from border districts of the state.

Another 1,300 youths will be hired from the state by different paramilitary forces in next six months.

Kashmir has been witnessing unrest since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8. As many as 81 people, including two cops, have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces.

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The father of a Chinese man killed while driving a Tesla sedan has sued the US electric car maker over an alleged fault with its Autopilot system, the family's attorney said today.

Gao Yaning, the 23-year-old driver, died in January after his Tesla Model S slammed into a road-sweeping vehicle on a highway in the northern province of Hebei. His father Gao Jubin filed the case against the company in June, lawyer Cui Qiuna told AFP.

The family believed the son was driving in Tesla's Autopilot mode and accused the firm of overstating the function's capabilities, she said.

During the trial's opening session in Beijing yesterday, Gao applied for an investigation into whether the autopilot was activated when the accident occurred, she added.

Gao has demanded Tesla stop using the phrase "automatic driving" in its promotion of Autopilot, publicly apologise for false advertising and pay 10,000 yuan (USD 1,500) in compensation for the family's grief caused by the son's death, Cui said.

"Tesla has been contacting Mr. Gao for a talk over reconciliation conditions but has yet to put forward a concrete solution," she said.

Tesla in August rephrased its description of the Autopilot system in some advertisements but "some of their staffers and their pamphlets are still using terms like 'automatic driving'", Cui said.

Tesla officials did not respond to AFP's request for comment today.

The company has said the Autopilot system, introduced last year, is not a fully autonomous system and drivers are cautioned that they need to be at the wheel and in control.

The system allows the vehicle to automatically change lanes, manage speed and brake to avoid a collision. The system may be overridden by the driver.

A Florida driver died in May after Autopilot failed to detect a truck and collided with it.

Tesla said last week it was upgrading the software to use more advanced radar technology.

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Chinese authorities are investigating a company that researchers say sold North Korea materials that can be used by its growing nuclear weapons program in a crackdown that reflects Beijing's growing frustration with its isolated neighbor.

The announcement about Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. In Dandong, a northeastern border city in Liaoning province, was unusually explicit for Beijing, whose dealings with the North are shrouded in secrecy.

Hongxiang is suspected of unspecified "serious economic crimes," according to separate announcements by police in Liaoning and China's foreign ministry. They gave no details but a South Korean think tank said last month it supplied aluminum oxide and other materials that are used in processing nuclear bomb fuel.

Beijing has long been North Korea's main source of aid and diplomatic support but President Xi Jinping's government is showing growing frustration with Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons in defiance of foreign pressure.

China signed on in March to UN sanctions that limit trade with the North and has tightened controls on cross-border flows of goods. Security Council resolutions prohibit nuclear weapons development by the North and all ballistic missile activity.

The government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un conducted its fifth nuclear test on September 9. That raised concern abroad it was moving closer to its goal of a nuclear-armed missile that could one day strike the US mainland.

"China will definitely take harsher measures including economic sanctions and more proactive measures to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons," said Lu Chao, director of the Border Study Institute of the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank.

"Although It is rare for China to announce the punishment of its own companies, it shows the firm determination to implement relevant UN resolutions," said Lu.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week US officials suspect Hongxiang and its chairwoman, Ma Xiaohong, of helping Pyongyang evade UN-imposed restrictions on trade.

Ma founded Hongxiang in 2000 and the company has expanded into trade, hotels and tourism.

Washington has pressed Beijing to lean harder on Pyongyang, but Chinese leaders have resisted for fear of destabilizing Kim's government and setting off a flood of refugees or a political collapse that might lead to US and South Korean troops being stationed in the North near China's border.

Phone calls to Hongxiang's headquarters in Dandong were not answered today. People who answered the phone at Dandong police headquarters said they had no information about the investigation. The Liaoning provincial police headquarters didn't respond to questions sent by fax.

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Voicing concern over the "strains" in Indo-Pak ties after the Uri terror attack, China today appealed to the two countries to exercise "restraint" and engage in more dialogue to "properly" deal with disputes while remaining committed to regional peace and stability.

"Recent violent clashes and attacks caused some casualties and strains in India-Pakistan relations," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told media briefing here.

"We are concerned about that. We hope all relevant parties can exercise restraint and avoid escalating tensions," he said about the Sunday attack on an army camp at Uri in Kashmir in which 18 soldiers were killed and several injured.

He was replying to a question about India's charge that the Uri incident was a cross border terrorist attack from Pakistan, and Islamabad's allegation that New Delhi is trying to divert attention from tensions in Kashmir.

In a guarded reply, Lu said "regarding counter terrorism our position is consistent. We oppose all forms of terrorism and believe in enhanced international cooperation to deal with this threat" and safeguard peace.

"Both India and Pakistan are important regional countries and we hope they have more dialogue and properly deal with disputes and remain committed to peace, stability and security of the region," he said.

This is the second time China reacted to the Uri attack.

On September 19, Lu appealed to India and Pakistan to have dialogue and consultation to resolve their differences and "enhance counter terrorism cooperation".

"Only this way can they safeguard peace," he said.

About today's meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Foreign Ministers in New York on sidelines of UN General Assembly - where they called for early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against terrorism, Lu said BRICS countries met to discuss international and regional issues of common interest including the convention on terrorism.

"We believe BRICS will work together and follow this consensus and push forward our common goals," he said.

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A Chinese company threatened to sack their employees if they buy expensive iPhones, sparking an online debate over the decision aimed at encouraging the employees to pay more attention to their family instead of material goods.

The company located in Nanyang City issued the warning in an official notice signed by the company's administrative department to the staff, appealing to them to support homemade products, and boycott American and Japanese goods.

"If you have so much money to buy the new Apple phone, you'd better spend your money to benefit the health of your parents and children. Do not work for such luxurious goods," state run china.Org.Cn reported.

The notice has raised wide debate online after it was posted on Chinese social media.

Some people expressed their understanding of the company's display of patriotism, while some said the action was invalid since it violated China's labour law.

An office clerk surnamed Liu explained that the purpose of the notice was to call on all the staff to pay more attention to their family instead of material goods.

He said the company itself was further discussing the notice.

"For those who had already bought an iPhone 7, I think the company won't fire them," Liu added.

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Coal India expects price of the dry fuel to decline in West Bengal as a cess of 20 per cent charged by the state will be subsumed in the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST)



"We have engaged a consultant for GST impact. Upfront coal will become cheaper as the cess will be subsumed," Coal India Chairman Suthirtha Bhattacharya told shareholders.

West Bengal charges 20 per cent cess on coal beside a meagre royalty against other states charging 12 per cent royalty.

The Centre has formed a committee with representation from Coal India and the state government to study and resolve the issues of cess and royalty.

Meanwhile, replying to the CIL's overseas plan, Bhattacharya said the company did not find Mozambique suitable for mining and surrendered the lease and asked the government for an alternate location.

He said it will sign an MoU with an African company for high calorific coal and was targeting acquisition of coking coal assets in Australia. It was also exploring assets in Indonesia.

The CIL board has accorded approval to the proposal for execution of MoU between CIL (Coal India) and African Exploration Mining & Finance Corporation, SOC Ltd (AEMFC), an entity owned by the government of South Africa for identification, acquisition, exploration, development and operation of coal assets in South Africa, officials said.

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Students from a school in northeast Nigeria, from where more than 200 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, will resume lessons next month, more than two years after the mass abduction, the state government has announced.

Chibok became synonymous with the Boko Haram conflict when fighters abducted 276 girls from the Government Secondary School (GSS) on the evening of April 14, 2014, sparking global outrage.

A total of 218 are still being held.

But residents in the town hit out at the plan, calling it unworkable, as it involves sharing an already overstretched building.

Borno state commissioner for education Inuwa Kubo announced late yesterday that all public secondary schools would re-open on October 3 after being closed for more than two years.

"All the damages done to the schools' infrastructure have been repaired," he told reporters in the state capital, Maiduguri.

Some secondary schools in areas still deemed insecure because of militant and military activity will, however, be moved to safe areas, he added.

He said the remaining students of the GSS in Chibok would have to share a building with the local primary school, as the secondary school, which was razed during the attack, has not been rebuilt.

Yakubu Nkeki, from a support group for families of the kidnapped schoolgirls, said the plan was "not feasible".

"The (primary school) pupils use the classrooms between morning and noon while the (junior secondary school) students use them between noon and late afternoon," he told AFP.

"So, the structures are already overstretched."



Primary school in Nigeria typically caters for children aged six to 11, while junior secondary teaches 11 to 15 year olds.

Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language widely spoken across northern Nigeria means "Western education is sin", has specifically targeted schools teaching a "secular" curriculum.

In March this year, the Borno state government said the Islamists had destroyed or damaged 5,335 classrooms and school buildings in 512 primary, 38 secondary and two tertiary institutions.

All schools in Borno were shut after a Boko Haram attack in neighbouring Yobe state on February 25, 2014, when at least 43 students were killed at a boarding school in Buni Yadi.

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A CoBRA commando, who was critically injured in an encounter with the Naxals in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district last week,died at a private hospital here today.

Head Constable Uday Narayan Goud (41), belonging to CRPF's specialised unit Commando Battalion for Resolute Action's (CoBRA) 206th battalion, succumbed this morning at Ramkrishna Care Hospital in Raipur, a CRPF official said.

Wreath-laying ceremony of the jawan will be held at the police battalion camp at Mana in the outskirts of the capital at 4 PM, the official said.

Subsequently, the body will be sent by air to his native place in Buxar district of Bihar, he added.

The jawan had sustained bullet injuries in his stomach during the gun-battle with ultras which took place in the restive Karigundam forests under Chintagufa Police Station limits of Sukma on September 16 while they were returning after an area domination operation in the region.

Soon after the incident, he was airlifted to Raipur for the treatment.

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Congress today latched on to the stalking and murder of a woman incident in Delhi to target the NDA government claiming the Centre's ruling alliance is also in power in the three "worst" performing areas in terms of crimes against women.

"We express grave concern, sorrow and anger at the kind of situation developing in Delhi and in India regarding the stalking of women," party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.

He said Maharashtra and Telengana follow Delhi as far as crimes against women are concerned.

Noting that in Delhi, crimes related to stalking have "doubled", he said, "Delhi is being talked of as the Stalking Capital of India."



Refering to yesterday's incident in Delhi, he said what happened is shocking and brutal and it is occurring in broad daylight. "Figures suggest 3 worst areas in crimes against women are NDA areas", he added.

A 21-year-old woman was stabbed to death in broad daylight yesterday by a man who had been stalking her for about a year.

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Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu today said consultations were on with regard to the National Common Mobility Card, which enables access to all modes of transport across the country, by using a single card.

Answering a query on his ministry's proposed NCMC, he said talks were on between banks and the Railways.

"The consultation process is on," he said here.

Interacting with reporters on board the first metro train from the airport here, he said as per the revised schedule, the first phase of Chennai Metro Rail project was likely to be completed by December 2017.

A senior Metro Rail official said as part of efforts for a common mobility card, the contours were being worked out with state government agencies.

Naidu said floods and issues involving contractors had delayed the Phase I of the Metro Rail Project.

He said once the project's first phase was fully completed, the ridership was expected to be 7.75 lakh per day.

"With the opening of the metro line from Little Mount to the airport today, Chennai will now have around 19 km of operational metro network out of the total 45 km of Chennai Metro Rail's Project's Phase one," he said.

The first phase covers Wimco Nagar (extension) in North Chennai, via Washermenpet-Broadway to the airport.

Naidu said cities like Tiruchirapalli, Tirunelvelli, Dindigul, Thoothkudi, Tiruppur and Erode would participate in Round three of Smart Cities by January next year.

The Special Purpose Vehicle proposal of Chennai Smart City is likely to be completed soon and a total of Rs 1,366 crore, besides Rs 1,570 crore for Coimbatore smart city project have been approved.

He said Tamil Nadu had the highest number of Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) cities (33) and that 39 projects worth Rs 7,082 crore have so far been approved for these cities.

On the single window clearance for housing projects mooted by the Centre, he said any development project would have to be cleared within 60 days after the submission of application.

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Union Health Minister JP Nadda today said the country is facing shortage of doctors but the government is taking several measures to address the issue as "health for all" is its objective.

"India faces a crippling shortage of doctors. The government is tackling this by rapidly increasing the capacity for training undergraduates and postgraduates in existing medical colleges and also by establishing new ones," he said.

The governmet is working to improve training capacity and establish new medical colleges to tackle the situation arising out of the "shortage" of doctors, the Health Minister said.

Speaking at the centenary celebration and convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical College, the Minister said, "Health for all is a national goal and a priority for this government."



He said the government has "grand" plans for redeveloping and modernizing Lady Hardinge Medical College.

"This government has grand plans for redeveloping and modernising LHMC to make it comparable with the best in the world. The redevelopment plan, with superspeciality block and other associated structures, on completion will decongest the present campus, provide enhanced infrastructure for teaching and research and wholesome environment for patients," Nadda said.

He said the government aims to improve the standards of medial education in the country.

"AIIMS-like institutions in different parts of the country are being established to set standards of medical education and healthcare at par with the best in the world.

"Existing premier medical colleges are also being upgraded with top class infrastructure and facilities. Medical teachers will also be closely involved in policy planning, regulation and enforcement of standards in medical education," he said.

The Health Minister urged the students not to forget the larger purpose of working to improve the health of the poor, the needy and the underprivileged.

"No patient should be denied treatment on account of being poor or belonging to lower strata of society," he said.

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A magistrate's court for CBI cases here today rejected IPS officer Satish Verma's application, seeking a copy of the supplementary chargesheet, filed in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan encounter case.

Magistrate DR Vyas said as the court had not taken cognizance of the chargesheet, it could not give him a copy. The court had, in March, rejected Verma's first application on the same ground.

The IPS officer, who had assisted the CBI in the probe of the case, had last week filed a fresh application, seeking a copy of the chargesheet, saying he wanted to ensure that the trial in the case began and concluded "expeditiously".

While the first chargesheet was filed by the CBI in the court of Special CBI (Sessions) Judge in July 2013, a supplementary chargesheet was filed in February, 2014 in the magistrate's court.

The Sessions Court had allowed Verma to inspect the first chargesheet, but on CBI's appeal, the High Court had overturned the order.

Proceedings against the accused named in the second chargesheet -- four officers of the Intelligence Bureau -- are yet to start as the Centre has not given nod for their prosecution.

Verma had said he wanted to challenge the delay in grant of sanction so that the trial was expedited.

Mumbra-based college girl Ishrat Jahan (19), Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in an encounter with Gujarat police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

A special investigation team (SIT), constituted by the Gujarat High Court, had concluded that it was a "fake" encounter and handed over the case to the CBI.

The first chargesheet named seven police officers as accused, including IPS officers PP Pandey, DG Vanzara and GL Singhal.

Verma is presently serving on Central deputation in the north-east.

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Curfew was in force in only three police station areas of city in Kashmir on Wednesday, as the curbs were lifted from other parts following improvement in the situation.

However, normal life remained affected in the Valley for the 75th straight day.

A police official said curfew continued in Nowhatta, M R Gunj and Khanyar police station areas of the summer capital on Wednesday.

The authorities had on Tuesday lifted curfew across Kashmir except from six police station areas of the city.

This morning, the curbs from three areas were lifted.

The official, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people under section 144 CrPC continued to remain in force in the Valley.

Meanwhile, normal life continued to remain disturbed in Kashmir for the 75th consecutive day due to restrictions and separatist sponsored strike.

The separatists, who are spearheading the current agitation in the Valley, have extended the protest programme till September 22.

They did not announce any period of relaxation in the strike for the week.

Shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut in and elsewhere in the Valley, while public transport was off the roads.

Schools, colleges and other educational institutions also continued to remain shut.

Mobile internet services also remained suspended, while the outgoing calls on prepaid numbers continued to remain barred across the Valley.

As many as 81 people, including two cops, have been killed in the unrest that broke out a day after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces in South Kashmir on July 8.
Water management boards could be an ideal option for resolving water disputes between the states like that between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka on Cauvery, a top Central Water Commission official said today.

He also said that the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB), which is to be formed by the Centre on the direction of the Supreme Court, will have representatives from both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

"The water management boards could be the ideal option for resolving dispute between the states, including Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) will have representation from both the states," Central Water Commission (CWC) Chairman G S Jha said here on sidelines of an Assocham event.

Emphasising on water storage and its conservation for resolving such crisis, Jha said, "We cannot think of bringing water security unless we are able to create enough capacity for its storage and release it as per requirement."



The Supreme Court yesterday directed the Centre to constitute within four weeks the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) in its award.

It also directed the Karnataka government to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water per day to Tamil Nadu from today till September 27.

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Music composer on Wednesday met Jain monk Tarun Sagar and apologised to him in person for his sarcastic tweet on the spiritual figure that had kicked up a storm.

The monk asked him to seek forgiveness from the Jain community for hurting their sentiments.

After the composer apologised as per the Jain community's tradition of seeking "Panch Mafee" that included holding of ears, Sagar said though he had already forgiven Dadlani, now he would appeal to the community to forgive him and withdraw protest against him and treat the matter as closed.

"I have been saying this right from the start when these events unfolded (when controversy broke out after Dadlani's tweet) that personally I don't feel hurt or sad. I was talking to Vishal today and I told him that Jain community has been hurt, it was their demand that he should come to me in person and apologise only after which they will stop protests against him.

"He came from Mumbai today and brought 'shriphal' from there to seek apology," Sagar said on Dadlani apologising for the tweet on the address made by the monk to the Haryana Assembly last month.

ALSO READ: Supreme Court refuses to give protection from arrest to Vishal Dadlani

Sagar said, "Anyone can make a mistake, even me, it is not a big thing, but realisation of the same is important and one should forgive such a person.""It was Jain community's request that if Vishal appears before me, he should be asked to seek Panch Mafee and the matter will end there," Sagar said.

After this, Vishal stood before Sagar with folded hands and was even made to hold his ears and apologised as directed that also included the composer saying that in future he will never hurt anyone's religious sentiments.

Afterwards, Sagar appealed to the Jain community to forgive Dadlani.

Sagar also appealed to those who had registered FIR against the composer to end the matter against him.

Dadlani later told reporters, "I apologised over Twitter 32 times and Tarun Sagarji also forgave me, but only thing is that I appeared in person now. I wanted to come personally earlier, but there was a FIR registered, so I did not want that people should feel that I have come here just because a case has been slapped against me."



"I felt it from my heart that my remarks generated so much controversy and people felt hurt.

"What I had wanted to say is that religion and governance should not be mixed together. What people understood from that tweet of mine was unfortunate. It was not my intention to hurt anyone's sentiments. What I had said was as per Constitution, religion and governance should not be mixed because we are a secular nation," Dadlani said.

Dadlani said after meeting "Guruji, I felt like we are



friends. Before coming here I watched many of his pravachans and realised the good message he was sending across to the world."



Earlier today, Dadlani reached the Digambar Jain Temple, Sector 27 here and held a close door meeting with the monk that lasted for about 20 minutes.

Recently, a court in Ambala had directed music composer Dadlani to join investigation at Ambala Cantt Sadar Police Station today in connection with a case registered against him by Haryana Police for allegedly hurting religious sentiments with his alleged sarcastic tweet on the Jain monk Tarun Sagar.

Ambala Cantt Police had registered a case over three weeks back against Dadlani and one more person under relevant sections including 153A (promoting enmity between classes), 295A (maliciously insulting the religion or religious beliefs of any class) and 509 IPC (uttering any word or making any gesture to insult the modesty of a woman etc).

The case was registered on the complaint filed by Punit Arora, a resident of Ambala Cantonment and he is stated to be a follower of Jain monk.

The complainant said that the accused had hurt religious sentiments intentionally with his sarcastic tweet.

Dadlani came under sharp criticism from several quarters including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for his sarcastic tweet



After a barrage of criticism, Dadlani had tendered an apology for his tweet and also deleted it.

The Jain monk had delivered a lecture 'Kadve Pravachan' at Haryana Assembly last month on the invitation of the state government.
The development activity in the Northeast has made rapid strides in the last two years and to make India's 'Act East Policy' more effective and fruitful, there is a need to strengthen resources proximal to the eastern borders, DoNER Minister Jitendra Singh said today.

"It is my considered belief that in order to make India's 'Act East Policy' more effective and fruitful, we will also have to strengthen and reinforce our resources proximal to the eastern borders," he said releasing the first-ever North Eastern Council's coffee table book on Northeast.

Singh in this regard referred to the under construction rail-link to Bangladesh from Tripura, which is being funded by the Ministry of DoNER on the Indian side from Agartala to Akhaura, along the Bangladesh border.

The Minister for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) said in the last two years, the development activity in the region has made rapid strides, primarily because of the personal interest and high priority accorded to the area by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"This is evident from the fact that no Prime Minister had attended a plenary meeting of the NEC at its headquarters in Shillong in the last 40 years before the current Prime Minister addressed the 65th Plenary Session of NEC on May 27 this year," he said.

The hard-cover coffee table book, consisting of 180 pages, is mainly a pictorial and visual depiction of the various facets of Northeast with messages from the President, the Prime Minister, DoNER Minister as well as from the Governors and Chief Ministers of all the eight Northeastern states.

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Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh will be in on a two-day visit from September 23, amid rumours that three MLAs want to quit the party ahead of the state polls due next year.

"Singh would be arriving in on September 23 and will participate in an event of Seva Dal. Next day, he will hold a crucial meeting with the party leaders," a senior Congress functionary told PTI on Wednesday.

Congress legislators Pandurang Madkaikar and Chandrakant Kavalekar said that they have kept their "option open" to join hands with Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) during the forthcoming polls.

Speculations are also rife that Congress MLA Vishwajit Rane may quit the party to contest election on the ticket of Sattari Yuva Morcha, an organisation floated by him.

"Singh will meet all the leaders during his visit. The discussions will be centred around recent news that are being floated about Congress legislators intending to quit the party," the functionary said.

Talks about forming an alliance are also likely to be held during the party national general secretary's visit, he said adding "some like-minded parties have already offered to join hands with Congress for the polls."

MGP leader Sudin Dhavalikar has already announced that they are in talks with Madkaikar to join MGP and contest from Cumbharjua seat.

"I am not happy in Congress. I have a standing offer from MGP. But before deciding anything I will consult my workers," Madkaikar told PTI in Wednesday.

Kavalekar, representing Congress from Quepem constituency, also said, "There needs a lot to be done by Congress to make sure that they win the next election."

"There are some offers for me, but I have to do what my workers say," he said.

Rane was not available for comments, though sources close to him claimed that he is not happy with Congress' delay in deciding on alliance with like-minded parties.
Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar today issued a warning to the village panchayats opposing mobile towers which are to be erected for the next month's BRICS summit in the coastal state.

"We are getting opportunity to host events like the BRICS summit. The state government, panchayats or municipalities should embrace this opportunity to project Goa on the world platform," Parsekar told reporters after chairing a cabinet meeting here.

"There is a huge bandwidth requirement as the BRICS summit proceedings have to be continuously telecast live for which towers have to be put up," he said.

"The panchayats should not oppose towers or we will have to draw our weapons, the panchayats must co-operate," he said, refusing to explain what he meant by "weapons".

Annual summit of BRICS, the grouping of emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, would be held in South Goa district on October 15 and 16.

Parsekar said it was a prestigious event and opposing the development work on flimsy grounds would put the reputation of the state at stake.

Some panchayats opposed the mobile towers for the fear that these towers cause cancer, he said, adding that the government "has started educating people on apprehension of danger of radiation due to mobile towers."



Cellular Operators Association of India had also held workshops in the area where the towers would come up, said the Chief Minister.

Further, the Secretary, Union Telecommunication Department, had assured that radiation emitted by mobile towers will be checked before the towers are installed, he said.

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Assam Rifles personnel apprehended three over-ground activists of the proscribed PLA of Manipur on September 11 , a statement issued today by the Assam Rifles said.

The trio were arrested from Nampisha area in Ukhrul district and were heading for Imphal along with explosives in a jeep, the press statement said.

The security forces during thorough check managed to recover two Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) weighing approximately 8.76 Kgs, two detonators and other articles.

The statement while not disclosing the identity of the arrested however said one of them hailed from the village of Onzia in neighbouring Myanmar.

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Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that his administration is trying to bring all government services on to the smartphone to effect the massive digital transformation which the state is "slated to achieve" in the next few years.

The administration is trying to bring all government services on to the smartphone to deliver it at the right time and right cost for the benefit of the common man, he said on Twitter.

"We are going through a massive digital transformation. We are connecting all the villages digitally by Dec 2018," he tweeted quoting the keynote address he delivered at the Oracle Open World Conclave in San Francisco.

Fadnavis said his government wants to transform education and the healthcare sector and also transform cities as equal number of population lives in both urban and rural areas.

"We need to convert our population into human resource. Speed & scale is the key. Demographic advantage is not permanent. I'm here to find solutions. By 2020 we have to put Govt processes on auto pilot mode for max efficiency & transparency.

"Technology is the only solution. Technology is gender neutral, person neutral & neutral by all means," he tweeted.

According to the Chief Minister, for any transformation, political leadership creates an idea and technocrats convert this idea into reality.

Meanwhile, the state government and Oracle have signed an MoU to accelerate digital transformation in .

Oracle and the government will develop the state's smart city programme, to make the state's urban landscape "more livable and inclusive".

The state and Oracle will set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to accelerate smart city program and modernise the government's technology solutions.

The CoE in Mumbai, will serve as a research platform to design, develop and test new capabilities to deliver better Government to Citizen (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) services, Fadnavis said.

Both the government and Oracle will invest in IT infrastructure, training and skill-set resources as well as management of the CoE in Mumbai, he informed.
Australia-headquartered Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) has launched its 'Corporate Traveller' brand in India and has appointed Gaurav Luthra as the Country Head for the vertical.

"The brand aims to address the demands of the emerging businesses and startups in the country," India said in a statement.

Gaurav will be spearheading operations and expansion of the newly-launched brand, while continuing to oversee Air, Hotel, Car and Insurance products portfolio under the larger corporate brand - FCM Travel Solutions, it added.

India MD Rakshit Desai said: "The diverse offerings of Corporate Traveller have been well-received globally, and will strengthen our endeavour to address unique travel requirements of India's emerging businesses and startup sector."

Gaurav has over 20 years of experience in leading profit center operations and implementation of new revenue lines for all FCM verticals in India.

has company-owned operations in 14 countries and a corporate travel management network that spans more than 90 countries employing over 19,000 people globally.
A fire broke out this evening on the top floor of a 23-storey building in suburban Malad here, fire brigade officials said.

However, no one was injured in the blaze, which erupted on the top floor of the Pimpripada's Rishi Tower at 4.53 PM, a fire brigade official said.

Two fire tenders were rushed to the spot, which doused the flames in around 20 minutes, he said, adding the exact cause of the fire was yet to be ascertained.

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A huge fire broke out at a textile factory located in an industrial area in Kim near Surat early this morning, though factory workers present inside were rescued unhurt, officials said.

Saanika Industries, which is into manufacturing of polyester yarns and textile raw materials, reported fire early today morning when around 150 persons were working inside the factory, Surat Chief Fire Officer S K Acharya said.

The company is located at an industrial area in Hariyal village of Kim, some 40 kms from Surat.

The blaze, which started at around 5.30 AM, was yet to be brought under control.

"Around 15 fire-fighting vehicles from Surat fire department, nearby industrial areas and municipality have been pressed into action to control the fire which spread to a large part of the factory. Around 150 persons working in the factory in night shift were rescued unhurt, but loss to the factory would run in crores," he said.

Acharya said the exact cause of the fire was yet to be ascertained, but suspected short circuit for the mishap.

"The fire spread fast due to the presence of plastic raw materials in the factory," he said.

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Anupam Kher may be known for his power-packed and versatile performances but the veteran actor considers Hollywood star Robert De Niro as the 'God of acting'.

Kher recently met the "Raging Bull" actor in New York. He had previously worked with him in the Hollywood film "Silver Linings Playbook".

"I can proudly call him (De Niro) my friend. Over the period of time he has a certain amount of respect for me, he likes me. I was to go to Toronto because my film 'Head Hunters Calling' was there (Toronto Film Festival), but I wanted to go to New York and say Hi to him.

"He was kind enough to meet me when I went to New York. It was like meeting 'The God of Acting'," Kher told PTI.

Though the "Khosla Ka Ghosla" star has worked with De Niro in the past, he never meets the actor with the intention of collaborating with him for a Hindi film.

"I don't want to be that person. When I spend half an hour, one hour with him, that is sufficient. If it (Bollywood film) has to happen, it'll happen. But I don't have an agenda behind meeting him and he recognises that," he said.

The 2012 Academy-Award nominated romantic comedy "Silver Linings Playbook" was one among the several international projects Kher featured in, like "Bend it like Beckham" and "The Other End".

The 61-year-old actor says international cinema has given him "friends for life" and he cherishes that a lot.

"It's beautiful to be friends with these people. Even being with Gerad Buttler, Armie Hammer, it was wonderful. You make friends for life. This is what international cinema has given me," he said.

"I don't just be part of the film. I go beyond that. I make friends for the rest of my life. They like me, they admire me, and I admire them. They make me feel like a rich a person," he said.

Meanwhile, Kher is all geared up for his upcoming Bollywood film "MS Dhoni: The Untold Story", where he plays the father of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who stars in the titular role.

The Neeraj Pandey directed biopic is set to release on September 30.

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France urged the UN Security Council today to impose sanctions on those such as Bashar al-Assad's regime who have carried out chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

"No crime should be allowed to pass in silence, even in exchange for honoring a truce. There can be no peace if there is impunity," Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said.

Ayrault reminded his colleagues on the council that a UN-mandated expert report had blamed the Damascus regime for two attacks with banned chemical agents in northern Syria in 2014 and 2015.

But Assad is protected on the Security Council by his ally, the veto-bearing permanent member Russia, which has deployed military force to protect Assad from a revolt by armed opposition groups.

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GM Mustard will have "serious" health and environmental impact, a farmers body today claimed and demanded a ban on the mustard hybrid.

In its resolution, Kisan Ekta, which claimed to be the largest farmers organisation representing 400 million farmers also reminded Prime Minister Narendra Modi that GM Mustard is a "negative" value crop and will "endanger" not only farmers but also trade, exports and environment as well.

The farmers body also decided to re-launch "Yellow Revolution" with a focus on organic and agro-ecological approaches, higher assured prices and increased protection from cheap imported oil.

"We resolve categorically to demand to the government that GM Mustard has to be banned. We want the state governments also to reject GM mustard.

"It is high time that we address the real issues that farmers face, vis-a vis farmer suicides, increasing cost of production, near stagnant prices, decreased import tariffs, massive crop losses, increasing debt of the farmers, and depleting natural resources including a healthy and organic soil," the body said in a statement.

The farmers body said that Indian agriculture has a strong "No GMO" brand value and is moving to a high value "Organic" brand, with very impressive growth rates while GM Mustard will destroy this trade advantage and the long-pending shift to organic farming and agro-ecological agriculture.

"We have also clearly understood that globally, there is massive opposition to any GM crop and any attempt to release more GM crops in India will endanger not only our farmers, but also our trade, exports and environment as well.

"We wish to remind the PM that GM Mustard is a negative value crop, while organic mustard will have huge value appreciation. This is advantageous for the farmer, trader and consumer. No sensible nation will destroy this advantage," they said.

Other Anti GM activists have raised concerns on the process currently being undertaken by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) under the Environment Ministry for GM mustard which they have termed as "meaningless and unscientific".

GEAC had constituted a sub-committee of scientific experts to examine the bio-safety data on GM mustard. The report was placed on the Environment Ministry's website, inviting comments. Activists have alleged that the committee did not have any health expert and three of its members have conflict of interest.

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The body claimed that the present GM Mustard like any other GM crop, will have serious health and environmental impact and the herbicide tolerance technology used in developing it will have "far reaching implications".

It also referred to the recommendations of a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture (2012) and Supreme Court Technical Expert Committee (2013) that such technology should not be introduced in India.

"Farmers are already reeling under increasing weed problem and use of hazardous herbicides, and this crop would force us to use more and more herbicides to combat "superweeds"," it said.

They said that India's unfortunate tryst with GM Crops is today clearly visible amongst the Bt cotton-farmers in Punjab, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

"In the last two years, their Bt Cotton farms were destroyed by the same bollworm that Monsanto's Bt Cotton technology was supposed to destroy and by other pests like whitefly.

"This much hyped technology has failed in such a short time, Monsanto and its subsidiaries and frachisees have made crores of profit and farmers are being forced to carry the burden of the failure of this technology. We farmers strongly believe that this technology, inherent with unnatural processes and risky manipulations, cannot be deployed anymore in our farms," they said.

They said that the GM Hybrid Mustard is less productive than at least five different varieties already in the market, and yet the productivity of GM Mustard was deceptively compared to low yielding varieties.

"We also call for a re-launching of the Yellow Revolution with a focus on organic and agro-ecological approaches, higher assured prices and increased protection from cheap imported oil," they said.
Realty firm Godrej Properties has acquired a 12-acre land parcel in Bengaluru to develop a housing project.

The company plans to develop a housing project covering about one million sq ft area on this land parcel off Sarjapur Road in South Bengaluru, the Mumbai-based developer said in a regulatory filing.

However, it did not disclose the seller or the transaction amount.

The project will be developed in partnership with Godrej Residential Investment Program II. This is the second project under this USD 275 million fund.

"We are happy to add this new project in Bangalore. Bangalore is a key market for us and we look forward to building a landmark project," Godrej Properties MD & CEO Pirojsha Godrej said.

Godrej Properties is currently developing residential, commercial and township projects spread across 11.98 million square meters (129 million square feet) in 12 cities.

The company recently entered Noida and Greater Noida markets.

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The on Wednesday gave approval for signing and ratification of an agreement between India and Samoa for exchange of information to curb tax evasion.

The agreement enables India and Samoa to provide assistance through exchange of information that is foreseeably relevant to the administration and enforcement of the domestic laws of the two countries concerning taxes, said an official statement after the meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The agreement would enter into force on the date of notification of completion of the procedures required by the respective laws of the two countries.

Negotiations for entering into an agreement for exchange of information with respect to taxes were finalised between India and Samoa in June, 2016 and both countries have agreed on the text of the agreement.

"The agreement will stimulate the flow of exchange of information between India and Samoa for tax purposes which will help curb tax evasion and tax avoidance," it said.

It further said at present there is no financial implications. However, in the event of extraordinary costs exceeding $500, the same will be borne by India.

India has similar provisions in tax information exchange agreements with other countries.

The information received under the agreement will be treated as confidential and could be disclosed only to persons or authorities concerned with assessment, collection, enforcement, prosecution or determination of appeals in relation to taxes covered under the agreement.

Also, information may be disclosed to any other person or entity or authority or jurisdiction with the prior written consent of the information sending country.

The pact also provides for mutual agreement procedure "for resolving any difference or for agreeing on procedures".

Samoa is a nation comprising the westernmost group of the Samoan Islands, in Polynesia.
A Senior Assistant Clerk at the District Inspector of Schools office was caught accepting bribe from a manager of a school today, police said.

"He has been arrested and would be presented before the Special Judge, Anti-Corruption Act, Meerut tomorrow. Meanwhile, he has been lodged at the temporary jail of Mathura Kotwali," DSP, Vigilance, Agra Baldhari Singh said.

According to the police report, the Allahabad High Court had rejected the claim of Sushil Kumar and recognised Kanti Kumar, a resident of Surir, as the bona fide manager of Rashtriya Inter College, Surir.

It is alleged that Senior Assistant Clerk Ashok Kumar had earlier takena bribe of Rs 5,000 from Kanti Kumar to complete the formalities.

"He then demanded Rs 10,000 more," the report said, adding that the complainant then contacted the Vigilance Department at Agra.

"After applying a powder on the currency notes, Kanti Kumar was sent to Ashok Kumar by a Vigilance team, led by DSP Singh," the report said.

The clerk was arrested by the Vigilance team, comprising five inspectors and three constables, the moment he accepted the money, in the presence of a number of people, it added.

His hands, when washed in water, turned red, the report stated.

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Samajwadi Party leader on Wednesday, said he has all the "qualities" to become the Prime Minister though his being a Muslim could be a "shortcoming".

Azam, who is known for his controversial remarks, said, "Make me the Prime Minister of the country and I will show how the country is run. I have all the qualities of being the Prime Minister, I have experience and education."

"Barring the fact that I am a Muslim, there is no other shortcoming," Khan said in sarcasm-laden remarks.

He was asked as to what policy needs to be adopted by the Centre in the wake of the Uri terror attack.

"No policy will be made on the basis of what I say to deal with the situation like Uri," the UP minister said, adding that he will press SP president Mulayam Singh Yadav to pitch for making him the Prime Minister.

Asked about his detractors, Khan said they are "barking dogs" who have no effect on him as he continues to do his own work.

When asked about an "outsider" in his party, he reiterated Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav's statement that Samajwadi family is "united".

"When the family is united and strong, outside forces will be ineffective," he said, in an apparent reference to Amar Singh being appointed as SP General Secetary by the party supremo.

Azam's bete noire Amar Singh, who is often described as an "outsider" in the Samajwadi Party, was yesterday appointed the party's General Secretary by Mulayam, in a decision that may be seen as yet another snub to son Akhilesh.
The Gujarat High Court today issued notice to the state government in response to a petition by AAP, which alleged that Surat police are not giving it permission for a rally by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Justice Sonia Gokani issued notices to the additional home secretary, Gujarat, Surat police commissioner and the district collector and adjourned the hearing to September 27.

The rally in Surat to be addressed by Kejriwal, AAP's national convener, is scheduled for October 16.

"This is going to be the first rally of Kejriwal in the state, to be held at Varachha in Surat. Considering that we have to prepare for the rally well in advance, we applied for police permission on August 19, but have not received any confirmation so far," AAP's media convener Harshil Naik said in the petition.

The party leaders have repeatedly approached the police commissioner but got no clarification, it said.

"A party delegation even met Governor O P Kohli on September 6 and requested him to intervene, but nothing has happened so far," it contended.

A few weeks ago, a programme organised by a trade association in Surat which Kejriwal was to attend, was cancelled as Veer Narmad South Gujarat University authorities denied a hall for the programme. AAP had alleged that the university acted under the BJP government's pressure.

The petition claimed that Surat police had allowed rallies by BJP chief Amit Shah, Union minister Smriti Irani and senior Congress leader Shankersinh Vaghela recently.

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Home Minister Rajnath Singh was on Wednesday, briefed on the ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir by Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, who visited the troubled state in the wake of the Uri terror attack.

Mehrishi conveyed to the Home Minister his assessment on the prevailing situation in the Valley as well as border areas after his interaction with Governor N N Vohra, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and civil, police and intelligence officials.

The Union Home Secretary visited Srinagar on Tuesday, after the terror attack in Uri in which 18 soldiers were killed.

The Home Minister was also apprised about the steps taken to check infiltration along the LoC and the International Border with Pakistan, official sources said.

Heavily-armed militants suspected to be from Pakistan-based JeM had stormed an Army Brigade Headquarters in Uri in Kashmir on Sunday, killing 18 jawans.
Hong Kong police arrested six people today over death threats to a new city lawmaker who is advocating more autonomy from China, with reports saying some of the suspects have triad links.

Eddie Chu was one of several rebel lawmakers to win seats in landmark legislative elections earlier this month.

He and his family have been under 24-hour protection since the vote on September 4 due to threats to their safety.

Police told AFP today that six men had been arrested for "intimidation" linked to the death threats made to Chu, but gave no further detail.

The South China Morning Post said suspected triad members were among those arrested in Wednesday morning raids, citing an unnamed police source.

Television footage showed some of the suspects wearing black hoods and being led into a police station.

Chu is an environmentalist who has campaigned against the destruction of heritage properties to make way for newer developments and is pushing for better rights for rural residents.

He has sought to expose shady political dealings in rural areas where local strongmen are influential and have been accused of having links to criminal gangs.

Triad gangs have traditionally been involved in drug-running, prostitution and extortion but are increasingly in legitimate ventures such as property and the finance industry.

Some are believed to also have links with the political establishment and there have previously been allegations of triads sending paid thugs to stir up trouble during protests.

Chu was one of at least five candidates in the semi-autonomous city pushing for more distance or even an outright break from Beijing who took seats for the first time in the Legislative Council assembly, amid fears of China tightening its grip.

Chu has previously said he received the threats because of his political views.

"The threat to my personal safety is imminent," he told reporters two weeks ago outside the police headquarters.

The legislative elections were the first major polls since the 2014 democracy rallies, with the anti-establishment camp increasing its share of the legislature, which is still weighted towards Beijing.

Chu, standing as an independent, emerged as winner in his constituency with more than 80,000 votes -- the most of any candidate in the polls.

The election saw the highest voter turnout since Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997 under a handover agreement guaranteeing its freedoms for 50 years.

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Ahead of the first meeting of the GST Council tomorrow, the hotel and hospitality industry today demanded 5 per cent tax rate on the sector, saying the current rate has worsened their condition.

"We are happy that the government has decided to introduce GST but we want a low tax rate of 5 per cent on the hotel and hospitality industry for at least five years.

"It will result in faster growth of the industry and also enhance government's revenue," Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) President Bharat Malkani told reporters.

The demand comes a day before the meeting of the newly constituted GST Council in the national capital.

Malkani said the domestic hospitality industry pays tax in the range of 18-25 per cent, which includes luxury tax and service tax, while in countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, it is not more than 5 per cent.

High taxes are one of the main reasons why tourists are flocking to these nations and not our country, he said, adding that the industry is suffering huge losses due to this.

Malkani also demanded rollback of total liquor prohibition in Bihar and control on sale of alcohol in Kerala as it has affected the hospitality industry adversely.

The association is holding its first national convention here beginning tomorrow, which is likely to be attended by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Niti Aayog Chief Executive Amitabh Kant.

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Himachal Pradesh Congress will launch programme in all thepanchayatsof the state to highlight the achievements of the government, HPCC President Sukhvinder Singh Sukkhu said today.

Addressing the first Panchayati Raj convention organised by the party here, Sukkhu said the programme 'PanchayatEk, Vikas Anek'would be a major step by the party to win 2017 assembly polls. Five member committees will be formed at booth level for further penetration in rural areas.

He lauded the achievements of the successive Congress led governments for making Himachal Pradesh a model state in the field of development and said the present government has fulfilled almost all promises made in the party's election manifesto.

"The state government has launched schemes for the welfare of each section of society and development of the state is of top priority for the government and the party would apprise the people about the developmental initiatives of the government," he said.

Sukkhu said the 73rd and 74th Constitution amendments ensured 33 per cent reservation to women in Panchayati Raj Institutions which have now increased to 50 per cent, increasing the representation and participation of women in Panchayati Raj Institutions and paving way for decentralisation of power.

He asked Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh to prepare policies forallocation of funds to



PanchayatiRajInstitutions from the state's own resources as promised.

He said the party was organising meetings and conventions of all sections of the society to it strong to fulfil the target of 'Mission Repeat 2017' in the upcoming assembly elections.

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The Union HRD ministry has decided to appoint Canara Bank as the promoter for setting up of Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA), that would provide much needed funds to boost research oriented infrastructure for premiere institutions like IITs, NITs and IIMs.

Sources said that the ministry had invited 'Expression of Interest' for identifying a joint venture partnership partner and after examining the proposals, Canara Bank was chosen.

Senior Canara Bank officials made a presentation today before HRD minister Prakash Javadekar as well, it is learnt.

Earlier, this month, the Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, gave its nod to a proposal of the HRD ministry for creation of HEFA.

The HRD ministry had then announced that HEFA would be formed as a SPV within a PSU Bank/ Government-owned-NBFC (Promoter) and it would leverage the equity to raise up to Rs 20,000 crore for funding projects for infrastructure and development of world class labs in institutions like IITs, IIMs and NITs, etc.

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A dog, adopted by a citizen after it was hungry and tied to a tea stall here, has been selected as a finalist in PETA India's fifth annual 'Cutest Indian Dog Alive' contest.

After sifting through hundreds of photographs of lovable Indian community dogs as well as their rescue stories, the judges for the contest selected Rosco, whose guardian is Spandana Raj.

Rosco was tied to a tea stall and looked hungry. When Spandana realised that no one was taking proper care of him, she decided to adopt him, according to a statement issued by PETA India.

"I found Rosco tied to a tea stall," says Spandana. "It came home and has been with us for two years now. It is a happy and loving dog," she said.

"Rosco is a lucky dog, and it has returned the favour of being rescued by bringing much love and joy into Spandana's life," says PETA CEO Poorva Joshipura.

"All rescued dogs are already winners because their lives were saved by people who love them for who they are," she said.

PETA urged the prospective guardians to adopt an Indian community dog from the streets or an animal shelter, rather than buying puppies from pet shops.

Breeders and pet shops often keep animals in dismal conditions, and because pedigree dogs are bred for certain exaggerated physical traits, such as long ears and drooping backs, many of them suffer from health ailments, including breathing problems, cancer, heart disease, bleeding disorders, skeletal malformations, and eye problems, the statement said.

Indian community dogs are generally healthier and more robust than their purebred cousins, PETA India said.

The winner would be announced on September 28.

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Improving the quality of education is still a major challenge in the country, Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said today.

"There are 270 million students in the country from KG to PG. But quality of education is still a major challenge," he said.

"India was a great power, it was one third of the world trade. But why was it one third of the world trade, because we had Nalandas, Taxilas and Vikramshilas, the great universities of the world at that time.

"If global rankings like QS or Times Ranking existed at that time, these universities would have got the top positions," Javadekar claimed.

"Therefore, those who attacked India destroyed its libraries, because this was its strength. The nation in which education is good along with research and innovation, is the one which is prosperous," he said.

The Britishers provided education to a limited class to serve their administrative purposes but did not want Indians to really learn, he said while speaking at 'Young Makers Conclave'.

About the IT sector in the country, the Union HRD minister said, "While India is called a software power, it is a limited software power. We do it, but we have not come up with Google, Windows, Twitter, Facebook etc which are doing huge business."



About the government's initiatives, Javadekar said that a Higher Education Financing Agency was being set up and he has held a meeting with Canara Bank officials in this regard today.

He also honoured Olympic medallists Sakshi Malik and Mary Kom at the event.

On the sidelines of the event, to a question on political violence in Kerala, Javadekar accused the "one way goondaism of CPM" for it and claimed that in its "draconian rule", nationalist BJP and RSS workers are being attacked.

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Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh today met his Brazilian counterpart Blairo Maggi and agreed to work expeditiously for early resolution of phytosanitary issues to boost the bilateral trade.

In the meeting, the ministers discussed various issues related to agriculture, livestock and trade and agreed to further develop friendly and cooperative relations between the two countries, an official statement said.

Both the sides acknowledged the need to promote South-South Cooperation to assist developing economies in meeting their basic requirements.

"They also agreed that both countries need to work together to explore ways and means for enhancing bilateral trade between the two countries and committed to work expeditiously for early resolution of phytosanitary issues for providing the required boost to bilateral trade," it said.

India's request for market access of seeds of pearl, millet, sorghum, corn seeds, rapeseed and cotton, for which technical information for conducting pest risk analysis was already submitted in July, 2012, and Brazil's request of market access for cotton, maize, soybean, grapes, apples, oats and avocado into Indian market were also discussed.

The proposed agreement between agencies of the two countries on sharing technical information on Indian cattle breeds, which form the mainstay of the Brazilian livestock population, was also discussed and it was agreed that a technical group can sit together to resolve outstanding issues, the statement said.

The two ministers agreed to get pending market access request expeditiously examined and, if necessary, utilize existing Joint Working Group for such technical discussions.

The Brazilian minister is here in India for the BRICS Agriculture Ministers' meeting to be held on September 23.

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India has pledged financial assistance worth 30.29 million Nepali Rupees for construction of a new college building in Udayapur district in the country.

A tripartite Memorandum of Understanding was signed among Indian Embassy, Local Development Officer, Udayapur district, and Shri Narad Adarsha Education Campus of Udayapur district for the construction of the campus building, according to a press release issued by the Indian mission here.

The campus offers three year bachelor course in Education Management and Humanities and also 10+2 curriculum with a total number of 770 students.

The new building would provide much needed classrooms and an improved environment for learning for the students and teachers of the campus, established in 1971.

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A Delhi court today reserved its order on the bail plea of a man, who had allegedly thrown ink at Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia outside the Lieutenant Governor's office here.

Metropolitan Magistrate Ambika Singh kept the matter for September 23 for pronouncing order on the bail application of 42-year-old Brijesh Shukla after hearing arguments of his counsel and the police.

The court also extended Shukla's judicial custody till September 23.

During arguments, police opposed the bail plea saying he was also involved in other criminal cases, as Shukla's counsel claimed that those cases have already been quashed by the Delhi High Court.

Advocate Rajesh Kumar, representing Shukla, said his client's custody was no more required as the investigation of police was almost complete and recovery has also been made.

He also argued that Sisodia was not a complainant in the case and it should not be made a political matter.

The accused claimed in the bail plea that the allegations against him were "false and fabricated" and he had not created any hurdle for public servant in performing duty.

Shukla, a resident of Karawal Nagar in Northeast Delhi, was yesterday remanded to day's police custody.

He was arrested on September 19 for allegedly thrown ink at Sisodia, saying he was angry with the Deputy CM's Finland tour at a time when the city was grappling with a health crisis.

Shukla has been booked under sections 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty) and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) of the IPC.

Shukla been engaged in protests against the AAP government over various issues and has also filed a complaint in court against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and AIMIM President Asaduddin Owaisi.

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A police inspector from Tamil Nadu has been arrested in connection with the theft of Rs 3.9 crore from a Kerala-bound car last month, and a search is on for two more personnel involved, police said today.

The car was proceeding to Malappuram in Kerala on August 25 after collecting money for gold ornaments sold in Chennai when a five member van-borne gang, of whom three were in police uniform, intercepted the vehicle for a "search".

They ordered the four occupants to get into the van and two of their accomplices followed the vehicle in the car.

At a major road junction, the four were forced to get out and the gang escaped with the cash and car, which was later found abandoned at Thrissur in Kerala.

A businessman later lodged a complaint, stating that there was Rs 3.9 crore cash in the car and that it was proceeds from sale of gold jewellery in Chennai.

Police today said their investigation led to the arrest of three persons, who revealed the hand of police personnel in the robbery.

The trio also said that Rs two crore cash was taken by police and the balance distributed among them, police said.

The inspector was arrested earlier this week, police said, adding a hunt was on to nab another inspector and a head constable.

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A sessions court here has ordered the release of human rights activist Khurram Parvez, who was taken into preventive detention for allegedly posing an imminent threat of breach of peace, but he was later allegedly booked under PSA.

The court had yesterday stated that the executive official, who ordered the activist's detention, had not followed necessary procedures including failure to adequately explain the grounds for his detention.

Meanwhile, the activist was today booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA) and shifted to Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu, JK Coalition of Civil Societies, an organisation run by the activist, claimed.

Parvez was arrested on September 16 and placed in administrative detention in a jail in Kupwara for allegedly posing an imminent threat of breach of peace.

Repeated attempts to contact District Magistrate Srinagar Farooq Ahmad Lone, who is vested with the authority to issue detention order under PSA, did not fructify.

Amnesty International India criticised the re-arrest of the activist.

"Detaining a person right after he is released, without any intention to charge him or bring him to trial, amounts to using a revolving door of persecution," Aakar Patel, Executive Director, Amnesty International India, said in a statement.

"This kind of arbitrary use of the law suggests that the Jammu and Kashmir police is determined to lock up Khurram Parvez at any cost," he said.

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Sunil Jaglan of 'selfie with daughter' fame) will soon launch an awareness campaign against the 'triple talaq' norm in the Muslim community.

He will start the campaign, 'Badlaon ki ore' (towards change), with a "national level" programme at his village Bibipur which will be attended by distinguished members of the Muslim community.

Informing this, Jaglan, a former sarpanch of Bibipur village, said, "Women empowerment must be uniform across the society. The women should enjoy equal rights in every community. The triple talaq system is a grave injustice to the Muslim women. A man can divorce his wife by uttering or writing 'talaq' thrice over phone or through e-mail."



He claimed that the norm was sanctioned by the Muslim Personal Law Board and it did not have any "legal validity".

Jaglan claimed that in 2012, he had succeeded in getting "all the khaps of north India" on the same dais to campaign against female infanticide and demand slapping of murder cases on those who indulged in it.

Recently, he has been made the national spokesperson of Akhil Bharatiya Pradhan Sangathan, an organisation involving over 30,000 village panchayats of Uttar Pradesh, Jaglan said, adding that 'Badlao ki ore' will be taken to the "national level" in association with it.

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Jammu today witnessed anti-Pakistan rallies for the third consecutive day with protesters burning Pakistani flags and effigy and demanding the government to give "befitting reply" to the neighbour.

A protest rally was held by District Congress Committee, Jammu Urban at the Press Club here.

A large number of Congress workers assembledoutside the venue and burnt the effigy of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif amid slogans against the country for abetting terrorism andsending terrorists across to India.

The workers of Dogra Front and Shiv Sena also took out a candle march in Jammu city to express condolences for the martyred soldiers.

While addressing the gathering, its President Ashok Gupta said the central government in Delhi got elected with the 2/3rd majority from the people and now after the Uri attack the sentiment in the entire nation is that "Pak should be taught a lesson like Bangladesh war".

To pay tributes to the soldiers, Jammu Province People Forum (JPPF) organized a protest-cum-tribute rally for the martyrs at Maharaja Hari Singh statue Tawi Bridge, here.

Speaking on the occasion, JPPF President Pavittar Singh Bhardwaj condemned the "Pakistan-sponsored fidayeen attack" on the military base camp at Uri.

He accused Pakistan of waging a "proxy war" against India by "encouraging militancy and communal tension" in Kashmir Valley which has now extended to parts of Jammu province and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to give a "befitting reply" to Pakistan.

Lashing out at the PDP-BJP coalition government, another group that took out a protest rally, Team Jammu, alleged the government has "disrespected" the martyred soldiers and demanded immediate compensation for the next of kin of the soldiers.

"It is unfortunate that many states has come forward and extended helping hand to the soldiers from Bihar, UP, Maharashtra and Jharkhand martyred in Uri attack but unfortunately, Jammu and Kashmir government is yet to utter a word regarding relief to two soldiers from Jammu, who were among those who died," Team Jammu Chairman Zorawar Singh Jamwal said.

"Stone pelters and those instigating violence in Kashmir Valley are being given due consideration," he said, adding it is "shameful and condemnable" that those who rendered service to the state and the nation are not given due attention.

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A ruling JD(U) legislator has served a legal notice to Sushil Kumar Modi for having claimed that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar wanted to give party ticket to controversial Siwan RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin's wife in the 2009 General Election, but the senior BJP leader today said he stood by his comments.

In a statement here, Modi charged the chief minister with getting the legal notice served on him through a party leader "after the removal of the mask on the Shahabuddin issue".

"I stand by what I had said that Nitish Kumar had no reservation regarding Mohammad Shahabuddin and wanted to give ticket to his wife after enrolling her in the JD(U)," Modi, whose party BJP was a coalition partner of JD(U) at that time, said.

JD(U) state spokesman and MLC Neeraj Kumar had yesterday served a legal notice to Modi through his lawyer Udai Pratap Singh for making "unsubstantiated" allegations against the chief minister.

"In the legal notice, the BJP leader has been asked to reply within 15 days or be prepared to face a case of defamation," Kumar said.

Modi said in his statement that if Nitish Kumar had any reservation about Shahabuddin, then "why did the state government not support lawyer Prashant Bhusan's plea in the Supreme Court to keep him (Shahabuddin) out of Bihar?"



"Would Nitish Kumar stop lawyer Ram Jethmalani, who became a member of Rajya Sabha on an RJD ticket with the help of JD(U), from fighting Shahabuddin's case in the Supreme Court?" Modi, who was the deputy chief minister during the NDA rule in the state, asked.

Meanwhile, the JD(U) MLC asked Modi to reply to his legal notice instead of "pronouncing his stand through a media statement".

The Centre also through different letters has already



made it clear that there was no talk of building any barrage between Varanasi to Haldia (NW-1), Sushil Modi said.

He also questioned the Bihar Chief Minister's protest when the state government has already given its consent for the said Waterways.

He quoted a letter written by Inland Waterways Authority of India Chairman Amitabh Verma to Bihar Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh in January last which said, "The consent of Government of Bihar was duly obtained for the notification of six rivers for declared as national waterway viz MW 37 (Gandak), 54 (Karmnasa), 58 (Kosi), 81 (Punpun) and 94 (Sone)."



Sushil Modi said the national seminar in Patna from February 25-26 should deliberate and study the adverse impact of Farakka dam and also discuss the problems of silt deposit in other major rivers of the state including Kosi, the worst affected by siltation.
Jharkhand Government today said it has signed eight agreements with investment commitments of over Rs 5,000 crore in a range of sectors during a road show here and will now tap funding opportunities in the US.

"We have successfully concluded the state's domestic investment promotion drive in Mumbai and signed eight MoUs worth over Rs 5,000 crore in areas of textiles, healthcare, medical education, skills development and e-governance. The event was attended by over 350 investors," Chief Minister Raghubar Das said here.

Das would now visit the US to scout for investment opportunities in the world's largest economy.

Jharkhand is organising the Global Investors Summit 2017 on February 16-17 in Ranchi to promote the state as a favoured investment destination. It had held a road show here in connection with the summit.

During the event, the government also announced half a dozen new policies aimed at a strategic diversification of the mineral resource rich state.

These policies covered areas like information technology & IT-enabled services (IT/ITeS), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), start-up (best start-up policy for ecosystem incentives among seven leading states), electronic systems design & manufacturing (ESDM), automobile and auto components and textiles & footwear.

Following the road show, the government today held 33 government-to-business meetings in the city with global investors across sectors such as food processing, education, urban infrastructure, IT-ITeS, power, industrial automation, hospitality, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, gems and jewellery, tourism and solid waste management.

The American sojourn following the Mumbai road show comprises an intense five-day outreach and networking programme by a delegation led by Das.

The delegation would attend MINEXPO 2016 (exhibition on metals, minerals and energy) in Las Vegas, where the State has a dedicated pavilion.

Jharkhand has over 40 per cent of India's mineral reserves. The State accounts for 27 per cent of national coal reserves and 26 per cent of its iron ore.

The delegation, which will leave for the US soon, will



also travel to the West Coast's Silicon Valley, home to global technology giants CISCO, Oracle and Hewlett Packard, with whom Jharkhand had previously signed MoUs in the areas of skills development, tele-education and e-health.

The team will also visit New York on the East Coast.

The main road show is expected to see participation of over 500 industry representatives. During this programme, the Government is looking to seal collaborations with leading organisations, industrial institutions, chambers of commerce and trade bodies with the objective to attract investments in the State, an official release said.

A goodwill function to host Indian Diaspora with roots in Jharkhand and erstwhile united Bihar will follow the road show, it said.

The Jharkhand Government, in second round, will reach out to investors in East Asia - primarily China, Japan and South Korea.
Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das today said that the state was ushering in an era of industrial growth and has geared up to attract suitable investments.

The investor-meet roadshow was a platform to lure investors who would become longterm partners in the burgeoning development of one of the country's youngest states, Das said during the G2B (Govt to Business) interaction in Mumbai to boost investments in varied sectors, a government release here today said.

The Jharkhand Chief Secretary Rajbala Verma and other government officials had one-on-one meetings with more than two dozen investors in the sectors, which included food processing, education, urban infrastructure, IT/ITes, power, industrial automation, hospitality, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, gems and jewellery, tourism and solid waste management, the release said.

At the industry interactive session, industrialists, investors and Chief Executive officers from various industries were invited and during the meeting they were informed about the opportunities, resources available, prospects of investments in different fields and positive industrial environment available in the state, the release said.

"The Industry interactive sessions proved extremely successful in order to inform the potential investors that a positive industrial environment is ready in the state for them to invest. In addition, the investors were informed about the various new policies that were launched in the last one year and six new policies which were launched during the roadshow yesterday," the release said.

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Women activists of Jammu Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) today held protests against Pakistan accusing it of Uri terror attack and promoting terrorism on Indian soil.

The protestors also accused the central government of failing to protest its citizens, to create an atmosphere of peace and security in the Jammu and Kashmir.

Around 150 women activists raised slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and council of Ministers for failing to respond appropriately to Pakistan-supported terror.

They took out a procession from Press Club to Tawi Bridge and blocked the vehicular traffic.

JKNPP leader Manju Singh described the attack on army camp in Uri, in which 18 soldiers were killed and more than 25 injured, as an act of cowardice and timidity on the part of Pakistan.

"Pakistan has stepped up its nefarious activities in the last two years with increased support to separatist and anti-nationals in Kashmir and sending terrorists acrossthe Line of Control (LOC) and international border (IB)," she said.

She alleged appeasement policy pursued by the Centre and the state had largely emboldened the anti-national forces in the Valley.

Asserting that anti-national movement in Kashmir has increased during the BJP rule, Singh said militancy-related incidents in the Kashmir Valley have increased and also border incursions and infiltration.

She said the situation which was normal prior to the last Assembly polls in J-K but it has deteriorated as BJP was toeing the PDP line.

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Lt Governor Najeeb Jung today scrapped the appointment of Krishna Saini as chairperson of Delhi's power regulator DERC by AAP government on grounds of legal infirmities, further escalating the already intense confrontation between the two sides.

The LG's office said Saini was appointed to the top post of Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) in March without approval of Jung as mandated under rules and procedures.

"In the given circumstances, the appointment of Chairperson, DERC has been declared as void, ab initio," the LG's office said in a statement.

Jung has also directed the government to initiate the process for selection of the chairperson of the DERC immediately, in accordance with law.

Saini, a former Chief Income Tax Commissioner, was appointed to head the regulator, which takes crucial decisions relating to power sector including tariff, in March without Jung's approval.

"As per Section 85, Electricity Act, 2003, the Selection Committee is to be constituted by the State Government. The power and functions of the State Government have been delegated to the LG vide government of India notification dated February 20, 2004.

"Further, the Council of Ministers appointed Sh. Krishna Saini as Chairperson, Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) without the approval of the Lt Governor," Jung's office said in a statement.

It said as the constitution of the selection committee as well as the appointment of DERC chairperson was done without putting up the matter to Jung for his concurrence, the entire process has been vitiated right from the beginning and "suffers from serious legal infirmities".

While appointing Saini, the AAP government had cited a Delhi High Court order of February 24 saying it was allowed permission to go ahead with his appointment.

Saini had retired as Chief Commissioner of Income Tax in January.

The LG and AAP government have been at loggerheads over a range of issues including appointments and have even been fighting it out in court. The Delhi High Court had last month held that LG is the administrative head of Delhi following which the AAP government had challenged the verdict in the Supreme Court.

(REOPENS DES28)



Later talking to reporters, Jung said Saini's appointment was quashed as it was "irregular".

Power experts said the LG's decision will further delay the tariff fixation process and all other directives issued by the government to DERC under Section 108 of the Electricity Act without the approval of the LG.

The government, which has time and again held the performance of the discoms as "atrocious", had ordered the DERC to compensate consumers for unscheduled power cuts



The Delhi High Court, in its August 4 order, had also termed as illegal the appointment of nominee directors of the Delhi government in the boards of the three discoms.
Children who spend just 15 minutes or more a day watching television may become less creative as compared to those who read books or solve jigsaw puzzles, a new study has warned.

Watching TV for short periods does not impact on the number of creative ideas that young children come up, researchers said.

However the research, conducted with 60 children of three years of age at Staffordshire University in the UK, has found that 15 minutes of children's television temporarily reduces the originality of the ideas they come up with.

"We were looking at the immediate impact of television on children's creativity," said psychology lecturer Dr Sarah Rose, who conducted the study.

"We compared children who watched slow and fast paced episodes of Postman Pat with children who were left to play with books and jigsaws. We then tested the children for the numbers of creative ideas and the originality of those ideas," Rose said.

"While there was very little impact of TV on the number of creative ideas generated, there was clear evidence that the children came up with less original ideas immediately after watching television although these effects seemed to disappear after a short time.

"Over time if children are less creative in their play, this could negatively impact their development," Rose said.

The new research is potentially useful to producers of children's television, early years' educators and parents as little study has been carried out on the development effects of television on young children, researchers said.

"There is a belief that the more slow-paced programmes are more educational but our findings do not support this," Rose added.

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A probe team of the National Human Rights Commission has found that many families "migrated" from Kairana in Uttar Pradesh due to threats pertaining to "increase in crime" and "deterioration" of law-and-order situation there.

Based on its findings, the Commission has sent a notice to the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police of the state to submit an action taken report, on the observations and recommendations of the team within eight weeks.

The team also examined relevant witnesses, victims, independent witnesses, police officials concerned and SDM. Copies of relevant records were also obtained and analysed.

"The team also obtained list of 346 displaced families or persons from PS to the MP, Kairana. Out of that list three residential localities were selected and at random at least six alleged victims or displaced families or persons were chosen for verification.

"The team also had telephonic verification from at least four displaced families mentioned in the list who had migrated to distant places such as Dehradun and Surat from Kairana town in Shamli district," the NHRC said in a statement today.

"Most of the witnesses stated that many families migrated due to threats pertaining to increase in crime and deterioration of law-and-order situation," the Commission says, quoting the team's findings.

However, in June, a probe conducted by the Shamli district administration into the alleged migration from Kairana had found that in the list of 346 families, 188 had left over five years ago. The inquiry had then found that only in three cases the families had faced 'rangdari' threats and police took timely action.

A home department spokesman had said that on verification of the list provided by BJP MP Hukum Singh, it was found that 66 families had left Kairana 10 years ago.

The NHRC probe team has also found that in 2013, after resettlement of about 25,000-30,000 members of Muslims community in Kairana town from Muzaffarnagar, the demography of Kairana town changed in favour of the Muslim community", it becoming the "more dominating and majority community".

"Most of the witnesses examined and victims feel that the rehabilitation in 2013 has permanently changed the social situation in Kairana town and has led to further deterioration of law-and-order situation," says the team's findings.

A Uttar Pradesh government spokesperson when today contact, said, "We are yet to receive the NHRC notice. And, we will respond to it only after receiving it."



At least 24 witnesses said the youths of a "specific majority community" in Kairana "pass lewd/taunting remarks" against the females of a "specific minority community" as per the NHRC findings. Due to this, females of the specific minority community in Kairana avoided going outside frequently.

"Some of the displaced persons also verified that it was one of the reasons for their migration from Kairana town," the NHRC said quoting the team's findings.

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Kalyan Jewellers has earmarked Rs 900 crore for its expansion plan during the current financial year, which includes setting up of two new showrooms in city, the company said today.

"The two showrooms, to come up in Velacherry and Anna Nagar, would take the total number of outlets in city to five with total investments of Rs 430 crore till date," the company said in a statement.

"Kalyan Jewellers has been on an aggressive expansion drive and has earmarked Rs 900 crore this financial year for expanding its distribution network in India and globally," the statement said.

The retailer has already set up six showrooms this year and is aims at opening 14 showrooms by the end of this fiscal.

Company's brand ambassadors Sonam Kapoor and Prabhu Ganesan will inaugurate the two showrooms in the city on September 25.

The two new showrooms are in large format, covering 7,500 square foot each and occupy three floors.

Kalyan Jewellers across Tamil Nadu has 20 large format showrooms and 150 mini diamond stores.

"We have opened showrooms in Anna Nagar and Velacherry to provide more accessibility to customers and strengthen our presence in Chennai," Kalyan Jewellers Chairman and MD T S Kalyanaraman said.

"Chennai contributes nearly 10 per cent of our topline revenues and we believe Kalyan has emerged as preferred jewellery brand given its relentless focus on quality, design and service," he said.

"We continue to be optimistic about our growth prospects in Tamil Nadu and have so far invested Rs 830 crore in the state. The launch also coincides with the festive season and customers can look forward to innovative offers..." he said.

Kalyan Jewellers currently has 102 exclusive showrooms in India and West Asia, it said.

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Barring a couple of stone-pelting incidents, situation was by and large peaceful in Kashmir where curfew was lifted from all places, except three police station areas of Srinagar.

However, normal life remained affected the Valley for the 75th consecutive day due to the separatist-sponsored strike.

43 people who were allegedly involved in disturbing law and order during the past 24 hours were arrested, raising to 208 the number of such people held over the past five days.

With improvement in the sitution, the authorities had yesterday lifted curfew across Kashmir except six police station areas of Srinagar.

This morning, the curfew was lifted from three of the police station areas while it remained in force in Nowhatta, M R Gunj and Khanyar police station areas, police said.

But restrictions on the assembly of four or more people under Section 144 of the CrPC continued in the Valley.

Due to the strike call of the separatists, public transport remained off the roads and shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut in Srinagar and elsewhere in the Valley.

Schools, colleges and other educational institutions also continued to remain shut.

The separatists, who are spearheading the current agitation in the Valley, have extended the protest programme till September 22.

They did not announce any period of relaxation in the strike for the week.

Mobile internet services remained suspended and the outgoing calls on prepaid numbers also continued to be barred across the Valley.

Meanwhile, a police spokesman said barring a couple of stone-pelting incidents, the situation in the valley remained by and large peaceful.

"A couple of stone-pelting incidents were reported from Zainapora in Shopian and Shangran, Dooru in Anantnag where miscreants in their attempt to disturb the situation assembled and pelted stones on police and security force deployments," the spokesman said.

"Barring these incidents, the overall situation remained under control across the valley," he added.

The spokesman said greater movement of people and vehicular traffic was observed across the Valley including in the Srinagar city.

As many as 81 people, including two cops, have been killed in the unrest that started a day after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces in South Kashmir on July 8.

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An attacker wielding a knife tried to storm the Israeli embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara today but was shot before reaching the building, Turkish reports and Israeli officials said.

Turkey's NTV television said the attacker tried to enter the well-defended embassy but was "neutralised" by being shot in the leg.

Employees of the embassy took refuge in a shelter, it added.

Israel's foreign ministry said the assailant tried to attack the Israeli embassy but was shot before reaching the building.

"The team members are unharmed. The assailant was injured before he reached the building," a ministry statement said.

The health condition of the attacker was not made clear. It was also not clear if the person had been shot by Turkish security forces or embassy guards.

Large numbers of police vehicles were dispatched to the scene and the road closed on which the building is located, an AFP correspondent said. Witnesses said they heard several shots fired.

CNN-Turk television said a suspicious package was also being investigated in front of the embassy.

The attack comes three months after Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship that left 10 Turks dead.

Under the deal, Turkey and Israel are to begin the process of exchanging ambassadors to fully restore their diplomatic ties although this has yet to formally take place.

Despite the crisis, the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul have carried on working in the last years, under heavy security.

Israel had already offered compensation and an apology over the raid, but with the agreement it also eased the naval blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, allowing Ankara to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.

The incident also comes with foreign missions in Turkey on a state of high alert following a spate of attacks across the country this year blamed on jihadists and Kurdish militants.

The British embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara was closed on Friday over security concerns while the German embassy offered only limited services.

Israel was quick to give its support to the Turkish government in the aftermath of the July 15 coup bid, condemning it while repeating its faith in the reconciliation process between the two countries.

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Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects have challenged the legalityof a Pakistani judicial commission that travelled to India in 2013 to probe the 2008 attack, which could further delay the case proceedings.

Lakhvi's counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi today said the defence lawyers on Monday challenged the proceedings of the judicial commission that travelled to Mumbai to record the statements of four Indian prosecution witnesses in the Islamabad High Court.

When asked had not the trial court already declared the commission's proceedings 'null and void', Abbasi told PTI: "No... The trial court had not declared the commission's proceedings null and void and we have challenged the legality of the commission in the IHC early this week."



Earlier, the defence lawyer had challenged the legality of the commission before the trial court in 2013 but it was dismissed.

A Pakistani panel comprising special prosecutors and the defence counsel in 2013 had visited Mumbai to record the statements from prosecution witnesses, including Magistrate R V Sawant Waghule, who recorded the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab; Ramesh Mahale, the chief investigation officer of the case, and Ganesh Dhunraj and Chintaman Mohite, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the terrorists killed during the attack.

The commission in 2012 had recorded the statement of these witnesses but due to an "official understanding" between the Pakistani and Indian governments, had not cross-examined them.

Lakhvi's lawyer has filed a plea the commission that went to India had not been allowed to cross-examine four key Indian witnesses.

A prosecution lawyer said the defence lawyers challenging the legality of the commission and saying it was not allowed to cross-examine the key Indian witnesses was aimed at delaying the case further.

He said this is evident from the fact that the legalityof the commission is being challenged over three years after it had travelled to Mumbai.

"As the case is already not heading further because India has yet to decide whether to send 24 witnesses to Pakistan to record their statement the defence lawyers challenging the Pakistani commission's proceedings in the IHC may further delay it," he said.

The court has not fixed the date of hearing.

LeT operations commander Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people in November, 2008.

Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attack, is living in undisclosed location after being released from jail on bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi. The case has been underway in the country for more than six years.

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Feeling lonely? Blame it on your genes, say scientists who have found that loneliness - a trait linked to poor health and early death - is partially heritable.

Loneliness is linked to poor physical and mental health, and is an even more accurate predictor of early death than obesity, researchers said.

To better understand who is at risk, researchers at University of California San Diego conducted the first genome-wide association study for loneliness - as a life-long trait, not a temporary state.

They discovered that risk for feeling lonely is partially due to genetics, but environment plays a bigger role.

The study of more than 10,000 people also found that genetic risk for loneliness is associated with neuroticism and depressive symptoms.

Evidence suggested links between heritable loneliness and schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.

"For two people with the same number of close friends and family, one might see their social structure as adequate while the other doesn't," said Abraham Palmer, professor at UC San Diego, who led the study.

"And that's what we mean by 'genetic predisposition to loneliness' - we want to know why, genetically speaking, one person is more likely than another to feel lonely, even in the same situation," he said.

The heritability of loneliness has been examined before, in twins and other studies of both children and adults.

From these, researchers estimated that 37 to 55 per cent of loneliness is determined by genetics.

Previous studies also to pinpoint genes that contribute to loneliness, focusing on genes related to neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, or other cellular systems associated with human attachment, such as oxytocin.

However, these studies mostly relied on small sample sizes, Palmer said.

Researchers examined genetic and health information from 10,760 people aged 50 years and older that was collected by the Health and Retirement Study.

As part of this study, participants answered three questions that measure loneliness.

The study accounted for gender, age and marital status, as married people tend to be less lonely than unmarried people.

Researchers found that loneliness - the tendency to feel lonely over a lifetime, rather than just occasionally due to circumstance - is a modestly heritable trait.

It is 14 to 27 per cent genetic, as compared to the previous estimates of 37 to 55 per cent.

This new estimate of the genetic contribution to loneliness could be lower than previous estimates because the team relied on chip heritability, a method that only captures common genetic variations and not rare genetic variation.

The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

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Low-oxygen environments in Tibet may be promoting longevity among the local people, according to a study by Chinese researchers.

According to research by Zhang Yaping and Wu Dongdong at Kunming College of Life Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, elderly people from the Tibetan Plateau have a longer lifespan than their counterparts in others parts of China.

By examining 2010 census data, researchers found that the proportion of the Tibetan population over 60 years of age was significantly lower than that for the Han population.

However, among Tibetans there is dramatic rise in the ratio of proportion of people older than 91 years old.

The proportion of individuals older than 100 years of age was also higher for male (but not female) Tibetans than for Han Chinese, state-run Xinhua agency reported.

According to the findings, published in Cell Research on September 9, elderly people living on the Tibetan Plateau tend to have a longer lifespan than elderly people living at lower altitudes, suggesting an association between hypoxia and longevity.

There have also been reports of a link between longer life expectancy and living in the high altitude Andean region in America, the report said.

Genetic studies showed that low-oxygen environments can accelerate the evolution of aging-associated genes, which might offset the effect of aging and extend lifespan, the researchers said.

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A non-woven fabric unit will be set up in industrial area in neighbouring Mandideep with capital investment of Rs 223 crore by M/s Avgol India.

This was informed in a Cabinet committee meeting chaired by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan yesterday, on investment promotion, an official of the Public Relation Department said today.

"It was decided in the meeting that rebate will be provided to M/s Avgol India on project proposal as per the Industrial Policy for setting up non-woven fabric unit with a capital investment of Rs 223 crore," the official said.

Facilities will also be provided to M/S Amba Shakti industry, being set up in industrial area Bamor, with capital investment of Rs 113.43 crore, as per 2010 Industrial Policy.

Besides, the committee also decided to go for open auction for 1.86 hectares land notified in Crystal IT SEZ in Indore after fixation of base value.

It also decided that a total of 22.778 hectare land will be given to M/S Trident Ltd in Budhni in Sehore district at 25 per cent rate for composite textile project for basic and social infrastructure, he said.

Minister for Finance Jayant Mallaiya, Minister for Industries and Commerce Rajendra Shukla, Minister for Water Resources and Public Relations Dr Narottam Mishra, Minister for Revenue Umashankar Gupta, Minister for Energy Paras Jain and Chief Secretary Anthony DeSa among others were present in the meeting.

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Chief of Defence Staff of Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) Maj Gen Ahmed Shiyam today visted the Southern Naval Command here and was briefed on the training activities undertaken by it.

He arrived in the city yesterday on a three-day visit accompanied by his spouse Khateeja Naeem and an MNDF delegation.

The visiting Chief of Defence Force interacted with Rear Admiral R B Pandit, Chief of Staff, Southern Naval Command (SNC), and was briefed on Indian Navy's training activities conducted by the SNC, a Navy release said.

The delegation visited training facilities at Observer School, Indian Naval Air Squadron (INAS) 322 which has Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), Naval Aircraft Yard facilities, Joint Operation Centre and Indian Coast Guard ship C- 421, it said.

Maj Gen Shiyam also interacted with the MNDF trainees, who are undergoing training at the Indian Navy training facilities.

Khateeja Naeem had an elaborate interaction with members of Navy Wife Welfare Association, Southern Region. She also visited Kerala Folklore Museum and appreciated the cultural heritage of Kerala.

Maj Gen Shiyam, Khateeja Naeem and MNDF delegation also had a glimpse of Kerala backwater at Kumarakoram, during the visit, the release said.

The delegation would lave here Kochi tomorrow.

The Chief of Defence Force, MNDF, is on an official visit to India from September 18 to 23 to consolidate bilateral relationship between the two countries.

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A man was detained by the Army today for allegedly trespassing into their Dehradun Road camp here, police said.

Mohd Azad, a resident of Bihar's Shahpur Chitri village in Supol district, was detained by Army personnel when he entered the camp taking cover of bushes, Additional Superintendent of Police Jagdish Sharma said, adding that the Army later handed him over to the local police station.

"He is trying to prove he is mentally ill and evading questions by intelligence agencies and police," said Sharma.

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A Delhi court today sent a man to police custody for four days for allegedly murdering a 21- year-old woman by stabbing her 22 times on a busy road here in front of hoards of onlookers.

Metropolitan Magistrate Muneesh Garg remanded 34-year-old Surender Singh to police custody till September 25 after the cops produced him before the court and apprised him about his crime.

The brutal murder, which was captured in CCTV camera, took place yesterday morning when the victim, Karuna Kumar, a teacher in a North Delhi school, was going for her work, police said, adding that Surender had been stalking her for over 18 months.

Police said Karuna, along with her cousin Neha, was on her way to work when Surender attacked her with a pair of scissors near Labour Chowk in Burari. As Surender caught Karuna off guard and plunged the single blade of scissors in her body, a man rushed to stop him but soon backed off fearing attack on himself.

Within about three minutes, Surender had stabbed Karuna 22 times, as onlookers kept away, it said. Neha told police that she was also threatened by Surender and had to back off but she kept shouting for help.

The victim was taken to Sushruta Trauma Centre in Civil Lines where she was declared brought dead.

The accused was beaten up by the locals, who caught him and handed him over to the police. He was arrested and a case of murder under section 302 IPC has been lodged against him.

Surender, son of a retired Delhi Police sub-inspector, is going through divorce proceedings and has two kids.

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With increasing focus on quality control, value addition and infrastructure, marine product exports from India are projected to increase by about 20 per cent to USD 5.6 billion in 2016-17.

The Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) expects the industry will reverse the decline from last fiscal when total seafood exports stood at USD 4.7 billion.

"Marine product exports from India are projected to increase nearly 20 per cent to USD 5.6 billion in 2016-17, particularly with strides in aquaculture diversification, quality control, value addition and improved production infrastructure," the Commerce Ministry said in a statement.

It said the efforts for the sector will be demonstrated at the upcoming biennial India International Seafood Show (IISS) in Vishakhapatnam.

During the three-day function, starting from September 23, technology, sustainable practices followed in capture and culture fisheries in India to ensure quality of seafood produced for both domestic and export market would also be highlighted.

The US and South East Asia are major importers of Indian seafood.

"The show will also focus on new technologies, production infrastructure and value-added products," it added.

International and domestic exhibitors will showcase their products and services to a potential global market and explore leads and partnerships.

Of the 290 stalls booked at the exhibition, more than 70 are of foreign companies.

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Government should focus on making the banking system stronger and give them independence to find their own solutions instead of stressing on mergers, industry body said in a report released here on Wednesday.

"Mergers or consolidation of the public sector banks is certainly no answer to the present crisis, which can only be resolved by professionalising these banks with the government keeping an arm's length," President Sunil Kanoria said while presenting the report.

The body has brought out the paper on 'Convergence, Not Consolidation Answer for Public Sector Banks' which suggests that there are no quick fixes for grave problems in the public sector banking.

"Overall the economy is doing good, government has done a lot in the last two years, but investment specially in the private sector is not picking up. The solution to the problem lies differently. Instead of merging of the PSBs, the focus should be to make them stronger and larger," Kanoria said.

The report says that the government should at the present juncture look at strengthening the banking system.

With some high profile borrowers getting into litigation and facing criminal probes, the public discourse puts additional pressure on the government, to find some quick fixes for the NPA (non performing assets) ridden banks, which find themselves terribly constrained to improve lending with the credit growth well below 10 per cent, the report said.

At present, public sector banks are grappling with bad loans situation running at about Rs 4.76 lakh crore (2015-16) in the form of gross NPAs.

The government has recently cleared the proposal of merging five associate banks of SBI, alongside a newer Bharatiya Mahila Bank, with the country largest lender.

"If size of the banks had a relationship with the health of the financial sector, the Chinese banks would have been the healthiest lot. But the biggest concern before the global financial community today is the health of the Chinese banks," said D S Rawat, Secretary General .

Kanoria said Reserve Bank has introduced a lot many schemes in the last two years to clean up the banking sector woes, but most of them have not worked.

"Rather than going with the scripted mechanism, give banks the autonomy, empower their boards, let them make their own decisions. Find a case by case solution than to have a scripted solution," he added.

Unlike the present situation where financial services division in Finance Ministry is virtually the master of the PSBs, the level of the government interface with the banks should be well defined and be done only through the Banks Board Bureau, comprising people of eminence, integrity and domain expertise, the report said.
A minor fire today broke out at the ground floor of the crowded Safadarjung Hospital here, but was soon brought under control and no major damage or casualty occurred.

The fire broke out in a meter box near casualty ward of the hospital this evening.

"A call of fire at MCB box containing electricity wire and meter, near casualty ward of the hospital on ground floor was reported around 4.15 pm. Four fire tenders were rushed to the spot and the fire was controlled within a few minutes," said Atul Garg, Chief Fire Officer, Delhi Fire Service.

Although the fire was not major, smoke emitted due to burning of wire and electrical fitting in the meter box caused panic among patients, their attendants and hospital staff.

The cause of the fire was under investigation but it was suspected that the blaze broke due to overheating of the electrical wire, police said.

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Renaming of the iconic Race Course road, on which Prime Minister's residence is located, drew mixed reactions from political parties and historians with few welcoming it while others slamming the move.

The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), at a high level meeting presided by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, decided to rename Lutyens Delhi's Race Course road (RCR) as Lok Kalyan Marg.

Hailing the decision, Delhi BJP Chief Satish Upadhyay said naming roads reflecting "Indianness, culture and great men and women of the country need to be appreciated."



"We welcome the move to name RCR as Lok Kalyan Marg. Any name which reflects on the culture and greatness of the nation is good. I don't think there is any scope of making any issue out of it," Upadhyay said.

While Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken refused to comment on the development, senior party leader Manish Tiwari said "Why no Param Vir Chakra winner Abdul Hamid marg or St Teresa marg?"



Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah took to twitter over the issue saying, "It's so good to know that everything is alright with the world & we can focus on the stuff that really matters - renaming roads #7LKM"



Conservation Architect AGK Menon, who is the convener of INTACH Delhi chapter, slammed the strategy behind renaming of roads but described today's decision as "harmless" saying it has no "historical agenda".

"There is a persistent problem with renaming of roads, which has become a universal strategy of some politicians. However, this time the renaming is rather 'harmless' as it does not have any historical agenda unlike the renaming of Aurangzeb road which had stronger resonances," Menon said.

BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi, who is a member of the NDMC Council, had proposed renaming Race Course Road as Ekatma Marg based on the philosophy of the party's ideologue Deendayal Upadhyay but it was not accepted.

Also, Kejriwal had proposed to rename the road after the 10th Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, but some members were not convinced.

Last year, the Aurangzeb Road, which is also not far from the Race Course road, was renamed after former president APJ Abdul Kalam. A number of historians had criticised the move.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress today announced candidature for Nashik and Amravati Graduates constituencies for the Maharashtra Legislative Council Polls due in December.

While Sudhir Tambe is the party's nominee from the Nashik Graduates constituency, Sanjay Khodake has been nominated from the Amravati Graduates constituency, the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) said in a statement.

The tenure of the sitting members will be over on December 5. A total of 11 seats from Teachers, Graduates and Local Authorities constituencies are up for grabs.

Khodake will take on BJP MLC Ranjit Patil, who has been renominated by his party last month. Patil had been appointed as Minister of State for Home (Urban), Urban Development, General Administration, Law and Judiciary and Parliamentary Affairs.

Khodake had earlier served as officer on special duty (OSD) to late state Home Minister R R Patil and PWD minister Chhagan Bhujbal. Later, he resigned from the post to join politics.

Currently, Nagpur University Teachers' Association leader B T Deshmukh represents the Amravati graduates constituency.

Tambe, who has been re-nominated by Congress, is a relative of former state Revenue Minister Balasaheb Thorat.

BJP has nominated Prashant Patil, a relative of Union MoS Subhash Bhamre for Nashik Graduates Constituency.

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The Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics pilot project was today given an extension for a period of one year by the Delhi government which intends to set up 1,000 such new clinics in the national capital by the end of this year.

The AAP government had launched the project on a trial basis for an initial period of six months which was to end today. The decision to extend it was taken at a Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal here today.

Mohalla Clinics scheme is one of the flagship projects of the AAP government, with 105 clinics set up by the Health Department so far.

"The Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics Pilot Project has been extended for a period of one year with effect from September 22 onwards. The cabinet approval given earlier was till this date," said a senior government official.

These neighbourhood clinics were set up as a pilot project for the 1,000 clinics that the government had promised to open by the end of the year to improve primary healthcare and reduce the burden on the tertiary care centres.

Kejriwal and other AAP ministers have praised the project on several occasions, terming it a "revolutionary step" in the health sector in the national capital.

The Chief Minister has also claimed that the project has been lauded across the globe.

Yesterday, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said about 8 lakh people have got medical treatment at the clinics.

Mohalla clincs provide consultation, 110 free essential drugs, immunisation for children, 212 basic tests and counselling. Once the project is completed, even specialist doctors would visit the facilities on a rotational basis.

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Most of the issues with the government over appointment of judges to the higher judiciary have been "sorted out", Chief Justice of India T S Thakur said today, a statement that comes close on the heels of a breakfast meeting between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week.

"Most of the things have been sorted out. Some issues are there which need to be discussed. I think may be in a week or two, these issues will be sorted out. Efforts are on...," he said.

The CJI was talking to reporters on the sidelines of an event when he was asked about the MoP.

He said the long-pending Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) to govern appointment of judges to higher judiciary is expected to be ready in a week or two.

The MoP came out of the Supreme Court verdict quashing the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act and upholding the collegium system of appointments to higher judiciary.

The government had recently acceded to some demands of the collegium including removing the cap on the number of jurists and lawyers who can be appointed to the apex court as judges.

On Saturday, Justice Thakur drove to the Raj Bhavan in Gandhinagar and greeted Modi on his 66th birthday. The meeting between the two lasted about half an hour.

"CJI Shri Thakur met Narendra Modi and extended birthday greetings to the Prime Minister," PMO India said in a tweet.

Delivering the 2nd Justice J S Verma Memorial Lecture,



organised by National Broadcasters Association, CJI Thakur said Justice Verma was part of the bench which delivered the two verdicts setting in place the collegium system of appointments which he termed as "much maligned".

On the importance of freedom of speech and expression and its evolution in the seven decades of Indian independence, he said, "Freedom of press is the freedom of the people" and "if media wants to be free it has to be fair".

He said the power of the media is the public trust and referred to various apex court verdicts delivered over the years, including the 2016 judgement setting aside section 66A of the Information Technology Act, to emphasise upon the role played by the courts in upholding the freedom of speech and expression.

Speaking about Justice Verma's contribution to law, the CJI said Justice Verma was the "chief architect" of the new anti-rape law which was formulated subsequent to the brutal December 16 gangrape that happened in the national capital and shook the nation.

The CJI said Justice Verma submitted his 630-page draft on the new anti-rape law in "record 29 days" which Justice Thakur also termed as "remarkable".

He also praised Justice Verma on his landmark Vishaka judgement against the harassment of women at workplace.

The CJI also said that Justice Verma's term as head of the National Human Rights Commission heralded a "new regime in protection of human rights".
Madhya Pradesh government has created a Rs 100 crore venture fund for budding entrepreneurs with innovative ideas for setting up industries, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said here today.

A senior official of Madhya Pradesh government said they may announce a Startup Policy on October 1.

Chouhan, who was in the city on a road show for the upcoming 'Global Investors Summit-2016', also said the state has now become power surplus and would support investors with "customised packages".

"There are huge opportunities for heavy to small scale industries in MP. Every sector has different policy. There are customised packages also for setting up industries.

"We have created a venture capital fund of Rs 100 crore. If somebody with an innovative idea wants to set up an industry, we will invest in the company. After the company becomes successful then we will withdraw the amount and invest in other company," Chouhan told reporters on the sidelines of the investors' meeting.

He said MP, which was "sick state" ten years ago, is now zooming with 10 per cent annual growth rate.

According to him, the agriculture sector has been growing at over 20 per cent for the past four years.

Inviting investors to the central Indian state, Chouhan said Madhya Pradesh is quite ideal for setting up industries as it has huge land bank and industry-friendly policies.

"There is no inspection Raj. There is no harassment or red tapism in the government," he added.

A senior official of the state government said Madhya Pradesh received investment proposals worth over Rs 6 lakh crore during the Global Investors' Summit held in 2014, with over 50 per cent if it translating into reality.

This year the summit will be held on October 22 and 23 in Indore, the commercial capital of MP.

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More infrastructure needs to be built in the north-eastern region, which shares borders with five countries, to enhance trade and commerce with the neighbouring nations, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar said today.

The north-eastern region, comprising of eight states, are backward and the untapped resources of the region cannot be utilized without building proper infrastructures, Sarkar told in his inaugural address at the three-day 'North East Connectivity Summit', which began here today.

"The region has international borders with five neighbouring countries. For developing better connectivity with those countries more infrastructure needs to be built. We need more roads, more rail tracks, more generation of power and then only Look-East policy, renamed as Act East policy, would be more meaningful", Sarkar said.

He said, "The relation between Bangladesh and India is very good and the neighbouring country is helping us immensely."



However, he criticized the central government for not properly addressing the issues of the people of the region.

"People of this region are poor, but the central government is not addressing the issues properly," he said.

Bibek Debroy, Member NITI Aayog said, Dhaka is just 150 km from Tripura's capital Agartala, Chittagong port is just 75 km from Tripura's border and Ashuganj river port is very near (50 km).

He said, Agartala-Akhaura rail link is being set up to connect north-east with Bangladesh and Akhaura check post is being modernized and many border haats (markets) are being set up to enhance trade with Bangladesh.

"These are all positive developments to build connectivity and boost trade relations," he added.

Chairman of FICCI NE advisory Council, Ranjit Barthakur said, the summit was organized by FICCI with support from the Tripura government to present a glimpse of the emerging opportunities for business in the state and connectivity was one of the core issues impacting economic development in the region.

Representatives from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Japan, Russia and other north eastern states also participated in the summit which would end on September 23.

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Changing the name of Race Course road to Lok Kalyan Marg sends a message as the Prime Minister's residence is located on it, Union Urban Development minister M Venkaiah Naidu today said.

In posts on twitter, Naidu lauded the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) for its decision.

"Compliments to NDMC, for deciding to change the name of Race Course Road into Lok Kalyan Marg," Naidu said in a post.

"It's a name with message as the PM's house is situated in that road," he added.

The decision to change the name of the road was taken at a high-level meeting of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) presided by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

As a result, the Prime Minister's residential address will now be 7 Lok Kalyan Marg and not the famous 7 Race Course Road.

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Nickel prices softened 0.36 per cent to Rs 684.70 per kg in futures market today as speculators trimmed positions amid a weak trend overseas and low demand from alloy makers at the spot market.

At the Multi Commodity Exchange, nickel for delivery this month traded lower by Rs 2.50, or 0.36 per cent, to Rs 684.70 per kg, in a turnover of 297 lots.

Analysts said apart of subdued demand from alloy makers in the domestic spot market, weakness in base metals at the London Metal Exchange (LME) as bulls exited after a run-up in prices. Investors awaited policy decisions from the Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve, weighed on nickel futures.

Globally, nickel for delivery in three months lost 1.3 per cent to USD 10,180 per tonne at the LME.

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In a criticism of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's rhetoric, US President said if America turned away refugees simply because they are "Muslim", it would reinforce the terrorists' propaganda and the "ugly lie" that the US is opposed to Islam.

Obama, who hosted a 'Leaders Summit on Refugees' during the 71st UN General Assembly session here yesterday, said the world was facing a refugee crisis of "epic proportions" with more than 65 million people having been driven from their homes, more than any time since the World War-II.

"Among them are more than 21 million refugees who have fled their countries - everything and everyone they've ever known, fleeing with a suitcase or the clothes on their back," he said.

"And if we were to turn refugees away simply because of their background or religion, or, for example, because they are Muslim, then we would be reinforcing terrorist propaganda that nations like my own are somehow opposed to Islam, which is an ugly lie that must be rejected in all of our countries by upholding the values of pluralism and diversity," he said at the summit attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Bangladesh Prime Minsiter Sheikh Hasina.

He highlighted that in recent years, the US has put in place intensive screening and security checks to take in refugees as well as ensure the nation's security.

"Refugees are subject to more rigorous screening than the average tourist. We've seen in America, hardworking, patriotic refugees serve in our military, and start new businesses and help revitalise communities. I believe refugees can make us stronger," he said.

"So the challenge to our security is because when desperate refugees pay cold-hearted traffickers for passage, it funds the same criminals who are smuggling arms and drugs and children.

"When nations with their own internal difficulties find themselves hosting massive refugee populations for years on end, it can risk more instability. It oftentimes surfaces tensions in our society when we have disorderly and disproportionate migration into some countries that skews our politics and is subject to demagoguery," he said.

For the past year, Trump has been warning that letting refugees in would make the US vulnerable to new terror attacks. The brash tycoon has spearked a wave of criticism over his comments on race, immigrants and refugees, including calling for a ban on Muslim travelers to the United States.

And this week, one of Trump's sons triggered an online storm with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl containing an assortment of tainted and untainted candies.
The monsoon session of the Odisha Assembly today began on a stormy note with the ruling BJD members creating ruckus over Mahanadi and Polavaram issues, leading to adjournment of the House till 3 PM.

As soon as the House assembled for the first day of the session, the ruling party members shouted slogans against the Centre and Chhattisgarh government over the Mahanadi and Polavaram issues.

Unable to run the House, Speaker Niranjan Pujari adjourned the House till 3 PM.

BJD member Byamakesh Ray was the first to stand on his seat and shout on top of his voice allegedly at a time when the National Anthem was being played in the House.

Though Leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra of Congress was seen trying to speak something, he was not allowed by the Speaker. Pujari immediately adjourned the House after the National Anthem.

"The ruling party has dishonoured the National Anthem at the direction of the Chief Minister. The Leader of the House (CM) was very much present at the House when his party member shouted during playing of the National Anthem," Mishra alleged outside the House.

"Unfortunately, the Speaker also did not caution the treasury bench member for his conduct," he told reporters.

The ruling party members, however, rejected the allegation and claimed that there was no disrespect to the National Anthem.

"Yes, a ruling party member was giving slogan in the House. But, it was much before the National Anthem was played," BJD spokesman Amar Prasad Satpathy said.

Industries Minister Debi Prasad Mishra said, "All of us have highest regards for the National Anthem. There is no point to disrespect the National Anthem."



As soon as the House was adjourned, the ruling party members including ministers marched to the Raj Bhavan and submitted a memorandum with Governor S C Jamir.

"We have raised the issue relating to violation of law of the land in regard to Mahanadi water dispute as well as Polavaram project," the Industries minister said.

The ruling party held both the previous UPA government and the present NDA government responsible for the violation of law in the Mahanadi and Polavaram issues.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As part of its plans to connect more destinations in India, Oman Air would start operating from the city from early next year.

"We are expecting to start operating from Kolkata from early next year. We are waiting for the nod from the Civil Aviation Ministry and hopefully we will get it soon. Kolkata is a potential market and we will be happy to start our operations from this city," Oman Air Regional Vice President Sunil V A told PTI here.

In fact, besides, Kolkata, Oman Air is also planning to start operations from Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu and Ahmedabad in Gujarat, he said.

Asked whether the commencement of the operations from the other two cities would be at the same time, the Oman Air official said, "Still the talks are on. The operations from these cities may start from the same time but we are surely going to operate from next year."



At present, Oman Air is operating from 11 destinations in India with 126 flights every week, offering onward connections to a number of European and African cities.

Elaborating about the operations from the city, the Oman Air official said, "From Kolkata it (the operations) will be double daily basis to all points in India. We are planning to have flights to Europe and African nations also.

"And with the number of people from West Bengal working in Oman we think there will be a good response. And we are bringing the flights here because lots of Omanis come to India for education, health check up."



Asked whether they have spoken to the state government, Sunil, who is part of a Oman Tourism delegation seeking to woo Indian tourists, said, "Once we finalise the operations we will have a word with them.

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Pakistan's lack of will in dealing with insurgents stems from its "India phobia", its military and civilian tensions and its trust deficit with neighbours, Afghanistan's foreign minister has said while demanding the dismantling of "safe havens" in to defeat terrorism.

"The way behaves is because they have India phobia, there are military and civilian tensions and there is trust deficit between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Salahuddin Rabbani said here when asked what motivates in dealing with insurgent groups and its "lack of will" to help deal with Taliban and other terror groups.

In a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday, Rabbani said out of these three reasons, Afghanistan and Pakistan can work on the issue of the trust deficit.

"After the formation of the national unity government, we did our best to go and work with Pakistan and we tried to open a new chapter of relations. On India phobia and the military and civilian tensions of the Pakistani leaders, this is something that they (Pakistan) have to sort it out," he said.

He said Afghanistan does not expect the violence and terror to subside anytime soon "as the Taliban and affiliate groups are sustained with logistical, financial and material support from elements in Pakistan."

Kabul has repeatedly underscored that terrorism will not be defeated in Afghanistan or elsewhere "as long as the distinction between good and bad terrorist continues" coupled with the lingering problem of terrorists' safe havens and sanctuaries which remain unaddressed.

"As our fight against terrorism continues, we have not closed the widow of opportunity for peace and reconciliation with the elements of armed opposition ready to give up violence. Yet we know that any prospect for the success is strictly contingent on the extent to which the government of Pakistan is ready and willing to clamp down on extremist groups," he said.

On the safe havens provided to terror groups in Pakistan, he said the spike in violence in Afghanistan shows that terror groups have continuous support "from somewhere" otherwise they would not have been able to fight in several provinces at the same time.

"We saw where their leader (Mullah Akhtar Mohammad) Mansour got killed," he said referring to the Taliban leader killed in an airstrike in Pakistan in May this year.

"Their sanctuaries, bases are somewhere in Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership should take this seriously and should make sure that these groups don't operate in those areas," Rabbani said.
Prime Minister has held a telephonic conversation with Pakistan's powerful Army Chief General Raheel Sharif ahead of his speech at the UN in which he is expected to raise the Kashmir issue, amid signs he may tone down his rhetoric to reduce tensions with India.

An official from the Prime Minister's Office said the two on Tuesday night discussed the situation in Kashmir and tense relations with India after the terrorist attack on an Indian army camp in Uri on Sunday in which 18 soldiers were killed.

Sharif had a plan to forcefully highlight the Kashmir violence, but the scenario changed after Uri terrorist attack which spotlighted the issue of cross-border militancy.

"The prime minister might strike a balance in his speech. He would talk about the Indian atrocities in Kashmir but also would be conciliatory to end tension," said the official.

Sharif may also offer proposals to address the Kashmir issue, including emphasis on implementing UN resolutions and the mediatory role of the community.

No statement was issued after the talks between the two Sharifs, which was their first contact since the Uri attack.

Geo TV reported that the conversation between the two leaders show that the situation after Uri attack was serious.

The Uri incident was one of the deadliest attacks on Indian Army in recent years, as heavily-armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed.

India's DGMO Lt Gen Ranbir Singh has said the four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings and that initial reports indicated that they belonged to Pakistan-based Jaish-E-Mohammed group.

Sharif is poised to address the 71st UNGA session in New York later on Wednesday.
A 17-year-old Christian boy has been arrested under Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws for sharing on Facebook an "inappropriate" photograph of Kaaba in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, police said today.

"We have arrested Nabil Masih, for sharing a page on Facebook which had derogatory content about Kaaba, the holy place of Muslims," said Muhammad Jamil, police officer of Phoolnagar police station, Kasur district of Punjab province.

Nabil is the resident of Deena Naath village of Kasur, some 50 km from Lahore.

Jamil said Nabil has been booked under blasphemy law of Pakistan Penal Code. He faces upto 12 years imprisonment under the charges.

"Police acted on the complaint of Nabil's neighbour who alleged that he checked the Facebook ID of Nabil and found him having 'liked andshared' blasphemous photograph of holy Kaaba which hurt his sentiments and of other Muslims," Jamil said.

Soon after arresting and registering FIR against Nabil police sent himto jail, anticipating attack on the police stationby angrylocals in the area.

Nabil's father, two brothers and three sisters had to leave the village to avert any possible attack on them.

"Police reached the village in time and managed to stop the people from taking law into their hand," Jamil said.

The enraged people wanted to burn the house of Nabil but the police stopped them from doing so.

"Had Nabil not been arrested, a law and order situation could have arisen in the village," the police officer said.

Allegations of blasphemy can trigger beatings and mob violence in the conservative Muslim-majority country, which has strict blasphemy laws including the death penalty.

A Christian couple were lynched and burnt in Punjab in 2014 after being falsely accused of desecrating the Quran.

Rights campaigners say blasphemy laws are often used to settle personal disputes in Pakistan.

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on Wednesday said its nuclear programme "cannot be limited" and the world should first put an end to India's atomic activities, a day after the US asked Islamabad to exercise restraint in its nuclear ambitions.

Pakistan's Permanent Representative to the UN Maleeha Lodhi, addressing a joint press conference with Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry here, said US Secretary of State John Kerry had urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to limit Pakistan's atomic programme.

However, she said it had been conveyed to the US Secretary of State that the proposals which were expected from should also be implemented by India.

"Pakistan's nuclear programme cannot be limited," Lodhi said.

"The world should first put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India," she was quoted as saying by Pakistani media.

On Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz's meetings with the foreign ministers of Austria, Switzerland and Japan, Lodhi said, "Pakistan's inclusion in the Nuclear Suppliers Group was discussed during the meeting."



Chaudhry claimed that no other state had acted against terrorism as much as Pakistan.
Palestinian municipal polls scheduled for October 8 were postponed today after a court delayed a ruling on whether to hold the first vote since 2006 to include both Fatah and Hamas.

The Palestinian high court in the Fatah-led West Bank put off its ruling until October 3, only five days before the scheduled date for the elections.

Two weeks of campaigning are usually allotted for Palestinian elections and had been set to begin on Friday.

In response, the electoral commission confirmed that the October 8 date "is no longer applicable." It set no new date.

On September 8, the court suspended the elections following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists.

It had left open the possibility that they could be re-scheduled for the same date if the dispute was resolved, but Wednesday's announcement by the electoral commission was widely anticipated.

Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012, but it was due to participate this year.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that Wednesday's court ruling amounted to "a cancellation of the electoral process."



Fatah and Hamas have not contested an election since 2006 parliamentary polls, which Hamas won -- sparking a conflict that led to near civil war in Gaza the following year.

Abu Zuhri called the latest move a Fatah ploy "to escape (new) elections."



This year's vote was planned with 81-year-old president Mahmud Abbas under heavy political pressure as opinion polls have suggested most Palestinians would like him to step down.

There has been no Palestinian presidential election since 2005 and Abbas has remained in office despite the expiry of his term.

Some analysts saw Abbas's decision to call the elections as a failed gambit since he may have been hoping Hamas would repeat its 2012 boycott.

Abbas is currently in New York ahead of his UN General Assembly address on Thursday.

Despite repeated reconciliation attempts, Hamas and Fatah have failed to bridge their differences and form a unified administration for the Palestinian territories.

The October vote was to choose municipal councils in some 416 cities and towns in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

It is seen by some analysts as a test of whether Hamas and Fatah can take a significant step towards reconciliation.

Their divisions are viewed as among the key obstacles in efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, at a standstill for more than two years.

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In a first, scientists have successfully teleported a photon - particle of light - over a distance of six kilometres, an advance that may enable secure communication without having to worry about eavesdropping.

Researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada, led by professor Wolfgang Tittel, set a new record for distance of transferring a quantum state by teleportation, using fibre optics cable infrastructure.

"Such a network will enable secure communication without having to worry about eavesdropping, and allow distant quantum computers to connect," said Tittel.

The experiment is based on the entanglement property of quantum mechanics, also known as "spooky action at a distance" - a property so mysterious that not even German physicist Albert Einstein could come to terms with it.

"Being entangled means that the two photons that form an entangled pair have properties that are linked regardless of how far the two are separated," said Tittel.

"When one of the photons was sent over to City Hall, it remained entangled with the photon that stayed at the University of Calgary," he said.

Next, the photon whose state was teleported to the university was generated in a third location in Calgary and then also travelled to the City Hall where it met the photon that was part of the entangled pair.

"What happened is the instantaneous and disembodied transfer of the photon's quantum state onto the remaining photon of the entangled pair, which is the one that remained six kilometres away at the university," said Tittel.

One of the critical pieces of infrastructure that support quantum networking is dark fibre.

Dark fibre, so named because of its composition - a single optical cable with no electronics or network equipment on the alignment - does not interfere with quantum technology.

This demonstration is arguably one of the most striking manifestations of a puzzling prediction of quantum mechanics, but it also opens the path to building a future quantum internet.

The study was published in the journal Nature Photonics.

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Scholars, researchers and noted personalities from around the world will congregate here tomorrow for a three-day global conclave to celebrate the legacy of Sikhism and Sri Guru Gobind Singh ahead of the grand 350th birth anniversary of the tenth Sikh Guru.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar will inaugurate the event at the Sri Krishna Memorial Hall which would be followed by a visit to the gurudwara in Patna Sahib, the birthplace of Sri Guru Gobind Singh.

The 'International Sikh Conclave' is being held from September 22-24 as a precursor to the impressive ceremony lined up by the Bihar government in January to mark the 350th year of the birth of the tenth Sikh Guru.

"Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, Union minister S S Ahluwalia, former chairman of National Commission for Minorities Tarlochan Singh and New Zealand MP Kanwal Singh Bakshi are among the personalties scheduled to attend the programme. Besides, some Sikh ministers in Canada have also been invited," a senior official told PTI.

Patna Sahib gurudwara or Taht Shri Harmandir Sahib, located in the old city in east Patna, is considered one of the holiest places in the world by the Sikh community, and with the grand anniversary celebrations next year, Bihar is also seeking to reposition itself on the global tourist map by leveraging his iconic legacy.

"This conclave also is to spread the word about the grand event to be held on January 5, preparations for which are in full swing. We want to present Bihar's best and all departments are working in tandem to execute it successfully," the official said.

The conclave to be attended by around 200 delegates would also have scholars of Sikhism, who would present papers on different aspects of the religion.

"On September 23, three panel discussion are lined up -- 'Sri Guru Gobind Singh: A spiritual saviour and crusader of rights', 'Sri Guru Gobind Singh: A poet par excellence' and 'Sikhism: A faith of love and humanity'. On the last day, a discussion would be held on the topic of 'Contributions of Sikhs to the Nation'," he said.

Cultural programmes would be an added attraction to the global event.

Musicians like Rabbi Shergill and Diljit Dosanjh would also be performing, he said.

A coffee-table book on Sri Guru Gobind Singh would also be launched on the occasion.

"The event would be closed by Governor Ram Nath Kovind. This would be an important event as Bihar gears up for the mega 'Prakashotsav' (festival) next year," he said.

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Punjab Fair Price shop owners today alleged that the SAD-BJP government has not paid them Rs 150 crore of their dues for the distribution of foodgrain under the government's flagship 'Atta-Dal' scheme.

"We have not been paid about Rs 150 crore by the state government which has been pending for a long time," Punjab Depot Holders Union president Gurjinder Singh Sidhu told reporters here.

He claimed that as many as 26,000 depot holders have not received Rs 25 per quintal as commission for distributing wheat to beneficiaries in the state.

Moreover, the state government has also "failed" to reimburse transportation cost for delivering wheat from godowns to the beneficiaries' houses.

"The total outstanding amount of non-payment of commission and transportation is about Rs 150 crore," he claimed.

Depot holders also charged the food and supplies department with demanding money for the release of the money.

"The government has released money to the food and supplies department for the payment of our commission one year back. But the department officials are not releasing our payment and even some of their agents are demanding Rs 1,000 per depot for release of commission," he alleged.

Sidhu said to protest against the non-payment of their dues, four depot holders went on hunger strike at Mohali. "We will continue to fight against the government for our rights," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The monthly pension of freedom fighters, including those who were incarcerated in Cellular jail in Andaman Islands or suffered outside British India, was hiked by around Rs 5,000 each on Wednesday.

The decision to give 20 per cent enhanced pension to all categories of freedom fighters, their spouses and dependents was taken at a meeting of the Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The revised scale of pension has taken effect from August 15, 2016 and the revised total amount of pension will be taken as basic pension for the respective categories of freedom fighter pensioners for calculating Dearness Relief, an official statement said.

The existing Dearness Relief system based on All India Consumer Price Index for Industrial workers, which was so far applicable to freedom fighter pensioners on annual basis, is being discontinued and replaced by the Dearness Allowance system applicable to central government employees twice a year.

This will be termed as "Dearness Relief", the appropriate term in case of pensioners, it said.

Pension for freedom fighters in the category of ex-Andaman political prisoners and their spouses has been enhanced from Rs 24,775 to Rs 30,000 per month.

Pension of freedom fighters, who suffered outside British India, has been raised from Rs 23,085 to Rs 28,000 per month.

Pension of other freedom fighters, including those who were members of Indian National Army (INA), has been raised from Rs 21,395 to Rs 26,000 per month.

Addressing the nation on the 70th Independence Day from the Red Fort, the Prime Minister had announced a 20 per cent hike in the pension for freedom fighters.

Central freedom fighter pensioners and eligible dependents under 'Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension' will get enhanced pension with effect from August 15, 2016.

All freedom fighters and spouses and dependent parents, eligible daughter pensioners of deceased freedom fighters drawing pension under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme, 1980 would be benefited by the decision.

So far, 1,71,605 freedom fighters and their eligible dependents have been sanctioned pension under the scheme.

At present 37,981 freedom fighters and their eligible dependent pensioners are covered under the scheme. Of these, 11,690 are freedom fighters themselves, 24,792 are spouses (widows/widowers) and 1,490 are daughter pensioners.

(Reopens DEL23)

In 1969, the central government had introduced the 'Ex-Andaman Political Prisoners Pension Scheme' to honour the freedom fighters who had been incarcerated in the Cellular Jail at Port Blair.

In 1972, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of country's Independence, a regular scheme for grant of freedom fighters' pension was introduced.

Thereafter, with effect from August 1, 1980, a liberalised scheme, namely the 'Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme' was implemented.

Besides the freedom fighters, spouses (widows/widowers), unmarried and unemployed daughters (up to maximum three at any point of time) and parents of deceased freedom fighters are eligible for pension under the scheme.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Online furniture marketplace Pepperfry has raised Rs 210 crore in a fresh round of funding from current investors Goldman Sachs, Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Zodius Technology Fund.

This is the largest investment raised by a vertical- focused, pure-play e-commerce company in India this year.

The funds will be used to scale Pepperfry's logistics and service network and to expand the footprint of Pepperfry Studios' (experience centres), it said in a statement.

Over three million customers have transacted on the platform in the last five years, it added.

The latest round brings the total funds raised by the company to USD 160 million.

Founded by former eBay executives, Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah, the Mumbai-based company had raised USD 100 million in July last year.

It clocked gross sales of Rs 1,000 crore in March 2016 and aims to triple this by March 2018.

With over 10,000 merchants, Pepperfry operates through 17 fulfilment hubs and has a delivery fleet of over 400 vehicles. So far, Pepperfry has launched 10 Pepperfry Studios in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru.

"In these next few months, Pepperfry Studio coverage will be extended into tier II and III towns. Also, the logistics network will expand to 1,000-plus cities," it said.

Pepperfry CEO Murty said the company aims to cater to 20 million customers by 2020. "We are doing this through a differentiated, profitable business model and I thank our investors for believing in the team," he added.

The furniture market in India is unorganised to a large extent. In the online category, Pepperfry competes with the likes of Ratan Tata-backed Urban Ladder as well players like FlipkSart and Amazon.

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Megastar Amitabh Bachchan today said "Pink" has already become a movement providing women with the opportunity to speak out.

"'Pink' is no longer perhaps a colour. Pink no more connotes the favourite colour of a young girl and her Barbie doll. Pink means you have the freedom and liberty to walk at night. Women got the opportunity to speak out through this film," Bachchan told a press conference here.

Turning to "Pink" actress Taapsee Pannu, who was sitting by his side, Bachchan said, "You know what experiences she went through while travelling in DTC buses but she did not muster the courage to protest. The film will now teach girls like her to go to police station and lodge protest. This is the victory of 'Pink'."



Bachchan, who also described the stabbing of a woman in full public view in New Delhi as "despicable", said people lacked the courage to come the aid of victims fearing harassment at police stations and courts.

But Pink talks about the rights of women to lodge protest during day and night hours.

"Some things are common everywhere. A Swedish girl wanted to take the film (Pink) to her country. Pink has given rise to such a movement," Bachchan said adding in real life in such a situation, he would have mouthed the same lines like Pink's crusader lawyer enacted by him.

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More than 19,000 students on the small Canadian province of Prince Edward Island were evacuated today after police received a threat that bombs were placed at a number of schools. Police said nothing suspicious was found after officers searched all of the schools in the province. Threats were also received elsewhere in Canada.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Kevin Baillie said the Prince Edward Island threat came via fax today morning, and that schools on the normally sleepy island were notified within 10 minutes.

"There's been no threat found. Everybody is safe," he told reporters.

The threat was faxed to Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada's capital of Ottawa, Baillie said.

"The message stated that the bombs been had placed at a number of schools and would be detonated today," he said.

A senior police official said a "swatting" style computer distributed a threat to jurisdictions across Canada and in the US and they are trying to locate the source.

Swatting is when someone contacts emergency services to deceive officials and report a bogus threat so that emergency personnel go to a scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation.

Police in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the central part of Canada are also investigating a threat against the city's largest school division which appears similar to the one in Prince Edward Island.

Police say the Winnipeg School Division received a faxed message around 8:30 AM that contained a threat to all schools within its jurisdiction. Schools were not evacuated or placed in lockdown.

Students at more than 60 English language and French language schools in Prince Edward Island were taken to safe locations by staff outside the schools, where buses met them. Baillie said bomb threats are hard to evaluate for credibility, but said authorities like to they err on the side of caution. "This disrupts a lot of lives," he said.

Parents and guardians were asked to wait for further instructions before picking up their children.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he empathized with parents.

"As a parent I know how worrisome this type of situation can be. I know the affected parents must be having a difficult day," Trudeau said.

Parker Grimmer, the island's director of public schools, said police contacted the school system today morning about "a threat that was of a significant nature" and asked for the evacuation of all schools. He said he expects all students to return to classes tomorrow.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Concerned over the spurt in dengue and chikungunya cases, President Pranab Mukherjee today asked young doctors to strive for overcoming the deficiencies in the healthcare system so that such vector-borne diseases become a thing of the past.

Noting that the ratio of doctors in the country is far less in comparison to international standards especially in the rural areas, Mukherjee said the cooperation of the young doctors will help the government to build the health infrastructure in the country.

Recalling his years of growing up in his native West Bengal, Mukherjee while speaking at the centenary celebrations and convocation of Lady Hardinge Medical College here, said he witnessed villages falling prey to epidemics like cholera, small pox, tuberculosis and plague.

"Invariably I used to see advertisements in railway stations and in every post office issued by the public health department of the then state government -- be careful of mosquitoes - mosquitoes are the death symbol. It was so prevelant," he said.

"Of course new situation has emerged. Old diseases are no longer prevailing. Due care have been taken to remove them from the society. Medical research and science has made substantial contribution.

"But at the same time, in the new century and in the new mellinium we have to face new problems. I request you (young doctors) to always keep in mind certain basic facts - our deficiencies. It is on your young shoulders again to substantially meet that deficiency," Mukherjee said.

He said India has one doctor per 1,700 people against international standard ratio of one doctor per 1,000 and the situation is more alarming in the rural areas, where the shortage of surgeons is as high as 83.4 per cent.

"So we can apprehend and also appreciate the huge dimensions of building up the health infrastructure particularly in the rural sector and your (young doctors) cooperation and sympathetic hands will no doubt help the government of the day to overcome the problem," he said.

The President advised the young graduating doctors to be proud of the skills instilled in them by the college to face challenges of the competitive world.

"Be truthful, be virtuous, have compassion and never deviate from your own conviction," he said.

He further asked them to be learners, students, and innovators and researchers as they go forward in their profession.

President Mukherjee said that during the 190 years of



"colonial exploitation", India was "forced" to get accustomed with names of the rulers and most of them have been forgotten but certain names like Lady Hardinge left a permanent impression in the minds.

"In our long history of 190 years of colonial rules, we were forced to get accustomed with so many names of our colonial rulers and personalities. Most of them we have forgotten today. We wanted to forget along with the end of 190 years of colonial exploitations.

"But certain names which are associated with the colonial era have left a permanent impression in our mind like Bethune, and one such name is Lady Hardinge who thought of providing medical education to girl students and establish an exclusive college," Mukherjee said.

He said that while the college was established in 1917, the British women got the right to vote in the Parliament elections in 1924.

"Seven years before, Lady Hardinge thought of providing modern scientific medical education to Indian women, I appreciate that," Mukherjee said.

The President termed doctors as the most important component of the society, who have a tremendous responsibility to provide healthcare to the needy.

He asked them to focus on providing their services in the rural and far flung areas to strengthen the medical infrastructure in the country.

Terming the convocation as an important milestone in the life of both teachers and students, Mukherjee said that while the students are rewarded for their hard work, faculty members have satisfaction as they feel that from raw materials they have produced a finished product which will be of immense service to the nation.

(REOPENS DES 24)



Noting that public health needs are ever increasing in India, Mukherjee called on the young doctors to regularly focus on medical facilities away from the cities, in the smaller towns and villages.

Talking about the shortage of doctors in rural areas, Mukherjee said the shortage of obstetricians and gynaecologists is 76.3 per cent, paediatricians 82.1 per cent and general physicians 83 per cent at the level of the Community Health Centres (CHCs).

"The overall shortage translates to 81.2 per cent as of the year 2015," he said.

Asking doctors to be consistently sensitive and empathetic towards the patients, Mukherjee said it is this attitude that should always guide them, before the drugs and medicines prescribed by them begin to give their required effect.
Punjab DGP (Law and Order) Hardip Singh Dhillon today reviewed security situation in the border districts of Pathankot, Gurdaspur and Amritsar in the backdrop of the Uri terror attack.

"Yesterday, I went to Gurdaspur and Pathankot. Today I went to Amritsar," Dhillon said, adding he had already visited Batala, Tarn Taran.

The DGP said, "The Punjab government had already earmarked Rs 45 crore for procuring modern equipment, including anti-land mine and bullet proof vehicles, UAVs, thermal image sensors to meet any sort of eventuality."



"Some of the equipment have already been procured and some are under procurement," he said.

Meanwhile, Pathankot SSP Rakesh Kaushal said the DGP met policemen, including chowki in-charges and police line staff, and stressed on night patrolling and vehicle checking, especially in the border areas.

"DGP asked policemen to be prepared to thwart any terror attack," Kaushal said.

In a presentation, the DGP was apprised about activities of the forces and the challenges they faced.

The DGP was told police need to be equipped with more weapons, including AK-47s, gadgets and bullet-proof jackets.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi's roadshow will enter Mathura on September 26 as part of his ongoing 'Deoria to Dilli kisan yatra'.

The rally will pass through the major areas of Vrindavan and Mathura before converging into a general gathering at the Jubilee Park in the central part of the city.

Gandhi and other part office-bearers will address the gathering, Congress district unit president Aabid Hussain said.

Hussain said at present there are three different road shows by Congress which are going on in the state. Besides Gandhi, Congress' chief minister nominee Shiela Dikshit and party state unit president Raj Babbar are also touring the start as part of the "27 saal - UP behaal" programme.

He said the party workers are gearing up to welcome the Congress vice president, who is making an aggressive pitch to woo voters in the poll-bound Uttar Pradesh.

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The Rajasthan government on Wednesday announced a package for the family of army jawan Hawaldar Nimb Singh who was killed in the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir.

Singh was a resident of Rajsamand district.

Under the package, Rs 20 lakh will be given to his widow.

Bhim MLA Hari Singh Rawat will hand over the cheque to her tomorrow, a release said.

The package was announced on Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje's direction.

The government higher primary school at Biliawas gram panchayat in Rajsamand will also be named after the jawan, the release added.

Besides, his widow or son or an unmarried daughter will also be given a government job, it said.

Singh's children  four daughters and a son  will get free education in a government school, college, technical institute or medical or engineering college, along with scholarships, it added.

Other facilities to be accorded to his family include free travel passes in state buses and a monthly allowance of Rs 900 for his widow, the release said.
Sri Lanka's election commission today told former president Mahinda Rajapaksa-backed Joint Opposition that it was not possible to register any new political party at the moment.

"They asked me about issues which may affect the registering of a new party, I told them currently it would not be possible due to local councils elections in Maritimepattu and Puthukuduyrippu," Mahinda Deshapriya, Chairman of the Elections Commission.

Under the Sri Lankan election laws no registrations of new political parties are accepted by the Elections Commission amidst a declaration of an election.

The Mahinda Rajapaksa backers who call them the Joint Opposition (JO) want to form a new political party to challenge the President Maithripala Sirisena's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).

They are unhappy with Sirisena forming a unity government with the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's United National Party (UNP).

The Rajapaksa backers met the elections chief today to ask him to hold the local council elections for over 300 councils throughout the island.

"We expressed opposition to the continued denial by the government of people's right to vote," Dallas Alahapperuma, a JO member told reporters.

The local government minister Faiszer Musthapha maintains that election could only be held early next year after the conclusion of the delimitation work related to determining the wards in each council.

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Shiv Sena today said Pakistan should be given a reply in its own language and sought to know from Prime Minister Narendra Modi what exactly he is going to do in response to the audacious Uri terror attack that left 18 jawans dead.

Asserting that talks with Pakistan is not going to yield any positive result, Sena President Uddhav Thackeray said it was high time the neighbouring country was given a reply in its own language.

Sena mouthpiece 'Saamana' carried a stinging editorial, the second on the issue since the September 18 assault, needling Modi, saying mere statements would not serve any purpose as happened after the Pathankot attack in January.

"Talking with Pakistan won't work now. It is now high time that it is answered in its own language. If war (with Pakistan) is to take place, it should be for well-being of the nation, not for votes. When will we finally understand Pakistan's language," Thackeray told reporters here.

Asked if he had spoken to the Prime Minister on the issue, Uddhav said, "he must be busy talking to Pakistan right now. When he gets free, we will talk."



Thackeray, whose party is a long-time ally of the BJP, said the Uri strike has set off a wave of anger among the masses and Modi is well poised to take definite action against the neighbouring country owing to the overwhelming majority the saffron outfit has in the Lok Sabha.

"If you keep doing what the previous Governments did, how can you say there is an atmosphere of change in the country? It seems the Government is of the view that those who want to shed tears may do so, we will continue to go to Pakistan to have tea and continue to welcome their artists and sports-persons here," he said.

He said people have made Modi the Prime Minister trusting the promises he had made ahead of elections, which now needs to be fulfilled.

"This is not the first time they have attacked us. They recently stabbed us with the Pathankot attack. There is no use of merely expressing anger against Pakistan."



Dubbing Pakistan as a "shameless" country that would not be affected by any international condemnation, Saamna editorial demanded "revenge" on the neighbour and asked the PM to spell out how exactly he is going to respond to the Uri attack.

"While the PM says Pakistan will be taught a lesson and would not be allowed to go scot-free after killing our soldiers, he needs to clearly state what exactly will he do. He had made similar statements after the terror strike at Pathankot air base," the Sena organ said.

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Unidentified robbers today looted Rs 37 lakh in cash and gold jewellery from a Canara Bank branch at Transport Nagar in Chhattisgarh's Korba district, police said.

The incident occurred around 10.30 AM when six people, wearing masks and carrying fire-arms, entered as soon as the branch opened, locked the bank staff and some customers in a room, and forced one of the employees to open the safety vault at gunpoint, District superintendent of police D Shravan said.

They took away Rs 37 lakh in cash and some gold jewellery but did not touch the worn out currency kept at the counter, the SP said, adding that the culprits appeared to be professionals.

They also took away CCTV camera and DVR (digital video recorder) in the bank, but police collected substantial footage from other CCTV cameras in the area and probe was on, Shravan said.

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The families of Delhi Fire Services personnel who lose their lives while on action will now be provided Rs 1 crore compensation, a policy of the Delhi government which until now covered other uniformed services personnel.

A decision in this regard was taken today in a Delhi Cabinet meeting presided over by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

The Cabinet approval brings Delhi Fire Services on par with the armed forces, paramilitary forces and other uniformed forces in terms of compensation, an official statement said.

"This compensation policy also covers the uniformed personnel killed on duty outside Delhi, but whose families reside in the national capital," it said.

The government also cleared a proposal to institute "bravery awards", which it said will be given on Independence and Republic Day every year.

"Ten awards will be given on both the days, carrying a cash amount of Rs 2 lakh each. Members of the public will have a right to send nominations for these awards," the government said.

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Russia today said a Predator drone from the US-led coalition flew over an aid convoy in Syria when it was destroyed, denying again that it bombed the humanitarian column.

"The evening of September 19 in the sky over that area at a height of 3600 metres and moving at a speed of 200 kilometres per hour there was an attack drone from the international coalition that took off from the Incirlik air base in Turkey," Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

"What is more the aircraft entered the area over the town of Orum al-Kubra, where the convoy was located, several minutes before it burst into flames and left 30 minutes later," he said.

Russia's military did not directly accuse the US-led coalition of carrying out a drone attack on the column but pointedly said that the aircraft is capable of "carrying out high-accuracy strikes".

Moscow and Washington are locked in a bitter war of words over the attack on the aid trucks and a warehouse on Monday that killed around 20 civilians.

A US official told AFP that Washington believes Russian aircraft carried out the strike and that there were two Su-24 jets operating in the area at the time.

Konashenkov once again denied Moscow's jets carried out any air strikes on the convoy and said that "they were not even in that area".

The Syrian government has also denied that it carried out the attack.

The Russian military spokesman said that the US and its allies in the coalition were making the allegations against Moscow to distract attention from a deadly strike against Syrian regime forces over the weekend.

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AfricaRice est un Centre de recherche du CGIAR  un partenariat mondial de la recherche agricole pour un futur sans faim. AfricaRice est aussi une association intergouvernementale composee de pays membres africains. Pour plus dinformations, visiter : www.AfricaRice.org
Top security experts from South Asian countries, except Pakistan, will meet here for two days beginning tomorrow to mull ways to strengthen the anti- terrorism mechanism in the region.

India is hosting the second meeting of the High Level Group of Eminent Experts to strengthen the SAARC anti- terrorism mechanism from September 22-23, an official statement said.

The meeting was recommended by the SAARC Ministerial Declaration on Cooperation in Combating Terrorism, adopted by the 31st Meeting of SAARC Council of Ministers in Colombo, in 2009.

However, the meeting will not be attended by Director General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan Aftab Sultan, amid the ongoing hostility between India and Pakistan over terror attack in Uri.

It is being hosted by Director of Intelligence Bureau Dineshwar Sharma and intelligence chiefs of all other SAARC nations -- Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Maldives besides India -- will participate.

The meeting is in line with the high priority India attaches for regional cooperation in anti-terrorism activities and given that terrorism remains the single biggest threat to peace, stability and progress in the region and beyond.

The meeting provides a platform for discussing and identifying measures to tackle this menace threatening our societies.

The meeting will review the functioning of the existing anti-terrorism mechanisms in the region including the SAARC Terrorist Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD) and the SAARC Drug Offences Monitoring Desk (SDOMD), intelligence sharing and police cooperation.

It will also discuss related issues such as combating corruption, cyber crimes, terror financing and money laundering. The high-level meeting is expected to draw recommendations to strengthen the existing mechanisms and discuss potential new areas of cooperation.

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The proposed USD 1 billion JV between global steel giant ArcelorMittal and India's largest producer of the metal SAIL will be finalised by December, Steel Minister Chaudhary Birendra Singh said today.

"I have told them (SAIL and ArcelorMittal) that JV formalities should be completed by December. It should be decided by December this year," Singh told reporters here on the sidelines of an event by Indian Chambers of Commerce.

Singh met ArcelorMittal Chairman Lakshmi Mittal in London last month and discussed the JV, which aims at setting up an automotive steel plant in India.

The meeting was also attended by SAIL Chairman P K Singh, ArcelorMittal Europe group CFO and CEO Aditya Mittal as well as Executive VP and Head of global automotive Brian Aranha -- who is leading the JV discussions on behalf of ArcelorMittal.

ArcelorMittal and the state-owned SAIL had inked a pact in May last year to explore the possibility of setting up an automotive steel manufacturing unit under a JV arrangement.

The proposed JV will construct world-class facilities for manufacturing automotive steel that will offer technologically advanced steel products for India's rapidly growing automotive sector.

The hot rolled input products for the proposed facility will be supplied by SAIL's new hot strip mill in Rourkela, Odisha, thus making the entire value chain indigenous.

The 'Maharatna' firm does not produce automotive steel and the JV will help it expand its product portfolio.

The Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal said India is forecast to become the world's third largest automobile manufacturing nation by 2026, with passenger vehicles likely to grow from around 3 million units today to over 7 million units in the next 10 years.

In an investor presentation in June 2015, it had said the proposed steel plant will come up at a major auto cluster in India.

India has four major auto clusters - Pune-Chakan belt in Maharashtra, in the outskirts of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, Sanad in Gujarat and the Gurgaon-Neemrana belt spread across Haryana and Rajasthan.

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Lashing out at the Sangh Parivar for describing 20th century social reformer Sree Narayana Guru as a Hindu saint, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan today said the move was an 'insult' to Guru and part of their political agenda to seize progressive and freedom movement idols of the country.

Inaugurating the state-wide centenary celebration of Guru's historic proclamation 'Namukku Jathiyilla' (We have no caste) here, Vijayan said it was a deliberate attempt on the part of Sangh forces to confine Guru within the compartments of a particular religion or caste.

The Chief Minister's statement came in the wake of a recent Facebook post of BJP state unit, describing Narayana Guru as the greatest "Hindu sanyasi" Kerala has ever seen.

The Chief Minister termed the debate, connected with Guru, as very 'unfortunate' and said the main objective behind itwas politics.

"There was a deliberate attempt to portray Guru as an advocate of whatever he had stood against. This is clearly an insult to Guru. The Namukku Jathiyilla proclamation made by Guru in 1916, itself was clear proof for what he was," he said.

"When the very essence of his proclamation is clear as daylight, the deliberate attempt to term him as Hindu sanyasi is going on. The danger of this propaganda should be realised by the general public and efforts should be made to check it," Vijayan said.

The CPI(M) leader said this kind of attempt by the Sangh Parivar was happening not only in Kerala, but also across the country.

"They are trying to make their own, the idols of freedom and progressive movements across the country," Vijayan said adding the right wing outfit had no role either in the freedom struggle or progressive movements in the country.

As part of their move, Sangh forces tried to portray social movement legends from B R Ambedkar to Ayyankali and Pandit Karuppan as Hindu religion reformers, he alleged.

"Actually, they all had fought against chatur varnya (caste system) and tried to free people from the terror of it. But the present efforts by Sangh Parivar is to picturise them as the advocates of what they actually stood against,"he said.

In this context, the Chief Minister also criticised BJP's argument that Onam celebration was 'Vamana Jayanthi' and not the homecoming of demon king Mahabali, which is the popular legend behind the festival.

"There were also attempts to seize the myths and legends of Keralites and distort them. The agenda behind this is to re-establish the bygone upper class hegemony," he said.

Triggering controversy, BJP president Amit Shah had greeted Keralites 'Vamana Jayanthi" during this Onam and Pinarayi Vijayan had objected to it and demanded an apology.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a queer way of driving home their point, a group of people from different religions on Wednesday sent a letter written with their blood to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to take stringent action against Pakistan.

The letter was written by Sarv Brahaman Maha Sabha (SBMS) in the wake of the recent terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir that left 18 jawans dead.

Representatives from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian communities were present in the letter writing programme, SBMS spokesman B K Sharma said.

He said the gesture signified that people belonging to all religions had the same blood in their veins.

"Strict action is required to check the massacre which is being perpetrated by Pakistan," Sharma said.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the Army in recent years, 18 jawans were killed and 19 injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the force in town in the wee hours on September 18.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear next week a PIL alleging the apathy of Delhi civic bodies which has led certain areas to look like garbage dumps and the outbreak of diseases like .

"Let it be listed for hearing on Monday (September 26)," a bench comprising Justices A R Dave and L Nageswara Rao said when senior advocate Colin Gonsalves mentioned the plea for urgent hearing.

"Certain areas falling under the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) have become garbage dumping grounds where mosquitoes are breeding," Gonsalves said.

The PIL, filed by Delhi-based doctor Anil Mittal, has sought a direction that a panel of experts be set up to ascertain the steps taken to tackle diseases like in country in general and Delhi in particular.

The senior lawyer referred to photographs, annexed with the PIL, showing heaps of garbage lying in residential areas of south Delhi and alleging that the civic body (SDMC) was not rising to the occasion.

The plea also sought directions for authorities in Delhi and the central government on how to deal with the crisis.

During the hearing, the bench, in a lighter vein, asked the lawyer as to whether the doctor has made "mosquitoes as parties" to the PIL or not.

On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court expressed concern over rise in dengue and cases and asked all city hospitals, including those run by the Centre and AAP government, not to deny treatment to patients.

It also ordered that steps be taken by both governments to increase the strength of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals by engaging "retired personnel, if so required, to meet the exigencies".

Over 2,600 chikungunya cases have been reported in Delhi till September 17 and the disease has caused 15 deaths so far. Chikungunya is a viral disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes, causing high fever and severe joint pain.
The Senate backed the Obama administration's plan to sell more than $1 billion worth of American-made tanks and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, soundly defeating a bid to derail the deal pushed by lawmakers critical of the kingdom's role in Yemen's civil war.

Senators who supported the sale said the United States can't deny its Middle East allies the weapons they need to combat Islamic State extremists and check Iran's aggression in the region.

"Blocking this sale of tanks will be interpreted by our Gulf partners, not just Saudi Arabia, as another sign that the United States of America is abandoning our commitment to the region and is an unreliable security partner," said Senator John McCain, R-Ariz, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Although a resolution against the sale failed to advance on a vote of 71-27, the measure's sponsors said yesterday the debate demonstrated that congressional support for arms sales even to a longtime and important Middle East ally isn't automatic.

They also used the time to insist that Congress play a larger role in foreign policy decisions, especially those involving the use of military force.

The war in Yemen is pitting the country's internationally recognised government and a Saudi-led coalition against the Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who are allied with army units loyal to a former president.

The Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out airstrikes in Yemen since March 2015 and thousands of civilians have been killed in the fighting, according to the UN human rights chief.

The United States is supporting the Saudi-led coalition with intelligence and logistical support, including refueling aircraft, according to senators opposed to the sale.

Most Americans are unaware of how involved their military is in Yemen, they said, adding that lawmakers never have fully discussed whether the participation advances US national security interests.

"Should Congress just lie down and be a lapdog for the president?" asked Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky, a sponsor of the resolution. "Everyone should understand that this is a proxy vote for whether we should be at war in the Middle East."

Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn , who also opposed the sale, said the Saudis have bombed areas that the US has asked them to avoid. At the same time, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are growing "by leaps and bounds," Murphy said, because the Saudis are hitting primarily Houthi and civilian targets.
Shaw Contract, a business unit of Shaw Industries Group Inc which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, is looking to penetrate into the small towns and also raise investment limit in the country.

The Bengaluru-based Shaw Contract India has been in operations for over two decades and is the second-largest supplier of commercial carpet tiles in the country with a market share of around 22 per cent, the company claimed.

Globally, Shaw which had USD 4.8-billion revenue last year is looking to invest more in the country.

With the macroeconomic growth and Shaw's projected investment, it anticipates increasing its business by 18-20 per cent annually over the next five years, Rakesh Lakra, regional VP, Shaw Contract India said but did not disclose the investment numbers.

He said in the first phase of expansion, the company will look to enter cities like Chandigarh, Pune and Ahmedabad.

The company will also be focusing more on the Northern markets, primarily the Delhi-NCR region.

Phil Decker, divisional vice president for Asia Pacific said, "India is one of the top three markets for Shaw in Asia and has growing at a rate of about 15 per cent in the past few years, and we believe there is much more potential for growth here."



The company will be investing in expanding its workforce, both in sales segment and implementing an India-specific design section. The India-focused design section will provide support for Shaw's hospitality and commercial carpet businesses, he said.

Shaw intends to develop more collections specific to Indian architecture and design requirements.

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workers in Goa on Wednesday burnt the national flag of Pakistan condemning the militant attack in Uri that left 18 jawans dead.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi during Lok Sabha elections was harping on national security as one of his main issues. But looking at the ground reality, Modi seems to have failed to address this crucial issue," Goa Chief Sudip Tamankar said addressing protesters at Azad Maidan here, after burning the flag.

"The militants are getting emboldened with every passing day, which is reflected through attacks on military bases like Pathankot and Uri. We find the country is not safe in the hands of Modi," Tamankar said.

Attacking Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Tamankar demanded that the Centre strip him (Parrikar) off from the portfolio for his "inefficiency" in handling it.

Goa chief said since Parrikar is more interested in upcoming Goa elections, he should be sent back to the party organisation for poll-campaigning rather than allowing him to handle such important portfolio.

Tamankar recalled that during 2012 Goa polls, Parrikar had assured the electorate that he will act against corrupt politicians who had looted Goa.

"But during his tenure as a Chief Minister, he failed to take action against even one corrupt politician," he added.
Threatening to sit on a fast if funds were not released for Siliguri Municipal Corporation, former CPI(M) minister and Mayor Ashok Bhattacharya today accused the TMC government of having a "vindictive attitude" towards Opposition-controlled municipalities.

He said the TMC government has "imposed an economic blockade" on the Left-controlled municipalities.

"The agenda of TMC is very clear, they want to take over all the Opposition-controlled municipalities either by force or by the use of money power. So the first step is to put an economic blockade. Either you switch over your allegiance to TMC or you won't be getting any funds from the state government," he said.

The Siliguri mayor said there are examples that once a municipality and its public representatives have switched allegiance to TMC, funds were released within next 48 hours.

"But the TMC should understand one thing that each and every public representative is not for sale. We are not for sale. The people have voted us and we can't betray them. If the state municipal affairs ministry doesn't release funds then we will start agitation. And we will also come to Kolkata and sit on fast against the vindictive attitude of the state government," he said.

(REO CES17)



Ironically, Congress MLA and chairman of Kandi



Municipality Apurba Sarkar came to the rescue of the state government and said that Bhattacharya too used to follow the same tactics of depriving opposition controlled municipalities during Left rule, especially when he was the state urban development and municipal affairs minister.

"In TMC regime we have been more or less regularly receiving funds. And Ashok Bhattacharya should not talk much, he too had deprived the opposition controlled municipalities when he was municipal affairs minister during the Left regime," Sarkar said.

Bhattacharya, however, failed to furnish proper answers to the allegations.

"These are baseless allegations. I am an elected MLA and a Mayor but the principal secretary to the state municipal affairs department is unwilling to talk to me, neither he receives my call".

Bhattacharya said he spoke to state finance minister Amit Mitra today and he had assured that he would look into the matter.

"Today when I called up Amit Mitra he said that state is going through grave financial crisis because of the debt during the Left regime. I told him that if that's the reason then no municipalities should get funds, why only Left controlled municipalities are being deprived. He said he will look into the matter," Bhattacharya said.

Led by Bhattacharya, the Siliguri Municipal Corporation has been a role model for anti-TMC parties in the state.
The Sindh Assembly today unanimously passed a resolution against exiled Mutthaida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain, demanding action against him under the treason laws for making anti-Pakistan remarks.

"The house condemns all sorts of crimes, torture, terrorism and anti-Pakistan slogans and activities carried out by any side and the most strict action should be taken against those responsible as per law and the Constitution," said the resolution which was also backed by the MQM lawmakers.

The resolution also stated that the assembly expresses solidarity with the parliament, armed forces, media, judiciary and all democratic institutions in Pakistan.

It was the first sitting of the Sindh Assembly since August 22 when the MQM chief made anti-Pakistan comments while addressing a hunger strike camp outside the Karachi Press Club which led to violence in the area and an attack on the ARY channel offices.

The MQM lawmakers supported the resolution just a day after the MQM's Pakistan leadership removed Altaf's London- based advisors from the party's top decision-making forum.

The MQM leadership in Pakistan had distanced itself from Altaf and the other leadership in London after the August 22 incident which led to the demolition of around 138 sector and unit offices of the party in Karachi by law enforcement agencies and its headquarters has also been sealed.

MQMs Leader of the Opposition in the Sindh Assembly Khawaja Izharul Hassan said, "We could have fled the country after what happened and the shame brought on the party but we decided to remain in Pakistan and deliver the party from the pressure it faced after Altaf's speech. We reached this decision without anyone dictating to us what to do."



MQM lawmaker Faisal Sabzwari said that while he supported the resolution against his party leader for his anti-Pakistan comments but what about those people from other parties who had made similar comments in the past.

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Facing flack over his absence from the national capital when the Delhi government was battling outbreak of vector-borne diseases, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today decided to hold review meetings everyday with head of different departments to ensure speedy and time-bound works.

Starting the series of such meetings, Sisodia today met with the heads of four departments- Environment, Information Technology, Revenue and Forest- at the secretariat here, two days after he returned from his official visit to Finland.

A senior government official said the Deputy CM has asked all departments to stress on outcome of schemes rather than on achieving spending targets and stating how much money was spent on particular project.

Sisodia's recent visit to Finland to study the country's education system courted controversy with Opposition saying AAP ministers was "missing" from the capital when it battled the dengue and chikungunya crises.

"The Deputy CM will hold numbers of meetings to review works of departments regularly. He has asked officers to stress on outcome instead of getting into data of estimates of various projects. From today, he has started holding meetings with HoDs," the official said.

In today's meeting, the HoDs gave presentations on their various projects and schemes.

If there is any specific point that needs to be dealt with separately, the Minister will call separate meeting, the officer said.

"The Deputy CM was upset with the forest department over tree census not being conducted. He sought to know why the department has not conducted tree census so far.

"The main purpose of the meetings is to ensure works being done by various departments are expedited," another official said.

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The only son of China's richest billionaire reportedly bought eight iphone 7s worth 9,584 USD for his pet dog on the day of its release.

Wang Sicong, 28, son of billionaire Wang Jianlin, the chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, posted two photos of the Alaskan malamute named Coco, sitting on a couch surrounded by iPhones still in their boxes last week, on the verified Weibo social media account of the dog, which has nearly 1.9 million followers.

Coco, 8, dubbed China's richest dog, posed with her black and rose gold iPhone 7 handsets, the South China Morning Post reported.

Wang Sicong, speaking as his dog's voice on the account, writes in the caption: "Not sure what people are showing off on social media about. There is nothing to show off. I was forced to take action."



The post has also gathered thousands of shares and comments.

In China, an iPhone 6 costs 6,988 yuan (USD 1,047), while the larger iPhone 7 Plus goes for 7,988 yuan (USD 1,197).

Forbes has put his father's net worth at USD 33.3 billion and is the world's 20th richest billionaire.

This is not the first time Wang Sicong has doted on Coco this way. In 2015, he attracted widespread outrage in China after posting photos of the dog wearing two Apple watches worth upwards of USD 37,000.

He's part of China's second-generation rich, the sons and daughters of tycoons that are best known for flaunting their lifestyles, the report said.

Nicknamed "the nation's husband" for his status as China's most eligible bachelor, Wang Sicong has come under fire from state media for his display of wealth.

Wang Sicong has also opened an online shop to mark her birthday, called Coco Wang, which sells a line of doggie-inspired toys and accessories, from tote bags, flasks to mobile phone cases. All of them carry cartoon illustrations of the pet.

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In an interim relief to senior advocate Nalini Chidambaram, wife of former Union minister P Chidambaram, the Madras High Court today directed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) not to proceed further on its summons, asking her to appear before it in connection with its money-laundering probe in the Saradha chit fund scam till further orders.

Passing the order on Nalini's petition seeking quashing of the last ED summons dated September 7, issued under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), Justice TS Sivagnanam said the court was inclined to grant the interim relief as not doing so would render the writ plea "infructuous".

The judge directed the Assistant Director, ED, Kolkata not to proceed further, pursuant to the impugned order (summons) and said the matter shall be kept in abeyance until further orders.

The matter relates to the "professional fee" of Rs one crore, paid to Nalini by Saradha Group chairman Sudipto Sen for her appearance in a Delhi court and the Company Law Board (CLB) on behalf of former Union minister Matang Singh's wife Manoranjana, over a deal involving the purchase of three television channels.

Sen had paid the fee as part of an agreement between him and Manoranjana.

The ED had issued the summons to Nalini, asking her to appear before it on September 29.

Alleging "political" reasons behind it, Nalini's counsel had pointed out in court that the CBI had already filed a chargesheet in the Saradha chit fund scam before a court in West Bengal and her name did not figure in it either as an accused or a witness. Yet, she was summoned by the ED.

Contending that the professional fee was received before the scam came to light, Nalini had submitted that as per section 160 of the CrPC, a woman could not be summoned by the police and the inquiry had to be conducted at her residence.

Appearing for the ED, Assistant Solicitor General G Rajagopalan had submitted that the matter was only in the stage of summons and mere summoning itself could not be assumed as the person had been made an accused.

In today's order, the judge said, "This court is of the considered view that the respondent (ED) should file counter affidavits, not only meeting the factual allegations made, but also the legal contentions raised."



Referring to Nalini's objection to summoning a woman to the police station, he said it had to be examined if the provisions of the CrPC or that of the PMLA would prevail in the light of certain judgments cited by both the sides.

The judge directed the ED to file its counter within four weeks and posted the matter to November 8.

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Chalit Manityakul, Ambassador of Kingdom of Thailand to India along with his first Secretary Ms. Chettida Kitchaiwat called on Sikkim Chief Minister Pawan Chamling at his official residence Mintokgang, here in the state.

During the interaction on September 19, the Ambassador Manityakul informed Chamling that the purpose of his visit was to enhance the already cordial relations between Thailand and the Indian state of Sikkim, a state goverment press release said today.

The ambassador also discussed the opportunities through which the bilateral relations between Thailand and Sikkim could be further enhanced through trade and investments.

Manityakul was all praise for Sikkim and was particularly vocal about the cleanliness of the state and its scenic beauty.

On the other-hand the Chief Minister, Chamling informed the ambassador that though Sikkim is a small state, it's beautiful and is the safest state in the country.

Talking about the investments Chamling informed the ambassador that Sikkim will welcome investment in agro-based industry and in tourism sector.

During the short interaction Manityakul too felt that Sikkim has a tremendous potential in tourism sector and drew comparison with Thailand when it comes to pilgrimage tourism especially Bhuddhism.

Minister Tourism, Government of Sikkim, Ugen T Gyatso and the Secretary, C Zangpo were also present during the meeting.

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Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray today said it's time the country gives Pakistan a reply in the language it understands because talks with the neighbouring nation "would not yield any result".

"Talking with Pakistan won't work now. It is now time to answer Pakistan in the language it understands. If war (with Pakistan) is to take place, it should be for well-being of the nation, not for votes. When will we finally understand Pakistan's language," Thackeray told reporters here in the backdrop of the Uri terror strike which left 18 soldiers dead.

Taking a jibe at Narendra Modi when asked if he spoke to the Prime Minister over the attack, Uddhav said, "He must be busy talking to Pakistan right now. When he gets free, we will talk."



He said there is a wave of anger among the masses over the Uri attack and that Modi is well poised to take a definite action against the neighbouring country owing to the overwhelming majority that the BJP enjoys in the Lok Sabha.

"If you keep doing what the previous government did, how can you say there is an atmosphere of change in the country? It seems that the government is of the view that those who want to shed tears may do so, we will continue to go to Pakistan to have tea and continue to welcome their artists and sportspersons here," he said.

He said people entrusted Modi the PM's chair following a series of promises he had made during his Lok Sabha election campaign which now needs to be fulfilled.

"This is not the first time they have attacked us. They recently stabbed us with the Pathankot attack. There is no use of merely harbouring feelings of anger against Pakistan," he said.

Thackeray also called for a special one-day session of Maharashtra Legislature to address the grievances of the Maratha community.

"Maratha leaders should come forward and voice their issues. There needs to be a discussion on the Atrocities Act and their reservation issue. We expect (NCP president Sharad Pawar) to raise this issue in the Parliament while we will raise it in the state Legislature," he said.

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British MPs are demanding a "grand strategic revision" in UK's policy to deal with the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group and to ensure it does not spread to Asia and Africa.

The House of Commons Defence Select Committee warned that the terrorist group, like Al Qaeda before it, could transform into an international movement with off-shoots if squeezed out of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

"The UK and coalition's strategy to counter Daesh [another name for ISIS] is predominately focused on Iraq and Syria and relies on the removal of territory from Daesh in order to eliminate it. That is a necessary, but not sufficient, strategy.

"[If] Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision," the committee's report said.

"Our counter-Daesh strategy should be as effective in Nigeria, Afghanistan or Libya as it is in Iraq or Syria. There needs to be a grand strategic discussion about the threat posed by Daesh and how we can defeat it," it added.

The UK has been taking part in air strikes against Islamist militants in Iraq since 2014 and Parliament authorised their extension to Syria last year.

The committee found there had been 550 Royal Air Force (RAF) missions in Iraq since December 2015 and 65 in Syria.

It also called on the government to put more information about the targets for air strikes in Syria into the public domain, in order to "justify and validate" its policy of military action.

Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said the UK must focus on the long-term risks.

"If Daesh transforms itself into an international movement or a network of affiliates - like al-Qaeda before it - which can survive the loss of territory - the UK government approach will need to adapt," he said.

"For example, if Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision. Assuming Daesh is squeezed out of both countries, we have to focus too on what happens next - both in other countries to which Daesh may migrate and in Syria especially where there is no shortage of other Islamist groups, just as dangerous, which are planning to take control," he added.

A UK government spokesperson said: "We have conducted over 1,000 air strikes, which is second only to the US in both countries, and have helped train more than 25,000 Iraqi forces.

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Pakistan's powerful security agencies are supporting religious extremists to "undermine" its democratically elected government's efforts to reach a reconciliation with India, British foreign policy experts have said.

At a event organised by the UK-based Democracy Forum and Henry Jackson Society, academics and global foreign policy experts sought to answer the central question of: "Is Pakistan a Victim or Perpetrator of Terrorism?"



Christine Fair of Georgetown University, Washington, addressed the topic using data for incidents of terrorism in Pakistan over the last 20 years and various surveys and case studies.

"There is ample proof that Pakistani security agencies are supporting religious extremist outfits," she said, adding that Pakistan's reliance on terrorism as a foreign policy instrument had "backfired" and they are now fighting those terrorist groups that they can no longer control.

"Whenever there appears to be a possible reconciliation with India by Pakistan's democratically elected government, the military undermine it by mounting terrorist attacks," she said at the seminar held at the University of London's Senate House last week.

Bob Blackman, a Conservative party MP, said that evidence demonstrates that Pakistan is a "perpetrator of terrorism" in Jammu and Kashmir.

He demanded that Pakistan's "illegal occupation" of parts of Kashmir should be ended.

Pakistani writer and journalist Irfan Hussain concluded that Pakistan was both a "victim and source of terrorism," while Dr Aqil Shah of Oklahoma University added that the Pakistani military's mistake was that it distinguishes between "good, bad and ugly" terrorists.

"Good groups, such as the Haqqani Network and Lashkar-e- Tayyaba, are free to roam the country collecting funds. Other groups classified as bad can still be brought under control and used by the state.

"Ugly groups, such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, are irreconcilable and are being fought by the military," Dr Shah said.

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The UN said today it was ready to resume humanitarian convoys in Syria after an attack on aid trucks and a warehouse, which left 20 people dead, triggered a suspension of deliveries.

"The preparation for these convoys has now resumed and we are ready to deliver aid to besieged and hard-to-reach areas as soon as possible," the UN's humanitarian office (OCHA) said in a statement.

The Monday attacks came as relief supplies intended for desperate Syrian civilians were being unloaded at the warehouse Orum al-Kubra, a town in Aleppo province.

Those killed included volunteers as well as a Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) staffer.

The UN announced it was suspending all deliveries yesterday morning and called for an investigation.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor group, said the attack was the result of air strikes, which if confirmed, would strongly implicate Russian or Syrian aircraft as neither opposition nor jihadist groups have air power.

An unnamed US official told AFP that Washington believed a Russian plane was responsible.

Both Moscow and Damascus have denied involvement.

Boosting aid deliveries has become a top UN priority in Syria, with convoys repeatedly blocked for security reasons, refusals by the Syrian government to grant authorisation and strict conditions imposed by opposition groups.

OCHA today restated its call for "safe, unconditional, unimpeded and sustained access to all Syrians in need, wherever they are.

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Hitting out at the Prime Minister over the Uri terror attack that left 18 soldiers dead, the AAP today alleged Narendra Modi's surprise Lahore stopover last December emboldened Pakistan and gave it "encouragement".

The city ruling party said the BJP government has no business to be in office if it cannot safeguard the nation.

It also said the Centre should ensure the families of martyrs are not "humiliated" by giving them "paltry sum" as compensation.

"The sacrifices of our martyrs must not go in vain. Pakistan has been sponsoring terror in India and it should be held accountable for this dastardly act and given a fitting response," AAP Delhi Convenor Dilip Pandey said.

He alleged "excessive encouragement" given to Pakistan by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Lahore surprise stopover has emboldened to country.

In an unannounced stopover, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had landed in Lahore on his way back from Kabul in December.

AAP also held 'shraddhanjali sabhas' in all 70 Assembly constituencies to pay tributes to the fallen soldiers.

Pandey said before Modi became Prime Minister, he made statements saying he would take tough stance against terrorism and Pakistan's involvement in such activities.

"But since he has assumed the office he is putting the nation's security at risk by his overtures to woo Pakistan," he alleged.

Pandey also attacked Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar who, he claimed, is forever occupied in Goa and has no time to monitor the country's borders.

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Congress today demanded Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's resignation in the wake of Uri attack, claiming he lacks commitment and focus, and wants to be the chief minister of Goa.

"In quick succession, we have had two dastardly attacks on army installations. This is an unfortunate novelty in the war by terrorists. Accountability should be fixed for repeated and recurring tactical, operational and strategic failures," party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.

Parrikar projects that he is either the proxy Chief Minister of Goa or wants to be the Chief Minister. In either case, the casualty cannot be India's defence, he said.

"We demand immediate remedial action and not jumlas (gimmicks). India cannot be left to fish in troubled waters. This is too serious a matter...We cannot allow our brave soldiers to become fodder. There is complete operational, tactical, strategic and logistical failure," he said.

Asked why Congress was not directly demanding the Defence Minister's resignation, Singhvi said, "You have to read between the lines...He lacks commitment, focus and interest as his attention is over a thousand kilometres south of Delhi."



Targeting the government, he wondered why is it that the Modi dispensation was attacking the Opposition through the media.

"As if constructive criticism is an anti-national act. We would be failing our democratic duty as the Opposition if we did not bring out several facets of the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in," he said.

Quoting from what Modi as the Gujarat Chief Minister had said during terror strikes in UPA days, he said,"Opportunistic and selective misuse of nationalism is the nature of BJP".

Across all parameters, there has been a deterioration in the security situation, be it in fatalities in terrorist violence, ceasefire violations, or explosion since Modi took over, the Congress leader alleged.

"This year alone, we have lost more soldiers than we have in the past six years. This is unacceptable," he said.

Singhvi said Congress has always stood with the nation and extended constructive advice to the government.

"Unless we introspect and strengthen ourselves, we will not be able to meet this threat. This threat is real and potent...We support whatever steps the government takes...," he said.

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India today told Pakistan that it has seized evidence showing involvement of Pak-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against this country.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active.

Jaishankar also told Basit about the content of GPS recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistan's role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed.

"If the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," he told the Pakistan envoy.

Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

He also reminded Basit that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India. "The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," he told Basit.

In a release, External Affairs Ministry said this year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

"Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of thirty one terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism. Foreign Secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing," it said.

Apart from GPS content, India has recovered a number of items that included communication matrix sheets and equipment, other made in Pakistan stuff like food, medicines and clothes which were conveyed to Basit.

"We now expect a response from the Government of Pakistan," Jaishankar told him.

Basit's summoning came a day after Jaishankar headed a high-level meeting, attended by senior Home Ministry officials and Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), during which the evidence recovered by Indian Army from the terrorists was shared with the MEA.

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The four terrorists who stormed an army base in Uri sector on Sunday killing 18 soldiers belonged to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and managed to sneak in by cutting the perimeter fencing of the highly-guarded army installation at two places, investigations have shown.

In an indication that the terrorists were well-versed of the layout of the army base close to the Line of Control(LoC), the assailants locked the cooking room and store from outside to prevent the soldiers from leaving before setting them afire, sources privy to the probe said today.

The investigators are not ruling out "insider help" to the terrorists in view of the precise nature of the actions undertaken by the intruders once inside the army base, the sources said, adding the attackers first cut the perimeter fencing at two places.

After locking the cooking room and store, two of the terrorists started moving towards the officers quarters within the base but they were gunned down before they could inflict any further damage, they said.

The two Global Positioning System (GPS) sets recovered from the slain militants were damaged during the attack and have been handed over to the NIA, which is probing the case.

The four intruders, who had crossed in from Pakistan- occupied Kashmir(Pok) a day earlier, were affiliated to LeT as the terrorist module bore striking resemblance to the group from the same Pakistan-based terror outfit eliminated in Poonch on September 11, the sources said.

Director General Military Operations (DGMO) Lt Gen Ranbir Singh had told reporters hours after the attack that as per initial reports the slain terrorists belonged to Jaish-e- Mohammad(JeM), also a Pakistan-based terror outfit.

"All four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings. Initial reports indicate that the slain terrorists belong to Jaish-E-Mohammed tanzeem," Lt Gen Singh had said.

The terrorists both at Uri and Poonch were carrying small plastic bottles containing a concoction of petroleum jelly and gelatin which was used to set the soldiers' tents on fire, the sources said.

Various intelligence agencies probing the bloodiest



attack on army in Kashmir in 27 years believe that the attack could be handiwork of LeT, which has been induging in shallow infiltration -- a strategy to target the first available security installation by the infiltrators after crossing the LoC.

The NIA yesterday registered a case to probe the terror attack at the Army installation in Uri.

The NIA took over the investigation from the Jammu and Kashmir Police, which had registered a case on Sunday, and began probe by collecting evidence available with the Army formation at Uri.

The NIA team led by Inspector General G P Singh has been camping in Uri since its arrival here yesterday. The team will collect the DNA samples of the four unidentified terrorists and their pictures would be shown to militants lodged in various jails of the state as well as other parts of the country.

The NIA team would prepare a dossier and may make a formal request to Pakistan once the identity of the four was ascertained.

Army has also instituted an inquiry into the attack with preliminary investigation suggesting the terrorists had entered the area at least a day before mounting the brazen assault.

The inquiry besides ascertaining lapses, if any, would also suggest measures to prevent such attacks in the future as Pakistani-based groups were indulging more in "shallow infiltration", which means that terrorists strike the first available installation after crossing the Line of Control.
The United States and Russia blamed each other for Syria's failing cease-fire today, illustrating why a fractured UN Security Council has been unable for more than five years to do anything to stop the Arab country's civil war.

In a public session originally envisioned to enshrine Syria's September 9 truce, world powers were left to rue the possibility of the conflict entering an even darker phase after a series of attacks on humanitarian workers.

Washington, Moscow and the council's other nations all sought to revive the US.-Russian cease-fire deal, but seemed stuck on fundamental differences old and new: Who bears ultimate responsibility for the war and whose actions over the last days scuttled perhaps the best opportunity for peace?



"Supposedly we all want the same goal. I've heard that again and again," a clearly angry U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the council, referencing oft-repeated international objectives of a united, secular and democratic Syria.

"But we are proving woefully inadequate in ... Making that happen."



Kerry outlined a litany of US complaints against Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and its chief backer, Russia.

He recited Moscow's changing narrative over a deadly attack this week on an aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counterterror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.

"This is not a joke," Kerry said, sharply criticizing those who engage in "word games" to dodge responsibility over questions of "war and peace, life and death."



Kerry offered one concrete suggestion to revive diplomatic hopes. Focused on protecting key aid routes in northern Syria, it was unclear if Russia and Syria would agree.

"To restore credibility, we must immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," he said.

The top American diplomat spoke just after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered his own set of barbs, underscoring the breakdown in trust in the 12 days since he and Kerry clinched a cease-fire agreement and a potential US-Russian military partnership against the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

The former Cold War foes and much of the international community hailed the outcome, only to watch it unravel amid an upsurge in violence that even included an accidental US strike that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers.

Unlike Kerry, who stressed the importance of Assad's government ending military operations against rebels and allowing in unfettered aid, Lavrov said the US had the biggest responsibility.

"The key priority is to separate the opposition forces from the terrorists," Lavrov said.

Responding to the wide criticism of the convoy airstrike, which American officials are blaming on Russia, Lavrov cited various possible explanations. Twenty civilians were killed when the Syrian Red Crescent convoy was struck.

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A two-day conference of Power, Renewable Energy and Mines Ministers of 29 States and Union Territories will be held here from October 7, Gujarat Energy minister Chimanbhai Saparia said.

The conference is being jointly organised by the Union Power Ministry, Gujarat government, Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Ltd and the Federation of Gujarat Industries.

"Union Minister of State for Power, Piyush Goyal, will inaugurate the conference. The aim is to review the implementation of various ongoing schemes/programmes and host of issues pertaining to power, coal and renewable energy sectors," Saparia told PTI.

Ministers and secretaries of the states and union territories and senior officials will discuss on issues like implementation of Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY), 24x7 Power for All, Rural Electrification Programme, transmission corridors and availability including Intra-State Transmission Capacity, he said.

"Discussion will also be held on formulation of broad aspects of progressive Hydropower Policy. In coal sector, deliberations will be held on coal swapping. Besides, adoption of Energy Conservation Building Codes by states and energy efficient agricultural pumps will be discussed," the minister added.

In the area of renewable energy, a state-wise review will be taken on solar power, wind power and small hydro power as well as the compliance of Renewable Purchase Obligations (RPOs) and Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs).

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A court in northern Vietnam has sentenced nine people to death for heroin trafficking.

The state-run online newspaper Zing says ringleader Trang A Tang and eight other Vietnamese nationals were convicted of trafficking 626 kilograms of heroin from Laos and Thailand into Vietnam between 2009 until the ring members were arrested in 2013.

The People's Court in Bac Ninh province handed them death sentences today at the end of a four-day trial.

Three others, including Tang's wife and father, were given life in prison on the same charges.

Court officials were not immediately available for comment. Vietnam has some of the world's toughest drug laws, with the trading or trafficking of at least 100 grams of heroin punishable by death.

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Protests and looting rocked a North Carolina city early today, following the fatal police shooting of a black man, with a dozen officers and several demonstrators injured in the violence.

Media reported that several hundred people gathered to protest the shooting of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, who was African-American, as was the officer who killed him. The shooting was the latest in a string involving black men killed at the hands of police, which has fueled outrage nationwide.

Demonstrations began late Tuesday and grew through much of the night near an apartment complex in the city of Charlotte, where the shooting occurred.

As of the shooting spread, protesters gathered, carrying signs that read "Black Lives Matter" and chanting "No justice, no peace!"



Later in the night, some protesters in Charlotte set fires blocking a major road, and others set trucks ablaze, according to reports.

A local television station reported that looters attempted to break into a Walmart store -- some throwing rocks and shattering glass doors -- and were held back at the entrance by officers.

The violence comes just days after another police shooting, captured on video, of an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Together, they are the latest in a series of recent police shootings -- from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Dallas, Texas -- that have left the African American community demanding law enforcement reforms and greater accountability from public officials.

reports said the officer in Tuesday's shooting, Brentley Vinson, has been put on paid leave.

WSOC-TV reported that the Charlotte shooting occurred as Vinson and other officers were searching for a suspect on an outstanding arrest warrant.

Police encountered Scott -- who was not the person they were seeking -- in a car parked at the building.

"At this point, all we know (is) they were in the apartment complex parking lot," Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Chief Kerr Putney told reporters late Tuesday.

"This subject gets out with a weapon. They engage him, and one of the officers felt a lethal threat and fired his weapon because of that."



Police said Scott had a firearm, which is legal under local law "open carry" gun laws. His relatives told local media, however, that he was not carrying a gun, but had a book in his hands when he was gunned down.

Charlotte police donned riot gear and used tear gas as they tried to subdue the angry crowd, which authorities said attacked and damaged several police cars over the course of the night.

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Viscera samples of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar, who committed suicide in 2014, have been brought back from the US by the members of a Delhi Police team probing the high-profile case.

The samples lying with a FBI lab in the US for over a year were brought back by DCP (south) and investigating officer of the case in the late evening, said a senior Delhi Police officer.

The samples are court property and the team was sent to bring them back.

The FBI lab has already given its report on the samples, said the officer.

The samples were sent to the FBI lab in Washington in February 2015 to determine the kind of poison that killed Sunanda after an AIIMS medical board identified poisoning as the reason behind her death but did not mention any specific substance.

Delhi Police had in January 2015 registered a case of murder in connection with Sunanda's death.

The FBI report sent to Delhi Police in November 2015 had virtually ruled out the theory of 'polonium poisoning' having caused her death. However, after Delhi Police failed to draw any conclusion on basis of the findings, the report was handed over to a medical board for examination before further proceedings in the high-profile case.

The medical board is yet to give its opinion on cause of Sunanda's death. They had demanded for some papers and clarifications which were provided to them, said a senior officer privy to the probe.

"The next line of investigation will be decided after the board comes out with its report," added the officer.

51-year-old Sunanda was found dead at a suite in a five- star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, a day after her spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar on Twitter over her alleged affair with Tharoor.

Several persons including Tharoor have been questioned in connection with Sunanda's death. The police have also conducted polygraph test on six persons, all prime witnesses in the case, including Tharoor's domestic help Narayan Singh, driver Bajrangi and Sanjay Dewan, a close friend of the couple.

In February, Tarar was questioned about her relation with the Congress leader and his wife, her fight with Sunanda over Twitter, and other issues revolving around Sunanda's death.

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Walmart India is evaluating policy guidelines to come up with a "food-only" retail model, after the government has allowed 100 per cent foreign direct investment in food retail, a top company official said today.

"We are currently evaluating all the policy guidelines and we do not have an 'only food model' anywhere. So, we need to conceptualise, evaluate and come up with a model, which takes time," Walmart India CEO Krish Iyer told reporters on the sidelines of India Retail Forum here.

"It is not something we will jump into very quickly," he added.

On government's move to open up food retail to investment, he said all the stakeholders including retailers, consumers, and farmers will benefit from it, and it will also increase access to capital, which will promote retail enterprise.

For Walmart India, food retail in the cash and carry business accounts for more than 65 per cent of business, he said.

"Particularly looking at the importance of food, we do believe that we will continue to focus a lot more on food in our cash and carry stores," Iyer said.

He also noted that resellers, particularly mom-and-pop stores are the most important channel for Walmart.

"Our e-commerce (B2B) experience has been good, and while we do not speak about the e-commerce sales, more than 50 per cent of buying is digitally influenced," he said.

Iyer further said that Walmart India is focusing on private labels, however, customer buying proposition is more crucial.

Walmart India has two private labels - Member's Mark and Right Buy.

"The idea of private labels is to support make in India programme," he said.

Walmart India operates stores in nine states across the country. In the next five years, it is planning to add 50 more stores, taking the total number to 70.

"We continue to focus on Tier II and Tier III cities, and the opportunities here are as good as metro towns," Iyer said, adding that availability of land is a challenge in metros but the company continues to look for good options.

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Director Leena Yadav, who is looking forward to the India release of her internationally acclaimed movie "Parched", has denied using the name of her producer Ajay Devgn to grab eyeballs for the project.

"Ajay was part of the film right from the birth of the idea. His presence is not a gimmick. We are not trying to use Ajay's name for our film. The film has a strong content and we want people to watch the film for its story. Ajay is just supporting us," Leena told PTI.

Usually with the presence of a known face for a film the makers are able to create more buzz about the project.

Quiz the helmer on this and she says, "None of us can say if the film can get attention due to Ajay's presence or not. If the film has a good story then it will definetly work."



For Leena the trouble while making "Parched" was getting finances in place.

"Getting money was a blessing in disguise for this film. We are grateful to get people to back our story. Also I had actresses who are fantastic and talented but not stars. It's a irony that people believe in stars," she added.

Set in a village in Rajasthan "Parched" is the story of three women Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee), Lajjo (Radhika Apte) and Bijli (Surveen Chawla) who take bold steps to change the trajectory of their lives for the better.

"The idea for "Parched" came from my visits to several villages and cities. I got my inspiration from my visits to lot of places. Its a universal story.. Women abroad also face problems," Leena said.

"We think problems are happening in the villages, the West thinks it is happening in the East but the fact is that these stories about women facing oppression are everywhere."



Leena reveals she did not face much difficulty while finalising the cast for "Parched".

"I choose people who fit the role and there is no dearth of talent in our country. I had some trouble casting for Surveen Chawla's role. I have managed to get the most committed and brave actors," she added.

The director also did not accord too much importance to the intimate scenes featuring Radhika Apte and Adil Hussain which were leaked on the internet.

"I don't care about what is out and what is not. The film



is much more than just that particular scene. I don't want to encourage any conversation about this. We need to rise above all this small mindness thing."



Set to release on 23 September, "Parched" features Tannishtha Chatterjee, Radhika Apte, Surveen Chawla, Adil Hussain and Sayani Gupta among others.

"We have got good response at various film festivals. We are quite excited to show the film in India," Leena said.
Questioning the national security and foreign policies of presidential rival Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump said if elected he will stop the policy of regime change overseas and instead focus on defeating Islamic State.

"We are going to stop the policy of regime change overseas, and instead focus on working with our allies on a military campaign to utterly destroy ISIS and defeat Islamic terrorism. This will not only require military warfare, but also financial warfare, cyber warfare, and ideological warfare," Trump said at an election rally in North Carolina.

Identifying radical Islam as a major threat to the United States, the Republican Trump alleged that Clinton of the Democratic Party was not even speaking about the issue.

"My opponent won't even say the words radical Islamic terrorism. In fact, Hillary Clinton talks tougher about my supporters than she does about Islamic terrorists. She calls the patriotic Americans who support our campaign  many of them cops and soldiers  deplorable and irredeemable," he said.

"Has she ever talked that way about radical Islam, or about those who oppress and murder women and gays overseas? Has Hillary Clinton ever called people who support these practices deplorable and irredeemable? In many countries overseas, non-believers face the death penalty  where is Hillary's condemnation here?" he asked.

"Let's ask Hillary Clinton: how many people who subscribe to Radical Islamic views, and support the oppression of non-believers, would you call deplorable or irredeemable - or are those words reserved only for hardworking Americans that truly love their country and that support Donald Trump?" he asked.

Trump asserted America can never elect a president, like Hillary Clinton, who "with her choice of words, thinks decent American citizens are a bigger threat than radical Islamic terrorists."

"Anyone who cannot name our enemy, is not fit to lead this country. Anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as America's president, he said.

"Her timetable withdrawal from Iraq, her push for regime change in Libya and Syria, her open borders policies  these are the actions that unleashed the ISIS disaster," he said.

He also criticised Clinton for her claim that "my opposition to radical Islamic terrorism is a recruiting tool." He said it demonstrated her level of ignorance about the terror threat "that is disqualifying".

Trump alleged that refusing to call out radical Islam will not lessen the danger, it will only increase and embolden the danger  just like they have seen during her disastrous and failed tenure as secretary of state.

"The rise of ISIS is Hillary Clinton's foreign policy legacy. Secretary Clinton has helped to topple regimes, displace millions, and then opened the door to ISIS to enter our country. How is this a smart policy?" he asked.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today said he will support whatever steps the Centre will take in the wake of Uri attack and the country should demonstrate unity on the issue of fighting terrorism.

"It should not be an issue for levelling allegations and counter-allegations...The country should demonstrate unity on the issue of terrorism...I will support whatever steps the Centre will take in the wake of the Uri attack and to root out terrorism," Kumar told reporters at a press conference.

An environment against terrorism should be created to isolate the country promoting terrorism and shelters of terrorists should be demolished, he said when asked what action should India take in the wake of the attack on the army base in Uri in which 18 soldiers were killed.

The Nitish Kumar cabinet had yesterday announced a financial aid of Rs 11 lakh each to kin of three soldiers from Bihar killed in the terror attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The BJP in Goa on Wednesday shot back at criticism of Defence Minister over his frequent visits to the coastal state and asked mediapersons, "would you not have come home, if you were Defence Minister".

"If you were made Defence Minister, would you not have come home? Would you have stayed back in Delhi?" BJP Goa unit general secretary Sadanand Tanavade asked the reporters during a press conference here.

He was responding to a question referring to Parrikar's frequent visits to Goa against the backdrop of militant attacks on Defence bases.

The Goa Congress had recently accused Parrikar of being a "part-time" Defence Minister, and said he was more interested in issues concerning the coastal state than matters related to security.

"Congress needs to be more focused on its own party rather than Parrikar," Tanavade told reporters in presence of state BJP chief Vinay Tendulkar.

Tanavade alleged that Congress was adopting publicity gimmicks by resorting to verbal attack on Parrikar to get media publicity.

"If you speak about Defence Minister or Chief Minister, you get quick media publicity. That is what Congress has been aiming at," he said.

Tanavade said BJP has been monitoring the criticism through social media and found out that only one particular party was indulging in it.

"Majority of the people who respond or comment to this party's criticism through social media are non-Goans," he said, refusing to name any political party.
Veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee says young, independent filmmakers need to be encouraged in Bengali film industry to make "their kind of cinema".

"If young and new directors are not encouraged to make their kind of cinema, how can we move on? I am always in favour of encouraging such film makers if the content is interesting and realistic" Soumitra told PTI at the music launch of Bengali film "Bastob" on Tuesday.

The acting legend, who enacts the role of a newspaper baron, loosely based on the real life character of a Bengali anti-establishment media owner, said there is a trend in Bengali commercial cinema to explore the realistic genre.

"This is commendable," the "Charulata" actor said.

Asked about the similarity of the name "Bastob" with a Bollywood blockbuster and similar cases of Bengali films having the same title of previous Hindi hits, Soumitra said, "Two films may bear the same name. A Bengali film may repeat the same title as of an earlier hit. So, what is the big deal?"



"How will that cause any great harm to the industry!", he commented.

Director Shyamal Bose said a brief narration about the role was enough for a personality like Soumitra Chatterjee to grasp the layers of the character and an actor like him or Saswata Chatterjee will never differentiate between big time directors and lesser known ones in terms of giving best shot as the camera rolled.

"Soumitra kaku worked with me in five films. He had worked with the mastero in 16 films. In totality he had acted in around 400 films.

"So, when he agrees to work with a filmmaker like me, who is around same age of his son, it shows unlike the public perception of him being unapproachable he is exactly the opposite. But he is a man of few words, a sensitive man and a thinking actor with vast repertoire of knowledge and experience," the filmmaker said.

"Unlike the out and out commercial Sanjay Dutt-starrer Hindi Bastab, my film is entirely different and it is a nonmainstream film which talks about a girl's rape and how she is stone walled by this society," the director said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's cabinet cleared the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from Dassault Aviation on Wednesday, paving the way for signing a deal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is betting on to modernise the air force, a government source told .

The value of the deal, which had been repeatedly held up as the two sides haggled over financial terms, was not immediately available.

Under the deal, India will get 36 Rafale jets in fly-away condition. India's fighter aircraft fleet, comprising Russian, British and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force's requirement of 45 to counter a "two-front collusive threat" from Pakistan and China.

The two countries will sign the final deal on Friday, the source, who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media, said.

(Reporting by Nigam Prusty; Editing by Malini Menon)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Nigam Prusty

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's cabinet cleared the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from Dassault Aviation on Wednesday, paving the way for signing a deal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is betting on to modernise the air force, a government source told .

The acquisition is part of a $150-billion military overhaul India has launched, drawing global arms makers into one of the world's most promising markets.

Under the deal, India will get 36 Rafale jets ready to go straight into service. India's fighter aircraft fleet, comprising Russian, British and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force's requirement of 45 to counter a "two-front collusive threat" from Pakistan and China.

The two countries will sign the final deal on Friday, the source, who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media, said.

French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is arriving New Delhi on Thursday, the source said, to sign the deal with his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar. French President Francois Hollande's office confirmed that Le Drian would visit India at the end of the week.

India, the world's biggest arms importer, had intended to buy 126 Rafale planes before several years worth of talks with Dassault broke down and Modi and Hollande stepped in last year to agree on the smaller purchase.

The value of the deal, which had been repeatedly held up as the two sides haggled over financial terms, was not immediately available.

Indian defence ministry officials have earlier said the value of the deal could be $8.5 billion to $9 billion.

The 90 planes not supplied via the original multi-role combat aircraft tender have meanwhile become the target of intense interest from other plane makers such as Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

(Reporting by Nigam Prusty; Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas in Paris; Editing by Malini Menon and Toby Chopra)

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The Indian market is unique in that there is equal opportunity in every price band, Sudhin Mathur tell Ritwik Sharma



How challenging is it to be conspicuous among a number of Chinese smartphone players in India?



First of all, there is a multitude of players. India is a huge market with almost 110 million phones being sold on an annual basis, and it attracts a lot of players, be it local brands, multinationals or Chinese. We need to look at creating our own space in this very competitive market. Based on the IDC report that has come out for the last quarter (April-June), the market on year-on-year basis grew by four per cent and we grew by almost 26 per cent. We are the No.2 brand by value and No. 3 in terms of volume.
Homegrown e-tailer Flipkart has crossed the 100-million registered users mark, becoming the first e-commerce company in the country to hit the milestone.

The Bengaluru-based company has doubled its user base over the last year and added 25 million users in the past six months alone.

"This is a small step in our efforts to build a platform that provides quality products, affordable and accessible to millions of Indians shopping online. This milestone has further energized us to ramp-up our efforts and build a world-class shopping destination," Flipkart co-founder and CEO Binny Bansal said.

One of the most valued start-ups in the country, Flipkart has Tiger Global, Accel Partners, Morgan Stanley and T Rowe among its investors. The company has raised over USD 3 billion in funding so far and has acquired companies like Myntra, PhonePe and LetsBuy. It has also invested in start-ups like Cube26, NestAway and BlackBuck.

A recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch Report pegged Flipkart as the leader with over 43 per cent market share. It forecast that by 2019, Flipkart would increase its share to 44 per cent.

e-commerce companies in India have witnessed tremendous growth on the back of strong demand for smartphones and increasing data usage. India, which is among the fastest growing e-commerce markets globally, is expected to continue on the growth momentum over the three to five years.

US online retailer Amazon and Chinese heavyweight Alibaba are making significant investments in India to capture the nascent market here.

India is being seen as an opportunity globally with a significant chunk of foreign investments flowing into the sector in companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm.
Mobile payment and commerce platform, Paytm have announced the availability of financing options on two-wheelers booked on its platform on Wednesday.

The company tied up with IndusInd Bank to launch two wheeler financing and plans to add more lenders to provide more financing options for consumers.



While booking a two-wheeler on Paytm, customers will have to pay the booking amount and can then avail a loan on the balance amount from the financing partner.

"This service will add to the comfort of ordering two-wheelers at attractive prices with the vehicle being delivered at your local dealership. With this move, we assist a larger set of customers through the complete automobile purchase journey," said Krishna Hegde, Vice President, Paytm.

"This tie-up is yet another digital initiative under the Bank's theme of Responsive Innovation to offer innovative and unique banking experience to our customers, while keeping the convenience in mind," said S.V. Parthasarathy, Senior Executive Vice President & Head - Consumer Finance Division, IndusInd Bank Ltd.
Sleepy little villages in pollbound Uttar Pradesh can now get some shuteye, thanks to the Congress and its trailblazing veep.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is on a month-long Kisan Yatra in the state, hoping to sell some farm-fresh ideas to the electorate that has over the years reduced his party to an also-ran. But his attempts to make a splash with Khat Sabhas, or cot meetings, as part of a major outreach programme turned nightmarish when people attending the events took home the charpoys after having their fill of refreshments on offer.

So the bed-and-breakfast scheme may be a hit with the locals but it's also a wake-up call for the party. For yet another attempt to repackage its crown prince seems to be assuming the form of a Hamlet-esque tragedy - "not to be".

Let's face it: the 46-year-old Gandhi scion has attempted more comebacks than cargo pants and in less-pocket-friendly ways. The Congress reportedly spent hundreds of crores on PR and advertising firms ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls on a marketing blitzkrieg for Brand Rahul. The results cannot be explained away by any "zero loss" theories.

Since then the party has capitulated in every state election, except Bihar where it is a junior partner in the ruling alliance.

The Congress has roped in Prashant Kishor to help coordinate its UP strategy, the same man who aided Narendra Modi's march to 7, RCR with a campaign that embraced modern electioneering techniques and wowed voters.

But the poll wizard is still rummaging through his bag of tricks to pull out a magical remedy for the grand old party that has spent the past two years licking its wounds after the worst electoral drubbing in its history.

The cot plot has seemingly flopped and Kishor who made his bed must now lie in it. After all, he picked a product to market that appears to be way past its sell-by date.

The challenge for Rahul - the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers - is to make up lost ground in time for next year's UP elections, his biggest test before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

However, critics have often said that the shy, dimpled bachelor is devoid of ideas, or a grand vision for what he wants to do for the country. Rebels and disgruntled workers have accused him of being inaccessible.

Even disillusioned Congress supporters have argued that he has failed to inspire confidence, and it's time for new young leaders to push aside the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and stem the decline.

Rahul loyalists though still believe that he would find a way to thread the needle and sew up his tattered party. So far, their Pavlovian response has been to close ranks behind him and insist that there is nothing wrong with his strategies despite a string of defeats.

The Uttar Pradesh electorate cannot accuse him of lack of trying. Rahul headlined the 2007 assembly election campaign events for his party here, but netted just 22 of the more than 400 seats on offer.

He marched through the state's dusty plains again five years later, attempting an image makeover by sleeping in Dalit homes, courting arrest, addressing over 200 rallies and even growing stubble. The party bagged four more seats this time.

Detractors see the MP as a parttime politician who makes sporadic interventions in issues of national interest with a shootand-scoot style of attacking the BJP-led government.

Last year brought another Rahul reboot with his "suit-boot ki sarkar" jibe at Modi and his team. After a mysterious weekslong sabbatical, the Congress leader displayed a fire-in-thebelly determination, joining student protesters on the barricades, showing solidarity with drought-hit farmers and hitting the campaign trail up and down the country. He was like an action figure come to life.

The long-time social media refusenik also finally let his office get a handle on Twitter where the BJP and Modi have been trendsetters.

However, his canvassing in crucial state elections failed to deliver the votes, raising further questions about his leadership abilities.

His "arhar Modi" dig at the PM and runaway dal prices during Parliament's monsoon session this year led supporters to believe that Rahul finally had his finger on the nation's pulse.

But then he made a series of dizzying twists and turns over his remarks blaming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for Mahatma Gandhi's assassination.

Though the Congress is unlikely to win the Uttar Pradesh elections, if it were to improve its share of votes, the Amethi MP would have cleared a crucial leadership test. If, however, he fails again, it would be time for the party to stop trying to remake him and write a fresh script with a brand-new protagonist.

Uttar Pradesh awaits Rahul's tryst with destiny.

The writer is Senior Assistant Editor, Mail Today
Moody's on Tuesday said it could upgrade India's rating in 1-2 years if it is convinced that the economic reforms are tangible.

Moody's, which has a 'Baa3' rating with a positive outlook, said evidence of policymakers working towards a faster fiscal consolidation, reducing the debt-GDP ratio and addressing infrastructure and monsoon volatility challenges will determine an upgrade, going forward.

ALSO READ: India's growth in manufacturing sector worries China



"We have a positive outlook on India. On balance, the risk is on the upside. We are continuously monitoring the rating. We see pressure building up in 1-2 years and any tangible change could bring about a change in rating," Moody's Sovereign Group Senior V-P Marie Diron told journalists.

Moody's Investors Service had in April 2015 revised India's outlook to 'positive' from 'stable' and said it could upgrade rating in 12-18 months. India's step-wise reforms have been set in motion, but weak investment and banking risk may act as speed-breakers, Moody's Investors Service said in a report.

Asked if policies are moving in the right direction for an upgrade, Diron said: "We have seen progress in implementation of reforms. What we did not anticipate is the weakness of private investment." Moody's listed six items on the list of pending reforms -the land acquisition Bill, labour law reforms, significant infrastructure investment, tangible benefit from Make in India initiative, tax administration and public sector bank reforms.

Stressing that weak financial health of public sector banks continues to pose contingent liability risk and muted private sector investment constrains India's ratings, Diron said external sector vulnerability could pose pressure.
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Construction of the massive mixed-use development project planned for Melrose known as La Central is now underway after lawmakers approved the first phase of the project last week.

The NYC Council Committee on Land Use granted several land use permits for the project on Thursday, September 8, allowing the project to move forward.

The 1.1 million-square-foot development will feature a total of 992 residential units in five buildings centered at 430 Westchester Avenue.

Councilman Rafael Salamanca, said he had worked hard to get the developer to offer 10 percent of the units at 30 percent average median income, or AMI.

La Central is the largest development to fall under the citys new Mandatory Inclusionary Housing guidelines that require affordable housing in all new developments.

Apartments will be available via lottery for households earning 30 to 100 percent of the New York City area median income, with residents of Community Board 1 getting first preference for 50 percent of those units, according to the developer.

I thought there should have been deeper affordability, and so I fought hard with the administration to ensure they lowered the AMI to 30 percent, and I didnt budge until that happened, Salamanca said. I dont want to displace anyone, but I want to keep the working professionals in the community.

The developer, Hudson Inc. of New York, hopes to close with the city for phase I of the project by the end of December, said Hudson principal Aaron Koffman.

That first phase will include three buildings housing 660 units of affordable housing, including 160 supportive housing units for adults living with HIV and military veterans suffering from mental illness.

Phase 1 will also include a 49,000-square-foot YMCA that will feature both a lap swimming pool and general-use pool, a dividable gymnasium and a fitness room.

YMCA spokesman Paul Custer said the organization was ramping up services to the borough, with another planned location just announced in the Edenwald section.

We want to expand our presence in the Bronx, and this will allow us to do so in a vibrant community, Custer said.

The facility will also offer community programs including recreational leagues, fitness classes, day camps and a diabetes prevention program.

We do very well in making sure we have programs going on in all our spaces all the time, Custer said.

Also planned is a an urban rooftop farm run by GrowNYC and a new studio for BronxNet that will feature a glass window studio that will allow residents to view shows being filmed.

BronxNet executive director Michael Knobbe said the new studio was the natural next step for the organization, giving them what he called an amazing opportunity in the south Bronx.

Its an area that has been underrepresented and is densely populated, Knobbe said.

Like existing BronxNet facilities at Lehman College and Mercy College, the studio will be used to train residents, including high school students, in the media arts and allow them to record Bronxfocused programing with the help of highly-trained staff.

Koffman said the developer wants to close on the second phase of the project within a year, which will include two more buildings, eight and 25 stories high, with a total of 336 apartments as well as a daycare center.

It will also include an astronomy center run by the Bronx High School of Science that is expected to broadcast programs to public schools across the city.
Thai AirAsia is launching flights between Phuket and Siem Reap in Cambodia.

Service is set to commence daily on November 7th of this year.

From a scheduling perspective the flight times are convenient, with a departure from Phuket at 6:20 in the morning, and arriving in Siem Reap at 7:40 am.

On the return leg, they leave Siem Reap at 8:40 am and arrive Phuket by 10:05 am.

In the past Thai AirAsia has flown to such destinations as Bali. Ho Chi Minh City, and Medan from Phuket.

One route that surprises me, that has not come into service in to nearby Langkawi?

Despite the relatively short distance between the two islands, and common sectors such as yachting, and tourism, it remains a chore to fly easily between them.
When it comes to per-student funding for education, a state cannot rank any lower than Utah, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report. Photo credit: U.S. Department of Education.

If its the third Thursday of the month it is time for a Legislative Town Hall meeting with Cache Countys legislators. The state representatives will meet with the public Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the new Ridgeline High School in Millville.

State Representative Curt Webb, R-District 5, says the the topic is one he realizes is important to local residents: education. For that reason, two monthly meetings will focus on that priority.

The topic for the first meeting is adequate funding.

We always hear about we want adequate funding for education. We will discuss what the definition for adequate funding may be, how much money they believe that they need, how that money will be used, how they believe that would affect the quality of education in Utah and what the source of that revenue would be.

There will be a round table discussion with several prominent people in education on Thursday. It will include Ben Leishman (from the Legislative Fiscal Analyst Office), Terryl Warner (member of the State Board of Education), Tami Pyfer (Education Advisor to Governor Gary Herbert), Dr. Beth Foley (dean of Utah State Universitys Emma Eccles College of Education and Human Services), Frank Schofield (Superintendent of the Logan City School District), and Steven Norton (Superintendent of the Cache County School District).
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By Kirsten Crow of the Caller-Times

The City Council wants to know whether its members can resign to run for elected office.

On Tuesday, the council voted without dissent to support a motion by City Councilwoman Carolyn Vaughn to "hire outside legal counsel to investigate the validity of a resignation that attempts to subvert city term limits for the express purpose to run for office."

The request came up as part of an item on the agenda related to the resignation of Mark Scott.

Scott resigned last week, citing a desire to run for mayor in 2018. A provision related to term limits in the City Charter may have barred him from running, unless he stopped short of completing his current term, he said.

A news release issued by Scott last week stated the now-former councilman consulted with John Bell, an attorney who has in the past served on charter review commissions, before making his decision.

Vaughn said at the start of the conversation she appreciated Scott's knowledge of the city and his tenure on the council but "was disappointed that he decided to find a way to get around what the City Charter says."

"I believe this is wrong on so many counts," she said. "I think it sets a precedent for councils down the road, that you can do that as well."

If there is a loophole, the council needs to discuss it, she added.

Questions included how city or state "holdover" provisions could factor into the situation, and when a council member is formally considered resigned.

After the meeting, City Attorney Miles Risley said he and staff would evaluate Wednesday which of the legal questions he should field, and which should go to outside counsel. Questions that go to outside attorneys would "implicate fundamental, potential political disagreements between council members."

It would be wise to refer those questions to outside counsel to avoid a perceived conflict, Risley added.

City Councilwoman Colleen McIntyre contended the discussion wasn't really about the charter, and more about "whether or not we want (Scott) to run for mayor."

Similar conversations didn't occur with past resignations of council members, she said.

The most recent resignation of a council member was Lillian Riojas, who resigned earlier this year to take a job in San Antonio. The council appointed City Councilman Michael Hunter to serve out the remainder of her term.

That was different, because Riojas resigned for a job, not to pursue elected office, Vaughn said.

Scott said he believed he had done the best thing he could in the situation, and described the discussion as "politics."

"I am really not surprised by much of what this council does, but I am surprised they decided to spend tax dollars to see if I can resign and run for mayor," he said.

Twitter: @CallerCrow
David Strickland

SHARE Molli Olgin Mary Kristene Chapa

By Krista M. Torralva of the Caller-Times

SINTON  A letter detailing the shooting of two girls at a Portland park was read to a San Patricio County jury Wednesday.

Portland police say David Malcom Strickland is the killer and authored the letter.

Prosecutors had former Portland detective Aaron Veuleman read the letter aloud in a San Patricio County courtroom on the third day of Strickland's capital murder trial.

The former University of Texas San Antonio student faces life in prison if convicted of the 2012 double shooting that killed Mollie Judith Olgin, 19, and seriously injured Mary Kristene Chapa.

The letter is written from the perspective of a hit man who declined an offer to kill the survivor of the attack.

Strickland, 30, was arrested 2014, after the letter meant for Chapa's father was instead given to authorities. A draft of the letter, including two identical sentences, were found on Strickland's laptop.

He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have suggested another man was responsible.

The letter says a Utah man Strickland once lived with sought the services of a hit man to kill Chapa. The letter's author detailed a conversation he said he had with the Utah man.

"I need her to disappear," the man told the letter's author. "I heard you wouldn't care if you got paid."

The letter's author wrote that the Utah man offered $15,000 to kill Chapa but the author eventually refused. The author said he asked why he needed Chapa killed.

The author wrote that the Utah man told him he was having a bad night after a fight with his wife and went to Taco Bell where an employee, one of the women, messed up his order.

Chapa and Olgin were at Taco Bell the night of the shooting. Olgin worked there.

The letter's author said he told the Utah man he didn't think that was a good reason to kill.

"I prefer (to kill) child molesters or violent offenders," the letter reads.

The Utah man told him, according to the letter, he found Chapa and Olgin at the Portland park and described attacking them.

The author wrote that the Utah man referenced the women's sexuality and called them "less than people."

The author wrote the Utah man described stacking the Hispanic woman on top of the white woman, and putting the gun to her head. The next day, bird watchers found the women. The couple testified Monday and said Chapa's arm was around Olgin.

The author tells Chapa's father his daughter isn't safe, and asks him to destroy the letter and to not look for him.

"I expect to die for this but perhaps it is time," the letter ends.

The letter includes the Utah man's address and a photo.

Portland police went to Utah and interviewed the man, an Army reservist. Military orders proved he wasn't in Texas at the time of the shootings, police said.

Defense lawyers challenged the credibility of Veuleman and another Portland detective who worked the case.

Former police Chief Gary Giles testified he removed the first lead detective, Sgt. Roland Chavez, to put fresh eyes on the case. Giles said police would have arrested Strickland earlier had Chavez done things differently during his investigation.

He was critical of the way Chavez conducted a firing test of Strickland's gun, and of the organization of evidence and paperwork. Giles testified Chavez failed to insure that his recorder was working when he interviewed another suspect in the case.

Veuleman was fired this year for leaking confidential information about the case to author, Chivas Sandage, who is helping Chapa write a book.

Current police Chief Mark Cory learned of emails between Veuleman and Sandage after defense lawyers subpoenaed the police department.

"I know I'm doing the right thing by helping you," Veuleman wrote in an email to Sandage.

Defense lawyer Jimmy Granberry, of Corpus Christi, also suggested Strickland could have learned details about the case from his wife, Laura, who worked with Veuleman's wife at a Chili's restaurant.

Strickland and his wife were arrested in their Helotes apartment in 2014. Charges of tampering with evidence were later dropped against Laura Strickland.

Initially, it was widely believed Chapa and Olgin were targeted because of their sexuality. Vigils were hosted in their honor across the country. Last year, Chapa was a presenter and speaker at the annual Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards in New York.

But police and prosecutors have said evidence does not support the hate crime narrative. Charges against Strickland do not include a hate crime.

In addition to capital murder, Strickland is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault, aggravated kidnapping and terroristic threat.

Twitter: @CallerKMT
File photo

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By Krista M. Torralva of the Caller-Times

A federal judge in Corpus Christi ordered Texas officials to change voter outreach efforts after the Department of Justice accused the state of not fulfilling its end of a deal to soften a controversial voter ID law.

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos on Tuesday also ordered the state to allow federal officials to review drafts of voter outreach and education materials before they are published.

Texas was forced to relax voter ID requirements before Election Day after a federal appeals court this year found the state's 2011 law discriminated against minorities and the poor.

The Justice Department says that despite the ruling, Texas still gives the impression that some voters can't cast a ballot.

Texas must now tell residents who can't obtain an ID due to a "reasonable impediment" that they can still vote if they sign a declaration.

At the center of the dispute was some key phrasing.

Texas voting education materials initially didn't include the word "reasonable," which the Justice Department and others involved in the lawsuit wanted inserted. The state's literature stated registered voters who "have not obtained" and "cannot obtain" one of the accepted forms of photo ID could vote if they sign a declaration and provide other identifying information such as a utility bill.

State officials had argued in filings the language has the same meaning without the word "reasonably. "

"There is nothing substantively different between the language the State Defendants have used in the guidance and that which the United States now proposes, " the state's response states.

Under an agreement reached last month, the state allocated $2.5 million to educate Texas voters on the new ID law modifications in time for the November election. Since then, state officials have been pushing a voter education campaign and training for election officials and poll workers, the state's response says.

Residents can obtain an election identification certificate at any Texas driver's license office during business hours. Additionally, the Department of Public Safety will open specified offices on two Saturdays  Oct. 22 and Oct. 29  to issue the certificates. In Nueces County, the DPS office at 3506 Twin River Blvd., 78410, in the Tuloso-Midway area will open those days.

However, voters who have one of the six types of government-issued photo IDs, or are able to get one, are required to use those.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Twitter: @CallerKMT
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Three Texas Supreme Court positions are up for election and we have little negative to say about the three incumbents. But this court as a whole has made some troubling decisions recently undermining public education and the public's right to know. All three incumbents supported those decisions and all three are, needless to say, Republican, which isn't a problem with us in and of itself.

But this court has been 100 percent Republican for 20 years and is in sore need of greater diversity of perspective. The decision that found the state's flawed, unfair, inadequate school finance system constitutional was unanimous. The court's decision that valued Boeing's secrecy over the public's right to know about a lease of public-owned property had only one dissenter.

All three incumbents  Debra Lehrmann, Place 3; Paul Green, Place 5; and Eva Guzman, Place 9  have Democratic opponents. All three have served admirably and we're reluctant to suggest that any incumbent with a clean record should be thrown out. It takes a distinguished opponent whose accomplishments suggest that he or she would do as well or better than the incumbent, and who brings elements of diversity that would make his or her philosophical presence felt.

There is one Democrat who rises to that level and she is Dori Contreras Garza, candidate for Place 5. Garza has been a justice on the 13th Court of Appeals since 2003. That's a lot of appeals court experience  about as close as a non-incumbent can get to matching resumes with a longtime incumbent Supreme Court justice. We've always been impressed that she was an accountant before she became a lawyer and that she was a mother who worked her way through law school. Garza also would give this diversity-challenged court a second Hispanic, a third woman and  here's another element lacking on the court  a longtime Rio Grande Valley resident.

Retired Judge Mike Westergren of Corpus Christi, the Democrat running for Place 3, also has a distinguished resume. In addition to being a district judge he was the Nueces County Attorney, a justice of the peace and the lawyer for Del Mar College. But, as much as it pains us to say about one of our community's best, being an old-school Democrat is the extent of the diversity he offers, and it isn't enough for us to recommend him in good conscience over Lehrmann. She is a talented hard worker who isn't shy about writing a strong dissent. We are ever appreciative that, shortly after joining the court, she dissented in the wrongheaded Severance case that defanged the Texas Open Beaches Act. We wish she'd have brought the same to the school finance and Boeing cases.

Again, we emphasize that our problem with the court is its need for philosophical diversity. Unseating Guzman would not be the remedy. She is the court's barrier-breaking first Hispanic woman  also Texas' first Hispanic woman elected to a statewide office. She was a district and appellate court judge in Houston before joining the Supreme Court. Guzman should be a shoo-in on merit.

Our picks:

Texas Supreme Court

Place 3: Debra Lehrmann (i)

Place 5: Dori Contreras Garza

Place 9: Eva Guzman (i)
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News that work to rebuild the A14 will get under way in November has been greeted with relief by people across Cambridgeshire.

This week it emerged a long-awaited 1.5 billion project to upgrade 21 miles of the A14 was finally about to start  plans which have been in the pipeline for nearly 20 years.

Highways England officials have said the upgrade will add extra capacity and cut up to 20 minutes of people's journeys, as the News reported.

Now readers of the News have spoken of their relief that work is finally set to start after a spate of serious accidents over the past few years.

One reader commented that the upgrade was "welcome" news but said they thought other improvements would be required in the north of Cambridge to prevent a "bottleneck".

They added: "I haven't seen any details published about how the widening beyond Histon will be accomplished as it would appear to require the complete rebuilding of the interchanges at Histon and Milton together with an extension of the banking between them.

"That banking was originally built too steeply and has needed regular repair ever since the northern bypass was opened.

"I fear the staggering cost of the project will only succeed in moving the congestion from the Huntingdon-Cambridge section to the northern bypass."

Another reader also gave the news a warm welcome but added: "I'll believe the 2020 finish date when I see it."

The upgrade comes after the News launched a petition for the road to be improved following a horrific lorry crash in 1998.

More than 10,000 people signed it, setting in motion a Government-funded study, which recommended widening and rerouting the road between Fen Ditton and Ellington, together with building the guided busway.

However while news of the upgrade has been met with a largely positive response, some readers expressed doubt over how long the work might take.

One reader said: "I hope this is not 4 years of road closures and added misery."

Another added: "Improve the A428 first please to cope with traffic being diverted."
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Two fines have been handed out by council officials to punt touts in Cambridge after a ban on the activity was imposed.

Cambridgeshire police and Cambridge City Council are now policing the activity which means that asking people to go on a punt tour is now a criminal offence.

Two fixed penalty notices (FPNs) have now been handed out as part of the new public spaces protection order (PSPO) that came into effect last Thursday (September 15) despite massive opposition from independent punt operators.

The council implemented the PSPO to prohibit touting for punt tours within specified areas of the city centre.

Two FPNs were issued to punt tour touts in the city centre on Saturday and the council intends to keep up enforcement action with particular attention to peak touting times.

It is a criminal offence to tout for punt tours in areas covered by the PSPO, with anyone in breach of the order facing a 75 fixed penalty notice, the council said.

The PSPO covers most of the city centre except specified touting locations beside the river at Quayside, Silver Street, Trinity College frontage at Garret Hostel Lane, Queens' Green and the walkway from Quayside to Jesus Green (La Mimosa), provided that certain conditions set out in the order are met.

Signs have been put in place to inform members of the public. Constables, police community support officers and enforcement officers are taking action against anyone breaching the order.

The council wrote to businesses, residents' associations, the universities and other interested organisations informing them of the introduction of the PSPO earlier this month.
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Sixty Cambridge businesses have stood up against plans to shut off city centre streets, saying the move would put their work at risk.

The businesses, all based in the Kite" area off East Road, gathered today to express their opposition to proposals under the Greater Cambridge City Deal to shut off city centre roads at peak times to ease congestion. Some even took to the streets with placards reading keep us open!"

Sixty businesses, including pubs, architects, cafes, shops and schools, signed a petition against the measures, which will be delivered to City Deal officials, who have stated their desire to reinforce Cambridge's position as a business-friendly city.

Dr Patrick von Heimendahl at the Clarendon Street Veterinary Surgery said: We are all of one opinion. We oppose the road closures and, by extension, a major part of the City Deal congestion measures.

Road closures are never good for the type of businesses we represent. People will find it almost impossible to come. Deliveries won't be able to get through and staff can't come to work.

We heard from the head teacher at Parkside School. They say they endorse our position because it will be hard for them to get staff in.

The magnitude of the plans is just beginning to sink in."

Henry Freeland, founding member of Freeland Rees Roberts Architects said: I am an architect. This seems strange to me. We need to get in and out and our clients need to get in to see us."

Steve Snudden works at the nearby Elm Tree pub.

He said: We are here out of concern. We need to get deliveries to the pub between 9am and 1pm. If we have to get deliveries in before that, the resident's will be affected. No one wants to hear barrels at six in the morning."

Local councillor, Tim Bick said: I don't think it is good for businesses. I believe it should be stopped. I think the City Deal should go away and think again and start treating people like adults."

A City Deal spokesman said: Ensuring business in Cambridge can thrive as the region continues to grow is at the very heart of the proposals to tackle the city's dire congestion problem. Bumper to bumper traffic jams on a daily basis help no-one.

The package, including PCCPs, has been designed to take decisive and meaningful action so the city remains a people-friendly place that can attract even more custom and drive even more business, a place where employers can recruit and retain workers and those workers are guaranteed to get to work - and home again -on time.

The core scheme in the historic centre was not universally popular but is now a prime example of what can be achieved when general traffic is effectively managed  streets once car-dominated and filled with toxic air are now thronging with shoppers, bustling shops and restaurants.

The plans will not close off swathes of the city, instead they will discourage through traffic from routing through the city centre during rush hour and every street will still be accessible at all times.

There are a large number of potential permutations on how the 'control points' are implemented and we are keen to hear as much feedback as possible on the potential benefits and impacts for individuals, groups and businesses so that, after October 10, we can put our heads down and refine and design the detail of the PCCPs. We will be considering points raised by people on access for employees of businesses immediately next to the proposed PCCPs.

There are still opportunities for businesses to speak with officers by telephone or to organise a lunch-time briefing session so they can discuss and learn about the proposals first-hand and offer feedback from an informed point of view."

Dr von Heimendahl said businesses from other parts of the city could contact him if they felt they would be affected by the plans. People should contact him at keepusopen2017@gmail.com
Dieudonne Tamfu Tamngwah, 29, was arrested after they attacked the local Post Office.

ADS



According to information gathered, Tamfu left Douala with his accomplice, Valery, and for Ekondo-Titi. They later visited the Post Office in order to study the environment to ease their intended operation.



After careful elaboration of their strategy, they later returned to proceed with their act, but confronted the Post Master who resisted them before surrendering. The noise from the office attracted the attention of passersby, obliging the two robbers to flee. The Commissioner of Public Security, Ekondo-Titi, Blaise Noghen Fomeyo and the Divisional Officer, Edwin Nkenya Ngwana, were immediately informed by the Post Master, who contacted the forces of law and order in Bongongo, who tracked down and arrested Dieudonne Tamfu.



The suspect was in possession of a sack containing three loaded locally-fabricated pistols. Meanwhile, his two accomplices, Essono and Valery, are said to have disappeared into thin air. The Post Master reported that the bandits made away with the sum of 685,000 FCFA from his office in Ekondo-Titi, but Tamfu refuted the allegation, saying that they collected nothing. According to Dieudonne Tamfu Tamngwah, this was not their first burglary operation. In 2015, they made away with 600.000 FCFA, 3.8 million FCFA, and 2.1 million FCFA from a business lady through a money transfer operation.

ADS
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 11:13AM

IBM in partnership with Ontario Centres of Excellence and the Government of Ontario launched the IBM Innovation Space, a new startup hub in Toronto to accelerate innovation activities and investments in Ontario by helping businesses propel into the global marketplace.

The IBM Innovation Space is the first initiative to launch under the IBM Innovation Incubator Project, a $54 million dollar initiative funded by a $24.75 million dollar contribution from IBM and $22.75 million from the Government of Ontarios Jobs and Prosperity Fund. Other partners include the SOSCIP Research Consortium and members of the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs (ONE).

The IBM Innovation Space will provide capacity, networking, infrastructure, and a multitude of new IBM cloud and cognitive business technologies to help entrepreneurs, startups, and developers incubate and innovate ideas and more rapidly move their business plans from research to commercialization.



IBMs Innovation Space will connect to the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs to support businesses with advanced IBM technologies, including a range of cloud, mobile, analytics, and social solutions. Experts from IBM and its network of collaborators will offer mentoring, support services, education, and legal counsel to assist startups in transforming some of Canadas biggest challenges in areas such as healthcare, natural resources, and financial services.

Access to the latest technology, including cognitive and cloud, as well as these kinds of resources and support, are so often out of the reach of start-ups  thats why we created this space," said Dino Trevisani, IBM Canada President. We want to help them innovate, get to market and expand more quickly to ultimately become the disruptors of tomorrow."

OCEs partnership with IBM through the IBM Innovation Incubator Project provides an ideal opportunity to bolster innovation across the province and help companies scale-up to become creators of the high value jobs that drive economic prosperity, says OCE President and CEO Dr. Tom Corr. By establishing and leveraging incubator hubs like the IBM Innovation Space, we can help turn Ontarios big ideas into commercial success here in Ontario and around the globe.

Todays announcement reinforces our commitment to fuel home-grown innovation and leverage our world-class talents to create jobs and economic prosperity, says Brad Duguid, Minister of Economic Development and Growth. The IBM Innovation Space demonstrates our commitment to increase innovation in Ontario by working collaboratively with the public and private sectors. We are thrilled to work with IBM and Ontario Centres of Excellence with foundational support from SOSCIP Research Consortium.

Several Ontario businesses have already accessed the IBM Innovation Space to work with IBM to more quickly incubate and commercialize ideas:

-Guelph-based LifeLearn used IBM Watson to develop their flagship offering, Sofie, an intelligent decision-support tool for veterinarians. Through the IBM Innovation Space, LifeLearn is connected to a larger pool of developers with global expertise that is often difficult to source in smaller centres.

- Big Terminal, a Toronto-based startup is using the Innovation Space to develop a search engine powered by IBM Watson to aggregate, consolidate, and analyze an abundance of financial data from around the world in one easy, navigable location.

- With IBM resources in the Innovation Space, Orenda is creating an intelligent software solution powered by IBM Watson to gather online data that helps businesses interpret what people are saying about their brands.

- Toronto-based IAmI runs its security application on IBM Cloud to provide users of any organization with unique identity accesses and identification services to stop cyber intrusion and data breaches.

- 4D Virtual Space uses IBM Watson and Bluemix to transform the real estate industry by turning floor plans into interactive and immersive real-time 3D environments. The IBM Innovation Space provided tools and resources that quickly and cost effectively moved the startup from product development to a minimum viable product within two months.

- Analytics 4 Life (A4L) is a medical information technology company that uses advanced signal processing techniques to extract, process, and analyze important data on patient health. A4L is the first company to graduate from the IBM Innovation Space.

IBM invests in incubator ecosystems like the Innovation Space in Toronto to help close the Canadian innovation gap and nurture research and development projects. Collaborative environments create a strong foundation for high value job creation by providing startups and developers with the expertise, resources and advanced technologies needed to grow their business and compete on a global scale.

IBM is a cognitive solutions and cloud platform company backed by over a century of business and systems innovation. IBM is dedicated to world-changing progress and building new ways to outthink challenges in a world where cognitive

intelligence is infused into the systems and processes that help improve business and society. For more information about IBMs continued investments in Canadian innovation, please visit http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ca/en/canadian-innovation.html.
"It's actually nice to come back," he says. "It's not until you come and do something like this that you really get a true snapshot of what's happening within the region. And the great thing about the show is that all the producers, large and small, from the region, and a large majority of them get involved and submit their wines. So it gives you a really true reflection of what's happening in the area."
Les Kovacs enjoys the "ease of working with these guys. It's a great group." Kovacs is in his seventh year as manager at P&B Shanty, tucked into bay 1 at 95 Commerce Park South, deep in the heart of the Chatham industrial park. On my first visit, I found the place partly by smell.

Bait on a hot day can't hide. It hits the nose first and unmistakably. Kovacs admits that it can be a "brutal environment." But he enjoys it.

Inside the bay on a recent hot summer day, about eight men and one woman were busy at work. The bay has low ceilings, pale white walls and a perpetually wet concrete floor. A man and a woman were busy opening big sea clams. They are bigger than your average surf clams, but look the same otherwise, like an oversized baked stuffed quohog size. They were being split and opened, the clam separated from the shell. Shells go into one bin on the floor, clam meat into smaller bins on the shelf.

But most of the action is men tying dogfish totes.

It is piece work. The men are paid by the tote.

Into each tote goes a few hundred feet of 8-gauge line, a mixture of cotton and nylon, strong enough in Kovacs's words to "pull the bottom from the ocean." Off the mainline hang 300 gangions, short sections of line at the end of which hangs a VMC hook. Each hook gets baited with a piece of cut herring. Boxes of Lund herring line the walk in freezers in the back. Herring chunks the size of a Fig Newton go on each hook.

The whole operation is contained in a space not much bigger than an average car garage. The work is busy but not frantic. The radio plays. The men are genial, conversing amiably, but always with an eye on their work. It is piece work, so the sooner they finish, the sooner they are done for the day.

Fishermen each have their favorite way of rigging. Kovacs shows me some special gangions that one of his customers insists on, slightly longer than average and with a braided line with a steel wire down the middle, which this captain feels increases the gangion's life; they take a lot of abuse, being ripped on all day as they are by sharks.

Most of the workers are from Haiti. They come here on work visas and work seasonally. Dogfish tote tying keeps P&B humming from June to November. Some of the guys come back year after year, some try it for a while and move on. It is not for everyone.

Kovacs, who used to run 70-man painting crews in Florida, prefers this work. He too ties totes, he has his own station set up near the back. His features a couple of flipped-over totes for a bench seat, his only concession to "my age," he says. Otherwise, he works as hard as any man in the shed.

Joseph Dalo, from Port au Prince, Haiti, is in his second season working at P&B, and he has another job as well. He first came to Cape Cod because he heard about it from his cousin, who lives here. He smiled as he worked and seemed to enjoy the company of his co-workers. A genial man, asked his favorite part about Cape Cod, he says, "all of it is the best."

Each tote is a work of, if not art exactly, then at least exacting, performance based efficiency.

A commercial dogfisherman, or any commercial guy for that matter, does everything he can to make the long, brutal work go faster. Well-tied totes that fly overboard in steady rhythm are highly prized. Totes have wet newspaper between each section of coiled line to keep the bait moist and the line from chafing. Little funnels made of newspaper sit in each corner; the idea is to provide drainage. If a captain hoses down the tote, water would become trapped, soaking and ruining the bait. The funnels in the corner help drain the tote and make sure it's ready to go at the moment of truth  the set out.

At best, you hope every hook flies overboard in a string and the bait stays attatched. A poorly tied tote can lead to a dreaded "disco ball" of tangled lines, gangions and hooks. Disco balls can ruin a whole carefully tied string, cut down on the yield, and increase time on the water. A tangled line doesn't so much as create more work for the captain as it quadruples it. It's just a nightmare, especially when there are fish on the line. Things get ugly fast, but a well-tied tote makes the captain's work so much easier.

Joey Dodge was working on this day. Dodge, 25, says he's been fishing since he was 8. His dad is a commercial fisherman. He talks about fishing with his dad years ago, how sometimes a whole haul would come up with just lobsters, and he'd be there in the cockpit, trying to sort through them with lobsters biting him, hanging off his ankles, even the sleeves of his clothing. Dodge says he enjoys the busy nature of the tying shed work, since he "can't sit still" anyway.

Kovacs continually praised the guys he works with. He allows no drugs in the workplace, but doesn't mind if the guys have a beer near the end of their shift. Dodge likes to wait until he only has one tote, or even half a tote, left to tie for the day before he'll crack a cold one.

An experienced worker can tie a tote in an hour and a half to two hours. They get paid by the tote, and some guys tie one or two and then head home, or more likely, to another job. Some stay and tie all day and into the night. "We've been here until 3 a.m. some days," admits Dodge. That's about the same time the captains start coming around to get thier totes for the day.

Kovacs' personal record for a single tote is 48 minutes. The fastest he ever heard was a still-talked-about shop legend who could routinely knock them out in 35 minutes. But it takes even experienced guys up to two hours.

Each tote is 300 hooks. Most commercial guys fish four totes a day, on two linked strings, to get their daily quota of 5,000 pounds. Most every hook comes back with a fish on it. So the hooks get beat up, straightened, pulled, bent, abused. A little "hookset" is at each tier's work station, along with a knife, some frozen herring, a used tote that a fisherman has dropped off to be baited, and a new tote into which the baited hooks are so carefully laid. Hooks go through the hookset, a small piece of wood with two wood screws and a post driven into each end, one for each of the two main hooks used (fisherman's preference). When the hook is pulled against the screws, it returns to its J-shape, ready to fish again.

The gear in the totes can cost about $180 brand new, with used gear available from around $75 and up. Like anything, Kovacs says, you get what you pay for. Old, beat up gear comes cheap but is more work to get ready. It's a trade off.

Kovacs was coy when asked what the workers make, but independent sources say its around $30 per tote. The fishermen pay about $50.

Most of the tiers start in the morning, but they are basically free to come and go as they please. "And the wardrobe is pretty casual," jokes Kovoacs. In the bloody, smelly, fish oil-smeared concrete wetness, T-shirts and old shorts suffice.

Even calling it a "brutal" work environment, Kovacs is clearly a man who enjoys it. "It's laid back," he says.

Paid by what you contribute. Laid back work environment, friendly co-workers, frequent breaks if you need one, and an end of the shift cold brew? Sounds pretty good.
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Documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Wengrofsky had always wanted to visit Detroit. Like his hometown, New York City, he envisioned Detroit as having a creative spirit forged out of the economic hardships of the 1970s. Detroit and NYC were sister cities going through the same destructive metamorphosis, he explains by email.

Wengrofsky asked rocker Sonny Vincent, whos performed and recorded with a number of Detroit musicians, to suggest creative spirits in the area. Sonny listed several proto-punk rock luminaries: Michael Davis of MC5 fame, Ron and Scott Ashton, Dennis Thompson, and one musician Wengrofsky knew little aboutHiawatha Bailey. The only thing Id ever heard about Hiawatha Bailey was that back in the 1960s, Wengrofsky recalls, Hi used to roam around wearing nothing other than an American flag.

Curious to meet this flag-wearing character in 2010, Wengrofsky headed for Detroit. At a party there, someone advised him, Youre not gonna find Hiawatha in Detroit. He lives in Ann Arbor.

When Wengrosky and Bailey finally met up, he learned that the flag story never happened. But he also realized that Bailey had a big tale to tell and we had the personal chemistry necessary for a feature-length project. Inspired, he drove back to New York to confer with his long-term cinematic partner, David Kavanaugh. The two filmmakers have worked on a slew of short film documentaries about NYC counterculture artists, poets, and actors. This would be their first roc-doc, but Kavanaugh was receptive. The two returned to Michigan and began filming The Song of Hiawatha.

The film chronicles the Bailey familys migration north out of the Jim Crow South in the 1950s. From there the narrative weaves through Motown during its glory days and comes to rest in Ann Arbor in the late 60s, then at the epicenter of social unrest. It chronicles the activities of the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, FBI surveillance, and how it all came together to shape the character of one counterculture punk rocker.

While the production team is putting the finishing touches on the film, a few holdups remain, financing first among them. Among other things, hell need to pay for a blistering Detroit rock n roll soundtrack.
Before taking its passenger car lineup to the Paris Auto Show at the end of the month, Hyundai will head to Hanover, Germany, this week, to debut the H350 Fuel Cell Concept at the 2016 IAA Commercial Vehicle Show.



Based on the same light commercial vehicle unveiled two years ago, the new study is said to provide a glimpse into the future of the brands LCV lineup.

The powertrain that includes an electric motor, fuel cell stack, high-voltage battery pack, inverter, and hydrogen tank, is capable of producing 136 PS (134 HP), allowing it to reach speeds of up to 150 km/h (93 mph). The 175-liter hydrogen tank can be filled in less than four minutes and provides a total range of 422 km (262 miles).

Hyundai states that the powertrain is intelligently packed in such a way that its installation has no impact on the H350s load area, and, depending on the wheelbase, the van provides 10.5 or 12.9 cubic meters, enough to host five standard European pallets, or room for a 14-passenger compartment.

PHOTO GALLERY
Jaguar Land Rover is moving its North American headquarters to a new facility. But unlike rival Mercedes-Benz, its not leaving the State of New Jersey. In fact its just moving across town from its current home in the Township of Mahwah.



The automaker opened its current headquarters in Mahwah back in 1989, and has operated from there ever since. By now its staff has grown to 250, supporting a network of 377 dealers across the United States and Canada.

The new facility will allow the headcount to swell to 315, working in a new 147,000-square-foot complex  including a 30,000-square-foot training, research and development center. The headquarters are being renovated from an existing facility located on Route 17 North, just a fifteen-minute drive from the current offices on MacArthur Boulevard.

The building is slated to adopt the same arch theme as the new design recently introduced for the brands dealers (pictured below). With plans approved, the renovation process is slated to commence before the end of this year, before the company can move in 2018. The company recently opened a new tech hub in Oregon, and has reportedly been considering opening an assembly plant in the United States as well.

Other foreign automakers with their North American headquarters in New Jersey include Volvo in Rockleigh, Mitsubishi (ironically) in Swedesboro, BMW in Woodcliff Lake, and Ferrari and Maserati in Englewood Cliffs.

Photo Gallery
An increasing number of automakers are already offering, or considering the launch, of pickup trucks, in all shapes and sizes, but Peugeot hasnt made a step into this direction so far.



The French brand isnt thinking about it  yet  but if it did, TheophilusChin is proposing the conversion of the all-new 5008 into something akin to a European-flavored (and -sized) Honda Pilot. Oddly, this rendering doesnt look half bad.

Increasing the new Pugs ground clearance, fitting it with roof rails and a practical bed that can carry all sorts of things, the 5008 has been transformed into a snazzy pickup truck that would make the Mitsubishi L200 jealous.

But would you actually buy one if by some miracle Peugeot ever decided to create it?

PHOTO GALLERY
Based on the Double Cab Tekna version of the Nissan Navara, the all-new Navara EnGuard Concept has arrived at the 2016 IAA Commercial Vehicle Show in Hanover, Germany.



Fitted with numerous design elements and performance upgrades, the pickup truck is described as durable and touch, and is said to have been designed to operate as a life-saving rescue platform in some of the worlds most harsh and extreme environments.

Compared to the standard Navara, the study features a 50 mm increase in ride height, bespoke overfenders with moulded side steps between them, emergency blue strobe lights, redesigned fog lamps and taillights, and fluorescent green color appliques, on the side steps and wheels. This shade is the most visible one in daylight and easily identifiable by people affected by color-blindness.

The Nissan Navara EnGuard Concept also has two pull-out fiberglass trays in the load bed, two-way radios, ropes and an axe in the shallow upper tray, and oxygen tank, resuscitation kit, life jackets, and buoyancy aids in the lower tray.

Moreover, rescue is enhanced by a DJI Phantom 4 drone, with an operating ceiling of 6,000 meters (19,685 feet), weighing 1,4 kg (3 lbs) and having the ability to fly at speeds up to 20 meters per second, for close to 30 minutes. The drone sends images back to the car, which appear on a pop-up high-def screen, hidden in the load bed wall.

Last but not least, the automaker has equipped the concept with a prototype portable battery pack, designed and developed in-house, using seven EV battery modules inside a weather-proof machined aluminum housing, each being a 2kW unit. When docked in place, these remain in constant charge mode and harvest power generated by the 190 PS (187 HP) twin-turbo 2.3-liter diesel engine. The batteries can be used with as an alternative to a petrol generator.

PHOTO GALLERY
Three prototypes of the 2017 Ford GT were pulled over for speeding yesterday in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado.



The test mules, filmed and pictured during a separate outing in Colorado, were pulled over by police officers from the Eagle County Sheriffs Office and Colorado State Patrol.

Local news outlet Vail Daily doesnt reveal if the Ford engineers driving the prototypes were fined and just how fast they were travelling. They were said to be going way faster than the 50 mph speed limit however.

The vehicles were in the area for high-altitude testing as development of the all-new GT supercar continues.

Production of the GT will commence next year and in the coming four years, fewer than 1,000 units will be built. Driving each will be a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 engine delivering upwards of 700 hp. Mated exclusively to a quick-shifting automatic transmission, the third-generation GT has the makings of being a European supercar slayer.

Hat tip to Brett Borgard!

Even Ford supercars cant outrun radar https://t.co/PJfDZQl8RF Vail Daily (@VailDaily) September 20, 2016

VIDEO
Photo: Okanagan Rail Trail

Tree Brewing Co. will be hoisting a glass of ale to everyone who is working to make the Okanagan Rail Trail a reality.

Tree Brewing Co. and Okanagan Rail Trail will be celebrating donors and volunteers with a family walk Sunday, Sept. 25 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at The Tree Brewing Beer Institute, 1346 Water St.

This partnership is a great example of how local businesses can contribute to and celebrate developing this legacy opportunity. We are looking forward to hosting this event, and offering our Okanagan Rail Trail Common Ale to participants, said Omar Rashwan, director of sales and marketing, Tree Brewing Co.

Rail Trail volunteers will lead participants along Cawston and Clement for a two- or four-kilometre walk. Children are welcome to ride their bikes.

Many of our donors and volunteers will be on hand to share their stories about why theyve contributed to the rail trail, and why its important to them, said Heather Stewart, Trail Ambassador. Tree Brewing will provide some beverages and appies upon conclusion of the walk.

There will also be a rail trail trivia game, a 50/50 draw and rail trail T-shirts will be on sale.

The nearly 50-km discontinued rail route between Kelowna and Coldstream is in the process of being converted to public corridor for future use as recreational pathway.
Photo: Contributed

A new micro-suite development in Kelowna has already nearly sold out.

Cambridge House says it set a new "volume sales record" for the Okanagan, with 172 of the 192 suites sold at opening.

Those who bought included young couples, singles, professionals and investors.

Kevin Bird, president of builder K West Homes, said Kelowna always comes with a high cost and he wanted the opportunity to offer more affordable housing.

"If you look at what is happening to housing choices in world class cities, they are getting smaller. But at the same time they are getting extremely more efficient," he said. "Why is there a need to have space if it doesnt get used?"

Most of the units are 313-square-foot studio apartments. There are a handful of 451-sq.-ft. one-bedroom units and two 946-sq.-ft. two bedroom units.

The condo, located at the intersection of Ethel Street and Leon Avenue, is expected to be complete in 2018.
Photo: Contributed

A man has been arrested after stealing $200 from a laundromat in Penticton.

According to Cpl. Don Wrigglesworth, the man took the money from the till at the Penticton Laundromat on Eckhardt Avenue, before departing on an expensive mountain bike,

The man, who had recently moved from Surrey, was found two hours later on Orchard Avenue, with $200 worth of loonies and toonies in his pocket.

He was also in possession of the stolen getaway bike.
Photo: Getty Images

Enderby is encouraging anyone impacted by multiple myeloma to come out and show their support.

The community north of Vernon on Highway 97A will be taking to the streets for the inaugural Multiple Myeloma March, Saturday, Sept. 24.

The march is part of Myeloma Canadas national signature fundraising event and it starts 1 p.m. at the Lions Club Gazebo.

Kelowna hosted its march on Sunday, Sept. 11, raising $5,645.

Headed by Ron Surry, his family and friends, the Enderby community aims to raise $10,000.

Many myeloma patients, like me, have mobility problems. If I could manage these problems by walking five kilomteres, maybe others could, too, said Surry, an 18-month myeloma survivor and the Enderby and Kelowna Multiple Myeloma March co-ordinator. Advocating for better access to new drugs is my way of encouraging multiple myeloma patients to remain hopeful and optimistic. Increased treatment options would create more stepping stones for patients to walk on and extend our lives with a better quality of life.

Multiple myeloma is a blood cancer that develops in the plasma cells found in bone marrow.

The beneficiary of this years march will be the Myeloma Canada Research Network (MCRN)  a patient-focused, collaborative research group working in nine provinces.

The Vancouver General Hospital, the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Surrey and the Kelowna Hospital in Kelowna, are three of the 21 centres participating in MCRN across Canada.

Participants can register, donate or get more information online.
Photo: Jennifer Zielinski

The discipline hearing for Osoyoos RCMP Const. Amit Goyal has again been delayed.

A hearing had been scheduled for earlier this month, but the matter is now set for Nov. 14.

Goyal was suspended with pay from the Osoyoos detachment in June 2013.

His departure from the RCMP followed two reports of vehicles stolen from his home in 2012. The cars were later found torched.

Charges were recommended by Trail RCMP against Goyal, but were not pursued by Crown counsel.

He currently faces three allegations under Section 39 of the RCMP regulations and two under Section 45 (b).

Section 39 reads that a member shall not engage in any disgraceful or disorderly act of conduct that could bring discredit to the force. Section 45 (b) states that a member shall not knowingly make a false, misleading or inaccurate statement or report to any member who is superior in rank or who has authority over that member pertaining to any investigation.

Previous hearings in 2015 and earlier this year also never happened.

Julie Gagnon, a media relations officer for the RCMP, could not be immediately reached for comment on the reason for the delay.
Pumpkin season is upon us, and it's shaping up to be a 'gourd' haul.

Its looking good out in the fields right now, so well be picking during the week, said Ron McMillan from McMillan Farms in Kelowna.

Weve got lots to pick still.

McMillan farm in Kelowna always draws a crowd this time of year with their pumpkin slingshot, hay rides and corn maze.

The farm opens Sept. 24.
It is now the site of a high school, but a Vernon field was once a place of hardship for hundreds of people.

From 1914-20, McDonald Field, next to WL Seaton Secondary School, was an internment camp during the First World War for men, women and children mostly of Ukrainian descent.

It was one of 26 camps across the nation.

Actor and filmmaker Ryan Boyko, of Armistice Films, produced a series of short documentaries on the internment camps, and last fall he was in the North Okanagan to feature the Vernon camp.

The series is now being released with the first episode of 'The Camps' featuring the internment camp near Mara Lake.

Episode two focuses on the Vernon camp.

Glenda Kohse is a direct descendant of Vernon internees.

My grandparents and my uncle were all interned here. My uncle came here as a three-month-old baby and spent the first six years of his life looking through barbed wire at these hills behind us, Kohse says in the documentary while walking through MacDonald Field.

Kohse said her grandmother made friends with a local woman who supplied her with milk for the baby.

It's just a really harsh way to start your life off, said Kohse. There was no explanation given. They took away their livelihood; my grandfather had boats, they took that away and he never got them back.

I would like the kids to understand this happened here. It's not just a playing field. There is a lot of history here.

Andrea Malysh, program manager of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund, said a digital map of the camps has also been created online.

You will be able to click on the map and view a particular story, said Malysh. There are some very horrific stories from the internment camps. Our beautiful parks have kind of a dark history.

Malysh explained many internees were forced to work on creating Canada's national parks, such as Yoho and Banff.

They actually helped build the Parks Canada project with free, forced labour, she said, adding Mount Revelstoke Park was also build on the backs of internees.
Photo: Getty Images

If you have an odd-looking mole, a skin-cancer concern or a bad rash and need an expert opinion, you're going to have to wait a long time to get one.

Dermatologists are in short supply in B.C., with wait lists for some being longer than a year.

Following Dr. Russel B. Harris's retirement in Penticton in January, Kelowna dermatologist, Dr. Carmel Anderson, became the only dermatologist east of the Lower Mainland in B.C.

Prince George used to have a dermatologist, Kamloops had two, Vernon had one, Penticton had one and we had one, and now there is only me, said Anderson. We are getting 30-40 new referrals a day.

She notes one dermatologist does work in Kamloops, but he does not work in the public system and you will have to pay to get in to see him.

This lack of doctors has forced her to send a letter to family doctors around the area telling them she has cut off acceptance of any new patients.

I will always take in emergencies and have emergencies every day, but elective patients and referrals will wait. I will open my office up once we get caught up, but we are booking next May in our office, just for an appointment, said Anderson.

There are days I feel overwhelmed. I don't just work at my office, I lecture at the medical school, teach the medical students in my office and do Internet consults.

While only one dermatologist exists east of the Lower Mainland, the options west are also limited.

Dr. Evert Tuyp, president of the BC Section of Dermatology and dermatologist in Coquitlam, said the situation is critical.

It's an awful mess, said Tuyp. There is a need for four more dermatologist in Surrey, a need in Chilliwack, in Abbotsford, Coquitlam, Langley, posting for three jobs in Richmond, four postings in Victoria. It is an issue everywhere.

Tuyp said, like Anderson, his wait list is also more than six months.

There was someone in Nanaimo who used to have a wait list of more than 18 months, there is someone in Langley with a wait list of more than a year.

A major part of the problem, according to both doctors, is the recruitment of new dermatologist. They say dermatologists in B.C. are paid less than anywhere else in Canada, which makes recruitment difficult.

Numbers provided by Dr. Tuyp show initial consult fees to see a dermatologist range from about $68.26 per patient in B.C. to $125.84 per patient in Nova Scotia.

A dermatologist who does an emergency room visit in B.C. gets $92.79, versus an Ontario dermatologist who will get $223.70.

We have tried to recruit dermatologists, and we have a number who said they are coming. They get out here to look at real estate and then see the fee schedule and they decide not to come, said Anderson.

Anderson said those with new referrals to see a dermatologist will either have to wait until her office reopens, go to Vancouver or Calgary or pay in Kamloops.
Photo: The Canadian Press Jeffrey Willis appears for his arraignment Tuesday.

A man was charged with murder Tuesday in the 2013 disappearance of a gas station clerk in western Michigan, a case that had stymied investigators until a teenage girl in an unrelated incident escaped from the suspect's van in April.

Jessica Heeringa disappeared from the gas station where she worked in Norton Shores, near Muskegon, as she was about to close up for the night. The body of the 25-year-old woman hasn't been found. Investigators weren't able to break the mystery until Jeffrey Willis was arrested in May in a different case.

"We found Jessica's killer," Muskegon County prosecutor D.J. Hilson told reporters.

Willis is charged with kidnapping and murder. He's already facing charges in two more local cases: the fatal shooting of a 36-year-old female jogger in 2014 and the attempted abduction of a teenage girl in April.

A not guilty plea was entered on Willis' behalf during a brief court hearing. His lawyer, Paula Baker Mathes, declined to comment.

At a news conference, Hilson repeatedly rebuffed questions about the evidence against Willis or whether he knew Heeringa.

"Mr. Willis is a monster," Hilson said. "He certainly is an individual that I wouldn't let any of my children around, much less any female around. What his total motivation was, that's only for him to say. Ultimately, I think this was part of who he was as a person."

Police said they found a pistol, rope, chains, handcuffs and syringes in Willis' van when they arrested him in the spring. If convicted, he faces life in prison without a chance for parole.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

School District 67 Supt. Wendy Hyer has confirmed there was a bear sighting in the vicinity of Skaha Lake Middle School and Princess Margaret Secondary School on Tuesday.

According to the superintendent, conservation officers were called.

Castanet will provide more details as they become available.
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Fun Facts You Didnt Know About Andy Cohens Rise to Prominence and His Partner Andy Cohen is one of Americas top media personalities who gained prominence after helping to bring the Bravo network back to life. He also hosted a couple of shows on the network, including the popular nightly series Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. After rising to the position of head of production and development at ...

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Open Secrets of How Joanna Gaines Balances Her Career With Being a Wife and Mother Joanna Gaines is the co-founder of Magnolia Homes, a business she runs with one goal: converting houses to homes. She doubles as the lead designer of the company which she co-owns with her husband, Chip Gaines. Lady Gaines gained massive popularity when she became a co-star with her husband on the HGTVs show, Fixer Upper. ...

Juicy Details of Ayesha Currys Love Story With Stephen, Her Family Members and Recent Pursuits When your husband is one of the greatest basketballers that the NBA has ever seen, then it bestows on you the status of a celebrity wife  and may not even demand that you do anything extra to maintain that status. However, Ayesha Curry, the wife of multiple NBA champion, Steph Curry, is not one ...

What Is Tarek el Moussas Ethnicity, Why Did He Divorce His Wife and Who Is He Dating? Tarek El Moussa has made himself one of the most recognizable men on reality television, especially to fans of HGTV. Thanks to his expertise in the world of real estate, Tarek has become a national star. But even to his hardcore followers, there are questions about Tarek El Moussa that remain unanswered, such as his ...

Fun Facts About Natalie Beckers Lonely Childhood and Eventual Career Success Natalie Becker is an actress of South African descent who became famous for her appearance in films like The World Unseen and The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior. A multitalented individual, Natalie is also a television/radio presenter. She is also a co-founder of the Thought Leader Global Media which she runs together with ...

Top 3 Female CNN News Anchors You Didnt Know Were Africans CNN is one of the leading news agencies in the world. The satellite and cable news network was founded in 1980 by Ted Turner and has been one of the best sources of news for a number of years. It also boasts of the best journalists and presenters all around in media broadcasting. The company is a ...

Channels That Aided Katie Pavlichs Growth as a Journalist and All About Her Marriage To Friedson If you have ever come across any Fast and Furious featuring Barack Obama, it is the handiwork of Katie Pavlich. The book which claims to have exposed Obamas bloodiest scandal and the shameless cover-up thereof, has been earning Pavlich much praise and fame ever since it was published in 2012. Nonetheless, Pavlich is more famed ...

Is Oprah Winfrey Married? Husband, Children, Biography, House, Facts Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire philanthropist, talk show icon, producer, actress, and writer. The media icon famously dubbed The Queen Of All Media owns and hosts the highest-rated television program in the media circle. Read more about the powerful television star below. Oprah Winfrey Biography Oprah was born as Orpah Gail Winfrey on January 29, 1954, to a ...

Who Is Arsenio Hall, What Happened To His Talk Show and Why Do Fans Think He Is Gay? He is one of the funniest beings to have graced the comedy constituent of the American entertainment industry. Arsenio Hall has a reputation for the rib-cracking disposition always portrayed in his comedy roles. He is not just a comedian; he is also an actor and a former talk show host for his popular show, The ...

What Is Woah Vicky Famous For and Who Are Her Family Members? Like most social media celebrities in this digital era, Woah Vicky is one of those stars that have utilized the internet as a powerful tool to propel themselves to instant fame. The social media space, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc., offers lots of people the right opportunities and potentials to become superstars overnight. Not everyone achieves ...

Where Is Michael Strahan Since His Retirement From The NFL and Who Is His Partner? Michael Strahan is a retired American football player turned media personality. He played the defensive lineman position and holds the record for most sacks in a single NFL season. He also only played for the New York Giants throughout the entire 15-year professional career that saw him win a Super Bowl ring. In February 2014, ...

How Wendy Williams Went From Being a College DJ to Having Her Own Talk Show and More About Her Divorce Wendy Williams is a former radio personality, now talk show host, who is known for her outspokenness and brash no-nonsense attitude. She gained fame and notoriety for her on-air clashes with celebrities before moving on to host her own talk show. Since 2008, Williams has hosted the nationally syndicated television talk show, The Wendy Williams Show. ...

Who is Sunny Hostin? Her Husband, Family & Net Worth Sunny Hostin is no ordinary Latina  American lawyer but also a successful columnist, multi-platform journalist, and social commentator. A happily married woman and mother of two, Hostin is the Senior Legal Correspondent and Analyst for ABC News and co-host of ABCs popular morning talk show, The View. She is a legal expert popularly known as a former ...

Who Is Robert Costa and Is He Married, Who Is His Wife? Robert Costa is a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC who is regarded as being part of Americas next generation of journalists. The University of Notre Dame graduate, who is of Italian/Portuguese descent, has been lauded for his fresh political perspectives in an industry full of old heads. In addition to his work listed above, Costa ...

Team Valor Pokemon Go  7 Key Facts You Need To Know Team Valor Pokemon Go  The craze of the new game Pokemon Go is one that took the gaming world by storm sending teenagers and adults alike into a frenzy and one of its teams Team Valor, has proven to be instrumental in making it so. Before the game was created, Pokemon was a cartoon ...

Sheryl Underwood  Husband, Family & Net Worth She is known for her trademark smile which can be described as the brightest and broadest smile ever seen on planet earth. She is none other than Sheryl Underwood the comedian, actress, and TV host whose funny wits has left America in great awe. Although Sheryl has risen to become an important personality in the industry, ...

Team Mystic Pokemon Go: 7 Facts You Need To Know And Signs You Are One Team Mystic of the break out game Pokemon Go is a team that is full of sass and chivalry. With an enchanting monicker, Team Mystic stands out from the rest of its counterparts and deserves to take the crown as champion in the Pokemon gaming-verse. To be a member of this exceptional team of Pokemon battle ...

Exploring Guy Beahms Dr Disrespect Persona, Wife and Why He was Banned Permanently From Twitch Guy Beahm who is popularly known by his online alias  Dr DisRespect, is an award-winning Twitch.tv streamer. He has leveraged on the Twitch platform to become an internet personality that is quite widely known. His online success is just more proof that anyone who is good at what they do can attain celebrity status ...

Critical Facts About Lee Ann McAdoo  The Infowars Anchor Lee Ann Mcadoo is a conservative journalist and television host whose interests in conspiracies and astrology has established her as a famous American reporter. Often referred to as Wonder Woman, McAdoo is a reporter who works for InfoWars.com, a controversial right-wing website run by radio show host, Alex Jones. Who Is Lee Ann McAdoo? Lee Ann McAdoo was born on 7 ...

Millie Weaver  Age, Husband & Infowars Career Millie Weaver is an American model, journalist, political activist, and social commentator. The young and beautiful journalist rose to fame working as a reporter for a controversial right-wing website InfoWars.com. Also known as Millennial Millie, Weaver is a social media influencer with over 100,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel and over 35,000 followers on Twitter. Who Is Millie Weaver and What Is ...

Is Jessica Tarlov Married? What Are Her Height & Weight? Jessica Tarlov is an American political consultant, strategist, and analyst whose influential and regular TV presence has made a popular figure. A good example of beauty with brains, Tarlov has appeared on various TV networks, mostly the FOX News Network where she is known for her liberal views on political analysis and insights. She is also the senior director ...

Who Is Kelly Rebecca Nichols  Alex Jones Ex-Wife? Kelly Rebecca Nichols is the ex-wife of controversial American radio show host, Alex Jones. She got nationwide attention following her divorce and subsequent custody battle with her estranged husband. Nichols, who worked with PETAs public relations department, was herself no stranger to controversies as she was involved in several publicity stunts of the non-profit animal rights ...

Who Is Bree Morgan  Cole Sprouse Ex-Girlfriend And What Is She Up To Now? Although Bree Morgan became famous through the Instagram, she also sapped some dose of popularity from Disneys sweetheart, Cole Sprouse of the Sprouse brothers. She is not only an Instagram star but also a YouTube vlogger whose popularity has long exceeded the ordinary level. Bree is conspicuously prominent on the internet and has her digital savviness ...

Does Vanna White Have Husband or Children, What Is Her Net Worth / Salary? For over three decades, Vanna White has been a household name, famous as the co-host and letter turner of the iconic NBC game show Wheel of Fortune. The talented and beautiful television personality is also an actress with several TV series and films to her credit. Since making her Wheel of Fortune debut in 1982, she has become one ...

Liz Wheeler  Biography, Husband & Net Worth Liz Wheeler is the kind of girl who sets the room on fire whenever she comes around. In this situation, however, she sets our screens on fire each time she appears as the host of One America News Tipping Point. She is, therefore, a presenter, publisher, consultant and a member of the Board of Zoning ...

Betty White  Net Worth, Children & Husband The entertainment industry will remain indebted to personalities like Betty White who brought something extra to the table and kept the world entertained for donkey years. The comedienne, actress, and writer graced the big screens in the early 50s as a show host and has been a delight since then. She is the queen of ...

Is Bill Nye (The Science Guy) Dead or Alive, What Are His Net Worth & Education? Everyone will always remember Bill Nye as the Science Guy. Besides his TV show Bill Nye the Science Guy, he is well-known for his Netflix show Bill Nye Saves the World which started airing in 2017 as well as his appearances in many famous media projects as a science educator. The star studied mechanical engineering ...

Is Cesar Millan Dead, Who Is The Wife & What Is His Net Worth? Cesar Millan is the famous dog whisperer who often stirs up mixed emotions. The Mexican-American is precisely speaking, a dog behaviorist; he has been in the game for over 25 years. His Emmy-nominated television series, Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan further pushed his method and tactics into the limelight. The series was produced from 2004 ...

Is Thomas Sanders Gay and Does He Have A Boyfriend? By the time Vine was shut down in January 2017, Thomas Sanders was already popular within and beyond the internet community for his heavy involvements on the online video hosting platform. After the tragic shutdown of Vine impacted on the growing career of the multi-talented personality, he immediately switched over to YouTube where he continued to upload ...

Is Shepard Smith Gay, Who Is The Boyfriend & What Is His Net Worth? There are only a few media personalities who are as bold and confident as Shepard Smith. Apart from his impressive stint at Fox News Channel which includes but not limited to his classic news delivery, upfront stance on virtually every issue and much more; he loves his job as much as he loves his personality. Smith ...

Is Milo Yiannopoulos Gay? His Husband and Net Worth Milo Yiannopoulos is a popular writer, journalist, polemicist, public speaker, and political commentator who is also known as the founder of The Kernel, an online blog. He has been said to be among the list of 100 weird and influential people in the United Kingdom. He appeared on this list as a result of personal beliefs and ...

Does Ryan Seacrest Have A Wife Or Girlfriend, What Is His Net Worth? From radio to television, Ryan Seacrest is a household name and a force to be reckoned with in showbiz. The radio personality, television host, and producer is best recognized as the host of the popular TV talent search contest American Idol. Heres how the media personality who always knew what his lifes ambition was and diligently pursued ...

Is Anderson Cooper Gay, Who is The Boyfriend or Husband? For many, the thought of becoming a millionaire by writing and talking about other people appears unachievable but this is the reality of the prominent American journalist Anderson Cooper who gathered millions of dollars for conducting accurate political analysis and other vital reports on TV. He is the main anchor of the CNN news show Anderson ...

Is David Muir Gay or Does He Have A Wife, What Is His Salary? David Muir is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who works for the ABC broadcast-television network and anchors the ABC World News Tonight with David Muir program while also co-anchoring the magazine program 20/20. The Ithaca College graduate, whose show has become the most-watched newscast in America, has covered stories from all across America and the world; reporting ...

Joel Osteen  Divorce Rumors, Net Worth & Family Members Joel Osteen is an American Televangelist, Senior Pastor of Lakewood Church based in Houston, Texas, a husband and a father of two. He is an author of many books, seven of which are New York Times Best Sellers and his televised sermons capture more than 7 million viewers per week and 20 million every month ...

Who Is Todd Chrisley? What To Know About His Children, Gay Rumors & Net Worth Premiered on the USA network in 2014, Chrisley Knows Best is one of the most watched family reality TV shows in the U.S. The series which is currently in its sixth season is centered around U.S real estate mogul Todd Chrisley and his family. The show reveals Todd the patriarch of the Chrisley family as a strict dad who rules ...

Who Is Shannon Bream Of Fox News? Her Husband, Children & Net Worth Shannon Bream who hosts the iconic primetime program started her journalism career in the late 1990s debuting as the evening and late-night news reporter for the CBS affiliate, WBTV. The beauty from America currently works for the Fox News Channel and she is best known for anchoring the primetime program. She also hosts Americas News ...

Is Troye Sivan Gay, Who Is His Boyfriend and What Is His Net Worth? Troye Sivan is an Australian singer and songwriter best known for songs like Happy Little Pill, Youth, Heaven (with Betty Who) and The Boyfriend Tag (with Tyler Oakley) which have all garnered him different awards and ranked on the Billboard Charts. Sivan, who was born in South Africa but now resides in the United States, is ...

Did iDubbbz Have Cancer, Is He Gay and Who Is His Girlfriend Now? iDubbbz is one YouTuber who has made a career out of courting controversy. Renowned for his absurdist channels and comedy video series, the Los Angeles based personality is the owner of two channels, iDubbzTV, and iDubbzTV2, as well as the brains behind comedy video series such as Content Cop, Kickstarter Crap, Gaming News Crap, and ...

Inside Greg Gutfelds Love Story With Wife Elena Moussa and Why Fans Thought He Was Gay Greg Gutfeld is a seasoned American television producer whose career in the media industry has spanned over a decade. He is a man of many talents who makes extra income through comedy, journalism, and editorial works. Gutfeld regularly appears on Fox News Channel as a panellist and co-host of the political talk show The Five ...

Works That Made Bo Burnham A Household Name and How Much He Is Worth Now One of YouTubes first viral stars and the worlds most exciting young comedian, Bo Burnham, has always amazed critics and comedy aficionados alike. Often regarded as the Justin Bieber of comedy, thanks to his fresh looks, floppy blond hair and hoodies, he has a multi-faceted career bigger than many comedians twice his age. It wouldnt ...

Is Louie Anderson Gay And What Is His Net Worth? Louie Anderson has one of the most abstract faces in the industry and equally knows how to use it to his advantage. He is not only a stand-up comedian but also an actor and television host who is known for his distinctive comic wits. Some of his notable projects include Family Feud, where he was ...

Is Don Lemon of CNN Gay, Who is His Partner and What Is His Salary? Don Lemon has risen to become one of the most recognizable faces on CNN over the past few years. The fiery journalist, who anchors CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, is liked and somewhat disliked for his strong and candid opinions on a variety of matters that do not just include politics but also race, significantly, matters that ...

Is Rachel Maddow Gay, Who is the Wife and How Much Does She Earn in Salary? Rachel Maddow is an award-winning American journalist, political commentator, and television news anchor. She is best known for hosting the popular nightly TV show The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Prior to this, she hosted a talk radio program on Air America Radio from 2005 to 2010. As of now, the TV sensation co-anchors MSNBCs ...

Demystifying Pokimane  Her Real Name, Ethnicity & Boyfriend Like most social media celebrities in this digital era, Pokimane Thicc is one of those stars who took advantage of the internet to make a name for herself. Given the unlimited potentials which the social media space offers, many people have been instantly propelled to fame just by posting creative online contents. Not only has ...

A Breakdown of Kris Jenners Net Worth, Sources Of Income and Relationships Over The Years Standing outside and looking in, Kris Jenner looks like the oil that greases the wheels of the entire Kardashian/Jenner machine. She has been dubbed a momager and rightfully so because she seems to have had a part to play in the trajectory of each and every one of her daughters individually and the Kardashian brand ...

Pursuits That Brought Liza Koshys Fame To its Zenith and Her Love Life Since David Dobrik Liza Koshy is an American actress who has leveraged YouTube as a platform to promote her comedy while also serving as a television host on occasions. She is talented and funny and has gathered a lot of fans from around the world. Koshy started on Vine in high school and was able to get millions of ...

Alex Aiono Biography  Inside The Life Of The American Singer Not everyone who started from the streets has attained the heights where Alex Aiono is currently. His story could be referred to as the perfect definition of rising from Grass to Grace. He came into the limelight after he started out as a YouTuber, singer, and producer. One fascinating thing about the young YouTuber is ...

Virginia Vallejo Biography And Her Love Story With Pablo Escobar Virginia Vallejo can be referred to as one of the oldest whistleblowers in history after her involvement with Pablo Escobar which made her famous. Over the years, many questions have been raised about her relationship with the drug lord and why she endangered her life to be with him despite his notorious acts. The death ...

Princess Love Bio  Ethnicity, Real Name & Parents For many people, Princess Love is simply Ray Js wife but there is so much more to this feisty lady than meets the eye. She is a star in her own right and has many feathers on her cap. Princess Love is a reality TV star, a model, video vixen, and fashion designer. She and her ...

Who is Papa Franku Also Known As Filthy Frank or Joji, Where is He Now? The social media as we all know today has given people the opportunity to be creative and innovative and at the same time, make something of themselves. YouTube is one of the known social platforms we have today that makes it possible for people to express their God-given talents and post videos they created to ...

Who Is Molly Qerim, How Did She Become a Famous Sports Anchor and Who Is Her Husband? Molly Qerim is an American sports anchor popularly known for moderating First Take, a highly rated sports talk show, on ESPN. Prior to joining ESPN, Qerim hosted Fantasy Live and NFL AM on NFL Network. It is quite obvious that the widely acclaimed television personality is in a class of her own when it comes ...

Safiya Nygaard  Height, Parents & Net Worth Safiya Nygaard is an American YouTuber, writer, content producer, and director who is popular for posting makeup, beauty and fashion videos on YouTube. Her videos regularly top at least one million views, thanks to her lively character as well as her willingness to experiment with outrageous outfits and different beauty products. Here are the things to ...

The Rigors of Sunlen Serfatys Career Journey Until CNN and Fun Facts About Her Personal Life CNN correspondent, Sunlen Serfaty is an Emmy Award-winning journalist known for covering a broad range of breaking news stories, national news, and Washington politics. She has been able to garner widespread recognition for herself which even goes beyond the sphere of her work. Her profile also increased with the extensive work she did in covering ...

Demystifying Jazz Jennings Real Name, Boyfriend & Family Of One The Youngest Transgenders Jazz Jennings is an unusual personality who became famous as a transgender activist and was recorded as the youngest documented public figure to be seen as transgender. She is also a YouTube personality and spokesmodel for brands, her fans, and other transgenders. She fought for acceptance in her high school with her super supportive family for over ...

Inside Fred Armisens Life  Ethnicity, Romantic Relationships and Gay Rumors Fred Armisen is an award-winning American comedian, he is also a writer, an actor as well as a musician. He was a cast member of the legendary comedy show, Saturday Night Live for 13 years and also one of the brains behind the successful satirical show Portlandia. Find out more about this incredibly talented guy ...

Ed and Lorraine Warren Biography: Cases, Kids, and Family Life Have you ever woken up with fear you could not explain, or felt a strange presence that made the hair at your nape rise or even experienced strange occurrences around you? Well, these were some of the promptings that made the well-known paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren delve into trying to explain the ideas ...

Truth About Tony Romos Wife, Kids and Life Since His NFL Retirement Tony Romo grew from the field as a quarterback to the screens as an American Football Analyst. He was a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys in the richest football league in the world (NFL) before retiring. As a junior, he was honored as an All-Ohio Conference Member, an Ohio Valley Conference Player of the Year and ...

Who is Brittany Venti, The Controversial Game Streamer and YouTuber? In recent times, many people live stream themselves playing video games. This has become a popular pastime on the internet and many highly skilled gamers have become internet celebrities through this means. However, some of them rather than becoming renowned for their gaming skills and great commentary, have become controversial and infamous. A good example ...

Rob Dyrdeks Family: His Kids And Relationship With Wife Bryiana Noelle Flores A multi-talented star and an elite pro skateboarder, Rob Dyrdeks success story began at a remarkably young age. Yet another proof that schooling doesnt always correlate with success, Rob has established himself not just as a phenomenal sportsman but also as a successful entrepreneur. Besides perfecting his skill as a natural talent on the board, ...

xChocobars  Biography and Everything You Should Know About Her Having distinguished herself and recorded massive successes in an industry notably dominated by men, it is very safe to say that Xchocobars deserves all the attention and cash she makes from her career. A household name on Twitch (a smart live streaming video platform), the online-gamer is popularly known for streaming classic games such as Stardew ...

Everything To Know About Mary Padian, Her Boyfriend and Net Worth Mary Padian is a famous American television reality personality best known for her involvements on the Reality show Storage Wars. She also has her own shop called Mary finds where she displays her antique collections. Since her childhood, Padian has been a creative learner. At the time, she used to create new items out of reusable ones and ...

Betsy Woodruffs Family Life: Is She Married or Related To Bob Woodruff? An old name in the world of journalism, Betsy Woodruff has warmed her way into the hearts of many with her impressive talents. Through hard work, Woodruff has carved a niche for herself in a very competitive field. Betsy has strong family and work values and is also an advocate for equal opportunities for everyone ...

Matpat (Matthew Patrick)  Wife, Height & Net Worth As far as internet business is concerned, Matpat remains one of the most dynamic and seasoned figures. He boasts a wealth of experience that has helped him in growing his business from one level of greatness to another. Like most successful people, MatPat started out small but today, he makes millions of dollars from his ...

Facts About Ricegum  His Girlfriend, Real Name & Net Worth Ricegum is an online gamer and YouTube sensation who ditched college; took advantage of the digital era, and made a name for himself on the internet. Though he began as a gaming YouTuber, Ricegum soon gained recognition as a controversial internet star following his many diss tracks. Here is everything you need to know about the youngster ...

Joy Taylor Once Married MLBs Richard Giannotti  Inside Look At Her Love Life and Family The erosion of the sexist idea that women have no business in sports broadcasting created a host of women celebrities who attained fame outside of modeling and acting. One of them, Joy Taylor, a radio personality and TV host for Fox Sports 1, has been in the industry since 2009, becoming one of the most ...

What To Know About Conan OBriens Wife, Kids & Family Today The name Conan OBrien is one that jumps right at you almost immediately you start talking about the most popular television hosts in the USA and this is no surprise because the man behind that name has risen to become one of the most admired men in the business. Known for hosting the late-night talk ...

David Letterman  Net Worth, Wife & Son In all of American, one man whose face has been seen frequently by late night TV talk show lovers is none but David Letterman. The comedian and TV show veteran has been hosting late night talk shows for more than three decades. His Late Night with David Letterman show began on February 1st, 1982 aired ...

Demystifying Sssniperwolfs Family Background And The Boyfriends Shes Had Since she launched her eponymously named channel in 2013, Sssniperwolf has been on the rise when it comes to video game influencers. She is one of the biggest names in the online gaming subgenre of YouTube videos. Real name Lia Shelesh, she started with Call of Duty: Black Ops II but has diversified with other ...

Lester Holt  Wife, Family & Net Worth Lester Holt is a multiple award-winning journalist, newscaster, reporter, and actor who has worked for notable media houses like WCBS TV, CBS, MSNBC and among others. His remarkable feat in journalism has endeared him to the hearts of many and earned him some awards and recognitions. Read on to get acquainted with his biography, ethnicity, ...

What Is Louis C.K. Doing Now, Where Are His Family And How Much Is His Net Worth? It is not easy to make it in comedy. It takes more than a funny bone and the ability to elicit a few giggles from a listening audience. For all the complexities that go into making a successful career in comedy, Louis C.K, the Washington D.C-born comedian, did it. For years, he was at the ...

The Progression of Hoda Kotbs Career, Her Ancestry and Family Life Hoda Kotb gained fame as a television host and news anchor for NBC. She anchors the shows signature show Today, and it has been an excellent vehicle for her skills in front of a camera. Kotb has won several awards, including Daytime Emmys and Peabody Awards. Simply put, she is one of the most successful ...

Jerry Seinfelds Family: All About The Amazing Comedians Wife and Kids Apparently one of the highly important entertainers in America, Jerry Seinfeld is a man of many talents. A very funny man, he is considered to be one of the most successful comedians in the USA who has been in the business as a professional rib-cracker for more than 40 years. As an actor, he has ...

The Rigors Of Sarah Silvermans Rise To Prominence And Rundown Of The Men She Has Dated A comedian, writer, and actress, Sarah Silvermans art and craft is as unique as you would ever find. Her poignant use of comedy to discuss social issues such as race, sexism, politics, and religion has gained her an impressive following. As unorthodox as her style is, so is her life experiences. She previously suffered from epiglottitis ...

Who Is Hannibal Buress, Does He Have A Wife or Girlfriend & Why Was He Arrested? Making people laugh when they are tense or not in the mood is a tough order and to ply the trade, it must indeed take some guts and expertise, this is what the humor maker, Hannibal Buress has been able to achieve and sustain after his inital teething process. The African-American is a screen writer, stand-up ...

The Success of John Mulaneys Career Efforts Since His Work On Saturday Night Live and Facts About His Wife John Mulaney had been working as a professional comedian for years before Saturday Night Live changed his status for life and like many who are now his fans, you probably did not know of him then. However, that changed when he joined the sketch comedy show in 2008. Since then, he has been one of ...

Jeff Dunham  Wife, Children and Net Worth Ventriloquism is a very subtle method of making an inanimate object (like a puppet, doll or dummy) appear to be saying words which are actually coming from the person (holding the inanimate object). In effect, the individual throws his/her voice to the puppet and can even appear to be having a conversation with it. Not ...

Ellen DeGeneres  Net Worth, Wife  Portia de Rossi & Parents Ellen DeGeneres is an American female standup comedian who has proven that whatever a man can do, a woman can also do. Since her journey as a standup comedian started in 1981, she has held swirl as one of the finest comedians America and the world at large has seen. She is often referred to ...

Revisiting Joan Rivers Death  The Daughter, Husband & Net Worth She Left Behind Joan Rivers was a renowned American comedian, TV host, writer, and actress. Her brand of comedy consisted of scathing one-liners and no individual or topic is spared. She hosted her own talk shows in the 80s and 90s and was a pioneer for women in stand up comedy. She was the first woman to host a late night ...

The Struggles of Margaret Chos Childhood, How It Influenced Her Career Growth and Love Life Margaret Cho is best described as a comic star who knows how to maneuver everything related to life into a rib-cracking joke. She is also known to criticize every social and political problem, especially those involving race and sexuality. Apart from her talents as a comic actress, she does amazingly well as a singer and ...

Where Is Eric Bolling Today? Who Is His Son & What Is His Net Worth? Eric Bolling who was once a notable figure on Fox News, is an American TV personality, an author, and versatile Journalist. As a political and financial analyst/commentator, he anchored discussions bothering on finance for Fox Business Channel. Here is everything there is to know about his career, family, and allegations that led to his exit ...

Who Is Chelsea Handler and Does She Have A Husband or Boyfriend? Chelsea Handler is one of Americas top female comedians. She is also an actress, writer, television host, producer, and activist. She is known to be very outspoken even with things that are very personal. In separate interviews with The New York Times, Handler revealed that she had an abortion twice when she was 16. She has authored five books ...

How Did Laura Lee Achieve Fame, How Much is She Worth and Who is Her Husband? Laura Lee is a popular American YouTuber, make-up artist and beauty blogger. From posting videos of her makeup routines on Instagram, Lee has transformed into a beauty influencer and a YouTube sensation. Today, her YouTube Channel has over 630 million views and 4.5 million subscribers. Asides having millions of followers across all social media platforms, ...

Madison Gesiotto Bio  Ethnicity, Parents & Measurements Madison Gesiotto is no ordinary woman; although she excelled in quite a number of pageants and competitions while she was in school, it is her views on politics and issues in America that has made her name known to most people. She possesses beauty and intelligence in a seemingly equal measure and has been able ...

Who Is Lil Tay? Parents, Brother, Sister, Age, Net Worth, Ethnicity Child stardom is nothing new in the entertainment world. With the advent of social media, we have seen more stars made from the internet than ever before, and Lil Tay is one of them. Her uploaded rap videos trademark is cursing, swearing, cash-throwing, and use of obscene languages. Her fame went wild after she dropped ...

What To Know About Tig Notaros Wife, Kids and Family Today Tig Notaro is an American stand-up comic star, writer, actress, and radio analyst. Since she started her career in 2001, she has become one of Americas best comedians, particularly when it comes to observational comedy. One prominent aspect of her routine involves her family, which includes a wife and two children. Interestingly, Tig Notaro is part ...

Who Is Chantel Jeffries? What To Know About Her Age, Ethnicity & Net Worth Chantel Jeffries is a lady of many talents. Beyond being celebrated as a DJ, she has fared well as a model, an actress, musician, and as an artist. She first rose to fame on Instagram where she has a large following. However, in recent times, she has hit the spotlight for her rumored relationships with some ...

Is Ellen DeGeneres Married, Who Is The Brother  Vance DeGeneres and Family Members? Ellen DeGeneres is one of a kind celebrity in todays world as she has used her wealth for the greater good for many people. She has served a host of famous awards shows like the Grammy, Primetime Emmy and Academy Awards. Moreso, she is probably one of the most decorated entertainment personalities around the world and ...

Carli Bybel Bio  Height, Boyfriend & Net Worth Video blogging is now on the rise and YouTube is the place where most of it happens. If you are a lady who cares about her looks or a guy who likes to help his woman out with her looks, then one person whose name rings a bell when it comes to giving beauty tips ...

Who Is Lexy Panterra? What To Know About Her Ethnicity, Boyfriend & Net Worth Lexy Panterra is one of the YouTube personalities whose breakout came through the Twerk dance videos she posted on her social media handles and YouTube which has so far generated over 13 million views for her. From there on, she created her LexTwerkOut workout program in 2014. She is sure very talented as she as moved ...

Who Is AnneMunition? What Is Her Ethnicity & Does She Have A Girlfriend or Boyfriend? AnneMunition is a professional gamer and content creator of American origin. She is one of the most sought-after streamers on Twitch  a popular online platform for watching and streaming videos, especially video games. AnneMunition has almost half a million followers on Twitch and her channel has accumulated at least 13 million views. Her favorite games ...

Norm MacDonald  Former Wife, Son & Net Worth Recently, 59-year-old former Saturday Night Live stand-up comic Norm MacDonald caused a not-so-funny stir when he expressed his personal opinion about the #MeToo movement speaking in defense of Louis CK and Roseanne Barr. Following the backlash of his actions, he is diligently doing damage control for his questionable opinion by posting a public apology on ...

Inside Iliza Shlesingers Life With Husband and How Much She is Worth Now Witty, spontaneous, and truly humorous, Iliza Shlesinger is an American comedian who is clearly proving that the stereotypical claim that women are not really funny is not only incredibly wrong but completely outrageous. Having been in the game for more than 10 years, Shlesinger has grown bigger with each step, stunning fans with her incredible ...

Who Is Nessa Diab? Details of her Parents, Ethnicity & Relationship With Colin Kaepernick Nessa Diab has gained more fame as the girlfriend of different footballers than in her career. She is currently with the popular National Football League (NFL) player, Colin Kaepernick, and has stood by his side during his most trying times. Also known for her mononym, Nessa, she recently engaged in a tweet battle with the ...

Samantha Bee  Inside the Life of Full Frontal Comedian and Presenter We have over the decades seen various brands of humor and personalities who have walked the ropes. One of the formidable forces in the world of comedy is no other than the iconic Samantha Bee of the Daily Show who now runs her own television show on TBS channel. She is a Canadian-American political commentator, ...

What Happened To Jessica Williamss Boyfriend And Which Are Her Best Works? Jessica Williams is a woman who has a lot of feathers in her cap  and keeps acquiring more. The former senior political correspondent of the comic Daily Show, who is also a comedian and actress whose recent movie appearance include starring as a playwright just recovering from a recent split with her boyfriend, Damon, and ...

Who is Nicole Byer? Here are 5 Facts You Need To Know About The Comedian Nicole Byer, an American comedian, actress, and writer, made a name for herself after she played supporting roles on MTVs prank show Ladylike and the reality show Girl Code. The latter was a series that featured comedians who analyzed in minute details, all the issues that young women deal with daily, from period to dating, to weird friendship dynamics and questions about sex. Currently, ...

A Closer Look At Bart Kwans Ethnicity, Height & Personal Life Bart Kwan is one of few Asians who is known for being successful in the comic industry at an international level. His fame broke out after the YouTube channel which he created with his close pal Joe Jo garnered up massive followings. The talented duo has been running the channel since 2007 and their success ...

Heres How VanossGaming Achieved Fame Online, His Worth and Other Facts About The Gamer For many years, the decision to drop out of college to pursue an online career was considered to be foolish and self-destructive by conventional wisdom. It was no different when Evan Fong, popularly known as VanossGaming, dropped out of college to pursue a YouTube career. However, that radical move paid off, and he stands shoulder to ...

Desi Perkins  Ethnicity, Net Worth & Husband YouTube is littered with videos of makeup tutorials by different people but if you are interested in learning how to do your makeup like a pro, there is just one person on that platform who you must follow. She is none other than Desi Perkins! She is a popular make-up artist, Instagram star, and vlogger. Desi, ...

The Phases of Casey Neistats Pursuits and His Love Story With Candice Pool YouTuber, vlogger, filmmaker, and creator extraordinaire; these are just a few hats that Casey Neistat wears and the story of how he got here is incredible. A native of Connecticut, Neistat started out by making refreshingly-authentic short films and videos that featured content that was based on everyday life and called attention to serious issues. He ...

Connor Franta  Inside The Life of American YouTuber YouTube has produced a lot of young celebrities in modern times and Connor Franta happens to be one of them. Apart from being a YouTuber, the young American is also an entrepreneur, entertainer, and writer. His journey to fame began almost a decade ago when he started a self-named YouTube channel where he uploads content ranging ...

Rhett and Link  Bio, Who are Their Wives, Net Worth and Family Facts Rhett and Link refer to an American comedy duo who are very popular on YouTube. They are known for their comic songs, viral commercials, skits and the daily show, Good Mythical Morning. Good Mythical Morning is the most watched daily show online, averaging 100 million views in a month. The show has featured guests such ...

A Walk Through The Maze of Ryan Higas Career Pursuits And Relationship With Arden Cho Ryan Higa is not only celebrated as a YouTube star, but he is also famed for appearing on television screens as an actor and comedian. Nigahiga, his Youtube channel, has gathered over 20 million subscribers and billions of views with his different comic acts, short films, and music videos uploads. With the rise in his career, ...

What to Know About The Shows That Made Craig Ferguson a Star and His Family Ties Rising to the top of your profession can sometimes be a hard and difficult process. It requires days and nights of working consistently hard to be better than what you were yesterday. It requires not giving up when all of your experiences seem to be pushing you to quit. It is because of these challenges ...

David Dobrik Married Liza Koshy for One Month  Inside His Family and Relationships David Dobrik is a YouTube sensation who has garnered fame not just for his vlogs but his love life too. Given his career as a YouTuber, his channel is one place where he shares his romantic escapades. With a cute boyish look like his, this Slovakian young man is definitely a good catch, and not ...

Merrell Twins Bio  Ethnicity, Parents & Boyfriend One of the beautiful things about modern life is social media. As rudimentary as it might seem, it could turn out to be the greatest thing that would be invented in the next 50 years because of its impact on human life. Very few tools have revolutionized human behavior and culture as much as social ...

Who Is Bunny Meyer, Is She Married & What Is Her Net Worth? Bunny Meyer is a YouTube celebrity who has amassed over 8.8 million subscribers with 1.5 million viewers on her channel. She is popularly known as Grav3yardgirl and is one of the highest-paid YouTubers in the world. She initially started out as a fashion designer and later chose the path of a YouTuber. Grav3yardgirl has used her knowledge on fashion, makeup, ...

Ninja  Inside The Life of The American YouTuber and Internet Personality Ninja is a talented video game player known for his mastery of Fortnite and other seemingly difficult games he plays with ease. The video gamer made a career out of what is ordinarily the hobby of many people and has since then amassed a huge online following. Find out about him here, including the controversies that ...

What Is Eva Gutowskis True Sexuality and How Did She Rise So Fast As an Influencer? Ever since Eva Gutowski joined YouTube in 2011, it has been an interesting journey for her, moving from one milestone to the other. Backed by an army of young women and teenage girl fans known as Evanators, she has risen to become one of the most-talked-about personalities in the digital stratosphere. She has also leveraged ...

Emma Chamberlain Biography  Age, Height & Net Worth Before now, people in the entertainment industry could only achieve popularity after many years of dedication and hard work but since social media came into the scene, massive success and overnight popularity became possible. That is the story of Emma Chamberlain who encountered fame as a fifteen-year-old. Emma is one of the many young people who became ...

Anna Akana  Ethnicity, Boyfriend & Net Worth There is a new crop of YouTubers known by their different contents with a very strong uniqueness that stands every one of them out, some upload video games, some fashion while some others have comedy video contents to showcase on their channels. Anna Akana has used her platform to showcase her comedy contents to the ...

Revealing Truths About Lilly Singhs Ethnic Background, Family and Her Relationship With Yousef Erakat Lilly Singh is an Indian-Canadian YouTube personality, actress, and comedian also known as Superwoman. She kicked off her YouTube career in 2010 with the launch of her channel IISuperwomanII and followed it up with a vlog channel in 2011. This paved the way for her fame and success which led to a world tour. The ...

Who Is Andrea Constand, Is She Married and What Is Her Connection With Bill Cosby? Many people got sexually molested but could not voice out due to the stigma victims suffer and what will become of them thereafter. Very few of the victims danm every consequence to seek justice and bring the perpetrator to the book, like Andrea Constand. She never got any media buzz, not until her friend cum molester; ...

Who Is Lazarbeam (Lannan Eacott)? Here Are Facts You Need To Know Lannan Eacott became a person of interest after his YouTube channel, LazarBeam pulled him to the limelight. Initially, he started with uploads of Madden Challenge videos before deciding to build his own channel in January 2015. Within the space of three years, his YouTube channel had gathered over 7 million loyal subscribers. Today, he has not ...

Puzzling Facts About Wengies YouTube Success and More About Her Fiance Among the many YouTubers who have succeeded in winning the hearts of millions of people is Wengie. She is a Chinese-Australian YouTube personality, vlogger, singer, and voice actress. Wengie is famous for a lot of things, from her simple life hacks, DIYs, craft ideas to fun experiments, tricks and pranks. Her content portfolio also includes hair tutorials, diet & fitness tips, lookbooks, ...

Is Jeffree Star A Billionaire and How Much Does He Make On YouTube? If looks can be deceptive then theres no other person who proves this maxim better than Jeffree Star. A quick look at Stars pictures would likely leave you wondering whether or not to tag him a male or female. But who says being controversial has to be a curse? For Star, his looks have caught ...

The Place of Rosanna Pansinos Career Hats In Her Rise To Fame and Facts About Her Personal Life There are a few phrases that could summarize Rosanna Pansinos rise to fame. None of them can do it better than the famous axiom, no knowledge is lost. Her popularity YouTube comes out of her foray into other professions, specifically acting. Although acting now occupies one of the major professional hats in Rosannas resume, it was ...

Muselk (Elliott Watkins) Biography  Age, Girlfriend and Net Worth The new and best in-thing in terms of career is video gaming and we have over time seen young men and women make massive income from an activity that was purportedly designed to serve as a hobby or a relaxation activity. One of such individuals is the Australian-born YouTube Celebrity and Twitch streamer, Muselk, whose ...

PopularMMOs Biography: 5 Interesting Facts You Need To Know We have over the years seen social media millionaires, especially on the YouTube social platform. These celebrities cum millionaires have made names for themselves after carving out niches on the internet, and a typical example of one of such exciting media personality on the YouTube is American Minecraft gamer and YouTube star, PopularMMOs whose channel ...

Jason Nash Once Married Marney Hochman  What To Know About His Ex-Wife and Kids The now-defunct video-sharing app Vine was the path that led Jason Nash to fame. With it, he built an audience of over two million followers, which he parlayed into a significant YouTube career. That move has seen him become one of the most popular personalities on the internet, with the cash income to go with ...

Where Does Dantdm Live? What Do We Know About His Net Worth, Wife and Brother? Most parents buy video games for their kids to occupy their time leisure, while other parents frown at their kids when they play video games. Despite the disparity, every parent would be proud of their child if he/she eventually turns a celebrity or millionaire through playing video games like Dantdm. Biography of Dantdm Dantdm was born Daniel ...

LaurDIY  Biography: 5 Facts You Need To Know About The YouTuber LaurDIY is the YouTube channel of Lauren Riihimaki which she created on December 1, 2011, when she was still a college undergrad with the sole aim of giving Do It Yourself (DIY) as well as practical fashion and beauty tips to her followers. She has used the channel to establish herself as a YouTube personality ...

Lachlan Ross Power  Bio And Family Life Of Australian The YouTube Star It is amazing the varied sources of income that the internet has made possible in this day and age. Internet fame can get its holder a whole lot of monetary and social benefits, but it must be noted that it does not come easy or cheap. For those who desire fame, content is the sacrifice ...

Alfie Deyes  Bio and Net Worth: Everything You Need To Know Alfie Deyes is one internet personality you definitely would like to know about. He boasts of over 10 million subscribers on three of his YouTube channels and has three bestseller books to his name. He is probably the most renowned young personality on YouTube today and his vlogging empire continues to grow by the day. ...

Colleen Ballingers Love Story With Husband Erik Stocklin and How Much She Is Worth Now Colleen Ballinger is an American comedian and YouTuber who is a very funny, adventurous, and highly talented woman. She is also an actress, singer, and writer. Collen is widely known for her work on YouTube where she posts content on her channel, Miranda Sings. The comedian has gained many subscribers over the years and has ...

Who Are The Dude Perfect Members and How Much Are They Worth? Entertainment in the 21st century can be digested in many forms and with platforms like YouTube, the creators and purveyors of entertainment have been democratized. Today, one of the most popular platforms to exhibit ones creative talents is YouTube, even though there are other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, who suffer in comparison to YouTube because ...

Who Is Rudy Mancuso, What Is His Earning Power and What Do We Know About His Girlfriend? Rudy Mancuso started his internet journey on Vine. He would later transition to YouTube where he solidified his place among the internets most beloved comedic creators. He is now regarded as one of the renowned internet personalities in the world, with a presence in mainstream TV and film projects like Comedy Centrals Drunk History and ...

Vsauce (Michael Stevens) Biography and Net Worth: All You Need To Know The advent of YouTube and the internet as a whole revolutionized how human beings consume information. With each passing year, the percentage of learning that is done in a traditional classroom decrease as a seismic shift to internet-based learning happens in our education industry. From open courses online to YouTube classes and videos, there are ...

How did Jake Paul Make His YouTube Big Break and Who is His Wife? One of the most interesting Social Media personalities of the 21st century is the young and popular Jake Paul whose elder brother is the famed Vine star, Logan Paul. Jake has utilized the power of the internet to bring himself to the limelight with a channel named JakePaulProductions that has amassed up to six billion ...

5 Facts You Need To Know About Reaction Time (Tal Fishman)  The American YouTuber Before 2015, the leading meaning of reaction time was the amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, until Tal Fishman started his channel, Reaction Time on YouTube and the dominant meaning changed. Today, a google search of Reaction Time would deliver Tal Fishmans videos and YouTube channel link with a few physics ...

Grace Helbig  Net Worth, Boyfriend and Family Life of The YouTuber Grace Helbig is an American internet personality, comedian, actress, and writer. She became popular due to her daily vlog series, DailyGrace, which ran on My Damn Channel from 2008 to 2013. Helbig is also popular for her own indie series on YouTube, ItsGrace, which she launched in 2014. Her vlogs which feature random stuff such as ...

Mark Wiens Bio  Ethnicity, Wife and Parents Food is a great way to connect with people. We all love to eat, if not for the pleasure of food, the satisfaction of quenching hunger, and the very process of providing and sharing that food is part of the strongest bonds that bind humanity together. Maybe it is our historical connection to food, where ...

Is Filthy Frank Dead, What Happened To Him and How Much Is He Worth? As George Kusunoki Miller, he was a nobody. However, as Filthy Frank, George was one of the most famous internet personalities on the planet. The Filthy Frank Show, a sketch series on his YouTube channel, TVFilthyFrank, was one of the platforms most influential creations. He is the reason a crazy dance song, Harlem Shake, made it ...

CaptainSparklez Bio  Net Worth, House and Cars of The Famous YouTuber Sometimes, what society wants from its citizens is quite different from what the citizens want for themselves. This is evident in the life and career of video blogger and American YouTube personality, Jordan Maron famous for his YouTube channel CaptainSparklez. He dropped out of school after discovering his talent in playing an online game called Minecraft. ...

Who is Simply Nailogical (Cristine Rotenberg)? Here are Facts You Must Know Canadian Youtube personality, Simply Nailogical (Cristine Rotenberg) originally started out polishing and designing nails even before it became a trendy culture in the social media. Simply Nailogica started out her showbiz career in her early days as a child actress, acting in commercials for game and toy companies. Aside from acting, she is blogger, vlogger, specializing ...

5 Interesting Facts You Need To Know About Huda Beauty In the world of entrepreneurship, it is interesting when an individual has a mentor who he/she looks up to, this yield more productivity on the part of the individual. The iconic and rich American beautician and makeup artist Huda Kattan nicknamed Heida is the founder of the Huda Beauty blog which is number one Instagram beauty blog ...

Is Dino MasterChef Gay? Details About His Ethnicity, Girlfriend, Where He Is Now Food, for the better part of the early years of human life, was nothing more than what we needed for survival. There was no artistry or curation to the method of cooking. The scarcity of food left no room for artistic expression until we figured out agriculture and we could make as much as we ...

Who Is Gabbie Hanna And How Did She Become Famous? As the world shifts to digital media and depends more and more on streaming services for its news and entertainment content, YouTubers have become one of the leading creators in the new media world. Their understanding of the online audience: how to create, maintain, and increase followers, are all handy skills that have primed them ...

Jacksepticeye  Height, Girlfriend & Net Worth Jacksepticeye is a YouTuber and actor who gained popularity with a series of gaming videos he uploads on his channel to the delight of millions of his subscribers. He is Known primarily for his comic video game series titled Lets Play and his vlogs. His channel was formerly ranked 46th in the list of most subscribed ...

Chris Heria Personal Details: About His Wife, Height & Ethnicity Background In this generation, keeping fit has become one of the major criteria for being hale and hearty. In fact, most occupations these days are majorly concerned with ones body mass, weight and looks. Unlike the past where most people have to register in a gym to keep fit, social media has made it quite easy ...

Everything You Need To Know About Game Grumps Gaming is becoming incredibly popular on YouTube these days with game vloggers make millions of dollars out of them yearly. One of the most popular up-coming gaming YouTube channels is Game Grumps. The Lets Play series was created in 2012 and celebrated its fifth anniversary on July 18th, 2017. In six years of its existence, the ...

Daithi De Nogla Biography, Girlfriend and Net Worth YouTube has created an avenue for many to make wealth and become famous from the comfort of their homes while having fun. Many have built a career out of the platform, uploading numerous videos that have earned them the admiration of viewers across the globe. For Daithi De Nogla, he is loved for his humorous commentary on ...

Does Phoebe Robinson Have A Boyfriend or Husband and What Do We Know About Her Family? Phoebe Robinson is a New York-based comedian, writer, and actress. She is best known as the co-creator and co-host of the WNYC Studios podcast 2 Dope Queens. Just like some other female comedians, she never had any original plans of becoming a stand-up comedian even though, according to her, she took a class on a whim at Carolines on Broadway. After ...

Who Are Lex and Alana from Listed Sisters? What Is Their Ethnicity & Is the Show Cancelled? America is a country built on diversity. Everywhere you look all over the country, a countless number of immigrants or children of immigrants have become an integral part of the fabric of the country. From entertainment to business, immigrants are creating a niche for themselves and climbing to the summit of their respective professions. One ...

Riveting Facts About Danielle Lombard And What She Is Best Known For The American entertainment industry is one that provides many avenues for aspiring hopefuls to express their talents and become famous. From films to television shows and game shows, there is no shortage of ways for men and women who desire fame to pursue and earn it in the United States of America. Another tested medium ...

Unearthing New Details About The YouTube Success And Personal Life of Alex Burriss of Wassabi Productions Wildly hilarious and truly audacious, Alex Wassabi is an American YouTuber who has become a very popular face on the video-sharing platform after having garnered millions of subscribers over the years by keeping people glued to his channel with his witty parody video releases. If you have always loved parody videos, there is every chance ...

Everything You Need To Know About H2O Delirious H2O Delirious whose full birth name is reported to be Jonathan Gormon Dennis has successfully kept himself mystified by hiding his face behind the masks leaving his loyal fans speculating who he really is for many years. The American YouTube star is easily identified by the Jason Mask Style with make-up which he wears on his ...

Who Is HolaSoyGerman and What Happened To Him? German Garmendia has certainly seen it all when it comes to internet success. His channels, HolaSoyGerman and JuegaGerman are in the top twenty most subscribed channel on YouTube. The Chilean YouTuber found a way to tap into one of the worlds greatest inventions and make a living from it. He has been able to build ...

Who Are Glenn Becks Family, What Is His Net Worth And What Happened To Him? The American political commentary space is filled with different personalities. A few of them, through their rhetoric, charisma, and resources have been able to build a large following of men and women who listen to them for insight and direction for various political and social issues in the United States. For Conservatives, the story is ...

Following Charissa Thompsons Rise Through The Ranks Of Sports Casting and All About Her Boyfriend Superstar TV host and sportscaster, Charissa Thompson, has been hailed as one of the highest-profile women journalists in America, and the reason is there for all to see. She has worked for popular establishments such as Versus, Yahoo! Sports, ESPN, GSN, and Big Ten Network. She currently hosts the popular pre-game show, Fox NFL Kickoff, ...

Is Chris Kattan Gay or Does He Have A Wife? What Is His Net Worth? Chris Kattan is a popular American comedian and actor. He has appeared in several comic movies and TV series such as The Middle, A Night at the Roxbury and Bunnicula. Kattan is, however, most popular for his six-year stint as a cast member of Saturday Night Live. During his time on the legendary show, he ...

Everything You Should Know About the Rise of Insta Star Claire Abbott and Why She Gave It All Up A lot of young Americans have shot into the limelight for uploading different kinds of videos on YouTube. Some of these young stars include Connor Franta, Desi Perkins, Emma Chamberlain, the Dolan Twins (Ethan and Grayson), and Claire Abbott. The latter became a social media celebrity for uploading sexy bikini pictures of herself on social media. Apart from ...

5 Facts You Need To Know About The YouTube Channel  h3h3Productions H3h3Productions is a YouTube channel that specializes on Comic responses or reactions of other contents or trendy stories. The celebrity couple that created the channel has over time racked up sizable views for their commentaries and contents. Even though they had their own fair share of copyright cases, thankfully they scored an unprecedented victory in all ...

Lilypichu Bio  Height, Brother and Love Story With Albert SleightlyMusical Chang Like most popular internet celebrities, Lilypichu is one of those Twitch streamers who spend their lives on camera. From daydreaming about the possibility of becoming a full-time professional streamer, she grew to live out her dreams on the popular live streaming platform where people play games, make crafts, and showcase their day-to-day activities. Given the rise of ...

KSI  What To Know About His Girlfriend, Brother  Deji Olatunji & Net Worth Assuredly, when Internet inventors Vint Cerf and Bob Khan created the technological masterpiece, they probably did not know how massive the creation will be harnessed by many for different purposes including as a platform for earning money through content creation. One of such person who smiles to the bank regularly today for spending time creating ...

The Interesting Progression and Highlights of Carrie Keagans Career as a Host and Actress Carrie Keagan has garnered huge fame through her various stints on television. She is not just your regular TV host but one with a difference. Keagan has hosted several high profile events and TV shows, including VH1s Big Morning Buzz Live and Fox News Channels Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. However, not many know she ...

The Gist On Elise Jordans Marriages And Her Rise To Prominence Political commentaries tend to be boring when it is handled by someone who does not have a knack for it. However, when you see the likes of Elise Jordan run the same commentary, you will have a lot of reasons to look forward to watching her again as the journalist is well-versed in the field ...

What Is Timmy Thick Best Known For and How Successful Is The Star? Thanks to the internet, many people whose talents would have ordinarily gone unnoticed have become famous. A very good example of this modern-day internet celebrity is Timmy Thick, an American social media star. He became popular on Instagram due to his penchant for posting raunchy pictures of himself. He also often posted videos of himself ...

What Does Heather Storm Do For a Living and Who Is She Dating? Reality Television is a great way to make a name for oneself as well as amass a fortune. Heather Storm can attest to this as she is one of those who have made a name and earned a lot from reality TV. She made her name appearing on shows like Car Fanatics, Awesome Autos, and, ...

Matt Carriker Biography  Net Worth, Wife & Height Unlike your regular veterinary doctor next door, Matt Carriker chose to spice up his noble profession with the unusual. Though he is known to many as a medical practitioner, Carriker is better renowned as a YouTube star and an animal lover. Having recorded huge successes on his various YouTube channels, the vet doctors name and ...

Jillian Mele of Fox News Career Achievements, Husband & Measurements There are quite a good number of presenters on radio and television who listeners and viewers may never wish to miss any of their shows because of their sensational golden voice, beauty or the special way or artistry they anchor their shows. Jillian Mele is one of such. She has been at the top of ...

Who is Gillian Turner of Fox News? Her Fiance or Husband and Net Worth Gillian Turner is well-known as a news correspondent for Fox News Channel but before she became a TV personality, she built an intimidating resume working for different institutions, including the American government. She served in different capacities at the White House National Security Council during the administration of former US Presidents  George W. Bush and Barack Obama. ...

Gloria Govan Bio  Age, Ethnicity & Height Even as Gloria Govan is famous as an American actress, author, a TV host, and reality television star, shes more popular as the wife of the former NBA player, Matt Barnes. She became known after appearing on the Florida version of the reality television series, Basketball Wives and later, Basketball Wives: LA  after Matt was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers. Sadly, ...

Michael Fishmans Interesting Start as an Actor and Why He Divorced His Wife of Many Years When one door closes, another one opens. As silly as that axiom may seem, it is the story of the resurgence of Michael Fishman, who plays D.J Conner on the popular show, Roseanne. Having played the character for several years as a child actor into his teenage years; when the show originally ended, Michael did ...

Who Is October Gonzalez  Tony Gonzalezs Wife? All You Need To Know October Gonzalez is a popular American TV host and media personality. Additionally, she is also a model. Gonzalez has hosted several TV shows such as Beat Shazam, Entertainment Tonight, and Rachel Ray. She has also featured in several reality TV shows. Gonzalezs fame is not just due to her profession but also because of her ...

Who Is Tony Berlin  Harris Faulkners Husband: His Children and Family Facts Tony Berlin is a popular American media guru. He has variously worked as a reporter, anchor, and producer for some of the biggest TV networks in America. They include CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC (where he hosted the popular Good Morning America). Berlin has now diversified into public relations and owns his own PR firm. ...

The Progression of Gianna Tobonis Journalism Career and Details About Her Marriage to Kyle Buckley Gianna Toboni may not be your ideal newscaster but her unusual reporting is what made her a household name. The American journalist is renowned for her hard-hitting and authentic reportage. A motivator and activist for total press freedom, Gianna loves to explore pervasive cultural issues. Not only does this unique and ambitious journalist call for all ...

Dog The Bounty Hunters Family Including Details of His Late Wife and Kids Popularly known as Dog, a name which he got from the television series, Dog The Bounty Hunter, Duane Chapman, an American bounty hunter, and one-time bail bondsman, went from being convicted for a felony to being a reality TV star. He was brought to the limelight following the capture of the convicted criminal, Andrew Luster in 2003 and this eventually made ...

Vicky Karayiannis, Chris Cornells Wifes Bio, Children and Family The world of showbiz is made up of different people who serve different roles, and function in a variety of capacities, and one of the most important people are those in the background. Publicists are undoubtedly one of these background people yet they are vital to the life and fame of most of our favorite ...

Joe Rogan Has A Step-Daughter and 2 Other Kids With Wife Jessica Ditzel  Meet His Family Joe Rogan is a popular American stand-up comedian and TV host. His journey to stardom began in the late 80s and has seen him host several shows, the most popular is the game show titled Fear Factor. The exciting show dares contestants to face some of their greatest fears and embark on challenging stunts. The ...

Josh Gates and Wife Hallie Gnatovich Have 2 Kids But Who Has the Higher Net Worth? Best known for his explorations and adventures, Josh Gates, is a television presenter with a voracious appetite for seeing the world and the beauties in it. Some of that beauty, however, is in his home, in the form of two children he shares with his wife, Hallie Gnatovich. Not excluded is their marriage which has lasted ...

Holly Sonders Wiki, Plastic Surgery & Why She Divorced Her Husband  Erik Kuselias After trying everything within her capacity to have a low key wedding, Holly Sonders was drawn to the public because of her husbands controversy at his workplace. Well, the two are rumored to be divorced but the article below will give more light on how true these rumors are. Meanwhile, Holly Sonders is yet to ...

Nadeska Alexis Bio  Age, Boyfriend & Net Worth Journalism is one diverse profession that allows the practitioners to choose their area of specialty, build a career on it by reporting the truth and facts which in the long run will distinguish them as deserving commendation and recognition among their peers. Some choose to specialize in political journalism, while to others it is sports ...

Media Platforms Charlamagne Tha God Has Explored and All The Controversies He Has Courted Charlamagne Tha God is an American on-air personality, radio presenter, and more recently, author. He is popularly known as a co-host on New York radios nationally syndicated show, The Breakfast Club, a program he has been hosting alongside DJ Envy and Angela Yee since 2010. However, his early years had no connection to his current career ...

A Look At Jimmy Fallons Net Worth and Family Including His Wife & Kids Sometimes, a childs passion for something is a pointer to what he/she would become in the future. As a child, Jimmy Fallon was literally obsessed with watching the late-night comedy program, Saturday Night Live (SNL). Then, his parents would tape the clean parts for him to watch and later, he and his sister would re-enact sketches from the ...

Kay Adams Biography  Does The Sportscaster Have A Husband or Boyfriend? When you hear the phrase sports enthusiast, women are hardly the first group that comes to mind. Well, thats changing pretty fast. Especially with the rise of female sports analysts and broadcasters like Kay Adams who is famed for knowing more about sports than most men do. And why not, shes paid handsomely for it ...

Ben Shapiros Family  Meet His Wife, Kids and Sister Who is Popular for the Wrong Reasons A multi-talented man, Ben Shapiro is a man of controversial nature, an attribute that has made him an unusual public figure. An intellectual whose career path was clearly defined even before he became a man, the Jewish conservative commentator has always had his way with words. He became popular by sharing his critical and often ...

QVC Shawn Killinger Bio  Husband, Net Worth & Facts To Know Shawn Killinger is a prominent TV personality who has worked her way to the top. Though not initially a journalist by training, she defied the odds and today has established herself as a household name, as well as, worked alongside some industry legends. More than just being a reporter, newscaster, and anchor, heres all you ...

Liv Lo  Dissecting the Ethnicity, Parents and Personal Life of Henry Goldings Wife While many are aware that Liv Lo is the better half to Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding, only a few understand why his beautiful wife appears increasingly endearing to fans. A former model turned TV personality, and fitness star, Liv has an impressive resume which when combined with that of her statuesque spouse is considered a perfect ...

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Photo: Contributed

Mortimer is not your average pet.

He's not exactly the classic definition of cute and cuddly, but to Andrew Brys, 'Morty' the ball python is his baby boy.

Morty has become ill, so Brys started a Go Fund Me page to raise money to cover the veterinarian bills for the white-pinkish snake.

Mortimer is a 2.5-year-old ball python I purchased from a breeder just over a month ago. Sadly, just a few weeks after receiving him, I noticed something was very wrong. He wasn't eating, and still hasn't taken a meal since I got him, said Brys, adding Morty has also developed a rash.

I took him to the vet, and was sent home with four different medications, including injections. He doesn't seem to be getting any better though, and what I thought was scale rot is turning out to be probably septicaemia.

Morty is in need of blood work and overnight stays at the vet's office, all of which costs money Brys does not have.

I hate asking strangers for money, but I need to make my baby boy healthy again. Anything helps, and Morty and I appreciate it so much, he said.
Many residents near Lake Avenue Beach access, or Mushroom Beach as it's known to some, are upset with a recent city council decision to allow a two-year trial run of an unleashed dog park at the beach.

The dog park was voted in during council Monday, along with two permanent dog parks elsewhere in the city.

Residents say it makes no sense to change the use of the popular beach.

The city has taken it upon themselves to take away prime beach area that residents and Kelowna people are actually using to turn it into a dog beach, said Julie Cancela, a resident on Lake Avenue.

The city gathered feedback from residents during a consultation period, which found almost 80 per cent of those in the area oppose the dog park.

We're 100 per cent against it, said Hayley Boucher, another resident in the area. Can you imagine having barking dogs and the smell of dog urine right beside your house?

Boucher says the issue has nothing to do with not liking dogs.

I have a dog, everybody in this neighbourhood has a dog. We're not an anti-dog area, but at the same time, this is already a public beach that's well used by people, she said. This has purpose already.

While residents have expressed concerns in the past with some of the regulars who frequent the beach, many feel adding the dog park will simply displace these people once more.

They talk about the homeless people, they're going to be displaced somewhere else, so now they're going to be here in front of our house or on the next one or the next one, said Boucher. It's just pushing it over.

Cancela says the people who use the beach in an inappropriate manner won't be deterred by a dog park.

According to some members of council, they think that this is going to deter the illegal activity going on at that beach, she said. It's not, because if you ever go down there, you will notice that many of the people who are using the beach in an inappropriate manner, doing drug deals and things like that, they all have dogs. And now this will give them an opportunity to let their dogs run free while they're doing their business.

People are going to come by and see these rottweilers, pit bulls, whatever it might be, and they're going to move on and stop using that beach.

While the parks have now been approved by council, they won't be a sure thing until the funds needed to create them are approved in the 2017 budget.
Photo: Contributed

And the winners are...

The first five recipients in the KPMG Top 20 under 40 include a small business owner, a professional appraiser, an educator, a lawyer and a property manager.

The second annual KPMG Top 20 Under 40 recognizes the next generation of leaders in the North Okanagan, those under the age of 40 who are making their mark through business success and community involvement.

The first recipients were selected among close to 50 nominations and include:

Taylor Dedora - Born and raised in Vernon, he is a UVic graduate and an associate at Schoenne & Associates Real Estate Appraisers.

Deanna Fester - With multiple university degrees, she is a business owner and coach at Cross Fit Vernon who also competes internationally.

Sherrilee Franks - A community volunteer and business owner, she is the managing broker and owner of Keystone Property Management Ltd.

Tracy Knight - A UBC law school graduate, she is a mentor and community advocate and is currently a lawyer at Nixon Wenger.

Brad Swanson - A UVic grad and former Western Hockey League player, he is now a leader and educator at Kala Star Academics & Outdoor School.

The next five recipients will be announced next Tuesday. All recipients will be featured on the KPMG Top 20 Under 40 website and will also be honoured at a special recognition event Oct. 20, during Small Business Week.

Its important for our community to know the calibre of talent we have and what they are doing to sustain and grow our region, says Dan Rogers, Vernon and District Chamber of Commerce general manager. It not only recognizes them for their efforts but also inspires others to dream big.
This evenings top stories for Sept. 20, 2016, with Castanet's Wayne Moore
Our son left his wallet on the roof of his car in Kelowna and drove away. After stopping for gas he realized he what had happened.

He was at the bank when a young blond man in a white shirt and tie, driving a white car returned his wallet.

He noticed it on Sutherland as people were driving over it. He stopped and picked it up and brought it to our house. We live in West Kelowna, we don't know where he lived. Our other son was in the garage when he came.

This is just a reminder that there are great people in this world. I hope he reads this, and remember, good deeds come full circle.

Thank you.

Carol Young
Photo: The Canadian Press

Calgary Conservative Jason Kenney is officially stepping down as an MP this week.

Kenney tweeted a photo of his resignation letter, dated Tuesday, to Speaker Geoff Regan, in which he says he is vacating his Calgary Midnapore seat effective Friday.

He says in his letter that it's been the greatest privilege of his life to represent his constituents in Parliament.

Kenney announced in July that he was running for leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta.

He also announced that he wants to rally conservative voters in Alberta in a new party to defeat the NDP in the 2019 provincial election.

The official leadership race officially begins Oct. 1.

"I leave the House with the same profound esteem for the institution of Parliament with which I first arrived in June 1997," Kenney wrote in the letter.

His tweet above a photo of the letter says "No going back now. #UniteAlberta."
Photo: The Canadian Press

A family friend of a Saskatchewan woman found dead in a forested area of British Columbia hopes a national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women will look into why police publicize some missing person cases but not others.

Dana Morenstein says Deanna Desjarlais of Saskatoon, who was a sex-trade worker with addiction problems, was twice reported missing earlier this year to police in Vancouver.

Last week, an officer called to tell her family that remains found May 17 in woods near Surrey, B.C., were recently matched to the 27-year-old, said Morenstein.

The body was badly decomposed and had been scavenged by animals. Morenstein said police informed the family that a cause of death hasn't been determined, but it's considered suspicious.

She's now questioning what police did before the remains were identified  and why they never released a missing person bulletin with a photo of Desjarlais to the public.

"No one even knew she was missing," said Morenstein, a teacher at the Kahkewistahaw First Nation, a reserve east of Regina.

She said when police didn't take public action, she started a Facebook page to get the word out about Desjarlais and sent flyers to Vancouver agencies to distribute.

"We were getting no help from police," said Morenstein, who added the national inquiry needs to look at missing persons being publicly identified.

"I think that there are too many missing women's cases that are dismissed."

Vancouver police said they seriously investigated Desjarlais as a missing person, even though they didn't issue a media release. She was first reported missing May 1.

"The information we had was that she was alive and well and potentially not wanting to be located," said acting Sgt. Brian Montague.

He said the family was notified and the file was closed. It was reopened when Desjarlais was reported missing again in June.
Photo: WestJet

WestJet has reached a multi-year deal with Suncor Energy to fly employees and contractors to and from its oilsands operations in Northern Alberta beginning in early November.

The airline says the agreement will involve more than 100 weekly flights between Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Kelowna and Fort McMurray and Suncor's operations in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.

WestJet's Suncor announcement follows news from the City of Brandon, Man., that the airline has decided to cancel its Brandon-to-Toronto route.

The city issued a news release saying WestJet offered a direct flight from the Wheat City to Toronto four days a week on a trial basis during the summer months.

In late July, the city says the airline announced it would offer year-round service between the two destinations starting in late October.

However, the city says WestJet recently told them bookings on the route were slow and the company made the decision to cancel the route altogether.
Photo: Google Maps

UPDATED: 11:36 a.m.

FortisBC crews arrived at the struck gas line at 10:50 a.m. and quickly got the leak under control.

Repairs have now been completed and crews are expecting to leave the area by 11:15 a.m.

Nicole Bogdanovic, with FortisBC, says the pipeline was struck by a pick axe.

Bogdanovic said residents should be calling BC One Call at 1-800-474-6886 before doing any type of digging in their yard.

ORIGINAL: 11:01 a.m.

A natural gas line was struck in the Crawford area of Kelowna Wednesday morning.

The line was hit at about 10 a.m. on the 1400 block of Crawford Road.

FortisBC crews are heading to the area.

When they do arrive, their first priority will be to make the area safe, said Nicole Bogdanovic with FortisBC.

How the gas line was struck and the severity of the leak are not known at this time.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Disney said Wednesday it would no longer sell a boy's costume for a Polynesian character that some Pacific Islanders have compared to blackface.

The getup depicts the character Maui in the upcoming animated movie "Moana." It has a long-sleeve brown shirt and long pants featuring full-body tattoos. It comes with a fake shark-tooth necklace and green-leaf "skirt."

Disney's online store had offered boy's pyjamas and a men's t-shirt in a similar design, but those products were no longer available Wednesday.

"The team behind Moana has taken great care to respect the cultures of the Pacific Islands that inspired the film, and we regret that the Maui costume has offended some," the company said in a statement. "We sincerely apologize and are pulling the costume from our website and stores."

Chelsie Haunani Fairchild said it's offputting to have a child wear the skin of another race.

"Polyface is Disney's new version of blackface. Let's call it like it is, people," Fairchild said in a video she posted on Facebook.

The Native Hawaiian college student said in an interview the costume doesn't honour or pay homage to a culture or person, but makes fun of it.

"It bastardizes Polynesians by doing something like that. You're stripping away its integrity," said Fairchild, who is attending school in San Antonio, Texas.

The Disney online store recently began selling the costume, just in time for Halloween. The listing noted the getup had "padded arms and legs for mighty stature!"

"Moana" is due for release in November. The animated feature is about a teenager who sails through the South Pacific to a fabled island. She meets Maui  revered in Polynesian oral traditions and viewed by some Pacific Islanders as an ancestor  who helps her explore the ocean.

The costume earned international condemnation.
If you have just started your journey in an online casino or are looking for a new site to play,...
States See Progress

Federal Policymakers Weigh In

(TNS)  State educational technology directors have outlined ambitious targets for increasing school bandwidth capacity in an effort to support digital learning and bridge the technology divide that exists in schools and in students' homes.Despite major strides in getting schools connected to broadband internet  in part a legacy of the 2014 overhaul of the federal E-rate program  state ed tech directors and some federal policymakers are continuing to champion redoubled efforts to provide equitable access to education technology.A report released this month by the State Educational Technology Directors Association, or SETDA, "The Broadband Imperative II: Equitable Access for Learning," calls on educators and policymakers to pick up the pace on building their technology infrastructure, specifically emphasizing the importance of finding more effective ways to get students connected outside of school. The goal is to bridge an emerging digital divide known as "the homework gap" that puts students without internet access at home at a particular disadvantage.SETDA first laid out a bandwidth target in 2012 and called on the Federal Communications Commission to modernize the E-rate program, which provides financial support for schools to build their technology infrastructure. That was a galvanizing moment in the national push for better broadband in schools. That push has seen the delivery in the past few years of high-speed broadband to additional classrooms servicing roughly 20 million students."SETDA putting out that goal, and the FCC's adoption of it, is a huge reason why we've made such strides in meeting it," said Evan Marwell, the CEO of EducationSuperHighway, a broadband-advocacy group. "Districts didn't know what to aim for."Marwell lauded the methodology used to develop the ambitious new targets SETDA has laid out."It's an achievable target," said Marwell, noting that even without E-rate subsidies, the price of high-speed connections is coming down dramatically in many parts of the country.John Porter, the chief information officer for the Mississippi education department, is confident his state has a robust plan in place to address expanding bandwidth needs.In Mississippi, the state buys internet services from AT&T and then distributes access to 112 of the 145 districts that opt into the program. The bulk statewide purchase, a model advocated by SETDA, gives the state better purchasing leverage than the individual districts would otherwise have, said Porter.The real challenge in Mississippi, he said, is not just in piping large bandwidth to district headquarters, but in ensuring that the districts are then distributing internet effectively through their local area networks.In some cases, he said, districts may not have the funds to buy new routers or equipment, and local officials may not have the technical expertise to build out efficient WiFi networks. Porter said his office is visiting every district in the state to verify they are using best practices in building out their local networks.Laurel Ballard, a digital learning supervisor in Wyoming's education department, said that a $15.8 million state initiative to increase bandwidth capacity by 4,000 percent that started in 2012 is paying big dividends for students.With the rise of 1-to-1 computing initiatives, personalized learning software, and open online educational resources, Ballard is not surprised that SETDA is calling for districts to ramp up bandwidth so quickly. She expects schools' bandwidth needs to "increase at exponential rates for a while."Like Porter in Mississippi, Ballard said Wyoming is well positioned to meet future bandwidth needs, pointing out that the rural state is one of only two nationally that can boast of high-speed connections to 100 percent of its public schools.For states or districts that are lagging behind, Ballard urges them to make the investment in improving connectivity. She emphasized that a robust internet infrastructure can help defray costs in other areas, such as curriculum development and teacher training. Better internet connections also allow districts to pool resources more efficiently.The SETDA report has also drawn the attention of policymakers at the federal level. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and Joseph South, the director of the office of educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education, both spoke at a Capitol Hill event this month marking the SETDA report's release.In her remarks, Rosenworcel celebrated the progress the E-rate has made in getting students connected to broadband, before pivoting to her continued focus on the homework gap.Citing Pew Research Center statistics showing that 5 million households with school-age children lack high-speed broadband, while 7 in 10 teachers assign internet-related homework, Rosenworcel asserted that "we are shortchanging our students and our economy as a whole."While arguing that the recent overhaul of the FCC Lifeline program  which subsidizes broadband purchases for low-income families  is a promising start, she called for more federal policies to support local and state-level initiatives that target the homework gap.For example, Rosenworcel favors loosening rules on how E-rate dollars are spent to support districts looking to outfit their buses with wireless internet modems. In some cases, districts have parked buses near low-income-housing complexes to provide after-school-hours internet access to students.South focused his remarks on widening the connections that pipe broadband to K-12 school buildings.He pointed out that major trends toward customizable learning software and cloud-based learning-management systems are putting increasingly heavy demands on school networks."We can't think of this as optional," said South, referring to students' need to have access to high-speed internet connections in class.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Having an active civil society is Armenias important achievements, Chairman of For Sustainable Human Development NGO, member of the Public Council Karine Danielyan said in an interview with Armenpress.

She said during the years the activists, NGOs have changed and demonstrate new approaches.

Of course, there are NGOs the approaches of which are unacceptable for me, but, overall, professionalism is realized in their activities, they have become more prepared, she said.

Over the years numerous NGOs of Armenia not only found their place in our country, but also they are actively working with international organizations.

We have NGOs which represent Armenia with dignity in international structures. I am proud of that, having an active civil society is a serious progress, she said.

Referring to the projects, she said very good projects are being developed, the leadership discusses them with the NGOs, but all of them remain in the papers. The NGOs must act in such a way, perhaps, to conduct a monitoring in order the projects not to be left in the papers, she said.

The Republic of Armenia celebrates 25th anniversary of Independence on September 21.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. The UKs Minister for Europe and the Americas, member of the Parliament Alan Duncan congratulates the Armenian people on the occasion of the countrys 25th Independence Day, press service of the UK Embassy to Armenia informed Armenpress.

Alan Duncan said: The UK enjoys a strong relationship with Armenia  a young country with a long history. We work closely with the Armenian government and people to promote democratic and governance reform and to strengthen our economic and cultural ties. We fully support the efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to broker the resolution of the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh, building a peaceful and prosperous future for Armenia and its neighbours. On behalf of Her Majestys Government I am delighted to send my congratulations to the Armenian people on the 25th anniversary of independence.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. April four-day war participant Rafik Krpeyan, who downed two Azerbaijani tanks, is confident if needed he will again go to the positions.

He has been awarded with Combat Cross 2nd degree medal by President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, reports Armenpress.

After realizing the Azerbaijani tanks, I have told the staff about it, and we have together downed them. At the moment I was thinking that I am doing it for my family, friends and people. Just being there in that period you understand that everything is real and you can die from a shot, he said.

He said there are many memories related to war days, fallen friends, but he didnt want to speak about it. He just said now the border is in safe hands, his friends are there. We always keep contact with them. Recently I visited Talish and met my friends. They say everything is good, he said.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence, President Serzh Sargsyan received congratulatory messages from heads of foreign states, international organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, clergy representatives and individuals, press service of the Presidential administration informed Armenpress.

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated President Serzh Sargsyan on Armenias Independence Day.

The message reads:

Dear Mr. Sargsyan,

I cordially congratulate you on your National Holiday - Independence Day.

Deeply rooted in history, relations between Armenia and Russia are developing in the spirit of strategic partnership, enriched with promising projects in different sectors. It is largely facilitated by our States integration-driven close cooperation in the Eurasian Economic Union, CSTO and CIS.

I am convinced that aimed at addressing urgent issues of regional and international relevance, through joint efforts we will provide for the development of the whole complex of strategic relations and constructive cooperation. This undoubtedly is in the best interest of the fraternal peoples of our two countries.

Dear Mr. Sargsyan,

I wish you good health, happiness and every success. Also, I wish peace, prosperity and progress to all your citizens.

President of the United States Barack Obama sent a congratulatory message to President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Independence Day of Armenia.

Dear Mr. President,

On behalf of the United States, I congratulate you and the people of Armenia as you celebrate 25 years of independence this September 21.

The United States has been a steadfast partner of Armenia from the first days of its independence. We remain committed to the promise of those early years, when Armenians proudly raised their tricolor flag for the first time since 1920. Today, we again affirm our belief that a secure, prosperous, and democratic Armenia is essential for the security for the Armenian people and for the region more broadly.

We thank Armenia for its support of our shared goals, particularly its response to the Syrian refugee crisis and its contributions to global peacekeeping operations and nuclear security. We will continue to work together to help Armenia realize its full potential.

I wish you and the people of Armenia all the best as you celebrate 25 years independence, the U.S. Presidents congratulatory message says.

President Francois Hollande of the French Republic sent a congratulatory message to President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of the Holiday.

Mr. President,

On the occasion of the national holiday of the Republic of Armenia, I am pleased to extend to you, as well as the whole Armenian people my best wishes for happiness, prosperity and success.

Armenia can be proud of the path covered during 25 years of independence, where it often met with numerous challenges and a difficult regional environment. I know that the people of Armenia will be able to continue with their efforts toward stability, democracy and development.

As you may know, our historically deeply-rooted relations are dear to me. Rest assured, Mr. President, I will advocate and support any link that binds our two countries.

In conclusion, let me reaffirm my commitment to finding a fair and lasting settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

As I had the opportunity to tell you during our Warsaw meeting on July 9, I am ready to host a meeting in Paris with a view to consolidating the ongoing peace process and discussing measures for the advancement of this extremely lengthy conflict, the message of the French President says.

President Xi Jinping of the Peoples Republic of China sent a congratulatory message to President Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Independence Day

Excellency,

On the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence, on behalf of the Government and the people of the Peoples Republic of China, as well as on my own behalf, I offer heartfelt congratulations and best wishes to you and, in your person, to the people of the Republic of Armenia.

During the past 25 years of independence, Armenia has achieved significant success in various fields of activity. Under your leadership, Armenia has maintained political stability, along with developed national economy and increasingly growing living standards. China is sincerely happy for it.

Attaching great importance to the development of relations between China and Armenia, I stand ready to join our efforts toward advancing bilateral ties and cooperation in all areas to achieve new progress to the benefit of our countries and peoples.

I wish prosperity to the Republic of Armenia, and happiness - to its people.

I wish you good health and all the best, the Chinese President said in his message.

On Armenias Independence Day, President of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic Bako Sahakyan sent a congratulatory message to President Serzh Sargsyan.

Honorable Mr. President,

On behalf of the people and authorities of the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh and my own behalf, I cordially congratulate you on the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence, a holiday, which is dear and memorable for all of us in Armenia, the NKR and the Diaspora.

The Armenian people had a centuries-old desire to restore their statehood and live freely and independently.

Our national dream came true in September 1991 when the two Armenian Republics were founded on the ancient Armenian land.

The whole Armenian nation embarked on the way of building the Armenian statehood, persistently overcoming numerous challenges and difficulties and registering brilliant victories.

We are confident that the Republic of Armenia will be able to overcome all of the existing problems, and the Armenian people will live a proud and dignified life.

Distinguished Mr. President,

I once again congratulate you and all our compatriots on this glorious holiday and wish peace, wellbeing and great achievements to Mother Armenia and our people, the congratulatory message of the NKR President says.

The congratulatory message of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, addressed to the President of the Republic of Armenia, reads as follows: It gives me great pleasure to send your Excellency my congratulations on the celebration of your National Day, in the year in which Republic of Armenia celebrates 25 years of independence, together with my best whishes for the people of Armenia in the coming year.

President Serzh Sargsyan received a congratulatory message from Federal President of Germany Joachim Gauck. The message reads in part:

Mr. President,

On behalf of my fellow countrymen and myself, I offer heartfelt congratulations to you and your compatriots on the 25th anniversary of declaration of Armenias independence.

German-Armenian ties have developed over the past 25 years to grow into a close and trusting friendship as evidenced by your visit to Germany in April this year. Supportive of Armenias commitment to continue political and economic rapprochement with the EU after joining the Eurasian Economic Union, Germany will back your country as a partner nation.

The settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict is of paramount importance to your country. As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict.

In addition to my independence-dated congratulations, I offer my best wishes for your personal well-being, as well as for your countrys peaceful, free and prosperous future.

President Serzh Sargsyan received congratulations and best wishes from Emperor of Japan Akihito, Swedens King Carl Gustav XVI, Belgiums King Philippe, President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo, President of the United Mexican States Enrique Pena Nieto, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, Australian Union Governor-General Peter Kosgrove, Republic of Moldova President Nicolae Timofti, President of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq Haider al-Abadi.

President Serzh Sargsyan keeps receiving congratulatory messages on the occasion of Armenias Independence Day.
LIVE: Parade dedicated to 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence kicks off in Yerevan




YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Parliament Speaker of Armenia Galust Sahakyan says the Independence is one of the most important achievements of our country over the past 25 years, reports Armenpress.

He said the officials have their share of guilt over mistakes made during the years of independence.

We all have our share of guilt. During these years we have done everything. After us people must come and think, must done everything which will be better for Armenia.

On September 21 Armenia is marking the 25th anniversary of its Independence. The Armenian people said a resolute yes to independence by means of a referendum 25 years ago. The majority of the Armenian population of age answered positively to the question Do you agree that the Republic of Armenia becomes a democratic independent state outside the USSR?. Two days later, September 23 the Supreme Council of Armenia declared it an independent, autonomous state.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan considers irreversible the achievements of the past 25 years, and the country has moved towards the right direction.

During his speech delivered at the military parade dedicated to Armenias 25th Independence Day, the President said the Armenian peoples formula of moving forward is very simple: work , work and work.

A quarter century ago on this day we made our choice with referendum ballots, but we all know that we have made that choice earlier in our hearts and our collective memory. We have selected the freedom still at a time of Hayk patriarch, we are committed to that choice. Today in the 21st century, the weapons have changed, but we havent changed with the determination to protect our own freedom, the evidence of it is this military parade. Of course, in the ideal world it is the right that will born strength, but todays world and our environment are far from being ideal. We have the strength of protecting our right and our freedom, the evidence is this military parade. The freedom and independence must be protected not only from external threats, our citizens must also be free since a free person and a free society act much more effective, we can and we must continue building effective state which will protect the free citizen and free society. Not free people can theoretically create a lot of things, but not happiness. Over the past 25 years we have recorded irreversible achievements, sometimes we made mistakes, sometimes we have appeared in extremes, but by and large we have moved forward on a right path. We are building our happiness in a peaceful and creative way, and our moving forward formula is very simple: work, work and work. We must multiple our achievements through our work and protect them with our strength, the President said, Armenpress reported.

On September 21 Armenia is marking the 25th anniversary of its Independence. The Armenian people said a resolute yes to independence by means of a referendum 25 years ago. The majority of the Armenian population of age answered positively to the question Do you agree that the Republic of Armenia becomes a democratic independent state outside the USSR?. Two days later, September 23 the Supreme Council of Armenia declared it an independent, autonomous state.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan attended the Military Parade of the Armenian Armed Forces dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence on September 21 in the Republic Square of Yerevan, press service of the Presidential administration informed Armenpress.

The President delivered a speech at the Military Parade.

Armenpress presents his full speech:

Soldiers, Officers, Generals,

My sisters and brothers,

I congratulate all of us on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Armenia.

We have made our choice by casting a ballot on this very day a quarter-century ago, but we are well aware that deep in our hearts and in our collective memory we had made that choice much earlier. We chose freedom at the times of Patriarch Haik. We are faithful to the decision that we had made back at the times of a bow and arrow. Today, at the 21st century weapons have changed, but we have not, and we are determined to defend our liberty. And this parade is a testimony to that.

In the ideal world the right, of course, is the source of might. Nevertheless, the contemporary world and our environment are far from being ideal. There are still circumstances, in which the might is the source of the right. We have got both our right and might to defend our freedom. And this parade is a testimony to that.

Freedom and independence need to be defended not exclusively from external threats. The domestic social and political life is no less important and vital to us. Our citizens should be free since a free individual and a free society function way more effectively. We can and we shall continue building an efficient nation, which will defend a free citizen and a free society. Unfree people theoretically can create a lot but not happiness.

In the course of the past 25 years we have registered irrevocable achievements. Occasionally we have made mistakes, occasionally we have run into the extremes, but at the end of the day we have been moving in the right direction. We are building our happiness with free thoughts and free hands, which means we produce peacefully and creatively. And there is only one obvious prescription as to how we shall move forward: it is to work hard, harder and harder.

Indeed, we highly value our achievements since we have paid a dear price for them. We shall multiply those achievements with our hard work and defend  with the might we have accumulated.

Long live our boys that vigilantly guard borders of Armenia: they are the primary guarantors of our freedom. Glory to the immortal heroes who fought in the Artsakh liberation war, to each and single brave fellow of ours. Glory to the young lions of this April, who wiped out all the hostile planning of our adversary. Some months ago at the grave of scout-machinegunner Sasun Mkrtchyan I promised on behalf of all of us that we would continue the sacred mission of Sasun and his friends, we would always keep lit the light that emanated from the new generation of Artsakh and Armenia, that had united all of us during those April days; united as a fist, ready to crush the head of the adversary that threatened our security. And we will keep our word. And this parade is a testimony to that.

Long live the citizen of the Republic of Armenia, a soil cultivator and construction worker, a physician and teacher, a miner and entrepreneur, a civil servant and artist. Glory to the citizen of Armenia, who establishes new values.

Long live the trilateral unity of Armenia-Artsakh-Diaspora: by joining our forces we are getting much stronger than one could imagine.

Long live our brothers and sisters that represent Armenias ethnic minorities, who enjoy equality and share responsibility in the consistent pursuit of the cause for development and defense of our country.

Long live the traditional Armenian family, which in spite of all currents remains the source of warmth that gives birth to heroes and brings up generations thirsting for knowledge.

My fellow compatriots,

I again congratulate all of us and Armenians around the globe with the quarter-century anniversary of the reestablishment of the independent Armenian statehood.

Glory to the Republic of Armenia!

Glory to the Armenian Armed Forces!
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. The most prominent ceremony the Military Parade dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence was held in the Republic Square of Yerevan on September 21.

Acting Defense Minister of Armenia Seyran Ohanyan welcomed all military unites and congratulated them on the Independence Day.

Then the acting Minister reported the readiness of the military parade to the Supreme Commander of the Armenian Armed Forces, President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, thereafter the parade launched.

Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II, His Holiness Aram I Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, Parliament Speaker Galust Sahakyan, Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan, President of the Constitutional Court Gagik Harutyunayn, members of the legislative and executive bodies, diplomatic representatives of foreign states in Armenia, military officials, clergy representatives were following the Military Parade.

Photos by Gevorg Perkuperkyan

A number of units of the Armenian Armed forces marched during the Military Parade.

Then the military equipment was brought to the Republic Sqaure (self-propelled anti-tank systems, cannons, Grad, Typhoon, WM-80, Smerch, Konkurs multiple rocket launchers, Tochka-U, Scud tactical ballistic missiles, Iskander mobile short-range ballistic missile system).

Honor Guard Headquarters and the Joint Armed Forces Brass Band concluded the Military Parade.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. On September 20, on the sidelines of the 71st regular session of the UN General Assembly, Acting Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian held a meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bolivia David Choquehuanca, press service of the Armenian MFA informed Armenpress.

The sides discussed issues concerning the bilateral relations and cooperation within the framework of international organizations, attached importance to the establishment of friendship group in the parliaments and the holding of regular consultations between the Foreign Ministries of two countries.

Edward Nalbandian expressed gratitude for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by both houses of the Bolivian legislative body back in 2014 and emphasized that it was an important input of the Bolivian people in the fight for the international recognition of crimes against humanity.

In course of the meeting, views were exchanged on the current international and regional issues.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. The Promise movie about the Armenian Genocide will become a real evil for Turks, Turkish columnist Ali Eyuboglu published an article in Milliyet newspaper, reports Armenpress.

He says for years the Turks have fought against resolutions recognizing the Armenian Genocide in the parliaments of different states that have become a real disaster.

We will face another problem soon, he writes referring to The Promise movie.

He tells that the movie author is famous Hotel Rwanda movies director, and the film stars are Christian Bale, Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon.

The Turkish columnist says the movie is financed by Armenian philanthropist Kirk Kerkorian stating that he was one of the richest people of the US who died at the age of 98 in 2015.

Armenians said about him: Azerbaijanis have oil, but we have Kirk Kerkorian, he writes. He says when the movie will be screened in cinemas, it will become a real evil for Turks.

The premier of the film The Promise about the Armenian Genocide was held within the framework of Toronto International Film Festival.

American-Armenian entrepreneur, billioner Kirk Kerkorian paid the film shooting costs, and it became known on the day of his death. Survival Pictures company is shooting the film

Michael lives in a small Armenian village and he promises himself to rich village women to get 400 gold coins as dowry. This allows him to travel to Istanbul to become a medical student where he befriend a son of a powerful general. Christopher (Christian Bale) is a reporter for the Associated Press and he bring along Ana, a Armenian women who was raised in Paris. Michael falls in love with Ana. When the Turkish joined the Germans in the First World War and crudely killed minorities living in the Ottoman Empire, despite the existing conflict, everyone must find a way to be saved.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. A preliminary opinion by the Council of Europe's constitutional law experts, (the Venice Commission) criticizes draft modifications to the constitution of Azerbaijan, which will be put to a national referendum on Monday 26 September, press service of the Council of Europe informed Armenpress.

Many proposed amendments would severely upset the balance of power by giving unprecedented powers to the President, according to the Venice Commission opinion.

For example, the extension of the presidential mandate from five to seven years cannot be justified given the already very strong position of the President, who since 2009 can be re-elected without term limits.

Another reform gives the President power to dissolve parliament, which does not only make political dissent in parliament largely ineffective, according to the opinion, but also affects the independence of the judiciary, since parliaments role in the approval of judges will be reduced.

The Venice Commission experts were particularly worried by the introduction of the figure of unelected Vice-Presidents, who may at some moment govern the country, and the Presidents prerogative to declare early presidential elections at his convenience.

The opinion also criticizes the procedure of the referendum as having lacked proper debate in parliament and having been carried out too quickly and without real public discussion beforehand.

Indeed, due to time constraints, the opinion rapporteurs themselves were unable to visit Azerbaijan and did not benefit from direct consultations with the authorities, experts and other stakeholders. In this context, the Venice Commission regrets that the authorities of Azerbaijan did not consult it prior to submitting the draft to the referendum.

The experts praised proposed amendments in the human rights chapter of the Azerbaijani constitution, such as the introduction of the concept of "human dignity" and of the right to conscientious treatment excluding arbitrariness by state bodies and of certain procedural rights. They also praised the proposal to elevate the principle of proportionality to the constitutional level, which means that every restriction to human rights should be proportionate to the aim the state seeks to achieve.

However, the experts expressed reservations with other proposed changes in the human rights chapter, in particular one which provides for limitations to public gatherings for the sake of "public order" and morality, since this provision risks to be too broadly interpreted. The opinion also is concerned about a proposed provision on withdrawing citizenship that reduces the scope of the current guarantee that prevents withdrawal of citizenship in absolute terms.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. While on a working visit in New York on September 20, acting Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian participated in and delivered remarks at the meeting of Foreign Ministers of the member states of the International Organization of La Francophonie held within the framework of the 71st regular session of the UN General Assembly, press service of the MFA told Armenpress.

The Ministers discussed the process of implementation of decisions made during the OIFs Yerevan Ministerial Conference.

The Foreign Minister of Madagascar briefed on the preparatory works of the summit which will be held in Antananarivo this November.
Six Hamilton County residents will receive degrees at WGU Tennessees third commencement ceremony, scheduled for Sept. 24 at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. Annie Munoz, bachelor of science, nursing Rachel Tolliver, master of science, nursing education Teri Rankin, bachelor of arts, interdisciplinary studies Pamela Frady, bachelor of science, nursing Christy Hixson, bachelor of arts, interdisciplinary studies Lisa Jackson, master of business administration, management and strategyWe want to congratulate every one of the 144 graduates participating in our third commencement and cant wait to celebrate with them said Dr.Kim Estep, chancellor of WGU Tennessee. Honoring our graduates hard work and dedication is my favorite moment year after year.Commencement speakers will include four members of the graduating class and guest speaker Mark Cate, co-founder and president of the Stones River Group and former chief of staff for Governor Bill Haslam.Earlier this year the state-endorsed, nonprofit online university celebrated its three-year anniversary. WGU Tennessee launched as part of Govenor Bill Haslams Drive to 55 college completion initiative in 2012. Enrollment is expected to eclipse 3,000 students within months and this years graduating class is the largest yet. In keeping with the competency-based universitys commitment to affordability, WGUs leadership recently announced that tuition rates will not increase in 2016.Weve made great progress in just three years: we now have nearly 3,000 current students and more than 1,500 total graduates, which speaks to our programs quality, affordability, and flexibility, Dr. Estep said. Its been our mission to help Tennesseans further their education and be better prepared for the changing workforce. Weve seen people are responding to that mission in ever increasing numbers.WGU Tennessee enrolls students into its programs each month. Tuition is about $3,000 for a six-month term, during which students can complete an unlimited amount of coursework. Those interested in learning more can visit tennessee.wgu.edu
Sgt. Thomas Douglas Wright, Jr., 23, of Hixson died on Sunday, September 18, 2016.

Tommy lived in Fort Oglethorpe early in life, attending Lakeview Fort Oglethorpe High school before moving to Rhea County where he graduated from Rhea County High School. He was a soldier with the Tennessee Army National Guard serving in the Headquarters Battery 1st Battalion 181st Field Artillery Hit em Hard serving his country as a missile operations specialist. Tommy was deployed to Kuwait/Jordan on one tour and Afghanistan on a second tour. He loved to ride motorcycles. No matter what kind of day you were having Tommy could put a smile on your face.



Survivors include his parents, Thomas Wright, Sr. (Cathy) and Sharon Grimsley (Randy); sister, Michelle Lewis (Kenney); grandparents, Bill Scalf (Faye) and Pat Scalf (Tony); nieces, Alannah Marie and Makenleigh Grace, his pride and joy; aunts, Debbie Scalf and Lisa Scalf McCaslin (Jeremy); uncle, Brad Wright (Patti); many extended family, friends and brothers in arms.



Services will be held on Monday, Sept. 26, at 12:30 p.m. in the funeral home chapel. Burial will follow at Chattanooga National Cemetery with full military honors.

Visitation is on Sunday, Sept. 25, from 4-8 p.m. at the funeral home.



Condolences and memories can be shared at www.williamsonandsons.com.



Arrangements are by Williamson and Sons Funeral Home, 8852 Dayton Pike, Soddy Daisy, Tn. 37379.
When the Saleen S7 burst onto the stage in 2000, it was a sensation. Its 7.0 forced-induction V8 and accompanying 550 horsepower (later bumped to 750) was a revelation for American motorsport, and the fact that it came from a small tuning firm known for making Mustangs more muscular only added to its intrigue. Off the show circuit and outside of enthusiast circles, its timeless design found some mainstream attention in Bruce Almighty as Jim Carreys ride of choice.

Though the story of its birth is murky and up for debate, its hard to argue that the S7 was perhaps one of the greatest feats of American automotive engineering to date. Flat-out, the twin-turbo S7  which debuted in 2005  was capable of 248 miles per hour, and it reached 60 in 2.8 seconds on the way there.

The rest of the 2000s and 2010s were and have been a struggle for Saleens firm. Its had some highly-publicized financial woes: Customers havent been getting their orders, its been selling off assets to balance its checkbook, and dealerships have sued the company over alleged fraud and breaches of contract. And so, Saleen is doing what many other small firms might do in its position: Take your finest merchandise, give it some fresh paint, more power, limit its production, and hope the proceeds can help offset its outstanding debts.

Naturally, Saleen didnt come out and explain it that way; the company says the limited run of seven new S7s (the S7 LM, now) is being built to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Saleens period of racing dominance between 1996 and 2002.

True to our form, we are bringing back Americas only true supercar, said Steve Saleen, President and CEO of Saleen Automotive in a press blast, We are celebrating our winning heritage and advancing the performance DNA that Saleen was built around.

The new Saleen S7 LM will see power  sourced from the same 7.0 liter Ford-derived V8  increase from 750 horsepower to an even 1,000. The LM will also benefit from unique livery, wheels, interior, and functional performance enhancements, the firm says.

Saleen is lucky in that the S7 provides such a timeless and solid base  even by todays standards, with the new Ford GT, the McLaren 675 LT, and the outbound Dodge Viper ACR, the Saleen still looks current and competitive.

However, the magic 1,000-horsepower figure puts it in the same rarefied air as todays crop of high-performance and equally high-priced vehicles. That kind of power puts you in leagues with Koenigsegg, the Ferrari La Ferrari, the McLaren P1, Lamborghinis high-end special editions, and various forms of vaporware from around the world.

But heres the question of the Saleens aged mechanicals: While the Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche 918, and Koenigsegg use space-age and Formula 1-derived hybrid technology and materials, the S7 LM  unless Saleen is withholding something  will be using the same structural components and engine tech that it used 16 years ago. That was enough to make the S7 world-beating then, but 16 years is an era in modern automotive times. Today, you can buy a 204 mile per hour family sedan with 700-plus horsepower for under $70,000.

Of course many, if not all of those hypercars have a barrier to entry of $1 million, and the Saleen will reportedly be no exception. The S7 sold for $375,000 (about $514,000 today) back in 2001, but thanks to the cars now-legendary status, and limited production, we doubt it will have much trouble moving the cars  16-year-old architecture or otherwise.

At that price, Saleen would net an even $7 million in sales, enough to at least dent  but not balance  its outstanding debt (which stood at roughly $5 million as of November 2014).

One thing is for certain: The 2017 Saleen S7 (yes, 2017 officially, though that might be gratuitous) likely wont be the savior Saleen needs it to be. But it will be warmly welcomed by the motoring community like an old friend.

Like classics? Its always Throwback Thursday somewhere.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. While on a working visit in New York, acting Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian met Foreign Minister of Latvia Edgars Rinkevics on September 20, press service of the Armenian MFA told Armenpress.

The sides discussed issues related to the organization of high-level visits, the expansion of the legal framework, the intensification of inter-parliamentary contacts.

Other issues related to intensifying the economic mutual cooperation, the preparation works of first session of the inter-governmental commission were on the discussion agenda.

The ongoing negotiation process over Armenia-EU relations new legal framework was touched upon at the meeting.
Celebrating jailhouse recovery Audio Article Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle Sears paid a visit to the Chesterfield County Jail last week, meeting with over 50 of the men and women participating in the HARP (Helping Addicts...

An icons legacy memorialized Audio Article Enon Library was dedicated in memory of the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker on Friday, Oct. 21. Board of Supervisors Chair Chris Winslow, right, was joined by Walkers daughter, Patrice Walker...
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. On September 20, at the UN Headquarter Acting Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian signed on behalf of Armenia an agreement adopted at the Climate Change Conference held in Paris under the auspices of the UN, press service of the MFA told Armenpress.

According to the agreement the international community must take joint steps aimed at confronting the global warming.

Last year President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan participated in and delivered a speech at the opening of Paris Conference.
Chicago investor and entrepreneur Marcus Lemonis put a new spin on a local catering company on CNBC's "The Profit" Tuesday night.

Lemonis offered a $300,000 investment for a 33 percent stake in Honest Foods Catering and steered the business into adding food trucks.

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Owner Tad Devlin told Lemonis the company was poised to see revenue drop by at least 30 percent this year following its $1.3 million in sales in 2015.

Lemonis was concerned about the company's reliance on film-industry catering  accounting for about 80 percent of its business  and Devlin's tendency to micromanage.

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The ep showed a bit of contention around how Devlin communicated. One of his employees told him to shove something up his posterior, and Devlin cursed at Lemonis.

With his catering business being seasonal, peaking in summer and fall through the winter holidays, Devlin said he's had to cut employee hours during slow periods.

Lemonis figured the food trucks  the company started with one for grilled cheeses and another for shaved ice  would provide another stream of revenue and offer employees a share of the profits.

Devlin said he was initially apprehensive about the step.

The 20-year-old business, based at 5408 N. Elston, already had a food truck it used for film job sites.

"From the type of catering we do, to add two trucks to our fleet at this point in time, I felt like that wasn't what we needed. We needed more catering jobs," Devlin said before the broadcast. "But his understanding is it's a new aspect of business for us. Not only does the company benefit from it, but the employees benefit as well.

"As long as we hit our margins, the employees will get a piece of the pie."

Devlin said Honest Foods was still awaiting approvals to operate its new trucks. But word was out about them before the show aired, and the company had inquiries in August about doing weddings and other private parties.

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Taping began in May and crews wrapped Aug. 13, according to Honest Foods. It's the only Chicago-area business to appear on "The Profit" this season.

Cheryl V. Jackson is a freelance writer

Twitter @cherylvjackson
Two-time Chicago entrepreneur Shawn Carpenter  is back with a new company.

The founder of financial services company YCharts has teamed up with Jonathan Suchland, a former Amazon software development manager, to create RepIQ  a platform to help salespeople find and contact promising potential customers, then use data to determine how they can improve their sales. Carpenter describes it as something like "Google Analytics for sales teams."

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Carpenter, who stepped down as YCharts' CEO in late 2015, will serve as the company's CEO. Suchland is its chief technology officer.

The founders, who met while working at Classified Ventures in the mid-2000s, said Wednesday morning they had closed a round of seed funding from Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Amicus Capital, Hyde Park Angels and San Francisco-based family investment group Arba. They did not disclose the amount.

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Carpenter, who also founded real-time investor portal WallStreetView, said he wanted to solve some of the problems he saw scaling sales at YCharts and leading revenue intelligence at Google before that.

"I've been living with this problem in building YCharts the last six years," he said. "It's hard to figure out who you should be targeting, hard to figure out the contact information of those people, and then when you start doing outreach and trying to sell your product, it's hard to figure out which companies or users are interested. We're really building around  the struggle to scale up a sales organization."

The platform includes a database of more than 500,000 companies, contacts at those companies and information about the systems and platforms they use. That way, sales people can filter for companies from a certain region, for organizations that use Salesforce or that fit other requirements.

The technology also aims to help individuals and sales teams see where they're winning or losing.

"Parsing through a lot of data is really hard, and it takes time to be able to look at what is really successful for you as an individual sales rep, what is successful for your sales crew as a team, and then as a company, what are the key things that help your reps sell?" Suchland said.

The platform might recommend the most effective content to use in the sales process, or the best industries and companies to target.

RepIQ is working with companies to test and work out the kinks on the product, Carpenter said. He expects to publicly launch the product later this year. He said the company will initially target mainly enterprise software companies, but that it could apply more broadly to other types of sales.

Hyde Park Angels member Eddie Leshin said RepIQ will supplement the other existing sales-focused technologies on the market already. He said sales data analytics are a void in the market.

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RepIQ, which hasn't hired yet, hopes to be a draw for talent inside and outside the city, the founders said. In a way, it already is: Suchland relocated to Chicago from Seattle to start the company.

"I think it just speaks to how people view Chicago and where we've come as a technology ecosystem," said Pritzker Group Venture Capital vice president Peter Liu. "It's also great to see Shawn staying here and building a company here and getting other folks to come back."

mgraham@tribpub.com

Twitter @megancgraham
A merger between insurance giants Aetna and Humana could threaten the quality and affordability of health care in Illinois and 14 other states, according to an American Medical Association analysis released Wednesday.

Aetna and Humana say they want to combine to offer better access to higher quality affordable care. But the Chicago-based AMA has been a vocal opponent of the deal, arguing it will lead to less competition among insurers and, in turn, fewer choices for consumers, at higher costs.

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Illinois has joined the U.S. Department of Justice in a lawsuit seeking to halt Aetna's proposed $37 billion acquisition of Humana. The Justice Department also is suing to block a proposed deal between insurers Anthem and Cigna. The medical association did not cite any competition issues with regard to that merger in Illinois in its analysis.

In Illinois, an Aetna-Humana merger raises competitive concerns across the state involving insurers offering PPO plans, according to the AMA analysis. The group said a merger also could harm competition in the Rockford, Bloomington-Normal, Kankakee-Bradley and Lake County-Kenosha County areas when one looks at the combined markets for PPOs, HMOs, plans offered on the Obamacare exchange and point of service plans.

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"When markets like this consolidate, the premiums go up and choices of care go down," said Dr. William Kobler, an AMA board member and family physician in Rockford.

He said physicians already have little bargaining power with big insurers, and consolidation will only make that worse.

"If we want to have access to those patients and keep our doors open, we're pretty much stuck with what the insurance company is telling us to do," Kobler said. Across the country, hospitals and physician groups also have been consolidating.

But Aetna spokeswoman Kristine Grow said Wednesday the deal will offer more choices to consumers and greater access to higher quality, more affordable care. She said the deal is mainly about Medicare Advantage  Medicare plans offered by private insurers  not the commercial products the AMA study analyzed. The AMA looked at nongovernmental PPOs, HMOs, plans offered on the Obamacare exchange and point of service plans.

"It's about bringing better quality and better value into Medicare Advantage," Grow said. "We'll be able to bring our best practices together."

The Illinois attorney general's office has said the merger could reduce competition among insurers offering Medicare Advantage plans in about one-third of the state's counties.

In joining the federal lawsuit, the attorney general's office disagreed with Illinois Department of Insurance acting Director Anne Melissa Dowling, who had granted conditional approval of the merger. Dowling had said that Aetna's acquisition of Humana might reduce competition in the Medicare Advantage market "in a few downstate counties," but that Medicare Advantage customers could always switch back to traditional Medicare if they were unhappy.

lschencker@chicagotribune.com

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Twitter @lschencker
With Bayer's proposed $66 billion purchase of Monsanto Co., the company that invented aspirin is poised to take on one of the world's biggest corporate headaches. A potential cure: dropping the Monsanto name.

The German drug and chemical conglomerate is considering that move to avoid sullying its reputation, according to people familiar with internal discussions at Bayer who asked not to be named because the talks are private. No decision has been made, and Bayer's managers will have some time to think: thanks to antitrust reviews in some 30 jurisdictions worldwide, the purchase isn't likely to be completed before late 2017.

Even if the deal goes through as proposed, merging the two companies into the world's top maker of seeds and crop chemicals will be a challenge. Bayer will need to integrate a company known for making the herbicide Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam War and tangling with environmental groups over genetically-modified crops.

One possibility would be to market Monsanto products such as seed corn and Roundup herbicide under the Bayer CropScience name, said Joachim Kregel, who represents independent investors at the German shareholder association SdK. Bayer, after all, brought aspirin to market in 1899, and in May it topped a ranking of the world's most reputable pharmaceutical brands from the Reputation Institute, a marketing consultancy.

"If anyone can do it, it's Bayer," Kregel said.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV last week, Monsanto Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant signaled he's open to a change.

"I've been very flexible," Grant said after the deal was announced on Sept. 14. "The key is less about the name and more about the products developed."

At a question-and-answer session with Grant, Bayer Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann said there's an opportunity for the companies to jointly "get beyond this image and reputation thing" by building on the trust Bayer enjoys in Europe.

Environmentalists have campaigned against the deal since talks were first disclosed in May, with celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo and Bianca Jagger tweeting in opposition. Opponents have argued that combining the companies will drive up prices for farmers and increase the spread of genetically modified seeds. Bayer and Monsanto counter that combining will leave them better able to research new products to help farmers produce more food. U.S. regulators say food from genetically engineered plants is as safe as that from non-genetically engineered sources. The European Union also has approved GMO products for sale.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will take a first look at the Bayer-Monsanto deal on Tuesday in a hearing on mergers in the agriculture industry. The proposed purchase comes after a pending deal between Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont Co. and China National Chemical Corp.'s planned takeover of Syngenta AG. Also on Tuesday, Bayer will host analysts and investors at a meeting scheduled before the deal was closed. On Wednesday, Germany's Green Party plans to raise antitrust and reputation concerns over the Bayer-Monsanto deal at a session of parliament in Berlin.

Bayer is no stranger to public-relations challenges. In 2011, the company paid $750 million to settle lawsuits that claimed a strain of its genetically modified rice had tainted other crops; Bayer said that it had acted responsibly in handling the biotech rice but wanted to resolve the litigation so it could move forward. Environmentalists have called on it to stop selling any GM seeds. Further back in its corporate history, the company was a Nazi contractor and used forced labor.

The Monsanto deal will give Bayer the opportunity to redeem a tarnished brand and highlight the benefits of the company's products, said Marc Tuengler, chief of DSW, a German association that advises small investors on proxy votes.

"With the right signals, the right decisions, Bayer can show what will be changed," Tuengler said. "Monsanto has a better chance of improving its reputation under Bayer's roof."

With assistance from Jeffrey McCracken, David McLaughlin and Lydia Mulvany
Two Breakthru Beverave executives are accused of a wine and spirits smuggling scheme in New York. (Rick Bowmer / AP)

Two top executives for Breakthru Beverage Group, an alcohol wholesale company co-led by Blackhawks Chairman Rocky Wirtz, were sued Tuesday for alleged involvement in a New York wine and spirits smuggling scheme.

Empire Merchants, a New York wine and spirits distributor, filed a civil suit in New York federal court Tuesday, alleging Breakthru Co-chairman Charlie Merinoff and CEO Greg Baird, among others, were involved in a "reprehensible criminal scheme" that entailed Maryland alcohol wholesalers selling alcohol to retailers in rural Maryland that was eventually smuggled into New York and sold illegally, costing Empire and the state of New York "millions of dollars" in lost liquor taxes.

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Breakthru Beverage, the combination of Wirtz Beverage Group and the Merinoff family's Charmer Sunbelt, two family-run wholesalers that merged earlier this year, is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Reliable Churchill, one of the Maryland wholesalers that allegedly participated in the scheme, was owned by Charmer Sunbelt and is now part of Breakthru Beverage.

The Wirtz family is standing by its business partners.

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"These allegations are wholly without merit and will be fought aggressively," said Rocky Wirtz, Breakthru co-chairman, and Danny Wirtz, vice chairman, in an internal email to employees Tuesday. "We take very seriously any accusation that impugns the integrity of Breakthru Beverage. The foundation of our company was built generations ago on the pillars of integrity and hard work. Those values hold strong today."

Breakthru spokeswoman Julia Sznewajs said Merinoff and Baird were not available to comment.

The lawsuit accuses the two men, both formerly Charmer Sunbelt executives, of fraud, unfair competition, deceptive trade practices and breach of fiduciary duty, among other allegations. The suit also alleges violations of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO.

According to the lawsuit, Reliable Churchill and Republic National Distributing Co., another Maryland wholesaler, sold excessive amounts of alcohol to retailers in rural Cecil County, Md., which in turn sold the alcohol to New York retailers. The wholesalers had "actual or constructive knowledge of these smuggled sales," the suit alleges.

Merinoff's Charmer Sunbelt was also part owner in the joint venture that operated as Empire, according to the lawsuit. Merinoff, who served on Empire's board of managers, wanted to "wrest control over Empire's New York operations from Empire's other principals," according to the complaint.

"Merinoff directed and participated in the Maryland bootlegging scheme for pecuniary gain," the lawsuit says.

In May, Republic National Distributing Co. was federally indicted on 23 counts related to selling alcohol to Cecil County retailers that was smuggled into New York from June 2009 to June 2012.

The exact timeline in the alleged scheme in Empire's civil lawsuit, which does not name Republic as a defendant, is less clear.

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gtrotter@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @GregTrotterTrib
Chicago pizza chain Lou Malnati's has sold a stake in the business to BDT Capital Partners, an investment and advisory firm headed by former Goldman Sachs investment banker Byron Trott. (Anthony Souffle / Chicago Tribune)

Lou Malnati's Pizza, which has 46 Chicago-area locations and recently expanded to Phoenix, is taking on a low-key but high-powered investor to help with additional expansion.

BDT Capital Partners, an investment and advisory firm headed by former Goldman Sachs investment banker Byron Trott, has taken a stake in Lou Malnati's.

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"We held off going out of state for 45 years, because we're a Chicago company," said owner Marc Malnati. "Opening in Phoenix was a pretty high investment. We put millions of dollars up to build out a new store, train a crew that had never made pizza before, shipped some of our people out to Phoenix. And when we opened in May, we experienced three-hour waits, people in line in 95-degree heat and excited about it. It was an incredible honeymoon.

"But we realized that to create a big enough footprint to thrive out there, we need to add six or eight stores," Malnati said.

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"And I realized we'd want to do this again and again, in the next dozen years ago, in a handful of other cities. And instead of my brother, Rick, and I taking all the risk when we move  when you move into another city it winds up being 10 times the risk  we thought it would be great to have a partner to shoulder some of that risk."

Malnati wouldn't say how large BDT's stake is, except to affirm that he and brother Rick are the two largest individual shareholders.

BDT was a good fit, Malnati said.

"Byron Trott is committed to family-owned, closely held companies," he said. "This (partnership) will create opportunities to have counsel and advice as we calculate our plans for the future. That's the big idea here."

Trott is best-known for his relationship with renowned investor Warren Buffett, and was a cornerstone in Buffett's $4.1 billion investment in Goldman Sachs in 2008, when Wall Street was reeling from the financial crisis.

BDT, one of the most lucrative private equity firms in Illinois, invests in and advises family and founder-led companies, including Tory Burch, Palatine-based grill-maker Weber-Stephen Products, Chicago's Wrigley Building, and Peet's Coffee and Tea.

Besides Buffett, Trott and BDT have advised other famous families including the Pritzkers, founders of the Hyatt Hotel chain; and the Waltons, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune.

Don't expect a slew of nationwide Malnati pizzerias any time soon, Malnati said.

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"We don't plant to grow any more aggressively than we have been for the last five years," he said. "We've generally opened one new restaurant a year, and maybe a few carryout locations. I believe this business is all about the people who work in the company, and those people have to have a certain level of experience. We work hard to develop that, but it takes time. So we move slowly."

Samantha Bomkamp contributed.

pvettel@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @PhilVettel
Marriott's year-long pursuit of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which set off a fierce bidding war, is nearing completion.

The hotel giant on Tuesday said it had cleared the last hurdle - a green-light from Chinese regulators - in its $13.6 billion takeover of Starwood, putting it on track to become the world's largest hotelier by Friday.

Under the terms of the deal, Starwood shareholders will receive $21 in cash and 0.8 shares of Marriott's stock for each share of Starwood's stock. The company plans to delist Starwood shares from the New York Stock Exchange before markets open Friday.

"This is a transformative deal, the kind you only see once in a generation," said Rachael Rothman, an analyst for Susquehanna Financial Group in New York. "Clearly it's going to empower Marriott's brand."

Maryland-based Marriott, which will soon have 1.1. million rooms worldwide and nearly $20 billion in annual revenue, earlier this year emerged as the winner in what became an international bidding war for Connecticut-based Starwood.

Marriott last November announced plans to buy Starwood for $12.2 billion. Weeks before shareholders were to vote on the merger, a business group led by China's Anbang Insurance Group swooped in with an unsolicited, all-cash offer of $12.8 billion for the Starwood. Marriott upped its offer to $13.6 billion; Anbang followed suit with a $14 billion bid.

In late March, Anbang withdrew its offer without explanation. Shareholders of Marriott and Starwood approved the planned merger in early April.

The deal hit another snag last month, when the Chinese Ministry of Commerce requested additional time to review the terms. Marriott had already received approvals from regulators in 40 countries, including the United States and the European Union, and had expected to finalize the acquisition by mid-year.

The deal brings together 30 brands, including Marriott's Ritz-Carlton, Courtyard and Renaissance Hotels with Starwood's St. Regis, Sheraton and W Hotels.

Marriott's chief executive Arne M. Sorenson said the company was drawn to Starwood because of its global presence, strong rewards program and popularity among younger travelers. He also said he expected a merger with Starwood to save $250 million in annual costs within two years.

"By combining these two platforms, we will be a bigger buyer of tomatoes or reservations or systems," Sorenson said in an April call with investors. "All of the hotels will benefit from that."

Marriott executive have said one of the most important issues going forward is to successfully combine Marriott and Starwood's large loyalty rewards programs - with 54 million members and 21 million members, respectively. Marriott executives have begun rolling out changes to its rewards program - making late-checkout more freely available, for example, offering a concierge service for its most elite members - in an effort to bring in more in line with Starwood's.

"How is this going to come together? It's a question on everyone's minds," said David Loeb, a lodging analyst at investment firm Robert W. Baird & Co. "Customer loyalty is what this [industry] is all about, and Marriott is going to want to attract and retain those loyal Starwood customers."
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau sent a congratulatory message on the occasion of Armenia's Independence Day.

Armenpress presents his full message:

"Today, we join the Armenian community - here in Canada, in Armenia, and around the world - in celebrating the country's 25th Independence Day.

Canada and the Republic of Armenia enjoy a dynamic and friendly relationship, rooted in the shared values of democracy and freedom, bilateral relations, and our collaboration in international organizations such as La Francophonie.

I look forward to working with President Serzh Sargsyan and newly-appointed Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan to further strengthen the relations between our two countries, and to work together on global and regional issues including peace, security, and development cooperation.

On behalf of the Government of Canada, Sophie and I invite all Canadians to reflect on the important contributions of Canadians of Armenian descent to our national fabric, and offer our best wishes to everyone celebrating today.
David Hoffmann, who was president of high-growth markets for McDonald's, has resigned his position, the burger chain said Wednesday. (McDonald's)

A longtime McDonald's executive who resigned abruptly last week has been named the new president of Dunkin' Donuts in the U.S. and Canada.

David Hoffmann was the president of McDonald's high-growth segment, which includes countries like China and Russia. The Oak Brook-based company announced his resignation in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.

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McDonald's said that Hoffmann failed "to satisfy certain conditions upon his departure, including execution of a noncompete agreement." As a result, he will forfeit certain benefits, including all unvested cash and equity incentive awards, the company said in the filing.

Noncompetes are standard in the corporate world and generally prohibit employees from jumping to a competitor too soon after leaving a company.

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Hoffmann will start at Dunkin' on Oct. 3. In his new role, Hoffmann will receive a base salary of $700,000 and an annual bonus up to an additional $700,000. But for fiscal year 2016, he will get a bonus payout of $1.1 million, set to be paid in March 2017. He also will be entitled to millions in company stock. Dunkin' is footing the bill for Hoffmann and his family to relocate for his new position. The doughnut chain is headquartered in Canton, Mass.

Hoffmann, a 22-year McDonald's veteran, has led the "high-growth" markets segment since it was created last year, linking together the countries where McDonald's sees the most growth potential: China, Russia, Italy, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Hoffmann started working at McDonald's in high school and then rejoined the company after getting an MBA from the University of Chicago through the burger chain's management training program. He has held general management positions in international markets since 2008, when he was named vice president of strategy and franchising in Japan.

McDonald's named Joseph Erlinger to replace Hoffmann as the high-growth segment's president. Erlinger has been with the world's largest burger chain for 14 years and currently serves as the unit's chief financial officer.

Late last month, McDonald's announced the departure of its U.S. president, a key architect of the company's recent transformation and 30-year company veteran. Mike Andres will remain with the company until the end of the year. McDonald's said on Aug. 2 that Chief Administrative Officer Pete Bensen would retire after nearly 20 years with the company.

sbomkamp@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @SamWillTravel

An earlier version of this story's headline mischaracterized McDonald's statement about Hoffmann's noncompete agreement.
Angelina Jolie Pitt and husband actor Brad Pitt arrive at the opening night gala premiere of Universal Pictures' "By The Sea" on November 5, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

Allow me to preface this column by acknowledging there are far more pressing concerns than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's pending divorce.

Their pain is nothing compared with that of, say, Nadia Murad, who was sold as a sex slave to an ISIS commander and is now suing the terrorist group on behalf of thousands of its victims.

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Their heartbreak doesn't equal that of Syrian refugees who can protect neither their homeland nor their children.

Their split won't leave either of them penniless or, in all likelihood, companionless.

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They will be fine.

And yet ...

News of Jolie filing for divorce from Pitt, her mate of 12 years and her husband of two, reverberated fast and furious. More so than Justin Bieber and model Sofia Richie, whose split was also announced this week. More so than Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, who parted ways this month.

More so, I'd venture to guess, than almost any celebrity couple whose love affair we watched take root and grow into what appeared to be a loving union of equals.

That's partly because they lasted more than a decade  a rare feat in Hollywood. But it's also because of who they are, apart from Hollywood.

A prominent divorce attorney said the terms of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's divorce are likely to be negotiated in private, rather than in a courtroom. (KCBS 2)

Earlier this month, Jolie, a United Nations envoy, appeared at a UN peacekeeping summit, where she spoke to delegates from 80 countries about the organization's alleged sexual abuse by peacekeepers. She is an outspoken advocate for Syrian refugees and visited with many of them as recently as March.

In 2013, she went public with her decision to have a preventive double mastectomy, hoping her frank discussion would encourage other women to determine their risk for breast and ovarian cancer.

The couple adopted children from Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia. Together they formed the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, which is reported to have given money to Doctors Without Borders, an Ethiopian HIV clinic and Pakistani refugees, among others.

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Pitt's Make It Right organization builds LEED-certified homes for people in need, including those in New Orleans displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

But we need one of them to be a villain.

They're splitting up, and we need to decide whom to blame, so Tuesday began the speculating about who's a bad parent, who smokes a lot of pot, who's having an affair with a co-star and so on.

And as of Thursday, we just may have a villain. Multiple reports now say Pitt is being investigated for alleged verbal and physical abuse against one of his children.

If he abused a child, we can spend the rest of his lifetime wrestling with whether his art overshadows his demons. (I tend to think demons overshadow art.)

But right now we don't know.

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What we do know is Jolie and Pitt, as a couple, took their wealth and privilege and fame and pointed it toward improving the world. That's worthy of our respect.

I bring this up not because I feel protective of a millionaire power couple I've never met. As I acknowledged earlier: They'll be fine.

I bring it up because we've gotten way too adept at shutting off our humanity toward people we don't know. We're too quick to dismiss people as flawed, and therefore unworthy of our grace; unrelatable, and therefore unworthy of our empathy; unknowable, and therefore unworthy of our energy.

I've been through a divorce. The way we talk about celebrities who split up isn't all that different from the way we talk about couples we know  even those we know intimately. We want details, and we want to pick sides. We pry and speculate and take those a-little-too-gleeful conversations where they don't belong  namely, behind the divorcing couple's back.

It's not helpful. It turns people into one half of a severed union, instead of, you know, people.

When "Love Warrior" author Glennon Doyle Melton announced her pending divorce on her Momastery blog, she attached a P.S. that was, in my eyes, one of her most powerful posts.

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"Try to avoid lamenting how sad it is that people 'throw away their marriages these days,'" she wrote. "Try not to generalize. I have met hundreds of divorced women who didn't throw their marriages away. Most of us fight like hell for our marriages until we realize that we can either save our marriages or save our souls.

"Please don't pretend to know what God thinks of us," she continued. "Please think deeply about the chasm-wide difference between leaving a man and leaving God. Please remember that when a woman leaves, she just brings God with her. Nothing separates a woman or a family from God's love. Not death, and certainly not divorce.

"Sometimes," she wrote, "when people make decisions about marriage, it evokes strong feelings in others. If my news does that to you today, please look inside and get curious about whether those feelings have more to do with you and your life than they do about me and mine."

Pitt and Jolie's divorce  and our handling of it  is hardly our most pressing concern. If I were making a Most Pressing Concerns list, it wouldn't even make the top 100. But it's a chance to examine and practice how we treat the people around us, particularly those whose marriages end.

We can do better.

hstevens@chicagotribune.com

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Twitter @heidistevens13

Editor's note: This column has been updated from its orginal version to include reports that Brad Pitt has been accused of child abuse.

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Chicago Cubs' Dexter Fowler celebrates with teammates after hitting a solo home run during the first inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals on Sept. 13, 2016. (Jeff Roberson / AP)

Thursday is an off day for the Chicago Cubs. Most of them, anyway.

Center fielder Dexter Fowler will deliver free pizza Thursday, part of a promotion for the UberEATS delivery app.

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From 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, UberEATS will fork over a free cheese pizza slice to anyone who orders from the general vicinity of the De Paul University or Northwestern University campus. (See the UberEATS blog for delivery boundaries and more details.)

To be clear: Fowler will deliver only some of the pizzas  luck of the smartphone tap. But no matter who delivers it, each slice will come with some free swag and promotion codes good for subsequent orders.

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Pizza is being provided by Rosati's Pizzeria, Frankie's Scallopine, Jet's Pizza, Delicious Italian Pizzeria Calzone, Sarpino's Pizzeria and The Warehouse Pizzeria. All are UberEATS participants.

To get in on the deal, download the UberEats app and select "Free Slice" from the Instant Delivery section at the top of the app when it appears on Thursday evening. Please be patient; demand is likely to be high.

And mark Oct. 6 on your calendar, when the same deal will be offered around the University of Chicago campus.

Phil Vettel is a Tribune critic.

pvettel@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @philvettel






Portrait of Roger Reeves, an acclaimed Chicago poet who was hired by the National Park Service to write a poem commemorating Pullman neighborhood. He is seen at a "free library" station in the neighborhood on Thursday, Aug 18, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

Roger Reeves went to Pullman the other day to work on a poem. He stepped from his car and watched for the rhythm of the neighborhood to reveal itself. Some people do this for a living. They are called poets. "I want to be catapulted into a poem," he explained. "I'm listening for music, collecting detail, looking for something." Reeves, whose watchful poems are attuned to the smallest telling detail in the everyday world, was writing a poem about Pullman, commissioned by the National Park Service and the Academy of American Poets, for the centennial of the Park Service.

"Doesn't feel like Chicago, does it?" he said.

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Fifteen miles south of the Loop, a world apart from Chicago, yet part of Chicago, the Pullman Historic District feels grand, and still, a former company town founded in the late 19th century that lost its company, and now, on a weekday, has the air of a place where the people have mostly vanished but their homes remain, lovely and brick; indeed, for the past century, the population of Pullman rarely reached beyond 10,000 residents, and now it has only 7,000, on about 250 acres. Reeves pulled out his notebook.

We walked.

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Being designated a national park in 2015 by President Barack Obama has not meant a daily crush of tour buses, and Pullman, 18 months later, feels lovingly, even pointedly, untended to, a rebuke to the rest of the gentrifying city. Reeves noted the "Don't Tread on Me" flag in a window, the bees spiraling in the sunlight around wooden frames in a backyard colony, the ruins of Market Hall, built in 1881, only to burn then burn again, the black char on its ancient lumber still evident. A woman crossed East 103rd Street with a pink scarf on her head. Reeves made a note in his journal, his handwriting tight and precise.

We rounded a corner.

He stopped.

Along a stone wall was an alley doubling as an art gallery, not graffiti murals, but paintings, in rain-beaten frames, a "No Wake" sign from a boatyard, knitted Hummel portraits, much more. Castoff flea market-type finds. "The longer I stand here the more I am seeing," Reeves said, and went to the front door of the home next to the wall and called a phone number taped in the window. After a short conversation with the owner, he returned, laughing: "You know, there is way too much to fit into one poem."

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We walked a few blocks and crossed Cottage Grove Avenue until we came upon a large man standing outside of a red brick castle with red barn doors and old stone horse heads. The man was Nick Lubovich and the building, built by Schlitz in 1906 as a stable for its horses, is now Argus Brewery. Reeves said, "Nick, I'm Roger, and the Academy of American Poets and National Park Service commissioned me to write this poem about Pullman, we were walking and "

"You saw my alley gallery!"

Reeves smiled. "You are attracted to history, and so am I." Indeed, there are two national parks in Illinois (the other is Lincoln's home in Springfield), and Reeves chose Pullman for many reasons, because of its seclusion, because of his interest in labor movement leader A. Philip Randolph (who organized the first African-American union here), because the place had been founded by industrialist George Pullman as a utopia.

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"Pullman is a living museum, man," Lubovich said. "Here is Norm."

A friend of Nick's stepped forward. "Stormin' Norman," Norm said.

"Stormin'," Reeves nodded.

"I'm brewery historian," Lubovich said. "Came to Pullman 10 years ago. Norm just moved here. There was a house I wanted. Called the owner every month for six years. Some months we yelled at each other! 'You are never getting this (expletive) house!' I'd go home feeling I had been fired and couldn't tell my wife! Lo and behold, we got that house." A man in a red cap approached. "This is brewery founder Bob Jensen."

Reeves shook hands.

"This guy," Lubovich said, motioning to Jensen. "Writing a poem."

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Reeves smiled but didn't explain more: That the poem would live on the Academy of American Poets website, that the National Park Service had been founded partly through the inspiration of artists (Hudson River School painters, for instance) who saw in vast American spaces a muse and grandeur. He didn't mention that he is an assistant professor of poetry at University of Illinois at Chicago, and came to the city six years ago, won a 2013 Pushcart Prize (for his poem "The Field Museum"), and the 2015 Whiting Award (given to emerging poets); he didn't say that he received his Ph.D. in English at University of Texas at Austin, and that as an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta he ran NCAA cross country, or that he came from southern New Jersey, a stone's throw from its cranberry bogs. Instead he just said: "Pullman's more South than Chicago."

"It's Bob's birthday," Lubovich said.

Jensen lowered his head. "Every time Bob is here it's his birthday," Lubovich said, laughing.

"Are we in Pullman?" Reeves asked.

"Historic Pullman," Lubovich said. "Technically, Roseland. Depends who's in office."

"My son is white and had dreads that would challenge yours," Jensen said to Reeves. "Went to the middle of his back. Took a razor and cut them off. Thought he would save them for some poor Rastafarian! Who wouldn't know they came from a white Irish kid!"

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"Well, he has a good heart," Reeves said, and asked Jensen's background.

"One of my ancient relatives was St. Sven," Jensen said without hesitation, "a Dane who conquered Dublin, met St. Patrick and converted to Catholicism. So some of our beer recipes were inspired by that conversion  that's my story and I'm sticking to it!"

"Trust me," Reeves said, "all of this will be in the poem in weird ways."

Lubovich moved to the front door of the brewery. He stood on the threshold and after hesitating a moment, as though preparing to make an announcement: "I don't think I shall hear a poem lovelier than a beer! The brew that Argus has on tap, its foamy cap and its golden base, is foamy stuff that I drink all day, until my memories fade away!"

Once the applause died, Reeves said, "I need to write that down."

"My great ancestor?" Lubovich said. "William Shakespeare. Boom!"

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Back at the car several hours later, Reeves sat in silence then said: "My mom used to say it is a poor frog who doesn't praise his own pond. That was great. Nick was great. I used to think that writing put you in a position to have a better life, but this is the better life, right now, isn't it? No matter what I write, it was just great to be out in the world."

MORE FROM CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI:

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cborrelli@chicagotribune.com







Watch the latest movie trailers.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 122 Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, anger management student, in "Dark Phoenix." The film, the latest in the "X-Men" franchise, costars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain. Read the review. (Twentieth Century Fox)
Warning: Spoilers ahead

Former North Side resident Seth Wilson could teach a class on how to win "Jeopardy."

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Wilson, a Ph.D. theater student at the University of Georgia, continued his win streak on Wednesday's episode of the quiz show. He correctly answered the "Final Jeopardy" clue about Purdue University's computer science department to win $22,800 and bring his three-day total to $83,800.

The two other contestants, Washington, D.C. writer/editor Sala Levin and retired federal employee Sharren Lee Gibbs, did not get the "Final Jeopardy" clue right.

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Wilson, who briefly lived in the Ravenswood neighborhood this year before moving to another city, is an alumnus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Vanderbilt University, but professed his allegiance to the Georgia Bulldogs on Wednesday's episode.

"Jeopardy" airs 3:30 p.m. weekdays on WLS-Ch. 7.

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 126 Woody introduces the gang to a homemade spork toy with self-esteem issues in "Toy Story 4." Read the review. (Pixar / AP)
In many ways, Patrick Phillips has a perfect perch from which to observe and document the ghosts of old racial divisions in his Georgia home that culminated in white citizens of the county hanging and beating several black men and expelling nearly all of its black citizens after the rape of two young white women in 1912.

Phillips walks a fine line in his fourth book, "Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America," as both an outsider whose family moved into Georgia's notoriously all-white Forsyth County when he was a young boy in the late 1970s and as an average suburban kid trying to understand his new environment.

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In fact, the origins of Phillips' new world as a boy  one where any mention of African-Americans was met with open rage from residents, despite few blacks having lived there in generations  was due to a nasty period when Forsyth earned its reputation as one of the most virulent of "sundown towns," municipalities where blacks were told in no uncertain terms not to stay after dusk.

But Phillips' 302-page "Root" isn't merely a piling-on to white Southern aggression, but a close examination of how tradition, indignation and the racial politics of the era easily allowed the county and its towns to become a land that time (and progress) forgot.

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"Blood at the Root," Phillips writes in the book's introduction, is his attempt to explain how Forsyth County  and Cumming, the county seat  had emerged as a hard-bitten white bastion that somehow persisted into the late 20th century, even as the civil rights movement had altered the nation's landscape.

At the root of Forsyth's 75-year-old color line  and Phillips' narrative  were two sexual assaults in September 1912. The rapes of Ellen Grice and Mae Crow were laid at the feet of black attackers, (though evidence against the accused men is called into question repeatedly by Phillips).

In these early days of the 1900s, when race riots to beat back black progress were common across the country and when the image of marauding black rapists had captured the white popular imagination (most famously in D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" in 1915), the mere mention of an assault involving a white woman and a black man often began with search parties and bloodhounds and ended with public lynchings or burnings.

In this case, the two attacks brought the "mob spirit" in rural Georgia to a boil. The assaults of Grice and Crow spurred beatings and intimidation of black citizens, at least one extrajudicial killing of a black suspect, two fast trials that resulted in the hanging of two black teenagers and finally, the expulsion of more than 1,000 black citizens from Forsyth by Ku Klux Klan night riders. Their lands, livestock and property were quickly seized by their former white neighbors.

Using old newspaper clips, census records and archival photos, Phillips retraces his home county's path to becoming a sort of fiery, white promised land that made it either celebrated or vilified by neighboring communities for decades.

"Blood at the Root" by Patrick Phillips.

Those public records help Phillips breathe life into the back stories of notable citizens, black and white, who were at the center of the confrontation, as well as events in the intervening 75 years.

"Blood at the Root" provides a fascinating glimpse into how Forsyth County, a farming region in the red clay of the northern Georgia mountains, managed to stave off racial progress despite being only about 40 miles away from Atlanta, the base of operations for civil rights warrior Martin Luther King Jr.

As Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts remade the nation and King's South, Forsyth residents, Phillips writes, were proud that their old-fashioned ways and views persevered. The good ol' boys of Forsyth could always be counted on to run any unfamiliar black faces out of town well into the 1980s.

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In January 1987, on the 75th anniversary of the 1912 expulsion, activists hoping to march through Cumming were famously met by 2,500 angry whites waving Confederate flags, holding signs that read "Keep Forsyth White" and chanting "Go home, n------!"

"Nearly everyone I knew, adults and children, referred to black people as 'n-----,'" Phillips writes, "and for the entire time I lived there in the 1970s and '80s, 'white only' was still the law of the land."

Of course, racial progress is easier to delay when the you have little diversity. Even in 2015, Forsyth County was still less than 4 percent African-American, according to U.S. Census information.

Phillips talks in great detail about some of the black residents of Forsyth County, including Grant Smith, a black clergyman who was whipped and beaten by a white mob in the aftermath of the second sexual assault. Sadly, African-American narratives are relatively scarce, as records of blacks who lived in the area were not well-maintained.

Some compelling white characters emerge, including Bill Reid, a dirt-poor corn and hog farmer and Ku Klux Klan member who became sheriff of Forsyth County. Reid would mysteriously disappear just as a mob of thousands rushed the county jail and seized and hanged a black prisoner.

Charlie Harris, the young, ambitious mayor of Cumming at the time of the expulsion, represents one of "Blood at the Root's" more moderate white figures. Harris tried to raise the town from northern Georgia backwater to a destination spot.

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When a group of wealthy Georgia businessmen and investors embarked upon a driving tour of Georgia, Harris' guarantee of safety for the group's black chauffeurs and servants quickly crumbled when the sight of blacks waiting in fancy cars spurred confrontation, including rock throwing and threats of lynching. The incident killed Harris' dream of a thriving Cumming and any chance for reconciliation among the races.

And even Reid's own deputy and political rival pushed against the county's racism, which is seen as strident and mean-spirited even in the Jim Crow South.

"Blood at the Root" does an admirable job of piecing together its history based on research and with too few surviving figures. Phillips can be forgiven if some of the narration and character development, in the absence of firsthand accounts, is gathered largely from newspaper reports of the day.

The Cumming of today, according to Phillips, shows few traces of its racist past, with black, white and brown now working and shopping in a revitalized town with its new courthouse, jailhouse and bank branches. Even the vice president at the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce was African-American, though he departed last year.

Still, in the town square, there remains a statue of Confederate Army Col. and U.S. Rep. Hiram Parks Bell, who fought hard against black progress.

As Cumming  and an entire nation  continue to deal with issues of race, social inequities, crime and safety, all deeply rooted in racial struggles of the last century, Phillips' book feels timely, unapologetically discussing the way fear, panic, ignorance and timing may have kept Forsyth County trapped in the past.

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wlee@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @MidNoirCowboy

Blood at the Root

By Patrick Phillips, W.W. Norton, 302 pages, $26.95
As his power and wealth increased, Al Capone became a Chicago celebrity. Here he enjoys a front-row seat  and a visit with the Cubs' Gabby Hartnett -- at a Comiskey Park charity game between the Cubs and the White Sox on Sept. 9, 1931. Seated to Capone's right, is his son Albert, and smoking a cigar is Roland Libonati, a state representative. Behind Capone is "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn and two bodyguards. Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak and many politicians and policemen were also at the game. (Chicago Tribune)

Al Capone  Fortune magazine fan? Add that descriptor to the many titles sported by one of America's most infamous gangsters, thanks to a letter, written from prison by Capone to his son, that is being auctioned Sept. 26.

Capone wrote the letter in 1938, or so it's believed, while imprisoned on federal income tax evasion charges at Alcatraz, the notorious federal penitentiary on the eponymous island in San Francisco Bay. The letter was written to Albert Francis Capone, nicknamed "Sonny," who was then a student at the University of Miami in Florida, according to RR Auction, the auction house hosting the sale.

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"Tell mother to order for you a monthly magazine I get here, called 'Fortune,'" he writes, sure his son will enjoy the periodical because "as to my estimation I think it is the most sensible magazine written." He even gives the address for the magazine's "advertising office" in Chicago, where his wife should send the $10  a lot of money in those days  for the annual subscription.

"This is the first time I'm aware of Capone being a subscriber to Fortune magazine," said Robert Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, a Boston-based company that has auctioned off other Capone-related documents in the past.

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It's probably news to most of us. But then, just how much do we really "know" Capone?

"He is one of the best-known Americans. People know who Al Capone is all over the world, but there's not a lot of material culture available," said John Russick, the Chicago History Museum's vice president of interpretation and education and the museum's Capone expert.

While Russick couldn't speak to the letter's authenticity, he said the letter, if genuine, "might give us a better sense of Capone's mental state and his capacity at this late stage in his prison term when, by most accounts, he was suffering from syphilitic dementia."

Click here to view a high-resolution version of the letter Al Capone wrote to his son from prison.

Livingston said the letter is carrying an auction estimate of around $50,000. Online bidding began Sept. 15 and runs through Sept. 25, followed by a live auction Sept. 26 in Cambridge, Mass., starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time. For details, go to RR Auctions web page: http://www.rrauction.com/.

"Al Capone's is the most sought-after gangster autograph I can think of," said Steve Grad, principal authenticator for PSA/DNA Authentication Services and an autograph expert who has appeared on "Pawn Stars," the History Channel television series. He called the Capone letter "a very fascinating piece" and, noted, as did Russick, that there are only "a handful" of items signed by Capone, mostly legal papers.

"It's incredibly rare to come across anything by him," Grad said.

The Capone letter's page on the RR Auction website displays a "pre-certified" designation from PSA/DNA, which is based in Newport Beach, Calif.

"Pre-certified means that, in addition to RR Auction, a third-party authenticator has seen the item and deemed it to be authentic," according to the auction house's website. "The item is eligible to receive a full third-party LOA (Letter of Authenticity) for an additional fee."

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"It's unquestionably authentic," said Livingston of the letter. "We take authenticity very, very seriously. That's why clients trust us and come back to us every year."

The Chicago Tribune has not independently verified the authenticity of the letter.

Written in pencil, the three-page letter is very much the sort of thing a father might write to a son. This is not Capone, the feared "public enemy No. 1," but Capone, the mandola player, who signs the letter, "Love & Kisses, Your Dear Dad." He urges his son not to worry about him, jokes about losing weight, but this is still a letter from Alcatraz. Besides detailing his daily routine, the gangster ends the letter with both his name, "Alphonse Capone" and "#85," his prison number.

Capone, as RR Auctions notes, "shares his enthusiasm" for the mandola, a musical instrument used in ensembles and folk groups.

"There isn't a song written that I can't play," Capone writes his son. "You know my mandola is got eight strings, and tuned exactly as the tenor banjo A-D-C-G. The only difference is the mandola is played mostly for solo work, but the tenor banjo plays cords in the orchestra, and I mean it too when I was playing in the band in here. First I learned a tenor guitar and then a tenor banjo, and now the mandola, but for solo work only."

Jonathan Eig, author of "Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster," quoted briefly from this letter in the 2010 book. He found a copy of the letter in the Alcatraz records stored at the National Archives at San Francisco, based in San Bruno, Calif. Letters like this, Eig said, shows Capone's "human side" and also a "certain simple-mindedness" which may or may not have been due to complications from syphilis.

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Capone, he said, seemed to "feel bad" about the pain he had caused his family but doesn't address Capone's "life of crime or the decisions that led to Alcatraz."

Russick said the Chicago History Museum fields questions all the time about Capone.

"Why did he come to power? Why are we still talking about him? Why is he still such a figure? Why is he the first name people think of when they think of Chicago?" he said. "When people are interested, even in a lawless despicable character like Capone, we find something about ourselves in telling the story."

wdaley@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @billdaley

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Chicago legends Al Capone, Nelson Algren live again in new books

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Newt Minow, former Chairman of the FCC, in his Chicago home in March 2011. (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune)

Newt Minow says ditch the moderator entirely and let Trump and Clinton go at it mano-a-womano.

They're a pair of candidates with a reputation for telling whoppers  so it's only natural that the buildup to the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has been dominated by discussion of moderator Lester Holt's role.

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Should Holt be a "fact-checker," or should he leave it to the candidates to debunk each other's erroneous claims, as veteran moderator Jim Lehrer controversially suggested last week?

Perhaps nobody is better experienced to voice an opinion than 90-year-old Chicago attorney and former FCC Chairman Newt Minow, who has been involved in organizing every televised presidential debate since 1960 and remains a director of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which organizes the debates.

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Minow prefers a simpler solution: Ditch the moderator entirely and let Trump and Clinton go at it mano-a-womano.

"If it were up to me and I were a dictator or could point a gun at the candidates, I would like to have them talk with each other and without a moderator," Minow said following a speech to the City Club of Chicago.

Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. >

Minow, a lifelong Democrat who voted for Republican Bruce Rauner in 2014, hinted he was not entirely satisfied with the decision to exclude Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson from the debate because they are below the 15 percent threshold in the national polls.

But "I don't know what the answer is," he said. While he said that the vast number of presidential candidates nationwide means some cutoff is necessary to hold a functional debate, he added that "our problem is, we don't know a better alternative ... but if somebody's got a better idea, we'd like to have it. We're not satisfied with what we've got."

Minow is perhaps most famous for describing TV as "a vast wasteland" in 1961 (the shipwrecked boat in "Gilligan's Island" was named the "S.S. Minnow" in his honor) but for what it's worth, he rated Lehrer the best moderator he's seen, and President John F. Kennedy the best debater.

He lamented that modern-day politicians have lost their sense of humor and peppered his remarks with several well-received gags, including one about attending a Democratic National Convention decades ago.

"One of our Democratic (delegates) got into a conversation with a woman who was a middle-aged suburban type from California. And I heard the woman say, 'Isn't it disappointing how unreliable the polls are?' and our Chicago delegate said, 'I don't know what you're talking about, lady  if there's anybody you can count upon it's the Poles!'"

kjanssen@chicagotribune.com

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President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan addressed the participants of the Military Parade of the Armenian Armed Forces dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence.

September 21, 2016, 12:09 Armenia president: 21st century weapons have changed, but we have not

STEPANAKERT, SEPTEMBER 21, ARTSAKHPRESS: Soldiers, Officers, Generals,

My sisters and brothers,

I congratulate all of us on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Armenia.

We have made our choice by casting a ballot on this very day a quarter-century ago, but we are well aware that deep in our hearts and in our collective memory we had made that choice much earlier. We chose freedom at the times of Patriarch Haik. We are faithful to the decision that we had made back at the times of a bow and arrow. Today, at the 21st century weapons have changed, but we have not, and we are determined to defend our liberty. And this parade is a testimony to that.

In the ideal world the right, of course, is the source of might. Nevertheless, the contemporary world and our environment are far from being ideal. There are still circumstances, in which the might is the source of the right. We have got both our right and might to defend our freedom. And this parade is a testimony to that.

Freedom and independence need to be defended not exclusively from external threats. The domestic social and political life is no less important and vital to us. Our citizens should be free since a free individual and a free society function way more effectively. We can and we shall continue building an efficient nation, which will defend a free citizen and a free society. Unfree people theoretically can create a lot but not happiness.

In the course of the past 25 years we have registered irrevocable achievements. Occasionally we have made mistakes, occasionally we have run into the extremes, but at the end of the day we have been moving in the right direction. We are building our happiness with free thoughts and free hands, which means we produce peacefully and creatively. And there is only one obvious prescription as to how we shall move forward: it is to work hard, harder and harder.

Indeed, we highly value our achievements since we have paid a dear price for them. We shall multiply those achievements with our hard work and defend  with the might we have accumulated.

Long live our boys that vigilantly guard borders of Armenia: they are the primary guarantors of our freedom. Glory to the immortal heroes who fought in the Artsakh liberation war, to each and single brave fellow of ours. Glory to the young lions of this April, who wiped out all the hostile planning of our adversary. Some months ago at the grave of scout-machinegunner Sasun Mkrtchyan I promised on behalf of all of us that we would continue the sacred mission of Sasun and his friends, we would always keep lit the light that emanated from the new generation of Artsakh and Armenia, that had united all of us during those April days; united as a fist, ready to crush the head of the adversary that threatened our security. And we will keep our word. And this parade is a testimony to that.

Long live the citizen of the Republic of Armenia, a soil cultivator and construction worker, a physician and teacher, a miner and entrepreneur, a civil servant and artist. Glory to the citizen of Armenia, who establishes new values.

Long live the trilateral unity of Armenia-Artsakh-Diaspora: by joining our forces we are getting much stronger than one could imagine.

Long live our brothers and sisters that represent Armenias ethnic minorities, who enjoy equality and share responsibility in the consistent pursuit of the cause for development and defense of our country.

Long live the traditional Armenian family, which in spite of all currents remains the source of warmth that gives birth to heroes and brings up generations thirsting for knowledge.

My fellow compatriots,

I again congratulate all of us and Armenians around the globe with the quarter-century anniversary of the reestablishment of the independent Armenian statehood.

Glory to the Republic of Armenia!

Glory to the Armenian Armed Forces!"
Nothing Mayor Rahm Emanuel can say at his crime policy speech Thursday night will stop the violence that's coming Chicago's way this weekend.

He'll talk about the addition of hundreds more police, about education, tougher gun sentences for repeat felons.

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And he's expected to take a great political risk in talking about the lack of proper parenting in the most violent, impoverished neighborhoods, those districts where nihilistic young men without much hope pull the triggers and leave bodies on the ground.

But words won't stop children being shot to death. Words won't raise the baby born the other day to Parasha Beard, 19, who was killed while sitting in a car Sunday on the South Side.

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Words can't console the mother of Demetrius Griffin Jr. He was 15, a freshman at Steinmetz High School, and was found in a trash can on the West Side over the weekend, his body burned beyond recognition.

Words can't heal any of that. Yet the mayor must do something, and it starts with words.

With more than 3,000 shot already this year and more than 500 killed, Chicago is being savaged by violence. Chicago in the national mind has become bloody Chicago, a town of gangs running wild, slaughtering innocents and gangbanger soldiers on the streets of his city.

President Barack Obama stays away. Hillary Clinton stays away. Rahm is left, the ultimate boss of a police force that in his own words has gone "fetal." So it's his duty to say something. He's the mayor of Chicago.

As one of his harshest critics, I've complained about him often. About his imperiousness and his silence, and his cynicism at City Hall, which pretended Chicago didn't need more cops, and which suppressed that hideous Laquan McDonald video so as not to lose African-American votes so that he would win re-election.

I've also been critical of the Democratic Party's role in helping to cynically maintain the urban underclass in poverty, with substandard education and entitlements doled out to secure a reliable party-line vote. That isn't politics. That's a crime of civil rights. It has gone on for decade after decade under machine bosses in big cities across America. And yet, without African-American votes, there is no Democratic Party.

That said, when Emanuel stands up and addresses the troubling issues Thursday night at Malcolm X College, what he doesn't deserve is immediate criticism.

What he deserves is for the city to hear him out.

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If he says what I expect him to say, then Emanuel will be showing he has the guts to take this problem on.

Emanuel, according to my sources who know his mind exceedingly well, is expected to deliver a state of the city address on crime.

Education is a part of it, as is adding more cops. Some of this is, of course, budget magic. But it is also about reorganizing the police force to push more police sergeants out from behind desks and into the neighborhoods where they're needed to supervise officers.

And he'll be taking a huge political risk when he, as my sources tell me, focuses on the lack of fathers in single-parent homes from which so many of the violent are raised. Some voices in Chicago have already warned him. Those voices have said, "Don't go there," as if skin pigment is a precursor for thinking about these problems, as if a white Jewish man raised in Wilmette has no business talking about the central issue:

Impoverished black families and cycles of dysfunction and what all that can trigger in neighborhoods where there are no jobs, no confidence in broken institutions and no hope.

He's going there. He has to go there. If he doesn't, all he'd be doing is talking, like so many of us pundits, and politicians like President Obama. So much talk, so many words.

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You can't very well say "don't go there" to people and then wonder, angrily, why they turn their backs on the problems of the cities. They've been warned not to go there. They've been told not to go there. They've been rhetorically threatened not to go there. So they don't. They disengage.

He'll focus on one of his favorite organizations, Becoming A Man, and is expected to announce major funding to provide much-needed mentoring for at-risk young people in homes without fathers. A mother can talk to a boy about becoming a man. But a father can show him. And when that father is gone, that boy still must be shown.

The risk for the mayor is twofold, one symbolic and tied to the identity politics of the left, that tired argument that he would have no business involving himself in what happens in poor black homes.

The second risk for Emanuel is also political. Becoming A Man isn't a political group per se, but some African-American officials privately say that by giving so much funding to one group, other organizations will feel left out.

"There are many organizations that can do the work," said one elected official. "But BAM will grow, with greater reach, pushing the others out, and it will become Rahm's network on the ground to help rehabilitate himself with the black community."

That may be. Policy is politics. If Emanuel has any hope of rehabilitating himself with black voters, if he has any thoughts of running for re-election in 2019  and still I have my doubts about that  squarely addressing the root causes of the violence is a risk he must take.

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Listen to "The Chicago Way"  radio free Chicago in podcast form  with John Kass and Jeff Carlin at www.chicagotribune.com/kasspodcast.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass
Calumet Township officials Tuesday filed a challenge with Lake County to invalidate Griffith's referendum seeking to secede from the township.

The complaint claimed the town did not properly state the election date for the referendum in the petition and was not property certified with the Lake County Board of Elections. The Lake County Board of Elections received the challenge Tuesday, shortly before its monthly meeting.

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The board's attorney, James Wiesner, said staff will review the challenge and make a recommendation to the group at its next meeting.

Attorney Alfredo Estrada, of Burke, Costanza and Carberry, which is representing the township's trustees, wrote in the complaint that state law requires petitioners to state the date of an election but Griffith failed to put a specific date and only gave an election deadline of Dec. 31, 2017.

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Second, the complaint stated the town clerk did not properly certify the petition to the elections board. Estrada wrote that Indiana law requires a petition for a ballot question to state the date of the election; contain the signature of petitioners; and state the residences of petitioners.

"The clerk failed to certify that the petition was in compliance," Estrada wrote.

Calumet Township Trustee Kimberly Robinson was out of the office and unavailable for comment.

Rick Ryfa, president of the Griffith Town Council, said the law is clear on that matter and the petition followed all the state requirements.

"This is baseless," Ryfa said. "If this is a sign of things to come, we'll be prepared for it."

Ryfa said the clerk-treasurer certified the petition the town received and the Town Council then set the election date, as state law requires. The state law governing the transfer of municipal territory to an adjacent township says voters can file a petition with a clerk that has been signed by voters that number 30 percent of the votes cast during the last election, and once the petition is certified, the town's legislative body determines an election date.

The town submitted 1,273 signatures to the Lake County Board of Elections in August, and tentatively set a Dec. 20 election for voters to weigh in on the measure.

Wiesner said the Board of Elections has little role in Griffith's special election or the petition itself.

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"We don't have a whole lot of say in this," Wiesner said.

Griffith's argument to split from Calumet Township is that state law mandates townships keep spending within 12 times the state average. Griffith officials have argued that Calumet Township is above that mark but that number is different depending on the interpretation of "average" in the state law.

The town reviewed an advisory letter from Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller's office to Rep. Harold Slager, R-District 15, on if the state uses an arithmetic mean or weighted mean to determine the township assistance property tax rate. Zoeller's office concluded the state should use an arithmetic mean.

Robinson met with the Town Council in August and said the township has worked to reduce its budget and work with its communities.

The budget has gone from $6.8 million in 2013 to $4.9 million in 2016, she said, and has reduced staffing from 79 employees to 45, with five more to go.

"I promise you, we're not doing anything but giving out services asked of us," Robinson said, during the August meeting.

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Ryfa said the township is wasting its residents' money on the "frivolous complaint."

"It's our money they're using to sue us," Ryfa said. "It's ridiculous."

clyons@post-trib.com

@craigalyons
West Calumet Complex housing units, in East Chicago, Indiana, Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2016. Residents of the West Calumet Complex must move out due to dangerously high lead level readings. (Antonio Perez/ Chicago Tribune) (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Gov. Mike Pence on Tuesday urged the head of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department to put together a specific plan to relocate residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex in East Chicago.

Pence, in a letter to HUD Secretary Julian Castro, requested the federal housing agency answer if relocation and moving expenses are available for all residents; if officials will work with residents who are unable to find an affordable housing option; if a plan exists for large families unable to find housing; and what the plan is to find housing solutions for families given the price difference between affordable and market rate options.

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"It is extremely important to me that these families are taken care of and that accommodations are being made by HUD and local housing authorities to ensure adequate housing can be found to accommodate all members of their households," Pence wrote in the letter. "After all, this is a situation none of them expected to be in."

Pence, also the Republican nominee for vice president, has drawn the ire of East Chicago residents for not personally visiting the city to meet with residents affected by the contaminated soil at the former U.S.S. Lead site, which includes the West Calumet Housing Complex.

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"We've been saying since the beginning, the governor should be here," said Bishop Tavis Grant, during a community meeting at the First Baptist Church in East Chicago last month.

Pence's office said his staff has been in regular contact with city officials in East Chicago about the situation around the former U.S.S. Lead site.

The Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority and State Department of Health agreed to provide the city with $200,000 to assist with its relocation and public health efforts. The state and city have partnered to offer residents free blood tests.

The city first learned of the extent of the lead contamination at the site in May, according to a timeline of events provided by East Chicago officials, and decided in June to relocate residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex.

Given the levels of contamination at the site, the city and East Chicago Housing Authority decided to demolish the complex once the residents are relocated.

HUD began releasing relocation vouchers in August and residents could start using them on Sept. 1.

James Cunningham, deputy regional administrator for HUD, told the Post-Tribune the federal agency is working closely with the local housing authority to provide funding and technical assistance for the relocation.

The tenants who have to relocate won't have to pay for most of the moving costs, Cunningham said, and things like security deposits, application fees and packing materials will be covered by HUD.

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"I know it's been a big question," Cunningham said.

Cunningham said HUD aims to have residents relocated by Dec. 1.

In the letter, Pence thanked Castro for HUD providing 12 housing counselors to assist residents and giving $1.1 million to the East Chicago Housing Authority for relocation assistance.

clyons@post-trib.com

Twitter: @craigalyons
Superintendent Rosemary Hendricks with attorney Howard Brookins Jr. during the Bellwood School District 88 board meeting in Bellwood on June 20. (James Svehla / for the Chicago Tribune)

When Superintendent Rosemary Hendricks was hired to lead a west suburban grade school district, one of her first orders of business was to bring in a security company to sweep her office for hidden electronic monitoring devices, or bugs.

Two years later, the district's administrative center is now under the guard of armed security.

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And in an unusual show of force, board meetings for Bellwood District 88 are being monitored by armed guards wearing bulletproof vests.

It's all highly unusual for the typical school board meeting, which is usually filled with mundane discussions of budget and policy issues.

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But Bellwood's meetings have recently become more contentious with some parents and senior citizens sharply questioning the district's spending on travel, perks and the hiring of a series of friends and family members by Hendricks and the board president.

Now, the hiring of a private security company, they say, is little more than an effort to intimidate opponents of Hendricks and board members. The critics point out that the district's largest school, Roosevelt Middle School, has a single security guard keeping watch over nearly 750 children.

"Who's paying for this?" said Deborah Giles, 61, a Bellwood resident. "We are."

The district  which has been steeped in legal bills, settlements and is a leader among the region's school districts for employee turnover  has become an extreme example of the effect that board dysfunction can have on vulnerable schools.

A month after the school year began, basic needs at Bellwood's schools are not being met. Parents complain that substitute teachers are still filling in until permanent hires are made. School buses are running chronically late. Even soap and toilet paper have been in short supply  and in more than one school, leaving basic hygiene needs unmet.

But the school board's president, Marilyn Thurman, said the added security is necessary to ensure "the safety of our employees." She and other board members declined to disclose details about the agreement to hire B&E Protection, or how much the company has been paid.

Bellwood police were also considered for the job, records obtained by the Tribune show, but the board decided to hire B&E Protection without putting the job out to bid because they wanted to immediately bring on private security.

As the meetings have become more contentious under Hendricks, who is in her third term as superintendent, Bellwood police have been on hand to provide security. But the dispute between Hendricks and her opponents has only escalated and this summer she filed a series of police reports, including one alleging that she had been harassed by a board member.

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Hendricks reported that a school board member was "attempting to physically attack" her following a July school board meeting. Police concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to file an assault charge, a police report shows. Not satisfied, Hendricks then petitioned a judge for a stalking no contact order against the board member, Sondra McClendon, one of her most vocal critics. But Hendricks dropped the case last week. She and McClendon both declined to comment.

Then last month Hendricks said she received three anonymous letters, one of which, she said, included a racial epithet, questioning her use of school district funds.

The following week, the school board called a special meeting and agreed to hire B&E Protection.

The company's chief executive, Michael Haymer of Hazel Crest, has a checkered past. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation suspended Haymer's license to operate as a security guard less than a month ago over failure to file and pay state income taxes, state records show.

He was initially granted the license in 2012 but was put on probation because of a prior criminal conviction. Court records show that he has been convicted of falsely impersonating a police officer, retail theft and trespass.

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There's nothing under state law that would preclude a security company from doing business as long as there is someone in charge who is in good standing, but that company would have to be operating under a licensed business, according to Terry Horstman, a spokesman for the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.

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Haymer disputes that his business is out of compliance. "I provided proof to District 88," he said. "If anyone needs it from the state, I'm happy to do that too."

However, there is no record of the requisite business license for B&E Protection on file.

The mere presence of the guards left some at Monday's board meeting unsettled.

"Did you all do a background check on them?" said Arnetta Watkins, another longtime Bellwood resident. "This is totally unacceptable."

acaputo@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @angelatcr
The death of a 4-year-old boy found dead after what authorities say was a small arson fire in an abandoned building in Englewood last month has been ruled a homicide, likely from neglect, authorities said Wednesday.

Manuel Aguilar, whose frail body was found in an abandoned building in the 1400 block of West Marquette Road about 9:30 p.m. Aug. 2, died from unspecified means but as "a result of probable neglect," a spokeswoman for the Cook County medical examiner's office said in an email Wednesday. His death was ruled a homicide.

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Aguilar's mother, Alyssa Garcia, 27, her friend Christian Camarena, 19, and a 17-year-old boy all have been charged in connection with the concealment of the boy's death and the arson. Manuel had lived with his mother and other family members in the 6400 block of South Wolcott Avenue. Garcia and Camarena are being held in Cook County Jail.

Prosecutors last month said Manuel had been kept in a back room with the family's bicycles and the putrid smell of his own urine, and his screams of "Let me out" were either ignored or met with a beating.

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When Manuel died, his body was placed in a playroom, then put inside the trunk of a car, and finally, days later, discarded in the basement of an abandoned building about a mile from his family's home, where it was wrapped in a blanket and set on fire Aug. 2.

Investigators initially thought the body was that of a 9-month-old infant.

The state Department of Children and Family Services had prior contact with Garcia, who recently gave birth to premature twins. In 2012, she was sentenced to 18 months supervision for endangering the life of a child.

Chicago police said they responded to a call of arson at an abandoned building in Englewood. A witness at the scene said three people had gone into the building with a container of lighter fluid. Police said they took Garcia and the two teens into custody after they saw them running away from the back of the abandoned building.

DCFS had previously opened two separate investigations into Garcia, at one point taking protective custody of her four children.

Police have said other charges could be filed after the Cook County medical examiner's office determined how the boy died. Information on whether police have reclassified their investigation as a homicide following the medical examiner's ruling was not immediately available Wednesday.
After years of insisting Chicago police could make do without adding officers, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration acknowledged Wednesday that the department needs hundreds more to combat the violence plaguing the city, announcing a plan to hire nearly 1,000 beat officers, detectives and supervisors over the next two years.

Unlike previous promises to add officers to patrol by reassigning existing members of the department, Emanuel's announcement includes a complicated formula that sets a goal of reaching a net gain of 970 officers by the end of 2018. It's a tall order, given that for many years the city has not even hired enough officers to replace those who retire or leave.

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In addition, how the department will pay for new officers  which will cost about $135 million annually in its early years  remained unclear. Emanuel pledged not to raise taxes to pay for police hiring.

The announcement comes as the mayor and his police department have been under intense pressure to reverse the rising tide of violence ravaging the city's most vulnerable neighborhoods  a relentless drumbeat of grim news that has shaped a perception of the city nationally as a chaotic and dangerous place.

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The hiring plan includes more than 500 new police officers, and hundreds more to beef up the ranks of detectives and supervisors. Police officials said they plan to then hire new officers to replace those who are promoted. The new hiring, they insisted, would be separate from the need to hire new officers to replace those who retire or leave the department for other reasons.

The hiring will begin in January, when the department starts enrolling an additional 100 recruits a month to the Police Academy, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said.

"I owe you a department stronger in numbers, equipped for the 21st century, richer in skills and best practices to manage and challenge peacefully and honorably," Johnson, flanked by his top brass, said at a news conference filled with rank-and-file officers.

While couching the announcement in terms such as "hiring goals," which critics said raised questions about the department's ability to actually hire the new officers, Johnson said he could not address the city's rampant violence by shifting officers from safer areas to more dangerous places.

"We can't rob Peter to pay Paul when it comes to the safety of our city," Johnson said. The plans announced Wednesday "will make us a bigger department, a better department and a more effective department."

Emanuel's office and the Police Department did not reveal the cost of the additional officers or how the hires would be funded. Aldermen who were briefed said the mayor's aides did not tell them either. Ald. Ariel Reboyras, 30th, chairman of the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said the estimate was $135 million a year once fully implemented in 2018.

The cost of a new officer is $138,000 in the first year, which includes salary, supervision and other benefits, city officials have said. So, $135 million would pay for roughly 978 officers. By the fifth year in the department, the cost of each officer including benefits rises to $180,000, with the same 978 officers then costing the city $176 million per year.

"There was no explanation provided to us on how it's going to be paid for," Ald. James Cappleman, 46th, said. "Alex Holt, the budget director, wanted to get back to us on that."

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Holt later released a statement.

"The budget office has been working to ensure that the 2017 budget includes these critical investments," she said in the statement. "While the 2017 budget is not yet final, we continue to identify all possible savings, reforms and sustainable funding to invest in the police department, but we won't have an increase in property tax, sales tax or gas tax."

Asked how the city would pay for the extra officers, Johnson also deflected the question.

"Listen, I'm superintendent of police. I'm a crime fighter, that's what I do," Johnson said to laughs from his fellow officers. "I can tell you this: The mayor and I have had several conversations. He has assured me the resources he's committed to giving us will be there."

Emanuel played down concerns about funding the hires, and reiterated his promise not to raise taxes to fund the plan.

"I'm determined that this is not a budget question. We won't raise property taxes. We won't raise taxes to pay for it," the mayor said Wednesday at an unrelated event. "We'll have the resources to meet our obligation."

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The prospect of hiring more officers has been off the table in previous years because of the city's budget woes  a stance that was backed up by confident assurances from top police officials that the department could manage well without them.

In Emanuel's first year in office, his new superintendent, Garry McCarthy, said the department did not need more officers even though leaders might want more officers if money wasn't a concern.

When asked to address the about-face on police staffing after years of relying on overtime, Emanuel said that in previous years of his administration violence rates had been low historically for Chicago. In fact, violence rates had been uneven in the city since Emanuel took over. The homicide rate spiked in 2012 and again in 2015.

This year, however, is a different story, with the murder rate on pace to match figures not seen since the crack cocaine wars that bloodied the streets in the late 1980s and 1990s. The city has already surpassed 3,000 shooting victims for the year and will most likely exceed 600 homicides for the first time in 13 years.

That surge has been accompanied by a decline in the number of murder cases that are solved  known as the clearance rate  below a level that already trailed the national average. Adding to the pressure, the U.S. Department of Justice continues to investigate the department's oversight in the wake of a string of shootings by cops.

On Wednesday, even the mayor acknowledged that circumstances had changed.

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"What happened this year is new," Emanuel said. "So we're meeting it with a new response, which is more police, more technology, greater investment in our mentoring, our summer jobs and our after-school."

One crime expert said that residents had reason to be encouraged. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said the new police positions were a "hopeful sign" for a city such as Chicago experiencing spikes in violence. But he said where the officers are deployed will be more important for the Police Department in how it fights the violence.

Fox said it will take time for newly hired officers to gain experience on the street. He also noted that there's still a chance the violent crime statistics can go down for reasons that have nothing to do with beefed-up manpower.

But inaction, he said, would court trouble. "If you do nothing," he said, "there's always a tendency for it to go up."

The mayor's office chose to roll out the news over multiple days leading up to a major speech Emanuel will deliver Thursday on his efforts to address the violence afflicting the city's poorest and most segregated neighborhoods.

In addition to beefing up the ranks of the police, the mayor is expected to promise more resources for mentoring and educational opportunities for young people most threatened by violence.

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"Every child will have a mentor in our 20 worst violent-crime areas and neighborhoods of the city," Emanuel said. "Because we're going to make sure not another generation falls to the grips of gangs."

Johnson said that in addition to the new patrol officers, the department would increase its number of detectives by 200, which would bring the total to 1,063  still about 100 fewer than in 2009. The plan calls for hiring 112 new sergeants, 50 new lieutenants and 92 new field-training officers. Hiring more supervisors is likely to be among the demands that will eventually be made by the Justice Department in its ongoing investigation of Chicago police, which was prompted by the Laquan McDonald officer-involved shooting scandal.

Replacing officers who retire or quit will be one of the challenges Johnson faces in implementing the plan. The department already lags behind in filling those vacancies, and union leaders and officers say that accumulation of bad press and low morale has more officers considering retiring early, seeking suburban police jobs or even a career change. Although budgeted for 12,500 officers, the current staff level is at 12,100, spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.

The added officers would bring the total number officers budgeted to 13,535, Johnson said. If Johnson keeps his pledge to erase the deficit in attrition replacement, the plan would actually add 1,435 officers to the ranks.

But it is attrition that poses one of the biggest challenges. In a typical year, 200 to 300 officers leave the department, Guglielmi said. He was unable to say how many officers had formally given notice of their plans to retire in the coming year, but union officials have said the figure is higher than normal. Johnson was careful to tailor some of his remarks to about 200 officers in the room Wednesday at the news conference.

"This is not an easy time to be a police officer," Johnson said. "The pressure to perform is greater than ever before. The cameras and phone videos means we are always constantly in the spotlight."

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The vacancies have been especially troubling to the detective division. The department is budgeted to have 992 detectives, but department staffing figures released by the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 recently showed the detective staffing at 862. In 2009, that figure stood at more than 1,150.

The impact of such losses shows up on how often killers are brought to justice.

The department's 2016 homicide clearance rate is 30 percent, far lower than the rate in other cities. When homicides from other years cleared this year are removed from the equation, the clearance rate for 2016 homicides drops to 21 percent.

"It's time to rebuild the detective division," Johnson said.

While the department will focus on hiring more officers, Johnson said he will look into jobs that can be done by civilians instead of sworn members.

Chicago had about 4.4 officers per 1,000 residents, more than any of the other four largest American cities, according to FBI statistics for 2014, the most recent year available. New York had 4.1, Los Angeles 2.5, Houston 2.4 and Philadelphia 4.1.

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But each of those four cities had more civilian employees per capita than Chicago, the FBI statistics show. New York's civilian ranks were much higher, with 1.8 civilian employees in its police department for every 1,000 residents  more than four times as many than Chicago.

Emanuel last year took steps to address that disparity by hiring 319 new civilian Police Department employees and shifting an equal number of cops to street duty. But the city still lags the other four large cities in the number of civilian employees.

The FBI statistics also show that the number of cops in Chicago declined by more than 400  to fewer than 12,100  between 2010 and 2011, the year Emanuel took office. Between then and 2014, the numbers of sworn personnel remained about 12,000.

The staff level of about 12,100 is about 400 fewer than the numbers reported to the FBI in 2010, former Mayor Richard M. Daley's last full year in office.

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As crime has spiked over the past few years, critics such as the police union and some aldermen have said the evidence clearly indicated the department's use of overtime to cover the city was not working and was stretching the rank and file to the breaking point. This year critics had become more vocal in urging Emanuel to face facts and find the money to hire more officers.

"Unfortunately, it took five years to come to the realization that we didn't have a force that was able to do the work that they need to do in our communities," said Ald. John Arena, 45th. "It's a good plan, if we follow through."

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Chicago Tribune's David Heinzmann, Hal Dardick and Dan Hinkel contributed.

bruthhart@chicagotribune.com

jbyrne@chicagotribune.com

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @billruthhart, @_johnbyrne, @jeremygorner
Andrew Wells, 54, was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography Sept. 19, 2016. (McHenry County sheriff's office)

The longtime city clerk of Harvard was arrested at City Hall on Monday and charged with possession of child pornography, the McHenry County sheriff's office announced Tuesday.

Andrew Wells, 54, was taken into custody after a three-month investigation that began after authorities received a tip from a McHenry County resident, according to a new release from the sheriff's department.

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Authorities said they found images containing child pornography on an electronic device that belonged to Wells. He was charged with three felony counts of possession of child pornography, police said.

Wells' bond was set at $40,000, and he was released from jail Tuesday afternoon after posting the required 10 percent, according to police and jail records.

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Authorities said the investigation, which is being aided by the city of Harvard, is ongoing.

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Wells has served several terms as elected clerk in the rural community in the northwest corner of the county. His current term is due to end next year.

Harvard 2nd Ward Ald. Michael Kelly said Tuesday that he and other city officials were informed of the investigation into Wells and that the city is cooperating in the investigation. Kelly said that, as far as he knew, Wells remained in office as clerk as of Tuesday.

Elected officials in Illinois cannot be forced to give up their seats unless they are convicted of a felony.

Coincidentally, Monday was the first day that potential candidates in next year's local elections could pick up nominating petitions, a responsibility handled by the clerk. Kelly said the clerk's office was continuing to function with no disruption in services.

Though stressing that Wells is innocent until proved guilty, Kelly said of the allegations that "anything of this magnitude is certainly surprising.

"Certainly it saddens me it's going to be a black eye on our city government," Kelly said.

Amanda Marrazzo is a freelance reporter.
Chicago Cubs' Ernie Banks, right, points his bat toward his favorite Wrigley Field home run target while the Braves' Henry Aaron takes in all the information he can get with the hope that he can break their tie for a major league home run lead on Sept. 21, 1957. At the time, both had 42. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

Lawyers for the widow of Ernie Banks abruptly withdrew Wednesday from the dispute over the estate of the late Cubs great, leaving a proposed settlement in limbo and signifying the case could go to trial.

For nearly two years, Elizabeth Banks has been contesting a will signed by Banks three months before his death in January 2015 that left his entire inheritance to Regina Rice, a longtime friend who took care of his financial affairs, and named her as executor of the estate.

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Banks, who was in the midst of a protracted divorce from the 83-year-old Cubs slugger at the time of his death, alleged in a petition in Cook County probate court that Rice "isolated and controlled" him in the final months of his life, including prompting Banks to change telephone numbers to avoid calls from family.

Recently, both sides had reported to Cook County Judge James Riley that they were close to a settlement.

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But at a status hearing Wednesday, attorney Thomas Jefson asked that his firm, Robbins Salomon and Patt, be allowed to withdraw from the case. The judge approved the move reluctantly, giving Elizabeth Banks the three weeks allowed under the law to find a new attorney.

"I don't know where we are going to go at this juncture," Riley said. "We are paralyzed here for 21 days."

Jefson did not state the reason for the withdrawal in court. In his two-page motion to withdraw, Jefson wrote that "differences have arisen between (the firm) and Elizabeth that make it impossible" for them to continue to represent her.

Jefson would not comment after the brief hearing, except to say, "We wish her the best."

Elizabeth Banks, who lives in California and was not in court Wednesday, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Attorney Linda Chatman, who represents Rice, told the Tribune by telephone that Banks had apparently rejected last-minute changes to the proposed settlement made by her own attorneys, making a final solution "pretty much a lost cause."

An added wrinkle to the case is that Riley is retiring from the bench in November. Since no settlement is likely to be reached by that time, a new judge will have to get up to speed on the case in addition to the new lawyers representing Banks.

Chatman said the dispute over the validity of the will would likely go to trial if no settlement can be reached.

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Rice has claimed in court filings that Ernie Banks entrusted her to carry out his wishes and wanted to make sure his estranged wife didn't share in his estate. Banks went so far as to send his wife a stern "cease and desist" letter in 2013 demanding that she stop claiming any right to his personal or business dealings, court records show.

In her petition, Elizabeth Banks alleged her husband had been diagnosed with moderate to severe dementia days before Rice arranged for him to sign a will at a suburban attorney's office that cut his family out of his estate and left everything to her.

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While the court battle has played out, Rice has been managing the affairs of the estate. Earlier this year, she placed 12 of Ernie Banks' possessions worth an estimated $250,000 in an auction, including his1977 Hall of Fame ring and his 1958 Babe Ruth Sultan of Swat Award, both of which have yet to sell.

Banks' "MR CUB" license plate and a photograph of him with Barack and Michelle Obama signed by the president and first lady each sold Aug. 28, according to the auction site's online records. The winning bidder shelled out just over $3,900 for the license plate and $3,346 for the photograph.

Banks was buried a week after his death at Graceland Cemetery a few blocks north of Wrigley Field. Although a previous will had directed that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered over Wrigley on a day the wind was "blowing out," the slugger's final will certified in court had no such provision.

Earlier this month, as Banks' beloved Cubs prepare for the postseason, a gray granite headstone in the shape of a diamond was installed at Banks' grave. Chatman said the marker is temporary  in the spring, private donors plan to erect a more elaborate stone honoring "Mr. Cub."

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"It's going to be very beautiful," she said.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @jmetr22b
A Cook County judge will be allowed to wage a write-in campaign against a former law clerk accused of impersonating a judge.

The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners had determined Judge Maryam Ahmad could not run in the 1st Judicial Subcircuit against Rhonda Crawford because she had lost in a primary this year for a seat in the subcircuit that includes the city's South Side and some south suburbs.

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But Cook County Judge Al Paul ruled Wednesday that Ahmad's primary loss did not disqualify her from running against Crawford.

The race for the seat on the bench has been controversial since August, when Crawford allegedly put on a judge's robe and heard at least three traffic cases in the Markham courtroom of Judge Valarie Turner. The cases had to be reheard; that was done earlier this month. Crawford, a law clerk and staff attorney for Chief Judge Timothy Evans, was then fired. Turner was reassigned to administrative duties that did not include hearing cases.

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Evans also apparently notified the state agencies that oversee lawyers and judges so they could review Crawford's and Turner's conduct.

Ahmad, who is based in the Maywood courthouse, sought to challenge Crawford, who won the primary for the vacancy created by another judge. But after she announced her long-shot campaign, the board ruled that she was ineligible. Ahmad challenged that in Cook County Circuit Court, saying that because she had not run for that vacancy, she still should be allowed to conduct a write-in campaign.

James Allen, a spokesman for the Board of Election Commissioners, said that board had prepared to accommodate Ahmad's candidacy in case the judge ruled in her favor. He said the board "carved out a space" on the election ballot for voters to write in a name in the Crawford race. He said the board would not appeal Judge Paul's ruling.

Ahmad said she was pleased with the ruling. Crawford could not be reached for comment.
The friendship ties between the Armenian and Abkhazian peoples will enable to surmount any difficulty, said Irakli Tuzhba, Modern Abkhazia NGO President, speaking to NEWS.am.

September 21, 2016, 13:02 Abkhaz analyst on Karabakh visit: Friendly relations will enable to overcome any difficulty

STEPANAKERT, SEPTEMBER 21, ARTSAKHPRESS: Tuzhba noted this reflecting on an Abkhaz high-level delegations recent visit to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh).

On September 2, the delegation participated in the events devoted to the NKR Independence Day anniversary. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan also attended the respective banquet, during which the visiting senior officials of Abkhazia had an informal conversation with him.

This circumstance has caused a whirlwind of negative emotions in the souls of numerous senior Georgian politicians, noted Tuzhba. Such a reaction by Tbilisi was unexpected for the representatives of Armenia. But Abkhazia is long accustomed to such demarches by the Georgian authorities.

[But] the processes of international cooperation are so large and multilateral that even the bravest attempts to hinder them are doomed to failure."
While some people fantasize about what they'd do if they ever won the lottery, Fidencio Sanchez hasn't given it much thought.

The 89-year-old paleta vendor from Little Village accepted a check Wednesday for $384,290 as beneficiary of the largest GoFundMe campaign in Illinois. But he has no plans to buy expensive toys or invest in stock. He's not even sure he'll buy a house.

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"I feel so happy and so lucky for all of this support. I've had to work so hard, so I'm so thankful to everyone for this," Sanchez said during a news conference. "Honestly, I haven't thought about how I'm going to spend the money. There's a lot to consider."

About 17,500 people from more than 60 countries offered anywhere from $5 to $2,000 in donations to Sanchez in an online fundraising campaign created by two strangers, Joel Cervantes and Jose Loera.

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Cervantes said he bought paletas from Sanchez earlier this month and photographed him apparently struggling to push a cart of Mexican ice pops around the Little Village neighborhood. He posted the image to Facebook and was soon contacted by Loera who helped him start a GoFundMe campaign to help Sanchez retire from selling paletas  a job he'd done for more than 23 years.

"(Sanchez) looked so tired. He reminded me of my abuelito and I was like, wait a minute, what are you doing pushing that paleta cart? Everybody was able to relate and say, 'Oh, no, we can't let this happen,'" Loera said.

Sanchez said he will no longer work as a paleta vendor for Paleteria y Neveria Poncho, a company he's worked with for more than 10 years.

"My body won't let me anymore. I did it out of necessity, but now I don't have to struggle anymore," he said. "I'm so happy and grateful to be here and grateful for the people who have helped me and to the community whose big hearts have helped me and my wife in our old age."

Gustavo Pedraza, co-owner of Paletas Poncho  and until recently, Sanchez's boss  said his doors are always open to Sanchez.

"He's been with us since I was a little kid. He's very humble, innocent, but a very hard worker," Pedraza said. "It's just amazing what happened here in Little Village because it became a national and international thing. We're gonna miss him, but we're always going to be in touch."

The initial goal of the campaign, which began Sept. 9, was to raise $3,000. Loera said donations surpassed that mark within the first few days. The 11-day campaign went on to become the largest GoFundMe campaign in Illinois and is also among the top 25 in the U.S., Bobby Whithorne, a spokesman for GoFundMe, told the Tribune last week.

"We've already seen a ripple effect of other people starting GoFundMe campaigns," he said. "It just shows that people are willing to support causes and help people. They just need an outlet, they need a platform. I love the fact that more people are starting to step up and do it."

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GoFundMe disburses the entire sum minus processing and service fees, as the site automatically takes 5 percent from each donation as a service fee, and WePay, which processes the transactions, deducts 2.9 percent plus 30 cents from each donation as a processing fee for payments.

It's common to set up a trust when a large amount of money has been raised, though funds are often deposited directly into a bank account, Whithorne said. Donations won't get released until a bank account or trust is established.

Sanchez and his wife, Eladia Sanchez, have hired an attorney to help them navigate the process of receiving the funds and are in the process of meeting with financial advisers and tax experts.

"I'm going to make sure they have all the information they need and meet with all the proper professionals and vet those professionals to make sure there isn't someone who slips through the cracks to take advantage of them or just make an easy commission," said Salvador J. Lopez, the couple's pro bono attorney.

Chicago Tribune's Marwa Eltagouri, Leonor Vivanco and Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas contributed.

nmoreno@chicagotribune.com

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Octavio Munoz, 40, a priest who was removed from ministry in July, was charged Sept. 21, 2016, with possession of child pornography. (Chicago Police Department)

Charges have been filed against a Chicago priest who was removed from the ministry last year after child pornography was allegedly found on his computer.

Octavio Munoz, 40, of the 4000 block of South Sacramento Avenue, was arrested Sept. 20 in Maryland and charged with possession of child pornography, according to police.

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He was extradited to Chicago for a bond hearing Wednesday afternoon.

Munoz was removed as pastor of St. Pancratius Church on the Southwest Side in July 2015 after the material was found on a computer in his possession, officials said.

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In an earlier statement released by the Chicago Archdiocese, officials said Munoz was reported to civil authorities and Archbishop Blase Cupich had withdrawn Munoz's authority to minister.
Octavio Munoz, 40, a priest who was removed from ministry in July, was charged Sept. 21, 2016, with possession of child pornography. (Chicago Police Department)

A Catholic priest responsible for recruiting young men to the priesthood appeared in court Wednesday on child pornography charges after police arrested him at a Maryland treatment center where the Chicago Archdiocese had sent him without notifying authorities, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors also disclosed that the archdiocese initially hired a private investigator after an employee reported seeing child pornography on the laptop of the Rev. Octavio Munoz, 40, last year. The archdiocese conducted its own investigation for more than a week before contacting Chicago police. The laptop was never found, they said.

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The archdiocese then sent Munoz to Maryland for counseling as the police investigation heated up, prosecutors said, prompting a sharp question from Judge Maria Kuriakos Ciesil.

"Isn't there counseling in the state of Illinois that he could've been afforded?" she asked.

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She ordered Munoz to turn over all his passports and remain in Illinois if he can post his $50,000 bail on the single count of possession of child pornography. She also banned him from having any contact with minors or using the internet.

The archdiocese notified police that Munoz was in Maryland, spokeswoman Colleen Tunney-Ryan said, though it was not immediately clear if police were told before an arrest warrant was issued Aug. 30.

Munoz had been rector of the archdiocese's Casa Jesus, a renowned training program for Latin American men who want to become priests. In that role, he traveled abroad to recruit young men to study in the United States, according to Assistant State's attorney Guy Lisuzzo.

In July 2015, Munoz was to vacate his Casa Jesus apartment before starting as pastor at St. Pancratius Parish in the Southwest Side neighborhood of Brighton Park, Lisuzzo said. An archdiocese employee showing the new rector around the Casa Jesus apartment on July 7 found boxes of Munoz' belongings still there, along with an open laptop on a TV tray playing a video of a young boy engaged in a sex act, he said.

Munoz was not there at the time, and both the employee and rector left the apartment, Lisuzzo said. The employee assumed the rector would report what they had seen, but learned about a week later after the apartment had been cleaned out that no report had been made, he said.

The then-rector told the archdiocese that "he did not see anything inappropriate on that computer," spokeswoman Tunney-Ryan said.

The worker contacted the archdiocese, which hired a private investigator on July 17 but did not immediately call police, Lisuzzo said. The investigator found an empty bag for a Sony laptop in a storage area used by Munoz, who admitted he owned the computer but said he no longer had it.

He then turned over other "electronic device(s)" that were examined by a private company, which did not find the video seen by the archdiocese worker but did discover emails with "stories of child erotica," Lisuzzo said. The analysis also revealed that Munoz had recently used additional devices, he said.

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From July 20 to July 28, private investigators went to Munoz's home and collected more "electronic devices," he said, but never found the black Sony laptop. Their investigation uncovered a video that appeared to show two boys having sex, he said.

The investigators called Chicago police and Munoz was removed from the ministry on July 28.

"We never saw the material the staff member reported,' Tunney-Ryan said. "In order to obtain and preserve the material" the archdiocese "immediately" hired private investigators.

Once the investigators found the suspect child pornography on July 27 and "in accordance with archdiocesan policy we immediately reported this information to civil authorities," she said.

Authorities executed search warrants for Munoz's home and previous apartment, as well as on all his electronic devices, Lisuzzo said, finding "hundreds of DVDs (and) VHS tapes that appear to depict minors" engaged in sex acts.

Prosecutors described two movies in particular that portrayed multiple sex acts involving children. They also found emailed stories of sex with children and "undergarments of a size intended for minors," Lisuzzo said.

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Some of the "hundreds of pieces of evidence" are still being investigated, Lisuzzo said.

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During the police investigation, Munoz "was moved by the archdiocese to a location for... (church) evaluation and business," Lisuzzo said. "The Chicago Police Department was not notified of that location."

Munoz's attorney, Raymond Wigell, said his client was sent to Saint Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md., and was always willing to surrender to police. He said an Aug. 30 arrest warrant was unnecessary.

Wigell said he did not know what type of counseling program Munoz was in. On its website, the institute says its clergy treatments "address anxieties, addictions, depression, substance abuse, boundary issues, interpersonal problems, sexual issues and other challenges."

Wigell said he did not know what devices were seized or whether they were controlled only by Munoz.

"They never tied that together so we'll have to wait and see," he said. "What I heard was speculation and innuendo, but not proof."

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sschmadeke@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @SteveSchmadeke
Students at one of two buildings at a Brighton Park elementary school were evacuated Wednesday morning as a precaution after a hole from a firework was found on the roof, police said.

Students at the school in the 4600 block of South Kedzie Avenue were sent to the other building after emergency crews were called about 9:45 a.m., said Officer Bari Lemmon, a police spokeswoman. No one was injured in the incident.

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By about 11:20 a.m., officials had determined the damage had been done by a firework, and police were giving the all-clear.

It was not known if the firework had gone off Wednesday morning or Tuesday night.

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Columbia Explorers Academy has its main building at 4520 S. Kedzie, but also has another building at 4600 S. Kedzie.

"Classes at the Columbia Explorers annex building were relocated to the school's main building today after damage to the roof of the annex was discovered," a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Education said in a statement.

The school's 7th and 8th grade students use the classrooms in the annex building where the damage took place.

For a time, police closed streets in the area as a precaution, Lemmon said.
More than 150 people attended a vigil Sept. 20, 2016, for Demetrius Griffin Jr., a 15-year-old Steinmetz student whose body was found burned beyond recognition in the trash in a West Side alley over the weekend. (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune) (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)

Polly Sykes doesn't know what happened to her 15-year-old son. All she knows is that his body was found burned beyond recognition in the trash in a West Side alley over the weekend.

After Demetrius Griffin Jr. missed his curfew Friday night, and after Sykes learned that police had discovered a burned body about 1:30 a.m. Saturday in the 5500 block of West Cortez Street, Sykes was struck with the inexplicable certainty that mothers sometimes have about their children  a sinking feeling that the body was Demetrius'.

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She was right.

So when Sykes finally spoke during a vigil for her son Tuesday night, she demanded answers: Why was Demetrius, a good kid who had just started ninth grade at Steinmetz High School, and who walked all his neighbors' dogs, so brutally killed?

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 9 Ashley Robinson, center, attends a vigil on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 for Demetrius Griffin, Jr., 15, whose body was found Saturday in the 5500 block of West Cortez Street in the South Austin neighborhood. (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune)

"Community, I need your help!" she cried, her voice hoarse from sobbing. A relative wrapped her arms around Sykes' shoulders to keep her from collapsing. "They killed my baby out here, in this alley. You know something.

"Please come forward," she cried, and began to choke. "They took my life."

More than 150 people attended the vigil in the South Austin neighborhood, on the same block Demetrius' body had been found. The short service was marked by sobs and despair. Relatives shrieked in agony; their high-pitched wails could be heard a block away. Demetrius' aunt Rochelle Sykes raised her hands to the sky and cried out again and again, "Fix it! Fix it, Lord Jesus. Oh, Jesus, oh, Lord. Fix it."

South Austin residents who never met Demetrius shook with grief, their cheeks matted with tears.

The Cook County medical examiner's office has yet to determine the cause and manner of Demetrius' death. No one was reported to be in custody, but police said whoever set the fire may have suffered burns.

Friends and family hold a vigil for Demetrius Griffin Jr., a 15-year-old freshman at Steinmetz High School whose body was found burned beyond recognition in a West Side alley over the weekend. Sept. 20, 2016 (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune) (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)

At the vigil, community activist Dawn Valenti turned toward reporters' cameras as if to address Demetrius' killer directly, and told that person to "look at how you've hurt this family."

"There's nothing that a 15-year-old can do to anybody for him to deserve what you guys did to him," she said. "Again, another senseless crime in the city of Chicago."

After the vigil, friends and neighbors signed large photographs of Demetrius, which were taped to a nearby tree. A friend held up a big yellow poster that read "Brunson Elementary Class of 2016." Demetrius' fellow eighth-grade graduates gathered to write messages of love in colored markers.

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One neighbor, Ashley Robinson, 27, became emotional during the vigil, even though she'd never known Demetrius.

"I'm hurt and I'm terrified for my own child. When I'm here, I'm picturing my own baby. I can't imagine him being taken from me," she said, referring to her 4-year-old son. "Lord, God, I don't know what this neighborhood has come to."

A police detective looks inside a recycling bin in an alley behind the 5500 block of West Cortez Street early on Sept. 17, 2016, in Chicago. A person was found dead and burned next to trash bins in the alley. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Before leaving, Sykes and her family parted from the rest of the crowd, who began to march down the block shouting, "What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now."

The family gathered at the corner of Cortez and Central Avenue to release dozens of red and white balloons into the sky.

As she watched them drift away, Sykes turned to face her family and friends and offered a final message:

"The devil is out here, and he's busy."

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meltagouri@chicagotribune.com
Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to hire 500 additional police officers, promote hundreds of cops to sergeant and detective, and spend more on programs that help youth growing up in some of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods, according to several sources familiar with the proposal.

Details of the mayor's blueprint began to emerge Tuesday night in advance of Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson's expected announcement Wednesday of the hiring portion of the plan.

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For more than two weeks, one of the questions about Emanuel's policing push has been whether he will hire to keep up with officer retirements and departures or increase the size of the force. Sources said the 500 officers would be above the level of attrition.

On top of the hires, Johnson is expected to announce an effort to beef up the number of sergeants and detectives in the department by promoting officers from within, sources said. The goal, they said, then would be to replace those promoted officers with new hires.

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Emanuel's overall plan also would include more money for recruiting and training new officers, a source with knowledge of the plan said. And when Emanuel gives what he's called a "major address" on policing Thursday evening, he is expected to include more money for community efforts aimed at creating more mentorship and education opportunities for disadvantaged youth, a source said.

For Emanuel, the move marks a change in course in how he's managed the policing of Chicago. Emanuel has insisted for years that the current number of officers has been enough to fight crime in the city, and the mayor instead has relied on upward of $100 million a year in overtime to provide enough officers in the city's most crime-ridden neighborhoods during the typically more violent summer months.

The mayor's police hiring comes as Chicago has endured a major uptick in shootings and slayings. More than 3,000 people already have been shot in the city this year, a number that already has surpassed the 2,980 people shot last year. Similarly, Chicago topped 500 homicides early this month after tallying 481 in all of 2015, according to Tribune data.

While it was unclear Tuesday night exactly how much Emanuel's policing plan would cost or how he would pay for it, it's unlikely the full bill would come due in the first year or two. That's because CPD already is struggling to bring in enough new officers through the academy to keep up with attrition.

Earlier this month, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the department is about 468 cops short of full staffing  which is 12,600 sworn officers. Guglielmi said an additional 100 officers recently graduated from the academy and an average of 200 to 300 officers retire each year.

The cost of a new police officer is $138,000 in the first year, which includes salary, supervision and other benefits, city budget spokeswoman Molly Poppe said. After five years on the force, the cost of that officer rises to $180,000.

Given those numbers, hiring 500 additional officers would cost $69 million for their first year of employment and rise to $90 million by the fifth year. Promoting officers to higher posts also would cost more, as would hiring their replacements and providing additional money for the police academy and training.

Asked about possible funding sources for more officers, Poppe reiterated that Emanuel has said the 2017 city budget would not include any property, sales or gas taxes to pay for officers. That, however, does not rule out other possible taxes and fee increases.

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Emanuel first raised the prospect of hiring more officers on Sept. 2, though he has remained vague on the details and whether the number of hired officers would exceed retirements and attrition.

The mayor recently said he has been meeting for weeks with Johnson about hiring officers. But each time he addressed the issue, Emanuel also was quick to seize on the need for stronger gun laws and more investment in struggling neighborhoods as other keys to addressing the city's surging crime.

"It's a complex problem with multidimensional facets to it," Emanuel said this month when noting he'd unveil a policing plan. "It's not just about more police, but it will include that. But it's also about more resources for our children, more resources for our neighborhoods and stiffer laws that reflect the values of our city."

Emanuel's decision to hire more officers also came after some members of the City Council's Black Caucus discussed adding funding for more cops.

"Specifically the number I'm throwing out is about 500," Ald. Howard Brookins, 21st, said nearly three weeks ago. "And would there be a stomach to raise taxes to do that."

After a gut check, Emanuel appears to have found one.

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Chicago Tribune's Jeremy Gorner contributed.

bruthhart@chicagotribune.com

hdardick@chicagotribune.com
Police fire tear gas into the crowd of protesters on Old Concord Road late Tuesday night, Sept. 20, 2016, in Charlotte, N.C. (Ely Portillo / AP)

CHARLOTTE, N.C.  Authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters, officers were injured and a highway was shut down during protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, over the fatal shooting of a black man by police who said he was armed and posed a threat.

The protests broke out Tuesday after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by a black officer at an apartment complex on the city's northeast side. They continued into early Wednesday morning, when TV footage showed dozens of protesters on Interstate 85 apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire on the highway.

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Neither the North Carolina Highway Patrol nor Charlotte police could immediately be reached for comment. The North Carolina Department of Transportation website showed a portion of I-85 near UNC Charlotte was closed in both directions early Wednesday. The website said the closure was due to police activity.

Tuesday night, a larger group of demonstrators gathered near the scene of the shooting. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. Photos and TV video showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Some officers were in riot gear.

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By 5 a.m. Wednesday, the streets were quiet with no protesters in sight. Broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance of a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.

The unrest in Charlotte came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police officers went to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott  who was not the suspect they were looking for  inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers saw Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

Scott was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Detectives recovered a gun at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

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Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Some protesters were heard yelling "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One person held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that "the community deserves answers."

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

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Shelby's attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he were carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.

Associated Press
ATHENS, Greece  Archaeologists excavating one of the richest shipwrecks of antiquity said Monday that they have found a 2,000-year-old depth measuring device, and human bones that could help build an ancient mariner's genetic profile.

The 1st century B.C. wreck of a large freighter discovered off the southern Greek island of Antikythera more than a century ago has yielded an ancient astronomical computer, marble statues, tableware and thousands of other artifacts.

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Human bones were found there before, but that was before DNA testing was available. The discovery of remains that old on the seabed is unusual.

The Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is conducting the excavation with the Greek culture ministry, said that if enough viable DNA was preserved, the bones could shed light on the shipwreck victim's ethnicity and geographic origin.

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"Archaeologists study the human past through the objects our ancestors created," said excavator Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist with Woods Hole. "With the Antikythera shipwreck, we can now connect directly with this person who sailed and died aboard the Antikythera ship."

Archaeologists also discovered a sounding lead  a roughly bell-shaped lead object weighing 110 pounds. Attached to a rope and lowered from a ship, it measured the depth of the sea and also brought up samples of the seabed that gave the ship's master useful information for anchoring.

"This humble instrument was of vital importance for safe seafaring in antiquity," a culture ministry statement said. A similar device was found in the Antikythera wreck during the first excavation, in 1900-1901.

The new discoveries were made during this year's second season of excavations, from Aug. 28-Sept. 14.

Associated Press
President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu discuss a 10-year military assistance deal struck this month worth $38 billion, the largest slice of military aid the U.S. has ever given another country. Sept. 21, 2016. (The White House) (Internet - Fair Use)

NEW YORK  Setting aside years of tensions, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bid each other farewell Wednesday with a strident affirmation of security ties between their nations and little public talk of their persistent differences over Iran, Israeli settlements and the Palestinians.

The two leaders were all smiles as they sat down in New York in what the White House said was likely their last meeting before Obama's presidency ends in January. Rather than delve into fraught debate about relaunching moribund peace talks, they cracked jokes about golfing together and future vacations devoid of stuffy meetings between heads of state.

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Obama made only a passing reference to his opposition to the uptick in Israeli settlement construction in occupied lands as reporters were allowed in briefly for the start of the meeting.

"We do have concerns around settlement activity," Obama said, adding that the U.S. wanted to help Israel pursue peace. And that was that.

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In private, Obama was more pointed, senior Obama administration officials said, and raised "profound U.S. concerns" that settlement-building was eroding prospects for peace. Netanyahu challenged that notion, said one official, adding that the two leaders had not "papered over" their differences.

Netanyahu's ardent opposition to Obama's nuclear deal with Iran  perhaps the biggest irritant in the relationship  did not come up, said the officials, who briefed reporters on the meeting on condition of anonymity. They said the meeting lasted about a half-hour.

The move by both leaders not to air their differences in public reflected their common understanding that if a breakthrough on Mideast peace is to occur, it won't be while Obama is still president. Following previous failed attempts to broker peace, the Obama administration has opted against a new major diplomatic push.

That means the focus shifts in the U.S. to Obama's potential successors: Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. Both would face similar obstacles to Obama if they sought to pick up where he left off, although Trump has insisted his administration would be anything but business as usual. Meanwhile, both Russia and France have signaled an interest in taking on a larger role in mediating between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, Obama hasn't ruled out the possibility that, in his final months in office, he'll seek to influence the future debate by laying out what he sees as the contours of any viable deal. That could come in the form of a major speech or a U.S.-backed U.N. Security Council resolution  both moves that would increase pressure on Israel and that Netanyahu would be expected to oppose.

White House officials said Obama wasn't actively planning such a move but would consider it if it appeared likely to influence the situation positively.

In public, Obama and Netanyahu spent most of their time touting a 10-year military assistance deal their countries struck this month worth $38 billion, the largest tranche of military aid the U.S. has ever given another country. The White House is hoping the unprecedented aid will curb the perception among Israel's supporters that Obama has been insufficiently supportive of Israel's security

"It is a very dangerous and difficult time in the Middle East and we want to make sure that Israel has the full capabilities it needs in order to keep the Israeli people safe," Obama said.

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Added Netanyahu: "Your influential voice will be heard for many decades, and I know you'll continue to support Israel's right to defend itself and its right to thrive as a Jewish state."

Ties between the two leaders never fully recovered after Netanyahu showed up on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress against Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been dismayed by periodic comments by the Israeli leader suggesting he's less-than-serious about the two-state solution that has been the basis of all serious peace efforts for decades.

Associated Press
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563 | October 29, 2022 11:04 The statement of the President of the Russian Federation inspires certain hopes. We anticipate that the vital interests of the Artsakh Republic will be fully protected. President Harutyunyan

551 | October 28, 2022 17:54 Power supply may be restored, if Kiev recognizes Russias new regions  Medvedev

535 | October 28, 2022 16:52 Zatulin: West seeks to push Russia out of negotiation process at any cost

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Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, center, and Minority Leader Harry Reid may be close to a stopgap spending bill that would secure funding to combat the Zika virus. (Alex Wong / Getty)

Senate leaders on Tuesday said they are close to deal on a stop-gap spending bill that would prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month and provide funding to combat the Zika virus, but disagreements over last-minute details continued to hold up an agreement.

Negotiators continue to haggle over politically driven policy provisions that could be attached to the legislation as well as whether it should include emergency aid for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and disaster relief for the recent flooding in Louisiana, aides said.

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Congress must pass a stop-gap spending bill before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30 or risk a government shutdown. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, have said they are confident a deal, which would include more than $1 billion in Zika funding, will be completed before the deadline, but the process is dragging out much longer than Republicans originally expected.

Senate GOP leaders had earlier hoped to wrap up the spending bill last week to allow vulnerable members to head home to campaign for reelection.

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In a sign that a deal could be struck soon, the Senate late Tuesday voted 89 to 7 to move forward with the legislation that will serve as the vehicle for any deal, an important procedural step.

The current negotiations center around what each party will allow in the bill in exchange for their priorities.

Republicans are pushing for the legislation to include disaster relief for the recent flooding in Louisiana. Democrats do not oppose that proposal but have insisted that the package also include funding for the water crisis in Flint. The Senate passed a bipartisan aide package last week as part of a broader water bill, and Republicans want to give the House more time to consider funding for Flint.

"Clearly Flint is going to be taken care of, it will just be after the election," said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana. "Whereas [people in Louisiana] are trying to decide if they're going to stay in their home or walk away from their mortgage."

The latest GOP offer also included a provision sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that would delay plans for the U.S. government to give up control over a global nonprofit that oversees the internet domain system.

Cruz told reporters that he is "cautiously optimistic" that it will be included in the final package.

But President Barack Obama's administration strongly opposes the delay and Democrats have been unwilling to accept that addition unless language is also included that would free the Export-Import Bank to approve more deals.

The bank is supposed to have a five-member board, but only two of the slots are currently filled due to Republican opposition to confirming more members. A third is needed to reach quorum to review deals over $10 million. The provision being pushed by Democrats would eliminate the need for a quorum.

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Reid also attacked McConnell for pushing to keep in place language to prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring corporations to publicly disclose their political spending. Liberal advocacy groups and some Democrats have been pushing for greater disclosure in this area in recent years.

"We're not going to have this bill [be] a pin cushion for McConnell's desire to have nothing -- nothing reported dealing with campaign spending," Reid said. "Corporations can give under the present law lots and lots of money and it doesn't have to be reported."

A key hurdle to a deal on the overall bill was cleared earlier week when negotiators agreed to change language that would prevent Zika funds from going to Planned Parenthood clinics in Puerto Rico. Democrats strongly opposed that prohibition, but aides and lawmakers said this week that an agreement has been struck to carefully re-route the funds so that family planning clinics could access money to help prevent the spread of Zika through sexual activity.

There remains, however, some differences over what spending cuts should be included to help pay for the $1.1 billion Zika funds the bill would provide.
Protesters in Tulsa are calling for the officer to face charges in the fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher. Sept. 20, 2016. (CBS Miami)

TULSA, Okla.  An unarmed black man shot dead in the middle of a street by a white Oklahoma police officer had run-ins with the law dating back to his teenage years and recently served four years in prison.

But those closest to Terence Crutcher described him as a church-going father who was starting to turn his life around. After marking his 40th birthday with his twin sister last month, Crutcher sent her a text that read, "I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna make you all proud."

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Crutcher was due to start a music appreciation class at a local community college Friday, the day Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby fatally shot him outside his abandoned SUV.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 10 Protesters pray over Tyler Johnson, son of Terence Crutcher, in front of the Tulsa County Courthouse on Sept. 19, 2016, in Tulsa, Okla., during a protest of the Tulsa Police shooting of Terence Crutcher. (Mike Simmons / Tulsa World)

The shooting was captured by a police helicopter and a cruiser dashcam, though it's not clear from the footage what led Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers gave Crutcher. An attorney for Crutcher's family said Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot. Shelby was put on paid administrative leave.

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Crutcher had been arrested in the past. In 1995 in nearby Osage County, officers said they saw him fire a weapon out a vehicle window. Records show Crutcher was ordered to exit the vehicle for a pat-down search and began making a movement to his right ankle before an officer managed to get control of him. A .25-caliber pistol was found in his right sock, according to an affidavit.

Crutcher received suspended sentences after entering a no-contest plea to charges of carrying a weapon and resisting an officer, court records show.

Oklahoma prison officials confirmed Crutcher also served four years in prison from 2007 to 2011 on a Tulsa County drug-trafficking conviction.

Court records show officers used force against Crutcher on at least four separate occasions, including a 2012 arrest on public intoxication and obstruction complaints. In that case, an officer used a stun gun on Crutcher twice while he was face down on the ground because the officer said Crutcher didn't comply with at least three orders to show his hands, a police affidavit states. Crutcher's father showed up while he was being arrested and told the officers that his son had "an ongoing problem" with the drug PCP, the affidavit states.

"Nobody claimed that he was a perfect individual. Who is perfect? But that night he was not a criminal," said Crutcher family attorney Melvin Hall regarding Crutcher's criminal record. "He did not have any warrants. He had not done anything wrong. He had a malfunctioning vehicle, and he should have been treated accordingly."

Neighbors described Crutcher as friendly and generous. They said he lived with four young children, cooked barbecue meals that he'd share with others and often belted out gospel songs in his driveway.

The Rev. Willie Lauderdale, whose church is near Crutcher's home, said Crutcher wasn't a member but would come sing some Sundays.

Camellia Bryant said her children and Crutcher's would have sleepovers. She said he was known throughout the neighborhood.

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Melrita Gilliam said she would see Crutcher drink alcohol sometimes "but he always kept it at home" and didn't drive.

"I never seen him raging or nothing out there," she said.

Two 911 calls before the shooting described an SUV abandoned in the middle of the road. One caller said the vehicle's driver was acting strangely, adding, "I think he's smoking something."

Sgt. Dave Walker confirmed Tuesday that investigators found a vial of PCP in Crutcher's SUV. A toxicology report could take several weeks.

Attorneys for Crutcher's family said the family didn't know whether drugs were found in the SUV, but that even if they were, it wouldn't justify the shooting.

PCP or phencyclidine can cause slurred speech, loss of coordination and a sense of strength or invulnerability, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. At high doses, it can cause hallucinations and paranoia.

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"To try and come now with some bogus justification, to say that he had PCP  well, let's look at the video," said civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton, speaking alongside Crutcher's family Wednesday in New York.

"We saw his hands up. We didn't see what was in the car, and it has nothing to do with the actions taken because the officers couldn't see what was in the car," Sharpton said. "His hands were up as his father has instructed young black men in Tulsa to do."

The police video shows Crutcher walking with his hands in the air toward his SUV that was in the middle of the road. A female officer is following him. As Crutcher approaches the driver's side, more officers walk up and Crutcher appears to lower his hands and place them on the vehicle.

The officers surround him and suddenly he drops to the ground. Someone on the police radio says, "I think he may have just been tasered." Then almost immediately, a woman's voice yells on the police radio: "Shots fired!" Crutcher is left lying in the street.

Police Chief Chuck Jordan has said Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his SUV.

Shelby's attorney, Scott Wood, told the Tulsa World that Crutcher wasn't following commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he had a weapon.

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"He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot," Wood said.

Attorneys for Crutcher's family dispute that, pointing to an enlarged photo from police footage that appears to show Crutcher's window was rolled up.

Local and federal investigators are trying to determine whether Shelby should face charges and whether Crutcher's civil rights were violated.

Associated Press
KENANSVILLE, N.C.  Donald Trump faced a swift backlash Tuesday after declaring that African-Americans are "in the worst shape they've ever been" during a campaign event here.

"We're going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they've ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever," Trump said during a campaign event at the Duplin County Events Center, where thousands of supporters gathered.

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The comments drew immediate criticism on social media from critics who accused him of failing to consider the United States' history with slavery and North Carolina's history with Jim Crow laws and segregation. Kenansville itself is named after a man whose family owned a slave plantation.

Trump has been regularly blasted for the way he has spoken about the struggles facing black Americans throughout the country. Black leaders have accused Trump of stereotyping African-Americans. He has compared American inner cities to war zones, has overstated unemployment among blacks, and has often asked several times, "What do you have to lose?"

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"You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street. They're worse, I mean honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities," Trump said Tuesday. "And I say to the African-American communities, and I think it's resonating, because you see what's happening with my poll numbers with African-Americans. They're going, like, high."

President Barack Obama on Saturday tore into Trump on that very issue, suggesting that Trump lacked historical awareness. "You may have heard Hillary [Clinton]'s opponent in this election say that there's never been a worse time to be a black person. I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow," Obama said during the Congressional Black Caucus gala in Washington, D.C.

Obama urged voters to support Clinton over Trump.

"If I hear anybody saying their vote does not matter, that it doesn't matter who we elect, read up on your history. It matters. We've got to get people to vote," Obama said. "I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote."
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden speaks via video link during the Athens Democracy Forum, organised by the New York Times, at the National Library in Athens, Greece, on Sept. 16, 2016. (Pantelis Saitas, EPA)

Edward Snowden did Americans a service. In revealing that the National Security Agency was collecting records of millions of our phone calls every day, he exposed a mass infringement on privacy, generated a valuable national discussion and brought about helpful reforms.

I'd like to say that his positive contributions warrant a presidential pardon so he could come home without fear of prosecution. I'd like to go see the new film about him and cheer for the hero. I'd like to say the interests of truth are paramount.

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But I can't. That's because there is another vital interest at stake: the lives and safety of Americans. Snowden put them in jeopardy, through disclosures that did not justify the risk. National security is a central responsibility of our government. Many of his revelations undermined that mission.

Snowden's defenders note, correctly, his central role in making public the NSA's domestic metadata program  which gave the government access to a vast trove of phone records without public knowledge. A commission appointed by President Barack Obama found the program created "potential risks to public trust, personal privacy and civil liberty"  and "was not essential to preventing attacks."

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What Snowden's allies omit is that most of what he leaked concerned activities that are important in combating terrorism and other dangers  particularly an NSA program that involves listening to phone conversations and reading email of foreigners located abroad. That operation, the presidential group determined, "has clearly served an important function in helping the United States to uncover and prevent terrorist attacks both in the United States and around the world."

One member of the panel, Geoffrey Stone, is a University of Chicago constitutional law professor, a member of the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union and an unabashed liberal. But he opposes a pardon for Snowden because based on what he learned from his service on the review group, he thinks the harm of his actions far exceeds the benefits.

The foreign surveillance "is by far the most important program the U.S. has," Stone told me. Snowden's leaks appreciably impaired its effectiveness by alerting our enemies to exactly how they were being monitored, giving them information useful for escaping detection. By weakening a vital weapon, Snowden's action may cost American lives, if it hasn't already.

Even one of the experts who favor a pardon acknowledged that "Snowden's actions caused great damage to national security." The admission came from Timothy Edgar, who was director of privacy and civil liberties on Obama's national security team and, before that, national security counsel for the ACLU.

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, wonders why Snowden revealed how the NSA spies on foreign governments, that it worked with Norway and Sweden to spy on Russia, that it was infecting Chinese computers with malware and that it had hacked into the networks of a telecommunications firm linked to the Chinese military.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent a letter to the president opposing a pardon  with every Democratic member signing. The committee, which compiled a classified report on the effect of Snowden's leaks, unanimously concluded that most of the documents he took "have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests  they instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries." The United States, it said, will have to "spend billions to attempt to mitigate the damage."

Nor did Snowden's revelations produce all that much change. The telephone records are still being collected and stored and are still accessible to the NSA. The eavesdropping of communications overseas goes on more or less unimpeded. Snowden obviously thought that if Americans knew what their government was doing, they would demand that it stop. They didn't.

The problems with a pardon are twofold. The first is that it would excuse Snowden for the weighty negative repercussions of his choices. The second is that it would encourage other federal employees and contractors with the top-secret security clearance Snowden had  all 1.4 million of them  to decide for themselves what should be secret and what should not.

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But national security, even in the most open democracy, requires a measure of secrecy. Exposing everything our government does to foil its adversaries makes it easier for those enemies to survive and succeed against us. The American people got something from what Snowden did. Our enemies got more.

Steve Chapman, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/chapman.

Download "Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century" in the free Printers Row app, available at www.printersrowapp.com.

schapman@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @SteveChapman13

www.facebook.com/stevechapman13
One thing that all Americans want to believe is that it can't happen here. But it can happen anywhere. It may be happening right now.

"It" is the rise to power of an unprincipled, populist and racist candidate who captures the White House and turns this country into a dictatorship. In a country so blessed by history and good luck, such an American outcome has always seemed preposterous.

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The rise of Donald Trump and the possibility that he might actually win the presidential election have raised fears that, this time, we might not be so lucky.

But it really couldn't happen here, could it?

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Over the years I have lived and worked in several countries  beautiful, cultured, civilized places  where it did indeed happen. These countries included Germany, Austria and Italy. Others come to mind  Argentina, Spain, Greece, Chile. No banana republics in this lineup, just countries with long histories, rich cultural traditions, great universities. Two of them, Greece and Italy, can claim to have invented Western civilization. All succumbed to a demagogue's siren call, and paid a fearful price.

But all these countries are different from the United States, right? Sure, and they're all different from each other, too. What they share is a moment in history when economic hardship or social change left masses of people  not everybody but enough  feeling cheated and abandoned, vulnerable to the lies and promises of a political snake-oil salesman who, in saner times, would have been laughed out of town.

This notion has a pedigree in American literature. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel actually called "It Can't Happen Here," in which a cynical senator named Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is elected on a platform of economic and social reform, plus racist and patriotic appeals. Once in power, he plays on his core of angry white men to impose a dictatorship and silence opposition with his "Minute Men" militia, while his opponents flee to Canada. The book ends with an invasion of Mexico.

Lewis based Windrip on the Louisiana governor Huey Long. In 2004, novelist Philip Roth wrote "The Plot Against America," in which Charles Lindbergh, the real-life American hero and Nazi sympathizer, is elected president in 1940, signs a treaty with Hitler, moves urban Jews into the Midwest or South, bans voting by blacks and sets up concentration camps for dissidents.

All this is fiction. Long is probably the closest we have come to a true American dictator, but he was assassinated in 1935 before an anticipated presidential run in the 1936 race. Some right-wing Republican senators did want Lindbergh to run against President Franklin Roosevelt. But we dodged both bullets. Long and Lindbergh, as American fuhrers, remained safely between the hard covers of novels.

Other countries have not been so lucky. Too many of them fell for a charismatic megalomaniac (Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini), or succumbed to a shameless demagogue (Juan Peron), or cheered as the military marched in to restore order (Francisco Franco or Augusto Pinochet).

Often, the new dictator voiced the resentments of people left behind by an economic downturn. Invariably, he solidified power by blaming his nation's woes on convenient "others"  Jews, blacks, communists. These days, in Europe as in the United States, the "others" are immigrants. Too often, this pied piper played on the failings of a ruling elite, out of touch at best or corrupt at worst.

In many cases, these would-be rulers had access to a captive media that created an alternative reality for their followers, as Fox News does for Trump. Hitler's Nazis had their own newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter (People's Observer). Mussolini was an Italian newspaper editor before he became Il Duce. Silvio Berlusconi, no dictator but a Trump-like narcissist and charlatan, is the Rupert Murdoch of Italy and used his media empire to misrule Italy for nine years.

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None of the dictators sneaked up on his country. Hitler wrote a book, "Mein Kampf," saying what he would do if he came to power, and then he did it. No one mistook Pinochet or the Greek colonels for civil libertarians. Like Trump, all gloried in their excesses. When the citizens of their countries cheered their rise to power, they knew  or should have known  what they were getting.

None did it alone. All had aides and hangers-on and sycophants, greedy for the money or power that goes with access to the throne. Most, no doubt, felt that their champions couldn't really be as bad as they seemed, or that the responsibility of high office would tame them. Some were enthusiastic drum-beaters  much like Sean Hannity today. Others put their party before their nation  like too many of our Republican leaders are doing now. Like the notorious German businessmen and generals of Hitler's time, all believed they could control the demagogue they helped gain power.

Invariably, these enablers felt that, as bad as their man was, the other side  usually socialists or other left-wingers  was worse. In this, they were wrong. Some, but not all, lived to regret their choice.

Bad things can happen to good countries. Some countries, like the United States, have stronger institutional protections. But history teaches that no country is immune.

Richard C. Longworth is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former chief European correspondent for the Tribune.

Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
Every time there is a terrorist attack attributed to Muslim extremists anywhere in the world, Donald Trump will rush forward to claim, as he did after an Easter bombing in Pakistan, that he alone can solve the problem of radical Islamic terrorism. His eagerness to score political points has come back to hurt him in the past, as when, following this summer's mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., he sent a tasteless tweet bragging: "Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!" He must have been deeply disappointed that the Orlando attack, which resulted in the deaths of 49 people, did not give him a boost in the polls. But, he apparently figures, there is still time to make political hay out of the suffering of others.

In the case of the weekend attacks in New York City, New Jersey, and Minnesota, which did not kill anyone but did leave numerous people injured, Trump did not even wait to find out exactly what had happened before telling a rally in Colorado on Saturday night: "We better get very tough, folks ... It's a terrible thing that's going on in our world and in our country, and we are going to get tough and smart and vigilant." The next day he tweeted with transparent glee: "Under the leadership of Obama & Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories abroad. Time to change the playbook!"

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With only seven weeks to go until the election, the question at hand is whether voters will be satisfied with Trump's calls to get "tough and smart" or whether they will demand to know what exactly he is going to do to stop terrorism, because if they do want details, they won't find any. Beyond Trump's bluster, there is ... more bluster. To the extent that he has spelled out any specific policies, they are likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the danger.

Trump laid out his counterterrorism agenda most comprehensively in an Aug. 15 speech in Youngstown, Ohio. He spent the first part of the speech castigating President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for enabling the growth of terrorism by, among other actions, pulling troops out of Iraq and bombing Libya, with no acknowledgement that he had supported bothmoves at the time. Even more brazenly, he repeated his oft-told lie: "I was an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning  a major difference between me and my opponent." In fact, Trump did not publicly come out against the war until August 2004, which was not, as he claims, "very early in the conflict," but 17 months into the conflict, by which time it was obvious that it wasn't going to be a "cakewalk."

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In that same Aug. 15 speech, Trump repeated another one of his much-cherished lines: "I have long said that we should have kept the oil in Iraq - another area where my judgment has been proven correct. According to CNN, ISIS made as much $500 million in oil sales in 2014 alone, fueling and funding its reign of terror." It's true that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, makes money off oil, but it's mainly Syrian, not Iraqi, oil. And Trump never explained in that speech  or in any other public comment since  how he would have "kept the oil in Iraq." In addition to it being a war crime (you're not allowed to "keep" another nation's resources), such an move would have required a long-term U.S. military occupation of the Iraqi oil fields, ports, and all of the land in between. If hatred of America is prevalent in the Muslim world now, imagine how much worse it would be if the United States had seized a Muslim nation's oil wealth.

In the blink of an eye, Trump switched tracks in that Ohio speech from outlining fantastic and unworkable non-solutions to advocating for what is already being done: "My administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cut off their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting." He even pledged to "find common ground with Russia in the fight against ISIS," which is exactly what the Obama administration is doing now in Syria to little effect.

And he vowed  wait for it  to convene an "international conference" to "halt the spread of radical Islam." An international conference! Brilliant! Why didn't anyone ever think of that before? Presumably he has never heard of all the conferences in Geneva and Vienna that Secretary of State John Kerry has convened with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to find a solution to the Syrian mess, Syria being the prime breeding ground of terrorism today.

Having made a brief ghostwritten foray into the realm of humdrum foreign-policy respectability, Trump immediately veered back to what got him where he is. The core of his approach is to keep saying the enemy is "radical Islamic terrorism," something that he (wrongly) claims Clinton never does. "To defeat Islamic terrorism," he said in Ohio, "we must also speak out forcefully against a hateful ideology that provides the breeding ground for violence and terrorism to grow." But there's a good reason why both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have been reluctant to speak of "Islamic terrorism," and it's not because Obama is a closet Muslim, as Trump has insinuated in the past. It's because they realize that in the battle against terrorism, the United States cannot win unless it can get the support of most of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims. By seeming to insult Islam and Muslims as Trump does, he plays into Islamic State and al Qaeda propaganda, which posits that there is a battle between Islam and the West.

But Trump doesn't care about winning Muslim hearts and minds. He seems to think he can keep Americans safe by keeping all terrorists out of the country, as if it weren't the case that many of our post-9/11 attackers  such as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter, and Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter  were homegrown.

Back on Dec. 7, 2015, Trump first proposed a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." His Muslim ban helped him win the Republican nomination but has left him open to well-justified charges of religious bigotry. So for the general election, he has been desperately trying to modify his ban. He knows he wants to ban someone; he's just not sure exactly who.

In early June, he said he would ban only immigrants  not all visitors  from countries where there is a "proven history of terrorism" against the United States. If taken seriously, this would apply to immigrants from Britain, France, and Italy, among other nations. A few days later, this was modified to suspend "immigration from regions linked with terrorism," which hardly solves the problem, since just about every region of the world has been linked to terrorism. By mid-July, the ban had been modified yet again to apply to "any nation that has been compromised by terrorism," a more nebulous category that could just as easily apply to the United States itself as to, say, Syria or Iraq.

Trump's Aug. 15 speech included a call to stop immigration from "regions where adequate screening cannot take place" while adding another category of undesirables: He vowed to "screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles  or who believe that sharia law should supplant American law." He never said, of course, how he would implement this kind of screening. Would U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ask visitors if they harbor "hostile attitudes towards our country"? It apparently never occurs to Trump that terrorists might lie about their true views. He surely has never heard of taqiya, the Islamic term for lying to avoid persecution. His focus on "sharia law"  i.e., Islamic religious law - is also misbegotten. It's like saying that he will screen out any visitors who believe that the authority of the pope supersedes that of the president of the United States. All observant Muslims obey sharia, just as observant Jews obey Halakha (rabbinical law) and observant Catholics obey papal law, but that doesn't make them bad Americans or potential terrorists.

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And what happens if a few stray terrorists should manage to slip through Trump's vaunted border controls or if they happen to be here already? He constantly suggests that the answer to terrorism is "profiling," which, he claims, we are not currently doing because of "political correctness." Speaking to Fox & Friends on Monday, Trump said, "Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. They are afraid to do anything about it because they don't want to be accused of profiling. And they don't want to be accused of all sorts of things." Is there any evidence that law enforcement has identified a lot of terrorists but won't do anything about it because of "political correctness"? Of course not. Just as there isn't any evidence that, as Trump constantly claims, friends and neighbors of the Orlando and San Bernardino, Calif., shooters knew what they were up to but refused to tell law enforcement. And just as there isn't any evidence that, as Trump also claims, "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in Jersey City, N.J., celebrated 9/11. What Trump seems to be suggesting is that law enforcement should employ a strategy of treating American Muslims as the enemy within - a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there were one.

For all of his huffing and puffing, Trump has yet to offer any remotely workable solution to terrorism. What he offers is a lot of anti-Muslim animus that is guaranteed to backfire. It's little wonder why the Islamic State is praying for a Trump victory. As noted by Matt Olsen, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, in an article for Time that did not receive the attention it deserved: "In August, one ISIS spokesman wrote: 'I ask Allah to deliver America to Trump.' Another supporter declared: 'The 'facilitation' of Trump's arrival in the White House must be a priority for jihadists at any cost!!!' ISIS is working to drum up support for the candidate it has called 'the perfect enemy.'"

It is deeply ironic and disturbing that the Islamic State's dream candidate is posturing as the tough-on-terrorism candidate. If voters can't see through Trump's con game, terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al Qaeda will receive an unprecedented helping hand from America's next president. Imagine what a conspiracy theorist  someone like Donald Trump  would make of that.

Washington Post

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is "The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Experience in Vietnam."
George H.W. Bush is planning to vote for Hillary Clinton. That's not considered major news by most mainstream outlets. But it should be.

The story, first picked up by Politico late Monday night from a Facebook post by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor, got almost no play, for example, from the New York Times. It created only a very small flurry of interest on Twitter, at least judging from my feed.

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The only previous exceptions after Franklin Roosevelt to the norm that former presidents support their party's nominee were presidents who were aged, one president  Richard Nixon  whose support wasn't wanted, and one instance in which Jimmy Carter failed to endorse Bill Clinton's re-election in 1996.

Now neither former president Bush is supporting the Republican nominee, with the senior Bush actually crossing party lines to vote for Clinton. They're joined by the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, meaning that three of five living former Republican presidential nominees have opted not to support their nominee. And there's a long list of important, albeit not quite as prominent, Republicans who won't support Trump, some of whom are supporting Clinton. That's not even counting those who grudgingly support "the Republican nominee" without saying his name, or in some cases without being willing to say he's qualified for the job.

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It's extraordinary. The last time anything at all similar happened was in 1972, when many leading Democrats deserted George McGovern. Sure, there are always a handful of cross-party endorsements in every election, but nowhere near this number, and many of them in normal years turn out to be either very conservative Democrats backing Republicans or very liberal Republicans backing Democrats.

It's also the best evidence, from people who follow politics closely and presumably care about both the fate of the Republican Party and of the nation, that Trump really isn't a normal potential president. These stories are the easiest way to show just how different Trump is from a normal nominee  something reporters have struggled to demonstrate.

After all, every presidential candidate lies, as Hillary Clinton famously did about sniper fire on a tarmac once; it's hard to differentiate that from how Trump is unusually untrustworthy. Any candidate can be caught with a knowledge gap or botch a question, as Gary Johnson did about Aleppo and the New York City bombs recently; it's hard to show that Trump is unusually ignorant about politics and world affairs.

Many candidates also have faced some questions about their personal finances; Trump is off the scale on that one, too (as can be seen in everything from the latest reporting on his personal "charitable" foundation to the lawsuits alleging that Trump University was a scam).

And plenty of candidates have made an ugly remark at some point or have been accused of using dog whistles to appeal to hatred, so how to show that the bigotry at the core of Trump's campaign and his political persona are far more serious?

The cold hard fact is that elite Republicans flee from him precisely because of any or all of these four disqualifying attributes  that he can't be trusted, that he doesn't have the information base to do the job, that his business and personal finances are a mess, and that he's running as a bigot.

In other words: Trump is different. He's not a normal candidate. His candidacy is untenable, according to those who have the strongest incentives to get it right.

Whether that information would matter to voters is an open question. I've seen plenty of people mock the idea, but I think there's a good chance some Republicans would see it as a fairly strong cue. Regardless, Republican disunity and defections may be the single strongest way to demonstrate something absolutely central to understanding this election: why Donald Trump isn't just a show-business version of a regular candidate.

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Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist covering U.S. politics.
WASHINGTON  The 2008 financial collapse was eight years ago this month  and the big banks are back to their old shenanigans.

Venerable Wells Fargo has engaged in behavior that would have made a robber baron blush: It pressured low-wage workers with unrealistic sales targets, so these workers created 2 million bogus accounts over five years, causing customers to be hit with fees and damage to their credit ratings. About 5,300 workers have been fired and $185 million in penalties assessed to the bank, but not a single high-level executive has been sacked or even forced to give back the tens of millions of dollars in pay earned based on the fraud.

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When Wells Fargo chairman and chief executive John Stumpf sat before the Senate Banking Committee this week, he represented a bank too big to fail, too sprawling to manage and too arrogant to own up to its failures.

Can't Wells Fargo take back some of the executive payouts?

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"I'm not an expert in compensation," Stumpf said.

Would he commit to investigate whether the fraud began in earlier years?

"I can't tell you that today."

Did he learn about the fraud before reading about it in the Los Angeles Times?

"I don't remember the exact time frame."

Stumpf informed the senators that what Wells Fargo did "was not a scam," disputed that "this is a massive fraud" and said he had no idea "why people did this."

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., encouraged Stumpf to "make certain that the employees are not the scapegoat for behavior at higher levels."

Stumpf repeated that "the 5,300, for whatever reason, they were dishonest, and I'm not scapegoating."

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If high-level bankers didn't go to prison for the subprime high jinks that caused the 2008 crash, it's a safe bet that none will in the Wells Fargo scandal either. But if arrogance were a criminal offense, Stumpf would be looking at a life sentence.

The bank's fraud, and the executive's insolence, may have one salutary result: It takes off the agenda any plan to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the post-2008 regulatory creations and a top target of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. The Los Angeles city attorney and the Los Angeles Times may deserve more credit for exposing the wrongdoing, but the audacity at Wells Fargo shows that the industry isn't about to police itself.

Stumpf also managed to create rare bipartisan unity on the Banking Committee  in condemnation of his actions. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, was "stunned." Dean Heller, R-Nev., compared him to Sgt. Schultz of "Hogan's Heroes." Robert Menendez, D-N.J., called the actions "despicable." Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., told Stumpf: "This isn't cross-selling, this is fraud."

Populist firebrand Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the Wells Fargo chief should resign, return his payouts and be subject to criminal investigation. "If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the crash drawer, they'd probably be looking at criminal charges for theft," she said. But "you kept your job, you kept your multimillion-dollar bonuses and you went on television to blame thousands of $12-an-hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich."

Stumpf blinked rapidly while listening to his accusers, as if sending Morse-code distress signals. His right hand, when he raised it to take the oath, was heavily bandaged. He offered obligatory statements of remorse ("I am deeply sorry that we've failed to fulfill on our responsibility. ... I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices. ... We should have done more, sooner.").

But how is it fair for executives to take home millions after thousands of workers defrauded customers?

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"It's a good question," Stumpf allowed.

Answers, however, were hard to come by. Would he recommend taking back some of the $125 million payout to the head of the division that committed the fraud?

"I'm not on the human resources and compensation committee."

Was she at least fired over this?

"No, Carrie Tolstedt (the former divisional senior vice president for community banking) chose to retire."

A half-dozen times, Stumpf repeated that the 5,300 workers fired were only 1 percent of his workforce  much like an airline executive arguing after a plane crash that 99 percent of his planes landed safely.

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A fraud involving only 5,300 people? "Every time you say that, you give ammunition to the folks who want to break up the big banks," Jon Tester, D-Mont., told him.

And here's more ammo: Stumpf, who presided over the whole thing, took home $19.3 million last year.

Dana Milbank is a Washington Post columnist.

Washington Post Writers Group

Twitter @Milbank
In late August, a confident Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on WTTW's "Chicago Tonight" that he soon would deliver a major address on public safety. Since then the task has only gotten harder. No wonder the mayor stalled his scheduled Tuesday speech until 6 p.m. Thursday. He must explain to Chicagoans how he proposes to calm a rising tide of bloodshed, heal a broken system of police accountability, and foster mutual cooperation between crime-ravaged citizens and cops who believe they're under siege.

That would be a treacherous mission for a mayor who had his city at his back. But many of Emanuel's constituents blame him for the very problems he promises to solve. They view him as a politician relentlessly bent on winning the next news cycle. On these issues that have riven his city, he'll be speaking to a populace he may be unable to please.

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Making Emanuel's Thursday just a little more complicated: Garry McCarthy, the police superintendent the mayor fired after the Laquan McDonald video rocked City Hall, has raised the bar for Emanuel. In a speech Monday to the City Club of Chicago, McCarthy didn't mention the mayor by name. He did, though, touch just about every base that Emanuel, too, must touch in his speech.

Former Chicago Police Department Superintendent Garry McCarthy discusses the Laquan McDonald video and rising tensions with the police on Sept. 19, 2016. (Jeremy Gorner / Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)

Tuesday's Tribune reported that the mayor's two-day delay gave Emanuel more distance from McCarthy's speech. McCarthy now stands as the first current or former city official to speak at length about connections between the mistrust of police and the rise of violent crime.

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These are not issues that are easy to discuss simultaneously. It's more convenient to talk about police accountability on Sunday and rampant violence on Monday. Taken together  and all of us should be talking about them together  they're a public safety crisis unique in Chicago's history:

Chicago is torn  in places distrustful of law enforcement yet also underpoliced, with rising numbers of its young people dying. This is a crossroads where "fetal"  Emanuel's notorious adjective for his hunkered-down police force  awkwardly meets fatal, the steady perforation of shooting victims. Citizens furious with their Police Department and the lethal misdeeds of some officers still must rely on the blue line to shield them from gangbangers. They work toward police reforms and, when they hear the crisp percussion of gunfire, dial 911 for police assistance.

You needn't agree with McCarthy's diagnoses. But give him credit for recognizing that the surge in violence and the public's sour relationship with its Police Department are elements of a single crisis. In the video of his speech at chicagotribune.com/mccarthy you'll see him walk through statistics of which he's proud, including a 38 percent overall reduction in crime on his watch, with fewer total arrests, a sharp rise in gun arrests, a 50 percent reduction in complaints against officers and a 68 percent reduction in police-related shootings. But in post-Laquan Chicago, he perceives community voices, public officials and the news media hounding cops and  a phrase he used repeatedly  empowering criminals.

Emanuel surely will have his own take on all that. He also may talk, as McCarthy did at length (and perhaps to some listeners' surprise) about why Chicago's minority communities justifiably distrust the police: a history of legal segregation enforced by white officers, the anger of disenfranchised communities overrun by narcotics and crime, broken families, joblessness, hopelessness, lack of education and opportunity, in sum a government system that has failed people. Who is the most visible and intrusive element of that government? McCarthy is right: Chicago police.

We dwell on the speech already given because, in its ambition and scope, it wove together the same threads that the as yet ungiven speech must weave together.

The difference is that Thursday evening's speaker is the mayor of Chicago, with unique powers and responsibilities. He has yet to offer an updated version of the police accountability plan that we've found unacceptable; his initial plan wouldn't have given a new police review authority independence from politicians and lawyers at City Hall, for starters.

We don't know how deeply the mayor will delve into his revised plan when he speaks Thursday night.

We do, though, know that police accountability and rising crime rates must be confronted at the same time, and that time is now.

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At the most crucial moment of Emanuel's mayoralty thus far, a torn Chicago awaits.

Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
STEPANAKERT, SEPTEMBER 21, ARTSAKHPRESS: The sides discussed issues concerning the bilateral relations and cooperation within the framework of international organizations, attached importance to the establishment of friendship group in the parliaments and the holding of regular consultations between the Foreign Ministries of two countries.

Edward Nalbandian expressed gratitude for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by both houses of the Bolivian legislative body back in 2014 and emphasized that it was an important input of the Bolivian people in the fight for the international recognition of crimes against humanity.

In course of the meeting, views were exchanged on the current international and regional issues.
On September 20, while paying a working visit to New York, Edward Nalbandian had a meeting with Edgars Rinkevics, Foreign Minister of Latvia, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia informed.

September 21, 2016, 15:28 Edward Nalbandian had a meeting with Edgars Rinkevics

STEPANAKERT, SEPTEMBER 21, ARTSAKHPRESS: The sides touched upon the organization of high-level mutual visits, attached importance to the expansion of legal field and intensification of inter-parliamentary ties.

The agenda of the meeting included issues related to the intensification of economic cooperation, as well as the preparatory works of the upcoming session of the Intergovernmental Committee.

Edward Nalbandian and Edgars Rinkevics discussed the negotiation process over the new legal framework of Armenia-European Union relations.
A Mount Prospect man whose wife was struck and killed by a motorist while riding her bike in a local crosswalk, pictured here with a "ghost bike" memorial to the victim, said Friday that nearly four months after the tragedy, city officials have still not released the official police report. (Karen Ann Cullotta / Pioneer Press)

Nearly 200 residents mourning the loss of a 55-year-old mother of five who was struck and killed while riding her bicycle across Central Road this summer packed the Mount Prospect Village Hall Monday night, demanding changes to what they allege is an increasingly dangerous local crosswalk.

Mount Prospect resident Eric Jakubowski, whose wife, Joni Beaudry, was struck and killed by an SUV on June 9 while riding her bike in the crosswalk at Central Road and Weller Lane, said Monday that he blamed the crossing signal installed in late 2015 at the busy intersection  which is under the jurisdiction of the Illinois Department of Transportation  with leading to the tragedy.

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Beaudry had activated the crossing signal, known as a Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacon, shortly before being struck by the driver of a Lexus SUV in the eastbound median lane, who failed to stop despite the yellow flashing lights.

"We all know who is going to lose a game of chicken  the pedestrian who walks into the crosswalk," Jakubowski said. "It makes no sense to meit's a poor engineering design."

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In a Sept. 1 letter from John Fortmann, IDOT Region One Engineer, sent to Mount Prospect Village Manager Michael Cassady, Fortmann said officials at the agency had reviewed the proposed strategies to enhance the marked crosswalk at the intersection.

Fortmann said IDOT officials support some of the ideas proposed by a local citizens group, including the installation of an additional signal in the median, which would include flashing units for both directions of Central Road. However, he said they could not support the installation of a proposed High-Intensity Activated Crosswalk traffic signal system.

Known as a HAWK, the pedestrian-triggered stoplight would allow traffic to flow until pedestrians need to cross safely with the assistance of a red light, but it does not meet current IDOT traffic control requirements, Fortmann said.

A second proposal to improve safety at the crosswalk, which was suggested by several local residents at Monday night's meeting, involves building a pedestrian bridge over Central Road.

Mary Ellen Mack, an IDOT construction supervisor who represented the agency at the meeting in Mount Prospect, assured the passionate crowd that the agency is taking all of the residents' concerns and ideas into consideration.

"We can figure something out," Mack said. "We know you guys want action right away, and we can move quickly."

Illinois state Rep. David Harris, whose district represents half of Mount Prospect and who also attended the Sept. 19 meeting, said he drives past the crosswalk on Central Road twice a day and has observed the crosswalk hazards first-hand.

"I've personally witnessed another near accident involving an individual nearly getting hit in the crosswalk, so I know these citizens have very legitimate concerns," Harris said.

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While the IDOT-designated road is owned and maintained by the state, officials in Mount Prospect had long advocated for additional traffic signals that would make the busy crosswalk safer for pedestrians, as well as the local elementary and high school students who ride their bikes to practices and games at nearby Melas Park.

But despite what residents described as good intentions on the part of the village and IDOT in installing the new signal system in October 2015, many who spoke at Monday night's meeting said the new crossing signal has only made the intersection more treacherous.

"My son rides his bike to Melas Park, and there's no safe place to cross," said John Ward, one of the many local residents who described themselves as friends of Beaudry, who was widely-known in town as a devoted mother, kind-hearted neighbor, and tireless volunteer with her church and other community organizations.

Referring to a recent study of the crosswalk when the signal was activated, Ward said: "They say eight out of 10 cars stopped, but what about the two out of 10 that did not stop? My experience driving down Central Road is that's not even close to accurate."

In a petition signed by 962 residents that was presented to the village board, local residents leading the safety effort wrote, "The problem with (the crosswalk signal) is that it does not provide the driver with definitive instructions as how to proceed when they see the yellow flashing lights. Drivers simply don't know what to do."

Beaudry's husband agreed, observing that driver's education students who are studying the current edition of "Rules of the Road" will not find an example of the unusual crosswalk signage currently installed on Central Road.

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"Quite frankly, this is a bigger issue than just Mount Prospect," Jakubowski said. "It's a fatal mistake."

kcullotta@tribpub.com

Twitter @kcullotta
Several of the neighbors who live on Apple Hill Lane, between Route 22 and Port Clinton Road, said they awoke Sept. 18 to discover that a vehicle had run over about a dozen of their mailboxes. (Ronnie Wachter / Pioneer Press)

The residents of the street immediately west of Stevenson High School are picking up pieces of their mailboxes after, police said, an Antioch man damaged dozens of them with his car.

Several of the neighbors who live on Apple Hill Lane, between Route 22 and Port Clinton Road, said they awoke Sunday morning to discover that a vehicle had run over about a dozen of their mailboxes. Lincolnshire police arrested a suspect  a 21-year-old Antioch man  earlier that morning, according to Sgt. Kim Covelli.

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"Everybody is pretty shook up about this," said Carl Heyden, who lives along Apple Hill Lane. "The majority of the homeowners in our area are senior citizens."

Heyden has security cameras around his property, including one focused on his mailbox. A recording at 2:34 a.m. Sunday, shows a vehicle driving near his property and then destroying Heyden's mailbox immediately afterward, he said.

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"A cloud of dust, and all the pieces go flying over the road," Heyden explained while watching the video. "And we don't have the standard four-inch post. We've got the big one, the six-inch post."

Soon after that moment at 2:41 a.m., a Lincolnshire police officer spotted a "heavily damaged vehicle" ignoring the streetlight at the intersection of Milwaukee Avenue and Marriott Drive, Covelli said. Police said the driver fled east on Marriott Drive for about a quarter of a mile, near where the street dead ends, stopped and then ran away on foot.

Police later apprehended the suspect, Covelli said.

While authorities continue to investigate the mailbox destruction, the Antioch man faces charges in Lincolnshire of eluding a peace officer, disobeying a police officer, driving without a license or insurance, disobeying a traffic control signal, failing to yield at an intersection, driving on the wrong side of the road, failing to signal, driving with one headlight and improper lane use.

Part of Apple Hill Lane stretches through unincorporated Lake County. Covelli said the driver only damaged mailboxes in Apple Hill's Lake County portion  which is why the man does not face property damage charges from Lincolnshire.

The Lake County Sheriff's Office is considering its own charges, said Det. Chris Covelli. Buffalo Grove police also are considering charges for damages to mailboxes that are located within their territory, said research and engagement officer Meghan Hansen.

"There were pieces of the vehicle that were located in the area of some of the mailboxes," Chris Covelli said.

rwachter@pioneerlocal.com

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Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer
The Board of Education for Community High School District 218 last week approved its budget for the current school year, one that includes a slight increase in the amount of money raised from local property taxes.

That had school board member Robert Stokas upset. He said he wished officials could have figured out a way to reduce the level of local property taxes used to fund school operations.

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The district, which oversees Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Shepard High School in Palos Heights and Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, gave its approval to a budget with revenue of $132.52 million, and expenditures of $135.45 million.

Of the money coming into the district, some $82.95 million will come from local property tax revenue. That is more than the $80.6 million the high school district received from local property taxes during the 2015-16 academic year. The increase in the district's tax levy for this year was approved by the school board in December.

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District 218 Business Manager Ilsa Richardella described the property tax hike as one that would raise an additional $2.3 million for the school district's budget this year. She would not provide any kind of estimate as to how much that increase would amount to for individual property owners.

Stokas said, "It may be such a small increase that many people won't even realize their portion of the tax bill for the schools went up, but it still went up. At this rate, it's going to keep going up every year through at least 2020."

Stokas cited budget projections for future years that estimate the local property tax share of the budget could wind up being as high as $92.24 million by the 2022-23 school year if things do not change.

Stokas was the lone opposition vote when the district gave its approval Thursday to the budget, saying he wishes alternate budgets were considered when school officials spent the summer months putting together a spending plan.

"I hope that in future years, we can have more of a discussion about this issue," he said. "I realize this budget is going to pass, but I just want to hear a better reason for why (property taxes) have to keep going up."

Board President Thomas Kosowski said he was pleased the district was able to put together a budget proposal providing enough money to provide quality educational programs. "Our students will be able to compete with those from other school districts," he said, adding there will be no significant changes in the amount of money spent last year.

"There will be only a slight difference," he said.

Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

He said the levels of spending for various programs at the three high schools are not significantly changed from the 2015-16 academic year.

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"There will be only a slight difference," he said.

The largest portion of the budget is devoted to salaries  accounting for $64.59 million to pay for faculty and other staff at the three high schools.

The school board approved the budget with no discussion, and no one from the public attended a hearing prior to Thursday's board meeting to address the issue. Kosowski said he thinks local residents would speak out if they had objections.

But Stokas said he does not believe school board members should take the lack of verbal complaints as a sign of approval.

"Just because they're not here does not mean they approve," he said.

Gregory Tejeda is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is featured in "The F Word: Stories Of Forgiveness" exhibit organized by The Forgiveness Project. (Brian Moody / The Forgiveness Project)

Forgiveness.

"No matter who you ask, every single person has a different understanding, interpretation or life experience of what that word means," said Louisa Hext, North America Coordinator of "The F Word: Stories of Forgiveness."

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Gathered by The Forgiveness Project, a London-based secular organization aimed at helping people understand and reconcile with past trauma. The project was founded in 2004 by Marina Cantacuzino, who wanted to tell the real stories of people whose response to being harmed was not about revenge but about healing and restoration.

The "The F Word" exhibit comes to Chicago's south suburbs this month, part of a weekend of restorative and forgiveness-focused programming in Homewood and Olympia Fields.

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The collaboration of three local synagogues  B'nai Yehuda, Congregation Am Echad and Temple Anshe Sholom  the exhibit's arrival advances a weekend of events that includes two presentations by Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Auschwitz, where she was subjected to wartime experiments under the direction of Dr. Josef Mengele.

Though the exhibit and programs are secular, Hext said the synagogues collaborated to showcase the events this weekend because it leads into the Jewish High Holidays.

It comes to town as Jews are preparing for the Jewish New Year, which takes place the following week, and for Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, which begins Oct. 11 and is considered the most holy day on the Jewish calendar, Hext said.

The exhibit and the events are open to people of all faiths, said Hext, who will speak publicly on Saturday about the exhibit and The Forgiveness Project's start.

"Our organization is secular, so I am not going to be speaking about faith," she said. Her focus will be the many definitions of forgiveness and the stories of those who have found empowerment and peace through it.

B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood is displaying the exhibit "The F Word" through Sept. 30. The exhibit features nearly a dozen 3-foot by 6-foot banners each telling personal stories of forgiveness. (Gary Middendorf / Daily Southtown)

The weekend's events are funded by a grant from the Chicago Jewish Federation with help from Homewood Flossmoor High School.

Kor, who made headlines last year when she met with Oskar Groening, called the "accountant of Auschwitz," after testifying at his trial in Germany, will address students at the school as well as speak publicly.

The exhibit, a striking show of some 15 personal accounts of reconciliation and forgiveness, is on display at B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom Synagogue in Homewood through Sept. 30.

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The collection of 3-by-6 foot colorful fabric banners feature first-person stories and photos of contributors from around the world, people who have endured violence, tragedy and injustice but who are learning to move on. Since its launch, "The F Word" exhibition has been seen in more than 14 countries, to an audience of over 70,000 people.

Among those featured is Alistair Little, who joined the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland when he was just 14. After serving a 13-year prison sentence, he now works on projects that aim to tackle the causes of violence.

There is Andrew Rice, whose older brother David Rice was killed on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center collapsed. Andrew has dedicated himself to trying to understand the underlying causes of violence.

And there is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He says, "To forgive is not just to be altruistic, it is the best form of self-interest."

After the exhibit closes in the south suburbs it will move to Lewis University in Romeoville and to St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Naperville.

B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood is exhibiting "The F Word: Stories of Forgiveness" through Sept. 30. (Gary Middendorf / Daily Southtown)

Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

Forgiveness Weekend events

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"The F Word: Stories of Forgiveness" photo exhibit will be on display at B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom/Congregation Am Echad, 1424 W. 183rd St., Homewood through Sept. 30. The public can view it from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday, as well as after Friday night services and by appointment. To arrange a docent-led tour contact Brian Zakem at bzakem@comcast.net. For more information, go to B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom's website at www.bybs.org.

On Friday, Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor, a forgiveness advocate and founder of CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Ind., will speak to students at Homewood Flossmoor High School during the day and to the public at 7:15 (following Shabbat services) that evening at Temple Anshe Sholom, 20820 Western Ave., Olympia Fields.

Louisa Hext will speak at B'nai Yehuda Beth Sholom at 7:30 p.m. (following Selichot services) Saturday at Temple Anshe Sholom, Olympia Fields. The event is open to the public.

For more information on The Forgiveness Project, go to www.theforgivenessproject.com/about-us/

dvickroy@tribpub.com

Twitter @dvickroy
County board members Jim Moustis, R-Frankfort Township, and Ragan Freitag, R-Wilmington, look over design elements for the proposed new couthouse. In the foreground, at right, is the project architect, Jason Dwyer, with Wight and Company. (Susan DeMar Lafferty / Daily Southtown)

Will County will break ground on the first of its new buildings  the public safety complex  at 11 a.m. Oct. 5, and officials said they are willing to spend more money to speed up this project so the next building  a new county courthouse  is not delayed.

The public safety complex will be an 85,000-square-foot center to house the Will County Sheriff's Office, a new consolidated 911 dispatch center to serve 30 communities, and the administrative offices for the Emergency Telephone System Board (ETSB) which oversees the county's 911 system.

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Site work will begin soon on the site, currently occupied by the Sheriff's Office. The existing building will be torn down when the new facility is completed.

The new complex is expected to be substantially completed by March 2018, but Leigh McMillan, with Leopardo, the construction management firm, said the project could be accelerated and completed by the end of 2017 if the county is willing to pay workers overtime to work on Saturdays.

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The courthouse construction cannot begin until the public safety complex is completed. Some of the sheriff's operations are temporarily housed in the former First Midwest Bank building, which the county owns and plans to demolish to create space for the new courthouse on the southwest corner of Ottawa and Jefferson Streets in Downtown Joliet.

The County Board set the "guaranteed maximum price" (GMP) of the public safety complex at $29.5 million, and allowed another $1.7 million for soft costs, such as engineering and design fees; and $1.5 million for furniture, equipment and moving expenses, bringing the total to $32.8 million.

Dave Tkac, deputy chief of staff for County Executive Larry Walsh, who is overseeing the project for the county, said the board would have to amend the GMP, and create an allowance or contingency fund for this overtime pay, but the amount has yet to be determined.

"Even though we are spending more money to accelerate this, we will make up for it with the courthouse not being delayed," said County Board Speaker Jim Moustis, R-Frankfort Township, during Tuesday's capital improvements committee meeting.

"It's crucial that we do not lose time on the courthouse. I don't want to lose a whole construction season," he said.

If the sheriff's staff can move out of the bank building by the end of 2017, it could be demolished in the winter and construction on the courthouse could begin in the spring of 2018, officials said.

Accelerating the public safety complex is "an excellent idea," said committee Chairwoman Ragan Freitag, R-Wilmington, noting that construction costs go up every year.

The public safety complex and the courthouse should be treated as one project, she said.

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Jason Dwyer, of Wight and Company, architect for the courthouse project, showed the committee a proposed layout of the 10-story, 370,000-square-foot building, which will have a total of 28 courtrooms, five more than the current courthouse.

The eighth and ninth floors will be built as shells only, each with space for five future courtrooms.

The lower levels will serve the "high volume" areas, such as the jury commission room, court clerk, traffic court and law library, with high speed escalators and elevators to the upper floors.

Court administrative offices will be on the top floor.

Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

Courtrooms average 1,700 square feet and include space for elevators to transport inmates, judges' chambers and attorney-client conference rooms.

The front of the courthouse will be glass, but Dwyer said they are considering a special type of glass or sound emitters to prevent birds from flying into the building.

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The structure is also being designed with an eye to future technology.

"We want to make sure the infrastructure can accommodate the courtroom of the future," Dwyer said.

The County Board has set a price of $195 million for the new courthouse.

The committee also discussed hiring a stationary engineer for the courthouse, during the construction process, so he can familiarize himself with the designs and layouts of the mechanical systems.

slafferty@tribpub.com
In their search for alternatives to incarceration, Will County officials may be scratching ankle monitors off their list for now.

After listening to Will County probation officer Eric Larson during a judicial committee meeting last week, County Board members were not sold on the idea and decided to continue to explore other options.

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The system doesn't work as great as some agencies claim, Larson said. The device itself costs $6 per day, plus the cost of manpower to monitor the devices, check on false alarms and make calls.

"I've had to call a victim and tell her I didn't know where the offender was," he said.

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Warden Brad Josephson previously told the committee it costs $97 per day to house an inmate and offenders typically pay for the bracelet.

In an earlier discussion on this topic, Sheriff Mike Kelley said ankle bracelet monitoring is "a slippery slope," and "more labor-intensive than people think."

"It's not 100 percent foolproof," Larson said of the bracelets' GPS monitoring systems, which have been used in other areas. He said other agencies have reported that the system may not be able to track someone on a train, in a basement or a downtown building, and it may lose power during storms.

The county also has used radio frequency units for people on house arrest, who are not allowed to leave a property, and found they are reliable for that purpose, he said.

Committee Chairman Darren Bennefield, R-Aurora, said when he attended a National Association of Counties (NACO) conference on the issue, other counties reported that when ankle monitors were used the crime rates increased because offenders knew they would not face jail time.

"We're not the only ones faced with these challenges of finding alternatives to incarceration. They're all talking about it," Bennefield said.

Counties in California have taken the lead on this, and Will County can learn from their experiences, he said.

Deputy Chief Stuart Taylor of the Will County Adult Detention Facility said the devices are more prevalent in counties with jails that are more overcrowded.

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"The question is, 'Who do you let loose?'" he said in an interview, adding that the decision is ultimately up to the judge.

Currently, the county has used ankle bracelets for juvenile probation, but they have considered them for adults as overcrowding becomes more of an issue at the jail, he said.

Reducing the jail population is one of the biggest benefits for using the monitoring devices, Taylor said.

"We realize that people do make mistakes," he said. "It's a good alternative for first-time offenders. This may allow them to get out of jail sooner  it's an incentive for inmates to be on their best behavior. They can get or keep their jobs, and move on with their life."

But, on the other hand, the units are "not as reliable as you would like them to be," Taylor said.

They have to be charged every other day, or they are dead.

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"If we don't get a signal, we have to go to the last known address and find them," he said. That is usually handled by the probation department.

There is also a liability with these monitoring devices, Taylor said. For example, if a driver is freed after his first DUI, but continues to drink and drive and kills someone, he said, "You have a problem."

Currently, there are no other alternatives to the ankle bracelets, which is why so many counties are still pushing for them, Taylor said.

"I would definitely like to see technology that is foolproof," he said.

In the meantime, Taylor said, they do not incarcerate people charged with misdemeanors.

"Unfortunately, I am a bit cautious about this," Bennefield told the committee, adding that law enforcement officials also have to be concerned about recidivism.

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"We don't want them to go back out and repeat the same crime," he said.

Board member Steve Balich, R-Homer Glen, who originally proposed the idea of monitoring non-violent offenders with ankle bracelets, said after hearing Larson he believes, "They are not going to work."

Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

Still, he and fellow board member Gretchen Fritz, R-Plainfield said they both would like to find a way for inmates to keep their jobs while fulfilling the terms of their sentences.

Julie McCabe-Sterr of the Will County State's Attorney's Office said Wisconsin has the Huber Law, which allows prisoners to be employed during the day, return to prison at night and pay for their incarceration.

Taylor said there are a "handful" of inmates on a work-release program.

Bennefield suggested the committee look into such programs, but also identify what services the county could provide for inmates with mental health issues.

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The county now has more than 80 participants in the Adult Redeploy Illinois program, through which repeat felons volunteer to participate in treatment programs to reduce their substance abuse, and increase their social productivity by helping them find jobs, do community service or get an education, which reduces recidivism, according to McCabe-Sterr.

Also this year, Will County agreed to participate in the national "Stepping Up" initiative with NACO, to share information and mental health resources with other counties.

slafferty@tribpub.com
A Westmont woman will paint the first installment of five murals depicting the past and future of the suburb in preparation for the 100th anniversary of the community.

Fanny Moy, 51, plans to unveil the portable mural on Nov. 10 to celebrate the 95th anniversary. Other artists will paint the other four murals, which will be unveiled each year as the village prepares for its 100th anniversary in 2021.

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"I am honored to be selected by the (mural) committee to be the first person to kick off this huge mural project," said Moy to village trustees on Sept. 9. "I want to capture Westmont's past through color to make it come alive."

Moy showed trustees a rough sketch of her ideas, which included imagery of Native American wigwams, dairy cows, churches, horses and buggies, prairie plants and few stray bricks on the foreground.

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William Gregg started a brick company in 1872. He decided on the area because the community sits on the highest point of land along the railroad line, which made it easier for steam locomotives to ship a full load of bricks to Chicago, according to village documents.

Moy said that Westmont was also an important diary stop.

Moy said the project been an educational experience for her and hopes viewers will learn a thing or two about the community.

"I didn't know all these places existed in Westmont," she said.

Trustee Bruce Barker, who is coordinating the mural project, said selected artists will paint on 4-foot-by-5-foot panels. Barker said the first mural will be displayed most of the time in a reception room area inside village hall.

"The size will allow us to display the mural at the library and other various events in Westmont," Barker said.

The other murals will include paintings of 1921 up to the present time. The last mural, however, will depict Westmont in the future. Barker said the village decided it was important to use local talent. "Fannie Moy is a phenomenal painter," Barker said.

Moy attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and also earned a teaching certificate in art. She has painted several other murals, including one titled "Reading in the Woods," which is at the Fairmount Elementary School library in Downers Grove. She also painted a mural entitled "Scenes from China" at an orphanage in Shanghai.

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Images of Moy's work can be found on her website at fannymoy.com.

Joseph Ruzich is a freelance reporter.
After less than three years at Algonquin Commons, the Fuddruckers is no longer in business, officials said.

The hamburger chain, at 1608 S Randall Road, closed in August, said Kim Gilmore, of Gilmore Marketing Concepts, the advertising agency for the mall.

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The reason for the closure is unknown, Gilmore said.

Fuddruckers opened in late 2013 in the building that once housed Cheeseburger in Paradise. Both restaurants are operated by parent company Luby's Inc.

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Mall officials do not know if another business will be moving into the location.

Other Chicago area Fuddruckers locations are in Schaumburg, Northbrook and Downers Grove.

Erin Sauder is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
The Grand Victoria Casino bought what used to be The Courier-News building in downtown Elgin in May for $450,000. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

The downtown Elgin building that once held The Courier-News was sold in late May to the Grand Victoria Casino.

"We purchased this building primarily for additional office space, dressing rooms for our events, overflow parking and limited storage," Grand Victoria Advertising & Public Relations Manager Marilou Pilman said. The casino is not far from the building, and the parking lots for the two facilities are next to each other.

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This was the second sale of the building at 300 Lake St. since The Courier-News closed its office in December 2010.

According to public documents, in May, the casino bought the building for $450,000 from Starfire Electronics. In June 2011 Starfire bought the building from Publishing Properties LLC for $195,000.

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The 27,616 square-foot Courier-News building was allowed to operate on a lawful nonconforming basis as a newspaper printing and publishing business from 1956 until December 2010. The Courier-News began publishing in 1925 after two Elgin papers that had been around since the late 1800s merged.

In May, the Grand Victoria Casino bought what used to be home to The Courier-News in Elgin for $450,000. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

The Courier-News' parent company in 2010, Sun-Times Media, closed the building and moved operations to an office in Aurora that oversees the Courier News, the Aurora Beacon-News and the Naperville Sun.

Tribune Publishing bought the Courier-News and the other suburban holdings of the Sun-Times in late 2014. Since the building's closing, Courier-News reporters have been working remotely, with editors based in Aurora.

Former staff from the 1990s and beyond have colorful memories of their time in the building, which was showing its age and was mostly empty at the end of its days as a newspaper office.

Former reporter Matt Baron, who runs his own public relations and media services business, recalled "a loose newsroom atmosphere that permeated the 90s." The hijinks included crank interoffice calls and tossing toys across the office, Baron recalled. Some staff also kept a quote book of witty quips made by coworkers.

Fellow former reporters Allison Hantschel, publisher of First-Draft.com, and Sean Noble, Director of ReadyNation-Illinois, and Senior Policy Associate at Fight Crime: Invest in Kids-Illinois, noted the building was home to feathered friends, too.

"I remember lots of finches nesting outside our windows, under the second-story awnings, and they essentially became our newsroom pets." Noble said.

Retired managing editor Paul Harth has mostly fond memories of the building and of the people with whom he worked.

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Of course, there was also the view out the newsroom windows of an occasional drug deal going on down the street or the sound of small arms fire coming from the neighborhood while working a Saturday night shift," Harth said. "The opening of the casino (in 1994) ended that stuff for the most part, making the area safer but less interesting in a way."

Harth said the most vivid memories he has are of the old press starting up each afternoon "when we were a p.m. paper and actually were printed there. The whole building would shake and soon that day's newspapers would be brought up to the newsroom, literally hot  actually just a little warm  off the press."

Harth added," Everyone would grab a copy and start reading. Holding that paper in your hands and reading your own story or one by one of your co-workers was kind of an affirmation of your work, and I never ceased getting a charge out of it."

mdanahey@tribpub.com
A Lake County Jail inmate charged with severely stabbing a Vernon Hills woman in 2015 while on a date has been recorded using a jail phone to tell family members he is feigning insanity to avoid prison, a prosecutor said in court Tuesday.

Assistant State's Attorney Lauren Kalcheim Rothenberg told Judge Daniel Shanes that the state has jail telephone recordings of Daniel Dion, 20, of Des Plaines, telling family members that he is "pretending to be crazy" because he doesn't want to go to prison and instead hopes to go to a psychiatric hospital.

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Dion's attorney, Ian Kasper, has already formally entered an insanity defense for Dion's trial, scheduled to begin Oct. 31. Dion faces felony charges including attempted murder.

Kasper was given discs containing the recordings Tuesday. Rothenberg also said a notebook was confiscated from Dion's cell that could lead to charges, and that he had written a letter to the stabbing victim, violating a no-contact order.

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As a result of those factors, Rothenberg said she has given Dion's defense a deadline of Oct. 4 to accept a plea deal she has offered to resolve the case. After that deadline, she said the state will seek indictments for new charges against Dion.

Shanes responded that he does not expect the new information to affect the date of Dion's trial, unless it is resolved through the plea deal.

"This is going on two years," he said of the pretrial process.

Kasper said he believes he may need a delay because the doctor who performed a psychological evaluation of Dion for the defense is having medical problems, but Shanes said he believes there is enough time for Kasper to manage a way to get the doctor's testimony to court or pursue a new evaluation with a different doctor.

Kasper had no comment after the hearing on the plea deal offer from the state, the details of which are not being made public.

Dion has pleaded not guilty to one count of attempted first-degree murder and three counts of aggravated battery for allegedly stabbing Katherine King outside of a Deer Park movie theater on Jan. 8, 2015.

Dion allegedly told investigators he stabbed King because "she annoyed him," according to Lake County Sheriff's Office officials and prosecutors.

He has been held without bond in Lake County Jail since he was arrested shortly after officers arrived at the Century Theater at 21600 W. Field Parkway the night of the incident.

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Authorities said Dion admitted to police that he attacked the woman and stabbed her multiple times while inside her vehicle. He told investigators "he woke up in the morning with the intent to kill her because she annoyed him," according to a Lake County Sheriff's news release.

Officials said Dion arranged to meet with King, then 24, under the "guise" of going on a date to the movie theater.

King, who suffered punctured lungs as well as cuts to her face and neck, was taken to the intensive care unit at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights.

She had been in critical condition prior to and after surgery, but has since recovered and attended some of Dion's court appearances.

Attempted first-degree murder is a Class X felony carrying a sentencing range of six to 30 years, which can be extended up to 60 years under certain aggravating circumstances.

jrnewton@tribpub.com

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Twitter @jimnewton5
St. Martin de Porres High School moved into the old St. Joseph Parish on Waukegan's south side in 2006. School officials say enrollment has since outgrown the property. (Dan Moran / Lake County News-Sun)

With three-quarters of the required $17 million committed, Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep is moving ahead with plans to transform the former Kmart on Belvidere Road into a new school facility, school officials said.

The Catholic high school  which exclusively serves families with limited financial resources  will begin some interior demolition of the vacant building at 3110 Belvidere Road in October with renovation to start in November or December, the school's spokeswoman, Mary Beth Sammons, said in an email.

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The school has outgrown its current leased space at the former St. Joseph Parish complex, a small two-acre property comprised of less than 30,000 square feet on the south side of Waukegan, St. Martin President Preston Kendall said in a news release.

Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep plans to renovate the former K-Mart building in Waukegan and move into it by early 2018. (Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep)

Its 400 students have to move year-round between five different buildings throughout the school day to attend classes, according to the release.

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The school has already received approval from the city to move ahead with its renovations, which it identified after a two-year search of more than 45 locations, Sammons said.

"I am so proud to have them come to the 9th Ward," Ald. Ann Taylor, 9th, said during the Waukegan City Council meeting Monday evening. "They are a private school for the economically disadvantaged that not only specializes in academics and work experience but also the commitment to faith and giving back to the community. Talk about making well-rounded individuals."

The first phase of work includes transforming about half of the 115,492-square-foot Kmart building into 21 classrooms, a cafeteria, a library commons area and administrative offices, according to the release. The classrooms will include three science labs to support a biology, chemistry and physics curriculum.

Future phases are still being planned but are expected to include additional classrooms and laboratory space, new areas for fine arts and other electives, a chapel, a student fitness space, exterior green spaces and practice fields, and a more appealing facade for the building.

Designs show how Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep plans to renovate the former K-Mart building in Waukegan and move into it by early 2018. (Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep)

The school has firm commitments for 75 percent of the $17 million needed to finish the first phase and is in talks with additional potential donors, Kendall said. A fundraising event is also planned for Oct. 22 at VenueOne North Shore in Deerfield.

The goal is to move into the renovated building in early 2018, according to the release.

Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep opened as St. Martin de Porres in August 2004 with its 95 students occupying the second floor and basement of a one-time Social Security Administration building at 1 N. Genesee St. In 2006, with enrollment up to 140, the school signed a lease with the Archdiocese of Chicago to occupy the St. Joseph's Parish property, which includes a classroom building that opened in 1925.

The 30 high schools in the Cristo Rey Network serve low-income students who work five full days each month to pay for most of the cost of their education and to gain professional experience, according to the school's website.

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emcoleman@tribpub.com

Twitter @mekcoleman
Illinois court judges seldom explain themselves or their reasoning, except to other judges when the judicial code demands an accounting or in their post-retirement memoires.

Judges speak for the final record at trial when they reveal what evidence prompted their verdict.

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So there's little chance Lake County Circuit Judge Victoria Rossetti will explain the unidentified conflicts that led her to step away from the Melodie Gliniewicz trial.

It's a sad footnote in a sad event.

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Local prosecutors and police are deprived in this case of the defendant they really wanted to punish. Fox Lake police crook Joe Gliniewicz killed himself after spending years humiliating them all for inattention to his thievery.

So the best they can offer up to the gods of justice is his widow.

Trying the widow of a notorious cop for skimming benefits from his crimes is a lot like trying John Dillinger's getaway car driver because John is not available.

All the Fox Lake officials, hometown gendarmes, and Explorer Post officials who let Gliniewicz do his worst aren't on trial. Though you wonder why not. No one's holding gross negligence and dereliction of duty accountable.

As for Rossetti, she had eight months as the designated judge in the case and never said a word about any conflict. And then she had an epiphany.

And then she quit, leaving a large hole.

Why? She won't tell. No one can make her. But she should tell.

This Gliniewicz is facing criminal charges for alleged conspiracy, money laundering and misuse of charitable finds as sidekick to her late husband's criminal mini-empire. She was either a co-conspirator or a duped bystander to it.

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Gliniewicz's widow fits all the characteristics of a plea-bargain candidate, but prosecutors don't have "G.I Joe" Gliniewicz as leverage.

It's pathetic, but it's all they have.

Rossetti all but admitted something about her relationships in the case would call her verdict into question. That's what a judicial "conflict of interest" is.

Sometimes it's substantial and real; sometimes it's an appearance of potential bias. But whatever it was, she ignored its damaging possibilities for seven months as the official trier of fact.

You'd normally welcome any judge's tightly constructed standards of equity, but this one falls outside the comfort zone.

It's too late to avoid answering for motives, and the recusal is stunning because Rossetti is no legal rookie. She was an experienced county prosecutor before assuming judicial robes 24 years ago.

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She is the preeminent criminal circuit court judge in the 19th Judicial District. This is not a rookie ethical mistake an experienced judge should commit.

If Rossetti faces a self-admitted conflict now, she also likely faced the same conflict for months as she weighed dismissal notions, set hearing and trial dates, and ruled on the admissibility of evidence.

The defense already had sought to dismiss the charges. But in June, Rossetti denied a defense motion to shelve four of the nine indictments against Gliniewicz, stating the defense arguments were "without merit." Would that argument have ended differently absent the judge's conflict?

Who can tell? Only she could.

Illinois rules offer several avenues to remove a judge, but they almost all rely on asking for a replacement before the trial starts and before any substantive rulings are issued.

But once a judge has issued multiple decisions as Rossetti had, announcing an unfixable conflict solves one problem but creates another. Now every substantive decision she issued in this case is open to retroactive debate based on fairness.

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Why did Rossetti not act on her conflict months ago? That answer was hidden by Lake County Chief Judge Jorge Ortiz, who said Rossetti, and anyone else in the county court system, can't discuss details about ongoing cases, including this one.

But Rossetti already has issued a telling statement.

She essentially announced that her verdict, in either direction, might be open to question.

A full explanation does not damage the court's credibility. But hiding the explanation does.

Lake County News Sun Twice-weekly News updates from Lake County delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

Judges normally assess their conflicts before a trial starts and, if any questions arise, the sitting judge could ask a senior jurist  in this case her boss, Ortiz.

The defense has right to question before her replacement, and ultimately an appeals court, if that June ruling was tainted.

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A trial date of Dec. 5 is currently scheduled for Gliniewicz, who remains free on bond.

Because Rossetti did not recuse herself until 10 days ago, she invites further scrutiny.

No one else needs call her judgment into question. She already did that.

David Rutter was an editor for 40 years at six newspapers.

David.Rutter@live.com
Woodworking teacher Josh Murawski shows students how the maze can be configured into different routes. Fourth-grade students from Naper Elementary School paid a visit Sept. 16 to the woodworking class at Naperville North High School to check out a mock-up of a maze they are helping create. (Jon Langham / Naperville Sun)

Naper Elementary School students could be the envy of their peers when it comes to a labyrinth for testing their robotic skills.

With technical assistance from Naperville North High School, Naper fourth-graders will be rolling robotic Sphero balls through what one elementary student likened to the always-changing maze in "Maze Runner," a literary reference that brought a smile to the face of Ryan Shambo, Naper's learning commons director and lead teacher.

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The collaboration between the two schools started after Shambo had trouble finding a maze to complement the school's technology.

Cubs fan Dylan Kuiman helps set up the computer numerical control machine that will cut the slots for a maze fourth-graders from Naper Elementary are creating for their robotic ball. (Jon Langham / Naperville Sun)

Like many local elementary schools, Naperville acquired the robotic balls to teach the basic concepts of computer coding.

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Shambo said students need some type of maze to apply those skills, but a search of the internet revealed little for him to purchase. Most of the suggestions called on teachers to tape off a section of the floor or create mazes using blocks, textbooks or other classroom objects.

Shambo wanted a more permanent, wooden, three-dimensional maze that also was self-contained so students wouldn't be chasing the robotic Sphero ball around a classroom.

He turned to the technology education department at Naperville North for guidance, and initial results far exceeded expectations.

A mock-up labyrinth was presented to Shambo and fourth-graders last week when the students toured the woodworking shop at the high school.

Naper Elementary School fourth-graders gather around the computer numerical control router machine at Naperville North as it cuts a pattern in wood for a maze they area designing for their robotic balls. (Jon Langham / Naperville Sun)

Josh Murawski, who teaches woodworking at the high school, proposed a maze with slots to hold removable walls so students can alter their mazes or create new ones.

"This is really amazing. I never thought of that," Shambo said. "I can see other schools will want a maze like this, too."

Murawski said the final design will be up to the students, who will decide how large and what other features they'd like to see in their maze, such as permanent structures or custom etchings.

During the tour, the fourth-graders watched how the grooves on the mock-up were cut using the school's computer numerical control router.

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Murawski explained how the same basic computer programming concepts high school students need tell the high-tech machine where to cut the wood will be used by the fourth-graders to code their Sphero robots.

The goal, Shambo said, will be for students to program the rolling balls by giving a series of two-dimensional commands  forward or backward and left or right.

Murawski said the big difference between coding for their robot ball and the computer-guided router is an up-and-down direction where the programmer tells the machine how deep to make the cut.

The high school teacher said as students are learning skills at younger ages, it forces junior high and high school teachers to adjust accordingly.

"We're going to have to step up our curriculum and difficulty in our program," said Murawski, who said he's up for the challenge and the new possibilities it opens for students.

Naperville North freshman James Recendez, whose Woodworking 1 class met the same time as the elementary visit, watched fourth-grader Luke Mundt's turn maneuvering the robotic ball briefly through the maze using an iPad as a joystick.

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James didn't recall playing with robots when he attended Naper Elementary, though he said he wished he'd had the chance.

Luke was looking forward to having a maze at his school. "I think it's good so kids learn how to program and code," he said.

Shambo said he also sees the collaboration between the two schools as a means of opening the door for creating a maze kit that schools throughout the area might use.

subaker@tribpub.com

Twitter @SBakerSun1
The Naperville District 203 school board was told that efforts to remove "barriers" such as cost and transportation were yielding results in terms of the number of students going to summer school. (www.naperville203.org / HANDOUT)

The school board in Naperville School District 203 continues to debate procedures aimed at improving the group's working relationship.

On Monday, board member Kristin Fitzgerald suggested the school board hold a self-evaluation session annually instead of periodically as mandated in district policy.

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The Illinois Association of School Boards, which likens the practice to a yearly doctor visit in which it's determined if a patient is healthy or needs treatment, recommends an annual checkup.

Fitzgerald's proposed change received unanimous support, and board members planned to include the assignment of the self-evaluation session to the list of responsibilities of the board president and vice president.

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The change in the duties, however, meant the board was unable to vote on a proposed measure to reduce the term of the board president and vice president positions from two years to one because both the duties and terms are included in the same policies.

A vote now won't occur until at least November.

Under current policy, the president and vice president serve two-year terms and are chosen by the board after each biennial consolidated election.

Board members also indicated they were ready to vote next month on a measure that allows any board member to seek legal advice from the board attorney as long as the questions first go through the superintendent.

If the advice is related to the superintendent's performance or contract, the board president would have direct access to attorneys under the revised policy.

Current policy states only the superintendent or a superintendent's designee are authorized to confer with district lawyers on legal issues.

In the revision, the superintendent would notify other board members about a question being submitted to the attorney before it happens as a means of transparency and to give other members the opportunity to refine the question or seek additional information.

The superintendent will log each contact and provide a monthly report of expenses.

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subaker@tribpub.com

Twitter @SBakerSun1
The Unity in Community Foundation hosted its 8th Annual CommUNITY Fundraiser and Food Drive on Sept. 17 at the Underpass Restaurant & Lounge in Franklin Park. Since 2009, the Foundation has been supporting charitable causes in Leyden Township.

Foundation President Tom Brimie said that funds raised on Sept. 17 will benefit three local causes: the Veterans Assistance Program, CommUNITY Helping Hands and local high school scholarships. Food was also collected for the local food pantries.

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About 160 people attended the benefit, which raised about $18,000, noted Brimie.

One of the event's aims was to honor U.S. military veterans. The evening kicked off at 6:30 with the "Star Spangled Banner" performed by veteran Tom Henninger.

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One U.S. Navy veteran attending was Bill Holic of River Grove, who noted: "Everyone is so patriotic." Holic grew up outside of Pittsburgh and joined the military in 1971 after working as a stock boy. He fought in the Vietnam War, and said that events that raise money for veterans make him feel good.

The event also included a silent auction and raffles.

Brimie said he was quite pleased with the evening, and happy that so many turned out to support community organizations. "We're just trying to have a good time and raise money for our veterans," he said. More information at theunityincommunity.org.
Three people face felony charges in connection with a Sept. 7 home invasion in which a man was shot in the leg in Pleasant Township, southeast of Kouts, officials said.

Andrea Wert, 36, of the 400 East block of County Road 1000 South in Pleasant Township, and her sister Leslie Wert, 36, of the 600 block of Division Road in Porter Township, are charged with two counts of aiding in a burglary and one count of aiding in a robbery, according to a press release.

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They were taken into custody Friday night, said Sgt. Jamie Erow, public information officer with the Porter County Sheriff's Department.

Joseph Potts, 32, who lives in Jasper County but has a Hebron address, is charged with two burglary counts; one robbery count; and one count of criminal confinement.

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He was arrested early Tuesday morning, Erow said, adding the investigation is ongoing.

Police were called around 12:20 a.m. on Sept. 7 to a residence in the 400 East block of County Road 1000 South by the victim, who reportedly had been handcuffed during the incident and shot in the leg before being forced to open a safe in a pole barn on his property.

The victim's girlfriend arrived home during the incident with the couple's four children, ages 14, 9, 4 and 11 months, who were asleep in the car.

One of the suspects allegedly put a gun to her back and led her to the pole barn where the victim was and made her try to open the safe. When she was unsuccessful, one of the suspects took the handcuffs off the victim so he could open the safe.

Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Free performance at Hammond Public Library

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, Hammond Public Library will present a free performance of music and dance at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the library, 564 State St., Hammond. An ensemble from AfriCaribe, an organization that provides educational and cultural programming through music, dance, theater and other artistic mediums, will be featured. In addition, works by artist Arturo Miramontes will be on display through the first week of November. A Hammond resident, Miramontes was born in Momax, Zacatecas, Mexico, and has a distinct style of interpreting Mexican American history through his bold use of colors and symbolism. More information is with Linda Swisher at 219-931-5100, ext. 310.

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South Shore Line debuts new website

The South Shore Line has unveiled their new website, which was created to enhance user experience and simplify access to vital information like train schedules and updates. The new website's design streamlines the access of information on desktops and mobile devices, and has additional features such as real-time updates and a trip planner that makes using the train easier for commuters or travelers. Users will find numerous resources for leisure riders in South Bend, Northwest Indiana and Chicago, an improved usability and mobile experience, and a comprehensive listing of commuter perks on the site. Information on train schedules, discounts and trip planning are at www.mysouthshoreline.com.

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PNW Sinai Forum to feature author

Kelly Turner, Ph.D. Will discuss her book, "Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds," at 4 p.m. Sunday in the James B. Dworkin Student Services and Activities Complex on the Purdue University Northwest campus, 1401 S. US Highway 421, Westville. Turner's book summarizes her research into cases of "radical remission," where the patient heals from cancer without Western medicine or after all treatments have failed. Students with valid school ID will be admitted free. Tickets and information are at www.pnw.edu/sinai-forum.

Family Listening session

The Arc of Indiana and the Division of Disability and Rehabilitative Services are partnering to host the Valparaiso Family Listening Session from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at Opportunity Enterprises, 2801 Evans Ave., Valparaiso. The session will act as an open forum to seek feedback from families and self-advocates regarding their needs and ways in which support can be administered. New federal laws affecting those with disabilities also will be discussed. RSVP to Barb Owens at 219-464-9621, ext. 236 or barb.owens@oppent.org.

Duel events to explore diversity

Indiana University Northwest will present Rethinking Multiculturalism and Diversity: Current Challenges and Proposals for Change from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sept. 29 in the Library Conference Center, Room 105 ABC, 3400 Broadway, Gary. Students and faculty members from the Technological Institute of Monterrey, Mexico, will join Northwest students in an exploration of the accomplishments of multiculturalism and diversity. Following the program, an evening of Puerto Rican history and culture will begin at 6 p.m. in the Bruce W. Bergland Auditorium with ALMA Borinquena 2016, featuring music, dancing and storytelling. More information is with Tierra Jackson at jacksoti@iun.edu or 219-980-6596.

Staff report
From left, Dale Kugler, Michelle Kodicek and Dave Greinke, and Dusty Godbey, kneeling,all of Porter County Hazmat, suit up Wednesday for a disaster drill at Cathay Industries in Valparaiso. (Amy Lavalley / Post-Tribune)

The call came in at 10:34 a.m. Wednesday. A tanker truck was unloading 30,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia when a hose ruptured, unleashing the toxic chemical into the air at Cathay Industries in Washington Township.

The truck driver was knocked unconscious and two plant workers were injured.

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In the end, everyone was fine. The toxic leak was staged, part of a disaster drill held at Cathay, 4901 Evans Ave., which drew a wide array of first responders and emergency workers.

The Porter County Local Emergency Planning Committee is tasked every year with running a training exercise, said Greg Eckhardt, the drill chair. Rick Trapp, the environmental manager at Cathay, agreed to host the exercise.

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"Plus, it's going to help him do his environmental plan," Eckhardt said.

Cathay uses waste acid from the steel mills to make pigment.

"We make a food-grade material with it and the primary end of it is women's cosmetics," Trapp said, adding the company's products also go into pet food and other products.

While emergency responders including the Washington Township Fire Department and the Porter County Bomb Squad have done drills at the facility before, Trapp said the large scale of Wednesday's drill constituted a first for the company.

Simulated chemical spray misted over the scene of the mock accident where the truck driver laid on the ground. Within a few minutes of the call, a Washington Township fire truck pulled onto the property and a firefighter conferred with a plant employee.

"We'll sit down in a couple weeks with the major players and go over, 'Here's what went wrong, here's what went right,'" Eckhardt said, noting everyone learns something every year. "Usually communication is one of the things we need to improve."

The nearby Washington Township schools were in on the drill as well, and were told to have students shelter in place while the scenario played out.

"I encourage them that this is a good time to test your staff," Eckhardt said, comparing the exercise to a tornado or fire drill. He said one of the scenario's evaluators would go over to the schools and to judge the response there.

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Sgt. Jamie Erow, public relations officer for the Porter County Sheriff's Department, took part in the exercise, too, fielding questions from media about what chemical was released, how many people were injured, and evacuation plans for a 2.7-mile radius around Cathay.

Also on the scene were representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which provides some funding for the drills while doing community outreach.

"They're here doing their jobs and at the end of the day, we will determine if they have gaps to cover," said Mick Hans, chief of chemical emergency preparedness and prevention for the EPA's Superfund division.

Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
A retired Crown Point police officer twice injured in the line of duty is suing the city over claims of discriminatory practices in the administration of the Police Department Records Division where he previously worked.

Charles Sprague recently filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Hammond in which he makes a number of allegations against the city and various staff involving workplace harassment by fellow employees, unfair internal hiring practices and accommodations over his disability.

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Attorney Alexander Kutanovski, who is representing the city in the case, said he could not comment on pending litigation.

Sprague had two back surgeries stemming from an on-duty vehicle accident in 2004 in which he was found not at fault, according to the lawsuit. He then underwent spinal fusion surgery in 2010 after his police dog suddenly jerked hard on the leash and he reinjured the same two vertebrae.

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He worked as a police officer until April 2013 when he retired with a medical disability, and was then hired into in a dual part-time position as an investigative support specialist and general service officer.

The lawsuit claims Police Chief Peter Land informed Sprague on May 8, 2014 he would not receive an interview for the full-time general service officer position for which he had applied. Believing a lesser qualified candidate was hired over him, Sprague filed a Charge of Discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Sprague also claims he was passed over for the newly created records supervisor position in September 2015, noting that he did not learn of the position until the job was already appointed. He alleges workplace harassment in claiming Chief Land would refer to him as "she" or "lady" because positions in records were traditionally filled by women, and that complaints to his supervisor about this "sexual harassment" went unheeded.

"That's not how an injured officer should be treated and stereotyped by his chief because just he's doing administrative work," said Sprague's attorney, Sam Adams of Indianapolis.

The lawsuit states that Land falsely accused Sprague of secretly recording conversations between police officers, and when word got out other officers and civilian employees treated him coldly, refused to talk with him and avoided working with him. Sprague alleges other employees retaliated against him by refusing to promote him, altering his work schedule, eliminating his ability to earn overtime and ostracizing him in the workplace.

Sprague's lawsuit includes a "Failure to Hire" complaint contrary to the American's with Disabilities Act and sexual harassment statutes.

"We brought this case because after he retired as a sworn officer he wanted to stay in the police department and working as a general service officer was a close as he could come to being a police officer," Adams said.

Sprague declined comment. The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages, lost wages and Sprague's hiring as a general service officer with the city of Crown Point.

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Jim Masters is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
A Portage company that began as a glass repair and window replacement business in Gary will undergo a four-year, $3 million expansion that will significantly boost a major part of its specialized manufacturing business, a company official said.

John Dumelle Jr., chief operating officer of Konrady Plastics, 1780 Coppes Ct., said the north side business will nearly double its physical size and add 14 full-time jobs at the plastic sheet, rod and tube distributor and manufacturer.

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The move will turn Konrady Plastics into more of a one-stop-shop for its customers, which include agriculture, transportation and food processing companies.

"Now, you can buy plastic sheet and tube from us and have us turn it into something you need," Dumelle said.

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The business currently houses its distribution and manufacturing functions in the same space, a 25,000-square-foot facility, he said. The addition will house the manufacturing side, which is growing rapidly, and free up room in the existing facility for the distribution business, Dumelle said.

Portage Economic Development Director Andy Maletta said the city gave Konrady a 10-year abatement on the real property, or the building expansion, and five-year abatement on the equipment and other property going into the expansion.

Such abatements usually begin at zero taxes the first year and work their way up to companies paying 100 percent of property taxes on their developments by the end of the abatement term.

"(Konrady's) choices are they can expand on that property or they can expand somewhere else," Maletta said. "It makes a lot of sense to give them the incentives, to help they create jobs.

"Right now, they're paying nothing in taxes (on the expansion), but in five or 10 years, they're paying a lot. You just feel this company is going to be here for a long time, and they're going to be paying taxes for a long time."

Construction on the 24,000-foot, $1.6 million expansion will begin this month, with the remaining roughly $1.4 million going toward new equipment and modifying existing facilities, he said.

"(Konrady will) gain about 35 percent more room in warehouse and double size of manufacturing capability," Dumelle said.

It will add the 14 new full-time jobs to its existing 35 employees. Officials already have begun the hiring process, Dumelle said.

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Michael Gonzalez is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Jollibee, which opened in Skokie this summer, marking its first Midwest restaurant, recently launched a philanthropic partnership with the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital. (Jollibee / HANDOUT)

Skokie's busiest new restaurant, the Filipino-based Jollibee, which opened its first restaurant in the Midwest this summer in the village, has formed a philanthropic partnership with the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital, the franchise announced.

Jollibee executives, hospital staff, children being treated at Comer Children's Hospital and the Jollibee mascot attended the official launching of the partnership last week in Skokie.

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Jollibee not only gave a $25,000 donation to the hospital, but officials also announced the kickoff of "Jollibee Days" at Comer, a well-known and distinguished medical center delivering critical pediatric care.

Jollibee officials said the brand wanted to "express its gratitude" for such a warm welcome when Jollibee opened in Skokie some seven weeks ago.

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"As a company that values families and kids, Jollibee believes the hospital to be a fitting partner that is aligned with the brand's mission to share joy  this time to kids who are in dire need of pediatric care," the franchise said in a released statement.

According to the hospital, the donation will go toward the Comer Children's Child Life and Family Education unit, which it says aims to provide families with the best experience possible while they are at the hospital.

Comer Children's Hospital is the only Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center on the South Side of Chicago.

"Our new partnership will enhance our opportunities to provide personalized care to our pediatric patients and their families, and improve the health of children in our community," said Dr. John Cunningham, chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago.

For "Jollibee Days," Jollibee will provide food to the children and their families at the hospital on a regular basis, officials said.

In a released statement, Ernesto Tanmantiong, CEO of Jollibee Foods Corporation, said the franchise is "honored" to partner with the Comer Children's Hospital.

"They are a leader in pediatric medicine and consistently make a difference in the lives of children in Chicago," he said. "The Child Life and Family Education unit is a perfect fit for Jollibee's family friendly mission, and we hope our contribution and continuing partnership will make a positive impact on Comer Children's and our community."

When Jollibee opened July 29 at 3534 W. Touhy Ave., many hundreds were waiting outside, some of whom even camped overnight. Some came from out of state.

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Since then, lines regularly have been out the door and underneath an outdoor canopy. The reception has been so strong, Jollibee officials said, that another Jollibee is planned for Chicago before the end of the year.

"The support Chicagoans have given our very first store in the Midwest is truly overwhelming and humbling at the same time," said Jose Minana, JFC Group President for North America and Foreign Franchise Brands in the Philippines.

The restaurant in Skokie marked the 34th Jollibee in the United States.

Jollibee restaurants are also located in California, Hawaii, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Washington, Virginia and now Illinois. Jollibee opened its first U.S. store in 1998 in California, officials said.

misaacs@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter: @SKReview_Mike
A Wheaton College employee was charged with possession of child pornography following a police search of his residence Tuesday night, DuPage County prosecutors said.

Benjamin Felker, 28, of the 1000 block of Briarbrook Drive in Wheaton, appeared in bond court Wednesday where his bail was set at $250,000.

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Felker, who according to prosecutors is a geology department laboratory associate, was taken into custody Tuesday night after police appeared at his residence with a search warrant. Investigators say they found numerous images and four videos depicting child pornography. Felker, who was home at the time, was taken into custody without incident, authorities say.

The allegations against him are unrelated to his employment, State's Attorney Robert Berlin said. College officials say Felker has been placed on leave and barred from campus.

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Wheaton College President Philip Ryken issued a statement through the state's attorney's office, pledging cooperation in the investigation.

"As a Christian community, Wheaton College fundamentally opposes the production and use of pornography, especially child pornography, which by its very nature exploits and victimizes the most vulnerable," Ryken said.

Felker's next court date is Oct. 4 in front of Judge Robert Miller.

Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter.
Retiring state Sen. Michael Nozzolio will be honored at an upcoming ceremony in Auburn.

Assemblyman Gary Finch and several Cayuga County officials will celebrate Nozzolio's career during an event at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 1 at Veterans Memorial Park in Auburn. The rain location will be the Episcopal Church of Saints Peter and John, 169 Genesee St.

The ceremony is open to the public.

The eight-member committee that organized the ceremony honoring Nozzolio, R-Fayette, includes Cayuga County Clerk Sue Dwyer, Cayuga County Sheriff David Gould and Cayuga County Treasurer Jim Orman.

"Sen. Nozzolio is a passionate voice for his community, for our party and for every New Yorker who shares his core values of hard work, honesty and accountability," Finch, R-Springport, said in a statement. "He has stood up for upstate values and is respected on both sides of the aisle as a man who could get things done. He is a giant. I am proud to call him a friend."

Nozzolio announced his retirement in February. He had surgery in April to repair faulty heart valves.

His legislative career spans more than three decades. He served in the state Assembly from 1983 to 1992. His Assembly district included parts of Cayuga County.

In 1992, Nozzolio was elected to the state Senate. He represented parts of Cayuga County and the Finger Lakes region in that chamber for 24 years.

Nozzolio was recently honored at a Cayuga County Republican Committee rally in Sennett. He's also scheduled to receive the Advocates Spirit Award from the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester at the group's annual gala Saturday.
China's major steel company Baosteel has unveiled a plan to acquire Wuhan Iron and Steel and thereby will become the world's second largest steelmaker, after ArcelorMittal.

According to announcements posted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange website on Tuesday evening, state-owned Baosteel will issue A-shares to all transferring shareholders of Wuhan Iron and Steel to absorb the latter,also a large state-owned steel enterprise based in Hubei Province.

The restructuring plan still needs approval from the shareholders of both listed firms.

Last year, Wuhan Iron and Steel reported a loss of 7.5 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion). Baosteel's profits shrank by more than 80 percent to its lowest level in 18 years.

The crude steel output of Baosteel and Wuhan Iron and Steel was 34.9 million tonnes and 25.8 million tonnes respectively last year. After the merger, the output of Baosteel will exceed that of HeSteel Group based in Hebei Province, to rank first in China.

Shares of the two firms have been suspended from trading since late June due to the planned restructuring.

China plans to cut steel production capacity by 100 million tonnes to 150 million tonnes by 2020, according to a government plan unveiled in February.

Chen Derong, president of Baosteel, said the merger will coordinate various aspects of the business, such as logistics and R&D.

Both companies produce and sell auto sheets. Now, long-distance transportation can be avoided and costs cut, he said.

Baosteel already planned to cut 9.2 million tonnes of capacity by 2018.Together, the production of both companies can be cut further, he said.

The market share of certain core products, such as high-end auto sheets, will be greatly expanded in China after the restructuring, according to a research report by Everbright Securities. Meanwhile, the profitability of these products will be improved and the company's pricing ability for upstream iron ore strengthened, it added.

Wang Bei, researcher with mysteel.com, said the restructuring will contribute to the balance between supply and demand through production adjustment and squeeze out ineffective or poor supply.

After the merger, the new entity will account for 7.6 percent of the country's crude steel output. Industry experts expect more acquisitions among steel producers.
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The Chinese government on Tuesday announced measures to stimulate venture capital (VC) in an effort to sustain the ongoing entrepreneurial wave.

To increase investment in cash-starved startups, China will nurture more VC investors, strengthen policy support, diversify corporate financing channels and allow in more foreign capital, according to a guideline released by the State Council.

Industrial leaders, business incubators, wealth management companies and other institutional investors will be encouraged to make investment, as well as individuals, such as angel investors, said the guideline.

State-owned companies will be allowed to set up VC funds or invest in new firms.

Venture loans will also be promoted in an orderly manner.

The official policy support will focus on taxation and coordination between VC investment and government projects.

China will attract foreign VC by granting easier access and simplifying procedures. Domestic companies will be encouraged to invest in foreign startups.

In addition, the government will enhance supervision, create a withdrawal mechanism and help set up an industrial association for venture investors.

Robust VC will help generate new growth impetus and stabilize the economy,the guideline said.

Confronted with a prolonged economic slowdown, policymakers are promoting mass entrepreneurship and innovation to sustain growth, rolling out preferential policies for people to establish their own businesses.

New business registrations jumped 28.9 percent in the first eight months of 2016.
The China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) signs a memorandum of understanding on strengthening a partnership to help the Chinese agriculture industry go global in Beijing on Sept. 20, 2016. [Photo by He Shan/China.org.cn]

The China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) signed a memorandum of understanding on strengthening a partnership to help the Chinese agriculture industry go global in Beijing on Tuesday.

The signing came after the State Council issued several opinions on promoting reform and innovation to accelerate agricultural modernization recently.

The MoU will promote collaboration and assistance between CCPIT and the Ministry of Agriculture in areas such as implementing national strategies and policies, increasing overseas investment and trade in the agricultural sector, ensuring trade and investment facilitation, building overseas agricultural cooperation demonstration zones, and improving government policies and regulations on overseas cooperation on agriculture.

"Agriculture is a key part of national strategy," said CCPIT Chairman Jiang Zengwei. "We must help Chinese agriculture go global, as people have an increased demand for agricultural products with improved quality."

He said the signing of the MoU was of great importance and signals a new level of partnership between the CCPIT and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Qu Dongyu, vice minister of agriculture, said promoting overseas cooperation in agriculture is a pressing job to implement the "Belt and Road" initiative.

He hoped the two signatories could join hands to improve the system of overseas cooperation to aid Chinese agricultural equipment manufacturers and their technologies and services "go global." The central government issued a No.1 Document addressing agricultural issues in January this year. It declared: "The agricultural industry should make plans for overseas cooperation, strengthen cooperation in investment, trade, science & technology as well as animal and plant quarantine with countries along the Belt and Road."

China has invested a total of US$7.18 billion in overseas agricultural projects, making up 10.9 percent of total outbound investment.
The People's Bank of China announced Tuesday that Bank of China is designated as the RMB clearing bank in the United States.

This represents another critical milestone in the process of RMB internationalization, and a step forward for Sino-U.S. financial cooperation.

Bank of China is now the designated RMB clearing bank in 11 countries and regions, namely, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Germany, France, Australia, Malaysia, Hungary, South Africa, Zambia and the United States, offering 24/7 RMB clearing services across the globe with its RMB clearing network that covers five continents.

As the world's largest economy, the United States is an important market for the RMB to "go global." In September 2015, China and the United States reached an agreement to further facilitate the use of the RMB in business. It was announced at the conclusion of the Eighth Session of the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue that RMB trading and clearing capabilities in the U.S. will be further developed and RMB Clearing Banks in the U.S. established.

Analysts believe that the designation of Bank of China as the RMB clearing bank in the United States will further facilitate RMB usage in the United States and cross-border transactions, and bring two-way trade, investment and economic cooperation to new heights.

Since its debut in the United States in 1930s, the Bank of China's New York Branch, formally established in 1981, has become the largest Chinese bank in the United States, with assets over US$50 billion by the end of 2015.
China and France pledged here late Tuesday to ensure a smooth implementation of Britain' s Hinkley Point nuclear power plant project, and to enhance cooperation in third-party markets.

The Hinkley Point nuclear project is Britain's first nuclear power plant in two decades. It will be co-built by China General Nuclear Power Corp., which has a one-third stake, and French state-owned company EDF.

The two sides reached the consensus as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met with French President Francois Hollande on the sidelines of a series of UN conferences.

During their talks, Li hoped all those concerned could work together to deliver a smooth partnership on the nuclear power program while at the same time calling for China and France to boost their cooperation.

Beijing attaches great importance to its nuclear power partnership with Paris, said Li.

In response, Hollande said France is ready to step up its cooperation with China in nuclear power and third-party markets.

He also hailed the importance of the Hinkley Point project and expects that all sides can come together to ensure the program's success.

Also in the talks, Li conveyed to Hollande greetings from Chinese President Xi Jinping and said China-France relations have seen sound and rapid development, while urging both sides to continue to respect each other, maintain high-level exchanges and consolidate trust for a stronger bilateral relationship.

Li called on the two countries to continue ratcheting up their coordination in international affairs, and to play positive roles in promoting world peace and development.

For his part, Hollande said his country sees in China a good friend, and has full confidence in the prospects of the Chinese economy.

He also lauded China's contribution on combating climate change and said France is ready to step up its cooperation with China in agriculture, finance and tourism.
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Chinese police brought 63 telecom fraud suspects back from Cambodia on Tuesday in their continued crackdown on such crimes, the Ministry of Public Security said.

Chinese police brought 63 telecom fraud suspects back from Cambodia on September 20, 2016 in their continued crackdown on such crimes, the Ministry of Public Security said.[Photo/Weibo account of CNTV]

The suspects -- 50 from the Chinese mainland and 13 from Taiwan -- were brought back by chartered plane which landed in Nanjing Lukou International Airport in east China's Jiangsu Province at around 8 p.m. Tuesday.

They are suspected of falsely presenting themselves as law enforcement officials to extort money from people on the Chinese mainland through telephone calls. The exact number of fraud cases and the amount of money involved are still under investigation, said the ministry.

Cambodian immigration authorities recently destroyed a telecom fraud den in Phnom Penh, netting the suspects and seizing telephones, computers and scripts.

The suspects were brought to the Chinese mainland in order to protect the interests of the victims, said the ministry.

The ministry has designated the Public Security Bureau of Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu, to investigate the case.

In accordance with the consensus across the Taiwan Strait, mainland police authorities have informed Taiwan through normal channels.

Since the launch of a special crackdown on telecom fraud in November last year, the ministry has cooperated with police in Kenya, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia, destroying 65 telecom fraud dens, arresting 1,168 suspects, including 347 Taiwan residents.
A local court in Beijing on Tuesday ordered Internet celebrity Sun Jie and Hong Kong-based herbal drink maker Jiaduobao Group (JDB), to apologize to the family of deceased war hero Qiu Shaoyun for microblog posts that the court said infringed on Qiu's rights to reputation and honor.

Daxing District People's Court said that Sun and JDB must publicly issue apologies on five consecutive days, and pay mental compensation of 1 yuan (about 15 U.S. cents) as requested to the plaintiff Qiu Shaohua, brother of Qiu Shaoyun.

Qiu, who Chinese children are taught about at school, is a hero of the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea (1950-1953).

The story goes that Qiu, 26, was concealed in the grass on Hill 391 before a general attack, but an American incendiary bomb was dropped nearby, and instead of betraying his position, and that of hundreds of fellow Chinese soldiers, he was burned to death.

Skeptical of the official story, Sun Jie mocked Qiu Shaoyun as "barbecued meat" in a post in 2013 on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, to his over six million followers, saying that "consumers refused to pay for [Qiu's meat] as it was only half roasted."

"They think the barbecued meat of Lai Ning is better," he continued, referring to a 14-year-old Chinese middle school student who died trying to help put out a forest fire in 1988.

The post caused quite a stir before Sun deleted it the next day. In April 2015, the JDB referenced the controversy again by promising in its own Weibo post to give 100,000 cans of herbal tea to Sun should he open a barbecue shop.

The beverage group issued a statement of apology quickly after the post, but Qiu Shaoyun's brother, Qiu Shaohua, filed a lawsuit against Sun and JDB in June 2015, demanding "the immediate cessation of the infringement, elimination of ill effects, apologies and mental compensation of one yuan."

In its verdict, Daxing District People's Court said Sun's comments were intentionally derogatory and humiliating.

The spread of such comments online had "a negative influence, had harmed public sentiment and undermined public interests, and had caused Qiu's family psychological damage," it said.

JDB's comments, meanwhile, had "a relatively large negative influence, and caused Qiu's family psychological damage," the verdict read.

It added that as a household name in China, JDB had failed to fulfill its obligation to exercise due discretion in its marketing campaigns and thus should bear legal responsibility.
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China's experiment in human living for space exploration is going smoothly, halfway into the project, the Astronaut Center of China (ACC) announced Tuesday.

Four volunteers started a 180-day experiment in June in a sealed space capsule, testing technology that will be used in deep-space exploration.

The experiment examines how oxygen, water and food can be used and reused in space.

The ACC has used Mars time with 24 hours and 40 minutes in a day in the experiment since Aug. 26.

Scientists are also examining the physiological changes and emotional fluctuations brought by a hermetic environment.

A total of 25 kinds of plants in the capsule as part of a larger ecological treatment system are also growing well.

The experiment will conclude on Dec. 13.
Assemblyman Gary Finch pledged Wednesday to push legislation that would reduce student loan debt in New York if he's re-elected to the state Assembly.

Finch's comments came one day after state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli released a report that found college student loan debt has more than doubled over the past decade.

Total student loan debt in New York now stands at more than $82 billion. There are 2.8 million people who are paying off student loans. The average amount owed is $32,200.

Finch, R-Springport, called the rise in student loan debt "simply unacceptable."

"We cannot make our kids indentured servants to the higher education industrial complex," he said. "It doesn't help them, and it certainly doesn't help us build a stronger economy."

This year, Finch cosponsored legislation that would increase state Tuition Assistance Program annual awards to up to $6,470 per student. The income eligibility maximum would rise from $80,000 to $100,000.

The bill was referred to the Assembly Higher Education Committee, but didn't advance in the Democratic-controlled chamber.

"We need to expand the pool of eligible students because there are too many middle-class families feeling intense anxiety about financing college," Finch said. "We want to cut down this mountain of debt."

Finch took a swipe at Assembly Democrats for blocking the legislation. He criticized the Democrats' support for the DREAM Act, which would open the state Tuition Assistance Program to undocumented immigrants.

He also referred to a push by Democrats, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to provide public dollars for college courses in state prisons  another proposal that Republicans opposed.

"That does not resonate with working people in my district who are playing by the rules and scraping by to save for college," he said.

Finch is locked in a battle for re-election against Democratic candidate Diane Dwire. The two squared off in 2014  a race Finch won by 10 percentage points.

Election Day is Nov. 8.
After decades of effort against leprosy, the possibility of eliminating the disease in China is possible by 2020, according to Ann Aerts, head of the Novartis Foundation, on Tuesday.

Eradication is measured by the reduction of new cases over time.

Because leprosy has an incubation period of five to 10 years, a person acquiring symptoms today may have been infected years ago. But the disease has been in decline in China and is expected to trickle to a halt by 2020.

Aerts spoke with China Daily during the 19th International Leprosy Congress in Beijing.

Leprosy is infectious but curable. The organism that causes it, mycobacterium leprae, has the unique ability to infect the peripheral nerves in humans, which may result in an inability to feel pain in the hands or feet, blindness and the loss of fingers or toes.

Currently, China detects around 600 to 700 new leprosy patients annually. They can receive immediate treatment through the country's healthcare system, which has successfully reduced transmission of the disease, Aerts said.

Globally, around 211,000 people were diagnosed with leprosy in 2015 - an average of one every 2.5 minutes. Of those, 1 in 11 are children, indicating continued transmission of the disease.

It is estimated that 1.2 million people are visibly and irreversibly disabled by leprosy, the foundation said.

India, Indonesia and Brazil account for 85 percent the leprosy patients worldwide. They are learning from China's experience in treating this disease, Aerts said.

"China has kept the level of knowledge on leprosy high among healthcare workers, which has been beneficial for bringing the disease under control," she said. "In some countries, leprosy no longer figures in the education curriculum for nurses and doctors, and that has led to a general waning of leprosy expertise, resulting in missed opportunities and delayed diagnoses."

For now, what China needs to do to eliminate leprosy is to interrupt its transmission - for example, by examining the family members and neighbors of existing patients and offering preventive treatment, she said.

Novartis, a Switzerland-based global healthcare company, provides anti-leprosy medicine free and has donated more than 56 million blister packs valued at around $90 million through the World Health Organization, which has helped to treat more than 6 million leprosy patients around the globe since 2000.

Chen Zhiqiang, secretary-general of the Handa Rehabilitation and Welfare Association in Guangdong province and one of seven members of the experts' commission of the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations, said it's important to end discrimination against leprosy patients during the "last mile" in the fight against this disease.

"It took a long time for people to understand that the disease can be cured, even though the disabilities it caused cannot be reversed," he said. "Thus, the key to eliminate the disease is to reach zero transmission, and a lot of work needs to be done."

According to the federation, leprosy-control programs have shown impressive results over the past three decades. With the introduction of multidrug therapy, the registered prevalence of leprosy globally decreased from more than 5 million people in the mid-1980s to around 200,000 in the last year.

More than 16 million people affected by leprosy have been treated since the 1980s. However, evidence that transmission of the disease still occurs can be seen in the consistent diagnosis of leprosy in children in many settings.
A couple in Ankang, Shaanxi Province held their wedding in a freeway tunnel on Tuesday because of a traffic jam caused by an accident. They just didn't want to miss the auspicious hour.

A couple in Ankang, Shaanxi Province held their wedding in a freeway tunnel on Tuesday because of a traffic jam caused by an accident. They just didn't want to miss the auspicious hour.

The morning accident happened at the tunnel exit when a semitrailer hit the guardrail and its damaged body blocked the road.

The traffic police didn't clear the road until 2:20 p.m., too late for a couple impatient to celebrate their marriage.

A fleet of wedding vehicles were stuck in the traffic jam. The bridegroom had picked up his bride early in a limousine, but when they headed to the ceremony site, the road was blocked. They thought there was plenty of time and even played poker while waiting; however, the traffic jam never eased.

As the time went by, the couple became worried about missing the most auspicious time. According to local custom, the wedding ceremony had to be held before 12:00 noon. So, they decided to hold the ceremony on site with the wedding emcee, witnessed by friends, stuck drivers and their passengers.

To ensure security, and hoping they would not affect any resumption in the flow of vehicles, the couple shortened the ceremony in 10 minutes, time enough to exchange pledges and rings with the help of the emcee.

The scene was uniquely romantic and became an instant hot topic when the photos were uploaded online.
A company in Henan province recently banned its employees from buying the newly-released iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, threatening them with the sack if they buy one, a local news website reported.

The company publishes a notice to ban its staff from buying iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. [Photo/HNR.cn]

The company located in Nanyang City issued the warning in an official notice signed by the company's administrative department to the staff, appealing to them to support homemade products, and boycott American and Japanese goods.

It said: "If you have so much money to buy the new Apple phone, you'd better spend your money to benefit the health of your parents and children. Do not work for such luxurious goods."

The notice has raised wide debate online after it was posted on Chinese social media. Some people expressed their understanding of the company's display of patriotism, while some said the action was invalid since it violated China's labor law.

An office clerk surnamed Liu explained that the purpose of the notice was to call on all the staff to pay more attention to their family instead of material goods. He said the company itself was further discussing the notice.

"For those who had already bought an iPhone 7, I think the company won't fire them," Liu added.

The notice was published on Sept. 18 because it was on Sept. 18, 1931 that the Japanese militarists staged the 'Liutiaohu' event as a prelude to invading northeastern China, unleashing full-scale aggression against China, according to Liu.

On this day every year, multiple activities are held across the country to commemorate this tragic moment.
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Two students were severely injured in a lab blast on the Songjiang District campus of Donghua University today, Shanghai Observer, a local-based news website, reported.

The site of blast taking placing today at a lab in Donghua University. Two students were heavily injured. --photo by Shanghai Observor

The explosion took place in one of the labs of the colleges chemical and biological engineering institute, the report said.

Shanghai Observer reported that its unclear at present what caused the explosion and the investigation is still under way.

The school has informed all of its colleges to carry out thorough safety check over all their labs.

Both the victims have been rushed to Ruijin Hospital.
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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the ongoing 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, the US on Monday. [Photo/Xinhua]

Premier Li Keqiang voiced Beijing's opposition to the plan by Washington and Seoul to deploy an advanced missile-defense system in the Republic of Korea while meeting with US President Barack Obama in New York. Li said "it is hoped that all parties will avoid taking actions that lead to escalation of the tense situation".

He and Obama met on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday.

Earlier this year, Washington and Seoul agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, angering Beijing and Moscow. The system's radar has a maximum reach of 2,000 km and could cover parts of China and Russia.

Earlier this month, tension rose anew on the Korean Peninsula after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea conducted a nuclear test in an area near the China-DPRK border.

Li said China endorses the UN Security Council's plan to further respond to the nuclear test by the DPRK.

Beijing remains committed to denuclearization of the peninsula, ensuring peace and stability, and resolving the issue through dialogue and consultation, Li said.

A White House statement released later on Monday said Obama and Li "resolved to strengthen coordination in achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula".

Zhang Tuosheng, director of the research department at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, said China should continue tackling two tasks simultaneously  counteracting the THAAD deployment plan as well as strengthening cooperation with the US and the ROK in boosting denuclearization of the peninsula.

"No efforts should be spared to resume the Six-Party Talks, and even if the resumption is unlikely, support should be given to other dialogue promoting peace on the peninsula and denuclearization," Zhang said.

Jia Xiudong, a senior researcher in international affairs at the China Institute of International Studies, said the DPRK nuclear tests and the US-ROK plan to deploy THAAD are "pushing the peninsula situation to a deadlock, which serves no interest of any party".

The root cause of the nuclear issue is the mutual distrust between the US and the DPRK, and the only way out is to resume dialogue, Jia said.

During their talk, Li and Obama also touched upon bilateral trade and investment, as well as global issues including sustainable development, refugee crises and peacekeeping.
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Authorities investigating the New York explosion case were searching on Monday for a 28-year-old New Jersey man who may be armed and dangerous, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) released a photo of Ahmad Khan Rahami, a naturalized US citizen of Afghan descent who was wanted for questioning in the Saturday night explosion in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, de Blasio said on CNN.

Federal authorities now believe the weekend explosion that injured 29 people in Chelsea, where another explosive device was found nearby, was linked to as many as six explosive devices found in Elizabeth, Homeland Security officials told Reuters.

The explosions came days before world leaders prepared to gather at the United Nations in New York for the annual General Assembly.

"We're going to have more security personnel than ever assembled over this next week during the UN General Assembly," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on CNN.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in television interviews that President Barack Obama, who is already in New York, was being briefed on the case.

Cuomo acknowledged there might be an international connection in the case.

"The evidence might suggest a foreign connection," Cuomo said in television interviews on Monday morning.

Investigators believe there are more people involved in the New York and New Jersey bombing plots than just Rahami, but they do not have a good idea who those people are, two US officials told Reuters.

An Federal Bureau of Investigation poster says Rahami was a resident of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where agents were executing a search warrant on Monday morning after explosive devices were found at a train station in that city, Mayor Christian Bollwage told CNN.

Warning that Rahami could be armed, De Blasio urged residents to be vigilant and report sightings to authorities.

Cuomo said that, while the bombs discovered in Manhattan and New Jersey were not identical, there were "certain commonalities" among the chemicals and technologies used.

The raid in Elizabeth came hours after an explosive device left near a train station there blew up when a bomb squad robot cut a wire on the mechanism, one of as many as five potential bombs found at the site, the mayor said.

No one was injured in the blast from the device, which had been left in a backpack placed in a trash can near the station and a bar, Bollwage told reporters earlier.

As many as five potential explosive devices tumbled out of the backpack when it was emptied, Bollwage said. After cordoning off the area, a bomb squad used a robot to cut a wire to try to disable the device but inadvertently set off an explosion, he said.

The Chelsea blast followed a pipe bomb explosion on Saturday morning along the route of a running race in the New Jersey beach town of Seaside Park. No one was injured in that blast.
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Conflicts in Syria have intensified over the week despite the Russia-US truce accord which started on Monday, as militants continued targeting Syrian government troops, the Russian Defense Ministry said Sunday.

"Only the Syrian government forces have observed the cessation of hostilities over the past six days since it came into effect... while militants attacks against the Syrian army are on the rise," the ministry's spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.

The Untied States failed to help separate terrorists from the so-called moderate opposition, and neither did it exert necessary pressure on them, Konashenkov added.

The situation is especially grave in the northern city of Aleppo, where movements of armored vehicles and cars have been recorded in the eastern part of the besieged city and its suburbs, said the spokesman.

On Sept 10, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry announced a nationwide cease-fire in Syria, which demands all warring sides stop attacks and airstrikes, and allow access to besieged areas, including Aleppo.

The cease-fire deal is now threatened with a recent escalation between Moscow and Washington, after the U.S.-led coaliton airstrikes killed 90 Syrian servicemen in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour on Saturday.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier on Sunday that the move would "put the implementation of the agreement in danger."
Nearly two weeks after Democratic congressional candidate unveiled a TV ad slamming U.S. Rep. John Katko's votes to defund Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a commercial that repeats the critique.

The DCCC's ad, which is already airing on Syracuse-area TV stations, contains a clip from an interview between WRVO's Grant Reeher and Katko, R-Camillus, in September 2015.

Reeher asked Katko to explain his vote for a bill that would cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Katko acknowledged that during his 2014 campaign for Congress he was "absolutely for funding Planned Parenthood."

That quote is highlighted in the DCCC's ad. A narrator says Katko "let us down" and attributed the GOP congressman's shift to accepting campaign donations from special interests.

Bryan Lesswing, a spokesman for the DCCC, said Katko broke his promise to support Planned Parenthood.

"It's clear that John Katko is fighting for the special interests that bankroll his campaign, not central New York," he said.

Following the votes in 2015, Katko explained that his position changed after a conservative group posted videos that purportedly showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the illegal sale of fetal tissue.

Katko told Reeher he had watched the videos, which he described as "horrific."

"And it's pretty clear to me, as a prosecutor who is analyzing evidence, that at least some people in Planned Parenthood are engaged in the selling of body parts," he said. "And that's against the law."

The allegations against Planned Parenthood sparked congressional and state-level investigations into the group's activities, but no illegal conduct has been found.
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British Prime Minister Theresa May attends a press conference after meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel(not in the picture) at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, on July 20, 2016.(Xinhua/Guo Yang)

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has used her first speech to the United Nations to stress the UK remains a global player, despite the country's planned withdrawal from the European Union.

"When the British people voted to leave the EU, they did not vote to turn inwards or walk away from any of our partners in the world. The U.K. will be a confident, strong and dependable partner internationally; true to the universal values that we share together."

Theresa May has also addressed the UN summit on refugees, announcing a new British troop deployment to Somalia to help root-out the al-Shabaab militant group.

"The biggest threats to our prosperity and our security do not recognize or respect international borders and if we only focus on what we do at home, the job is barely half done. This is not the time to turn away from our United Nations, it is the time to turn towards it."

The UK military is going to send over 200 UK soldiers into Somalia as 'military advisors.'

Theresa May says a new UK military outpost is also going to be established in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

She also says Britain will host an international conference next year to address issues in Somalia and in other countries in the Horn of Africa.
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Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said on Tuesday that his country has made "remarkable progress" in fighting the extremist group Boko Haram, which staged terrorist attacks in the northeastern part of the West African country.

Buhari, speaking at the General Debate of the UN General Assembly, said, "Nigeria has made remarkable progress in our resolve to defeat Boko Haram whose capacity to launch orchestrated attacks as a formed group has been severely degraded."

"In the last few months, their operations have been limited to sporadic use of improvised explosive devices against soft targets," said the president.

"Ngieria has continued to combat terrorism based on the established rules of engagement and in conformity with international best practices," he said.

Boko Haram uses Nigeria's northeast region as its stronghold and has been frequently raided in the past six years.

Over the past months, the Nigerian government has launched several military operations to eliminate the terrorist threat.
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Thousands of protesters will demonstrate against the European Union's (EU) free trade deals with the United States and Canada late Tuesday in Brussels, as doubts and resistance intensifies across the continent.

Organizers expect 15,000 people to attend with the route covering areas around EU institutions, local media reported,

The demonstration, following several strikes in several German cities, is part of a series of planned activities against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), EU's trade deals with Washington and Toronto respectively.

Europe has recently seen increased anger and resistance toward the two deals from politicians and worker unions. This comes as parties hope to conclude TTIP by the end of this year and gain approvals on CETA from member states and the European Parliament.

French President Francois Hollande earlier criticized TTIP as "clearly unbalanced" and his government refrained support for continuing the talks while German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel believed the deal had "de facto failed" as Brussels and Washington reached no agreement after three years of negotiations.

Workers have opposed the deals fearing lower consumer and environment protection standards in Europe, and job losses. Another protest is planned in Bratislava on Friday, when EU trade ministers are expected to discuss the two deals.
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The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Tuesday that aid deliveries set to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas in war-torn Syria have been temporarily put on hold following an airstrike on a UN/Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy Monday.

"As an immediate security measure, other convoy movements in Syria have been suspended for the time being," OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke told the press.

According to reports, 18 out of 31 trucks carrying life-saving supplies were destroyed by warplanes in Urum al-Kubra, northwest of Aleppo.

The evening-attack resulted in at least one senior humanitarian official working for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent being killed as well as civilian casualties and severe damage to key infrastructure including a hospital.

A UN spokesperson said the convoy had received clearance from all required parties to deliver critical supplies of food, medical supplies as well as non-food items including blankets and clothes to some 78,000 people in Big Orem.

"This is a very, very dark day for humanitarians in Syria and across the world. I think there has been a moment of shock and frankly disgust by this attack," Laerke said.

"At this point, we remain committed and undeterred to continue to the best of our ability to help all Syrians in needed," he added.
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Tokyo and Paris are the most preferred tourist destinations for Chinese short-distance and long-distance outbound travels, respectively, according to a report issued by the World Tourism Cities Federation (WTCF) at its meeting held in Chongqing Municipality in southwest China.

The WTCF report says that Chinese tourists spent 215 billion U.S. dollars during their overseas travels in 2015, accounting for 17 percent all consumption by international customers.

More than 120 million Chinese tourists made overseas trips in 2015, up 10.09 percent year-on-year. America, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Britain saw the biggest increase in Chinese tourists in 2015.

According to the report, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Osaka, Jeju Island, Nagoya, Pattaya, Singapore, Inchon and Busan were the top 10 most preferred cities for Chinese tourists' short-distance outbound travel.

Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, Sydney, London, Venice, Washington, New York, Florence and Frankfurt were the 10 most favored long-distance destinations.

The report said that the strong growth of China's outbound tourism has contributed substantially to the world's tourist market.

Cheng Hong, deputy mayor of Beijing, was named WTCF executive vice president at the two-day meeting, which closed Tuesday.

WTCF is a non-governmental organization established in 2012. It now has a membership of 172 cities.
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South Korean parliament on Wednesday passed a resolution to denounce the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) over its latest nuclear test, urging the DPRK to abandon its nuclear program.

From the 300-member National Assembly, 203 lawmakers participated in the vote, with 200 voting in favor and three in abstention.

The resolution said the DPRK's reckless provocations will only lead the country to face isolation and pressure from the international community, urging Pyongyang to recognize that it cannot survive with nuclear development and to take immediate and effective measures for the full abandonment of its nuclear development plan.

The passage of the resolution followed the DPRK's announcement on Sept. 9 that it successfully conducted an explosion test of nuclear warhead that can be mounted on ballistic rockets.

Pyongyang had conducted a series of ballistic missile launches since top leader Kim Jong Un gave an order on March 15 to test a nuclear warhead and ballistic rockets capable of carrying the warhead "in a short time."

Earlier this month, the DPRK test fired three Rodong ballistic missiles that flew about 1,000 kilometers and landed near Japan's territorial waters.

On Aug. 24, a ballistic missile was launched from a DPRK submarine off its east coast, traveling 500 kilometers, the longest-ever distance by the DPRK.

South Korean lawmakers urged the military to establish a defense system to respond to the DPRK's nuclear test and submarine-launched ballistic missile.

They also urged the government to make diplomatic efforts at encouraging the DPRK to return to a dialogue table for denuclearization that can lead to peace on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia.
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Several police officers were wounded Tuesday evening in the U.S. city of Charlotte, North Carolina while trying to disperse a protest against police's fatal shooting of a black man, authorities said.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) said on its twitter account that "agitators" destroyed marked police cars during the demonstration.

A large crowd of protesters gathered Tuesday evening at The Village at College Downs apartment complex on the Old Concord Road, where an African-American man, identified as Keith Lamont Scott, was killed Tuesday afternoon by a police officer, local media reported.

Some protesters chanted "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One of them held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."

The protest turned violent when protesters surrounded police in riot gear and started throwing glass bottles and garbage at and vandalized police cars at the scene. The police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the protesters.

The CMPD said earlier that the shooting occurred after police officers looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant encountered Scott, who "exited a car with a gun."

Scott was shot because he was considered to be a threat to the officers, the CMPD said. Emergency personnel took him to Carolinas Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

But family members told a different story about the shooting, the Fox46 TV reported. They said Scott was disabled and unarmed, and was reading a book inside his car while waiting to pick up a child from a school bus.

Brentley Vinson, the officer who killed Scott, has been placed on paid administrative leave as a standard procedure pending an investigation of the shooting. Vinson is also an African-American.
Beer is good. The brewed beverage has been part of human life for at least 5,000 years . In fact many historians believe that the cultivation of grains and subsequent development of beer and bread led to something we all like better than brewski: civilization

When consumed in moderation, beer provides a relaxing, tasty and filling diversion from the stresses of everyday life. In the heat of summertime, ice-cold ale goes a long way; in winter, a frothy stout served at room temperature can give one energy and nutrition.

Because of such ameliorative effects, this veritable ambrosia has a distinct place in helping define the joys of human life all over the globe.

On that note, its impossible to drive through Wales without sampling the national brand, Brains. Up in the north of Britain, Newcastle Brown Ale represented the hearty and humble lifestyles of a sea-faring, coal-mining population.

And its like that everywhere we live, breathe, work and play, from San Miguel in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, to Polar in Caracas, Sapporo in Kyoto and Leinenkugel all over the upper Midwest of our United States.

Here in New Mexico, the sudsy supplement is a relatively recent addition to our culture, but has recently taken the lead as a social lubricant, after-work diversion and even as the basis for booming businesses in the Duke City. And while commercially- produced beers remain popular, the ascendence of craft beer has added a saucy and successful dimension to the proceedings.

Here in New Mexico, the sudsy supplement is a relatively recent addition to our culture, but has recently taken the lead as a social lubricant, after-work diversion and even as the basis for booming businesses in the Duke City.

Although wine has been made in this part of the world since the Spanish colonized the area in the 16th centuryand research done at the University of Colorado revealed that Indigenous peoples of the Southwest made traditional fermented beverages long before European colonizationit took the efforts of immigrants from central Europe to bring beer as we know it to this part of the West.

As the Industrial Revolution and the trans-continental railroad opened up the North American continent to immigrants in the middle of the 19th century, settlers from Germany, Austria, Scotland and Ireland landed in the Southwest. Among their possessions: a working, artisan-based knowledge of beer-making based on sometimes centuries-old traditions from their homelands.

In our state, breweries often popped up in boomtowns, farming communities and mining camps. Beer expert Jon C. Stott, author of the thirst-quenching tome, New Mexico Beer: A History of Brewing in the Land of Enchantment wrote that beer was broadly introduced to this region in the 1850s.

Nearly 40 years later, beer came to Burque in the form of the Southwestern Brewery and Ice Company. Located adjacent to the all-important rail line running through town, the behemoth of a buildingwhich is still standing on the edge of Downtownwas the home of Glorieta Beer.

Like most of the beer produced in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, experts reckon that Glorieta was heavier than the suds we are so familiar with now. Still, it was a popular brand among a host of smaller competing recipes made along the Rio Grande valley, outselling competing brands as the our city grew into the modern age.

Glorieta Beer was borne on the dreams of American immigrants who wanted to bring an essential part of their culture to their new home; they were successful because they turned a formerly small-scale, home-based activity into a commercial, even industrial process that could serve hundreds instead of scores.

Don and Harry Rankin, of Lawrence, Kan. partnered with German emigres and brewmasters Jacob and Henry Loebs to create the states first commercial brewery.

According to local histories and archives, their main product sold for a nickel in a tall mug at local saloons with names like the White Elephant, Free & Easy and Bucket of Blood.

All that fun ended in 1917 though, when the State of New Mexico became the 27th US location to enact laws prohibiting the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Southwestern went on as an ice factory, sans suds for decades after the ban took effect.

When the nightmare of Prohibition ended 16 years later, small beer-making operations resumed here and there in the state but no sizable operations came into fruition until near the end of the century with the rise of the Santa Fe Brewing Company. This time around, a middle course was charted. The next generation of brewers embraced artisan quality and traditional methods but loaded the glass with technology, an interest in community and a plan for economic success that surpassed corporate models in scope and execution.

Santa Fe Brewing Company, the state's largest beer-making outfit, was established in 1988. Luke Macias, brewery marketing director says the idea for the operation was realized when the original owner, Michael Levis, realized there was no craft beer in New Mexico even though the sweet substance had become popular up north, in Colorado.

Macias told Weekly Alibi, He [Levis] and a buddy went up to Colorado and bought a seven-barrel used beer-house they got from Boulder Beer Company. They made nut brown and pale ales, items that are still on our menu, but with slight tweaks, even though a lot has changed. We've grown with the times, IPA is still popular and Happy Camper, the first canned beer in New Mexico, is our biggest seller. What's important to us is that beer-making continues to grow as an industry here in New Mexico. We want to make great beer and help sustain that activity all around New Mexico. Good beer creates jobs and makes people happy.

Given that beer makes for happiness, imparts a sustainable job-market as the number of breweries grow, and so has a positive influence on local culture, it was only a matter of time until it bubbled back up in Burque.

And while they did not completely eschew the commercial, industrial level of beer-making that made the process a big money, corporate operation in Americaalong the lines of North American Beer-making giants like Anheuser-Busch and the Miller Brewing Companylocal and regional brewers have used their business acumen to create smaller, yet more effective niche markets, serving neighborhoods and small cities like Albuquerque with a cornucopia of flavor, excellent service and a singularly attractive, one-of-a-kind product.

Through this new vision, their products have become symbols of worthy small-business models, gained loyal followers and therefore ensured that beer would continue to flow throughout Albuquerque.

Shyla Sheppard, owner of Bow & Arrow Brewing Company , a relatively new member of the local brewery scene, says her number one goal is to create an excellent product. Along with co-owner Missy Begay and brewmaster Luke Steadman, an expert who has experience in all aspects of the beer-making process, her business is built on authenticity. We want to be meaningful on several levels, how our name, location and logo convey our core values. We want to be a brand that people can relate to. In terms of our branding, we are inspired by our unique heritage, landscape and people of the American Southwest. Attention to detail is important, bringing local beer drinkers a unique perspective through your brand is important. There would be no industry but for the customers.

As for their success in Burque, Sheppard adds, We share [with customers] a love of learning about the environment and culture; we have a sense of place. We're coming from [Native American] culture with a sense of pride and hope to encourage other [Indigenous] businesses.

Such declarations speak to the diversity available in Burque's collective beer experience. But they're also evidence of how a form of sustenance some say is responsible for our very civilization continues to have profound influence on the way we proceed through life, whether that vitality is for business or for pleasure.
U.S. Rep. John Katko's campaign is once again using Democratic candidate Colleen Deacon's own words against her in a television commercial.

The new ad, which begins airing on Syracuse-area broadcast and cable TV stations Wednesday, features a clip from Deacon's appearance in December on "The Campbell Conversations," a radio show hosted by Grant Reeher on WRVO.

Reeher asked Deacon, D-Syracuse, for her view on what the U.S. should be doing to combat ISIS, a Middle Eastern terrorist group. The portion of Deacon's response replayed in the ad is, "Um ... fighting ISIS, obviously, I ... I don't know what the answer is ..."

A narrator then mentions Deacon's support for the Iran nuclear deal  an agreement Katko, R-Camillus, opposes. Side-by-side images of Deacon, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State John Kerry are shown in the commercial.

While Katko's ad focuses on one small part of the interview, it leaves out a large chunk of Deacon's response to Reeher's question.

In that interview, Deacon said "keeping America safe is obviously our number one priority. That is non-negotiable."

She added: "I do know we need to have a strategy moving forward that works with our allies in a united front that is smart, to eliminate the terrorists and the terrorist threats that we have, not only to potentially America but all over the world.

"But I also think we need to have a plan going forward that when we do eliminate these organizations, we're not creating a vacuum where other organizations can move right in and take over where the others left off, which is what we're seeing happening now."

The goal of the Katko for Congress ad is clear: To highlight a potential area of weakness for Deacon in the campaign.

Katko has become a leading voice in Congress on national security issues. He chaired a task force that examined terrorist travel to the United States and the threat posed by these individuals.

He's also the chair of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, a panel that's tackled several aviation security issues under his leadership.

Deacon hasn't shied away from national security issues, but has focused mainly on domestic issues throughout her congressional campaign. Her website lists several positions on issues ranging from the economy and education to infrastructure and paid family leave.

Deacon's website doesn't mention any of her positions on national security-related topics.

Katko is running for re-election against Deacon in the 24th Congressional District race. The district is comprised of Cayuga, Onondaga and Wayne counties, plus the western portion of Oswego County.

Election Day is Nov. 8.
Sept. 21, 1936

Fire, the origin of which was not learned, threatened a score of cottages at Southeast-on-Owasco Monday evening. One was burned with its contents. It was the property of Henry Morris of Samson Street, Cortland. The roof of the cottage just north of the Morris cottage was burned. The second cottage is the property of Ernest Rogererg of Whitney Point. Slightly damaged was a cottage south of the burned one and it is the property of E. W. Cannon of Horseheads.

The 20 camps are all in a "huddle" and only the lack of wind prevented a conflagration such as visited Cascade on the opposite side of the lake a few years ago.

Sept. 21, 1961

New officers of the Order of Rainbow for Girls were installed at a meeting held at the Masonic Temple Sunday. Louise Reed, installing officer; Vlasta Ceresnak, worthy associate advisor; Linda Reed, worthy advisor; Gail Kingston, Hope; Robin Schreiber, Charity, and Dianne Chilson, Faith.

Sept. 21, 2006

Following the organically produced goods trend, one Cayuga County agency organized a farm tour to showcase the "new push" in farming. A group of county employees, farmers and anyone with a stake in the region's land jumped on a bus that took them to three stops on this year's Cayuga County Graze New York Tour. The agency's staff hopes to encourage other operations to allow cattle and other farm animals to roam pastures and eat grass rather than force them to stand all day and munch feed.

Cayuga County earned the 40th spot in the nation for milk dairy production. Jason Cuddeback, district technician for the soil and water organization, aims to use the growing popularity of grass-grazing to counter allegations that have heated up over the summer. Politicians and residents often blame farmers as the main cause of issues in Owasco Lake. Excess phosphorous running into the water caused oxygen depletion which in turned caused the plants and fish to die.

Sept. 21, 2011

The carriage house theater on the grounds of the Cayuga Museum will be getting a new name to go along with the $400,000 of restoration work. The Cayuga Museum announced that when the 70-year-old theater reopens in the spring it will be named Theater Mack in honor of the Maciulewicz family and their business, Mack Studios.

Casimir Maciulewicz, founder of Mack Studios, was a longtime supporter and president of the museum's board of trustees, and Peter Maciulewicz, the present owner and CEO of the design company, has served as a board member for 12 years and is currently president. Mack Studios donated all of the exhibit furniture and display work to the museum and Peter and Carol Maciulewicz are the largest private donors to the theater restoration project.
Authorities are still investigating a two-car collision that killed one person and injured several others last week.

Buddha Subba, a 21-year-old from Rochester, died Saturday at the scene of a head-on crash at the intersection of Route 104 and State Barn Road in Sterling, according to the New York State Police.

Troopers said Subba, who was driving a Honda Accord with four other passengers, was traveling westward on State Barn Road and continued onto Route 104, but failed to yield at a yield sign to an eastbound Buick Century driven by 32-year-old Corey Messmer, of Scottsville.

State police originally reported Monday that three people in Subba's vehicle were seriously injured. Investigators clarified Wednesday that one of the vehicle's passengers was seriously injured, while the three other occupants suffered superficial injuries. An updated medical status was not available at this time.

Messmer, who was 31 at the time of the crash, was uninjured, while his only passenger suffered minor injuries, according to state police.

Charges are pending. Troopers said the case will be reviewed by the Cayuga County District Attorney's Office.

A GoFundMe page has been started to raise money for Subba's funeral and medical expenses. According to the page, Subba's wife, Reeta, was seriously injured in the crash. By Wednesday morning, around $2,500 had been raised through the webpage.
Premier Li Keqiang's meeting with top executives in New York will help to push forward China-US economic relations, including ongoing negotiations on bilateral investment, experts said.

In his four-day New York trip to attend the annual United Nations session, Li has been reaching out to the US business community as much as possible and has met representatives of the media, think tanks and leaders from economic and financial circles. On Tuesday night, he and his entourage will also attend a reception hosted by the Economic Club of New York, a non-profit membership organization.

The meeting with business executives is seen as a public diplomacy effort by Li to set out a clear direction for future China-US relations and to strengthen mutual understanding between the business communities of the two countries.

Xu Hongcai, a researcher with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said that Li's meeting with the business leaders in New York shows China's desire to gain insight into the concerns of the business community, which could advance China-US commercial relations from a bottom-up approach.

"It shows that the Chinese leader wants to know more about the demands of the business community and to respond to their concerns and questions," Xu said.

Negotiations for the bilateral investment treaty comprise one of the most closely watched issues in China-US economic relations.

Experts have urged greater flexibility in resolving disputes in the negotiations so that the two sides could soon reach agreement on the treaty.

China and the US have made progress toward concluding the negotiations for a treaty with the objective of creating fair, transparent and liberalized investment regimes.

The two sides have recently exchanged the third revised and significantly improved negative list proposals. A negative list defines sectors that remain off-limits to each other's investments, with areas not on the list considered to be open.

Li Guanghui, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing, said both sides should intensify negotiations and speed up work to conclude a mutually beneficial treaty with high standards.

But he warned that the negotiation could be more challenging with the US presidential election in November creating more uncertainties.

China and the United States started the treaty negotiations in 2008 to increase mutual investment. Since June, the two countries have engaged in negotiations on negative lists.
New Zealand approved on Tuesday the sale of a 50 percent stake in the country's largest meat processor, Silver Fern Farms, to a unit of China's Bright Food Group, enhancing the South Island-based company's access into the Chinese market.

The approval of the NZ$261 million ($191 million) deal is an encouraging outcome for Chinese investors, following a high-profile rejection and complaints over the slow approval process.

The Dunedin-based company had voted in October to allow Shanghai Maling Aquarius Co, a unit of State-owned enterprise Bright Food, to take a half-share in the firm and applied for approval from foreign investment regulators the same month.

Minister for Land Information Louise Upston, who approved the deal after it received the go-ahead from the Overseas Investment Office, said in a statement it would "put the company in a better financial position and allow it to increase its exports".

Silver Fern Farms Chairman Rob Hewitt said the capital invested would allow the company to develop its brand and strategy.

The company is particularly focused on the China market, their biggest by volume, and can take advantage of Bright Foods' supply chains and 8,000 Chinese supermarkets.

"It's the fastest-growing protein market in the world so it's going to bring significant benefit," Hewitt said of Bright Foods' involvement.

Chinese companies have in recent years been attracted to New Zealand's agricultural sector as China seeks sources of high-quality protein to feed its fast-growing middle class. However, some Chinese investors have hit roadblocks from political opposition to foreign ownership of domestic assets.

In September 2015, the New Zealand government blocked the NZ$88 million purchase of a local farm by Shanghai Pengxin Group Co, despite the OIO approving the sale. The government said at the time they were not satisfied there would be "substantial benefit" to New Zealand.

Reuters
As the West Onondaga County Journal marks its 10th anniversary in 2016, we take a look at the people, places and events that made headlines around the community over the past decade.

With the help of the Skaneateles Historical Society, we have compiled a list of the biggest stories of the past 10 years for this week in history:

Sept. 20, 2006

 Sandra Rademacher, the owner of the Lady of the Lake bed-and-breakfast in Skaneateles, hosts a crew from MTV for the filming of an episode of MADE that profiles Liverpool teen Brandin Fennessy.

 The village of Skaneateles launches a website for the first time, offering a variety of information from a calendar to a list of forms for downloading, in hopes of keeping village residents better informed.

 The Skaneateles Board of Education will pay out $35,342 in school tax rebates to 19 different claims that range from paperwork and assessor errors to cases that have gone before small claims court.

Sept. 19, 2007

 The Skaneateles village board postpones the effective date for a resolution that would decrease or completely cut retiree health insurance benefits and hires a consultant to look at insurance options.

 The Skaneateles Town Board hosts a public informational session to discuss the possibility of forming a Highland Avenue drainage district to address flooding problem in a swamp behind properties there.

 The Dispatch Citizens Advisory Committee submits its final report to the village and town boards that recommends keeping the Skaneateles Communications Center and suggests improvements over time.

Sept. 17, 2008

 West Lake Street residents and contractors with Big Horn Construction come to a consensus to limit the hours of construction on a nearly home, negating the need for a village ordinance limiting noise.

 Skaneateles Town Councilor Dave Laxton is pushing a program to conserve open spaces and agricultural land to prevent them becoming developed and organizing a committee to head the effort.

 Assemblyman Will Barclay brings a RemaiNY committee member and a fellow Assemblyman to Skaneateles for a forum on issues facing young New Yorkers and their decisions to leave the state.

Sept. 23, 2009

 Skaneateles resident Don Spear promises to abide by any future conditions set by the Skaneateles Town Board involving a drainage district for his Hidden Estates property on the east side of the lake.

 Children wait outside Skaneateles Middle School, one of five stops on the 100-mile Ride for Missing Children, with cheers and signs for the 60 bicyclists who had ridden 50 miles so far in the annual event.

 Both the Democratic and Republican parties in Skaneateles are proud of the fact that the community has excellent participation in elections with three contested races of five total on November's ballot.

Sept. 22, 2010

 As the Skaneateles Communications Center prepares to turn out the lights for the last time in its 43-year history, dispatchers say the move may save money, but the community will lose a valuable service.

 A group of six urban design graduate students from the University of Notre Dame spends a week in Skaneateles researching the community's planning needs and presenting the findings of their work.

 The Skaneateles village board will conduct a public meeting next month about the consolidation into the town's assessment department as part of an effort to eliminate duplicate services and save money.

Sept. 21, 2011

 The Skaneateles Area Chamber of Commerce hosts a talk with speakers who represent opposing sides of the question on whether hydrofracking for natural gas is a viable industry for New York state.

 Katie Brennan, 26, and Chris Grilli, 28, become the owners of the more than 50-year-old Skaneateles Bakery that is a favorite lunch destination among residents and visitors to the village of Skaneateles.

 The Parks and Recreation Council of Skaneateles aims to raise $125,000 to update an area of Austin Park where a swing set, jungle gym and sandbox now stand and form a committee to oversee the work.

Sept. 19, 2012

 Potential buyers of the large, unfinished mansion on West Lake Road can tour the large blue-roofed home with an auction set at the house after its previous owner was indicted for money laundering.

 The Skaneateles Village Police Department is boosting its efforts to retrieve overdue and outstanding parking revenue from unpaid parking tickets in the amount of $38,000 for a total of 3,173 tickets.

 The Skaneateles Education Foundation funds with a grant a week-long visit from long-distance swimmer, author and speaker Lynne Cox, an idea that came from a group of 10th-grade students.

Sept. 18, 2013

 Skaneateles Police Chief Lloyd Perkins tells the village board that the police department's Sept. 5 move into the new village hall was smooth and uneventful, and a few things remain to be adjusted.

 The Skaneateles First Presbyterian Church will host its annual fundraiser for the John Dau Foundation at the Skaneateles Country Club six years after establishing a medical clinic in South Sudan.

 Shane Lauer and twin brothers Jack and Nolan Willis, who all live with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, participate in the Skinnyman Triathlon through a group called Athletes Serving Athletes.

Sept. 24, 2014

 For the first time, the Skaneateles Country Club served as the venue for the 39th annual International Antique & Classic Boat Show, with many Skaneateles residents taking the chance to show their boats.

 The Skaneateles Board of Education starts off the school year by adding the Communication and Policy committees to its roster of committees and renaming the Curriculum and Instruction committee.

 The Skaneateles Town Board adopts a document that contains a mission statement and vision statement for the Rails to Trails Committee as it seeks to develop a network of nature trails in the town.

Sept. 23, 2015

 Skaneateles Nursery School hosts a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its new location at the Skaneateles Central School District office building after losing its previous home at St. James' Episcopal Church.

 The Marcellus Central School District submitted to the state Education Department ahead of times its design specifications for a $14.85 million capital project to upgrade the district's three buildings.

 The Skaneateles Board of Education aims to host a public meeting during the Skaneateles High School open house to bring parents and students up to speed on the district's ranking system changes.
Levan Davitashvili, Georgia's agriculture minister, delivered a speech at the press briefing with media representatives on Sept 13, 2016. [Photo/ moa.gov.ge]

A day after China and Georgia announced they would sign a free-trade agreement late this year, Georgia's agriculture minister said the two countries' wine industries would be big beneficiaries very quickly.

"Our countries have a special relationship that goes back to the Silk Road era and before," said Levan Davitashvili, who took a break from Georgia's ongoing election campaign to discuss the news with a group of visiting Chinese journalists.

"Today the tariff on wine imports in China is 48.5 percent, but after the FTA goes into effect next summer, it will be 0," he said.

"But there will be big benefits for both countries, especially for Chinese producers who will be doing joint ventures in Georgia. We have free trade agreements with one-third of the world, including the EU, Turkey and Russia, so 'Made in Georgia' products will open a great window for Chinese companies."

For Georgia companies, he noted, the wine industry has a big head start, thanks to an investment of about $500,000 his country has made to tell the story of Georgia wine in China.

"Four years ago, we had a target to become 1 percent of total Chinese wine imports, which at that time was about 300 million bottles," he said. "We have already reached that goal, selling 5 million bottles to China last year. Our target now is to be selling 20 million bottles annually five years from now."

While Georgia may be most famous in Europe for its quality white wines, he says, exports to China are 80 percent red wine, as China is the world's largest consumer of red wine. Sparkling wine and brandy make up the remaining exports.

Georgia claims the title of the "cradle of wine," with a tradition of winemaking that archaeologists have documented going back 6,000 years. The country also has 525 recognized grape varieties, but the bulk of wines that go to China are the rich, red-black vintages of Saperavi.

"We have been eager to develop this agreement," he told China Daily, noting that it fits very well with the Belt and Road Initiatives of President Xi Jinping.

Wine, agricultural produce and commodities and the chemical industry are all areas that will benefit, he said.

Tourism is expected to grow as well, he said, citing statistics that show Georgia is the third-safest country in the world.
In a new focus in the hunt for corrupt officials who have fled overseas, police will not only bring fugitives back to China to face justice, but will also emphasize recovering their ill-gotten assets, the Ministry of Public Security said.

While the previous priority was collecting evidence in overseas manhunts, the recovery of assets acquired illegally in China will be a new anti-corruption initiative in the coming months, said a senior official at the ministry who requested anonymity.

As part of the new initiative, public security authorities will work closely with People's Bank of China, particularly the division that cracks down on money laundering, the official said.

In addition, authorities will enhance communication and conduct joint investigations with other countries on a case-by-case basis inan attempt to repatriate more corrupt officials so they can stand trial. They also will share intelligence with their counterparts in those countries to locate, freeze and recover the ill-gotten assets, he said last week.

In recent years, the United States, Canada, Australia and Singapore have become popular destinations for corrupt Chinese officials, due to a lack of bilateral extradition treaties and differences in laws, the ministry has said.

A large number of corrupt officials have transferred billions of yuan in illegal funds to their foreign accounts, either through money laundering or underground banks, the ministry said.

As part of operation "Fox Hunt 2016", which began in April, 409 fugitives have been returned from 61 countries and regions, it said. Thirty-eight former officials charged with corruption were among those arrested.

Meanwhile, Chinese police have extradited a fugitive surnamed Chen from France, the first such action there since an extradition treaty between the two countries took effect last year.

Chen, who is charged with illegal acquisition of public funds worth more than 20 million yuan ($3 million), was extradited to China on Monday after spending three years on the run in France.

According to the ministry, more than 30 teams of law enforcement officers have been sent to capture fugitives in such countries as Madagascar, Thailand, Peru, the Philippines, Ecuador, the Republic of Korea, Cambodia and Spain.

Several more fugitives will be extradited from Europe and South America in the near future, said the anonymous official at the ministry.
With travel and trade on rise, China seeks quarantine cooperation within Eurasia

China is looking to step up cooperation with Eurasian countries in border health quarantine procedures to prevent the spread of endemic diseases just as the Belt and Road Initiative is set to bring about more frequent international exchanges.

Establishing a China-Eurasia health quarantine cooperation mechanism would help to prevent the spread of endemic diseases such as the Zika virus and Middle East respiratory syndrome, according to Zhang Jiwen, head of the Department of Supervision on Health Quarantine. The department is part of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

He made the remarks at an international forum on entry-exit health quarantine at the Fifth China-Eurasian Expo, which opened on Tuesday. The Expo, to be held until Sunday in Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, has attracted representatives from 57 countries and six international organizations.

Zhang said the Belt and Road Initiative will bring more frequent international exchanges in cargo and personnel as cross-border trade increases.

"The public health risks in the border areas will also increase as a result," he said.

Zhang noted that there are 4.4 billion people in Eurasia, and public health conditions and endemic disease transmission rates vary greatly among countries.

"HIV, malaria, dengue in the Greater Mekong region; MERS and echinococcosis in Central Asia; and poliomyelitis and tuberculosis in West Asia and Africa, have all posed threats to Eurasian countries," he said.

Zhang said the authority has proposed a research effort leading to creation of a cooperative health quarantine mechanism for countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative in three to five years.

It also hopes to establish a cooperative network for port quarantine among those countries in five to 10 years, he said.

"The network will enable a more sound health quarantine system and cooperation scheme among those countries," he said.

The spread of the Zika virus demonstrates the importance of enhanced surveillance globally, said Chin Kei Lee, medical officer for emerging infectious diseases with the World Health Organization's China Office. Chin spoke on the sidelines of the forum.

"Eventually there will always be a risk for disease to be transmitted to any country, including China. For global problems, there is a need for global solutions," he said.

"Enhanced surveillance ... of the situation of different countries will be very useful for countries including China to see where the risks are and how to control the risks," he said.

He said that collective and coordinated actions between countries can make a difference in the prevention of endemic diseases.

China has intercepted 11 of 22 imported cases of Zika virus through border health inspection procedures, according to the AQSIQ.
More international air routes between Urumqi and major cities in Western Europe, Egypt and India will be launched in the next decade, officials announced Tuesday. The expanded service is expected to strengthen connections between the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and destinations along the Belt and Road Initiative.

Urumqi International Airport operates 24 direct and connecting international passenger routes to destinations in Central Asia, Turkey, Iran, Russia, South Korea and Azerbaijan.

But it doesn't provide direct service to Western Europe.

Demand is rising from China's central and western regions for better service to Western and Central Europe for tourism and business travel, said Tang Zhanyou, deputy secretary-general of Urumqi's government.

"The routes to Western Europe are expected to save a significant amount of travel time for passenge

rs wishing to travel from Xinjiang to Paris or Frankfurt. Chinese passengers won't need to transfer in other European cities such as Vienna or Helsinki before reaching their final destinations in Western and Central Europe," Tang said.

Air China will launch a Chengdu-Urumqi-Rome route by year's end following approval from the Civil Aviation Administration this month.

The city government will complete the construction of terminal 4 at Urumqi International by 2020, which will expand the airport's capacity by 40 million passengers a year, Tang said.

It will be one of the largest airport terminals in western China and will have three runways, including one that can handle the Airbus A380 super jumbo jet.

Urumqi International serves as an important civil aviation and air traffic hub in western China. It has expanded three times since it came into service in 1973. It is also one of the regional hubs for China Southern Airlines Co.

Feng Hao, an air transportation researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission, said both new terminal and air routes in Urumqi will contribute to growth in air cargo, tourism, trade and investment business linked to the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as creating momentum to improve regional connectivity and people-to-people exchanges.
A court in Beijing on Tuesday ordered internet celebrity Sun Jie and Hong Kong-based herbal drink maker Jiaduobao Group, to apologize to the family of deceased war hero Qiu Shaoyun for social media posts that the court said harmed Qiu's reputation and honor.

Daxing District People's Court said that Sun and JDB must publicly apologize on five consecutive days and pay 1 yuan ($0.15) as compensation for mental suffering to Qiu Shaohua, the hero's brother.

Chinese children learn about Qiu in school. As a soldier in the Korean War (1950-53), Qiu, 26, was concealed in the grass on Hill 391 before an attack by Chinese forces, but the US Army dropped an incendiary bomb nearby. Instead of moving and betraying his position, and that of hundreds of fellow soldiers, Qiu burned to death.

Skeptical of the official story, Sun Jie mocked Qiu Shaoyun as "barbecued meat" in a post in 2013 on Sina Weibo to more than 6 million followers, saying that "consumers refused to pay ... as it was only half roasted".

"They think the barbecued meat of Lai Ning is better," he said, referring to a 14-year-old Chinese middle school student who died trying to help put out a forest fire in 1988.

The post caused a stir before Sun deleted it the next day.

In April 2015, JDB, the beverage maker, referenced the controversy again by promising in its own Weibo post to give 100,000 cans of herbal tea to Sun should he open a barbecue shop.

It issued a statement of apology quickly after the post, but Qiu Shaoyun's brother sued Sun and JDB in June 2015, demanding "immediate cessation", as well as the "elimination of ill effects" by means of apologies and the payment of 1 yuan for mental distress.

In its verdict, the court said Sun's comments were intentionally derogatory and humiliating.

The spread of such comments online had "a negative influence, harmed public sentiment, undermined the public interest and caused Qiu's family psychological damage", it said.

It added that as a household name in China, JDB had failed to exercise discretion in its marketing and therefore should bear legal responsibility.
Seven police sniffer dogs and their handlers, fresh from a successful security mission at the G20 Leaders Summit early this month in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, were welcomed at Harbin Taiping International Airport in Heilongjiang province recently.

"As early as March, we began to train and select sniffer dogs for the summit from more than 200 police dogs at our training base," said Qi Ming, director of the dog training facility of the Heilongjiang provincial border defense troops in Harbin.

After four months of training and rounds of internal selection, seven dogs passed the strict examination of the Ministry of Public Security and joined the mission to intercept explosives during the summit, Qi said.

"As soon as we arrived at Hangzhou on July 30, we dedicated ourselves to intense training even though the summit wouldn't start for another month," said Zheng Hang, the team leader. "Every day we spent more than 12 hours outside. The high temperature of the city was an enormous challenge for the dogs, which are native to the northeast."

In order to lower the temperature, they installed electric fans and automatic spray devices in kennels and placed blocks of ice outside. In addition, they decided to shave off the hair of the northern dogs.

"I chose a Mohawk style for my 4-year-old Labrador, which makes him look quite fashionable. But now another problem is coming. How will he withstand the winter cold in Harbin before its hair grows out again? Maybe I'll have to tailor a cotton waistcoat for him," Zheng said.

Wu Xu, a handler with another Labrador, said: "The heavy tasks and uncomfortable conditions will more or less affect the dogs' mood. As their trainers, we pay attention to their daily lives, but it is most important to interact with them. They like being touched, and we also often talk with them."

Wu told this story: "One day, when we patrolled around West Lake, my feet seemed to catch fire, even though I was wearing thick shoes, because of the high surface temperature. My dog kept scampering on the scalding road. Suddenly it jumped into the lake to cool itself. I really didn't have the heart to rebuke it, but I had to ask it to go ashore because we were on duty."

During the monthlong mission, the team patrolled an area of more than 2 million square meters and intercepted more than 260 prohibited items.
In their wheelchairs, leprosy victims Huang Shaokuan (left), 90, and Chen Yanfang, 80, visit the Palace Museum in Beijing on Tuesday. They are delegates from Guangdong province to the 19th International Leprosy Congress. Both were disabled by the disease during childhood.Feng Yongbin / China Daily

China lauded for its efforts at keeping level of knowledge high

After decades of effort against leprosy, the possibility of eliminating the disease in China is possible by 2020, according to Ann Aerts, head of the Novartis Foundation, on Tuesday.

Eradication is measured by the reduction of new cases over time.

Because leprosy has an incubation period of five to 10 years, a person acquiring symptoms today may have been infected years ago. But the disease has been in decline in China and is expected to trickle to a halt by 2020.

Aerts spoke with China Daily during the 19th International Leprosy Congress in Beijing.

Leprosy is infectious but curable. The organism that causes it, mycobacterium leprae, has the unique ability to infect the peripheral nerves in humans, which may result in an inability to feel pain in the hands or feet, blindness and the loss of fingers or toes.

Currently, China detects around 600 to 700 new leprosy patients annually. They can receive immediate treatment through the country's healthcare system, which has successfully reduced transmission of the disease, Aerts said.

Globally, around 211,000 people were diagnosed with leprosy in 2015 - an average of one every 2.5 minutes. Of those, 1 in 11 are children, indicating continued transmission of the disease.

It is estimated that 1.2 million people are visibly and irreversibly disabled by leprosy, the foundation said. India, Indonesia and Brazil account for 85 percent the leprosy patients worldwide. They are learning from China's experience, Aerts said.

"China has kept the level of knowledge on leprosy high among healthcare workers, which has been beneficial for bringing the disease under control," she said. "In some countries, leprosy no longer figures in the education curriculum for nurses and doctors, and that has led to a general waning of leprosy expertise, resulting in missed opportunities and delayed diagnoses."

For now, what China needs to do is interrupt transmission - for example, by examining the family members and neighbors of existing patients and offering preventive treatment, she said.

Novartis, a Switzerland-based healthcare company, provides anti-leprosy medicine free and has donated more than 56 million blister packs valued at around $90 million through the World Health Organization, which has helped to treat more than 6 million leprosy patients around the globe since 2000.
Educational equality is an important foundation of social equality. Ensuring students from impoverished families enter school and complete their studies smoothly, is an important measure to promote educational equality and a crucial means to alleviate poverty.

In 2015, through the joint efforts of the financial and educational departments of the central and local governments, as well as schools at all levels, student financial aid in China made new breakthroughs.

The national student financial aid system was enhanced through increased subsidies, with more special aids targeting at registered poverty-stricken students, orphans and disabled students. New policies were also implemented to prevent students dropping from school due to financial problems.

1. The national student aid policies were further improved.

In 2015, focusing on weak links of student aid policies, the financial and educational departments of central and local governments adjusted and introduced student financial aid policies according to the regional level of economic and social development and the need of students from impoverished families. The national student financial aid system covering learning stages from preschool to postgraduate education was improved to affect more students.

1.1 New national student aid policies have been developed.

The repayment period for national student loans was extended to the school year plus 13 years, no longer than 20 years. The loans' grace period was extended from two years to three years.

The government-funded interest discount would be provided when the student pursues further degrees or suspends schooling owing to bad health. The establishment of a new reimbursement-based aid was proposed, providing subsidies to students who lost capacity to work due to injury. The mechanism was first established in Jiangsu, Hunan, and Shandong provinces.

The annual standard of national tuition assistance for high schools and secondary vocational schools grew from 1,500 yuan ($224.9) per student per year to 2,000 yuan per student per year.

The tuition exemption policy for high school students was enhanced. After the fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of education and the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development explored ways to waive the tuition of students from impoverished families on record. The new tuition exemption policy was specially designed for minority students in high schools in the Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous regions, as well as Qinghai, Sichuan, Hainan and Hunan provinces.

The range for secondary vocational schools' tuition exemption eligibility was also expanded in regions such as Hainan, Shanghai, Guizhou, Henan and Gansu. Up to 2015, 17 provinces have accomplished tuition exemption for all secondary vocational school students.

Regions such as Shanghai, Jiangsu, Fujian, and Guangxi further enlarged the range of students receiving living expenses' subsidies while attending boarding schools. The scope of coverage was expanded to non-boarding students from impoverished families or all boarding students. Yunnan, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Qinghai further increased these subsidies.

Aid policy was specially drafted for students from extremely impoverished families on record in Guizhou, Shandong, Chongqing, Shaanxi and Gansu. Aid systems for disabled orphans were built up in provinces such as Hebei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui and Guangdong.

1.2 The national student financial aids have formed system.

The national student financial aid system in China covers all learning stages, both public and private schools and all students from impoverished families.

Under the new policy, local governments are the primary sources of financial aid and the central government provides subsidies as rewards to them. Preschool-age children from impoverished families, children with disabilities and orphans enrolling in kindergarten are also eligible for financial support.

For students in compulsory education (grades one to nine), the government provides free education for all students and offers free textbooks for rural students and students from impoverished urban families. The government also distributes free Chinese dictionaries to rural students, provides subsidies for boarding students from impoverished families and provides nutritious meals for students in impoverished areas.

For students in secondary vocational education, the dominant student aid mode is to forego tuition and grant national stipends, while supplementary aid provides students with aid through workplace internships and funding from schools and social sponsors.

For students in high school education, the dominant model is to provide national stipends, and the supplementary aid provides school funds and funds from social donations.

For undergraduate students, the government provides student aid in multiple ways, including national scholarships and stipends, loans, school stipends, work-study programs, free education for normal students, tuition subsidies for retired soldiers, subsidies for enlisted students and students from impoverished families, meal subsidies, tuition exemption and a "green channel", which allows freshman register at colleges or universities even when they cannot pay the full tuition.

For post-graduate students, the government provides student aid in the forms of national scholarships and stipends, loans, school stipends, tuition subsidies for retired soldiers, subsidies for enlisted students, and the "green channel".

2. Funding of student aid kept growing substantially.

Funding of student aid kept growing in 2015, which surpassed 150 billion yuan for the first time, an increase of 10 percent from 2014. The sum of subsidies for free textbooks and nutritional programs reached 45 billion yuan.

2.1 The total funding surpassed 150 billion yuan.

In 2015, a total of 156.03 billion yuan was spent on subsidizing 84.33 million students receiving preschool education, compulsory education, secondary vocational education, high school education and higher education. The funding increased by 13.90 billion yuan, or 9.78 percent, from 2014. The amount of government funding in student financial aid has maintained rapid growth for nine years, since the government started building the national student financial aid system in 2007.

A total of 5.36 billion yuan was used to subsidize 4.58 million preschool children. About 17.32 billion yuan was put into school boarding for students during compulsory education, supporting 14.77 million people.

About 15.67 million students at secondary vocational schools received financial support, totaling 34.62 billion yuan. About 7.90 million high school students received financial subsidies, the sum of which reached 13.93 billion yuan, an increase of 2.41 billion yuan, or about 20.99 percent, from 2014. More than 41 million college and university students were supported by subsidies of nearly 85 billion yuan, up 13.11 billion yuan, or 18.29 percent.

China has focused on increasing subsidies for college and university students, especially for graduate students, reducing financial burdens for their families. In 2015, subsidies for them grew rapidly. The total sum of national student loans increased by 5.29 billion yuan, or 31.66 percent, from 2014. National stipends for graduates, scholarships and the "Three Assistances" for graduates increased by 5.04 billion yuan, 3.13 billion yuan and 749 million yuan respectively.

2.2 Free textbooks cost 18.7 billion.

In 2015, nearly 16.3 billion yuan was provided by financial departments for subsidizing free textbooks to 124 million students. About 1.10 billion yuan came from the central government. About 5.33 billion yuan was from local governments. And 2.40 billion yuan was provided by financial departments of local governments for subsidizing free textbooks to 56.98 million primary and high school students.

2.3 26.4 billion yuan was provided for nutrition programs .

In 2015, student nutrition programs were carried out in about 89,000 schools, subsidizing over 21.11 million students. Over 20 billion yuan from the central government was provided for the nutrition programs. Pilot programs were developed in 720 counties of 25 provinces, covering about 45,000 schools, supporting 11.23 million students. Abut 6.30 billion yuan was provided by financial departments of local governments.

3. Government played the key role in the national student financial aid.

The funding of national student financial aid primarily came from government funding, supplemented by schools' funds and social donations.

3.1 Government spent more than 100 billion yuan on student financial aid, an increase of 6 percent from 2014.

In 2015, 105.19 billion yuan was provided for student financial aid by government funding, an increase of 6.24 billion yuan, or 6.31 percent, from 2014. About 55.94 billion yuan came from central government, up 4.10 billion yuan, or 7.92 percent. More than 49.25 billion yuan was from local governments, an increase of 2.14 billion yuan, or 4.54 percent.

Government funding was the main source of national student subsidies, accounting for 67.42 percent of the total. About 35.85 percent was from the central government while 31.56 percent was from local governments.

Over 5.17 billion yuan, was spent on subsidizing preschool education, accounting for 96.51 percent of the total funding. Subsidies for school boarding during compulsory education all came from government funding. More than 26.7 billion yuan was put into subsidies for vocational secondary schools, which constituted 77.15 percent. About 12.84 billion yuan provided by government funding made up 92.17 of subsidies for high school students. Over 43.15 billion yuan, or 50.88 percent of the sum of subsidies for college and high school, came from government funding.

3.2 Universities provided over 22 billion yuan for national student loans, up 31 percent from 2014.

2015 was the first year after the standard of national student loans was improved. Student loans supported by colleges and universities reached 21.99 billion yuan, up 5.29 billion yuan, or 31.66 percent from 2014. It is an important part of subsidies colleges and universities provided, which compromised 25.93 percent of the total.

3.3 Schools and society provided 28.8 billion yuan, an increase of 9 percent.

In 2015, 28.86 billion yuan of subsidies came from the revenue of schools and donation of enterprises and institutions, social groups and individuals, an increase of 2.33 billion yuan, or 8.76 percent, from 2014, accounting for 18.49 percent of the total subsidies. And 19.04 billion yuan was from the revenue of schools, making up 12.20 percent of the total subsidies. Subsidies of about 9.81 billion yuan came from the donation of enterprises, social groups and individuals, which constituted 6.29 percent of the total.

4. All policies were implemented effectively.

In 2015, financial and educational departments at all levels promoted the increase of aid funds, and the intensity and the effectiveness of aid policies.

4.1 Subsidies for preschool children

In 2015, nearly 4.58 million children in kindergartens received financial support from various channels. More than 4.29 million of them were supported by the government. About 238,200 were supported by kindergartens and 48,400 received charitable donations. The sum of all subsidies reached nearly 5.36 billion yuan. Some 5.17 billion yuan came from the government, 158 million yuan came from kindergartens and 29.20 million yuan from charitable donations.

1) Aid from the government

In 2015, government at all levels helped more than 4.3 million children - about 11.38 percent of all children at kindergartens nationwide - with financial subsidies. In western China, about 2.53 million children received financial aid, accounting for 22.78 percent of all enrollment. In central China, 839,500 children received financial aid, about 6.19 percent. About 921,900 children received financial aid in eastern China, more than 7 percent of the total enrollment.

Government at all levels provided financial aid of 5.17 billion yuan. There was 1 billion yuan from the central government to support kindergartens nationwide, accounting for 19.32 percent of the total, 2.19 billion yuan, or 42.33 percent from provincial-level, 377 million yuan from city-level, or 7.29 percent, and 1.61 billion yuan from county-level, or 31.06 percent.

By region, about 3.23 billion yuan, or 62.37 percent, was spent in western China. About 853 million yuan, or 16.49 percent, was spent in central China. About 1.09 billion yuan, or 21.1 percent, was used in eastern China.

2) Aid from kindergartens

In 2015, about 238,200 children in kindergartens received financial support from kindergartens' revenue. Approximately 114,100 are from western China, 73,500 from central China, 50,600 from eastern China. The subsidy amounted to 158 million yuan, with 72 million spent in western China, 39 million in central China and 47 million yuan in eastern China.

3) Aid from society

In 2015, about 48,400 children received the aid from society nationwide. Approximately 26,100 are from western China, 5,400 from central China, 16,900 from eastern China. The subsidy amounted to 29.20 million yuan, 14.35 million yuan was spent in western China, 2.97 million yuan in central China and 11.88 million yuan in eastern China.

4.2 Subsidies for students in compulsory education

In 2015, the government provided free textbooks for the country's 124 million students in the compulsory education stage. About 56.98 million students enjoyed the free textbook policy supported by local government, 14.77 million students from impoverished families were subsidized for living expenditures. Government at all levels provided about 16.30 billion yuan for the free textbooks and dictionaries. Nearly 10.97 billion yuan was provided from central finance (including the Corps); 17.32 billion yuan was used to subsidize boarding students from impoverished families, 7.18 billion yuan of which was provided by the central government (including the Corps); local governments provided 2.41 billion yuan as free textbook fund.

1) Free textbooks provided by the central government

In 2015, about 124 million students at the compulsory education stage received free textbooks, 89.85 percent of the total students. By region, about 36.96 million students, or 90.03 percent, in western China benefited from the free textbook policy; in central, 46.32 million, or 87.87 percent; in eastern, 40.96 million, or 92.03 percent.

About 16.30 billion yuan from finance at all levels was spent on providing free textbooks. About 10.97 billion yuan, or 67.29 percent, came from the central government. About 3.65 billion yuan, or 22.39 percent, was from provincial-level governments. About 197 million yuan, or 1.21 percent, was from city-level governments. About 1.49 billion yuan, or 9.11 percent, was from county-level governments.

By region, about 5.02 billion yuan, or 30.83 percent, was spent in western China. About 5.33 billion yuan, or 32.69 percent, was spent in central China. About 5.95 billion yuan, or 36.48 percent, was used in eastern China.

2) Free textbooks provided by local governments

In 2015, about 56.98 million students received free textbooks provided by local governments, 41.21 percent of the total number. Among them, about 22.17 million students were in western China, accounting for 54.02 percent. About 16.20 million were in central China, or 31.73 percent. And 18.60 million students were in eastern China, or 41.80 percent.

More than 2.41 billion yuan was provided by local governments to support the textbook policy. This includes more than 620 million in western China, 25.75 percent of the total number; 551 million in central China, 22.88 percent of the total number; and 1.24 billion in eastern China, 51.37 percent of the total number.

3) Living expenditure subsidies for students at boarding schools:

In 2015, more than 14.77 million students from impoverished families boarded at their school enjoyed the living expenditure subsidy policy - 51.84 percent of the total number of boarding students. Among them, more than 9.69 million students were in western China, accounting for 79.52 percent of all local boarding students. About 3.44 million were in central China, 29.19 percent. And 1.64 million students were in eastern China, 36.28 percent.

About 17.32 billion yuan was provided by governments at all levels to support students, roughly equal to 2014. About 7.18 billion yuan came from the central government, accounting for 41.45 percent of the total. About 6.80 billion yuan, or 39.28 percent, was from provincial-level governments. About 592 million yuan, or 3.42 percent was from city-level governments. And more than 2.75 billion yuan, or 15.85 percent, came from county-level governments.

The amount of money spent on subsidizing living expenditures for boarding students in western, central and eastern China were 12.00 billion yuan or 69.30 percent, 4.13 million yuan or 23.84 percent and 1.19 billion yuan or 6.86 percent respectively.

4.3 Secondary vocational education

In 2015, 34.62 billion yuan was spent on subsidizing 15.67 million students studying at secondary vocational schools. Among the students, 10.50 million enjoyed national tuition exemption of 21.01 billion yuan; 2.65 million enjoyed national stipends totaling 5.30 billion yuan; local governments put in 405 million yuan to help 212,800 students; the schools provided 450 million yuan for 772,400 people; aid from society reached 76 million yuan in supporting 65,700 students; and about 1.47 million students at secondary vocational schools gained part of their tuition amounting to 7.38 billion yuan.

1) National tuition exemption

In 2015, 10.50 million students at secondary vocational schools had their tuition waved by the national tuition exemption policy. They included 3.25 million students in western China, about 30.91 percent of the total; 3.41 million students in central China, about 32.43 percent; and 3.85 million in eastern China, or 36.66 percent.

The central and local governments spent a total of 21.01 billion yuan on the subsidy for tuition exemption, about 60.68 percent of the total subsidy for secondary vocational education. About 11.18 billion yuan came from central government financial support, accounting for 53.20 percent of the total amount of subsidy for tuition exemption. The remaining 9.83 billion yuan, or 46.80 percent, was from local governments.

By region, about 6.49 billion yuan, or 30.91 percent of total tuition exemption funding, was spent in western China. About 6.81 billion yuan, or 32.43 percent, was spent in central China, and 7.70 billion yuan, or 36.66 percent, was used in eastern China.

2) National stipends

In 2015, about 2.65 million students at secondary vocational educations received national stipends. About 1.30 million, or 48.89 percent, were in western China. About 909,000, or 34.31 percent, were in central China, and about 445,000, or 16.80 percent, were in eastern China.

Governments at all levels spent about 5.30 billion yuan providing national stipends, which took up 15.30 percent of the total sum of subsidy. This included 3.41 billion yuan, or 64.27 percent, from the central government, 1.89 billion yuan, or 35.73 percent, from local governments.

About 48.89 percent of the total subsidy, or 2.59 billion yuan, went to students in western China; 34.31 percent, or 1.82 billion yuan, went to central China, and 16.80 percent, or 890 million yuan, went to eastern China.

3) Local subsidy programs

In 2015, in addition to implementing the national tuition exemption policy and national stipends, local governments subsidized 212,800 students at secondary vocational schools. About 68.23 percent of the students, or 145,200, were in western China. About 19.50 percent, or 41,500 students, were from central China and 12.22 percent, or 26, 000 students, were from eastern China.

In addition to implementing the national tuition exemption policy and national stipends, local governments spent an extra 405 million yuan. About 316 million yuan, or 78.02 percent, was spent in western China. About 39 million yuan, or 9.63 percent, was spent in central China. About 50 million yuan, or 12.35 percent, was spent in eastern China.

4) School aid

In 2015, secondary vocational schools themselves subsidized 772,400 students. Among them, about 49.16 percent, or 379,700 students, were from western China, 32.28 percent, or 249,300 students, from central China and 18.56 percent, or 143,400, from eastern China.

The secondary vocational schools themselves spent 450 million yuan subsidies. About 36.00 percent of the subsidy, or 162 million yuan, came from western China, 36.44 percent, or 164 million yuan, from central China, and 27.56 percent, or 124 million yuan, from east China.

5) Aid from society

About 65,700 students at secondary vocational schools received schooling subsidies from donations by social entities and individuals in 2015. These included 24,100 students, or 36.68 percent, in western China; 22,000 students, or 33.49 percent, in central China and 19,700 students, or 29.98 percent, in eastern China.

The total sum of social donations was 76 million yuan, including 22 million yuan, or 28.95 percent, in western China, 34 million yuan, or 44.74 percent, in central China and 20 million yuan, or 26.32 percent, in eastern China.

6) Regular workplace internships

In 2015, about 1.47 million students at secondary vocational schools gained part of their tuition through regular workplace internships. They included 493,800 students, or 33.66 percent, in western China, 447,800 students, or 30.52 percent, in central China, and about 525,600 or 35.82 percent, in eastern China.

They earned 7.38 billion yuan, including 2.92 billion yuan, or 39.56 percent, for students in western China, 1.64 billion yuan, or 22.18 percent, in central China, and 2.83 billion yuan, or 38.26 percent, in eastern China.

4.4 Subsidies for high school education

In 2015, a total of 7.90 million Chinese high school students received financial aid. They included 4.62 million students in western China, 2.34 million in central China and 943,300 in eastern China. Total subsidies were 13.93 billion yuan, an increase of 20.99 percent, or 2.42 billion yuan, from 2014. About 7.55 billion yuan was used in western China, 4.47 billion yuan in central China and 1.92 billion yuan in eastern China.

1) National Stipends

In 2015, a total of 4.95 million high school students received their schooling subsidies through national stipends. Among them, more than 2.43 million students, or 33.11 percent, were in western China, about 1.80 million, or 19.98 percent, were in central China, and about 714,400 students, or 9.84 percent, were in eastern China.

The total spent on national stipends was 9.96 billion yuan. About 6.28 billion yuan, or 63.04 percent, came from central government funding; 1.90 billion yuan, or 19.07 percent, from provincial-level governments; 550 million yuan, or 5.52 percent, from city-level governments; and 1.23 billion yuan, or 12.38 percent, from county-level governments.

By region, about 4.88 billion yuan, or 49.02 percent, went to western China, about 3.60 billion yuan, or 36.15 percent, to central China, and 1.48 billion yuan, or 14.84 percent, to eastern China.

2) Aid from local governments

In 2015, a total of 2.31 million high school students received a schooling subsidy from local governments, including 1.90 million students in western China, 286,600 in central China and 121,200 in eastern China.

In addition to implementing the national stipends, the total sum of local government subsidies was 2.88 billion yuan, including 2.21 billion yuan from governments in western China, 431 million yuan in central China and 238 million yuan in eastern China.

3) School aid

In 2015, high schools themselves provided financial aid to about 512,500 high school students including 227,200 students in western China, 212,400 in central China and 72,900 in eastern China.

The total sum spent by high schools was 766 million yuan, including 324 million yuan by schools in western China, 319 million yuan in central China and 123 million yuan in eastern China.

4) Aid from society

In 2015, more than 130,400 high school students received their schooling subsidies through social donations, including 53,700 students in western China, 42,100 in central China and 34,700 in eastern China.

The total sum of social donations for high school students was 326 million yuan, with about 131 million yuan going to western China, 115 million yuan to central China and 79 million yuan to eastern China.

4.5 Financial aid for college and university students

In 2015, financial aid for higher education from governments, communities and colleges or universities totaled 84.80 billion yuan, from which more than 41.42 million students benefited.

More than 43.15 billion yuan came from government funding, accounting for 50.88 percent of the total in 2015. Central government funding totaled 26.90 billion yuan, accounting for 31.72 percent, and local government funding was 16.25 billion yuan, or 19.16 percent.

Financial institutions contributed 21.99 billion yuan for the national student loan program, accounting for 25.93 percent of the aid package.

Universities or colleges spent their revenue of 17.67 billion yuan on providing financial support for students, 20.83 percent of the entire aid package.

About 2 billion yuan, or 2.36 percent, was from social donations, including social entities, companies and individuals.

1) Scholarships

In 2015, 8.21 million students at colleges or universities funding for national scholarship totaled 17.97 billion yuan, 21.07 percent of the entire aid package.

Among them, more than 50,000 students at junior colleges, colleges or universities received 400 million yuan national scholarships; 35,000 postgraduate students received 700 million yuan; 10,000 PhD students received 300 million yuan.

More than 763,200 students at junior colleges, colleges or universities received a total of 3.82 billion yuan national encouragement scholarships.

And about 1 million postgraduate students received a total of 7.04 billion yuan from national scholarships for postgraduate students' studies.

2) Stipends

In 2015, more than 10.73 million students were supported through stipends. The total sum spent on stipends was 28.48 billion yuan, which took up 33.59 percent of the whole.

Among them, more than 5.43 million students at junior colleges, colleges or universities received 15.26 billion yuan in national stipends; 3.14 million postgraduate students received 10.61 billion yuan.

3) National student loan programs

About 3.33 million students received student loans of 21.99 billion yuan, accounting for 25.93 percent of financial aid for college and university students. Among them, about 2.99 million students received student credit loans from their family locations. The total sum was 19.82 billion yuan. National finance provided 2.61 billion yuan in national student loan programs to 3.15 million students.

4) Tuition and loan compensation for students and graduates enlisted in military service

A total of 111,100 enlisted students received 1.41 billion yuan in such compensation.

5) Tuition compensation and loan compensation for college graduates who work at grass-root levels

The compensation for such students was 651 million yuan, about 66,400 students benefited.

6) Free education and subsidy for normal college students

About 99,200 students studying at six major normal universities and some local schools had their tuition exempted or waived. The total sum for supporting normal college students was 559 million yuan.

7) Educational aid for veterans

A total of 8,439 veterans received financial aid for studying at colleges with the total sum of 44.83 million yuan.

8) College enrollment aid for freshmen

About 71.23 million yuan was given to 107,300 such students.

9) Occupational aids for postgraduate students as assisting teachers, researchers, managers

The compensation for such students was 3.63 billion yuan, about 1.37 million students benefited.

10) Aid for students working part-time jobs offered by schools

About 3.29 million students benefited from a total of 2.42 billion yuan through part-time jobs offered by schools.

11) Other forms of subsidies

About 769 million yuan was given as allowances to help 1.67 million students who come from families with special needs and exceptional difficulties.

More than 1.50 billion yuan was allocated as a food allowance to 7.09 million students.

About 186,300 students had their tuition waived. The total of waived tuition fees was 523 million yuan.

About 53,600 students benefited from an interest-free loan. The total sum was 290 million yuan.

About 194,300 students benefited from other channels of assistance, with the total sum totaling 1.93 billion yuan.

In the autumn of 2015, 1.07 million new college students from impoverished families enjoyed the so-called "green channel" treatment, taking up 14.17 percent of the all enrollment.

The report is released by China National Center For Student Financial Aid.
A user logs on to the WeChat service on a smartphone. [Photo/Xinhua]

Information posted by users on social media can be used as evidence if the contents are involved in related criminal cases, according to a recent regulation issued by China's law enforcement authorities.

The rule, co-formulated by the Supreme People's Court, Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security, is aimed at regulating the collecting and reviewing of digital data in criminal cases and will come into force on October 1.

Law enforcement authorities have the right to collect and retrieve digital data during investigations, the rule says.

The data includes information posted on Weibo, Wechat, network disk and other online platforms, as well as e-mails and cell phone messages.

However, the collecting and retrieving process must be kept secret to prevent national and business secrets or personal information being leaked, it says.

The related information could also be temporarily frozen if it is too large to be collected or has the danger of being tampered with or lost.

Law enforcement agencies have stepped up their crackdown on online blackmail, fraud and rumors.

China has experienced an increase in online fraud, particularly in the field of P2P lending, over the past year, a report published by online security company Liewang shows. There have been 24,886 reports of online fraud, up 7.96 percent from last year.

A 19-year-old would-be freshman in Guangdong province was defrauded of 9,800 ($1,470) yuan in a telephone scam in July, while a freshman-to-be and a college student, both in Shandong province, died of heart attacks after they were defrauded of their money in August.

Police later detained 28 suspects involved in the three telecom fraud cases.

Also, according to the criminal law, if someone is found guilty of spreading rumors and destabilizing the social order, he or she can face imprisonment of three to seven years. But in a minor case, the rumormonger would only need to apologize and pay a fine of up to 500 yuan.

On September 6, police detained seven real estate agents for spreading rumors that Shanghai were set to change property market rules, which would treat couples divorced within one year as part of one family, meaning they would have to pay a higher down payment to buy a second house.
Guangdong Highsun Group Co Ltd, a Chinese company principally engaged in commercial property management, has launched a business-to-business commerce platform for buyers, helping upgrade local professional wholesale markets, according to the company.

It says buyers are allowed to use the e-commerce platform to select and buy goods in various professional wholesale markets.

The newly-launched platform follows a similar one launched in March providing Internet finance and offline logistics and warehousing services for trade companies in the wholesale markets.

"By using the B2B service, buyers and trade companies will be more efficiently connected," said Zhou Xiaobo, general manager of Guangzhou Highsun Internet Technologies Co, a division of Highsun Group.

According to Zhou, the company has planned to build a warehouse center of about 13,000 sq m in Panyu district of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, by the end of this year.

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is traditionally a trading center for various goods, with hundreds of professional wholesale markets concentrated in the city's downtown areas.

"By providing warehouse and logistic services for traders and buyers, professional markets will be steadily moved to suburb areas. It will be very helpful to increase traffic efficiency in downtown areas."
MARCELLUS  The Marcellus Central School District awarded seven contracts totaling close to $1.1 million without soliciting competition for the professional services, the New York State Comptroller's Office found.

According to audit report released Wednesday by the comptroller's office that focused on the district's procurement policy and habits, the district spent $700,000 total on two contracts for architectural services, $336,600 total on two contracts for insurance, $21,900 total on two contracts for financial services and $12,800 on one contract for executive search services.

In the cases of each of the seven contracts, the comptroller's office noted in its report that the district did not use a request for proposals process  as required by its procurement policy  or document its decision-making process for awarding the contracts.

"There is an increased risk that these services were not procured in the most economical way without favortism in the best interest of District residents," the report states.

Though the board did issue an RFP for legal services and received proposals from six legal firms, the comptroller's office found that the Marcellus Board of Education awarded the contract to the firm that proposed the highest annual retainer of $54,000 plus an hourly rate of $160 to $185 and paid the firm a total of $117,960 during the audit period.

Other firms proposed lower fees for retainers and hourly rates, but the district did not document its reasons for selecting the higher-cost firm.

The comptroller's office also found that the district made 19 purchases totaling $119,130 without following its own procurement policy. That policy requires the district to obtain three written quotes for goods costing between $2,500 and $19,999 and services costing between $2,500 and $34,999.

The policy also allows the district to participate in cooperative purchasing arrangements through BOCES without obtaining quotes and to make purchases through county, state and federal contracts. The district also does not have to obtain quotes for emergency situations and for purchases from sole-source vendors where competition is not possible.

For 15 of those purchases totaling $98,837, the district obtained two quotes for only one of the items and one quote for the remaining items. For two other items, the district indicated that the purchases came from sole-source vendors but did not provide further documentation, and the comptroller's office found that the items were available from more than one vendor and that the district could have solicited competition for the items.

The district purchased tires indicating that they came from a state contract, but the comptroller's office found that the contract had expired and that the district should have obtained the required quotes.

The district also purchased antifreeze indicating that it was an emergency purchase because time was a critical factor, though it did not provide documentation to support the determination.

The comptroller's office also found that the district did not comply with competitive bidding requirements for two purchases totaling $62,153 for infield mix for a softball field and school lockers.

"When officials fail to adhere to established policies and procedures they cannot be sure goods and services of the maximum quality are obtained in the most economical manner in the best interests of the District without favoritism, waste or fraud," the report states.

In its report, the comptroller's officer recommends the district solicit competition for the procurement of professional services, ensure that required quotes are obtained, comply with its procurement policy, distribute the policy to all officials and staff involved with purchasing and document its decision-making processes.

In response to the report, through a letter included in the 15-page document, Superintendent Michelle Brantner said the district agrees with the recommendations and is in the process of amending policies and procedures to strengthen the purchasing habits in the district.

"It is our intent to be fiscally responsible and ensure the most economical use of district resources," she said in her letter. "The district is implementing correction actions to address recommendations made in the report."
BEIJING - China will officially recognize those who excel in poverty alleviation work, an official from the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development announced Wednesday.

"The poverty alleviation prizes are comprised of awards for endeavor, contribution, dedication and innovation. Each award will be held by no more than 10 people at any time," said Zheng Wenkai, deputy head of the office at a press conference.

The prizes will be issued once a year until 2020.

There were still around 70 million Chinese last year living below the poverty line, many in harsh conditions without roads, water or power.

Lifting them out of poverty by 2020 will be "the most arduous task" on China's path toward a moderately prosperous society in all respects, according to a key poverty alleviation instruction released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council last December.
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A villager in Zhoujiawan picks red peppers she planted. The film on the grounds plays a big role in keeping the water from evaporating. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

It takes two hours' drive on a slightly bumpy and winding road for our bus to arrive at Zhoujiawan village. The view of the grand mountain and the terrace fields along the way is impressive. Unfortunately, a beautiful view does not equal a decent life.

Zhoujiawan is one of the typical villages in eastern Gansu province where the scarce rainfall means the yield from farmlands depends largely on nature. As a saying goes, it is a place "hit by drought nine out of 10 years". To provide for drinking and irrigation, water cellars are excavated in each family to collect rainwater flowing down from houses and courtyard.

And the land is also scarce: Each family has an average of around 20 mu of lands (1.3 ha), and most of it is on the slopes. To expand the area of farmlands, locals level the sloping lands and cultivate on terrace fields.

The village's remoteness from the nearest town also means that transportation is a problem. In the past, the village was connected with the county seat Huining by a dirt road built on a cliff which became impassible in rain and snow. It was so narrow that two tricycles, a major transport vehicle of the villagers, could not pass through at the same time, and so dusty that the oil and sugar villagers bought from the town would be covered with flying dust during the transport.

The harsh natural conditions make it hard for villagers to make a decent income by farming, said Wang Rui, a publicity official of Huining county.

In 2015, more than half of the 1,840 villagers in Zhoujiawan still lived under the poverty line, which means they earned less than 2,800 yuan ($420) in net income a year. But the poverty number is expected to drop to less than 200 by the end of this year, largely as a result of more government fund and better farming practice.

Wang Hai, 52, is one of the beneficiaries of a series of anti-poverty tools.

Wang has more than 20 mu of lands on which he grows potato and corn. The yield per mu can surpass 1,000 jin (500 kg) in a good year, compared with 200 jin per mu in the past.

The change in output is attributed to a water-saving technique called "film farming"  a layer of film covered on the ground which can keep more water in the soil and remarkably reduce evaporation. The introduction of technique was not smooth, as some villagers thought it was too complicated, said Wang Rui. They only started to accept it after seeing the benefits of those who used the technique first and with the assistance from agricultural technicians.

In May, Wang Hai also set up a chicken farm in which he raised more than 1,000 chickens using the fund granted by the local government. He earned 3,600 yuan a month from selling eggs. It may not sound a lot of money to someone from big cities, but it is huge amount in a mountainous village in Gansu.

Wang said he has a designated technical official to guide him in the raising, which makes the whole process much easier. Two months ago, his son even bought a video monitoring system to help manage the chicken farm. After it was installed, Wang no longer needed to go to check the chickens in the hen several times a day.

Besides, chickens' excrement can be used as fertilizer for the farmland, which in turn produces fodder for them, making a sustainable cycle.

The infrastructure of the village has also improved. An asphalt road replaced the old one that connected the village to the town. Compared with the nearly three-hour travel out of the village in the past, it now only takes less than two hours to villagers to go to the nearest town.

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Beijing

Trilateral economic corridor planned

China, Mongolia and Russia will cooperate in many fields, including intellectual property, to build a trilateral economic corridor, according to guidelines released by the National Development and Reform Commission last week. The three neighbors agreed to improve transport facilities, to renovate ports of entry, to increase cooperation in energy, mineral resources, and environmental protection, and to widen service trade.

Xinhua News Agency

Views sought on online literature

On Monday, the National Copyright Administration publicized its regulations for online literature to gather public opinions. The regulations say that operators of search engines, browsers, blogs, app stores and online storage should not offer literature works without the permission of the right owners, and should delete infringing works and links within 24 hours after receiving the right owners' complaint.

Techweb

Shandong

Cultural exposition promotes heritage

With the theme of "Intangible cultural heritage in modern life", the fourth China Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo opens in the provincial capital Jinan on Wednesday and last through Sunday. The event includes exhibitions, forums, performances, trade and interactions. Craftsmen will demonstrate their skills. The organizer has invited more than 5,000 buyers, companies and associations from China and overseas.

iqilu.com

Zhejiang

Crackdown on counterfeit goods

The police of Haiyan county recently cracked down on a group making and selling counterfeit zips. They seized two suspects and found more than 20,000 zips bearing faked "SAB" labels at a factory in Taizhou city. The factory owner, surnamed Wu, said he had provided the counterfeit zips to a clothes factory because the client did not have enough time for genuine SAB products. Each of the counterfeits was sold at 1 yuan ($0.15), but the cost was only 0.25 yuan.

Jiaxing Daily

Guanggong

Institute to aid in internationalization

The Guangdong Intellectual Property Office and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies agreed on Sept 13 to jointly build an international IP institute, study international IP systems, launch course projects to provide better training and research strategies related to international trade for local companies. The IP office's head Ma Xianmin said the cooperation would help companies in Guangdong to expand abroad and promote the province's innovationdriven development.

southcn.com

(China Daily 09/21/2016 page17)
Andy Ng (second from left), general manager of QQ Music, speaks at the recent forum. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The Chinese music market, once seen as chaotic, is now viewed as having enormous untapped potential, thanks to the country's online user base of 650million people and a growing number of licensed digital services.

During the recent Music Matters 2016 event, which was held from Sept 12 to 15 in Singapore, the Chinese music market was in focus at the QQ Music China Forum: The World Turns to China.

Now in its 11th year, Music Matters, with live performances and forums, is a global platform for the music industry in the Asia-Pacific and a gateway for budding artists.

Speaking at the event, Andy Ng, general manager of QQ Musicrun by China's internet giant, Tencentsaid that there were about 700 million music lovers in China now, and for QQ Music, the number of monthly active users was about 400million,which comprises nearly 90 percent of the country's online music market.
Dancers perform the new theatrical production Sailing Through Time by the Caracalla Dance Theater at the opening of the Baalbeck International Festival, in Baalbek, Lebanon, in July. REUTERS

Lebanon's Caracalla Dance Theater is now exploring the story of the Silk Roadtraveling through history and geography to revive an ancient path that has united people of different cultures.

Sailing Through Time tells the story of Taymour, a Baalbek native whoin the prime of lifesets out along the Silk Road in search of China.

The show premiered in July at the Bacchus Temple, in Baalbek, Lebanon.

It was the opening performance of the 60th edition of the Baalbeck International Festival, an annual cultural event in Lebanon.

The production, comprising 195 artists from Lebanon, Spain, India, Ukraine and China, will tour Europe later this year. And Ivan Caracalla, head of Caracalla Dance Theater, plans to bring the production on a full tour of China next year.

Caracalla, who was in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, with his troupe to participate in the third Silk Road International Arts Festival from Sept 7-21, says: "The news today is full of stories of destruction, wars and many ugly things. We are losing our sense of humanity, our sense of values, our sense of morality. So, when we were thinking about a production for the Baalbeck International Festival, we wanted to do something to remind people that all of us share a common humanity.

"When we look back into our history, what's the biggest thing we learn from it? It was the Silk Road, which provided the background for many adventures and stories that have informed human, cultural and commercial exchanges between civilizations.

"The Silk Road brought together the world. It was not just about trade but about people meeting each other and people discovering each other. This is what made the Silk Road thrive," he says.

"This promoted the dialogue of civilization, the dialogue of culture, the dialogue of people. It was a great way to break barriers.

"Since Xi'an was the departure point of the Silk Road, we wanted to stage a show in Xi'an next year to kick off the China tour."
A young reader and his mother look at publications at a Beijing book fair.DA WEI/CFP

Yang Chenxi, an 8-year-old from Zhejiang province's Huzhou, recently spent half of her summer holidays with her grandparents in the countryside in Suqian, Jiangsu province.

Every night before bed, the girl, a fan of Disney cartoons and My Little Pony, begged her grandmother, Li Yuehua, to tell her a story.

"I told her stories about how bad people who mistreated good people were punished, and stories about illiterate but cocky people who made mistakes when they tried to read Chinese characters. My granddaughter loved the stories and laughed a lot," says Li.

Thankfully, for Chinese children like Yang, Western fairy tales like The Little Mermaid and Cinderella are not the only options when it comes to bedtime stories.

In recent years, Chinese writers have been using tradition, folk stories and legends to create books for children.

Wang Quangen, a professor of children's literature at Beijing Normal University, is currently working on a series of six books based on stories from such Chinese classics as In Search of the Supernatural from the Eastern Jin Dynasty (AD 317-420), Classic of Mountains and Seas from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) and Strange Stories from a Studio from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

For the series, called Chinese Fairy Tales Passed on From Generation to Generation, Wang has chosen 217 stories and is rendering them into language children easily understand.

"We need to pick stories that will not only interest children today, but also cater to current tastes and values. Through these books, children should be able to see the virtues and the wisdom of the ancient Chinese," says Wang.

On the cover of one of the books is an illustration from a story titled Maid Yexian, a tale similar to Cinderella.

It is a story from Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang about a maid named Yexian, who can make clothes using gold thread.

After her parents die, her stepmother treats her badly.

One day, she loses her shoe on her way back from a party, which leads to her encounter with her Prince Charming.

The tale, however, does not end like Cinderella.

The tale of the maid Yexian existed at least 800 years before Cinderella, but few Chinese know the story.

"From this perspective, this series promotes classic tales that have been forgotten," says Wang.

Wang Lin, who has a PhD in children's literature and is a promoter of children's reading, says that in a globalized worldwhere language does not indicate nationalitythe cultural genes of a nation are represented by the songs people sing, the books they read and the stories they listen to when they are young.

Last year, a set of three books based on mythical creatures in the Forbidden City (also known as the Palace Museum) was released and became very popular with children.
The Chinese edition of Zoref's book.

The Chinese post photos of overseas vacations, cute pets and gym selfies every moment of every daybut social networks can prove powerful if users understand how to distill collective wisdom.

That's the view Israeli author and crowdsourcing researcher Lior Zoref shares in his book Mindsharing: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything.

He toured Shanghai and Beijing for the Chinese edition's launch this month.

"Today, social networks are mostly about sharing moments. In the next decade, they'll also help you answer questions and solve complex problems," Zoref writes, quoting Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, in his preface.

"Before my visit to China, I thought US technology is superior with regards to social networks. Now, I think that Chinese technology in some respects is far more advanced," Zoref tells China Daily.

"People here are so open to the idea of crowdsourcing, because they use the technology so much in their life, probably more than any other nation. That's why I am so happy to publish the book here."

Zoref worked at Microsoft as a marketer from 1996 to 2010.

He's pursuing his PhD at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, where he's researching ways in which people can use social networks for professional development.

His book cites examples of how he got ideas for public speeches and career development from people on social networks with whom he wasn't particularly close, such as acquaintances and friends of friends. He also examines how other people have used social networks to deal with such problems as managing finances, raising children and finding romantic partners.

"There is a saying (that) two heads are smarter than one. I say: What about 1,000 heads?" Zoref says.

He also writes about different strategies for different social-network platforms, how to manage digital relationships and ask the right questions.
Li Min attends a Beijing event marking the launch of three new books about veterans who fought against Japanese invaders. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Old soldiers never die. That is, if they're remembered.

Sunday commemorated the Sept 18 Incident's 85th anniversary, marking the Japanese occupation of northeastern China. It's a day remembered with a mix of misery and pride.

Many in the crowd shed tears when 92-year-old female veteran Li Min stood onstage in the National Library of China to recall her experiences fighting the invaders and close calls with death.

"I was the only one among the comrades in my unit who didn't die on the battlefield," she says.

"I got lost and found another unit. I joined them to continue to fight. Most of them also died."

Li is one of only two surviving women veterans of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army led by the Communist Party of China.

Files show the army had about 30,000 guerrilla fighters when it was formed after the Sept 18 Incident. There were fewer than 1,000 by the end of World War II in 1945.

The NLC on Sunday released three new books based on interviews with United Army veterans.

It also opened an exhibition about this history, and the vets' bravery and sacrifice, that will run until Sept 30.

The 220,000-character-long Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, one of the trilogy's books, includes oral history. It records interviews with 16 veterans and four of their sons since 2012.

"This has taken the longest time and included the most interviews among the NLC's oral history projects in recent years," project organizer Tang Gengsheng says.

Tang's group interviewed all known 25 veterans and 60 veterans' sons in seven province-level administrative regions. It filmed 240 hours of footage, and obtained numerous manuscripts and pictures.

Only 13 of the vets are still alive.

"We have to hurry against time," Tang says.

"Records must be saved before the old soldiers are gone."

The other two books are compiled according to two researchers' interviews, starting from the mid-1990s.

"Soldiers had to fight invaders. Their families were killed in many brutal ways," researcher Jiang Baocai says.

"Some details shock me. Some women soldiers abandoned their babies when hiding in the forests, since the infants' cries attracted enemy attention.

"War is so cruel. But they didn't have a choice. It's much more difficult to honor unnamed people than (famous) heroes. But history is made by many unnamed people's efforts."

Oral history scholar Ding Yizhuang expects more projects on United Army to follow the books' release.

"Wars' oral histories reveal many vivid details that can't be gained from official records," she says.

"The books provide many new angles from heroines, although wars are often seen as fights among men."

The research faced many difficulties. One is confirming details provided by interviewees with historical records.

"And some veterans' children initially refused to do interviews due to the lack of their parents' recognition as heroes," Jiang says.

Some soldiers returned to their farms rather than fight until the war's end. Authorities in later decades refused to recognize their brave deeds.

"I'm glad the new books give those soldiers the recognition they deserve," says Li.

"Every memoir of us survivors is not about individual memories but serves a whole generation."

Liu Yuebin, a history professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, believes more research on the United Army will dispel some stereotypes about the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

The war has traditionally been considered to have broken out with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in Beijing. But more official documents reviewed in recent years point toward the Sept 18 Incident.

"We got used to saying 'eight-years' when referring to the war in textbooks," he says.

"However, that's unfair to northeastern China's fighters, who sacrificed before the rest of the country."
Richie Loidl. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Classical pianist Richie Loidl lives and grew up in the Salzkammergut region in Austria, close to the city of Salzburg. This region is visited by many tourists every year because of its picturesque landscape of lakes and mountains. It is also known as the place where great composers like Mozart, Brahms, Mahler spent summer.

Educated in classical music, Loidl came in contact with Boogie Woogie and Blues, a musical genre, which was originally played in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and was reanimated by Hamburg and Vienna pianists at that time.

In 1995, Loidl, along with his musician friends, organized the first "Night of Boogie Woogie", which was a great success. Since then, with lots of ideas and creative inputs collected, the pianist expanded the music festival into "a combination of authentic boogie & jazz music feeling with professional lakeside holiday services and lifestyle", which is called Shake the Lake.

Decades later, Shake the Lake International Music Festival has evolved into the largest and one of the most authentic European boogie-woogie festivals.

Loidl brought this music extravaganza to Beijing for the first time on Sept 16 and 17 at the Kempinski's Yanqi Hotel nearby the Yanqi Lake.
Vietnam will begin to teach Chinese language in primary school from 2017, according to the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) on Monday.

The MoET is building a general education program for Chinese, Japanese and Russian languages and the three languages will be taught as the first foreign language to local students from grade three to grade 12.

Nguyen Minh Chau, deputy head of education and training department of Vietnam's northern Lang Son province, said on local Dan Tri (People's Knowledge) online newspaper on Monday that as his province borders China, it will be favorable to develop Chinese language teaching.

Lang Son will continue to teach English as the first foreign language in schools and teach Chinese as the first foreign language in some classes to meet with pupils' demand.

In the 2016-2017 academic year, Korean, French and German will be taught as the second foreign language.
(Effective Date:1991.03.01--Ineffective Date:)

Article 1. To strengthen the administration over the permanent representative offices set up by foreign waterway and highway transport enterprises and other organizations in China, the rules hereof are formulated in accordance with "the Provisional Regulations of the State Council of the People's Republic of China Concerning the Administration over Permanent Representative Offices of Foreign Enterprises" and in the light of the concrete situation in the waterway and highway transport.



Article 2. When foreign waterway and highway transport enterprises, including those engaged in harbor business, harbor and navigational channel construction, highway construction, transport agencies and other transport-related organizations and enterprises (hereinafter referred to as foreign transport enterprises) need to apply for establishment of permanent offices in China because of business needs, the applications have to be approved by the Chinese Ministry of Communications and Transport (MCT).



Article 3. When the foreign transport enterprises apply for establishing permanent representative offices in China, they should present the following documents and materials:

a. An application signed by the enterprise's chairman of board of directors or general manager, covering the name of the permanent representative office to be set up, its responsible members, line of business, period for resident operation and location;

b. Legal business license or duplicate copy of business registration issued by the governing authorities of the foreign country or region the enterprise is domiciled;

c. Capital credibility certificate issued by financial organizations that have business relations with the enterprise;

d. Letters from the enterprise appointing the office bearers of the permanent representative office and their resumes and photos (two copies).

Article 4. When the application is ratified by MCT, "the Document of Ratification for Establishment of Permanent Representative Office of Foreign Transport Enterprises in China" will be issued.

Article 5. After the foreign transport enterprise's application for establishment of permanent representative office in China is ratified, the enterprise must, within 30 days as of the date of ratification, take the document of ratification to go through the procedures for registration and residence at the provincial, autonomous regional or municipal administration of industry and commerce and local public security organs and obtain the registration certificate for permanent representative offices of foreign enterprises and certificates of residence before they start business. If they fail to go through the necessary procedures within the specified period, the document of ratification is automatically cancelled.

Article 6. The number of representatives of the permanent representative offices is to be examined and decided by MCT in the light of the need of their business. In each ratification of the establishment of a permanent representative office, the longest resident period given will be three years. If the representative office needs to continue the resident operation after the expiry of the period, it must, within 30 days before the expiry of the period, present to MCT an application signed by the chairman of the board of directors or the general manger of the foreign transport enterprise. When the application is approved by MCT, it will be granted "the Document of Ratification for Prolonging Resident Period of Permanent Representative Offices of Foreign Transport Enterprises." Each prolonging period shall not exceed three years.

Article 7. If a foreign transport enterprise wants to change the name of its permanent representative office, responsible members or representatives, line of business, resident period and location, it must apply to MCT for such a change. The application for such a change must be signed by the chairman of the board of directors or general manager of the foreign transport enterprise. Upon approval by MCT, it is granted "the Document of Approval for Change". If the application involves the change of responsible members or representatives of the permanent representative office, the letters of appointment, resumes and photos (two copies) of the new persons representing the office must be attached.

Article 8. When a permanent representative office of a foreign transport enterprise intends to employ a Chinese citizen to work for it, it must entrust the department appointed by the local government to manage the employment and report in time to MCT about such employment and/or change of such employment. @@page@@

Article 9. The proper business activities of the permanent representative offices and their representatives of the foreign transport enterprises are protected by the laws of the People's Republic of China. The permanent offices and their staff must abide by Chinese laws and decrees and the rules hereof and carry out proper business activities within their business scope.

Article 10. The permanent representative offices of foreign transport enterprises can only engage in indirect business activities. Should there be agreements between the Chinese and foreign governments in this regard, things should be done according to governmental agreements.



Without the ratification by MCT, foreign transport enterprises are not allowed to establish permanent representative offices in China, nor use the name of permanent representative offices, their business cards and seals; nor to engage in any of the business activities of a permanent representative office.

Article 11. MCT has the authority to supervise and control the work of the permanent representative offices of foreign transport enterprises and may ask them to report their annual business activities.

Article 12. When permanent representative offices of foreign transport enterprises intend to terminate their business upon or before the expiry of their resident period, they should report to MCT in written form within 30 days before such a termination.

Article 13. When permanent representative offices of foreign transport enterprises violate the rules hereof, MCT may warn, fine or punish them according to the seriousness of the cases and may, if it is of a serious nature, cancel the Document of Ratification for Establishment of Permanent Representative Offices and notify the administration of industry and commerce.

Article 14. When transport enterprises invested by overseas Chinese, Hong Kong and Macao compatriots or Sino-foreign transport joint ventures set up outside the Chinese boundary apply to establish permanent representative offices in China, the case is handled in the light of the rules hereof.

Article 15. The right to interpret the rules hereof rests with MCT.

Article 16. The rules hereof comes into effect as of March 1, 1990.
The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing launched on Sunday the Golden Fall International Art Festival throughout September and October that includes several exhibitions and seminars involving artists and scholars from home and abroad.

A highlight event is a new media art biennial discussing the future relationship between the human beings and technology. Two shows will be held at CAFA's art museum and the World Art Museum at Beijing's Millennium Monument, as part of the annual Beijing Design Week.

Fei Jun, the biennial's curator, says the international artists integrate art and technologies, and they invite the audience to reflect on the emerging issues between people and machines and science.

Another exhibition starting from Sept 30 will revolve around the career of Japanese photographer Hiroji Kubota over a span of 50 years. Titled The Story of Looking, it will provide a unique perspective for the audience, through Kubota's lens, to review the world's transformations and major events since the 1960s.

The exhibition will also retrace the 77-year-old's connection with China. Kubota made several trips in the country between 1978 and 1985, taking some 200,000 pictures. He held two exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China, first in 1981 and another in 1985, which cast long-lasting influence on young photographers of the time.

The first congress of International Academic Printmaking Alliance will be held on Sept 25. The two-day conference will be attended by artists and university professors from across the world, and coupled with an exhibition to be held at the Taimiao or Beijing Working People's Cultural Palace.

The activities will address to not only academic topics but also how to make lithography more attractive to the audience when artistic creations today tend to be multiple oriented and mixed with various mediums.

Two forums will talk about the design of symbols of the Winter Olympic Games to be held in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, in 2022, and how art can play a bigger and constructive role in city planning, as Beijing is speeding up its construction of a new administrative subcenter in its Tongzhou district in the eastern suburb.

Fan Di'an, the headmaster of CAFA, says the initiate of the festival will deepen the school's collaboration with the universities, museums and cultural institutions abroad, bringing students and teachers to the front line of international art circles.

He says being a privileged art college, they not only stress academic developments but also, they hope to transform these achievements into real-life products that will benefit the general public.

Related:

French and Chinese to stage art in containers
A file photo of one UN security council meeting held in New York, US on June 11, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea's nuclear/missile adventure is dangerous not just for the Republic of Korea, the United States, and Japan. A nuclear-armed yet unstable neighbor will prove detrimental to China, too, even though it does not look like one now.

The key stakeholders should have stood together for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Beijing's latest indication to cooperate with Washington in the United Nations Security Council should have been a matter of course. Washington and its allies must be aware that no sanctions will succeed without Beijing on board. And a military solution can hardly go without violating the UN mission for peace.

For Beijing, collaborating with other players and making the UN Security Council work, and its resolutions bite, are necessary, if the matter is to be handled within the UN framework.

Security Council members had pledged to take "further significant measures" if the DPRK conducted another nuclear test. Now is time for them to honor that promise, and break what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the "accelerating spiral of escalation".

With Beijing now agreeing to "further", "necessary" sanctions, there at least is a better chance for the Security Council to come up with what is badly needed to resolve this issue.

But the next question is to what extent the key stakeholders can agree on how much "further" is "necessary", and this will determine whether there will be a strong enough regime of operational sanctions to discourage Pyongyang.

After all, such divisive issues as the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense anti-missile system remain inescapable obstacles in any substantive discussion on regional security. Divergent security concerns have divided not only the four immediate stakeholders, but also the Security Council, leaving ample room for Pyongyang to press ahead with its nuclear/missile programs.

Also, it has severely undermined solidarity and synergy indispensable for a forceful collective stance against the obvious threat.

The Security Council has issued a resolution each time Pyongyang has conducted a nuclear test, only its members have taken longer time to agree on a text acceptable to all.

The current situation brooks no more foot-dragging. That the past resolutions failed to stop Pyongyang's nuclear bid was a warning that, the anticipated new resolution on "further" sanctions must make Pyongyang rethink its morbid approach.
SOME ORGANIZATIONS posted online advertisements offering advanced courses in business and management, apparently for the elite class. Their tuition fees vary from about 30,000 yuan ($4,498) to more than 7 million yuan. Beware of such courses, because they are run by diploma mills. Beijing Times commented on Tuesday:

These expensive courses have fancy names, and claim to be affiliated to top universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University. Such claims can attract a lot of executives and businesspeople. And offers like "elite training completion certificates" can impress even top managers and executives, for they can also help build business contacts.

People go to extreme lengths, no matter what profession they are in, to build contacts, especially because it is part of Chinese tradition. Therefore, many people enroll for such courses. For example, a course for CEOs of listed companies has more than 50 top management trainees. And the urge to excel in one's field in order to make more money is fanning the craze of taking up expensive and fancy courses.

The Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee has banned many such courses, causing many government officials to give up their executive MBA courses. Although some leading officials of State-owned enterprises are still undergoing training in a few institutions, the ban has spelled the doom for most of the bogus institutions.
THE LONGHAI EXPRESS ROAD overpass in Zhengzhou, capital of Central China's Henan province, which cost about 650 million yuan ($97 million) and took over two years to build, was opened just two months ago but is already overburdened with heavy traffic leading to congestions. Beijing News commented on Tuesday:

Not much can be done to smooth the flow of traffic on the overcrowded overpass, although relevant departments have been urged to come up with a corrective plan as soon as possible. Ironically, the costly overpass was designed to reduce traffic pressure, and the changes the authorities intend to make now could have been made before it was opened to the public.

However, its designers refuse to admit that their original plan has failed. Instead, they argue that the sharp increase in the number of vehicles in recent years is to blame for the problem. But many of them had said the traffic volume was unlikely to reach saturation point even after 2030, so the overpass would serve its intended purpose.

Such an amateur attitude makes one wonder whether the giant construction project was improvised by the local authorities. In fact, both urban planning experts and ordinary citizens had bitterly opposed the plan before it was implemented. Had the designers accepted some of their suggestions, the overpass would not have been in a mess just two months into operation.

It is a bit late now to make amendments to the project. Reducing the nine traffic lanes to four, the poorly designed overpass is probably the result of "by-the-book" planning, which apparently did not consider the suggestions of "real professionals", such as traffic police.

The overpass is an example of bad decision-making and the lack of scientific planning in many failed urban construction projects. Urban planners need to solicit the opinions of experts and ordinary people both before they press ahead with a major project.
A Chinese clerk counts RMB (renminbi) yuan banknotes at a bank in Huaibei city, East China's Anhui province, January 22, 2015.[Photo/IC]

DATA FROM THE Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security show the average monthly income of migrant workers mainly engaged in manual labor was 3,072 yuan ($461) in 2015, while college graduates were earning a monthly average of 3,726 yuan six months after leaving campus. This shows the gap between those with and without college diplomas is shrinking. China Youth Daily comments:

Many people criticize college graduates for expecting higher salaries than migrant workers, saying their attitude is discriminatory. Such criticism is groundless. When a family spends huge amounts on its children's higher education, it will expect them to get well-paying jobs.

It is unfair to equate white-collar workers with their blue-collar counterparts. If a college diploma does not get a good job and social position, people will hesitate to send their children to college, which in turn would undermine the authorities' efforts to improve the educational standards in China.

However, that does not mean college students should necessarily get higher salaries than migrant workers. The demand-supply principle, not college diplomas, should largely decide an employee's salary.

The number of college graduates has been rising with each passing year, reaching 7.49 million in 2015, almost nine times that of 847,000 in 1999, when colleges started expanding. Since white-collar jobs have not increased at the same pace, college graduates have to compete with their peers to get one, and employers could easily compel them to settle for a lower salary.

During the same period, the number of blue-collar workers declined. For example, since 2008, labor-intensive enterprises in the Yangtze River and Pearl River delta regions have been complaining about the shortage of workers. As a result, blue-collar workers' salaries have been rising.

Therefore, it is not surprising to see the gap between the incomes of college graduates and migrant workers narrowing. Similarly, one should not be surprised to see college graduates seeking higher salaries.
The Beijing municipal government recently issued a guideline for deepening hukou (household registration) reform, which says the capital will abolish the rural and urban hukou system, and implement a unified registration system. In the future the capital's residents will be registered just as Beijing residents.

The guideline also says a new set of education, medical and healthcare, employment, social security, housing, land and demographic systems will be established in accordance with the unified hukou system.

Experts said the Beijing hukou reform will pave the way for equitable public services in urban and rural areas. The reform will ensure Beijing's rural residents get better social welfare, old-age support and medical treatment. For instance, at present urban residents' basic medical insurance can cover both outpatient and inpatient treatment, but rural residents insurance covers only inpatient treatment. This will no longer be the case.

Thirty municipalities, provinces and autonomous regions, including Beijing, have launched hukou reform.

One of the most important issues of public concern is whether the cancellation of rural hukou means rural residents have to give up their right to homestead and farms.

Zhu Lijia, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said a unified household registration system doesn't mean rural residents will be deprived of their property. Land reform will also be implemented in accordance with the hukou reform to protect rural residents' rights and interests.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang addresses the 18th ASEAN-China summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Nov 21, 2015.[Photo/Xinhua]

A series of high-profile interactions between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this month has sent a strong signal to the rest of the world: The two sides are making joint efforts to deepen cooperation and prevent outsiders from interfering in regional affairs.

Premier Li Keqiang attended the 19th ASEAN-China leaders' meeting and the 19th ASEAN-China, Japan and the Republic of Korea leaders' meeting in Vientiane, Laos, on Sept 7. China has played important roles in both mechanisms, which, over the years, have served as major channels for regional integration.

On Sept 11, the 13th China-ASEAN Expo opened in Nanning, capital of South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. The annual event has become a major platform for China and ASEAN member states to showcase the fruits of their cooperation, ink new business deals and discuss ways to deepen their relationships.

Such high-level interactions have not only helped strengthen China's good-neighborly ties with the 10-member regional bloc, they have also made the two sides more confident of their abilities and wisdom to properly handle their differences and contribute to regional peace and development.

Admittedly, relations between the two sides have been overshadowed by the recent disputes between China and some ASEAN member states in the South China Sea. Some in the West have even developed a tendency to portray the disputes as open discord between the two sides whenever a high-profile meeting is held between their leaders.

After an arbitral tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in its dispute with China over the South China Sea in July, some vested interests thought the East Asia Summit meetings in Laos could be a perfect occasion to drum up anti-China sentiments again. However, those who harbored such feelings were disappointed because the leaders of China and ASEAN member states vowed to ease tensions in the South China Sea and deepen their cooperation.

The two sides have agreed, among other things, to set up a hotline so that their senior diplomats can assess and address emergencies at sea. They also issued a joint statement on the application of the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea, an international agreement reached in 2014 to reduce the chances of maritime incidents, in the South China Sea. These significant agreements will help enhance strategic trust between the two sides and help make the South China Sea truly peaceful and stable.

In his remarks addressing the 10+1 summit, Premier Li also talked about the prospect of a code of conduct, which the two sides have been negotiating for three years to pave the way for the implementation of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. China has proposed a framework of COC to be completed before ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in July next year.

Under the gaze of the rest of the world, China and ASEAN exercised strong political will and made concrete efforts to steer clear of the obstacles in their bilateral ties. As Premier Li said in Vientiane, regional prosperity and development hinges on peace and stability in the South China Sea. And lessons from other regions in the world that have encountered some turbulence show how important it is for regional players to maintain peace and stability at all times.

Asian countries should cherish the hard-won peaceful environment in the region, because it has been the basis of their economic development and social progress in recent years. The fruits of China-ASEAN relations in the past 25 years show healthy cooperation between the two sides has served as a cornerstone of regional development, and there is every reason for the two sides to build on this desirable momentum.

The author is deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily Asia Pacific.

jasmine@chinadailyhk.com
Colombian coffee. [Photo/Agencies]

Colombian coffee farmers in 1927 created a very insightful organization for sustainable inclusion of smallholders, aggregating around 500,000 farmers. In essence, this organization brought capacity to adapt to market changes in the coffee chain promoting value for the farmers and building global scale. There are many points we can learn from their experience, and I will address some of them in this story.

We can learn about good governance (very democratic and participative) and transparency through the structure and history of this organization. For educational purposes, they have training sessions for coffee experts in order to enhance knowledge and several other topics, and these are under a foundation named Manuel Mejia. For research there is an institute called CENICAFE (organizes events, scientific publications and others). The organization has risk management policies and financial sustainability with transparency - all the reports are available on the website - and linked to a recognized company, Deloitte, doing their reports

Cafe de Colombia has a strategic planning and management process prioritizing projects and a strong ethical code transmitting responsible practices in the coffee chain. They are organized in regional structures, with local departments and committees making it possible to reach farmers all over the country and to deal locally with local problems. Cafe de Colombia also has a clear positioning that shares consciousness, knowledge and enhances the pride of using Colombian Coffee. They created a coffee farmer mascot named Juan Valdez for marketing purposes. Nice videos can be seen on the web site.

In terms of products, brands, packaging and communication we learn from observing their ability to create and manage a global brand, Juan Valdez, and differentiate Colombian coffee from competitors, creating value. Juan Valdez also sells coffee cups, plates, milk recipients and sugar with creatively designed logos. Innovation is also seen with the development of new products, such as lattes, liquor, rum and other brand extensions and colorful packaging using the image of the farmer and farms, old houses and others.

In terms of communication, the brand uses different types of social media (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube) and builds recognition among consumers and with positive impact in society and the environment. They also have training programs for baristas to be real communicators of Colombian Coffee and created a community, called friends, in a loyalty program, a real club of consumers which is expanding quickly. An amusement park in Colombia called Coffee Park helps to complete the Juan Valdez experience. They pay attention to details, and we know that marketing is all in the details.

Other learning points come from Juan Valdez's distribution channel strategy. Consumer experience in their coffee shops should be unique and build emotional ties. Cafe de Colombia sells through very different channels, from its own coffee shops in Malaysia, Kuwait, Latin America, North America to supermarkets in 19 countries and more than 3000 points of sale.

Channels also involve embassies in Colombia and other countries, selling in large companies' offices and in several restaurants. They are open to receiving investments through franchising and exports Colombian talents to work in these coffee shops. The Cafe de Colombia coffee shops are considered embassies of Colombian and Latin American people in several countries, being a place where people gather and enjoy, valuing the consumer experience.

Finally, the learning points in sustainability (social/people, environmental/planet and economic/profit) involve a clear strategy for cost reduction, risk mitigation, innovation, brand value and a healthier working environment bringing more productivity. Efforts in the area of rural education, social security and investments, income distribution (considered one of the five most important inclusion business models in the world), a program "free of alcohol and drugs", management of environmental resources with climate-smart coffee production, measuring carbon emissions, specific program for solid residues management and reuse of materials, linked to the trend of the circular economy.

A final question is, who should learn from these experiences? My experiences in public and private projects show that this valuable experience of the Colombians have important messages for other governments, to see how to help an organization or to stimulate the creation of these forms that can provide sustainable inclusion being able to move forward on their own. Messages are also given to other associations and cooperatives to benchmark their programs, projects, strategies and governance, how to capture and share value with vertical integration towards the final consumer using innovative marketing and sustainability strategies.

Colombian coffee has a story that I admire and use in my lectures and the reasons are the ones listed above. Congratulations!

The author is professor of strategic planning and food chains at the School of Economics and Business, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil (www.favaneves.org) and an international speaker. Author of "The Future of Food Business" and coordinator of 50 books published in 8 countries and in China, "The World on the Tongue".
Visitors pose with Hello Kitty at the world's largest Hello Kitty Park in Anji county.[Photo provided to China Daily]

If you're grumpy because the line is too long, then a Japanese cartoon character may arrive to cheer you up.

Really.

That's a service at the world's largest Hello Kitty Park in Zhejiang province's Anji county.

The destination provides rides, educational performances and parade floats.

Arrivals are greeted by Kitty's face fixed on a Ferris wheel.

Photo ops abound beyond that.

Families can even visit her house to tour her bedroom, living room and kitchen. Portraits of her parents and grandparents hang on the walls.

Nighttime imbues the area with the glow of colorful lights for a parade.

The park's protagonist appears on floats alongside such characters as penguin Bad Badtz-Maru.

Souvenir shops sell more than 4,000 kinds of merchandise, such as phone cases, toys and backpacks.

The park's Yinrun Jinjiang Castle Hotel offers Hello Kitty themed rooms. The pink accommodation is adorned in namesake style down to the finest details.

The park is brand-owner Sanrio's only authorized Hello Kitty park outside Japan.

"Our park has its own culture," says Liu Fudao, managing director of the park's operator, Zhejiang Insight Angel Paradise Management Ltd.

"Hello Kitty and her friends have different personalities. They are more than cartoon characters. They have their own stories. These stories constitute their culture."

Liu says many guests come from cities within 150 kilometers.

Others are from Beijing, Fujian, Guangdong and Hong Kong.

"It's a family destination," he says.
The World Tourism Cities Federation's annual summit kicked off in Chongqing on Sept 19. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The World Tourism Cities Federation's annual summit kicked off in Chongqing on Sept 19.

About 400 guests from 89 cities and 47 institutions worldwide gathered at the event.

"The federation was founded in 2012. With great support and joint efforts of all parties, it has completed all tasks for startup and achieved conspicuous results," says Wang Anshun, chairman of the WTCF Council and mayor of Beijing.

"I believe that this year's summit will become a grand event for tourism industries with a distinctive Chongqing feature and further promote innovative development of the world tourism industry."

Forums on shared economy, tourism promotion sessions and investment fair were held during the summit.

More than 20 famous tourism enterprises and related institutions from China and abroad attended the Tourism Investment Fair during the summit. Approximately 80 projects were showcased at the fair and intended investment is expected to hit $16 billion.

At the same time, the annual Market Research Report on Chinese Outbound Tourist (City) Consumption was unveiled at the summit.

Los Angeles and Qingdao in Shandong province were voted as host cities of 2017 and 2018 summit, respectively.

During the summit, WTCF signed strategic partnership agreements with Tencent Technology, Travel Channel and iQIYI. In addition, Chongqing tourism bureau signed a MOU with Washington DC Tourism Bureau and Airbnb.

Related:

Bamboo hullaballoo
Jiangling Motors Co., Ltd. is one of the best companies with the rapidest development in domestic automotive industry and one of the biggest companies in China commercial vehicle industry. It has been ranked among the Top 100 Listed Companies in China in consecutive 3 years.

In the middle of 1980s, JMC took the lead in introducing the internationally advanced truck technology to produce Isuzu vehicles and became the major light truck maker in China. In November 1993, JMC was publicly traded in Shenzhen Stock Exchange with A share issuance, the first listed company in Jiangxi Province. In 1995, JMC entered a strategic partnership with Ford Motor Company by ADRs B share issuance.

As the first company introducing foreign investment in Jiangxi, JMC has established strategic relationship with Ford and other Fortune 500 companies and develop rapidly. In 1997, JMC and Ford succeeded in launching the first Sino-foreign joint developed automobile in China - Transit. JMC has absorbed the world advanced product technology, manufacturing skills and management concept, the effective share balance system, highly efficient & transparent operation management, which enables the company to form a standard management and operating system and guarantees the effectiveness of companys governance and scientific decision-making with a scientific system. JMC has established international standard system and operating system, such as: R&D, logistics, sales service, financial support, and JMC has become the example of successful cooperation among China local companies and foreign owned companies.

JMC autos fully meet the consumption demands of different customer. Transit commercial vehicle, JMC Light Truck, Baodian Pickup, Baowei SUV have become the model of fuel-efficient, practical and environment-friendly vehicles. Transit with the great favor of domestic consumers has become the fastest growing vehicle brand both in the mid & high end commercial vehicle market and dual passenger/cargo vehicle market. Besides, Transit all along kept over 30% sales volume growth in recent two years, becoming the best manufacturer with the top diesel commercial vehicle sales volume in the light bus market. JMC independent brand Baodian pickup is ranked first in the domestic diesel pickup market; Kaiyun and JMC light truck achieved a 50% market share, maintaining their strong position in the middle & high end light truck market.

JMC took the lead in establishing the modern marketing system in China automotive market. JMC has established powerful marketing network throughout the country. Following the 4S exclusive operation, JMC has 85 first-tier dealers, 497 second-tier dealers. With the rapid development of JMC overseas distribution service network, the export sales of JMC autos reached 7175 units in 2006. JMC has become the biggest exporter of diesel commercial vehicle in China and has been recognized as State whole vehicle export base by Ministry of Commerce of Peoples Republic of China and National Development and Reform Commission. JMC focuses on customer and adopts Ford Service 2000 Standard Mode and implements the JMC cares system. It strives for the quality of service process and has won the first place among Ford global enterprises with its highest customers satisfaction. The core competence of JMC in Chinese market lies in its excellent marketing, all-around network, and also rapid and complete customer service, which builds up the well-known brand image of JMC automobiles in China commercial vehicle field.

JMC has established ERP information support system and a highly efficient logistics system to ensure balanced production and greatly reduced stock inventory. JMC has implemented JPS lean production system, now achieving a score of 7.2. Besides, it has established quality management information network and promoted NOVA-C, FCPA review, applied 6 sigma tools in order to constantly improve product quality constantly and reduce the cost. Whats more, JMC is honored as the top 10 advanced enterprise of National 6 sigma management promotion. Transit has won the Ford Global Customer Satisfaction Gold Award in consecutive 3 years with its excellent quality and become China best commercial vehicle in 2006.

With the concept of win-win policy with our suppliers, JMC has used Ford Q1 review mode for reference and perfect suppliers evaluation and supply system, becoming the first one in passing the TS 16949 integrated management review amongst domestic auto companies.

JMC continues to improve its independent development capability through introducing foreign advanced technologies. Annual Research & Development expense for new product is about 5% to 7% of company sales revenue; additionally, sales of JMC special and refitted vehicles is ranked number one in China. JMC PD Technology Center has been recognized as National Class Technology Center.

To pursue for "being bigger and stronger", JMC is seeking broader development space to become the key production base of commercial vehicles in China and even Asia-Pacific regions.
The number of Chinese traveling to the United States during China's National Day holiday in October is expected to rise remarkably, in keeping with an expected overall increase for the whole year, tourism industry insiders said.

Bookings for travel to the US during the National Day holiday, from Oct 1 to 7, are triple the number from last year, according to a report released on Tuesday by lvmama.com, a major online travel booking platform.

Ni Jiali, general manager of Lvmama.com's outbound tourism department, said the rise resulted from beneficial tourism policies adopted by both China and the US.

"2016 is the Sino-US tourism year, and a lot of events are being hosted against this backdrop," she said, citing as an example the high-level China-US dialogue on tourism held this month in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

Additionally, the US Commerce Department will work with the China National Tourism Administration to cultivate new travel paths, and seminars will be held to figure out ways to improve tourists' travel experience, she said.

Such factors as the mutual approval of visas allowing multiple entries within 10 years and the launch of new direct flights between the two countries are also making a difference, according to Yu Wenjun, director of US travel for Ctrip, a leading online travel agency.

Bookings at Ctrip for travel to the US during the weeklong holiday have increased by 40 percent over the same period last year, making the US the fourth-favorite destination for Chinese tourists during the coming holiday.

The first three destinations are all China's neighbors  Thailand, South Korea and Japan.

The number of Chinese tourists traveling to the US has increased greatly in the past decade. Last year alone saw nearly 2.7 million  a fourfold increase from the number in 2007.

"I believe that with the help of all these happenings around the Sino-US tourism year, this number will not only swell during the upcoming weeklong holiday, but also for the whole year," said Ni of Lvmama.com.

zhaoxinying@chinadaily.com.cn
A migrant stands among the remains of a burned tent at the Moria migrant camp, after a fire that ripped through tents and destroyed containers during violence among residents, on the Lesvos island, Greece, Sept 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

MYTILENE, Greece - A day after a fire broke out at a refugee hot spot which left hundreds of people without shelter, the Greek government pledged to take immediate measures to improve the situation.

A ship is to be leased to operate as a floating hot spot at the port of Mytilene until the Moria accommodation center is fully functional again, the Ministry of Citizen Protection and the General Secretary of the Aegean and Island Policy announced on Tuesday.

Refugee and migrant families are the priority, the General Secretary of the Aegean and Island Policy Giannis Giannelis told Xinhua.

"The ship will have a capacity of over 1,000 people and will be used as a hostel in order for the situation to be eased, after yesterday's incidents," Giannelis said.

In addition, extra police forces will be sent to Lesvos, he said.

People were forced to flee Moria and many spent the night in the streets without shelter or food, when a fire broke out during clashes among refugees of different nationalities in the hot spot on Lesvos island.

The fire spread through the camp and destroyed 50 tents and three containers, including personal belongings. Nobody was hurt by the fire.

Dozens of people escaped through small openings in the fence.

Most of them left all their personal belongings behind and some even walked to reach the city of Mytilene.

The Greek government is seeking ways to decongest all the eastern Aegean islands which continue to receive immigrants and refugees, Giannelis added.

More than 10,000 people out of the 60,000 currently stranded in Greece, according to data released on Tuesday from the North Aegean Regional Police Department, have remained trapped on Lesvos, Chios, and Samos since March, when the EU-Turkey agreement to stem the influx was implemented.

During the last 24 hours, 65 immigrants and refugees have arrived on the northern Aegean islands.

Boats keep coming as tensions on the islands, in particular Lesvos, have dramatically risen lately.
Thousands of people demonstrate against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in the center of Brussels, Belgium, Sept 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
Activists in California are demanding that the California Board of Education remove a "misleading" link in its recently approved curriculum that includes teaching about "comfort women" of World War II.

From left: Phyllis Kim, executive director of the Korean American Forum of California; Julie Tang, retired judge and co-chair, Comfort Women Justice Coalition; Yong-Soo Lee, Korean comfort woman survivor; Lillian Sing, retired Judge and co-chair, Comfort Women Justice Coalition, and US Congressman Mike Honda, chair emeritus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, at a press conference on Sept 16 in San Jose, California. LIA ZHU / CHINA DAILY

California, after New Jersey in 2004, is the second state in the US to include the topic of "comfort women" in the history-social science framework for public schools, which provides guidance to teachers, administrators and publishers.

"Even though we thank the state Board of Education for including the curriculum, we think it's very, very wrong to sneak in the link," said Lillian Sing, a retired San Francisco Superior Court judge and co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, a San Francisco-based advocacy group for "comfort women".

The link she referred to is to an agreement between Japan and South Korean in December last year, under which Japan pledged to pay 1 billion yen (about $8.3 million) from its state funds to build a "comfort women" foundation in South Korea, and Seoul, in return, agreed on a "final and irreversible" resolution on the wartime sex slavery issue.

The activists objected to the inclusion of the deal, arguing that the state Board of Education violated due process and transparency by "sneaking something in" at the last minute after the period of public comments was over.

"They sneaked in a link that they claimed was an agreement between Japan and South Korea as if the issue was resolved," said Sing, adding that the "comfort women" issue involves not only South Korea but other countries such as China, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Julie Tang, another retired judge and co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, told reporters on Sept 16 in San Jose, California, that the problem was "lack of notice", which is a violation of the US Constitution and "secret behind closed-door chambers".

"By that time, the public had no chance to protest or give information to convince the commissioners to vote against that," she said. "So without the information, the commissioners voted unanimously on the curriculum framework along with this link."

The activists said that they were told the foreign governments contacted Tom Adams, deputy superintendent of the Instruction and Learning Support Branch at the California Department of Education, to put the agreement in the curriculum. Adams couldn't be reached for comment.

"I think the judges are right. There's a violation of process," said Congressman Mike Honda, who joined the activists at the press conference. "(If) The Japanese government wants to continue the issue, then they should stand in the line and follow our process here, but not do it under a cloak of secrecy."

He encouraged the public to write to the state Board of Education and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson to review the situation and remove the link from the books.

The Japanese-South Korean deal immediately sparked debate after it was announced last year, as activists called it "narrow" and "limited" and criticized the two governments for failing to consult the victims.

Among the activists is Yong-Soo Lee, 89, a South Korean "comfort woman" survivor. She joined Honda and the activists to protest the board, including the agreement in the new curriculum.

"I am the living proof of history. I'm testifying what I experienced and what I saw myself," Lee said through a translator. "There were numerous victims. They were not consulted. I was never consulted about the so-called agreement.  I can't acknowledge the agreement."

Lee was one of the hundreds of thousands of girls and young women who were forced into institutionalized sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in occupied territories before and during World War II. She was only 15 years old when she was forced into sexual servitude and said she was repeatedly raped for two years on a daily basis.

"Everywhere we go, every hearing that we attend, there's a group of denialists who claim the atrocities never happened and the 'comfort women' were paid prostitutes," said Sing. "It's because the (Japanese) government robbed its citizens of the truth of history.  We will not let that happen to our students in California, in the United States."

"We want to tell the truth  ugly or beautiful, bad or good. The truth must be told," said Sing.
MELBOURNE - The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's brand new ship will launch its first anti-whaling campaign from Australia.

The Ocean Warrior, a custom-built, $9 million "warship without guns", is on its way to Australia where it will dock at Fremantle, Hobart or Melbourne to prepare to disrupt Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

The vessel, which is Sea Shepherd's first brand new ship, sacrificed a vast majority of its storage space to accommodate bigger engines and long-range fuel tanks.

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd member, said the new ship would not be bullied by Japanese whaling ships which were able to ram the older vessels used by the society.

"Our biggest challenge in our campaigns in the past has been that the Japanese whaling vessels have rammed us with their superior size, and they have outrun us with their superior speed," Hammarstedt told Fairfax Media on Wednesday.

"So this is a vessel they cannot catch."

Japanese whalers killed 333 minke whales, 200 of which were pregnant, in Antarctic waters in summer 2015, the first whaling expedition since the International Court of Justice declared the practice illegal in 2014.

Japan has since excused itself from the court's jurisdiction, instead creating new rules for whaling that doubled the size of hunting grounds in the Southern Ocean.

Australia was one of 95 countries to condemn Japan's continued whaling at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii in September.

"Accountability is important," Hammarstedt said. "The way that we see it is that the international community has now had two years to ensure that Japan complies with the law. They haven't done so.

"Our position is that the international community has failed the whales, so that gives us no other option than to head down (to the Southern Ocean)."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump takes the stage for a rally with supporters in Kenansville, North Carolina, US, Sept 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

WASHINGTON - Violent attacks in the US states of New York, New Jersey and Minnesota over the weekend could help Republican candidate Donald Trump's presidential campaign, at a time when terror threat is on the rise.

The weekend saw a chain of incidents including the bombings in downtown New York and New Jersey, which injured dozens of people, and the stabbing attack by a man at a shopping mall in Minnesota, which wounded nine people.

Trump has for the past year been making the case that the current administration, to which his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is tied as a former secretary of state, has been soft on terrorism.

The bombastic businessman has been talking tough on the issue, vowing to use profiling and other means frowned upon by the Obama administration to go after terrorists.

"Terrorism generally has been a good issue for Trump because it plays to his argument that the world is a dangerous place and America needs a tough leader," Darrell West, vice-president and director of governance studies of the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua.

Trump will say that this confirms his narrative that the United States is under attack and extraordinary measures are needed to protect the country, West said.

"His best argument is that America needs a leader as tough-minded as our adversaries," he said.

In the wake of the latest attacks, Trump and Clinton traded barbs over how to deal with terrorism to ensure national security.

Trump has criticized Clinton for being "weak and ineffective" and "has the most open borders policy of anyone ever".

He blamed the terror attacks, including the shooting attacks in California and Florida, on the Obama administration's failure to screen those entering the country.

Claiming "Immigration security is national security," Trump promised to get tough on illegal immigration as a way of fighting terrorism.
WASHINGTON - Several police officers were wounded Tuesday evening in the US city of Charlotte, North Carolina while trying to disperse a protest against police's fatal shooting of a black man, authorities said.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) said on its twitter account that "agitators" destroyed marked police cars during the demonstration.

A large crowd of protesters gathered Tuesday evening at The Village at College Downs apartment complex on the Old Concord Road, where an African-American man, identified as Keith Lamont Scott, was killed Tuesday afternoon by a police officer, local media reported.

Some protesters chanted "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One of them held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."

The protest turned violent when protesters surrounded police in riot gear and started throwing glass bottles and garbage at and vandalized police cars at the scene. The police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the protesters.

The CMPD said earlier that the shooting occurred after police officers looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant encountered Scott, who "exited a car with a gun."

Scott was shot because he was considered to be a threat to the officers, the CMPD said. Emergency personnel took him to Carolinas Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

But family members told a different story about the shooting, the Fox46 TV reported. They said Scott was disabled and unarmed, and was reading a book inside his car while waiting to pick up a child from a school bus.

Brentley Vinson, the officer who killed Scott, has been placed on paid administrative leave as a standard procedure pending an investigation of the shooting. Vinson is also an African-American.
OTTAWA -- China-Canada relations have improved steadily since last year, and the two sides will take advantage of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's visit to Canada to expand the scale of bilateral economic and trade cooperation, said Chinese ambassador to Canada Luo Zhaohui.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kicked off a visit to China with stops in Beijing and Shanghai before attending the G20 Summit held in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Premier Li's official visit to Canada later this week comes within less than a month of Trudea's trip to China.

"Such a frequent exchange of visits in a short period of time is indeed rare in the history of China's foreign relations," Luo told Xinhua.

Despite some previous setbacks, China-Canada ties have improved steadily since the Liberal Party of Canada took office last November, which can be summarized in four ways, Luo said.

The first involves political exchanges between China and Canada.

Last November, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Trudeau on the sidelines of the G20 Summit held in Turkey and suggested building a long-term, healthy and stable strategic partnership with Canada on the basis of mutual respect and win-win cooperation.

Last October, Li congratulated Trudeau on his election as Canadian prime minister after his Liberal Party won a landslide victory in Canada's federal elections.

During his first official visit to China and his attendance at the G20 Hangzhou Summit earlier this month, Trudeau enjoyed a high-level reception and hailed a new era in China-Canada relations. The two countries also agreed to establish an annual dialogue between the Chinese premier and Canadian prime minister.

Secondly, pragmatic cooperation between China and Canada has achieved steady growth.

China is Canada's second largest trading partner, a source of imports and a market for exports. Last year, bilateral trade reached $55.7 billion, more than 370 times the amount at the beginning of diplomatic ties decades ago.
NEW YORK - Chinese premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday said frictions represent only a minor part in China-US economic relations, calling upon the two sides to expand common interest and properly handle differences.

Li made the statement when addressing a welcoming dinner party organized by the Economic Club of New York.

When bilateral trade and investment grow from nearly nothing to its current enormous volume, it is only inevitable that frictions might arise, said Li, who is here for a series of United Nations conferences and engagement with a wide spectrum of Americans.

Frictions are not the dominating element in China-US economic relations but just a minor part of cooperation, the premier told about 1,000 elites of American business.

However, they should not be ignored, and the two sides should work to resolve their differences before they spread to others areas of the relationship, Li said.

On China' s business environment, Li said while complaints from some American business people impressed him, he also read a report by the US-China Business Council which told a different story.

In its annual survey, the council found 90 percent of US businesses operating in China were profitable, up from 85 percent in 2014.

The Chinese premier also cited increased investment by US enterprises in China.

China is still working to improve its business environment for foreign enterprises, Li added.

As part of its overall drive to further open up, China has streamlined procedures for foreign investment, said Li.

The gathering came one day after the premier met with US President Barack Obama in New York, during which Li called for concerted efforts to promote economic and trade ties between the world's top two economies.

Economic and trade cooperation is the "cornerstone" and "propeller" of China-US relations, Li said during their talks.

Enhancing China-US cooperation is in accord with the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the common wish of the world community, he said, while expressing China's willingness to deepen bilateral, regional and global cooperation in various fields.

Obama, for his part, reiterated that his country supports China's reform process and hopes that the two sides can make further progress in bilateral investment treaty negotiations.

Li is scheduled to attend the general debate of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday before heading to Canada to continue his overseas trip, which will also take him to Cuba.
DETROIT - Chrysler LLC began laying off thousands of salaried workers Wednesday as part of an effort to slash costs in the companys new era of private ownership, a spokesman said.

The cuts wont end there. On Thursday, Chrysler planned to announce the elimination of third shifts at the Toledo North plant in Ohio and the Belvidere plant in Illinois in the first quarter of 2008, according to two congressional aides with knowledge of the announcement. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The decisions will eliminate 750 jobs in the Toledo plant, which makes the Jeep Liberty and Dodge Nitro, and 1,000 jobs at the Belvidere plant, where Chrysler assembles the Dodge Caliber, Jeep Compass and Jeep Patriot.

Chrysler spokesman Mike Aberlich said about one-third of the companys temporary workers will be laid off in the next few months, along with other salaried workers. Aberlich didnt disclose the number of workers that will be affected, but a person briefed on the plan said 1,000 salaried workers and 1,100 temporary workers  who work in engineering, finance, procurement and other areas  will be laid off.

The layoffs of temporary workers began Wednesday and will be completed by December. Salaried workers will be eligible for early retirement and separation packages beginning next month, said the person, who requested anonymity because the plan has not yet been announced.

The white-collar cuts come on top of the 13,000 layoffs Chrysler announced in February as part of a massive restructuring plan. Those cuts included 11,000 production workers, such as those in Toledo, and 2,000 salaried employees who also were offered buyouts or early retirement packages.

Chrysler became a private company in August when Germanys Daimler AG sold 80.1 percent of Chrysler to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP. Chryslers new chief executive, Bob Nardelli, has said the automaker is focused on raising cash for its turnaround.

Nardelli and Chrysler Vice Chairman Tom LaSorda didnt elaborate on the layoffs Wednesday during a trip to Washington to meet with lawmakers and the Bush administration on energy legislation, including upgrades to fuel economy regulations.

Nardelli said the final decision on the cuts came Tuesday during Chryslers first board meeting as a private company. Those are within the confines of the board and the boards decisions, he said of the layoffs.

Nardelli said the board meeting went well. He refused to say whether the board approved expected cuts in Chryslers vehicle lineup.

Its an interesting transition from public to private. I think that it was a very productive session for all of us, Nardelli said.

Chrysler and other automakers have opposed a Senate plan that would increase fuel economy standards 40 percent to a combined 35 miles per gallon for cars and trucks by 2020. Several automakers support an alternative that would mandate 32 to 35 mpg by 2022 and maintain separate requirements for cars and trucks.

Were all hoping that were going to have a reasonable compromise. These folks make trucks and they do a great job so we want to make sure Chrysler is strong, said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who joined Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Kit Bond, R-Mo., in a Chrysler meeting.

Nardelli said he was down making some new friends and visiting some old while discussing a broad range of issues affecting Chrysler.

Its important, I think, for me to listen and learn and try to come up the learning curve right now, he said.
Shanghai. November 12 (Gasgoo.com) - More hybrid electric vehicles models made either by joint venture automakers or local Chinese automakers will be sold in Chinese market next year, Chinese newspaper reported.

1. Hondas Civic hybrid vehicle will be imported to Chinese market by the end of this year and it will be priced at $22,000-$25,000. The vehicle is powered by 1.3 Liter i-VETC engine and IMA, electromotor, nickel-hydrogen battery, and power control unit. The maximum output and torque of this vehicle is equivalent to that of a 1.8 liter gasoline engine.

Experts say the vehicle can run 31 kilometers on one liter gas and that it consumes half as much gasoline as a conventional 1.8 liter vehicle does.

Hondas joint venture Dongfeng Honda is also planning to locally produce Honda Civic Hybrid which is similar to the imported hybrid in China next year. So for, Honda has sold more than 100,000 Civic Hybrid vehicles worldwide.

General Motors chairman Wagoner announced in Beijing earlier this month his companywill start local production of Chevrolet brand hybrid vehicle in China next year. The vehicle is developed by the 2.chairman Wagoner announced in Beijing earlier this month his companywill start local production of Chevrolet brand hybrid vehicle in China next yearThe vehicle is developed by the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center, a joint research facility between General Motors and Shanghai Automotive. Shanghai GM did not release estimated prices for this vehicle, but Wagoner said it should not be too expensive.
DETROIT - United Auto Workers members have ratified a four-year contract with Ford Motor Co. that sets lower pay for some newly hired workers and puts the company's huge retiree health care debt into a UAW-run trust.

The UAW, which represents about 54,000 workers at Ford, said Wednesday that 79 per cent of those voting favoured the pact.

Workers at General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC have ratified similar deals, with the contract winning at Chrysler by only a small margin. Unlike the other two automakers, there was no strike at Ford.

The landmark deals have been praised by the companies and union for protecting jobs while cutting labour costs to make the struggling automakers more competitive with their Japanese rivals.

UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said the union negotiated a contract with Ford that protects wages, benefits and seniority rights and provides income and secure health care for retirees.

"We stood our ground in the face of some rather big asks by the company and came away with a creative agreement that addresses the concerns of our members and also gives the company the opportunity to move forward," he said in a statement. "Now it's up to Ford to successfully bring to market the top-quality vehicles our members are building in UAW Ford factories."

The UAW said production workers voted 81 per cent in favour of the deal, while skilled trades workers were 71 per cent in favour.

"This agreement is proof that by working together with our UAW partners, it is possible to find solutions that collectively benefit our employees, retirees and the company," Ford President and Chief Executive Alan Mulally said. "This contract will provide significant opportunities for the company's long-term competitiveness, and that is good for all of us."

In addition to the active workers, the deal covers more than 94,000 Ford retirees and 28,000 surviving spouses. It will run until Sept. 14, 2011.

The Ford deal was reached in the early morning hours of Nov. 3 after a nearly two-day bargaining session at the company's Dearborn headquarters.

In exchange for the wage cuts and other concessions, Ford promised not to close any U.S. plants beyond some it already has identified. It also promised future products to six U.S. assembly plants and agreed to make hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of improvements to factories.

Industry analysts say the pact should help the ailing automaker by lowering wages for thousands of new workers and moving its retiree health care obligations to a union-run trust.
(Photo : GettyImages/LintaoZheng) China's Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011.

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China's Tiangong-1 space station is likely to fall into the Earth's atmosphere late in 2017, according to a senior official associated with the country's manned space program.



Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011. The space station terminated its data service in March this year. It was operational for four and a half years; surpassing its designed life by two and a half years.



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Wu Ping, deputy direction of the manned space engineering office, said that the space lab is currently intact. It is orbiting at an average height of 370 kilometers. Through its lifetime, the station had docked with Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 spacecraft in November 2011, June 2012, and June 2013 respectively.



According to Xinhua, Wu said that a large part of the space lab is likely to burn up during the fall. Ping stated that the fall is not likely to cause any damage to the ground or affect aviation activities. China would monitor the space station on a continuous basis and will issue early warnings about any possible collision.



Space reported that the assertions suggest that China may no longer be in control of the station. If the station was under control, it could have been steered to a guided re-entry at a specified time and location. China is not part of the consortium managing International Space Station. The country is working to have its own space station operational in Earth orbit by 2022.



China launched Tiangong-2, the successor to Tiangong-1, on September 15 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China.



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(Photo : Getty Images) A Samsung Galaxy Note 7 lays on a counter in plastic bags after it was returned to a Best Buy in Orem, Utah.

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Samsung Electronics revealed on Monday that its first reported battery explosion case in China was due to external heating, assuring its clients in the world's biggest smartphone market that the units sold there are safe.



"The test results show that the damage to the device was caused by external heating," Samsung said in a statement.



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The investigation came after photos of charred Galaxy Note 7 from two Chinese owners went viral online. Of the two devices, only one was obtained for investigation.



In an interview with The Associated Press, one of the phone users said the handset began heating up and vibrating late Saturday night, and then it exploded, emitting black smoke. The second complaint claimed that the phone exploded on Sunday while the user was playing a game.



Amperex Technology, Samsung's battery supplier for handsets in China, said that a joint investigation with Samsung revealed that the case was not directly linked to the battery it produced.



"According to the burn marks on the sample, we surmise that the source of the heating comes from outside the battery, and it's very likely that there was an external factor causing the heating problem," Amperex said.



The two devices that exploded were bought at JD.com after Samsung officially launched the unit in China on Sept. 1, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Note 7 phones recalled in China by Samsung last week were those distributed before the official Sept. 1 launch.



An insider told Reuters that Samsung SDI is the maker of the faulty batteries that were recalled.



Meanwhile, it is not clear whether Samsung's official statement is enough to ease worries. The company has been hit by crisis after it announced a global recall of its Galaxy Note 7 following 92 reports of Note 7 batteries overheating or catching fire in the United States, CNBC reported.



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China's Premier Li Keqiang addresses a press conference .

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During the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Forum on Tuesday, China's Premier Li Keqiang applauded his country's effort in making sure that it is constantly growing economically.



Li, who was the chairman of the United Nations (UN) event, stressed on the growth of the state while maintaining peace and protecting the environment.



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"The foundation of sustainable development is development. The core of development is growth because without development and growth, all other things will lose their foundation," he said.



He added that on matters related to development, there should be global assistance to help make sure that it is not only one state that benefits.



"The development we are talking about should be open, interconnected and inclusive. In this sense, sustainable development is a global endeavor," Li said.



The forum was aimed at achieving 17 goals by 2030, some of which include poverty alleviation and environmental protection.



Premier Li voiced optimism that between now and 2020, cases of poverty would be a thing of the past and China's health and housing sector would be commendable.



"We have high hopes that we are capable of eradicating poverty based on the current standards in China by the year 2020 so as to meet targets when it comes to hunger and poverty eradication, women and children's health as well as affordable housing," he said. "By 2030, we hope we will be getting close to the standards of developed countries."



David Nabarro, a UN special advisor for the event, applauded the Chinese government for its efforts to do away with poverty.



"China has also recognized the importance of equity dimension," Nabarro said. He also commended the low carbon growth strategy set out in China's latest 5-year development plan.



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Tagschina, China Development, 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, China Foundation For Poverty Alleviation
(Photo : Getty images) A freighter docks at the Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province of China.

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China's Ministry of Commerce has slammed critics who clam that the world's second largest economy does not favor businesses.



China's Ministry of Commerce spokesperson Shen Dangyang addressed reporters on Tuesday, explaining that foreign investors seeking special terms of trading are the ones giving the country a bad image.



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"Why are there complaints? Because foreign companies in China that rely on low costs and preferential treatment are now struggling," he inquired.



"Companies that rely on preferential policies to make easy money feel the environment has worsened. But companies with real foresight, real competitiveness, they feel that the investment environment has improved," Shen explained. "China's foreign investment market is not deteriorating."



He added that the future of trade in China is quite competitive, and the country's leaders are not "blindly optimistic."



Shen was replying to a growing perception that foreign investors investing in China are finding it harder as compared to Chinese investors in other countries.



Recent remarks by a European official during the G20 Summit last month also put China in the spotlight.



"China, while asking in public for more openness and steps to counter protectionism is still giving Western investors only a limited access to their market," said the official.



Foreign investors are reportedly concerned about China's recent laws and policies, which some fear will make it even harder to do business in the country.



Critics claim that the new regulations will either remove all foreign investors from the country or make life quite hard for them to operate.



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Reel World

Movie Culture

Globalquerque!, New Mexicos Celebration of World Music and Culture, returns to Albuquerque this week. Along with all the usual music- and- dance- filled events, organizers have assembled the third annual International Cinema Series. Screenings have been taking place throughout the month of September at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. This will culminate during the festival itself with a handful of great films from around the globe. On Thursday, Sept. 22, starting at 7pm, you can catch Sergey Bodrovs epic historical drama Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan. This 2008 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film paints a multidimensional portrait of the man born as Temudgin in 1162 AD and his rise to visionary leadership of the Mongol people. Shot in remote Central Asian locations, the film features authentic Mongolian dialogue and is subtitled in English. On Saturday, Sept. 24, theres a double feature to be had. First up at 12pm is Benda Bilili!, a documentary about an unusual group of street musicians from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Four of the members are paraplegics, three are able-bodied men, and all of them play on homemade instruments. At 2pm, the Cinema Series wraps up with Favela Rising, an award-winning documentary about a former Brazilian gang member who unites his poor neighborhood through the power of hip-hop music and Afro-Brazilian dance. All screenings take place at the NHCCs Bank of America Theatre (1701 Fourth Street SW). Admission is free to the public. For more info go to globalquerque. org/ cinema. html.
(Photo : Getty images) Tourists walk on a street in China.

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Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province has not only experienced an increase in tourism, but the city's real estate sector has also received a boost following the recent G20 Summit.



As of Sunday, Sept 18, home prices in the region had sparked by 22 percent from the previous year. A record has also been set with over 5,105 homes, valued at over $1 billion, bought within a single day on Sunday, according to local housing authorities.



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The rise in home prices has prompted authorities to prevent non-Hangzhou residents who already own one or more houses from purchasing another house in the region.



According to Yu Xiaofeng, a professor with Zhejiang University of Technology's Real-Estate Studies Center, the first week after the G20 Summit saw the most purchase in houses.



"Non-local residents made up 34 percent of Hangzhou's home sales in August, rising to 39 percent in the first week after the summit," he said.



Yu, however, noted that there is an indication of over investment and speculation in the region.



Hangzhou's tourism sector also benefitted from the summit.



According to Yang Yanfeng, a researcher with the China Tourism Academy, the recent renovations in the city will capture the attention tourists.



"The Great Wall, pandas, Tibet and the landscapes of Guilin are usually what foreigners equate with China. But the promotion of Hangzhou this month highlighted its picturesque scenery and is likely to attract more visitors," he said.



According to He Jianmin, a professor at Shanghai University of Finance, the region had made several breakthroughs, but some parts of the region maintain a free entrance policy.



"We saw the ticket prices from many other attractions double or even triple, but Hangzhou sacrificed a loss in ticket revenue for the development of the tourism industry and the service sector as a whole," he explained.



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Tagschina, Hangzhou Housing security and Management Bureau, tourism, real estate
(Photo : Getty Images) China has vowed to support the United Nations financially to deal with the ongoing refugee crisis.

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China plans to step up its effort to resolve the global refugee crisis by providing $100 million and creating an additional $1 billion fund.



China's Premier Li Keqiang made this revelation on Monday at a United Nations refugee summit in New York, Reuters reported.



"We are committed to shouldering our responsibilities compatible with our abilities," Li said at the summit. "We would like to provide $100 million of additional humanitarian assistance on top of the previous pledges while considering taking further supportive measures."



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Li added that Chinese government is seriously contemplating forming a separate China-U.N. Peace and Development Fund to help developing nations in their efforts to deal with the refugee crisis.



During last year's annual gathering of global leaders in New York, China pledged to create a $1 billion fund to help UN in its mission to resolve the refugee problem. China took the first step in this direction when it signed an agreement with the UN earlier this year to pay $20 million every year for next 10 years to fund peace, security, and development.



Under the terms and conditions of the agreement, China's financial contribution would be divided evenly between supporting peace and security for refugees and implementing a 2030 economic agenda for sustainable development.



Experts have noted that unprecedented refugee crisis due to conflicts in the Middle East and Africa poses a huge challenge for the entire world. The ongoing civil war in Syria, Afghanistan and several African nations has over the years drastically increased the population of refugees heading to Europe and North America.



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Tagschina, Syrian refugees, refugee crisis, Refugee Summit
(Photo : YouTube) After its latest funding run, Grab is now valued at $3 billion.

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Ride-hailing service Grad has confirmed that it has completed its latest round of funding and was able to accumulate $750 million in new capital. Grab is widely considered by many tech analysts as the biggest rival of Uber in the Southeast Asian market.



Grab said that the latest Series F round of funding was led by the company's biggest investor, SoftBank. Along with SoftBank, Grab revealed that a handful of existing and new backers also contributed to the latest funding run, but they wish to remain anonymous. Rumors indicate that Chinese transportation company Didi Kuaidi joined latest Grab's funding round, although both companies have refused to comment on this matter.



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An inside source in Grab told Tech Crunch that the latest round of funding would put Grab's post-money valuation at $3 billion. Grab had a market valuation of $2.3 billion before the latest funding round.



Grab said that it currently has 400,000 drivers and has been downloaded more than 21 million times on various app stores. The company added that its service is being booked "up to 1.5 million" times daily.



With its current value, many market experts are convinced that Grab can essentially take on Uber in a head-on fight.



Grab is currently targeting Indonesia as the company's next market. Indonesia happens to be the world's fourth most populous country and has the largest economy in Southeast Asia.



Currently, Grab is operating in six countries within the Southeast Asian region. The company's headquarters is based in Singapore.



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TagsGrab, grab fund, grab funding run, grab value, Didi, Uber
(Photo : Getty Images/Justin Sullivan ) The HP logo is displayed on the entrance to the Hewlett-Packard Headquarters September 16, 2008 in Palo Alto, California.

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HP has recently launched an update that will prohibit its printers from using ink cartridges manufactured or sold by third-party manufacturers. Many non-HP cartridges are being manufactured, sold, and used across the world.The company's decision to ban these products have created quite a stir in the tech community.



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Chinese online ink retailer 123inkt confirmed that starting Sept. 13: HP printers are no longer going to accept their ink cartridges. Once users try to use these non-HP cartridges on their HP printers, an error message appears.



The error message reads, "One or more cartridges appear to be damaged. Remove them and replace them with new cartridges."



Affected manufacturers and users were quick to voice out their concerns in various social networking platforms. On the other hand, HP confirmed that the company intentionally added the failure date to all non-HP cartridges in the firmware of its printers.



In a statement acquired by China Tech News, an HP spokesperson said, "Affected printers will continue to work with refilled cartridges if they contain the original HP security chip. Other cartridges possibly don't work."



HP added that its decision to ban non-HP cartridges is part of the company's plan to maintain the integrity of the company's intellectual properties. The company said that this provision allows it to ban other types of printer cartridges to be used in its printers.



Following HP's latest decision, a handful of tricks to circumvent the new rule surfaced on several tech websites. Some users claim that they were able to circumvent the rule by installing an old version of the printer's firmware. On the other hand, this operation requires advanced tech skills and inexperienced users may render their printers totally inoperable if not properly guided.



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TagsHP, hp printer, hp ink, hp printer ink, hp third party ink, printer ink
(Photo : VCG/VCG via Getty Images) Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma attends a meeting during the first training class of Jack Ma Foundation Rural Teachers Awards at Xiaohewan Primary School in Xiayun Town on Aug. 3, 2016 in Anshun, Guizhou Province of China.

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China's Alibaba Group Holding Limited is set to expand its Alipay services in Hong Kong as it aims to include 8,000 merchants before the year ends.



Alipay, an online payment service, will be launched in Hong Kong by Oct. 13, China Daily reported.



This will give the country's tourists the chance to use the system in making purchases in Hong Kong. To date, only the mainland's visitors can use Alipay whenever they want to buy something from Hong Kong.



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Ant Financial Services Group senior vice-president and head of international business Douglas Feagin revealed that with Alipay's operation in the Special Administrative Region of China, the company is now keen of encouraging more merchants to sign up. The Ant Financial is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.



With its current license from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Chinese e-commerce giant is moving towards enabling local consumers use the online payment service in convenience stores and other offline merchants.



As its next move, Feagin divulged that they will apply for a permit with HKMA asking them to let Alipay of China's Alibaba offer other services such as mobile payment at POS machines, peer-to-peer transfers and issuance of physical cards.



In the meantime, Bloomberg reported that Ant Financial may just be worth more than the American multi-national banking firm Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated.



Head of telecom and Internet research at CLSA in Hong Kong Elinor Leung reportedly shared that majority of the value of Jack Ma's Ant Financial could be in Alipay.



It was noted that in June, the affiliate of China's Alibaba was already worth about $60 billion, and it is estimated to be at $75 billion already at present - a figure which could be higher than Goldman Sachs'.







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Tagschina, China Alibaba, Alipay, Alipay Hong Kong
(Photo : GettyImages/LintaoZhang) China and Canada could sign an extradition treaty soon.

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Canada has agreed to pursue dialogue with China towards a bilateral extradition treaty, the Canadian Prime Minister's office announced. Canada had long resisted any such treaty on account of human rights concerns.



The announcement was made just a day before the scheduled deportment of Canadian missionary Kevin Garratt. Canadian authorities have vehemently denied making any concessions for Garratt's release,



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The move to stage talks for a bilateral treaty comes as a part of growing cooperation between China and Canada to nail down fugitives.



According to NY Times, China has long been interested in signing bilateral extradition treaties with some western nations, which it claims have become an attractive destination for corrupt Chinese officials. In the recent years, China has solidified its war against corruption and has carried out several anti-corruption campaigns under the leadership of its President Xi Jinping.



China signed one such treaty with Australia in 2007. However, Australia is yet to ratify the agreement. In the past, The United States, New Zealand, and Britain have declined to enter into any such treaty with China. Reuters reported that these countries are mainly concerned about China's human rights record.



Canada's Foreign Affair Ministry has stated that Canada's relationship with China hinges on promoting and protecting human rights. In 2011, Canada extradited Lai Changxing, a Chinese billionaire accused of corruption. The extradition took place after authorities in Ottawa received assurance from China that Lai will not be tortured or executed. In 2015, the US had also deported Yang Jinjun, a businessman accused of corruption, to China.



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TagsCanada, china, Kevin Garratt
(Photo : NASA/JPL) Quantum teleportation explained in a cartoon.

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In what's being variously described as historic and a true breakthrough, scientists for the first time successfully demonstrated the feasibility of quantum teleportation using an existing telecommunications network.



This marvelous accomplishment is a key step along the path to the long-term goal building a fiber-based quantum internet connecting cities, countries and the world. This new quantum network will launch a new kind of internet almost immune from hacking and spying.



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Two independent teams of scientists, one in China and one in Canada, succeeded in transferring quantum information over several miles of commercial optical fiber networks in a series of experiments. The experiments were carried out Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China.



Quantum teleportation bears no similarities to the teleportation seen in Star Trek and in other sci-fi movies. It refers to the instantaneous transmission of information and not actual matter like persons or things.



Quantum teleportation is a form communication not transportation. It provides a way of transporting a "qubit" or a "quantum bit" from one location to another without having to move a physical particle a qubit is normally attached to.



Quantum teleportation relies on this weird thing called "quantum entanglement" otherwise called "spooky action at a distance" by Albert Einstein. When two subatomic particles are entangled, changing the quantum state of one immediately changes the quantum state of the other, no matter how far apart they are.



This also means quantum entangled things can move a lot faster than the speed of light, which violates the classical laws of physics.



Using quantum entanglement, researchers in Canada sent quantum information over 6.2 kilometers of Calgary's fiber optic network. On the other hand, the Chinese team using a slightly different configuration did so over a distance of 12.5 km.



The development of super fast quantum computers; quantum cryptography and the creation of extremely secure "quantum internet" will revolutionize communications.



Quantum internet will allow users to transfer information through quantum states instead of the currently used strings of digital 0s and 1s. Since a hacker can't read the quantum state of a photon without disturbing it, a quantum network is unhackable.



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TagsQuantum Teleportation, china, Canada, teleportation, Star Trek, quantum entanglement, spooky action at a distance, Albert Einstein
(Photo : GettyImages/FengLi) China is reportedly building two wind turbines every hour.

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China is carrying out the world's biggest turbine installation program. According to the International Energy Agency, the country is building two wind turbines every hour.



China would soon be able to meet its entire annual increase in energy demand through wind turbines. However, the country's wind turbines have to compete with coal-fired generators for access to the grid.



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According to the BBC, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has since expressed concerns about China's excess coal-fired power stations. This excess requires China to turn off its wind turbines for 15 percent of the time of a year. This is drastically higher than 1 -2 percent of the time in a year that an average European wind farm is forced to stop generating power.



"China has now a clear over-supply. In the province of Gansu, 39 percent of wind energy had to be curtailed (turned off because there is not enough capacity on the grid)," the agency stated. The agency has advised China to design a plan to phase-out its coal power plants which are mostly old and inefficient.



CNBC reported that China accounted for 36 percent of global investments in renewable resources last year. The country also plans to impose a freeze on the building of new coal-powered plants until 2018. In 2015, China installed 30,000 MW of new wind energy plants. It is highly likely that Chinese authorities overestimated the increase in electricity demand.



China had long supported the construction of coal plants by providing easy finance and assistance. However, now the country has turned its focus to clean energy.



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Tagschina, wind mills, International Energy Agency
(Photo : Aleppo 24) Destroyed UN trucks carrying food and medical aid in Syria lie burnt out after a Russian air attack. (Inset) Russian Su-34 fighter bombers such as these two were said to have attacked the unarmed convoy.

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The United Nations condemned Russia for its barbaric air attack on a UN humanitarian convoy in Syria that destroyed trucks carrying food and medicine to civilians trapped at Aleppo even as the United States said it had more than enough evidence to confirm the Russian Air Force carried out the unwarranted attack. The murderous attack also killed some 20 UN aid workers and civilians.



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An infuriated UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon blasted the Russian attack as "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate."



"Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the power of depravity sinks lower," Ban told world leaders at the UN General Assembly annual meeting in New York on Sept. 20.



The aid convoy and a UN warehouse were destroyed by Russian ground attack jets (probably Sukhoi Su-34 fighter bombers) on the evening of Sept. 19 in the area of Urum al-Kubra, west of Aleppo. The Russians apparently attacked the unarmed UN convoy twice (which the United States say is standard Russian tactics) and prompted the UN to halt its aid operations in Syria.



The International Committee of the Red Cross said some 20 civilians, most of the UN aid workers, were killed in the Russian attack. Among the dead was Omar Barakat, director of the Red Crescent's Urum al-Kubra branch.



The UN said 18 of the convoy's 31 trucks were hit with most of those hit being destroyed. The aid in these trucks was intended for eastern Aleppo where some 250,000 civilians are in desperate need of food, medicine and water.



The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said aid workers had been killed in an "aerial bombardment."



"All of our information indicates clearly that this was an airstrike. That means there only could have been two entities responsible," said U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.



These entities were either Moscow or the Syrian regime. While Rhodes didn't specify which country's planes carried out the strike, US military sources citing classified intelligence were certain Russian fighter bombers carried out the attack.



The US government also holds Russia responsible for the murderous attack whether or not Russia carries it out, said Rhodes.



"We hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this airspace given their commitment under the cessation of hostilities was to ground air operations where humanitarian assistance was flowing," said Rhodes, referring to the terms of a recent ceasefire brokered between the US and Russia.



The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad pronounced that ceasefire dead on the same day its Russian allies attacked the UN aid convoy.



Russia, of course, denied its warplanes had bombed the convoy claiming, implausibly, that unnamed rebels were responsible. No Syrian rebel faction operates an air force and there were no reports of any rebel ground attacks on the convoy.



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TagsUnited Nations, Russia, Aleppo, United States, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Urum al-Kubra, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
(Photo : Getty Images) Taiwan is building military facilities on the Taiping Island in the South China Sea which is also being claimed by China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines

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New satellite images of the South China Sea shows that Taiwan is constructing what appears to be anti-aircraft gun towers on the Taiping Island which is under its control, according to Taipei newspaper. The China Times.



The Taiping Island, which is also known as Itu Aba Island, is the largest feature in the Spratly group of islands which is being jointly claimed by China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan.



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The China Times reported on Monday that satellite images show new construction on the Taiwan-controlled Island. The structures under construction are believed to be anti-aircraft defenses which include gun blockhouse towers.



Four new buildings



At least four new buildings on the island were captured in the satellite images. The US has expressed concerns that these structures could be turned into military facilities as China continues to conduct patrols and engage in military exercises in the maritime region.



According to The China Times, the buildings appear to be about three to four storeys high and are facing the western section of the disputed waterway.



The buildings are reportedly huge; about five to six times larger than the current anti-aircraft weapons system on the island.



Protests



The discovery of the facilities comes as authorities in Taiwan and China are protesting against the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which dismissed China's claims over islands and reefs in the disputed sea under its nine-dash line.



Taiwan's Defense Minister Feng Shih-kuan on Tuesday refused to comment on the purpose of the new structures saying it is state secret.



"It is inconvenient for us to reveal any military facilities we are installing on Taiping Island and what their purposes are as they are all considered secrets," he told reporters during a legislative session.



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TagsChina Times, South China Sea, Taiping Island, Spratly group of islands, satellite images, arbitral court ruling, military facilities, china, Taiwan
(Photo : Getty Images) Passing cars leave a streak of light as steam rises from the cooling towers of the Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant at night on June 11, 2015 near Grafenrheinfeld, Germany.

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China is planning to allocate $570 billion to build more than 60 nuclear power plants over the next decade.



Zheng Mingguang, China's State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) vice president and chief nuclear designer, said at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in London last Friday that China plans to initially build around 30 reactors over the next five years and more five years after that.



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China's three biggest nuclear companies - SNPTC, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) - will build at least two nuclear power plants every year, Reuters reported.



The 60 new nuclear power plants would include between six to 10 power plants that will make use of China's CAP1000 technology, which is similar to the AP1000 from Toshiba's Westinghouse.



Currently, two new nuclear reactors from CNNC are under construction in Sanmen county, Zhejiang province, according to the Manila Bulletin, while SNPTC will make another two reactors at Haiyang in Shandong province, and CGN will also build two at Lufeng in Guandong province.



Meanwhile, Daily Caller reported that China plans to make its nuclear generating capacity more than double, from roughly 27 gigawatts to 58 gigawatts by 2020. The country also aims to get about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030 and have over 350 gigawatts by 2050. One gigawatt of power is enough to sustain energy to around 700,000 households.



To date, China has 30 operational nuclear reactors, which derive 2.5 percent of its electricity, and another 21 are still under construction.



Chinese brokerage Orient Securities said China's nuclear facilities will have a 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) market over the next five years.



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Tagschina, Nuclear Power, nuclear reactors, Nuclear Power Plant
(Photo : getty images.) China's Ministry of Public Security said on Tuesday that Cambodia has deported 13 Taiwanese citizens to China in connection with a telecom fraud case.

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Cambodia has deported 13 Taiwanese citizens to China in connection with a telecom fraud case. The move is likely to trigger another deportation saga between China and Taiwan. The news of the deportation was confirmed by China's Ministry of Public Security on Tuesday.



About 50 Chinese nationals were also deported along with the 13 Taiwanese nationals, Reuters reported. All the suspects were arrested in Phnom Penh after Cambodian police conducted a raid to nab criminals suspected of committing internet and phone extortion fraud. Cyber fraud which costs China billions yearly has also driven some Chinese victims to suicide.



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Uk Heisela, a senior official in Cambodia's immigration department, claimed that no Taiwanese official was in touch with the Cambodian government over the case.



Taiwan Criticizes Cambodia's Deportation Move



Taiwan's foreign ministry strongly protested againist Cambodia's deportation of its citizens. Taiwan claimed that Phnom Penh had acted under pressure from China. In June, Cambodia had deported another 25 Taiwanese suspects to China, while Kenya and Malaysia also deported several Taiwanese suspects despite protests from Taiwan.



China said has all concerned countries are fully cooperating to break the telephone fraud ring. Investigations into the case which began last November has lead to the arrest of 1,168 suspects including 347 Taiwan citizens.



Experts claim Taiwan cannot do much in the ongoing deportation fiasco, as it does not share any diplomatic relation with Cambodia, Kenya and other countries involved in the case. Taiwan as of today is officially recognized by only 22 countries, most of whom are small and poor countries located in African and the Latin American region.



Many countries are still hesitant to officially recognize Taiwan, for fear of provoking China. China considers Taiwan, which considers itself a sovereign nation, as a wayward province awaiting unification with mainland China. Taiwan separated from China in 1949 following a bitter civil war.



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TagsCambodia, Taiwan, Taiwan and China, Cross-Strait relationship
(Photo : Keen Security Lab) White hat hackers control a Tesla Model S.

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Tesla Motors said it responded immediately to a successful attempt by Chinese "white hat" or ethical hackers that remotely seized control of a Tesla Model S sedan by compromising the vehicle's Controller Area Network (CAN) bus.



The successful hack by Keen Security Lab, a subsidiary of Chinese tech and media company Tencent, was the first case of a remote attack that compromised a CAN Bus to achieve remote controls of a Tesla car. The CAN bus is the system that allows the different segments of hardware in the car to interact with one another.



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The white hat team gained control of the test Tesla sedan when the car was connected to a hacked Wi-Fi hotspot. To blame for the CAN bus vulnerability is Tesla's ability to roll-out over-the-air (OTA) updates to its vehicles as if they were mobile phones.



The Chinese team seized control of the Tesla Model S using the car's wireless network. Once inside the Tesla's computer, the white hats were able to control the car's infotainment system, move the car's power-operated seats, lock and unlock the doors, fold the mirrors, pop the trunk and engage the brakes while the car was moving -- a frightening scenario.



Tesla said within just 10 days of receiving the report from the Chinese, it deployed an OTA software update (v7.1, 2.36.31) that addresses the potential security issues. Tesla noted the issue demonstrated is only triggered when the web browser is used, and also required the car to be physically near to and connected to a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot.



"Our realistic estimate is that the risk to our customers was very low, but this did not stop us from responding quickly," said Tesla.



"We engage with the security research community to test the security of our products so that we can fix potential vulnerabilities before they result in issues for our customers. We commend the research team behind today's demonstration and plan to reward them under our bug bounty program, which was set up to encourage this type of research."



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Tagstesla motors, Tesla Model S, Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, Keen Security Lab, Tencent
(Photo : GettyImages/PhilippGuelland) The import is likely to start by the end of the year, although no time line has been provided.

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China has agreed to resume importing beef from the United States. The import is likely to start by the end of this year, although no time line has been provided yet.



Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who is currently in the US for attending UN General Assembly meeting, announced it at an event in New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel.



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He said that the decision shows China's sincerity in opening its markets to US business once again.



CNBC reported that Li talked about Chinese authorities completing quarantine procedure for US beef on the bone. The completion of this formality paves the way for resuming the imports.



Speaking to US business groups, Li revealed that China is a large producer of animal and agricultural product.



"We also recognize that the United States has very good beef, so why should we deny Chinese customers this choice?" he said.



China has imposed a ban on most US beef imports since 2003. This was done in response to the discovery of mad-cow disease in some American beef cattle.



Despite the World Animal Health Organization declaring that the risk of the disease is "negligible," some countries, such as Brazil and China, banned the import of beef from the United States. However, Brazil withdrew the ban earlier this year.



According to Wall Street Journal, US cattle producers are currently struggling with the declining price level in the domestic market. This year, the producers have pressed agriculture officials to prioritize the need of reopening export markets.



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Tagschina, United States, Mad Cow Disease, China Beef Import
Deranged Duterte shows the finger to the European Union.

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As expected, the Philippines' unhinged president, Rodrigo Duterte, reacted violently to criticism by the European Union (EU) of his bloody drug war, repeatedly yelling "Fuck you" at the EU and "flipping the bird' at them in a profanity laden rant.



And, as he did with the Americans, he sneered at the Europeans as murdering colonialists that massacred thousands of their colonized peoples.



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In a five-page resolution issued Sept. 15, the EU ordered its delegation in the Philippines and the embassies of its 27 member states to monitor human rights abuses. It urged Duterte "to put an end to the current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings" of drug suspects.



EU lawmakers raised concern about the very high numbers of Filipinos being killed during police operations and by vigilante groups.



The EU urged the Philippine government to investigate abuses "in full compliance with national and international obligations and respect for human rights."



"President Duterte repeatedly urged law enforcement agencies and the public to kill suspected drug traffickers who did not surrender, as well as drug users," said the EU in a resolution.



"President Duterte publicly stated he would not pursue law enforcement officers and citizens who killed drug dealers who resisted arrest."



That number now exceeds 3,500 persons since July 1, said the Philippine National Police (PNP). Some 30 to 40 Filipinos are being killed every day by police and killers the police claim are "vigilantes."



"I read the condemnation of the European Union against me. I will tell them fuck you. You're doing it in atonement for your sins," said Duterte said in a speech at his hometown of Davao City in Mindanao.



He said members of the EU had become strict (about human rights) because they had "guilt feelings" over the atrocities they had committed in the past as colonizers.



He called the Europeans "hypocrites." He said a check of encyclopedias will show what European countries had done. For instance, France and Great Britain had killed Arabs.



"And then the European Union now has the gall to condemn me. I repeat it, fuck you!" he shouted.



Incredibly, Duterte asked whom he was supposed to have killed in the Philippines.



Assuming that the accusations against him were truth, and there were over 1,000 killed in the country, he asked who were the people who were killed?



"Who were they? Criminals? You call it genocide?



How many did they kill?" he said, referring to the Europeans.



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TagsPhilippines, Rodrigo Duterte, European Union, Fuck you, drug war, Philippine National Police
(Photo : getty images.) Canadas Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday sidestepped questions on possibility of Canada signing an extradition treaty with China, but agreed that discussion on the sensitive issue has already started.

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Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday fended off questions on the possibility of the country signing an extradition treaty with China, but agreed that Ottawa has already started discussion with Beijing on the sensitive issue.



"Extradition is certainly one of the things the Chinese have indicated they want to talk about...... As everyone knows, Canada has very high standards in terms of extradition treaties in accordance with our values,"Trudeau told a news conference in United Nations. "But we're happy to have a high-level security dialogue."



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The top official of the Canadian government confirmed about the high-level security dialogue in a separate statement posted on his official website.



It was noted that Canada's national security adviser visited China last week and agreed to start talks about an extradition treaty as part of a security dialogue, which reportedly sparked off speculation that Canada may have made concession to China to secure the deportation of Canadian missionary Kevin Garratt.



However, Ottawa insisted that it has not struck any deal with China over Kevin Garratt's release. Garratt was convicted of spying in China, but Beijing agreed to deport him to Canada last week.



Canada's main opposition, the Conservative Party, has strongly criticized Trudeau's decision to start negotiation over extradition treaty with China, claiming that Ottawa is giving undue concession to Beijing on the issue.



"Does the prime minister not understand that our openness to China should be about encouraging China to adopt our values for human rights, as opposed to us giving in to China's?" interim party leader Rona Ambrose told the House of Commons.



Several western countries have been hesitant in signing extradition treaty with China, mainly out of concern about the integrity of China's judicial system and treatment of deportees. The Chinese government, though, has been pressing hard on signing the extradition treaty, as many of the suspected Chinese criminals are believed to be hiding in many popular western countries like United States, Australia and Canada.



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TagsCanada, Justin Trudeau, Canada and China, china
(Photo : Getty images) Democratic Party Presidential Aspirant, Hillary Clinton

(Photo : Getty images) Republican Presidential aspirant, Donald Trump.

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Presidential aspirants Donald Trump, a Repbulican, and Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, have constantly strived to outweigh each other's plans in relation to what they would do to China if they are elected to the world's economic powerhouse.



This might, however, be easier said than done. The constant strive for the US to remain as the world's most powerful and not be overtaken by China is said to be a case that requires great skill and intelligence.



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For his part, Donald Trump, the former business tycoon turn politician, has not been lenient when stating that China's position in the world market is fixated on shortcuts and manipulation.



If elected, Trump has made a pledge to kick off his leadership by declaring China as "a currency manipulator under the 1988 Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act."



Another promise in his campaign is to stop theft of American intelligence. It was noted that this could be a great achievement, but a tough one as well. The only way it can reportedly succeed is only if US would deny American companies from investing in China.



Meanwhile, he also added that he will put an end to unfair competition by setting an equal trading and labor platform for both World powers. This could be good news to the workforce as they are expected to get paid in accordance to their work, not citizenship.



As these pledges look commendable, it can be noted that they go hand in hand with his campaign slogan to "Make America Great Again."



Clinton, on the other hand, has reportedly opted to gather goodwill and trust between the first and second world powers (US and China, respectively), rather than creating an economic war zone, something which Trump allegedly wishes to do.



Her quest as the American leader is not to question China's "currency manipulation," but instead, deny the country market economy status under the US law. This is a special treatment specifically to China.



The presidential aspirant has likewise pledged to confront China on matters to do with the country under-pricing the value of steel for the country to get more export.



She, however, has failed to give insight on how she will do this, including the timeline for whatever she is set to implement.



According to a report by Brookings, Hillary has a greater challenge in dealing with the Chinese community. It reads that after her run as the secretary of State, Global time issued a special report describing her as the most hated American Political Politician among Chinese internet users.



However, the end result of the election does not really mean much for the Chinese community. Hillary has an advantage of being lenient while addressing key topics unlike Trump, but that's really not an asset to consider the US-China economic relationship.



The two presidential aspirants are among the five other aspirants who are vying for the Presidential sit.



The remaining three are: Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson, Green Party's Jill Stein and Constitution Party's Darell Castle.



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Tagschina, USA, Donald Trump for President, Hillary Clinton for President 2016, US Presidential Elections
Pope Francis met with refugees and leaders of religious faiths including Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus who joined him for a day of prayer for peace in Assisi, home of his namesake, the 12th-century friar St. Francis.

But it was the migrants he invited to join him for lunch on Tuesday (Sept. 20) who captured the headlines and illustrated the tangible impact of war and conflict.

Among them: 6-year-old Maria, the popes youngest guest, who came to Italy from the Syrian capital, Damascus, four months ago. With her parents, Nour and Mohanad, she traveled on a boat from Libya across the Mediterranean to Turkey.

Up until now she has only known fear, her father, Mohanad, told the Italian news agency ANSA. She has not lived a childhood like all the others. She has only known war.

The pope asked another young guest, 8-year-old Qudus from Syria, to make the appeal for peace. She was among those who traveled to Italy with Francis aboard the papal plane when he returned from his visit to Lesbos in April.

Tuesdays peace lunch was held at the refectory of the Franciscan friars in Assisi, which hosted the 30th World Day of Prayer for Peace, established by St. John Paul II in 1986.

Throughout the day, Francis had individual talks with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I; the head of the Anglican church, Archbishop Justin Welby; and Patriarch Aphrem II from the Syriac Orthodox Church, as well as Muslim and Jewish leaders.

The refugees came from countries including Syria, Eritrea, Mali and Nigeria. Many escaped war and conflict at home and are seeking a new life in Italy, where they are living in migrant centers.

One man from Mali, who identified himself by his first name, Sira, first met Francis when the pope washed his feet nearly six months ago as part of the annual Easter ritual. A Muslim, Sira survived a voyage by boat from Libya. He is no longer a refugee; he now has a legal work permit.

I believe there is no difference, we all pray to the same god, he told Italian media ahead of Tuesdays event.

Earlier Tuesday, the pope said the world had to go beyond the divisions of religion and appreciate the shame of war.

The world is at war. The world is suffering, Francis said during the homily at morning Mass at the Vatican.

There is no God of war, he said while urging all men and women of goodwill, of any religion, to pray for peace.

Josephine McKenna is RNS Vatican correspondent

Courtesy: Religon News Service

Publication date: September 21, 2016
An anti-gay pastor who was recently banned from South Africa and went instead to Botswana, has been deported from that country and also banned there.

ChristianToday.com reports that U.S. pastor Steven Anderson made controversial comments after the June shooting that killed 49 at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Anderson had praised the shooting, saying that there were now 50 less pedophiles in this world.

Because of these comments, Anderson was barred from coming to South Africa where he had planned to visit.

He instead went to Botswana where he said that gays and lesbians should be killed and that women should not be allowed to preach in church during an interview with a local radio station in Botswana's capital, Gaborone.

Government authorities reportedly arrested Anderson at the radio station and proceeded to deport him.

"He was picked up at the radio station. I said they should pick him up and show him out of the country," said Botswanas president, Ian Khama. "We don't want hate speech in this country. Let him do it in his own country."

Anderson, however, maintained that he was leaving the country of his own accord.

"I am not being arrested. I am leaving Botswana voluntarily, he told witnesses at the radio station. He added that he enjoyed being in Botswana.

Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com

Publication date: September 21, 2016
Aaron and Melissa Klein, the Christian owners of a bakery in Oregon, continue to stand firm in their position that their First Amendment rights were violated when they were fined $135,000 for declining to make a cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony in 2013.

The bakery owners paid the fine last year in December and also appealed in the Oregon Court of Appeals in April claiming that the government had violated their religious freedom by imposing hefty fines for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer.

The state lawyers filed a brief justifying the charges against the Kleins, to which the bakery couple replied this month. State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and Solicitor General Benjamin Gutman said that the fines were for discriminatory conduct and not to deny the couple's religious beliefs, and that the colossal amount of fine was appropriate because the bakery's refusal to serve the couple had caused the Cryers deep emotional distress.

"Everybody is entitled to their own beliefs, but that doesn't mean that folks have the right to discriminate." Avakian was quoted as saying by The Oregonian in 2013. He then added that the government did not want to close down businesses but wanted to rehabilitate them.

"For those who do violate the law, we want them to learn from that experience and have a good, successful business in Oregon," he had said.

The Kleins' brief says that Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian levied the fines on them without due process, and violated their religious freedom right. They maintain that the government cannot compel artists to devote their art to causes which violate their conscience.

The couple had served the women before, but they could not participate in the event which they said violated their deeply-held religious convictions.

"It wasn't them as a couple. We served them in the past. It had to do with their event. We just couldn't partake in that particular event," Melissa told The Daily Signal last year.

The Kleins said they believe that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, and that they had also baked cakes for couples with same-sex attractions, but baking a cake for their wedding would be akin to participating in the event.

"This case is, first and foremost, about whether Oregon has commandeered individuals' liberty to compel them -- upon pain of crippling financial penalties -- to facilitate the multitude of events in which 'persons' protected by (discrimination law) might participate," the brief states. "Such events might be weddings, as here, or religious rituals, sex-segregated club initiations, or abortions."

"So the court must determine: Has Oregon, for example, compelled Catholics to sculpt totems for Wiccan rituals? Feminists to photograph fraternity initiations? Pro-life filmmakers to video abortions?" the brief asks. "It has not, and that ends the case."

The fine imposed on the Kleins, which also included a high interest per day for delay in payment, amounts to $136,927.07, is as yet in an escrow account and will be released to either of the parties after the case is concluded.
A band whose songs are played by over 50 million people around the globe on Sundays released the movie "Let Hope Rise" on Friday, which documents the band's journey and the testimonies it has experienced.

The band, Hillsong United, is a part of the Hillsong Church founded in 1983 in Sydney, which now has over 100,000 members in 12 countries. The band travels around the world for worship performances and is comprised of musicians, pastors, and lyrics writers.

Directed by John Michael Warren, the movie is about the lives of band members who started composing worship music as a part of youth activities at the church, and how their lives are a testimony of God's grace. The documentary shows their big and small battles in life which were overcome with God, as well as their journey from being a small-time band to a world-renowned one, impacting the lives of millions of people with their heart-rending worship music.

Senior Pastor Brian Houston is also featured in the movie, who says that Hillsong's success is not about the band but it is all about God.

"Let Hope Rise" is intended to pull the audience into a worship experience, which is an overarching theme of the movie.

Fox 4 News asked Hillsong United's guitarist Dylan Thomas why lyrics were shown along the bottom of the screen in the songs as they were featured in the movie, to which Thomas responded: "I mean everything we do is about worship experience, and we want people to feel connected as we sing these lyrics because there is a truth in them Biblically, as this is what is believe. So I think unintentionally when they started screening this film, people started singing. That is why there are lyrics, so that people could see the lyrics because they have so much truth to it."

The movie captures the lives of the musicians behind their stage performances and social media presence and the way they deal with life through faith in God. Musicians in the movie also talked about dealing with highs and lows in life such as trusting God with baby born with congenial heart anomalies and family crisis situations.

"Hillsong - it's not about the name 'Hillsong', it's about the name of Jesus," creative director of Hillsong Church Joel Houston told Gospel Herald. "My prayer is that people see this film...and through the lens of a silly story about a bunch of people from Australia who are just trying to figure it out, and they can maybe experience God in a personal way and it helps them go, 'Wow, maybe there's a plan and purpose for my life that's greater than I knew.'"
I had the privilege or reading a pre-release version of "God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church." Here are 20 quotes from the book, which you should pick up.
In the next 30 minutes, a quarter of practicing Christian women who use social media will check their accounts (26%). Within the next two hours, another quarter will check in (29%).

Thats according to an August survey by Barna Group and Proverbs 31 of 455 American women. Barna defines practicing Christian women as those who self-identify as Christian, attend church at least once a month, and say their faith is very important in their lives.

Most of those womenlike a quarter of the worlds populationare on Facebook. The company has 1.7 billion active monthly users, including four out of five practicing Christian women in America.

In fact, far more womenChristian or nothave Facebook accounts than any other type of social media. Less than half the percentage of Facebook users are on Pinterest (37%), Twitter (35%), or Google Plus (26%). Fewer still have accounts with Instagram (20%), Tumblr (10%), or Snapchat (9%).

Like all American women, Christian women ...

1
Surviving Ebola -- Franklin Graham's Gripping Documentary 'Facing Darkness' Pits Faith Against Fear The True Story of Samaritan's Purse's Race Against Time to Save American Medical Missionaries Stricken With Ebola Comes to Movie Theaters in March, 20



Contact: Michael Conrad, 214-616-0320,



BOONE, N.C., Sept. 21, 2016 /



"Samaritan's Purse workers were holding the last line of defense in a crisis the world was largely ignoring," said Graham, president and CEO of the relief organization. "Hundreds were dying and it was only growing worse. When the disease struck Dr. Kent Brantly and hygienist Nancy Writebol, we knew we had to get them home for treatment. It was their only chance, yet it was something no one had ever done."



Featuring interviews with those who fought the outbreak first hand, FACING DARKNESS was filmed on location in Liberia and the U.S. where the events took place. It is a story of true heroes, risking their lives in an effort to stem one of the deadliest epidemics of the century. Ebola infected more than 28,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and the disease claimed more than 11,000 lives.



FACING DARKNESS premieres in select U.S. movie theaters for one night through Fathom Events on March 30, 2017.



View trailer here:



The Ebola outbreak began in March 2014, and by June it was a raging epidemic. Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were in an ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, fighting the surge of the killer virus when they caught the disease themselves.



The team at Samaritan's Purse worked around the clock toward the only hope for Brantly and Writebol. It was something that had never been doneevacuate the Ebola patients to the U.S. for treatment and cure.



MORE THAN A MEDICAL STORY

The true story of Brantly and Writebol's evacuation, treatment and eventual cure unfolds side-by-side with an inspiring story of faith facing and overcoming fear.



"Faith is not something that makes you safe," Brantly said, describing his decision to stay in country and fight the disease. "You had to face death in the eye and decide, 'Who am I going to be today?'"



Complicating the situationafter years of civil war, the people of Liberia deeply distrusted any authority and went so far as to blame the aid workers for spreading the disease. Hospitals and people were attacked. Yet the Samaritan's Purse team continued to serve.



"I think when there's a crisis, God wants us to be there," Graham said of the organization's commitment to stay in Liberia. "He doesn't want us to run away. God has put us there for a reason, and he expects us to do something about it."



Eventually, a change in culture stemmed the spread of the disease, accomplished through a massive public health education program, in which Samaritan's Purse reached 1.5 million people. One year later, Liberia was declared Ebola free.



FACING DARKNESS not only tells the story of saving Brantly and Writebol, it shows what happens when people choose compassion over fear in service to others.



FACING DARKNESS is directed by Arthur Rasco. It will premiere at the Heartland Film Festival, and has received an Award of Excellence from the Accolade Global Film Competition.



For interviews, contact: Michael Conrad



For press material, visit:



About Samaritan's Purse International Relief

Samaritan's Purse works to meet the physical and spiritual needs of individuals in crisis situations. Led by Franklin Graham, Samaritan's Purse works in more than 100 countries to provide aid to victims of war, disease, disaster, poverty, famine and persecution. For more information visit

Share Tweet Contact: Michael Conrad, 214-616-0320, Michael@Lovell-Fairchild.com BOONE, N.C., Sept. 21, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- FACING DARKNESSa new documentary from Samaritan's Purse and Executive Producer Franklin Grahambrings to vivid life the true story of two American aid workers in West Africa stricken with the deadly Ebola virus and the race against time to get them home and get them treated."Samaritan's Purse workers were holding the last line of defense in a crisis the world was largely ignoring," said Graham, president and CEO of the relief organization. "Hundreds were dying and it was only growing worse. When the disease struck Dr. Kent Brantly and hygienist Nancy Writebol, we knew we had to get them home for treatment. It was their only chance, yet it was something no one had ever done."Featuring interviews with those who fought the outbreak first hand, FACING DARKNESS was filmed on location in Liberia and the U.S. where the events took place. It is a story of true heroes, risking their lives in an effort to stem one of the deadliest epidemics of the century. Ebola infected more than 28,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and the disease claimed more than 11,000 lives.FACING DARKNESS premieres in select U.S. movie theaters for one night through Fathom Events on March 30, 2017.View trailer here: FacingDarknessMovie.com The Ebola outbreak began in March 2014, and by June it was a raging epidemic. Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were in an ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, fighting the surge of the killer virus when they caught the disease themselves.The team at Samaritan's Purse worked around the clock toward the only hope for Brantly and Writebol. It was something that had never been doneevacuate the Ebola patients to the U.S. for treatment and cure.MORE THAN A MEDICAL STORYThe true story of Brantly and Writebol's evacuation, treatment and eventual cure unfolds side-by-side with an inspiring story of faith facing and overcoming fear."Faith is not something that makes you safe," Brantly said, describing his decision to stay in country and fight the disease. "You had to face death in the eye and decide, 'Who am I going to be today?'"Complicating the situationafter years of civil war, the people of Liberia deeply distrusted any authority and went so far as to blame the aid workers for spreading the disease. Hospitals and people were attacked. Yet the Samaritan's Purse team continued to serve."I think when there's a crisis, God wants us to be there," Graham said of the organization's commitment to stay in Liberia. "He doesn't want us to run away. God has put us there for a reason, and he expects us to do something about it."Eventually, a change in culture stemmed the spread of the disease, accomplished through a massive public health education program, in which Samaritan's Purse reached 1.5 million people. One year later, Liberia was declared Ebola free.FACING DARKNESS not only tells the story of saving Brantly and Writebol, it shows what happens when people choose compassion over fear in service to others.FACING DARKNESS is directed by Arthur Rasco. It will premiere at the Heartland Film Festival, and has received an Award of Excellence from the Accolade Global Film Competition.For interviews, contact: Michael Conrad Michael@Lovell-Fairchild.com 214-616-0320For press material, visit: Lovell-Fairchild.com About Samaritan's Purse International ReliefSamaritan's Purse works to meet the physical and spiritual needs of individuals in crisis situations. Led by Franklin Graham, Samaritan's Purse works in more than 100 countries to provide aid to victims of war, disease, disaster, poverty, famine and persecution. For more information visit www.samaritanspurse.org
Baptist Christian leaders condemn religious liberty report as 'moral disaster'

Leading Baptists have condemned a US report advocating peaceful co-existence between religious groups and "non-discrimination principles".

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has described it as part of "a moral revolution that is taking place right before our eyes."

He ws referring to the latest and hardest-fought battle in the US "culture wars"  what has been described as the conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty.

He warned the way "religious freedom" and "religious liberty" were written in the report, in "scare" quotes, was a clear indication that they will both be consigned "to the dustbin of history", regardless of the US Constitution.

The report, from the US Commission on Civil Rights, published earlier this month, is titled: Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties.

It examines the balance between faith-based exemptions from nondiscrimination laws, and legal protections in nondiscrimination law, such as the right to marry.

The report says: "Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights."

The commission, which is an advisory body to the President of the United States, judges: "Overly-broad religious exemptions unduly burden nondiscrimination laws and policies."

It urges courts, law and policy makers to "tailor religious exceptions to civil liberties and civil rights protections as narrowly as applicable law requires."

Commission chairman Martin Castro says in the report: "Our country was founded by those fleeing religious persecution. We must, therefore, always be vigilant to ensure that religion not be used as a pretext to persecute those whose civil rights and civil liberties should be protected."

He adds: "The phrases 'religious liberty' and 'religious freedom' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance."

Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, described the language on religious freedom as a "logical, moral and political disaster."

"For this administration to argue that religious liberty is merely a euphemism for unlawful discrimination demonstrates how deeply entrenched our federal government is in a culture war mentality against religious dissidents," he told Baptist Press.

"Freedom of conscience isn't privilege or luxury: It is the first freedom, without which no other freedom can exist. This hostile attitude toward tens of millions of law-abiding Americans is tragic, and my prayer is that it would quickly give way to a recognition that soul freedom is worth defending for all."
Christian boy in Pakistan jailed for blasphemy over Facebook 'like'

A 16-year-old boy in Pakistan has been jailed for a Facebook "like", according to World Watch Monitor.

Nabeel Masih  also known as Nabeel Chohan  is accused of committing blasphemy by liking and sharing the post which "defamed and disrespected" the Kaaba in Mecca, at the centre of Islam's most sacred mosque.

He was arrested after police raised his home in Dina Nath village in the Punjab region following a complaint against him.

The complainant, Akhtar Ali, told police: "On 18 September, I was with my friends Bakht Khan and Saddam... We took our friend Waqar's mobile phone and started seeing pictures of his various friends on Facebook. But when we opened Nabeel Masih's profile, there was a picture posted in which the Kaaba is defamed and disrespected. Seeing that picture, our religious feelings were hurt."

Nabeel's cousin, Imran, 24, told World Watch Monitor that Nabeel had nothing against Muslims and meant no harm.

"It was only a mistake by him and he clearly stated that he did not intend to hurt but to condemn the post," Imran said. He added that Nabeel is illiterate and works as a labourer in a nearby ghee factory.

Pastor Samuel Masih, who was visiting his sisters in the village, said that, although everything seemed calm, "many of the Christians have left the area due to fear of security".

Phoolnagar Police Station head, Shahbaz Ahmed Dogar, reiterated that everything was under control and urged Christians to return.

"There was no announcement from mosque loudspeakers or any gathering of people," he said. "Those who have left the area have taken only precautionary measures and I would encourage them to return to their houses."

Christians in Pakistan have faced repeated attacks and the country's draconian blasphemy laws are often used as a pretext for intercommunal violence. Among the most well-known victims of the law, which has been widely condemned, is Asia Bibi, sentenced to death in 2010 following an argument with Muslim neighbours. She remains in prison.
Christians in Nepal 'increasingly under threat' as eight charged with trying to convert children

The issue of religious freedom in Nepal has been raised at the UN this week, after the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) and Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) jointly highlighted the case of eight Christians who have been charged with attempting to convert children to Christianity after distributing a pamphlet about Jesus in two schools.

The case is the first to test Nepal's religious freedom since the country's new constitution was implemented in 2015.

The group, who were helping children through the trauma of last year's major earthquake in the country, is alleged to have violated existing laws on conversion and Article 26, paragraph 3, of the constitution, which regulates religious freedom and states that "no person shall act or make others act in a manner which is contrary to public health, decency and morality, or... convert a person of one religion to another religion".

The joint WEA and CSW oral statement to the UN Human Rights Council said the case "is an early indicator of how legal provisions may be invoked to restrict peaceful expressions of religious faith and the very basis of a secular state and society where human rights are protected".

It urged Nepal to drop all charges against the eight Christians and amend Article 26 of the new constitution "to guarantee the right to choose and change one's religion or belief, and the right to choose not to believe in a religion."

Separately, the WEA said this week that the case "exposes [the constitution's] disrespect for religious freedom and offers a glimpse into the new republic's future".

There have been reports that members of the group, arrested in June in the Charikot area of Nepal's Dolakha District, were tortured by the authorities.

Five of the seven men and one woman were working for the organisation Teach Nepal when they distributed the material in the schools, which have Christian principals but do not exclusively teach Christian children. The two school principals and a pastor coordinating the efforts were also arrested.

The chairman of Teach Nepal, Barnabas Shrestha, said in July that the group were "invited by a pastor to do the counselling in the school," adding that the police "wanted our people to say yes, they have preached the Gospel... which is not true".

A spokesperson for CSW told Christian Today that the final hearing of the case was supposed to be held today, but was postponed until 26 October.

"So far in the court hearings there haven't been any indication as to whether the charges will be upheld or removed," the spokesperson said.

"The eight who are accused of attempting to convert children to Christianity are hoping and praying that the charges will be dropped because they did not give out any of that material forcefully  it was merely handed out as part of a trauma session on the earthquake."

The spokesperson added: "We are very concerned about this case because if the charges are not dropped this could set a very negative precedent and Christians across Nepal could be arrested for merely handing out Christian literature. We are closely monitoring this case and are very concerned about it. This is an early indication of how the law can be used. If freedom of faith is not upheld for all beliefs it will be very regressive to the country's development."

World Watch Monitor has said the freedom of Nepal's Christians "is increasingly under threat."

Also in July, the Government announced to all leaders of Christian orphanages and boarding schools in Kathmandu that it would close them down, impose large fines and confiscate possessions if just one Christian booklet was found in their institution. It was also announced that attending a Bible club or praying with children were banned.

Further, an anonymous source told World Watch Monitor that the Social Welfare Council, which approves foreign aid for various programmes, has stopped granting approval for Christian ones.

In 2015, Nepal's Constituent Assembly voted to remain secular and resisted pressure from Hindu nationalists to become a Hindu state. Hours later, two churches were bombed. Pamphlets promoting Hindu nationalism were found at the churches and the nationalist group, Hindu Morcha Nepal, issued a statement to the media calling for Christian leaders to leave the country and for converts to Christianity to return to Hinduism.

The WEA said the joint arrest "clearly amounts to disrespect for religious freedom, which flows out of the new constitution."

It added: "Nepal, of course, cannot be compared to Saudi Arabia or North Korea, but the progress of the people of any nation is often relative to the degree of civil freedom their governments recognise. Religious freedom is not something that benefits Christian nations in the West, as is often perceived in some countries. This freedom allows people to live their lives with the dignity they have as human beings, and no nation should rob their citizens of it. It was for the dignity of the citizens that Nepal's civil war fought to put an end to the monarchy. This is what Nepal's leaders need to be reminded of."

The individuals who have been charged are Shakti Pakhrin, the pastor of Charikot Christian Church; Prakash Pradhan, the principal of Mount Valley Academy; Bimal Shahi, the principal of Modern Nepal School, and Teach Nepal staff Banita Dangol, Balkrishna Rai, Philip Tamang, Kiran Dahal and Bhimsen Tiwari.
Could ISIS ever be punished in court?

Amal Clooney wants to take ISIS to court for what she says is a "clear case of genocide".

The international human rights lawyer has made headlines in recent days for telling world leaders at the United Nations they should be "ashamed" for their failure to "prevent or even punish" the militant group for a "genocide that has gone completely unaddressed and ignored".

She has added she would be "delighted" to be on the team if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is ever taken to court for war crimes. Together with her husband George Clooney and the UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson, she has set about trying to persuade governments to collect evidence of ISIS' crimes for a prosecution.

But is it possible take ISIS to court?

The White House, the European Parliament and UN human rights report have all ruled that ISIS is committing genocide  a term that carries significant moral and legal obligations to act. All signatories of the genocide convention, which include both the UK and US, are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide wherever they arise.

But while the declarations of genocide by political bodies is significant, they will not allow a prosecution of ISIS leaders.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the body that can bring the perpetrators to trial for charges such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. That is the ultimate goal for Clooney if she wants to bring ISIS to justice. But the difficulty is that the ICC is not allowed to launch an investigation independently. It has to be invited to do so.

There are two options for kick-starting an ICC investigation. The first is for the states involved to invite the ICC to come in and carry out an inquiry. In the case of ISIS that would require Syria and Iraq to ask the ICC in. But neither country is a party to the Rome Statute which established the ICC in 1998. So neither can ask the ICC to investigate, even if they wanted to.

The second option to launch an ICC investigation is for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to authorise it. The difficulty with this is that the UNSC conventionally gives the ICC a geographical area to investigate, rather than a particular body. So in this example the UNSC would tell the ICC to investigate possible acts of genocide in Syria and / or Iraq.

But the UNSC is unlikely to do that because Russia is a permanent member of the UNSC. Russia openly supports Assad and any investigation into crimes in Syria would include those committed by the president. Evidently Russia does not want this as it would most likely result in their ally being convicted of war crimes.

So even if the UK, the US, France or China (the other permanent members) brought forward a resolution to ask the ICC, Russia would likley veto it. Tobias Ellwood, a UK foreign office minister, told MPs earlier this year: "Any referral to the International Criminal Court by the UN Security Council will be possible only with a united Council and ideally with the co-operation of countries in which alleged crimes have been committed."

He said the UK government had already tried to refer the situation in Syria to the ICC in 2014 but it had been vetoed by Russia and China.

But Fiona Bruce MP told Christian Today the 2014 referral was against Assad and so was a "completely different issue".

She said: "It was not about the genocide of Daesh [ISIS] which in my view no country would condone. I believe the referral should be made without comparison to 2014 and am confident it will not be vetoed."

But as long as the investigation covers an entire geographical area, the assumption is that Russia would veto again.

There is, however, one last possibility for the UNSC to agree on a referral. That would be if the resolution was specifically to investigate crimes committed by ISIS, rather than crimes committed in an area.

A source working with the UN told Christian Today they were trying to offer this as a route forward but as it broke with convention it was much more difficult.

But another source close to the campaign told Christian Today Russia is likely to veto any action of the ICC, even if it is only against ISIS, because they view the ICC as too Western and too political. They see it as an "instrument of Western retribution," the source said.

So even if a resolution was made only in reference to ISIS and not Syria more broadly, which would be unprecedented, it is unlikely to get past Russia.

It seems the system and the odds are stacked against Clooney's efforts.
Disused churches are being donated to house homeless people

Religious orders and churches in Ireland are being asked to give empty properties to the state to help ease Ireland's homelessness crisis.

Simon Coveney, housing minister, has pleaded for empty presbyteries, convents and other buildings to be offered to house homeless people, the Belfast Telegraph reports.

Latest figures show there are now more than 900 homeless families including 2,000 children in Ireland.

Many millions of dollars worth of property has already been handed over but Coveney appealed for all religious groups to consider whether they had any spare buildings at all.

"If there are any religious congregations listening and you have properties that are no longer in use or you are looking to vacate in the coming months or years we are interested in talking to you. Please make contact with us directly," said Coveney, speaking at the national parliament or Oireachtas housing committee.

Coveney was defending plans to build new social housing set out in his ambitious Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness. The plan itself states: "We will also work in partnership with religious congregations to identify underused land and property that may have potential to be brought forward for social housing and mixed- tenure developments."

Coveney said a number of religious orders have already given property, such as a home for nuns in Kerry that was handed over to a housing agency. Other buildings belonging to religious orders are also in the process of being offered to house the homeless.

The government has pledged 47,000 social houses will be built in six years. There will also be thousands more in private schemes. Currently nearly seven per cent of houses in Ireland are social housing. The rate in Europe is 17 per cent.
Evangelicals celebrate release of detained Christian missionary Kevin Garrett

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has thanked Justin Trudeau after he secured the release from China of Canadian missionary Kevin Garrett.

After two years in detention on suspicion of espionage, Garrett was released last week, shortly after Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau made his first official visit to China. Along with his wife Julia, Garrett was arrested in 2014 in Dandong, a city on the border with North Korea.

The couple had run a Christian coffee shop there since 2008 and have lived in China for 30 years providing humanitarian aid. Although Julia was released on bail in February 2015, Kevin was held in detention after a Xinhua report claimed there was evidence he had accepted tasks from "Canadian espionage agencies to gather intelligence in China".

His son Simeon denied either of his parents had been involved in spying.

Garrett arrived back at Vancouver International Airport on Thursday and was greeted by his family.

Bruce Clemenger, president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, praised Trudeau and government departments that had "assiduously worked together" to secure the release.

"We are grateful for your persistence in securing Mr. Garratt's freedom, and your defence of the core Canadian principle of freedom of religion," he said in a letter on Tuesday.

He added he was proud of the Garrett's "dedication, humanitarian compassion and uncommon sacrifice on foreign soil. As Christians, we are inspired by their steadfast dedication to their faith under such difficult circumstances."

James Zimmerman, a Beijing-based lawyer who acted for the Garretts, also thanked Trudeau's government.

"The family appreciates the strong, persistent efforts of the Canadian government to secure Kevin's release," Zimmerman said.

In a statement the Garrett family thanked those involved in the release and everyone for their thoughts and prayers. They also asked for "respect for their privacy in this time of transition."
First openly gay bishop elected by Anglican Church in Toronto

The Anglican Church in Canada has elected an openly gay bishop, the first in the diocese of Toronto.

The diocese said the Rev. Canon Kevin Robertson was "the first openly gay, partnered bishop-elect in the diocese and perhaps in the Canadian church".

Suffragan bishop-elect Robertson, 45, and his partner Mohan have two children. He is the incumbent of Christ Church, Deer Park, in Toronto, and was ordained deacon and priest in 1997 after earning his Master of Divinity from Trinity College in Toronto.

"I'm very overwhelmed," he said on the chancel steps after his election. "I didn't really expect to be standing here on the steps, but I'm deeply, deeply honoured. I realise this is an historic day in the life of our church. It's no secret that I'm the first openly gay, partnered bishop-elect in the diocese and perhaps in the Canadian church as well, and I know that for some people that's a real challenge and for others it's the fulfilment of what they've been hoping and praying for a very long time. The peace and unity of the church is really important to me and I will work to continue that peace and unity as a bishop."

Robertson's election is not without criticism. Before the election, the Rev. Dr. Catherine Sider Hamilton of St. Matthew's Riverdale in Toronto issued an official protest against the inclusion of "one candidate whose lifestyle is, to the best of my knowledge, irregular according to the teaching of the church regarding chastity and marriage". She went on: "It is a teaching that still stands formally, and I believe that the inclusion of this candidate by the nominations committee is premature." The Archbishop of Toronto, Colin Johnson replied that all the nominees were clergy under license in the diocese and in good standing.

Robertson said his election was "a turning point for our diocese, and I'm honoured to be a part of that."

He added that though his election reflected inclusivity in the Church, he also wanted to represent the whole Church. "I think LGBTQ clergy and lay people might naturally gravitate towards me looking for some leadership around the issue of full inclusion, but I absolutely see myself as a bishop for the whole church, including people who have a very different view of things than I do. I'm their bishop, too."

Archbishop Johnson said: "Kevin is certainly not the first gay man to become a bishop in the Communion but his election will probably bring a negative reaction in some places and a positive reaction in others. We're at an early stage in this experience. I think many parts of the world do not understand it, so it will be a challenge for them, but it will be an opportunity for us to explain how and why we have made this choice".

The Anglican Church in Canada first began accepting same-sex unions in 2002. Canada nationally legalised same-sex marriage in 2005.
Black pastor Terence Crutcher posed no threat to police who fatally shot him, say lawyers

Lawyers acting for the family of Terence Crutcher, the black pastor fatally shot by a white police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have said he posed no imminent threat despite claims by police that he was reaching into his vehicle.

The shooting of Crutcher by Officer Betty Shelby after his SUV broke down on Friday, was the latest in a series of fatal shootings that have raised questions of racial bias in US policing.

Two police videos of the Tulsa shooting that have been broadcast widely since their release on Monday have stoked the debate, with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton calling the contents "unbearable."

A lawyer for Shelby has said she acted because she feared for her life, believing Crutcher was reaching into his vehicle for a weapon.

Tulsa police have said that he was unarmed, there was no weapon in the vehicle, and released the videos showing he had his hands in clear view before he was shot.

Shelby has been placed on administrative leave and is under criminal investigation, prosecutors and police said. The US Justice Department has launched a separate, civil rights investigation about the use of force by officers.

At a news conference in front of the Tulsa County courthouse, lawyers for Crutcher's family released enlarged still images from the police videos they said showed the vehicle's window was closed and stained with blood after Crutcher was shot.

"He is not threatening to anyone," lawyer Benjamin Crump said. "How can he be reaching into the car if the window is up and there is blood on the glass?"

Crutcher's family called the shooting a criminal act and is seeking charges.

About 200 people gathered for a peaceful protest in front of Tulsa's Civic Center Plaza on Tuesday night, holding signs reading: "Justice 4 Crutch" and calling for Shelby to be arrested.

Scott Wood, a lawyer for Shelby, told the Tulsa World that Crutcher ignored repeated commands from the officer.

"He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot," said Wood.

Police said they received two calls of a car being broken down and blocking a road.

In one video shot from a police helicopter, a person is heard saying Crutcher is not following police instructions.

A voice from the helicopter then says: "That looks like a bad dude too, could be on something." An officer is seen with a weapon drawn before Crutcher drops to the ground, and a female officer can be heard on police radio saying: "Shots fired."

The video shows Crutcher on his back with what appears to be blood oozing from his torso.

A separate police dashcam video also shows the officer with a weapon drawn and following Crutcher as he walks to his vehicle with his hands in the air. A pop is heard as he appears to place his hands on the vehicle and he falls a few seconds later.

Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany, said her brother was a church-going man who had enrolled at Tulsa Community College to better his life.

"That big 'bad dude,' his life mattered," she told a separate news conference on Monday.

Separately, protesters blocked a highway and clashed with police in Charlotte, North Carolina, early on Wednesday morning after officers fatally shot a black man they said had a gun when they approached him in a parking lot.

About a dozen officers and several protesters suffered non-life threatening injuries during an hours-long demonstration near where Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot by a policeman on Tuesday afternoon, police and local media said on social media.

Additional reporting by Reuters
Methodist exhibition 'demonises' Israel, says former Archbishop George Carey

An exhibition at London's Hinde Street Methodist Church focusing on the difficulties faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation has been criticised by former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey.

The exhibition entitled 'You Cannot Pass Today', depicting the limitations on Palestinian travel between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, sparked criticism from Jewish organisations including the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD),which accused it of harming Jewish-Christian relations.

It includes a replica checkpoint and features photographs by Peter Morgan, along with accounts of Palestinians' experiences. It was organised by Katherine Fox, who has recently returned from monitoring human rights in Bethlehem with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, which is supported by the Methodist Church. She said: "Londoners know what it is like to be constantly late for work, miss hospital appointments and get crushed on a lengthy commute through no fault of their own. But most are shocked when I tell them the extent of what I witnessed daily at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem."

Lord Carey backed criticisms of the exhibition, saying yesterday: "Jewish people across Europe are increasingly being targeted and killed by terrorists, who often attempt to justify their actions by demonising Israel. It is therefore particularly sad to see a church in London demonising and singling out Israel's defensive actions against terrorism."

He added: "Checkpoints in Israel are sadly needed in order to save lives. The methods used by democracies to defend their civilians should not be undermined by religious leaders in places of worship and brotherhood."

However, Jeremy Moodey, the chief executive of Embrace the Middle East, told Christian Today: "Having visited this exhibition myself, I can't really see what all the fuss is about. It is very low-key and simply highlights the daily humiliations and indignities inflicted on the Palestinians by the checkpoints, which incidentally are, along with the separation barrier of which they are part, illegal under international law. This is a matter of fact. It says nothing about the Jewish people, so is certainly not antisemitic."

In a statement, the church said the exhibition had been "carefully curated to reflect the issues of divided communities within Israel and Palestine and to promote reflection and prayers for peace".

It said the display "seeks to explore aspects of human rights and dignity. It has been put together on the basis of principled impartiality, putting concern for human rights above support of any particular group by referring to international law. There is no criticism or judgement of the Jewish community or faith."

Hinde St had informed a local synagogue about the exhibition but the letter was not received. The church said this was "deeply regrettable, as it would have allowed earlier conversation and dialogue which was the church's intention".

After representations by the BOD and the Zionist Federation, the church agreed to include a table of information prepared by the Federation. In a statement, the two organisations said it was talking to the church about a panel discussion including a pro-Israel speaker.

It said: "The church has expressed regret that a letter about the exhibition sent to a local rabbi did not get through, and in future we would hope to see more rigorous consultation around such sensitive events, for the sake of good interfaith relations.

"The Jewish community is now seeking volunteers, as well as those who have already signed up over the weekend, to hand out leaflets outside the church explaining the reasons why Israel feels the need for such security measures.

"We hope that the event will be conducted in a constructive spirit of genuine dialogue by organisers and visitors alike."

The Methodist Church has had a fraught relationship with the Jewish community over its stance on the occupation and Israel's Palestine policy, which it has frequently criticised. It called for a boycott of goods from illegal Israeli settlements in 2010 and considered extending its position on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to the rest of Israel at its 2014 Conference, but resolved to postpone consideration of the issue for two years.
Pastor Steven Anderson deported from Botswana after calling for death of gays and lesbians

The president of Botswana said yesterday he had ordered the arrest and deportation of anti-gay US pastor Steven Anderson.

Anderson, pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, had previously been barred from South Africa and from the UK because of his homophobic views. He had notoriously welcomed the killing of 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, saying there were now "50 less paedophiles in this world".

President Ian Khama said he had ordered Anderson's immediate arrest and deportation after the pastor said in an interview with a local radio station in the capital Gabarone on Tuesday morning that gays and lesbians should be killed.

"He was picked up at the radio station. I said they should pick him up and show him out of the country," Khama said in an interview. "We don't want hate speech in this country. Let him do it in his own country."

The president said Anderson had been put on a visa watch-list two days ago after being barred from South Africa but appeared to have slipped into Botswana before all border posts were fully alerted.

Anderson denied he was being deported.

"I am not being arrested. I am leaving Botswana voluntarily," he told witnesses at the radio station, adding in the local Setswana language that he loved Botswana very much.

During Tuesday's radio interview, in which he also called for pedophiles and adulterers to be killed and said the Bible barred women from preaching in church, Anderson said he had arrived in Botswana last Thursday from Ethiopia.

Onkokame Mosweu, a commentator on gay and lesbian affairs, welcomed the government's move to remove Anderson, adding: "He should have never been allowed to come to Botswana in the first place."

Anderson has not met with the encouragement he might have hoped for on his visit to Africa. The Evangelical Alliance of South Africa condemned his "hatred for LGBTs" when his visit there was mooted. General secretary Moss Ntlha said: "The constitution lays the basis on which South Africa's many cultures agreed to live together. White-black, religious and secular, LGBT and straight, rich and poor, we all stand as one rainbow nation."

He continued: "As South Africans we accept that people with LGBT orientations have rights to dignity and freedom, as indeed all other South Africans."

Additional reporting by Reuters.
See the night sky as never before at the 2016 Flagstaff Star Party.

Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition will host a viewing of the stars, planets and galaxies this Thursday, Friday and Saturday night at Buffalo Park. The Star Party will feature naked-eye and hosted telescopic observing, as well as astronomy talks and guided tours of Flagstaffs sunsets and night skies.

Hosted viewing through high-power telescopes will be every night from 7 to 10 p.m. Up to 30 telescopes manned by amateur and professional astronomers from the Flagstaff area will be available to use for free.

Weather permitting, Lowell Observatory Research Scientist Brian Skiff will give a sunset talk from 6 to 6:30 p.m. every evening in which he will describe the transition from sunset into twilight, including the Earth-shadow and Belt of Venus in the east and the layered colors over the sun in the west.

Each evening will feature a twilight talk by a different astronomer from 6:45 to 7:15 p.m. at the Buffalo Park Pavillion. On Thursday, Jeffrey Hall of Lowell Observatory will explain the difference between nearby stars and those that just look closest due to their brightness in a presentation titled A Walk around Our Stellar Neighborhood.

On Friday, Lowell Observatorys Nick Moskovitz will describe the origin of meteorites, how they fall to Earth, and what they can teach us about the formation and evolution of the solar system in his presentation titled Asteroid Impacts and How We Are Avoiding the Fate of the Dinosaurs.

David Koerner of Northern Arizona University will talk about the thousands of planets astronomers have discovered and plans to search for signs of extraterrestrial life in his presentation titled Discovering New Worlds, which will take place Saturday.

From 7:15 to 7:30 p.m. each evening, a local astronomer and night-sky enthusiast will hold a night sky orientation to point out the North Star, constellations, the Milky Way, planets and other less-known objects visible to the naked eye.

The 2016 Flagstaff Star Party will include two workshops. On Thursday from 3 to 5 p.m. in the NACET Accelerator parking lot, Lowell Observatory Educator Jim Cole will teach participants how to set up their telescopes, align them, find astronomical objects and select the best eyepiece for different types of celestial objects. The workshop is free but registration is required.

New York-based photojournalist Stan Honda will host a night sky photography workshop Friday at the NACET Accelerator parking lot. That workshop is $25 and registration is required. Participants must bring their own cameras. More details about what kinds of cameras are allowed are available on the registration website.

All 2016 Flagstaff Star Party attendees should bring warm clothing and close-toed shoes that are comfortable on Buffalo Parks unpaved paths. More information is available at www.flagstaffstarparty.org.

Flagstaff celebrates International Peace Day

The Flagstaff Peace Day Celebration committee will sponsor an International Day of Peace Celebration this evening.

The celebration will begin at 4 p.m. in front of the Peace Pole near the University Union building on the Northern Arizona University campus. The group will walk to Heritage Square in downtown Flagstaff, where they will meet others around 4:40 p.m.

The group will convene at Heritage Square for about 30 minutes before walking to Flagstaff City Hall, where participants will display their support for International Peace Day along East Route 66. There will also be presentations and exercises.

The International Day of Peace, also known as World Peace Day, is observed annually on September 21. The General Assembly of the United Nations designated it as a day for all humanity to join together and work for peace.
'Sister Wives' season 8 air date, rumors: Show to be cancelled if Kody divorces Robyn?

The much-speculated TLC reality TV series "Sister Wives" is approaching its eighth season, but Kody Brown's recent decision to divorce current wife Robyn might put the show up for cancellation.

In attempt for a season 8 comeback, "Sister Wives'" Kody is allegedly planning to divorce current legal wife Robyn in search for two more wives. However, after Kody announced the plan, Robyn is said to push the divorce herself as she is against Kody's decision.

The same can also be said for his two other spiritual wives Meri and Christine, who are also rumored to leave Kody by the time season 8 of "Sister Wives" airs.

Such rumors about three wives leaving the "Sister Wives," which was originally intended to show a polygamous marriage of four people, are leaving viewers thinking that season 8 of TLC might not happen.

Aside from the unconfirmed comeback of the show, the Brown family has also had a difficult time in their quest to have polygamy legalized in Utah, where they used to reside. Utah follows a strict polygamy law that prohibits the cohabitation of several partners even if the patriarch is only legally married to one wife.

The Brown's lawsuit to have polygamy legalized in the said state was rejected by the Court of Appeals, and they are now taking their case to the Supreme Court.

Speaking about the Brown family's lawsuit, Jonathan Turley, the family's attorney, said, "This has been an extended and difficult struggle for the Brown family but they have never wavered in their commitment to defending the important principles of religious freedom in this case." He added, "Utah is a state that was founded by courageous citizens seeking these very protections from government abuse and religious inequality. This lawsuit is true to the original dream of those seeking freedom in Utah."

Because of the Utah polygamy law, the Brown family decided to move from Lehi to Las Vegas, where the polygamy laws are more in their favor.

As of now there is still no official news about the TLC show's comeback for season 8.
Sudan bishop urges UN to intervene to save Christians facing death sentence

A prominent Sudanese bishop has appealed for the international community to intervene to save the lives of pastors who are facing the death sentence in a court in Sudan.

Bishop of Kadugli diocese, Andudu Adam Elnail, had to flee himself from Sudan to South Carolina in the US in 2011 after his property was torched when he refused to tell his Christian flock to endorse Sudan President Omar al-Bashir.

He called for the United Nations and the US to step in to help the four men on trial in Khartoum.

Bishop Elnail told FoxNews.com the charges were "concoted".

Pastors Hassan Abduraheem and Kuwa Shamal, on trial with Czech Christian Petr Jasek and human rights activist Abdulmonem Abdumawla face capital charges including espionage and waging war against the state. Jasek is also charged with the propagation of false news.

One charge against the pastors is that they propagated news about churches being burned down in Khartoum and bombed in the Nuba mountains, where Christians are classed as "atheists".

Bishop Elnail told Fox News: "We call for their protection and immediate release and urge that the UN, US government  including Congress  and other world communities demand the freedom of these two men of God and other prisoners."

Bishop Elnail said the two pastors are being held in solitary confinement. He said he had known Shamal, who has seven children, for many years and described him as a "humble and good man" in his mid-40s who has dedicated his life to God.

He said: "The government is not interested in the Christian religion. There is no freedom for us, we cannot build churches, we are treated as second-class citizens. We need the international community to pressure the government of Sudan to give us our freedom of religion."

The US State Department has been tracking the case and is lobbying Sudan, designated a country of "particular concern", to show greater respect for religious freedom.

"We are committed to working with countries to make tangible improvements in respect for religious freedom and continue to look for opportunities to address these issues with the government of South Sudan," a spokesperson said.

Christian Today has followed the case of the pastors and the two other accused men, and reported recently that their lives were at risk.

According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) which is campaigning on behalf of the men, the charges against the Czech man are central to the case.

Part of the case against Jasek is based on the financial aid given for the medical treatment of a young man from Darfur, Ali Omer, who was injured in a demonstration in 2013. Jasek donated $5,000 towards Omer's medical treatment, which was signed for by Abduraheem and Abdumawla. The Czech was arrested when he left Sudan and the other three arrested nine days later.

The prosecution alleges that the $5,000 Jasek donated to Omer's treatment was in reality support for rebel movements in the South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur regions, according to CSW.

Shamal was not involved in fundraising for Omer but appears to have been included because of his position in the Sudan Church of Christ.

Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of CSW, said: "The case against Rev Hassan Abduraheem, Mr Abdumawla, Rev Kuwa Shamal and Mr Petr Jasek is an example of NISS's manipulation of the criminal justice system to harass ethnic and religious minorities.

"The evidence clearly shows that Rev Abduraheem, Mr Abdumawla and Mr Jasek attempted to provide medical care for Mr Omer. As a consequence of their acts of kindness, these men have been detained in terrible conditions and are now enduring an unjust trial.

"RevKuwa Shamal, meanwhile, is being targeted simply because of his position as a senior church leader, his ethnicity and relationship to Rev Abduraheem. We urge everyone who is as concerned as we are about this grave injustice to join us in campaigning to see these men set free. CSW urges the government of Sudan to drop the charges against these men without conditions or delay."

He also called for the end of targeting religious and ethnic minorities in Sudan.

Video of a hymn-singing protest on behalf of the four men outside the courtroom in Khartoum, Sudan posted on Facebook by Youeel Ibrahim.
Syrian Archbishop: 'A bullet narrowly missed my head'

Christians in Syria are being targeted by Kurdish militias according to a senior Christian leader in the region.

Syriac Catholic Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo says Kurds in Hassake, a city in north-east Syria, and surrounding areas are responsible for "acts of violence and intimidation" against Christians.

Hindo said he believes the aim is to get rid of all Christians from Hassake, one of the 10 largest cities in Syria.

Parts of Hassake, which has a large Kurdish population, were lost to Islamic State terrorists but the People's Protection Unit (YPG) managed to seize them back last year. The city, the administrative centre of the region, is now largely under control of Kurdish militia but as in the rest of Syria, fighting is a consant as different groups battle for supremacy.

Hindo told Agenzia Fides: "Whenever the Kurdish militia enter in action to reaffirm its military hegemony over the city, the epicenter of their raids and acts of force is always the area of the six churches, where most of the Christians live.

"In many cases they expelled the Christians from their homes under the threat of Kalashnikovs. And where they enter, they loot everything."

He said he had a narrow escape himself when shots of gunfire were fired through the window of his house and a bullet narrowly missed his head.

"At that moment, the area was presided over by Kurdish militias, and there were no other armed persons nearby."

The status of authority in the city remains confused. The Archbishop said that Shaddadi, once an ISIS stronghold, is now controlled by Kurdish militia but some of these are locals who had previously served under Islamic State.

Christians have been targets of Kurds for some time in Syria.

In June, Christians were attacked by a suicide car bomber in the Kurdish city of Qamishlo.

Turkey has also called on the United Nations to investigate crimes of ethnic cleansing it says the YPG has been committing in Syria. Turkey says YPG has been engaging in a campaign of demographic change in areas it has captured from ISIS.

However, Kurdish forces deny the charges and say they are in fact collaborating with Arab and Assyrian fighters.
Why I'm gutted about the Brangelina split

Another celebrity marriage, another celebrity divorce. I don't normally take notice of the showbiz sections of newspapers but there is something about the story of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and their six children that makes their break-up somehow personal. As a father of six myself, like them with three birth children and three adopted, I feel for the difficult challenges this will bring to every member of the family. It's hard to see the dissolution of a family that has stood against violence against women, challenged global inaction on the refugee crisis and opened their home to children from some of the world's most troubled nations.

According to court douments, Jolie is seeking physical custody of all six children. Although we don't know  and indeed may never know  the full story, parenting a large, blended, cross-cultural, multi-ethnic and adopted family is a challenge. In our own family we can sympathise with some of the challenges, although we cannot claim to know anything about the added pressures of living in the constant spotlight of global celebrity status. Furthermore, as director of a charity that works with adoptive, fostering and blended families, I recognise the challenges to marriages and parenting when it comes to vulnerable children. When Jolie first started adopting children transnationally there were some criticism of her motivations and the best interests of the children.

My charity is working alongside local and indigenous adoption movements around the world including in many parts of Africa and Asia, where local Christians are being encouraged and supported to adopt children from orphanages and the foster care system. This is because it is not just more cost-efficient to care for the children in this way, but it seems to be in many cases extremely beneficial for children to stay in their home cultures wherever possible. Nevertheless we are keen to support all adoptive families in the UK  wherever their children are from originally  recognising there are substantial ongoing pressures that come from early childhood trauma, poverty and dislocation.

In our work seeking to inspire and encourage adopters and foster carers, sadly we have come across quite a number of marriages that have come to an end where the adoption is reported to have played a part. One couple I know involved an ultimatum from a partner to choose to proceed with the adoption or to save the marriage. In her case she felt compelled to prioritise the needs of the children in her care. I have met other couples who remain together for the sake of the children but blame adoption for the effective breakdown of their marriage. However in most cases I know of, adoption has been an extra bond in the marriage as both spouses enjoy working together for the sake of a child from a very difficult background.

You might be surprised that an adoption advocate is talking about these difficult situations, but I believe too many people have an overly romantic view of adoption. Cute films like Annie, Despicable Me and so many others, portray adoption as a fairytale 'happily-ever-after' storyline. Perhaps it is healthy for potential adopters to see that life is much more complicated than that. It is both a mixture of some of the most difficult and wonderful experiences parents will ever know. Going into adoption with your eyes wide open is important because children who have already had the most difficult start to life will be better served by those that have realistic expectations.

As Jolie now seeks to bring up six children as a lone parent, like all single adopters she is going to need support, not judgement, encouragement not criticism. I have come across so many single women who are brilliant parents to their adopted children. Indeed many adopted while they were single because they realised they could be the best parent a child might ever know, and that it is so much better that a child has one parent able to provide ongoing love, support and help than have no parents involved in their lives at all. This is why I will pray for Angelina, just as I will pray for Brad and their six children.
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A year after ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries began slowly returning to supermarkets following a bacteria contamination linked to 10 listeria cases, including three deaths, the Brenham-based ice cream icon is once again pulling some of its products from store shelves.

On Wednesday, Blue Bell announced a recall of "select products" that came from its plant in Sylacauga, Ala. because they were made with a chocolate chip cookie dough ingredient supplied by a vendor that was "potentially" contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.

The cookie dough ingredients came from Garner, Iowa-based Aspen Hills, Inc.

The Blue Bell Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Blue Bell Cookie Two Step ice cream products were not sold in Texas, but they were distributed in 10 states throughout the south, including Louisiana.

SPECIAL REPORT: Inside Blue Bell: Grime and discontent

In a statement on its website, Blue Bell identified the potential problem through what the creamery called "intensified internal testing" and notified Aspen Hills, which then issued a voluntary recall.

Listeria monocytogenes can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people and with those with a weakened immune system. For normally healthy people, eating some of the contaminated ice cream can cause short-term illnesses such as a fever, nausea and diarrhea. A listeria infection can result in miscarriages and stillbirths for pregnant women.

To date, no illnesses have been reported due to the potential listeria contamination. "Although our products in the marketplace have passed our test and hold program, which requires that finished product samples test negative for Listeria monocytogenes, Blue Bell is initiating this recall out of an abundance of caution," company officials said Wednesday.

Aspen Hills reported shipping 578 cases of the suspicious "no egg chocolate chip cookie dough" to the Alabama plant on July 26. They shipped a further 1,358 cases to Brenham between Aug. 9 and Aug. 22.

After the 2015 listeria outbreak, the company halted production. With a significant investment from Fort Worth oil billionaire Sid Bass, Blue Bell began returning to shelves about a year ago. The economic impact of the latest voluntary recall was not immediately clear.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, questioned the method Blue Bell used to evaluate its products before being shipped out.

PHOTOS: A timeline of the 2015 Blue Bell recall

"You can make a mistake once but for a company to make a mistake twice?" Nestle asked. "Obviously, they weren't doing something if they shipped something they tested."

A Seattle-based attorney specializing in food safety issues also raised a question about the supplier. Bill Marler negotiated a settlement with a Florida man who got sick after eating Blue Bell ice cream that tested positive for listeria. On Wednesday, he wondered if Aspen Hills - the vendor that provided the potentially contaminated items - also employed the "test and hold" method to ensure their products are safe for human consumption.

"If they had done that, then arguably that ingredient would never have made it into Blue Bell's products," Marler said. "The real question is, have they (Blue Bell) required their vendors to do that?"

Blue Bell Creameries was fined $175,000 as part of a settlement with Texas health officials as a result of the 2015 listeria outbreak. The settlement requires Blue Bell to continue practices mandated by the Department of State Health Services in May 2015, such as withholding each lot of ice cream from distribution until tests come back negative.

On Wednesday, the state officials said the company notified them within 24 hours of receiving the lab-confirmed positive sample for listeria, as required by the agreement Blue Bell signed.

"Through the use of Blue Bell's test and hold protocol, no finished product that has been tested and confirmed positive for (listeria) at the Brenham plant has entered the marketplace in Texas," the Department of State Health Services said in a statement.

Blue Bell issued a series of incremental recalls when the original listeria outbreak was first discovered in early 2015. The company initially insisted the problems were limited to a small amount of ice cream. Blue Bell eventually shut down its entire operation and admitted ongoing sanitation problems across its plants. The company laid off or furloughed more than 2,800 employees and Blue Bell brand ice cream was unavailable in stores from April through August of 2015.

Bass bailed out the family-run company with a cash infusion of up to $125 million. All of its furloughed workers returned to work and some of their laid off employees were rehired.

The latest Blue Bell recall follows another high-profile food contamination case. The Chipotle Mexican Grill burrito chain temporarily shuttered dozens of restaurants late last year after two E. coli outbreaks in Washington and Oregon sent 21 people to the hospital. Health officials identified a second outbreak that infected five people in the Midwest.

Although the possible listeria contamination is another setback for Blue Bell, Marler said the company is likely more concerned about the ongoing federal inquiry. Under U.S. law, it's a misdemeanor to distribute tainted food and heavier penalties can be levied if it's done knowingly.

"The criminal investigation is still ongoing," Marler said. "They have bigger concerns than," the latest listeria-based recall.

Katherine E. Blunt and Will Axford contributed to this report.
A federal judge has sided against Cowboys Dancehall in a lawsuit claiming that its mortgage lender wrongfully foreclosed on the Northeast Side nightclub and forced it into bankruptcy.

Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald King dismissed the case in which the San Antonio club argued that it didnt default on its mortgage agreements and that Missouri-based EverBank Financial Corp. and its subsidiary Business Property Lending wrongfully accelerated the venues foreclosure, according to an order signed Monday.
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The last thing Canadian backpacker Audrey Carey did before she was fatally shot in the head last year in San Franciscos Golden Gate Park was thank the three young drifters accused in her killing for being her friend, according to court testimony Tuesday.

The account of Careys final moments emerged during a preliminary hearing in Marin County Superior Court for 19-year-old Lila Scott Alligood and her boyfriend, 24-year-old Morrison Haze Lampley. Each is charged with double murder in a case that stunned the Bay Area with its senselessness.

The two are accused of killing Carey, 23, whose body was found Oct. 3 during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, as well as Steve Carter, a 67-year-old tantra instructor who was gunned down two days later on a popular trail northwest of Fairfax. Judge Kelly Vieira Simmons must decide after the hearing whether to send the defendants to a jury trial.

A third suspect, Sean Michael Angold, 25, pleaded guilty in May to second-degree murder in connection to Carters death, while agreeing to testify against Lampley and Alligood.

Taking the witness stand Tuesday was Marin County sheriffs Detective Scott Buer, who recounted an interview conducted with Alligoods former cellmate at the county lockup in San Rafael.

The cellmate, Pamela Bullock, said Alligood had referred to Carey  who was on her first solo backpacking trip  as the bitch and had explained that the three befriended her shortly before killing her for her modest belongings. While Carey was thanking them for being her friends, Buer said Bullock told him, Alligood already had her wallet.

All of a sudden, Lampley jumps up and shoots her and there is blood ... all over, Buer testified.

Two days later, Carter, a respected tantra teacher, purportedly crossed paths with the drifters and was shot multiple times on a scenic fire trail in the Loma Alta Open Space Preserve near Fairfax. Carter was clutching the leash of his Doberman pinscher, which was also shot but survived. According to Buer, Alligood told Bullock, The old man needed to die.

Buer said Alligood told him after her arrest that Angold had pulled the trigger, not Lampley, her longtime boyfriend. Later, she admitted to investigators that Lampley shot Carter, Buer said.

She stated that she was protecting Lampley and that she loved him and that he was the only thing she had left, Buer said.

Buer said Alligood tried to enlist Bullock in a mission after the cellmates release, contacting a bum in San Francisco and paying him to say Angold was the shooter.

Attorneys for Lampley and Alligood have sought to blame Angold for the killings. Through their questioning of Buer, they established that Angold had smoked methamphetamine from a glass pipe he shared with the accused couple.

The couple hooked up with Angold in San Francisco before the slayings after hitchhiking along Highway 1 from San Diego, according to testimony.

Residents in San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury neighborhood have said that in the weeks before the killings, the three camped out in Buena Vista Park, blending in with the areas transient population. There they developed a reputation for erratic behavior and meth use.

After Carters killing, all three were arrested outside a soup kitchen in Portland, Ore., after authorities tracked them with the GPS in Carters stolen station wagon. The three defendants had the Smith & Wesson handgun used in both slayings, as well as Careys passport, airline tickets and camping gear, police said.

The gun had allegedly been stolen from a car at San Franciscos Fishermans Wharf on Oct. 1.

Chief Deputy Public Defender David Brown, who is representing Lampley, sought Tuesday to highlight inconsistencies in Alligoods statements.

Amy Morton, who is representing Alligood, questioned Bullocks motivations for coming forward. Bullock, who was serving time for vehicle theft, contacted law enforcement in a bid to get out of jail early and seek custody of her daughter.

Im fighting for time, Morton said Bullock wrote to investigators. Help me so I can help you guys.

As Tuesdays hearing went on, Alligood appeared teary-eyed as Lampley showed little emotion. They face up to life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted. Under his plea deal, Angold faces up to 15 years to life in prison.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VivianHo
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Theater

Smoke on the Mountain: A.D. Players presents a musical tale, set in the 1930s, about the singing Sanders family. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday; $20; 2710 W. Alabama; 713-526-2721, adplayers.org

In the Heights: Theater Under The Stars presents a vibrant snapshot of three days in an eclectic Manhattan neighborhood. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; $38.50-$111; 800 Bagby; 713-315-2525, thehobbycenter.org

The Revolutionists: The lives of four fiery women collide during the French Revolution. Presented by Main Street Theater. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; $10-$15; 2540 Times; 713-524-6706, mainstreettheater.com

The Mother****** With the Hat: Obsidian Theater presents this show about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; $15-$30; 3522 White Oak; 832-889-7837, obsidiantheater.org

Whistle Down the Wind: This musical features Andrew Lloyd Webber using gospel, folk and traditional Broadway showstoppers. Presented by Queensbury Theatre Mainstage. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; $32-$40; 12777 Queensbury; 713-467-4497, queensburytheatre.org

The Marvelous Wonderettes - Dream On: It's 1969, and the Wonderettes are throwing a fabulous retirement party for their beloved teacher. Presented by Stages Theatre. 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Wednesday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday; $17-$47; 3201 Allen Parkway; 713-527-0123, stagestheatre.com.

Buried Child: A young man returns to his family home, only to discover that no one recognizes him. Produced by Catastrophic Theatre. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; $10-$75; 3400 Main; 713-521-4533, matchouston.org

True West: 4th Wall Theatre Company presents this Sam Shepherd classic that delves into sibling rivalry. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Monday, Wednesday, 3 p.m. Sunday; $29-$49; 1824 Spring; 832-786-1849, 4thwalltheatreco.com

Saturn Returns: When the planet Saturn completes its cycle every 30 years, human life is affected. Produced by Houston's Theatre Southwest. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; $18; 8944 Clarkcrest; 713-661-9505, theatresouthwest.org

Sassy Mamas: The Ensemble Theatre presents a romantic comedy of three "cougars." 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; $36-$61; 3535 Main; 713-520-0055, ensemblehouston.com

The Redemption Series: The Landing Theatre presents 12 original plays in response to crisis in America. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; $10-$100; 1119 Providence; 562-502-7469, landingtheatre.org

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Play focuses on the volatile relationship of associate history professor George and his hard-drinking wife, Martha. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; $12-$15; 4318 Allen-Genoa, Pasadena; 713-941-1758; pasadenalittletheatre.org

Classical/Opera

Mahler Symphony No. 1: The Houston Symphony premieres winning works of its first Young Composer Competition. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday; Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana; 713-224-4240, houstonsymphony.org

Strauss II, Die Fledermaus: A lavish masquerade ball, an elaborate trap, and a whirlwind of lies and revelations. Presented by Opera in the Heights. 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday; $13-$71; 1703 Heights; 713-861-5303, operaintheheights.org

The Complete Choral Works of Maurice Durufle: Houston Chamber Choir open its 21st season with French composer Maurice Durufle, in a collaboration with world-renowned organist Ken Cowan. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday; $10-$36; 6100 Main; 713-224-5566, houstonchamberchoir.org

Dance

Houston Ballet: Stanton Welch's story ballet "Madame Butterfly" and his abstract "Son of Chamber Symphony" share the bill, with live music by the Houston Ballet Orchestra. 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; additional performances through Oct. 2; Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas; $25-$195; 713-227-2787, houstonballet.org.

David Parsons Dance: The popular American company returns with six works, from classics such as 1982's "Caught" to this year's "Almah." 8 p.m. Friday; Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas; $43-$103; 713-227-4772, spahouston.org.

METdance: Its 21st season starts with works by Larry Keigwin, Margot Gelber, Catarina Rago and Katarzyna Skarpetowska, plus a site-specific work. 7:30 p.m. Friday; Discovery Green, 1500 McKinney; 713-400-7336; discoverygreen.com. FREE

Uptown Dance Company: "Dance Infusion 2016" features works by choreographer Chet Walker and dancer Andre Silva. 7 p.m. Friday-Saturday; MATCH, 3400 Main; $15-$30; 713-521-4533, matchouston.org.
Sex offender notifications

The Coconino County Sheriffs Office would like to make the following Level 2 (intermediate risk to the community) sex offender notifications:

 Martin Manuel Pena Jr., 27 is living at 3200 S. Litzler Drive, Apt. 12-153 in Flagstaff. Pena was convicted of child molestation in Maricopa County in 2008. He is not wanted by police at this time. Pena is not wanted by police at this time.

 Anthony Ray Talas, 37, is living at 3120 E Route 66, No. 104. Talas was convicted in Coconino County in 2016 of two counts of attempted sexual abuse of a child. He is not wanted by police at this time.

Notification that Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders are living in the community is required by Arizona law. Resident abuse of this information to threaten, intimidate or harass sex offenders will not be tolerated by the Coconino County Sheriffs Office.

If residents have information about current criminal activity by any offender, contact the sheriffs office at (928) 774-4523 or visit www.coconino.az.gov/sheriff.

For more information on sex offenders in the Flagstaff area, visit the Arizona Department of Public Safety sex offender website at www.azsexoffender.com.

City and county residents who want to report a crime but wish to remain anonymous may call Silent Witness at 774-6111 or (877) 29-CRIME, submit a tip online at www.coconinosilentwitness.org, or text the word Flagtip along with your information to 274637 (CRIMES). Rewards of up to $2,000 are given for information that leads to an arrest.
A man has been arrested in the shooting death of a 35-year old Beaumont woman more than 15 years ago in southwest Houston.

Larry Lozano, 40, is charged with murder in the slaying of Martha Closner, who was found shot to death about 6:50 a.m. July 25, 2001, at 3000 Bering, according to the Houston Police Department.

Police said officers who were dispatched to the scene found Closner lying on the ground outside her 1998 Chevrolet Camaro. She had been shot in the head and died at the scene.

Closner had worked at a club in the 3100 block of Bering until 2 a.m. the day she died and had left about a half-hour later without experiencing any problems at the club.

During a recent review of the case, police said, officers with the HPD Cold Case Unit identified another witness and then identified Lozano as a suspect in the shooting.

Following more investigation into the case and a re-examination of the DNA evidence, Lozano was charged in the killing. He was arrested Tuesday without incident in Colorado County, where the county seat is Columbus.

No other information about the case was released. Also no information was released about where Lozano had been since the slaying or if he had initially been a suspect in the case.
A man was rushed to the hospital early Wednesday morning with a bullet lodged in his face after a shooting during a home invasion in north Houston.

The shooting happened about 3:30 a.m. at a residence in the 9300 block of Irby near Ferguson Way, said Lt. Larry Crowson of the Houston Police Department.
Authorities found nothing suspicious when they searched court buildings after a bomb threat was made Wednesday morning against the Harris County courthouses in downtown Houston.

A private citizen received an email containing the bomb threat about 8:30 a.m., said Alan Bernstein, special assistant to Harris County Precinct 1 Constable's Office.
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A Texas group known for searching and rescuing missing people received threats from around the world after a man claiming to be an employee left hateful messages about Muslims online.

Phillip Barbaria, who claims to be an employee of Texas EquuSearch, posted comments on author Qasim Rashid's Facebook page denouncing Muslims. Texas EquuSearch quickly denounced Barbaria, denying he is an employee of the organization.

READ MORE: Texas threatens to 'exit' the federal refugee program over terrorist concerns

"Americas (sic) problems are our problems and we don't need yours and your war you ran from and brought here!" Barbaria ranted in his post. "So go write in your pig book and keep your muslim (sic) problems your problems and don't preach it to CHRISTIAN americans!! ISIS is your people, Obama's people and now Clintons, Trump sure didn't create ISIS any more than anyone posting here!"

Barbaria ended his rant by telling Barbaria to "Go sit on a pressure cooker!"

Texas EquuSearch said Barbaria's only ties to the organization is that he registered as a member.

READ MORE: Pope, refugees and religious leaders pray for peace

"Mr. Barbaria is not, nor has he ever been, an employee of Texas EquuSearch," the group said in a release. "He did register as a member with our organization in 2012 but has never participated in any activities, including new member orientation.

"We are mortified at his expression of hatred and his attack on Mr. Rashid, which is in direct opposition to everything we stand for at Texas EquuSearch. It matters not to us who you are or what you do in life. If you disappear, we will do everything in our power to bring you home."

Texas EquuSearch founder Tim Miller said his group has received online hate messages from around the world after Barbaria posted his rant, according to KPRC. Miller told the news station that his organization aims to heal and does not support hateful speech.
The autumnal equinox occurs this year at 9:21 a.m. Central time September 22.

That marks the time the sun is at the equator at local noon.
A decidedly disparate crowd swelled inside the Esperson Gallery at GreenStreet on Monday night. In addition to the usual suspects - artist Kelley Devine, handbag designer Beth Younger Purpich, and the Menil's Caroline Starry LeBlanc - business-formal politicos mixed with the creative crowd during the fifth annual "Art of Leadership" reception honoring one rather important elected official: Mayor Sylvester Turner.

No surprise, then, that the downtown studio space was more packed than usual. Bold faced couples Gracie and Bob Cavnar and Susie and Sanford Criner sipped wine and nibbled cheese next to consul generals Sujiro Seam and Alistair Walton of France and Australia, respectively.
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Billy G. Williams had long ago resigned himself to the idea he would never have a high school diploma.

Williams had dropped out of Pasadena High School as a junior in 1950 so he could enlist and serve in the Korean War. Rather than go to the senior prom, he traveled to Korea and served as an Army platoon sergeant for a year.

But after reading a story in the Chronicle about another service member who was awarded a diploma years after his service thanks to a little-known Texas law, Williams picked up the phone and called the Pasadena Independent School District.

Last month, Williams collected his high school diploma during a Pasadena ISD board meeting. Williams dressed in a hunter green cap and gown as friends, family and neighbors cheered him on from the audience.

It was a great feeling, Williams said. The reason it was special to me was because I didnt know there was any provision like this. I didnt expect it to happen.

The provision is Texas Education Code 28.0251, which allows school districts to issue high school diplomas to eligible veterans. It provides for veterans who were honorably discharged and served between 1940 and 1975 or after 1989 and includes those who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It also covers the Korean War, where Williams division served alongside a Turkish brigade. When he got back to his home base, he saw a familiar face among the recruits and draftees he was tasked with training.

It was Carl Schwartz, one of Williams former teachers at Pasadena High.

After that he came back and started teaching again, and later on he was elected to the school board for many years, Williams said. It turned out he was the one who handed my daughter and son their high school diplomas.

Schwartz, now in his 90s, also attended Williams graduation ceremony.

My teacher was able to be with me. That was everything, that made it, Williams said.

In honor of a 92 year-old Pasadena tradition, Williams was presented not only his 1951 high school diploma, but also an alumni lapel pin that he can proudly wear to show others his Eagle pride.

This pin is worn over your heart and represents the history of Pasadena High School, said Joe Saavedra, the school's principal, at the ceremony. We congratulate you and it is our honor to welcome you as an alumnus of PHS.

Williams said it was one of his proudest accomplishments.

I have done many things in my life that Im proud of, but Ive always regretted not earning my high school diploma, Williams said. Id love to say that I am a graduate of Pasadena High School.

Now he can.
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Authorities released surveillance images of a woman and two men suspected of stealing a car last month from a supermarket parking lot in north Harris County.

The theft occurred Aug. 5 in the 15800 block of Champions Forest, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies said the owner of a black Mercedes Benz c230 walked into the store and stopped to look at patio furniture on display in the lobby area. She put her keys on the patio table but left without picking them up.

Later, another woman is seen on surveillance walking past the table and then leaving the store. Outside in the parking lot two men join her. They climb into a sport utility vehicle and are seen driving through the parking lot pressing the key fob horn on the stolen keys as they search for the victim's vehicle.

The man is seen getting into the victim's car and driving away.

The car has the Texas license plate number CRL-4420.

The only available descriptions of the suspects concerned their clothing. The woman was wearing a blue shirt and black pants. One of the men had on a black Houston Texans shirt and blue jeans while the other man wore a white T-shirt and gray shorts.

Anyone with information about the suspects is urged to call the Harris County Sheriff's Office Auto Theft Division at 713-446-4399 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.

Crime Stoppers will pay up to $5,000 for information that leads to the arrest of the suspects or charges being filed against them.

All Crime Stoppers tipsters remain anonymous.






Next week, city of Katy officials are expected to approve the city's 2016-17 budget and tax rate, which will be lowered by 2 cents for the fourth straight year as the growing city continues to add yearly revenue.

The city's budget includes the hiring of 12 new city workers, seven of whom will be staffed at the fire department, with the city still prepping for the opening of its second fire station possibly next year. The budget also focuses on several developments that will begin construction next year inside of the 16,000-resident city.

Lowering the tax rate "puts money back into the pockets of residents," said City Administrator Byron Hebert. "We had told the citizens a long time ago when (Katy Mills Mall) came in, that when the mall bond was paid off, we could start lowering the tax rate. We're doing what we said we were going to do."

The city has multiple projects it plans to direct funds towards during this next budget year, including the revitalization of downtown streets and a boardwalk district with a 50,000-square-foot convention center, a hotel and shopping area.

In addition to the seven fire personnel, the city plans to hire two police workers and three other service positions.

The city's tax rate, if approved, will be lowered to 50 cents per $100 of taxable property value. Four years ago, the city initiated a five-year plan aimed at lowering the tax rate by 2 cents each year. The 11-square-mile city is split between the three appraisal districts of Harris, Fort Bend and Waller counties.

But even with the lower tax rate, some homeowners could see a rise in their tax bill because of increased property values in the city. The estimated taxable value increased by $192 million since last year to about $2 billion, according to the city's budget.

The city can afford to lower taxes because of the increase in taxable value and overall revenue increase, Hebert said. The city's total general sales tax also rose by $1.1 million, the budget reflects.

Though the city is in close proximity to the slumping Energy Corridor, which has been devastated by a downturn in oil prices these past two years, Katy has benefited from its newest residential developments such as Cane Island and business ventures such as the recently opened Typhoon Texas Waterpark next to the mall.

"Katy continues to see positive growth, despite the less than optimal economic climate," said Becky Wilkins, the city's finance director. "The city has a good distribution of revenue from property tax and sales tax, without one category being top-heavy. This allows us to continue to operate in an economic downturn (since) we have different revenue streams."

The city is also awaiting the opening of a Buc-ee's travel store in 2017 along Interstate 10 that is expected to employ approximately 200 people and add to the city's sale tax revenue, Wilkins said.

This year's budget also includes approximately $42,000 toward the purchase and insurance of body-worn cameras for each of the police depart ment's 52 officers.

Last year, the city's budget focused on allocating $1.2 million toward re-asphalting some of Katy's aging streets such as Katy Fort Bend Road and Fifth Street. In previous years, the city allocated large funds to improving its fire department, which transformed from a mostly volunteer-based unit to staffing a large percentage of full-time personnel.
Richard L. Heath has been named the new executive director of the NAU campus in Prescott Valley. He comes from the Greater Prescott Regional Economic Partnership, where he was able to build strong relationships in the community.

Im looking forward to utilizing my economic development and workforce development experience to enhance our Prescott Valley campus and educational success throughout Yavapai County," Heath said in a press release. "I see the campus becoming a valuable community asset as the region grows and NAU has the opportunity to provide significant resources toward education and workforce development.

NAU President Rita Cheng is excited to welcome him to the university's extended campus.

Richard has exciting ideas on expanding our academic programs to address the needs of the communities in Yavapai County, she said.

Susan Johnstad, Yavapai's previous assistant vice president and campus executive officer, will be transitioning to a new role within the university. She will be working in Phoenix as the associate vice president for Online and Statewide Programs for Extended Campuses.
How far will the Zika outbreak spread, and for how long?

Predicting Zika's course in the continental United States is difficult. Health experts have never confronted a virus quite like this one: a mild infection that can nonetheless devastate unborn infants, and that is transmitted by both mosquitoes and sex.

Even tracking cases is hard because so few cause symptoms. "This is such a new thing entomologically that we're all speaking above our pay grade," said Joseph M. Conlon, a technical adviser to the American Mosquito Control Association.

Still, there is growing agreement among some experts that the virus may be, at best, slowed by aggressive mosquito control. Nothing short of winter will stop it, they said, and how many cases are mounting up is still hotly debated.

Virtually no entomologists believe that the transmission of Zika is limited to a few square miles of downtown Miami and Miami Beach, no matter how vigorously state officials insist it is.

"That's just dreaming - it's totally unrealistic," said Duane J. Gubler, a former director of the vector-borne diseases division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Mosquitoes move around, people move around. Mosquitoes even move by car sometimes."

Nonetheless, the CDC on Monday lifted its travel advisory for the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, saying that no new locally transmitted cases had been detected there since early August and traps there had few mosquitoes since the spraying of two pesticides, naled and Bti, began.

Elsewhere, Florida has been reporting new locally transmitted cases almost every day. There were 79 as of Sept. 16. As of Friday, it was investigating 17 infections to ascertain whether each was a lone case or part of a wider cluster.

The state has refused to reveal the five places where it has trapped mosquitoes that tested positive for the virus, saying the information was "not necessary to public health." Last week, arguing that it was, The Miami Herald sued Miami-Dade County to force it to name the sites.

And it's likely that some local transmission is not even known about yet. According to local doctors, hundreds of women are waiting weeks to get test results from overwhelmed state laboratories.

Experts have long predicted that other Gulf Coast cities, including Galveston and South Texas, might have outbreaks like Miami's. Indeed, they may be having them now without realizing it because of the testing lags and asymptomatic cases.

Since January, the CDC has predicted that Zika would not spread faster on the U.S. mainland than dengue and chikungunya, both of which are also carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

But some scientists argue that dengue and chikungunya are poor models for Zika. Lab animals with Zika develop more virus in their blood than they do when infected with the other viruses, said Rebecca C. Christofferson, a disease transmission specialist at Louisiana State University's veterinary school. And, she said, Zika appears to be unusually quick to move from a mosquito's gut to its salivary glands, where it is injected into the next victim.

Dengue takes seven to 10 days to make that trip; chikungunya takes as few as five days, depending on temperature, mosquito size and other factors. "Zika is looking like chikungunya," Christofferson said.

Also, Zika flies below the public health surveillance radar. Dengue's nickname is "breakbone fever," and chikungunya's is "bending-up disease." Both can be excruciatingly painful, so victims often see doctors quickly and their test results are reported to the state.

By contrast, 80 percent of Zika victims lack symptoms and may never see a doctor. As a result, a Zika cluster can grow without being noticed until someone infected, usually a pregnant woman, is tested.

Also, the state's biggest dengue outbreak began in 2009 in Key West, a tiny vacation island with a relatively rich and educated population of 25,000. It still took two years to contain, with 90 confirmed cases.

The state's first Zika outbreak is in Miami, an area of 5.5 million. Cities are more likely to have residents, some with guns or dogs, who refuse to open their doors to mosquito inspectors, said Conlon of the mosquito control association. One property's pools and gutters can produce enough mosquitoes to blanket a neighborhood.

Urban indifference also plays a role.

"What's getting to me is how complacent people in Miami are about this," he said. "That does not bode well for containment."

Predictions of Zika's course are also made difficult by a monumental wild card. Unlike other tropical viruses, it can be sexually transmitted.

"That makes Zika a different breed of dog," Gubler said.

If an infected person passes it to a household sexual partner, the virus will be in human blood for up to 20 days at that location for local mosquitoes to pick up and pass on.

The long-term picture is even fuzzier. Experts are divided on whether the virus could become endemic, recurring summer after summer.
As part of Diane Douglas' We Are Listening Tour, the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction will be at Hopi Mission School in Kykotsmovi tonight from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

She plans to discuss the initiatives proposed in her "AZ Kids Can't Wait!" plan, which includes support for teacher retention and a reduction of standardized testing.

She will also speak with attendees about the importance of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the new federal education regulation, and hear feedback on other state education policies.
Having an MRI during pregnancy presents no danger to the fetus or the offspring, researchers have found, but the risks appear to change when a contrast agent is used.

Researchers tracked 1,424,105 deliveries of live and stillborn infants in Ontario from 2003 to 2015. Among them were 5,654 women who had MRIs and 397 who had an MRI with a contrast agent called gadolinium, which can enhance the image. The study was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The incidence of congenital abnormalities for women who had first-trimester MRIs without contrast was no higher than for those who had none at all, and there were no differences in abnormalities among their children, who were followed up to age 4.

Among women who had gadolinium-enhanced procedures, there was a slightly higher risk of still births and neonatal death, and their children had higher rates of a range of skin diseases and inflammatory conditions. But there were not enough women with enhanced MRIs to draw definitive conclusions about the risk of any single outcome.

The lead author, Dr. Joel G. Ray, a clinician researcher at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said that the findings should be reassuring to women who require a regular MRI during pregnancy. Women who need an MRI with a contrast agent should talk to their doctors about the risks and benefits of the procedure.

"The panic button gets pushed" when a woman who did not realize she was pregnant gets an MRI or when a pregnant woman needs one, he said. "Our paper should limit the anxiety or concern that those women have."

Early menopause linked with heart risk

Menopause before the age of 45 is associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and death, a review of studies has found.

The average age at the onset of menopause is 51, but some women start much earlier. Premature menopause is defined as onset before 40, while early onset menopause occurs before 45.

Researchers in the Netherlands pooled data from 32 studies of premature menopause and early onset menopause that included more than 310,000 women.

Compared with women who reached menopause after 45, those who reached menopause earlier had a 50 percent increased risk of coronary heart disease and a 23 percent higher risk of stroke. They had no greater risk of stroke mortality, but did have a 19 percent increased risk for death from cardiovascular disease and a 12 percent increased risk for overall mortality.

The study, online in JAMA Cardiology, also found that compared with women who were younger than 50 at menopause, those who experienced menopause at 50 to 54 had a 13 percent lower risk of fatal cardiovascular disease, but no difference in the risk of stroke.

The reason early menopause is associated with more health risks is not clear, but an earlier loss of ovarian function may cause hormonal changes that lead to inflammation and vascular damage.

"Women who reach menopause early should be screened for medical conditions such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes," said the lead author, Dr. Taulant Muka, a physician and postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. "Treating these disorders early reduces the risk."
PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Food News Dinner Bells at the BioPark The ABQ BioPark is selling tickets to a four course meal and dessert in the park's apple orchardmade completely from fresh ingredients found in the park's Heritage Farm. The Heritage Farm Harvest dinner happens Oct. 8.

The Seattle Seahawks invited ABQ's Joe Powdrell of Mr. Powdrell's Barbeque House to their opening game last weekend. The team's owner is reportedly in talks with Powdrell about selling food anointed in his arbeque sauce at games. That's one small step for Powdrell, one giant leap for cultural transference.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, American sugar consumption is up since the 70s, down since the 90s and  still bad for you. Apparently we're inching toward better waistlines, though, and a lot of that is thanks to a decrease in the consumption of soda. Who'd have thunk?

Local chef Rob Connoley, famed for his often foraged menu at the now defunct (cough) Curious Kumquat in Silver City, is signing copies of his new cookbook, Acorns & Cattails, at Las Cosas Kitchen Shoppe (181 Paseo De Peralta ) in Santa Fe. The book signing is from 3-5pm on Sept. 29, and there will be a $95 cooking class at 6pm, presumably involving stuff you'd find in your backyard. To register call 877-229-7184.

The first taproom from New Mexicos Abbey Brewing CoThe Monks Cornerwill host its grand opening Oct. 5. Located inside the Imperial Building at Second Street and Silver in downtown ABQ, this new drinking spot is promising 20 taps, including at least one cider and some outside breweries, too.
In the last few weeks, weve allowed ourselves to indulge in the quips and quibbles of the presidential race, obsessing over things like whether Hillary Clinton lied about her health or whether Donald Trump told the truth about his role in the birther movement.

Its a shame that it took a series of terrorist attacks to bring us back to serious business.

The weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey, as well as a separate stabbing incident in Minnesota, reminded us of whats really at stake in this years presidential election.

We all know by now that the greatest threat to our national security isnt someone trained by a foreign terrorist network flying a plane into a skyscraper in a major U.S. city. Orlando, Fla., and San Bernardino, Calif., have shown us that the newest wave of terrorists are home-grown and often radicalized over the internet. There are people living among us who want to bring our country down, and one of the most important qualities we need in a commander in chief is someone whos smart enough to figure out how to keep that from happening.

Over the last two days, Clinton and Trump have provided us with two different road maps for fighting terrorism. Neither candidate said anything we havent heard before, but its been interesting to watch them talk about their strategies under pressure. Its clear that both of them need to rethink their approach.

Trumps response has been nearly juvenile, revealing once again his chilling dearth of experience in foreign and domestic affairs. Clinton, on the other hand, has come off sounding like a lifelong bureaucrat who is more concerned about spouting policy than convincing Americans that they will be safer under her watch. Each technique is designed to appeal to a certain constituency. And neither is sufficient to pull anyone over from the opposing side.

At least Trump gives it to us straight, though his message is unfiltered and often premature and factually incorrect. His anti-terrorism platform is centered on capturing our emotions. He plays to our patriotism, prodding us to release our fear in angry bursts, targeting our neighbors who likely are no more terrorists than we are.

Clinton, on the other hand, presents a cooler, more controlled image. She cautions us to wait before jumping to conclusions and trust that she has the experience to address any situation that may arise with dignity and resolve.

Even with her broad experience, a recent CNN poll shows Clinton lagging behind Trump on the issue of fighting terrorism. Fifty-one percent of registered voters said they trust Trump to better handle terrorism if elected, compared with 45 percent who said they trust Clinton.

It is easy to understand why Trump came out ahead. He lays out the problems in a simplistic way and offers solutions that a 5-year-old could understand. Void of political jargon, and often without real substance, he promises to fight terrorism by giving control to the people, rather than relying on others to come to our rescue.

Many Americans find his ideas repulsive. But to the folks who want to protect our country by any means necessary, even treading on the civil rights of other Americans, Trumps plain talk is just what they want to hear.

Trump would have us believe that our immigration system is largely responsible for the terrorism. The more limits we place on who can enter our country, he says, the more likely we are to keep terrorists from setting off bombs on U.S. soil.

Certainly, we cant expect anyone to actually tell us that he wants to enter the country in order to kill Americans, so we would have to rely on his extreme vetting to weed those people out. To do that essentially would mean probing the minds of everyone who tries to come to America from what he calls terrorist nations.

Trump has mentioned requiring some sort of ideological test. I wonder if thats anything like the old literacy tests African-Americans used to have to take in the South as a means of denying them the right to vote?

Trump also apparently thinks that our police officers are wimps. He says the police in New York know who the terrorists are but are afraid to do anything because they dont want to be accused of racial profiling.

You know in Israel, they profile, Trump said in an interview Monday on Fox News. Theyve done an unbelievable job  as good as you can do.  They see somebody thats suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in.

Never mind that racial and ethnic profiling is against the law in New York and most other states.

Whether Trumps ideas are practical, or even effective, is beside the point. Those who listen to him are looking for something concrete, something in plain English that they can point to and say, Look, were stamping out terrorism in America.

Clintons ideas for fighting terrorism are more esoteric. And quite frankly, they frequently sound like political garble. Unlike Trump, who preys on our fear and anger, she tries to appeal to our strength by reminding us that we arent a nation of cowards.

Thats not a bad thing. But she never really explains how were going to stop lone-wolf terrorists from shooting up a nightclub or walking up to shoppers in a suburban Minnesota mall.

On her website, she lays out three areas that she would focus on as president.

First, she would take out the Islamic States stronghold in Iraq and Syria, in part, by resolving civil and sectarian wars taking place in those countries. So far, our track record hasnt been too good in that area. Next, she would work with our allies to dismantle global terrorism. Even while she was secretary of state, that didnt happen.

Third, she would harden our defenses at home. Shes on to something here by promising to support our first responders, law enforcement and intelligence officers with the right tools, resources, intelligence and training to prevent attacks before they happen. But some folks would like to hear more about what those tools would look like.

Trumps supporters are very clear about where he stands, though he likely wont be able to do any of things he has promised if elected.

Those of us who like Clinton might not understand exactly what shes saying, but we trust that she knows what shes talking about.
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Tuesday marks the 77th anniversary of classes starting on the University of Houston's main campus.

Since 1939, UH has opened its doors to educate and inspire Houston students, and to celebrate, the college shared a #TransformationTuesday post on Facebook.

RELATED: UH fans now have a special beer to celebrate football domination

The university shared a black-and-white shot of an aerial view of its campus in the past, and a current view of its main campus to show the dramatic change the school has seen over the decades.

Needless to say, UH has added a few additional buildings, and the city of Houston as a whole has blossomed.

READ MORE: University of Houston's enrollment hits record level

Today, UH is a major public research and teaching institution, serving more than 39,800 students annually with nearly 300 undergraduate and graduate programs.

The school has also produced very successful students who made names for themselves across the nation. Click through the gallery above to see UH alums who have become celebrities.

ON CAMPUS LIFE: The internet is loving this University of Houston student's math response to a Facebook joke
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Republicans in Cleveland shouted "lock her up!" whenever Hillary Clinton's name came up at the GOP convention in July.

A parade in Amarillo over the weekend decided to give some folks a preview of what that might look like.

A float carried a person in a President Obama mask and someone wearing a Hillary Clinton mask in what appeared to be a jail cell. Or a wooden box. Or a cage. It was pretty flimsy, whatever it was.

READ MORE: DeLay insists FBI is 'ready to indict' Hillary Clinton

Riding along on the float was a man wearing a Donald Trump "Make America Great Again" banner. A group called Stars and Bars organized the float, which rode along side a group called the Confederate Riders of America.

A sign held next to the float said "Hillary for Prison 2016."

"It was in no way racist," Michael Bateman, the President of the Confederate Riders of America told KXXV-TV. "There was a sign right next to them that said 'Hillary for prison, 2016. We had no racial intentions at all."

READ MORE: Texas prison inmate defeats Obama in parts of West Virginia

The right wing loved it. Photos of the float popped up over the weekend on various conservative web sites, frequently with commentary along the lines of there being nothing wrong with the float and dismissing any criticism of it.

"So one person thinks it's offensive because Obama is black and they put him in a mock 'cage,' which it's actually more of a fence, and the sole reason they find it wrong is because of the color of his skin," wrote Rufus Shinra on freerepublic.com. "If it was a white politician, say Donald Trump was mocked on a parade float, I'm guessing it would be in no way offensive or socially unacceptable."

Not everyone was so crazy about it.

READ MORE: Texas couple claims dog killed over Hillary Clinton sign

"A lot of people in the black and Hispanic community are saying, 'Why would you put a black man in a cage?'" Amarillo resident Rodney Darnes told the station. "The fact that Hillary is in the float only sets the women's movement further back."

But, the photo went viral on social media over the weekend. And at a minimum, it got the float and the Confederate Riders of America on the map.
GALVESTON  A suspect in the shooting death of a La Marque woman apparently took his own life after firing at Houston police during a high-speed pursuit, police said Tuesday.

Marvin Martin, 23, was the boyfriend of victim Melissa Cervantes, 34, whose body was discovered early Monday morning in her house in the 11oo block of Second Street in La Marque, police spokesman Detective Shawn Spruill said. La Marque is about 50 miles south of Houston.

Martin was wanted for questioning but was not a suspect when he apparently killed himself a few hours after the discovery of Cervantes' body, Spruill said.

Police confirmed information that made Martin a suspect only after his death, he said. Spruill declined to reveal information linking Martin to Cervantes's death because the investigation is continuing.

Houston police spokesman John Cannon said investigators were awaiting a report from the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences that would verify the cause of death and establish that the deceased is Martin.

Police saw a Black Mazda driven by a man believed to be Martin heading the wrong way down Smith Street in the Midtown area about 3:30 a.m., Cannon said.

The Mazda accelerated and led police on a high-speed chase onto Interstate 45, where Martin fired about three shots from a pistol at officers while driving, but officers did not return fire, Cannon said. The chase continued on the Southwest Freeway where the Mazda, heading south, struck a guardrail at the Kirkwood exit, he said.

The Mazda drove a short way along the feeder road before striking a power pole in the 12000 block of Southwest Freeway in Stafford, Cannon said.

Officers used bullhorns to ask Martin to exit but got no response, he said. They then fired a bean-bag from a non-lethal beanbag gun to break the windows, enabling them to see that the driver appeared to be dead.

Cannon said preliminary indications are that Martin "likely suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

Spruill said police are still awaiting information that would link any weapons found in the Mazda to Cervantes' death.

Police discovered Cervantes' body while investigating a report of shots fired in the neighborhood and noticed that the sliding glass door to her house was shattered, he said.
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This week in 2005 many of us in the Houston area were buckling down to bear the brunt of Hurricane Rita.

The aftermath and horror of Hurricane Katrina just weeks before had scared many people in the area into action, with long lines at grocery stores, hardware stores and voluntary evacuations.

RELATED: How Hurricane Rita anxiety led to the worst gridlock in Houston history

Hurricane Rita, a Category 5 monster, was moving toward the Texas Gulf Coast with frightening speed, causing evacuation orders for low-lying areas.

The rush to get out of town and to places to the north and west created horrendous traffic jams as residents from every county in the area clamored to get out of the path of what was predicted to be a damaging hurricane.

People who would have otherwise hunkered down, were scared into taking drastic action. Rita did indeed look terrifying and was headed straight toward Houston with 175 mph winds and worst-case scenario potential.

The worst was possible.

RELATED: Despite 'forgotten' status, Hurricane Rita ravaged southeast Texas

Some 2.5 million people hit the road ahead of the storms arrival. The worst day was probably Thursday, Sept. 22, as every conceivable evacuation route was clogged well past capacity.

For example, Texas 146, which travels through Liberty County, dumped 600,000 people into a county with only 70,000 residents, Liberty County Sheriff's Sgt. Ronnie Alexander told the Chronicle at the time.

On other major freeways, frustrated drivers took things into their own hands and drove on the wrong side of the road before authorities designated "contra-flow" lanes to speed things along.

Thousands of people ran out of gas, or their cars overheated from all the inching along, causing many to stop and sleep along the highway.

There were even reports of price gouging by convenience store owners, inundated with customers.

Perhaps the most tragic incident of the monumental evacuation was the death of 24 Bellaire nursing home residents who died when their chartered bus caught fire and exploded about 6:45 a.m. Sept. 23, 2005, on traffic-clogged Interstate 45 near Dallas.

The residents were being evacuated to a sister facility in Dallas in advance of Hurricane Rita, which was still listed as a Category 5 storm when the bus left Bellaire about 3 p.m. Sept. 22.

RELATED: Looking back at the 1900 hurricane that wiped out Galveston 117 years ago

By the time Rita made landfall about 2:40 a.m. Sept. 24, 2005, near Sabine Pass, it had weakened to a Category 3 hurricane.

The storm still did $12 billion in damage, but Katrina did more than $100 billion in damage. A little more than 100 deaths occurred during Rita compared to almost 2,000 during Katrina.

About the worst impact in Houston was some branches down, empty gas stations and a few hours without electricity.

Thousands who evacuated from the Bayou City would have been better off if they had just stayed home, made a batch of margaritas and watched TV.

With additional reporting by Carol Christian
A Houston painter has been charged with aggravated assault, accused of running over a former employee four times in a truck with his painting company's name on the side, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Rogelio Alberto Guardado, 69, appeared in magistrate court after being arrested Monday in connection with an incident at 11 p.m. Sept. 11 in an apartment complex at 6767 Long Drive.

Prosecutors said Guardado was in a tan Nissan pickup with a camper shell with "Rogelio's Painting" on the side when he ran over 41-year-old San Juanita Herrera.

A witness told police that they saw the truck run over Herrera at the entrance of the southeast Houston apartment complex. The driver turned around in another part of the parking lot, revved his engine and ran over her again, police said. The driver then reversed his truck and ran over Herrera a third time. Then he sped out of the parking lot, running over Herrera for a fourth time.

Herrera was critically injured, but was able to tell police she believed it was Guardado, a former employer. She was rushed to a nearby hospital. Details of her injuries were not released, but police said she is in critical condition.

She later told police where Guardado lived, and when they arrived at his home in northwest Houston on Sept. 12, they found the truck that had been described.

Guardado said he did not loan out his truck and denied being involved, prosecutors said.

Guardado is being held in the Harris County jail in lieu of $30,000 bail. He is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. If convicted of the second-degree felony, he could face a maximum of 20 years in prison.
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Two of six members of a Texas A&M fraternity wanted on warrants have been arrested after drugs were discovered at a frat house party where a student was found unresponsive and later died at the hospital last month in College Station.

Thomas James Emeterio, 21, and Aaron Douglas Spring, 20, turned themselves into authorities Monday, according to the College Station Police Department.

Emeterio is charged with possession of a controlled substance.

Spring has several drug-related charges, including possession of marijuana, possession of a controlled substance and manufacturing/delivery of a controlled substance.

The arrests came after warrants, ranging from possession of marijuana to manufacture and delivery of a controlled substance, were issued for six Sigma Nu fraternity members following an investigation. Officers were called to a party about 4:40 a.m. Aug. 20 at the fraternity house at 550 Fraternity Row, according to the College Station Police Department.

Police said when officers arrived, party-goers showed them a fraternity member, later identified as Anton Gridnev, who was unconscious and not breathing.

Gridnev, of Frisco, was rushed to College Station Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

After finding illegal substances in the house, police arrested Samuel Patterson, 21, for possession of LSD and MDMA, known as ecstasy; Michael Frymire, 20, for possession of cannabis hash oil; and Ty Robertson, 21, and Christian Sandford, 18, for possession of marijuana. It is not known if those arrested are A&M students.

Maxwell Gollomp, 19, a College Station resident from Bellaire; John Cain, 19, a College Station resident from Houston; and Zachary Farmer, 20, a College Station resident from Denton were all cited for drug paraphernalia, a Class C misdemeanor.

Officials said the investigation identified four other people in connection to the illegal drugs. Police will release their names once they have been taken into custody.
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At a gas station off Interstate 10, you may not be able to put a tiger in your tank, but you certainly can see a live one while topping yours off.

Tony is a real tiger, living in a real cage at a real gas station about 20 miles west of Baton Rouge. And, his fate has been the epicenter of a five-year fight over whether the tiger should be kept in captivity at the truck stop in Grosse Tete, a village of 670 people whose name means "Big Head."

The Bengal tiger has been living at Tiger Truck Stop for 16 years and spends his day as a roadside attraction that is odd, even by Louisiana standards. The truck stop revels in the notoriety, selling T-shirts reading "Animal Rights Activists Taste Like Chicken."

READ MORE: Animal welfare group threatens Houston restaurant giant over white tigers at aquarium

But, Tony's fate - and the fate of any potential replacement - has been the subject of lawsuits and legislation.

Truck stop owner Mike Sandlin has had Tony for 16 years and has said repeatedly he takes good care of the big cat and genuinely cares about the animal's welfare. Tony lives in an enclosure with toys, shade and water.

In pictures, Tony's enclosure appears to be cleaner and more orderly than most truck stop bathrooms.

"Tony is happy and healthy at the truck stop in his 3,200-square-foot habitat," Sandlin told The Times-Picayune/Nola.com.

READ MORE: Conroe Police release 911 call that alerted authorities to loose tiger

But, Sandlin's detractors have gone to court to try and free Tony the Tiger, saying a truck stop is no place for a big cat to live. Gas fumes, noise and little room to roam, they say, are tough on a tiger.

"For us it's absolutely about the welfare for Tony," Animal Legal Defense Fund lawyer Matthew Liebman told a Louisiana legislative committee in 2014. (This is the same group threatening to sue Houston billionaire Tillman Fertitta over four white tigers living at the downtown aquarium.)

There's a Facebook group hoping to free Tony along with multiple petitions aimed at doing the same thing, but thus far, they haven't had much success. And, Tony has drawn fans from around the country, some of whom have gotten tattoos or painted murals of the cat.

READ MORE: The Houston Zoo's 18-year-old male lion has died

Court rulings against Sandlin were thwarted in 2014 by then-Gov. Bobby Jindal (he of the short-lived 2016 presidential run).

Jindal signed into law a legislative nose-thumbing at animal rights activists aimed at helping Sandlin. In short, the law overturned rulings barring corporate ownership of big cats and other exotic animals and exempts Sandlin from the state's ban on owning big cats.

None of this impacts the Louisiana State University mascot, Mike the Tiger, and the on-campus enclosure.

"The threat of him being drug away to some strange place -- never petted, never sweet-talked to again...I would not stand by and see that happen to that tiger," Sandlin told the New Orleans newspaper. "To have these idiots, these nuts that think they know more about tigers than I do -- I can't stand it."
BC-US--Charlotte Police-Fatal Shooting, 6th Ld-Writethru,372

Protesters confront police after shooting in Charlotte

Eds: Adds details of protests.

By TOM FOREMAN Jr.

Associated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - A black police officer shot an armed black man at an apartment complex Tuesday, authorities said, prompting angry street protests late into the night.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and several officers had been injured. Television coverage showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd.

Police had gone to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw the man - not the suspect they were looking for - inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers saw the man get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

The man, identified as 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Detectives recovered a firearm at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.

Some protesters were heard yelling "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One person held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

Earlier, a tow truck was brought in to take another police cruiser away. Local media outlets reported that car suffered damage to its rear end.

One television news crew has retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that "the community deserves answers."
Texas, which has taken in more refugees than any state in the nation over the past year, is threatening to leave the federal refugee program if the Obama administration does not meet its security demands.

The dispute comes as the Obama administration has announced a new goal of resettling 110,000 refugees in the United States in the coming year, including an unspecified increase in the number from Syria.

READ MORE: Trump Jr. compares refugees to poisoned Skittles, Twitter reacts swiftly

In a letter Wednesday to Robert Carey, director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission said that unless Washington "unconditionally" approves the state's new plan controlling placements in Texas by September 30, the agency will "exit" the program.

Without an agreement, Texas would join Kansas and New Jersey in withdrawing state participation in the refugee program over the federal government's vetting procedures to screen out potential terrorists.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the letter was sent in response to the Office of Refugee Resettlement's "unwillingness" to approve the state's new refugee plan, which would require national security officials to ensure that refugees do not pose a security threat to Texas.

READ MORE: Fiery campaign rhetoric leads to trial delay for Houston man linked to ISIS

"Empathy must be balanced with security," Abbott said in a statement. "Texas has done more than its fair share in aiding refugees, accepting more refugees than any other state between October 2015 and March 2016. While many refugees pose no danger, some pose grave danger, like the Iraqi refugee with ties to ISIS who was arrested earlier this year after he plotted to set off bombs at two malls in Houston."

Obama officials say the U.S. has a thorough vetting process for incoming refugees, but that it is impossible to "guarantee" that none could potentially pose a problem.

READ MORE: Bashar al-Assad's Texas-sized victory against ISIS

The state's letter, signed by state refugee coordinator Kara Crawford, said Texas would continue to provide services and benefits to private and non-profit refugee agencies until January 31, 2017.

Despite the threat, Texas officials do not have the authority to block the federal government or private agencies from placing or relocating refugees in the state. Texas' move would essentially remove the state as a pass-through for federal relocation dollars to charities and other private resettlement agencies.

READ MORE: State says it will not allow refugees in Texas without security guarantees

Despite objections raised by Gov. Greg Abbott and other state officials, Texas took in 7,205 refugees over the past 12 months, more than any other state. White House officials attribute the state's record to strong support from churches and other faith-based and religious organizations.
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U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert can't help himself.

The latest blast from the Republican from Tyler aimed at President Barack Obama's administration is that officials are taking advice and recommendations from the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization considered a terrorist group by some foreign governments.

What set Gohmert off this time on the Howie Carr Radio Show was the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey and the arrest of an American citizen, Ahmad Rahami. Rahami's father had reported him to the FBI in 2014, but investigators didn't find a credible threat at the time.

READ MORE: Texas Congressman Gohmert says Hillary Clinton 'mentally impaired'

"There will never be enough red flags  as long as we are taking guidance from Muslim Brotherhood operatives, who are advising this administration, advising the State Department, advising Homeland Security, advising our intelligence," Gohmert said.

As for evidence, Gohmert offered nothing solid (and wasn't really pushed on the show, either).

Instead, Gohmert advanced a theory that to control what is taught and not taught about radical Islam, the administration published new rules that require all instructors dealing with the extremist religion to be certified by the Muslim Brotherhood, through advisory councils that also approve training materials and curriculum.

READ MORE: Louie Gohmert invokes Matt Damon in bizarre speech about gays, space

Again, he offered no evidence and wasn't really quizzed for any, either.

Gohmert has a long history of making accusations and claims about his political opponents.

Earlier this month, Gohmert told the Values Voter Summit that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was mentally impaired after falling and suffering a concussion in 2012.

As for proof? Gohmert didn't offer any basis for that accusation, either.
Tom Reel

-- Sid Miller wont face charges for suing taxpayer money for personal trips, by the Houston Chronicles Brian Rosenthal. Our office has determined that criminal intent would be difficult to prove in this case. Additionally, the total amount spent on the trips was relatively small, the state has been refunded all the money it expended on these trips, and the facts have been made known publicly so that Commissioner Miller is likely to be more careful in the future, Assistant District Attorney Susan Oswalt said in the memo about the case. Taking these factors into consideration, we have decided to close our file.

-- My latest in Texas Take: The Cruz challenge is taking shape. Getting attention is how Ted Cruz has made a name for himself in politics, which is no small feat for a freshman Republican senator from a safe GOP seat. He is nobodys idea of a vulnerable senator, one that the party will have to spend millions to defend in a few years  unless that challenge comes from within. Michael McCaul acknowledged this political calculus this week, saying that Republicans who do not endorse Trump this cycle just want attention. Its now up to McCaul, should he decide to challenge Cruz, to make sure attention around Cruz remains at an all-time high.
The summers final Live on the Waterfront concert was held Wednesday evening at Prince Arthurs Landing. The popular series in Thunder Bay has completed nine weekly shows that began on July 13. Wednesdays concert was unique as it was held one hour later in the evening to mesh with the 10 p.
Representatives from the Excel Development Group attended the Beatrice City Councils meeting Monday to discuss a housing project.

The Sun Ridge Development, second addition to the city will have a proposed 14-16 single-family homes, as proposed for a Beatrice workforce housing project.

Using a recently published housing study, the development group decided to look into workforce housing to fill the need.

Workforce housing is probably the number one issue in almost every community in Nebraska nowadays, said President Brent Williams. When you go to a community and ask what is your biggest issue for economic growth it is workforce housing.

He said that the homes are for families that make $40,000 to $60,000 dollars a year and can afford the house payments.

We are going to ask for some different funds to help discount the pricing, Williams said. As we have seen in other communities, once you get the ball rolling with the first project other projects will then follow down the road.

The proposed land acquisition for the lots will be $18,750 for each lot at $300,000 total, a price point that Williams admitted has not been agreed upon yet with the current landowners.

The construction cost for the 16 houses will be just over $3 million with the total development costs reaching close to $3.7 million. The price point on the houses will range between $193,000 and $205,000 depending on square footage and other factors. The developer fee for this project would be $182,000, which is just more than 5 percent.

The houses will be two bedroom and three bathrooms with a two-car garage.

We were looking for $360,000 of TIF Funding and $250,000 of other LB840 funding for a total subsidy of $610,000, Williams said.

Construction will finish in about four to five months for the project.

We dont manufacture offsite, but we will look at both stick building and bringing in the walls and stuff offsite, Williams said. Its not a manufactured home. These will be $200,000 nice custom homes basically.

City Administrator Tobias Tempelmeyer later explained that following the housing study, the city asked for requests for proposals, prompting Excels interest and the city's interest in doing a housing project.

The area being looked at is the subject of a blight and substandard study. Following that, it will go before the council. If labeled blight and substandard TIF funding can be applied to it.

Tempelmeyer is anticipating that the study will be done in the next couple weeks.

"Most likely if anything will happen it will be done next year based on where we are in the construction cycle," Tempelmeyer added.
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Annual statewide assessment scores were released Friday and Beatrice Public Schools officials said progress has been made, though theres always room to improve.

The Nebraska State Assessment (NeSA) early this year tested students of certain grade levels, ranging from third to 11th, on their knowledge and know-how in reading, writing, math and science.

As a whole, weve seen improvements and were very excited about that, said BPS Director of Curriculum Jackie Nielsen. Its normal for students to be at that 80 percent and below range in math. We had four grade levels score 80 percent and above in math this year. So its very exciting to see students move toward the 80 percent range and into the high 80s and 90s.

Statewide, average NeSA math scores have slowly and steadily increased from 63 percent to 73 percent since 2011. Statewide data in reading and science increased at about the same rate, with average scores this year of 82 percent and 72 percent, respectively. Writing scores have not yet been released for any district.

All 2016 NeSA reading, math and science scores are available on the Nebraska Department of Education website. The data is available by school district, which shows each grade levels scores in each subject area. Students in grades three through eight as well as 11 were tested in reading and math. Fifth, eighth and 11th graders were tested in science.

Nielsen said BPS students score at or above the state average the majority of the time and their strong suit is in reading.

We have the last six years of data in math and reading and the last five years of data in science, she said. From where we started, we have made great gains. We are very excited to have made those gains and to be trending upward in the areas of reading, math and science.

Some individual BPS grade levels' average scores in specific subject areas increased 10 percentage points this year from last, Nielsen said.

Nielsen and BPS Superintendent Pat Nauroth attribute district test score increases to a number of reasons.

First, the evaluation system implemented last year gives specific feedback to teachers on instruction, and its helping, Nielsen said.

The focus is on teaching and how they are teaching and how they are asking kids questions to make sure they understand concepts, Nielsen said. The main purpose of this is to grow. We want all teachers to become better. We want to help them improve their craft.

BPS administrators use material from the Marzano Center in assessing teachers, both in periodic in-class observations and formal evaluations.

Second, Nielsen said the district has benefited from narrowing its focus to priority curriculum, as state standards (on which NeSA tests) are vast.

We cant cover everything, she said. The indicators are just too much. So we have to ask, What are the most important pieces?

Third, the implementation of school improvement plans for each BPS school are helping, Nielsen said. School improvement teams do things like evaluate student academic data, such as math scores, and discuss how the students are doing and how they can improve. Nielsen said this started about three years ago.

Additionally, BPS administrators and teachers take any professional development opportunity to share information with each other, such as instructional ideas taught at conferences. This is done during PLC (professional learning communities) time on Wednesday afternoons when students go home early.

Nielsen also mentioned classroom teachers increased focus on fluency in reading and writing, including understanding and recognizing vocabulary.

Im very pleased that while trend lines go up, our overall student needs are also going up, Nauroth said. So not only are we making gains, were making gains when we have higher needs.

Nauroth is referring to an increased number of students on free and reduced lunches and an increased number of students in special education.

The BPS school board set a priority goal for this school year to increase NeSA writing scores. However, the state has since decided to replace the NeSA reading and writing exams with a consolidated English Language Arts exam that uses text-dependent analysis (TDA), which is a more interactive test format.

All of the school improvement plans have focuses on the number of times students are writing and providing feedback to students on that writing, Nielsen said. Were already seeing the amount of writing increased so far this year, which is great.  Even though the test is gone, we still need to improve our writing. Everyone can improve their writing.
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In a development that has been welcomed by candidates for Canadian immigration through the Express Entry selection system, the latest draw has seen a substantial increase in the number of candidates invited to apply for Canadian permanent residence. This increase means that the number of Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) points required in order for a candidate to receive an Invitation to Apply (ITA) has decreased for the second draw in a row.

A total of 1,288 candidates in the Express Entry pool with 483 or more CRS points received an ITA in the September 21 draw. Candidates who have been issued an ITA are now in a position to submit an application for Canadian permanent residence. Accompanying family members, including spouses or common-law partners, as well as dependent children, may also come to Canada along with the principal applicant. The government of Canada aims to process applications within six months.

Just four weeks ago, the CRS point requirement was 538 and only 750 candidates were invited to apply. The move towards larger draws, and a corresponding decrease in the CRS point requirement, likely reflects a desire on the part of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to issue more ITAs through the fall season, in order to reach the annual intake levels set earlier this year for the federal economic immigration programs that receive applications through Express Entry. An IRCC representative made comments earlier this year to that effect, and it now appears that that prediction is becoming a reality.

With the number of ITAs having increased and the CRS cut-off point going down substantially, many candidates who did not receive an ITA on this occasion remain optimistic about achieving their Canadian immigration goals.

Obtaining an ITA

When the government of Canada published its year-end 2015 Express Entry report, it stated that more than half (57 percent) of candidates who received an ITA in 2015 had Core CRS scores below 450* (Core CRS indicates a candidates score without the additional 600 points for a job offer or an enhanced provincial nomination certificate). Many of these selected candidates entered the pool before receiving an enhanced provincial nomination certificate from a Canadian province.

Since Express Entry was first introduced in January, 2015, more and more Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) options have become available to Express Entry candidates. For example, since the previous Express Entry draw took place on September 7, the province of British Columbia (BC) conducted a draw for the British Columbia Provincial Nominee Program (BC PNP). Approximately half of the total 477 candidates for immigration to BC who were invited in that draw were Express Entry candidates who had previously created a profile in the federal Express Entry system. These skilled worker and international graduate candidates are now in a position to obtain a provincial nomination certificate, after which they may be awarded 600 additional CRS points and an ITA in a subsequent draw from the pool.

With many other PNP categories opening and closing quickly (such as Saskatchewans International Skilled Worker  Express Entry sub-category) evidence suggests that being ready to apply for such opportunities in advance is key to ultimately receiving an ITA for permanent residence.

There are many potential ways in which candidates may increase their CRS score, and thereby increase their chances of receiving an ITA. For tips for improving Express Entry Comprehensive Ranking System scores, click here.

Taking the opportunity

The latest developments in Express Entry are very encouraging, says Attorney David Cohen. IRCCs forecast that the number of invitations to apply would increase is coming to fruition, and candidates in the pool continue to have opportunities to obtain additional points, particularly through the Provincial Nominee Programs.

In addition to the latest positive developments, the government of Canada has made it quite clear that it is looking at increasing the number of immigrants to Canada in 2017 and beyond. Not only that, it has stated that it is looking at options to make changes to the Express Entry system. The exact changes, if and when they happen, are not yet known. Accordingly, individuals who are currently eligible to enter the pool are encouraged to do so. It is only once a candidate is in the pool that he or she may attract the attention of Canadian provinces that are looking to welcome newcomers through a PNP, as well as Canadian employers hiring through the Express Entry system.

To find out if you are eligible for immigration to Canada, including through the federal economic programs that are processed under Express Entry, please fill out a free online assessment today.

*The lowest CRS cut-off point in any draw that has taken place so far is 450.

 2016 CICnews All Rights Reserved
PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Baked Goods News Break Rob M. That's right, kids. Once again, it's time to put the medicine away and face the ugly (and sometimes not-so-ugly) marijuana news. Hold on to your asses.

Canadian Safety Minister Criticizes Border Policy Last week, Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale called the American practice of permanently banning Canadians who have admitted to using marijuana in the past a ridiculous situation. This was in response to the case of Matthew Harveya Canadian citizen who works in the legal Canadian marijuana industrywho was banned from entering the US in 2014 after telling customs agents that he had illegally consumed cannabis in the years prior to receiving his medical card. If Harvey ever wants to enter the US again, he has to pay nearly $600 (US) to apply for an advanced permission permit, a travel waiver that's given on a discretionary basis and can have an expiration date that ranges from one to five years, dependent on the approving officer's choice. This ludicrous situation, as Goodale called it, comes from an immigration law that prohibits entry to anyone who admits to having violated the drug policies of their own country. Goodale went on to tell CBC News that the Canadian government needed to discuss the situation with US border agencies, and pointed out that there are certain ironies involved in the situation. "In Canada we're moving in an orderly way to a new regime that will include tight restrictions and regulation, and taxation, and at the end of the day will be more effective in keeping marijuana out of the hands of our kids, he said. Last April, Canadian Health Minister Jane Philpott told the U.N. that Canada plans to legalize pot by the spring of 2017.

Last week, Department of Defense Secretary Ash Carter spoke to an audience of tech experts at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2016 innovation and technology conference in San Francisco. The address was part of a DOD effort to attract a new generation of techies to work for the military. Oddly enough, when asked about whether or not they plan on turning down employees who can't pass a drug test, Carter responded, It's a very good question, and we're changing that in recognition of the fact that time's changing. Generations changeand by the way laws change as respecting marijuana and so forth. And that in many other ways, we need towhile protecting ourselves and doing the appropriate things to make sure that it's safe to entrust information with peoplewe need to understand, and we do, the way people arehavelives have changed. Not hold against them things that they've done when they were younger. And so it's an important question, and the answer is yes, we can be flexible in that regard. And we need to.
The school year is fresh and new. But high school seniors with college ambitions began their academic slog weeks ago, on Aug. 1, when the Common Application went live. Carefully curating application content, they're pushing hard toward deadlines at colleges statewide and across the country.Already, the admissions process has taxed these seniors more than most. Juggling the ACT with old and new versions of the SAT, these students, as juniors, stared down an unusually daunting lineup of admissions exams. They did so knowing they face long odds at top schools. Many selective colleges reported record numbers of applicants last year.Fueling fears further: The number of international students attending American colleges and universities continues to grow. According to 2016 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, international enrollment at U.S. schools, led by students from China and India, rose 6 percent last year. Global competition won't wait for the workplace.Online message boards bear witness to students' angst. They share accolades, begging strangers to "chance" their admission odds; they discuss double-digit applications  hoping, just hoping, the blitz approach works. Offline, parents strategize about admissions-proofing transcripts, built to withstand scrutiny and inspire awe.The mother of high school and college students, I know how fraught the undergraduate admissions process has become. For some, it's a punishing obsession.Colleges are pushing a healthier message. Through "Turning the Tide," a report and two-year initiative launched in early 2016 by Harvard's Graduate School of Education, they hope to "re-shape" college admissions. The initiative is endorsed by admissions deans at more than 100 institutions, including the Ivies, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest University.Referencing adolescent anxiety and depression, its stance is strong and sensible:write report authors.Comprehensive and holistic, the initiative seeks to promote meaningful service, reduce academic pressure, and equalize opportunities for dis- advantaged students.Academic recommendations, however, are vague. Students shouldn't overload on AP classes, notes the report, but some can manage intensive schedules. This is true, of course  but where to draw the line? Fortunately, guidelines for extracurricular involvement and service are specific and reward genuine engagement. Two to three outside activities is plenty. Quality beats quantity.In response, some schools have rewritten application questions. UNC-Chapel Hill endorsed the initiative, says Stephen Farmer, vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions,Still, UNC's application has been revised, says Farmer, toInstructions ask applicants to share activities that have been "especially worthwhile"; applicants are assured that caring for a family member, for example, is just as valuable as founding a club.Such changes make sense.What else helps? While high schools and parents can't control competition, they can alleviate pressure. A good place to start: rejecting the determinism that says the future depends on where a student attends college. It isn't true. And it turns high school into an intolerable performance treadmill.Context is helpful, too. As troubling as these problems are, they're confined largely to high achievers. Many other students, as assessments show, aren't ready for college work. Others don't believe it's within their grasp.So some students need their sights raised. Others need a gentle reality check. They all need freedom  from parents and others  to own their ambitions, successes, and failures. On that, their future does depend.1
We have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, President Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation last weekend. I will consider it a personal insult and an insult to my legacy if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good send-off? Go vote. He didnt need to say for whom.

You might think that Obama would want to leave himself out of it. Hes not running, after all. You might think that he would want to remind black voters why Hillary Clinton is such a fabulous candidate that they cant miss the opportunity to vote for her, especially since shell preserve his policies. Then again, given that blacks have made little economic progress during the Obama years, that approach probably wouldnt workas Clinton herself knows, since she divides her time between pledging to continue Obamas policies and promising to reach out to all the Americans who have been left behind over the last eight years. Thats a tough wire to straddle even for a nimble politician, and Clinton isnt nimble.

Obamas urgent appeal to black voters comes just as a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California poll shows Clinton losing 16.5 points in one week to Donald Trump among blacks. That drop seems too dramatic to be believed, and the poll might be an outlier. In any scenario, Clinton will win the black vote by a huge margin. But the worry for Democrats is that the margin will shrink, and that black-voter turnout will wane, potentially moving close swing states into the Republican column.

So what does Obama have to fall back on? His old standby of messianic persuasion, with a twist: unlike in 2008, when he set himself up as a savior, he now warns his supporters not to let the savior down. Self-respecting Americans ought to be disgusted by such royalist remarks from a public officeholder, let alone a president. But after taking calls on his radio show from black listeners who could not bear to insult President Obama, according to the New York Times, Al Sharpton was heartened. Making not voting synonymous with an insult to the president is a shot in the arm, he said.

One way of looking at Obamas warning is that it suggests political panic. The last several weeks have seen Clintons lead in the polls nearly evaporate. Odds are, Clinton still wins, but in a political year like this one, youre better off keeping your money in your pocket. Clinton is a dreadful candidate whom even many on the Left see as having no core beliefs but her own ambition. Fouled by scandal but pristine of achievement, shes about as inspiring as death and taxes. No wonder her campaign is signaling to the bullpen for the closer, Obama.

Obamas warning also illustrates the sense of entitlement, even ownership, that Democratic candidates have long felt regarding black voters, whom they regard as theirs. Democrats generally operate with no fear that such overt paternalism will prompt a backlash. Not even Al Gore, talking in kindergarten locutions to black audiences, or Hillary Clinton, exclaiming I dont feel noways tired in a black church, caught much guff for the transparent posturing that would have exposed Republican politicians to weeks of media ridicule. Obama, of course, has a genuine connection with black Americans that goes well beyond such canned routines. He can even come right out and tell them, as he did Saturday night, that by virtue of their race, there is only one acceptable way to vote. Never mind what contempt this suggests for their ability to make up their own minds.

Finally, Obamas words offer another exhibit of his invincible self-involvement. For years, he has injected himself into political events, most infamously, perhaps, after the death of Trayvon Martin. And now hes even told some voters that their own deliberations about the future, as expressed in their vote in November, will be an affront to him if they reflect a conclusion different from his own.

Time will tell whether Obamas racial appeal helps Democrats pull another tired old liberal warhorse across the finish line. One can hope that around the country, some black voters are saying to themselves, Mr. President, as a freethinking American, I take your warning as a personal insult. Thats precisely what it is.

Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images
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The Washington Posts David Fahrenthold broke the story today that Donald Trump used more than $250,000 from his charitable foundation to settle legal disputes for his for-profit businesses. In other news, Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt. Can you guess which story got more attention?

. @Fahrenthold just dropped maybe the most substantive AND colorful Trump story of 2016. Dammit, Brangelina. https://t.co/DhdA3FOrAO  Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 20, 2016

Frustrated by this dynamic, some journalists on Twitter have turned to a version of the bait-and-switch affectionately known as Rick-rolling. Indeed, Emma Roller, a freelancer and contributing writer for the New York Times opinion page, tweeted out the Post story story using the line, wow, so THIS is why Angelina left.

wow, so THIS is why Angelina left https://t.co/9iKV3SowMx  Emma Roller (@emmaroller) September 20, 2016

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The tactic is part-joke, partly a means of capitalizing on readers outsized interest in celebrities, and partly an expression of exasperation about hard-reported, important journalism getting buried by stories about famous people. This problem has reached a new level during the recent election cycle, as so much impressive investigative work and relentless fact-checking seem not to be putting a dent in Trumps image, at least among his supporters.

Related: Election results: Heres what to expect and when

Journalists are competing not only with celebrity news and Trump himself, but with other journalists. In an email, Roller says her tweet was not meant to criticize celebrity gossip, but to comment on the flightiness of the news cycle:

I was reading Twitter, and David Fahrentholds big scoop about Donald Trumps shady spending of other peoples charitable donations broke. I follow a lot of political reporters on Twitter, and they all started to share Davids story. But  the Brangelina news broke at the same time, and like moths to a bug zapper, all these political reporters stopped talking about Davids story and started sharing Jennifer Aniston GIFs.

Roller didnt expect her tweet to get so much attention (more than 4,000 retweets and likes as of Tuesday evening), but others soon followed, including Politicos Hadas Gold, who retweeted Roller with an OMG, read this. In Golds tweets, unlike in Rollers, the image and headline of Trump are not visibleperpetuating the misconception that Rollers tweet was actually about Angelina.

One person responding on Twitter called it the first documented case of responsible clickbait. It is a journalists job to act responsibly in the public interest, but straight misrepresentation is not responsible. Tweeting out a link with misleading texteven as a jokeis the equivalent of changing a headline. The text of a tweet, from a trusted reporter, is the Twitter users path into an article; a journalist has a responsibility to accurately describe the piece.

I spoke briefly to the Society of Professional Journalistss Head of Ethics Andrew Seaman this Sunday, before this latest Twitter eruption. He emphasized that the SPJs ethics code for journalists applies universally; journalists should not act differently on Twitter than they do in their writing. So does tweeting like this violate the SPJs code to label advocacy and commentary, and never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information?

Related: 7 photos that capture the absurdity of this election season

Roller is an opinion writer, which gives her more leeway than others. The New York Times has repeatedly reminded reporters to remain unbiased; BuzzFeed sent a similar memo to staff last month. Most media organizations now have guidelines for their employees on Twitter, but even so, writes Tow fellow Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde, journalists feel there is a great deal of risk involved in tweeting.

Referring to how Twitter has a way of blowing things out of proportion, one journalist admitted, I definitely would not be surprised if, say a year from now, I tweet something just kind of candidly and it ends up coming back to haunt me and getting me fired.

Much of this is uncharted territory. Even seasoned reporters who dont misrepresent the content of the piece are trying to capitalize on Brad/Angelina readership. See The Washington Posts Karen Tumulty, who jokingly calls it a #mediaconspiracy that the announcement coincided with the Post piece. But she uses the #brangelina hashtag, thereby driving traffic to Fahrentholds story. What are the ethics of misleading an audience that is trying to find content about something else?

Im freaking out about Brangelina and all, but also Trump used 258k from his charity to settle legal disputes womp https://t.co/wQKk5v7BOp  Alana Abramson (@aabramson) September 20, 2016

Twitter has given journalists space to show more personality, but this extra room also opens up risk. That the news cycle pays more attention to Brad and Angelina is a dilemma that goes beyond the purview of journalists aloneand it is not the job of a single journalist to solve it. Some stories are culturally engineered to attract attention, and Twitter is only the latest tool to reward playfulness over credibility and seriousness. Ultimately, newsrooms and journalists need to work together with platforms such as Twitter to slow the news cycle and bring more attention to stories that matter.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Nausicaa Renner is digital editor of CJR.
Borchers Appointed CEO of Allianz X

The recently established unit Allianz X has won Peter Borchers to become CEO as of October 1, 2016. Peter Borchers is one of the most experienced and highly respected leaders in the area of corporate incubation and corporate start-up collaboration. He will join Allianz from hub:raum/Deutsche Telekom.

Allianz X is one of the key pillars of the Digital Transformation strategy of Allianz Group and represents the company builder and venturing unit. Allianz X will be identifying, building and globally scaling new business models in the InsurTech space with the highest degree of entrepreneurial freedom. Allianz X helps building companies that serve and improve the lives of customers and can have impact on a global scale.

Harris to Lead Chubbs Global Services Division

Tom Harris has been appointed executive vice president, Global Services for Chubb North America. In his new role, Harris will have worldwide responsibility for the delivery of commercial insurance solutions and services for global clients of all sizes. Additionally, he will be responsible for oversight and development of Worldview, Chubbs online portal that currently provides more than 16,000 risk managers and brokers with tools and insight to manage their global insurance programs.

Harris will report to Chris Maleno, senior vice president, Chubb Group, and division president, Chubb North America Major Accounts and Joseph S. Clabby, vice president, Chubb Group, and division president, Chubb Bermuda and Global Accounts.

Harris has more than 20 years of insurance industry experience and most recently served as a global client executive in Chubbs North America Major Accounts division. Prior to joining legacy ACE in 2010, he spent 16 years serving in various roles in Financial Reporting, Risk Management, Corporate Strategy and Development and Accounting.

Cohen Promoted to President of Great American Insurance Groups Strategic Comp Division

Great American Insurance Group promoted Jason M. Cohen to divisional president of Strategic Comp, succeeding Stephen Rosenthal who will retire at the end of 2016.

Cohen joined Great American in 2006 as divisional vice president and claims counsel and most recently served as divisional executive vice president of Operations for Strategic Comp. Prior to joining Great American, he served as an attorney for the law firms of Keating, Muething & Klekamp and Bingham McCutchen.

Hernandez Appointed Senior Vice President, Commercial Risk Control

CNA announced the appointment of Steve Hernandez as senior vice president, Commercial Risk Control, effective September 26, 2016. In this role, Hernandez will be responsible for the overall strategic direction and leadership of the Commercial Risk Control function, including developing Risk Control products and services that align with CNAs underwriting strategies for various product lines and customer segments. He will be based in Chicago and will report to Kevin Leidwinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, CNA Commercial.

Hernandez joins CNA with more than 26 years of global property and casualty expertise. Most recently, he served as senior vice president of Global Risk Engineering (Loss Control Services) for Chubb, where he was responsible for creating the strategy and building a global risk engineering value proposition with key stakeholders. He also served on the companys diversity, senior manager Roundtables, where he was a moderator and presenter for numerous diversity and employee resource group sessions, including the Minority Development Council, Working Parent, Hispanic and LGBT resource groups.

Hernandez succeeds Bill Boyd who announced his retirement earlier this year after 12 years of service at CNA and a successful 38-year career in the insurance industry. He will build on and advance Bill Boyds successful positioning of the Risk Control organization as a positive brand differentiator for CNA.

MEMIC Hires Kordell as Safety Management Consultant in Massachusetts

Workers compensation specialist The MEMIC Group has announced the appointment of Richard Kordell as safety management consultant. Kordell will join Loss Control Manager Scott Valorose in providing safety training services and advice to MEMICs growing customer base in Massachusetts.

With more than 30 years of loss control experience, Kordell has held senior loss control positions at Acadia Insurance, AIG Consultants, Travelers Insurance Company and CIGNA Loss Control Services.

He is a member and past President of the American Society of Safety Engineers, Worcester County Chapter.
The sharing economy has blurred the line between employees and independent contractors, according to experts who spoke during Marshs New Reality of Risk webinar yesterday.

The webinar, Managing Wage and Hour and Employment Practices Risks, focused on how employers can navigate these types of claims even as new issues and sources of risk arise.

Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) claims have skyrocketed, according to Kelly Thoerig, employment practices liability coverage leader at Marsh. Wage and hour claims includes a broad class of claims related to pay and classification practices, she said. Claims filed under this federal law have a lower threshold for establishing a collective action and automatic statutory attorneys fees are applicable should the case be successful. In addition, damages under the FSLA double if a company is found to have willfully violated the Act.

Plaintiffs can choose which law is most favorable, according to Thoerig. Thus they can choose to file a claim under the FSLA, or under state laws, like California, where the law is broader and may have different rules. In addition, they have the option of filing a claim under common law which typically have longer statute of limitations.

Certain businesses are at a higher risk for these types of claims. Businesses that have many non-exempt or hourly employees and/or low wage employees tend to see more of these types of claims, Thoerig said.

Industries at high risk for FSLA claims include:

Retail

Food and beverage

Construction

Healthcare

Financial services

Technology

Staffing agencies

According to Thoerig, 57 percent of settlement dollars come from the technology, financial and food service sectors and the majority were paid out in New York and California.

Thoerig said that certain categories of claims tend to be seen the most, including allegations relating to unpaid overtime, improper classification, missed or late meals, improper tips or time sharing.

Employer strategies to mitigate FSLA claims, according to Thoerig, include staying abreast of changes in laws, conducting wage and hour audits, staying vigilant in the classification of employees and risk transfer options.

Joint Employer Standard

According to Wendy Mellk, a New York-based principal at the law firm of Jackson Lewis, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling in Browning Ferris Industries of California, Inc. created a new joint employer test. While the decision is on appeal, the result of the decision is increasing litigation in this area.

The National Labor Relations Act defines joint employers as two separate legal entities that share the ability to control conditions of employment, such as the hiring, firing and supervising of employees.

Mellk also noted that the NLRB is focusing their efforts on franchisors, like McDonalds, alleging that both the franchisees and the corporation are joint employers. In addition, she explained that the head of the Labor Departments wage and hour division, David Weil, has written a book on the subject, The Fissured Workplace, that explains how larger companies distribute their risk to smaller companies who may be less compliant with employment regulations.

This focus could impact companies who contract with many vendors, essentially broadening the definition of joint employer relationships.

Mellk said this had an instant impact on DOL investigations.

She recommended that businesses have a clear understanding on how the relationship with a vendor will work. This includes addressing such things as training, supervision and complaints. The firm should have this understanding in writing/contract form. Workers should be provided with an explanation of who they work for and how various work-related issues will be addressed, she said. Mellk stressed that practice should follow the agreement, meaning there should be consistency with what the agreement states. Lastly, firms should analyze the agreement and determine the risk and reward to handling various aspects of the employment process.

She further recommended that contractor agreements contain specific statements regarding the management of employees and detail which firm retains sole rights to hire and fire employees. Each company should have its own procedures and policies with respect to employees, Mellk said. She cautioned that firms who choose to retain the right to control employees may be on the hook for future labor-related claims.

Global Perspective

Ann Longmore, multinational leader of Marshs FINPRO Practice, said that globally, rules differ even when addressing the same employment issue. She provided an update on various countries, including China, where there is an increasing number of collective employee actions being filed. The claims there are being brought by younger employees, in the 25-35 age range. The country is also seeing higher value disputes brought by senior managers and technicians.

Singapore recently established an Employment Claims Tribunal that goes into effect in April 2017 to handle their increasing labor claims, Longmore said.

Trends seen globally include significant awards for discrimination and sexual harassment claims, claims filed across multiple jurisdictions, greater protections for whistleblowers and more employees researching EPLI trends via the internet.

Thoerig said that here in the U.S. the hot button trend in 2016 is transgender discrimination. Other top issues include equal pay and website accessibility.

The experts agreed that the sharing economy has blurred the lines between employees and independent contractors. Mellk offered some recommendations for firms seeking to avoid misclassification. These include:

Erring on the side of caution;

Using a centralized decision making system;

Employing independent contractor agreements;

Asking independent contractors to carry insurance.

According to Thoerig, the key to remember is that the EPLI policy is typically written under the named perils basis. Wage and hour claims are usually excluded under EPLI policies, she explained.

Globally, Longmore said that while there has been an increase in EPLI purchased in the U.S., that isnt the case elsewhere. Larger global employers interested in this coverage are either procuring local policies, self-insuring, or seeking out policies from London insurers for outside EPLI cover. The reason, she said, is that the policies tend to be more economical and offer broader coverage than U.S. issued policies.
New Jersey Dry Cleaner Sentenced for Avoiding Payroll Taxes

The co-owner of a dry cleaning firm who conspired to evade payroll taxes for workers who were living in the country illegally is now headed to prison.

Federal prosecutors say 38-year-old Phillip Hui, of Sicklerville, received a 15-month sentence on Thursday. He had pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to obstruct and impede the IRS and to harboring the workers.

Hui co-owned the Voorhees business with Kathy Lei, a 36-year-old Williamstown resident who pleaded guilty to similar charges. Shes due to be sentenced Oct. 14.

Prosecutors say the pair paid their workers in cash in 2012 and 2013. The workers lived at a house owned by Lei and two others.

By failing to report the workers to the IRS, the owners avoided paying more than $97,000 in payroll taxes.

Prison Terms for 2 Mexican Physicians Guilty of Claims Fraud

Prosecutors in South Texas say two doctors from a family medicine clinic in Mexico must serve nearly three-year U.S. prison terms for insurance-related fraud.

Dr. Mayolo Melchor and 61-year-old Dr. Bertha Hernandez-Melchor, of Reynosa, Mexico, were sentenced Thursday by a federal judge in McAllen.

Both physicians in June pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a nearly $2.6 million insurance claim scam. Each was sentenced to 34 months behind bars and must repay the money.

Investigators say the physicians conspired with policyholders of the American Family Life Insurance Company to prepare and submit fraudulent claim forms and faked accident reports from 2001 to 2010.

Prosecutors say forms with bogus information were delivered to the family clinic in Mexico, then faxed to AFLAC headquarters in Georgia.

Philadelphia Official Admits Theft in $400k Auto Shop Fraud

A former city fleet supervisor in Philadelphia has admitted to theft and conspiracy charges in a scheme that prosecutors say steered work to an auto body shop that overcharged the city more than $400,000.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Robert Otterson also pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing from city inventory.

Authorities say Otterson qualified an auto body shop for work that didnt have the necessary equipment. The shop had been run by Ronald Galati Sr. and his son, Ronald Jr.

Authorities say Otterson told them what to bid and shared in the ill-gotten proceeds.

Galati Sr. is serving more than 20 years in prison for attempting a failed hit on his daughters boyfriend. He pleaded no contest to charges. Galati Jr. pleaded guilty.

All three are to be sentenced in December.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
AKRON, Ohio - Akron police are asking for the public's help to find a man wanted for his role in a fatal 2015 gas station shootout.

Romeo Thomas, 29, is charged with murder, felonious assault and abuse of a corpse in Akron Municipal Court, according to records. He is the accused shooter in an Aug. 1, 2015 shootout outside a West Akron gas station.

The shootout happened about 5:30 a.m. at a Circle K gas station between Roslyn and Orlando avenues, Akron police Capt. Daniel Zampelli said after the shooting.

Passengers in two cars -- a black Chrysler 300 and a 2004 black Infinity -- exchanged more than two dozen rounds of gunfire.

Officers found James C. Tyler, 27, dead in front of a house on nearby Peerless Avenue, police said. He was killed by a single gunshot to the neck that struck his spinal cord and brain, the Summit County Medical Examiner's Office said.

Akron police said that Thomas was the driver of one of the vehicles involved in the shootout, but did not specify which vehicle. A man in Thomas' vehicle was also struck by a bullet, but he did not suffer fatal injuries.

Thomas should be considered armed and dangerous, Edwards said.

Anyone with information on Thomas' whereabouts is asked to contact Akron police's Detective Bureau at 330-375-2490; the U.S. Marshals at 1-866-4-WANTED or the Summit County CrimeStoppers at 330-434-COPS. Callers can remain anonymous.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
9.20 Cleveland Police Monitoring Team use-of-force community meeting

A breakout group discusses Tuesday night questions laid out in a worksheet put together by the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team. A community meeting on the city's West Side was set up by the monitoring team to solicit feedback about its proposed police use-of-force policy.

(Jane Morice, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Three days after the November 2014 afternoon when a Cleveland police officer shot Tamir Rice, Mayor Frank Jackson, police Chief Calvin Williams and other officials spent hours fielding tense questions and enduring heavy criticism from an angry public.

Close to two years later, the scene at another forum on policing resembled a corporate retreat, where moderators spoke to small groups of Cleveland residents about their current perception of the police department in a city in the throes of police reforms outlined in an agreement with the Justice Department.

For the second time in a week, the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team held a meeting to encourage the community to provide feedback on a proposed use-of-force policy that, if passed by the city council, would represent one of the most dramatic shifts in how police officers deal with the public.

Cleveland Police Monitor Matthew Barge explained to the more than 50 attendees the most significant changes in the proposed policy that would give police officers much clearer standards for when they can use force.

Among those changes include allowing officers to use force only when absolutely necessary; officers must try to exhaust all de-escalation techniques before applying force; officers must provide medical care to people who are injured and officers who see their fellow officers using too much force have a duty to intervene.

Tuesday's meeting came a day after Tulsa, Oklahoma officials released video of a man, 40-year-old Terence Crutcher, shot and killed by police there once again thrusting the topics of use-of-force and police reform back into the national spotlight. The residents who attended made their primary concern clear: how will officers be held accountable for use-of-force abuses?

While the monitoring team found that many of the mechanisms used to field community complaints is fundamentally broken, the public has been repeatedly assured that the department is committed to fixing that system.

At least half of the groups voiced concerns regarding officers' training to de-escalate tense interactions and more effectively communicate - actions for which officers will be held accountable.

The member of one group expressed lingering concerns about how police officers engage with Cleveland residents. She said that it seems like officers approach a situation with too much aggression, and said that she wishes they would "cool off" and "speak softly" when trying to assess a problem.

"Sometimes it makes you wish you didn't call in the first place," another member of her team said.

Williams and U.S. Attorney Carole Rendon attended and spoke at both Thursday's forum at the Jerry Sue Thornton Center at Cuyahoga Community College on the East Side and Tuesday's meeting at the Urban Community School on the West Side. They stressed how important community involvement is to the reform efforts.

"It's all well and good for us to sit in a room and talk about how things should be, and how our department should be a model for the nation. But that doesn't work - it doesn't work in isolation," Rendon said. "We're a community and this is our police department. Unless we know what it is that you want & what you need, what's of concern and interest to the community, then we can't do our jobs effectively."

Williams added to Rendon's comments by encouraging interested residents to take ride-alongs with police officers in order to see how policy is put into action.

"We don't have anything to hide," he said.

The suggestions put forth Tuesday night will be added to those offered at Thursday's meeting, and the monitoring team will adjust the policy in the weeks to come. Monitor Barge emphasized during his initial presentation that the policy is not finalized.

The monitoring team is responsible for piecing together recommendations on future policies, such as how use-of-force incidents will be reported and investigated by the department. Monitoring team members said that similar community input meetings will be held once those pieces of policy are completely drafted.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
NEW TOWN, N.D.  Federal pipeline regulators will be in North Dakota this week investigating complaints about an oil pipeline recently installed under Lake Sakakawea.

Personnel from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration are investigating claims from former crew members on the Sacagawea Pipeline that the coating of the pipe was not properly inspected before it was installed under the lake.

The federal agency is expected to conduct interviews in North Dakota this week and investigate the complaints. The owner of the pipeline contracting company has said the claims are false accusations made by workers who were fired.

The North Dakota Public Service Commission also has jurisdiction over the oil pipeline, but the safety allegations fall under the federal agencys area of authority, said PSC Chairwoman Julie Fedorchak.

So far, the federal regulators have not notified state regulators that the Sacagawea Pipeline is out of compliance, Fedorchak said Monday.

Our staff has been pushing them to keep us informed on whats going on, Fedorchak said.

The Public Service Commission is investigating other complaints about the Sacagawea Pipeline related to construction practices and reclamation. Fedorchak said she expects staff to complete a report about those concerns soon.

Meanwhile, officials from the Three Affiliated Tribes are appealing a judges decision in a federal court case involving the oil pipeline and a companion natural gas gathering pipeline thats currently under construction.

Paradigm Energy Partners, the company constructing the 70-mile pipelines, filed the case in U.S. District Court after tribal officials issued a cease and desist order to stop pipeline construction. Tribal officials say the company was required but failed to get the tribes permission to begin pipeline installation under Lake Sakakawea.

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland recently granted the companys request for a preliminary injunction, which prevents tribal officials from interfering with pipeline construction.

In his ruling, Hovland wrote that Paradigm has the necessary permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to drill under the lake and was not required to get consent of the tribe.

Tribal officials have filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

The pipelines will transport oil and natural gas from McKenzie County to Mountrail County, crossing Lake Sakakawea south of New Town. The 16-inch steel pipelines will be installed at least 100 feet below the lakebed.

The oil pipeline, which will transport 140,000 barrels of oil per day, is complete, and the natural gas pipeline is in early stages of construction, according to court records.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - There's a new story to tell about poverty in Cleveland that is far different than what has been written, and rewritten.

Fewer Cleveland residents are living in poverty, new census estimates say. This in a city that has been maligned for years as having one of the highest poverty rates in the country.

Numbers

behind

the news

The reversal of the trend is not simply because the city has been shrinking. The percentage of people in poverty is also down.

I looked back over 10 years of poverty data after the U.S. Census Bureau last week released estimates for 2015 that show the poverty rate in just one year dropped from 39.2 percent to 34.7 percent. I found:

Fewer Clevelanders are living in poverty than at any time since 2008.

The city's poverty rate dropped more sharply last year than at any other time during the last decade.

Suburbs now account for a higher share of the countywide population in poverty (41.4 percent) than at any time in five years.

While Cleveland's population in poverty shrunk by 17,616 in 2015, the number of suburban residents in poverty increased by 2,163. Which suburbs are home to the increasing numbers of poor people is not known from this latest census bureau information, released only for large places.

Poverty is down in all three of Ohio's big cities, but Cleveland's drop is the sharpest. Poverty fell in Cincinnati from 30 percent to 27.4 percent, and in Columbus from 21.5 percent to 20.7 percent.

Don't read too much into the precise numbers. They are estimates. But the trends are clear.

John Corlett, head of the Center for Community Solutions think tank, watches such things closely as part of the organization's work on health, social and economic issues, and as a Cleveland resident.

"I have lived in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood for almost 25 years. I can see it in my neighborhood," Corlett said of improved economic conditions, perhaps due in part to higher income people moving into pockets of the city.



"But I could also guess, based on what I know, that poverty has spread into surrounding communities. It has has spread into Lakewood. It has spread in Parma, Maple Heights and other places," Corlett said. "I know that from my volunteer work in the food bank and other charities. I know there is more need in other communities."

One in three remain in poverty



Though the direction is positive for Cleveland, poverty is a problem that is a long way from being solved.

One in three Clevelanders remain in poverty, or more than 130,000 in total. The rate is worse for children. Half of the city's young people are in poverty.

Here are the poverty rates for the last 10 years in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.

And, overall, Cleveland's poverty rate of 34.7 percent is the 11th highest in the country among cities of at least 65,000 people. Cleveland is no Detroit (39.8 percent) or even Youngstown (35.7 percent), but it isn't far behind.

It is a bigger problem among Cleveland's minorities - 40 percent of Hispanics and 43 percent of blacks. Yet one out of every five white residents in the city also is in poverty.

Life in poverty

According to the Census Bureau, living in poverty for a single person means having less than $12,331 in income. For a family of four, the threshold is $24,257.

"People can't imagine what it would be like to live on that," said Claudia Coulton, founder and co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University.

Coulton said far fewer parents receive welfare checks because there are now time limits for how long they can receive money, and although many people do qualify for food stamps, studies show they often don't last the entire month for the poorest families.

"The hardest thing poor families face is putting a roof over their head," Coulton said. She said public programs meet the need of only about a fifth of the people who would qualify. So the rest are left to compete for the "substandard housing" they are able to afford.

"The good news," Coulton said, "is that the poverty rate both in Cleveland and in our region declined. ... Poverty has finally achieved a significant decrease."

That, at least, is a start.

Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner or see previous stories at cleveland.com/datacentral.
AKRON, Ohio -- The Junior League of Akron has been shining a spotlight on some of Akron's fanciest homes through its Designer ShowHouse fundraiser. This year, the service organization decided that its own headquarters - a 1915 house that lacked enough working bathrooms and places to sit - deserved attention as its ShowHouse.

Northeast Ohio design firms redecorated 15 spaces in the home, and the Junior League raised money for permanent renovations and new furniture, said ShowHouse co-chairwoman Jacqui Flaherty-Ricchiuti. Employees from Lowe's store in Fairlawn volunteered their time to beautify the front and back porches and flower beds.

You can see the beautifully decorated rooms during tours that start Thursday, Sept. 22 through Sunday, Oct. 9. If you fall in love with a sofa or ottoman, just write a check for it and take it home after the tours. Proceeds from the sale of ShowHouse furniture - provided by participating design firms or donated by participating stores - go to the Junior League.

The league raised more than $60,000 for permanent renovations and new furniture for meeting spaces, entertaining and events. This furniture will be moved in after the tours.

"We have many beautiful pieces of furniture that were donated to the league and are in storage, which we will move back into the house," said ShowHouse Co-chairwoman Jacqui Flaherty-Ricchiuti said. "Now we have three working restrooms. We did not have a working oven; now we will have a place where we can cook and heat up food."

IF YOU GO

Junior League of Akron Designer ShowHouse 2016

What:

Northeast Ohio design firms redecorated 15 spaces in the house that is the Junior League's headquarters.

When:

Tours will be Thursday, Sept. 22 through Sunday, Oct. 9. Times vary; see the website.

Where:

929 West Market St., Akron.

Tickets:

$20 at Summit County Acme Fresh Market Locations and $25 at the door. Call 330-836-4905.

The house, located on W. Market Street in Akron, was built by Ellsworth M. and Mary Statler, founders of the Statler hotel chain. It was constructed for Mary Statler's sisters and brother, but the siblings never moved in, according to a history compiled by the Junior League.

The house was later home to former Akron Mayor William J. Laub. The Laub family gave the house to the Junior League in 1968.

When the Junior League began its renovations, the biggest transformation took place in the kitchen. Workers peeled off three layers of wallpaper, updated bad plumbing and replaced peeling linoleum flooring with luxury vinyl planks.

H. Everson Designs of Akron turned a closet into an arched niche, lined in white subway tile, that now holds a cooktop and chandelier. A beaded, custom black-and-white valance in a bird print dresses up the window over the sink.

The house's dining room is so large that Amy Douglass with Interior Design Studio of Medina created two seating zones - a buffet, a bar area with upholstered chairs.

Douglass gave the room a masculine vibe by using dark grays, and painting the fireplace surround a glossy black. "We wanted it warm and clubby and cozy," Douglass said. "So many people eat in the kitchenette and run."

The living room is a mid-century modern space for reading, talking and gaming, said Garth Andrew of Garth Andrew Co. of Bath. A tan and orange area rug delineates a conversation area where a gray sofa and two bucket chairs are arranged in front of the fireplace. Artwork over the fireplace picks up the orange tones in the rug.

A pedestal marble-top table and pedestal chairs, arranged in a corner of the living room, is ready for family game night.

On the second floor, Jones Group Interiors of Akron turned a tiny room into a richly detailed men's study stuffed with antiques, paintings and books. A large cabinet holds curios and keepsakes, and a stuffed owl and pheasant keep watch on the many oil portraits and landscapes on the wall.

"We appreciated the history of the home, and wanted to reflect on the past era rather than the present," said Breanna Piccirilli, Jones Group assistant designer.

The rest of the second floor includes a bathroom redone in a coastal theme (by the KKP Group of Northfield), a bedroom filled with items from Goodwill Industries of Akron (designed by Goodwill), and a "Magnolia Retreat" bedroom with reclaimed, distressed furniture (Spruce Home Decor of Niles).

"Having the home restored has given our members a sense of remembrance and pride," Flaherty-Ricchiuti said via email. "Many members spent time in this home throughout the years, and now we can come back to a beautifully restored place and do more good work for the community."
9.20.16 Key Bank robbery

These surveillance camera stills show the man police say is responsible for robbing a Key Bank branch Tuesday morning on Cleveland's West Side.

(FBI)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Law enforcement officials are searching for the man responsible for robbing a bank Tuesday morning on Cleveland's West Side.

The Cleveland branch of the FBI release surveillance images of the robber Tuesday evening. The robbery took place about 9:45 a.m. at the Key Bank branch on the 3100 block of West 117th Street, FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said.

The robber walked into the bank but waited several minutes before approaching a teller and passing a demand note, Anderson said. The teller handed the robber cash, and he ran toward West 117th Street.

The robber did not imply or show a weapon, and no injuries were reported, Anderson said.

Anyone with information about the robbery should call Cleveland police at 216-621-1234 or the FBI at 216-522-1400, Anderson said. Tips can remain anonymous, and reward money is available for information that leads to the successful prosecution of the responsible individual.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
Terakedis Fine Art will open a show for Rolinda Stotts, a Colorado-based artist, featuring her work created in the Bella Rotta style.

The opening events will run from Oct. 6-8, where the community will have access to the artist through multiple creative experiences.

At noon on Oct. 6, there will be a brown bag discussion about the development of artistic identity at Terakedis Fine Art. Also on Oct. 6, the gallery will host an introductory class in oil painting and Bella Rotta from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The limit is 12 people. Interested students should contact the gallery to register.

On Oct. 7 during ArtWalk, Stotts will be available at the gallery to discuss her work from 4:30 to 10 p.m.

On Oct. 8, she will teach a youth painting class from 10 a.m. to noon.

Stotts grew up on a dairy farm working with animals and dirt, growing crops and building fences, all while learning to nurture life and respect nature. This is where her life began as an artist.

The lessons of balance and harmony that she learned on the farm are invaluable in expressing her feelings and experiences on canvas, she said.

Bella Rotta is the name she uses to describe her technique. It is Italian for beautiful broken." In order to replicate the effect of extreme age and texture, she uses a complex 10-step process that allows her to manipulate her work to give it the essence of having survived centuries.

She wants the paintings to look like you discovered an ancient fresco somewhere, and found a way to bring it home.

For more information or to register for a class, call 406-696-0149 or visit www.terakedisfineart.com.
The Henge and Grant Jones are playing a CD release party show on Saturday night at Yellowstone Valley Brewing Company's Garage Pub.

The five-track EP The Henge is promoting features original Americana rock and roll, said guitarist/vocalist Bryan Brooksby.

"We play and sing because it's what we love the most, and we are excited to light up the YVBC with a good ol' fashioned rock and roll show," Brooksby said.

The show is all-ages and kicks off at 5 p.m.

Glass Spiders: David Bowie Tribute Pub

Glass Spiders, playing Friday at 9 p.m. at the Pub Station, is a Montana-based tribute to the music of David Bowie.

The band performs an expansive catalog of songs representing the breadth of Bowies 50-year career.

The Missoula Independent commented, How does one describe a Glass Spiders show. Its not easy to evoke the sheer radness of it all."

Formed in 2014 by a group of Missoula musicians, Glass Spiders was conceived for a one-off show at a popular venue. Due to a scheduling conflict, the venue was forced to cancel the show, leaving the band with a full set of tunes and nowhere to play them.

With dwindling options and a nagging itch to channel the energy of Bowies music, the band moved the show to the local VFW, where on a Sunday evening, Glass Spiders made their debut. When more than 200 people filled the bar past capacity, the band agreed that wouldnt be its one and only performance.

Since then, Glass Spiders has expanded its catalog and honed its live performance.

In 2015, the group played a 2 1/2hour show to a sold-out (400+) Halloween crowd. In 2016, the band performed three full sets, including all of the 1976 album "Station to Station," for a crowd of more than 550 people at Missoulas revitalized Top Hat Lounge.

Glass Spiders members include: Nick Ryan (Bowie vocals); Alison Gadbow, Rachel Patrie and Jenny Lynn Fawcett (backing vocals); Travis Yost and John Sporman (guitars); Jason McMackin (bass guitar); Ben Weiss (synthesizers, percussion); Tom Helgerson (piano); Nate Hoyme (saxophone); and Jamie Rogers (drums).
George Soros speaking at the 2015 CGI Annual Meeting in New York.

Billionaire financier George Soros gave a fresh $2.5 million to a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC in August, part of a $23.4 million haul for the group.

Priorities USA Action, which cannot coordinate with Clinton's campaign but spends heavily in favor of the Democratic presidential nominee, started September with $41.5 million on hand, according to a Federal Election Commission report filed Tuesday. The fundraising haul for the PAC, which does not face the contribution limits a campaign does, came in the wake of the Democratic National Convention and a polling surge for Clinton.

Soros, the chairman of Soros Fund Management, previously contributed $7 million to Priorities USA Action last year. He also gave Clinton's campaign committee the maximum $2,700 donation last year.

Soros has traditionally donated to Democratic causes and candidates. He previously donated to Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

Priorities USA this election has spent heavily on ads supporting Clinton and opposing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The PAC aimed to spend $77 million on TV ads from the last week in August until Election Day in November, NBC News reported last month.

Trump has repeatedly criticized Clinton for receiving big checks from donors, though large GOP donors have mostly spurned the billionaire developer during his run.

Other tops donors to Priorities USA in August include hedge fund manager Donald Sussman, who gave $2 million, and entrepreneur Fred Eychaner, who contributed $3 million.
A policeman takes a photo of Ahmad Khan Rahami as he is placed into an ambulance in Linden, New Jersey. Anthony Genaro | Getty Images

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In New York Rahimi is charged with bombing a place of public use, destruction of property by means of fire or explosive and use of a destructive device in furtherance of a crime of violence, in addition to the charge of using a weapon of mass destruction. In New Jersey he is charged with two counts of using and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction for the attempted bombings in Seaside Park and Elizabeth, authorities said. The criminal complaint filed in New York says 31 people were injured in the Chelsea blast, although authorities had previously said only 29 were hurt. The injuries included one motorist who was knocked unconscious by the force of the blast, and a woman who had multiple ball bearings removed from her body, according to the complaint. That filing not only details the types of bombs used in New York  pressure cookers packed with ball bearings and steel nuts  but also references posts made on social media allegedly by Rahami that list two favorite videos as being related to jihad. The bombing in Manhattan involved a "high-explosive main charge" and the blast "caused significant injuries and multiple-million dollars of property damage across a 650-foot crime scene," the FBI said in the criminal complaint. The complaint also says that Rahami drove into Manhattan using the Lincoln Tunnel at around 6:30 p.m., two hours before the explosion, and that he stayed in the city until 11:30 p.m., long after the situation calmed somewhat. He left through the Lincoln Tunnel as well, the complaint said.

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It's that time again! Jim Cramer rang the lightning round bell, which means he gave his take on caller favorite stocks at rapid speed:



Cummins Inc : "I would actually buy Cummins for the long term. I think that China is going to be fine, and it is a bit of a China play."

Micron Technology : "I think Micron is terrific. Remember, I like Intel. I like Micron, boy I'll tell you I still love NVIDIA even though it just moved up again today.

Chesapeake Energy Corp : "Chesapeake is not one of my favorites. Anadarko is the one we have been saying is really good after that acquisition of Freeport-McMoRan properties in the Gulf of Mexico."

Skyworks Solutions : "Skyworks Solutions is a huge part ... as much as $7 of intellectual property in an Apple iPhone 7. So I remain steadfast that this is a good stock."

Alcoa : "I like the split very much ... I wanted to double down on it, to tell you honestly. Why? Because I truly believe that aircraft demand is strong, and this looks like Precision Castparts to me."

Kroger : "I think Kroger has been overly punished. I am now after Kroger had been down, down, down, down, I am willing to say that you should stop selling Kroger. It's too low to sell."

Cliffs Natural Resources : "No, no, no. That had its day, move on. I don't like what they make, and that's in the end what does matter."
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Tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad are hitting a boiling point as the two point fingers at each other over Sunday's assault in Kashmir. But even as rhetoric gets heated, military escalation isn't expectedfor now. Four gunmen stormed an Indian army brigade headquarters in the Indian-administered town of Uri, killing 18 soldiers on Sunday. Many called it the deadliest attack on security forces in nearly a decade. Nobody has claimed responsibility but Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government accused Pakistan of involvement, labeling it a terrorist state for supporting militants believed to be the perpetrators of Sunday's attack.

India claims the gunman were members of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a terror group based in Pakistan and known for brutal tactics in India-controlled Kashmir to force the withdrawal of troops. Islamabad has categorically rejected the allegations, describing the charges as New Delhi's attempt to deflect attention from the deteriorating human rights situation in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The bickering between the two arch-enemies is currently playing out at the on-going United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) session in New York, where Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is expected to raise the issue during his address on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Indian forces killed at least 8 suspected militants along the 800 kilometre border with Pakistan, Reuters said. Known as the Line of Control (LOC), the partition separates areas under Indian administration, primarily Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), from Pakistan's territories, which include Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.

More skirmishes are widely expected. But Modi's government possesses little elbow room for full-blown military action given the risk of a long drawn-out conflict between the nuclear neighbors, according to strategists. The severity of Sunday's attack has raised public anger in India, with protesters burning the Pakistani flag and calling for revenge. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,464 Indians released on Monday, half disapproved of Modi's relationship with Pakistan while three-fifths supported the use of force against the war on terror. "Domestic pressure is clearly growing on Modi to retaliate quickly, but that's easier said than done...The government is unlikely to risk a serious miscalculation," observed Jan Zalewski, senior India analyst at global risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft.

"Delhi doesn't appear to have a clear game-plan on how to calm the situation, and so it will want to desist from any knee-jerk reactions to the attack that could make things even worse." In recent years, India has refrained from aggressive responses to terrorism, which included the 2008 Mumbai attacks carried out by Pakistani militants that left 166 dead. Instead, New Delhi has used international gatherings to highlight what it calls Pakistani support of terrorists. For now, it appears the government will continue this approach. The Indian Express reported on Monday that military commanders warned Modi against calls for immediate surgical strikes inside Pakistan.

Kashmiris carry the body of 11 year-old Nasir Shafi in Harwan on the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, on September 17, 2016. Nasir was killed when Indian police fired pellets on him during clashes in Harwan, local residents said. Faisal Khan | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Retaliation would be a setback to Modi's attempts at normalizing relations with Pakistan, cautioned Dhruva Jaishankar, foreign policy fellow at Brookings Institution India. If Modi chooses to stay calm, he has the ability to withstand public pressure, Jaishankar added. Domestic politics is another reason why New Delhi may wish to abstain from an armed conflict. "Continued unrest in Kashmir could also bring down the state government, an uneasy coalition between a local party and the nationally ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), setting back the party's efforts to reach out to India's minority Muslim community ahead of upcoming state elections," Eurasia warned in a recent note. The BJP's opposition could also exploit the current crisis to disrupt the winter session of parliament, which opens in November, and potentially delay legislation necessary to implement the long-awaited goods and services tax, Eurasia added. For Kashmiris however, Sunday's attack is yet another obstacle towards peace. "Who has benefited from this? Surely not Kashmiris," remarked Farooq Siddiqi, head of the World Kashmir Diaspora Alliance, a Canadian-based non-profit with chapters in Brussels and the U.S.

Inside the crisis

Sunday's attack was the latest act of aggression in the decades-old conflict that has seen Kashmir's mountainous landscape used as a battleground for India-Pakistan tensions. The two nations have fought four wars, three of which were over the Himalayan region.

An Indian soldier looks toward the Kashmir valley. TAUSEEF MUSTAFA | AFP | Getty Images
Elk hunting generates a large chunk of revenue for a couple of Central Montana counties, according to a recently released report.

Last year nearly $4 million in economic expenditure was generated by hunters in four different hunting districts in Fergus and Petroleum counties, according to a research brief conducted by Ben Alexander of Headwater Economics, a Bozeman-based research group. The majority of the expenditure  an estimated $3.8 million  came just from elk hunting, according to the report.

The analysis was released this week by the Montana Wilderness Association, which is lobbying for greater protection of large blocks of Bureau of Land Management property in the region.

The BLM is working on a Resource Management Plan for its Lewistown Field Office, which includes portions of Fergus and Petroleum counties. The plan will guide how the BLM manages more than 650,000 acres in the region for the next 20 to 30 years. The agency plans to have the document finalized by January 2017.

It's long been known that recreation is a big financial driver for Montana. A survey conducted by the Outdoor Industry Association in 2011 and 2012 said recreation generated $5.8 billion in direct spending and created 64,000 jobs in the state.

In 2006 Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks estimated that elk hunters "spent $98.5 million on transportation, lodging, food, guide fees and other purchases, excluding license fees."

The four hunting districts include the Chain Buttes, Horse Camp Trail and Dovetail Creek areas, as well as Blood Creek, Arrow Creek, and Carter Coulee.

These areas represent some of the most productive ungulate habitat anywhere in North America, and thats because these areas are largely roadless and undeveloped, said Bill Berg, a former deputy project leader of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, in a press release. If we want to continue having big game populations that are this healthy, we need intact ecosystems.

The Headwaters Economics report shows that Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks recorded more than 25,000 elk hunter days in 2015 on the four Fergus County hunting districts. Of those days, 7 percent overall were represented by nonresidents, but expenditures by out-of-state hunters comprised about half the total.
When Daniel Lubetzky started his company PeaceWorks, he aimed to unite groups in conflict in business ventures, such as a sun-dried tomato spread made in an Israeli factory that employed many Palestinian workers.

His breakaway product, though, proved to be one now made in the United States  KIND Bars, the healthy fruit and nut bars seen on the shelves of stores from grocers to gas station mini-marts  and he eventually split KIND Bars into a separate company in 2004.



watch now

1. Tap your personal pain for a great idea. In launching PeaceWorks, Daniel Lubetzky often traveled around the world, going store to store to persuade merchants to sell his products. Sometimes he craved a healthy snack, but it wasn't always easy to find something natural, like an apple. "I needed a snack I felt would be wholesome and real but would travel well with me," recalled Lubetzky. "The stuff out there was too indulgent, tasted like cardboard, didn't feel like real food. I was on the lookout for products that would be healthy, tasty, wholesome and also convenient." At a trade show in the late '90s, the young entrepreneur came across a fruit, nut and yogurt bar made in Australia that he thought could fill the gap in the marketplace. He began importing it and within a year generated $1 million in sales from it. Once the Australian bar-maker was acquired by a big conglomerate, however, the ingredient list changed to include sulfate preservatives and artificial sweetener. Unwilling to sell a product with these ingredients, Lubetzky decided to make his own bars, and KIND Healthy Snacks got its start.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of KIND Courtesy Kind

2. Time your product right. At the time Lubetzky entered the market with KIND bars, the U.S. market was saturated with energy bars filled with unpronounceable ingredients, though there was a bar in Australia made with fruits and nuts. Lubetzky had to invest a lot of time in learning how to create a natural bar with a decent shelf life and confront constant skepticism about his idea from retailers, who thought his products looked too healthy and weren't sure how to market it within their stores. Nonetheless, he persisted, convinced the market was ready for it. Once Lubetzky introduced the bars, he found consumers responded quickly. "A lot of life is timing," he said. "We came up with a solution that spoke to people. They could really connect."



3. Be disciplined. In the early days of PeaceWorks, Lubetzky rushed into developing multiple brands. "I was a little bit overeager and developed too many products too quickly," he recalled. Though his experimenting paid off with the sudden popularity of his KIND Bars, he realized that creating a separate company for this product would see more growth by developing a single, powerful brand. "I learned how to be disciplined and to focus," he said.

4. Don't try to conquer the world all at once. When seeking distribution for his products in the early days of PeaceWorks, Lubetzky took a shotgun approach to finding stores to carry his products, which include satay sauce and pesto. "We were so hungry, excited and naive that I would just knock on any door," he said. By the time he started KIND, he realized it was better to take his time and grow strategically rather than to force things. "We knew our core consumer was in the natural stores," he said. "Once we saturated the natural stores, we expanded into specialty stores. Then, when we were really strong, we went into the grocery aisles and national supermarkets. Only then did we start going into alternative channels, like coffee shops and mass retailers."
Chinese officials have confirmed that the country's first space lab is expected to fall into the Earth's atmosphere in the latter half of 2017, sparking speculation that authorities have lost control of the 10.4 meter long module that weighs 8.5 tons.



Launched in 2011 and known as the Tiangong-1, China's orbiting space laboratory was scrapped earlier this year after its functions failed following two years in space. Last week, Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, told a press conference it had "comprehensively fulfilled its historical mission" and was currently intact and orbiting at an average height of 370 kilometers.



"Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," she said, according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.



She said that it was unlikely to affect aviation activities or cause damage to the ground and that China highly values the management of space debris.
U.S. stock-index futures rose on Wednesday as European and Japanese shares rallied followed the Bank of Japan's major overhaul of its policy and traders awaited the U.S. Federal Reserve's announcement.

The Fed will announce its latest policy decision on Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, with Fed Chair Janet Yellen briefing the media at 2:30 p.m. ET. Market consensus is for the central bank to hold its base rate in the 0.25-0.50 percent range and not lift again until December. CME Group's FedWatch Tool puts the probability of no rate change at 85 percent, with a 15 percent change of a hike to 0.50-0.75 percent.



Fed poll

A surprise could not be ruled out, according to the head of economic research at Daiwa Capital Markets. "It is far from the case that all recent data have been soft, with an upside surprise seen to last Friday's CPI figure and (forecasts) of third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth still around 3 percent," Chris Scicluna said on Wednesday in a note. Earlier on Wednesday, the Bank of Japan announced it would change policy, abandoning its monetary base target in favor of targeting the yield curve for Japanese bonds . It held the deposit rate unchanged at -0.1 percent and said it would maintain its program of bond purchases. The Japanese Nikkei 225 closed around 1.9 percent higher subsequently, having traded 0.3 percent up on the day before the decision was announced. Japanese banking shares rose to close sharply higher, boosted by the news of no further rate cuts. European shares also rallied in early trade on the Bank of Japan news.

European stock markets

European markets


There's a pot of untaxed, corporate profit gold sitting offshore, and the European Union plans to press for what it considers its fair share.

The official leading that effort, EU's antitrust commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, was in Washington this week to deal with the blow back from her recent decision to slap Apple with a $14.5 billion tax bill.

The visit included a meeting Monday with U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew,who has been bluntly critical of a series of EU investigations into taxes paid by American companies on profits held outside the U.S.

But the visits have apparently left Vestager undaunted.

"The pushback is what we thought it would be," she told CNBC on Wednesday. "These are profits generated in Europe, and also I think (should) be taxed in Europe."

Those profits swelled to some $2.4 trillion  or about 14 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, according to new estimates released Monday.

Both Apple and the Irish government are appealing a ruling last month that the tech giant owes the Irish Treasury $14.5 billion, based on a government tax break that the EU ruling said qualified as "state aid." Such assistance amounts to an illegal subsidy under EU law, the ruling said.
Former President Bill Clinton voiced support for a lower corporate tax rate and said the geopolitical reasoning behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership is clear.

Clinton said he supported a higher corporate tax rate in the past. Wife Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has not released a plan that addresses the current 35 percent rate. She has also said she would put her husband in charge of reinvigorating the economy.

"I was the president who urged it to be raised to 35 percent, but when I did it, it was precisely in the middle of OECD countries. It isn't anymore," Clinton told CNBC on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative.

"I think it should be lowered. This is just me now. I'm not speaking for," he added, trailing off without saying for whom he was not speaking.

Clinton said the United States should try to get the corporate tax rate as close to the international average as possible to make it more competitive, but it should also maintain an alternative minimum tax to ensure all businesses pay an acceptable amount.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he would drop the corporate tax rate to 15 percent.
Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption charges, a crusading federal judge ruled on Tuesday, adding more turbulence to the country's political landscape. Judge Sergio Moro said that Lula, who served as president from 2003-11 and has for two decades been an iconic and powerful political force in Brazil, will face charges of accepting 3.7 million Brazilian reais ($1.14 million) in bribes connected to a sweeping kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras. Moro wrote in his ruling that according to the prosecutors' charges, Lula was a "direct beneficiary" of bribes from OAS SA, one of the engineering and construction firms at the center of the graft scandal, and therefore must stand trial.



Victor Moriyama | Getty Images

The corruption case will also put on trial Lula's wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva; OAS Chief Executive Jose Aldemario "Leo" Pinheiro; Paulo Okamotto, the president of the Lula Institute, and four others. In an emailed note late on Tuesday, Lula's lawyers again said their client had committed no crime and labeled Moro as a "impartial" judge who was on a witch hunt to see the former leader jailed. Lula, speaking via video link, told an event held by his lawyers in New York that the charges were a "farce." "What's happening isn't getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more," said Lula, adding that he "will keep fighting." Tuesday's events capped an incredibly choppy few weeks for Brazil. Lula's hand-chosen successor Dilma Rousseff was found guilty by the Senate of breaking budget rules and dismissed from the presidency late last month. Her successor, former vice president Michel Temer, has abruptly pulled the country to the political and economic right, and is trying to boost Brazil out of its worst economic recession since the 1930s. Moro's decision may prevent Lula from making a political comeback in the 2018 presidential campaign. It could also derail any hopes the Workers' Party (PT) had of returning to power, or possibly even surviving, according to some experts. Despite the corruption allegations facing the PT and several of its former coalition parties, the most recent polls have shown Lula remains a leading candidate for 2018. Lula was charged with three counts each of corruption, which carries a maximum sentence of 16 years per count, and money laundering, with a possible sentence of up to 10 years per count. If found guilty, however, the sentence would be determined by the judge, and Lula and the others to stand trial would have chances to appeal.

Turn of Fortunes
European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager speaks during a news conference at the EU Delegation in Washington on September 19, 2016.

Margrethe Vestager is the European Union's antitrust commissioner who handed Apple a $14.5-billion back taxes bill in August  the largest tax penalty for a U.S. tech company.

In an interview with CNBC's Sara Eisen, Vestager said the pushback has been what she thought it would be. Unlike the United States, Europe has a "third competition tool," which is a ban of state aid.

When asked how she got to such a big tax bill for Apple, Vestager first explained that the investigation was regarding the two tax rulings allowing Apple to put huge profits into Europe, "with no employees, no premises, no read activities," leaving only a "tiny fraction of their profits generated in Europe" to ever be taxed.

Given the large tax fee, Vestager said, "I think basically the very large figure is just an illustration of a very successful, very big company."

She said in the beginning of the interview, "We never questioned how Apple is organized. We do not question Irish tax code, that is for the Irish."



Both Apple and the Irish government are appealing based on a government tax break that the EU ruling said qualified as "state aid."






A man arrested Tuesday for promotion of prostitution is being investigated by the Montana Division of Criminal Investigations for victimizing multiple women in several counties.

Terrance Tyrell Edwards, 34, is being investigated by DCI after he was arrested Tuesday by the Billings Police Department. Chief of the Investigations Bureau John Strandell said Billings Police requested the help of DCI due to the multiple jurisdictions involved in the case.

At this time, law enforcement believes there may be multiple victims involved in the case, Strandell said.

The case is being prosecuted in U.S. District Court. Edwards has not yet appeared in court to be charged with the felony offense.

The Montana attorney general's office spokesman John Barnes said the investigation is in its early stages, and additional charges could be filed.

Lake County Sheriff Don Bell said in a statement that Edwards kidnapped a 22-year-old Polson woman and held her against her will for 11 days. He said authorities found and arrested Edwards after the woman called her mother from a cellphone.

Barnes says that based on interviews with the woman, it does not appear that she was abducted initially. But he says investigators are looking at her case as an instance of human trafficking, which involves holding a person under threat or duress.

In 2012, Edwards was given a five-year suspended sentence for forcing his girlfriend into prostitution.
France may seek compensation from carmakers whose vehicles far exceed carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions targets in normal driving, budget minister Christian Eckert said on Wednesday.

Addressing lawmakers at the National Assembly, Eckert said government legal services were preparing action to recover "lost tax receipts" from carmakers whose vehicles should have incurred higher green penalties at the time of sale.

The diesel scandal, which broke a year ago when Volkswagen admitted cheating U.S. nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions tests, prompted industry-wide investigations in France and other countries.

Besides on-the-road NOx emissions far in excess of regulatory lab scores, the inquiries found gaps between claimed CO2 output and actual fuel efficiency for many car models.

Under France's "bonus-malus" scheme, cars with lower CO2 emissions and fuel consumption benefit from sales subsidies funded by penalties on the sale of less economical vehicles, based on the amount CO2 emitted per kilometer.

"There will be no leniency nor particular severity," Eckert said on Wednesday. The budget minister also announced plans to shift green incentives from hybrids to pure-electric cars and begin phasing out fuel tax advantages for diesel-powered fleets.
watch now

Hillary Clinton heads toward the first general election debate in strong position against Donald Trump in their battle for the presidency, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows. Among likely voters, Clinton draws 43 percent support to 37 percent for Trump, 9 percent for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, and 3 percent for Green Party nominee Jill Stein. When the choice is limited to the Democratic and Republican nominees, Clinton's lead grows to seven percentage points, 48 percent to 41 percent.

Her margins have fallen only slightly since the last NBC/WSJ poll in early August, after both parties had staged their national conventions. That indicates Trump has failed to substantially ease doubts about his suitability for the Oval Office, while voters recalibrate their desire for dramatic change as Election Day draws closer.

Hillary Clinton Getty Images

Respondents "revealed a hardening of personal dislike and professional uncertainty about Donald Trump," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the NBC/WSJ survey with Republican counterpart Bill McInturff. "Voters see Hillary Clinton as safe and smart. In this year, it looks like a winning hand."

The three presidential debates, beginning next Monday night at Hofstra University in New York, give Trump an opportunity to shake up the underlying structure of the race. But McInturff noted: "Something that does not yet exist in this campaign would have to happen."

Most voters continue to look askance at both candidates. Since May, however, views of Clinton (now 37 percent positive, 52 percent negative) have grown slightly more favorable, while views of Trump (28 percent positive, 61 percent negative) have grown slightly less favorable.

On issues, voters prefer Clinton over Trump by 50 percent to 39 percent on "dealing with immigration," while splitting evenly (44 percent Clinton, 43 percent Trump) on handling terrorism and homeland security. On the economy, the billionaire businessman holds a 46 percent to 41 percent edge.

But the poll shows Clinton, a former First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State, with powerful advantages over Trump on "being knowledgeable and experienced enough to handle the presidency" (60 percent to 23 percent), and "having the right temperament to be president" (56 percent to 23 percent). Voters prefer Trump on "being honest and straightforward" by 41 percent to 31 percent, down from his 16-percentage point edge on that quality in June.

Voters choose Clinton by a two-to-one margin, 51 percent to 25 percent, on "being in charge of our nuclear weapons," and by 48 percent to 33 percent on "being a good Commander-in-Chief." Though Trump has cast himself as the candidate of change, voters pick Clinton narrowly (44 percent to 38 percent) on "changing the country for the better."



Indeed, the approach of the election and the choice they face has altered voters' opinions about how much change they want. Some 49 percent say they want a president to bring "major changes" even if those changes can't be predicted, while 47 percent prefer "a steady approach" even if that means fewer changes. That near-even split contrasts with a solid margin in July, when voters preferred "major changes" by a 56 percent to 41 percent margin.

In the battle for Congress  where Republicans currently control both the House and Senate  voters express a narrow preference for Democrats, 48 percent to 45 percent.


This profile of Leon Cooperman originally appeared in 2014. On Wednesday, the SEC filed insider trading charges filed against Cooperman and his firm, Omega Advisors. Leon Cooperman is addicted to investing. The hedge fund manager's stock-junkie lifestyle starts at 5:15 a.m. on weekdays, when he wakes up in the Short Hills, New Jersey, house he's lived in for 36 years. He then drives to the Manhattan offices of his $10.7 billion Omega Advisors, getting in by 6:30 a.m. (he took the ferry for 30 years before the firm recently moved from Wall Street to midtown). Cooperman then digs in to investing for 12 hours  including a working lunch in the office  bouncing between grilling corporate executives in person or on the phone, consulting with his 18-person research team and reading company reports. By 6:30 p.m., it's off to a business dinner with more CEOs or fellow investors like Mario Gabelli of Gamco Investors and Bill Priest of Epoch Investment Partners. Then it's a quick post-dinner shower and more time in front of a Bloomberg terminal checking international markets before bed at 11 p.m. "The way to be successful is do what you love and love what you do," Cooperman said in a 2014 interview. "I get paid normally a lot of money for basically doing something I enjoy doing. And what I enjoy is to hunt  finding something somebody else doesn't see, making a bet and having Mr. Market prove me right." For decades, Mr. Market had smiled on Lee Cooperman, making the 71-year-old South Bronx native a billionaire. However, his fortunes took a dramatic change Thursday when regulators charged him and his firm, Omega Advisors, with insider trading. A maniacal focus on picking undervalued companies combined with the hard work and frugality of someone who came from little had led to a nearly unparalleled track record of investment returns for longer than most people have worked on Wall Street. Take Cooperman's recommendations at the Delivering Alpha conference. In 2012, Cooperman made 10 stock recommendations at the joint CNBC and Institutional Investor presentation. All gained in value over the next year, many by double digits. In 2013, the hedge fund manager presented 10 more picks. Eight of them were winners. However, his stock picking over the past couple of years has been on the decline, and he did not attend the 2016 conference.

His flagship Omega Overseas fund has averaged returns after fees of 14.6 percent since inception in January 1992 through June 2014, according to confidential client materials obtained by CNBC.com. The fund reportedly was down 4.2 percent in 2014, though, and another 10 percent in 2015. Until his fortunes turned, Cooperman had also beat most of his hedge fund peers. The average stock-focused hedge fund, as represented by the Absolute Return U.S. Equity Index, gained just 9.34 percent on average from January 1998 through June 2014 (the index doesn't go further back). Cooperman's fund had gained 11.9 percent over that period.



Not perfect

Cooperman's record has other blemishes as well. In 2008, Omega lost 35.2 percent net of fees. It was by far the largest loss in the firm's history and worse than most hedge funds during the peak year of the financial crisis (the AR U.S. Equity Index fell 13.98 percent). "So it was really 2008 that was a rough patch for us, and it was very simple. We misjudged the significance of Lehman," Cooperman said in a 2011 interview. "2008 was transformative for me because, at the time, I allowed my people to hold onto their positions when I should've started kicking them out well before we got into the hole." (Lehman Brothers, one of the nation's largest investment banks, filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, precipitating the financial crisis that drove the U.S. economy into a deep recession.) Unlike other firms, Omega did not "gate" investors as others did, meaning it allowed them to take out their money as usual. The fund rocketed back with a 52.6 percent gain in 2009; Cooperman said on CNBC that he saw some signs of optimism days after the stock market's nadir in early March. He noticed early that stock prices were often not falling even when their earnings were poor, a sign of a bottom. Omega continued its value strategy in early 2009, buying cheap stocks and betting that the market would rise, or at least not "double dip" again into a depression. "There's a sustainability to the economic expansion when it comes about," Cooperman said on CNBC in August 2009. "We're bottoming around now." Omega lost money in four other calendar years. In 1994, it fell 24.1 percent in part because of bad bond, stock and macroeconomic bets. In 1998, it was down 5.2 percent despite a roaring stock market, thanks mostly to emerging market loses precipitated by Russia's debt default. In 2002, Omega declined 12.7 percent, although less than S&P 500 Index. And in 2011, it fell 1.4 percent mostly on bad equity positions, a year many hedge funds struggled given stock market swings around a potential U.S. debt default. The charges that came Wednesday also weren't Cooperman's first brush with regulators and law enforcement. Cooperman's self-described worst investment was when an Omega executive, Clayton Lewis, was aware of a 1998 scheme to bribe officials in Azerbaijan to buy a government oil company from which Omega could profit. Omega signed a nonprosecution agreement with the Justice Department in 2007 and paid $500,000 to resolve the matter. Lewis pleaded guilty, cooperated with investigators and was sentenced to time served  six days. Cooperman said Clayton lied to him and Omega sued to recover some of the losses. The parties agreed on a private settlement in 2010, and Omega has largely avoided emerging markets since. "I had a rogue employee. It happens," Cooperman said. "But it was the worst chapter in my life."

Hunter College graduation picture Source: Leon Cooperman

From the South Bronx to Columbia Business School

Cooperman was born to working-class Polish immigrants  his father was a plumber  and grew up in the family's one-bedroom apartment. He attended neighborhood schools and was the first in his family to go to college, at nearby Hunter, where he met his future wife of 50 years, Toby, in French class. After a false start at dental school as an undergraduate, Cooperman focused on economics coursework and became interested in business. He went to work at Xerox as a quality control engineer after Hunter, but soon started at Columbia Business School with the help of a National Defense Education Act student loan. Cooperman fell in love with stock picking at Columbia. He learned the school's mantra of "value" investing, the term for finding undervalued securities popularized by professors Benjamin Graham and David Dodd and espoused by fellow alum Warren Buffett. After class, Cooperman would race classmates Gabelli and Art Samberg  future billionaire investors in their own right  to a pay phone to call their shared stock broker. "We were all Ph.D.s  poor, hungry and driven," fellow Bronx native Gabelli said of his time at Columbia with Cooperman. "If you're doing fundamental analysis a la Graham and Dodd, it is basically focused, intense bottoms-up," Gabelli added. "That has been a training and discipline that Lee and other sell-side analysts  have taken every day in their life and their passion they understand and dominate knowledge of specific companies."

Clockwise from left: Cooperman on "Wall Street Week" in 1982; fishing on a rare day off in 1988; 25th wedding anniversary in 1989, with son Michael, Toby, Regina and Mario Gabelli; with fiance Toby in early 1960s; with one of three grandchildren in 2001 Source: Leon Cooperman

Golden at Goldman

Cooperman got his MBA on Jan. 31, 1967, and started at Goldman Sachs the next day. He quickly rose through the ranks and was made partner in charge of research in 1976. Each year from 1976 to 1986, Cooperman was voted onto Institutional Investor's All-America Research Team for portfolio strategy, including being ranked first in the sector from 1977 to 1985. Cooperman then helped the bank set up its asset management unit, which he led as chairman and CEO. When Goldman balked at the idea of setting up a hedge fund, Cooperman left on amicable terms after 25 years to launch Omega the day after leaving in November 1991. "He was an outstanding research person at Goldman Sachs," said John Whitehead, the former co-chairman of the bank who worked with and was a mentor to Cooperman. Whitehead, who was also an early Omega investor, remembers Cooperman knowing companies in his Goldman portfolio "better than anybody else" and said his individual company research made him "different and special."

Adding value

Omega practices a classic "value" strategy with a focus on picking undervalued American stocks selected on the basis of broad and deep research. While Cooperman mostly looks at micro company developments, he uses macroeconomic analysis led by longtime top deputy Steve Einhorn to inform how much risk to take and when to dabble in other asset classes, like international stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and equity indexes. The firm also takes positions against some overvalued stocks using short bets, but the vast majority of its historical profits have come from the long side, according to an Omega's investor presentation (the firm declined to comment on fund performance or positioning).

While Cooperman said he has a "potpourri" of best trades, he said the single greatest investment of his career was discovering Henry Singleton, late founder of technology conglomerate Teledyne Technologies . Cooperman first recommended Teledyne's stock while at Goldman and went on to meet with Singleton twice a year for 25 years to learn from his operational prowess, which included buying back shares when the stock price was low and making large acquisitions when it was high.

Generally, "any stock or bond at the right price" is how Cooperman describes his investment philosophy. "I find over the years, if I buy something at the right price, invariably I get lucky," he said. He likes to use the analogy of selecting from 25 different brands of beer in the supermarket: some combination of return-on-equity, growth rate, price-to-earnings ratio, dividend yield and asset value. "There's something that makes you reach for one particular brew," Cooperman said in 2011.

Hard work

He's the James Brown of hedge fundsthe hardest working man in the industry. Doug Kass founder of Seabreeze Partners Management

Those close to Cooperman had credited his work ethic for Omega's success. "Lee is the hardest working guy in the investment business I know and have ever known," said Robert Salomon Jr., former head of Salomon Brothers Asset Management who has been friends with Cooperman since the late 1960s and was an early investor in Omega. "I don't think he puts in long hours, I think he works around the clock. I don't care whether he's on a plane or car or in Florida presumably on vacation  he's working." "If you ask me what I enjoy the most about vacation, it's coming home," Cooperman joked.

"He's the James Brown of hedge funds  the hardest working man in the industry," said former employee Doug Kass, founder of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management. "More than anyone I know  he goes belly to belly with the management. He knows the companies as thoroughly as the CFOs of the companies he invests in," Kass said. "It's hard work." Kass added that Cooperman never takes projections from a company  or himself  at face value. "He's always second- and third- and fourth-guessing a company and his thesis," Kass said.

Cooperman's addiction to work has meant pushing employees hard. "He's tough on people, but he wants those people to succeed very badly," Kass said. "He's much tougher on himself than the other people." Asked about being a difficult boss, Cooperman says he wants to justify Omega's high fees  usually 1.5 percent of assets for management and 20 percent on positive performance. "You have to bring a total commitment to the business or you don't belong. Premium fees demand premium performance," Cooperman said. "I don't expect others to work harder or longer hours than me. I try to lead by example." Former Omega employees include Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management; David Fiszel, a portfolio manager at Point72 Asset Management (formerly SAC Capital Management); Michael Zimmerman, founder of Prentice Capital Management; and Brian Zied, founder of Charter Bridge Capital Management. One unfortunate  and unrepresentative  of the dozens of Omega alums is Samuel Israel, a low-level, 18-month employee in the early 1990s who went on to perpetrate one of the worst pre-Madoff frauds in hedge fund history with his Bayou Hedge Fund Group. He's now in prison for running a $450 million Ponzi scheme  after being caught by authorities in 2008 following a fake suicide.

Walking the value walk

Cooperman is known for his frugality almost as much as his work ethic. Nearly everyone who has met Cooperman has a story about him trying to save money. Cooperman recently hung the pictures on the wall in Omega's new offices instead of being charged $25 for each installment, according to Joe Scanlon, the firm's head of investor relations. He stays overnight at Kass' home instead of getting a hotel while visiting the Hamptons on New York's Long Island. He buys his own newspapers every morning. He eschews chauffeured car service and once shared a taxi with this reporter in Las Vegas from the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference to the airport  asking the cabbie questions about various casino performances most of the way. "It has to do with value investing. You walk the walk," Gabelli said. "You don't even want to pay wholesale in anything you do." "Unlike some hedge fund managers who invest purely for the financial rewards, Lee does it for the love of investing," said Michael Oliver Weinberg, who teaches at Columbia Business School and has invested in hedge funds professionally.

Cooperman received an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters from Hunter College. Jennifer Raab, president of Hunter College; Lee and Toby Cooperman; Maurice DuBois (June 3, 2010). Source: Omega Advisors

Giving Pledge
The global economy remains stuck in a "low-growth trap," the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development warned on Wednesday. The OECD projects in its latest interim economic outlook that worldwide GDP growth will remain flat at about 3 percent in 2016, with only "modest improvement" expected in 2017. (CNBC)

Donald Trump's campaign spending reached a high of nearly $30 million in August, but Hillary Clinton still outspent him by nearly $20 million for the month. Clinton also had more cash on hand, with $68 million at the start of September to Trump's $50.3 million. (CNBC)



U.S. officials say they believe Russia is responsible for an attack on an aid convoy in Syria. The officials said two Russian warplanes were flying above the convoy at the exact time of the strike on Monday. The Russian foreign ministry said Russia had nothing to do with the strike. (Reuters)

Ahmad Rahami was formally charged with using weapons of mass destruction in a federal criminal complaint on Tuesday. The suspect in the Chelsea bombings has also been charged in New York City, as well as in New Jersey for allegedly placing bombs in Seaside Park and Elizabeth. (NBC News)



Protests broke out in Charlotte, North Carolina overnight after police confirmed they had shot and killed a man while pursuing a different individual. Police say Keith Lamont Scott, 43, exited his car while holding a firearm on Tuesday. (NBC News)

T-Mobile US (TMUS) could become a takeover target of NBCUniversal parent Comcast (CMCSA), according to the Wall Street Journal's Heard On The Street column. The paper said such a move could be part of Comcast's plans to launch a wireless service by mid-2017. (WSJ)


When business guru Marcus Lemonis met the owner of catering company Honest Foods, he quickly sensed a problem: The boss didn't know how to treat his employees.

Despite its savory food and 8 percent net profits, the Chicagoland team was on the verge of a mutiny and the business on the brink of demise.

"If you really genuinely don't change, everybody at some point will walk out and you'll lose your business and I'll lose my money and they'll be gone," Lemonis, host of CNBC's "The Profit," warned on this week's episode.

Tad Devlin, known for having a controlling, temperamental nature, was constantly nervous about losing his business, so he transferred his panic onto his 12 employees.

"He worries that other people aren't doing their jobs, then he interferes and then he wonders why people can't do their job," Lemonis said.

Impressed with the company's mouth-watering food, Lemonis offered Honest Foods $300,000 for 33 percent of the business and proffered advice to Devlin on how to be a better leader.

Lemonis advised Devlin to cede control, delegate more tasks and trust his employees.
A daily morning look at the financial stories you need to know to start the day

STOCKS/ECONOMY

-Stock futures are higher ahead of this afternoon's big Fed decision announcement live on CNBC's Power Lunch at 2pm Eastern. Investors are already cheering the Bank of Japan's just-announced overhaul of its monetary policy.

-Mortgage applications tanked by 7.3 percent amid rising rates last week.



OIL/ENERGY



-US crude prices are up more than 2 percent and almost at the $45/barrel level on a surprise drawdown in inventory.
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The CEO of pharma giant Mylan might need some strong medication of her own after getting a congressional beat down. Mylan chief Heather Bresch and her company were accused of "disgusting" greed and of getting "filthy rich" by congressmen as she sought to defend the company's decision to hike the price of lifesaving anti-allergy EpiPens by more than 500 percent in recent years. "The greed is astounding, it's sickening and disgusting," Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., told Bresch as she was grilled by members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee over the now-more-than $600 price for a two-pack of EpiPens. "I'm a very conservative, pro-business Republican, but I am really sickened by what I heard today, and what I've read before about this situation," Duncan said. "In my opinion, no one can really earn or deserve $19 million a year," said Duncan, referring to an amount close to what Bresch made last year. Bresch, started the hearing by arguing that the company isn't making profits that come close to the more than $600 sticker price.

"I'm proud to be the CEO of Mylan, but I never expected to be here under these circumstances  discussing the price of EpiPen Auto-Injectors," Bresch told the committee.

"I've spent my entire career working to break down barriers, expand access to high-quality medicines and lower health-care costs," said Bresch, whose company has increased the price of EpiPens more than 500 percent in recent years.

"It troubles me greatly that the EpiPen product has become a source of controversy," said Bresch, 47, whose father is U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va.

watch now

Before she testified, a stone-faced Bresch was lambasted by the ranking minority member of the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who told her he wasn't "impressed" by her prepared remarks. Cummings said Mylan was "yet another drug company" that "had jacked up the price of a lifesaving product for no discernible reason." Mylan did so, Cummings fumed, "to get filthy rich at the expense of our constituents." And Cummings compared Mylan and Bresch to former Turing CEO Martin Shkreli and ex-Valeant CEO Michael Pearson who "sat at this same witness table" months ago, when they were grilled about their own companies' big price hikes of old drugs. Those two CEOs, Cummings said, had "absolutely no remorse, none!" "In Mylan's case, they had a virtual monopoly over the market, and they took advantage of it," Cummings said,. "They use the simple, but corrupt business model that other drug companies have repeatedly used: find an older, cheap drug that has virtually no competition, and then raise the price over and over and over again." Bresch said during testimony that Mylan has 94 percent of the market share for sales of auto-injection devices containing epinephrine, the drug that counteracts the potentially fatal allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis. Cummings asked Bresch, "You agree that you made hundreds of millions of dollars based on EpiPen" in 2015? "Yes sir," Bresch answered. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., later asked Bresch what her salary was. "About $18 million," Bresch answered.

Mica then quipped: "Sounds like you're doing pretty good on this."

Bresch said her compensation is in the "middle" of her pharma company CEO peers.

The controversy that Mylan faces exploded in August when consumers expressed outrage that a two-pack of EpiPens now cost more than $600 in cases where users had to pay full price. August traditionally sees the biggest EpiPen sales as parents buy packs of the devices in preparation for the school year.

Consumer complaints drew the attention of Congress, as well as the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who called for a rollback of EpiPen prices.

Bresch on Wednesday blamed misconception about EpiPen prices on an "opaque and frustrating" system for pricing pharmaceuticals.

"I know there is considerable concern and skepticism about the pricing of EpiPen Auto-Injectors," Bresch said. "I think many people incorrectly assume we make $600 off each EpiPen. This is simply not true." "In the complicated world of pharmaceutical pricing, there is something known as the 'Wholesale Acquisition Cost,' or WAC," she said. "The WAC for a two-unit pack of EpiPen Auto-Injectors is $608. After rebates and various fees, Mylan actually receives $274. Then you must subtract our cost of goods which is $69. This leaves a balance of $205. After subtracting all EpiPen Auto-Injector related costs our profit is $100, or approximately $50 per pen." Bresch said that about 4 million two-packs of EpiPens, or 8 million pens in all, have been sold in the past 12 months. That would mean, based on Bresch's own math, that Mylan's profit over the past year on EpiPens alone is about $400 million. Bresch noted that Mylan soon will roll out a generic version of EpiPen, which will sell for about half, or $300, of the current wholesale price. The company also has expanded its rebate program so that many patients can lower their out-of-pocket costs for buying brand-name EpiPens. She also said that the company is working on extending the shelf life of EpiPens from 18 months to what it hopes will be 24 months.
Someone in North Korea is in a lot of trouble.

The secretive state somehow accidentally opened access to all the websites hosted on its servers, revealing that it only has 28 registered domains.

On Monday at around 10 p.m. Pacific time, North Korea's nameserver  that contains information about all of the ".kp" websites  was misconfigured, allowing it to be accessed. This meant Matthew Bryant, a researcher, was able to access the domain names and some of the file data about the site.

Bryant dumped all of this on Github  a site that hosts computer code. It's the first real look into the secret online world of the hermit state North Korea.

Some of the websites take a long time to load and some are inaccessible. Among the 28 sites listed is one called Air Koryo, a flight booking site, and one named Friend, presumably some sort of social network.

One website that has always been accessible outside of North Korea is the Korean Central News Agency  the state-run propaganda site.

A Reddit page lists all of the websites discovered and below are some examples of the sites.
After denying she was the victim of human trafficking, Phylicia Monique Zubia was convicted and sentenced for promotion of prostitution in court Tuesday.

Investigators from the Montana Division of Criminal investigations arrested Zubia, 22, and a 17-year-old girl in a Billings hotel room on Dec. 23, 2015. The investigators arranged to meet with Zubia and the girl after finding pictures of the women on a Backpage.com post. In the post the women were advertising sex for money.

The two women had traveled through New Mexico, Texas and North Dakota before being caught in Billings.

At Zubia's sentencing Tuesday, Yellowstone County Judge Michael Moses gave Zubia a deferred sentence of three years to the Montana Department of Corrections.

Ole Olson, an assistant attorney with the Montana Attorney General's office, recommended Zubia be given a suspended sentence of five years to the Montana Women's Prison. Zubia never said she was a victim of a pimp in this case, Olson said. If she ever wanted the felony wiped from her record, she could avail herself of the human trafficking protections the state offers, Olson said.

Zubia's public defender, Edward Werner, said his client shouldn't have to admit she was a victim, and there was no question she was a victim of society. Werner recommended the deferred sentence, adding he believed everyone in the courtroom wanted to see Zubia moving forward with her life. A deferred sentence would give her a better chance at improving her future, Werner said.

Zubia had a conviction for solicitation from 2013, and Moses wanted to make sure Zubia was done with prostitution.

"Frankly, I think there is a pimp involved, a good friend of yours I assume," Moses said. "But if you're done, that means done with everything. I like the prospect of a deferred imposition of sentence."

Zubia's three years of supervision will be completed in her home state of New Mexico. Time on supervision will be closer to two years since she was given credit toward her sentence for the 182 days she spent jailed at the Yellowstone County Detention Facility.

The 17-year-old in the hotel with Zubia was extradited to New Mexico for a parole violation. She was immune from charges of prostitution due to a 2015 Montana legislative change that allows for underage victims of human trafficking to not be prosecuted.

The man suspected of being Zubia's pimp, Lavondrick Terelle Hogues, 29, pleaded not guilty to aggravated promotion of prostitution earlier this year.

Hogues' prosecution reflects a shift during the past two legislative sessions regarding the way sexual exploitation cases are being handled in the state.

The same bill that decriminalized the acts of minors subjected to human trafficking also created the affirmative defense, which allows for victims to be identified as such, even if they committed illegal acts while being trafficked. This not only protects them from criminal prosecution but allows them to receive victim services in the state.
A contractor crew and a specialized underwater construction subcontractor helped guide heavy equipment on Tuesday, sinking 3,200-pound sand bags into the Yellowstone River.

They worked three miles upstream from Laurel atop a man-made rock weir  a miniature peninsula that juts halfway across the river. The sandbags will form a cofferdam around the weir, allowing workers to install the long-awaited water intake.

The current unit, dubbed the 2003 intake, sits below the Highway 212 bridge south of town. Its been plagued with issues since a flood swept through the area in 2011 and changed the riverbed topography.

Now in its ninth week, the $12 million intake project is underway. The work has been a long time coming for city officials. Laurel Public Works Director Kurt Markegard said that it defines critical infrastructure  a working intake brings millions of gallons of water to its residents, as well as the CHS refinery.

This is probably one of the most important jobs weve done since 2003, Markegard said.

Once the cofferdam is finished, pumps will pull out the remaining water, and the intake infrastructure will be installed. Markegard said surveys identified that upstream spot as one thats more unlikely to be ruined by a flooding event.

Large blue piping will carry water back to the citys treatment plant, which sits at shore near the old intake. Nick Wilson of Wilson Bros. Construction said that the pipes will sit an average of 14 feet underground. But its a gravity-fed system, so the pipes will gradually get deeper as they reach town.

About 25 trucks have arrived to pile up the pipes at the job site, Wilson said. About 75 more are expected.

A Wyoming firm, Wilson Bros. is the contractor. Montana-based Great West Engineering is handling the engineering work. Representatives from those companies meet each week with the city of Laurel and others involved in the project to discuss progress.

Meanwhile, temporary rock weirs were built just downstream from the Highway 212 bridge to keep the river level up above the old intake. Since the 2011 flood eroded the riverbed, the intake has suffered from ice jams in the winter and summer water levels that are too low.

Much of the construction cost will be covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which approved nearly $43 million in public assistance to Montana after a 2011 disaster declaration.

The funding requires a local match of 25 percent of the project cost. Finding a source for that 25 percent has kept the Laurel project at bay before, and its likely to persist in the future.

Funds on loan

Laurel officials had a rocky road to find $3 million for 25 percent of the intake project. The funds didnt make it to a vote in the 2011 or 2013 sessions of that Montana Legislature. In 2015, the infrastructure bill failed.

Gov. Steve Bullock directed his office to piece together various money streams for the project, but it was announced in October 2015 that the money was no longer available  gone toward other projects.

So Laurel took out a $1.7 million loan from the State Revolving Loan Fund Program and used $1.3 million in city reserves, according to City Councilman Tom Nelson. But it wasnt an easy pill to swallow, as the town neared its borrowing capacity.

They gave us the loan. We had to take it, Nelson said. We had no choice.

Nelson expressed some rancor over the 2.5-percent-interest loan, because he felt the state was obligated to pay the 25-percent match of FEMA funds as Laurel recovers infrastructure from the flood.

Hes not the only city official who felt that way. At a July 12 city council meeting, Councilman Douglas Poehls said Bullocks office essentially betrayed the city, according to meeting minutes. City Chief Administrative Officer Heidi Jensen said at that meeting that the governor hasnt given an official written statement about the states responsibility to the funds.

Nelson traveled to Helena in August to talk to state officials. Accompanying him were Billings state Rep. Kelly McCarthy, Laurel Civil City Attorney Sam Painter and Laurel state Rep. Vince Ricci.

Ricci declined to comment on the meeting. The governors office didnt respond to a request for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

Nelson said Monday that Andy Huff, Bullocks chief legal counsel, and Adam Schafer, Bullocks policy director, heard him out on the manner. He said he requested an answer within two weeks but didnt get one.

The governments still responsible for it, he said. The state still requested the emergency declaration from the president. That was given.

The citys hopes are pinned to the 2017 legislative session, when repayment for the state loan could end up tied to an infrastructure bill.

Ultimately, officials see it as a welcome sign that earth is moving west of town, near the end of Red Bridge Road.

Work is expected to be completed around April.
Dateline: Norway

A famous black metal musician just won an election for his local Town Counciland hes not too happy about it. Gylve Fenriz Nagell, a drummer for the influential black metal band Darkthrone, was signed up to run for Council in Kolbotn, a suburb of Oslo, as a joke. He agreed to stay on the reserve list, however, and did his best not to win. My campaign was a picture of me holding a cat saying, Please dont vote for me, Fenriz told the Clrvynt website. Unfortunately, the picture of Nagell and his cat, named Peanut Butter, resonated with voters. He will now have to serve as a backup member of the council for two years. Basically, I have to step in when the usual people who go to the big meetings are sick or something, Nagell told Clrvynt. Then I have to go sit there and feel stupid among the straight people.

Dateline: Colorado

A pet owner was called to come rescue her canine at doggie daycare after the animal ate a bag of heroin. Denver police confirmed officers were chasing a drug-dealing suspect on Tuesday, Sept. 13, near the Bark & Play Doggie Daycare and Boarding when an officer spotted the man throwing something over the business fence. Garrett Bishop, owner of Bark & Play, told KMGH-TV that the something was nearly 20 bags of heroin. All in all, 17 baggies were found in our playroom, said Bishop. Not including the five that the guy tried to swallow. At least one of the bags was gobbled up by Charlie, a female golden retriever. You cant process that your dog ate heroin, said Charlies owner. The concerned owner, identified only as Laura, got a call from the kennel saying Charlie was high on heroin. Workers said, Were treating her, but you need to come as soon as you can. The daycare took Charlie to a veterinarian, who treated her with charcoal and the heroin antidote Narcan. Laura said Charlie is recovering, but, she still has no energy. The Denver Police Department said its Victim Assistance Unit is working to reimburse Laura for her vet bill, which totaled more than $500. Police said the suspect was taken into custody and will face drug-related charges.

Dateline: Washington D.C.

A Maryland woman was arrested for a brazen daylight robbery after she stole three entire French fries from an officer of the law. The crime went down in the nations capitol around 9:45pm on Wednesday, Sept. 7, at the Italian Pizza Kitchen on U Street. A woman allegedly sat down next to a police officer and tried to start a conversation, an MPD source told WUSA-9. The source said the woman then reached down and took a French fry from the officers plate as he was eating. The officer asked the woman to stop, but she took another. The police officer asked the woman to stop a second time, warning her that she was engaging in theft and could be arrested. The woman proceeded to snatch a third fry, at which point the officer arrested her. In the police report, property stolen was listed as French fried potato with a quantity of three. The unnamed woman was charged with second-degree theft.

Dateline: Kansas

A 70-year-old man robbed a bank because hed rather be in jail than at home with his wife. On the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 2, Larry Ripple of Kansas City entered the Bank of Labor and handed an employee a note saying, I have a gun, give me money. The teller handed over $2,924 in cash. Instead of fleeing the scene of the crime, however, Ripple took a seat in the lobby of the bank and waited for authorities. When a security guard approached him, Ripple allegedly said, Im the guy youre looking for. The guard recovered the money and called the police and FBI. Ripple was taken to Wyandotte County Jail and charged with one federal count of bank robbery. An affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Eric R. Beltz shines some light on Mr. Ripples unusually short crime spree, saying that [Ripple] and his wife had an argument at home and [he] no longer wanted to be in the situation. Ripple wrote out his demand note in front of his wife and told her hed rather be in jail than at home. Ripple then walked to the bank and robbed it. Ripple was released from jail after appearing before a US Magistrate Judge. It is unknown if he went back home to his wife or not.
A 12-year-old Lewis and Clark Middle School student was taken to a Billings hospital Tuesday morning after being hit by a pickup on Broadwater Avenue.

The boy is the third School District 2 student struck on the way to or from school since the school year began Aug. 25, according to an emailed "special edition newsletter" sent out on Tuesday afternoon by SD2 Superintendent Terry Bouck.

At about 7:15 a.m., the collision was reported at the intersection with Eighth Street West. The boy had been waiting with his brother at the southeast corner of the intersection, according to a morning press release from the Billings Police Department. When the boy stepped onto the crosswalk to cross Broadwater Avenue, he was hit by an eastbound RAM 5500's towing mirror, said BPD Sgt. Shane Winden.

The mirror hit the boy's head, and the impact was strong enough to fold the mirror back and shatter the passenger side window. The boy was taken to St. Vincent Healthcare and was in critical condition as of 10 a.m., according to BPD.

Medical response was delayed because American Medical Response's ambulances were already dispatched to other calls. Billings firefighters assisted the injured boy until a Lockwood Fire and Rescue ambulance arrived on scene.

Winden said the 26-year-old Billings man driving the truck reported having sun in his eyes. Witnesses provided conflicting accounts of whether the man had a green light, and it was not immediately known whether citations would result from the incident. No arrests were made or citations issued, as of the morning press release from BPD.

In the email, Bouck states that he and members of my leadership team will be meeting with city and county officials in the coming days to discuss how we as a community can do even more to protect our kids.

The email asks SD2 staff and trustees to remind students, staff and parents of your schools to be very cautious at intersections and near busy roadways. High schools, please be sure to let your student drivers know how important it is to be cautious in parking lots and surrounding areas.

Parents are asked in Boucks email to Please take the time to talk with family and friends about the importance of traffic safety, being alert and protecting all those who journey to, from and around our schools.
A man photographs a mural on a restaurant wall depicting US Presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin greeting each other with a kiss in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on May 13, 2016.

An internet entrepreneur is entering the media industry to investigate the nature of presidential candidate Donald Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.



Millionaire Rob Glaser on Wednesday announced the launch of PutinTrump.org, a site that aggregates media coverage and does original reporting on Trump's comments about Russia.

Glaser, founder of Real Networks, the company behind internet multimedia player RealPlayer, will partner on the site with Bill Buzenberg, a National Public Radio veteran and former head of the Center for Public Integrity.

Glaser said that despite not being too well-versed on Russia before the 2016 election, he felt that the reporting on the issue lacked continuity and was more like an ice cream "flavor of the day." He's the sole patron of the site, through a political action committee.



"Every day there's something outrageous said by Donald Trump," Glaser said. "What happens after a while is that people get numb to what the big picture is, because all they hear is the cacophony and all they see is the swirl."



"If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him," Trump has said of Putin, adding that he expects to have a "very, very good relationship" with the Russian president, whom Trump views as more of a leader than President Barack Obama.



The Republican nominee's campaign has reportedly worked against his party's call for giving weapons to Ukraine and upping sanctions against Russia. Amid cyberattacks with alleged Russian ties, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats have criticized Trump's stance on Putin.

Glaser said Trump's stance marks a departure from one of the few constants of the past 70 years: the view that the Soviet Union, and now Russia, needed to be contained. Glaser said he thinks Russia does not share American political and institutional values such as free markets, openness and democracy.

"This was usually not controversial. The general notion of where [politicians stand on Russia] was pretty well understood," Glaser said. "Now comes along Donald Trump who cousins up to Putin, ... literally goes out of his way to lavishly praise the leaders of Russia."

Glaser said he hopes that a modern day Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein can "follow the money" to find more about Trump and Putin's relationship.

"You have this unprecedented alliance between a presidential candidate the leader of Russia and it's not being talked about as a whole," Glaser said. "All these different pieces aren't being put together."

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
The U.S. is developing its first new hand grenade in over 40 years - and it can be thrown by southpaws.



The grenade, which is being worked on by engineers at Picatinny Arsenal, will give "greater flexibility to the warfighter" according to a news release from the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC).

The grenade has been designed for "ambidextrous" use, meaning that soldiers will be able to throw them with either their left or right arm. At the moment, left-handed soldiers need to use a different arming procedure when using current grenades, ARDEC said.

The Enhanced Tactical Multi-Purpose (ET-MP) grenade will also give soldiers the option to "use a hand grenade with different effects simply by flipping a switch," ARDEC added.

"Soldiers will not need to carry as many types of hand grenades," Jessica Perciballi, ARDEC project officer for the ET-MP, said in a statement. "They are currently carrying one M67 grenade that provides lethal fragmentation effects," she added.

"With the new multi-purpose grenade, they can carry one ET-MP grenade and have the ability to choose either fragmentation or concussive effects desired for the situation."

Input from soldiers has been key to the design. "The request for a multi-purpose grenade came from the warfighter in 2010," Matthew Hall, grenades tech base development lead, said. "Research began almost immediately," he added.

"The science and technology funding to move forward with a project came in fiscal year 2013. We received direct input from the Army and Marine Corps early on, which was critical in ensuring the new arming and fuzing design was user friendly."

With the ET-MP, Hall added, detonation time can be "narrowed down into milliseconds, and until armed, the hand grenade will not be able to detonate."

Currently, the idea is to move the new grenade to Project Manager Close Combat Systems  the part of the U.S. Army that equips and trains soldiers  in the fiscal year 2020.

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The U.S. on Wednesday lost its status as the home of the world's top university, with the U.K.'s venerable University of Oxford coming top in the Times Higher Education's table of best colleges.

This was the first time in the 13 years the newspaper has run the rankings that a U.S. university was not top. Almost 1,000 (980) universities from 79 countries were ranked on multiple criteria including quality of teaching, research and international outlook. The results were independently audited by professional services firm PwC.

The University of Oxford knocked 2015's top university, the California Institute of Technology, into second place this year. The U.S.'s Stanford University held in third place, followed by the U.K.'s other historic institution, the University of Cambridge. Nonetheless, the U.S. still dominated the rankings, housing seven of the world's top 10 universities and around 15 percent of all listed. Times Higher Education's top 10 for 2016-2017: University of Oxford, U.K. California Institute of Technology, U.S. Stanford University, U.S. University of Cambridge, U.K. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S. Harvard University, U.S. Princeton University, U.S. Imperial College London, U.K. ETH Zurich, Switzerland University of California, Berkeley, U.S. and University of Chicago, U.S.



California Institute of Technology Danita Delimont | Getty Images

Almost two-thirds of the U.S. universities in the top 200 were public institutions.

"The results suggest that the U.S. public universities have been successfully weathering the storm of funding cuts, following dips in their rankings progress in the last couple of years," Phil Baty, the editor of the rankings, said in a media release. Four of the top 10 universities were European (Swiss and U.K. specifically), but Baty said the continent was losing ground in tertiary education, while Asia was in ascendance. "Some European university leaders have already expressed concerns over building collaborations with top U.K. researchers, following the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union in June," he said. China's Peking University ranked 29th, up from 42nd last year, while the National University of Singapore, Asia's top-ranked university, was 24th, its highest position yet.

Top college for top central bankers?

Central bankers were in focus on Wednesday after both the Bank of Japan and the U.S. Federal Reserve issued policy updates.

With that in mind, it's interesting to note where the heads of the world's major central banks attended college  and their places in the Times Higher Education's table. Fed Chair Janet Yellen attended Brown University and then Yale University, which were ranked respectively joint 51st and joint 12th in the world this year by Times Higher Education. Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda was educated at the 39th-placed University of Tokyo and then studied at top-rated University of Oxford.
Wells Fargo broke the cardinal rule: It went directly after the mom-and-pop bank branch customer. Not that it is right to cheat anyone, but hey, the rest of Wall Street does have its standards.

We're not talking about some esoteric product like a credit default swap that was conjured up in a Wall Street tower, spreading toxic risk over thousands of supposedly sophisticated institutional investors.

Nor are we talking about giant financial institutions fighting over investment banking deals. We're talking about you, me, our spouse, parents, friends and kids directly being cheated by people we know inside our community, whose weapon of choice is common, everyday checking accounts and credit cards. How dare they!

I think most people still don't have a clear understanding of what went wrong when the housing bubble led to the Great Recession. But this time the scandal is easy to grasp, even if the scale of it  millions of accounts opened in the name of unwitting consumers  is breathtaking.

That's what's different about this scandal. And that's why the CEO and the entire board of Wells Fargo have to leave right now. We're talking about the people customers see every time they walk into a branch. It is sacrosanct that you don't go after the little guy who may be less financially sophisticated and often unaware that he is getting ripped off.
Utica College will formally inaugurate Laura Casamento as the schools 9th president in a ceremony set for this Friday. She previously served as the schools executive VP and chief advancement officer. Casamento replaced Todd Hutton, who retired as the schools longest serving president after 18 years. Photo credit: Utica College Twitter feed.

UTICA, N.Y.  Utica College plans to formally inaugurate Laura Casamento as the schools 9th president this Friday.

Casamento took over as the colleges new president on Aug. 1, the school said in a news release issued Monday. She is the first woman to serve as president in Utica Colleges 70-year history.

The Sept. 23 ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. in the Charles A. Gaetano Stadium, weather permitting.

Casamento succeeded Todd Hutton, who retired as the schools longest-serving president after 18 years, according to Utica College.

She had previously served as the schools executive VP and chief advancement officer. In that role, Casamento was a principal architect of Utica Colleges tuition reset.

The initiative reduced the cost of undergraduate tuition and fees by 42 percent to below $20,000 for all new and returning undergraduates, according to the schools website. It took effect this semester.

Casamento also oversaw several institutional initiatives including the Achieve: A new Dream, A New Era campaign, which raised more than $34 million, topping the colleges goal of $25 million, according to Utica College.

Prior to joining Utica College, Casamento was president and COO of Herkimer County Trust, an independently owned, state-chartered bank in Herkimer.

She served as president from April 1998 until December 2002, when the bank was sold to the Savings Bank of Utica, which is now part of M&T Bank (NYSE: MTB).

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com
MARCY, N.Y.  Minority and women entrepreneurs have the chance to learn how to sell their products and services to various levels of government.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and partners are hosting the Opening Doors to Government Contracting conference on Oct. 11 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Student Center in Marcy.

The conference costs $10 per person, and includes a continental breakfast, the SBA said in a news release.

For more information and to register by Oct. 6, visit www.sba.gov/ny/syracuse or call (315) 733-9848.

Opening Doors to Government Contracting will provide information, resources, and practical advice on how to conduct business with federal, state, and local agencies, the SBA said.

Procurement-resource specialists will present specific government-procurement programs and certifications for minority and women entrepreneurs in the We Can Help panel presentation.

Participants will also be able to attend workshops that will cover federal contracting and certifications, along with state certifications and marketing to state agencies.

In addition, three business owners who have become successful government contractors will participate in the How We Did It panel presentation.

They include John Piseck of CTM Corp. in Frankfort; Colleen Maxwell, accounting and management consultant at Natures Footprints, LLC in Newport in Herkimer County; and Linda Rockwood, owner of Mohawk Valley GIS in Utica.

The event concludes with a speed-networking session for attendees to connect with procurement representatives from large companies and federal, state and local agencies looking for local small-businesses suppliers.

The conference is presented by the SBA Syracuse district office; the Business Training Institute, Inc. of Utica; the Mohawk Valley Small Business Development Center (SBDC) procurement-assistance center; North Country Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) in Watertown; Utica SCORE; and the Womens Business Center of New York State, the SBA said.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com
NORWICH, N.Y.  NBT Bank announced it is splitting its marketing and corporate communications functions and has appointed leaders of each segment.

NBT announced that Thomas J. McEntee has joined the bank as senior VP and chief marketing officer. He is leading the banks marketing function, developing strategies and programs that leverage digital and traditional channels to promote the bank and its products and services, according to an NBT news release.

McEntee has 22 years of experience in marketing and financial services. He previously was head of digital strategy in the life and specialty insurance division at BlueCross BlueShield, according to the release.

Prior to that, he held a leadership position in multi-channel marketing and digital strategy with MetLife. His work experience also includes jobs at J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Charles Schwab.

McEntee earned his bachelors degree in international marketing from Baruch College in New York City and he graduated from the executive management program at Babson College.

Florence R. Doller, who led a combined marketing and communications function during her 19-year career with NBT, is now focusing her efforts fully on internal and external communications strategies as senior VP and director of corporate communications, NBT said.

Doller has 22 years of experience in communications and marketing in financial services. She joined NBT Bank in 1997 as assistant VP and marketing manager, and was promoted to VP and director of marketing in 1999 and senior VP in 2010.

She earned her bachelors degree in communications from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and holds the certified financial marketing professional designation from the Institute of Certified Bankers.

NBT Bank indicated in its release that it split the marketing and communications functions to position the bank for future growth including in the digital area.

Norwichbased NBT Bank said it offers personal banking, asset management, and business services through a network of 154 bank branches in six states  New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Contact The Business Journal News Network at news@cnybj.com
Former first lady of Nigeria, Patience Jonathans lawyers have given the Economic and Financial Commission (EFCC) 14 days with effect from September 18 to unfreeze her accounts and tender a public apology to her.

In an open letter written to the EFCC Chairman, Ibrahim Magu, Senior Partner of First Law Associates, Timipa Okponipere stated that if the EFCC refuses to conform, We shall file an action at the African Commission on Human Rights at the Gambia demanding N5 billion in exemplary and punitive damages.

According to him:

There is no established legal or political precedent for what the EFCC is currently doing to our client. How many former First Ladies in Nigeria have received the Patience Goodluck Jonathan Treatment (PGJT) to have warranted the EFCC to engage in the effrontery to freeze our clients accounts and subject her to public opprobrium, ridicule and disgrace? This nonsense must stop forthwith.

Our client is a respected senior citizen of international repute, a retired Permanent Secretary and the immediate past First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Our Client is a law-abiding citizen who has never or at all been the subject of any criminal and/or financial investigation, whether at home or abroad. Accordingly, she has not been found guilty of any criminal conduct throughout a sparkling public service career spanning over 35 years.

During the 5 years our client served as First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria between May, 2010 and May, 2015; she was the Initiator/Founder of the A. ARUERA WOMEN FOUNDATION as well as the WOMEN FOR CHANGE INITIATIVE; both of which Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) substantially contributed to the 35 per cent affirmative action for women in the country. Our Client is the recipient of numerous local and international awards in recognition of her untiring commitment towards uplifting the living standard of women, children and the aged in Nigeria.

Sir, it is against this sterling and meritorious background of our client that we most respectfully, write to draw your attention to the numerous breaches of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (Ratification and Enforcement) Act 2004 committed by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in cause of the Commissions illegal and unlawful investigation of our client for alleged money laundering. These investigations have reportedly led to the freeze of our clients accounts and led to untold consequences to our clients health and wellbeing.

The EFCC must realize that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (Establishment) Act 2004 is inferior in content and quality to both the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (As amended) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, 2004.
The death on Monday of Mike Fellows, a Libertarian candidate for Montana's U.S. House seat, has triggered a scramble in county election offices to determine how best to update the general election ballots.

In Yellowstone County, the states largest county, officials are considering re-printing about 90,000 ballots at an estimated cost of $30,000.

Chief Deputy County Attorney Dan Schwarz said Wednesday the issue will be discussed with county commissioners Monday.

Yellowstone Countys general election ballots are being printed and list Fellows as the Libertarian Party candidate in the House race.

Fellows, 59, of Missoula, died in a two-vehicle crash near Potomac on Monday night. He had participated in a Monday night forum hosted by Seeley Lake Community Council.

Rick Breckenridge of Proctor was selected Wednesday as Fellows' replacement on the ballot. Breckenridge will take on incumbent Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Republican, and Denise Juneau, a Democrat.

Fellows chaired the Montana Libertarian Party and was on the board of the Libertarian National Committee. He was a frequent but unsuccessful candidate. Fellows ran for office every other year since 1996, when he ran for the Montana House. He ran for the U.S. House in 1998, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010; for Secretary of State in 2000 and for the clerk of the Montana Supreme Court in 2012.

Schwarz said he and Bret Rutherford, the countys election administrator, participated in a conference call with the Montana Secretary of States office and other county election officials late Tuesday afternoon to discuss what to do about the ballots.

Rutherford was out of the office Wednesday.

There were a number of scenarios discussed on how to address the situation, Schwarz said. The consensus was to simply reprint the ballots, he said.

Yellowstone County believes the prudent response is to reprint the ballots to avoid legal problems down the road, Schwarz said.

Secretary of State Linda McCulloch was unavailable for comment on Wednesday.

Schwarz said Yellowstone County is in a better position to reprint ballots than other counties because its election office keeps a surplus of ballot paper stock on hand for emergencies.

Its still going to be expensive and not be easy, Schwarz said.

Other counties may not have a surplus of ballot paper readily available, he said.

In addition, Yellowstone County already has mailed about 350 ballots to voters serving in the military, he said. The county is working on how to address the situation with the military ballots, Schwarz said.

Voter registration for the Nov. 8 general election closes on Oct. 11 and late, in-person registration begins on Oct. 12. Absentee ballots are to be mailed on Oct. 14.
This 0.96 troy ounce gold nugget is also a product of the Bering Sea in Alaska.

The Gold Basin in the Mojave Desert in Arizona produced this 0.92 troy ounce gold nugget. Gold Basin is a popular location for place gold prospecting.

Stanton, Ariz., is the location where this 1.77 ounce gold nugget was discovered.

This 8.07 troy ounce gold nugget cluster was found at Ladies Canyon near Downieville, Calif.

The Oct. 1 session of Holabird Western Americana's three-day sale Sept. 30 through Oct. 2 includes numerous gold nuggets discovered in locations around the United States.

Don't have the time or patience to prospect for gold on your own but still want the thrill of owning the hoped for result?

Holabird Western Americana is offering multiple lots of gold nuggets, found in locations around the United States, during the Oct. 1 session of its three-day sale Sept. 30 to Oct. 2.

Nugget cluster

An 8.07-troy-ounce cluster of gold nuggets is offered with an estimate of $13,000 to $18,500. The largest nugget in the cluster measures 0.5 millimeter by 1.8 millimeters by 1.8 millmeters.

The cluster was found at Ladies Canyon near Downieville, Calif.

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Arizona find

A 1.77-ounce nugget from a location near Stanton, Ariz., is offered with an estimate of $2,900 to $4,000.

The nugget measures 1 millimeter by 3.7 millimeters by 3.1 millimeters.

Gold Basin discovery

Gold Basin, Ariz., yielded a 0.92-ounce nugget that is offered with an estimate of $1,500 to $1,900.

The nugget measures 1 millimeter by 4.5 millimeters by 1.9 millimeters.

According to the auction lot description, "Gold Basin is a popular placer gold spot in Mohave County, Arizona. The placers in the Gold Basin region have produced both coarse and fine gold. While nuggets in the four to five ounce range are about the maximum that are found, these are rare. Still, there are a good number of nuggets over an ounce that have been found in this area."

North to Alaska

The 49th state yielded a 1.37-ounce nugget measuring 0.8 millimeter by 3.6 millimeters by 2.8 millimeters. The nugget, with an estimate of $2,200 to $4,000, is identified as having been discovered in the Bering Sea.

The Bering Sea also yielded a 0.96-ounce gold nugget with small amounts of quartz showing. Measuring 1.5 millimeters by 3.8 millimeters by 1.8 millimeters, the nugget is offered with an estimate of $1,600 to $2,000.

Hand-made silver ingot

Offered with an estimate of $150 to $300 is a 1907 hand-made 25-millimeter round silver ingot from Central City, Gilpin County, in Colorado.

The ingot is stamped on one side in four lines, FINE / .999 / SILVER / 1907. On the other side is stamped in two lines the weight designated as 6 DWT / 3GR.
BOZEMAN  A mining company planning to build a copper mine near a Smith River tributary has resubmitted its application after state environmental officials said the previous version was insufficient.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported that Tintina Resources Inc. resent its application to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality after the previous version was rejected six months ago.

The mine would be located on private land about a mile from Sheep Creek, which feeds into the popular Smith River.

Conservationists and fly-fishing organizations are concerned the mine will harm the river and its trout fishery.

Tintina CEO John Shanahan said in a news release that the new application is more comprehensive.

DEQ public policy director Kristi Ponozzo says the agency will review the new application over the next 30 days and decide whether all issues have been resolved.
BUTTE  The Montana Standard newspaper wants a judge to open up negotiations on the Butte Hill Superfund cleanup after 14 years, saying the public and press have a right to keep a watchful eye on the workings of government.

The Standard and the Silver Bow Creek Headwaters Coalition filed papers in federal court in Butte on Tuesday seeking permission to intervene in a case between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Atlantic Richfield Co. over cleanup issues left from decades of mine pollution.

If U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon grants the initial request, The Standard and its partner, the Headwaters Coalition, could then formally argue that federal court orders to keep the talks secret block public access to otherwise public information.

The Superfund litigation, which will decide long-term, multimillion-dollar cleanup responsibilities for pollution on the Butte Hill, has dragged on for more than 20 years. The current "consent decree" talks now involve the EPA, ARCO, two state agencies and Butte-Silver Bow County.

There are few matters more important to the people of Butte and Silver Bow County than the environmental cleanup of the Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site  including the manner in which that cleanup is conducted and whether the cleanup proposals will in fact ensure a clean and restored Silver Bow Creek, a brief in support of the motion says.

In filing, The Standard is joined by the Silver Bow Creek Headwaters Coalition led by Buttes Fritz Daily, Ron Davis and Sister Mary Jo McDonald.

The coalition won a lawsuit against the state in 2015 when a state judge ruled that Silver Bow Creek was the official name of the channel running through the center of Butte. They say that bolsters their quest to make the channel a clean, free-flowing creek someday.

The Montana Standard and the Headwaters Coalition is represented in the matter by attorney Jim Goetz  who also represented the coalition in their victory last year.

The request to intervene in the suit is aimed just at the secret talks, not the underlying disputes over pollution matters.

At the Montana Standard we believe that when three levels of government  state, federal and local  are holding talks that will affect life in Butte for generations, the public is entitled to know whats going on in real time, Standard Editor David McCumber said Tuesday.

Gov. Steve Bullock also weighed in, saying, Obviously, well do what the judge tells us, but I like sunshine.

Chief Executive Matt Vincent voiced similar sentiments.

"These meetings have been closed for over 14 years, and even though were making progress now, we still dont have a consent decree. What harm could a little sunlight possibly do?"

ARCO declined comment late Tuesday. The Montana Standard also sought and was awaiting comment from the EPA.

The request comes a day after Bullock withdrew the state from consent-decree negotiations  at least temporarily  because BP/ARCO has refused to permit the state to dump polluted Parrot smelter mine tailings near the Berkeley Pit. Bullock wanted removal of the tailings to start this year.

Vincent also declined to participate in another round of Superfund talks Monday, saying no tangible progress could be made without the state at the table.

In its filing Tuesday, the Standard said Haddons initial order in August 2002 was granted through a single motion by the EPA that was unopposed and contained no substantive reasons why talks should be confidential. The state of Montana agreed to the confidentiality provisions.

ARCO, which inherited the pollution problems after buying the Anaconda Co. in 1977, asked in December 2003 that a provision be added saying communications during negotiations should be kept confidential after the talks were over. The judge granted that request.

Butte-Silver Bow agreed to the terms in November 2004, and just this past June, the state and county denied open-records and open-meeting requests by The Standard. They said the confidentiality order prevented them from complying with Montana access laws.

In its filing, The Standard says courts routinely find motions to intervene timely regardless of time that has passed  in this case 14 years  since an order was made. It says the EPA and ARCO had no right to bargain away the publics rights to know about government dealings that affect Montana.

Some officials have suggested privately in recent months that talks should be confidential because it is the only way negotiators can be frank and reach agreements similar to those on other Superfund matters. But The Montana Standard has rejected that thinking for months.

Does anybody believe that this process could have been any more tortured and less effective if it had been carried out in public? the newspaper asked in a July 24 editorial.
The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form
HELENA  A hearing on a request from Disability Rights Montana to release two patients held in an intensive treatment unit at the state hospital into the general population has been continued to December.

Helena District Court Judge Kathy Seeley said the patients will continue to live in long-term isolation units in the meantime. In August, four people living at Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs filed a lawsuit alleging they were held in physical restraints for longer than state law allows and kept in isolation for almost 24 hours a day. DRM had asked for the patients to be immediately moved out of isolation before a jury trial could be held. They also asked for damages.

"We're obviously very disappointed we have to wait until December when we have people who are in seclusion 23 hours a day," said Bernadette Franks-Ongoy, executive director of DRM.

Seeley said if asked for a decision from the bench Tuesday, she could not grant the injunction.

I have not heard any testimony tailored to these patients as to what we are supposed to do, she said. And I am not going to direct that they just be placed on the unit, in the regular unit.

Curt Drake, a Helena attorney who is representing the state hospital and employees named in the suit, said there wasnt enough information for Seeley to grant the injunction Tuesday.

It is not safe now in the judgment of people who work with them every day, he said.

Bridgitt Erickson, staff attorney for DRM, called the living conditions of the patients who brought the lawsuit not appropriate.
Family starts over after losing home, pets in Wooldridge fire

The McComb family called Wooldridge home before losing everything material to wildfire. What hurt the most was the loss of their pet dog Olaf.
April 21, 2016 - Cars approach Memphis International Airport, which stepped up efforts to bring in new carriers after Delta Air Lines scaled back the passenger hub. While Memphis now has at least one-stop service to almost all the cities it was connected to by the old hub, many Mid-South cities are still struggling to maintain daily air service to Memphis.

(Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Wayne Risher of The Commercial Appeal

A small passenger airline that tried to connect Mid-South cities and Memphis after Delta Air Lines closed the local hub has filed for bankruptcy.

SeaPort Airlines said it has ceased Memphis operations and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The Portland, Oregon-based carrier offered passenger service to Harrison and Hot Springs, Arkansas, out of Memphis International Airports Signature Flight Support.

Memphis airport officials said they would work with affected cities to maintain air connections to Memphis and the Mid-South.

Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy code covers the liquidation of assets. A judge Tuesday ordered the liquidation. In February, SeaPort had filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which let it stay in business while a plan was drafted to repay creditors.

Early in 2015, SeaPort expanded rapidly to 26 cities in 10 states including Jackson, Tennessee; Greenville, Mississippi; Tupelo, Mississippi; and Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The commuter line stepped in after Delta bought Minnesota-based Northwest Airlines in 2008 and began scaling back service in favor of Delta's massive operation in Atlanta.

Northwest had operated a network of feeder flights between Mid-South cities and Memphis, where more than 300 daily departures made Memphis International the carrier's southern hub.

By March 2015, however, SeaPort had asked U.S. regulators to be let out of the Essential Air Service subsidy contract covering service to Greenville.

At the time, SeaPort marketing director Claire James cited a pilot shortage, telling the Greenville Delta Democrat newspaper the airline employed too few pilots to maintain the original service plan.

The Oregonian newspaper reported SeaPort operated five leased aircraft  two based in Portland, Oregon, and three in Memphis. According to the newspaper, the carrier sought permission from the court to complete operations Tuesday so each plane would be at its home base when it entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings.
July 9, 2015 - JoAnne Hupt (left) and Susan Hillker relax by the pool outside the Crowne Plaza Memphis Downtown on Second Street. The two traveled to Memphis for the first time from Detroit to visit Graceland and other Memphis attractions. (Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Ted Evanoff of The Commercial Appeal

Crowne Plaza Memphis Downtowns new owners have completed a $7 million renovation.

Officials at the 230-room hotel released a statement Wednesday saying each room received new carpet, window treatments, fresh paint, 43-inch flat screen televisions, lounge chairs, end tables, a refrigerator and a safe. Ninth and 10th-floor rooms received 49-inch televisions, upgraded bathroom vanity mirrors and additional bathroom, hallway and elevator wall and floor treatments.

The hotel, managed by Chesapeake Hospitality of Greenbelt, Maryland, advertises it is close to Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid, Beale Street, the Memphis Cook Convention Center and St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital.

In 2015, Nagib Lakhani of ReMax Hospitality Consulting Services Inc. led a private equity groups $12.6 purchase of the hotel, once named the Brownestone, from a bank. The buyers included members of the Rashid family, known in Memphis for playing a key role in the original fundraising for St. Jude, a 5,000-employee cancer research center.

Near the hotel, owners of the 600-room Sheraton Hotel completed a $7 million renovation just before Bass Pro opened its tourist attraction last year. St. Jude now plans a $1.2 billion expansion and is considering a redevelopment plan for the adjoining Pinch District.
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By Katie Fretland of The Commercial Appeal

Black Lives Matter activist Pamela Moses was walking down the middle of Washington Avenue yelling for help and saying "I have my hands up, don't shoot" before authorities detained her and charged her with inciting to "riot," records show.

Moses, 38, was arraigned this week. She is due back in court Oct. 25.

"To me, it's a bogus charge," said activist Keedran "TNT" Franklin.

According to an affidavit of complaint, a deputy responded around 10:05 a.m. Friday to a disorderly conduct report at the courthouse at 140 Adams. Other law enforcement officers, according to the document, were responding to a "possible trespassing" at the same location.

Field commanders and a deputy were advised that Moses entered the courthouse and was in front of chancery courtroom 3 without an escort "in violation of a court order" that requires an escort for her in "any county courthouses."

Deputies tried to detain Moses, who according to the affidavit refused to provide identification and said she was leaving.

A sergeant said, "Stop, and give me your identification because a report has to be taken."

Moses, according to the document, walked down Washington yelling,"Y'all come help me. They're trying to kill me."

She raised her hands in the air saying not to shoot.

Deputies placed handcuffs on her and the affidavit charges that she became "even more vocal" and "uncooperative."

About 10 to 15 people were present at B.B. King and Washington, and Moses yelled to passersby for help. According to the affidavit she "stated that she was part of the Black Lives Matter movement."

The affidavit says she lay on the ground and tried to stop deputies from putting her in a patrol car, and while inside the car, authorities confiscated her cell phone she tried to use.

Moses was initially charged with disorderly conduct, criminal trespass and inciting to riot.

The charges were later amended, deleting the criminal trespass charge and replacing it with resisting official detention.

According to the Tennessee law she is charged under, "a person commits an offense who incites or urges three or more persons to create or engage in a riot."

"They only use it to hold people and look for other charges, if you're a real asset to the community or the movement," Franklin said. "Usually when they do that, they're going through activists' phones, kind of probing into their lives. To me it's not a valid charge."

This story will be updated.
SHARE Lance Sanderson (Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal)

By Clay Bailey of The Commercial Appeal

A Christian Brothers High senior prohibited from bringing a same-sex date to a school dance last year filed suit Tuesday seeking $1 million from the school on several grounds, including breach of contract and emotional distress.

The suit, filed in Circuit Court, states Lance Sanderson "has been caused to suffer severe injuries and damages which include, but are not limited to disability, past and future emotional distress, past and future medical expenses and personal care services; and these damages are either permanent or continuing ..."

In September 2015, Sanderson was the center of a dispute when he asked to bring a male student from another school as his date to the CBHS Homecoming Dance. The lawsuit states Sanderson previously acknowledged to school officials that he is gay.

Sanderson's parents  Michael Sanderson and Stephanie Winkler  said they signed a contract in February 2015 for their son to attend CBHS as a senior in the 2015-16 school year and made all payments for him to attend. They contend the school "failed to comply with the terms of the agreement by failing to provide Lance with an education during his senior year and failed to allow him to attend school during the majority of his senior year."

According to the lawsuit, Sanderson told Chris Fay, the school's principal, during the 2012-13 school year that he is gay. The complaint states that  at that time  Fay advised Sanderson not to share his sexual orientation with anyone else, adding the principal "acted as if he were ashamed, embarrassed and disapproving of Lance's sexual orientation ..."

Later, according to Sanderson's complaint, Fay made "a number of inappropriate, false and derogatory statements to Lance about gay people."

After the school refused to allow Sanderson to bring a male date to the dance, Sanderson posted the decision on social media. As part of the school's reaction to the controversy surrounding the student and his posting of the school's decision regarding him bringing a male date, Sanderson was sent home the following week.

According to the lawsuit, filed by Howard Manis, the parents later met with the school's counsel and were told Sanderson had two options  either be home-schooled or attend another school.

"There was no discussion nor option for Lance to return to CBHS," the lawsuit states. "It was made clear to the (parents) that Lance was not allowed to return to CBHS."

However, during fall break the parents were led to believe Sanderson was not expelled or suspended from school and could return.

The student returned on Oct. 8, 2015, but contends he was met with derogatory comments from other students and others and "made to feel unwelcome."

He eventually completed his remaining course work online away from campus and received his diploma from CBHS earlier this year.

Efforts to reach Fay, the school's principal, by email and telephone, were unsuccessful Tuesday evening.
September 20, 2016 - State Sen. Larry Miller (left) and Memphis City Councilman Berlin Boyd chat after a press conference at City Hall where members of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators campaigned for the pot decriminalization ordinance. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Ryan Poe and Clay Bailey of The Commercial Appeal

Nashville on Tuesday became the first city in Tennessee to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, but some state lawmakers hope the city of Memphis could become the second in two weeks.

The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted 35-3 on final reading Tuesday night to allow police officers to either issue a civil citation punishable by a $50 fine or community service, or charge someone under the state's criminal law, for possession of a half-ounce or less or marijuana. Under state law, violators are charged with a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 and up to a year in jail.

Earlier in the day, members of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators arrived in Memphis to campaign around the city and at City Council for a similar ordinance that received the second of three readings Tuesday before a final vote as early as Oct. 4. The ordinance is sponsored by council member Berlin Boyd.

Rep. Brenda Gilmore, D-Nashville, said the caucus she presides over as chairwoman feels the criminal justice system across the state "has gotten out of whack." The caucus isn't advocating for legalizing marijuana, she emphasized, but is instead offering a second chance for low-income violators to avoid a cycle of a criminal justice system they perceive as discriminatory to African-Americans.

State Sen. Lee Harris, D-Memphis, said criminal records for African-Americans associated with small amounts of marijuana thwart the future of a minority middle class.

"In the city of Memphis one of the things we lack is an African-American middle class," Harris said, later adding: "This is a cycle that we've got try to get out of if we're going to create an African-American middle class."

In a press conference in City Hall, caucus members questioned whether state Rep. William Lamberth, R-Cottontown, could follow through on a threat to sponsor a bill that would halt state highway funds for cities that do not enforce criminal penalties outlined in state law, like in the case of the marijuana ordinances. The state budgeted $129.1 million in highway funds for Shelby County and $119.5 million for Davidson County.

But much of that money is from federal sources, complicating any attempts to block funding, said Harris, who said Lamberth's criticism could be a "temper tantrum."

"This is a Shelby County issue," said state Rep. Larry Miller, D-Memphis. "I think we have a better understanding of what we're doing here."

State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, D-Memphis, said harsh marijuana laws distract from the real issues cities face, tying up officers with small arrests when they should be on the streets deterring violent crime.

Referencing higher marijuana arrest rates for black youth, state Rep. Johnnie Turner, D-Memphis, said a double standard in law enforcement has persisted too long, recalling a time when the parent of a young white offender was called to come get him rather than authorities charging the youth after a stolen car incident.

"That motivated me more than almost any incident about the inequity in the enforcement of law," Turner said. "If that had been a black boy. ... It was just not fair."

Some opponents have argued that taking a more lenient approach to punishment of marijuana possession could contribute to larger problems. They contend marijuana is a gateway to other, stronger drugs.

State Rep. G.A. Hardaway, D-Memphis, perceives the problem differently.

"I'd say the gateway we need to be conscious of is one we already have," Hardaway said. "Having these heavy penalties (is) a gateway to poverty, the gateway to illiteracy, the gateway to homelessness. That's what's really going to be your gateway to increased drug use."

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said he wants to see more research and hear from drug courts before making a final decision on whether to support the ordinance.

Boyd said he doesn't plan on presenting more research from experts to try and convince the administration.

And he warned council members that if they don't vote for the ordinance, the story he'll tell constituents is "these council members feel your lives don't matter."
September 13, 2016 - A memorial grows at the burned home on James at Severson where the deaths of 10 victims marks the deadliest fire in the city in a century, fire officials said. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

By Jennifer Pignolet of The Commercial Appeal

Shelby County Schools will honor the children who died in the Sept. 12 house fire with a plaque on the playground where four of the seven attended school.

Board member Billy Orgel made the suggestion during a work session Tuesday night, and the idea became a plan nearly instantaneously.

"I wonder if we can maybe do something for the memory of those kids," Orgel said during a discussion of a new playground surface that will be added at Cummings Elementary. A plaque would be there forever, he said, and wouldn't cost much.

"I think it's an excellent idea," Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said, and immediately directed staff members to make it happen.

Three adults and seven children died in the fire on Severson Avenue in South Memphis: LaKisha Ward, 27; Carol Collier, 56; Eloise Futrell, 61; and Futrell's seven grandchildren: Angel Mitchell, 17; Cameron Hollingsworth, 10; Ernest Jett III, 9; Diamond Jett, 8; Alonzo Ward, 7; Kiera Jett, 5 and Precious Rose Jett, 2.

Hopson said he has encouraged his staff to donate to funds set up for the families affected by the early-morning fire, which trapped everyone who was living in the tiny house.

"It just reminds us of the poverty that so many of our students live in," Hopson said.

An account has been established at First Tennessee Bank in the family's name to help pay for funeral services. To donate, contact First Tennessee Bank.
Germantown Aldermen Rocky Janda, Forrest Owens and David Klevan appeared at a candidates' forum Tuesday night. (Daniel Connolly/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Daniel Connolly of The Commercial Appeal

The only two challengers seeking seats on Germantown's Board of Mayor and Aldermen were not at a candidates' forum Tuesday night, and they're complaining about the way the forum was set up.

A forum organizer said no harm was meant and he regrets any inconvenience.

The forum, at Germantown City Hall, was organized by the Leadership Germantown Alumni Association and played out in a one-sided fashion as incumbents presented their platforms.

Candidate David Nischwitz, who's challenging Position 5 Alderman Rocky Janda, said the organizer invited him on short notice Sept. 9. He said he could not attend because he was scheduled to leave town for a business meeting.

"I find it hard to believe that the soonest you could communicate this was less than two weeks before the actual event," Nischwitz said by phone from Houston.

He said an organizer proposed videoconferencing or having a representative speak for him, but he thought both options impractical.

Candidate Dean Massey, who is challenging Position 3 Alderman David Klevan, said in an email he pulled out of the forum in solidarity with Nischwitz.

Russell Johnson, an attorney and a lead organizer of the forum, said no ill will was meant.

"I truly regret any of the candidates not being able to attend," Johnson said.

One reason for the relatively late notice was a delay in lining up emcees, Johnson said.

Janda and Klevan spoke alongside Alderman Forrest Owens, who has no opposition. The three gave similar answers to questions on civic issues such as taxation and fire and police services.

Klevan expressed "deep disappointment" with his opponent's absence. "I felt like we came here to play a Super Bowl and we had a big practice." He said he's ready to debate anytime.
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By Natalie Neysa Alund, USA TODAY NETWORK  Tennessee

The Coffee County Sheriff's Office is investigating a report of a teenager being attacked by a clown, a department spokesman said Wednesday.

According to Sheriff's Office spokesman Lucky Knott, the teen, whose age is being withheld, reported told police that on Monday night, a man dressed in a red hoodie and a clown mask assaulted him in Summittville.

The juvenile also said he swung at the clown and was cut by a knife.

Deputies responded to the area but did not find anyone matching the clown description.

The incident comes on the heels of recent claims concerning scary clowns frightening people have been reported by people around the country, Knott said.

Knott said the department will investigate the accuracy of the report.

People in Tennessee carry guns and somebody jumping out and scarring someone is subject to getting shot," Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves said Wednesday.

Graves said anyone found scaring people and hurting people will be arrested and said anyone who files false report can be prosecuted.

The sheriff, on Wednesday, was asking residents to avoid dressing up like a clown for Halloween next month.

"People should think seriously about not being a clown this holiday," Graves said.
Democratic Sen. Reginald Tate of Memphis speaks during a Senate Education Committee hearing on affirmative action in public colleges and universities in Nashville, Tenn., on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013. (AP Photo/Erik Schelzig)

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For textbook examples of the sense of entitlement that can make some public officials forget whom they work for, one couldn't do better than the responses some Tennessee legislators gave to questions about a European junket in 2011.

Consider the response of state Sen. Reginald Tate of Memphis, the only Democrat among six lawmakers on the trip: "I don't have any problems with it," Tate told The Commercial Appeal reporter Jody Callahan during a telephone interview this week. "Hurry up and finish, because you're getting on my nerves now."

Or how about former state Rep. Joe Carr, a Lascassas Republican, when he was asked if he had any concerns that the five-day trip was financed by a tea party poobah who has been encouraging anti-Muslim sentiment among state legislators: "I don't give a rat's ass," he replied.

It's not hard to hear a sense of disappointment in those remarks by a couple of politicians who probably assumed after five years that they would never have to answer questions about a questionable gift. Suddenly, along come pesky reporters asking for explanations, and now the thing is going public.

It's not that anything illegal took place. The money for the jaunt, ostensibly to educate the lawmakers about the threat of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic radicals, came from someone who's not a registered lobbyist and therefore didn't have to be reported.

Tate said the trip produced no legislation. "I don't think I brought back (anything) that I put into effect as legislation as far as it relates to Islam," he said. All six lawmakers on the trip, however, have introduced or supported what some have labeled anti-Islamic legislation.

The trip, which included stops in London, Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam, only came to light because reporters encountered it during an investigation of the finances of state Rep. Jeremy Durham, who was expelled last week from the General Assembly for sexual misconduct.

Durham invested campaign funds in the company of Republican donor Andy Miller, whose Tennessee Freedom Coalition, labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, organizes events that are designed to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. The group spearheaded opposition to the development of an Islamic center in Murfreesboro.

Lawmakers on the trip described it as a useful opportunity to find how European cities are coping with terrorism.

"I wish that we would've had more room and opportunity for more lawmakers to see what we saw," said Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro.

What the public might wish for is a change in the financial reporting requirements for legislators that would prevent the public from being kept in the dark about such a trip for such a long time.

A truly transparent system would reveal who is traveling where at whose expense  for educational purposes or anything else.
Edward Stanton III

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By Edward L. Stanton III, Special to Viewpoint

Day in and day out, heroin is ruining lives and ravaging communities.

The rising popularity of this potent and illegal drug has had catastrophic effects nationwide. In 2007, there were 2,400 heroin-related deaths in the U.S. By 2014, that number grew to more than 10,000  an increase of 340 percent.

Often, prescription opioids serve as a gateway to heroin use. These pills, created for medical use, can have devastating effects when consumed recreationally.

Among new heroin users, four out of five report previously abusing prescription opioids before using heroin. More than 60 percent of the 47,000-plus drug-related deaths in 2014 were attributed to heroin or prescription opioid abuse.

Maintaining a prescription drug addiction can be costly. A single pill can cost as much as $60. However, people can buy a bag of heroin  significantly more potent than a prescription pill  for a fraction of the cost.

Prescription opioid abuse and heroin use cut across socioeconomic lines. Users range from the inner-city to the suburbs, blue collar to white collar, preteens to teens, college students to middle-aged adults and senior citizens.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Tennessee takes this threat extremely seriously. With our law enforcement partners, we remain committed to bringing to justice those who supply and distribute these lethal substances.

In August alone, the U.S. Attorney's Office has prosecuted multiple individuals engaged in heroin and prescription opioid distribution. Among them were an 11-member heroin trafficking organization responsible for moving massive amounts of the drug from Texas to Memphis for distribution. The group was collectively sentenced to more than 64 years in federal prison.

Further, two Memphis men engaged in the distribution of heroin, oxycodone and other controlled substances collectively received more than 20 years in federal prison for their criminal activity.

The U.S. Attorney's Office is also ramping up its prevention efforts regarding heroin and prescription opioids. Our office has received funding from the Gulf Coast High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Program to implement a federal initiative that targets criminal activity involving heroin and prescription opioids.

In collaboration with the Shelby County District Attorney General's Office, we will use the HIDTA funding to hire a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney and support staff member to prosecute heroin and opioid cases.

Due to the startling effects of prescription opioid abuse and heroin use nationwide, the Department of Justice has launched a National Heroin & Opioid Awareness Week. During the initiative, which began Monday and runs through Friday, our office will help educate the public on the adverse impact prescription opioids and heroin are having on the community.

We also are highlighting the efforts by law enforcement to combat this problem through various initiatives, state and federal prosecutions, and community outreach endeavors.

One effort already in place that has helped suppress pharmaceutical-controlled substance abuse and distribution nationwide is the DEA's National Take-Back Initiative. Each year, the U.S. Attorney's Office and other law enforcement agencies participate in Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, which gives citizens the opportunity to dispose of unused, unwanted and expired prescription drugs. Millions of pounds of prescription drugs have been collected and disposed of since the Take-Back's inception.

The abuse of heroin and prescription opioids constitutes two of the greatest public safety and public health epidemics of our time.

Through criminal prosecutions, collaborative initiatives with our law enforcement and public health partners, and community engagement, the U.S. Attorney's Office will remain steadfast in mitigating the wrath of these drugs  restoring our communities and saving lives in the process.

Edward L. Stanton III is U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee.
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By Josh Rogin

Senior executives from a major U.S. defense contractor toured China last month as part of their search for a foreign company to build a dry dock for U.S. Navy ships, with the help of the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The trip raised eyebrows both inside the Pentagon and among experts who don't believe a Chinese company should be involved in U.S. military-related projects.

The company, Ingalls Shipbuilding, is a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, which advertises itself as "America's largest military shipbuilding company" and has built more U.S. Navy ships than any other military shipbuilder. Ingalls is based in Mississippi. The problem is, it needs a new dry dock to build ships there and says there are no American companies that can do it. So Ingalls is looking abroad for help.

Last month, senior Ingalls executives traveled to China for two weeks to visit several different ports. They also met with officials at the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, a meeting facilitated by a very powerful Mississippi lawmaker.

"The staff of Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, has requested that Consulate Shanghai meet with a Mississippi constituent company Ingalls Shipbuilding," wrote an official from the State Department's legislative affairs bureau in a July 19 email I obtained. "The constituent is looking for a new Chinese vendor to build a new drydock for their shipbuilding company. They would like advice from the Consulate to walk them through how to do business in China."

Ingalls executives met with U.S. officials in Shanghai, including Cameron Werker, the principal commercial officer at the consulate. In a follow-up email, Werker said Ingalls executives were planning to visit seven ports in China. The company has already conducted technical evaluations of proposals, and "China is the leading candidate," Werker wrote. The other candidates are South Korea and Japan.

Ingalls' only client is the U.S. Navy, according to Werker. He wrote that the plan is to build ships to about 50,000 tons in Mississippi and then float them out to the dry dock for adding another 20,000 tons of exterior work. The dock would then be used for "launch and retrieve."

After the Ingalls executives left China, the defense liaison officer in Shanghai, Steve Angel, alerted the Pentagon, the Navy and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing about the trip.

"Ingalls Shipbuilding was here looking at Chinese shipbuilding companies to build a dry dock for USN ship construction," Angel wrote. "Lobbied for by a U.S. Senator (Cochran). Not sure what Big Navy's or OSD's awareness are, but wanted to flag this for awareness."

Larry Ferguson, China country director for the Office of the Secretary of Defense's policy shop, responded to Angel's email: "I think it's fair to say we'll want to do some fact finding."

The Pentagon declined to comment about whether it has concerns about a Chinese shipbuilding company potentially building a dry dock that will then be used to build and maintain U.S. Navy ships.

"As many other shipyards in America, including those that also build Navy ships, have done in the last decade when needing to replace a large dry dock, Ingalls Shipbuilding is looking across the world market for a solution," said Bill Glenn, a spokesman for Ingalls. "Since no decision has been made, it is premature to discuss this effort further."

Chris Gallegos, a spokesman for Cochran, told me that the senator's office didn't actually lobby for Ingalls to get meetings with U.S. officials in China, but only forwarded a request for a point of contact at the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai from Ingalls to the State Department.

As for whether there is a security concern about having a Chinese company help build U.S. Navy ships, Gallegos said, "Senator Cochran expects all security precautions to be in place to protect U.S. national security."

According to its public filings, Huntington Ingalls spent $4.8 million on lobbying in 2015. One of Huntington Ingalls's in-house lobbyists, Carolyn Apostolou, spent 26 years as a professional staffer on the Senate Appropriations Committee before joining Huntington Ingalls in 2013, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' Open Secrets project. Gallegos said Ingalls employees have also supported Cochran financially.

"Ingalls is the single largest private employer in Mississippi. Given Senator Cochran's strong record of support for industry in Mississippi, I suspect many Ingalls employees have supported his campaigns," he said.

Some Asia experts believe that there's a real security risk in having a Chinese company build a dry dock for U.S. Navy ships because all large Chinese companies have deep ties to the Chinese government.

"Any time you have an entity like that working on U.S. military systems, common sense tells you there's likely a security risk," said Michael Auslin, Asia scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "We know that there are connections, we know there is influence, we know there is government assistance. The Chinese government will have the plans."

The Chinese government could use the project to implant surreptitious recording devices or other surveillance equipment near where sensitive U.S. Navy operations are ongoing, he said. U.S. intelligence agencies suspect that China uses projects of its largest telecom company, Huawei, as a means of spying on foreign countries.

Moreover, the Ingalls project would be a boon to the Chinese defense industry at the expense of the defense industry of U.S. allies, Auslin said. The money is essentially coming from the U.S. taxpayer because the U.S. government is Ingalls' only client, he said.

"Wouldn't it be better to go with an ally like Japan or South Korea?" Auslin said. "In an environment like this, you are basically subsidizing the Chinese defense sector. Is that something we want to do?"

It's a shame the United States can't handle 21st-century shipbuilding with its own domestic industry. But if U.S. defense contractors have to go abroad, they might want to think twice before subcontracting to America's biggest naval competitor. It's either a security risk or an economic subsidy that could better benefit an allied country. Either way, it's a bad idea.

Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of the Washington Post.
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By Noah Feldman

Plenty of local governments open their meetings with a quick, generic prayer from a member of the clergy. But is it different when the lawmakers themselves say "Let us pray" and then supplicate God to open everyone's heart to the message of Jesus Christ? Does that violate the Constitution?

In a significant defeat for religious liberty, a federal appeals court has upheld a continuous practice of sectarian, public prayer by the members of a North Carolina board of county commissioners. The dissenting judge, the distinguished conservative J. Harvie Wilkinson, said the "seat of government" in the case was made to resemble "a house of worship." The court's majority said it was just following Supreme Court precedent.

At the start of all the meetings of the Rowan County commissioners, one of the five  all of whom are Christians and have been as long as anyone can remember  invites those present stand for the invocation and the Pledge of Allegiance. The commissioners take turns, but each typically opens by saying "Let us pray" or "Please pray with me."

Then the commissioner assigned to that meeting offers a prayer that would be entirely normal and appropriate in any evangelical church.

One representative prayer quoted by the court went like this: "Let us pray. Holy Spirit, open our hearts to Christ's teachings, and enable us to spread his message amongst the people we know and love through the applying of the sacred words in our everyday lives. In Jesus's name I pray. Amen."

A federal district court in North Carolina struck down the prayer practice, concluding that among other constitutional problems, it impermissibly coerced residents attending the meetings into participating in prayer.

On Monday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the district court. It applied the controlling Supreme Court precedent, the 5-4 decision in the 2014 case, Town of Greece v. Galloway.

The Supreme Court held there that it is in principle permissible for legislative prayer to be sectarian. The government body in the case designated local clergy to offer prayers before town council meetings, and the record showed that although no non-Christian clergy had been denied, the prayers were normally Christian. The court also held, in a plurality opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, that residents weren't coerced to participate in the prayers.

The 4th Circuit majority held that the Rowan County commissioners weren't coercing residents to pray any more than the councilors in the town of Greece. But Judge Wilkinson, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan and when younger was frequently mentioned as a potential Republican Supreme Court nominee, strongly disagreed.

Wilkinson noted that the prayers, given by the legislators themselves, were "bordering at times on proselytization and exhortation." They were delivered by the legislators themselves to open meetings of what he called "our most basic unit of government." Wilkinson wrote that he had "seen nothing like" the Rowan County practice before. In effect, the place of government was turning into a church. "It cannot be right," the judge concluded.

Wilkinson is surely correct. It's true that if legislative prayer by clergy is permitted under the Town of Greece precedent, then logically there shouldn't be a bright-line rule against prayer by a legislature. It's also true that the Town of Greece case held  rightly in my view  that the Constitution doesn't require legislative prayers to be non-sectarian.

But the Constitution's establishment clause, from its founding until the present, has been interpreted to prohibit coerced participation in public prayer. The Founding Fathers understood very clearly that there was a long tradition of established churches requiring attendance at public prayers and sermons.

And anyone who wants to appear before the Rowan County board of commissioners has no choice but to attend the deeply and sincerely religious prayers that open its session. The prayers include in their language not only the commissioners themselves but also everybody who is present. There is no way to opt out of the prayer if you are standing there. The framers would have recognized this for exactly what it is: an establishment of the religious beliefs of the government.

Correctly interpreted and applied, Kennedy's plurality opinion in the Town of Greece case would recognize this. In that opinion, Kennedy called for a "fact sensitive" inquiry. And he said that legislative prayer could not permissibly be used to "proselytize."

Spreading the gospel is the very definition of proselytizing. That's what one commissioner was doing in a 2007 Christmas prayer when he said, "We'd like to thank you for the virgin birth, we'd like to thank you for the cross at Calvary, and we'd like to thank you for the resurrection. Because we do believe that there is only one way to salvation, and that is Jesus Christ."

There's a name for spreading the gospel in an official government setting: It's called an establishment of religion. The full 4th Circuit should rehear this case and reverse itself. If it doesn't, the Supreme Court should take the case and clarify that the Town of Greece precedent doesn't allow a legislative chamber to become a de facto church.

Bloomberg View columnist Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University.
GRAND FORKS -- More than anywhere else in the country, the youth of North Dakota are leaving the nest.

According to census data, a little more than 14 percent of the states population of millennials -- the generation between ages 18 and 34 -- are living at home with their parents. Thats less than half the national average of about 33 percent, and the lowest share to be found in the U.S., where youth as a whole have been gravitating back to the childhood home since the turn of the century. In 2000, about 23 percent of people in the same age range were rooming with Mom and Dad.

Beyond the state image of rugged independence, there may be other factors at play in the launch of North Dakotas young people. Despite a downturn in commodity prices, the state still has a low unemployment rate. With more people in jobs, even younger workers can earn enough money to secure their own housing.

Keith Reitmeier, eastern region director for Job Service North Dakota, said the job market remains strong in the area under his jurisdiction. To demonstrate that, he pointed to high participation rates among employers in job fairs scheduled for Thursday in Grand Forks and next week in Fargo.

We have 70 local employers signed up, Reitmeier said. For Fargo next week, theyll probably have 90 or so. It just shows theres demand, and a lot of the times at these job fairs, its more of the entry-level positions that employees are looking to fill.

Despite layoffs in the energy and agricultural sectors, both areas which Reitmeier described as a little soft lately, he said employment has been fairly steady on the whole. A strong state economy benefited younger workers along with more experienced hands, he added, which could contribute to a financial ability to leave the childhood home for greener pastures.

Affordable housing also likely plays a role in getting millennials into their own places.

Brandon Baumbach, a business development projects coordinator at the Grand Forks Region Economic Development Corp., said the strong state economy created a major demand for apartment units over the last few years. He said developers building to meet that demand have added to the job market while building housing options that may appeal to younger renters.

Grand Forks housing might be less affordable than offerings elsewhere in the state, but Baumbach said the cost is offset by people getting paid well in the local economy.

At the same time, while local wages have increased, affordable rental options may not have kept pace. More than 49 percent of renters in the Grand Forks metro area may face a cost burden, meaning they pay more than a third of their income towards their housing.

Back on the career side, Baumbach said younger workers might see a boost as members of another generation -- the baby boomers -- begin to retire. Replacement from the younger ranks could provide opportunities for entrance and advancement for the millennial bracket, he said.

Baumbach serves on the board of the Greater Grand Forks Young Professionals and, at 28, is himself a millennial. He viewed the states trends of youthful housing independence as a boon for the North Dakota economy as a whole.

When theres less millennials hanging in their basements of their parents, thats a pretty good sign, he said. Theyre not only participating in the workforce, but theyre spending by either buying their own places or by renting. Its a functioning economy.
Security is a top priority at the Bank of Labor, but the financial institution updates its formal information security policy only once a year, maybe twice, regardless of what's happening in the ever-changing threat landscape.

That's not to say that the union bank ignores emerging threats such as new malware variants or phishing schemes, says Shaun Miller, the bank's information security officer. On the contrary, the organization, which has seven branches in the Kansas City, Kan., area plus an office in Washington, routinely tweaks its firewalls and intrusion-protection systems in response to new and active threats. To avoid fatiguing its 120 users, however, it refrains from formalizing new policies more frequently.

"The purpose of our policies is to be at a high level, not to cover every eventuality out there," says Miller. "We update procedures for tactical day-to-day stuff, but when it comes to our strategic direction on security going forward, we change our policies in a limited fashion so as to not overwhelm users."

[ Download the full report: IT Security's Looming Tipping Point ]

The Bank of Labor isn't alone. Given how fast the threat landscape changes, it can be difficult for a company to modify something as rigid as a corporate security model to keep pace with every new attack vector. In a recent survey of 287 U.S.-based IT and business professionals conducted by Computerworld, CIO and CSO, 33% of the respondents said that they work for organizations that have had the same model for information security management in place for five or more years. Meanwhile, 23% said their model had been in place for three to five years, 33% said one to three years, and just 11% said less than a year.
Larry Ellison made a splash this week when he said that Oracle would give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud. Then, the company outlined the pillar of the tech titan's infrastructure offering: beefy, bare-metal servers running in the cloud.

That's right: Oracle is going after a market that's full of virtualized workloads with servers that clock in with a whopping 36 physical CPU cores, according to Vice President of Engineering Don Johnson. Rather than starting from the low end of the infrastructure market and working its way up, Oracle is starting at the top and working its way down.

It's a move that's aimed at power-hungry enterprise workloads that require a lot of processing power, like Oracle Database or video rendering. The company will provision bare-metal servers when customers ask for them, and customers are billed by the hour for what they use.

The strategy has earned some early praise. "Smart and scalable choices seem to have been made throughout, Gartner Vice President Lydia Leong said in a note. However, I would characterize this early offering as [a] minimum viable product; it is the foundation of a future competitive offering, rather than a competitive offering today.

Oracle is making a play that takes advantage of a lot of its strengths in the cloud market. The company has access to the latest and greatest hardware, and it builds all the hardware it uses, said Deepak Patil, a vice president of product development at Oracle.

Oracles infrastructure moves are well-suited for the companys host of on-premises customers, many of which havent migrated their workloads to the cloud yet, said IDC analyst Al Hilwa.

They have especially not moved their large enterprise databases, which typically run on bare metal, and indeed, large VMs are likely needed to run the typical Oracle database, he said. Oracles focus on the high-end is a good fit for its customer-base but is predicated on the fact that the customers are willing and able to move.

One of the key architecture advantages for Oracle's bare-metal offering is the fact that the company is running network virtualization on the network layer, and not in the hypervisor. That allows the company to hand users the keys to a completely bare-metal server that Oracle isn't running software on, in addition to other network connectivity advantages.

Customers will be able to set up whatever operating system and hypervisor they want on top of the hardware, Johnson said Monday. Some configurations will require more work than others, but the guiding principle is that the servers will indeed be bare metal.

Having a bare-metal server also provides security benefits, Johnson said. Because Oracle handles all of the network virtualization work away from the bare-metal server, users have physical isolation of workloads from other cloud tenants and the provider itself, a feature exclusive to this cloud offering, he said.

"Not only do you not need to trust or worry about adjacent contents, you don't need to worry about the provider, he said. If there's zero trust, there's less risk.

One of the key issues that Oracle faces with its infrastructure rollout is scaling it up worldwide. Right now, the infrastructure offerings are live through the company's western U.S. region, based in Phoenix, Arizona. The company is aiming to have its eastern U.S. region running by December or January and expects to expand to two European regions by mid-2017.

The company seems committed to the infrastructure push, IDC Group Vice President Al Gillen said in an email. But scale will be an issue.

It is also a long-term commitment that won't be ready for anything beyond test deployments until a second zone becomes available in the U.S. market, he said.

Gartner's Leong had a different take, saying that scale isnt as much of an issue for the company as it is a problem with its quality of offering and a current lack of customers.

Oracle needs to build a compelling feature set, get customers, and then expand data center footprint, she said.

Oracle seems committed to the hard work of building out its offering, but executives at the company have different takes about the shape that takes. When asked Monday about the company's infrastructure spending, CEO Mark Hurd led with the companys SaaS business.

So, if we had a choice strategically, we wanted to nail the SaaS business," Hurd said. "Then the second thing that we wanted to make sure that we got right was the PaaS business. Youll see more investments into infrastructure, but remember, its riding behind the wake of the SaaS and PaaS infrastructure thats out there.

Johnson, meanwhile, led with the companys infrastructure commitment.

The key foundation of a cloud platform is infrastructure. Its IaaS, he said. It is the fundamental building block that makes everything else possible. [With] all the things that you require up the stack, either the foundational pieces give them to you, or you dont have them.

The two perspectives aren't incompatible; after all, those SaaS applications have to run on something. But differing views on Oracle's business have appeared: one a SaaS- and PaaS-first cloud that's building an infrastructure business, and another an infrastructure company using that expertise to operate SaaS and PaaS products.

It will be worth watching Oracle to see how that tension resolves and how cloud customers and competing providers react to the company's plans. Competitor Amazon is expected to release new high-performance compute instances later this year.
Samsung said Tuesday that 500,000 new Note7 devices have been shipped to U.S. carriers and retailers to replace the smartphones recalled because of a fire hazard.

The devices will be available for exchange starting Wednesday, the company said in an emailed statement.

In all, 1 million Note7 devices were recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission last Thursday after reports surfaced that Note7s could catch fire. The problem was related to problems with the phones' lithium-ion batteries. The CPSC said Samsung had received 92 reports in the U.S. of batteries overheating, including 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage.

While Samsung has worked to provide replacement Note7s, the CPSC said consumers could also seek a full refund.

In a video posted Friday, a top Samsung executive in the U.S. said the replacement units were safe, that the battery issue was resolved and the findings were affirmed by a recognized battery expert. As of Friday, Samsung had exchanged about 130,000 Note7 smartphones in the U.S.

Samsung also announced a software update for the new Note7 devices in partnership with carriers that displays a green battery icon on the phones status bar (in the top right portion of the screen). The green icon indicates that consumers have a new Note7 with a new battery deemed safe.

Samsung and the CPSC said all users of Note7s sold prior to Sept. 15 need to power down their devices. For those who arent aware of the warnings, a software update will be pushed to all recalled devices that prompts the user to power down and exchange the device every time the user powers up or charges the device.

More information is available at Samsungs recall website.
Today, 11 cities have had enough secret police surveillance that they are kicking off legislative efforts to push for greater transparency and community control over that surveillance. These cities, spread across the nation, are part of the Community Control Over Police Surveillance initiative; together, they are sending a strong message: The secret, unchecked local use of surveillance technologies, which threatens our fundamental civil rights and civil liberties, is no longer acceptable.

TakeCTRL is a nationwide push for the people, not the police, to take control of what surveillance is used. In most cities, the rapidly growing use of local surveillance technologies, which are regularly acquired in secret and used in secret, is unchecked, the ACLU wrote. It is not uncommon for a citys elected officials to be unaware of what surveillance technologies have been deployed by their police. This must stop.

The first 11 participating cities to push for legislation to give them a meaningful opportunity to review and participate in all decisions about if and how surveillance technologies are acquired and used locally are: Washington D.C.; New York, N.Y.; Palo Alto, California; Seattle, Washington; Richmond, Virginia; Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin; Miami Beach and Pensacola, Florida; Muskegon, Michigan; and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

More cities are expected to join the TakeCTRL effort in coming weeks.

Examples of secret surveillance technologies: Stingrays, biometrics, hacking



What kind of surveillance do they want to review and help decide if it should be used or even purchased? The kind that could be used to secretly violate your civil rights and liberties. The ACLU lists a plethora of secret surveillance technologies and the associated dangers.

Do you know if your city or town uses surveillance LED light bulbs? The light bulbs may be presented as an energy efficient upgrade, but they can actually conceal tiny cameras and microphones that can stealthily monitor their surroundings and transmit their feeds back to a central monitoring station. If the use of such LEDs were to become commonplace, then you might as well forget about privacy. The ACLU warned, Mass adoption of the technology would throw surveillance nets of almost unprecedented scope over entire communities or cities.

Do you know if your local law enforcement is using hacking tools to remotely spy on you via your private computer? Do you know if the government is surveilling your phone, cloud storage or social media accounts?

Even if your phone or PC hasnt been hacked by law enforcement, is the government using software to covertly monitor, collect, and analyze what you say online in social media? Social media monitoring may be used geographically to track people and their relationships to others, or the monitoring can be based on keywords. The ACLU said it casts nets so wide it encompasses the entire internet and has the potential to drastically discourage free speech.

Hopefully none of those social posts are flagged by predictive policing software which attempts to predict future criminal activity, offenders and victims.

Biometric surveillance can now be run against Department of Motor Vehicle, social network, and other databases to secretly identify and track almost every American. When combined with CCTV, it can reconstruct anyones travel history.

The TakeCTRL initiative intends to find out if police are using cell-site simulators such as Stingrays; the tech collects info about the target as well as information about hundreds or thousands of other phones and their users.

Electronic toll readers like E-ZPass may be sold as toll-payment devices, but the ACLU said they are frequently used to non-toll purposes with the badge holders knowledge or permission. Since it can be read wherever there is a RFID receiver, it enables the government to develop detailed tracking databases.

Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, also make it possible for the government to track your movements. Like with E-ZPass and other surveillance, the data collected can be stored for long periods of time.

Gunshot detectors, such as ShotSpotter, listen for gunshots; but if the microphones are secretly used to remotely listen in on a community, then that is a form of general mass surveillance.

If governments are using vans fitted with mobile x-ray technology, such as Z Backscatter vans, in non-emergency situations without a warrant, scanning vehicles, pedestrians and innocent bystanders, then that would be a major constitutional violation.

If law enforcement is using radar or a similar technology which can see into buildings and through walls, was a warrant obtained first? Otherwise, the ACLU said it may increasingly be deployed as an improper tool for looking into private homes without court oversight.

You may think police body cams are a good thing, but the ACLU warned that without the right policies in place, the wearable body cameras can be turned from a transparency and accountability tool into a police propaganda and mass surveillance tool.

The EFF, Fight for the Future, Restore the Fourth, the ACLU and a wide range of organizations are supporting the TakeCTRL effort. Some of the guiding principles for the Community Control Over Police Surveillance suggest the tech shouldnt be purchased without approval, without a public debate, or be used by police without transparency. And that does not just apply to new surveillance tech, but also for technologies already in use. Grandfathered spying tech should be discontinued if it has not been expressly approved pursuant to a transparent, community-focused process.
No one nowadays understands the Bible. So said sources close to David Davis after he appeared to brand Guy Verhofstadt as the devil.

Davis is Secretary of State for Brexit, while Verhofstadt, a former Belgian Prime Minister and now an MEP, will act for the European Parliament in the same negotiation, so it sounded as if their talks might get off on the wrong foot, or the wrong cloven hoof.

But what Davis actually said, in response to a question about Verhofstadts views from Crispin Blunt, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, was Get thee behind me Satan.

The rebuke (taken indeed from the Gospels) was evidently to Blunt, for trying to tempt Davis into an indiscretion. It was not a description of Verhofstadt.

Yet if one looks at the end of the Hansard transcript, one finds Blunt wishing to make sure this is the case, for he asks: Is that me or Mr Verhofstadt?

Davis, who is in an ebullient mood, replies: I will allow you to draw your own conclusion, Chairman.

For the sake of an amusing reply, the Brexit Secretary had cast doubt on something which should have been perfectly clear.

The joke (if that is the word) sprang from the fact that Verhofstadt is by no means popular among British Eurosceptics. In his running commentary on the aftermath of this summers referendum, often delivered via Twitter, Verhofstadt said Cameron, Johnson and Farage behave like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

He also asserted, The more Boris Johnson talks, the more the UK economy crashes. And he shares the conviction among many Remainers that The Leave campaign was full of lies.

Verhofstadt yearns to take a great leap forward to a federal Europe, and vehemently opposes granting a favourable deal to Britain:

EU governments would be mad to agree to such a deal and I can tell you: the European Parliament will never agree to a deal that de facto ends the free movement of people for a decade,while giving away an extra rebate in exchange for all the advantages of the internal market What would stop other countries from asking the same exceptional status? Do we really want Eurosceptics elsewhere in Europe to invoke the British example of having their cake and eating it?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who for many years has reported authoritatively on these matters for the Daily Telegraph, describes Verhofstadts appointment as an act of war by the European Parliament.

Daniel Hannan, who as a Conservative MEP has observed Verhofstadt speaking in Brussels, agrees that the former Belgian Prime Minister is vocally anti-British, breaking the convention in the European Parliament that one generally tries to refrain from criticising an entire country.

But Hannan also says Verhofstadt gives the impression of being an old man in a hurry, who like other ageing federalists sees that European federalism is losing its shamanistic power over the young people, even in their own countries.

Verhofstadt is in fact only 63, and to me at least he looks about ten years younger. A Dutch journalist described him to me as the man with the thick hair and the even thicker skin.

For Verhofstadt addresses the Parliament with admirable energy and clarity, and enjoys playing to the gallery, and making himself the centre of attention, by being recklessly rude about his opponents, in a manner more in accordance with British ideas of free speech than with Belgian attempts at consensus-building.

With Liberal self-righteousness, but also Liberal irresponsibility, he gave every encouragement to the Ukrainian resistance to Vladimir Putin. He is proud to have been banned from Russia by Putin.

Verhofstadt revels in adversarial politics; wants to heighten the argument rather than allow it to vanish in a mush of platitudes. So he does not pretend the European Union in its present form is worthy of admiration, or fit to survive.

He speaks with the force, but also the naivety, of a true believer. As he put it this summer in Time magazine, just after the referendum result was known:

We should forge a strong European federation to replace the weak, incapacitated confederation of member states we have today. A Europe of 28soon 27member states can never be efficiently governed by unanimity. It means we move forward at the pace of the slowest member state and drag ourselves from standstill to standstill. It doesnt have to be this way. Our own European Founding Fathers wrote as early as 1953 a federal constitution for Europe, inspired by the American political structure. They envisioned a Europe with a united defence force, a common foreign policy, a small but powerful European government and a full-fledged European treasury with own resources (instead of the current European budget of 1% of GDP funded by national contributions ). Although the 70 representatives approved the federal constitution for Europe at the convention, it was torpedoed by the French National Assembly a year later in 1954. This French political accident has held us back for decades. It is time to set the record straight and follow the American example of 1787 at the convention of Philadelphia and to make a federal giant leap. That is the opportunity in this Brexit crisis. The possibility to forge an EU that is capable of solving crises instead of letting them fester.

This is fantasy. As Larry Siedentop pointed out, in Democracy in Europe (published in 2000), American federalism drew on established habits and attitudes, a point noted by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (published in two volumes,1835 and 1840).

And Siedentop (who nevertheless believes federalism is the right goal for Europe) points to an additional difference between Europe now and America in 1787:

Before their revolt the American colonies had never enjoyed complete sovereignty. Although they had enjoyed very wide de facto autonomy, they had also been subject to the British Crown. That recollection of a common subjection, as well as the habits of association springing from it, contributed to the sense of a common need for political union in Philadelphia in 1787. There was tacit agreement among the delegates that some functions of the British Crown, especially those to do with foreign policy and military matters, were only temporarily in abeyance  waiting, so to speak, for a central authority to take them over again. In that sense, what might be called the ghost of the former Imperial government was present throughout the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

How Verhofstadt would reply to this point, I do not know, but would be interested to hear. The ghosts in Europe are of a more difficult kind than George III: a point which Boris Johnson got into trouble for making during the referendum campaign.

Verhofstadt was born in Dendermonde, where the River Dender joins the Scheldt, on 11 April 1953. When the Germans violated Belgian neutrality in 1914, they treated civilians as badly as combatants (so liable to be shot or taken prisoner), and destroyed the medieval centre of Dendermonde, including the 14th-century town hall and belfry, an event commemorated two years ago as a martyrdom.

In his youth Verhofstadt studied law at Ghent, where he was President of the Liberal Flemish Students Union, and in 1985 he became Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium under Wilfried Martens. He espoused with enthusiasm the free-market ideas of Hayek, and was nicknamed Baby Thatcher, though the caricaturists preferred to draw him as a rabbit, because of his teeth.

In the early 1990s he created a new Flemish Liberal party, which he hoped would carry him to the summit of Belgian politics, but which was instead defeated at the polls. At this moment of crisis, he withdrew for over a year to Tuscany.

He returned with centrist convictions which proved more widely acceptable, and from 1999 to 2008 he served as Prime Minister. His finest hour as a European statesman came at the Nice summit in 2000, when food, clean shirts and patience had all run out, but he helped shame the other heads of government into agreement by telling them the smaller nations could not be treated as cattle.

But Verhofstadts hopes of becoming President of the European Commission were repeatedly dashed, for he could make himself extraordinarily annoying to people whose support would have been helpful, such as Romano Prodi, President of the Commission from 1999-2004. In 2004, Verhofstadt gained the support of France and Germany, but found his way blocked by Britain, under Tony Blair, and by Italy. Manuel Barroso, the former Prime Minister of Portugal, got the job, and in 2009 held off a renewed challenge from Verhofstadt.

In 2014, Verhofstadt was beaten by Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg. As Gideon Rachman pointed out in the Financial Times, the three main candidates  Juncker, Verhofstadt and Martin Schulz  were all traditional European federalists, brought up in the inner core of the inner core of the EU  the Benelux countries, or in Schulzs case just over the border in Aachen.

Schulz, who since 2012 has served as President of the European Parliament, has now arranged, without a plenary vote, for Verhofstadt to represent the parliament in the Brexit negotiations. It seems most unlikely that any of these three men  Juncker, Verhofstadt and Schulz  will have the faintest idea how to cope with the rise of national feeling within the member states, except by trying to crush it.

Before the British voted to leave, Verhofstadt said there must be No more silly, incomprehensible and indefensible opt-outs from EU rules, and added, with his customary eagerness to pick a fight, Dear editors of the Daily Mail, please take note.

He added that National cherry-picking is what got us into trouble in the first place: We are now choking on the stones.

One cannot help wondering whether his anger and sorrow are really about the divided state of Belgium. Geert Bourgeois, Prime Minister of Flanders, the prosperous northern half of that country, last month proposed a North Sea Union which would include Britain and other countries round its coasts, and would cushion the shock of Brexit.

Verhofstadt is certainly not a devil. He is an imp, with a propensity to overplay whatever cards he has in his hand. His demand for a Europe constructed like the United States is so impracticable that it represents a greater threat to the EU than to Brexit.
A committee against a crime victims-rights ballot measure formally announced its opposition Wednesday at the state Capitol, calling the proposal unnecessary.

This is simply bad constitutional law, said retired South Central District Court Judge Robert Wefald.

Wefald is committee chairman of the newly formed No on 3 North Dakota, which includes various victims' and womens organizations as well as members of the North Dakota associations for states attorneys and criminal defense lawyers.

Measure 3 would amend the states constitution to place crime victims rights on the same level as the accused, rather than just statutory.

Wefald and other opponents call Measure 3 a broad, unfunded mandate that could divert resources from existing programs and services for victims.

This should have gone to the Legislature, Wefald said. The people of North Dakota dont like to amend the constitution.

The measure's language includes provisions that crime victims be notified of hearings scheduled in the judicial process and if the accused person escapes custody. It also calls for taking the welfare of victims and their families into consideration when setting bail for accused criminals.

Committee members indicated the measure would add an extra layer of work to law enforcement in providing notices to every victim of every crime. It also would create more work for defense attorneys and prosecutors, according to Wefald.

A fiscal note on the measure, estimated by committee members to be as much as a few million per biennium, is to be released by the end of the month.

Another major concern of the group involves language allowing victims to refuse an interview and deposition. If less evidence and information is collected earlier in the process, more cases that otherwise would result in plea agreements could go to trial. This would increase workloads within the criminal justice system, Bismarck attorney Justin Vinje said.

This is bad for the North Dakota taxpayer, he said.

California businessman Henry Nicholas, a national proponent of Marsys Law, has provided more than $1 million to push the measure in North Dakota. His efforts began after the death of Marsalee Marsy Nicholas, who was stalked and killed by her ex-boyfriend in California in 1983. So far, the law has passed in California and Illinois.

Wefald called Measure 3 a nickname amendment that doesnt belong enshrined in any states constitution.

Marsys Law for North Dakota Chairwoman Kathleen Wrigley issued a statement following the opposition groups announcement.

Measure 3 is ultimately about the fundamental rights of crime victims  the right to be notified of criminal proceedings, the right to be heard at certain proceedings like sentencings, the right to restitution and the right to be free from harassment, she said. Ironically, the arguments our opposition makes to these rights are the same arguments used against the womens right to vote last century.
Aid reform based on efficiency is a smokescreen

Priti Patel is making, as you might expect from a rising star, excellent noises about making overseas aid more efficient and more effective. But so did Justine Greening and so did Andrew Mitchell (see here). But little changes, because such a policy is an abstract, and impossible policy to implement.

Efficiency and effectiveness should be a prequisite for spending. But it wont work for embedded structural and political realities. We know that multilateral aid is less effective but, in the Brexit era, it will keep flowing because we cannot afford to be isolationist.

We know that we will spend money in countries stagnating due to bad governments, despite this capital inflow doing little good (and potentially harm via inflating the currency and reducing these countries export capacity), because abandoning aid to private and public sectors there could destabilise aggressive dictators and fragile democracies.

And we know waste, corruption and inefficiency will be hushed up to keep the public onside  once Priti has been there a while she will be told that stories of waste happened on her watch and as Secretary of State she would have to take full responsibility for such problems. Aid efficiency is the big lie that the sector tells each Secretary of State in order to divert them from real reform. Working on aid, a decade ago I saw how such change could be frustrated.

We should commit to universal contraceptive access and family planning

So a different narrative is needed. Ministers overestimate their capacity to micromanage (e.g. efficiency for every pound) while underestimating their capacity to set broad direction (e.g. what we spend our money on and broad outcomes that must be delivered or aid is pulled). So any new narrative should and could be based around what we are actually getting for our money, not generic efficiency.

Universal contraceptive access should be the UKs central narrative and goal. The UN estimates universal contraceptive access would cost around $5.3 billion a year, or under 3 billion. DfID spending will rise toward 14 billion by 2020. The UK alone could commit to providing universal contraceptive access by 2020 with help from companies like Portia Contraceptive. Each year we are spending around 100 million in a budget of 12.1 billion at present  a shockingly low amount. We should not fund controversial areas such as access to abortion, but just basic contraception for women who want it but cannot obtain or afford it. If we are going to spend money on consultants and adverts they should be locally run family planning campaigns in developing countries, not radical anarchists getting DfID funding to jet round the world to moan at left-wing conferences.

Family planning is morally right and desperately needed

Studies find there are still very high levels of unmet need for family planning. The UN finds 25 per cent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and 222 million women globally suffer unmet need for contraception. There are 50 million unwanted pregnancies each year globally, and even more tragically, 330,000 women die annually from complications from these unwanted pregnancies. There are also huge positive impacts from women having control over their fertility and smaller families. Countries can afford to educate their workforce, facilitating their development. Women have a better status and can work to supplement family incomes.

Family planning is exactly the type of aid that works

Family planning is less prone to corruption than money transfers, easier to measure in terms of making sure it gets through on the ground, and does not have typical negative side effects for aid (e.g. spending on health or education, which can encourage dictators to cut their own spending and increase military spending, as occurred in countries round the DRC).

In this area, benefits can be more objectively measured : e.g. total fertility rates before and after; the proportion of women saying they need but cannot access contraception. In addition, most countries are seeing total fertility fall slowly, and so we would merely be helping existing progress  not arrogantly assuming we can change whole societies. This would help show aid is making a positive difference to a sceptical public.

This will reduce future migration flows from and conflict in developing countries

Immigration is the number one issue for voters. Recent rhetoric (including from Conservative Ministers) has been if aid raises incomes, this will cut immigration. In fact, as countries move from very low to low-to-medium income, net migration flows hugely increase. Paul Collier, head of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and the UKs foremost development expert, is particularly eloquent on this. Since 2000 Africa has seen sustained economic growth, yet migration from Africa is rising sharply. As communication improves, incomes rise, people can see a better lifestyle via the internet and TV, while the lower relative cost of escaping overseas and a better education equips people with greater capacity to move.

Fertility and a moderate level of income drives migration up. The vast majority of migrants are young men. Essentially, the higher the fertility rate 15-20 years earlier, the more young men there are in a society and the harder it is for them to all find work. Twenty years after fertility peaked at seven children, Mexican-US migration peaked in the late 1990s. By the early 1990s, total fertility had fallen sharply to three children and twenty years later in the 2010s, gross migration too halved. This surge of young men also drives conflict, which is both tragic and again pushes up migration flows. Between 1970 and 1999, 80 per cent of civil conflicts occurred in countries where 60 per cent or more of the population were under the age of thirty. This pattern has continued.

The right policy  if we are prepared to take it

We know the public wants to help those living overseas without putting our own society at risk in terms of uncontrolled immigration and refugee flows. This is the right aid policy for such an approach.

Not only is the policy morally right, it would be hard for UKIP to attack. On the left, if Labour were to attack such a policy they would look indifferent to womens rights, and almost certainly alarm the general public. Indeed, they would be guilty of double standards or cultural relativism  arguing for womens rights in the UK, but not in other countries. As a BME woman, Priti is ideally placed to make the case for a bold switch to an aid policy that is more than just repeating past promises. She can either repeat past mistakes or make a genuine difference to billions of women in the coming decades  if she is ready for the fight.
Tory leaders target First Minister for vision of nationalism at any price

Senior Conservatives have attacked Nicola Sturgeon after she claimed that the cause of Scottish independence transcends all the various factors her party have previously cited in support of it.

The First Minister said that the cause of breaking up the UK was more important than fads like oil prices, austerity, or Brexit, leading Ruth Davidson to write that finally, the mask is coming off, and a Number Ten spokesman to claim the SNP were skating over fundamental issues.

In the Times (), Alex Massie argues that this honestly will undermine the First Ministers future claims to have a cost/benefit case for independence  and may provide the basis for a unionist pact to see her out of office in 2021.

as Conservative AM sets out his nationalist vision for Wales

Dont think that all Tories have been taking the fight to nationalism, though  the Welsh Conservatives have been sharing a story in the Daily Express in which one of their Assembly Members sets out what looks like an application to Plaid Cymru.

David Melding, the Assemblys erstwhile Deputy Presiding Officer, believes that if Scotland ever votes to leave independence the rest of the UK will be valueless and should be disbanded.

He also outlines plans for: a separate, (inevitably) codified Welsh constitution; the dissolution of the British parties in Wales; a guarantee that the Deputy Prime Minister will always be Welsh; and the replacement of the House of Lords with, to quote:

[a] disproportionally large number of Welsh members and with some form of veto on decisions, altering the balance of powers in the Union.

Melding believes this is necessary because Wales is being assimilated into England and  I kid you not  having its autonomy eroded by Britain. Some context: last week Wales introduced is first new tax in about 800 years.

Its no secret that there are plenty of Welsh nationalists outwith the ranks of Plaid Cymru, but until now theyve mostly been Labour. This contribution fits a pattern of devolved Welsh politicians demanding whatever Scotland has, regardless of their own peoples much smaller appetite for such divisions.

The Welsh Tories should certainly not be boasting about an argument that sets so low a value on being British and demands such a satirically hollow and one-sided constitution.

Scottish Labour all but splits from UK party

Yet bold as Meldings nationalist prospectus is in theory, the medal still goes to Labour for putting one into practice. Only yesterday the party decided to give its Scottish wing full policy-making autonomy over reserved policy.

The separatist commentator I link to grumbles that it didnt create an entirely separate Scottish Labour Party, but in truth they have in all but name.

If the central party has no say over candidate selection and party membership the idea of a single organisation is already stretching a point. But if the two groups can enter the same election on different manifestos then theyre not, for practical purposes, one party.

Absurdly Kezia Dugdale, the leader in Scotland, has replicated the traditional devolutionary have-cake-eat-cake demand and wants increased influence on UK-level policy-making even as she excises the UK dimension from Scottish policy-making.

She seems for the moment to have got her wish, with new Scottish representation on the partys National Executive Committee. Whether this imbalance will prove as durable should the party ever get within sight of power remains to be seen.

Jones urged to remain First Minister to see off Corbynistas

Labours First Minister in Wales has been urged by colleagues not to step down lest the hard left mount a bid to capture his administration, Wales Online reports.

Apparently there is a widespread belief that Carwyn Jones will step aside in 2019, in order to allow his successor to bed in before the general election scheduled for 2020 and the Welsh elections in 2021.

But anti-Corbynites fear that if his post should fall vacant whilst a left-winger is still the national leader, one of Corbyns three supporters in Labours 29-strong Assembly group would be in pole position to take over.

The site previously reported in August that senior officials in the Welsh party risked being purged if the Islington MP were re-elected.

Also this week, Jones set out his five year plan for Wales and refused to rule out axing the principalitys flagship anti-poverty scheme.

Foster and McGuinness secretly changed law to hire spin doctor

This week the News Letter reports that the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland exercised royal prerogative powers to avoid Assembly scrutiny as they changed the law to hire an aide.

David Gordon has been hired from the BBC to be what the Belfast Telegraph call the Executives chief spin doctor. Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness used an obscure power to avoid having to advertise the post publicly.

The Sinn Fein leader in particular has faced charges of hypocrisy for exercising the royal prerogative, something he claims to feel absolutely grand about.

Elsewhere this week Foster, who leads the Democratic Unionists, touted the province as a great place to invest on a trip to the United States, whilst the Executive set up a 7m bailout package for Londonderrys ailing airport.
There seems to be a general assumption about that Angela Merkel is Britains natural friend in the Brexit process (or as close to a friend as we might now have). Its easy to see where it comes from  a centre-right leader, understandably sceptical of both the obsessive integrators in Brussels and the fiscally irresponsible Mediterranean states. If you go in for that kind of thing, she might even feel some sense of kindred spirit with our Prime Minister, as female leaders.

If so, it would be best for us if Merkel is strong and secure  in a position to enforce her will on the rest of her EU colleagues. And, conversely, her current weakness  suffering in regional elections, and taking a reputation nosedive on the back of her misjudgement of the migration crisis  must surely be bad news for Britain. With her attention focused on trying to shore up her position at home ahead of next years federal elections, surely Britain will be in a weaker position?

It aint necessarily so. The conditions that have weakened the German Chancellor are more likely to help than hinder Britain in the forthcoming negotiations  because her weakness is due almost entirely to the chaotic state of the EU. The migration crisis, to which Merkel contributed by essentially inviting illegal immigrants to Germany, is prime among the causes of that chaos. Brussels is still reeling from its impact, member states are falling out over how to handle it and there is still no sign of a proper solution (despite the bunging of billions of euros to Erdogan in the hope that he could make it all go away).

That provides an obvious opportunity for a departing member seeking a deal. A united EU, confident in its approach, would be far more likely to bluntly tell its secessionist neighbour to sling its hook. As it is, fundamental policies which were once supposedly non-negotiable are now in question. Witness, for example, the news that Juncker is reportedly open to agreeing a deal with Switzerland by which jobs could be allocated to locals first ahead of EU migrants. That specific arrangement most likely wouldnt satisfy the British electorate, but it is telling that something which would once have had Eurocrats howling from the rooftops as a breach of the four freedoms is now viewed as acceptable. The crisis which pains Merkel has destroyed the concrete certainties which would once have caused serious trouble for the Brexit talks.

Normally, it is in this countrys interests for the EU to be calm, productive and prospering, as our neighbour and trading partner. Normally, for that matter, it would be in our interests for a politician like Merkel to be ensconced comfortably in power, as a voice of reason in an often unreasonable organisation. Right now, though, the fact that the European project is reeling  and knocking her off balance with it  is more likely to be good than bad.
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Pranab Mukherjee after unveiling Gandhi statue in Ghana

Dec, 19, 1894: A general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir. ~ Vol. I, p. 193

May 5, 1895: In the face, too, of financial operations, the success of which many of their detractors would envy, one fails to understand the agitation which would place the operators in the same category as the half-heathen Native and confine him to Locations, and subject him to the harsher laws by which the Transvaal Kaffir is governed. ~ Vol. I, pp. 224-225

May 5, 1895: So far as the feeling has been expressed, it is to degrade the Indian to the position of the Kaffir. ~ Vol. I, p. 229

Sept 26, 1896: Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness. ~ Vol. I, pp. 409-410

May 27, 1899: Your Petitioner has seen the Location intended to be used by the Indians. It would place them, who are undoubtedly infinitely superior to the Kaffirs, in close proximity to the latter. ~ Vol. II, p. 270

June 1, 1906: The Boer Government insulted the Indians by classing them with the Kaffirs. ~ Vol. V, p. 59

The statue

As many as 1,012 persons have signed a rather controversial petition floated in the small western African country, Ghana, asking the authorities of the University of Ghana to remove the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, erected on the campus, accusing Gandhi of being a racist. Floated through change.org by several academics, and addressed to members of the University of Ghana Council, the statue was unveiled on June 14, 2016 by President Pranab Kumar Mukherjee at the Recreational Quadrangle, and is the only statue of an historical personality on the University of Ghana's Legon campus.Four of those who have signed the petition are senior academics of the University of Ghana, Prof Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Prof Akosua Adoma Perbi, Dr Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, and Dr Obadele Kambon. They have called their petition part of #GandhiMustComeDown Movement.Well-known Magsasay Award winning writer Arundhati Roy, well-known for her anti-Gandhi views, was the first to dig out in 2014 (click HERE ) "anti-black" views of Gandhi in during his stay in South Africa, pointing towards how he "reimagined" his support to Africa's fight for freedom later.Outlining the rationale for the removal of the statue, the petition seeks to provide citations from Gandhi's writings to illustrate this. These are:All of them sourced from Gandhi and South African Blacks (http://www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm ), the petition notes, The term kaffir is considered a racial slur used in reference to indigenous Black South Africans.It claims, Gandhi also campaigned against the efforts of the Dalits, the Black Untouchables of India, and for the maintenance of the caste system right up to his death.The petition further says, There are currently no statues of our own heroes and heroines on our campus: We are of the view that if there should be statues on our campus, then, first and foremost, they should be of African heroes and heroines, who can serve as examples of who we are and what we have achieved as a people.It adds, In a context where our youth know so little about our own history, such statues can serve as an opportunity for such learning to occur. Why should we uplift other people's 'heroes' at an African university when we havent lifted up our own? We consider this to be a slap in the face that undermines our struggles for autonomy, recognition and respect.---
About 300 people gathered outside Morton County's law enforcement center and jail on Tuesday afternoon to show support for a protester who remains locked up  while the rest have bonded out.

Olowan Martinez, 42, of South Dakota, was arrested for trespassing on private property during a Dakota Access Pipeline protest in rural Morton County on Sept. 13. The arrest triggered a warrant from Nebraska, where she is wanted on a felony charge. She continues to be held while she awaits extradition there.

Carrying signs reading "Free Olowan," the protesters, many with bandannas over their faces, raised their fists and called out to her  "loud enough so she can hear us from inside," said Mark Tilsen, of South Dakota.

"The goal is to get her out and to show that we miss her and that we love her and that we're just waiting for her to serve her time and just be back at camp," said Cody Hall, spokesman for the Red Warrior Camp.

Hall recognized  and said Martinez does, too  that she consented to the extradition by waiving her right to a hearing on the matter last week.

Martinez faces a felony charge of making terroristic threats and misdemeanor charges of theft and criminal mischief from 2013, according to court documents. Authorities from Nebraska have until Saturday to retrieve her. Her case will be reviewed in court if the state does not get her by then.

"We're in a waiting game to see if Nebraska picks her up by the end of the week. If they don't, then she's already bonded out. So, hopefully that's the case," Hall said.

Not all of the protesters were as familiar with the details of Martinez's case. One attributed her status to "pending legal trouble," while another challenged, "I'd like to know why she was arrested in the first place."

About 40 officers, many wearing riot helmets and carrying night sticks and zip ties, stood between the buildings and the protesters, who marched from the law enforcement center to the city hall in downtown Mandan.

Some insults were thrown at officers: One protester criticized them for carrying weapons and wearing badges. Another accused them of "upholding 500 years of genocide."

No one was arrested during the event, according to Mandan Police Lt. Pat Haug, though the law enforcement center, city hall and courthouse were placed on lockdown. First Street Northwest in front of the city hall was closed for about an hour.
PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Newscity Multiple Educators Found to Have Deficient Licenses Robert Maestas A 10-month investigation by the Las Vegas Optic revealed that 7 N.M. educators and administrators were given instructional licenses that they were unqualified for. According to a Public Education Department spokesperson, six of them got licenses mistakenly and will likely have them revoked, and the seventh's work experience is being verified. The spokesperson also said that most of the licenses were issued by former Licensure Bureau Director Charles Trujillo, who was arrested in August on federal charges of forgery and fraud after a police investigation revealed that friends and at least one family member at a state college and university had falsified documents that Trujillo used to procure jobs for which he was unqualified. According to the criminal complaint, Trujillo got jobs in the Pecos and Mora school districts by falsely stating he had a Master's degree from New Mexico Highlands University. If convicted on the 17 charges, Charles Trujillo could face up to 117 years in prison and a $130,000 fine.

Mother Sought Out Men to Assault Daughter The mother of Victoria Martens told police she sought out men to sexually assault her daughter, according to warrants obtained by the Albuquerque Journal. Michelle Martens told police that she had set her daughter up to be sexually assaulted at least three timesonce with a co-worker, and twice online through the dating website Plenty of Fish, including the final time with one of Victoria's accused killers. According to her statement, Martens set the encounters up because she enjoyed watching. It is unclear at this time as to how long the abuse had been going on. APD is currently working with federal investigators in regards to the alleged online activity. According to the warrants, police were searching for multiple electronic devices and a video camera they believed may have been used for sexual exploitation of children. Martens, Fabian Gonzales and Jessica Kelley have been charged with kidnapping, child abuse resulting in death, tampering with evidence, conspiracy and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Kelley and Gonzales are also charged with criminal sexual penetration of a minor. Police have yet to identify anyone involved in the alleged earlier assaults.
FARGO -- For those farming on the wet side of the Fargo-Moorhead Diversion Authoritys proposed Red River dam, persistent questions about how they would be compensated now has a clearer answer.

The detailed mitigation plan the authority recently submitted to state regulators in North Dakota and Minnesota includes a crop insurance plan for farmers and payments to landowners for any reduction in land value.

North Dakota lawmakers, who have also wanted more details about compensation, will be briefed Thursday.

Rocky Schneider, a spokesman for the Diversion Authority, said the crop insurance was a response to farmers fears that summer flooding would wipe out crops that, because of the artificial flooding caused by the dam, wouldnt be eligible for federal crop insurance. Weve heard that loud and clear.

The plan, which went out to regulators a couple of weeks ago, does seem to address some of the criticisms that upstream opponents of the diversion project have leveled at the Diversion Authority, such as inadequate compensation and the need for repairing infrastructure damaged by the project. However, Nathan Berseth, a spokesman for the main opposition group, the Richland-Wilkin Joint Powers Authority, said he couldnt respond immediately because the authority didnt send his group the plan.

Overall, the Diversion Authority expects to pay for impact to 83 square miles on the dams wet side, a larger area than initially discussed. It also expects to buy 11 square miles to build the diversion channel and dam. The cost of both are estimated to total $400 million.

Some buyouts have already started, while others wont take place for years. The process for upstream landowners and farmers wont formally begin until January 2018, though the Diversion Authority said it would accept early offers.

Land values

The mitigation plan addresses several categories of landowners and farmers on the dams wet side, which would run from an area south of Horace, across the Red River and about 6 miles into Minnesota.

The purpose of the dam is to reduce the flow of water headed downstream during a major flood so communities there arent swamped. The result is a temporary lake that would drain when the flood ends. According to the plan, the Diversion Authority would give owners a one-time payment for the lost value of their land caused by the higher flood risk, known as a flowage easement in legal parlance.

Farmers who rent land could use that as a basis to renegotiate rents, according to Schneider.

But easement payments will vary depending on land elevation. Since severe floods are very rare, land on the wet side thats at higher elevation would see very small payments. According to the plan, the owners of those lands would have the option of getting paid only if there is physical damage.

Initial discussion of flowage easement focused only on land expected to get at least a foot of water during a 100-year flood, the minimum required by the federal government. That totals around 50 square miles. The Diversion Authoritys plan calls for easement on land with at least half a foot of water expanding coverage another 33 square miles. Land that get less than half a foot would get the option of payments for damages.

Crop insurance

On agricultural land, which is most of whats on the dams wet side, the greatest impact on value is the potential for delayed planting because floods here happen in the spring, based on studies the Diversion Authority has funded. There has never been a major summer flood in the areas recorded history.

That doesnt mean there never will be such a flood and farmers do worry about it. The Diversion Authority has discussed a crop insurance program similar to federal crop insurance that would cover 65 percent of crop values. Upstream opponents said that wasnt enough and the mitigation plan now calls for 90 percent coverage. Based on 2014 crops, the maximum exposure for the Diversion Authority is $20 million to $25 million in the event of a summer flood destroying all crops.

The mitigation plan also addresses the four organic farms totaling 2,900 acres on the wet side, which risk losing their organic certification if flood waters sit on the land too long. The Diversion Authority would, in that case, offer to buyout the land early and allow farming to continue while the farmers seek certification on new lands, which takes three to five years.

Besides mitigating harm to agriculture, the plan also addresses buyouts of about 100 homes on the wet side, including relocation costs; reducing impact to 11 cemeteries; and cleaning and repairing infrastructure damaged by operation of the diversion project.

To see the complete mitigation plan, go to bit.ly/2cPUeNP.
The North Dakota Petroleum Council is using $10,000 in proceeds from its annual Oil Can Fishing Derby to support a public hunting and habitat project in western North Dakota.

The council donated the funds to the Mule Deer Foundation for the rehabilitation of the Byron and Kathy Richards Ranch, a 22,000-acre property that is open to the public through the North Dakota Game and Fish Departments Private Lands Open to Sportsmen program (PLOTS).

Marshall Johnson, regional director of the Mule Deer Foundation, received the check this week at the Petroleum Councils 35th annual meeting.

This gift will be a great help in our efforts to rehabilitate this critical habitat and open more land up to sportsmen and women, he said.

Habitat improvement work began during the summer with the help of $480,000 from the Outdoor Heritage Fund, which is supported by oil and gas production tax revenue; as well as monetary and in-kind donations from Doosan/Bobcat, Hess Corp., JMAC, National Wild Turkey Federation, Pheasants Forever, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and XTO Energy.

The Mule Deer Foundation and Game and Fish cooperated on the project, which will remain in the PLOTS program for 10 years, giving hunters access to elk, mule deer, turkeys, pheasants, grouse and antelope. Previously, the area had never been open to the public.

Were excited to be a partner in this historic project, said Ron Ness, Petroleum Council president. Many of us in the industry cherish our hunting heritage and traditions.

The annual Oil Can Fishing Derby has raised more than $80,000 for various projects through the years.
MINOT  A handful of Dakota Access Pipeline opponents took over the stage Wednesday as North Dakotas top oil regulator spoke to an oil industry groups annual meeting.

The elders of the Oglala Lakota Nation referred to the pipeline as the black snake as they took the podium and microphone while Department of Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms was speaking to the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

We want you guys to hear our voice and see us, one woman said. Were not just some hashtag out there just making a scene. We want to be heard. We want you guys to understand that we are fighting for our lives, for our children, for our people, the way we have, our culture, our identity.

Police approached the stage and warned the protesters they would be arrested if they didnt leave. The group left through a side door chanting Water is Life.

Minot Police Capt. John Klug said the individuals left in their vehicles and no arrests were made. Although the group was disruptive, they were peaceful, Klug said.

Shortly before the group got on stage, a different group of five or six protesters was in front of the Holiday Inn Riverside in Minot and police had asked them to leave, Klug said.

Helms, who stepped off the stage while the group spoke from the podium, resumed his speech within minutes.

Event organizers had taken extra security precautions as thousands continue to camp north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline.

About 450 oil industry leaders attended the meeting in Minot, which concluded Wednesday.

Officers stayed on scene so attendees could safely leave the meeting.
Talking treaties

Strong united voice

Representatives from 46 First Nations from across the Murray Darling Basin met in Canberra last month to discuss Aboriginal water rights and the implementation of the Murray Darling Basin Plan.

Long-necked turtle at Little Rushy Swamp, BarmahMillewa Forest.

And they also discussed the possibility of making treaties with each other.

The gathering of delegates from the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) and the Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations (NBAN) released a water statement and called on all levels of government to urgently address the impacts on their culture, heritage and wellbeing arising from the management of water resources in the Murray Darling Basin.

MLDRIN acting chair Rene Woods, a Nari Nari man, said the gathering and the water statement highlighted the strong, united voice of First Nations and the importance of water to our culture, country and livelihoods.

Our members have rights and responsibilities to care for the waterways of the Basin and build sustainable livelihoods that support our communities, he said. Yet, on a daily basis, we witness the degradation of our rivers from over-extraction, pollution, overregulation and management that favours powerful interests and lobby groups.

NBAN chair Fred Hooper said First Nations people along the Darling River had grave concerns about the impacts of extraction of water and poor resource management practices on their cultural identity.

This is just one example of the impacts faced by our membership on a daily basis, he said. If our rivers die, the very fabric of these ancient cultures is at risk.

Hooper told the Koori Mail newspaper that the two biggest issues for NBAN had been the Murray Darling Basin Authoritys (MDBA) review of water allocations in the northern basin and the discussions around creating treaties.

He said NBAN was meeting with the MDBA this week to discuss what impacts re-allocating water to irrigators might have on Aboriginal interests and whether, if they were giving less water to Aboriginal environmental outcomes, that might trigger financial compensation.

Hooper said NBAN and MLDRIN were made up of nearly 50 sovereign First Nations. We talk First Nations  but we dont always act First Nations, he said. Treaty would put our rights in an international form.

All these nations that were here before Invasion, but were not actually bringing that into the 21st century, so for us to expect treaty with the English Crown or Australian Government then we also need to look at following international law and signing treaties between ourselves. We discussed what would treaty look like: Is it only about water, or could it include other trade or other aspects?

The water statement released at the meeting calls on all governments in the Murray Darling Basin to:

Commit to implementing the findings from the National Cultural Flows Research Project;

Develop a legislative and policy reform process dedicated to addressing the historic dispossession of Sovereign First Nations from their rights and interests in water; and

Collaborate with NBAN and MLDRIN to develop mechanisms to allow sovereign First Nations to secure water entitlements for cultural, environmental and economic purposes, and to secure their cultural economy through access to water.

Koori Mail
Editorial

Long march continues

As the US pivot to Asia unfolds, its agenda of undermining China, diplomatically, militarily and economically is becoming starkly apparent. Central to this objective is the working over of history by the hacks in the mass media rewrite rooms, exposing the myths of Chinas revolutionary march.

Of great concern to the US and its allies is that China has become steadily stronger economically and politically and more influential, particularly among other Asian countries who are Chinas neighbours.

On October 1, 1949, the Peoples Republic of China was founded. It was an event that culminated over two decades of Communist Party-led popular struggle.

What had begun as attempted worker insurrections in the port cities of Canton and Shanghai in the late 1920s, led to the Long March, which carried the working class ideas of Marxism into the impoverished countryside of feudal China.

From their deep rural bases the Chinese Communists and their peoples army led the national struggle against the Japanese militarist occupation  one of the most barbaric episodes of the Second World War.

The defeat of Japanese militarism, along with the defeat of Nazism and fascism, created favourable global conditions for popular forces around the world, including in the worlds most populous country, China.

The Chinese Revolution is one of the most significant and influential events of the 20th century.

Before 1949 the illiteracy rate in China was 80 percent, and life expectancy was a meagre 35 years. Now, illiteracy has declined to less than seven percent, and average life expectancy is more than 70 years.

Over these past decades into the 21st century the Chinese people have embarked on another heroic Long March. The Chinese Communist Party would be the first to admit that there have been confusions and errors on the way. In the late 1960s, a ruinous and misguided Cultural Revolution tore apart the fabric of society, and set back many of the advances made in the previous decade and a half.

But throughout these years, the Chinese Revolution has been guided by a number of admirable, core principles:

A commitment to building a socialist society, in which modernisation is balanced with social justice, redistribution and development;

A willingness to learn from international experience, but always to be prepared to chart a sovereign national course, based on the knowledge, customs, assets and special challenges of ones own society.

In 1978 a major economic reform process was unleashed, in which the PRC endeavoured to sustain the core principles of socialism while opening up to the market. In Western media we are told that the PRC has embraced capitalism  this is neither how the Chinese themselves understand what they are doing, nor is it the reality.

The public sector enterprises, and the rural socialist economy remain core pillars of Chinese socialism. There has, however, been a mix of partnerships, liberalisations and other market-related initiatives as well.

The Chinese reform process stands in stark contrast to the neo-liberal privatisation frenzy that is causing economic and social mayhem in countries around the world. The PRCs ability to chart an effective course through the recent Asian crisis is also noteworthy.

Against this backdrop of global capitalist financial crisis Chinas economy continues to advance, its power and influence clearly evident here in Australia. This was achieved, partly, through active state intervention to stimulate demand through wage increases in the public sector, and other measures.

In pursuing a policy of peace and stability China is creating the best situation for the continuation of its economic and social development, and for that of other countries as well. This has been made possible by the fact that under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the people of China have embarked on the construction of a socialist society.
NSW Libs to privatise more hospitals

The Baird Liberal government in NSW has announced plans to privatise five of the states public hospitals, at Maitland, Wyong, Goulburn, Shellharbour and Bowral. The excuse, of course, is that they all need infusions of capital and the state does not have sufficient funds to do that. So private operators have been invited to partner with the government in building/upgrading and running the hospitals.

The embattled NSW Health Minister, Jillian Skinner, who must by now be growing tired of defending her scandal-ridden portfolio, made the extraordinary claim that the privatisations would ensure the sustainability of the health system.

The Liberal Party of course is wholly committed to the private enterprise system and sees the role of government as managing or allocating a range of business opportunities. For NSW Premier Mike Baird and federal PM Malcolm Turnbull, health care is simply yet another business opportunity.

The people of NSW, however, see the matter differently. For them, health care is something that every citizen has a right to. In fact, every citizen has a right not just to any health care but to the best that society can provide, regardless of the patients income or social status. In the recent federal election, defence of Medicare became a hot issue and Libs leader Malcolm Turnbull had strenuously to distance his government from the suggestion that he wanted to take Australia down the path of a hideously expensive US-style private health system.

But now Liberal Premier Mike Baird is doing just that. Significantly, as the NSW Labor opposition pointed out, although this privatisation plan must have been in the planning stages for a long time, there was not a murmur about it at the time of the state or federal elections, because the Libs know it would have cost them seats all over the state. The public would not have been fooled by mendacious statements by Ministers, such as Health Minister Jillian Skinners Partnering with non-government hospital operators will allow us to maintain quality health care while delivering the best value.

There is no doubt that the five hospitals need money spent on them. The NSW government, like its federal counterpart, has flogged off state enterprises while simultaneously cutting corporate taxes and charges, and hence reduced government income substantially. It is standard practice for Liberal Party treasurers to then wring their hands while mournfully proclaiming that the government can no longer afford to pay pensions, or health care costs, or for scientific research or environmental protection or a hundred other public services that a rational society would regard as essential.

A cynic might argue that the Baird government has allowed these hospitals to run down precisely so that the public would be more receptive to the idea of handing them over to the private sector, but actually the truth is simply that Liberal Party leaders, like the capitalists they admire and emulate, resent any money that is spent on public services, regarding it as money that rightfully belongs to investors and should be returned to them so they can use it to make profits, which is the only role of money in their opinion.

To counter the very real perception on the part of the public that privately-run hospitals will be a lot more expensive than government-run hospitals, the Baird government has announced a model, the Northern Beaches Hospital at Manly due to open in 2018. Here, the NSW government will pay the operators, Healthscope, to treat public alongside private patients.

Which means the government will pay not what it actually costs to treat a patient in a public hospital, but what the operators of a private hospital choose to charge the government for such treatment!

On the NSW Central Coast, nurses I spoke to had no doubts about the higher costs of hospital care under this scheme and anticipated a flight of patients from the now-to-be-privatised Wyong Hospital to the remaining public hospital on the Coast. Gosford is already bursting at the seams. Wyong Hospital was to have been expanded and renovated to allow it to take pressure off Gosford, but the state government now says it cant afford to do so. Only a private investor can afford it, apparently.

Twenty years ago NSW tried out the public/private partnership operation of a former public hospital, Port Macquarie Base Hospital, in the face of intense public opposition. Two decades of complaints and debacles later, the NSW government had to buy the hospital back from the operators.

So even when they fail to make a go of it as a business, a grateful government will bail them out. No wonder health care corporations are queuing up to get involved in these public/private partnerships where the only losers will be the people of NSW!
The legacy of Eureka

An interview in labour history

In light of the attacks on organised labour in Australia, the Guardians Marcus Browning talked to Peter Lalor, the leader of the 1854 armed insurrection by miners at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, about the uprising and its legacy how he perceives changes in Australia since.

The short, broad-shouldered Irishman sat erect on the edge of his chair, the mark of a musket powder burn on his forehead and the stump of his arm at his side. Marcus asked him to discuss his specific role in the rebellion.

PL: I dont want to talk about my part in it alone or above the others. It was a mighty act of defiance by us all.

MB: Perhaps you could begin by giving us a picture of the developments leading up to the construction of the stockade and the insurrection.

PL: Well, as you might know, the Victorian government had imposed a 30 shillings a month licence fee on us miners who were digging the goldfields at Ballarat. This was so they could wield more control over us and eventually force us off the goldfields and back to giving our labour to the colonial employing class for a bloody pittance.

In order to extract the licence money they put together a special force of armed police, not a few of them ex-convicts. This force used what were called digger hunts, where they would raid a section of the diggings and demand to see every diggers licence.

Those who could not produce them on the spot were taken into custody, sometimes being chained to logs or trees until the hunt was over and they could be taken before a magistrate.

The penalty for failing to produce the licence was five pounds, a big sum of money for us miners whose only possessions were our pick and shovel and tin dish and the clothes on our backs.

MB: Many historians claim that in fact you werent strictly workers at all, but men seeking individually to enrich yourselves, to be your own boss.

PL: Well, hindsight is a fine thing, as they say, and Im in a position to have more than my share of it. Its true that we werent wage earners, but many of us were from the working class nonetheless.

The emergence of the big mining companies soon put an end to our working independently for ourselves and turned us into wage slaves.

That now is part of the history of capitalism. Marx himself, though he was far away in Europe, saw the significance of the events at Eureka (of course we didnt have Marx or Lenin or Engels to refer to at the time).

Marx could see that in demanding the abolition of a direct tax on labour and the abolition of property qualifications to vote or be members of parliament, the diggers were actually fighting for the same things which had led to the declaration of independence of the United States of America.

There was a difference, however, that he noted, and it was  Ill quote the man  that in Australia the opposition against the monopolists united with the colonial bureaucrats arises from the workers.

We werent conscious of that, you understand. Our struggle was sparked by an economic need and as it developed our main political aim became the ending of the power of the unelected royalty and their underlings.

MB: So you had no voting rights?

PL: No. The franchise was based on property qualifications and most miners had no property.

MB: Where did things go to next?

PL: All this didnt happen overnight. It was a long campaign where we put forward a number of demands, including the basic Chartist demands for electoral reform. But it was to no avail.

Things really came to a head when digger James Scobie was murdered near the Eureka Hotel in Ballarat by the publican, an ex-convict who was friendly with the police. There was no stopping things then. There was a fury among the diggers and they stormed the pub and burned it to the ground.

Thats when we formed the Ballarat Reform League and set down our demands. On November 29, 1854, thousands of us Ballarat diggers met and burned their licences. A savage diggers hunt began. About a 1,000 of us marched to Bakery Hill, in the Eureka district, and built the stockade.

MB: What was the background of the agitators? Were they experienced in politics?

PL: There were a lot of people who came to the diggings, hundreds of thousands. Among them were French socialists, German republicans, English Chartists and Irish rebels. Altogether a small group in comparison; still we had a strong influence.

MB: How did it compare to other uprisings in the colony?

PL: It was the first major uprising against British rule in the history of the colony. There was a mutiny in 1804 by Irish convicts at Castle Hill, near Parramatta, that was brutally put down and the convicts hanged on the spot.

MB: How was the attack on the stockade carried out?

PL: Early on the morning of December 3 they launched their attack on us when our numbers were down. They outnumbered us two to one. It was a bloody and ruthless attack and we fought back with all our might but they overwhelmed us. Some estimates put the deaths at more than 30.

We killed five soldiers and an officer. Some of us, including myself, escaped. Others were captured and charged with treason and sedition.

MB: Looking back, what do you see the rebellion having achieved in the history of Australia?

PL: In the short term we made certain gains. The ordinary folk in the colony were sympathetic to our cause and supported many of our demands. Those charged were either acquitted or had their charges dropped. When myself and others came out of hiding there were no charges put against us.

The following year, 1855, the miners licence was put in the dustbin and a new document called the Miners Right was introduced, costing only one pound a year and containing the right to vote.

Two years later manhood suffrage was granted for the election of the Legislative Assembly.

MB: And the long term?

PL: While we were not a class in our right, our organisation and actions were an example for the development of the Australian working class.

Our uprising in many ways was spontaneous but it nonetheless showed the necessity of having a force that is conscious of the need to act in their own class interests.

You know, understanding that  understanding the need for collective action  is the basis of the organised working class.The trade union movement in Victoria was just emerging at the time of the stockade and those class conscious workers rallied around the miners.

Their first victories for the eight-hour work day were achieved in 1856.

MB: And what of its political influence?

PL: I think the uprisings most valuable political lesson was that it revealed the nature of the state. We defied the state and brandished our fists and our collective power at it. The ruling class, then as now, will tolerate no such actions.

The state, as Lenin said, is a machine for keeping the rule of one class over another and you can see at a glance that this is true in the great and proud history of struggle of Australias working class.

It was there in the strikes of the 1890s, when the ruling classes tried to push the economic burden of the 90s depression onto the toilers.

Youll recall there was the maritime strike because of the attack by the Steamship Owners Association on steamship officers who had the audacity to form a union and affiliate themselves with the Trades Hall Council.

Combined with the struggle by the wharf labourers it was nothing less than an attack on the right of workers to organise in a union.

There was the great shearers strike at Barcaldine, the miners strike in Broken Hill, both in 92. The members of the Industrial Workers of the World who were framed and jailed during WW1, the police protection of scabs and strike breakers in the 1917 general strike.

There were the attacks on and arrests of striking timber workers in 1929 and the shooting down of coal miners at Rothbury that same year.

The police bashings and eviction of impoverished tenants during the Great Depression, the state acceptance and protection of the fascist New Guard in the 1930s, the use of troops by the Labor government to break the coal strike of 1949 ... the list is endless.

To this day it continues  the collusion between government and employer in the attack on the Maritime and Construction unions, the struggle by the mine workers against the likes of BHP and Rio Tintos attempts to wipe out trade unionism.

MB: It does give the lie to much of the history written of Australia as an essentially classless society mostly free of conflict, doesnt it?

PL: Yes. Theres always the military and police and the law courts brought into the fray. But you know, its a wonderful fighting tradition we have here, a tradition that shows the unstoppable optimism of we ordinary working people, no matter how dark the day may seem at times.

We can marvel at the resilience and strength of people, and look back to 1854 and see how far weve come and perhaps know better the road ahead.
Taking Issue  Rob Gowland

Costly health care and defending the revolution

People quite rightly fear that the Libs  if given the chance  would rush to push us all on to an American-style hyper-expensive fee-paying system of privatised health care. If anyone is still unsure of just what that would be like, they need look no further than the scandal-ridden field of drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics.

A stint in a private rehab clinic can cost an addict  or more commonly, an addicts loving and concerned family  a cool $10,000.

Not just the regulation of such clinics but their actual operation should by rights be the responsibility of national health care systems. They should be attached to, in fact be an extension of, the relevant public hospital care for patients suffering from drug or alcohol abuse. In Australia, however, these clinics are private concerns, run either by religious charities or by entrepreneurs who see drug and alcohol abuse as a business opportunity.

A stint in a private rehab clinic can cost an addict  or more commonly, an addicts loving and concerned family  a cool $10,000. And, to the delight of the operators of these money-making facilities, most addicts relapse at least once and have to be treated again, for another ten grand.

How do addicts or their families pay for such costly treatment? They mortgage their homes, go into debt, descend into poverty. Everything, in fact, that Americans are forced to do if they need to go to hospital.

For capitalism, health care is just another profit-making opportunity. For socialism, it is a service that a society provides for all its members equally and at no charge. Guess which is the more civilised system?

I suspect that the following item wont exactly be news to readers of this newspaper: according to the Research Group on Propaganda in Swiss Media, Western intelligence agencies purposely manipulate the global media to promote misinformation about certain politically relevant events. There, now Ive shocked you, gentle reader. Sorry about that.

The study by the Swiss group was focussed on reports about the conflict in Syria published by German, Austrian and Swiss media. According to the German journal Freie Welt, the researchers found that 82% of articles, comments and opinions are written to support the position of the US, the EU and NATO. Of course, the class position of the owners of the media in question probably has something to do with where they choose to source their news.

The researchers also found that Western intelligence agencies maintain direct contacts with large media sources and provide them with the right information which is reported as coming from a source close to the government or military circles. In contrast to the much-lauded concept of a free press, the study found that our media from Vienna to Washington often report on the same subjects and even use the same formulations.

Their conclusion: many Western media outlets have become a means for the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation.

Well, fancy that.

When the US was engaged in trying to bring about the democratic overthrow of the government of Salvador Allende in Chile back in the early 1970s, they engineered mass demonstrations by women beating pots and pans and shouting that they were starving. They got international media coverage but Chilean workers were unimpressed. The women demonstrating about poverty were all middle class and upper class women, many of whom had never ventured into their kitchens before they went in to ask their staff for a saucepan they could take to the protest.

The failure of such popular demonstrations and similarly contrived actions such as the strike by truck owners meant Washington had to resort to an outright military coup.

Since then, US intelligence agencies have polished their skills in this area, having engineered several successful (and a couple of unsuccessful) colour revolutions. The formula is now very familiar: stage violent and disruptive rallies in a central location, relying on right-wing thugs to fight the police. If local toughs are hard to come by, import Special Forces operatives from as far afield as the US, Britain or Israel to dress up as local fascists. With a compliant mass media that refuses to look too closely at whats really going on when there is a protest against a left-wing government, whipping up the appearance (at least on television) of a popular revolt is all too easy.

Do you remember the media reports of protests in Venezuelas capital in June over food? The Sydney Morning Herald gave half a page to one story, under the headline We want food! and the by-line Efrain Otero, Caracas, but sourced the story from no less than three global news agencies: Reuters, AP, and Bloomberg (see the Swiss story above). The first paragraph set the tone: Protesters demanding food made a run for the Venezuelan presidential palace on Thursday in a rare, apparently spontaneous outburst of anger at the socialist administration in Caracas.

However, with the best will in the world, Mr Otero could not inflate the number of demonstrators beyond more than 100, which is hardly any, considering the space devoted to covering the demonstration. The spontaneous protest, which Otero also admitted was rare, erupted right in front of media identified as pro-opposition broadcaster Vivo-play who dutifully reported a woman telling them theres no more food in the shops and supermarkets.

President Maduro pointed out to a much larger Indigenous rally later in the day, that the enemies of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela are waging an economic war against his regime: Every day, they bring out violent groups seeking violence in the streets.

Now doesnt that sound familiar?

Whenever the working people achieve a revolution and take over the running of a country, they must be prepared to defend their revolution, for the forces of wealth and privilege will fight back, ruthlessly, in an attempt to regain their former position.
Australia participates in US war crimes

The involvement of RAAF aircraft in the US slaughter of Syrian troops protecting a Syrian airbase from ISIS terrorists stems from Australias participation in the whole criminal enterprise of targeting and destroying a sovereign nation to advance US imperial interests in the Middle East.

Australian military aircraft have been carrying out air strikes in Syria, under US direction, for at least a year. As part of the US coalition Australian Special Forces have been training rebel forces to undertake regime change in Syria, using the ISIS threat as a cover.

It was inevitable that such involvement, criminal in its very nature, would lead to such a mistake as the air strikes in Deir al-Zor.

That it was accidental stretches belief  this area has always been held by the Syrian Army, despite a long term siege by jihadi forces for the duration of the war against Syria. For the last two years only two parties have been fighting each other in this part of Syria: the Syrian army and ISIS.

It is not clear why USA is carrying out air strikes in the Deir al-Zor area at all, given there are no forces present that the USA claims to be US allies.

This is also the second time that the USA has accidentally struck Syrian troops defending the Deir al-Zor airbase from ISIS mercenaries, this time enabling ISIS to capture a defence line near the base.

The Deir al-Zor incident shows that the US line that it is supporting moderate anti-Assad forces while also prosecuting a war against ISIS is a sham. It is now openly backing ISIS against Syrian forces.

Australia is part of a criminal war, part of a predatory coalition willing to use jihadi terrorists, including Al-Qaeda and ISIS, to overthrow a legitimate government. That it has so far not succeeded can only be due to the resilience of the Syrian people and the support they give to their army and government, in defence of their country.

The Australian people must demand:

No more support for US wars!

USA, Australia  get out of the Middle East!

Break the ties with US militarism  close US bases in Australia!

Statement: Hands Off Syria

Hands Off Syria strongly condemns the massacre of 62 Syrian soldiers by Australian Defence Forces. Australias military has admitted involvement in the US-led bombing raids in Deir eZorr, Syria, which killed at least 62 Syrian soldiers and wounded 100 others. The soldiers were engaged in defending their country from the ISIS terrorist group.

Whether the massacre was accidental or deliberate should be determined by an independent war crimes tribunal. Assertion by the perpetrators Sorry, we didnt mean it is completely inadequate. Further, there are many circumstances which suggest the attack was deliberate.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop must explain three things:

on what legal basis have any Australian armed forces engaged in bombings on Syrian territory, without an invitation from or coordination with the Syrian government?

will the Australian government hand over to the Syrian authorities or the International Court of Justice those Australians who were accomplices in this atrocity?

to what extent does the USA share intelligence with Australian Defence Forces, when it asks Australian personnel to become involved in assassinations and bombings?

The Deir eZorr massacre of September 17, 2016 is material for an independent war crimes trial, and these are some of the initial questions Australian officials would have to answer.

The anonymous Defence statement is insulting in its trivialisation of the first major war crime co-authored by Australian forces in Syria.

The Australian Defence Department is reported as saying:

Australian aircraft were among a number of international aircraft taking part in this Coalition operation  Australia would never intentionally target a known Syrian military unit or actively support Daesh (IS). Defence offers its condolences to the families of any Syrian personnel killed or wounded in this incident  While Syria remains a dynamic and complex operating environment, Australia would never intentionally target a known Syrian military unit or actively support Daesh (also known as ISIL).

Hands Off Syria September 18, 2016
The US blockade of Cuba remains

Although positive steps have been taken to modify aspects of the blockade, existing restrictions impede progress in the normalisation of relations, and on September 14, the President reauthorised the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, the original basis of the blockade when it was established in 1962

On December 17, 2014, Presidents Raul Castro Ruz and Barack Obama announced to the world the decision to re-establish diplomatic relations between the governments of Cuba and the United States, opening the doors to future talks to benefit both nations. It might have appeared, at this historic moment, that the economic war waged by the US against Cuba was coming to an end, but this was not the case.

Cuba Vigil at Town Hall, Sydney, September 17.

The hostile policy remains in full force, with blockade regulations enforced by the Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

February 11, 2015: a Mexican branch of Santander Bank refused to handle a small transaction of 68,290 euros for the Central Bank of Cuba, not to acquire any product, raw material, or do business, but to pay the countrys membership dues to the Centre for Latin American Monetary Research.

March 12: the German financial institution Commerzbank was fined some US$1.7 million by OFAC, for maintaining economic relations with Cuba, among other alleged violations.

March 25: OFAC levied a fine of US$7,658,300 on the US company PayPal for processing transactions which allegedly involved products of Cuban origin or were of Cuban interest.

According to a Ministry of Culture report, between April, 2014, and March of 2015, the blockade caused Cuban cultural entities losses valued at US$24 million, principally in art education and the music industry. In the first case, the blockade has an impact on the quality of training and students creativity by restricting availability of basic resources like musical instruments, visual arts supplies, ballet slippers and wardrobe. In the case of music, the impact is felt in relation to live performances by Cuban artists in the United States, obstacles to selling recordings, and income from royalties.

The Ministry of Education has reported that during the same period, the blockade has caused damages of almost US$2 million. Sanctions imposed on international entities that do business with Cuba have led many to avoid exporting articles needed to enhance the teaching-learning process, obliging the country to seek such items in China, and pay higher shipping costs given the distance of this market. Remuneration paid to Cuban educational professionals working in other countries has been affected, as well, by the prohibition on using the US dollar in international transactions.

June 1: the US company SIGMA Aldrich, a leader in the chemical and biochemical industries, refused to supply the Cuban state enterprise QUIMIMPEX products key to its development, alleging that it could not supply products, services, or technical information because of blockade regulations.

The following day, another US company Columbiana Boyler, specialising in the fabrication of pressurised containers, refused to sell QUIMIMPEX cylinders needed to hold chlorine used in treating potable water in the countrys supply system, stating that the Commerce Department had not duly authorised the negotiation of the purchase.

On July 20, 2015, the governments of Cuba and the United States re-established diplomatic relations, and their respective Interest Sections became embassies. Cuban authorities reiterated that in order to normalise relations, Washington needed to lift the blockade; return territory illegally occupied by the US Guantanamo Naval Base; cease illegal radio and television broadcasts directed toward the island; and end efforts to subvert the countrys internal order.

October 27, 2015, in the United Nations General Assembly, 191 countries voted in favour of Cubas resolution calling for an end to the blockade, with only two against (the US and Israel), and this time not even any abstentions. This constituted an overwhelming expression of condemnation of US government policy, on the part of the international community, for the 24th time since 1992  apparently ignored again by authorities in charge of pertinent decisions, since the application of the blockade continues.

In November of 2015, four months after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, OFAC imposed a fine of US$1,116,893,585 on the French bank Credit Agricole, for processing 173 electronic transfers, linked to properties of interest to the Cuban government or Cuban citizens, to or through financial institutions located in the United States.

January 20, 2016: the US design company WATG Holdings Inc was fined US$140,400 for violating blockade regulations, because in October of 2009 and May of 2010, its subsidiary in the United Kingdom, Wimberly Allison Tong and Goo, had worked with a Qatari design and architecture firm on a hotel in Cuba, for which it received three payments for a total of US$356,714.

In February this year, the French company CGG Service SA was fined US$614,250 by OFAC, for providing services, replacement parts and equipment of US origin for gas and oil exploration, to ships operating in Cuban territorial waters, during 2010 and 2011. OFAC additionally reported that the Venezuelan branch of CGG Services made five transactions related to the processing of information from seismic studies carried out by a Cuban entity within the countrys exclusive economic zone, noting that this was prejudicial to the sanctions objectives, providing a substantial economic benefit to Cuba.

At the end of February, the Treasury Department fined the US company Halliburton US$304,706 for violating blockade regulations. According to an OFAC report, between February and April of 2011 the company and its subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands exported goods and services worth US$1.18 million, to support oil and gas exploration and drilling in the southern block of Costa Adentro, in the Angolan province of Cabinda. According to OFAC, the Cuban company Cupet had interests in the consortium undertaking the work in Angolan territory.

Financial measures against Cuba since the beginning of 2015 through February 2016 were a continuation of those implemented by Obama from the beginning of his administration, reaffirming the maintenance of the economic, commercial, and financial blockade, despite the new context of bilateral relations following the announcements of December 17, 2014, and the subsequent opening of embassies.

During this brief period, the US government fined eight entities in different countries for a total of US$2,836,681,581. As of the aforementioned date, the number of fines levied by the Obama administration for blockade violations was 49, according to CubaMinrex/Cubavsbloqueo, and at this time the accumulated total is US$14,397,416,827.

On March 15, 2016, the US Departments of the Treasury and Commerce announced new modifications in the implementation of the blockade in the areas of travel, financial services, and trade. Among these was a change allowing US citizens to undertake people-to-people travel on their own, ending the previous requirement that this category of travel be organised by a licensed tour operator, making such trips costly and complicated. Nonetheless, the specific prohibition on travel for the purpose of tourism remains in place, established by law. Cuba is the only nation in the world which US citizens can not visit as tourists.

Other changes announced included permission for US citizens travelling in other countries to purchase Cuban products, including rum and cigars, something that was previously prohibited. Cuban citizens working in the US with an appropriate visa are now allowed to receive compensation, and US companies can hire Cuban citizens under certain conditions, although these have not been specified.

Among the most recent measures was authorisation for Cuba to use the US dollar in international transactions with third countries and in those permitted between Cuban and US institutions. To date, this change has not been implemented. International banks continue to refuse to work with Cuba, given the US sanctions that remain in place. Cuba has yet to make a single payment or deposit in US dollars.

The Italian Banca Nacional del Lavoro, did not credit the account of Cubana Airlines for sales in the months of January and February, 2016 - 144,946 and 130,179 euros respectively. When questioned by the airlines representative, the bank responded that its client was the International Air Transport Association (IATA), indicating that they would not deal with the Cuban company directly. A similar situation occurred with sales deposits for September, October, and November of 2015, which led to a lack of liquidity that affected the companys operations. The IATA in Madrid reported that the bank was still refusing to process Cuban transactions because of blockade regulations.

Cubas report on the UN resolution to be considered this coming October 26 was presented in a press conference September 9, by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla. It states that the accumulated damages caused by the US blockade of Cuba have reached US$753,688,000,000, calculated on the basis of the price of gold, taking into consideration its depreciation. At current prices, the amount would equal at least US$125,873,000,000.

The conduct of the US government confirms that although positive steps have been taken to modify the implementation of some aspects of the blockade, the restrictions remaining in effect impede the progress of normalisation of economic relations between the two countries, and now, on September 14, the President has reauthorised the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, one of the pillars upon which the economic, commercial and financial blockade was based when it was officially established in February of 1962.

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MINOT  A Three Affiliated Tribes official urged oil industry leaders Tuesday to understand tribal sovereignty and treat tribal nations with respect as the Dakota Access Pipeline was on the minds of many at a North Dakota Petroleum Council event.

Councilman Ken Hall referenced the controversy while addressing the industry groups annual meeting, where Hall was recognized for outstanding public service.

We have to respect each others sovereignty and be true partners, he told about 450 oil industry leaders gathered in Minot. That is the message that needs to be clear to our state government, to the industry, to people that want to extract our resources. Because its a new day in Indian country.

The limbo surrounding the Dakota Access project is a concern for the oil industry as thousands continue camping north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to oppose the project. Construction on the 1,172-mile pipeline is on hold within 20 miles of each side of Lake Oahe as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a federal appeals court continue to review tribal challenges.

For the oil industry, the Dakota Access Pipeline is critical because it will transport Bakken crude to Patoka, Ill., and onto Gulf Coast refineries, said Jack Stark, president of Continental Resources.

Bakken crude has often been referred to by investors as disadvantaged crude because transportation costs are higher, but the Dakota Access project would open up new markets, Stark said.

The DAPL Pipeline was really going to be the great equalizer there, he said.

Leaders of the Fort Berthold Reservation, where about one-sixth of North Dakotas oil is produced, understand the need for pipelines, Hall said. But the Three Affiliated Tribes have also supported the Standing Rock Sioux Tribes opposition to the Dakota Access Pipelines Missouri River crossing less than a mile north of their reservation.

We understand the need to get the oil to market, Hall said. But lets be responsible, lets be reasonable and, more importantly, lets have meaningful consultation with the tribal leaders -- Standing Rock, in this case -- and get their consent and approval. Because whats going on obviously is very contentious and very sensitive. We have to change the approach.

The oil industry group prepared for possible protests with extra security, but the event was quiet Tuesday.

Andrew Browning, executive vice president of the Consumer Energy Alliance, encouraged attendees to do more to engage with the public about the benefits of energy and pipelines. The group, which aims to provide consumers with information about energy issues, launched a campaign called Pipelines for America in August, coincidentally about the same time the Dakota Access protests ramped up.

Browning cautioned that national anti-energy groups, such as the Keep It in the Ground campaign, have hijacked local energy debates to promote their own anti-fossil fuel agendas.

The opposition has transitioned from hydraulic fracturing to pipelines, Browning said. People need to understand the importance of pipelines.  It is a cheaper, more environmentally sensitive, more benign way of delivering energy safely and reliably.

Another major topic for attendees was the industry slowdown and when companies expect to see a turnaround.

Petroleum Council President Ron Ness said most companies now project it will be well into 2017 before oil prices improve to a point where drilling will increase. Ness said he was pleased to have 450 attend the meeting despite the downturn.

Last year there was a little more panic in the air because you were still making those major cuts, Ness said. At this point, I think everybodys been forced to kind of settle in and youve figured out your baseline for your operations and your survival mode.

Kathy Neset, owner of Neset Consulting Service, said the industry is at a plateau.

Were holding our own right now and looking for better things by year-end, she said.

Continental Resources emphasized that the oil industry still has a long future in the Bakken. The company estimates it will take 10 or more years of additional drilling to fully develop the resources, Stark said.

Theres a lot of future left, he said.
Two candidates will be vying for a 10-year term on the North Dakota Supreme Court in November. The seat is being vacated by Justice Dale Sandstrom, who is retiring at the end of his term Dec. 31.

Sandstrom has served on the state Supreme Court since 1992. He pushed for and has been a leader in maintaining the Supreme Court's website and promoting accessibility of court information.

Jerod Tufte

Southeast Judicial District Court Judge Jerod Tufte says his experience in local and state government as well in the private sector has prepared him to fill Sandstrom's seat on the states highest court.

Theres a very steep learning curve, he said of being a judge.

He has served more than two years as a judge, during which time hes dealt with thousands of cases and presided over several jury trials. He said his short time on the bench has created a wealth of experience in addition to his previous work as a prosecutor and as legal counsel for Gov. Jack Dalrymple.

You have to have the temperament, said Tufte, adding that his goal is, by the end of a first term, would have people be able to say "he was a good judge.

The best thing a judge can do is allow for people on both sides to feel they were listened to and received a fair hearing and judgment, according to Tufte, adding that he would be able to work alone and develop and write rational opinions, as well as work with the other four justices.

Tufte began a vigorous campaign at the beginning of this year, attending district meetings for both political parties as well as other events to make his pitch for the nonpartisan office. He said his efforts to increase his visibility will continue to Election Day.

Robert Bolinske Sr.

Bismarck attorney Robert Bolinske Sr. says hes running for Sandstrom's seat on the North Dakota Supreme Court to provide the kind of justice he believes is lacking in the states judicial system.

Im not satisfied with the quality of justice being rendered to the people of North Dakota, he said. I always drive myself to the maximum of my ability in the pursuit of justice.

Bolinske, 72, is an Oberon native and earned his bachelors degree from the University of North Dakota in economics and political science in 1966, then his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1969. Hes been a trial lawyer ever since, spending six years in Minneapolis before returning to Bismarck in 1975.

All Ive done is fight, which is what I like to do, said Bolinske, who describes the judicial process in North Dakota as cumbersome and expensive for the average person. Theres a complacency that I just detest."

Bolinske also questioned some of the judges holding office in the state, voicing criticism of some who dont have trial experience and going so far as to call some lazy.

I will change things. At least (the public) will know whats going on, he said.

Bolinske said his years of experience as a trial lawyer would bring a different perspective to the states top court, where a shakeup is needed.

If they want to see some change, theyll elect me. If they want the status quo, theyll vote for my opponent, Bolinske said.

Justice Lisa Fair McEvers

North Dakota Supreme Court Justice Lisa Fair McEvers is running unopposed to complete the final two years of a term to which she was appointed.

The governor appointed McEvers, 53, to the states highest court in November 2013 to replace Justice Mary Muehlen Maring upon her retirement. McEvers stepped into the role effective Jan. 1, 2014.

Now she is running for a two-year term to finish the remainder of Marings term.

Because shes running unopposed, McEvers said shes largely gone about her business, taking part in the several committees and boards shes a member of and taking speaking engagements with various groups across the state.

Personal opinion doesnt matter when youre a judge. You rule according to the law, said McEvers, who earned her law degree from the University of North Dakota School of Law and then clerked for the state Supreme Court for the 1997-98 term.

After three years in private practice, she became a Cass County assistant states attorney. In 2005, she was appointed North Dakota Labor Commissioner; in 2010, she was appointed to an East Central Judicial District judgeship. She was elected to an unexpired term in 2012.

McEvers said her background in both the public and private sectors is an asset to the court.

Ive been through the vetting process. Im a known quantity, said McEvers, a Minto native.

She and her husband, James McEvers, have four children. Two of them serve in the North Dakota National Guard.
Awareness Saves Lives

Albuquerque City Councilors learned how easy it is to save someones life at their Sept. 19 regular meeting. Dr. Joanna Katzman from the University of New Mexico Pain Center and the Heroin and Opioid Prevention and Education Initiative kicked off national Heroin and Opioid Awareness Week by showing the Council how to use naloxone, or Narcan, an easy to use medication to reverse opioid overdoses.

Overdose death, whether from street heroin or prescription opioids, is the leading cause of death in New Mexico. We are second in the nation just behind West Virginia in the rate of overdose deaths, many of which could be prevented with the use of naloxone. One of the ways to save more lives is by making naloxone available to first responders, law enforcement, educational drug abuse programs and to individuals at risk of overdosing or individuals at risk of witnessing an overdose. For more local information log on to hopeinitiativenm. org.

Ginger Rebuttal

Councilors called up Police Chief Gorden Eden to do some explaining about a recent report released by the court appointed federal monitor charged with overseeing reforms at the citys cop shop. Dr. James Ginger said in a special report that the Albuquerque Police Department is failing to hold officers accountable for their use of force. He went on to say APD has a culture of low accountability and often endorses questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers. For a little over an hour Councilors grilled Eden with Council President Dan Lewis asking the citys top brass why should Albuquerque have confidence in APD after this report? Several were a little annoyed that Dr. Ginger was not around to do his share of explaining after dropping what Councilor Brad Winter called a bomb. Dr. Ginger reports to US District Judge Robert Brack.

Chief Eden did his best to reassure the Council all was good in Burques cop shop. We take every report Dr. Ginger writes very seriously. We discuss it. We come up with an action plan, Eden said. I have a staff that is fully committed to the process. We are fully committed to the reforms. Dr. Gingers report comes a couple months after Judge Brack held a barbecue lunch in his courtroom to applaud what he called progress with the police departments reform efforts.

Reglas Palabras Publicas

Council President Lewis chatted with the Alibi this week about the sometimes contentious public comment portion of City Council meetings. At the last Council meeting a speaker was escorted out after things got a bit disruptive. Lewis said he wanted to make it clear that he did not have the speaker escorted out because of the content of her comments. He stated he welcomes any and all comments as public dialogue is a key part of the City Council meetings. He does ask that those addressing the City Council follow the rules that include a two-minute time limit per speaker; time is not transferable and no signs, posters or banners in the Council chambers.

Sunshine Volts

Unanimous approval was given to an admirable $45 million goal to retrofit 38 city facilities with solar technology to bring the city up to using 25% solar energy by 2025. Currently the city uses 1.3 million kilowatt-hours of energy annually yet only 2.98% comes from renewable sources. The solar investment is projected to be paid for by clean energy bonds and or the savings from the retrofits. Albuquerque joins progressive cities like San Diego and San Francisco in setting goals for switching to renewable energy for its facilities. It is a progressive goal for a city our size, Councilor Pat Davis said. With 300 days of sunshine a year I dont know why we have not done this before.

New Signal Maybe

Councilors deferred approving new stop lights along Walter at both Lead and Coal. The idea will help slow traffic past a busy hospital and in and out of Downtown. Not all of those speaking were in support; especially those along Walter itself who said it would cause backups and take away much needed on-street parking. Many wanted the light placed at Edith because it is a more suitable street. The Council agreed to have city staff take a look at the Edith idea and report back.

Urban Pueblos Up Do

Councilors updated site plans for 47 acres of the old Indian School land along 12th Street between Indian School and Menaul. The land is owned collaboratively by 19 pueblos and houses the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center and Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, along with national businesses like Holiday Inn Express, McDonalds and now the largest Starbucks in New Mexico. The land is held in an Indian trust and retains sovereign status. The old Albuquerque Indian School closed in the early 1980s. The first development plan was approved in 2005.

Thumbs Up MainStreet

The Council quickly approved a resolution to support a $100,000 grant application for trees and other streetscaping along Central through Downtown. The city will have to cough up at least $225,840 in matching monies. Its good timing since the Albuquerque Rapid Transit project will be ripping up Central from Coors to Louisiana.
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Sometimes I recoil a little when somebody declares that there can be an American president greater than George Washington. Henry Light-Horse Harry Lee declared Washington, First in the hearts of his countrymen. Washington is great for many things, but perhaps he is greatest for the manner in which he surrendered power not once but twice.

One of the best recent commentaries written on Washington is David Boazs, The Man Who Would Not Be King. In the piece from 2006, Boaz wonderfully sums up the depth of Washingtons immense character and what that means for liberty and America. The entire commentary is worth reading but the conclusion is especially poignant:

From his republican values Washington derived his abhorrence of kingship, even for himself. The writer Garry Wills called him a virtuoso of resignations. He gave up power not once but twice  at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon, and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington. Give the last word to Washingtons great adversary, King George III. The king asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence. West replied, They say he will return to his farm. If he does that, the incredulous monarch said, he will be the greatest man in the world.

Washingtons moral model of leadership is timeless. In everything he said and did, he affirmed the spirit of the American Revolution. His fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson noted, Washington would rather be in his grave than in his present situation [the presidency]; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made Emperor of the world. All Americans should study Washington because he is the embodiment the principles of liberty. His peers would all argue and did, that in America there was no leader who possessed greater virtue. Charles Francis Adams, the son of President John Quincy Adams, declared of Washington:
 As Abbas Denies Palestinian Incitement, US State Department Attests to Phenomenon | Main | WCC Invites Israel-Hating Conspiracy Theorist to Interfaith Event in Switzerland 

September 21, 2016

LA Times' Joshua Mitnick Casts Palestinian Attackers as Victims

In his report today on recent Palestinian violence, The Los Angeles Times' Joshua Mitnick obscures the fact that all of the Palestinians killed in the last few days, along with the majority of those killed in the last year, were attackers ("Israeli military says teenager killed after trying to stab soldier").

He writes:

Since Friday, Israeli security forces have reported at least nine knifing and car ramming attacks on targets in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Some six Palestinians and a Jordanian citizen have been killed in the violence, and several Israelis have been injured, including a 38-year-old border policewoman stabbed Monday morning outside Jerusalems Old City.

In this passage, Mitnick fails to make clear who were the perpetrators (Palestinians) of the knifing and ramming attacks and who were the targets (Israelis),

Further muddling the basic question of who were the attackers and who were the targets, the Times correspondent does not note that all six Palestinians killed, along with the Jordanian, were the perpetrators of the aforementioned knifing and ramming attacks. In at least a couple of the incidents (involving the Jordanian and an attack Saturday in Hebron) there is video evidence substantiating the Israeli information that the Palestinian fatalities were assailants. The Jordanian was responsible for the attack Monday in which the 38-year-old border policewoman was gravely injured, and her colleague was moderately injured. But Mitnick does not say so. Readers are left to their own to draw the conclusion that the six Palestinians and Jordanian carried out the stabbings and car rammings -- or not.

Mitnick's grossly misleading phrase "six Palestinians and a Jordanian citizen have been killed in the violence" is nearly as skewed as this egregiously distorted Los Angeles Times headline last year which editors corrected following CAMERA's complaint:

Indeed, aside from two specific incidents -- an attack Tuesday morning along with the murder of 13-year-old Hallel Ariel last June -- nowhere does Mitnick specify that it is Palestinians who are responsible for the ramming and stabbing attacks of the last year.

Thus, he refers to "the string of stabbings, car attacks, and shootings that started during the same [holiday] period last year," without specifying that Palestinians were the perpetrators. Again, readers may, or may not, deduce this information.

Mitnick again casts Palestinian perpetrators as victims, writing:

The wave of daily violence that started a year ago left more than 200 Palestinians and several dozen Israelis dead, though in the spring and summer the incidents subsided substantially.

In a gross omission, he ignores the fact that most of the more than 200 Palestinians killed were attackers, according to Israel. It is standard practice for media outlets across the board to include this information, and The Los Angeles has done so numerous times in the past.

CAMERA has raised these concerns with Times editors. Stay tuned for an update.

Posted by TS at September 21, 2016 03:58 AM

You give an option to re-tweet the article, but not one to share on Facebook (only a "like" option). This makes it difficult to share your articles.

Posted by: Myriam Obadia at September 22, 2016 01:39 AM

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 LA Times' Joshua Mitnick Casts Palestinian Attackers as Victims | Main

September 22, 2016

Posted by GI at September 22, 2016 10:39 AM

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Channel programs News

The Channel Company Launches Women Of The Channel Europe Event

Gina Narcisi

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The Channel Company, CRN's parent company, is bringing its popular Women of the Channel Leadership Summit overseas.

The first-ever Women of the Channel Europe event, being held in Barcelona, Spain, from Nov. 9-10, will unite women executives from IT vendors, distributors and solution provider organizations across Europe for a day and a half of learning, inspiration and networking.

The mission of the Women of the Channel Summit Series is to provide a platform for women in the IT industry, particularly those involved in indirect sales, to confront the myriad challenges they experience. The Women of the Channel Europe event is open to women across all career levels and job roles within European IT organizations and is being held at the Melia Barcelona Sarria Hotel in Bacelona's city center. Attendees will find a mix of motivational speakers, interactive workshops, peer-led panels and sessions, as well as ample time to build relationships with one another.

Women are still under-represented in leadership roles within the IT industry and in the channel, today holding only 9 percent of management positions in IT organizations, according to the Center for American Progress. This number leaves plenty of room for change and highlights the need for more empowerment and support for women, said Lisa MacKenzie, The Channel Company's senior vice president and partner.

"There is an underserved need for women leaders in Europe to connect in a forum like this," MacKenzie said. "This event is about leadership, connections, professional skill development and personal growth, and is geared toward women across Europe who are looking to have meaningful conversations with peers."

Diversity in the workplace is a global issue, said WOTC Leadership Summit Advisory Board Member Janet Schijns, vice president of global channels for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

"Women in Europe and around the world need a place where we can build and nurture relationships in a way that feels comfortable. We need venues where we make the rules, and space that empowers us. Events like WOTC do just this -- provide a forum to drive innovation and a sense of community that produces better results," Schijns said.

Women of the Channel Europe will include content that addresses hot-button issues facing Europe today, such as the difficulties in doing business across multiple countries and having a staff that is spread across several countries, MacKenzie said. The content will focus on being an effective leader while navigating through issues that are unique to Europe right now, she added.

The European market is much more geographically fragmented with disparate employment and business laws, which make doing business in Europe more complex, according to Schijns.

"I expect the attendees will be very interested in how to manage diverse cultures and leadership skills," she said.

The Women of the Channel Europe event will kick off Nov. 9 with a cocktail and networking party, followed by a day of keynotes by bestselling authors, noted motivational speakers, channel partner panels, and various skill development breakout sessions on Nov. 10.

Speakers will include Rita Clifton, author, branding expert, and former chairman of Interbrand, and Helen Rutherford, founder of Lead A Market, a well-known channel marketer and consultant who works closely with solution providers and channel-focused vendors.

Also keynoting at the show will be bestselling author and entrepreneur Sahar Hashemi, who co-founded the popular U.K.-based coffee bar chain Coffee Republic.

"Women working in the channel create a powerful community that can drive the industry and our respective businesses forward," Verizon's Schijns said. "I'd like to see women use this time to build personal career plans, develop their network of women in channel, and learn skills to help them continue to advance their career."

In addition to its latest WOTC event launch in Europe, The Channel Company went live with its Women Of The Channel Online site geared toward supporting women in the IT industry in August, WOTC.CRN.com.

On the horizon is the Women of The Channel Leadership Summit 2016, which is being held from Nov. 30-Dec.1 in New York City.
Channel programs News

Insight, Logicalis CEOs: Tech Data-Avnet Deal Will Be Major Win For Channel Partners

Michael Novinson

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Tech Data's purchase of Avnet's technology business will allow the distributors to marry Tech Data's low cost structure with Avnet's technical expertise, according to executives of two of Avnet's top channel partners.

"I think Tech Data sees the value in what Avnet brings to the table," said Vince DeLuca, CEO of Logicalis U.S., No. 30 on the 2016 CRN Solution Provider 500. "I think they'll get the best of both worlds out of the acquisition."

Logicalis does hundreds of millions of dollars of business with Avnet each year, and DeLuca hopes the influence of Tech Data's low cost structure will free up money for the combined company to provide more technologically advanced, services-rich solutions. Tech Data plans to pay $2.6 billion for Avnet's data center-focused Technology Solutions (TS) business, with the deal expected to close in early 2017.

"We have a lot of regard and a lot of respect for both companies," said Ken Lamneck, CEO of Insight Enterprises, No. 15 on the 2016 CRN SP 500. "We're supportive of the move, and we don't anticipate any problems."

Even though Insight already has deep relationships with Ingram Micro, Synnex and Arrow, Lamneck said Insight plans to maintain virtually all of its existing business with Avnet and Tech Data, which totals in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year for both companies. Lamneck said he isn't worried about an erosion in support or margins since both companies already operate on a massive global scale.

DeLuca similarly believes that Tech Data can use its cost structure to influence Avnet without diminishing the quality of support provided by the distributor today. Logicalis has sourced through Avnet for at least a decade, DeLuca said, and has worked closely with the distributor in recent years around cloud computing enablement, platforms and marketplaces.

"I dont plan on making any changes [in my distribution strategy] because of this," DeLuca said.

Although Logicalis doesn't envision making any distribution-related changes, DeLuca said he will reassess if there's a degradation in price or quality in the future.

The Tech Data-Avnet deal will also put pressure on other value distributors to look at how their operating margins are shaping up, DeLuca said, creating the potential for further consolidation. The convergence of on-premise data center technology with cloud -- coupled with the blurring of lines between value and volume distribution -- is causing distributors to reassess their strategy, DeLuca said.

"I'm anticipating a certain level of consolidation," DeLuca said.

The distinction between broadline and specialty distribution has definitely diminished over the past decade, Inisght's Lamneck said, as traditional volume players got access to value-focused vendors such as IBM and HP for the first time.

The change, Lamneck said, has been driven by shifts in business strategy by the vendors themselves. IBM, for instance, is much less focused on hardware than it was a decade ago and volume distributorsare building up more capabilities around specialty technologies.

Logicalis' DeLuca is also seeing a convergence between broadline and specialty distribution, which he believes is driven by vendor consolidation, the commoditization of infrastructure, and the increased relevance of software and public cloud.

The acquisition will considerably augment Tech Data's effort to build a higher-value business, Lamneck said, making it one of the largest players in both the broadline and specialty distribution businesses. Insight leans heavily on Avnet for quoting and configuration work, Lamneck said, making sure all of the data center products work together and clients are given an accurate assessment of what IT they need.

Insight relies on Tech Data for volume products such as desktops, notebooks, software and peripheral devices, Lamneck said, as well as a little bit of value products. Logicalis, meanwhile, currently uses Tech Data opportunistically in areas such as stocking and inventory when Avnet is unable to deliver the product or service, according to DeLuca.

Lamneck said Tech Data CEO Bob Dutkowsky and Avnet TS President Patrick Zammit both reached out to him yesterday to ensure that Insight had no concerns about the deal. Zammit also reached out to DeLuca yesterday to explain what was behind Avnet's decision to sell its technology business to Tech Data, DeLuca said.

"I see a lot of cultural synergies between the organizations," DeLuca said. "I think this is a good move."
Networking News

Partners See Possible Cloud Business Boost As CenturyLink Reportedly Set To Sell Data Center Facilities

Gina Narcisi

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Months of speculation and uncertainty around CenturyLink's data center future might be coming to an end as its physical data center assets reportedly have attracted the attention of some possible buyers. Now partners are pondering how a potential sale would impact their cloud, hosting and co-location revenue.

A group of four private equity firms -- GTCR, Charlesbank Capital Partners, Berkshire Partners and Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners -- are getting ready to jointly bid for Monroe, La.-based CenturyLink's 58 data center facilities, according to a report from Thomson Reuters earlier this month.

CenturyLink did not return CRN's request for comment by publication time regarding if a potential data center sale would impact resources available to partners.

Similar to competing telecoms that are also in the data center space today, data center operations has been a secondary, or "fringe" business for CenturyLink, said one solution provider and CenturyLink partner who asked not to be named.

[Related: CenturyLink Plans Layoffs, Partners Hope Recent Emphasis On Channel Continues]

CenturyLink's reported decision to sell off its data centers could steer some partners away from suggesting CenturyLink's data center services to its business customers, at least for now while ownership may be uncertain, the solution provider said.

"Despite what the companies may say about a merger or acquisition, when the company changes hands, the tools and people are never the same so it absolutely would influence those decisions," the executive said. "You wouldn't want to take a high-billing customer and put that revenue at risk for something that may or may not resemble tomorrow what it does today."

But while CenturyLink's possible shedding of its data center facilities would make the solution provider reconsider suggesting its data center services to a customer, the executive believes that CenturyLink's decision could help the company grow in the cloud space.

"This could infuse them with some cash, and help them narrow their focus on strategic products and services, especially in the cloud," the solution provider executive said.

On its past three earnings calls, CenturyLink CEO Glen Post told investors that the carrier is considering several strategic options for its data center business. Post said that these options include a partnership or joint venture, a sale of all or a portion of the data centers, or even holding onto some or all of its data center locations.

Post said during the carrier's second-quarter 2016 earnings call that he anticipated that "the probable sale" of its data center business would be announced during the third quarter.

A carrier's decision to part with its data center facilities isn't surprising to solution providers. According to Michael Bremmer, CEO of TelecomQuotes.com, a telecom consultancy based in Moreno Valley, Calif., the data center wars have been won by the large data center operators and cloud providers, such as Amazon, Google and Equinix. But luckily for most service providers, such as the carriers that are offering cloud services, they don't need to be in the server business to offer cloud, he said.

Other carriers have backed out of the business of owning and operating data centers. Telecom provider Windstream sold off its data center facilities to data center operator TierPoint for $575 million in October 2015. And, according to Verizon CFO Fran Shammo during a June media conference, the Basking Ridge, N.J.-based carrier is also looking to offload its 48 data centers, worth an estimated $2.5 billion, that the carrier acquired from Terremark in 2011.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based master agent PlanetOne Communications sits squarely in CenturyLink's footprint and sells its co-location and hosting services through its community of solution provider partners. The company's reported selling of its data centers shouldn't change its growing portfolio of strategic offerings, said Ted Schuman, CEO of PlanetOne, CenturyLink Premier Elite partner.

Schuman doesn't anticipate the potential data center sale having a negative impact on partners.

"CenturyLink is really driving toward solution-selling, and this includes cloud," he said. "Selling off those [data center] assets wouldn't change my confidence in suggesting CenturyLink because they have a lot of resources to help partners go to market to make the solution sale."

Cash freed up from the potential data center sale could also help CenturyLink deepen its foothold in the cloud space by giving it room to make a cloud-related acquisition, the anonymous solution provider said.

"All telecoms today are dependent on cloud revenue in some way, shape or form," the solution provider executive said. "Carriers that arent quite there have to get there somehow."
Networking News

AT&T's 'Transformational' Project AirGig Promises Multi-Gigabit Speeds In More Locations

Gina Narcisi

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Telecom giant AT&T is experimenting with delivering multi-Gigabit wireless internet speeds using existing power lines. AT&T Tuesday unveiled Project AirGig, a technology that will transport high-speed connectivity to any location or handheld wireless device, according to the carrier.

Project AirGig will work by using a combination of license-free spectrum and low-cost plastic antennas developed by AT&T to regenerate the wave signals across existing power lines. This method will allow the Dallas-based carrier to connect people and mobile devices to multi-Gigabit speeds without relying on expensive fiber networks, according to AT&T.

AT&T said that because of the freedom that Project AirGig has from cables, the technology would allow it to combat the high cost of deploying high-speed internet connectivity to new areas, including rural locations and underserved areas.

[Related: Google Battles AT&T, Comcast Over Fiber Rollout In Nashville, Reportedly Plans To Cut Fiber Staff In Half ]

Project AirGig is the result of AT&T's experimentation with several different ways to send a modulated radio signal around or near medium-voltage power lines. The new technology doesn't require a direct connection to the power line  instead, AirGig relies on antennas and devices mounted along the power line that AT&T Labs has created for the project. These devices will regenerate millimeter wave signals that can be used for 4G LTE and 5G multi-Gigabit mobile and fixed deployments, according to the carrier.

Because AirGig technology doesn't rely on fiber or an electrical connection, AT&T will be able to deploy multi-Gigabit internet speeds faster and within areas that have been historically underserved, AT&T said.

"Project AirGig has tremendous potential to transform internet access globally  well beyond our current broadband footprint and not just in the United States, said AT&T's chief strategy officer and group president, Technology and Operations, John Donovan. "Were looking at the right global location to trial this new technology next year.

AT&T did not respond to CRN's request for comment by publication time regarding whether AirGig would be immediately available to business customers and through its ecosystem of channel partners.

TeraNova Consulting Group, a solution provider that specializes in telecom expense and managed services for wireless solutions and an AT&T partner, believes the carrier's latest wireless technology is "fascinating," said Natasha Royer Coons, managing director of the San Diego-based solution provider.

"If AT&T allows solution providers in the channel to sell 5G speeds in more service areas leveraging this technology, it will help us deliver more solutions over cellular to our clients," Coons said. "These solutions range from supporting streaming at much greater speeds, and less latency for connecting a whole universe of devices such as wearables, cars, security cameras, home appliances [and] alarms." 

Industry research firm Gartner predicts that there will be 20.8 billion connected devices by 2020, compared to the currently estimated 6.4 billion connected devices today. 

AT&T is facing stiff competition in the high-speed internet arena. Earlier this year, Comcast unveiled its Gigabit-speed Internet service that relies on a modem upgraded with DOCSIS 3.1 technology. This technology can enable connectivity speeds of 10 Gbps on the download and 1 Gbps on the upload, without any reliance on fiber networks.

AT&T is already delivering Gigabit wireless speeds in 29 U.S. markets today via its GigaPower Fiber-based internet service to consumers and small businesses. The carrier plans has expansion plans for its fiber network by the end of 2016.

AT&T also said in its blog that it has more than 100 patents pending for AirGig's "transformational" technology and other access technologies, a factor that could greatly benefit the carrier from a competitive standpoint, TeraNova's Coons said.

"Since [AT&T] would have the patents and first-mover advantage leveraging bleeding-edge technology, I definitely see a few competitive advantages for AT&T," she said.

These advantages include owning the revenue-generating patents that can be sold to other wireless carriers, equipment revenue that can be sold to utility companies, as well as the potential for partnerships and contracts with utility companies interested in using this technology to deliver greater wireless reach and speeds to their own customers or to leverage the technology for smart grid applications, according to Coons.

Testing for Project AirGig has already begun at AT&T's outdoor facilities and the carrier expects its first field trials to begin in 2017.
Unlocking Greater Scale

Avnet has opted to unload its $9.65 billion Technology Solutions business to volume distribution powerhouse Tech Data as the Phoenix-based distributor looks to double down on its semiconductor business.

Avnet Technology Solutions (TS) President Patrick Zammit spoke exclusively with CRN about how becoming part of Tech Data will affect margins, sales and technical support, unlock greater scale and a deeper line card, and accelerate investment around next-generation technologies.

Zammit also discussed why channel partners should remain with Avnet, the potential financial consequences of switching to another distributor and what will happen to Avnet's top leadership once the deal closes in the first half of 2017.
A terminally ill minor has been euthanized in Belgium, becoming the first child to be euthanized in the country since Belgium removed its age restrictions on euthanasia two years ago.

According to CNN, the child was suffering from an incurable disease and had asked for euthanasia, Sen. Jean-Jacques De Gucht said.

"I think it's very important that we, as a society, have given the opportunity to those people to decide for themselves in what manner they cope with that situation," said Gucht, a supporter of euthanasia legislation.

Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002 and then in 2014 the bill was extended to those under the age of 18 with the provision that the child understood was euthanasia means. Parental consent must also be given.

"This can only be in cases of serious and incurable diseases, which is the same thing for adults ... but for minors an additional condition is that the death must be expected in the near future," said Jacqueline Herremans, president of Belgiums Association for the Right to Die with Dignity.

Meanwhile, Pastor Denny Burke says that America is not so far behind Belgiums precedent.

If life is only reckoned as valuable based on utility or quality of life, then when society deems such lives unworthy of living consent may no longer be required, he wrote in a column on his blog. Utilitarianism can be a conscience-crushing, life-destroying moral argument. And we must oppose it wherever it raises itself up against the image of God (2 Corinthians 10:5). This is a slippery slope that we must not go down, but it appears we are already on the move.

Publication date: September 19, 2016
When the Costa neoRomantica heads to Asia next year, it will not be with the intent to spend the full year sourcing Chinese passengers as the ship will instead concentrate on building up the Japanese market for the Italian brand, according to Kelvin Wong, vice president commercial, Costa Asia.

The 1993-built neoRomantica will be the fifth Costa ship in Asia, and the move to Japan will also help offset capacity growth in China.

The ship will use Fukuoka, Maizuru and Kanazawa in Japan and Busan in South Korea as embarkation ports.

Sailings will offer port stops in Japan, South Korea and Russia.

We see Japan as a market with great potential, said Wong. Thats why we established an office in Tokyo

earlier this year. Deployment of the premium neoRomantica will reinforce our leading position in Asia and allow us to continue to significantly grow in the Japanese cruise market. The Costa neoRomantica is targeted to Japanese passengers, but will also accommodate South Korean passengers.

The deployment move demonstrates Costas expansion into other Asian markets, offsetting capacity growth in China. It also contributes significant capacity to the Japanese market, where the neoRomantica will join Princess Cruises, which has seasonal deployment, and a trio of local Japanese operators.


Crystal Cruises has unveiled further design details of it first aircraft, a Boeing 777-200LR, as part of the companys Crystal AirCruises experience.

To lunch service in fall 2017, Crystal AirCruises will transport 84 guests to what it calls some of the worlds most exotic and remote locales in first class accommodations on 14-, 21- and 28-day itineraries.

The privately owned Boeing 777-200LR is currently being transformed to meet Crystals standards of customization, and will boast plush, fully reclining seats, social spaces, large flat-screen TVs, butler and concierge services and Michelin Star-inspired cuisine, according to a prepared statement.

Crystal AirCruises is not just a thrilling new venture, but a groundbreaking development in the luxury travel industry, says Edie Rodriguez, CEO and president. Even the savviest travelers and guests who have sailed on our award-winning ocean cruises many times will relish brand new opportunities to explore places impossible to reach by water, all with Crystals signature personalized service and the highest standard of luxury at every point of travel.

According to Crystal, its plane is larger and newer than any private jet travel option, appointed with features more commonly found in luxury suites. The seats fully recline to lie-flat beds, measuring 73.5 inches long, for maximum personal space and ergonomic comfort, while the expansive social lounge has a stand-up bar, two divans and four dining tables with dedicated seating for six guests. Cuisine will be prepared by a dedicated executive chef in galleys and paired with a premium wine list.

Guests will also enjoy creature comforts and conveniences including Bose Noise Cancelling headphones, Apple iPads, complimentary global WiFi, 24-inch interactive TVs with on-demand programming and music library, individual USB ports and power outlets, and a live cockpit-to-ground listening channel. There will also be custom blankets, lumbar and pillows, plush duvets and mattress toppers  as well as spacious lavatories with amenities.


MSC Cruises has confirmed that the Splendida is heading to China in 2018 as reported by Cruise Industry News last month.

The 138,000-ton, 3,300-passenger (double occupancy) Splendida will be joining the 59,000-ton, 1,560-passenger Lirica, which since her launch in May has recently moved her year-round homeport from Shanghai to Tianjin, according to MSC.

MSC said that the Splendida will undergo significant drydock enhancements in late 2017, customizing the ship for the Chinese market.

The bigger ship will also be introducing the cruise lines Yacht Club concept in China.
We're 2.5 million strongmore than 1.7 million girls and 750,000 adults who believe in the power of every G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-taker, Leader) to change the world. Since 1912, weve built girls of courage, confidence, and character who make the world a better place.
Executives at Booz Allen Hamilton learned the importance of information security the hard way back in 2011 when the hacker group Anonymous claimed that it had penetrated one of Booz Allens servers and had deleted 4GB of source code and released a list of more than 90,000 military email addresses and encrypted passwords.

The breached server turned out to be a development environment containing test data, but that didnt really matter; it was a wakeup call, says Michael Waters, director of information security at the consulting firm and government contractor. It was a pretty unpleasant experience, but it did galvanize substantial investment  both capital and HR  in getting things done. The firm looked around and said, We have been working on this, but we need to put more toward it.

Over the next year, Waters information security staff grew from 12 to 70 employees, budgets increased, and processes and governance improved significantly. But a security plan is never finished, and in 2013 Booz Allen received a second jolt  this time in the form of an insider threat  when recent hire Edward Snowden, working under contract to the NSA, leaked highly classified documents describing government surveillance programs.

Booz Allen promptly fired Snowden and further honed its infosec program  a practice that continues to this day, says Waters. We constantly update our information security procedures, no matter what the circumstances, and we also are continuing to strengthen our ethics and compliance program every year, he says.

Today, Waters would put his infosec program on par with those of the worlds biggest enterprises, but he would have preferred to get there without those pivotal events.

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

Many companies today hope to avoid similar high-profile wakeup calls. After years of news about disastrous breaches, information security has finally gotten the attention of upper management. Two-thirds of 287 U.S. respondents to a survey conducted by CSO, CIO and Computerworld said that senior business executives at their organizations are focusing more attention on infosec than they were in the past. And most of the respondents said they expect that focus to continue. Yet IT leaders still face challenges when it comes to aligning security goals with the needs of business, including justifying costs, defining risks, and clarifying roles and responsibilities.

Half of the survey respondents said security-related efforts account for less than 10 percent of their IT budgets, and nearly three-quarters said security efforts account for less than 25 percent of ITs time. And while half of those polled said theyd grade their organizations security practices as an A or B, an equal portion would choose C, D or F.

So how can enterprises get from where they are today to having a cohesive, funded and fully implemented information security program? IT leaders and analysts share tips for navigating these muddy waters and protecting the organization from threats.

Emphasize awareness

About a year ago, customers of sales and marketing advisory firm SiriusDecisions started asking questions about the security of the information they share with the Wilton, Conn.-based company. With all the news about data breaches, they were concerned that a weak link might jeopardize the competitive intelligence they shared.

Vice president of IT Jonathan Block knew the firms infosec policies and procedures were sound. SiriusDecisions operates entirely in the cloud, relying on big-name vendors whose security practices far exceed what the firm could do on its own. But he says the growing number of client inquiries, along with a slew of highly publicized security breaches at other companies, lit a fire under us, underscoring the importance of information security both internally and for the firms clients.

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

Today, SiriusDecisions shares detailed information with customers about its service providers security certifications and audits, trains every employee on information security awareness, especially social engineering  its biggest threat today  and earmarks 10 percent of its IT budget specifically for infosec initiatives.

Asked to grade the firms efforts, Block says, Id give us a solid B. Our goal is to try to get ahead of a lot of these things. The frequency and severity of attacks are always going to increase, but weve identified the type of attacks that do the most damage, and we focus our efforts on those.

Create a communication channel

At Wells Fargo, executives are much more knowledgeable about information security than they were four years ago, says chief information security officer Rich Baich, who became the banks first CISO in 2012.

Much of the improvement centers around better collaboration and communication between technical and nontechnical staff, business units and executives, he says. To help get there, Wells Fargo realigned its security hierarchy. In January 2015, Baich began reporting to the chief risk officer instead of the CIO to emphasize securitys risk-based focus and to improve transparency with the board of directors.

Im not in technology, Baich says. [The new hierarchy] allowed us to effectively create a communication channel that helped people understand the language of security, the importance of security, how it fits into the larger, overall risk management construct  and ultimately helped drive and make this part of our culture, [in which] every individual team member is a risk manager.

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

Baich would not assign a letter grade to Wells Fargos information security program, saying that even a good grade might invite scrutiny from prospective hackers. But Elvis Moreland, who worked at the bank as an independent cybersecurity contractor from November 2015 to May 2016, applauds the steps Wells Fargo has taken to boost security, including its move to adopt federal NIST cybersecurity standards, which he helped plan as part of the banks hybrid security framework. Theyll work their way up to a B easily if those efforts continue, he says.

Moreland recommends the NIST cybersecurity framework because it applies to both the private sector and the federal government, and because it offers three decades of documented lessons learned that can be applied to any organization. Its hundreds of millions of dollars in free research, says Moreland, who is now a senior cyber-security and risk management consultant at Atos BDS North America. Companies would cover 80 percent of the security vulnerabilities and weaknesses we see today just by realigning the security hierarchy and adopting the NIST framework, he adds.

Give it a spin

Even before the 2011 attack, Waters had been working on Booz Allens information security framework. However, it was challenging to get the attention and budget I needed, he recalls.

He soon learned that the tone and perspective he used to communicate infosec needs to the IT department, executives and business units were critical to getting things done.

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

Today, Waters says that when he and his team discuss security needs with their business colleagues, they might say, Its not that I want you to do something, but its this new regulation we need to comply with, and I can help you figure out how to do it. Or, Outside attackers are trying to steal our data or wreck our systems; Im here to help implement the protections and controls because of these outside forces.

Spend wisely

Gary Vause, founder and president of cybersecurity consultancy VSC, says many companies keep tight caps on their infosec budgets because they expect to need resources to put out the next security fire. They know its coming, but rather than be preventive, they choose to be reactive, he says.

On the other hand, he cautions, throwing money at the problem isnt the answer either. Developing an understanding of a companys security maturity level  a view that includes people, processes and technology  can help organizations prioritize budgets based on the most critical vulnerabilities, he says.

Emily Mossburg, principal of Deloittes Resilient Services practice, agrees that its not about spending more money. The question, she says, is this: Are you prioritizing the things that could actually hurt your business the most? And are you remediating the areas where your business is the most vulnerable? She advises focusing on the areas where the threat actors are really after your business and, ultimately, where the impact would be the greatest.

Make it real

Companies often look at the easy-to-identify, tangible losses in a data breach, such as the number of records with personally identifiable information. Those should certainly be protected, Mossburg says, but less obvious losses could actually prove costlier.

In June, Deloitte released a report that uncovers 14 business impacts of a cybersecurity incident, half of which are hidden costs, including loss of intellectual property, devaluation of your trade name and lost contract revenue. Those hidden costs can be far more expensive than the initial triage and damage control expenses, and they can go on for years.

In one hypothetical model that Deloitte created based on its experiences with customers, the cost to a healthcare company that lost a significant number of medical records was more than $1.6 billion. Of that figure, only 3.5 percent of the costs were considered above the surface tangibles that are generally expected in the wake of a cyberattack, such as post-breach customer protection services and cybersecurity improvements.

When you can articulate a risk that the business and board of directors agree with, then you can come up with a plan to mitigate and manage that risk.  Michael Eisenberg

The remaining 96.5 percent of the costs were for less tangible hits, such as lost customer relationships and increases in insurance premiums. Such beneath the surface costs often come as a shock for companies in the post-breach remediation process.

We need to make this real for people, Mossburg says. Its very important to understand the industry, the nuances to the types of systems they use, their interconnectedness to third parties, the types of data they have, how theyre using it and what that might be. All those contributing factors, along with the type of incident, make scenarios unique for every company. Weve had a lot of conversations [with clients] on what are the scenarios that they should be modeling for themselves, she says.

Articulating risks is an important first step, says Michael Eisenberg, vice president in the office of the CISO at cybersecurity solutions provider Optiv. When you can articulate a risk that the business and board of directors agree with, then you can come up with a plan to mitigate and manage that risk  a plan that includes additional funding and resources, he says.

Writing on the wall

Five years after the Anonymous breach at Booz Allen, Waters still displays a framed copy of the Washington Post article about the attack on his office wall. For me and my leadership team, he says, its a reminder that this is never allowed to happen again.

How the survey was conducted This special report is based on an online survey conducted by CIO, Computerworld and CSO from March 25 through May 23, 2016, among readers and customers of the three publications who responded to newsletter and email solicitations. The survey explored the interaction of information security and traditional IT teams in enterprises today: Whos responsible for which security duties, where roles and responsibilities overlap, and what challenges organizations face in aligning infosec concerns with IT strategy and business goals. Only the responses of those who indicated that they currently resided in the United States were tallied, for a total of 287 qualified responses. Some 83 percent of the qualified respondents are IT leaders or professionals, 11 percent are business managers, and the remaining 6 percent perform other business functions.

Next read this: Is security making the grade? What IT and business pros really think
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A few years ago, the then-maestro of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony assured friends that Fairfields Alex Beyer possessed the ability to reach the heady heights of piano performance  provided he stay true to his calling.

The late Gustav Meier had been a Beyer supporter from when the young musician captured the GBS competition for instrumentalists at age 13, debuting with the orchestra the following season. A senior in a dual degree program at Harvard University and the New England Conservatory, Beyer, 22, returns to the GBS to open its 71st season on Saturday, Sept. 24, under the baton of Eric Jacobsen. He does so as a recent participant in the Queen Elisabeth (of Belgium) Competition in Brussels, where he won the Bronze Medal. Earlier this year the American Pianists Association chose him as one of the nations top five young pianists.

When we caught up with Beyer recently, we asked him a few questions by email.

Q. You have great affection for the GBS. Why?

A. (Winning the GBS Carlson Horn competition) was the groundbreaking moment of my early musical endeavors. I played the Tchaikovsky Concerto (at the GBS debut) ... my playing (at the time) was sloppier than (Meier) probably cared for  but he took the risk, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Q. What is your affinity for Saturday nights program?

More Information The Klein Memorial Auditorium, 910 Fairfield Ave., Bridgeport. Saturday, Sept. 24, 8 p.m. $59-$15. All concerts preceded at 7 with a talk on that night's program. 203-576-0263, gbso.org See More Collapse

A. Ill be playing the second concerto of Beethoven, Op 19. Despite its number, it was written and even revised before the first concerto. ... In the moments building toward a climax ... Beethovens score explodes in rejoice.

Q. What will you do after graduation?

A. I have thought about my future at length. ... For now, I am looking to perform as much as possible, and enjoy other subjects, mainly mathematics and history, to keep my mind fresh.

Q. The grueling 13-month APA competition is now your major focus. On what do the judges base their findings?

A. The competition gets started in September with a few gala performances in New York and Indianapolis, where the APA is based. ... There is a week of performances by each of us throughout the coming season  mine is in February  and then we all convene for Discovery Week, which is April 1-8. By the end, (each of the five candidates) will have played a solo recital, a selection of American music, a selection of songs, a piano quintet, a concerto with a high school orchestra as a part of the outreach program, a concerto with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, and a concerto with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. All the bases will have been covered!

Q. Music and mathematics are your passions. Why?

A. When I hear math professors talk about their own research, I am in awe of the apparent infinitude of realms, and subrealms, and sub subrealms that exist in the universe of mathematics. But music, similarly miraculous in its existence, is also infinite to me. There is an uncountable number of ways to approach a work, and uncountable trajectories that can be taken from any given starting point. These trajectories are a product of, and mingle with, the human experience: where weve been, what weve seen, heard, felt, learned. There is so much yet to discover!

pasboros@ctpost.com; Twitter:@PhyllisASBoros
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LOS ANGELES (AP)  Charmian Carr, the actress best known for sweetly portraying the eldest von Trapp daughter in Rodgers & Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music," has died. She was 73.

Carr died Saturday of complications from a rare form of dementia in Los Angeles, Carr's spokesman, Harlan Boll, said.

At age 21, the actress portrayed Liesl von Trapp in the 1965 film version of the musical "The Sound of Music." She famously performed the song "Sixteen Going on Seventeen."

After "The Sound of Music," Carr's only other major Hollywood role was starring with Anthony Perkins in the Stephen Sondheim television musical "Evening Primrose." She played a mysterious young woman who lived in a department store.

"It's always sad when a member of the family passes away  and in the case of the 'family' of the movie 'The Sound of Music,' it's especially sad when it is the first of the group to go," said Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization, in a statement. "Charmian Carr played the oldest von Trapp child, and in some ways she maintained that role in real life  guiding, cheering, supporting and generally being there for the rest of her 'sisters' and 'brothers.' "

20th Century Fox, the studio that produced the "Sound of Music" film, noted Carr's death. "The Sound of Music lost a beloved member of the family w/ the passing of Charmian Carr. She will be forever missed," the studio said on its Twitter account.

The actress later wrote a pair of books about her "Sound of Music" experiences: "Forever Liesl" and "Letters to Liesl." She fully embraced audiences' reverence for the musical, frequently appearing at fan events commemorating the film, including sing-a-long performances at the Hollywood Bowl.

"I tell people that they should consider sing-a-long 'Sound Of Music' like going to a therapist," she told The Associated Press before a 2005 appearance. "It's just a kind of therapy. They can move around. They can dance and talk back to the screen. They can skip their appointment with the shrink that week."

Carr went on to become an interior designer in Southern California. Her clients included Michael Jackson and "Sound of Music" screenwriter Ernest Lehman.

She was born in Chicago in 1942. Her mother was a vaudeville actress, and her father was a musician and orchestra leader. Her family moved to the San Fernando Valley when she was a child.

Carr is survived by her four siblings, her two children and four grandchildren. She is also survived by the six other actors who became part of cinematic history when they were cast as the von Trapp children.

"We're second family," said Kym Karath, who played the youngest von Trapp, Gretl, in an AP interview last year to commemorate the film's 50th anniversary. "As adults, we were deeply bonded, so our lives have really interwoven with each other."

___

This story corrects the spelling to Rodgers, instead of Rogers.
BRIDGEPORT - A local man, awaiting trial in a Trumbull rape case, was charged Wednesday with an earlier rape here.

Manuel Montanez, 24, of Spring Street, was taken into custody by the U.S. Marshal Fugitive Task Force with the assistance of judicial marshals as he waited in court for his case to be called.

He was taken out of the courthouse in handcuffs after being served with a warrant charging him with first-degree sexual assault and first-degree unlawful restraint.

He was being held in lieu of $250,000 bond pending arraignment in Superior Court on Thursday.

Montanez was arrested May 12 by Trumbull police after a 23-year-old woman complained he had raped her in her home.

Trumbull police said the woman told them that on Oct. 10, 2015, she had been at the Windsock bar in Stratford and had invited Montanez and some other people she had met there back to her home.

The woman was getting changed in her bedroom when police said Montanez came into the room uninvited and told the woman, I know how to satisfy you.

Police said the woman told them she ordered Montanez out of her room but instead he pulled her clothes off and raped her.

City police detectives said they were later contacted by Trumbull detectives who had discovered during their investigation at least three more possible rape victims of Montanez.

One of them was a 22-year-old woman who police said claimed she was raped in Montanezs home in 2014.

Police said that woman told them that in June or July 2014, she had gone to Montanezs home here to pick up some belongings. While in the home she went to use the bathroom.

Police said the woman told them she was in the bathroom when Montanez came in and, despite her pleas for him to stop, pulled her clothes off and raped her.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 5 1 of 5 Contributed Photo / ST Show More Show Less 2 of 5 Lauralton Hall /Academy of Our Lady of Mercy Show More Show Less 3 of 5 4 of 5 Lauralton Hall /Academy of Our Lady of Mercy Show More Show Less 5 of 5









MILFORD  An historic, 150 year-old tower on the Lauralton Hall campus is being re-purposed into a classroom for science, math and technology courses, and renamed for a prominent alumna.

The water tower on the schools High Street campus will be renamed the Merwin Tower in honor of female science pioneer and Lauralton alumna Alyce Merwin in a program on Friday, school spokeswoman Kathy Callahan said.
Ingalls 5K on Causeway.jpg

Nearly 750 runners took part in last Saturday's "5K on the Causeway," sponsored annually by Ingalls Shipbuilding to raise money for Mississippi Special Olympics. This year's event raised $13,000.

(Ingalls Shipbuilding photo)

PASCAGOULA, Mississippi -- Ingalls Shipbuilding's annual "5K on the Causeway" charity run raised some $13,000 Saturday -- monies which will go to support Special Olympics of Mississippi.

Nearly 750 runners from across the coast and Alabama participated in the event, held on Singing River Island adjacent to the shipyard. A non-competitive fun run was also held this year.

"Ingalls, along with, Interactive Health, is proud to support Special Olympics of Mississippi, and we are especially proud of the annual 5K on the Causeway," said Ingalls vice president Edmond Hughes. "The 5K gives us an opportunity to raise money for a worthy cause while promoting healthy lifestyles and wellness for our employees and the local community."

Ingalls previously donated $5,000 to Mississippi Special Olympics in conjunction with the Summer Games held at Keesler Air Force Base in May.

The top male finisher Saturday was Josh Becker, with the top female Amanda Whitaker, an Ingalls employee. Each winner received a medal hand-designed by Special Olympics athletes.

"Many of the employees start training weeks in advance to get ready for this event every year," said Ingalls Program Manager for Interactive Health, Joni Goodman. "Over the past five years we've seen increased participation and dedication to this event, and it has become a special race for a worthy cause. It's wonderful to see so many folks devoted to a great cause."

At the conclusion of the race, participants and families remained on Singing River Island for activities, live music and food provided by local vendors.
Women Hemmed in Prayer .jpg

A group of Pascagoula women from various churches in the area bound together as a group called, "Hemmed in Prayer" where they sew garments to send to less fortunate countries.

(Virginia Milstead )

PASCAGOULA, Miss. - A group of Pascagoula women have decided to follow the Romans 12:13 bible verse that says, "When God's people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality."

Women On Mission (WOM) is an organization within First Baptist Church that focuses on mission activities. In 2008, a ministry named, "Hemmed in Prayer" was formed by the WOM ladies for the purpose of sewing clothing for needy children around the world.

The initial goal was to make about 1,000 garments to provide to countries around the world, but little did they know, their expectations evolved as their efforts translated to sewing 20,000 hand-made garments consisting of children's clothing, blankets, tote bags, and diapers.

Virginia Milstead, one of the volunteers and former home economic teacher said the women really enjoy sewing and the camaraderie of meeting with like-minded women with one goal in mind.

"We all get along and you can just imagine when a surplus of women get together how that can be, but we don't have that here," Milstead said. "These are women who want to use their talents for God and a very worthwhile cause. We genuinely enjoy being around each other doing God's work."

According to volunteer Nelda Broom, an average of 35 to 40 ladies spend each day sewing and there isn't a budget for their endeavors. Broom also said women joined their group who were simply looking for something to do.

"Most of the women are widowed and retired and were just looking for something to be involved in," Broom said. "It evolved into what we have today and our purpose for creating these garments is bigger than us."

In August, the ladies had completed a total of 20,030 garments and by Sept. 20, a grand total of 20,445 garments had been completed and are ready to send across the world. So far, the group has sent garments to Africa, Haiti, Kenya, Tanzania and many more.

WOM meet every third Tuesday of the month at the First Baptist Church in Pascagoula and if any other women are interested in joining their group, you do not have to be a member of First Baptist to join.

Anyone who feels compelled to donate, material and sewing equipment donations can be dropped off at the church.
Cuba and Iran sign memorandum of understanding in key sectors

In the presence of Cuban President Raul Castro, and the head of state of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hasan Rohani, a Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation in various sectors was signed on Monday in Havana.

Roberto Morales, Cuban Minister of Public Health, and Seyed Hasan Ghazizadeh Hashemi, Minister of Health and Medical Education of the Persian nation, signed the legal document that includes the spheres of health, research, education and medical technology.

Outline agreements will also be signed as part of the official visit to Cuba of the Iranian head of state, for cooperation in the fields of biomedicine, organic farming and the development of veterinary research; an interbank memorandum of cooperation, and a letter of intent for the joint production of the Pentavalente vaccine.

Rohani arrived in Havana on Monday afternoon from Margarita Island, Venezuela, where the 27th Summit of Non-Aligned Countries was recently concluded, the pro-tempore chairmanship of which was transferred by Iran to the Bolivarian nation.

The Persian head of state will leave for the United States on Tuesday to take part in the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Mark Everson.jpg

Property owner Mark Everson stood before the Pascagoula city council on Tuesday to implore the council to look into the decision to drive former Moss Point Chief of Police Art McClung home after he was stopped by Pascagoula police for speeding and driving under the influence. (Tyler Carter/Gulflive.com)

PASCAGOULA, Miss. - Residents in Pascagoula are not quite over the way the city handled a situation involving former Moss Point Chief of Police Art McClung.

At Tuesday's city council meeting, property owner Mark Everson - an executive whose governmental service included serving as former IRS commissioner under President George W. Bush -- addressed the city council and encouraged them to take a closer look into policies to see if proper procedure was followed in the police department's handling of McClung.

"I do urge the council to investigate and reach a conclusion about the handling of the Moss Point police chief matter," Everson said. "Police departments across the country are under siege, they deserve our support. At the same time, they must be held accountable for the proper conduct of their affairs."

McClung was pulled over Pascagoula police July 29 after reportedly driving 109 mph on U.S. 90 between the Gautier bridge and the Pascagoula bridge in his city-assigned police SUV. In the dash cam footage released by Pascagoula police, McClung is heard telling officers that he had consumed, "about three vodkas." Officers on the scene called their captain who then told them to call Chief Kenny Johnson, Pascagoula Chief of Police.

Former Moss Point Chief of Police, Art McClung. (File photo/Gulflive.com)

According to McClung, he and Johnson spoke and Johnson told his officers to drive McClung home. He was charged with no offenses, and no report on the incident was filed.

Johnson has come under fire for his handling of McClung and has left community members wondering why no disciplinary action has been levied against Johnson.

Everson, an executive whose government service included working as a deputy director for the federal Office of Management and Budget and deputy director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the matter needs transparency and complete accountability to show good faith to residents and those outside of Mississippi.

"There is clearly great public concern about the way this situation was handled based on the 1,700 views the dash cam footage has received after it being uploaded to YouTube," Everson said. "The Constitution demands equal protection under the law, which means there is no favoritism. You don't have the option to not be prosecuted or investigated in this country because of who you are. I think you have significant public concern and you have oversight responsibility for the city and conduct of the police department. It is important to establish accountability and how they were followed or not followed."

"The public deserves to know if procedures were properly followed in this instance," Everson said. "The stakes for the city could not be clearer. I know you all are deeply concerned about economic development of this community and I can tell you that there are consultants and governed officials in California and Virginia who are looking at how this case is being handled as well as the oversight of the hospital and I can tell you that the perceptions they have are not positive."

After dash cam footage of McClung was released by the Sun Herald, the Moss Point Board of Aldermen held an emergency meeting where they decided to suspend McClung without pay pending an internal investigation.

At their Sept. 6 meeting, the Board of Aldermen went into executive session where McClung was allowed to give an account of the events of July 29. Aldermen returned to chambers where a motion was made to fire McClung. McClung had until last Tuesday by 5 p.m. to submit a letter of resignation, which he did.

Pascagoula City Manager Joe Huffman said he had spoken to Johnson and says that while he was limited to what he could disclose about his findings because of the issue being a personnel matter, Huffman said he thought Johnson exercised proper judgement based on the circumstances of the case.

"Chief Johnson and I talked, and right now where I am at on it is that he was not on site when the incident took place so he made a decision based on the information he had at that time and he felt it was the right decision," Huffman said. "I can support that, I think that law enforcement officers have discretion and Chief Johnson did what he thought was right at the time with the information he had."

The Mississippi Press spoke with Huffman last week. Huffman said that if there is a change in the status of an employee in the city, that information would not be released to the public because of it being a personnel matter.

Everson said he believes the council should look into the police department's policies to see if protocol was followed and if they did not, the message they are sending to parents in the community is "damning."

"Not looking into this sends a bad message to parents who are concerned about drunk driving in this city," Everson said. "It's a real issue across the country and I am hard pressed how the council would answer a mom or dad who is concerned about drunk driving."
Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary , Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase: Click here to read more.
Prosser, defense propel Berlin past Penns Manor in Appalachian Bowl

Berlin Brothersvalley made it 2 wins in a row for the WestPAC in the Appalachian Bowl with convincing victory over Penns Manor at Windber Stadium.
Boo! What are the scariest spots in Lake County?

The old courthouse. A tea room in Mount Dora. Lake County has several places that are thought to be haunted.
Itas a torrid Tuesday afternoon on the corner of Goodman and Southern. Crossing guard Bob Jones stands on the side of the road as a bead of sweat trickles past his mustache and meets the toothpick dangling from his mouth.

The temperature is 91 degrees, and the bright neon vest covering his buttondown isnat doing him any favors. But Jones isnat complaining. A smile spreads on his face as a Toyota quickly approaches.A

He steps onto the street, the red stop sign flying up in his hand and the whistle blowing from his mouth, loud and clear. The Camry slows to a halt.

A student hustles over the crosswalk and Jones is quick to greet him.

aHave a good one now, have a good one.a

aThank you,a the student replied.

aYouare more than welcome.a

After the student and Camry have moved, the Blue Line passes by and the driver makes sure to honk and wave at his favorite crossing guard. Jones returns the favor, smiling and giving him the go-ahead gesture.

When the Blue Line has passed through, University of Memphis student Maryle Wingfield, 22, heads to her car, and makes sure to say hello to Jones.

aHe makes my day just about every day I see him,a the early childhood education major said.A aAnd heas super positive just about every time I see him.a

Many other students have observed the positivity and they appreciate every bit of it.

aHeas just a very warm soul who is always spreading joy and warmth,a said U of M junior Becky Longoria, 20, a child development family studies major. aHeas a friend to everyone.a

U of M senior Elizabeth Nguyen, 21, a finance major, agrees with Longoria.

aHeas really sweet and calm,a she said. aMost crossing guards are aggressive, but heas not.a

And yet when looking at Jonesas past, the abundance of positive energy and lack of aggression could be seen as surprising.

Born on Sept. 27, 1946, Jones was raised in Memphis by his parents, a railroad worker and a hairdresser.

With both parents working full-time, he spent much of his time with his sisters. Jones would later meet his future wife, Bette. In 1964, he graduated from high school, and in October of that same year, he joined the military.

aThere was nothing really going on,a he said. aI went ahead and joined because it would be something different,a he said. aYou learn a lot of things that you need to learn, and youare being productive.a

Jones never imagined, though, that he would be sent overseas. aIt just wasnat on my mind,a he said. But in 1965 the conflict in Vietnam escalated, and Jones would go on to spend two tours there.

Working as an RTO (Radio Telephone Operator), he transferred messages and made sure all forms of communication ran smoothly. If there was a signal detachment and wires needed to be put up or stretched out, it was on Jones.

And it wasnat just the stressful work that got to him. In his two tours, the veteran saw multiple friends fall in battle.

aIt was a bad dream,a he said. aI lost several of my partners. Three of us didnat make it, and four of us did.a

After his discharge in 1968, Jones tried to shake off the perils of war. He attended Shelby State, now Southwest Community College, for a time, and married Bette. The two had five children, four girls and one boy, and for a time, things seemed to be looking up.

But after just 11 years of marriage, Bette unexpectedly passed away. Itas a difficult subject for Jones, and one he still rarely discusses.

aThings happen,a he said. aThings happen that you have no control over.a

With his wife gone, Jones focused on other aspects of his life. For 23 years, he worked as a shipping and receiving clerk for nexAir.

But after retirement he found himself with too much time on his hands. So two years ago he took the U of M crossing guard position he holds today, a position that provides him not only work, but joy as well.

aThey smile, I smile, they smile back, and itas energizing,a he said. aI look forward to it.a

On Tuesday afternoon Jones raises his stop sign and blows his whistle. Cars come to a stop and a solemn student passes over.

But her sullen look is soon met with a smile. aAlright, alright, have a good one now,a he tells her. She looks down as her teeth flash and her frown reverses. Jones has done his job. He lowers his stop sign, drops his whistle, and with a friendly wave, gives the cars the go-ahead.
When Phil Shiners ambulance-chasing law firm ceased trading last month, the Mail hoped this was the end of hounding British soldiers over their conduct in the heat of battle more than a decade ago. But still their ordeal drags on.

As Sergeant Alexander Blackman languishes in jail, still waiting to hear if he can appeal against his murder conviction, three more soldiers face prosecution over the drowning of an Iraqi 13 years ago  despite being cleared in 2006, after a three-year inquiry.

Meanwhile, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team plods through a backlog of some 1,500 cases  more than 1,000 of them brought by Mr Shiners utterly discredited Public Interest Lawyers.

Sergeant Alexander Blackman (pictured) is still languishing in jail after being convicted of murdering a Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan

As for IHATs ruthless methods, yesterday it emerged its investigators humiliated a female captain in a dawn raid on her home, simply because she would not testify against an ex-colleague.

Indeed, so appalling is our treatment of the heroes who risk their lives for us that a decorated major embroiled in the drowning case has volunteered to face a war crimes trial in the Hague, rather than endure more delays in his own country.

This is why the Mail welcomes Theresa Mays warning that IHAT must act with all speed to reject vexatious cases which blight soldiers lives.

What is so gut-wrenchingly galling is that if, God forbid, theres another war, it wont be these procrastinating lawyers, judges and Whitehall top brass laying down their lives for Britain.

Indeed, after all these years, shouldnt Mrs May go further  and close down IHAT altogether? How can justice so long delayed be anything but justice denied?

Wrong again, George

As part of Project Fear, George Osborne predicted that a Brexit vote would knock 10 to 18 per cent off house prices by 2018. He could hardly have been wider of the mark.

In reality, average prices have risen since the vote, while experts say they will keep going up for at least five years.

George Osborne (pictured) was the chief architect behind Project Fear, which failed so spectacularly to stop Brexit

At the top end of the market, however, the sacked chancellors predictions of a slowdown have indeed come true.

Just one problem. The decline has been caused not by Brexit but by the swingeing stamp duty increases introduced in December 2014  by a certain George Gideon Oliver Osborne.

Indeed, so damaging was his tax grab that the Treasurys receipts from stamp duty actually fell last year by 531million.

Last week, when Mr Osborne offered patronising tips to Mrs May on how to do her job, this paper respectfully recommended a period of chastened silence from the calamitously out-of-touch architect of Project Fear.

Today, as we urge Philip Hammond to reverse his predecessors stamp duty increases, we repeat: zip it, George.

 In an uncompromising speech to the UN, Mrs May commendably pledges to tackle the migration crisis at its root, focusing aid on improving conditions as close to migrants homes as safety allows. This is surely the most humane way forward  as much for displaced peoples and the post-war health of their homelands as for Britain and Europe, struggling with unmanageable numbers. For once, this could be aid well spent.
Turn left out of the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, walk past the citys Brandenburg Gate and youll come to one of the most moving and unsettling public spaces on the planet.

Every day you will find people walking silently among more than 2,500 concrete slabs, some lost in thought, others visibly upset.

This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated in 2005 as a visible reminder, in the heart of the capital, of the terrible crimes no German can ever forget.

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Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, felt a moral obligation to help when the migration crisis hit Europe

For more than 70 years the Germans have lived in the shadow of the Third Reich and with the shame of the Holocaust. No nation has done more to confront the demons of its past, or tried harder to make amends.

No one epitomises the new Germany better than Angela Merkel.

Serious, moralistic and hard-working, the Lutheran pastors daughter could hardly be more different from the strutting monstrosities who dominated her nations history in the first half of the 20th century.

Mrs Merkel has never made any secret of her belief that the stains of Germanys past have given it a historic obligation to the rest of the world  and to humanity itself.

So when the Mediterranean migration crisis erupted in late 2014, she knew exactly what to do.

By the summer of 2015, she had thrown open her nations borders. And as hundreds of thousands of people poured into the great cities of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne, she repeated the same words, again and again: Wir schaffen das. We can do this.

As gambles go, it could hardly have been better-intentioned. Unfortunately, it was a disaster.

Last weekend, the people of Berlin went to the polls. In a result unprecedented in German history, they handed Mrs Merkels party a drubbing, with her governing Christian Democrats sinking to just 17.5 per cent of the vote.

Supporters of right-wing group Pegida at a demonstration in Munich in August. The far-right alternative in Germany has recently made major gains in elections

For Mrs Merkel, who has been Germanys Chancellor for almost 11 years, Sunday nights result was probably the worst humiliation of her career. On Monday, she even offered a partial apology for the chaotic scenes that have alarmed so many ordinary Germans.

If I was able to, she admitted, I would turn back time by many, many years, so I could have prepared the government and the authorities for the situation which hit us out of the blue in the late summer of 2015.

Yet even as she was speaking, a very different group of politicians were celebrating a tumultuous electoral breakthrough. For, with more than 14 per cent of the vote, the anti-immigration, far-Right Alternative fur Deutschland had won no fewer than 25 seats in the Berlin state assembly.

The AfD already had representatives in nine of Germanys 16 state legislatures.

But as the capitals Social Democratic mayor remarked even before the votes were counted: Berlin is not any old city. Berlin is the city that transformed itself from the capital of Hitlers Nazi Germany into a beacon of freedom, tolerance, diversity and social cohesion.

No wonder, then, that so many people around the world shudder to see the far-Right on the march in the heart of Hitlers imperial capital. And no wonder, either, that Mrs Merkels own position has never seemed more imperilled.

Posters in Greece depicting Angela Merkel as a Nazi may seem ridiculous but they are mining a seam of anti-German feeling which dates back 70 years

There is a dark irony in the fact an immigration policy designed to expiate the sins of the Third Reich, and to show how much Germany has changed, has reawakened the worst monsters of the 20th-century past.

Are the anti-immigration AfD exactly the same as the Nazis? No, of course not. And it would be a mistake to write off all their voters as racists or extremists.

Many of them are ordinary, working-class Germans, alarmed by the influx of so many newcomers and by the reports of sexual assaults in cities such as Munich and Cologne. In that respect, they are not so different from the 3.8 million people who voted for Ukip in our last general election.

Well, up to a point. For whats truly disturbing is that AfD officials tried to book a rally in Munichs Hofbraukeller, the beer hall where Hitler gave his first speech as a member of the Nazi Party in October 1919.

And they have also tried to revive the word volkisch  conjuring up folksy images of the countrys home-grown culture  which the Nazis used to set Germans apart from their supposed racial inferiors.

At the very least, the AfD are not as different from their historical forebears as theyd like to pretend.

Indeed, the former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, has even warned of the coming nightmare of a Nazi renaissance.

And in case you think thats an exaggeration, it is worth remembering that Mrs Knobloch knows what she is talking about.

As a Jewish child in the early Forties, she survived the Holocaust only because of the kindness of a Catholic farming couple in rural Franconia (a region of northern Bavaria) who pretended she was their illegitimate daughter.

When Mrs Knobloch speaks, the rest of us should listen. And I think she is right. That so many Germans feel support for such an organisation is indeed immensely worrying.

Yet although we in Britain often like to think of the Germans as genetically predisposed to marching about in uniforms, the truth is that for the past 70 years they have been probably the most moderate and undemonstrative nation in Europe. So why on earth has this happened?

Well, I am afraid the answer is obvious. It was obvious right from the moment Mrs Merkel threw open her nations borders to the world  a decision that will surely go down as one of the most disastrous own goals in recent history.

As her own vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, admitted last week, none of her ministers expected a million migrants to pour across Germanys borders.

But that is precisely what happened, even as Mrs Merkel complacently insisted that everything was going exactly as planned.

Her instinct to offer a helping hand to Syrias refugees was, of course, highly laudable. She was, I think, right to insist on the values of our common humanity and common decency, and to try to ease the suffering of those in need.

But good intentions must always be tempered by pragmatism, and by a realistic sense of ordinary voters communal loyalties and national identity.

The rise of the far-right in Germany has prompted fears of a 'Nazi renaissance' back to the horror regime of the 1930s and 40s, pictured

In repeating her simplistic mantra We can do this, Mrs Merkel made no allowance for the fact that millions of Germans were deeply uneasy at the prospect of admitting at least a million newcomers from Muslim North Africa and the Middle East, most of whom were young men who did not speak German.

She made no serious effort to distinguish between genuine refugees from a horrific civil war and economic migrants hoping to build better lives in Europes most dynamic industrial superpower.

Nor did she make any serious effort to ensure the newcomers assimilated with the local population.

Politicians have a duty to take their voters anxieties seriously, not to brush them aside with blithe condescension.

But when hundreds of North African men ran amok in Cologne on New Years Eve, carrying out more than 2,000 alleged sexual assaults and robberies in a few hours, the authorities actively tried to cover it up, alarmed that the truth would drive a wedge between immigrants and Germans.

Sad to say, the far-Right could hardly have asked for better publicity. If Mrs Merkel had wanted to give them the perfect boost, she could hardly have done a better job.

The truth is that the migration crisis has brought out the very worst in Europes politicians  from the boorish demagoguery of Hungarys Viktor Orban, who misses no opportunity to demonise migrants in the kind of language last heard in the Thirties, to the patronising, preachy bullying of the EU elite, who refuse to make the slightest allowance for the anxieties of millions of people.

Yet it is Mrs Merkels fate that represents the greatest tragedy of all.

Only a few years ago, she was comfortably Europes most impressive leader, a genuinely pragmatic, thoughtful and sensible politician who seemed to represent all that was best about modern Germany.

But now, with her credibility and political capital gradually seeping away, her days as Europes pre-eminent power broker seem numbered.

She believed that through throwing open the borders, she would help to atone for her countrys past.
Two condom kingpins are now using tampons to tackle poverty in Africa.

Dustin Leonard and David Wommelsdorff, the Australian duo behind HERO condoms, have started a fresh venture that aims to battle inequality through inconvenience.

Their business, Her, is a home-delivery tampon supplier that will donate a month's worth of pads to women in Kenya for every box you buy at home.

Hero: Dustin Leonard is the co-founder of the HERO condom brand. He is now branching out into a socially-conscious tampon business

Charitable: Mr Leonard (left) is working with African authorities to deliver sanitary pads to poverty-stricken Kenyan women. He is pictured in Botswana in 2013

Mr Leonard and Mr Wommelsdorff started HERO in 2013 with the explicit aim of reducing the prevalence of HIV in Africa.

For every packet of condoms bought in Australia, HERO donates condoms to clinics in disease-stricken Botswana.

Her follows a similar one-for-one business model, this time targeting poverty and inequality in Kenya.

Mr Leonard explained: 'Our approach is to find different issues and problems and to create a business that can solve those problems.

Convenient: For every box of home-delivered tampons ordered, Her will donate a month's worth of pads to Kenyan women

'In Africa, you can see that when most girls start menstruating they don't have access to feminine hygiene products.

'They try to use rags, try to use banana leaves and it just doesn't work.

'The health impacts of that has a massive domino effect. And this enables the cycle of poverty to continue.

'They are dropping out of school. And they end up having kids or battling health problems and they are just not ready from any perspective  physically, emotionally or financially.'

Solving problems: Mr Leonard said his business ideas focused on solving real-world problems. He is pictured in Botswana in 2013

Every month Her's customers will receive a box of 100 per cent organic cotton tampons delivered straight to their door.

Although still in its infancy, the business has already proved popular and sold $50,000 worth of tampons on pre-order.

Mr Leonard told Mamamia: 'Feminine care products are something half of Australians need every month.'
There are designs in both high heel and flat styles

The illustrator most well known for her work on Candice Bush's Sex and the City book has added another feather to her cap - shoe designer.

Megan Hess, who has also written and illustrated three of her own books, has teamed up with Shoes of Prey to design a collection of fancy footwear.

The website, which was created by Australian Jodie Fox in 2009, allows women to design their own shoes as well as buy ready-made designs.

Fancy footwear: Shoes of Prey has launched a new collection in collaboration with illustrator Megan Hess

Magic hands: Hess (above) illustrated Candice Bushnell's Sex and the City book

Hess is working with the company as part of a new 'inspirer' campaign, where four high-profile women collaborate with the brand to design shoes.

The illustrator's designs are called the The Fleur-de-lis Collection, and feature luxe gold and nude tones.

There are five shoes in the collection in total, three heels and two sets of flats.

All that glitters: Hess has design five different shoes, two flats and three high heels

'I'm so excited': The shoes represent Hess' unique style

Hess said she's extremely happy to be working with the global company.

'Im so excited to launch my capsule collection with Shoes of Prey and be part of the celebration of individual style and creativity,' she said.

'I want my collection to ignite that creative spark in women all around the world to become part of an ever-expanding community of change makers.'

More to come: They are the first of four collections designed by 'inspirer' women

Click your heels: The shoes are called the Fleur-de-lis Collection are are available on Shoes of Prey's website

Hess' collection is the first of four, with Shoes of Prey also collaborating with fashion 'influencer' Kim Jones and founder of beauty website GrittyPretty.com Eleanor Pendleton.

The final collection will be by Shoes of Preys co-founder and chief creative officer Jodie Fox.

'Were incredibly thrilled to collaborate with such inspirational and talented women to launch our Inspirer Collections,' Ms Fox said.
Beatrice proved she was the ultimate party princess as she partied at her favourite members' club for the second night in a row on Tuesday.

The 28-year-old royal displayed her trim figure and tanned legs as she navigated the cobbled streets following a night out at exclusive haunt, LouLou's, for the second consecutive night.

Dressed in a silky midnight blue dress and leather jacket, Princess Beatrice showcased her style credentials as she left the trendy haunt in the small hours.

Princess Beatrice, 28, flashed her tanned legs as she enjoyed a night out at LouLou's for the second night in a row

The fashion fan, who has been putting in several appearances over London Fashion Week, offset her look with caged black stilettos and a glowing tan.

Despite her busy week, Beatrice looked composed as she headed to a waiting car.

The Princess, who recently called time on her long-term relationship, certainly isn't at home moping and has been using London Fashion Week's festivities as the perfect time to let her hair down.

The 28-year-old joined the style set at the star-studded LOVE magazine and Marc Jacobs party at Loulou's in London on Monday night.

The fashion fan offset her look with caged black stilettos and a glowing tan as she navigated the street following her night out

Newly single Princess Beatrice, 28, looked chic in a figure-hugging dress as she joined her royal relatives at the star-studded LOVE magazine party

Showing off her trim figure in a grey pleated dress, Beatrice worked the room and chatted to stars and pals including Cara Delevingne, Amber Heard and Bella Hadid.

She also rubbed shoulders with royal family members, including Lady Kitty Spencer and Lady Amelia Windsor.

Beatrice also looked to be in great spirits as she joked around with Saloni presentation with friend Marissa Montgomery, a TV presenter and founder of the fashion brand Rotten Roach, earlier in the day.

The pair were joined by stylist and girl-about-town Olivia Buckingham.

Showing off her trim figure in a grey pleated dress, Beatrice worked the room and chatted to stars and pals including Cara Delevingne, Amber Heard and Bella Hadid

She also rubbed shoulders with royal family members, including Lady Kitty Spencer, left, and Lady Amelia Windsor, right

Earlier in the day, Princess Beatrice showed how to nail trans-seasonal dressing in a nautical inspired ensemble at London Fashion Week

Beatrice was showing no sign of her recent heartache as she joked around with friends. She split from her long-term boyfriend Dave Clarke last month after 10 years together

Despite recently splitting from her long-term boyfriend Dave Clarke, Beatrice was showing no sign of recent heartache, as she waved her arms about in a cheering motion while laughing with her friends.

However, she does appear to have taken the age-old step of getting a new post break-up hairdo.

The royal's distinctive auburn locks were looking noticably lighter, appearing almost blonde as her hair tumbled around her shoulders.

Princess Beatrice of York with TV presenter and designer Marissa Montgomery and stylist Olivia Buckingham

Beatrice's auburn locks were looking noticably lighter, perhaps after opting for a post break-up hairdo

She's also following the tried-and-tested formula of keeping busy, attending Dave Gardner's 40th birthday at Mayfair's LouLou's this weekend with her mother Sarah Ferguson.

The previous weekend the social butterfly was spotted taking in the U.S. Open men's final in New York.

After 10 years together, Beatrice called time on her relationship with Dave Clark, The Mail On Sunday reported last month.

The couple reportedly quietly called time on their romance a month ago after the failure of long and exasperated 'make or break' talks  centred on whether or not they should get married

A source said: 'After ten years together, Beatrice and Dave had to wonder why they were not married.
Children's designer Rachel Riley whose traditional style clothes are a firm favourite of the Duchess of Cambridge has revealed the secrets behind the young royals' wardrobe ahead of next week's Canada tour.

The London-based designer said she could 'never have anticipated the response' after her sailing boat dungarees sold out within hours of George wearing them his first overseas tour in Australia.

And she said that she believes her traditional-style clothes are a hit with Kate because they suit formal occasions, telling

'They're not going to date in photos in years to come,' she told The Telegraph.

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Prince George in Rachel Riley's 85 smocked set at his sister Princess Charlotte's christening in July 2015

Rachel Riley's smocked sailing boat dungarees, costing 75, sold out within hours of being worn by Prince George

That's why the designer predicts Kate will stick to her customary traditional clothing for the children on the upcoming royal tour of Canada.

'It's an official engagement and they are representing the country, so I imagine red, white and blue might feature,' she said.

'But Canada is also known as the great outdoors so I'm sure there will be some casual pieces.'

While Prince George joined his parents on the royal tour of Australia and New Zealand when he was nine months old, the Canadian tour will be the first time Princess Charlotte has been so widely seen in public.

Rachel Riley said she could never have anticipated the response after her smocked sailing boat dungarees sold out hours after Prince George was spotted in them

Fashion expert and stylist Naomi Isted agrees that Kate is likely to stick to her tried and tested formula for the upcoming trip.

'Kate is renowned for favouring both British and Spanish traditional childrenswear designers for both Prince George and Princess Charlotte and tends to favour such designers due to their more formal and classic styles,' she told FEMAIL.

'She doesn't style her children in trend pieces but prefers to go for classic wardrobe pieces that are timeless, tailored and typically British.

Prince George wearing a 42 whale sweater by Pepa & Co in his official third birthday portrait

Pepa Gonzalez, founder of Pepa & Co predicts that Charlotte - pictured around the time of her first birthday - will wear a similar dress in a muted colour with Mary Janes to a children's party in Canada

'Her preference for classic British designers like Rachel Riley is completely understandable as their style is suitably classic British and quite conservative.

'Rachel Riley believes her 20-year-old label appeals to the Royals because it's built on timeless classic shapes in strong colours and archive style prints.

Stylist Naomi Isted predicts Charlotte will be in a traditional dress in a muted colour and George will be casually dressed for a children's party in Canada

'George has worn quite a lot of clothes with smocking, this is a method particularly favoured by Rachel Riley.

'For public appearances and official photos, as on their Canada tour I expect Kate to style her children in a way that won't date.

'They are Royals and their official pictures need to have the continuity of their timeless, conservative and classic British heritage style.'

Pepa Gonzalez, founder of Pepa & Co whose whale jumper Prince George wore for his third birthday portraits, predicts an overall casual look for the youngster in Canada.

'The youngest Royals will be attending a children's party as part of the royal tour, so we expect to see Princess Charlotte wearing a classic hand smocked dress in soft muted colours paired with Mary Jane shoes which is elegant and formal and which we know the Duchess of Cambridge is a big fan of.

'For Prince George we expect a more casual look, but still keeping some elements of the style he has become accustomed to wearing.

'With a similar climate to the UK, I am sure we will see the more casual style for Prince George of cotton sweaters, paired with shirts and shorts."
A Sunderland couple who met whilst playing dwarfs in a Snow White panto have married in a fairy-tale wedding, with their miracle son as page boy.

Laura Whitfield, who is just 4ft 2, proposed to 3ft 11 Nathan Phillips a month before the birth of their son - the only 'double dwarf' in Britain.

Nathan Junior was born with two different forms of dwarfism, anachondaplasia like his mum and pseudochondaplasia like his dad, and was not expected to survive more than a few hours.

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Sunderland couple Laura Whitfield, 26, and Nathan Phillips, 37, who met while playing dwarfs in a production of Show White have married in a fairytale ceremony

The couple's two-and-a-half year old son Nathan acted as page boy for his parents' big day

However two-and-a-half years later, the healthy toddler acted as a ring bearer at his parent's wedding.

Laura, 26, and Nathan, 37, from Sunderland, met when they were both performing as dwarfs in a production of Snow White.

They got hitched in the lavish South Causey Inn, in County Durham, among 50 of their closest family and friends.

Bride Laura followed her son down the aisle in a 800 designer dress which trailed behind her as she reached the front of the church - where Nathan waited in his suit.

Rachel wore an 800 designer dress as the couple exchanged their vows at the South Causey Inn in County Durham

The happy couple sign the register on their wedding day. They got engaged after Laura proposed to Nathan a month before their son was born

Professional entertainer Laura said: 'We met when we were doing a panto in Bath back in 2012.

'It was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he was playing Grumpy and I was playing Soppy.

'It was amazing because it was the perfect fairy-tale start to our life together - now we are married and the wedding was simply magical.

The newlyweds hit the dancefloor. Laura has described their big day was a 'fairytale' start to their life together

'We waited so long to get married so that little Nathan could be old enough to carry the rings, but in the end the cushion was too heavy for him.

'He decided he didn't want to carry it any more and he threw it to the side.

'It was quite funny and it was really special for us to have him there - he just loves to steal the show.'

Laura with her son Nathan who was not expected to survive after being born with two forms of dwarfism

Laura proposed to Nathan even though she knew he was planning to pop the question as she laughs when she gets nervous and didn't want to ruin the moment when he surprised her

After finding out that Nathan had been planning to pop the question, Laura decided to propose herself.

Laura, who has appeared in films such as the Harry Potter series, said: 'I knew that Nathan was going to propose to me - he had even went to my dad to ask for his permission.

'I was just so worried because when I am nervous I can't help but laugh, but the last thing I wanted was for Nathan to propose and for me to just laugh in his face - I didn't want to ruin the moment.

Nathan and Laura, who has appeared in films such as the Harry Potter series, exchange rings during the ceremony

Sealed with a kiss! The happy couple celebrate becoming husband and wife

'I also know what he is like - it would have taken him ages to man up and just get the job done.

'I just took matters into my own hands.

'He was so surprised but it was so unique and lovely - it's nice to do something a bit different.'

It was only a month after the proposal that the actress found out that she was pregnant - which was an extremely difficult time for the pair.

Laura and Nathan steal a romantic moment during their big day

Laura said their big day was a chance for both her and Nathan to show off how confident they are withing themselves

Laura said: 'At first I was advised to consider abortion by the doctors because I was having a few health complications with my pregnancy, however I was determined to see how far we could make it with little Nathan and we both fell in love with him at the first scan.

'It is touch and go when he was born because they did not think he would survive more than a coupe of hours after birth because of his double dwarfism, but he was a little fighter and now he is practically fine.

'Doctors said that although little Nathan may have a few extra GP appointments compared to other children, there is no reason that he should not have a life like any other kid his age.

'The same goes for myself and big Nathan - I suffered a bit of bullying at school because of my condition, but I soon learned how to stick up for myself and people sharp stopped bothering me.

'I know that people doubt us because we are little, but we are just like everyone else - the only thing that is different is our height.
Queen Letizia brought some glamour to the Big Apple on Wednesday as she paid a visit to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, New York.

The mother-of-two looked business-like in a crisp white Hugo Boss top and matching pencil skirt, which highlighted her trim figure.

The 44-year-old, who is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' special ambassador for nutrition, participated in a boardroom discussion with the Director General of the FAO.

Queen Letizia looked glamorous in a figure-hugging white gown as she joined Director General of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Brazilian Jose Graziano da Silva in New York on Wednesday

The monarch, who offset her look with Magrit 'Mila' snakeskin pumps and TOUS ruby, emerald and moonstone earrings, was appointed in 2015 and helps raise public awareness about poverty and malnutrition around the world.

The organisation aims to work towards eradicating hunger and poverty by utilising natural resources such as land, water, air, climate and genetic resources, for the benefit of the country.

After her round table discussion, the glamorous Queen joined her husband, King Felipe, at the UN General Assembly where he delivered a speech.

The Queen, who has two daughters with her husband, watched avidly as her husband addressed the assembly.

The 44-year-old, who is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' special ambassador for nutrition, participated in a boardroom discussion with the Director General of the FAO

The mother-of-two looked business-like in a crisp white Hugo Boss top and matching pencil skirt, which highlighted her trim figure

The monarchs have a busy schedule which will see them attend a reception later on tonight hosted by President Obama and his First Lady wife, Michelle.

Last week, the youthful Queen celebrated turning 44 and stunned on the red carpet at the inauguration of the Royal Theatre Season in Madrid, Spain.

Dressed in a figure-hugging Felipe Varela dress, which showcased her trim figure, Queen Letizia posed for snaps with her husband, King Felipe.

Queen Letizia put on an incredibly glamorous display in a plunging black dress as she joined her husband at the opening of royal theatre season in Madrid, Spain

The monarch displayed her toned legs in the above-the-knee dress, which had an embellished hemline and plunging neckline.

She accessorised with dazzling diamond De Grisogono earrings, which Cheryl Fernandez-Versini is a fan of, Prada court shoes and a matching black clutch bag by Nina Ricci.

The youthful royal wore on-trend lilac eyeshadow on her eyelids and a glossy pink lip for the occasion.

Earlier in the week, the Spanish royal flaunted her slight frame with figure hugging black trousers and a billowing white blouse as she stepped out in the Andalusian city.

She accessorised with dazzling diamond De Grisogono earrings, which Cheryl Fernandez-Versini is a fan of, Prada court shoes and a matching black clutch bag by Nina Ricci

She looked lovingly at her husband, King Felipe, as they posed for pictures on the red carpet

The mother-of-two looked right at home as she greeted dozens of primary aged children at the Gines Morata school.

She kept her makeup natural and opted for a straight hairstyle which she has been favouring of late.

The youngsters seemed thrilled to have a royal in their midst greeting her with high fives as she entered the playground on Tuesday.

Letizia, 43, visited the school to celebrate the opening of the 2016-2017 scholarship course.

Queen Letizia of Spain showcased her slender figure earlier this week during a visit to the Gines Morata school in Almeria
A Married at First Sight star who fled her marital home after her husband called her unattractive has revealed that they had already consummated their marriage  even though he claims they have only kissed.

On Tuesday night's episode of the FYI reality series, Nick Pendergrast, 32, and Sonia Granados, 33, got in an explosive fight about his invisibility to 'open up', prompting him to cruelly announce that not only is he not attracted to his new wife  he doesn't even like her as a person.

After the fight, Sonia stormed out of their house, telling his two beloved dogs that they 'have a s**t father', but in a preview for next week's episode, the social worker insists that they have been far more intimate than they have led people to believe.

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Bombshell: Sonia Granados reveals in a preview clip of next week's episode of Married at First Sight that she and her husband Nick Pendergrast have consummated their marriage

Hmm... Sonia tells Pastor Calvin Roberson, one of the show's relationship experts, that she and Nick have had sex, and he is clearly shocked. He explains that Nick says they've only kissed

'We had been intimate,' she tells Pastor Calvin Roberson, one of the show's three relationship experts.

'What do you mean intimate? he asks, insisting that she share specifics.

Before she answers, Pastor Calvin explains that Nick told him that they only kissed, but according to Sonia, that isn't the truth.

'We had sex,' she says, proving that the couple have more than just a few issues to work on in their marriage.

Ironically, the couple had been working on their issues with intimacy, and during last week's episode, they met with a tantric massage therapist. The session went so well that Sonia deduced that they might even consummate their marriage that night.

Marital woes: On last night's episode of Married at First Sight, Nick, 32, announced that he isn't attracted to Sonia, 33

Now, Sonia's revelation makes her fight with Nick even more heartbreaking, considering how harshly he lashed out at her.

'When we first got married, I thought she was beautiful, but my level of attraction to her is not as high as it was initially,' he told the cameras during last night's episode. 'We were matched by the experts, but maybe there is underlying things that I didn't say or that you didn't say or that they didn't know or that never came up that is a big deal and makes us not as compatible as we thought we were.'

When Sonia told him that she just wants him to know that she isn't trying to convince him of anything, she is just open to the process, he made it seem like he has already given up on their marriage.

'Yeah, I believed in it too, but at this point, four weeks into it, I should have more feelings than I do. That's all I'm saying,' he says while petting one of his dogs.

Harsh words: 'I don't think she is attractive, and I'm not attracted to her and that is me opening up,' Nick said of his wife of four weeks

Giving up: Nick eventually stormed away to go to bed and suggested that Sonia do the same

Sonia urged Nick to 'open' himself up more, and the word alone causes him to explode.

Sonia argued that he is being 'so defensive', but Nick insisted that she keeps saying the 'same thing over and over and over and over again' and it's not helping.

Nick eventually left the room to take the dogs out, and when a producer reminded him that all relationships take work, he responded within earshot of Sonia: 'Well, you've got to be attracted to that person to have that relationship.'

'I don't like her. That's opening up,' he told the cameras. 'I can't open up any more than that. I don't think she is attractive, and I'm not attracted to her and that is me opening up to the fullest f*****g extent.'

Hard times: When he was walking out, Nick loudly told a producer he isn't attracted to his wife, prompting Sonia to pack her bags

Over? At the end of the clip, Sonia left her marital home with two suitcases, but not before she told Nick's beloved dogs that they 'have a s**t father'

At the end of the episode, Sonia packed her backs and left their marital home.

In a post-episode interview with former Married at First Sight star Jamie Otis, Sonia explained that Nick not only said he didn't find her attractive  he yelled it.

'I felt like a piece of crap,' she said.

However, Nick claimed hurting Sonia was not his intention, explaining it was said in the heat of the moment.

'It made me feel bad right away,' he added.

Nick also noted that his comments had nothing to do with her physical appearance.

Understandable: After the episode, Sonia admitted to former Married at First Sight star Jamie Otis that Nick's comments made her feel like 'crap'

Explanation: In his interview with Jamie, Nick claimed his lack of attraction has to do with their overly emotional conversations, not her appearance

'It's not a physical attraction thing,' he said, claiming his lack of attraction to his wife has to do with her constant desire to have 'overly emotional' conversations.

'Sometimes I want to just have a conversation about what you did at work,' he said. 'I don't want to talk about how I am feeling inside all of the time.'

Last week, Derek Schwartz, 35, and Heather Seidel, 32, became the first couple to opt for a divorce before the end of the six-week experiment.

Despite their split, the show's counselors are continuing to meet with them to see how they are doing.

When Dr. Pepper Schwartz, the show's resident sociologist, visited Heather, she admitted that she checked out of the marriage when Derek said she was on her 'high horse' and an 'alcoholic' during their arguments.

Heartbreaking news: Meanwhile, Derek Schwartz, 35, told his mother that his wife Heather Seidel, 32, asked him for a divorce

Not letting go? Derek admitted to his mom that he is still wearing his wedding ring because they are 'technically' still married

Different opinion: Heather said she thinks it is disrespectful to still wear her wedding ring

Although she had taken her wedding ring off and was ready to move on, Dr. Pepper encouraged her to write Derek a letter detailing the things she did appreciate about him during their short marriage.

However, it was clear during Dr. Pepper's meeting with Derek that he was having trouble letting go. The account executive was still wearing his wedding ring, and he admitted that he was too embarrassed to tell his co-workers that his marriage ended after only 10 days.

But he did agree to take Dr. Pepper's advice and write Heather a letter as well. During the episode, Derek also confessed to his mom that Heather had asked him for a divorce, and she was clearly surprised by the news.

'I am truly shocked that she gave up after one week,' Derek's mom told the cameras. 'I can't believe that she could throw everything away after a week!'

'I feel upset that she hurt you,' his mom told him, however, she noted that 'sometimes things aren't meant to be'.

Moving on: When Dr. Pepper Schwartz, the show's resident sociologist, visited Heather and Derek separately, she encouraged them to write each other nice letters

Hindsight: In their post-show interviews with Jamie, Derek said he had no hope of them reconciling, while Heather said that looking back she wished they could have been friends

Ripping off the Band-Aid: Heather, who is pictured with Derek before their split, said she believed she would hurt him more if she asked for a divorce later in their relationship

Derek went on to joke that at least he 'got this nice ring out of it', and his mom asked why he was still wearing his wedding band.

'I mean, technically, we are still married,' he responded. Unsurprisingly, Heather didn't agree.

'I just don't think it is respectful to still wear it,' she said of their wedding rings.

When speaking to Jamie after the episode, Derek said there isn't any part of him that is hoping for a reconciliation.

'I wouldn't say I am hoping for that,' he said. 'It would have been nice if we could have been friends or been friendly. My thing is, I don't want to judge her a person.'

Derek went on to say that when he thinks of her, he is reminded of the opportunities she wouldn't give him.

Celebration! Tom Wilson, 28, is happier than ever with his Lillian Vilchez, 24, who spent much of the episode planning a surprise party for him

Look of love: Even though Tom seemed frustrated with her unexplained desire to clean before his surprise party, he still gave her a kiss during their chores

Meanwhile, Heather said that looking back she wishes that they could have gotten to know each other and cohabited because she thinks they could have found a 'nice friendship'.

'The emotions were so high and the perceptions were so different,' Heather explained. 'I would have been willing to say, "Hey, cool. Let's live together, and let's learn about each other," but I already knew romantically  no.'

Heather added that her choice to get divorced was for his sake because she believes he would have tried to pursue a romantic relationship with her, and she 'would have continued to hurt him'.

'I think that's worse,' she said, noting that she opted to be honest about her not seeing the marriage working.

However, not all is lost. Tom Wilson, 28, and his wife Lillian Vilchez, 24, appear to happier than ever after she surprised him with a birthday party that included a pinata, chocolate cake, and a visit from his brother Jeremy, who lives in Colorado.
The Duchess of Cambridge is to carry out her first solo overseas trip, travelling to Holland next month for a day of engagements.

Kate will spend the day in The Hague and Rotterdam and itinerary will include a courtesy call on King Willem-Alexander.

She will no doubt be delighted to catch up with his vibrant wife, Queen Maxima, 45, during her visit to the royals.

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The Duchess of Cambridge will visit The Netherlands for a day of engagements next month - her first trip abroad on royal duties without Prince William

Argentinian-born Maxima, an economics graduate, worked for major financial companies as well as teaching English and maths before meeting King Willem-Alexander.

And like Kate she is a devoted mother, combining bringing up her three daughters Princesses Catharina-Amalia, Alexia and Ariane with royal duties.

Art art history graduate Kate, who has a keen interest in photography and painting, will visit an Old Masters exhibition on the one day trip.

She will also attend a round table discussion on a variety of themes from addiction to mental health.

Kate will pay a courtesy call to King Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands, pictured with his wife Queen Maxima at the state opening of parliament in The Hague

Kate has made mental wellbeing a cornerstone of her work in the past year and launched the Heads Together campaign with William and Harry to change the conversation on mental health.

She is also the patron of Place2Be a charity for children that provides in-school counselling and support to young people.

The one-day trip, planned for October 11, will be a royal milestone for the Duchess as she will be travelling abroad by herself without the Duke of Cambridge.

Kate on her first official visit to Canada in 2011, shortly after her marriage to Prince William. The couple are embarking on a second tour this weekend, with their children George and Charlotte

Kate has been on several royal tours including a visit to Australia in April 2014, but her day-long trip to The Netherlands will be her first solo trip without William

Kate, pictured during the early stages of her pregnancy with Princess Charlotte, had to cancel a trip to Malta, her first solo royal tour, because of severe morning sickness

A tour of Malta in 2014 was scheduled to be Kates first solo trip.

But she had to cancel as she was suffering from acute morning sickness while pregnant with Princess Charlotte.

Her husband stepped in at the last moment to carry out the trip on her behalf.

It will be an exciting few weeks of travel for Kate, who is setting off for Canada with William, Prince George and Prince Charlotte this weekend.

The family will touch down in Victoria, British Columbia, on Saturday and journey to Vancouver the following day.

According to the itinerary, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be visiting Bella Bella in Heiltsuk, which describes itself as an Indian Reserve, on their forthcoming  and highly anticipated - tour to Canada.

The couple will travel to Bella Bella in British Columbia  home to the Heiltsuk people  as part of the week-long tour to the British realm.
Over three decades ago, Tracey 'Africa' Norman saw her successful modeling career disappear after it got out in the industry that she's transgender.

Times have certainly changed since then, however, with the trans community coming more and more into the spotlight  and trans models hitting the runways at major fashion shows. Things have changed enough, in fact, that at the age of 64, Tracey is now back to modeling  and scoring her first magazine cover.

She and fellow trans model Geena Rocero are the first transgender women ever to appear on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, fronting two versions of the India edition's October issue.

Major moment: Trans model Tracey 'Africa' Norman, 64, covers a special edition of Harper's Bazaar India

Breaking down barriers:Gina Rocero, who is also a trans model, gets her own cover in the diverse series

Inspired: Tyra Banks agreed to join in, too, when she heard Tracey's story

The two ground-breaking women are joined by Tyra Banks and seven other models for a series of covers, which the magazine is presenting as a 'special collaboration celebrating diversity'.

'India is actually very inclusive of transgender people,' art director and executive producer Christopher Sollinger told New York Magazine's The Cut.

Christopher first had the idea for the shoot after reading a profile of Tracey last year, which detailed her struggles with transitioning, her rise in the fashion industry  in the '70s, she modeled for Clairol and even had a hair dye designed after he own natural color  and her fall after some people learned her secret.

Trailblazer: Tracey was successful in the '70s and even nabbed her own Clairol box before people learned her secret and work dried up

Known names: Mormon sisters Pyper America and Daisy Clementine Smith nabbed a joint cover, too

Art director and executive producer Christopher Sollinger turned the series of photos into a celebration of diversity

'[The] story really moved me and a lot of my friends, and ever since I read it Ive been thinking about what I can do to give back to Tracey,' he said. 'This entire project stems from wanting to do something with Tracey.

'The way she had to live in hiding and in fear, being such a beautiful woman with so many talents and gifts, just felt so wrong. Shes someone who should be celebrated. I wanted to create an image that she would be able to look at and feel proud and seen and loved and appreciated.'

He ended up expanding it into a bigger project spotlighting diversity, also casting Filipino trans model Geena, supermodel Tyra Banks, Muslim model Hind Sahli, Belgian actress Hannelore Knuts, Korean model Soo Joo Park, Brazilian model Emanuela de Paula, Martinique native Cora Emmanuel, and American sisters Pyper America and Daisy Clementine Smith.

Expressive: Korean model Soo Joo Park appears as well, wearing a headpiece by American artist Isaac Aden

High fashion: The models were dressed in Chanel and Roberto Cavalli

Though they all look different and come from different walks of life, they're styled the same on their respective covers in outfits by Chanel and Roberto Cavalli, as well as large statement headpieces by American artist Isaac Aden.

Christopher noted that while Tyra is by far the biggest name of the bunch, she was thrilled to join the ensemble after hearing Tracey's story.
One dog-loving bride's bright idea to swap out bouquets for adorable puppies in her wedding photos has made her an internet hit.

Sarah Mallouk Crain, who works at the Pitties Love Peace rescue in Pennsylvania, recently wed her longtime love, and fellow animal lover, Matt Crain in a beautiful ceremony.

With three rescue dogs of their own and frequent foster pups passing through their lives on the way to forever homes, its no surprise that when it came to their wedding day, they wanted to ensure their love of the animals would play a role.

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Making a happy day happier: Bride Sarah Mallouk Crain (center) of Pennsylvania decided to feature puppies instead of flowers in her wedding photos

Snuggled up: Sarah works at the Pitties Love Peace rescue, where she got the puppies for the sweet photo shoot

So, Sarah hatched a plan. Bringing down a gaggle of adoptable puppies from her workplace, she decided to rubbish the usual floral arrangements and instead have her bridesmaids and Matt's groomsmen pose with pooches.

'When the bride, Sarah, first came to me with this idea I was thrilled!' explains wedding photographer Caroline Logan to Daily Mail Online. 'Being a puppy lover myself I was extra excited for Matt & Sarah's day to arrive.'

Not only were each of the six puppies incredibly photogenic but, according to the photographer, they even helped the wedding party put on their best faces for the pictures.

Puppy love: Five of the pups are eight-week-old boxer-coonhound sisters named Martha, Abigail, Dolley, Elizabeth, and Louisa

All paws: Photographer Caroline Logan said that the shoot 'was a dream for everyone'

'While photographing six rambunctious puppies definitely brought an added challenge, it also caused the bridal party to be more at ease,' she says, adding that it helped divert from the awkward 'what do I do with my hands?!' sort of thoughts that go through the minds of photo subjects.

'And of course, the bridal party loved it! From the minute the puppies came bounding around the corner exploring their new surroundings, the bridesmaids were gushing about how cute they were. It was a dream for everyone!' she adds.

Five of the puppies in the shoot are a group of eight-week-old boxer-coonhound sisters named Martha, Abigail, Dolley, Elizabeth, and Louisa, who were rescued at just one week old.

Looking their way: The couple are hoping that the popularity of the photos might lead to some of the dogs finding forever homes

Without a hitch: Caroline tells Daily Mail Online that the photo shoot had 'no puppy drama, no accidents, and no dresses harmed'

Playing around: Caroline says that the dogs even helped the wedding party to be more at ease

As for the sixth pooch involved in the shoot, he is a nine-week-old pit bull mix pup who was rescued from the streets of Brooklyn and thus named Biggie Smalls.

In the images from the shoot, the beautiful bridesmaids hold the squirming pups in long green gowns, while in other shots the groomsmen are all smiles in sharp suits with the dogs cradled in their arms.

The resulting photos have swiftly gone viral, which was the couple's exact intention as they are hoping to find forever homes for the six sweet dogs.

'Thankfully there was no puppy drama, no accidents, and no dresses harmed in the making of the photos!' says Caroline.
Only a few sips can make Rachel Harris feel giggly and light-headed. 'I get shaky, my heart starts palpitating, I go all silly and hyper and my mouth starts running away with me,' she says.

Later, once the buzz has worn off, the 35-year-old is left needing a lie-down and feeling a bit foolish about her behaviour while under the influence.

But it's not alcohol she's drinking. It's coffee - which seems to have the same effect on her as a few glasses of wine.

Claire McGill, 41, a communications adviser from Cheltenham, has been rationing her caffeine intake for the past few years, making use of her sensitivity to keep her fit and motivate her to exercise

'Every time I drink normal coffee, I feel like I'm drunk,' says Rachel, a primary school teacher from Manchester.

'Once I had a cup before a staff meeting and I couldn't stop talking.'

As well as the babbling and jitters, Rachel experiences a coffee 'come-down' that closely resembles a hangover.

'About an hour after I drink it, I feel sluggish and sleepy and just want to lie down,' she says.

'The only other time I experienced this was when I took flu tablets with caffeine in. It obviously doesn't agree with me, so I only drink decaffeinated coffee now.'

The European Food Safety Authority advises that 400mg of caffeine a day - about four cups of coffee - is safe for adults, so Rachel's reaction to this single dose is fairly extreme. It doesn't seem to fall into the category of caffeine intoxication, a psychiatric disorder that can occur if you consume 800mg to 1,000mg of caffeine at once, even though the symptoms are very similar.

The most likely explanation is her genetic make-up, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and University of Trieste in Italy studied the DNA of around 3,000 coffee-drinkers and discovered that some had a variation of a gene called PDSS2, which reduces the body's ability to break down caffeine, causing it to stay in their system for longer.

Rachel Harris, 35, a primary school teacher from Manchester, feels giggly and light-headed after just one cup of coffee. She get shaky and her heart starts palpitating

Those without the variation metabolised it much quicker.

'If you metabolise caffeine faster, then the levels in your body will change quickly and your physical reaction to it will be more pronounced, which triggers a psychological response,' says GP Dr Sarah Jarvis.

'Caffeine makes your heart beat faster and if you start to focus on it, more adrenalin is released, which will make you feel anxious, light-headed, hyper and dizzy - similar to what you may feel after drinking excessive alcohol.

'The 'come-down' is then the post-adrenalin effect.'

Caffeine makes your heart beat faster and if you start to focus on it, more adrenalin is released, which will make you feel anxious, light-headed, hyper and dizzy - similar to what you may feel after drinking excessive alcohol - and the comedown is the post-adrenalin effect (stock photo)

Dr Jarvis says caffeine naivety may also play a part, adding: 'If you don't drink very often, you may have a stronger reaction and feel more drunk after a glass of wine than those who drink regularly, and the same goes for coffee.'

Chris Stemman, executive director of the British Coffee Association, agrees.

'Tolerance to caffeine varies,' he says. 'Absorption is virtually complete 45 minutes after ingestion. But how we break down the caffeine depends on our physiology and lifestyle - research shows that smokers typically break down caffeine more quickly than non-smokers.

Most drink coffee because of the positive effects - mental alertness, better endurance and concentration - but if those effects are too quick and unpleasant, self-moderation has to be the key

'This is thought to be because smoking increases levels of enzymes in the liver which break down caffeine. Pregnant women, on the other hand, will metabolise it more slowly, though research is still under way to understand what causes this.

'Most drink coffee because of the positive effects - mental alertness, better endurance and concentration - but if those effects are too quick and unpleasant, self-moderation has to be the key.'

Claire McGill, 41, has been rationing her caffeine intake for the past few years, making use of her sensitivity to keep her fit.

'I've had what I call the 'coffee wobbles' for four years. I remember having an episode at a meeting where I had a machine coffee that was so strong it made me shake and gave me a jittery, confident buzz as if I'd drunk alcohol,' says Claire, a communications adviser from Cheltenham.

If Claire drinks coffee that's too strong, she gets the 'coffee wobbles' - where she shakes and gets a jittery, confident buzz like you would be alcohol

'The feeling stayed with me for a couple of hours, then I fell kind of flat and became really hungry. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, though, and I actually liked the energy and confidence it gave me.

'I started to use it as an energy boost before an exercise class. I once even asked the instructor if he could play faster music because it was too slow for me.'

Professor Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist from the University of Oxford, says this caffeine sensitivity is more to do with our evolutionary response to taste.

When Claire drinks strong coffee she gets jittery for a couple of hours, then fals flat and becomes really hungry. She likes the energy and confidence it gives her

'We are born rejecting bitter-tasting foods because in the past it would ward us off foods that were poisonous or off,' he explains. 'Some people have as many as 14 times the number of taste buds as others, which makes them more sensitive to bitter tastes.

'Coffee - while we can learn to love the taste, just like dark chocolate - is still bitter-tasting, and for those with a heightened evolutionary sensitivity, it could induce symptoms such as nausea or dizziness.'

For Rachael Cresswell, sensitivity to caffeine means she now only drinks weak coffees - mochas and milky cappuccinos - and rarely a full cup

Whatever the cause, Claire won't drink more than two to three cups of coffee a week and won't touch a drop after 3pm.

'I can't risk saying the wrong thing in a meeting,' she says. 'I've done it a few times, thanks to my over-confidence, and it's not worth the risk.'

For Rachael Cresswell, sensitivity to caffeine means she now only drinks weak coffees - mochas and milky cappuccinos - and rarely a full cup.

'I once went to a pub and had three refills of coffee and it felt like I'd been on an alcohol bender,' says 35-year-old Rachael, from Paignton, Devon.

'I had the shakes and felt dizzy and sick and like I needed to eat something to feel better.

Rachel babbles and jitters when she drinks coffee - then experiences a coffee 'come-down' that closely resembles a hangover, where she feels sluggish and sleepy

'I ended up having to go home, where I went straight to bed, waking up a couple of hours later feeling sluggish and hungover.' Rachael, a stay-at-home mother to two children under two, has had this kind of reaction to coffee nearly half a dozen times, but still won't be giving it up altogether.

'With young children, I need coffee sometimes, for a pick-me-up after a sleep-deprived night, but I try to avoid chain places where they make it strong, such as Costa or Caffe Nero,' she says.

'I prefer to go to Starbucks or local places where I know the coffee is weaker. Then I can have the nice, high effect where I can meet friends and be chatty and confident, without the nausea.'

Once a colleague accidentally bought Rachel regular coffee instead of decaf - resulting in her becoming 'drunk on coffee' at work

Dr Jarvis says there's no harm in drinking coffee, even if you are sensitive to it. 'If it does induce a negative effect, you could just switch to decaffeinated coffee or reduce the amount of caffeine you're drinking - and that includes in tea, coffee or drinks such as Red Bull,' she says.

She adds it might be useful to do a simple placebo test at home.

'To check if your sensitivity is physical or psychological, you could ask a partner or friend to make you a coffee every day for two weeks without telling you if it's caffeinated or not.

'Then you can see at the end if it really is the caffeine that is giving you these negative symptoms.'

Rachel Harris inadvertently did a placebo test of her own when a colleague got her coffee order mixed up.

She ended up drinking a normal coffee instead of her usual decaffeinated cup.

'And there I was again in the staff room, drunk on coffee, all silly and giggly,' she recalls.
Like many women I was intrigued by the revelation that Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the mega-bestseller, Eat Pray Love, has left her husband to live with her best friend.

It made me think of the married men, fathers of children, who finally come out as gay - and wonder how many women secretly feel themselves to be sexually fluid too, neither fully heterosexual nor gay, but both?

It was many years ago that I first raised the last question - to myself. In 1971 I was working for the womens magazine Nova. One of its star writers was Irma Kurtz (for many years now the agony aunt of Cosmopolitan magazine), who took me to a famous lesbian club called Gateways, in Chelsea - the subject of her next feature. I was 25, Irma about ten years older, and we looked like a couple. Since glamorous (and heterosexual!) Irma was my heroine it was oddly pleasing.

The recent film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, is the story of a forbidden affair between two women in Fifties New York - now we can be more fluid about our feelings

Once at the club Irma left me alone while she did interviews, and I found myself an object of predatory attention. Butch women in mens clothes asked me to dance - and the truth is this avowedly heterosexual girl found she didnt mind at all.

Whats more, I found myself looking with real admiration at the more stunning women in the room, and wishing they would approach me.

And what would I have done had I been propositioned by one I really fancied? To this day I simply cannot say. But I dont mind

The recent film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, is the story of a forbidden affair between two women in Fifties New York.

Nowadays, thankfully, we can be more open, more fluid.

How many women might say: Yeah, my husbands OK . . . but I love being with my best friend so much more! Does this mean more women are likely to follow hidden desires and start passionate affairs with their own sex?

It wouldnt surprise me. As this papers advice columnist, Im unhappily aware that for huge numbers of women marriage is a terrible disappointment. My postbag delivers this disturbing truth each week.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the mega-bestseller, Eat Pray Love, has left her husband to live with her best friend. How many women secretly feel themselves to be sexually fluid too, neither fully heterosexual nor gay, but both?

Wives experience intense emotional loneliness with men who never talk, never share, never show any tenderness. For many women sex within marriage is a detested chore, so is it surprising that a woman dreams of cuddles with the one person who really understands her needs: the beloved female friend?

Elizabeth Gilbert has been attacked in some quarters, not just for betraying her husband but for actual dishonesty. As if she has betrayed the whole idea of happy heterosexuality. Certainly the ending of her 2006 bestseller was romantic - with the writer in bed with handsome Felipe for a month.

Ten million readers thrilled to her frankness: I have never been loved and adored like this before by anyone, never with such pleasure and single-minded concentration. Never have I been so unpeeled, revealed, unfurled and hurled through the event of lovemaking.

Elizabeth with her then-new husband. She has been attacked in some quarters, not just for betraying her husband but for actual dishonesty. As if she has betrayed the whole idea of happy heterosexuality. Certainly the ending of her 2006 bestseller was romantic

Felipe was Brazilian businessman Jose Nunes and Gilbert married him in 2007. They became business as well as bed partners.

Then came the bombshell - as unexpected as if Cinderella had run off with the Fairy Godmother.

This month Elizabeth Gilbert revealed that she ended the marriage to share her life with Rayya Elias, a Syrian writer (and lesbian and former drug addict) who - after a 15-year friendship - is now her partner in love. Her old self loved men, now she loves a woman. But should we be shocked? Throughout history men and women have found themselves bisexual as well as homosexual, and Freud believed it a natural state.

Ten million readers thrilled to her frankness in her bestselling book

But are we talking about physical (sexual) love? Or are emotions more important? The answer is: both.

In the ancient world, admiration of beauty could not be divorced from sex. Men enjoyed physical pleasure with beautiful boys then went home to their wives - as they have in every century since.

Intense friendships between women have always used the passionate language of love without necessarily finding physical expression (though plenty do).

Husbands tended not to mind. The wife having a crush on her friend was preferable to her having a lover. And men generally thought women could only really be satisfied by intercourse.

They would, wouldnt they? The point is, there are different ways to be satisfied, and Elizabeth Gilberts hot sex with Felipe is only one. Dare I whisper in this over-sexualised age that Satisfaction can take the form of emotional ecstasy too - which some prefer. And at different stages in life, women (its not for me to speak for men) might want both - and from either sex.

Angelina Jolie would agree. Now in the news because of her acrimonious split with her third husband Brad Pitt, the Hollywood star epitomises stunning femininity.

Back in 1996 she began a passionate relationship with a model and actress called Jenny Shimizu. In 2000 Jolie married Billy Bob Thornton but apparently went on seeing Shimizu until 2005. When asked in 2003 if she was bisexual, the actress responded: Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel its OK to want to kiss and touch her? Absolutely - yes.

Bel Mooney first began questioning her sexuality in 1971, and admits she likes the fantasy of being with a woman - and suspects many women secretly feel the same

Sexuality is powerful, but for many, soft sensuality is just as important. Does it really matter what form love-making takes? I believe what happens in the bedroom should stay there, and deplore the modern obsession with sexual performance that cheapens relationships today.

To hell with Fifty Shades Of Grey - think of the fifty shades of human emotions, in all their complexity.

If a woman decides her feelings for her friend outweigh her love for her husband, it may have little to do with rampant sex and all to do with holding, kissing, stroking, sharing.

In 1996 Angelina Jolie began a passionate relationship with a model and actress called Jenny Shimizu. When asked in 2003 if she was bisexual, the actress responded: Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel its OK to want to kiss and touch her? Absolutely - yes'

We should never underestimate the power of tenderness. In my experience, the most intense female friendships are based on laughter, shared confidences, mutual support, loyalty - and mutual admiration. Sex or no sex, many women prefer the company of their girlfriends to that of their partner. Even last year, interviewed about her friendship with Rayya, Elizabeth Gilbert told the Sydney Morning Herald, Theres a kind of intimacy only found in female friendships . . . and explained, Its not your sister, its not your lover, its not your BFF (best female friend). There isnt really an identification for it. I know it sounds like a love story and it is, totally.

We should never underestimate the power of tenderness. In my experience, the most intense female friendships are based on laughter, shared confidences, mutual support, loyalty - and mutual admiration

Now that love story has been given a tragic twist - one thats surely key to this whole affair.

For Rayya has been diagnosed with cancer. Gilbert has ended her marriage and chosen to share her life with a woman who is dying.

This is tenderness in action. If the essence of true love is not having sex but caring for another more than you care for yourself, and wanting above all to look after them - then Gilbert is now proving its beauty.

She says: I do not merely love Rayya, I am in love with Rayya. And I have no more time for denying that truth. The thought of someday sitting in a hospital room with her, holding her hand and watching her slide away without ever letting her (or myself!) know the extent of my true feelings for her - well, that was unthinkable.

Id like to believe Gilberts husband Jose Nunes has compassion in this unusual situation. Few of us want to share the rest of their lives with a partner who wishes to be at the side of another - male or female.

Psychotherapist Susie Orbach believes Elizabeths story resonates because we are finally starting to recognise that sexuality is neither binary nor fixed. That love, attraction and sexuality are more layered and interesting than theyve been allowed

In the 19th century two women in an intense relationship were called, sentimental friends and kindred spirits. Good terms both.

I know four women (three with grown-up children) who left heterosexual relationships to live with gay partners - demonstrating that love can shift and change as you age.

One alternated heterosexual and lesbian relationships for years and is very relaxed about the whole thing.

Psychotherapist Susie Orbach believes Elizabeths story resonates because we are finally starting to recognise that sexuality is neither binary nor fixed. That love, attraction and sexuality are more layered and interesting than theyve been allowed

Susie is now married to novelist Jeanette Winterson, a well-known lesbian icon. Orbach is matter-offact about the change in her life: One can have loved a man - and more than one, as I have - then, unexpectedly and deliciously, find love with a woman. We make this an oddity but it is not so infrequent.
A woman in Italy has given birth to her first child at the age of 61.

Maria Rosaria Veneruso delivered a healthy boy on Monday afternoon after a 'normal and peaceful' pregnancy, according to local reports.

Ms Veneruso and her husband Enzo were delighted with their new arrival, who weighed 7lb 7oz and they named Elia Francesco.

He was born hospital in the Castel Volturno commune in the Campania region in the south-western part of Italy.

Maria Rosaria Veneruso delivered a healthy boy at an Italian hospital on Monday afternoon

'I have fulfilled my dream,' she told local media. 'The future does not scare me.'

It is reported that Ms Veneruso conceived without undergoing IVF - but this has been refuted by experts in the UK.

Dr Leila Hanna, a consultant gynaecologist & obstetrician at BMI The Sloane Hospital, told MailOnline it was 'highly unlikely' she conceived without a donor egg.

'Miracles do occur but women don't get pregnant naturally at 61,' she told MailOnline.

She explained that it was far more likely the baby was born as a result of a donor egg.

She said: 'There's a lot of egg donation going on all over the world which is allowing women to have babies later in life.

New mother Maria Rosaria Veneruso and husband Enzo told reporters that were delighted with their new 7lb 7oz arrival, who they named Elia Francesco

'There are patients coming back to the UK after treatment overseas. I think there needs to be more regulation.'

Doctor Stefano Palmieri, who oversaw the birth in Italy, said there had been no problems during the pregancy.

'It was a peaceful pregnancy,' he said.

He said Ms Veneruso was in good physical health and regularly exercised during the pregnancy.

Earlier this year, 70-year-old Daljinder Kaur gave birth to a boy following two years of IVF treatment at a fertility clinic in the northern state of Haryana.

It is thought she is the oldest woman in the world to give birth - taking the mantle from Rajo Devi Lohan - who was also 70 when she gave birth to daughter Naveen following treatment at the same clinic.

Hitting out at critics, Mrs Kaur said she was not too old to become a first-time mother, adding her life was now complete with the arrival of their son, called Armaan.
This is the moment a man burst a cyst on his wrist - by hammering a nail into the lump and letting the fluid burst out.

Jason, from Vancouver, has been battling this recurring ganglion cyst for years.

And this is not the first time Daily Mail Online has documented his videoed attempts to make it go away.

He has tried every trick in the book - from thumb tacks to screwdrivers, and even a mini sword.

But now, he thinks he has found the fail-safe solution: a humble push pin.

Jason, from Vancouver, has been battling this recurring ganglion cyst for years

He has tried every trick in the book - from thumb tacks to screwdrivers, and even a mini sword

But now, he thinks he has found the fail-safe solution: a humble push pin

The video, posted on YouTube on Monday, was filmed by his pregnant wife, who was not identified in the clip.

It has already wracked up more than 9,000 views.

'I have a large ganglion cyst on my wrist that's been causing me problems,' Jason tells the camera.

'I just tried to pop it with this large fish hook,' he says, showing viewers the hook wrapped around his cyst.

'It did not work and it left a little - kind of a bruise-ish mark around the area.

'It was really frustrating and extremely painful. So I'm going to use this push pin instead. It's worked really well in the past.'

He assures viewers that the pin has been sterilized - as he proceeds to hammer it into his wrist.

As he drives it in he squirms in pain, saying 'smokey bear' in an apparent attempt at covering up a curse word.

Eventually there is an audible crack as he seems to pop the cyst.

Jason then proceeds to pull the push pin out in one go, causing a thick clear liquid to ooze out of the wound.

He then squeezes it to push more out - including some blood and other matter.

He assures viewers that the pin has been sterilized - as he proceeds to hammer it into his wrist

Jason pulls the push pin out in one go, causing a thick clear liquid to ooze out of the wound

He then squeezes it to push more out - including some blood and other matter

'There she blows,' he says as his wife zooms in for a better angle.

Jason claims he does not have health insurance, hence the home-treatment.

Unsurprisingly, medical professionals do not advise using Jason's method to treat lumps found on the body.

After one of Jasons first videos, Dr Arun Ghosh, a private British physician based in Liverpool, explained the cyst is a ganglion, a fluid-filled swelling that develops near a joint or a tendon.

Ganglions are made up of a thick jelly-like fluid called synovial fluid, which surrounds joints and tendons to lubricate them during movement.

They occur when this fluid leaks out and collects under the skin.

Ganglions can occur alongside any joint in the body, but are most commonly found on the wrist, hand and fingers.

Generally harmless, if they do not cause any pain, they can be left alone and will disappear without any treatment.

Dr Ghosh said: 'We advise not draining minor ganglions. They just get bigger and bigger. We only drain it if they are very large and hindering the use of the hand.

'A ganglion is a fluid-filled sack. If you start the drainage process, the bigger and bigger the sack will fill.

'This is the issue this gentleman has caused, hell need to drain it more often.'

Medical professionals do not advise using Jason's method to treat lumps found on the body

He told MailOnline it is dangerous for patients to try and drain growths at home.

'From a hygiene point of view youve got to sterilize your equipment. We would never insert anything that would be used in the house. They are covered in millions of bacteria.

'There are very fine arteries and nerves in the hand, and theyre so easy to damage. If they are damaged you get irreversible pain. If you think how often you use your hand that can be debilitating.'

Traditionally, ganglions were treated by being 'bashed with the family Bible', but this is no longer recommended, as this could cause the fluid to disperse and cause carpel tunnel syndrome - a swelling in the wrist - he added.
Thousands of women with breast cancer are being needlessly denied life-saving pills that cost 34p a day, experts warn. File image

Thousands of women with breast cancer are being needlessly denied life-saving pills that cost 34p a day, experts warn.

An estimated 27,000 women a year are missing out on bisphosphonates  a drug that stops breast cancer spreading to the bones.

If everyone who could benefit from the drugs received them, 1,180 lives could be saved a year in England, according to charity Breast Cancer Now.

And its research revealed a lack of clear guidance on funding them was the main obstacle to prescriptions.

Bisphosphonates  typically used to treat osteoporosis  alter bone tissue, making it harder for cancer cells to survive there. They are already used for advanced prostate cancer patients.

The drugs have been hailed as having the potential to prevent about one in ten breast-cancer deaths, and could save the NHS millions of pounds a year.

But polling of 125 cancer specialists found only 24 per cent routinely used the drugs for breast-cancer patients  with 45 per cent saying confusion over funding was the main barrier.

In England it is unclear if paying for the drugs is the responsibility of the hospital trust or the local clinical commissioning group, or whether they should be funded centrally by NHS England, along with many other cancer treatments.

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, Breast Cancer Now's chief executive, called for a national policy on funding the drugs.

She said: 'While bisphosphonates are not routinely available to all eligible breast cancer patients, women's lives are needlessly being put at risk.

'These are cheap and widely available drugs and the overwhelming evidence of their ability to save lives should have changed practice by now. But they are still sitting on the shelf, blocked by bureaucratic inertia.'

Bisphosphonates are 'licensed' only for osteoporosis and for some women whose cancer has weakened the bone.

An estimated 27,000 women a year are missing out on bisphosphonates  a drug that stops breast cancer spreading to the bones. Pictured, breast cancer cells

They are widely considered useful and safe for breast cancer as well  but many doctors are uneasy about 'off-licence' use.

The drugs are unlikely to get a licence for breast cancer, as it would require huge investment in clinical trials. But research in the Lancet last year found the drugs could prevent at least 1,000 breast cancer deaths a year.

Postmenopausal women on bisphosphonates saw a 28 per cent reduction in the chances of their cancer coming back. The drugs cut the risk of dying from the disease during the ten years following diagnosis by 18 per cent.

Bisphosphonates can be taken for around three years, either as a daily tablet called ibandronate, costing 34p per day, or intravenously every six months with a drug called zoledronate, costing 4p a day.

Across both treatments, the full cost with consultant time and monitoring of side effects is 43p a day on average.

Professor Rob Coleman, of Sheffield University, said that the treatment should be made available 'as a matter of urgency'.

And Professor Ian Smith, of the Breast Cancer Clinical Reference Group, said: 'It is deeply concerning that such an inexpensive treatment known to improve survival for women with breast cancer is not being made available to all that could benefit.

'In order to deliver the best quality breast cancer care to UK patients, the introduction of these drugs for all eligible women must now be our top priority.'

NHS England said decisions on the funding of the drugs were made locally but the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence would consider their use in upcoming guidance.
Is the Delhi government under-reporting cases of chikungunya? Statistics made available to Mail Today show a remarkable difference between the cases reported by hospitals and those presented by the Delhi government.

As per official data, Delhi has so far reported 2,625 cases of the vector-borne disease this season.

However, private and government hospitals in the city present a completely different figure.

Statistics made available to Mail Today show a remarkable difference between the cases of chikungunya and dengue reported by hospitals and the city government

Around 1,500 cases of chikungunya have been reported from Indraprastha Apollo Hospital alone, with most patients coming from Delhi and NCR.

The cases are extremely high this year. On average, more than 15-20 fresh patients are visiting the out-patient department in our hospital every day.

"The trend is worrying this year as more and more people are testing positive for chikungunya," said a senior doctor of the hospital, requesting anonymity.

Official data released by municipal authorities on Monday, said that the city has reported 2,625 cases of chikungunya and 607 cases of dengue in the national Capital so far.

Last year, the city witnessed 15,867 cases of dengue and 64 chikungunya cases. Chikungunya and dengue have claimed at least 34 lives so far this year.

There are around 41 private and 35 government hospitals in Delhi that are treating patients from various parts of the country.

We have seen more than 400 cases of chikungunya this season. Around 10-15 fresh cases are being reported every day, said Dr SP Byotra, senior consultant and chairman of the department of medicine at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH).

At SGRH, 75-year-old JD Madan died on Thursday morning - the fifth person to have succumbed to chikungunya at this hospital in the last five days.

The Centre-run Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital has also reported more than 560 cases of chikungunya, and most of the patients were from Delhi and NCR.

Our hospital has reported more than 560 and 250 cases of chikungunya and dengue, respectively. Most patients are from Delhi and NCR, said Dr VK Sinha, spokesperson, RML Hospital.

On an average, the hospital is witnessing around 600-700 new patients with fever every day.

We have allocated 110 beds for dengue and chikungunya patients, out of which 47 are occupied, Sinha added.

The sudden spike in chikungunya cases in Delhi and several other parts of north India has come nearly 10 years after a massive outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease across the country.

In 2006, more than 13 lakh suspected chikungunya cases were reported across the country, according to the National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP).

The Delhi government will launch a month-long intensive fogging drive across the city from Thursday.
The rush of reaction within India to the terrorist attack - clearly plotted and executed by Pakistan - on an Army base at Uri in Kashmir, which resulted in the death of 18 soldiers, is quite unlike the outrage that has followed similar acts of cross-border aggression in the past.

This time, the sense of India's exasperation is palpable.

Irrespective of their personal political preferences, Indians across the country want to see Prime Minister Narendra Modi take visible, punitive action against Pakistan.

The outrage that has followed the attack by militants on an Army base at Uri in Kashmir is quite unlike the outrage that has followed similar acts of cross-border aggression in the past (pictured - Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi)

Assurance

Modis assurance that, those behind this despicable attack will not go unpunished, has not served to assuage feelings or stop them from boiling over.

Some of the harshest criticism of Modis meandering Pakistan policy has emanated from his staunchest supporters.

A cartoon by the popular newspaper cartoonist Manjul, who is known to weigh-in after considerable rumination, shows Modi blowing smoke rings at Pakistan through the barrel of a field gun.

Others have been less charitable in lampooning Modi the Strong Man with a 56-inch chest.

There has been a spate of social media posts highlighting the similarities between what Modi and his predecessor Manmohan Singh had to say after cross-border terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan.

Some of the harshest criticism of Modis meandering Pakistan policy has emanated from his staunchest supporters

Modi has promised to punish the perpetrators; whereas Singh once promised to go after them.

The findings of the annual political survey conducted by the American organisation, PEW, whose publication coincided with the attack at Uri, shows there is more to the outrage than mere passing reaction to an incident, that these are not enraged sentiments that will fail the test of time.

Modis popularity ratings remain phenomenally sky-high more than two years into his five-year term.

There is sufficient endorsement of his economic policies to persist with them with suitable mid-course corrections.

At the moment, there is no challenger to the masnad of Delhi.

The finding that stands out in stark contrast to the others and bruises the Prime Ministers image, especially within his core constituency, is the extremely low support for Modis approach in dealing with Pakistan.

There has been a spate of social media posts highlighting the similarities between what Modi and his predecessor Manmohan Singh had to say after cross-border terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan

The PEW poll was conducted long before Pakistans latest transgression.

An instant poll today would yield near zero support and possibly lower overall endorsement of Modi.

During the 2014 election campaign, Modi was scathing and unsparing in his criticism of Singhs abysmal failure to deal with Pakistan.

After winning a spectacular mandate, Modi, through explicit deed if not spoken word, has controverted everything he said, and stood for on Pakistan, while seeking votes.

This by itself is not unknown of. Indian politicians tend to blow hot on Pakistan when not in power. The heat dissipates once in office.

Barring Indira Gandhi, every Indian Prime Minister has chased the elusive legacy of being remembered by posterity as a peacemaker.

Irrespective of their personal political preferences, Indians across the country want to see Prime Minister Narendra Modi take visible, punitive action against Pakistan

Pakistans military dictators and Prime Ministers, on the other hand, have resolutely followed the doctrine of inflicting a thousand cuts on India by waging a covert war of cross-border terrorism.

The twain of good intention and ignoble evil were never destined to meet. But what was a brilliant opening gambit, of inviting Pakistans Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif along with other SAARC heads of government to his swearing-in ceremony, has turned into disastrous adventurism in a terrain known to be treacherous and hostile.

Modi should have known better, never mind pressure from Washington, DC, or the urge to go down in history as the statesman who achieved the impossible.

Exchange

Its not possible to turn the clock back. The exchange of saris and shawls, the long walk with Sharif in Kathmandu, the orchestrated surprise visit to Sharifs home on his birthday, the invitation to a Pakistani team, including an ISI man, to visit Pathankot after the IAF base there was attacked, the resumption of talks, all that and more now belong to the past.

Modi has to begin afresh and craft an all-new policy to deal with Indias constant tormentor.

If he indeed means to keep his promise, he must act craftily and ruthlessly, regardless of consequences by way of upsetting the US and China.

Soldiers guard outside the army base which was attacked suspected militants in Uri

Even if India must stand alone, he should let it be known, India will stand.

Damage

It would be stupid to expect Modi to publicly state what he plans to do. Thats not how sensible leaders respond to challenges to national security.

Between war (undesirable) and inaction (unacceptable) lies a vast space for coercive action, both overt and covert, to inflict material damage and disorient Pakistan.

Giving asylum to Baloch nationalists and asserting Indias rights over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan are good first steps; they send a message to Pakistan and its patrons.

Modi should also declare he wont attend the SAARC summit at Islamabad and withdraw MFN status to Pakistan.

It would distress Pakistan and its funders if Modi were to downgrade diplomatic relations.

These are some of the things that can and should be done immediately. They would calm down Indians and give Modi time to figure out the big response, its elements, and their implementation.

Anything less would only breed sullen, unforgiving anger.

A woman lights candles during a vigil for the soldiers who were killed in the Uri attack

Voters, contrary to what politicians love to believe, have a long memory. Meanwhile, Modi would do well to go easy on tall talk of exposing and isolating Pakistan by taking Indias plaint to international fora.

Pakistan does not care about being exposed and the countries that matter will not isolate Pakistan.

Soothing stories by establishment journalists about Indias grand diplomatic success will not quite make up for the fact that insincere statements of condemnation of Pakistani terrorism by foreign governments are meaningless triumphs, poppycock victories.
Lets face it, 46-year-old Rahul Gandhi has had more comebacks than cargo pants. But unlike Rahul Gandhi, cargo pants are useful

Sleepy little villages in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh can now get some shuteye, thanks to the Congress and its trailblazing veep.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is on a month-long Kisan Yatra in the state, hoping to sell some farm-fresh ideas to the electorate that has, over the years, reduced his party to an also-ran.

But his attempts to make a splash with Khat Sabhas, or cot meetings, as part of a major outreach programme turned nightmarish when people attending the events took home the charpoys after having their fill of the refreshments on offer.

So the bed-and-breakfast scheme may be a hit with the locals but its also a wake-up call for the party.

For yet another attempt to repackage its crown prince seems to be assuming the form of a Hamlet-esque tragedy - not to be.

Lets face it: the 46-year-old Gandhi scion has attempted more comebacks than cargo pants. But unlike Rahul Gandhi, cargo pants are useful.

The Congress reportedly spent hundreds of crores on PR and advertising firms ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls on a marketing blitzkrieg for Brand Rahul.

The results cannot be explained away by any zero loss theories.

Mum and Son: Sonia Gandhi is hoping that her son can step-up and carry the family dynasty

Since then the party has capitulated in every state election, except Bihar where it is a junior partner in the ruling alliance, the Congress has roped in Prashant Kishor to help coordinate its UP strategy, the same man who aided Narendra Modis march to 7, RCR with a campaign that embraced modern electioneering techniques and wowed voters.

But the poll wizard is still rummaging through his bag of tricks to pull out a magical remedy for the grand old party that has spent the past two years licking its wounds after the worst electoral drubbing in its history.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and AK Antony during a farmers' rally

The cot plot has flopped, and Kishor, who made his bed, must now lie in it. After all, he picked a product to market that appears to be way past its sell-by date.

The challenge for Rahul - the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers - is to make up lost ground in time for next years UP elections, his biggest test before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

However, critics have often said that the shy, dimpled bachelor is devoid of ideas, or a grand vision for what he wants to do for the country.

Rebels and disgruntled workers have accused him of being inaccessible.

Even disillusioned Congress supporters have argued that he has failed to inspire confidence, and its time for new young leaders to push aside the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and stem the decline.

Like father like son: Rajiv Gandhi with his wife Sonia

Rahul loyalists though still believe that he would find a way to thread the needle and sew up his tattered party.

So far, their Pavlovian response has been to close ranks behind him and insist that there is nothing wrong with his strategies despite a string of defeats.

The Uttar Pradesh electorate cannot accuse him of lack of trying. Rahul headlined the 2007 assembly election campaign events for his party here, but netted just 22 of the 400 plus seats on offer.

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with his wife Sonia Gandhi offering floral tributes at Shakti Sthal

He marched through the states dusty plains again five years later, attempting an image makeover by sleeping in Dalit homes, courting arrest, addressing over 200 rallies and even growing stubble. The party bagged four more seats this time.

Detractors see the MP as a part-time politician who makes sporadic interventions in issues of national interest with a shoot-and-scoot style of attacking the BJP-led government.

Last year brought another Rahul reboot with his suit-boot ki sarkar jibe at Modi and his team.

Jawaharlal Nehru, President of the Indian Congress and India's first Prime Minister with his daughter future Indian Prime Minister, Indira Nehru (later Gandhi)

After a mysterious week-long sabbatical, the Congress leader displayed a fire-in-the-belly determination, joining student protesters on the barricades, showing solidarity with drought-hit farmers and hitting the campaign trail up and down the country.

He was like an action figure come to life.

The long-time social media naysayer also finally let his office get a handle on Twitter where the BJP and Modi have been trend-setters.

Getting down with the kids: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is finally on Twitter

However, his canvassing in crucial state elections failed to deliver the votes, raising further questions about his leadership abilities.

His arhar Modi dig at the PM and runaway dal prices during Parliaments monsoon session this year led supporters to believe that Rahul finally had his finger on the nations pulse.

But then he made a series of dizzying twists and turns over his remarks blaming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for Mahatma Gandhis assassination.

Though the Congress is unlikely to win the Uttar Pradesh elections, if it were to improve its share of votes, the Amethi MP would have cleared a crucial leadership test.

If, however, he fails again, it would be time for the party to stop trying to remake him and write a fresh script with a brand-new protagonist.

Uttar Pradesh awaits Rahuls tryst with destiny.
Terrier: Commons committee chairman Andrew Tyrie

There are few more terrier-like Commons committee chairmen than Andrew Tyrie.

When in pursuit of a target he is relentless, as the Financial Conduct Authority found when it was forced to publish its report on the HBOS collapse.

His latest expedition, as part of the Treasury Select Committee's probe of Brexit, has thrown up a stack of data about passporting  the licence that financial firms and individuals need to practise across borders.

The numbers are a treasure trove for those seeking to make political points.

The FT highlights the fact that 5,476 London-based firms could find their operations at risk as a result of Brexit.

This paper saw the cup more than half-full, noting that there were 8,008 European financial firms which have passports from UK authorities to do business in London.

In other words, the pull of the City as a financial centre is greater than that of all the other 27 countries in the EU.

Not all passports are equal. The list of holders will range from global banks such as HSBC and Goldman Sachs to much smaller lenders and mortgage providers.

For HSBC, Britain's largest bank, the whole thing is irrelevant since it owns a Paris-based bank Credit Commercial de France (since renamed HSBC) which has all the passport rights it needs.

The breakdown of numbers provided by Andrew Bailey, chief executive at the Financial Conduct Authority, shows that in many areas traffic is almost all one way into London.

Insurance is a case in point, with Lloyd's of London a focal point for chunks of European underwriting.

Departing chairman John Nelson said that although Brexit wasn't helpful, Lloyd's would not need to abandon its iconic Richard Rogers-designed headquarters any time soon.

That is quite important, given that around a quarter of Britain's large export of services are insurance, reaching far beyond the borders of the 28 nations.

Indeed, one leading insurance chief executive told me recently that when you are dealing with 47 regulatory regimes around the world, 'Leave' or 'Remain' makes not a jot of difference.

There have been suggestions that European hedge funds, some 80 per cent of which have chosen to make London's rakish Mayfair neighbourhood their home, will have to move to the EU because they hold 212 outbound passport arrangements and only 45 inbound licences.

That is exactly what you would expect, given that London is the home of alternative investment strategies.

Law firm Morgan Lewis does not think an exodus is necessary. It says the passport 'is not a prerequisite for assessing the single markets' for alternative investments as most providers satisfy 'equivalence' regimes.

Put simply, because regulatory standards are at least as good, if not better, in London compared to the EU, there is no issue.

So far equivalence, enshrined in the Lisbon treaty, has not been fully tested. But it is going to be a powerful weapon when Brexiteer negotiators get down to brass tacks.

There is an assumption in Frankfurt, Paris and elsewhere that Britain's success as a financial centre is all down to passport rights. That is simply a misreading.

It has become as powerful as it is because of the openness of borders to capital flows, the depth of liquidity in financial markets and cultural factors ranging from language to back-up services such as legal and IT.

At the fringes there will be problems, perhaps, for some US banks based in London which may need to put more into Continental operations. The Swiss manage quite well as a financial hub outside the EU with a deal which includes some migration trade-offs.

Passporting numbers are an inconsequential diversion from real issues.

Spanish practices

There have been two big drivers for European clothing retailers in recent time: the switch of as much production as possible to low-cost Asia and the rise of online selling.

Spanish based Inditex, owner of Zara and Massimo Dutti, eschews both. Yet in the six months to July sales were up 16 per cent and profits 8 per cent at 1.26billion (1.1billion).

Its secret? Some 65 per cent of its turnaround fashion is made and shipped from Spain, Portugal, Turkey and North Africa and can be in shops in days.

In contrast, Marks & Spencer has long Asian lead times for delivery and an expensive website which trails Germany's Zalando and Asos in terms of flexibility. M&S chief Steve Rowe may be aware of the problem but we have still to hear his solutions.

Cook's chutzpah

Youhave to hand it to Apple's Tim Cook. Paying your fair share of taxes in Europe may be 'crap' but cannibalising British technology is fair game.

Apple's eye (and its vast offshore treasure trove of 166billion) is rumoured to be looking at McLaren Technology Group, a leading innovator in F1 and the motor industry, which has helped Olympic-winning bike technology and transformed design and digital technology for the mass market car industry.
Shares in Majestic wine fell by a quarter after the profit warning.

Majestic Wine shares tanked today after the firm warned on profits due to tough trading at its commercial arm and a costly marketing campaign for Naked Wines in the US.

The wine retailer said it is now reviewing its commercial division - which sells directly to restaurants and pubs as well as advertising media companies in London - after seeing flat-lining sales put pressure on its profit margins in the first half.

Full year earnings in the division could be around 2million lower than expected, Majestic cautioned.

Majestic's woes have been compounded by troubles at its Naked Wines online business, bought last April for 70million, which is set to suffer a small loss after taking a hit on a failed direct mail campaign in the United States.

The charge will will see the division slip back into the red after making a surprise maiden profit in the last financial year.

As a result, Majestic said, overall group earnings for the year to April 3 2017 are set to come in lower than City expectations.

As a result of the profit warning, in late morning trade, the AIM-listed group's shares were down around 25 per cent, or 108.25p, at 325.25p.

Rowan Gormley, chief executive of Majestic Wines, said: 'It is very disappointing that two isolated factors are distracting from the great progress across the rest of the group.'

Mr Gormley insisted his turnaround plan was bearing fruit in Majestic's retail arm, which enjoyed its first rise in like-for-like sales in four years for the 12 months to March 28.

Rowan Gormley, the founder and former boss of Naked Wines, was appointed chief executive of the wider Majestic Wine group last year to help boost its fortunes.

He said the group remains on track to notch up 500million sales by 2019 and sought to assure investors Majestic was still aiming to resume shareholder dividend payouts this year.

Majestic Wine has 210 wine warehouses across the UK as well as two branches in France, while online business Naked Wines operates across Britain, the US and Australia.

The firm also owns fine wine specialist Lay and Wheeler, which recently returned to growth, according to Mr Gormley.

Analysts at Liberum Capital said they believe the recent troubles at Majestic are 'short term in nature and do not reflect anything more sinister'.

Liberum analyst Wayne Brown said: 'Majestic Wine has faced two issues in the first half of FY17E and while we are downgrading our estimates by 20 per cent, we feel these issues are more short term in nature and do not reflect anything more sinister.

'A combination of a tough backdrop in commercial as well as a planned investment in Naked Wines USA not delivering intended returns are the two drivers.

'The core Majestic Retail business is on track and on target and Naked Wines in the UK and Australia is growing according to plan.'

Mr Gormley, the founder and former boss of Naked Wines, was appointed chief executive of the wider Majestic Wine group last year to help boost its fortunes.
prison bars

(File photo)

Good Wednesday Morning, Fellow Seekers.

If we ever needed a reminder of why state House Democrats so richly deserve their historic minority in Pennsylvania's 253-member General Assembly, we now have it:

State Rep. Leslie Acosta, D-Philadelphia (Pa. House photo)

On Tuesday, convicted Democratic state Rep. Leslie Acosta, defied calls from her own party leadership, including Gov. Tom Wolf, to resign her North Philadelphia House seat, The Inquirer reports.

Acosta, who is running for re-election, despite the fact that she'll be out of a job shortly after her sentencing in January, said through an attorney that "it is [her] intention to let the legal process run its course so she can continue to serve her constituency for as long as possible.

"If the courts ultimately determine that she is unfit to hold public office, she will, of course, abide by that decision," her attorney, Christopher Warren, told the newspaper.

Just so we're clear on things: Acosta has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, in connection with an offense that occurred before her election.

Wolf, on Tuesday, quite sensibly, said he doesn't think that "any public official who is guilty - pleaded guilty to corruption - should be in public life. We need to be aboveboard, transparent, open, and honest. If we can't do that, we shouldn't be here."

Just in case there was any mistaking his intent, Wolf told The Inky, "No public official should be in office who is guilty of a crime."

The state Constitution bars any lawmaker, convicted of a felony, from holding office. In practice, that's generally understood to take effect upon sentencing.

Warren told the Inky that Acosta had a "convincing" argument to stay - though he wouldn't say what that was.

You can add Acosta's name to the long parade of state House Democrats who have pleaded guilty to crimes or been implicated in them over the last two years.

They include four Philadelphia lawmakers caught up in a corruption sting; former Rep. J.P. Miranda, who pleaded guilty to ghost payrollng, and Rep. Marc Gergley, of Allegheny County, who's been charged with using his office to help an illegal gambling operation.

On Monday, House Democratic Leader Frank Dermody told the Associated Press he had yet to speak with Acosta about the charges. But, he said, even if Acosta has pleaded guilty, she could still serve as a regular voting member of the House until her sentencing.

"This is really unfortunate," Dermody said. "Leslie has been a great member."

That's unacceptable.

In this case, House Democratic leaders, who have generally proven to be ineffectual at just about ... well ... everything, need to step up and say, loudly, that they won't tolerate a convicted felon in their ranks; that it undermines the public's already dented faith in state government; and that, despite the technical language of the Constitution, it's bad for the institution for Acosta to remain in office.

If they could do that for Kathleen Kane - and some of them had the commonsense to do so - they can do that for Acosta. There's no excuse here - even if it means sacrificing one of their already small minority.

The rest of the day's news starts now.

A state judge has ruled that a Pa. inmate's decades-long stay in solitary confinement must end, The Post-Gazette reports.

Michelle Obama will campaign for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia next week, PhillyMag reports.

State lawmakers will parallel the feds on self-driving car rules, The Tribune-Review reports.

Yeah .. so Daylin Leach has a picture of himself as a centaur. Because, of course (via BillyPenn).

Here's your #Harrisburg Instagram of the Day:

Keystone Crossroads travels to Mahanoy City, Schuylkill Co., for a series on the 'end of coal country.'

In the face of a statewide teachers shortage, staffing services are struggling to meet demand, NewsWorks/WHYY-FM reports.

Violent crime in Allentown has been reduced half over the last decade, The Morning Call reports.

FiveThirtyEight has given Democrat Katie McGinty a 59 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race (via PoliticsPA).

What advice are Democrats giving HRC in advance of next week's debate? Let Trump just say crazy stuff (via Politico).

Roll Call looks at Sen. Richard Burr's surprisingly competitive re-election campaign in North Carolina.

And now you're up to date. See you all back here in a bit.
Bernard Matthews has been bought by the owner of the 2 Sisters Food Group in a deal that will safeguard 2,000 jobs.

Chicken king Ranjit Boparan bought the struggling turkey giant from private equity group Rutland Partners through a pre-pack administration  taking on its assets but without liabilities such as its pension deficit.

Bernard Matthews, which has operations in Norfolk and Suffolk, has made losses for several years. The pension scheme is now likely to fall into the Government-backed Pension Protection Fund.

Bootiful: Bernard Matthews has been bought by the owner of the 2 Sisters Food Group

A spokesman for Boparan said: We have a proven track record in turning around businesses and we aim to make Bernard Matthews great again.

Rutland said: We are pleased that it has now been acquired by Ranjit Boparan with access to a large UK poultry group and that all the jobs have been preserved.
Feezan Hameed, also known as Feezan Choudhary, made millions from a scam in which money was taken from small firms

Britain's biggest cyber-fraudster grew so rich from a 113million scam that he flew his personal valets 8,000 miles across the world to polish his Porsches.

Feezan Hameed Choudhary, 25, described himself as King and lived like one  jetting off around the globe to party with pop stars.

Dripping in gold jewellery, he posed as a hot-shot music producer and property developer and owned a fleet of flash cars including a Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini and his two beloved Porsches.

Choudhary blew millions on a property portfolio in Pakistan, Dubai and Scotland, treated himself to 100,000 shopping trips at Harrods, bought 45,000 Rolex watches and enjoyed luxury holidays in the Middle East where he was pictured strolling the desert with a tiger.

But in reality the Burnley-born fraudster had fleeced over 750 British firms to fund his millionaire playboy lifestyle. Raking in 3million a month by cold-calling bank customers, he ruined hundreds of lives and put small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy  leaving one victim so distraught that she committed suicide.

Yesterday he was jailed for 11 years as the scale of the fraud by his 19-strong gang was uncovered for the first time.

Southwark Crown Court heard how Amy and Emma Daramola, two sisters who worked as Lloyds customer services assistants, were paid 250 for each bank statement they could hand over. Choudhary would use the information to trick business banking customers into thinking he was calling from their lender.

Hameed even posed with a tiger in a glamorous photo shoot thanks to the riches he obtained with the scam

Feezan Hameed had this loud and expensive Lamborghini thanks to the hundreds of thousands he made with his partners in the scam

This picture shows the entire row of luxury cars that Hameed had, including (from left to right) a Bentley , a BMW and an Audi

He poses with a specialist Mercedes 4x4 in another picture documenting his lavish lifestyle

Hameed, 25, posted this picture of an expensive watch and his Lamborghini online

The fraudster, pictured, as he marries his bride at an incredibly lavish engagement party

Confetti flies through the air as Choudhary enjoys his engagement, paid for with money he claims he earned as a music producer and property developer but was actually from the scam

Unwitting customers were told their accounts had been hacked and were duped into giving their internet banking passwords over the phone. The trick enabled the fraudster, nicknamed Fizzy, to steal 2.2million in minutes from one solicitors firm alone.

Using sophisticated software, the bank accounts were drained while his cohorts jammed the firms phone lines to stop them alerting their bank to the massive losses.The huge sums he made allowed Choudhary to live the high life, spending a fortune on Versace clothing.

Garments were bought for him by his butler Abdul Iqbal, 23, who was filmed paying for designer jeans with bin bags of cash while his employer dictated a shopping list using the video-calling system Facetime.

The shameless conman hired suites at five-star Mayfair hotels to carry out the fraud. He also made calls to victims from his luxury holidays in Pakistan where he hung out with pop star Bilal Saeed, who he claimed to be producing a music video for.

Prosecutors believe that Choudhary took a 50 per cent cut of the proceeds which he blew on luxury villas and commercial properties in Pakistan, Dubai and Motherwell, near Glasgow.

He was so obsessive about his cars that he flew his personal team of valets from Scotland to Pakistan to look after his fleet of Porsche Cayennes at his villa in Lahore.

Scotland Yard believes at least 750 businesses were affected between January 2013 and October 2015, but there could be countless others. Choudhary targeted customers from Lloyds, Santander, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Sisters Amy, right, and Emma, who were not jailed, seem to be enjoying a glamorous life in the picture believed to have been taken in 2013

Sisters Emma (left), 23, and Amy, 24, Daramola, both of Barking, east London both worked for Lloyds and were handed suspended sentences earlier this year

Amy Daramola, 24, pictured in a glamorous swimsuit, was recruited by her security guard boyfriend who offered her 50 for each bank statement. She later demanded 250

Amy (pictured) even enlisted the help of her younger sister Emma, who wrote online in a blog that she was a slave to fashion and banking gave her the cash for clothing.

One solicitors' firm in Liverpool was said to have lost more than 500,000 while another law firm in Angelsey lost 670,000. A company in Gloucestershire was drained of more than 2million in less than two and a half hours.

Nearly 70million was laundered through bureaux de change in London and sent to Dubai and Pakistan. Only 47million has been recovered. Some 100 officers from 16 forces helped smash the fraud, with detectives using anti-terror techniques such as bugs and evidence from a supergrass former gang member. The fraudsters employed a technique called vishing using details of company accounts provided by corrupted bank employees.

GETTING AWAY WITH IT AT THE TOUCH OF A BUTTON The gang used the vishing tactic after getting details of company accounts from bank staff Choudhary phoned businesses claiming to be from their bank, saying security on the accounts had been compromised He got internet bank security details and passwords from employees and emptied their accounts in minutes, blocking phone lines with software to stop contact with the real bank Stolen funds were moved to his bank account at the touch of a button and then distributed across a number of accounts The cash was withdrawn by money mules and moved through transfer exchanges from London to Pakistan and elsewhere The biggest raid saw 2.2million taken from a solicitors firm in minutes Legitimate bank phone numbers provided by corrupt bank staff were used to confuse victims The gang, said to be more sophisticated than most terrorist rings, used burner mobile phones, ditched every 24 hours Advertisement

Amy Daramola, 24, was recruited by her security guard boyfriend who offered her 50 for each bank statement. But she demanded 250 to hand over the documents and later enlisted the help of her 22-year-old sister Emma, who wrote online in a blog that she was a slave to fashion and banking gave her the cash for clothing.

Pictures on social media reveal the glamorous pair, from Barking in East London, partying on holiday and in nightclubs around Essex. In an earlier hearing, the sisters were handed suspended sentences after admitting conspiring to commit fraud.

Corrupt Lloyds account business adviser, Jones Opare-Addo, 58, from Putney, West London, was jailed for five years for leaking account details to the gang and setting up accounts to launder cash.

Choudhary used the details to convince businesses he was a genuine bank employee, telling them they had been hacked by someone in Aberdeen called King.

Stolen funds were moved to his bank account at the touch of a button and then distributed across a number of other accounts before the cash was withdrawn by money mules. When the racket was finally smashed, Choudhary fled to France where he was arrested using a false passport trying to board a plane to Pakistan on the night of the Paris terror attacks last November.

The ringleader, who was first convicted of fraud at 16, admitted conspiracy to defraud and money laundering in July but refused to name the bank insiders who helped him.

He claimed he was at risk of kidnap from rival criminal gangs who firebombed his Bentley outside his home in Glasgow after he was accused of having an affair with another criminals wife last year.

Images released by police shows a huge pile of cash uncovered during the investigation

CCTV footage of the gang appears to show them paying at the counter with cash from a binbag

CCTV shows Hameed (on screen) shopping for designer jeans using the FaceTime app

Jailing him, Judge Peter Testar said the scam was allowing cash to flow like coins from a fruit machine. He added: This was a complex, clever, persistent and pitiless fraud. The damage to the people running these businesses was potentially devastating. It would break the hearts of those who lost this money to see how it was frittered away on frivolous junk at Harrods.

'FRAUD GANG DESTROYED OUR TRUST IN OUR BANK' A family of farmers who lost thousands to the fraud gang said the scam left them afraid to answer the phone. A couple who run a farm in the Scottish Borders were conned out of more than 10,000 just weeks after they started using telephone and internet banking. The farmer's wife, who asked not to be named, told the Edinburgh Evening News: 'I believed entirely that I was speaking to legitimate bank staff. They knew who we banked with and their local knowledge took us in completely. 'We no longer trust people and are reluctant to speak on the phone. It's been a very lonely experience and we feel bitter.' Advertisement

He called the gang 'clever, persistent and pitiless' and described Choudhary as a 'very strong personality' who is 'persuasive and authoritative to the point of bullying'.

Choudharys girlfriend Ayesha Nadeem, 25, was jailed for 20 weeks while his brother Nouman, 22  the gangs accountant  was given three-and-a-half years. They both admitted money laundering.

Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Gould, who led the investigation, said: It is the biggest fraud of this kind we have seen in the country.

The level of trade craft they used was as high, if not higher than most terrorist networks.

Nouman Chaudhary, 21, of Glasgow, was sentenced to three and a half years for conspiracy to money launder.

Judge Testar said Chaudhary 'frittered money away on ephemeral junk' at Harrods and was present when 48,000 was spent at the luxury department store, and also 'threw himself fully into the lavish lifestyle' including expensive hotels, cars and nightclubs. He travelled first class to Dubai and Pakistan.

Ayesha Nadeem (left) from Glasgow was sentenced to 20 weeks for money laundering on May 9. Jason Branche, who worked at Lloyds, from east London, got a suspended sentence for conspiracy to commit fraud by abuse of position

Nouman Chaudhary (left) and Abdul Iqbal (right) were also jailed for taking part in the scam

Syed Amish (left) and Mohammed Mehtab (right) were jailed for money laundering

Abdul Iqbal, 23, of Edinburgh, was sentenced to 21 months for conspiracy to money launder.

Hameed treated him as a butler or servant but he got a 3,500 watch from the scheme and was present at Harrods when 70,000 was spent.

He accepted that 110,000 went through his account but he 'threw himself happily into the task and enjoyed the life that Fazeen Hameed brought him', the judge said.

It would break the hearts of those who lost this money to see how it was fritted away on frivolous junk at Harrods Judge Peter Testar

Syed Ali Amish, 24, of Luton, was sentenced to 32 months for conspiracy to launder money.

The judge said he played a 'significant role' in the gang including recruiting others to provide bank accounts and trying to arrange accounts himself.

Mohammed Mehtab, 35, of Watford, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to launder money. He allowed more than 9,000 to go through his account.

Syed Haider, 31, of Slough, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to launder money and was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Bilal Ahmed, 27, from Ilford, and Bushra Shabab, 30, from Slough, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money. They were sentenced to three years and four months, and two years in prison respectively.

Syed Haider (left) was jailed for conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to launder money and Bilal Ahmed (right) pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money

Bushra Shabab (left) was given a two-year suspended sentence today for conspiracy to launder money and Ayesha Nadeem (right) was jailed for 20 weeks in May

Mohammed Azhar, 38, from Slough also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to launder money and was sentenced to 32 months in prison.

Nine more people were sentenced at previous hearing, the details of which can now be published as all the defendent's trials have concluded.

The Daramola sisters walked away with a suspended sentence and account business advisor at Lloyds, Jones Opare-Addo, 58, was also jailed for five years for leaking account details to the gang.

Naveen Devalapally from London was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to launder money and on 9 August was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison.

Naresh Somu, 27, from Glasgow was found guilty of conspiracy to launder money and on 9 August was sentenced to 10 weeks in jail.

Ayesha Nadeem, from Glasgow pleaded guilty to money laundering and was sentenced to 20 weeks on 9 May 2016.

Sharmila Ravichandran, 22, Nikita Kadam, 24, and Harishakthimalayan Ponnusamy, 23, all from Cardiff, were all found guilty of money laundering and jailed on May 20. They were sentenced to eight, six and eleven months in jail respectively.
Lohan has a history of erratic behaviour - she was twice arrested in 2007 -

In August, police were called to the erratic star's London home after she claimed that he was trying to strangle her - Tarabasov was not charged

The troubled couple argued on holiday on Mykonos, Greece, when Egor, 23, was pictured grappling roughly with the star

Lindsay Lohan has sensationally claimed she feared her former fiance would throw acid in her face during their tempestuous relationship.

The troubled Hollywood actress, 30, said she called off her toxic engagement to Russian playboy Egor Tarabasov after a string of rows which turned violent.

In a tell all interview with Russian television's Channel One for which she was paid a reported 650,000, the star said: 'I went to bed and he broke into my house. He started strangling me.'

Opening up: In a tell all interview on Russian television, Lindsay Lohan (pictured) has revealed she feared her former fiance, Russian playboy Egor Tarabasov, would throw acid in her face

Speaking on Russian TV, Lohan claimed Tarabasov (pictured together) 'broke into her house' and tried to strangle her. He has denied all the allegations made by his former fiancee

Lohan was reportedly paid 650,000 to appear on Russian television in the tell all interview. Pictured: She posted this racy selfie in bed from her Moscow hotel room on Instagram

No charges were brought against Tarabasov, 23, and Lohan has offered no evidence to back up her claims.

She went on: 'I feared that Egor may splash acid in my face.

'I jumped out to the balcony and shouted with all my force, 'He's trying to kill me, call the police!' I am lucky to come to Moscow to speak.'

A show source said Tarabasov phoned his former fiancee before her interview and asked her not to appear on the show.

But a spokesman for the Russian businessman said he is now on holiday in Greece, and denied he had called Lohan in Moscow.

The spokesman said Tarabasov denies all the 'harmful' and 'false' allegations made against him by his ex.

In a statement, the Russian said: 'It has come to my attention that my former fiancee, Lindsay Lohan, is planning new smear campaign against me in the Russian and international media.

'My relationship with Lindsay came to an end in July 2016. In the weeks that followed, there were numerous attempts to discredit my name by inaccurately portraying the nature of our relationship, publishing distorted facts, and making false accusations.

'I decided not to address those harmful and false statements at that time. As an international businessman, I aim to maintain a low profile and concentrate on developing my business. I also chose to keep my silence out of respect for Lindsay.

'Today, I would like to state that all accusations made, and about to be made, by Lindsay against me are not true.

'I refuse to be dragged into the media storm created in the aftermath of our breakup. I will not be making any more statements with regards to my former relationship with Lindsay, but I will use all possible legal means to protect my name and reputation.'

Cracks began to emerge when these disturbing images from July showed an angry, violent altercation between the pair

During a heated exchange when the pair argued in a black 4x4 in Mykonos, the actress hurled his mobile phone on the sand and fled

Former wildchild Lohan is now known for her erratic off-screen behaviour, partying and has spent time in rehab.

In 2007 she was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and ordered to spend 45 days in a rehabilitation facility.

In July of that year, less than two weeks after she had been discharged, the wayward star was arrested again, this time for possession of cocaine, driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license.

The Mean Girls star got engaged to toyboy Egor last September following a whirlwind romance.

But cracks began to appear in their relationship as early as July, when Egor was pictured violently grabbing her in a tussle on the beach on holiday on Mykonos.

During a heated exchange in Greece the pair argued in a black 4x4 and the actress hurled his mobile phone on the sand and fled the the car.

He chased her, held her in an attempt to grab the handset back and twisted her arm behind her back during their Mediterranean break.

Afterwards Lohan said: 'I realise now you can't stay in a relationship just for love.

Lohan told presenter Andrey Malakhov (left): 'I feared that Egor may splash acid in my face.'

Lohan (pictured) is said to have been paid 650,000 for her tell-all interview on Russian TV where she made her claims about her former fiance

After pictures of her tussle with Egor in Mykonos emerged, Lindsay said: 'No woman can be hit and stay with that person if that person isn't prepared to say sorry'

'No woman can be hit and stay with that person if that person isn't prepared to say sorry.'

As the relationship crumbled, next Lindsay sent a series of worrying posts on Twitter after Egor spent a night partying with Russian socialite Dasha Pashevkina.

The final straw came in August when police were called to Lohan's 3million London home after she screamed on the balcony that he was trying to strangle her.

Before her landmark interview to be broadcast in Russia tonight, presenter Andrey Malakhov boasted: 'For the first time on TV, Lindsay Lohan tells about her romance with the son of Russian oligarch Egor Tarabasov.'

It covers her 'desire to run away from loneliness' but how she found 'dangers' with Tarabasov, the presenter added.

As their relationship crumbled, Lohan sent a series of angry tweets that Egor was out in London partying at a nightclub with her former best friend, socialite Dasha Pashevkina

Lohan and Russian designer Dasha (pictured) fell out after the erratic star's angry outburst - and the socialite was forced to move house after being trolled the Hollywood star's fans

It follows reports in Russia that Lohan was drunk before being interviewed and that she had refused to appear on the show.

During her time in Moscow Lohan spent all of her time in her suite at the five star Ritz-Carlton Hotel, close to the Kremlin, it is claimed. She posted an Instagram selfie in bed wearing a red bra and a second racy photo with the caption: 'Being alone is the best way to find yourself.'

A report in newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets quoted sources saying that Lohan had been unwell - but not drunk.

She enjoyed a visit to a cafe on Red Square before leaving Russia, having recorded her interview which is to be broadcast on Wednesday. She posted a photo with of her plate with ham and melon from the cafe with hashtags hashtags 'love' and 'Moscow'.

Earlier there were claims that Lohan had demanded an audience with Vladimir Putin as part of the agreement to be interviewed in Russia.

It was also claimed she had demanded that there should be no appearance on the show by Tarabasov or his parents, or their mutual friend, clothes designer Pashevkina.

Tarabasov (right) has recently been in Greece with his rumoured new girlfriend, London-based Ukrainian model and designer Anna Epifantseva (left)

New love? Tarabasov was seen with Anna (pictured) at a Quest Pistols concert in Moscow two weeks ago and is said to be currently on holiday with her in Greece

Meanwhile, Tarabasov is in Greece with his rumoured new girlfriend, London-based Ukrainian model and designer Anna Epifantseva, whose mother is said to be a high-ranking Ukrainian official.

Tarabasov was seen with Anna at a Quest Pistols concert in Moscow two weeks ago, and the pair have been linked by Russian Hello.
Terrorists are massacring innocent civilians across the western world, and although the chances of getting caught up in the next attack are small, few people are prepared.

Britain is currently on a 'severe' threat warning, and horrific atrocities have already been carried out in France, Belgium, and just recently the United States.

The latter charged Afghan-born Ahmad Khan Rahami with planting bombs in New York and New Jersey on Saturday, injuring 31 people, and the risk of lone-wolf attacks has never been higher.

'The people there are there to kill you': Ch Supt Scott Wilson lists 9 things to do in an attack

Many fear the UK is faces a similar calamity, having not suffered a major hit since the London bombings in 2007.

And while the country conducts regular training and mock incidents in case of a Bataclan-type attack, how ready are its people if the worst should happen?

The UK Government has been spreading the slogan 'run, hide and tell,' in recent months.

But what does that really mean  and what are the crucial factors that could boost your chances of survival?

Mr Wilson, pictured in London, has put together a 'guide to surviving a terror attack'

'Stay alert but not alarmed' says Detective Chief Superintendent Scott Wilson in our video

Detective Chief Superintendent Scott Wilson, appointed National Counter Terrorism Co-ordinator, Protect and Prepare, teamed up with MailOnline for an exclusive hard-hitting video setting out nine life-saving tactics.

The top anti-terror chief, who has worked with the Metropolitan Police since 2003, said you need to act fast.

'The people who are there to carry out these terrorist attacks are there to kill you and your western lifestyle,' he warns in the video, overlain with footage from Greater Manchester Police's suicide-bomber drill staged back in May.

NINE LIVE-SAVING TIPS IN THE EVENT OF AN ATTACK 1. You need to stay alert but not alarmed 2. There is no point staying to negotiate 3. Get yourself away from the danger zone 4. Try and hide within a building behind steel doors 5. Use properties where you can barricade yourself in 6. Don't hide behind a desk or a normal wall 7. Keep quiet 8. Ring 999 9. Get detailed information out there as quickly as possible  how many offenders? What type of weapon? Any casualties? Advertisement

Last year British police started their own campaign telling people to 'run, hide, tell' if they are caught up in a terrorist gun attack.

A public information film was released by the National Police Chiefs' Council and advised the first reaction must be to run for the exit.

'We're hoping this strategy can help to save more lives in the event of an attack,' explained Ch Supt Wilson.

'Run, for example, means don't hide under a table or play dead. Run out of the building. Don't try to negotiate.'

'Hide means that if you can't get out of the building, barricade yourself behind a steel door, stay quiet and turn your phone on silent.'

'Then tell - phone the police as soon as you can, give exact locations, what kind of weapon the terrorist might have had, are there any casualties.'

Teaming up with MailOnline, Ch Supt Wilson's advice in the video is given out alongside the scene where Greater Manchester police were preparing officers for a 'Daesh style' extremist assault similar to those that killed hundreds in Paris and Brussels.

Greater Manchester Police staged a drill preparing officers for a 'Daesh style' extremist assault back in May

In the mock event the 'suicide bomber' shouts 'Allahu Akbar', which the force had to later issue a grovelling apology for

The UK conducts regular training and mock incidents in case of a Bataclan-type attack

In the mock event the 'suicide bomber' shouts 'Allahu Akbar', for which the force had to later issue an apology.

'Run, hide and tell': Ch Supt Wilson says you need to think in this order

The police were then accused of 'bowing to political correctness' after angry commenters online believed they were right to make the exercise similar to previous ISIS planned attacks.

Expanding on his tips, Ch Supt Wilson added: 'It's about remaining calm and getting yourself to a safe place. The examples might be really simple but how many people would think of these actions when they're in that situation?'

Mr Wilson said the key piece of advice is for people to be stay 'alert but not alarmed' about the prospect of getting caught up in a terrorist incident.

He explained that crucial information in the event of an attack, called in via 999, will help the authorities who are ready for just such a moment.

Last month, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe announced more armed patrols for the streets of London.

Officers are equipped with rifles, hand guns, tasers, ballistic shields and BMW motorbikes for a rapid response.

Find out more at npcc.police.uk.

London police have recently been kitted out with heavy-duty weaponry to combat terrorists
Hillary Clinton is making a strong early showing among advance votes cast in swing state North Carolina, but is failing to drum up enthusiasm in Iowa.

Democrats have made up 40 per cent of North Carolina's early voters so far, compared to 33 per cent for Republicans.

The state is a must-win for Trump if he is to collect the 270 electoral college votes required for the White House.

Early voters account for a significant chunk of the population. In 2012, 45.6 million people, or 35 per cent of the electorate, voted before Election Day.

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Democrats have made up 40 per cent of North Carolina's early voters so far, compared to 33 per cent for Republicans

North Carolina narrowly voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. The state is crucial for Trump if he is to win the election

Still, with seven weeks to go before election day, people are in the early stages of casting their early votes.

Just 2,939 ballots have been returned in North Carolina so far, of over 53,000 that were requested, according to data compiled by The Associated Press. The state narrowly voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

These initial figures, received Tuesday, are too preliminary to serve as clear indicators about how the election will go.

Still, they are of interest because, unlike polls, they deal with actual voters either casting ballots or taking their first steps to do so. Campaigns are scrutinizing these figures to help guide their strategies.

Clinton has sought to win support among ethnic minorities. On Tuesday, the campaign announced a new radio ad in North Carolina and other battlegrounds aimed at young African-Americans.

She has also slammed a voter ID law passed by a Republican-led legislature which was later struck down by a federal court as racially discriminatory.

'More than half of North Carolina voters will cast their ballots ahead of Election Day, which is why we have been working tirelessly to give voters all the information they need to make their voices heard,' said Dan Kanninen, the Clinton campaign's senior adviser for North Carolina.

Trump, meanwhile, was visiting rural parts of the state on Tuesday to gin up support among working-class whites.

Democrats historically do well in attracting early voters, and Republicans acknowledge their main goal is to avoid deep deficits before Nov. 8.

Advance voting kicks off this week in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Iowa doesn't start early voting until Sept. 29, but more than 68,000 people already have requested absentee ballots.

Trump visited the rural parts of North Carolina on Tuesday as he tries to drum up support among working-class whites

Democrats dominate the early Iowa voter requests so far, but the actual number of party requests is less than half what it was by this time in 2012

Democrats dominate the early requests with 40,476 or roughly 60 percent of the ballots so far. That's compared to 13,011 or 19 percent for Republicans.

But in an indication of softness among Clinton supporters, the numbers from her party are down significantly from 2012, when 92,850 Democrats had requested ballots at this point, compared to 13,635 for Republicans.

Obama won Iowa in 2008 and 2012 based on a strong early vote.

Among those requesting an early ballot in Iowa was Josh Hughes, a 19-year-old sophomore at Drake University in Des Moines.

'I'm so ready for the election to be over,' he said, citing negative campaign rhetoric.

He plans to vote for Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Many of his classmates  once Bernie Sanders supporters  are opting to wait for now.

'The engagement is a little bit lower,' he said.

The Republican National Committee described Iowa's early numbers as evidence that Clinton's campaign is failing to inspire enthusiasm among voters.

'The RNC is continuing our historic ground game efforts in Iowa to ensure Republican victories up and down the ticket on Election Day,' said Sean Spicer, chief strategist for the RNC.

An Economist / YouGov poll on Wednesday showed Clinton at 40 per cent, and Trump at 38. Libertarian Gary Johnson collected 7 per cent and the Greens' Jill Stein 2 per cent.

And in Ohio, election officials reported Monday that more than 524,000 voters had submitted absentee ballot applications.

That's up from nearly 485,000 during a similar period in 2012, when a record 1.87 million absentee ballots ultimately were cast by mail and in person, according to the secretary of state's office. The state did not break down the requests by party affiliation.

Of the Ohio requests so far, more than 11,000 are from overseas and military voters, whose ballots will be mailed out this week. Ballots for the other voters will be mailed on Oct. 12.

The Supreme Court last week declined to reinstate a period of Ohio early voting in October in which people could register and vote on the same day. That was popular among minority voters.
The brides beatific smile said it all. Looking longingly into the face of her handsome groom, Angelina Jolie was a picture of wedded bliss. If only that image of marital happiness, captured in the film Mr and Mrs Smith where the couple first met 12 years ago, was borne out in real life.

But perhaps the writing was on the wall  or even doodled on that extraordinary home-designed Versace veil  at Miss Jolie and Brad Pitts actual wedding day in 2014.

For not only did the bride not smile, but in a brief statement released to Hello! magazine she managed not even to mention any fondness for the groom.

The couple got married two years ago and stole the headlines when Brad lifted the home-designed Versace veil

Its a wonderful feeling to be married, said Miss Jolie. The children are so happy.

After ten years together  in which Hollywoods first couple amassed six children, both biological and adopted  the marriage fell apart after only two years. So what went wrong? It is indicated that she disliked Pitts unwashed, pot-smoking, party persona.

More broadly, though, it cannot be denied that the pair have become vastly different people to the dazzling Hollywood A-listers who first set eyes on each other more than a decade ago. Once a dangerously glamorous starlet and former heroin addict, Miss Jolie intoxicated Pitt while co-starring with him in the film Mr and Mrs Smith in 2004, stealing him away from wife Jennifer Aniston.

But since they got together, Jolie has reinvented herself as more than just red carpet eye-candy

Although they said they would not marry until same-sex weddings were legal in America, under pressure from the children they changed their minds. We didnt realise how much it meant to them, Pitt observed.

Their honeymoon was spent making the film By the Sea, which told the story of an unhappily married couple. Miss Jolie directed the film. She said: It was our way of testing ourselves. We knew that if we could get through this wed come out even stronger and happier, and we did. She added: Weve always liked putting ourselves through challenges, even though it was maybe a little more dangerous for us as a couple.

However, the thrill of being the second Mrs Pitt  and Hollywoods leading wife  did not last for long. Already tired of acting by the time they married, Miss Jolie was redefining herself as a humanitarian and woman who demands to be taken seriously.

Regular visits to conflict zones in which she styled herself as a special envoy to the UN  and an unlikely alliance with former Foreign Secretary William Hague  only served to reinforce the message that Miss Jolie was no red carpet eye candy. She has since been made an honorary dame for her work campaigning against the use of sexual violence as a weapon in wars and has been awarded a visiting professorship at the LSE, even though she never went to college herself. Two weeks ago she returned from a trip to Iraq and on Friday she addressed the UN in New York.

The new Miss Jolie came to the fore particularly after the health crisis which led to her mastectomy in 2013, which was followed by the removal of her ovaries in 2015.

The couple were seen arguing on their hotel balcony in Sydney after he was pictured enjoying a beer first thing in the morning, and the couple were then seen smoking together

I can reveal that the 41-year-old has now forged a new alliance with power couple Baroness Arminka Helic and Chloe Dalton, former aides to William Hague, and is considering a new life in politics.

Last year she set up the Jolie Pitt Dalton Helic foundation, a non-profit organisation which focuses on womens rights. The three women, it is said, have become close. A source claimed that Pitt has been put out by their influence. A source said: Arminka helps Angelina make decisions about her next political move. Angie considers her a mentor.

Brad and Ange have rowed non-stop for years but leaving was always out of the question for Ange. She was under Brads thumb and he wore the trousers in the relationship and made all the decisions.

Jolie has forged a new alliance with power couple Baroness Arminka Helic and Chloe Dalton, former aides to William Hague

Now, these two women have come in and are overseeing everything  from their security to their staff to travel arrangements, where they live and which nannies they hire. Ange is now standing up to Brad, whereas before she didnt. So egged on by these two, shes found herself again.

The source added: Brad has made some stupid choices, especially wasting money on Miraval [the French chateau] where they never stay. Angelina would rather be in the UK, and she is interested in enrolling the kids in school in London. I hear that Brad cant cope with the kids on his own. Instead she has a loyal new posse and he has been pushed out.

Observers also noted earlier this year that Miss Jolies brother James Haven  who has an awkward relationship with Pitt  has been made the full-time nanny to her children.

A source said: Ange has always paid James 10 per cent of her earnings, which is something she agreed to back when [her mother] Marcheline was handling all her finances in the years pre-2002. She trusts him, hes always been her best friend and Brad drove a wedge between them for years so its pretty big that hes now back in the fold.

It seems that Pitts involvement in his wifes various charitable ventures has also been downgraded.

Brad, who always wore the trousers in the relationship, is said to have been put out by the new friendship and her ambitions to enter poilitics

The actor was listed as inactive in her foundation this spring. Those who enquired about this peculiarity were told it was an oversight. But the truth is that for some time, the chess pieces in this particular marriage have been moving in the direction of separation. Chateau Miraval  where they married  was quietly put on the market this spring, against Pitts wishes. Although it cost the Fight Club star almost 28million to buy in 2008  and more than 15million was spent on renovations  it is said that Miss Jolie disliked the French property, viewing it as incompatible with her new high-minded career. It must be said that Miss Jolie may not be the easiest person to be married to. Despite her litany of good works, she has a reputation for outlandish, highly strung and high-maintenance behaviour. In a leaked email last year, Sony Pictures producer Scott Rudin called her a minimally talented spoilt brat.

Observers noted earlier this year that Miss Jolies brother James Haven  who has an awkward relationship with Pitt  was made the full-time nanny to her children

On the home front, too, all has been far from a bed of roses for quite some time. Of Pitt she observed in 2009: I get so angry that I tear his shirt. They were photographed bickering  her smoking a cigarette, him drinking a beer  during the filming of By The Sea in 2015.

In 2008 a bodyguard sold his story  anonymously  to an American magazine and painted an unflattering picture of her as a self-centred control freak and total psycho.

He claimed that she would nitpick at Pitt until he stormed off, that she was a shouter and screamer and that he had the peculiar habit of getting the giggles when the children cried. Not that her approach to child-rearing is said to be any more conventional. She is famously against any kind of rules. There are no set bedtimes, and they are allowed to eat what they like.

She not only allows the children to collect martial arts weapons but has said she doesnt see how she can deny them tattoos. She also lets their biological daughter Shiloh live as a boy  which apparently left Pitts mid-Western parents aghast.
The Gunn Point Beach is notorious for its difficult terrain

to the driver's plight and were quick to joke

An unfortunate driver is being trolled by social media after his car got bogged down on a beach.

Ryan Fenton posted on the Darwin Beer Economy Facebook group seeking urgent help to rescue his silver Nissan from the sinking sands of Gunn Point Beach, northeast of Darwin, on Tuesday evening.

Users were not too sympathetic to Mr Fentons plight, advising him to 'try turning on the wipers on when the tide comes in,' or 'if the windows are left down you might at least get some fish.'

Ryan Fenton posted on the Darwin Beer Economy Facebook group seeking urgent help to rescue his silver Nissan from the sinking sands of Gunn Point Beach

Users were not too sympathetic to Mr Fenton's plight, advising him to 'try turning on the wipers on when the tide comes in'

Mr Fenton offers a 'few cartons, petrol and a feed' to anyone who can come help him pull it out, but the response is less than sympathetic

Mr Fenton spoke to Daily Mail Australia about the incident and said it was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

'Its really about how you drive, I noticed the sand getting soft and before I knew it the wheels were sinking in, he said.'

'I tried to get out but the wheels just dug themselves in.'

Posting a picture of the ensnared car with the tyres deep in the brown mud and sand, Mr Fenton offers a 'few cartons, petrol and a feed' to anyone who can come help him pull it out.

'Bottom line is the c**** f***ed. Needs recovery at the next low tide. Next low tide is at 2am. I have a snatch already hooked up. Just need a beast of a truck to pull it out,' he asked.

Help didn't appear straight away, with a friend passing along a message from the bogged down driver hours later: 'Yes I can provide coordinates. It's pretty much out in the water as we type.'

Some offered to meet Mr Fenton with boats, after he said the high tide was coming in

One hoped Mr Fenton would come across the forgetful fish Dory

Some saw the silver lining, suggesting Mr Fenton could use the opportunity to get some fishing done

Mr Fenton had in fact faced a similar situation before, getting stuck with his dad in muddy terrain in January last year and being towed out by his mum

Facebook users were quick to offer 'help' to Mr Fenton.

'I can meet you there at high tide in my boat,' one suggested.

Another asked: 'Have you tried turning it off and on again?'

Mr Fenton had in fact faced a similar situation before, getting stuck with his dad in muddy terrain in January last year and had to be towed out by his mum.

Some pointed out Mr Fenton was as fault due to his choice of car

Gunn Point is notorious for its difficult terrain, one user points out it's likely to happen again

Mr Fenton said despite the jokes, he did receive a lot of good advice from experienced off-roaders and was able to remove the car with a group of friends in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

'That's the main thing, getting the car back but the tyres were new, hopefully I can get some money back on them.'

Gunn Point is notorious for its difficult terrain. Footage show a LandCruiser ute becoming stuck after trying to cross a waterway in August last year.
Darden said he 'really can't remember the details,' but that he and Clark never kissed

Neither prosecutor had confirmed a possible connection outside of the courtroom, despite much speculation

When pressed, he admitted, 'Yes, we were more than friends.'

Darden said, 'I think I have told the truth about it in lawyer land. In lawyer land, hey, half truths are truths.'



It was a burning question on the minds of millions of Americans during the O.J. Simpson trial: Did prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden hook up?

Just a day after The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story won big at the Emmy Awards Darden finally opened up about his relationship with his fellow attorney.

'We were more than friends,' Darden said to ET. 'We were inseparable back then.'

Romantic rumors have swirled about the pair since the 1994 court case.

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Did they or didn't they? Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden were famously tight-lipped about a possible relationship, which was hinted at during the FX TV show, but never confirmed

Marcia Clark (left) and Chris Darden (right) were prosecutors in the O.J. Simpson double murder trial in 1995. The miniseries hints at an intimate relationship which was rumored during the time of trial because of their chemistry in the courtroom and the passing of secret notes

Journalist Jenee Darden with her father Chris Darden, the only black prosecutor in O.J. Simpson double murder trial, insists he did not have an intimate relationship with fellow prosecutor Marcia Clark

Asked whether he would ever tell the whole truth about their relationship, the 60-year-old lawyer said, 'I think I have told the truth. In lawyer land, a half truth is a truth,' he added.

During the interview, Darden claims that he can't remember all of the details of his time with Clark, some 22 years ago, however he insisted that the pair never kissed.

'I'm not a kisser. Kissing is intimate. Kissing is more intimate than sex,' he proclaimed.

The chemistry between the two was part of American Crime Story: The People V. OJ Simpson

There is plenty of drinking and laughing at the bar, and the pair share a moment when they get back to the hotel, but there is no intimacy shown between the two

The chemistry between the two became the focus of the FX miniseries. The pair were seen going away together for the weekend and attending the birthday party of one of Darden's close friends.

There is plenty of drinking and laughing at the bar, and the pair also share a moment when they get back to the hotel, but there is no intimacy between the two, with no kissing either.

The pair haven't spoken in years but described the relationship between the two of them as being like 'fire'. Darden said that he and Clark haven't spoken in years -- but he thinks if they did, it would be a 'great conversation.'

Despite the hints at the passionate relationship the pair shared, Darden remained tight-lipped in the finer details calling called Clark a 'fabulous woman and a fabulous lawyer.'

Darden and his former co-counsel Clark haven't kept in touch, Darden said, but 'I think if I called her tomorrow we'd probably laugh our butts off.'

Darden discussed the infamous trial in his best-selling memoir, In Contempt, which came out earlier this year.

Jenee shares her personal thoughts on her father and the trial of the century on her blog Cocoa Fly

Darden's daughter, Journalist Jenee Darden also says there was no intimacy between the two prosecutors during the trial of the century.

The 36-year-old writer revealed in her blog details about what it was like being the teenage daughter of the only black prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial.

In all the years since the trial ended and O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the double murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman - the question most people still ask her is: 'Did your dad hook up with Marcia Clark?'

Jenee writes: 'I'm used to it after 20+ years. Being older helps because I handle it better.'

She recently wrote in a blog post; 'As for whether my father and Marcia were seeing each other,

I asked my dad during a car ride around the time of the trial.

'He said no. In other interviews, he won't confirm or deny the rumors. I told Access Hollywood: 'That's grown folks' business' because I was a kid at the time. And you know what? It's still none of my business.'

Darden wed wife Marcia Carter in 1997, and the pair share three children. Clark, now 63, has two sons from her second marriage.
EU migrant numbers could be slashed by 100,000 a year post-Brexit without damaging the economy, experts say.

In a policy paper which will be seen by ministers, the think-tank MigrationWatch argues work permits should only be given to 30,000 highly skilled EU migrants a year.

Setting this limit would allow businesses to hire essential staff  as it exceeds official estimates of the number of such workers brought over in recent years.

EU migrant numbers could be slashed by 100,000 a year post-Brexit without damaging the economy, experts say. Above, the 'Jungle' in Calais

In a policy paper which will be seen by ministers, the think-tank MigrationWatch argues work permits should only be given to 30,000 highly skilled EU migrants a year

But it would mean an end to the 'open door' influx of unskilled workers which puts pressure on public services and can hit wages for lower-paid staff.

The think-tank also says there should be no restrictions on tourists, business visitors, students or retired migrants from the EU.

Alp Mehmet, of MigrationWatch, said: 'A sensible limit on skilled EU migration would maintain the inflow of qualified EU workers who benefit our society and economy while allowing some room for expansion.

'At the same time, closing our doors to low-skilled workers is also essential to reduce the scale of immigration and restore public confidence in its control.'

Overall net migration is currently around 327,000 a year. That is far in excess of the Government's target of 'tens of thousands', recently restated by Theresa May

Overall net migration  the numbers arriving minus those leaving  is currently around 327,000 a year.

That is far in excess of the Government's target of 'tens of thousands', recently restated by Prime Minister Theresa May.

Since 2006, around 1.6million EU migrants have arrived in the UK.

Analysis of the labour market suggests just 22 per cent  a total of 273,000  were either highly skilled or filling jobs on an official list of shortage occupations, such as nurses, engineers or IT professionals.

On average, the number of EU workers in jobs which would qualify for a visa if the applicant was from outside the bloc is 25,000 a year, MigrationWatch calculated.

It said: 'We recommend that the annual limit should be set at 30,000 a year, based on the 25,000 average arrivals per year who are now in highly skilled work, plus 5,000 additional permits to allow for expansion.'

However, Tory MP and former business minister Anna Soubry, speaking for the Open Britain campaign group, said: 'This would prevent UK businesses from accessing the skills they need and would drag the UK out of the EU's single market.
The foster father accused of murdering Queensland schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer reportedly took pills after he was taken into police custody.

Tiahleigh's foster father Rick Thorburn has been placed in an induced coma in hospital after a suspected self harm attempt.

The 56-year-old had swallowed the pills at either Logan Central Police Station or Beenleigh Watch House shortly after his arrest on Tuesday, Albert and Logan News reported.

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Schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer's foster dad Rick Thorburn is in an induced coma in a Brisbane hospital after a suspected self harm attempt in custody

The 56-year-old man being led into a police van by detectives on Tuesday from the Logan Central Police Station to the Police Watchhouse in Brisbane

Tiahleigh's (pictured) naked body was found decomposing along the banks of a river last year

Solicitor Kelly Thompson, representing Rick Thorburn, leaves the Southern Districts Magistrates Court in Beenleigh on Wednesday

A Queensland Police spokeswoman could not comment on the report, but said an investigation was underway.

'A 56-year-old man was transported from the Beenleigh Watch House to the Princess Alexandra hospital yesterday [Tuesday] after falling ill,' she said.

'The Ethical Standards Command is reviewing the circumstances of the matter.'

The claim comes after he was due to face Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday after he was charged with the 12-year-old's murder.

Police have not disclosed details of what prompted the hospitalisation but he reportedly lost consciousness once charges were laid against him.

Tiahleigh's foster father Rick Thorburn was due to face Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday after her was charged with the 12-year-old's murder

His lawyer Kelly Thompson would not confirm if her client's condition was caused by self-harm.

His condition had improved on Wednesday morning, police said.

Tiahleigh's mother Cindy Palmer was in the courtroom flanked by a dozen supporters wearing 'Justice for Tiahleigh' t-shirts.

Ms Palmer didn't comment as she left court but another of Tiahleigh's foster families spoke of a young girl who loved the water.

'She was a feisty little girl, but a good girl,' Wayne Pemberton, who cared for Tiahleigh for two and a half years before she lived with the Thorburns, said.

Thorburn had been due to face court on Wednesday, alongside his son Trent, 19, who has been charged with incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The court heard Trent allegedly told a cousin on Facebook he thought Tiahleigh was pregnant after having sex with her.

The 12-year-old is alleged to have told her foster mother about it.

Tiahleigh's mother Cindy Palmer was in the courtroom flanked by a dozen supporters wearing 'Justice for Tiahleigh' t-shirts

Cindy Palmer, the mother of murdered schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer, arrived at a Queensland court on Wednesday morning

Thorburn's lawyer Kelly Thompson would not confirm outside court if her client's hospitalisation was caused by self-harm

Tiahleigh was last seen alive on October 30 last year when she was dropped off at Marsden State High School, south of Brisbane.

Her body was located almost a week later on the banks of the Pimpama River on the northern Gold Coast.

Thorburn was one of the pallbearers at her funeral.

The case against Thorburn has been adjourned to December 21.

Thorburn's wife Julene, 54, and another son, Josh, 20, have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

They have been released on bail and will face court on October 10.

CHARGES LAID OVER TIAHLEIGH PALMER'S MURDER FOSTER FATHER RICK THORBURN: Charged with murder and interfering with a corpse. The 56-year-old was due to face court on Wednesday but is in an induced coma after collapsing while in custody. FOSTER BROTHER TRENT THORBURN: Charged with incest, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury. The 19-year-old was denied bail on Wednesday after a court heard he had admitted on Facebook Messenger to having sex with Tiahleigh and was worried she might be pregnant. FOSTER BROTHER JOSH THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 20-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. FOSTER MOTHER JULENE THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 54-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. Advertisement

Rick Thorburn (second left) was selected to be a pallbearer at the young girl's memorial service and wept as he carried her body from the funeral home

Tiahleigh Palmer's body was found dumped by a Brisbane river a week after she was last seen alive on October 30 last year when she was dropped off at school

Trent Thorburn, a metal fabrication apprentice and classic car builder, was charged with incest, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury

Thorburn's wife Julene, 54, (left) and another son, Josh, 20, (right) have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice

Trent is accused of having an illegal sexual relationship with the 12-year-old during the 10 months she had been in the family's care last year.

Police will allege Thorburn murdered his foster daughter after finding out Trent was allegedly sexually abusing her, the Courier Mail reports.

They allege he feared his son could be convicted under the Queensland Criminal Code, which states a sexual relationship between siblings - including foster, step or de facto circumstances - is considered incest, which can attract a life sentence.

Trent describes himself on social media as a dancer, metal fabrication apprentice and classic car builder.

His social media is flooded with photos of selfies, car parts and him dancing.
The death of schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer has prompted calls for an overhaul of Queensland's foster care system, after the 12-year-old's family was charged on Tuesday over her murder.

Rick Thorburn, 56, allegedly killed his foster daughter, while his wife Julene and their two sons Trent and Joshua, aged 19 and 20, have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Trent, a metal fabrication apprentice and classic car builder, was also charged with incest.

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The murder of schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer has prompted calls for an overhaul of Queensland's foster care system

Rick Thorburn, 56, has been charged with murdering his foster daughter Tiahleigh Palmer

Following the arrests, opposition leader Tim Nicholls said he had concerns with the foster care system.

'In terms of the foster care system, [the Tiahleigh Palmer case] will no doubt be something that will be examined by the child and family services commission,' Mr Nicholls, from the LNP, said to the Brisbane Times.

'It should be investigated by (the Queensland Family and Child Commission), but we need to wait and see, I think, for the results of the police investigation before commenting too much further.'

Brian Smith, executive director of Foster Care Queensland, said people applying to become foster parents were already thoroughly vetted.

'We have absolutely complete confidence in the type of checking that's available, and what needs to be available, and the assessment itself,' he said.

Trent Thorburn, 19, has been charged with incest, perjury and attempting to pevert the course of justice

Julene Thorburn (pictured) has been charged with with one count each of perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice

Police are expected to allege Mr Thorburn took Tiahleigh's life after finding out Trent had been sexually assaulting her during the ten months she had been in the family's care, The Courier Mail reported.

Mr Thorburn is alleged to have feared his son could be convicted of incest.

The pair are due to appear before the Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday, while Joshua and Mrs Thorburn will appear on October 10.

The arrests come 11 months after Tiahleigh's naked and decomposing body was found by fishermen dumped by the banks of the Pimpana River, 40 minutes from where she was last seen with Mr Thorburn at Marsden State School.

Tiahleigh's (pictured) naked body was found decomposing along the banks of the Pimpana River in Southeast Queensland
Theresa May has warned a taxpayer-funded investigation into the Iraq War not to pursue 'vexatious' cases

Six soldiers have been arrested and 20 questioned under caution during a controversial taxpayer-funded investigation into the Iraq War, it was revealed yesterday.

Officials acting for the Iraq Historic Allegations Team have even turned up on the doorsteps of veterans families to demand information over decade-old allegations.

On occasions, they have threatened relatives with arrest. Disturbing accounts of Ihats heavy-handed tactics have added to the growing fury over the continued existence of the inquiry and the hounding of British soldiers.

Yesterday, it emerged that a decorated female ex-Army officer had been restrained in her own home during a raid related to an Ihat investigation.

Some MPs have called for the entire enterprise to be scrapped, particularly as many of the original complaints were submitted by the now-defunct law firm Public Interest Lawyers.

Last night, Theresa May intervened for the first time to warn the 57million probe it must not pursue vexatious cases which subject British troops to years of torment.

The PM stopped short of saying Ihat should be scrapped, but defended the Armed Forces and their conduct overseas, saying Ihat must ensure it does not encourage an industry of vexatious allegations coming forward.

The Mail told yesterday how a decorated major, on sick leave for stress, has become so tormented by a decade-long witch-hunt that he has told Defence Secretary Michael Fallon he would rather face a war crimes trial in the Hague as he would have a better chance of a fair trial.

Officials acting for the Iraq Historic Allegations Team have even turned up on the doorsteps of veterans families to demand information over decade-old allegations. File photo

He is still being pursued over the drowning of an Iraqi teenager in Basra 13 years ago, despite having been cleared by an inquiry in 2006.

Other veterans have told how they have faced up to five investigations into one incident, and have said they felt they were hung out to dry by the Army.

Lawyers for some of the troops involved said Ihat investigators had turned up at family homes and barracks gates to demand information or threaten arrest.

A decorated major told Defence Secretary Michael Fallon he would rather face a war crimes trial in the Hague as he would have a better chance of a fair trial

Solicitor Hilary Meredith said: In one harrowing incident they appeared at an ex-girlfriends house and interviewed her on whether her former partner had tattoos, was abusive or talked in his sleep.

Yesterday, an Ihat spokesman revealed that six soldiers had been arrested during its inquiries  four by appointment in one investigation, and two without warning as part of two separate investigations.

Ihat itself does not have the power to arrest but can send military police. It then interviews suspects.

The spokesman said 20 troops were cautioned as potential suspects and said they were usually asked to attend interviews voluntarily.

They are cautioned before interview so they know anything they say can be used against them if they are prosecuted.

No member of Ihat has lost their job or faced disciplinary action over their conduct to serving troops or veterans.

But five employees from Red Snapper, the firm paid 5million a year to recruit former police officers as Ihat investigators, have left in the last 12 months.

Their departures were linked to wider performance-related issues raised by the Ihat management team, a spokesman said.

The probe was set up by the Government in 2010 and is now looking at around 1,500 cases of alleged criminality by British troops during the Iraq War.

Speaking in New York, the PM said: We should be absolutely proud of the fact that we have in our Armed Forces men and women who are willing to put themselves on the line for our safety'

Downing Street has said it wants the inquirys work to be completed by 2019, and Mrs May said it had been told to focus on cases where there may be questions of allegations which are not the vexatious ones and report within the timescale.

Speaking in New York, the PM said: We should be absolutely proud of the fact that we have in our Armed Forces men and women who are willing to put themselves on the line for our safety and do things that most of us would not contemplate being willing to do in terms of our own safety.
The girl's grandmother, Sue Palmer, revealed the 'pain on pain' she feels

Police allege he killed the girl to protect his son Trent, charged with incest

Her foster father Rick Thorburn has been charged with the girl's murder

The grandmother of Tiahleigh Palmer has revealed the charges laid against the schoolgirl's foster family was 'not a relief at all'.

Sue Palmer vowed to wear her purple Justice for Tiahleigh wristbands until arrests were made in the murder investigation, A Current Affair reported.

On Tuesday, the grandmother finally took off the wristbands when foster father Rick Thorburn, 56, was charged with the 12-year-old Queensland schoolgirl's murder.

'To be really truthful, it's not a relief at all,' Ms Palmer revealed in an emotional interview on Tuesday night.

'It's not even closure. It's just pain on pain.'

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Rick Thorburn (left), his wife Julene (middle right) and two sons, Josh (middle left) and Trent (right) have been charged with a string of offences in relation to the death of Tiahleigh Palmer

Mr Thorburn also faces a charge of interfering with a corpse.

His 19-year-old son, Trent Thorburn, faces an incest charge, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury.

Julene Thorburn, 54, and Joshua Thorburn, 20, each face one count each of perverting the course of justice and perjury.

Ms Palmer said the charges against Tiahleigh's foster family 'knocked the wind right out of my sails'.

'It's really, really scary. It's awful trying to raise little girls and boys nowadays.

'You can't fix kids once you've wrecked them. You can't fix Tiahleigh.

Tiahleigh's (pictured) naked body was found decomposing along the banks of the Pimpana River 40 minutes from where Mr Thorburn was allegedly last seen dropping her at school

'To be really truthful, it's not a relief at all,' Tiahleigh's grandmother, Sue Palmer, said

Sue Palmer vowed to wear her purple Justice for Tiahleigh wristbands until arrests were made in the murder investigation, and was finally able to take them off on Tuesday

'I'm absolutely addled with thoughts of how she died, and that's something I really want to know,' Ms Palmer said.

'When it happens to your own it's like a twisted knife in your heart.'

The grandmother said the foster family had taken 'pride of place' at Tiahleigh's funeral which she 'didn't think they deserved'.

'People treated them as if they were parents of long-standing, which they weren't.'

Mr Thorburn was one of the people who carried her coffin at her funeral in November.

'He cried big crocodile tears, bordered on hysterics and entrenched himself in the grief, her friends and events,' a source close to the family told Daily Mail Australia.

Rick Thorburn, 56, has been charged with Tiahleigh's murder and interfering with a corpse

Trent Thorburn, a metal fabrication apprentice and classic car builder, was charged with incest, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury

Mr Thorburn (second left) was selected to be a pallbearer at the young girl's memorial service and wept as he carried her body from the funeral home

The dramatic arrest comes 11 months after Tiahleigh's naked and decomposing body was found by fishermen dumped by the banks of the Pimpana River, 40 minutes from where she was last seen with Mr Thorburn at Marsden State School.

She had been missing for six days before she was registered missing by police and an alert was issued about her disappearance.

Police followed up with more than 3,500 separate lines of enquiry during the investigation, which eventually resulted in detectives seizing Mr Thorburn's car last week.

The blue 2009 Ford XR6 sedan was forensically examined, with police revealing it was the foster carer's vehicle ahead of his arrest on Tuesday.

Trent's older brother Joshua (pictured) has been charged with perverting the course of justice and perjury, along with his mother Julene

Julene Thorburn (left), the foster mother of murdered schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer, is providing evidence to police on her husband (right) Rick's alleged involvement in the 12-year-old's death

Julene Thorburn (pictured) was not initially charged when she was arrested alongside her husband and two sons but was charged later that night with perjury and perverting justice

Police will allege Rick Thorburn, 56, took his foster daughter's life after finding out his son Trent, 19, had been sexually assaulting her during the ten months she had been in the family's care, the Courier Mail reported.

Mr Thornburn is believed to have feared his son could be convicted under the Queensland Criminal Code, which states a sexual relationship between siblings - including foster, step or de facto circumstances - is considered incest, which can attract a life sentence.

He was denied bail and has reportedly not disclosed anything to detectives investigating the alleged murder.

Ms Thorburn is providing evidence to police about the investigation into the death of her foster daughter, Tiahleigh Palmer (pictured left and right)

He was denied bail and has reportedly not disclosed anything to detectives investigating the alleged murder

Mr Thorburn and his 19-year-old son will face Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Wednesday.

Ms Thorburn and her eldest son Joshua are expected to appear in the same court house on October 10.

The perjury charges relate to the family providing false testimony to the Crime and Corruption Commission during a secret hearing relating to Tiahleigh's death earlier this year.

Detective Inspector Damien Hansen said Ms Thorburn and her two children were expected to be 'key witnesses' in the murder trial and confirmed she was 'co-operating' with police as they continued their investigation.

Tiahleigh's murder rocked mourners from the Logan community and resulted in a review that lead to a change in reforms for children who go missing from out-of-home care

Mourners laid flowers outside Marsden State School (pictured) where Tiahleigh was last seen

The dramatic arrest comes 11 months after Tiahleigh's naked and decomposing body was found by fishermen dumped the banks of the Pimpana River (pictured)

Police released footage of her in a classroom from two days before her disappearance

CCTV footage of Tiahleigh in her school uniform ahead of her disappearance on October 30

She was gone for six days before she was registered as missing by police and an alert was issued about her disappearance

Tiahleigh's mother Cyndi Palmer spearheaded an online campaign to bring her daughter's killers to justice, but has asked for privacy since Tiahleigh's foster family were taken into custody

Mr Thorburn was denied bail and has reportedly not disclosed anything to detectives investigating the alleged murder

Search crews are pictured scouring bushland during the investigation last year

Last week, a blue Ford XR6 sedan was taken by Queensland Police for forensic examination
Rahami is charged with use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder among other offences

He is believed to be behind two bombings and one attempted bombing in New York City and New Jersey over the weekend

Rahami was arrested Monday in a shootout with police in New Jersey

Mena, 26, previously had to sue Rahami for nearly $1,000 in child support

The two had a daughter while still in high school and later broke up

His ex-girlfriend has now filed for full custody of her 9-year-old daughter

When Rahami was trying to move his wife to the U.S. in 2014, he petitioned a local senator to help her with a visa since she was pregnant

The suspected bomber's wife is said to be cooperating with authorities

Rahami's mother also left the US, she flew to Turkey on August 24

Ahmad Khan Rahami's wife Asia Bibi was intercepted by authorities in the UAE after leaving the US for Pakistan days before the terror attacks

The wife of New York and New Jersey bombing suspect, who flew to Pakistan before the terror attacks, is being questioned by American authorities.

Ahmad Rahami's wife, Asia Bibi Rahimi, was intercepted by authorities in the United Arab Emirates after leaving the US for Pakistan days before the terror attacks. She is currently said to be cooperating with authorities.

Rahami's mother also left the U.S., flying to Turkey on August 24 - a couple of weeks before her son was accused on planting multiple bombs in New Jersey and New York which injured 29 people.

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The wife of New York and New Jersey bombing suspect, Asia Bibi Rahimi (pictured in 2014) who flew to Pakistan before the terror attacks, is being questioned by American authorities

Ahmad Rahami ( left, and on his arrest mugshot for attempted murder, right) has been charged with five counts of attempted murder and use of a weapon of mass destruction

Rahami was charged on Tuesday with using a weapon of mass destruction and bombing public places.

He is also charged with five counts of attempted murder of law enforcement officials, and two gun charges, after a shootout with cops on Monday. He remains on $5.2million bail in hospital.

Ahmad Rahami met and married Asia Bibi in 2011 while in Pakistan and the two had a child together, law enforcement sources say.

When Rahami tried to return to the United States, he lobbied for his wife to join him in New Jersey. They were told she would have to remain in Pakistan until she'd had her child, ABC News reports.

In May 2014, she was granted entry with their baby and granted a U.S. Green Card.

Rahami also has another child with his childhood sweetheart Maria Mena.

Mena, who broke up with Rahami some time ago, has accused him of being a deadbeat dad who hated America and refused to pay his child support.

Maria Mena, the ex-girlfriend of suspected terrorist Ahmad Rahami, filed for full custody of their nine-year-old daugher on Tuesday. Above, a police officer stands guard outside Mena's home in New Jersey on Tuesday

Since news of Rahami's arrest, Mena has filed for full custody of their nine-year-old daughter.

In court papers obtained by DailyMail.com, Maria Mena petitions the court to be the sole guardian of their daughter due to the ongoing criminal case.

'Requesting full custody, defendant has been charged with police attempted murder, and is currently under protective services after possible terrorist related activity in NYC,' Mena writes in the latest court documents.

It's unclear how active 28-year-old Rahami had been in his daughter's life. Mena claimed in previous interviews that she hadn't seen him in two years, after seeing him become more anti-American.

Mena and Rahami dated while attending Edison High School, and classmates said she was pregnant at prom.

Their young love was apparently not well received by Rahami's father, who organized for him to visit Afghanistan right before their daughter was born.

Rahami was arrested on Monday after a shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey

Rahami (pictured on Monday) is suspected in two bombings and an attempted bombing over the weekend in New York City and New Jersey

The Rahami family business is searched on Monday in Elizabeth, New Jersey

While he was critical of American culture compared to the strict Islamic rules of his homeland, Maria never believed he'd never go as far as to hurt innocent people.

'He seemed standoffish to American culture, but I never thought he would cross the line,' she said. 'I never thought he would do something like this,' she said through tears. 'I think he was brainwashed.'

They broke up sometime after the child was born, and after Rahami returned from Afghanistan he stopped paying for child support as he took longer and longer trips back to the Middle East. At one point, Mena had to sue him for nearly $1,000 in child support.

The last trip that Maria, 26, was aware of, Rahami brought back a wife and child.

While they were together, she says he would often compared American culture to life in Afghanistan, saying how 'there weren't homosexuals in Afghanistan.'

'Death To Your OPPRESSION': The chicken shack terrorist's journal The 'Manhattan bomber's' journal revealed he hoped to die a martyr and pledged that his 'bombs will be heard in the streets', authorities say. 'Death To Your OPPRESSION,' Ahmad Khan Rahami ranted about the US government in his diary, found by on the suspect by arresting officers. The journal also praises the likes of Osama bin Laden and accuses America of 'slaughter' in the Middle East. 'Death To Your OPPRESSION,' Ahmad Khan Rahami wrote of the US government in his diary, which praises the likes of Osama bin Laden and accuses America of 'slaughter' in the Middle East A criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court provided the chilling motivations that authorities said drove the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives in New York and New Jersey, injuring at least 30 people. Prosecutors say the document ends: 'The sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION.' The federal criminal complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, also alleges that Rahami began buying bomb components in June, purchasing citric acid, circuit boards, ball bearings and electric igniters on eBay. Advertisement

He was also heavily critical of the military, once pointing out a military character as 'the bad person' to his young daughter.

Maria wouldn't reveal why she and Rahami broke up but did say that she did not want him anywhere near their daughter.

'I didn't want him to see my daughter,' she said. 'If he loved her, he would have paid child support. My greatest fear is that he would try to take my daughter.'

Rahami now faces five charges of attempted murder and two gun charges for the gunfight he had with police on Monday when police took him into custody. He is expected to face further charges for the the bombings in New York City and Seaside Park, New Jersey on Saturday.

Above is the second pressure cooker bomb found in Chelsea that never detonated. Investigators were allegedly able to identify Rahami from fingerprints on the device

The first Manhattan bomb, which injured 29 people, also destroyed the New York dumpster. Above, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (right) and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (second right) survey the scene on Sunday

Twenty-nine people were injured in the New York City bombing while no one was injured in Seaside Park, where a military charity race was due to take place. Rahami is also considered a person of interest for the five pipe bombs found near the Elizabeth, New Jersey train station on Sunday.

Law enforcement say it was fingerprints left behind on an unexploded pressure cooker bomb in Manhattan that led them to Rahami, who wasn't on any terror watch lists.

Investigators found the prints, duct tape and a cell phone triggering device, which they traced to Rahami, according to the complaint.

A criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court had now provided some clues to the motivations that authorities said drove the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives.

The 'Manhattan bomber's' journal revealed he hoped to die a martyr and pledged that his 'bombs will be heard in the streets', authorities say.

Rahami's journal, found by on the suspect by arresting officers, praises the likes of Osama bin Laden and accuses America of 'slaughter' in the Middle East.

RAHAMI SUED HIS LOCAL POLICE OVER DISCRIMINATION The prime suspect in the New York and New Jersey bombings sued his local police force and claimed they were persecuting him for being a Muslim. Ahmad Rahami said in a lawsuit that cops in Elizabeth, New Jersey subjected his and his family to discrimination and 'selective enforcement' based on their religion. The family - who used the name Rahimi in the legal papers - claimed that police tried to shut down their chicken restaurant, called First American, too early each night with 'baseless' tickets and summonses. Ahmad, 28, his father Mohammad Sr, 53, and his brother Mohammad, brought the lawsuit together and said that local residents also racially abused them and said: 'Muslims don't belong here'. The lawsuit was filed in 2011 and reveals that Ahmad has a long history of grievances with city officials, their local police force and people who lived close to them. Court records show that the complaint was dismissed with prejudice in 2012, meaning that it could not be brought again. At a press conference on Monday, the mayor of Elizabeth revealed that citizens complained when the fried chicken restaurant first opened because it was open for 24 hours and people congregated outside of it. The police tried to shut the store down at 10pm daily and that's when the Rahami family field the lawsuit. The city won the right to enforce the 10pm closing time in court, proving that it was a 'quality of life' issue. Advertisement

In it, he vowed to martyr himself rather than be caught after setting off explosives in New York and New Jersey, while it a ccuses the U.S. government of 'slaught(er) against the mujahidean (sic) be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham [Syria], Palestine ...'

Prosecutors say the document ends: 'The sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION.'

Investigators have also discovered video, recorded two days before the terror attacks, and recovered from a family member's phone, which shows Rahami appearing to test out his bomb making skills.

Investigators are looking into Rahami's overseas travel, including a visit to Pakistan a few years ago, and want to know whether he received any money or training from extremist organizations.

They believe he may have received terrorist training on his 'radicalization' trip to Pakistan where he visited the Taliban stronghold of Quetta.

The New York explosive devices contained aluminum powder, ammonium nitrate and HMTD - a chemical used in multiple terrorist plots against the West including the July 7, 2005, London bombings - by al Qaeda, CNN reports.

Investigators believe that Rahami's use of the chemical indicates overseas training as there have been very few 'lone wolf' attacks have successfully used the tricky substance.

Confused: Rahami's father, Mohammad Sr (right) said he didn't know of his son's alleged plans, and that he's 'not sure what's happening exactly'

The FBI is now looking into Rahami's multiple, and lengthy stays in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2011 and 2014 to see whether there is evidence of terror training.

Rahami underwent screening during his return from the Middle East and was flagged to the FBI has part of a batch of people who could require extra scrutiny.

The bulletins are fairly common - with dozens of people every week being flagged for extra security.

An official told CNN it was not what Rahami said in interview but the fact he'd traveled to regions where terrorists are located multiple times.

Despite the flag, nothing was done until 2014, when the FBI opened up an 'assessment,' the least intrusive form of an FBI inquiry, based on comments from his father after a domestic dispute, the bureau said in a statement.

'The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism,' the bureau said.

A law enforcement official said the FBI spoke with Rahami's father in 2014 after agents learned of his concerns that the son could be a terrorist.

The court documents of Maria Mena who has filed for a restraining order against her ex

Maria Mena, Rahami's ex-wife filed an application for the full custody of their daughter

During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Rahami's father told reporters Tuesday outside the family's fried-chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that he called the FBI at the time because Rahami 'was doing real bad,' having stabbed the brother and hit his mother. Rahami was not prosecuted in the stabbing; a grand jury declined to indict him.

'But they checked, almost two months, and they say, 'He's OK, he's clear, he's not terrorist.' Now they say he's a terrorist,' the father said. Asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, he said: 'No. And the FBI, they know that.'

However, he denied any knowledge of his son's plans to bomb New York and New Jersey last weekend.
A drug cartel queen is being investigated over the murders of a drug cook and his girlfriend.

Police allege Dung Thi Ngo, 40, ordered Kevin Ly to execute of the pair after they stole a large quantity of methamphetamines, also known as the drug ice, from her, The Daily Telegraph reported.

She is also being investigated over the deaths of two other men and the four deaths are connected to the drug ring overseen by Ngo.

Ly, 25, has been charged over the 2013 murders of Son Thanh Nguyen, 39, and his 35-year-old girlfriend, Thi Kim Lien Do.

Following their deaths, the couple's bodies were wrapped up bedsheets and dumped in separate locations in Sydney.

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Homicide squad detectives arrested 25-year-old Kevin Ly on Monday and have charged him with two counts of murder. Ly was allegedly ordered by a drug cartel queen to kill them

The body of Son Thanh Nguyen (right) was discovered bound and dumped in a gutter on Antwerp Street at Bankstown, Sydney's southwest, in April 2013 and in January the following year, the body of his girlfriend Thi Kim Lien Do (left) was found wrapped in a sheet

The 25-year-old was allegedly one of Ngo's 'henchmen' and carried out the couple's executions inside a Canley Vale rental home, in Sydney's south-west, that doubled as a clandestine laboratory.

While at the house with Ly, Ngo - who is behind bars for supplying drugs and will walk free next year - allegedly told him to 'just do it'.

'She handed a case containing fifty dollar notes to one of accuseds male associates,' court documents said.

'The accused and his associates looked at each other and nodded.'

A pair of farmers stumbled across Ms Do's body in a gutter while repairing a fence in 2013. Pictured is the man arrested on Monday

Ly was carrying a shotgun, and his two associates had a revolver and a samurai sword.

Investigators believe Mr Nguyen was a methamphetamine 'cook', and that he and Ms Do were murdered inside a Canley Vale rental home that doubled as a clandestine laboratory.

'She [Ms Do] may well may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but certainly our information is that Mr Nguyen was involved in a dispute with a group which has led to his death over drugs,' Detective Superintendent Mick Willing said.

It is alleged that Mr Nguyen had stolen a quantity of methamphetamine from his female boss, and that Ly - the woman's 'henchman' - had lured him back to the Canley Vale house that day on her instructions.

Investigators believe both deceased were bound and Ms Do was heard pleading: 'Please forgive me. I didn't do anything. I know nothing. Please don't kill me.'

In another room, Mr Nguyen's boss is said to have warned him: 'Return it. If you return it, Lien will stay alive. If you did it, you have to bear the consequences.'

In January the following year, the body of his girlfriend Thi Kim Lien Do, 35, was found wrapped in a sheet in bushland in West Hoxton (police pictured at the scene)

Police said Ms Do's body was decomposed and it was difficult to initially determine whether the body was male or female

Police documents viewed by AAP reveal that a key piece of evidence - a photograph showing the suspected syndicate boss's car parked outside the Canley Vale house on the day of the murders - was unearthed because a Google Street View camera happened to pass through on that day.

Late on April 10, an off-duty ambulance officer was driving through Bankstown when she spotted a pair of legs poking out of a pile of sheets on the side of the street.

The grim bundle hid Mr Nguyen's body- his wrists were tied behind his back with cable ties and blood-soaked tissues were stuffed in his mouth.

The day after Mr Nguyen's body was discovered, his girlfriend was reported missing.

But her fate was not known until early 2014, when a home owner repairing a fence near West Hoxton came upon what he thought was a dead animal. What he found instead was a human skull, wrapped in bedding.

Ly's case returns to Central Local Court in November.
Parts of the country have been hit by flooding as emergency services remain on alert and flood warnings are still in place with further rain is predicted.

Roads looked more like rivers in Broken Hill, New South Wales, where footage revealed cars ploughing through flooded streets after heavy rain on Tuesday.

In Victoria, rain continued to fall on Wednesday and residents had prepared for the worst, with a severe weather warning in place.

In NSW, farmers were being warned to expect heavy rain, cold temperatures and southwesterly winds and people travelling during the upcoming school holidays -which begin this weekend - have been warned by the State Emergency Service to be aware of flood affected areas.

Emergency management commissioner of Australia, Craig Lapsley, told The Today Show the state's rivers were already full and any further rain could result in major flooding.

Scenes from Broken Hill, New South Wales, show cars driving on roads that look more like rivers

Holiday makers have been warned to stay alert for flooding while travelling

Emergency management commissioner of Australia, Craig Lapsley, said the state's rivers were already full and any further rain could result in major flooding

This driver decided to take their chances and drive through flooding at Broken Hill

Montacue Road in Adelaide Hills, which was severely damaged by rain last week

Any more rain in Victoria could result in already full rivers flooding

Reports are for more rain in New South Wales and Victoria for the rest of the week

Thunderstorms were expected in NSW and Victoria on Wednesday, while flood warnings remained in place in both states, as well as Queensland and Tasmania.

In South Australia, where bad weather pummelled Adelaide last week and more rain is predicted, some roads are likely to be closed for months before being repaired, according to the ABC.

The deluge comes after the Northern Territory was battered by rain in recent days, with up to 100mm falling in some places in just a day - five times the September average.

There were 32 flood warnings in effect across the country overnight on Tuesday as the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) warned residents who live near rivers to be alert of dangerous conditions.

They were centered in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, while fierce winds and storms are also expected in South Australia.

Weatherzone senior forecaster Graeme Britton told News.com.au that the rain could last for days.

Yet more rain is forecast across Australia overnight and through tomorrow, with more than 20mm set to fall across the country. Pictured, rain in Adelaide Hills last week

Parts of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania will face the brunt of the bad weather throughout the next 24 hours. Pictured, rain in Adelaide Hills last week

Melbourne will be even less lucky, with the rain continuing until the weekend, albeit with a cold but relatively dry Friday. Pictured, floods in Victoria

'It's certainly going to be a wet couple of days across the eastern states,' he said.

'A front moving east over South Australia will bring more rain over Victoria and NSW, and this will link with a trough over QLD bringing heavy falls.'

There could be showers in Sydney until the weekend, with rain expected every day until Saturday.

Melbourne will be even less lucky, with the rain continuing until the weekend, albeit with a cold but relatively dry Friday.

Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart are also set for showers over the next few days, with even sunny Perth forecast to be struck by storms and torrential rain.

It has been one of the wettest Septembers in recent years, with record rainfall on parts of the east coast and in the north.

Australia has been pounded with rain and fierce winds over the last week, causing this landslide in Adelaide Hills

Cricket was most definitely not going ahead at this pitch in Darwin after heavy showers

The deluge comes after the Northern Territory was battered over the rain in recent days, with up to 100mm falling in some places in just a day

The Northern Territory and Queensland have faced an unseasonal amount of rain in the last week, the BoM said.

'A broad swathe of Australia's tropical region, extending from the Northern Territory's Top End to inland southern Queensland, received between 50 and 100mm,' a spokesman said.

'Many sites observed record September daily rainfall totals and many more are on track to have their highest September rainfall on record. Several sites in the central Top End had daily falls of more than 100mm.'

These parts of northern Australia would usually see between 5 and 20mm of rain in September.
Mr Blair and his old pal Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has run Kazakhstan as his personal fiefdom since 1991

During a recent major interview, Tony Blair was asked about a subject very close to his heart: money.

Am I better off than most people? Yeah, Im very lucky, he told the US title Newsweek. Am I in the league of the super-rich? Absolutely not, though you will have to make up your own mind about that.

It was a similar story back in 2014, when the prolific private-jet traveller used a speech in London to discuss the wealth his murky post-Downing Street career had generated.

I read that I am supposed to be worth 100million, he declared. Cherie is kind of asking where it is! Im not worth a half of that, a third of that, a quarter of that, a fifth of that I could go on!

Our former prime minister has of course always been a pretty straight kind of guy. But to a casual reader, the remarks seemed at best odd and at worst downright delusional. After all, his known property holdings alone were, at the time, worth north of 30 million.

Then there were Blairs extensive earnings from advisory roles with the Swiss insurance giant Zurich International and US investment bank JP Morgan, not to mention the 250,000-a-pop he occasionally trousered from speaking engagements.

Yet all these paled into insignificance next to the piles of money generated by Tony Blair Associates (TBA), his highly-secretive company which has in recent years provided consultancy and lobbying services to a string of companies and dictatorships, and which in the word of one commentator appears to have an aversion to democracies.

Founded in December 2008, months after he left office, and eventually employing more than 200 staff around the world, it offered what was described on its website as advice and support to foreign governments as well as geopolitical and strategic counsel to large companies.

To what remains of his circle of friends and supporters, this was an entirely decent endeavour, providing Blair with a vehicle to earn money that  he constantly insisted  was being funnelled into supporting his selfless charitable work.

To a rather larger number of critics, who noted with a cynical eye his ever-expanding property empire and billionaire lifestyle, things of course looked rather different.

They saw TBA as a vehicle through which he shamelessly leveraged the contacts and experience gained in public office for personal gain, destroying his reputation and debasing the office of British Prime Minister (perhaps irredeemably) in the process.

The firms absence of a moral compass could be gleaned, it was claimed, from its willingness to sign consultancy deals with a string of dodgy regimes and rapacious companies, including the government of Kuwait (an absolute monarchy which paid TBA a reported 27 million over four years), and the corrupt dictator of Kazakhstan (which we shall discuss later).

Hardly helping things with regard to its public image was the fact that TBA also stood at the head of a corporate structure that was deliberately created to render Blairs business activities almost entirely impenetrable.

The edifice of limited partnerships was devised by the auditing firm KPMG, along with Robert Barnett, Blairs lawyer and literary agent, who secured a rumoured 4.6million advance for his memoirs (which Blair, 63, with some fanfare gifted the British Legion). It represents the most complex and secretive configuration of companies that its possible to legally create under UK law.

In a nutshell, the structure involves no fewer than 12 legal entities beneath TBA, split into two different groups. One is known as Windrush and the other as Firerush. They consist of limited partnerships which sit on top of other limited partnerships. These are in turn organised via nominee companies through leading private wealth lawyers Bircham Dyson Bell, which boast such accessible names such as BDBCO No 819.

Tony Blair's personal wealth has rocketed since he rose to power in Britain in 1997, pictured

Although money passes between the different organisations in this network, the bizarre and opaque structure means its impossible to know exactly how much cash is there, or where it eventually ends up. Crucially, the structure also has the effect of making it impossible for even a forensic accountant to establish from outside who exactly is paying for the services of either Blair or TBA.

Though clearly not intended under UK law, its possible under UK law, is how the tax expert Richard Murphy once described the opacity of the enterprise, noting that it provides Blair with close to the secrecy he would have achieved if he was outside the UK in a tax haven.

The result has of course been to prevent the media, and by the extension the British public, establishing exactly how much Blair has made during his eight-year business career. As his biographers David Hencke and Francis Beckett put it in their book Blair Inc, even he might have difficulty calculating his net worth.

When details of his paid work have leaked out, however, they have rarely failed to be controversial, largely because of the extent to which Blairs political interests became intertwined with his money-making ones.

The Mail was leaked an extraordinary dossier of documents this year detailing TBAs dealings with its most controversial client  the autocratic government of Kazakhstan, whose longstanding dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev has run the country as a personal fiefdom for almost 30 years, and whose regime has murdered and imprisoned opponents, shut down opposition newspapers, and siphoned cash to a network of cronies and family members.

The papers, which included 30 emails, and several business pitches, showed how Blair, who had originally forged a friendship with the Kazakh despot while in office, demanded a fee of 5.3million per year for TBA to work with the dodgy administration.

In return, he promised to offer leader to leader advice to the despot, helping to provide political and legal counsel, train civil servants, and present the country on the world stage as a remarkable success story.

Our leaked emails showed how he first offered private strategic advice to Nazarbayev just a year after leaving office, and went on to sign a first consultancy deal in 2011.

Since then, the companys paid work had extended to helping the dictator fend off international criticism over a massacre of striking oil workers, and advising him to enlist the help of Baroness Ashton, a New-Labour-crony-turned-EU Commissioner, in setting up a partnership and co-operation deal with the EU.

Presuming TBA had earned 5.3 million each year that it worked for Nazarbayev, its overall income would have been upwards of 20 million.

Previous estimates have put Mr Blair's wealth at between 60million and 100million, although he claims it less than 20million

Where that money ended up is of course anyones guess. But it should be noted that it represents income from just a single client.

Blair has in the same period pursued business in dozens of countries, many of which bear only a passing relationship with democracy, including Dubai, Azerbaijan, China, Qatar, and Colombia.

Today, after nearly eight lucrative years, that dubious line of work would appear to be at an end.

TBA and the opaque network of Windrush and Firerush companies are finally to be wound up, and their remaining funds placed into a new organisation devoted to what has been described as not for profit work.

According to Mr Blairs office, the new organisation will even start publishing full accounts.
The devastated parents of a five-year-old boy who died after falling down stairs at school have spoken about their grief over losing their 'ray of sunshine'.

Nimrah Qaseem and Shadan Ahmad dropped their young son Sufiyaan, known as Sufi, off at the Southern Rise Children's Centre in Wodonga on September 6, it was the last time they would see him smile.

Nimrah, Sufi's mother, remembered the five-year-old as her 'best friend and 'lucky charm', according to The Courier Mail.

Nimrah Qaseem, Sufivaan and Shadan Ahmad before the accident at school which took the five-year-old's life

'There was nothing bad about Sufi, only goodness and kindness,' she said.

Nimrah is five months pregnant and revealed Sufi was excited to become an older brother, and would ask his mother for a sibling every night before bed.

'I am a proud wife and I was a proud mother. I was a queen for my two boys, my husband and my son. No matter how many kids I have, no one will take his place in my heart.'

The family moved to Wodonga just nine months before the accident that shattered their world. They previously lived in Ballarat where Sufi's father Shadan worked as a doctor.

The family are calling for safer schools to stop accidents like this from happening again.

'Our faith is keeping us strong. But we want to be sure this never happens to another family. We are suffering and we don't want anyone else to ever feel that pain,' Shadan said.

Sufi stands with a dinosaur in a candid picture, he has been described as his mother's best friend

The family are well known in the Muslim community and say they don't blame anyone for the accident but don't want any other families torn apart.

Sufi's accident, which happened at 4.30pm is still being investigated by police, who believe it was a tragic accident.

The young boy was treated by paramedics at the scene, but suffered a cardiac arrest after being taken to Albury Base Hospital in NSW. He died shortly afterwards.

Principal Clint Eckhardt described the incident as a 'tragic accident'.

'This news has had a profound impact ... and I know that our community will band together and support each other throughout this time,' he said in a statement after the incident.

A funeral has been held for the young boy.

Sufi was playing on steps at the Southern Rise Education Centre in Wodonga when he fell on stairs




As Reuben and Jasper Williams and their stepfather laid dead the the wreckage of their rental car, their injured sister, Tessa, begged to hold her also-injured mother's hand.

The Brisbane family-of-five had been less than an hour into a holiday in New Zealand when their car smashed into another vehicle on Monday afternoon.

Witnesses said they saw Tessa Williams begging to hold her mother Belinda's hand as they lay injured, according to the Courier Mail.

Reuben, 12, and Jasper, 14 Williams (pictured at a younger age) were killed in the car crash

While Belinda Williams (left) survived the crash, her partner Stephen Phillip (right) died

The stepfather, Queensland Symphony Orchestra violinist Stephen Phillips, 54, and Reuben, 12 and Jasper, 14, were killed in the crash as they travelled to a family reunion.

Ms Williams and Tessa were rushed to Waikato Hospital, where they remain in a stable condition.

The family had picked up a rental car after flying into Auckland from Brisbane on Monday morning.

They planned to spend two weeks visiting Belinda Williams' family, Stuff reported.

The Nissan the family-of-five were travelling in crossed the centre line and collided with a truck. Police believe Mr Phillips was driving at the time.

Mr Phillips was Queensland Symphony Orchestra's First Violinist, and had been a member since 1987.

Queensland Symphony Orchestra violinist Stephen Phillips, 54, (pictured) and his stepsons, aged 12 and 14, were killed in the crash in Huntly in New Zealand's North Island on Monday afternoon

The Nissan the family-of-five were travelling in crossed the centre line and collided with a truck. Police believe Mr Phillips was driving at the time (Emergency crews are pictured at the scene)

QSO Chairman Greg Wanchap said: 'The family was tragically involved in a car accident while in New Zealand on holidays yesterday and sadly Stephen passed away.

'Stephen had been a member of the QSO since 1987 and Belinda has played with the QSO since 2002.

The truck driver was uninjured, police said.



Inspector Freda Grace, Road Policing Manager for Waikato District said the crash was another reminder to drive safely.

'While the investigation into the cause of the crash continues, our thoughts are with the family and friends of all those involved,' she said.
A man has been charged with double murder after the shooting of a mother-of-nine and her nephew.

Obina Ezeoke has been charged with the murders of mother-of-nine Annie Besala Ekofo, 53, and her nephew Bervil Kalikaka-Ekofo, 21.

They were gunned down at a flat in East Finchley, north London, on Thursday shortly after 6.30am.

Mother-of-nine Annie Besala Ekofo, 53, was gunned down in her flat in East Finchley, London

Scotland Yard said 24-year-old Ezeoke, of no fixed address, is to appear in custody at Hendon Magistrates' Court in north west London on Wednesday.

The Metropolitan Police revealed it has also been established that Mr Kalikaka-Ekofo, a psychology student, died from a gunshot wound to the head.

His post-mortem was carried out at Northwick Park Hospital Mortuary on Saturday.

A 20-year-old man remains on bail until a date in late October.

The two victims were gunned down at a flat in north London in what is feared to have been a case of mistaken identity.

A post-mortem examination for Mrs Besala is yet to take place.

Officers were called to the scene on Elmshurst Crescent, East Finchley, at around 6.25am on Thursday to reports of two people injured at the address.

On arrival they found they were suffering from gunshot injuries and both victims were pronounced dead at the scene.

At the time of the killings four other people, including a child, were also at the property but were not harmed.

Bervil Kalikaka-Ekofo, a psychology student, died from a gunshot wound to the head

On Saturday Scotland Yard said it had found 'no evidence to suggest Mrs Besala or Mr Kalikaka-Ekofo were the intended targets of the shooting'.

Detectives said they were keeping an open mind as to the motive for the attack - as well as investigating whether anyone else associated with the address was the target.

Mr Kalikaka-Ekofo's father, Patrick Ekofo, said his son 'never looked for trouble'.

Mrs Besala was described as a 'wonderful and loving mother and wife' who was 'glue that kept everyone together' in a statement from her relatives.

Police say their enquiries into the incident are continuing.
Parents on the dole whose children skip school could be stripped of their welfare.

The idea is being proposed as a possible method to help Australia tackle the problem of its growing welfare bill - which at present sits at $160 billion.

Social Services Minister Christopher Porter said relating welfare payments to school attendance could have the successes the 'no jab, no pay' policy had, Yahoo reported.

It's just one idea to deal with the welfare bill, which could increase to a lifetime total $4.8 trillion in coming decades, according to reports.

Parents on the dole whose children skip school could be stripped of their welfare in a bid to tackle Australia's growing welfare bill (stock image)

Social Services Minister Christopher Porter said the idea could be successful like the 'no jab, no pay' initiative (stock image)

'No jab, no pay' requires children to be vaccinated or welfare payments won't be made.

The proposal comes as a report revealed 750,000 people receive welfare or the dole - also known as Newstart.

HOW WAS THE LIFETIME WELFARE BILL CALCULATED? Australia's population in 2015 taken (accounting for people on welfare)

Uses pattern of previous welfare payments to project the amount people will be paid over the rest of their lives

Discount rate of five per cent added because a dollar now is worth more than in the future

The figure for the lifetime cost - $4.6 trillion - is 44 times the total welfare payments in 2014-2015 Source: The Conversation Advertisement

That figure includes more than 250,000 carers and 432,000 parents who receive payments.

Newstart is the federal government's largest cost.

The federal government has also announced a new plan intended to break the welfare dependency cycle, and it is planned to be up and running by next year.

It is pouring $96 million into a program targeting thousands of young carers, students and parents to ensure they're not on welfare for the rest of their lives.

The proposed idea would link school attendance with welfare payments (stock image)

The proposal comes as a report revealed 750,000 people are on the dole - contributing to Australia's $160 billion welfare bill (stock image)

Armed with a new report and statistics on the impact of welfare reliance, Mr Porter is calling for a revolution in the system.

He's worried generations of youth are being trapped into a life on welfare - from young mothers who have had parents on benefits to students graduating and unable to shake off reliance on unemployment payments.

For too many people, the money flows, nothing changes and lives don't improve.

'The human cost of lost opportunities, of lost potential, is a terrible result of the system that we have in place at the moment,' the minister said.

The government will give community groups and NGOs the money but it will be up to the services to 'BYO the ideas'.

Besides the fund, targeted youth could also have to abide by new rules to ensure they're working for their payments under stricter mutual obligation controls.

The community sector isn't happy with the 'modest' amount of the fund saying it recently lost $1.5 billion to provide such services anyway.

The Australian Council of Social Service is also worried about the shift to self-reliance, because it could mean people relying on charity if they've just given up seeking government help.

Minister for Social Services, Christopher Porter

Chief executive Cassandra Goldie pointed to the experience of New Zealand, which the report is modelled on, amid concerns Kiwis are falling through the cracks.

'The end result has often been that people are no longer in a position to comply and they fall away,' she told reporters in Canberra.

Labor is suspicious the data will be used for further welfare cuts, pointing to controversial policies such as the one-month wait for the dole for youth.

'The government is talking this up but their actions fall a long way short,' opposition social services spokeswoman Jenny Macklin told ABC radio.

The Greens said there were barriers to employment that the government should be focusing on fixing.

'A half-baked version of the New Zealand approach that fails to broadly address poverty and disadvantage will leave us worse off than when we started,' community services spokeswoman Rachel Siewert said.

The community sector isn't happy with the 'modest' amount of the fund saying it recently lost $1.5 billion to provide such services anyway
Karl Stefanovic has said marriage breakdowns are 'no one's business' while awkwardly discussing celebrity divorces on the Today Show amid reports he split up with his own wife and moved out of the family home.

The host and Editor-In-Chief of Stellar Magazine Sarrah Le Marquand were speaking about the high profile split of Hollywood stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on Wednesday morning.

'It is a big media story, you can argue it's no one's business what's going on inside there,' a stony-faced Stefanovic told the panel.

'They're high profile, it's a tough one'.

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Karl Stefanovic has said marriage breakdowns are 'no one's business' while awkwardly discussing celebrity divorces on the Today Show

Ms Le Marquand agreed with Stefanovic celebrity relationships are often thrust in the spotlight.

'Really only the two of them will ever know, but you can't expect anything other than it to fold out in front of the media,' she said.

Stefanovic, 42, is rumoured to have moved out of the family home and is staying at the $20 million Bondi home owned by his friend James Packer as he and wife Cassandra Thorburn 'try to work their marriage out'.

He was absent from the Today Show on Tuesday morning and was later photographer looking downcast as he arrived home in his white Mercedes to pick up his son River.

News reader Sylvia Jeffreys stepped in to host the program with Lisa Wilkinson in Karl's absence.

They briefly made mention of his absence at the beginning of the show saying he was tidying up a 60 Minutes story.

It comes days after revelations he split with his wife Cassandra Thorburn

The host and Editor-In-Chief of Stellar Magazine Sarrah Le Marquand were speaking about the high profile split of Hollywood stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on Wednesday morning

'He had a couple of loose ends on a story he's finishing, so he'll be back in the chair tomorrow,' Wilkinson said.

Nine also told Daily Mail Australia Stefanovic was absent due to filming for 60 Minutes.

He was pictured leaving Nine's studios in Willoughby on Monday morning in his white Mercedes after news broke at the weekend of the couple's split.

Stefanovic (pictured with wife Cassandra Thorburn) is rumoured to have moved out of the family home and is staying at the $20 million Bondi home owned by his friend James Packer

'It is a big media story, you can argue it's no one's business what's going on inside there,' a stony-faced Karl told the panel

He and his wife Cassandra Thorburn (both pictured) are reportedly 'trying to work their marriage out'

The 42-year-old kept his windows - and retractable roof - rolled up and did not stop or get out of the car to answer questions from the media about his marital situation.

His wife was spotted taking their three children - Jackson, 16, Ava, 11, and 10-year-old River - to school.

The pair met in the 1990s while Stefanovic was working with WIN television and Thorburn was employed by the ABC in Rockhampton.
Aid convoys in Syria have been suspended by the United Nations after missiles bombarded trucks carrying wheat and medicines near Aleppo, killing 20 civilians who were mostly charity workers.

Bundles of nappies were left strewn next to the burnt out vehicles destroyed in the strikes, which were yesterday blamed on Russian president Vladimir Putin and described by a UN spokesman as potential war crimes.

UN officials said they had been delivering assistance for 78,000 people in the town of Uram al-Kubra on Monday night when 18 trucks and a Red Crescent warehouse were hit.

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Aid convoys in Syria have been suspended by the United Nations after missiles bombarded trucks carrying wheat and medicines near Aleppo

Bundles of nappies were left strewn next to the burnt out vehicles destroyed in the strikes, which were yesterday blamed on Russian president Vladimir Putin

A rescue worker who witnessed the strikes said more than 20 missiles pounded the area for more than two hours, even hitting his team as they searched the debris for survivors.

Hussein Badawi, who leads the local Syrian civil defence group, said the attacks came from helicopters and land-based missiles and accused Syrian and Russian aircraft of taking part.

Another witness, Mohammed Rasoul, said the convoy was 'erased from the face of the earth'. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 'it was mostly Russian warplanes that carried out the air raid'.

Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that all aid deliveries had been halted pending a review of the security situation in Syria in the aftermath of the attacks.

'It's a very, very dark day for humanitarians across the world,' he said.

Both Russia and the Syrian army denied they were to blame.

Britain's International Development Secretary Priti Patel said: 'These people died while they were selflessly delivering humanitarian assistance to those in dire need.

UN officials said they had been delivering assistance for 78,000 people in the town of Uram al-Kubra on Monday night when 18 trucks and a Red Crescent warehouse were hit

'The death of those who are trying to bring hope to a country which has known little more than conflict, violence and hunger for six years is yet another act of barbarity. The result is that more people in Syria will now go without the lifesaving support they need.'

The United States holds Russia responsible for the air strike that hit an aid convoy in Syria, a White House spokesman said on Tuesday.

'There only could have been two entities responsible, either the Syrian regime or the Russian government,' the spokesman, Ben Rhodes, said.

'In any event, we hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this space,' he added.

UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien said in a statement: 'If this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it a 'sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack,' in his address to world leaders at the General Assembly Tuesday. 'Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower,' he said, describing the bombers as 'cowards' and those delivering aid as 'heroes.'

At a meeting of the United Nations in New York, the US and Russia insisted the ceasefire in Syria was not over.
War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, who is president of the reading charity Book Trust, wants primary schools to reinstate story time

The joy of reading is being killed for many children by constant school tests, former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo says.

The author of War Horse, who is president of the reading charity Book Trust, wants primary schools to reinstate story time.

In a speech tonight, he will say the teaching of reading in school can take the wonder out of stories and turn them into a subject for tests of comprehension, handwriting and grammar in which at least as many children fail as succeed, leading some to give up.

In the inaugural BookTrust Lecture, he is expected to add: 'You disappoint yourself, disappoint others. You give up. I gave up.

'To give up on books is to give up on education, and if you give up on education, then you can so easily give up on hope  so many avenues barred, so many possibilities never imagined, so many discoveries never made.'

He said having a story time at the end of every school day would make it 'a special time, a fun time, devoted entirely to reading, to writing, to storytelling, to drama', adding: 'No testing, no comprehension, no analysis, no interrogation.

'Children have to want to learn. Give them the love of story first; the rest will follow.'
Her voice cracking, the mother of an Arizona pilot who was burned as he managed to keep his blazing plane flying as four skydivers jumped for their lives, said her son was a hero.

Ryan Kilgore, who suffered burns before he also jumped from the plane that crashed into a house Saturday night, was in stable condition after surgery on Tuesday.

The 31-year-old 'was more concerned for others than himself during a crisis,' Jan and Bill Kilgore, of Spokane, Washington, said in a statement that his mum read during a news briefing at the hospital.

A pilot and four skydivers aboard a plane survived a fiery crash in a Phoenix suburb Saturday

Jan and Bill Kilgore, the parents of Ryan Kilgore, the pilot of the plane that crashed into a home in Gilbert on Saturday night, made a statement at the Maricopa Medical Cente

Ryan was flying skydivers over Gilbert, Arizona when the plane caught fire. The skydivers jumped out, and Ryan was also miraculously able to get himself out and parachute to the ground

Mrs Kilgore noted that her son was very relieved to learn that nobody else was injured.

'With the heroic act of a brave pilot who was more concerned for others than for himself during a crisis, and with the outpouring of support from the community in the days that followed,' Jan said, 'we remember the world is still filled with people who care.

'We are honored to call this pilot our son,' Jan went on. 'Time stood still,' she told reporters recounting the moment when she and her husband first heard of the dreadful news.

'Thanks to his quick and appropriate action, everyone on board the flight survived. Ryan knew and performed his job very well,' Mrs Killgore continued.

'We are very sorry for the family that lost their beautiful home, and we are so glad that no one else was injured, and that no lives were lost,' she said.

A GoFundMe page has been set up by Ryan's brother to help cover some of the medical costs the family faces.

The parents left the briefing immediately after reading the statement without commenting on the state of their son's injuries.

The four skydivers landed safely, and the Gilbert, Arizona couple who lived in the home got out with their dogs after Kilgore's plane crashed into the house, which will have to be torn down.

Sharon and Peter LeBeau told CBS Phoenix that they were thankful for first responders and family and friends who had reached out to them.

'We are grateful to God to be alive,' said Sharon LeBeau, who lived in the home with her husband and dogs. 'I've never seen so much compassion and kindness.'

The couple were simply watching television when the plane plunged into their house, destroying it. The entire back of the home was obliterated in the crash.

Neighbors Kevin and Catharina Wilhelmsen created a GoFundMe campaign to aid the devastated couple, saying that the LeBeaus had 'lost their entire home and all of their belongings.'

Ryan landed safely but has suffered burns and is currently in the hospital undergoing trauma evaluation

Kilgore had radioed to say, 'fire on the wing, fire in the airplane,' moments before he bailed out of the aircraft in a parachute.

A young man at a pool party said he heard a loud explosion and noticed the plane was headed in his direction.

Jesse Cagle-Villegas said he was in the swimming pool and felt doomed. But the plane never came; it made a sharp left.

'I never would have expected that in my wildest dreams,' Cagle-Villegas said.

Kevin Mark and his friends were in their back yard enjoying a pool party when the crash happened and was among the first to come to Ryan's aid.

'I can tell you with absolute certainty that Ryan did his best to avoid hitting any homes and was aiming for the field just south of where his plane struck the home,' he wrote online.

'He stayed in that burning plane as long as he possibly could, sustaining burns to his back, neck and arms trying to avoid crashing into the homes beneath him.

'While we were trying to make him comfortable and treat him for shock, Ryan's only concern was if anyone had been hurt on the ground. I cannot express the level of angst and emotional pain he was going through over the thought that his plane may have struck a home and/or injured anyone.

'I knew he was in a great deal of physical pain from the burns and the hard landing he suffered from staying in that plane for so long, but he never once complained about his injuries until he found out no-one else was hurt. You could see the relief in his eyes and face when he found out no-one "else" was injured. He is a brave young man who did his absolute best in an unreal and dangerous situation.'

The five individuals were able to successfully jump from the small plane before it crashed into a house which erupted into flames

Fire crews arrived at the scene of the crash where they were finally able to extinguish the blaze

Ryan's skills from 10 years of piloting were put to the test as the small plane caught fire Saturday night

Cagle-Villegas ran to the front yard and saw a parachute coming down to an empty field. His feet still wet and shoes untied, Cagle-Villegas ran toward the field, jumped over a brick wall and found Kilgore standing. Cagle-Villegas helped him walk to a house and called for help.

Another eyewitness recounted their experience: 'My husband and I were on our swing outside watching this plane go around, and all of a sudden we heard this big bang and we saw the plane catch on fire,' Jeri Kimbro told The Arizona Republic.

'I saw a ball of flame straight down,' another eyewitness, Mason Paulette, told the Republic newspaper. 'It's not something you want to see.'

A National Transportation Safety Board investigator on Monday completed the on-scene portion of the agency's investigation and a preliminary report on the crash is expected within a week or two, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Tuesday.

The harrowing scene unfolded during what was supposed to be a thrilling pyrotechnic skydive jump at a local fair.

Attendees at the fair initially believed that the crash was part of a fireworks display, and was simply part of the celebration.

Seth Banda, a spokesman for Constitution Week, said the Arizona Skyhawks Parachute Team has been performing pyrotechnic skydiving at the fair for about three or four years.

The plane tore through the roof of the Peter and Sharon LeBeaus' house while they were still inside. Incredibly they survived and managed to walk away without a scratch

The LeBeau's were inside the home at the time of the fiery smash but were able to escape the blaze without injury, police said

The small plane had been carrying skydivers for the annual Constitution Fair on Saturday evening, according to police

He said the skydivers completed their jump and landed at their intended spot as expected.

Pyrotechnic skydiving is a niche market and only about 40 or so people in the country do it, according to John Hart, one of the leaders of Team Fastrax, which performs all over the world.

The pyrotechnics vary but shows generally involve skydivers strapping fireworks or sparks to their legs and then jumping out of planes.

The one story home had been gutted by the blaze and damaged by the plane crash - although the occupants escaped unharmed

The small plane had appeared to get into trouble and crashed at around 7.30pm near Ray Road, Phoenix

The pilot, Ryan Kilgore was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was treated for burns after the small plane crashed into the home

Hart says pyrotechnic skydiving has grown in popularity over the past 15 years or so, and his team and others regularly perform at major sporting events, Fourth of July celebrations and in Europe and China.

But jumping with pyrotechnics comes at a high risk since parachutes are flammable. Usually sky divers have to take larger planes than normal and jump in groups of four to six from at least 12,000 feet in the air so that they can safely deploy their parachutes without catching fire, Hart said.

The explosives are usually linked via Bluetooth so that only one of the sky divers has to deploy the pyrotechnics, which all go off at the same time, Hart said.

Hart said that some shows require divers to wear up to 100 pounds of fireworks on their legs.

Jumpers are equipped with stainless steel plates and a flame-retardant blanket around their legs in case of an explosion.

Jumping with fireworks also requires special licensing and training.

The following day, the mangled remains of the plane was removed from the roof of the house
She's the worlds most beautiful royal, according to Tatler, and is a fixture at Society events.

But even Lady Amelia Windsor was refused entry to the hottest London Fashion Week party in town.

The 21-year-old granddaughter of the Duke of Kent, who was sporting a stylish black leather jacket and long red and black skirt, was turned away from the LOVE magazine bash in Mayfair on Monday night after being forced to wait outside with her sister Marina, 23, right.

Even Lady Amelia Windsor - the world's most beautiful royal - was refused entry to the hottest London Fashion Week party in town

She spent 20 minutes trying to get in but was refused and ended up walking away looking slightly embarrassed, says my spy.

She didnt make a scene, but her friends were arguing with the doorman, explaining who she was. But to no avail.

Those who did make it in included Princess Dianas party-loving niece Lady Kitty Spencer, Viscountess Weymouth, models Lottie Moss and Poppy Delevingne and former Wonderbra model Eva Herzigova, who ended up dancing on a table.

A party spokeswoman tells me: Lady Amelia arrived as we suffered a huge bottle-neck due to having just let in a high volume of guests at once.

Model behaviour: Lottie Moss, Poppy Delevingne and (right) Eva Herzigova

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has used the Broadway opening of a British production of Sweeney Todd to tell New Yorkers that London is open.

The show is about a demon barber who slits strangers throats. Is this, er, the right sort of message to give mugger-wary Manhattanites?

Peer pressure and plots in Cameron seat

Party girls: Lady Kitty Spencer and Viscountess Weymouth at the bash

Is there a plot to stitch up the selection of David Camerons successor in his West Oxfordshire seat of Witney?

His friend and Old Etonian former minister Lord de Mauley has emailed local Tories enouraging them to vote tomorrow for a favoured candidate, David McFarlane.

He is chairman of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association and received an MBE in Camerons infamous resignation honours list. The by-election will be held on October 20.

Whether de Mauleys words will carry much weight remains to be seen. When Rupert Ponsonby, aka 7th Baron de Mauley, was Defra minister in 2013, he said the poor must learn to go without. Not exactly a one-nation Tory.

A young prince and a very off-colour faux pas

With much excitement in Canada over the imminent visit of Prince William and Kate, lets hope there are no royal faux pas reminiscent of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus black sheep mother Margaret.

She also mingled with royalty when she was married in the 1970s to Pierre Trudeau, the long-running PM of the country.

Visit: Margaret Trudeau and Charles. In 1979 Margaret recalled the Prince, who was only two months younger than her, had once looked long and hard down my cleavage

The pair met Prince Charles during Pierres premiership and spirited Margaret indiscreetly implied that twentysomething bachelor Charles took a fancy to her shapely charms.

In 1979 Margaret recalled the Prince, who was only two months younger than her, had once looked long and hard down my cleavage at one official event during her marriage.

This off-colour revelation was treated with right royal disdain by Charles, according to Anthony Holdens 1979 biography of the Prince.
Almost half of all Australians support One Nation leader Pauline Hanson's policy of ban Muslim immigration over fears Islamic people 'do not integrate into Australian culture'.

Polling conducted by Essential Research found 49 per cent of Australians surveyed supported a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia, with 40 per cent opposed to the idea.

The results surprisingly revealed more than one third of Greens voters (34 per cent) support the proposed ban, while 60 per cent of Liberal voters and 40 per cent of Labor voters agreed.

A perceived terrorist threat was the second greatest reason given (27 per cent) by those who support the ban, behind fears Muslim people 'do not integrate into Australian society' (41 per cent).

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About half of Australians support Pauline Hanson's policy to ban Muslim immigration (Ms Hanson pictured making her maiden speech last Tuesday)

Polling conducted by Essential Research found 49 per cent of Australians surveyed supported a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia, with 40 per cent opposed to the idea

22 per cent of those who supported a ban said Muslim people 'do not share our values', while just four per cent said Australia is a Christian country.

The poll of 1,000 people across Australia was conducted twice because of the 'surprising' results.

Peter Lewis, Executive Director of the research company, said he had concerns the results showed it was a 'rogue poll' because he did not believe the poll would be so decisive.

'We thought it would be more than the actual Hanson vote, but the actual level of support surprised me,' Mr Lewis said in a statement.

'I was worried it was what we call a 'rogue poll' - although the weekly 2PP [two party preferred] looked fine.

'So we repeated [the poll] and got the exact same result,' Mr Lewis said.

A perceived terrorist threat was the second greatest reason given (27 per cent) by those who support the ban, behind fears Muslim people 'do not integrate into Australian society' (41 per cent)

The results come just a week after Ms Hanson told the Senate: 'Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims' (she is pictured making her speech

The results come just a week after One Nation's Pauline Hanson told the Senate in her maiden speech: 'Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims.'

'If you are not prepared to obey our laws, respect our culture and our way of life, then I suggest you go back where you came from,' she said.

'If it will be any help, I will take you to the airport and wave you goodbye with sincere best wishes.'

She said the 'culture and ideology' of Islam is 'incompatible to our own'.

Greens senators staged a walk-out mid-way through Ms Hanson's speech.

The poll has been hotly debated on social media.

The poll has been hotly debated on social media. Political commentator Osman Faruqi said Muslim people had been demonised in the media for the past 15 years without the space to respond

Mr Faruqi said the 'racist' results should not come as a surprise

Political commentator Osman Faruqi said Muslim people had been demonised in the media for the past 15 years without the space to respond, and the 'racist' results should not come as a surprise.

Labor's Tim Watts said on Twitter there was a 'need for political leadership to challenge and unpack this simplistic, political snake oil'.

He pointed out Australia's regional ally Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population.

'Imagine if Hanson's xenophobia caused us to cut ourselves off from China in the 90s? Now she wants to make the same mistake with Indonesia?' he said on Wednesday morning.

Labor's Tim Watts said on Twitter there was a 'need for political leadership to challenge and unpack this simplistic, political snake oil'

Mr Watts pointed out Australia's regional ally Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population

'Imagine if Hanson's xenophobia caused us to cut ourselves off from China in the 90s? Now she wants to make the same mistake with Indonesia?' he said on Wednesday morning

The news comes as race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane criticised Ms Hanson for stoking the flames of racial hatred as an 'initiation rite' for new waves of migrants.

He is due to speak at Australian National University on Wednesday.

'Some would say that just as the Irish, Italians, Greeks and Asians copped ugliness, so too will Muslims. That immigrants must show grit and forbearance, become part of the mainstream, and then be free to have a go at the next lot who arrive,' Mr Soutphommasane's speech notes say, according to Guardian Australia.

'While we may never eradicate racism and bigotry, it isn't good enough to say its targets must grin and bear it, or that there's nothing we can do. Doing so amounts to normalising racism, to suggesting that it should be tolerated.'
The second litter of meerkat pups to be born at Taronga Zoo in Sydney this year, have just started venturing outside their nest.

The tiny, adorable pups, whose parents Nairobi and Maputo also gave birth to male meerkat Lwazi and female Serati in January, have been captured running around the meerkat enclosure, sniffing at leaves and exploring their home.

When they were born on August 18 they only weighed a few grams, but they now weigh 150 grams each.

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The second litter of meerkat pups (pictured) to be born at Taronga Zoo in Sydney this year, have just started venturing outside their nest

The tiny, adorable pups have been captured running around the meerkat enclosure, sniffing at leaves and exploring their home

Their parents Nairobi and Maputo also gave birth to male meerkat Lwazi and female Serati in January earlier this year

When the pups were were born on August 18 they only weighed a few grams, but they now weigh 150 grams each

The yet-to-be-named pups have also started eating solid foods such as mealworms and vegetables.

Taronga Zoo keeper Courtney Mahony said they have been eager to investigate their new surroundings.

'These pups are more confident and adventurous than the previous litter and I think thats because they have mum, dad and two siblings to support and protect them,' she said.

The pups (pictured), which are yet to be named, have now started eating solid foods such as mealworms and vegetables

Taronga Zoo keeper Courtney Mahony said the pups (pictured) they have been eager to investigate their new surroundings

'These pups (pictured) are more confident and adventurous than the previous litter and I think thats because they have mum, dad and two siblings to support and protect them,' she said

She described Nairobi and Maputo as 'fantastic and attentive' parents to the pups (pictured)

'They are fantastic and attentive parents, but its also been wonderful to watch big sister Serati play a role in caring for the pups.'

Ms Mahony said it was incredible to see a young meerkat stepping up and taking on responsibility for her siblings.

'She's grooming them, helping to babysit and always checking on them to make sure theyre safe,' she said.

Zoo keeper Courtney Mahony also said the pups' (pictured with parent) older sibling Serati had played a role in caring for them

Ms Mahony said it was incredible to see a young meerkat stepping up and taking on responsibility for her siblings (pictured)

She said big sister Serati was helping to groom them, babysit and was always checking on them to make sure they were safe

The sex of the pups (pictured right) will be determined when they have their first check up

The sex of the pups will be determined in October when they have their first veterinary examination, but the zoo suspects they are both female.

The pair are being weighed regularly to make sure they are healthy.

The pups are being slowly introduced to the outside world and will be in Taronga's Meerkat Manor for short periods each day to interact with visitors.

The pair of pups (pictured) are also being weighed regularly to make sure they are healthy

The pups (pictured) are slowly being introduced to the outside world at Taronga Zoo

They will be in Taronga's Meerkat Manor for short periods of time each day to interact with visitors

Meerkats are small, active animals that belong to the mongoose family

The dark patches around their eyes (pictured) lessen the desert glare similar to sunglasses and their ears can close in the event of a sand storm
A 14-year-old girl who has been missing from her Perth home since Friday night could be in danger, police say.

Isabella Bella Farano left her family home in Mirrabooka on September 16, and has not made contact with her family since.

The teenager is described as being thin, 150 centimetres tall, with fair skin, brown eyes and long dark brown hair.

Isabella Bella Farano, pictured, has been missing from her home in Mirrabooka - Perth for five days

When she left her home five days ago she was wearing  length leggings, white Nike hi-top shoes and a black Adidas zip up jumper with white stripes running down the sleeves.

Police have released two photos of the the 14-year-old in the hope someone has seen her since her disappearance.

Bellas family are concerned for her welfare. Anyone with information is urged to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
have recieved flowers, jewellery and notes from the selfless mum

Flowers, jewellery and thoughtful notes are bringing joy to dozens of strangers thanks to Laura Beacham and her random acts of kindness.

The mum-of-two has been spreading joy to residents in the Western Australian city of Rockingham as part of a 'Create Kindness' campaign across the month of September.

'I just feel that sometimes people just need something nice in their life - a little something,' Ms Beacham told The West Australian.

Laura Beacham has been spreading random acts of kindness to residents in the Western Australian city of Rockingham as part of a 'Create Kindness' campaign

One Perth mum was having a bad week with a sick son in hospital, when she received these flowers while at a shopping centre

Her generous acts has created a huge response on social media, with many praising the mum for her kind and selfless behaviour.

'Laura is always doing random acts of kindness with sole purpose of brightening others days,' director of Close To My Heart, Susan Wilmost posted.

'Laura runs craft afternoons and evenings in her home to provide people with a fun activity, friendship and support. She is one of the kindest people I know.'

Others posted pictures of their own surprising gifts.

'I received a beautiful random gift of kindness at Rusticos in Rockingham,' one recipient posted.

'I have had a terrible 3 months, my mum being diagnosis with breast cancer 3 days before my birthday in July and she has just started chemo last week.

'The night I went out and found your gift I was having a bad day and didn't feel like laughing but I got your beautiful gift and that night I laughed.'

Another user posted an image of a bunch of flowers she found randomly while shopping.

'Whoever is doing this sure has put a smile on many faces, whoever you are, thank you.

'You sure made a lot of peoples bad day feel a lot better.'

Another user posted an image of a bunch of flowers she received randomly while shopping. (right) 'Whoever is doing this sure has put a smile on many faces, whoever you are, thank you'

'I was having a bad day and didn't feel like laughing but I got your beautiful gift and that night I laughed,' one recipient posted after she was given a necklace




FBI agents visited the St. Cloud, Minn., school district this week after a Somali-American man went on a stabbing rampage Saturday at a local mall, injuring 10 people before an off-duty police officer shot and killed him, the St. Cloud Times reports .

Tensions between Muslims and some non-Muslims in the central Minnesota city have simmered for years, including incidents of bullying and harassment of Somali and other East African immigrants in schools.

School board member Al Dahlgren said St. Cloud schools Superintendent Willie Jett was with FBI agents throughout the day, as a precautionary measure, adding that there has been very little disruption for the students, according to the Times.

I dont want people to think that theres a connection between the schools and the incident, because thats not true, Dahlgren told the newspaper. The FBI are here both as a part of the investigation and as an extra security measure, which I think is a normal thing when theres an incident like that in the community. Theyre trying to make it as normal as possible for the students.

Education Week visited the St. Cloud school system this year to take a look at how the district adjusted to its growing immigrant population. Somali families began resettling in the city in large numbers at the turn of the century, and their children have become fixtures in the schoolsmore than 16 percent of the districts students are Somali.

The majority of the Somali community is Muslim. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a federal civil rights complaint against the St. Cloud school district in 2011, alleging a hostile environment for the districts Somali students that included widespread and frequent harassment, much of it based on religion.

Remnants of that tension remain. Discord at St. Clouds Technical High School erupted in spring 2015 when students and parents, most of them Somali, alleged that school officials did not adequately respond to bullying incidents and anti-Islamic discrimination.

There are fears the hostility could resurface as more details emerge about the mall attacks. The man accused in the stabbing spree was Dahir Ahmed Adan, a graduate of the districts Apollo High School. According to police, Adan asked at least one person if they were Muslim and made references to Allah while carrying out the attacks. None of the victims suffered life-threatening injuries.

District leaders released a statement this week, urging a measured response to the incident, which has the community on edge.

We recognize the deep emotions and concern felt throughout the community, and are prepared to support members of our school community affected by this event, the district statement read.

... we want to assure families that we prioritize safety and security in our buildings and proactively prepare and practice safety procedures in each of our schools so that students and staff remain safe while in our care.

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Insists that they are a 'typical family' even though they don't look alike

He said he adopted the children because 'everyone

Barry Farmer said he knew he wanted to work with children since he was a teenager.

So at age 21 he became a licensed foster parent and at 29, Farmer, he is the father of three adoptive sons.

But he gets stares when they go out, but it's not because of his age.

It's because Farmer is black and his three sons are white.

'It's a typical family. We may not look alike, but it's a typical family,' Farmer told WRIC.

Barry Farmer (top, right), 29, of Virginia is the adoptive father of Darrell (bottom, right), 14, Xavier (top, left), 12, and Jeremiah (bottom, left), six

Farmer said he knew he wanted to work with children since he was a teenager and adopted the three children after fostering them

Farmer says being the three boys' father is the best job he's ever had and hearing 'I love you' is what makes any challenges worth it

Farmer said when he was growing up he never went to parties. Instead, he thought about how he could help children.

When he was 17 he wrote in his journal that he wanted to become a foster parent.

'I went through the training, the director who was there told me I was perfect for the program. I didn't expect one kid, let alone three,' said Farmer.

First came Darrell, now 14 years old, then Xavier, who is 12 years old.

Farmer said he thought he was done after Xavier, but then six-year-old Jeremiah came along and he knew he had to open his home to the little boy.

'I went through the training, the director who was there told me I was perfect for the program. I didn't expect one kid, let alone three,' said Farmer

Farmer said he wanted to adopt all three children because everyone deserves to have a family

'In this day in time when it comes to family, and seeing color or seeing unity and belonging, and that's what I was hoping to accomplish with my family anyway.

'When I have them now I can't imagine them anywhere else, and it's a typical family,' said Farmer.

Farmer said he wanted to adopt all three children because everyone deserves to have a family.

He says family is deeper than skin color.

In a recent post on Facebook, he said being the boys' father is the best job he's ever had.

'There are a lot of jobs in this world that I could be doing ... but the position of father is one that I could never turn down.

'It's full time, no days off and no health benefits.

'As far as the pay? Just hearing the words "Dad, I love you" all day every day is all I will need.

'I wouldn't trade that job for anything. I'm glad these three hired me for the job,' Farmer wrote.

His oldest don Darrell told ABC 8 News that when Farmer saved him from a dark time in his life. 'Dad was like, "can I be your dad forever?" And I was like, "you already are",' Darrell said

'When someone calls you dad, you're like, "who me?" I just like taking care of children,' said Farmer.

His oldest don Darrell told ABC 8 News that when Farmer saved him from a dark time in his life.

'Dad was like, "can I be your dad forever?" And I was like, "you already are".
It's uncertain whether she can re

given a bridging visa and has been reunited with her

A woman from Iran who was locked up in immigration detention after her Australian visa application was refused has been released after two years.

Mojgan Shamsalipoor was 18-years-old when she escaped an arranged marriage to a 60-year-old man in Iran and travelled to Australia by boat in the hopes of seeking asylum in 2012.

She pursued an education and met her husband Milad Jafari - an Iranian refugee, before she was placed in immigration after her refugee status was rejected.

Ms Shamsalipoor, now 22, has now been reunited with her family and husband following her release from the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation (BITA) on a bridging visa, the ABC reports.

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Mojgan Shamsalipoor (front right), who was locked up in immigration detention after her Australian visa application was refused, has been reunited with her family and husband

Mojgan Shamsalipoor was 18-years-old when she escaped an arranged marriage to a 60-year-old man in Iran and travelled to Australia by boat in the hopes of seeking asylum in 2012

In a statement, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said a number of 'illegal maritime arrivals' had been released today.

'This is in line with the Government's decision to reduce the number of people in detention,' the statement said.

'These people have been granted temporary bridging visas. All have been found not to be owed protection by Australia.

'They are not refugees and are expected to return to their countries of origin. They will not have access to permanent stay visas.'

Ms Shamsalipoor said she was repeatedly raped and abused by family members in Iran and fears persecution if she was deported .

Her lawyer Kevin Kadirgamar told the ABC that despite the news, the 22-year-old's future was still uncertain.

'The bridging visa continues to place a shadow of uncertainty over her future in that the minister has not gone as far as allowing her the opportunity to reside in Australian permanently with her husband.'

After her release Ms Shamsalipoor was greeted by her husband Milad (right) and her brother Hossein

Ms Shamsalipoor pursued an education and met her husband Milad Jafari - an Iranian refugee, before she was placed in immigration detention

Ms Shamsalipoor (pictured before fleeing to Australia) said she was repeatedly raped and abused by family members in Iran and feared persecution if she was deported

Her teachers at Yeronga State High School were inspired by her determination to continue learning and organised for her to continue studying while she was detained in Brisbane

Ms Shamsalipoor attended Yeronga State High School where she completed year 12 before she was transferred into detention and taken to Darwin's Wickham Point Detention Centre in August 2015 before being transferred to Brisbane.

Yeronga State High School Deputy Principal Jessica Walker said the 22-year-old planned to focus on living her life with her husband and family.

'She's just really overwhelmed with being free and being able to just walk where she wants, do what she wants, go shopping - all the simple things in life we take for granted.'

Ms Walker told the Brisbane Times that Ms Shamsalipoor would now apply for a partner's visa with the hope of getting permanent residency.

Ms Shamsalipoor and Mr Jafari - who is an Australian resident - met at Yeronga State High School and married in October 2014.

The asylum seeker's teachers at Yeronga State High School were inspired by her determination to continue learning and organised for her to continue studying by day release while she was being detained at BITA.

Shamsalipoor would now apply for a partner's visa with her husband Milad Jafari. with the hope of getting permanent residency

Ms Shamsalipoor and Mr Jafari - who is an Australian resident - met at Yeronga State High School and married in October 2014

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said in a statement that people released 'will not have access to permanent stay visas'
Boris Johnson has insisted there is no prospect of 'normalising' relations with Russia as he held face-to-face talks with his Moscow counterpart for the first time.

The Foreign Secretary made the government's position clear as he met Sergei Lavrov in New York where they were attending the UN general assembly.

During the discussion Mr Johnson condemned the airstrike on a Red Crescent convoy in the war-torn country this week - which resulted in the deaths of 20 civilians and the US has blamed on Russia.

The Foreign Secretary posted a photograph of the meeting with Sergei Lavrov, left, on Twitter

Boris Johnson met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov face-to-face while they were both in New York for the UN general assembly

Moscow has denied it is responsible and pointed the finger at Syrian rebels.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: 'The ministers discussed the crisis in Syria and the increase in violence in recent days, including the recent unacceptable attack on an aid convoy.

'The Foreign Secretary pressed for Russia to use its influence constructively and underlined the need for the international community to work together to resolve the conflict.

'Mr Johnson also raised the situation in Ukraine, where there are continued violations of the Minsk agreements, and stressed the need for a sustainable ceasefire in eastern Ukraine.

'The Foreign Secretary was clear that while ongoing disagreements mean it is too early to normalise diplomatic relations, it is right that both countries continue to discuss important global issues.'

The face-to-face meeting was their first since Mr Johnson was appointed.

Earlier this month Mr Johnson welcomed the US-Russia deal aimed at addressing the crisis in Syria.

The agreement was thrashed out by US secretary of state John Kerry and Mr Lavrov in an attempt to reduce violence in Syria and lead to a long-sought political transition, ending more than five years of bloody civil war.

However, the aid convoy strike earlier this week has all but destroyed the tentative ceasefire in Syria.
Her anger at the slow pace of investigation boiled over earlier this month

'Justice for Tiahleigh': The murdered schoolgirl's mother, Cindy Palmer, arrived at a Brisbane court surrounded by a throng of supporters wearing purple-themed shirts

Even when it seemed like no one was listening or she was being attacked by trolls, Tiahleigh Palmer's mother has never stopped fighting for justice.

Cindy Palmer put on a brave face as she arrived at court on Wednesday morning following a breakthrough in the police investigation into the schoolgirl's death.

The 12-year-old's foster father, Rick Thorburn, was charged with murder and interfering with a corpse. His son, Trent, was charged with incest.

The past year has been frustrating for Ms Palmer - who has previously been in jail and had brushes with the law - but is said to have turned her life around and devoted herself to finding Tiahleigh.

When Tia vanished in October 2015, many believed she was just a troubled runaway. But Ms Palmer thought different.

'That was horrible,' she told reporters in March.

'I felt like I was the only person apart from the police who really knew she wasn't a runaway at that stage'.

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Happy memories: Ms Palmer was hoping get Tiahleigh back before the tragedy

'I felt like I was the only person apart from the police who really knew she wasn't a runaway,' Ms Palmer told reporters at a press conference earlier this year

'We were doing everything we could to find her because it just didnt feel right at the time.'

According to a profile by The Weekend Australian Magazine, she penned a series of heartbreaking Facebook pleas begging for information.

Then her daughter's decomposing body was found by fishermen on a Gold Coast river on November 6, sparking an investigation which has lasted almost a year.

Friends said she had been attacked by trolls over the fact her daughter was in foster care and the critics were still laying into her on Facebook this week.

Before the tragedy, Ms Palmer wanted her daughter back.

Ms Palmer was in and out of police custody and jail through 2011 and 2013, Daily Mail Australia reported last November.

Her criminal record has never been detailed and friends would only say it was 'petty... not violent or big stuff'.

She wrote about getting parole on Facebook in 2011 and swore to change her life.

And Tia's former carer Julie Pemberton said last year Ms Palmer had got herself together.

'Tia loved her mum dearly and Cyndi adored her girl. Her mum is so good, she has got it together.

'She had Tia young and might have made a few mistakes but she is lovely and absolutely adores her daughter.'

Tia lived with Ms Pemberton for almost three years until December 2014.

Over the past year, Ms Palmer has devoted herself to finding her daughter, regularly speaking about her happy memories to raise awareness.

Despite reportedly telling friends to be patient with the police, Ms Palmer's anger at the slow pace of the investigation boiled over in angry Facebook posts to supporters a fortnight ago.

'Like seriously how hard is it? What are the police doing?' she wrote to a 4,000-strong group of supporters.

'I sit back and watch these other horrible murders solved and think, what about Tiahleigh???

Friends and relatives - including accused murderer Rich Thorburn (centre) - carried Tiahleigh Palmer's coffin during her funeral last year

Ms Palmer's frustration with the slow pace of the investigation boiled over in a Facebook post to supporters on September 1

Ms Palmer's fondest memory with her daughter was 'giggling and laughing' as they put their make-up on before her first concert. But 'now we'll miss out on all these mother daughter moments,' she wrote this year

'Why is no one coming forward or speaking up about her! Does her life not matter. How can one little girl go so unnoticed?

'This is not an attack on police in anyway but it is 2016 the amazing technology they have how can we not know anything!!!!'

Police swooped on the home of Tiahleigh's foster parents on Tuesday, charging foster father Rick Thorburn with murder and interfering with a corpse.

Mr Thorburn's son, 19-year-old Trent Thorburn, was charged with incest, perverting the course of justice and two counts of perjury.

Julene Thorburn, 54, and Josh Thorburn, 20, were charged with one count each of perverting the course of justice and perjury.

TIMELINE OF TIAHLEIGH PALMER'S MURDER In handcuffs: Rick Thorburn was denied bail and has reportedly not disclosed anything to detectives investigating the alleged murder October 30, 2015: Tiahleigh was last seen about 8.10am when her foster father dropped her off near Marsden State High School. November 5: Police appealed to the public for information on her disappearance and released an image of the 12-year-old. November 6: Fisherman found her body on the banks of Pimpama River. She was no longer wearing her school uniform. November 14: About 600 people attended her funeral. December 4: Search widened after Tiahleigh's shoe found; police release footage of classroom two days prior to her disappearance. February 15, 2016: A $250,000 reward for information which would lead to an arrest was offered by police. March 14: Tiahleigh's mother Cindy Palmer makes public appeal to help find her killer. March 23: Police forensically examined a vacant house in Waterford West on Logan Reserve Road. July 11: Queensland schools became required to inform parents and carers if a child was absent. September 13: A blue Ford XR6 was seized by police and forensically examined. September 19: Tiahleigh's mother said the car belonged to her foster carers. September 20: Four people were taken into custody and her foster father Rick Thorburn, 56, was charged with her alleged murder and interfering with a corpse. Mr Thorburn's son, 19-year-old Trent Thorburn, was charged with incest, perverting the course of justice and two counts of perjury. Julene Thorburn, 54, and Josh Thorburn, 20, were charged with one count each of perverting the course of justice and perjury. Advertisement




Audrey Carey (pictured) thanked three young drifters for befriending her right before they shot her dead to steal her belongings, a court has heard

A Canadian backpacker thanked three young drifters for befriending her right before they shot her dead to steal her belongings  before going on to kill an elderly tantra instructor who crossed paths with them two days later, a court has heard.

Audrey Carey, 23, was found dead in San Franciscos Golden Gate Park during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival on October 3 last year.

Lila Scott Alligood, 19, and her boyfriend Morrison Haze Lampley, 24 are each charged with two counts of murder in the death of Carey and 67-year-old Steve Carter.

A third drifter, Sean Michael Angold, 25, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Carters death as part of a deal to testify against Alligood and Lampley, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The details of Careys last moments emerged at a preliminary hearing in Marin County Superior Court on Tuesday.

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Lila Scott Alligood (right, in court on Tuesday) and her boyfriend Morrison Haze Lampley (left) are each charged with two counts of murder

Marin County Sheriffs Detective Scott Buer testified that he interviewed Alligoods former cellmate at the county jail in San Rafael.

Bullock told him that Alligood said Lampley had shot Carey in order to steal her belongings.

Alligood referred to Carey as the b****, Bullock said.

And as the young woman was thanking the trio for being her friends while she was backpacking alone for the first time, Alligood had already stolen her wallet.

All of a sudden, Lampley jumps up and shoot her and there is blood all over, Buer said, according to the Chronicle.

The pair are also accused of gunning down 67-year-old Steve Carter (above) on a hiking trail

Then, two days later, Carter was shot dead on a hikinh trail in the Loma Alta Open Space Preserve near Fairfax.

His Doberman pinscher was also shot, but survived.

And Buer said that Alligood told her cellmate: The old man needed to die.

Alligood, Lampley and Angold were arrested outside a soup kitchen in Portland, Oregon after police tracked the GPS in the station wagon they had stolen from Carter.

The Smith & Wesson handgun used in both killings was also found on them. The weapon was reportedly stolen from a car in San Franciscos Fishermans Wharf days before Careys murder.

Authorities also found Careys passport, plane tickets and camping equipment.

Alligood and Lampley joined Angold in San Francisco after hitchhiking from San Diego weeks before the killings, the Chronicle reports.

Video courtesy of KRON 4

Marin County Sheriff's Detective Scott Buer marks the location of the 2015 homicide site of Steve Carter on a map during the preliminary hearing on Tuesday

Alligood (right) and Lampley joined Angold in San Francisco after hitchhiking from San Diego

Residents in the citys Haight-Ashbury neighborhood said the trio fitted in with the areas transient population and would camp in Buena Vista Park, where they would use meth.

But after their arrest, the couple turned on Angold and tried to blame him for the killings.

Sean Michael Angoldb (above) pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Carters death

Buer said Alligood had at first insisted Angold pulled the trigger to kill Carter but later admitted that it was her long-term boyfriend.

She stated that she was protecting Lampley and that she loved him and that he was the only thing she had left, Buer said.

He added that Alligood had tried to recruit her cellmate Bullock to find a bum and pay him to say Angold had been the shooter.

Alligoods attorney Amy Morton questioned Bullocks motivation in coming forward with the information.

Bullock, who was serving time for vehicle theft, contacted authorities because she wanted to be released early in order to get custody of her daughter.

Help me so I can help you guys, Bullock wrote to investigators.

Alligood and Lampley each face up to life imprisonment without parole if convicted.

As part of his plea agreement, Angold is facing 15 years to life in prison.
The magistrate ordered the boy to watch the film to learn about racism

The young offender targeted an Asian schoolboy during a robbery

The boy faced a string of charges following a crime spree in Perth

A boy, 13, has been ordered to watch Clint Eastwood's film Gran Torino

A 13-year-old boy has been ordered to watch a Clint Eastwood's film to learn about racism after an Asian schoolboy was victimised during the boy's crime spree.

The young boy who faced a string of charges on Tuesday at a Children's court in Perth attacked the Asian boy during a robbery at Thornlie train station in February, reported The West Australian.

Magistrate Stephen Vose described the attack as 'blatant racism' as he recognised the number of Asians victimised exceeds the number of Asian people in the community.

A 13-year-old boy was ordered to watch Gran Torino's film Clint Eastwood after he attacked an Asian schoolboy during a robbery

The boy punched his victim in the face numerous times before tackling him and reaching for his backpack which contained a laptop, $20, keys and his lunch.

The young boy was ordered to complete six months within the community as well as watch Gran Torino in hopes of learning some life lessons.

'It is a great movie,' Mr Vose said to the boy.

'I think you will enjoy it but you might also learn something out of it.'

In the 2008 film, Clint Eastwood plays the role of a retired auto worker and Korean War veteran who despises the many Asian, Latino and black families in his neighbourhood.

After an unlikely bond develops with the Asian family, Clint Eastwood's character defend the family becoming a reluctant hero.

Magistrate Stephen Vose (left) said the Gran Torino movie (right) will hopefully teach the young boy something about multiculturalism and racism

The boy's prosecutor accepted the magistrates decision as being relevant to the boy's age

The boy who was present at court along with his mother must also take part in counselling or certified programs while reporting to an assigned supervisor.

Prosecutor Matthew Walton noted the magistrate's decision would be beneficial for the young boy.

Law Society of WA president Elizabeth Needham said out of the ordinary sentences are made possible under the sentencing act to help address young offenders.

'There is a slightly different sentencing regime for juveniles and it is in part to recognise the fact that they are very young and their minds are still very malleable,' she said.
A dinosaur found at the top of a mountain with a touching note has been reunited with its owners - more than two years after he went missing.

Bruce the velociraptor was used as a prop around a safari-themed stage at the Big Pineapple Music Festival in 2014 before he was mysteriously taken.

But on Tuesday morning, Madison Bothe and her friend Julia Blake stumbled across the lost-looking dinosaur at the top of Mount Coolum in Queensland's Sunshine Coast with a handwritten letter attached to him.

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Madison Bothe (right) and her friend Julia Blake (left) found the lost-looking dinosaur at the top of Mount Coolum on the Sunshine Coast with a note attached to him on Tuesday morning

The handwritten note said he had been on an adventure around Australia and overseas

'Return me to big pineapple to my owner,' the note read.

'I escaped from Kenilworth and want to go home. I have seen and been through some s***, dog fights, cage fights, chicken fights, horse races, dog races and emu races, all across NT, Roma, Darwin, Cairns, Port Headland (sic).'

Puzzled by the message, the girls decided to do a quick Google search where they discovered an old article claiming the dinosaur was reported missing in 2014.

His mysterious disappearance prompted an extensive search party, and a public appeal was launched through the media two years ago - but there was no trace of the dinosaur.

'We came across an article and saw that he had been stolen from the music festival,' Ms Bothe told Daily Mail Australia.

'At the bottom, it said something like "if anyone found this dinosaur, please call the police". The photo matched the one we found.

'We thought it was a massive joke but we called the police station anyway. They just laughed at first but then they asked if we could get it down to the station.

'Another woman named Julie helped us carry it down the mountain and into the car.'

The two friends were joined by another bush walker named Julie (right) who helped carry the dinosaur down the mountain before loading him into a car

The women arrived at Coolum Police Station after reporting that he was found on Tuesday

Two police officers couldn't help but laugh when they received a phone call about a dinosaur

The girls transported the dinosaur via a car to the Coolum Police Station.

Ms Bothe said the dinosaur was 'pretty heavy on one end' and he was not in the best shape when the girls found him.

'It's a bit worse for wear - it's missing its tail, an arm and an eye,' she said.

And despite finding the dinosaur on top of the mountain, Ms Bothe believed the prop was planted at the location deliberately.

'I actually climbed Mt Coolum the night before,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'It was definitely not there. Whoever had taken him, did it between sunset the night before and 7.30am on Tuesday.

'He was standing on top of the mountain with natural surroundings overlooking the ocean. There are tourists all around so they would've seen it the day before.'

The dinosaur, which was heavy on one end, was loaded into the boot of a car on Tuesday

Bruce the dinosaur was used as a prop around a safari-themed stage at a music festival

Two officers carry the giant velociraptor into the police station after he was found

His mysterious disappearance prompted an extensive search party when he was stolen

The dinosaur has since been reunited with his owner after being missing for over two years

Bruce the dinosaur is back home with his owner after he disappeared for more than two years

Just hours after the dinosaur was found, Mitch Brookes - a co-organiser of the festival - could not help but laugh when he read about the story.

'THEY FOUND OUR DINOSAUR!' he wrote on Facebook.

'Back in 2014 at the Big Pineapple Music Festival our dinosaur got mysteriously ripped from the Playground Safari Stage and ended up all over the paper.

'Well, 2 years and 4 months later its been found on the top of Mt Coolum (close to Clive Palmers dino lab) with a missing tail, arm and eye.

'To the person who went to the effort of putting it up there and leaving this hilarious note. Well played.'

Ms Bothe said she was very impressed with the positive outcome after the dinosaur was reunited with his owner.
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Incredible drone footage has captured aerial views of the Church of Scientology's massive and secret 'Gold Base' headquarters located in California.

The video shows Scientology's 500-acre international management headquarters, which is also known as 'Int Base' to Scientologists as well as 'Gold Base' because it holds the Golden Era Productions studios.

An anonymous source originally sent the footage to the Underground Bunker, a site operated by journalist Tony Ortega, who has covered Scientology since 1995.

The source filmed the facilities using a 4K camera mounted on a drone.

Never-before-seen drone footage shows the incredible detail of Scientology's secretive compounds. The video captures Scientology's 500-acre international management headquarters, which is also known as 'Int Base' to Scientologists as well as 'Gold Base' because it holds the Golden Era Productions studios. Pictured is the 'Cine Castle', which houses the studios

An anonymous source originally sent the footage to the Underground Bunker, a site operated by journalist Tony Ortega, who has covered Scientology since 1995. The buildings pictured are called the 'berthing', which are a set of newer apartments on the compound

The source filmed the facilities using a 4K camera mounted on a drone. Pictured at a different angle is the Cine Castle which is right across from a highway

DeVocht said the lake (pictured) used to be a small pond. 'Its where they used to make people jump into the water,' he says. He added that they 'use millions of gallons a day' watering the grass

The website reported that they sent screenshots from the video to a man named Tom DeVocht, who worked at the base for several years.

DeVocht told the Bunker that one of the most significant places on the site is Building 50.

That particular building holds the offices of the Religious Technology Center and its chairman, Scientology leader David Miscavige.

DeVocht told the site that located near Building 50 is a rectangular garage that holds Miscavige's vehicles.

He said he spent close to $47 million on Building 50, adding that the trees surrounding it cost as much as $10,000 each.

The entire facility also has its own power plant to ensure the base has its own electricity supply.

One of the most significant places on the site is Building 50 (top left), which cost nearly $47 million, according to DeVocht. He said the trees surrounding it cost nearly $10,000 a piece

Building 50 (pictured at another angle) holds the offices of the Religious Technology Center and its chairman, Scientology leader David Miscavige

DeVocht revealed other interesting information about a set of newly constructed apartment buildings on the site, which are called the 'berthing'.

He told the Bunker that he was excommunicated because he refused to finish building them after he reportedly found out that Miscavige was going to use them to lock up dissident members.

'I'm not locking anyone up,' he said.

Near the apartment buildings is a special gym that was built for Miscavige and his guy pal, Tom Cruise.

Another significant building on the compound is the Bonnie View, which was the name of a Scottish-themed residence that was located on the land when the church bought the property.

The Church of Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard liked the Bonnie View home and had intentions of living in it but Miscavige had the house torn down and replaced with a larger version.

DeVocht told the Bunker that the place is filled with items from Hubbard's life.

There are three small buildings near the home that are visitor suites, which Tom Cruise would use when he was visiting and one of them is even equipped with a full-sized theater for Cruise's use.

On the top left side are two square buildings with flat white roofs. They housed 'The Hole,' the prison for executives where Miscvaige, locked away up to about 80 people, some for several years

In this aerial shot a tennis court can be seen across from another building on the compound

Located on the compound are two square buildings with white roofs, where Miscvaige held 80 people in prison, some for several years, in what is known as The Hole.

DeVocht told the Bunker that the lake located on the compound used to be a small pond, where people were made to jump into the water.

He said they also use 'millions of gallons a day watering that grass'.

Lastly, the footage shows the Star of California, a building constructed across from a highway that is supposed to resemble a sailing ship, complete with three masts.

The view then shows Bonnie View and the buildings near it. Bonnie View was the name of a Scottish-themed residence that was on this spot when the church bought the property. The bottom right-hand side shows a garage that holds Miscavige's vehicles

DeVocht said he was excommunicated because he refused to finish building the 'berthing' (pictured) after he reportedly found out that Miscavige was going to use them to lock up dissident members
A yoghurt truck has crashed on the Federal Highway, spilling 1.5 tonnes of the dairy product across an entire lane during the morning traffic peak.

The crash happened in wet conditions about 4km south of the Hume Highway exit at Yarra in Wollogerang about 9am, reported the Canberra Times.

The New South Wales Fire and Rescue Service attended the scene along with police, and said the van had overturned, spilling yoghurt across the road.

A truck carrying 1.5 tonnes of yoghurt crashed on the Federal Highway in New South Wales about 9am on Wednesday morning during peak hour traffic (pictured)

Images show the white van tipped on one side on the grassy roadside, with crushed tubs, lids and cardboard boxes strewn across an entire lane.

A NSW Fire and Rescue spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia said they were called to the scene to assist at 9.07am on Wednesday morning.

'We had reports a vehicle had rolled over and there were possibly two people trapped inside, and a possible leak coming from the truck.

'When we arrived we found a van that had rolled over on the side of a median strip and spilled approximately 1.5 tonnes of yoghurt across the road.'

The spokesperson said the two people in the van had managed to get themselves out and were not injured.

The southbound lane was closed while the NSW Fire and Rescue crew focused on entering a nearby drain.

The southbound lane on the Federal Highway was closed while NSW Fire and Rescue worked with police and the EPA to clear yoghurt from the road and prevent rain from washing it into nearby drains

A bobcat was brought to the scene and sandbags were used to assist with the clean up.

The spokesperson said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also attended the scene.

The road was reopened about 11.10am.
But his father had disapproved and would shout at his son to 'stop being gay' and 'stop acting like a woman and start acting like a man'

Yusufiy said Mateen was 'flamboyant' and would dance round their home

The Orlando shooter who slaughtered 49 people at Pulse nightclub says his pledge of allegiance to ISIS was 'nonsense' and he 'didn't have what it takes' to join a terrorist group.

Sitora Yusufiy, who married mass murderer Omar Mateen shortly after they met online in 2009, described her ex-husband as a violent, abusive man who was bullied by his own father for his 'homosexual' tendencies.

In an interview with CrimeWatch's Kim Goldman she refuted the authorities' claims he'd been an Islamic extremist saying the shooting had 'nothing to do' with religion and had more to do with mental illness and his repressed sexuality.

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Sitora Yusufiy, who married mass murderer Omar Mateen shortly after they met online in 2009, described her ex-husband as a violent, abusive man who was bullied by his own father for his 'homosexual' tendencies

'When I heard that he pledged to ISIS, I immediately knew that was nonsense,' she said on Tuesday. 'Because I knew Omar and I knew how he got when he got violent.

'He would make up things, make up stories, make up names, makeup connections which were not true at all.

'He doesn't have what it takes to actually be committed and devote himself to a an organised crime gang or terrorist group. Because it takes some sort of dedication or sacrifice. I don't think he had that in him.'

His former wife believes the real motivation behind the devastating mass shooting on June 12, 2016, may be because of his repressed sexuality and abusive father.

She said that the shooter and his father had often clashed over the idea that Mateen was 'acting gay.'

'He would act really flamboyant at time,' she said of her ex-husband. 'He would start dancing around with his sisters, joking and gossiping.

Yusufiy (left) refuted the authorities' claims Mateen (right) been an Islamic extremist saying the shooting had 'nothing to do' with religion and had more to do with mental illness

'His father would yell at him. His father would tell him to 'Stop acting like a woman and start acting like a man.'

And a few times he would call him 'coony' (Farsi for 'gay') in front of me. He would tell him to stop being gay.

'Omar would pretend like it didn't hurt him. He would laugh it off but then he couldn't let it go.

'And so, I realized that was the real reason.'

A gay man who attended the police academy in 2006 with Mateen said that the pair went out to gay bars and that at one point Mateen told the man he wanted to pursue a relationship.

'He's a homosexual and he was trying to pick up men,' said Jim Van Horn, who called Mateen a Pulse 'regular' and described his approach to chatting with people in the club.

'He would walk up to them and put his arm around them or something and maybe try to get them to dance a little bit or something and go over and buy them a drink.'

Meanwhile, multiple people came forward to say that they had spoken with Mateen on gay hookup apps including Grindr and Jack'd.

Sitora Yusufiy, who married mass murderer Omar Mateen shortly after they met online in 2009, has described how he 'seemed like a normal human being' at first, but he soon turned violent

Yusufiy said that his pledge of allegiance to ISIS was 'nonsense' and he 'didn't have what it takes' to join a terrorist group

Mateen's ex-wife told CrimeWatch he had never shown interest in her sexually and sex had been perfunctory.

'There was no sexual connection between us. All he wanted to do was have children to fit the criteria with his father and to make his family proud.

'And that's what we did.'

But when Yusufiy finally left her abusive, controlling husband, with the help of her family, she was horrified to discover she was pregnant.

She was faced with the heartbreaking decision; keep the child and as such, a permanent link with Mateen, or have an abortion. Yusufiy chose the latter.

'It was probably the most difficult decision I had to make in my life,' she said. 'But I don't regret it.'

Yusufiy says she still remember the horrible moment she discovered her former husband was responsible for the deaths of 49 people.

'I woke up to find my phone ringing, and my mom and my dad leaving me text messages saying' "Wake up, wake up!" My father said your ex-husband is involved in a mas shooting.

'I said, "What do you mean? He was shot?"

'"No, he was the one that did it,"' her father had replied.

' Everything just stopped and it was like 'Oh my god. Omar did this, Omar.'

'Dark past': Omar Mateen (pictured) beat his ex-wife for not doing household chores, a report claims. Eight years later he unleashed the deadliest gun massacre in America's history, killing 49 people in a gay club

Yusufiy, who said she did not agree with Mateen's views, revealed her ex-husband was mentally unstable and had bipolar disorder, yet wanted to become a police officer and had applied to the police academy

Yusufiy, who finalized her divorce with Mateen in 2011, said she turned on the television, terrified, and all her husband's terrible beatings and violent outbursts came flooding back.

Yusufiy described how when she'd first met Mateen, he 'seemed like a normal human being' at first, but he soon turned violent.

Speaking to reporters in July, with her fiance beside her, she said her husband had began to beat her within a few months of their new marriage.

'He was mentally unstable he was obviously disturbed. I know he had a history of [taking] steroids.

'I was with him for about four months, then my family rescued me.'

She described one occasion when she had fallen asleep watching television in the living room when she woke up to find her husband yanking the pillow from under her head and pulling her hair after he'd got into a fight with his father.

Following a brief romance, the Mateen and Yusufiy tied the knot in March 2009 and moved into a two-bedroom home owned by Mateen's family in Fort Pierce.

Yusufiy said that Mateen owned a gun during their marriage, was 'short tempered' and would express 'hate towards things'. She would not reveal if he had any homophobic views.

Following a brief romance, the pair tied the knot in March 2009 and moved into a two-bedroom home owned by Mateen's family in Fort Pierce.

At the start of their relationship, she told the Washington Post, he was not particularly religious and was not violent. But soon things changed.

'That's when I started worrying about my safety and he was abusing me physically very often and not allowing me to speak to my family and he kept me hostage from them,' she said during her press conference.

She added: 'And I tried to see good in him even then but my family was very tuned into it I was going through and decided to visit me in rescue me out of that situation.'

New York-born Mateen was a private person and dedicated much of his time to exercise.

'He was not a stable person,' she told the Post. 'He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn't finished or something like that.'

When her parents found out about the beatings just months after the wedding, they staged an intervention and rescued her from the home.

'They literally saved my life,' she said.

Mateen, 29, killed 49 people and wounded another 53 after occupying a gay club in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. Pictured: Blood-drenched victims stand outside the club after the brutal massacre

Yusufiy told the Post she has not had contact with Mateen since they finalized their divorce in 2011.

Despite his violence, she said there was no sign he would go on to be a mass murder.

Speaking on Sunday, she told the newspaper she was still processing the news of Mateen's massacre.

'I am still processing. I am definitely lucky,' she said.

During her press conference, Yusufiy relayed a message to the shooting victims' friends and family.

'To be in someway affiliated at one point in my life to somebody that cause such a tragedy was it shook me off the ground,' she said. 'It was really difficult and it's gonna take a while to process.

'I was so so deeply hurt and heartbroken for the people that lost their loved ones and families that are now suffering and people that are wounded that are healing,' she said. '[I want to offer] my sympathy.

'What I feel for the people, what I feel for the souls that are transitioning I don't know why somebody would do this and that is my biggest concern. And I pray for their healing and I pray for their peace,to find their peace I pray for the victims to find their peace.'

Drunk: Mateen had sometimes just sat quietly in Pulse, one witness said, but at other times he became very drunk and belligerent. He spoke to few there, but when he did he would talk about his wife and son (pictured)

She added: 'I personally am not a person that remembers anything negative about anybody. I do everything to kill my ego every day and kill everything negative I remember.'

Her fiance also spoke briefly, saying: 'I asked everyone to forgive everybody. Let's not make this another reason to invade Afghanistan.'

Mateen married a second time after divorcing Yusufiy, to Noor Zahi Salman, with whom he had a son.

The pair got a mortgage together in 2013, but they were living at separate addresses when he went on his rampage.

Mateen, 29, killed 49 people and wounded another 53 after occupying a gay club in Orlando, Florida, on June 12.

It came shortly after he had pledged allegiance to the leader of ISIS, according to the FBI.

The shooter's father Seddique Mateen said that his son got angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami a couple of months ago and thinks that may be related to the shooting.

He added: 'We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident. We weren't aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country.'
A Connecticut program that brings mental-health practitioners into preschool classrooms to support teachers has a measurable impact on reducing problem behaviors in young children .

The study of Connecticuts Early Childhood Consultation Partnership was led by Walter S. Gilliam, the director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University. Gilliam studied preschool expulsion well before the topic caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Education, which has started requiring schools and districts to report the rates of children suspended and expelled from preschool. His first study on the topic, released in 2005, found that preschoolers were expelled at three times the rate of K-12 students . In 2015, Connecticut lawmakers enacted a ban on out-of-school suspensions and expulsions of students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade.

The research, published this month in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, examined the programs impact on 176 3- and 4-year-olds in 88 classrooms. After counseling, teachers said that children who went through the program had lower rates of oppositional behaviors, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, compared to a control group of children. The study didnt have any impact on a teacher assessment of expulsion risk measures, but other research has found that preschool teachers are less likely to expel students when they have access to mental health services.

ECCP was formed in Connecticut in 2002 over concerns about the states then high levels of preschool suspension and expulsion. The state-funded program sends trained mental health practitioners to public or private early-childhood programs in classrooms on request. The consultants guide teachers to gently redirect behavior rather than scolding children. They also help discover the root cause of behavior issues for children who struggle the most and who prompted the request for assistance. Thats meant to help teachers respond more sensitively to difficult students.

Education Week included ECCP in a 2014 article on efforts to reduce preschool suspensions and expulsions . And the program was also recently profiled on National Public Radio. The radio segment details an incident where a boy with orange socks swings a stick at classmates. His teacher, without yelling at the boy, convinces him to use the stick for a jumping game instead. Next thing you know, all the children are taking turns jumping over the stick. If youve ever watched a 4-year-old on the edge of a temper tantrum involving a stick, youll know just how incredible this little scene is.

This program is offering a solution to a federally recognized need, said Gilliam in an interview with Education Week. And because of the way ECCP is structured, the degree to which its so well-defined, it could be picked up and put just about anywhere.

Staff writer Christina A. Samuels contributed to this report.
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Police have insisted the man who was shot dead by a Charlotte cop was carrying a gun and refused repeated orders to drop it.

Father-of-seven Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was gunned down by Officer Brentley Vinson while standing next to his car in the North Carolina city on Tuesday night, prompting violent protests that left 16 officers injured.

His family have insisted he was disabled and was only reading a book when he was killed, but Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney says officers found a weapon in his vehicle.

Hours after the shooting, demonstrators arrived at the scene and began destroying marked police vehicles, setting trucks alight and throwing rocks at officers.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Putney said one person had been arrested and slammed the 'agitators' for turning a peaceful demonstration violent.

He added that the story of Scott's shooting is 'very different' to how it has been portrayed in social media, and made it clear that they did not find a book at the scene.

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Keith Lamont Scott (pictured left) was shot by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Brentley Wilson (right) at The Village at College Downs at about 4pm on Tuesday

His family have insisted he was disabled and was only reading a book when he was killed, but Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney says officers found a weapon in his vehicle. He is pictured center to the left of Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts and right of the city's head of Community Relations, Willie Ratchford

Video shows one protester jumping on top of a police car and officers firing tear gas to break up the crowd

Another image shows a man dancing on the roof of the marked patrol car, surrounded by a crowd of more protesters

Charlotte's Mayor Jennifer Roberts has called for 'peace, calm and dialogue' as the city braced for further protests planned for Wednesday evening.

Students started the second round of demonstrations by staging a lie-in at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The unrest unfolded as demonstrators in Tulsa, Oklahoma, demanded the arrest of a police officer seen on video fatally shooting an unarmed black man who had his hands in clear view at the time.

Criminal investigations into the deaths have been launched in both cities.

Video shows one protester jumping on top of a police car and officers firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Several hundred people gathered with some setting fires to block a major road, while others set trucks ablaze.

Some stole boxes from trucks before police used flash grenades in an attempt to disperse the angry crowd, an ABC affiliate in Charlotte reported.

A group of protesters then tried to break into a Walmart store before police arrived and began guarding its front entryway.

Some protesters were heard yelling 'Black Lives Matter,' and 'Hands up, don't shoot!' . They held up a sign saying 'Stop Killing Us' and 'it was a book', making reference to the object Scott was reportedly holding when he was shot dead.

The protests came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police went to the complex around 4pm looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott - not the suspect they were looking for - inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

A protester tries to kick one of the tear gas canisters thrown onto the floor by police during the demonstrations

Police work at the scene of protests in Charlotte, North Carolina. More demonstrations are expected on Wednesday night

A protester walks with his right arm raised near police officers in the hours of the deadly shooting of Keith Lamont Scott

A demonstrator holds up a poster, claiming that police confused Scott's book for a gun. But cops have insisted they did not find a book in his vehicle

Protesters throw objects at police officers on I-85. Police said 16 of their officers were taken to hospital after the clashes

Some protesters were heard yelling 'Black Lives Matter,' and 'Hands up, don't shoot!' at police officers in riot gear

On Twitter, the CMPD said 16 officers were injured, including one officer who was hit in face with a rock

Police officers dressed in riot gear confront the demonstrators who cops later described as 'agitators'

Police in riot gear deployed tear gas to disperse the crowds of protesters who gathered in Charlotte on Tuesday night

Protesters march down W.T. Harris Blvd holding traffic signs and a bollard after the officer-involved shooting

Officers saw Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said.

When officers approached, Scott exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

However, Scott's brother told reporters: 'He was waiting in the car for his son to get from school.

'The police came with no uniform to determine he was police or not and he just jumped out and yelled "gun" and shot him.

'I think he shot him four times, I'm not sure, but he's dead.'

Scott, was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Detectives recovered a firearm at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Both the presidential candidates reacted to the situation in Charlotte. Donald Trump said he hoped the violence would end while Hillary Clinton mentioned the victim, Keith Lamont Scott, and Terrence Crutcher, who was shot and killed by police officers in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Students take part in a lie-in at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, in protest against police brutality following the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott

The students laid on the floor of one of the university buildings with posters scattered around them

Aerial footage shows huge crowds of demonstrators gathered around parked patrol cars in the middle of the highway

Police officers also used teargas to try and break up the crowd as the protests turned violent

A police officer attempts to extinguish a fire on Interstate 85 during protests after a man was shot dead by police

A cop clad in riot gear works alongside a blaze started by the demonstrators on a night of chaos in Charlotte

A police officer holds his baton in the air as he stands guard next to a parked car, a truck and a pile of burning debris

Riot cops remove a man from his vehicle from the middle of the highway as the protest intensifies

A demonstrator with a mask resting on the back of his head confronts police officers standing in a line opposite him

Police officers are seen holding their line during protests on the I-85 as the tension between officers and the demonstrators escalated on Tuesday night

Protesters demonstrate in front of police officers wearing riot gear after police fatally shot Keith Lamont Scott

Police officers wearing riot gear block a road during protests in Charlotte on Tuesday

Adam Rhew said police officers used around six to eight cans of tear gas to disperse the crowd

A man points at police officers wearing riot gear, standing in front of a bus during protests over the deathof Keith Lamont Scott

A police cruiser with broken windows is pictured at the scene of Tuesday night's protests

Officer Brentley Vinson - a former college football player - was identified as the officer who shot Scott, WCCB reports.

Officer Vinson, who has worked at the department since July 2014 and is also black, has been placed on paid on administrative leave, as is standard procedure in such cases.

Meanwhile, Scott's daughter Lyric Scott live streamed the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook.

In the video, she says that her father was parked and reading a book in his car while waiting for a school bus to drop off his son.

'My daddy didn't do nothing,' she is heard saying in the video. 'They just pulled up undercover.'

She added that Scott was disabled and claimed that officers had Tasered him and then shot him four times.

Around several hundred protesters gathered in Charlotte, North Carolina to protest the shooting

A line of police officers in riot gear work to control the protests which turned violent

A protester is pictured rising above the crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina, at a protest following Keith Scott's death

An aerial shot shows police in riot gear around a police cruiser facing off against protesters

Initial reports say at least 100 protesters gathered at the scene, with some throwing water bottles at police

The police officers were in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Later on Tuesday night, video from WCCB in Charlotte showed police in riot gear confronting several hundred protesters gathered to demonstrate against the shooting.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The officers were shown backing up as protesters advanced down the street.

Initial reports said protesters gathered at the scene, with some throwing water bottles at police.

Adam Rhew said that the crowd began to disperse after police deployed tear gas. He said on Twitter that he estimates the CMPD used six to eight cans of tear gas.

The police officers were in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

Scott's black SUV (left) is pictured in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Charlotte after the shooting

Police in North Carolina said an officer shot and killed a black man carrying a gun at a Charlotte apartment complex - but his family have insisted he was only reading a book

Scott's daughter Lyric Scott live streamed video from the scene (above) on Facebook

Earlier, a tow truck was brought in to take another police cruiser away. Local media outlets reported that car suffered damage to its rear end.

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that 'the community deserves answers.'

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby.

Shelby shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Her attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon.

An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.
A 44-year-old naturopath assaulted police during a drunken night out as her friend tried to grab the officer's gun when they were ushered out of a premises.

Leza Marsh pleaded guilty at Geelong Magistrates' Court on Tuesday over the public disturbance in Grovedale, southwest of Melbourne, at 1.15am on March 24 last year, reported Geelong Advertiser.

Marsh and her friend Donna Samuels refused repeated requests to leave the premise until officers were called.

A 44-year-old naturopath assaulted police as her friend tried to grab a cop's gun from its holster during a drunken night out

'Both women were heavily intoxicated, argumentative and were escorted from the premises by police,' Prosecutor, Leading Senior Constable Scott Bell said.

The pair continued to be a disturbance after being ushered outside forcing police to approach them again.

Marsh grabbed the officer by his arm causing him to push her away.

'Samuels then approached the officer from behind and gripped his firearm in its holster,' he said.

'He pushed her hand away and Marsh rushed forward towards him with her fists clenched.

During an unrelated incident in March this year, Marsh was charged with hindering police when she continuously interjected despite being warned not to during a police discussion.

Leza Marsh pleaded guilty at Geelong Magistrates' Court on Tuesday over the public disturbance

Marshs lawyer Duncan Robertson argued the incident at Grovendale which saw Marsh rush towards the officer was the result of not taking medicine for spina bifida  a condition that left he with an unusual limp.

Marsh was charged with hindering and assaulting police and emergency service workers, resisting police and giving a false name and address.

She did not receive a conviction but was issued a $1,500 fine.
The teenage foster brother of Tiahleigh Palmer was worried he might have made the Queensland schoolgirl pregnant before she was allegedly murdered by his father.

Trent Thorburn, 19, is alleged to have admitted to a cousin via a Facebook message that he had slept with the 12-year-old shortly before she disappeared.

Tiahleigh allegedly had told her foster mother about it.

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Trent Thorburn, 19, is alleged to have told a cousin in a Facebook message that he had slept with his foster sister Tiahleigh Palmer and was concerned she was pregnant

Tiahleigh was last seen alive on October 30 last year and her body was found a week later by a Brisbane river bank

Trent Thorburn's lawyer John Ide (left) leaves the Southern Districts Magistrates Court in Beenleigh on Wednesday

Thorburn faced a Brisbane court on Wednesday after being charged with incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over Tiahleigh's death.

In opposing bail, police prosecutor Sergeant Elen French said Thorburn had obstructed police during the investigation and that he and his family had betrayed Tiahleigh's trust.

'The victim was put in care and protection of the defendant and his family,' Sgt Elen French told the court.

'This defendant betrayed her trust. He abused his position as big brother and took advantage of her.

'A consequence of that is her young life has been taken.'

Thorburn was asked on five occasions whether he had sex with Tiahleigh or knew anything about her death but he denied it, the prosecutor said.

Thorburn's lawyer argued he would serve more time in custody than if he were sentenced on the charges if bail were refused, and his client was young and had no criminal history.

He was denied bail.

Thorburn faced a Brisbane court on Wednesday after being charged with incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over Tiahleigh's death

Tiahleigh's body was located in November last year on the banks of the Pimpama River on the northern Gold Coast

Rick Thorburn has been charged with her murder and was due to appear in the same court on Wednesday but is in an induced coma in hospital after a suspected self-harm attempt

His father Rick Thorburn, 56, has been charged with her murder and was due to appear in the same court on Wednesday but is in an induced coma in hospital after a suspected self-harm attempt while in custody.

He was a pallbearer at her funeral.

Thorburn's wife Julene, 54, and another son, Josh, 20, have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

They have been released on bail and will face court on October 10.

Police will allege Thorburn murdered his foster daughter after finding out Trent was allegedly sexually abusing her, the Courier Mail reports.

CHARGES LAID OVER TIAHLEIGH PALMER'S MURDER FOSTER FATHER RICK THORBURN: Charged with murder and interfering with a corpse. The 56-year-old was due to face court on Wednesday but is in an induced coma after collapsing while in custody. FOSTER BROTHER TRENT THORBURN: Charged with incest, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury. The 19-year-old was denied bail on Wednesday after a court heard he had admitted on Facebook Messenger to having sex with Tiahleigh and was worried she might be pregnant. FOSTER BROTHER JOSH THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 20-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. FOSTER MOTHER JULENE THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 54-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. Advertisement

Police charged Trent on Tuesday with incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over Tiahleigh's death

Trent Thorburn, 19, allegedly sexually assaulted his foster sister Tiahleigh Palmer during the 10 months she had been in his Queensland family's care last year

They allege he feared his son could be convicted under the Queensland Criminal Code, which states a sexual relationship between siblings - including foster, step or de facto circumstances - is considered incest, which can attract a life sentence.

Trent describes himself on social media as a dancer, metal fabrication apprentice and classic car builder.

His social media is flooded with photos of selfies, car parts and him dancing.

Tiahleigh was last seen alive on October 30 last year when she was dropped off at Marsden State High School, south of Brisbane.

Her body was located almost a week later on the banks of the Pimpama River on the northern Gold Coast.

Cindy Palmer, the mother of murdered schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer, arrived at a Queensland court on Wednesday ahead of Thorburn's court appearance

Julene Thorburn, 54, (left) and another son, Josh, 20, (right) have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Rick Thorburn (left), his wife Julene (middle right) and two sons, Josh (middle left) and Trent (right) have been charged with a string of offences in relation to the death of Tiahleigh Palmer
A 25-year-old cyclist is trying to piece together what happened to her after she was found on the side of a bike trail last week.

Skjelse Rapoch was riding her bike on a trail in Portland, Oregon, last week. The next thing she remembers is being covered in blood with her face smashed.

Skjelse was on her way to meet her husband Jeff for an evening bike race, when she was found by a friend.

'I got a phone call from my friend Eddie saying, "Hey, I found your wife. You need to get here right now," Jeff told KOIN.

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Skjelse Rapoch (pictured), 25, was riding her bike on a trail in Portland, Oregon, last week when something happened to her. She has no memory of her ride but woke up on the trail bloodied

Skjelse was on her way to meet her husband Jeff (right) for an evening bike race, when she was found by a friend with bones broken in her face, a fractured jaw, a broken hand, seven missing teeth, brain bruising and a concussion

Skjelse, an avid cyclist, assumed she had simply flipped over her handle bars and sustained the injuries

Courtesy KOIN

'Skjelse was in the middle of the path and her bike was on one side she was sort of sitting up and looking around really kind of bewildered.'

Dazed, Skjelse was taken to the hospital with bones broken in her face, a fractured jaw, a broken hand, seven missing teeth, brain bruising and a concussion.

She couldn't remember anything from her ride but assumed she went over the handle bars.

That's when the doctors told her and Jeff, her injuries were not consistent with that type of accident.

The doctors told the couple if Skjelse went over the handle bars, she would have broken her neck or her shoulders.

At the hospital doctors told her and her husband Jeff (right), her injuries were not consistent with that type of accident

Jeff told KOIN he found a rock near where his wife was found (pictured). He thinks there's blood on it and that it might have been used to attack Skjelse

Police agreed the situation is suspicious enough to warrant an investigation (pictured Skjelse's helmet after the incident)

'The injuries aren't consistent with the standard over the bars crash. There's a lot of force that's being generated from another object,' Jeff said.

Jeff told KOIN he found a rock near where his wife was found. He thinks there's blood on it and that it might have been used to attack Skjelse.

After passing on the rock to police, they agreed the situation is suspicious enough to warrant an investigation.

A GoFundMe page has raised more than $20,000 for Skjelse, who might need up to $40,000-worth of oral surgery alone.

'She's just going to get better the best way she knows how, and that's just through the kindness in her heart and the courage that she has,' Jeff said.

A GoFundMe page has raised more than $20,000 for Skjelse, who might need up to $40,000-worth of oral surgery alone

Skjelse says she's thankful show wore her helmet that day and calls herself the luckiest unlucky person in the world

But despite the bone grafts and dental reconstructions Skjelse might need over the next year, she says she's thankful show wore her helmet that day.

'It saved my life. The damage would have been irreversible,' she said.

She called herself the luckiest unlucky person in the world.
Mining giant BHP Billiton have copped a massive $1 billion tax bill from the Australian Taxation Office over a 'valuation issue' with its marketing office in Singapore.

The ATO has accused the mining company of tax avoidance dating back to 2003 by moving its iron ore sales through the offshore marketing hub.

BHP has said it will fight the tax bill, saying the issue does not involve 'tax avoidance' and it does 'not agree with the ATO's position,' The ABC reported.

Mining giant BHP Billiton have copped a massive $1 billion tax bill from the Australian Taxation Office over a 'valuation issue' with its marketing office in Singapore

The ATO has accused the mining company of tax avoidance dating back to 2003 by moving its iron ore sales through the offshore marketing hub

The mining company has a separate battle with the Queensland Government over $280 million in royalties.

BHP has denied tax avoidance, saying 58 per cent of its Singapore profits are taxed in Australia at the standard tax rate, The Courier Mail reported.

'Given the size, geographic scope and complexity of our operations and, at times, uncertainty regarding the application of taxation laws, we have occasional disagreements with tax authorities over the amount of taxes to be paid,' a spokesperson said.

'In this respect, BHP Billiton is no different from other large and complex corporations'.

The company said there would not be an increase to Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mackenzie's salary after it was slashed by half to just under $3 million this year

BHP chief financial officer Peter Beaven said the company were prepared to fight the case in court and were confident of its position, according to The Australian.

The company said there would not be an increase to Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mackenzie's salary after it was slashed by half to just under $3 million this year.

His wage was sliced after the Samarco iron ore disaster in Brazil, which left 19 people dead after a dam collapsed in 2015.

The dam was a joint venture between Vale and BHP Billiton.

An ATO spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia they were unable to comment further on 'activities relating to individual taxpayers'.
He had hoped to die a martyr rather than be arrested after the bomb attacks in New Jersey and New York, authorities say

Ahmad Khan Rahami 'carried out a dry run for the Manhattan and New Jersey bombs in his back yard',

Ahmad Rahami in his arrest mugshot for attempted murder was charged with five counts of attempted murder and use of a weapon of mass destruction

Manhattan bombing suspect Ahmad Rahami set off a pipe bomb in his back yard two days before the attacks in New York and New Jersey, court papers claim.

Federal prosecutors will claim video recovered from a family member's cell phone shows Rahami conducting a 'dry run' before the bombing.

Footage shows him igniting incendiary material in a cylinder and a fuse being lit followed by loud explosion and billowing smoke, as laughter is heard in the background, court papers say.

Rahami has been charged with federal counts of using a weapon of mass destruction and bombing public places.

The 28-year-old had already been charged with five counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and two gun charges after a shootout with police following the terror attacks over the weekend. He remains on $5.2million bail in hospital.

Now criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court provides clues to the chilling motivations that authorities say drove the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives in New York and New Jersey, injuring at least 30 people.

Rahami could face multiple life sentences over the attacks.

The federal criminal complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that Rahami began buying bomb components in June, purchasing citric acid, circuit boards, ball bearings and electric igniters on eBay.

In a statement, the online auction site said it was 'proactively working with law enforcement authorities on their investigation' but that all the items he's bought are widely available and 'legal to buy and sell in the United States'.

'Death To Your OPPRESSION,' Ahmad Khan Rahami wrote of the US government in his diary, which praises the likes of Osama bin Laden and accuses America of 'slaughter' in the Middle East

A journal revealed he hoped to die a martyr and pledged that his 'bombs will be heard in the streets', authorities say.

'Death To Your OPPRESSION,' Ahmad Khan Rahami ranted about the US government in his diary, found by on the suspect by arresting officers.

The journal also praises the likes of Osama bin Laden and accuses America of 'slaughter' in the Middle East.

The document also shows excerpts from a handwritten journal found on Rahami following his arrest Monday which gave some clue to the bomber's motives.

In it, he vowed to martyr himself rather than be caught after setting off explosives in New York and New Jersey, while it a ccuses the U.S. government of 'slaught(er) against the mujahidean (sic) be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham [Syria], Palestine ...'

The journal also praised the likes of Osama bin Laden - the founder of al-Qaeda who took responsibility for the September 11 attacks, Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric killed in a 2011 drone strike, and Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army major who went on a 2009 rampage at the Fort Hood military installation.

Rahami is wanted for questioning in connection to two bombings and an attempted bombing in New York City and New Jersey over the weekend. He is pictured slumped over in Linden, New Jersey after his arrest on Monday

Above is the second pressure cooker bomb found in Chelsea that never detonated. Investigators were allegedly able to identify Rahami from fingerprints on the device

Prosecutors say the document ends: 'The sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION.'

Federal agents would like to question Rahami. But Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., who received a classified briefing from the FBI, said Rahami was not cooperating; that could also be a reflection of his injuries.

Investigators are looking into Rahami's overseas travel, including a visit to Pakistan a few years ago, and want to know whether he received any money or training from extremist organizations.

They believe he may have received terrorist training on his 'radicalization' trip to Pakistan where he visited the Taliban stronghold of Quetta.

The federal criminal complaint details the types of bombs used in the New York and New Jersey attacks. The New York explosive devices contained aluminum powder, ammonium nitrate and HMTD - a chemical used in multiple terrorist plots against the West including the July 7, 2005, London bombings - by al Qaeda, CNN reports.

Investigators believe that Rahami's use of the chemical indicates overseas training as there have been very few 'lone wolf' attacks have successfully used the tricky substance.

A criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court provided the chilling motivations that authorities said drove the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives in New York and New Jersey, injuring at least 30 people

The federal criminal complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that Rahami began buying bomb components in June, purchasing citric acid, circuit boards, ball bearings and electric igniters on eBay.

The FBI is now looking into Rahami's multiple, and lengthy stays in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2011 and 2014 to see whether there is evidence of terror training.

Rahami's first documented trip to Pakistan was in 2005, when he visited Karachi, another terrorist hotbed, aged, The New York Times reported.

In 2011, Rahami made another lengthy trip, visiting Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Quetta, Pakistan. He visited Quetta from April 2013 to March 2014.

Rahami was stopped on one trip for secondary screening, but he satisfied the questions and was cleared, a source told Fox News.

His activities while in Afghanistan and Pakistan are unknown, although he did meet and marry his wife Asia Bibi Rahimi in 2011 with whom he has a child.

The wife of New York and New Jersey bombing suspect, Asia Bibi Rahimi (pictured in 2014) who flew to Pakistan before the terror attacks, is being questioned by American authorities

RAHAMI SUED HIS LOCAL POLICE OVER DISCRIMINATION The prime suspect in the New York and New Jersey bombings sued his local police force and claimed they were persecuting him for being a Muslim. Ahmad Rahami said in a lawsuit that cops in Elizabeth, New Jersey subjected his and his family to discrimination and 'selective enforcement' based on their religion. The family - who used the name Rahimi in the legal papers - claimed that police tried to shut down their chicken restaurant, called First American, too early each night with 'baseless' tickets and summonses. Ahmad, 28, his father Mohammad Sr, 53, and his brother Mohammad, brought the lawsuit together and said that local residents also racially abused them and said: 'Muslims don't belong here'. The lawsuit was filed in 2011 and reveals that Ahmad has a long history of grievances with city officials, their local police force and people who lived close to them. Court records show that the complaint was dismissed with prejudice in 2012, meaning that it could not be brought again. At a press conference on Monday, the mayor of Elizabeth revealed that citizens complained when the fried chicken restaurant first opened because it was open for 24 hours and people congregated outside of it. The police tried to shut the store down at 10pm daily and that's when the Rahami family field the lawsuit. The city won the right to enforce the 10pm closing time in court, proving that it was a 'quality of life' issue. Advertisement

She is currently being questioned by American authorities after being intercepted by law enforcement in the United Arab Emirates on her way from the US to Pakistan days before the terror attacks. She is currently said to be cooperating with authorities.

Rahami's mother also left the U.S., flying to Turkey on August 24 - a couple of weeks before her son was accused on planting multiple bombs in New Jersey and New York which injured 29 people.

In 2014, the FBI opened up an 'assessment,' the least intrusive form of an FBI inquiry, based on comments from his father after a domestic dispute, the bureau said in a statement.

'The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism,' the bureau said.

A law enforcement official said the FBI spoke with Rahami's father in 2014 after agents learned of his concerns that the son could be a terrorist.

During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Rahami's father told reporters Tuesday outside the family's fried-chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that he called the FBI at the time because Rahami 'was doing real bad,' having stabbed the brother and hit his mother. Rahami was not prosecuted in the stabbing; a grand jury declined to indict him.

'But they checked, almost two months, and they say, 'He's OK, he's clear, he's not terrorist.' Now they say he's a terrorist,' the father said. Asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, he said: 'No. And the FBI, they know that.'

However, he denied any knowledge of his son's plans to bomb New York and New Jersey last weekend.

The disclosure of the father's contacts with the FBI raises questions about whether there was anything more law enforcement could have done at the time to determine whether Rahami had terrorist aspirations.

This is the chilling moment that suspected bomber Ahmad Rahami is caught on surveillance footage casually walking down a Manhattan street with an explosive in his suitcase

Destruction: This was the scene on West 23rd Street, Midtown Manhattan, on Monday after Saturday's bomb attack. Rahami came to the US as an asylum seeker aged seven

Two homeless men also found a backpack full of five pipe bombs near the Elizabeth, New Jersey rail station on Sunday. One of the devices accidentally went off as police were trying to disarm it. No one was injured in that incident

Confused: Rahami's father, Mohammad Sr (right) said he didn't know of his son's alleged plans, and that he's 'not sure what's happening exactly'

That issue arose after the Orlando massacre in June, when FBI Director James Comey said agents a few years earlier had looked into the gunman, Omar Mateen, but did not find enough information to pursue charges or keep him under investigation.

THE 'AMERICA-HATING DEADBEAT DAD ' The high school sweetheart of the Manhattan bomber, describes him as an anti-Western deadbeat who refused to pay child support for his daughter. Maria Mena asked a New Jersey court Tuesday to give her full custody of their child  and issue a restraining order against the suspect. The 26-year-old met Rahami at high school and said he had always been 'standoffish to American culture' but said she never believed he would 'cross the line.' 'I think he was brainwashed,' she told FoxNews.com. The two had their daughter while they were still in high school. Rahami's parents didn't approve of the relationship and organized for him to go back to Afghanistan before the girl was born. After that, he began to change and Maria realized she didn't want him around her daughter. He would rail against the military and gay people in the U.S., saying 'there weren't homosexuals in Afghanistan,' according to Maria. He was also heavily critical of the military. In 2008, Maria sued him for nearly $1,000 in child support. Court records show that by 2016, he had $3,000 outstanding. Advertisement

Asked Tuesday about Rahami, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama 'is confident that the Department of Justice and the FBI will go back and review the interactions that this individual had with law enforcement to determine if there's something different that could have been done or should have been done to prevent the violence that we saw over the weekend.'

As for whether Obama was concerned that the 2014 FBI inquiry had been closed after finding no terror ties, Earnest noted Rahami's rights as a U.S. citizen.

Rahami worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said he learned this week that Rahami worked night shifts at the AP building and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the AP told law enforcement officials about Rahami's work at the Cranbury facility.

Summit's vice president of security services, Daniel Sepulveda, said Rahami last worked for the company in 2011. Sepulveda said he was unaware of any complaints about Rahami's conduct.

William Sweeney, the FBI's assistant director in New York, said on Monday that that at the time of the bombing, Rahami was apparently not on the FBI's radar.

Nor were Afghan intelligence officials aware of either Rahami or his family, said Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, director-general of the Afghan National Directorate of Security.

Rahami could face multiple life sentences over the bombing attack in New York

The bombing investigation began when a pipe bomb blew up Saturday morning in Seaside Park, New Jersey, before a charity race to benefit Marines. No one was injured.

Then a shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bomb exploded Saturday night in New York's Chelsea section, wounding 31 people, none seriously. An unexploded pressure-cooker bomb was found blocks away - with Rahami's fingerprints on it and his face captured by a nearby surveillance camera, according to the court complaint.

Late Sunday night, five explosive devices were discovered in a trash can at an Elizabeth train station.

Rahami could face multiple life sentences over the bombing attacks. He is currently being held on $5.2 million bail.
They were interrupted by adults at a house and the girl then complained

ousin to remove underwear, before he rubbed his genitals against hers

A 17-year-old boy who pleaded guilty to unlawfully and indecently dealing with his 11-year-old cousin has escaped a conviction.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, appeared in the Bundaberg Children's Court on June 21 and was warned he would face an adult court if he reoffended, reported New Mail.

The court heard the teenager, who was aged 16 and eight months at the time, persuaded his cousin to remove her underwear before he rubbed his genitals against hers on September 23 last year.

A 17-year-old Queensland boy who pleaded guilty to unlawfully and indecently dealing with his 11-year-old cousin has escaped a conviction (stock image)

The pair were reportedly interrupted by adults who came back to the house.

The girl immediately complained to them about the incident.

Judge Michael Shanahan said the boy had a history of dishonesty offences but no sexual offences and noted his age and prospects of rehabilitation.

Judge Shanahan decided not to record a conviction but said it was the teen's last chance.

'A sexual offence committed by an adult requires actual imprisonment, unless there are very special circumstances,' he said.

'So not only are you at risk of going to jail, you will go to jail if you repeat this offence.'
A vial of the drug PCP was found in the car of a black pastor shot dead by Tulsa police on Friday night, according to officials.

Police have refused to say whether pastor Terence Crutcher was high at the time of his death until the results of an autopsy. PCP or phencyclidine, also called angel dust, can cause slurred speech, loss of coordination and a sense of strength or invulnerability. At high doses, it can cause hallucinations and paranoia.

The pastor's twin sister has said her family is demanding immediate charges against the female police officer who fatally shot him.

Referring to an audio recording in which an officer in a helicopter flying overhead said Crutcher looks like a 'bad dude,' Tiffany Crutcher told reporters that her family wanted justice because 'that big "bad dude"  his life mattered.'

'His life mattered,' Tiffany repeated. 'And the chain breaks here. We're going to stop it right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is bigger than us right here. We're going to stop it right here.'

Under threat: Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby's lawyer says the cop (left) shot and killed unarmed black pastor Terence Crutcher (right) because he reached into his SUV and would not follow her commands

Tiffany broke down in tears as those gathered at the family news conference met her words with applause.

Later, dozens of people gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse on to protest the fatal police shooting. The gathering was organized by a local Black Lives Matter group.

'This is about Terence. This is about a loss of life that's significant and should not have been taken,' said Mark Whited, who represented We the People Oklahoma at the protest.

'The stakes were made. Things need to come out. There needs to be transparency in the whole process.

Crutcher's sister, who spoke during a family press conference says anyone who knew her brother, knew what he was about.

Dr. Tiffany Crutcher speaks to the media about her brother Terence Crutcher who was shot on Friday Tulsa Police

Mary Williams, left, bows her head as Pastor Allen Jamison, right, says a prayer at the start of at a 'protest for justice' over Friday's shooting

Adrian Colbert raises his fist at a protest calling for the arrest of Officer Betty Shelby, who Crutcher dead

Community leaders who watched the video expressed shock and outrage about what they saw, but called for a calm reaction

'He had more friends than anyone I knew. He loved to cook and his passion was singing, he loved to sing,' said Dr. Crutcher.

She said her brother had recently started pursuing his passion of singing at Tulsa Community College.

'I got his last text message, that I'm gonna keep forever and it was like 'I love you, and I'm gonna make you proud' and vice versa,' said Dr. Crutcher.

'I just feel like I'm in a nightmare, really,' she said. 'I just want to wake up and this all be over tomorrow.'

The shooting occurred after officers spotted 40-year-old Crutcher's vehicle stopped in the middle of the road, last Friday evening.

Police say the pastor refused to follow officers' commands and ended up being shot.

Officer Tyler Turnbough used his taser while his partner, Officer Betty Shelby, fired her gun.

Marq Lewis, founder of 'We the People Oklahoma', speaks to protesters calling for the arrest of Officer Shelby, outside the Tulsa Police headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Terrence Stevens stands among protesters. City officials asked that protests remain peaceful, saying they will seek justice

Rev. Warren Blakney speaks to protesters. The rally called for Officer Shelby's arrest

Pastor Jennettie Marshall, of Living Sanctuary Evangelistic Ministries, speaks at a 'protest for justice'

People hold signs at a 'protest for justice'. Around 100 people gathered also the scene of the shooting late Tuesday

Police later noted that Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his car.

On Tuesday investigators claimed they found the drug PCP in Crutcher's vehicle, but attorneys for the slain man's family say a discussion of drugs distracts from questions about the use of deadly force.

Tulsa Sgt. Dave Walker told the Tulsa World that investigators recovered one vial of PCP in Crutcher's SUV, but he declined to say where in the vehicle it was found or whether officers determined if Crutcher used it Friday night.

A spokeswoman for the state medical examiner's office said autopsy and toxicology results for Crutcher are pending, and police said Tuesday the toxicology report could take several weeks.

Attorneys for Crutcher's family said the man's relatives did not know whether drugs were found in his vehicle and, even if they were, that wouldn't justify his fatal shooting.

'Let us not be throwing a red herring, and to say because something was found in the car that was justification to shoot him,' said attorney Benjamin Crump, one of the family's lawyers.

About 200 protesters gathered Tuesday evening outside the Tulsa Police Department. Many chanted 'Fire Betty'

As protesters gathered outside the Tulsa County courthouse, outrage echoed throughout Twitter as the masses called for justice

Tulsa Police say officer Betty Shelby fatally shot Crutcher on Friday as she was responding to a report of a stalled vehicle

Meanwhile, protesters gathered outside the courthouse, carrying signs and chanting as people passed by while heading to work on Tuesday morning.

They shouted 'Hands up. Don't shoot' and 'Black Lives Matter'. One woman carried a sign that said 'Am I next?' Another sign read,' I am not a threat.'

Another protester carried two signs, one saying 'I can't Breathe' and the other 'Black Lives Matter.'

John Ballard puts his hands up in what has become a symbol of the Black Lives movement

Police footage, which Crutcher's family's attorney called 'extremely disturbing,' showed the man with his hands in the air moments before he was fatally shot

Victor Walter gets emotional as he and other protesters call for justice in the shooting death

'If we cannot trust the people we are paying to police our streets, we have a problem,' the man said. 'We have a problem. It's not really us. The City of Tulsa has a problem.'

'What brought me out here today is because I have a black son, black brothers and a black father who definitely need the support of everyone in the community, including the protection of the police,' protester Jaynae Silas said to Tulsa World.

Crump compared Crutcher's shooting to Monday's arrest of New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami, who police say engaged officers in a shootout.

'He wasn't killed. So why was an unarmed black man who has committed no crime, who only needs a hand, given bullets in his lungs?' Crump said.

Attorney Benjamin Crump, center, one of the attorneys for Crutcher's family, provided an enlarged photo of the police footage that appeared to show that the victim's window was closed

'How can he be reaching into the car if the window is up and there is blood on the glass?' Benjamin Crump told reporters

Hands up: Crump, center, demonstrates that Terence Crutcher's hands were up as he speaks during a news conference about the shooting death Tuesday

Officer Shelby fatally shot Crutcher the 40-year-old on Friday after responding to a report of a stalled vehicle.

Sgt. Shane Tuell said Tuesday that Shelby had a stun gun at the time but did not use it. Officer Tyler Turnbough, who is also white, used his stun gun on Crutcher, police said.

Two 911 calls described an SUV that had been abandoned in the middle of the road.

One unidentified caller said the driver was acting strangely, adding, 'I think he's smoking something.'

Oklahoma prison officials confirmed Tuesday that Crutcher served four years in prison on a drug conviction from 2007 to 2011.

But Damario Solomon-Simmons, another attorney for Crutcher's family, said Shelby and other officers had no way of knowing about Crutcher's background or the potential for drugs in his vehicle when they approached him Friday.

Crutcher, pictured in the white shirt being filmed by a Tulsa Police helicopter after his car broke down in the middle of the road on Friday night, was shot dead shortly afterwards

Shelby's lawyer says his client opened fire and Officer Tyler Turnbough (pictured) deployed a Taser simultaneously when Crutcher's 'left hand goes through the car window'

'It's undisputed that the officers on the scene had no idea what may be in Terence's car,' Solomon-Simmons said.

'At that particular moment that he was shot, he was not a suspect for any crime. Period.'

Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday that Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his SUV when he was shot.

It's not clear from dashcam and aerial footage what led Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers gave Crutcher.

Shelby's attorney, Scott Wood, said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he was carrying a weapon.

'He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot,' Wood told the Tulsa World.

Officers followed Crutcher back to his car with their weapons drawn

Officers in the helicopter predicted their ground colleagues were going to use their taser

Seconds later, Crutcher was laying on the ground with the call 'shots fired' on the radio

But attorneys for Crutcher's family challenged that claim Tuesday, presenting an enlarged photo from the police footage that appeared to show that Crutcher's window was rolled up.

Local and federal investigations are underway to determine whether criminal charges are warranted and whether Crutcher's civil rights were violated.

Hundreds of protesters rallied Tuesday night outside police headquarters in downtown Tulsa calling for Shelby to be fired.

'Police treated Crutcher differently than they would if a white person had been stopped in a similar instance,' said Sharon Smith, 60, an African-American resident of the suburb of Broken Arrow.

Organizers urged participants to remain peaceful, and the protesters dispersed before nightfall without any incidents.

Footage released Monday shows Terence Crutcher broken down and with his hands in the air as police approached him on Friday. He was shot dead at the scene by a female officer

Four police officers are seen surrounding Crutcher by his car. One of the officers, Betty Shelby, discharged her weapon. The shot killed Crutcher , who is seen here lying on the ground

AUDIO FROM HELICOPTER OFFICER 1: 'He's got his hands up for her now. 'This guy's still walking and not following commands.' OFFICER 2: 'Time for taser I think.' OFFICER 1: 'I've got a feeling this is going to happen.' 'That looks like a bad dude too, Probably on something.' VOICE OVER THE RADIO: 'I think he may have been tasered. 'We've got shots fired... suspect down.' Advertisement

Police helicopter footage was among several clips released Monday that show the shooting and aftermath.

A man in the helicopter that arrives above the scene as Crutcher walks to the vehicle can be heard saying 'time for a Taser' and then: 'That looks like a bad dude, too. Probably on something.'

Betty Shelby's mother-in-law, Lois Shelby, said the officer is grieving for Crutcher's family and isn't prejudiced.

She told the AP in a phone interview Tuesday that Shelby 'thought she had to protect her own life' when she shot Crutcher.

'She wouldn't harm anyone. We're all sick. We feel for the (Crutcher) family,' Lois Shelby said. 'But, you know, we have a family that goes out every day and faces life and death. And when she is being accused of things she didn't do wrong, it's too much, and they don't think about our family.'

Betty Shelby declined comment, referring calls to her attorney.

When Shelby asked Crutcher, pictured left with his father, if he was the owner of the stalled SUV, he allegedly mumbled incoherently in response

Police work the scene of Terence Crutcher's shooting in Tulsa, where they say the 40-year-old had ignored repeated requests to put up his hands before reaching into his SUV

Lingering questions: Authorities haven't yet said whether Crutcher had a weapon when he was shot Friday while reaching into his stalled SUV

Police video shows Crutcher walking toward his SUV that is stopped in the middle of the road. His hands are up and a female officer is following him.

As Crutcher approaches the driver's side of the SUV, more officers arrive and Crutcher appears to lower his hands and place them on the vehicle before the officers surround him.

Crutcher can be seen dropping to the ground. Someone on the police radio says, 'I think he may have just been tasered.' Then almost immediately, someone can be heard yelling, 'Shots fired!' and Crutcher is left lying in the street.

Shelby's attorney, Wood, said Turnbough fired the stun gun at the same time Shelby opened fire because both perceived a threat.

The shooting comes four months after ex-Tulsa County volunteer deputy Robert Bates was sentenced to four years in prison on a second-degree manslaughter conviction in an unarmed black man's 2015 death.

Bates said he mistakenly grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. Shelby worked as a Tulsa County sheriff's deputy for four years before joining the Tulsa Police Department in December 2011, officials said. She has been placed on paid leave.

Crutcher (left and right) had left class at Tulsa Community College Friday night when his SUV stalled in the street

Heartbroken: Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, left, comforts Tiffany Crutcher, twin sister of Terence Crutcher. At right is Rev. Joey Crutcher, her and Terence's father
A Netflix executive has scoffed at a suggestion its subscribers in Australia, Europe and other parts of the globe received inferior content compared with U.S. audiences.

Netflix chief financial officer David Wells, responding to a question at Goldman Sachs' 25th Annual Communacopia Conference in New York on Tuesday, said it was 'absolutely inaccurate'.

'I think there is a general meme that whether it is a European consumer, an Australian consumer, an Asian consumer gets screwed relative to the US population,' Mr Wells said.

Netflix chief financial officer David Wells scoffed at a suggestion its subscribers in Australia, Europe and other parts of the globe received inferior content compared with U.S. audiences

The video streaming giant plans to spend US$5 billion (AU$6.6 billion) on TV and movie offerings this year and another $US6 billion in 2017.

'We want to continue growing the content library both within the US and outside the US,' he said.

'As long as we are able to grow our global subscriber population, we have a virtuous cycle there in terms of being able to find and monetise that content across a larger base, which then propels our ability to find more content and produce more content.'

Mr Wells admitted there was not much the company could do to prevent subscribers sharing their passwords with friends or family outside their households to allow free access to Netflix.

The video streaming giant plans to spend US$5 billion (AU$6.6 billion) on TV and movie offerings this year and another $US6 billion in 2017.

'If they don't use it within the terms of use we're unhappy about it,' he said.

'There's not a whole lot we can do.
English-language-learner services are designed, in theory, to prevent educational inequity, but for some students the specialized services may be reinforcing it.

A new study out of the University of Oregon found that designating early elementary students who are close to being proficient in English as ELLs may actually do more harm than good.

Ilana Umansky , an assistant professor in the universitys college of education, argues that kindergarten students who score at or just above threshold for English-learner services are often indistinguishable from those who score just below. However, the students on the cusp who are identified as English-learners end up scoring significantly lower on math and English/language arts tests in 2nd through 10th grade, Umanskys research determines.

Umansky blames their classification as English-learners, and the diminished teacher expectations and social stigma tied to that status, for the lower test scores. Also particularly harmful is the fact that designation as an English-learner can set up a tiered education system, one that can restrict students access to a school or districts full menu of academic resources and coursework, she writes.

Studies have long shown that long-term English-language learners, those who arent reclassified as English proficient as they head into middle and high school, often struggle in school and are less likely to graduate. Umansky makes the case that English-learner classification can negatively impact students, especially those who may not need the services, as early as 2nd grade.

Umanskys research focuses on a large urban district in California. She cautions that the negative effect of ELL classification found in her study should not be considered constant across districts, schools, or programs, and that the language of instruction for the students is a key factor: bilingual programs, including dual-language immersion education, can buffer students from negative effects of being tagged as an English-learner, she writes.

Rather than being defined by their lack of proficiency in one language, EL students in two-language classrooms may be defined by their knowledge of two languages, Umanksy writes. In addition, teachers who speak the home language of their students may understand their students lives, backgrounds, and families better, and, as a result, have more accurate expectations of EL students and form closer relationships with them that help them succeed.

Heres a link to the abstract of the study, To Be or Not to Be EL: An Examination of the Impact of Classifying Students as English Learners .

Umansky was among the lead researchers for a 2014 study that determined that English-language learners in San Franciscos public schools were equally proficient in English by the time they reached 5th grade regardless of whether they had been in a bilingual program or had received all their instruction in English . Heres a link to Education Weeks reporting on that research.

Related Stories

Pre-K Literacy Key to English-Language-Learner Reclassification, Study Finds

Building ELLs Literacy Early is Crucial

Does the Term English-Language Learner Carry a Negative Connotation?

Teaching English-Language Learners: What Does the Research Tell Us?

CCSSO Offers Guidance on Reclassification of English-Language Learners

Districts Work to Root Out Bias Against, Spanish-Speaking Students, Teachers

San Franciscos Bilingual Programs as Effective as English Only, Study Finds

Photo Credit: Maritza Fabia, a 3rd grader at Rose Hill Elementary School in Colorados Adams 14 school district, listens to her teacher during a Spanish class. The district is under a federal compliance agreement to correct discrimination problems.

--Nathan W. Armes for Education Week
A school teacher has come under fire after suggesting homosexuals were not confident about themselves because their 'lifestyle choice is wrong'.

The year eight teacher, from Northern Territory, has sparked outrage on social media after he made the remarks on the Alice Springs Community Open Forum, which has almost 8,000 members.

The Facebook comment was in response to an article about Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's decision to announce a marriage equality plebiscite.

'Gays think the reason they don't feel good about themselves is because society currently won't let them call themselves married,' he wrote on Saturday.

'Will it change when the law changes? No, because the reason they don't feel good about themselves is because their lifestyle choice is inherently wrong.'

The year eight teacher has caused uproar in Alice Springs after posting on the town's community forum that homosexuals 'lifestyle choice is wrong'

A school teacher has come under fire after suggesting homosexual people were not confident about themselves because their 'lifestyle choice is wrong' (stock image)

His controversial views has caused uproar among the community, with many describing the comment as 'disgusting' and 'inappropriate'.

'I sometimes agree with your posts but I find your statement absolutely disgusting,' one person wrote.

'And this from a person in such an influential position of shaping young kids into adults. What an abhorrent and evil statement.

'I am horrified that our education department has someone so willing to display to the world their uneducated bigotry on their payroll. I hope and pray your bias does not shine in the classroom. Their 'lifestyle'!!! REALLY!!'

The comment was in response to an article about Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's move to negotiate about marriage equality plebiscite (stock image)

Department of Education acting chief executive Vicki Baylis has confirmed they are aware about the Alice Spring teacher's actions and an investigating was underway.

'The department treats all complaints very seriously and is taking appropriate action on this complaint,' Ms Baylis told Daily Mail Australia in a statement.

'Our schools have a strong focus on inclusiveness and ensuring our students feel safe and welcomed by teachers, staff and other students, every day at school. The department does not support the comments made by the individual.
One day after a Texas Womans University student was found murdered in a park, a tweet mysteriously appeared on her Twitter account.

'Never knew I could feel like this', the tweet posted to Jacqueline Vandagriff's Twitter said on September 15.

Vandagriff had been found dismembered and burned in Acorn Woods Park in Grapevine, Texas, on September 14.

Jacqueline Vandagriff (left) was found burned and dismembered in a Texas park this week. Charles Dean Bryant (right) is charged with her murder

A day after her murder, a tweet appeared to Vandagriff's Twitter account, which said: 'Never knew I could feel like this'

Authorities responded to a fire in the park at 6.30am where the remains of Vandagriff were found inside a plastic kiddie pool.

A witness told police they saw a man standing over the fire before leaving, according to an arrest report.

Vandagriff, 24, of Frisco, was identified after an autopsy by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner following the grim discovery.

Grapevine police then arrested Charles Dean Bryant, 30, near his house in Haslet on Sunday, about 20 miles from where Vandagriff's body was found.

After officers worked around-the-clock to investigate the case in several cities in north Texas, they arrested Bryant at around 2.30pm on Sunday.

It's not clear if the two knew each other before meeting at a bar, but around 6.45pm on September 13, Vandagriff tweeted: 'I'm glad I decided to get off tinder and walked to a bar.'

At 8.20pm, Bryant posted to Facebook saying, 'Just walking in the rain.. emo as f***'.

First they are seen in security footage leaving Fry Street Public House (pictured) and later down the road leaving the Shots and Crafts bar together around 11pm

Bryant was later spotted in security footage buying a shovel from a Walmart at 4.41am on September 14

Bryant, who CBS News reports as having worked at gay dance club the Urban Cowboy Saloon in Fort Worth, was seen in security footage going to two bars in Denton with Vandagriff.

First they are seen in footage leaving Fry Street Public House and later down the road leaving the Shots and Crafts bar together around 11pm.

We were able to talk to employees of that bar and they have us a name of a suspect, and we just followed the trail from there, Grapevine police Sgt. Robert Eberling said.

Then at 10.56pm, Bryant posts on Facebook again saying: 'Teach you tricks that will blow your mind.'

The statement is a lyric from the TV On The Radio song 'Wolf Like Me', which is about sex.

According to an arrest warrant, cell phone records show Vandagriff's phone was in the vicinity of Bryant's house around 1am that night, CBS News reported.

Vandagriff's purse was also found in the trash at Bryant's home.

Earlier in the night Vandagriff posted on Twitter that she was glad she got off the dating app Tinder and went to a bar

A day after her death, this eerie tweet appeared on Vandagriff's Facebook page. Police are investigating the tweet after they were made aware. The 24-year-old's purse was found in a garbage can at Bryant's house

At 4.41am, Bryant is caught on security footage buying a shovel from a Walmart, according to police.

There was evidence at this home in Haslet that someone had tried to dig a hole in the backyard.

Investigators also noticed there was a patch in the backyard, which indicated a kiddie pool had been placed there.

Another kiddie pool, similar to the one Vandagriff was found in, was in the backyard.

Bryant's roommate told police there used to be two kiddie pools - but only one was there when police arrived.

Two days after her murder, Bryant posted to Facebook saying: 'Full moon.. lets see what trouble I can get into'.

In the time between Vandagriff's death and Bryant's arrest, the 30-year-old visited two parks, one at 6am, writing: 'Early mornings and sleepless nights but she got you feeling alright.'

At 11.56pm on the night he allegedly murdered Vandagriff, Bryant posted this status to Facebook

Days later, he posted a tweet about the full moon and said 'let's see what trouble I can get into'

He also posted once about 'detesting liars' and another time saying: 'Never let anyone else dictate your life, if you're happy and aren't hurting anyone, other people's opinions don't matter be it family, friends, strangers.

'Do what you want, Love who you want, Live your life!!'

Bryant had been arrested several times in the days leading up to Vandagriff's death.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Bryant's 18-year-old ex-girlfriend - a student at University of North Texas - had broken up with him on August 23.

The day after the breakup, Bryant showed up at his ex-grilfriend's dorm. The woman, who he had dated for three months, called the police.

Bryant was given a criminal trespass warning on August 25.

Vandagriff's body was found in a kiddie pool similar to one found in Bryant's backyard. Bryant's roommate said there had recently been two kiddie pools in the backyard where there is now only one

Just days before he was seen with Vandagriff, Bryant had been arrested several times for allegedly stalking his ex-girlfriend

Then, on August 31, He then showed up at the restaurant where his ex-girlfriend worked and asked to be seated in her section. She called the police and they told him to stop contact or he would be arrested.

Then on September 6, Bryant showed up on the doorstep of his ex-girlfriend's dorm and said he had something for her.

She called police and he was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and taken to the Denton County Jail.

He was released the next day and returned to the dorm where he was arrested again and charged with stalking. He posted bail on September 9.

A witness who saw the fire in this park after Vandagriff's murder said they saw a man standing over it

According to his Facebook page, Bryant works at Procore Fitness.

However, Eberling said Bryant had worked at the gay dance club but had been fired on Sunday for not showing up for his shift.

The Vandagriff family released a statement thanking the extraordinary efforts of the Grapevine police department, FBI and all law enforcement agencies who assisted in the investigation.

We would also like to thank our friends, family and the friends of our daughter Jackie for all their support in this difficult time, the statement added.

Vandagriff was a junior at Texas Womans University in Denton.

The schools Vice President for Student Life Monica Mendez-Grant paid tribute to Vandagriff in a statement on the schools website.

The death of a student affects the entire TWU community, and I know that all of us send our deepest sympathy to Jacqueline's family and friends, she said.

Jacqueline exemplified the spirit of learning and service that is the hallmark of our TWU community.

She lived her life with a desire to serve others through her interest in nutrition.
The Sinn Fein president has denied any involvement in the murder

He was found shot dead in his cottage in Ireland in April 2006

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has denied sanctioning the murder of a former leading party official who had been revealed as a spy for MI5.

Denis Donaldson was found shot dead inside his cottage near Glenties in Co. Donegal, Ireland, in April 2006.

It was believed that dissident group the Real IRA carried out the killing, but claims have recently been made that the death was ordered by republican and alleged Provisional IRA member Thomas 'Slab' Murphy.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, right, has denied sanctioning the murder of former MI5 informant Denis Donaldson, left, who was killed in April 2006

Mr Donaldson was found shot dead inside his cottage, pictured, months after it was revealed he was working for the British Government inside the IRA and Sinn Fein

Mr Adams (right) pictured with Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness (centre) made the announcement about Mr Donaldson's (left) MI5 involvement at a press conference in December 2005, pictured

The shock allegation was made by a man claiming to be a former Special Branch agent within the IRA to BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme.

He also told the BBC Mr Donaldson  revealed as an MI5 informer by Mr Adams in December 2005  had unearthed a 'spy ring' within the Northern Irish Assembly in 2002, that the IRA held maps and security codes to the British Government's Northern Irish Office and that the IRA also possessed personal information about all serving prison officers and several unionist politicians.

The anonymous informer, known as 'Martin' said: 'I know from my experience in the IRA that murders have to be approved by the leadership.

'Gerry Adams, he gives the final say.'

He added the Real IRA only claimed responsibility for the death in 2008 because 'someone might take them more seriously'.

The claim was rejected by the Sinn Fein leader, who has always denied he was in the IRA. His lawyer told the programme his client had no knowledge of or involvement in Mr Donaldson's death and denied being consulted about it.

Mr Adams's party colleague Gerry Kelly dismissed the documentary as a 'collection of discredited conspiracy theories'.

'The programme makers have had no regard for the feelings of families of the victims of the conflict, including the family of Denis Donaldson,' said the North Belfast Assembly member.

Mr Adams has consistently denied he was a member of the IRA.

The programme also aired claims that Murphy 'ordered the killing to maintain army discipline' following the revelation that Mr Donaldson was working for MI5.

It was also alleged that Irish republican Thomas 'Slab' Murphy, who was jailed for tax evasion earlier this year, ordered the killing

Murphy, 67, was jailed earlier this year for tax evasion and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

The BBC programme said it tried to contact Murphy's representatives to put the claims to him but received no reply.

The Real IRA split from the Provisional IRA in 1997 after rejecting the ceasefire called against Great Britain in July of that year. It has been designated a terrorist organisation by the British Government.

The police's handling of the murder investigation into Mr Donaldson's death is being investigated by the Police Ombudsman, with a report set to be published later this year.

During the Troubles it is believed there were at least 800 informers for the British Government within the IRA and Sinn Fein.

Raymond White, a retired Royal Ulster Constabulary assistant chief constable and Special Branch Officer, told the BBC well-placed agents could subtly influence decisions made by IRA leadership and 'slowly damage' the group from inside.

He said: 'Agents had to be selected and, if possible, placed or manipulated into certain positions and allowed to develop and grow.'

'If you looked upon agents and those, they're sort of a cancer within, a slow-growing cancer - they can sort of infect other parts of the system.'
A Victorian father who pimped out a vulnerable 16-year-old girl he was in a relationship with was on Wednesday sent to prison for two-and-a-half years.

Glen Jeffries, 42, forced his teenage girlfriend into prostitution so he could support his ex-wife and two children and would stand guard outside rooms while the girl was forced to perform sex work on clients he had arranged.

When he was interviewed by police, the former concreter said passing on messages about sex work was the only way he could earn an income.

A Victorian man who forced his 16-year-old girlfriend to work as a prostitute after he lost his job has been jailed

Jeffries had lost his job not long after the 16-year-old victim moved in with him after he approached her on Facebook in September 2014.

The Victorian County Court heard the teen was initially willing to perform sex acts for money so they could buy food and pay rent.

When she told Jeffries she wanted to stop he said if she didn't continue working his ex-wife and children would 'miss out'.

Pressure from the work - which occurred in motel rooms around Victoria - eventually led the teenager to collapse, after which Jeffries contacted a 13-year-old girl on Facebook and tried to convince her to come to Ballarat to earn money as an escort.

He pleaded guilty to three charges, including causing a child to work as a sex worker and attempting to procure a 13-year-old girl for sex services.

In jailing him for two and a half years on Wednesday, Judge Meryl Sexton said he had offended against a vulnerable teen for his own benefit.

It was also clear he was willing to facilitate sex between an adult and a 13-year-old, she said.

The father of two was jailed in the Victorian County Court for two-and-half years

'You sought to corrupt a 13-year-old in a most depraved way,' Judge Sexton told Jeffries, who she ordered to serve at least 16 months before being eligible for parole.

'You did so in order to obtain money for your own benefit.'

In a victim impact statement tendered in court, the 16-year-old said Jeffries' actions had left her feeling scared, alone and anxious.

She never knew who was going to walk through the door and do things to her, she told the court.

'She feels her body and soul and life have been violated,' Judge Sexton said.

As someone who was in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, she was already vulnerable, and continued to suffer, waking up screaming and unable to trust anyone, Judge Sexton said.
For more than a decade they trailed around the world accumulating children like other people collect souvenirs. Often the arrival of a new child would coincide with filming commitments in some of the most remote outposts on the planet.

Indeed the more benighted the destination, the higher the chance Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's clan would be embracing a new family member.

In this charmed, globe-trotting existence their offspring  both adopted and biological  became almost like trophies, a kaleidoscope of colours and races to embellish their parents' image as Hollywood deities.

Jolie-Pitt clan: The pair with children (left to right) Vivienne, Pax, Shiloh, Maddox, Knox and Zahara

Through carefully choreographed PR stunts, gushing details of the children's progress  from their embrace of different cultures to their future plans  would be offered up alongside the plots of Pitt or Miss Jolie's latest blockbuster.

But in taking their adopted children away from poverty, they actually drew them into a film-star fantasy lifestyle where all the natural rhythms of childhood are absent.

The children were home schooled, speak a multitude of languages  from Arabic to sign language  and when their parents travelled they were dragged along too.

No experience, however distressing, was out of bounds. When Miss Jolie, in her role as a United Nations special envoy, met refugees in Lebanon, she took ten-year-old Shiloh with her.

IS IT LAST LAUGH FOR JENNIFER ANISTON? Eleven years ago, almost to the day, papers granting the divorce of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt until then Hollywood's golden couple, were finalised Eleven years ago, almost to the day, papers granting the divorce of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt until then Hollywood's golden couple, were finalised. Miss Aniston, then 36, was reluctant to sign the final decree, still devastated by their break-up, which was sparked by her heartbreaking discovery that Pitt, then 41, had fallen for a glamorous actress with whom he was filming a movie  none other than Angelina Jolie. The announcement that Pitt and Miss Jolie are set to divorce has rekindled memories of their split. Online news sites and social networks erupted with headlines proclaiming it was 'karma' for the former star of Friends, who last year married the little-known American actor Justin Theroux, 45. Doctored images of Miss Aniston celebrating and jumping for joy flooded the internet. 'That, my friends, is what you call closure,' wrote one Twitter user. 'Today is redemption day,' declared another. Amid the speculation, Miss Aniston herself has remained silent  although there must have been times in the past when she longed to hear such news. It took until last year for Miss Aniston to comment on Pitt. 'Nobody did anything wrong,' she insisted. 'It was just, like, sometimes things happen. We're not in daily communication. But we wish nothing but wonderful things for each other.' Advertisement

When she met the Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, she took 12-year-old Pax. And eldest son Maddox was co-opted into doing research on the killing fields of Cambodia for a film about the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge.

There is no doubt that Miss Jolie and Pitt's split will have the most profound effect on their children. Indeed, some will conclude it is a rum business to adopt several youngsters from all over the world, and then divorce so they are deprived of a stable nuclear family.

In all, the pair have six children aged eight to 15. The collection began in 2002 when Miss Jolie was 27. While filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia she visited an orphanage in Battambang.

She and her then husband, the actor Billy Bob Thornton, applied to adopt seven-month-old Maddox. The process was halted the following month when the US government banned adoptions from Cambodia amid allegations of child trafficking.

Although the go-between acting for Miss Jolie was later convicted of visa fraud and money laundering, the actress's adoption of Maddox was deemed lawful. Once the process was finalised, she took custody of him alone in Namibia  where she was filming Beyond Borders  with Miss Jolie and Thornton separating three months later.

In 2005, she adopted daughter Zahara from an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. By then she was dating Pitt, and the actor travelled with her to collect the girl. The following year, she and Pitt adopted both children together. The family swelled further the following year when she gave birth to their first natural child, Shiloh, in Namibia.

In 2007, Miss Jolie was back in south-east Asia, where she adopted a son, three-year-old Pax, from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City. She had to adopt him as a single parent to get round Vietnam's regulations, which prevent unmarried couples adopting. A year later, the family was complete when she gave birth to twins Knox and Vivienne.

'All the kids are learning different languages,' Miss Jolie told Radio 4's Women's Hour in June. 'Shiloh is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language, Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Maddox has taken to German and Russian, Zahara is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.'

Undoubtedly it is an extraordinary and highly eccentric family. The problem, of course, is that Hollywood is littered with the damaged children of celebrities whose colourful lives are often the undoing of their offspring.

'I want to really focus on my children,' Miss Jolie promised last year, 'doing the best I can to guide and protect them before they are out of the house. These are the most important years.'
A woman may have taken a photo of a Tasmanian Tiger in dense bushland more than 50 years ago, decades after the last known rare native died in captivity.

The photograph was captured by Melbourne woman Rilla Martin in 1964 west of Goroke in the Wimmera region of western Victoria.

Known as 'Rilla's creature' or 'Ozankadnook Tiger', the animal in the photograph and its legitimacy have been the subject of debate ever since the image was published across Australian newspapers in the '60s.

Ms Martin had been holidaying with her cousin, Mr Graeme Martin, a stock agent from Goroke, according to an old newspaper clipping from Wimmera Mail-Times.

A woman may have taken a photo of a Tasmanian Tiger in dense bushland more than 50 years ago, decades after the last known rare native died in captivity

The photograph and animal, known as 'Rilla's creature' was captured by Melbourne woman Rilla Martin in 1964 west of Goroke in the Wimmera region of western Victoria

'The picture shows a heavily-muscled animal with a squat, powerful head and heavy tail.'

A nearby resident at the time, Howard Hinch, told the newspaper his sheep were often mauled by an 'unknown beast' in the area.

'Old residents of Ozenkadnook remember the animal's weird scream, and many claim to have seen it in the scrub,' the newspaper described in the mid-1960s.

Many residents reported seeing the animal, but had no evidence until Ms Martin's photograph apparently showed its continued survival.

Ms Martin had posted the image to her cousin with a letter, which reportedly said: 'This is the photograph of the thing I took that morning and you wouldn't believe me.

'Please return the picture because I am sure you people feel I am silly.'

The thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, became extinct in 1936 when the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo

Since 1936 there have been number sightings of the Thylacine but none have ever been substantiated (Thylacine pictured at Hobart Zoo in 1933)

The cousin then told the newspaper: 'I thought she was only pulling my leg at the time but after seeing this picture, I am convinced.'

Ms Martin described the animal as having a 'pig-like snout', according to rumoured reports.

The photograph has been republished numerous times, and it has lost some detail in the process  with the original image unaccounted for.

In 2012, a man named Chris unearthed an earlier copy of the photograph from Wildlife magazine at the NSW State Library and alerted staff.

Chris wrote on Facebook he believed the image was 'one of the first-ever prints of Rilla's critter'.

The library's curator of photographs, Alan Davies, responded to him by letter and said the photograph appeared to be an 'uncropped second generation enlargement'.

The female pictured here is the last one to have been captured and died at now closed Hobart Zoo in September, 1936

The last known Thylacine is pictured at Hobart Zoo in 1933

'It is a single weight glazed glossy silver gelatin print, typical of that period,' Mr Davies wrote. 'In that sense it is an original.

'However, the lack of detail in tonal range and overall blurriness suggests to me that it is a copy of another photograph.

'Clearly this is an enlargement, as Rilla Martin's camera was a Brownie Box, taking much smaller negatives.

'Having said that, what distinguishes this photograph from the other reproduced images of Rilla Martin's image is that it has not been cropped as severely and a much more extensive view of the animal's surroundings is revealed.'

The image at NSW State Library provides more foreground with foliage, scrub and sticks.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the library.

The last known Tasmanian Tiger, known as Thylacine, died at Hobart Zoo in 1936.

To this day, some believe to have spotted the animal in Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and rural Queensland.

To this day, some believe to have spotted the animal in Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and rural Queensland

Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia released video of what they claim to be a Tasmanian Tiger walking through a field in 2008 in south-west Victoria

However, no sightings have ever been substantiated.

Photos of the potential Thylacine sightings have generally come back as feral dogs with striped markings.

Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia released video of what they claim to be a Tasmanian Tiger walking through a field in 2008 in south-west Victoria.

The group's founder, Neil Waters, said there is no doubt that it is a thylacine but said it could well be a sub-species of the creature.

The woman in the video says she saw a number of the animals on about 12 separate occasions. The stripes on the hind quarters and its 'prehistoric' head stood out to her.

On one occasion she decided to take a camcorder and zoomed it in as close as she could to the animal.

Often peoples sightings of are rubbished by claims the creature was more likely a fox, but on one instance the woman said she saw a Thylacine while a fox was in the background so she could compare the two.

'This Thylacine here was a lot bigger and broader than the fox,' she said.

The group's founder, Neil Waters, said there is no doubt that it is a thylacine but said it could well be a sub-species of the creature

'The fox had the typical bushy tail and pointy nose and red colouring, but this guy here, yeah, he was a browny-grey, the long straight tail and a different gait about him all together, where a fox would trot but this one sort of ambled,' the woman said.

Earlier this month, about three seconds of footage of an animal roaming at Adelaide Hills was unearthed, after it was filmed in February.

Those belonging to the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia claim it is a mainland Thylacine and say five different people witnessed the animal in broad daylight.

'We believe our footage to be a small Thylacine moving around the Adelaide Hills,' amateur researcher Neil Waters said.

'You can see the animal's head. You can see the body of the animal, it does appear to have some sort of dark discolouration on the body which may or may not be stripes.

'You can clearly see it has a very distinct hock on its rear foot, it has a long stiff pointy tail. Where the tail connects to the body is very wide, which is typical of a Thylacine,' Mr Waters said.
A boat captain from Cameroon murdered six passengers crossing from Morocco to Spain because they were Christian, prosecutors claim.

The Muslim man, identified in court documents as Alain N. B, blamed the Christians for rough seas, 29 survivors testified.

He forced six men off the boat, sending them to certain death, it is claimed.

At least 21 people died making the crossing between Morocco and Spain in December 2014 (File picture)

The alleged killings happened on a crossing between Nador in northern Morocco and southern Spain in 2014, The Telegraph reports.

Investigators were told that the captain and his second in command, also from Cameroon, believed the weather got worse each time the Christians prayed.

They used planks of wood to beat the Nigerian pastor, with the public prosecutor writing: 'They badly wounded him before throwing him overboard.'

Witnesses claim the duo then searched fellow passengers for signs they were Christian, and similarly attacked five other migrants.

Alain N. B's second in command died before trial could start.

The boat travelled from Nador in northern Morocco to southern Spain, where 29 people were rescued

The prosecution state the captain 'was aware that the victims could not possibly survive and that they would die, either by drowning, from the cold, or from the physical injuries they had suffered'.

The sea was rough and there were no boats nearby that could rescue the men thrown overboard.

Just one body, which may have been that of a victim, was recovered.

The trial is happening in Almeria, southern Spain, where prosecutors are calling for six separate terms of 15 years - meaning the captain would be sentenced to 90 years in jail if convicted.

The public prosecutor argues that 'religious motivation' is an aggravating factor.

Sea rescue services rescued 29 survivors from the 10-metre-long inflatable craft, which did not have a motor.

At least 21 people died during the perilous crossing, including seven babies whose mothers had been unable to hold onto them.

All the survivors were from Sub-Saharan Africa, but several appeared frightened of telling authorities what happened.
A woman was stabbed to death by her 'stalker' as bystanders just stood and watched her die.

CCTV footage show a man approach the woman - named as teacher Karuna, 22, from Sant Nagar in Burari - on a busy street in Delhi Tuesday morning.

As people walk by and watch, she is stabbed 26 times by her killer, but nobody intervenes.

CCTV footage show a man approach the woman - named as teacher Karuna, 22, from Sant Nagar in Burari - on a busy street in Delhi Tuesday morning

As people walk by and watch, she is stabbed 26 times by her killer, but nobody intervenes

Initially, the murderer stabs his victim 19 times as she helplessly squirms in the street.

The man, named by Karuna's family as her stalker Surendar Singh, then hits her over the head with a rock and stamps on her skull.

One local tentatively approaches the attacker, but walks away, and the woman is stabbed a further seven times at least.

She died in hospital of her injuries.

People have reacted in horror to the video, labelling passers-by as inhumane.

One man said: 'Shame on those people who were doing nothing to stop him - it's not just that guy but even those people also killed her.

'If this was a cow, there would have been hundreds of people attacking that guy.'

Antoher, Chandragupta Prabhakar, said: 'What's wrong with those people who passed by?

'Come on, he was just one person and there were more than five people who could have at least tried to help her, but did nothing apart from watching her being stabbed.

'Seriously, it's a cruel world filled with self-centred people.'

People have reacted in horror to the video, labelling passers-by as inhumane

The man, named by Karuna's family as her stalker Surendar Singh, then hits her over the head with a rock and stamps on her skull

The victim's brother said the assailant had a history of harassing his sister, and the family had filed a police complaint against him some months ago, according to local media.

Atul Pandey from Chennai also condemned the witnesses as well as the killer.

He said: 'Today I have seen the worst face of humanity .

'Such people really exist?

'How can you kill a women so ruthlessly like some animal.

'The worst thing was, no-one dared to stop him.

'Had I been there I would have stopped him and certainly killed that bastard even if it was for the cost of my life . Its better to die than to see such a thing happening in front of you . If she was allowed to suffer and die , then it is possible that anyone would be allowed to suffer and die , again no one will come forward . If such an animal is given the same treatment then only he will realise hi fault .

Sushil Sirohi said the bystanders 'don't deserve to live in this world', while Ahmed Khan blasted them as cowards.

The attack happened when the victim was walking with her cousin at around 9am,

'It seems that the assailant started liking her when they used to be neighbours earlier, but since he was married, she never paid attention,' senior police official Esha Pandey told the BBC.
A family have been forced to flee their home after dozens of the world's deadliest spiders burst out of a bunch of Asda bananas and crawled over their kitchen floor.

Mother-of-two Sophie Newcombe, 26, was unpacking the weekly shop when she spotted a white nest attached to the side of a banana.

She dropped the fruit in fright and both Sophie and her partner, Ashley Gamble, watched in horror as the Brazilian wandering spiders escaped in all directions through their Leicester home.

Scroll down for video

Mother-of-two Sophie Newcombe, 26, was unpacking the weekly shop when she spotted a white nest attached to the side of a banana. Dropping the fruit, Sophie and her partner, Ashley Gamble, watched in horror as the Brazilian wandering spiders escaped in all directions through their Leicester home

The venomous spiders have a bite that cause long and painful erections in males, followed by death, within a matter of hours.

'It was like something out of a horror moive,' Mr Gamble told The Sun.

The forklift driver grabbed a hoover and tried to suck up the arachnids - but he fears many may still be loose in their home.

'The nest was around the size of a 20p piece, and they were just falling out of it onto the floor,' he said.

The venomous spiders have a bite that cause long and painful erections in males, followed by death, within a matter of hours

'I grabbed the hoover and tried to suck up as many as I could, but they were running off everywhere. My partner was absolutely petrified.'

The couple, who have two young daughters, Isla-Rose and Amelia-Lily, decided to pack their essentials and stay at Mr Gamble's mother's house.

They are now calling on Asda to fumigate their home so they can move back.

The supermarket has apologised and said it is investigating the issue.

A spokesman for Asda said: 'We are in contact with Mr Gamble and would like to reassure all our customers that these types of incidents are extremely rare.

'All our bananas are washed and sprayed before they are transported to the UK and every single piece of fruit is manually checked for quality and stowaways.

We sell one billion bananas every year and the chance of finding a spider is incredibly low, but very occasionally one hangs around to give us a fright.

'We are sorry for any upset this has caused and remain in touch with Mr Gamble while we investigate further.'

Asda has apologised and a pokesman for the supermarket said it is investigating the issue
The simulation dubbed 'Red Flag' will take place in Alaska next month

The U.S. and South Korea are said to be preparing to conduct a mock attack on a nuclear facility amid fears Kim Jong Un will conduct another missile test.

Military officials have already warned of heightened activity at North Korea's weapon's test site with experts predicting the secretive nation is preparing an underground detonation.

South Korea is now on high alert, especially as another test by the North could coincide with the 68th anniversary of the Worker's Party of Korea being founded on October 10.

Finger on the button: South Korean military analysts believe Kim Jong Un is on the verge of another nuclear test

Now an official with the South Korean Defence Department has told CNN that they and the United States will carry out a joint exercise next month.

The simulation dubbed 'Red Flag will take place in Alaska from October 3 to 21.

The operation will use a GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munition, a kit that converts bombs that normally just free-fall from planes into guided munitions.

According to the US Air Force, the system was most recently used during NATO's bombing campaign in Libya in 2011.

Kim Jong Un directs the launch of a new rocket engine in pictures launched this week, with experts fearing a long-range missile launch might not be too far away

It comes at a time of heightened activity at a test site in the Punggye-ri area of North Korea's North Hamgyeong Province - where five previous detonations have happened - has prompted claims a nuclear test could be imminent.

A South Korean military source told the Yonhap News Agency: 'The canopy erected to hide the entry way of No. 2 tunnel (where the fifth nuclear test was conducted) has not been removed.

'Moreover, a giant canopy was set up over the entryway of the No. 3 tunnel where many expect a sixth nuclear test could take place.'

Although the canopy is not camouflaged, it does prevent it being observed from the sky, with the official stating both tunnels could be used at any time for another nuclear test.

Kim declared himself delighted with the rocket engine test, details of which were released this week by state media

If another nuclear test is carried out, it will be the fourth under the regime of Kim Jong Un, who took power from his father, Kim Jong Il in December 2011.

The most recent test, on September 9 this year, was the strongest to date, and North Korea claims it now has the ability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile.

And on Tuesday researchers carried out a 'successful' ground test of a new rocket engine.

This week's test prompted fears that North Korea is edging closer to a long-range missile launch.
California courts have handed Students Matter, the group behind the landmark Vergara v. California case, yet another defeat in their quest to use the judiciary to upend laws that they say keep bad teachers in the classroom. Yesterday, Contra County Superior Court Judge Barry P. Goode ruled that a group of California school districts that arent using student test scores for evaluating teachers are in compliance with state law.

In this case, Doe v. Antioch, the plaintiffs claimed that collective bargaining agreements covering 13 California districts were patently violating state law by barring the use of student test scores in teacher-evaluation systems . With echoes of the Vergara case, the plaintiffs lawyers blasted a state evaluation framework in which 98 percent of teachers are given satisfactory ratings, while only 44 percent of students pass state reading tests and just 33 percent are proficient in math.

The districts lawyers contended that the agreements dont run afoul of the state law in questionthe 1999 Stull Actbecause that legislation doesnt explicitly mandate that tests scores be used to evaluate teachers.

That law commands school districts to evaluate employees performance as it reasonably relates to the progress of pupils toward the standards... and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments.

The judges ruling boiled down to one phrase in the Stull Act.

The phrase reasonably relates gives the school districts discretion to determine what is reasonable in this complex situation, the judge ruled.

In a statement released after the ruling , Students Matter founder Dave Welsh said that this decision underscores the need for Governor Jerry Brown to sign a bill that encourages districts to use a variety of measures for evaluating teachers, including test scores, classroom observations and student and parent surveys.

If the court will not enforce the Legislatures clear and unambiguous intent in the Stull Act, then their refusal underscores the need for Governor Brown to sign AB 2826, clarifying the measures of student progress that must be used in the evaluation of educators, Welch said.

According to the National Council pm Teacher Quality, California is one of only 10 states that does not require districts to use student test scores as part of teacher evaluations.

This decision comes just weeks after the California Supreme Court refused to consider the Vergara case, letting stand an appeals court decision finding that the states teacher job-protection job protections did not in themselves violate the students equal-protection rights.
An investigator says they constantly move to avoid welfare investigations

The couple denies the allegations, saying officials are targeting them

Child welfare investigator said some of the 11 children didn't have beds

Neighbors said their filthy children regularly climbed into bins for food

Have faced child welfare investigations in at least three states since 2001

Their 11 children will remain in state custody, a judge ruled on Tuesday

The eleven children of a couple who've faced child welfare investigations over allegations of neglect will remain in state custody for now, a West Texas judge has ruled.

In a hearing on Tuesday, parents William A, 48, and Claire Rembis, 36, disputed Child Protective Services' claims, which included that some of the children regularly climbed into trash bins and scavenged for food behind their Lubbock home.

Some neigbors claimed they heard screaming at night  one described 'shrieks of terror'  that were quickly followed by loud music to cover the sounds.

'It never stopped whenever they were living there,' neighbor Paige Figge told a judge during a court hearing earlier this month, after the children were taken into state custody.

William and Claire Rembis (pictured), 48 and 36, are under investigation for neglect in Lubbock, Texas. They have faced child welfare cases in at least three states since 2001

William A. Rembis, left, and his wife Claire, center, accompanied by a court-appointed attorney Mark Skelton, right, on Tuesday

Court records and testimony show the parents have also been investigated for similar allegations in New Jersey, Michigan, and Plano, Texas, since 2001. None of the cases led to criminal charges.

The children range in age from 16 months to 17 years old.

Judge Kevin Hart said on Tuesday the couple had disregarded CPS' efforts to investigate, calling the couple 'defiant.'

He told them the issues are 'fixable' if the couple cooperates with the agency's pending service plan.

'I think they have forced my hand to some extent,' Hart said. 'I think I don't have a choice.'

He cited some of the couple's children roaming the alley unsupervised and getting into the garbage bins, the instability of housing, and, 'most significant,' the condition of the inside of the home, where investigators reported not enough beds, a lack of food, and an odor of feces or urine.

Child welfare investigator Kristin Stecklein said during last week's custody hearing that some of the children didn't have beds when she visited the home earlier this year. One of them was a 5-year-old girl who another child told her slept in a box in a closet, Stecklein said.

The couple homeschooled their children, but Stecklein said she didn't 'see any signs' of school material  a point William Rembis disputed on Friday.

Texas Tech University students who lived next door to the family testified that children were in the alley scavenging in trash bins six days a week.

Neighbors said filthy children regularly climbed into trash bins and scavenged for food behind the West Texas house where the 11 children lived with their parents. Ten of them are pictured

One student, Madison Burnham, said she saw a child eating food from a box she'd recently thrown out.

'I don't think children should be allowed to do that,' Burnham told the judge.

Other neighbors testified that after screaming began inside the house, loud heavy-metal music was played to cover the sounds.

Claire denied the noise allegation. She also said her children wear hand-me-down clothing and doesn't mind them going barefoot.

'It's just being natural,' she said. 'To us, it's just normal.'

Stecklein said the family's home had a 'strong foul odor' and not enough food to feed 11 children and two adults when she visited.

William also disputed that allegation in testimony, noting his family received about $1,100 a month in food stamps.

One investigator in Lubbock suggested the couple (pictured) may be moving to avoid such investigations, which are difficult to track across states

'We've never had a problem with having enough food,' he told the judge. 'My kids are well fed.'

'They don't eat out of the trash,' Ms Rembis told The Associated Press outside the courtroom in Lubbock last week. Her husband called the allegations 'ridiculous'.

The couple is appealing an eviction notice issued last week by a different judge. They told Hart they may move to Colorado, which he said would complicate the situation.

The case marks the latest child welfare investigation involving the couple, who have faced similar cases in at least three states. One investigator has suggested they may be moving to avoid such investigations, which are difficult to track across state lines.

The parents deny the allegations.

The children were taken into state custody in late August, after child welfare workers discovered 10 of them had been taken to Colorado. Two of the children also were briefly removed from the family's home in Plano in 2013, and all were removed in a separate case there last year.

In Michigan, child welfare officials received five complaints between 2007 and 2012, including one about unsupervised children eating out of garbage cans. In New Jersey, the couple was investigated after their oldest son, who was about 2 at the time, was found wandering alone in 2001, according to testimony in the Lubbock case.
A ghost hunter has revealed a terrifying picture captured in house of the 'most violent poltergeist haunting in Europe' that appears to show the ghostly shape of the infamous 'Black Monk' peering out of it.

Pete Boulton and his business partner Rob Hughes run Ghostnspectors Paranormal Group and visited the house in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, in June to investigate.

The house was the site of one of Britain's most notorious alleged hauntings when the Pritchard family were subjected to years of torment by the so-called 'Black Monk of Pontefract'.

 Slide me  Ghost hunter Pete Boulton from Stockport, Greater Manchester believes this is an image of the 'Black Monk of Pontefract' who has been terrorising a suburban family home in the West Yorkshire town for more than 50 years and has been the subject of a hit horror movie in 2012

Mr Boulton visited the home in June and noticed the strange image from the mirror

Mr Boulton's picture of the hallway shows a mirror with a face staring out of it, with either black hair around it or a black hooded robe - though there was no one near him at the time.

The ghoulish apparition appears in the same spot that the Black Monk, also known as Mr Nobody or 'Fred', is said to regularly stand and was where 14-year-old Diane Pritchard was dragged by an invisible hand.

Mr Boulton, from Stockport, Greater Manchester, said: 'We arrived around 7 in the evening and began wandering around the house.

'I began taking photos like usually do at a new location and I took quite a few of the hallway near the stairs. I was just snapping away at random at the house, not at anything in particular.

Mr Boulton, pictured beside his Honda with personalised ghost hunting number plate, said he started snapping away after arriving at the West Yorkshire house earlier this year

'I took three or four pictures and one was particularly dark so when I got home I put it on the computer to brighten it up.

'[It was as I brightened it up that] I noticed there was a weird shape in the mirror. No one from the group was downstairs [at the time]. So it couldn't have been anyone from the group.

'To be honest I was a bit reluctant to share it as it seemed too good to be true. It looks like a figure. But that was it, as soon as I saw it I shared it on social media.

'It wouldn't have freaked me out if I had seen it there and then [in the house]. But it might have freaked a few of the others out. I would have got quite excited by it as that's why we are there.

'It came as a surprise. It's difficult to say what it is. There's still a chance it is just pareidolia [seeing faces in shapes] however I asked other people what they could see but I didn't tell them what I had seen.

'Most saw what I did. With pareidolia, people usually see different things - that's why you can dismiss stuff usually. But not this one as everyone saw the same thing.

'I haven't dismissed it due to this and certainly to me it's unexplained.

'There is no evidence it definitely is paranormal. I hope that it's a genuine capture [of something paranormal]. I would love that but I've been doing it that long I am realistic about my expectations.'

Jean and Joe Pritchard moved into the house in Pontefract, West Yorkshire in August 1966 and claimed to start experiencing 'paranormal occurrences' almost immediately

Jean and Joe Pritchard moved into 30 East Drive with their two children Phillip, 15, and Diane, 12, in August 1966 and allegedly began experiencing paranormal occurrences almost immediately.

Inexplicable events were said to include green foam appearing the taps, objects being thrown around and levitating, photographs being slashed and even family members being slapped and shoved downstairs.

It is said that later on in their occupation of the haunted house, Diane's hair stood on end and she was dragged upstairs - the same stairs that can be seen in Pete's picture - apparently leaving finger marks on her throat.

Pete Boulton, right, and his friend Rob Hughes, left, travel around the north west of the country investigating unexplained phenomena as part of the Ghostnspectors Paranormal Group

Mr Boulton said: 'Everyone knows that location as it is very well known. However we didn't have a majorly active experience. The odd thing happened but nothing necessarily paranormal.

'It's a fascinating location, very atmospheric. It's an iconic place - that's why [ghost hunters] want to go.

'The poltergeist case there is very famous and that's what attracted me to it, but I didn't expect much.

'There are films about the house, though I didn't experience anything on that level. I would have left pretty sharpish. It's only interesting up to a point.'

The haunting at the house was the subject of the 2012 horror movie When The Lights Went Out and was investigated for the Halloween special of Most Haunted Live in 2015.
The BBC has been accused of racism after using the term 'Jock' in a headline for a business story on its website.

The 'offensive' word was used as part of a blog post, titled 'Jock Shock', by its Scottish business editor Douglas Fraser.

And Scots took to Twitter to slam what they believe is a 'racial slur'.

The 'offensive' word was used as part of a blog post, titled 'Jock Shock', by its Scottish business editor Douglas Fraser

SNP MP Carol Monaghan tweeted the BBC story and wrote: 'The use of "Jock" is as unacceptable as any other racist slur. @BBCScotland is this considered an appropriate headline?'

Another user said: '@bbcscotlandnews "jock"? Stick your racist language and colonial attitudes where the sun doesn't shine.'

Pam G said: '"Jock"? Care to reword that or are Scottish licence payers expected to tolerate derogatory & insulting language?'

The term 'Jock' is often used loosely to describe Scottish regiments of the British Army.

But many find the word offensive and UK courts have convicted people for using the term in a derogatory manner.

In Coventry, a man was given 200 hours of community service for calling Andy Murray 'a useless Jock', five years ago.

However, a British Airways captain who claimed he was victimised by fellow pilots for being Scottish, after being called 'Jock', lost his tribunal claim.

Douglas Maughan said he was targeted after he blew the whistle on a 'canteen culture of racism' at the airline. His claims were rejected at Watford Employment Tribunal in 2010.

Other people disagreed that 'Jock' was an offensive term.

Twitter user @Sargon_of_Akkad responded: 'I'm half-Welsh and was called a "taff" the other day. Can I sue under anti-discrimination laws?'

'The use of "jock" has been controversial in the past.

'Police Scotland dropped action against columnist Katie Hopkins after comments she made describing Scottish people as "sweaty little jocks" provoked a flurry of complaints.'

SNP MP Carol Monaghan slammed the BBC

Derek Murray said: 'For generations, Scottish soldiers have been known as "The Jocks" in the British Army. Racist slur it is not.'

A spokesman for BBC Scotland told The Scotsman: 'The news headline that was used with an article on the Scottish economy was a play on words on the term Shock Jock.

'It was produced by our Scottish news team and we do not consider the reference to be offensive.'

In 2009, the BBC wrote a story attempting to answer the question 'Is it a slur to call someone a Jock?'

It said: 'Can calling someone a Jock be considered a serious slur?

'Scotland thrives on stereotypes and sometimes makes very good use of them, but is it time to drop the J-word?

'The question of how much offence to take to the word is a difficult one.'
Good Morning Britain viewers were left furious today after the show bumped its coverage of the police shooting of another unarmed black man in America to discuss Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's divorce.

Twelve police officers have been injured during violent protests in North Carolina which broke out after an officer fatally shot a black man who they claimed was carrying a gun - but his family have insisted he was a disabled father-of-seven who was just reading a book.

GMB had the shooting and subsequent riots as their headline story - but many viewers felt the show focussed much more heavily on the 'Brangelina' split instead, particularly after they brought in a 'celebrity brand expert' and spent time analysing social media reaction.

Good Morning Britain viewers were left furious today after the show bumped its promised coverage of the police shooting of a black man in America to discuss Brangelina's divorce

GMB had the shooting and subsequent riots as their headline story - but many viewers felt the show focussed much more heavily on the 'Brangelina' split instead

Some viewers took to Twitter to vent their frustration at the coverage.

One said: 'Watching @GMB and hearing more news about angelina and brads divorce than the two black men recently shot in the USA. I'm disgusted.'

Another said: 'With everything that's going on in the world, I can't believe @GMB have spent the last half hour talking to 'experts' about Brangelina.'

A Twitter user added: 'Without sounding too much like @piersmorgan why is @GMB spending more time talking about Brad and Angelina than the riots in Charlotte?'

Disabled father Keith Lamont Scott (pictured and right, with his wife) was shot by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers at The Village at College Downs at about 4pm on Tuesday

Many viewers took to Twitter to vent their frustration at the lack of coverage of the shooting

The flagship ITV daytime show brought in celebrity experts and had a live video link to their US editor, who is based in Los Angeles, to discuss the Hollywood divorce.

A Good Morning Britain spokesman said: 'The breaking news about protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, following the shooting of an African American man by police, was the lead news story today on the programme.

'It featured prominently throughout the morning and coverage included two eye witness accounts.'

Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer at The Village at College Downs in Charlotte at about 4pm on Tuesday.

The police department issued a statement saying the officers fired their weapons after considering Scott a threat.

But Scott's brother and sister said he didn't have a gun and was reading a book in his car while waiting for his son to be dropped off from school, WSOC reported.

On Tuesday night, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock.

Video shows one protester jumping on top of a police car and officers firing tear gas to break up the crowd.

Protesters demonstrate in front of police officers wearing riot gear after the fatal shooting

Police in riot gear deployed tear gas to disperse the crowds of protesters who gathered

The protests came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

It is just the latest in a series of shootings of unarmed black men by police in the US.

Meanwhile Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt for 'the health of her family', two years after the couple wed at their estate Chateau Miraval.

The actress filed papers on Monday citing irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split and asked for physical custody of the couple's six children - Maddox, age 15; Pax, aged 12; Zahara, aged 11; Shiloh, aged 10; and twins Vivienne and Knox, aged eight.

Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt for 'the health of her family', two years after the couple wed at their estate Chateau Miraval in France

A source close to the couple told TMZ that Jolie, 41, made the decision to file because of the way 'Brad was parenting the children,' adding that 'she was extremely upset with his methods'.

That same source claims Jolie became 'fed up' with Pitt's consumption of 'weed and possibly alcohol' mixed with his 'anger problem'.
The president of the Philippines has lashed out at EU criticism of his war on drugs in a profanity filled tirade before ending the rant by raising his middle finger.

Rodrigo Duterte is facing international condemnation due to the rising death toll in his country after a brutal crackdown on crime.

Last week the European Parliament publicly criticised the 'current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings in the Philippines.'

The president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, pictured, has lashed out at EU criticism of his war on drugs in a profanity filled tirade before ending the rant by raising his middle finger

An EU resolution said: 'Duterte must put an end to the current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings ... (and) launch an immediate investigation into (them).'

But in comments filmed by broadcaster ABS-CBN, Duterte responded to the criticism by saying: 'I say to them, f*** you.

'You're doing it in atonement for your sins.'

Singling out France and Britain, Duterte claimed that the parliament's members were 'hypocrites' whose colonial-era ancestors killed 'thousands' of Arabs and other peoples.

He added: 'They're taking the high ground to assuage their feelings of guilt. But who did I kill? Assuming it to be true, 1,700, who are they? Criminals. You call that genocide.

'Now the EU has the gall to condemn me. So I repeat it. F*** you," he said, raising his middle finger.

Since Duterte took office on June 30, about 3,000 people have been killed in a crackdown on crime

The European Parliament has publicly criticised the 'current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings in the Philippines'

Duterte won elections in a landslide victory in May after vowing to eradicate the illegal drug trade in six months, and promising that 100,000 criminals would be killed in the process.

Since he took office on June 30, about 3,000 people have been killed, a third of them suspects shot dead by police and the rest murdered by unidentified attackers, according to police statistics.

Duterte said on Sunday he needed to extend his crime war for another six months because the drug problem was worse than he expected.

Meanwhile in a separate speech on Tuesday, he also repeated a vow to shield police or soldiers from prosecution.

He said: 'If you massacre a hundred and you also number a hundred, why, all of you will get pardons.

Duterte, pictured at a military training camp has said he needs to extend his crime war for another six months because the drug problem was worse than he expected

'Restored to full political and civil rights plus a promotion to boot.' he told soldiers during a visit to a military camp.

However, it is not the first time the 71-year-old leader has reacted badly to foreign criticism.
A Queensland man has been charged with attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed a man in front of his girlfriend over a long running family feud.

Nathan William Charles, from Warwick in southeast Queensland, left a man with four stab wounds to his torso, police allege.

The victim was rushed to Princess Alexandra Hospital after seeking treatment at Warwick Hospital on August 27, Warwick Daily News reported.

Nathan William Charles (pictured), from Warwick in southeast Queensland, left a man with four stab wounds to his torso, police allege

Charles, who has a number of tattoos on his face, remains in police custody. His case was heard briefly in court on Wednesday.

The victim, his partner and another man drove to a house in Tooth Street where Charles and his girlfriend were sitting inside a car, it is alleged.

Police allege Charles, 28, stabbed his victim with a small knife after the pair got into a fight when they got out of the car.

According to police Charles and members of the victim's group were distant relatives and had been involved in a long running family dispute.

Charles was arrested on August 28 and charged with attempted murder.

He is set to appear in court again on November 22.
The twin brother of Stephanie Scott's killer said sorry to her family for the 'hurt' he caused them by trying to help his sibling cover up the teacher's brutal murder.

Marcus Stanford apologised to the murdered-bride-to-be's family on Wednesday from a caravan he has been staying at with his father in the York Peninsula, west of Adelaide, since his release from Junee Correctional Centre two weeks ago.

The 25-year-old, who was jailed for pawning two of Ms Scott's rings for his brother Vincent after he stabbed and sexually assaulted the young school teacher, said he was 'stupid' not to realise how profoundly his actions would affect them.

'I just want to say sorry for what I've done and the hurt I've cause the [Scott] family,' Stanford told Nine News.

Marcus Stanford (pictured) apologised to Stephanie Scott's family from a caravan he has been staying at with his father west of Adelaide, since his release from prison two weeks ago

The 25-year-old was jailed for pawning two of Ms Scott's rings for his brother Vincent after he stabbed and sexually assaulted the young school teacher (pictured)

'I did a really stupid thing and unfortunately I cant take it back,' he added.

Stanford, who has tried to take his own life and self-harmed since his June arrest, vowed to do his best to stay on the straight and narrow.

'I hope for now I won't cause any more trouble,' he said.

He pleaded guilty to being an accessory to Ms Scott's murder after the fact and was convicted 15 months jail in the New South Wales Supreme Court in August, but had been in custody since June 2015 and was released in September.

The court heard he felt 'sick' once he realised the items he had received in the mail from his brother had belonged to Ms Scott, but didn't want to 'back stab' his twin by contacting police.

Stanford has been staying with his father at a caravan park in the York Peninsula since his release

He pleaded guilty to being an accessory to Ms Scott's murder after the fact and was convicted to one year jail in the New South Wales Supreme Court in August

Justice Robert Hulme said Stanford pawning the 26-year-old's rings for $705 was an 'appalling, disgraceful and inexcusable act' that had a significant affect on the family

Justice Robert Hulme said Stanford pawning the 26-year-old's rings for $705 was an 'appalling, disgraceful and inexcusable act' that had a significant affect on the family after her death.

'It was the act of a man who put morality and human decency secondary to the interests of his murderous brother,' Justice Hulme said.

The judge said Stanford would have known the rings were of sentimental value and had been stolen during the murder of a much-loved woman.

But he sold them off regardless, 'in circumstances where they would be unlikely to be returned'.

The brother's father, Steve Stanford, said he had never asked Vincent, a cleaner at Ms Scott's school, why he had dragged her into a storeroom to rape her before stabbing her in the neck with a large knife.
North Korea has accidentally leaked details of its secretive propaganda websites allowing people in the West to access them for the first time.

A total of just 28 websites were found to be registered on the .kp domain, showing the lack of internet activity in the country.

The websites were leaked yesterday after a glitch by the country's systems administrators meant the web addresses were published and people were able to access them.

North Korea has accidentally leaked details of its secretive propaganda websites allowing people in the West to access them for the first time

The websites were leaked yesterday after a glitch by the country's systems administrators meant the web addresses were published and people were able to access them

But the sites did not remain accessible for long and most now seem to have gone offline.

However, Matt Bryant, a security engineer who found out about the glitch, told Motherboard, he was able to compile a list of all of the sites, which he then published on GitHub.

And it appears most of the sites that North Koreans have access to are dedicated to the country's leader Kim Jong Un.

On one site, kcna.kp, the top story was about a visit the North Korean leader made to a fruit farm.

Meanwhile another, rodong.rep.kp, had a section entitled 'Supreme Leader's Activities', and praised Kim Jong Un for transforming the country's youngsters.

It appears most of the sites that North Koreans have access to are dedicated to the country's leader Kim Jong Un

Many of the other pages on the sites discussed other news stories of the day, including North Korea's recent nuclear test and their tension with South Korea

Many of the other pages on the sites discussed other news stories of the day, including North Korea's recent nuclear test and their tension with South Korea.

In one opinion piece on South Korea and their president it is titled: 'Park Geun Hye Will Be Made to Pay Dearly for her Crimes against DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).'

Meanwhile other sites available are airkoryo.com.np, the domain for North Korea's national airline and nta.gov.np, a site for the country's tourist board.

And some appear to be clones for western sites with the address friend.com.kp, looking similar to Facebook.

Kim Jong-un is said to be a fan of the internet and has previously been pictured next to an iMac computer

Doug Madory, a researcher at internet monitoring and performance firm Dyn, told Motherboard: 'We didn't think there was much in the way of internet resources in North Korea, and according to these leaked zone files, we were right.'

Internet access in North Korea is available but only those with special permission are allowed online, as residents need government approval to buy a computer.
A renowned British historian who for nearly 20 years regaled audiences in South Africa with tales of the Anglo-Zulu war has died after a savage beating by armed robbers.

Robert Gerrard suffered serious brain injuries, a shattered pelvis and severe burns in the attack, during which he was beaten, tied up, and had boiling water poured over him.

He died last week aged 74 after suffering complications from his wounds, having been left unable to walk after being tortured in February.

Robert Gerrard, who was a renowned expert on the Anglo-Zulu War and a popular tour guide in South Africa, died after a brutal attack by robbers in his home

A similar fate befell his mentor, historian David Rattray, who was shot dead in 2007 by intruders at his lodge in KwaZulu-Natal.

Such was Mr Gerrard's passion for the subject - the Royal Geographical Society fellow was the resident expert at Isandlwana Lodge - that his ashes will be spread over the battlefield at Rorke's Drift next month.

The Battle of Rorke's Drift, one of the key clashes during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, was the basis of 1964 film Zulu, starring Michael Caine.

Former US President Jimmy Carter and his family were among those to be given tours by the expert, who said it was in KwaZulu 'where I started to live my passion'.

Mr Gerrard's family was steeped in South African history - his great-grandfather, Sir John Robinson, was the first prime minister of the colony of Natal between 1893 and 1897, while his father, Brigadier Bernard Gerrard, was commanding officer of the Gordon Highlanders.

Passionate: Visitors lavished praise on Mr Gerrard, who was described as passionate and knowledgeable about his subject

Mr Gerrard was to follow in his father's footsteps, serving with the Gordons in Kenya and on a secondment in Malaysia, Borneo and Thailand before leaving the army in 1969 to become a commodity trader.

While living in South Africa, his passion for British military history flourished, and he began lecturing on the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the Anglo-Boer Wars of 1881 and 1899-1902.

He penned a book about the Anglo-Zulu War, People of the Heavens, which proved an invaluable resource for researchers.

As a tour guide in the region, the historian got to know Zulu descendants of combatants and gained valuable insight into the war from their perspective.

The former army officer said it was in KwaZulu 'where I started to live my passion'

He proved popular with visitors - testimonies from people who had enjoyed his talks lavished praise on his presentation style and passion for the subject.

'Rob is an enormous draw. He is charming and terrifically knowledgeable,' an American tourist wrote on the Isandlwana Lodge website.

And a South African visitor stated: 'Rob is a great story teller and his passion for history excites you into a deeper understanding of the battles that took place here.'

Mr Gerrard was attacked at his home after returning home from dinner with guests.

A painting depicting the death of Prince Eugene Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of Napoleon, during the Anglo-Zulu War

His sister, Sally Gerrard Fox, told The Times: 'He was an incredibly fit and determined man until this.

'He would be out striding on the mountainside on tours every day.

'But he just wasn't getting better, he was forcing himself to walk again but it was clear that the attack sounded the end of his career.'

Charles Edwin Fripp's painting of The Battle of Isandhlwana of 1879 showing clashes between British and colonial troops and the Zulu army

No one has been arrested for the attack, in which thieves stole two handguns, two rifles, credit cards, and broke Mr Gerrard's finger to steal a signet ring.

Mrs Fox said: 'They beat the living hell out of him, smashed his head into the floor, tied him up, poured boiling water over him, fractured his pelvis in seven places.

'Afterwards he was shattered not only that this had happened but the brutality behind what happened, the lack of clear reason behind it.'

The divorced father-of-two suffered a suspected stroke, a collapsed lung and pneumonia, although a post mortem is yet to determine his cause of death.

'For the first time in my life, I could see that he was almost scared,' Mrs Fox said.

'I have never seen him scared of anything in my life, but he was.'
Drug-taking students are to be given testing kits on campus so they can check the content of their party pills.

Melbourne University's student union has voted to buy and hand out the kits so people know exactly what they are buying from drug dealers.

The move came after a number of students died after taking dodgy pills at music festivals, but police warned anyone using the kits that they could be arrested.

Drug-taking students are to be given testing kits on campus so they can check the content of their party pills (file picture)

Student union president Tyson Holloway-Clarke said the kits were 'to test the drugs to see if they are what they say they are'.

'If a student buys ecstasy, the kit will change colour and tell you that it's ecstasy, it won't tell you how much ecstasy, it won't tell you if it's got other things in it that might be unsafe,' he said.

'We could do what we're doing here, addressing a reality that students and young people of this age are using drugs, or we could pretend it doesn't exist.'

But police warned that anyone using the kits to test illegal drugs could be arrested for possession.

'Those handling illicit substances as part of a pill-testing service could be liable to prosecution,' a Victoria Police spokeswoman said.

The push for drug-testing kits was led by campaign group Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

Melbourne University's student union has voted to buy and hand out the kits so people know exactly what they are buying from drug dealers (file picture)

Its president, Nick Kent, admitted the tests were not foolproof but hoped it would reduce overdoses and deaths.

'Prohibition has created a situation where people are taking substances and they have no idea what is in them,' he told The Age.

A university spokesman said there were 'no plans to provide equipment to test the purity of illegal drugs'.

Victoria's upper house is investigating the effectiveness of drug testing kits and other means of reducing deaths from illegal substances.

But Premier Daniel Andrews is opposed to pill testing and the government has no plans to roll out the kits.
The Celebritiest Divorce of Them All: Brangelina to Go by Just Brad and Angelina Now

Before there was Kimye, there was Brangelina. (And, I'm told, there are a bunch of black and white photos of famous couples from back in the day.) And the greatest celebrity coupling of its time is now coming uncoupled. Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt.

I know, I know -- it's a dark time for all of us. But celebrity divorces can often teach us a few lessons about our own relationships, so let's all take a deep breath and dive into quite possibly the biggest celebrity divorce of all time.

Won't Somebody Think of the Children?

Jolie beat Pitt to the courtroom, filing legal documents on Monday citing irreconcilable differences. Her divorce petition asked for sole physical custody of the couple's six children, while only giving Pitt visitation rights. Rumors are that the source of the split has to do with Pitt's parenting style, which could be why she does not want him to have joint physical custody.

Jolie is reportedly not requesting spousal support as part of her filing.

We Want Prenup!

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question in the split is whether the couple, who first got together in 2004 but waited until 2014 to get legally hitched, ever signed a prenup or a postnup agreement. And they might have been right to take Kanye West's advice. According to Forbes' Natalie Robehmed, Pitt has earned almost twice as much as Jolie has since the marriage, raking in around $76.5 million to Jolie's $40 million in the past two years. That's a whole lot of money to divide, to say nothing of the personal property, real estate, and prior earnings the couple may have shared during the marriage.

Though they were married in France, the couple has resided in California and Jolie filed for dissolution in Los Angeles County. California is a community property state, meaning that, absent a prenup or a mutually-approved property settlement agreement, any income made or property acquired during the marriage belongs to both spouses equally, and therefore must be split equally. (Although there are some exceptions for gifts and inheritances.) Whereas property owned by a spouse prior to the marriage would remain with that spouse.

While it seems impossible, the couple is hoping to resolve their breakup quietly. More likely, we'll all have a front row seat to the end of a relationship that's been in the public eye since it began.

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Police say three people were injured and a man has been arrested

He tried to set fire to a house as people went to woman's aid, they said

Witness says man attacked a woman in the street after stabbing child

Police, ambulance and fire crews were called to scene this morning

A woman ran who had been stabbed ran naked across a road to get away from a knifeman, who had also attacked two children with a knife and set a house on fire.

The woman, thought to be aged around 25, was taken to hospital in London following the altercation at the home, where a man 'set the stairs alight', in Broadstairs, Kent, at around 7.50am.

Witnesses said a woman and her children were stabbed by her 'partner or ex-partner'.

Police confirmed a 20-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and taken to hospital for treatment.

Police are at the scene of a triple stabbing in Broadstairs, pictured, today after a naked woman was stabbed after fleeing across the road from a house which was set on fire

A cordon has been placed around the house in Albion Road, which has windows damaged by

Jeremy Talbot, pictured with wife Sally, said he gave first aid to the woman and her two children after they were attacked by the knifeman

A spokesman for Kent Police said the woman suffered stab wounds while two children had been taken to a local hospital but neither were seriously injured.

Two fire engines extinguished the blaze as police arrested one man who was seen by eyewitnesses being led away in handcuffs.

A mechanic gave first aid to the woman and her two young children.

Jeremy Talbot, 29, was driving to work this morning when he came across a 'commotion' in the street and a naked woman came out of the house followed by a man holding a bloody kitchen knife.

Mrs Talbot said her 'hubby came to the rescue' after the women and children were attacked

The father-of-two attended to the woman before kicking the door down of the family home where he was confronted by the knifeman.

Mr Talbot, from Broadstairs, Kent, said: 'Driving to work there was a big commotion in the street and somebody stopped my car and said there had been a stabbing.

'I got out my car and grabbed my first aid bag from the boot and a lady came out of the house completely naked and her partner came out behind her holding a bloody kitchen knife.

'I gave the woman first aid, she had a stab wound to her neck and five or six wounds to her back there was a lot of blood.

'I gave her first aid in the street, she was about 25, and kept her talking.

'I could see smoke coming out of the window and someone was shouting that there were kids inside the house.

'I then left her with others and kicked the door down and I could see the stairs were on the fire and the person that I think stabbed the woman was sitting on the sofa holding the kitchen knife.

'He came towards me but a neighbour who was in the house with me pushed him back as I ran upstairs to try and find the kids.'

He added: 'When I reached the top somebody from outside shouted that the kids were outside so we quickly got out the house, leaving the guy inside.

'The woman's daughter, who was about five or six, had been stabbed and I saw that she had a deep cut on her left hand between her finger and thumb.

'I don't know if she had tried to stop him or not, but the cut was dripping blood.

The incident unfolded in front of a nursery school in the road in Essex this morning

'There was a young boy there too, he must have been around ten, but I didn't see any stab wounds on him.

'As we were outside the firefighters and police turned up.

'I think the guy set the house on fire as he was the only one who was in the house when I saw smoke coming out the windows.'

His wife Sally Jane Talbot wrote about the drama on Facebook.

She said: 'Hubby to the rescue again. First aiding a woman and her child who's been stabbed by her partner and then the bloke set the house alight.

'He works in St Peters industrial estate and we were on our way taking him to work.

'She just ran across the road naked and screaming and the bloke followed with a knife and stabbed her several times including a really bad one in the neck.

'He also stabbed his daughter in the hand - not bad though. He then went in the house and set it alight.

'My hubby was doing first aid on the woman when the bloke set fire to the house and someone said there were children inside. So Jeremy kicked the door down and went in to get them.

'The bloke with the knife then went to the door and a neighbour pushed him back so Hubby could get in. Then they said the kids were out of the house, so they came back out.'

Other neighbours spoke of their shock at the incident in the 'normally quiet' street.

Jade Foster, 27, said the woman was living with her boyfriend and her twins - a boy and a girl.

Ms Foster added: 'When I came outside to smoke this morning I saw all the commotion.

'Apparently she has been airlifted to hospital with multiple stab wounds.

'I have heard the children are ok. It just so shocking. Nothing ever happens on this road.'

The scenes unfolded in front of this nursery and was witnessed by children on a school bus

Another neighbour, who declined to be named, said: 'I couldn't see anything apart from gridlocked buses and cars, with fire engines and ambulances. It's shocking this has happened here.'

A Kent Fire and Rescue spokesperson said: 'We were called to a house fire at 7.58am this morning and sent two fire engines. The road is closed for a police investigation.'

A spokesman for Kent Police said: 'At 7.50am on Wednesday 21 September, we were called to an assault at Albion Road, Broadstairs.

'Police officers are currently at the scene where three people have sustained injuries. Albion Road is closed at its junctions with Sowell Street and Church Street.

'South East Coast Ambulance Service has attended and three people have been taken to hospital.

'Kent Fire and Rescue Service are at the scene due to a report of a fire. The fire has now been extinguished.

'A man has been arrested and police are not looking for anybody else in connection with this incident.'

The spokesman added: 'One woman has been taken to a London hospital for treatment for injuries consistent with stab wounds.

'Two children have been taken to a local hospital for treatment - one for minor injuries and the other child as a precaution.
A man wielding a knife and shouting 'Allahu Akbar' has been shot and injured by a security guard after trying to storm the Israeli embassy in Turkey.

It is believed the attacker, named as 41-year-old Turkish national Osman Nuri Caliskan, launched the stabbing attack at the office in Ankara while shouting 'God is Great'.

But he was caught by security before reaching the entrance to the building and had the 12 inch knife wrapped inside newspaper.

Turkey's NTV television said the attacker tried to enter the well-defended embassy but was 'neutralised' by being shot in the leg after ignoring a police warning to stop.

Scroll down for video

Police move in to arrest a man who was shot and injured after brandishing a knife outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey

A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry says that the attacker was slightly wounded in the incident.

In a statement they said: 'The team members are unharmed. The assailant was injured before he reached the building.'

The health condition of the attacker was not made clear. It was also not clear if the person had been shot by Turkish security forces or embassy guards.

However, the Ankara governor's office said the man was mentally unstable and does not appear to have any links to any organisation.

Turkish police surround the Israeli embassy in Ankara after a man tried to storm the building today

It has also been reported that a suspicious package was also found in front of the embassy where the man was shot

Large numbers of police vehicles were dispatched to the scene and the road closed on which the building is located, an AFP correspondent said. Witnesses said they heard several shots fired.

CNN-Turk television said a suspicious package was also being investigated in front of the embassy.

The attack comes three months after Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship that left 10 Turks dead.

Under the deal, Turkey and Israel are to begin the process of exchanging ambassadors to fully restore their diplomatic ties although this has yet to formally take place.

Large numbers of police vehicles were dispatched to the scene and the road closed on which the building is located

Despite the crisis, the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul have carried on working in the last years, under heavy security.

The incident also comes with foreign missions in Turkey on a state of high alert following a spate of attacks across the country this year blamed on jihadists and Kurdish militants.

The British embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara was closed on Friday over security concerns while the German embassy offered only limited services.
A man has been arrested after killing two of his children, two stepchildren and critically injuring his wife in an attack at their home in suburban Detroit, police said.

Officers responded early Wednesday to a Dearborn Heights home after a man called police around 1.20am, saying he had just killed his family, WXYZ-TV reported.

Police found the man, identified by local media as Gregory V Green, waiting on the front porch when they arrived and he was taken into custody.

They also found a horrific scene with victims attacked in different ways.

Scroll down for video

A man has been arrested after killing his two young girls, two of his stepchildren and critically injuring his wife (all five victims pictured) at their home in Michigan, police said

Dearborn Heights police stand outside a house on Wednesday morning after the tragic attack involving a blended family of five

Green's 17-year-old stepdaughter Kara Allen and 19-year-old stepson Chadney J Allen were found dead and bound in the basement after being shot execution style, ClickOnDetroit reported.

His daughters four-year-old Kaleigh Green and six-year-old Koi Green were found dead in their beds after they were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes in a car, police said.

Their father had reportedly manipulated the tail pipe of the car, killing the children with exhaust fumes.

He then placed the young children back into bed on the ground floor of the home, police said.

The suspect's 17-year-old stepdaughter Kara Allen (left) and 19-year-old stepson Chadney J Allen (right) were found dead and bound in the basement after being shot execution style

The car where the young children were asphyxiated was parked outside the home and had a hose hooked to the exhaust that was routed into the car, police said.

Police administered CPR before they were taken to hospital, but did not survive, according to Dearborn Heights police Lt. Michael Krause.

His wife, identified as Faith Green whose age was not released by police, was found shot and stabbed in the basement, The Detroit News reported.

She was taken to Oakwood Hospital where she is listed in critical condition, and is expected to survive her injuries.

The two older children are reportedly Faith Green's children from a previous relationship while the two younger children she had with Gregory Green.

Police have not cited a motive but the killings appear to have stemmed 'from a domestic violence-type situation,' Dearborn Heights police Capt. Michael Petri said.

The suspect's wife, identified as Faith Green (pictured), was found shot and slashed in the basement with her two older children

Records show Faith Green had filed for divorce in August.

She cited a 'breakdown in the marriage relationship' in the filing in Wayne County court.

Records show she also filed for divorce from Gregory Green, 49, in 2013 but no further action was taken.

She had asked for a personal protection order that same year but it was turned down by a judge.

Her divorce lawyer, Harvey Beck, spoke briefly with the AP, calling the deaths 'a terrible situation,' but declining further comment.

In the past, police have reportedly responded to the home for domestic violence and family troubles.

The father was also reported to have a criminal record, pleading no contest to second-degree murder in 1992, according to ClickOnDetroit.

He was released from parole in April 2010 after spending 16 years in prison.

Mayor Dan Paletko, speaking near the home, called the killings 'a tragedy in every sense of the word.'

Neighbors described the family as quiet and hardworking.

'Just two or three weeks ago, they had a birthday party  balloons and all that stuff out there,' Ronnie Jones told WXYZ-TV.

'They've been working on the house the last two or three months.'

His four-year-old daughter and six-year-old daughter were found dead in their beds after they were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning in a car, police said. The man had reportedly manipulated the tail pipe of the car (pictured), killing the children with exhaust fumes

Officers responded early Wednesday to the home (pictured) after the man called police around 1.20am, saying he had just killed his family. He was taken into custody

Police at the Dearborn Heights station said no one was available to offer updated information early Wednesday, but that a news conference was likely.

The Associated Press sent emails seeking information from local and state police, who were assisting on the scene.
Borrowing fell in August compared to the same month a year ago, indicating tax receipts held up in the weeks after Brexit.

ONS chief economist Joe Grice today said the latest data indicated there was no severe shock to the economy from the referendum.

But after months of gloomy forecasts from Remain campaigners about the impact of Brexit, the new figures will boost hopes the economy will avoid recession.

As borrowing continues, total Government debt of more than 1.6trillion is still rising but it is now slightly lower as a share of GDP as the economy overall grows.

Borrowing is down in the latest official figures on Government spending - but less than the targets set at the last Budget. The ONS said the data indicated there had been no 'major effect' on the economy from the referendum

In new official data, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said public sector net borrowing, which does not include public sector banks, dropped by 900 million to 10.5 billion year on year, against economists' forecasts for 10 billion.

Government borrowing for the fiscal year to date - the period from April to August - decreased by 4.9 billion to 33.8 billion, compared with the same period last year.

Revealing the new figures, Mr Grice said: 'As the available information grows, the referendum result appears, so far, not to have had a major effect on the UK economy.

'So it hasn't fallen at the first fence but longer-term effects remain to be seen.'

Experts warned it was still too soon to make a clear assessment of the impact of the EU referendum on the economy.

Alan Clarke, head of European fixed income strategy at Scotiabank, said. 'It is a case of so far so good for the public finances this fiscal year. It is far, far too soon to expect to see any hint of a Brexit effect.'

Total Government debt will be higher again this year at 1.6trillion as the Government is still borrowing but debt is now marginally lower as a share of the whole economy

Suren Thiru, Head of Economics at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said: 'Although government borrowing fell in August, it was by less than many had expected.

'If the UK economy slows as we expect, cutting the deficit is likely to become increasingly problematic as materially weaker growth will make it more difficult to generate tax revenue.'

Today's data comes after a lower-than-expected surplus of 1 billion in July, which was down 200 million on the same month last year, and lower than forecasts of 1.6 billion.

July figures are usually higher as self-employed people pay their income tax and businesses settle corporation tax bills.

In June, Government borrowing fell to its lowest level since 2007 at 7.8 billion.

The ONS said public sector net debt excluding banks climbed to 1.6 trillion, equivalent to 83.6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).
An alleged member of an outlaw motorcycle gang drove himself a kilometre before calling emergency services after he was shot in the face in Wollongong, South Sydney.

The 29-year-old victim suffered severe facial injuries from the shooting, but managed to get behind the wheel and drive to a home in Mountain Ave, where he called Triple 0.

After he phoned emergency services at about 2.30pm, he was flown to St George Hospital in Kogarah, Sydney, for emergency surgery.

A 29-year-old man has been shot in what police believe is a targeted attack

Police said the man was attacked in Joanne St, Woonona, a northern suburb of Wollongong this afternoon, Wednesday September 21.

Police said they believe the victim was a member of an outlaw bicycle gang and the shooting was a targeted attack, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The 29-year-old suffered severe facial injuries and was airlifted to St George Hospital in Kogarah, Sydney

The man remains in hospital where he is reportedly in a serious but stable condition.

A hunt to find the gunman continues.
Advertisement

These incredible pictures show the moment a jackal defied gravity as it leaped into the air to fight off vultures who were trying to take his meal.

The hungry birds swooped in as they tried to get their claws on the jackal's kill, but it was not going to give it up without a fight.

Despite having six vultures to contend with, the determined wild dog was pictured jumping up to take on the scavengers.

Pecking order: These incredible pictures show the moment a jackal defied gravity as it leaped into the air to fight off vultures who were trying to take his meal

Dog's dinner: The hungry birds swooped in as they tried to get their claws on the jackal's kill, but it was not going to give it up without a fight

Despite having six vultures to contend with, the determined wild dog was pictured jumping up to take on the scavengers

The vultures were no match for the jackal who was able to fend them off before making a swift getaway with the carcass of a small animal between its teeth.

But it was not easy work, with the hunter taking a full 10 minutes scrapping for its dinner.

The remarkable set of pictures were taken by Australian photographer Marc Mol, who captured the jaw-dropping fracas.

The 56-year-old, who is originally from Sydney, stumbled across the scuffling animals in Deception Valley, in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana.

Jackals are known to scavenge but their long legs and curved canine teeth make them good hunters too. They mostly feed on small animals like birds and reptiles.

Vultures rarely attack healthy animals, rather waiting for other predators to kill and then eating what is left over. However, they will intimidate and chase off smaller animals to try and steal their dinner - as these opportunistic birds attempted.

Every dog has its day: The vultures were no match for the jackal who was able to fend them off after a 10-minute fight

The remarkable set of pictures were taken by Australian photographer Marc Mol, who captured the jaw-dropping fracas
San Francisco firefighters urinated in a female colleague's bed during a campaign of bullying, it has been claimed.

Officials said the crew at Station 2 in San Francisco's Chinatown launched a six-month campaign of harassment against their co-worker which also included verbal abuse.

As a result, all officers at the unit, at 1340 Powell Street, will be moved to new assignments early next month, according to a letter reportedly written by fire chief Chief Joanne Hayes-White.

San Francisco firefighters urinated in a female colleague's bed during a campaign of bullying, it has been claimed. Officials said crew at Station 2 (shown in the fire picture above) in San Francisco's Chinatown launched a six-month campaign of harassment against their co-worker which also included verbal abuse

According to SFGate, an investigation revealed claims of urination in a female firefighter's bed at the station.

Hayes-White wrote in a letter how there was 'egregious harassing and retaliatory behavior' by some of the firefighters which ended up creating a 'hostile work environment based on gender'.

She said 'deficiencies in leadership' meant the harassment lasted from January to July.

SFGate reports that neither the chief nor a department spokesman would comment on the specific case.

But Linda Simon, deputy director of the San Francisco Department of Human Resources which investigated the case, reportedly said there was 'sufficient evidence to substantiate these allegations'.

An investigation has reporedlt revealed claims of urination in a female firefighter's bed at the station (file picture)

Simon added: 'We conduct a thorough investigation. If we have a finding, then we take corrective action. And that's what happened in this case.'

However, she has not said how many people took part in the alleged harassment.
Angelina Jolie 'fired her children's nanny' because she was spotted 'flirting' around her now estranged husband Brad Pitt and it made her 'uncomfortable'.

The nanny, who cared for the couple's six children, was allegedly given the sack just months before Jolie decided to file for divorce, The National Enquirer claims.

'[Brad's] always well-liked by the staff and friendly with them, but it became obvious this nanny was flirting around him and being a little too friendly,' a source told the magazine.

'She noticed the nanny was always at the pool when Brad was there. Her paranoia grew even further when she saw him fresh out of the shower wrapped in just a towel, getting some juice while the nanny was also in the kitchen with a huge smile on her face,' they added.

Angelina Jolie, seen here in 2015, reportedly fired her children's nanny a few months before filing for divorce from Brad Pitt

The claims come as Pitt has reportedly warned Jolie he is ready to fight for joint custody of their children amid reports she told him 'I can't do this any more' before filing for divorce.

Sources close to Pitt told TMZ that he is angry at his estranged wife for allegedly spinning stories about him being a potential risk to their kids because of 'anger issues and substance abuse'.

Pitt reportedly said the actress has 'unleashed hell' because the entire family has become targets for the paparazzi while reports have also claimed that a shocking 'incident' may have prompted the divorce.

A source claimed Jolie became jealous of the children's nanny (not pictured). The family are seen here together at LAX airport

Pitt said he wanted to keep the divorce under wraps for the benefit of their children.

Over the last few days, Pitt has had conversations with Jolie pleading for her to handle the divorce 'like adults', sources told the site.

The Hollywood stars' home is now surrounded by photographers, with the Los Angeles Police Department patrolling regularly because of the media frenzy.

Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt on Monday for 'the health of her family', two years after the couple wed at their French estate Chateau Miraval.

The actress filed papers citing irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split and asked for physical custody of the couple's six children - Maddox, age 15; Pax, aged 12; Zahara, aged 11; Shiloh, aged 10; and twins Vivienne and Knox, aged eight.

Pitt has expressed his anger over Angelina Jolie's decision to file for divorce. The couple are seen here in happier times

A source close to the couple told TMZ that Jolie, 41, made the decision to file because of the way 'Brad was parenting the children,' adding that 'she was extremely upset with his methods'.

That same source claims Jolie became 'fed up' with Pitt's consumption of 'weed and possibly alcohol' mixed with his 'anger problem'.

It has also been revealed that Pitt was blindsided and was told that Jolie was divorcing him just a day before she filed the legal papers, a source told the Mirror.

Pitt allegedly visited his lawyer to discuss how to move forward in Los Angeles hours after Jolie met with her lawyer.
Jeremy Corbyn's ex-wife has defected and voted for Owen Smith in the Labour leadership contest, she revealed today.

As a bitter Labour leadership contest draws to a close today, Jane Chapman slammed her ex-husband for having old fashioned politics and questioned: 'Are the politics of the 1970s relevant to the 21st Century and to post-Brexit Britain?'

Professor Chapman, who was married to the Labour leader for five years in the 1970s, backed Mr Corbyn for the top job a year ago out of 'loyalty'.

But she said Mr Smith - who is widely expected to lose heavily when the results are revealed on Saturday - was 'younger', 'more media savvy' and 'more flexible'.

Professor Jane Chapman, who was married to Jeremy Corbyn in the 1970s, said her ex-husband's politics were no longer relevant in the 21st Century

Professor Chapman (pictured with Mr Corbyn in 1974) said Owen Smith was a 'younger' and 'more flexible' leader for Labour

In the harsh interview with BBC Radio 5Live, Prof Chapman questioned the 'relevance' of Mr Corbyn's politics to modern Britain.

The marriage between Mr Corbyn and Ms Chapman was brought to a final end after the Labour leader turned up with lover Diane Abbott months after the couple had separated.

Voting ended in the Labour leadership contest at noon today.

Prof Chapman said: 'Last time I voted for Jeremy out of personal loyalty, but I've been so saddened and really upset by some of the things this last year that I just feel that Owen's policies are also radical and that's good.

'So I don't think there's more difference in policies. But there's more difference in flexibility, media ability and I think the ability to unite the party and to have a longer term post-Brexit vision. I think that's something that's been missing.'

She said Mr Corbyn - who has been married three times - had not 'changed that much politically' since the 1970s and added: 'That begs the question, are the politics of the 1970s relevant to the 21st Century and to post-Brexit Britain?'

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured addressing supporters at a final rally last night, is expected to win heavily when the results of the Labour leadership contest are revealed on Saturday

Prof Chapman told the programme there was little different on policy between Mr Corbyn and Mr Smith.

But she said: 'It's not policies, it's leadership, it's inspiring the parliamentary party to work with him in ways that are effective in holding the opposition to account.'

Pressed on whether Mr Corbyn could improve, she said: 'I think he could develop it but it's been a bit slow and it's been a bit chaotic.
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Incredible images have captured police undergoing intense training in Nanning, China.

Pictures from September 18 show armed police taking part in various exercises including fighting in the mud.

The officers were carrying out combat training in unfamiliar territories to enhance their combat capability.

Pictures show the extreme training the officers have to go through in order to be a member of the special warfare units.

According to Xinhua, the teams of Guangxi armed police practice real combat in strange environments. The goal is to train the resilience of the armed forces.

The training aims to improve efficiency of the officers.

Officers are taught how to eliminate the enemy in just one blow, mastering the techniques of one shot one kill.

Harsh and brutal conditions: The men can be seen moving around in the mud as part of their training regime

Determination: Police officers undergo training in brutal conditions in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

Now that looks rough! During the training, the officers are trained in how to deal with combat in strange environments

That looks very muddy! During the exercises in Nanning, officers are taught how to eliminate the enemy in just one blow

Jumping around in the mud: Police undergo training in treacherous conditions in Nanning, Guangxi Autonomous Region

Kicking around in the mud: The men kick their feet around in the mud during their brutal police training exercises

An odd place to train: The teams of Guangxi armed police practice real combat in strange environments

Pictures show the extreme training the officers have to go through in order to be a member of the special warfare units
Bud Biz Barriers: Just Because Weed Is Legal, Doesn't Make the Weed Business Easy

If you haven't noticed, marijuana laws in this country are changing rapidly. Four states have already legalized recreational pot possession, and a slew of others now allow medical marijuana for those with a prescription. And for those with an entrepreneurial mind, changes in the law mean business opportunities.

But just because your state has legalized it today, doesn't mean your weed retailer can open its doors tomorrow. Several states have set up significant barriers to entry into the medical marijuana market, and if you ain't got the dough, you may be out of luck.

Prescription Restrictions

The states that have allowed medical marijuana (or are contemplating new medical marijuana laws) have included some strict statutes limiting who can grow and sell medical marijuana, the kinds of products they can sell, and the licensing requirements to even become a register grower or retailer. Florida has a Medical Marijuana Legalization Initiative on the ballot for November, but the Sunshine State is already rolling out draft regulations, the most striking of which is the hard cap of only five licensed dispensing organizations. In order to qualify to be one of the five, an agricultural nursery must have been in existence for at least the last thirty years, and even then the state required a $5 million performance bond.

Similar barriers exist in New York, where the state requires an up-front $200,000 refundable registration fee for every application in addition to the $10,000 non-refundable application fee. The Empire State also caps the number of dispensing organizations at five, and they are limited to 20 dispensaries in the state. Estimates place the start-up costs for a New York medical marijuana company in the neighborhood of $25 million.

Open Smoking Season?

If you happen to live in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, or one of the other states that has (or soon will) legalize recreational marijuana, the hurdles to starting a cannabiz may be lower, but they still exist. The biggest being finding a bank that will do business with marijuana growers and sellers. No matter what a state may say about recreational or medical marijuana, the feds still consider the drug illegal, and most banks are federally chartered.

And even if you get financing, navigating the red tape of state marijuana laws can be a nightmare. Your best bet before you jump into the bud business is to consult with an experienced commercial attorney familiar with the laws in your state.

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Ms Golden was sentenced to 24 months in prison for the crime

She pocketed $90,000 in fraudulent Centrelink payments over five years

Ms Golden has one biological child but claimed to have three more

A single mother who pocketed over $90,000 in Centrelink payments for three children that never existed has been outed after five years of brazen fraud.

Aimee Golden, 30, has one biological child but claimed to have given birth to twins named Nickolas and Jayden in 2009 and then another girl named Mikayla in 2011.

According to a report byA Current Affair, Ms Golden made up the three extra children in order to cash in on family tax benefits and single parenting payments.

She was only outed when she tried to claim Newstart allowance - financial help for those actively seeking full time work - while she was already holding down a job.

Single mother Aimee Golden, 30, (pictured) pocketed over $90,000 in Centrelink payments for three children that never existed

The single mother, who has one biological child, claimed to have given birth to twins in 2009 and then a girl in 2011. She cashed in on family tax benefits and single parenting payments

Department of Human Services general manager Hank Jongen told ACA that the latest technology allowed them to track inconsistencies in information given to different government agencies.

He said that Ms Golden, who was covertly filmed by investigators to build up a dossier of evidence proving her fraudulent activity, was XXX

'What we're looking at here is a woman, 30 years of age, who claimed $90,000 over a five-year period that she wasn't eligible for,' Mr Jongen said.

'If you look at this footage, it appears to illustrate that there is only one child in her care and that was her biological child,' Mr Jongen said.

Ms Golden was sentenced to 24 months in prison for the fraud

Ms Golden was sentenced to 24 months in prison, and was also found to have been given a 12-month good behaviour bond in 2011 for the very same offence.

The 30-year-old mother is just one of countless taxpayer-fleecing fraudsters that have been outed by Centrelink's latest crackdown on welfare scammers.

A 38-year-old Victorian man landed himself 18 months in prison after he was found to have claimed $75,000 in Newstart while running a number of businesses.

Another woman, from Tasmania, earned herself a 5 month suspended prison sentence and 3-year good behaviour bond for claiming to be a single parent while living with a man.

A 38-year-old Victorian man (pictured) landed himself 18 months in prison after he was found to have claimed $75,000 in Newstart while running a number of businesses
The family of a 90-year-old war veteran who died months after he was attacked as he rode on his mobility scooter wrote a letter to his attacker saying thanks to him, the great grandfather 'died in pain and fear.'

Ron Walker, a well-known army veteran and former Ministry of Defence dog handler who lived in Torquay, Devon, died on Wednesday morning.

Vicious thug Kevin Williams was jailed for 20 months after he admitted ABH following the unprovoked town centre attack in April.

Great-grandfather Ron Walker (pictured), a well-known army veteran and former Ministry of Defence dog handler who lived in Torquay, Devon, died on Wednesday morning

A court heard Williams repeatedly punched and then kicked Mr Walker as he rode his mobility scooter.

Witnesses saw Williams raise his arm with a clenched fist and punch Mr Walker three times in the face and then kick him in the shin so hard that his scooter almost tipped over.

Now, Mr Walker's family have paid tribute to their 'wonderful Pop' while his granddaughter, Natalie Lynn, wrote an open letter to Williams.

In it, she said: 'Because of you my grandfather's last few months were lived in pain and fear.

Vicious thug Kevin Williams (pictured right) was jailed for 20 months after he admitted ABH following the unprovoked town centre attack in April (Pictured: Mr Walker, aged 20)

'Because of you he lost his pride, dignity and trust in others. Because of you he became angry and confused.

'Because of you we were by his side, while he died afraid. Ron Walker, or as I knew him Pop, was a humble man.

'He never liked to be the centre of attention and lived his life pretty anonymously, spreading cheer and happiness through Torquay with a smile or a sweet.

'He connected with many people, sharing stories of his army days, or his time as a dog handler for the Ministry of Defence.

'He was a wonderful father, grandfather and great grandfather and will be greatly missed.'

Mr Walker started work as a farmhand at the age of 13 before moving onto the railways. He enlisted into the British Army and was posted to Palestine as part of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to keep transport networks open, due to his experience with trains

On the day of the attack businessman John Doherty, who runs Dot's Pantry, helped look after Mr Walker.

Mr Doherty knew Mr Walker well.

He said: 'Ron was my first ever customer in Dot's Pantry. Whenever I had a chance I would have a cup of tea with him.

Mr Walker (pictured) died on Wednesday aged 90, five months after the vicious and unprovoked attack

'He was a lovely old boy. Since the attack, every time I've seen him he has looked less and less well.

'It clearly had an affect on his health.'

Natalie Lynn said her grandfather died as a result of pneumonia and sepsis but said the assault had a key part to play in his rapid decline.

She said: 'Pop died from pneumonia and sepsis in the end.

'When he was assaulted he suffered two black eyes and a bloody nose and and open wound to his leg.

'The leg took four months to heal and reduced his mobility further and his emotional state continued to decline.

'He was scared to leave the house for too long and basically gave up looking after himself.

'Between the assault and his death he had four admissions to hospital and three of these were linked to the assault.

'Ten days before he died he went out on his scooter and blacked out causing a nasty injury to his leg.

'He lost a lot of blood leading to three blood transfusions and an operation.

'He declined further and there came a time when no more could be done.

'He suffered emotionally and physically ever since the assault, and although his death was not a direct result of the assault it certainly played a big factor in his rapid decline.'

Mr Walker started work as a farmhand at the age of 13 before moving onto the railways.

He enlisted into the British Army and was posted to Palestine as part of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to keep transport networks open, due to his experience on the railways.

From Palestine he was posted to Suez before returning to England as a sergeant training recruits.

After he left the army he met Alice, his future wife.

He worked for the Automobile Association before joining Longmoor Military Railway in Hampshire, and then discovered his new calling and became a dog handler for the MoD until his retirement, when he moved to Torquay.

Natalie added: 'We knew this day would come, but not how it would come.

'The last five months of his life he suffered both physically and emotionally just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

A funeral service will take place on Monday, September 26, at 11.15am at Torbay Crematorium.
A British man accused of trying to shoot Donald Trump was reportedly having a psychotic episode at the time and describes the whole incident as 'a blur'.

Autistic 20-year-old, Michael Sandford, from Surrey, says he has no memory of trying to gun down the presidential candidate after grabbing a policeman's gun at a rally in Las Vegas on June 18.

He pleaded guilty to being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm and disrupting an official function at a court in Nevada last week.

Since his arrest, Michael has been held at a high security prison in the Nevada desert and his mother, Lynne, has been campaigning for the right to see him.

Michael Sandford has been jailed after grabbing a police officer's gun at a Trump campaign rally at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in June

Earlier this month she flew out to America and was granted a meeting with her son.

He had been living in America for 18 months prior to the incident but had lost touch with home, and had a 'delusional psychotic episode' at the time of the attack, Lynne said.

She added: 'He has no memory of what happened, just describing it as a blur.

'He is now on various medications and feeling a substantial improvement, however when he realized what he had done he was horrified and very remorseful.'

She admitted Michael, who has severe OCD, anxiety, depression and previously anorexia, is 'not coping' in prison, and she has reiterated her hope that he can be sent home for treatment.

Michael Sandford, (left), from Surrey, has been visited in a Nevada jail by his mother Lynne (right)

Lynne added: 'He gets ten minutes a day exercise in an outdoor cage, but due to the searing heat, that is about all you could manage anyway.

'His cell is so small he can stretch both arms out and touch both walls, and it is only as long as the bed.'

Lynne said seeing him in jail 'was an emotional rollercoaster, very bittersweet'.

'The joy of seeing him again after so long, but the sorrow and heartache of witnessing him in that setting - where no parent ever wants to see their child.

'I was separated from Michael by a dense mesh screen. He was in leg irons.

'I'd traveled over 5,000 miles to see my son but had to make do with putting our hands to the mesh at the same place, but all I could feel was cold metal.

'However after a time I felt the warmth from his hand. At the end, I was allowed a few minutes alone with him, and we both hugged the mesh screen simultaneously and he felt one of my tears come through the mesh,' she said.

Trump was speaking to a crowd at the Treasure Island hotel and casino when the incident took place in June

Over the next two days Michael's sister and grandmother accompanied his mother to the prison, but they were only allowed to see him via video screen.

Michael, who grew up in Dorking, Surrey, is due to be sentenced on December 13, having signed a plea bargain to reduce his jail time.

He will then be moved to another prison at which point his mother hopes to start legal proceedings to have him extradited home.

The family has set up a fundraising page to help pay for the ongoing legal battle and Lynne said the response in Dorking has been exceptional.

She said: 'I have had many letters from people who remember him fondly, and hold him in the highest regard and realise how completely out of character this is for him.

'All remark how genuinely polite, caring, courteous and kind he was - along with his whacky sense of humour.
A mother has pleaded for her 17-year-old beauty queen daughter to come home amid claims she has flown from her home in Russia to Dubai to sell her virginity for 10,000.

Anna Feschenko, 17, a model who was runner-up in the Miss Moscow contest in June, travelled to the United Arab Emirates after claiming its was a prize from the pageant.

But her friends denied it was a prize and said her true intention was to join an escort service which would offer her as a virgin to Arab clients.

Anna Feschenko, 17, a model who was runner-up in the Miss Moscow contest in June, travelled to the United Arab Emirates, where it is claimed she plans to sell her virginity

She hoped to earn money to pay for her university education in Moscow.

Her travelling companion, named as Ekaterina K, 19, fled when she realised Miss Feschenko's alleged intention to work as an escort in Dubai.

She said: 'I travelled there because Anna invited me and said that it was a prize paid for by the Miss Moscow contest.

'In two days we had a scandal when I got to know the truth about why we were there.I told Anna that I was not going to stay and would go home.

'Anna tried to push me, she asked me to go away and leave her alone there. But I don't need this kind of job.'

It is believed that Miss Feschenko found a sponsor in Dubai using a website in Russia

Her friends Ekaterina, left, and Karina say that Miss Feschenko is now living in a flat in Dubai with two other girls who work as escorts

Ekaterina's parents - who flew to Dubai to bring their daughter home - informed Anna's mother who called on Russian police to help, reported Life.ru news website.

Ekaterina added: 'I believe she had a right to know. It is a privilege in the UAE to be a virgin.

'I think Anna was just impressed with the amount of money she could get.'

She also claimed Miss Feschenko was no longer living in the hotel where they originally stayed but was now in a flat in Dubai with two other eastern European girls who were ready to work as escorts.

While another friend, Karina claimed she warned her in advance about the risks of such a venture.

Olga Feschenko - Anna's mother - said she was now in touch with her daughter by text messages, and hopes she will now return to Russia

Olga Feschenko - Anna's mother - said she was now in touch with her daughter by text messages, and hopes she will now return to Russia.

But she was expecting her yesterday and she did not come.

She said: 'I am in touch with Anna, we are in contact all the time. I am worried about my daughter, I am a normal parent.

'I watch many soap operas and you know what it happening there, so I decided to rush to police.

'Usually she would always text me when she finished some activity like the gym, and now you see what happened. So I went to the police.'

Miss Feschenko has previously said she is a long distance runner who loves classical music, and plays the violin

The police say there is a limit to what they can do since the mother had given her daughter formal permission - as an under 18 - to travel to Dubai with Ekaterina acting as her guardian.

The website of the beauty pageant - at which she was crowned 'Vice Miss Moscow' as runner-up - said she is a long distance runner who loves classical music, and plays the violin.

She was actively involved in charity work and 'dreams of travelling around the world.'

Now police in Moscow are checking websites and social networks which offer girls the opportunity to 'sell' their virginity, reported Life.ru
Derbyshire County Council has changed its rules over parents taking children on holidays during term time following Jon Platt's victory

Parents in one local authority have been given the green light to take their children on holiday during term time without the risk of being fined.

Derbyshire County Council has changed its rules following Isle of Wight father Jon Platt's victory at The High Court last May.

Judges decided Mr Platt - who had originally been fined 120 by his local authority - did not break the law when he took his six-year-old daughter on a family trip to Florida.

But a month later Isle of Wight Council was told it could apply to the Supreme Court for permission to appeal against the High Court judgment.

Derbyshire County Council has now introduced interim arrangements abolishing fines while awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling - as long as a pupil's total attendance over the previous year is 94 per cent or above.

Instead, parents will be sent a letter advising them that their child's record will show the holiday, and any further absences during term time 'may result in the issue of a penalty notice'.

However, the council says the change in policy should not be taken as tacit approval for children to be taken out of school for a holiday and instead recommends that absences in term time should only be taken in 'exceptional circumstances'.

A Derbyshire County Council spokesman said: 'The council has approved new interim arrangements following the Isle of Wight High Court ruling on unauthorised pupil absences. These arrangements provide schools with a guide to help headteachers make decisions about unauthorised absences.

'While we strongly recommend pupils should not be taken out of school during term time except in exceptional circumstances, we believe the interim arrangements provide a fair and proportionate approach using the average Derbyshire annual attendance rate.'

Derbyshire County Council's interim unauthorised school absence policy now reads in full: 'Schools should continue to consider requests for holiday absence in accordance with pupil regulations (exceptional circumstances only) and submit all requests for the issue of penalty notices to the local authority in the normal way.

HOW CAN PARENTS AVOID THE HOLIDAY FINE? Derbyshire County Council has introduced interim arrangements abolishing fines while awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling. A pupil will be allowed to go on a term time holiday as long as their total attendance over the previous year is 94 per cent or above. So in order for parents with children at school in Derbyshire to take their children out of school without being fined, their children can only have been off for maximum of 11 days the year before. Advertisement

'Where overall attendance is above 94 per cent over the previous 12 months, calculated from the week after the holiday absence, penalty notices will not be issued.

'In such cases, parents will be sent a letter advising that their child's record will show the unauthorised holiday and any future unauthorised leave may result in the issue of a penalty notice.

'Where all absence, including unauthorised holiday absence, would result in an overall attendance of 94 per cent or below, penalty notices will be issued.'

Kathryn Boulton, service director at Derbyshire County Council, described the interim policy as 'fair and proportionate.'

She said: 'In the interim period, the council approved some arrangements that supports schools with some local guidance on supporting good school attendance.

'There are always exceptional circumstances and the county council believes that these interim measures provide a fair and a proportionate approach.'
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From pens with daggers to compasses inside buttons, this is the fascinating escape equipment used by Allied forces in the Second World War that appears to have come straight out of a spy film.

MI9, Britains centre for military intelligence between 1939 and 1945, invented hundreds of covert devices to help prisoners of war escape and aid the return of soldiers stranded in enemy territory.

Researchers at the War Office department even engineered maps inside Monopoly games, and their work has been revealed in a book by military veteran and historian Phil Froom entitled Evasion and Escape Devices.

Clever plan: John Waddington, Britains Monopoly distributor, was contracted by MI9 to manufacture and smuggle escape maps early in the war. Because Monopoly was a well-known game the authorities thought it would make a good platform to smuggle escape and evasion contraband into prisoner of war camps. The thickness of the board and the outer box accommodated the inclusion of hacksaws, maps and compasses - and items were even smuggled inside the dice

Engineering: An example of a hollow Bakelite dice thought to have been used to smuggle items into prisoner of war camps. This was among hundreds of covert devices invented by MI9, Britains centre for military intelligence between 1939 and 1945, to help prisoners of war escape and aid the return of soldiers stranded in enemy territory

It tells the story of how John Waddington, Britains Monopoly distributor, was contracted by MI9 to manufacture and smuggle escape maps early in the war.

Because Monopoly was a well-known game the authorities thought it would make a good platform to smuggle escape and evasion contraband into POW camps.

The thickness of the board and the outer box accommodated the inclusion of hacksaws, maps and compasses - and items were even smuggled inside the dice.

Waddington became the intelligence agencies main source for distributing escape maps and as a result were also used to supply other printed items.

This included packs of playing cards that contained individual paper map tiles concealed between the front and backs of the cards.

Cuttings from 48 cards formed a full map, the four aces provided an individual map of just roads, railways and rivers - and the joker held the map assembly key.

Another of MI9s bright ideas was to smuggle concentrated dyes, meaning that if an Allied soldier was behind enemy lines they could dye their uniform to avoid being noticed and captured.

One way of getting the ink in to enemy territory was through the use of artists pastels, which actually contained compressed and concentrated dyes.

Multiple uses: An example of an early MI9-designed escape pen with a compass hidden inside of the cap, and a magnetised pen clip for secondary use as a compass needle. A new book by military veteran and historian Phil Froom entitled Evasion and Escape Devices has brought the full extent of the many cunning Allied tactics to light

Bright idea: An MI9 concept drawing for what Jaques of London called their 'Whittington Chess Set'. The sides of the set have been hollowed to include a variety of escape and evasion items. One of MI9s ideas was to smuggle concentrated dyes, meaning that if an Allied soldier was behind enemy lines they could dye their uniform to avoid being noticed and captured. One method of transporting this dye into camps was inside chess pieces

Another method of transporting this dye into camps was inside the ink bulbs of special fountain pens or chess pieces.

The most astonishing masquerade involved concealing the dyes within candy almonds - prisoners knew to avoid the pink confectionery since they were inedible.

MI9 intelligence officer Clayton Hutton was responsible for a large number of the evasion devices that were produced and he is credited with assisting with the escape of 35,000 Allied soldiers.

One of his incarnations was the escape pen, which was also used by American intelligence agency, MIS-X.

So as to incorporate as many escape aids as possible Mr Hutton was keen to use existing components of the pen itself.

As well as incorporating the uniform dye he could squeeze in multiple compasses, maps and specially compressed Aspirin and Benzedrine tablets.

Another of Mr Huttons obscure conceptions was the needle gun.

The pen shaped armament was powered by two extremely powerful springs that fired handmade projectiles crafted from gramophone needles and shaving brush hairs.

Covert: The Gillette Blue blades used by MI9either magnetised as compasses or to conceal messages and ship them to within the camps. MI9 intelligence officer Clayton Hutton was responsible for a large number of the evasion devices that were produced and he is credited with assisting with the escape of 35,000 Allied soldiers

Secretive: One of Mr Hutton's incarnations was the escape pen, which was also used by American intelligence agency, MIS-X. So as to incorporate as many escape aids as possible Mr Hutton was keen to use existing components of the pen itself. As well as incorporating the uniform dye he could squeeze in multiple compasses, maps and specially compressed Aspirin and Benzedrine tablets

The needle could travel up to 40ft with decent accuracy.

Needle guns were shipped to France and distributed to the resistance groups, who used them to harass the German occupation troops.

The Resistance started rumours among the Germans that the darts were actually poisoned meaning that every German who was shot would rush to hospital terrified that he had suffered a fatal wound.

Perhaps the Allies boldest scheme involved fabricating 32 fictitious charities, whose names were used to front goods-running operations.

One such charity, the Lancashire Penny Fund, concealed escape equipment into 18 German POW camps inside Christmas crackers.

The brash British authorities included a letter accompanying the crackers requesting the camp commandant present the crackers to the camp leader to help brighten their spirits during the difficult times.

The scheme was successful, with 50 per cent of the crackers being passed on by the German authorities.

Author Mr Froom, 56, served nine years in the British Army in Signals Intelligence before taking up a role in the defence industry.

A copy of the original secret design drawing of the dart gun dated February 1943 (left), and a concept drawing of artists' pastels (right) that were actually concentrated dyes shipped into camps by MI9 which allowed escapees to dye their uniforms

The medal collector and military historian from near Reading, Berkshire, spent around 13 years researching and writing the book.

He said: I decided to write the book because there are so many fascinating wartime stories that remain untold, its a captivating topic to study.

As a collector and during my time in the army I came in to contact with bits and pieces which peaked my interest.

I then realised there was nothing documenting the evasion and escape devices used by the Allies during WWII so I decided to do it myself.

It wasnt easy because so much information on the subject is incomplete or inconsistent.

I had to do a lot of cross-referencing and detective work to ensure everything was correct.
90 day limit has been taken out of the new plan today

The EU has today scrapped a 90-day limit to its landmark free mobile phone roaming policy, promising checks to curb abuse after the initial plan ran into fierce criticism.

The Commission announced the original 'free roaming' plans with huge fanfare in early 2015, but when it unveiled the details this week consumer groups were outraged by a limit to just 90 days of free roaming per year.

European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker on Friday ordered officials back to the drawing board, and they have returned with a limitless policy.

European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker on Friday ordered officials back to the drawing board, and they have returned with a limitless policy

'We will not put any kind of limits on duration or, how many days (travellers) can enjoy no roaming surcharges, but we decided to put some clear safeguards on residency,' EU Commissioner for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip said at a news briefing.

Consumer groups had assumed the Commission's pledge to end mobile roaming charges - charges when people use their phone outside their home country - meant exactly that, without conditions or caveats.

As a result, they responded angrily to the 90-day 'fair use' limit, charging that Brussels had caved in to the powerful telecoms companies for whom roaming charges have long been a lucrative source of extra income.

Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein insisted Friday that the decision was perfectly routine, that Juncker had not been fully aware of all the details and when he had seen them and the reaction, had asked officials to try again.

The decision may prove embarrassing for Juncker as he prepares his annual State of the Union address to Parliament next week when he will try to rally support for the EU project in the wake of Britain's shock vote to quit the bloc.

The initoal pact was greeted with anger by some consumers who said the 90 day limit on free roaming was unfair and not part of the original plan

The Commission had made the end of roaming charges a top priority, promising to remedy a constant cause of complaint from consumers returning home from holiday to find they have run up huge bills after using their mobile phones abroad.

EU Commissioner for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip described the end of roaming fees 'as one of the best achievements of the European Union in the last few years.'

As for the 90-day limit, that was needed to 'strike the right balance' between consumers and companies so as to ensure continued investment, Ansip said when announcing the plans last week.
Passengers set to fly to Ibiza were delayed after one of the flight attendants was arrested for being 'too drunk to fly'.

Jacqueline Madden was arrested at Glasgow Airport on Monday evening for allegedly being over the limit of alcohol while working.

The 50-year-old was due to fly to Ibiza from Glasgow but was arrested at the airport, delaying a Thomson Airways flight by two hours.

Passengers set to fly to Ibiza with Thomson Airways were delayed by two hours after one of the flight attendants was arrested for being 'too drunk to fly' (file photo)

The flight was due to leave at 8pm but didn't take off until 10pm.

Thomson Airways confirmed Madden of Houston, Renfrewshire, has been suspended.

Madden was detained in police custody on Monday night and released yesterday.

She was due to appear at Paisley Sheriff Court on Tuesday but the hearing has been moved to a later date, Glasgow Live has reported.

Jacqueline Madden, 50, was arrested at Glasgow Airport on Monday evening for allegedly being over the limit of alcohol while working

A spokeswoman said: 'We will conduct our own investigation to ensure appropriate action is taken.

'The safety of our customers and crew is always our first priority.'
Moving vans were seen arriving at the couple's Los Feliz compound on Wednesday morning

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Angelina Jolie and her team have set up a war room in a secretly rented Los Angeles home as they take onBrad Pitt in the divorce of the century.

At the same time, a source close to the couple tells DailyMail.com that Pitt just wants to resolve the divorce amicably for the sake of the children, whose safety is his main concern at this time.

'Brad still cares for Angelina very much and respects her as the mother of his children,' says the source.

'But after the rhetoric that has been put out over the past 24 hours about his drinking and doing drugs, along with the completely untrue rumors about him having an affair with his co-star Marion Cotillard, he is hoping to be able to turn the volume down.'

The source then added that while people close to Jolie have been going after Pitt in the press, he is making sure that his friends and colleagues say nothing negative about his estranged wife.

'People close to him specifically avoided criticizing her while trying to stay positive in defending him at Brad's request,' explains the source.

Meanwhile, moving vans were seen arriving at the couple's Hollywood Hills compound on Wednesday morning.

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It's on: Angelina Jolie has set up a war room in Los Angeles as she prepares to take on Brad Pitt (couple above at the 2015 Academy Awards)

Getting to work: Moving vans were seen entering the couple's Los Feliz compound on Wednesday (above)

Getting the job done: Jolie rented her new home in Los Angeles without Pitt's knowledge,m leaving him shocked according to a source

All about the children: A source close to the couple says that Pitt's main concern at this time is the safety of their children (family above in June 2011)

Not happy: Pitt reportedly said Jolie 'unleashed hell' because the entire family has now become paparazzi targets (couple above in Mr. and Mrs. Smith)

Pitt is said to be 'furious' at Jolie for filing for divorce, a move he says could put their kids at risk, and sources have now said there is 'no chance' he will allow her to claim sole custody.

Sources close to Pitt told TMZ that he is angry at his estranged wife for allegedly spinning stories about him being a potential risk to their kids because of 'anger issues and substance abuse'.

Pitt reportedly said the actress has 'unleashed hell' because the entire family has become targets for the paparazzi while reports have also claimed that a shocking 'incident' may have prompted the divorce.

Over the last few days, Pitt has had conversations with Jolie pleading for her to handle the divorce 'like adults', sources told the site. He said he wanted to keep the divorce under wraps for the benefit of their children.

Pitt was ever ready to to counselling for Jolie.

'He offered to improve and even go into intense therapy. The reality is Brads still madly in love with Angelina. He adores her and never intentionally tried to hurt her,' a source told The Sun.

'Yes, he did drink and smoke weed. And yes, they did have fights where hed raise his voice. He knows he needs to improve and is trying to make himself a better person for the sake of the children.'

The Hollywood stars' home is now surrounded by photographers, with the Los Angeles Police Department patrolling regularly because of the media frenzy.

Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt on Monday for 'the health of her family', two years after the couple wed at their French estate Chateau Miraval.

The actress filed papers citing irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split and asked for physical custody of the couple's six children - Maddox, age 15; Pax, aged 12; Zahara, aged 11; Shiloh, aged 10; and twins Vivienne and Knox, aged eight.

A source close to the couple said that Jolie, 41, made the decision to file because of the way 'Brad was parenting the children,' adding that 'she was extremely upset with his methods'.

That same source claimed Jolie became 'fed up' with Pitt's consumption of 'weed and possibly alcohol' mixed with his 'anger problem'.

It has also been revealed that Pitt was blindsided and was told that Jolie was divorcing him just a day before she filed the legal papers, a source told the Mirror.

This despite the fact that Jolie listed their official separation date as September 15 - last Thursday.

Pitt allegedly visited his lawyer to discuss how to move forward in Los Angeles hours after Jolie met with her lawyer.

Jolie, who is being represented by Laura Wasser, is not asking for spousal support in the divorce. Wasser most recently represented Johnny Depp in his divorce from Amber Heard.

The couple had not been seen together in months and were last photographed on a red carpet together in November of last year while promoting their film By The Sea.

The source said the pair had been planning a trip to London but it was canceled Monday, the same day Jolie filed for divorce.

Under California divorce law, the couple will not be allowed to leave the state or the country with any of their six children unless they have the consent of the other parent.

The couple are both expected to begin filming in the near future on two big projects, with Pitt set to reprise his role as Gerry Lane in a World War Z sequel and Jolie once again putting on her horns to play the classic Disney villain Maleficent.

Jolie will also soon be doing press for her Netflix documentary First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, while Pitt will be out promoting Allied before it bows in theaters later this year.

He also stars alongside Tilda Swinton in the 2017 release War Machine, which has wrapped production.

Tense moment: A source also claims Jolie became 'fed up' with Pitt's consumption of 'weed and possibly alcohol' mixed with his 'anger problem' (couple above in November 2014 in Sydney)

Last shot: The couple the last time they were seen together at a LA pharmacy with son Knox (above) on his birthday

The Hollywood stars' home is now surrounded by photographers, while the Los Angeles Police Department (pictured) patrols regularly because of the media frenzy

Pitt and Jolie began dating in early 2005 after they met on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith.

Page Six claimed that it was after Jolie learned through a private eye that Pitt may have been cheating on her with Marion Cotillard on the set of their new film Allied that she made the decision to split from the actor.

But a source close to the couple claims that the actress was so jealous of Cotillard that she refused to speak with the French star after meeting her on the set of the film Allied.

'Angelina completely ignored Marion on the set, and when Marion tried to talk to her she just looked the other way,' the source told DailyMail.com.

'Marion was devastated. Here she is thinking she is going to meet this great UN ambassador and instead Angelina refuses to speak to the woman because of her own jealousy.'

The source also said that rumors of an affair between Pitt and Cotillard are '100 per cent false', and that Pitt's main concern at this time is his children.

'He does not want them reading anything negative in the press about himself or their mother,' said the source.

'He's not going to get dirty.'

As for the reason for Jolie's jealousy the source said: 'Because of the way women view her she projects her own stuff onto innocent women like Marion.'

Cotillard, 40, has been in a relationship with actor and writer Canet, 43, since 2007, and the couple have a 5-year-old son, Marcel.

The French magazine Closer is reporting that Cotillard has confirmed that she is expecting her second child with partner Guillaume Canet this December - after being dragged into the Brangelina divorce drama.

Shutting it down: A source close to Pitt claims rumors of an affair with Marion Cotillard (above in Allied) are '100 per cent false'

Out and about: Cotillard with her partner Guillaume Canet in 2015 (left) with whom she has a five-year-old son; At the premiere of her film Juste La Fin Du Monde in Paris last week (right)

An attorney for Jolie, Robert Offer, said Tuesday in a statement that she has filed for the dissolution of the marriage 'for the health of the family'.

He then added: 'She will not be commenting, and asks that the family be given its privacy at this time.'

Jolie's manager Geyer Kosinski also released a statement, saying: 'Angelina will always do what's in the best interest to protect her children.

'She appreciates everyone's understanding of their need for privacy at this time.'

Pitt said in a statement to DailyMail.com: 'I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.'

Cotillard has yet to respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com, but a source close to the actress said: 'Marion and Guillaume are blissfully happy, and these kind of claims are not what Marion wants to be hearing.

'Claims that she's cheating on Guillaume with Brad will leave her absolutely devastated. This doesn't sound like her at all.'

The source added: 'She enjoys her family time, and wants to enjoy more of it. All this fuss will be a huge shock to her.'

This will be the third divorce for Jolie, who was previously married to Elementary star Johnny Lee Miller for three years after the pair met on the set of the film Hackers.

She later wed Billy Bob Thornton just two months after the pair began dating when they met on the set of Pushing Tin.

Thornton had been engaged to actress Laura Dern at the time.

Pitt's first marriage to Aniston ended in 2005, with rumors swirling at the time that it was because of his relationship with Jolie.

Now, friends say Aniston sees the impending divorce of Pitt and his second wife as 'karma' for what happened to her 11 years ago.

An insider told Us Weekly, that Aniston commented on Tuesday after the split was revealed: 'Yeah, that's karma for you!'

The actress, 47, 'admittedly feels sort of satisfied about Brad and Angelina's split', according to the insider.

Prior to that Pitt was engaged to Gwyneth Paltrow and dated actress Juliette Lewis for three years in the early 1990s, despite being a decade older than the then teenager.

The split comes less than a year after the two released By the Sea, which told the story of an unhappily married couple.

Jolie directed and starred in the film alongside Pitt, and admitted how difficult the shoot was at times.

'It was our way of testing ourselves. We knew that if we could get through this, we'd come out even stronger and happier. And we did,' she said of making the film.

'We've always liked putting ourselves through challenges, even though it was maybe a little more dangerous for us as a couple.'

She then added: 'I don't think we want to go through it again though.'

In another interview Jolie said of the unhappy couple at the center of the film, played by herself and Pitt: 'It almost makes you get past those issues because you can laugh at them.

'You do a film about bad marriage and you witness that behavior. You study it, you let it out, you attack each other and then you just want to hold each other and make sure you never behave that way.'

The two also said that the filming of the movie on Malta served as their honeymoon.

Past love: Pitt was previously married to actress Jennifer Aniston (left in 1999, right in 2005 days before they announced their split)

Caught: The first photo of the pair as a couple was published in April 2005, showing them with son Maddox in Kenya (above)

Former flames: Pitt was in a three-year relationship with Juliette Lewis (on left at the 1992 Academy Awards); Pitt was engaged to Gwyneth Paltrow (on right at the 1992 Academy Awards)

Jolie adopted her first son Maddox in March 2002, two years before she met Pitt on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

The film was originally set to star Nicole Kidman, but the actress dropped out at the last second.

The couple denied that they were together, even after US Weekly ran photos in April 2005 of the two playing with Maddox at their rented villa on Diani Beach, Kenya.

Shortly after it was revealed that Pitt was by Jolie's side three months later when she adopted daughter Zahara from an orphanage in Ethiopia.

Soon after, Pitt formally adopted Jolie's son Maddox, with the children changing their surname to Jolie-Pitt.

The pair finally announced they were together in 2006 after Jolie became pregnant with Pitt's child.

Shiloh Jolie-Pitt was born in May 2006 in Namibia, with the couple choosing to give birth in Africa to avoid a press frenzy.

The following March the couple adopted again, this time traveling to Vietnam and adding three-year-old Pax Thien as the newest member of the family.

Jolie then became pregnant once more, confirming in May 2008 that the couple was expecting twins.

Knox and Vivienne were born in July of that year, with the first photos of the two selling for an astounding $14 million in a deal between Hello and People.

The two held off on getting married however, but said in interviews that their six children wanted them to tie the knot.

They finally revealed that they were engaged in April 2012, and were married a little over two years later in August 2014.

During that time, Jolie secretly underwent a double mastectomy in February 2013 after discovering she had a defective BRCA-1 gene that put her at high risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers.

Exes: This will be the third divorce for Jolie, who was previously married to actors Johnny Lee Miller (left in 1998) and Billy Bob Thornton (right in 2002)

They do: Pitt and Jolie's wedding ceremony featured only their six children, and Jolie wore a custom Versace dress which featured drawings done by her sons and daughters

Weighing in: 'It's very sad. Something very serious must have happened for Angelina to make a decision like this,' said Jolie's father John Voight (pair above in 2001, Jolie with brother James Haven on right at the Golden Globes in 2000)

Jolie later had her ovaries removed in early 2015, something she spoke about last November with NBC's Tom Brokaw in her first joint interview with Pitt in more than a decade.

In that interview, Jolie praised Pitt for his support while she underwent the two procedures.

'I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasn't something where I was going to feel less of a woman, because my husband wasn't going to let that happen,' said Jolie.

Pitt meanwhile said he would do 'whatever's got to be done to keep the family together', adding that he would 'keep the family together as long as possible'.

He then added: 'This was her charge, no question. It's a scary decision. There's many things that can go wrong and go many different directions.'

The couple's wedding took place at Chateau Miraval, their home in France.

The secret ceremony featured only their six children, and Jolie wore a custom Versace dress which featured drawings done by her sons and daughters.

Jolie's actor father Jon Voight spoke about his daughter's high-profile split in an interview with Inside Edition on Tuesday.

'It's very sad. Something very serious must have happened for Angelina to make a decision like this,' said Voight.

He then added: 'I am concerned for Angie and the children, and hopefully I'll be seeing them very soon.'

Former co-star and friend George Clooney was working with President Obama at the United Nations to solve the global refugee crisis, when he found out about the divorce.

Clooney could not hide his shock when he was told his friends had split.

When he was asked about the news at the UN General Assembly in New York by CNN, shocked George asked, 'What happened?'

And upon learning Jolie was the one who had lodged divorce papers, the 55-year-old said: 'I didn't know that. Wow.

'It's an unfortunate story about a family. I feel very sorry to hear that.'

On the market: Pitt and Jolie are now reportedly trying to sell their French estate, Chateau Miraval (above)

Main pad: When in the US, the family spends most of their time in the Los Feliz home that Pitt bought in 1994 and where he once lived with Aniston (above)

Breaking the news: CNN's Richard Roth had the delicate task of informing George Clooney of his friends' split while Clooney was working with President Obama at the United Nations to solve the global refugee crisis

The couple's combined wealth has been estimated at $400 million with much of it tied up in property they've collected all over the world.

That includes their aforementioned French property, Chateau Miraval, in addition to multiple estates in California and a mansion in New Orleans.

They listed their French Quarter home back in 2015 for $6.5 million, then slashed the asking price on their Big Easy home by $850,000, bringing it to $5.65 million.

That property is still on the market.

The family's main residence however is still the Los Feliz home that Pitt purchased from Elvira, Mistress of the Dark back in 1994.

He used to live at the Los Feliz home with Aniston.

Pitt snapped up that property for just $1.7 million, but then spent years doing massive renovations on the property while also buying up nearby lots when they went on the market.

The two also have at least one apartment in New York City, a 12,000 acre wildlife preserve in Cambodia, and used to own a compound in Malibu, which they sold in 2011 to Pitt and Aniston's good friend Ellen DeGeneres.

The couple also started the Jolie-Pitt Foundation together in 2006.

The foundation has donated millions of dollars to diverse causes such as efforts to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina and the tornado that ravaged Joplin, Missouri; children's health centers in Ethiopia and Cambodia; the N/a'an ku se Foundation in Namibia; GlobaL Action for Children; the HALO Trust; and Doctors Without Borders.

The foundation's site has been taken down for 'renovation'.

BRANGELINA - A TIMELINE OF A VERY HOLLYWOOD ROMANCE May 2004 : Although Brad is married to Jennifer Aniston at the time, rumors of an on-set romance swirl after Pitt and Angelina Jolie start filming Mr & Mrs Smith. January 2005 : Brad and Jennifer announce in a joint statement that after 'much thoughtful consideration' they had decided to split. They add: 'We happily remain committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another.' March 2005 : Jennifer files for divorce citing 'irreconcilable differences' as speculation about Brad and Angelina's romance continued. April 2005 : Brad and Angelina's relationship is confirmed after paparazzi photographs of them on holiday in Kenya with her son Maddox surfaced. They have yet to speak publicly about it. July 2005 : Jennifer is reportedly left heartbroken when Brad and Angelina take part in a revealing photo shoot for W magazine entitled Domestic Bliss. The photo essay shows them as a couple with children. Later that month Angelina adopts her second child, daughter Zahara, from Ethiopia. September 2005 : Jennifer slams Brad as having a 'sensitivity chip missing' following the W photo shoot, which he brainstormed. October 2005 : Brad and Aniston's divorce is finalized. January 2006 : Angelina and Brad announce she is pregnant with their first child while Brad applies to formally adopt her children Maddox and Zahara. May 2006 : The couple's first biological child Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt is born in Swakopmund, Namibia. December 2006 : Angelina tells Vogue that while filming Mr & Mrs Smith, she couldn't 'wait to get to work' to see Brad. Two years later, Jennifer brands the comments 'uncool'. March 2007 : Jolie adopts three-year-old Pax Thien from Vietnam. May 2008 : At the Cannes Film Festival, Angelina confirms she is expecting twins. Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline are born in July. October 2008 : Angelina reveals her romance with Brad began while he was married to Jennifer as she says they 'fell in love' on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith. The pair had always maintained up until this point that their relationship only started after he split from Jennifer. September 2011 : Brad tells Parade magazine that before Angelina he 'wasn't living an interesting life'. He added: 'I think that my marriage had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn't.' He said he's finally a 'satisfied man' with Angelina. He later insisted the comments were misunderstood, adding: 'Jen is an incredibly giving, loving, and hilarious woman who remains my friend.' December 2011/January 2012 : The couple admit in separate interviews that the children are encouraging them to marry. While they had planned to wait until gay marriage was legal, they reveal the pressure from the children is strong. April 2012 : Brad and Angelina reveal their engagement. February 2013 : Angelina has a secret double mastectomy after discovering she had a defective BRCA-1 gene that put her at high risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers. She tells the world about it in a New York Times Op Ed in May. July 2014 : It is announced that Brad and Angelina will reunite on the big screen for the first time since Mr & Mrs Smith. Jolie will write and direct  the 'intimate, character-driven drama' By the Sea. August 2014 : The couple tie the knot in a secret ceremony at Chateau Miraval in France and after a short family honeymoon in Nice, the Jolie-Pitts head to Malta to start shooting By The Sea. September 2016 : Angelina files for divorce citing 'irreconcilable differences'. Advertisement




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Thousands of teenage students took to the streets of Portsmouth as they celebrated the start of their university careers during Fresher's Week.

Drunken revellers were photographed lying on the pavement, while scantily-clad girls marched through the city centre.

Some of the youngsters, living away from home for just a few days can be seen vomiting, screaming and collapsing on the street.

One group of girls were spotted wearing a figure-hugging leotard printed with the legend: 'Don't Tell Daddy.'

The remains of kebabs were seen smeared all over the side of the pavement as the streets were strewn with rubbish generated during the debaucherous night out.

Security guards, bouncers and police tried to keep the teenagers safe after many over-indulged the special offers available during their first week in college.

One group of girls was spotted walking through Portsmouth last night wearing bathing suits emblazoned with Dirty Disco

Some of the more daring girls on the streets had a message for their fathers which might cause them some concern

Some of the young women took a moment to sit beside a monument near the Guildhall in Portsmouth to catch their breath

Most of the students seemed to be enjoying themselves as some of the clubs suggested a certain dress code for the night

One man with his friends, was carrying a sign warning of 'Wet Floors' which was an appropriate cautionary tone for the night

This girl is being assisted by two secuirty guards and her friends as she sat momentarily on the ground near a night club

One chap decided to take a different perspective on the night by gazing at the stars supported ably by the pavement

Here, a couple of students mounted a lion outside Portsmouth's Guildhall while a friend captures the moment for posterity

In traditional student fashion, some gentlemen borrowed a shopping trolley so they could take their mop home with them
Genres : Drama, Action

Starring : Bernardo Ruiz

Director : Bernardo Ruiz

Plot Synopsis

"Kingdom of Shadows" takes an unflinching look at the human cost of the U.S.-Mexico drug war through the perspectives of three unlikely individuals. Sister Consuelo Morales, based in the devastated city of Monterrey, prods government officials to take action against the drug cartels on behalf of grieving families whose loved ones have gone missing. Texan rancher Don Henry Ford Jr. offers historical context for the evolution of the hyper-violent state of drug trafficking today. He recounts his career as a smuggler during the 1980s, before being imprisoned for importing marijuana. Undercover agent-turned-senior Homeland Security officer, Oscar Hagelsieb, recounts his own remarkable journey, and offers a unique perspective on the U.S.' role in the drug war. As the child of undocumented parents, Oscar grew up in an impoverished neighborhood where many of his peers gave in to the temptations of the drug economy. "Kingdom of Shadows" reveals the human side of an often misunderstood conflict that has resulted in a growing human-rights crisis.
An entrepreneur has created a device that allows people to pay other internet users to use their wi-fi on the go, which he claims is the web's answer to Uber.

David Poxon is the Queensland University of Technology PhD student behind the start up company Velvet, which has constructed a $60 gadget that creates a secondary wi-fi network for people to share their service with strangers.

Users who are wasting their high data plans simply set up the device, allocate how much data they want shared and wait for travellers or passersby to log in, earning them almost $4 for every gigabyte used.

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David Poxon (pictured) is the Queensland University of Technology PhD student behind the start up company Velvet which allows people to share their internet service with strangers

'We want people to turn their routers into hotspots and then be paid for it,' he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Velvet website estimates you could earn $30 for sharing nine gigabytes worth of data, while you can expect to bring in over $3,000 for sharing more than 1000.

The software engineer came up with the idea while studying in France after having issues finding readily available wi-fi in the city, which reminded him how much data was being wasted on his plan back at home.

He then developed Velvet's Hotshot device which creates a secure network for others to divide their monthly data allocation, with buyers spending $5 per gigabyte.

Velvet's Hotshot device creates a secure network for others to divide their monthly data allocation and share it with others in exchange for a fee

Mr Poxon said he wanted to 'give life to the concept of the sharing economy', creating a community that operates much like the ride-sharing app, Uber (pictured)

'It's a win-win because it gives buyers easy access to data without needing a phone company contract,' Mr Poxon said

'It's a win-win because it gives buyers easy access to data without needing a phone company contract,' he told the ABC.

Mr Poxon said he wanted to 'give life to the concept of the sharing economy', creating a community that operates much like the ride-sharing app, Uber.

'Velvet will allow you to buy only the data you need for what you want to do online,' he said, adding it will be particularly useful for those who are travelling or don't want to lock into long term contracts.

'Cafes or Airbnb hosts might like to sell their Wi-Fi through Velvet, or people living in apartment buildings or other places with close neighbours.'

Mr Poxton said the platform will be particularly useful for those who are travelling or don't want to lock into long term contracts

Mr Poxon warned users will have to check with their contracts before signing up to onsell their data as some telecommunications companies do not allow it.

'You need to know your terms and conditions and it depends on what telco people are with,' he said.
John Curtice, one of Britain's top pollsters, said there was no 'buyer's remorse' among the public after the shock result in June

Britain does not regret voting for Brexit and voters have clear red lines in how the country should quit the EU, a top pollster has found.

Professor John Curtice, who works on major exit polls at general elections, said there was no 'buyer's remorse' among the public after the shock result in June.

The figures will come as a blow to Remain campaigners attempting to stir support for a second referendum on Britain's future in Europe months after Brexit was backed 52 per cent to 48 per cent on June 23.

More than twice as many people oppose a second poll than support another referendum.

At a briefing in Westminster today, Mr Curtice said: 'Very few minds have been changed - there are very few signs of regret.'

The top priority for voters - supported by 81 per cent of them - is ending Britain's financial contributions to the EU that every year run to billions of pounds.

A close second is ending free movement of people, backed by 79 per cent, which means ending Britain's membership of the single market as it leaves the wider EU.

The pollster told The Mirror: 'Most people do not feel European in this country. And so there is an argument about the legitimacy of this 350million that we don't 'control', that the EU decides how is spent.

'(People think) - ''Why does the EU have the right to spend 'our' money?''.'

Also at the event, Professor Matthew Goodwin added that the vote had also defined the core liberal v conservative battle  or 'identity politics' - currently dividing Britain and fomenting the rise of Ukip and other anti-establishment political groups.

Theresa May, pictured with European Council president Donald Tusk at the UN last night, has insisted 'Brexit means Brexit'

Theresa May has repeatedly insisted 'Brexit means Brexit' since becoming Prime Minister

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron used his party conference this week to launch a campaign for a second referendum on the Brexit deal.

He said Prime Minister Theresa May would be 'pragmatic' when it became apparent no deal would be popular, in the best interests of Britain and endorsed by hard-line Eurosceptics.

Labour leadership contender Owen Smith has also spent the summer campaign urging a second referendum to try and dilute the Brexit vote.
A British soldier facing prosecution over the drowning of an Iraqi teenager has accused the Army of 'betraying its finest' by leaving him to be 'hounded' over the death.

The serviceman is one of three - including a decorated major - who have been pursued by the courts for 13 years over the death of Said Shabram.

Said, 19, drowned in the Shatt al-Arab river near Basra, southern Iraq, after allegedly being forced into the water at gunpoint by British troops in 2003.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat) recommended prosecution even though a military investigation in 2006 cleared the men, two of whom are still serving.

Said Shabram, 19, (pictured) drowned in the Shatt al-Arab river near Basra, after allegedly being forced into the water at gunpoint by British troops in 2003

The soldier, who spoke anonymously, said the Army has 'failed in its most basic duty of care' by leaving them unsupported.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the man said: 'The reality of 21st Century warfare is now that anyone in the world, even our enemies, can make any allegation against British forces no matter how absurd, and the British Government and Army will stand and watch in utter indifference as it destroys their lives and careers.

'The Army has surrendered its own powers of discipline and investigation to a private company and betrayed its finest people to protect itself from scrutiny at the highest levels.'

He said the Army's top brass have sacrificed junior ranks to protect themselves.

A British soldier facing prosecution over the drowning of the Iraqi teenager has accused the Army of 'betraying its finest' by leaving him to be 'hounded' over the death (stock)

'Regardless of the allegation, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Army has failed in its most basic duty of care', he said.

'There are veterans who have been persecuted for years by Ihat, but haven't heard a single word of support from the Army, yet alone legal or psychological support.'

His comments come after Theresa May insisted she will not allow an 'industry of vexatious allegations' against British troops over claims of abuse in Iraq.

Concerns have been raised over the 'industrial scale' of claims lodged with Ihat supported by the legal aid system.

Mrs May has insisted that action had been taken to address false claims and Ihat's work would be completed by the end of 2019, after a review of the system by former director of public prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith.

Johnny Mercer MP, a member of the Defence Select Committee who is heading an investigation into Ihat, branded the legal pursuit of troops 'a national disgrace'.

His comments come after Theresa May (pictured) insisted she will not allow an 'industry of vexatious allegations' against British troops over claims of abuse in Iraq

Mr Mercer, a former army officer who served in Afghanistan, called for Ihat to be axed.

He told Today: 'I feel that we asked a generation of our young people to conduct a deeply unpopular war, poorly resourced, poorly planned, and when they return to the United Kingdom they are then pursued for decades afterwards by spurious allegations - what has become a self-fulfilling and entirely self-inflicted industry, financed by the taxpayer, which has yet to produce a single prosecution.'

He said the UK has done its servicemen and women 'a huge disservice', adding: 'A process of seeking compensation by foreign nationals run by a private company is now ruining lives for both those who are serving and those who are retired, and it is not the way we look after our servicemen and women in this country.'

Mr Mercer said European human rights law should not be applied to the battlefield and that 'absolutely Ihat should be shut down'.

But Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the British Army's chief legal adviser in Iraq in 2003, said many of the legal claims brought against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) have been proven.

He told Today: 'I hear the words vexatious and spurious bandied around, but to date there have been 326 settled cases, and the Government has paid up 20 million.

'Now if the Government paid out they are not vexatious and they are not spurious, they are proven and the MoD have admitted liability.'
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is cutting Donald Trump some slack over a proposal he made last year to ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States.

'I dont want to be unfair to anyone here. During election campaigns there is a perception based on a certain vision and a point of view,' he told Erin Burnett, per a transcript provided by CNN.

He said, 'Then that vision or point of view gets corrected and develops as a result of experience, reports and advice from experts.'

Sisi, who met with both Hillary Clinton and Trump Monday in New York, said he has 'no doubt' Trump would be a strong leader if elected.

He wasn't as laudatory of Clinton.

Donald Trump met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi Monday at the Palace Hotel in New York. General Michael Flynn, Ret, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), left, as Sisi talks

Sisi is cutting Donald Trump some slack over a proposal he made last year to ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States. 'I dont want to be unfair to anyone here,' he told CNN

Sisi, pictured today the United Nations General Assembly in New York, says he has 'no doubt' Trump would be a strong leader. He wouldn't say that Clinton would make a 'good president'

'Political parties in the United States would not allow candidates to reach that level unless they are qualified to lead a country the size of the United States of America,' he told Burnett through a translator after she asked if Clinton would make a 'good president.'

At a Democratic primary debate earlier this year, Clinton derided Sisi as she argued that she was against the Arab Spring movement in Egypt that destabalized the country's government.

'We saw what happened in Egypt. I cautioned about a quick overthrow of Mubarak, and we now are back with basically an army dictatorship,' she stated.

Sisi told Burnett, 'I believe that that statement was not made after our most recent meeting between myself and Mrs. Clinton.

'But also in Egypt there will not be a chance for any dictatorship because in Egypt there is a constitution, there is law, and there the will of the people which will refuse to allow any leader to stay in his position for any period longer than his term which is four years.'

The Egyptian politician took power in 2013 in response to protests against elected leader Mohamed Morsi, head of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Morsi was elected after an uprising pushed out Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of the U.S. government.

Clinton attends a bilateral meeting with Egypt's President Sisi at the Palace Hotel in New York on Monday. Sisi met with both presidential candidates that night

World leaders are in New York City this week for the United Nations General Assembly. Clinton had meetings with three on the sidelines of the summit.

She sat down with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Sisi and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for an hour or more each on Monday evening.

Clinton first met Sisi at the UNGA two years ago, just after his election. The Egyptian president spoke privately with Clinton and her husband, Bill.

Reporters caught but a glimpse of both Clinton's and Trump's meetings with Sisi on the 50th floor of the Palace Hotel in New York on Monday.

The Egyptian leader was speaking when the candidates' travelling press corps entered and reporters were booted by Egyptian officials moments later.

Sisi told Clinton he wanted to speak to her 'about the path that we are taking in order to build up a new civil society, a new modern country that upholds the rule of law, that respects human rights and liberties.

'And as a matter of fact we are taking this path that is eventually leading up to this target,' he stated.

Her campaign said afterward that they had a 'constructive discussion about bilateral ties and cooperation on a wide range of issues, including counterterrorism.'

Clinton arrives for her meeting with Sisi. Reporters caught but a glimpse of both Clinton's and Trump's meetings with Sisi based on the autocratic government's strict rules

Clinton pushed for a tightening of the bond between the U.S. and Egypt and Egypt and Isreal when it comes to fighting ISIS and other terrorist groups.

'Secretary Clinton emphasized the importance of respect for rule of law and human rights to Egypt's future progress,' the readout also said. 'Secretary Clinton called for the release of U.S. citizen Aya Hijazi and raised concerns about prosecution of Egyptian human rights organizations and activists.'

Journalists accompanying Trump were allowed to listen in and take photographs for less than 1 minute while Sisi spoke to the Republican in Arabic.

'All the world is suffering from the crisis of extremist thought,' the Egyptian president told him, according to a Reuters reporter who translated.

A pool reporter watched as Trump nodded along, but noted that he was probably waiting for a translation: Trump had no earpiece to listen to an English-language version of what Sisi was saying.

In a readout provided to the press, the Trump campaign wrote that the businessman 'expressed to President Sisi his strong support for Egypts war on terrorism, and how under a Trump Administration, the United States of America will be a loyal friend, not simply an ally, that Egypt can count on in the days and years ahead.'

Trump took the meeting along with retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, both of whom have advised him on the nexus between immigration and national security.

Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and press secretary Hope Hicks waited outside.

Clinton also met with Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko on Monday. Her readout of the meeting emphasized their discussion about Russian aggression. Poroshenko's government says Trump blew them off

Conway told a Bloomberg Politics reporter that she wasn't aware whether Trump and Sisi would discuss the GOP nominee's early dalliance with a 'complete and total ban' on Muslims entering the United States amid a spike in foreign terror attacks.

The readout said Trump 'emphasized to President el-Sisi his high regard for peace-loving Muslims.'

He also told the Egyptian leader that he 'understands that every day there are people of goodwill that sacrifice their lives and fortunes to combat the growing threat of radical Islamic terrorism.'

Trump said last year that he would temporarily bar foreign Muslims from entering the United States in response to the country's terror crisis. He's since limited the temporary ban to countries 'compromised by terrorism.'

He said Monday it would apply specifically to 'regions where safe and adequate screening cannot occur.'

Trump was invited to meet with Poroshenko, but the Ukrainian government says the Republican candidate blew them off.

A readout of Trump's meeting with Egypt says he 'emphasized to President el-Sisi his high regard for peace-loving Muslims'

Clinton routinely berates Trump for pursuing foreign policies that align with the Kremlin's global goals and for asserting in an interview that Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine.

Russian separatists have occupied the Crimean Peninsula for two years now in spite of a peace deal ordering troops out. Poroshenko has blamed the incursion for the economic downturn in his country.

And yet, Trump has been commendatory of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he says he admires for his 'very strong control' over his country and high approval ratings within. The Republican White House candidate said this month at a forum that admires Putin more than U.S. President Barack Obama because the Russian autocrat is 'a leader.'

Clinton promised Poroshenko this week that she would stand with the country against 'Russian aggression.'

The Ukrainian leader and Clinton had an 'in-depth discussion of the crisis' in the country, her campaign said after their meeting, during which they talked also about 'Russia's broader attempts to weaken Europe and destabilize its periphery.'

A readout of the 75-minute meeting from Clinton's team mentioned Russia four times as it remonstrated with Trump's friendly attitude toward the country's foe.

'Secretary Clinton stressed her commitment to stand with the government and people of Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, and discussed ways to help Ukraine strengthen and defend itself,' the statement said.

Clinton likewise 'stressed her commitment to cooperation with our partners and allies to deal with a wide range of challenges, including Russia.

'They discussed implementation of the Minsk agreement, Ukraine's programs on reforms, and ways the US can help support investment in Ukraine,' her campaign said, 'and she outlined her clear-eyed approach to Russia.'

Adding, 'If elected, she looks forward to deepening and intensifying cooperation with Ukraine.'

Russian separatists have occupied the Crimean Peninsula for two years now in spite of a peace deal ordering troops out. Poroshenko has blamed the incursion for the economic downturn in his country.

Trump has been commendatory of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he says he admires for his 'very strong control' over his country and high approval ratings within.
Swarovski told her husband that she was from Italy, but in reality she was a Mexican immigrant who changed her name to DKNY Swarovski

That same year, Mr Cunningham filed for divorce from his wife after 10 years of marriage

All of this was revealed in a 2014 therapy session with the children

So she attempted to strangle her eight-year-old son so she could vanish with her five-year-old daughter

The murder attempt allegedly happened when Swarovski took off to Colorado and didn't want the 'extra baggage' of a second child

In the midst of Michael Cunningham and DKNY Swarovski's divorce, it was revealed that the mother tried to kill one of their two children

A 41-year-old Wall Street entrepreneur from upscale Rye, New York claims his wife hoodwinked him for 10 years, leading him to believe she grew up an Italian orphan when she was really a Mexican immigrant.

While Michael Cunningham thought it was strange that his wife legally changed her name to DKNY Swarovski, he says he never suspected that she would have lied to him about her heritage.

Meanwhile, the 41-year-old former stay-at-home mom could face attempted murder charges for allegedly trying to strangle their eight-year-old son.

Details of Swarovski's shady background and her reported violence towards her children was revealed in divorce papers this week, as a judge in Westchester County, New York referred the custody case to law enforcement for possible criminal charges.

Michael Cunningham's wife, DKNY Swarovski, allegedly tried to strangle their eight-year-old son in 2014. Above, Mr Cunningham's new home in Larchmont, New York

In an interview with the New York Post, Mr Cunningham described an idyllic life the couple and their two children led in Rye before they started arguing about parenting.

In 2014, Mr Cunningham filed for divorce when his wife refused to let his friends and family have a role in their son's and daughter's lives.

That year, Swarovski absconded to Colorado where she allegedly attempted to strangle their eight-year-old son with headphone wires.

According to court documents, the mother said she wanted to kill her son so she could run away with their five year-old daughter 'without the extra baggage'.

She allegedly told her son 'it will only hurt for a minute'. Meanwhile, the boy's little sister was shoved into a bathroom so she wouldn't interfere.

For some reason though, Swarovski is said to have stopped and let the boy live, and even tried to cover up his scars with make-up. She later returned to New York with the kids when she was threatened with arrest.

The details of her alleged dark plot to kill her son were later revealed in a therapy session with the two children.

Mr Cunningham was in the therapy session when the revelations were made and recalls his son breaking down as he remembered the scarring attack.

'Hes apologizing to me and I said, "Whats wrong?" and he said, "Mom tried to kill me and it wasnt an accident she put a cord around my neck,"' Mr Cunningham recalled.

In her ruling this week, Westchester Judge Linda Christopher awarded Mr Cunningham full custody of his children, and referred the case to law enforcement so that they may investigate attempted murder and child abuse charges.

'This case is unlike even the most horrendous cases of abuse and neglect that Family Court judges must preside over,' Christopher wrote in her decision. 'Attempting to kill ones own child in a calculated, coldblooded manner is a rarity.'

Also revealed in the couple's divorce was the fact that Swarovski lied about her Italian heritage.

The couple apparently met in New York and married in Las Vegas in 2004, and though Mr Cunningham found his wife's name strange he never questioned her story that she grew up as an orphan in Milan, Italy.

In reality, she grew up in Mexico in a household with 10 siblings and left for the U.S. at the age of 19. Two years after moving to Colorado, she changed her name to DKNY Swarovski.

'We went to Italy, we met people who were supposed to be her previous employees, previous friends, they all spoke Italian to each other. She was meticulous. She left no stone unturned,' Mr Cunningham said.

When reached by the Post, Swarovksi said denied the claims that she ever harmed her kids, saying her ex-husband has 'brainwashed' their children.
A bomb squad has been called to an army base in Scotland after a suspicious package was discovered nearby this morning.

Specialist police attended Redford Barracks near Edinburgh at 11am when the 'unattended' item was found at a bus stop in Colinton Road.

It is understood the alarm was raised by base guards and that a robot was sent to the scene to dispose of the package.

A robot and bomb squad, pictured, were at the scene of Redford Barracks in Edinburgh after a suspicious package was found

Officers have closed the surrounding roads after guards spotted the item at a bus stop

One onlooker who witnessed the controlled explosion said: 'I saw a cute little robot and it trundled over to the bus stop and looked at the item for a while.

'After a while, I just saw the thing blow up and then the little robot trundled back to where it came from.'

The robot carried out the controlled explosion of the item around 12.30pm.

A loud bang was heard and puffs of smoke could be seen by onlookers behind the cordon.

The item was later deemed not to be suspicious after testing by the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team.

The incident caused significant traffic disruption in the area due to the road closures.

Police said a man was seen acting suspiciously in the area around 10.30am and that they are keen to hear from anyone with more information.

He was described as white, in his 50s, tall and of heavy build with short brown hair.

His appearance was dishevelled and he was wearing light-coloured clothing.

Inspector Graeme Dignan of Drylaw Police Station has been overseeing the response.

He said: 'This item was not a threat and there was no danger to the public at any time, I would like to thank people in the area for their patience whilst this situation was brought to a safe conclusion.

'We are now investigating how the item came to be left outside the barracks, and want to speak to anyone who was in the Colinton/Craiglockhart/Colinton Mains areas this morning and may have seen the man described or has any other information that may assist.'

A spokesman for Police Scotland added: 'Police are in attendance in Colinton after an item was discovered unattended in the street on Colinton Road.

'The section between Oxgangs Road North and Redford Road is currently closed whilst initial inquiries are carried out.'

It is the latest base to be put on alert this year after two men attempted to abduct an airman outside an RAF base in Norfolk in July

It is the latest military base in the UK to be put on high alert this year over fears of a Lee Rigby-style attack.

Two men attempted to abduct a serviceman at RAF Marham, Norfolk, on July 20.

The attackers, said to be of Middle Eastern appearance, have not yet been found despite public appeals and a Crimewatch feature that was broadcast earlier this month.

The airman managed to fight them off despite one of them brandishing a knife, and it led to RAF personnel being told to keep a 'low profile' and not wear their uniforms in public.
Chicago Police Department is adding 970 more officers to its roster over the next two years in an attempt to halt the 50 per cent surge in violence the city has sustained this year.

The city hasn't seen this many officers hired in one go since the mid-90s - but Mayor Rahm Emanuel hasn't explained where the money will come from, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.

And at $138,000 per new officer and a total of $134million for all the new hires, there's a lot of money to account for.

Scroll down for video

Cop shopping: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has promised to hire 970 new police over two years at a cost of $134m - but it's not clear exactly where the money will come from

Violence: The city has been gripped by violence in the past year, with 500 people killed by Labor Day weekend. Rising crime rates have coincided with falling numbers of cops

The plan is to add 516 patrol officers, 200 detectives, 112 sergeants, 92 field-training officers and 50 lieutenants to the roster.

This, it is hoped, will help the city get to grips with a wave of violence that has gripped the city, climaxing with record-breaking numbers of deaths this year.

'When I sat down as superintendent, one of the first things everybody asked me was, did we have enough police officers?' said Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.

'I took a real hard look at it and this is what I think we need to make Chicago safer,' he added. 'It's going to cost. But there's no price for the safety of this city.'

However, Johnson said, while the mayor has assured him that he will get the money he needs, the 'specifics' are with the budgeting office.

Tax: The office of Mayor Emanuel (pictured) said that the money would not come from a raise in 'general revenue taxes' which have gone up to aid pensions in recent years

Since being elected in 2011, Emanuel has raised property taxes by $838million to pay for police, fire and teacher pensions and increased water and sewer bills by 29.5 per cent to save the city's biggest pension fund.

But the mayor's communications director, Adam Collins, promised the new police officers would be paid for 'without an increase in general revenue taxes.'

Exactly where the money will come from, however, remains unclear.

In August, 400 people were shot in the city and at least 78 homicides were recorded.

That made it the most violent month in Chicago since October of 1997, when there were 79 homicides, The Chicago Tribune wrote.

And over the Labor Day weekend, Chicago recorded its 500th homicide this year.

As of September 8, the city was on track to end 2016 with a murder rate of 24.1 people per 100,000 residents.

That's dramatically more than New York, which is seeing the murder rate drop and is expected to finish at 3.8 people per 100,000 by the end of the year. Both cities' murder rates were at around 31 people in 1990.

And as violent crime has risen, the numbers of police have fallen: There were 1,252 detectives in 2008, down to 922 today.

Death: Chicago saw 400 people shot and 78 people killed in August - making it the most violent month since October 1997, when there were 79 homicides

The CPD has an authorized strength of 12,500 officers, but with 468 vacancies for sworn police - and more are expected to open up in a series of retirements.

Emanuel promised during his election run to hire 1,000 additional police officers, but once in office he changed that to '1,000 officers on the beat,' the Sun Times wrote.

Half of those officers came from disbanded specialist units; most of the rest were brought in from desk jobs.

He also closed three police stations and two area detective headquarters, as well as removing 1,400 vacant police positions.

In 1986, 950 officers were signed up to the Chicago PD. Around ten years later around 1,000 further officers were hired with help from Bill Clinton's crime bill.
The Satanic Temple is coming to Salem, Massachusetts  and the move is being met with a collective yawn from locals.

According to The Boston Globe, the movement's followers will establish their very first international headquarters in the town that was made famous for the Salem witch trials over three centuries ago.

The new headquarters will be housed in a Victorian-style home less than a mile away from Gallows Hill, the site where villagers executed over a dozen people suspected of witchcraft.

'The history of Salem is also part of the history of Satanism,' the organization's spokesperson, Lucien Greaves, said.

This old art gallery on Bridge Street in Salem will be the global headquarters for the Satanic Temple movement - and residents don't seem to care

'I feel that [Salem] is a very appropriate place for this.'

The public will be invited to the home and take in art installations, lectures, and film screenings.

Despite the perception of Satanists as demonic followers of an ideology that seeks to spread evil, the movement's adherents say that there is a misconception amongst the American public about its true nature.

Greaves told the Globe that Satanists do not worship an Antichrist or any other deity.

Temple officials say that contrary to public perception, the movement doesn't worship an Antichrist nor does it espouse the spread of evil

Instead, it seeks to 'embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions,' according to its website.

'Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world  never the reverse.'

Satanism doesn't promote 'evil' in the traditional sense, but rather uses Satan as a tool to challenge orthodoxy.

The organization says it utilizes imagery to promote egalitarianism, social justice and the separation of church and state.

'Satan is symbolic of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty even in the face of insurmountable odds,' the movement states.

'Satan is an icon for the unbowed will of the unsilenced inquirer the heretic who questions sacred laws and rejects all tyrannical impositions.'

The Satanic Temple has a following that numbers 40,000 nationally.

Local officials say there has been almost no objections offered from residents, although the only concern the municipality has is whether the headquarters will function as a place of assembly.

That would impact zoning regulations, they say.

Video courtesy of NECN

The movement's Baphomet monument shows Satan with horns, hooves, wings and a beard. It has tried to have it displayed in public venues, but those efforts have been met with protest

The Satanic Temple has been in the news in recent years over battles to preserve the separation of church and state.

Last year, the temple unveiled a controversial goat-headed bronze monument at a secret Detroit venue.

The 8-foot-tall Baphomet monument shows Satan with horns, hooves, wings and a beard.

Backed by an inverted pentagram, it weighs more than a ton and is flanked by statues of two young children gazing up at the creature.

The group was originally going to host the statue's revealing at a popular restaurant until the owner backed out after receiving threats.

This past July, the movement said it would petition to set up after school programs to counterbalance Christian after school programs.

A 2001 Supreme Court decision allowed Good News Club, an after school Christian club, to continue to operate in schools, and the Satanic Temple, which has 20 chapters across the US, says this is indoctrinating children into evangelicalism.
A 16-year-old refugee has been arrested at a migrant home in Germany after he was seen 'praying for ISIS' amid fears he was plotting a terror attack.

Officers from the SEK anti-terror unit seized the Aghan teenager, called Mohammad, at a refugee shelter in Cologne - the fifth such arrest in Germany within a week.

The arrest on Tuesday came hours before the interior ministry warned of radicals targeting unaccompanied minors and youths in the camps for recruitment into the ranks of terrorists.

It is understood Mohammad was in contact with other radicals and planning an act of terror.

A 16-year-old refugee has been arrested at a migrant home in Germany after he was seen 'praying for ISIS' amid fears he was plotting a terror attack (file picture)

'According to the information by the State Security Service the teen has radicalised himself in a very short time,' said Cologne police in a statement.

'The evaluation of the available evidence pointed to a serious threat,' it added.

Police also said three refugees were hurt while trying to escape the centre housing 200 migrants when they saw armed officers move in.

The Syrian boy attended one of the mosques of the Turkish community in Cologne and was heard 'praying for Islamic State.' According to a local newspaper the word 'bomb' was also heard by worshippers.

Mohammad's father Jamal denied his son was a radical but was suffering from depression.

Officers from the SEK anti-terror unit seized the Aghan teenager, called Mohammad, at a refugee shelter in Cologne - the fifth such arrest in Germany within a week (file picture)

Ralf Jager, the interior minister of the state of North-ReinWestphalia (NRW) where the arrest took place said: 'Europe, including Germany and NRW has long been in the crosshairs of Islamist terrorism. The danger is real and concrete. Our security agencies are therefore on high alert and are checking every lead. This arrest shows it yet again.'

Last week three Syrians suspected of being and ISIS 'sleeper' cell were arrested at their home in northern Germany. Another arrest took place on Monday at a home in Boblingen of a 24-year-old Syrian who came to Germany last year.

He is accused of fighting with Jihadists and belonging to a proscribed terror group. He was caught after leaving a computer on a train with disturbing material on it.

In July, the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) said it was following around 410 leads on possible terrorists among asylum seekers in Germany.
A boat headed for Europe carrying 600 migrants has capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Egypt killing at least 29 people.

Egyptian authorities say the vessel overturned after lurching due to overcrowding near Rosetta in the city of Alexandria and that the death toll could rise.

Local official Alaa Osman from Beheira province said the migrants were from several African countries and Syria.

A boat headed for Europe carrying 600 migrants has capsized in the Mediterranean close to Egypt killing at least 29 people (file picture)

He added that a total of 155 people have been rescued so far but that bodies are still being pulled from the water.

Rescue workers recovered the bodies of 18 men, 10 women and one child, but said they did not know how many others had drowned.

It is thought the boat, which was carrying Egyptian, Syrian, and African migrants, was headed for Italy.

Thousands of illegal migrants have made the dangerous sea voyage across the Mediterranean in recent years fleeing war and poverty, mostly via lawless Libya. Thousands have drowned.

The number of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Europe has increased significantly in the past year, EU border agency Frontex said earlier this month.

More than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September, compared to 7,000 in the same period last year, it said.

Experts say smugglers in Egypt mostly use old fishing vessels, stuffed way beyond capacity both below and above deck.

Egyptian officials last month warned half a million Syrians are now gathered in the country as it said it was struggling to stop people leaving its shores bound for Europe.

A map showing where the boat capsized off the Egyptian coast as it was headed for Europe

Foreign minister Hisham Badr said the EUs 5billion deal with Turkey to stop migrants crossing to the Greek islands had led to a surge in people attempting to travel via his country instead.

He told MEPs in Brussels: Currently in Egypt we are over-burdened with increased numbers of refugees and migrants entering the country and leaving on boats towards Europe.

What has happened as a result of the deal with Turkey, the closing of the Balkan route, the pressure has increased on Egypt.

Mr Badr said there were now five million migrants in Egypt, with many coming from Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.

He said Egyptian authorities were trying to block as much as possible these migrants travelling through [to Europe], but thousands had slipped through.
Netsweeper is a litigious cyberarms dealer that threatened to sue the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab when its researchers outed the company for its work in helping Yemen's despotic regime censor the internet; later, the company dropped its lawsuit.

Now, Citizen Lab has published a report documenting Netsweeper's collaboration with yet another autocratic, human-rights abusing government, this time in Bahrain.

*Internet filtering technology developed by Netsweeper, Inc. has been identified on the networks of nine Bahrain-based ISPs.



*

Testing on the ISP Batelco shows that at least one of the Netsweeper installations is being used to filter political content, including content relating to human rights, oppositional political websites, Shiite websites, local and regional news sources, and content critical of religion.

*

These installations appear to have become active between May and July 2016, a few months after the release of a public tender by Bahrain's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in January 2016 indicating Netsweeper won a bid to provide a 'national website filtering solution.'

*

Our testing suggests that Netsweeper installations in Bahrain are communicating with and receiving updates from Netsweeper Inc.-controlled infrastructure.

*

Bahrain has been in a period of extended political crisis since a stifled uprising in 2011, and the Bahraini government has engaged in a series of repressive tactics against oppositional political figures and human rights activists, including torture, arbitrary arrests and the revocation of oppositional figures' citizenship.

*

The sale of technology used to censor political speech and other forms of legitimate expression, to a state with a highly problematic human rights record, raises serious questions about the corporate social responsibility practices of Netsweeper, Inc.
A number of university teachers have become a talking point in China for their 'extremely good looks'.

These female educators, from the Sichuan Normal University in south-west China, have been billed as 'goddesses' after their school uploaded pictures of them to a social media platform.

Students at the university are studying harder and sitting in on extra classes because they want to meet these beautiful lectures, according to a teacher from the school.

Gorgeous: Teachers from China's Sichuan Normal University have been called 'goddess lecturers' for their good looks. Pictured above is Cheng Si, one of the teachers who are popular among students

At work: Cheng Si (above) teaches at the College of Fashion and Design. She is also studying her Master's degree in artistic design

Stylish: Huang Leiping, another 'Goddess lecture', teaches at the school's College of Dance

Elegant: Huang is a folk dancer and has received many national awards for her performance

Highly popular: Huang is funny and strict at the same time, according to the school

Talented: Dong Jing, also from the College of Art, teaches visual communication and animation. She is an award-winning teacher and has published a dozen children's books

The Sichuan Normal University is located in Chengdu, a city known for its beautiful women.

These teachers were selected by their school to represent a generation of young lectures to the public.

A teacher surnamed Xu, who is charge of the school's social media publicity, told MailOnline that the teachers were chosen based on their academic achievements, popularity as well as their appearances.

Xu said: 'Because we're a teachers' college. Our students will be teachers in the future. We wanted these lectures to be their examples and to show them what they could become.'

Their pictures were shared in two posts on the university's account on WeChat, a Chinese social media app, on May 7 and September 19.

According to the school, the first post had received such good feedback that they decided to post a second one.

Respectable: Wang Ying has a PhD in modern Chinese literature. She teaches at the College of Chinese Literature and is an established author

Beautiful: Teacher Li Qingqing has taught English Literature in the College of Foreign Languages since 1998. She is extremely pretty and talented, said her students

Well liked: Chen Shan (above), an associate professor at the College of Art, is very popular among students who hope to study their Master's degrees in traditional Chinese arts

Accomplished: Teacher Chu Ziqi has studied dancing as well as educational theory in the past

Unique: Chu is well liked among students for combining Western and Chinese methodologies in her teaching

A total of 16 teachers have been selected. They teach a variety of majors, including singing, dancing, artistic design, theatre and English.

Xu hoped that the posts would change Chinese people's stereotypes towards successful female teachers, who are often thought to be old, ruthless and cold.

Xu added: 'Students are very willing to take their lessons. Some said they would sit in on extra classes just to see these teachers.'

Fashionable: Wei Yina was a professional model and now she teaches at the College of Fashion in the Sichuan Normal University

Yang Tao specialises in folk dance and has co-authored a text book on the topic. She is now writing a text book on the dance moves of Chinese minority group Yi

Liu Hongdou is a lecture in singing at the Sichuan Normal University specialising in folk music

These pictures have been widely shared on Chinese internet.

On QQ.com, one of China's largest news websites, many web users are stunned by the teachers' youth and attractive appearances, such as 'Xuan' who commented 'They have beauty and intelligence.'

Another user called 'rain, cloud' said: 'They are impossibly beautiful.'

Some users said these teachers made them want to go back to school again. A user called 'Snake' said: 'If I were still studying, I would surely work harder.'

However, there were also people arguing that their teaching skills should be more important.

'Ba shan shu shui' is one of them who wrote: 'It's no use to say they are pretty. The key is if they know how to teach and if they teach hard.'
The parents of a Georgia teenager say that when their daughter was sexually assaulted by a classmate last year, officials at her high school put the blame on her and badly mishandled the investigation into the incident.

The family have filed a complaint with the US Education Department, accusing Gwinnett County Public Schools of violating the girls civil rights under Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded institution.

The federal complaint also suggests that the way the probe into the incident was handled may have been influenced by race, since the alleged victim is biracial and the boy is white.

The incident allegedly occurred at Peachtree Ridge High School in February 2015 when the victim was 16 years old and enrolled as a sophomore.

According to the victim, identified by her initials, T.M, by Slate Magazine, which first reported the story Monday, a male classmate of hers lured her to the newsroom at their high school after class and pressured her to perform oral sex.

A Georgia teen and her family claim officials at Peachtree Ridge High School (pictured) badly botched an investigation into her sex assault and punished her for what happened

When the girl told school officials about what happened, she claims a school resource officer asked her to describe what she was wearing during her encounter with the teenage boy, and also questioned why she did not bite her alleged assailants penis in order to stop the sex act.

In the end, both the victim and her alleged attacker were suspended for engaging in sexual activity on school grounds, according to attorney Adele Kimmel, who is representing the girls family.

My school punished me and made it seem like the attack was somehow my fault. For a long time, I thought maybe it was. Alleged sex assault victim T.M.

The punishment imposed on the victim in this case is a textbook example of how schools often treat girls of color who report sexual assault, Kimmel told the news website. This is a significant problem in our nations schools, and our hope is that the federal investigation into the familys complaint will help to break this cycle.

School district officials in Gwinnett County have strongly denied the allegations outlined in the federal complaint.

The family's attorney said her client and the teenage boy attended the same high school and knew each other, but were not dating, when on the afternoon of February 4, 2015, the male student approached the 16-year-old girl as she was waiting for her mother to pick her up, and said he wanted to show her some video equipment.

According to T.M., she followed her classmate into the school's newsroom, where he coerced her into performing oral sex on him.

The next day, the girl went to her teacher and tearfully told her about what happened.

T.M. was then questioned about the incident by the Peachtree Ridge High School resource officer, who allegedly asked her: 'Why didn't you bite his penis and squeeze his balls?'

An assistant principal brought T.M. into the newsroom where the sex act took place the day before and instructed her to physically re-enact what happened in front of several school officials, the familys complaint states.

That same assistant principal would later admit that he was not properly trained in identifying sexual assault, according to the complaint.

Despite the alleged victims protestations, school administrators later held a joint disciplinary hearing for both parties, during which the girl was called upon to prove that what she had experienced was assault and not consensual sex, as the boy had claimed.

Victim speaks: The girl, identified as T.M., says on February 4, 2015, a male classmate lured her into their school's newsroom and coerced her into performing oral sex on him

T.M.s father said the family asked administrators to question his daughter and her alleged assailant separately, and they even considered skipping the hearing altogether, but in the end the girl decided 'she wanted to stand up for herself.'

In the course of the proceedings, which lasted seven hours, the accused teen told officials that he knew the sexual act was consensual by the look that T.M. had on her face, which he described as 'blank' and expressionless, but which signaled to him that she 'wanted' to perform oral sex on him.

In the end, the school district's lawyer asked officials to find the male student more credible than the alleged victim, because the girl 'chose not to scream louder and louder' during the encounter.

Both T.M. and the boy were suspended for 10 days for engaging in consensual sexual activity on campus in violation of the schools code of conduct, according to the family's complaint.

The girls parents said that after T.M. returned to school, she became the target of persistent bullying and was labeled a 'whore' and a 'liar' by her classmates.

In March 2015, T.M. dropped out of school and shortly after was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which left her feeling suicidal.

The girl has since switched two schools and moved with her family to a different county, hoping for a fresh start in a new place where no one knew her story, but her parents say T.M. is not the same lively, extroverted person she had been before the alleged assault.

In a statement to Slate, T.M. said officials at Peachtree Ridge High School should have protected her from her attacker by expelling him after the incident.
This is the shocking moment an enraged Muslim woman started screaming at a man as he tried to enter a university wearing a Pauline Hanson shirt.

The mobile phone footage, shot at Curtin University in Perth, shows the woman furiously shouting at the man, branding him a 'fascist' and accusing him of 'demonising Muslims'.

The video shows the woman's scathing attack on the man, but it is not clear if he provoked her before the footage began.

This is the shocking moment an enraged Muslim woman started screaming at a man as he tried to enter a university wearing a Pauline Hanson shirt

The unidentified woman, who was wearing a pink headscarf, is heard telling the man 'you have no right to be here' as he tries to walk into the university building.

He tells her that he used to attend the university and that he has an appointment at student services, but she quickly shuts him down.

'You have no right to be on this campus. No you don't. Get off this campus. You're not welcome here. Get off,' the woman screams.

She then looks down and sees that the former student is wearing a shirt voicing his support for Pauline Hanson.

The controversial One Nation leader has sparked outrage in recent weeks by calling for an end to all Muslim immigration and claiming that 'Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims'.

'Why are you wearing a Pauline Hanson shirt? Why are you wearing a Hanson shirt?' the woman repeatedly asks.

'Why are you wearing a Pauline Hanson shirt? Why are you wearing a Hanson shirt?' the woman repeatedly asks

Another woman, who appears to be a friend of the Muslim woman, moves in as the headscarf-wearing woman is ushered away to calm down

The man tells her that he is a supporter of the Queensland senator, but the woman continues her rant.

'He is a proto-fascist,' she shouts as other students begin to gather round.

'He has no right to be here. All he wants to do is demonise Muslims. Muslims have had enough. Get off this campus, you're not welcome here,' she adds.

Pauline Hanson has sparked outrage in recent weeks by calling for an end to all Muslim immigration

The Hanson supporter insists that he has as much right to be on campus as anyone else, but the woman continues accusing him of being a 'fascist' as she points at him.

Another woman, who appears to be a friend of the Muslim, moves in as the headscarf-wearing woman is ushered away to cam down.

'Respect our rights. F*** off, move on,' the new woman says.

'I have an appointment at student services. I am going. You're the one who followed me,' the man replies.

'I am an ex-student of this university. I have a completed degree here and I have an appointment,' he adds, after the woman accuses him of harassing Muslims on campus.

They both tell each other to 'f*** off' before he says: 'I have a right to be here. I have an appointment. I don't attack anyone. I have an appointment at this university. Deal with it.' The man then leaves and enters the university.
The glamorous teenage girl fell in love with the country while travelling

Single Australian men aged 20-27, of slight muscular build, with an unforgettable smile and a deep love for horses and the outback - meet Kate*.

Born and raised in the Netherlands, the 19-year-old glamour immediately fell in love with the charm of Australia while picking berries in rural NSW on a working visa.

But with less than a year left before getting shipped back home, Kate has turned to Facebook to find 'true love' and a 'country cowboy to spend the rest of her life with.'

The stunning tourist created a Facebook page named 'Kate wants a date' on Tuesday and had thousands of suitors flooding her inbox in a matter of hours.

In an interview with Daily Mail Australia, the self-described 'open-minded' and 'softly-spoken' country girl insisted she was searching for 'love - not a visa.'

Kate, 19, was born in the Netherlands but has spent the last year in Australia picking berries in rural NSW on a working visa

The stunning tourist has fallen in love with the country and has started a Facebook page in the hopes that she might be able to fall in love and live with her dream 'cowboy'

'I'm not looking for a visa, I'm looking for love': Kate insists her intentions are pure and genuine

'I've always wanted to live in the countryside and I've always been interested in that kind of lifestyle so that's why I came to Australia in the first place,' she said.

'When I got here I absolutely fell in love with this country and I knew that I wanted to stay.'

Some people might think I'm doing this for a visa but I'm not ... I'm truly looking for love

But after a relationship breakdown with an Aussie boyfriend, Kate found herself in Coffs Harbour, on NSW's north coast, with no prospects of an immediate future in the country she loved.

'I've tried some dating sites and I've also dated some guys here but I think this is a good idea to get to know people from all over the country,' she explained.

Since creating the Facebook page, she has received nearly 8,000 comments from interested single blokes and thousands more private messages in her private inbox.

Since starting the page on Tuesday, Kate has been flooded with private messages from thousands of suitors (pictured)

Kate said she had tried dating sites but thought starting a Facebook page would be a good way to reach people from all over the country

'I wanted to take a chance and hope that luck may come my way': Hopeful country romantics sent adorable messages to Kate's inbox

'Hey Katie, I'm Harry - one of my mates tagged me in your recent post and I know you'd be getting bombarded by guys but I wanted to take a chance and hope that luck come(s) my way,' wrote one hopeful romantic.

'To a beautiful girl named Kate, I see you're on a search for a date, Your smile is so stunning, For you I'd come running, So tell me, Have I come too late?,' wrote another.

'Hey Kate! I'm probably 10,000 behind the race at the moment. But if ya get to reading this I'm from Yeppoon in tropical Queensland. Your (sic) wearing your heart on ya sleeve and I like the rawness of that. If your keen to chat, I'd like that. Till then good luck in your search ... peace by the journey!,' wrote a man named Clint.

Kate described her ideal man as a 'cowboy through and through.'

'I think I'm looking for a tough man but with a good heart, also a sense of humour. Someone you can drink a beer with,' she said.

'A guy who can rides horses, likes country things like fishing and hunting. I've always wanted to find a cowboy but I'm open for anything else different than that too.'

A number of matchmakers cheekily tagged their friends in the hope of setting them up with the glamorous Dutch tourist

'Can ride like a demon and good with rope too': Kate's matchmaking Facebook page was flooded with thousands of hilarious comments

One man volunteered his friend, who he described as 'single and very much ready to mingle'

Kate's story bears an uncanny resemblance to a hoax that took the internet by storm last year in August.

A woman claiming to be a French tourist named Natalie Amyot appealed for the public's help to find a man she had fallen pregnant with during a one night stand.

It later emerged that Ms Amyot was not pregnant and had been hired as an actor as part of a viral social media marketing scam aimed at promoting Mooloolaba on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

But Kate staunchly denies that her quest for love is anything but genuine.

'Some people might think I'm doing this for a visa but I'm not,' she said.

'I am truly looking for love.'

If interested, you can try your luck and message Kate on her Facebook page.

*Kate has chosen not to reveal her real name.
Mr Karvelis (pictured) had only been in the country for one week

A Romanian hit-and-run killer who mowed down a father-of-two was on bail for sexually assaulting two women.

Costica Ciapa, 27, who was born in the Eastern European country, but lives in Gravesend in Kent, struck Rimantas Karvelis, 57, as he was crossing the road.

Mr Karvelis had only been in the country for one week and was in the UK from Lithuania to visit his ill son in hospital.

The 57-year-old died from 'catastrophic' multiple fractures nine days later in King's College Hospital in London.

He was thrown onto the windscreen and went over the roof of the car.

Ciapa drove off with a shattered and dented windscreen and abandoned the vehicle a mile away from the incident.

He briefly returned to the scene of the crash as police, paramedics and numerous witnesses treated the injured father-of-two but fled for a second time.

Ciapa was eventually traced a month later after officers found an Asda shopping receipt in the damaged Astra and tracked down his girlfriend through the store's CCTV.

At Maidstone Crown Court yesterday, he admitted causing death by careless driving, causing death by driving while unlicensed and without insurance, dangerous driving, failing to stop and failing to report an accident.

He faced a maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment but the court heard a crash expert for the defence had concluded the collision was 'unavoidable' as Mr Karvelis was crossing at a diagonal and effectively taking a short-cut across the busy London Road in Northfleet, Kent.

But Judge Julian Smith said the direction in which Mr Karvelis ran across the dark, wet but lit road meant Ciapa would have seen him for a greater time than otherwise would have been the case.

'What you were not doing was keeping an adequate look-out in the road ahead,' he told Ciapa.

'This was not a case of a momentary inattention but a case where there was a very obvious risk in that area as you approached it and it requires particular attention and there would have been available to you a view of Mr Karvelis for some period far greater than for a moment.

At Maidstone Crown Court Ciapa admitted causing death by careless driving, causing death by driving while unlicensed and without insurance, dangerous driving, failing to stop and failing to report an accident

'You failed to see it (the risk), failed to respond to him and tragically struck him. It is clear from the victim impact statement that the impact of his death is a profound one.

'He was the head of his family, the breadwinner, he provided guidance and emotional and financial support and was the foundation for his family. They have been left bereft by his death.'

Judge Smith said Ciapa's guilty pleas were 'pragmatic' ones and and did not reflect any remorse or contrition.

'You were determined to avoid the responsibility for that tragic collision. The reason was because you knew you had done something wrong. You returned to the scene and saw the seriousness of what you had done.

'You had seen the inevitable tragic consequences and you would have known that if there was not a death, there was injury so severe that you must, in all conscience, account yourself for it. But you didn't.'

The court heard Ciapa, whose wife and three-year-old child live in Romania, has already been served with deportation notice by the Home Office to return to his native country once he has served his sentence.

The mechanical agricultural science graduate came to the UK four years ago and was working as a block paver earning 60 a day when he struck Mr Karvelis.

Ciapa had picked up his girlfriend and her father from a carwash and was heading into Gravesend town centre when the collision occurred at 6.40pm on October 24, last year.

Prosecutor David Malone said Mr Karvelis had just left the Aldi supermarket and was two-thirds of the way across the road when he was hit by the Astra, which was travelling between 24 and 26mph. The speed limit is 30mph.

However, Mr Malone said the impact was heavy and there was no braking.

Mr Karvelis suffered fractures to his leg and jaw, a bleed on the brain and a collapsed lung and had to be put into an induced coma. He died on November 3.

Documents found inside the Astra included a receipt for a shopping trip to Asda where CCTV was obtained and from that police were able to identify his female partner. From her they were able to identify Ciapa and his name was circulated

Mr Malone also told the court the police investigation was 'intense and determined'.

'The car was found abandoned in a nearby street and wasn't registered to the defendant.

'Documents found inside the Astra included a receipt for a shopping trip to Asda where CCTV was obtained and from that police were able to identify his female partner. From her they were able to identify Ciapa and his name was circulated.'

Mr Malone said that having gone back to the scene of the crash he would have realised 'the enormity' of what had happened.

Ciapa was arrested a month later and charged, as well as sentenced to a total of 30 months for two offences of sexual assault and one of robbery.

In a victim impact statement from one of Mr Karvelis's sons, Audrius, the court heard the effect 'the well-loved' husband, father and son's death had had.

'Dad's death shook us and our community and forever changed the way I look at the world,' he wrote.

'I think it makes me physically ill and the sadness puts me down.'

The court was told the dangerous driving offence related to Ciapa fleeing the accident when it would have been impossible for him to see out of the smashed windscreen and there was, in fact, a near-miss with another vehicle.

Ronnie Manek, defending, said Mr Karvelis had 'contributed' to the fatal accident in the way he crossed the road but accepted he was entitled to do so wherever he chose and only became a hazard once off the pavement and in the carriageway.

He added that although the conditions were dark and wet, Ciapa was not speeding and the collision occurred 'in seconds', there was enough time for him to take preventative measures.
A skilled leopard loses her dinner to a pack of lions in this dramatic footage shot in a South African national park.

Tourists watch in awe as the female leopard pounces on an impala at a waterhole in South Africa's Kruger National Park.

But a pride of hungry lions spot the kill and think they can grab themselves a free lunch.

The leopard sits by the waterhole after killing an unsuspecting impala (pictured left). But two lionesses have spotted the chance to get a free lunch and sneak up on the big cat (pictured right)

The lions wait until he leopard has expertly killed the impala, a member of the antelope family.

They then slowly sneak up to the leopard and, when they are just inches away, give her the fright of her life.

Since the lions are more than twice her size, the leopard has no chance of fighting them off.

The leopard has no chance of fighting off the attackers, who are more than twice her size. After some hissing she quickly escapes into some nearby trees

She tumbles into the water before escaping into some nearby trees and abandoning her kill.

The two happy lionesses tentatively step into the water, grab the dead impala by the horns and drag it out.

The pride is later snapped enjoying its stolen meal.

After seeing off the competition the lionesses tentatively look into the water where the dead impala has sunk

The lions grab the impala by the horns (pictured) and drag it out of the waterhole to take it back to the pride

Tourists later snapped the lions covered in blood and enjoying their stolen meal (pictured)

Kruger National Park is one of the largest game reserves in Africa, covering 19,485 square kilometres.

It is home to all of the 'big five' game animals- a term coined by big game hunters to describe the hardest creatures to hunt.
A safari park has been forced to shut down their penguin enclosure after a number of the birds contracted malaria from mosquitoes and died.

Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire is home to dozens of the hand-reared birds, but some of them have died after contracting the avian strain of the disease.

Visitors were left devastated after zoo keepers at the park shut Penguin Island to allow staff space and time to care for the remaining birds.

Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire is home to dozens of the hand-reared Humboldt penguins, but some of them have died after contracting the avian strain of the disease from mosquitoes

Bosses at the safari park, which is home to a colony of captive-bred Humboldts, said they will release more details about the number of penguins affected later today.

In a statement on Facebook Darren Beasley, head of animal operations, said: 'It is with great sadness that we have to announce that a number of our Humboldt penguins have passed away due to an outbreak of Avian Malaria amongst the colony.

'This would have been contracted through an airborne mosquito.

'Although our penguins are a tough bunch this has subsequently led to problems with the remaining group, leading to a very distressing time for everyone involved in their care.

Bosses at the safari park, which is home to a colony of captive-bred Humboldts, said it will release more details about the number of penguins affected later today

'Our team of keepers are absolutely devastated - they have looked after the penguins each and every day, with most of the penguins having been hand-reared by the team since hatching.

'Whilst this disease DOES NOT affect humans we have taken the decision to close Penguin Island to visitors in order to give our team additional space and time to care for our remaining birds and to allow the heartbroken keepers time themselves to get through this terrible experience.

'Despite the best efforts of our team and with expert advice from other collections around the country who have previously experienced the same tragedy, we have still been unable to save a large amount of these incredible and popular aquatic birds.

Visitors were left devastated after zoo keepers at the park shut Penguin Island to allow staff space and time to care for the remaining birds

'Keepers will be spending the coming days and weeks doing everything they can to care and treat the remaining penguins in our collection in the hope that their health improves and they get better.

'In the meantime we hope visitors to the park understand the difficult position our team are in and our reasons for closing this popular attraction.'
Hungary has sparked a major diplomatic row by claiming that parts of the UK are 'no-go zones' because there are so many migrants.

A leaflet issued to millions of households as part of a referendum on EU migrant quotas claims that there are several hundred no-go zones in European cities where the authorities are unable to maintain control.

An accompanying map marks London with a 'no-go' sign, surrounded by five others which appear to relate to locations including Southampton and Peterborough.

Scroll down for video

The leaflet that has been distributed by the Hungarian authorities saying some areas of Britain are 'no-go zones' due to the number of migrants

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is fighting for a No vote in the referendum due to be held on October 2 on Brussels' plans to relocate migrants from frontline arrival states like Italy and Greece to other countries around the EU's Schengen zone.

The quota system would require Hungary to take in around 1,500 migrants.

The leaflet also marks out Paris, Berlin, Marseille, Stockholm and Copenhagen as cities with no-go areas.

It warns: 'The so-called "no-go" zones are areas of cities that the authorities are unable to keep under their control.

'Here the recipient society's written or unwritten norms do not apply. In those European cities, where immigrants live in great numbers, several hundred 'no-go' zones exist.'

Challenged over the claims, Hungary's foreign minister Peter Szijjarto told BBC2's Newsnight: 'We based this information on open, official reports given by the police of the respective countries and from the news.

'There are no-go zones in Europe and we don't want no-go zones in Hungary.'

Mr Szijjarto said he personally 'likes' London, but insisted that its designation as a no-go zone was made after consultation with the Hungarian embassy in the capital as well as 'very careful' analysis of official reports.

The British Embassy in Budapest has lodged a protest with the Hungarian foreign ministry about the contents of the leaflet.

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is fighting for a No vote in a referendum on Brussels' plans to relocate migrants from frontline arrival states like Italy and Greece

The leaflet accuses Brussels of trying to 'prescribe the obligatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary' without the approval of its Parliament, and warns of the danger that terrorists might 'slip in with the crowds of immigrants'.

The row comes after a Chinese airline was forced to withdraw an in-flight magazine warning tourists to take precautions when visiting areas of London with ethnic minority populations.

Around one in three of the 8.6million people in London were born outside the UK. In some boroughs the proportion is greater than half.

Of the total three million non-British residents 40 per cent are from Europe, 30 per cent from the Middle East and Asia, 20 per cent from Africa and 10 per cent from America or the Caribbean.
His son is a U.S. citizen and has lived in Tarrant County, Texas since 1997

The elder el-Hage is currently service a life sentence in Colorado for his role in the 1998 bombings at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania

Texas is one of several states to ban Spice

Abdullah el-Hage was arrested on charges of selling synthetic marijuana at his Fort Worth, Texas smoke shop on September 14

A smoke shop owner in Texas with ties to Osama bin Laden has been arrested for peddling synthetic marijuana.

Abdullah el-Hage was arrested on September 14 on charges that he sold synthetic marijuana - more commonly known as as Spice or K2 - at his Fort Worth business, I Smoke & More.

The 29-year-old is the son of Wadih el-Hage, a man who worked as Osama bin Laden's personal secretary in Sudan in the 1990s. The elder el-Hage is currently serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison for helping plan the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Abdullah is just one of five men who federal officials believe were part of a Spice ring. While Spice is legal in some states, Texas is one of several states that has banned the substance. The substance is a plant-based product laced with a chemical that mimics cannabis, but it can also cause users to behave erratically and its side effects can sometimes be fatal.

Synthetic marijuana - known also as Spice and K2 - is a plant product laced with a synthetic cannabinoid. It is illegal in some states, but banned in Texas

Abdullah el-Hage is the son of Wadih el-Hage (left), who once served as Osama bin Laden's (right) personal secretary

According to the federal complaint, confidential informants and undercover cops bought Spice from el-Hage's shop and another shop called New Smoke Delight several times between July 2015 and July 2016.

Four of the other men arrested in the sting reportedly sold Spice as workers at either of the two smoke shops, while another man, 55-year-old Khaled Al Haj, ordered the drug from a supplier in Denver and distributed the product to the two businesses.

At a recent court hearing, el-Hage's defense attorney tried to convince a judge to release him on bail. But the judge sided with prosecutors who argued that he was a flight risk.

Abdullah is a U.S. citizen who has spent much of his life in Texas. He appears to be very Westernized, according to photos on his Facebook page

This meme posted to Abdullah's Facebook page shows he has pride for being a Texan

During a raid of el-Hage's home, investigators seized more than 13,000 packets of spice and an estimated $200,000 to $400,000 in cash.

El-Hage's American-born mother, April Ray, testified in her son's defense at the hearing. She said he was a U.S. citizen who has lived in the area since 1997 and was a father figure for his six siblings.

Ray asked that he be released from jail so that he could stay with her in the lead up to the trial.

From left to right: Khaled Al Haj, Floyd Lee and Deya Al Raji. According to court papers, Al Haj purchased and distributed the Spice to local businesses and Lee and Al Raji, clerks at El-Hage's shop, sold the substance to customers

Abdullah's mother has actually spoken out before about her ties to bin Laden before, in a 2002 Newsweek article titled 'Married to Al Qaeda'.

In the article, Ray said that bin Laden was a 'great boss' and 'not the monster people make him out to be'.

Her husband moved to the U.S. in 1978, first living in Louisiana. In 1992, he started working for bin laden in Sudan and later moved his family around the world, eventually settling back down in Texas in the late 1990s. Not long after, he was arrested for his role in the 1998 embassy bombings.

It's unclear whether Abdullah was born in the U.S., since his parents moved to Pakistan the same year he was born. Irregardless, he would have had American citizenship at birth since both of his parents were citizens.

After the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden went into hiding and was eventually found hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Hundreds of mourners have attended the funeral of skydiver Pamela Gower who died when her specially modified parachute did not open properly and she plummeted into a parked car.

Pamela Gower, 49, who had dwarfism, was jumping from 15,000 feet when the parachute's canopy partially opened and spiralled out of her control.

Onlookers saw her 'spinning like a top' as her parachute became tangled in the air and propelled her towards the ground.

Amid moving scenes today, the self-confessed 'crazy trainee skydiver' was carried into South Shields Crematorium by her family as her heartbroken friends and extended family watched on.

People paid tribute to the popular Miss Gower 'who let nothing get in her way', saying she died 'doing what she loved' and 'lived life to the full'.

Colourful flowers in the shape of a parachute lay in the window of the hearse during the funeral of Pamela Gower at South Shields Crematorium today

Hundreds of people lined the street as they paid tribute to the popular Miss Gower

Pamela Gower described herself as a 'crazy trainee skydiver' and had posted various pictures of herself taking part in the extreme sport on Facebook

There was a sombre silence as the procession of three cars were led into the South Shields Crematorium by the funeral director.

Colourful flowers in the shape of a parachute lay in the window of the hearse.

Friends and family flooded into the building to the sound of The Jam's 'A Town Called Malice' and many mourners had to stand during the service as the room was so packed.

The fitting poem 'What Should One's Life Be' was read out by conductor Margaret Humphrey during the service.

The congregation filed out to Gloria Gaynor's 'I Am What I Am' before going onto the wake at the White Lead pub in Hebburn, in South Tyneside.

The family used a picture of Miss Gower in front of the Taj Mahal as it was a 'perfect example' of how she let 'nothing get in her way'

Her parents, Catherine and Len, said their daughter was a 'determined, independent woman.'

They said: 'Pamela was a great girl who was loved by her family so much and was a wonderful daughter and sister. Pamela was a very determined and independent woman who let nothing get in her way.

'Our mam always told Pamela how proud she was of her, as was the rest of our family. We will remember how she always saw the funny side of things, just like her 'Da'.

Miss Gower was not married and did not have any children.

She worked as an employment adviser for Remploy, an organisation which provides employment placements for disabled people.

There was a sombre silence as the procession of three cars were led into the South Shields Crematorium by the funeral director

Friend Tony Layton, 46, who had known her for 20 years, added: 'She was very outgoing.

'Everyone has stories about Pamela. She had a great sense of fun.

'She had a form of dwarfism, but she travelled a lot. She was a very adventurous person.

'She was always off on her jaunts, doing something or other. She was into skydiving for a few years.

'She used to do a lot of tandem jumps and was training to be a sky diving instructor.

'She had a great sense of humour, she would have tried anything.

'She was a very friendly person and she would give you her last.'

Miss Gower's cousin Anthony Cairns said: 'She certainly lived life to the full that's for sure. It just makes you aware that you have to make the most of life as you have no idea when it is likely to be taken away from you. She was doing exactly that I guess, doing what she loved.'

Skydiver Pamela Gower (pictured on an earlier jump), was killed after her parachute failed to open properly

Just weeks ago, Ms Gower wrote: 'Nothing makes me more happy than skydiving, can't wait for the next jump!!!!'

According to police, Miss Gower's plunge on September 10 was her first in Britain after some jumps abroad and she used her own equipment.

She took her very last skydive with the Peterlee Parachute Centre, and jumped from an aircraft at around 15,000ft up - landing on a parked car in a housing estate near Shotton in County Durham.

It is understood her parachute twisted on deployment- the connecting ropes were crossed over and the canopy didn't open properly.

The only way a jumper can rectify the fault is by fully rotating to untwist their ropes, but this is often impossible to do at speed.

She was rushed to hospital by air ambulance and taken into intensive care, but later died.
Kickstarter to fund six VR films in the next six months, five of which are written and directed by women. She says:

One of them, Eagle Bone, directed by Tracy Rector has already been selected to screen at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival (one of five pieces chosen from around the world!) Its the first VR piece to be directed by an Indigenous person in North America. And we are very proud to have been a part of its creation. Another one we are doing is a surreal comedy I have written and hope to direct, called Slow Moving Houses. In addition we are producing Lynn Shelton's first VR piece, Power, Experience Pride by Dacia Saenz, Dom by Netsie Tjirongo and Arcadia Flats (a Werewolf horror) by Joe Jacobs. Its a pretty diverse slate of creative VR projects.
More than 19,000 students in the small Canadian province of Prince Edward Island were evacuated this morning because of a bomb threat, which has since proven to be unfounded.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Kevin Bailey said the threat came via fax Wednesday morning, and that schools on the normally sleepy island were notified within 10 minutes. Officers later searched the schools and found nothing suspicious.

There's been no threat found. Everybody is safe, Bailey told reporters.

More than 19,000 students in Prince Edward Island, Canada, were evacuated this morning because of a fake bomb threat

School staff talks with the police while students wait to board buses during evacuation procedures at Charlottetown Rural High School in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

The threat was faxed to Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada's capital of Ottawa, Bailey said.

The message stated that the bombs had placed at a number of schools and would be detonated today, Bailey said, adding that a suspect has not been identified.

Students at more than 60 English language and French language schools were taken to safe locations by staff outside the schools, where buses met them.

Bailey said bomb threats are hard to evaluate for credibility, but said authorities like to they err on the side of caution.

Parents and guardians were asked to wait for further instructions before picking up their children.

Parker Grimmer, the island's director of public schools, said police contacted the school system Wednesday morning about a threat that was of a significant nature and asked for the evacuation of all schools. He said he expects all students to return to classes on Thursday.

Police received a threat via fax that bombs were placed at a number of PEI schools

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Staff Sergeant Kevin Bailey told reporters that nothing suspicious was found

This is new to us so we are reacting in a new way, Grimmer said. But we have plans and procedures and I think we followed them.

Prince Edward Island is located off Canada's Atlantic coast and is the country's smallest province with a population of approximately 146,000.

At Holland College in the provincial capital of Charlottetown, a woman burst into the classroom to tell everyone to pick up their books and evacuate immediately, student Morgan McNeil said. Outside, everyone was in a panic and helicopters were flying overhead, he said.

I know there will be a process to look at this afterward but we wanted to ensure the safety of those students, Grimmer said. This is not a normal day and this is a day that I think we responded to well.

Bailey said similar anonymous threats were made to schools and colleges in the nearby province of Nova Scotia, where the Nova Scotia Community College Marconi Campus, Cape Breton University and the NSCC technology campus in Halifax were evacuated.

Halifax Regional Police said in a press release that an explosive disposal unit went to the scene but found that a suspicious package was only garbage and reopened streets in the area.
Two ten-year-old children have been arrested after they allegedly mutilated goldfish in a stomach-churning rampage at a northern Adelaide child care centre.

The childcare's pet gold fish were cut up with scissors, and the rooms defecated and urinated in during the sickening vandal attack.

Two ten-year-old children have been arrested but five children all aged 10-and-under were alleged to have broken into the child care centre before perpetrating the vile acts on Sunday.

The children destroyed walls and computers, and covered the rooms in paint during the rampage

In the rampage, the children destroyed walls and computers, and covered the rooms in paint, according to Seven News.

But in the most vile and gruesome act, the child care's fish tank was smashed, and the fish cut up with scissors.

In response to the shocking discovery, a visibly shaken kindergarten director Jill Rogers said 'our children were very attached to our fish'.

The community was quick to lend a hand, with donations coming in as quickly as destroyed equipment was taken out

The child care's fish tank was smashed, and the fish cut up with scissors. The fish tank (pictured) has since been replaced.

A pet budgie was also reported missing after the attack.

As parents arrived to the news on Monday morning, they were visibly shaken.

Upon learning details of the vandalism, one mother was reduced to tears as she held her young son in her arms.

'It's actually quite upsetting what they've done in there,' she said.

Another woman was shocked to learn how young the alleged offenders were.

Kindergarten director Jill Rogers said 'our children were very attached to our fish'

'Oh my god, seriously far out, I didn't hear that,' she said.

'I can't imagine anyone doing that, but to be so young, that's even worse.'

Mother Trinity Scannell said she was disgusted by the lewd acts, and wanted to see the children and their parents face justice.

'The parents are definitely accountable for it and they should pay for the damages too,' she said.

'The children should come back for punishment and do some cleaning' said mother Trinity Scannell

'And the children should come back for punishment and do some cleaning.'

But the community was quick to lend a hand, with donations coming in as quickly as destroyed equipment was taken out.

Replacement books and a new fish tank were donated to ensure the children did not arrive to empty rooms and play areas.
Rahami has since married a Pakistani woman and the pair have a child together

Rahami and Mena were High School sweethearts. Mena was pregnant at prom, friends said

He has been banned from contacting their daughter

A New Jersey court granted her request for custody one day after she applied for it, saying there was potential for 'irreparable harm' to the child

Maria Mena was temporarily granted full custody of the daughter she had with Ahmad Rahami, one day after he was charged with planting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey

Rahami (pictured in his year book in 2007) met Maria Mena at Edison High School. The couple had a child while still in school

The ex-girlfriend of chicken shop terrorist Ahmad Khan Rahami has been temporarily granted full custody of their nine-year-old daughter.

Maria Mena, who was pregnant with Rahami's child while they were in school, applied to a judge for custody on Tuesday - a day after her former sweetheart was captured in a shoot-out with New Jersey police.

A New Jersey court temporarily granted her petition on Wednesday morning, saying there was potential for 'irreparable harm' to the child.

On Tuesday night, Rahami was charged with planting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey over the weekend. 29 people were injured when a device exploded in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea on Saturday night. A nearby device failed to detonate.

In court papers obtained by DailyMail.com, Mena had petitioned the court to be the sole guardian of their daughter due to the ongoing criminal case.

'Requesting full custody, defendant has been charged with police attempted murder, and is currently under protective services after possible terrorist related activity in NYC,' Mena wrote in the documents.

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Maria Mena, the ex-girlfriend of suspected terrorist Ahmad Rahami, filed for full custody of their nine-year-old daugher on Tuesday. Above, a police officer stands guard outside Mena's home in New Jersey on Tuesday

The court agreed with Mena's concern. NBC reported a verdict that read: 'The Plaintiff's testimony has convinced the Court that the purported harm to the minor child under the instant circumstances is both emergent and irreparable and has therefore satisfied the standard,'

It's unclear how active 28-year-old Rahami had been in his daughter's life. Mena claimed in previous interviews that she hadn't seen him in two years, after seeing him become more anti-American.

Mena and Rahami dated while attending Edison High School, and classmates said she was pregnant at prom.

Their young love was apparently not well received by Rahami's father, who organized for him to visit Afghanistan right before their daughter was born.

Rahami was arrested on Monday after a shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey

Rahami (pictured on Monday) is suspected in two bombings and an attempted bombing over the weekend in New York City and New Jersey

While he was critical of American culture compared to the strict Islamic rules of his homeland, Maria never believed he'd never go as far as to hurt innocent people.

'He seemed standoffish to American culture, but I never thought he would cross the line,' she said. 'I never thought he would do something like this,' she said through tears. 'I think he was brainwashed.'

They broke up sometime after the child was born, and after Rahami returned from Afghanistan he stopped paying for child support as he took longer and longer trips back to the Middle East. At one point, Mena had to sue him for nearly $1,000 in child support.

The last trip that Maria, 26, was aware of, Rahami brought back a wife and child.

While they were together, she says he would often compared American culture to life in Afghanistan, saying how 'there weren't homosexuals in Afghanistan.'

He was also heavily critical of the military, once pointing out a military character as 'the bad person' to his young daughter.

Maria wouldn't reveal why she and Rahami broke up but did say that she did not want him anywhere near their daughter.

'I didn't want him to see my daughter,' she said. 'If he loved her, he would have paid child support. My greatest fear is that he would try to take my daughter.'
The victim was shot after police thought he was holding a gun-but it was a cell phone

Semer's mother criticized the decision saying it was 'cold blooded murder'

Sgt. Brian MacNaught and officer Keith Holmes were cleared of all charges

Demarcus Semer,21, was shot dead by two policeman in

Police thought Demarcus Semer was holding a firearm-in fact it was his cell phone

A Florida grand jury cleared two police officers Tuesday who fatally shot an unarmed black motorist last April as he fled, with prosecutors saying the man's actions gave the officers a reasonable belief their lives were endangered.

The St. Lucie County Grand Jury cleared Fort Pierce police Sgt. Brian MacNaught and officer Keith Holmes for the April 23 shooting of Demarcus Semer, 21, during a traffic stop.

Prosecutors say their investigation showed he refused to get out of his car and then tried to drive away, clipping Holmes and dragging MacNaught who was hanging out the passenger door. Both officers are white.

Assistant State Attorney Tom Bakkedahl called Semer's death an 'unmitigated tragedy,' but added that 'all he had to do is step out of the car and Mr. Semer would be here with us today'.

Latercia Middelton, Semer's mother, criticized the decision, saying, 'I can't see my son anymore. This is cold-blooded murder'.

Family attorney Lorenzo Williams said a wrongful death lawsuit would be filed against the city. Semer, a former bank teller, had just begun working for a tech company when he was killed.

According to Bakkedahl, Holmes pulled over Semer for speeding. Holmes told investigators that Semer, who had no criminal record, hesitated when asked for his driver's license. He said he then smelled marijuana and could see a small amount in the car. Holmes said he told Semer to get out of the car, but he refused.

About this time, MacNaught pulled up, got out and opened the passenger door to Semer's car to tell him to exit and to make sure no one else was inside. The officers say Semer refused, so Holmes tried to pull him out of the car.

They told prosecutors Semer threw the car into drive and started to drive away. The car knocked Holmes to the ground, injuring his knee. MacNaught, to protect himself from being run over, jumped into the car.

Bakkedahl said Holmes, from his angle, thought Semer was about to run over MacNaught so he fired into the car.

Bakkedahl called that 'a very bad mistake but he thought he was doing what he needed to do to protect the life of his sergeant'.

Two Fort Piece officers (file picture) tried to stop Semer's car when he ran over the legs of one of them, authorities said. The other cop was partially inside Semer's car when he fired, according to the county sheriff

The bullets missed Semer but two would have hit MacNaught if they hadn't lodged in the car, Bakkedahl said.

MacNaught told investigators he thought Semer was the shooter, so he jolted him with his electric stun gun. Semer jumped out of the car and ran around the front. He said he thought Semer might be coming to shoot him, so he pulled his gun.

He said Semer ran toward a house but then turned toward him with an object in his hand, so he fired six shots. He hit Semer once, killing him. The object was Semer's cellphone.

'It was then that MacNaught realized he had shot an unarmed man,' Bakkedahl said. He said the entire incident took less than 30 seconds.

Bakkedahl said that to convict MacNaught or Holmes of a crime, prosecutors would have to prove they had no reasonable fear their lives were endangered.

'It simply would not be possible,' he said.
Sheldon Sevinor, 70, was arrested on Sunday and charged with possession of crack cocaine

A Massachusetts plastic surgeon who has been a guest on several national television programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, is facing drug charges.

Sheldon Sevinor, 70, was arrested on Sunday when officers conducting surveillance on a suspected drug dealer witnessed what appeared to be a drug transaction involving Sevinor, police said.

Officers seized a total of five twist bags of what is believed to be crack cocaine, more than $1,500 cash on the suspected drug dealer and a flip phone, The Daily Item in Lynn reported.

Investigators had conducted the undercover surveillance on Sunday at the home of 61-year-old Johnnie Albert, who police described as a well-known drug user.

Albert was followed by police after getting into his car and driving to Mall Street where a grey Dodge allegedly driven by Sevinor was parked.

The two allegedly had a conversation before Albert drove away and Sevinor followed behind, police said.

They then pulled over on Hardwood Street where Sevinor drove to where Albert's car was parked, before Albert got out and walked over to Sevinor, police said.

Investigators had conducted the undercover surveillance on Sunday at the home of 61-year-old Johnnie Albert (pictured), who police described as a well-known drug user

Officers then allegedly witnessed Albert put his hands into Sevinor's car before pulling them out and placing something in his pants pocket.

After witnessing the alleged drug transaction, an officer approached Sevinor who allegedly reached his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled something out before appearing to throw it on the ground.

Officers said they saw several twists of what is believed to be narcotics fall out of his hand, police said.

When he got out of the car after officers asked him to exit, police said they saw two twist of what appeared to be crack cocaine on the driver's side floor of the car.

They also found two twists on the ground located outside the car and both men were taken into custody, police said.

Sevinor pictured right. His attorney said his client 'has never been accused of any type of inappropriate behavior' in 40 years as a surgeon

During their investigation, officers also found $1,516 in cash in Albert's pocket, with one pile amounting to $200.

Police believe that amount was from the alleged drug transaction, equaling to each of the five twists of cocaine costing $40 a bag.

Officers also seized three more twists of suspected crack cocaine after conducting a search of Albert's car inside a Mentos container located in the console.

Albert has been charged with crack cocaine possession with intent to distribute and crack cocaine distribution.

Meanwhile, Sevinor, who was released on bail, has been charged with possession of crack cocaine.

His attorney told The Daily Item of Lynn that his client 'has never been accused of any type of inappropriate behavior' in 40 years as a surgeon.

He declined to comment on the specifics of the charges.

Sevinor lives in Nahant and has offices in Lynn, Boston and Florida.

Sevinor has been a featured guest on Good Morning America, The View (pictured far right) and Inside Edition. He lives in Nahant and has offices in Lynn, Boston and Florida

He has been a featured guest on Good Morning America, The View and Inside Edition.

He has been invited to teach on topics around the world including breast reconstruction in China, facial rejuvenation in Argentina and liposuction and body contouring in France, according to his website.

He served a four-year term on the board of the National Board of Medical Examiners, is certified by the American Board of Cosmetic Surgery and is an honorary member of the European Academy of Cosmetic Surgery.

Sevinor also served on the Board of Directors of the American Cancer Societys Massachusetts Division, according to his website.

The plastic surgeon received his undergraduate degree from Syracuse University before earning a medical degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine.

He then went on to serve a clinical clerkship at Harvard Medical School before doing his residency in general surgery at Brown University-Rhode Island Hospital, his website states.

He was Chief Resident in Plastic Surgery at University of Florida-Jacksonville Hospitals where he served his plastic surgery residency.
A Pennsylvania man found himself trapped next to the body of his girlfriend for three days after the SUV he was driving plunged down an embankment in southeast Indiana, injuring his legs.

Kevin Bell, 39, of Dover, was driving Nikki K Reed, 37, back to her home in Seymour, Indiana for her son's birthday party on Saturday afternoon when he lost control of his vehicle and went head-on into a tree, police said.

Hobbs was killed instantly, but Bell was trapped alive with her until he was able to crawl to the road for help days later.

Tragic: Kevin Bell, 39, lost control of this SUV in southeastern Indiana on Sunday afternoon, and hit a tree down an embankment. His girlfriend, Nikki K Reed, 37, died instantly

Trapped: Bell (left) suffered leg injuries that left him trapped with the body of Reed (right). He crawled to the road Tuesday and was taken to hospital, where he's expected to recover

The SUV, which crashed off the US 50 near the Jennings-Ripley County line, was not visible from the roadside, according to state police.

It wasn't until Bell had clawed his way up to the road at around 5pm Tuesday that a motorist saw him and was able to provide help.

On a YouCaring page to raise money for her mom's funeral, Reed's daughter, Brooklyn said her mom had been heading home for her youngest son's birthday party.

Reed had gone to Pennsylvania to pick up Bell, and had last spoken to her daughter at 12.30pm Saturday.

After days of panicked searching, the family were told of Reed's death by a state trooper Tuesday.

Family: Nikki Reed (top center) was on the way to the birthday party of her youngest son (bottom-center) when the horrific accident happened

'I don't know what happened or how it happened,' Brooklyn wrote. 'All I know is that I want this to not be true, I just wish it was a dream!

'I love my mom so much! I wish she was still here so I can hug her and tell her I love her one more time!'

Bell was taken with non-life threatening injuries to a hospital in North Vernon, about 65 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

An investigation continues.
A Philadelphia mother of two has admitted to a plot to leave her kids and travel to Syria to join ISIS.

Keonna Thomas, 32, was in court Tuesday and pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

'I believe that I'm guilty of this charge,' said Thomas, wearing a hijab over her green prison jumpsuit, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

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Keonna Thomas, 32, (left) was arrested at her home in Philadelphia in 2015 on the day she planned to fly to Syria to join the terrorist group Islamic State

In court Tuesday, Thomas pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization. She was arrested at home (pictured) in April 2015

Thomas was arrested in April 2015 as she made breakfast for her daughters, ages seven and nine  the day she planned to abandon them and go fight for ISIS.

Prosecutors say she communicated with an ISIS recruit in Syria who asked if she wanted to be part of a martyrdom operation, court documents show.

'I can make that wish come true,' the fighter reportedly replied.

At some point, Thomas and the recruit, Abu Khalid al-Amriki, struck up a relationship  and later married over Skype.

In February 2015, she told Amriki it 'would be amazing' to take part in a suicide attack.

'A girl can only wish,' she told him, court records show.

She already had a flight to Barcelona, Spain, booked when she was arrested. From there, she had planned on flying to Syria, court records show.

Thomas' home had been under surveillance by FBI for a week before she was arrested. Thomas had a series of American flags lined up outside (pictured)

Thomas  who called herself Fatayat Al Khilafah and 'YoungLioness'  actively spoke of her desires on a Twitter account that has since been removed.

'I see why the mujahideen [violent jihadi fighters] Sacrifice Dunya [life on earth] for Akhirah [the afterlife] there's no comparison,' read one tweet.

Another said; 'Only thing I'm jealous of is when I see the smiles of shuhadaa [martyrs].'

Her home, which had been under surveillance by FBI in the week leading to her arrest, had American flags lined up outside.

In one exchange with the fighter, they discussed how he would shoot or behead his wife if she turned out to be a spy.

'Cutting head is more personal,' Thomas replied.

Defense attorney Kathleen Gaughan said Thomas has accepted responsibility and 'looks forward to putting this behind her and being a mother to her two young children.'

Thomas, who was arrested at a public housing development in north Philadelphia, is scheduled to be sentenced January 17.
ISIS have claimed to have captured a Russian spy who has appealed to Vladimir Putin for help.

Scepticism surrounds the footage of a man who is dressed all in black making a direct appeal to the leader of the Kremlin.

The clip is markedly different to the barbaric videos the terror group usually circulates.

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In the video, the man gives his name as Yevgeniy Petrenko, and says he was taken by militants as he carried out his regular duties.

'Today I want to appeal to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, a man who gave an oath on the constitution to faithfully defend Russia's citizens wherever they may be,' he says, according to the Daily Mirror.

The man has a kafir badge pinned to his chest, known as a symbol of a non-Muslim, and claims to be a captain in Russia's security agency, the FSB.

But there is no footage of any fighters, as has become the norm for ISIS videos, and there is no sign of the orange Guantanamo Bay-style jumpsuits their captors are usually made to wear.

Russian media have questioned the validity of the appeal, and the FSB has yet to comment on the video.




and parents are outraged with the policy

from formal/graduation if they take part

Number of schools across New South Wales have

Schools across New South Wales have cancelled muck-up day, with some warning students they will have to sit their exams elsewhere if they take part in the end of year tradition.

A mother of a student at Georges River College in southern Sydney said the principal threatened to ban Year 12's from their formal and graduation.

The principal also told students they would have to sit exams elsewhere if they participated in muck-up day shenanigans.

Schools across New South Wales have cancelled muck-up day, with some warning students they will have to sit their exams elsewhere if they take part in the end of year tradition (stock image)

MUCK-UP DAY CANCELLED - James Busby High School - Casino High School - Wiley Park Girls High School - Killara High School - Warners Bay High School - Georges River College - Wagga High School Source: The Daily Telegraph Advertisement

'To threaten a child that they could not sit their HSC on school grounds because they brought in a water pistol is plain ridiculous,' the mother told The Daily Telegraph.

Georges River students were told any acts of vandalism would result in suspensions, an education department spokesperson said.

'If a student is suspended an alternative venue to sit the HSC may be required.'

A year 12 student at Casino High School in rural NSW said they would face harsh penalties if they mucked up.

Some schools have threatened to ban year 12's from their formal and graduation and if they participate in the shenanigans (stock image)

'My school and a number of others have threatened a barring from the formal, withheld HSC marks, banning from whole school end of year excursions, suspensions and in extreme cases expulsion,' the student said.
A stem cell marketer with two alleged aliases and an extensive tattoo collection on his face is accused of promising patients with conditions like cancer and multiple sclerosis that he can help cure them if he is paid tens of thousands of dollars quickly up front.

Michael Farrelly, who goes by Mikael Wolfe, and his Gold Coast company, Autologous Stem Cell Research Organisation (ASCRO), were recently reported to the police and Queensland's Office of the Health Ombudsman by the Stem Cells Australia for 'unethical and exploitative practices,' according to ABC's 7.30.

Mr Wolfe, who is also facing three dangerous drug charges stemming from a police raid of his home in March, has allegedly made millions of dollars convincing people with debilitating conditions that stem cell treatment could cure them, despite no evidence to support his claims.

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Michael Farrelly (pictured), a Gold Coast stem cell marketer who goes by Mikael Wolfe, is accused of promising patients with debilitating diseases that he can help cure them if he is paid $44,000 up front

Mr Wolfe (left) and his company, Autologous Stem Cell Research Organisation (ASCRO), were recently reported to the police and Queensland's Office of the Health Ombudsman by the Stem Cells Australia for 'unethical and exploitative practices'

'The real concern is that patients are being put at risk, they're being charged exorbitant sums of money for treatments where there's absolutely no evidence of efficacy and that really have real potential to do harm,' Stem Cells Australia's Program Leader, Professor Martin Pera, said.

In one case, Mr Wolfe used the pseudonym Patrick Collimore as he allegedly emailed back and forth with a patient, encouraging him to seek treatment at Autologous Stem Cell Treatment  a company he often referred clients to.

Mr Wolfe allegedly told the patient the treatment would cost $100,000 but he could receive it for a discounted $44,000 with the condition that at least $20,000 was deposited into his bank account immediately, according to ABC.

Stem cell doctor Mike Belich (pictured) said he refused to treat three patients sent to him by Mr Wolfe because he could not cure their ailments

'You will miss this opportunity if you don't take the step towards improving your health,' Mr Collimore wrote.

'As the Jewish say, 'we give all our health for wealth but when we are on our death bed, we would give all our wealth for one day of health'.'

Eric Hu, director of Autologous Stem Cell Treatment, confirmed he had received multiple patients from Mr Wolfe but said the company's stem cell treatment should be used for 'rejuvenation', not treating larger health issues like Mr Wolfe had promoted.

The stem cell treatment involves taking a person's own stem cells and reinjecting it into their bloodstream.

Mr Wolfe is also facing three dangerous drug charges stemming from a police raid of his home in March

'...They're being charged exorbitant sums of money for treatments where there's absolutely no evidence of efficacy...' Stem Cells Australia's Program Leader, Professor Martin Pera (pictured), said

Stem cell doctor Mike Belich told ABC he refused to treat three patients sent to him by Mr Wolfe because he could not cure their ailments.

'They had conditions stem cells wouldn't help  you've got to be very judicious with stem cells,' Dr Belich said.

'Stem cells can't magically help every disease.'

'He's a complete fraudster. He's got no morals. He preys on people that are vulnerable,' Dr Belich said.
Yesterday, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf addressed the Senate Banking Committee about his bank's years of fraud, driven by threats of firing for low-level employees if they didn't meet unrealistic sales-targets, overseen by an executive who was given a $125m retirement bonus when she quit last summer, just before the scandal broke (though the bank had known it was going on since 2011).

Stumpf, who appears to have put his fist through a wall, did not handle himself well. Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith parses through his blunders and suggests that this will likely lead to criminal prosecution, in part because of Stumpf's unwillingness to consider giving back any of the millions the bank paid to him and his top execs while they turned a blind eye to a fraud that affected 2,000,000 Wells Fargo customers  trashing their credit records, pilfering from their accounts, then hitting them with fines and penalties.

Stumpf also refused to consider calling the credit reporting bureaux to repair the customer credit ratings damaged by his fraud; instead, his bank will take the much more expensive step of phoning each of those customers  and then trying to sell them more Wells Fargo products.

The bank requires its customers to surrender their right to sue, submitting instead to binding arbitration when they open accounts  and now they say that this clause applies to accounts that weren't opened by the defrauded customers, but rather, by bank employees who were committing frauds against them. That is, you "agree" to binding arbitration with Wells Fargo even when the "agreement" is made without your knowledge and consent in the course of Wells Fargo committing a crime to which you are the victim.

Better still: the bank signed up those defrauded customers for an expensive "fraud protection" service, charging the premiums to them even as it defrauded them.



Some of the actions look to set up a criminal case. I'm getting out in front of serious legal analysis, but some of the actions were so rancid that they would seem to set up criminal charges. The San Francisco bank would transfer money from deposit accounts to cover fees in unauthorized credit card accounts. In addition, bank employees would forge customer signatures to create phony accounts. In many ways, this is worse than the robosigning scandal, since the signatures were thousands of fakes of a single mortgage servicer or law firm employee, who presumably was in on the con or would not have objected. It was still a fraud on the court, since the affidavits in question affirmed personal knowledge, where there was often none even if person whose signature was robosigned had made all those signatures him or herself. But forging customer signatures on a widespread basis is another kettle of fish entirely.

Wells Fargo CEO's Teflon Don Act Backfires at Senate Hearing; "I Take Full Responsibility" Means Anything But

[Yves Smith/Naked Capitalism]
Race-hate stickers emblazoned with the words 'Rapefugees not welcome' have been plastered on lamp-posts and bus stops in a coastal town.

The Islamophobic and anti-immigration stickers, which show robed men armed with knives chasing after a woman, are being investigated by police.

The images, which have appeared throughout South Shields, near Newcastle, display the logo of far-right group the North West Infidels.

Residents have expressed their disgust at the racist stickers - some of which show Neo-Nazi symbols.

Race-hate stickers emblazoned with the words 'Rapefugees not welcome' have been plastered on lamp-posts and bus stops in South Shields, Tyne and Wear

One displays the name 'Mohammad' and list a number of defamatory statements underneath.

'It's just not right, they shouldn't be there. They're awful,' one resident said.

'I spotted the first one last month I phoned the council to get it removed.

'The council came out and removed it but more and more are appearing. There's quite a few in the area now.

The Islamophobic and anti-immigration stickers, which show robed men armed with knives chasing after a woman, are being investigated by police

A 29-year-old, who did not wish to be named, described the stickers as 'embarrassing'.

'It's embarrassing to think visitors might believe we approve of such behaviour like this in South Shields,' the resident said.

'Well we don't, it's a multicultural town and there's no room for racism and hatred here.'

A member of the North West Infidels has since posted on Twitter, saying: 'I'm glad they're up and being seen.

'Why are some more concerned about stickers being put up than people travelling half way across the world for our benefits?!'

The 'Rapefugees not welcome' symbol was the same as the one used on banners and posters by protesters in Cologne, Germany, earlier this year.

A member of the North West Infidels has since defended the racist stickers on Twitter

Hundreds took to the streets after a string of New Year's Eve sexual assaults and robberies.

A leaked report has since revealed a staggering 1,200 women were sexually abused in German cities during New Year's Eve celebrations.

The police document stated detectives believe 2,000 men were involved across various cities but that the bulk of the crimes were committed in Cologne and Hamburg.

Of the 2,000 perpetrators, around 120 have been identified, and about half of them were foreign nationals who had only recently arrived in Germany.

In the wake of the flood of offensive stickers found in South Shields, Neighbourhood lnspector John Smith said the stickers will not be tolerated.

Hundreds took to the streets after a string of New Year's Eve (pictured) sexual assaults and robberies in Cologne, Germany

He said: 'This type of literature will not be tolerated in South Shields and anyone caught posting them should expect to be put before the court.

'This material has been removed and anyone who has any information relating to the posters should contact the South Shields Neighbourhood Policing.'

Councillor Moira Smith, from South Tyneside Council, said: 'Reducing racism is one of the top priorities of the South Tyneside Community Safety Partnership and, as always, we are extremely concerned by these stickers appearing in public places.
Russet the hedgehog died after 26 research markers and a radio tracker attached to him meant he couldn't curl up

Animal welfare groups have slammed wildlife researchers who attached so many trackers to a hedgehog it was unable to curl up and later died.

Charities said scientists left the hedgehog, called Russet, looking like a 'bad joke' after they fixed 26 markers to his spines and a radio tracker on his back.

Shocking pictures show the creature covered in huge, brightly coloured antennae and with a transmitter strapped to his back when he was found on June 17.

Hedgehogs have no distinctive markings so researchers glue fluorescent markers to the insectivores to identify them in studies.

But the Nottingham Trent University survey of the abundance of hogs in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, left Russet dehydrated, underweight and with broken toes on one foot.

Shocking pictures show the creature covered in huge, brightly coloured antennae and with a transmitter strapped to his back when he was found on June 17. The Nottingham Trent University survey of the abundance of hogs in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, left him dehydrated, underweight and with broken toes on one foot

Hedgehogs have no distinctive markings so researchers glue fluorescent markers to the insectivores to identify them in studies

He eventually died despite attempts to treat him by Lynda Britchford, from Oxton Wild Hedgehog Rehab.

She said: 'Having been presented with the hog, to be honest it looked like someone's idea of a bad joke.

'Ultimately, we feel that this places hogs at a disadvantage and risk, and don't agree with it.

'The coloured sleeves are attached in groups of 10, so Russet would have had 30 attached.

'The time it would take to attach 30 of those with a heat gun would be quite stressful for the hog.

'Sticking 30 brightly coloured long reflective tubes on them makes them stick out like a sore thumb - particularly to unscrupulous kids or adults, and potentially to predators.

'The researchers said they checked Russet every three to four days - that is a very long time.

Russet eventually died despite attempts to treat him by Lynda Britchford, from Oxton Wild Hedgehog Rehab. The hog (seen above as he was being cared for) also had mange, severe colitis and an intestinal fluke

'Russet was admitted weighing 437g, but according to the researcher, the tracker was fitted on June 6 and he weighed 243g then.

'By my calculations, he lost 28 per cent of his bodyweight in eight days. That didn't happen overnight.

'It may be that if he had been checked on sooner, his poor condition would have been spotted and he would have become less critically unwell as he was on admission.'

Ms Britchford also said the placement of the trackers 'would impact upon males trying to mate with females who had them attached'.

She said the attachments would impede a hedgehog's ability to squeeze into small gaps and make them less camouflaged.

Russet also had mange, severe colitis and intestinal fluke and he was unable to curl up following the research.

The woman who found him, who did not want to be named, said: 'He looked distressed and I think he was a bit wobbly.

'We thought either he'd been rolling in wire and got it stuck to him or somebody had thought it was funny to put Christmas tree lights or something around him.

'When my husband went to get him to pick him up, he couldn't curl up, he couldn't curl and protect himself, so that upset us because we thought, there's something wrong there.'

The tracker is far too big and will almost certainly cause problems Caroline Gould from Vale Wildlife Hospital

The method of attaching heat-shrinking plastic to hedgehogs spines has been used since 2004 and scientists claim it is like adding hair extensions to humans.

But international guidelines state they should weigh no more than 5 per cent of the animal's weight.

Caroline Gould from Vale Wildlife Hospital said: 'Vale is totally against studies such as this.

'The tracker is far too big and will almost certainly cause problems, get entangled or prevent the hedgehog from getting through or under hedges, gates, fences and sheds.

'It should not be legal to use these on hedgehogs.'

In a statement, the RSPCA said: 'We feel that the number of coloured tags, and the fact that they are longer than the spines they are attached to, may present problems, although we have no evidence for this.'

But the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) has defended the study, which it part funded, claiming it couldn't have interfered with the well-being of hedgehogs.

Disgusted visitors to the BHPS Facebook page have left pictures of Russet with outraged comments.

Kate Goacher wrote: 'Its absolutely disgusting and I would never support this treatment of any animal. It's nothing but cruel animal testing! '

Sue Grey said: 'We want this barbaric practice funded by you stopped now.'

Katie Robertson posted: 'I hope you get what you deserve by this picture being shared on social media. What barbaric, disgusting "research" are you funding, BHPS?... None of my money is coming your way ever.'

Hugh Warwick, who works for the BHPS, said: 'Over 30 years of work, there is no evidence that our research interferes with the well-being of hedgehogs at all.

'The heat-shrink plastic tags that are now the standard marking technique do not require plastic to be melted onto the spines and cause the hedgehog no trouble at all.

'It is not far off humans getting hair extensions.'

Nottingham Trent University said: 'The animal is completely unhindered and able to go about its activities - such as feeding and breeding - in the usual way.
Growing xenophobia and right-wing extremism could threaten peace in eastern Germany, according to her own government.

In a report urging mainstream society to take a stronger stand against anti-migrant action, the government today said in many demonstrations against asylum seekers, the line between popular protest and far-right agitation was becoming 'blurred'.

It comes following a string of attacks on asylum seekers, including a number of refugee houses being targeted by arson.

Growing xenophobia and right-wing extremism could threaten peace in eastern Germany, according to her own government

In a report urging mainstream society to take a stronger stand against anti-migrant action, the government today said in many demonstrations against asylum seekers, the line between popular protest and far-right agitation was becoming 'blurred'

'Right-wing extremism in all forms poses a very serious threat to the societal and economic development' of eastern Germany, said Iris Gleicke, who is the government's point person for national unity.

'Determined action from the government, the states, communes and civil societies is necessary to ensure peace in eastern Germany,' she told reporters as she presented the latest report examining progress since German reunification in 1990.

In previous years it has been largely focused on industrial regeneration for the region, which has lagged behind the west economically, and experienced a wave of depopulation as mostly younger people left for the west for jobs.

But rising xenophobia has emerged as a key concern this year, as anger over the arrival of around a million asylum seekers in Germany in 2015 is running high in many eastern states such as Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

It has also fuelled a surge in support for the right-wing populist AfD party, which has been accused of running an anti-migrant and Islamophobic campaign.

Eastern states have been required to take in relatively few new arrivals compared to western states, under a quota system calculated by the size of the state's population and income.

But arson attacks on accommodation for asylum seekers and assaults on refugees have shot up dramatically in the region, Gleicke said.

'I am disturbed by this rising far-right and xenophobic violence.

'It is more than an alarm bell if the attacks and violence are backed by or quietly accepted by mainstream society,' she said, noting that the incidents had sparked global outrage.

It comes following a string of attacks on asylum seekers, including a number of refugee houses being targeted by arson

In previous years it has been largely focused on industrial regeneration for the region, which has lagged behind the west economically, and experienced a wave of depopulation as mostly younger people left for the west for jobs

But rising xenophobia has emerged as a key concern this year, as anger over the arrival of around a million asylum seekers in Germany in 2015 is running high in many eastern states such as Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

Former communist eastern Germany has been the scene of several ugly incidents in which far-right extremists have targeted asylum seekers.

Clashes broke out last week between dozens of asylum seekers and far-right extremists in the eastern city of Bautzen, forcing police to call in reinforcements to quell the violence.

In February, a cheering crowd was seen outside a burning asylum shelter in the same town, clapping and shouting: 'Good, that's up in flames.'

That same weekend, a video emerged of far-right thugs intimidating refugees - including crying children - and preventing them from getting off a bus to enter another shelter in the eastern town of Clausnitz.

Gleicke insisted it was not only up to churches or politicians to take a stand against such violence.

Eastern states have been required to take in relatively few new arrivals compared to western states, under a quota system calculated by the size of the state's population and income

'Mainstream society must also do its part. It's definitely uncomfortable.

'I know what it is to have to fight against neo-Nazis.

'But I expect companies, too, to give greater support to civil society on this front,' she said.

Beyond the potential toll at home, the poisoned atmosphere also risks tarnishing the region's reputation abroad, hurting prospects not just for tourism but also for investment.

Gleicke said that on recent trips to the United States and Japan where she sought to promote eastern Germany as a location for business start-ups, she was asked: 'What is the situation when an engineer, who is of colour, wants to come?'

'It's extremely clear that a place that is not open to the world or which is not open to immigration will be disadvantaged economically,' she warned.

Germany's top economists echoed the concerns.

Marcel Fratzscher, who heads German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), told Handelsblatt business daily that the lurch towards the far-right could drive away companies or highly-qualified workers from the region.
Karl Bloxham was found lying on the floor at the home he shared with Ellishia Allen in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, with Allen kneeling close to his head covered in blood

A boyfriend was was stabbed to death in a frenzied attack by his ex-glamour model girlfriend has been pictured for the first time.

Karl Bloxham was found lying on the floor at the home he shared with Ellishia Allen in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, with Allen kneeling close to his head covered in blood.

The 29-year-old plunged a knife into her former partner on July 29 last year after he sent her a text saying: It's over'.

She has been jailed for life for his murder.

Paramedics tried to save the father-of-two's life for 35 minutes but was pronounced dead at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham later that night.

A court heard Allen attacked Mr Bloxham, 39, with the 12cm blade when he returned to their home after he had been for a drink with work colleagues.

The former model then called emergency services, saying: 'I've just stabbed my boyfriend. He's dying in front of me. I've just stabbed him. He was calling me names. He was drunk.

'I've got a mental health problem. I just grabbed the knife and I've just stabbed him in his heart. I didn't know where I was stabbing him and I've stabbed him to death.'

Allen also gave her address to the telephone operator and added: 'He's dead.. His eyes are open and he's dead...he's not moving...and I stabbed him.'

Allen today admitted murder at Nottingham Crown Court and was jailed for life with a minimum term of 14 years behind bars.

Judge Gregory Dickinson QC said: 'I'm absolutely sure you picked up a knife and used it because you were angry because Mr Bloxham decided to leave you.'

The 29-year-old plunged a knife into her former partner on July 29 last year after he sent her a text saying: It's over'

The couple started a relationship with Mr Bloxham in 2011 but it was 'volatile and unpredictable' almost from the outset, the court heard.

On the night of the murder, neighbour told police they heard loud thumping sounds coming from the flat as well as Allen shouting, doors slamming and their dog barking.

Another resident heard Allen shouting 'Karl, please don't leave me' and a third heard a male voice shouting 'stop, you're hurting me'.

In a victim impact statement, Mr Bloxham's sister Kylie Petrice said: 'I miss him. I regret I did not tell him enough that I loved him.'

Allen today admitted murder at Nottingham Crown Court and was jailed for life with a minimum term of 14 years behind bars

Allen had a string of previous convictions including for lashing out at air stewards on a flight

Mr Bloxham's father Ted also said he had lost his son and his best friend. He added: 'We have a life sentence ourselves that will never go away.'

The court heard Allen had been an alcoholic and had the characteristics of emotionally unstable personality disorder as well as having bulimia and anorexia.

She has previous convictions for assaulting police and for being drunk on an aeroplane.

She was spared jail in 2008 after she forced an airplane to make an emergency landing when she lashed out at British Airways cabin crew after losing her bag in the planes toilet.
Tiahleigh Palmer told her foster parents their son, 19, had been sexually assaulting her when she was left alone with him in the days before her foster father killed her, a court has heard.

Trent Thorburn, 19, allegedly admitted to a cousin via Facebook that he had incestuous sex with his 12-year-old foster sister and feared he impregnated her on October 28, two days before she was believed to have gone missing from Marsden State School.

Police struggled to identify exactly how Tiahleigh died because her body was found severely decomposed in a river near the family home in Logan, Queensland.

Investigators believe she was murdered in her family home the day before Rick Thorburn, 56, told police he had dropped her safety to school on October 30.

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Tiahleigh Palmer told her foster parents their son, 19, had been sexually assaulting her when she was left alone with him in the days before her foster father killed her, a court has heard

Prosecutors claim she had told her foster parents, Julene (left) and Rick Thorburn (right), that their son had been preying on her when they left the house before she was murdered

Trent Thorburn, 19, allegedly admitted to a cousin via Facebook that he had sex with his 12-year-old foster sister and feared he got her pregnant on October 28

Trent has been charged with incest, perjury and perverting the course of justice, while his father, 56, has been charged with murder and interfering with a corpse.

The court heard Tiahleigh had told a friend that she went to her foster mother Julene Thorburn, 53, to report the sexual abuse, the Australian reported.

'The victim had disclosed to her that when her foster carer went out, their son would then have sex with her,' police prosecutor Ellen French told the court.

'She further said that the victim claimed to have disclosed this to her foster mother.'

Ms French said a friend of Trent's also told police the young girl had told her foster parents: 'Trent tried to touch me.'

The court heard Trent denied the allegations to his parents and on five other occasions to police, but eventually admitted he had lied about the sexual abuse.

Rick Thorburn (left), his wife Julene (middle right) and two sons, Josh (middle left) and Trent (right) have been charged with a string of offences in relation to the death of Tiahleigh Palmer

Prosecutors believe Tiahleigh was killed by her carer Rick Thornburn (pictured) at the family home a day before he claimed to have dropped her at school

Further details about the conversation Trent had with his cousin on Facebook messenger about his sexual activity with Tiahleigh were also revealed in court, the Australian reported.

'During that conversation he said he had sex with the victim on the prior Monday and he had only done so because she had threatened to kill his dog,' Ms French said.

'The defendant said he was concerned about being pregnant even though he had pulled out,' she said, adding that he claimed to have told his mother about it.

A sexual relationship between siblings, including under foster, step or de facto circumstances, is considered incest under the Queensland Criminal Code and can attract a maximum life sentence.

Police allege that after learning of his son's alleged actions and Tiahleigh's suspected pregnancy, he feared the bisexual dancer would become a target for violence offenders in prison had he been convicted.

Trent Thorburn, 19, is alleged to have told a cousin in a Facebook message that he had slept with his foster sister Tiahleigh Palmer and was concerned she was pregnant

Trent Thorburn's lawyer John Ide (left) leaves the Southern Districts Magistrates Court in Beenleigh on Wednesday

CHARGES LAID OVER TIAHLEIGH PALMER'S MURDER FOSTER FATHER RICK THORBURN: Charged with murder and interfering with a corpse. The 56-year-old was due to face court on Wednesday but is in an induced coma after collapsing while in custody. FOSTER BROTHER TRENT THORBURN: Charged with incest, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury. The 19-year-old was denied bail on Wednesday after a court heard he had admitted on Facebook Messenger to having sex with Tiahleigh and was worried she might be pregnant. FOSTER BROTHER JOSH THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 20-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. FOSTER MOTHER JULENE THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 54-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. Advertisement

In opposing bail, Ms French said Thorburn had obstructed police during the investigation and that he and his family had betrayed Tiahleigh's trust.

'The victim was put in care and protection of the defendant and his family,' Sgt Elen French told the court.

'This defendant betrayed her trust. He abused his position as big brother and took advantage of her.

'A consequence of that is her young life has been taken.'

According to the Courier Mail, the perjury charges relate to the family providing false testimony to the Crime and Corruption Commission during a secret hearing relating to Tiahleigh's death earlier this year.

Thorburn's lawyer argued he would serve more time in custody than if he were sentenced on the charges if bail were refused, and his client was young and had no criminal history.

He was denied bail.

Thorburn faced a Brisbane court on Wednesday after being charged with incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over Tiahleigh's death

Tiahleigh's body was located in November last year on the banks of the Pimpama River on the northern Gold Coast

Tiahleigh's foster father, 56, was due to appear in the same court on Wednesday but was in an induced coma in hospital after a suspected self-harm attempt while in custody.

He was a pallbearer at her funeral.

Thorburn's wife Julene, 54, and another son, Josh, 20, have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

They have been released on bail and will face court on October 10.

The charges comes 11 months after Tiahleigh's naked and decomposing body was found by fishermen dumped by the banks of the Pimpana River.

She was gone for six days before she was registered missing by police and an alert was issued about her disappearance.

Police charged Trent on Tuesday with incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over Tiahleigh's death

Trent Thorburn, 19, allegedly sexually assaulted his foster sister Tiahleigh Palmer during the 10 months she had been in his Queensland family's care last year

Cindy Palmer, the mother of murdered schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer, arrived at a Queensland court on Wednesday ahead of Thorburn's court appearance

Julene Thorburn, 54, (left) and another son, Josh, 20, (right) have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
He was jailed for four years, but sentence was suspended for three years

A British teacher who had been ordained as a Buddhist monk has been given a suspended jail sentence in Thailand for kidnapping youngsters who were used in child porn films.

Fabian Frederick Blandford, 64, was convicted of committing sex acts with minors at Fang Provincial Court in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

The pervert was also found guilty of trafficking and selling children for sex and for use in pornography.

Fabian Frederick Blandford (pictured) was ordained as a Buddhist monk but later left the monastery and married a local woman. He was given a suspended jail sentence

The court heard Blandford had direct access to young children because he taught them English.

In January police, acting on a tip-off from the US Department of Homeland Security, arrested him and found hundreds of indecent images of children on his computer.

Investigators in the US had found horrific images of child abuse sent to a suspect in America from an IP address used by Blandford, the court was told.

Thai police arrested Blandford (pictured) after the US Department of Homeland Security tipped them off about illegal images being uploaded from a specific internet address

Blandford - who speaks fluent Thai - was ordained as a monk in Chiang Mai but left the monastery to marry a local woman, who bore him a child.

Judges sentenced Blandford to four years and two months but suspended it for up to three years.

He was also fined 80,000 baht (1,825) and ordered to perform 48 hours of community work.

Blandford must also report to report to probation officers every four months.

Blandford (pictured) had been a Buddhist monk for a month but later worked as a teacher

Blandford was said to be good friends with his Thai neighbours and had offered to teach English to local children.

He was reported to have once been a Buddhist monk. He claimed on a social media profile, which has since been taken down, that he was a monk 'for one week'.

Under a new Thai law brought in last month, possession of child pornography carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and distribution carries a penalty of seven years.

It is not clear why his sentence was suspended or whether he faced deportation from Thailand.
A police officer who beat two homeless men at Whitmore Square in central Adelaide has had a 'second complaint of aggressive misconduct' made against him.

Constable Matthew Schwarz now faces a second complaint after a teenage P Plater claimed he threatened her and bashed on her car window.

That complaint is due to be heard next month, according to Seven News.

A police officer's beating on two homeless men at Whitmore Square was captured on film

The Director of Public Prosecutions did not pursue the officer though, because he was in 'a fragile state of mind'

This most recent complaint against Con Schwarz follows the police officer's brutal attack on two homeless men.

Shaun Jones and Chris Macke were hit with a police baton by Constable Matthew Schwarz in Whitmore Square, a brutal attack captured on camera.

But all charges were dropped against the two men when the magistrate ruled the officer had used excessive force.

The Director of Public Prosecutions did not pursue the officer though, because he was in 'a fragile state of mind'.

Constable Matthew Schwarz (pictured) will face trial in January

The police ombudsman called for the officer to be stripped of his authority, but the police commissioner refused.

Con Schwarz is now facing a highly secretive police disciplinary tribunal.

A trial is set for January.

Lawyer Andrew Carpenter said 'no one is exempt from the law' and wanted Con Schwarz to be punished.

Shaun Jones (pictured left) and Chris Macke (pictured right) were hit with a police baton by Constable Matthew Schwarz in Whitmore Square, a brutal attack captured on camera

'No matter what your standing is or your title is,' he said.

'If one person has been harmed, obviously it would be a risk to let another person suffer that same fate.'

Shadow Police Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan said there was a long delay in dealing with Con Schwarz' case, and it was 'completely unacceptable'.
Lapwood is reading psychology and philosophy at Christ Church College

Lapwood, 23, was questioned for six hours before being released on bail

An Oxford University student whose father is a vicar was arrested on suspicion sexual assault and actual bodily harm during a raid on his house boat.

Inigo Lapwood, 23, was arrested during a dawn raid yesterday on his houseboat moored near Christ Church College in Oxford.

A relative at Lapwood's home said he could not comment on the allegations against the student due to the police investigation.

Inigo Lapwood was arrested during a dawn raid on his houseboat which was moored near Christ Church College in Oxford following an allegation of sexual assault and ABH

Inigo Lapwood, pictured, was arrested yesterday during a dawn raid on his boat which is moored near Christ College in Oxford after a fellow student made allegations of sexual assault

Officers arrested the 23-year-old psychology and philosophy student and questioned him for six hours until he was released on police bail to return to the station on November 24

The psychology and philosophy student was held for six hours until he released on police bail.

A relative who answered the door at the family home and said Lapwood was 'not available'.

He said: 'It's going to be a thorough police investigation and we can't say anything until it's completed.

'Everything will be cleared up in due time.'

Lapwood's father is Rev Robin Lapwood who is based in a parish in Oxfordshire.

A friend of the alleged victim told MailOnline: 'She has been through a tremendous ordeal both physically and mentally.'

Lapwood is reading psychology and philosophy at Christ Church College in Oxford, pictured

Lapwood's father is the Rev Robin Lapwood, right, who is a vicar in Oxfordshire

Lapwood, pictured, has been told not to try and contact his alleged victim

The source said: 'He has been described as a brilliant student. This is not true. He will struggle to get a 2.2.'

It is understood he is very politically active on campus.

Lapwood was released on police bail until November 24.

It is understood he has been ordered to avoid all contact with the complainant and remain away from the college campus.

Thames Valley Police said: ' A 23-year-old man from Oxford was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and ABH. He has been released on police bail until November 24.'

Christ Church College said they cannot comment on the allegations as the police are investigating the matter and an arrest has been made.
While others believe retaining a CGI workforce is a mistake and will cause more political headaches for Hillary Clinton

Former foundation staffers are grumbling that the layoffs were treated

The Clinton Global Initiative plans to retain some staff after the new year, a decision that has some former Clinton Foundation employees' feathers ruffled.

It's a 'bad idea' one former official told Politico. 'I really think they should make a clean break, and apparently so do most staff.'

The 12th and final CGI winds down today, with the ex-president slated to give a 'personal reflection' about the initiative and the greater Clinton Foundation later this afternoon.

Then, in the coming months, dozens of CGI employees are scheduled to lose their jobs at the end of 2016  but some will get to stay, meaning more political problems for Hillary Clinton could be on their way.

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Bill Clinton moderates a panel at his 12th and final Clinton Global Initiative this week in New York City - while CGI is supposed to be closing up shop, some staffers will be staying on

Clinton (left), pictured with Serbian Prime Minister Alexsander Vucic (center) and Srebrenica Mayor Camil Durakovic (right), admitted the foundation could cause political problems

Politico did a deep-dive on the matter and found several camps of people complaining about the way the Clinton Global Initiative is closing up shop.

Some believed that the layoffs were handled in an insensitive way.

'It was poorly managed, treated too glibly, patronizingly, completely lacking empathy at the fact that so many young people were going to be laid off,' one source told Politico.

Other argued that keeping people employed, even if its a limited number, will continue to plague Hillary Clinton's political career.

The Clinton Foundation and, in turn, the Clinton Global Initiative have become political fodder for Republicans, including nominee Donald Trump, after Hillary Clinton's emails exposed that donors had the ears of her top aides while she was secretary of state.

And while no smoking gun was ever produced that showed State Department officials doing donors' bidding, Bill Clinton has admitted keeping CGI alive and staying on at the Clinton Foundation would create problems.

'Yeah, the stuff that they've said so far is just bull,' Clinton said of Republican criticism when talking to CNBC's Becky Quick yesterday. 'But if she was actually the president, it would raise too many questions. I think it's fair.'

Chelsea Clinton will be the only Clinton staying on.

During an interview with NPR, which aired Monday, Clinton opened up the door to Republicans' pay-to-play attacks by saying that some donors probably gave to the Clinton Foundation to gain greater influence with the Clintons, eyeing a Clinton White House 2.0.

'Well, since we had more than 300,000 donors it would be unusual if nobody did,' Clinton responded when NPR's Steve Inskeep asked about donors' motivations.

So far, the Clinton Global Initiative hasn't released details on what projects would continue, though some are multi-year commitments, meaning that employees could potentially stay on for years.

'Staff will be performing a number of roles, including continuing to provide advice with respect to commitment development and commitment improvement, based on our commitment database and experience having previously developed over 3,600 commitments with our members, and continuing to facilitate introductions and partnerships between members,' a Clinton Foundation spokesman told Politico.

Not all of those partners give money directly to the Clinton Foundation, the spokesman added.

For everyone else, they'll 'have their jobs and benefits at least through the end of the calendar year,' the spokesman said, adding that departing employees were getting resume help and hooked up with job leads.
Donald Trump's presidential campaign has a released a new campaign ad that provides a brief flashback to the infamous 1990s Bill and Hillary Clinton interview conducted days after Bill Clinton was publicly accused of having a steamy affair with Gennifer Flowers.

The footage is tucked into an ad that otherwise hails Trump as a 'success' who is 'dreaming big' and 'defined by freedom.'

The ad doesn't quote from the interview, where the then-Arkansas governor didn't deny an affair as he repeatedly searched for new ways to say there had been 'problems' in his marriage and that the American people got the 'drift' of what he was saying under repeated questioning by interviewer Steve Kroft.

Just before the clip, the Trump ad's moderator calls for 'leaving the past behind.'

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STAND BY YOUR MAN: Donald Trump's campaign released a new ad that gushes about the GOP nominee  and shows a flash of an infamous '60 Minutes' interview where Bill Clinton got quizzed about whether he had an affair with Jennifer Flowers

The ad, which gained political immortality when Hillary Clinton defended her husband in a southern twang and then said defiantly that she wasn't 'some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.'

It also is credited with helping salvage Clinton's political career, as he went on to a campaign-saving second place in the New Hampshire primary in 1992.

The rest of the ad is filled with accolades for Trump, accompanied by footage of diverse supporters, shiny new buildings and a soundtrack of beating drums.

'United for family, jobs, country. Defined by freedom ...Standing together, pushing ahead,' says the moderator.

'Well make America great again,' the moderator says. The ad says calls Trump's effort a 'movement, not a campaign.'

The ad is filled with patriotic images

Trump's campaign is described as a movement, and images highlight a racially and ethnically diverse group of supporters

Trump is described as a 'builder, businessman, success' in his new campaign ad

Trump campaigned in North Carolina on Tuesday

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said the positive ad is a contrast with Hillary Clinton's 'horrific' record.

While Hillary Clinton distracts and diverts attention away from her horrific record with negative advertisements that lack substance, our campaign plans on promoting the positive energy that has turned Mr. Trumps campaign into a full-fledged movement.

The campaign says the ad will 'run nationally on cable and select broadcast programming.'

In the famous Clinton interview, '60 Minutes' host Steve Kroft probed Bill Clinton again and again about his marriage and whether he had an affair with Jennifer Flowers.

Trump told Bill O'Reilly he wasn't looking to bring up Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky at the presidential debate Monday

OFF THE TABLE: Trump said he won't bring up the Monica Lewinsky affair as long as Hillary Clinton treats him with 'respect'  but his campaign is referencing Jennifer Flowers and infidelity in a new TV ad

Finally, Hillary Clinton jumped in. 'You know, I'm not sitting here  some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,' she said. "I'm sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him.'

Bill Clinton, in the interview, acknowledged causing 'pain in my marriage' but refused to directly speak about whether he had an affair with Flowers.

'I think the American people, at least people that have been married for a long time, know what it means and know the whole range of things it can mean,' he said when pressed about having marital difficulties and whether he had committed adultery.

Trump told Fox News on Monday that he wasn't 'looking' to bring up another infidelity issue, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, in Monday's presidential debate.
The man struck the suspect with his Chevy Cobalt, retrieved his cash from his pockets and headed home

The victim drove away after robbery, but then returned to look for his debit card and again came upon his attacker, now armed with a knife

A suspected robber who held up a man at a drive-up ATM in Philadelphia got his comeuppance when the victim returned to the scene of the mugging minutes later and turned the tables on his assailant.

Police say a Portuguese immigrant was withdrawing money from a Wells Fargo bank on Bustleton Avenue on Monday night when he was approached by a man armed with a gun.

The suspect, a 49-year-old man described as wearing dark sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt, grabbed the cash from his victim and fled.

The driver of this white Chevy Cobalt struck a man who police say had robbed him at a drive-up ATM in Philadelphia

The suspected mugger had managed to plunge a knife through the windshield before beyond tossed into the street

The driver, who had his wife and young child in his white Chevy Cobalt at the time, sped off, but later realized that his debit card was still in the ATM, so he returned to look for it, thinking the robber was long gone, reported Philly.com.

But the married dad was in for a startling surprise.

Investigators say the perpetrator showed up again, this time brandishing a knife.

That is when police say the driver of the Chevy jumped into action, striking the brazen thug with his car and tossing him onto the street.

Before he became airborne, the mugger managed to plunge his knife through the victim's windshield, leaving a hole in the glass.

The man then approached the bloodied mugger, went through his pockets, retrieved his stolen cash and headed home less than a mile away.

The incident took place at this Wells Fargo bank on Bustleton Avenue

Police found the 49-year-old suspected thief lying bloodied near the bank

Police officers located the damaged Chevy on Rutland Street and interviewed its owner, who recounted the events of the night through a Portuguese-speaking interpreter.

Investigators later obtained surveillance footage from the bank, which they say corroborated the victim's story.

The robbery suspect was taken to Aria Torresdale Hospital with critical head injuries, reported CBS Philly. When he is released, he is expected to be charged with robbery.
A Minnesota mother of two will spend nearly eight months in jail for hiding her two teenage daughters from their father during a two-year divorce battle.

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki, 50 of Stillwater, was initially sentenced to six years probation  plus 34 days in jail this year and 15 days for each year until 2022.

But Grazzini-Rucki has chosen instead to serve her whole sentence at once.

When she gets out she will not be subjected to probation or any monitoring.

Her ex, the girls' father, broke down at tears at the result.

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki, 50, will spend eight months in jail for hiding her teenage daughters from their father for two years during a bitter divorce

Gianna, 16, and Samantha, 17, (left and right) went missing between April 2013 and November 2015 before being found living on a ranch in Minnesota, three hours from their parents' house

In court, father David Rucki (center) looked distraught as he recounted not seeing his daughters for two years

The teenagers  Samantha and Gianna  were found in November last year at a horse ranch in western Minnesota, after they hadn't been seen in public since April 2013.

Grazzini-Rucki drove the girls, then 13 and 14, almost 200 miles from Lakeville to the ranch near Herman to hide them from their father David Rucki during a bitter divorce, prosecutors said.

Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said it is unacceptable for any parent to hide their children from a custodial parent.

'The almost two-and-a-half years that these children were hidden led to significant trauma to her daughters and caused significant adverse impacts to the rest of her family,' Backstrom said in a statement.

'It is simply not OK to take the law into your own hands and violate court orders, even when you don't agree with those orders and even when they involve your own children,' he told The Associated Press.

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki was initially sentenced to 34 days in jail this year  plus 15 days for each year until 2022. Instead, she chose to serve her whole sentence at once

Prosecutors say Grazzini-Rucki drove the girls, then 13 and 14, almost 200 miles from Lakeville to hide them from their father David Rucki (pictured) during a bitter divorce

In court for sentencing (pictured), Grazzini-Rucki was told by prosecutors it is unacceptable for any parent to hide their children from a custodial parent

David Rucki, who now has custody of the girls, spoke against his ex-wife during her sentencing hearing Wednesday

Grazzini-Rucki's attorney, Stephen Grigsby, said the guilty verdict 'far exceeds disappointment.'

He said a decision to appeal isn't up to him, but he believes there would be grounds for one.

Grigsby claimed the judge had no legal basis when she allowed evidence at trial that was designed to discredit his client.

He said Grazzini-Rucki testified during the trial that the girls ran away because they were terrified of their father, and they threatened to run away again with or without her help.

Grazzini-Rucki's attorney, Stephen Grigsby, said the guilty verdict 'far exceeds disappointment'  but did not confirm if she plans to appeal

Doug and Gina Dahlen (pictured), are facing felony charges on accusations of hiding the girls at the request of their mother. The girls were both found on their ranch in Herman in November 2015

Grigsby said Grazzini-Rucki testified she placed them in the care of someone she trusted in order to protect them.

Grazzini-Rucki was free during trial but was taken into custody after the verdict and bail was set at $100,000, or $50,000 with conditions.

The owners of the White Horse Ranch, Doug and Gina Dahlen, are facing felony charges in the case.

They have said they took the girls to restaurants, garage sales, church and shopping trips and didn't try to hide them.

The girls were taken to the White Horse Ranch (right), whose owners Doug and Gina Dahlen now face felony charges

While Grazzini-Rucki heads off to jail (pictured), the sisters now live with their father after they were reunited last year

The Dahlens also say the teens had access to computers and cellphones and could have gone home.

Before the girls disappeared in April 2013, they repeatedly accused their father of abuse.

But a court-appointed psychologist concluded Grazzini-Rucki had brainwashed them and a judge granted full custody to the girls' father after finding there was no credible evidence of abuse.

The sisters have been participating in a reunification program and moved back in with their father late last year.

Wednesday morning Rucki asked the judge to impart 'the highest sentence permitted.'
Two high school girls from northern Florida were threatened on social media after posting images of themselves dressed up as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his wall.

The threats were serious enough to compel local law enforcement to beef up security at Palatka High School on Tuesday, according to WKMG-TV.

The threats came in response to Cassidy Cushman's post on Facebook showing her dressed as 'the wall' and standing alongside her friend, Shelby McCellan, who wore a Trump costume.

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Cassidy Cushman (right) and her friend, Shelby McCellan attend high school homecoming dressed as 'the wall' and Donald Trump, prompting angry responses from Facebook users

During his run for the presidency, Trump has pledged that if elected he would build a wall along the US-Mexico border in order to keep out illegal immigrants.

The two teenagers had dressed up for their school's homecoming week festivities.

On Monday, the students were asked to wear something in accordance with the America theme, WJXT reported.

Cushman and McCellan were barraged with taunts and threats on Facebook.

Cushman's original Facebook post evoked nearly 300 comments and was shared over 50 times, according to WKMG.

Facebook users aim their wrath at Cushman and McCellan for their choice of costume

Many of the comments on Facebook were racist in nature and included veiled threats

The image of the two girls in their costumes went viral, making them more of a target to a larger Facebook audience

'Ya'll stank white h***,' wrote one Facebook commenter.

'Dumb crackers,' wrote another, using a pejorative for Caucasian.

'I don't mind fighting a freshman hun. Or sophomore,' wrote another Facebook user.

Cushman (left) and McCellan were subjected to insults and threats on Facebook. The threats compelled school officials to beef up security

Trump has been accused of employing incendiary rhetoric against minorities during the presidential campaign.

People who identify as Trump supporters in campaign rallies and social media have been accused of propagating racism and xenophobia.

Trump has been accused of making racist and xenophobic comments during his campaign

His opponent, Hillary Clinton, said earlier this month that half of the New York businessman's supporters were a 'basket of deplorables,' a comment she later said she regretted.

Trump has come under fire for describing Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, suggesting a judge could not be fair because of his Mexican-American heritage, and proposing a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the United States.

The school, however, took no issue with the costumes.

'There was nothing racist and/or mean about (the) choice of costume.' McCellan's mother said. 'They are just strong in their political beliefs.'

'Both myself and the other girl's mother spoke with the school principal this morning. And he, along with other staff, saw no issue with the costumes the girls had on.'
Federal complaint fails to mention journal's reference to al-Adani, the ISIS spokesman killed by coalition forces in August

Excepts from the suspected bomber's journal were previously published in a criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court

Several Al-Qaeda and ISIS leaders are mentioned by name

Diary found on Ahmad Khan Rahami when he was captured has been pictured for the first time

A picture has surfaced showing the bloodied and bullet-ridden journal the chicken shop terrorist was carrying when he was arrested after a shootout with police.

In the first released photo of the diary, the notebook is seen opened and laying flat to a page with handwritten text on one side. A large rectangular chunk is missing from the middle of the notebook, indicating it was pierced with a bullet.

While the ink has bled due to water or blood, it is still possible to make out the names of two terrorists on the page, including Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

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This is the blooded and bullet-ridden notebook found on Ahmad Rahami when he was arrested on Monday

Ahmad Rahami's reference to al-Awlaki was first mentioned in the criminal complaint about the 28-year-old home-grown terrorist.

Curiously not mentioned in the criminal complaint though was Rahami's reference to 'Brother Adnani' - believed to be Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, an ISIS spokesman who was killed on August 30.

Rahami also gave praise to Osama bin Laden and Nidal Hasan, the soldier who killed 13 people at Ford Hood in 2009, in other parts of the journal not seen in the picture.

FBI investigators have been hesitant to connect Rahami to any larger terror organization so far, despite the New Jersey man's frequent travels back to Pakistan and his home country of Afghanistan in recent years.

Ahmad Rahami faces five counts of attempted murder and two gun charges

It's still unclear whether he learned how to build the bombs alone, or if may have received training from a larger organization during these frequent trips.

What's evident is that he at least sympathized with groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS due to the other very anti-American sentiments written in the journal.

'You (USA Government) continue your [unintelligible] slaught[er] against the mujahidean be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham [Syria], Palestine...' Rahami writes in one passage.

In the journal, he spoke of his fears police would catch him before he had the chance to carry out a suicide attack.

'The FBI & homeland security [unintelligible] looking for me...[unintelligible] my heart I pray to the beautiful wise ALLAH. To not take JIHAD away from. I beg [unintelligible] for shahadat [martydom] & inshallah [God willing] this call will be a[n]swered.'

Prosecutors say the document ends: 'The sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION.'

NEW YORK BOMBER CITED AL-QAEDA AND ISIS LEADERS AS INSPIRATION FOR THE ATTACK In the journal Ahmad Rahami was carrying when he was arrested on Monday, he mentions several terror leaders as inspirational figures. Pictured below are four of the people referenced in the journal. It's likely that Rahami could have paid tribute to even more terrorists in the journal since a lot of the writing is unintelligible after the paper got wet with the bomber's blood and the rain. Pictured left: Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born radical Muslim cleric who was a senior leader for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Pictured right: Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, an ISIS spokesman who was killed on August 30 Pictured left: Osama bin Laden, the former leader of al-Qaeda who was killed in a raid on his secret compound in Pakistan in 2011. Pictured right: Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Hasan killed 13 people during a shooting at the military base in 2009. Hasan was a psychiatrist in the Army. He was captured during the shooting and is currently on death row Advertisement

Meanwhile, court documents also show that Rahami was actually recorded performing a test run of a pipe bombs in his back yard just two days before the attacks

Federal prosecutors will claim video recovered from a family member's cell phone shows Rahami conducting a 'dry run' before the bombing. Manhattan bombing suspect Ahmad

Footage shows him igniting incendiary material in a cylinder and a fuse being lit followed by loud explosion and billowing smoke, as laughter is heard in the background, court papers say.

Rahami has been charged with federal counts of using a weapon of mass destruction and bombing public places.

Rahami is pictured slumped over in Linden, New Jersey after his arrest on Monday

The 28-year-old had already been charged with five counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and two gun charges after a shootout with police following the terror attacks over the weekend. He remains on $5.2million bail in hospital.

Now criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court provides clues to the chilling motivations that authorities say drove the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives in New York and New Jersey, injuring at least 30 people.

Rahami could face multiple life sentences over the attacks.

The federal criminal complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that Rahami began buying bomb components in June, purchasing citric acid, circuit boards, ball bearings and electric igniters on eBay.

In a statement, the online auction site said it was 'proactively working with law enforcement authorities on their investigation' but that all the items he's bought are widely available and 'legal to buy and sell in the United States'.

'Death To Your OPPRESSION,' Ahmad Khan Rahami wrote of the US government in his diary, which praises the likes of Osama bin Laden and accuses America of 'slaughter' in the Middle East

Above is the second pressure cooker bomb found in Chelsea that never detonated. Investigators were allegedly able to identify Rahami from fingerprints on the device

Federal agents would like to question Rahami. But Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., who received a classified briefing from the FBI, said Rahami was not cooperating; that could also be a reflection of his injuries.

Investigators are looking into Rahami's overseas travel, including a visit to Pakistan a few years ago, and want to know whether he received any money or training from extremist organizations.

They believe he may have received terrorist training on his 'radicalization' trip to Pakistan where he visited the Taliban stronghold of Quetta.

The federal criminal complaint details the types of bombs used in the New York and New Jersey attacks. The New York explosive devices contained aluminum powder, ammonium nitrate and HMTD - a chemical used in multiple terrorist plots against the West including the July 7, 2005, London bombings - by al Qaeda, CNN reports.

Investigators believe that Rahami's use of the chemical indicates overseas training as there have been very few 'lone wolf' attacks have successfully used the tricky substance.

The FBI is now looking into Rahami's multiple, and lengthy stays in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2011 and 2014 to see whether there is evidence of terror training.

Rahami's first documented trip to Pakistan was in 2005, when he visited Karachi, another terrorist hotbed, aged, The New York Times reported.

In 2011, Rahami made another lengthy trip, visiting Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Quetta, Pakistan. He visited Quetta from April 2013 to March 2014.

Rahami was stopped on one trip for secondary screening, but he satisfied the questions and was cleared, a source told Fox News.

His activities while in Afghanistan and Pakistan are unknown, although he did meet and marry his wife Asia Bibi Rahimi in 2011 with whom he has a child.

The wife of New York and New Jersey bombing suspect, Asia Bibi Rahimi (pictured in 2014) who flew to Pakistan before the terror attacks, is being questioned by American authorities

She is currently being questioned by American authorities after being intercepted by law enforcement in the United Arab Emirates on her way from the US to Pakistan days before the terror attacks. She is currently said to be cooperating with authorities.

Rahami's mother also left the U.S., flying to Turkey on August 24 - a couple of weeks before her son was accused on planting multiple bombs in New Jersey and New York which injured 29 people.

In 2014, the FBI opened up an 'assessment,' the least intrusive form of an FBI inquiry, based on comments from his father after a domestic dispute, the bureau said in a statement.

'The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism,' the bureau said.

A law enforcement official said the FBI spoke with Rahami's father in 2014 after agents learned of his concerns that the son could be a terrorist.

During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Rahami's father told reporters Tuesday outside the family's fried-chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that he called the FBI at the time because Rahami 'was doing real bad,' having stabbed the brother and hit his mother. Rahami was not prosecuted in the stabbing; a grand jury declined to indict him.

'But they checked, almost two months, and they say, 'He's OK, he's clear, he's not terrorist.' Now they say he's a terrorist,' the father said. Asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, he said: 'No. And the FBI, they know that.'

However, he denied any knowledge of his son's plans to bomb New York and New Jersey last weekend.

The disclosure of the father's contacts with the FBI raises questions about whether there was anything more law enforcement could have done at the time to determine whether Rahami had terrorist aspirations.

This is the chilling moment that suspected bomber Ahmad Rahami is caught on surveillance footage casually walking down a Manhattan street with an explosive in his suitcase

Destruction: This was the scene on West 23rd Street, Midtown Manhattan, on Monday after Saturday's bomb attack. Rahami came to the US as an asylum seeker aged seven

Two homeless men also found a backpack full of five pipe bombs near the Elizabeth, New Jersey rail station on Sunday. One of the devices accidentally went off as police were trying to disarm it. No one was injured in that incident

Rahami's father Mohammad Sr told reporters on Tuesday that he'd reported his son to the FBI two years ago over fears he was being radicalized after he turned violent and attacked his younger brother and his stepmom

That issue arose after the Orlando massacre in June, when FBI Director James Comey said agents a few years earlier had looked into the gunman, Omar Mateen, but did not find enough information to pursue charges or keep him under investigation.

Rahami worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said he learned this week that Rahami worked night shifts at the AP building and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the AP told law enforcement officials about Rahami's work at the Cranbury facility.

Summit's vice president of security services, Daniel Sepulveda, said Rahami last worked for the company in 2011. Sepulveda said he was unaware of any complaints about Rahami's conduct.
This is the python that was found in the bathroom of the woman's Chicago apartment, wrapped in the shower curtain

Imagine walking into the bathroom of your apartment and seeing a snake slithering up from the tub and wrapping itself around your shower curtain.

That was the scene faced by a Chicago woman this week - and it's not the first time it has happened in her building.

The three-foot python - found by the female tenant in an 2nd floor apartment in the 6500 block of South Normal - is now in the hands of Chicago Animal Care and Control.

However residents if the building are worried the building is now infested with snakes.

The woman's grandson told WGNTV that he helped retrieve a smaller snake a few weeks ago. That snake was killed. Others in the building have also complained.

However it appears the problem started with a former resident who was breeding snakes in her apartment on the third floor.

Problem: Just a few weeks earlier, this smaller snakes was killed inside the building

When the woman moved out, neighbor Carolyn Sims says more than a dozen dead snakes had to be removed from the apartment.

Ever since, people have either seen snakes in the building or found them in their own apartments.

'You are endangering lives,' one male resident told WGNTV. 'They need to clean this place up right. '

A search by Animal Care and Control Tuesday morning turned up no new snakes.

The three-foot python was found by the female tenant in an 2nd floor apartment in the 6500 block of South Normal

The company that manages the building, Eastlake Management Group, says it will bring in an pest control company to search out any snakes possibly remaining.

The Chicago Herpetological Society will take possession of the ball python that was found on Monday.

It pointed out that this type of snake it harmless to humans.
A so-called 'student preacher' from Key Largo has been arrested for 'molesting a manatee' in an Islamorada creek.

James Roy Massengale Jr, 47, was allegedly spotted touching two adult manatees and their two calves in the small park of Islamorada Library Beach on Friday.

A witness had told Massengale, who is apparently homeless, that it is against the law to harass the endangered creatures, but he simply shouted back 'I'm riding it!' the Bradenton Herald reported.

Water palaver: James Roy Massengale Jr, 47, was arrested for allegedly 'touching and lying over' manatees in a Florida creek. Pictured: Massengale and a manatee in the water

'Manatee molestor': Massengale was arrested at Islamorada Library Beach after allegedly chanting 'Take me to jail!' Once at jail he reportedly refused to give ID

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers arrived on the scene and questioned Massengale; they say he told them the witness had said nothing.

But after becoming 'verbally combative,' FWC Officer Bobby Dube said, the man 'changed his story.'

This time the alleged manatee manhandler 'admitted he did talk to the witness, but "wasn't going to stop until someone with a badge" told him to,' Dube said.

Molesting manatees is a misdemeanor, so the officer on the scene decided to give the man a notice to appear in court.

However, Massengale then reportedly said he would not turn up to court, and 'continuously chanted 'Take me to jail"' - at which point he was arrested.

Up the creek: Massengale, listed as a 'student preacher' in jail documents, had reportedly boasted about 'riding' the endangered mammals

He was arrested by the Sheriff's Office on a charge of 'reaching for, touching, and lying over top manatees in the creek.'

However, Massengale wasn't done: Upon arriving at Plantation Key Jail he reportedly refused to provide identification information and was placed in isolation.

He is currently being held on a $25,000 bond. According to ABC's Local 10, his jail records list him as a 'student preacher.'

The Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act of 1978 forbids intentionally or negligently annoying, molesting, harassing or disturbing any manatee.

Conviction under state law can result in a fine of up to $500 and/or imprisonment for up to 60 days. If a manatee is killed or injured then a maximum fine of $50,000 and/or one year in prison can be served under federal law.
A Chicago elementary school was evacuated this morning after a hole caused by a possible explosive device was discovered on the roof of a building on campus.

The Chicago Police Bomb and Arson unit and officials from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives arrived at the Columbia Explorers Elementary Academy on Chicago's South Side at around 10am after getting a call about a suspicious hole in the roof.

Some 200 students were removed from an annex building on school property where the hole was discovered to the main school building next door as a precaution, according to police.

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Emergency: An annex building at the Columbia Explorers Elementary Academy on Chicago's South Side was evacuated Wednesday morning after a possible explosive device was found on the roof

School officials came upon a large hole on the roof, surrounded by grey, dusty residue

Investigators believe the incident that damaged the roof of the school building occurred Tuesday night.

ABC 7 Chicago reported that neighbors told school officials they heard a loud noise at around 10pm.

Initially authorities thought that the hole was caused by fireworks, but an ATF official later said they were investigating an explosive device, NBC Chicago reported.

On Wednesday morning, school staff came upon a large hole in the roof, with grey, dusty residue around it, possibly indicating that an explosion had occurred.

The annex building reopened just after noon Wednesday. No injuries were reported.

Unanswered questions: Initially authorities thought that the hole was caused by fireworks
Mr Johnson said today it was 'too early' to blame Russia for convoy attack

On Monday Boris looked bored as Theresa May talked of post-Brexit world

Boris Johnson looks like he would like to be anywhere in the world but at the United Nations in New York.

Britain's Foreign Secretary was pictured today pulling an assortment of faces, all of which suggested he was feeling the pressure as the UN discussed the situation in Syria.

Boris said it was 'too early' to make 'conclusive judgments' about who was responsible for the attack on an aid convoy in Syria.

Boris Johnson holds his famous blond hair as John Kerry makes a point at the UN today

Boris Johnson holds his head as he reads a document at the UN in New York today

Another game of Pokemon Go? He was back on his phone again today

He met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for the first time to discuss the attack, which left 20 civilians dead and which the US has said it holds Russia responsible for.

US officials have said two Russian jets were in the sky above the convoy at the moment it was hit. But Moscow has rejected the accusation.

Boris said: 'It's too early to say anything about criminality and that kind of thing, or indeed to make conclusive judgments about responsibility.'

He said: 'The United Nations has not come down on the side of saying they were air strikes, we just don't know.'

Mr Johnson, always a man for the bigger picture, did not look in his element today amid the diplomacy and the minutiae of UN protocol

What's wrong with your left hand? Mr Johnson awkwardly reaches over to shake Mr Kerry with his right hand but avoids eye contact

Better not let the Russians see this - Mr Johnson smiles as he warmly shakes the hand of Petro Poroshenko, the President of the Ukraine, which is currently at war with ethnic Russian rebels

Mr Johnson adjusts his tie during the UN Security Council meeting

Making a point - John Kerry gestures while speaking as Boris and the Uruguayan foreign minister look on

Boris Johnson poses for a photograph in front of a painting of the former UN Secretary General - and wartime Wehrmacht officer - Kurt Waldheim

'But, put it this way, when you look at what happened to the aid convoy, there are only two possible culprits, only two forces that are capable of having carried out that strike flying in that area - they are the Syrians and the Russians, and we have our doubts about the Syrian capability to fly at night.'

Earlier in the week some had suggested he was playing Pokemon Go or Candy Crush Saga as he peered down at the phone as Mrs May decried violence in Syria to the assembly.

Boris, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, looked thoroughly bored as May went to great efforts to portray Britain as an outward-facing nation, despite preparing to leave the European Union.
Clinton does have someone playing Trump in her mock face-offs but the campaign won't say who that person is - but it's not Darrell Hammond

Candidate is also 'preparing for the different Trumps that might show up,' said the senior aide

ormer secretary of state and U.S. Senator will be asked more difficult questions than her opponent

Hillary Clinton's camp began the debate dance on Wednesday, working to set expectations for the Democrat's performance in next week's high-profile skirmish.

A senior aide told reporters several times this afternoon that Brooklyn's 'biggest concern' is that moderators, in this case NBC's Lester Holt, will go easy on Donald Trump during the clashes.

Clinton Communications Director Jen Palmieri said the campaign is worried 'a low bar' is being set for Trump and the former secretary of state and U.S. Senator will be asked more difficult questions than her opponent.

'My biggest concern is what kind of standards he is held to,' Palmieri told reporters traveling with the candidate.

The candidate is also readying herself to take on either iteration of Trump - the statesman and the provocateur.

'We are preparing for the different Trumps that might show up,' said the senior aide.

Hillary Clinton's camp began the debate dance on Wednesday. A senior aide told reporters several times this afternoon that Brooklyn's 'biggest concern' is that moderators, in this case NBC's Lester Holt, will go easy on Donald Trump during the clashes

With Trump, 'you're not sure who's going to show up, so you have to assume that he might approach the debate this way or that way,' she said. 'He may be aggressive or he may lay back. That's hard to game out.'

The campaign official emphasized that Brooklyn's apprehensiveness is not related to Clinton's performance last week in a commander in chief forum or a specific debate moderator.

Their worry is that 'people accommodate their questions, and lower the bar of their questions to suit the candidate in front of them - and that's what happened with Trump in the past.'

Moderators may 'ask Hillary Clinton a set of much harder questions and ask him easier questions because he has not put forward a set of detailed material.

'And so he ends up getting much more one-dimensional and simple questions,' Palmieri stated, 'and that is not what you be expected of somebody who's looking to be president of the United States.'

Trump has also opined about the moderators. 'Look, it's a phony system. Lester is a Democrat. I mean, they are all Democrats. OK? It's a very unfair system,' Trump told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.

Holt, the wire service Reuters says, is actually a registered Republican.

Only one of the four general election moderators is affiliated with the Democratic Party, and that's Fox News anchor Chris Wallace.

He's said in the past that his voter affiliation is a reflection of Washington, D.C. politics, where Republicans have been out of power for more than a 100 years and the Democratic primary is only open to party registrants.

But Trump also expressed anxiety that Holt could turn up the heat on him in response to criticism of his colleague Matt Lauer for his handling of the candidates during a military forum.

Lauer was highly criticized for the reasons Clinton's camp put forward today - he gave Trump a pass and roughed up the ex-cabinet official too much.

The campaign is worried 'a low bar' is being set for Trump and the former secretary of state and U.S. Senator will be asked more difficult questions than her opponent

Palmieri's assertion that her candidate may be at a disadvantage during the debates despite Clinton's years of experience in that setting first as a Senate candidate and then as the the runner up in the 2008 battle for the Democratic nomination to the White House accents the importance of the nationally televised brouhaha.

The senior official acknowledged Wednesday that it's the 'most important night of the entire election' so far.

'I'm sure she will perform well. She always does and so our concern is just what kind of standard is he held to,' Palmieri said.

Clinton has been prepping for the debate, the campaign official stated, declining to say how many hours she had spent on it.

'She thinks it's important, and she thinks you should prepare,' Palmieri said.

That doesn't necessarily mean she's standing in a room with a Trump stand-in every day, though, the aide said.

'She has materials that she reviews every day, but it's not as if shes practicing.'

Clinton does have someone playing Trump in her mock face-offs but the campaign won't say who that person is.

Reporters attempted to guess the identity of campaign's Trump on Wednesday with no success.

Palmieri said guessers could cross at least two names off the list, however.

It is not former Saturday Night Live cast member Darrell Hammond, who still appears on the show from time to time to do impersonations of both Bill Clinton and Trump.

Nor is it Congressman Joseph Crowley, a Democrat from New York who name had popped up as an option.
Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that too many people are losing their lives in confrontations with police.

'Weve got to do better. And I know we can. And if Im elected President, we will,' Clinton promised an Orlando audience.

The Democratic presidential candidate said she doesn't 'have all the answers' and did not explain what, specifically, she would do to limit the loss of life in the aside at the beginning of a speech lifting up people with disabilities.

And she admitted to not having all the facts in the cases of Terence Crutcher, a Tulsa man shot dead by police last Friday, and Keith Lamont Scott of Charlotte, whose death inspired bloody protests last night that left 16 law officers with injuries, either.

'But we do know that we have two more names to add to a list of African Americans killed by police officers,' Clinton stated. 'Its unbearableIt needs to become intolerable.'

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Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that too many people are losing their lives in confrontations with police and vowed to make it stop if she's president

Clinton noted that she's spent a lot of time with mothers who's children lost their to police and gun violence. They feel the country believes their children are 'disposable,' she said.

'I know I dont have all the answers. I dont know anyone who does. But this is certain: too many people have lost their lives who shouldnt have.'

Yesterday Clinton said police officers acted 'absolutely inexplicably' when they tasered and shot Crutcher, an unarmed black man with his arms up in surrender, on Friday.

'This horrible shooting, again? How many times do we have to see this in our country? In Tulsa, an unarmed man with his hands in the air? I mean, this is just unbearable, and it needs to be intolerable,' Clinton said of the Terence Crutcher shooting Tuesday morning on the Steve Harvey Radio show.

Clinton said she'd 'do everything possible to improve policing' and 'go right at implicit bias' if she wins in November.

'There are good honorable cool-headed police officers. We've seen them in action, in New York over the last, you know, 48 hours because of the terrorist attacks.'

She added, 'We can do better. We have got to reign in what is absolutely inexplicable, and we've got to have law enforcement respect communities and communities respect law enforcement because they have to work together.'

On the program geared at African Americans the Democratic presidential candidate said she can perhaps steer the conversation in the right direction by speaking 'directly to white people' and saying, 'Look, this is not who we are.'

The Tulsa Police Department on Monday released a dashcam video of Terence Crutcher, whose family says he was having car trouble when police found him at his SUV in the middle of a highway, with his hands in the air

The Tulsa Police Department on Monday released a dashcam video of Crutcher, whose family says he was having car trouble when police found him at his SUV in the middle of a highway, being swarmed by law enforcement officers moments before he was shot dead.

Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said it and an aerial video of the incident that came out on Monday are 'disturbing' and an investigation is underway. He also asked the Justice Department to open a probe into the shooting.

Clinton condemned the shooting on Harvey's show as she compared herself to Trump.

At the rally Wednesday in Florida Clinton was careful to praise police again for their handling of the weekend's terror threats and warn against retribution against the men and women in blue for injustices toward the African-American community.

She said, 'We also saw the targeting of police officers in Philadelphia last week. And last night in Charlotte, 12 officers were injured in demonstrations following Keith Lamont Scotts death.

'Every day, police officers across the country are serving with extraordinary courage, honor and skill. We saw that again this weekend in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

'Our police handled those terrorist attacks exactly right.They likely saved a lot of lives.'

Clinton condemned the shooting today and said, 'Weve got to do better. And I know we can. And if Im elected President, we will'

Clinton said she's spoken 'to many police chiefs and other law enforcement leaders who are as deeply concerned as I am and as deeply committed to reform.'
A Connecticut college student was disciplined on Wednesday after she uploaded a picture of her friend wearing a beauty facial mask to Snapchat with the caption, 'Black lives matter.'

The photo went viral within hours, prompting an intense backlash on social media.

The woman in question is a student at Quinnipiac University, according to Fox 61.

Initially, the image was perceived as intentionally incendiary, with the woman pictured seeking to denigrate African Americans by painting 'blackface.'

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A Twitter user identifying herself as a Quinnipiac student shared the Snapchat image that forced administrators to take disciplinary measures against the student who took the picture

Social media users who saw the photo called for the expulsion of the woman in the picture.

It was later learned, however, that the student in the image was wearing a beauty facial mask and that she had no knowledge that the person taking the photograph would post it on Snapchat with a racially insensitive caption.

The university disciplined the friend who took the photograph rather than the woman pictured, Fox 61 and the Hartford Courant are reporting.

There is still no official word as to the exact nature and scope of the punishment.

In response to the backlash, Quinnipiac University felt compelled to issue a statement on its Facebook page disavowing the photo and promising action.

'The university takes this matter very seriously and acted swiftly to discipline those responsible for the offensive photo,' Quinnipiac said.

The university released a statement vowing to take disciplinary measures and disavowing racism and bigotry

Quinnipiac is a small, private university located in Hamden, Connecticut. Its student body numbers just 9,000

'This incident does not reflect the true nature of our university, where we have a long history of zero tolerance for any acts of racism, hatred or bigotry.'

The incident drew a reaction from the head of the Connecticut NAACP, Scott Esdaile, who said the photo was 'just disgusting.'

Esdaile said that the university should have 'zero tolerance' for such displays, according to the Hartford Courant.

Last week, a Kansas State University student who posted a Snapchat that showed her wearing a black mud mask with a racial slur in the caption was thrown out of school.

The picture, which shows Paige Shoemaker and her friend Sadie Meier wearing L'Oreal Clay facial masks, was captioned: 'Feels good to finally be a n****r'.

Shoemaker said she would have been a senior at KSU this year, but was informed by administrators this week that she was no longer a student after the Snapchat debacle.

The Snap got the attention of the Twitterverse on Thursday after it was posted by a KSU student named Desmund, who identified Shoemaker as the original sender.

'Welcome to Kansas State University. Where breakfast in the morning is some K-State Family with a side of racism,' read the post, which was retweeted more than 15,000 times in one day.

Paige Shoemaker (pictured right with friend Sadie Meier) said she was kicked out of Kansas State U after sending this snapchat, which shows her wearing clay mask and using a racial slur

The Snap got the attention of the Twitterverse on Thursday after it was posted by a KSU student named Desmund, who identified Shoemaker as the original sender of the picture

A screengrab of the Snapchat was also posted on the official Facebook page of Kansas State University, where it continued to spread like wildfire.

Shoemaker publicly apologized for the picture in a post on her Facebook on Thursday, but claimed that her and Meier were not wearing blackface.

'We clearly understand that what was said and done was completely disrespectful,' she wrote.

'I did want to inform everyone that it was NOT "black face" (sic), but it was a L'Oreal clay facial masks.'

Shoemaker also said she believed the picture was a 'joke' among her inner circle of friends that has since been taken 'way out of proportion'

'We never intended for the picture to offend anyone. We had only meant for it to be taken in a funny way, but we clearly understand that what we said should never be joked around about.'

'People shouldn't joke around about such a serious topic like this because it feeds into racism,' she continued.
Accused: Sharon Harry, 61, is accused of stabbing her boyfriend Friday after he refused sex with her. He was still being treated on Tuesday

A 61-year-old Trenton woman reportedly stabbed her boyfriend in the chest after he turned down a demand for sex.

Sharon Harry was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and weapons charges after Friday's alleged incident.

The man survived but suffered a 'serious injury' in the attack, according to NJ.com.

Trenton police would not identify the man, but confirmed that he was Harry's boyfriend.

He was still conscious and coherent when police arrived at their home on Pearl Street.

He told officers what happened before he was taken to hospital, prosecutors said in a bail hearing Tuesday.

The Trenton woman faces aggravated assault with attempt to cause bodily injury with a deadly weapon, possession of weapon for an unlawful purpose and unlawful purpose of a weapon.

Harry's attorney told the court that the attack was out of character for the woman. She has no prior record.

The Supreme Court judge ultimately reduced her bail to $10,000 from $25,000.
Sir, The real Queen Victoria would never have worn an old-fashioned frock. She would undoubtedly have worn something more in keeping, such as a mini-skirt or hot pants, writes Craig Brown

Sir, Further to letters pointing out that in the new TV series the young Queen Victoria is shown dancing to a melody that wasnt written for another 36 years, may I point out that, in those far-off days, groups like the Swinging Blue Jeans and The Shadows were much in demand, and the young Queen would have been able to hum all their hits.

L.T., Hants.

Sir, Further to the previous letter, I was horrified that in the third episode, none of the characters attended a grand ball. Surely the writer should have known that in Victorian times there was dancing both before and after all advertising breaks?

P.B., Herts.

Sir, Some of the street scenes were appallingly inaccurate, too. On every Victorian street, there was a resident haggard old crone whose job it was to issue dark warnings while pointing a finger and cackling. Yet not a single crone was to be seen on the screen. Why ever not?

E. Huff, Fulham.

Sir, In answer to your previous letter, might they have all been attending a conference of haggard old crones? Its the only possible explanation.

I myself was disappointed to see so few dirty-faced nippers on cobbled streets playing with hoops and yelling Oi, Mister! at passers-by while merrily picking their pockets. Yet these mischievous youngsters were everywhere in those days. Have the programme makers no sense of history?

Sir, Further to the previous letter, I was horrified that in the third episode, none of the characters attended a grand ball, writes Craig Brown. Pictured is a scene from Victoria

B.A., Middlesborough.

Sir, Am I right in thinking that the tune Victoria was seen playing with Albert on the piano in episode two was Stayin Alive? If so, the programme makers were hopelessly wrong. It is well known that Victorias favourite Bee Gees song was How Deep Is Your Love, and Stayin Alive was the hit she loathed.

T.R., Oxon.

Sir, I am sure I saw Victoria texting in broad daylight in episode three. This is historically inaccurate. She would never have spent her time openly texting her friends during luncheon with her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Far from it. The young Queen was famously well-mannered, so would always have texted under the table.

R.P., Guildford, Surrey.

Sir, Why did the producers of Victoria portray Windsor Castle as being over-run by meerkats? I have scoured the history books, but am unable to find any reference to a meerkat infestation of Windsor Castle in the 1830s, or, indeed, at any other time.

H.R., Bisley.

Sir, I wonder if your previous correspondent failed to spot that Victoria had been interrupted by an advertising break? This might also explain the unexpected arrival of a group of bronzed Americans sipping Coca-Cola around a swimming pool immediately following the entrance of Prince Albert in episode one.

Mrs J.T. Squires, Avon.

Sir, Years ago, while watching The Six Wives Of King Henry VIII on the television, I discovered to my surprise that the King married a seventh wife called Meg. Queen Meg was a well-dressed lady who stood behind the desk in the reception area of a Tudor motel called Crossroads, checking guests in with a ready smile.

I was so pleased to find that, after so many mismatches, King Henry had ended up with this immensely capable wife. I am indebted to the producers of this historical drama for broadening my sympathy for this most maligned of monarchs.

Sir, How I wish Ross Poldark would stop removing his shirt every Sunday evening! writes Craig Brown

G.A.W., Wilts.

Sir, How I wish Ross Poldark would stop removing his shirt every Sunday evening! It is a well-known fact that people in the olden days rarely, if ever, removed their shirts. If they ever did so, it would only be in the privacy of their own room, first having checked there were no cameras around.

T. Smythe, Essex.

Sir, Further to your earlier letters, I was bitterly disappointed that the actress playing Queen Victoria failed to give her a German accent. In real life, she would surely have said, Achtung! Achtung! Schnell! Schnell! when hurrying her courtiers into dinner. I remember this from her starring role in the excellent BBC Colditz series in the 1970s.

J.P., Croydon.
Staying put: Mary Berry, pictured outside her home today, reportedly turned down a 7million offer to move to Channel 4

The BBC is reportedly planning a rival baking show starring Mary Berry, Mel Geidroyc and Sue Perkins once the Great British Bake Off moves to Channel 4.

Judge Paul Hollywood yesterday announced he will follow the show to the new broadcaster, becoming the only Bake Off star to make the switch.

The news came minutes after Miss Berry, 81, said she would not move to Channel 4 because of her 'loyalty to the BBC'.

She is said to have turned down a 7million offer to continue as a judge.

Presenters Mel and Sue dealt a major blow to the show's future by announcing they would not return to host.

And the BBC is reportedly ready to capitalise on the stars' decision to stay with a new baking show said to be on the cards.

A BBC source told the Mirror: 'We've got three of the fab four staying with us. Were thrilled. The chances of us reuniting Mary, Mel and Sue are very high.'

However the Corporation runs the risk of legal action if it attempts to copy the Bake Off format too closely.

The BBC lost the rights to Bake Off following seven series after programme-maker Love Productions struck a three-year deal with Channel 4 worth a reported 75million.

The celebrity baker, 81, announced today that she would not move over her 'loyalty to the BBC'

Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood cut a furtive figure yesterday as he was spotted sneaking into Channel 4. He announced today that he would follow the show to Channel 4

Presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, pictured on last night's episode with Berry and Hollywood, dealt a major blow to the show's future by announcing they would not return

However the presenters' and judges' contracts needed to be negotiated separately.

Announcing her decision today, Berry said it had been a 'privilege and honour' to 'be part of seven years of magic in a tent'.

The judge, who is paid 500,000 to be on the show, is understood to have turned down a 7million offer from Channel 4, the Popbitch mailout reported.

In a statement today, Berry said: 'The Bake Off family - Paul, Mel and Sue have given me so much joy and laughter.

'My decision to stay with the BBC is out of loyalty to them, as they have nurtured me, and the show, that was a unique and brilliant format from day one. I am just sad for the audience who may not be ready for change, I hope they understand my decision.

'I wish the programme, crew and future bakers every possible success and I am so very sad not to be a part of it.

She added: 'Farewell to soggy bottoms.'

Hollywood did not mention Berry in his statement, which came minutes after she revealed she would remain with the corporation.

He was reportedly offered a role at Top Gear but turned down the opportunity.

He said: 'Since I was a kid, baking has been part of my life. The seven series inside the tent have created some great memories. Best of all, I have felt so pleased to experience other people getting the baking bug, just as I did when my dad helped me make my first loaf.'

Berry and Hollywood released a statement after the announcement to express their upset

Mary Berry has quit the Great British Bake Off over her 'loyalty to the BBC' after it was announced the show was moving to Channel 4

'The Great British Bake Off has brought baking to the nation and we've seen people from all walks of life and backgrounds experience the highs and lows of competition, and more importantly helping each other.

'It's been a huge part of my life in the past few years and I just couldn't turn my back on all that - the bakers themselves, the bakes, the team that makes it, and of course the tent, the bunting, and who could forget ... the squirrels.

'So I am delighted that I will be continuing as a judge when Bake Off moves to Channel 4.

'I want to thank the BBC and Mel and Sue for making my time in the tent great fun and really rewarding.'I'm staying in the tent with the bakers where I belong. I want to thank Mary. I'll miss her but she has made the right decision for her.'

Hollywood later said he and Berry remain 'great friends', and he explained why he did not mention his co-judge in his original statement.

'When I spoke about my news earlier on, I did not know what Mary was saying about her decision, and more importantly had not been able to speak to her,' he said.

Presenters Mel Giedroyc (second from right) and Sue Perkins (second from left) said they were not leaving BBC. Now judge Mary Berry (right) has today stated she will not feature in new show. Paul Hollywood (left) was spotted arriving for negotiations on his future

Hollywood later said he and Berry remain 'great friends', and he explained why he did not mention his co-judge in his original statement

'A PEACOCKING MANCHILD': FORMER GBBO STAR RUBY TANDOH 'CRITICISES PAUL HOLLYWOOD IN TWITTER RANT' Former Great British Bake Off contestant Ruby Tandoh appeared to call Paul Hollywood a 'peacocking manchild' in a thinly veiled Twitter attack on the judge. Miss Tandoh, who took appeared on the show in 2013, posted several tweets today, apparently attacking Hollywood's decision to follow the show to Channel 4. The judge is the only Bake Off star to make the switch after Mary Berry and presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins said they would remain at the BBC. Posting on Twitter today, Miss Tandoh wrote: 'ahhhhhh a peacocking manchild lingering wherever the money is, i am shocked [sic]'. Minutes later she appeared to comment on what Hollywood was like on the Bake Off set, writing: 'This, from a man who turned up to work revving a rental lamborghini. or was it a ferrari. i don't remember, the air was thick w testosterone.' Referencing the opening lines to Moby Dick, she added: 'Call me ishmael. my child, it was a dark time: shirts tucked into bootcut jeans and the season's first dusting of spray tan on the ground...' After the bizarre posts, she added: 'i will be told off for this. i did it all for you my friends'. Twitter criticism: Ruby Tandoh launched a thinly veiled attack on Paul Hollywood on Twitter Advertisement

'Let there be no doubt: I have loved every minute of my time working with Mary. I have learned so much from her and we are great friends inside and outside the tent.

'That will not change. Knowing her as well as I do, I am sure she has made the right decision for her. I will miss her.'

Charlotte Moore, director of BBC content, welcomed baking queen Berry's decision, which comes after days of speculation about whether she will move.

'Mary is an extraordinary woman, loved and adored by the British public, and the BBC is her natural home,' Ms Moore said.

'I've been very lucky to have had the pleasure of working with Mary over the last seven years and I'm so pleased that relationship will continue.

MARY BERRY'S STATEMENT ON HER DECISION TO LEAVE 'What a privilege and honour it has been to be part of seven years of magic in a tent - The Great British Bake Off. The Bake Off family - Paul, Mel and Sue have given me so much joy and laughter. 'My decision to stay with the BBC is out of loyalty to them, as they have nurtured me, and the show, that was a unique and brilliant format from day one. I am just sad for the audience who may not be ready for change, I hope they understand my decision. 'I wish the programme, crew and future bakers every possible success and I am so very sad not to be a part of it. Farewell to soggy bottoms.' Advertisement

'She is an inspiration to generations, a real icon and I can't wait to cook up more unmissable shows with her in the future.'

Richard McKerrow, co-founder and creative director of Love Productions, who has been criticised for choosing a higher offer from within the BBC, said: 'Paul's presence will ensure the culture of Bake Off continues in the tent as it makes its move to Channel 4.

'We want to reiterate to Bake Off fans, that the show they love will remain wholly familiar, and that Channel 4 is a great place to make our show. Bake Off will be produced by the same team, in the same tent, with the same recipe.'

A Love Productions statement said Berry would be missed.

'We respect Mary's decision not to join the next chapter of the Bake Off story,' it said in a statement.

'We are immensely grateful to her for all her work and for her recognition today that Love Productions had made a 'unique and brilliant format from day one' with Bake Off.

'The whole family, crew and team that made Bake Off for the BBC, and who will now make it just as brilliantly for C4, will miss her.'

Clearly keen to keep his visit private, Hollywood arrived in a blacked-out car and waited until a chaperone arrived before he got out to walk to the back door

Jay Hunt, chief creative officer of Channel 4 said: 'Paul really is the star baker  an exceptional talent with a twinkle in his eye.

'His wit, warmth and wisdom are vital ingredients in Bake Off's success. I'm so delighted he's coming to Channel 4.'

Hollywood cut a more furtive figure yesterday as he was spotted sneaking into Channel 4 to discuss whether he'll stay on when the broadcaster takes the show from the BBC.

EX-CULTURE SECRETARY QUESTIONS BAKE OFF BIDDING WAR John Whittingdale questioned whether Channel 4 should enter into bidding wars with the BBC Channel 4's purchase of the Great British Bake Off has prompted fresh questions about whether such deals are 'appropriate', a former culture secretary has said. John Whittingdale questioned whether Channel 4 should enter into bidding wars with the BBC, given both are public service broadcasters. He told BBC Radio Four: 'Channel 4 obviously have a remit to be distinctive and different, but I accept that they need to also at the same time generate revenue. 'They make popular programming which fulfils that objective. But in this case, they have essentially poached a show which is very successful from another public service broadcaster - and at some considerable cost. 'It raises questions, even before it was discovered they'd failed, actually, to get presenters to come with them, as to whether or not it is appropriate for Channel 4 to be bidding against the BBC for a show which was created by the BBC. 'It's up to the production company to decide which way to go, but they've followed the money.' Channel 4 and the BBC are the only not-for-profit major broadcasters in the UK. However, Channel 4 operates in a hybrid model where it is allowed to attract advertising revenue. This is in order to make ends meet and subsidise higher quality and more public service shows that are not as commercially successful. Its public service remit states it should be more distinctive and innovative with its programming. Mr Whittingdale added: 'The irony is, if Channel 4 had commissioned Great British Bake Off at the very beginning, rather than the BBC, it would have been applauded. 'People would have said 'here is something different, which is a bit risky', and which certainly wasn't in any way a certainty in terms of success. 'Instead what they've done is the BBC commissioned it, the BBC built it up, and now when it's extremely successful Channel 4 are buying it off the BBC. 'The decision to purchase Bake Off off the BBC, I have to say surprised me. It does raise questions about whether or not it's appropriate.' During his time as culture secretary Mr Whittingdale commissioned a review into the structure of Channel 4, which included the possibility of privatisation. He told the World at One programme: 'To grow the business does need investment. 'One of the arguments for bringing in a private sector partner is it would bring in additional investment capital for expanding. 'That's something Channel 4 are resistant to, but its a demonstration of the need they have to increase their revenue that they clearly perceive Bake Off as a sort of cash cow that can pay for other things.' Mr Whittingdale added that the Government would announce the results of the review in due course. There were reports this summer that the Government was unlikely to change Channel 4's status following the review. Advertisement

Clearly keen to keep his visit private, he arrived in a blacked-out car and waited until a chaperone arrived before he got out to walk to the back door.

The negotiations took place as the Mail told yesterday how the TV chef  who is paid around 500,000 a year by the BBC  had quietly registered his name as a trademark for potential products and services.

Berry and Hollywood released a statement after the announcement, which said: 'We were very shocked and saddened to learn that Bake Off will be moving from its home.

'We're not going with the dough. We wish all the future bakers every success.'

The negotiations took place as the Mail told yesterday how the TV chef  who is paid around 500,000 a year by the BBC  had quietly registered his name as a trademark for potential products and services

It was announced last week that the BBC had lost the rights to the show following seven series after programme-maker Love Productions struck a three-year deal with Channel 4 worth a reported 75m

Great British Bake Off fans have compared the split between Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry to the divorce of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

While viewers rushed to praise Berry for her decision to stay with the BBC, they expressed disappointment that Hollywood had split from his fellow judge with his move to Channel 4.

One wrote: 'Paul Hollywood breaking up with Berry on bake off is a bigger showbiz breakup than Brad Pitt and Jolie,' while another said: 'Britain currently dealing with our own #Brangelina as Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood go their separate ways ...'

Former Bake Off contestant Martha Collison compared the news Berry will not follow the show when it moves to Channel 4 to the abdication of a queen.

Collison, who at 17 was the youngest contestant on the show when she made it to the quarter-finals in the fifth series, tweeted: 'The queen of baking has abdicated. Will the world ever be the same again?'

Richard Burr, who was a finalist in the same series, added: 'Crikey! That tent @Channel4 have bought is looking emptier and emptier ...'

The Hunger Games star Sam Claflin praised Berry, writing: 'The Great British Baker is Off? My egg is broken. Mary Berry is just pure class. Class move,' while former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott cheered her on with a reference to Hollywood's nickname for her, saying: 'Well done Mary Berry! Or can I call you Bezza?'

PAUL HOLLYWOOD'S STATEMENT ON SWITCH 'Since I was a kid, baking has been part of my life. The seven series inside the tent have created some great memories. Best of all, I have felt so pleased to experience other people getting the baking bug, just as I did when my dad helped me make my first loaf.' 'The Great British Bake Off has brought baking to the nation and we've seen people from all walks of life and backgrounds experience the highs and lows of competition, and more importantly helping each other. 'It's been a huge part of my life in the past few years and I just couldn't turn my back on all that - the bakers themselves, the bakes, the team that makes it, and of course the tent, the bunting, and who could forget ... the squirrels. 'So I am delighted that I will be continuing as a judge when Bake Off moves to Channel 4. 'I want to thank the BBC and Mel and Sue for making my time in the tent great fun and really rewarding.' Advertisement

This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield chimed in: 'Mary Berry quits Bake-Off ... clang went the wheels as they all fell off'.

Hollywood's announcement he would be staying with the show despite the departures of Berry and hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins was met with anger and disappointment on Twitter.

Andy Jacksson wrote: 'Not watching Bake-Off just for Paul Hollywood. It's all 4 of them or nothing. GBBO,' while Colin Bell said: 'Can't believe I'm going to have to get Paul Hollywood removed from my tattoo of the Bake-Off team. Who's paying for that?'

Others were concerned the show would not be the same without the rest of the team.

Adam Postans wrote: 'It's 2017. Paul Hollywood enters an empty tent and shakes himself by the hand. Roll end credits,' while Tom Kirk added: 'Hi, I'm Paul Hollywood and welcome to One Man and His Tent'.

Katy Ling said she felt let down, adding: 'Haven't felt this betrayed since Taylor Swift took her music off of Spotify.'

JonDBarker tweeted: 'Paul Hollywood looks at the attending list, as more and more people 'can't make it'. Later he sees them together in a selfie on Instagram.'

Perkins and Giedroyc released a joint statement last week to reveal they were not moving.

'We made no secret of our desire for the show to remain where it was,' they said.

'The BBC nurtured the show from its infancy and helped give it its distinctive warmth and charm, growing it from an audience of two million to nearly 15 at its peak.

'We've had the most amazing time on Bake Off, and have loved seeing it rise and rise like a pair of yeasted Latvian baps.

'We're not going with the dough. We wish all the future bakers every success.'

Giedroyc refused to comment on the announcements this afternoon.

The BBC presenter, 48, left her home in Ealing, west London, on a black Trek bicycle, wearing blue denim dungarees and a herringbone tweed jacket.

When asked if she had any comment about the latest Bake Off development, she said: 'No, I don't. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.'

Audience-favourite Val Stones  who used dental floss to cut her dough  became the fifth baker to leave the tent, while Candice Brown (above) was crowned star baker for the second time

Danny Baker claimed to show an edited 'Love Productions contract', which he tweeted today

HOW BAKE OFF'S PAUL HOLLYWOOD SHOT TO FAME Hollywood was one half of a beloved television double act, serving as co-judge with cookery expert Mary Berry Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood has gained a reputation for his steely gaze, his firm handshake of approval and his bread-making expertise. Hollywood was one half of a beloved television double act, serving as co-judge with cookery expert Mary Berry. But while Berry has quit alongside Bake Off presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, Hollywood will be following the show from the BBC to Channel 4. The 50-year-old, who was born in Merseyside, has followed the family baking tradition. With a grandfather who was head baker at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, a young Hollywood worked at his father's bakery in York. He later became a baker at hotels around Britain including the Dorchester in London, and also worked at resorts in Cyprus. Hollywood gained a reputation as an authority on bread making with his best-selling cookery book 100 Great Breads. It was the Great British Bake Off which made Hollywood a household name after its 2010 launch, with the show becoming a national favourite. On the back of the show's success, he set out to conquer the US with The American Baking Competition - with Marcela Valladolid at his side as co-judge. He and wife Alexandra (left) are now reconciled. They share a teenage son, Josh However, the show was cancelled after one series and also led to marriage trouble for Hollywood, after he embarked on an alleged affair with Valladolid. He and wife Alexandra are now reconciled. They share a teenage son, Josh. Hollywood will now be the only member of the original line-up returning to the show, saying: 'I just couldn't turn my back on all that.' Advertisement

Last night the current series reached its halfway stage, with the amateur bakers tackling a series of pastry challenges.

Audience-favourite Val Stones  who used dental floss to cut her dough  became the fifth baker to leave the tent, whilst Candice Brown was crowned star baker for the second time.

But fans of the programme have been distracted by the news that it is moving channel.

In the meantime, Hollywood appeared to be making sure he's ready to take commercial advantage of the 25million-a-year deal by trademarking his name with the Intellectual Property Office, suggesting he could bring out his own branded fruit juices, craft beers, restaurants, cafes and bars.

HOW MARY BERRY HAS BECOME A NATIONAL TREASURE Mary Berry secured a spot as a national treasure Mary Berry secured a spot as a national treasure when she joined co-judge Paul Hollywood on the first series of The Great British Bake Off in 2010. The veteran TV cook has been at the centre of many memorable moments during her time on the show, from 'soggy bottoms' to fondant-related death stares, and her penchant for a trendy jacket. Here are some of Berry's highlights as she announces she is leaving the popular baking show when it moves from the BBC to Channel 4. Soggy bottoms Berry is perhaps best known for her kind yet critical judgments on the bakers' attempts. Her most famous sign of disapproval is to remark on a bake - usually an undercooked pastry - with a 'soggy bottom'. On a show known for its cheeky innuendos, this is the standout, and Berry also made reference to it in her official statement announcing her departure from the series. Boozy doughnuts Berry has won legions of fans for her fondness of bakes that include alcohol, and in the fifth series she was incredibly impressed with baker Luis Troyano's boozy doughnuts. After taking a sip of the rum-laced cocktail doughnut, Berry pulled a delighted face and said: 'I mean, why are we bothering with the doughnuts?' Her reaction has since been captured and recreated in gifs and memes across social media. After Noon Plus Picture shows Mary Berry, cookery writer and television cook demonstrating a new type of stuffing for turkeys and also a new method of carving it in 1979 Sausage jokes During the latest episode of Bake Off, a social media stir was caused as contestant Candice Brown handed Berry a large black pudding sausage. The octogenarian judge showed some gusto as she gladly took the foodstuff in her hand as Brown told her to 'feel the weight of that'. Style icon By the third series of Bake Off, Berry had secured her place as an unlikely style icon as she swapped cardigans for trendy and often brightly coloured blazers. In 2014, during a broadcast of the programme, a printed jacket from Marks & Spencer had sold out in one hour due to Berry wearing it on the episode. Mary Berry, with her husband Paul Hunnings, after she became a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012 Berry's horrified 'death stare' In series five, Berry made headlines for her ice-cold, unimpressed gaze, directed at baker Enwezor Nzegwu in reaction to the use of store-bought fondant in his 3D biscuit scene Showstopper piece. It was dubbed the 'fondant death stare' on social media, and Nzegwu was eliminated from the Bake Off tent at the end of the episode. The great Jaffa Cake debate The debut episode of the current series saw Berry chastise Hollywood for dipping a Jaffa Cake into his tea before eating it, leaving fans on social media in hysterics. Unimpressed, she told him: 'We don't do that in the south, you know.' Berry's cheeky innuendos As well as her 'soggy bottom', Berry is known for her use of an innuendo almost as much as presenters Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc. One such moment saw her commenting while whisking egg whites: 'There it is looking perfectly stiff.' Advertisement

Nigella Lawson is the viewers' favourite to replace Mary Berry in the Great British Bake Off, according to a new survey.

The 56-year-old celebrity chef beat last year's winner Nadiya Hussain and Delia Smith, who tied for second place.

Jamie Oliver was fourth choice, ahead of James Martin, Gino D'Acampo, the Hairy Bikers, Lorraine Pascal, Ainsley Harriott and Gordon Ramsay.

The survey of 1,000 Bake Off viewers was conducted by online market researchers OnePoll.

No bunting, tent or Paul Hollywood but there's NOTHING to stop the BBC launching a bakery contest starring Mary, Mel and Sue

By Anthony Joseph for MailOnline

The BBC could launch a baking contest starring Mary Berry, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, MailOnline can reveal.

There are no UK laws stopping the corporation from creating a similar show to The Great British Bake Off.

However, it is unlikely they will be allowed to use bunting, a tent and other signature touches that is associated with current programme.

It was announced last week that the BBC had lost the rights to the show following seven series after programme-maker Love Productions struck a three-year deal with Channel 4 worth a reported 75million.

Presenters Giedroyc and Perkins dealt a blow to the show's future by announcing they would not be moving from the BBC.

Now judge Berry, 81, who is paid 500,000 to be on the show, has stated she will also be leaving.

Chef Hollywood is moving with the show after he was spotted arriving at Channel 4's base for negotiations, with reports suggesting he turned down a role on Top Gear.

But that can't stop the BBC from producing a baking show with the Berry, Giedroyc and Perkins.

Judge Berry, 81, who is paid 500,000 to be on the show, has stated she will also be leaving

Head of film and television at Clintons law firm, Kami Naghdi, told MailOnline: 'They wouldnt be able to use a name thats the same or similar.

'They could do a cooking competition show per se  there are many going back to Masterchef and Saturday Kitchen.

'This is what TV people call Format Rights and its dealt in billions of dollars a year. But Format Rights arent a right recognised by the law.

'Its much more about the set, the name and the brand and logos which are protected by copyright and trademark laws.

'Programmes about cooking competitions are an open market. But does an audience want the Great British Bake Off or do they want the judges and presenters.

'The proof will be in the pudding.'

The BBC has yet to comment on what they will do with Berry, Giedroyc and Perkins, who have pledged their allegiance to the corporation

The BBC has yet to comment on what they will do with Berry, Giedroyc and Perkins, who have pledged their allegiance to the corporation.

Formatted TV shows are extremely popular in the UK, with the likes of X Factor, The Voice, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, Big Brother, The Weakest Link and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.

If it's a success on one channel, it can be licensed for broadcast on others and can be re-produced internationally.

Huge sums of money are made from these deals, but it is still a grey area on the legality of Format Rights as copyright laws do not protect a general idea or concept.
Police will continue to search the Queensland home where schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer spent 10 months before she was allegedly murdered by her foster dad.

The 12-year-old's foster mother Julene Thorburn assisted police as they searched the Chambers Flat property, south of Brisbane, on Wednesday as her 19-year-old son faced court on an incest charge.

Tiahleigh spent 10 months living with the Thorburn family, including their two teenage sons, in their four bedroom home on the 2ha rural property.

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Police will resume their search of the Queensland home where Tiahleigh Palmer spent 10 months before she was allegedly murdered by her foster father Rick Thorburn last year

Tiahleigh Palmer, 12, was allegedly murdered by her foster Rick Thorburn at the family's home

Investigators believe she was killed in her family home the day before Thorburn told police he had dropped her safety to nearby Marsden State High School on October 30.

Her body was located almost a week later in a river near the family home.

Thorburn remains in hospital in an induced coma after collapsing following a suspected suicide attempt after being charged with murder on Tuesday.

Police ethical standards command is investigating how Thorburn collapsed, amid reports he may have swallowed pills while in custody.

Tiahleigh spent 10 months living with the Thorburn family, including their two teenage sons, in their four bedroom home on the 2ha rural property at Chambers Flat

Rick Thorburn (left), his wife Julene (middle right) and two sons, Josh (middle left) and Trent (right) have been charged with a string of offences in relation to the death of Tiahleigh Palmer

Investigators believe she was killedin her family home the day before Thorburn told police he had dropped her safety to nearby Marsden State High School on October 30

It's also been suggested he may have suffered a cardiac incident.

Tiahleigh's 19-year-old foster brother Trent Thorburn was denied bail on Wednesday as he faced court on incest and perjury charges.

The girl's biological mother Cindy Palmer watched from the gallery as it was alleged he'd confessed in a Facebook Messenger conversation with a cousin that he'd had sex with Tiahleigh and feared she might be pregnant.

Police also alleged he'd repeatedly lied during their murder investigation and was determined to do all he could to avoid a prison sentence for his alleged crimes.

CHARGES LAID OVER TIAHLEIGH PALMER'S MURDER FOSTER FATHER RICK THORBURN: Charged with murder and interfering with a corpse. The 56-year-old was due to face court on Wednesday but is in an induced coma after collapsing while in custody. FOSTER BROTHER TRENT THORBURN: Charged with incest, attempting to pervert the course of justice and two counts of perjury. The 19-year-old was denied bail on Wednesday after a court heard he had admitted on Facebook Messenger to having sex with Tiahleigh and was worried she might be pregnant. FOSTER BROTHER JOSH THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 20-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. FOSTER MOTHER JULENE THORBURN: Charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The 54-year-old is on bail and due to face court on October 10. Advertisement

Prosecutors believe Tiahleigh was killed by her carer Rick Thornburn (pictured) at the family home a day before he claimed to have dropped her at school

Tiahleigh's body was located in November last year in a river near the family home

Tiahleigh's 19-year-old foster brother Trent Thorburn faced court on Wednesday charged with incest and perjury. He is alleged to have had sex with the 12-year-old

Julene and the couple's older son Joshua, 20, have also been charges with perjury and perverting the course of justice.

They're set to face court on October 10.

Child Services Minister Shannon Fentiman announced Queensland's blue card system would be reviewed following the allegations against Tiahleigh's foster carers.

Ms Fentiman also revealed the Thorburns had operated a family day care business following Tiahleigh's death until police provided intelligence in April to authorities that resulted in their approvals being revoked.

Cindy Palmer, the mother of murdered schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer, arrived at a Queensland court on Wednesday ahead of Thorburn's court appearance

Julene Thorburn, 54, (left) and another son, Josh, 20, (right) have been charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Prosecutors claim Tiahleigh told her foster parents, Julene (left) and Rick Thorburn (right), that their son had been preying on her when they left the house before she was murdered
One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has left viewers shocked after he accused panelist Waleed Aly of condoning Islamic terrorism.

The Project panel were discussing a new poll revealing nearly half of Australians want to see Muslim immigration banned when co-host Peter Helliar asked Mr Roberts if this meant Aly should be 'deported or relegated to breakfast TV in Syria'.

'No, but it would certainly be nice if Waleed actually condemned and didn't condone Islamic terrorism. Wouldn't that be a good start,' Senator Roberts responded on Wednesday night.

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One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has left viewers shocked after he accused panelist Waleed Aly of condoning Islamic terrorism

'No, but it would certainly be nice if Waleed actually condemned and didn't condone Islamic terrorism. Wouldn't that be a good start,' Senator Roberts said of the TV host

The crowd gasped following the response and there was a brief stunned silence before guest host Hamish McDonald, who replaced Aly for the night, jumped to his defence.

'Just for the record, I don't think anything needs to say anything, but quite clearly he does and for your reference in future it's Hinduism'.

He then signed off the interview referring to Mr Roberts as 'Senator what's his name.'

Earlier in the interview, Senator Roberts said the poll revealing 49 per cent of Australian are against Muslim immigration does not surprise him.

Mr McDonald then slammed the Senator for being unable to say how fast the numbers are growing after his party vocalised Australia is being 'swamped by Muslims'.

The crowd gasped following the response and there was a brief stunned silence before guest host Hamish McDonald, who replaced Aly for the night, jumped to the defence of the host

Following the segment, the Senator took to Twitter saying the hosts forgot their 'manners'

Earlier in the interview, Senator Roberts said the poll revealing 49 per cent of Australian are against Muslim immigration does not surprise him

'Do you know what the fastest growing faith other than Christianity is in Australia?' Mr McDonald asked.

'No I don't,' a stumped Senator Roberts responded as the panel laughed.

Following the segment, the Senator took to Twitter saying the hosts forgot their 'manners'.

'They dont like that their views are in minority,' he wrote.

On Wednesday, polling conducted by Essential Research found 49 per cent of Australians surveyed supported a ban on Muslim immigration.

The results surprisingly revealed more than one third of Greens voters (34 per cent) support the proposed ban, while 60 per cent of Liberal voters and 40 per cent of Labor voters agreed.

Waleed was absent from the panel on Wednesday night, but his fellow hosts jumped to his defence in his absense

Earlier in the interview, Senator Roberts said the poll revealing 49 per cent of Australian are against Muslim immigration does not surprise him

The results come just a week after One Nation's Pauline Hanson told the Senate in her maiden speech: 'Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims.'

'If you are not prepared to obey our laws, respect our culture and our way of life, then I suggest you go back where you came from,' she said.

'If it will be any help, I will take you to the airport and wave you goodbye with sincere best wishes.'

She said the 'culture and ideology' of Islam is 'incompatible to our own'.

On Wednesday, polling conducted by Essential Research found 49 per cent of Australians surveyed supported a ban on Muslim immigration
Doctors said cost analysis should consider the expense of caring for child

But to keep costs down the test will only be offered in some circumstances

Senior doctors sparked fury yesterday for suggesting the NHS should work out the cost effectiveness of caring for children with Downs syndrome.

It was condemned as putting a price on a life by families of children with the condition.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists raised the prospect in a consultation into a new test for Downs which the NHS is set to approve.

Twenty-year-old Oliver Hellowell has Downs syndrome and is a successful wildlife photographer

The new test  Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing  is 99 per cent accurate at telling pregnant woman how likely their baby is to have the condition.

To keep costs down, the test is likely to be offered only to pregnant women considered at high risk of having a Downs child.

But the Royal College said: If the decision [to restrict it to high-risk women] has been made primarily on cost grounds, then a more rigorous economic analysis has to be made that includes the lifetime costs of caring for children and adults with Downs syndrome.

It added: Such an economic analysis may (or may not) suggest that testing for all is cost-effective.

Yesterday Dr Elizabeth Corcoran, of the Downs Syndrome Research Foundation, said: It has always been our fear that these types of calculations and economic analyses go on behind closed doors between policy makers, but here it is in black and white.

MY TALENTED SON IS A JOY, HE'S NOT A BURDEN Twenty-year-old Oliver Hellowell has Downs syndrome and is a successful wildlife photographer. He has taken acclaimed pictures of stunning scenes from nature while amassing a global Facebook following of 60,000 fans. Now Olivers mother Wendy OCarroll is outraged by the Royal Colleges suggestion that the NHS should calculate how cost-effective it is to look after Downs children. Mrs OCarroll, 56, from Somerset, said: The cold and calculated argument which happily balances human life against possible medical costs is one I find both terrifying and deeply disturbing on so many levels. I am not against abortion, and I do believe parents have a right to choose, but I am vehemently against an approach which presents our children as nothing but a burden. As the parent of a 20-year-old young man with Downs syndrome who is enjoying life enormously, and bringing incredible value to the lives of all those who come into contact with him... I know this to be untrue. Mrs OCarroll, who also has a daughter, Anna, attributes Olivers success to his eye for detail, partly due to his condition. Advertisement

It is utterly shocking that in this day and age someone can put a cost value on someones life just because they have a disability. It is worse still that this comes from a respected Royal College that is a professional beacon for doctors.

Supporters of the new technique, which involves a simple test of the expectant mothers blood at about ten weeks, say that it will give women more choice and see fewer miscarriages associated with the more invasive amniocentesis tests.

Pregnant women can already have a Non-Invasive Prenatal Test privately, costing between 400 and 900. But campaigners fear that it will spark an increase in abortions, because an estimated 90 cent of women with an unborn Downs baby opt for a termination.

Testing only high-risk women would keep costs down, but such a regime would inevitably mean some babies with Downs would be missed  put at 289 a year. As these babies grow up, it will cost the NHS to care for them.

But families say the cost should not be a factor, and that Downs is not a disease that needs to be eradicated. Colette Lloyd, 43, of Oxford, whose daughter Katie, 18, has the condition, said putting a pounds and pence valuation on her childs life harks back to the dark ages.

She added: We are told that screening is about a womans choice, but clearly this is just a smokescreen for the medical professional to absolve themselves of any responsibility and achieve their cost-saving aims.

My daughters life is worth far more than any costs she may have.

And Paul Critchlow, 48, of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, said of his 24-year-old daughter Emily: As a parent of a young person with Downs syndrome, I am appalled at the suggestion that the lifetime cost of caring for children and adults with Downs should be a factor in determining whether or not they should even be born.

He said the Royal College had no remit to intervene in this way, adding: By suggesting that lifetime cost should be factored in, is frankly a step too far and leads us into the murky world of eugenics  who deserves to live and what that life should look like.

Oliver has taken acclaimed pictures of stunning scenes from nature while amassing a global Facebook following of 60,000 fans. He is pictured here with his mother, Wendy

It is unethical and immoral to even consider the attempt to calculate the lifetime cost of any human being and then measure it against the likely benefit of that persons life.

The Royal Colleges contribution to the debate came in its response to a consultation being held by the UK National Screening Committee ahead of the tests expected NHS roll-out.

Supporters of the NIPT programme say any cost effectiveness analysis should also take into account the benefits of giving women greater choice.

Prof Lyn Chitty, who led an NIPT trial at Great Ormond Street Hospital, has said: One of the fears of NIPT was that we may reduce the number of Downs syndrome children who are alive  but actually 30 per cent continued with the pregnancy.

She said these women all decided to keep their Downs baby, compared to 6 per cent under the current system.

Mike O'Carroll, 55, Oliver Hellowell, 17, Wendy O' Carroll, 53, and sister Anna Coles, 26, at home in Westonzoyland, Somerset

Prof Chitty added: Introducing NIPT into NHS maternity care means that more women can be safely reassured about the health of their baby without having an invasive test which increases the risk of miscarriage.

NIPT would lead to 4,870 fewer amniocentesis tests in England and Wales a year, saving the NHS about 337,000 annually, Government advisers predict.

This, they say, will drive down the number of miscarriages by about 25 a year.

Last night the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists declined to comment. But a source insisted: The RCOG is not suggesting the NHS would or could or should save money by calculating the value of a Downs life.
An Ohio woman was found passed out after overdosing on heroin in her pickup truck as her 8-month-old grandson was sitting in the backseat.

The woman, Debra Hyde, apologized to the boy's parents after she was discovered unconscious in her truck while it was parked at a gas station in front of a wall of propane tanks in Elyria, Ohio.

A passerby, Raylene Crofts, noticed Hyde and the toddler in the parked car and called emergency services, WSBT-TV reported.

First responders had to break two windows in order to extricate Hyde and her grandson from the vehicle.

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Debra Hyde apologized to the parents of her 8-month-old grandson who was left in the backseat of her truck as she was passed out in the driver's seat from a heroin overdose

By a miracle, no one was hurt despite the fact that the truck was in drive and Hyde's foot was on the brake.

Emergency aid personnel gave Hyde a dose of Narcan, bringing her back to consciousness.

She was then taken to University Hospitals Elyria Medical Center for treatment.

According to the police report, the infant was found in poor health and dirty.

Hyde, a resident of Elyria, Ohio, was arrested. She faces child endangerment charges

He was wearing a soiled diaper and there appeared to be scabs and open wounds on his nose and face, according to WEWS-TV.

When asked by a CNN affiliate why she used heroin while parked in a gas station with her grandson in the car, she replied: 'I don't know, sir. I don't know. I wish I could answer that.

'One time do you want to take that chance, no... it's not worth it... it's not worth it. It doesn't solve your problems it's just gonna make loved ones hurt in the end.'

Hyde is likely to be charged with child endangering. Her grandson was transferred to child services.

The boy was found by emergency response crews in poor health. He was wearing soiled diapers and had scabs and wounds on his face

'I love my grandson so much, I don't know why I decided to take drugs with him inside my truck,' Hyde told WEWS-TV.

'I'm humiliated, I'm so embarrassed that I could resort to that.'

'I knew something wasn't right, her truck was running in front of dozens of propane tanks, it could have been a disaster,' said Crofts.

'I'm just glad I stopped to help. The emergency crews responded so quickly, they are the real heroes.'

Hyde's truck was parked in front of a row of propane tanks at a local gas station. The engine was running, the gear was in drive, and her foot was on the brake

First responders were forced to smash the windows on both the driver's and passenger's side in order to extricate Hyde and her grandson from the pickup truck

Hyde regained consciousness after first aid personnel gave her a dose of Narcan, a substance commonly administered to patients who overdose on heroin

Earlier this month, Rhonda Pasek, the so-called heroin grandma, was found passed out in a car with her boyfriend while her four-year-old grandson looked on from the back seat.

Pasek insists she was not high on the drug.

Instead Rhonda Pasek says she had drunk a single bottle of Redd's Blueberry Ale and taken part of what she thought was a Percocet-like painkiller because she was feeling so bad.

'I made the worst mistake of my life,' Pasek, 50, sobbed to DailyMail.com in an exclusive jailhouse interview.

'I'll be paying for this until the day I die. 'I know how wrong I was, and there is no taking it back. I take full responsibility,' she added.

'I accept the punishment they gave me, but I can tell you, it is nothing compared to how I am punishing myself.'

Rhonda Pasek (left), 50, and 47-year-old James Acord (right), who were disgracefully pictured passed out in a car after allegedly overdosing on heroin as a toddler sat in the backseat 'almost definitely' would have died, police have said

But she insists she is not a heroin junkie.

'They took my blood and the nurse told me there was not a trace of heroin in my system,' she said.

Police are still waiting for toxicology reports and say that, depending on what they reveal, she could face more charges.

When asked about the allegations of heroin, Pasek rolled up the sleeves of her dark green prison uniform and showed her arms which had no sign of any trackmarks.

Her public defender also told the local newspaper The Review that Pasek had tested negative for heroin and said no syringes were found in the car.

Pasek is serving 180 days in Columbiana County Jail in Lisbon, Ohio, after she pleaded no contest last week to child endangerment.

She now knows she has a huge uphill fight ever to be allowed back in her grandson's life.

'The judge said I should never see him again, he wants no contact between us whatsoever' Pasek blubbed.

'That isn't fair. The worst people get to see their family.

'That baby did nothing wrong. I am his mother as far as he is concerned.'
Millions of chickens carrying superbug strains of the food-poisoning bacteria campylobacter end up in supermarkets, a study has found.

Some 73 per cent of chickens sold in the High Street in 2014-15 were carrying campylobacter, according to the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Research published yesterday reveals that 75 per cent of these were resistant to at least one antibiotic or antimicrobial.

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Millions of chickens carrying superbug strains of the food-poisoning bacteria campylobacter end up in supermarkets, a study has found

And about 5 per cent were resistant to a wide range of antibiotics commonly used in human medicine  meaning that, should you fall ill after eating an affected bird, it is more difficult for doctors to treat you.

The figures suggest more than 450million chickens sold in the UK every year are contaminated with campylobacter that is resistant to at least one important antibiotic.

And 36million would be carrying bugs resistant to a wide range of antibiotics.

Campylobacter is the biggest cause of food poisoning, with more than 500,000 cases a year, 80,000 GP consultations and an estimated 100 deaths.

The FSAs chief scientific adviser Professor Guy Poppy said: The spread of bacteria that are resistant to one or more antibiotics, is of great concern.

He said the emergence of these bugs could be responsible for up to 10million deaths a year worldwide by 2050.

On issues with chicken sold in the UK, he said: The high levels of resistance found are of particular concern. With 900million chickens produced in 2014, there could potentially be millions of chickens with multiresistant campylobacter.

Campylobacter is not the only problem. Earlier this month the Daily Mail revealed a Cambridge University study that identified a problem with superbug versions of E.coli in supermarket chicken.

Some 73 per cent of chickens sold in the High Street in 2014-15 were carrying campylobacter, according to the Food Standards Agency (FSA)

The revelations come as governments around the world discuss the emerging superbug threat this week at the United Nations general assembly in New York.

Modern farming techniques have been blamed for the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of food-poisoning bacteria such as campylobacter, E.coli and salmonella. The problem is caused by common bacteria that make animals sick mutating, becoming resistant to the antibiotics used to treat them.

When people fall sick after coming into contact with these bugs, doctors find it difficult to clear up the resulting infections using medicinal antibiotics.

The Governments chief medical officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, has linked the use of antibiotics on farm animals to treat or prevent infections as being instrumental in the rise of superbugs.

Dame Sally said that even minor infections could become untreatable, describing antimicrobial resistance as a catastrophic threat

She called on ministers and the farming industry to radically reduce the use of such drugs, which is particularly prevalent on intensive factory farms.

Dame Sally said that even minor infections could become untreatable, describing antimicrobial resistance as a catastrophic threat. The FSA has declared the emergence of antibiotic resistance, also known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a significant threat to public health.

The organisation says it is working with supermarkets, farmers and other sectors of the industry to tackle the problem.

The Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics  made up of health, medical, environmental and animal welfare groups  is campaigning to cut use of antibiotics on farms.

Its scientific adviser Coilin Nunan said the FSAs findings were of huge concern. RUMA, which represents farm drug distributors, farming groups and meat processors, said the use of antibiotics in farms plays only a small part in the problem.

It said doctors giving unnecessary antibiotics to patients is a bigger issue. Its chairman Gwyn Jones said: Test results such as these build a better picture of the challenges we all face across human and veterinary medicine.

Good kitchen hygiene, washing hands after handling raw meat and thorough cooking, as advised by the FSA, remain the most reliable ways of preventing the spread of any harmful bacteria.
Donald Trump has spoken repeatedly about crime and violence in African American communities, and on Wednesday he proposed a solution: more use of 'stop and frisk' policing techniques.

The presidential candidate invoked the controversial policy at a town hall event in Cleveland when an audience member asked about 'violence in the black community.'

Trump responded: 'I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well,' in comments reported by NBC.

He continued: 'You have to be proactive, and you know you really help people sort of change their mind, automatically, you understand, you have to, in my opinion.'

'I see what's going on here, I see what's going on in Chicago. I think stop-and-frisk in New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked.

Republican Donald Trump said Wednesday that 'stop and frisk' policing works 'incredibly well'

Police championed the policy as a way to get guns off the streets, but it provoked angry protests by civil libertarians in New York and other cities

Trump, who was introduced by boxing promoter Don King at a church event Wednesday, has been reaching out to minority communities. He brought up stop and frisk as a solution to urban violence

Audience member Geoff Betts 38, who is black, said he felt dismayed by Trump's response, Reuters reported.

Connie Tucker, who is white and supports Trump, said she sensed discomfort in the room when the candidate gave his answer.

"I felt like there was a pause," she said.

Trump tweeted about his support for stop and frisk in 2013.

'Stop and frisk works. Instead of criticizing Chief Ray Kelly, New Yorkers should be thanking him for keeping NY safe,' Trump wrote.

The issue became a flashpoint in New York politics and when a federal judge ordered a court monitor of enforcement of a policy by the NYPD that it found violated the civil rights of citizens.

Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote in her ruling that stop and frisk was a 'demeaning and humiliating experience' for communities of color. 'No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,' she wrote.

Trump advisor former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has championed stop and frisk policies

Trump made the comments during a town hall event with Sean Hannity of Fox News

Anger over police tactics has escalated since the stop-and-frisk controversies, as the deaths of African-Americans, many of them unarmed, at the hands of police have sparked unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore and other cities.

The opposition to "stop-and-frisk" led police departments in New York, as well as Chicago and Newark, New Jersey to agree to cut back on its use, in some cases submitting to outside monitoring and improving police training. In New York, ending the practice was a key plank of Democrat Bill de Blasio's successful 2013 run for mayor.

Tucker, a pastor at Father Heart Ministries in Columbus, Ohio, said she liked policies that yielded results, so if stop-and-frisk helped reduce crime, she was for it.

City Council member Christine Quinn (right) speaks with fellow member Jumaane Williams in 2013 weeks after a federal judge ruled that the NYPD violated the civil rights of minorities with their stop-and-frisk policy

Former New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Ray Kelly (R) speaks at a press conference with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg about the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk practice on August 12, 2013 in New York City after a federal court judge ruled that Stop-and-Frisk violates rights guaranteed to people

Betts, a distributor of hair products, said he is registered to vote as an independent and that he attended the town hall because he was curious about what Trump would say to try to win over black voters. He said he thinks police unfairly discriminate against black citizens and he is against stop-and-frisk.

"We are victims," he said, adding he walked out of the town hall while it was still under way.
The number of elderly British expats receiving the winter fuel payment fell by more than two thirds after a crackdown on sunshine benefits.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former work and pensions secretary, acted to end the scandal of pensioners receiving the handout  worth up to 300 a year  despite living in hot countries.

His success has saved the taxpayer more than 16million a year.

The number of elderly British expats receiving the winter fuel payment fell by more than two thirds after a crackdown on sunshine benefits

Figures show that in 2015/16, a total of 42,015 people living in the EU received the payment from the British taxpayer.

This was down from 137,845 the year before. The amount spent on the payments fell from 24.5million to 8.1million.

The winter fuel payment is worth 200 for over-60s and 300 for those over 80.

Britain had to pay the money to expats in hot countries because of a European Court of Justice ruling described by Mr Duncan Smith as ridiculous.

Iain Duncan Smith acted to end the scandal of pensioners receiving the handout

The reduction was achieved because he imposed a new temperature test on those receiving the benefit.

It affected countries where the average annual temperature was higher than the warmest region of the UK  the South West at 42F.

It meant residents of Spain, France, Greece, Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Gibraltar stopped getting the cash.

Italy is not included because its northern region has a winter climate colder than that of the British Isles.

Its exclusion meant more than 2,000 Britons could claim the benefit, even in the warmer south.
So wrong: George Osborne

Project Fear lay in tatters last night after a string of major reports showed the British economy is prospering following the Brexit vote.

In a damning assessment of the scaremongering by the Remain camp, the Office for National Statistics declared that there had been no post-referendum economic shock.

Even the left-leaning, pro-EU Guardian newspaper reported the economy had 'confounded analysts' gloomy expectations,' with its own analysis finding consumer spending was strong, unemployment low and the housing market stable following June's EU vote.

The ONS even pointed to indicators of strength  such as rising house prices, record levels of employment and soaring high street sales.

The upbeat comments from the countrys official statistical body made a mockery of George Osbornes dire warnings before the vote of an immediate and profound economic blow.

The Bank of England also admitted yesterday that business sentiment had improved about Britains post-Brexit prospects, and said the fall in the pound had boosted tourism.

And, in a significant U-turn, the OECD was forced to raise its growth forecasts for the UK economy, having been among the many international forecasters to predict economic catastrophe.

Last night Tory MP John Redwood, a former cabinet minister, said: These people got it comprehensively wrong. Those people who threatened us with an immediate shock and recession should be apologising.

On a day that appeared to have hammered the final nails into the Project Fear coffin:

Banking heavyweights including UBS, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan also raised their forecasts for the UK;

A separate ONS report showed the deficit fell in August thanks in part to a surge in income tax and corporation tax receipts;

Car production was at a 14-year high, with demand from overseas booming.

Mr Osborne, chief architect of Project Fear, had claimed a Brexit vote would cause a DIY recession, while David Cameron said it would put a bomb under the economy.

But yesterday the new Chancellor Philip Hammond hailed the underlying strength in the UK economy.

City commentator David Buik, an analyst at stockbroker Panmure Gordon, added: It comes as absolutely no surprise to me that the ONS feels that Brexit has not damaged the UKs economy. There was absolutely no need for Project Fear. It was irresponsible and totally unnecessary.

In a sweeping round-up of economic data collected since the referendum, the ONS noted that house prices continued to grow strongly, while the manufacturing and construction sectors are on the same paths as before vote. It added: So far there are no signs of a sharp collapse in consumer confidence as some early fears had suggested.

Joe Grice, its chief economist, said: The referendum result appears, so far, not to have had a major effect on the UK economy. So it hasnt fallen at the first fence but longer-term effects remain to be seen. The OECD  the leading economic think tank in the West  said it now expects the economy to grow by 1.8 per cent this year. That was better than the 1.7 per cent previously forecast and puts Britain on course to be the fastest growing major economy in the developed world this year alongside Germany. Earlier this year, the Paris-based watchdog had warned Brexit would be a major negative shock to the UK economy.

A monthly round-up of independent forecasts published by the Treasury also showed City institutions were far more optimistic. After the Brexit vote, banks had downgraded their forecasts. But Morgan Stanley, which donated 250,000 to the Remain camp, now expects growth of 1.9 per cent this year, up from the 1.2 per cent it predicted in August.

UBS revised up its forecast for growth this year from 1.3 per cent to 1.9 per cent as it welcomed a more resilient post-referendum performance than anticipated.

The Bank of England warned the economy has slowed since the referendum, having grown by 0.6 per cent between April and June, and added that companies are less willing to take on staff or invest. But its report, based on the views of its regional agents  its eyes and ears around the country, found sentiment improved in August.

The Bank said the fall in sterling  it is down 11 per cent against the euro since the referendum  has boosted tourism as families opted to holiday in Britain.

It added that the fall in sterling, which raises the cost of imports, has not led to higher prices, despite claims a vote to leave would hit shoppers in the pocket.

ONS figures yesterday showed the Government borrowed 10.5billion last month  down from 11.5billion in August last year. The Treasury was boosted by a rise in tax receipts. In a further sign business is booming, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said 109,000 cars were produced last month  the best August for 14 years.

No buyer's remorse: Voters want to cut migration and stop funding EU

Theresa May has already indicated that ending free movement will be a deal-breaker

Ending free movement from Europe and halting the billions Britain sends to Brussels are the publics red lines for the Brexit negotiations, a new study revealed yesterday.

An analysis of polling by elections expert John Curtice found there was not much evidence of buyers remorse, among Brexit supporters  with the vast majority still wanting to leave the EU.

It found little support for a second referendum on Britains EU membership. Only about a third of voters want to see a second poll, virtually all of them Remain voters.

And it laid out voters key demands for Brexit negotiations. Ending Britains EU budget contributions is the publics top priority, with 81 per cent in favour.

Scrapping the free movement of people is also a red line, with 79 per cent of voters citing it as a key demand. Theresa May has already indicated that ending free movement will be a deal-breaker. Cabinet ministers at Chequers last month agreed the exit deal must mean controls on the numbers of people who come to Britain from Europe. But Mrs May has avoided questions about whether Britain will halt all payments to the EU. Some ministers are pushing her to agree to reduced contributions in return for access to the EUs single market. Professor Curtice said it was clear that any deal that involved the UK continuing to bankroll Brussels would meet stiff resistance. Its a sovereignty issue, he said. Most people do not feel European in this country.

And so there is an argument about the legitimacy of this 350million (a week) that we dont control, that the EU decides how is spent. People think  Why does the EU have the right to spend our money?

By contrast, voters are more relaxed about having to comply with EU regulations. Just 17 per cent said ending all Brussels rules should be a red line.

Professor Curtice analysed results of every poll conducted since June 23. Remainers have claimed the public mood has changed since Brexit, with many voters regretting their vote. But Professor Curtice suggested this was wishful thinking. It came as Mrs May prepared for crunch talks in Downing Street today with Martin Schulz, the socialist leader of the European Parliament, which has the power to veto Brexit terms.
Shocking footage has captured the moment an out-of-control SUV ploughed into a crowd in China on September 19.

The driver says that he was wearing slippers which hindered his ability to control the vehicle, reports Huanqiu, an affiliation with the People's Daily Online.

Three people were injured in the incident which took place in Yichang, central China's Hubei province.

Shocking moment: The vehicle smashed into people waiting on the street for a bus

Horrifying: People were left lying on the floor after the vehicle ploughed into a crowd

Smashing into people: Three people were injured in the incident and taken to hospital

In the footage, the white vehicle can be seen turning, almost hitting a woman.

It then disappears out of the camera before reappearing and heading towards a large crowd of people who appear to be waiting for a bus.

The vehicle ploughs into the crowd, throwing three people to the floor.

It then crashes into a curb resulting in parts of the vehicle to fall off.

Two cars were also hit by the SUV.

People can be seen rushing over to the injured.

According to the driver, he was wearing slippers at the time and he says they caused him to lose control of the vehicle.

Police confirmed that three people had been injured and were taken to hospital however their condition is not life-threatening. They have ruled out whether he had been drinking before the incident.

However police are still investigating the incident.

Tragic accident: The driver lost control of the vehicle in Yichang, central China

Bizarre: The driver says he was wearing slippers which meant he lost control of the vehicle
A couple in China, who were stuck in a traffic jam, held their wedding in a tunnel in order to marry at an auspicious moment.

The pair had been planning to marry during a ceremony and banquet which was set to be held at 12pm, considered an auspicious time by the couple, reports Huanqiu, an affiliation with the People's Daily Online.

40 relatives and friends stuck inside the tunnel in Ankang, Shaanxi province attended the wedding.

Tying the knot: The couple decided to hold their wedding ceremony in a tunnel in Ankang

Hitched! The couple had wanted to wed at 12pm a time they considered to be auspicious

Unwanted: An traffic accident had occurred leaving vehicles stuck in the tunnel for hours

According to reports, the grooms set out at 5am to escort the bride and then the couple drove to the wedding venue.

However on their way to the wedding, there was a traffic accident and they became stuck in the tunnel.

At first, the couple thought they would make it to the wedding venue at 12pm as they still had plenty of time.

The groom was so relaxed he even played poker with his friends in the tunnel.

However they soon became anxious after they waited over an hour.

Knowing that they wouldn't make it in time, they discussed with their wedding planner and agreed to hold a simple wedding ceremony inside the tunnel.

Around 40 relatives and friends attended the wedding ceremony.

In some parts of China, especially in the north, people hold the belief that bride and groom who marry for the first time must wed at noon; while those who have been married before hold their banquets in the evening.

Upon realising they were running out of time, they decided to hold the ceremony in a tunnel

Beautiful:The woman dressed in traditional Chinese husband wed surrounded by family
A baby in Ningbo, China, is set to have some digits removed after he was born with 15 fingers and 16 toes.

The child, nicknamed Yuanyuan, has 31 digits in total and was born without thumbs or big toes, reports the People's Daily Online.

Doctors are in the process of removing the extra digits and reshaping the child's remaining digits over three stages of operations.

31 digits in total: A child in China has been born with 15 fingers and 16 toes

Operations: The child is currently receiving treatment to remove the additional digits

According to reports, Yuanyuan's mother was born with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.

The family are from Hunan Province in southern China.

Yuanyuan's digits are asymmetrical meaning that they will need to be reshaped.

Doctors say that the surgery will be long and a long period of recovery will be needed once the operations are complete.

Because the medical treatment is highly costly, the hospital has decided to reduce the cost of the procedures.

Not the first case: In May, it was reported that another baby in China was born with 31 digits

The child, Honghong, is also from Hunan and was also born with two palms and two thumbs

Doctor Xu Jihai from No 6 Ningbo Hospital told reporters that the surgery will be completed in three phases.

The first phase involves removing the toes and ensuring that the child is able to walk.

Once that is finished, the second phase involves making thumbs for the infant and removing additional fingers.

While the third would completely reshape the child's fingers.

Once the phases are finished, there will be enough time for Yuanyuan to recover before starting school.

The hospital has guaranteed 16 years of follow-up for him as he grows.

Doctors have already completed the first phase of treatment.

This isn't the first case like this in China.

In May, it was reported that another baby was also born with 15 fingers and 16 toes.

The boy, named Honghong, is also from Hunan province and has two palms on each hand with no thumbs.
Dramatic footage has captured the moment a driver with serious road rage drove into a man's legs after an argument in China.

The footage taken on September 10 in Yinchuan shows the two drivers involved in a confrontation when all of a sudden, the female driver rams into the man, reports Huanqiu, an affiliation with the People's Daily Online.

Police are said to be investigating whether or not the woman had hit the man on purpose.

Gesturing at the car: The man had been rowing with the driver of the other vehicle

Shocking moment: The vehicle suddenly launched forwards pinning the man to his car

The footage, shared by People's Daily on Youtube, was taken on the evening of September 10 in Yinchuan.

According to the report, the woman was driving a BMW while the man had a Porsche.

In the footage the man can be seen pointing and shouting at the moving vehicle.

He slaps the hood of the car before then trying to open the door of the vehicle.

The car starts to move forwards but the man still isn't finished.

Horrifying incident: The vehicle drove into the man's legs pinning them to his vehicle

Heart-stopping: The car suddenly moved backwards and the man fell to the floor in pain

As he checks the front of his car, the other vehicle lurches forwards crushing his legs and pinning him to his vehicle.

His own vehicle is moved by the force of the smash.

The man can then be seen falling to the ground.

The female driver then gets out of her vehicle and checks on the man.

According to a police report, it's unclear whether the smash was intentional however they are investigating the case further.
Modern humans first left Africa 100,000 years ago in a series of slow-paced migration waves and arrived in southern Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed, according to a new study.

The research suggests that humans spread out across the globe in four migration events driven by climate change, connected to variations in the Earth's orbit.

The results challenge traditional models that suggest there was a single exodus out of Africa around 60,000 years ago.

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The researchers modelled human migration 80,000 years ago. The model simulates the arrival in Eastern China and Southern Europe and migration out of Africa along vegetated corridors in Sinai and the Arabian Peninsula

IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum London told MailOnline the research is 'the most comprehensive climate, vegetation and human-dispersal modelling study published so far'. 'While the earliest [migration] wave had only limited further penetration across the rest of Eurasia, they [the researchers] argue that modern humans could have arrived in small numbers in China and southern Europe by about 80,000 years,' he explained. 'While the former dispersal is now supported by some fossil evidence, such an early arrival in Europe (more than 35,000 years earlier than usually considered) has no archaeological or fossil support at present. 'The authors speculate that European Neanderthals might have assimilated the small numbers of moderns in this early dispersal wave. However, this is something which has not been detected in ancient DNA studies so far.' Advertisement

Changes in the climate, coupled with the wobble of the Earth's axis, are known to have caused massive shifts in vegetation in tropical and subtropical regions, which opened up green corridors between Africa, the Sinai and the Arabian Peninsula.

This was thought to have enabled early members of our species, Homo sapiens, to leave North east Africa and embark onto their grand journey into Asia, Europe, Australia, and eventually into the Americas.

But whether climate shifts really did influence early human migration has been a matter of intense debate.

To explore the idea, researchers from the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) used one of the first integrated climate-human migration computer models to re-create the spread of Homo sapiens over the past 125,000 years.

The model simulates ice-ages, abrupt climate change and captures the arrival times of Homo sapiens in the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula, Southern China, and Australia in close agreement with paleoclimate reconstructions and fossil and archaeological evidence.

The researchers found that modern humans appear to have been constrained within Africa until around 100,000 years ago when changes in the climate allowed them to spread rapidly into the Middle East and Asia (illustrated)

Between 90,000 and 80,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had spread as far east as southern China and were making inroads into southern Europe, far earlier than believed (illustrated)

WHAT THE FOUR STUDIES TELL US ABOUT HUMAN ANCESTRY The Simons Genome Diversity Project study After analysing DNA from 142 populations around the world, the researchers conclude that all modern humans living today can trace their ancestry back to a single group that emerged in Africa 200,000 years ago. They also found that all non-Africans appear to be descended from a single group that split from the ancestors of African hunter gatherers around 130,000 years ago. The study also shows how humans appear to have formed isolated groups within Africa with populations on the continent separating from each other. The KhoeSan in south Africa for example separated from the Yoruba in Nigeria around 87,000 years ago while the Mbuti split from the Yoruba 56,000 years ago. The Estonian Biocentre Human Genome Diversity Panel study This examined 483 genomes from 148 populations around the world to examine the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa. They found that indigenous populations in modern Papua New Guinea owe two percent of their genomes to a now extinct group of Homo sapiens. This suggests there was a distinct wave of human migration out of Africa around 120,000 years ago. The Aboriginal Australian study Using genomes from 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea, this study examined the genetic origins of these early Pacific populations. These groups are thought to have descended from some of the first humans to have left Africa and has raised questions about whether their ancestors were from an earlier wave of migration than the rest of Eurasia. The new study found that the ancestors of modern Aboriginal Australians and Papuans split from Europeans and Asians around 58,000 years ago following a single migration out of Africa. These two populations themselves later diverged around 37,000 years ago, long before the physical separation of Australia and New Guinea some 10,000 years ago. The Climate Modelling study Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa used one of the first integrated climate-human migration computer models to re-create the spread of Homo sapiens over the past 125,000 years. The model simulates ice-ages, abrupt climate change and captures the arrival times of Homo sapiens in the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula, Southern China, and Australia in close agreement with paleoclimate reconstructions and fossil and archaeological evidence. The found that it appears modern humans first left Africa 100,000 years ago in a series of slow-paced migration waves. They estimate that Homo sapiens first arrived in southern Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed. The results challenge traditional models that suggest there was a single exodus out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Advertisement

It identifies prominent glacial migration waves across the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant region around 106,00094,000, 89,00073,000, 59,00047,000 and 45,00029,000 years ago.

It also shows an almost simultaneous early arrival of Homo sapiens in southern China and Europe about 90,00080,000 years ago.

Recent fossils - identified as being unequivocally Homo sapien - were discovered in southern China and were last year dated to be 80,000-years-old.

'One of the surprising results of our study is that the scenario that agrees best with all the Asian data is one that also simulates a very early arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, pre-dating the oldest fossil evidence by about 45,000 years,' said Axel Timmermann, lead author of the study, which is published in the journal Nature.

Co-author Tobias Friedrich added: 'The green migration gateway that opened up between Africa and Eurasia 110,000-95,000 years ago would have also promoted a low-density migration into Southern Europe and possibly a weak early interbreeding with Neanderthals.'

The green migration gateway that opened up between Africa and Eurasia 110,000-95,000 years ago would have also promoted a low-density migration into Southern Europe and possibly a weak early interbreeding with Neanderthals (reconstruction pictured)

The study, one of four looking at early human migration published in Nature, shows that every 20,000 years, warmer and wetter northern hemisphere tropical summers boosted human migration and saw an exchange of humans between Africa and Eurasia.

Professor Timmermann said: 'In our model simulation we see a complex pattern of human dispersal out of Africa and back flow into Africa, that challenges the more unidirectional away-from-Africa perspective that is still very prevalent in anthropology and some genetic studies.'

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL MAKE ANIMALS SEEK NEW HOMES Researchers have found that climate change is altering ecosystems across the globe, and many species may soon have to migrate to follow the conditions necessary for their survival. In a previous study, they determined that the Amazon Basin, southeastern United States, and southeastern Brazil will have high densities of climate-driven movement, Cool Green Science explains. But, according to the new research, just 41 percent of the natural land area in the US 'retains enough connectivity to facilitate species tracking their preferred climate conditions as the global climate changes.' While the map highlights the big picture view of the phenomenon rather than local patterns, they do show how human development could soon pose challenges to these migrating species - but the researchers say there are ways we can help. 'There are a number of ways that conservationists and land managers can re-build or maintain connectivity to improve species' ability to adapt to warmer temperatures,' the researchers explain. 'Removing fencing, adding wildlife overpasses (or underpasses) to major roadways, and better routing of infrastructure like pipelines and powerlines can all help re-connect areas fragmented by human development.' Advertisement

The findings promise to transform the way anthropologists view early fossils of modern human and their spread around the world.

Previous ice core and marine sediment core studies have found evidence during glacial periods for rapid climate transitions between cold and warm periods on timescales of a human lifetime.

The new study addresses for the first time with a computer model whether these naturally occurring climate shifts influenced global human migration patterns.

Comparing simulations of the human migration model with and without these climate fluctuations, the researchers found only regional impacts on simulated human density in areas extending from northern Africa to Europe.

Professor Timmermann said: 'According to our results, the global-scale migration patterns were not affected by past abrupt climate change events on timescales of decades.'

The team next plans to include Neanderthals in its computer model and account for food competition, interbreeding and cultural developments to get a better idea of how modern man eventually came to populate Earth.




Nasa says it is a result of fractures or a hill that had been naturally raised

Believes it's evidence aliens fled Mars during a war and settled on Earth

Some theories suggest a cataclysmic event or war plagued Mars hundreds of years ago that forced the Martian inhabitants to leave and settle on Earth.

Now, alien hunters believe there is evidence of this migration as a historical structure in Japan appears to be identical to a formation on the red planet.

Looking at a Kofun Era tomb in Japan, a YouTuber claims to see same keyhole shaped mound on Mars - suggesting extraterrestrials contributed to the development of Japans ancient civilization.

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Looking at the Kofun Era tomb in Japan (left), a Youtuber claims the same keyhole shaped mound is on Mars (right), suggesting extraterrestrials contributed to the development of Japans ancient civilization

A TOMB ON MARS? Looking at the Kofun Era tomb in Japan in Google Earth, a Youtuber claims the same keyhole shaped mound is on Mars, suggesting extraterrestrials contributed to the development of Japans ancient civilization. Secureteam 10 used 745.64N 1392852.95E using Google Earth and 6 357.07N 92 413.22E in Google Mars, the YouTuber was able to locate the similar structures on two different planets. This new discovery suggests that since the structure in Japan was a burial site for the elite, the one on Mars was a tomb for a Martian noble or king as well. Advertisement

Tyler with Secureteam10 shared these bizarre findings in a video he put together locating the peculiar structures on Google Earth.

Using the coordinates 36 745.64N 1392852.95E with Google Earth and 6 357.07N 92 413.22E in Google Mars, the YouTuber was able to locate the similar structures on two different planets, reports The Inquisitr.

The keyhole shaped mound looks incredibly similar to what we have here in Japan, Tyler says during the video.

There are many interesting things about this mound that we found on Mars.

First of all, it is a massive structure and it appears in a very isolated, flat empty plain.

The sides of the structure have straight edges that run down to a large circular dot formation at its base. Just like the one we have here in Japan.

Centuries ago in Japan, those of royal birth were laid to rest in ancient imperial graves known as a kofun or old mounds.

Tyler with Secureteam10 shared these bizarre findings in a video he put together locating the peculiar structures on Google Earth (pictured). He used the coordinates 36 745.64N 1392852.95E with Google Earth

And 6 357.07N 92 413.22E in Google Mars (pictured), the YouTuber was able to locate the similar structures on two different planets

These burials were reserved for Japans emperors, empresses and other prominent members of the empire, and were built between the 3rd century and early 7th century.

Kofun tombs are known for their keyhole-shape with a square front and curved back - it also looks similar to an exclamation point.

Although some believe the identical structures may be hard evidence that aliens lived among us, Nasa has made statements to clarify it isn't.

Although many believe the identical structures may be hard evidence that aliens lived among us, Nasa has made statements to clarify it isn't. The agency says the straight edges are the result of fractures or a hill that had been naturally raised - not alien intervention

WHY WE SEE STRANGE THINGS ON MARS Pareidolia is the psychological response to seeing faces and other significant and everyday items in random stimulus. It is a form of apophenia, when people see patterns in random, unconnected data. There have been multiple occasions when people have claimed to see religious images and themes in unexpected places. On the red planet, one of the most famous is the 'face on Mars' spotted by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976. This was later proven to just be a chance alignment of shifting sand dunes. Advertisement

The US space agency explained the straight edges are the result of fractures or a hill that had been naturally raised, which formed a solid terrain and was eroded over for billions of years.

Interestingly enough, despite this extensive erosion over millions of years, we still have a formation that exhibits remarkable symmetry, Tyler suggests.

Nasa has had to admit that these similarities do exist and theyre more than just similarities, its d*mn near identical.

Tyler says the formation on Mars is a massive structure and it appears in a very isolated, flat empty plain. The sides of the structure have straight edges that rundown to a large circular dot formation at its base

Other Martian researches agree with Nasa that the structure on Mars has experienced the billion years of erosion, but believe it is the reason to why the edges are much smoother than the structures in Japan.

Tyler and other alien hunters alike firmly believe the geometric structure found in Google Mars is much too similar to be deemed an accidental formation of natural processes.'
China has confirmed rumours that its Tiangong-1 space station is out of control and will crash back to Earth in 2017.

A senior official with the country's crewed space programme confirmed the news at a recent press conference, reports Xinhua.

The Tiangong-1 space station module was launched in 2011 and was expected to be deorbited at the end of its life to crash into the ocean or burn up in the atmosphere.

Chinese officials have now confirmed that it will head towards Earth in the latter half of 2017 - but no one knows where the debris will land.

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The Tiangong-1 space station module (artist's depiction) was China's first step towards its ultimate goal of developing, building, and operating a large Space Station as a permanent human presence in Low Earth Orbit. The nation has now lost control of the space station

Returning a spacecraft to Earth is tricky business, mostly due to the intense heat produced if the re-entry is uncontrolled.

'Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling, said Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, reports Xinhua.

The Chinese space agency will continue to monitor Tiangong-1 and has vowed to issue warnings if there are any potential collisions imminent.

The news confirms earlier reports from satellite trackers who have been watching the movement of Tiangong as it orbits the Earth.

They suggested that China may have lost control of the unmanned 8 ton (7.3 tonnes) vehicle, a theory that has now been confirmed.

Thomas Dorman, an amateur satellite tracker, told Space.com: 'If I am right, China will wait until the last minute to let the world know it has a problem with their space station.

'It could be a real bad day if pieces of this came down in a populated area, but odds are it will land in the ocean or in an unpopulated area.'

China launched its second experimental space station last week. The successful launch is a sign of the growing sophistication of the country's military-backed space program, that intends to send a mission to Mars in the coming years

THE TIANGONG-1 SPACE STATION MODULE Tiangong-1 is China's first Space Station Module. The vehicle is the nation's first step towards its ultimate goal of developing, building, and operating a large Space Station as a permanent human presence in Low Earth Orbit. The module was launched on September 29, 2012. Tiangong-1 features flight-proven components of Chinese Shenzhou Spacecraft as well as new technology. The module consists of three sections: the aft service module, a transition section and the habitable orbital module. The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurized volume. Advertisement

The news comes days after China launched it second space station - Tiangong 2 - on a Long March 7 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China.

Two astronauts are scheduled to launch to the new space station on the Shenzhou 11 spacecraft in October, and are due to remain on board for a month.

The orbiting lab is considered to be a stepping stone in a mission to Mars by the end of the decade.

Tiangong-1, which means 'Heavenly Palace', was launched in September 2011 with the hope of creating a larger space complex that China wants to be operational in Earth orbit around 2020.

The module has performed a series of docking exercises, including the uncrewed Shenzhou-8 mission in 2011 and the crewed Shenzhou-10 mission in 2012.

According to the China Manned Space Engineering (CMSE) office, Tiangong-1 also contains Earth observation instrumentation and space environment detectors.

In a statement in 2014, officials from CMSE, said: 'Tiangong-1 has obtained a great deal of application and science data, which is valuable in mineral resources investigation, ocean and forest application, hydrologic and ecological environment monitoring, land use, urban thermal environment monitoring and emergency disaster control.'

Tiangong-1 features flight-proven components of Chinese Shenzhou Spacecraft as well as new technology

While Tiangong-1 has collected huge amounts of data, earlier this year, state-run news agencies in China reported that the CMSE had terminated Tiangong-1's data-gathering activities.

Additionally, CMSE officials explained that the telemetry connection to the space lab had failed, which suggests that the vehicle will make an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth in the future.

However, other experts have reassured that such speculation does not mean that Tiangong-1 is definitely out of control.

Dr Thomas Kelso, a Senior Research Astrodynamicist at the Centre for Space Standards & Innovation, has plotted the altitude of the space station throughout its time in orbit, and says that it was re-boosted relatively recently.

The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurized volume

The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurized volume

While Dr Kelso does not have a way to measure the space station's stability, he told Space.com: 'We might expect to see the rate of decrease in altitude - the slope between re-boosts - increase if it was tumbling, since the station would have higher drag.

'Instead, we see the slowest decrease in altitude in recent years - consistent with the lower drag at a higher altitude.'

This would suggest that Tiangong-1 is dormant but stable.

Dr Kelso added: 'That might be why the Chinese aren't responding - they probably don't understand why they would need to.'
Jupiter's sixth-closest moon Europa is one of the most interesting bodies in our solar system when it comes to the hunt for alien life.

The moon, which lies 500 million miles from the sun, has an ocean lying beneath its surface which makes it one of the most likely places in the solar system for life to thrive.

Now Nasa has released a cryptic message saying 'surprising' evidence about the moon, related to the ocean, will be announced on Monday.

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Jupiter's sixth-closest moon Europa is one of the most interesting bodies in our solar system when it comes to the hunt for extra terrestrial life. Now Nasa has released a cryptic message saying 'surprising' evidence about the moon will be announced on Monday

WHAT WE KNOW Nasa researchers will present results from a Europa observing campaign. The campaign found 'surprising evidence of activity that may be related to the presence of a subsurface ocean'. The images to be presented were taken by the Hubble space telescope. The press briefing will be held at 14:00 ET (19:00 GMT) on Monday, and broadcast in a live video stream. Advertisement

The press briefing will be held at 14:00 ET (19:00 GMT) on Monday, and broadcast in a live video stream.

'Astronomers will present results from a unique Europa observing campaign that resulted in surprising evidence of activity that may be related to the presence of a subsurface ocean on Europa,' Nasa officials wrote.

The images presented will have been taken by the Hubble space telescope.

Because Europa has the potential to have more liquid water than we have on Earth, some have speculated that the surprise reveal could be evidence for life.

The 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 km) moon harbors a huge ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell.

Astronomers think this ocean is in contact with Europa's rocky mantle, making all sorts of interesting chemical reactions a possibility.

Instead of direct evidence of life, however, experts have said it is more likely to be a step towards finding it.

The announcement could be related to faint plumes of water spotted on the moon back in 2012. This graphic shows the location of water vapor detected over Europa's south pole in December 2012

JUPITER'S ICY MOON EUROPA Jupiter's icy moon Europa is slightly smaller than Earth's moon. Europa orbits Jupiter every 3.5 days and is tidally locked - just like Earth's Moon - so that the same side of Europa faces Jupiter at all times. It is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle and a surface ocean of salty water, like Earth. Unlike on Earth, however, this ocean is deep enough to cover the whole surface of Europa, and being far from the sun, the ocean surface is globally frozen over. Many experts believe the hidden ocean surrounding Europa, warmed by powerful tidal forces caused by Jupiter's gravity, may have conditions favourable for life. Advertisement

This is an artist's concept of a plume of water vapour thought to be ejected off the frigid, icy surface of the Jovian moon Europa, about 500 million miles (800 million km) from the sun

WHO WILL SPEAK AT THE ANNOUNCEMENT Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at Nasa Headquarters in Washington. William Sparks, astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Britney Schmidt, assistant professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Jennifer Wiseman, senior Hubble project scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Advertisement

The announcement could be related to faint plumes of water spotted on the moon back in 2012.

Hubble used a spectrograph to see normally invisible plumes of water vapour, shown in pictures as blue pixels above the moon.

'By far the simplest explanation for this water vapour is that it erupted from plumes on the surface of Europa,' lead author Lorenz Roth of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said at the time.

'If those plumes are connected with the subsurface water ocean we are confident exists under Europa's crust, then this means that future investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of Europa's potentially habitable environment without drilling through layers of ice.

'And that is tremendously exciting.'

Bill McKinnon, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Business Insider the announcement is likely to be connected to these plumes.

'A plume confirmation would be a great thing,' McKinnon added, but 'I have no insider knowledge.'
With their squashed little noses and wrinkled faces, they have become a favourite with dog lovers.

But vets are warning against buying fashionable flat-faced dogs amid concerns over their health and welfare.

The dogs, such as French bulldogs, pugs and Pekingese, are bred to emphasise certain cute features which make them susceptible to a number of severe health problems, including difficulty breathing, infection and eye problems.

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It appears that dogs with 'flat-faces', including pugs, may have health problems, leading to 'increased animal suffering.' The British Veterinary Association is warning people not to buy flat-faced dogs, amid a rise in the number being abandoned due to health problems

The RSPCA said selective breeding had become so extreme that it also caused the dogs pain and even prevented them from behaving normally.

Experts have now called for urgent action and reforms to breeding standards to prevent increased animal suffering.

Sean Wensley, president of the British Veterinary Association, said: Prospective owners need to consider that these dogs can suffer from a range of health problems, from eye ulcers to severe breathing difficulties.

We strongly encourage people to choose a healthier breed or a crossbreed instead.

Dog charities have reported an increase in owners dumping their pedigree dogs in huge numbers as they find themselves unable to manage complex health issues.

The problem has been compounded by disreputable puppy farms, mainly in central and eastern Europe, experts said.

THE HEALTH ISSUES The broad head shape seen in these dogs did not evolve naturally, and is instead the result of selective breeding. The facial structure of flat-faced dogs forces the breathing passages to be very compact. This, along with other structural elements of the body can lead to issues that include: - Difficulty breathing when exercising - Excess noises such as snorting and snoring - Inability to properly regulate body temperature, which leads to heavy panting - An elongated palate, which can cause episodes of reverse sneezing which can consist of excessive gasps and wheezes Advertisement

Battersea Dogs Home and Blue Cross Animal Rescue received a total of 314 flat-faced dogs in 2015, compared with 226 in 2014, a 39 per cent rise.

Both charities said they were also having to carry out more operations to clear airways, removing obstructive pieces of tissue and widening nostrils.

Flat-faced dogs  or brachycephalic breeds, meaning short-nosed  also include cavalier King Charles spaniels and Shih Tzus. They have become increasingly popular in recent years, a trend partly fuelled by celebrity owners such as Jonathan Ross and Kelly Osbourne.

But they are associated with a number of health problems including brachycephalic syndrome, a condition which makes it difficult for them to breathe due to their shorter airways and narrower nasal slits.

This is why the dogs are often heard wheezing and snoring, with as many as 90 per cent of pugs suffering in this way.

Their eye sockets are shallower, causing their eyes to protrude further, making them susceptible to injury and eye ulcers.

And excessive skin forms into folds and crevices on their faces, creating an ideal environment for bacteria and yeast to grow.

Pedigree cats bred to have flat faces such as the Persian and Exotic were found to suffer from similar breathing difficulties.

RSPCA dog welfare expert Lisa Richards said: Many dogs have been bred to emphasise certain physical features, some of which have become so extreme that they can cause pain and suffering, make dogs prone to particular disorders, or even prevent them from behaving normally and from enjoying the activities we know dogs love.

INBREEDING BULLDOGS Researchers from the University of California compared the DNA of almost 150 British bulldogs. The dogs were from countries as far apart as the US and Czechoslovakia  but their genes were highly similar. As a result, the average bulldog is the genetic equivalent of a puppy born when a brother and sister who were highly inbred themselves, mated. Writing in the journal Canine Genetics and Epidemiology, researchers warned it will be hard to find enough dogs with good genes to improve the breed's health. Advertisement

'For example, dogs who have been bred to have short, flat faces often have narrow nostrils and abnormally-developed windpipes. They can suffer severe breathing problems and many have difficulty enjoying a walk or playing.

A recent survey by the Royal Veterinary College found many owners of short-nosed dogs were not aware of the common underlying health problems. Caroline Reay, chief vet at Blue Cross Animal Hospital in Merton, said: Most owners  and some vets  think airway noise, and consequently reduced activity, is normal, so the problems are rarely discussed. I think the number of operations we are carrying out is really only the tip of the iceberg.

Selective breeding has long blighted the dog world. In 2003, there was controversy when the winner of Crufts was a flat-faced Pekingese called Danny. It later transpired he had undergone surgery to enable him to breathe and had to sit on an ice pack to stop him overheating after winning best in show.
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The skull of one of the most famous archaeological finds of the twentieth century has been reconstructed using 3D imaging.

Brazilian scientists have revealed what Lord of Sipan - the royal ruler of the mysterious Moche civilisation - would have looked like if he had been alive today.

The 2,000-year-old Moche mummy was first discovered in 1987 and, at the time, was considered one of the ten most important discoveries of the twentieth century.

His face was unveiled today in Lima, Peru - and MailOnline had exclusive access to see the results.

Brazilian scientists have revealed what Lord of Sipan - the royal ruler of the mysterious Moche civilisation - would have looked like if he had been alive today. Pictured is the 3D virtual facial reconstruction showing the skull how it was found (left), the skull reassembled (centre) and the digital reconstruciton of the face (right)

THE LORD OF SIPAN The Lord of Sipan was discovered in 1987 and was the first in a series of Moche mummies to be uncovered. The remains of the ancient ruler were found in an untouched pyramid burial chamber by Dr Waler Alva in Huaca Rajeda, near Sipan in Peru. The excavation uncovered breathtaking burial treasures which included a crescent-shaped headdress of hammered gold, a gold death mask, gold eye and mouth patches and a necklace composed of sixteen gold discs. The Moche leader was found buried with six other people. The Lord's skeleton is usually kept in a glass case at Dr Alva's Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum. Advertisement

Lord of Sipan ruled the Moche civilisation, which flourished in Peru between AD 50 and AD 700.

The name comes from an site in a valley of the same name which was the central city for the Moche people.

The Moche people are known for their elaborate pottery and jewellery as well as for pioneering early metal working skills.

What's more, they build numerous large pyramids, some of which still dominate the landscape.

Evidence suggests that the Moche people engaged in a form of ritual combat, followed by human sacrifice.

Until the discovery of the Lord of Sipan's tomb in 1979, the best known remains of the civilisation were two large structures - the Temple of the Sun (Huaca del Sol) and the Temple of the Moon (Huaca de la Luna) - near Trujillo.

The reasons for the collapse of the Moche culture are unknown, but experts have suggested prolonged drought, earthquakes, or extreme flooding from the El Nino phenomenon may have been to blame.

Some experts suggest a civil war may have been the cause of their downfall.

Cicero Moraes, the 3D computer graphics designer responsible for reconstructing the virtual features of the ancient leader, worked alongside forensic dentist, Dr Paulo Miamoto, who conducted anthropological analysis on the ancestry of the king.

The researchers, both members of the Brazilian Team of Forensic Anthropology and Forensic Odontology, revealed that the king was aged between 45 to 55.

'He has the typical features of pre-Columbian ancestry and looks like the original South American indigenous Indians that lived here hundreds of years ago,' said Dr Miamoto.

The project, sponsored by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University (UIGV) in Lima, Peru, has been an exciting challenge but was far from straightforward, according to the Brazilian scientists.

'The Lord of Sipan's skull was severely damaged,' Mr Moraes revealed.

Two gold eyes patches and one for the mouth decorate the wealthy remains of the Lord of Sipan. The skeleton was discovered in 1987 and was the first in a series of Moche mummies to be uncovered

'It had been smashed into about 96 fragments because it had been lying in the soil for centuries and had been crushed by pressure from the sediments,' he explained.

Mr Moraes went to inspect the relic with the permission of Peruvian Archaeologist Dr Walter Alva, in the presence of Dr Eduardo Ugaz, the dean of the faculty of engineering and computing, and Santiago Gonzales, from the same department, who helped coordinate the project.

THE MOCHE CIVILISATION The Moche Civilisation lived on the Northern coast of what is now Peru between 50 AD and 700 AD. The name comes from an site in a valley of the same name which was the central city for the Moche people. The Moche people are known for their elaborate pottery and jewellery as well as for pioneering early metal working skills. What's more, they build numerous large pyramids, some of which still dominate the landscape. Evidence suggests that the Moche people engaged in a form of ritual combat, followed by human sacrifice. Until the discovery of the Lord of Sipan's tomb in 1979, the best known remains of the civilisation were two large structures - the Temple of the Sun (Huaca del Sol) and the Temple of the Moon (Huaca de la Luna) - near Trujillo. The reasons for the collapse of the Moche culture are unknown, but experts have suggested prolonged drought, earthquakes, or extreme flooding from the El Nino phenomenon may have been to blame. Some experts suggest a civil war may have been the cause of their downfall. Source: Britannica Advertisement

The graphic imaging specialist was surprised to find the misshapen skull had been glued together.

Conservation technicians at the Royal Tomb of Sipan Museum in Lambayeque on the north western coast of Peru, where the Moche mummy is entombed, had also pinned a plastic wireframe inside the skull cavity to stop the fragile cranial bones from falling apart.

This meant the task of restoring the virtual skull to its original shape would be one of the most difficult and complicated elements of the project.

The pieces of the Lord of Sipan's crushed skull are held together by an internal plastic wireframe and glue

The Lord of Sipan's remains are kept under protective glass at the Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum (left). The realistic face of the Lord of Sipan is finally revealed dressed in his royal finery (right)

It took Mr Moraes six days of intensive work to remount the skull and less than 24 hours to apply muscle, tissue and skin, tone, using algorithms from free Blender 3D software, to reconstruct the face.

To start the work, Mr Moraes used photogrammetry - a technique that uses photography to map measurements - to build 3D data of the bones.

He took dozens of spatially accurate photographic measurements from all angles of the skull, digitally mapping the relic with 45 images of the upper half of the cranium and 45 of the lower half.

Mr Moraes said: 'I uploaded the photos into the computer and proceeded to break the skull into many pieces so I could start from scratch to remount it back to its original anatomy.'

To assist with the rebuilding, Mr Moraes, who is based in Sinop, a city in west-central Brazil, imported the image of an average male skull and used it as a template to reshape the old Lord of Sipan's head.

HOW THE FACE OF THE THE LORD OF SIPAN WAS REVEALED Cicero Moraes, a 3D computer graphics designer, used photogrammetry - using photography to map measurements - to build 3D data information of the bones. He took dozens of photographic measurements from all angles of the skull, digitally mapping the relic with 45 images of the upper half of the cranium and 45 of the lower half. He uploaded the photos and used 3D software to start piecing the fragments back together, using a template of an average male skull. With forensic anthropological and anatomical advice, he manipulated the crushed remains to make them fit together. Gaps in the structure were filled in with grey colouring. The skull was then assessed by forensic dentist Dr Paulo Miamoto Advertisement

He said: 'It was like working with a 3D jigsaw puzzle but without the final correct picture to refer to.'

With detailed forensic anthropological and anatomical advice provided by Dr Miamoto along with the skull template, Mr Moraes manipulated the crushed remains, using trial and error, until he made them fit.

Gaps in the structure were filled in with grey colouring and the completed skull was sent to Dr Miamoto, based in Santos, on the southern coast of Brazil, for forensic analysis.

He studied the biological profile of the Moche ruler, which included identifying distinctive features, such as scars and evidence of disease along with the possible reason for his death.

Cicero Moraes, 3D graphic designer took around 90 photographs in order to digitally map the Lord of Sipan's skull

Cicero Moraes, 3D graphic designer, took 45 photographs of the bottom of the skull and 45 of the top section in orders to digitally recreate it

Dr Miamoto said: 'I was pleasantly surprised to find the Moche king had remarkably good oral health.

'He did have a few cavities but considering the period he lived in, his dental work showed he held a high economic position and was wealthy.

'During his era, it was typical for the majority of the peasants to use their teeth as tools. There was no evidence this person ever did this or did any hard work,' he added.

The remounted Lord of Sipan skull was sent as a 3D image to Dr Paulo Miamoto who carried out anthropological and forensic dental analysis

A similar sized skull was used as a 3D reference to expand the crushed Lord of Sipan's skull back to its original shape

Using 3D graphics to add the luxury ornaments, clothing and artifacts to put the Lord of Sipan into historical context

The Lord of Sipan's remains were found at Huaca Rajada near Sipan in what is now Peru in 1979

Dr Miamoto's work on the ancient skull was funded by the Sao Leopoldo Mandic Faculty for Dentistry and Medicine, in Campinhas, Sao Paulo.

He used indicators, such as the superciliary arch, the bulky area above the eyebrows which is more pronounced in men than women, and examined the thickness of the bone behind the ears where the muscles of the neck connect, to confirm the skull was that of a middle-aged man.

He said: 'I'm confident from my research this ancient ruler didn't suffer from arthritis or have a degenerative disease. It's likely he died from natural causes.'

Nearly 2,000 years later in 1987, Archaeologist Dr Walter Alva discovered the warrior-priest's remains in an untouched pyramid burial chamber in Huaca Rajada, near Sipan.

At the time, the find was listed as one of the ten most important discoveries in the twentieth century.

The excavation uncovered breathtaking burial treasures which included a crescent-shaped headdress of hammered gold, a gold death mask, gold eye and mouth patches and a necklace composed of sixteen gold discs.

The nature of the jewellery and ornaments, along with a warrior's shield lead archaeologists to conclude that he was a high-ranking warrior-priest or a lord.

Adding to the theory, the Moche leader was found buried with six other people including three women - thought to be wives or concubines - two males believed to be warriors and a child of around 10 years old.

Remains of another male were found on the roof overlooking the burial chamber.

Not surprisingly Dr Alva, who is also currently the director at the Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum is very protective of the excavated Moche relics.

It took three months of negotiations before he finally granted permission for the ancient skull to be removed from its glass covered tomb for further inspection.

Reflecting on the collaboration between Brazil and Peru, Alva said: 'The reconstruction of the features of the Lord of Sipan and the forensic anthropological analysis has allowed us to get closer to the face of our ancestors.
Until now, talking horses have only existed in fiction.

Instead of directly communicating, riders have to interpret whinnies and neighs with their own intuition.

But now scientists have trained horses to communicate precisely using symbols.

Horses in an experiment have been shown when they feel cold and need a blanket by pointing with their heads to a symbol  a horizontal black line. If they wanted their blanket taken off they pointed to a vertical line and for no change, a blank symbol. Stock image

THE CLEVER HANS EFFECT The researchers took precautions to guard against the possibility which is known in horse training circles as the 'Clever Hans' effect. A horse called Clever Hans won world-wide fame for being able to answer maths questions asked of him  which he would answer by stamping his feet the correct number of times. It was later shown that his trainer was subtly indicating the number of times he needed to stamp his feet. The study's authors say that unlike with Clever Hans, there was no 'right or wrong' answer for the horse as it would be rewarded with a carrot for whichever choice was made. Also, the horses' heads and ears were focused on the symbols in front of them, and the choices were made without hesitation. Advertisement

Horses in an experiment have been shown when they feel cold and need a blanket by pointing with their heads to a symbol  a horizontal black line.

They were also able to communicate two other possibilities: that they wanted their blanket taken off - a vertical line, or 'no change'  a blank symbol.

The research in Applied Animal Behaviour Science found 23 horses in the trial learned the task after training for just 10 to 15 minutes a day over two weeks.

The horses were taught to associate putting the blanket on and off with the symbol by being rewarded with slices of carrot.

And the researchers found the selection of the symbol was not random, but was dependent on the weather.

Horses opted for a blanket when the weather was wet, windy and cold.

Cecilie Mejdell, of the Norwegian Veterinary Institute and colleagues carried out the study.

To test whether the horses had learnt the meaning of the symbols, they were let out of their paddocks for two hours, to become fully aware of the weather.

All horses had a blanket on and had to choose between 'blanket off' or 'no change'. In the two winter situations left (and right picture) both horses touch the blank 'no change' display board

The symbols were hung up on a fence in front of each horse, and the horse was released, and their trainers stepped aside. Poltergeist (pictured) touches the board with the 'blanket off' symbol

Choice made by horses for blanket status is illustrated at days with very different weather conditions

The symbols were hung up on a fence in front of each horse, and the horse was released, and their trainers stepped aside.

The horse then approached and made one touch with the muzzle.

On cold days, around 5C (41F), the horses chose to put on a blanket, and they chose not to on warm days when the temperature was around 23C (73F).

'The horses used their new insight to communicate their preference regarding blanketing in order to obtain or maintain thermal comfort,' the authors wrote.

'Based on their individual perception of weather including ambient temperature, wind and precipitation.'

'In conclusion, horses can learn to use symbols to communicate their preference regarding blanketing,' the authors write.

The researchers warned that they could not be 100 per cent certain the trainers were not subtly influencing the horses.

But they took precautions to guard against the possibility which is known in horse training circles as the 'Clever Hans' effect.

Symbols were presented on white painted wooden display boards (35  35 cm). To the left, the horizontal bar meaning 'put blanket on', in the middle the blank board meaning 'no change', and to the right, the vertical bar meaning 'take blanket off'

A horse called Clever Hans won world-wide fame for being able to answer maths questions asked of him  which he would answer by stamping his feet the correct number of times.

It was later shown that his trainer was subtly indicating the number of times he needed to stamp his feet.

The study's authors say that unlike with Clever Hans, there was no 'right or wrong' answer for the horse as it would be rewarded with a carrot for whichever choice was made.
Fish take part in a dawn chorus just like birds, scientists have found.

You would not notice on the surface  but below the waves, special equipment records an array of fish songs that has been compared to the more familiar , a study has uncovered.

Researchers from Exeter University and Curtin University, in Perth, Australia identified seven distinct choruses over an 18-month period, happening at dawn and at dusk.

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Fish take part in a dawn chorus just like birds, scientists have found. Batfish were among the species captured 'singing' in chorus at Port Headland, Australia

The researchers carried out soundings at Port Headland in northern Australia.

The calls from the fish are used in a variety of ways  partly to announce their location, to advertise their availability for reproduction, how they are feeding and whether they are engaged in territorial disputes.

Researchers believe that the fish react to the sunrise.

Steve Simpson, a marine biologist at Exeter told New Scientist 'You get the dusk and dawn choruses like you would with the birds in the forest'.

Calls in the chorus range from a low 'foghorn' call made by the Black Jewfish, a 'grunting' call that another researcher compared to the 'buzzer in the Operation board game' from a fish called Terapontid, and a 'ba ba ba' call from a batfish.

The calls from the fish are used in a variety of ways  partly to announce their location, to advertise their availability for reproduction, how they are feeding and whether they are engaged in territorial disputes

SINGING DOLPHINS Recent research has shown that dolphin mothers sing to their unborn calves by singing their name. The mothers teach their babies their signature whistle before birth and in the two weeks after, which the animals use to identify one another. Researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi, have suggested that the mothers teach their babies the whistle as part of the imprinting process. Signature whistles are sounds made by dolphins, used to identify different individuals. Dolphin calves will eventually make their own individual whistle, but in the first stages of life, they use their mothers. Advertisement

The authors, writing in Bioacoustics said: 'Distinct diurnal patterns in the choruses were observed, associated with sunrise or sunset and in some cases, both'

Robert McCauley, who led the research said: 'I've been listening to fish squawks, burbles and pops for nearly 30 years now, and they still amaze me with their variety'.

The recordings were captured by two devices, called hydrophones, one positioned by the Port Headland shore and the other 21.5 kilometres away offshore.

'This is a method that allows us to understand what's happening at Port Headland 24/7 for a year and a half,' said Mr McCauley.

He added: 'We are only just beginning to appreciate the complexity involved and still have only a crude idea of what is going on in the undersea acoustic environment'.

Just as on the surface, the fish have to put up with passing noise from ships and boats  but this does not put them off and they do not stop their 'singing'.

Fish songs have been little studied compared to the noises made by whales and dolphins.

Scuba divers have been unaware of the fish noises because the bubbles released by their breathing gear mask the sounds of the fish.
Measuring just over an inch in size, lemur leaf frogs are critically endangered in the rainforests of Costa Rica and Panama where they are found.

But a British zoo has found a way to breed the tiny amphibians in captivity  by creating artificial rain storms.

Keepers at Paignton Zoo in Devon created a special rain chamber using a water pump and a timer system that would make it rain every few hours during the day.

A British zoo has successfully bred a criticially endangered species colour-changing lemur leaf frog (pictured) by creating artificial rain storms to mimic the rainforest environment where they normally live in Costa Rica and Panama

The conditions are designed to mimic the humid conditions in the hilly lowland forests where the tiny creatures are found.

THE LEMUR LEAF FROG With large bulging eyes the lemur leaf frog, also called Hylomantis lemur, is active at night. During the day it clings to the underside of leaves where its bright green skin helps it stay camouflaged. In the hours of darkness, however, its skin changes colour to become a reddish brown. The tiny amphibian, which grow just over an inch in size, also has a pigment in its skin called pterorhodin, which reflects heat from its surface. This allows the frogs to remain cool during the day while clinging to leaves, something that many other frogs are unable to endure. This may also help protect the frog against the disease caused by the Chytrid fungas that has devastated amphibian populations around the world. However, it is unclear whether it is the high temperatures that the frog can endure or specific compounds in its skin itself that helps protect it against the killer fungus. Advertisement

Loss of their habitat due to deforestation and development has seen numbers of the frogs in the wild plummet.

However, it is thought lemur leaf frogs are thought to be largely resistant to the devastating chytridiomycosis funal disease that has destroyed many amphibian populations.

The frog has a pigment in its skin that reflects heat, allowing it to stay cool while spending hours on the underside of leaves, but this is also thought to defend it against the disease.

Andy Meek, a keeper at Paignton Zoo, said: 'We have a total of 18 tadpoles, a number of which have now become full froglets.

'We also have 10 adults. The species is critically endangered. There is a studbook currently being set up to manage this species in Europe.

'This is a first for Paignton Zoo, so I'm really pleased.'

The zoo is one of only four collections in the UK working to save the lemur leaf frog.

The nocturnal amphibians have slender bodies and lime green skin which enables them to blend almost perfectly with the leaves they cling to.

Unlike other frogs they have no webbing on their feet but their bulging eyes allow them to see in the dark when they come out to hunt.

Paignton Zoo is one of four amphibian collections in the UK to be involved in efforts to save the lemur leaf frog (pictured right) from extinction. They have successfully bred 18 tadpoles some of which have already turned into froglets (pictured left)

Keepers at Paignton Zoo created a special rain chamber with a timer so it would rain ever couple of hours to replicate the conditions the lemur leaf frogs (pictured) might see in the wild

Lemur leaf frogs can change colour - they are light green during the day while resting and turn reddish-brown at night when active.

They usually lay their eggs on leaves overhanging water with a sticky substance. When they hatch the tadpoles are then washed off into the water below where it can take 150 days for them to develop into adult frogs.
The results show the scroll's writings to be the book of Leviticus, making it the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book ever found in a synagogue

Its sheets are disintegrating so the writings within have remain unknown

Over 45 years ago, archaeologists discovered a burned 1,500-year-old Hebrew scroll on the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel.

The ancient book has untouchable, disintegrating sheets, making it extremely difficult to see the ink-based writings within.

But researchers have now used a new digital analysis technique on the precious scroll, allowing them to see the writings without so much as opening it.

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The En-Gedi book has untouchable, disintegrating sheets, making it extremely difficult to see the ink-based writings within. But researchers have now used a new digital analysis technique on the precious scroll, allowing them to see the writings without so much as opening it

WHAT DID THE SCROLL SAY? The scroll shows two distinct columns of Hebrew writing that contain lines, words, letters and spacing. This includes the phrases: - 'If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, a male' - 'without blemish he shall offer; to the entrance of the tent of meeting, he shall bring' - 'it is for acceptance on his behalf before the Lord. 'He shall lay his hand upon the head...' Further analysis revealed the scroll's writings to be the book of Leviticus, which makes it the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book ever found in a synagogue. Advertisement

Previous studies have successfully identified text within ancient artefacts, but the En-Gedi manuscript represents the first severely damaged scroll to be virtually unrolled and non-invasively read, line by line.

Ms Phnina Shor, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls Project, said: 'The discovery of text in the En-Gedi scroll absolutely astonished us; we were certain it was a shot in the dark, but the most advanced technologies have brought this cultural treasure back to life.'

Researchers from the University of Kentucky use a series of digitalisation techniques to 'see' ink-based text within the fragile scroll while avoiding the need for physical handling.

Traditionally, scrolls must be unrolled and pressed flat in order to duplicate the text.

But that was not an option for the En-Gedi scroll which has been burned and crushed into lumps of charcoal.

Instead, the researchers used X-ray microtomography  a technique that uses x-rays to create cross-sections of a physical object that can be used to recreate a virtual 3D model  followed by segmentation, in which a 'page' is digitally created.

Last year the researchers revealed the first eight verses of the Book of Leviticus in the scroll, but due to the scroll's charred condition, it was not possible to either preserve or decipher it.

However, their new research using high resolution scanning and virtual unwrapping has allowed the team to recover substantial ink-based text at high quality.

Traditionally, scrolls must be unrolled and pressed flat in order to duplicate the text. But that was not an option for the En-Gedi scroll which has been burned and crushed into lumps of charcoal

Piece by piece, the team managed to recreated over 100 scanned segments of the scroll by hand, to unveil the text written on each.

The resulting image of the virtually unrolled scroll contains 35 lines of text, of which 18 have been preserved and another 17 have been reconstructed.

This includes the phrases: 'If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, a male', 'without blemish he shall offer; to the entrance of the tent of meeting, he shall bring' and 'it is for acceptance on his behalf before the Lord. 'He shall lay his hand upon the head...'

A charred piece of parchment found at the site of an ancient synagogue on the coast of the Dead Sea in Israel has been read for the first time since its discovery after it was scanned and analysed using a 3D CT scanner. The image above shows a researcher at the Israel Antiquities Authority holding the burned scroll

Piece by piece, the team managed to recreated over 100 scanned segments of the scroll by hand, to unveil the text written on each. The resulting image shows two distinct columns of Hebrew writing that contain lines, words, letters and spacing

Further analysis revealed the scroll's writings to be the book of Leviticus, which makes it the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book ever found in a synagogue.

Professor William Seales, who led the study, said: 'This work opens a new window through which we can look back through time by reading materials that were thought lost through damage and decay.

'There are so many other unique and exciting materials that may yet give up their secrets - we are only beginning to discover what they may hold.'
Despite appearances, the oceans are far from silent places.

If you dunk your head underwater youll hear a cacophony of sounds from wildlife great and small, crashing waves, and even rain.

And its louder still for creatures attuned to these sounds.

However, humans are changing these ocean soundscapes.

Our recent research showed that changes caused by people, from ocean acidification to pollution, are silencing the seas' natural noises.

(Were also filling the oceans with human noise).

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Researchers found that changes caused by people, from ocean acidification to pollution, are silencing the seas' natural noises - and were also filling the oceans with human noise. The biggest issue is that fish depend on these noises to find their way

SILENCING THE SEA Humans are increasingly dominating the physical and chemical environment. Burning fossil fuels is altering the carbon cycle, which results in large amounts of carbon and nitrogen liberation in the ocean About one-third of the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere dissolves in the ocean, leading to increased seawater acidity (or ocean acidification). This is an obvious problem for animals that produce a calcium carbonate shell or skeleton (such as corals, some plankton, and snails). Ocean acidification also alters the behaviour of many animals by messing up their brain functioning. Other studies show ocean acidification can also change the response of fish larvae to settlement habitat sounds by deterring them rather than attracting them. It also affects the sounds that ocean ecosystems produce. Experts say if we dont reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rocky reefs could be much quieter in 2100 than now. Advertisement

This is bad news for the species that depend on these noises to find their way.

All over the world you can hear a lively crackling sound made by thousands of snapping shrimp that live along coastlines.

These common shrimp, often referred to as pistol shrimp, have a large claw that they can close with such force that a cavitation bubble is formed.

As this bubble implodes on itself a loud snap is created  like a pistol shot  which can be heard over long distances.

In fact, snapping shrimp are the loudest marine invertebrates, and second only to the noisest marine animals, which are sperm whales!

Snapping shrimp are found all over the world, including in coral reefs, kelp forests, seagrass beds and mangroves.

Other types of animals create ocean noise too.

Urchins and parrotfish make clearly audible chomping sounds as they scrape algae off rocks.

Many fish are frequent and loud talkers and make an array of sounds such as chirps, burps, whistles, knocks and so on.

They use these to mark out their territory, during fights and to locate mates.

These biological sounds, together with those from rain, crashing waves and seismic activities, form the so-called underwater soundscape.

Sounds that are emitted from temperate and tropical reefs are loud and quite constant.

As such these sounds form a reliable source of information for animals, particularly for navigation.

Most animals in the sea let go of their fertilised eggs without providing any parental care.

All over the world you can hear a lively crackling sound made by thousands of snapping shrimp (pictured) that live along coastlines. Polluting the ocean is not only changing its sound but providing less shelter and food for creatures like the snapping shrimp

HOW LARVA USES SOUND TO FIND THEIR WAY HOME As these eggs hatch, small babies (larvae) are dispersed by ocean currents. Growing up away from coastal areas provides a safer place with fewer predators. However, after growing for a few weeks or months in the open ocean, it is time for these young animals to return to the coast to find a home. How do they find their way in the vast and uniform open ocean? Sounds and odours from coastal habitats are key cues that allow marine animals to find their new homes and replenish adult populations. Earlier studies have shown that ocean acidification can change the response of fish larvae to settlement habitat sounds by deterring them rather than attracting them. Advertisement

As these eggs hatch, small babies (larvae) are dispersed by ocean currents.

Growing up away from coastal areas provides a safer place with fewer predators.

However, after growing for a few weeks or months in the open ocean, it is time for these young animals to return to the coast to find a home.

How do they find their way in the vast and uniform open ocean?

Sounds and odours from coastal habitats are key cues that allow marine animals to find their new homes and replenish adult populations.

Humans are increasingly dominating the physical and chemical environment.

We are altering the carbon cycle through the burning of fossil fuels and the nitrogen cycle by extracting vast amounts of nitrogen for food production and releasing it as waste.

Large amounts of this carbon and nitrogen liberation end up in the ocean.

About one-third of the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere dissolves in the ocean, leading to increased seawater acidity (or ocean acidification).

This is an obvious problem for animals that produce a calcium carbonate shell or skeleton (such as corals, some plankton, and snails).

Remarkably, ocean acidification also alters the behaviour of many animals by messing up their brain functioning.

Larva hatches along the coastal lines and uses the sound of the sea to find their way back home. However, ocean acidification can change the response of fish larvae to settlement habitat sounds by deterring them rather than attracting them

RACE TO SAVE THE CORAL REEFS Across the world, 50 per cent of coral reefs have been destroyed in the last 30 years and the fight is on to save them. Each year between one per cent and two per cent of world coral reefs are destroyed, largely by shoreline pollution and climate change. Scientists think that rising air and ocean surface temperatures are causing coral bleaching and changing the chemistry of the oceans. Warmer water stresses corals, which are incredibly sensitive to temperature. If temperatures rise, the zooxanthellae consumed by coral as food leaves their tissue and they turn white, because the algae gives it its colour and nutrients. White coral is said to be bleached and is weak. As carbon dioxide levels rise, more of the gas dissolves into the ocean, causing it to become more acidic - a process called acidification. The decreasing pH means that corals can't absorb the calcium carbonate they need to maintain their skeletons and the reefs dissolve. Last year, the Catlin Seaview Survey (CSS) teamed up with scientists around the world to create a record of the state of the world's vanishing marine habitats. Advertisement

Earlier studies (see also here) have shown that ocean acidification can change the response of fish larvae to settlement habitat sounds by deterring them rather than attracting them.

Two of our recent studies (see also here) showed that ocean acidification not only affects sound reception, but also the sounds that ocean ecosystems produce.

If we dont reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rocky reefs could be much quieter in 2100 than now.

And snapping shrimps are the reason.

Coastal discharge of nutrients from sewage plants and catchment runoff also degrades kelp forests and seagrass beds.

Two of our recent studies showed that ocean acidification not only affects sound reception, but also the sounds that ocean ecosystems produce. If we dont reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rocky reefs could be much quieter in 2100 than now

These coasts are more silent than their healthy counterparts.

In many parts of the world, kelp forests, seagrass beds and coral reefs have been replaced by carpets of turf-forming or mat-forming algae.

These weedy types of algae have much lower diversity of species and provide less shelter and feeding opportunities for shrimps and other noisy animals.

KILLER WHALES ARE STRUGGLING TO HEAR EACH OTHER Researchers found underwater sound pollution along the coast of the Pacific disrupts how orca's communication with each other, and interferes with their ability to track and hunt salmon. The researchers measured underwater noise as ships passed their study site 3,000 times. Research has shown that the growth in commercial shipping has raised the intensity of low-frequency noise in the ocean almost 10-fold since the 1960s. Orcas, like other toothed whales, (stock image) use mid- and high-frequencies to communicate and find their prey so the study measured a wide range of frequencies from 10 Hz to 40,000 Hz. The results found ships are responsible for elevated levels at these frequencies - including at 20,000 Hz where killer whales hear best Because the noise occurs at similar low frequencies used by baleen whales there is growing evidence it may impact their ability to communicate, and therefore their survival. To analyse the nature of ship noise, particularly in coastal areas close to ports, scientists measured around 1,600 unique ships as they travelled through Haro Strait, in Washington State. This is a critical habitat for the endangered Southern Resident killer whales. The orcas are iconic in the Pacific Northwest and support a multi-million dollar ecotourism industry in the United States and Canada. Because the orcas, like other toothed whales, use mid- and high-frequencies to communicate and find their prey, the study measured a wide range of frequencies (10 Hz to 40,000 Hz). Study author Doctor Scott Veirs, of Beam Reach Marine Science and Sustainability School, said: 'The results show that ships are responsible for elevated background noise levels not only at low frequencies as expected, but also at medium and higher frequencies - including at 20,000 Hz where killer whales hear best. Advertisement

Degraded habitat means fewer animals, which means less noise.

For larvae that use sound as a navigational cue, this means that fewer larvae will be able to successfully locate their home.

And fewer returning larvae means less replenishment of fish stocks.

Climate change and ocean acidification act at global scales and are difficult to stop in the short term. In contrast, nutrient pollution is a local stressor, which makes it more manageable.

US SET TO CRACKDOWN ON OCEAN NOISE THAT HARMS FISH The ocean has gotten noisier for decades, with man-made racket from oil drilling, shipping and construction linked to signs of stress in marine life that include beached whales and baby crabs with scrambled navigational signals. The United States aims to change that as a federal agency prepares a plan that could force reductions in noise-making activities, including oil exploration, dredging and shipping off the nation's coast. The draft plan calls for developing noise limits and setting up a standardized listening system. It would also call for the creation of an online archive of noise data that could hold thousands of hours of recordings, which scientists could then cross-reference against data on where marine life congregates. The plan urges more research on the effects of noise on sea creatures and more coordination with environmental and industry groups, the military and government. Some data is in short supply, since NOAA has assessed the abundance of only 17 percent of the marine mammal species that it is mandated to monitor. Noise also takes on greater urgency with Arctic seas increasingly open to shipping and development with the melting of ice from global warming. The scientists behind the project admit the ocean was never quiet. For millions of years it was filled with sounds ranging from the thunder of storms to the songs of whales. But fish and marine mammals evolved to coexist with those sounds, scientists note. Advertisement

Various options exist for local communities to reduce nutrient pollution of coastal areas. hese include improved sewage treatment, restoration of coastal vegetation (such as mangroves) and swamps that extract sediment and nutrients from stormwater runoff, and decreasing the use of rivers as outlets for polluted waters.
The exact landing site of the first meteorite to hit the British Isles has been a mystery for years.

Now a scientist claims to have discovered its exact location.

Palaeontologist Dr Mike Simms believes he has found the 25 mile-wide impact crater under the small town of Lairg in northern Scotland.

Palaeontologist Dr Mike Simms believes he has found the 25 mile-wide impact crater under the small town of Lairg in northern Scotland

For years scientists have been studying green rock fragments found sandwiched between 1.2 billion-year-old sandstone near Ullapool, 30 miles to the west of Lairg.

For decades this layer was thought to be a volcanic mudflow until, in 2008, geologists from Oxford and Aberdeen proved that it had actually been formed by a giant meteorite impact.

But the location of the impact itself remained a mystery.

'When I visited the area on holiday in 2011 I found clues that the source of this unique layer - the impact crater - actually lies to the east,' Dr Simms said.

'That raised the possibility that the crater might still exist somewhere on the Scottish mainland.'

A geology and gravity low map shows the area below Lairg where the meteorite hit

Palaeontologist Dr Mike Simms who claims to have discovered exactly where the first meteorite to hit the British Isles landed

Dr Simms said geophysics helped lead him eastward to Lairg, using the principle that the sediment that filled the crater, and the fractured rock beneath it, would have a weaker gravitational pull than denser rock around the crater.

He said geophysical maps of Scotland indicated a large gravity anomaly centred on the town.

The scientist, who is curator of Palaeontology at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, said its similarity to gravity anomalies associated with impact craters around the world suggested that a vast crater was buried several miles beneath Lairg.

Dr Simms estimates the size of the crater at 25 miles across, which would make it one of the 15 largest craters on the planet.

A close-up of the impact deposit shows the angular green fragments embedded in red sandstone

He said the meteorite would have been around two miles in diameter and 13 billion tonnes in weight and would have penetrated five miles into the earth when it struck at 40,000 mph.

Dr Simms told MailOnline: 'Only big meteorites, weighing hundreds of tons or more are still travelling fast enough to make an impact crater; smaller ones get slowed by the atmosphere and so just make a dent a bit bigger than the meteorite.'

The story behind the discovery will be told on Saturday in Walking Through Time at 8pm on Channel 4.
The most detailed genetic study of Indigenous Australians confirms the group is the oldest continuous civilisation on the planet.

The civilisation dates back more than 50,000 years ago, according to a new paper that was published alongside two others in Nature.

The research claims that around 72,000 years ago, a group of migrants began the journey out of Africa that would ultimately shape the future of humanity.

This single wave of travellers gave rise to all non-African populations alive today.

New evidence supports the idea that there was just one exit event  but once out of Africa, the Papuan and Aboriginal ancestors branched off early on, with some eventually reaching Australia, where they would remain isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years

KEY FINDINGS OF THE STUDY The researchers found that the 'overwhelming majority' of non-African populations stem from a single migration from Africa 72,000 years ago. Along with this, they found evidence that Aboriginal Australians are descended directly from the first people to inhabit Australia. And, the DNA revealed traces of DNA which suggest modern humans interbred with an early human species that has not yet been characterized as they migrated through Asia. The researchers also say there appears to be a mysterious dispersal that occurred in Australia roughly 4,000 years ago. While these migrants shaped speech and thought, they experienced a 'ghost-like' disappearance. Advertisement

In the first major genomic study of Aboriginal Australians, researchers have confirmed that along with European and Asian ancestral groups, Papuan and Australian genomes too can be traced back to this migration.

The new evidence supports the idea that there was just one exit event  but once out of Africa, the Papuan and Aboriginal ancestors branched off early on, with some eventually reaching Australia, where they would remain isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years.

In the study, published to the journal Nature, an international team of experts collaborated with elders and leaders from various Aboriginal Australian communities, along with numerous other organizations.

The researchers sequenced the genomes of 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea, using DNA from saliva to reveal new insight on the origins of modern human populations.

The study addresses a number of fundamental questions about human evolution  how many times did we leave Africa, when was Australia populated, and what is the diversity of people in and outside Australia? said Professor Eske Willerslev, who led the research and holds posts at St Johns College, University of Cambridge, the Sanger Institute and the University of Copenhagen.

Technologically and politically, it has not really been possible to answer those questions until now.

'We found evidence that there was only really one wave of humans who gave rise to all present-day non-Africans, including Australians.

The analysis led to a number of findings on the population of Australia, which has one of the longest histories of continuous human occupation.

While earlier theories have suggested that Papuans and Australians originated from an earlier migration event, the new study indicates this was not the case.

Our results suggest that, rather than having left in a separate wave, most of the genomes of Papuans and Aboriginal Australians can be traced back to a single Out of Africa event which led to modern worldwide populations, said Dr Manjinder Sandhu, a senior author from the Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge.

There may have been other migrations, but the evidence so far points to one exit event.

The research suggests all modern humans living today emerged from a single migration wave and then interbred with other extinct human species (illustrated)

In the study, an international team of experts collaborated with elders and leaders from various Aboriginal Australian communities. Pictured, Professor Eske Willerslev speaks with Aboriginal elders in the Kalgoorlie area in southwestern Australia in 2012

Australia has been occupied by humans for roughly 50,000 years, and the researchers say the Papuan and Australian ancestors split off from the first migration group about 58,000 years ago.

The European and Asian ancestral groups did not become distinct until around 42,000 years ago.

After this initial split, the researchers say several other divergences occurred; the Papuans and Aboriginal Australians split roughly 37,000 years ago.

Many years later, these populations became physically separated by water.

It wasnt until much later that the Aboriginal communities regained contact with the rest of the worlds populations, first with Asian communities and then European travelers in the 18th century.

'GHOST-LIKE' DISAPPEARANCE OF CULTURE-SHAPING GROUP The researchers say there may have been an internal migration within Aboriginal culture roughly 4,000 years ago. Today, about 90 percent of Aboriginal communities speak languages in the 'Pama-Nyungan' linguistic family. According to the researchers, these people stem from the founding population, which split from the Papuans 37,000 years ago before further diverging. But, experts say the Pama-Nyungan languages are much younger than this, and can be traced back just 4,000 years. This has long baffled scientists, who wondered how two separately isolated communities came to share the same younger language family. While previous theories suggested this was the result of a second migration, the study now shows that this is not the case. The researchers found signs of a 'tiny gene flow,' which indicates migration from north-east Australia across the continent. This may have occurred at around the time the Pama-Nyungan language and stone tool technologies emerged. The researchers say these migrants likely had a strong influence on the culture of the continent - but, genetic evidence of these people has disappeared even as their culture and language persists. Advertisement

According to the researchers, most Aboriginal communities were genetically isolated from each other by 31,000 years ago, likely the result of environmental barriers, including an impassable desert.

The genetic diversity among Aboriginal Australians is amazing, said Assistant Professor Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, from the Universities of Copenhagen and Bern, a lead author on the study.

Because the continent has been populated for such a long time, we find that groups from south-western Australia are genetically more different from north-eastern Australia, than, for example, Native Americans are from Siberians.

The study also revealed that traces of DNA from an ancient, extinct human species fund in Aboriginal Australians could be from a species that has not yet been characterized.

This illustration shows the interaction between modern and archaic human lineages according to a second study published today, showing traces of an early out of Africa expansion that can still be seen within the genome of modern Sahul populations in Papua New Guinea

Around 72,000 years ago, a group of migrants began the journey out of Africa that would ultimately shape the future of humanity. According to new research, this single wave of travelers gave rise to all non-African populations alive today. A stock image is pictured

It was previously thought that this stemmed from encounters with a group known as Denisovans.

We dont know who these people were, but they were a distant relative of Denisovans, and the Papuan/Australian ancestors probably encountered them close to Sahul, said Professor Willerslev.

Along with this, the researchers say a mysterious dispersal may have occurred within Aboriginal culture roughly 4,000 years ago from the northeastern part of Australia  but these migrants, who are thought to have defined the way in which people spoke and thought, disappeared in a ghost-like manner.

Its a really weird scenario, Professor Willerslev said. A few immigrants appear in different villages and communities around Australia.

They change the way people speak and think; then they disappear, like ghosts. And people just carry on living in isolation the same way they always have.

WHAT THE FOUR STUDIES TELL US ABOUT HUMAN ANCESTRY The Simons Genome Diversity Project study After analysing DNA from 142 populations around the world, the researchers conclude that all modern humans living today can trace their ancestry back to a single group that emerged in Africa 200,000 years ago. They also found that all non-Africans appear to be descended from a single group that split from the ancestors of African hunter gatherers around 130,000 years ago. The study also shows how humans appear to have formed isolated groups within Africa with populations on the continent separating from each other. The KhoeSan in south Africa for example separated from the Yoruba in Nigeria around 87,000 years ago while the Mbuti split from the Yoruba 56,000 years ago. The Estonian Biocentre Human Genome Diversity Panel study This examined 483 genomes from 148 populations around the world to examine the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa. They found that indigenous populations in modern Papua New Guinea owe two percent of their genomes to a now extinct group of Homo sapiens. This suggests there was a distinct wave of human migration out of Africa around 120,000 years ago. The Aboriginal Australian study Using genomes from 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea, this study examined the genetic origins of these early Pacific populations. These groups are thought to have descended from some of the first humans to have left Africa and has raised questions about whether their ancestors were from an earlier wave of migration than the rest of Eurasia. The new study found that the ancestors of modern Aboriginal Australians and Papuans split from Europeans and Asians around 58,000 years ago following a single migration out of Africa. These two populations themselves later diverged around 37,000 years ago, long before the physical separation of Australia and New Guinea some 10,000 years ago. The Climate Modelling study Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa used one of the first integrated climate-human migration computer models to re-create the spread of Homo sapiens over the past 125,000 years. The model simulates ice-ages, abrupt climate change and captures the arrival times of Homo sapiens in the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula, Southern China, and Australia in close agreement with paleoclimate reconstructions and fossil and archaeological evidence. The found that it appears modern humans first left Africa 100,000 years ago in a series of slow-paced migration waves. They estimate that Homo sapiens first arrived in southern Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed. The results challenge traditional models that suggest there was a single exodus out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Advertisement

This may have happened for religious or cultural reasons that we can only speculate about. But in genetic terms, we have never seen anything like it before.

The research is one of three genetic studies looking at prehistoric human ancestry that are published today in the journal Nature.

In a second study, researchers at the Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia, examined the genomes of modern people living in Papua New Guinea.

They conclude that indigenous populations there can trace two per cent of their genomes to an earlier but now extinct group of Homo sapiens that left Africa around 120,000 years ago.

This suggests the ancestors of those living in Papua New Guinea may have met and bred with these earlier pioneers before they died out.

However, most populations living outside Africa appear to not have encountered these earlier Homo sapien migrants.
Residents and visitors of Philadelphia will soon think twice before urinating in public.

The Southern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority is set to test a special paint in subways that sprays urine back at offenders in bid to combat complaints of 'human waste' in the systems.

When liquid, in this case urine, hits the Ultra-Ever Dry paint, it will remain almost spherical and bounce off the surface instead of running down it.

Scroll down for video

Philadelphia is set to test a clear paint in its subway lines that sprays urine back at the offender in bid to combat complaints of 'human waste' in train systems. The image on the right shows how much the water rebounds off (right) the wall compared to an uncoated wall (left)

THE PEE-REPELLENT SPRAY Cities have had enough of public urination and are now adding a pee-repelling paint to walls and transit areas. Officials are using Ultra-Ever Dry paint, which is a water-fearing solution that repels liquids. A hydrophilic surface a drop of water turns into a flat dome and sticks to the surface. However, when liquid hits the Ultra-Ever Dry paint, a hydrophobic surface, it remains almost spherical and bounces off the surface. The paint crates a shield of air over top of the surface. Advertisement

The nanotechnology spray can be applied to almost any material and is dispensed from a large professional paint spray-like applicator.

With a hydrophilic surface, a drop of water turns into a flat dome that allows it to stick.

However, when a drop of liquid hits a hydrophobic surface, it will stay roughly spherical because there is a layer of air covering the surface that acts like a shield - this is the key to Ultra-Ever Dry, reports Billy Penn.

Public urination in Philadelphia, and in most cities around the US, is an illegal act that carries a fine of a few hundred dollars.

The Southern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) plans to test the liquid-repellent coating this fall.

This new is just a litle over year after San Francisco, California and Hamburg, Germany's St. Pauli made headway by adding the product to their transit area and public streets.

Public urination was quite the issue in the German city and the local businesses banded together to install a 'pee wall' coated in Ultra-Ever pain for the 'wildpinklers', which literally means 'free pee-ers' in German.

In a short video produced by the group, members can be seen putting up signs reading 'DO NOT PEE HERE! We pee back' on specially-treated walls.

Inspired by this move, San Francisco sprayed down nine of their own in July 2015 and installed more in the following months.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) ending up spending about $2 million in this project after replacing all of the floorboards on 80 smelly elevators before coating them with the urine repellent.

Public urination in Philadelphia, and in most cities around the US, is an illegal act that carries a fine of a few hundred dollars. The Southern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) plans to test the liquid-repellent coating this fall

@sfpublicworks How expensive is this spray? Could we be building more public restrooms instead?  Chris Marra (@chrismarra) July 23, 2015

A wee-ly good idea? The coating costs several hundred dollars per wall, The San Francisco Chronicle reported, leading some people to comment (above) that more public toilets are a better solution to the dirty problem

SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch told Billy Penn that SEPTA will be using the same product employed in both San Francisco and Hamburg.

Mark Shaws demoed the technology at a TED talk in 2013, explaining: 'The surface of the spray coating is formed with nanoparticles that form a rough surface.

'It has billions of interstitial spaces [spaces between layers] and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules and cover the surface with air.'

Battle plan: Nine walls around the Mission and Soma districts in San Francisco (marked on the map) were the first to treated with hydrophobic Ultra-Ever Dry paint in 2015, so that if someone urinates on them, they will get hit right back with it

'It's an umbrella of air all across itThis layer of air is what the water [or mud or urine] hits and it glides right off.'

The coating costs several hundred dollars per wall, The San Francisco Chronicle reported via The Next Web, leading some people to comment that more public toilets are a better solution to the dirty problem.

Public Works chief Mohammed Nuru said: 'The team that did the testing [were] excited because the liquid bounces back more than we thought it would,' but people believe they can outwit the hydrophobic paint

Public Works chief Mohammed Nuru told the paper: 'The team that did the testing [were] excited because the liquid bounces back more than we thought it would.'

If the pilot is a success and deters people from using public walls as toilets, the hydrophobic paint could be applied to more neighborhoods.

The spray can also be used to prevent ice, corrosion and bacteria and can even be applied to clothes and cars to enable them to be 'self-cleaning'.
When people think about visiting Japan, it's often the neon lights and high rise buildings of Tokyo that spring to mind, or perhaps the temples and geishas of Kyoto.

But there is a quieter, slower-paced side to Japanese life - and it centres around the 'onsen', or hot spring.

Onsen can range from a tiny natural pool by the ocean to an artificially-created bath in the centre of a city. But they are the ultimate destination for all to bathe, relax and socialise.

Guests can book a private romantic hot spring or soak in communal pools. Either way they are expected to bathe naked. Eleanor is pictured in a kimono, which made the undressing process a bit quicker and less awkward

Luxury: Guests have extensive villas all to themselves but all the furniture is on the floor

And taking this to the next level are hot spring resorts, where Japanese bathers go to unwind, easing away the stresses of their hectic lives but it's something that tourists rarely get to experience.

However, through Booking.com we were lucky enough to jet off to an exclusive resort at the island of Kyushu, nine hours south of Tokyo by train, to sample this authentic experience.

Close to the picturesque village of Yufuin, the Yufuin Sankouen hot spring resort offers a network of beautiful baths in a range of sizes for private and communal use.

The private hot tubs range from smoothly-modelled swimming pools lined with long wooden benches, to the romantic 'evening steam bath' which is framed with rocks and greenery and blessed with a stunning view of mount Yufu.

Some of the more rustic hot springs at the resort are open air and framed with mountain views

While others are indoors and communal and resemble a swimming pool

The experience felt like we were indulging in pure luxury with Shisheido toiletries provided at every hot spring. And if that wasn't enough, guests have their own private villas to relax and be pampered by maids.

And while our villa looked a bit dated, it had some lovely timeless features such as an elaborate tea set and its own mini hot tub.

It was also sprawling, so much so that some elderly Japanese ladies knocked on the door on the last night thinking it must be where one of the hot springs was housed.

While the resort allows guests to move from bath to bath - as long as they aren't reserved - there are strict rules that are second nature to the Japanese but take some getting used to for Westerners.

One is that guests must wear special shoes like wooden flip flops to go to the baths. Guests must also thoroughly wash before entering the pool by sitting on a little stool and using a handheld shower.

Not only that, but you have to be naked when getting in; any kind of bathing costume is frowned upon. Luckily, we were given beautiful kimonos to make the undressing process a bit swifter and less awkward.

The baths are there for you to soak and talk about life, swimming and splashing is also not considered good form.

Japanese-style dining: Gourmet dinner, called Kaseiki, is served in multiple courses over many hours

Every kind of speciality was brought out - blush pink slices of tuna sashimi, fish tempura straight from the pan, Wagyu beef for us to cook ourselves on a hot grill, all washed down with sweet sake

In the evening, our gourmet, multi-course 'Kaseiki-style' dinner was served in our villa, and was simply one of the best meals I've ever had in my life.

As we sat there in our Japanese pyjamas, every kind of speciality was brought out - blush pink slices of tuna sashimi, fish tempura straight from the pan, Wagyu beef for us to cook ourselves on a hot grill, all washed down with sweet sake.

Kim, our waitress brought course after course until I thought I would sink if I tried to get back into the hot spring for a late night dip.

As is traditional in Japan, the villa had no permanent bed - instead Kim returned later on in the evening to unroll futons for us, with huge soft duvets on top.

Drinking our sake and watching TV on the floor, the overall affect felt much like we were having a sleepover together.

Private party: Guests can relax on their own balcony, while maids bring out sashimi, slices of raw fish

Yufuin itself is a quaint little town, packed and popular with domestic tourists.

It provided a great opportunity to pick up a few souvenirs including cute bottles of soy sauce for our families and walk along a riverbank lined with cherry blossom.

And it was the only place in Japan far away enough from Tokyo that we were actually stopped and asked where we are from.

As our resort was a 40-minute walk away from the town, the staff offered us pick ups and drop offs in the morning and for a few hours in the afternoon. This was pretty convenient but I didn't like not being in control of my own destiny while travelling so it may have been better to be located closer to town.

However, I can see why the experience of going from spring to spring was so appealing, it's a lovely relaxing activity and I understand now why the Japanese enjoy it so much. Even when it rained, it made being under the steam water even more enjoyable and added drama to the landscape surrounding the resort.

Although it was splurge (around 225 a night, half board) Yufuin Sankouen offered a relaxing and authentic Japanese experience making it worth it, especially as it provides the chance to eat a dinner of Michelin-star quality in your pyjamas without feeling guilty.

TRAVEL FACTS Air France flies from two airports in Tokyo: Tokyo-Narita and Tokyo- Haneda. The carrier offers 14 weekly flights via its Paris hub, Charles De Gaulle. Prices start from 489 return, including taxes, from London Heathrow. The town of Yufu is eight hours by train from Tokyo, or six hours from Kyoto. A private villa for two at Yufuin Sankouen resort booked through Booking.com starts at 35,000 Japanese yen (271.50) per night, including breakfast, a traditional multi course Kaiseki dinner and access to the hot springs. It is one mile away from the centre of the town but a free pick-up and drop off service from Yufu train station is included in the stay. Advertisement




There will be 125 superyachts - worth millions each - on display and 580

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For the rich and glamorous, the end of September calls for a hop down to Monaco for its annual yacht show.

It's not just the place to be seen but also, if your pockets are deep enough, the place to buy luxurious vessels.

And even if you're not planning to purchase a second home on the seas, you can still peek into how the other half lives.

This year, the event takes place between September 28 and October 1. Here, MailOnline Travel rounds up some of the not-to-be-missed vessels exhibiting at the show.

Baglietto 46m superfast

Need for speed: The Baglietto 46m superfast, which can travel up to 26 knots, is making its debut at this year's yacht show in Monaco - the event will take place between September 28 and October 1

Twin room: This bedroom on board the Baglietto is perfect for sharing - wood paneling and downlighters give it a warm feel

Jack and Jill bathroom: A washroom on board the Baglietto features wooden floors, a deep tub and twin sinks

Cook off! Multiple cooking rings and double sinks means it's easy to cater for big numbers on theBaglietto

The Baglietto 46m superfast is not the biggest yacht at just over 46m (150ft11in) but it's spacious enough to hold 12 guests and ten crew.

Both the exterior and interiors are the vision of Florence-based designers Francesco Paszkowski and feature a chic blend of creams and teak.

The sleek vessel, which can travel up to 26 knots, is making its debut this year.

Custom Line 108'

Personal touch: Each Custom Line 108' yacht owner can work with an interior designer according to their personal tastes

Light and airy: Boaters can sit comfortably in the Custom Line 108's lounge while looking out over the seas

Modern edge: The boat's kitchen has everything, including a state-of-the-art oven and ice maker

Room for all: The bedrooms offer plenty of space for passengers, with in-room sinks and storage cabinets

The sporty Custom Line 108', measuring 32.9m (107ft11in), has five spacious cabins and six bathrooms for guests and a further three cabins and three bathrooms in the crew quarter.

Two of the guest cabins are twins, two are doubles and the spacious master bedroom has enough room for an office area and his-and-hers sinks.

Each of the guest cabins feature sun-trapping windows that allow the maximum amount of light into the room and for its residents to look over the passing landscape - all while preserving its privacy.

Heesen Amore Mio

Record breaker: The Heesen Amore Mio is the largest and most powerful sports yacht ever built in the Netherlands

A bit of all white: The boat features a sleek outside deck with clean furnishings and natural wood floor

Dinner is served: Guests on the boat can enjoy an open-air dining experience, thanks to large outdoor decks

Room with a view: Photos show how owners could potentially make use of the boat's entertaining space

Plush: The Heesen Amore Mio features five en-suite cabins, all finished to a high spec

The Heesen Amore Mio, measuring 45m (147ft7in), features five en-suite cabins and can travel up to 30 knots.

Guests will flock to the upper decks where there's a 18m (59ft) long sun deck that's equipped with a cinema.

There's also enough space for ten guests to sit and dine, a square pool and an infinity terrace.

Amels Holland Elixir

Keep fit: The Amels Holland Elixir is a 55m (180ft5in) vessel - it features a jacuzzi on deck and gym facilities

Ocean views: Floor-to-ceiling windows in the boat's lounge area allow boaters to look out over the high seas

Cocktail hour: Guests can enjoy beverages from the roof bar aboard the Amels Holland Elixir - before plunging into the hot tub

Amels Holland Elixir is a 55m (180ft5in) vessel boasting six luxurious cabins.

The bathroom in the master suite in particular is worthy of any five-star hotel with a full bath, shower and vanity area.

It's not scrimping on extra touches as there's also a jacuzzi on deck and gym facilities.

Fraser Yachts Eclipse

Party at sea: The Fraser Yacht Eclipse was built to house 12 guests, with three double rooms and two twin cabins

Room for two: Faux brickwork and caramel colours give this twin bedroom a cosy feel

Living the high life: The Eclipse looks more like a five-star hotel than a boat - the watery views are the only giveaway

Marble tops: The bathroom aboard the Eclipse features a deep bathtub, polished tops and gold sink basins

The 43m (141ft1in) Eclipse is available for sale and for chartering, with rates starting from 115,000 (97,673) per week.

Guests can stay in one of the three double or two twin cabins.

There's an impressive upper deck with a jacuzzi and room for a jet ski.

Or if you prefer, there's a fabulous lounge with sit-down bar for evenings where you just want to relax.

Gulf Craft Majesty 155

New ride: United Arab Emirates superyacht builder Gulf Craft has launched its largest yacht yet, the 47 metre Majesty 155

Lounging around: The Majesty 155 features a large lounge area, which still looks roomy despite the giant sofas

Too much choice! Passengers can choose to sit on the sofas or at the bar - perfect for breakfast or cocktail hour

To sit and sleep: One of the bedrooms on the Majesty 155 - featuring clean furnishings - is so big it even has a lounge area

The impressive-looking Gulf Craft Majesty 155 comes in at 47m (154ft1in) and features five guest cabins.

Its master suite has made the most of the space with a fold-down balcony that can be extended in or out to create a small, private outdoor space.

And even better - there is an on-board elevator that connects all the decks.

Heesen Galactic Super Nova

All action: The Galactic Super Nova boasts a foredeck that can be used as a helipad or transformed into a cinema

Shiny and new: The Galactic Super Nova features slick monochrome interiors with chrome finishings

Welcome aboard: A shot shows people enjoying the views and soaking in the sea air on board the Galactic Super Nova

Storage space: Cabinets run the length of the lounge, which features a large flat screen TV

The Galactic Super Nova, at 70m (229ft7in), is the biggest vessel built by yacht specialists Heesen to date.

As well as six staterooms, including a master suite and a VIP cabin, there's also a foredeck that can be used as a touch-and-go helipad or transformed into a cinema.

And for those looking to relax, there's an infinity pool with a waterfall, glass-panelled bottom and hydro-massage spa jets.

Mondomarine M50

The Mondomarine M50 is available in an eye-catching red or a gun-metal grey

To suit all tastes: The boat's new owners can choose to customise it when they buy the vessel

Basic model: As a standard though, the 49.1m (161ft) yacht has five guest cabins with the master suite offering enough space for a jacuzzi bath and a balcony

The Mondomarine M50 is available in an eye-catching red or a gun-metal grey and its new owners can choose to customise it when they buy the vessel.

As standard though, the 49.1m (161ft) yacht has five guest cabins with the master suite offering enough space for a jacuzzi bath and a balcony.

For customisation, owners are invited to work with Hot Labs designers, who created the exterior, to envision their own interiors.

Custom Line Navetta 37

Bigger and better: Coinciding with its 20th anniversary, Custom Line announced its largest model, the Navetta 37

Mood lighting: The Navetta 37 boasts double rooms with plenty of room to relax in

Lookout point: A bathroom on the Navetta 37 has floor-to-ceiling glass partitions so bathers can see the sea

The 37m (121ft6in) Custom Line Navetta 37 was launched earlier this year and was designed with the ability to 'go anywhere' in mind.

But while being very sea-worthy, its five guest cabins are also designed for comfort and each of the double rooms offers its residents plenty of room to relax in.

And, for cooler nights, there's also a hot tub to warm your cockles.

Baglietto Unicorn

Welcome aboard: Measuring 54m (177ft2in), the Baglietto Unicorn accommodates ten guests and 11 crew members

His and hers: One of the Unicorn's bathrooms is decked out with glossy black cladding and a deep tub to fit two

Funky vibe: While many of the other boats feature light-coloured furnishings, the Unicorn's colour scheme is centered around black and silver

Sit back and relax: Guests on the boat can hang out in the lounge while watching the world go by

Breakfast bar: The Unicorn's kitchen had a round-edged island, lit by overhead spotlights

The Baglietto Unicorn made its debut this summer. Measuring 54m (177ft2in), the ship accommodates ten guests and 11 crew members.

It features 'classic yet contemporary' interiors, with sleek black and silver furnishings.

Amenities include an indoor gym and rooftop hot tub.

Monte Carlo MCY105

Special delivery: The unveiling of the MCY 105, the largest to date, coincided with Monte Carlo Yachts' five year anniversary

Collaborative process: This 32m (105ft) superyacht was created by the design team of Dan Lenard and Carlo Nuvolari with the active input of her Hong Kong owner

For the fashion pack: It features luxury decor from Hermes and Armani along with custom pieces from the Italian furniture maker, Poltrona Frau

Leading the way: In addition to its lavish interiors and sporty exterior, the beauty of the MCY 105 is its short, six-month build time, made possible by advanced construction methods taken from the automotive and aviation industries

Time to snuggle up: Dark wooden paneling gives the boat a cosy feel - perfect for some stormier days at sea

Room with a view: The bedrooms aboard the Monte Carlo MCY105 offer guests plenty of space

Monte Carlo Yachts celebrated its fifth anniversary this spring by unveiling its newest and largest flagship yacht, the MCY 105.

This 32m (105ft) superyacht was created by the design team of Dan Lenard and Carlo Nuvolari with the active input of her Hong Kong owner. It features luxury decor from Hermes and Armani along with custom pieces from the Italian furniture maker, Poltrona Frau.

Inside, the split-level master suite at the bow is more like a roomy apartment than a cabin, with the upper-level bed lit by a broad skylight.
Theresa May has been urged to give the go-ahead for flights to resume between the UK and Sharm el-Sheikh by the head of the cross-party parliamentary group on Egypt.

The group's chairman, Sir Gerald Howarth, has written to the Prime Minister asking her to end the ban and claimed that significant progress has been made on tightening security checks at the Red Sea resort's airport.

He also warned that there was a risk of people in Sharm becoming 'radicalised' if the area's tourism industry continued to suffer.

Flights between the UK and Sharm were suspended by the Government in November 2015

Flights between the UK and Sharm were suspended by the Government in November 2015 after the terrorist bombing of a Russian passenger plane, killing 224 people.

Britons at the resort were brought home in a series of rescue flights with extra airport security.

During a visit to Egypt in July, Sir Gerald inspected how baggage was handled at the airport and met senior officials.

In an interview with the Press Association, the Conservative MP for Aldershot said: 'They really have been listening to what the UK authorities have been asking them to do. They are clearly bending over backwards to try to deliver.

'One of the guys we met was a Department for Transport (DfT) official and when I asked him, 'Are there any showstoppers to the resumption of flights?', he said 'No'.

'I believe that the necessary measures have been put in place to minimise the risk.

'We live in an imperfect world and no government can guarantee 100 percent security anywhere.'

Sir Gerald Howarth explained that hotels in Sharm el sheikh (above) were only 25-35 per cent occupied and were 'clearly hurting' from the UK flight ban

In June, British Airways suspended its flights to Sharm 'indefinitely', stating that 'the safety and security of our customers will always be our top priorities'.

Easyjet, Monarch and Thomson Airways have previously said they are awaiting for the Foreign and Commonwealth to change its travel advice, which currently warns against all but essential travel by air to or from the resort.

Sir Gerald explained that hotels in Sharm were only 25-35 percent occupied and were 'clearly hurting' from the UK flight ban.

'They've invested a huge amount of money in these really very sophisticated places,' he said.

'They've kept on the staff. They can't do that indefinitely and, if the staff are laid off, we will have a substantial number of people who will be potentially radicalised.

'There is an imperative on ensuring that the resort can resume its contribution to the prosperity of Egypt.'

Last month, Mrs May welcomed Egypt's efforts to improve security at Sharm airport in a phone conversation with the country's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

An account of the call released by Downing Street gave no indication the Prime Minister was ready to ease Government advice, saying only that the UK would continue 'working closely' with Cairo on the issue.

Last month Mrs May welcomed Egypt's efforts to improve security at Sharm airport (above) in a phone conversation with the country's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'The Prime Minister said she recognised the economic effects of the suspension, given the importance of the tourism industry to Egypt's economy, and she praised the Egyptian government's ongoing efforts to improve security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport.'

Sir Gerald said the resumption of flights was ' exclusively in the hands of the Prime Minister' and he believed ' she is keen to make a decision in the next few weeks'.

He added: 'We hope that we can resolve this problem.'

A DfT spokeswoman said: 'The security of British nationals is our top priority, and we took the decision to suspend flights from Sharm el-Sheikh in November last year to protect the travelling public.
But a fat family squeezed the tourist out and he was

A holidaymaker was left bitterly disappointed after he was unable to ride a steam train up a mountain- because there were too many fat people on board.

Tourist Anthony Poppel, 69, already had a ticket but was told by staff at the Snowdon Mountain Railway there was no room after an obese family climbed on board.

The train could not take the strain of carrying the chubby passengers to the top of the highest mountain in England and Wales - and rail chiefs today admitted: 'It is a growing problem of obesity in this country.'

Tourist Anthony Poppel, 69, already had a ticket but was told by staff at the Snowdon Mountain Railway there was no room after an obese family climbed on board

After booking his return ticket on the traditional steam service, Poppel arrived on the platform to be told there was no room. He received a letter of apology blaming the rotund family who refused to give up their seats (pictured)

He had already paid for the 32.50 return trip up the 4.5miles up the steep North Wales peak but the fat family refused to get off to make way for him.

The group of four took up the space for five people - and Poppel was squeezed out.

Retired office worker Poppel, who travelled more than 300 miles from Suffolk for the dream steam trip, said: 'It ruined my holiday.'

The pensioner was looking forward to his trip on the Snowdon Mountain Railway after travelling from his home in Suffolk to North Wales.

But after booking his return ticket on the traditional steam service, he arrived on the platform to be told there was no room.

He received a letter of apology blaming the rotund family who refused to give up their seats.

It said: 'Your ticket was valid for the departure at 12 noon but unfortunately it seems that other occupants of the carriage were large in stature and refused to move their family group to accommodate you more easily in your allotted carriage.'

'Our carriages accommodate 10 people but the issue of obesity in our country is leading to more incidents of this type every year.'

Poppel, of Martlesham, Suffolk, was on holiday at the seaside resort of Llandudno.

The pensioner was looking forward to his trip on the Snowdon Mountain Railway. It takes passengers from the station at Llanberis at the foot of the mountain to the summit of Snowdon (pictured) up the winding rail line

He even arrived 30 minutes early for the spectacular 90 minute journey to the 'roof of Wales'.

He said: 'I was told to arrive there at 11.30 to pick up my ticket to get on the compartment of the one-carriage train.

'But there was no space for me, it was full-up.

'When I went to get in, there were people sitting down and several kids in there as well. The young guard who was there said, "Sorry, it is full". I had to go and get my money back.

'It ruined my holiday really. I had travelled a long way to see it and I thought it was poor show.'

He added: 'It was my first time in Wales and I was really looking forward to going up Snowdon.'

The 4.5 mile narrow gauge railway which was built in 1896 - intended for the slimmer passengers of Victorian days.

It takes passengers from the station at Llanberis at the foot of the mountain to the summit of Snowdon up the winding rail line.

A spokesman for the famous railway, which runs to the top of the 3,560ft mountain, said: 'More than 130,000 passengers travel on Snowdon's narrow gauge railway every year.

'On the day of Mr Poppel's visit a family of four occupied the full width of his carriage due to their physical size and weight, taking the space normally reserved for five people.

'We requested that they sit opposite one another but they refused.
An Austrian airline is claiming to have launched the shortest international flight - taking just eight minutes.

The quick trip, being sold by People's Viennaline, takes passengers from St Gallen in Switzerland to Friedrichshafen in Germany.

Tickets for the 13-mile journey - which will operate twice daily from November 2 - will cost 34 (40).

Come fly with me: The quick trip, being sold by People's Viennaline, takes passengers from St Gallen in Switzerland to Friedrichshafen in Germany

At present, people travelling between the two countries - partitioned by Lake Constance - can drive 77km (47 miles), which takes about an hour.

There is also a ferry service available but is longer again, with times starting from one hour and 20 minutes.

A 50-seat Embraer 145 aircraft will be used for the new route, which will run ten times a week.

New flight path: Tickets for the 13-mile journey - which will operate twice daily from November 2 - will cost 34 (40)

The idea behind the flight is to use it as a feeder flight to connect with the airline's Friedrichshafen-Cologne route, according to People's Viennaline CEO, Daniel Steffen.

However, passengers can also disembark at Friedrichshafen after the eight-minute flight from St Gallen.

Previously, the route between the Austrian capital of Vienna and the Slovak capital of Bratislava was the shortest international schedule.

However, the ten-minute trip is no longer operational anymore.

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The world's shortest domestic flight is currently the mile-long journey from Westray to Papa Westray in Scotland's Orkey Islands, which can take as little as 47 seconds, depending on wind direction.

A bidding war over the route was settled in 2013, with the contract being awarded to Scottish airline Loganair, its current operator.
Bilbo Baggins, the main character in JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, likes nothing more than staying at home in his enchantingly cosy hobbit hole.

Indeed anyone who has read the book or watched the films cannot help but fall in love with the diminutive house and long to stay there... and now you can.

Enterprising Kristie Wolfe from Idaho has created the perfect hobbit hole in Washington state and rents it for 158 a night on Airbnb.

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Enterprising Kristie Wolfe from Idaho has created the perfect hobbit hole in Washington and rents it for 158 a night on Airbnb

The designer and dressmaker bought a five acre plot of land above Lake Chelan for $18,000 (13,850) last summer and instantly got to work

Needless to say, Wolfe, 33, was inspired by Tolkien's novel and the ensuing films and cartoons and - following her success with building a treehouse in Hawaii - she set about finding suitable land in North America for her hobbit house.

'I have a short list of different types of building materials or unusual structures that I would like to experiment with and an underground home was high on that list, Wolfe told MailOnline Travel.

The designer and dressmaker bought a five acre plot above Lake Chelan for $18,000 (13,850) last summer and instantly got to work.

The hobbit hole was dug and constructed within days following permission from officials who only saw hand-sketched plans on graph paper.

With sustainability being of paramount importance to Wolfe, she set up a solar panel, plus septic and water tanks in the 288 square feet house.

Family and friends helped Wolfe throughout, lending a hand to the roofing and wrapping before the entrepreneur set about decorating the interior.

The house is almost the spitting image of Bilbo Baggins's fictional home in The Hobbit which was recreated as above in the film version of the book

For hobbits such as Bilbo and Frodo (as seen in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) the tiny home was the perfect size for their diminutive proportions

Both resourceful and creative, the house builder installed the top of an old cable spool for the iconic round door, while a local artist made the hinges. Cheap, secondhand windows were then hidden behind repurposed circular mirror frames.

For the cordwood floor, Wolfe found bits of wood from roadsides and among discarded firewood, cut them into one inch-thick sections, stuck them down with a heavy construction adhesive and filled the joints with a thin mortar by hand - all with the help of her nearest and dearest.

With sustainability being of paramount importance in Wolfe's house, she set up a solar panel, septic and a water tank in the 288 square feet house - which was dug and constructed within days following permission from the country (obtained with only hand-sketched plans on graph paper)

Both resourceful and creative, the tiny house builder installed the top of an old cable spool for the iconic round door while a local artist made the hinges

Available on Airbnb since March of this year, the completed tiny house sleeps two people in a queen bed, has hot water and features an indoor fireplace. In keeping with Bilbo's penchant for a staying in his hobbit hole with a pipe, smoking is also permitted.

For the cordwood floor, Wolfe found bits of wood from roadsides and among discarded firewood, cut them into one inch-thick sections, stuck them down with a heavy construction adhesive and filled the joints with a thin mortar by hand - all with the help of her nearest and dearest

Available on Airbnb since March of this year, the completed tiny house sleeps two people in a queen bed, electricity is supplied by solar energy and features an indoor propane fireplace.

In keeping with Bilbo's penchant for a staying in his hobbit hole with a pipe, smoking is also permitted.

Wolfe says of the delightful property on the home rental website: 'Reverently framed by the iconic round doorway, the wondrous views will entrance your imagination and inspire an unforgettable journey.

'Every nook of this little habitation will warm your sole, every cranny will charm your expedition of repose. Up the pathway, tucked into the earth, an unbelievable adventure awaits!'

She adds that guests can expect the majority of their neighbors to be deer, rabbits, birds and grouse in the remote location.

And was it worth all the hard work? 'Definitely' the 33-year-old says. 'The reception has been great from guests that have stayed and I love that I can share my passion of off grid, sustainable, simple living with people.'

She adds that due to the vast nature of the area of the plot she continues to visit every couple of months and work on things.

Wolfe was introduced to construction at an early age thanks to her mother who, with six children, had to remodel their houses to fit the family.

Her mother was involved in her treehouse project in Hawaii a couple of years ago, she says, but hated being on ladders.

'I kept telling her all the next one I'll build into the hill so you won't have to worry about it,' Wolfe jokes.

Her mum turned 60 during the hobbit house project and helped her daughter throughout.

Wolfe says of the delightful property on the home sharing website: 'Reverently framed by the iconic round doorway, the wondrous views will entrance your imagination and inspire an unforgettable journey'

'Every nook of this little habitation will warm your sole, every cranny will charm your expedition of repose. Up the pathway, tucked into the earth, an unbelievable adventure awaits!' she writes

The house may not have a kitchen but it has a delightful deep free-standing bath

Cheap, secondhand windows are hidden behind repurposed circular mirror frames

The current house is themed after a woodworker - hence the tree design on the inside of the front door - but Wolfe sees the next one being a beekeeper (and slightly more feminine) and hopes to make the windows slightly bigger - although that is the only change she'll be making

She now intends to create her 'shire' and has started on two further hillside homes.

The current house is themed after a woodworker - hence the tree design on the inside of the front door - but Wolfe sees the next one being a beekeeper (and slightly more feminine) and hopes to make the windows slightly bigger - although that is the only change she'll be making.

In addition Wolfe has resolved to construct an above-ground communal kitchen with a thatched roof that will reassemble a traditional English pub due to the absence of proper cooking areas in the homes.

Tolkien wrote of his protagonist's abode: 'Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.'
Rail bosses have come up with a new solution to overcrowding on Britains busiest train routes - flip-up seats which create more room for standing passengers.

A new generation of space-saving seats have been developed at a cost of 900,000, and could boost passenger capacity by up to 30 per cent, the Times reported.

One of the designs comprises face-to-face seats either side of the table which can then be flipped up at busy times to squeeze in more standing passengers.

Rail bosses have come up with a new solution to overcrowding on Britains busiest train routes - flip-up seats which create more room for standing passengers

A new generation of space-saving seats have been developed at a cost of 900,000. This image shows how passengers can squeeze in to previously unused spaces

The seats have been designed for journeys up to an hour long

Another design option is a skinny-seat located on the aisle, which forces travellers to sit in an upright position to save legroom and increasing the number of rows in a carriage.

The designs, which were funded by the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) and showcased in a video by the firm behind them, could be made a feature in commuter trains within a year as part of plans to tackle overcrowding.

It comes after a government report this summer showed that a third of rail passengers travelling into London in the morning rush hour have to stand, while the figure is 20 per cent in Birmingham and 16 per cent in Leeds and Manchester.

Bruce Williamson, spokesman for Railfuture, the passenger campaign group, said: We support imaginative solutions to overcrowding, but the bottom line is that most people want a comfortable seat.

The flip-up seats will result in an increase in capacity of 30 per cent, according to London-based transport consultancy firm PriestmanGoode who led the project

This sort of thing is not a long-term solution to the decades of underinvestment that have created capacity problems on trains.

The flip-up seats, designed for journeys up to an hour long, will result in an increase in capacity of 30 per cent, according to London-based transport consultancy firm PriestmanGoode who led the project.

Paul Priestman, the chairman, said that a change was necessary because the seats on trains had hardly changed for more than 100 years.
Sitting in the spacious Chart Room of Cunard's Queen Victoria, sipping brandy while listening to a string quartet of talented young women wearing elegant evening gowns, my husband Jim turned to me and said: 'I wonder where everyone is?'

We were in near solitude. The answer is that there are so many places to be and things to do on a cruise ship that it's often hard to believe there are two or three thousand fellow passengers on board.

It's all a far cry from what we'd imagined cruising might be like when we first ventured on board the old QE2 about 20 years ago.

There are so many places to be and things to do on a cruise ship that it's often hard to believe there are two or three thousand fellow passengers on board

We were apprehensive about signing up to share our holiday with so many total strangers. We wondered whether it would all feel rather cramped, like a posh Butlin's-onsea. We certainly thought it would be a one-off for us  just to say we'd done it.

All these years later, I've lost count of how many wonderful trips we've had on board a variety of fabulous ships. I often give lectures about the royals on the Cunard ships. It can be quite a daunting experience, as the theatres seat hundreds of people  and you always have your fingers crossed for a full house.

Luckily, folk of almost all nationalities seem fascinated by our Royal Family. I tell them all the crazy things that happened when I travelled the world as the BBC's Royal Correspondent: President Mandela's infectious excitement when the Queen visited South Africa  and her joy at meeting him; Diana's landmine mission in Angola; and the rollercoaster of reporting on the War of the Waleses. Americans, in particular, like to know every detail about William, Kate and, of course, Harry.

But, for me, the real joy of cruising is that it takes so much of the hassle out of seeing the world.

After the initial journey to join your ship  which may involve the stress of air travel and almost certainly the horror of holiday traffic on the motorways  you can unpack, unwind and let the world come to you.

After an evening of fine wining, dining and possibly dancing, you wake up refreshed and marvel at the sight of a new country, island or city that has arrived at your door.

I have woken to the sound of sea lions barking at Puerto Vallarta in Mexico and stood on the balcony in my nightie just after dawn as we arrived at the entrance to the Panama Canal. Seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time as we glided gently into New York after a sixday Atlantic crossing was sheer magic.

Yet nothing beats that initial peek at your destination for the day: yours to explore as much or as little as you choose.

But even though the industry is expanding rapidly, with more than 20million passengers a year, some myths about cruising persist. Let me debunk them for you.

Myth: We'll be cooped up like sardines

Well  first of all, it's certain to be a pretty magnificent tin. The sort of place that most of us would love to live in. And, beyond that, there's almost always a sense of space and a variety of quiet corners.

Most ships have impressive libraries with luxurious leather armchairs where you can relax in peace. Some have crossword corners  peaceful spots where you can try your hand at the daily crossword in the ship's newspaper  and huge jigsaws scattered about to stop at, ponder and maybe add a piece or two.

Out on deck, there are plenty of sun-loungers, so you won't be sunbathing cheek by jowl. And, of course, there's always the privacy of your own cabin  or stateroom, as they're often called  where you can chill out in front of the TV or, better still, watch the ocean glide by.

Myth: All the food will make me fat!

There's no getting away from the fact that you can eat and drink from the moment you wake until long into the night, all the while topping up with room service.

But after the initial novelty of having so many delicious treats on tap, Jim and I find we generally gain no more than a pound or two on cruises.

There's no getting away from the fact that you can eat and drink from the moment you wake until long into the night, all the while topping up with room service

We make it a rule never to be tempted by the amazing desserts  but we indulge liberally in everything else. And the standards are usually extremely high.

Sometimes, in the Caribbean, the crew will organise a barbecue on the beach. In the top-grade Grill restaurants on Cunard's three Queens, you can ask for pretty much anything you want  and often the maitre d' will cook it at your table.

Myth: If you've done one you've done them all

Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are so many ships and destinations, each offering something different. In recent years, my husband Jim and I have been lucky enough to holiday on the largest full-rigged sailing ship in the world  the Royal Clipper  which gave us a really unique experience.

You can climb the mast, help hoist the sails or simply admire the beauty of an exquisite tall ship.

We've visited Australia on Queen Victoria (which feels a little bit like home to us) and, last month, we went on our first river cruise down the Rhine aboard Uniworld's SS Antoinette, which turned out to be very luxurious indeed.

When Jim and I went on our very first cruise all those years ago, we were astonished that so many of our fellow voyagers had notched up dozens of cruises. But, now, we understand why. And what's more, we count ourselves as life members of that happy band of travellers.

Myth: It'll be just like Butlin's

There's certainly a similar sense of joy, conviviality and fun about cruising, but you never feel as if you're being corralled into taking part in any of the activities.

The options are set out in a daily newssheet from which you can pick and choose.

And there's so much you can learn: many ships have lecture programmes about the history, arts or culture and politics of the places you're visiting. You can learn to paint, dance, ice-skate, play croquet or go wall climbing.

My perfect day on board is to have breakfast on the balcony, then go to the line-dancing class (always a huge laugh), relax, read, enjoy a light lunch, go for a swim, then run for a mile or so around the jogging deck before a yoga class  followed by sundowners on the balcony and dinner in one of the restaurants.

Myth: I'll soon get bored of it

Boredom is not an option. There are so many ports of call to explore and on-shore adventures to be had.

In Santorini, Greece, we hired a quad bike and raced around like teenagers. In Bonaire, in the Caribbean, we began to believe we really were teenagers and hired a huge Harley-Davidson  only to find neither of us could reach the brake pedal!

In Germany recently, we went on a tour that took us to a vineyard where they make organic vinegar  so good you can drink it as an aperitif.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage is over, with the actress filing for divorce just days ago.

But the Hollywood golden couple's marital doom may have been foreshadowed by an explosive fight that broke out between the then newlywed pair in Sydney, Australia, two years ago.

The 41-year-old actress and the 52-year-old actor - who tied the knot just three months before in August - were pictured engaging in a dramatic exchange on their InterContinental Hotel balcony on November 17, 2014.

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Sign of things to come? Divorcing couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were pictured embroiled in a heated conversation in Sydney, Australia, TWO years ago

Heated: The explosive argument broke out during the couple's visit to Sydney on November 17, 2014

An eyewitness told InTouch at the time: 'When Brad threw up his arms, you could see the frustration on his face. He was clearly exasperated with her.

'They kept talking over each other and putting their hands up in anger.'

'They were upset but getting nowhere. Angie looked like she was on the verge of tears,' the source added.

Upset? Angelina appeared downcast as she stood in front of the railing with her arms crossed

Wearing a black T-shirt and trousers with a fedora, the Fight Club actor was seen puffing on a cigarette during the argument.

Angelina, who had undergone a preventative double mastectomy in February 2013, was also pictured with a lit cigarette in hand during the row.

She was dressed down in a grey T-shirt and black trousers with a grey cardigan, which she took off at one point and wrapped around her waist.

Sullen: The mother-of-six was claimed to be 'on the verge of tears' over the dramatic exchange

She appeared tense and was seen leaning against the balcony railing as she spoke to her husband.

The Maleficent star was also pictured looking sullen and downcast with her arms crossed as she stood on the balcony.

On the same evening, following the quarrel, the pair stepped out for the Sydney premiere of Angelina's film Unbroken.

Distanced: The argument took place just hours before Brad and Angelina stepped out for the Sydney premiere of her film Unbroken

The appearance marked the parents-of-six's first red carpet as a married couple.

An eyewitness claimed to InTouch that the pair appeared distant during the event, and Brad then flew off 'in one private jet and Angie in another.'

The actress-turned-director filed for divorce from the handsome actor last Thursday on September 15, citing irreconcilable differences for the split.

Later that night: Following their dramatic argument, Brad stepped out to support Angelina at the premiere of her film Unbroken

Angelina has also requested physical custody of their six children -Maddox, age 15; Pax, aged 12; Zahara, aged 11; Shiloh, aged 10; and twins Vivienne and Knox, aged eight.

A TMZ source claims the actress' decision was made based on the way 'Brad was parenting the children,' adding that 'she was extremely upset with his methods.'

The source also claims that the mother-of-six was 'fed up' with her husband's consumption of 'weed and possibly alcohol' as well as his 'anger problem.'

Distant: Despite keeping up appearances, an eyewitness claimed the couple were distant during the event

Custody battle? Angelina has requested physical custody of the couple's six children

Brad told DailyMail.com in a statement: 'I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.'

A report in PageSix claimed that Angelina filed for divorce after hiring a private eye who learned he had been having an affair with French actress Marion Cotillard.

The couple, dubbed 'Brangelina', met and began dating in 2005 while filming their first movie together Mr. And Mrs. Smith.

Cheating? PageSix has claimed Brad's affair with Allied co-star Marion Cotillard (pictured in a still from the film) was what broke his marriage

Last seen: The couple's last red carpet appearance was at AFI Fest last year promoting their movie By The Sea

They dated for 10 years before finally tying the knot in a very intimate ceremony on August 23, 2014.

Held in the chapel of Chateau Miraval  the family's estate in the French village of Correns  the nuptials were attended by just 20 guests.

Their last red carpet appearance together was at the AFI Fest promoting their movie By The Sea almost a year ago.
On Monday she glammed up for the Paris premiere of her new film La Danseuse.

But by Tuesday afternoon actress Lily-Rose Depp she had traded in the haute couture for some cosy casual wear as she made her way out of Los Angeles International Airport following her long-haul flight from France.

Prizing comfort above all else, the 17-year-old rising star slipped into an oversized Converse sweatshirt, which emphasised her petite frame.

Casual chic: On Tuesday afternoon actress Lily-Rose Depp made her way out of Los Angeles International Airport following her long-haul flight from Paris

A seasoned international traveler, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis wore a t-shirt beneath her top, well-aware that layering is essential to staying comfortable in the air - even if you're traveling in First Class.

Proving that comfort can be sexy, she teamed her top with a pair of spray-on, navy blue leggings which showed off the contours of her perfect pins.

Completing the off-duty look, she wore black trainers and white socks.

Airplane couture: Prizing comfort above all else, the 17-year-old rising star slipped into an oversized Converse sweatshirt, which emphasised her petite frame

She gets it: A seasoned traveler, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis wore a t-shirt beneath her top, well-aware that layering is essential to staying comfortable in the air

Taking after her mother, who knows how to jazz up even the simplest of looks, Lily-Rose carried her mobile phone in a bright red case, which matched her perfectly polished nails.

Ready to hit the streets and battle those bright California rays, the young actress wore a pair of oblong black shades with metallic studs.

A natural born stunner, she went make-up free and let her complexion shine on its own without any artificial enhancement.

Shady lady: Ready to hit the streets and battle those bright California Rays, the young actress wore a pair of oblong black shades with metallic studs

It's me: A natural born stunner, she went make-up free

Just hours earlier, at the Paris premiere of her new film La Danseuse at the Cinema Gaumont Opera, Lily-Rose wowed onlookers in a chic sequin mini dress and retro T-bar pumps as she beamed on the red carpet.

She was the epitome of retro glamour in the understated, sleeveless dress which featured a flirty flapper hem.

She wore her glossy caramel tresses in an artfully tousled updo and emphasized her striking peepers with bronze eyeshadow and lashings of mascara.

About last night: Just hours earlier, at the Paris premiere of her new film La Danseuse, Lily-Rose wowed onlookers in a chic sequin mini dress and retro T-bar pumps



Despite attracting attention in the fashion world, Lily Rose appears to be carving out a successful path as an actress, with the project marking her fourth major movie in two years.

The Chanel muse featured in the fantasy French drama Planetarium alongside Hollywood star Natalie Portman.

She also starred in Kevin Smith's comedy-horror films Tusk and Yoga Hosers, alongside her acting father.
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He spent Tuesday morning on Hollywood Boulevard, where his Bad Santa 2 co-star Kathy Bates was honoured with a star on the Walk Of Frame.

But Billy Bob Thornton's role in the ceremony was very much overshadowed by news of ex-wife Angelina Jolie's divorce from Brad Pitt after 13 years together.

The 41-year-old Angelina split from Billy Bob, who is 20 years her senior, when she and Brad fell in love while filming hitman comedy Mr. And Mrs. Smith in 2003.

Better things to do: Billy Bob Thornton spent Tuesday with Shirley MacLaine helping to induct Kathy Bates on to the prestigious Hollywood Walk Of Fame and has yet to comment on ex-wife Angelie Jolie's decision to divorce Brad Pitt

Billy Bob, 61, has yet to comment on the situation, instead focusing on Kathy's star ceremony.

He was joined at the event outside the TCL Chinese Theatre by 68-year Kathy's frequent co-star, Shirley MacLaine, 82.

The pair worked together on 1992's Used People, 1995's West Side Waltz, The Dress Code in 2000, Rumor Has It in 2005, and Valentine's Day in 2010.

Puckering up: Shirley, 82, and 61-year-old Billy Bob planted kisses on the 68-year-old Oscar-winning actress's cheek as she held a copy of her star

The real thing: Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Leron Gubler held up a star as Shirley and Billy Bob looked on. Both have worked with Kathy many times

Billy Bob also co-starred with Kathy in 1998's Primary Colours.

On a hot and unusually humid day in Los Angeles, Kathy kept cool in a white dress with a grey pattern and grey pumps as she posed between Shirley and Billy Bob.

Shirley wore a sheer orange blouse, that complimented the colour of her hair, blue capri pants and a matching blue scarf around her neck plus cream sandals.

Having a chat: The Valentine's Day co-stars talked as Billy Bob leaned in to hear

Paying tribute: Kathy, who will play Billy Bob's mother in Bad Santa 2, was honored with the 2,589th star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame

Billy Bob looked comfortable in a striped shirt in shades of white, peach and orange, plus black and grey striped trousers.

American Horror Story star Kathy was honored with the 2,589th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, saluting a career that has brought her an Oscar for her role in Misery, and two Emmys.

Meanwhile, Angelina is reportedly being represented by divorce lawyer Laura Wasser, who helped in her divorce from Billy Bob in 2003 and is representing Johnny Depp in his split from Amber Heard.
Her elder sister Kate is known for testing the boundaries of fashion.

And Lottie Moss proved she was every inch as chic as her superstar sibling as she slipped into her second stylish ensemble of the day on Tuesday.

After turning heads in a chic rose print shift dress at the Burberry and Dazed magazine cover launch, the 18-year-old model slipped into a sheer floral top for the i-D And CHANEL Present The Fifth Sense - Mirror Maze By Es Devlin exhibition.

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Twice as nice: Lottie Moss proved she was every inch as chic as her superstar sibling Kate as she slipped into her second stylish ensemble of the day on Tuesday

Flashing the flesh whilst remaining demure, Lottie layered a black bandeau beneath her sheer top, which was adorned with blue lace flowers.

Tucked into a little black skirt, the garment flashed a hint of her toned stomach whilst showing off her small waist.

Pleated in design, the thigh-skimming skirt also offered a glimpse at her lean legs, which she had elongated with gold barely there heels.

Blonde beauty: The 18-year-old model slipped into a sheer floral top for the i-D And CHANEL Present The Fifth Sense - Mirror Maze By Es Devlin exhibition

Lacy lady: Flashing the flesh whilst remaining demure, Lottie layered a black bandeau beneath her sheer top, which was adorned with blue lace flowers

Fashionable friends: Aimee Phillips and Nick Grimshaw cuddled up together at the bash

Lovely ladies: Camille Benett and Billie J D Porter looked chic in their ensembles

Velvet vixens: Alicia Rountree and Gizzi Erskine rocked the fabric of the season

Punk rock: Daisy De Villeneuve rocked some vintage vibes in her laid back ensemble

On the decks: Isabella Summers provided the musical entertainment for the evening

Keeping her accessories simple, the stunning star carried a large black clutch bag adorned with a cartoon, which she grasped between her perfectly manicured fingers.

Ensuring she wouldn't overpower her eye-catching outfit, the starlet also opted for a flattering make-up palette that traced her defined cheekbones with rouge and saw her plump pout painted with rosy gloss.

She finished off the look by styling her honey coloured locks in loose waves that framed her pretty face.

Lottie was in good company at the bash, which was also attended by the likes of Nick Grimshaw and Alicia Rountree.

Floral fancy: Lottie once again shone in her own right as she attended the the Burberry and Dazed magazine cover launch hosted by Christopher Bailey and the father of her niece, Jefferson Hack at Makers House in London on Tuesday night

Earlier in the night Lottie wowed at the Burberry and Dazed magazine cover launch hosted by Christopher Bailey and the father of her niece, Jefferson Hack, at London's Makers House on Tuesday night.

Lottie was perhaps invited personally to the event by Kate's ex-boyfriend Jefferson, the editor of Dazed, who is the father of her 13-year-old daughter Lila Grace Moss Hack.

Typically well turned-out for the evening ahead, she slipped into the structured shift dress adorned with metallic flowers emblazoned atop a black base.

She clutched an over-sized leather clutch bag while accessorising with a teetering pair of gold strappy sandals - adding length to her long pins.

Her blonde locks were perfectly coiffed into natural-looking curls while her make-up was dewy and fresh with fluttering lashes and a nude lip making up her beauty regimen.

Blonde beauty: The 18-year-old blonde beauty looked sensational in a chic rose print shift dress as she dazzled among fellow industry hotshots at the star-studded bash

She posed alongside Made In Chelsea star Josh 'JP' Patterson who looked dashing in black trousers with a checked jacket.

Lottie also grabbed The Face Of An Angel star Sai Bennett for a snap, with the girls looking phenomenal while Sai wore a slinky silver dress.

The blonde beauty is set in good stead to go far in the high-fashion business as older half-sibling Kate has graced the cover of British Vogue no less than 30 times with additional appearances on the publication's global issues.

Glam duo: Lottie also grabbed The Face Of An Angel star Sai Bennett for a snap, with the girls looking phenomenal while Sai wore a slinky silver dress

Hunky: She posed alongside Made In Chelsea star Josh 'JP' Patterson who looked dashing in black trousers with a checked jacket

Lottie first transformed into a cover girl for L'officiel's March issue last month and in the accompanying interview, she explained she feels 'no pressure' to live up to Kate's legacy.

She told the prestigious style bible: 'I am who I am and I do what I want, whether that is modelling or anything else. The success of my sister does not affect me in my choices. I feel no pressure in that respect.'

Lottie described 42-year-old Kate as 'simply someone other than me' and added it's 'my turn to tell my own story'.
They've been firm friends for years.

So it came as no surprise to see Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart seemed in great spirits at the press night after party for No Man's Land at St Martins Lane on Tuesday.

After taking to the stage at Wyndham's Theatre, the friends were basking in the warm reception they received as they partied with the cast and crew.

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Reunited: They're firm friends. So it came as no suprise to see Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart seemed in great spirits at the press night after party for No Man's Land on Tuesday

Reunited for the first time in seven years after they appeared in a production of Waiting for Godot together, the pair were undoubtedly glad to be working together once more.

Looking as dapper as ever in a colourful ensemble, Sir Ian donned a scarlet paisley smoking jacket with cream chinos and velvet loafers.

Meanwhile, Sir Patrick cut a suave figure in a fitted navy suit and patent black brogues.

Back in business: After taking to the stage at Wyndham's Theatre, the friends were basking in the warm reception they received as they partied with the cast and crew

Encore: (L-R) Owen Teale, Patrick, Sean Mathias (Director), Ian and Damien Moloney seemed in great spirits after receiving a stunning reception for their performance

Fantastic four: Reunited for the first time in seven years after they appeared in a production of Waiting for Godot together, the pair happily posed for snaps with their co-stars

The pair were joined by their co-stars Owen Teale and Damien Molony, as well as esteemed colleagues Michelle Collins and Floella Benjamin.

No Man's Land is an adaptation of Harold Pinter's play, which tells the story of two ageing writers, Hirst and Spooner, who strike up an unlikely friendship after meeting in a pub.

As the pair continue drinking and the tales take a turn for the unlikely, the banter soon turns into a revealing power game, further complicated by the return home of two sinister younger men.

Guests of honour: Michelle Collins and Floella Benjamin made an appearance at the party

Directed by Sean Mathias, No Mans Land previously toured Sheffield, Brighton and Cardiff and will continue its London run until December 17.

Speaking to the Guardian about working with his friend again, the thespian said: 'Playing Spooner to Patricks Hirst on Broadway was a constant joy, which is why I am delighted to be back with him in the West End.'

The pair also starred alongside each other in the X Men series.

Pleased: Sir Ian revealed he was delighted to be starring alongside Sir Patrick once more, seven years after they took to the stage on Broadway

The pair spoke about their preparations for the role on The One Show earlier this year, with Ian joking he was in awe of Patrick's physique.

The Star Trek actor revealed: 'I eat whatever I like in the old green room; a glass of wine and some potato chips.'

And Ian teased: To see a man of Patrick's age, who is not holding his stomach in as I'm doing on television now, is remarkable. He's as fit as he looks.'
She's been holidaying in Mykonos to celebrate her milestone 40th birthday.

But on Monday, Samantha Armytage was back to everyday life, shopping for groceries at a Woolworths supermarket in Sydney.

The media personality dressed down for the occasion going makeup free as she picked up several items including bananas, apples, mushrooms, pasta, pizza bases, wraps and Coke Zero.

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Back to reality! Samantha Armytage, 40, was seen picking up groceries at a Woolworths supermarket in Sydney on Monday, after celebrating her milestone birthday in style in Mykonos

Samantha cut a casual figure for the outing, sporting a grey loose-fitting shirt, coordinating scarf draped over her shoulders and chest and a pair of black leggings.

Accessorising with a pair of dark sunglasses hanging from the neckline of her top, leopard print flats and a pop of colour with a red manicure, she carried the rest of her belongings in a simple black shoulder bag.

Sweeping her short blonde tresses off her face into a casual do, the television presenter went makeup free with just a set of fake eyelashes.

Low-key: The Sunrise host cut a casual figure for the outing, sporting a grey loose-fitting shirt, coordinating scarf draped over her shoulders and chest and a pair of black leggings

Effortless: Accessorising with just a pair of dark sunglasses hanging from the neckline of her top, a pair of leopard print flats, and a pop of colour with a red manicure, she carried the rest of her belongings in a simple black shoulder bag left to hang on her shopping trolley

Natural: Sweeping her short blonde tresses off her face into a casual do, the television presenter went makeup free with just a set of fake eyelashes

The blonde beauty looked to be pondering her choices as she strolled through the supermarket aisles.

Selecting a variety of items, Samantha was seen picking up some fruit and veg, healthy wraps, mineral water, pasta, a pizza base, along with the standard milk and bread.

The outing comes just after she was seen to be having a ball, during her recent birthday trip to Greece.

Decisions: The blonde beauty looked to be pondering her choices as she strolled through the supermarket aisles

Health conscious: The personality was seen at one stage selecting fresh green vegetables

Focused: The star looked to be deep in thought as she was seen reading the contents of a particular package

Sweet deal: Samantha was seen picking up fresh fruit during the outing

Sharing plenty of pictures on her travels, the presenter kept her fans across her multiple celebrations while away with a small group of friends.

Enjoying the end of the northern hemisphere's summer, Samantha appeared unable to contain her happiness, looking relaxed and content in all of her photos.

One particular snap that had her social media followers intrigued, featured the curvaceous star posing in front of a souvlaki shop with a genetically blessed mystery man.

Stocking up: The red carpet regular would no doubt be filling up her kitchen with a selection of fresh fruit and vegetables after celebrating her birthday in style in Greece

Firm decision: Samantha was seen picking up the best bunch of bananas

Grinning from ear-to-ear in the photo left fans asking the single star: 'Who is that gorgeous man?'

Another asked: 'Who's your friend beautiful Sam?'

While one fan pointed out: 'You look so happy', while another simply wrote: 'Umm, hello!'

Samantha is expected to return back on screen later this month.
She hit Milan this week for a TEZENIS fashion show.

But it was a whirlwind trip for busy Rita Ora as she jetted home to London on Tuesday, where she was seen strutting through Gatwick airport.

The Brit beauty as usual showed off her individual sense of style, teaming a patchwork skirt with a statement leather hat.

Back on home soil: It was a whirlwind trip to Milan for busy Rita Ora as she jetted home to London on Tuesday, where she was seen strutting through Gatwick airport

Rita kept her look comfy for the flight, swapping her favoured racy minis for a flowing ditsy print skirt.

She added zip-up boots to the calf-length number while up top a loose black sweater hinted at her ample assets thanks to its semi-sheer material.

The finishing touch was Rita's favourite black leather baker boy hat with stud detail.

Chic: The Brit beauty as usual showed off her individual sense of style, teaming a patchwork skirt with a statement leather hat

Nice hat! The finishing touch was Rita's favourite black leather baker boy hat with stud detail

Rita completed her look with a glam full face of makeup, accentuating her pretty features with a dash of lippie and lashings of mascara.

The busy star was joined by her sister Elena for the flight, who looked chic in a green leather jacket and skinny jeans as she helped carried the luggage.

As well as her collaboration this year with TEZENIS, Rita was recently revealed as the new face of America's Next Top Model, replacing the long-serving host Tyra Banks.

Pop of colour: Rita kept her look comfy for the flight, swapping her favoured racy minis for a flowing ditsy print skirt

Check out the shoes: She added zip-up boots to the calf-length number while up top a loose black sweater hinted at her ample assets thanks to its semi-sheer material

The busy star has also been focusing on her long delayed second album with Warner Music, following a legal battle with Jay Z's label Roc Nation.

'I just signed a new deal. I can't wait! I'm so excited, so this year [new music is coming] for sure,' Rita gushed to VH1 at the MTV VMAs last month.

'I'm recording it in London, so I've definitely just kept it back to where I'm from, you know?'

Glam: Rita completed her look with a glam full face of makeup, accentuating her pretty features with a dash of lippie and lashings of mascara

Shady lady: A statement pair of shades helped the star keep her cool as she made her way through the crowds

And who I am and everything that I've become up to this point and just working with my friends and basically just making a record that I want my friends to dance to.'

However the start of her second album has not run completely smoothly - after she was forced to hit out at claims she is the woman Jay Z allegedly cheated on Beyonce with, as implied by her new album Lemonade.

After speculation that she was 'Becky with the good hair' mentioned in the song Sorry, the Hot Right Now songstress spoke to Vanity Fair about the 'rude and disrespectful'.

Tunes: Rita kept one earphone in as she listened to her music while she walked

Work trip: She hit Milan this week for a TEZENIS fashion show

She said on the matter: 'First and foremost, Jay Z is my inspiration and one of my idols - lyrically, musically, business-wise. I still look up to him and his wife every day. Beyonce was one of my biggest idols growing up.

'That (pin) was a present from Katy Perry. Maybe I was the only one seen wearing it, but there were others. As for the rest of it, I'm oblivious, I'm just not the gossip queen.

Finishing her tirade, she continued: 'I find it incredibly rude and disrespectful to women in general (when) we get accused of something that's basically against the important part - the music.'
It was equivalent to the Oscars of the reality world, due to the all-star turnout.

So all guests were determined to turn heads, none more so than CBB star Casey Batchelor and TOWIE stunner Kate Wright who both opted for perilously plunging ensembles for the Hang Dr. party in London on Tuesday night.

The 31-year-old glamour girl left very little to the imagination as she flashed her bra in a sexy coord while her Essex counterpart, 24, showed off her sensational form in a tight khaki two-piece.

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Eye-popping: So all guests were determined to turn heads, none more so than CBB star Casey Batchelor and TOWIE stunner Kate Wright who both opted for perilously plunging ensembles for the Hang Dr. party in London on Tuesday night

Casey looked undeniably sensational at the bash although did very little to protect her modesty in the two-piece comprising of a duster coat and tapered trousers.

The pink jacket featured striped material with a tied waist which emphasised her tiny middle while she opted to wear nothing but a bra beneath.

She flashed her black lace push-up bra which made the most of her eye-popping assets while matching her thick black choker.

Scraping her hair into a ponytail off her heavily made-up face, the brunette beauty appeared to point all eyes towards her cleavage.

Sizzling: Kate, 24 showed off her sensational form in a tight khaki two-piece

Racy: Casey looked undeniably sensational at the bash although did very little to protect her modesty in the two-piece comprising of a duster coat and tapered trousers

Eye-popping assets! The pink jacket featured striped material with a tied waist which emphasised her tiny middle while she opted to wear nothing beneath

A shocking sight: Casey's racy ensemble no doubt turned heads as she headed into the bash

Drinking in the street! Casey held onto a delicious-looking beverage outside the bash

Kate meanwhile showed off the physique she gains by working out seven days a week in a tight ensemble.

The blonde beauty opted for her favoured style of a cleavage-baring crop top as she paraded into the event while bending down and giving an eyeful of her assets.

She boosted her statuesque height with the addition of snakeskin thin strap heels paired with a chic nude handbag.

Her bouncy blonde tresses were styled into a centre parting, while her make-up was heavy-handed and perfectly-applied.

Chic: Kate was arguably in the tightest ensemble of the evening

Stunning! Kate meanwhile showed off the physique she gains by working out seven days a week as she flashed her sensational figure in a tight ensemble

The happy couple: Some TOWIE alumni came in the form of Lewis Bloor who arrived on the arm of his new girlfriend Marnie Simpson, who he met in the Celebrity Big Brother house

Happy boy: Lewis in particular looked to be in extremely high spirits, flashing a beaming smile as he and Marnie enjoyed their night out

Tres chic: The Geordie Shore star was certainly dressed to kill for her date night as she wore a super short mini dress in a second skin beige material

Plump pout: Marnie, known for her love of cosmetic fillers, gave a sexy pout as she left the venue

Hometime? The lovebirds looked as though they were ready to call it a night

Fresh from holiday: Having just returned from a holiday with her beau in Barcelona, she was naturally showing off a sun-kissed glow which Lewis was also rivalling

It must be love: The smitten couple left the club hand-in-hand heading off into the night

Some TOWIE alumni came in the form of Lewis Bloor arriving on the arm of his new girlfriend Marnie Simpson, who he met in the Celebrity Big Brother house last month.

The Geordie Shore star was certainly dressed to kill for her date night as she wore a super-short mini dress in a second skin beige material.

Having just returned from a holiday with her beau in Barcelona, she was naturally showing off a sun-kissed glow which Lewis was also rivalling.

While many sceptics have cast doubt over their union, the couple appear to be going strong as Lewis could not keep his hands off his stunning girlfriend.

Loved up: It was a night of the couples as former EastEnders actress Jacqueline Jossa and her boyfriend, former TOWIE star Dan Osborne took a night off parenting duty for a date night

Mummy and daddy's night out! The loved-up duo share one-year-old daughter Ella, while Dan also has two-year-old son Teddy from a previous marriage, yet the pair looked ready for a night off

Muscle boy: Dan, who works with The Dreamboys, showed off his super buff physique

Getting serious: Dan cast a serious look over the party while he headed out

Mr. smiles: It wasn't long before Dan was back to his usual chipper self however

It was a night of the couples as former EastEnders actress Jacqueline Jossa and her boyfriend, former TOWIE star Dan Osborne took a night off parenting duty for a date night.

The loved-up duo share one-year-old daughter Ella, while Dan also has two-year-old son Teddy from a previous relationship, yet the pair looked ready for a night off.

Jacqueline wowed in a black lace dress which was certainly more prim than her reality counterparts, while Dan looked hunky in a tight black shirt.

The boys are back in town! Made In Chelsea alumnus Hugo Taylor and Spencer Matthews arrives at the bash together

Chic chums: Spencer, 28, and Hugo, 30, both rocked up in smart casual attire - looking fit and healthy

Pouting it up: Flying the TOWIE flag once more was one of the show's original cast members, Amy Childs, who opted for an ill-fitting nightie style dress

Devastated: Her night out comes shortly after Amy - who has used lip fillers and undergone breast augmentation in the past - revealed that her penchant for cosmetic procedures has ruined her confidence

Hand in hand: Bianca Gascoigne was joined by boyfriend CJ Meeks on Tuesday evening

Here she comes: The bubbly blonde was hard to miss as she exited her cab in a pair of raunchy over-the-knee boots

The lady is a vamp: Bianca opted for a thigh-skimming red dress and jaunty wide-brimmed hat

Flying the TOWIE flag once more was one of the show's original cast members, Amy Childs, who opted for an ill-fitting nightie style dress.

Her night out comes shortly after Amy - who has used lip fillers and undergone breast augmentation in the past - revealed that her penchant for cosmetic procedures has ruined her confidence.

Speaking to Star Magazine the 26-year-old said: 'I used to look in the mirror and think, "Oh my God, I dont even look life myself any more."'

Brunette beauty: Jess Wright sashayed into the event in a floral jumpsuit

The happy couple: Not far behinf was her cousinnNewly-engaged Elliott Wright, who left his work in his southern Spain restaurant chain to enjoy a night out with his fiance Sadie Stuart

A good looking pair: He was no doubt overjoyed to be joined by his former TOWIE pals at the glamorous bash, since he left the show and launched his own reality show Playa In Marbella

Newly-engaged Elliott Wright left work in his southern Spain restaurant chain to enjoy a night out with his fiance Sadie Stuart.

She went for a smouldering look in a racy bralet with a sexy choker detail while Elliott was super-suave in a double-breasted blazer.

He was no doubt overjoyed to be joined by his former TOWIE pals at the glamorous bash, since he left the show and launched his own reality show Playa In Marbella.

Busty babe: Disgraced beauty queen Zara Holland, who was stripped of her Miss GB title earlier this year following a sexy romp on Love Island, wowed in a plunging top

Monochrome madness: She also flashed her legs in super skimpy shorts while lengthening her legs with strappy black heels

Commanding attention: The sultry star wore a super sexy white top which flashed her ample assets, which she frequently boasted of on her Love Island stint

Blonde beauty: Zara was in a joyous mood, flashing a winning smile as she entered the club

Disgraced beauty queen Zara Holland, who was stripped of her Miss GB title earlier this year following a sexy romp on Love Island, wowed in a plunging top.

The sultry star wore a super sexy white top which flashed her ample assets, which she frequently boasted of on her Love Island stint.

She also flashed her legs in super skimpy shorts while lengthening her legs with strappy black heels.

Sexy stuff: Brief TOWIE star Pascal Craymer seemed determined to turn heads as she went braless beneath a plunging black blazer

Oops! Despite a momentary moment in the spotlight during a brief stint on TOWIE, she remains in the spotlight

Pesky plunge: Her deeply revealing number seemed to cause troubles when she stepped out of the car

Oh dear! Pascal looked sensational despite her unfortunate wardrobe malfunction

All the lads: The TOWIE boys were out in force as James Locke, Jon Clarke with his brother Chris enjoyed their night out among other stars

EastEnders stars out on the town: EastEnders star Dean Gaffney arrived with his 23-year-old girlfriend Rebekah, who looked chic in a bra-flashing silk dress

Chic: Bianca Gascoigne went for a bold statement in a hot pink playsuit with sexy thigh-high lace-up boots and an edgy fedora

Brief TOWIE star Pascal Craymer seemed determined to turn heads as she went braless beneath a plunging black blazer.

EastEnders star Dean Gaffney arrived with his 23-year-old girlfriend Rebekah, who looked chic in a bra-flashing silk dress.

Bianca Gascoigne went for a bold statement in a hot pink playsuit with sexy thigh-high lace-up boots and an edgy fedora.

The TOWIE boys were out in force as Dan Edgar, James Locke and Jon Clarke, with his brother Chris, enjoyed their night out among other stars.

James Bennewith, who uses the moniker Diags, attended alongside his girlfriend Fran Parman who was much more low-key than her former TOWIE colleagues.

Happy couple: James Bennewith, who uses the moniker Diags, attended alongside his girlfriend Fran Parman who was much more low-key than her former TOWIE colleagues

Stunners: Dan and Diags proved a good looking addition to proceedings

Lads! BFFs Dan and Diags were seen sharing a laugh as they left the bash

Dashing: TOWIE stalwart James Lock looked handsome in a cream suede biker jacket

X Factor reject Chloe Paige attended the bash in a wholly racy ensemble as she continued her week of being a constant attendee at London Fashion Week.

She sported a racy lace leotard in a pink hue which flashed the entirety of her chest while the base flashed her bottom.

Pulling on a suede fringed jacket and scraping her peroxide tresses into a high bun, Chloe wowed at the bash where she ensured all eyes were on her.

Chic: X Factor reject Chloe Paige attended the bash in a wholly racy ensemble as she continued her week of being a constant attendee at London Fashion Week

Peachy: She sported a racy lace leotard in a pink hue which flashed the entirety of her chest while the base flashed her bottom

Perky posterior: Pulling on a suede fringed jacket and scraping her peroxide tresses into a high bun, Chloe wowed at the bash where she ensured all eyes were on her

Smile, honey: Chloe looked to be enjoying her night out, mingling with the other celebrities in attendance

Blondes have more fun! Chloe joined her fellow blonde Zara
They've had their ups and downs and, after news of THAT other famous couple parting, made a point to prove they're very happy.

Sarah Jessica Parker couldn't contain the giddiness as she set foot with husband Matthew Broderick upon the purple red carpet at the New York City Ballet Fifth Annual Fall Fashion Gala on Tuesday.

The Sex And The City star, 51, was, of course, fashion savvy in a maroon cleavage-baring long-sleeved top and a silky long skirt that tossed up, down and around to show off her black strappy high heels.

Date night: Sarah Jessica Parker and her husband of nearly 20 years Matthew Broderick were a cosy couple at the NYC Ballet's Fifth Annual Fall Fashion Gala on Tuesday

Sarah was especially attentive to her marital partner of nearly 20 years, Matthew, 54, adjusting his greying hair at one one point and embracing him the next.

The actress, who stars in HBO's new series Divorce, got her flirt going while smiling and posing for the cameras.

Her hem of her long gown spilled out around her on the carpet but caused more looks, no doubt, when she started swishing the material.

Fancy footwear: The Sex And The City star swished her long skirt around and showed off her amazing black strappy heels

Fun with a flourish: Sarah was glowing in a two-toned ensemble

Carrie-d away: The 51-year-old actress enjoyed swishing her silky long skirt this way and that way as she made her way down the purple carpet

That's love: Sarah fiddled with Matthew's greying hair in a loving way

In love and loving it: The couple - who have been through their ups and downs - proved they are definitely on track

Sarah's famously toned, tanned limbs resembled dancer's legs.

Her long, waist-length hair was burnished dark gold, parted center and casading over her shoulders.

Matthew, who stars in the upcoming Warren Beatty-directed film Rules Don't Apply opposite Lily Collins and due out November 23, seemed quite pleased.

Hugs: Sarah and Matthew strolled down the arrivals line arm-in-arm

In the spotlight: Sarah commanded the spotlight and her husband didn't seem to mind

Curvy: Sarah flaunted lots of cleavage in her very low-cut ensemble

Easy does it: Like her former alter ego Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah navigated the ground expertly in her strapping high heels

Onwards: The actress stars in the new HBO series Divorce which premieres on October 9

This is fun: The star appeared to be having a ball twirling around in that billowy dress

The Ferris Bueller's Day Off star didn't mind letting his famous wife take the spotlight, grinning good-naturedly.

Others to attend the formal gathering included Diane Kruger, Julianna Margulies and her husband Keith Lieberthal, and model Constance Jablonski.

Diane Kruger was a lovely sight in her white sprigged frock with puffed three-quarter sleeves and silver strapped heels.

Pale and dramatic: While Diane Kruger wowed in her white sprigged frock, Julianna Margulies exuded elegance in a strapless black lacy number

The good husband: Julianna was joined by her lawyer husband Keith Lieberthal

Not one to 'mesh': Constance Jablonski was modelesque in her short little black dress with racy see-through mesh details

The German-born actress carried a black metal-studded bag and wore her reddish-blonde hair pulled back into a loose ponytail.

Julianna Margulies wore a black strapless lace-accented number that set off her alabaster complexion.

The raven-haired star of The Good Wife looked happy to be with her husband of nine years, lawyer Keith Lieberthal.

Constance Jablonski was modelesque in her short little black dress with racy see-through mesh details.
She's regularly jet-setting around the world exploring new countries with her boyfriend, Tyson Mayr.

And on Monday, Lisa Hyde arrived in Ravello, Italy to be a bridesmaid for close friend Janelle Ladewig.

Following the luscious coastal wedding, the 28-year-old reality TV star took to Instagram to show off the stunning baby blue bridesmaid gowns.

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Baby blues: Lisa Hyde stunned in a baby blue bridesmaid gown on Monday as she attended a wedding of a close friend in Ravello, Italy

Posing on a veranda looking over the coastline, Lisa stunned in the loose-fitting halter neck ensemble, which gathered tightly around the waist before flowing to the floor.

The designer dress was paired with cream peep-toed heels and a white and blue floral arrangement, which Lisa held onto tightly.

The former Bachelor contestant had styled her hair in a loose bun while allowing random strands to fall freely beside her face.

By her side: Following the ceremony she shared an image of herself and boyfriend Tyson Mayr sharing a passionate kiss in front of the picture-perfect backdrop on the endless sea

She gushed in the caption: 'Yesterday I was at the most perfect wedding with the most beautiful people. Very honoured and blessed to be a part of my gorgeous friends Janelle & Chris's special day.

'And to top everything off it was held in the most romantic place Ravello, Italy. I wish we could do it all again.'

Lisa also shared an image of herself and Tyson sharing a passionate kiss in front of the picture-perfect backdrop of the endless sea.

Tyson looked very dapper in his a navy button-up shirt and matching blazer that he paired with white trousers.

On the go: Days earlier the loved-up couple attended a wedding in Mexico

'Ravello, Italy... Feeling the #love,' Lisa wrote alongside the loving image.

The couple have travelled to various corners of the globe since going public with their relationship in 2015.

At the time of making their romance official, Tyson headed to the South African jungle for a stint on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!

Before meeting the hunk, Lisa Hyde tried to find love with Blake Garvey on The Bachelor Australia in 2014.
They had a short-lived romance but apparently called it quits after a month of dating.

Sofia Richie seemed to be letting Justin Bieber know what he's missing as she stepped out in West Hollywood on Tuesday.

And while the daughter of Lionel Richie was indulging in some retail therapy, she also managed to show a glimpse of her nipple as she was bending down to handle her bags of purchases.

Whoops: Sofia Richie suffered a nip slip as she enjoyed a bit of shopping on Tuesday on the heels of her break-up with Justin Bieber

Somber mood: The 18-year-old looked a little downcast as she made her way outside but then perked up a little as her dress started doing its own thing

Retail therapy! The model was seen emerging from high-end store Maxfield in West Hollywood with multiple purchases in her grasp

The petite blonde was laughing as she went, wearing a very plunging long striped shirt dress by BY. Bonnie Young and some black sandals.

The 18-year-old looked a little downcast as she made her way outside but then perked up a little as her dress started doing its own thing.

She opted for a messy, unkempt hair look as she added some subtle and dainty jewelry to her laid back look.

Oops! The young star showed off a little more than she perhaps expected

Girl time: The petite blonde wore a very plunging long striped shirt dress by BY. Bonnie Young and some black sandals as she was seen carrying some shopping bags

Leggy display: The high slit in the front of the dress blew open in the wind showing off Sofia's lean pins

Sofia also opted for minimal make-up as she showed off her natural complexion.

She was seen engaging in some retail therapy at Maxfield in West Hollywood with a girlfriend.

It's no wonder the teenager wanted to cheer herself up, given her relationship with the infamous bad boy Justin has officially ended.

Casual: Sofia also opted for minimal make-up as she showed off her natural complexion

Sense of humour: Sofia got a case of the giggles on the way to the car

Silly ladies: Sofia and her friend couldn't stop laughing as she kept getting tripped up by her long dress

The only way to cure heartache: It's no wonder the teenager wanted to cheer herself up, given her relationship with the infamous bad boy Justin has officially ended

Apparently Justin and Sofia were never all that serious to begin with, a source told TMZ.

Despite their short-lived romance, Justin and Sofia did vacation together in Mexico for her 18th birthday.

However, they haven't been seen together in public since then, and according to reports they haven't been talking much lately either.

Just a few weeks ago: Despite their short-lived romance, Justin and Sofia did vacation together in Mexico for her 18th birthday

No more: However, they haven't been seen together in public since then, and according to reports they haven't been talking much lately either

Just a fling: Apparently Justin and Sofia were never all that serious to begin with

Cute: Sofia showed off her subtle gold jewelry

Behind the scenes: Sofia gave fans a sneak peek into her day of shopping

Little black dress: Sofia showed off her petite figure in the LBD

Joking around: Sofia pulled some funny faces as she showed off her tiny frame

New outfits? Sofia and her girlfriend took to Snapchat as they enjoyed a night out after their day of shopping

Beauties: The pretty ladies flashed some flesh as they took to the streets for their girls night out
She revealed to The Guardian that her guilty pleasure is following Justin Bieber on Instagram, earlier this year.

And it seems Isla Fisher's unlikely infatuation with the young pop sensation has reached a new level, with the 40-year-old donning an official Justin Bieber-branded jacket as she ran errands in West Hollywood on Tuesday.

Going makeup-free for the off-duty occasion, the fiery-haired actress proudly sported her branded jacket, which was emblazoned with Justin's name on the front as well as the name of his Purpose Tour on the back.

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What do you mean? Isla Fisher, 40, demonstrated her unlikely appreciation for pop sensation Justin Bieber on Tuesday when she emerged wearing a jacket emblazoned wit his name and the name of his recent tour, as she ran errands in West Hollywood

The mother-of-three completed her ensemble with a grey T-shirt, Adidas-branded capri leggings and a pair of runners, while making sure to obscure her face behind a set of polarized sunglasses.

She let her slightly wavy hair hair hang loosely by her shoulders while throwing on a pair of delicate drop earrings, a chain necklace and her weighty engagement ring from her husband, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Last month, the Australian beauty admitted she is happy with staying at home more than other actresses because she loves to spend time with her children.

Casual: The mother-of-three completed her ensemble with a grey T-shirt, Adidas-branded capri leggings and a pair of runners, while making sure to obscure her face behind a set of polarized sunglasses

Speaking to The Metro, she said: 'I'm not in that bracket of hugely successful actresses who get offered amazing parts all the time, which is fine by me because it means I get to stay at home with my family.'

Isla also released her first children's book, Marge in Charge, last month, which is about an eccentric babysitter.

She explained: 'Marge subverts all the rules. The kids end up babysitting their babysitter.

'I'm not in that bracket of hugely successful actresses': Last month, the Australian beauty admitted she is happy with staying at home more than other actresses because she loves to spend time with her children

'I live vicariously through Marge because, being a mother myself, these days I have to be sensible.'

Meanwhile, Isla has also been celebrating the release of her new supernatural thriller Nightmares.

Directed by Kevin Greutert, the film co-stars Anson Mount, Eva Longoria, Jim Parsons and Gillian Jacobs.

New gig: Meanwhile, Isla has also been celebrating the release of her new supernatural thriller Nightmares
They were spotted at Melbourne Airport on Sunday, just days after going public with their relationship on The Bachelor finale.

And Richie Strahan and Alex Nation appeared to be taking yet another trip as they were seen arriving at Sydney Airport, this week.

The reality TV couple dressed in similar casual outfits as they pulled their luggage to the terminal on Wednesday.

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New destination? The Bachelor 2016 winning couple Richie Strahan and Alex Nation appeared to be taking yet another flight as they arrived at Sydney Airport by taxi on Wednesday

Mother-of-one Alex kept it simple in a pair of ripped denim jeans and white sneakers.

She also wore a white long sleeve with a black jacket, and styled her blonde hair sleek and straight.

The 25-year-old looked in happy spirits as she flashed a sparkly ring on her right hand.

Meanwhile, Richie appeared to take style cues from his girlfriend.

He opted for a simple white top under a denim shirt and rounded off his everyday look with black jeans.

Keeping it simple: The reality TV couple dressed in similar casual outfits and seemed in happy spirits as they pulled their luggage to the terminal

The trip comes after Alex's ex-husband revealed on Instagram he was spending school holiday with their five-year-old son Elijah.

Taking to Instagram, Joel Porter shared a photo of himself and Elijah at his workplace before taking annual leave.

'Taking time off so we can spend the school holidays together! Lots of fun planned!' he wrote in the caption.

'Lots of fun planned!' This comes after Alex's ex-husband Joel Porter revealed on Instagram he was spending school holiday's with their five-year-old son Elijah

Meanwhile, Alex and Richie's relationship is still going strong as they spend quality time together following a busy press tour.

But the couple faced a Twitter backlash after Thursday's season finale, with some fans claiming the 31-year-old had picked the 'wrong' woman.

Throughout the series, Nikki Gogan had been a favourite to win Richie's heart but was eventually runner-up.

Young love! Meanwhile, Alex and Richie's relationship is still going strong as they spend quality time together following a busy post-Bachelor press tour

On Wednesday, The Bachelorette Georgia Love even admitted she is worried about getting a similar reaction.

She told News Corp: 'It did frighten me. There hasnt been that backlash before, and it made me realise not everyones going to be behind my decision'.

The 27-year-old added: 'Im happy in my decision and whos to tell me whether Im right or wrong in that?'
Diane Kruger looked sensational as she attended the Ballet Fifth Annual Fall Fashion Gala in New York City on Tuesday.

She was a lovely sight in her white sprigged frock with puffed three-quarter sleeves and silver strapped heels.

The German-born actress carried a black metal-studded bag and wore her reddish-blonde hair pulled back into a loose ponytail.

Work it: Diane Kruger looked sensational as she attended the Ballet Fifth Annual Fall Fashion Gala in New York City on Tuesday

The short length of the dress really showed off her toned legs.

She looked happy and relaxed as she posed up a storm on the red carpet.

Others to attend the formal gathering included Julianna Margulies and her husband Keith Lieberthal, and model Constance Jablonski.

Julianna Margulies wore a black strapless lace-accented number that set off her alabaster complexion.

Beauty: She was a lovely sight in her white sprigged frock with puffed three-quarter sleeves and silver strapped heels

The raven-haired star of The Good Wife looked happy to be with her husband of nine years, lawyer Keith Lieberthal.

The stylish actress posed alongside her husband of almost a decade on the red carpet.

The actress looked beautiful in her strapless black lace gown that cinched at the waist.

Accessories: The German-born actress carried a black metal-studded bag and wore her reddish-blonde hair pulled back into a loose ponytail

Model: She looked happy and relaxed as she posed up a storm on the red carpet

Workouts are paying off: The short length of the dress really showed off her toned legs

Dapper couple: Others to attend the formal gathering included Julianna Margulies and her husband Keith Lieberthal

Constance Jablonski was modelesque in her short little black dress with racy see-through mesh details.

Sarah Jessica Parker also walked the carpet with her long-term husband Matthew Broderick.

Meanwhile, the actress has been busy focusing on some upcoming film projects.

Stunning: The actress looked beautiful in her strapless black lace gown that cinched at the waist

The French film, Tout nous separe, she just completed is currently in post-production and will be out in 2017.

Currently there is no plot to this Thierry Klifa directed movie. Kruger stars opposite Nicolas Duvauchelle and Catherine Deneuve.

In The Fade is another film she recently wrapped. It's a drama directed by Fatih Akin that's also due out in 2017.

Hollywood royalty: Sarah Jessica Parker also walked the carpet with her long-term husband Matthew Broderick
She's the controversial reality star making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

And just days after Suzi Taylor, 45, was fired by her manager due to her bizarre antics at his party in Melbourne over the weekend, the former Block contestant was whisked away to the Middle East on Sunday to attend an exclusive event.

The Channel Nine star was flown to Qatar as a guest of honour for a VIP soiree to mark the opening of a new luxury building, The Courier Mail reports.

A-list treatment: Suzi Taylor, 44, was flown to Qatar in Doha on Sunday to be the guest of a launch event for a luxury building

It is unknown which luxury building was opened, however, Suzi was on hand to cut the ribbon and greet guests at the new property.

The real estate agent and mother-of-three landed herself in hot water recently.

The former Penthouse Pet was sacked by her manager Stephen Bucknell in mid-September, after she stunned fellow party-goers with eyebrow raising comments made at his event in Melbourne.

According to the Herald Sun, Stephen and his guests 'did not take well to what Suzi had to say' at the event.

Sacked: The former Block reality star was sacked by her agent Stephen Bucknell recently because of her behaviour at an event he held

'I feel her behaviour was not in line with somebody I would like to represent. She is a lovely girl and I wish her all the best in the world,' he said.

Stephen represented Suzi for nine months.

'When you're in the public eye, you've got to watch what you say and do and I'm learning from that,' Suzi said while at Bucknall's party.

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Party animal: In 2015, topless photos emerged of the busty burnette topless while dancing on a boat off Melbourne's Docklands wearing nothing but a G-string bikini bottom

'I'm honest, I'm real and I own up to my mistakes.'

It's not the first time Suzi has been the subject of controversy.

In 2015, topless photos emerged of the busty brunette, topless and looking worse for wear while dancing on a boat off Melbourne's Docklands, wearing nothing but a G-string bikini bottom.

Controversial Suzi: The 45-year-old mother of three has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons of late

The images were taken just days before the former glamour model was found collapsed and unconscious at the site of the popular renovation show after suffering from 'exhaustion.'

Suzi was seen partying on the boat following Oaks Day celebrations at Flemington.

While she was absent from the racecourse that day, she had been a guest at the birdcage on both Derby Day and Melbourne Cup.

Partners: The 45-year-old, who had no tradie experience, competed on The Block with close pal Yvonne Cosier, 39

The former Block contestant is no stranger to flashing her flesh after posing for a number of very racy photoshoots in the 1990s.

And the well-endowed brunette's model looks also caught the attention of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, with Suzi saying that she was his 'girl on the Gold Coast.'

'We would go to small, private little restaurants and we'd either sit right in the back of the restaurant or we would just stay in the hotel room,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Partying too hard? The topless photos were taken just days before the former glamour model collapsed from 'exhaustion'

'It wasn't that social. He didn't really like to really go out in the public eye, which I didn't blame him. It was more of a private get together all the time, which I loved.'

Last month, Suzi said she was hoping to find love at the notorious Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

The reality TV star claimed she is already friends with publisher Hugh Hefner.

Emotional ride: Suzi was often criticised by her fellow competitors for not pulling her weight on set

The mother-of-three added: 'I'm probably going over to the Playboy mansion in the next month or so. You never know what's going to happen.'
Bachelor fans were sent into meltdown after the show's former star Blake Garvey revealed his past work as a stripper.

And it seems history has repeated itself, with The Bachelorette's newcomer Rhys Chilton now being revealed to be a part-time topless entertainer.

The 29-year-old Brisbane local, who was billed simply as an 'entrepreneur' by Channel 10, also performs at 'ladies events', as per his eponymous website.

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'Bachelorette parties, ladies nights and corporate events': The Bachelorette contestant Rhys Chilton, 29, has been revealed to be a part-time topless entertainer

In one section of the site, Rhys describes his services as including appearances at 'Bachelorette parties, ladies nights and corporate events', during which he will appear either 'in one of my many fine suits or with the top half missing.'

'Yes I've done plenty of ladies events in my time and I'd like to say it's truly a shame there's a sleazy, negative association with this type of work,' the site reads.

Later, Rhys revealed that he has 'always enjoyed' performing at hen's parties, 'whether single or in a relationship'.

History repeating itself? Bachelor fans were sent into meltdown two years ago after the show's former star Blake Garvey revealed his past work as a stripper

Breaking the mould: 'Yes I've done plenty of ladies events in my time and I'd like to say it's truly a shame there's a sleazy, negative association with this type of work,' the site reads

'My honesty and respect allows me to do this kind of work without it ever being an issue to my partner (If in fact I have one),' he assured potential clients.

Making sure to clarify the nature of his business, Rhys later added: 'Rules are simple- I'm not a stripper, I'm not a giggilo, Pants stay on (shirt is more than happy to come off), I'll try not to get fat.'

Another section of his website offers small business consulting services.

Runway sensation: According to his StarNow profile, Rhys has also dabbled in modelling in past years, having appeared in shoots for modelling agency Vivien's Brisbane and having strutted his stuff at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Brisbane

Confident: He also seems to have tried his hand at presenting in front of the cameras, having appeared in a video for Event Festival TV during Brisbane's BrisAsia Festival 2014

According to his StarNow profile, Rhys has also dabbled in modelling in past years, having appeared in shoots for modelling agency Vivien's Brisbane and having strutted his stuff at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Brisbane.

His profile also reveals his goals of 'developing' his body to the level of a fitness model.

He also seems to have tried his hand at presenting in front of the cameras, having appeared in a video for Event Festival TV during Brisbane's BrisAsia Festival 2014.

Perhaps they've crossed paths? Georgia Love has had her brush with the word of male entertainers, having posed arm-in-arm with a shirtless performer at a hen's night in a recent Instagram snap

Georgia Love has had her brush with the word of male entertainers, having posed arm-in-arm with a shirtless performer at a hen's night in a recent Instagram snap.

But Rhys isn't the only Bachelorette hopeful to have stripped down in front of an audience - a video of Cameron Cranley, 26, has recently surfaced depicting the Western Australian firefighter taking off his shirt and trousers on stage.

In the video, which was filmed during a charity event, Cameron dramatically tears off his shirt before thrusting toward the swarm of hysterical female viewers.

Not one to shy away from the spotlight, Cameron also posed oiled up in a shoot for the 2016 Perth Firefighters Calendar, which supports the Princess Margaret Hospital Total Care Burns Unit.

He's not shy! But Rhys isn't the only Bachelorette hopeful to have stripped down in front of an audience- a video of Cameron Cranley, 26, has recently surfaced depicting the Western Australian firefighter taking off his shirt and trousers on stage

Rauncy: In the video, which was filmed during a charity event, Cameron dramatically tears off his shirt before thrusting toward the swarm of hysterical female viewers
He stepped out with his wife between filming Thor: Ragnorak on the Gold Coast.

And Jeff Goldblum was the sweetest of celebrities to a starstruck Nine News reporter when he was spotted at breakfast with his wife Emilie Livingston.

'Nice to meet you. I wish I could talk more,' the 63-year-old actor said with his 33-year-old wife beside him at the Nobby Beach cafe.

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Out and about: Actor Jeff Goldblum was spotted with his wife Emilie Livingston on the Gold Coast on Wednesday

'This is my wife Emilie,' the Jurassic Park actor politely introduced his wife to the journalist.

'We're right in the middle of doing something. So, so nice to meet you.'

The Independence Day: Resurgence star is said to be playing the role of Grandmaster in the Marvel blockbuster.

'Nice to meet you': The 63-year-old star politely told the reporter he couldn't talk during the meeting

Spotted: The couple have also been seen around town with their 14-month-old son Charlie

His co-stars Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Mark Ruffalo and Idris Elba have all been spotted around the Gold Coast while production for the 2017 film is underway.

Meanwhile, Jeff and Emilie have also been out and about with their 14-month-old son Charlie.

Jeff married his former gymnast wife in November 2014 after three years of dating and welcomed their first son in 2015.

Speaking about his baby in the Montreal Gazatte, Jeff gushed:'He's a hoot and a half. He's on the verge of walking  it's a lot to deal with.'

Proud parents: Jeff and his former gymnast wife Emilie welcomed their son Charlie in July 2015

The veteran actor also revealed his surprise about being able to still work in the industry after all these years.

'I launched into this business as a sort of crime of passion and I hoped against hope for some kind of miraculous adventure of a creative kind,' he said.

'And Ive been lucky. I've been able to stay at it and keep trying to get better and work with interesting people on interesting projects. And how about that? A couple of them have been really popular.'
Reports of Angelina Jolie filing for divorce from Brad Pitt on Tuesday shocked their fans - and now Selena Gomez has become embroiled in the situation.

The 24-year-old posted a picture of herself sitting next to the Hollywood megastar at the Golden Globes and The National Enquirer claims Angelina was 'furious.'

As Brad, 52, sat looking forwards in his black tie back in January, Selena was pictured looking giggly as she looked incredible in her white off-shoulder dress.

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Not happy: Angelina Jolie was reportedly furious when Selena Gomez posted this flirty Instagram at the Golden Globes with Brad Pitt back in January

A source told the site: 'Angie blew a gasket when she saw Selenas Instagram, and heard through friends about how Brad and Selena flirted so shamelessly.

'Now Selena is bragging to everyone that Brad is gung ho to make another movie with her. Selena is going around jokingly calling Brad "my future husband," and Angie is obviously none too pleased.

According to the publication Angie demanded that Brad didnt work with the young star again.

The actress cited irreconcilable differences as she filed for divorce from the actor following a 12 year relationship on September 15 - 'for the health of the family'

The Instagram snap came after Selena talked about having a soft spot for the father of six at the time.

She told reporters on the red carpet that she was seeking him out, saying: 'Im not going to lie. Its nice to look at all of the hot guys I admire.

'Im trying to find Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt right now!'

MailOnline has contacted a representative for Selena Gomez and Angelina Jolie.

Back in 2013, Selena even went as far as to say that she was so nervous around him at the MTV Awards, she hid under a table.

Gorgeous girl: Back in 2013, Selena even went as far as to say that she was so nervous around him at the MTV Awards, she hid under a table

In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres shortly afterwards, Selena said Brad requested a meeting with her backstage after the show - pictured on stage at the awards

In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres shortly afterwards, Selena said Brad requested a meeting with her backstage after the show.

'I was in my dressing room and I had just finished performing,' she told the talk show host. 'They knocked on my door and they said Brad Pitt would like to come in and I was like, "He can come in."

'I was trying to play cool and be really nice,' Selena added. 'As soon as he walked out I ran and I hid under the craft service table for like two minutes because I couldn't believe it was happening.'

'He was like, "Can I have a picture with you?" I was like, "Can I have a picture with you?"' she laughed.

Star: Selena had a cameo role in Brad's 2015 movie The Big Short

Brad's part: The movie tells the story of four denizens in the world of high-finance predict the credit and housing bubble collapse of the mid-2000s

But unfortunately Selena, who later starred alongside Brad in The Big Short, didn't manage to get her own picture.

'It was a lot happening,' she explained. 'He's so pretty.'

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt is 'furious' at Angelina Jolie for filing for divorce, a move he says could put their kids at risk, amid claims she told him 'I can't do this anymore.

Sources close to Pitt told TMZ that the actor is angry at Jolie for allegedly spinning stories about him being a potential risk to their kids because of anger issues and substance abuse.

Custody battle? Angelina has requested physical custody of the couple's six children

Pitt reportedly said Jolie 'unleashed hell' because the entire family has become targets for the paparazzi while reports have also claimed that a shocking 'incident' may have prompted the divorce.

Over the last few days, Pitt has had conversations with Jolie pleading for her to handle the divorce 'like adults', sources told the site.

Pitt said he wanted to keep the divorce under wraps for the benefit of their children, but instead, he says, Jolie has painted him as a risky dad and asked for sole physical custody.

A source close to the couple told TMZ that Jolie, 41, made the decision to file because of the way 'Brad was parenting the children,' adding that 'she was extremely upset with his methods'.

The Hollywood stars' home is now surrounded by photographers, while the Los Angeles Police Department patrols regularly because of the media frenzy.

Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt for 'the health of her family', two years after the couple wed at their French estate Chateau Miraval.

The actress filed papers on Monday citing irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split and asked for physical custody of the couple's six children - Maddox, age 15; Pax, aged 12; Zahara, aged 11; Shiloh, aged 10; and twins Vivienne and Knox, aged eight.

A source close to the couple told TMZ that Jolie, 41, made the decision to file because of the way 'Brad was parenting the children,' adding that 'she was extremely upset with his methods'.

That same source claims Jolie became 'fed up' with Pitt's consumption of 'weed and possibly alcohol' mixed with his 'anger problem'.
She revealed her penchant for cosmetic procedures has ruined her confidence earlier this week.

But Amy Childs, 26, put her surgically-enhanced features on full display as she attended the Hang Dr launch party at London's Archer Street cocktail bar on Tuesday night.

The former TOWIE star - who has used lip fillers and undergone breast augmentation - flaunted the results of going under the knife as she pouted up a storm at the star-studded bash.

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Pucker up! Amy Childs, 26, put her surgically-enhanced features on full display as she attended the Hang Dr launch party at London's Archer Street cocktail bar on Tuesday night

The reality TV personality opted for a midi-length nude dress cinched at the waist and plunged at the neckline, drawing attention to her incredibly ample assets.

With her signature fiery red tresses styled in loose curls, the stunning star went for a simple make-up look to accentuate her plump pout.

Amy, who was joined by her former TOWIE co-star and cousin Harry Derbidge, toted her belongings in a matching nude clutch and teetered down the carpet in sky-high rose gold stilettos.

The former Celebrity Big Brother star completed her elegant look with simple large hoop earrings.

Work it: The former TOWIE star - who has used lip fillers and undergone breast augmentation - flaunted the results of going under the knife as she pouted up a storm at the star-studded bash

Pretty in pink: The reality TV personality opted for a midi-length nude dress cinched at the waist and plunged at the neckline, drawing attention to her incredibly ample assets

Earlier this year, Amy confessed to having an addiction to plastic surgery.

Speaking to Star Magazine, the 26-year-old said: ' I used to look in the mirror and think, "Oh my God, I dont even look like myself any more."'

The red-haired beauty told the magazine that when she first became famous, she was offered countless procedures for free, and added that the procedures weren't always long-lasting.

'Ive had really bad experiences with my boobs. They have really dropped, which doctors didnt tell me would happen when I got them done...Ill have to get an uplift because of that  which means going under the knife again.'

BFF: Amy, who was joined by her former co-star and cousin Harry Derbidge, toted her belongings in a matching clutch and teetered down the carpet in sky-high rose gold stilettos

Long night: The former Celebrity Big Brother star completed her elegant look with simple large hoop earrings

But she claims to have 'toned down' her look since leaving TOWIE: 'I havent touched lip fillers in nine months. I like big lips and I get offered fillers all the time for free but my lips have calmed down a lot now and I like that look.'

The revelations come just days after Amy arrived at the Ashley Isham catwalk show at London Fashion Week showing off very full lips.

She sported heavy make-up with a slick of pink lipstick on her extremely plump pout.

Despite the rather large lips, she's currently taking part in a hard-hitting campaign against cosmetic surgery.

Pouty: Amy showed off her very full lips once again at the Ashley Isham London Fashion Week catwalk show over the weekend

Amy and former TOWIE co-star Danielle Armstrong posed in coffins for gruesome photos to demonstrate that going under the knife to improve body appearance can be life threatening.

The star had used her Instagram account to hit back at claims she is a hypocrite, insisting that she wants to prevent impressionable young men and women from making mistakes and rushing into cosmetic surgery.

She posted a picture of her campaign image on Instagram and wrote: 'You may have seen my recent pic from @3DLipos #DyingToBeBeautiful campaign.

'Many people are calling me a hypocrite for getting involved in this campaign but I want to set the record straight. Being involved in this campaign doesnt make me a hypocrite, it makes me educated.

Back in the day: The reality star looked rather different back in 2012

'Yes, many people have pointed out I have in fact had surgery and Im not going to deny that. Ive always been open about the procedures Ive had done and even more open about the mistakes Ive made.'

'The reason for me getting involved with this campaign is to highlight to young, impressionable girls and boys out there (like I was myself) that you shouldnt rush into the decision to go under the knife to change your body like I did. '

'Technology and times have come along way and there are so many safe and effective non-surgical alternatives on the market that come with no risks like 3D-Lipo.

'I want everyone to explore every option given to them before they make any decision to change their appearance. Research and stay safe always.'

Flame-haired: Amy didn't disappoint as she attended a London Fashion Week show in a black bardot dress and very full pout on Saturday

Amy had breast-enlargement surgery aged 18, and earlier this year, admitted she'd become addicted to plastic surgery.

'I got totally obsessed, she told Now magazine. I woke up one day and thought Amy, what are you doing to yourself? Look at your lips! I looked like a blow-up doll. I just thought Id lost my beauty.

Amy admitted she regretted going too far when it came to getting lip fillers - having undergone a painful treatment to get the filler removed three years ago.

'I took em all out,' she told The Sun. 'I then had to have like a re-corrective treatment on my lips. The reconstruction was so painful. It was basically like [the filler] being squeezed out, it was really painful but it was more fool me.'
She lives her life in the public eye as a well-known reality star.

And Jess Wright, 31, has revealed how body-shamers left her in tears when they cruelly criticised her bikini body earlier this year.

Speaking to MailOnline on Tuesday night at the Hang Dr Launch Party inside London's Archer Street Cocktail Lounge, Jess revealed: 'I was devastated when I saw those pictures. I cried my eyes out.

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Staying strong: Jess Wright, 31, has revealed how body-shamers left her in tears when they cruelly criticised her bikini body earlier this year

'I wasn't looking my best and the pictures were taken from really unflattering angles.'

And the TOWIE star had some choice words for the online trolls, adding: 'It's hard, but I just say f**k them. I have lost some weight. So far I've lost about five pounds.'

The abuse hasn't put Jess off wanting to remain in the limelight, however, with the star revealing she'd happily take part in I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!

'I just love to sing and dance and entertain,' said the Essex favourite.

Fighting back: The TOWIE star had some choice words for the online trolls, adding: 'It's hard, but I just say f**k them'

As well as a career in the spotlight, Jess admitted she'd love to start a family.

She said: 'I'd love to have kids, but I just need to find the right man first.'

When asked if she'd found Mr Right already, the star simply replied 'maybe' with a coy smile.

The beauty looked great for the star-studded launch party in an all-black trouser and vest top combo.

Cruel: Pictures of Jess enjoying herself on holiday this summer were the subject of criticism by trolls

Her luscious locks cascaded over her shoulder, and her glamorous make-up was flawlessly applied.

Addressing the haters at the time, Jess recorded a video on social media: 'I've enjoyed my past year and yes I'll be the first to say I have put weight on.

'I have an extra couple of lbs I'd like to shift but I'm a normal girl and just like anyone my weight fluctuates especially during certain times of the month.

'I've been on holidays, I've had tonnes of cheat meals, I've had more vinos than normal, met amazing people & I wouldn't change a thing.

'Life is for living and I'm doing exactly that.'

As she concluded her message, she wrote: 'What kind of message are we sending out to women and young impressionable girls?!?

'I am by no means fat, I'm a UK size 10 yet I am being body shamed for putting on weight. #EveryBODYisbeautiful.'
The debut episode of The Bachelorette aired on Wednesday.

And leading lady Georgia Love certainly had some very awkward and interesting introductions with some of her potential suitors.

The brunette left 29-year-old model Rhys red-faced after he spoke French to her and said something rather unromantic, which she understood.

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Awkward! The Bachelorette's Rhys was left red-faced after speaking to Georgia Love in French, thinking she couldn't understand when she could

'Oh you speak French, you weren't meant to understand that, Rhys said, shocked.

In French, he blurted out: 'I've got nothing important to tell you it's just a strategy so that you talk to me later.'

Bumbling through his speech, Georgia encouraged him along.

Taking it in her stride: In French, he blurted out to Georgia Love (pictured): 'I've got nothing important to tell you it's just a strategy so that you talk to me later'

But as he walked off, the part-time model admitted to the camera: 'It definitely didn't come out as smooth as I thought it would.'

'But whatever. Roll with it. I think she appreciated it,' Rhys said.

Dressed in layers against the winter chill, he was quickly compared to Harry Potter by the other Bachelors.

'Oh, my God. I thought Clark Kent was here. Or was it a big Harry Potter?,' one of the contestants said.

First impressions: Dressed in layers against the winter chill, he was quickly compared to Harry Potter by the other Bachelors

Trying to impress her: During the show, Rhys also showed off his impressive yoga skills, doing some moves in his suit by the pool

'Well, I brought my magic wand with me, so watch out, boys,' Rhys said.

During the show, Rhys also showed off his impressive yoga skills, doing some moves in his suit by the pool.

Georgia came over and watched, but it failed to get him some more one-on-one time with her.

He said dryly to camera: 'It didn't eventuate in any kind of time with Georgia, so I think I was lied to,' Rhys said, with the other men edging him on to do yoga.

Georgia has a total of 16 men vying for her attention, among them a wellness coach, a miner and a marketing manager.
Her stunning looks landed her in fifth place on Forbes' 2016 list of the world's highest-paid models.

And Rosie Huntington-Whiteley proved exactly why she is the darling of the fashion world as she showcased her incredible style while leaving London's Soho Hotel on Tuesday night.

The supermodel, 29, put her toned and tanned pins on full display as she wowed in a thigh-skimming mini dress.

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Model behaviour! Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, 29, proved exactly why she is the darling of the fashion world as she left London's Soho Hotel on Tuesday night

The British beauty looked ready to hit London's nightlife scene as she stunned in a floral sequinned number, which flaunted her long limbs to perfection.

The statuesque model added even more height to her lean frame as she teetered in sky-high strappy stilettos.

Rosie's honey-hued tresses sprawled down her shoulders in loosely curled waves as she opted for minimalist makeup to accentuate her striking features.

The siren stayed simple with her accessories, opting for elegant hoop earrings and her huge diamond engagement ring from fiance Jason Statham, 49.

Stunner: The supermodel looked ready to hit London's nightlife as she stunned in a floral sequinned number, which flaunted her toned and tanned pins

Rosie showcased her sartorial sass once again at the opening of jewellery store Nirav Modi in Old Bond Street earlier this week.

The supermodel looked sultrier than ever as she posed in a lace bustier top that revealed a hint of cleavage during London Fashion Week.

The Mad Max: Fury Road star showed off her svelte physique to perfection in the slinky bustier, which featured racy lace-up detail and a zip.

She added a high fashion edge to the ensemble with some black parachute pants that rested on her hips.

Lovely in lace: Rosie proved her sartorial sass once again earlier this week at the opening of jewellery store Nirav Modi in Old Bond Street during London Fashion Week

High fashion edge: The British beauty dazzled as she showcased her figure in a corset-style top and parachute pants

The Victoria's Secret Angel injected a dose of sparkle with an opulent diamond choker necklace and drop earrings.

Her caramel-golden tresses were styled in a sleek centre-parting that perfectly offset her striking features.

Rosie plumped her famously full pout with a matte dusky nude lipstick and emphasized her green eyes with a sultry bronze eyeshadow.

'The greatest influence in my life': Earlier this week, Rosie opened up about her relationship with actor Jason Statham, 49, who proposed in January with a five-carat diamond ring

The catwalk queen landed in fifth place on Forbes' 2016 list of the world's highest-paid models, earning $9 million in the past year.

Earlier this week, Rosie opened up about her relationship with actor Jason, who proposed in January with a five-carat Neil Lane diamond ring.

Speaking to Harper's Bazaar Australia, she said: 'I have an amazing relationship with my partner. He's by far the greatest influence in my life.'

The couple have been dating for six years and live together in Beverly Hills.

Turning heads: The statuesque beauty ensured all eyes were on her as she left the event

Fashion-forward: Rosie wore a black blazer slung off her shoulders in a style
She's known for her kooky sense of style - and Rita Ora sported a rather racy look as she walked through the airport.

The 25-year-old was pictured leaving Italy after attending the Tezenis catwalk show in Verona, for Milan Fashion Week - she is the face of the brand.

Rita channelled a very sexy look for her stride through the terminal, wearing a sheer top which exposed her lacy bra.

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Talk about taking-off: Rita Ora sported a lacy bra under a sheer top as she walked through the airport following Milan Fashion Week

She's got it going on: The 25-year-old was pictured leaving Italy after attending the Tezenis catwalk show in Verona, for Milan Fashion Week - she is the face of the brand

The very sexy piece of lingerie had a strap at the top which drew further attention from the eye.

Rita teamed the number with a pretty patchwork skirt in blue and green which fell down to past her knee.

She wore a leather cap, piling her platinum blonde locks underneath for her flight home and shielded her eyes behind dark sunglasses.

Colourful: Rita teamed the number with a pretty patchwork skirt in blue and green which fell down to past her knee

Adding some extra inches to her height, Rita slipped on a pair of loose-fitting black ankle boots in patent leather.

Rita wore the exact same bra from the upcoming Tezenis collection in the latest campaign for the brand.

A short clip of herself wearing it appears on her Twitter feed, against a backdrop of red and blue flashing lights.

The busy star was joined by her sister Elena for the flight, who looked chic in a green leather jacket and skinny jeans as she helped carried the luggage.

As well as her collaboration this year with TEZENIS, Rita was recently revealed as the new face of America's Next Top Model, replacing the long-serving host Tyra Banks.

The busy star has also been focusing on her long delayed second album with Warner Music, following a legal battle with Jay Z's label Roc Nation.

Wrapped up: Earlier she threw on a white dressing gown in a bid to cover up a little

Wow: She wore a pair of lace-up knee high boots as she was pictured outside
He shot to fame as the hapless and shabby street-cleaner Robbie Fowler on EastEnders back in the 90s.

But Dean Gaffney looked anything but a mess on Tuesday night as he attended the Hang Dr. party in Soho,London with his model girlfriend Rebekah Ward.

Heading out to the bash at Archer Street, the 38-year-old actor and his 23-year-old girlfriend treated one of Dean's twin daughters, Chloe Burge, 19, to a night out.

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All loved up: Dean Gaffney looked anything but a mess on Tuesday night as he attended the Hang Dr. party in Soho,London with his model girlfriend Rebekah Ward

Looking more in love than ever, Dean cosied up to his stunning girlfriend on the red carpet at the event.

Though the couple held back on their PDA as one of Dean's twin girls from his relationship Sarah Burge was out on the town with them.

Despite the striking lack of an age-gap between Rebekah and Chloe, the two women appear to be getting on better than ever - and all three were seen smiling thoughout the night.

Wrapping a protective arm around her waist, the actor was doing his best to affect a gentlemanly air of chivalry.

A family affair: Heading out to the bash at Archer Street, the 38-year-old actor and his 23-year-old girlfriend treated one of Dean's twin daughters, Chloe Burge, 19, to a night out

Rebekah, who Dean is rarely seen without, showed off her incredible figure in a satin silver mini dress.

The thigh-grazing number allowed the pretty blonde to flaunt her legs, whilst flashing a hint of her perky bossom.

Adding a pair of nude platform heels to the mix, the model further accentuated her figure whilst defining her lithe legs.

She finished off her look with a thick black choker and a quilted leather handbag.

That's a happy man: Looking more in love than ever, Dean cosied up to his stunning girlfriend on the red carpet at the event

Wearing her platinum blonde locks arrow-straight, the model let her locks frame her striking features.

Dean looked the epitome of dapper chap, teaming a blue blazer with a pastel shirt, chinos and tobacco Oxford lace-ups.

The ex EastEnders star's latest relationship appears to be flourishing as his his twin daughters Charlotte and Chloe appear to be more than happy with their father's new love.

Family outing: Ex EastEnders star Dean Gaffney has shared a proud photo with his girlfriend Rebekah Ward, 23 (far left) and his twin daughters Charlotte and Chloe Burge, 19

And its clear to see, as the actor's numerous snaps of the foursome show there's no bad blood between the three women.

With his arms wrapped around them, Dean looked proud as punch of Rebekah and his twin girls, who were all dressed up for the family night on the town.

Rebekah is seen seated on Dean's right, looking gorgeous in a low cut cream dress. Chloe and Charlotte looked equally glam in their short dresses as they beam and pout for the camera.

'Everyman needs a good women behind him... I have 3!!!! #daughters #GF ' [sic], Dean captioned the photo.

Split: Charlotte and Chloe, born in 1996, are Dean's daughters with his ex girlfriend Sarah Burge, pictured together in 2006 during Dean's stint on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here

Twins: The girls post regular snaps rom their nights out on their Instagram pages

It seems like Rebekah has become close to her boyfriend's daughters, as she also shared the snap alongside the gushing caption: 'How he created these two beautiful stunners i will never know!'

Charlotte and Chloe, born in 1996, are Dean's daughters with his ex girlfriend Sarah Burge.

The couple of 22 years, who met when they were just 15-years-old, announced their split in June last year, after Dean admitted to cheating on Sarah with a string of women.

In an interview with the Sun last year, he admitted to being ashamed of his philandering ways. 'Women were my drug and now, looking back, I'm ashamed of my past,' he confessed.

Break up: Dean and Sarah were together for 22 years, after meeting when they were just 15, but announced their split in June last year, after Dean admitted to cheating with a string of women

Gorgeous: Charlotte and Chloe have got their selfie faces sorted judging by their pouting shots

'How many times did it happen? I couldn't put a finger on it.'

Meanwhile during his appearance on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! in 2006, Dean revealed how his cheating had affected Chloe and Charlotte's mother, admitting: 'She took it bad. I wasn't going from bed to bed but I took her for granted.

'It takes a bigger man to admit it. It was hitting fame at such a young age that did it. My outlet was being a red-blooded male who enjoyed female company.'

Dean was first seen with Rebekah back in April, bringing the blonde model along as his date for Ladies Day at Aintree.
The Bachelorette's Georgia Love is hoping her potential suitors of the show will fall head over heels for her.

And Bachelor Ben certainly did that - quite literally - when he tripped on his way to introduce himself to her for the first time.

The 32-year-old Wollongong miner laughed off the incident, telling her: 'I'm falling for you already!'

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'I'm falling for you already': The Bachelorette's Ben tripped up the stairs as he made his way to meet leading lady Georgia Love for the first time on Wednesday's debut episode but quickly turned it into a joke

Ben - who describes himself as a dog person - then gave Georgia a T-shirt that featured his face along with his two pet huskies, Bindi and Zephyr.

It read: 'Pick our dad - he will make you smile when you've had a ruff day!'

'This is, like, for us, for later on, like, when we're in love and stuff like that,' he told her.

Interesting gift: The miner gave the journalist a T-shirt with his face on it, along with his two dogs and a joke

Not the best impression! He took a tumble on the pavement

His pride and joy: Ben is seen here driving a vintage car with his pet pooches in the back

'So, you don't wear it until then,' he added

He said in a piece to camera that if his love interest doesn't like dogs, it's a 'deal breaker.'

He asked her if she had a pet pooch, but she shocked him when she said she had a cat.

'Cat people are fine,' Ben said to camera.

'I don't really know heaps of cat people. I don't think. I just met an amazing one, so they can't be that bad, can they?'

Deal breaker? He asked her if she had a pet pooch, but she shocked him when she said she had a cat

During the cocktail party, Ben said he was feeling a little insecure in terms of his physical appearance compared to the other guys.

'We got some absolute tens there and I'm rolling in, you know, 5.5 on a good day.'

He was one of 16 contestants who introduced themselves to Georgia for a shot at love.

While two Bachelors were sent home, he remains in the competition.

According to his Bachelor profile, Ben said he will stand out from his rivals by making Georgia laugh.

Will she find the one? Georgia had a total of 16 men vying for her attention before sending two home on the debut episode

'Im going to make her laugh all the time and make her feel like its refreshing to hang out with me,' he said.

He added he wants to be married in ten years and have a family.

'Married with two kids, building my empire with a lady by my side, renovating and selling houses for a living,' he said.

Georgia is Australia's second Bachelorette, having taken over the reins from former TV star and now radio host Sam Frost.
She started the week on a decidedly high note, when it was announced on Instagram on Monday morning that she was engaged to her longtime beau.

And following the news that she'd accepted her childhood sweetheart Matt Kaye's proposal, Lacey Turner is stepping out with her stunning engagement ring.

On Wednesday morning, the EastEnders star, 28, was spotted wearing the diamond dazzler as she ran errands in a ripped jeans and a flowing grey top.

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Out and about: Lacey Turner was pictured for the first time since announcing her engagement to childhood sweetheart Matt Kaye

Dazzling: Her diamond engagement ring was on proud display for all to see

Opting to forgo makeup for her early excursion, the brunette beauty allowed her wavy tresses to rest on her shoulders with a a centre-parting.

And, as she strolled along in flip-flops, Lacey was likely still fielding congratulatory calls as her phone rested against the side of her face while she chatted away.

Matt revealed the couple's engagement news shortly after he proposed to his belle, uploading a snap in which a visibly stunned Lacey showed off her ring.

Captioning the image, he wrote: 'She said yes ooooosssshhhhhhhh #fiance@laceyturner.'

As followers congratulated the couple, a close friend uploaded a separate snap of the pair with the accompanying caption: 'Just wna say a huge congratulations to my best mates@laceyturner and @matty_overgrown on there engagement so happy for you both love you both so much! (sic)'

Another posted: 'Congratulations to you and @laceyturner hope you will be happy together forever x (sic)'

Delighted: Actress Lacey announced her engagement to Matt Kaye in a new Instagram post shared with fans on Monday morning

Great news: As followers congratulated the couple, a close friend uploaded a separate snap of the pair alongside a gushing tribute

Elsewhere a fan, posting under the name xxjenniferwinterxx, wrote: 'Yay!!!!! Best news I've heard! It's about bloody time! Love u both xxx (sic)'

Lacey started dating Matt in 2006, when she was 18, but despite instantly falling for the barber shop owner she admitted they were taking their relationship one day at a time.

'He's practically perfect. I'm really happy. We are very similar - we both like staying in and watching TV and films,' she told the News of the World.

'We are really happy but we are taking it slow. We are still so young - we haven't really thought much about the future.

So happy: Lacey and businessman Matt started dating in 2006, when she was 18-years old

On-off: Lacey split with Matt in 2012, but the couple later rekindled their relationship

'I know that I want to be a mum, but not for many years yet. I'm just getting started with my career so that is way off.'

The actress previously revealed that getting into costume for marriage scenes with doomed screen husband Bradley Branning, played by Charlie Clements, put her off walking down the aisle herself.

Getting married seems so stressy, she told Sunday magazine in 2007. I wore that dress for 15 days and I couldnt breathe out. I wont do it.

'Id hate being the centre of attention too. If I had to get married, I think Id wear Ugg boots and pyjamas.

Quite an Eiffel: Lacey and Matt have posted numerous happy snaps across social media

Lacey started dating Matt shortly after splitting with ex-boyfriend Jake Gotlib in 2006, but the notoriously private star was initially coy about discussing her relationship.

'We'd been friends for a few years, which gradually developed into something more, and now he's my boyfriend and I'm very happy,' she told the Daily Mirror at the time.

The announcement caps a successful month for the 28-year old actress, whose role as troubled Stacey Fowler helped win her the award for Best Actress at the British Soap Awards.

Lacey beat off stiff competition from former Coronation Street star Paula Lane, Hollyoaks' Jennifer Metcalfe and Emmerdale's Lucy Pargeter to take home the accolade.
Steve Levitans bitter divorce has reportedly taken another acrimonious turn following claims the Modern Family creator has been banned from taking his daughter to an awards ceremony.

The Hollywood producer, 54, is currently in the midst of an ugly court battle with estranged wife Krista, whose second request for a restraining order effectively banning him from the family home was rejected last week.

Levitan is understood to be outraged following a reported altercation with a security guard outside the Brentwood property ahead of his appearance at the 68th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday evening.

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Bitter divorce: Steve Levitan is currently in the midst of an ugly court battle with estranged wife Krista, whose second request for a restraining order effectively banning him from the family home was rejected last week

TMZ claim the producer, director and screenwriter had arrived to collect daughter Hannah after encouraging her to return home from college so he could treat her to a night out at the annual ceremony.

The website claim a security guard emerged from a parked car and stepped in after Hannah attempted to hug her father on the sidewalk.

In legal documents obtained by TMZ, Levitan claims he 'felt like a criminal' during the incident, during which the guard reportedly demanded to know if he 'needed help with something.'

MailOnline have contacted Levitan's representatives for further comment.

The couple lived together in Brentwood, California. Their home is worth an estimated $12million according to Zillow. Above the front of the house

The 8,609-square-foot house, hidden behind hedges, features six bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Above, the back of the house

Estranged wife Krista previously told a judge that her husband, whom she married in 1992, has been abusive and turned up at her family home in Los Angeles uninvited.

The judge rejected her request for a restraining order as the couple's lawyers continue to fight over Levitan's estimated $50 million fortune.

It comes after Krista's court documents came to light, claiming her estranged husband earns more than $2.4 million a month.

Levitan - who also wrote for Frasier, Wings, and The Larry Sanders Show - separated from his wife Krista on New Year's Eve. She subsequently filed for divorce.

The couple separated on New Years Eve and Mrs Levitan filed for divorce citing 'irreconcilable differences'

There appears to be no pre-nup between the parents-of-three.

Last week TMZ reported that court documents filed by Krista, who is asking for spousal support, show that her soon-to-be ex-husband earns $2.46million a month before tax and puts away $1million into a savings account.

She also estimates that they spend over $11,000 a month on clothes almost $10,000 on education and another $7,000 on childcare for their three children.

In addition she says they spend almost $2,000 each month on beauty treatments, $1,300 on fitness and health an a further $1,333 a month on pet care.

In legal documents she cites irreconcilable differences as the reason to end their marriage.

Mr Levitan on set with some of the stars of Modern Family. He has explained previously that the storylines of the Emmy Award winning comedy come from his own family life

Married in 1992, the couple have three children, two daughters Hannah and Alexa, and a son, Griffin - all of whom are adults, so child support or custody is not a factor.

Levitan has explained previously that the storylines of the Emmy Award winning comedy Modern Family come from his own family life living in Los Angeles, including incidents with his wife.

He told the audience at Paley Fest in 2010 that Krista smashed his expensive television remote control into a thousand pieces and left it by their front door for him to find - as portrayed by Claire in the show.

'We go home, we spend time with our kooky families and we write down what they do and say. that's how we get about half of our stories,' Levitan said at Paley Fest.

'My wife cannot operate a remote control to save her life, and one day I came home and a brand-new remote was in a thousand pieces by the front door. That's one of many stories that I've jut plucked from my life.'

Mr Levitan pictured with Modern Family star Sofia Vegara at the Golden Globes in 2014. In addition to Modern Family, Mr Levitan created Just Shoot Me! and also wrote for Frasier, Wings, and The Larry Sanders Show

In another interview with NPR, Levitan says he used to get in trouble for recording his family interactions for television fodder.

He says that he regularly pulls out his phone and hits record during good conversations at the kitchen.

Other times the move doesn't go down well.

'In the middle of a huge fight or somebody's having a breakdown of some sort, it's not rare to hear, "Put that phone away  I don't want to see this on the show!"'

Modern Family won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series, as well as two other Emmy Awards: Outstanding Supporting Actor in Comedy Series for Eric Stonestreet, and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd in 2010, after hitting screens in 2009.

Levitan also won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series for Modern Family in 2012.
She was gifted with two very different bracelets during Wednesday night's premiere of The Bachelorette.

And when it comes to Georgia Love's taste in accessories, it appears that less is more for the Hobart news reader.

After receiving a lavish Tiffany bracelet from Carlos, 33, and an unusual pasta bracelet from Courtney, 30, Georgia was decidedly more impressed by the cheap trinket as she chose to present the latter with a yellow rose.

Quality gift: Stripper Carlos, 33, from Victoria, gave Bachelorette Georgia Love, 28, a lavish Tiffany bracelet upon meeting her during Wednesday night's premiere of the dating series

Over the top: Despite having just met the Hobart news anchor, Carlos gifted her with expensive jewellry

Regrets? Initially the dancer appeared pleased with himself until he was set home at the end of the episode

'Courtney, will you accept this first impression rose?' she asked to which he enthusiastically replied: 'Absolutely. Thank you very much!'

Host Osher Gusberg explained to the group that a first impression rose signifies Georgia's 'most meaningful connection' on that evening.

Courtney's rose came much to the dismay of Carlos, who had dropped hundreds of dollars on the lavish jewellry with the hopes of impressing the brunette beauty.

Thoughtful gift: Courtney, 30, gave Georgia a cheap bracelet made of pasta upon meeting her for the first time

Happy: She was thrilled with the gift and gushed over it

Lasting impression: He was later presented with a yellow rose from Georgia, proving that his efforts paid off

'What a mood killer!' he scoffed after Courtney secured the rose.



Georgia, 28, and Courtney exchanged several flirtatious giggles upon meeting and she explained that she chose to give him the rose because there is undeniable chemistry.

'Courtney and I just clicked. From the moment that we first started speaking on the red carpet, our conversation flowed. He made me laugh. He's just somebody that I want to be around,' she said.

Last laugh: While Courtney's pasta bracelet became the butt of many jokes throughout the evening, he appeared to have the last laugh as Georgia loved it

Impressed: 'I've never been given a pasta bracelet in my whole life, and I love it,' she said

While the pasta bracelet became the butt of many jokes throughout the episode, it appears that Courtney had the last laugh as Melbourne-native Georgia was quite impressed.

'I've never been given a pasta bracelet in my whole life, and I love it,' she said.

'This is the kind of thing that as a little girl I would have loved, you know, to receive, and wherever that girl was in year 2 who didn't accept that bracelet...'

Courtney later said in a side interview: ' I feel over the moon.'

During the rose ceremony Carlos and Dale were sent home.

Bye bye! Carlos tried to hide his disappointment as he was sent packing

Gone: Dale was also given the boot




However, a source close to the pair told TMZ the reports are untrue and they are not wed

The couple have two young daughters

Hollywood heartthrob Ryan Gosling has married his long-term partner Eva Mendes in a secret ceremony.

According to US Weekly the 35-year-old Drive star and actress, 42, tied the knot earlier this year in small and intimate ceremony.

The magazine reports that the Hollywood couple, who have been dating since 2011, invited their immediate families and a small group of friends.

However, a source close to the pair insisted to TMZ that the wedding reports are untrue and they are not wed.

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Hitched! Hollywood heartthrob Ryan Gosling has married his long-term partner Eva Mendes in a secret ceremony

A source close to Hitch star Eva told the magazine: 'Eva and Ryan have always felt like a married couple. They are infatuated with each other.'

MailIOnline has contacted representatives of both Ryan and Eva for comment.

The couple met while working on Derek Cianfrance's thriller The Place Beyond The Pines.

True love: According to US Weekly the 35-year-old Drive star and actress, 42, tied the knot earlier this year in small and intimate ceremony

The Canadian actor, who shot to fame in The Notebook and Drive, and Eva have two daughters together.

Eva gave birth to their two-year-old daughter Esmeralda Amada Gosling in September 2014, before the couple welcomed Amanda Lee Gosling in April.

Speaking to US at the Toronto Film Festival the Nice Guys star gushed about his family, saying: 'We couldnt be happier. They are so sweet.'

'They're infatuated with each other': A source close to Hitch star Eva told the magazine: 'Eva and Ryan have always felt like a married couple. They are infatuated with each other'

And Ryan couldn't help but rave about his home-life during an interview with Good Morning America earlier on in May.

Speaking just weeks after the couple welcomed their youngest daughter into the world, he told the breakfast show: 'It's heaven. It's like walking through a field of flowers every day. I live with angels.'

The couple's alleged secret union shouldn't come as a surprise to fans, as the couple kept both their children's births secret till the last minute.

Where it all began: The couple (pictured with Bradley Cooper in 2013) met in 2012 while working on Derek Cianfrance's thriller The Place Beyond The Pines

'We couldnt be happier': Speaking to US at the Toronto Film Festival the Nice Guys star gushed about his family, saying: 'We couldnt be happier. They are so sweet'

On April 14, it was reported that Ryan and Eva were expecting their second child, with Eva giving birth to Amada in Santa Monica two weeks later.

Before Ryan found love with Eva he previously had a protracted on/off relationship with his Notebook co-star Rachel McAdams, and before that dated Sandra Bullock.

Prior to her relationship with Ryan Eva dated George Augusto from 2002- 2010.
The Bachelorette's Clancy first introduced himself to Georgia Love on the debut episode of the show holding a shaver, telling her she can shave off his rugged beard.

The smooth tactic to get more time with Georgia worked, with the 28-year-old getting rid of his facial hair in front of his shocked rivals.

Georgia couldn't believe her eyes after seeing his new look and freshly shaven face, saying how good he looked, while Clancy said during the shave: 'This is the weirdest first date.'

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'This is the weirdest first date': On Wednesday's debut episode of The Bachelor, Georgia Love shaved contestant Clancy's beard in the mansion after introductions

In a piece to camera, Clancy admitted he was glad to have that time with Georgia and hoped the quirky move made him stand out against the other Bachelors.

'I'm very excited to have a bit of one-on-one time with her, giving her the opportunity to get rid of the beard,' The 29-year-old said.

'So, hopefully I'm in with a good chance to get the first impression rose.'

Smooth: In a piece to camera, Clancy admitted he was glad to have that time with Georgia and hoped the quirky move made him stand out against the other Bachelors

One of the boys meanwhile commented that Georgia was going for it like a 'sheep shearer.'

After Georgia left an almost Wolverine-esq set of chops on his face, the medical sales representative eventually fixed his beard and shaved off the rest, looking completely different without it.

His new look left Georgia swooning and she told the camera how great he looks.

She likes it! His new look left Georgia swooning and she said to camera how great he looks

'Clancy looked good with a beard, but clean-shaven - whew! Hello! Clean-shaven Clancy,' Georgia said.

Clancy made it through the evening, being handed a red rose by Georgia.

Two contestants were sent packing from the bunch of 16 - Carlos and Dale.

Georgia - who is Australia's second Bachelorette - seemed to have a great connection with Clancy.

Well worth it! Clancy made it through the evening, being handed a red rose by Georgia

Smitten? Georgia - who is Australia's second Bachelorette - seemed to have a great connection with Clancy

According to his Bachelorette profile, he said his idea woman would be someone who is 'fun, smart, independent, good sense of humour and good values.'

He also said he doesn't believe in 'the one'.

'I believe there are a few compatible people but not many.'
He's one of the most successful and sought-after actors in the world.

But George Clooney, 55, was pushed aside as his stunning human rights lawyer wife Amal, 38, was mobbed by adoring fans as they left the UN roundtable in New York on Tuesday.

The silver fox looked more like a doting fan himself as he beamed at his preoccupied wife.

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Upstaged! George Clooney, 55, was pushed aside as his stunning human rights lawyer wife Amal, 38, was mobbed by adoring fans as they left the UN Roundtable in New York on Tuesday

Amal posed for selfies with her devoted fans, as George was forced to simply look on, while a bodyguard tried to reunite the pair.

The stunning brunette opted for a classy knee-length dress, cinched at the waist which accentuated her tiny frame.

The actor looked equally stylish in a fitted black suit paired with a white shirt and striped grey tie to complete his suave look.

Once he finally got his hands on his wife, George held on tight as they walked with their fingers entwined in each others.

All hands on deck: Once he finally got his hands on his wife, George held on tight as they walked with their fingers entwined in each others

Honeymoon not over! George and Amal held hands as they attended a CEO Roundtable on the sidelines of the United Nations

The couple, who married in 2014, proved the honeymoon stage was not over as they gave a loved up display while holding hands and casting adoring looks throughout the roundtable meeting, which was also attended by President Obama.

During the summit for refugees, George thanked the President for commitments of $650-million for refugee assistance.

Mr Clooney has also been working for human rights, unveiling last week a report on the rampant corruption in South Sudan.

Look of love: The actor couldn't stop looking at his stunning wife - who has been advocating for a former Yazidi sex slave in her capacity as human rights lawyer

Happy: Mrs Clooney beamed as her husband spoke, no doubt happy to have him by her side

Amal has called on the UK to take more refugees from Syria and is currently mounting a legal case against ISIS on behalf of a Yazidi sex slave, Nadia Murad.

She also said she would be 'delighted' to work on a prosecution of Syrian president Bashar Assad over crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Speaking to Channel 4 News alongside Nadia, Mrs Clooney said: 'I would hope that more could be taken in.

George was able to tear his eyes away from his gorgeous wife to turn to President Obama at one point - but kept holding tight

Holding hands: The heat between the two is clear- nearly two years after they wed

The pair let go of each other long enough for a round of applause at the CEO roundtable

The pair wed in Venice on September 27, 2014. Here they are about to take their seat in the UN on Tuesday

The actor appeared to be a fantastic mood as he took a seat by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

'There has been one Yazidi family that has been given asylum so far in the UK.

'You have had a million refugees accepted in Germany in the last year and 70,000 of those have been Yazidis.

'In every other country it's been literally a handful, so I'm hoping that can improve.

'That is something that my husband and I are doing in the US, for example, with the International Rescue Committees. If the Government disappoints then at least they should empower you to make a difference.'

Reasons: 'This is my job,' said Clooney when asked why she took on the case against ISIS, who added that she discussed the risks with husband George

Earlier the human rights lawyer covered up in a chic coat on her way into the UN

Mrs Clooney's newest client Nadia was captured by ISIS when she was just 19 and became a sex slave.

Clooney spoke on the Today show about how Nadia was at times raped by two men at a time until she 'fell unconscious.'

Nadia said that ISIS members killed six of her eight brothers and her mother when they stormed her town in the northern Iraq two years ago during the Yazidi genocide.

The high-profile lawyer and her husband have taken Nadia into the care of their own home.

Mrs Clooney has been very busy. In addition to speaking at the UN and doing multiple television appearances to promote Nadia's cause, the pair also met with the French Foreign Minister on Monday, seen here

The Clooneys have even taken Nadia into their home

Brave women: Clooney said Nadia was taken captive as a sex slave at the age of 19 and at times raped by two men at once until she fell unconscious (Nadia and Clooney above)

She said during an interview yesterday that the risks that come with taking on the brutal terrorist group are far outweighed by the urgency to combat their unconscionable treatment of people, specifically women.

Today, she was critical of the UN's failure to take stronger action against ISIS: 'There's obviously situations that have called for action by the Security Council where there has been inaction and so you can't say that the UN is fulfilling the role that it's supposed to be playing.

'There is no reason why the council should be paralysed. Isis has actually confessed to its crimes online. That's why when I spoke at the UN it was not my intention to speak in terms of congratulations, thank you for calling it genocide.

'The point is, what is the UN going to do about it? And I do hope that with the leadership of the UK this can actually be pushed forward.'

Retaliation: Clooney said that bombing the group was not enough and that the trial was needed because it is impossible to 'kill an idea' (above at the UN last week)

Mrs Clooney was also keen to take Syrian president Assad to task - and wants to be part of it.

She added: 'If there is a prosecution of President Assad I would be delighted to work on it. I think the UN has concluded that the Syrian government has committed crimes against humanity and war crimes.

'They're not the only ones - there are other actors who have committed the same crimes. But I think there's little doubt that that's what we're dealing with.'
Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux have split.

That is the latest headline from InTouch Weekly - the same publication that correctly reported last week that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were divorcing.

But Aniston's rep has told DailyMail.com the magazine's new report is 'a complete fabrication' and that the 47-year-old Friends vet has no plans to split from her 45-year-old husband of one year.

Not over: Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux are not breaking up, according to her rep. On Wednesday InTouch Weekly claimed they had split. Here the couple are seen in January

Thew new issues: The publication claimed the two have been living apart

But they got this one right: Last week the same magazine reported Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were splitting, which was proven true on Tuesday after she filed for divorce; here the couple are seen in March 2014

The magazine is alleging Aniston is calling it quits with Theroux because he has been talking to his ex-girlfriend Heidi Bivens, who he spent 14 years with.

Aniston's rep, however, told DailyMail.com the InTouch report is a 'complete fabrication.'

The cover story details conversations Theroux has had with Bivens, reporting they often laugh together on the phone.

It was added he has a flirty relationship with his Leftovers co-star Margaret Qualley, 21, and that distance has been a problem as the actor has been in Australia for three months shooting his HBO series.

Rocky: The publication alleged that Jennifer has not liked it that Justin is still talking to his ex Heidi Bivens, who he dated for 14 years; here Aniston and Theroux are seen in June 2011

His last lady: The star with Bivens at the Rodarte Fall fashion show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in February 2011 in New York City

A younger gal caught his eye? It was also claimed Justin flirted with Margaret Qualley, 21, far right, last year; here Justin and Justin are seen with Margaret and Jovan Adepo at The Leftovers TV series premiere in Austin in October 2015

The main focus of the cover story, however, was Justin and Heidi.

'They've stayed in contact ever since they broke up,' said a source. 'Jen hates it. She let him have it, saying it was the last time she ever wanted to hear about that woman.'

And even though Jennifer has told Justin she is not comfortable with his conversations with Heidi, he refuses to stop, it was added by the source.

'Justin and Heidi are friends, and that's not going to change,' said the insider.

No JT: The beauty went solo to the LA premiere of her new movie Storks on September 17; Justin has been in Australia for three months to shoot The Leftovers

Heidi, 40, is a stylist and costume designer who has worked on music videos for Kanye West and on the film Spring Breakers with Selena Gomez. She lived with Justin for several years in New York City.

But when Justin met Jennifer on the set of the 2012 film Wanderlust, he split from his longtime love.

Now it seems the writer and actor cannot let go of his ex.

Talk of Bivens even overshadowed their one year wedding anniversary in August, it was claimed.

According to InTouch, when Justin flew home from Australia - where he has been shooting The Leftovers - they talked about his ex.

He's been gone: The 45-year-old actor and the beauty wed in August 2015; here they are pictured in February

'They had the fight over Heidi,' said a pal. 'By the end of the trip they were barely speaking to each other.'

It was also added that the couple decided to split before he returned to Australia for more shooting.

The source said Justin feels he is doing nothing wrong by talking to Bivens and he even lets Aniston see their text messages.

'But Jen flies off the handle and says he's obsessed with Heidi,' said the insider.

But the Zoolander star had told his wife he did not want to 'ignore' Heidi, it was added. It was also claimed he helped Heidi get a job as a costume designer on a new film.

Bad past: It was then added that Aniston has trust issues stemming from her marriage to Brad Pitt, who she was wed to from 2000 until 2005; here Jen and Brad are seen in 2001

Their last red carpet together: Pitt reportedly left Aniston when he fell for Jolie on the set of Mr And Mrs Smith; here they are pictured in May 2004

It was then added that Aniston has trust issues stemming from her marriage to Brad Pitt, who she was wed to from 2000 until 2005.

Pitt reportedly left Aniston when he fell for Jolie on the set of Mr And Mrs Smith. But there have also been reports Jennifer and Brad were done before he stepped foot on the set of the thriller.

And there have been claims it was Jennifer who cheated with her Friends co-star Matt LeBlanc. This rumour was backed up by LeBlanc's father several years ago.

She's still a pal?: It was claimed Theroux helped Bivens land a costume design job on a movie recently; here she is seen in April 2014 in Beverly Hills

'Jen lives in constant fear that Justin is going to run off with another woman and leave her heartbroken like Brad did,' said a source.

On Wednesday UsWeekly reported Jennifer called the Brad and Angie split 'karma.'

As far as Justin's relationship with Qualley, the daughter of Andie MacDowell, 58, the two were reportedly flirting at an HBO Emmy after party in 2015.

Qualley plays Theroux's daughter on the show.

Now that Justin is wrapping up his shoot in Australia, he will come home to Aniston, but the publication added the two will have to work out their 'separate lives' before things get better. 'This is a make or break time for the relationship,' it was added.
He quit Coronation Street in June after starring as Jason Grimshaw for 16 years.

And Ryan Thomas, 32, discussed what it's like leaving one of the nation's best-loved shows when he attended the Hang Dr Launch Party, on Tuesday night, inside London's Archer Street Cocktail Lounge.

Speaking to MailOnline, the actor said: 'It's a horrible game sometimes when you come out of a soap. You're there to be judged on what you do next but, really and truly, Ive never been so happy since I left Coronation Street.

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A new chapter: Ryan Thomas, 32, discussed what it's like leaving one of the nation's best-loved shows when he attended the Hang Dr Launch Party inside London's Archer Street Cocktail Lounge

'It was the hardest decision in the world leaving, but right now is the happiest time in my life, so I have no regrets.'

'More than anything I miss the people. Its been the best years of my life. I'm very much thankful to Coronation Street for that, but its just time to change.

And the soap's demanding schedule isn't something he'll miss, adding: 'Not having that half seven in the morning call 'til half seven at night everyday. Theyre doing six episodes (a week) now, I got out just in time (laughs).'

Ryan and his brothers, twins Adam and Scott, 27, totally transformed their physiques earlier this year, spurring each other on over the course of an intense 12-week programme.

Time to move on: Ryan quit Coronation Street in June after starring as Jason Grimshaw for 16 years

While he's kept up certain aspects of the three-month plan, he admitted it's too hard to keep up forever.

Discussing his transformation, he said: 'I'm all or nothing. I'm an extremist.

'I maintain to a certain point. It was so intense the regime - eating and stuff, it was hard, hard work.

'It was hard to keep that up continuously and no drinking. I live in London now and don't have my brothers pushing me to do it.

'It becomes very anti-social as well.'

The star will jet off to Canada with a pal soon and has plans to see some of the country's many Coronation Street fans in theatres over there.

When it comes to his big career change, Ryan said: 'If I'm really honest with you, I don't care what other people think. I do this for me, not for anyone else. Im not here to prove anything to anyone.'
It's getting heated between Game Of Thrones star Lena Headey and her ex-husband, Irish musician Peter Loughran.

Loughran is upset that the 42-year-old actress moved with their son to the UK this past summer while he's remained in the United States.

But Headey's lawyer Joy Stanley told TMZ Wednesday that Loughran - who's saying now that he has no intent to depart the states - previously agreed to terms of the move, under which both retain joint custody of their son Wylie, aged six years.

Custody dispute: Game of Thrones Beauty Lena Headey, seen here at the show's April premiere in Los Angeles, is embroiled in a row with ex Irish musician Peter Loughran over her summer move to the U.K. with their son, Wiley

Better times: The two, who parted ways in 2011, were pictured in 2009 at a Hollywood event

In the right: The star said via her lawyer that her ex had previously agreed to the move

The British beauty 'has not taken the parties' child against any custody arrangement,' her attorney told the outlet, which reported that her main motivation to move overseas was the strong support system of relatives she has in the U.K. (Last year, she welcomed a daughter named Teddy.)

Headey, who's been nominated for Emmys three consecutive years for her portrayal of Cersei Lannister on HBO's adventure fantasy, tied the knot with Loughran in 2007, before separating in 2011, with their divorce becoming final in 2013.

It's been a thoroughly contentious split for the musician and actress, who's also been seen in 300, The Brothers Grimm and Possession: in 2013, the tattooed beauty, citing her ex's past driving issues, asked the court to make him download an app that would prohibit him from texting while driving (which she agreed to download as well).

Natural beauty: The actress, 42, looked pretty at an April event in Los Angeles

Queen for a day: Headey has been nominated for Emmys three straight years, for her work on the HBO hit

That year, the Bermuda-born star of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles star also brought to the court's attention Loughran's social media posts showing him posing with an AK-47, in a successful petition from keeping him from taking the boy on a holiday trip to his native Ireland.

In in an essay for Plan International announcing she was expecting a girl last year, Headey vowed she would do everything in her power to ensure that her daughter would be 'loved, protected, respected, and celebrated.
Ashley Tisdale's eye for fashion is keen enough to have wrangled her a clothing line.

On Wednesday, the first day of autumn, she once again proved her style credentials.

The 31-year-old was spotted dripping effortless glamour in a chic outfit when she dropped by New York City's Madison Square Park for the Farm Heroes Super Saga launch party.

Here's to the ladies who launch: On Wednesday, Ashley Tisdale attended a launch party for Farm Heroes Super Saga at Madison Square Park in New York City

Profitable companions: The mobile game was created by King, the company behind such other Sagas as Candy Crush and Pet Rescue

Her blonde hair fell free over a sleeveless, white-striped yellow top that tightened about her trim midriff. Small ovular holes ran from her neck to her waist, offering glimpses of the skin underneath.

The High School Musical star had tucked the top into thinly striped black and white dress, which featured one particularly wide black stripe down the middle.

Black stilettos matched her black fingernails, elegantly signalling the end of summer as she posed against a rail at the mobile game's 'interactive Urban Orchard.'

Farm Heroes was developed by King, the company behind such other Sagas as Candy Crush and Pet Rescue.

The first day of autumn: The 31-year-old wore a multicoloured striped outfit perfect for the new season

At another point that day, the New Jersey native was spotted out in New York City in another nonchalantly stylish ensemble.

Her blue blouse - speckled with white dots - offered quite a bit of cleavage, and was sheer enough to provide a glimpse of her darker bra.

A white belt cinched around light blue jeans that stopped far enough above her ankle to show off her black leather high-heeled boots.

Credentialled: The New Jersey native is no stranger to fashion, having recently launched her own clothing line via Signorelli

Last week, the Young & Hungry actress launched her first clothing line, a collaboration with Signorelli. At the launch, she expounded to PeopleStyle on her brand's fall wardrobe offerings.

'I'm a huge fan of plaids,' she said, vaunting the fact 'You can dress them up. You can dress them down  Im really, really proud of those because we have so many different color patterns and the material is just so great.'

She reflected on the designing process as having been 'really fast,' explaining: 'You create so much and you design so much stuff and then a lot of stuff gets dropped. Youre just like, "Whoa. Oh my God. Thats so crazy."

'I had no idea. I thought these two jackets were going to for sure be something the companies would come in and buy.'
Lupita Nyong'o is baffled by rumors that she wouldn't be returning for Star Wars: Episode VIII.

During an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the 12 Years A Slave Oscar winner said 'I don't know where this rumor came from. It hurt my feelings because I've shot my scenes.'

'You never really know, when you shoot your scenes in a movie, which ones are gonna make it and all that. So, its always, Fingers crossed!' she added. 'But as far as I know, Im in it.'

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Clarified the situation: During an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Wednesday, Lupita Nyong'o confirmed she has shot scenes for Star Wars: Episode VIII

Nyong'o plays Maz Kanata, a thousand-year-old alien dubbed the 'pirate queen', using motion capture to bring the character to life.

She was first seen in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens.

The actress addressed the rumors during her sit-down interview with Ellen as she continues to promote her current big screen release Queen Of Katwe.

Debuted in The Force awakens: The actress plays the character Maz Kanata in the Star Wars films using motion capture to create the miniature alien known as the 'pirate queen'

'I don't know where this rumor came from' The 12 years a Slave Oscar winner said her feelings had been hurt by the rumors that she would not be a part of the next Star wars installment

The talk show host and comedienne pointed out that the Kenyan beauty has graced her third Vogue cover this month.

Nyong'o explained how she'd suggested to the fashion magazine that they shoot photos of her in her ancestral home in Africa, and they'd agreed.

Among the pictures is one of her with her 96-year-old grandmother wearing traditional dress.

Model too: Nyong'o, 33, also chatted with Ellen about doing her third Vogue cover for the October issue of the fashion magazine

Back to Africa: She explained how she'd suggested the photos be shot in her ancestral home in Kenya and she posed with her 96-year-old grandmother in traditional dress

Comfort zone: Nyong'o talked baout how working as a model before she forged a career as an actress had been helpful since it got her used to being in front of a camera

Watch the birdie: She then showed off her 'sexy face' that she uses when modeling, before Ellen showed off hers

She explained that working as a model before forging her career as an actress had been a helpful experience.

'It's very vulnerable to have your picture taken,' she said. 'Everyone is trying to capture beauty and you don't always feel very beautiful, so you have to give sexy face and all that.'

Ellen invited her to show off her 'sexy face' which she did, and then Ellen showed off hers, much to the delight of her studio audience.

Stylish: The star wore a red and gray patterned sleeveless jumpsuit with matching turban for her talk show appearance

Publicity: Nyong'o is currently promoting her new film Queen Of Katwe, about a girl in Uganda whose horizons are widened after she learns to play chess

The star was later seen in a different but equally as vibrant ensemble as she headed for an appearance at Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Lupita headed to the ABC studios in a gorgeous fitted yellow floral dress, paired with traditional headdress and suede teal heels.

The film is set for release on September 23.

On to the next! The star was later seen in a different but equally as vibrant ensemble as she headed for an appearance at Jimmy Kimmel Live
She gave birth to her second child last month.

And Luisa Zissman is on a true mission to regain her perfect post-baby body as proved in a sensational Instagram snap posted shared with her 421,000 followers on Wednesday.

The 29-year-old Apprentice star, who is also mother to six-year-old Dixie from her previous marriage, shares baby Indigo with husband of one year Andrew Collins - and is determined to get her figure back.

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Body changing: Luisa Zissman is on a true mission to regain her perfect post-baby body as proved in a sensational Instagram snap posted to her 421,000 followers on Wednesday

Luisa has been avidly documenting her weight loss journey with her followers, shortly after ridding her social media accounts of all images of her children.

Her decision comes after she previously expressed her desire to raise her family away from the spotlight, as well as admitting that her husband didn't approve of her sharing pictures of the kids.

And despite her reluctance to post baby shots, she is still extremely keen to show off her body on the photo-sharing site.

On Wednesday, she was keen to share her progress with her phenomenal shape as she posted the in-depth caption reading: '2 weeks postpartum vs today 7 weeks postpartum. Stomach gone down & very slowly getting some kind of tone back, long road ahead!

Astounding: The 29-year-old Apprentice star, who is also mother to six-year-old Dixie from her previous marriage, shares new baby Indigo with husband of one year Andrew Collins - and is determined to get her figure back

Peace out! Luisa looked sensational and is determined to get back to her post baby look

'For those interested I've been eating well but not denying myself anything & doing Pilates, or toning classes at least once a day, sometimes twice and horse riding too. I STILL lack core strength which I discovered when schooling my horse today!

'But I'll get there! Loving my new leggings from H&M! #mummytummy #postpartumfitness #postpartumbody #7weekspostpartum.'

Just two weeks after birth Luisa shared a snap of herself in underwear just before giving birth, alongside a snap of her in a bra and jeans this week.

What a transformation: Luisa Zissman looked remarkably different just two weeks after giving birth to Indigo Esme

Flaunting her incredible washboard stomach, the former Apprentice star wrote: '2 weeks ago vs this morning. Surprised at how quickly my stomach has gone down. I gained 2st with this pregnancy & have 7lbs to lose now.

'With Dixie I gained 4st! having been very fit before I got pregnant was a massive bonus in my recovery I think. Skin is still loose & can't wait to tone up but on the whole pretty pleased with how belly is looking.

'Have no core strength which I realised after trying to ride my horse last week. I did NO exercise throughout my pregnancy due to my hips & pelvis being in agony, and I ate well but didn't deny myself anything.

'As soon as doc signs me off I'll be following @kayla_itsines programme to get fit, doing Pilates & yoga and of course my beloved horse riding. Will share my progress here with the other mummas who are interested to see. #postnatal #postpartumbody (sic)'.

'I will protect their privacy: The previous day Luisa took the decision to remove all pictures of her two young children from her social network pages

And the previous day was when Luisa took the decision to remove all pictures of her two young children from her social network pages.

Taking to Instagram she posed a screengrab of her notes, writing: 'Just wanted to say thanks to those that were lovely & wrote nice comments on my pic of Dixie. I have now deleted that pic and most others of her and have taken the decision to no longer share photos of Dixie on social media.

'When both my girls are old enough they can have their own social media accounts but until then I will protect their privacy and not share anymore.'

'Cabbage leafs and iced towels in plastic bags, the glamorous life of motherhood. Regretting that boob job right about now. #engorged #massivemelons.(sic)' Luisa wrote last Sunday

In her true open and honest style, she previously admitted she was in a lot of pain from breastfeeding.

She posted an Instagram selfie of her breasts covered in cabbage leaves and iced towels as she got used to feeding again.

Sharing the photo on her Instagram page, Luisa wrote: 'Cabbage leafs and iced towels in plastic bags, the glamorous life of motherhood. Regretting that boob job right about now. #engorged #massivemelons.(sic)'

'She's here! Born Tuesday 2nd August at 9.21pm weighing a very healthy 8.1lbs (where was she hiding in my little bump?!) Luisa announced on IG

Luisa and second husband Andrew Collins welcomed baby Indigo at London's Portland Hospital in August.

And like many new mothers' experience, the former Celebrity Big Brother star was finding the first few days of nursing rather painful.

She announced Indigo's birth a week and a half ago with a photo of the baby's hand, writing: 'She's here! Born Tuesday 2nd August at 9.21pm weighing a very healthy 8.1lbs (where was she hiding in my little bump?!).

Mingling with Rylan Clark: Luisa, who is also mother to six-year-old Dixie from her previous marriage and shares new baby Indigo with husband of one year Andrew Collins

'Daddy won't let me post any pics of her so this is all you'll get, but she's perfect in every way.

'I had a perfect hypnobirth in water, she was born very quickly after a 1hr labour with no pain relief. I love giving birth!! It's the most amazing thing ever!

'Finally home from hospital & enjoying being a family of 4! Oh and her name: Indigo Esme Collins.'

Luisa revealed in April she was pregnant with her first child with Andrew, who she wed at the Chateau de la Napoule, a waterside castle on the French Riviera in July 2015.

The pair, who share a 17 year age gap, started dating in late 2013 - a few months after she found fame on The Apprentice - with Andrew proposing with a 1.5million Boodles ring in Paris in October 2014.

She remains on good terms with her first husband Oliver - founder of Totally Fitness - who she split from in 2012 following three years of marriage after he allegedly cheated on her.
On the ITV series Grantchester they play an unlikely crime-fighting duo.

But on Wednesday the actors found themselves close to a real-life police drama as authorities handcuffed a man just yards from the set in Cambridgeshire.

Proving just how professional they are, James and Robson continued filming and looked completely unfazed by the action unfolding nearby.

An ITV spokesman told the MailOnline: 'There was an incident in Grantchester village involving the police but it was in no way connected to the Grantchester production and filming was not affected.'

Crime fighters: On Wednesday actors Robson Green, left, and James Norton continued filming the ITV crime drama Grantchester in Cambridgeshire

Heartthrob James, who plays Vicar Sidney Chambers in the detective series, was seen walking down the street in his 1950s costume, consisting of a white button-up, dark trousers and a vest.

He looked contemplative as Robson, who portrays Police Inspector Geordie Keating, chatted to him about the latest happenings in the Cambridgeshire village.

Looking every inch the detective, he wore a double-breasted, three-piece suit and a large overcoat, and carried a brown hat.

Police disturbance: As James and Robson filmed their scenes, local police handcuffed a man standing just yards away from the set

In character: Hoping to re-create the 50s, James wore a vintage vicar's outfit, while Robson wore a three-piece, double-breasted suit with a large overcoat

Grantchester is a small-screen adaptation of crime-fiction book series The Grantchester Mysteries by James Runcie and the first series pulled in an average of 6.6 million viewers when it debuted in October 2014.

The final episode saw Geordie shot on duty.

A year on, he appears to have put this behind him but underneath his carefree exterior there are new feelings of vulnerability, and this puts a strain on his relationship with wife Cathy and his friendship with Sidney.

The six new episodes are being filmed in London and Grantchester as well as in Cambridge's city centre.

A 90 minute Christmas Special will also be broadcast later this year.

Victoria Fea, ITVs Controller of Drama, commented: 'Viewers have really taken Grantchester to their hearts. Were really excited to commission not only a third series, but also a Christmas special.

'The village of Grantchester is always beautiful, but to add a festive touch will be absolutely wonderful!'
She was the focus of attention of Tuesday as her A-Lister husband George Clooney was pushed aside by her adoring fans.

But it was back to business as usual for Amal Clooney nee Alamuddin as she continued with her work alongside the UN in New York on Wednesday.

Showing that she takes as much pride in her appearance as her work, the 38-year-old human rights lawyer wowed in a chic monochrome shift dress as she set about her daily duties.

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Back on track: It was back to business for usual for Amal Clooney nee Alamuddin as she continued with her work alongside the UN in New York on Wednesday

Proving that less is more, Amal wowed in a black dress with fluted white sleeves and a pleated hem that grazed her tanned and toned pins.

The chic gown also featured a stylish collar, that she fastened with a scarlet neck tie to inject a splash of colour into the ensemble.

Adding some extra height to her modelesque frame, she also donned a pair of patent black court heels as she strolled down the street.

Beauty and brains: Proving that she takes as much pride in her appearance as her work, the 38-year-old human rights lawyer wowed in a chic monochrome shift dress

Classic and chic: Proving that less is more, Amal wowed in a black dress with fluted white sleeves and a pleated hem that grazed her tanned and toned pins

Keeping her accessories simple, she wore a pair of oversized shades and delicate diamond earrings that didn't overpower her classic look.

She also clutched a large black handbag in her perfectly manicured fingers, no doubt filled with important legal files and documents relating to her legal case against ISIS.

Amal finished off the look by sweeping her chestnut coloured locks back into a stylish half up do that framed her flawless features.

Red hot: The chic gown also featured a stylish collar, that she fastened with a scarlet neck tie to inject a splash of colour into the ensemble

Whilst Amal performs her talents off-screen, she found herself more well-known than her Hollywood husband George, the day before.

Seeming surprised by the recognition, the Lebanese-British activist was mobbed by adoring fans she left the UN roundtable in New York on Tuesday alongside her handsome husband.

And the silver fox looked more like a doting fan himself as he beamed at his preoccupied wife.

Pounding the pavements: Adding some extra height to her modelesque frame, she also donned a pair of patent black court heels as she strolled down the street

All about the accessories: Keeping her accessories simple, she wore a pair of oversized shades and delicate diamond earrings that didn't overpower her classic look

Amal posed for selfies with her devoted fans, as George was forced to simply look on, while a bodyguard tried to reunite the pair.

The stunning brunette opted for a classy knee-length dress, cinched at the waist which accentuated her tiny frame.

The actor looked equally stylish in a fitted black suit paired with a white shirt and striped grey tie to complete his suave look.

Once he finally got his hands on his wife, George held on tight as they walked with their fingers entwined in each others.

Upstaged! George Clooney, 55, was pushed aside as his stunning human rights lawyer wife Amal, 38, was mobbed by adoring fans as they left the UN Roundtable in New York on Tuesday

The couple, who married in 2014, proved the honeymoon stage was not over as they gave a loved up display while holding hands and casting adoring looks throughout the roundtable meeting, which was also attended by President Obama.

During the summit for refugees, George thanked the President for commitments of $650-million for refugee assistance.

Mr Clooney has also been working for human rights, unveiling last week a report on the rampant corruption in South Sudan.

All hands on deck: Once he finally got his hands on his wife, George held on tight as they walked with their fingers entwined in each others

Honeymoon not over! George and Amal held hands as they attended a CEO Roundtable on the sidelines of the United Nations

Look of love: The actor couldn't stop looking at his stunning wife - who has been advocating for a former Yazidi sex slave in her capacity as human rights lawyer

Happy: Mrs Clooney beamed as her husband spoke, no doubt happy to have him by her side

Amal has called on the UK to take more refugees from Syria and is currently mounting a legal case against ISIS on behalf of a Yazidi sex slave, Nadia Murad.

She also said she would be 'delighted' to work on a prosecution of Syrian president Bashar Assad over crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Speaking to Channel 4 News alongside Nadia, Mrs Clooney said: 'I would hope that more could be taken in.

George was able to tear his eyes away from his gorgeous wife to turn to President Obama at one point - but kept holding tight

Holding hands: The heat between the two is clear- nearly two years after they wed

The pair let go of each other long enough for a round of applause at the CEO roundtable

The pair wed in Venice on September 27, 2014. Here they are about to take their seat in the UN on Tuesday

The actor appeared to be a fantastic mood as he took a seat by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

'There has been one Yazidi family that has been given asylum so far in the UK.

'You have had a million refugees accepted in Germany in the last year and 70,000 of those have been Yazidis.

'In every other country it's been literally a handful, so I'm hoping that can improve.

'That is something that my husband and I are doing in the US, for example, with the International Rescue Committees. If the Government disappoints then at least they should empower you to make a difference.'

Reasons: 'This is my job,' said Clooney when asked why she took on the case against ISIS, who added that she discussed the risks with husband George

Earlier the human rights lawyer covered up in a chic coat on her way into the UN

Mrs Clooney's newest client Nadia was captured by ISIS when she was just 19 and became a sex slave.

Clooney spoke on the Today show about how Nadia was at times raped by two men at a time until she 'fell unconscious.'

Nadia said that ISIS members killed six of her eight brothers and her mother when they stormed her town in the northern Iraq two years ago during the Yazidi genocide.

The high-profile lawyer and her husband have taken Nadia into the care of their own home.

Mrs Clooney has been very busy. In addition to speaking at the UN and doing multiple television appearances to promote Nadia's cause, the pair also met with the French Foreign Minister on Monday, seen here

The Clooneys have even taken Nadia into their home

Brave women: Clooney said Nadia was taken captive as a sex slave at the age of 19 and at times raped by two men at once until she fell unconscious (Nadia and Clooney above)

She said during an interview yesterday that the risks that come with taking on the brutal terrorist group are far outweighed by the urgency to combat their unconscionable treatment of people, specifically women.

Today, she was critical of the UN's failure to take stronger action against ISIS: 'There's obviously situations that have called for action by the Security Council where there has been inaction and so you can't say that the UN is fulfilling the role that it's supposed to be playing.

'There is no reason why the council should be paralysed. Isis has actually confessed to its crimes online. That's why when I spoke at the UN it was not my intention to speak in terms of congratulations, thank you for calling it genocide.

'The point is, what is the UN going to do about it? And I do hope that with the leadership of the UK this can actually be pushed forward.'

Retaliation: Clooney said that bombing the group was not enough and that the trial was needed because it is impossible to 'kill an idea' (above at the UN last week)

Mrs Clooney was also keen to take Syrian president Assad to task - and wants to be part of it.

She added: 'If there is a prosecution of President Assad I would be delighted to work on it. I think the UN has concluded that the Syrian government has committed crimes against humanity and war crimes.

'They're not the only ones - there are other actors who have committed the same crimes. But I think there's little doubt that that's what we're dealing with.'
Earlier this year he set tongues wagging every time he removed his shirt in the Big Brother house.

And on Wednesday fitness model Alex Cannon was at it again as he stripped down to his swim trunks during his very first visit to Walt Disney World resort in Orlando.

With the Florida sun hitting nearly every inch of his gym-honed body, Vicky Pattison's BFF flaunted his abs of steel in the pool and on the sand

Abs of steel: On Wednesday fitness model Alex Cannon stripped down to his swim trunks during his very first visit to Walt Disney World resort in Orlando

Not afraid to let it all hang out, the Scouse hunk slipped into a pair of thigh-skimming swim trunks.

Soaking wet and standing tall, Alex seemed to relish the attention as his tiny shorts hugged him in all the right areas.

Later in the day he let onlookers know just how hard he works to maintain his form as he broke into a sweat while doing lunges in a local park.

Burning those calories: Later in the day he let onlookers know just how hard he works to maintain his form as he broke out in a sweat while doing squats in a local park

Commanding attention: Alex seemed to relish the attention as his tiny shorts clung to his sculpted legs

Fit: Proving just how taut his core his, Alex managed to stand tall even as the waves crashed against his body

Proving just how taut his core his, Alex managed to stand upright even as the waves crashed against his body.

Managing to balance style with convenience, he wore his wet hair slicked back and sported a neatly trimmed beard that added a rugged element to his pretty boy poses.

Making sure to emphasise the model in fitness model, he also worked a variety of expressions, at times looking contemplative, at other moments sultry.

Seriously cut: Managing to balance style with convenience, he wore his wet hair slicked back and sported a neatly trimmed beard that added a rugged element to his pretty boy poses

He's got it: Making sure to emphasise the model in fitness model, he also worked a variety of expressions, at times looking contemplative, at other moments looking sultry

As the day advanced Alex put on some clothes and enjoyed a spot of shopping, including a stop at a gift shop selling Minnie Mouse babywear.

Alex recently revealed he secretly became a father just days before he went into Big Brother, but he didn't meet his daughter until she was a month old.

In an interview with new! magazine, the 28-year-old revealed that the tot, now two months old, was born prematurely when he was holed up ahead of the show, so he couldn't meet her.

Unable to confide to his housemates, who had no idea about his daughter, the first-time dad admitted not meeting Mila Grace was 'daily torture'.

Fatherly love: As the day advanced Alex put on some clothes and enjoyed a spot of shopping, including a stop at a gift shop selling Minnie Mouse babywear

Nice to meet you: Perhaps thinking of daughter Mila Grace, Alex posed for a photo with Cinderella outside of her castle

Man cleavage: Alex showed off his stunning decolletage in a tight-fitting striped top
The Great British Bake Off

Rating:

Grand Designs

Rating:

Many a true word's spoken in jest, and Sue Perkins's wincing puns took on a bitter new twist in The Great British Bake Off (BBC1).

As the amateur rivals made Danish pastries, she was counting down the clock: 'Thirty minutes left for grievous butterly harm! ... Five minutes for your Danish to make a Killing!'

Finally, she went too far. Young baker Tom was explaining how he wanted to infuse his pastry with the flavour of milk dregs from the cereal bowl, a thought that made Mary Berry pull a face of sheer horror. Sue stepped in: 'Tom, as we say in the breakfast business, Cheerio!'

As she made bite-sized starters that went by the pretentious name of amuse-bouches, Candice declared: 'It's good to get your hands in and give your sausages a good squeeze'

Even the camera crew groaned. Since her non-joke was a direct reference to a breakfast brandname, it's surprising that the BBC producers left it in.

Sue knew her puns had reached the point where they inflicted actual physical pain, and was revelling in it. Pretending to don her coat, she bid everyone goodbye: 'I'm leaving the tent, guys, it's been really great.'

No one could have guessed, when that scene was shot earlier this year, that Sue and her co-presenter Mel Giedroyc really were on their way out of the marquee  nor that it was highly likely this would be 81-year-old Mary's final season too.

Paul Hollywood has remained suspiciously silent about his intentions, and whether he'll transfer to Channel 4  though it's rumoured that he has been offered a million quid to stay, in a deal that would reportedly double his salary.

If he's the only original presenter in the new-look Bake Off, that'll be like Ringo Starr with three session musicians, climbing back on stage and calling themselves The Beatles.

In this laboured analogy, caustic Sue would be John Lennon; Mary would be the one with all the talent, Paul McCartney; and sad-eyed Mel would be the quiet guitarist pushed to the back of the band, George Harrison. Their hits could include Strawberry Flans Forever, Yeasterday, and Here Comes The Bun.

Sue Perkins knew her puns had reached the point where they inflicted actual physical pain, and was revelling in it

Those terrible puns are infectious. So are the saucy innuendos  contestant Candice clearly thinks she can win by serving up the rudest asides. She has already invited Mel to 'grab my jugs'.

Now, as she made bite-sized starters that went by the pretentious name of amuse-bouches, she declared: 'It's good to get your hands in and give your sausages a good squeeze.'

The bakers who look best placed to take the crown, though, are Jane and Selasi. Jane knows all the tricks  checking that her filo pastry-mix was thin enough, she laid it over a brandy bottle and read the label through the dough.

Ghanaian Selasi seems to operate in a different timezone to the other contestants, which enables him to spend as much time chatting or standing with his hands on his hips as he does baking. And he still finishes 20 minutes before the rest, every time.

Plumber John and his partner Noreen, a ceramic artist, looked as though they'd never finish, as delays dragged on for years at the 85,000 woodland plot where they hoped to build a home, in a new series of Grand Designs (C4).

Nothing happened for months on end, while the couple lived in a tumbledown caravan at the site, next to a supermarket carpark in the Cotswolds.

Presenter Kevin McCloud kept up the cheerful patter on his visits, but he must have suspected that the house would never be started, let alone completed, and that this episode would have to be shelved too.

Plumber John and his partner Noreen, a ceramic artist, looked as though they'd never finish, as delays dragged on for years at the 85,000 woodland plot where they hoped to build a home, in a new series of Grand Designs

You had to root for John and Noreen, though. It wasn't just their dream of a living-room 40ft off the ground, with balconies looking across the treetops. It was their determination to blend with the countryside.

They wanted the ground floor to be hatched in polished metal, to reflect the greenery  but not too polished, in case blackbirds flew into it by accident. Anyone who cares that much deserves to succeed.
She wowed on the red carpet last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

But Rachel Weisz proved she can look just as good in her casual daywear as she ran errands in New York on Wednesday.

Dashing through Soho with bags in tow, the 46-year-old actress looked effortlessly chic as she set about with her daily duties.

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Chic and cheerful: She wowed on the red carpet last week. But Rachel Weisz proved she can look just as good in her casual daywear as she ran errands in New York on Wednesday

Highlighting her enviably lean legs, the mum-of-one slipped into a pair of skinny jeans that clung to her toned pins.

She teamed the garment with a crisp blue shirt and layered up in a tweed blazer.

Allowing her natural beauty to shine through, the Constantine star went make-up free for the outing, whilst her chestnut locks were swept back into a topknot.

Au natural: Allowing her natural beauty to shine through, the Constantine star went make-up free for the outing, whilst her chestnut locks were swept back into a topknot

Rachel was no doubt enjoying some downtime after promoting her new film, Denial in Toronto last week.

Ensuring she'd be the main talking part at the movie's festival premiere, Rachel dazzled in a chiffon floral gown that billowed across her phenomenal figure.

While the dress initially appeared demure, a corseted waist visible through the sheer material added a racy touch particularly when paired with a nude underlay.

Making moves: Dashing through Soho with bags in tow, the 46-year-old actress looked effortlessly chic as she set about with her daily duties in a crisp shirt and tweed jacket

Rachel plays historian Deborah Lipstadt in the movie, the author of 2005 book Denial: Holocaust History on Trial, on which the film is based.

The movie is about a 1996 British libel suit brought against Lipstadt and the publisher of her tome, Penguin Books, by Timothy Spall's character, David Irving, the British historian who Lipstadt accused of being a Holocaust denier.

While the hard-hitting subject matter is garnering interest, the reviews of the movie have been mixed.
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About Censored News Censored News is published by Brenda Norrell. Since 2006, Censored News has received more than 20 million pageviews. As a collective of writers, photographers and broadcasters, we publish news of Indigenous Peoples and human rights. Contact publisher Brenda Norrell: brendanorrell@gmail.com

From the publisher Censored News is published by Brenda Norrell, a journalist in Indian country for 40 years. Norrell created Censored News after she was censored and terminated as a staff reporter at Indian Country Today in 2006. She began as a reporter at Navajo Times during the 18 years that she lived on the Navajo Nation. She was a stringer for AP and USA Today and later traveled with the Zapatistas through Mexico. She has been blacklisted by all the mainstream media for 14 years. Contact brendanorrell@gmail.com

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She is preparing for the launch of her new ITVBe show The Mummy Diaries.

And Sam Faiers seems to be in relaxation mode ahead of her next round of being catapulted into the spotlight as she enjoyed a family getaway with her partner Paul and their baby Paul Tony in Sardinia this week.

Littering her Instagram account with sweet family shots, the 25-year-old former TOWIE star shared a number of images of her two Pauls before she wowed on the shores in a skimpy dress which flashed her bikini bottoms.

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A bit of all white: Sam Faiers seems to be in relaxation mode ahead of her next round of being catapulted into the spotlight as she enjoyed a family getaway with her partner Paul and their baby Paul Tony in Sardinia this week

Sam appears to be having a wonderful time as she hit the beach with her boys shortly after her recent getaway with her mum Sue and sister Billie.

One stunning shot, no doubt captured by her partner, saw her pose in a slinky white dress boasting a plunging neckline and slashes up to the hips which gave a glimpse of her barely-there bikini bottoms underneath.

She simply captioned the shot: 'In love with Sardinia' - a point she made clear as she showed her followers snaps of the local delicacies and exquisite views.

The idyllic background was captured once more when Sam took a picture of her beau Paul cradling their little boy as he dipped his toes in the water.

Her happy couple: Littering her Instagram account with sweet family shots, the 25-year-old former TOWIE star shared a number of images of her two Pauls before she wowed on the shores in a skimpy dress which flashed her bikini bottoms

Her little boy: She simply captioned the shot: 'In love with Sardinia' - a point she made clear as she showed her followers snaps of the local delicacies and exquisite views

As she headed out to dinner later in the night, Sam was once again feeling snap happy as she posted an image of her pre-night out ensemble comprising of a stunning green lace midi dress.

Showing off her sun-kissed glow, the former reality star dazzled into the camera while enjoying the warm evenings on the Italian island.

Sam has been proving herself to be quite the international jetsetter as just a week before her latest trip she headed away with her immediate family.

Sister and fellow former TOWIE star Billie brought along her daughter Nelly, who was seen playing with her little cousin on a number of occasions, while their mum Sue was also joining in the fun.

A dream in green: As she headed out to dinner later in the night, Sam was once again feeling snap happy as she posted an image of her pre-night out ensemble comprising of a stunning green lace midi dress

Sexy: Busty sisters Sam and Billie enjoyed an impromptu selfie session as they took sexy images while sizzling in their bikinis

Granny time: Sam's mum Sue showed off her incredible body as she played with her grandchild

Busty sisters Sam and Billie enjoyed an impromptu selfie session as they took sexy images while sizzling in their bikinis.

It was on the trip that Billie announced on Instagram that she was expecting her second child with her fiance Greg Shepherd.

The pair shared the news in a sweet snap in which they cosied together while Nelly pointed at her mum's stomach with the caption: 'And then there were four.'

In between her two holidays, Sam and Paul took a quick pitstop to head to swanky London hotel Claridge's, to meet up with Paul's mum Gaynor who was pictured having a cuddle with baby Paul in a sweet snap.

Sister, sister: Billie and Sam loved their getaway together

Granny: In between her two holidays, Sam and Paul took a quick pitstop to head to swanky London hotel Claridge's, to meet up with Paul's mum Gaynor who was pictured having a cuddle with baby Paul in a sweet snap

Following the release of Sam's documentary The Baby Diaries, from which The Mummy Diaries will continue, Paul's relationship with his mother was heavily scrutinised.

Various incidents throughout the show saw fans blast the property developer for his behaviour towards Sam and his close relationship with his mum Gaynor.

After the initial show aired in February, the Essex-born beauty was forced to jump to her boyfriend's defense after a host of incidents saw fans lash out at his behaviour - deeming him a 'controlling man boy'.

Too much? Various incidents throughout the show saw fans blast the property developer for his behaviour towards Sam and his close relationship with his mum Gaynor

While he repeatedly asked Sam to cook for him, including while she was breastfeeding, he also fell asleep during pre-natal lessons although one moment in particular captured the attention of viewers.

Paul and Gaynor were seen having a deep chat while sitting on a sofa, after which the pair locked lips in what many deemed an over-expressive display of mother-son affection.

After the documentary aired and the shock kiss hit social media, Sam posted a defiant photo of herself kissing their baby son Paul Jnr on the lips on her Instagram.
The six Jolie-Pitt children have grown accustomed to travelling the world with their now-separated famous parents Angelina and Brad.

But life is very different - and a lot more low-key - for Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Vivienne and Knox's cousins.

Just like her older brother, Brad's sister Julie Neal and her husband Rob have three biological children including twins  daughters Rylie and Josie, both 18, and son Caleb, 21.

The other Pitts: Brad's sister Julie Neal lives a quiet life in Missouri with husband Rob and their five children, including Ethiopian-born Caden and Cruz

Lap of luxury: Life is quite different for Brad, Angelina and their kids (L-R) Pax, Zahara, Knox, Shiloh, Maddox and Vivienne (not pictured). The family is seen here in May 2014

They have also adopted Ethiopian-born sons Caden, nine, and Cruz, eight, who are growing up fast and adapting to life in the US as exclusive pictures of Julie, 47, treating her boys to haircuts at a trendy local barbershop last month show.

And after being encouraged by the good work of Angelina and Brad, the youngest Pitt sibling also works for a charity as a director of the Missouri based I Pour Life, which helps give job skills to people with HIV and leprosy in Ethiopia.

Brad and Angelina's brood are no strangers to globetrotting and living in the lap of luxury, and when not at home in their sprawling Hollywood Hills compound the youngsters often spent time with their A-list parents at their French estate Chateau Miraval.

Maddoz, 15, Pax, 12, Zahara, 11, Shiloh, 10, and Vivienne and Knox, eight, have also enjoyed trips to India, London, Italy, Tokyo, Australia and Maddox's native Cambodia.

Close knit: Brad and Julie are seen here with her eldest son Caleb, who is now 21, in a photo from her blog

Just like Brad: Julie adopted Caden and Cruz from Ethiopia. She is shown here taking them to get haircuts in Springfield last month

But in contrast to the Jolie-Pitt house, where there is said to be a lack of rules and set bed times for the youngsters, Julie lives a quiet life in Missouri with her husband and children.

However one thing she definitely has in common with her famous brother and his now estranged wife is a strong desire to help those in need.

Julie is director of the charity I Pour Life and helps run a scheme called 10x10 in the desperately poor town of Korah, which is now helping ten women living with diseases including HIV and leprosy learn a trade so they can support themselves.

The charity also works in El Salvador, in Central America, and runs self-help programmes in her home town, where it is putting the finishing touches to its new headquarters.

So cute: The youngsters, who are eight and nine, are growing up fast and adapting to life in the US

Big family: Just like her older brother, Brad's sister Julie Neal and her husband Rob have three biological children including twins  daughters Rylie and Josie, both 18, and son Caleb, 21

Julie also launched the charity Digg Deep which raised $200,000 to build a well in the Ethiopian village of Chuko Wayama where her son Cruz was born.

Jeremy Alvarez who works with Julie at the I Pour Life charity, said: 'Julie is a really kind and caring person. The charity started off in El Salvador in 2011 and then Julie started working on projects in Ethiopia such as building wells and then we launched there, too.

'Our work is about teaching people how to be self sufficient. We want people to run their own business or raise chickens, for example.

'Here in the US we focus on finishing schooling, getting jobs, learning how to manage finances and so on.'

Close knit: Rylie is shown here with her adopted little brother as they head out for ice cream

Brad's younger brother Doug, 49 - a businessman and father of adult daughters Reagan and Sydney and son Landon - has also got involved with good works, founding the Care to Learn organisation in their home town of Springfield after hearing a story of how a local boy was teased at school because he was so poverty stricken the only pants he had to wear were his mother's.

Since 2008 Care to Learn has helped thousands of children by providing them with items to further themselves from backpacks to hearing aids. Doug has also helped raise more than $1million for clean water projects in Tanzania.

Brad, Angelina and his brother and sister also donated a million dollars to open a cancer treatment center in his home town named after his mother.

The Jane Pitt Pediatric Center at the Mercy Hospital opened in 2010 and has helped hundreds of local children stricken with cancer, no matter if their families have health insurance or not. The A-list couple have since made further donations to support its work.

Family first: Brad and Angelina, who confirmed their split on Tuesday, are seen here several years ago with Brad's extended family (including Maddox, Pax and Zahara)

Clashing: While Brad is said to favour rules and have traditional values, Angelina apparently takes a more bohemian approach to parenting

Cancer is a very close subject to Angelina, who has had terrible and unfortunate experiences with the disease. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died after an eight-year battle with ovarian cancer in 2007 and in May 2013 Angelina herself revealed she had undergone a preventative double mastectomy after doctors told her she had a high chance of developing breast cancer.

A family friend of the Pitts said: 'Brad and Angelina don't make a big song and dance about their work here and the work they do with their family.

'All of them are motivated simply by the want to help people a lot less fortunate than themselves. They want to give something back and make the world a better place for their children.

'None of them see the point in just sitting on their laurels. Julie is a committed Christian and Brad is an atheist but they share they same values. Doug, too. They care about people and want to help.

Following in his footsteps: One thing Julie definitely has in common with her famous brother and his now estranged wife is a strong desire to help those in need

'Brad and Angelina also have a lot of experience with charitable work worldwide now. They appreciate they have been in a very privileged position and have met very important people in many, many countries who are all trying to help. Their advice is invaluable.

'Needless to say they also have their own multi-cultural family and have adopted children from Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia so they have been able to help Julie with that process, too.

'Speaking candidly, the mid west is not a place where you see many white parents fostering or adopting children of different ethnicities. They hasn't fazed Julie or Brad one iota, of course.

'Their adopted children are just as much part of their families as their biological children.'

Charitable: Julie is director of the charity I Pour Life and helps run a scheme called 10x10 in the desperately poor town of Korah, which is now helping ten women living with diseases including HIV and leprosy learn a trade so they can support themselves

However despite appearing to be one of the happiest families in Hollywood, it has been claimed after Angelina filed divorce papers on Monday that she and Brad clashed over their different parenting styles.

A source told DailyMail.com on Tuesday that Angelina 'is famously against any kind of rules. There are no set bedtimes, and they are allowed to eat what they like. '

While Brad has traditional values and is apparently more strict about 'disciplining' the children and 'having rules', Angelina allegedly disagrees and takes a bohemian approach.

A source told People: 'Brad has always been stricter. He has wanted the kids to have more structure. Brad will get frustrated sometimes and yell at the kids.

Helping others: Julie also launched the charity Digg Deep which raised $200,000 to build a well in the Ethiopian village of Chuko Wayama where her son Cruz was born

'Angelina always had a more relaxed attitude when it came to the kids. She definitely never yells.'

Brad's brood spent time in Cambodia while Angelina was directing First They Killed My Father, and a source revealed to DailyMail.com that Angelina would let the youngsters run wild.

'The children can all be a nightmare apart from Maddox. Hes really, really sweet and nice,' the insider said. 'Angie believes everything the children tell her. They can do no wrong in her eyes, everything they say becomes the gospel truth.

'Theyre very hot and cold with all the staff. Theyre very physical and boisterous and hard to handle  especially because theres six of them. The eleven year old [Zahara], is the one who instigates it all.

'They care about people': A family friend said that while Julie is a Christian and Brad is an atheist, they 'share they same values' and 'want to help' those less fortunate than them

'One of the team threw a towel which accidentally hit Vivienne and caused her to trip up. Then Zahara was instructing her what to tell Angie - to say she was eating a biscuit at the time and nearly choked because of it.'

The insider alleged that one of the nannies who is believed to have been helping to take care of the large brood in Cambodia was let go because Angelina thought she had her sights set on Brad.

'The nannies had it hard,' the source claimed. 'One got fired  the kids told Angie she was crushing on Brad, and that was the end of it.'

But something that Brad and Angelina could agree on was their charity work.

Spitting image: Brad's businessman brother Doug (seen 2012) founded the Care to Learn organisation in their home town of Springfield

Brad's nieces and nephews: Doug's adult children Sydney, Landon and Reagan are seen here in a photo last year

In 2003 Angelina founded the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation in Cambodia, named after the son she and Brad adopted from there, which helps community development and environmental conservation.

The foundation was initially funded with the $14million the couple received for allowing pics of their twins Knox and Vivienne to be used in magazines.

In 2007 she also helped launch the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict which helps provide an education to youngsters who have been affected by wars and natural disasters.

Close knit: Doug took his family to the World War Z premiere in New York City in 2013

Angelina additionally travels the world and has visited more than 20 countries in her role as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and

Brad himself has been the guiding light of The Make It Right Foundation which was started with his $5million grant with the aim of constructing hundreds of 'green' homes in the area of New Orleans worst hit by Hurricane Katrina.

He is also one of the founders of the organization Not On Our Watch which aims to prevent genocide around the world.

The couple have also funding an AIDS clinic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the country where adopted daughter Zahara was born.
Jennifer Garner and her estranged husband Ben Affleck appeared to have a tense conversation in his car on Tuesday morning.

But the next day the 44-year-old Alias vet was back to good spirits.

The mother-of-three flashed a megawatt movie star smile as she was seen heading to a workout in Los Angeles.

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Cheery: Jennifer Garner flashed a megawatt smile as she headed to a workout in LA on Wednesday morning

Upbeat and in shape: The 44-year-old Alias glowed as she showed off an impressively toned body while walking to her SUV

The Dallas Buyers Club actress looked fit in her black workout ensemble that included snug leggings, a T-shirt, and vest.

Light blue trainers with purple ties were a nice pop of color.

The Vanity Fair cover girl wore no makeup and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She carried a white water bottle and her cell phone.

Later she was seen with her son Samuel who wore a green shirt and sweatpants.

Keeping it simple: The Vanity Fair cover girl wore no makeup and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She carried a white water bottle and her cell phone

Mini Ben! Later she was seen with her son Samuel who wore a green shirt and sweatpants

More serious: The star put on her sunglasses and kept her head down as she took a call

On Tuesday morning the Catch And Release actress looked noticeably strained as she sat in the passenger seat of a car with Affleck, who she split from in June 2015.

They have yet to finalize their divorce and they live at the same Pacific Palisades, California, property as they co-parent.

This follows a report from PageSix that the actors, who are both 44-years-old, had a 'tense' verbal exchange when they attended a block party over the weekend.

Talking it out? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner were spotted together in a car in Los Angeles on Tuesday and seemed to not be too happy about it

The relationship: The parents of three married in 2005 and separated last year

It is not clear if they were just having a serious conversation or if they were involved in an argument while sitting in a Ford SUV.

Because the actors have yet to finalize their divorce, there has been rampant speculation they are reuniting.

But sources have insisted to People magazine they will not reconcile.

That would go with the PageSix story that added the 'co-parents were having an intense conversation at a carnival-themed block party in their neighborhood, and that Garner looked particularly upset after glancing at something on her phone.'

Later the Argo director was seen taking his four-year-old son Samuel for a walk in Santa Monica.

The Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice star, who'd lately been filming Justice League in Britain, still looked upset. His eyes were red as if he had been crying.

The star wore an olive green T-shirt that emphasized his well-built torso.

Light grey shorts and black and white trainers completed the look for the Pearl Harbor actor, who had coiffed his hair a bit for his day out.

Garner wore her hair in a braided ponytail and she had on a sweater.

Father-son time: That day, the Argo director was also seen taking his and Garner's four-year-old son Samuel for a walk in Santa Monica

Samuel seems to have been getting quite a bit of attention.

On Monday, the pair were spotted taking him out to lunch in Santa Monica. Neither looked very happy on that trip either.

Last month, she told Today that she and her estranged husband prioritize their children. 'You don't have a choice,' she said. 'I mean, it has to be.'
English women struggle to be sexy, claims Lady Victoria Hervey

English women struggle to be sexy, claims Lady Victoria Hervey, who made her name sporting next to nothing at society events.

Women in London are too conservative and dont have the courage to wear sexy outfits.

'Its an English thing, she tells me.

I grew up in the South of France so I have a much more international approach.

Despite turning 40 next month, the daughter of the late 6th Marquess of Bristol still leads by example, sporting a sheer black ensemble at a recent party.

Its empowering to dress provocatively, she says.

In a move likely to cement her status as the voice of the provinces, Theresa May has joined the Rotary Club.

The Prime Minister accepted an invitation to become an honorary member of the Rotarys branch in Eastbourne, where she spent her early years while her father was a hospital chaplain.

Though she missed the beer and skittles evening that the seaside towns Rotary organised earlier this month, she could still make the beer festival followed by a curry.

Moving on: Helena and male friend take a stroll

Helena Bonham Carter was walking with a mystery man in Hampstead, North London, yesterday.

At one stage her companion, wearing a flat cap and Harrington-style jacket, gave her a consoling hug.

Helena Bonham Carter was walking with a mystery man in Hampstead, North London, yesterday

The 50-year-old actress has been single since splitting with film director Tim Burton in 2014 after 13 years and two children together.

She has spoken about the incredible pain she went through following the break-up. Although they remain on friendly terms for the sake of their children, Billy, 12, and Nell, eight, Helena admitted the split was life-changing. You go through massive grief  it is a death of a relationship, so its utterly bewildering. Your identity, everything, changes.

She also said she felt so fragile she wanted to put handle with care tape across her forehead.

Everyone always says you have to be strong and have a stiff upper lip, but its ok to be fragile.
He famously reached a divorce settlement with Amber Heard last month.

And Johnny Depp is continuing to move on from the past.

The 53-year-old actor has listed his five-penthouse home located in Downtown Los Angeles for a whopping $12.78 million.

On the go: Johnny Depp has listed his property in Downtown Los Angeles, as he is pictured in Hollywood back in May

Eccentric: The 53-year-old actor has listed his five-penthouse for a whopping $12.78 million

Iconic: The property is located in the landmark Eastern Columbia Building

The unique high-rise property is located in the landmark Eastern Columbia Building as the total units equal to about 11,500-square-feet.

It is quite a unique living experience as Johnny kept the five adjacent penthouses largely separate and lived in them 'like rooms in a home', real estate agent Kevin Dees of Partners Trust told The Wall Street Journal.

Kevin is working with colleague Nick Segal in unloading the property which includes five condo units, four two-bedrooms and on one-bedroom.

Interesting: It is quite a unique living experience as Johnny owned the five adjacent penthouses

Modern touch: The property was interestingly decorated as this kitchen has a modern, stainless steel look

Checked: One of the many staircases featured a black and red checkered design

Cosy: Another stair case led to a comfortable lounging area

Eclectic taste: One of the dining areas featured lots of interesting artwork

Colourful character: The red dining chairs had a vintage feel

The 1930s art deco building was modernised in 2007 by The KOR Group right before Johnny picked up the properties in 2007 and 2008.

The Pirates Of The Carribean star added doorways connecting three of the penthouses for living and entertaining spaces while the other two were an art studio and a guest suite according to the business-focused daily.

Interested buyers should not assume they would have to buy all five of the condos as the listing says that penthouses are available for individual purchase with prices upon request.

Speakeasy: The bar area had a retro feel as well

Details: Plenty of attention was given to the decor on the property including designs on the floor (left) and lighting fixtures (right)

Reading space: There is also a library featuring a large television

Piece of mind: There was also a worn out leather couch with several pillows

Why so blue? Every room seemingly had it's own personality

Going green: This room included a long wooden table

Perfect for parties: No doubt it is perfect for social gatherings

Collector: This wall alone had several paintings and mirrors

The historic building is 13-stories and is one of the highlights of the beautiful LA skyline and may be best identified by the four-sided clock tower.

Depp has been trying to offload real estate as of late as he relisted his estate in the South of France for a whomping $56 million, which was double its previous asking price.

The talented actor is moving forward in his life after his divorce with Amber Heard.

Where the magic happens: On of the bedrooms was very colourful

Views: No doubt the historic building has breathtaking sights

Majestic: Orange curtains could be closed to keep privacy

Dizzying: Even the bathrooms were filled with patterns

He married the 30-year-old actress, his Rum Diary co-star, in Ferbuary 2015 following his split from longtime love Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has two children Lily-Rose and Jack.

Heard filed for divorce in May, appearing in court in Los Angeles with a bruised face to seek a temporary restraining order against the Hollywood star whom she accused of abuse.

The former spouses reached a settlement on August 16 in which the restraining order was dismissed and Heard received $7 million, which she then donated to charity.

Fun in the sun: On the roof there is a small garden and seating area

Making a splash: There was also a beautiful pool

Retro-chic: The entrance of the building was very grandiose

Trademark: The building is best known for the four-sided clock tower

Looking good: The 1930s art deco building was modernised in 2007 by The KOR Group right before Johnny picked up the properties in 2007 and 2008

Branding: The building is so famous the windows have the name of it emblazoned in gold

Towering: The historic building is 13-stories

Stunning: The building is one of the highlights of the beautiful LA skyline
She's alleged to have struck up a romantic relationship with her Victoria co-star Tom Hughes.

But Jenna Coleman was putting in a solo appearance at the Burberry and BAFTA In Conversation event, held at Makers House in London on Wednesday evening.

The 30-year-old actress was the picture of elegance in a gorgeous, plum coloured Burberry ensemble as she arrived at the soiree.

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Stunning: Jenna Coleman was putting in a glamorous appearance at the Burberry and BAFTA In Conversation event, held at Makers House in London on Wednesday evening

Jenna exuded sophistication in the belted coat dress, nipped in at the waist and falling to mid-calf.

The demure number ensured the former Doctor Who favourite looked classy as ever, and was accessorised with understated jewellery and black strappy heels.

Jenna wore her brunette bob in a sleek style and enhanced her eyes with a sweep of bronze shadow.

Also in attendance at the event was Truly, Madly, Deeply star Juliet Stevenson, dressed to impress in a black lace dress.

Dreamy: Jenna exuded sophistication in the belted coat dress, nipped in at the waist

Understated beauty: The demure numberwas accessorised with simple jewellery and black strappy heels

Jenna has so far remained tight-lipped about her relationship with on-screen love Tom, 30, which was revealed by the Mail On Sunday.

The couple are understood to have been secretly dating since last summer, before they began filming their roles as the young Queen Victoria and the love of her life, Prince Albert.

And in a suitably royal twist, Prince Harry played an unwitting matchmaker after making a move on Jenna at a polo match last summer that left Tom so jealous he pursued Jenna for himself.

Sources close to the couple say they have deliberately kept their romance below the radar because they are deeply private people.

Natural beauty: Jenna wore her brunette bob in a sleek style and enhanced her eyes with a sweep of bronze shadow

Strike a pose: Amanda Berry, BAFTA CEO, welcomed Jenna to the special talk

Rumoured love interest? Jenna and her Victoria co-star Tom Hughes are said to have been secretly dating for a yea

Theyve been together for months, on and off since last summer, said one friend.

Tom dumped his long-term girlfriend to be with Jenna and she chose to be with him even though Prince Harry was very keen on her. What started as an affair became a very serious romance.

Last week the pair were seen at The Electric, the Notting Hill branch of exclusive club Soho House, where they cosied up together in the members area after attending a dinner hosted by Glamour magazine.

A source close to Jenna said: The reason the chemistry is so tangible is because they are dating in real life. Those scenes are very real. They are completely hooked on one another.

Making a chic appearance: Juliet Stevenson was also in attendance at the London event

Elegant: The Truly, Madly, Deeply actress sported a lovely, lace embellished dress

Strike a pose: Juliet looked effortlessly elegant as she made her grand arrival

The actors fuelled rumours that their relationship was more than strictly professional when they were seen dining for two hours together in London a fortnight ago.

They wanted to keep it quiet because they didnt want their professionalism called into question, said the source. Also Tom was dating another actress when he met Jenna and it was all a bit messy.

The actors first met three years ago while filming BBC2 drama Dancing On The Edge.

At the time, Jenna was dating Game Of Thrones star Richard Madden and Tom was living with actress Ophelia Lovibond in Hampstead, North London.

Sources say Tom set his sights on Jenna last year during a polo match in Ascot, when she was photographed with Prince Harry.

Representatives of both stars declined to comment.
She had jetted into Italy for Milan Fashion Week.

And there was no missing Izabel Goulart as she greeted the stylish city while hitting up a tourist attraction on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old shared a video of herself twirling in front of the Milan Cathedral as she joyfully shouted, 'Bonjourno Milano!'

Greetings! Izabel Goulart shared a video of herself twirling in front of the Milan Cathedral as she joyfully shouted, 'Bonjourno Milano!'

Clad in a super stylish all-black look, Izabel shot her hand into the air as she greeted the city with a bright smile on her face.

She wore her long waves down while accessorizing the look with a pair of sunglasses and carrying a leather purse.

Hello there! There was no missing Goulart as she greeted the stylish city

Making her entrance! The star shot her hand into the air as she greeted the city with a bright smile on her face

After striking the pose, the model turned her back towards the camera, walking towards the tourists checking out the historic Italian destination.

'Buongiorno Milano!!', Izabel wrote in the caption. 'Milan Fashion Week!!Exciting day ahead! Bom dia!! Semana de Moda de Milao ... Comecou!!! #italy #milan #duomo #buongiorno #milanfashionweek.'

Milan Fashion Week runs until September 26, showcasing top Italian designers' Spring/Summer 2017 womens collections.

Super stylish: She wore her long waves down while accessorizing the look with a pair of sunglasses and carrying a leather purse

Strutting her stuff: After striking the pose, the model turned her back towards the camera, walking towards the tourists checking out the historic Italian destination

In the midst of the craziness of her working life as a jet-setting catwalk queen, Izabel still manages to fit in exercise on a daily basis and is a big fan of sports.

She told Vogue magazine: 'I have a personal goal to work out one hour daily, no matter how busy my schedule is.

'Exercise just brings me a lot of focus and dedication to my everyday life.'
Juggling two young children and co-starring in a TV series can't leave much time for romance.

But Ginnifer Goodwin squeezed in a tender moment on set on Tuesday, as her husband Josh Dallas planted a kiss on her lips.

The 38-year-old actress - who welcomed their baby son Hugo on June 1st - looked smitten with her handsome co-star as they filmed ABC's Once Upon A Time in Vancouver, Canada.

Fit for a princess: Ginnifer Goodwin squeezed in a tender moment on set on Tuesday, as her husband Josh Dallas planted a kiss on her lips

The brunette beauty and her 34-year-old husband - who co-star as Snow White and Prince Charming - showed no signs of sleepless nights despite having their hands full at home with a two-month old and their son Oliver, aged two.

Although perhaps that was partly thanks to the large coffee Ginnifer was sipping, using a mug which featured a picture of the Queen.

The star looked chic as she soaked up the autumn sunshine, covering her eyes in giant dark glasses.

Close to royalty: Ginnifer was supping from a mug which featured a picture of the Queen

She showcased her post-baby bod in a relaxed-fitting white blouse with scalloped neckline.

Ginnifer stayed warm in the cool climate with a cream wide-sleeved coat.

Her slender legs were elegantly displayed in skintight black leggings teamed with black knee-high leather boots.

Relaxed: The star looked chic as she soaked up the Autumn sunshine, covering her eyes in giant dark glasses, alongside her handsome husband as they chatted to the crew

Her signature pixie hairstyle was swept to one side, and the Big Love star kept her green eyes concealed behind dark movie star shades.

Josh wrapped up in a parka jacket with a fur trimmed hood between takes, and wore a black leather jacket underneath it.

They were joined on set by co-stars Jennifer Morrison and Colin ODonoghue.

Ginnifer and Josh married in April 2014 after meeting on set of their ABC series and one month later welcomed their first son Oliver.

She previously admitted they were eager to have as many children as possible - Ginnifer told E! News: 'We'll have as many [children] as the universe will grant us.'
Some say diamonds are a girl's best friend.

But it looks like a glimmering Tiffany & Co bracelet didn't do much for The Bachelorette's Georgia Love after Wednesday night's first episode.

The 28-year-old has revealed she returned the gift to contestant Carlos Fang, soon after eliminating him on the Channel Ten.

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Not a fan: The Bachelorette Georgia Love has revealed she returned the precious Tiffany bracelet gifted to her by contestant Carlos after eliminating him on the first night

'The fact he did go home on the first night, I felt uncomfortable holding on to that  knowing how much it's worth, and that it's such a big gesture,' the brunette beauty told The Sydney Morning Herald.

'So I actually sent it back to him, with a note to say how much I loved and appreciated it.

'Given the circumstances, I didn't want to look as if I'd taken a gift, then sent him out the door. That's not the kind of person I am,' she added.

Diamonds are a girl's bestfriend: Upon meeting Hobart news reporter Georgia, 28, the male stripper introduced himself and then unexpectedly pulled out at Tiffany bracelet

Awkward! From the very get go Carlos, the only Asian cast on the Channel Ten reality dating series, stood out amongst the crowd - but all for the wrong reasons, thanks to a cringeworthy gesture

During Wednesday's episode, Carlos, stood out amongst the crowd - but all for the wrong reasons, thanks to a cringe worthy gesture.

Dressed in a dapper navy suit, the entrepreneur from Victoria at first appeared to be a solid candidate until he revealed his rather unconventional occupation.

'I'm the owner of Fabrique nightclub. Give 'em what they want. Give 'em the VIP treatment. And on weekends, I like to get on stage and take my clothes off,' he said in a side interview.

Grateful: The Hobart news anchor appeared pleased with the cringeworthy gesture

Upon meeting Hobart news reporter Georgia, the male stripper introduced himself and then unexpectedly pulled out a Tiffany bracelet.

'How do you feel about poems?' he asked to which Georgia replied: 'About poems? I love poems.'

He then awkwardly explained: 'I don't have a poem.'

'Oh... OK.' said a puzzled Georgia.

'But I thought I'd give you a little gift,' he offered to which she replied: 'My goodness.'

Take it off! Carlos, 33, revealed that he is a male stripper

Ladies man: The Melbourne resident performs racy routines for a living

A preview? Carlos showed off some of his racy moves upon first meeting Georgia

'So... ..I've got a little present for you,' he continued while pulling out the silver bling.

The brunette beauty took a moment to assess her gift, 'Wow! Thank you so much. My goodness!'

Carlos appeared pleased with himself and said: 'I thought you'd appreciate this.

Whoa! The brunette beauty was left blushing after the routine

He then went on to name drop in an attempt to draw further praise: 'Coming to date one with a Tiffany box is a big move.'

Georgia politely agreed: 'A big move! It's really beautiful. Thank you so much.'

The broadcast journalist then proceeded to inquire about his profession.

Proud: Carlos said he considers himself to be just like any other successful entrepreneur

'Now, I haven't even asked you what you do,' she said which garnered a bizarre response.

'Some guys like to collect hats ... Other guys like to collect cars ... My thing is businesses, so... Nightclubs, restaurants...limos, yeah. Well, I have a company So...,' he said.

'OK! Now we're learning! Now I'm learning a bit more about you!' she replied.

Opening up: 'I started as a stripper about eight years ago,' he told Georgia

He went on: 'I started as a stripper about eight years ago.'

Georgia then requested a preview.

'Can you give me a move? Give me a twirl or, you know, a spin or something,' she said.

'Well, you know, as a stripper, you definitely know how to take your clothes off, so...,' he replied while simultaneously removing his blazer.

'And that's all you get for now,' he replied tentatively.

However, Carlos didn't get to show Georgia the rest of his 'bump and grind moves' after he was sent home at the end of the evening when he failed to get a rose.

Georgia kicked off her quest for love on Wednesday and will date 16 potential suitors as part of her journey.
US charges Afghan-born suspect with NY, NJ attacks

The United States charged an Afghan-born American restaurant worker, who was critically wounded in a police shootout, with detonating and planting bombs in New York and New Jersey.

US prosecutors said Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, carried out twin bombings on Saturday in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood and along the route of a US Marine Corps run in the New Jersey town of Seaside Park.

The 13-page indictment slapped him with four charges, including use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use and destruction of property by means of fire or explosives.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, charged with twin bombings in New York and New Jersey, was shot and captured after being spotted in the doorway of a bar in Linden, New Jersey Jewel Samad (AFP/File)

He was captured on Monday while carrying a handwritten journal that lauded Osama bin Laden and US-born Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, and criticized US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, it said.

He will be transported to Manhattan to face the charges, said federal prosecutors in New York. If convicted, he risks spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Prosecutors said 31 people were wounded in the Chelsea attack, including a victim from Britain, a driver knocked unconscious and a woman whose body was pierced with ball bearings, metal and wood.

The bomb was a pressure cooker device, packed with ball bearings and steel nuts, placed in a dumpster and detonated by a timed device -- similar to a second pressure cooker bomb discovered four blocks away.

Five pipe bombs found in Rahami's hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey and the second device safely defused in Chelsea, were covered in the suspect's fingerprints, the indictment alleged.

Surveillance footage also put him in Chelsea, and Rahami bought the ingredients for the bombs from eBay over the summer, prosecutors said.

- Video on relative's phone -

A video recovered from a relative's cell phone also allegedly showed Rahami igniting an incendiary device just two days before the bombings in or near his home in Elizabeth, the indictment alleged.

Rahami was shot and captured on Monday in Linden, New Jersey, just four hours after the FBI released his mugshot and sent an emergency cellphone alert to millions of people.

He has been charged separately with unlawful weapon possession and five counts of attempted murder of a police official.

Rahami, who was operated on after sustaining multiple bullet wounds, is in "critical but stable" condition, police said.

The terror charges come after the FBI admitted that they investigated Rahami for terrorism in 2014 following a complaint from his father, but found no link despite alleged acts of violence.

Mohammad Rahami, an immigrant from Afghanistan who brought his children to the United States, said he warned the FBI that his son was a danger and a terrorist in 2014.

"He doing bad, he stabbed my son, he hit my wife," he told reporters on Tuesday, explaining why he had alerted agents two years ago.

In August 2014, Rahami was accused of stabbing Nasim Rahami in the leg, and charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a knife.

He reportedly spent three months in jail but was never prosecuted.

"The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks, and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism," the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.

- Year in Pakistan -

It still remains unclear how and why exactly Rahami allegedly become radicalized, and whether he definitively acted alone.

Officials say so far they have found no connection between Rahami and any militant groups, raising the possibility that the weekend bomb attacks could be another lone-wolf-style operation.

Officials say Rahami traveled extensively to Afghanistan and spent around a year in Pakistan, where he married and his wife became pregnant.

Albio Sires, a New Jersey congressman in the US House of Representatives, said Rahami had sought his help to obtain a visa for his heavily pregnant wife to travel to the United States in 2014.

She left the United States shortly before Saturday's attacks and was stopped in the United Arab Emirates, US media reported.

He worked at the family's fried-chicken restaurant, where The New York Times quoted friends as saying that he started praying and wore traditional clothes after returning from Afghanistan.

He was also father to a child with his high-school girlfriend.

Another line of inquiry may be whether the family's tussles over their business could have played a role in radicalizing Rahami.

His family sued the city of Elizabeth in 2011, accusing it and local police of discrimination because they were Muslim and Afghans, in ordering them to close their restaurant by 10:00 pm. The suit was settled in favor of the city.

Updated map of New York and New Jersey locating the two blasts Kun Tian, Jonathan Jacobsen, Vincent Lefai (AFP)

Security remains high in New York following a bombing in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood Justin Sullivan (Getty/AFP)

Ahmad Khan Rahami is a US citizen who was born in Afghanistan in 1988
US cousins draw long prison terms over conspiring to help IS

An American soldier and his cousin were sentenced to jail terms of up to 30 years over a plot to attack a suburban Chicago military base and cause mass fatalities.

The men pleaded guilty in December 2015 to conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State group.

Hasan Edmonds, 24, was a soldier in the US Army National Guard when he began communicating online in January with an FBI agent pretending to be an Islamic State fighter in Libya.

A US soldier and his cousin were sentenced to long jail terms over a plot to attack a Chicago military base after making contact with undercover FBI agents Yuri Gripas (AFP/File)

Edmonds admitted to giving the purported militant advice on "how to fight and defeat the US military," the plea agreement said. He said he and his cousin Jonas were ready to conduct an attack in the United States.

Edmonds and his cousin began meeting with another undercover agent in March who pretended to help Edmonds plan a trip to Mosul, Iraq to join the Islamic State group.

They also discussed a plan for Jonas Edmonds, 31, to use his cousin's military uniforms to attack the base in Joliet, Illinois where Hasan Edmonds was assigned.

Jonas said he wanted the undercover agent to help him achieve a "body count" of 100 to 150 people.

In Tuesday's sentencing by US District Judge John Lee, the younger Edmonds drew a prison term of 30 years while the elder got 21 years.
First oil in two years leaves key Libyan port

An oil tanker left a key Libyan port early Wednesday with the first crude shipment from the terminal since fighting halted exports there in 2014, an official said.

Oil is war-ravaged Libya's key asset, and rival administrations have been vying for control of territory and oil resources since the 2011 uprising that overthrew dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

"The Maltese-flagged vessel Seadelta has just left Ras Lanuf port with 776,000 barrels of oil, going to Italy. This is the first shipment of oil from Ras Lanuf port since November 2014," said Omran el-Fitouri, oil exports coordinator at the port.

Maltese-flagged oil tanker Seadelta has left Ras Lanouf port in Libya with 776,000 barrels of oil, going to Italy, the first shipment since late 2014 when fighting erupted over control of the 'oil crescent' - (AFP)

The shipment is the first to leave any of the four ports along Libya's eastern "oil crescent" since they were seized by military strongman Khalifa Haftar last week.

His forces handed management of the ports to the National Oil Corporation (NOC), which said that crude exports would resume "immediately" from Ras Lanuf and another of the ports, Zuwaytina.

The NOC says it is loyal to Libya's Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) but also to a rival parliament based in the east.

The parliament supports Haftar's forces and has refused to give the GNA its vote of confidence.

On Sunday, fighters loyal to the GNA launched an attack aimed at retaking the key eastern oil ports, but were repelled by Haftar's forces.

The fighting had forced the Maltese-flagged Seadelta to turn back out to sea for safety before docking and filling up.

Other ports in the crescent have been operating intermittently in recent years, but major exports from Ras Lanuf could pump desperately-needed revenue into the central bank's coffers.

Despite the fighting for control of the terminals, the GNA said on Wednesday it supported the NOC's efforts to boost exports.

"Oil production and returning Libya to its previous levels of production will support Libya's currency and its economy," said Ahmad Meitig, the GNA's deputy prime minister-designate, after a meeting with NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla.

That could only have "very positive consequences for the citizens and economy of Libya," he said in an audio message published on the GNA's Facebook page.

- Markets sceptical -

Fitouri told AFP on Wednesday that a second tanker, Maltese-flagged Syra, was preparing to deliver a further 580,000 barrels from Ras Lanuf to Tarragona in Spain.

The latest shipment could also help ease a cash crisis for Libya's strapped banks which are in dire need of hard currency.

Libya has Africa's largest oil reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, but production and exports have slumped dramatically during the years of crisis.

Libya pumped around 1.6 million barrels of crude a day before Kadhafi's overthrow, but the ensuing chaos slammed production, which fell as low as 290,000 in recent months, according to the NOC.

Oil prices rose on world markets on Monday after the tanker was turned back. Prices edged up again on Wednesday.

Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at OANDA, said the Seadelta's successful departure was unlikely to have a dramatic effect given the murky picture for Libyan production.

"The amount of oil coming out of Libya is fairly limited so it won't have a material impact on crude prices today," Halley told AFP. "The fighting means that we don't know how sustained their output can be."

Last week, US envoy to Libya Jonathan Winer told AFP it was essential that money from the resumption of oil exports went only to the UN-backed government.

"Oil needs to be produced throughout the country to generate the revenues necessary to pay for salaries for the Libyan people to have the government be able to function," Winer said.

The GNA is the centrepiece of UN efforts to restore stability in Libya and forge a central authority capable of tackling the twin scourges of the Islamic State group and people-trafficking across the Mediterranean.

But it has struggled to impose its authority amid opposition from the rival administration.

Libya's key oil ports - (AFP Graphic)
Egypt's Sisi urges Israel to make history with peace

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged Israel to "write a bright page" in Middle East history and make peace with the Palestinians.

Speaking at the United Nations, Sisi said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at "the core of regional instability" and called for a settlement based on a two-state solution leading to a Palestinian state.

"Permit me to deviate from the written statement to address an appeal to the Israeli leadership and Israeli people," Sisi told the UN General Assembly.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at "the core of regional instability" and called for a settlement John Moore (Getty/AFP)

"We have a real opportunity to write a bright page in the history of our region, to move toward peace," he said.

The first Arab country to make peace with Israel, Egypt has stepped up its diplomacy over recent months to try to re-start Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Indian court to rule on 2008 British schoolgirl's death

An Indian judge will finally deliver a verdict Friday on two men over the rape and death of British schoolgirl Scarlett Keeling in Goa in 2008, after years of delays and controversy.

Fifteen-year-old Keeling's bruised and half-naked body was found on popular Anjuna beach in the north of the Indian resort state eight years ago.

Her death made headlines worldwide, drawing attention to the dark side of a tourist destination that has long been a hangout for Western hippies and later highlighting India's sluggish justice system.

A woman walks near the place where the body of British teenager Scarlett Keeling was found on Anjuna beach in Goa Indranil Mukherjee (AFP/File)

Police initially dismissed the teenager's death as an accident but opened a murder probe after Keeling's mother, Fiona MacKeown, pushed for a second autopsy which proved she had been drugged and raped.

MacKeown also accused local authorities of trying to cover up the death to protect drug gangs operating in Goa, a former Portuguese colony.

Several weeks after the attack, local men Samson D'Souza and Placido Carvalho were arrested and charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, using force with intent to outrage a woman's modesty and of administering drugs with intent to harm.

The move angered the victim's family who had wanted the defendants tried for rape and murder, but officers from India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said they lacked sufficient evidence to indict them on stronger charges.

Police allege D'Souza and Carvalho plied Keeling with a cocktail of drink and illegal drugs, including cocaine, before sexually assaulting her and leaving her to die by dumping her unconscious in shallow water where she drowned.

The trial began at a children's court in Goa's state capital Panaji in 2010 but has been plagued by numerous delays, including infrequent hearings due to a backlog of cases and a public prosecutor withdrawing from proceedings.

- Key witness refused to testify -

Final arguments were heard at the end of last month with the prosecutor arguing that dozens of bruises on Keeling's body were evidence of a struggle. Defence lawyers however said the teenager died an accidental death.

Vikram Varma, a lawyer acting for MacKeown, told AFP the prosecution's case was dealt a blow when a key witness, Briton Michael Mannion, refused to testify, but he is hopeful that some justice can finally be achieved.

"It was important for the judge to hear Mannion's testimony to convict. So that was a setback," said Goa-based Varma.

"(But) I'm keeping my fingers crossed that after all this struggle we may get a verdict of guilty," he added.

MacKeown told a British tabloid last month that she feared the men would walk free.

"We were close to putting it to bed once and for all but my heart has been broken again because Mannion cannot testify," she told The Sun newspaper.

The family was on a six-month holiday to India when MacKeown and her other daughters went on an excursion to the southern state of Karnataka, leaving Keeling in the care of a Goan family.

MacKeown, who is due to be in Goa for Friday's verdict, came in for heavy criticism back home for leaving her daughter without parental supervision.

She was only able to bury her daughter's body more than two years after Keeling died, when it was finally returned to her by Indian authorities after a long bureaucratic wrangle.

Placido Carvalho (R), an Indian defendent in the case of the rape and death of British schoolgirl Scarlett Keeling in Goa in 2008

Foreign tourists walk near the place where body of British teenager Scarlett Keeling was found on the Anjuna beach in Goa Indranil Mukherjee (AFP/File)
Michelin launches first mainland China guide in Shanghai

The famed Michelin food guide launched its first edition in mainland China Wednesday, awarding stars to elegant luxury establishments as well as a humble haunt serving up Cantonese staples.

The inaugural edition covers the commercial hub of Shanghai and gives stars to 26 restaurants, including the world's least expensive two-star establishment Canton 8 -- a popular lunchtime spot catering to local families.

"Canton 8 is a reflection of what can be found in Shanghai -- masterful, delicious and very good-quality cooking," said Michael Ellis, international director of the Michelin guides.

Master chef of T'ang Court, Justin Tan (L) waves on stage after the announcement of his three stars award in the Michelin Guide Shanghai on September 21, 2016 Johannes Eisele (AFP)

Lunch there can cost as little as 48 yuan ($7), Michelin said.

Chef Jian Jieming of Canton 8 said he had never dreamed of making the list. He credited the fresh ingredients and comfortable atmosphere of the restaurant for its two-star award.

The publication of the inaugural mainland China edition follows the company's first guide to Singapore in July, when Michelin inspectors gave stars to the city-state's famous street food stalls.

The guides, first published in France more than a century ago to promote automobile travel, now cover 28 countries and spotlight diverse cuisines including Brazilian, Burmese, Cajun, Peruvian, and Tibetan.

But they are not without their critics, who question whether the quality of street fare in places like Hong Kong and Singapore can compare to the French haute cuisine on which the guide's reputation was made.

"We have to adapt to the country," Claire Dorland-Clauzel, executive vice president at Michelin, told AFP.

"Our role is to promote quality food everywhere, not (only) French food."

The China guide awarded its highest three-star rating to T'ang Court, a cosy six-table Cantonese restaurant in The Langham hotel, famous for dishes that include braised sea cucumber and Wagyu beef.

"The talented and creative chef Justin Tan offers cuisine in which traditional Cantonese dishes rub shoulders with some very modern dishes," Ellis said.

After learning of the award, chef Tan told AFP he "never imagined" winning three stars, adding that he was now "very nervous".

Restaurants that have won a star from the culinary bible have in the past built big businesses after being recognised, with Hong Kong's Tim Ho Wan and Taiwan's Din Tai Fung turning into international franchises.

Canton 8 can likely expect to see a similar surge in customers. On Tuesday night, before the release of the guide, the inexpensive two-storey restaurant was filled with only around 20 diners feasting on crystal prawn dumplings and lobster porridge.

Regular patrons expressed pride Wednesday in the recognition of their local favourite, where tables were packed and reservations required for lunch.

-'Overdue' recognition -

A cosmopolitan city with a sprawling, tree-lined French Quarter, Shanghai is the latest Asian city to feature in the guide following the launch of editions focusing on Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore.

"What makes Shanghai particularly exciting is its been an economic and cultural crossroads for decades and the gastronomy of Shanghai really reflects that rich history," Ellis told AFP.

International recognition of Chinese cuisine is "overdue", said Fuchsia Dunlop, a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine.

"China has the most amazing gastronomic culture, and for historic reasons it has not been at the forefront of international gastronomy," she said.

But she was not convinced Michelin's approach of sending individual reviewers could truly identify the country's best restaurants.

Chinese cuisine traditionally caters to groups, with family-style meals consisting of several shared dishes, she said.

"If you have one person going out to eat, it's impossible for them to get a sense of a full, balanced Chinese meal," she said.

"Even if you went 10 times, you wouldnt get a sense of a meal with all the contrasts."

Master chef of Canton 8, Jie Ming Jian (R) is given a two star award by Michelin Guides director Michael Ellis in Shanghai on September 21, 2016 Johannes Eisele (AFP)

Justin Tan is the chef at T'ang Court, a Cantonese restaurant in The LangHam hotel which was awarded the guide's highest three-star rating Johannes Eisele (AFP)
Suspected Hong Kong triads held over lawmaker death threats

Hong Kong police Wednesday arrested six people with suspected triad links over death threats to a newly-elected lawmaker who advocates greater autonomy from China.

Eddie Chu was one of several rebel lawmakers to win seats in Hong Kong's landmark legislative elections this month.

He and his family have been under 24-hour protection since the vote on September 4 because of the threats.

Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick was one of several independent lawmakers to win seats in landmark legislative elections in Hong Kong in September Anthony Wallace (AFP/File)

Police told AFP six men aged 19 to 53 have been arrested for "criminal intimidation" in connection with the death threats to Chu.

They said initial investigations revealed they were thought to be members of triad organised crime gangs.

Television footage showed some of the suspects wearing black hoods and being led into a police station.

"Though I'm happy to see that the police have carried out the arrests, it doesn't mean the threat to my family has been removed," Chu said in a written response on his Facebook page.

"The power that is manipulating and intimidating behind the scenes and shielding the collusion between officials, business people, village strongmen and gangsters is still controlling Hong Kong's political development and our lives," he said.

Chu is an environmentalist who has campaigned against the destruction of heritage properties to make way for newer developments.

He has sought to expose shady political dealings in rural areas where local strongmen are influential and have been accused of having links to criminal gangs.

Triad gangs have traditionally been involved in drug-running, prostitution and extortion but increasingly operate in legitimate ventures such as property and the finance industry.

Some are believed to have links with the political establishment and there have previously been allegations of triads sending paid thugs to stir up trouble during protests.

Chu was one of at least five candidates in the semi-autonomous city pushing for more distance or even an outright break from Beijing who took seats for the first time in the Legislative Council, as fears grow that China is tightening its grip on Hong Kong.

Chu has previously said he was threatened because of his political views.

The legislative elections were the first major polls since the 2014 democracy rallies, with the anti-establishment camp increasing its share of seats in the legislature which is still weighted towards Beijing.

Chu, standing as an independent, emerged as winner in his constituency with more than 80,000 votes -- the most of any candidate.
US bomber lands in S. Korea in show of force

An American strategic bomber landed in South Korea on Wednesday in a show of force the US said was aimed at reminding Pyongyang of its powerful military assets in the region.

The move comes a day after North Korea claimed it had successfully tested a new, high-powered rocket engine which the South said was designed to demonstrate progress towards attaining a long-range missile.

Television footage showed two supersonic B-1B Lancers flying low over the US Osan Air Base at Pyeongtaek, 64 kilometres (40 miles) south of Seoul.

A US B-1B Lancer - aiming at reinforcing the US commitment to its key ally South Korea - makes a landing at the Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek on September 21, 2016

One of the aircraft flew back to the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, while the other landed at Osan, Yonhap news agency said.

"The bond between the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is ironclad and the strength of that commitment will not be shaken by North Korea's aggressive behaviour," said Lieutenant General Thomas W. Bergeson of the US Air Force.

"What we are showing today is just one tool we have to choose from a wide array of options. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region," he said.

The US flew two planes over South Korea last week, days after the North's fifth nuclear test, but they returned swiftly to Guam.

Critics dismissed the move as cursory in the light of an apparent quickening in the pace of North Korea's nuclear and missile testing programme.

It was not clear how long the Lancer that landed at Osan would stay.

South Korea is home to around 28,500 US troops and numerous bases.

The B-1 Lancer is a four-engine strategic bomber that can reach speeds of Mach 2.

It is capable of carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the US Air Force inventory.

"It can rapidly deliver massive quantities of precision and non-precision weapons against any adversary, anywhere in the world, at any time," US Forces Korea said in a press statement.

B-1B Lancer Gal ROMA, Laurence CHU (AFP)
Red Cross seeks $15.5 mn to help flood-hit N. Korea

The Red Cross appealed Wednesday for $15.5 million in emergency funding to help flood-ravaged North Koreans, warning of a "secondary disaster" in the impoverished country unless urgent assistance is provided.

At least 138 people are known to have died and nearly 400 are missing after torrential rain triggered major floods, devastating villages in the country's northeast, the UN said last week.

According to the UN, 140,000 people need assistance. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said that about 70,000 remain homeless after tens of thousands of houses were damaged or destroyed.

A woman stands in the rubble of heavily damaged homes due to flooding of the Tumen river in late August 2016 in Musan district, North Korea Anil Pokhrel (UNICEF DPRK/AFP/File)

"People were vulnerable before this disaster but now they are in danger of reaching tipping point," said Chris Staines, head of the IFRC delegation in Pyongyang, in a statement.

"Winter is on our doorstep and when you add up the impact of the floods and the risks people now face, we could see a secondary disaster here in the months ahead", Staines said, following a visit to the affected areas.

With winter temperatures threatening to plunge to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit), the $15.5-million fund will be used to deliver crucial relief supplies including tents, medicines and coal to 7,000 families.

Images published by state media showed collapsed roads and railways, as well as houses engulfed in a wall of mud, while hundreds of people -- many covered in dirt -- struggled to remove the debris.

It said large numbers of troops and residents from nearby areas had been mobilised for reconstruction, with authorities urging them to "work miracles".

The impoverished and isolated North is vulnerable to natural disasters, especially floods, due partly to deforestation and poor infrastructure.

At least 169 people were killed by a massive rainstorm in the summer of 2012.

However, huge government resources are swallowed up by a missile and nuclear weapons programme widely condemned by the international community.

The North, already under layers of sanctions imposed over past missile and nuclear tests, is facing potentially more sanctions following a fifth nuclear test staged on September 9.

North Korean villagers to repair flood damaged roads from Chongjing to Musan and Yonsa counties in North Hamyong province, North Korea on on September 8, 2016 Murat Sahin (UNICEF DPRK/AFP/File)
Russia, US spar at UN as air strikes pound Aleppo

Russia and the United States clashed at the United Nations over the carnage in Syria, as air strikes pounded Aleppo following the collapse of a ceasefire.

An angry US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded at a UN Security Council meeting that Russia force Syria to ground its air force, which Washington blames for an attack on an aid convoy.

Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are to sit down with key players in the conflict on Thursday to try to revive the ceasefire and chart a new course towards ending the five-year war.

US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded at the UN Security Council that Russia force Syria to ground its air force, which Washington blames for attacking an aid convoy Timothy A. Clary (AFP)

"We are at a make or break moment," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the council, urging world powers to use their influence to help restart political talks so Syrians can "negotiate a way out of the hell in which they are trapped."

Russia and the United States negotiated the latest ceasefire plan, but Syria ended the truce on Monday following an apparently accidental US-led coalition strike on Syrian soldiers.

Shortly after the truce ended, the UN aid convoy was hit, killing 20 humanitarian workers and destroying 18 trucks carrying food for desperate civilians in Aleppo province.

On Wednesday, heavy bombardment pummeled Aleppo city and the wider province, key battlegrounds in Syria's conflict, and a raid hit a medical team late Tuesday.

Addressing the council, Kerry said the bombing of the aid trucks raised "profound doubt" about whether Russia and its Syrian ally were committed to upholding a ceasefire.

"We must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and to give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," he said.

Moscow denies that Russian or Syrian planes carried out Monday's strike on the aid convoy.

A Russian military spokesman said a coalition drone was in the area when the aid trucks were destroyed, a claim the Pentagon denied.

After halting aid operations in response to the convoy attack, the United Nations said it was ready to resume humanitarian deliveries.

- Diplomacy still in play -

Despite the US-Russian acrimony, diplomatic efforts were set to continue in New York with a new meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) to be held on Thursday.

The ISSG, which includes all key players in the Syria conflict, met for an hour on Tuesday, but made little headway in agreeing on the next steps to end the war that has killed 300,000 people.

Sounding a cautious note, Kerry told reporters late Wednesday that "it's going to be difficult. We'll see what people are willing to do."

Moscow meanwhile said it is dispatching its flagship aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to bolster its forces in the eastern Mediterranean off Syria.

In his address to the Security Council, Lavrov declared that there would be "no more unilateral pauses" by Syrian government forces, arguing that opposition fighters on the ground had previously used those ceasefires to regroup.

The foreign minister insisted that all sides must rein in rebel groups on the ground to ensure they comply with the ceasefire and said a list of terror groups not covered by the truce should be reviewed.

Only the Islamic State group and the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front are not covered by the ceasefire, but Russia has long argued that other groups are fighting alongside those jihadists.

"If we can agree on this kind of comprehensive approach, an integrated, multifaceted approach, the chances of a cessation of hostilities surviving and being successful will be better," Lavrov said.

After hearing Lavrov, Kerry said he felt like the Russians were "sort of in a parallel universe" while the Russian foreign minister said it was time to "refrain from emotional reactions."

Syria's Ambassador Bashar Jaafari railed against a "filthy propaganda war" waged by the United States and its allies, insisting his government is fighting "tens of thousands of terrorists" backed by foreign countries.

- Aleppo under fire -

Dozens of raids hit the city's east as regime troops advanced on rebels in Aleppo's southwestern outskirts, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

At least 12 civilians, including two children, were killed, the highest single-day toll since the truce collapsed this week, the group said.

In northwest Idlib province, 18 Syrians were killed during bombings on the town of Khan Sheikhun, according to the organization.

In the village of Khan Tuman, south of Aleppo city, two nurses and two drivers were killed in an attack on two ambulances, the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations said.

Syrian state media reported that the city's government-held west had come under rebel shelling, which killed two people.

The United States holds Russia responsible for the attack on the aid convoy, with a US official saying two Russian SU-24 ground attack jets were operating in the area where it was struck.

The Russian foreign ministry said the "unsubstantiated, hasty accusations" seemed designed to "distract attention from the strange 'error' of coalition pilots."

Dozens of Syrian troops were killed in Saturday's strike by the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State, which Washington said was a mistake.

Russia said it endangered the deal reached with Washington that provides for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid deliveries and cooperation between Moscow and Washington in battling IS and other extremist groups.

Syrian men remove a baby from the rubble of a destroyed building following a reported air strike in the Qatarji neighbourhood of the northern city of Aleppo on September 21, 2016 Ameer Alhalbi (AFP)

A damaged truck carrying aid on the side of the road in Orum al-Kubra on the western outskirts of Aleppo after a convoy delivering aid was hit by a deadly air strike Omar haj kadour (AFP)

Deadly strike on clinic near Aleppo
China court hears case over Tesla fatal crash

The father of a Chinese man killed while driving a Tesla sedan has sued the US electric car maker over an alleged fault with its Autopilot system, the family's attorney said Wednesday.

Gao Yaning, the 23-year-old driver, died in January after his Tesla Model S slammed into a road-sweeping vehicle on a highway in the northern province of Hebei. His father Gao Jubin filed the case against the company in June, lawyer Cui Qiuna told AFP.

The family believed the son was driving in Tesla's Autopilot mode and accused the firm of overstating the function's capabilities, she said.

The family of a Chinese man who was killed while driving a Tesla sedan are demanding in court that the company stop using the phrase "automatic driving" in its promotion of Autopilot mode Justin Sullivan (Getty/AFP/File)

During the trial's opening session in Beijing Tuesday, Gao applied for an investigation into whether the autopilot was activated when the accident occurred, she added.

Gao has demanded Tesla stop using the phrase "automatic driving" in its promotion of Autopilot, publicly apologise for false advertising and pay 10,000 yuan ($1,500) in compensation for the family's grief caused by the son's death, Cui said.

"Tesla has been contacting Mr. Gao for a talk over reconciliation conditions but has yet to put forward a concrete solution," she said.

Tesla in August rephrased its description of the Autopilot system in some advertisements but "some of their staffers and their pamphlets are still using terms like 'automatic driving'", Cui said.

Tesla officials did not respond to AFP's request for comment on Wednesday.

The company has said the Autopilot system, introduced last year, is not a fully autonomous system and drivers are cautioned that they need to be at the wheel and in control.

The system allows the vehicle to automatically change lanes, manage speed and brake to avoid a collision. The system may be overridden by the driver.

A Florida driver died in May after Autopilot failed to detect a truck and collided with it.
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

Three men from Bulawayo have allegedly swindled a Zimbabwean man based in South Africa of his R45 000 in a botched house purchasing deal.The suspected fraud stars Bheka Hlabangane of Khami Prison, Lennox Maphosa and Dearer Moyo of Cowdray Park were not asked to plead top fraud before Bulawayo magistrate Evelyn Mashavakure.They allegedly swindled Clever Moyo of Nkulumane based in South Africa of R45 000 in a deal where they sold him a house.The matter will be back in court on September 27.Sometime in September 2008, Moyo in South Africa called Hlabangane looking for a house to buy in Zimbabwe. Hlabangane allegedly told him that he was selling house number 15046 in Cowdray Park at R70 000. Moyo sent his young brother Saulos Moyo to view the house.After two months the house was paid for in full as Hlabangane was receiving money from Moyo. Maphosa later told Saulos that the house was not properly built and as such Moyo would be allocated another house number 15626 Cowdray Park which was a two roomed.Maphosa later advised Saulos that the house number 15626 was in dispute and Moyo was allocated another house number 15674.The house was under construction by then and accused number two promised to extend it to a four roomed house and the agreement of sale was crafted to that effect.Hlabangane and Maphosa failed to extend the house as per promise leading to Moyo reporting the matter to the police. Investigations done revealed that Moyo paid R45 000 to the accused persons. It was further discovered that the house in question was reposed by the Bulawayo City Council from Surprise Mupfure.
DR Congo warlord ends hunger strike at ICC

Congolese former rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda has ended an unprecedented hunger strike in his detention cell in The Netherlands after a two-week standoff with the judges at his war crimes trial.

"He has begun to eat again," his lawyer Stephane Bourgon told AFP, adding Ntaganda had decided to end his self-imposed fast late Tuesday after the court granted him some concessions.

The once-feared rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo is on trial at the International Criminal Court where he has denied 18 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Once-feared rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda (2ndL), from the DRCongo, has not appeared in court at the ICC in The Hague since September 7 after going on hunger strike Lionel Healing (AFP/File)

But saying he was "ready to die", Ntaganda had decided to refuse food "in the ultimate act of protest" according to his lawyer, after judges maintained tight restrictions on his visitors saying they feared he might tamper with witnesses.

Bourgon told AFP "we won permission to appeal the judges' decision and we have made arrangements so that he can see his wife, this week, with a certain degree of intimacy."

Ntaganda, who has not appeared in the courtroom in The Hague since September 7, has also begun instructing his legal defence team again, Bourgon said.

"He is weak, and has lost weight and you can see it in his face. But there is nothing to be alarmed about," added Bourgon.

Ntaganda was however again not present when his trial resumed on Wednesday afternoon, and the judges granted him permission not to attend the trial in person again until September 29 so he can profit from the visit of his family.

But Bourgon told AFP that for Ntaganda, born in 1972, the "fight is far from over as he wants to prove he is innocent of the accusations of interfering with witnesses."

"The restrictions are just the consequence of the allegations which we believe have been evaluated on an insufficient basis by the judges. These allegations could impact the trial because they concern witnesses who have already testified, or who will do so."

Once dubbed "The Terminator", Ntaganda has denied the charges arising out of savage ethnic attacks carried out in the DR Congo by his rebel Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC) in 2002-2003.

His trial opened in September 2015 after he walked into the US embassy in Kigali in 2013.

The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been mired for two decades in ethnically-charged wars, as rebels battle for control of its rich mineral resources.

Prosecutors say Ntaganda played a central role in the Ituri conflict in the far northeast which rights groups believe alone has left some 60,000 dead since 1999.
Obama flirts with Mideast peace push in final months

When he came to power, he appeared to imply it was one of his priorities.

In reality, US President Barack Obama has made less headway than many of his peers trying to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Now, with just four months remaining in office, is Obama once again thinking about peace in the Middle East?

In New York on Wednesday for the final United Nations General Assembly of his eight-year double term, Barack Obama will meet the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, perhaps for the last time Saul Loeb (AFP/File)

No-one in Washington was expecting a sudden breakthrough in the stand-off between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and Mahmud Abbas' Palestinian authority.

But in New York on Wednesday for the final United Nations General Assembly of his eight-year double term, Obama will meet the Israeli leader, perhaps for the last time.

Will the meeting prove to be another tense footnote to a stalemate, or a last bid to influence a dossier that confronted and disappointed of all his predecessors?

Little public comment is expected from Wednesday's meeting -- the parties are too far apart -- but some observers expect Obama to enter the fray with a major speech after the November 8 presidential election.

"This would be a declaratory effort to put on record what America believes are the parameters for a solution," argued Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Center.

"And it would be an effort to put the Obama... signature or stamp on an issue that presumably he cares deeply about," the former senior advisor argued.

On January 22, 2009, Obama marked his second day after his swearing in as leader of the Free World by nominating George Mitchell as Middle East peace envoy.

The former senator had been the point man in talks to end Britain's Northern Ireland conflict, and his promotion had been seen as marking the young US leader's seriousness.

The president himself, elected on a vague but inspiring "hope and change" ticket, vowed to "aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians."

Eight years later, that has not come to pass. Israel and its neighbors are enduring a rough patch of political violence, despite high-profile international oversight.

Whatever personal tensions undermine ties between Obama and Netanyahu, the leader in the White House enjoys access to a bully pulpit.

Last week, Obama endorsed Israel's record 10-year, $38 billion US military aid contract -- a predictable result of the talks, but one which emphasized tensions.

Does this gift give Obama leverage to pressure the Jewish state's government into accepting the groundwork for a future compromise? Well, not quite.

If Obama had left Israel-Palestine at the heart of what he has done or not done in office, the challengers in the race to replace him might have made it an election issue.

Instead, both Obama's preferred successor Hillary Clinton and his Republican antagonist Donald Trump have limited themselves to a defense of their records as supporters of Israeli security.

In the final month of his presidency in 2000 Bill Clinton had clear goals for the Middle East: two states alongside one another, with a shared capital in parts of Jerusalem, and he met with both sides for a final push.

"This was done in a low key fashion, with very little media visibility because Clinton honestly still believed there was still a chance to get a deal," Miller said.

Obama, however, would have to make a more public impact.

If he chooses to re-enter the debate it would be to lay down the outlines of a future peace deal, binding the parties to a two-state solution that both say they support, but which today seems very far off.

Whatever personal tensions undermine ties between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader in the White House enjoys access to a bully pulpit Gali Tibbon (AFP/File)
Israeli guards shoot unarmed Palestinian girl at checkpoint

Israeli guards shot and wounded an unarmed 13-year-old Palestinian girl on Wednesday after she did not stop at a checkpoint, officials said, the latest incident in an upsurge of violence.

The Israeli defence ministry said the girl was not carrying a weapon but told officers afterwards that she had wanted to die.

The incident occurred at a checkpoint near the Israeli settlement of Alfei Menashe and the Palestinian town of Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli border guards check a driver near the Palestinian town of Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank Jaafar Ashtiyeh (AFP/File)

The Palestinian health ministry described the girl's wounds as moderate.

The Israeli defence ministry said the girl arrived "on foot with a suspicious bag at the vehicle-only lane of the Eliyahu crossing which is not open to foot traffic."

"Guards at the crossing called for her to stop several times and then fired warning shots into the air. When this did not stop her, a single shot was fired at her leg."

A new surge of violence began on Friday after Palestinians wrapped up the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha and as Israel tightened security ahead of major Jewish holidays in October.

There have been nine attacks or attempted attacks by Palestinians against Israelis since then, according to Israeli authorities.

The upsurge has shattered several weeks of relative calm.

The attacks have included one on Monday in which a Palestinian stabbed two Israeli police officers outside Jerusalem's Old City, leaving one in serious condition and another moderately wounded.

The assailant in that case was shot and seriously wounded.

Violence since last October has killed 230 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, one Jordanian, an Eritrean and a Sudanese, according to an AFP count.

Israel says most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks. Others were shot dead during protests or killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza.

Many analysts say Palestinian frustration with the Israeli occupation and settlement building in the West Bank, the complete lack of progress in peace efforts and their own fractured leadership have helped feed the unrest.
Palestinian local polls postponed, no new date

Palestinian municipal polls scheduled for October 8 were postponed on Wednesday after a court delayed a ruling on whether to hold the first vote since 2006 to include both Fatah and Hamas.

The Palestinian high court in the Fatah-led West Bank put off its ruling until October 3, only five days before the scheduled date for the elections.

Two weeks of campaigning are usually allotted for Palestinian elections and had been set to begin on Friday.

A Palestinian walks outside the Central Elections Commission offices in Gaza City Mohammed Abed (AFP/File)

In response, the electoral commission confirmed that the October 8 date "is no longer applicable." It set no new date.

On September 8, the court suspended the elections following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists.

It had left open the possibility that they could be re-scheduled for the same date if the dispute was resolved, but Wednesday's announcement by the electoral commission was widely anticipated.

Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012, but it was due to participate this year.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that Wednesday's court ruling amounted to "a cancellation of the electoral process."

Fatah and Hamas have not contested an election since 2006 parliamentary polls, which Hamas won -- sparking a conflict that led to near civil war in Gaza the following year.

Abu Zuhri called the latest move a Fatah ploy "to escape (new) elections."

This year's vote was planned with 81-year-old president Mahmud Abbas under heavy political pressure as opinion polls have suggested most Palestinians would like him to step down.

There has been no Palestinian presidential election since 2005 and Abbas has remained in office despite the expiry of his term.

Some analysts saw Abbas's decision to call the elections as a failed gambit since he may have been hoping Hamas would repeat its 2012 boycott.

Abbas is currently in New York ahead of his UN General Assembly address on Thursday.

- Aftermath of 2006 polls -

Despite repeated reconciliation attempts, Hamas and Fatah have failed to bridge their differences and form a unified administration for the Palestinian territories.

The October vote was to choose municipal councils in some 416 cities and towns in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

It is seen by some analysts as a test of whether Hamas and Fatah can take a significant step towards reconciliation.

Their divisions are viewed as among the key obstacles in efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, at a standstill for more than two years.

The Palestinian parliament has not met since 2007, the year Hamas, buoyed by its 2006 election victory, seized the Gaza Strip by force, driving out Fatah in a week of deadly clashes.

Hamas caused a shock by winning the majority of seats in the 2006 polls, which were seen by some as the most transparent to be held in the Palestinian territories.

But the international community refused to accept a Hamas government, demanding the Islamist group first renounce violence, recognise Israel and respect agreements signed between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

The European Union and the United States have blacklisted Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

Palestinians cast their votes in the municipal elections in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip on January 27, 2005 Pedro Ugarte (AFP/File)
Drone strike kills two suspected Qaeda members in Yemen

An apparent US drone strike in Yemen killed two suspected Al-Qaeda members and caused a large explosion when munitions they were transporting blew up, a security official and witnesses said Wednesday.

Washington is the only government to operate drones over Yemen but only periodically releases statements on its long-running bombing campaign against the country's powerful Al-Qaeda branch.

Tuesday evening's strike hit the Wadi Abida district of Marib province, east of the capital Sanaa.

The United States has carried out numerous drone strikes against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) operatives in Yemen HO (US AIR FORCE/AFP/File)

The security official named one of the dead as Abu Yaqin al-Waeli, a local Al-Qaeda commander.

Marib is largely in the hands of loyalists of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and his allies in a Saudi-led coalition.

But Al-Qaeda has taken advantage of fighting with the Shiite rebels who control the capital to expand their presence in the province.
Turkey says Syria rebels would lead fight to take IS-held town

Turkey said Wednesday that Ankara-backed Syrian rebels would lead any operation to capture a key town held by Islamic State (IS) jihadists well inside the territory of its conflict-torn neighbour.

Turkish Defence Minister Fikri Isik denied newspaper reports that Ankara planned to send in additional infantry Turkish troops to take the IS bastion of Al-Bab, saying that Turkey had "no plans today" to do so.

In an incursion that began on August 24, Turkish special forces, tanks and artillery, backed by coalition air strikes, have supported opposition fighters against IS jihadists.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey could push further south to create a 5,000-square-kilometre safe zone in Syria Bulent Kilic (AFP/File)

The pro-Ankara rebels captured the town of Jarabulus from IS on the first day of the offensive and have since also taken several villages around Jarabulus and neighbouring Al-Rai.

But taking Al-Bab, 30 kilometres (18 miles) from Al-Rai on the Turkish border, would be a far tougher proposition.

"Our plan right now would be for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to conduct this (operation) instead of Turkey's own infantry," Isik told reporters in the northwestern city of Eskisehir.

"We give all kinds of support to (Syrian rebels)... and we will continue to do this."

According to press reports, there are already hundreds of Turkish troops and dozens of Turkish tanks inside Syria.

Turkey refers to the pro-Ankara rebels as the FSA, although many analysts see them as a varied collection of various Syrian opposition brigades rather than a single organised force.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said before heading to the UN General Assembly in New York this week that Turkey could push further south to create a 5,000-square-kilometre (1,900 square-mile) safe zone in Syria.

A report in the Hurriyet daily had said earlier that additional Turkish infantry troops would be needed to capture Al-Bab from the jihadists.

A Turkish official told Hurriyet that it was essential that Ankara had "a comprehensive ground force" to push further into Al-Bab city.

"Of course, operation plans include ground force elements," the official said.

Military sources also told the HaberTurk newspaper that the Al-Bab operation was slower and riskier compared with the lightning advance in Jarabulus and Al-Rai because there was a higher risk of military losses and mines had been laid by IS.
Missiles, tanks on show at Iran military parade

Iran showed off missiles, warplanes, tanks and marching troops on Wednesday in a display of military strength in the face of growing regional tensions.

The Islamic republic used the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war to parade arms including 16 ballistic missiles through Tehran.

A new missile with multiple warheads, called Zolfaghar, was also on show with a threat directed at Iran's arch-rival Israel written on the side of the truck transporting it.

The Islamic republic used the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war to parade arms including 16 ballistic missiles through Tehran Chavosh Homavandi (AFP)

"If the leaders of the Zionist regime make one false move, the Islamic republic will destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa," it said, referring to two Israeli cities.

S-300 missiles delivered by Moscow this year were also on show in the capital. Other military parades were held elsewhere in the country.

"The recent decision of the American criminals to give military aid to the usurper Zionist regime (Israel), reinforces our determination to increase our defence capabilities," said General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran's armed forces.

The United States and Israel in September signed a record $38 billion 10-year military aid deal, despite increased disagreement over the Middle East peace process.

"The ultimate objective of the United States, the Zionist regime and those who support terrorist groups... is to destroy the infrastructure of Syria and Iraq in favour" of Israel, Bagheri said.

Tehran has advisers on the ground in Iraq and also in Syria to help the military in both countries battle armed groups fighting the national governments.

Iran also has fraught relations with its Gulf Arab neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia.

The two countries, the Middle East's foremost Shiite and Sunni Muslim powers, support opposing sides in the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

Tensions between them have also mounted over the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, from which Iranians were excluded this year.
Regional troops, Boko Haram clash near Lake Chad: Nigeria

Nigeria's military on Wednesday said regional troops had recaptured a town on the shores of Lake Chad from Boko Haram, but the Islamists claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties.

Army spokesman Sani Usman said its troops and counterparts from the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) had "captured Malam Fatori... after a fierce battle" backed by air support.

But "the terrorists reinforced around (the) border with Niger... while the troops were consolidating on this success", he added in an emailed statement.

Nigerian soldiers patrol on June 5, 2013 near Maiduguri Quentin Leboucher (AFP/File)

Several Boko Haram fighters were killed, said Usman, without specifying a number.

Malam Fatori, in Borno state, was liberated in March last year as part of a regional counter-offensive against the Islamists, who had captured swathes of territory in northeast Nigeria in 2014.

But fighters from Boko Haram, which is affiliated to the Islamic State (IS) group and now calls itself Islamic State West Africa Province, reoccupied the town after troops left.

The MNJTF is made up of soldiers from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin.

Northern Borno state, which is near the border with Niger, is inaccessible because of insecurity, with Boko Haram pushed into areas in and around Lake Chad by the military offensive.

There have been an increasing number of attacks in southeast Niger in recent weeks, an indication the rebels have re-grouped and switched focus.

Boko Haram claimed its fighters, which it dubbed "the cavalry of the caliphate", attacked the regional force.

"This offensive led to the death of more than 40 soldiers and left tens of others injured," it said in a statement posted on social media.

There was no way of verifying either the military or the insurgents' claims.

Last month, the IS high command designated Abu Musab al-Barnawi as Boko Haram leader, replacing Abubakar Shekau. Shekau, however, has maintained he is still in charge.

Barnawi has criticised Shekau for his indiscriminate killing of civilians, most of them fellow Muslims.
Hong Kong protest leaders avoid jail after failed court bid

Three young Hong Kong activists who led the city's massive "Umbrella Revolution" pro-democracy protests walked free from court Wednesday after a renewed bid by prosecutors to jail them.

It comes as tensions remain high in the semi-autonomous city with fears growing that China is tightening its grip, sparking a growing independence movement.

Nathan Law, 23, who was recently voted in as the city's youngest lawmaker and wants self-determination for Hong Kong, was one of the trio in court and slammed Wednesday's hearing as a political move.

Leaders of Hong Kong's "Umbrella Revolution" (from left) Alex Chow, newly elected lawmaker Nathan Law and Joshua Wong shout slogans as they arrive at the Eastern Court in Hong Kong on September 21, 2016 Anthony Wallace (AFP)

"The Department of Justice and the government are basically hunting those (who took part in) civil disobedience and those who uphold democratic values," he told reporters.

Law, Joshua Wong and Alex Chow were all convicted in August for taking part in, or inciting others to take part in, a protest that led up to the major pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014 calling for fully free elections of the city's leader.

They were given community service or suspended sentences after the magistrate said she believed they had been "genuinely expressing their views" during the protest, which saw students climb over a fence into the Hong Kong government complex.

But prosecutors sought a sentence review in court Wednesday, asking for jail terms for the three.

They argued the protest they led was large-scale and that the defendants had not shown genuine remorse.

Magistrate June Cheung, who also handed down the original verdict and sentencing, dismissed the review case.

"During sentencing, I already took into account carefully the seriousness of the case, thus imposing community service as well as a suspended sentence -- which can legally replace jail terms -- to the three, who are first offenders," Cheung said.

It is not clear whether prosecutors will try to appeal further.

Law said prosecutors must have come under "huge political pressure" to bring the review.

Chow, 25, said it had been brought "to suppress those who oppose the government and ask for universal suffrage through the legal system".

Wong, 19, who became the face of the Umbrella Movement, urged supporters to continue civil disobedience as a way to campaign for freedoms and rights.

Hong Kong has been governed under a "one country, two systems" deal since it was handed back by Britain to China in 1997.

The agreement is designed to protect Hong Kong's freedoms for 50 years, but there are concerns those liberties are already being eroded.

Law and Wong have together set up a new political party calling for Hong Kongers to have a choice over their sovereignty when the handover deal expires in 2047.
News / National

by Staf reporter

Exiled anti-president Robert Mugabe activist Evan Mawarire of #ThisFlag movement has warned Nigerian billionaire businessman Aliko Dangote against investing in Zimbabwe, saying government ministers will plunder his funds.Dangote visited Zimbabwe and met Mugabe last year, with the intention to invest in a multi-million dollar cement manufacturing plant in the country. However, over a year down the line, the continent's richest man is yet to invest in the country.Mawarire said he told Dangote that in Zimbabwe, ministers loot investors' money.His remarks come as anti-government protestor Patson Dzamara has petitioned the World Bank not to bail out Zimbabwe because of escalating human rights abuses and repression on tent hands of Mugabe's regime.
Knife attacker shot outside Israeli embassy in Ankara

A mentally disturbed Turkish man wielding a knife tried to storm the Israeli embassy in Ankara on Wednesday but was shot before reaching the building, Turkish and Israeli officials said.

The man, armed with a 30-centimetre (12-inch) knife, ran towards the embassy shouting slogans and was shot in the leg, the governor's office in the Turkish capital said in a statement.

It said initial investigations showed that the man, named as Osman Nuri Caliskan, "appeared to be mentally disturbed" and had no record of links with any militant group.

Turkish special forces on patrol outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara, on September 21, 2016 Adem Altan (AFP)

Suat Gencer, a florist working nearby, said he heard four shots and then ran to the embassy to see what had happened.

"I saw a man who had been shot in the leg. I didn't see a knife but other witnesses said he had a knife and he would set a bomb off," he told AFP at the scene.

Large numbers of police vehicles were at the scene and the local road was closed, an AFP correspondent said, while news channel CNN-Turk reported that a suspicious package was being investigated.

Israel's foreign ministry said the assailant was shot by a local guard and that all its embassy staff were safe.

"The assailant was wounded in the foot. We don't know if he was attacking police officers or the embassy itself," foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in a statement.

He added that the man reached the "outer perimeter" of the embassy and investigations were ongoing.

The incident came with foreign missions in Turkey on a state of high alert following a spate of attacks across the country this year blamed on jihadists and Kurdish militants.

- Embassies on high alert -

The British embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara was closed on Friday over security concerns while the German embassy offered only limited services.

Three months ago, Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship that left 10 Turks dead.

Under the deal, they are to begin the process of exchanging ambassadors to fully restore their diplomatic ties, although this has yet to formally take place.

Despite the crisis, the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul have carried on working in the last years, under heavy security.

Israel had already offered compensation and an apology over the raid, but with the agreement it also eased the naval blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, allowing Ankara to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.

Turkey's NTV television said employees of the embassy took refuge in a shelter during the incident on Wednesday.

The health condition of the attacker was not clear but the Hurriyet daily said he had been detained by police, showing a picture of him sitting on the road with his hands tied behind his back.

- 'Change the Middle East!' -

It reported that he had shouted "I will change the Middle East!" when advancing on the embassy building.

Three Israelis and an Iranian were killed in March in a bombing in central Istanbul blamed on Islamic State (IS) jihadists. Israel subsequently upgraded its security advice for Turkey, encouraging citizens to leave.

Israel was quick to give its support to the Turkish government in the aftermath of a July 15 coup bid, condemning it while repeating its faith in the reconciliation process.

Turkey appears to be moving back to its previous "zero problems with neighbours" foreign policy after the country also normalised relations with Russia damaged after Turkey shot down a Russian jet in November last year.

Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has also indicated interest in improving relations with Egypt -- damaged after the ousting of pro-Ankara president Mohamed Morsi -- and even Syria amid the over five year civil war.

A bomb-disposal expert examine a bag outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, on September 21, 2016 Adem Altan (AFP)
Missiles, tanks on show at Iran military parade

Iran showed off missiles, warplanes, tanks and marching troops on Wednesday in a display of military strength in the face of growing regional tensions.

The Islamic republic used the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war to parade arms including 16 ballistic missiles through Tehran.

A new missile with multiple warheads, called Zolfaghar, was also on show with a threat directed at Iran's arch-rival Israel written on the side of the truck transporting it.

Iran used the 36th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war to parade arms including 16 ballistic missiles through Tehran Chavosh Homavandi (AFP)

"If the leaders of the Zionist regime make one false move, the Islamic republic will destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa," it said, referring to two Israeli cities.

According to the commander of the air wing of the elite Revolutionary Guards, General Amir-Ali Hadjizadeh, the Zolfaghar has a range of 750 kilometres (466 miles).

S-300 missiles delivered by Moscow this year were also on show in the capital. Other military parades were held elsewhere in the country.

A large maritime display involving 500 fast patrol boats and warships took place in the Gulf, according to Iranian media.

For the first time, Russian-made Sukhoi Su-22 fighter jets flew over the area of Bandar Abbas, a major port on the Gulf coast.

"The recent decision of the American criminals to give military aid to the usurper Zionist regime (Israel), reinforces our determination to increase our defence capabilities," said General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran's armed forces.

The United States and Israel in September signed a record $38 billion 10-year military aid deal, despite increased disagreement over the Middle East peace process.

"The ultimate objective of the United States, the Zionist regime and those who support terrorist groups... is to destroy the infrastructure of Syria and Iraq in favour" of Israel, Bagheri said.

Tehran has advisers on the ground in Iraq and also in Syria to help the military in both countries battle armed groups fighting the national governments.

Iran also has fraught relations with its Gulf Arab neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia.

The two countries, the Middle East's foremost Shiite and Sunni Muslim powers, support opposing sides in the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

Tensions between them have also mounted over the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, from which Iranians were excluded this year.
Tearful Hong Kong leader grilled over housing controversy

Hong Kong's embattled leader Leung Chun-ying choked up during a public grilling Wednesday over a housing controversy as questions remain whether China will support him for a second term.

It was the latest in a series of problems for the chief executive, who has been faced since he took office in 2012 with major political protests, a growing movement seeking independence from China and allegations of corruption.

Leung and finance secretary John Tsang -- a potential rival for the leadership -- faced a packed room of reporters for a publicly televised press conference to answer mounting questions over their links with a troubled public housing development.

Hong Kong's leader Leung Chun-ying has seen his popularity wane since taking office, particularly after mass pro-democracy rallies in 2014 failed to win reform Anthony Wallace (AFP)

The government has been accused of bowing to pressure from local politicians -- who have a reputation as pro-establishment strongmen -- over the project in the city's partly rural hinterland known as the New Territories.

Authorities decided to prioritise construction of 4,000 homes by displacing people in three villages, instead of developing a larger unoccupied site controlled by rural leaders which would yield 13,000 more flats.

Densely packed Hong Kong is badly short of public housing.

Leung denied any "collusion" between the government and rural leaders at the expense of local residents.

At the end of the hour-long press conference, he faltered and choked on his words.

"I really must thank my government colleagues, regardless of whether in public or private housing. Every little bit of our achievements did not come easily," he said, before abruptly leaving the room.

Leung, who is not known for showing emotion, was immediately criticised online.

"He had to resort to using this trick," said Kirstie Cheng on newspaper Apple Daily's website.

Others on social media accused him of "pretending" to cry.

Leung has seen his popularity wane since taking office, particularly after mass pro-democracy rallies in 2014 failed to win reform.

Their lack of success in achieving that goal has spawned a number of parties and politicians calling for more autonomy or even independence from Beijing.

Leung has also been questioned over a reported HK$50 million ($6.5 million) payment from Australian engineering firm UGL related to his former senior role at a surveying firm, months before he took office.

He has denied any wrongdoing in a case which has been reported to the city's corruption bureau.

Leung's term ends in March and he has not confirmed whether he will put himself forward again. There is some speculation that current finance secretary Tsang is favourite to take over.

Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah (R) and Hong Kong's leader Leung Chun-ying were being grilled over their links with a troubled public housing development Anthony Wallace (AFP)
Tutu discharged from hospital: family

South African anti-apartheid leader and Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu was discharged from hospital Wednesday following his re-admission on Saturday, his family said.

Tutu, 84, had returned to hospital in Cape Town as surgical wounds had shown signs of infection after he underwent an operation two weeks ago.

"Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was discharged from hospital this morning to continue his convalescence at home," said a family statement.

South African anti-apartheid leader and Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu was discharged from hospital Rodger Bosch (AFP/File)

Tutu has spent time in hospital several times since last year.

One reason for his admission has been an infection resulting from the prostate cancer treatment he has been receiving for nearly 20 years.

On Tuesday, the country's deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa described Tutu as "jovial as usual" after visiting him in hospital.

The much-loved and outspoken clergyman is best known for his opposition to South African white-minority rule that ended in 1994.
Iraq MPs vote to sack finance minister after graft allegations

Iraq's parliament voted on Wednesday to remove the country's finance minister, who was questioned over corruption allegations last month, lawmakers said.

The removal of Hoshyar Zebari, who has served in every government since 2003, comes as Iraq faces a major budget shortfall that it is to help address with funding from the International Monetary Fund.

Of 249 parliament members in attendance, 158 voted to sack Zebari, who became finance minister in 2014 after a long career at the helm of the country's foreign ministry, two MPs told AFP.

Iraq's parliament voted to remove the country's finance minister, who was questioned over corruption allegations last month Safin Hamed (AFP/File)

"The finance minister was removed during a secret voting session," MP Ammar Toma said.

Abdulrahim al-Shammari, another MP, confirmed that parliament had voted to remove Zebari, the most senior Kurdish minister in the federal government.

With Zebari goes a long-standing link between Baghdad and the country's autonomous Kurdish region, the leader of which has called for a referendum on independence, and his removal could signal a further disengagement between the two sides.

Zebari, who denied the corruption allegations against him, is the second minister to be sacked by parliament in less than a month.

Lawmakers voted on August 25 to remove defence minister Khalid al-Obeidi, who had also been questioned over alleged corruption.

Interior minister Mohammed al-Ghabban resigned following a bombing in central Baghdad that killed more than 300 people in July, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office announced that he had also accepted the resignations of six other ministers.

Abadi called in February for the cabinet to include technocrats, but has faced major opposition from powerful political parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

Parliament approved five new ministers in August after months of delay, but the powerful defence and interior posts remain unfilled.

The removal of the finance minister comes with Iraq in economic crisis caused by low oil prices that have followed years of mismanagement and corruption when prices were high and money plentiful.
17 dead as Yemen loyalists battle rebels for heights

Heavy fighting between Yemeni government forces and Shiite rebels for control of the heights overlooking the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait has killed 17 combatants, the loyalist commander said Wednesday.

The waterway connects the Suez Canal and Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean beyond and is a major shipping lane.

"We launched an offensive which enabled us to recapture two mountains," loyalist commander General Fadhl Hassan told AFP.

Fighters loyal to Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi drive a tank in the area of the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, in the southern province of Taez, on October 1, 2015 Saleh Al-Obeidi (AFP/File)

"In 18 hours of fighting, which reduced in intensity this afternoon, 13 rebels and four of our men, one of them a colonel, were killed."

The rebels said on their sabanews.net website that they had taken several government-held positions and inflicted losses in the fighting.

Despite an 18-month-old military intervention by a Saudi-led coalition in support of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, the rebels still control nearly all of Yemen's Red Sea coast.

The fighting came as the rebels marked the second anniversary of their seizure of Sanaa in alliance with renegade troops loyal to ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Rebel leader Abdulmalik al-Huthi delivered a televised speech on Tuesday night in which he blasted Saudi Arabia as "the enemy" and its government as "tyrannical".

"The revolution will continue today in the face of aggression, it will continue until it achieves freedom and independence," he said.

"I tell the Saudi regime... you are responsible for your end and the results of your failed aggression."

Most members of Huthi's Ansarullah movement belong to Yemen's Zaidi religious minority. In September 2014 they took control of the capital and advanced on other parts of the country.

Forces loyal to President Hadi are mainly based in the south and are struggling to push northwards despite support from coalition forces.
Sudan says hosting 400,000 S.Sudan refugees

Sudan said Wednesday it is hosting about 400,000 South Sudanese refugees who fled a brutal civil war that erupted in the world's youngest country after it broke away in 2011.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes since a new conflict gripped South Sudan in late 2013 following its split from Sudan under a landmark peace deal.

"The number of South Sudanese refugees registered by Sudanese authorities is 400,000," Sudan's Minister of State for Interior Babiker Digna told reporters in Khartoum.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes since a new conflict gripped South Sudan in late 2013 Albert Gonzalez Farran (AFP/File)

"The influx of South Sudanese continues until now... and the process of registering them is also ongoing."

On Friday, the United Nations refugee agency said that the overall number of refugees from South Sudan had crossed the one million mark.

The UN said that as of August 31 the total number of South Sudanese in Sudan had exceeded 247,000, of which about 90,000 had arrived since January this year.

When asked about the discrepancy, Digna said: "Many times we don't agree on the numbers" with the UN.

The UN refugee agency representative for Sudan, Noriko Yoshida, appealed for more global aid to help address the South Sudanese refugee crisis.

"If we don't have sufficient resources, it is also difficult to protect and assist these refugees," Yoshida told reporters at the same news conference.

Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic are the other countries hosting tens of thousands of South Sudanese refugees.

South Sudan fell into civil war in December 2013 when fighting erupted between supporters of President Salva Kiir and former vice president Riek Machar, after Kiir accused his deputy of plotting a coup.

Machar is now in Khartoum where he arrived last month for what the Sudanese authorities said was medical treatment.

He was replaced by Taban Deng Gai as South Sudan's first vice president after hundreds of people died in Juba in July in renewed fighting between Machar's forces and government troops.
Iraqi forces ready by 'early October' for Mosul assault: top US officer

Iraqi security forces will be ready by next month for an assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, the top general in the US military said Wednesday.

"We assess today that the Iraqis will have in early October all the forces marshaled, trained, fielded, equipped that are necessary for operations in Mosul," General Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a military event in Washington.

"Timing of that operation now is really just a function of a political decision by Prime Minister (Haider al-)Abadi."

Iraqi forces have already reconquered towns north of Sherqat on the way to Mosul, the jihadists' last major stronghold in the country Safin Hamed (AFP/File)

Iraqi forces have been moving northwards from Baghdad for almost two years, gradually retaking areas over which IS declared its "caliphate" in June 2014.

Kurdish peshmerga forces to the north of Mosul will also join the assault.

The United States is leading an international air campaign that has been pounding IS targets across Iraq and Syria.

Though the Pentagon does not plan on directly sending American troops into combat, it has thousands of soldiers in Iraq who are training and arming Iraqi partners.

"We will be in a position to provide whatever support, whatever reinforcement, those forces need in order to be successful," Dunford said.

IS seized Mosul, Iraq's cosmopolitan and religiously mixed second city, in a lightning offensive through the north and west of the country.

Mosul had an estimated population of around two million before IS took it over.

Accurate numbers for the population remaining in the city are hard to come by but the United Nations and other officials have said up to one million civilians may still be living under IS rule in the Mosul area.
Obama threatens to veto bill targeting Iran's leaders

The White House on Wednesday said President Barack Obama would veto congressional measures to reveal the assets of Iran's leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if a bill came to his desk.

Warning that the proposed legislation would force suspect dealings further into the shadows, the White House said Obama's top advisors would recommend he veto.

"Producing this information could also compromise intelligence sources and methods," the White House said in a statement.

US President Barack Obama addresses the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on September 20, 2016 Jewel Samad (AFP)

The measures would target the Iran's supreme leader, it's president and a raft of individuals linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds force and the powerful Basij paramilitary group.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Health minister David Parirenyatwa has revealed that the World Bank has invested $45 million in Zimbabwe's health sector since 2011. Parirenyatwa was speaking at a global Results-Based Financing (RBF) workshop organized by the World Bank on Monday.Parirenyatwa said the programme had influenced better use of resources and increased accountability in the health delivery system. World Bank country manager for Zimbabwe, Camille Nuama, commended the Ministry of Health for efficient utilization of inputs.Meanwhile, parliament has criticized a government plan to introduce a tax that will fund the proposed health insurance, arguing that such cover works in stable economies and that it was prone to abuse.Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health and Child Care chairperson Ruth Labode said they had learnt from other countries like Tanzania, Ghana and Rwanda that corruption remained a threat to such a plan.Labode said in the event that the tax was introduced, there was need to put in place proper safeguards against corruption and abuse. The MDC-T MP said such funds would need to be audited by external institutions and not government comptroller for "transparency and accountability".
Russia says to send flagship aircraft carrier to Syria coast

Russia's defence minister said Wednesday that Moscow was dispatching its flagship aircraft carrier to bolster its forces in the eastern Mediterranean off Syria.

The Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier would be sent to join Russia's current naval deployment there, minister Sergei Shoigu said during a televised meeting.

"Currently the Russian naval deployment to the east Mediterranean consists of no less than six battleships and three or four support vessels," he said.

Russia's flagship aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov to be deployed in the eastern Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Syria Christos Avraamides (PIO/AFP/File)

"In order to bolster the military capabilities of the group we plan to add the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier to the group," Shoigu said, without specifying a timeframe.

Russia has been flying a bombing campaign in Syria for the past year in support of Bashar al-Assad and has deployed a naval contingent to back up its operation.

This is the first time that the Soviet-era Kuznetsov -- Russia's only aircraft carrier that is part of its Northern fleet based in Murmansk -- will join the Russian deployment after undergoing a refurbishment.

Russia has a base in government-controlled Syrian territory from which it has flown most of its bombing raids in the country.
Murder-plagued Chicago to hire more cops

Chicago is to hire hundreds more police officers to help it combat a murder epidemic that has claimed more than 500 lives so far this year, the highest homicide rate of any major US city.

Police chief Eddie Johnson said Wednesday that 970 additional sworn personnel will be recruited over the next two years -- the bulk of the positions being patrol officers and detectives.

"These added resources will make us better, and give us the capacity we need to address our crime problems across the city," Johnson said at a news conference.

Chicago has already recorded more than 500 murders for 2016, a 50 percent increase from 2015, and a rate not seen since the 1990s Saul Loeb (AFP/File)

Johnson evaded questions of how the increase would be paid for in a city that has suffered chronic budget shortfalls, and recently hiked taxes and government fees to shore up its finances. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office has not yet outlined its fiscal plan.

Chicago already has a full-time police force of 12,656 sworn officers, many of whom have been asked to work overtime to increase staffing in short bursts in order to combat rising gun violence.

Johnson acknowledged that that strategy has taxed officers. "They're not machines. We just can't keep pushing and pushing, he said.

By the end of 2018, the city plans to have a police force totaling 13,535 sworn positions.

The city has already recorded more than 500 murders in 2016 -- a rate not seen since the 1990s, according to an analysis by the Chicago Tribune. (The city has not seen a force surge since the 1990s either, according to the police department.)

To make matters worse, the police department reportedly only solves about 30 to 40 percent of homicides, which are mostly fueled by gangs and the drug trade.

Meanwhile, the police department has been under scrutiny, facing a federal civil rights probe after the release of a video late last year showing a police officer fatally shooting unarmed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. The officer who shot the teenager 16 times was charged with murder, and Johnson recommended that seven others be fired for covering up the crime.

Johnson this week implemented mandatory training to teach officers conflict de-escalation techniques, which he considers part of his strategy to increase community cooperation in solving crimes.

"Every day we have to work hard to getting the trust of the community back," Johnson said. "We didn't lose trust overnight. We didn't. So we're not going to get it back overnight."

- 'Social ills' -

Experts lauded Chicago's plan to hire more cops as an important step toward combating the city's escalating murder rate.

There are more murders in Chicago than Los Angeles and New York combined -- both of which have larger populations than Chicago's 2.7 million.

"Overtime can't be a long-term solution," Christine Cole, executive director of the policing think-tank Crime and Justice Institute told AFP.

"The conversations that I've been hearing among police professionals, including people outside the city of Chicago, is that they've been understaffed for some time," Cole said.

A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law projected that murder rates in 2016 will increase 13 percent nationwide, but that Chicago will lead the way with a 47 percent jump.

Ames Grawert, who co-authored the report, told AFP that an increase in the city's police force can make a difference.

"One thing that we found in our previous reports (is) that officer hiring was positively correlated with a decrease in crime," Grawert said.

But Johnson cautioned that the many factors driving Chicago's crime -- education, economics, and even mental health issues -- cannot be solved by increasing the police force alone.

"The social ills of the country are being dumped on the doorstep of law enforcement," Chicago's top cop said. "The mayor understands that. He knows that this is a piece of our crime-fighting strategy."

Chicago police officers listen as the police department speaks during a conference in Chicago on September 21, 2016 Nova Safo (AFP)
Embattled Clinton steps up drive to court young Americans

Hillary Clinton is revving up her drive to woo young people, a key demographic that is resisting her as she battles Donald Trump tooth and nail for the White House.

The polling numbers are alarming for the Democrat as she seeks to become the first female president of America.

As recently as August, among millennials aged 18-34 Clinton held a 24-point lead over the Republican Trump in a four-way race including two alternative candidates. But in September this margin had dwindled to five points, according to a Quinnipiac poll.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at Temple University on September 19, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Brendan Smialowski (AFP/File)

The breakdown now looks like this: Clinton at 31 percent, Trump at 26 percent, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson up from 16 percent in August to 29 percent in September, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 15 percent, according to this poll.

A total of 62 percent of those questioned said they were willing to vote for a candidate other than Clinton or Trump.

Some 90 percent said they consider Clinton to be intelligent and 77 percent find her experienced. But 77 percent said they do not think she is honest, a score that is worse than Trump's at 68 percent, according to the Quinnipiac survey.

A CBS/New York Times poll gave Clinton 48 percent support among millennials, compared to 29 percent for Trump. But 21 percent said they will either not vote or cast their ballot for someone other than Clinton or Trump.

Without the support of young Americans, Clinton could lose in the battleground states of North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, experts say.

Millennials were a huge part of the coalition that brought Barack Obama to power in 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2012 when he won re-election, said Jeanne Zaino, a professor of political science at Iona College outside New York City.

"The millennials are the biggest generation in American history, surpassing now the baby boomers," said Zaino, adding that the group contains 69 million potential voters and Clinton needs their support.

"Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, she has not been doing well with millennials. They are deserting her for people like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein," she added.

"She has really got to work hard to call them back into the fold and then get them out to vote in November," Zaino said.

Polls show young people feel Clinton does not put priority on issues that affect them, and that she is an establishment politician who will not bring about change.

What is more, some millennials were born while Bill Clinton was president, from 1993 to 2001, and have only vague familiarity with that period. And what they do know centers mostly on scandals of the Clinton era, Zaino said.

- 'Huge generational gap' -

And when young people learn, for example, that Mrs. Clinton used to be against same-sex marriage, "they cannot fathom it."

"There is a huge generational gap," said Zaino.

Clinton's former rival Bernie Sanders, who electrified young Americans with his pledge to fight income inequality and Wall Street excess and provide free university education, may be older but he spoke to young people in a way that Clinton cannot, Zaino said.

In a bid to remedy all this, the Clinton campaign announced Monday that she would intensify her outreach to young people through round table talks, live discussions on Facebook, events designed to get them to register to vote and sending heavyweight substitutes out on the campaign trail to court them.

Obama, his wife Michelle, Sanders, liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren and Clinton's running mate Tim Kaine all campaigned last week to try win over young people.

In a speech Monday at Temple University in Philadelphia, Clinton spoke about what she called the values that drive her and her early days as a young lawyer working to help poor children.

She also discussed other issues that are important to young people: climate change, sexual violence on US university campuses, and the problem of students having to take out huge loans to pay for college.

She appealed to students to register to vote and then get out and cast their ballots on November 8.

"I need you," Clinton said. "This is going to be close."

The crowd applauded politely.

Clinton also published an open letter on Mic, a website that targets millennials, addressing what she has learned from this group of Americans.

"Your generation is the most open, diverse and entrepreneurial generation in our country's history," Clinton wrote.

She vowed to work with young people to lift what she described as barriers blocking them from realizing their full potential.

"If I'm fortunate enough to be elected, you will always have a champion in the White House," Clinton wrote.

Staffers and volunteers work in a campaign office for US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Charlotte, North Carolina Nicholas Kamm (AFP)
Indian ministers approve Rafale fighter jet deal

An Indian cabinet committee gave its approval Wednesday to a long-delayed deal to buy 36 fighter jets from France's Dassault, as the country looks to bolster its military in the face of China's growing clout.

A senior Indian defence ministry official said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet committee on security had given its green light to the multi-billion dollar Rafale jet purchase at a meeting in New Delhi and the defence ministers of both France and India would ink the agreement on Friday.

"The deal was approved at the meeting in the evening," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The Dassault Rafale fighter jet performs a flying display at the International Paris Airshow at Le Bourget on June 19, 2015 Miguel Medina (AFP/File)

"It will now be formally signed by Indian and French defence ministers on September 23 in New Delhi."

The official said that other details including the exact amount and formalities "will become clear after the signing event".

While stopping short of confirming the deal, the French presidency also said that Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian would head to the Indian capital on Friday.

In a brief statement, the presidency said that Le Drian's visit had been "agreed in principle with Prime Minister Modi" when he met French President Francois Hollande at the G20 summit in China earlier this month.

There was no immediate comment from Dassault but a report by the Press Trust of India put the purchase price at around 7.9 billion euros (8.8 billion dollars).

The Rafale purchase was first mooted in 2012 but has faced major delays and obstacles over the last four years.

India entered exclusive negotiations on buying 126 Rafale jets four years ago, but the number of planes was scaled back in tortuous negotiations over the cost and assembly of the planes in India.

Modi announced on a visit to Paris last year that his government had agreed in principle to buy the jets as India looks to modernise its Soviet-era military.

But the deal continued to be held back by disagreements such as Delhi's insistence that arms makers invest a percentage of the value of any major deal in India, known as the offset clause.

Hollande again pushed the deal on a visit to India in January, when he was Modi's guest for the Republic Day celebrations, but officials privately acknowledged that price had become a sticking point.

In an interview ahead of that trip Hollande said that India needed new planes and "France has shown that it has the world's best aircraft".

The increasing assertiveness of its giant neighbour China as well as its simmering rivalry with Pakistan have increased India's need to upgrade its military.

- Cutting-edge technology -

Manmohan Bahadur, a retired air vice marshal, said the Rafale would give India's airforce a cutting edge that its rivals lacked.

"It is a deal that should have happened much earlier. The Rafale beats any other fighter jet in the region," Bahadur told AFP.

"Besides having absolutely cutting edge technology, it comes with beyond visual range missiles, which are also better than what both China and Pakistan possess. Its endurance, striking range and power stand out."

Gulshan Luthra, from the New Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, said the planes would deliver an important boost to India's air force.

"The fundamental thing is the air force does not have new aircraft, the old ones need to be replaced and Rafale is a spearhead," he said.

"Unfortunately, we have been very late on this deal. But this has been chosen and it's a very good aircraft."

The highly versatile Rafale is currently being used for bombing missions over Syria and Iraq as part of international campaign against the self-styled Islamic State jihadist group.

It has also been deployed in the past for air strikes in Libya and Afghanistan.

The deal, if confirmed, is a major vote of confidence in the Rafale which had long struggled to find buyers in overseas, despite heavy lobbying efforts by the Hollande administration.

It is the biggest order for the Rafale after Egypt agreed to buy 24 of the jets in 2015 and Qatar purchased the same amount later that year.
Rival accuses Libya govt's forces over deadly airstrike

A rival Libyan administration on Wednesday accused forces allied with the country's unity government of carrying out an air strike that killed seven civilians.

Women and children were among those killed in the raid on Tuesday in Sokna, 480 kilometres (300 miles) southeast of Tripoli, the parallel administration said in a statement on its website.

The strike was carried out by "aircraft that took off from an air base in Misrata belonging to illegal militias and terrorist groups allied with them," it said, referring to forces loyal to the UN-backed unity government.

Fighters from the pro-government forces loyal to Libya's Government of National Unity (GNA) hold a position as they target the Islamic State (IS) group in Sirte on June 23, 2016

A spokesman for the base called the accusations "wrong and biased", according to a Facebook page run by the unity government.

"Flights (on Tuesday) did not reach those areas, but were only reconnaissance flights in the coastal area," said Lieutenant Colonel Mohammad Qanunu.

It was not immediately possible to contact independent witnesses in Sokna.

UN envoy Martin Kobler wrote on Twitter that he was "shocked" by reports of air strikes in the area that killed "many civilians, among them women and children."

"Civilian casualties are unacceptable," he said.

Sokna lies in Al-Jufra district, 200 kilometres (125 miles) south of Sirte, where forces allied with the Government of National Accord (GNA) are battling Islamic State group (IS) jihadists.

GNA forces based in nearby Misrata often carry out reconnaissance flights south of Sirte to intercept IS fighters fleeing into the desert.

- Rival governments -

The GNA was formed following a UN-backed deal in December 2015, but it has struggled to impose its power across a country riven by violence since the fall of dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

The GNA, created last year as a UN-brokered power-sharing government, still needs a vote of confidence from the parliament based in the east.

The parliament has so far withheld its support, instead backing the rival administration, which is also based in the country's east.

Both governments depend on militias for their authority, and the parallel authority is backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Last week Haftar's forces seized four key export terminals in Libya's coastal "oil crescent", in a further blow to the GNA's efforts to extend its writ across the whole country.

Meanwhile, GNA forces have been fighting for more than four months to oust IS from Sirte, Kadhafi's coastal home town.

Suicide bombings and sniper fire from the cornered jihadists have slowed the offensive.

More than 450 members of the loyalist forces have been killed and around 2,500 wounded since the operation began in May.
Airbus, Boeing granted US license to sell planes to Iran

Airbus and Boeing announced Wednesday that they received US licenses to sell planes to Iran Air, clearing the way for the first western aircraft sales to the country in decades.

The approvals from the US Treasury Department allow both aerospace giants to proceed with sales worth billions of dollars into a country that had been entirely off limits prior to the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.

"We have issued the first two licenses for the export of certain commercial passenger aircraft to Iran under this new policy -- to Boeing and Airbus," said a Treasury spokesperson.

Airbus reached a deal in January 2016 to sell Iran 118 aircraft but it required approval from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control Pascal Pavani (AFP/File)

"These licenses contain strict conditions to ensure that the planes will be used exclusively for commercial passenger use and cannot be resold or transferred" to any Iranian entity still under US sanctions, the spokesperson said.

The approval allows Boeing to fulfill its June memorandum of agreement (MOA) with Iran Air that covered the sale of 80 planes, consisting of the single-aisle 737 and the long-range 777.

Boeing will also lease 29 other planes to the Iranian national carrier under the deal.

"We applied for a US government license that would allow us to complete the sales anticipated in the MOA," said Boeing spokesman Marc Sklar. "We have received that license and remain in talks with Iran Air based on the MOA."

The deal is estimated to be worth roughly $25 billion. The Boeing sales would be the first from a US aviation company to an Iranian entity since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Additional sales would require another license, said a person familiar with the matter.

Airbus struck a similar preliminary agreement in January to sell Iran 118 aircraft, but it also required US approval because some of the planes' components are made in the United States.

The deal includes the single-aisle A320 and the long-range A330.

An Airbus spokesperson said it had received the first of two licenses applied for on Tuesday and expected the second one "in the coming weeks".

The Airbus deal was initially valued at $25 billion (22.4 billion euros) but Iranian officials say it is worth nearer $10 billion.

Neither Airbus nor Boeing has announced a schedule for delivering the planes.

Before the nuclear deal under which Iran has curbed its atomic program in return for a lifting of international sanctions, an embargo dating from 1995 prevented Western manufacturers from selling equipment and spare parts to Iranian companies.

The restrictions, which have been blamed for crippling the industry, were partly lifted by an interim agreement on Iran's nuclear program that came into force in January 2014.

Iran's current commercial aviation fleet, which has a poor air safety record, numbers around 140 planes with an average age of around 20 years, with many in desperate need of replacement.

Iran projects a demand for between 400 and 500 commercial airliners over the next decade.

Boeing's deal with Iran drew scorn from some on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers on a panel in the House of Representatives enacted a measure to block the sales, but it did not win support in the full Congress.

Iran projects a demand for between 400 and 500 commercial airliners over the next decade Adrian Dennis (AFP/File)
Migrant boat capsizes off Egypt, killing at least 30

A boat carrying migrants capsized Wednesday in the Mediterranean off Egypt's north coast, killing 30 people and triggering an operation in which another 150 were rescued, officials said.

The vessel overturned off the port city of Rosetta, police and health officials said, with the total number of people on board not immediately clear.

The tragedy comes months after the EU's border agency Frontex warned growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.

Nearly 100,000 migrants have landed at Italian ports this year, roughly in line with the level of arrivals in the same period in 2015

Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.

"Thirty bodies have been recovered," said health ministry official Adel Khalifa, updating an earlier toll.

Emergency workers had rescued 150 passengers, Khalifa and two police officials said.

The health ministry said earlier in a statement that 29 people had drowned "when a boat carrying illegal migrants capsized off the coast of Rosetta".

Hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties, it added.

More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for Europe since 2014, according to the United Nations.

Asylum-seekers have been seeking other ways to reach Europe since March, when Balkan countries closed the popular overland route and the EU agreed a deal with Turkey to halt departures.

"Egypt is starting to become a departure country," Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.

- 'Deadliest year' -

"The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year," he said.

More than 300,000 migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.

The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015.

Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be "the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea," said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).

In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, drowning at least 169 migrants.

Earlier that month, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the Greek island of Crete and the bodies 104 migrants washed up on a beach in Libya.

Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.

Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period in 2015, said the UNHCR.

But Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against 2015 figures.

Arrivals began falling after a March deal between the European Union and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.

The European Union launched "Operation Sophia" last year to destroy smuggler boats that could be used to ferry migrants across the sea.

An EU official told AFP this month that almost 300 smuggler boats had been put out of commission in the past year.

The official, who did not want to be identified by name, said the migrants on the seized vessels were all transferred to the nearest safe ports and will be considered for asylum as refugees.
Russia says coalition drone was in area when Syria aid convoy hit

Russia on Wednesday said a Predator drone from the US-led coalition flew over an aid convoy in Syria when it was destroyed, denying again that it bombed the humanitarian column.

"The evening of September 19 in the sky over that area at a height of 3600 metres and moving at a speed of 200 kilometres per hour there was an attack drone from the international coalition that took off from the Incirlik air base in Turkey," Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

"What is more the aircraft entered the area over the town of Orum al-Kubra, where the convoy was located, several minutes before it burst into flames and left 30 minutes later," he said.

Russia's military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said a coalition attack drone was over the area of the aid convoy Omar haj kadour (AFP/File)

Russia's military did not directly accuse the US-led coalition of carrying out a drone attack on the column but pointedly said that the aircraft is capable of "carrying out high-accuracy strikes".

Moscow and Washington are locked in a bitter war of words over the attack on the aid trucks and a warehouse on Monday that killed around 20 civilians.

A US official told AFP that Washington believes Russian aircraft carried out the strike and that there were two Su-24 jets operating in the area at the time.

Konashenkov once again denied Moscow's jets carried out any air strikes on the convoy and said that "they were not even in that area".

The Syrian government has also denied that it carried out the attack.
Washington Post takes heat for Snowden prosecution call

A Washington Post editorial arguing for the prosecution of intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has sparked an outcry in the media community -- including from some of the newspaper's own journalists.

The weekend editorial provoked a heated response, with some pointing out the irony that the newspaper was calling for criminal charges against a source who helped it win a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting.

The editorial board "has no say on news, and just showed why," said a tweet from Barton Gellman, the Post reporter who led the team that shared the Pulitzer with The Guardian for the reporting on global surveillance based on Snowden's leaks of National Security Agency documents.

Washington Post's weekend editorial provoked a heated response, with some pointing out the irony that the newspaper was calling for criminal charges against a source who helped it win a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting Frederick Florin (AFP/File)

Gellman added that Snowden's "disclosures served the public. WP journalists are proud of our role."

Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said the Post's editorial view comes as a shock to the media community even if there is a separation of the opinion and reporting units.

"It does seem to me that any news organization that is going to rely on a source and potentially imperil that source, really needs to stand by that source," Kirtley told AFP.

"I personally think Snowden should come back and face charges, but I didn't take Snowden's leaks and put them all over my newspaper."

Kirtley noted that prosecuting sources for leaks should be troubling for the world of journalism.

"It is my belief that going after sources for leaks using the Espionage Act is a prelude to going after the journalists who receive that information," she said. "It hasn't happened yet, but it is possible."

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan also broke with the editorial board, calling for Snowden to be pardoned.

"Snowden did an important -- and brave -- service for the American public," Sullivan wrote in a column Tuesday.

"Without his decision to bring the information to journalists, it is very unlikely that we would know what we do about mass surveillance in the post-9/11 world."

- 'Ignominious feat' -

A more blunt response came from Glenn Greenwald, a member of the Guardian team that met with Snowden and now an editor at the online news site The Intercept.

"The Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in US media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source -- one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service," Greenwald wrote.

The debate comes amid increasing calls for a pardon for Snowden, who has been living in Moscow out of the reach of US law enforcement.

The Post editorial argued that not only should Snowden not be pardoned, but that he should return to face charges and argue his defense "before a jury of his peers."

The editorial acknowledged that Snowden justifiably exposed violations of law by the National Security Agency which helped lead to reforms.

But it added that Snowden also "leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations" and "disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly 'tremendous damage' to national security."

But Fortune magazine media writer Matthew Ingram said it was troubling to see the comments from the Post, which has a tradition of investigative journalism which dates back to leaks in the Watergate scandal and Pentagon Papers case.

"Attacking and undermining the source that helped the company win a Pulitzer Prize looks hypocritical at best and craven at worst, and is almost certain to make future Snowdens think twice or even three times about going to the newspaper with a leak or a classified tip," Ingram wrote.

Edward Snowden speaks via video link at a news conference for the launch of a campaign calling for President Obama to pardon him on September 14, 2016 in New York City Spencer Platt (Getty/AFP/File)
UN says 'ready' to resume Syria aid convoys

The UN said Wednesday it was ready resume humanitarian convoys in Syria after an attack on aid trucks and a warehouse, which left 20 people dead, triggered a suspension of deliveries.

"The preparation for these convoys has now resumed and we are ready to deliver aid to besieged and hard-to-reach areas as soon as possible," the UN's humanitarian office (OCHA) said in a statement.

The Monday attacks came as relief supplies intended for desperate Syrian civilians were being unloaded at the warehouse Orum al-Kubra, a town in Aleppo province.

A damaged truck carrying aid is seen on the side of the road in the town of Orum al-Kubra on the western outskirts of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo Omar haj kadour (AFP)

Those killed included volunteers as well as a Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) staffer.

The UN announced it was suspending all deliveries on Tuesday morning and called for an investigation.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor group, said the attack was the result of air strikes, which if confirmed, would strongly implicate Russian or Syrian aircraft as neither opposition nor jihadist groups have air power.

An unnamed US official told AFP that Washington believed a Russian plane was responsible.

Both Moscow and Damascus have denied involvement.

Boosting aid deliveries has become a top UN priority in Syria, with convoys repeatedly blocked for security reasons, refusals by the Syrian government to grant authorisation and strict conditions imposed by opposition groups.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Zimbabwe First (ZimFirst) party leader Maxwell Zeb Shumba has threatened to take legal action against Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) president Joice Mujuru, accusing her of "stealing" his party's name and manifesto.In a letter dated September 18, Shumba gave Mujuru 10 working days to respond, failure of which he would take the matter to the courts.Shumba, a former adviser to MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai, alleged Mujuru had been ignoring his calls to resolve the issue amicably leaving him with no option, but to take the legal route. But ZimPF spokesperson Jealousy Mawarire said his party had not yet received the letter, adding Shumba was free to take the legal route.
Campaigners demand 1988 Iran massacre probe as tape emerges

A new campaign group on Wednesday called for a UN probe into the 1988 massacres in Iran after the release of a decades-old audio tape shed fresh light on the alleged atrocities.

From August 1988 to February 1989, Iranian authorities executed nearly 5,000 political prisoners, according to Amnesty International. Iranian opposition groups have given a figure closer to 30,000.

The executions received limited attention at the time, in part because of a media blackout imposed Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had taken charge of the country in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

A woman looks at signs as she takes part in a rally marking the 25th anniversary of the 1988 massacre of Iranian political prisoners Pierre Andrieu (AFP/File)

But a 1988 recording released last month by relatives of a late dissident cleric -- which purportedly includes discussion of the killings among top Iranian officials -- has sparked renewed calls for justice.

The new group called "Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran" launched Wednesday at a press conference at the United Nations in Geneva.

Its members include Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate held hostage for years by FARC rebels, and Tahar Boumedra, who served as the UN's top human rights representative in Iraq.

The release of the tape "has re-opened a wound", Betancourt said, with the group urging the UN rights office to initiate an investigation into the executions.

The tape is of Iran's late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's former heir apparent, meeting with top judges and prosecutors.

Montazeri, who had reportedly been critical of the executions, is heard describing the crackdown as "the worst crime committed in the Islamic Republic".

"They'll write your names as criminals in history," Montazeri told his audience.

His family posted the recording on his official website in August.

Montazeri was subsequently sidelined by Khomeini and placed under tight surveillance by the Iranian regime until his death in 2009.

The campaign group said it has documented evidence of at least 12 mass graves across Iran where victims were buried, with relatives of victims increasingly coming forward after the tape's release.

"The impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators must end," said group member Azadeh Zabeti, a British-Iranian lawyer.
Jordan awaits vote results as Brotherhood claims seats

Jordan's electoral commission on Wednesday began announcing the results of its general election with the influential Muslim Brotherhood set to return to parliament as a significant opposition force.

A senior Brotherhood official said preliminary results indicated it was on course to win at least 16 seats in the 130-seat chamber, after the Islamists boycotted two previous polls in protest at the electoral system and alleged voting fraud.

Almost 24 hours after polls closed, the kingdom's electoral commission had only announced preliminary results for three out of 23 constituencies.

A Jordanian woman casts her ballot in the parliamentary elections at a polling station in the capital Amman on September 20, 2016 Khalil Mazraawi (AFP/File)

It said other results would be announced "as and when" they were known.

As well as the performance of the Brotherhood's Islamic Action Front, attention surrounding Tuesday's polls was focused on the low turnout, with just 1.5 million voters out of a 4.1-million strong electorate opting to cast ballots.

The vote comes as Jordan, a key Western ally, wrestles with the spillover of wars in Syria and Iraq and the burden of hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Experts say the low turnout reflects a lack of enthusiasm among voters for a parliament with limited power to affect government policy.

King Abdullah II can appoint and sack Jordan's military and intelligence chiefs, senior judges and members of parliament's upper house without government approval.

Even after reforms to electoral laws, the vast majority of seats were expected to go to businessmen and tribal elders loyal to the royal court.

"The presence of other parties will be very weak," Brotherhood second-in-command Beni Zaki Rsheid told AFP.

"The vast majority (of lawmakers) will be made up as usual of deputies already close to power."

Rsheid said the IAF was on course to win 16 seats, roughly on a par with what analysts had predicted.

With previous elections dogged by allegations of vote rigging, Tuesday's vote passed largely without incident, in spite of what the Islamists said were "several" irregularities.

Voting was monitored by 14,000 local observers and more than 650 from abroad.

Speaking at the New York at the UN General Assembly, Abdullah said Jordan had pulled off a "real victory" by holding successful elections during turbulent times.
Egypt allows wheat fungus after row with Russia

Egypt's cabinet on Wednesday backed down from tough restrictions on wheat imports that threatened a crisis with Russia, saying it would allow up to 0.05 percent ergot in grain shipments.

Egypt, the world's top importer of wheat, at the end of August toughened its stance against the presence of any trace of ergot, a common fungus that can be dangerous in large quantities, in its imports.

United Nations and World Health Organization health standards allow up to 0.05 percent of grain with ergot in a shipment, but rumours spread in Egypt that even in small quantities the fungus causes cancer and miscarriages.

The dispute between Egypt and Russia began in August when Egypt refused Russian wheat imports due to the presence of ergot Danil Semyonov (AFP/File)

"Everything that was raised about ergot and the importation of wheat -- that it is harmful to public health -- and the carcinogen wheats has no basis in truth," the cabinet said in a statement.

The decision comes one day before a ban by Russia, the world's biggest wheat exporter, comes into effect against the importation of citrus fruits from Egypt on sanitary grounds.

The dispute between the two key trading partners began in August when Egypt refused Russian wheat imports due to the presence of ergot.

The cabinet said Wednesday the zero-tolerance policy to ergot led to the cancellations of three wheat tenders by Egypt, with one on August 31 that has attracted one offer, and two on September 16 and 19 has did not attract any offers.

A senior Russian agriculture ministry official, Vladimir Volik, last Wednesday accused Cairo of "haggling" as a marketing strategy at a time when Russia is primed for a bumper harvest of wheat.

Russian sanitary officials announced the citrus fruit ban two days later.

Egypt is the largest export market for Russian cereals.

The zero-tolerance policy "has led to a halt of 540,000 tonnes of wheat shipments from international ports to Egypt," Supply Minister Mohammed Ali al-Sheikh said in Wednesday's statement.

Egypt imports 11 million tonnes of wheat a year, with the government importing five million tonnes a year and the remainder by the private sector.

"The current situation might negatively impact the country's strategic wheat reserves, and the inability to meet the domestic market's needs on the medium term," Sheikh said.
Boat with up to 450 migrants capsizes off Egypt, 42 drowned

A boat carrying up to 450 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean off Egypt's north coast on Wednesday, drowning 42 people and prompting a search operation that rescued 163 passengers, officials said.

The vessel overturned off the port city of Rosetta, police and health officials said.

Five survivors, handcuffed to beds in a Rosetta hospital room, told AFP up to 450 people were on board.

People gather along the shore in the Egyptian port city of Rosett during a search operation after a boat carrying migrants capsized in the Mediterranean STRINGER (AFP)

"The boat sunk. My three children died," said Badr Abdel Hamid, 28, before breaking into tears.

"We were 450 people on board. We left at 2:00 am. An hour an half later, it capsized. Whoever knew how to swim, swam. We even abandoned the women and children," said Ahmed Mohamed, 27.

The boat sank some 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) from the coast and the victims included one child, 10 women and 31 young men, a municipal official in the Mediterranean city told AFP.

They were Egyptians, Eritreans, Sudanese and Syrians, said the official, Ali Abdel Sattar.

"I just wanted to reach Europe and live a decent life," said Ahmed Gamal, 17.

The tragedy comes months after the EU's border agency Frontex warned that growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.

Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.

Egypt's Prime Minister Sharif Ismail ordered police to arrest the smugglers responsible, a cabinet statement said.

The military said in a statement that 163 passengers had been rescued so far, adding that they had stopped another boat elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast carrying 294 migrants.

With the search operating ongoing for an unknown number of people, health ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed told AFP that hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties.

- Egypt becoming departure country' -

More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for Europe since 2014, according to the United Nations.

Asylum-seekers have been seeking other ways to reach Europe since March, when Balkan countries closed the popular overland route and the EU agreed a deal with Turkey to halt departures.

"Egypt is starting to become a departure country," Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.

"The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year."

More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.

The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015.

- Fatality rates rise -

Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be "the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea," said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).

In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, drowning at least 169 migrants.

Earlier that month, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the Greek island of Crete and the bodies 104 migrants washed up on a beach in Libya.

Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.

Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period in 2015, said the UNHCR.

But Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against 2015 figures.

Arrivals began falling after the deal between the European Union and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.

The European Union launched "Operation Sophia" last year to destroy smuggler boats that could be used to ferry migrants across the sea.

An EU official told AFP this month that almost 300 smuggler boats had been put out of commission in the past year.

Nearly 100,000 migrants have landed at Italian ports this year, roughly in line with the level of arrivals in the same period in 2015 STRINGER (AFP/File)

Egypt migrant boat disaster AFP/J.Jacobsen, JJ (AFP)
Japan PM demands world find 'new means' to stop N. Korea

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday demanded that the world find a new way to halt the threat from North Korea after the long-sanctioned regime's nuclear and missile tests.

Abe, addressing the UN General Assembly, said that calculations about North Korea needed to change after its latest actions including the state's test of what it said was a miniaturized nuclear bomb for a warhead.

"There is no alternative but to say that the threat has now reached a dimension altogether different from what has transpired until now," Abe said.

Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addresses the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on September 21, 2016 Jewel Samad (AFP)

"The threat to the international community has become increasingly grave and all the more realistic. It demands a new means of addressing it, altogether different from what we applied until yesterday," he said.

Abe did not spell out specific actions but said Japan would use its non-permanent seat on the Security Council to explore new options.

The right-leaning leader first rose to power with tough talk on North Korea and has made revision of Japan's US-imposed pacifist constitution his signature issue.

But Japan has never fired a shot in anger since World War II and is constitutionally barred from offensive military operations.

Abe highlighted that Japan, the only nation to have suffered nuclear attack, was committed to the elimination of the ultra-destructive weapons.

Pointing to US President Barack Obama's landmark visit to Hiroshima in May, Abe raised the specter of a North Korea willing to use nuclear weapons.

"This is a challenge posed to the conscience of humankind. Were we to overlook it, how would we justify it to our own consciences?" Abe said.

- Long history of sanctions -

China and the United States are in talks on drafting a new Security Council resolution to punish North Korea, although such measures have not stopped Pyongyang in the past.

North Korea is already one of the most impoverished and sanctioned countries on Earth, with a March resolution after a previous nuclear test ordering searches of all ships heading to the isolated country and restricting shipments of luxury products.

Kim Jong-Un's regime says that it needs nuclear weapons to ensure its survival against arch-enemies the United States and Japan and wants recognition as a nuclear state.

China has been increasingly critical of North Korea but many analysts believe that a rising Beijing would prefer to put up with the troublesome regime rather than risk a united, US-allied Korea on its border.

While Obama has supported dialogue with US adversaries, his administration has voiced frustration with North Korea and advocated tough sanctions, with an aid-for-disarmament deal between the countries quickly falling apart in 2012.

Abe in his address also made a new pitch for a permanent seat on the Security Council, pointing out that Japan has historically been the top funder of the United Nations after the United States.

He renewed Japan's commitments to aid, including international development assistance and financing for adaptation to climate change, saying the country had in recent decades given $334.5 billion.

"If we do not carry out the reform of the Security Council now, it will easily be put off for a decade or two," Abe said.

A joint bid a decade ago by Japan alongside Brazil, Germany and India for permanent seats collapsed largely due to opposition from China, the only Asian country with veto power, which accused Tokyo of not sufficiently regretting World War II.
Pentagon denies coalition drone was near Syria aid convoy

The Pentagon on Wednesday strongly denied Russia's claim that a US-led coalition Predator drone was in the air over an aid convoy in Syria when it was attacked.

"None of our aircraft -- manned or unmanned, US or coalition -- were anywhere in the vicinity of Aleppo when the strike against the humanitarian convoy occurred," Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said.

Trucks carrying food and medical equipment from the United Nations and other agencies were unloading aid into a warehouse in Orum al-Kubra, a town in Aleppo province, when a deadly attack killed around 20 civilians late Monday.

US officials have told AFP that two Russian SU-24 warplanes were operating in the area where the aid convoy was struck, and one of them was directly above the convoy when it was hit

The Pentagon remarks came after Russia had insinuated that the coalition drone may have been involved in the strike.

Moscow released the aircraft's purported air speed and altitude as well as its location over Orum al-Kubra shortly before the strike.
Pakistan PM tells UN India obstacle to peace

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lashed out at India over escalating tensions in Kashmir, telling the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that New Delhi was an obstacle to peace.

Gun battles raged Tuesday on the disputed Kashmir border between the nuclear-armed neighbors, two days after 18 Indian soldiers were killed in an attack blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

The Sunday assault was the worst of its kind to hit the divided Himalayan region in more than a decade.

Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif addresses the United Nations General Assembly General Debate September 21, 2016 at the United Nations in New York Don Emmert (AFP)

"The international community ignores the danger of rising tensions in South Asia, at its own peril," Sharif warned the General Assembly.

"Pakistan wants peace with India. I have gone the extra mile to achieve this," he told the gathering in New York. "But India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue.

"Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences," the Pakistani premier said.

"We are open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions," Sharif said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed to punish those responsible for Sunday's attack in Kashmir and has faced calls from some within India for military action against Pakistan.

Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. Both claim the disputed Himalayan territory in its entirety and have fought two wars over it.

Several rebel groups have fought an estimated 500,000 Indian forces deployed in the territory, demanding independence for the Muslim-majority region or its merger with Pakistan.
Boeing receives US license to sell planes to Iran

Boeing said Wednesday it obtained a US government license to complete a sale of planes to Iran Air, moving closer to the first such deal since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The aerospace group said it remained in talks with Iran Air on a final sales agreement after the two sides reached a preliminary deal in June. The deal is valued at as much as $25 billion.

"Any final sales agreement would have to adhere to the license we've been issued," said Boeing spokesman Mark Sklar.

Founded in 1916 in Seattle by William Boeing as the Pacific Aero Products Co., Boeing has evolved into the biggest exporter in the United States Paul J. Richards (AFP/File)

The June memorandum of understanding covered the sale of 80 planes to Iran Air. Boeing will also lease 29 other planes to Iranian national carrier under the deal.

Additional sales would require another license, said a person familiar with the matter.

Earlier Wednesday, Airbus announced that it obtained a first licence from the United States to supply passenger jets to Iran, a key step towards fulfilling a multi-billion-dollar deal of its own.

Iran had been an international pariah prior to the nuclear deal reached last year with world powers and the US-Iran relationship remains one of mutual distrust, with the US maintaining extensive sanctions on the Islamic republic.
Digitally unwrapped scroll reveals earliest Old Testament scripture

An extremely fragile, ancient Hebrew scroll has been digitally unwrapped for the first time, revealing the earliest copy ever found of an Old Testament Bible scripture, researchers said Wednesday.

Known as the En-Gedi scroll, it contains text from the Book of Leviticus, and dates at least to the third or fourth century, possibly earlier, according to the report in the journal Science Advances.

The deciphering of its contents is described in the journal as a "significant discovery in biblical archeology."

The scroll was found by archeologists in 1970 at En-Gedi, the site of a large, ancient Jewish community dating from the late 8th century BC Gali Tiboon (AFP/File)

The scroll is not the oldest ever found -- that honor belongs to the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls which range from the third century BC to the second century of the common era (AD).

Radiocarbon analysis has shown that the En-Gedi scroll dates to the third or fourth century AD.

Some experts think it is older than that. An analysis of the handwriting style and the way the letters are drawn suggests it could date to the second half of the first century or the beginning of the second century AD.

Its contents were long thought to be lost forever, because it was burned in a fire in the 6th century and was impossible to touch without dissolving into chunks of ash.

The scroll was found by archeologists in 1970 at En-Gedi, the site of a large, ancient Jewish community dating from the late 8th century BC.

Its fragments were preserved by the Israel Antiquities Authority for decades.

"Each fragment's main structure, completely burned and crushed, had turned into chunks of charcoal that continued to disintegrate every time they were touched," said the study.

So researchers used advanced digital scanning tools to "virtually unwrap" the scroll and see its contents, without ever touching it.

A microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) scan was able to pick up traces of metal in the ink.

"We were amazed at the quality of the images," said Michael Segal, head of the School of Philosophy and Religions at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"Much of the text is as readable, or close to as readable as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls or high resolution photographs of them."

- Back from the brink -

Before the scroll was digitally unveiled, experts believed the artifact may have been a Torah scroll.

But a look at the images showed it was the Book of Leviticus, from the third book of the Book of Moses.

This makes it the earliest Pentateuchal book -- relating to the first five books of the Jewish or Christian scriptures -- ever found.

The scroll shows 18 lines of text in each column, which were originally 35 lines long.

Like other ancient Hebrew scrolls, it contains only consonants and no vowels.

Symbols for vowels were not introduced in Hebrew until the 9th century.

"We were immediately struck by the fact that in these passages, the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll is identical in all of its details both regarding its letter and section division to what we call the Masoretic text, the authoritative Jewish text until today," said Segal.

Its uniformity with the medieval texts stunned researchers, who said it was 100 percent the same, both in its consonants and in its paragraph divisions.

"We have never found something as striking as this," said Emanuel Tov, professor emeritus in the department of Bible at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"This is quite amazing for us that in 2,000 years this text has not changed."

Researchers hope the techniques developed to read it will be used on other scrolls, including some from the Dead Sea Scroll collection, which have remained undecipherable until now, and others from disasters such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the 1st century.

The technology, called "Volume Cartography" and developed with funding from the US National Science Foundation, will become freely available next year as open source software, researchers said.

It could also be useful to intelligence agencies or investigators.

"Damage and decay is the natural order of things, but you can see that sometimes you can absolutely pull a text back from the brink of loss," said co-author Brent Seales, professor and chairman in the department of computer science at the University of Kentucky.

"The En-Gedi scroll is proof positive we can potentially recover whole texts from damaged material, not just a few letters or a speculative word," said Seales.

A conservator at the Dead Sea scrolls laboratory in Jerusalem works on fragments of a Dead Sea scroll on February 24, 2016 Gali Tibbon (AFP/File)
Charlotte fumes as two narratives of shooting emerge

Was the victim carrying a gun, or a book? Was the officer who opened fire black or white? In the North Carolina city of Charlotte, two conflicting accounts of the police shooting of an African-American man took hold Wednesday.

City officials appealed for calm after a night of violence triggered by the shooting, with Charlotte's police chief saying that Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was shot after officers saw him with a gun and posing a threat to their safety.

Police chief Kerr Putney -- who is black -- identified the officer who fired the shots as Brentley Vinson, also African-American.

Students gather at the University of North Carolina on September 21, 2016 for a protest against police brutality following the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott Nicholas Kamm (AFP)

But neighbors and people claiming to have witnessed the incident disputed the official account, convinced the shooting is just the latest example of police brutality that has disproportionately impacted black communities.

A climate of distrust has descended on the largely black neighborhood where Scott died, in the wake of several incidents in recent years of African-American men killed at the hands of white police officers.

Community members said Scott was doing what he regularly did on a school-day afternoon: reading a book as he waited for his young son to step off the school bus at the Village at College Downs housing complex.

Two women who claim to have seen the shooting said police leadership lied about the circumstances of the deadly encounter, which along with the recent killing of a black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma has fuelled a fresh burst of nationwide anger about police violence.

Others who gathered at the site of the shooting also were quick to insist that Scott was holding a book, not a firearm, and that the officer who opened fire was white, not black.

Police stated that no book was found at the scene.

But it was a narrative that began taking hold among members of the black community.

"A white officer with a bald head shot that man," insisted Taheshia Williams, whose daughter goes to school with Scott's son.

As for Scott holding a gun in the encounter, "It's a lie," she told reporters.

"They took the book and replaced it with a gun so they can look like that man did something that he didn't do."

- Complying will 'get you murdered' -

Williams noted that she believed Scott had complied "exactly" with specific police orders to exit the car and walk to the back of the vehicle.

"Obviously complying is going to get you murdered. Because that is what happened."

Another black woman, who asked not to be named, also insisted that it was a white officer who opened fire, and that Scott had no weapon.

"I saw it from my balcony," she told AFP, pointing to a third-floor apartment within view of the spot where Scott was shot.

"The chief is lying" by saying that officer Brentley Vinson fired the shots, she said.

The contradictions between the police accounts and those of Scott's Charlotte neighbors highlight the tensions that often exist between heavily armed US security forces and African-American communities, whose members complain of unfair racial profiling and decades of police brutality.

"Innocent blood cries from the grave!" declared civil rights activist John Barnett, with a minister and some Scott friends and neighbors at his side, as he called for authorities to sweep the Charlotte police force of "dirty cops" in its ranks.

"We've got a virus, we gotta use some chemotherapy to get that virus or that cancer out," he said.

Barnett led a brief call-and-response of "Hands up, don't shoot," echoing one of the chants that rose up during Tuesday night protests that turned violent, leaving 16 police officers injured.

Some of those who gathered Wednesday at the scene of the shooting appeared shell-shocked in the aftermath of Scott's death.

"He was a sweetheart. I never had any ill feelings about him," Sheila Daniel, 36, said of Scott, who was a regular customer at the shop where she works.

She said the police account was "completely different" from the one put forward by one of Scott's daughters.

Police routinely entered the housing complex on Tuesdays and Thursdays on patrol and should have seen that "this is his normal routine," she said of Scott, who regularly waited for his son at the bus stop.

Daniel, who has a 20-year-old son, said she feared he could fall victim to police discrimination.

"I have to worry about whether I'm going to get that phone call" from authorities about a dead son or daughter.

"If I get that phone call, hell is going to break loose."

Three youths raise their fists September 21, 2016 near the site where Keith Lamont Scott was shot by police Nicholas Kamm (AFP)
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

A man from Cowdray Park has been fined $50 for smuggling goods worth $200 from Mozambique into Zimbabwe.Actine Nyathi (52) pleaded guilty to the charge when he appeared before Bulawayo magistrate Evelyn Mashavakure. The magistrate convicted and sentenced him to pay $50 fine or spend 15 days in jail.The court was told that on September 7 this year at 2:30am detectives from the border control unity at Joshua Nkomo Airport in Bulawayo received information that that Nyathi had smuggled goods from Mozambique through the Forbes Border Post without declaring them or paying duty.They went to Rixi Taxis in the city where they spotted Nyathi who was in Mahube Express Bus. They searched his luggage and discovered that he had bales of clothes and boots. When they asked him to produce the declaration particulars he failed leading to his arrest.Councillor in trouble for sidelining residents in committee selectionHarare Residents Trust has said residents of Lochnivar have raised concern that Councillor Peter Moyo did not consult residents when he chose members of the ward development committee.The trust said most of the members of the committee are his political affiliates."The police have complained that they were not involved in the election and are not aware of the developments that are taking place. The ward development committee should have the following members the Councillor, Secretary-District Officer and representatives from residents groups, business, police, youth, health ,education, people living with disability and churches," said the trust."The residents complained that the councillor has been given $9000.00 so far but no feedback meeting has been done to inform residents of the developments made."
Fujairah launches UAE's first supertanker dock

The oil terminal at Fujairah on Wednesday inaugurated a dock for supertankers, the first of its kind in OPEC member the United Arab Emirates.

The facility enables the terminal to receive tankers measuring 334 metres (yards) and weighing 330,000 tonnes, port director Mussa Murad said at the inauguration ceremony.

"This dock is the deepest oil dock in the Middle East," he said.

An Emirati man stands in front of a pipeline at the oil terminal of Fujairah during the inauguration ceremony of a dock for supertankers Karim Sahib (AFP)

The jetty is able to process two million tonnes of petroleum products at loading or unloading in 24 hours, he said.

In contrast, for the entirety of 2015 the terminal handled 56 million tonnes of petroleum products.

At the inauguration, Fujairah's ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Mohammed al-Sharqi cut a symbolic ribbon before a moored supertanker's sirens were sounded in celebration.
Obama urges calm in calls to Charlotte, Tulsa mayors

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday called the mayors of Tulsa and Charlotte, where the shootings of two black men by police have reignited summer-long racial unrest, urging a calm response to protests.

"Both mayors provided the President with an update on the situation on the ground and the protests in their cities," a White House official said about Obama's conversations with Mayor Dewey Bartlett of Tulsa and Mayor Jennifer Roberts of Charlotte.

"The President and both mayors reiterated that any protests should be conducted in a peaceful manner and that local law enforcement should find ways to calmly and productively engage those protesting."

Students gather at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte on September 21, 2016 for a protest against police brutality following the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott nearby the previous day Nicholas Kamm (AFP)

Terence Crutcher was shot dead by police in Tulsa, Oklahoma last Friday, and Keith Lamont Scott was killed by law enforcement in Charlotte, North Carolina on Tuesday.

Violence and looting overnight in Charlotte injured at least 16 officers and several demonstrators.

"The President expressed his condolences to both Mayors on the tragic events and affirmed the Administration's commitment to provide assistance as needed," said the White House official.

These are just the latest in a series of fatal police shootings -- from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to St. Paul, Minnesota -- that have left the African American community demanding law enforcement reforms and greater accountability.

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were quick to weigh in.

"Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Too many others. This has got to end. -H," tweeted Democrat Clinton, signing the post herself.

After calling to "make America safe again" in a tweet, Trump suggested Wednesday that the Tulsa officer who shot Crutcher had "choked."

"I don't know what she was thinking," the Republican said, speaking at an African-American church in Cleveland, Ohio.

"Did she get scared? Was she choking? What happened?"
Authorities: Nashville police officer fatally shoots suspect

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  Nashville police say an officer has fatally shot a 43-year-old man who pulled a pistol when confronted.

Metro police spokesman Don Aaron tells The Tennessean (http://tnne.ws/2d6zkcF) that the man was shot just before 2:30 p.m. Tuesday and no officers were injured.

Robertson County Sheriff's Office spokesman Ryan Martin has identified the dead man as Sandy Joe Duke of Springfield.

Officials say Duke was a suspect in a home invasion earlier in the day in Robertson County. Aaron says Robertson County sheriff's officials were able to track the suspect to Nashville.

Aaron says the man initially fled officers when they ordered him to stop and then turned toward them with a pistol in hand. He says Officer Wesley McClelland opened fire at that point.

McClelland has been placed on administrative leave.

Duke and McClelland are both white.

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Vikings allow Wells Fargo to keep certain signs near stadium

MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The Minnesota Vikings will allow Wells Fargo to keep certain signs near the team's new stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

The Star Tribune (http://strib.mn/2cXJSNT ) reports a mostly confidential settlement was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court to a legal dispute involving office-tower rooftop signs near U.S. Bank Stadium.

Under the settlement, the team allowed Wells Fargo to keep elevated  but not illuminated  signs on the rooftops of two office buildings next to the stadium.

Attorneys for the Vikings had labeled the signs a giant "photo bomb" of aerial images of the new $1.1 billion stadium. In June, U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank gave Wells Fargo 30 days to remove the elevated signs.

Vikings vice president Lester Bagley and a Wells Fargo spokesman both call the resolution "in the best interests of both parties."

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Islamic extremists claim 40 troops killed in Nigeria

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP)  Islamic extremists said Tuesday they killed more than 40 troops from a multinational force in an attack on a convoy in northeast Nigeria  the fourth attack in three days following a lull as Nigeria's home-grown insurgency confronts a leadership struggle.

Analysts are warning that the struggle could lead to more violent attacks that will kill more people in a 7-year-old Islamic uprising started by Boko Haram that has killed more than 20,000 people, forced 2.6 million from their homes and spread to neighboring states.

The Islamic State's West Africa Province annihilated "a convoy of the African Coalition Crusader forces" in the town of Malam Fatori, the SITE Intelligence Group reported, translating an IS communique posted on social media. There was no way to independently verify the claim and no word from Nigeria's military late Tuesday night.

Eighteen people were killed Sunday and Monday when insurgents ambushed another convoy, gunned down Christians leaving a Sunday church service and beheaded a village head and his son.

No one has claimed responsibility for the earlier attacks.

Tuesday's was the first Nigeria attack claimed by the IS group since August, when it named a new caliph in Nigeria and provoked a struggle with the longtime leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau.

Shekau pledged Boko Haram's allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015, giving it its first sub-Saharan franchise. Islamic State said it replaced Shekau in August, in a dispute that revolved around his indiscriminate killings of Muslims.

Many more Muslims than Christians have been killed in attacks targeting mosques, churches, marketplaces and schools.

Tuesday's Islamic State communique did not say when the convoy was attacked but claimed it "resulted in killing more than forty and wounding dozens" of troops from Nigeria and neighboring countries. The multi-national force is also battling Nigeria's home-grown Islamic insurgents who have spread their extremist uprising to Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

Analysts from IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre warned the recent lull and drop in fatalities likely will be followed by increased cross-border attacks.
Watson, Ramirez lend glitz to UN gender equality event

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  Emma Watson cheered the possibility of the U.S. electing its first female president. Edgar Ramirez questioned a "macho" world that teaches boys to suppress emotions and dominate women.

The actors roused up a glitzy and high-powered crowd at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on Tuesday night to promote the U.N. Women's HeForShe initiative to draw men into the fight for global gender equality.

The organization released a report detailing progress made by 10 universities around the world that have committed to redressing gender inequality in their institutions. It is part of a wider project convening 10 heads of state, 10 global corporate CEOs and 10 university presidents to take concrete action for gender parity.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, center, shares a laugh with Trevor Noah, left, host of "The Daily Show" and actress Emma Watson prior to delivering a speech as he attends a reception on the occasion of the 2nd Anniversary of "HeForShe" in New York, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)

Watson, the U.N. Women Global Goodwill Ambassador, drew whoops and cheers when she referenced the possibility of Hillary Clinton winning the U.S. presidential elections.

"I don't know if I would have believed you if you had told me two years ago before I made my HeforShe speech that we might have the first female president of the United States," said Watson, best known for her "Harry Potter" character Hermione Granger, the plucky bookworm whose wits frequently saved the day.

Watson also celebrated the fact that Britain has a woman prime minister in Theresa May.

Ramirez, a Venezuelan actor who starred in "The Liberator" and "Joy," gave an impassioned indictment of a world where "male adolescents are taught to be dominant, tough and disrespect women." He said teaching boys to suppress their emotions creates taboos around male mental health, leads to depression and even violence.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finish President Sauli Niinisto also spoke. "The Daily Show" host Trevor Noah served as presenter.

The report on the 10 universities detailed stark gender disparities within the participating institutions. At Georgetown university, 74 percent of its leadership and 64 percent of its tenured professors are men. At the University of Oxford, just 23 percent of tenured professors and 38 percent of senior leadership are women.

The report highlighted imbalances within certain academic tracks and in fields of study chosen by female students compared to their male counterparts.

Stony Brook University President Samuel Stanley told The Associated Press his school has started anti-bias training for senior leaders and search committees in an effort to redress gender imbalances. Nearly two-thirds of tenured professors at the New York-based school are men, and a similar number make up its senior leadership.

Stanley said his own daughters have encountered difficulties while pursuing careers in sciences, including one who was asked by a colleague if she could bake cookies.
Cambodia deports 63 Chinese, Taiwanese over alleged web scam

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP)  Cambodia has deported 50 Chinese and 13 Taiwanese citizens to China over an alleged internet scam, complying with demands from Beijing, a senior police official said Wednesday.

The suspects were flown out of Cambodia on Tuesday, said Gen. Ouk Haiseila, chief of the Cambodian Interior Ministry's Immigration Investigation Bureau. He said the Chinese government sent a special plane from Beijing to take them back.

In June, Taiwan protested after Cambodia deported 25 Taiwanese internet scam suspects to rival China in the latest snub of the self-ruled island. Cambodia regards Taiwan to be part of China.

In this Sept. 20, 2016 photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, Chinese police escort an internet fraud suspect at Lukou International Airport in Nanjing in eastern China's Jiangsu Province after being deported from Cambodia. Cambodia has deported 13 Taiwanese and 50 Chinese suspects to China, a senior police official said Wednesday. (Han Yuqing/Xinhua via AP)

The latest group of 63 suspects was arrested late last month in a rented house in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. They were accused of defrauding victims in China using phone calls made over the internet.

Since 2012, at least 982 Chinese and Taiwanese accused of taking part in internet scams have been arrested and deported back to China, according to Ouk Haiseila.

Although Taiwan's constitution formally decrees that it and the Chinese mainland are part of a single Chinese nation, Taiwan functions like an independent country and does not acknowledge Beijing's claim of authority over it.

Rights activists and Taiwanese authorities say such deportations reflect the great influence China exercises over Cambodia through aid and investment.

China is a key ally and economic partner of impoverished Cambodia. It has provided millions of dollars in aid and investment over the past decade, agreed to write off debts and granted it tariff-free status for hundreds of items.

Kenya and Malaysia have also deported Taiwanese internet scam suspects to China despite protests by Taiwanese officials.

In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, hooded internet fraud suspects are escorted off a plane by Chinese police at Lukou International Airport in Nanjing in eastern China's Jiangsu Province after being deported from Cambodia, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Cambodia has deported 13 Taiwanese and 50 Chinese suspects to China, a senior police official said Wednesday. (Han Yuqing/Xinhua via AP)
Argentine leader mentions Falklands in chat with British PM

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  Argentine President Mauricio Macri said he spoke informally with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday and brought up the dialogue the countries have re-established in hopes of resolving the dispute over the Falklands Islands.

Macri told reporters the encounter after a United Nations lunch was "a minute" and "very informal." The two leaders had a similar encounter 10 days ago at the G-20 summit in China.

He separately told the official Argentine news agency Telam that he greeted May and told her that "he is ready to start an open a dialogue that includes, of course, the issue of the sovereignty of the Malvinas." The islands are referred to as the Malvinas in Argentina.

Argentina's President Mauricio Macri, center, speaks with Brazil's President Michel Temer, right, as they arrive for a luncheon during the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (Lucas Jackson/Pool Photo via AP)

Macri said the British leader responded with a "yes, that we should start to talk," according to Telam.

Argentine Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra later cautioned that while the sovereignty of the disputed islands is something to be discussed with Britain, it would be "a big step to say that the issue is on the table."

There was no comment from the British government.

Tensions between Argentina and Britain have eased since Argentine President Cristina Fernandez left office and Macri assumed the post promising a less-confrontational stance.

Last week, the two governments announced that they had agreed to lift restrictions affecting the islands, in a thawing of relations. The sides agreed to increase the number of flights between the Falklands and Argentina, adding one new stop a month in each direction.

Argentina lost a 1982 war with Britain after Argentine troops seized the South Atlantic archipelago.
Memorial tribute planned for late Ohio leader Voinovich

ATHENS, Ohio (AP)  A memorial tribute to the late George Voinovich, former two-term Ohio governor and U.S. senator, is planned in Washington.

Ohio University says the bipartisan gathering Thursday at the National Press Club will include talks by Democratic Sen. Tom Carper, of Delaware, and Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi (TEE'-behr-ee), of Ohio. It also will include video messages from Ohio's senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Rob Portman.

President Barack Obama, a Democrat, wrote in a message for the tribute that the Republican "was a patriot who dedicated his life to serving others."

Voinovich's family will accept an outstanding federal government alumni award on his behalf. He died in June at age 79.
Ahmad Khan Rahami: What's known about the bombing suspect

NEW YORK (AP)  Ahmad Khan Rahami, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, was charged by federal officials in two states Tuesday with planting bombs in New York, and at a military charity run and train station in New Jersey.

He remains hospitalized after a shootout with police Monday, hours after investigators say he dumped a package with bombs in a trash can near a train station. Investigators are looking into his previous overseas travel and other run-ins with the law.

Here's what's known about Rahami:

FILE - This September 2016 file photo provided by Union County Prosecutor's Office shows Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is in custody as a suspect in the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey. Rahami worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, N.J. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor. Rahami remained hospitalized Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, after a shootout the day before with police in New Jersey. (Union County Prosecutor's Office via AP, File)

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STABBING CHARGE

Rahami was accused of stabbing one of his brothers in 2014, but a grand jury declined to indict him, despite a warning from the arresting officer that Rahami likely was "a danger to himself or others," court records show. He also was accused of violating a domestic-violence restraining order in 2012.

Rahami has a child with a woman he dated while attending high school in Edison, New Jersey, but the two have since had a tumultuous relationship. Rahami often was hundreds of dollars in arrears in child support, and their custody case was called before a family court judge six times in five years, records show.

A judge on Tuesday granted her request for temporary full custody of the child after she went to court, citing the terror investigation.

In 2011, the woman went to court to stop Rahami's overnight visits with the child, but a judge found she hadn't provided evidence to show that their child was in danger of being taken out of the country. A judge approved a visitation agreement between the two in May 2014, ordering that the child spend Christmas and Thanksgiving with her  and the Muslim holy days Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha with Rahami.

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INVESTIGATED BY FBI

Following the 2014 stabbing, the FBI looked into Rahami after his father expressed concern his son might be a terrorist, law enforcement officials said Tuesday. During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd and acting like a thug, the officials said.

Rahami's father told reporters Tuesday that he called the FBI at the time because Rahami "was doing real bad."

William Sweeney, the FBI's assistant director in New York, said Monday that that at the time of the bombing, Rahami apparently was not on the FBI's radar.

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WHERE HE WORKED

Federal investigators said that Rahami purchased components for the bombs on eBay, and had them shipped to a business where he worked in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. They said he worked there until Sept. 12, but didn't identify the store.

Rahami had worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an Associated Press administrative technology office in New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said Rahami worked night shifts and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

Customers at a fried chicken restaurant owned by Rahami's father where he had worked said his demeanor changed after taking trips overseas and he started wearing more ethnic clothing.

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A WIFE FROM PAKISTAN

Rahami has made five trips overseas over the last six years, according to Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur, who was briefed by the FBI on Tuesday. MacArthur represents the district including Seaside Park.

On a trip to Pakistan in 2014, Rahami emailed his local congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport.

Democratic New Jersey Rep. Albio Sires said his office wrote a letter to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan to check on the status of the case and the woman received a visa.

____

Associated Press writers Dake Kang in Elizabeth, New Jersey; Michael Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey; Josh Cornfield in Philadelphia; Jake Pearson in New York; and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this story.
News / National

by Staff reporter

A Zimbabwean white farmer has been sentenced to 12 months in jail after refusing to comply with a directive to move out of his farm at the height of the country's controversial land reform programme, said a report on Wednesday.According to New Zimbabwe, Phillip Valentine, 40, was dragged before magistrate Poterai Gwezhira to face a charge of contravening the gazetted land act.Valentine reportedly refused to move out of his Odzi farm that had been seized by the government on October 10, 2000 and given to a black beneficiary Chief Zimunya.The prosecutor told the court that following a number of eviction notices by Mutare's land officer Simon Matendere, the convicted farmer still refused to move out of the farm.Valentine was sentenced to 12 months in jail or pay a $600 fine.Colonial land ownershipReports indicated that President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party launched the land reforms in 2000, taking over white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.Mugabe said the reforms were meant to correct colonial land ownership imbalances.At least 4 000 white commercial farmers were evicted from their farms.The land seizures were often violent, claiming the lives of several white farmers during clashes with veterans of Zimbabwe's 1970s liberation struggle.Critics of the reforms have blamed the programme for low production on the farms as the majority of the beneficiaries lacked the means and skills to work the land.Mugabe vowed in recent years that whites would never be allowed to own land in Zimbabwe, further adding that the few remaining white farmers "must go".Mugabe claimed that Zimbabwe was "no country for whites" as far as land was concerned.
US flies bombers over South Korea again in show of force

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  The United States on Wednesday flew a pair of supersonic bombers over ally South Korea for the second time in as many weeks in a show of force following North Korea's latest nuclear test earlier this month.

U.S. Forces Korea said one of the two B-1B bombers landed at Osan Air Base, 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the border with North Korea, but did not say when it will return to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

Such flyovers are common when animosity rises on the Korean Peninsula, which is technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The United States also flew two B-1B bombers over South Korea on Sept. 13.

A U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, flies over Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (Seo Myung-gon/Yonhap via AP) KOREA OUT

"What we are showing today is just one tool we have to choose from a wide array of options. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region," Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, commander of the U.S. 7th Air Force in South Korea, said in a statement.

North Korea uses such flyovers and the American military presence in the South in its propaganda as alleged proof of U.S. hostility, which it says is the reason it needs a nuclear weapons program. After last week's flyover, North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency described the B-1B as an "ill-famed nuclear war means" and accused the United States of resorting to "nuclear threat and blackmail" against the North.

The B-1B doesn't currently carry nuclear weapons under a disarmament treaty, and some U.S. experts do not consider them as nuclear capable in their current configuration.

Military experts raise concerns that North Korea is moving closer toward obtaining the ability to put nuclear warheads on a variety of its ballistic missiles, a growing arsenal that one day may include a reliable weapon that could reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korea conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test to date on Sept. 9, claiming it as a successful nuclear warhead detonation that proved its ability to mass produce "standardized" nuclear weapons that could be used on missiles.

There is a possibility that North Korea will follow its latest nuclear test with a long-range rocket launch as it did after its fourth nuclear test in January. The North's state media on Tuesday said leader Kim Jong Un observed a ground test of a new rocket engine and ordered a satellite launch preparation.

Outsiders view North Korea's space launches as a cover for banned ballistic missile tests as the country openly pursues long-range nuclear weapons.
Researchers: Canadian firm helping Bahrain censor the web

LONDON (AP)  Researchers have identified a Canadian company at the center of a small Arab nation's online censorship system  a finding that sits awkwardly with Ottawa officials' public support for digital freedoms.

Specialists from internet watchdog Citizen Lab said in a report published Wednesday that web filtering firm Netsweeper Inc. is helping block news and opposition websites in Bahrain, a Gulf Arab monarchy which has been wracked by unrest since pro-democracy protests were stifled there in 2011.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert said the discovery undermines Canadian leaders' forceful condemnations of online censorship .

"Canadian policymakers have been quite vocal about saying that this is wrong," Deibert said in a phone call ahead of the report's release. "Yet here we have a Canadian company that's doing precisely that."

Netsweeper, based in the city of Guelph, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Toronto, did not return a call and other messages. In 2011, a company spokesman was quoted as saying there was "no good conversation for us to have" about allegations of censorship.

Citizen Lab said the banned Bahraini sites include ones run by opposition and human rights groups as well as sites critical of Islam. Gambling and pornography sites also were blocked.

Netsweeper's suspected role as Bahrain's censorship provider first came to light after the firm appeared to win a contract for a "national website filtering solution" earlier this year. Researchers at Citizen Lab said they confirmed the company's role there by scouring Bahrain's internet space for Netsweeper installations and trying to access blocked sites from a server in the country.

The researchers drew on clues such as lines including the words "Netsweeper" or "netsw" returned during internet scans and a tell-tale line of code in the web addresses thrown up by blocked sites.

Based at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, Citizen Lab has made a specialty of exposing the companies behind surveillance and censorship in the Middle East and beyond. Last month, its discovery of Israeli-made spy software targeting an Arab dissident's iPhone prompted Apple to issue a worldwide security update . Citizen Lab has been tracking Netsweeper's work for years .

Bahrain's Information Ministry did not reply to emails seeking comment. Canadian officials  who are promoting an upcoming Dubai trade show which Netsweeper is supposed to attend  said in a statement that while they could not comment on specific companies, "we expect Canadian businesses to operate lawfully and according to Canadian values."

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Online:
Iran 'determined' to boost military after US-Israel deal

TEHRAN, Iran (AP)  Iran's chief of staff of the armed forces said Wednesday a $38 billion aid deal between the United States and Israel makes Iran more determined to strengthen its military.

In comments broadcast live on Iranian state TV, Gen Mohammad Hossein Bagheri said the U.S.-Israel aid deal "will make us more determined in strengthening the defense power of the country." He spoke at an annual military parade.

Last week the U.S signed an unprecedented new security agreement with Israel that will give the Israeli military $38 billion over 10 years.

Iran does not recognize Israel and supports anti-Israeli militant groups such as Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

During a separate parade Wednesday in the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, Iran unveiled a new missile, known as Zolfaghar.

It was carried by military truck which bore a banner printed with a 2013 anti-Israeli quote by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying that Iran will annihilate the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa should Israel attack Iran.

Tasnim, the semi-official news agency, which is close to Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guard, said the missile is a "long range ballistic" with a cluster warhead. It did not provide further details.

The semi-official ISNA news agency later said the solid-fuel missile had a range of 700 kilometers (435 miles.)

Zolfaghar is the name of the sword used by Imam Ali, a cousin of the Prophet Mohammed and his successor according to Shiite belief.
Migrants are main target of French presidential candidates

PARIS (AP)  Temporary home to thousands of migrants trying to reach Britain, the French city of Calais is a major battlefield for presidential candidates who are seizing on fears of immigration in campaigning for spring elections  and following in the footsteps of far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, competing in the conservative primary in November, visited Calais on Wednesday.

Sarkozy didn't go to the makeshift camp known as the "jungle." Instead he met security forces in charge of protecting the ferry port and preventing migrants from entering the area. He made no public comment during the visit.

Former French President and candidate for the right-wing Les Republicains party primary Nicolas Sarkozy visits the Calais harbour, northern France, Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. Temporary home to thousands of migrants trying to reach Britain, the French city of Calais is a major battlefield for presidential candidates who are seizing on fears of immigration in campaigning for spring elections. (Philippe Huguen, Pool via AP)

Presidential contender Le Pen, well positioned in polls, has made fighting immigration her longstanding issue. The president of the National Front is campaigning to leave the EU and its visa-free zone, which would allow France to reinstate controls at national borders.

Sarkozy's rivals for the conservative nomination have also visited Calais, and President Francois Hollande  who has not formally declared his candidacy  is considering going to Calais next week. The migrants from Africa, the Middle East and beyond camped in Calais are a thorn in the side of the Socialist government, the symbol of its failure to find effective responses to Europe's migrant crisis.

French conservative politicians argue that Britain should be responsible for dealing with people who hope for asylum in the U.K. They want to renegotiate a 2003 treaty that effectively puts the British border in Calais, leaving French authorities to police migrants trying to cross the Channel.

Sarkozy signed that treaty as interior minister, but now he wants to send migrants to a center on British territory. The U.K. would be in charge of repatriating those who would not be granted a legal status, he has said.

His main challenger in the conservative primary, former Prime Minister Alain Juppe, went to Calais in January, including a walk in boots in the muddy slum camp.

"It's not acceptable to keep going that way," Juppe told Franceinfo radio-television network Tuesday. "We must differentiate those who are here illegally and send them back" to their countries.

Le Pen paid her last visit to Calais two years ago, when she claimed she would send the migrants "back home even to countries at war."

Hollande's government promised to dismantle the Calais camp by the end of the year and resettle migrants in small centers across France to examine their situations on a case-by-case basis.

That plan has prompted vehement protests from many local conservative and far-right politicians, saying they fear the consequences of the presence of migrants in their towns.

The number of migrants living in the "jungle" reached as many as 10,000 this month according to aid groups operating in the camp, compared to 7,000 according to a count by French authorities in August. There were a few hundred there in 2012 when Hollande was elected.

Former French President and candidate for the right-wing Les Republicains party primary Nicolas Sarkozy, right, flanked by Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart, center, walks during his visit at Calais harbour, northern France, Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. Temporary home to thousands of migrants trying to reach Britain, the French city of Calais is a major battlefield for presidential candidates who are seizing on fears of immigration in campaigning for spring elections. (Philippe Huguen, Pool via AP)
China probes company accused of North Korea trade violations

BEIJING (AP)  Chinese authorities are investigating a company that researchers say sold North Korea materials that can be used by its growing nuclear weapons program in a crackdown that reflects Beijing's growing frustration with its isolated neighbor.

The announcement about Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. in Dandong, a northeastern border city in Liaoning province, was unusually explicit for Beijing, whose dealings with the North are shrouded in secrecy.

Hongxiang is suspected of unspecified "serious economic crimes," according to separate announcements by police in Liaoning and China's foreign ministry. They gave no details but a South Korean think tank said last month it supplied aluminum oxide and other materials that are used in processing nuclear bomb fuel.

In this Thursday, March 17, 2016 photo, vehicles wait at a border checkpoint to cross into North Korea in Dandong in northeastern China's Liaoning Province. Chinese authorities are investigating a company that researchers say sold North Korea materials that can be used by its growing nuclear weapons program in a crackdown that reflects Beijing's growing frustration with its isolated neighbor. (Chinatopix via AP)

Beijing has long been North Korea's main source of aid and diplomatic support but President Xi Jinping's government is showing growing frustration with Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons in defiance of foreign pressure.

China signed on in March to U.N. sanctions that limit trade with the North and has tightened controls on cross-border flows of goods. Security Council resolutions prohibit nuclear weapons development by the North and all ballistic missile activity.

The government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un conducted its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9. That raised concern abroad it was moving closer to its goal of a nuclear-armed missile that could one day strike the U.S. mainland.

"China will definitely take harsher measures including economic sanctions and more proactive measures to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons," said Lu Chao, director of the Border Study Institute of the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank.

"Although It is rare for China to announce the punishment of its own companies, it shows the firm determination to implement relevant U.N. resolutions," said Lu.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week U.S. officials suspect Hongxiang and its chairwoman, Ma Xiaohong, of helping Pyongyang evade U.N.-imposed restrictions on trade.

Ma founded Hongxiang in 2000 and the company has expanded into trade, hotels and tourism.

Washington has pressed Beijing to lean harder on Pyongyang, but Chinese leaders have resisted for fear of destabilizing Kim's government and setting off a flood of refugees or a political collapse that might lead to U.S. and South Korean troops being stationed in the North near China's border.

Phone calls to Hongxiang's headquarters in Dandong on Wednesday were not answered. People who answered the phone at Dandong police headquarters said they had no information about the investigation. The Liaoning provincial police headquarters didn't respond to questions sent by fax.

In April, China banned imports of North Korean coal and iron ore, an important revenue source for the impoverished country. Beijing also banned sales of jet fuel to the North, though it said civilian aircraft would be allowed to refuel on flights to China.

That was followed in June by a ban on exports to the North of "dual use" items with possible civilian and military applications including metal alloys, cutting and laser-welding equipment and materials that could be used in production of chemical weapons.

Beijing is making "unremitting efforts to driving forward denuclearization" on the Korean peninsula and "performing our international obligation of nonproliferation export control," said a foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang.

The South Korean think tank, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said in its report Hongxiang supplied the North with possible "dual use" products including pure aluminum ingots, aluminum oxide, ammonium paratungstate and tungsten trioxide.

Tungsten trioxide can be used in making more aerodynamically stable missiles, while aluminum oxide is used to resist corrosion in gas centrifuges during uranium enrichment, according to Asan. It said those could qualify as "potential military and nuclear dual use products" under U.S. Department of Commerce restrictions.

Hongxiang is one of the biggest traders with North Korea and carried out imports and exports worth a total of $532 million in 2011-15, said the report.

Companies affiliated with it also helped to maintain North Korea's cyber infrastructure and traded with entities in Myanmar that also are subject to international sanctions, Asan said.

There was no indication why the large scale of Hongxiang's trade failed to attract official attention earlier.

___

AP researchers Yu Bing and Liu Zheng contributed.
Airstrike hits medics in Syria as UN moves to resume aid

BEIRUT (AP)  An airstrike in northern Syria killed four medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, a relief group said Wednesday, as the U.N. announced it would resume aid deliveries suspended after an attack on a convoy two days ago that killed 20 people.

The escalation of violence against humanitarian workers has all but destroyed a cease-fire that took effect on September 12, and has stoked tensions between the truce's architects, the U.S. and Russia, which have traded blame for running it into the ground.

The U.N said convoys to priority areas would be resumed, with deliveries planned as early as Thursday. "Our obligation to civilians on all sides is to go where and when we can with relief," said Jan Egeland, a senior U.N. humanitarian official focused on Syria. "We hope to resume convoys tomorrow and Friday, but still work on security guarantees.

In this photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, men stand amid rubble after airstrikes in al-Mashhad neighborhood in the rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo, Syria, Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in a series of bombings in several parts of the besieged city Aleppo on Wednesday. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP)

But air raids continued in other parts of Syria, with activists reporting at least 23 civilians killed in the besieged parts of Aleppo city and the nearby rebel-held Idlib province.

The attack that killed the medics took place shortly after they arrived at the scene of an airstrike in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman on Tuesday. As the medics deployed, planes circled around and struck the area again, Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said. Al-Moufti initially said that five medics were killed. The group later said two nurses and two ambulance drivers were killed, while a third nurse remains in critical condition.

Syrian government forces have been accused of carrying out "double tap" attacks throughout the 5-1/2 year war, placing paramedics and rescue workers in peril.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nine militants, some of them belonging to the Fatah al-Sham Front, an al-Qaida-linked group previously known as the Nusra Front, were also killed in the "double tap" attack.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike. Aircraft from Syria, Russia and the U.S.-led coalition are targeting the Fatah al-Sham Front, which along with the Islamic State group was excluded from the cease-fire.

The airstrike on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy Monday night prompted international condemnation over attacks targeting humanitarian facilities and workers. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the convoy strike as a "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack." The convoy was carrying U.N. aid.

The U.S. initially said it believed Russian or Syrian government jets were behind the attack on the aid convoy. But a senior U.S. official said Wednesday that Washington has determined with a very high degree of confidence that the attack was carried out by a Russian piloted aircraft.

Moscow denied that Russian or Syrian aircraft were behind the attack, saying there was a fire in the cargo. Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said a U.S. Predator drone was in the area of the convoy attack when it happened.

In New York on Tuesday, Russian and U.S. diplomats insisted that the cease-fire, which went into effect nine days ago, was not dead, despite soaring violence. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart Sergey Lavrov exchanged blame in a public session on Syria at the U.N. Security Council.

The Syrian military said the truce expired Monday night, shortly before presumed Russian or Syrian government jets launched a sustained aerial attack on Aleppo's opposition-held neighborhoods.

The cease-fire was intended in part to allow humanitarian convoys to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas throughout Syria. The U.N. estimates that some 6 million Syrians live in such areas.

On Wednesday, Syrian opposition activists said suspected government airstrikes in the northern city of Aleppo and the rebel-held Idlib province killed 23 civilians, including at least five children.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, said at least 11 civilians, including three children and three women, were killed Wednesday during air raids on several rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo.

Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in the Aleppo strikes.

In nearby Idlib, the Observatory said 12 civilians, including two children, were killed in at least eight air raids.

Elsewhere in Syria, airstrikes on the opposition-run town of Talbiseh, outside of the central city of Homs, killed two civilians and wounded tens of others, according to the activist-run Talbiseh Media Center.

The town is besieged by government forces. The Observatory said government jets subjected the town to heavy bombardment Wednesday morning.

State TV meanwhile said a Syrian warplane crashed after carrying out a combat mission against Islamic State militants northwest of the capital, Damascus. The pilot was rescued, according to an unnamed military official quoted on state TV.

The IS-affiliated news agency Aamaq said the group downed the plane in the eastern Qalamoun mountains after the aircraft carried out four raids. IS shot down a government aircraft on Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.

___

Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

In this photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, rescue workers work the site of airstrikes in al-Mashhad neighborhood in the rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo, Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in a series of bombings in several parts of the besieged city Aleppo on Wednesday. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP)

In this photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, rescue workers work the site of airstrikes in al-Mashhad neighborhood in the rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo, Syria, Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in a series of bombings in several parts of the besieged city Aleppo on Wednesday. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP)

United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, listens during a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, right, talks with Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin before the start of a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
Outraged Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday grilled the head of pharmaceutical company Mylan about the significant cost increase of its life-saving EpiPens and the profits for a company with sales in excess of $11 billion.

Defending the company's business practices, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that she wishes the company had 'better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration' of the rising prices for some families.

'We never intended this,' Bresch said, but maintained that her company doesn't make much profit from each emergency allergy shot.

The list price of EpiPens has grown to $608 for a two-pack, an increase of more than 500 percent since 2007.

Families who rely on multiple EpiPens to respond when their children have allergic reactions, whether at home or at sporting events, have lashed out at Mylan in growing public outcry.

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch testifies before the House Oversight Committee hearing on EpiPen price increases on Wednesday

House Oversight Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said high executive pay at Mylan 'doesn't add up for a lot of people' as the EpiPen price has increased.

Chaffetz said executives for the company made $300 million over five years while the list price for a pair of the emergency allergy shots rose.

'Parents don't have a choice,' Chaffetz said. 'If your loved one needs this, it better darn well be in your backpack.'

Bresch, who displayed an EpiPen, said the company makes only $50 in profit on each EpiPen. But Chaffetz said he finds that 'a little hard to believe.'

The soft-spoken CEO patiently listened to criticism after criticism from lawmakers of both parties, but found no sympathy in the room. In response to one question, Bresch acknowledged that she made $18 million in salary last year.

'Sounds like you're doing pretty well on this,' said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla.

The list price of EpiPens has grown to $608 for a two-pack, an increase of more than 500 percent since 2007

When asked if she understood what the furor was about, she argued that the complexity of drug pricing is partially to blame.

'I truly believe the story got ahead of the facts,' Bresch said.

EpiPens are used in emergencies to stop anaphylaxis, the potentially fatal allergic reactions to insect bites and stings and foods like nuts and eggs.

People usually keep multiple EpiPens handy at home, school or work, but the syringes, prefilled with the hormone epinephrine, expire after a year.

The company says it has made strides to more widely distribute the drug to schools and others and raised awareness of deadly allergies. That requires investment, Bresch said.

The Mylan executive has some familiarity with Capitol Hill  she is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. But lawmakers so far haven't given any deference to her, and several other committees have called for investigations into the price increase.

Bresch noted that Mylan has said it will begin selling its generic version for $300 for a pair. That will still bring Mylan tens of millions of dollars in revenue while helping retain market share against current and future brand-name and generic competition.

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch points to her chart to help her answer questions while testifying

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch holds up an EpiPen while testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington

Chaffetz said he was skeptical that the company will lose any money on the generic versions.

'This is why we don't believe you,' he said.

The company has also offered coupon cards and has doubled the limit for eligibility for its patient assistance program. But critics have said the coupons, discount cards and patient assistance programs aren't real solutions because many customers won't use them or won't qualify for them.

Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, a physician, told Bresch that she was 'trying to make us feel good' about the generic version and other programs, but that he doesn't feel good about it.

'A mother would cut off her right arm to get that drug. You chose to charge her $600 instead of cutting off her arm,' DesJarlais said. 'Lower the price so they can afford it.'

Last year, more than 3.6 million U.S. prescriptions for two-packs of EpiPens were filled, according to data firm IMS Health. That brought in sales of nearly $1.7 billion for Mylan, though the company says it only receives about $1.1 billion after rebates and fees paid to insurers, distributors and other health care businesses.
Family, neighbors: Tulsa man was changing his life, generous

TULSA, Okla. (AP)  An unarmed black man shot dead in the middle of a street by a white Oklahoma police officer had run-ins with the law dating back to his teenage years and recently served four years in prison.

But those closest to Terence Crutcher described him as a church-going father who was starting to turn his life around. After marking his 40th birthday with his twin sister last month, Crutcher sent her a text that read, "I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna make you all proud."

Crutcher was due to start a music appreciation class at a local community college Friday, the day Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby fatally shot him outside his abandoned SUV.

This undated photo provided by the Parks & Crump, LLC shows Terence Crutcher, right, with his twin sister Tiffany. Crutcher, an unarmed black man was killed by a white Oklahoma officer Friday, Sept. 16, 2016, who was responding to a stalled vehicle. (Courtesy of Crutcher Family/Parks & Crump, LLC via AP)

The shooting was captured by a police helicopter and a cruiser dashcam, though it's not clear from the footage what led Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers gave Crutcher. An attorney for Crutcher's family said Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot. Shelby was put on paid administrative leave.

Crutcher had been arrested in the past. In 1995 in nearby Osage County, officers said they saw him fire a weapon out a vehicle window. Records show Crutcher was ordered to exit the vehicle for a pat-down search and began making a movement to his right ankle before an officer managed to get control of him. A .25-caliber pistol was found in his right sock, according to an affidavit.

Crutcher received suspended sentences after entering a no-contest plea to charges of carrying a weapon and resisting an officer, court records show.

Oklahoma prison officials confirmed Crutcher also served four years in prison from 2007 to 2011 on a Tulsa County drug-trafficking conviction.

Court records show officers used force against Crutcher on at least four separate occasions, including a 2012 arrest on public intoxication and obstruction complaints. In that case, an officer used a stun gun on Crutcher twice while he was face down on the ground because the officer said Crutcher didn't comply with at least three orders to show his hands, a police affidavit states. Crutcher's father showed up while he was being arrested and told the officers that his son had "an ongoing problem" with the drug PCP, the affidavit states.

"Nobody claimed that he was a perfect individual. Who is perfect? But that night he was not a criminal," said Crutcher family attorney Melvin Hall regarding Crutcher's criminal record. "He did not have any warrants. He had not done anything wrong. He had a malfunctioning vehicle, and he should have been treated accordingly."

Neighbors described Crutcher as friendly and generous. They said he lived with four young children, cooked barbecue meals that he'd share with others and often belted out gospel songs in his driveway.

The Rev. Willie Lauderdale, whose church is near Crutcher's home, said Crutcher wasn't a member but would come sing some Sundays.

Camellia Bryant said her children and Crutcher's would have sleepovers. She said he was known throughout the neighborhood.

Crutcher would drink alcohol sometimes "but he always kept it at home" and didn't drive, Melrita Gilliam said.

Lauderdale said: "I never seen him raging or nothing out there."

Two 911 calls before the shooting described an SUV abandoned in the middle of the road. One caller said the vehicle's driver was acting strangely, adding, "I think he's smoking something."

Sgt. Dave Walker confirmed Tuesday that investigators found a vial of PCP in Crutcher's SUV. A toxicology report could take several weeks.

Attorneys for Crutcher's family said the family didn't know whether drugs were found in the SUV, but that even if they were, it wouldn't justify the shooting.

PCP or phencyclidine can cause slurred speech, loss of coordination and a sense of strength or invulnerability, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. At high doses, it can cause hallucinations and paranoia.

"To try and come now with some bogus justification, to say that he had PCP  well, let's look at the video," said civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton, speaking alongside Crutcher's family Wednesday in New York.

"We saw his hands up. We didn't see what was in the car, and it has nothing to do with the actions taken because the officers couldn't see what was in the car," Sharpton said. "His hands were up as his father has instructed young black men in Tulsa to do."

The police video shows Crutcher walking with his hands in the air toward his SUV that was in the middle of the road. A female officer is following him. As Crutcher approaches the driver's side, more officers walk up and Crutcher appears to lower his hands and place them on the vehicle.

The officers surround him and suddenly he drops to the ground. Someone on the police radio says, "I think he may have just been tasered." Then almost immediately, a woman's voice yells on the police radio: "Shots fired!" Crutcher is left lying in the street.

Police Chief Chuck Jordan has said Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his SUV.

Shelby's attorney, Scott Wood, told the Tulsa World that Crutcher wasn't following commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he had a weapon.

"He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot," Wood said.

Attorneys for Crutcher's family dispute that, pointing to an enlarged photo from police footage that appears to show Crutcher's window was rolled up.

Local and federal investigators are trying to determine whether Shelby should face charges and whether Crutcher's civil rights were violated.

___

This story has been corrected to show that the quote about not seeing Crutcher 'raging' was from Lauderdale, not Gilliam.

___

Associated Press writer Karen Matthews in New York contributed to this report.

This undated photo provided by the Parks & Crump, LLC shows Terence Crutcher, left, with his father, Joey Crutcher. Crutcher, an unarmed black man was killed by a white Oklahoma officer Friday, Sept. 16, 2016, who was responding to a stalled vehicle. (Courtesy of Crutcher Family/Parks & Crump, LLC via AP)

Attorney Benjamin Crump, center, one of the attorneys for Crutcher's family, demonstrates that Terence Crutcher's hands were up as he speaks during a news conference about the shooting death of Crutcher, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Tulsa, Okla. Crutcher, was shot by a Tulsa Police officer on Friday night. Also pictured are attorneys David Riggs, left, Damario Solomon-Simmons and Melvin C. Hall. (Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP)

Attorney Benjamin Crump, center, one of the attorneys for Crutcher's family, speaks about Terence Crutcher during a news conference about the shooting death of Crutcher Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Tulsa, Okla. Crutcher, was shot by a Tulsa Police officer on Friday night. Also pictured are attorneys David Riggs, left, Damario Solomon-Simmons and Melvin C. Hall. (Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP)

Marq Lewis, right, of We The People Oklahoma, stresses that the "protest for justice" over Friday's shooting death of Terence Crutcher, sponsored by We the People Oklahoma, will remain peaceful, in Tulsa, Okla., Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

In this photo made from a Sept. 16, 2016 police video, Terence Crutcher, left, lowers his right arm as he is pursued by police officers moments before he was shot and killed by one of the officers in Tulsa, Okla. When it comes to charging an officer, legal experts say, the most important determination isn't whether the officer was actually in danger in hindsight. It's whether the officer reasonably believed in his or her own mind that they or fellow officers were in danger at the split second they choose to shoot. There's no clear, standard formula investigators can rely on to answer the question of whether an officer's belief that he or she's in peril is reasonable, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago said. (Tulsa Police Department via AP)

People hold signs at a "protest for justice" over Friday's shooting death of Terence Crutcher, sponsored by We the People Oklahoma, in Tulsa, Okla., Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
Hillary Clinton spent $645,000 more a day than her opponent Donald Trump last month, but even with her $50 million campaign outlay, she has not been able to pull away from him in the race for the White House.

Clinton's campaign had its most expensive month to date in August, eclipsing its previous monthly high by more than $12 million.

And combined, Clinton and the national Democratic Party paid out $78 million in August, while Trump and the Republican National Committee spent about $47 million.

While both candidates are raising huge sums from donors, their lopsided spending lays bare the difference in the two major party presidential campaigns. Clinton is running a conventional operation featuring multi million-dollar ad buys and expansive voter outreach.

Trump has kept spending down by enjoying seemingly limitless free media coverage and outsourcing the guts of his voter contact duties to the Republican Party.

I'm Hillary Clinton and I approve spending a fortune: Her campaign burned through $50 million in August, with more than 35,000 ad slots

Boasting about low-spending: Trump has made a point of highlighting how Clinton is now getting a polls boost from her ad spend

Free publicity: Trump has benefited from his ability to seize the media agenda and get airtime which Clinton is paying for through provocative interventions such as this

The spending disparity has also become a favored Trump boast.

'Our expenditures on advertising, our expenditures on people, our expenditures on everything are a tiny fraction. And yet we're minimum tied,' Trump said Tuesday at a rally in Kenansville, North Carolina. 'If you can spend less and be winning, that's a positive thing, right?'

Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Trump has been 'derelict' in building a political operation that would help not only himself but down-ballot Republicans.

Four years ago, President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney each raised and spent about $1 billion, a formidable number that Clinton's national finance director has also set as a benchmark.

Much of Clinton's spending has been eaten up by advertising, which is costing her about $10 million per week. Through August, she blanketed 11 states with 35,714 broadcast television commercials to Trump's 7,457 in five states, according to Kantar Media's political ad data.

Clinton also has built a robust campaign team of 800 employees who cost a total of about $5 million last month. Even after an August hiring spree, Trump has a far smaller shop of about 130 employees and more than 100 consultants.

Among those consultants: Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. He parted ways with Trump in mid-June  and was immediately hired as a CNN contributor  but his Green Monster firm received a $20,000 payment for 'strategy consulting' Aug. 11, the same amount it has regularly been paid for months.

The campaign says it will continue paying Lewandowski's firm severance through the end of the year to 'honor its contract' with him.

The Trump campaign's biggest expense for the month was more than $11 million to Giles-Parscale for digital consulting and online advertising. Like Trump, the Texas firm is new to politics.

Still getting paid: Controversial ex-Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski's consulting firm received $20,000 in August. He is now a CNN commentator

Example of big money: A PAC which backs Clinton produced a celebrity-packed 'get out the vote' video on Wednesday

The Clinton campaign's August fundraising report shows increases in legal and polling expenses, which appear to reflect those firms' billing cycles. The campaign spent about $450,000 on legal bills and almost $1.3 million on polling.

The presidential spending is even more lopsided after factoring in the main super PACs backing each candidate.

While the campaigns must adhere to a $2,700-per-person, per-election donation limit, super political action committees can accept unlimited amounts of money.

Deep-pocketed Priorities USA spent $20.6 million last month, almost exclusively on Trump-bashing and Clinton-boosting TV, radio and digital.

The group also replenished its war chest with a healthy $23.4 million haul.

Trump's outside boosters have so far raised and spent much less money; for example, one group, Great America PAC, spent just $2.6 million in August. Some late help may be on the way: On Tuesday, a group called Future 45 said it has a $5 million commitment from billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and $1 million from members of the Ricketts family to attack Clinton.

Clinton's aides insist their investments will pay off on Election Day.

'Battleground states carry that name for a reason: They're going to be close, from now until Election Day,' campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in a memo to supporters this week.

'But we are going to win them because we've spent the past year building a superior ground game to communicate our message and turn our people out to vote.'

Yet if August finance reports are a guide, her heavy spending is only one piece of the puzzle.

The polls have tightened significantly since Clinton benefited from a post-convention bump in early August.
Time gap in offering aid after police shooting stirs concern

ATLANTA (AP)  Philando Castile. Eric Garner. And now Terence Crutcher. Each was a black man killed in a confrontation with an officer, with the aftermath captured on video. And each time, the video leaves the impression of a wounded man left to die alone, with no sense of urgency to try to save him.

Law enforcement experts say it's not a sign of callousness, but of trying to ensure the officers and others are safe before approaching someone who could be armed or remain a threat even after they've been shot.

Civil rights activists call it the ultimate indignity and one more example of indifference and quick-to-shoot attitudes of police toward minorities.

FILE - In this July 6, 2016 file photo, Investigators search a car at the scene of a police involved shooting in Falcon Heights, Minn. A Minnesota officer fatally shot a man in the car with a woman and a child, an official said. Philando Castile was shot during a vehicle stop in an incident recorded by his girlfriend from the drivers seat. Recent shootings by police raise a fundamental question: In the moments after officers shoot someone, how soon can medical aid be given? (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP, File)

"When the police take actions that result in injury to you and then leave you on the ground to die, well, I think that's a constitutional violation," said Randolph M. McLaughlin, a civil rights attorney and professor at Pace Law School in New York City.

In the latest case, Crutcher, 40, was killed after his vehicle stalled in the middle of a street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A helicopter-mounted police camera recorded Crutcher walking toward his SUV with his hands up. The lawyer representing the officer who shot Crutcher says she fired when one of his hands reached through the SUV's window. Attorneys for Crutcher's family dispute that, presenting at a press conference an enlarged photo from police footage that appeared to show that Crutcher's window was rolled up.

As he lies on the ground, the officers stand nearby but no one provides aid until about a minute or two later.

That gap has stirred questions about why he was left in the street, motionless, unarmed and seemingly no threat.

Law enforcement experts say that in those situations, police are furiously trying to figure out whether there are other weapons nearby, whether other people might be in the vehicle and how much of a threat the person is. Is it safe for police or EMTs to approach? All of that must be determined, no matter how badly injured the wounded person might appear.

In countless cases, they say, people have been shot and yet still posed a threat. In one well-known 2013 case, a man in Oregon was pulled over by a state trooper; he emerged from the vehicle wearing military camouflage, fired multiple shots and then got back into his car. Although shot in the chest, he drove a mile away before collapsing from his injuries.

More recently, the suspect in multiple stabbings at a Minnesota mall was shot three times by an off-duty officer before he succumbed to the injuries  within just an arm's length of the officer.

Unlike the movies, which often show people falling instantly to the ground, many who are shot can still function and pose a threat.

"They will fight through the pain," said Lance LoRusso, a lawyer and former police officer in Georgia who represents officers involved in the use of deadly force. "They had nothing in their bloodstream but determination."

Beyond the police shootings in recent years, what disturbs civil rights activists are how people shot by officers are treated afterward.

Garner, a 43-year-old man who was accused of selling cigarettes on the street in Staten Island, died after an officer put him in a chokehold. Video of the incident shows no medical assistance was provided for at least six minutes. Castile was shot during a vehicle stop in an incident recorded by his girlfriend, who was sitting next to him. The video shows him sitting in the car, his shirt bloodied, with an officer pointing a gun at him but no one coming to his aid.

McLaughlin, the attorney, said it's especially jarring in recent days to see Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect in the bombings in New York and New Jersey, being given aid and put in an ambulance after a gun battle with police. He calls it a double standard that exposes inequality.

"If that works for an alleged terrorist  why doesn't that same principle apply when police stop any individual in the street?" he asked.

McLaughlin urges citizens to not just film encounters with police but to also call 911 to ensure medical aid is provided more quickly "because the police may not do it, out of shock out of fear, whatever."

John Bostain, a former police officer in Virginia, now trains law enforcement as co-owner of Command Presence Training Associates. He said it's wrong to think officers want to shoot someone and then purposely avoid providing medical help.

In the immediate aftermath of a shooting, he said, officers are working furiously to assess and secure the scene to make sure it's safe for the officers, any first responders as well as the public. Does the person have weapons or ready access to weapons? Is anyone else in the car who could pose a threat? It might seem to take a long time for the public viewing a video afterward, but not for the officers who are sorting through these and other questions in rapid fire, he contends.

"I don't see this as an overt example of cops just not giving a crap and letting this guy lay there and die," Bostain said. "I think we have to understand they're human beings and their brains are processing things a thousand miles an hour. Their perception of time versus our perception of watching it on a video are totally different."

"Just because we shot somebody doesn't mean we don't want them to survive," he said. "We really don't want to hurt people. ... That's just not who we are."

FILE - In this photo made from a Sept. 16, 2016 police video, Terence Crutcher, left, with his arms up is pursued by police officers as he walks next to his stalled SUV moments before he was shot and killed by one of the officers in Tulsa, Okla. Recent shootings by police raise a fundamental question: In the moments after officers shoot someone, how soon can medical aid be given? (Tulsa Police Department via AP, File)

FILE - This undated photo provided by the Parks & Crump, LLC shows Terence Crutcher, right, with his twin sister Tiffany. Crutcher, an unarmed black man was killed by a white Oklahoma officer Friday, Sept. 16, 2016, who was responding to a stalled vehicle. (Courtesy of Crutcher Family/Parks & Crump, LLC via AP, File)

FILE - In this July 12, 2016 file photo, TV Judge Glenda Hatchett, right, listens as Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, takes questions during a news conference on the State Capitol grounds in St. Paul, Minn. Hatchett is representing the Castile family in the shooting death by police of Philando Castile last week in Falcon Heights, Minn. after a traffic stop by St. Anthony police. A photo button of Philando is shown on Valerie Castile's dress. Recent shootings by police raise a fundamental question: In the moments after officers shoot someone, how soon can medical aid be given? (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)

FILE - In this July 23, 2014, file photo, Eric Garner's body lies in a casket during his funeral at Bethel Baptist Church in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Garner, a 43-year-old man who was selling cigarettes on the street in Staten Island, died after an officer put him in a chokehold. Video of the incident shows no medical assistance was provided for at least six minutes. (Julia Xanthos/New York Daily News, Pool, via AP, File)

FILE - In this July 14, 2015 file photo, Eric Garner's daughter Emerald Snipes, left, is joined by her brother Eric Garner, center, and mother Esaw Snipes, as she speaks during a news conference, in New York. Garner, a 43-year-old man who was selling cigarettes on the street in Staten Island, died after an officer put him in a chokehold. Video of the incident shows no medical assistance was provided for at least six minutes. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
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by Staff reporter

Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko is at the Gwayi Shangani Dam to meet South Africans investors who have expressed interest in completing the project.The Vice President's visit is a follow-up to the previous one which was a fact-finding mission to assess the situation at the site.It was at this time that he began looking for investors with the objective of turning Matabeleland North into a green belt, as well as promote the growth of the industry in Bulawayo.Matabeleland North Minister of State Ambassador Cain Mathema says the project is crucial to promote livelihoods of the people in Matabeleland region and will involve ZINWA and other relevant government departments.Representatives of South African investors say they are willing to work on the project and see to it that it is completed for the benefit of country.The Gwayi Shangani Dam project has been on the table since 1912, and companies from Malaysia and China who had been given the contract have failed to complete the project.
Outside groups spending big to help Trump, Clinton

WASHINGTON (AP)  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton say they raised record amounts of money in August for their presidential bids  a total of $233 million just in one month. And wealthy donors are pouring millions of dollars more into outside groups involved in the race for the White House and Senate contests.

Many of those groups, along with the presidential campaigns, are due to report the details of their late summertime fundraising and expenses to federal regulators on Tuesday.

Here are some takeaways from the reports:

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TRUMP MANAGER SUPER PAC PAYMENT

A firm headed by Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, received almost $250,000 from a super PAC in late August, the same month the company also was paid $128,000 by the Trump campaign, new documents show. The payment from Make America Number 1 to Conway's The Polling Company was made Aug. 23, more than a month after Conway joined Trump's team and almost a week after Trump named her his campaign manager.

That super PAC is funded almost exclusively by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, who had tapped her to lead the super PAC during the primary, when the group backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Meanwhile, Trump's campaign continued paying its former manager, Corey Lewandowski. He and the campaign parted ways June 20, yet his Green Monster Consulting earned another $20,000 for "strategy consulting" on Aug. 11, the same amount it had regularly been paid.

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CLINTON SPENDING SPREE

Clinton is spending at a faster clip than Trump. The difference meant his campaign started this month with nearly a $10 million cash advantage over hers.

Clinton's campaign spent almost $50 million last month, nearly $12 million more than in July, including $33 million that went into advertising. She has blanketed the airwaves with thousands of commercials promoting her candidacy and attacking Trump as unfit for the presidency. And Clinton spent about $5 million on her roughly 800-person payroll.

The campaign raised more than $60 million in August; Clinton also helped raise another $81 million last month for the Democratic National Committee and state parties working to elect her. Trump's campaign raised about $42 million and spent almost $30 million in August. Like Clinton, Trump also raised tens of millions of dollars more for the party.

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MORE BIG CHECKS FOR CLINTON GROUP

Apart from the campaign, which faces $2,700-per-person, per-election donation limits, Clinton can count on several super political action committees to promote her candidacy. Donors can give those groups as much as they'd like.

The biggest one, Priorities USA, continued to haul in money from wealthy Democratic donors in August. The group raised $23 million last month. And it started this month with $41.5 million in the bank.

Nearly half of that came from a handful of big donors. Slim-Fast billionaire Daniel Abraham gave $3 million as did Chicago media billionaire Fred Eychaner. Combined, the two men have given the super PAC $16 million this election cycle.

Democratic super donors  both billionaire financiers  George Soros and Donald Sussman gave $2.5 million and $2 million, respectively, and Emerson Collective LLC, a social activism organization headed by Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, contributed $2 million.

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DEMOCRATIC, REPUBLICAN FUNDRAISING

The Democratic Party raised $29.4 million last month compared to $23.4 million brought in by the Republican National Committee. Both presidential nominees have been working to raise money for their respective parties  which in turn devote resources to help their White House bids.

Despite the similar August fundraising totals, the Democrats burned through far more cash, leaving the party with $11.5 million available as of Sept. 1, compared to the GOP's nearly $41 million.

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SENATE CASH

Billionaires are writing big checks to outside groups focused on the Senate, the August documents show.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC helmed by a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, raised more than $28 million in August after months of slow fundraising.

More than two-thirds of that haul came from billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, marking their first major investments in the 2016 races. 39.3

The Democratic counterpart to the group, the Senate Majority PAC, raised $11.6 million last month. Its top August donor was Eychaner, who gave $3 million. Close allies of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid direct the super PAC.

Despite having been trounced in August fundraising, overall, the Democratic group has nearly kept pace with the Republican group, the reports show.

But brace for a flood of new Republican-boosting ads: The Senate Leadership Fund began this month with $40.2 million in the bank. The Senate Majority PAC had a little more than $12 million in available cash as of Sept. 1.

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NRA FOR TRUMP

One of the most active outside groups backing Trump, the Republican nominee, is the political arm of the deep-pocketed National Rifle Association, which began September with about $10 million in the bank.

"The NRA  great people  they endorsed me," Trump said at a rally Tuesday in North Carolina.

The NRA Political Victory Fund reported Tuesday that it raised $1.4 million in August, mostly from small donations, while it spent more than $3.9 million.

The majority of the group's spending some $3 million was on television advertising opposing Clinton, the Democratic nominee, the reports show. According to the Kantar Media's political ad tracker, the group's ads have been concentrated in the battleground states of Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Iowa. The new reports also show the NRA set up pro-Trump booths at gun shows across the country.

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FACEBOOK MONEY FOR CLINTON

Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of the social media site Facebook explained in an essay this month that he would spend $20 million to help elect Clinton and other Democrats. A chunk of that money  $5 million  showed up in the League of Conservation Voters' bank account in August. That made up the majority of its almost $6 million in August fundraising, reports filed Tuesday show.

Nearly all of LCV's expenses last month were related to television ads opposing Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. The group is also canvassing and mailing out pledge cards and other materials backing Clinton, filings show.

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Keep track on how much Clinton and Trump are spending on television advertising, and where they're spending it, via AP's interactive ad tracker. http://elections.ap.org/content/ad-spending

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President Barack Obama conducted what is expected to be his final bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon as he began to wind down his presidency and make way for his successor.

The U.S. president and the Israeli PM who haven't always seen eye to eye on regional issues are chatted this afternoon at the Lotte New York Palace hotel ahead of Obama's return to Washington.

At the top of the meeting, Obama said in brief remarks that a $38 million U.S. military assistance deal for Israel will ensure that the country's military has the full capabilities it needs during a time of great uncertainty.

'The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable,' he said.

Obama also took Netanyahu up an offer to golf in Israel once he's out of office.

'We'll set up a tee time,' he quipped.

President Barack Obama is conducting what is expected to be his final bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon as he begins to wind down his presidency and make way for his successor

At the top of the meeting, Obama said in brief remarks that a $38 million U.S. military assistance deal for Israel will ensure that the country's military has the full capabilities it needs during a time of great uncertainty

Relations between the leaders of the allied nations have been chilly since Obama inked a deal with Iran to halt its nuclear program that included the lifting of some sanctions on the country that funds terrorist activity in Israel.

The United States has returned $1.7 billion in frozen assets to Iran since the completion of the agreement with the admission that some of that money will assuredly make its way to Hezbollah.

The five-nation terror pact also lifted $100 billion in economic restrictions on the country related to its pursuit of nuclear power. Sanctions pertaining to Iran's terror activity were left in place wholly.

Netanyahu made an aggressive case for Western countries and Russia not to engage with Iran, speaking to legislators in Washington during a joint session of Congress. The White House did not invite him to 1600 Pennsylvania during the visit as Israel was just weeks away from a national election, and it pushed ahead with nuclear talks.

Publicly both leaders have remained cordial to each other and have affirmed the United States' commitment to Israel's security at every turn.

Teasing Obama this afternoon Netanyahu told his American counterpart, 'As you conclude your presidency, I know you're going to be busy with many, many things, much more than improving what I hear is a terrific golf game.'

Continuing, he said, 'Your voice, your influential voice will be heard for many decades. And I know youll continue to support Israels right to defend itself and its right to thrive as a Jewish state. So I want you to know, Barack, that youll always be a welcome guest in Israel.

'And, by the way, I don't play golf, but right next to my home in Caesarea, in Israel, is a terrific golf course.'

A White House official said Tuesday they would discuss that 'security cooperation' - but they would also talk about'concerns' about Israel's conduct toward the Palestinians.

Obama tread lightly on Tuesday as he addressed the conflict between the opposing nations during remarks before United Nations.

'Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land,'he stated.

The statement was a notable inclusion in the speech. Obama avoided the topic entirely in remarks to the General Assembly in 2015.

His final address to fellow global leaders, which Netanyahu was not present for, Obama stressed the importance of the institution to the building of solidarity between nations and his 'equal treatment for all communities -- whether its a religious minority in Myanmar, or an ethnic minority in Burundi, or a racial minority right here in the United States.

'We all have to do better as leaders in tamping down, rather than encouraging, a notion of identity that leads us to diminish others,' he said.

Publicly both leaders have remained cordial to each other and have affirmed the United States' commitment to Israel's security at every turn even as they disagreed over Iran

A senior U.S. official said after the meeting there was 'a discussion about Israeli Palestinian relations and some of the challenges posed in particular by the violence that is ongoing, the recent spike in violence.'

Settlement activity is entering its 50th year, and Obama raised 'profound U.S. concerns about the corrosive effect that that is having on the prospects of two states,' the official said.

Netanyahu pushed back on that assessment, according to the U.S. government.

Another U.S. official added, 'They've never papered over their differences.'

The president's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, indicated Tuesday that Obama would not shy away from the issue in his meeting Wednesday with the Israeli leader.

'We've been concerned about continued settlement activity, the potential viability of a Palestinian state in the face of that settlement activity. We've raised those directly with the Israeli government. I'm sure President Obama will do so tomorrow as well.'

They also discussed the aide package to Israel that Rhodes described as a 'very substantial commitment' - $38 billion over 10 years - that will ensure 'Israels qualitative military edge, and certain capabilities that we have worked through with them in determining how they deal with threats in their region.'

It's evidence of a concrete achievement to showcase as evidence that America and its closest Mideast ally are sticking together. The 10-year military assistance deal worth $38 billion, the largest tranche of military aid the U.S. has ever given another country.

The White House is hoping the unprecedented aid will curb the perception among Israel's supporters that Obama has been insufficiently supportive of Israel's security.

Yet Iran's chief of staff of the armed forces said Wednesday the U.S.-Israeli aid deal only makes Iran more determined to strengthen its military.

President Barack Obama walks to the podium to speak during the Leaders Summit on Refugees during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters today. He's heading back to Washington later this afternoon

Netanyahu thanked Obama for the military aid in his remarks at the beginning of the meeting.

'It greatly enhances Israels security. It fortifies the principle that youve enunciated many times that Israel should be able to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.'

Yet that point of agreement, reached after arduous negotiations, only partially masks the underlying tensions between the two governments  most notably over Israel's posture toward the Palestinians and continued expansion of settlements in occupied territories.

Despite Obama's protestations, since he took office Israel has pushed a wave of construction that matched or even exceeded the pace of building when George W. Bush was president, according to Israeli government data obtained by The Associated Press.

Previous efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace have left a bad taste for the Obama administration, most notably a frenetic attempt by Secretary of State John Kerry that collapsed in 2014. Reluctant to invest more diplomatic resources at a time when he says both sides lack the needed political will, Obama has long since conceded that his administration won't be the one to forge a resolution to the Mideast conflict.

Yet that has not stopped the president from publicly flirting with the possibility that, in his final months in office, he'll seek to influence the future debate by laying out what he sees as the contours of any viable deal.

That could come in the form of a major speech or a U.S.-backed U.N. Security Council resolution  both moves that would increase pressure on Israel and that Netanyahu would be expected to oppose.

'I wouldn't rule out the president taking any particular step,' Rhodes said.

Netanyahu heads to New York at a time of renewed violence, including a series of stabbings by Palestinian assailants in Israel and other incidents that have raised concerns about a return to more frequent bloodshed.

Hours before his meeting with Obama, Turkish officials shot and slightly wounded an attacker armed with a knife who tried to enter the Israeli Embassy in Turkey, Turkish officials said.

Netanyahu will likely try to portray his country as a victim in a global war against Islamic extremism. Israel has blamed accused Palestinian leaders of inciting violence  a claim the Palestinians reject.
Years after casino went bust, Gary still skeptical of Trump

GARY, Ind. (AP)  Donald Trump swooped into Gary, Indiana, on his private jet and pledged to make the down-on-its-luck city great again.

It was 1993, and the New York mogul was wooing officials in the mostly black city to support his bid to dock a showboat casino along a Lake Michigan shoreline littered with shuttered factories. Trump and his representatives later told state gaming officials he would leverage his "incomparable experience" to build a floating Shangri-La, with enough slot machines and blackjack tables to fill city coffers and local charities with tens of millions each year, while creating scores of well-paid jobs for minority residents.

"We are looking to make this a real peach here, a real success," Trump said of the project.

FILE - In this June 3, 1996, file photo, the Trump Casino sits on the dock in Buffington Harbor in Gary, Ind. Donald Trumps appeal to black voters sounds familiar in Gary, and not in a good way. In 1993, Trump swooped into Gary on his private jet and pledged to make the down-on-its-luck city great again with a riverboat casino along a Lake Michigan shoreline littered with shuttered factories. Little more than a decade later Trumps company declared bankruptcy, leaving behind lawsuits and hard feelings in the majority-black city. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

Today, as the Republican presidential nominee pursues black voters with vows to fix inner-city troubles, many Gary residents say his pitch to solve the problems of crime and poverty is disturbingly familiar. Like others who have done business with Trump, they say their experience offers a cautionary tale.

Little more than a decade after investing in Gary, Trump's casino company declared bankruptcy and cashed out his stake in the boat  leaving behind lawsuits and hard feelings in a city where more than one-third of residents live in poverty. Trump's lawyers later argued in court that his pledges to the city were never legally binding. Trump told The Associated Press that his venture was good for Gary.

Local civic leaders disagree.

"What you had was a slick business dealer coming in," said Roy Pratt, a Democratic former Gary city councilman. "He got as much as he could and then he pulled up and left."

Gary is a victim of the economic shifts Trump has bemoaned on the campaign trail. Just 30 miles southeast of Chicago, Gary's fortunes fell with the steel industry. The remaining 77,000 residents abide persistent crime and chronic unemployment.

In a presentation to the Indiana Gaming Commission in 1994, Trump's team touted his "superior marketing and advertising abilities" to pitch a 340-foot long vessel called Trump Princess with more than 1,500 slot machines.

To sweeten the pot, Trump's representatives said they would try to ensure that at least two-thirds of the casino's staff would be minority residents from the surrounding area, according to a transcript.

He offered to fund a new charitable foundation endowed with casino stock worth $11.5 million. His official proposal also listed eight "local minority participants" in the project, a diverse group of Indiana businessmen.

The state gaming commission eventually awarded Trump a casino license. A May 1996 agreement signed by the Trump organization said the developer would "endeavor" to fill 70 percent of its 1,200 full-time jobs with minorities. Trump was to invest $153 million.

The eight business partners in Trump's license application had been offered a chance to buy shares worth more than $1 million, but most didn't have the money.

So both sides negotiated a deal  for no cash up front  offering the group 7.5 percent of the stock for the riverboat and another 7.5 percent into a trust for charity.

However, the men said Trump reneged once the license was approved. None got stock in the casino, and the money for charity was less than promised.

All eight sued for breach of contract, alleging they were dumped after Trump's license was approved.

As construction proceeded in spring 1996, Trump's company began hiring in advance of the casino's grand opening in June. But his commitments to hire minorities and local businesses never came to fruition, according to local leaders.

"It simply did not happen," said Richard Hatcher, a Democrat who was Gary's first African-American mayor.

Hatcher helped bring a 1996 lawsuit alleging Trump's organization had only hired about 20 percent minorities. Though more than half of Trump's casino staff was eventually made up of racial minorities, the lawsuit said blacks were overwhelmingly relegated to minimum wage jobs, such as valets and janitors.

Trump's lawyers argued the minority hiring goals were not legally binding and succeeded in getting the lawsuit dismissed.

The other lawsuit, filed in federal court by the eight jilted business partners, continued. Six of the men dropped out of the case after Trump's company agreed to pay them a combined $2.2 million, but two refused to settle.

The jury awarded them $1.3 million. But Trump appealed, and in 2001 a federal appeals panel overturned the jury's award, saying their agreements with Trump's company had not been legally binding.

In 2004, Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts Inc., the parent company of the Gary casino, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Trump sought to restructure $1.8 billion in debt, much of it tied to hotels and casinos in New Jersey and New York.

Trump sold his company's stake in the Gary casino the following year for $253 million. According to financial disclosures, the proceeds from the sale were used to shore up the financial condition of Trump's other casino and resort properties. Through his spokeswoman, Trump told the AP he stood by his record.

"It worked out very well and was very good for Gary, Indiana," Trump said.

The riverboat is still docked in Gary's industrial harbor. On a recent workday, a sparse jeans-and-sweat-pants crowd lined up for the serve-yourself soda and coffee between games.

Asked about Trump's recent "What do you have to lose?" pitch to black voters, former Indiana gaming commissioner David Ross said it would be a bad bet.

"What you have to know is that Trump is for Trump and he's not for any black voters or anybody," Ross said. "What he's looking for is to make some money for Trump."

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Chart the path Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton must take on the Road to 270 to reach the White House with AP's Electoral College interactive map: http://elections.ap.org/content/road-270-0

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Biesecker reported from Washington.

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Follow Associated Press reporter Sophia Tareen at http://twitter.com/sophiatareen and Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck
Donald Trump Jr. becomes campaign flashpoint

NEW YORK (AP)  Donald Trump is trying to run a more disciplined campaign, going easy (for him) on slip-ups and inflammatory tweets lately. His eldest son is another story.

In recent tweets, Donald Trump Jr. likened Syrian refugees to a poisoned bowl of Skittles candy, spread an incendiary story suggesting Muslim men are preying on Western women and used a cartoon character appropriated by white supremacists. He's one of his father's most prominent advisers.

The three adult Trump children, who are running their father's company in his absence, have been valuable assets in the campaign. Daughter Ivanka introduces him at major events like his convention acceptance speech and last week's rollout of a policy on child care. Sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump do frequent interviews and campaign stops and have become popular figures with donors, who often cite Trump's kids as evidence the nominee is a good father and a good person.

FILE - In this July 19, 2016, file photo, Donald Trump, Jr., son of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Donald Trump is running a more disciplined campaign of late, largely avoiding the verbal slip-ups and inflammatory tweets that some have deemed offensive. But in recent weeks, a series of eyebrow-raising sentiments has been emanating from another Trump: the candidates eldest son. Donald Trump Jr. has posted a pair of controversial tweets warning of the dangers of admitting refugees. One post likened refugees to a bowl of Skittles and drew widespread condemnation. And its not the first time that Donald Trump Jr. has used imagery that some believe carries xenophobic or racist connotations. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Donald Trump Jr., though, has been raising eyebrows with some of his own pronouncements recently, such as a pair of tweets within 24 hours warning about refugees allowed in the U.S. In the first, he posted a tweet featuring a bowl of the candy Skittles with a warning: "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?" The tweet went on: "That's our Syrian refugee problem."

The photo, a popular image on the extreme right, quickly drew condemnation. Skittles parent company, Wrigley Americas, offered a terse response from Denise Young, vice president of corporate affairs: "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy." The photo of the bowl of Skittles was taken by a refugee from Turkey now living in Britain, who denounced Trump for using it.

Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, tweeted: "This is disgusting."

Then on Tuesday morning, Trump Jr. linked to a news article posted on the conservative news site Breitbart with the incendiary headline: "Europe's Rape Epidemic: Western Women Will Be Sacrificed at the Altar of Mass Migration." The article suggests that Muslim men are a menace to Western women and are prompting European leaders "to follow the Islamic way entirely; they've decided to place restrictions on the freedoms of their own women."

Trump Jr., 38, did not return a request for comment from The Associated Press but defended his comment to the Deseret News on Wednesday, saying "We've seen what's going on in Europe. We can't be naive to that and pretend that's not happening there."

"If there's one death associated with it because we messed up and we didn't do it right, that's a problem for me," Trump told the Utah newspaper.

A Trump spokesman suggested that "the media's run out of things to attack Mr. Trump on, and so now they scour the social media accounts of his family looking for things to blow out of proportion."

"Here's the reality: This is a family that's passionate about changing America by bringing real positive change to Washington," said Jason Miller, the Trump campaign's senior communications adviser. "They're not political insiders, and their honesty and connection with real people is what's made them so popular with voters also seeking change."

This is not the first time Trump Jr. has used imagery that some believe carries xenophobic or racist connotations.

Last week he posted a doctored image of himself, his father and several other prominent Trump allies next to Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character whose image has been used by white supremacists. He's also retweeted an academic who has argued that anti-Semitism is a "logical" response to Jewish control of the world's banks. And last week he made what resembled a Holocaust-themed joke in a radio interview, suggesting that if Republicans behaved in the same way Democrats are in 2016, the media would be "warming up the gas chamber."

Trump Jr. said later he was referring to capital punishment.

He muddied the political waters again when he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review his father shouldn't release his tax returns because it would "distract" from the celebrity businessman's "main message." The elder Trump has repeatedly said the reason he has not released his returns is because they are being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

To be sure, the Republican nominee himself previously retweeted white supremacists and his new campaign CEO is the head of Breitbart News, a choice that prompted Clinton to suggest that Trump was "helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party."

Trump Jr. and wife Vanessa  who have five children  spent about 90 minutes Monday in New York City with 18 supporters of the pro-Trump super PAC, Rebuilding America. Laurance Gay, the group's director, said Trump Jr. spoke passionately about his time in the campaign with his father and how much he enjoys mingling with working-class men and women.

And Trump Jr., who gave a well-received convention speech, is the only Trump family member to star in a campaign commercial. He appears in an ad showing his father hugging and kissing his young grandchildren.

At a rally Tuesday in North Carolina, Trump supporter Pam Guy, who runs a pharmacy with her husband in Thomasville, brushed off the fuss over the Skittles tweet.

"It just makes us more endeared to them because of what they have to go through when they're just being sincere and honest," she said.

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What political news is the world searching for on Google and talking about on Twitter? Find out via AP's Election Buzz interactive. http://elections.ap.org/buzz

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Associated Press writers Julie Bykowicz in New York and Jill Colvin in High Point, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

FILE - In this July 19, 2016, file photo, Donald Trump Jr., son of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The younger Trump posted a message on Twitter likening Syrian refugees to a bowl of poisoned Skittles, causing a stir and negative tweets on the internet into Tuesday, Sept. 20. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Air Force identifies pilot who died in California U-2 crash

BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP)  The pilot who died after ejecting from a U2 spy plane that crashed in northern California was identified Wednesday as Lt. Col. Ira S. Eadie.

Eadie was assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron at Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento, California. The Air Force did not release his age or hometown.

Another pilot who survived sustained injuries that are not life-threatening and is now recovering in good condition at a local medical facility, base officials said. The surviving pilot was not identified.

In this June 25, 2013, photo released by the U.S. Air Force 9th Reconnaissance Wing public affairs, shows Lt. Col. Ira S. Eadie, who died in a crash of a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane after taking off from Beale Air Force Base in Northern Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Military officials said Wednesday, Sept. 21, that Beale was assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron at Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif. (U.S. Air Force via AP)

Col. Danielle Barnes, a senior officer who oversees base operations, said military personnel recovering the two pilots found that both their parachutes had deployed. She said she could not discuss what caused the plane to crash or Eadie's death. There's no timeline for investigators to conclude their probe.

"They will take as long as they need to execute a thorough and detailed investigation," Barnes said.

The Air Force said the plane was conducting a training mission on a routine flight path before something went wrong and the high-flying aircraft slammed into a mountainous area about 20 miles west of the runway.

Photos from the scene showed sections of the tail and wing splayed on the mountainside, with much of the aircraft charred and disintegrated. The crash sparked a fire on the grassy terrain, which was quickly extinguished.

The U-2 "Dragon Lady" is a surveillance and reconnaissance plane capable of flying above 70,000 feet (21,336 meters), an extremely high altitude that's twice as high as a typical commercial airliner flies. Developed during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet Union, the single-engine aircraft now carries high-resolution cameras and sensors to gather radio signals and other information useful to intelligence agencies and battlefield commanders.

Pilots wear pressurized suits like those used by astronauts to survive in the low-pressure, low-oxygen environment in the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Before the crash, the Air Force said it had 33 U-2s. Most are a single-seat aircraft, but five  including the one that crashed Tuesday were a two-seat version used for training pilots to fly the specialized plane. Built by the defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp, the U-2 fleet is based at Beale, with some planes flying missions from air bases around the world.

There have been a handful of crashes since the U-2 began flying in the 1950s. The Soviet Union shot down a U-2 and captured pilot Frances Gary Powers in 1960. Powers was imprisoned for two years before being released in a prisoner exchange.

The U-2 is slated for retirement in 2019 as the military relies increasingly on unmanned aircraft such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk for intelligence gathering, though senior U.S. lawmakers from California are pressuring the Air Force to delay the retirement.

ADDS CONDITION OF PILOTS - An aircraft assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance squadron at Beale Air Force Base and on a training mission went down on the lower slopes of the Sutter Buttes on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Sutter County, Calif. The U.S. Air Force says one pilot was killed, and one was injured after they ejected from the plane. (Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

Smoke rises from the wreckage of a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane that crashed in the Sutter Butte mountains, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, near Yuba City, Calif. The plane had just taken off on a training mission from nearby Beale Air Force Base. The two pilots ejected before the crash. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

ADDS CONDITION OF PILOTS - An Air Force officer stands guard in front of the burnt U-2 spy plane assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance squadron at Beale Air Force Base, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Sutter County, Calif. The aircraft crashed during a training mission and went down on the lower slopes of the Sutter Buttes. The U.S. Air Force says one pilot killed, and one was injured after they ejected from the plane. (Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

A California Highway Patrol helicopter drops water on a fire caused by the crash of a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane in the Sutter Butte Mountains, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, near Yuba City, Calif. The plane had just taken off on a training mission from nearby Beale Air Force Base. The two pilots ejected before the crash. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Colonel Larry Broadwell, commander of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing and Beale Air Force base, near Marysville, Calif., discusses the crash of a U-2 spy plane Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. One pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from the plane shortly after taking off from Beale, on a training mission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Authorities look over part of the wreckage of a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane that crashed in the Sutter Butte mountains, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, near Yuba City, Calif. The plane had just taken off on a training mission from nearby Beale Air Force Base. The two pilots ejected before the crash. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

ADDS CONDITION OF PILOTS - The wreckage of a U-2 spy plane that crashed after taking off from Beale Air Force Base on a training mission in Northern California, is seen Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. The U.S. Air Force says one pilot was killed, and one was injured after they ejected from the plane. (Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

This June 16, 2015, photo released by DVIDS/U.S. Air Force shows a mobile chase car pursuing a U-2 Dragon Lady as the aircraft prepares to land at Beale Air Force Base, Calif. Mobile chase cars guide the aircraft during takeoffs and landings. One American pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from a U-2 spy plane shortly before it crashed in Northern California on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 the U.S. Air Force said.(Airman 1st Class Ramon A. Adelan/Released U.S. Air Force via AP)

Colonel Larry Broadwell, commander of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing and Beale Air Force base, near Marysville, Calif., pauses while talking to reporters about the crash of a U-2 spy plane Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. One pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from the plane shortly after taking off from Beale, on a training mission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Colonel Larry Broadwell, commander of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing and Beale Air Force base, near Marysville, Calif., discusses the crash of a U-2 spy plane Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. One pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from the plane shortly after taking off from Beale, on a training mission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

A U.S. Air Force Hazmat team inspects the wreckage of a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane that crashed in the Sutter Butte mountains, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, near Yuba City, Calif. One pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from the plane shortly after taking off from Beale Air Force base on a training mission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

A firefighter puts water on the flames of a fire caused when a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane crashed in the Sutter Butte mountains, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, near Yuba City, Calif. One pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from the plane shortly after taking off from Beale Air Force base on a training mission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

A U.S. Air Force Hazmat team inspects the wreckage of a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane that crashed in the Sutter Butte mountains, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, near Yuba City, Calif. One pilot was killed and another injured when they ejected from the plane shortly after taking off from Beale Air Force base on a training mission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Nothing to see here: Southeast Asia flummoxed by haze study

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP)  Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science.

Last year's fires in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997, burning about 261,000 hectares of forests and peatland and sending haze across the region for weeks. Many were deliberately set by companies to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

The study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Harvard and Columbia researchers estimated the amount of health-threatening fine particles, often referred to as PM2.5, released by the fires that burned from July to October and tracked their spread across Southeast Asia using satellite observations.

FILE - In this July 30, 2015, file photo, a fireman talks on his walkie talkie as he and his team battle peatland fire on a field in Pemulutan, South Sumatra, Indonesia. Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science. Others say governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable. (AP Photo, File)

In Indonesia, a spokesman for the country's disaster mitigation agency said the research "could be baseless or they have the wrong information." Indonesia officially counted 24 deaths from the haze including people killed fighting the fires.

Singapore's Ministry of Health said short-term exposure to haze will generally not cause serious health problems. The study was "not reflective of the actual situation," it said, and the overall death rate hadn't changed last year. In Malaysia, Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said officials are still studying the research, which is "computer generated, not based on hard data."

"People have died but to what extent the haze contributed to it, it's hard to say," he said. "If an 80-year-old fellow with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problem and exposure to haze died, what did he die of? This is hell of a difficult question to answer."

The dry season fires are an annual irritant in Indonesia's relations with its neighbors Singapore and Malaysia and the finding of a huge public health burden has the potential to worsen those strains. The 2015 burning season, which was worsened by El Nino's dry conditions, also tainted Indonesia's reputation globally by releasing a vast amount of atmosphere-warming carbon.

The Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to prosecute companies and individuals who set fires and also strengthened its fire-fighting response. This year's fires have affected a smaller area in large part due to unseasonal rains.

Jamal Hisham Hashim, research fellow with the International Institute for Global Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable.

He said decades of air pollution research that followed London's killer smog in 1952 has established the relationship between fine particulate matter and premature deaths, particularly in people with existing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

"The pollution level that occurred during the haze is severe enough to cause premature deaths. That is indisputable," he said. "The study is a wake-up call. We need to be shaken; we have become too complacent with the haze."

Joel Schwartz, an author of the study who is regarded by his peers as one of the world's top experts on the health effects of air pollution, said authorities in the affected countries have not offered any details of how they reached conclusions critical of the study.

During the haze, Malaysia suffered air pollution at 10 times the level that the World Health Organization says causes premature deaths, he said, while Singapore's claim that short-term exposure does not have serious effects is factually incorrect.

The Singaporean statement that its death rate was unchanged from 2014 did not demonstrate anything, Schwartz said, due to a worldwide trend for declining mortality. The study's premise is that deaths are higher than what they would be without the haze rather than a comparison to a particular year, he said.

Separately, Singapore's health ministry did not respond to a question on why heart disease and pneumonia, both of which can be bought to fatal conclusion by fine particle exposure, had increased as a percentage of deaths in 2015.

Malaysia, meanwhile, does not measure PM2.5 in its air pollution index but has been planning to from next year.

Half a dozen scientists with expertise in air pollution who reviewed the study for The Associated Press said its methodology was sound and its conclusions reasonable. Some cautioned that the estimates of 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, another 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore are invariably uncertain because aspects of the modeling rely on assumptions and the actual figures could be higher or lower.

The study considered only the health impact on adults and restricts itself to the effects of fine particles rather than all toxins that would be in the smoke.

Philip Hopke, director of the Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science at New York state's Clarkson University, said air pollution studies have to overcome several challenges because "no one who gets sick or dies comes to the doctor or hospital with a clear label that says airborne particles or ozone did this."

Another problem is the studies typically assume that fine particles are the sole cause of illness or death but smoke from fires contains ozone and a variety of volatile compounds that would also affect health.

"A major event like occurred here is extremely likely to have caused adverse health outcomes in terms of both sickness and deaths," he said.

___

Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Annabelle Liang in Singapore and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report.

FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2015 file photo, a woman disembarks from a boat as the Ampera Bridge is shrouded in haze from wildfires in Palembang, South Sumatra, Indonesia. Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science. Others say governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable. (AP Photo, File)
Finnish neo-Nazi accused of killing man at demonstration

HELSINKI (AP)  Authorities in Finland have arrested a neo-Nazi activist accused of killing a 28-year-old man during a demonstration in Helsinki.

The Helsinki District Court on Wednesday remanded the 26-year-old suspect in custody on suspicion of homicide and assault.

The suspect is accused of assaulting the victim who reportedly spat on the ground in front of members of the Finnish Resistance Movement at a demonstration on Sept. 10. The victim was hospitalized after hitting his head on the ground. He died of his injuries six days later.

The neo-Nazi group admits the victim was "confronted" during the rally but denies any wrongdoing. Police didn't release names of the victim or the suspect.
Paris mayor asks for 'national unity' in 2024 Olympic bid

PARIS (AP)  Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has urged all French presidential candidates to throw their support behind the capital city's bid to host the 2024 Olympics.

Speaking to a group of French senators on Wednesday, Hidalgo said her team has met with all candidates and asked them to build a "national unity" around the bid.

Paris is bidding to host the 2024 Games against Budapest, Rome and Los Angeles. The International Olympic Committee will choose the host in September 2017, while the French presidential election takes place in April-May.
Pakistani Christian jailed for blasphemy over Facebook like

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP)  Pakistani police say they have arrested a 16-year-old Christian boy on blasphemy charges after he "liked" an "inappropriate" photograph on Facebook of the Kaaba in Mecca, one of the holiest sites in Islam.

Senior police official Akhtar Ansari said Wednesday the arrest was made this week in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province.

He says police have sent the boy to jail pending trial.

Ansari says police made the arrest after being alerted of the Facebook post by a Muslim, who said he found it insulting.

Under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, anyone accused of insulting Islam can be sentenced to death. However the laws are also sometimes used to settle personal scores and target minorities.
UN expert urges more aid for North Korea after typhoon

GENEVA (AP)  A U.N. expert is calling on the world community to do more to help North Korea cope with fallout from deadly Typhoon Lionrock and says officials in the reclusive country should allow access to those in need.

Tomas Ojea Quintana, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, pointed to U.N. estimates that more than 140,000 people require assistance after the typhoon that killed at least 138 people in the northeastern part of the country.

The U.N. human rights office said in a statement Wednesday that Ojea Quintana called on the international community to "increase support for on-going humanitarian efforts on the ground," citing national reconstruction efforts underway.
Opinion / Columnist

The deplorable state of public healthcare in Zimbabwe shows how the government has abandoned its priorities in serving the people resulting in thousands people dying from curable diseases.Public healthcare is now in the intensive care unit due to serious shortages of basic medical services and medicine such as aspirin and antibiotics.Due to lack of government funding and support, Harare Central Hospital, a major referral centre, has announced the suspension of surgeries as it has run out of painkillers.This shows how the government of the day has misplaced priorities.The situation at Harare Central Hospital is a reflection of the dire state of health system in the country. Other critical sectors are going through similar lean periods as the government has abandoned them.The dreadful state of the health centres has resulted in unnecessarily loss of lives due to the failure of the Zanu PF administration to provide healthcare centres with basic medicine such as; antibiotics and pain relievers such as morphine.It is sad to note that when 90% of hospitals and clinics are operating without essential medicines in stock while President Robert Mugabe, his family and senior government and Zanu PF officials regularly travel to Singapore and other countries for medical treatment.When 80% of the posts for midwives remain vacant in the public sector, Mugabe's daughter, Bona, early this year travelled out of the country to give birth.The sad reality is that infant babies and expectant mothers are dying due to lack of proper medical attention. The situation is worse in the rural areas where the health centres are kilometres away from homesteads and there is a critical shortage of nurses and medicine.With 90% of the population unemployed and only a third of the population on medical aid, most people are forced to seek medical attention at public health centres but unfortunately they are dying from diseases such as asthma, diabetes and hypertension because the government does not care.It is clear that Mugabe cannot fix the plethora of crises that he causes. His administration has decided to abandon public health as a priority sector. The state's obligation is to ensure accessible, affordable, acceptable, quality health services are equitably distributed amongst Zimbabweans.Although antiretroviral (ARV) drugs are supplied for free at all public health institutions, there have been cases of shortages at most centres, seriously raising health concerns among those on treatment.The government is failing to take cognisance of the importance of health, and its centrality to national development. No prospects for development will be realised if the population suffers from ill health,and if visitors and investors alike are not assured of access to quality health care in the country.With the rain season about to start, the public health sector will have no capacity to handle outbreaks of archaic diseases such as cholera and typhoid.The present situation has been exacerbated by poor remuneration, working conditions and late payment of nurses and doctors in the public service.As PDP, our position remains that the socio-economic crisis in Zimbabwe can only be solved by a National Transitional Authority (NTA).Under an NTA government, the priority will be to rebuild the economy which will result in a Zimbabwe with a revenue base and ability to finance critical institutions like healthcare institutions. A revived economy will also ensure the realisation of the people's right to health, as enshrined in the Zimbabwe constitution.Sibongile MgijimaPDP Secretary for Health and Child Welfare
The Latest: Protesters trying to stop cars on interstate

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP)  The latest on police shooting and protests in Charlotte, North Carolina (all times local):

12 a.m.

Groups of protesters are trying to stop cars driving on the downtown highway loop around Charlotte.

Demonstrators protest Tuesday's fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C. on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Protesters rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasn't immediately clear how. Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Footage from TV station helicopters showed about three dozen people on Interstate 277 trying to stop cars late Thursday night. Several cars made it through, dodging people.

It was the latest incident in a night of violence in Charlotte's normally vibrant downtown. One man was shot and critically wounded, several reporters and people were attacked, windows were shattered and small fires set Wednesday night.

Police have not given an update on the number of people or police officers hurt.

There also were destructive protests Tuesday. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory has declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard.

___

11:30 p.m.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency in Charlotte as protests over a police shooting turned violent for a second night.

McCrory said in a statement late Wednesday he was also sending the National Guard to Charlotte as scattered groups of protesters continued to attack reporters and other people, break windows and set small fires in North Carolina's largest city.

Wednesday's protests started as a prayer vigil, but a group split off and marched through downtown. The march turned violent after a protester was shot and critically injured. City officials say police did not fire the shot.

After the shooting, police in riot gear began firing tear gas and marching through downtown arm in arm.

Keith Scott was shot to death Tuesday. Police say he had a gun, but neighbors and his family say he only had a book.

___

9:50 p.m.

Charlotte officials say a man shot during a protest is in critical condition but was not wounded by a police officer.

The city of Charlotte made the announcement Wednesday night on its Twitter feed, reversing an earlier statement that the man had died.

The man was shot as police in riot gear protected an upscale hotel in downtown Charlotte.

After the shooting, protesters began throwing bottles, dirt clods and fireworks at the officers. The police fired flash grenades and then tear gas back, dispersing the crowd of several hundred.

But groups of protesters kept marching around downtown, followed by police in riot gear who continued to fire tear gas at them.

The protesters were angry about the police shooting of Keith Lamont on Tuesday at his condominium complex. Police said the black man had a gun, while neighbors and his family said he was holding a book.

Video of the shooting has not been released.

___

This item has been corrected to show that the city now says the man is in critical condition, not dead.

___

9:10 p.m.

The emergency medical service in Charlotte says a person has been taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries from an apparent gunshot wound.

Charlotte Medic tweeted that the person was injured Wednesday night but didn't give details.

The service says it has taken eight patients  seven law-enforcement officers and one civilian  to area hospitals during protests over the police shooting of a black man.

___

8:35 p.m.

Protesters have rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.

At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasn't immediately clear how.

Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance.

Officers on bicycles surrounded a pool of blood on the ground and a few people threw bottles and clods of dirt at police.

The tense standoff continued as police fired small canisters of tear gas into the protesters.

___

8:30 p.m.

Groups of college students are descending on the condominium complex parking lot where a black man was shot and killed by a black Charlotte police officer.

One group of students came from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, about 80 miles away. Others came from Guilford College, also in Greensboro.

Meanwhile, students and faculty from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte canvassed the neighborhood, some of them offering words of comfort while others passed out water.

Before nightfall, a memorial was set up at the site where Scott was shot. People prayed and held candles, and flowers were placed beneath a table.

___

8:10 p.m.

A prayer vigil over the fatal police shooting of a black man in Charlotte has turned into a protest march through downtown.

Several hundred marchers have been angry but peaceful Wednesday night as they shouted slogans like "Hands up; don't shoot" and "Black lives matter" outside downtown landmarks.

Police blocked off streets, and some protesters yelled and pointed at them, but officers did not react.

The scene was in contrast to Tuesday's protest, which turned violent with protesters threw rocks and damaged police vehicles.

___

6:30 p.m.

The White House says President Barack Obama has called the mayors of Charlotte and Tulsa to get an update on protests after fatal shootings involving police officers and a black victim.

Obama made calls to mayors Jennifer Roberts of Charlotte and Dewey Bartlett of Tulsa.

The White House says Obama expressed his condolences to both mayors and affirmed the administration's commitment to provide assistance as needed.

Obama and the mayors reiterated that protests should be conducted in a peaceful manner and that local law enforcement should find ways to calmly engage those protesting.

The White House says Obama will continue to get updates on the situations from Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

___

3:45 p.m.

The mother of a man shot to death by Charlotte police says he was a family man.

Keith Lamont Scott's mother, Vernita Walker of Charleston, South Carolina, told The Charlotte Observer that her son had seven children.

She told the newspaper: "He was a family man . And he was a likable person. And he loved his wife and his children."

Scott has a criminal record in three states, including Texas, South Carolina and North Carolina. Texas records show that he was convicted of evading arrest with a vehicle in 2005, and several months later of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

In 1992 in South Carolina, records show Scott pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Court records also show a misdemeanor assault conviction in North Carolina from 2004.

___

3:10 p.m.

About 100 students gathered at the student union at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to protest the shooting death of a black man by a police officer about a mile from campus.

The students first gathered on a patio behind the student union and were led in prayer. They walked back into the union and held a "lay-in" by lying on the green-carpeted floor in the rotunda.

Some students wore T-shirts reading "Black Lives Matter." Eventually, they began singing "This Little Light of Mine."

The school's chancellor was scheduled to speak later Wednesday afternoon.

Police say Keith Lamont Scott refused repeated demands to drop a handgun and was shot. Neighborhood residents say Scott was unarmed when he was shot to death.

___

2:45 p.m.

Court records indicate that the man shot to death by Charlotte police had a criminal record including an assault conviction.

Mecklenburg County records matching Keith Lamont Scott's name and birth date show Scott was charged in April 2004 with multiple counts, including felony assault with a deadly weapon. Records show that most of the charges were dismissed, and he pleaded guilty to a single charge of misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon.

Records from nearby Gaston County show that Scott pleaded guilty to driving while impaired in 2015.

A woman who identified herself as an advocate for Scott's family, Annette Albright, said at a news conference that he shouldn't be "re-victimized" because of things he did in the past.

She told reporters: "What he was doing at the time of the shooting is what's relevant."

___

A woman who identified herself as the mother of a black man who was shot to death by Charlotte police says her son was raised in the Charleston, South Carolina, area.

Vernita Walker told The Post and Courier (http://bit.ly/2dbsqY1) that her son Keith Lamont Scott attended James Island Charter School, but she refused to comment further to the newspaper.

A woman who identified herself as Scott's mother answered a cellphone listed for Scott's sister and told The Associated Press the family was not commenting.

At the Walker residence in a neighborhood of modest ranch homes near Charleston, a man standing in the driveway, who would not give his name, said the family had no comment. He said a statement might be issued on Thursday.

___

12:30 p.m.

The North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urged Charlotte police to release any footage from body or dashboard cameras of a fatal shooting this week.

The ACLU noted that a new North Carolina law restricting release of such footage doesn't take effect until Oct. 1. That new law says footage from police body or dashboard cameras can't be released publicly without a court order.

Karen Anderson, executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina, issued a statement that said the Charlotte police department should release any footage in the interest of transparency.

Charlotte's police chief has said the officer who shot Keith Lamont Scott was not wearing a body camera, but chief Kerr Putney also says he cannot release body camera and dashboard camera video from other officers because of the ongoing investigation.

___

12 p.m.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the police shooting deaths in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Charlotte, North Carolina, are highlighting the most vivid and painful divisions that persist between law enforcement and communities of color.

Lynch made her comments at the beginning of her address to the International Bar Association Conference in Washington. She says the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into the death of Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa and the agency is in regular contact with Charlotte authorities as the investigation begins there.

Charlotte's police chief says 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott refused multiple warnings to drop a handgun before a black officer fatally shot the black man.

A woman claiming to be Scott's daughter posted a video to Facebook soon after the shooting, saying that her father had an unspecified disability and was unarmed when he was shot.

___

10:45 a.m.

An outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam is calling for an economic boycott of Charlotte after a police officer shot a man to death.

B.J. Murphy called for the boycott Wednesday at a news conference of black leaders, saying if black lives don't matter, black money shouldn't matter.

Murphy and others were reacting to the police shooting of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was killed Tuesday. Authorities say he had a gun and refused officers' commands to drop it. The officer who fired the fatal shot is also black.

A woman claiming to be Scott's daughter said in a video posted on Facebook that her father was unarmed and had a book, not a gun. Police say they did not find a book at the scene.

___

10:30 a.m.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney says officers recovered a gun that they say a man had when he was shot and killed by an officer.

Putney said at a news conference Wednesday that 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott had a gun, but no book when officers searched him and his vehicle. A woman claiming to be Scott's daughter said in a video posted on Facebook that her father was unarmed and had a book, not a gun.

The woman's claims could not be verified by The Associated Press.

Putney also says several police vehicles were damaged in the protests that followed Wednesday afternoon's shooting.

Putney says the officer who shot Scott, Brently Vinson, was not wearing a body camera. Putney says he cannot release body camera and dashboard camera video from other officers because of the ongoing investigation.

___

9:45 a.m.

The Charlotte police chief says officers gave 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott multiple warnings to drop a handgun before fatally shooting him.

Police Chief Kerr Putney said during a news conference Wednesday morning that officers were searching for a suspect Tuesday when they saw Scott exit a vehicle with a handgun. He says the officers told him to drop the gun and that he got out of the vehicle a second time still carrying the gun. He says the man was shot because he posed a threat.

He says officers requested medical help and performed CPR on the black man.

The black officer who shot Scott has been placed on administrative leave while the shooting is investigated.

The chief said 16 officers sustained minor injuries during protests Tuesday night and that one person has been arrested.

___

9:20 a.m.

A civil rights activist says he has a powerful witness to the shooting of a black man by a black Charlotte police officer at an apartment complex.

John Barnett said Wednesday morning that the witness did not see 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott make any threatening gestures toward officers before he was shot Tuesday afternoon. Scott died at the scene of the shooting.

Barnett did not immediately name the witness.

Protests lasted throughout the night, damaging police cars, causing minor injuries to about a dozen officers and closing down a part of Interstate 85 not far from the shooting scene.

Charlotte's mayor and police chief also plan to make statements about the shooting Wednesday morning.

___

9:10. a.m.

Charlotte officials plan to release a statement on the latest in their investigation of the shooting of a black man by a black police officer Tuesday afternoon.

The statement was to be released at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if a city spokesman would take questions on the investigation.

Streets in Charlotte were clear Wednesday morning after angry motorists protested over the shooting Tuesday night.

Forty-three-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was shot to death by an officer who has been placed on administrative leave during the investigation into the shooting.

Scott's family was expected to meet with reporters at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

___

5:50 a.m.

The streets in Charlotte, North Carolina, are quiet Wednesday morning after angry protests over the fatal police shooting of a black man left officers injured and shut down an interstate.

Traffic is flowing again on Interstate 85, hours after protesters blocked the highway and television footage showed some apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire.

No protesters could be seen around 5 a.m. but broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized during protests earlier. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance to a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.

The protests broke out Tuesday after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by a black officer at an apartment complex on the city's northeast side.

___

3 a.m.

Demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of a black man by a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina, have shut down a small section of Interstate 85.

TV footage early Wednesday showed dozens of protesters on the highway facing a line of law enforcement officers. At one point a fire flared up.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation website shows a portion of the highway near UNC Charlotte is closed in both directions. The website says the closure is due to police activity.

Neither the North Carolina Highway Patrol nor Charlotte police could immediately be reached for comment.

The protest comes after police on Tuesday fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott. Demonstrators had gathered earlier near the scene of the shooting before a smaller group moved to the highway.

Police fire tear gas as protestors converge downtown following Tuesday's police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Protesters have rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasn't immediately clear how. Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance.(AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Police fire teargas as protestors converge on downtown following Tuesday's police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Protesters have rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasn't immediately clear how. Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance.(AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

A man squats near a pool of blood after a man was injured during a protest of Tuesday's fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C. on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Protesters rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasn't immediately clear how. Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Police fire teargas as protestors converge on downtown following Tuesday's police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Protesters have rushed police in riot gear at a downtown Charlotte hotel and officers have fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. At least one person was injured in the confrontation, though it wasn't immediately clear how. Firefighters rushed in to pull the man to a waiting ambulance.(AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Police stand in formation in Charlotte, N.C., Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters in an overnight demonstration that broke out Tuesday after Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by an officer at an apartment complex. (Jeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer via AP)

Protesters clash with police in Charlotte, N.C. on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters in an overnight demonstration that broke out Tuesday after Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by an officer at an apartment complex. (Jeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer via AP)

Taheshia Williams, center, tells her eyewitness account of the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, in Charlotte, N.C. Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Scott's death on Sept. 20 led to protests and rioting. (AP Photo/Nell Redmond)
Man wounded after attempt to enter Israeli Embassy in Turkey

ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  An attacker armed with a knife tried to enter the Israeli Embassy in Turkey on Wednesday before being shot and slightly wounded by Turkish security officials, Turkish and Israeli officials said.

The Ankara governor's office identified the man as Osman Nuri Caliskan, a Turkish national born in 1975, and said that a preliminary investigation indicated that he appeared to be mentally unstable and has no known links to any terror group.

The man was carrying a 30 centimeter (12-inch) -long knife and a bag and was captured by police after being shot in the leg.

Armed forces near the scene outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

The state-run Anadolu Agency said police guarding the embassy shot him in the leg after he took out a knife wrapped inside a newspaper, started to shout and ignored the security officers' warnings to stop and drop the knife.

Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told The Associated Press that all embassy staff were safe.

"The attacker was wounded before he reached the embassy," Nashon said in a statement in Jerusalem, adding that the incident took place in the "outer perimeter" of the embassy.

The incident comes just months after Turkey and Israel reached an agreement to end a six-year rift, paving the way for the normalization of ties and the mutual re-appointment of ambassadors. The two countries were once close allies but tensions peaked in 2010 after Israeli commandos stormed an aid ship trying to breach Israel's blockade of Gaza. Ten Turkish activists were killed in the raid.

Last month, police detained five people who tried to break into Israel's consulate in Istanbul to protest Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip.

A statement from the Israeli Embassy said the assailant acted alone and tried to stab a Turkish police officer.

"One of the Turkish police officers situated in front of the Embassy responded immediately and shot the attacker in the foot in order to neutralize him," the embassy said. "The police officer's action brought the incident to an end."

The statement said: The Embassy trusts the Turkish forces to control and investigate the incident.

Police blocked roads leading to the heavily protected embassy building. Turkish media reports said embassy staff has was moved to a shelter.

Turkey's private NTV television and other media reports said the man walked past the embassy building several times, raising suspicion, before trying to enter the building.

__

Associated Press Writer Ian Deitch in Jerusalem contributed.

Armed forces near the scene outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Armed forces near the scene outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Police officers examine the scene outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Armed forces near the scene outside the Israeli embassy, left, in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Police officers examine the scene outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Police officers examine the scene outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, Turkey where a solo attacker was shot and wounded Wednesday Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)
Rome mayor nixes 2024 Olympic bid: 'This city is unlivable'

ROME (AP)  Irresponsible, unsustainable and unaffordable.

Refusing to put up with more debt in a city besieged by corruption and poor public services, Mayor Virginia Raggi rejected Rome's bid for the 2024 Olympics on Wednesday, effectively dooming the capital's candidacy for the second time in four years.

"This city is unlivable," Raggi said in a news conference at city hall atop ancient Capitoline Hill. "We need to focus on that.

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi gestures during a press conference after she did not show up at a scheduled meeting with a delegation of the Italian Olympic Committee, in Rome, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Raggi says its irresponsible to bid for 2024 Olympic Games, effectively dooming Romes candidacy. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

"We have a much more ambitious project for Rome than the one for the 2024 Games," Raggi added. "We want to upgrade the services, give back to citizens a city that is as worthy as any other European capital."

If approved by Rome's city assembly, Raggi's motion to withdraw the bid would leave only Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest, Hungary, in the running for the 2024 Games. The International Olympic Committee will decide on the host city in September 2017.

Raggi's rejection comes after then-Premier Mario Monti stopped Rome's plans to bid for the 2020 Olympics because of financial concerns.

"We've lost all credibility, if we pull out," Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago said, ruling out an eventual bid for the 2028 Games, even from another Italian city. "Because they'll think people in Italy are not serious."

Raggi said it would be financially "irresponsible" to pursue the bid any further given the city is barely able to get its trash picked up. She highlighted the debts that previous Olympic host cities have incurred and the unfinished infrastructure already blighting Rome from previous sporting bids as reasons to justify the withdrawal.

"In light of the data we have, these Olympics are not sustainable. They will bring only debt," she said. "We don't want sports to become another pretext for more cement foundations in the city. We won't allow it."

Raggi drew up a motion to withdraw the bid Wednesday and put it before the city assembly, which has the final say. There was no immediate word if and when the council would take it up.

Malago said the committee would continue working on the bid in the absence of a formal vote, noting the next dossier must be submitted to the IOC on Oct. 7.

"If there's no formal act, we can continue," he said. "They can't just declare it in a news conference."

Indeed, rival cities weren't ready to count Rome out altogether.

"There is no confirmation that Rome has departed from the 2024 race and as such it is not appropriate for us to offer any comment except to wish our Italian colleagues well during this period of difficult time," the Budapest Olympic committee said.

Raggi, a 38-year-old lawyer who is Rome's first female mayor, was elected in June representing the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement.

The Rome bid was approved by the city assembly last year with 38 votes in favor and only six against  meaning Raggi will have to put the issue up for another vote to officially end the candidacy.

The IOC requires bidders to have support from the government and city.

Previous Mayor Ignazio Marino, who was forced out over an expense account scandal, had supported the bid. And Premier Matteo Renzi has been a big fan of the candidacy since he helped launch it in 2014. He has said the bid would be doomed if Rome's mayor doesn't support it.

A budget of 24 million euros ($27 million) has already been allotted  much of it spent  to the bid committee, even though candidacy head Luca Cordero di Montezemolo has no salary.

Raggi's rejection was another stinging blow for the IOC's "Olympic Agenda 2020" program, which was designed to make bidding for and hosting the games more flexible and more affordable.

"Rome was able to bid only after the IOC changed its rules with Agenda 2020 and reduced the costs of putting together a candidacy," Malago said.

The bid had been slated to be centered around Rome's historic monuments: a cycling sprint alongside the Roman Forum, beach volleyball at the Circus Maximus and the marathon passing through St. Peter's Square and finishing under the Arch of Constantine. Plus, a nightly parade of athletes at the Colosseum.

Relying on many venues that were used for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, the candidacy proposed using existing structures for 70 percent of the required sites. The budget had been projected at 5.3 billion euros ($6 billion)  2.1 billion euros for the construction of permanent venues and the balance for temporary venues.

The withdrawal is another clear signal that the IOC still has a lot of work to do to convince cities that hosting the games is a boon and not a burden.

Voters in Hamburg rejected the German city's 2024 bid in a referendum. Boston also dropped out last year amid a lack of public and political support and was replaced by Los Angeles.

"It's very upsetting," Rome bid vice president Luca Pancalli said. "It's like we started a race and someone gets out of the pool in the middle of the race and says we're not racing any longer."

___

Andrew Dampf on Twitter: www.twitter.com/asdampf

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi gestures during a press conference after she did not show up at a scheduled meeting with a delegation of the Italian Olympic Committee, in Rome, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Raggi says its irresponsible to bid for 2024 Olympic Games, effectively dooming Romes candidacy. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago gestures during a press conference, after a scheduled meeting with Rome mayor Virginia Raggi did not take place, in Rome, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi has rejected the city's bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, effectively dooming the candidacy. (Giuseppe Lami/ANSA via AP Photo)
Authorities probe oil sheen in bay north of San Francisco

VALLEJO, Calif. (AP)  Authorities on Wednesday were investigating whether a mysterious odor is linked to a 40-foot wide oil sheen on San Pablo Bay, north of San Francisco, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The probe came after Vallejo residents were told Tuesday to stay inside when the odor prompted several people to go to a hospital with respiratory issues.

The shelter-in-place order was later lifted but the source of the smell had not been pinned down.

Vallejo police said the first call about the odor came from the western side of Mare Island, KNTV reported (http://cbsloc.al/2d1NMnz ).
European human rights group warns on Azerbaijan constitution

PARIS (AP)  A European law and human rights commission on Wednesday criticized proposed constitutional changes in Azerbaijan that would extend the president's term, a conclusion that drew an angry response from the ex-Soviet nation.

The Venice Commission, a watchdog body of constitutional law experts based in France, released a preliminary report saying that extending the presidential mandate "cannot be justified" and that other proposed legal changes would upset the balance of powers.

The commission expressed concern about a measure limiting public gatherings and said a measure giving the president power to dissolve parliament would weaken political dissent.

FILE - In this March 30, 2016 file photo, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev makes a statement before a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the State Department in Washington. A European law and human rights commission, in a report released on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, has criticized proposed constitutional changes in Azerbaijan that would extend the presidents term. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Azerbaijan is to hold a referendum Monday on the changes. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the capital of Azerbaijan Saturday to protest against them.

Some critics characterize the oil-rich Caspian Sea nation as effectively a dynasty as President Ilham Aliyev is the son of the previous president and see the proposed measures as a mechanism for extending his rule.

The Venice Commission experts are part of the Council of Europe, a rights authority whose 47 members  including Azerbaijan  have signed the European Convention on Human Rights.

The commission also complained that Azerbaijan rushed these reforms through without enough parliamentary and public debate, and said it regrets that Azerbaijan didn't consult the commission.

Shahin Aliyev, the head of the legal department in Azerbaijan's presidential administration, shrugged off the Venice Commission's criticism as hasty and unfounded.

"We are seeing that hasty conclusion, which has many flaws, as politically driven," he said at a briefing in the capital Baku. "They speak to us in a language of ultimatums."

The presidential aide voiced surprise that the commission hadn't asked Azerbaijan for any explanation or clarification before issuing its verdict. He rebuffed the criticism and argued that the proposed constitutional changes are intended to streamline the government structure in order to help conduct political and economic reforms.
The Latest: US official: Syria convoy hit by Russian plane

BEIRUT (AP)  The Latest on Syria's conflict (all times local):

11 p.m.

A senior U.S. official says that Washington has determined with a very high degree of confidence that an attack on a humanitarian aid convoy in Syria on Monday was carried out by a Russian piloted aircraft.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

The assessment laid more deliberate blame on Moscow for the strike on the Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy, which killed 20 civilians.

Washington had said Tuesday that Russia was to blame, but that the strike delivered by a Russian-made Su-24 could have been carried out by Russia or Syria. Both militaries use Su-24 fighter jets.

Officials are now saying the U.S. has gathering enough intelligence to say that it was Russia, not Syria, that launched the airstrike.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss intelligence information publicly.

 Lolita C. Baldor in Washington

8:45 p.m.

The United Nations says it will resume aid convoys within Syria after an attack on a convoy killed 20 people and prompted a temporary suspension.

Jens Laerke, the spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian aid agency, says Wednesday that "several" convoys are expected as early as Thursday, but didn't specify where. He said the convoys would not go to Aleppo.

An attack on Monday night in Aleppo province on a warehouse of the Red Crescent where U.N. aid was delivered that day killed 20 people and destroyed most of the delivery.

In response, the U.N. suspended overland aid operations to priority areas in Syria pending a full security assessment.

Laerke acknowledged that a full assessment had not been completed, but said the planned deliveries would take place now on a case-by-case basis.

___

7:30 p.m.

Syrian opposition activists say suspected government airstrikes in the northern city of Aleppo and the rebel-held Idlib province have killed 23 civilians, including at least five children.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 11 civilians, including three children and three women, were killed Wednesday during air raids on several rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo. The Observatory says the toll is likely to rise because rescue efforts are ongoing.

Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, says 24 people were killed in the Aleppo strikes. Mohammed Abu Jaafar, from the local forensics team, said one of the 24 was a fighter.

In nearby Idlib, the Observatory said 12 civilians, including two children, were killed in at least eight air raids.

A U.S. and Russian-brokered cease-fire that went into effect nine days ago is on the brink of collapse, with the government and the rebels alleging dozens of violations.

___

6:45 p.m.

The Russian military says a U.S. drone was flying over the area when an aid convoy was attacked in Syria on Monday.

Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Wednesday the Predator drone, which took off from the Incirlik base in Turkey, flew into the area where the convoy was attacked near the Syrian city of Aleppo minutes before it came under fire.

He says the drone left the area about a half-hour after the attack.

U.S. officials said Tuesday that two Russian Su-24 aircraft were flying over the area at the moment of the attack. Russia has denied that its own aircraft or Syrian warplanes struck the convoy.

The attack drew international condemnation and prompted the U.N. to suspend aid shipments in Syria, where some 6 million people live in besieged or hard-to-reach places.

___

6:10 p.m.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wants all aircraft over key humanitarian routes in northern Syria grounded in order to facilitate desperately need aid deliveries.

Kerry told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that such a step could restore credibility to efforts to end the five-year civil war and "give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded."

A U.S.-Russian cease-fire that went into effect nine days ago has all but collapsed. The U.N. suspended aid deliveries after a strike on a humanitarian convoy this week.

___

5 p.m.

The Russian defense minister says the navy will send its sole aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.

Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday that the Admiral Kuznetsov will join other Russian ships near Syria's shores. He didn't specify when it will be deployed, but Russian media reports have said the mission is planned for the fall.

The Soviet-built Admiral Kuznetsov, the only aircraft carrier in the Russian navy, has recently been re-equipped with new fighter jets.

Russia has waged a yearlong air campaign in Syria that has shored up President Bashar Assad and allowed his troops to seize some key ground. Last week, Moscow and Washington brokered a cease-fire in Syria, which is now teetering on the brink amid renewed fighting and an attack on a humanitarian convoy.

___

4:50 p.m.

The U.N. Security Council has taken up Syria's civil war as a temporary truce unravels and international tensions rise.

A day after the U.S., Russia and other powers sought to keep the week-old cease-fire alive, the same actors are debating the conflict in a public setting.

Moscow backs Syrian President Bashar Assad's government, while Washington supports many of the rebel factions fighting to topple him. Both say they're committed to fighting the Islamic State group and al-Qaida-linked militants.

A relief organization reported five medical staff killed in an airstrike in northern Syria on Tuesday night, the latest in a series of attacks on humanitarian workers.

A strike on a Syrian Red Crescent aid convoy earlier this week prompted international condemnation. The U.N. called it a deliberate attack. U.S. officials say they believe Russia carried out the strike. Russia denies responsibility.

___

3:20 p.m.

A medical relief organization says an airstrike in northern Syria hit a mobile emergency unit, and not a medical facility.

Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, says five staff members were killed when its ambulances were hit. He told The Associated Press in Paris on Wednesday that the team was bombed while responding to an earlier airstrike targeting militants from the al-Qaida-linked Fatah al-Sham Front.

The Paris-based aid group initially said the attack Tuesday night leveled a medical triage facility it operates in rebel-held territory outside the contested city of Aleppo.

The group, known by its French initials UOSSM, said three nurses and two ambulance drivers were killed.

___

2:50 p.m.

Syrian state TV says a military warplane has crashed and the pilot has been rescued after carrying out a combat mission against Islamic State group militants northwest of the capital, Damascus.

State TV, quoting an unnamed military official, says the pilot has been rescued but doesn't say what caused the plane to crash in the Qalamoun mountains, an area that straddles the border with Lebanon.

The IS-affiliated news agency Aamaq said earlier the group's militants downed the plane in eastern Qalamoun after the aircraft carried out four raids against it. The agency said the plane crashed in an area controlled by either the government or rebel factions.

The militant group downed a government aircraft Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.

___

2:20 p.m.

A Syrian monitoring group says a warplane has crashed northwest of the capital, Damascus, as Islamic State group militants claim they downed it.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the fate of the pilot remains unclear. It says it was unclear if the warplane was downed Wednesday or had technical problems.

The Observatory says the plane crashed in the eastern Qalamoun mountains, northwest of Damascus.

The IS-affiliated news agency Aamaq says the group's militants downed the plane in eastern Qalamoun, after the aircraft carried out four raids against it. The agency says the plane crashed in an area controlled by either the government or rebel factions, indicating it would not have pictures of the aircraft.

IS says it downed a Syrian government warplane. There was no immediate comment from the government.

___

10:30 a.m.

A medical relief organization says four of its staff have been killed in an attack on a medical facility in Syria.

The International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations says an airstrike Tuesday night in northern Syria leveled a medical triage point in rebel-held territory outside the contested city of Aleppo.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group puts the toll at 13 dead, among them four nurses and paramedics and nine rebel fighters, some of them belonging to the al-Qaida-linked Fatah al-Sham Front.

It says the triage point was located in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman, south of Aleppo.

There were no reports on who was behind the strike.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, speaks alongside British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, left, during a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, right, talks with Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin before the start of a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, right, approaches Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin before the start of a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, right, talks with Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin before the start of a Security Council meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
The Latest: Analysis says Trump plan would add $5.3T to debt

WASHINGTON (AP) 

The Latest on the U.S. presidential campaign (all times EDT):

12:01 a.m.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016 in Dayton, Ohio. (Ty Greenlees /Dayton Daily News via AP, Pool)

A new analysis from a nonpartisan group finds that Donald Trump's tax proposals would increase the federal debt by $5.3 trillion over the next decade.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget also calculates that Hillary Clinton's proposals would add $200 billion to the debt.

Much of the cost of Trump's programs comes from the tax cut plan he unveiled last week. Trump vowed the tax cuts would pay for themselves by triggering record economic growth, but the committee was skeptical and presumed no new growth.

Trump has also proposed a sharp increase in military spending. He's proposed some spending cuts, but they wouldn't come close to balancing the budget.

The cost of Clinton's plan comes from her proposals for free college, child care aid and universal pre-K for 4-year-olds.

___

8:46 p.m.

Hillary Clinton's campaign says Donald Trump hasn't changed his mind about where President Barack Obama was born.

Trump told ABC6 in Toledo, Ohio, Wednesday that he reversed five years of promoting the falsehood that Obama was born outside the United States because he "wanted to get on with the campaign." Trump on Friday acknowledged the fact that Obama was born in this country.

In his first comments on the topic since then, Trump said Wednesday that "a lot of people were asking" him questions about it and he wanted to get back to talking about jobs, the military and national security.

Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson responded late Wednesday that "Donald Trump hasn't actually changed his mind." Ferguson added that Trump had tried "to change the subject. And it didn't work."

___

7:15 p.m.

Donald Trump says he acknowledged the fact that President Barack Obama was born in the United States because he "wanted to get on with the campaign."

Trump on Friday reversed five years of promoting the falsehood that Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii. He did not explain why at the time. But he told ABC6 in Toledo, Ohio, Wednesday, "A lot of people were asking me questions."

He says he wanted to get back to talking about jobs, the military and "how to get rid of" the Islamic State group.

Hillary Clinton and members of the Congressional Black Caucus have suggested it's too late for Trump to reverse course. And even as Trump disavowed the "birther" tale, he offered up another falsehood: that "Hillary Clinton and her campaign" in 2008 started the rumor.

___

7 p.m.

Mexican singer Vicente Fernandez is lending his voice to support Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and potentially drum up Latino voters.

In a video released Wednesday and paid for by the Washington-based Latino Victory Project, the man known as the "King of Ranchera" music sings about working "hand-in-hand" for a Clinton victory.

Fernandez croons that under a Clinton presidency "we will always have a bridge." He is shown leaning on a ranch fence amid clips of galloping horses, smiling children and a campaigning Clinton.

Fernandez also sings that "my people were hurt that someone would offend us." It's an apparent reference to Republican candidate Donald Trump, whose disparaging comments about migrants have angered many Mexicans.

The singer alluded to Trump at an April concert, saying he would "spit in his face" if they ever met.

The video was posted on YouTube and on the singer's Facebook page.

___

6:08 p.m.

Bill Clinton is urging supporters of his family's charity to not grow "disheartened" or "deterred" as a major wing of the organization shuts down.

The former president is speaking at the close of the final Clinton Global Initiative meeting. The annual CGI meeting in New York has brought together political leaders, celebrities and philanthropists.

This year's meeting was held under a cloud of controversy surrounding the Clinton Foundation. Donald Trump has accused Hillary and Bill Clinton of using the foundation to enrich themselves and to give donors preferential access to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

Bill Clinton did not directly address Trump's accusations in his remarks, though he has denied them previously. Instead he used his speech to tout the work CGI has enabled around the world, including lowering HIV drugs and increasing access to clean drinking water.

___

5:50 p.m.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is sharply criticizing Donald Trump's call for national use of "stop-and-frisk," a police tactic that a federal judge has ruled can be discriminatory against minorities. Trump said in Fox News Town hall that the practice "worked incredibly well" in New York City.

De Blasio, a Democrat who supports Hillary Clinton, on Wednesday called Trump's proposal "appalling" and suggested that "he's either ignorant about the history of the city or he's lying about it."

Stop-and-frisk, which allows police to search anyone they deem suspicious, was widely used in New York even though critics said it increased tension between communities of color and the police. Trump said Wednesday he favors using it nationwide.

A federal court ruled in 2013 that the city's use of the tactic was excessive and unconstitutional. De Blasio was elected that year after promising to end overuse of the tactic.

___

5:22 p.m.

Donald Trump's campaign is backing conservatives on Capitol Hill, warning that the Obama administration is about to "turn control of the internet" over to foreign powers.

Specifically, Republicans are trying to block the government from ceding an oversight role over some of the internet's key systems. They include the directories that help web browsers and apps locate information on the web.

Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller warned Wednesday that "internet freedom is now at risk." He praised congressional Republicans for fighting the change "admirably."

Trump adversary Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is leading the charge on Capitol Hill.

Miller said that, "Congress needs to act, or internet freedom will be lost for good." He warned, "there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost."

___

4:35 p.m.

Donald Trump is traveling across Ohio with a colorful cast of characters that includes a former college basketball coach and convicted felon.

The Republican nominee for president was introduced at a Toledo rally Wednesday by former Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Bobby Knight, whose endorsement Trump has credited for his win in Indiana's primary. Knight advised the crowd to support Trump and also buy red, white and blue shirts to show support for the United States.

Also part of the entourage is boxing promoter Don King, who was convicted of murder in the 1960s. King was barred by GOP officials from speaking at the Republican convention in July, but he's spoken on Trump's behalf twice Wednesday. His first speech at a church event included a racial epithet.

Also along for the ride is Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on Trump's "The Apprentice," who now helps lead the Republican nominee's outreach effort to African American voters.

___

3:47 p.m.

Donald Trump is calling for the expanded use of "stop-and-frisk," a police tactic that a federal judge has ruled can be discriminatory against minorities.

Asked during a Fox News town hall taping how he would stop violence in the black community, Trump pointed to the tactic that gives police the ability to stop and search anyone they deem suspicious.

He says he would "do stop-and-frisk" because it is "proactive." He adds that the procedure "worked incredibly well" in New York City.

The use of stop-and-frisk expanded exponentially under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, drawing complaints from minority communities who were disproportionately targeted and deepening tensions between communities and police.

A federal court ruled in 2013 that the city's use of the tactic was excessive and unconstitutional. New York has since scaled it back.

___

3:53 p.m.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is getting a boost from former cast members on "The West Wing."

Clinton's campaign said the actors will participate in organizing events in Ohio on Saturday and Sunday. Scheduled to attend are Richard Schiff, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Dule Hill, Joshua Malina and Mary McCormack.

The group will appear in the Mahoning Valley, Cleveland, Sandusky and Toledo as they encourage voters to register.

"The West Wing" was a political drama created by Aaron Sorkin that aired on NBC from 1999 to 2006.

Clinton is not participating in those events.

___

3:41 p.m.

Hillary Clinton is urging union workers to "stage an intervention" for friends and family considering voting for Donald Trump.

The Democratic presidential candidate asked members of the Laborers International Union of North America to volunteer for her campaign, saying "the choice for working families has never been clearer."

The union represents 12 million construction and public services employees. They endorsed Clinton during her primary contests against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Clinton spoke by videoconference to the group's annual conference on Wednesday. She's also campaigning in Orlando.

___

3:40 p.m.

Donald Trump Jr. is defending a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned candy.

Trump Jr. said Wednesday in Salt Lake City that his tweet was spurred by his concern as a father about inadequate vetting of people coming into the United States. His remarks came during a visit with editorial boards from the Mormon-owned Deseret News and KSL-TV.

Trump Jr. said "We've seen what's going on in Europe. We can't be naive to that and pretend that's not happening there,"

Trump Jr. has been widely criticized for his posting this week. It showed a bowl of Skittles, a multicolored candy, and asked: "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?"

___

3:20 p.m.

Hillary Clinton is stressing her support for people with disabilities.

At a campaign event Wednesday, Clinton pledged to "build an inclusive economy that welcomes people with disabilities." She was speaking at the Frontline Outreach Family and Youth Center in Orlando, Florida.

Clinton promised to provide more job opportunities and to get rid of the sub-minimum wage for people with disabilities. She also promised to make colleges and universities more accessible and to provide more support for people with autism.

Clinton did not directly mention Republican opponent Donald Trump, though she did repeat her campaign mantra that "love trumps hate."

Clinton's campaign and her supporters have highlighted a video of Trump appearing to mock a disabled reporter, which has drawn strong reaction from voters in focus groups and other forums.

___

2:55 p.m.

Hillary Clinton says recent police-involved shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Charlotte, North Carolina, add two more names "to a long list of African-Americans killed by police officers."

She says "it's unbearable and it needs to become intolerable."

But Clinton, at a campaign event Wednesday in Florida, also noted that many police chiefs are committed to reforms. And she credited police officers for showing courage and skill in responding to attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota during the weekend.

Clinton says America is safer "when communities respect the police and the police respect communities."

___

2:10 p.m.

Donald Trump says that he's planning to add nine names to the list of men and women he says he'll pick from to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court.

The Republican presidential nominee said during an appearance at an Ohio church on Wednesday that he's planning to expand the list that he unveiled in May to 20 names from 11.

Trump has sometimes wavered in his language, saying at times that he'd pick directly from the list and at others that his picks would be similar.

But he says now that he "will pick from that group of 20 people."

Trump is also railing against Republicans who are withholding their support from him, saying they "should be ashamed of themselves" because the Supreme Court is at stake.

___

1:48 p.m.

Hillary Clinton's communications director says the candidate is preparing for the "different Trumps" that could show up at the first debate.

Jennifer Palmieri told reporters Wednesday that the Democratic nominee's campaign thinks Republican Donald Trump "may be aggressive or he may lay back." She added: "That's hard to game out."

Clinton and Trump meet at the first debate Monday night. Clinton is appearing in Florida Wednesday, but has no campaign events scheduled in the coming days as she prepares for the debate. Palmieri declined to say who is playing Trump in their practice sessions.

Palmieri said the campaign is concerned that Clinton and Trump will be judged differently, saying "my biggest concern continues to be a low bar set for him on expectations."

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable on manufacturing following a tour of Staub Manufacturing, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Dayton, Ohio. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump applauds as he is introduced by boxing promoter Don King prior to speaking at the Pastors Leadership Conference at New Spirit Revival Center, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she boards her campaign plane at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Hungarian inmates working around the clock on border fence

MARIANOSZTRA, Hungary (AP)  Hungarian prison inmates are ramping up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants.

The razor wire manufacturing at the prison in Marianosztra, northern Hungary, has increased from two shifts earlier this year, to three. Besides its domestic use, Hungary has also sold or donated fence elements, including wire and steel posts, to other countries in the region, including Slovenia and Macedonia.

"The inmates are manufacturing razor wire in three shifts a day, with 13 inmates in each shift producing the wire," Lt. Tamas Szep, the prison's press officer, said Wednesday. "The capacity of the plant is around 100 wire spools per day, which is heavily influenced by the fact that most of the work is done by hand."

Hungarian and Polish soldiers and policemen patrol the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke, 180 kms southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Two days earlier forty-nine Polish officers, including twenty-five policemen and twenty-four border guards arrived to Hungary to assist their Hungarian colleagues with border defence until October 29. The Polish contingent fulfills duty as part of the cooperation between the Visegrad Group (V4) countries. (Zoltan Gergely Kelemen/MTI via AP)

Human rights organizations consider Hungary's fences erected last year as the first step in efforts by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government to dismantle the country's asylum system.

Hungary's Helsinki Committee says the fence, the closure of asylum centers and other measures are destroying the asylum system.

"The asylum system, over the past year, has been basically emptied of its capacity to provide protection," said Helsinki Committee co-chair Marta Pardavi. "There is a clear policy of zero migration, of zero refugees coming to Hungary."

Other steps taken by Hungary in recent months to destroy its asylum system include the closure of refugee reception centers, the elimination or reduction of subsidies to assist the integration of people granted asylum, the deterioration of legal safeguards for refuges and new measures which allow the summary return across the fence of migrants caught near the border.

While the fence could serve legitimate defense needs, criticism of the barrier is exacerbated by the very small number of refugees  up to 15 per day  who are allowed to file asylum claims at a couple of makeshift "transit zones" set up by Hungary on the Serbian border. Hundreds have been waiting, sometimes for months, in deplorable conditions.

"Hungary is closing its territory with a fence with the aim of keeping out of the European Union those who need protection from terror, persecution and torture," said Gabor Gyulai, director of the Helsinki Committee's refugee program. "A functioning asylum system has been willingly destroyed by the government for political reasons."

Orban's anti-migrant policies have been building toward a referendum to be held Oct. 2 in which the prime minister hopes to gather political support for his opposition to any future EU plan to resettle migrants among its member states.

Separately, Hungary is also challenging the EU in court, hoping to prevent having to temporarily take in 1,294 refugees until their asylum claims are decided.

The government's relentless referendum campaign includes a ubiquitous galaxy of anti-migrant posters, television ads, multiple daily statements and forums held by government officials and from Orban's Fidesz party, as well as a pamphlet distributed to voters warning about the alleged risks of migration.

One of the claims is that there are hundreds of "no-go" zones which "authorities are incapable of keeping under control" in cities of countries with large numbers of immigrants like Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. According to the pamphlet, "the written and unwritten norms of the host societies do not apply" in those areas.

In its own way, the Hungarian government has already achieved its goal, as many of the few hundred refugees a year granted asylum in the country prefer to leave.

The government policies "are basically condemning the refugees to homelessness and unemployment," Gyulai said. "It's no wonder that many refugees, even after they get protection here, move on toward western Europe."

Prison inmates are manufacturing razor wire used on the fences Hungary has built on its borders with Serbia and Croatia to stop the flow of migrants and refugees, in Marianosztra, Hungary, Wednesday,. Sept. 21, 2016. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced plans for a second fence on the Serbian border against a possible surge of people along the Balkan route toward western Europe but rights advocates see the barrier as Hungarys first step in the dismantling of its asylum system. (AP Photo/Andras Nagy)

A Hungarian soldier patrols at the transit zone at Hungary's southern border with Serbia near Tompa, 169 km southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Hungarian prison inmates have ramped up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants. (Sandor Ujvari/MTI via AP)

Hungarian soldiers, front, and police officers patrol the transit zone at Hungary's southern border with Serbia near Tompa, 169 km southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Hungarian prison inmates have ramped up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants. (Sandor Ujvari/MTI via AP)
Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen kill at least 11

SANAA, Yemen (AP)  Aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen struck targets in the eastern port city of Hodeida on Wednesday, killing 11 people, including women and children, Yemeni security officials said.

A dozen wounded were brought to the hospital after the raid, which left several residential areas in rubble, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to brief journalists.

Earlier, the Saudi Civil Defense said a citizen was wounded by a projectile fired from Yemen into the southern border region of Najran.

Capt. Abdelkhaliq al-Qahtani said in a statement that emergency forces responded to the incident Wednesday morning and that the wounded Saudi man was taken to the hospital for treatment.
Girl with knife at school says she feared clown attacks

ATHENS, Ga. (AP)  Police say a fearful 11-year-old Georgia girl who took a knife to school told officers she needed the weapon to fend off clowns.

The Athens Banner-Herald reports (http://bit.ly/2diYHLE) the girl was arrested Friday at Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School in Athens amid reports and social media posts about clowns frightening children in Georgia and other states.

An Athens-Clarke County police report states the girl said she needed the knife to protect her and her family because she had heard the stories about clowns jumping out of the woods and attacking children.

Police say they released the girl to her mother on a charge of possession of a weapon on school grounds.
Iraq's finance minister dismissed amid economic crisis

BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraq's parliament dismissed the finance minister after a no-confidence vote on Wednesday, a move that risks further upsetting the country's already precarious economic situation.

Hoshyar Zebari, a former foreign minister and prominent Kurdish politician, was ousted after weeks of political wrangling over corruption allegations and accusations of misuse of funds. Zebari's opponents did not file formal charges or publicize any evidence. Zebari has denied any wrongdoing.

Zebari played a key role in securing a badly needed $5.34 billion loan from International Monetary Fund in July. The IMF has established a series of benchmarks connected to the three-year loan, requiring Iraq to reduce public spending, improve collection of tax and customs revenues and fight corruption and money laundering.

FILE - In this Dec 3, 2014 file photo, Iraq's Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in Baghdad, Iraq. Iraq's parliament has dismissed the finance minister after a no-confidence vote linked to allegations of corruption and mismanagement. The removal of Zebari, a former foreign minister and prominent Kurdish politician who has denied any wrongdoing, comes as Iraq is grappling with an economic crisis driven by low oil prices and the costs of battling the Islamic State group. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)

Another $18 billion could potentially be unlocked, but each step will take longer to implement without a finance minister.

Following Zebari's dismissal Wednesday, IMF mission chief for Iraq Christian Josz said in a statement that the organization remains "committed to working with (Iraqi) authorities" to meet the benchmarks required for the loan.

Zebari is the second minister to be dismissed by parliament, which voted to fire the defense minister last month. In July the prime minister accepted the resignation of the interior minister after a bombing claimed by the Islamic State group in Baghdad killed hundreds of people.

The no-confidence vote was supported by 158 parliament members, more than the simple majority required to remove Zebari from his post. Seventy-seven voted against the measure while 14 abstained, parliament spokesman Emad al-Khafaji told The Associated Press.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called the parliament speaker earlier on Wednesday from the U.N. General Assembly in New York, asking to postpone the vote given the economic crisis, al-Khafaji said.

A number of parliamentarians said the dismissal of Zebari and the defense minister were politically-motivated, aimed at undermining al-Abadi's government. Sunni lawmaker Dhafir al-Ani said Zebari's ouster could jeopardize negotiations with the IMF. "The dismissal of Zebari will derail long-sought economic reforms," he added.
Ukraine, rebels agree to pull back troops, weapons

KIEV, Ukraine (AP)  Representatives of Ukraine and separatist rebels agreed Wednesday to pull back troops and weapons from several areas in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to shore up a fragile peace agreement.

Darka Olifer, spokeswoman for ex-President Leonid Kuchma who represents Ukraine in the so-called Contact Group, said that the agreement signed in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, applies to three specific areas and will be monitored by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

She said that the deal was signed by Kuchma, Russian representative Boris Gryzlov and OSCE envoy Martin Sajdik. Rebel representatives in the group said that the separatist leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions would honor the agreement, Olifer added.

Ukrainians carry flowers and flags as they take part in the Peace March in Kiev, Ukraine, Sept. 21, 2016, during the International Day of Peace. The placard reading "Peace to the World". (AP Photo/Sergey Chuzavkov)

The conflict in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatist rebels and Ukrainian government troops has killed more than 9,600 people since it erupted in April 2014, according to the United Nations. A February 2015 agreement in Minsk, which was brokered by France and Germany, helped end large-scale battles, but smaller clashes have continued to claim lives and a political settlement has stalled.

Wednesday's agreement follows a visit to Ukraine last week by the French and German foreign ministers, who sought to revive the fragile peace agreement.

A cease-fire declared last week has helped reduce fighting, and the pullback of troops and weapons from three locations should further stabilize the situation and serve as a model for a broader withdrawal of forces. Unlike earlier deals to withdraw artillery and armor, the new agreement also refers to troops and small arms.

"This document is intended to de-escalate the situation along the line of contact and effectively creates conditions to prevent the use of firearms," Olifer said. "Its implementation in those three areas would allow the working-out of approaches for possible separation of forces along the entire line of contact."

Last year's Minsk deal envisaged that Ukraine only regain control of the rebellious region's border with Russia after granting it special status, holding local elections there and offering amnesty to the rebels. That provision has drawn strong criticism in Ukraine, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been cautious in pushing it through parliament, fearing public anger.

Ukraine has accused Russia of failing to withdraw its troops and weapons from the east, but Moscow has denied it has any presence there. The Kremlin, in turn, has argued that Ukraine has failed to meet its end of the Minsk deal by not providing autonomy for the eastern regions and calling elections.

Speaking during a visit to Ukraine last week, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier voiced hope that the latest cease-fire would become a lasting truce and urged Ukraine to move forward on local elections, a special status for the rebel regions and an amnesty for the rebels.

Ukrainian lmilitary cadets take part in the Peace March in Kiev, Ukraine, Sept. 21, 2016, during the International Day of Peace. (AP Photo/Sergey Chuzavkov)

Ukrainian lyceum school students and military cadets stand at a memorial for soldiers killed during the Soviet war in Afghanistan as they take part in the Peace March in Kiev, Ukraine, Sept. 21, 2016, during the International Day of Peace. (AP Photo/Sergey Chuzavkov)

A girl poses for a selfie with military cadets before the Peace March in Kiev, Ukraine, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, during the International Day of Peace. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

U.S. President Barack Obama, center, greets Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko as they arrive for a luncheon during the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (Lucas Jackson/Pool Photo via AP)

Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, right, greets British Prime Minister Theresa May as he arrives for a luncheon during the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (Lucas Jackson/Pool Photo via AP)
Egypt's Coptic church criticized over el-Sissi rallies at UN

CAIRO (AP)  Egypt's Coptic Christian church is facing criticism over its role in organizing rallies in support of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi during his visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

Egypt's Christian minority, which accounts for about 10 percent of the nation's 91 million people, has strongly supported el-Sissi since he took office a year after the military, to the relief of most Christians, overthrew an elected Islamist president in 2013.

But on Wednesday, nearly 800 Christians, including authors, academics, activists and professionals, signed an online statement expressing concern about what they see as the church's deepening involvement in politics.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi speaks during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

"We stress our opposition to Egyptian churches taking the lead in mobilizing demonstrations, regardless of whether they are for or against the president. It's a departure from the rules of democracy as well as dragging religion into politics," the statement said. "We urge Egyptian churches to stay clear of politics and restrict themselves to their spiritual and religious tasks."

El-Sissi traveled to New York with a large delegation of loyal parliamentarians and media figures. Two senior Christian clerics traveled there ahead of the president and met with Egyptian Christian expatriates to urge them to take part in rallies outside el-Sissi's residence and the U.N. headquarters.

Buses were lined up outside churches in New Jersey, home to a large Egyptian Coptic community, to take them to New York city. Activists on social media described the church's role as disgraceful, while others interpreted the reliance on the Christians for the New York rallies as sectarian.

The statement said that despite the "warm" relationship between el-Sissi's government and the church, "simple" Christians, especially in rural Egypt, continue to suffer from sectarian violence and discrimination.

El-Sissi's New York visit, which included meetings with foreign leaders as well as U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is partially aimed at improving Egypt's image after it has come under criticism from rights groups and Western nations over a sweeping crackdown on dissent.

The Christian rallies  involving a few hundred people, many waving Egyptian flags or carrying posters of el-Sissi  were meant to show popular support for the president and discourage followers of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president he removed in 2013, from staging protests against his rule.

Some of the president's past foreign visits were marred by protests by Morsi supporters against his rule or assaults against loyal journalists traveling with him.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi looks at his notes after speaking at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Sinn Fein chief Adams denies he approved killing of IRA spy

DUBLIN (AP)  Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams has rejected an ex-member's accusation that Adams authorized the 2006 Irish Republican Army killing of a high-profile informant.

The BBC's Spotlight investigative program in Belfast broadcast an interview with the man making the allegation on Tuesday night but shielded his identity, citing fears the IRA might try to kill him, too.

The man, whom the BBC identified as a former member of the outlawed IRA and legal Sinn Fein who had passed intelligence tipoffs for years to British authorities, said Adams approved the 2006 killing of former Sinn Fein official Denis Donaldson.

FILE - In this Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014 file photo, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams speaks to journalists after his meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams has rejected a former informer's accusation that Adams authorized the 2006 Irish Republican Army killing of another high-profile informant. The BBC's flagship Spotlight investigative program in Belfast broadcast an interview with the man but shielded his identity, citing fears that the IRA might try to kill him too. The man said Adams approved the 2006 killing of former senior Sinn Fein official Denis Donaldson. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, file)

The BBC Spotlight documentary said senior IRA figures came under internal pressure to sanction Donaldson's killing by IRA commanders in South Armagh, a border region where suspected turncoats frequently were taken to be interrogated, tortured and slain. The man said Adams had "the final say."

Donaldson in December 2005 admitted he had secretly briefed police and British intelligence officers on IRA and Sinn Fein activities for two decades, an offense that traditionally merited the death penalty within IRA circles. But his public confession came just months after his dominant IRA faction, the Provisionals, had officially disarmed in support of peacemaking efforts.

Donaldson moved from Belfast to live alone in an isolated farmhouse with no running water or electricity in the Republic of Ireland, where police found him shot to death five months later.

Nobody ever has been charged with Donaldson's killing. A splinter group nicknamed the Real IRA claimed responsibility three years later, but suspicions have persisted that Donaldson's former colleagues in the Provisionals were responsible.

Adams said Wednesday he had no role in Donaldson's slaying and accused the BBC of reckless journalism, but stopped short of saying whether he would sue for libel.

"I very specifically and categorically and in a very unqualified way deny these allegations," Adams told Irish broadcasters RTE.

While he denies ever having been a member, every credible history of the Irish republican movement has identified him as a Provisional IRA commander since the early 1970s. The Provisionals killed nearly 1,800 people from 1970 to July 2005, when the group formally renounced violence.

Suspicions that Provisionals killed Donaldson after declaring peace threatened to derail efforts to revive a unity government for Northern Ireland. A partnership government formed jointly by Sinn Fein and leaders of Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority nonetheless has governed the United Kingdom region in relative stability since 2007.

Adams has been arrested numerous times on suspicion of involvement in IRA activities, particularly before he spearheaded the rise of Sinn Fein in the 1980s. He was interned without trial as a Provisional IRA suspect in 1972, released to serve as an IRA negotiator in brief cease-fire talks with the British government, and interned again from 1973 to 1976.

His only criminal conviction stems from his failed 1974 escape attempt from an internment camp.

He was arrested in 2014 and questioned over the IRA's 1972 abduction and slaying of a west Belfast woman branded a British army spy. Two deceased IRA members had identified Adams in audiotaped interviews as the west Belfast commander who ordered the woman to be buried in an unmarked grave. Adams denied the allegations and was released without charge.

File photo dated 09/12/2005 of Denis Donaldson,as Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams denied sanctioning the murder of the British spy in the IRA. Wednesday Sept, 21, 2016. The allegation about the 2006 killing of Denis Donaldson was made by a man who claimed he was also a paid state agent in the IRA. (Paul Faith/PA via AP)

FILE - In this Wednesday, April, 5, 2006 file photo a Garda officer stands outside the isolated home of Denis Donaldson, the former Sinn Fein member who spied for Britain, and who was murdered near Glenties, Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland. Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams has rejected a former informer's accusation that Adams authorized the 2006 Irish Republican Army killing of the high-profile informant. (AP Photo, file)
Robert Caro to receive honorary National Book Award medal

NEW YORK (AP)  Robert Caro is this year's winner of a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, given for "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters."

The 80-year-old historian, known for his epic, acclaimed biographies of former President Lyndon Johnson and municipal builder Robert Moses, was praised Wednesday by the National Book Foundation for his "exceptional work and significant impact on American literature." Previous honorees include Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo and Ursula K. Le Guin.

"Caro's in-depth and long term exploration of the lives of two prominent men makes a much larger contribution to American Letters than it might seem at first glance," Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, said in a statement. "His life's work, and his stunning prose, teaches us to better understand political influence, American democracy, and the true power of biography."

FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2016 file photo, author Robert Caro attends the East Hampton Library's 12th Annual Authors Night Benefit in East Hampton, N.Y. Caro is this year's winner of a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, given for "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." (Photo by Scott Roth/Invision/AP, File)

Caro will receive his award Nov. 16 at the annual National Book Awards ceremony and dinner benefit in Manhattan, where winners in the competitive categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature will be announced.

A longtime New York City resident, Caro is one of the world's most prominent historians even though he has published just five books. "The Power Broker," his landmark biography of Moses, is standard reading for city historians and planners and has been praised by President Barack Obama, who once said he was "mesmerized" by it. Caro's writings on Johnson, four volumes so far, are best-sellers widely read in Washington and have inspired some legislators to seek his advice.

Accepting awards has almost become routine for Caro. His resume includes two Pulitzers, a competitive National Book Award (for "Master of the Senate"), three National Book Critic Circle prizes and a National Humanities Medal, presented to him in 2010 by Obama. He won at least five awards just for his most recent Johnson book, "The Passage of Power," published in 2012.

Interviewed recently by telephone as he stood outside the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, Caro said receiving the National Book Award medal had him thinking about the "wonderful journey" of his life, an adventure joined by his wife and primary editor and researcher, Ina Caro. He spoke of being so broke while working on "The Power Broker" that he and Ina had to sell their home. For the Johnson books, he has lived in rural Texas and spent many days in Washington on Capitol Hill, where LBJ reigned in the Senate in the 1950s. He's still planning a visit to Vietnam for the next Johnson book.

"This award in particular means a great deal to me because it's getting me to remember a lot of things along the way," he said.

Caro's interview with The Associated Press was a quick break from his ongoing Johnson work. He was at the library for yet more research on a series that began 40 years ago and totals more than 3,000 pages for the first four books. He isn't ready to set a date for the fifth, and presumed last installment.

"When I first was coming to Austin there used to be scores of people in the Johnson administration who were close to Johnson. I could hardly find enough time to interview all of them," he said.
Danish Elvis fan loses 'Graceland' trademark dispute

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP)  A court in Denmark has ordered the owner of a museum modeled after Elvis Presley's Graceland Mansion to pay 500,000 kroner ($75,000) in damages to a U.S. company that owns the Graceland trademark.

Memphis, Tennessee-based GL SPE LLC sued Henrik Knudsen for using the name Graceland for his museum in Randers, in northwestern Denmark.

The Maritime and Commercial High Court in Copenhagen on Wednesday ruled in favor of the U.S. company, and ordered Knudsen to pay damages for trademark infringement.

Knudsen has since changed the name of the museum to Memphis Mansion.
Polls close in UK Labour Party's divisive leadership vote

LONDON (AP)  Voting has closed in the race to lead Britain's main opposition Labour Party  a bitter contest that pits left-wing incumbent Jeremy Corbyn against challenger Owen Smith.

Some 640,000 members and supporters had until noon Wednesday to cast ballots. The winner will be announced Saturday.

Corbyn was elected last year and has strong support from the party grassroots. But most Labour legislators think he cannot win a general election.

Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, left, at a rally for party members phoning people for their support of Corbyn in the leadership election, at the Unison headquarters in central London, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. (John Stillwell/PA via AP)

They passed a no-confidence vote in Corbyn, but he refused to resign, sparking a leadership challenge.

Corbyn says he'll try to unite the party if, as expected, he is re-elected.
The Latest: PM: UN peace fund gets half $300 million needed

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The Latest on the high-level U.N. General Assembly meetings (all times local):

11 p.m.

A U.N. fund to help prevent countries from returning to war and stay on the path to peace has received $151 million in pledges  just half of the $300 million it sought for the next three years.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

More than 25 countries announced pledges to the Peacebuilding Fund at a conference Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting.

Despite falling short, the U.N. said the money pledged is enough to keep the fund in operation while it seeks solutions for long-term funding.

Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told the closing session that sustaining peace "is a task more critical than ever" and he urged all countries to make sure the fund has the money it needs.

The Peacebuilding Fund currently supports more than 120 projects in 25 countries. The U.N. said Wednesday's pledges will provide money for projects in more than 20 countries.

___

8:30 p.m.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina says her country is battling a wave of terrorism and is taking steps to stand up to extremism and fight radicalization at home.

Hasina, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly gathering in New York, said officials are dealing with "local fringe elements" who have drawn inspiration from "certain international terrorist entities" and that no country seems immune to such attacks.

Some have accused Bangladesh's secular government of turning a blind eye to the possibility of outsiders radicalizing elements in the Muslim-majority nation.

In July, a group of Islamist militants seized control of a cafe popular with expatriates in Dhaka, the capital, killing 20, including 17 foreigners. After a long standoff, six extremists were killed.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Bangladesh authorities rejected the claims, saying the jihadi group based in the Middle East has no presence in the country.

"I am confident, with our people's resilience and support, we will make sure terrorists will have no place in our soil," Hasina said.

___

3:50 p.m.

The U.N. Security Council is urging all parties in Congo to end violent clashes and open a peaceful political dialogue on the holding of presidential elections.

The council on Wednesday strongly condemned the violence, which it said has led to the death of at least 32 people, including four police officers.

Congo's government has said at least 17 were killed Monday in clashes between security forces and demonstrators opposed to President Joseph Kabila extending his term.

Tensions have risen as indications have increased that Kabila will stay in office after his term legally ends in December.

The statement approved by all 15 council members stressed "the crucial importance of peaceful, credible, inclusive, transparent and timely presidential elections, in accordance with the constitution."

___

3:45 p.m.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says that there is no room in the 21st Century society for discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Speaking at the opening of the first high-level meeting organized by U.N.'s LGBT core group on the sidelines of the General Assembly Wednesday, Ban said he has been criticized by many people including U.N. member states for his advocacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, but it is a price he prepared to pay.

"Several countries are bucking the tide of history with draconian new punishments for being gay  or even just talking about being gay," Ban said. "These abuses will only end when countries take concrete steps to protect people."

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet attended the meeting.

___

3:30 p.m.

World leaders have approved a wide-ranging declaration aimed at addressing the rising number of drug-resistant infections  something the World Health Organization says has the potential to kill millions and undermine the global economy, likening it to "a slow-motion tsunami."

The declaration approved Wednesday recognizes the size of the problem and encourages countries to develop plans to cut back on antibiotic use, make better use of vaccines and fund development of new drugs to combat Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which currently claims the lives of an estimated 700,000 people each year and is expected to rise sharply.

"This is already an historical moment for countries of the world. Heads of states and heads of governments agreed to address a neglected issue," WHO Director General Margaret Chan said.

___

2:35 p.m.

President Barack Obama is praising the peace accord in Colombia as an "achievement of historic proportions."

Obama says the U.S. is proud to have played a modest part in encouraging the talks that led to the breakthrough deal to end the Western hemisphere's longest-running war.

Obama noted the deal faces challenges in implementation, including approval by the Colombian people in an October referendum.

Obama made the remarks at a meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. The leaders met on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly gathering in New York.

Santos presented Obama with a bound copy of the agreement and thanked the American president for supporting the process.

Santos says U.S. deserves some credit for an agreement that will change both Colombia and the larger region.

__

2:10 p.m.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is strongly criticizing suppression of protests by archrival India in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Sharif called Wednesday for an independent inquiry into extra-judicial killings and a U.N. fact-finding mission to investigate what he termed "brutalities."

The South Asian nations' dispute over Kashmir is a perennial topic that surfaced at the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N.

Tensions have intensified since the July 8 killing of a popular Kashmir rebel commander by Indian soldiers. More than 80 people have been killed in the protests. India accuses Pakistan of supporting rebels in Indian-held Kashmir.

Sharif called for dialogue with India over their Kashmir dispute, and said Pakistan was ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty between them.

___

2:05 p.m.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says the mandate of the U.N. to uphold world peace is being threatened by North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Abe devoted about half of his address to the General Assembly on Wednesday on the topic of North Korea, which earlier this month conducted its fifth nuclear test in defiance of repeated Security Council resolutions intended to constrain its weapons development.

Abe said North Korea this year fired three missiles into Japan's exclusive economic zone and it was a matter of luck that no ships or aircraft were damaged.

He said after the recent nuclear test the North Korean threat is increasingly grave, and urged unity in the council to confront it.

Abe said, "We must concentrate our strengths and thwart North Korea's plans."

___

1:55 p.m.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is lambasting Russia for being "the instigator and major participant" in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Addressing the 71st session of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, Poroshenko accused Russia of "financing, sponsorship, and coordination of terrorist groups which have committed countless crimes against my compatriots."

"The terrorist component of the undeclared hybrid war that Russia wages against Ukraine is evident," he stressed.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatist rebels and Ukrainian government troops has killed more than 9,600 people since it erupted in April 2014, according to the United Nations.

Representatives of Ukraine and separatist rebels agreed Wednesday to pull back troops and weapons from several areas in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to uphold a fragile peace agreement reached in February 2015 in Minsk.

___

1:50 p.m.

Former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi is making her first speech at the U.N. General Assembly since she formed a democratically elected government in Myanmar.

Suu Kyi says that when the people of Myanmar voted to elect her party to lead a new civilian government last November, shifting from decades of military rule, they were exercising their right to fashion their dreams and aspirations for their country.

She says national reconciliation in the country also known as Burma  an ethnically diverse country riven by long-running civil conflict  is her government's highest priority.

Suu Kyi says that Myanmar does not fear international scrutiny of the situation in Rakhine state where there have been sectarian tensions between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims.

___

1:30 p.m.

A senior Saudi official is warning that any attempt by the U.S. government to hold his country responsible in connection with elements of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center could backfire.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud also told the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday that the desert kingdom sees "a good relation with Iran," amid heightened tensions between the two neighbors.

U.S. Congress this month sent President Barack Obama a bipartisan bill that gives victims' families the right to sue in U.S. court for any role that elements of the Saudi government may have played in the 2001 attacks. Obama has signaled he will veto the bill.

Al-Saud said any such law "will have negative repercussions," without going into detail.

_____

12:20 p.m.

Afghanistan says "merciless attacks from terrorist groups" against its civilians are being planned and organized on Pakistani territory.

Vice President Sarwar Danesh told the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday that Afghanistan has repeatedly asked Pakistan to destroy known terrorist safe havens but there's been no change in the situation.

Danesh said the Taliban and Haqqani network are trained, equipped and financed there. He said Pakistan has a dual policy, discriminating between what it views as "good and bad terrorists," which undermines the international order.

Danesh said the government was leaving the door open to armed groups willing to seek peace. He said such an agreement is about to be signed with the Hezb-e-Islami group whose leader, Gulbuddin Helmatyar, is a U.S.-designated terrorist.

Pakistan contends that it too is a victim of terrorism.

_____

11:45 a.m.

President Barack Obama says Africa has faced stiff economic headwinds in recent years but that the continent's broader trajectory is unmistakable. He says "Africa is on the move."

Obama is speaking at a U.S.-Africa Business Forum on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. He's touting increased U.S. private sector investment in Africa along with U.S. government efforts to support trade and commerce.

The White House says participants in the forum are pledging to make $9.1 billion in support available for trade and investment in areas like construction, energy, transportation and health care in Africa.

Obama says Africa is essential to America's progress and to the entire world. But he says current efforts to expand economic ties are "just scratching the surface."

_____

11:30 a.m.

Colombia's peace accord is standing out as a bright spot for a troubled Latin America at the high-level U.N. General Assembly gathering.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos basked in world praise as he formally submitted the peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to the U.N. Security Council.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that "in a time of armed conflicts in many other paces, peace in Colombia sends a powerful message of hope in the world." He praised Santos for his "vision and determination."

Santos received a warm embrace from Venezuelan Ambassador Rafael Ramirez after the ceremony.

Earlier in the week, Latin America's bitter divisions were on display when Venezuela and six other Latin America countries walked out as Brazilian President Michel Temer addressed the General Assembly, protesting the impeachment of his predecessor.

____

10:50 a.m.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says his country's people are "holding their breath" as they watch the U.S. presidential campaign.

But Abe declined to say who he'd prefer to see win in November.

Abe is in New York for the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations. He held a 50-minute meeting Monday in New York with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Speaking at an event organized by Reuters news agency, Abe urged U.S. politicians to explain to Americans the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

President Barack Obama wants Congress to approve the deal, but both Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump oppose it.

___

10:30 a.m.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is urging continued international commitment to a Korean peninsula free of nuclear arms, in comments alluding to the recent testing of an atomic weapon by its North Korean ally.

Li urged new efforts to "reach a comprehensive political solution on the Korean nuclear issue," in comments to the U.N. General Assembly.

Beijing has long been North Korea's main source of aid and diplomatic support. But it is showing growing frustration with Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons in defiance of foreign pressure.

____

10:15 a.m.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe railed against Western sanctions, urging the United States, United Kingdom and their allies to abolish them.

The 92-year-old leader said that while his country is "the innocent victim of spiteful sanctions," it cannot proceed with the implementation of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

The U.S. has imposed targeted sanctions against Mugabe and 97 others, citing human rights abuses and evidence of electoral fraud. The EU, Australia and Canada also have imposed similar sanctions.

The U.S. also gives humanitarian assistance to Zimbabwe.

____

9:30 a.m.

The U.N. Security Council has taken up Syria's civil war as a temporary truce collapses and international tensions rise.

A day after the U.S., Russia and other powers sought to keep the week-old cease-fire alive, the same set of characters debated the conflict in open setting.

Moscow backs Syrian President Bashar Assad's government; Washington supports what it deems "moderate" rebels. Both say they're committed to fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

A relief organization reported five medical staff killed in an airstrike in northern Syria Wednesday.

It was the latest attack on humanitarian workers.

A strike on a Syrian Red Crescent aid convoy earlier this week promoted international condemnation. The U.N. called it a deliberate attack. U.S. officials say they believe Russia carried out the strike. Russia denies responsibility.

___

9 a.m.

The Paris Agreement on climate change has topped the required 55 ratifications  but the countries that have formally joined don't account for the minimum 55 percent of global emissions needed for the deal to enter into force.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced at the end of a special event that with 31 more countries handing over their official documents on Wednesday, there are now 60 parties that have ratified the deal representing over 47.5 percent of global emissions.

"We have crossed one of the two thresholds," Ban said. "We need 7.5 percent more."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he is confident of reaching the magic number of 55 percent before the next U.N. climate conference, which starts Nov. 7 in Marrakech, Morocco.

He urged people everywhere "to become warriors for the planet."

Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos Calderon addresses the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Afghanistan's Vice President Sarwar Danesh addresses the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

United States Secretary of State John Kerry, left, shakes hands with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during a ceremony to mark more signatories to the Paris climate accords at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama addresses the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Mexico's Secretary of Environment and Natural ResourcesRafael Pacchiano Alaman, left, presents his country's agreement of the Paris Agreement on climate change, to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

United States Secretary of State John Kerry addresses a high-level event on the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change during the 71st session of the U.N. General Assembly at U.N. Headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)
Two young New Hampshire mothers have been arrested at a mall after police say they appeared drunk and were 'barely able to stand' to care for their babies.

According to law enforcement officials in Salem, one of the women was seen lying in a puddle while holding her child above her head.

Police say the drunken duo acknowledged they consumed alcohol when they were found in a parking lot at the Mall at Rockingham Park on Monday evening. Both were charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

Moms charged: These booking photos show Baylie Lecolst (left) and Amber Giordano (right), who were arrested at a New Hampshire mall because they were 'barely able to stand' or care for their babies

Baylie Lecolst, 22, and 24-year-old Amber Giordano, of Hampstead, were released on bail and are scheduled to be arraigned October 31.

The suspects' infant children, a one-month-old and a four-month-old, were released to the custody of family members.

Police officers responded to the Salem mall at around 6.15pm Monday after getting a call from a shopper about two seemingly inebriated women with babies in the parking lot.

Capt. Joel Dolan, of the Salem Police Department, told the station WMUR one of the suspects was found lying on the ground in a dirty puddle consisting of grease and water.

Feisty: During their arrest, police say Giordano and Lecolst, pictured left with her baby and right with her boyfriend, were uncooperative and belligerent

During their arrest, police say the two moms were uncooperative and belligerent, refusing to provide their addresses and hurling insults at some of the officers. As a result, their booking process took nearly four hours.
Leonie Pretorius

21 September 2016





Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba is calling for Basotho nationals living in SA to regularise their stay by 30 September.

Undocumented Lesotho citizens living in South Africa have been urged to take advantage of the remaining days to regularise their stay in South Africa before the deadline.

Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba says residents have until the end of September to submit applications.

The Lesotho permit initiative is a special dispensation for Lesotho nationals who work study or do business in South Africa and arrived in the country before 30 September 2015.

The permit initiative was launched in February 2016 and will expire in December 2019.

Gigaba says they have simplified the application process.

Labels: Deadline looms for Lesotho nationals living in SA
Stalled front and tropical storm deluge roads, close schools

NORFOLK, Va. (AP)  Flooding in coastal Virginia and North Carolina blocked roads and forced school closings Wednesday that affected for more than 100,000 students.

A stalled weather system and the remnants of Tropical Storm Julia have brought days of rain and localized flooding to the region.

The rain is expected to continue into Thursday. The U.S. Navy authorized a 2-hour delay Thursday morning for its non-essential personnel at military installations throughout the Hampton Roads region.

Cars stall out in floodwater on Effinghman Street in Portsmouth, Va.,, as others drive by in a steady rain, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. A stalled weather system and the remnants of Tropical Storm Julia have brought days of rain and localized flooding to the region through Wednesday. (Steve Earley/The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

National Weather Service Meteorologist Matt Scalora said late Wednesday afternoon that anywhere from 9 inches to 16 inches fell over the region during a 72-hour period. He added that the rainfall broke records for individual dates on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Forecasters predicted the heaviest of the rain would end by Wednesday evening. The rain is expected to continue for much of Thursday before Julia's remnants drift out to sea by the following day.

Local media reported impassable roadways and highway ramps throughout the region Wednesday. Major school districts in Virginia's south Hampton Roads region canceled classes. So did two North Carolina counties, Currituck and Gates.

Officials in Chowan County, North Carolina, reported on a website that at least two roads were washed out along with water lines serving 150 customers. Several others roads are impassable. Between five to 10 inches of rain has fallen there.

In Currituck County, Emergency Management Director Mary Beth Newns wrote in an email that several buildings had been flooded.

In Virginia Beach, resident Todd Solomon said he's never seen rainstorms close schools without a hurricane bearing down.

Solomon lives in a flood-prone neighborhood. He said water flooded his backyard up to his house's foundation but failed to enter the home. He said his neighborhood has fared pretty well, considering.

"A lot of parents were pretty surprised," said Solomon who has a child in middle school. "The kids are pretty happy. They were texting, saying hey what are we going to do today? It was like summer or the weekend."

Virginia Beach police officer R. Ellis directs a resident how to get back to his home at the closure point on Sandbridge Road in Virginia Beach, Va., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. A stalled weather system and the remnants of Tropical Storm Julia have brought days of rain and localized flooding to the region through Wednesday. (Vicki Cronis-Nohe/The Virginian-Pilot via AP)
US grants Airbus, Boeing a chance to sell airplanes to Iran

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  The U.S. government granted aviation giants Airbus and Boeing permission on Wednesday to sell aircraft to Iran following last year's nuclear accord.

European airplane manufacturer Airbus announced the license from the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control early Wednesday. Chicago-based Boeing followed with its own announcement later in the day.

The approval clears the way for the two plane manufacturers to access one of the last untapped aviation markets in the world. Both companies have announced separate $25-billion deals to sell aircraft to airlines in the country, although analysts are skeptical that there is demand for so many jets or available financing.

FILE -- In this March 2, 2008 file photo, two passenger planes of Iran's national air carrier, Iran Air, are parked at the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, Iran. Airbus announced Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, that the U.S. government has granted it a license allowing it to sell the first 17 planes involved in a landmark deal with Iran. Most Iranian planes were purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Islamists to power. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)

The deal would be the biggest for an American company since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and U.S. Embassy takeover.

The announcements come as Iranian and U.S. leaders are in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and shows that the outgoing administration of President Barack Obama is honoring the economic terms of the nuclear pact.

Though based abroad, Airbus needed the approval of the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control for the deal because at least 10 percent of the manufacturer's components are of American origin.

Airbus applied for two licenses to cover its deal with Iran to ensure the fast delivery of some of the aircraft, Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon told The Associated Press. The license announced Wednesday covers the first 17 planes involved in the deal, which will be A320s and A330s, he said.

Dubon said Airbus hoped to receive a second license allowing it to sell the remaining planes to Iran soon.

Iran's U.N. mission did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. State television referred to an AP report on the sale.

Iran's nuclear deal with world powers, which limits its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions, specifically allowed for the purchase of aircraft and parts. That's set off a race between airplane manufacturers for the newly opened market, home to 80 million people.

In January, national carrier Iran Air signed agreements to buy 118 planes from Airbus, estimated to be worth some 22.8 billion euros ($25 billion). On Sunday, state TV reported that Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan, a deputy transportation minister, said Iran would cut the number of Airbus planes to 112.

Base model A320s are listed at an average of $98 million, while A330s start at $231.5 million. That puts the value of the approved 17 aircraft in the first license around at least $1.8 billion and possibly much higher based on list prices, though buyers typically negotiate sizable discounts for bulk orders.

Under Boeing's deal, Iran Air will buy 80 aircraft with a total list price of $17.6 billion, with deliveries beginning in 2017 and running until 2025. Iran Air also will lease 29 new Boeing 737s. In a statement, Boeing spokesman Marc Sklar said "we have received that license and remain in talks with Iran Air" based on the memorandum of agreement reach in June.

The Boeing deal has been criticized by American lawmakers over Iran's "pernicious behavior," including launching ballistic missiles, firing rockets near U.S. warships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz and briefly detaining American sailors who strayed into its territorial waters.

The U.S. presidential election could also have an effect on the sales. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to tear up the nuclear deal if elected this November.

Most Iranian planes were purchased before the Islamic Revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Islamists to power. Out of Iran's 250 commercial planes, 162 were flying in June, while the rest were grounded due to lack of spare parts.

Iran Air, whose website lists 43 airplanes in its fleet, says it has direct flights to over 30 international destinations, including London.

___

Online:

Airbus: www.airbus.com

Boeing Co.: www.boeing.com

Iran Air: www.iranair.com

___

Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, Scott Mayerowitz in New York and Adam Schreck contributed to this report.

___
New class of pampered purebred dogs emerges in Cuba

HAVANA (AP)  Lourdes Ortega spent nine years castrating cattle and ridding pigs of parasites until a chronic nerve disease forced her out of veterinary medicine, leaving her struggling for two decades to raise three sons as a single mother on disability.

Then opportunity appeared in the form of a year-old Chihuahua named Macorina.

A university professor who worked nights hired Ortega to feed, walk and groom Macorina in 2013 for $28 a month, more than the average state salary. The little dog became the first client of a flourishing small business once unimaginable in Cuba. Today Ortega's three-room Havana home is a sea of squirming, yipping beagles, Chihuahuas and dachshunds, bringing in enough income to keep Ortega's family fed and to build new rooms to house more dogs.

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, a cat and dog sleep at the home of Lourdes Ortega who works to care for the pets of owners who go out of town in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Sept. 19, 2016. Dozens of dog salons, boutiques and purebred puppy sellers have cropped up across Havana in recent years, creating hundreds of jobs and a series of small reminders of the widening income gap in a society that strived for decades to be a land of absolute equality. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

Cuba's growing upper-middle class has a thing for fancy dogs, and is spending relatively big sums to pamper them. Dozens of dog salons, boutiques and purebred puppy sellers have cropped up across Havana in recent years, creating hundreds of jobs and a series of small reminders of the widening income gap in a society that strived for decades to be a land of absolute equality.

"There are a lot of people who've traveled overseas, who've opened business and who have had better economic opportunities," Ortega said. "This is really a service for people with means, one that most Cubans don't have access to."

"It's really a new way of thinking in our country," she said.

A handful of organizations work to spay and neuter street dogs and find homes for their offspring, but Cubans with means prefer to spend between $100 and $300 on purebred puppies sold by word of mouth or on classified websites that advertise breeds ranging from American Staffordshire terrier to Pomeranian. In a country where cars and new homes are out of touch for even the prosperous, a purebred dog is an affordable status symbol that offers a return on investment in the form of future puppies to sell.

On Monday morning, a line of about a dozen people cradling mostly purebreds stretched out the door of Luis Chow Chow, a full-service breeder and groomer in the working-class neighborhood of El Cerro.

Owner Luis Aguiar said the family-run business saw between 40 and 50 animals a day for services ranging from ear-cleaning to washing and brushing.

In the back of the line stood Yasmil Fernandez, 27, and Ernesto Borges, 26, a couple who run a design and marketing firm for private business owners out of their apartment. Fernandez cradled Luca, a teacup-size 45-day old Rottweiler puppy who nipped at her gold chain as they waited.

The dog cost $100 when they bought him last week, Borges explained, but the breeder had left him malnourished and upkeep was not going to be a matter of simply feeding him table scraps.

"For this one, we need to buy meat," Borges said.

Aguiar charges about a dollar for routine visits, within the means of Cubans who have private-sector jobs or help from relatives overseas. For the wealthier, there are special services like home grooming visits than run up to $10 per session.

"People are tending toward purebred dogs and that brings with it a whole care regimen that's more involved than with mixed-breeds," Aguiar said. "Cubans in general are starting to realize what a dog is worth."

_____

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, dog owners wait for their turn at a vet in Havana, Cuba. A handful of organizations work to spay and neuter street dogs and find homes for their offspring, but Cubans with means prefer to spend between $100 and $300 on purebred puppies sold by word of mouth or on classified websites. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, a man holds his Labrador named Nemo as a vet attends his dog at a clinic in Havana, Cuba. Cuba's growing upper-middle class is spending relatively big sums to pamper their dogs. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, dog breeder and groomer Luis Aguilar, also know as "Luis Chow Chow," attends to his four Chow Chow dogs at his home in Havana, Cuba. Aguilar said the family-run business sees between 40 and 50 animals a day for services ranging from ear-cleaning to washing and brushing. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, Angela waits for her turn with her dog at a vet in Havana, Cuba. Cuba's growing upper-middle class is spending relatively big sums to pamper their dogs. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, Lourdes Ortega sits at home where she works to care for people's pets in Havana, Cuba. A university professor who worked nights hired Ortega to feed, walk and groom her Chihuahua in 2013 for $28 a month, more than the average state salary, becoming the first client of a flourishing small business once unimaginable in Cuba. Today Ortega is bringing in enough income to keep her family fed and able to build new rooms to house more dogs. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

Siberian Huskies named Yara, sitting, and Dona, are taken for a walk by their owners in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. In a country where cars and new homes are out of touch for even the prosperous, a purebred dog is an affordable status symbol that offers a return on investment in the form of future puppies to sell. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)

In this Sept. 19, 2016 photo, Yanet Torres holds her Xoloitzcuintle, or Mexican Hairless Dog, as she waits for their turn at a vet in Havana, Cuba. Cuba's growing upper-middle class is spending relatively big sums to pamper their dogs. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)
Post-Ebola, West Africans flock back to bushmeat, with risk

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP)  As the deadly outbreak of Ebola has subsided, people in several West African countries are flocking to eat bushmeat again after restrictions were lifted on the consumption of wild animals like hedgehogs and cane rats. But some health experts call it a risky move.

Ivory Coast, which neighbors two of the three countries where Ebola killed more than 11,300 people since December 2013, lifted its ban on wild animal meat this month.

The meat of squirrel, deer, fruit bats and rats has long been a key source of protein for many in the region, but it is also a potential source of the Ebola virus.

FILE-In this file photo taken on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014, Yaa Kyarewaa, await clients as she stands next to her makeshift bush meat shop at one of the largest local markets in Accra, Ghana. As the deadly outbreak of Ebola has subsided, people in several West African countries are flocking to eat bush meat again after restrictions were lifted on the consumption of wild animals like hedgehogs and cane rats. But some health experts call it a risky move. (AP Photo/Christian Thompson, File)

Though bushmeat hasn't officially been linked to West Africa's recent Ebola outbreak, the deadliest in history, infections in Africa have been associated with hunting, butchering and processing meat from infected animals, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The Ebola virus is then spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of victims or corpses.

"From a public health standpoint, this decision is unfortunate at best," said Ben Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. "The only source of Ebola in the world is infected animals, and there's good evidence that some of these animals, like bats, can be infected for a long time."

However, not all bushmeat is equal, he said. Bats pass on the virus and travel far. Some types of rodents can get the virus. Primate meat is likely not as much of a danger, given that they succumb to Ebola more quickly than people.

"There's a good case for banning the sale of bats as bushmeat. The other sources are a lesser risk," Neuman said. "I don't want to see it all legal, but we don't want to see people go hungry, either."

Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana all warned against, or banned, the sale of bushmeat in 2014 as the outbreak emerged. They began rolling back those restrictions after the World Health Organization said in March that Ebola was no longer an international health emergency.

Many in the countries are happy that they can now enjoy the meat they have always relied on. Some believe it is tastier than imported meats or chicken, and it's often cheaper.

"We weren't happy that the government banned us from eating bushmeat these past two years. But we did what we were told because of Ebola," said Lucien Douhan while shopping for bushmeat in the Yopougon suburb of Abidjan.

In the teeming open-air markets, vendors handled the stiffened meat in recognizable animal form. Bat wings competed for space on worn wooden tables with other meat, some tails and claws still attached. Flies buzzed. A machete hacked.

Those who sell the meat say they have been through hard times.

"We couldn't afford for our kids to go to school. It was hard for us. We had to sell frogs so the kids could eat, and we sold snails too," said Brigitte Gahie. "But today, thanks be to God, the meat is back and the people are coming back."

In Guinea, bushmeat sales are still illegal, said Mohamed Tall, the minister of livestock and animal production there. Despite the ban, people still consume it.

"We ate it before Ebola. We eat it after Ebola. Nothing can stop me from eating it," said Marcel Yombouno in Guinea.

Liberia issued a warning against the consumption of bushmeat during Ebola, but now the meat is being sold openly. In Sierra Leone, a bushmeat ban has been lifted.

Ebola first appeared in 1976 in Congo and has caused periodic outbreaks there and in other African countries. Its re-emergence is likely, said Neuman, given the densely populated areas where Ebola has occurred.

"Ebola will come again," he said. "Hopefully we will be ready this time."

___
Bridge executive: News release on lane closures was bogus

NEWARK, N.J. (AP)  The head of the agency that operates the George Washington Bridge testified Wednesday a former colleague charged with causing gridlock for political retribution tried to persuade him to keep traffic lanes closed because it was "important to Trenton," which he took to mean Republican Gov. Chris Christie's office.

Patrick Foye later acknowledged during cross-examination he approved sending press releases promoting a false story about the traffic jams.

Foye's testimony put the focus on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the bridge and New York-area airports, tunnels, transit hubs and the World Trade Center.

Bill Baroni leaves court, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Bill Baroni, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey official, and Bridget Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, are charged with civil rights violations, conspiracy and wire fraud. Prosecutors say they caused the traffic jams by reducing the number of access lanes to the bridge from three to one without notifying Fort Lee officials. (Viorel Florescu/The Record via AP)

Foye, the agency's executive director, put a stop to the four days of September 2013 traffic jams in Fort Lee that the government has charged were part of a political vendetta against the town's Democratic mayor for not endorsing Christie for re-election.

He described ordering the reopening of the lanes on Sept. 13, 2013, after receiving reports of massive gridlock for days. Later that day, he testified, he met twice with deputy executive director Bill Baroni, Christie's top appointee to the agency.

Baroni and Christie's former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly, are accused of reducing access lanes to the bridge and face fraud, conspiracy and civil rights charges. They have pleaded not guilty and have said the government has twisted federal law to turn their actions into crimes. They also have said other people with more power and influence were involved in the lane closures but aren't being prosecuted.

Baroni asked Foye at both meetings to close the lanes again because it was "important to Trenton," Foye testified. Foye said he took that to mean Christie's office, which was located there. Foye also testified Baroni told him Christie's senior staff had been briefed.

Christie isn't charged and has denied knowledge of the plan until well after it was put into action. However, prosecutors said in opening statements Monday that jurors would hear testimony that people bragged about the scheme to Christie on the third day of the four days of closures.

During often testy cross-examination Wednesday, defense attorneys tried to show Foye knew about the closures earlier than he said and waited a day to stop them so he could "swoop in and look like a hero."

Pressed by attorney Michael Critchley, representing Kelly, Foye admitted approving shortly after the closures press releases that he knew outlined a false narrative  that the reduction of bridge access lanes in Fort Lee was part of a traffic study.

"When the buck came to you, you allowed a false press release to go out?" Critchley asked.

"The statement wasn't true. I let it go out, yes," Foye responded.

Earlier Wednesday, Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich testified he initially denied the lane closures were political payback because he was afraid the governor's administration would torpedo a building project in his town. The bridge, one of the busiest in the world, crosses the Hudson River and connects Fort Lee and New York City.

Sokolich wrote a letter to the editor of The Star-Ledger newspaper in November 2013, after the election, saying media reports of political retaliation were "simply not true."

That clashed with his testimony Tuesday, when he said he had "strong suspicions" that was indeed the case when Baroni and others didn't respond to his repeated requests for help during the lane closures.

"Which was the lie?" Critchley asked Sokolich on cross-examination.

"You just read it," Sokolich responded, referring to the letter.

Later, during redirect by the government, Sokolich explained, saying, "I was petrified of further retribution. I wanted to do everything possible to keep the borough of Fort Lee out of this story. That was what I viewed as my primary function as mayor."

Testimony is scheduled to resume Thursday with two Port Authority employees, including one who witnessed the meetings between Foye and Baroni, and a former Christie campaign worker who sought Sokolich's endorsement.

Bridget Kelly enters the courthouse for the start of the trial, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Bill Baroni, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey official, and Bridget Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, are charged with civil rights violations, conspiracy and wire fraud. Prosecutors say they caused the traffic jams by reducing the number of access lanes to the bridge from three to one without notifying Fort Lee officials. (Chris Pedota/The Record via AP)

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich arrives at Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Court for a hearing, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Newark, N.J. Three years after gridlock paralyzed a New Jersey town next to the George Washington Bridge for four days, two former allies of Gov. Chris Christie are being tried. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, leaves the courthouse, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Sokolich, the Democratic mayor who prosecutors say was targeted by two former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie for a political vendetta told jurors Tuesday how he was courted by Christie staffers for more than three years before ultimately declining to endorse Christie's re-election. (Viorel Florescu/The Record via AP)

Bridget Anne Kelly and her attorney Michael Critchley, far left, arrive at the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Courthouse in Newark, N.J., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Kelly and Bill Baroni are charged with causing traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge in September 2013. Kelly was Christie's deputy chief of staff. Baroni was an executive at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. (Danielle Parhizkaran/Northjersey.com via AP)
The Latest: Lawyer: Bombing suspect needs access to attorney

NEW YORK (AP)  The Latest on explosive devices being found in New York and New Jersey (all times local):

10:10 a.m.

A federal defender is complaining that bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami has not had access to a lawyer since he was arrested in New Jersey on Monday.

FILE - In this Monday, Sept. 19, 2016 file photo, Ahmad Khan Rahami is taken into custody after a shootout with police in Linden, N.J. Rahami, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan has been charged by federal officials in two states with planting bombs in New York and at a military charity run and train station in New Jersey. Rahami remained hospitalized Tuesday, Sept. 20, after a shootout the day before with police in New Jersey. (Nicolaus Czarnecki/The Boston Herald via AP)

David E. Patton said in a letter to a federal judge Tuesday night that Rahami has been held and questioned by federal law enforcement agents since his arrest.

Federal terrorism charges were filed against Rahami on Tuesday night.

Authorities say Rahami planted bombs in New York City and New Jersey over the weekend.

Rahami was wounded in a shootout with police and is in a hospital in New Jersey.

Patton says his office is available to meet with Rahami in New Jersey and represent him at a telephone or videoconference appearance.

___

1 a.m.

Federal prosecutors say bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami bought components online and recorded a video of himself igniting a blast in a backyard. They say he vowed in a handwritten jihad journal that "the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets."

Court complaints filed Tuesday give a chilling glimpse into what authorities say motivated the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives last weekend in New York and New Jersey. One bomb injured 31 people in Manhattan.

The blasts came two years after the FBI looked into him but found nothing tying him to terrorism.

Rahami remains hospitalized with gunshot wounds from a shootout with police that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, New Jersey.

It's not immediately clear whether Rahami has a lawyer who can comment on the charges.

FILE - This September 2016 file photo provided by Union County Prosecutor's Office shows Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is in custody as a suspect in the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey. Rahami worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, N.J. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor. Rahami remained hospitalized Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, after a shootout the day before with police in New Jersey. (Union County Prosecutor's Office via AP, File)
Police: Syrian held in Germany had contact with IS recruiter

BERLIN (AP)  A 16-year-old Syrian refugee who was arrested in western Germany had contact with a recruiter for the Islamic State group and instructions for making explosives, authorities said Wednesday.

The unnamed suspect was detained Tuesday by a tactical response team at a refugee shelter in Cologne's eastern district of Porz, after fellow migrants and a local mosque raised concerns about the teen's behavior.

Records on the suspect's phone showed he had communicated with a person abroad linked to the Islamic State group "who wanted to win the young Syrian over for Islamist activities," police said.

Investigators found that the teen had chatted about when Muslims are allowed to kill somebody, received instructions on how to construct an explosive device and discussed traveling to the Middle East.

The suspect also expressed "unmistakable willingness" to carry out an attack, said Cologne police official Klaus-Stephan Becker.

The city's police chief said that the suspect was first registered in Germany together with his parents and sister in January 2015. Juergen Mathies said the teen appeared to have come from a "good home" and that his parents were academics who had lived in Damascus before fleeing the civil war in Syria.

The suspect was questioned three times by police in recent months following tips from social workers, fellow refugees and a Cologne mosque that suggested the teen had undergone a rapid process of radicalization.

German authorities are on alert for possible extremists who might have entered the country as part of the influx of migrants in recent years.
Negative online reviews are double-edge sword for businesses

NEW YORK (AP)  It is a double-edged cybersword: a negative review of a restaurant or other business, posted for the world to see.

Anyone who peruses Yelp!, TripAdvisor, Google and companies' own websites can see complaints about bad food, surly sales associates, late deliveries or defective merchandise. But some business owners, even when they are chagrined or embarrassed, regard a bad review as valuable information that will help them improve.

Jeff Gates, who co-owns eight restaurants in the Boston area, says online reviews give him a steady flow of feedback and likens them to the comment cards few diners fill out. He reads and responds to every post, and consults with staffers to understand what worked and what didn't.

Jeff Gates, who co-owns eight restaurants in the Boston area, poses at his Gaslight restaurant in the South End neighborhood, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Boston. Gates, who personally answers his restaurants' online reviews, estimates he's replied to about 4,000 patrons since the online review website Yelp got started. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

"If multiple people are picking up on the same issue, that's something we really want to focus on," says Gates, whose restaurants include Aquitaine and Gaslight Brasserie.

Some negative reviews may be inevitable, especially with a business that has hundreds of customer interactions each day. Miscommunications can lead to mistakes, restaurants can be short-staffed and businesses do fall down on the job.

Gates also looks at who's leaving the reviews. If there's a pattern of skewering restaurants, it could be a customer who can't be satisfied. Jim Turner, who owns Turner's Seafood restaurants in Melrose and Salem, Massachusetts, says he knows customers who have too much to drink and are asked to lower the volume will post complaints about how they were treated.

"You have to accept that everybody is going to have that, everybody is going to have those customers," says Turner, who responds to each review privately.

Negative reviews can be irritating, Turner says, but because they point out issues like poor service, they spur him to address any problems, which in turn lifts the restaurants' ratings.

Owners who contact reviewers are sometimes able to get a bad review updated and improved. But even businesses that take a constructive attitude can find it difficult or even impossible to get a review removed. They can appeal to site operators, but most reviews stand.

Some angry businesses owners have sued people who wrote the reviews, but unless they can prove they were libeled because of false information, they're not likely to win. Some businesses have also sued sites like Yelp!, but also unsuccessfully. Last week, a federal appeals court ruled against an owner who contended that Yelp! should be held responsible for a negative review.

Lawmakers are taking steps to protect reviewers and review sites. The House has passed a bill that would prevent businesses from requiring customers to sign agreements that they won't post negative reviews. A similar Senate version passed last year, so the two will have to be reconciled before the measure goes to the president. A law outlawing such agreements took effect in California last year.

Brandon Gerson, who oversees marketing for Hudson Allergy, a medical practice in New York, actually considers reviews part of that strategy. Patients are given tablet computers and encouraged to write reviews before they leave the office. If they're unhappy with any aspect of the practice, they get a response.

Shirley George Frazier says she's posted five negative assessments among about 50 reviews of restaurants, hotels and other businesses. She says reading customer reviews help her make informed decisions, and hopes negative reviews will motivate business managers to correct the situation.

"I expect good service and a good environment and when that goes downhill in whatever way it does, the room or front desk or room service, I am absolutely disappointed," says Frazier, who lives in Paterson, New Jersey.

An owner who gets a nasty or unreasonable review may want to make a snarky response, but that will only invite more vitriol, says Darnell Holloway, Yelp!'s director of business outreach. People who see a contentious exchange may give that business a pass.

A long and angry Google post that complained about the food and service at BBQ'd Productions in Third Lake, Illinois, and made personal comments about the staff "felt like a punch in the gut," owner Kris Schoenberger says. He resisted responding in kind but posted a reply offering to speak with the reviewer.

"You have to take the high road and you have to be bigger and better," says Schoenberger, whose company has a 4.6 rating on Google.

Some owners try to limit the number of jabs people can take. Opera Bracelets owner Cindy Battisti allows only those who have bought her jewelry inspired by opera stories to post reviews on her site  not "people who haven't had a bracelet in their hand."

If people make disparaging comments on Battisti's Facebook ads, she responds with more information about the bracelets and a link to her website.

"It's easy to take it personally, because my business is me, but you've got to be professional," says Battisti, who lives in Rochester, New York.

Eighty percent of the reviews on Yelp! are three stars or higher, says Holloway. And while businesses want high ratings overall, many owners believe a perfect score looks dishonest.

"There's something sort of suspicious about a business that has an immaculate record," Gerson says. "You can't please everyone."

_____

Follow Joyce Rosenberg at www.twitter.com/JoyceMRosenberg . Her work can be found here: http://bigstory.ap.org/content/joyce-m-rosenberg
Paris Climate Change agreement passes key threshold

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  Thirty-one countries formally joined the Paris climate change pact Wednesday, bringing the total number of countries ratifying the treaty to 60 and raising hopes that it will enter into effect by the end of the year.

The number is higher than the 55-country threshold needed for the treaty to enter into force. But because together those countries account for 48 percent of total global emissions  short of the 55 percent threshold  the agreement must wait for more nations to join.

"Today we also heard commitments from many other countries to join the agreement this year. Their combined emissions will take us well past the required amount for the agreement to enter into force," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at an event on the sidelines of the high-level U.N. General Assembly gathering. "I am convinced that the Paris Agreement will enter into force before the end of 2016."

Chinese chairman of the national development and reform commission Xu Shaoshi, left, shakes hands with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during a ceremony to mark more signatories to the Paris climate accords at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he is confident of reaching the magic number before the next U.N. climate conference, which starts Nov. 7 in Marrakech, Morocco. He urged people everywhere "to become warriors for the planet."

The world's two biggest emitters, the United States and China, have already ratified the deal, providing momentum for other countries to quickly ratify the accord.

Brazil, Mexico and Argentina were the largest emitters to join the treaty Wednesday, but many of the countries that joined were small island nations, whose very existence is threatened by rising sea levels provoked by global warming, but whose individual emissions account for a mere fraction of a percent of total global emissions.

The treaty's ratification has taken place at what is considered a blistering pace for international diplomacy, reflecting a sense of urgency in the fight against global warming and a desire to seal the deal before Ban and U.S. President Barack Obama leave office.

The European Union, which accounts for 12 percent of global emissions, is lagging behind other countries in joining the deal but is trying to speed things up.

"We are trying to accelerate the ratification process," EU Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete told The Associated Press.

He said EU environment ministers will meet Friday to discuss a plan to ratify the agreement as a bloc, even though only a handful of the 28 member states have approved it domestically.

If all agree and the plan is endorsed by the European Parliament, which is likely, the EU could ratify the deal by early October.

David Waskow, International Climate Director at World Resources Institute, called Wednesday's announcement "a major step forward."

"We're seeing broad political support around the world for this agreement, other countries said they're going to join in the coming several months so we really see the momentum from Paris not only continuing but actually growing," Waskow said.

After years of negotiations, governments agreed in Paris last December to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say are warming the planet.

So far, 185 nations have signed the agreement which takes effect 30 days after 55 countries, representing 55 percent of global emissions, deposit their ratifications with the secretary-general.

___

Associated Press Writer Karl Ritter contributed to this report from Stockholm.

Brazil's President Michel Temer, left, delivers his country's ratification instrument to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at a high-level event on the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change during the 71st session of the U.N. General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

Mongolia President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, left, poses for a picture with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during a ceremony to mark more signatories to the Paris climate accords at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
The Latest: Judge won't order federal arraignment for Rahami

NEW YORK (AP)  The Latest on explosive devices in New York and New Jersey (all times local):

12:30 a.m.

A Manhattan U.S. magistrate judge has refused a request by public defenders to schedule an initial appearance for the man suspected of setting off bombs in New York and New Jersey on federal charges.

This undated photo provided by the FBI shows Ahmad Khan Rahami, wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a New York City neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town was taken into custody Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, after a shootout with police in New Jersey, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. (FBI via AP)

U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein on Wednesday night noted that court rules require an arrested person be brought before the court "without unnecessary delay."

He said there is no evidence contrary to government claims that Ahmad Khan Rahami remains held on state charges in New Jersey and has not yet been arrested on the federal charges.

Authorities say Rahami planted bombs in New York City and New Jersey over the weekend.

Rahami was wounded in a shootout with police and is in a hospital in New Jersey.

___

6:25 p.m.

A Linden, New Jersey, police officer injured in a shootout with a man suspected of setting off bombs in New York and New Jersey is headed to a school to thank students for their well wishes.

Officer Angel Padilla will visit Linden School No. 5 on Thursday. Padilla is a member of the school's parent-teacher association and is very involved in events there and in the community.

Students at the school wrote get well cards for Padilla and Officer Pete Hammer, who were hurt in Monday's shootout.

Padilla was shot in the torso, but his bulletproof vest saved him from a more serious injury. Hammer was grazed in the head by a bullet or shrapnel. Both officers were treated at a hospital and have been released.

___

6 p.m.

Two federal law enforcement officials say the wife of a man charged with setting off bombs in New York and New Jersey will return soon to the United States.

One of the officials said Wednesday that Ahmad Khan Rahami's wife made a statement to authorities after walking into the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. The other official says investigators believe she left the U.S. for Pakistan in June.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the ongoing case.

Rahami's wife is thought to be a Pakistani national.

Rahami is an Afghan-born U.S. citizen. He emailed a congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport during a 2014 visit to Pakistan.

A public defender has sought a court appearance for Rahami so he can hear the federal terrorism charges against him.

___

Associated Press reporters Jake Pearson in New York and Eric Tucker in Washington, D.C., contributed to this item.

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2:50 p.m.

A homeless man who found a backpack filled with bombs in New Jersey on Sunday night is being hailed as a hero.

Authorities say Lee Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station. Federal investigators say the bag was left by New York-region bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami.

Parker says he realized something was wrong with the heavy backpack after seeing wires.

Linda Flores-Tober, executive director of the Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless, says she is glad Parker is being recognized. The group is putting Parker up in a hotel and an online fundraising campaign has raised thousands for him and a friend.

Parker says all he wants is a good job.

___

2:40 p.m.

Police in New York City say hundreds of 911 callers have reported suspicious packages since the Saturday night explosion in Manhattan.

Police say they've received 406 phone calls of suspicious packages throughout the five boroughs between 8:30 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Monday.

None of the packages turned out to contain explosives.

Police Commissioner James O'Neill told reporters Wednesday he wants New Yorkers to report what they see.

A pressure-cooker bomb packed with shrapnel exploded Saturday evening in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. More than two dozen people were injured. A second bomb discovered blocks away didn't explode. It was removed by a bomb unit robot.

Federal prosecutors have charged Ahmad Khan Rahami with planting those bombs as well as others in New Jersey.

___

12:05 p.m.

The FBI has released an image of two men who took a suitcase holding a bomb that didn't explode in New York City.

Federal prosecutors have charged Ahmad Khan Rahami with setting a bomb in New Jersey and two in New York City. One of the bombs left in Manhattan didn't explode.

The FBI issued a poster Wednesday showing "two unidentified individuals" who investigators want to talk to. The agency says the men were seen Saturday night removing the bomb from a piece of luggage, then leaving the device behind while taking the suitcase.

Investigators have said the two men are being sought as witnesses, not suspects.

The FBI released an image of the two men that it says was captured on closed circuit television recordings between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on West 27th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.

___

11:40 a.m.

A New York Police Department deputy commissioner says federal investigators are likely reviewing their previous contacts with a 28-year-old man arrested in connection with a pair of bombings in New Jersey and New York. But he says it does not appear that anything was missed.

John Miller is the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism and is testifying in front of the House Homeland Security Committee.

He says Ahmad Khan Rahami "seems like many suspects who come into contact with the system at various times" and was handled "to the extent ... that law would allow."

Miller says a single report that does not generate more information about a potential threat or crime would not allow authorities to follow or investigate a person or their associates indefinitely.

___

10:30 a.m.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the Justice Department intends in the "near future" to bring Ahmad Khan Rahami to New York to face charges in a Saturday night bombing there.

Lynch spoke Wednesday at an International Bar Association conference.

Federal prosecutors in New York and New Jersey issued criminal complaints Tuesday evening charging Rahami in weekend bombings in both those states.

Lynch says she has full confidence in prosecutors' ability to bring Rahami "to justice for his heinous actions." She says the charges reflect the Justice Department's "unwavering determination to finding, capturing and prosecuting all those who attempt to commit or commit acts of terror against our nation."

Rahami is being treated in a hospital after being injured in a shootout Monday with police in New Jersey.

___

10:20 a.m.

A judge has granted temporary sole custody to the mother of a child whose father has been charged with planting bombs in New York and New Jersey.

A New Jersey judge on Tuesday granted the woman's request, which cited the terror investigation against Ahmad Khan Rahami.

Rahami often was hundreds of dollars in arrears in child support and their custody case was called before a family court judge six times in five years.

A judge approved a visitation agreement between the two in May 2014, ordering that the child spend Christmas and Thanksgiving with the mother and the Muslim holy days Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha with Rahami.

___

10:10 a.m.

A federal defender is complaining that bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami has not had access to a lawyer since he was arrested in New Jersey on Monday.

David E. Patton said in a letter to a federal judge Tuesday night that Rahami has been held and questioned by federal law enforcement agents since his arrest.

Federal terrorism charges were filed against Rahami on Tuesday night.

Authorities say Rahami planted bombs in New York City and New Jersey over the weekend.

Rahami was wounded in a shootout with police and is in a hospital in New Jersey.

Patton says his office is available to meet with Rahami in New Jersey and represent him at a telephone or videoconference appearance.

___

1 a.m.

Federal prosecutors say bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami bought components online and recorded a video of himself igniting a blast in a backyard. They say he vowed in a handwritten jihad journal that "the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets."

Court complaints filed Tuesday give a chilling glimpse into what authorities say motivated the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives last weekend in New York and New Jersey. One bomb injured 31 people in Manhattan.

The blasts came two years after the FBI looked into him but found nothing tying him to terrorism.

Rahami remains hospitalized with gunshot wounds from a shootout with police that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, New Jersey.

It's not immediately clear whether Rahami has a lawyer who can comment on the charges.

Ahmad Khan Rahami is taken into custody after a shootout with police Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, in Linden, N.J. Rahami was wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and the New Jersey shore town of Seaside Park. (Moshe Weiss via AP)

New Yorkers pass a shattered storefront window on W. 23rd St. in Manhattan, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in New York. The window was hit by shrapnel from the terrorist bomb that exploded across the street Saturday evening. An Afghan immigrant wanted in the bombings was captured Monday after being wounded in a gun battle with police. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

This frame from surveillance video released by the New Jersey State Police shows Ahmad Khan Rahami, wanted for questioning Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, in bombings that rocked the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and the New Jersey shore town Seaside Park over the weekend. (New Jersey State Police via AP)

FBI agents walk around the roof outside an apartment during an investigation at a building Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. FBI agents are searching the apartment that is tied to Ahmad Khan Rahami, wanted for questioning in the New York City bombing. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

This poster provided by the FBI shows Ahmad Khan Rahami, wanted for questioning Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, in bombings that rocked a Manhattan neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town. (FBI via AP)
Murdered priests mourned in Mexico's troubled Veracruz state

PASO BLANCO, Mexico (AP)  Mourners packed a church Wednesday for a funeral Mass in memory of a Roman Catholic priest who was murdered along with another cleric in the troubled Gulf coast state of Veracruz.

Parishioners filled all the standing room inside the church in the community of Paso Blanco while others outside listened through the windows, huddling under the eaves as a steady rain fell.

A large banner on the front of the church bore a photo of the young Rev. Jose Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz, who was ordained only a few years ago and arrived at his post in the city of Poza Rica just a month before he was murdered.

Mourners pay their last respects to slain Rev. Jose Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz at Our Lady of Asuncion Church in Paso Blanco, Veracruz state, Mexico, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Mourners packed the church for the funeral Mass in memory of the Roman Catholic priest who was murdered along with another cleric in the troubled Gulf coast state of Veracruz. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

"You are a priest for always," the banner read.

Suarez and Rev. Alejo Nabor Jimenez were last seen Sunday in Poza Rica, and their bullet-ridden bodies were discovered the following day on a roadside miles away. One had been shot nine times.

State prosecutors say they believe the clerics knew their attackers and had been drinking with them before the get-together "turned violent."

But some parishioners are skeptical of that theory and say organized crime has plagued Poza Rica with killings and disappearances.

"Unfortunately, Poza Rica is a very severe place in (terms of) security," a priest said during Wednesday's service, calling on authorities to ensure justice in the killings.

Suarez's casket was on display during the Mass. People broke open the floor of the church to construct the vault that will be his final resting place.

Pope Francis sent a letter of condolences calling the slain clerics "victims of inexcusable violence." The letter was signed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, and posted online by the Mexican Conference of Bishops.

"Yet again we confirm that violence and insecurity have taken root in our society," Bishop Jose Trinidad Zapata Ortiz of the city of Papantla, near Poza Rica, said in a statement released by the Conference. "We hope that authorities clear up the crime and that such a regrettable loss of our brothers serves for the arrival of the peace we all desire so much."

The Catholic Media Center says 28 priests have been killed in Mexico since 2006, not counting this week's slayings. It says Veracruz, Guerrero and Mexico state are the most dangerous in the country.

The U.S. State Department wrote in its 2015 International Religious Freedom report that priests in Mexico are "victims of extortion attempts, death threats, and intimidation by organized criminal groups."

___

Associated Press writer Peter Orsi in Mexico City contributed to this report.

People gather at Our Lady of Asuncion Church in Paso Blanco, Veracruz state, Mexico, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Mourners packed the church for a funeral Mass in memory of a Roman Catholic priest who was murdered along with another cleric in the troubled Gulf coast state of Veracruz. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

A person prays in Our Lady of Fatima Church in Poza Rica, Veracruz state, Mexico, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Two of the church's priests were found dead on Monday, and were last seen Sunday. Their bullet-ridden bodies were found on a roadside. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

People pray in Our Lady of Fatima Church in Poza Rica, Veracruz state, Mexico, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Two of the church's priests were found dead on Monday, and were last seen Sunday. The bullet-ridden bodies of the priests were found on a roadside. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

Our Lady of Fatima Church in Poza Rica, Veracruz state, Mexico, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Two of the church's priests were found dead on Monday, and were last seen Sunday. The bullet-ridden bodies of the priests were found on a roadside. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
Russia to send its aircraft carrier to eastern Mediterranean

MOSCOW (AP)  The Russian navy will send its sole aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean as part of Moscow's efforts to reaffirm its influence in Syria and showcase its resurgent military might.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday that the Admiral Kuznetsov will sail to the eastern Mediterranean to join other Russian ships in the area. He didn't specify when the carrier will be deployed, but Russian media have earlier reported that the mission was planned for the fall.

The Soviet-built Admiral Kuznetsov, the only aircraft carrier in the Russian navy, has recently been re-equipped with new Su-33 and MiG-29K fighter jets. It carries about 40 aircraft and is smaller than U.S. aircraft carriers.

FILE - In this 2004 file photo the Admiral Kuznetsov carrier seen in the Barents Sea, Russia. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, that the navy will send its only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to the eastern Mediterranean to join other Russian ships deployed near the Syrian shores.(AP Photo, file)

The ship is based in Sevoromorsk on the Kola Peninsula and is part of the Russian navy's Northern Fleet.

Russia has waged a year-long military campaign in Syria that has shored up President Bashar Assad and allowed his troops to seize some key ground. Last week, Moscow and Washington brokered a cease-fire in Syria, which is now teetering on the brink of collapse amid renewed fighting and Monday's attack on a humanitarian convoy.

Since Moscow launched its air campaign in Syria on Sept. 30, 2015, the military has used it to test its latest jets and missiles. In a demonstration of its new precision strike capability, Russian strategic bombers, surface ships and a submarine have repeatedly launched cruise missiles at targets in Syria.

By sending the Admiral Kuznetsov to Syria's shores, Russia would significantly beef up its forces there. It would also give the military a chance to test its carrier-born aircraft in combat for the first time.

In 2013, the Russian navy restored a constant presence in the eastern Mediterranean for the first time since the Soviet collapse, using the Soviet-era facility in the Syrian port of Tartus to replenish supplies.

Tartus is the only such facility the Russian military now has outside the former Soviet Union.

Shoigu pointed at the Cold War times, saying that the Soviet navy presence in the eastern Mediterranean helped protect Moscow's interests in the region.
Trump weighs in on internet fight in stopgap spending bill

WASHINGTON (AP)  Donald Trump's campaign has inserted itself into already tricky negotiations on a temporary spending bill needed to avert a government shutdown, siding with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in trying to block the government from ceding its limited role in overseeing some aspects of the internet.

"Donald J. Trump is committed to preserving Internet freedom for the American people and citizens all over the world. The U.S. should not turn control of the Internet over to the United Nations and the international community," senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller said in a statement.

Democratic and Republican administrations have both supported a transition of the U.S. Commerce Department's role in governing the internet's domain name addressing systems, transferring responsibility to such stakeholders as technical experts, businesses and other governments.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis. speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, following a House GOP caucus meeting. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

The temporary spending bill is the top item on the congressional agenda before lawmakers leave Washington for the fall campaign. It also provides more than $1 billion in long-delayed funding to battle the Zika virus. Lawmakers hope negotiations on the measure will be wrapped up this week, though the pace of talks has been slow and Wednesday produced no visible breakthroughs.

Many experts say Cruz and his allies are greatly overstating the Commerce Department's potential influence over internet content and spinning exaggerations and conspiracy theories. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is pushing to use the stopgap spending bill to at least delay the transition. Democratic negotiators like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada are strongly opposed to that effort.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., came out Wednesday in favor of adding money to the measure to address catastrophic flooding in Louisiana.

President Barack Obama has heeded calls by Louisiana's governor and congressional delegation and requested $2.6 billion to help Louisiana rebuild from last month's devastating floods. Ryan didn't volunteer how much money he supports. But the Republican speaker is opposed to a key demand of Democratic negotiators: money to help Flint, Michigan, repair its lead-tainted water system.

The flood aid question is one of a handful of unresolved issues involving the stopgap funding bill, which would prevent a shutdown next week and keep the government running through Dec. 9.

Meanwhile, the Senate rejected a resolution to block the Obama administration from selling more than $1 billion worth of American-made weapons to Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. Lawmakers backing the measure, including Rand Paul, R-Ky., are critical of the kingdom's role in Yemen's civil war, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposed the resolution, which was killed by a 71-27 vote.

"I think it's important to the United States to maintain as good a relationship with Saudi Arabia as possible," McConnell said Tuesday.

The other big item on the Capitol Hill pre-election to-do list is an override vote on President Barack Obama's anticipated veto of legislation that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. Ryan predicted that "the votes are there for the override." The vote is expected next week.

The Zika-fighting portion of the pre-election spending bill is nearly complete. Republicans have dropped language to block affiliates of Planned Parenthood in Puerto Rico from receiving funding for prevention and treatment of Zika in the territory. Zika, which can cause grave birth defects, is often transmitted by sexual contact, and women are being advised to delay getting pregnant if they live in an area where Zika is widespread.
UK's Tate galleries acquire replica of anti-war protest camp

LONDON (AP)  A replica of an anti-war protest camp that stood outside Britain's Parliament for a decade has been acquired by the country's most visited group of art museums, the Tate.

Artist Mark Wallinger's "State Britain" recreates the tent, placards and posters of Brian Haw, who set up camp outside Parliament in 2001 and remained until his death from cancer in 2011.

Haw used the camp to protest British involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Officials repeatedly tried to remove him.

FILE - In this 15, Jan 2007 file photo Mark Wallinger sits at the unveiling of his installation State Britain at Tate Britain, as the artist's recreation of an anti-war protest camp in Parliament Square will have a permanent home at the Tate. Wallinger's 2007 reconstruction of Brian Haw's long-running, one-man peace camp against the Iraq war, has been given to the gallery by the British artist for its collection. A replica of an anti-war protest camp that stood outside Britain's Parliament for a decade has been acquired by the country's most visited group of art galleries, the Tate. Artist Mark Wallinger's "State Britain" recreates the tent, placards and posters of Brian Haw, who set up camp in 2001 and remained until his death from cancer in 2011 in protest at British wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Cathal McNaughton/PA via AP - file)

Wallinger's prize-winning work is among the new acquisitions announced Wednesday by Tate, which operates London's Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
The Latest: Authorities eye whether odor linked to oil sheen

VALLEJO, Calif. (AP)  The Latest on the investigation of an oil sheen and strong odor on a bay in California (all times local):

9:40 a.m.

Authorities are investigating whether a mysterious odor is linked to a 40-foot wide oil sheen on San Pablo Bay, north of San Francisco.

The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed the sheen Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, Vallejo residents were told to stay inside after the odor prompted several people to go to a hospital with respiratory issues.

The shelter-in-place order was later lifted but the source of the smell had not been pinned down.

___

7:56 a.m.

A shelter-in-place order for a northern California community has been lifted Wednesday after local authorities determined a strong odor was not coming from within the city.

The mysterious odor prompted several people in Vallejo to go to the hospital Tuesday.

The U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday night was investigating reports of an oil sheen on waters near Vallejo but didn't spot a sheen around Vallejo from the air. Additional investigation is planned for Wednesday.

KNTV reports (http://cbsloc.al/2d1NMnz) that Vallejo police said the first call on the odor came in at 7:20 p.m. Tuesday from the western side of Mare Island.

Vallejo is on the San Pablo Bay, north of San Francisco.

___

4:30 a.m.

The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating reports of an oil sheen on waters near a northern California community where local authorities are trying to determine the source of a strong odor.

The Coast Guard didn't spot a sheen around Vallejo from the air on Tuesday but said crews will look again Wednesday morning.

Fire officials, meanwhile, are telling people in the city to shelter in place.

The Fire Department says gas monitors are registering safe levels, but it has asked residents to close windows and turn off air conditioning units. Fire officials say the odor is not linked to any natural gas or refinery burn off from nearby facilities.
The Latest: Germany could extend border checks again

MARIANOSZTRA, Hungary (AP)  The Latest on Europe's response to the influx of refugees and other migrants (all times local):

7:05 p.m.

Germany's top security official says the country could extend border checks beyond the middle of November in an effort to prevent migrants from crossing into the country unnoticed.

@Workers begin construction of a 4-meter- (13-foot) high wall along the roadway leading to the Calais port, outside Calais, northern France, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. The kilometer-long wall being paid for by Britain, is a new barrier to try to keep migrants from crossing the English Channel. (AP Photo/Michel Spingler)

Thomas de Maiziere says a return to the unrestricted movement between countries that are members of Europe's passport-free travel area known as the Schengen Zone is desirable.

But he told reporters at a meeting in Bavaria on Wednesday that he favors continuing the border checks when the measure is due to expire in mid-November.

They were last extended for six months in May.

Bavaria has been the main point of entry for hundreds of thousands of migrants coming to Germany since early 2015.

___

6:30 p.m.

French police have used tear gas to force hundreds of migrants away from a road leading to a port town that is seen as a gateway to Britain.

Authorities said about 300 migrants from a makeshift camp known as "the Jungle" approached the road to Calais on Wednesday afternoon and dozens tried to enter the thoroughfare.

Local officials in the northern Pas-de-Calais region say migrants hurled objects at police officers, who then used tear gas to push them back. A police officer received minor injuries and one person was arrested.

The clash came as workers have begun building a Britain-funded wall along the road to try to keep migrants from sneaking onto ferries crossing the English Channel.

___

5:10 p.m.

Romanian border police have detained eight migrants, including four children, after they crossed the River Danube and tried to enter Romania.

Police said in a statement they found the group of six Iraqis and two Syrians near the Bistret border point in southwest Romania on Tuesday evening during a river patrol.

Wednesday's statement said the group, aged 4-33, crossed the Danube in two boats that a Bulgarian guide had given them. The river forms the border between Bulgaria and Romania.

The group told police they had paid between $2,000 and $3,500 to guides and were trying to reach Austria.

___

1:30 p.m.

Hungarian prison inmates have ramped up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants.

Razor wire manufacture at the prison in Marianosztra, northern Hungary, has increased from two shifts earlier this year, to three. Besides its domestic use, Hungary has also sold or donated fence elements, including wire and steel posts, to other countries in the region, including Slovenia and Macedonia.

Human rights organizations, meanwhile, consider Hungary's fences erected last year as the first step in efforts by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government to dismantle the country's asylum system.

Hungary's Helsinki Committee says the fence, the closure of asylum centers and other measures are destroying the asylum system.

Hungarian and Polish soldiers and policemen patrol the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke, 180 kms southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016. Two days earlier forty-nine Polish officers, including twenty-five policemen and twenty-four border guards arrived to Hungary to assist their Hungarian colleagues with border defence until October 29. The Polish contingent fulfills duty as part of the cooperation between the Visegrad Group (V4) countries. (Zoltan Gergely Kelemen/MTI via AP)

Prison inmates are manufacturing razor wire used on the fences Hungary has built on its borders with Serbia and Croatia to stop the flow of migrants and refugees, in Marianosztra, Hungary, Wednesday,. Sept. 21, 2016. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced plans for a second fence on the Serbian border against a possible surge of people along the Balkan route toward western Europe but rights advocates see the barrier as Hungarys first step in the dismantling of its asylum system. (AP Photo/Andras Nagy)

A Hungarian soldier patrols at the transit zone at Hungary's southern border with Serbia near Tompa, 169 km southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Hungarian prison inmates have ramped up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants. (Sandor Ujvari/MTI via AP)

A patrolling Hungarian policeman walks past a road roller during construction works in the transit zone at Hungary's southern border with Serbia near Tompa, 169 kms southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Hungarian prison inmates have ramped up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants. (Sandor Ujvari/MTI via AP)

Hungarian soldiers, front, and police officers patrol the transit zone at Hungary's southern border with Serbia near Tompa, 169 km southeast of Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Hungarian prison inmates have ramped up their production of razor wire, working around the clock as Hungary prepares to build a second fence on the border with Serbia to keep out refugees and other migrants. (Sandor Ujvari/MTI via AP)
Turkey delays UN counter-torture official's visit

ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  A U.N. official on countering torture has criticized a Turkish government decision to postpone his visit to the country saying the move "sends the wrong message."

U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said Wednesday that Turkey delayed his four-day visit that would have started on Oct. 10.

Turkey declared a state of emergency after a failed coup on July 15 and began a massive crackdown on a movement led by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who it accuses of orchestrating the attempt.

FILE - In this March 11, 2015 file photo, Juan E. Mendez, Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, speaks during a news conference about his annual report to the Human Rights Council at the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland. Mendez, speaking on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, has criticized a Turkish government decision to postpone his visit to the country saying the move "sends the wrong message." (Martial Trezzini, Keystone, File via AP)

Mendez said his visit would have been crucial in light of the thousands of arrests and the allegations of overcrowding and poor conditions in detention centers following the coup.
Connecticut undersea warfare center welcomes new commander

GROTON, Conn. (AP)  The outgoing commander of an undersea warfighting center in Connecticut says he has been working to make sure technology being developed for the U.S. Navy's submarine fleet is useful when it gets into sailors' hands.

Rear Adm. Jeffrey Trussler, who has led Undersea Warfighting Development Center in Groton since its creation a year ago, is turning over command to Rear Adm. James Pitts at a ceremony Wednesday.

Pitts, a native of Milton, Florida, served as an officer on several attack submarines and was assigned most recently to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations as leader of a branch dedicated to planning, programming and development.

Trussler said the command has been developing tactics, techniques and procedures for employing unmanned systems and other technologies, which may work differently in different environments.

"You just don't receive an unmanned vehicle out of a box, open it up and say, 'We're going to war.' Turn it to on, throw it in the water and go," he said at a defense conference in Newport, Rhode Island, in August.

Trussler said sailors are employing these technologies, not the contractors that built them, in peacetime and in war, and it's the center's job to help "get every ounce of capability out of those systems."

"People get really enamored with technology. In the end, it's still people who have to operate these systems," he said. "Our organization is making sure people are best prepared to operate the capabilities we have, and articulating what we need. We're the go between."

The command also assesses warfighting readiness and capabilities, works with training centers and coordinates efforts to bring new capabilities to the fleet.

U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat, said it's critical that the Navy maintains its undersea dominance, particularly as China and Russia modernize their submarine fleets, and that's what the center aims to do.
Ralph Lauren working on memoir, scheduled for next fall

NEW YORK (AP)  Ralph Lauren, one of the giants of modern American fashion, is working on his autobiography.

Simon & Schuster told The Associated Press on Wednesday that it will release the book in fall 2017, in conjunction with his company's 50th anniversary. The book is currently untitled.

"His style is instantly recognizable to even the most casual observer, a triumph of business savvy and aesthetic sensibility that is unmatched anywhere," Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy said in a statement.

FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2015 file photo, designer Ralph Lauren poses in his office in New York. Lauren, one of the giants of modern American fashion, is working on his autobiography. Simon & Schuster said, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, that it will release the book in the Fall 2017, in conjunction with his companys 50th anniversary. The book is currently untitled. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)

"How Ralph Lauren's business became the epitome of American style is one of the great cultural stories of our time," added Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp.

Famed for his company's polo-pony motif, the 76-year-old Lauren has combined Americana, ruggedness and refinement to create an upscale look and a lifestyle known worldwide. He has risen from an immigrant household in New York City to founding an iconic brand that made him one of the world's richest men. Lauren stepped down as chief executive in 2015 and was succeeded by Old Navy President Stefan Larsson.

Financial terms for the book were not disclosed. Lauren was represented by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, whose clients range from Barbra Streisand to President Barack Obama.
Court OKs jail time for minister who pushed Muslim tenant

BOSTON (AP)  A Massachusetts landlord convicted of pushing a Muslim tenant down the stairs will have to serve six months in jail and take a class on Islam, the state's highest court ruled Wednesday.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruling came in the case of Daisy Obi, a Christian minister from Nigeria who was convicted of assault and battery for pushing her tenant in 2012.

A judge sentenced Obi to two years in jail, but suspended all but six months of the sentence. As a condition of her probation, the judge ordered Obi to attend an introductory class on Islam.

Obi, who is in her 70s, appealed both the sentence and the requirement that she take a class on Islam, arguing that the requirement violated her constitutional right to free exercise of religion.

The high court found that Obi had not shown that her sentence was disproportionate to the seriousness of the offense.

Obi's former tenant, Gihan Suliman, cut her lip and injured her shoulder in the fall. During the sentencing hearing, Suliman said the assault had a "deep physical impact" on her and that she does not trust people in the same way she did before.

The court did not directly address Obi's constitutional objections to the requirement that she attend a class on Islam, but said she waived that claim in her appeal because she never raised that objection in the lower court.

"While conditions of probation that touch on religion and risk incursion upon constitutionally protected interests should be imposed only with great circumspection, the defendant raised no such concerns before the trial court judge, and there is no information in the record that would allow us to evaluate her claims," Justice Barbara Lenk wrote for the court in the unanimous ruling.

The court's upholding of Obi's sentence means she will have to take the course on Islam.

Suliman claimed that Obi taunted her and her children with anti-Muslim insults on several occasions before the day she pushed her down a flight of stairs at Obi's multi-family home in Somerville, just outside Boston.

Obi, the pastor of the Adonai Bible Center in Somerville, denied ever making disparaging remarks about Muslims and said she did not push Suliman.
Judge dismisses challenge to N. Carolina gay-marriage law

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  A federal judge has dismissed a challenge to a North Carolina law that says magistrates with religious objections can refuse to marry same-sex couples.

The judge ruled the three couples who brought the case  two gay and one interracial  lacked legal standing to sue and lacked evidence showing they were harmed directly by the law that took effect in June 2015.

North Carolina and Utah are the only states currently enforcing such religious-recusal laws. About 5 percent of North Carolina's magistrates have filed recusal notices, which prevent them from officiating at all marriages  gay and heterosexual  for at least six months. The law also allows some court clerks to decline to issue marriage licenses because of "any sincerely held religious objection."

The plaintiffs argued they could sue because some taxpayer money was being used for travel expenses for other magistrates to come to McDowell County, where all the magistrates had recused themselves. But U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn wrote they didn't point to any specific funds appropriated by the legislature to implement the law's alleged unconstitutional purpose.

The couples who sued the state courts director also "lack standing by virtue of the fact that their claims are merely generalized grievances with a state law with which they disagree," Cogburn said in the decision released late Tuesday.

The couples' lawyers filed a notice Wednesday saying they'll appeal Tuesday's ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A married lesbian couple who sued and live in McDowell County told reporters last month they're worried whether they can get equal and fair treatment from local magistrates, knowing their recusals.

The law "expressly declares that magistrates' religious beliefs are superior to their oath of judicial office to uphold and support the federal constitution. And the law spends public money to advance those religious beliefs. That is a straightforward violation of the 1st Amendment," Luke Largess, a lawyer for the couples, said in a news release.

Cogburn wrote that it's possible someone could suffer real harm because of the law, but he said the plaintiffs provided no evidence that has actually happened. The law says a chief District Court judge or county Register of Deeds  both elected officials  must ensure marriage transactions are carried out if no one else is available.

Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, the chief sponsor of the legislation, said the law actually protects 1st Amendment rights.

"We appreciate the court recognizing the plaintiffs failed to identify even one North Carolinian who was denied the ability to get married under this reasonable law," Berger said in a release.

During oral arguments last month over the state's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Cogburn pointed out that recusals can remain secret  particularly in counties where not all magistrates have objected. The state courts system considers recusal paperwork part of personnel records.

"A law that allows a state official to opt out of performing some of the duties of the office for sincerely held religious beliefs, while keeping it a secret that the official opted out, is fraught with potential for harm that could be of constitutional magnitude," he wrote.
Lawyer: Calif prosecutors could get Durst now, if they want

NEW ORLEANS (AP)  A lawyer for real estate heir Robert Durst says Los Angeles County prosecutors could get custody of him immediately, rather than wait until he's moved to a federal prison in Indiana to serve time for a weapons conviction.

Durst has been assigned to a prison in Terre Haute to serve a seven-year sentence after pleading guilty to possessing a weapon as a convicted felon. But meanwhile, he's still facing a murder charge in Los Angeles and is eager to prove his innocence there, said his lawyer, Texas attorney Richard DeGuerin.

"We've been begging to get to California since two days after he was arrested," DeGuerin said Wednesday.

Durst was arrested in March 2015, on the same day HBO aired the finale of "The Jinx," a 6-part documentary about Durst, the disappearance of his first wife in 1982, the death of his friend Susan Berman in California in 2000 and the 2001 dismemberment killing of a neighbor in Galveston, for which he was acquitted of murder after claiming self-defense.

He waived extradition to California at his first court appearance.

"None of the proceedings against him in California can begin until he's in California custody," DeGuerin said.

To get that custody, he said, prosecutors would ask a judge for a habeas corpus writ for Durst's prosecution.

"They're going to have to do that eventually, wherever he goes," he said.

Los Angeles County prosecutor John Lewin wouldn't comment.

"I have a policy on active cases: I will not talk to the press," he said.

Durst, 72, has been jailed in Killona, in Louisiana's St. Charles Parish. His legal team probably won't be told in advance when he'll be moved, DeGuerin said.
Obama promotes trade, investment between US and Africa

NEW YORK (AP)  Promoting trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa, President Barack Obama on Wednesday urged even greater engagement with a continent he characterized as "on the move" after overcoming some stiff economic headwinds. Obama said progress in Africa is also important to security and prosperity around the world.

"The broader trajectory of Africa is unmistaken. Thanks to many of you, Africa is on the move," the president told business leaders at a forum on trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa. The gathering was held on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session that brought scores of world leaders to New York.

Obama said some $9 billion in trade and investment deals and partnerships that were announced Wednesday were encouraging, "but we're just scratching the surface."

President Barack Obama walks off stage after speaking at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum at The Plaza Hotel in New York, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

"More can and will be done," he said.

Obama said the Africans he meets always tell him they want "aid, not trade." He called on leaders to keep making it easier to do business in Africa and to spend more on building up the infrastructure, including increasing access to electricity to the two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa where it is scarce or lacking.

Good governance and institutions that are free of corruption are also essential to attracting investment, the president said.

"People don't want to do business in places where the rules are constantly changing depending on who's up, who's down, whose cousin is who," he said, adding that such environments create the kind of risks that scare away investors.

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap
Clinton, Trump decry latest police shootings of black men

CLEVELAND (AP)  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton decried a fresh round of police-involved shootings on Wednesday, with the Republican nominee saying he was "very troubled" by the killing of a black man by a white police officer in Oklahoma.

Courting black voters who have long spurned Republicans, Trump's event in Cleveland Heights' New Spirit Revival Center took a bizarre turn when he was introduced by boxing promoter Don King, who used a racial slur as he made the case for black voters to support Trump. In an interview later, Trump called for a national expansion of "stop-and-frisk," the police tactic that a federal judge ruled can be discriminatory against minorities.

Trump's latest foray into the black community not only sought to connect with voters in Cleveland, home to a large community of African-American voters key to Clinton's prospects in Ohio, but also with moderate suburban voters, who frequently hear Clinton describe Trump as extreme.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump listens as he is introduced by boxing promoter Don King prior to speaking to the Pastors Leadership Conference at New Spirit Revival Center, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

King, introducing Trump, raised eyebrows when he said a black man is always framed by his skin color, recalling that he once told pop icon Michael Jackson "if you're poor, you're a 'poor Negro.' If you're rich, you're a 'rich Negro.'" An educated black man is "an intellectual negro."

King, who is black, continued: "If you're a dancing and sliding and gliding n----- I mean Negro  you are 'a dancing and sliding and gliding Negro.'" Gasps and laughs could be heard from the audience.

The King incident underscored the often clumsy way in which Trump has made his appeal to minority voters. Many black community leaders and voters have been offended by his dire depiction of life in minority communities. Trump's outreach has also been viewed cynically as an attempt by his campaign to soothe concerns among more moderate, suburban voters.

At the end of the Ohio church event organized by members of his diversity coalition, Trump was asked about recent high-profile police shootings in Oklahoma and North Carolina. Trump said 40-year-old Terence Crutcher, who was killed in Friday's Tulsa, Oklahoma, shooting, "looked like he did everything you're supposed to do. And he looked like a really good man."

"This young officer, I don't know what she was thinking. I don't know what she was thinking but I'm very, very troubled by that," Trump said, calling it a "terrible situation."

But hours later he called for the expanded use of stop-and-frisk, a police tactic that a federal judge has ruled can be discriminatory against minorities. Trump said during a Fox News town hall taping that the tactic, which gives police the ability to stop and search anyone they deem suspicious, had "worked incredibly well" in New York, where it was expanded under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat who supports Clinton, slammed Trump's call for more stop-and-frisk as "appalling" and disputed Trump's account of how well it worked. De Blasio suggested Trump is "either ignorant about the history of the city or he's lying about it."

Clinton notably made no direct mention of Trump in a speech in Orlando, Florida, focused on helping people with disabilities thrive in the U.S. economy. She pointed to the Oklahoma and North Carolina shootings at the start of her remarks, saying it added two more names "to a long list of African-Americans killed by police officers. It's unbearable and it needs to become intolerable."

Clinton has made curbing gun violence and police brutality a central part of her candidacy. She has campaigned alongside a group of black women called the "Mothers of the Movement," who advocated for more accountability and transparency by law enforcement. The group includes the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, black victims of high-profile killings.

Trump, joined by running mate Mike Pence at the Ohio event, has routinely praised police officers in his speeches to supporters. But after reading from notes about the role of the black church in the civil rights movement and vowing to help struggling black Americans, Trump questioned the Tulsa officer's reaction in shooting Crutcher, who was unarmed.

Video of the shooting, which Trump cited, shows Crutcher's hands up as officers approach and Crutcher then appears to place his hands on a vehicle before the officers surround him. He then drops to the ground. Someone on the police radio says, "I think he may have just been tasered." Then almost immediately, someone can be heard yelling, "Shots fired!" Crutcher is left lying in the street.

Trump's meeting came after street demonstrations continued into the early hours of Wednesday in Charlotte, North Carolina. On Tuesday, 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by Charlotte police officer Brentley Vinson, who is black. Officers say Scott was armed and posed a threat. Police used tear gas to disperse protesters during the demonstrations that left about a dozen officers injured.

__

Thomas reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Catherine Lucey in Orlando, Florida, and Bill Barrow in Cleveland contributed to this report.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she boards her campaign plane at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The Latest: Detective takes stand in trial for 2 officers

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  The Latest on the trial of two former Albuquerque police officers (all times local):

1:10 p.m.

An Albuquerque police detective who a year ago said a police standoff with a homeless man began to unravel when he held two knives and took a defensive stance has begun testifying in the trial of two officers charged in the man's shooting death.

Defendants Keith Sandy, former Albuquerque Police Department detective and former Repeat Offender Project officer, left, and Dominique Perez, right, former Albuquerque police officer and SWAT member are seen in court on Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, N.M. Sandy and Dominique Perez are charged with the 2014 fatal shooting of an armed homeless James Boyd. Defense attorneys have argued that Boyd, who was mentally ill and had history of violence against law enforcement, was a threat. (Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal, Pool)

The testimony from Detective Geoff Stone, who was the lead Albuquerque police detective in the 2014 officer-involved shooting death, got underway Wednesday.

A prosecutor asked him to describe for jurors the firearms, ammunition and police equipment that now-retired Detective Keith Sandy and Officer Dominique Perez had on them the day of the shooting.

Sandy and Perez are standing trial on second-degree murder charges in the death of homeless camper James Boyd, who was shot after an hours-long standoff that involved 19 officers.

A special prosecutor faults police for escalating the standoff.

___

11 a.m.

A New Mexico judge has dismissed a juror in the trial of two former police officers charged with second-degree murder in an on-duty shooting because she was overheard talking about a defense attorney.

The juror was excused Wednesday after a television journalist testified under oath to hearing her speaking on her cellphone outside the courthouse the night before.

She reportedly told her daughter that Sam Bregman, the attorney for now-retired Detective Keith Sandy, spoke loudly in court.

Jurors are under strict instructions not to discuss the case with anyone and can't mention the names of people involved.

Bregman argued to keep the woman on the jury.

He said she had a hearing problem and may have been simply saying she was able to hear him.

___

2:50 a.m.

An expert witness says Albuquerque police botched a standoff two years ago that led to the death of a mentally ill homeless camper, missing the opportunity to calm a volatile situation and shooting the man who had two pocket knives but posed no immediate threat.

Jeffrey Noble, a former police sergeant and attorney, testified Tuesday as an expert witness for the prosecution in the trial of two former police officers who are facing second-degree murder charges.

Testimony continued Wednesday in state district court in Albuquerque.

Hundreds of protesters decried James Boyd's 2014 death as yet another questionable shooting by a police force that had killed more than 20 suspects from 2010 to 2014.

Police shootings have dropped since federal and city officials settled on reforms. But the series of court-mandated changes, including a use-of-force policy that adds new reporting measures for officers and their supervisors, are still fresh.

The prosecutions expert witness police expert Jeffrey Noble comments on two Albuquerque officers, defendants Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, not seen, in court on Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, N.M. Sandy and Dominique Perez are charged with the 2014 fatal shooting of an armed homeless James Boyd. Defense attorneys have argued that Boyd, who was mentally ill and had history of violence against law enforcement, was a threat. (Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal, Pool)

The prosecutions expert witness police expert Jeffrey Noble comments on two Albuquerque officers, defendants Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, not seen, in court on Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, N.M. Sandy and Dominique Perez are charged with the 2014 fatal shooting of an armed homeless James Boyd. Defense attorneys have argued that Boyd, who was mentally ill and had history of violence against law enforcement, was a threat. (Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal, Pool)

Defendant now-retired Detective Keith Sandy, middle, surrounded by his defense attorney Sam Bregman, left, are seen in court on Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, N.M. A frame-by-frame breakdown of police helmet video from the March 2014 shooting was shown to jurors Monday on the first day of the trial of now-retired Detective Keith Sandy, middle, and former Officer Dominique Perez, not seen. (Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal, Pool)

Defense attorneys Sam Bregman, left, and Luis Robles talk during a break during the trial of two former Albuquerque officers, defendants Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, not seen, in court on Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, N.M. Sandy and Dominique Perez are charged with the 2014 fatal shooting of an armed homeless James Boyd. Defense attorneys have argued that Boyd, who was mentally ill and had history of violence against law enforcement, was a threat. (Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal, Pool)

Defense attorney Sam Bregman, right, objects to a question during the trial of two former Albuquerque officers, defendants Keith Sandy, and Dominique Perez, not seen, in court on Tuesday Sept. 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, N.M. Now-retired Detective Keith Sandy and former Officer Dominique Perez are charged with the 2014 fatal shooting of an armed homeless James Boyd. Defense attorneys have argued that Boyd, who was mentally ill and had history of violence against law enforcement, was a threat. (Jim Thompson/The Albuquerque Journal, Pool)
Plan to dig up, move historic Nevada graves angers heirs

RENO, Nev. (AP)  A pioneer cemetery on the edge of downtown Reno where the remains of Civil War soldiers, city founders and a tribal chief have rested for more than a century has been anything but restful in recent weeks.

The cemetery's owners want to dig up as many as 1,100 graves on one end of the 6-acre site and move them to the other end to make way for a development. Reno residents and heirs of the dead are outraged, calling the cemetery a Nevada historical treasure that should not be disturbed.

"Save our souls," reads a handwritten note between fluttering ribbons tied to the chain-link fence that encircles Hillside Cemetery. Next to the note is a sign bolted to the fence with a markedly different tone: "Notice of determination for disinterment and removal of human remains."

This Sept. 19, 2016 photo shows ribbons and notes tied to the fence around Hillside Cemeteryon the edge of downtown Reno, Nev. Historic preservationists are outraged that the owner of the cemetary has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume hundreds of graves and transfer the remains to another section of the cemetery so the land can be sold for potential development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

The owners posted the notice, secured health permits to move remains and alerted family members in recent weeks in accordance with a 2001 state law known as the Cemetery Authority Act.

After encountering a groundswell of opposition, the owners said Sunday they've temporarily suspended any plans for exhumations. But critics remain concerned.

"They call it the Cemetery Authority Act. I call it the Grave Robbers Law," said Fran Tryon, a retired teacher and genealogist who founded the Hillside Cemetery Preservation Foundation.

The site overlooking Interstate 80 a half-mile (0.8 kilometers) from the main casino drag is Reno's oldest cemetery, the final resting place for hundreds who reflect northern Nevada's unique frontier past. Granite tombstones and wooden markers sit atop many of the graves, while others are marked by tiny flags or simply a pile of rocks.

The buried include a former Kentucky congressman who moved to Nevada in 1870 and later was appointed a national bank examiner by President Grover Cleveland. Not far away are the remains of Paiute Chief Johnson Sides, who worked as an interpreter and "peacemaker" for the U.S. Army.

Also interred at Hillside are state lawmakers, saloon keepers, train-hopping hobos and dozens of infant victims of scarlet fever and other epidemics from the early 1900s.

"This is northern Nevada's history," Tryon told The Associated Press during a recent tour of the property. "These are our founding fathers."

Facing the prospect of hundreds of graves being moved, volunteers have spent months removing weeds and litter, and posting makeshift signs and markers on the blighted grounds that had become overgrown with sagebrush.

Health officials say opponents' fears that exhuming the graves could spread anthrax and other diseases are largely unfounded. The only real threat would be to workers doing the digging, who will wear protective clothing.

"Each set of remains would be relocated in its own container," the Reno health district said in a release.

Drew Lawton, owner of another cemetery that controls Hillside, last week assured the Reno City Council exhumation of graves was not imminent. And on Sunday, just before meeting with dozens of heirs of the dead, he issued a statement on behalf of the cemetery that said in view of "a few families' unfavorable responses," any potential disinterment is on hold. He declined to elaborate.

Lawton said in a previous statement that any renovation would include appropriate monuments, fencing and financial provisions for the cemetery's ongoing care, and any work would be done by archaeologists and other experts.

Developer Vinton Hawkins has the option to buy the land. His spokesman, Reno lobbyist Greg Ferraro, said earlier they envisioned a "multi-phased project" and that discussion about long-term development was premature.

"The Cemetery Authority has gone above and beyond what Nevada law requires in an effort to connect with families," Ferraro said in a statement.

Tryon acknowledged past problems with vandalism and dumping at the site. But she said neighboring fraternities and sororities that once partied there have helped with cleanup in recent years. Over Labor Day weekend, they helped fill more than a dozen garbage bags with weeds and trash.

Jeremy Lambert, a U.S. military veteran who lives across the street, joined the cleanup effort four months ago.

"I didn't like all the weeds," Lambert said. "Then I saw the foundation's site on Facebook and started to learn about all the veterans here  Civil War, Spanish American War, World War I.

"I think it's disrespectful," he said. "They fought for their country. They should be left alone."

Among the heroes, mayors and business leaders laid to rest at the cemetery are everyday people who deserve respect too, Tryon said. The cloth markers she's tied to the fence with plot numbers and information she's uncovered in researching the dead offer a glimpse into their lives  or at least their demise, such as murder victims and one "unknown" who was run over by a train.

Given Hillside's prime location near the University of Nevada, Reno campus, Tryon and others believe construction of an apartment building is the most likely outcome if the disinterment goes forward.

"The purpose was always to develop this. They are going to sell it and put the money in their pocket," Tryon said. "I wouldn't want to live in those apartments. It would be a very bad vibe."

In this Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016 photo, the remains of many of Reno's founders have rested for more than a century in Hillside Cemetery on the edge of downtown Reno, Nev. Some of the graves have headstones, but others have only wooden markers erected in recent years by volunteers like this one pictured here. Historic preservationists are outraged that the owner has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume hundreds of graves and transfer the remains to another section of the cemetery so the land can be sold for potential development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner).

In this Sept. 8, 2016 photo, a sign hangs on the fence that reads "Notice of determination for disinterment and removal of human remains" in Reno, Nev., at Hillside Cemetery. The owners posted the notice, secured health permits to move remains and alerted family members in recent weeks in accordance with a state law known as the Cemetery Authority Act. Reno residents and heirs of the dead are outraged, calling the cemetery a Nevada historical treasure that should not be disturbed. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

In this Sept. 10, 2016 photo, Fran Tryon, founder of the Hillside Cemetery Preservation Foundation, poses for a photo at the cemetery in Reno, Nev., next to the grave site of Paiute Chief Johnson Sides. Tryon is among those who are outraged that the owner has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume graves and move them to make way for a development. The plan is currently on hold, but heirs of the dead remain concerned. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

This Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016 photo shows Hillside Cemetery in Reno, Nev. The pioneer cemetery where the remains of Civil War soldiers and city founders have rested for more than a century could be relocated. The cemetery's owners want to dig up and move the graves to clear the way for a development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

This Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016 photo shows Hillside Cemetery in Reno, Nev. The pioneer cemetery where the remains of Civil War soldiers and city founders have rested for more than a century could be relocated. The cemetery's owners want to dig up and move the graves to clear the way for a development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

In this Saturday, Sept. 10, 2016 photo, the headstone for the grave of Catherine Frick, a native of Ireland who died in Reno in 1913, is seen at Hillside Cemetery on the edge of downtown Reno, Nev. It had been missing until last summer when someone discovered it while cleaning out the basement of an old fraternity house. The owner of Reno's oldest cemetery has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume hundreds of graves dating to the 1860s and transfer the remains to another section of the cemetery so the land can be sold for potential development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

CORRECTS NAME TO JEREMY LAMBERT, INSTEAD OF SCOTT NEBESKY In this Saturday, Sept. 10, 2016 photo, Fran Tryon, left, founder of the Hillside Cemetery Preservation Foundation, and Jeremy Lambert, a volunteer, repair markers and post ''No Trespassing'' signs at the cemetery in Reno, Nev. They are among those outraged that the owner has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume hundreds of graves in Reno's oldest cemetery dating to the 1860s and transfer the remains to another section of the cemetery so the land can be sold for potential development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)

In this Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016 photo, the remains of many of Reno's founders have rested for more than a century in Hillside Cemetery on the edge of downtown Reno, Nev. Some of the graves have headstones, but others have only wooden stakes marking the plot number like this one pictured here. Historic preservationists are outraged that the owner has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume hundreds of graves and transfer the remains to another section of the cemetery so the land can be sold for potential development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner).

This Sept. 19, 2016 photo shows ribbons and notes tied to the fence around Hillside Cemeteryon the edge of downtown Reno, Nev. Historic preservationists are outraged that the owner of the cemetary has obtained a permit and posted a notice of plans to exhume hundreds of graves and transfer the remains to another section of the cemetery so the land can be sold for potential development. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)
Deceased lawmaker to remain speaker of Nicaragua congress

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP)  The Nicaraguan congress will have a dead man as its speaker for the next four months, lawmakers in the Central American nation have decided.

The National Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday night to keep Rene Nunez, who was the body's president for nine years until his death on Sept. 10, as their titular head.

The assembly's vice president will take on his administrative duties until the end of the legislative session Jan. 10, when new leadership is to be chosen.

FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2005 file photo, National Assembly President Rene Nunez talks during a press conference in Managua, Nicaragua. Nicaragua's congress has decided that Nunez, who died on Sept. 10, 2016, will remain as the body's titular head through the end of the legislative session in January. The unprecedented move is intended to honor Nunez, who was president of the legislative assembly for nine years until his death, at age 69. The assembly's vice president will take on his administrative responsibilities. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

The unprecedented move is intended to recognize Nunez's contributions to the country, said Edwin Castro, leader of the ruling Sandinista party's congressional bloc.

"What we are deciding is that no substitute will be chosen because the president of this assembly will continue to be Rene Nunez," Castro said in remarks to lawmakers.

Opposition legislator Lissethe Montenegro, who abstained from the vote, argued that the law calls for deceased legislators to be replaced.

"I think Rene should be allowed to rest in peace," she said.
Trump's new Cuba position provokes anxiety on the island

HAVANA (AP)  Donald Trump's threat to undo President Barack Obama's detente with Cuba unless President Raul Castro abides by Trump's list of demands is provoking widespread anxiety among ordinary Cubans, who were paying little attention to the U.S. presidential campaign until now.

Trump had been generally supportive of Obama's reestablishment of diplomatic ties and normalization of relations, saying he thought detente was "fine" although he would have cut a better deal.

Then, in Miami on Friday, the Republican nominee said he would reverse Obama's series of executive orders unless Castro meets demands including "religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of political prisoners." Castro said in a speech the following day that Cuba "will not renounce a single one of its principles," reiterating a longstanding rejection of any U.S. pressure.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Germain Arena, Monday, Sept. 19, 2016, in Ft. Myers, Fla. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

While Hillary Clinton maintains an electoral college advantage, Cubans are suddenly envisioning the possibility of a U.S. president who would undo measures popular among virtually everyone on the island, from hard-line communists to advocates of greater freedom and democracy.

"I don't think he'd make such a drastic decision. Or would he?" Bernardo Toledo, a 72-year-old retired state worker, asked nervously. "It would be disgraceful."

While the detente announced on Dec. 17, 2014 has had limited direct impact on most ordinary Cubans, it has created feelings of optimism about a future of civil relations with Cuba's giant neighbor to the north. An Univision/Washington Post poll of 1,200 Cubans taken in March, 2015 found that 97 percent supported detente.

For most ordinary people in a country that's had only two leaders over nearly six decades, and where the president's word is law, Trump's unexpected reversal was a reminder that a single election might wipe away those closer ties.

"All we want is to be left in peace. Isn't he thinking about our families?" complained pharmacist Heidi Picot. "How could he do something like this, make everybody worried?"

Still, some Cuban experts on relations with the U.S. saw the candidate as merely pandering to anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in South Florida, and don't believe a President Trump would follow through with his campaign pledge. Detente is increasingly popular among Cuban-Americans and South Florida pollsters say Trump is not ahead with them by the margins managed by previous Republicans who've won Florida.

Hillary Clinton has declared her support for continuing Obama's policy, which has reopened the U.S. Embassy, re-established direct flights and removed Cuba from a list of state terror sponsors. It also has done away with most limits on cash remittances from the U.S and increased cooperation on topics ranging from law enforcement to public health.

"I don't think it will be very easy for Trump to reverse some things," former diplomat Carlos Alzugary said. "Break diplomatic relations? Put Cuba back on the list of terrorist states? Those things are almost impossible."

Cuba's state media had been virtually silent on the U.S. presidential campaign, seemingly uncertain of how to square the polarizing and highly competitive race with the oft-repeated Cuban assertion that U.S. democracy offers false choices between nearly identical corporate pawns.

Trump's statement generated an unusual amount of official coverage over the weekend. State radio stations and other government-run media accused the Republican of pandering to Cuban-Americans in an attempt to win Florida's electoral votes.

A Trump reversal would fit a historical pattern, started under Jimmy Carter, in which Democratic presidents build ties to Cuba and their Republican successors largely undo them.

Obama has worked hard to make the opening irreversible by building popular and corporate support at home. In Cuba, the government has welcomed some new ties, like scientific cooperation and commercial flights. It has stalled on others, like ferries from Florida. Some observers believe that's because Castro's government fears building ties that a hostile future U.S. administration could use in the interests of regime change.

The Cuban government has given no indication of whether Trump's statement will give new impetus to U.S.-Cuba normalization, or cause the process to stall in what could be its last three months.

Meanwhile, Cubans remain hopeful, but increasingly worried.

"It's a way to move the economy forward, to diversify," said Yenitsia Arango, a 34-year-old nurse. "The door's been opened to better relations and it's not a good idea to go in reverse."

_____ Correspondent Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.

_____

Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ARrodriguezAP

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mweissenstein

FILE - In this March 21, 2016 file photo, Cuban President Raul Castro, right, lifts up the arm of President Barack Obama at the conclusion of their joint news conference at the Palace of the Revolution, in Havana, Cuba. Donald Trumps pledge to undo Obamas detente with Cuba is provoking widespread anxiety among ordinary Cubans, who were paying little attention to the U.S. presidential campaign until now. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton takes as selfie as she meets with attendees during a campaign stop at Temple University in Philadelphia, Monday, Sept. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Scanning software deciphers ancient biblical scroll

JERUSALEM (AP)  The charred lump of a 2,000-year-old scroll sat in an Israeli archaeologist's storeroom for decades, too brittle to open. Now, new imaging technology has revealed what was written inside: the earliest evidence of a biblical text in its standardized form.

The passages from the Book of Leviticus, scholars say, offer the first physical evidence of what has long been believed: that the version of the Hebrew Bible used today goes back 2,000 years.

The discovery, announced in a Science Advances journal article by researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem on Wednesday, was made using "virtual unwrapping," a 3D digital analysis of an X-ray scan. Researchers say it is the first time they have been able to read the text of an ancient scroll without having to physically open it.

This undated photo released by the Israel Antiquities Authority shows an ancient charred scroll destroyed in a fire centuries ago. The 3D analysis is the first time experts say they have been able to read the text of an ancient scroll without having to physically open it. (Israel Antiquities Authority via AP)

"You can't imagine the joy in the lab," said Pnina Shor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who participated in the study.

The digital technology, funded by Google and the U.S. National Science Foundation, is slated to be released to the public as open source software by the end of next year.

Researchers hope to use the technology to peek inside other ancient documents too fragile to unwrap, like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and papyrus scrolls carbonized in the Mt. Vesuvius volcano eruption in 79 CE. Researchers believe the technology could also be applied to the fields of forensics, intelligence, and antiquities conservation.

The biblical scroll examined in the study was first discovered by archaeologists in 1970 at Ein Gedi, the site of an ancient Jewish community near the Dead Sea. Inside the ancient synagogue's ark, archaeologists found lumps of scroll fragments.

The synagogue was destroyed in an ancient fire, charring the scrolls. The dry climate of the area kept them preserved, but when archaeologists touched them, the scrolls would begin to disintegrate. So the charred logs were shelved for nearly half a century, with no one knowing what was written inside.

Last year, Yosef Porath, the archaeologist who excavated at Ein Gedi in 1970, walked into the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls preservation lab in Jerusalem with boxes of the charcoal chunks. The lab has been creating hi-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copies of biblical texts ever discovered, and he asked researchers to scan the burned scrolls.

"I looked at him and said, 'you must be joking,'" said Shor, who heads the lab.

She agreed, and a number of burned scrolls were scanned using X-ray-based micro-computed tomography, a 3D version of the CT scans hospitals use to create images of internal body parts. The images were then sent to William Brent Seales, a researcher in the computer science department of the University of Kentucky. Only one of the scrolls could be deciphered.

Using the "virtual unwrapping" technology, he and his team painstakingly captured the three-dimensional shape of the scroll's layers, using a digital triangulated surface mesh to make a virtual rendering of the parts they suspected contained text. They then searched for pixels that could signify ink made with a dense material like iron or lead. The researchers then used computer modeling to virtually flatten the scroll, to be able to read a few columns of text inside.

"Not only were you seeing writing, but it was readable," said Seales. "At that point we were absolutely jubilant."

The researchers say it is the first time a biblical scroll has been discovered in an ancient synagogue's holy ark, where it would have been stored for prayers, and not in desert caves like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The discovery holds great significance for scholars' understanding of the development of the Hebrew Bible, researchers say.

In ancient times, many versions of the Hebrew Bible circulated. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to as early as the 3rd century B.C., featured versions of the text that are radically different than today's Hebrew Bible.

Scholars have believed the Hebrew Bible in its standard form first came about some 2,000 years ago, but never had physical proof, until now, according to the study. Previously the oldest known fragments of the modern biblical text dated back to the 8th century.

The text discovered in the charred Ein Gedi scroll is "100 percent identical" to the version of the Book of Leviticus that has been in use for centuries, said Dead Sea Scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who participated in the study.

"This is quite amazing for us," he said. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."

Noam Mizrahi, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert at Tel Aviv University who did not participate in the study, called it a "very, very nice find." He said the imaging technology holds great potential for more readings of unopened Dead Sea Scrolls.

"It's not only what was found, but the promise of what else it can uncover, which is what will turn this into an exciting discovery," Mizrahi said.

__
Missouri Senate no slam dunk as GOP spends to save Blunt

ST. LOUIS (AP)  In an election with control of the Senate at stake, Republicans were counting on a win in GOP-friendly Missouri. Instead they're suddenly plunging millions into the state to save incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt from a young challenger who assembled an AR-15 rifle blindfolded in a daring new ad.

Polls show the race is close, but Democrats argue the momentum is with Missouri's 35-year-old secretary of state, Jason Kander, a former Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan. Even Republicans were awed by Kander's recent TV ad showing him putting together a rifle with a blindfold on and challenging Blunt, who did not serve in the military, to do the same.

"Mr. Kander has hired himself a great ad agency. My hat is off to him," said GOP Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Senate GOP.

FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2015 file photo, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. In an election with control of the Senate at stake, Republicans were counting on a win in GOP-friendly Missouri. Instead theyre suddenly plunging millions into the state to save incumbent Blunt from a young challenger Jason Kander. (AP Photo/Molly Riley, File)

Democrats' Senate campaign committee has sought to seize the moment, announcing $3.5 million in new advertising last week. "That's a very, very, very, good ad, maybe the best ad I've ever seen, but that means buying more," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana.

This week, Wicker's committee was forced to answer back with more than $500,000 in broadcast spending so far in St. Louis and Springfield. The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC run by allies of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is also spending heavily on the race, investing $2.5 million in Missouri this month alone.

Privately some Republicans voice dismay that they have to intervene in the Missouri race to such an extent at a time when they're defending incumbents in blue and purple states around the country. In an unpredictable political environment with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, Republicans are trying to protect a slim 54-46 Senate majority against Democrats who are determined to retake control.

The shifting environment in Missouri comes partly because Democrats are pulling back in battleground Ohio, where incumbent GOP Sen. Rob Portman has opened a substantial lead, and in Florida, where incumbent GOP Sen. Marco Rubio is looking strong in a state where advertising is extremely expensive. Instead Democrats have decided to direct resources to North Carolina and to Missouri, where their advertising dollars will go farther.

Many Republicans are concerned about North Carolina's GOP Sen. Richard Burr, but many still sound confident that Blunt will ultimately prevail. The 66-year-old has served in Congress for two decades and is a member of the Senate leadership, but he lives in Washington, D.C., where he can be seen walking his dog around his Northwest D.C. neighborhood, and has been attacked over his family's network of D.C. lobbying contacts. His son Andy, a lobbyist, is also his campaign manager.

"It's going to be closer than it ought to be I think, given the uniqueness of this election year, but Roy Blunt's going to win," said John Hancock, chairman of the Missouri Republican Party. "The reason Democrats are putting money into Missouri is they have failed to gain any traction in other Senate races across the country."

And despite praising Kander's ad, Wicker said Republicans would show the Democrat is wrong for Missouri by highlighting his support for President Barack Obama's health care law, his F rating from the National Rifle Association and other issues. Republicans have been substantially outspending Democrats in the state so far.

"Jason Kander is really good at taking a gun apart and putting it back together. I expect also that he could ride a bull at a rodeo in a very effective manner. Perhaps he could do a lot of push-ups," Wicker said. "When all of that is said and done the fact is he's totally out of step with Missouri on the key issues that this campaign will revolve around."

Kander himself, in a phone interview with The Associated Press, said he is seeing increasing enthusiasm at his rallies. The gun ad, he said, certainly helped.

"Our message from Day 1 has been that Missourians are frustrated with politics as usual in Washington and are ready for a new generation of leadership," Kander said. "Clearly, that's resonating."

Aides declined to make Blunt available for an interview but insisted he was taking the race seriously and working hard.

"Roy Blunt has been to all 115 counties in Missouri an unprecedented three times since declaring for Senate. In August alone, he made more than 100 stops across the state," said spokesman Tate O'Connor. "No one works harder for Missouri than Roy Blunt."

___

Werner reported from Washington.
Navajos ask federal judge to restore polling places in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY (AP)  Navajo Nation member Davis Filfred prefers casting a ballot the old fashioned way at a polling place. But he's worried he may have to make a three-hour round-trip drive this November to make that happen.

San Juan County in southeastern Utah switched to an all-mail ballot election system in 2014, leaving only one polling place in the northern county seat of Monticello for that election. That meant tribal members who live in far-flung corners of the county had to drive twice as far as white residents, according to a Navajo group that filed a federal lawsuit in February over the new system.

The group urged U.S. District Judge Jill Parrish Wednesday to approve their request for a court order requiring the county to open nine polling places for the November election, three satellite locations for early voting and staff them with bilingual workers who can help Navajo speakers.

In this Aug. 22, 2016, photo, Navajo Nation member Davis Filfred speaks during a meeting with the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority at the Red Mesa Chapter, near Montezuma Creek, Utah. Filfred is among the tribal members hoping a federal judge on Wednesday, Sept. 22 grants the group's request for an injunction that would require the county to restore polling places for the November election and staff them with bilingual workers who can help Navajo speakers. "A lot of Navajos don't understand the mail-in ballot," said Filfred. "They would rather go to a polling place. That's what they're accustomed to and they want that back. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

"There's no way for us to have a redo of the upcoming election," said attorney Arusha Gordon, represented the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission.

Parrish didn't rule Wednesday, but she questioned why she needs to issue the order if county officials already plan to open three locations for in-person voting on the Navajo Nation to supplement all-mail voting. The county did the same for the June primary election, which came three months after the lawsuit was filed.

Parrish said it seemed the group's argument hinged mainly on the notion the county can't be trusted rather than proof of imminent harm to Navajo voters.

"I don't think you can just say, 'I think they're liars, we don't trust them,' " Parrish said.

Gordon said county officials have failed to come through before, prompting the need for a court-ordered requirement. One such example was the county failing to air ads on Navajo radio ahead of the primary about voting procedures, she said. Their translation of ballots and explanation of mail-in voting has also been haphazard, Gordon said.

Jesse Trentadue, an attorney for the county, said the plaintiffs are glossing over the changes made for the primary election and unfairly focusing on 2014 election. He said county officials take seriously their duty to make sure Navajos have equal opportunity to vote and accused the group suing of wanting special treatment.

"They don't get a better opportunity. They get an equal opportunity," Trentadue said.

The battle has reignited long-festering tensions between tribal members and other residents in a rural county that sits in the Four Corners region of the West and covers the northern tip of the Navajo Nation that is mostly in Arizona and New Mexico.

Similar legal clashes have been waged recently in Nevada, Montana and the Dakotas over a variety of issues involving the Voting Rights Act, including access to polling places as well as unreliable U.S. mail service on reservations.

San Juan County, Utah officials defend the new system, saying it led to higher voter participation in 2014. They accuse the Navajo plaintiffs of fabricating the claims in the lawsuit in an attempt to control local politics.

The county lost to the Navajo Nation earlier this year in a different election policy clash when a federal judge ordered San Juan County to redraw the boundaries of its election districts after ruling that it had violated equal protection for American Indians. The tribe argued in a lawsuit filed in 2012 that the county's decision to maintain a decades-old boundary was racially motivated.

In Nevada, tribal leaders asked a federal judge earlier this month to order that state and two counties to establish satellite polling places on reservations where they say Native Americans are being denied an equal opportunity to vote in the November elections.

Two Paiute tribes accuse the secretary of state and the counties of discriminating by illegally refusing tribe members voting access afforded to people in wealthier, mostly white neighborhoods. Members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe living in Washoe County say they must travel 96 miles roundtrip to register to vote or to cast ballots in person.

In 2014 in Alaska, a federal judge ordered the state to do more to help Native language speakers understand their ballots after voters argued voting materials in both Yup'ik and Gwich'in were inaccurately translated and poorly distributed.

Filfred, a member of the Navajo Nation Council, part of tribal government, said many Navajos don't understand the mail-in ballot.

"They would rather go to a polling place. That's what they're accustomed to, and they want that back," Filfred said. "If you take that away from them, you're messing with their voting rights."

___

Associated Press writer Scott Sonner contributed to this story from Reno, Nevada.
2nd wildfire breaks out on California military base

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP)  Another wildfire, likely sparked by a downed powerline, broke out Wednesday and forced the evacuation of buildings on a large central California military base where another blaze has been burning all week, officials said.

The new fire broke out at 2 p.m. on the north side of the coastal, mostly undeveloped Vandenberg Air Force Base is unrelated to the older, larger fire that's on the south side, base officials said.

The new blaze, which had grown to at least 100 acres, brought the evacuation of administrative buildings, but was not yet a threat to any of the housing or key facilities on the base.

A California Highway Patrol investigator looks at the wreck of a water tender fire truck involved in a rollover crash near Vandenberg Air Force base that took the life of a Ventura County Fire Dept. firefighter and injured another firefighter Wednesday morning, Sept. 21, 2016, near Lompoc, Calif. The accident happened as firefighting crews gained ground in their effort to contain the wildfire at the base near launch pads used to send satellites into space. The truck crashed before dawn at a roundabout on a two-lane highway just outside Vandenberg, said Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Steve Swindle. (Len Wood/The Santa Maria Times via AP)

Southward winds sent smoke over Lompoc, a city of 40,000 people at the edge of the base, though the flames themselves were not threatening the city.

A preliminary report says a downed powerline sparked it.

Resources were being diverted from the earlier fire that broke out over the weekend in a remote canyon and forced the postponement of a satellite launch. It was 70 percent contained and had burned about 19 square miles (49 square kilometers) of rugged land.

A firefighter died Wednesday and another was hurt when the water truck they were in overturned on a highway outside the city of Lompoc, miles from the fire lines.

Ventura County firefighter Ryan Osler was killed, and Adam Price was injured. There were no other occupants in the truck.

Neither fire posed an immediate threat to the base's launch complex that fires satellites into space.

The two fires forced the cancellation of an exotic car show on the base planned for the coming weekend.

Vandenberg encompasses nearly 156 square miles (405 square kilometers) along the Pacific Ocean.

Skid marks lead to the scene of a rollover crash of a water tanker truck near Vandenberg Air Force base that took the life of a Ventura County Fire Dept. firefighter and injured another firefighter Wednesday morning, Sept. 21, 2016, near Lompoc, Calif. The accident happened as firefighting crews gained ground in their effort to contain the wildfire at the base near launch pads used to send satellites into space. The truck crashed before dawn at a roundabout on a two-lane highway just outside Vandenberg, said Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Steve Swindle. (Len Wood/The Santa Maria Times via AP)
AP FACT CHECK: Trump's bogus birth claim about Clinton

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  When finally coming around to the fact President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Donald Trump tacked on a dig at his White House rival. It was Hillary Clinton, he said, who started the rumor that Obama was born abroad.

"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it," the Republican presidential nominee said last week. "President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period."

But Trump's new allegation that it was all Clinton's fault is as untrue as his original lie. The public record over the past decade undermines his attempt to blame the Democratic nominee for the origins of a conspiracy Trump peddled for years.

FILE - In this Sept. 16, 2016 file photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump states that "President Barack Obama was born in the United States," during a news conference in Washington. The public record over the last decade undermines Donald Trumps attempt to pin on Hillary Clinton the origins of a conspiracy he peddled for years about President Barack Obamas birthplace. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

People in Clinton's orbit did discuss Obama's background during their bitter primary struggle in 2008. But as nasty as that campaign got at times, it was not an anything-goes affair. And it appears that when Clinton got wind of smears about Obama's roots or religion, she either shut down that line of argument or ignored it.

There is no evidence that Clinton herself has ever said Obama wasn't born in America.

Trump, meanwhile, was for the past five years the primary propagator of the falsehood that Obama was not born in Hawaii in 1961, even though there was no serious question about Obama's birthplace even before the president produced his birth certificate in 2011.

On Sunday, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway cited three pieces of evidence to support her boss' claim that Clinton was the original "birther."

Here's a closer look at evidence that is dubious at best, fails to tie the falsehood conclusively to Clinton herself and cannot compete with Trump's yearslong effort to undermine the legitimacy of the nation's first African-American president.

___

THE EMAIL

In an interview Sunday with CBS' "Face The Nation," Conway offered as a first piece of evidence an email that surfaced about a month before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses. Obama and Clinton, then U.S. senators, were at that time locked in a fierce campaign as stars atop the Democratic presidential field.

Judy Rose, Clinton's top volunteer in a rural eastern Iowa county, had forwarded the chain email to eight fellow Democrats. It mentioned Obama's father's Kenyan ancestry and the father's Muslim faith. But that email, which became public the following month, stated that "Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii."

The email falsely claimed Obama is a Muslim and equated Islam with support for overthrowing the U.S. government. "The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level," the email from an anonymous author stated.

Rose quit her unpaid volunteer post and Clinton's national campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle contacted her counterpart in Obama's campaign, David Plouffe, to apologize. It was clear, Obama's team says, that Clinton was not behind the attempted smear.

"Having worked on that campaign, there was no point where we felt that Hillary Clinton was pushing these rumors," said Tommy Vietor, Obama's 2008 Iowa campaign spokesman and later a White House communications aide.

Questions about Obama's place of birth did surface in an anonymous email in April 2008 that was circulated among some die-hard Clinton supporters, as Obama appeared headed toward the presidential nomination.

That email alleged that Obama's U.S.-born mother was living in Kenya late in her pregnancy, was unable to travel and registered his birth in Hawaii after he was born. There is no evidence Clinton or her campaign team spread it around.

___

THE MEMO

Conway also cited a memo by Mark Penn, Clinton's chief pollster and media strategist in the 2008 campaign. It cites Obama's "Lack of American Roots" as a liability.

"His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited," Penn wrote, further suggesting Obama was "not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values." Penn went on to suggest Clinton draw attention to the idea "without going negative."

In a race that had become personal and caustic, Clinton rejected out of hand the ideas that Penn did present, Solis Doyle said.

"I'm not saying we didn't campaign hard against Obama," she said. "It was a hard-fought, sometimes brutal campaign. But this would have delegitimized his identity. And, to us, that was beyond the pale."

It is worth noting, too, there is no mention in the strategy proposal of Obama's birthplace. "We are never going to say anything about his background  we have to show the value of ours," Penn wrote.

___

THE ASSOCIATE

By one account, an important unofficial adviser to Clinton did stoke rumors about Obama's country of birth. Conway cited Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal meeting the Washington bureau chief for McClatchy newspapers at the time, James Asher, and telling him Obama was born in Kenya.

Blumenthal has denied discussing the subject with Asher, who maintains he met with the Clinton confidant. McClatchy correspondents have said it's true Asher asked them to look into Obama's ties to Kenya. Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Asher on Tuesday were unsuccessful.

But there is no dispute that Blumenthal, while close to Clinton, was not officially part of the campaign staff. The McClatchy newspapers found nothing to support the claim that Obama was born in Kenya.

Nor did Clinton's campaign stir a pot that Trump would tend to for years.

"The 'birther' thing was never an issue that mattered in any conversation, rising to the level where we had to address it," said Paul Tewes, a senior Obama campaign adviser in 2008. "In other words, I don't believe the Clinton campaign was out there being malicious."

___

This story has been corrected to fix the order of Trump's comments on Friday.

___

Follow Thomas Beaumont on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tombeaumont
The Latest: Bridge exec admits approving bogus news release

NEWARK, N.J. (AP)  The Latest on the second day of testimony in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing trial (all times local):

3:10 p.m.

The agency that operates the George Washington Bridge sent press releases promoting a false story about traffic jams that prosecutors say were caused by two former allies of New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie for political retribution.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich arrives at Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Court for a hearing, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Newark, N.J. Three years after gridlock paralyzed a New Jersey town next to the George Washington Bridge for four days, two former allies of Gov. Chris Christie are being tried. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Executive director Patrick Foye testified Wednesday that he approved the releases that said the traffic jams in Fort Lee in September 2013 were due to a traffic study. He said he knew the assertion to be untrue.

Foye's deputy executive director, Bill Baroni, is on trial with former Christie deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly. They're charged with creating traffic jams to punish a Democratic mayor for not endorsing Christie.

The mayor testified he initially lied, saying he didn't think the closures were for political revenge, because he was afraid of jeopardizing a redevelopment project.

___

1:35 p.m.

The head of the agency that operates the George Washington Bridge has testified that one of the defendants charged with causing gridlock for political retribution tried to persuade him to keep the traffic lanes closed.

Patrick Foye is executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

At the trial of two former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie, Foye said Wednesday that deputy executive director Bill Baroni asked him to reclose access lanes after Foye ordered them reopened.

Baroni and former Christie deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly are charged with creating traffic jams to punish a Democratic mayor for not endorsing Christie in 2013.

Foye testified Baroni said the closures were "important to Trenton," which Foye presumed meant Christie's office.

Christie isn't charged.

___

12:25 p.m.

A Democratic New Jersey mayor who prosecutors say was punished with traffic gridlock by former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie says he initially denied it was political payback because he was afraid the governor's administration would torpedo a building project in his city.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich testified Wednesday at the trial of Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly. They're charged with causing traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge in September 2013.

On cross-examination Wednesday, Sokolich admitted he lied in a letter to a newspaper in November 2013 when he denied earlier reports he'd been targeted for not endorsing Christie.

He testified he was concerned about a multibillion-dollar project near the bridge.

Kelly was Christie's deputy chief of staff. Baroni was an executive at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

___

11:59 a.m.

A Democratic New Jersey mayor who prosecutors say was punished with traffic gridlock by former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie for not endorsing Christie admitted lying in a letter to a newspaper about the motive to save a building project.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich testified Wednesday at the trial of Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly. They're charged with causing traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge in September 2013.

On cross-examination Wednesday, Sokolich admitted he lied in the letter in November 2013 when he denied earlier reports he'd been targeted for not endorsing Christie.

He testified he was concerned about a multibillion-dollar project near the bridge.

Kelly was Christie's deputy chief of staff. Baroni was an executive at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

___

11:24 a.m.

A Democratic New Jersey mayor who prosecutors say was punished with traffic gridlock by former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie for not endorsing Christie tells a jury he lied when he wrote to a newspaper it wasn't a case of political retaliation.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich testified Wednesday at the trial of Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly. They're charged with causing traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge in 2013.

On cross-examination Wednesday, Sokolich admitted he lied in a letter to the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger in November 2013 when he denied earlier reports he'd been targeted for not endorsing Christie.

Kelly was Christie's deputy chief of staff. Baroni was deputy executive director at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge.

___

9:55 a.m.

The Democratic New Jersey mayor who prosecutors say was targeted in a political revenge plot by former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie is back on the witness stand at their federal trial.

Defendants Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly are charged with causing traffic jams in Fort Lee near the George Washington Bridge in 2013 to punish Mayor Mark Sokolich for not endorsing Christie's re-election.

Kelly was Christie's deputy chief of staff at the time. Baroni was deputy executive director at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge. He was Christie's top appointee to the agency.

Sokolich testified Tuesday he was showered with attention from Christie staffers before declining to endorse Christie's re-election in late summer 2013. The traffic jams occurred several weeks later.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, leaves the courthouse, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Sokolich, the Democratic mayor who prosecutors say was targeted by two former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie for a political vendetta told jurors Tuesday how he was courted by Christie staffers for more than three years before ultimately declining to endorse Christie's re-election. (Viorel Florescu/The Record via AP)

Bridget Kelly enters the courthouse for the start of the trial, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Bill Baroni, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey official, and Bridget Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, are charged with civil rights violations, conspiracy and wire fraud. Prosecutors say they caused the traffic jams by reducing the number of access lanes to the bridge from three to one without notifying Fort Lee officials. (Chris Pedota/The Record via AP)

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, leaves the courthouse, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Sokolich, the Democratic mayor who prosecutors say was targeted by two former allies of Republican Gov. Chris Christie for a political vendetta told jurors Tuesday how he was courted by Christie staffers for more than three years before ultimately declining to endorse Christie's re-election. (Viorel Florescu/The Record via AP)

Bill Baroni leaves court, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 in Newark, N.J. Bill Baroni, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey official, and Bridget Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, are charged with civil rights violations, conspiracy and wire fraud. Prosecutors say they caused the traffic jams by reducing the number of access lanes to the bridge from three to one without notifying Fort Lee officials. (Viorel Florescu/The Record via AP)

Bridget Anne Kelly and her attorney Michael Critchley, far left, arrive at the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Courthouse in Newark, N.J., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. Kelly and Bill Baroni are charged with causing traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge in September 2013. Kelly was Christie's deputy chief of staff. Baroni was an executive at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. (Danielle Parhizkaran/Northjersey.com via AP)
Officials: Refinancing South Carolina reactors saves money

JENKINSVILLE, S.C. (AP)  Officials overseeing the construction of some of the country's first new nuclear reactors in decades said Wednesday that a recent financing deal means fewer costs from the multibillion-dollar project will be passed on to power customers in South Carolina.

The comments from officials including SCANA Corp. CEO Kevin Marsh, whose employer owns a 55 percent stake in the project at V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Jenkinsville, come just weeks before state regulators are due to consider the ninth rate increase related to the construction project.

The 3.1 percent increase requested by SCANA's electric utility component, South Carolina Electric & Gas Co., would be the largest single rate increase since the company began charging its 700,000 customers for construction.

The V.C. Summer Nuclear Station's unit one, right,, is shown beside unit two, left, under construction near Jenkinsville, S.C., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. SCE&G is seeking a 3.1 percent residential raise that would be the largest single rate increase since the utility began charging its 700,000 customers for the reactors' construction. The hike, which would take effect at the end of November if approved, would be the ninth such increase to pay for the $14 billion reactors since 2009. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Currently pending before the Public Service Commission, the request would pay off an additional $846 million in cost overruns. It pushes the project's final costs to nearly $14 billion. In 2009, the utility's final approval paperwork estimated costs at $11.4 billion.

Marsh, who spoke with The Associated Press during a rare media day at the complex about 30 miles northwest of Columbia, said that he understands power customer frustrations with the repeated rate increases to offset financing for new reactors.

But the chief executive said that a fixed-price deal negotiated last year when Texas-based Fluor Corp. became the project's lead construction contractor makes it easier to stay on target.

"It gives us a significant amount of price certainty," Marsh said of the negotiated deal, which he said shifts more costs back to reactor designer Westinghouse Electric Co. instead of power customers.

"If you have a series of rate increases, it's logical that they would be frustrated by that," Marsh told AP. "Sometimes, the best decision for the long term is not the easiest."

Marsh spoke while standing on a platform specially constructed to give reporters a vantage point overlooking the massive project. About 3,800 people are currently working on the reactors, which will be massive structures of concrete and steel. One of the largest cranes on earth is currently at the site, a blue, 560-foot-tall monster with twin booms, a massive rear counterweight and ability to move components weighing millions of pounds.

Projects like the new reactors in Jenkinsville are rare. Along with two additional Westinghouse AP1000 reactors being constructed at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia by Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power and its co-owners, they're the first of their kind to be built in the U.S. Once both are online, South Carolina will have nine operational nuclear plants.

Initially slated to open in March 2017, the first reactor is now expected to go online in August 2019, with the second following a year later. Officials have attributed delays to previous suppliers unaccustomed to the high degree of scrutiny associated with nuclear work.

But officials also attribute delays, as well as increased costs, to changes in the project's construction contractors. The original company, Shaw Group Inc., was bought out in 2012 by Chicago Bridge & Iron, which was replaced in October by Fluor.

___

Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP. Read more of her work at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/meg-kinnard/

V.C. Summer Nuclear Station's unit two's turbine, right, and containment unit, center, are shown under construction near Jenkinsville, S.C., during a media tour of the facility Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. SCE&G is seeking a 3.1 percent residential raise that would be the largest single rate increase since the utility began charging its 700,000 customers for the reactors' construction. The hike, which would take effect at the end of November if approved, would be the ninth such increase to pay for the $14 billion reactors since 2009. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

V.C. Summer Nuclear Station's unit two's turbine, right, and containment unit, center, are shown under construction near Jenkinsville, S.C., during a media tour of the facility Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. SCE&G is seeking a 3.1 percent residential raise that would be the largest single rate increase since the utility began charging its 700,000 customers for the reactors' construction. The hike, which would take effect at the end of November if approved, would be the ninth such increase to pay for the $14 billion reactors since 2009. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

V.C. Summer Nuclear Station's unit two is shown under construction near Jenkinsville, S.C., during a media tour of the facility Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. SCE&G is seeking a 3.1 percent residential raise that would be the largest single rate increase since the utility began charging its 700,000 customers for the reactors' construction. The hike, which would take effect at the end of November if approved, would be the ninth such increase to pay for the $14 billion reactors since 2009. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

A worker walks past a cooling tower, back, under construction at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Jenkinsville, S.C., during a media tour of the facility Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. SCE&G is seeking a 3.1 percent residential raise that would be the largest single rate increase since the utility began charging its 700,000 customers for the reactors' construction. The hike, which would take effect at the end of November if approved, would be the ninth such increase to pay for the $14 billion reactors since 2009. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Workers wait for material to be delivered to the turbine unit of V.C. Summer Nuclear Station's unit two under construction near Jenkinsville, S.C., during a media tour of the facility Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016. SCE&G is seeking a 3.1 percent residential raise that would be the largest single rate increase since the utility began charging its 700,000 customers for the reactors' construction. The hike, which would take effect at the end of November if approved, would be the ninth such increase to pay for the $14 billion reactors since 2009. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Homeless man hailed as a hero after reporting backpack bombs

ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP)  Lee Parker still pictures the explosion that could have happened if he had dropped the backpack he took from a garbage can on Sunday night while a friend bought beer.

"I see it sometimes in the back of my mind and I know I need to get past it," said the 50-year-old homeless man from Elizabeth, New Jersey. "But, I feel good. I'm OK, and I'm grateful."

Authorities say Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station Sunday. One of the bombs exploded while a police robot was trying to disarm it. Other devices found inside were taken away by investigators.

Lee Parker explains to reporters how he found a bomb near a trash can, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Authorities say Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station Sunday night. Federal investigators say the bag was left by New York-region bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Police say the bag was left by Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was charged with planting bombs that exploded in Saturday in Manhattan and Seaside Park, New Jersey.

Rahami, also of Elizabeth, was captured Monday morning after a shootout with police in the doorway of a bar in nearby Linden. He remains hospitalized and has yet to make an initial court appearance.

Investigators say it was the second time a bomb planted by Rahami was uncovered by someone scavenging for luggage. The FBI released an image Wednesday of two men seen Saturday night leaving a pressure cooker device behind while taking a suitcase in Manhattan. That device didn't explode.

Parker said he realized something was wrong with the heavy backpack after seeing wires from something that he first thought were decorative candles. Parker dropped the bag and went with friend Ivan White to the police.

"I don't like to think about what could have happened, but I'm just so blessed and glad it didn't," Parker said. "I still have my nine lives, I guess, and I'm going to keep trying to live them well."

Parker is staying at a local hotel paid for by an Elizabeth nonprofit that helps the homeless and working poor. He has also received food and clothes and thousands of dollars have been donated to a GoFundMe campaign for Parker and White.

Linda Flores-Tober, executive director of the Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless, is glad Parker is being recognized.

"These men were first identified as homeless, but they shouldn't be anonymous," she said. "They did the right thing and deserve all of the attention for what they are  heroes. They deserve to be known."

Flores-Tober said her group will continue to work with Parker, who says all he wants is a good job.

"Under the so-called hero's cape, I'm just a regular dude," Parker said.

Lee Parker, left, poses for a photo with Raiza Acosta, who wanted to thank Parker for finding a bomb near a trash can, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Acosta, who works in Elizabeth, was driving by and recognized Parker. Authorities say Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station Sunday night. Federal investigators say the bag was left by New York-region bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Lee Parker explains to reporters how he found a bomb near a trash can, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Authorities say Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station Sunday night. Federal investigators say the bag was left by New York-region bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Lee Parker, right, is hugged by Raiza Acosta who wanted to thank Parker for finding a bomb near a trash can, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Acosta, who works in Elizabeth, was driving by and recognized Parker. Authorities say Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station Sunday night. Federal investigators say the bag was left by New York-region bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Review: In 'Storks,' a dormant baby delivery business

The question of "Where do babies come from?" has been answered, throughout movie history, with some unsavory characters. In the case of "Rosemary's Baby," a demonic neighbor was to blame. In "Knocked Up," it was Seth Rogen's doing. The truth can hurt.

But evading the query has its own lineage, too, and in "Storks," the cop-out answer  one I suspect most toddlers don't even buy  has been given the full animated movie treatment. "Storks," at least, has the sense to tweak the old myth (the folklore of baby-delivering storks goes back before Hans Christian Anderson and runs all the way to "Dumbo") and imagine the large birds more like Amazon delivery drones.

The storks, from their remote island enclave, have given up the baby business to embrace the more lucrative line of online sales. Now they deliver things like new cellphones to equally expectant customers, a flock right out of Jeff Bezos' own heart.

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows characters Nate Gardner, voiced by Anton Starkman, from left, Sarah Gardner, voiced by Jennifer Aniston and Henry Gardner voiced by Ty Burrell in a scene from "Storks." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

A cutthroat corporate environment has also replaced a more natural habitat. Junior (Andy Samberg) is a company bird devoted to pleasing his suit-clad CEO (Kelsey Grammer). But his promotion is jeopardized when he fails to carry out an order to fire the place's lone human worker, Tulip (Katie Crown), an orphan baby now grown and mostly wrecking the assembly lines.

You'd assume a movie about storks would inevitably be about parenting, but the film, directed by Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland, is more about maintaining a work-family balance. Junior begins questioning his workplace allegiance while he and Tulip, having accidentally put the baby-making machinery back into action, desperately try to deliver a wished-for baby.

The baby request comes, by letter, from the lonely son (Anton Starkman) of an overworked realtor couple (Jennifer Aniston, Ty Burrell). In a nice touch, they work from home, a convenience that has nevertheless obliterated their home life. "We never stop" is their mantra, one countless parents today can surely easily identify with. Their boy taunts them: "I'll be in college in the blink of an eye."

If there was more inquiry into this part of "Storks," the film may have found its emotional core. But instead, the bumbling quest of Junior and Tulip takes precedent, as they elude things like a pack of baby-smitten wolves. (Their leaders are voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.)

Stoller, a comedy filmmaker ("Neighbors," ''Forgetting Sarah Marshall") making his animated debut, and Sweetland, a veteran Pixar animator, come from different worlds and the mix of humor and sentiment doesn't quite gel.

On the other hand, Samberg in bird-form is surprisingly true to Samberg the human. To a degree rare in animated movies, "Storks" has assimilated Samberg's comic sensibility in PG form. His Junior is goofy, self-deprecating and sweet, and says things like "Cool beans."

Executive produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ("The LEGO Movie"), "Storks" has a lot of the ingredients for a playful, irreverent cartoon. One clever fight scene with penguins plays out in total quiet, so as not to wake the baby.

But the movie doesn't have enough to hang itself on; the premise is too flimsy and that old question of "Where babies come from?" remains oddly avoided, in even a child-friendly way. Kids, you're just going to have to look for answers elsewhere.

"Storks," a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for "mild action and some thematic elements." Running time: 86 minutes. Two stars out of four.

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows characters Jasper, voiced by Danny Trejo, left, and Tulip, voiced by Katie Crown in a scene from "Storks." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows characters Sarah Gardner, voiced by Jennifer Aniston, from left, Nate Gardner, voiced by Anton Starkman and Henry Gardner voiced by Ty Burrell in a scene from "Storks." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows characters Nate Gardner, voiced by Anton Starkman, left, and Henry Gardner voiced by Ty Burrell in a scene from "Storks." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Jasper, voiced by Danny Trejo, in a scene from "Storks." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
Senate votes to back $1 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Senate on Wednesday backed the Obama administration's plan to sell more than $1 billion worth of American-made tanks and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, soundly defeating a bid to derail the deal pushed by lawmakers critical of the kingdom's role in Yemen's civil war.

Senators who supported the sale said the United States can't deny its Middle East allies the weapons they need to combat Islamic State extremists and check Iran's aggression in the region.

"Blocking this sale of tanks will be interpreted by our Gulf partners, not just Saudi Arabia, as another sign that the United States of America is abandoning our commitment to the region and is an unreliable security partner," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

FILE - In this Sept. 15, 2016 file photo, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Senate on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, backed the Obama administrations plan to sell more than $1 billion worth of American-made tanks and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, soundly defeating a bid to derail the deal pushed by lawmakers critical of the kingdoms role in Yemens civil war. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Although a resolution against the sale failed to advance on a vote of 71-27, the measure's sponsors said the debate demonstrated that congressional support for arms sales  even to a longtime and important Middle East ally  isn't automatic. They also used the time to insist that Congress play a larger role in foreign policy decisions, especially those involving the use of military force.

The war in Yemen is pitting the country's internationally recognized government and a Saudi-led coalition against the Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who are allied with army units loyal to a former president. The Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out airstrikes in Yemen since March 2015 and thousands of civilians have been killed in the fighting, according to the U.N. human rights chief.

The United States is supporting the Saudi-led coalition with intelligence and logistical support, including refueling aircraft, according to senators opposed to the sale. Most Americans are unaware of how involved their military is in Yemen, they said, adding that lawmakers never have fully discussed whether the participation advances U.S. national security interests.

"Should Congress just lie down and be a lapdog for the president?" asked Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a sponsor of the resolution. "Everyone should understand that this is a proxy vote for whether we should be at war in the Middle East."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who also opposed the sale, said the Saudis have bombed areas that the U.S. has asked them to avoid. At the same time, the Islamic State and al-Qaida are growing "by leaps and bounds," Murphy said, because the Saudis are hitting primarily Houthi and civilian targets.

"Let's press the Saudis to get serious about spending more time as firefighters and less time as arsonists in the global fight against terrorism," Murphy said.

The American Bar Association said last week there are credible reports Saudi forces have used American-made military equipment to carry out "indiscriminate and disproportionate" attacks on civilians.

The U.S. should suspend further security assistance to Saudi Arabia "at least until such time as it can be credibly determined" that the allegations have been investigated and the kingdom is abiding by the law of armed conflict, the director of the bar association's governmental affairs office said in a Sept. 14 letter to Murphy and Paul.

The Defense Department informed Congress of the proposed $1.15 billion sale to Saudi Arabia on Aug. 8. The deal involves more than 100 main battle tanks, machine guns, smoke grenade launchers, night-vision devices, vehicles to recover damaged tanks from the battlefield, and thousands of rounds of training ammunition.

The primary contractor for the equipment is General Dynamics Land Systems of Sterling Heights, Michigan.

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein last month called for an international investigation of rights abuses and violence in Yemen. His Geneva office released a 22-page report that chronicled abuses on both sides in the conflict.

Roughly 3,799 civilians had been killed since the air campaign began, according to Zeid's report. The U.N. and rights groups estimated at least 9,000 people overall have died. Nearly 3 million more people have also been displaced inside the Arab world's poorest country.

Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition were responsible for 60 percent of the 2,067 civilians killed in the conflict over a yearlong span starting on July 1, 2015, according to the report. Just under one-quarter  475  of the civilian deaths were attributed to rebel forces like those loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and 113 to affiliates of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

___

Follow Richard Lardner on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rplardner
Uruguay says ex-Gitmo detainee demands exceed government

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP)  President Tabare Vazquez said Wednesday that the demands of a former Guantanamo detainee who is on a hunger strike exceed Uruguay's capacity to deliver.

Abu Wa'el Dhiab has not been eating for more than a month trying to pressure the government into letting him join his wife and children in Turkey or in another nation. He agreed to start drinking water late Monday to give the government more time to offer him a proposal to leave Uruguay.

Vazquez said at a news conference that Uruguay's foreign minister would meet with officials from the U.S. State Department, but he reiterated that the solution is not up to his government.

FILE - In this Sept. 9, 2016 file photo, Syrian native Abu Wa'el Dhiab rests in bed while conversing with his family via a laptop, in his apartment in Montevideo, Uruguay. Uruguay's president said on Wednesday, Sept. 21, that Dhiab demands exceed his government's capacity to deliver. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico, File)

"The Uruguayan government is doing everything possible," Vazquez said. "But as I've said in the past: If the countries where the Syrian citizen wants to go don't take him, we can't do anything about it."

Christian Mirza, the government's liaison with Dhiab and five other ex-Guantanamo detainees resettled in Uruguay, has said that Turkey, Lebanon and Qatar have rejected taking Dhiab.

Dhiab has been vocal about his unhappiness in Uruguay. Shortly after his arrival in 2014, he turned up in neighboring Argentina and denounced the U.S. failure to close Guantanamo. He has also protested outside the U.S. Embassy in Montevideo. In July, he set off alarms when he vanished for several weeks, before turning up in Venezuela, which sent him back to Uruguay.

Dhiab briefly fell into a coma last week and has been hospitalized twice.
The Latest: EpiPen price hike linked to Medicare drug issue

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Latest on the House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on rising EpiPen prices (all times local):

5:25 p.m.

A Democratic congressman is suggesting that public outrage over the increase in price for the EpiPen could help Congress pass legislation allowing Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with companies.

FILE - In this July 8, 2016, file photo, a pharmacist holds a package of EpiPens epinephrine auto-injector, a Mylan product, in Sacramento, Calif. Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is defending the cost for life-saving EpiPens and is offering no suggestion that there are plans to lower prices. Breschs prepared testimony was released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ahead of her Sept. 21 appearance before the panel. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

Congressman Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts linked the EpiPen controversy to Medicare and drug prices during a hearing Wednesday before a House committee. He says the high price charged by pharmaceutical company Mylan shows a blatant disregard for people who need the EpiPen.

Medicare is the federal government's largest drug purchaser. Allowing it to negotiate directly with companies is a move long favored by the Obama administration, but one universally opposed by drugmakers.

Lawmakers of both parties are pressing Mylan CEO Heather Bresch about company profits from the EpiPen. Bresch says the company does not take home the $600 list price of the emergency injection.

___

4:10 p.m.

The top Democrat on a House committee investigating the price of the EpiPen says pharmaceutical company Mylan has not turned over figures detailing its profits from the emergency injection.

Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland is the ranking member on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He says Americans have a right to know how much Mylan executives are making off what he calls "exorbitant prices."

CEO Heather Bresch says Mylan makes about $50 per pen after subtracting rebates, fees, materials and other costs. The injectors sell in two packs for about $600 each.

Cummings is pressing the CEO on how many units Mylan sold last year. Bresch says roughly 4 million packs.

___

3:45 p.m.

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee says high executive pay at pharmaceutical company Mylan "doesn't add up for a lot of people" as the company has raised the price for the life-saving EpiPen.

Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah says executives for the company made $300 million over five years while the list price for a pair of the emergency allergy shots has risen to more than $600.

Chaffetz says parents don't have a choice.

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is testifying before the panel Wednesday. Bresch says the company makes only $50 in profit on each EpiPen.

Chaffetz says he finds that "a little hard to believe."

___

3:40 p.m.

A senior Food and Drug Administration official says the agency cannot approve generic versions of EpiPen if manufacturers do not submit them.

The FDA's Dr. Douglas Throckmorton is telling House lawmakers that his agency has given the drug industry suggestions for developing drug injectors like EpiPen.

Lawmakers have pressed the FDA in recent days on what can be done to create more competition for Mylan's EpiPen.

The agency has a backlog of generic drugs under review, including a version of EpiPen from competitor Teva Pharmaceuticals. But the company said earlier this year that regulators had found problems with its application. Teva's drug and several others aren't expected to hit the market until 2017 or later.

___

3:30 p.m.

The head of pharmaceutical company Mylan is defending the cost for life-saving EpiPens, signaling the company has no plans to lower prices despite a public outcry and questions from skeptical lawmakers.

In testimony for Congress, CEO Heather Bresch says she believes Mylan has struck a balance between price and access to the drug. The price of EpiPens has grown to $608 for a two-pack, an increase of more than 500 percent since 2007.

Bresch says the company does not want to go back to a time when awareness of allergic reactions was much lower and many schools did not stock the drug.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is questioning Bresch about the pricing.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., ranking member on the House Oversight Committee questions Mylan CEO Heather Bresch during the committee's hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, on EpiPen price increases. Bresch defended the cost for life-saving EpiPens, signaling the company has no plans to lower prices despite a public outcry and questions from skeptical lawmakers. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah holds up an EpiPen during his opening remarks during the committee's hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, where Mylan CEO Heather Bresch testified on EpiPen price increases. Bresch defended the cost for life-saving EpiPens, signaling the company has no plans to lower prices despite a public outcry and questions from skeptical lawmakers. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
US Court won't hear man's appeal of Mexico extradition

MEXICO CITY (AP)  U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has declined to take up an appeal by a Chinese-Mexican businessman fighting extradition from the United States to face drug charges in Mexico.

A lawyer for businessman Zhenli Ye Gon said Wednesday there could be further appeals.

Lawyer Greg Smith has said in the past that he could seek a stay from another justice, even if Roberts refused.

Ye Gon has been jailed in the United States since July 2007, when authorities seized more than $205 million from his Mexico City mansion, one of the largest drug-related cash seizures ever.
Man found guilty of murder in shooting death of Army vet

BOSTON (AP)  A Massachusetts man has been found guilty of gunning down a former Army sniper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted 28-year-old Salem resident Peter Castillo on Wednesday of first-degree murder in the 2012 shooting death of Stephen Perez. Castillo now faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for Monday.

Prosecutors said Castillo shot Perez in the back in the early morning hours of April 28, 2012, following an altercation between two groups of people in Boston's Theater District.

Authorities said Castillo fled to the Dominican Republic after the shooting. He was captured in January 2015.
Fair board shuts down vendor of suspected THC-laced candies

FREDERICK, Md. (AP)  Operators of a Maryland county fair are shutting down a vendor suspected of selling candies laced with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Great Frederick Fair Executive Assistant Karen Crum says directors voted to remove the booth Wednesday, a day after sheriff's deputies seized lollipops, gummies and other sweets that field-tested positive for the drug.

Sgt. Jason Deater of the Frederick County Sheriff's Office says investigators are awaiting confirmation from a Maryland State Police lab before deciding whether to charge the vendor.

In this Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016 photo, Sheriffs deputies search a Great Frederick Fair booth in Frederick, Md., after receiving reports that the vendor was selling candy laced with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Investigators say the candy field-tested positive for the drug, but theyre awaiting confirmation from a state police lab. (Bill Green/The Frederick News-Post via AP)

Deater says deputies had received citizen complaints about sales of drug-laced candies. He says the sweets were in a glass case inside a tent offering henna tattoos, t-shirts and sweatshirts.
Vegas lawyer's 'Black Lives' protest resembles Ohio case

LAS VEGAS (AP)  A deputy public defender in Las Vegas who defied a judge's request that she not wear a "Black Lives Matter" pin in court has become the latest voice of protest in a national debate over police brutality and race relations.

Erika Ballou's protest comes two months after a black defense attorney in Ohio was arrested on a contempt of court charge for wearing a similar pin in a municipal courtroom  prompting a debate about where to draw the line between courtroom decorum, political speech and free expression.

Youngstown, Ohio, defense attorney Andrea Burton said Wednesday she settled a federal civil rights lawsuit on Sept. 1 with an agreement that allows her to wear the pin in the courthouse  but not in the courtroom.

RETRANSMISSION TO CORRECT LOCATION OF COURTROOM TO YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO - Attorney Andrea Burton poses for a portrait Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Las Vegas. Burton touched off a protest about race and free expression in a Youngstown, Ohio courtroom when she refused to remove a "Black Lives Matter" button (AP Photo/John Locher)

"We agreed to apply a dress code evenly, so that officers also can't be in a courtroom with black tape over their badges," Burton said during a vacation in Las Vegas.

Ballou, who is black, balked Tuesday at Clark County District Court Judge Douglas Herndon's request that she remove the small round "Black Lives Matter" pin from her blouse while representing a white domestic battery defendant at a sentencing hearing.

The protest is expected to continue Thursday, when Ballou and attorneys who back her protest say they intend to wear "Black Lives Matter" pins again in Herndon's courtroom. Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn said he'll be with Ballou to support her position.

"If you think that Black Lives Matter is anti-police, ask yourself if police are anti-Black Lives," Ballou said in a written statement prepared last weekend, after she learned the Las Vegas police union sent a letter to judges complaining about what the union executive termed "'Black Lives Matter' propaganda" in courtrooms.

"In a free country, I shouldn't be afraid of the police," Ballou said in her statement, "but I am."

If Burton's case provides an example, Ballou may not win permission to wear the pin in court.

John Juhasz Jr., a lawyer who represented Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Robert Mililch in the Ohio case, said federal case law he found shows that judges have broad discretion over decorum and defense lawyers are in court to represent their clients' interests, not their own.

"Lawyers are there for other people, not for ourselves," Juhasz said. "The cases talk about lawyers not having First Amendment rights themselves in court. We go there as advocates for other people."

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said judges can limit perceived political speech or expression in court and even ban clothing such as T-shirts that convey a message. He said the challenge is doing it even-handedly, because allowing one particular message could open the doors to others.

"Imagine how controversial it would be if the judge said, 'You can wear Black Lives Matter pins, but you can't wear White Lives Matter or Police Lives Matter pins,'" Volokh said.

In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a Maine lawyer who was told to remove a political button in court.

Lower courts had ruled that the judge rightly told attorney Seth Berner in 1995 to remove a 2-inch pin that said "No on 1  Maine Won't Discriminate," a reference to a ballot initiative to eliminate local laws protecting gay people from discrimination.

"An attorney is free, like all Americans, to hold political sentiments," said a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. "In a courtroom setting, however, lawyers have no absolute right to wear such feelings on their sleeves (or lapels, for that matter)."

Ballou and Burton said they've never met or communicated with each other, and didn't know of the other's stand in the free speech debate.

Burton said she was unaware of Ballou's protest on Tuesday until she was contacted by a reporter.

Both frame the issue in terms of equal protection under the law, due process, free speech and civil rights.

"Just this morning, I wake up to another black man being shot in Charlotte (North Carolina), and two days ago in Oklahoma a man gets shot walking to his car with hands up," Burton said.

"It isn't that one life matters any more than any other," the Ohio lawyer added. "Every life matters equally. But when it comes to race, it doesn't appear that the idea of all lives matter is actually true."

____

Associated Press writer Brian Melley in Los Angeles and AP photographer John Locher in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

____

This story corrects the reference to attorney Erika Ballou, not Burton, in the sixth paragraph and the quoted reference to Oklahoma, instead of Oklahoma City in the penultimate paragraph.

Erika Ballou, a deputy public defender in Clark County, Nev., speaks with colleagues outside of a courtroom Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Las Vegas. Ballou sparked a protest in a Las Vegas courtroom where she refused on Tuesday to remove a "Black Lives Matter" button from her blouse despite a judge's request not to demonstrate what he called "political speech." (AP Photo/John Locher)

RETRANSMISSION TO CORRECT LOCATION OF COURTROOM TO YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO -Attorney Andrea Burton poses for a portrait Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Las Vegas. Burton touched off a protest about race and free expression in a Youngstown, Ohio courtroom when she refused to remove a "Black Lives Matter" button (AP Photo/John Locher)

Sarah Hawkins, a deputy public defender in Clark County, Nev., wears a "Black Lives Matter" pin in support of fellow public defender Erika Ballou in a courtroom Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Las Vegas. Ballou sparked a protest in a Las Vegas courtroom where she refused on Tuesday to remove a "Black Lives Matter" button from her blouse despite a judge's request not to demonstrate what he called "political speech." (AP Photo/John Locher)

Judge Douglas W. Herndon listens to Erika Ballou, a deputy public defender in Clark County, Nev., in a courtroom Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Las Vegas. Ballou sparked a protest in a Las Vegas courtroom where she refused on Tuesday to remove a "Black Lives Matter" button from her blouse despite a Herndon's request not to demonstrate what he called "political speech." (AP Photo/John Locher)
Mylan CEO defends EpiPen cost to angry lawmakers

WASHINGTON (AP)  Outraged Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday grilled the head of pharmaceutical company Mylan about the significant cost increase of its life-saving EpiPens and the profits for a company with sales in excess of $11 billion.

Defending the company's business practices, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that she wishes the company had "better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration" of the rising prices for some families.

"We never intended this," Bresch said, but maintained that her company doesn't make much profit from each emergency allergy shot and signaled the company has no plans to lower prices.

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, before the House Oversight Committee hearing on EpiPen price increases. Bresch defended the cost for life-saving EpiPens, signaling the company has no plans to lower prices despite a public outcry and questions from skeptical lawmakers. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The list price of EpiPens has grown to $608 for a two-pack, an increase of more than 500 percent since 2007. Parents who rely on multiple EpiPens to respond when their children have allergic reactions, whether at home or at sporting events, have lashed out at Mylan in growing public outcry.

In nearly four hours of questioning, the soft-spoken CEO often seemed unsure, or declined to answer directly, when asked about the company's finances and profits, infuriating lawmakers.

"You could make this thing go away by being honest and candid, but I don't think you are," House Oversight Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Bresch as he ended the hearing. Afterward, Chaffetz told reporters he thought Bresch created more problems with her vague testimony.

The frustration was bipartisan. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the oversight panel, compared Bresch's answers to a game of "hide the ball."

Bresch found little sympathy in the room. In response to one question, Bresch acknowledged that she made $18 million in salary last year.

"Sounds like you're doing pretty well on this," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla.

Chaffetz said high executive pay at Mylan "doesn't add up for a lot of people" as the EpiPen price has increased. He said executives for the company made $300 million over five years while the list price for a pair of the allergy shots rose.

"Parents don't have a choice," Chaffetz said. "If your loved one needs this, it better darn well be in your backpack."

Bresch, who displayed an EpiPen, said the company makes approximately $50 in profit on each shot. Chaffetz said he finds that "a little hard to believe."

When asked if she understood what the furor was about, she argued that the complexity of drug pricing is partially to blame.

"I truly believe the story got ahead of the facts," Bresch said.

EpiPens are used in emergencies to stop anaphylaxis, the potentially fatal allergic reactions to insect bites and stings and foods like nuts and eggs. People usually keep multiple EpiPens handy at home, school or work, but the syringes, prefilled with the hormone epinephrine, expire after a year.

The company says it has distributed tens of thousands of free shots to schools and raised awareness of deadly allergies. That requires investment, Bresch said.

The Mylan executive has some familiarity with Capitol Hill  she is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. But lawmakers so far haven't given any deference to her, and several other committees have called for investigations into the price increase.

Bresch noted that Mylan has said it will begin selling its generic version for $300 for a pair. That will still bring Mylan tens of millions of dollars in revenue while helping retain market share against current and future brand-name and generic competition.

The company has also offered coupon cards and has doubled the limit for eligibility for its patient assistance program. But critics have said the coupons, discount cards and patient assistance programs aren't real solutions because many customers won't use them or won't qualify for them.

Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, a physician, told Bresch that she was "trying to make us feel good" about the generic version and other programs, but that he doesn't feel good about it.

"A mother would cut off her right arm to get that drug. You chose to charge her $600 instead of cutting off her arm," DesJarlais said. "Lower the price so they can afford it."

Last year, more than 3.6 million U.S. prescriptions for two-packs of EpiPens were filled, according to data firm IMS Health. That brought in sales of nearly $1.7 billion for Mylan, though the company says it receives about $1.1 billion after rebates and fees paid to insurers, distributors and other health care businesses.

In the Senate, leaders of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' investigations subcommittee said earlier this month that they have also begun an inquiry into the company's pricing and competition practices. The Aging Committee requested briefings on the issue, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has written several letters to Mylan demanding answers.

___

AP Health Writer Matthew Perrone and AP Medical Writer Linda A. Johnson contributed to this report.
IS rocket fired in Iraq may have contained mustard agent

WASHINGTON (AP)  A small rocket that landed on a military base in northern Iraq where hundreds of U.S. troops are working with Iraqi troops may have contained a mustard agent, a U.S. military official said Wednesday.

No one was hurt and U.S. officials are still testing a residue found on a metal fragment from the rocket.

The U.S. official, who discussed details of the incident on condition that he not be identified by name, told reporters at the Pentagon that the attack happened Tuesday at Qayara West air base. The base is a staging area for Iraqi forces preparing for an assault on Mosul, the city that has been the Islamic State's main stronghold in Iraq since 2014.

U.S. officials have been reluctant to say how many U.S. troops are advising and assisting Iraqi troops at Qayara West. The U.S. official who described Tuesday's rocket attack said "hundreds" of U.S. troops are there, but he would not be more precise.

The official said the attack was militarily insignificant. He said a small group of U.S. soldiers who inspected remnants of the rocket after it exploded found a black, oily substance on a fragment of metal. An initial test of the suspicious substance showed it contained residue of mustard agent, but a second test was negative.

The fragment has been sent to a laboratory for further testing, the official said.

Mustard agent in sufficient quantities and concentration can maim or kill by damaging skin, eyes and airways.

Earlier this month, a U.S. general said American warplanes had eliminated a "significant chemical threat" to Iraqi civilians by bombing a complex of buildings near Mosul that Islamic State militants had converted from pharmaceutical manufacturing to chemical weapons production.
Prosecutor: No state charges for teacher who stepped on flag

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP)  A North Carolina district attorney says he won't prosecute a high school teacher for stepping on an American flag during a lesson on the First Amendment.

Cumberland County district attorney Billy West told The Fayetteville Observer on Wednesday (http://bit.ly/2dkb0rf ) that the state's misdemeanor flag-desecration charges are unenforceable because a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling protects such actions.

Massey High Classical High School teacher Lee Francis says Monday's history lesson was about that case, which determined flag-burning is a form of protected speech. Francis was put on paid administrative leave Tuesday.

News outlets have quoted students as saying that Francis asked for a lighter or scissors, and when no one produced them, he put the flag on the floor and stomped on it.

Francis says he stepped on the flag several times with his right foot.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that the incident happened in North Carolina, not South Carolina.

___
Minnesota mom chooses prison for hiding 2 teen daughters

HASTINGS, Minn. (AP)  A Minnesota woman chose Wednesday to serve time in prison after being found guilty of hiding her two teenage daughters from their father for more than two years.

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki, 50, of Stillwater chose to serve up to eight months in prison instead of six years of probation and staggered jail time. With time off for good behavior, Grazzini-Rucki likely will be released from the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee after five months, the Star Tribune (http://strib.mn/2djQ8QF ) reported.

Judge Karen Asphaug initially sentenced Grazzini-Rucki to 34 days in jail this year along with an additional 15 days in each subsequent year until 2022. She was to report each year on Nov. 18, the anniversary of the day her daughters were found last year.

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki appears in court during her sentencing, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Hastings, Minn. Grazzini-Rucki was convicted in July of felony deprivation of parental rights for hiding her daughters for more than two years from their father. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP, Pool)

Grazzini-Rucki's ex-husband, David Rucki, urged the judge to give Grazzini-Rucki "the highest sentence permitted."

"Sandy no longer understands what it means to be a parent and therefore I don't think she understands what she's taken from me or, more importantly, my children," Rucki said.

But after the hearing, Grazzini-Rucki chose instead to execute her entire sentence at once. While an additional court hearing will have to be held, Grazzini-Rucki is allowed to make the request under law, Dakota County Attorney James C. Backstrom said. She was immediately taken into custody after Wednesday's hearing.

Grazzini-Rucki chose prison to get the sentence over with rather than stretch it out over six years, said her attorney, Stephen Grigsby.

Grazzini-Rucki also was fined $944 for each of her daughters, which represents $1 for each day her two daughters were missing. She also was ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution to the Minnesota Crime Victims' Reparations Board for family reunification efforts in the case as well as any future counseling expenses for her daughters.

In July a jury convicted Grazzini-Rucki on six counts of deprivation of custodial or parental rights. She was acquitted on two counts of causing minors to be runaways. She could only be sentenced on two of those counts  for depriving the girls' father and aunt of their custodial or parental rights.

The teens were found at a horse ranch in western Minnesota. Prosecutors say Grazzini-Rucki drove the then-13- and 14-year-old girls almost 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Lakeville, where they were living, to the ranch near Herman to hide them during a bitter divorce.

The girls moved back in with their father late last year.

The owners of the White Horse Ranch, Doug and Gina Dahlen, are facing felony charges in the case. They've said they took the girls to restaurants, garage sales, church and shopping trips and didn't try to hide them. The Dahlens said the teens had access to computers and cellphones and could have gone home.

Before the girls disappeared in April 2013, they repeatedly accused their father of abuse. But a court-appointed psychologist concluded Grazzini-Rucki had brainwashed them and a judge granted full custody to the girls' father after finding there was no credible evidence of abuse.

___

Information from: Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki and her attorney Stephen Grigsby, left, appear in court during her sentencing, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Hastings, Minn. Grazzini-Rucki was convicted in July of felony deprivation of parental rights for hiding her daughters for more than two years from their father. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP, Pool)

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki is led out of the courtroom after her sentencing, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Hastings, Minn. Grazzini-Rucki was convicted in July of felony deprivation of parental rights for hiding her daughters for more than two years from their father. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP, Pool)

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki listens during her sentencing, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Hastings, Minn. Grazzini-Rucki was convicted in July of felony deprivation of parental rights for hiding her daughters for more than two years from their father. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP, Pool)

CORRECTS SPELLING OF LAST NAME TO RUCKI, NOT RUKI - David Rucki put his hands to his face and wiped away tears after giving his impact statement during Sandra Grazzini-Rucki's sentencing, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Hastings, Minn. Grazzini-Rucki was convicted in July of felony deprivation of parental rights for hiding her daughters for more than two years from their father. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP, Pool)
Inmate 'very happy' about order ending 36 years in solitary

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  A Pennsylvania inmate who has won a court order freeing him from solitary after 36 years told his lawyer Wednesday he looks forward to simply being with others in the prison yard and taking classes beyond his third-grade education.

Attorney Bret Grote said Arthur Johnson, 64, was "obviously very happy" when told of a federal judge's recent order to free him.

"He was very grateful and glad that the decision came out the way it did," Grote said. "We all felt very confident in the strength of our case, and that there was no legitimate basis for keeping him in these conditions for this incredible amount of time."

The Aug. 15, 2016, photo provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections shows Arthur Johnson. Johnson, a Pennsylvania inmate who has won a court order freeing him from solitary after 36 years told his lawyer Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016 he looks forward to simply being with others in the prison yard and taking classes beyond his third-grade education. (Pennsylvania Department of Corrections via AP)

U.S. Middle District Judge Christopher Conner on Tuesday gave prison officials and Johnson's lawyers a week to work out a plan for release from solitary, with a goal of integrating him with the prison's general population within about three months. Asked about a possible appeal, a corrections spokeswoman said Wednesday the order was still being reviewed.

Johnson is serving life without parole for the 1970 murder of a man in Philadelphia. Several escape attempts, including one in which a guard was bound and gagged, landed him in isolation, although prison officials have described him as a model inmate over the past 25 years.

Grote said he has no doubt that Johnson has suffered severe effects from living without physical contact with other people for so long. He said Johnson has passed the time by reading and writing, although that has become more difficult because his attention span and short-term memory have declined, which the lawyer attributes to his living conditions.

In solitary, Johnson has been allowed an hour in a caged-in exercise area five days a week, and gets taken in handcuffs to shower three times a week. His 7-by-10-foot cell is illuminated at all hours.

"It's not surprising  he's looking forward to being able to be in the yard with everyone else at the institution, like an actual yard, to be able to have group activities and interaction," Grote said.

Pennsylvania prison officials say 115 inmates are currently on what's known as "restricted release," or longer-term solitary confinement for those segregated from other inmates for chronic disciplinary issues or out of safety concerns. Others can end up for shorter periods of time in a restricted housing unit for their own protection or the protection of others, or for disciplinary reasons, although some of those prisoners have cellmates.

The state also maintains one of the country's largest death rows  currently 176 men and one woman  in solitary confinement conditions. Pennsylvania has executed only three people since the death penalty was deemed legal in the 1970s, and is currently under an execution moratorium set by the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf.

The Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center, where Grote is legal director, also represented Russell "Maroon" Shoatz, who also spent decades in solitary in Pennsylvania's prison system. The state said it would stop punishing him with solitary for his past behavior, and earlier this year agreed to pay him a $99,000 settlement.

The practice of placing inmates into solitary confinement has been under scrutiny in other parts of the United States in recent years.

In California, extensive use of solitary confinement prompted mass hunger strikes by inmates in 2011 and 2013 and led to a settlement in which the state has significantly pared back its use of isolation.

In Louisiana, the so-called "Angola Three" were released after spending decades in isolation in state prisons. Officials said they were deemed to be at risk of causing trouble among inmates because of their Black Panther Party activism.

Colorado in 2014 halted the practice of placing mentally ill prisoners in long-term solitary, absent special circumstances. Other states have begun reducing their use of solitary confinement, or at least studied the issue.
3 years after '12 Years,' Nyong'o's face is back on screen

TORONTO (AP)  The filmmaker Mira Nair was familiar with the regal grace of Lupita Nyong'o long before most.

The Indian-born, New York-based Nair has been close friends with Nyong'o's family for years. One of Nyong'o's first jobs in the movies was interning in New York for Nair's production company. She also later worked for Nair's Uganda-centered film school, Maisha Film Labs.

What does Nair recall of Nyong'o as a younger woman?

In this sept. 12, 2016 photo, actress Lupita Nyong'o, a cast member in the film "Queen of Katwe," poses for a portrait at The Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

"Like she is: immensely thoughtful and stylish," Nair says with a laugh. "She wouldn't speak unless she had something to say. And full of fun, which sometime you guys don't see. But there's a real appetite for life there."

In the African chess prodigy tale "Queen of Katwe," a now much more established Nyong'o has reunited with Nair for a film that reflects much of the actress's past, as well as her future. It is, surprisingly, the first time moviegoers have gotten to see Nyong'o's face on screen since her breakout, Oscar-winning performance in 2013's "12 Years a Slave."

In the three years since, she's appeared in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" in a motion-capture performance, lent her voice to "The Jungle Book" and starred on Broadway in Danai Guirira's Liberian drama "Eclipsed," earning a Tony nomination. But "Queen of Katwe," she says, epitomizes the kind of film she wants to be in.

"The success of '12 Years of Slave' has put me in a position where I can choose," Nyong'o said in a recent interview. "I want to honor the opportunity that I've been given. So I've worked very hard to choose things that I'm passionate about because I think I'm most useful when I feel conviction. I want to continue to do work that moves me and develops cultural conversations.

"It takes one film at a time, one story at a time, to actually shift the norm," she adds.

"Queen of Katwe," which opens Friday, is itself an anomaly. It's a family-friendly film made in Africa with an entirely black cast  a first for Disney. The film tells of Phiona Mutesi's (newcomer Madina Nalwanga) rise from the Katwe slums in Kampala, Uganda, to elite levels of chess. Nair shot it in South Africa and Uganda. Nyong'o plays Phiona's head-strong mother.

The local flavor, as well as the real people the story is based on (who appear briefly but movingly at the end), gives "Queen of Katwe" an infectious spirit. During one celebratory scene in Katwe, extras mixed with nearby onlookers, eager to join in the exultation.

"Because this doesn't happen very often, we were all filled with such gratitude to be able to tell this story," says Nyong'o.

Even if Nyong'o wasn't sitting in a high-back chair at a Toronto hotel shortly after the film's screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, the 33-year-old would appear queen-like, herself, given her calm poise and precision with words.

Although Nyong'o now seems remarkably at home on any red carpet, she spent years hesitating to commit to acting. As an undergrad at Hampshire College, she initially explored other roles on film sets.

"I was just trying to figure out where in this industry, if not in the front of the camera, I would fit in," she says. "I had always been discouraged that it was possible. I was from Kenya and I didn't know any Kenyan actors in America. It just didn't seem like a possible career path."

Nyong'o, born in Mexico and raised in Kenya, had a very different upbringing than the impoverished ones of "Queen of Katwe." But, as Nair says, "Like Phiona, she's harnessed her potential and thankfully the world has rewarded her for it."

"I spent a lot of time denying the fact that I wanted to be an actor, and I felt I could bring this to the film," Nyong'o says. "It's about having the courage to pursue your dream and it takes courage because sometimes your dreams are unconventional and surprising and uncomfortable for those around you to understand."

But shortly after graduating from the Yale School of Drama, Nyong'o landed the role of Patsey in Steve McQueen's "12 Years of Slave," immediately catapulting her to stardom.

"It definitely was a lot all at once," she says. "One of the things I focused on as everything was happening was saying yes  making my bowl bigger. Often times, people teach you to prepare for failure, but they don't necessarily teach you to prepare for success."

One of Nyong'o's early film experiences was as a production assistant on "The Constant Gardner," the John le Carre adaptation about a British diplomat in Kenya whose wife is murdered. Nyong'o, though, would like to see more stories like "Queen of Katwe" make it to movie screens.

"Because I grew up on the African continent, I understand we're about more than war and famine and wildlife," she says. "My childhood opened me up to the rest of the world. I had a very multicultural upbringing. So I know that we have a lot to offer. We have a lot to offer in the world of cinema."

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

In this image released by Disney, Lupita Nyong'o, left, and Madina Nalwanga appear in a scene from "Queen of Katwe." (Edward Echwalu/Disney via AP)

In this Sept. 12, 2016 photo, actress Lupita Nyong'o, a cast member in the film "Queen of Katwe," poses for a portrait at The Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

In this Sept. 12, 2016 photo, actress Lupita Nyong'o, a cast member in the film "Queen of Katwe," poses for a portrait at The Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

In this image released by Disney, Lupita Nyong'o, right, and Madina Nalwanga appear in a scene from "Queen of Katwe." (Edward Echwalu/Disney via AP)

In this Sept. 12, 2016 photo, actress Lupita Nyong'o, a cast member in the film "Queen of Katwe," poses for a portrait at The Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

In this Sept. 12, 2016 photo, actress Lupita Nyong'o, a cast member in the film "Queen of Katwe," poses for a portrait at The Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
Care homes still using 'chemical cosh' to quieten dementia patients

Too many care homes are still using a "chemical cosh" to quieten dementia patients despite a Government-ordered review of their use, research suggests.

The study from five universities found no overall reduction in the prescribing of antipsychotics to dementia patients in UK care homes between 2009 and 2012.

In most (77%) cases in 2012, treatment was "excessive" and lasted for far longer than the recommended six weeks.

Too many care homes are still using a "chemical cosh" to quieten dementia patients

Older antipsychotics such as haloperidol and chlorpromazine are also still being used extensively, the study found - with no significant shift towards newer, safer types such as risperidone.

Antipsychotics were originally developed for patients with schizophrenia or psychosis. However, they are regularly prescribed "off label" for people with dementia, some of whom show challenging behaviour.

The new research comes despite the Government's 2009 National Dementia Strategy, which called for a review of the use of antipsychotics in light of their side-effects, which include strokes.

In 2014, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the attitude towards dementia "must and will change" as he recounted reports of people " drugged up with a chemical cosh just so a care assistant can get a good night's sleep".

In the latest study, led by Coventry University and published in the journal BMJ Open, experts examined prescribing data from more than 600 care homes and found no significant decline in antipsychotic prescribing rates over the period.

Care homes in the top fifth for prescribing were more likely to be in deprived areas, the study found, while there was a six-fold variation in prescribing rates depending on geographical area.

George McNamara, head of policy at Alzheimer's Society, said: "This continued reliance on antipsychotics to manage behavioural symptoms of dementia is deeply worrying.

"Around 90% of people with dementia experience symptoms that affect their behaviour causing aggression, agitation, or even delusions and hallucinations. These symptoms can develop as part of their condition, but may also be caused by other factors - pain, discomfort, or unmet need.

"When this is the case, prescribing antipsychotics treats the person with dementia as the problem rather than the root cause of their behaviour.

"Antipsychotics increase the risk of stroke, falls and even death - it's shocking that the evidence continues to be flatly ignored. With person-centred approaches and training programmes for care home staff, continued inappropriate prescribing is a step backward into the dark ages."

Professor Clive Bowman, from City, University of London - which took part in the latest research, said: "Our study shows that the National Dementia Strategy has failed to have a sustained effect on the excessive prescription of antipsychotic medicines for people resident in care homes.

"This is unacceptable. Clear standards are required regarding the use of these drugs and a designated responsibility for monitoring medicines and their usage mandated."

Research from the King's Fund has found that cluttered ward layouts and poor signage in hospitals and care homes are the top causes of confusion and distress in people with dementia.
Gerry Adams denies sanctioning murder of British spy Denis Donaldson

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has denied sanctioning the murder of a British spy in the IRA.

The allegation about the 2006 killing of Denis Donaldson was made by a man who claimed he was also a paid state agent in the IRA.

The man made a series of claims, on an anonymous basis, to BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme.

The claim was rejected by Gerry Adams, who has always denied he was in the IRA

The most explosive was that Mr Adams sanctioned the killing of Mr Donaldson.

Mr Donaldson, 55, a Sinn Fein official and close colleague of Mr Adams, was shot dead at an isolated cottage near Glenties in Co Donegal in April 2006.

He had been living in the remote area of Donegal following his exposure as a state agent a year before his death.

Dissident republican group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the murder in 2008 but the circumstances surrounding Mr Donaldson's outing as a British agent and subsequent death have long been shrouded in mystery.

The man interviewed by Spotlight said the IRA was responsible for the murder and Mr Adams sanctioned it.

The claim was rejected by the Sinn Fein leader, who has always denied he was in the IRA. His lawyer told the programme his client had no knowledge of or involvement in Mr Donaldson's death and denied being consulted about it.

Mr Adams's party colleague Gerry Kelly dismissed the documentary as a "collection of discredited conspiracy theories".
Jeremy Corbyn vows to reach out to all Labour MPs if he is confirmed as leader

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has promised to "wipe the slate clean" and work with challenger Owen Smith and other internal critics if he is confirmed as leader on Saturday.

In a statement released after polling closed in the long-running leadership battle, Mr Corbyn said he plans to hold discussions with Labour MPs over the coming days in a bid to heal the rift which saw him lose a confidence vote among the parliamentary party by a margin of 172-40.

In a message to critics in the parliamentary party, he demanded an end to "sniping and personal attacks" and said that Labour MPs have a responsibility to "respect the leadership" of whoever is elected.

Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith await the verdict of party members

With Mr Corbyn installed by bookies as all-but-certain favourite to retain his leadership, Mr Smith came close to conceding defeat by saying that he will not accept a place in his shadow cabinet.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the BBC, Mr Corbyn set his face against proposals from deputy leader Tom Watson to return to the electoral college system which gave MPs and unions more say over the choice of a leader.

"I don't think that's a very good way of doing things," he said, adding: "I think we have to stick with one-member one-vote."

Asked whether he would change in response to criticisms of his leadership style if he wins a second mandate, he told interviewer Laura Kuenssberg: "Sadly for everyone, it's the same Jeremy Corbyn."

In a statement following the close of polls, Mr Corbyn said: "As far as I am concerned, the slate will be wiped clean this weekend.

"If I am re-elected leader, I will reach out to and work with all Labour MPs to form a broad and effective opposition to this divisive and floundering Tory government.

"I will build on the broad policy agreement that stretches across our party, based on a clear anti-austerity agenda. And I will work to create a strong leadership team for our party, inside and outside Parliament, based on respect for each other and for all those who rely on Labour to defend their interests.

"In the next few days, I will be holding discussions with MPs and others about the best way to cement a new working relationship with the Parliamentary Labour Party, as we democratise our party and its structures.

"All Labour party members and MPs have a responsibility to work within the democracy of our party and respect the leadership of whoever is elected.

"We owe it to the millions of people Labour exists to represent to end the sniping and personal attacks, and work together for all those who depend on the election of a Labour government. Anything else would be destructive self-indulgence."

Mr Corbyn said that regardless of the outcome of the leadership contest, "I will want to work with Owen Smith and all members of our party".

But the former work and pensions spokesman ruled out a return to the shadow cabinet which he quit in June along with a raft of senior Labour figures.

Mr Smith told the BBC News Channel: "I don't think he can rebuild Labour's reputation in the country, so I won't be serving in Jeremy's cabinet.

"But I will do what I've always done, which is be Labour, vote Labour, loyally serve this party and make sure from the backbenches I continue to make the arguments I've made during this campaign, in order to get Labour seen once more as credible, get us back on the front foot and get us back into power."

Mr Corbyn told the BBC he had had "an awful lot of calls" over the past few days from Labour MPs who wanted the party to "come together" after the leadership contest is over.

" I invite them, if I get a second mandate on Saturday morning, to come on board, work together - as we have in the past and will in the future ," he said.

Mr Corbyn insisted it was possible for Labour to win a general election in 2020 by building on the "unprecedented" levels of enthusiasm which have made it the biggest political party in Europe, with more than half a million members, and seen large crowds attend his campaign rallies across the country.

Next week's annual conference in Liverpool will be "the turning point" for Labour, he predicted.

Asked whether he would be able to do better than former leader Michael Foot in translating the large numbers who turned out to see him speak into electoral success, Mr Corbyn replied: "Michael Foot did a great job and did his best. We are going to do even better."

Labour's ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) has put off a decision on MPs' demand to be allowed to elect members of Mr Corbyn's shadow cabinet.

Despite meeting for almost nine hours on Tuesday, the NEC was unable to reach a decision on the proposal put forward by Mr Watson.

Mr Corbyn said he was "looking at all democratic alternatives" and suggested that he supports moves to increase representation of the grassroots membership - among whom he enjoys strong support - on the NEC.

But he played down suggestions that he favours a role for members in choosing the shadow cabinet team, stressing "the necessity of a leader being able to appoint key positions in the shadow cabinet".

Around 640,000 people were eligible to vote in the election sparked by Mr Smith's challenge.

They included not only full party members, but also trade union affiliates and registered supporters who paid 25 for the right to vote.

Mr Corbyn told the BBC that "the party made a great deal of money from them".

He won last year's leadership race with 59.5% of the vote - and is widely tipped to win by a wider margin this time, with a recent YouGov poll for The Times putting him on 62%.

Graham Sharpe, of bookmaker William Hill, said: "All of the serious money staked from a 60,000 bet downwards has been for a convincing Corbyn victory."
Plain English Campaign hails write ruling by judge

A High Court judge could get an award - for writing in plain English.

The Plain English Campaign, which promotes the use of simple language, has heaped praise on a case ruling written by Mr Justice Peter Jackson, following a family court hearing in Liverpool.

A spokesman said the 6,555-word ruling should be read by every judge in the UK - and he said Mr Justice Jackson would be considered for one of the campaign's Plain English awards.

Mr Justice Peter Jackson is being considered for a Plain English Campaign award for his easy-to-follow ruling

Council social services bosses had asked the judge to make decisions relating to the future of four children - aged between 12 and 10 months - who were in foster care.

Mr Justice Jackson, who is based in the Family Division of the High Court in London, said he had made his ruling as short as possible so that the older children and their mother could follow it.

He also included emojis which had featured in messages sent between family members in his ruling.

"Mr Justice Jackson's ruling was an excellent example of plain English," said the Plain English Campaign spokesman.

"It was clear, concise and easy to follow. It was written in a way that anyone - not just lawyers - could understand. Every judge in the country should read it."
Too early for judgments on Syria aid convoy attack, says Johnson

Boris Johnson has insisted it is "too early" to make "conclusive judgments" about who was responsible for an attack on an aid convoy in Syria.

Mr Johnson has met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for the first time to discuss the attack, which left 20 civilians dead and which the US has said it holds Russia responsible for.

US officials have told the BBC that two Russian jets were in the sky above the convoy at the moment it was hit. But Moscow has rejected the accusation.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson at the Untied Nations General Assembly in New York.

The Foreign Secretary said Russia and Syria were the only two potential "culprits" and the UK had "doubts" that Syria would be able to carry out such a strike at night.

Mr Johnson told the BBC that "this is not a civil war going on in Syria, this is a proxy war" as he was asked whether the suggestion that Russia may have committed a war crime made the prospect of reviving a ceasefire more difficult.

He said: "I think it's too early to say anything about criminality and that kind of thing, or indeed to make conclusive judgments about responsibility.

"But, put it this way, when you look at what happened to the aid convoy, there are only two possible culprits, only two forces that are capable of having carried out that strike flying in that area - they are the Syrians and the Russians, and we have our doubts about the Syrian capability to fly at night.

"You are left with a pretty strong conclusion as you'll have been hearing."

Mr Johnson met Mr Lavrov on Tuesday while the pair were in the US for the United Nations General Assembly.

Their face-to-face meeting in New York was their first since Mr Johnson was appointed, and came days after talks between Theresa May and Moscow over Russian president Vladimir Putin's support for Bashar Assad's Syrian regime.

Mr Johnson said the "overwhelming responsibility" for the failed ceasefire in the country rested with the Assad regime and its sponsors.

He said: "Everybody in that room knows that and it's up to people in that room to create the conditions for a ceasefire - they have done it before, they can do it again - and we know that the overwhelming responsibility for the failure to have a ceasefire, the overwhelming responsibility for the breaches in the ceasefire that we have seen lies with the Assad regime and indeed its sponsors."

But Mr Johnson said "we shouldn't give up" on the prospect of a resolution with negotiations in a "pretty critical state but it is not yet terminal and it can be revived".

While the US has blamed Russia for the attack on the aid convoy, Peter Ford, the former British ambassador to Syria, said there is "clearly much doubt" over who carried it out.

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "The United Nations, having initially spoken about air strikes have significantly rowed back, they now just talk about attacks of uncertain provenance.

"And the only evidence we have is what opposition spokespeople say."

He said the accidental bombing of Syrian regime forces by US troops just days ago shows that its intelligence can be wrong.
It's safe to resume flights to Sharm el-Sheikh, Theresa May is told

Theresa May has been urged to give the go-ahead for flights to resume between the UK and Sharm el-Sheikh by the head of the cross-party parliamentary group on Egypt.

The group's chairman, Sir Gerald Howarth, has written to the Prime Minister asking her to end the ban and claimed that significant progress has been made on tightening security checks at the Red Sea resort's airport.

He also warned that there was a risk of people in Sharm becoming "radicalised" if the area's tourism industry continued to suffer.

Flights between the UK and Sharm were suspended by the Government in November 2015

Flights between the UK and Sharm were suspended by the Government in November 2015 after the terrorist bombing of a Russian passenger plane, killing 224 people.

Britons at the resort were brought home in a series of rescue flights with extra airport s ecurity.

During a visit to Egypt in July Sir Gerald inspected how baggage was handled at the airport and met senior officials.

In an interview with the Press Association, the Conservative MP for Aldershot said: " They really have been listening to what the UK authorities have been asking them to do. They are clearly bending over backwards to try to deliver.

"One of the guys we met was a Department for Transport (DfT) official and when I asked him, 'Are there any showstoppers to the resumption of flights?', he said 'No'.

"I believe that the necessary measures have been put in place to minimise the risk.

"We live in an imperfect world and no government can guarantee 100% security anywhere."

In June, British Airways suspended its flights to Sharm "indefinitely", stating that "t he safety and security of our customers will always be our top priorities".

EasyJet, Monarch and Thomson Airways have previously said they are awaiting for the Foreign and Commonwealth to change its travel advice, which currently warns against all but essential travel by air to or from the resort.

Sir Gerald explained that hotels in Sharm were only 25-35% occupied and were "clearly hurting" from the UK flight ban.

"They've invested a huge amount of money in these really very sophisticated places," he said.

"They've kept on the staff. They can't do that indefinitely and, if the staff are laid off, we will have a substantial number of people who will be potentially radicalised.

"There is an imperative on ensuring that the resort can resume its contribution to the prosperity of Egypt."

Last month, Mrs May welcomed Egypt's efforts to improve security at Sharm airport in a phone conversation with the country's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

An account of the call released by Downing Street gave no indication the Prime Minister was ready to ease Government advice, saying only that the UK would continue "working closely" with Cairo on the issue.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister said she recognised the economic effects of the suspension, given the importance of the tourism industry to Egypt's economy, and she praised the Egyptian government's ongoing efforts to improve security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport."

Sir Gerald said the resumption of flights was " exclusively in the hands of the Prime Minister" and he believed " she is keen to make a decision in the next few weeks".

He added: "We hope that we can resolve this problem."

A DfT spokeswoman said: "The security of British nationals is our top priority, and we took the decision to suspend flights from Sharm el-Sheikh in November last year to protect the travelling public.
Jeremy Corbyn's first wife backs 'media savvy' Owen Smith for Labour leadership

Jeremy Corbyn's first wife has revealed she has backed Owen Smith in the Labour leadership contest.

Jane Chapman cited concerns over Mr Corbyn's ability to lead Labour MPs, as well as calling Mr Smith more flexible and media savvy.

The two were married for five years in the 1970s, having met through the Labour Party.

Jane Chapman, Jeremy Corbyn's first wife, said Labour leadership rival Owen Smith was more media savvy

Ms Chapman told BBC Radio 5 Live Mr Corbyn was "totally committed, totally principled, and he's a workaholic in the nicest sense of the word".

But Ms Chapman, who is now a professor of communications at the University of Lincoln, said she had been "saddened and upset" by recent events in the Labour Party.

She said Mr Smith's policies were also radical and there was not much difference between the two in that regard.

But she highlighted Mr Smith's approach to the media and his ability to unite the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) as superior to that of Mr Corbyn.

"He's younger and I think he's more media savvy and I think he's more flexible about the way he would conduct the leadership, with a bigger emphasis on winning the election," she said.

"It's a question of balance. Do you put your energies on the constitution of the Labour Party, the democracy, building up the grassroots?

"What proportions of energy do you put to that, the thing Momentum is doing, and what proportion of your energy do you put towards fighting the Tories in Parliament and building up a successful Parliamentary Labour Party in their important democratic role of opposition."

Ms Chapman added: "I think the ability to unite the party and to have a longer term post-Brexit vision, I think that's something that's been missing.

"If he (Mr Corbyn) has got the vision, it's not coming across sufficiently in the public sphere, in the media coverage.

"The stakes are really high at the moment. The role of the PLP is going to be crucial, as we know, because there's going to be a lot of work with legislation as we withdraw.

"It's really important the Labour Party puts up a strong case in Parliament. I think that emphasis has to be on the PLP as well as the democracy and the grassroots."

Ms Chapman, speaking to Emma Barnett, who was hosting 5 Live Daily for the first time on the station, also questioned whether Mr Corbyn had the necessary leadership skills for such a job.

She said Mr Corbyn had only ever worked as a trade union organiser or an MP, and had no experience outside that.

"There are skills with leadership, there are management skills," she said.

"I think he could develop it but it's been a bit slow and it's been a bit chaotic.

"We're running out of time, because the longer he takes to develop it and his team, the more Labour is losing in the polls. That's the reality of it."

Ms Chapman also suggested he could be pressured into staying on as leader until a natural successor "that's acceptable to Momentum and the left emerges".

She added: "My heart and soul is still very much with what he stands for ... But one of the things about Jeremy is that he hasn't actually changed that much politically.
Britain protests to Hungary over claims of 'no-go' zones in UK

Britain has protested to Hungary about a leaflet issued by the country's government claiming that parts of the UK are "no-go zones" because of the numbers of migrants.

The pamphlet - issued to millions of households as part of a referendum on EU migrant quotas - claims that there are several hundred no-go zones in European cities where the authorities are unable to maintain control and the host nation's social norms do not apply.

The supposed zones are not listed, but a map marks London out with a "no-go" sign, surrounded by five others which appear to relate to locations including Southampton and Peterborough. Elsewhere in Europe, Paris, Berlin, Marseille, Stockholm and Copenhagen are also marked out as cities with no-go areas.

Hungary would be required to take 1,500 migrants under the quotas scheme

The leaflet warns: " The so-called 'no-go' zones are areas of cities that the authorities are unable to keep under their control.

"Here the recipient society's written or unwritten norms do not apply. In those European cities, where immigrants live in great numbers, several hundred 'no-go' zones exist."

Challenged over the claims, Hungary's foreign minister Peter Szijjarto told BBC2's Newsnight: "We based this information on open, official reports given by the police of the respective countries and from the news.

"There are no-go zones in Europe and we don't want no-go zones in Hungary."

Mr Szijjarto said he personally "likes" London, but insisted that its designation as a no-go zone was made after consultation with the Hungarian embassy in the capital as well as "very careful" analysis of official reports.

Following its publication, the British Embassy in Budapest complained to the Hungarian foreign ministry about its contents.

Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is fighting for a No vote in the October 2 referendum on Brussels' plans to relocate migrants from frontline arrival states like Italy and Greece to other countries around the EU's Schengen zone.

The quota system would require Hungary to take in around 1,500 migrants.

But the leaflet accuses Brussels of trying to "prescribe the obligatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary" without the approval of its Parliament, and warns of the danger that terrorists might "slip in with the crowds of immigrants".

The row comes after a Chinese airline was forced to withdraw an in-flight magazine warning tourists to take precautions when visiting areas of London with ethnic minority populations.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "This leaflet is clearly inaccurate. There are no areas in the UK in which the laws of the UK cannot be enforced."

A spokesman for the Hungarian Embassy in London said: "The October 2 referendum is about the mandatory distribution mechanism and the leaflet serves as an information tool for Hungarian citizens.
Network Rail fined over death of ex-actress killed by train in Suffolk

Network Rail has been fined 4 million for a string of safety failures after a former actress was struck and killed by a train on a railway foot crossing.

Olive McFarland, who was a regular in TV dramas and films from the 1950s to the 1970s, died on the crossing near Needham Market, Suffolk, in August 2011.

The 82-year-old was hit by a train travelling at nearly 100mph on a section of track that a Network Rail employee said should have been restricted to 55mph, but this safety work was not done, Ipswich Crown Court heard.

Olive McFarland died on the crossing near Needham Market, Suffolk, in August 2011

At an earlier hearing at Ipswich Magistrates' Court, Network Rail admitted being an employer in breach of a general duty of care for a period spanning from January 1999 to the day of Mrs McFarland's death in 2011.

The company was sentenced at Ipswich Crown Court on Wednesday.

A fine of 4m was imposed with Network Rail granted 28 days to pay, and it was ordered to pay costs of 35,857.

Mrs McFarland, 82, had starred alongside Sean Connery in the 1961 film The Frightened City.

She had a home at Creeting St Mary near Stowmarket, Suffolk, and lived in a care home in Eye.

In a statement issued after the hearing, Richard Schofield, route managing director at Network Rail, said: "We are truly sorry for the death of Miss McFarland.

"Since this tragic accident we have improved safety by introducing a speed restriction on the line and reducing the crossing distance by straightening the crossing and re-positioning the gates.

"However, this is not a permanent solution.

"We believe that removing the level crossing is the safest option and we are continuing to work with the local community to get their support to close this crossing.

"In the year following Miss McFarland's death, the executive directors turned down their bonus entitlement and instead chose for this money to be reallocated to a safety improvement fund for level crossings.

"Since 2010 we have closed over 1,000 crossings and we are spending 100 million across the country improving level crossing safety."

The sentencing follows an investigation by regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

It found that Network Rail had failed to act on substantial evidence that pedestrians had poor visibility of trains when approaching the Gipsy Lane foot crossing, and were exposed to an increased risk of being struck by a train.

Mrs McFarland was struck by a train travelling from London to Norwich.

Ian Prosser, HM Chief Inspector of Railways, said: "Today's sentencing at Ipswich Crown Court brings to a close our prosecution of Network Rail for failures which contributed to the death of Ms Olive McFarland.

"My thoughts are with Ms McFarland's family.

"In 2011, Network Rail's safety management fell below the standards required, putting members of the public using Gipsy Lane footpath crossing in unnecessary danger.

"Over the past decade, Network Rail has focussed its attention and investment on improving health and safety on Britain's railways.

"However, despite now being ranked as the safest in Europe, there can be no room for complacency.

"Rail safety remains a top priority for the regulator.
First solo overseas trip for the Duchess of Cambridge

The Duchess of Cambridge is to carry out her first solo overseas trip, travelling to Holland next month for a day of engagements - including a courtesy call on King Willem-Alexander.

Kate will spend the day in The Hague and Rotterdam where her itinerary will cover a range of events from a visit to an art exhibition of Old Masters to a round table discussion on a variety of themes from addiction to mental health.

The one-day trip, planned for October 11, will be a royal milestone for the Duchess as she will be travelling abroad by herself without the Duke.

The Duchess of Cambridge will head to Holland on October 11

A tour of Malta in 2014 was scheduled to be Kate's first solo trip but she had to cancel as she was suffering from acute morning sickness while pregnant with Princess Charlotte.

Kate will meet King Willem-Alexander at Villa Eikenhorst the royal residence he shares with wife Queen Maxima and their three daughters, Princess Amalia, Princess Alexia and Princess Ariane.

The family home is on the forested De Horsten estate in Wassenaar near The Hague, and despite being a private residence the Dutch monarch sometimes hosts foreign guests.

Art is an interest of the Duchess, who is patron of the National Portrait Gallery, and later she will travel to the Mauritshuis art museum in The Hague to see an exhibition featuring Dutch old masters loaned by the Royal Collection - artwork, furniture and other objects accumulated over centuries by the British monarchy.

The highlight of the attraction will be Vermeer's The Music Lesson and Kate will see the painting after she has toured the gallery's permanent collection.

Before leaving the Duchess will meet children taking part in the gallery's learning programme and attend a short reception with museum supporters.

At the official residence of Sir Geoffrey Adams, Britain's ambassador to the Netherlands, Kate will convene a round table discussion on the themes of addiction, intervention, family and mental health.

Sitting at the table will be professionals from the Netherlands' Trimbos Institute, a non-profit research centre working on the issues of mental health and addiction.

They will be joined by counterparts from two of the Duchess' UK charities - the Anna Freud Centre for Children and Families, a leading charity in the research, teaching and the provision of care for children and young people with mental health issues, and Action on Addiction.

Later Kate will travel to the neighbouring city of Rotterdam to learn about a community initiative that provides a public workshop in an economically deprived district, with its facilities aimed at teenagers.
Sir Nicholas Serota has a suggestion for Tate Modern's neighbours after they complained about being overlooked by visitors to its new viewing platform - put up net curtains.

Visitors have flocked to the gallery's extension since it opened in June - with views of the London skyline from high above the River Thames - a big draw.

But people living in luxury apartments next to Tate Modern have been irked that the 10th-floor rooftop terrace allows visitors to see straight into their glass-fronted living rooms.

People living in the luxury apartments (right) next to the Tate Modern extension (left) have been told to put up net curtains if they don't like the view

One resident told the Guardian: 'It's quite horrible. At first, we thought it may be offices or something else thereIts really bad, because I have young girls and there are strangers looking in. Its no funI counted 50 people looking at me...I feel like Im on display all the time.'

Tate Modern erected signs asking visitors to the Switch House building to respect the privacy of its neighbours to prevent people waving and pointing to residents in their homes and taking pictures of the apartments.

But while views of St Paul's Cathedral, Canary Wharf and Wembley Stadium are part of the attraction, visitors have remained curious about the interiors of the properties, some of which are reported to have cost up to 19million.

The Tate's outgoing director, Sir Nicholas, said residents of the Neo Bankside apartment complex would have been well aware of their position.

Visitors have flocked to the gallery's extension since it opened in June - with views of the London skyline from high above the River Thames a big draw

He said: 'We, as anyone who's visited Tate Modern will be aware, put up some signs encouraging our visitors not to gesticulate, to recognise that people who live nearby have a right to some privacy.'

Sir Nicholas, who transformed the public's perception of modern art during his 28 years at the Tate, added: 'Obviously that privacy will be enhanced if those people decided that they might put up a blind or net curtain or whatever, as is common in many places.

'Clearly, people purchasing those flats were in no doubt that Tate Modern was going to build its Switch House building and the character and uses of that building were widely known ... People purchased with their eyes wide open.'

Sir Nicholas Serota (pictured) has been director of the Tate since 1988 but will leave soon to take up a new job as chairman of Arts Council England

Neo Bankside was designed by renowned architect Richard Rogers' firm, Rogers Stirk Harbour And Partners.

Developers received planning permission for the luxury flats in 2007 and began construction in January 2009.

The Tate received planning permission in May 2009.

Adele Morris, a local Liberal Democrat councillor, told the Guardian Sir Nicholas's comments were an insult: 'That is an atrocious comment for a man of his stature and his position to make. A director of a big, public institution making a flippant comment like that about something which he knows is directly affecting peoples lives and their privacy.

'Would he be saying the same thing if it was a council flat? Is it to do with the presumption that these people are rich and they get what they deserve buying a flat like that? I dont agree with that, I think everybody is entitled to a certain amount of privacy.'

A spokesman for Neo Bankside's property developers Native Land said: 'We are aware that public use of the new viewing gallery of the Tate Modern's Switch House has caused concern over the privacy of some of the residents of Neo Bankside, whose apartments can be seen by visitors.

'While development of Neo Bankside had already begun when plans for the new gallery were submitted to the authorities, potential buyers at Neo Bankside had access to marketing material which showed the location of the planned viewing gallery.

'A model showing the planned Tate extension in context to Neo Bankside was also available.
Oxford named best university in the world

Oxford has been ranked the best university in the world, the first time an institution from the UK has taken the accolade.

It topped the Times Higher Education (THE) world university rankings for the first time, knocking the California Institute of Technology, the five-times best, into second place.

Cambridge and Imperial College London join Oxford in the top 10 for 2016/17, named fourth and eighth respectively, vying for positions in the rankings with the likes of Stanford, Harvard and Princeton universities and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in the US.

Oxford has topped the Times Higher Education world university rankings for the first time

But there were warnings that the vote to leave the European Union could pose a big threat to higher education in the UK, destabilising it and hindering academics from working with colleagues on the continent.

And there are fears the looming departure from the EU could discourage overseas students from applying to British universities, with some research suggesting more than 40% are looking elsewhere.

Phil Baty, editor of the THE world university rankings, said: "The UK must ensure that it limits the damage to academics, students, universities and science during its Brexit negotiations to ensure that the UK remains one of the world leaders in higher education."

The global rankings saw 91 UK universities placed in the top 980 universities, which represents 5% of the world's higher education institutions, judged on areas such as teaching, research and industry income.

With 88 universities in the top 800, up from 78 last year, the UK is second only to the US for the number institutions in the world's best 800.

Despite this success, UK universities lagged behind on the industry income indicator, which assesses the ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy, the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university's ability to attract funding - with the nation's best-placed appearing at just 127 in the rankings.

The UK is the world's second most popular destination for overseas students, according to the British Council, with 493,570 enrolled in universities in 2013/14, up around 80,000 on the 415,585 five years before.

But Mr Baty warned that Asia is continuing to grow as a higher education "superpower", with China's leading universities, Peking and Tsinghua, in the top 40 and the National University of Singapore at 24.

He said: "It is fantastic news that the University of Oxford has topped the world university rankings for the first time. It is a great result for the UK higher education sector and cements its position as one of the greatest university nations in the world."

Mr Baty added that the Brexit vote was a "big threat" to the higher education sector.

He said: " As well as some top academics reporting they have been frozen out of collaborative research projects with EU colleagues, many are admitting that they might look to relocate to a university outside the country.

"A Times Higher Education survey conducted before the referendum found that 40% of university staff said they would be more likely to leave the country in the event of a Brexit.

"It is also having an impact on the UK's potential to attract international talent in the future - more than two-fifths of prospective overseas students said they were less likely to go to a UK university due to the referendum result, according to a survey by Hobsons."

Education Secretary Justine Greening said: "Britain has long been home to some of the best universities in the world, and it's fantastic to see a UK university top these world rankings for the first time.

"We want to see this success continue and provide real opportunities for students up and down the country.

"That is why we are reforming higher education to make sure it delivers the quality teaching and skills that students and employers expect.
Manchester bosses Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola to resume rivalry in EFL Cup

Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola must pit their wits against each other once again after Manchester United were drawn at home to Manchester City in the fourth round of the EFL Cup.

Having resumed a rivalry that turned extremely sour in Spain when they were in charge of Real Madrid and Barcelona, Guardiola claimed the early bragging rights with a derby victory in the Premier League earlier this month.

And now the pair will clash again when holders City visit Old Trafford in the week of October 24.

Jose Mourinho, pictured left, and Pep Guardiola, right, will do battle in the EFL Cup

The Manchester derby was not the only heavyweight tie, with Liverpool and Tottenham also set to do battle for a place in the quarter-finals.

Meanwhile, there will be a London derby between West Ham and Chelsea, who won a dramatic third-round tie against Leicester in extra-time on Tuesday.

Norwich's reward for beating Everton at Goodison Park is a trip to Elland Road to face Leeds while Preston, who took the Premier League scalp of Bournemouth, will travel to Newcastle.
EU's Mr.Brexit builds team, plans European tour

BRUSSELS, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Michel Barnier, the French politician who will lead EU negotiations with London on Britain's exit from the European Union, plans to tour member states once he takes office on Oct. 1, EU sources said on Tuesday.

"He'll do a round of capitals and gauge the mood," one source said, noting that until Prime Minister Theresa May formally notifies Brussels of the British departure under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon treaty, negotiations will not start.

Barnier, a conservative former minister and European Commissioner, was appointed by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to serve as his chief negotiator with Britain following the Brexit referendum in June.

Barnier, 65, who oversaw financial services regulation for the EU executive until 2014, has already been joined by several staff including a German deputy, trade negotiator Sabine Weyand, and expects to have a "critical mass" of about 10 people on his team within a couple of weeks, sources said.

His staff is likely to reach around 20 in time, though the negotiating process, once Britain has triggered it, will draw in much larger numbers of Commission officials.

One source said Barnier was planning to concentrate his team on negotiating three main areas: disentangling Britain from the EU budget; trade and foreign policy; and issues around the single market, including migration of workers.

It is unclear when formal negotiations will start. May's government is still assessing its objectives and she has said she will not trigger Article 50's two-year countdown to exit before next year. Juncker and other EU leaders say they will not discuss terms until she does, although some governments are keen to give London some idea of where talks might lead.

Barnier wants to hear from the other 27 EU governments what their priorities are. He will coordinate the Commission's work on the detail of any divorce settlement, which will also need the agreement of the Council of the other member states, as well as of the European Parliament.
Air strike kills civilians in central Libya - doctor, eyewitness

BENGHAZI, Libya Sept 20 (Reuters) - At least eight civilians including women and children were killed in an air strike near an oasis town in central Libya on Tuesday, a hospital doctor and an eyewitness said.
Air strike kills civilians in central Libya -doctor, eyewitness

BENGHAZI, Libya, Sept 20 (Reuters) - At least nine civilians including women and children were killed in an air strike near an oasis town in central Libya on Tuesday, a hospital doctor and local officials said.

The identity of the war planes responsible for the strike near Houn could not be confirmed. Armed groups loyal to factions based in eastern and western Libya operate nearby.

A spokesman for forces loyal to Libya's eastern government said war planes from the western city of Misrata had carried out the strike as they tried to target a rival brigade that had recently been in the area.

But an air force spokesman in Misrata, Mohamed Gonono, denied the claim. "Our air force did not reach that area," he said. "We only conducted reconnaissance in the coastal region."

An eyewitness in Houn said residents had heard war planes overhead before learning that civilians had been hit as they were visiting thermal springs south of the city.

He went to the hospital in Houn to try to offer help and described the situation there as "chaotic." A doctor in Houn and a statement from the municipal council of Al Shgega - the main town in the region that many of the victims came from - said at least nine people were killed and 20 wounded.

Armed forces from Misrata and the east are on opposite sides of Libya's political divide and have been involved in a sporadic conflict for more than two years.

The eastern forces are loyal to a parliament and government that relocated from Tripoli in 2014 after rival factions backed by Misratan armed groups seized control of the capital, setting up parallel institutions.

Misrata's main factions now support a U.N.-backed government that is trying to establish itself from Tripoli but has failed to win endorsement from the east. For the past four months Misrata's armed groups have been engaged in a battle against Islamic State in Sirte, about 275 km (170 miles) north of Houn.

Fears of renewed civil conflict rose over the past 10 days after eastern forces seized four oil ports and advanced along the coast to within about 150 km of Sirte.

Earlier, a military source said six people had been killed when a military helicopter operated by armed forces loyal to the eastern government crashed late on Monday.

Among those killed was Colonel Idris Younes, an adviser to the head of Libya's eastern parliament, the source said, adding that two passengers had survived.
France's Hollande blames Syria for ceasefire failure

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 20 (Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande blamed the Syrian government on Tuesday for the collapse of a U.S.-Russia-backed ceasefire and urged foreign supporters of President Bashar al-Assad to help enforce peace or risk the country fragmenting.

"I say to the Syrian government's foreign backers that they must compel the regime to enforce peace otherwise they will bear the responsibility for the splitting up of the country and the chaos," Hollande said in an address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Russia and Iran are the main foreign backers of Assad and his government.

The French president also said the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces and Islamic State in Syria should not go unpunished and that the U.N. Security Council should adopt a resolution on the matter as soon as possible.

"I won't let this go. The international community cannot accept that chemical weapons were used. We were proved right before and in 2013 stocks were identified and destroyed, but there are still some and have been used again," he said.

He told world leaders the Syrian conflict would be remembered as a "disgrace" for the international community if it failed to end the fighting swiftly.

The United Nations on Tuesday suspended all aid shipments into Syria after an attack on a convoy carrying humanitarian supplies near Aleppo.
Turkey's Erdogan urges world to act against U.S.-based Gulen

By Parisa Hafezi

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on world leaders at the United Nations to take measures against a U.S.-based cleric's "terrorist network" that he said threatened their security.

"I am calling, from this podium, to all our friends, to swiftly take the necessary measures against the Gulenist terrorist organization for their own safety and the future of their nations," Erdogan said.

"It is evident from our experience that if you do not fight the Gulen network at this stage, it may be too late later."

Turkish authorities have accused Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating Turkey's failed coup in July. Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania since 1999, has denied involvement in the coup attempt.

Accusing Gulen of building up over decades a network of followers inside the armed forces and civil service to take over Turkey, authorities have asked the United States to extradite or detain the cleric. Gulen denies these charges.

In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Erdogan said the United States should "not harbor a terrorist" like Gulen and said his activities around the world should be banned.

Calling for an immediate political solution to resolve the crisis in Syria, Erdogan said: "Turkey's incursion into northern Syria in early September had led to establishing peace, balance and stability in a region taken over by hopelessness".

He added: "We cannot lose more time to realize the political resolution process and end the root of the problem, which is the fighting in Syria, terror and atmosphere of cruelty."

Turkey's incursion into Syria came after it had called in vain for several years for world powers to help create a "safe zone" along the Syrian border, with the aim of clearing out Islamic State and Kurdish fighters and of stemming a wave of migration that has caused tension with Europe.

Turkey has said it has no plans to stay in Syria.

"We respect Syria's territorial integrity," Erdogan said.
U.S. nuclear waste backlog could be eased by private disposal - Moniz

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The United States could alleviate growing stockpiles of nuclear waste at U.S. power plants by allowing private companies to dispose of it and foster support for new nuclear projects, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said on Tuesday.

The U.S. government spent billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada that was supposed to store nuclear waste permanently underground, but politicians from the state, including top Senate Democrat Harry Reid, opposed the project, leading to its cancellation in 2010.

The waste is now mostly held at power plants in dry cask storage or in spent fuel pools, said Moniz, a nuclear physicist who has run the department since 2013. The United States could start transferring that waste to interim sites, potentially including government and private disposal sites, in the middle of the next decade until a permanent solution is developed.

"We would like to have the authority for publicly owned and operated (storage) facilities. We are also very much interested in the possibility of pursuing private storage," Moniz said in an interview about the nuclear issues the next administration will face after President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission received an application earlier this year from Waste Control Specialists, part of Valhi Inc to store waste at a site in Texas. More companies may also apply.

"Potentially that could go faster," if the private sector took on the challenge, Moniz said of the mid-2020s' timeframe for moving waste into interim storage.

Nuclear power supplies 60 percent of the country's virtually carbon-free electricity and is an important part of Obama's plan to fight climate change. But even some of his fellow Democrats have reservations about moving ahead with nuclear, which faces competition from natural gas, until the waste problem is solved.

Senator Diane Feinstein told Moniz at a congressional hearing last week she would not support new nuclear power projects unless the issue is dealt with.

Moniz said if companies take over storage, Congress will still need to act. One thing the next administration will have to work on with Congress is making sure that money from the nuclear waste fund, set up in 1983 to help pay for Yucca Mountain, would be available to pay companies for the storage.

MOX PLANT

Another thorny issue on nuclear waste has been an agreement with Russia to convert plutonium left over from the Cold War to nuclear plant fuel. Under the deal struck in 2000, each country is expected to convert 34 tons of the material into fuel pellets.

The federal government has spent about $5 billion on a plant in South Carolina and associated facilities that would convert the material into MOX, or mixed-oxide pellets for reactors. But cost estimates for the project have soared, and now Moniz says the MOX method would cost up to $50 billion over 50 years.

He wants the country to consider simply diluting the plutonium with inert materials and disposing the mix deep underground, such has been done for other nuclear materials in New Mexico.

But Russia would have to sign off on the idea, an action Moniz is optimistic about in part because Moscow has already changed its side of the original deal. Russia now wants to dispose of the fuel in a so-called fast reactor, a technology the United States does not have. Moniz has brought up the idea of underground disposal to his counterparts in Russia as a "heads up," he said.

"What Russia has said is if Congress acts to say that the dilute and dispose approach is the preferred alternative, then they will engage on this question of change," he said.

With many hurdles ahead on nuclear issues, speculation has grown on whether Moniz would remain in his role as energy secretary in the next administration. Moniz would not say whether he would rule it out.
Brazil's ex-president Lula to stand trial for corruption

By Brad Brooks

SAO PAULO, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption charges, a crusading federal judge ruled on Tuesday, adding more turbulence to the country's political landscape.

Judge Sergio Moro said that Lula, who served as president from 2003-11 and has for two decades been an iconic and powerful political force in Brazil, will face charges of accepting 3.7 million Brazilian reais ($1.14 million) in bribes connected to a sweeping kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras .

Moro wrote in his ruling that according to the prosecutors' charges, Lula was a "direct beneficiary" of bribes from OAS SA , one of the engineering and construction firms at the center of the graft scandal, and therefore must stand trial.

The corruption case will also put on trial Lula's wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva; OAS Chief Executive Jose Aldemario "Leo" Pinheiro; Paulo Okamotto, the president of the Lula Institute, and four others.

In an emailed note late on Tuesday, Lula's lawyers again said their client had committed no crime and labeled Moro as a "impartial" judge who was on a witch hunt to see the former leader jailed.

Lula, speaking via video link, told an event held by his lawyers in New York that the charges were a "farce."

"What's happening isn't getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more," said Lula, adding that he "will keep fighting."

Tuesday's events capped an incredibly choppy few weeks for Brazil.

Lula's hand-chosen successor Dilma Rousseff was found guilty by the Senate of breaking budget rules and dismissed from the presidency late last month.

Her successor, former vice president Michel Temer, has abruptly pulled the country to the political and economic right, and is trying to boost Brazil out of its worst economic recession since the 1930s.

Moro's decision may prevent Lula from making a political comeback in the 2018 presidential campaign. It could also derail any hopes the Workers' Party (PT) had of returning to power, or possibly even surviving, according to some experts.

Despite the corruption allegations facing the PT and several of its former coalition parties, the most recent polls have shown Lula remains a leading candidate for 2018.

Lula was charged with three counts each of corruption, which carries a maximum sentence of 16 years per count, and money laundering, with a possible sentence of up to 10 years per count.

If found guilty, however, the sentence would be determined by the judge, and Lula and the others to stand trial would have chances to appeal.

TURN OF FORTUNES

Nonetheless, simply putting on trial the former president who left office with an 83-percent approval rating sent shockwaves across Brazil.

Lula was widely adored at home and abroad for his exceptional life story, rising from poverty to the presidency, and of being the charismatic, rough-talking former union leader who led massive strikes in the 1980s that helped topple an entrenched military dictatorship.

"It's a huge, grave blow to Lula's myth," said Claudio Couto, professor of political science at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) university in Sao Paulo. "Any condemnation of Lula would also end up being a condemnation of the Workers Party."

The decision and the Petrobras probe as a whole make up a watershed moment for the fight against corruption in Brazil, experts say, where for centuries the rich, powerful and politically connected have enjoyed impunity.

Now they are the target of this country's most sweeping anti-corruption push ever, which became known to the public two years ago. It has since seen nearly 200 people, including top executives and politicians, facing corruption charges and 83 people already found guilty and jailed.

Federal prosecutors leveled charges against Lula last week, labeling him as the "commander" of the Petrobras graft scheme that they say has caused an estimated 42 billion reais ($12.6 billion) in losses to Petrobras shareholders and tax payers.

It was the first time that Lula, 70, has been charged by federal prosecutors for involvement in the political kickbacks scheme at Petrobras.

He has been indicted separately by a court in Brasilia for obstruction of justice in a case related to an attempt to persuade a defendant in the Petrobras scandal not to turn state's witness.

Lula's lawyers have said prosecutors lacked the evidence to back up their accusations and that charges against him amount to political persecution to stop him from running for president in 2018.

But experts say that if the prosecutors' charges are proven, the case against Lula is essential to demonstrate a new strength in rule of law and the determination of institutions to prosecute corruption at the highest levels.

"It's a crucial and critical juncture for Brazil, to try such a powerful figure like Lula and, if he is guilty, to send him to jail," said Carlos Pereira, a professor of public policy at FGV in Rio de Janeiro and one of Brazil's top experts on corruption.

"Voters now see powerful white guys going to jail - not just poor, black Brazilians, as was always the case."

But Pereira also warned that the political fallout if Lula were to be found guilty and sent to jail would be enormous, and that the chances of the PT "disintegrating" even more likely.

"The PT has been an incredibly important party for the re-democratization of Brazil, being the main force that represents leftist groups and created policies that promoted unprecedented social inclusion in our unequal society," he said.
UK's May raised concerns over detained aid worker with Iranian leader

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 20 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday raised concerns about the case of a detained Iranian-British aid worker with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a Downing Street official said.

Iranian-British aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to five years in prison in Iran on charges that remain secret, her family said earlier this month.

"The Prime Minister raised a number of consular cases where we have concerns, including Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe," a Downing Street official said.

The official said May wanted to understand the situation after reports that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been sentenced.

Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards have accused her of trying to overthrow the country's clerical establishment. The official charges against her have not been made public and the Iranian authorities were not immediately available for comment.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a London-based charity that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News. The Foundation and her husband have dismissed the Revolutionary Guards' accusation.

The 37-year-old, who appeared in court for the first time in August, according to Iranian media and her family, was arrested at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport as she tried to leave Iran after visiting her parents.
Nicaragua opposition party chooses new presidential candidate

MANAGUA, Sept 20 (Reuters) - A Nicaraguan opposition party on Tuesday chose a new presidential candidate to compete against incumbent Daniel Ortega in a November election after its previous contender dropped out.

Jose del Carmen Alvarado, a 66-year-old dentist, will run as the candidate of the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), replacing Pedro Reyes, a lawyer who announced his resignation on Monday after failing to secure financing for his campaign.

The party had just 2.2 percent of voter support last week, according to an opinion poll ahead of the Nov. 6 election.

"You will see in the next poll how this will be reversed," Alvarado told reporters.

In July, Reyes sparked opposition anger when the National Assembly accepted a decision by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal at Reyes' behest to throw out 16 PLI deputies who had refused to support him as leader.

Reyes' opponents, who had declared themselves independent, accused him of being in league with Ortega, and the move stirred fears that opposition was being snuffed out in Nicaragua.
White House presses Congress on bill allowing 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia

NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The White House said on Tuesday it is trying to persuade Congress not to press ahead with a bill that would allow survivors and families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue the government of Saudi Arabia for damages, in an apparent effort to avoid having a presidential veto overridden.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest, speaking during a press briefing in New York, repeated a promise that President Barack Obama would veto the bill, which has been passed by both houses of Congress, but said there was a push to change legislators' minds about the law.

"White House officials and other senior officials on the president's national security team have engaged members of Congress and their staffs in both parties in both houses," Earnest said.

Congressional aides have said the measure appeared to have enough support, two-thirds majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, for lawmakers to override an Obama veto for the first time since he took office in January 2009.

The Senate sent the bill to Obama last week, giving him a 10-day window, which ends on Sept. 23, to veto the measure.

"We're going to continue that engagement up to and through the president vetoing this legislation in the hopes that we can find an alternative that preserves the effective response that we've already designed to counter state sponsors of terrorism rather than leaving that designation subject to individual decisions by individual judges," Earnest said.
India backs off major retaliation over Kashmir raid, for now

By Douglas Busvine and Sanjeev Miglani

SRINAGAR, India/NEW DELHI, Sept 20 (Reuters) - For all the shrill rhetoric immediately following Sunday's attack on an Indian army camp in Kashmir, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan, the threat of a sudden escalation in hostilities between the nuclear-armed rivals has receded for now.

Two days after 18 Indian soldiers were killed, in the biggest blow to security forces in the disputed Himalayan region for 14 years, some officials called for a measured response and plotted a diplomatic offensive to increase pressure on Pakistan.

Military action was limited to skirmishes near the Line of Control separating the countries in Kashmir, with Indian troops killing eight people they said were trying to cross the de facto border and separately fighting four or five suspected militants.

India's Federal Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said there was a deep sense of outrage about the attack in the border town of Uri, and that patience with Pakistan was wearing thin.

But he added: "Whatever decisions the government takes in this regard will be done with full diplomatic and strategic maturity." Prasad also warned against loose talk of conducting cross-border strikes.

Pakistan has dismissed Indian allegations of involvement in the Uri attack, saying the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had apportioned blame even before the investigation was complete.

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday tweeted that "Pakistan is a terrorist state."

The attack presents Modi with the most serious crisis involving Pakistan since his election in 2014, with Hindu nationalists who helped him sweep to power expecting a more robust reaction than that of the last government.

Yet the response so far resembles the path of "strategic restraint" that previous leaders have adopted, even at times of major tension including the 2008 assault on Mumbai in which 166 people were killed by gunmen who came from Pakistan.

Senior security officials on the ground in Indian-ruled Kashmir, facing a hardening of separatist attitudes in response to the rise of Modi, say they can manage the impulsiveness of his hardcore Hindu nationalist allies.

"This country has a very robust bureaucratic set-up to take care of their inadequacies," one senior army officer said, on condition of anonymity.

Any military action against Pakistan would be carefully weighed on its merits and against less risky alternatives such as diplomatic pressure, economic measures or covert action.

"It's a tactical decision," the officer said.

DIPLOMATIC WARFARE

On Tuesday, a team from India's National Investigative Agency gathered more evidence from Uri including blood samples, DNA and the GPS devices that the four attackers carried. The assailants were killed by the army.

Indian government officials are hoping they can establish the route they believe the gunmen took to cross the Line of Control from the Pakistani side, because it would help mount a diplomatic offensive against Islamabad for harbouring militants.

An official at the Indian interior ministry said the government was preparing to make a case before the United States to encourage it to take economic measures against Pakistan for failing to act against insurgents operating from its soil.

Washington has already cut back military and economic aid to Pakistan, in part because it says Islamabad did not target the Pakistan-based Haqqani militant network blamed for a widening insurgency in Afghanistan.

"You will see multiple serious action against Pakistan, the results will hurt their economy," the Indian interior ministry official said.

One problem for Modi's government is that, by promising an appropriate response to the attack and raising expectations of a punitive strike, officials in his administration could now lose face with its core nationalist constituency.

Another is that retaliatory measures carry a risk of a bigger conflict between India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars since independence, two of them over the nuclear flashpoint of Kashmir.

"There are no easy options, but not doing anything is also not an option," said an Indian defence source.

OPTIONS AND RISKS

Military officials in New Delhi and Srinagar, summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, have cautioned against rushing into cross-border strikes that members of Modi's right wing Bharatiya Janata Party were baying for in the hours after the raid.

One option long on the table is a small group of soldiers carrying out a fast attack on one or two Pakistan army posts across the border that are suspected of helping militants sneak into Kashmir, the defence source said.

Another option that the Modi's administration is seen as more likely to explore than its predecessors is targeted assassinations of leaders of militant groups based in Pakistan.

But India's operational and intelligence capabilities to carry out such operations are unproven and carry the risk of going wrong.

"India may well decide to introduce some subtle means of punishing Pakistan into its policy toolkit," wrote Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center on an Indian website Rediff News.

"Forget about sending in troops or raining down missiles, but don't rule out certain types of furtive activities, including occasional covert operations that target specific terrorist leaders or facilities."
Former National Guard member gets 30 years for plot to attack Illinois base

By Timothy Mclaughlin

CHICAGO, Sept 20 (Reuters) - A former member of the Illinois National Guard was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday for planning with his cousin to attack a military installation outside Chicago as part of a conspiracy to support the Islamic State militant group.

Hasan Edmonds, 24, and his cousin, Jonas Edmonds, 31, pleaded guilty last year to planning to carry out an armed attack on the military facility where Hasan Edmonds had been training in Joliet, 34 miles (55km) southwest of downtown Chicago.

Jonas Edmonds was sentenced to 21 years in prison earlier on Tuesday.

"They were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for planning to wage violence on behalf of ISIL in the Middle East and to conduct an attack on our soil," U.S. Assistant Attorney General John Carlin said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to Islamic State by an acronym.

"Thanks to the efforts of many prosecutors, agents and analysts, we were able to ensure these plotters did not attain their violent intentions."

Jonas Edmonds' attorney, James Graham, said prosecutors initially believed his client was more culpable, but changed course as the trial proceeded to focus on Hasan.

Hasan Edmonds' attorney, Paul Flynn, was not immediately available for comment.

Hasan Edmonds was arrested at Chicago's Midway Airport in March 2015 as he tried to fly to Egypt. The cousins' plan called for Hasan to leave the United States and join Islamic State fighters while Jonas carried out the attack, according to an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint.

Prosecutors said Hasan Edmonds had been using Facebook to communicate with an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent pretending to be an Islamic State fighter.

Hasan Edmonds pleaded guilty in December 2015 to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and attempting to provide support - namely personnel - to the organization.

He had been a member of the Illinois National Guard since 2011.

Jonas Edmonds, 30, pleaded guilty the same month to the conspiracy charge and a charge of lying to law enforcement on an offense related to terrorism.

U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas wrote in court documents last month that Hasan Edmonds "...betrayed both his word and his country by plotting to kill his fellow soldiers on behalf of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant."
Oil prices rise on reported US crude stock draw, firm Japan imports

By Henning Gloystein

SINGAPORE, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Oil prices climbed on Wednesday, supported by a reported draw in U.S. crude inventories and by firm import data from Japan.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were up 1.79 percent, or 79 cents, at $44.84 a barrel at 0027 GMT, buoyed by a contractual rollover into higher-demand November as a front-month.

Traders said that the main WTI price driver had been American Petroleum Institute data showing a 7.5-million barrel draw to 507.2 million barrels in U.S. crude inventories, the third weekly stock draw.

International benchmark Brent crude oil futures were trading at $46.46 per barrel, up 58 cents, or 1.26 percent, from their last close.

Traders said that Brent was being supported by firm import data from Japan.

Japan's customs-cleared crude oil imports rose 0.5 percent in August from the same month a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said on Wednesday.

Japan, the world's fourth-biggest crude buyer, imported 3.38 million barrels per day of crude oil last month, the preliminary data showed.

Overall, however, oil markets remain oversupplied as exporters around the world pump near record amounts, while demand stutters.
Salary of BHP CEO cut in half after Brazil mine disaster

SYDNEY, Sept 21 (Reuters) - BHP Billiton Chief Executive Andrew Mackenzie's annual salary was cut in half following the Samarco dam disaster in Brazil that claimed 19 lives and caused widespread environmental damage, the global miner said.

Mackenzie was paid $2.24 million in the 2016 fiscal year, down from $4.58 million the previous year. While his base salary was maintained at $1.7 million, he did not receive any short- or long-term incentive payments, according to BHP's annual report.

"The dam failure at Samarco was a key consideration, along with the ongoing decline in commodity markets and its associated impact on our performance," BHP said in the report.

Almost a year after the spill at the Samarco mine, owned jointly by BHP and Brazilian miner Vale, there is still no date for restarting operations, complicating attempts to restructure Samarco's debt and increasing the possibility the miner may be allowed to run out of money.
Switzerland regrets Thai decision not to extradite Swiss national linked to 1MDB probe

KUALA LUMPUR/ZURICH, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Switzerland said it regrets a decision by Thai authorities not to extradite Swiss national Xavier Justo, a possible key witness in the global money-laundering probe linked to Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

Malaysia's 1MDB, once a pet project of Prime Minister Najib Razak who chaired its advisory board, is the subject of money-laundering investigations in at least six countries, including Switzerland, Singapore and the United States.

Justo was jailed for three years in Thailand in August 2015 after the police said he admitted to blackmail and attempting extortion of his former employer Petrosaudi, a Saudi Arabia-based oil and gas company and joint venture partner of 1MDB.

Justo leaked several confidential documents from Petrosaudi relating to its joint venture with 1MDB that were published by Malaysian and international media groups early last year, and formed the basis for the graft and money laundering probe.

His sentence was cut to two years by a royal amnesty in August, prompting the Swiss authorities to request his transfer to serve the remaining term back home.

Thai Justice Minister Gen Paiboon Koomchaya was quoted telling Malaysian state news agency Bernama that the decision to deny Justo's transfer was made "in accordance with Thai law".

The Swiss foreign office said it took note of the decision with "regret". "Switzerland has not yet been officially informed by the Thai authorities of the decision to refuse the transfer to Switzerland," it said in a statement to Reuters.

Justo's lawyer in Thailand, Worrasit Piriyawiboon, said his client was not extradited because he has less than one year of his sentence left to serve.

The decision to reject Justo's transfer to Switzerland came shortly after Malaysia's prime minister concluded a visit to Thailand. Both countries have denied any interference.

Najib's press secretary said in a statement late on Tuesday that no one from the Malaysian delegation raised any matter relating to Justo during the Thai visit.

"Malaysia does not sanction attempts to interfere with the internal affairs or judicial process of other countries," Tengku Sariffuddin said in a statement.

The U.S. Justice Department filed lawsuits earlier this year seeking to seize more than $1 billion of assets allegedly siphoned off from 1MDB, founded in September 2009 to invest in strategic property and energy projects.

Najib has denied any wrongdoing and said Malaysia will cooperate with the international investigations.
Cambodia deports 13 Taiwanese telecoms fraud suspects to China

SHANGHAI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Cambodia has deported 13 Taiwanese nationals suspected of telecoms fraud to China, the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing has said, ignoring protests from Taiwan asking the Southeast Asian country not to proceed.

The public security ministry said on Tuesday 50 Chinese nationals were also sent back with the Taiwanese deportees.

They were all arrested in a Cambodian police raid in Phnom Penh and suspected of committing internet and phone extortion fraud. Such scams have cost billions of dollars and driven some victims to suicide.

Cambodia, one of China's closest allies, does not have official relations with self-ruled Taiwan. It treats the island as part of "one China" in line with Beijing, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province.

Uk Heisela, a senior official in Cambodia's immigration department, confirmed the deportations and said Taiwan had not been in touch with Phnom Penh over the case.

"All victims are in China," he said.

Cambodia has deported more than 200 people suspected of involvement in the fraud rings to China since November.

Taiwan's foreign ministry said late on Tuesday it had protested strongly against the deportation of Taiwanese nationals to China and said Cambodia had been pressured by China.

The Chinese public security ministry said the suspects were being brought back to help with investigations and because the victims of the gang-related fraud scheme were from the mainland. They will be tried in Nanjing, the capital of coastal Jiangsu province, it said.

The ministry said authorities in Taiwan had been informed of the case.

China has cooperated with police in Kenya, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia to break up 65 telecom fraud rings since November, the ministry said, leading to the arrest of 1,168 suspects, including 347 Taiwan residents.
New Zealand posts record migrants, but key sectors missing out

WELLINGTON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - New Zealand's immigration boom struck a record with 125,000 newcomers landing in the 12 months through August, yet shortages of skilled labour in hot sectors like tech and construction is fuelling criticism of government policies.

The latest data, released on Wednesday by the statistics office, will likely add to the growing calls for the government to do more to attract the right kind of workers needed to fill jobs in the Pacific nation.

The country's centre-left opposition party, rather than conservatives, has led that criticism, and in July even the central bank called for a review of migration policies.

"The key issue around migration is what is the - for want of a better word - the quality of the people that we bring in," Reserve Bank of New Zealand governor Graeme Wheeler told a news conference last month, reinforcing the call for a review.

"What are the skills they're bringing in and can they add value to the economy?" he added.

Foreigners with experience in areas on the country's skill shortage list had a better chance of gaining a work visa and residency, which offered benefits such as the country's free public health services. However, only eight percent of work visas went to people on that list, according to Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse.

A housing boom in Auckland, partly driven by increased numbers of immigrants seeking a place to live, and the rebuilding of earthquake-ravaged city Christchurch had created strong demand for construction.

Yet Fletcher Building, the country's largest building company, said the labour shortage coupled with supply constraints meant there were some "unacceptable" delays in Auckland projects.

"The local labour force is stretched and we are looking to Australia and the UK, particularly for project management disciplines," said Fletcher CEO Mark Adamson.

New Zealand's IT scene, the country's fastest-growing export sector, was also struggling to keep up.

The number of technology jobs had grown 35 percent in the past four years, according to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, a financial technology firm based in Wellington that is expanding in the U.S. market, said New Zealand's reputation as a tech hub was growing, helping lure workers, but that finding enough workers remained a challenge.
US bombers fly over South Korea for second time since North's nuclear test

By Yoo Han-bin

OSAN, South Korea, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Two U.S. supersonic bombers flew over South Korea on Wednesday, with one of them landing at an air base 40 km (25 miles) south of the capital, the second such flight since North Korea's Sept. 9 nuclear test.

U.S. Forces Korea said the flight by a pair of B-1B Lancer strategic bombers based in Guam was a show of force and of U.S. commitment to preserve the security of the peninsula and the region.

The United States, which has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, flew two B-1 bombers on Sept. 13 escorted by U.S. and South Korean fighter jets in a show of solidarity with Seoul.

The North condemned the earlier flight as an armed provocation that mobilized "ill-famed nuclear killing tools". It did not immediately respond to Wednesday's flight.

The U.S. Air Force said the Wednesday flight was the closest ever to North Korea by a B-1 bomber.

"Today marks the first time the airframe has landed on the Korean peninsula in 20 years, as well as conducting the closest flight near North Korea ever," the U.S. Air Force said on its website which also showed a B-1B bomber landing at the base in South Korea.

The South's Yonhap news agency said the aircraft flew over a U.S. live-fire training site in the Pocheon area bordering the North.

North Korea has ignored global condemnation of its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, and this week said it had successfully tested a new rocket engine that would be used to launch satellites, again in violation of U.N. sanctions.

The leaders of the United States and China, which is the North's main diplomatic ally and economic benefactor, condemned the latest nuclear test and pledged to step up cooperation at the United Nations and in law enforcement channels.

CHINA URGES RESTRAINT

U.N. diplomats say the two countries have begun discussions on a possible U.N. resolution in response to the latest nuclear test, but China has not said directly whether it would support tougher steps against North Korea.

China, which has objected to a planned U.S. deployment of a THAAD missile defence system in the South to counter the North's missile threat, called on "all parties to exercise restraint and to avoid any actions that could further escalate tensions".

South Korea's prime minister, Hwang Kyo-ahn, told parliament South Korea wanted existing U.N. sanctions against the North tightened by removing loopholes that allow it to trade in minerals if it is for subsistence.

North Korea has been testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles at an unprecedented rate this year, beginning with its fourth nuclear test in January and including the launch of a satellite in February that was widely seen as a test of long-range ballistic missile technology.

The North's test of a new rocket engine for satellite launchers this week was believed to be part of a long-range missile programme, according to the South's military.

North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, ordered preparations for the launch of a satellite "as soon as possible" on the basis of the successful test, its state media reported.

North Korea this month fired three missiles that flew about 1,000 km (600 miles), and in August tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile that experts said showed considerable progress.

It also launched an intermediate-range missile in June that experts said marked a technological advance for the isolated state after several failed tests.
Malaysian pension fund eyes more tech investments after Uber

By Liz Lee

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Malaysia's $30-billion pension fund, Kumpulan Wang Persaraan (KWAP), is looking to pump in more money into technology firms, following its recent foray into the sector with an investment in what sources have identified as ride-sharing service Uber.

KWAP, Malaysia's second biggest pension fund with 123 billion ringgit ($29.74 billion) of assets under management, is diversifying into new sectors at a time when returns across its investments have slowed.

The pension fund has committed to a $30-million investment in its "first disruptive technology deal" in a foreign firm, its chief executive officer, Wan Kamaruzaman Wan Ahmad, told Reuters in an interview. It is a "global technology company with a market value of over $60 billion".

"This is our first investment in this space, and we want to continue building our expertise in this area," the CEO said.

While Wan Kamaruzaman did not reveal the name of the firm, two sources close to the deal said KWAP had recently invested the amount in Uber Technologies Inc. The sources did not want to be named as the deal was still under wraps.

A financing round earlier this year valued Uber at $62.5 billion. The U.S. firm has been operating in Malaysia since 2013.

Uber did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Like KWAP, other Malaysian government-linked funds have also been investing more in tech assets, such as Khazanah Nasional Bhd that has put money in Alibaba, Skyscanner and WeLab.

KWAP expects a 5 percent return on total investment this year. It posted a return of 5.4 percent last year, lower than a targeted 6 percent.

"This lower-for-longer climate is prevailing. We think we are able to achieve a 5 percent target. To our standards in the current environment, that is still good," Wan Kamaruzaman said.

EYEING MORE IN UK

Around 90 percent of KWAP's investments are in traditional assets such as fixed income and equity. The remaining 10 percent goes to alternative investments such as private equity, but the CEO said the fund may increase that allocation to 15 percent.

Wan Kamaruzaman said the fund intends to increase exposure in logistics, healthcare, education and consumer goods, adding that it also sees opportunities in the UK where a Brexit vote has weakened the sterling and dented asset prices.

KWAP, which has 250 million pounds ($324.50 million)allocated for UK equities investment, is looking to add more UK properties to its portfolio, the CEO said.
PRESS DIGEST - Bulgaria - Sept 21

SOFIA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - These are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Wednesday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

-- Bulgaria will provide interest-free loan to its state-run power company NEK to pay compensation of over 620 million euros to Russia's Atomstroyexport over canceled Belene nuclear power project, the government said. (Capital daily, Trud, 24 Chasa, Monitor, Standart, Duma, Sega, Telegraph)

-- Prime Minister Boiko Borisov discarded as nonsense a remark of a Russian deputy from Russia's ruling United Russia party, who told Bulgarian state television that Russia will buy out the entire country after it has already bought half of its Black Sea coastline. (24 Chasa, Monitor, Standart, Telegraph, Sega)

-- Azeri state energy company SOCAR is interested to enter Bulgarian gas and oil product markets, its regional manager for the Balkans Murad Haidarov said. (24 Chasa, Standart)

-- Bulgaria plans to invest about 16 billion levs ($9.11 billion) in construction in the next 6 years, deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Donchev said, adding funds will go for roads and city development. (Standart, Monitor, 24 Chasa)
Poland - Factors to Watch Sept 21

Following are news stories, press reports and events to watch that may affect Poland's financial markets on Wednesday. ALL TIMES GMT (Poland: GMT + 2 hours):

ENERGA, BOGDANKA

State-run utility Energa may not extend its long-term contract on coal supplies from coal miner Bogdanka after 2016, after it said it would buy coal from state-owned miner PGG, Parkiet daily said.

RETAILER TAX

Poland may impose a flat tax of 0.6-0.8 with some allowance starting from 2017 instead of the progressive tax that was questioned by the European Commission, Rzeczpospolita daily said quoting unnamed sources.

STATE-RUN FIRMS

Agents from Poland's anti-corruption office entered the premises of five state-run firms, including KGHM, PKN Orlen, Lotos, Azoty and PGZ, following dismissal of the treasury minister, who was criticised for appointing some of his colleagues as the firms' executives, Rzeczpospolita daily said.

The anti-corruption office said it was checking the companies' expenses on PR and consulting.

UTILITIES

The dismissal of the treasury minister last week may trigger a reshuffle in the management boards of some state-run energy companies, including PGE, Tauron, Energa and Enea, Rzeczpospolita daily said quoting sources from the Energy Ministry.

ALLEGRO

Private equity fund Mid Europa Partners has joined Cinven and Permira in their bid to buy Polish auction site from South Africa's Naspers, Puls Biznesu said quoting unnamed sources.

The other joint bids were submitted by three consortia, including CVC and General Atlantic, Advent International and Hellman & Friedman, Apax Partners and CPP Investment Board.

AVIVA

British insurer Aviva mulls opening a shared services centre in Poland that would employ 1,000 people, Puls Biznesu daily quoted Mark Wilson, Aviva's CEO as saying.

Wilson added that Poland is on the company's short list, but it is still in talks with Polish government.

****Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.****
Oil tanker leaves Libya's Ras Lanuf with first export cargo since 2014 - port manager

BENGHAZI, Libya Sept 21 (Reuters) - An oil tanker left the Libyan port of Ras Lanuf for Italy early on Wednesday with the first crude export cargo from the terminal since at least late 2014, the port manager said.
Equatorial Guinea looks to European gas buyers for Fortuna FLNG -energy minister

By Mark Tay

SINGAPORE, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Equatorial Guinea is negotiating pricing terms with potential offtakers for production from its 2.2 million tonnes per year (tpy) Fortuna Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) project, eyeing Europe as its next key market.

While Asia remains a key LNG customer for Equatorial Guinea, the small west African country has "to compete with all the supply that is going to Asia", said Equatorial Guinea energy minister Obiang Lima, referring to new projects from Australia and the United States.

"We are seeing that the European market is becoming more attractive for the future than Asia," Lima said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday on the sidelines of an industry conference in Singapore.

LNG producers such as Equatorial Guinea are benefiting from European buyers trying to wean themselves off Russian gas by taking advantage of short routes from Africa for the super-chilled fuel shipped in tankers.

The Equatorial Guinea government is targeting a break-even cost of around $6-$7 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) for gas from the Fortuna FLNG project supplied to Europe.

Current Asian spot LNG prices are around $5.50 per mmBtu, while British NBP natural gas spot trading prices , a European benchmark, are at $4.20 per mmBtu.

"We are coming to the final phases of designating our offtakers ... (but) one of the key criteria of this project that has not been decided yet is the fiscal terms that the government would provide to the project," Lima said.

The final investment decision on the project will be made by the end of this year, with completion set for 2019, he said.

"The biggest advantage that we have in floating rather than onshore (projects) is that a lot of the development is not done in-country," Lima said.

The project could be expedited as ship and rig builders like Singapore's Keppel Corp can divert more resources to building its FLNG vessel as orders for new rigs and ships are cancelled amid depressed oil prices, he noted.

BEARISH ON ENERGY PRICES

Lima remains bearish on oil and gas prices and sees the pricing rout that began for both in 2014 lasting through 2020, with the LNG supply glut and weaker demand from key Asian countries such as China continuing to weigh on sentiment.

Despite the bearish view, the energy minister is confident Equatorial Guinea will be able to award new acreage from its EGRonda 2016 Oil and Gas Licensing Round.

"The big majors are the ones acquiring assets because they understand that this is the best time to get positions and because they have the funds," Lima said.

"A lot of the majors have shown interest and I would not be surprised that if at the end the majors are the ones who get the majority of the acreage."

PLANS FOR OIL TERMINAL AMENDED

Also, Equatorial Guinea's plans for a 2.2 million cubic metre oil terminal have been tweaked as the country has limited means to fund such a project, Lima said.

The government is now seeking private investors to partner with on the initiative.

Major trading houses like Gunvor and Socar, and French oil major Total have indicated interest in participating in the storage and shipping terminal, he said.

Vopak, which was originally planned to be the terminal's operator, will no longer be involved in the project, Lima said.
Bangladesh river ferry sinks; dozens missing

DHAKA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Dozens of people were missing after an overcrowded ferry sank on a river in Bangladesh on Wednesday, and a police official said the bodies of two women had been recovered with the search for survivors still underway.

Low-lying Bangladesh, with extensive inland waterways and slack safety standards, has an appalling record of ferry accidents, with casualties sometimes running into the hundreds.

The river bank collapsed and a huge slab of mud fell on the ferry while it was anchored alongside, Ziaul Hasan, a police official in the southern district of Barisal, told Reuters.

"About 35 people are missing. The search operation is underway," he said, adding that the bodies of two women had been found.

Overcrowding is a common factor in many of the accidents and each time there is an accident the government vows to toughen regulations.
Libya exports first oil cargo from Ras Lanuf since 2014

By Ayman al-Warfalli

BENGHAZI, Libya, Sept 21 (Reuters) - An oil tanker left the Libyan port of Ras Lanuf for Italy early on Wednesday with the first crude export cargo from the terminal since at least late 2014, boosting hopes of reviving the North African producer's oil output.

The port manager at Ras Lanuf said a second tanker was preparing to load at the terminal, one of four seized on Sept. 11-12 by eastern Libyan forces loyal to military leader Khalifa Haftar.

Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) has welcomed a promise by Haftar's forces to allow the NOC to control the ports. NOC Chairman Mustafa Sanalla said on Wednesday that national production had risen to about 390,000 barrels per day (bpd) from less than 290,000 bpd before the ports' change of control.

Any boost in production through the ports could also benefit the United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli as it tries to unite rival armed factions and stabilise the economy, though Haftar has so far rejected the GNA.

The NOC said last week it would immediately begin exports from Ras Lanuf and Zueitina, and as soon as possible from Es Sider. Exports have continued from Brega, the fourth port seized but which had remained open.

Together, the ports have a capacity of nearly 800,000 bpd, though Ras Lanuf and Es Sider have been damaged in clashes and Brega has been operating at below maximum capacity.

Armed conflict and disputes have left Libya's oil installations under the control of different factions and cut output to a fraction of the 1.6 million bpd produced before an uprising toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The NOC has ambitious goals of producing more than 900,000 bpd by year-end, but says it needs funding for its operating budget and the reopening of blockaded pipelines in western Libya to reach that target.

Sanalla said on Wednesday that the NOC had so far received 310 million Libyan dinars ($220 million) from the GNA, and had been promised another 300 million.

"These amounts of money are not enough but we take into account the difficult financial situation currently," he said.

NOC's eastern subsidiary Arabian Gulf Oil Company (AGOCO) said on Wednesday production had resumed at Majid field, which had been closed since last year and was pumping only 4,000 bpd.

On Tuesday, AGOCO said its overall production had risen by at least 50,000 bpd to 210,000 bpd after restarting two other fields, Nafoura and Hamada.

Haftar's forces seized the ports from a rival armed group that had controlled them for more than two years, and on Sunday fended off a counterattack.

Many in western Libya suspect Haftar, a former Gaddafi ally, of plotting to take power nationally.

Factions that support him have tried to export oil from eastern Libya independently, bypassing the NOC in Tripoli, though they have also allowed oil shipments for NOC Tripoli to continue from the eastern port of Hariga.

After Haftar's forces seized the ports, the United States and major European powers called for them to withdraw, cautioning that they would move to block any shipments that took place outside the authority of the GNA.

The Seadelta tanker that left Ras Lanuf on Wednesday loaded with 700,000 barrels of crude and the second tanker that was preparing to load were both arranged before Haftar's forces seized the ports.

Sanalla has said he received the go-ahead from the GNA's leadership before moving to open the ports last week, and that export earnings would be channelled through Tripoli.
Thailand, China agree on $5 billion cost for rail project's first phase

BANGKOK, Sept 21 (Reuters) - China and Thailand agreed on Wednesday that the first phase of a planned high-speed railway project will cost 179 billion baht ($5.15 billion), Thailand's transport minister said, with both countries calling for closer ties following rocky negotiations.

The 873 km (542 miles) rail line will link Thailand's border with Laos to the ports and industrial zones in Thailand's east.

Beijing has ambitious railway plans to connect the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming to Thailand, through Laos, and Thailand wants to modernise its ageing rail network.

Earlier this year China put the project cost at 560 billion baht ($16.09 billion), which Thailand said was too high.

Agreement over the project's framework comes after months of sometimes tense negotiations, officials said.

"This project will cost 179 billion baht. This is what we agreed upon," Thai Transport Minister Arkhom Termpittayapaisith told reporters in Bangkok after a three-day meeting between China and Thailand.

Arkhom said Thailand will bear full construction costs, while China will provide funds for technical systems.

The first phase will focus on a 250 km (155 miles) track from Bangkok to the northeastern Thai province of Nakhon Ratchasima, with construction starting in December.

"Both countries want to begin this project by the end of the year and there is limited time remaining," said Wang Xiaotao, vice chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission, who was present at Wednesday's talks in Bangkok.

Thailand's junta has targeted infrastructure spending as a long-term fix to help boost the economy in light of weak exports and consumer confidence.

Thailand has moved closer to China and away from its traditional ally the United States, following a 2014 coup by the Thai army, through an increase in diplomatic visits and joint Thai-China military exercises.
New Zealand again gives approval for first extradition to China

By Charlotte Greenfield

WELLINGTON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - New Zealand will go ahead with its first extradition of a resident to China, New Zealand's justice minister said on Wednesday, after reconsidering its position at the behest of the High Court and maintaining the man should be sent to China.

New Zealand agreed in December to extradite South Korean Kyung Yup Kim, who is a New Zealand resident, to China to face charges for the murder of a woman in Shanghai.

The High Court later ordered the government to reconsider its decision because of concern Kim might not be protected from ill-treatment and given the right to silence before a trial.

Justice Minister Amy Adams said via an email from her spokesman that she had considered the High Court's ruling and had decided that Kim should be surrendered to China.

Kim denies the murder charge, according to court documents, and his lawyer, Tony Ellis, told the High Court this week that Kim intended to keep fighting the case up to the Supreme Court.

The drawn-out case and the possibility of more court reviews has highlighted the hurdles China faces as it seeks to drum up international cooperation in a campaign to track down corruption suspects who have fled overseas.

That was further underscored on Tuesday when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sidestepped questions on extraditions to China, saying Canada would stick to high standards when deciding whether to return Chinese citizens.

China's foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a daily briefing on Wednesday that Kim's extradition "serves the common interests of China, New Zealand and other countries that cooperate with China in this way".

"We hope and are confident that on the basis of mutual respect we will continue to cooperate in the administration and enforcement of the law," Kang said.

China has pushed for an extradition treaty with New Zealand since 2014. In April, on a visit to Beijing, Prime Minister John Key said an extradition treaty was "possible", as long as people did not face torture or the death penalty.

The High Court also ruled on Wednesday that Kim, who has spent the past five years in an Auckland prison while the extradition proceedings went on, should be allowed out on bail.
German retail, construction associations lift 2016 sales forecasts

BERLIN, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Germany's HDE retail association and the HDB construction association on Wednesday raised their sales forecasts for 2016 in a further sign that private consumption and building activity will propel growth in Europe's biggest economy this year.

HDE said it now expects nominal retail sales to increase by 2.5 percent in 2016, up from its previous forecast of 2.0 percent. Sales in the first half of the year were up 2.6 percent, it added.

HDB lifted its forecast for nominal construction sales to 5 percent growth in 2016, up from 3.5 percent previously.

Orders in construction reached a level last seen during the boom times following unification and the economic upswing in East Germany in the mid-1990s, it added.
Flash floods in Indonesia kill 20; rescuers hunt for missing

GARUT, Indonesia, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Indonesian search and rescue teams worked on Wednesday to find victims of flash floods that killed 20 people and damaged hundreds of homes, authorities said.

The floods hit the Garut area, about 200 km (125 miles) southeast of the capital, Jakarta, on Tuesday after torrential rain.

"We've reported that we found 20 bodies and we've identified 15 of them," said Endah Trisnawati, a member of a police disaster victims identification unit.

It was not clear how many people were missing but some officials in the area said it could be up to 15. Some media reported 20 people were unaccounted for.

Authorities said search and rescue operations would go on.

Military personnel and volunteers helped evacuate about 1,000 residents of the area.

Debris floated in gradually receding floodwater in inundated villages and there appeared to be widespread damage to vehicles and buildings.
Saga customers carry on travelling despite Brexit

By Noor Zainab Hussain

Sept 21 (Reuters) - Britain's shock vote to leave the European Union has not dented demand for holidays among Britons over 50 years old, travel and insurance firm Saga said on Wednesday.

Saga, which offers ocean and river cruises, singles holidays and escorted tours, said a poll of its travel customers showed 99 percent of them were not reconsidering their holiday plans because of the June 23 vote to leave the bloc.

Chief Executive Officer Lance Batchelor said Saga's clients, most of whom live off retirement funds, plan well in advance and were not likely to change their behaviour quickly.

"They are a tough bunch. They love to travel. If you talked to Saga customers as they approached retirement and asked them what they plan to spend their time on, the answer will very often be lots of travel," Batchelor said.

"Because they have at least 50 years of life experience, they are less likely to panic when things happen around the world. They want to carry on travelling, they are really brave and intrepid," he said.

Saga, which has already achieved the majority of its holiday sales for the current year, reported an 8.5 percent rise in first-half pretax profit from continuing operations to 109.9 million pounds ($142.6 million), beating a consensus forecast supplied by the company of 99 million pounds.

Recent attacks in Tunisia, Egypt and France and Turkey, coupled with a hit to sterling from the Brexit vote, have dampened demand for travel by Britons.

But Saga's customers have only changed course over their preferred travel destinations, the company said.

"Events that have happened over the last 12 months in Turkey, Egypt and in some North African countries have certainly led to a lower level of demand there," Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Hill told Reuters.

"We see certainly good demand for our Asian, Caribbean and South American destinations," he said.

The company, which listed on the London Stock Exchange in May 2014, raised its interim dividend 23 percent to stick to its payout target of 50-70 percent of net earnings.

On the new European capital rules for insurers that came into effect in January, Saga reported a Solvency II ratio of 196 percent, well above minimum capital requirements of 100 percent.

Shares in Saga were up 1.5 percent at 225 pence at 0941 GMT.
Northern Nigerian city celebrates ancient festival as security improves

By Ulf Laessing

ZARIA, Nigeria, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Riders wearing brightly coloured warrior robes and bearing spears were again packing the streets of this northern Nigerian city, greeting their traditional ruler as locals celebrated a thousand-year-old tradition in a region hit by Boko Haram.

Last week the traditional ruler in Zaria city rode in a horse carriage to kick off the Durbar celebrations that mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

The Durbar is a custom dating back more than 1,000 years which involves warriors from villages and towns in Nigeria's Muslim north traveling once a year to the emir's palace to renew a pledge of respect to their ruler.

But the thousands who packed the streets and minarets of mosques to watch were a far-cry from last year when many stayed indoors from fear following an attack by Boko Haram fighters that killed some 35 people in Zaria.

Now, following a military crackdown on the militant group, Alhaji Shehu Idris, Emir of Zazzau, rode to his palace.

He greeted people lining the pot-holed streets of this dusty city as he passed by, Once at the palace, he watched with officials as each area of his traditional constituency presented their turbaned chiefs and warriors in a mark of respect.

Several men -- wearing white, red, blue or yellow robes -- demonstrated their horse-riding skills on the unpaved parade ground. But some women and girls also walked during the procession.
Caixabank bids for Banco BPI after takeover hurdle cleared

By Sergio Goncalves

PORTO, Portugal, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Spain's Caixabank launched a bid for Banco BPI on Wednesday and slightly raised its offer price after shareholders in the Portuguese bank scrapped a 20 percent cap on voting rights and cleared the way for the takeover attempt.

Caixabank's, BPI's largest shareholder, has had the Portuguese lender in its sights for months.

But a dispute over voting rights with other stakeholders clouded the bid it announced in April, as its formal launch depended on the cap being lifted.

Caixabank, which will now be able to vote with its full 45 percent stake in BPI, said in a statement it was launching its offer for the rest of the bank at 1.134 euros per share.

That is slightly above the 1.113 euros set in April, as its offer is now considered compulsory rather than voluntary under Portuguese rules and obeys different minimum price metrics. The new price is equivalent to the weighted average of BPI's shares over the past six months, Caixabank said.

Shares in BPI, which has a market capitalisation of 1.59 billion euros ($1.8 billion), were suspended ahead of the shareholder vote. The stock closed at 1.091 euros on Tuesday.

Shares in Caixbank closed 1.17 percent higher on Wednesday after the result of the vote, at 2.422 euros a share.

The lifting of the cap was supported by over 88 percent of the votes cast, BPI said.

The Spanish bank's bid had been opposed by Angolan investor Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola's president who has a stake of about 20 percent in the Portuguese bank, and a local shareholder.

The shareholder meeting to vote on the issue had been postponed twice from its initial date of July 22.

Earlier on Wednesday, Banco BPI proposed selling a 2 percent stake in its Angolan unit BFA to a company controlled by dos Santos in exchange for Luanda's support in the vote.

It was not clear whether dos Santos accepted the offer, which would give her a 51 percent controlling stake in BFA and help BPI comply with European Union regulations on exposure to risky Angolan assets.

One of the BPI shareholders told reporters after the general meeting that dos Santos' company had abstained in the votes, which was enough for Caixabank and other shareholders to pass the change.
Iraqi finance minister sacked, risking economic fallout

By Saif Hameed and Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Iraq's parliament sacked Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari on Wednesday over corruption allegations, a move that risks further destabilising the major OPEC producer's fragile economy as it struggles with a massive budget deficit.

Zebari lost a no-confidence vote by 158 to 77, two lawmakers said, after questioning in parliament last month over alleged corruption and misuse of public funds, which he denies.

Zebari, a prominent Kurdish figure who had served as Iraq's foreign minister for more than a decade, has recently led high-level negotiations for a loan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and with international lenders for a Eurobond.

Iraq's economy, which relies almost exclusively on oil revenue, has been battered by a drop in crude prices and the costs associated with the war against Islamic State, which seized a third of the country in 2014.

Falling revenues have caused the public deficit to widen and delayed payments to foreign oil producers for investment costs.

The IMF in July approved a three-year, $5.34 billion standby loan for Iraq in exchange for a package of economic reforms. The deal is expected to unlock a total of $18 billion in financial aid over three years.

Baghdad has also said it would try to sell $2 billion in bonds by the end of the year after failing to do so in 2015.

Sarhan Ahmed, a member of parliament's finance committee, said Zebari's sacking would "shake confidence" between the IMF and the Baghdad government.

"Today's move will undermine the ongoing efforts by Iraq to convince the IMF and other lenders it has a stable economic and political atmosphere," Ahmed told Reuters.

Baghdad-headquartered Rabee Securities' chairman, Shwan Ibrahim Taha, said it was unlikely the IMF deal or the bond offer would be endangered by changing a politically appointed official but lamented the departure of Zebari, whom he called "a very capable politician and a very capable minister".

Zebari, who could not immediately be reached for comment, took on the finance portfolio two years ago in the government formed by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

There are no obvious replacements for him. Ministerial posts are distributed along ethnic, sectarian and party lines in keeping with a quota-based system set up after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Iraq is also waging war against Islamic State without a defence minister, who was sacked by parliament last month over separate corruption charges, and an interior minister, who resigned following a large suicide bombing in July in central Baghdad by the ultra-hardline group.
Knife-wielding man shot outside Israeli embassy in Turkey -officials

By Umit Bektas and Jeffrey Heller

ANKARA/JERUSALEM, Sept 21 (Reuters) - A man was shot and wounded by Turkish police outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara after he shouted slogans and wielded a knife on Wednesday, but initial inquiries indicated he had no links to an organised group, officials said.

The man, a 41-year-old from the central city of Konya, was carrying a bag and brandishing a 30-cm (12-inch) knife as he approached the embassy, the Ankara governor's office said in a statement.

He was shot in the leg after ignoring a warning from police, it said, adding he did not appear to be linked to a group.

"According to initial examinations... (the man) appears mentally unstable, no criminal record or organisational links have been found."

Turkey faces multiple security threats, including Islamic State militants blamed for bombings in Istanbul and elsewhere, and Kurdish militants following the resumption of a three-decade insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast last year.

Police told Reuters the man shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is greatest") outside the embassy before he was shot. Police were examining his bag but had not tried to detonate it, a Reuters photographer at the scene said. The area outside was only briefly cordoned off.

A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, said the attacker man was making his way toward a policeman, knife in hand, when he was shot.

Embassy staff were secure throughout the incident, he added.
Iraqi forces close in on town south of Mosul

By Ghazwan Hassan

TIKRIT, Iraq, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Iraq's military closed in on Wednesday on the centre of Shirqat, a northern town held by Islamic State seen as a stepping stone in the campaign to recapture the jihadists' stronghold of Mosul.

The army, backed by local police and Sunni Muslim tribal fighters, have taken 12 nearby villages since launching the operation on Tuesday morning, said Ali Dawdah, the mayor of Shirqat currently based in Erbil.

With air support from a U.S.-led coalition, the troops are now less than 3 km (2 miles) from the town centre, according to Dawdah, who said he expected the campaign to be concluded within 48 hours.

Five security personnel and one civilian have been killed in the battle for Shirqat, where they face hazards including roadside bombs, mortars and snipers, said the mayor and a source in the Salahuddin Operations Command which oversees military operations in the area.

Shirqat, on the Tigris river 100 km south of Mosul, has been surrounded by Iraqi troops and Iranian-backed Shi'ite Muslim militias allied to the government but so far the militias have not participated in the operation.

Tens of thousands of civilians are thought to be trapped in Shirqat and surrounding villages, which have been under Islamic State control since the group seized a third of Iraqi territory in 2014.

Officials have warned for months of a humanitarian disaster inside, where residents living under Islamic State's harsh rule say food supplies have dwindled and prices soared.

There has not been a large-scale displacement of civilians so far. Iraqi authorities hope the course of the battle will allow most residents to stay at home to avoid creating a humanitarian crisis as forces move towards Mosul.

Residents of Shukran and Houri villages told Reuters by phone they had begun waving white flags above their houses on Tuesday evening as the military advanced, but Islamic State punished them with 50 lashes each.

The behaviour of the fighters and the treatment of Shirqat's residents will be closely watched by the million or so Sunni residents of Mosul, who have a historic mistrust of the forces of successive Shi'ite-led governments in Baghdad.
EU's new Africa fund aims to attract private investors to Sahel region

By Robin Emmott and Marilyn Haigh

BRUSSELS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The European Union's new 44 billion euro ($49 billion) Africa fund aims to entice private investors to some of the world's poorest nations and slow mass migration to Europe, the EU's development chief Neven Mimica said.

The fund, unveiled last week by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, could be up and running by mid-2017, Mimica said, and is based on a similar, larger fund for Europe already operating. http://tmsnrt.rs/2d1w3iL

It will rely mainly on private investors and development banks to fund selected commercial projects that might otherwise be considered too risky for funding by commercial lenders, Mimica told Reuters in an interview.

"We would like to have new investments in primarily fragile, conflict-affected countries; risky markets where the investment would not come without such an investment scheme," he said.

The fund's focus should be on the most fragile countries, particularly in the semi-arid Sahel region, where climate change, poverty and natural disasters are driving millions of people north to Europe's shores.

"We are tackling the root causes of migration, because poverty is the root cause of migration," said Mimica.

The EU is keen to stem migration after more than 1.3 million people arrived in a mass influx last year, straining relations between the bloc's 28 members and compounding an identity crisis caused by Britain voting to leave the union.

While overall arrival numbers have fallen partly due to a deal between the EU and Turkey under which Ankara prevents migrants from embarking for Europe from its shores, numbers arriving from Africa to Italy have stayed level.

Some 130,000 migrants reached Italy from Africa so far this year, similar to last year's figures, according to the United Nations.

Since the EU considers most African migrants to be looking for work, not fleeing war or oppression, this makes it less likely they will be granted asylum.

Mimica cited countries such as Niger and Mali as a priority for the fund, as well as Rwanda. He is set to travel to Mali next week to discuss the fund with officials there.

In a bid to attract private companies, the bloc will guarantee any commercial projects that fail in the early stages. Later, EU governments may also come on board as guarantors, which EU officials hope could as much as double the investment in the fund.

NOT ENOUGH

The European Union, from where more than half of the world's development aid comes every year, making it the largest donor, donates some 20 billion euros annually to Africa.

At a summit in Malta last year, EU and African leaders also agreed a 1.8 billion euro trust fund for the region made up of public money. That is separate from the new 44 billion euro initiative, which is focused on attracting private investors.

Of the private capital in Africa, less than 10 percent goes to so-called fragile states. In such countries, the cost of setting up a business is three times higher than in the rest of Africa, according to EU data.

Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Rwanda were all fast-growing economies over the past decade, but they remain classed by the World Bank as fragile and more likely for their populations to emigrate because of lack of clean water.

"In Rwanda, I saw nicely arranged terraces for wheat, beans, coffee, tea. But the next step is missing ... the processing of the coffee beans, of the tea leaves," Mimica said, adding that global contributions to development aid still fall short.

"We have to engage private sector and domestic resources. "They are much more capable of bridging the gap from billions to trillions," he said. ($1 = 0.8972 euros)
Iran parades new weapons at time of Gulf tension with US

By Babak Dehghanpisheh

BEIRUT, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Iran marked the anniversary of its 1980 invasion by Iraq by showing off its latest ships and missiles and telling the United States not to meddle in the Gulf.

At a parade in Tehran on Wednesday, shown on state TV, the military displayed long-range missiles, tanks, and the Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defence system.

At the port of Bandar Abbas on the Gulf, the navy showed off 500 vessels, as well as submarines and helicopters, at a time of high tension with the United States in the strategic waterway.

U.S. officials say there have been more than 30 close encounters between U.S. and Iranian vessels in the Gulf so far this year, over twice as many as in the same period of 2015.

On Sept. 4, a U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after an Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast-attack craft came within 100 yards (90 metres) of it in the central Gulf, at least the fourth such incident in less than a month, U.S. Defense Department officials said.

"We tell the Americans that it's better that the capital and wealth of the American people should not be wasted on their inappropriate and detrimental presence in the Persian Gulf," said Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Tasnim news site quoted him as saying: "If they want to extend their reach and engage in adventurism they should go to the Bay of Pigs" - a reference to the location of a botched U.S. attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1961.

In Tehran, the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, declared that Iran wanted peace.

"BROTHERS IN FAITH"

But he said Iran's lessons in the 1980-88 war against Iraq now served as a guide for "our brothers in faith" in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Bahrain, countries where Iran has political, religious or military allies.

Among the weapons displayed was the new long-range "Zolfaqar" ballistic missile, named after a legendary sword said to have given by the Prophet Mohammad to Imam Ali. It has "a cluster warhead capable of hitting targets spread over the ground", according to Tasnim.

A banner on the side of a truck carrying the new missile bore a threat to Iran's arch-foe Israel: "If the leaders of the Zionist regime make a mistake then the Islamic Republic will turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust."

The Russian-supplied missile defence system on show in Tehran was deployed last month around Iran's underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow.

Enrichment at the site, around 100 km (60 miles) south of Tehran, has stopped since the implementation in January of Iran's agreement with world powers to curb its nuclear programme in exchange for an easing of sanctions.
EU scraps telecom roaming time limit in effort to please public

By Julia Fioretti and Marilyn Haigh

BRUSSELS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The European Commission proposed on Wednesday scrapping time limits on charge-free mobile phone roaming included in next year's plan to abolish such tariffs after critics said its initial proposal was consumer unfriendly.

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker abruptly ordered the previous proposal to be redrafted two weeks ago to make good on a pledge to end roaming charges. The EU executive is seeking to shore up public support after Britain's vote to leave the bloc and the rise of anti-establishment parties.

Europeans, millions of whom frequently cross often nearby borders, have been irritated by charges for making calls or using data abroad that seem far greater than any additional costs required to provide that service.

The Commission's initial proposal on the "fair use" of roaming was to allow consumers to roam for up to 90 days per year and for a maximum of 30 consecutive days, while paying only their domestic prices.

Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the digital single market, told a news conference that there would no longer be a formal limit on surcharge-free roaming when new rules enter force in June 2017.

"We will not put any limit in terms of days... but we decided to put clear safeguards in terms of residency," he said.

Operators like Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom will be able to check consumers' usage patterns to ensure they do not abuse the system by buying a cheap SIM card in one EU country and using it permanently elsewhere.

"We want to protect both sides," Ansip said.

The burden of proof will fall on companies, who will have to demonstrate that a customer is abusing free roaming by comparing their usage abroad to that at home without falling foul of data protection rules limiting the tracking of online habits.

"It is an interesting pro-consumer measure against the backdrop of rising anti-EU sentiment in many member states," said Rob Bratby, telecoms partner at law firm Olswang.

"However, it feels a little like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic if it is supposed to reconnect EU citizens with Europe."

For example, if a person uses their phone a lot more abroad than at home, or if a SIM card is largely inactive at home, operators will be able to apply roaming surcharges.

Similarly, if a customer uses multiple SIM cards when travelling then operators would be able to charge for roaming. Operators, though, would have to inform users they were facing surcharges and consumers would be allowed to challenge them.

The level of those surcharges is being debated by the European Parliament and member states, with a final agreement expected early next year.

Such surcharges would not apply to travellers using SIM cards from countries in which they reside or with which they have a "stable link", which could include work commuters, expats frequently in their home country or exchange students.

The Commission said it would adopt its new proposal by Dec. 15 after feedback from member states and national regulators.

Telecom and mobile operators' associations ETNO and GSMA, representing companies such as EE, Telefonica and Telia, said they would provide feedback.

ROAMING BATTLES

For a decade, battles over roaming charges have served as a barometer of EU politics.

The Commission, in its role as enforcer of a single market, has long cited its campaign to cap roaming charges, forcing them down by some 90 percent since 2007, in efforts to show voters it works for them.

But a rearguard action by phone companies, defending profits and citing big discrepancies in prices from Bulgaria to wealthy Luxembourg, had left consumer groups disappointed.

Roaming charges account for a fraction of companies' revenues, typically between 3 and 6 percent.
Swiss voters likely to back new law on surveillance - survey

By John Miller

ZURICH, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Voters in Switzerland on Sunday are likely to back a law extending the spy service's authority to monitor internet traffic, deploy drones and hack foreign computer systems to combat militant attacks, a survey shows.

Switzerland's system of direct democracy gives citizens final say on the law passed in September 2015 which will give new powers to the Federal Intelligence Service, along with rules on when the agency can use them.

In a survey last week by polling group gfs.bern on behalf of Swiss state television, 53 percent were in favour of the law, with 35 percent opposed. Twelve percent were undecided, gfs.bern said.

Though neutral Switzerland has not been targeted by the sort of militant Islamist attacks seen elsewhere in Europe, the Swiss government contends previous intelligence laws are outdated and ill-equipped to tackle threats that have intensified as militants deploy new technology in a tight-knit global network.

"The Federal Intelligence Service will get modern information-gathering tools, including for surveillance of telephone calls or internet activities," the government said. "These can only be deployed under strict conditions."

For instance, the agency must get the government's go-ahead before deploying software to penetrate foreign computer networks. When gathering information, its agents must "employ methods least likely to intrude on the targeted person's civil rights", according to the law.

Across Europe, countries including France have expanded spy agency powers, following Islamist attacks that have shifted some governments' priorities from privacy to security.
Vietnam drug kingpin, 8 henchmen get death sentence for heroin smuggling

HANOI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - A court in Vietnam sentenced to death a notorious drugs kingpin and eight associates on Wednesday, delivering the maximum punishment in a single verdict over the trafficking of more than half a tonne of heroin.

The case centred on Trang A Tang, a 33-year-old leader of a network that trafficked drugs from the infamous Golden Triangle area of northwestern Laos, northeastern Myanmar and northern Thailand, and distributed them in Vietnam.

Tang has become well-known for his opulent lifestyle and for managing to evade justice while spending lavishly on big houses and luxury cars.

The four-day trial in Bac Ninh province heard how the gang had handled 2,181 heroin "cakes", weighing 350 grams (0.77 lb) each, between 2009 and 2013. That works out to 763 kg (1,682 lb) of heroin.

Ton Trong Hung, secretary of the court, said by telephone that nine members of the network had received the death penalty. Tang's wife and father were among three others jailed for life.

The judge called Tang "extremely dangerous" and said he "must be permanently removed from society", state-run radio Voice of Vietnam reported on its website.

Trafficking of more than 100 grams (3.5 oz) of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment in Vietnam.
Syrian warplane crashes near Damascus, cause unknown - monitor

BEIRUT, Sept 21 (Reuters) - A Syrian warplane crashed north of Damascus on Wednesday, but it was unclear if it had been shot down or came down because of a technical fault, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

The jet crashed in the Eastern Qalamoun area near the Syrian capital, the British-based Observatory said.

Islamic State militants, who have a presence in the area, said in an online statement that the plane had been shot down.

Syrian state media quoted a military source as confirming a warplane had crashed after targeting Islamic State. It did not give a reason for the crash. It said the pilot had been rescued.

Islamic State claimed on Sunday to have shot down another Syrian warplane that crashed near Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria.
U.S. begins unblocking jetliner sales to Iran

PARIS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The United States has started issuing licences unblocking the sale of Western passenger jets to Iran, aviation sources said.

The U.S. Treasury has issued licences allowing the export of some European Airbus jets to Iran and is expected to start approving sales of Boeing jets within days, the sources said.

A spokesman for Airbus confirmed it had received a U.S. licence covering a total of 17 aircraft slated for early delivery. Although based in Europe, Airbus needs U.S. approval because of the high number of U.S. parts in its jets.
Guinness Nigeria gets $95 mln Diageo loan due to currency shortage

LAGOS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Guinness Nigeria said on Wednesday that is parent Diageo had given it a $95 million term loan to support its dollar needs through foreign currency shortages caused by the West African country's floating of the naira.

Chief finance officer Ronald Plumridge said the company's currency needs were much bigger than it can source locally and from exports and so Diageo had stepped in with the loan.
Gunmen abduct American teacher in Yemen - colleagues

DUBAI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Gunmen abducted an American teacher on Tuesday from an English language school in Sanaa, capital of wartorn Yemen, witnesses said, in the latest of a series of kidnappings of foreigners.

Armed men in civilian clothes entered the school and forced the teacher into their car as bewildered colleagues and students looked on.

"We were shocked when the armed group entered the building. They got to his office and took him to an unknown location," a Yemeni teacher at the school said.

Local security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"We are aware of reports of U.S. citizens being held in Yemen. Privacy considerations prevent us from commenting further on this case," a U.S. State Department spokeswoman told Reuters.

Dozens of foreigners were abducted in the years before a civil war erupted in March 2015 when the armed Houthi movement, drawn from Yemen's Zaydi Shi'ite sect, seized Sanaa.

Most were released when their tribal abductors won concessions from central authorities in local disputes, but some have been executed by militants.

A Tunisian employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross was kidnapped in December and appeared in a video pleading for her life last month as a masked gunman stood over her.

The Houthi takeover prompted many countries to close their embassies and aid agencies to sharply reduce their staff, reducing the number of foreigners - and kidnappings - in Yemen.

But over the course of the 18-month-old war several Americans have been detained on espionage charges by the Iranian-allied Houthis, who accuse the United States of arming and supporting a Saudi-led coalition which has intervened in the conflict on the side of the exiled government.
Nigerian army says battling to push Boko Haram out of northeast town

LAGOS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Nigeria's army said it had launched an offensive to push Boko Haram militants out of a remote northeast town near the border with Niger, as it fought to end a seven-year insurgency destabilising the region.

The military said it had killed several militants in Mallam Fatori near Lake Chad but Boko Haram had called in reinforcements. "The operation is continuing," said army spokesman Sani Usman.

There was no immediate comment from Boko Haram, which does not speak to the media and only releases video statements.

But Islamic State, to whom Boko Haram pledged loyalty last year, said militants had attacked an army convoy in the area on Monday and killed 40 troops, in a statement on its affiliated news agency Amaq, picked up by SITE which monitors jihadist announcements.

There was no independent verification of either the army or the Islamic State account.

Boko Haram controlled a swathe of land in northeast Nigeria around the size of Belgium at the start of last year, but has been pushed out of most of that territory by the Nigerian army, aided by troops from neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

The militants have nevertheless continued to carry out suicide bombings in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries, in their struggle to set up an Islamist state.

The Boko Haram insurgency has killed thousands and displaced more than 2 million people in Nigeria.
Discipline cases in Canada spy agency hit peak in 2015 -govt data

By Ethan Lou

TORONTO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The number of disciplinary cases in Canada's main spy agency nearly quadrupled over six years to reach 26 in fiscal 2015, before dropping to 13 the following year, government data showed.

Just fewer than half of the incidents in the year ended on March 31, 2015, appeared to involve security issues, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service data that Reuters obtained under access-to-information laws.

The data showed just seven disciplinary cases in fiscal 2009.

Canada's ruling Liberals ran on an election platform last year to increase oversight of the country's spy agencies and have said they plan to set up a parliamentary committee to do this.

Reuters obtained summaries of the 63 CSIS disciplinary cases in the last three of the government's fiscal years. The files were redacted to the extent that some details were unclear or unavailable.

For fiscal 2015, at least 12 cases clearly involved security matters.

For the three years as a whole, there were 20. They include removing classified material from premises, bringing home "protected and secret" documents and sending classified information through "unsecure email."

Another 20 cases involved human-resources issues, such as taking too many breaks, misuse of agency vehicles and taking too many unauthorized sick leaves.

The remaining case summaries were withheld or had nearly all of the information removed.

The CSIS invoked laws that allow withholding of information if releasing it would be "injurious" to international affairs, national defense or prevention of "hostile activities."

A CSIS spokeswoman declined to provide more details on the cases, citing "national security and privacy," and said only that the agency had "strict policies" and "strict disciplinary measures."

"I can assure you that these breaches of policy did not have an operational impact," she said.

The CSIS did not address follow-up questions on the matter.

Penalties in the incidents included oral reprimands for losing a laptop and "accidentally" removing classified material. In a more serious case, an employee was suspended for 20 days in a matter labeled only "misuse of computer systems - breach of security."
Afghanistan says to sign peace deal with warlord Hekmatyar

KABUL, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Afghan authorities will sign a peace accord on Thursday with Hezb-e-Islami of Afghanistan, a party led by one of the country's most prominent Islamist warlords, the government's media office said.

The long-expected deal with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran of almost 40 years of fighting in Afghanistan, follows months of negotiations aimed at bringing his group, which has long been allied with the Taliban and al Qaeda, into the political fold.

The accord, which officials say was largely concluded at the weekend after a preliminary deal in May, will be formally signed at a ceremony at the office of the High Peace Council at 1100 a.m (0630 GMT), the government media office said.

Hekmatyar has been accused of serious human rights abuses, notably during the 1990s civil war, when his forces were blamed for heavy bombardments of Kabul that killed thousands, but he has played little direct part in the insurgency in recent years.

However, after the repeated failure to start peace talks with the Taliban, the accord offers some hope that the Kabul government can persuade other militant groups to leave the battlefield and join a peaceful political process.

The United States had welcomed signs of an agreement with Hezb-e-Islami and earlier this year, after the preliminary accord was signed, the State Department said it hoped a final agreement would help to end violence in Afghanistan.

According to Afghan media, the agreement will grant Hekmatyar amnesty for past offences and the release of certain Hezb-i-Islami prisoners. The Kabul government also agreed to press for the lifting of international sanctions on Hekmatyar.

But many, particularly among the supporters of President Ashraf Ghani's reluctant partner in government, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, have had deep reservations about concluding an agreement with a Pashtun warlord of such prominence.

Abdullah's mainly Tajik supporters have been alarmed by the prospect of a powerful Pashtun bloc upsetting the uneasy equilibrium that has held since the disputed 2014 election was resolved with the creation of a national unity government.

Many activists have also been sharply critical of concluding an agreement with a leader who is accused of serious human rights abuses.

Allied at various times with the anti-Soviet mujahideen, Pakistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban, Hekmatyar was included on the U.S. State Department's Specially Designated Global Terrorist list in 2003.

He is believed to command several hundred fighters linked to several attacks on international and Afghan government forces.
Petrobras mulls lowering Brazil fuel prices in 2016 -O Globo

SAO PAULO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - State-controlled Brazilian oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA is considering lowering wholesale gasoline and diesel prices by year-end, which would be the first time since September 2015, O Globo newspaper said on Wednesday.

Citing sources close to management, the paper said the company may cut prices of fuels at its refineries to match those of international competitors.

In a news conference on Tuesday, Chief Executive Officer Pedro Parente said the company would not need government approval for a price adjustment, a change from the policy under impeached President Dilma Rousseff.

"The main difference is that if we want to alter the price today, we change it," Parente said. "We evaluate market conditions. We don't have to ask anything of anyone. We can take actions that attend to the interests of the company."

Petrobras derives nearly a third of its revenue from domestic fuel sales. The lowering of gasoline prices would squeeze the margins of Brazil's ethanol sector, which competes directly with the petroleum-based fuel at the pump.

Large companies such as Raizen, Biosev and Sao Martinho have been optimizing sugar production because the sweetener offers returns superior to ethanol. A drop in gasoline prices will make sugar even more attractive to mills.
Greece rejects asylum requests by three Turkish soldiers

By Renee Maltezou

ATHENS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Greece has rejected asylum requests from three of a group of eight Turkish soldiers who fled there after the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July, police sources said on Wednesday.

Turkey has formally sought the men's extradition, calling them "traitors" and "terrorist elements". The soldiers deny involvement in the attempt by elements of the Turkish military to topple President Tayyip Erdogan.

The eight Turkish soldiers flew a Black Hawk helicopter to northern Greece on July 16 and asked for asylum. But they were arrested and received two-month suspended jail terms on charges of illegal entry into Greece.

A police official said three of the soldiers failed to furnish Greek authorities with sufficient evidence to counter accusations that they were involved in the coup.

"They could not refute the evidence submitted by Turkish authorities on their participation in the events of July 15," the source said, referring to the date of the coup attempt.

The three would appeal against the asylum rulings, defence lawyer Stavroula Tomara said. It was not immediately clear when rulings for the other five soldiers might be delivered.

"We are under the impression that the ruling was predetermined. I have observed illegalities and irregularities ... I have stressed this to the authorities in writing but they have not shown any interest," Tomara said.

The eight Turks have said that their lives would be in danger if they were forcibly repatriated. They said they had no role in the coup and that they had fled Turkey when their helicopter came under fire.

The soldiers have been kept in protective custody pending the outcome of their asylum applications. Three of the eight are majors, three are captains and two are sergeant-majors.
Ethnic street signs raise old tensions over identity in Lithuania

By Andrius Sytas

VILNIUS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The Lithuanian language sign in Vilnius's former Jewish quarter reads "Jewish Street" and below hangs a Hebrew version, with Star of David. Not far away, in Cyrillic letters, is the plaque announcing Russia Street, and then there is Warsaw Street.

A rash of new foreign language signs has appeared in Vilnius's narrow thoroughfares honouring ethnic minorities that have inhabited the city, not least a Jewish community destroyed by Nazi occupiers. But government is determined to banish them in a dispute mirroring tension over the Baltic state's identity.

Lithuania's battle for independence from Moscow, culminating in a failed Soviet Army bid to crush secessionists in 1991, raised questions of ethnic and cultural identity suppressed over decades of Soviet rule.

"All these plaques are to celebrate our diversity," Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Simasius told Reuters as he unveiled a street sign in Hebrew and Yiddish.

But some still view neighbouring Russia and Poland with suspicion. Both occupied parts of what is today Lithuania in the 20th century. Before the war Vilnius - Wilno to give it its Polish name, Vilna in the days of Russian imperial rule - was a part of northeast Poland.

The government representative in Vilnius region Vilda Vaiciuniene said the plaques violated a law requiring all official names to be in Lithuanian, and must be removed.

"It looks like we will have to go to court over this," Vaiciuniene told Reuters.

Lithuania has long experienced tensions with its vocal and politically-united Polish minority, which makes up around 7 percent of its population. Ethnic Poles protested in 2014 when they were told to remove street signs in their language because of the same law.

Nearly all of Vilnius's ethnic Poles were forced to move to Poland after the end of World War Two. The city's Jewish population was wiped out. In a country whose borders and populations as well as street and town names have changed so often, history and language are a potent force.

SHADOW OF UKRAINE

Ethnic Poles' grievances have a sympathetic ear in Warsaw, muddying Lithuania's relationship with its crucial partner in energy and security.

"It is strange that the government sees this as something important. It's as if the government has nothing better to do. It's shameful", said Michal Mackevic, leader of the Lithuanian Polish Union.

Lithuanians have been slow to recognize their role in helping Nazi Germans exterminate Lithuanian Jews in World War Two, even after the Lithuanian president apologised in Israel's Knesset in 1995. This has been slowly changing, however, with thousands of ethnic Lithuanians flocking to a commemoration of the Holocaust for the first time in late August.

"To see here the street name in Hebrew language, Yiddish language is very moving," said Amir Moimon, Israel's ambassador to Lithuania. "This used to be a small ghetto, where 11 thousand Jews were packed .. And were all murdered."

There are fewer tensions over ethnic Russians, mostly Soviet-period immigrants who make up about 6 percent of the population. But the spat over foreign language signs may feed into wider Baltic issues over language and culture in the face of an assertive Moscow.

In fellow Baltic countries Latvia and Estonia suspicions over their much larger ethnic Russian communities have grown since Russia annexed Ukrainian Crimea. Some fear Moscow could foment ethnic unrest in the Baltic states.

"It (the move to take down foreign language street signs) is done partly because of solidarity with Latvia and Estonia," said Kestutis Girnius, associate professor at Institute of International Relations and Political Science in Vilnius.
Pirates attack and loot container ship off Guinea coast

CONAKRY, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Pirates stormed a container ship off the coast of Guinea on Wednesday, making off with money and some of its cargo but leaving the crew unharmed, the government said.

They fired guns and briefly held the crew hostage while they were looting the ship named Wendok, Guinea government spokesman Albert Camara said by telephone.

He did not have details of the flag Wendok was flying under, the company running it, what its cargo was nor the nationalities of the crew.

He said that Guinea's navy had been alerted but that the pirates had escaped before it could catch them.

Two security sources confirmed the incident, but likewise did not have further details.
Rift Valley Fever outbreak kills 21 in western Niger

By Kieran Guilbert

DAKAR, Sept 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Health workers in western Niger are racing to contain an outbreak of Rift Valley fever that has killed at least 21 people over the past month, an aid agency said on Wednesday.

The highly contagious disease, which is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes or close contact with contaminated animals, has infected 52 people in Niger's western region of Tahoua since late August, the country's health ministry said.

The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA) and Niger's health authorities have opened an emergency treatment centre, in the region's hardest-hit district of Tchintabaraden, to look after the infected and stop the disease from spreading.

"Unfortunately, the 52 severe cases officially registered at present only represent the tip of the iceberg," ALIMA's medical coordinator Oumarou Maidadji said in a statement.

With no specific treatment or effective human vaccine, Rift Valley fever can cause blindness and severe haemorrhaging, leading the victim to vomit blood or even bleed to death.

Herders and farmers are deemed at higher risk of infection from the disease, which can devastate livestock.

Niger's health ministry said people in the Tahoua region, especially pastoralists, should avoid handling meat from infected animals, boil raw milk before consumption, and ensure that the corpses of dead animals are buried carefully.

ALIMA is also working with local partners and doctors to provide a mobile clinic which travels the region to inform the public about the disease and how to prevent it from spreading.
UAE says Algiers oil talks aimed at consultation, not decision-making

FUJAIRAH, UAE, Sept 21 (Reuters) - An oil meeting next week in Algiers due to be attended by OPEC countries is aimed at holding consultations rather than making decisions, the energy minister of the United Arab Emirates said on Wednesday.

"Wait until we meet next week," Suhail bin Mohammed al-Mazroui told reporters. "Wait for us to discuss first before we jump to any conclusion."

"We are not ... targeting a decision, we are meeting for consultations," he said, adding: "We at the UAE are encouraged and we support the joint approach between Saudi Arabia and Russia."

Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will meet on the sidelines of the International Energy Forum, which groups producers and consumers, from Sept. 26-28. Non-OPEC producer Russia is also attending the forum.

Saudi Arabia, the leading oil producer inside OPEC, and Russia, the biggest producer outside the group, agreed in early September to cooperate on global oil markets, saying they would not act immediately but could limit output in the future.

"We should not drive expectations in a certain direction prior to the meeting ... We need to be cautious not to do something that is a quick solution," Mazroui said.

Algerian Energy Minister Noureddine Bouterfa said on Tuesday that OPEC members could decide to hold an extraordinary meeting to discuss oil prices immediately after their gathering in Algiers.

OPEC and non-member producers including Russia are discussing a deal to stabilise the oil market by at least freezing output, although key details such as the timing and baseline for any deal have yet to emerge.
Turkey village guard killed in militant clash, aerial operation underway -sources

ANKARA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - A Turkish village guard was killed on Wednesday in clashes with Kurdish militants in the southeastern town of Siirt, security sources said, adding that an ariel operation was underway against the insurgents.

The fighting broke out in a rural district of the town in the mainly Kurdish southeast, the sources said. Village guards are residents armed and paid by the state to protect their communities. They are frequent targets for fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
As Obama's term wanes, so does focus on Israeli-Palestinian issue

By Arshad Mohammed and John Irish

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - In his first major United Nations speech eight years ago, President Barack Obama said he would not give up on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

In likely his last U.N. speech, on Tuesday, he spoke little about the conflict beyond voicing the unsurprising sentiment that matters would improve if Israel let go of Palestinian land and if the Palestinians rejected incitement and embraced Israel's legitimacy.

While U.S. officials have said Obama could lay out the rough outlines of a deal - "parameters" in diplomatic parlance - after the Nov. 8 presidential election and before he departs on Jan. 20, many Middle East analysts doubt this will have much effect.

The result, they say, is likely to be a legacy of failure on an issue Obama made a priority when he came into office in 2009 and declared in his first U.N. General Assembly address: "I will not waver in my pursuit of peace."

Obama has little to show for his two efforts - one spearheaded by George Mitchell in his first term and another by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in his second.

"He has not made an impact on this issue, at all, and he wants to," said Elliott Abrams, a Middle East adviser to former President George W. Bush, a Republican. "So I think the question that he is asking is really a legacy question, rather than asking a pragmatic question of what will really help the parties."

Obama will raise concerns about Israeli settlements when he meets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Wednesday, the White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said.

Rhodes said Obama had no plans to pursue a new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative before leaving office, though he could take unspecified steps.

AFTER NOV. 8

A U.S. official who tracks the issue said he does not expect the White House to decide whether Obama might make a speech on the issue or seek to pass a new U.N. Security Council resolution, until after Americans elect his successor.

"They are waiting to see what they can get the boss to do after the election pressure is over," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They have been toying with the idea for months."

The U.S. presidential election pits Democrat Hillary Clinton, Obama's former secretary of state and his choice for the top job, against Republican businessman Donald Trump. Several analysts believe Obama will consult Clinton if she wins.

The acid political climate between Israelis and Palestinians makes progress unlikely. Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have no plans to meet this week at the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders.

"We don't expect much from Abu Mazen," Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon told reporters on Monday, referring to the Palestinian leader by his nickname.

Palestinians say Israeli settlement expansion in occupied territory is dimming any prospect for the viable state they seek, with a capital in Arab East Jerusalem.

Israel has demanded tighter security measures from the Palestinians and a crackdown on militants responsible for a string of stabbings and shootings against Israelis in recent months. It also says Jerusalem is Israel's indivisible capital.

With U.S. efforts to broker a deal on a Palestinian state on Israel-occupied land in deep freeze for two years, France has tried to revive interest in the issue, with one senior French diplomat arguing that letting matters drift even during a U.S. election year is like "waiting for a powder keg to explode."

'IN YOUR DREAMS'

In his eighth speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Obama gave little time to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

"Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land," Obama said in his lone direct reference to the conflict during the 48-minute speech.

The lack of progress has frustrated Arab and Western officials, some of whom were not shy about voicing their dismay.

"On this issue, you hear everything and nothing from the Americans. One says Obama is ready to do something, another says 'no way'; one says a resolution is the way forward, another says 'in your dreams,'" said a senior Western diplomat.

Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington said Obama tends to act as a "mandarin" who offers rational solutions rather than as a politician who moves public opinion.

As a result, merely sketching out the contours of a deal would do little to change the political realities on the ground.
EIB to loan Ethiopia $200 mln for migrants jobs scheme

By Aaron Maasho

ADDIS ABABA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The European Investment Bank is set to lend Ethiopia $200 million to build two industry parks that will employ 30,000 refugees in a move aimed at curbing migration to Europe, the bank said on Wednesday.

The Horn of Africa country hosts more than 743,000 refugees and asylum seekers from neighbouring countries, many of whom use its camps as way stations on a longer journey to Europe.

The bank said the 30,000 refugees will be among 100,000 people who will be employed altogether in a scheme that will cost $500 million. The World Bank, Britain, and other EU nations will provide the rest of the financing.

"We know that Ethiopia is for many a stopping point before making the dangerous onward journey to final destinations in Europe," said Werner Hoyer, the EIB's president.

"Initiatives and projects like this provide people with a choice to stay closer to home and an opportunity for economic growth as well," he added in a statement.

Over 161,000 Eritrean refugees currently reside in Ethiopia, the majority of whom say they fled the prospect of unlimited service in the Eritrean military.

More than 33,000 Eritreans sought asylum in Europe last year, the European Union says.

Eritrea accounts for five percent of the refugees and migrants to have reached European shores so far this year, according to data obtained from the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.
Indian cabinet approves purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets

By Nigam Prusty

NEW DELHI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - India's cabinet cleared the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from Dassault Aviation on Wednesday, paving the way for signing a deal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is betting on to modernise the air force, a government source told Reuters.

The acquisition is part of a $150-billion military overhaul India has launched, drawing global arms makers into one of the world's most promising markets.

Under the deal, India will get 36 Rafale jets ready to go straight into service. India's fighter aircraft fleet, comprising Russian, British and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force's requirement of 45 to counter a "two-front collusive threat" from Pakistan and China.

The two countries will sign the final deal on Friday, the source, who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media, said.

French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is arriving New Delhi on Thursday, the source said, to sign the deal with his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar. French President Francois Hollande's office confirmed that Le Drian would visit India at the end of the week.

India, the world's biggest arms importer, had intended to buy 126 Rafale planes before several years worth of talks with Dassault broke down and Modi and Hollande stepped in last year to agree on the smaller purchase.

The value of the deal, which had been repeatedly held up as the two sides haggled over financial terms, was not immediately available.

Indian defence ministry officials have earlier said the value of the deal could be $8.5 billion to $9 billion.
England's Anderson could be rested in Bangladesh, India test series

Sept 21 (Reuters) - England fast bowler James Anderson may sit out some of the test matches on their tours of Bangladesh and India, he said on Wednesday.

The 34-year-old, England's leading test wicket-taker with 463 victims, was named in the squad for the tour to Bangladesh where they play two tests next month.

England travel to India in early November for a five-test series.

"It's a tough one because as a player if you're fit you want to play, simple as that, no matter what the format you're desperate to play," Anderson told reporters.

"But there may well come a time when it will get managed. At 34 I probably have to manage myself, be managed, quite well. You want, if possible, to play every test but India is going to be five back to back and that's a huge ask for any bowler," he added.
Mexico's America Movil eyes acquisition of Brazil rival Oi -Valor

SAO PAULO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - America Movil SAB is interested in acquiring some or all of the operations run by struggling Brazilian rival Oi SA, the chief executive of the Mexican telecom giant said in a newspaper interview published on Wednesday.

Brazilian paper Valor Economico reported that Daniel Hajj, CEO of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's telecom empire, said he was eyeing an acquisition of Oi operations whether or not the company is split up in the midst of an in-court restructuring.

"We are open to looking at anything," Hajj said in the Valor report. "I am very interested in participating in the (market)consolidation in Brazil, but I don't know how it will happen."

Oi's preferred shares rose 8 percent in early trading, while America Movil advanced 1 percent.

Hajj's remarks renewed speculation about merger activity in Brazil's telecommunications market, where four major rivals have struggled to maintain profits in a deep recession while keeping up costly investments in new broadband technology.

Telecom Italia SpA engaged Oi in merger talks early this year, but new management in Italy has shown less interest in dealmaking. America Movil and Spain's Telefonica SA never ruled out a deal with Oi, but their scale in Brazil mean tough antitrust hurdles for an outright takeover.

A spokeswoman for America Movil confirmed Hajj's comments, adding that "when we know what is up for sale and what are the conditions, we will evaluate the case." Oi declined to comment.

Any dealmaking is expected to hinge on cooperation from the government, Oi's second-biggest creditor, which is reviewing onerous fixed-line concessions and keeping a close eye on licensing and antitrust issues that are key to consolidation.

"We believe Oi is too large for any of the existing players to acquire it entirely, due to market concentration," Credit Suisse analysts told clients in a note, adding that a piecemeal sale of Oi operations was better for America Movil than a wholesale takeover.

The analysts highlighted potential asset sales that Oi outlined in its court recovery plan, including data centers, fiber networks and mobile operations, but added that no deals are likely until Oi concludes its six-month in-court reorganization and Congress passes a new telecom law expected in the first half of next year.

Oi filed in June for protection from creditors in a 65.4 billion reais ($20 billion) bankruptcy case, the country's biggest-ever.
Spanish politicians mull reform to avoid Christmas Day election

MADRID, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The ruling People's Party (PP) said on Wednesday it would try to prevent Spain's next election from falling on Christmas Day, as talks to form a government and avoid the third vote in a year flounder.

The rise of new political players in the wake of a long recession has split voters and resulted in two consecutive hung parliaments after general elections on Dec. 20 and June 26.

Parties are trying to minimise the fallout from any third ballot among exasperated voters, as they blame each other for the impasse and look to change the date.

Spain's electoral calendar dictates that the next election would fall on Dec. 25 if parties fail by Oct. 31 to form an administration.

"If the Socialist party forces us into a third election, the PP is going to work to make sure it does not fall on Dec. 25," PP spokesman Rafael Hernando told a news conference.

He said the conservative PP would present a motion in parliament to change the electoral law to allow parties to trim campaigns to one week rather than two, meaning the ballot would be on Dec. 18. The motion would need approval from other forces, though most have signalled they would be in favour.

Parties on the right and left have until now vetoed each others' proposals to form a government.

PP leader and caretaker Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy lost a parliamentary confidence vote in early September on a second term in office after opposition from the centre-left Socialists, triggering the countdown to a third election.

Negotiations between all sides on a coalition have stalled as parties wait for the results of regional elections in the Basque Country and Galicia on Sept. 25.

Voter frustration is rising and polls show abstention could reach record highs in another election.
Cuba's Communist Party paper publishes U.S. election info notice

HAVANA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Cuba's Communist Party newspaper Granma published on Wednesday a U.S. embassy notice advising Americans living on the island on how to register for the Nov. 8 presidential election, another sign of thawing relations between the former Cold War foes.

Granma habitually publishes electoral information for other countries, but this is the first time it has done so for the United States, a U.S. embassy official confirmed.

Cuba and the United States re-established diplomatic relations in July last year after decades of hostility following the 1959 revolution in which Fidel Castro's rebels overthrew a U.S.-backed government.

"Information for the U.S. citizens resident in Cuba," the headline of the electoral notice read, framed in a red box. It went on to explain how Americans should register to vote, either online or at the embassy.

The Granma newspaper is named after the yacht that carried Castro and 81 other rebels including left-wing icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara to Cuba in 1956, launching the revolution. State radio stations also read out the electoral notice on Wednesday.

The U.S. presidential election campaign pits Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton against Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Clinton has signaled she would continue President Barack Obama's policy of re-engagement with Cuba, urging Congress to end its trade embargo against the island.
GRAINS-Soy, corn futures ease on profit taking, harvest pressure

By Mark Weinraub

CHICAGO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - U.S. soybean and corn futures fell on Thursday, pressured by profit taking after a streak of gains and by weakness on the cash market, traders said.

Wheat futures rose slightly, with short-covering supporting prices despite a glut of global supplies.

Soybeans notched the biggest decline, shedding 1.5 percent after a four-session rally pushed prices to their highest in nearly a month.

Traders said farmers in parts of the Midwest were aggressive sellers of recently harvested soybeans, causing commercial operators to hedge cash market deals with sales in the futures market. Cash market bids for corn also were weaker as many growers began to harvest.

Weather forecasts for the weeks ahead "still do not look ideal for an extended harvest window, but central and eastern belt farmers should at least be able to make good headway in the coming days, starting to bring in these record 2016 U.S. crops," Matt Zeller, director of market information at INTL FCStone, said in a note to clients.

At 11:06 a.m. CDT (1606 GMT), Chicago Board of Trade November soybean futures were down 15-3/4 cents at $9.74 a bushel and CBOT December corn was off 1-1/4 cents at $3.39-1/4 a bushel.

"There is some selling pressure today in soybeans and corn following their rises in past days, said Graydon Chong, senior commodities analyst with Rabobank. "But markets remain relatively rangebound, with corn especially reaching the upper parts of its range so it is not unusual to see a move down at such a point in markets."

CBOT December soft red winter wheat was up 3/4 cent at $4.06-3/4 a bushel.

In the wheat market, the focus turned to Indian demand.

Indian importers have purchased around 76,000 tonnes of Ukrainian-origin wheat in the past couple of weeks as India steps up purchases after two years of poor output.
Indonesia launches new campaign to end female genital mutilation - minister

By Beh Lih Yi

JAKARTA, Sept 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Indonesia is embarking on a renewed campaign to end female genital mutilation (FGM), according to its women's minister Yohana Yembise, despite opposition from religious leaders who have stymied past efforts to combat a practice that is common.

Home to the world's largest Muslim population, Indonesia tried to ban FGM a decade ago but opposition from influential Islamic clerics has meant it is still widely practised.

Almost half of Indonesian girls aged 11 and under have undergone some form of FGM, the United Nations' children agency, UNICEF, said in February, citing government statistics from Indonesia for the first time in a global study of FGM.

Together, Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia account for half of the estimated 200 million women and girls around the world who have been cut, according to UNICEF.

Yembise, Minister for Women's Empowerment and Child Protection, said the government has begun working with women's and religious groups to raise awareness of the dangers of FGM and a survey was underway to provide "scientific evidence" to support the government's goal to halt the practice.

"We try to approach the traditional and religious leaders to understand and to be aware that we have to end this female genital mutilation," Yembise told foreign journalists.

FGM, which involves the partial or total removal of a girl's external genitalia, is practised across a swathe of African countries and in pockets of Asia and the Middle East.

FGM can cause a host of health problems. In some cases girls may bleed to death or die from infections. Others may suffer fatal childbirth complications later in life.

Rights groups in Indonesia have long called for a ban on FGM, while supporters of the practice argue that in Indonesia a less drastic form of cutting is usually carried out.

The UNICEF study showed that three in four Indonesian girls underwent FGM when they were under six months old, and the procedure was usually carried out by midwives.

After the government tried to ban FGM in 2006, the country's top Muslim clerical body issued an edict arguing that the practice was a required part of religious tradition.

Grata Endah Werdaningtyas, a senior foreign ministry official, said the new campaign would target families.

"We have to target the concerned groups like the parents because they are the one who decide (on children's circumcision) - not the doctors, not the religious leaders," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

But widespread superstition remains a hindrance, she said.
Gabon warns opposition against violence ahead of court ruling

By Edward McAllister

LIBREVILLE, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Government officials in Gabon warned opposition leader Jean Ping on Wednesday that he risked arrest if renewed unrest erupts when the Constitutional Court rules on his challenge to last month's presidential election result.

The government said six people died in riots that erupted this month when results from the Aug. 27 poll handed victory to incumbent President Ali Bongo by less than 6,000 votes, extending his family's half-century grip on power.

Ping said as many as 100 people were killed in the violence and filed a request for a recount, alleging fraud in one of Bongo's strongholds.

"Mr. Ping said clearly that if the constitutional court did not declare him winner that there will be disorder. If he crosses the line, he will be arrested," government spokesman Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze told a news conference.

The Constitutional Court has until Friday to decide on his complaint, but the authorities are already stepping up security in the capital Libreville, the epicentre of the violence.

Soldiers and police were visible on the city's streets on Wednesday, taking up positions at major crossroads.

"Today we hear of more calls for disorder by certain compatriots. We know who they are. We know where they are. We are not going to let them agitate," Interior Minister Pacome Moubelet Boubeya said at the same news conference.

Ping's petition alleges irregularities in Haut-Ogooue province where Bongo won 95 percent on turnout of 99.9 percent.

A European Union observer mission also noted anomalies in the province's results. Former colonial ruler France recommended a recount and the African Union pledged to send observers to monitor the work of the Constitutional Court.

Bongo's allies submitted evidence to the court rejecting Ping's allegations and countering that the opposition leader - a former chairman of the African Union commission - had himself organised fraud.

Ping is a lifelong insider to Gabonese politics. He was a close ally of Omar Bongo and has two children with the late president's daughter, Pascaline.

During more than four decades in power, Omar Bongo cultivated close relations with a succession of French presidents. However, Ali Bongo's ties to Paris have been more tenuous.
Kenya calls for more funding to return Somali refugees from Dadaab

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI, Sept 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Kenya has called at the United Nations General Assembly for more funding for its plan to repatriate more than 300,000 Somali refugees living in a vast camp on its border, citing world leaders' commitment to burden-sharing.

In May, Kenya announced its plans to close the world's largest refugee camp, Dadaab, saying it had been infiltrated by terrorist cells. Since then, many refugees have left the camp, with officials saying their departures are voluntary.

However, rights organisations have alleged that Kenya has harassed Somali refugees to return home when it is not safe to do so.

"Kenya has hosted among the largest number of refugees in the world in the last three decades and the burden our country has continued to endure remains disproportionate to support received," Kenya's foreign minister Amina Mohamed said in a statement.

"We hoped that the burden we have been shouldering in hosting huge numbers of refugees would be lifted through a coordinated strategy for the orderly and humane return and resettlement of refugees from the camps in Kenya."

In May, Kenya was hosting around 600,000 refugees and asylum-seekers, including almost 350,000 in Dadaab.

Speaking on the sidelines of the U.N. meeting, Mohamed said the repatriation of refugees was being carried out humanely and in line with international obligations.

She said refugees (in Kenya) "have been living in crowded, insecure and squalid conditions that are simply unacceptable".

"The closure of Dadaab camp, which has been in existence for over 25 years, will therefore not only end a life of decades in exile, but also enable the refugees to regain their human dignity," Mohamed said.

Her statements reflect Kenya's determination to press ahead with closing the camp despite an outcry from rights groups who say Somalia is not safe enough for their return.

The government says Somali Islamist group al Shabaab has used Dadaab as a recruiting ground. Kenya has been hit by a string of attacks by al Shabaab, including on a shopping mall in Nairobi and a university in the northeast.

The heads of the world's 20 largest economies said in November that all states need to share the global refugee burden through humanitarian aid, refugee resettlement and the pursuit of political solutions.

Following Kenya's announcement that it intends to close Dadaab, the U.N. called on donors to increase food aid to refugees returning to Somalia and to support job creation and the repair of schools and clinics.

It has yet to raise the funds it seeks.

"The international community should join hands in meeting the needs of refugees, especially the provision of basic necessities and utilities, as well as health and educational facilities," Mohamed said.

In August, some refugees who had left Dadaab were stranded near the Somali border after authorities in Jubaland refused to receive them, saying they could not provide enough assistance, local media reported.

Hunger is worsening in Somalia due to poor rains, with five million people now short of food, the U.N. said on Tuesday.
Ukraine, separatists agree troop withdrawals in three hot spots

By Andrei Makhovsky

MINSK, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists agreed on Wednesday to withdraw troops from three small towns on the front line in eastern Ukraine, a pilot de-escalation project that is part of the latest push to get a much-violated ceasefire to stick.

Under the terms of the agreement, armed forces from both sides are banned from entering the three areas, which are four square kilometres each in size. The withdrawal must start within a month and be completed within three days.

The move follows a new truce on Sept. 15 that spurred hopes for the peace process, although it failed to stem all the violence in the region. The conflict has killed over 9,600 soldiers, civilians and pro-Russian rebels since April 2014.

The plan was first announced during a visit by German and French foreign ministers to Kiev last week.

The withdrawal will be observed along three sections of the 480 km front line, in the small towns of Stanytsia Luhanska and Zolote in the Luhansk region and Petrovske in the Donetsk region, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed the agreement but said more work was needed.

"We have had to learn that neither pronouncements of good will nor commitments about the withdrawal of weapons were sufficient to achieve a lasting ceasefire," he told the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "Additional areas (for withdrawals of troops) must be agreed soon to ensure the disengagement of forces along the entire line of confrontation."

Most of the terms of the original Minsk deal, including restoring control of Ukraine's eastern borders to Kiev and holding regional elections, have yet to be implemented.

"There are no guarantees even now," Steinmeier said. "If the parties to the conflict are unwilling to stick to already signed agreements, there will be no progress."

While limited in geographic scope, the latest agreement is the first time the sides have committed to withdraw light arms. High-calibre weapons are already meant to have been withdrawn to secure holding areas, although the OSCE regularly reports violations on both sides.

Separatist officials welcomed the deal, the separatist news website DAN reported.
Climate deal comes one step closer to effect at United Nations

By Michelle Nichols and Valerie Volcovici

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - An agreement to fight global warming came one step closer to taking effect on Wednesday when dozens of countries deposited their ratification of the deal at the United Nations, taking the total to 60, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.

The deal, agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris last December, needs ratification by at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions to take effect. Ban said the 60 countries represented more than 47.5 percent.

The United Nations said 14 countries, representing 12.58 percent of emissions, have committed to joining the agreement in 2016, which would allow the threshold of 55 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions to be reached.

"What once seemed impossible is now inevitable. I'm confident that by the time I leave office the Paris agreement will have entered into force," Ban, whose second five-year term ends on Dec. 31, told an event on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly.

The binding global deal would slash greenhouse gases, keeping global temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists warn that countries are likely to cross that threshold if they don't take more drastic actions.

The Paris agreement received a boost earlier this month after U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping submitted their plan to join the agreement. The world's two biggest emitters account for around 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The European Union, whose members have not yet ratified the Paris Agreement, is aiming to formally join the pact by the end of the year, said EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete.

This will require approval from each of the 29 member states, which collectively rank behind China and the United States as the third biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

"Yes, it will be complex. But yes we will get it done," the commissioner said.

Each country will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions according to their own national strategies.

Paula Caballero, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, said the fact that the agreement would likely enter into force this year "took everyone by surprise."

"This rapid pace reflects a spirit of cooperation rarely seen on a global scale," Caballero said in a statement.

With ratification on the horizon, the representative for small island states that face the most direct threat from climate change, said he would redouble efforts to bring the number over the line.
Syria will not become another Libya or Iraq, says Syria U.N. envoy

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The Syrian government is ready to resume peace talks without preconditions and the country "will not become another Libya or Iraq," Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar al-Ja'afari told the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday.

"My country is ready to resume intra-Syrian dialogue with no preconditions and according to decisions and foundations that launched this very dialogue, in order to reach a political solution that is decided by the Syrians," Ja'afari said.
France's Ayrault sets out Syria ceasefire monitoring mechanism

By John Irish

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault distributed a document on Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council outlining a new mechanism to monitor a U.S.-Russia brokered truce in Syria that it wants major powers to discuss later this week.

"France's belief is that only a collective mobilization will make it possible to achieve the goals (of this ceasefire). This truce is dead ... so everything must be done to make it live again," Ayrault told reporters after a United Nations Security Council briefing on Syria.

"I have proposed a new monitoring mechanism and distributed it to all members of the Security Council ... for discussion."

The ceasefire, which took effect last week, has so far followed the path of all previous peace efforts: abandoned by the warring parties even as diplomats far away debated it.

The mechanism would aim to restore confidence to guarantee the truce, according to the document seen by Reuters.

It would see an existing monitoring task force that has lacked teeth replaced by a panel of experts of countries in the International Syrian Contact Group (ISSG) that includes the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Britain and France.

The panel, which would be rubber-stamped by the Security Council, would gather all material on violations of the truce from national intelligence agencies and civil society.

"In order to guarantee the independence of the panel, the presidency of the panel of experts would be confided to a representative of the United Nations General Secretariat," the document said.

Under the sole responsibility of the president, a weekly report would be prepared for the ISSG on truce violations and a bi-monthly report for the Security Council.

The mechanism could also be used to monitor humanitarian access to civilian populations.
Kazakh wealth fund says 34 firms sold in privatisation drive

By Claire Milhench

LONDON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's $65 billion sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna has sold 34 small and mid-sized companies by public auction as part of its privatisation drive, a managing director of the fund said on Wednesday.

Baljeet Grewal declined to say who had bought the companies, or how much has been raised in the first phase of an ambitious five-year plan which will culminate in public offerings of stakes in some of the country's biggest companies.

The oil-rich Central Asian nation was hit hard by the collapse in world oil prices from a high of $115 in June 2014 to a trough of $27 in January 2016.

To raise money it plans to sell off hundreds of companies held by Samruk-Kazyna in whole or in part, ranging from the very small to behemoths such as energy producer KazMunayGaz (KMG) and flagship carrier Air Astana.

To date, Grewal said the fund had sold 34 of the 172 smaller "non-core" companies that have been earmarked for sale via public auction, including helicopter company Euro-Asia Air, which has been sold to a European company.

"The majority of these investors largely come from Central Asia, China and Europe," she told Reuters but said she could not disclose any buyers' names.

She added that so far no company had failed to sell, but Samruk-Kazyna is prepared to liquidate or merge any companies left on the shelf.

Seven large companies have been slated for public listings from 2018-2020. As well as KMG and Air Astana, these include railway giant Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, uranium miner Kazatomprom and postal service KazPost.

Grewal said Air Astana would be among the first to be listed, with the state retaining a minority stake. In other cases, she expected a maximum of a 25 percent stake in a company to be sold.

The KMG stake could list towards the latter part of 2018, to coincide with an expected recovery in the oil price, she said. She expects to see prices back up to around $55-$60 a barrel by then, from the current $47 a barrel, as the oil glut erodes.

Minority shareholders of KazMunaiGas Exploration and Production (KMG EP), KMG's upstream subsidiary, in August rejected KMG's proposal to give the parent company more control over its subsidiary and the option to sell their shares to KMG. KMG has a 58 percent stake in KMG EP.

Grewal, who was in London to speak at an investment conference, denied the process was a failed exercise and said the intention was to give minority shareholders the option to exit, given the slump in oil prices.

The privatisation process of the seven large assets could extend beyond 2020, she said, adding: "It depends on the consideration for the asset and the market itself."

Stakes in another 37 core companies are expected to be sold to strategic investors - either best-in-class industry participants or financial investors.
Brazil's Temer promises investors political and legal stability

NEW YORK, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Brazilian President Michel Temer on Wednesday promised political and legal stability for investors to put their capital in a country weathering the impeachment of his predecessor and the worst recession in generations.
Abandoning discretion, Iranians proclaim their role in Syrian war

By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Babak Dehghanpisheh

DUBAI/BEIRUT, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Abandoning a long-standing reticence, Iranians are increasingly candid about their involvement in Syria's war, and informal recruiters are now openly calling for volunteers to defend the Islamic Republic and fellow Shi'ites against Sunni militants.

With public opinion swinging behind the cause, numbers of would-be fighters have soared far beyond what Tehran is prepared to deploy in Syria, according to former fighters who spoke to Reuters, and commanders quoted by Iranian media.

Iran has been sending fighters to Syria since the early stages of the five-year war to support its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in the struggle against Sunni rebels backed by Gulf Arab states and Western powers.

Once Tehran described these forces as military "advisers" but with around 400 killed on the battlefield, this discretion has slipped and several thousand are now believed to be fighting Islamic State and other groups trying to topple Assad.

Many Iranians initially opposed involvement in the war, harbouring little sympathy for Assad. But now they are warming to the mission, believing that Islamic State is a threat to the existence of their country best fought outside Iran's borders.

"The first line for the security of Iran is Syria and Iraq," a would-be volunteer named Mojtaba told Reuters by email from Tehran. Mojtaba, who asked that he be identified by only his first name, said he had been trying in vain to get out to fight in Syria for the past two years.

While Islamic State still holds large areas of Syria and Iraq, it has so far failed to stage attacks in neighbouring Iran like it has in Turkey.

Nevertheless, Iranian media have reported the breaking up of cells linked to the jihadist group at home, and the large numbers of people such as Mojtaba willing to join the battle in Syria suggest Tehran has the stamina to pursue its involvement there for years if it wishes.

"DEFENDERS OF THE SHRINE"

Iran alludes to its fighters in Syria as "defenders of the shrine", a reference to the Sayeda Zeinab mosque near Damascus, which is where a granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammad is said to be buried, as well as other shrines revered by Shi'ites.

It is casting its recruitment net wide. As well as Iranians, it has gathered Shi'ites from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to battle the Syrian opposition in what has become a sectarian conflict.

Brigadier General Mohsen Kazemeini, the Revolutionary Guard Corps commander for greater Tehran, said last month there were so many volunteers that "only a small number of them are sent to (Syria)", according to the Defa Press site.

Fighters killed in Syria are praised as heroes on state television and given lavish funerals. Iranian wrestler Saeed Abdevali dedicated the bronze medal he won at the Rio Olympics to the families of "defenders of the shrine" who have been killed.

Some volunteers, disappointed at the long waiting list, take a shortcut. They fly directly to Damascus and volunteer at the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, according to postings on Modafeon, a web site dedicated to news and pictures of the "defenders".

The potent message of protecting the shrines has drawn in Shi'ite Afghans, some of whom live in Iran and others in Afghanistan. These Afghans fighting in Syria under the supervision of the Revolutionary Guards are known as the Fatemiyoun.

SACRED BELIEFS

A 26-year old Afghan student living in Mashad in northeast Iran described how he was sent with other Fatemiyoun to fight in Damascus and Aleppo for about 45 days after limited training.

"My motivation is the same as the Iranians," the student, who asked not to be identified because of security concerns, said. "We are both fighting in Syria, so it shows our cause is far beyond geographic borders. We are fighting to defend our sacred beliefs and Shi'ite ideology."

Asked if he thought Iranian society had grown more welcoming to those who fight in Syria, he said "One hundred percent. When I was deployed, people were saying that they were doubtful if our fight would change anything. But now they respect the fighters more, as they are more familiar with the threats the rebels in Syria and Iraq can cause to Iran."

He said that pay, or the promise of gaining Iranian citizenship upon their return from the battlefield, are also incentives for some Afghans to volunteer. The Afghan fighters get about $450 a month, according to a Fatemiyoun commander interviewed by the Tasnim news site.

Senior officials regularly discuss the role of the Revolutionary Guards and Iranian special forces in Syria in terms of confronting the existential threat that mostly Shi'ite Iran faces from Sunni militant groups such as Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said this appealed more to public opinion than support for Assad.

"Fighting Shi'ite-hating bloodthirsty ISIS jihadists is easier to sell to Iranians than wasting billions on a ruthless dictator who gasses his population," he said.

A video regularly featured on Iranian state television shows a group of children wearing fatigues and combat boots singing about a religious duty to fight in Syria.

"The red lines around the shrine are made of my blood," they sing. Children under 18 may go to Syria to serve in non-combat support roles as long as they are accompanied by a guardian, according to postings on the Modafeon web site.

LESSON FROM EUROPE

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has described the wars in Syria and Iraq, where Iranian-backed authorities are also fighting Sunni militants, as crucial to the survival of the Islamic Republic. If Iranians had not gone and died fighting there, "the enemy would enter the country", he said,

This perception has won over many doubters. Sasan Sabermotlagh, a 34-year-old decorator in Tehran, said he was initially "100 percent" against the war, but he and many others he knows had changed their mind.

Despite Iran's often fraught relations with the West, Sabermotlagh cited attacks staged by Islamic State in Europe in recent months. "Now that people completely know (Islamic State) and after the incidents in France, Germany and elsewhere, you can say that 90 percent of the people who criticised the 'defenders of the shrine' don't anymore," he said.

Sabermotlagh even considered joining the fight. "When I see the videos and the pictures it has a big effect on me," he said. "I think if (Islamic State) or a similar group find their way to Iran then we will suffer similar things."
Thirteen detained in Turkey cemetery assassination plot -security sources

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Turkish authorities detained 13 people including municipal officials on Wednesday on suspicion of trying to assassinate a senior politician by planting explosives at a cemetery where his relatives are buried, security sources said.

Police found 640 kilograms (1,411 pounds) of explosives at a cemetery plot for relatives of Mehdi Eker, deputy chairman of the ruling AK Party and a former agriculture minister, in the largely Kurdish southeastern province of Diyarbakir, they said.

The security sources said the explosives were detected a day before Eker was due to make an annual visit to the cemetery ahead of last week's Eid al-Adha holiday.

Some of the 13 people detained were municipal officials in Diyarbakir province, they added, giving no further details.

The city of Diyarbakir is the largest in the southeast. The region has been scorched by waves of violence since a ceasefire between the Turkish state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fell apart last year.

The government has removed two dozen elected mayors in the southeast this month over suspected links to militants. The pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), the third largest in Turkey's parliament, has decried the move as an "administrative coup".

Security sources also said a Turkish village guard was killed on Wednesday in clashes with Kurdish militants in the southeastern town of Siirt, and that an aerial operation was under way against the insurgents.

The fighting broke out in a rural district of the town, they said. Village guards are residents armed and paid by the state to protect their communities. They are frequent targets of PKK militants.
Egypt cancels zero ergot wheat policy amid mounting pressure

By Eric Knecht

CAIRO, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Egypt has reversed its controversial zero-tolerance policy on the common grains fungus ergot, the government said on Wednesday, backtracking on an import regulation that had all but blocked its access to global wheat.

Egypt, the world's largest buyer of wheat, has seen its imports grind to a halt since it imposed a ban on ergot last month, with three successive state tenders cancelled on the back of mass boycotts by suppliers who say the condition is impossible to guarantee.

Ergot can cause hallucinations when consumed in large amounts but is considered harmless in low quantities.

The government said it was reinstating a 0.05 percent tolerance level for ergot, a common international standard it had used before the ban, and was applying it to both outstanding and future wheat contracts.

The decision to apply last month's ban retroactively to outstanding contracts had led to the suspension of 540,000 tonnes of wheat en route to Egypt after being suspected of ergot contamination, the government said.

A flurry of cargoes held up and rejected at ports after last month's ban infuriated traders, who argued their contracts, made under the old 0.05 percent rule, should be honoured.

Russia, a top supplier of wheat to Egypt, banned Egyptian fruit and vegetable imports shortly after one of its cargoes was rejected before setting sail from Novorossiysk. An Egyptian delegation is expected to arrive in Russia next week to discuss the impasse.

TRADERS SKEPTICAL

Egypt runs a massive food subsidy programme that provides bread for tens of millions of its poorest citizens and which may have come under threat had it not eased its import restriction.

After announcing the policy reversal the government said it had enough wheat to sustain the country for four months. It said it would compensate for the recent slowdown in wheat inflows by "operating all ports."

"Egypt had no real choice but to cancel the zero ergot policy if they want to feed their people with large scale wheat imports. It has been said so many times during this affair that no country anywhere in the world can provide wheat with zero ergot in bulk volumes," one European trader said.

Still, some traders expressed scepticism at what they saw as just the latest flip-flop in a months'-long saga that has seen decrees overturned and contradictory policy announcements from different ministries.

"There needs to be new legislation. This is not enough for any supplier to participate," one Cairo-based trader said.

Wednesday's reversal restores 2010 standards that permit 0.05 percent ergot tolerance but makes no mention of agriculture quarantine legislation that still allows for zero tolerance, the trader added - a contradiction that in the past allowed rejections to continue.

As part of the rule reversal, the government said it will contract an international firm to conduct ergot inspections on wheat shipments and discontinue the practice of sending foreign delegations led by officials from three of its ministries.
Tunisia says UK firm Petrofac shutting down local operation due to protests

By Tarek Amara

TUNIS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - British oil and gas industry services company Petrofac has told Tunisia it has started to shut down its local operations after months of protests disrupted its gas production, the government said on Wednesday.

"Petrofac has officially informed us that they have started the process of closing down," Iyed Dahmeni, the government's spokesman told reporters.

"We will do everything we can to convince them to stay if the young men who are protesting accept the agreements we are proposing."

Prime Minister Youssef Chahed held an emergency meeting with ministers earlier in the day in a bid to end the crisis caused by protests from job seekers and persuade the British company to stay.

Losing Petrofac, whose operations supply around 13 percent of Tunisia's domestic gas needs, would be another financial blow to the country just as Chahed's government promises to take the decisions needed to create jobs, push through economic reforms and bolster growth that were hit by Islamist militant attacks last year.

A source with Petrofac and a government official earlier told Reuters the company had sent a letter officially informing the government of its decision. Petrofac representatives did not immediately reply with a comment after they were asked for a response.

Tunisia has been praised for its political progress to democracy since the 2011 uprising over corruption and official abuses ousted its long-standing leader Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. But economic progress has not followed, and many young Tunisians are frustrated about the lack of jobs.

Since January, protests by groups of young men have disrupted gas production at the site of the Chergui gas field on the island of Kerkennah in the south, where Petrofac holds a 45 percent share with the rest held by a state-run company.

Government officials say that importing gas from Algeria to make up for the shortfall caused by disruption to Petrofac's production has cost the government about $100 million (76.4 million) so far this year.

Violent protests erupted in January and the army intervened to protect the gas operations. But since then several attempts to negotiate with local residents seeking jobs have fallen apart and sit-ins have continued.
Former Gulf emirate official held over alleged fraud - lawyers

DUBAI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - A former senior official of a key development body in the Gulf emirate of Ras Al Khaimah has been arrested in Saudi Arabia over an alleged $1.5 billion fraud, his lawyers said on Wednesday.

Khater Massaad was detained at Jeddah airport, in the west of the kingdom, on Tuesday under an arrest warrant issued by the government of Ras Al Khaimah (RAK), according to a statement from Massaad's legal team.

The arrest was confirmed by a statement from the RAK government, which said it would seek his return to the United Arab Emirates to stand trial.

The move follows what the RAK government described in early August as a breakdown in talks with Massaad in relation to "global embezzlement and mismanagement of $1.5 billion" during his tenure as chief executive of the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (RAKIA).

Massaad has continually insisted that the charges brought by the RAK government are unfounded, and that an October 2015 trial at which he was convicted in absentia by an RAK court of corruption and fraud had numerous flaws.

"Massaad is confident that proper judicial review will result in his release, and he will ultimately bring to justice the perpetrators of the judicial fraud conducted against him in RAK," said a statement from his legal team on his arrest.

The RAK government said in its statement on Wednesday that the arrest warrant "included additional allegations of substantial fraud and diversion of public monies in relation to an alleged multi-million dollar fraud regarding his activities when he was CEO of RAKIA in relation to RAKIA's sale of Poti Sea Port in Georgia".

RAKIA is a state body aimed at attracting investment to the emirate of 300,000 people, one of the poorer parts of the UAE.
Gabon warns opposition against violence ahead of court ruling

By Edward McAllister

LIBREVILLE, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Government officials in Gabon warned opposition leader Jean Ping on Wednesday that he risked arrest if unrest resumes when the Constitutional Court rules on his challenge to last month's presidential election outcome.

The central African government said six people died in riots that erupted this month when results from the Aug. 27 vote handed victory to incumbent President Ali Bongo by less than 6,000 votes, extending his family's half-century grip on power.

Ping, a former African Union commission chief, said as many as 100 people were killed in the violence and he filed a request for a recount, alleging fraud in one of Bongo's strongholds.

"Mr. Ping said clearly that if the constitutional court did not declare him winner that there will be disorder. If he crosses the line, he will be arrested," government spokesman Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze told a news conference.

The Constitutional Court has until Friday to decide on Ping's complaint but authorities are already stepping up security in the capital Libreville, epicentre of the violence.

Soldiers and police were visible on city streets on Wednesday, taking up positions at major crossroads.

"Today we hear of more calls for disorder by certain compatriots. We know who they are. We know where they are. We are not going to let them agitate," Interior Minister Pacome Moubelet Boubeya said at the same news conference.

The petition alleges irregularities in Haut-Ogooue province, where Bongo won 95 percent on a turnout of 99.9 percent. A European Union observer mission also noted anomalies in the province's results.

Ping's spokesman, Jean Gaspard, told reporters on Wednesday that results in his campaign's possession indeed showed that Bongo had won the province, but by a smaller margin of 89.17 percent with turnout of 81.67 percent.

Gaspard said that on a national level, those figures made Ping the poll's winner with 51.17 percent of the vote, ahead of 46.71 percent for Bongo. "In principal, these are the results that must be proclaimed by the Constitutional Court."

Bongo's allies submitted evidence to the court rejecting Ping's allegations and countering that the opposition leader had himself orchestrated vote fraud.

Ping is a lifelong insider to Gabonese politics. He was a close ally of Omar Bongo and has two children with the late president's daughter, Pascaline.
Obama welcomes Colombia peace deal as an historic achievement

NEW YORK, Sept 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama welcomed on Wednesday a peace deal between Colombia's government and leftist FARC rebels to end Latin America's longest war, describing it as an "historic achievement."
Ghana could be Africa's number four oil producer by 2020 -report

ACCRA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Ghana could become the fourth biggest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa by 2020 once two new offshore fields come on stream, to push total output above 240,000 barrels per day (bpd), pan-African bank Ecobank said on Wednesday.

The West African country produces around 103,000 bpd ranking it ninth, far behind leaders Nigeria and Angola, which produce an average of 1.867 million bpd and 1.754 million bpd respectively, said the Ecobank research report.

Ghana's Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN) field came on stream in August and is expected to increase output to a peak of around 80,000 bpd.

The Jubilee field, which started producing oil in 2010 and is operated by British oil company Tullow, could bounce back to production of around 115,000 bpd once it solves technical problems with its production vessel.

At the same time, the Sankofa field operated by Italian company ENI is due to open in August 2017 and should produce around 30,000 bpd, while U.S. independent Kosmos Energy plans to connect the Mahogany-Teak-Akasa (MTA) field to the Jubilee oil production ship.

"Based on existing fields and field development plans Ghana crude oil output is estimated to be over 240,000 bpd by 2019. This could potentially make Ghana the fourth largest oil producer in Sub Saharan Africa by 2020," the report said.

Production costs for Ghana's oil projects, which are all in deep water, mean that the crude remains viable if global prices fall to $40 per barrel, allowing it to remain attractive to investors in the event of price fluctuations, it said.
U.S. Senate clears way for $1.15 bln arms sale to Saudi Arabia

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate cleared the way for a $1.15 billion sale of tanks and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, defending a frequent partner in the Middle East recently subject to harsh criticism in Congress.

The Senate voted 71 to 27 to kill legislation that would have stopped the sale.

The overwhelming vote stopped an effort led by Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy to block the deal over concerns including Saudi Arabia's role in the 18-month-long war in Yemen and worries that it might fuel an ongoing regional arms race.

The Pentagon announced on Aug. 9 that the State Department had approved the potential sale of more than 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored recovery vehicles and other equipment to Saudi Arabia.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said General Dynamics Corp would be the principal contractor for the sale.

Paul, Murphy and other opponents of the arms deal were sharply critical of the Riyadh government during debate before the vote, citing Yemen, the kingdom's human rights record and its international support for a conservative form of Islam.

"If you're serious about stopping the flow of extremist recruiting across this globe, then you have to be serious that the ... brand of Islam that is spread by Saudi Arabia all over the world, is part of the problem," Murphy said.

The criticism came days before lawmakers are expected to back another measure seen as anti-Saudi, a bill that would allow lawsuits against the country's government by relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Barack Obama has promised to veto that bill, but congressional leaders say there is a strong chance that lawmakers will override the veto and let the measure become law. Overriding a presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate.

In Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition is battling Iranian-allied Houthis, the Houthis have accused the United States of arming and supporting the Saudis, who intervened on the side of Yemen's exiled government.

The war has killed over 10,000 people and displaced more than 3 million.

But backers of the deal said Saudi Arabia is an important U.S. ally in a war-torn region, deserving of U.S. support.
Nigeria owed $12.7 bln in undeclared oil exports - court document

By Chijioke Ohuocha

LAGOS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Nigeria has said it is owed a total of $12.7 billion by more than a dozen companies for allegedly not declaring exports of crude oil to the United States between 2011 and 2014, according to court documents seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

The documents are part of a lawsuit the Nigerian government filed on June 7 against one of the companies - Nigerian AGIP Oil Company, a subsidiary of Italy's ENI and it was not immediately clear from the documents exactly how many of the companies Nigeria is suing. Reached late Wednesday, Garba Shehu, a government spokesman, declined to comment.

The suit alleges that companies exported a total of 57 million barrels oil crude oil to the United States over the period and did not declare all of this to Nigerian government as required by law, according to the documents.

ENI had said on Tuesday the claim against it amounted to $160 million, that there were "no grounds" to the claim and that it would contest it in court. ENI was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.
Saudi-led coalition air strike kills at least 6 in Yemen - residents

SANAA, Sept 21 (Reuters) - At least 6 civilians were killed on Wednesday when a Saudi-led coalition air strike hit a house in western Yemen, residents and medics said.

Fighter jets of an Arab alliance launched missiles on Wednesday at a presidential palace in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah occupied by leaders of the Iran-allied Houthi militia, a resident told Reuters.

A raid hit a house adjacent to the palace killing six civilians and wounding 12 according to a medic who said rescue workers were searching for victims among the rubble.

It was not immediately clear if any Houthi leaders had been killed or injured in the attack.

"The scene was awful. Body parts were mixed up with the remains of the house and blood filled the place," said a resident who declined to have his name published out of fear for his safety.

The Saudi-led coalition was formed early last year to fight the Houthis after they took over the capital Sanaa, made gains in other provinces and forced Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's government to flee into exile.

U.N.-sponsored talks to try to end the fighting that has killed more than 10,000 people collapsed in failure last month and the Houthi movement and allied forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh resumed shelling into neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Wednesday's attacks were the latest in a series of strikes that have hit schools, hospitals, markets and private homes.

A coalition spokesperson was not immediately available to comment. Saudi officials say aircraft of the Arab alliance only target military facilities in Yemen.
Japan's Abe says North Korea threat demands "entirely distinct" response

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The threat posed by North Korea after its multiple missile and nuclear tests this year is "substantially more serious" than it was in the past and demands an "entirely distinct" response, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Wednesday.

In an address to the annual United Nations General Assembly, Abe said the world needed to thwart North Korea's plans and it was time for the U.N. Security Council to "indicate an unmistakable attitude to this threat."

Abe said that this year alone, North Korea had launched a total of 21 ballistic missiles and had conducted two nuclear tests, the most recent on Sept. 9.

"The threat has now reached a dimension altogether different from what has transpired until now," Abe said, adding that it was "substantially more serious than before."

"We must therefore respond to this in a manner entirely distinct from our responses thus far. We must concentrate our strengths and thwart North Korea's plans," Abe said, adding that Japan would "lead" Security Council discussions on the issue.

U.N. diplomats say discussions are under way on a possible new U.N. sanctions resolution on North Korea after its latest nuclear test. Analysts and diplomats say much depends on the attitude of China.

China is the main ally of neighboring North Korea, but has been angered by its repeated missile and nuclear tests and backed tough U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang in March. At the same time, it has repeatedly called for a return to international talks to resolve the issue, in spite of the skepticism of other world powers.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told the General Assembly on Wednesday that countries must remain committed to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, while seeking a solution to the North Korean nuclear issue through dialogue.

The United States said Li and U.S. President Barack Obama agreed in New York on Monday to step up cooperation in the U.N. Security Council and in law enforcement channels

China and the United States are also targeting the finances of Liaoning Hongxiang Industrial, a Chinese conglomerate headed by a Communist Party cadre that the Obama administration thinks has a role in assisting North Korea's nuclear program, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Forget isolation. Israel's diplomatic ties have never been better.

By Josh Cohen

Sept 21 (Reuters) - (Editor's note: Paragraph four contains language that may be offensive to some readers.) Barack Obama is meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly Wednesday, at a time when the U.S. president is considering whether to initiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal before he leaves office.

If Obama does so, it will be over Netanyahu's objections - and could trigger a very public disagreement between the two leaders during Obama's final months in office.

This would not be the first Obama-Netanyahu spat, though. American officials were furious when they saw a recent video of Netanyahu describing opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "ethnic cleansing" of Jews. The State Department called it "inappropriate and unhelpful;" White House officials were reportedly livid.

On various other occasions, meanwhile, senior administration officials have described Netanyahu as "recalcitrant," "myopic,""reactionary," "obtuse," "blustering," "pompous," "Aspergery" and "chickenshit." Netanyahu reportedly dislikes Obama, while Israel's Defense Ministry has compared the Iran nuclear deal to Britain's 1938 Munich appeasement agreement with Nazi Germany.

Given American-Israeli tension, some fret Israel risks diplomatic isolation - something even Netanyahu recently felt compelled to deny. In reality, though, Israel's diplomatic gains have never been greater. Here's why.

First and foremost, despite the Obama-Netanyahu friction, Israel's partnership with its powerful American patron remains robust. Washington just agreed to provide Israel with a record-sized $38 billion military aid package. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton emphasize their strong support for Israel. The country also retains overwhelming support in Congress and - according to the latest Gallup poll - among the American public as well.

Even beyond its relationship with Washington, Israel is successfully developing close ties with an unprecedented number of countries - including many old enemies.

Consider Egypt. Although Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David accords almost 40 years ago, it has been a "cold peace" at best, and as late as 2011 Israel was forced to evacuate over 80 diplomats after protesters stormed its embassy in Cairo.

But since Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's ascension to power in 2014, Israeli-Egyptian cooperation has reached new heights. Egypt's Foreign Minister recently visited Israel, and a Netanyahu-Sisi summit may soon be possible.

Common national security and economic interests drive this newfound cooperation. Both sides see Gaza-based Islamist group Hamas as a common foe, and during Israel's 2014 military campaign against Hamas Sisi reportedly took an even harder line on a possible Israeli-Hamas ceasefire than Netanyahu himself.

The two countries also share intelligence on Hamas and Islamic State's Sinai affiliate. Egypt even allows Israel to conduct drone strikes against militants on Egyptian territory, according to a former senior Israeli official.

Mutual security interests also drive an Israeli-Saudi detente, particularly a shared fear of Shi'ite Iran. In the run-up to the Iran nuclear deal - which both Israel and Saudi Arabia opposed - Riyadh reportedly offered the Israeli government the use of its airspace to attack Iran as well as assistance with air-to-air refueling for Israeli jets. These contacts came to light when it was revealed that representatives from the two countries had held five secret meetings in 2015 to discuss managing the threat from Tehran.

Relations have continued this year. In May two former senior Israeli and Saudi officials - including Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief - shared the stage at a Washington think tank to discuss their mutual fear of Iran. In July a retired Saudi general led a delegation of Saudi academics and businessmen on a trip to Israel for discussions with senior Israeli officials.

While no diplomatic relationship between the two countries exists - Saudi Arabia insists an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement be signed before it recognizes Israel - it's extremely unlikely these types of extensive contacts could occur without approval from the highest levels in Riyadh.

A new Israel-Greece-Cyprus alliance has also emerged. The Greek and Israeli militaries hold extensive air and naval exercises together, and in 2015 Greece allowed the Israeli air force to conduct exercises over Crete.

Earlier this year, meanwhile, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Netanyahu held talks in Israel, followed by a three-way summit between Netanyahu, Tsipras and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades that concluded with the creation of a de-facto geopolitical bloc between the three states.

Security and economic interests drive this Israeli-Greek-Cypriot bloc. Greece and Cyprus are both historically antagonistic toward Turkey, while Israeli-Turkish relations deteriorated after the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, when the Israeli navy stormed a Turkish ship trying to deliver aid to Gaza. The two countries agreed to normalize ties in June, but continue to disagree over Gaza. This makes Israeli-Greek-Cypriot defense cooperation a natural hedge against an increasingly unpredictable Ankara.

Israel's offshore natural gas bonanza provides another reason for its alliance with Greece and Cyprus. Since Israel possesses far more gas than it needs for its own economy, Netanyahu, Tsipras and Anastasiades also discussed the possibility of building a pipeline from Israeli gas fields through Cyprus and Greece to supply Europe - something that would further cement this new three-way alliance.

Israel is also significantly expanding trade and diplomatic ties with India, the world's largest democracy. Israel sold approximately $10 billion worth of military equipment to India in the last decade, making India the largest foreign buyer of Israeli military gear, while Israel is India's second largest arms supplier after Russia.

On the diplomatic front, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee made an official state visit to Israel in 2015 - the first ever by an Indian head of state - while India's foreign minister visited in January. Given India's long history of supporting the Palestinian cause and denouncing Israel, India's willingness to bring its relationship with Israel out from "under the carpet" represents another significant success for Israeli diplomacy.

Israel has overcome a similarly fraught history with China. For many years post-revolutionary China supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization with both diplomatic and military aid, and Beijing did not officially recognize Israel's right to exist until 1992. But business interests drive an increasingly warm relationship. Chinese-Israeli trade has exploded and the two sides are also discussing a free trade agreement.

Israel accrues significant advantages from its growing Chinese ties. As part of its "Silk Road" initiative, China recently began building a new port in the Israeli town of Ashdod on the Mediterranean, while also agreeing to fund a so-called "Red-Med" high-speed railway line to connect Israel's Red Sea town of Eilat to Ashdod.

Chinese venture capital firms also invested $500 million in Israeli startups in 2015, and by 2020 may hold as much as $10 billion of investments in the Israeli technology industry. Netanyahu visited China in 2013, while Chinese vice premiers traveled to Israel in 2014 and again earlier this year. In May the two countries signed a 10-year multiple entry visa agreement - making Israel only the third country granted this arrangement by Beijing.
Kerry demands Russia, Syria ground warplanes to save truce

By Michelle Nichols and Tom Perry

UNITED NATIONS/BEIRUT, Sept 21 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry demanded on Wednesday that Russia and the Syrian government immediately halt flights over Syrian battle zones, in what he called a last chance to salvage a collapsing ceasefire and find a way "out of the carnage".

An impassioned Kerry faced off with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the U.N. Security Council in New York, during a tense televised showdown, saying the bombing of an aid convoy in Syria raised "profound doubt whether Russia and the Assad regime can or will live up to" ceasefire obligations.

Speaking before Kerry, Lavrov told the 15-member Security Council: "One needs to refrain from emotional instincts, from rushing to the microphone immediately to comment on something; a probe should be conducted (into the aid convoy attack)."

Listening to Lavrov made him feel like he was living in a "parallel universe", Kerry said.

"To restore credibility to the process we must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," Kerry said.

The key areas are places where humanitarian aid needs to be delivered and where Syrian government forces have been accused of targeting civilians.

The aim of the ceasefire deal between the United States and Russia, which took effect on Sept. 12, is to facilitate aid access to besieged areas and allow the pair to jointly target Islamic State jihadists.

More than 300,000 people have been killed and half of Syria's 22 million people have been uprooted since a crackdown by President Bashar al-Assad on pro-democracy protesters in 2011 sparked a civil war. Islamic State militants used the chaos to seize territory.

AID DELIVERIES MAY RESUME

The United Nations suspended aid deliveries after the convoy attack two days ago, which the Syrian Red Crescent says killed some 20 people, but the world body said on Wednesday it was gearing up to resume deliveries.

On the ground, rebels battled the forces of the Assad government on major frontlines near Aleppo and Hama, and air strikes reportedly killed a dozen people including four medical workers.

"I emphasise this to Russia. The United States continues to believe there is a way forward that, although rocky and difficult and uncertain, can provide the most viable path out of the carnage," Kerry said.

U.S. officials believe Russian aircraft are responsible for the attack near Aleppo, but Moscow has denied involvement and the Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday a U.S. Predator drone was in the area when the convoy was attacked.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault distributed a document on Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council outlining a new mechanism for monitoring the truce that it wants major powers to discuss later this week.

The ceasefire is probably the last hope for a settlement on Syria before President Barack Obama leaves office in January, and has been Kerry's main focus for months. But it has become a repeat of previous peace efforts: abandoned by the warring parties even as diplomats far away debate it.

"I call on every country to cease providing support of any kind to any party that is trying to sabotage this plan," Kerry said.

The Syrian army is backed by Moscow, Iran, Shi'ite militias and fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah, while the rebels are supported by countries including the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani dismissed Kerry's demand on Wednesday, telling NBC News that such a move would only benefit Islamic State and jihadists Nusra Front.

Kerry said it was a moment of truth for the opposition, which he said must do more to distance itself from the Nusra Front, long al Qaeda's Syrian wing but which changed its name and disavowed al Qaeda two months ago.

Nusra is still characterised by both the West and Moscow as a terrorist group excluded from the ceasefire. Other rebels say Moscow and Damascus use this to justify broader attacks.

Tensions between the United States and Russia escalated over a Sept. 17 attack by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers in the eastern Deir al-Zor province. Washington said that strike was carried out by mistake with the intent of hitting Islamic State militants.

BOMBING ALL NIGHT

Overnight fighting was focused in areas that control access to Aleppo city, where the rebel-held east has been besieged by Russian and Iranian-backed pro-government forces and completely encircled for all but a few weeks since July.

Syrian state media said the army had recaptured a fertiliser factory in the Ramousah area to the southwest of the city. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring body, confirmed the advance and said government forces had pressed forward near an apartment complex nearby.

A rebel fighter in the Aleppo area said warplanes had been bombing all night in preparation for an attack. But "the regime's attempts to advance failed," said the rebel, speaking to Reuters from the Aleppo area via the internet.

A Syrian military source said insurgent groups were mobilising to the south and west of Aleppo and in the northern Hama area. "We will certainly target all these gatherings and mobilisations they are conducting."

The army reported carrying out air strikes on seven areas near Aleppo. The Observatory said one air strike killed four medical workers and at least nine rebel fighters in the insurgent-held town of Khan Touman south of Aleppo.

The medical staff killed were working for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), it said. UOSSM confirmed in a statement that at least four of its staff had been killed.
Ghana leader tells U.N. to dance to tune of Michael Jackson

By John Irish

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Ghana's President John Mahama told global leaders on Wednesday they should learn a thing or two from the King of Pop Michael Jackson and finally turn his song "Heal the World" into reality.

Mahama, who is to seek re-election later this year, touched on some of the more serious issues affecting his continent ranging from the plight of African migrants to growing xenophobia across the world and regional leaders clinging to power.

But having been born the same year as the deceased Jackson, in 1957, Mahama could not resist a lyrical appeal to the annual gathering of world leaders who have spent the week shuffling from one crisis to the next.

"The words of his 1991 hit song 'Heal the World' continue to echo from his grave. It is my wish that history will record our time here in this hall as one that gave reality to Michael Jackson's song, heal the world, make the world a better place for you and me, and the entire human race."

Reminding the world that the fall of the Berlin Wall had opened a new era of globalisation, trade and interaction, Mahama bemoaned that refugees trying to make a better life for themselves were being made the scapegoats.

He described the harrowing trip for young West Africans seeking a better life after taking the "trek of death" across the deserts and war zones of the continent and embarking on overloaded boats to Europe only to be held in detention centres.

"Hate speech is becoming common. People complain of being tired of being politically correct. In many places xenophobia has taken over rational thinking.

"It's a paradox of our world that nearly 30 years after (President Ronald) Reagan called for the Berlin Wall to be torn down, new walls are springing up everywhere."

Ghana is one of Africa's most stable democracies and voters have twice turfed the government of the day out of power at elections.

Mahama said it was too easy for bigger powers to proselytize democracy, but that some of the continent's older leaders could work to convince those clinging to power to step down to avoid new conflicts.
During the 1990s, and the 2008-10 uprisings in Kashmir, a constant in the discourse of the Indian polity and the media was the shikarawala. Built on the myth that tourism is the mainstay of the local economy (when, in fact, it's agriculture),the shikarawala is the symbol of normalcy. If he has no work, it means Kashmir's daily life is affected, and if he does, lo and behold, normalcy and peace have returned to Kashmir.

You see, a shikarawala symbolises Kashmir for most Indians (more so the saffron brigade). Mr Wonderful Flower Man and his colleagues are the people most tourists from India interact with - they are seen as "innocent people who want to eke out an honest living oaring through the pristine lakes".

So whenever Kashmir is on the boil, TV cameras pan on the lonely Dal and the even lonelier shikarawala. But this time, it is different. Like any other Kashmiri, the shikarawala is also sick and tired of a status quo that keeps pushing the region on the edge. Everyone is fed up with a situation that is not only unpredictable, but also unacceptable to one and all.

In the curfewed streets of Srinagar, choked for almost three months now, people gather after prayers to protest for justice and demand self-determination. As it passes down street after street, in the midst of clouds of teargas, the cry for freedom echoes in alley after alley.

In the discussions at home and among friends, the discourse turns to the simple "We want this to end" or a negotiated sigh - "at least something positive should come out". Enough blood has been shed - 86 people have been killed in the most gruesome manner. Never again.

In 2010, the bloody summer in which 128 people -most of them teenagers - were killed, the demands were similar. However, after putting Kashmir under siege for weeks, Delhi began its fire-fighting exercise by engaging interlocutors. Tensions simmered, and people hoped for a positive outcome while debates kept raging in Parliament and TV studios. But their window of hope was shut in the wake of arbitrary arrests in thousands, unabated killings, and the vitriol spewed by TV presenters. The predictable end to the interlocutors' report, like many others before, leaves little doubt.

Hence the Hurriyat refused to talk to the All Party Parliamentary Delegation. These photo-ops have hijacked the very idea of confidence-building measures. How does one build confidence when repeating the same exercise time and again? Do Kashmiris need to hear the rhetoric again? It insults the intellect and intelligence of millions of people who have been determined to seek their political rights.

For six years, Hurriyat leaders were shelved, their passports impounded and most of the time, two stalwarts Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, put under house arrest. In fact, the latter has been prevented from offering Eid prayers in Eidgah in the last six years. Geelani has been under continuous house arrest for six years now, and shutting the door on the New Delhi delegation was nothing but a political statement. Now that Mirwaiz too has been jailed, and Geelani continues to be under house arrest, is this diplomacy or tit-for-tat?

To say that the people of Kashmir are on the streets just because Hizbul commander Burhan Wani was killed is unfair. If one has to analyse the situation, it has to start post the 2010 uprising. Instead of creating the environment for a resolution, the state unleashed a crackdown on protesters resulting in many losing their lives and being jailed under the draconian Public Safety Act. Police atrocities have been unprecedented, with some Kashmiris even being sodomised and extortion becoming a routine practice.

The PDP, before it came to power, convinced the youth who were charged with stone pelting to vote for them so that their charges are dropped. To avoid further police harassment, some did vote for the PDP, but were backstabbed following the alliance with the BJP.

When Ram Madhav calls for any solution under the ambits of Indian Constitution, one needs to call his bluff. What stops the current government in New Delhi from giving Kashmir its so-called autonomy? Since India, over the years, didn't seek permission from the people of Kashmir, why does it need their approval now?

Probably because, they know, it is not about administration anymore. We can see that on the ground - the current regime is only in charge of controlling internet connectivity and the occasional chai cuppa statement. India continues to suppress Kashmir under its military boots. Azadi is not just a romantic clarion call, but a reality that a Kashmiri grows up with. Freedom is a basic value for any human being, but in Kashmir it is an unaffordable luxury.

The anger and resentment in Kashmir is not a new phenomenon, it is as old as the conflict itself. Kashmir will not "calm down" because of ironic operation names, but through bold will. Sending thousands of forces to the Valley in addition to the 7,00,000 troops will only push Kashmiris to the wall. It will embolden the resentment into seeking permanence.

To maintain status quo, thousands of crores are being spent and many Indian soldiers losing their lives. On the other hand, Kashmiris lose hundreds of young boys every year, with no justice. The wails of mothers in India and Kashmir are the same, so is the colour of their blood and the aspiration for peace.

No father in India would want to send his son to a war to die, no mother in Kashmir wants her 11-year-old to be killed in an unfathomable tragedy. The warmongers in air-conditioned TV studios must not outrage our shared humanity.

Conflicts don't end with money or by maintaining military presence, but through dialogue.

The responsibility of peace lies with the Indian state and it cannot establish it under the shadows of the gun. It is practical for India to function as a democracy and understand that Kashmiris want the end of status quo. Why must Kashmiris be deprived of a life without fear?
The rush of reaction within India to the terrorist attack, clearly plotted and executed by Pakistan, on an Army base at Uri in Kashmir, resulting in the death of 18 soldiers (many others are in hospital, being treated for serious injuries, and the death toll could inch up), is quite unlike the outrage that has followed similar cross-border crimes in the past.

This time a sense of exasperation is palpable. Irrespective of their personal political preferences, Indians across the country want to see Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take visible, punitive action against Pakistan, imposing severe material costs for its deeds.

Assurance

Modi's assurance, that "those behind this despicable attack will not go unpunished", has not served to assuage feelings or stop them from boiling over.

Some of the harshest and caustic criticism of Modi's meandering Pakistan policy and failure to inflict punishment has emanated from his staunchest supporters.

A cartoon by the popular newspaper cartoonist Manjul, who is known to weigh in after considerable rumination, shows Modi blowing smoke rings at Pakistan through the barrel of a field gun.

Others have been less charitable in lampooning Modi the Strong Man with a 56-inch chest.

Quick and smart "Googling" has resulted in a spate of social media posts that highlight the similarities between what Modi and his predecessor Manmohan Singh had to say after cross-border terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan.

Modi has promised to "punish" the perpetrators; Singh had promised to "go after" them. The findings of the annual political survey conducted by the American organisation, PEW, whose publication coincided with the attack at Uri, shows there is more to the outrage than mere passing reaction to an incident, that these are not enraged sentiments that will fail the test of time.

Modi's popularity ratings remain phenomenally sky high more than two years into his five-year term.

There is sufficient endorsement of his economic policies to persist with them with suitable midcourse corrections. At the moment, there is no challenger to the "masnad" of Delhi.

The finding that stands out in stark contrast to the others and bruises the prime minister's image, especially within his core constituency, is the extremely low support for Modi's approach in dealing with Pakistan.

Narendra Modi's birthday diplomacy. (Photo credit: Reuters)

The PEW poll was conducted long before Pakistan's latest transgression. An instant poll today would yield near zero support and possibly lower overall endorsement of Modi.

During the 2014 election campaign, Modi was scathing and unsparing in his criticism of Singh's abysmal failure to deal with Pakistan. After winning a spectacular mandate, Modi, through explicit deed if not spoken word, has controverted everything he said, and stood for, on Pakistan while seeking votes.

This by itself is not unknown of. Indian politicians tend to blow hot on Pakistan when not in power. The heat dissipates when in office.

Barring Indira Gandhi, every Indian prime minister has chased the elusive legacy of being remembered by posterity as a peacemaker.

Pakistan's military dictators and prime ministers, on the other hand, have resolutely followed the doctrine of inflicting a thousand cuts on India by waging a covert war of cross-border terrorism. The twain of good intention and ignoble evil were never destined to meet.

But what was a brilliant opening gambit, of inviting Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif along with other SAARC heads of government to his swearing-in ceremony, has turned into disastrous adventurism in a terrain known to be treacherous and hostile.

Modi should have known better, never mind pressure from Washington, DC, or the urge to go down in history as the statesman who achieved the impossible.

Exchange

It's not possible to turn the clock back. The exchange of saris and shawls, the long walk with Sharif in Kathmandu, the orchestrated "surprise" visit to Sharif's home on his birthday, the invitation to a Pakistani team, including an ISI man, to visit Pathankot after the IAF base there was attacked, the resumption of talks, all that and more now belong to the past.

Modi has to begin afresh and craft an all-new policy to deal with India's constant tormentor. If he indeed means to keep his promise, he must act craftily and ruthlessly, regardless of consequences by way of upsetting the US and China. Even if India must stand alone, he should let it be known, India will stand.

Damage

It would be stupid to expect Modi to publicly state what he plans to do. That's not how sensible leaders respond to challenges to national security.

Between war (undesirable) and inaction (unacceptable) lies a vast space for coercive action, both overt and covert, to inflict material damage and disorient Pakistan.

Giving asylum to Baloch nationalists and asserting India's rights over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan are good first steps; they send a message to Pakistan and its patrons.

Modi should also declare he won't attend the SAARC summit at Islamabad and withdraw MFN status to Pakistan. It would distress Pakistan and its funders if Modi were to downgrade diplomatic relations.

These are some of the things that can and should be done immediately. They would calm down Indians and give Modi time to figure out the big response, its elements, and their implementation. Anything less would only breed sullen, unforgiving anger.

Voters, contrary to what politicians love to believe, have a long memory.

Meanwhile, Modi would do well to go easy on tall talk of exposing and isolating Pakistan by taking India's plaint to international fora. Pakistan does not care a toss about being exposed.

Countries that matter will not isolate Pakistan. Soothing stories by establishment journalists about India's grand diplomatic success will not quite make up for the fact that insincere statements of condemnation of Pakistani terrorism by foreign governments are meaningless triumphs, poppycock victories.




Today is the feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. He is the traditional author of the first gospel. St. Matthew was born at Capernaum. He was working as a tax collector when Jesus called him to be one of the twelve apostles. He was sitting among the tax collectors, when Jesus said to him, "Follow me." "And he got up and followed him" (Matthew 9:9).Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew. His gospel, with its familiar references to the messianic prophecies, throws light on the continuity between the covenants. Moreover, his vocation is one of the most popular episodes in the life of Jesus, because of the personality of the one called the tax collector and the revelation of redeeming love that concludes and crowns the story. Matthew's position as tax collector equated with collaboration with the enemy by those from whom he collected taxes. Jesus' contemporaries were surprised to see Christ with a traitor, but Jesus explained that he had come "not to call the just, but sinners.""Mark and Luke call Matthew by his Jewish name Levi and Mark says that he was "the son of Alphaeus" (Mark 2:14). He may have been the brother of James, who is also called the "the son of Alphaeus" (Mark 3:18). The name Matthew means "gift of Yaweh" and it is possible that he was given this name when he followed Jesus.Because of his profession, Jews of strict observance would have nothing to do with him, for he fell under a religious ban. He was despised by the Pharisees who hated all publicans (tax collectors for the Romans). Therefore, his response to the call of Jesus to follow him is all the more remarkable, as he stood up at once, "leaving everything behind" (Luke 5: 28).Matthew's Gospel is given pride of place in the canon of the New Testament, and was written to convince Jewish readers that their anticipated Messiah had come in the person of Jesus. He preached among the Jews for 15 years; his audiences may have included the Jewish enclave in Ethiopia, and places in the East.In art, St. Matthew is represented by an angel holding a pen or an inkwell.Saint Matthew is the patron saint of: accountants, bankers, bookkeepers, customs officers, financial officers, guards, money managers, Salerno, Italy, security forces, security guards, stockbrokers, tax collectors, the diocese of Trier, Germany.
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Deutsche Telekom AG, together with its subsidiaries, provides integrated telecommunication services. The company operates through five segments: Germany, United States, Europe, Systems Solutions, and Group Development. It offers fixed-network services, including voice and data communication services based on fixed-network and broadband technology; and sells terminal equipment and other hardware products, as well as services to resellers. The company also provides mobile voice and data services to consumers and business customers; sells mobile devices and other hardware products; and sells mobile services to resellers and to companies that purchases and markets network services to third parties, such as mobile virtual network operators. In addition, it offers internet services; internet-based TV products and services; and information and communication technology systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions with an infrastructure of data centers and networks under the T-Systems brand, as well as call center services. The company has 242 million mobile customers and 22 million broadband customers, as well as 27 million fixed-network lines. Deutsche Telekom AG has a collaboration with VMware, Inc. on cloud-based open and intelligent virtual RAN platform to bring agility to radio access networks for existing LTE and future 5G networks; and partnership with Microsoft to deliver high-performance cloud computing experiences. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Bonn, Germany.
National Bank of Canada provides various financial products and services to retail, commercial, corporate, and institutional clients in Canada and internationally. It operates through four segments: Personal and Commercial, Wealth Management, Financial Markets, and U.S. Specialty Finance and International. The Personal and Commercial segment offers personal banking services, including transaction solutions, mortgage loans and home equity lines of credit, consumer loans, payment solutions, and savings and investment solutions; various insurance products; and commercial banking services comprise credit, and deposit and investment solutions, as well as international trade, foreign exchange transactions, payroll, cash management, insurance, electronic transactions, and complimentary services. The Wealth Management segment comprises investment solutions, trust services, banking services, lending services, and other wealth management solutions. The Financial Markets segment offers corporate banking, advisory, and capital markets services; and project financing, debt, and equity underwriting; advisory services in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, and financing. The U.S. Specialty Finance and International segment provides specialty finance products; financial products and services to individuals and businesses in Cambodia; and investment solutions, guaranteed investment certificates, mutual funds, notes, structured products, and monetization. It provides its services through a network of 384 branches and 927 banking machines. National Bank of Canada was founded in 1859 and is based in Montreal, Canada.
The Progressive Corporation, an insurance holding company, provides personal and commercial auto, personal residential and commercial property, general liability, and other specialty property-casualty insurance products and related services in the United States. It operates in three segments: Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, and Property. The Personal Lines segment writes insurance for personal autos and recreational vehicles (RV). This segment's products include personal auto insurance; and special lines products, including insurance for motorcycles, ATVs, RVs, watercrafts, snowmobiles, and related products. The Commercial Lines segment provides auto-related primary liability and physical damage insurance, and business-related general liability and property insurance for autos, vans, pick-up trucks, and dump trucks used by small businesses; tractors, trailers, and straight trucks primarily used by regional general freight and expeditor-type businesses, and long-haul operators; dump trucks, log trucks, and garbage trucks used by dirt, sand and gravel, logging, and coal-type businesses; and tow trucks and wreckers used in towing services and gas/service station businesses; as well as non-fleet and airport taxis, and black-car services. The Property segment writes residential property insurance for homeowners, other property owners, and renters, as well as offers personal umbrella insurance, and primary and excess flood insurance. The company also offers policy issuance and claims adjusting services; and acts as an agent to homeowner general liability, workers' compensation insurance, and other products. In addition, it provides reinsurance services. The company sells its products through independent insurance agencies, as well as directly on Internet through mobile devices, and over the phone. The Progressive Corporation was founded in 1937 and is headquartered in Mayfield, Ohio.
The following companies are subsidiares of Bayer Aktiengesellschaft: AB Seeds Ltd, AB Seeds Sales (2006) Ltd, AO Bayer, Adverio Pharma GmbH, AgrEvo Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, AgraQuest Inc., Alcafleu Management GmbH & Co. KG, Algeta, Artificial Muscle Inc, Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, Athenix Corp., Atlantic Breeders S. A. R. L., BUS C.V., Bayer (Proprietary) Limited, Bayer (Schweiz) AG, Bayer 04 Immobilien GmbH, Bayer 04 Leverkusen Fuball GmbH, Bayer A / S, Bayer AB, Bayer AS, Bayer Agriculture BVBA, Bayer Agriculture Limited, Bayer Algerie S. P. A., Bayer Altersversorgung GmbH, Bayer Animal Health GmbH, Bayer Austria Gesellschaft m.b.H., Bayer B.V., Bayer Beteiligungsverwaltung Goslar GmbH, Bayer Beteiligungsverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH & Co. OHG, Bayer Bitterfeld GmbH, Bayer Bulgaria EOOD, Bayer Business Services GmbH, Bayer Canadian Holdings Inc., Bayer Capital Corporation B.V., Bayer Chemicals GmbH, Bayer Consumer Care AG, Bayer Consumer Care Holdings LLC, Bayer Corporation, Bayer CropScience, Bayer CropScience (Portugal)-Produtos para a Agricultura Lda, Bayer CropScience Beteiligungsgesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Bayer CropScience Biologics GmbH, Bayer CropScience Deutschland GmbH, Bayer CropScience Holding Inc., Bayer CropScience Holding SA, Bayer CropScience Holdings Inc., Bayer CropScience Inc., Bayer CropScience LLC, Bayer CropScience LP, Bayer CropScience Limited, Bayer CropScience NV, Bayer CropScience S. L., Bayer CropScience S. r. l., Bayer CropScience Schweiz AG, Bayer CropScience Vermogensverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Bayer East Coast LLC, Bayer Essure Inc., Bayer HealthCare Animal Health Inc., Bayer HealthCare Holdings LLC, Bayer HealthCare LLC, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc., Bayer HealthCare US Funding II LLC, Bayer HealthCare US Funding LLC, Bayer Inc., Bayer International Trade Services Corporation, Bayer Medical Care Inc., Bayer New AU M1059 USD LLC, Bayer New AU M3650 LLC, Bayer New BE M3155 LLC, Bayer New CA M5015 LLC, Bayer New CH M3868 LLC, Bayer New CZ M3204 LLC, Bayer New DE M3385 LLC, Bayer New Gewas I M3640 LLC, Bayer New Gewas II M3640 LLC, Bayer New HU M3440 LLC, Bayer New MA M3130 LLC, Bayer New MX M3640 LLC, Bayer New MY M1455 LLC, Bayer New NL M3644 LLC, Bayer New Oogst M3648 LLC, Bayer New PL M3655 LLC, Bayer New RO M3695 LLC, Bayer New RU M3708 LLC, Bayer New TH M1763 LLC, Bayer New TK M3970 LLC, Bayer New UA M3702 LLC, Bayer New UK M3939 LLC, Bayer New Veggie M3617 M5157 LLC, Bayer New Veggie Mig M3617 M5157 LLC, Bayer New ZA M3743 LLC, Bayer Overseas Trade Services Corporation, Bayer Puerto Rico Inc., Bayer U.S. LLC, Bayer US Finance II LLC, Bayer US Finance LLC, Bayer US Holding LP, Bayer West Coast Corporation, Bayer World Investments B.V., Bayer d. o. o., Bayer spol. sr. o., Bayer-Handelsgesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Beeologics Admin LLC, Beeologics Holdings Limited, Beeologics LLC, Beeologics USA Inc, Berlimed S. A., Berlipharm B.V., Berlis AG, Biogenetic Technologies B.V., BlueRock Therapeutics, Care/of, Channel Bio LLC, Chemion Logistik GmbH, Collateral Therapeutics Inc., Conceptus SAS La Garenne, Cooper Land Company of New Jersey Inc., Coppertone LLC, Corn States LLC, Dihon Pharmaceutical, Dr. Scholls LLC, Dritte Bayer Real Estate VV GmbH & Co. KG, Erste Bayer Real Estate VV GmbH & Co. KG, Erste K-W-A Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, EuroServices Bayer S. L., Funfte Bayer Real Estate VV GmbH & Co., GP Grenzach Produktions GmbH, Grass Roots Biotechnology LLC, Hornbeck Seed Company Inc., Icon Genetics, Intendis GmbH, Intraserv GmbH & Co., Jenapharm GmbH & Co. KG, KVP Pharma+Veterinar Produkte GmbH, KWA Investment II LLC Research, KWA Investment III LLC, KWA Investment IV LLC, KaNDy Therapeutics, MENADIER Heilmittel GmbH, MNL Luxembourg S. a. r. l., MONSANTO Hungaria Kft., MONSANTO Saaten GmbH, Merck-Consumer Care (MCC), MiraLAX LLC, Monsanto ACUA MHC LLC, Monsanto AG Netherlands I C.V., Monsanto AG Netherlands II C.V., Monsanto AGN Holding LLC, Monsanto Ag B.V., Monsanto Agrar Deutschland GmbH, Monsanto Agricultura Espana S. L., Monsanto Agricultura Italia S.p.A., Monsanto Agriculture Nigeria Limited, Monsanto Burkina Faso SARL, Monsanto CR s. r. o., Monsanto Canada ULC, Monsanto Caribe LLC, Monsanto Company, Monsanto Crop B.V., Monsanto Crop Sciences Denmark A/S, Monsanto Crop Sciences Norway A/S, Monsanto Crop Sciences Sweden A.B., Monsanto Finance SA, Monsanto Gesellschaft m. b. H., Monsanto Gida Ve Tarim Ticaret Ltd, Monsanto Grain B.V., Monsanto Great Lakes Production Co LLC, Monsanto Hawaii Production Co LLC, Monsanto Hellas Agriculturals Ltd, Monsanto Holding I C.V., Monsanto Holding II C.V., Monsanto Holding III C.V., Monsanto Holding Ukraine Ltd, Monsanto Holland B.V., Monsanto II Lda, Monsanto Illinois Production Co LLC, Monsanto Inter-America Company, Monsanto International Sarl, Monsanto Invest B.V., Monsanto Iowa Production Co LLC, Monsanto Ireland Limited, Monsanto Jordan LLC, Monsanto Kenya Ltd, Monsanto Kool BV, Monsanto LA Holdings II Co LLC, Monsanto Latin America Holdings Co LLC, Monsanto MGCV MHC LLC, Monsanto MSCV Holding LLC, Monsanto MYCV MHC LLC, Monsanto Malawi Ltd, Monsanto Missouri Production Co LLC, Monsanto NL BV, Monsanto Northern Production Co LLC, Monsanto Oogst B.V., Monsanto Operations B.V., Monsanto Polska Sp. z o. o., Monsanto Production Supply LLC, Monsanto Romania SRL, Monsanto Rus LLC, Monsanto S.A.S., Monsanto Seed Supply LLC, Monsanto Seeds LLC, Monsanto Serbia D. O. O., Monsanto Slovakia S. R. O., Monsanto South Africa (PTY) Ltd, Monsanto Southern Production Co LLC, Monsanto Tanzania Limited, Monsanto Technology International LLC, Monsanto Technology LLC, Monsanto Treasury Services SARL, Monsanto UK Limited Cambridge U. K., Monsanto Vegetable Holding LLC, Monsanto Vegetable IP Holding C.V., Monsanto Vegetable IP Management BV, Monsanto Vegetable Seed Holding LLC, Monsanto Western Production Co LLC, Monsanto Zaad B.V., Monsanto Zambia Ltd, Monsanto d. o. o., Pallas Versicherung, Pandias Re AG, Pianosa B.V., Relay Limited, SC Bayer SRL, SCEA De Ruiter Zonen Selection, Sechste Bayer Real Estate VV GmbH & Co., Seminis Vegetable Seeds U. K. Ltd, Siebte Bayer VV GmbH, Steigerwald Arzneimittelwerk GmbH, TECTRION GmbH, TOO Bayer KAZ, The Climate Corporation International SA, TravelBoard GmbH, UAB Bayer, Vierte Bayer Real Estate VV GmbH & Co., WeatherMe OU, Zeptosens, Zoner.ag, Zweite Bayer Real Estate VV GmbH & Co., and Zweite K-W-A Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH.

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AutoZone, Inc. retails and distributes automotive replacement parts and accessories. The company offers various products for cars, sport utility vehicles, vans, and light trucks, including new and remanufactured automotive hard parts, maintenance items, accessories, and non-automotive products. Its products include A/C compressors, batteries and accessories, bearings, belts and hoses, calipers, chassis, clutches, CV axles, engines, fuel pumps, fuses, ignition and lighting products, mufflers, radiators, starters and alternators, thermostats, and water pumps, as well as tire repairs. In addition, the company offers maintenance products, such as antifreeze and windshield washer fluids; brake drums, rotors, shoes, and pads; brake and power steering fluids, and oil and fuel additives; oil and transmission fluids; oil, cabin, air, fuel, and transmission filters; oxygen sensors; paints and accessories; refrigerants and accessories; shock absorbers and struts; spark plugs and wires; and windshield wipers. Further, it provides air fresheners, cell phone accessories, drinks and snacks, floor mats and seat covers, interior and exterior accessories, mirrors, performance products, protectants and cleaners, sealants and adhesives, steering wheel covers, stereos and radios, tools, and wash and wax products, as well as towing services. Additionally, the company provides a sales program that offers commercial credit and delivery of parts and other products; sells automotive diagnostic and repair software under the ALLDATA brand through alldata.com and alldatadiy.com; and automotive hard parts, maintenance items, accessories, and non-automotive products through autozone.com. As of November 20, 2021, it operated 6,066 stores in the United States; 666 stores in Mexico; and 53 stores in Brazil. The company was founded in 1979 and is based in Memphis, Tennessee.
Cardinal Health, Inc. operates as an integrated healthcare services and products company in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and internationally. It provides customized solutions for hospitals, healthcare systems, pharmacies, ambulatory surgery centers, clinical laboratories, physician offices, and patients in the home. The company operates in two segments, Pharmaceutical and Medical. The Pharmaceutical segment distributes branded and generic pharmaceutical, specialty pharmaceutical, and over-the-counter healthcare and consumer products. The segment also provides services to pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare providers for specialty pharmaceutical products; operates nuclear pharmacies and radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facilities; repackages generic pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter healthcare products; and offers medication therapy management and patient outcomes services to hospitals, other healthcare providers, and payers, as well as provides pharmacy management services to hospitals. The Medical segment manufactures, sources, and distributes Cardinal Health branded medical, surgical, and laboratory products and devices that include exam and surgical gloves; needles, syringe, and sharps disposals; compressions; incontinences; nutritional delivery products; wound care products; single-use surgical drapes, gowns, and apparels; fluid suction and collection systems; urology products; operating room supply products; and electrode product lines. The segment also distributes a range of national brand products, including medical, surgical, and laboratory products; provides supply chain services and solutions to hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, clinical laboratories, and other healthcare providers; and assembles and sells sterile, and non-sterile procedure kits. The company was incorporated in 1979 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ohio.
Delek US Holdings, Inc. engages in the integrated downstream energy business in the United States. The company operates through three segments: Refining, Logistics, and Retail. The Refining segment processes crude oil and other feedstock for the manufacture of various grades of gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel, asphalt, and other petroleum-based products that are distributed through owned and third-party product terminal. It owns and operates four independent refineries located in Tyler, Texas; El Dorado, Arkansas; Big Spring, Texas; and Krotz Springs, Louisiana, as well as three biodiesel facilities in Crossett, Arkansas, Cleburne, Texas, and New Albany. The Logistics segment gathers, transports, and stores crude oil, intermediate, and refined products; and markets, distributes, transports, and stores refined products for third parties. It owns or leases capacity on approximately 400 miles of crude oil transportation pipelines, approximately 450 miles of refined product pipelines, an approximately 900-mile crude oil gathering system, and associated crude oil storage tanks with an aggregate of approximately 10.2 million barrels of active shell capacity; and owns and operates ten light product distribution terminals, as well as markets light products using third-party terminals. The Retail segment owns and leases 248 convenience store sites located primarily in West Texas and New Mexico. Its convenience stores offer various grades of gasoline and diesel under the DK or Alon brand; and food products and service, tobacco products, non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages, and general merchandise, as well as money orders to the public primarily under the 7-Eleven and DK or Alon brand names. It serves oil companies, independent refiners and marketers, jobbers, distributors, utility and transportation companies, the U.S. government, and independent retail fuel operators. Delek US Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee.
Fabrinet provides optical packaging and precision optical, electro-mechanical, and electronic manufacturing services in North America, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe. The company offers a range of advanced optical and electro-mechanical capabilities in the manufacturing process, including process design and engineering, supply chain management, manufacturing, printed circuit board assembly, advanced packaging, integration, final assembly, and testing. Its products include switching products, including reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers, optical amplifiers, modulators, and other optical components and modules that enable network managers to route voice, video, and data communications traffic through fiber optic cables at various wavelengths, speeds, and over various distances. The company's products also comprise tunable lasers, transceivers, and transponders; and active optical cables, which provide high-speed interconnect capabilities for data centers and computing clusters, as well as Infiniband, Ethernet, fiber channel, and optical backplane connectivity. In addition, it provides solid state, diode-pumped, gas, and fiber lasers used in semiconductor processing, biotechnology and medical device, metrology, and material processing industries; and differential pressure, micro-gyro, fuel, and other sensors used in automobiles, as well as non-contact temperature measurement sensors for the medical industry. Further, the company designs and fabricates application-specific crystals, lenses, prisms, mirrors, laser components, and substrates; and other custom and standard borosilicate, clear fused quartz, and synthetic fused silica glass products. It serves original equipment manufacturers of optical communication components, modules and sub-systems, industrial lasers, automotive components, medical devices, and sensors. The company was incorporated in 1999 and is based in George Town, the Cayman Islands.
The following companies are subsidiares of Quanta Services: (De) Lazy Q Ranch LLC, 1 Diamond LLC, 1Diamond AS, 618232 Alberta Ltd., 8246408 Canada Inc., Advanced Electric Systems, Advanced Electric Systems LLC, Advanced Utility Testing & Maintenance LLC, Alexander Publications LLC, Allteck GP Ltd., Allteck Limited Partnership, Apprenticeship Programs Inc., Arby Construction, Arcanum Chemicals LLC, Arnett & Burgess Oil Field Construction Limited, Arnett & Burgess Pipeliners (Rockies) LLC, Arnett & Burgess Pipeliners Ltd., B&N Clearing and Environmental LLC, Banister Pipelines Constructors Corp., Banister Pipelines Constructors GP Ltd., Banister Pipelines Limited Partnership, Brent Woodward Inc., Brink Constructors Inc., Brink Constructors Inc. A Corporation Of South Dakota, Brown Engineering and Testing, CAT SPEC Ltd., CAT-SPEC Limited Partnership, CAT-SPEC Limited Partnership (Regd Name) CAT SPEC Ltd., CAT-Spec Limited Partnership, Canadian Utility Construction Corp., Cat Spec Limited LP, Cat Spec Ltd, Cat Spec Ltd. L.P., Cat Spec Ltd. LP, Cat Spec. Ltd. LP, Cat-Spec Ltd (A Domestic limited Partnership), Cat-Spec Ltd LP, Cat-Spec Ltd., Cat-Spec Ltd. L.P., Cat-Spec Ltd. LP, Cat-Spec Ltd. Limited Partnership, Catalyst Changers Inc., Chatham Electric, Citadel Industrial Services L.P., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd. L.P., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Coe Drilling Pty Ltd., Computapole, Conam Construction Co., Consolidated Power Projects Australia Pty Ltd, Conti Communications Inc., Crux Subsurface Canada Ltd., Crux Subsurface Inc., Cutting Technology - 1 Diamond LLC, DB Utilities Inc., DE Lazy Q Ranch LLC, DNR Pressure Welding Ltd., Dacon Corporation, Dashiell (DE) Corporation (Dashiell Corporation), Dashiell Corporation, Dashiell Corporation DBA Dashiell (DE) Corporation, De Mears Group, De Mears Group Inc., Delaware Quanta Technology LLC, Delaware Underground Construction Co., Didado Utility Company Inc., Digco Utility Construction L.P. Digco Utility Construction Limited Partnership, Dorado Specialty Services L.P., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd. L.P., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Dorado Specialty Services. Ltd. L.P., Driftwood Electrical Contractors, EHV Power ULC, ELITE PIPING & CIVIL L.P., ELITE TURNAROUND SPECIALISTS LTD, Elite Fabrication Ltd. Elite Fabrication LP, Elite Piping & Civil Limited Partnership, Elite Piping & Civil Limited Partnership, Elite Piping & Civil Lp, Elite Piping & Civil Ltd L.P., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd. L.P., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd. Limited Partnership, Elite Piping and Civil L.P., Elite Turnaround Specialists L.p., Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Lp, Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Partnership, Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Partnership, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd Lp, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd., Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. L.P., Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. LP, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. Limited Partnership, Energy Consulting Group LLC, Enscope, Enscope Pty Ltd, FIC GP LLC, Field Personnel Services LLC, First Infrastructure Capital Advisors LLC, First Infrastructure Capital GP L.P., Five Points Construction Co., G-Tek, G-Vac, GEM Engineering Co., Grand Electric Inc., Great Lakes Line Builders, Grid Creative Inc., Grid Manufacturing Corporation, Grid Training Corporation, H.L. Chapman Pipeline Construction Inc., Haverfield Aviation, Haverfield Aviation Inc., Haverfield International Incorporated, Heritage Midstream LLC, IM Electric Inc., IUC ILLINOIS LLC, IUC Nebraska LLC, InfraSource Construction LLC, InfraSource Field Services LLC, InfraSource Services LLC, InfraSources Construction LLC, Infraestructura ETP de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V, Infrasource Engineering Company PC, Infrasource Iowa Underground LLC, Infrasource Of Pa LLC, Integracion Tecnologica del Peru SAC, Intermountain Electric Inc., Intermountain Electric Inc. A Corporation of Colorado, IonEarth LLC, Irby Construction Company, Irby Construction Company Inc., Iron Mountain M.J. Electric LLC, Island Mechanical Corporation, J.C.R. Construction Co. Inc., J.C.R. Utility Construction Co., J.W. Didado Electric Inc., J.W. Didado Electric LLC, J.w. Didado Electric, JBT Electric LLC, Kingston Contracting Inc., Lazy Q Ranch LLC, Lazy Q Training Center LLC The Lazy Q Lineman School, Legend Foundation Services, Lex Engineering Ltd., Lindsey Electric L.P., Logical Link, Longfellow Drilling, M. G. Dyess Inc., M. J. ELECTRIC LLC IRON MOUNTAIN, M. J. Electric LLC, M. J. Electric LLC - Iron Mountain, M. J. Electric LLC DBA M. J. Electric Iron Mountain LLC, M.J. Electric LLC DBA M.J. Electric Iron Mountain, M.J. Electric LLC Iron Mountain, MTS Field Services, MTS Field Services (Richmond Co), MTS Quanta LLC, Manuel Bros. Inc., Marathon Construction Services, Mears Canada Corp., Mears Equipment Services LLC, Mears Group Inc., Mears Group Pty Ltd, Mears Installation LLC, Mearsmex S. de R.L. de C.V., Mejia Personnel Services LLC, Mercer Technical Services, Microline Technology Corporation, Mid America Energy Services Inc., NACAP Niugini Ltd., NC Northstar Energy Services Inc, NGI Construction, NGI Construction Inc., NGI Construction Inc. (FN), NLC CA. Inc., NLC FL. Inc. Northwest Lineman Center, NLC ID. Inc. Northwest Lineman College, NLC TX. Inc., NPC Energy Services LLC, Nacap Australia, Nacap PNG Limited, Network Communication Services, North Houston Pole Line L.P., North Houston Pole Line Limited Partnership, North Sky Communications, NorthStar Energy Services Inc., Northern Powerline Constructors Inc., Northstar Energy Solutions LLC, Northwest Lineman Center, Northwest Lineman College, Northwest Lineman Training Center, Northwest Lineman Training Center Inc., Nova Constructors LLC, Nova Constructors LTD, Nova Equipment Leasing LLC, Nova Group Inc, Nova Group Inc (CA), Nova Group Inc., Nova Group Inc. DBA NGI Construction, Nova NextGen Solutions LLC, O. J. Pipelines Canada Corporation, O. J. Pipelines Canada Limited Partnership, O.J. Industrial Maintenance, O.J. Pipelines Canada, One Call Locators Canada Ltd., P.D.G. Electric, PAR Electrical Contractors Inc., PDG Electric Co., Par Internacional S. de R.L. de C.V., Performance Energy Services Guyana Ltd., Performance Energy Services L.L.C., Phasor Engineering Inc., Phoenix North Constructors Inc., Phoenix Power Group Inc., Potelco Inc., Potelco Incorporated, Power Delivery Program Inc., Price Gregory International Inc., Price Gregory Services LLC, Probst Construction Inc., Probst Electric Inc., QEPC, QEPC Power Solutions LLC, QES GP LLC, QP Energy Services LLC, QPS Engineering LLC, QPS Engineering LTD., QPS Engineering PLLC, QPS Environmental, QPS Flint Construction, QPS Flint Tank Services, QPS Global, QPS Global Services, QPS Global Services (Richmond Ci), QPS Professional Services, QPSE, QS Mats, QSI Engineering Inc., QSI Finance (Australia) Pty Ltd., QSI Finance (Cayman) Pvt. Ltd., QSI Finance Canada ULC, QSI Finance GP (US) LLC, QSI Finance I (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., QSI Finance I (US) LP, QSI Finance II (Australia) Pty Ltd., QSI Finance II (Lux) S.a r.l, QSI Finance II (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., QSI Finance III (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance III (Lux) SARL, QSI Finance IV (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance IX (Canada) Limited Partnership, QSI Finance V (US) L.P., QSI Finance VI (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance VII (Canada) Limited Partnership, QSI Finance VIII (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance X (Canada) ULC, QSI Inc., QSN Lux Holdings I SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings II SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings III SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings IV SCSp, QTSL LLC, QUANTA FOUNDATION SERVICES, Quanta APL GP II Ltd., Quanta Asset Management LLC, Quanta Associates L.P., Quanta Aviation Services LLC, Quanta Canada GP ULC, Quanta Canada Holdings III Limited Partnership, Quanta Canada Holdings LP, Quanta Canada III GP Ltd., Quanta Capital GP LLC, Quanta Capital LP L.P., Quanta Capital Solutions Inc., Quanta Cares, Quanta EPC Services, Quanta Electric Power Construction LLC, Quanta Electric Power Construction Management Inc., Quanta Electric Power Services LLC, Quanta Electric Power Services West LLC, Quanta Energized Innovations Ltd., Quanta Energized Services U.S. LLC, Quanta Energized Services of Canada Ltd., Quanta Energy Services LLC, Quanta Environmental Solutions, Quanta Equipment Company LLC, Quanta Government Solutions Inc., Quanta Holdings I (Netherlands) B.V., Quanta Holdings II (Netherlands) B.V., Quanta Infraestructura de Chile SpA, Quanta Infrastructure Services LLC, Quanta Infrastructure Services S. de R.L. de C.V., Quanta Inline Devices LLC, Quanta Inspection Services, Quanta Insurance Company Inc., Quanta International Holdings (US) LLC, Quanta International Holdings II Ltd., Quanta International Holdings Ltd., Quanta International Limited, Quanta Kingsvale LP Ltd., Quanta Lines Pty Ltd., Quanta Maine Services LLC, Quanta Middle East LLC, Quanta Pipeline Services Inc., Quanta Power Australia Pty Ltd, Quanta Power Generation Inc., Quanta Power Inc., Quanta Power Solutions India Private Limited, Quanta Resource Development, Quanta Services Africa (PTY) Ltd., Quanta Services Australia Pty Ltd., Quanta Services Chile SpA, Quanta Services Colombia S.A.S., Quanta Services Costa Rica Ltda., Quanta Services Guatemala Ltda., Quanta Services International Holdings II LP, Quanta Services International Holdings LP, Quanta Services Management Partnership L.P., Quanta Services Netherlands B.V., Quanta Services Panama S. de R.L., Quanta Services Peru S.A.C., Quanta Services Puerto Rico LLC, Quanta Services of Canada Ltd., Quanta Subsurface Canada Ltd., Quanta Subsurface LLC, Quanta Tank Services, Quanta Technology Canada ULC, Quanta Technology LLC, Quanta Technology UK Ltd., Quanta Tecnologia do Brasil Ltda., Quanta Telecom, Quanta Telecom Services, Quanta Telecommunication Services, Quanta Telecommunication Services LLC, Quanta Telecommunications Services LLC, Quanta Underground Services, Quanta Underground Services (Culpeper Co), Quanta Underground Services (Spotsylvania Co), Quanta Underground Services Inc., Quanta Utility Engineering Services Inc., Quanta Utility Installation Company Inc., Quanta Utility Operation LLC, Quanta West LLC, Quantecua Cia. Ltda., R. R. Cassidy Inc., RMS Holdings LLC, RMS Holdings LLC (Delaware), RMS Welding Systems, RMS Welding Systems LLC, Ranger Directional, Realtime Engineers Inc., Realtime Utility Engineers Inc., Redes Andinas de Comunicaciones S.R.L., Riggin & Diggin Line Construction, Rms Welding LLC, Rms Welding Systems LLC, Road Bore Corporation, Ryan Company Inc. The, Ryan Company Inc. of Massachusetts, Ryan Company Inc.(The), Seaward, Seaward Corp, Seaward Corporation, Service EC (DE) Inc., Service Electric Company (DE), Service Electric Company Inc., Service Electric Company of Delaware, Servicios Par Electric S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios de Infraestructura del Peru S.A.C., Southwest Trenching Company Inc., Specialty Tank Services L.P., Specialty Tank Services LP, Specialty Tank Services Limited Partnership, Specialty Tank Services Limited Partnership, Specialty Tank Services Ltd., Specialty Tank Services Ltd. (LP), Specialty Tank Services Ltd. L.P., Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, Specialty Tank Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold General LLC, Stronghold Holdings (BVI) Limited, Stronghold Inspection L.P., Stronghold Inspection Limited Partnership, Stronghold Inspection Limited Partnership, Stronghold Inspection Lp, Stronghold Inspection Ltd L.P., Stronghold Inspection Ltd., Stronghold Inspection Ltd. L.P., Stronghold Inspection Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Limited Partnership, Stronghold Ltd., Stronghold Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Management Holdings LP, Stronghold Specialty General LLC, Stronghold Specialty Ltd., Stronghold Specialty Ltd., Stronghold Specialty Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Tower Group LP, Stronghold Tower Group Ltd LP, Stronghold Tower Group Ltd., Stronghold Tower Group Ltd. LP, Stronghold VI LLC, Subterra Damage Prevention Specialists Ltd., Summit Line Construction, Sumter Utilities Inc., T. G. Mercer Consulting Services Inc., TA Construction, TC Infrastructure Services Ltd., Taylor Built, Texas Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, The Aspen Utility Company LLC, The ComTran Group Inc., The Hallen Construction Co. Inc., The Massachusetts Ryan Company Inc., The Ryan Company Inc Of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Inc., The Ryan Company Inc. (Massachusetts), The Ryan Company Inc. of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Incorporated of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Of Massachusetts Inc., The Ryan Company of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company of Massachusetts (FN), Tom Allen Construction Company Inc., Tom Allen Construction Company of Delaware, Trans Tech Electric, TurnKey Automation Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Ltd., TurnKey Automation Ltd. Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Ltd. Limited Partnership, TurnKey I&E Ltd., Turnkey Automation Ltd. L.P., Turnkey Automation Ltd. LP., UCC Underground Construction Co. Inc., Ucc - Underground Construction Co., Underground Construction Co. Inc., Underground Construction Co. Inc. (Delaware), Underground Electric Construction Company LLC, Utilco Inc., Utility Fleet Services, Utility Line Management Services Inc., Utility Testing & Maintenance LLC, Utility Training Services Corporation, VALARD Polska sp. Z o.o., Valard, Valard, Valard Construction (Ontario) Ltd., Valard Construction (Quebec) Inc., Valard Construction 2008 Ltd., Valard Construction Australia Pty Ltd, Valard Construction LLC, Valard Equipment (AB) Ltd., Valard Equipment GP Ltd., Valard Equipment Limited Partnership, Valard Geomatics (Ontario) Ltd., Valard Geomatics BC Ltd., Valard Geomatics Ltd., Valard Mechanical Ltd., Valard Norway AS, Valard Sweden AB, Valard Zagreb d. o. o., Wade D. Taylor Inc., West Coast Communications, Winco Helicopters, Winco Inc., Winco Inc. an Oregon Based Corporation, Winco Powerline Services, Winco Powerline Services Inc., Winco Powerline Services Inc., Winco Services Inc., World Fiber Inc., and mmit Line Construction Inc..

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Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush on Monday said he would be voting in November for Hillary Clinton according to a pair of sources who are close to the nations 41st President.

If true, this is a huge rebuke of the nominee of his own party Donald Trump.

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The same sources said it was not the first time that Bush disclosed that he intended to vote for Democratic nominee Clinton.

These comments came while in a receiving line for a foundation that Bush attended and while he spoke to Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, the daughter of Robert Kennedy and the former lieutenant governor of Maryland.

There were close to 40 people present at the time and it was not clear the number of people who heard Bush, though multiple did.

The decision by Bush to vote for the Democratic nominee is a dramatic new chapter for the complicated relationship of three decades or more between two of the most prominent families in U.S. politics.

It is a huge political move and one that comes only 49 days from Novembers election and within a week of the first debate between Donald Trump and Clinton.

Kellyanne Crowley the campaign manager for Trump on Tuesday said she respects the former president, who is 92 years old and the decision he has taken.

However, she added that it was ironic that he would vote for Clinton, as she is the wife of Bill Clinton who knocked Bush out of the race.

News of Bushs support for Hillary was first seen on Facebook after Kennedy Townsend had posted a photo of herself with the former president and a caption that said she was told by the president he would be voting for Clinton.

When asked, representatives of the Bush family declined to make a publicly response.

The vote Bush will cast is one of a private citizen and just that, one vote and he will not comment on the race for the White House in the interim, said Jim McGrath the spokesman for Bush, through a prepared statement.

However, sources close to the matter and present for the conversation have said they were disappointed and surprised that Kennedy Townsend publicly shared the private conversation she had with Bush.

Kennedy Townsend did not comment via a spokesperson when asked about her sharing her private conversation with President Bush.
Ally Financial Inc., a digital financial-services company, provides various digital financial products and services to consumer, commercial, and corporate customers primarily in the United States and Canada. It operates through four segments: Automotive Finance Operations, Insurance Operations, Mortgage Finance Operations, and Corporate Finance Operations. The Automotive Finance Operations segment offers automotive financing services, including providing retail installment sales contracts, loans and operating leases, term loans to dealers, financing dealer floorplans and other lines of credit to dealers, warehouse lines to automotive retailers, and fleet financing. It also provides financing services to companies and municipalities for the purchase or lease of vehicles, and vehicle-remarketing services. The Insurance Operations segment offers consumer finance protection and insurance products through the automotive dealer channel, and commercial insurance products directly to dealers. This segment provides vehicle service and maintenance contract, and guaranteed asset protection products; and underwrites commercial insurance coverages, which primarily insure dealers' vehicle inventory. The Mortgage Finance Operations segment manages consumer mortgage loan portfolio that includes bulk purchases of jumbo and low-to-moderate income mortgage loans originated by third parties, as well as direct-to-consumer mortgage offerings. The Corporate Finance Operations segment provides senior secured leveraged cash flow and asset-based loans to middle market companies; leveraged loans; and commercial real estate product to serve companies in the healthcare industry. The company also offers commercial banking products and services. In addition, it provides securities brokerage and investment advisory services. The company was formerly known as GMAC Inc. and changed its name to Ally Financial Inc. in May 2010. Ally Financial Inc. was founded in 1919 and is based in Detroit, Michigan.
Synovus/Cohutta Bank announce the addition of Wilson Meads as a commercial banker to the bank's Chattanooga team at 800 Market St.

As a commercial banker, Mr. Meads helps ensure delivery of the full range of Synovus services, products and banking capabilities to small business and commercial banking clients in the greater Chattanooga market, officials said.



In 2005, Mr. Meads joined Citizens First, the Synovus affiliate in Rome, Ga., as a management associate and was a regional credit analyst for six years. Most recently, he served as a commercial banker in the Rome market.

Mr. Meads earned a bachelor of science degree in economics from Berry College.
Growin, Growin, Growin on the River is the theme this year at the River Maze. On the banks of the Ocoee River, one can have lots of fun on a real farm.

The intricate design for the corn maze at The River Maze is exceptionally challenging, but organizers have improved the opportunities for people to have more fun than ever before outside the corn maze.

If one's top choice is our then maze, then one should get ready to get lost as officials have carved out our corn maze to give tribute to the top ten crops grown in the United States. The design features a big thrashing machine, (a combine), stalks of corn, a pumpkin patch, and wheat plants.

The River Maze is fortunate to have its own crops this year in an unseasonably dry year. So, yes, home grown pumpkins will be found on a ride to the pumpkin patch. The scenic beauty and many other attractions will be a rewarding experience for anyone going to the River Maze.

To celebrate the grand opening on Saturday, The River Maze is partnering with CASA of Bradley and Polk counties, to host CASA Day at The River Maze. On Saturday, Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Bradley and Polk Counties will partner to help raise funds for advocacy of children involved in court proceedings in Polk County. On this day, $3 from each ticket sold will be donated to CASA and their efforts to expand their services in Polk County.

CASA Day at The River Maze will feature several exclusive opening day attractions. An assortment of vendors from Tennessee and North Georgia will be on-site selling handiworks and refreshments. There will also be radio station coverage, as well as live music in the evening. Folksy husband and wife duo Drakeford will take the stage at 7 PM, followed by Flatlands Jump, a band that effortlessly blends hip-hop beats with a rustic Americana sound, who are set to perform at 8 PM. As always, traditional activities will be open such as the namesake corn maze, interactive pumpkin patch, and tractor hayrides.



The River Maze will give visitors the chance to "get lost" Sept. 24 through Oct. 30. Hours are Friday 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m.to 9:30 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Field trip hours, during weekdays, are available by reservation. The River Maze is three miles east of Ocoee, Tn., on US Highway 64. Cost is $10 for ages 3 and up. This includes all mazes and the hayride. In addition, cow train rides, corn cannon shots, face painting, pumpkin painting, and water wars will be available through the purchase of tokens. For those who want pumpkins, they will be for sale. If visitors want to come for pumpkins only, the trip to the pumpkin patch will be $5 along with the purchase of pumpkins. Discounts are offered for groups and field trips. For more information or to make reservations, call 423.650.0710 or visit www.TheRiverMaze.com



The River Maze experience offers something for everyone.

Exciting attractions this year are the Jump Pad, the two 30 foot tube slides, a Spookley  themed timed maze (Tag with Spookley and Friends), Barnyard Basketball and Football, Tether Ball and more

The River Maze also has a maze carved in a field of soybeans. It features the nursery rhyme, Hey Diddle, Diddle. The little ones will really enjoy this.





There are also two little mazes, The American Maze and The No Left Turn Maze.

Interactive passports are available for groups and the general public. Each contains ten questions that quiz the user on a chosen subject, and those who answer the questions correctly will receive clues that guide them along the correct path to the exit. Subjects include: sports, boy scouting, girl scouting, scriptural, American history, interactive, teambuilding, and agriculture.

Our new scavenger hunt through the maze this year will be Music in our Ears. Find all the checkpoints and you can find the favorite river songs of the Fetzer family members.

We have made our maze smart. You can use your smartphone for trivia questions and the checkpoints. You can scan the code at our entrance or go to the website, www.mazetrivia.com . Group leaders, you can use this website to customize your own questions for your youth.

The RIVER MAZE caters to school field trips during the day and has created an education campaign that includes: lesson plans and activity sheets for teachers, discounted field trip opportunities, and an educational passport that can be custom designed by our staff or you can do it yourself at www. Mazetrivia.com. It integrates what students are learning at school into the maze experience and helps guide students along the correct pathway. Teachers can access curriculum materials and field trip information online at www.TheRiverMaze.com. Field trips can also be scheduled by reservation





In an effort to make the experience as easy or as hard as visitors want it to be, the maze has been divided into two phases: beginner and expert. Participants will have the option to continue on to the next phase or exit the maze at the entrance to the second level.

Customized activities have been added for birthday parties, corporate outings and group rivalries/races.

The River Maze has its own pumpkin patch. Come pick the perfect pumpkin.

If the weather is still warm, visitors can battle each other in Water Wars (a water balloon launcher).

Other attractions include Corn Toss, and Corn Ball

Visitors can still meet Spookley the Square Pumpkin, the Official Spokes-Pumpkin for National Bullying Prevention Month, to raise awareness for bullying prevention.
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Following three successful years of leadership at The Company Lab (CO.LAB), Executive Director Mike Bradshaw will depart from the organization to lead a new Chattanooga office for Jensen Hughes, an international safety engineering and consulting firm. Jack Studer, co-founder of venture incubator Lamp Post Group, will step in as executive director.

Over the next few months, CO.LABs board of directors will work with the community and CO.LABs leadership team to refine CO.LABs strategic plan and develop the job description that the board will use to conduct a national search for the person who will provide the long-term executive leadership of CO.LAB.



The transition will take place effective immediately, though Mr. Bradshaw will continue to serve the organization as a consultant through the end of 2016. During that time, Mr. Bradshaw will advance key projects that were developed under his leadership at CO.LAB. During the transition period, CO.LABs board, community leaders and senior staff will work closely together to refine the organizations strategic plan to take into account new developments and opportunities in Chattanoogas entrepreneurial community.



Mike has brought to CO.LAB, first as entrepreneur-in-residence and then as executive director, an outstanding entrepreneurial spirit, great insight into the journey that young businesses travel, and a genuinely caring attitude and approach to his work, said Rick Hitchcock, chairman of CO.LABs board of directors. He has developed an outstanding staff and has led them well as they have worked to fulfill CO.LABs mission as a high-growth startup accelerator, as a champion for broader community access to entrepreneurial training and resources, and as Chattanoogas front door for entrepreneurs seeking to start or grow their business.



Over the course of his tenure, Mr. Bradshaw introduced a number of initiatives that have altered the fabric of entrepreneurial life in Chattanooga. In 2013, he championed the adoption 3D printing technologies at a time when public awareness about the concept was low and public access to the machines was virtually nonexistent. In 2014, he led the effort to launch the nations first 3D printing startup accelerator in Chattanooga through GIGTANK. Mr. Bradshaw also helped launch the Chattanooga Mini Maker Faire, a festival that celebrates the do-it-yourself culture of making things. In addition, he has played an integral role in developing plans for an Advanced Manufacturing Application Center in Chattanooga.

Aside from his leadership in the 3D printing movement, Mr. Bradshaw has deepened ties between CO.LAB and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has helped develop a formal resource-sharing partnership with LAUNCH Chattanooga, and has overseen the relocation of CO.LAB from Main Street to the Edney Innovation Center. Through his ongoing service as CO.LABs entrepreneur-in-residence, Mr. Bradshaw has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs who have launched dozens of new businesses in Chattanooga.

While we will greatly miss Mikes full-time leadership, he has graciously agreed to provide continued assistance on some key projects that will impact the growth of Chattanoogas entrepreneurial community, said Mr. Hitchcock. In addition, his new office at Jensen Hughes is located in the Edney Innovation Center, placing him in close proximity to many of the entrepreneurs and community members his work has nurtured.

Among the projects Mr. Bradshaw will continue to support are the establishment of an Advanced Manufacturing Application Center that will pursue innovations in 3D printing, as well as the completion of a study on new ways to measure the impact of entrepreneurs on community and economic development.

I first walked into CO.LAB in 2011 as a volunteer to help aspiring entrepreneurs, said Mr. Bradshaw. It turned out to be a calling that led to a period of personal growth and satisfaction as unexpected as it was profound. I am inspired everyday by the people from all walks of life who have the dream of building a business and are ready to work.

Mr. Bradshaw has worked with Jensen Hughes since 2009 when it acquired a tech startup he helped found. Today, that startup is bringing a division of the worlds largest privately-held fire protection engineering and life safety company to Chattanooga. As the director of the Jensen Hughes Academy, Bradshaw said he believes the opening of this new office in Chattanooga is a testament to the attractiveness of the citys Innovation District.



I am deeply grateful for the extraordinarily generous support of the people and organizations on whom CO.LABs work depends, said Mr. Bradshaw. Volunteers are CO.LABs secret sauce, and I am looking forward to rejoining their ranks as we continue the work to make Chattanooga the best place in the world to start and grow a new venture. I believe every CO.LAB volunteer will join me in urging people across the city to join in and become part of CO.LABs journey.



Over the course of Mr. Bradshaws tenure at CO.LAB, a number of major developments have begun to reshape Chattanoogas entrepreneurial environment and the opportunities available therein. The establishment of the citys Innovation District and the growing number of tenants within its anchor building at the Edney Innovation Center are chief among them. CO.LABs relocation into the Edney in October 2015 has had a dramatic effect on the organizations work, particularly with regard to its accessibility and its approach to partnering with other organizations and individuals who value entrepreneurial innovation. Other developments, such as the retooling of The Enterprise Center to focus on innovation and digital technology, the creation of The Jump Fund, and the launch of Lamp Post Groups Dynamo logistics accelerator, make the next six months an ideal time for CO.LAB to identify new needs and opportunities that are emerging in tandem.

With a front row seat, I have watched Chattanooga establish a remarkable entrepreneurial ecosystem, creating a model for other cities trying to grow in this important space, said Mr. Studer. CO.LABs work with young companies to develop business ideas, find mentors, and connect to funding sources has helped propel Chattanooga into the national discussion. I am thrilled to help shepherd CO.LAB into the next stage of its journey.

Mr. Studer is a co-founder of Lamp Post Group, a local venture incubator that has created over 100 jobs and tens of millions of dollars in local economic impact since launching in 2010. He is also a co-founder of the Chattanooga Renaissance Fund, an angel investment fund established in 2011 for entrepreneurs in the Southeast. Most recently, Mr. Studer co-founded Torch in 2014, which is a local company that has created a Wi-Fi router with built-in parental controls. After studying Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton, his career began on Wall Street at Credit Suisse, where he found success working on corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions with major companies such as Google, Oracle, Omniture and YouTube. A Chattanooga native, Mr. Studer is a graduate of the Baylor School and currently serves as the chairman of Erlanger Health Systems board of directors.


Charlottesville City Council has solidified new rules for public speakers at council meetings, implementing a lottery system that encourages the public to sign up for slots in advance.

Mondays 4-1 vote in favor of the new procedures came on the heels of a six-month trial period where those wishing to speak during the public comment period at the start of meetings were allowed to sign up days in advance and 12 speakers were chosen using a lottery system.

Previously run on a first-come, first-served basis, the public comment rules, as well as a slew of other council meeting procedures, were changed earlier this year.

Every city and county in Virginia tries to figure out what the right system is, Mayor Mike Signer said Monday. There are lots of different cities that have tried to figure out what the right balance is ... and there are pros and cons to each approach.

Under the new rules, people can call or email the councils clerk to reserve a speaking slot ahead of the meeting. At 9 a.m. on the day of the meeting, the signup period is closed. By noon, the selected speakers are posted on the citys website. Whoever is not selected in the lottery can speak at the end of the meeting.

When the measure was introduced in February, it was immediately met with resistance from some.

Signer and others have defended the new rules, emphasizing that the same number of speakers  12  are invited to address the council and that the lottery system, which randomizes whos selected to speak when theres more than 12 sign-ups, means a diverse range of voices can be heard.

Signer also has said the policy removes uncertainty for those who make plans to attend the meeting, but are then unable to speak because they arrived late or were unable to sign up before 12 others.

At Mondays meeting, the council amended the procedures to limit the advanced signups to nine slots, allowing three slots to remain open to anyone who arrives before the start of a meeting and wishes to speak.

But some were not satisfied with the amendment and made use of Mondays public hearing on the resolution to air their grievances.

Reading from a letter drafted by the citys Human Rights Commission, commission member Sue Lewis questioned whether the council meant to decrease the amount of citizen input.

The implementation of this new process, based on one work session and one reading, without public hearing and essentially ruling by resolution, did not allow any input by the citizens who elected you through a democratic process  the very ones who you have charged us as commissioners to protect, she said.

Brandon Collins, of the Public Housing Association of Residents, implored the council to heed the Human Rights Commission letter, saying that it was consistent with how many in the public feel.

You all have tasked them and repeatedly told them ... you want them to hold your feet to the fire on these matters, Collins said. Here they are, actually coming to the council ... That should hold a lot of weight.

Since beginning to observe the new procedures in March, 12 council meetings had been held prior to Mondays meeting. During that time, according to staff, there have been a total of 130 advance signups and 19 in-person signups.

Of those 130 signups, 125 spoke before the council. Before beginning the six-month trial for the comment procedures, there had been 110 public addresses before the council, Signer said.

Although there was a flurry of interest in speaking at council meetings during the first few months, the number of people signing up to speak has dropped off since. However, two recent council meetings saw more people arriving at the beginning of the meetings and signing up for still-available slots.

Signer mentioned the uptick, noting that at one recent meeting, people were able to spontaneously show up and raise concerns about facility and management issues at Crescent Halls, a public housing complex for elderly and disabled people.

Some, including Walt Heinecke, a University of Virginia professor, questioned Signers motive, particularly his past assertion that the new procedures would assist people such as single mothers who would want an assurance they can speak at meetings before making arrangements to attend.

Heinecke said Signer used that example as a way to create the perception of a problem that needed solving.

Its basically a policy trick where you compare a part to the whole, he said. It implies theres like 50 single mothers out there when it was maybe one, maybe none. We dont know.

Pointing to flashpoints in city politics over recent years, such as the debate about the Meadow Creek Parkway and the water supply plan, Heinecke said previous mayors and councils trudged through times of tough dissent without attempting to overhaul meeting procedures.

Think about the trajectory of this. We didnt have this problem three or five years ago. We had this problem when this council came into being and started ignoring the public, Heinecke said.

Even with Occupy [Charlottesville] coming several times with some of their protests, that didnt happen. It wasnt the result, said Nancy Carpenter, an employee with The Haven, a day shelter for homeless people.

We need to ditch these [procedures] and go back to the way we did things in the past, Heinecke said.

They give way too much power to the mayor, he said, alluding broadly to the meeting procedures that vested some implicit mayoral responsibilities and added some rules for councilors to streamline the meetings.

In an awkward moment that briefly mired Mondays discussion, Councilor Bob Fenwick asked whether the other changes to meeting procedures were also part of the six-month trial.

A staff memo for Mondays resolution said the trial period was only for the public comment procedures, which were adopted in February alongside a separate resolution for the meeting procedures.

Fenwick said he remains opposed to the rules and asked that the rule that compels councilors to defer to the city manager for responses to public concerns be changed. The item was not up for discussion, however.

Fenwick was the sole vote against adopting the resolution for the public comment procedures.

I do believe this is an infringement on freedom of speech, he said. I thought it six months ago, and I think it even more strongly now.

While remaining staunchly opposed to the procedures, Fenwick acknowledged the move allows for leadership to conduct an efficient meeting.

Councilor Kathy Galvin, who supported the proposal, said she appreciates streamlining the meetings at the cost of limiting excessive debate among council members on certain agenda items or issues raised by the public.

I see a lot of value to having an efficient and well-run meeting, Galvin said, noting that it prevents the meetings from going past 11 p.m. and allows the public to stay tuned into meetings before it becomes too late.

She added that the mayor can still use discretion to let councilors address urgent matters that are not on the agenda.

I appreciate the discipline thats been exerted upon us and I think weve done the peoples business in a lot more transparent and efficient way because of it, Galvin said.

Signer acknowledged that in the role of mayor, he can use discretion within the rules for the benefit of the public.

Ive got another year and three months in this position right now, he said. Im going to try and do this as well as I can under the rules that we have ... and make this accessible as I can under the authorities that are given when youre trying to run an efficient meeting and do the peoples business.
photo by 3D Entertainment Films photo by 3D Entertainment Films photo by 3D Entertainment Films photo by 3D Entertainment Films photo by 3D Entertainment Films Previous Next

Some of the worlds most vibrant living communities are hidden from public view in the ocean depths. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, coral reefs support more than 4,000 species of fish and 800 known coral species.

Recently, vast areas of these underwater treasures were protected with the creation of the new Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument surrounding the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean and the designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, the first in the Atlantic Ocean.



Much of the credit for protection of these unique marine ecosystems can be traced to the efforts of ocean advocates Jean-Michel Cousteau and Dr. Sylvia Earle. These two diving legends have used their expertise to reveal to the world the colorful sea creatures thriving in coral reef communities. They have worked tirelessly to inspire world leaders to consider increasing protections for the ocean.



President George W. Bush established the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument a decade ago after meeting with Cousteau and Earle. And, they helped persuade President Obama to expand protections in Hawaii and create the new monument in the Atlantic.



A new giant screen film, Jean-Michel Cousteaus Secret Ocean 3D,provides a unique opportunity to view some of the worlds most amazing marine communities with a SCUBA diving legend. This underwater adventure, narrated by oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, opens at the Tennessee Aquarium IMAX 3D Theater on Friday, Sept. 30.



Filmed over three years in vibrant marine communities from the Bahamas to Fiji, this is the first IMAX 3D film directed by Jean-Michel Cousteau. The conservationist chose to focus on the secret world within the ocean that is perhaps the biggest story of all  that the smallest life in the sea is the mightiest force on which we all depend.



More than 30 species of fascinating sea creatures, some no bigger than one inch, were filmed for the very first time using new technologies. The crews captured animal behaviors in 3D that have never been seen in theaters thanks to ultra-HD 5K cameras, slow motion, macro and motion control techniques.



Since the 1940s, the Cousteau family has been deeply connected to the water. Several generations have grown up with our Calypso adventures, which revealed to the public what was a totally unknown world at that time, said Jean-Michel Cousteau. Thanks to the new technology developed specifically for us, I immediately understood that this was a revolution in underwater filming that would allow us to capture a whole new range of behaviors I had never before witnessed in my 69 years of diving. Secret Ocean 3D takes us one step further in the discovery of the ocean in a way my father, Jacques Cousteau, could have only imagined.



From the time of my very first dive, Ive had the frustration of knowing that there was always more beyond what I could see, but technology is key to being able to see the ocean with new eyes, said narrator Dr. Sylvia Earle. Thanks to the stunning IMAX 3D format, Secret Ocean 3D allows us a deeper understanding of all life in the sea, the heart of our planet, and encourages us to take care of not only the large creatures, such as whales and dolphins, but also the tiny creatures that make the rest of life possible. With knowing comes caring, but first we need to know.



Alongside marine biologist Holly Lohuis, Jean-Michel Cousteau provides a brand new view of the underwater world that will leave audiences inspired by the beauty and diversity of the oceans. He hopes theyll have an even stronger desire to protect what they have seen for the first time, or re-discovered along the journey.



View the official trailer: https://vimeo.com/120367619



Jean-Michel Cousteaus Secret Ocean 3D at the Tennessee Aquarium IMAX 3D Theater opens Friday, September 30



Admission:



Non-member: $11.95 adults; $9.95 children (3-12)

Aquarium Member: $8.00 adults; $8.00 children (3-12)

IMAX Club passholders: Free

Purchase tickets online: http://www.tnaqua.org/plan-you r-visit/ticket-information


For minority- and women-owned businesses to make it, they need to become a critical part of the value chain of the businesses they are trying to work with, said Bill Cooper, director of diversity strategies for Atlantic Constructors.

Cooper was the keynote speaker at Tuesdays Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerces Chamber Business Diversity Luncheon, hosted by the Chamber Business Diversity Council and held at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

Cooper said the time is right for minority- and women-owned businesses to find a position that truly adds value and to be able to sustain themselves, now that companies are shedding non-core activities and outsourcing more.

Since the population is starting to shift and there will be more minorities and women as players in the world of business today, if we do not begin to understand what is required for women and minority business owners to be successful, then who is going to be able to take over those businesses that are outsourced? Cooper said.

So Im here today to declare that rather than worry about the procurement processes that build the numbers up, corporations that desire to do business with women and minorities need to find out what these businesses need most, he said.

Money and customers is what they need most, he said, but until weaknesses are addressed, businesses will not be able to move forward.

The Forward/Adelante Business Alliance, which publishes Virginias first bilingual magazine, was the recipient of the 2016 John F. Bell Sr. Vanguard Award. The award recognizes an individual, business or organization that actively promotes diversity within the greater Charlottesville business community.

Alex Urpi, vice president of the alliance, accepted the award and spoke about the magazines beginnings.

Olga Morse started the magazine in 2008, when she was a real estate agent, with her son Ivo Tomasini.

At the time, it was a business journal, but more than a business journal in its concept and its spirit, Urpi said.

He said their purpose in starting the magazine was to connect cultures, open doors and crush stereotypes.

She realized that much of the Hispanic community and its success was separate from the rest of the business community in Charlottesville and in Central Virginia, he said. They were there. There was the success, there was the entrepreneurship, but there was a distance. There was a gap that she wanted to bridge.

They started the Chuck Lewis Passion Award to celebrate entrepreneurs who overcome obstacles and achieve success as a way highlight local small-business owners who might be overlooked otherwise.

In Spanish, you never say that someone is successful; you say tener exito, which is to have success, Urpi said. By very nature of the language, success is not something innate. Youre not born with it. You work toward it, you obtain it.

He said Morse faced challenges but she fought through to bridge the gap by helping people understand each others cultures to build relationships and create trust, and in turn help others obtain success.
DANVILLE  GOP congressional candidate Tom Garrett called for opponent Jane Dittmar to retract a YouTube ad Tuesday, after Garrett said it falsely accused him of voting for uranium mining in the Virginia General Assembly.

However, Dittmars campaign said the ad is accurate, citing environmentalist opposition to the 2013 legislation.

Democrat Dittmar and Republican Garrett are running to replace retiring Rep. Robert Hurt, a Republican who has represented the 5th District for nearly six years.

Citizens in Virginia Five espouse honesty and integrity, Garrett said in a news release. My opponents ad has neither. I have never voted for uranium mining in Virginia, ever.

Garrett was responding to a 30-second Dittmar spot titled Doing on her campaigns YouTube page. In the ad, Dittmar says Garrett accepted $6,000 in campaign contributions from Dominion Virginia Power, and then voted for bills in favor of fracking, uranium mining and groundwater drilling.

Career politician Tom Garrett took Dominion Powers money, then protected their bottom line  putting our communities and our water at risk with his votes, Ditmarr says in the spot.

The ad cites House Bill 1790 as the basis for the uranium mining support. The bill  which had bipartisan support in 2013  establishes a Virginia Nuclear Consortium Committee. The legislation tasks the committee with making the commonwealth a leader in nuclear energy and serving as an interdisciplinary study and research resource for Virginia on nuclear issues.

In a response, Dittmar campaign manager Tom Vandever said environmental groups were opposed to the 2013 bill because it could open the door to uranium mining in Virginia. He cited February 2013 articles in The Virginian-Pilot in which groups such as the Sierra Club and the Keep the Ban Coalition said the legislation would allow Virginia to study the Coles Hill site in Pittsylvania County and could lead to a recommendation of reversing the uranium mining ban.

For him to claim he did nothing about promoting uranium mining is either disingenuous or totally clueless, Vandever said.

However, Garrett said the bill had nothing to do with uranium mining. He said it was a job-creating measure responsible for helping companies like Babcock & Wilcox and Areva bring jobs to the district.

Voting records are fair game when you run for public office, Garrett said. However, it is a slap in the face to the voters to spend tens of thousands of dollars on deceitful and misleading negative ads.

This year, Virginia Uranium filed lawsuits against the state government in both federal and state court, after Gov. Terry McAuliffe said he would veto any legislative efforts to reverse the ban on uranium mining. A federal judge ruled against the company, and a circuit judge in Wise County has yet to rule on the issue. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Oct. 7 in Wise County.

Garrett received $1,000 campaign contributions from Virginia Uranium in 2011 and 2012, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
The Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia will host Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer and Councilor Wes Bellamy from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesday for a discussion about local government.

Invited by the graduate student-run journal Virginia Policy Review, the topic of the discussion is The History that Fuels Local Government Action.

The event will be held at Garrett Hall at 235 McCormick Road. The event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided.
A report released today by an environmental research and advocacy group found concentrations of hexavalent chromium, a potential carcinogen, in the public drinking water systems of 200 million Americans in every state, including the utilities that serve Richmond and the counties of Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico.

The local concentrations of the metal, dubbed the Erin Brockovich chemical for the former paralegal who became famous for her work on behalf of residents in Hinkley, Calif., where groundwater was contaminated by a utility company, are well below the federal Environmental Protection Agencys maximum contaminant level for total chromium of 100 parts per billion, the nationwide enforcement standard.

They are also below the only state-level standard in the nation: Californias maximum of 10 parts per billion. A single part per billion is roughly equivalent to a drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the report says.

But the report by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group points to a two-year study by the National Toxicology Program published in 2008 that found drinking water with hexavalent chromium caused cancer in laboratory rats and mice. The metal, which occurs naturally but is often associated with industrial pollution from steelmaking, chrome-plating, coal ash and other sources, has long been recognized as a carcinogen when inhaled.

In 2010, scientists at the respected and influential California Office of Health Hazard Assessment concluded that ingestion of tiny amounts of chromium-6 can cause cancer in people, a conclusion affirmed by state scientists in New Jersey and North Carolina, the report says.

In California, a non-enforceable public health goal of 0.02 parts per billion was set, the level that would pose negligible risk over a lifetime of consumption, the report says. But in 2014, after aggressive lobbying by industry and water utilities, the state regulators adopted a legal limit 500 times the public health goal.

The report  which warns that if left untreated, the contamination could cause an estimated 12,000 additional cancer cases  uses data gathered by the EPA from 2013 to 2015 from public utilities that took more than 60,000 drinking water samples and found hexavalent chromium in 75 percent.

This is the first time anyone has ever tested this extensively for chromium-6, said Bill Walker, the Environmental Working Groups managing editor and a co-author of the report.

***

In the Richmond area, the highest average concentration observed was in the city, where it was 0.3 parts per billion. A spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Utilities could not be reached for comment Monday. Hanovers average concentration was 0.2 parts per billion; Henricos was 0.19 parts per billion; and Chesterfields was 0.09 parts per billion.

Utility officials from all three counties said their water met all applicable standards.

I would say this should give our customers reassurance, that California has set the only and highest level for hexavalent chromium and we are well under their limit, said Arthur Petrini, Henricos director of public utilities.

George Hayes, Chesterfields director of utilities, said the county has never exceeded a Safe Drinking Water Act primary maximum contaminant level.

The current treatment technologies available are seeking to decrease levels to less than 1 ppb, a level that all our three current water sources currently achieve, Hayes said.

Steven Herzog, Hanovers director of public utilities, pointed to a figure in the June 2013 journal of the American Water Works Association, which estimated that the costs to meet Californias standard would range from $550 million to $5.1 billion nationally.

With enough money and resources, you can treat water to any level you want, Petrini said. The question is: At what level is money spent wisely to ensure public health versus just to meet a standard?

***

The Environmental Working Group, which also was the author of a 2010 report that found hexavalent chromium in the tap water of 31 cities, says it hopes to prod the EPA into action after being stalled by a chemical industry challenge. The agency has been weighing a decision on a new hexavalent chromium-specific maximum contaminant level for at least six years.

The test results on the EPAs website are hard to find and even harder to understand, said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group and a co-author of the report. So we compiled and sorted the data, and we found that the scope of the contamination is startling. Its long past time for the EPA to take action to protect Americans from chromium-6.

The EPAs maximum contaminant level of 100 parts per billion was set in 1991 based on potential adverse dermatological effects over many years, such as allergic dermatitis (skin reactions), not potential health risks from ingestion.

It hasnt caught up to 25 years of research into the harmful health effects of chrome-6 in water, including cancer and lung damage, Walker said.

Several requests to interview an official at the EPA on the status of the review have been unsuccessful over the past month. The agency said in a statement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Monday that it is actively working on the development of the Integrated Risk Information System assessment of hexavalent chromium, which will include a comprehensive evaluation of potential health effects associated with hexavalent chromium and EPA expects that the draft IRIS assessment will be released for public comment in 2017.

The agency says that prior to regulating a contaminant, it must find that the contaminant meets three criteria: that it may have an adverse effect on the health of persons; is known to occur or there is a substantial likelihood that the contaminant will occur in public water systems with a frequency and at levels of public health concern; and in the sole judgment of the EPA administrator, the regulation of the contaminant presents a meaningful opportunity for health risk reductions for persons served by public water systems.

Action on establishing a risk level and a national standard would help eliminate debates like the one that has raged in North Carolina, where state officials issued hundreds of do not drink letters to residents near coal ash sites whose wells showed concentrations above 0.07 parts per billion of hexavalent chromium and other contaminants, which critics called an impossibly low standard. The state later rescinded many of the letters, telling residents their water was as safe as most public water systems, igniting another controversy that has led to the resignation of Megan Davies, the state epidemiologist.

Hexavalent chromium also has popped up in tests of private drinking water wells near coal ash ponds that Dominion Virginia Power is in the process of closing in Bremo Bluff and Dumfries.

***

Laurie McNeill, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Utah State University who has spent 14 years researching issues surrounding hexavalent chromium in public drinking water, called the Environmental Working Group report a bit overblown but said the EPA should finish its review to provide some clarity.

As long as its below 10 parts per billion, its in compliance with what the state of California would say. Right now, I think thats our best guidance for what is an acceptable level of risk, she said.

Referencing the local concentrations in Richmond, she added that 0.3 parts per billion is a level she would definitely not be worried about. ... If you look at environmental regulation, California tends to be on the leading edge. Its hard to imagine that their regulators dropped the ball on their analysis of chrome-6. I would be surprised if that was the case.
Gas prices in Virginia on Monday were up an average of 5 cents per gallon from Friday and may increase an additional 20 cents per gallon as the fallout continues from a break in a major pipeline that carries gas to much of the eastern U.S.

Colonial Pipeline Co., based in Alpharetta, Ga., expects to have a temporary fix in place by the end of the week to bypass the break  detected earlier this month  which has caused gas shortages in parts of the Southeast.

With something like this, we expect gas prices to go up, said Tammy Arnette, a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic.

Certainly the tightening of supplies will have an impact on that. They could go up as much as 20 cents per gallon before its all over with. The good news is that Virginia gas prices are still some of the lowest in the country.

Gas prices in the state averaged $2.03 per gallon Monday. In the Richmond area, the average price was $2 per gallon, also up 5 cents since Friday.

Nationally, gas averaged $2.21 per gallon, up 3 cents since Friday.

The Colonial Pipeline stretches from Texas to New York. The leak and spill was detected Sept. 9 by a mining inspector in Shelby County, Ala., in Line 1 of the pipeline.

An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 barrels  252,000 to 336,000 gallons  were spilled. A second line, Line 2, which normally carries diesel, jet fuel and home heating oil, is still operating.

The pipeline brings a great deal of gasoline throughout the Southeast and up into the Mid-Atlantic states and the Northeast, said Gregg Laskoski, senior petroleum analyst for the Southeast for GasBuddy, which collects and reports crowd-sourced fuel-price data in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

The company website states that Colonial Pipeline transports more than 105 million gallons per day.

Its a 36-inch pipeline. So when you shut that down and take that much volume offline, it creates a tremendous infrastructure challenge to try to come up with an alternative source for supplying that kind of volume to the states that it needs to reach, Laskoski said.

It can be done if something can be cobbled together, and thats in place right now where other alternative pipelines are being used. Some fuel is arriving in markets by ship, by railroad, by truck, he said.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Friday declared the situation a disaster for Virginia, noting that the pipeline is the only source of gasoline for many retailers in the commonwealth.

He issued an executive order effective through Oct. 1  or sooner if the situation resolves  that relaxed weight, registration, hours worked and other restrictions on truckers transporting gasoline in the state.

Governors in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina have issued similar orders.

This is a proactive step to protect Virginia citizens and businesses by ensuring that companies can bring in the gasoline supplies they need to offset any shortages that may arise as a result of this event, McAuliffe said in Fridays statement.

The executive order also warned against gasoline price gouging by retailers. Price gouging at any time is unacceptable. I have directed all applicable executive branch agencies to take immediate action to address any verified reports of price gouging of gasoline, McAuliffe said.

I make the same request of the Office of the Attorney General and appropriate local officials. I further request that all appropriate executive branch agencies exercise their discretion to the extent allowed by law to address any pending deadlines or expirations affected by or attributable to this resource shortage, the statement said.

Colonial Pipeline Co. last week estimated Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina would be the first to be impacted by potential disruptions in supply.

The company reported on its website Monday that it had obtained gasoline from Gulf Coast refiners to ship supplies throughout the affected region.

On Saturday, the company began construction of a temporary bypass around the broken section of the pipeline.

Whether prices continue to rise depends on that construction, said Martha Mitchell Meade, also a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic.

Right now, Colonial Pipeline is saying that it will take till the end of this week. If that takes longer, the situation obviously is going to change. Its a very fluid situation, Meade said.

Arnette and Meade said they have heard reports of spotty shortages, including one station in Danville that may have run out of gas.

But overall, We have ample supplies at the moment. But its important to monitor those supplies because we operate on a just-in-time inventory system  delivery as needed, Arnette said.

Laskoski, at GasBuddy, advised people not to rush out and top off their gas tanks just to be safe  doing so could exacerbate an already difficult situation and make it longer for the supply issue to be corrected.

The suppliers and distributors that are trying to manage this as best they can have to identify the locations geographically that have the greatest need, he said.

If consumers behave in an irrational way  panicking and topping off their tanks  that is going to draw down on the available fuel at a rate that exceeds what would customarily occur.
The Urban League of Greater Chattanooga presents its annual Equal Opportunity Day breakfast on Friday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 a.m. at the Chattanooga Convention Center with keynote speaker Jahana Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year named by the Council of Chief State School Officers. Ms. Hayes is the first member of her family to graduate college and now serves as a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, Ct.

Despite a challenging upbringing, Ms. Hayes was inspired and encouraged by her teachers to dream big and attend college. A lifelong student, she earned an associate degree from Naugatuck Valley Community College, a Bachelor of Science from Southern Connecticut State University, a Master of Arts from Saint Joseph University and a certification from the University of Bridgeport. Ms. Hayes has been teaching for the past 12 years and says she feels privileged to have the opportunity to transform lives and foster a sense of social responsibility in the next generation. As the 2016 National Teacher of the Year and a frequent spokesperson for education, Ms. Hayes says she hopes to motivate more people to become educators and play a part in shaping the citizens of tomorrow.

"As a teacher, I strive to facilitate learning in a way that engages students by connecting on a personal level and stimulating academic growth, while simultaneously producing contentious and productive members of society," said Ms. Hayes.

Each year, the Urban League of Greater Chattanooga-as part of the National Urban League movement-celebrates Equal Opportunity Day as a community-wide celebration of inclusion. This year's event theme is "Equity in Education," focusing on the role that educators and the community play in progressing education for all students. To recognize corporate and individual leadership in the region, the Urban League will give out three awards at the event: Inclusion by Design Award, Community Impact Award and the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Award.

"The Urban League desires to raise awareness of the importance of teacher leadership and community engagement in addressing educational inequities for low-income and minority youth who face significant barriers to academic and career success," said Warren E. Logan, Jr., president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Chattanooga. "We believe Jahana Hayes' exceptional record as an educator and her passion for engaging youth in their communities will resonate with educators and leaders across the community who attend this year's EOD event."

The Urban League's education programs include an afterschool program, STEM Academy, summer coding camp, National Achievers Society and the Infinite Scholars Scholarship Fair. The Urban League fosters economic empowerment through the Entrepreneurship Center, NextLevel Chattanooga, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, Employment Center and homeownership counseling. In addition, the Urban League offers health and wellness initiatives focused on improving health outcomes for underserved populations.

The Urban League is offering several sponsorship levels or individual tickets for the event. All proceeds from the event will support the Urban League's empowerment programs. For more information, visit www.ulchatt.net. or call Lily Sanchez at 756-1762 or lsanchez@ulchatt.net.






SEPT. 24

ORANGE ASEMMBLY OF GOD YARD SALE

Orange Assembly of God will hold a yard sale Saturday, Sept. 24 from 7 a.m. - 2 p.m. The yard sale will be held on Route 15 in front of the church. Office furniture, household goods, some clothing and baked goods will be available. Taste of Hope will be selling fried chicken. To donate or sell on consignment, please call 672-3377 or 672-0479 and leave a message.

MT. CALVARY BAPTIST CHURCH PRE-THANKSGIVING DINNER

The Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, Nasons, will host the Usher's Auxillary, District 2, for their Pre-Thanksgiving Dinner Saturday, Sept. 24 at 3 p.m. All are welcome to attend.

SEPT. 25

BETHEL UMC HOMECOMING

Bethel United Methodist Church will hold its homecoming service Sunday, Sept. 25 at 11 a.m. The Rev. Henry Aylor will be the guest speaker and special music will be provided by the youth of Oak Grove Mennonite Church. A covered-dish lunch will follow at the pavilion.

OFFICERS DAY AT MT. PLEASANT BAPTIST CHURCH

Mt. Pleasant will celebrate its annual officers day on Sunday, Sept. 25. The guest for the 2:30 p.m. evening service will be the Rev. John Saunders of Emanuel Baptist Church, Orange, along with his choir and congregation. All officers are invited to participate.

EMANUEL BAPTIST CHURCH GUEST PASTOR

Pastor John Saunders of Emanuel Baptist Church will be on vacation Sunday, Sept. 25. The Rev. Dr. Tracie Daniels, Associate Pastor of Union Run Baptist Church, will be preaching the 11 a.m. service.

MT. ZION UMC HOMECOMING

Mt. Zion United Methodist Church will hold its annual Homecoming service on Sunday, Sept. 25 at 11 a.m. The Rev. Ray Brill will be the featured speaker. Rev. Brills message will be A Homecoming to Remember. He will preach from two texts: Jeremiah 29: 10-14 and Luke 15:17-24. Rev. Follett will lead worship, and special music will be provided by the Mt. Zion UMC choir, the Hurt Hollow Band and Pickin Daisies. Lunch will follow the service. All are welcome. Zion United Methodist Church is located at 2394 Mt. Zion Church Road, Oak Park. For further information, call 672-5233.

BLUE RUN BAPTIST CHURCH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

Blue Run Baptist Church, Barboursville, will be celebrating Pastor Peggy Brices 20th Anniversary on Sunday, Sept. 25 at 3 p.m. Their guest will be Bishop Mary Bonner, Pastor of Harvest International Full Gospel Church, Petersburg, along with her choir and congregation. All are invited.

OCT. 1

SINGING PASTORS/MINISTERS

Main Uno Baptist Church will host a Singing Pastors/Ministers program Saturday, Oct. 1 at 4 p.m.

OCT. 2

REV. LUNDYS 19TH ANNIVERSARY

Main Uno Baptist Church will celebrate pastor the Rev. Dr. Darnell Lundys 19th anniversary on Sunday, Oct. 2. The guest preacher for the 11 a.m. service will be the Rev. Lloyd Feggans, Associate of the New Green Mountain Baptist Church. The guest preacher for the 3 p.m. service will be the Rev. Dr. Lehman Bates of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Charlottesville, along with his choir and congregation.

UNION BAPTIST CHURCH HOMECOMING

Union Baptist Church, located at 312 Cobb Street, Gordonsville, will be celebrating its homecoming Sunday, Oct. 2. Revival services begin Monday, Oct. 3 and continue through Wednesday, Oct. 5. The day begins with Sunday school at 9:30 a.m. followed by the morning worship service at 11 a.m. Lunch will be served afterwards. Homecoming service begins at 2:30 p.m. with prayer and praise, and a worship service at 3 p.m. The guest pastor for Sunday afternoon will be Bishop Frederick O. Jones, Pastor of the Harvest Assembly Baptist Church, Alexandria. Bishop Jones will be accompanied by his choir and church family. Revival services will be held Monday, Oct. 3 and continue through Wednesday, Oct. 5. Prayer and praise services will occur nightly at 7 p.m. with Bishop Jones. Various choirs will deliver the music. Please contact 832-5293 for more information.

SOMERSET CHRISTIAN CHURCH HOMECOMING

Everyone is invited to join Somerset Christian Church at their homecoming on Sunday, Oct. 2. Their church service will begin at 11 a.m. with Minister Clay Corbin officiating. Lunch will be served after the service.

OCT. 8

MT. PISGAH BAPTIST CHURCH APPRECIATION SERVICE

Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church will hold a service in appreciation of Deacon Phillip Henderson on Saturday, Oct. 8 at 3 p.m. The event will feature special guests The Faithful Few, from Kilmarnock. For more information, call 854-6927.

BREAST CANCER AWARENESS PROGRAM

Shady Grove Baptist Church, Orange, will host a breast cancer awareness program on Saturday, Oct. 8 at 11 a.m. The event will include praise dance performances, soul-stirring songs, and a testimonial from guest speaker Sister Debra Syrkes Minor. For more information, contact Sylvia Ellis Tyree at 854-8835.

OCT. 9

MAIN UNO BAPTIST CHURCH 94TH ANNIVERSARY

Main Uno Baptist Church will celebrate its 94th church anniversary on Sunday, Oct. 9. The guest preacher for the 11 a.m. service will be the Rev. Dr. Earl Pendleton, Assistant to the Pastor of Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church, Charlottesville.

MT. HOLY BAPTIST CHURCH USHER DAY

Mt. Holy Baptist Church will celebrate Usher Day on Sunday, Oct. 9 at 3 p.m., with special guests the Rev. Dwayne Robertson and the Mt. Olive Baptist Church of Culpeper congregation.

MT. PISGAH BAPTIST CHURCH ANNIVERSARY

Mount Pisgah Baptist Church, located at 217 Mt. Pisgah Church Road, Tanners, invites all to celebrate our 137th church anniversary as well as the 13th anniversary of our pastor, the Rev. Walter Bryant on Sunday, Oct. 9. Church anniversary service will begin at 11 a.m. with Rev. Darryle Crump as the guest preacher. The pastors anniversary service will begin at 3 p.m. with the Rev. Nathaniel Butler as the guest preacher. Lunch will be served. For more information, call 540-672-9065.

OCT. 15

PREGNANCY CENTER FUNDRAISING BBQ

The Pregnancy Centers of Central Virginia will host its annual Fall Fundraising Barbeque on Saturday, Oct. 15 at 5:30 p.m. at Orange County High School. Hear abortion survivor, Gianna Jessen, as she shares her testimony and inspires supporters to fund another year of free services for moms and babies through The Pregnancy Center ministry in Orange. Visit VirginiaPregnancy.org/Events to reserve a seat today or call 661-0099.

HARVEST FESTIVAL/CRAFT SHOW

Craigs Baptist Church will hold a harvest festival/craft show on Saturday, Oct. 15 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Vendors are still needed and may contact 854-5284 for more information. Craigs Baptist Church is located at 14123 W. Catharpin Rd., Spotsylvania Courthouse.

OCT. 22

MT. HOLY BAPTIST CHURCH CHOIR DAY

Mt. Holy Baptist Church will celebrate Choir Day on Sunday, Oct. 22 at 3 p.m. A special guest choir, as well as Nikisha Diggs and the One Accord Gospel Band, will attend. All are welcome.

DEC. 2

BASKET RAFFLE AND VENDOR BAZAAR

St. Isidore Farmer Catholic Church has additional spaces available for a two-day gift basket raffle and vendor bazaar on Friday, Dec. 2 from 12 -7 p.m. and Saturday, Dec. 3 from 9 a.m. Items sold should be handmade. The cost for vendor space is $35/day or $50 for both days. Contact Barbara Mosticone at (434) 242-2072 or rhino92@yahoo.com for more information.

NOTICES

CALL-IN BIBLE STUDY

Beulah Baptist Church, Rixeyville, hosts a free call-in Bible study with Pastor Kenneth Pitts every Wednesday from 7 -- 7:30 p.m., studying the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. The call-in number is (302) 202-1118, access code 862090.

CHRIST ANGLICAN DISCUSSION SERIES

Christ Anglican Fellowship will host a seven-week discussion series, Objections to Christianity, Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. at the Christ Anglican Fellowship Center, located at 153 E. Main St., Orange. All serious inquirers welcome. For more information, call 672-8331.

COMEDIAN WEBCAST

Orange Church of the Nazarene will host SHEjammygans, a not-so-late night live webcast talk show starring Christian comedian Anita Renfroe. Be ready for an hour of laughs, conversations and fun. This event is held the first and third Tuesdays of each month at 9 p.m. in the church sanctuary. For more information, call 661-0145 or visit SHEjammygans.com.

EXERCISE AND DEVOTION SERIES

Orange Church of the Nazarene will host Sweatin with Jesus every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday morning at 9 a.m. at Fellowship Hall, at the corner of Nelson and Belleview Street in Orange. Come enjoy low-impact exercise and devotions for free! For more information, call 661-0145.

CANCER SUPPORT GROUP

A free cancer support group will be held every Thursday 12:30  2 p.m. starting June 2 for eight weeks, facilitated by Counseling Interventions. Meetings will be held at Orange Presbyterian Church. Child care will be provided. For information or to register, call 672-4240. There is no cost to attend.

CRAIGS BAPTIST PROGRAMS

Craigs Baptist Church, 14123 W. Catharpin Road, holds its Sunday morning worship at 9:30 a.m. and Sunday School at 11 a.m.; ladies Bible study every Sunday at 6 p.m.; midweek worship every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Craigs is hosting an open gym/Bible study Tuesday nights for teens (ages 12 and up) that will run through the summer months. Contact the church office for information on AWANA, VBS, Centershot or teen open gym night at 854-5284.

GORDONSVILLE DAYSTAR WORSHIP KIDS SERVICES

Gordonsville Daystar Worship, located at 303 N High Street (beside Gordon Barber Elementary), will be conducting special services for children at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings from Sept. 18 through Nov. 6. Their new Youth & Children's pastor has many years experience as a public school teacher and school administrator. She has many VBS style activities, games, music and creative ministry planned! The theme of the services is "Go for the Gold" and is based on the Olympic Games!
Country music legend Garth Brooks will perform in Virginias state capital for the first time in 19 years at a Nov. 12 concert at the Richmond Coliseum as part of his world tour with wife Trisha Yearwood.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Sept. 30. There is an eight-ticket limit for purchase at ticketmaster.com or 866/448-7849. Including fees, all tickets to the Garth Brooks concert in Richmond will sell through TicketMaster for nearly $75, according to a news release.
Telemedicine offers parents and their pediatricians a new tool to keep children from having to go to the emergency room for routine care. This fall, five telemedicine clinics will open in Hamilton County schools as a result of a partnership between the Pediatric Health Improvement Coalition, Hamilton County Department of Education, and Childrens Hospital at Erlanger.

Trenton is in second grade at Orchard Knob Elementary School. His mom, Kristeen Brumfield, is a fourth grade teacher at the same school. If Trenton gets sick she has a hard time leaving her students to take him to the pediatrician. He always seems to get sick at 2:30 in the afternoon," said Ms. Brumfield. "By that time you cant get in to see the doctor, so your choices are an urgent care clinic or the emergency room. They dont know him there. Nurse Regina sees him at school every day. She knows whats normal for him, and hes comfortable with her.

Orchard Knob is one of five elementary schools in Hamilton County that will be using telemedicine this year. Telemedicine allows the school nurse to talk with a nurse practitioner at Childrens Hospital at Erlanger through a secure video link. With special equipment, the nurse practitioner can listen to the childs lungs and heart, as well as look in his ears and mouth from across the city. After the visit, the nurse practitioner calls the parents and the pediatrician, ensuring that everyone stays up to date with the childs care.

For many of our community's children, access to health care is a near impossible challenge," said Dr. R. Allen Coffman, president of the Pediatric Health Improvement Coalition for the Tennessee Valley, an organization helping get this technology installed in Hamilton County schools. "These children attend their neighborhood school every day. Taking health care to the center of the child's community, the neighborhood school, knocks down almost all of the challenges to receiving health care.

PHICs vision is a community created to the health and well-being of all children.

Jacqueline Burney, the Telemedicine care coordinator for Hamilton County Department of Education, is excited to have the clinics. Studies have shown that healthy kids have better academic outcomes," she said. "It also increases classroom time. If they are seen here they may be able to go back to class instead of calling their parent and sending them home.

Principal Lafrederick Thirkill agrees. Not only does telemedicine provide high-quality medical care by trusted providers, but it also give students the opportunity to see the impact of technology and the way it can enhance medicine.

In addition to Orchard Knob Elementary, there are telemedicine clinics at East Ridge Elementary, Woodmore Elementary, East Side Elementary and East Lake Elementary this fall. As for Trenton, he said the telemedicine visit felt normal  except for the light that hurt his eyes. Then he headed back to class.
The Virginia State Police is experiencing a severe manpower shortage, creating policing deficits on state roadways that officials say make highway safety unsustainable in the long term.

In the first nine months of 2016, 103 sworn employees and 76 civilian employees have left the department. There currently are 116 sworn vacancies in the field, according to a Sept. 16 memo by Col. W. Steven Flaherty, the agencys superintendent. The memo was distributed to state police employees Friday and obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The majority of those leaving are doing so to seek better-paying employment in other local, state and federal agencies, Flaherty writes, adding that applications to join the state police have fallen 48.5 percent since February.

The agencys starting salary of $36,207 for troopers is among the lower police employment wages in Virginia.

The department has 44 troopers in training for a seven-month academy class that is set to graduate Nov. 4.

The next class, which has 60 students, isnt scheduled to graduate for another six months.

Even though they are not in service, the troopers in training are not counted as vacancies, meaning that for practical purposes, the department is 220 troopers short.

Flahertys memo noted that the manpower crisis has been exacerbated by news that state revenue shortfalls would prevent 3 percent pay raises for state employees originally included in Virginias biennial budget. In the week after Gov. Terry McAuliffes announcement, 11 troopers gave notice to leave the department.

In the Richmond area, state police have lost 11 troopers from the 40-trooper allotment for Area 8, which covers the interstate highway system that runs through the city of Richmond and Henrico County, according to another internal memo addressing manpower shortages written by 1st Sgt. John A. Rehme III, the Area 8 commander.

The number has been reduced further to 23 troopers through special assignments inside and outside of the department, and military leave.

Factoring days off, sick leave and mandatory training, staffing in the area frequently dips below the safe and acceptable minimum of 18 troopers that Rehme believes is necessary for each 24-hour period.

Adequate staffing, he writes, does not happen now and has not happened in a long time  I dont sleep well.

Sleep might not come for a while. Flaherty said the next recruiting class, set to begin in March, may be delayed by budget cuts.

We know that you have been asked to do more with less for too long and the resulting consequences are a stark reality being experienced across every section of the department, Flaherty states in the memo.

Flaherty noted that applications for positions in law enforcement are trending downward nationally, but he said state police, which currently have 2,818 sworn and 848 civilian positions, are having a hard time attracting candidates given the low starting salary.

Starting pay in the Henrico Police Department is $43,892, the Hanover County Sheriffs Office pays $41,719, and the Hopewell Police Department pays $41,017.

In Norfolk, starting officers make $41,168, while in Fairfax County, salaries begin at $50,263.

Locally, the Chesterfield County Sheriffs Office, which oversees the county jail, pays $36,500, while in Southwest Virginia, the Wytheville Police Department pays $34,716.

Our troopers are taking up collections for other troopers who cannot afford to buy their own lunch, one commander wrote to another state police official in an email. They are risking their lives every day and cannot afford to eat. What does that say?

Like other state government agencies, the Virginia State Police has not been immune to budget cuts and reductions.

Since 2006, the department has experienced a $94.2 million reduction in general fund budget resources, according to figures provided by the department.

Budget reductions currently under consideration will cut an additional $13.1 million.

Flahertys memo encourages state police employees to communicate with their state senators and delegates.

I wish there was a quick and simple solution to resolve these very serious circumstances, he writes, noting earlier in the memo that the state police executive staff has been discussing compensation with the governors office and members of the General Assembly.

The governors office and state legislative leaders have been trying to navigate the pitfalls of reduced revenue and budget promises.

"The governor is going to do everything he can -- public safety is a top priority," said McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy.

"We're looking at strategies and ways we can mitigate what they've experienced over the last few years. And we have proposed savings through Medicaid expansion that would shield a lot of agencies from these cuts, and Republicans have viewed that as a non-starter."

The leading Republican in the General Assembly expressed concern over how acute the situation has become.

Im grateful for the hardworking men and women of the Virginia State Police and the agencys unwavering commitment to the safety of our commonwealth, said Speaker of the House William J. Howell, R-Stafford.

We are aware of the fundamental challenges we face with our state workforce, and we are working to address those long term, but this is a more immediate concern that needs attention, Howell added, calling a daily manpower shortage in the department very troubling.

(804) 649-6061
James Douglas Vere Nicoll died at his home, Willow Marsh, Locust Dale, Virginia, on Thursday, September 15, 2016, after a valiant battle with cancer.Born in Charlottesville on Thanksgiving Day in 1955, Jamie was the son of the reveredlocal orthopedic surgeon Douglas Vere Nicoll. Jamie attended Middlesex School in Massachusetts and Pitzer College in California. After a few years in the business world of New York City, Jamie returned to his home in Virginia, where he and his devoted wife, Rachel started Summerfield Farm Products, Ltd., a provisioner of high-end meat cuts to renowned chefs across the United States. From a small log cabin in Free Union to an expansive retail shop and processing plant in Culpeper, Jamie was at the forefront of the farm-to-table movement.Jamie earned a reputation as the ultimate authority on meats and charcuterie, and was sought after as a celebrity guest chef for important gourmet gatherings and celebrations across the country. Anyone who ever experienced one of Jamie's meals appreciated his culinary expertise and creativity. From veal and blueberry sausages to smoked salmon to roasting a pig on the spit to flamboyantly eating the eyeballs, Jamie's passion for food and life was contagious. His raucous laughter filled the room and will stay with those who knew and loved him always.In his later years, Jamie returned to his childhood love of horses. From playing polo and training polo ponies to rekindling his love affair with a four-in-hand, Jamie made sure that horses once again became an integral part of his life. In his last few months, his greatest delight was having his brother Roderick and nieces and nephew drive a carriage with him on the farm, something he regularly enjoyed with his wife, Rachel and daughters, Emily and Hannah. His enthusiasm has encouraged the family to continue carriaging as a part of their connection to the land and their heritage.To those of us who loved and admired Jamie's passion for life, courage andgenerosityof spirit, a light has dimmed.The family will hold a private remembrance at Willow Marsh in October.In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to the Equus Foundation,equusfoundation.org.
Stereotypes have consequences. Would officer Betty Shelby have shot and killed Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black motorist, in Tulsa last Friday had "looks like a bad dude" not crackled over her police radio? We may never know. But the result might well have been different had this 40-year-old father of four, returning from a class at the local community college, been described simply as a stranded motorist in need of help.
Cracker Barrels flagship nonprofit partner, Operation Homefront, in partnership with Chase Bank, will present the deed to a new, mortgage-free home for veteran Melissa Schafer and her family on Monday.

Operation Homefront has placed more than 500 families with over 1,200 children into mortgage-free homes and is the provider of choice for short-term and critical assistance, long-term stability and recurring support programs to military families.

Veteran Melissa Schafer, her husband and her three children Cameron, 17, Emma, 13, and Samuel, 8, are receiving the home in Chattanooga.



The deeding ceremony on Monday will be held from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. At the ceremony, Ms. Schafer will be presented the deed and la arge key to her new home by Operation Homefront and Chase. The family will also be getting their first look at their newly decorated living room, featuring decor contributions from Cracker Barrel. Representatives from Operation Homefront, Cracker Barrel and Chase will offer their remarks.

Ms. Schafer was born into a military family, and in 1998, enlisted in the Army National Guard. As a specialist, she served as a military police officer. She patrolled and responded to emergency calls and assisted with crime scene security and investigations. Her first active duty call was in 2002 and after one year she enlisted in the Reserves until 2006. She became active again that same year and in 2007, she deployed to Afghanistan. In 2008, she was honorably discharged suffering from major arthritis in her back.

During her last year in service, Ms. Schafer met her (future) husband, Aaron, who also in the Army serving as a military police officer. They have been married for seven years, and with their three children have been living in a rented apartment.




Siskin Hospital opens its newly expanded Center for NeuroRecovery Outpatient Program to provide advanced care and comprehensive programming for those affected by a broad range of neurological disorders.

For many years, Siskin Hospital has offered specialized treatment programs to inpatients, subacute patients, outpatients and fitness center members. Now, the expanded Center for NeuroRecovery ties all these service levels together in a center of excellence that serves as the hub for those with neurological impairments throughout the continuum of a treatment plan, said officials.

We believe this new program offers an unparalleled scope of neurological services in the Chattanooga region, said Siskin Hospital President and CEO Carol Sim.

The key to the Center for NeuroRecovery is team coordination of a patients treatment plan across programs, the acquisition of expert medical professionals and an engaged and highly competent clinical staff. For example, all Siskin Hospital clinicians working in any of the NeuroRecovery programs must complete a minimum of 10 hours of neurologically-related continuing education annually  and most of them far surpass this baseline expectation. Accordingly, Siskin Hospital has more certified brain injury specialists and certified stroke rehabilitation specialists than any facility in the region.

In addition, new technology allows therapists to identify and measure impairments that in the past were difficult to measure. For instance, speech pathologists can see in real time how a patient is swallowing by using a process known as Fiberoptic Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing. And with the Frenzel Goggles, physical therapists can watch minute involuntary movements of the eyes, giving them vital clues used to establish an effective treatment plan for vertigo.

With a clear diagnostic evaluation, therapists can then use evidence-based neuro-rehabilitative treatment technologies to help restore a patients functional movement, strength, gait, balance and other functional competencies.

The Center for NeuroRecovery also includes a home-like treatment area where patients practice activities of daily living, such as cooking, bed making, and mobility at home. Such motor relearning is critical to helping patients regain their independence, said officials.

A mix of private, semi-private and open treatment spaces, the Center meets the stimulation control needs of neurologically-impaired patients. And a defined exercise area built specifically for neurological deficits helps patients master the use of exercise equipment under the supervision of therapy, making it easier for patients to transition to an independent exercise program.

The Siskin Health & Fitness Center is also an integral component of the Center for NeuroRecovery. Individuals with neurological challenges can receive guidance by specially-trained exercise physiologists in this medical model fitness center.

To talk to one of the Center for NeuroRecovery specialists, or to arrange a tour, call 634-1385.




Siskin Hospital has been awarded a $15,000 grant from the Tennessee Promise of Nursing Grant Program.

Siskin Hospital, with Chattanooga State Community College, will use the grant funds for the Nursing Intern Partnership Program at Siskin Hospital, slated to begin next May. The program will provide nursing students with a comprehensive orientation to a specialty hospital in order to create a seamless transition from school to practice. Following the 10-week intensive summer internship, participating students will be eligible for employment as nurse techs and continue to hone their nursing skills for qualified employment on graduation.

This is a multi-win program, benefiting students, Siskin Hospital, Chattanooga State, the community, and the nursing industry as a whole, said Tracy Reed, DNP, MBA, RN, Siskin Hospital vice president of patient care services and CNO. As the demand for qualified nursing professionals grows, such collaboration between education and service will become increasingly important.

The Tennessee Promise of Nursing Grant Program is designed to help new nursing graduates gain valuable clinical experience through nursing externships, internships or other innovative approaches. In 2016, the program has awarded $171,000 to 12 organizations statewide.

The funds for the Tennessee Promise of Nursing Grant Program were raised at the Promise of Nursing for Tennessee gala event in Nashville. The event raised a total of $285,000 which also funds student scholarships and faculty fellowships in addition to these training grants.

The Tennessee Hospital Association (THA) led the Tennessee campaign and served as the grant program facilitator.
Photos: Inside An Historic, Derelict West Town Church Slated For Demolition

By Stephen Gossett in News on Sep 21, 2016 4:51AM



The push-and-pull between development and preservation is an eternal, irreconcilable conflict for cities. One of the most noteworthyand now urgentexamples in recent history of these competing impulses is the case of St. Boniface Church, in West Town. The architecturally significant but long-unused church has been endangered since at least 1999, with conservation-minded residents and organizations fighting to maintain it all the while. Now, the churchs fate could be sealed in as little as two days.

Preservationists have been fighting to keep the church standing in recent months, according to the Tribune, and according to DNAinfo, a developer who wants to save the church building has until Friday, or else it will be sold to another and all but guaranteed the wrecking ball. With that in mind, this seemed like the perfect moment to give readers a look inside St. Bonifacefor what might be the last time.

The stunning, 113-year-old Romanesque Revival church was designed by Henry Schlacks, the most famous and celebrated architect of Chicago churches. It has also been closed since 1990 and that disuse has given way to disrepair. Both the splendor and neglect are both on display in the images above, often within a single frame. Our photographer Matt Tuteur has been taking photos inside the vacant church for years, and he shared a collection of his favorite photos, above, with us last month.

The city notified neighbors last month that unless Stas Development purchases the church (1358 W. Chestnut St.) by Friday, Sept. 23, it would be sold to developers Guardian Capital, who will likely demolish the building and use the site to build new homes. Stas wants to maintain the structure, use it to house condos and add an adjacent building to be used by the Chicago Academy of Music.

Whether or not that plan succeeds within the next few days will determine if the beauty that still shines through the ruins in the images above will be permitted to stand.
Bianca Del Rio, James Franco, Anthony Rapp Headline Reeling Fest Schedule

By Joel Wicklund in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 21, 2016 3:40PM



Christian Slater, Garrett Clayton, Keegan Allen and James Franco in promotional art for "King Cobra." (Courtesy Reeling and Allied Integrated Marketing.)

Opening with a starring vehicle for drag icon Bianca Del Rio and closing with a gay porn-themed crime saga produced by and co-starring James Franco, this year's schedule for Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival is not short on star power.

The festival's 34th edition runs Sept. 22 to 29, with opening night at the Music Box Theatre and subsequent films at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema and Chicago Filmmakers, which originated and continues to oversee the event.

Del Rio (a.k.a. Roy Haylock), who gained national popularity after winning the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race, will attend the opening night gala and showing of Hurricane Bianca, a comedy written and directed by Columbia College grad Matt Kugelman. The supporting cast features Alan Cumming, SNL veteran Rachel Dratch, Margaret Cho and RuPaul.

Inspired by a true murder case tailor-made for tabloid headlines, closing night draw King Cobra stars Franco as a gay porn producer who plots to kill a rival (Christian Slater) in order to obtain the rights to work with a rising star in the skin flick biz. Eighties and '90s teen film icons Molly Ringwald and Alicia Silverstone also star in this movie generating a lot of advance buzz.

Also getting much attention is Closet Monster, which was named Best Canadian Feature Film at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. The dark coming-out and coming-of-age drama is reportedly quite audacious in story and style. One character certainly stands out in the festival program's synopsis: a talking hamster voiced by Isabella Rossellini.

Another high-profile guest appearing is Joliet native Anthony Rapp, who has a devoted fan base stemming from his role in the original Broadway production of Rent (as well as subsequent revivals and the movie adaptation). Rapp will attend to help promote two films he stars in: bwoy, in which he plays a bereaved father drawn to a young Jamaican man; and Do You Take This Man?, a romantic drama about a gay couple navigating various hurdles on the eve of their wedding.

Other potential highlights on the schedule include Sundance Audience Award winner First Girl I Loved and the documentary centerpiece, Upstairs Inferno, which details the 1973 burning of a gay bar in New Orleans that took 32 lives. (It stood as the largest targeted mass murder of homosexual people in U.S. history until this year's tragedy at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.)

Reeling also offers multiple short film programs to go along with over 30 features. Filmmaker Q&As, pre- and post-screening parties and other special events are also on the calendar. Pricing varies for individual tickets and festival passes, with discounted admission if you sign up for a membership. For the complete Reeling schedule and details on all the films, click here.


Why 1000 New Police Officers Might Still Fail To Curb Homicides

By Stephen Gossett in News on Sep 21, 2016 4:18PM



Tripp Chicago

Theres no denying it: Gun violence in Chicago is a tragic, international embarrassment, and it desperately needs remedying. To that end, the Chicago Police Department will announce on Wednesday plans to hire nearly 1000 new officers. But the million-dollar question remainswill it work?

The city of Chicago has tallied an alarming 500-plus homicides this year. We are on pace to having the most violent year in over a decade. A major reason for such a high homicide rate could be that so many murders go unsolved, argued Alex Kotlowitz, the Chicago-based author of There Are No Children Here and co-producer of The Interrupters, in the New Yorker on Tuesday. In the article, Thomas Hargrove, of the Murder Accountability Project, says clearance rates and murder totals are correlated. If you allow murders to go unsolved, it all goes to hell, he told Kotlowitz. In 2015, only 26 percent of all homicides resulted in a murder charge.

At the same time, Chicago is experiencing an ongoing shortage of detectives. According to Reuters, Chicago has seen its detective ranks fall from 1,252 in 2008 all the way down to 922. "You get so many cases you could not do an honest investigation on three-quarters of them, a retired detective told the news agency.

According to Anthony Guglielmi, CPD Communications Director, the wave of hiring will include 200 detectivesan improvement but still below the 2008 figure.

Here's a breakdown of new 970 police officer positions coming to CPD: 516 officers, 92 field training officers, 200 dets, 112 sgts, 50 LTs  Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) September 21, 2016

Of course, as Chicago Magazine pointed out when looking at the detective shortage, other factors exist, including social-service cuts and a scarcity of forensic investigators. And as Kotlowitz points out, police often blame a lack of cooperative witnesses. But in an otherwise gaffe-prone speech, even former Supt. Garry McCarthy acknowledged that police have a well-deserved bad reputation in the African-American community.

Whether the city's hiring spree works or not will partially depend on the success of new detectives, but it also depends on the actions of the 516 added officers who are not detectives, trainers, or upper brass. Kotlowitz quotes Ghettoside author Jill Levoy: When violent crimes go unpunished while nonviolent ones get hammered, many conclude that the state seeks control, not justice. The problem is manifold, of course, but when it comes to more police, the "how" will prove as important as the "how many."
Famed Chinese Pianist Lang Lang was named New York City's first-ever Cultural Tourism Ambassador by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday, as part of the U.S.-China Tourism Year events that promote travel and tourism between the United States and China.

Famed Chinese Pianist Lang Lang was named New York City's first-ever Cultural Tourism Ambassador by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sep. 20, 2016. [Photo/gmw.cn]

Lang was also inducted into the Ride of Fame by the Grey Line Company, which operates the city's iconic double-decker sightseeing buses. He was also presented with a double-decker bus, with a permanent artwork and a special seat decorated with his photo and signature.

"I'm so excited, today will be a very long and beautiful memory that stays in my mind forever," Lang said at the induction ceremony on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street outside Steinway Hall in the Borough of Manhattan.

Lang said as the city's Cultural Tourism Ambassador, he will invite friends from China to New York City and enjoy the best classical music and cultural events.

He will also encourage friends and fans to travel to China and experience the wonderful culture there.

New York City also proclaimed Sept. 20, 2016 as "Lang Lang Day" in the city.

In 2015, 2.67 million Chinese visited the United States. "New York City is definitely the #1 dream destination in 2016 for Chinese travelers," said Pierre Gervois, Publisher of the Shanghai travelers' Club magazine.

He said the attractivity of New York City is extremely strong for all categories of Chinese travelers, from Chinese real estate investors to students.
The Chinese music market, once seen as chaotic, is now viewed as having enormous untapped potential, thanks to the country's online user base of 650million people and a growing number of licensed digital services.

Andy Ng (second from left), general manager of QQ Music, speaks at the recent forum. [Photo provided to China Daily]

During the recent Music Matters 2016 event, which was held from Sept 12 to 15 in Singapore, the Chinese music market was in focus at the QQ Music China Forum: The World Turns to China.

Now in its 11th year, Music Matters, with live performances and forums, is a global platform for the music industry in the Asia-Pacific and a gateway for budding artists.

Speaking at the event, Andy Ng, general manager of QQ Musicrun by China's internet giant, Tencentsaid that there were about 700 million music lovers in China now, and for QQ Music, the number of monthly active users was about 400million,which comprises nearly 90 percent of the country's online music market.

Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.
Walmart India operates stores in nine states across the country. In the next five years, it is planning to add 50 more stores, taking the total number to 70.

Mumbai: Walmart India is evaluating policy guidelines to come up with a "food-only" retail model, after the government has allowed 100 per cent foreign direct investment in food retail, a top company official said on September 21.

"We are currently evaluating all the policy guidelines and we do not have an 'only food model' anywhere. So, we need to conceptualise, evaluate and come up with a model, which takes time," Walmart India CEO Krish Iyer told reporters on the sidelines of India Retail Forum here.

"It is not something we will jump into very quickly," he added.

On government's move to open up food retail to investment, he said all the stakeholders including retailers, consumers, and farmers will benefit from it, and it will also increase access to capital, which will promote retail enterprise.

For Walmart India, food retail in the cash and carry business accounts for more than 65 per cent of business, he said.

"Particularly looking at the importance of food, we do believe that we will continue to focus a lot more on food in our cash and carry stores," Iyer said.

He also noted that resellers, particularly mom-and-pop stores are the most important channel for Walmart.

"Our e-commerce (B2B) experience has been good, and while we do not speak about the e-commerce sales, more than 50 per cent of buying is digitally influenced," he said.

Iyer further said that Walmart India is focusing on private labels, however, customer buying proposition is more crucial. Walmart India has two private labels Member's Mark and Right Buy.

"The idea of private labels is to support make in India programme," he said.

Walmart India operates stores in nine states across the country. In the next five years, it is planning to add 50 more stores, taking the total number to 70.

"We continue to focus on Tier II and Tier III cities, and the opportunities here are as good as metro towns," Iyer said, adding that availability of land is a challenge in metros but the company continues to look for good options.
The BSNL subsidy support will be given from the Universal Service Obligation Fund.

New Delhi: The Cabinet today cleared the long-pending compensation of Rs 1,250 crore for public sector telecom company BSNL to support rural landline connections installed before April 1, 2002.

"The Cabinet approves subsidy of Rs 1,250 crore to BSNL as compensation for deficit incurred by BSNL in operating rural wire-line connections," said Frank Noronha, the government's Principal Spokesperson, on Twitter.

The BSNL subsidy support will be given from the Universal Service Obligation Fund for the rural connections installed prior to 1 April, 2002, he added.

The state-run telecom firm has asked the government to provide Rs 2,000 crore to support rural wireline connections. On the basis of the submission of BSNL and the detailed information in respect of working rural wire-line connections installed before April 1, 2002, the deficit per rural wire-line connection was estimated at Rs 4,876 for 2011-12.

Accordingly, the deficit from the rural wire-line connections installed before April 1, 2002 for 2011-12 and 2012-13 were estimated at Rs 1,593 crore and Rs 1,265 crore respectively.

The Department of Telecom had paid subsidy for these connections to BSNL up to July 17, 2011. Based on the trend at that point, regulator Trai estimated subsidy of Rs 1,500 crore for 2011-12 with effect from July 17, 2011 and Rs 1,250 crore for the subsequent year effective July 18, 2012.

BSNL has received Rs 1,500 crore subsidy and the Cabinet approved the pending amount of Rs 1,250 crore today.
The Commerce Ministry is also in consultations with the ports authorities for timely handling of cargo.

New Delhi: Worried over continuous dip in exports, the Commerce Ministry is working on a proposal to enhance the logistics competitiveness of exporters and is discussing it with the railways as well as port authorities.

As part of the proposal, the department of commerce is suggesting to the Railways Ministry that it needs to clearly distinguish between consignments for exports, imports and general in terms of the freight rates, an official said.

It has also suggested to the railways to work on ways to reduce the delivery time of consignments providing to traders more predictability and reliability. Indian exporters time and again demand drastic cuts in freight rates to enhance their price competitiveness in the global markets.

"Logistics costs of exports are currently very high in India and due to this, Indian goods are less competitive in the global markets. Railways should give competitive rates to exporters," the official said, adding that cross-subsidisation between passenger and freight trains is also impacting the railways in terms of transportation.

Citing an example, an industry expert said the time taken for delivery of consignment through Railways from Tughlakabad, in Delhi to Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNPT) is huge and needs to be reduced to about 36 hours.

In India, the container transport is heavily inclined in favour of roads due to high freight rates of railway, unpredictable and unreliable scheduling of freight trains, and poor last-mile connectivity. The Commerce Ministry is also in consultations with the ports authorities for timely handling of cargo.

Currently, traders have to spend a lot of time in off- loading and on-loading their consignments from ports, impacting the country's trade. FIEO Director General Ajay Sahai said that improvement in port infrastructure would help in reducing transaction costs and boost shipments.

A Commerce Ministry strategy paper released in 2010 had emphasised upon the need to invest billions in improving infrastructure to boost exports. It had asked the government to invest to modernise roads, ports, railways, airports, power and customs stations.

Between December 2014 and May 2016, exports fell for 18 months straight due to weak global demand and slide in oil prices. Shipments witnessed growth only in June this year but entered into the negative zone again in July and August.

To boost shipments of both goods and services, the Commerce Ministry is pressing for better exchange rate policy, alignment of freight rates with global standards and a liberalised visa regime.
The agreement would enter into force on the date of notification of completion of the procedures required by the respective laws of the two countries.

New Delhi: The Cabinet on September 21 gave approval for signing and ratification of an agreement between India and Samoa for exchange of information to curb tax evasion.

The agreement enables India and Samoa to provide assistance through exchange of information that is foreseeably relevant to the administration and enforcement of the domestic laws of the two countries concerning taxes, said an official statement after the Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The agreement would enter into force on the date of notification of completion of the procedures required by the respective laws of the two countries.

Negotiations for entering into an agreement for exchange of information with respect to taxes were finalised between India and Samoa in June, 2016 and both countries have agreed on the text of the agreement.

"The agreement will stimulate the flow of exchange of information between India and Samoa for tax purposes which will help curb tax evasion and tax avoidance," it said. It further said at present there are no financial implications.

However, in the event of extraordinary costs exceeding USD 500, the same will be borne by India. India has similar provisions in tax information exchange agreements with other countries.

The information received under the agreement will be treated as confidential and could be disclosed only to persons or authorities concerned with assessment, collection, enforcement, prosecution or determination of appeals in relation to taxes covered under the agreement.

Also, information may be disclosed to any other person or entity or authority or jurisdiction with the prior written consent of the information sending country.

The pact also provides for mutual agreement procedure "for resolving any difference or for agreeing on procedures".

Samoa is a nation comprising the westernmost group of the Samoan Islands, in Polynesia.
Dadlani had described Sagar's speech in the assembly on August 26 as "monkery". (Photo: ANI)

Chandigarh: Music composer Vishal Dadlani on Wednesday said that Jain monk Tarun Sagar had forgiven him for his comments on his speech in the Haryana Assembly.

Dadlani said that he found his comments against the saint unnecessary and is glad that the Jain guru has accepted his apology.

"Guruji has forgiven me and I think we have also developed a connection between us. We both are blunt. He said that whenever I am free and he has time I should visit him. I felt very nice after meeting him," said Dadlani.

"The main thing is that he has forgiven me. I did not expect him to be so nice with me. The case is a different thing; judiciary will take its own course. However, this was my attempt to seek apology from Muni ji as I felt that the statement I made was not necessary," he added.

Dadlani, who was lacerated for his sarcastic tweet on Jain monk Tarun Sagar last month, met the spiritual leader at his ashram to deliver his latest apology.

Dadlani had described Sagar's speech in the assembly on August 26 as "monkery" and later deleted the tweet and added that the monk "has no clothes on", which reflected an unhealthy trend of religion colouring politics.
Katrinas suspiciously over-friendly behaviour with the media remained as short-lived as Baar Baar Dekho in the theatres. After going all-out to woo the media with smiles and her quaint Hindi, Katrina retreated right into her shell, refusing even to talk to the paparazzi at the airport on September 14, when she left for London.

According to eyewitnesses, Katrina not only refused to speak to the media at the airport, but also refused to get out of her car until the photographers left. Says the source, Katrina was willing to miss her flight. But she wouldnt get out of her car until the paparazzi left. It was just weird.

This is the same actress who was prancing and grooving all over the place with Sidharth Malhotra to promote Baar Baar Dekho, just two weeks ago, says a filmmaker who has worked with Katrina.

She effectively played the fun-loving gal on Kapil Sharmas show, leaving the team stunned. She was even selling chappals on Comedy Night Bachao. And now, she is back to being her sullen old self. Kuch toh consistency honi chahiye behaviour mein. Or is it just a use-the-media-as-per-your-convenience stunt?

Actress bolts from award ceremony

Katrina Kaif was presented with the Smita Patil Memorial Award for Best Actor by the socio-cultural organisation, Priyadarshini Academy, on Monday. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari honoured the actress with the award.

Also, a day before the award ceremony, the news of Katrina being given this award had spread, more so because of the trolls who made fun of the actress, who is not quite known for her acting skills.

Katrina herself did not speak at the function and actually opted to sneak out after the ceremony, even though the publicist handling the event had promised media interaction. When contacted, the actress spokesperson informed, Media interactions with Katrina were never planned at the award ceremony.
Mumbai: Angeline Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, her partner of 12 years, shocking fans of the much loved couple. The petition that Jolie has filed cites irreconcilable differences as a reason for the divorce.

Several rumours are doing the rounds with regard to the exact reason for the split and one of the prominent from among them was news of Pitts growing proximity with his Allied co-star Marion Cotillard.

According to reports, Jolie hired a private investigator to spy on the couple during the shoot of the film as there were reports since a few months of the couple getting too comfortable with each other on the sets. But surely sad victimhood is not Angelina Jolie's style?

The couple has six children and the actress has asked for physical custody of them. She is also asking the judge to give Pitt visitation rights and is in favour of a joint legal custody.
The couple is now heading for a splitsville after 11 years of togetherness. (Photo: AFP)

Washington D.C: Brad Pitt may be under a turmoil post divorce filing by his wife Angelina Jolie, but there is one record the father to six would to like set straight- his kids' "well-being."

The 'World War Z' actor expressed deep sadness and concern in a conversation with the People magazine, saying, "I am very saddened by this but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids."

"I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time," he requested.

Fans and media alike, no one is a stranger to the fascinating romance and the family life of this Hollywood couple, who are now heading for a splitsville after 11 years of togetherness.

As a couple, Brangelina have come a long way dealing with personal as well as professional issues and it is safe to say it is natural instinctive for the father to be saddened by the announcement after all the years stood for each other.

When in 2013, she had preventive double mastectomy, Pitt was by Jolie's side reportedly for every procedure. He was there again after a 2015 ovarian cancer scare led her to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes.

The 'Mr And Mrs Smith' actor is just as outspoken about his support for his wife. Back then he was reported to have said that he found "Angie's choice., absolutely heroic."

"All I want is for her to have a long and healthy life, with myself and our children," he said in a statement then.
Actor Jayam Ravi, who has wrapped up the shooting of director Lakshmans Bogan, has started working for his next project with director Vijay, where he is paired opposite Telugu and Hindi actress Sayyeshaa Saigal (who will be seen in Shivaay). Produced by AL Azhagappan, the yet-untitled film also stars Varun, Thambi Ramaiah and Sanjay Bharathi in significant roles.

Speaking to DC, Ravi says, This movie will explore a topic that no director has ever done before. It will be high on human emotions and will emphasise on the tag, Who is a better human being? It is definitely a new character in my career. I am doing my homework to get the role right.

The actor believes that Sayyeshaa is star material  She is sincere and her pronunciation of Tamil is on par with any native speaker. The team is planning to shoot this yet-to-be- titled film in Chennai, Thailand and Andaman Islands.

Vijay has ensured that the cast is involved in workshops, before the start of the schedules. We had a three-day workshop and one-day script-reading session. We understood the seriousness of the script and are now comfortable with each other on the sets, Ravi adds.

Meanwhile, the Thani Oruvan actor confirmed that he is all set to shoot for Shakti Soundar Rajans Tik Tik Tik from October. Nivetha Pethuraj of Oru Naal Koothu fame will be his romantic interest  Its a space film and we are confident of pulling it off. This wont be a science-fiction like Interstellar, but an entertainer. The film will be a visual extravaganza with a lot of set works, he concludes.
An investigation has been launched after a former doctoral student broke news online regarding the qualification of China's national test center for genetically modified organisms.

Wei Jingliang dropped out of school from the Beijing-based Institute of Animal Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences on April 1 this year, despite possibly receiving his doctoral degree in July 2017.

He had been a member of the Agriculture Ministry's center for safety supervision and testing of transgenetic animals and feed, also known as the national test center for GMOs, at the research institute.

According to Wei, he was appointed archivist of the transgenetic test center in mid-May 2015, prior to a triennial inspection of the center's archives in July of the same year. He was responsible for the development and management of all archives.

There is no routine records of center activities for the past three years due to time taken up by daily research tasks, Wei said. "To pass inspection, all files have to be made up within a month,"he added.

That is what Wei called fraud.

"Fraud here refers not to the test itself, but to its qualification, as triennial inspection is seen as a kind of authentication," Wei explained. "The center fabricated archives for the past three years and pretended to have to be qualified."

Wei admitted that the key point in the issue is the management of the laboratory instead of transgene tests.

In June 2015, Wei had a talk with his supervisor Li Kui and expressed his desire to quit, as he found the center kept inadequate records of all process files, which he considered inappropriate. However, Li declined his request, saying the center was following the national strategy and did not allow temporary replacement of staff members.

Wei said he quit school because he was disappointed by the degree of fraud in scientific research, and was also once given a warning by the school for his participation in a volunteer program.

As he had received no feedback after reporting the fabrication to authorities, he opted for the online posts. "My aim is to let those wrong doers take responsibility and the country fix systematic loopholes before any major accident occurs," Wei said.

"This 'fraud' is totally different from experimental data fraud as the center didn't do any experiments at all," said Luo Yunbo, a GM food expert with China Agricultural University. "Consumers should not doubt the safety of GM products," he added.

Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences said a joint investigation group set up by the Agriculture Ministry will start inspection work at the center today.
Senior director and producer Dasari Narayana Rao was the chief guest at the audio release function of Premam, which stars Naga Chaitanya.

Whenever I see Chaitanya or his movies, I always feel I am looking at a boy from my neighbourhood. There is magic in his smile and it is with that magic that he makes a heroine (Samantha) fall for him. I dont know what maya she has cast over Chaitanya that he too has fallen for her, said Dasari, referring to the film, Ye Maya Chesave, starring Naga Chaitanya and Samantha.

The director further pointed out that love stories belong to the Akkineni family. I directed ANR in 27 films and 20 of them are love stories. I had a long working relationship with ANR and our film Premabhishekam created a record in Tollywood. The legacy continued with Nagarjuna and now its Naga Chaitanya. I am confident that Akhil, too, will take it to another level, says the veteran director.

Nagarjuna, who attended the function, left early to participate in his fathers birth anniversary programme. Among other celebrities that attended the function, were Shruti Haasan and Madonna Sebastian.
The bark extracts of Ashoka tree are used for the treatment of leucorrhea and other uterine disorders. (Photo: Pixabay)

Bangalore, Karnataka: A joint study by a team of Indian and Canadian scientists has suggested that traditional medicines with Ashoka (botanical name Saraca asoca) as an ingredient are mostly adulterated.

The bark extracts of Ashoka tree are used for the treatment of leucorrhea and other uterine disorders. It also has anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, anti-pyretic, anti-helminthic and analgesic characteristics.

The study carried out by scientists from University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, Kuvempu University, Shimoga, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, Bangalore, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab and University of Guelph, Toronto, Canada, analysed samples from outlets in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and found 80 percent of the samples were spurious.

This is the first comprehensive and large-scale study to demonstrate the widespread adulteration of market samples of Ashoka in India. The study was published in International Journal of Legal Medicine.

"In this paper, we have confined only to the bark extracts of Ashoka where we found 80 percent are spurious. In other medicinal plants, the adulteration ranges from 20 to 100 percent ," Dr. G. Ravikanth, Associate Professor at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore told Indian Science Journal.

Indiscriminate and rampant extraction of the wood of Ashoka to meet the ever-increasing market demand has led to a sharp decline of the plant population. Consequently, it has recently been classified as 'vulnerable' by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"In the absence of any regulatory agency to check the quality of traditional medicines, no studies have been carried out in India to assess the implication of adulterations," said Dr. Ravikanth.

He added, "Studies abroad have shown adverse consequences of adulteration in Indian traditional medicines. For example, more than 100 women suffered kidney failures due to admixtures of roots of anti-inflammatory agent 'Stephania tetrandra' by the roots of a toxic herb Aristolochia fangchi in the United States.

Similarly, Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum) barks that were adulterated with C.Cassia and C. Malabatrum have a bitter and burning flavour. C.cassia contains 1 per cent coumarin, a naturally occurring flavouring substance, which causes hepatotoxicity."

The researchers suggested DNA bar coding to detect and quantify adulteration in raw herbal trade of a variety of medicinal plants. A limitation of this technique, however, is the raw herbal trade material is in the form of powder, billets, or even dried plant material and is extremely recalcitrant to extraction. In such cases, chemical fingerprinting, using techniques such as NMR spectroscopy could be used in conjunction with DNA bar coding to identify herb species and admixtures.

In recent years, there has been great demand for medicinal plants as alternative health care system. India exports over 5000 metric tonnes of herbal products annually and the demand is growing approximately by 10-15 percent.

Most of the herbal medicines are used in the crude forms (unlike the chemical drugs) and have to be taken for a prolonged period. There are no regulatory standards for traditional medicines, as in the case of modern pharmaceutical drugs.
It is an epidemic of depression. Drawing attention to this less understood mental condition, a study reveals that one in every working professional in the country is suffering from depression! Techies, analysts, accountants, auditors, sales executives none is spared. Experts suggest that individuals should take clues and seek help if they are suffering from anxiety or depression. Companies too should consider absenteeism and continuous sick leaves by their employee as a sign of work-related stress and depression and take remedial action. If untreated or undiagnosed, depression could lead to serious diseases, reports Joyeeta Chakravorty

She just broke down one day and I had no idea how to handle the situation. I anyway took time out and spoke to her and tried to pacify her," says a team leader at a private MNC about a colleague, who had received a very bad performance rating.

Such incidents are not rare in corporate offices, which are seeing a rise in depression and work-related stress among their employees. A report on The Mental Health Status of Employees in Corporate India by 1to1Help.net, a professional counselling company for corporates, reveals that 80 per cent of 6000 employees of various organisations in multiple cities, exhibited symptoms of anxiety and 55 per cent of depression. These employees admitted to have been suffering these symptoms for over a year before seeking professional help.

The study also found that the number of people at risk for suicidal behavior had gone up from 2.1 out of 10 in 2008 to 8.21 in July 2016. The data was pooled from results of two self-assessment tests on depression and anxiety taken by employees between July 2014 and July 2016 and self-help articles they had read over a period 15 years as well as their counselling data from 2006 to 2016.

In addition, the counsellors at 1to1Help.net reported seeing an increase in the number of people approaching their employee assistance programme for concerns such as extreme anxiety and depression. There was a rise in the number of people who were at risk for suicidal behavior. From a mere three to five people per week, we were beginning to see an average of two people per day who were at such risk. This called for action, says Ms Archana Bisht, director, 1to1Help.net.

Depression is a very common condition worldwide. Globally, an estimated 350 million people of all ages suffer from it. That is how common it is, reveals Dr Mohan K Isaac, former HoD of the department of psychiatry at Nimhans, and associate professor at the University of Western Australia.

Read  Guest column: Look at the warning signs, seek help for mental health

In the corporate structure there is a different work ethic which is good, but can affect a number of people differently. Many have a place to vent out the frustration, stress and anxiety or join stress buster programmes, but others may not have friends or other avenues to help them keep stress at bay, he explains, adding that work- related stress can have various reasons including work overload or underload, lack of clear responsibilities, job description, role ambiguity, unrealistic deadlines or job and career uncertainty.

There is this fear of losing the job or losing the promotion to someone else which leads to depression and hence employees should find avenues to balance work and personal life. Many can but some cannot, he notes.

In fact so common is depression today in ther city that the OPD at Nimhans is crowded each day with around 250 people, of whom some 35 per cent are battling different stages of it, according to mental health experts.

According to the World Health Organisation,common mental disorders are increasing worldwide. Between 1990 and 2013, the number of people suffering from depression and/or anxiety increased by nearly 50 per cent, from 416 million to 615 million. Close to 10 per cent of the worlds population is affected, and mental disorders account for 30 per cent of the global non-fatal disease burden. Humanitarian emergencies and ongoing conflicts are adding to the numbers. WHO estimates that during emergencies, as many as 1 in 5 people are affected by depression and anxiety.

The age group being hit by depression has drastically reduced and now it is affecting the age bracket of 15-30 in the city, says Dr Chandrashekar, Professor and HOD, Department of Psychiatry, Victoria Hospital.

Companies should incorporate awareness programme, counselling

ePsyclinic.com, an online platform that provides mental health care through therapies and counselling services, conducts some 800 sessions a month for Bengaluru, and of these upto 60 per cent are related to work pressure and job insecurities, 20 per cent to smoking and drug addiction (early stage) and the rest to adolescent issues such as love and career. The average person not trained in psychology cannot interpret these symptoms easily. Mental stressors, anxiety and depression do have a chemical basis, but also more often than not, these stressors also have a life trigger, says Ms Shipra Dawar, founder, ePsyclinic.com.

Ms V Vandana, consultant clinical psychologist at Vikram hospital in the city, stresses the need for an awareness programme and regular counselling sessions in companies. Some companies have in-house counsellors, but a clinical psychologist is recommended for employees with depression and other such issues. In addition they could hold some group sessions once in two or three months and conduct some awareness campaigns as well to highlight the warning signs and tell employees whom to reach out to, she says.

Thankfully employees today are more informed, read web generated material and use the online help which is available. But the biggest problem is for people who do not seek assistance either because they are not aware enough or because there is no help available, says Dr Mohan K Isaac, former HoD department of sychiatry), Nimhans, and WHO consultant, Mental health is a much underrated health concern and does not receive the optimum importance that it should. Mental illnesses are often the leading causes for various physical ailments. With companies covering their employees health insurances, is mental health insured too? The need of the hour is to ensure that companies take the initiative to create a stress- free work environment by providing outlets for employees to voice their grievances and deal with their issues, sums up Ms Archana Bisht, Director, 1to1Help.net

Work related stress

Work overload or under-load

Lack of clear responsibilities, job description, role ambiguity

Unrealistic deadlines

Job insecurity, career uncertainty

Low participation in decision-making

Isolated working conditions

Poor communication

Poor relationships with supervisors

Interpersonal conflicts

Non-supportive culture

Underutilization of skill

Work schedule  shifts, inflexible schedules

Sexual harassment

Work place bullying

Demands on time - Dealing with time pressure

Fear of failure

Fear of making mistakes

Doubts about choice of career

Work related stress

Some jobs may be more stressful than others

Everyones level of stress tolerance is different

What may stress one may not stress another

Find out what aspects of work are stressful to an individual

Consequences of work related stress

Absenteeism, sick leaves

Physical ailments

Poor work performance

Accident proneness. accidents

Tension and conflicts between staff

Anxiety, harmful substance use

Depression, suicidal ideation

Those who became unemployed had twice the risk of increased depressive symptoms and diagnosis of clinical depression than those who remain employed
Pizza" the polar bear stands up inside his enclosure at the Grandview Mall Aquarium in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. (Photo: AFP)

Beijing: A Chinese aquarium holding a forlorn-looking polar bear named Pizza said today it has "no need" for foreign interference, after activists offered to

move the animal to a British zoo.

Animals Asia, a Hong Kong-based organisation, created a petition calling for the closure of the Grandview aquarium in the Chinese city of Guangzhou that attracted half a million signatures. Photos of Pizza shared widely on social media show the bear lying listlessly on the ground in a gloomy, windowless room while visitors crowd around taking photos on their cell phones.

Activists said the Yorkshire Wildlife Park in England had offered to adopt Pizza on condition that he was not replaced by another polar bear, adding the zoo would not pay for the animal due to "fear that any funds could be used to buy more animals". But the zoo declined to comment or confirm the offer while the aquarium operator said no one had contacted him about taking the bear, adding they "have no need for foreign organisations to get involved".

"Yorkshire Wildlife Park has not contacted us," said the general manager of the aquarium, a man surnamed Fan who refused to give his full name. "We are a legally compliant aquarium, run according to Chinese standards and protecting animal rights. In the future we will strengthen the protection of animal rights and

welfare," he added.

The cost of transferring the large, living carnivore nearly 10,000 kilometres from Guangzhou to Doncaster, England "will be raised if the offer is accepted", Animals Asia said. The activists said they are now pushing for a meeting with the aquarium in hopes of getting a response to their offer, adding they will draw up a bill if officials agree to have Pizza delivered.

The animal welfare director of Animals Asia, Dave Neale, said in a statement that the aquarium "have the chance to put their mistake right" and end the crush of negative media attention. The group has been publicising Pizza's plight since the

beginning of the year.
Iceland as an exotic travel destination has been gaining popularity in India for the past few years.

Chennai: After offering its picturesque landscape to Hollywood, Iceland has invited film producers from Kodambakkam to shoot their films in their country. It has also come forward to render assistance, including technical know-how, to entrepreneurs to launch their business ventures in India.

Iceland as an exotic travel destination has been gaining popularity in India for the past few years. Speaking to Deccan Chronicle on the sideline of a meeting with producers and stakeholders in the Tamil film industry at Chennai on Tuesday, Mr Thorir Ibsen, ambassador of Iceland to India, said that the country offers a wide range of landscape and amazing range of geological and natural phenomena with imposing glaciers, geysers, black sand beach makes for arresting visuals, floating icebergs, majestic waterfalls, stark highlands and lava fields.

Iceland became an international tourist destination after the shooting of several blockbuster Hollywood films in the early 1980s. Some of them are -A View to a Kill (1985), Judge Dredd, (1995), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, (2001), Die Another Day (2002), Batman Begins, (2005), Journey to the Center of the Earth, (2008), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), Oblivion (2013), Titanium, (2014), Noah (2014), Interstellar (2014), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and upcoming Fast & Furious 8 (2017). An entire song sequence in 'Dilwale', a Bollywood film, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, a Kollywood film 'Aadavan' featuring Suriya and Nayantara in the lead roles, were shot in Iceland.

Ambassador Mr Thorir Ibsen said that Iceland is a pioneer in the use of geothermal energy for space heating. The country also specialises in the hospitality sector, shipping, food processing, IT and data centers. It provides free and compulsory education up to graduation and quality health care. The country accords importance to women's empowerment with 40 per cent of Parliamentarians, 50 per cent of government servants and 80 per cent of labour force/manpower comprising women.

The ambassador also discussed with businessmen from Tamil Nadu on Tuesday. He has toured several cities in the country to raise awareness about the facilities being offered by Iceland.
Hull, UK: It takes a badass to take on a burglar in a calm and calculated manner and showing extraordinary courage is something Punjabis seem to have mastered.

When it comes to Punjabi aunties, they are not to be taken lightly, and Stuart Gleeson from Hull, UK realised this the hard way. When he decided to threaten Karamjit Sangha as she was sipping on tea, the robber did not have any idea about what was coming.

Sangha who owns a News and Booze store in Hull was enjoying her tea when Gleeson dashed in with a seven inch knife and told her to hand over the cash. Sangha remained calm and told the thief to let her finish her tea.

When Gleeson refused to let her finish, Sangha said OK and picked up a craft knife which she waved at Gleeson to his horror. Karamjit said she didnt intend to hurt him, but the robber was shaking and fled.

Gleeson was later arrested and has now been sentenced to a five year jail term, while Sangha says that people who feel sorry for her should actually feel sorry for the man.
The man asked about how exactly the government plans to protect us from aliens or zombies or extra dimensional beings and if we stand a good chance without Will Smith. (Credit: Screengrab/ Go Goa Gone)

A concerned Indian citizen decided to use the Right To Information (RTI) Act to get an answer regarding a largely ignored threat to the nation: a zombie apocalypse. You read that right. A man who goes by the name Ajay Kumar had filed an RTI request to inquire about the governments preparedness in case of an invasion by aliens or zombies.

Not only did Kumar ask about how exactly the government plans to protect us from aliens or zombies or extra dimensional beings but also if we stand a good chance without Will Smith. Of course, Will Smith has his Hollywood credentials to cement his position as the indispensable space hero. Of course, the Indian government did not disappoint him.

Pictures of the bizarre RTI application went viral after they were posted on Twitter by a journalist. Although the request was originally filed on March 15 this year and was first posted on the Facebook page Yourti.in in June, it has been picked up by social media now.
Kollam: A 90-year-old woman living alone was allegedly assaulted and harassed by her neighbour after he trespassed into her house at Kadakkal in Kollam district.

Police said the nonagenarian woman, a widow and a cancer survivor, was attacked by the 63-year-old man last week.

"The man intruded into her house and attacked and behaved in a manner which amounted to outraging her modesty," District police chief Ajeetha Begum said.

He was arrested and charged under IPC Sections 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 377 (unnatural offences).

"We have registered the case based on the statement given by the woman. She was sent to the hospital for detailed medical examination. The accused was arrested and IPC 354 and 377 were charged against him according to her statement," Ajeetha Begum said.

However, police dismissed reports aired by some television channels that the old woman was brutally raped.

Meanwhile, the state Human Rights Commission initiated suo moto into the incident based on media reports.

A few months back, a Dalit law student was brutally raped and killed by a migrant labour in Perumbavur in Ernakulam district, triggering heated debates on the safety of women in the state.
New Delhi: A day after a 21-year-old woman was brutally stabbed to death with scissors in broad daylight by a stalker, the victims mother said the accused Surender Singh used to follow her daughter everywhere. Wherever my daughter went, she found him there, said Karunas mother, Rama.

Karuna was attacked by 34-year-old Surender Singh who stabbed her nearly 22 times in a span of two-and-a-half minutes as passersby looked on in north Delhi's Burari area. The incident drew outrage as CCTV footage of the frenzied stabbing was aired by media, prompting the Centre to seek a report from the Delhi Police.

The victim, Karuna Kumar, worked as a teacher at Novel Riches School along with her cousin Neha. Both of them were on their way to the school when Karuna was suddenly attacked by Surender with a pair of scissors near Labour Chowk in Burari around 9 am, police said.

As Surender caught Karuna off guard and plunged the single blade of scissors in her body, a man rushed to stop him but soon backed off fearing attack on himself. Within two-and-a-half minutes, Surender had stabbed Karuna 22 times, they said.

Neha was also threatened by Surender and had to back off but she kept shouting for help.

According to a Hindustan Times report, Surender travelled seven kilometres every morning just to follow Karuna to school and he would wait for six hours outside the school gate to follow her back home. Surender would click photos and make videos of Karuna, he also used to send her hand-written notes and claimed to love her, but she had turned down his proposal.

Reportedly Surender had been stalking Karuna for the past six months and he stabbed her after he found about her alleged affair with another man.

Karuna used to learn computer at the training centre owned by Surender and he fell in love with her, police said.

She changed her route to school, but he followed her there as well. She used to dread going out at night as she knew he would be waiting for her outside the house. He had all the information about my daughters whereabouts. He threatened to tarnish her image by morphing and circulating her photos and threatened to kill her and both her brothers. We went to the police with a complaint, but Singhs father urged us to come to a compromise, assuring that his son would behave, Rama was quoted as saying

Surender is the son of a retired Delhi Police sub-inspector. He is going through divorce proceedings and has two kids.

I have disowned him six years ago. I have nothing do with him. He has behavioural issues. We used to get a lot of complaints about him. I tried to put him on track but he never listened, said Surenders father.

The CCTV footage showed that the accused came on a bike with another man and hurriedly got down before stabbing the girl who staggered and fell down as she tried to save herself.

The brutal attack did not stop there and he kept on stabbing the helpless girl like a maniac even as some petrified passersby watched unable to take any action.

Karuna was rushed to Sushrut Trauma Centre in Civil Lines where she was declared brought dead by the doctors. Surender was beaten up by the locals, who caught him and handed him over to the police. He was taken to Aruna Asaf Ali Hospital with head injuries but later shifted to LNJP Hospital.

A case under section 302 IPC (murder) has been registered against the accused, said DCP (North) Madhur Verma.

A Delhi court on Wednesday sent Surender Singh to police custody for four days. Metropolitan Magistrate Muneesh Garg remanded Surender to police custody till September 25 after the cops produced him before the court and apprised him about his crime.

The Centre has sought a report from Delhi Police over the brutal murder of the girl. "We have sought a fact report from Delhi Police Commissioner over the incident. Whatever happened is very sad," Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju told reporters.

Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia expressed shock over the gruesome incident while hitting out at the Delhi Police, saying instead of "harassing" AAP legislators the force should focus on security of people. "Shocking incident in Delhi of stabbing of 21-yr old woman. Delhi Police needs to focus on citizen's security than harassing AAP MLAs," he tweeted.
New Delhi: Taking a firm stand, India on Wednesday gave Pakistan evidence of involvement of Pak-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against this country.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active.

Jaishankar provided Basit with the content of GPS recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistan's role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed.

"If the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," he told the Pakistan envoy.

Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

He also reminded Basit that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India. "The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," he told Basit.

In a release, External Affairs Ministry said this year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

"Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of thirty one terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism. Foreign Secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing," it said.

Apart from GPS content, India has recovered a number of items that included communication matrix sheets and equipment, other made in Pakistan stuff like food, medicines and clothes, which were shown to Basit. "We now expect a response from the Government of Pakistan," Jaishankar told him.

Basit's summoning came a day after Jaishankar headed a high-level meeting, attended by senior Home Ministry officials and Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), during which the evidence recovered by Indian Army from the terrorists was shared with the MEA.

Following the tragedy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had strongly condemned the "cowardly terror attack" and assured the nation that those behind the "despicable attack" will not go unpunished.

Sources state that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will strongly emphasize Pakistan's involvement in the attack during her UNGA speech on September 26.

Pakistan has, however, flatly rejected New Delhi's claims of involvement in the Uri terror attack, stating that the latter has a traditional tendency to point fingers at the former whenever a terror attack takes place on Indian soil.

Meanwhile, the National investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the terror attack in Uri Sector of Jammu and Kashmir, will be seeking the help of the Army, Intelligence Bureau and RAW to get identities of the terrorists verified.

The agencies will be asked to provide the NIA with intercepts of the last two to four months in the region.

As per sources, Kashif Jaan, who had escorted the Pathankot terrorists till the border, could also have been the handler of the slain terrorists in Uri. The NIA sources say that Uri attack may have been masterminded by Kashif Jaan, Rauf Asgar and Masood Azhar.

On Tuesday, NIA had filed an FIR in the Uri terror strike case and a six-member team will soon visit the site of the attack to collect the evidence in the matter. According to sources, NIA will collect the blood samples and finger prints of the four killed terrorists in Uri.

The Army is set to handover all items recovered from the killed terrorists including weapons, navigation maps to the NIA for further investigation. The NIA will also send the GPS and icon satellite set to the United States for forensic investigation to find out what route the terrorists chose and when and how they entered Indian territory.
Amaravati: After months of delay, Andhra Pradesh State Secretariat will finally start its full-fledged functioning from its Transitional Headquarters at Velagapudi in the capital region Amaravati from October 3.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu will formally move into is office chambers on the auspicious day of Vijaya Dasami, which falls on October 11.

A central Command and Control Centre is also being set up n the first block at the Transitional Headquarters for the Chief Minister for live monitoring of various activities of the government from across the state.

"Since the five blocks in the Interim Complex are ready for occupation, it has been decided by the government to commence full-fledged functioning of the Secretariat from October 3.

All departments of the Secretariat are requested to issue necessary instructions with a direction to the employees that hey should report to their respective departments at Velagapudi in the forenoon of October 3," Chief Secretary Satya Prakash Tucker said in an internal communication to all Special Chief Secretaries, Principal Secretaries and Secretaries.

A clear timeline has been drawn for the shifting from Hyderabad to the establishment of new offices at Velagapudi between today and September 30, he said.

"As October 1 and 2 are holidays, the full-fledged functioning should start from October 3," the Chief Secretary added.

The Chief Minister had first set June 15 as the deadline for relocation of offices from Hyderabad to the Amaravati region and later deferred it to June 27.

But with the buildings under construction, the government repeatedly put off the relocation process from July to August and then September.

Almost all ministers checked into their new chambers in the Transitional Headquarters at Velagapudi but only Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu has been functioning from here for over 10 days now, said Tucker.

Offices of the heads of departments and various commissionerates and directorates moved to the capital region in June-July but they have not actually been functioning as the staff remained in Hyderabad.

With the Secretariat finally opening at Velagapudi, it isexpected that HoDs too will function completely from the capital region.

The Central Record Room in the Secretariat at Hyderabad will be moved after a similar facility is created at Velagapudi. A committee under the chairmanship of General Administration Department Secretary (Political) has been constituted to look into this.
The pension given to freedom fighters and their heirs will be hiked by 20 per cent. (Photo: Representational Image)

New Delhi: The pension given to freedom fighters and their heirs will be hiked by 20 per cent after the Union Cabinet on Wednesday gave its nod to the proposal.

In his Independence Day speech this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that the government would increase freedom fighters' pension.

"The Prime Minister had announced that the pension for freedom fighters or their heirs will be increased on the basis of 20 per cent plus DA. The proposal has been approved," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said after a meeting of the Union Cabinet.

Addressing the nation on the 70th Independence Day from the Red Fort, Modi had said: "The government is taking steps to increase the pension for freedom fighters by 20 per cent.

So those who are receiving Rs 25,000, will now get Rs 30,000. This is a small act of reverence on my behalf."
The four youth who were assaulted by cow vigilantes in Gujarats Una, will join a march organised as part of the Sangh Parivar's ambitious outreach to Dalits. (Photo: File)

Una: A Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Dalit group has claimed that the four youth who were assaulted by cow vigilantes in Gujarats Una, will join a march organised as part of the Sangh Parivar's ambitious outreach to Dalits.

Bhante Sanghpriya Rahul, president of Bharatiya Bauddha Sangh, claimed that, "The four will participate in the yatra for about 10-12 days when it enters poll-bound UP," said a report.

The yatra is part of the Sangh Parivar's effort to bring Dalits to the Hindutva mainstream. It is expected to help with the project of consolidation of Hindus into a political group, and simultaneously stop conversions to Christianity.

The chief patron of Bauddha Sangh is BJP MP and former Union minister Satyanarain Jatia, in whose name the invitation to people to join the outreach programme has been sent, said the report.

The yatra will begin from Alipur Road in Delhi on October 14, the date when B R Ambedkar converted to Buddhism.

Jignesh Mewani, a Dalit leader, meanwhile sees this as an attempt to cause a split in the Dalit movement. He was quoted as saying that he would surely try to prevent the four youth from attending the march.
The Centre said the Kohinoor diamond was found in Kollur mines on the southern banks of river Krishna in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday informed the Supreme Court that it will explore ways and means to bring back the Kohinoor diamond, which is currently in the possession of the United Kingdom, through a satisfactory resolution.

The Centre made this statement in response to a public interest writ petition for a direction to the Union Government to get back the Kohinoor diamond as it was apprehended that the precious stone will be sold in auction. This stand is in contrast with the earlier submission made by the Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar in the court that it will not be possible to bring back the diamond to India.

Giving its historical background, the Centre said the Kohinoor diamond was found in Kollur mines on the southern banks of river Krishna in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh by one Mir Jumia, Golgonda General and was presented by him to Shah Jahan in an uncut form.

After passing through several dynasties ruling India, in 1813 it came into the possession of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh of Punjab. The statement asserted there is no doubt that this diamond is of Indian origin.

It said that it is a known fact that Kohinoor diamond was duplicitously confiscated by the East India Company in 1849 from Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was then a minor. The said diamond represents the sentiments of the people of India and therefore the matter of bringing back this diamond is being raised from time to time since Independence.

It also made it clear that the credentials of India regarding ownership of Kohinoor diamond based on historical facts and evidence cannot be doubted.

Since taking away of Kohinoor pre-dates the entry into force of the UNESCO Convention (under which export or transfer of antiquities are prohibited), there is no binding legal basis in international law in this case.

The only recourse is to explore the possibility of seeking the return of illicitly transferred/taken cultural property through negotiation/agreement with the foreign country concerned.

On the petitioners averment that there are attempts to sell the Kohinoor diamond through auction, the Centre said they have no official information regarding attempts to sell this piece of art and craft. The government is mindful of the sentiments that have been expressed by the Indian public and Parliament from time to time about the return of Kohinoor diamond and other items of India and it will explore all ways to get back the diamond, the affidavit said.
Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court on Tuesday asked the Telangana state government how long it would continue the prohibitory orders in Vemulaghat village of Medak district. Justice M.S. Ramachandra Rao was dealing with a petition filed by Mr Y Santosh Reddy and five others of Vemulaghat, challenging the authorities for imposing CrPC Section 144 in the village. Ms B. Rachana, counsel for the petitioners, told the court that the executive magistrate had imposed Section 144 on July 28.

The judge said that continuation of the prohibitory orders even after the situation was brought under control amounted to infringing the rights of the citizens. When the judge questioned why the villagers resorted to attacking the police, Ms Rachana replied that the police had lathicharged them when they were peacefully protesting against the authorities who were trying to take away land under GO 123 for the Mallannaagar project.

She said that the police had booked cases under IPC Section 307 (attempt to murder) and were preventing others, including relatives, from entering the village. Mr Venugopal, counsel for the home department, submitted that the village was still tense and an affidavit had been filed about the situation there. The judge said that he would pronounce orders on Wednesday.
Siwan: Additional District and Sessions Judge of Siwan Ajay Kumar Srivastava, who had awarded life imprisonment to controversial RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin in a murder case, has been transferred to Patna.

Sources close to the judge said he had requested for transfer due to "family reasons" and not any "threat". The transfer was "routine", they added.

Srivastava has been posted in Patna in the same capacity. He had sentenced Shahabuddin to life term on December 11, 2015 after holding him guilty in the murder case of Rajiv Roshan, an eyewitness in the killing of his two brothers, using acid, at Siwan in 2004.

Terming the case "rarest of rare", the judge had awarded life sentence to the former RJD MP.

On September 7 this year, the Patna High Court granted bail to Shahabuddin in the same case which paved way for his release from jail after 11 years.

His release from prison and his politically sensitive comments on Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, calling him "CM of circumstances", after the release had triggered a controversy.

Noted lawyer Prashant Bhusan has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against granting of bail to Shahabuddin. The Bihar government has separately filed an appeal against the bail granted to the RJD leader. The apex court, which had issued a notice to Shahabuddin, is scheduled to hear the matter on Monday.
When the consent of the girl could not be dispensed with while aborting pregnancy, the court had no option but decline permission to terminate it, the judge said. (Photo: Representational Image)

Madurai: The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court on Tuesday dismissed a petition filed by the father of a teenage girl seeking termination of her pregnancy as she was allegedly "kidnapped, raped and made pregnant".

Dismissing the plea, Justice S Vimala said under the IPC, termination of pregnancy was an offence. Besides, in this case, the girl had not given her consent and in fact, wanted to carry the foetus as she had later married the accused.

When the consent of the girl could not be dispensed with while aborting pregnancy, the court had no option but decline permission to terminate it, she said.

Besides, the right to motherhood was for empowerment of women. Thus, the foetus could not be ordered to be aborted against the wishes of the girl, the judge ruled.

The girl, a minor at the time of the crime in February, is a major now and has married the boy accused of raping her.

The judge also said it was appropriate that there should be teams of experts comprising doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors in schools and colleges to guide teenagers. "As teenage pregnancy has many problems associated with it, there is a need to create awareness about the same."

Referring to the contention of the petitioner that under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, the consent of the girl (for sex) was immaterial till the age of 18, the judge said there were some contradictions between certain provisions of the Act and other statutes such as the Child Marriage Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

While as per the IPC, sex with wife (aged 15-18) would not amount to rape, the POCSO does not provide for any such exemption.

Such contradictions touched upon the Constitutional validity of the POCSO Act but it could only be decided by a division bench, the judge said, adding, "If deemed

appropriate, the Chief Justice could consider posting this matter before a division bench."

The petitioner had submitted that his minor daughter was kidnapped on February 13 and rescued subsequently and the accused was arrested. Later, during medical examination, the girl was found to be pregnant.

Contending that his daughter became pregnant on account of "rape", he had sought termination of her pregnancy.

However, during the hearing of the petition, the girl and the boy appeared in the court and the former said the pregnancy was "not out of coercion" and there should be no order for abortion.

Noting that the girl and the boy were married now, the judge said when the marriage was not shown to be void, the plea of the petitioner to terminate her daughter's pregnancy without her consent could not be entertained.
New Delhi: With New Delhi trying to corner Islamabad over the terror attack in Uri, Pakistan has decided not to send its Intelligence Bureau chief to India to attend the second meeting of High Level Group of Eminent Experts from SAARC countries beginning Thursday.

As per Pakistan sources, Director General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan Aftab Sultan will not attend the SAARC meeting and the country will be represented by an official of the Pakistan High Commission.

The source also stated that Pakistan is "fully committed" to SAARC related events.

The two-day conference of top security experts of SAARC countries will begin from Thursday in the national capital.

The aim of the meeting is to strengthen the SAARC Anti-Terror Mechanism. The first meeting was held in New Delhi in February, 2012.

The agenda of the meeting includes functioning of SAARC Terrorist Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD) and the SAARC Drug Offences Monitoring Desk (SDOMD), countering terrorism and strengthening anti-terrorism mechanisms in SAARC, intelligence sharing and police cooperation, human resource development and relationship building, combating corruption and cyber crimes, among others.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a plea filed by a doctor seeking proper steps to be taken to stop the widespread disease of Chikungunya and dengue in Delhi.

The plea will be heard on September 26, said reports.

Meanwhile, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Wednesday slammed the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) for not doing enough to stem the outbreak.

NGT demanded to know what NDMC had been doing for 2 months even as thousands of people fell sick. It accused the NDMC of turning a blind eye to the problem.

The NGT suggested that the MCD, NDMC, Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and the AAP state government should meet to resolve the crisis.The tribunal also asked concerned officials to come to its office next Wednesday to take stock of admin steps taken to tackle chikungunya and dengue.

There seems to be no respite from the viral onslaught in Delhi where chikungunya cases have mounted to over 2,600, with 1,568 of them being recorded in the last one week.

According to a municipal report released on Monday, 2625 chikungunya cases have been recorded in the national capital till September 17, marking a massive rise of nearly 150 per cent from the previous count.

As per estimates by the South Delhi Municipal Corporation which tabulates the data for vector-borne disease cases in the national capital, on behalf of all the civic bodies here, 1,057 confirmed cases of chikungunya were reported till September 10.

At least 15 fatalities due to chikungunya complications have been reported at various hospitals in the city, though SDMC and Delhi government have not acknowledged these deaths yet.

Among the three corporations, SDMC has recored 304 cases, followed by 244 in areas under the North Delhi Municipal Corporation and 80 under the East Delhi Municipal Corporation.

1,283 cases have been recorded from areas falling outside the jurisdiction of the municipal corporations. Addresses were not available for 1,018 patients among these cases.

714 cases were recored from other states, according to the report.

At AIIMS laboratories, 1,748 chikungunya blood test samples have tested positive till Sunday.

The chikungunya outbreak in the national capital is the worst in the last six years.

According to municipal data, the last time the number of affected people reached three-figure mark was in 2011.

Both the AAP-held Delhi government and LG Najeeb Jung have told hospitals not to turn away patients who may be infected with chikungunya or dengue.

The AAP government has come under fire as most of its ministers were not in the capital when the outbreak of chikungunya happened.

The war of words between AAP and the Modi government has continued with AAP leaders including CM Arvind Kejriwal and Health Minister Satyendar Jain have slammed LG Jung and the dispensation at the Centre for the outbreak.

The Health Minister even went so far as to claim that chikungunya itself does not cause death, and blamed the media for being 'paid' by vested interests to misreport the problem.
New Delhi: There will be no separate rail budget as the government on Wednesday decided to end the 92-year-old practice by merging it with the general budget.



However, even after the merger, the distinct entity and the functional autonomy of the Railways would be maintained.



The functional autonomy of the Railways will be maintained, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said.



Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said that it was decided for merger of the rail budget with general budget but distinct identity of the railways will be maintained.



Following the merger of budget, the Railways would not have to pay dividend to the central government though it would still get gross budgetary support from the exchequer.



As far as the salary and pension bill of railway employees is concerned, it will remain the responsibility of the national transporter as there will be no change in the existing practice.



A joint committee set up to finalise the modalities for the merger of rail budget with the general budget in its report, submitted in the first week of this month, to the Finance Ministry recommended various changes including waiving off the payment of dividend by the Railways but continue with the practice of getting gross budgetary support (GBS) from the exchequer.



In the financial year 2016-17, the railways had to pay dividend of Rs 9,731 crore, of which subsidy was Rs 4,301 crore, as a result the national transporter had to pay Rs 5,430 crore to the exchequer.



At present, the railways has to bear an additional burden of about Rs 40,000 crore on account of implementation of the 7th Pay Commission awards, besides, an annual outgo of Rs 33,000 crore on subsidies for passenger service.



The decision to merge the railway budget with the general budget is significant as in recent years as political heavyweights, particularly regional satraps, have used this occasion to nurture their constituencies in a big way.
Bengaluru: Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah will on Wednesday hold an all party and cabinet meeting on Wednesday to discuss the next step after the Supreme Court ordered the release of 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 27.

However, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Janata Dal (Secular) have decided to boycott the meeting, said a report.

BJP has demanded that the government should call an Assembly session immediately to decide the issue.

"I have already spoken to Jagadish Shettar, Ananth Kumar, Sadananda Gowda, we have decided not to attend any meeting called by the Chief Minister on the Cauvery issue," State BJP Chief Yeddyurappa told reporters in Shivamogga.

"Immediately Assembly session should be called where the issue should be discussed in detail, the decision taken there should be informed to the Supreme Court," he said.

"Despite calling cabinet meeting, floor leaders meeting, all party meeting for three or four times you (government) did not take any specific decision keeping interest of farmers in mind. At least now immediately assembly session should be called and a clear decision should be taken, there by respecting the public opinion..." he added.

As he faced a fresh challenge on the raging Cauvery row at a time when protests were abating, Siddaramaiah said that Karnataka does not have water and it would be difficult to implement the SC order. It is an unimplementable order, he said.

The Cauvery Supervisory Committee had on Monday asked Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs per day from September 21 to 30 but the apex court doubled the quantum to 6,000 cusecs till September 27 on Tuesday after Tamil Nadu pressed for water to save its samba paddy crop.

The chief minister said Karnataka had placed facts based on ground reality before the Cauvery Supervisory Committee but it still passed an order directing the state to release 3,000 cusecs per day between September 21 and 30.

He said the Supervisory Committee was constituted by the apex court, which had given a direction on September 5 to Tamil Nadu to approach the panel and asked Karnataka to file a response to the neighbouring states plea.

Farmers tied noose around their necks to protest against the fresh SC order at Mysore road in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

Police have been deployed across the city to ensure that no untoward incidents happen, a senior Bengaluru police official said on Tuesday.

Karnataka state reserve police, city armed reserve police, rapid action force and quick reaction teams have been deployed across Bengaluru, where prohibitory orders under section 144 of CrPc are in force, he said.

Siddaramaiah said the state government was awaiting the copy of the Supreme Court order and the state cabinet will meet on Wednesday followed by an all party meeting to chalk out the future course of action after consulting legal experts.

... we will discuss the pros and cons of this order. After taking views and opinion of leaders from all parties, we will proceed further, he added.

A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and UU Lalit has directed the Centre to constitute the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) -- as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) -- within four weeks.

Keeping in mind the violence that ensued last week over the Cauvery issue in Bengaluru, Siddarmaiah said, I appeal to the people, especially to people from Cauvery basin to maintain peace; they should not get carried away by emotions.

The government is committed to protect the interest of the state, its people and its farmers. Every one should cooperate, he said.

Soon after the Supreme Courts order, Siddaramaiah held meetings with senior ministers and officials.

As the Supreme Court order came, sporadic protests erupted in Mandya, Mysuru, Srirangapatna and nearby areas erupted, with farmers demonstrating on the streets.

In Mandya district, the epicentre of Cauvery agitation, protesters at several places blocked the Bengaluru-Mysuru highway.
Mumbai: Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray on Wednesday said it's time the country gives Pakistan a reply in the language it understands because talks with the neighbouring nation "would not yield any result".

"Talking with Pakistan won't work now. It is now time to answer Pakistan in the language it understands. If war (with Pakistan) is to take place, it should be for well-being of the nation, not for votes. When will we finally understand Pakistan's language," Thackeray told reporters here in the backdrop of the Uri terror strike which left 18 soldiers dead.

Taking a jibe at Narendra Modi when asked if he spoke to the Prime Minister over the attack, Uddhav said, "He must be busy talking to Pakistan right now. When he gets free, we will talk."

He said there is a wave of anger among the masses over the Uri attack and that Modi is well poised to take a definite action against the neighbouring country owing to the overwhelming majority that the BJP enjoys in the Lok Sabha.

"If you keep doing what the previous government did, how can you say there is an atmosphere of change in the country? It seems that the government is of the view that those who want to shed tears may do so, we will continue to go to Pakistan to have tea and continue to welcome their artists and sportspersons here," he said.

He said people entrusted Modi the PM's chair following a series of promises he had made during his Lok Sabha election campaign which now needs to be fulfilled.

"This is not the first time they have attacked us. They recently stabbed us with the Pathankot attack. There is no use of merely harbouring feelings of anger against Pakistan," he said.

Thackeray also called for a special one-day session of Maharashtra Legislature to address the grievances of the Maratha community. "Maratha leaders should come forward and voice their issues. There needs to be a discussion on the Atrocities Act and their reservation issue. We expect (NCP president Sharad Pawar) to raise this issue in the Parliament while we will raise it in the state Legislature," he said.
Mumbai: Dubbing Pakistan as a "shameless" country that would not be affected by any international condemnation, Shiv Sena on Wednesday demanded "revenge" on the neighbour and sought to know what exactly Prime Minister Narendra Modi was going to do in response to the Uri attack.

"While the PM says Pakistan will be taught a lesson and would not be allowed to go scot-free after killing our soldiers, he needs to clearly state what exactly will he do. He had made similar statements after the terror strike at Pathankot air base," the Sena said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.

Modi had talked about taking revenge on Pakistan and exposing its true face before the world after the January Pathankot terror attack but everything was soon forgotten, Sena, a longtime BJP ally, said.

"We had even given them proof of their involvement but we were only made fun of. If the PM wants to do a similar thing now, he should not make strong statements now," it said.

"Everybody knows Pakistan is a terror-sponsoring nation. Why waste time in declaring it one? The country's economy is anyway in shambles and is living off grants. What will we get by imposing financial restrictions on it? Its true face had been exposed before the world long time back. What is the need to expose it further," the Sena said.

"It is a shameless nation. What do we plan to achieve by merely trying to condemn it with words? Do something, take revenge! 125 crore people in our nation want you to take revenge against Pakistan," the Sena said.

Four JeM terrorists had attacked the army base in Uri on Sunday killing 18 soldiers. The terrorists were also eliminated.
Soldiers guard outside the army base which was attacked suspected militants in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir. (Photo: PTI)

Uri: The four terrorists who stormed an Army base in Uri sector on Sunday killing 18 soldiers belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and managed to sneak in by cutting the perimeter fencing of the highly-guarded Army installation at two places, investigations have shown.

In an indication that the terrorists were well-versed of the layout of the Army base close to the Line of Control (LoC), the assailants locked the cooking room and store from outside to prevent the soldiers from leaving before setting them afire, sources privy to the probe said on Wednesday.

The investigators are not ruling out "insider help" to the terrorists in view of the precise nature of the actions undertaken by the intruders once inside the Army base, the sources said, adding the attackers first cut the perimeter fencing at two places.

After locking the cooking room and store, two of the terrorists started moving towards the officers quarters within the base but they were gunned down before they could inflict any further damage, they said.

The two Global Positioning System (GPS) sets recovered from the slain militants were damaged during the attack and have been handed over to the NIA, which is probing the case.

The four intruders, who had crossed in from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (Pok) a day earlier, were affiliated to LeT as the terrorist module bore striking resemblance to the group from the same Pakistan-based terror outfit eliminated in Poonch on September 11, the sources said.

Director General Military Operations (DGMO) Lt Gen Ranbir Singh had told reporters hours after the attack that as per initial reports the slain terrorists belonged to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), also a Pakistan-based terror outfit.

"All four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings. Initial reports indicate that the slain terrorists belong to Jaish-e-Mohammed tanzeem," Lt Gen Singh had said.

The terrorists both at Uri and Poonch were carrying small plastic bottles containing a concoction of petroleum jelly and gelatin which was used to set the soldiers' tents on fire, the sources said.

Various intelligence agencies probing the bloodiest attack on army in Kashmir in 27 years believe that the attack could be handiwork of LeT, which has been indulging in shallow infiltration -- a strategy to target the first available security installation by the infiltrators after crossing the LoC.

On Tuesday, the NIA registered a case to probe the terror attack at the Army installation in Uri. The NIA took over the investigation from the Jammu and Kashmir Police, which had registered a case on Sunday, and began probe by collecting evidence available with the Army formation at Uri.

The NIA team led by Inspector General G P Singh has been camping in Uri since its arrival here yesterday. The team will collect the DNA samples of the four unidentified terrorists and their pictures would be shown to militants lodged in various jails of the state as well as other parts of the country.

The NIA team would prepare a dossier and may make a formal request to Pakistan once the identity of the four was ascertained.

Army has also instituted an inquiry into the attack with preliminary investigation suggesting the terrorists had entered the area at least a day before mounting the brazen assault.

The inquiry besides ascertaining lapses, if any, would also suggest measures to prevent such attacks in the future as Pakistani-based groups were indulging more in "shallow infiltration", which means that terrorists strike the first available installation after crossing the Line of Control.
Army personnel in action inside the Army Brigade camp during a terror attack in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The Union Cabinet met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on Wednesday morning, in the backdrop of last Sunday's terror attack in Uri in which 18 army soldiers were killed.

The Cabinet Committee on Security held meeting to review the situation arising out of the attack. Rajnath Singh, FM Arun Jaitley and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar attended the meeting.

On Tuesday, India stopped another infiltration attempt in Uri, with security personnel killing 10 terrorists. One army man was also martyred in the operation. The encounter is still on, 19 hours after it began.

Meanwhile, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi reviewed the security situation in Kashmir on Tuesday in the backdrop of the deadly militant attack on an army base in Uri and the ongoing unrest in the valley.

Mehrishi arrived in Srinagar early Tuesday morning and held series of meetings to review security situation across the Kashmir Valley.

He had detailed discussions with top officials from various security forces, police and intelligence agencies.

Mehrishi also called on Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti to discuss the prevailing situation in the valley. He left for New Delhi in the evening.

Meanwhile, with New Delhi trying to corner Islamabad over the terror attack in Uri, Pakistan has decided not to send its Intelligence Bureau chief to India to attend the second meeting of High Level Group of Eminent Experts from SAARC countries beginning Thursday.

As per Pakistani sources, Director General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan Aftab Sultan will not attend the SAARC meeting and the country will be represented by an official of the Pakistan High Commission.
Kolkata: The West Bengal government would offer jobs and financial assistance of Rs. two lakh each to the families of the two jawans from the state killed in the terrorist attacks in Uri, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Wednesday.

"Generally the Centre does it... We've done it for CRPFs in the past. On humanitarian ground, we will offer jobs of home guards to someone in the family and Rs. two lakh each to the families of two jawans Gangadhar Dolui and Biswajit Ghorai as special cases," Ms Banerjee told reporters at state secretariat Nabanna.

Two of her cabinet ministers -- Arup Roy and Rajiv Banerjee -- were present at Dolui's residence in Howrah district's Jagatballavpur, she said.

"My ministers were present at Dolui's residence at Jagatballavpur," she said, adding that gun salute was given.

In one of the deadliest attacks on the army in the recent years, 18 soldiers were killed and over 20 others injured as heavily armed suspected Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists, stormed an army base at Uri town in north Kashmir's Baramulla district in the wee hours on Sunday.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attends a Leader's Summit on Refugees during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly. (Photo: AP)

New Delhi: Ahead of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs address to the UN General Assembly, Pakistan's permanent representative to UN Maleeha Lodhi told reporters in New York that Pakistan's nuclear program cannot be restricted.

Lodhi said that during a meeting, US secretary of state John Kerry urged Nawaz Sharif to limit Pakistan's atomic program, but in response, Sharif said that what was expected of Pakistan must also be implemented by India.

The world should first put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India," said Lodhi and added that Pakistan's inclusion in the Nuclear Suppliers Group was also discussed during the meeting.

Pakistan's foreign secretary Aizaz Chaudhry, who was also addressing the press conference, said that "no other state had acted against terrorism as much as Pakistan had."

Nawaz Sharif has held a telephonic conversation with Pakistan's Army Chief General Raheel Sharif ahead of his speech at the UN in which he is expected to raise the Kashmir issue, amid signs he may tone down his rhetoric to reduce tensions with India.

An official from the Prime Minister's Office said the two on Tuesday night discussed the situation in Kashmir and tense relations with India after the terrorist attack on an Indian army camp in Uri on Sunday in which 18 soldiers were killed.

Sharif had a plan to forcefully highlight the Kashmir violence, but the scenario changed after Uri terrorist attack which spotlighted the issue of cross-border militancy.

"The prime minister might strike a balance in his speech. He would talk about the Indian atrocities in Kashmir but also would be conciliatory to end tension," said the official.

Sharif may also offer proposals to address the Kashmir issue, including emphasis on implementing UN resolutions and the mediatory role of the international community.

On Monday, Raheel Sharif had met his top commanders and said the military was watchful towards the security imperatives of the country in the wake of hostile narrative by India.

Taking note of a hostile narrative being propagated by India, Gen Sharif said that we are fully cognizant and closely watching the latest happenings in the region and their impact on the security of Pakistan. Armed forces of Pakistan are fully prepared to respond to the entire spectrum of direct and indirect threat, the statement said.

The Uri incident was one of the deadliest attacks on Indian Army in recent years, as heavily-armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force. Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed.

India's DGMO Lt Gen Ranbir Singh has said the four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings and that initial reports indicated that they belonged to Pakistan-based Jaish-E-Mohammed group.

Sharif is poised to address the 71st UNGA session in New York later on Wednesday.
The associations told the Court that the seats in B category will be filled on merit as per ranking obtained in NEET and any students from India can apply. (Representational image)

Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court on Wednesday made it clear that the Presidential Order under Article 371 (D) of the Constitution of India which gives reservation to local candidates at educational institutions in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana state is not applicable to management quota seats (B-category) in private medical colleges offering MBBS and BDS courses.

A division bench comprising Justice V. Ramasubramanian and Justice Anis was dismissing the petitions of several students aspiring for admission under the management quota.

The students were challenging the action of the Association of Private Medical Managements of both the Telugu states in giving admission to students of other states.

The petitioners contended that all the seats must be given to students of AP and Telangana as per the Presidential Order.

The associations told the Court that the seats in B category will be filled on merit as per ranking obtained in NEET and any students from India can apply.

When the bench sought the response from both the governments, they informed the Court in unequivocal terms that the Presidential Order is not applicable to B category seats in private medical colleges.

While considering the statements of both the governments, the bench pointed that the Presidential Order speaks about institutions which are under control of the state government s. These private colleges cannot be termed as institutions that are under the control of the government.
Rejecting Sharif's offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, the minister said, "Talks and guns don't go together". (Photo: ANI/Twitter)

New York: Strongly reacting to Pakistan Prime Minister's remarks at the UN, India today described them as non-factual and full of "threat bluster" and said glorification of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani by him at the world forum is an act of "self-incrimination" by Pakistan.

"We just heard a speech full of threat bluster and rising immaturity and complete disregard of facts," Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar said at a press conference at the India's permanent mission here after Sharif's address to the UN General Assembly.

He also criticised Sharif for glorifying Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, and said India "will not succumb to blackmail tactics of the Pakistan Government that seems eager to use terrorism as policy".

"We heard the glorification of a terrorist. Wani is declared commander of Hizbul, widely acknowledged as a terror group. It is shocking that a leader of a nation can glorify a self-advertised terrorist at such a forum. This is self incrimination by Pakistan PM," Akbar said.

Rejecting Sharif's offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, the minister said, "Talks and guns don't go together".

"Pakistan at this moment seems to be run by a war machine rather than a government. Pakistan wants dialogue while holding a terrorist gun in its hand," he said. He also rejected Sharif's allegations against India with regard to the current unrest in Kashmir and said, "Kashmir occupation is by Pakistan occupation army. The world also knows that Pakistan has been indulged in ethnic cleansing of its own people," he said.
New Delhi: The MEA on Wednesday evening summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and lodged a strong protest over the terror attack at Uri, saying that the violation by Islamabad of its own anti-terrorism assurances is a matter of very serious concern, adding that India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents if Pakistan wants to probe the cross-border attacks.

The MEA said India now expected a response from Pakistan on this. Foreign secretary S. Jaishankar told Mr Basit that the Uri terror attack showed that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active.

Awaiting Pakisatn response, says India

The MEA said that that India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents if Pakistan wants to probe the cross-border attacks.

The MEA said India now expected a response from Pakistan on this. Foreign secretary S. Jaishankar told Mr Basit that the Uri terror attack showed that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, and demanded that Paki-stan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

New Delhi mentioned the recovery of items from the bodies of the terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch attacks including the GPS from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site, grenades with Pakistani markings, communication matrix sheets, Comm-unication equipment; and other stores made in Pakistan, including food, medicines, and clothes.

Meanwhile, as the government faced more calls for a strong action against Pakistan, Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi convened a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security which weighed responses to the Sunday attack that killed 18 jawans. Modi also went into a huddle with top BJP leaders.
Hyderabad: Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao put the administration on high alert following predictions of heavy rainfall in the next two days, even as he asked officials to take up relief operations on war footing on Wednesday.

Mr Rao, who is away in New Delhi to attend the Apex Council meeting, was constantly in touch with senior officials and asked them to utilise the services of disaster management, police and Army in relief operations.

He asked the city administration to shift people from low lying areas and dilapidated houses to safer places. He told medical and health department officials to check the spread of contagious diseases.

People should be cautious in view of the prediction of heavy rain in the next two/three days. Complaints to control room should be attended to on priority, he said.

The Chief Minister also monitored the rising water level at Hussainsagar and other lakes in the twin cities and outskirts. He also asked officials to evacuate people living around rising lakes to safer places and ensure that water flowed without obstruction on all the thoroughfares in and around city.
Hemavathy Horata Samiti stages a protest in Tumakuru on Wednesday against the Supreme Court decision on the Cauvery dispute ordering release of water to TN

Bengaluru: The state government has deferred its decision to release Cauvery river water to Tamil Nadu until the one-day session of both Houses of the legislature decides on this on Friday.

The state Cabinet has taken a decision to convene the emergency session of both Houses on September 23 at 11 am. Till the Houses decide, the government has deferred its decision to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu for one week as directed by the Supreme Court.

Addressing mediapersons after the Cabinet meeting, which followed the all-party meeting here on Wednesday, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said that all party leaders including former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda have suggested that the government convene the session to discuss the issue.

JD(S) and Sarvodaya Karnataka Paksha attended the meeting while BJP leaders boycotted. In the all-party meeting, former Prime Minister Deve Gowda, former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and prominent Congress leaders suggested that the state government not release water to Tamil Nadu, when availability of water is not adequate to meet drinking water needs. They felt an unanimous resolution should be passed during the session.

Based on the state legal teams feedback, Mr. Deve Gowda and other leaders suggested that non compliance with the Apex Court would not amount to contempt when the state is not in a position to implement the impractical order, sources said.

Leaders also suggested that after passing the resolution not to release water in the legislature, this should be conveyed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case again on September 27. Sources told this newspaper that senior counsel Fali S. Nariman has also suggested to the state government to take a political decision about its difficulty to implement the order.

Leaders opined in the meeting that the present availability of water in the reservoirs is 27 tmcfeet, but water needed for drinking requirements upto the end of May, 2017 is 28 tmc feet. In such circumstances how can the state comply with the SC order, they pointed out and suggested that the CM take a tough stand.
A soldier lifts an iron barricade to allow a vehicle to drive out of a military base at Braripora on Wednesday. (Photo: AP)

New Delhi: Fearing surgical strikes by India following the Uri attack, Pakistan has started mobilisation of troops along the Line of Control and the International Border. Interestingly, mobilisation of troops by Pakistan is not just restricted to the northern sector in Jammu and Kashmir, but troop build up has also been spotted along the western sector in Rajasthan.

The issue was flagged during the meeting of the Cabinet Committee of Security chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital on Wednesday. Both the BSF and the Army that are responsible for guarding the border and the LoC respectively have been asked to maintain a high degree of vigil.

The two security forces in separate reports to the Centre have also confirmed troop mobilisation by Pakistan close to the border. Sources said it was surprising that Pakistan was deploying additional troops along the western sector also but this could well be a preventive measure on its part.

In fact, during a high- level meeting headed by the Prime Minister on Monday, instructions were issued to the security forces to remain alert along the western sector also.

While confirming troop build up by Pakistan, a senior security official said, we have noticed a lot of activity by Pakistani forces along the Rajasthan border also in sectors like Ganganagar and Barmer. Our security forces on the ground are alert and closely monitoring every development.

Even while the CCS discussed various possibilities of a retaliatory offensive by the Indian forces, sources said any armed action will not be taken in undue haste as India would examine all possibilities of cornering Pakistan at the diplomatic and economic level fronts also. The prevailing security situation in the Valley post Uri attack was reviewed at length during the meeting.
Hyderabad: With both TS and AP sticking to their respective stands on the Palamuru-Rangareddy and Dindi Lift Irrigation projects, the first meeting of the Apex Council held in Delhi on Wednesday failed to reach consensus. The matter was left to the Central government to represent to the Supreme Court under whose direction the meeting was convened.

TS Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao categorically said in the meeting that the TS government will not stop construction work on the projects since it did not violate any norms.

Mr Rao said that the TS government will obtain necessary permissions regarding these projects as and when needed. AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu responded by saying that his government will continue to oppose these two projects and there was no going back on its stand.

Union water resources minister Uma Bharti convened the first meeting of the Apex Council consequent on the directions of the Supreme Court on a petition by Krishna delta farmers against the TS government for taking up these two projects. The petitioners had said that they feared poor inflows for Krishna delta and thereby affecting their riparian rights.

Along with the two Chief Ministers, the meeting was attended by ministers, officials and engineers from both the states. The two lift schemes topped the agenda of the meeting. Putting forth his arguments, Mr Rao stated that both the Palamuru and Dindi projects cannot be considered new as they were sanctioned and approved by previous undivided AP governments.

He also argued that each and every political party, including the Telugu Desam and BJP, had in their 2014 election manifestos, promised to complete the projects. This, he said, was proof that the two projects were not new, as was being alleged by residuary AP state.

Mr Rao also said that as a Prime Ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi had addressed an election meeting in Mahbubnagar during which he accused successive governments of failing to take up the Palamuru-Rangareddy scheme and promised to complete it. Mr Rao presented audio and video clippings of the speech in the Apex Council meeting.

Countering this argument, Mr Naidu said that as per the original GO issued by the government of undivided AP, the Palamuru-Rangareddy scheme was supposed to be taken up from the foreshore of Jurala project. He said that the TS government has changed the plan and included Srisailam project instead of Jurala, besides enhancing the utilisation of waters thereby affecting the interests of residuary AP.

Mr Naidu brought to the notice of Apex Council meeting that as per Item 10 of Schedule 11 of the AP Reorganisation Act, both the projects were not listed. He said that this meant that even according to the Central government, they were unauthorised projects and could not be taken up.

As far as other issues are concerned, consensus was reached on allowing the Krishna River Management Board to set up telemetry systems at all the irrigation projects to quantify both inflows and outflows.

The Union minister announced a five-member expert panel that would go into the other disputes like TS claim over share in Godavari water diversion to Krishna basin and ad-hoc sharing of Krishna waters for the present and ensuing water year.

The Centre has agreed to replace two members A.D. Mohale and R. Goel in the expert panel following a complaint by the TS government that they had shown special interest towards AP in their previous assignments.
Army personnel take positions and move towards the site where militants were hiding during an encounter at Lachipora in Uri Sector of Kashmir on Wednesday. (Photo: PTI)

NEW DELHI: Defence minister Manohar Parrikar said on Wednesday admitted that there must have been lapses and blunders in Uri which led to the death of 18 soldiers at the hands of four terrorists inside an Army base on Sunday.

Mr Parrikar said the government is working towards ensuring that the perpetrators of the deadly Uri attack are punished and it will not sleep over terror being pushed into India from across the border.

This country is a very responsible power, but that does not mean I will sleep over this kind of terrorism that is being pushed from across. How do I do it is entirely for the government under the Prime Minister to decide, he said. Dismissing reports about Pakistans threat of use of tactical nukes, the minister remarked that empty vessel makes more sound and the person who has strength, usually makes less noise.

After Sundays attack, there has been a flurry of high-level meetings between top officials of the Army, home ministry and security agencies with the top leadership of the government. On Wednesday too, Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag met National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.
The chargesheet was filed on August 24 and filed before the district court in Srinagar on August 30. (Photo: DC/file)

Mumbai: Six men from Pakistan occupied Kashmir living in Italy have been chargesheeted for funding terror activities in Jammu and Kashmir through separatist groups, reports revealed.

According to reports, the chargesheet has accused Hurriyat leaders Firdous Ahmad Shah and Yar Mohammad Khan of money laundering and raising funds for terrorism, an during it to wage war against India. The funds were availed during the heights of Kashmir unrest, which has claimed a total of 87 lives, and brought the Valley to a complete standstill with a curfew that lasted over two months.

Firdous Ahmad Shah is the head of Democratic Political Movement and also a member of the hard-line separatist faction Hurriyat Conference.

Firdous Shah and Khan reportedly used an Italian remittance firm Madina Trading, to avail the funds. The firm has also come into the notice of security forces after it was used to create a voice over internet protocol account to co-ordinate for the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2008.

The chargesheet was filed on August 24 and filed before the district court in Srinagar on August 30.
Woman's relatives took her to a private hospital where they refused to treat her till the fee was deposited. (Photo: ANI Twitter)

Korba: In an appalling incident, a 22-year-old pregnant woman, carrying a dead foetus, died of infection in Chhattisgarh's Korba district allegedly after doctors at various private hospitals denied to attend her as she was unable to pay their fees.

As the issue came into light, Korba district Collector P Dayanand constituted three-member team to probe the incident. The woman identified as Saraswati Mahant died on Monday night at a private hospital here at Rajgamar road, the Collector said.

A native of Podibahar village under Rampur police station, Gulabdas Mahant had taken his wife Saraswati to Jamunadevi Memorial Maternity private hospital on Monday following she complained of severe pain in her stomach.

The woman was told at the hospital during a scan that her eight-month old foetus had died. "Doctors at Jamunadevi hospital advised to get the foetus removed and asked for a fee of Rs 10,000. Besides they also asked to arrange blood for my wife," Gulabdas said.

"Doctors stopped her treatment when I told them that I am arranging money. Even after my request they refused to treat her," he said holding the doctor responsible for the death of his wife.

According to Gulabdas, he later took her wife to atleast three private hospitals in the area but nowhere doctors agreed to operate upon the lady.

Finally at Srishti Medical Institute hospital, doctors said that they would operate on the woman next day but she died at around 11:30 on Monday night.

As the issue was raised by local media, Collector P Dayanand ordered a probe into it. A three-member team headed by Additional Collector Heena Netam has been formed to investigate the incident, the Collector said.

Korba Chief Medical and Health Officer Dr P S Sisodia and District Family Welfare and Health Officer Dr B P Kurre are other members of the enquiry squad.

Stringent action would be taken against anyone found guilty after the probe, the Collector added.
Tamil Nadu ministers and people offer flowers after the release of water from Mettur Dam in Salem on Tuesday for irrigation of over 12 lakh acres of Samba crops. (Photo: DC)

THANJAVUR/CHENNAI: The Cauvery Delta region, which is solely dependent on river water for cultivation of crops, erupted in joy on Tuesday after the Supreme Court directed the Union Government to set up the Cauvery Management Board within four weeks.

The farmers were also happy about the release of 6,000 cusecs of water from Cauvery for the next seven days beginning tomorrow. The mood among farmers in the entire Delta region comprising Thanjavur, Nagapattinam, Tiruvarur and parts of Tiruchy and Pudukkottai districts was that of confidence and a sense of victory. Political parties including the ruling AIADMK and principal Opposition DMK hailed the Supreme Court ruling on setting up of the CMB, calling it as victory for the state of Tamil Nadu.

Justice has finally been delivered. The Union Government should have formed the Board immediately after it notified the CWDT award in the gazette in 2013.

But now, after the CMB is established, farmers can approach the Board for getting water during distress years, Mannargudi S Ranganathan, Secretary, Cauvery Delta Farmers Welfare Association, told Deccan Chronicle.
Chennai: The Madras high court referred the matter of autopsy on the body of Ramkumar, the sole accused in techie Swathi murder case who allegedly committed suicide in Puzhal prison on September 18, to a third judge.

The judge will decide as to whether an independent private doctor could be allowed to be present at the time of autopsy as there was difference of opinion between two judges of a division bench on this issue.

In his appeal, Paramasivan sought to set aside an order of a single judge dated September 19, which turned down his plea to permit a doctor of his choice to be present at the time of autopsy to be conducted by the government doctors on the body of his son Ramkumar. The bench said while the counsel for the appellant insisted that an independent forensic expert of his choice should be on board at the time of conduct of the post-mortem, the relief was vehemently opposed by the additional advocate general.

Reliance was placed on the decision of the apex court in Peoples Union for Civil Liberties Vs State of Maharashtra by the appellant, wherein the Supreme Court, on the basis of the United Nations Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officers, has culled out the charter of the United Nations, which has opined that affording the victims family and legal representative the right to request that an independent qualified representative be present during the autopsy of the victims body.

In the present case, it was the case of the appellant since the victim had died while in custody, it was a case of custodial death, warranting the presence of an independent person of the victims choice to be present at the time of post-mortem. However this stand was opposed by the additional advocate general, the bench added.

The bench said on the above aspect, while Justice Huluvadi G Ramesh was of the view that it would be advisable to allow such independent forensic expert to be present at the time of the post-mortem, as the same would be in no way prejudicial to the case of the prosecution and would in effect fortify the stand of the state about its fairness, Justice S.Vaidyanathan, however, subscribes to the view of the additional advocate general that an independent person with forensic knowledge would, in fact, lead to creating a doubt in the minds of the public about the arbitrary nature of the conduct of the state machinery and suggested induction of one more government doctor in the post-mortem panel instead of an independent person of the choice of the appellant, the bench added.

Earlier, during the course of arguments, R.Sankarasubbu, counsel for the appellant submitted that the appellant wanted Dr P. Sampathkumar, vice principal and HoD, Ramachandra Medical College, Porur to be present during post-mortem.

When the bench pointed out that Dr. Sampathkumar is a private doctor, Sankarasubbu cited three judgments to show that the presence of a doctor of victims choice is allowed during autopsy.

Additional advocate general C Manishankar submitted that the government has nominated reputed doctors to conduct autopsy on the body of Ramkumar. After postmortem if the appellant has any doubts, he can challenge the post-mortem report. Sankarasubbu said it is only based on circumstantial evidence that Ramkumar was arrested. While effecting arrest, police inflicted injuries on him. Thereafter also he was subjected to torture. Complaints were made to authorities. Under these circumstances, he died on September 18. According to them it is not a case of suicide, but custodial death.

Passing orders on an appeal filed by Ramkumars father, R.Paramasivan, the bench comprising Justices Huluvadi G Ramesh and S.Vaidyanathan said, Since there exists a difference of opinion with regard to the appointment of an independent person to be present at the time of autopsy, between us, Registry is directed to place the matter before the Chief Justice for listing the matter before the third judge for his opinion on the above aspect. Not to conduct autopsy till the decision is taken by the third judge.
New Delhi: A 21-year-old school teacher was stabbed over thirty times by a stalker in broad day light in Delhi and not a soul came forward to stop the brutal crime unfolding in front of them. Many walked away from the crime scene unperturbed, fearing for their own safety.

What happened in Delhi is a reminder that a woman is not safe anywhere whether in the sprawling capital or in the cloistered train compartment, and drives home the point that no matter how many precautions a woman takes, crimes against women can be avoided only if we change the focus towards the perpetrator, rather than the victim.

The case follows a slew of other such attacks on women, most notably a similar attack on a 24-year-old Chennai techie. S Swathi, employed with Infosys, was hacked to death by a jilted lover, again in broad day-light, on Nugambakkam railway station which was teeming with people. Again, as is the norm these days, no one came forward and Swathi bled to death at the crime scene. Not stopping there, the alleged killer's father had the audacity to claim that his son was being framed for being a Dalit.

A 35-year-old woman was raped in a moving train on Sunday and pushed out of it, resulting in loss of her right leg in Mau district of Uttar Pradesh. The incident has achieved a record - UP now has the second highest number of crimes in railways after Maharashtra.

Earlier last month, a mother and daughter, on their way back with their family from a funeral, were waylaid in the national highway near Bulandashahr and gangraped by a group of bandits.

Two girls were gangraped by a group of men in Delhis Aman Vihar last week in front of their male companions who were thrashed and tied up first.

If there are still any naysayers, then this incident would probably help one understand the situation better.

A student of Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi recently put up a post in Facebook describing her harrowing experience inside her own PG accommodation.

So much so for the outrage that was triggered after the infamous Nirbhaya gangrape case.

Thousands took to the road, men and women, turned up in large numbers to express solidarity with the paramedic student who was gangraped in a bus in heights of winter. 'Not another one' was what echoed then. There was some hope.

But there was no one to come forward to help Swathi, or Karuna, or anyone else for that matter.

Makes one wonder, when will the hipocrisy end?
Panaji: The BJP in Goa shot back at criticism of Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar over his frequent visits to the coastal state and asked mediapersons, "Would you not have come home, if you were Defence Minister".

"If you were made Defence Minister, would you not have come home? Would you have stayed back in Delhi?" BJP Goa unit general secretary Sadanand Tanavade asked the reporters during a press conference here on Wednesday.

He was responding to a question referring to Parrikar's frequent visits to Goa against the backdrop of militant attacks on Defence bases.

The Goa Congress had recently accused Parrikar of being a "part-time" Defence Minister, and said he was more interested in issues concerning the coastal state than matters related to national security.

"Congress needs to be more focused on its own party rather than Parrikar," Tanavade told reporters in presence of state BJP chief Vinay Tendulkar.

Tanavade alleged that Congress was adopting publicity gimmicks by resorting to verbal attack on Parrikar to get media publicity.

"If you speak about Defence Minister or Chief Minister, you get quick media publicity. That is what Congress has been aiming at," he said.

Tanavade said BJP has been monitoring the criticism through social media and found out that only one particular party was indulging in it. "Majority of the people who respond or comment to this party's criticism through social media are non-Goans," he said, refusing to name any political party.
Referring to the law and order situation in the state Amit Shah claimed "only BJP government which can improve the situation here". (Photo: PTI)

Lucknow: Hitting out at successive BSP and Samajwadi Party governments in Uttar Pradesh over corruption, BJP president Amit Shah today alleged that people of the state were left empty handed while the leaders of the two parties flourished under their rule.

He also alleged that while SP was committing atrocities on Dalits, BSP supremo Mayawati was exploiting them and claimed that only BJP can ensure uplift of the community.

"In the last 15 years, the people of Uttar Pradesh have been entangled between SP and BSP and remained where they were, while the leaders of these parties accumulated wealth," he alleged.

Addressing a 'Parivartan Maha rally' organised by former BSP leader Swami Prasad Maurya, Shah raised questions on graft cases, from Taj corridor to alleged mining scam linked to Gayatri Prasad Prajapati.

"I want to ask Akhilesh as to why was Gayatri Prasad Prajapati was removed from the ministry...corruption was cited as the reason when he was dismissed, but he was taken back within a week...is he not corrupt now," he asked.

"Had there been no corruption in the mining department in the state (headed by Prajapati), every household would have got a colour TV set," Shah claimed.

"Modiji is sending money to the state but it is being divided between chacha and bhatija...," the BJP national president alleged targeting Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and state minister Shivpal.

Taking a jibe at the Samajwadi Party over the infighting, Shah said it was "bigger than Mahabharat".

"Uncle (chacha) and nephew (bhatija) are throwing each other's supporters out and Amar Singh is playing the role of Narad," he alleged. Shah also tried to corner Mayawati, saying she should have used the money spent for buying her bungalows for the poor Dalits in the state.

"Behenji (Mayawati) you got clear majority (in 2007)... what did you do? NRHM scam, Noida plot allotment scam, Taj corridor scam, security number plate scam, police recruitment scam," he alleged.

"After a scam worth Rs 40,000 crore, she says that she will work for the betterment of the state's backwards and Dalits if voted to power," the BJP president alleged.

In the rally organised under the banner of Loktantrik Bahujan Manch of Maurya, who has accused the BSP supremo of selling party tickets, Shah asked the people to tell others about the number of bungalows owned by Mayawati in Delhi.

Questioning Mayawati's claims of working for improving the lot of Dalits, he claimed, "If she had distributed the money she spent on the bungalows...every Dalit household would have got an air conditioner."

He also lashed out at the BSP supremo over the issue of atrocities on Dalits, saying, "As many as 1,074 Dalits were killed between 2008-2011 ...Behenji, before seeking Dalit votes you will have to give an answer on the killing of Dalits (under your government) to their Samaj."

"While Mayawati exploits Dalits, SP commits atrocities on them," he alleged, adding both cannot do any good and it is only BJP which can work for their uplift on its "sabka saath, sabka vikas" motto.

Shah also hit out at Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who is currently on 'Deoria to Dilli Kisan Yatra', alleging, "Rahul baba your family has ruled the country for 65 years... it is Congress which is responsible for farmers' plight...had the party been real sympathiser of farmers their condition would not have been like this."

Terming Congress as "vote splitter", Shah alleged the party is nowhere in the race for power in the Assembly elections next year and it is in fray to help SP and BSP which had lent their support for 10 years at the Centre.

Recalling the massive support BJP got from Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Shah said the Modi government is working to develop all sections of the society and mentioned various schemes being run by it.

"But if the state does not have a government which works for the people and the poor, all such schemes of the Modi government will not reach to the ground level..," the BJP national president alleged.

Informing that the fund allocation for the state "has been hiked by Rs 1,00,000 crore" by the Modi government, he asked the Chief Minister as to why it has not been properly utilised for development and said, "UP will also be developed but only BJP can do this."

He also raised the slogan "na sapa na basapa, abki baar bhajapa sarkar' (No SP, no BSP, next time BJP government) at the rally.

Referring to the law and order situation in the state Amit Shah claimed "only BJP government which can improve the situation here".

Maurya in his speech alleged, "The massive loot in BSP had frustrated the common workers...we left the party because of this...the workers of the BSP are totally fed up."

Meanwhile, Amit Shah is scheduled to visit Mathura on September 28 for the five-day long birth centenary celebration of BJP ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. The celebrations, which will start on September 25 will also be attended by Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh among others.
Patna: The Bihar government today made a strong presentation before a committee constituted by Union Water Resources Ministry to show how siltation in the Ganga due to the Farakka Barrage had caused flooding in the region.

Principal Secretary of Bihar Water Resources Department Arun Kumar Singh made a power point presentation before Madhav Chittle committee, an official statement said in Patna.

The committee was formed at the initiative of the Bihar government.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, during his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had drawn his attention towards the siltation triggered by Farakka Barrage that leads to floods every year.

He had urged the PM to order a study to access the situation and formulate a national silt policy.

The Bihar government's presentation in the national capital was attended by Secretary of Union Water Resources ministry Shashi Sekhar and IIT Delhi Professor A K Gosain.
There are many ways you can react to the dastardly terrorist attack on the Army camp in Uri, close to the Line of Control with Pakistan. Personally, the one image that brought home the human toll of terror was the teardrop rolling down the cheeks of one of the three daughters of slain soldier Naik Sunil Kumar Vidyarthi, among the 18 killed in the pre-dawn attack. That image of the young girl who had just lost her father knocked one in the jaw. But the three sisters did not let grief immobilise them. Along with their classmates, they headed towards school and took their first semester examinations. That is what their father would have wanted them to do, they said.

This is what living with terrorism means. Since the attack on the Uri Army camp, experts have spouted zillions of words on what India should do, can do and the pros and cons of each step. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) is all set to take over the probe into the Uri attack. The discussions on prime time television will go on. As an ordinary citizen, what concerns me most is the security lapse. If an Army base in one of the highest security zones in the country is not secure, how secure are we? More important, what should be done to instil a sense of security among common men and women who are bombarded with images of terrorisms deadly touch?

Media reports suggest that the terrorists or fidayeens (suicide squad) which carried out the Uri strike sneaked into the Army camp by cutting the fence. They also seemed to be familiar with the camps layout. They fired grenades, setting aflame the diesel barrels lying inside the complex. Soldiers sleeping in tents were trapped in the engulfing flames. It was death by fire for 17 of them. One more died the next day. The terrorists are dead. But the questions the attack pose will not go away. How did the terrorists get in? How does someone cut a fence to an Army camp without setting off an alarm? Even a thief who tries to break into a car or a home would trigger an alarm. Cutting a fence would take more than a few minutes. Then there are other questions. Why were the soldiers sleeping in tents which were not even flame-retardant? Why did the Army camp not have a boundary wall? How many Army camps or military installations do we have without basic protection, especially in such vulnerable spots?

Media reports also mention that the four terrorists were dressed in Army fatigues, their hair was cut short. They did not look like a suicide squad, an official told a leading newspaper. What do terrorists look like? Did Ajmal Kasab look like a terrorist? What lessons have we learnt from past attacks? A Sri Lankan journalist friend says the Uri attack reminded him of the attack on the Katunayake Air Force base and airport way back in 2001. In a pre-dawn attack, 14 members of the LTTE Black Tiger suicide squad infiltrated the base, located about 35 km from capital Colombo. They destroyed the electricity transformers, plunging the whole area into darkness; they cut through the barbed wire surrounding the base and began their attack. They used rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and assault rifles to hit at Sri Lankan Air Force planes.

The terror strike at Uri was not as huge but certainly among the deadliest that India has seen in recent years. The similarity between the two was the ease with which terrorists could get inside a supposedly secure zone. To an ordinary citizen, what is deeply worrying are these repeated security lapses. They suggest lack of adequate surveillance and preparedness. There have been similar critical security breaches in India in the past. The attack on Parliament House comes to mind at once. In January this year, there was another terrorist attack, the one on the Pathankot base of the Indian Air Force.

That attack had led to the death of seven Indian security personnel. In its wake, a report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee of the home ministry had red-flagged the missed clues emblematic of the many gaps in Indias overall security apparatus and its readiness to battle cross-border terrorism. The committee had questioned how the Pakistani terrorists managed to cross the border despite fencing, floodlighting and patrolling by Indian frontier guards. It expressed bewilderment at the ease with which terrorists managed to breach the high-security airbase in spite of terror alert sounded well in advance.

Some of the important points raised by the committee related to the airbases security cover which was less than robust. The panel had noted that during its visit to the airbase, it found that there were no roads around the perimeter wall of the airbase complex, so the armed terrorists could gather there and start a gun battle that lasted for 72 hours before they were killed. Shrubs and trees on the premises had grown long enough to help terrorists in hiding and making difficult for security forces in flushing (them) out. The panel had also drawn attention to the role of the narco syndicate active in the border areas of Punjab and had asked for investigations on how the terrorists might have taken the help of networks used by smugglers to infiltrate the border.

This is not the time to indulge in blame games. But it is also not the time to ignore what is obvious. Of what use are expensive fighter planes and submarines and state-of-the art armoury if we cannot provide basic protection to our soldiers? This is the lesson of Uri we must not forget. In all the retaliation talk, we must not let anybody brush such fundamental issues under the carpet. The teardrop that rolled down the cheek of slain soldier Vidyarthis daughter is a pressing reminder of the urgency of the task ahead.

The writer focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies. She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com
News reports are not entirely clear if Nawabzadeh Brahamdagh Khan Bugti, today the foremost symbol of Baloch freedom from Pakistan who has been living in self-exile in Geneva, desires Indian citizenship or political asylum in India. Whats not in doubt, though, is that in 2007, after Pakistan President Pervez Musharrafs Army assassinated his grandfather, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the head of the preponderant Bugti tribe who became the standard-bearer of Baloch freedom, the ISI has organised several attempts on the life of Brahmdagh, who founded the Baloch Republican Party.

That makes Brahamdagh red hot political property  in the context of Balochistan as well as Pakistan as Muhammed Ali Jinnah had forcibly absorbed the territories of the Khan of Kalat (the Balochistan ruler), although the latter had an embassy in Karachi, Pakistans first capital, for nearly eight months after August 1947. Interestingly, at the time of the Indian Independence, the Quetta municipality was led by the Congress Party, although Kalat was deemed to be outside the framework of princely states during colonial rule.

Brahamdagh Bugti is politically as sensitive as the Dalai Lama was when he was given asylum by the Nehru government. If Mr Bugti becomes an Indian citizen, his political movement will be constrained, and his activities seen as interference by an Indian national. Asylum is a different matter, however. It means extending open support to the cause of Balochistans independence. This is what Pakistan does in Kashmir. But while Pakistan seeks to grab Kashmir in the name of religion, Muslim Balochistan has no wish to be retained inside Muslim Pakistan.

If the Modi government offers asylum to Mr Bugti, it would be the start of a new chapter in the subcontinents affairs. Of course, it is not clear to what extent his government is ready to espouse the Baloch cause, and on what terms the Baloch republican leader receives asylum in this country. New Delhi has been tight-lipped about the behind the scenes action. (A question  will the Indian high commissioner in Islamabad attempt to fly to Balochistan to visit resistance leaders, should he be constrained from seeing them at his Islamabad residence?) We should take on board that Beijing wont be happy with the India-Balochistan equation as it is busy expanding its influence to Balochistan.
Buy peace from barrel of a gun: Rakesh Sinha, chief editor of Pakistan Watch and honorary director of RSS think tank India Policy Foundation

Uris grim story has hurt 130 crore people of India and the country collectively realised that days of dialogue and diplomacy with Pakistan are over. The RSS, Jan Sangh and later the BJP have never been unambiguous in their reading of Pakistan. Its very creation was based on the narrative of deconstruction of democracy, secularism, and indivisible civilisational history of India. Therefore, its primary source of existence has been perennial hatred for India. Rulers and generations of Pakistan have changed but their collective conscience against India remains unchanged.

The formation of the BJP-led NDA government in 2014 was a message of Akhand Bharat. The Pandavas, before entering the final battle of Mahabharata, made one last attempt to buy peace and demanded only five villages from the Kauravas but the latter refused. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the most sincere effort to convince Pakistan that mutual trust and dialogue was the path for resolving disputes. Pakistan, however, responded with terrorism that exposed it. The world has acknowledged the genuineness of Mr Modis preventive diplomacy.

A New York Times editorial on May 12, 2016, urged the US government to put the squeeze on Pakistan for its double game dealing with Afghanistan. However, the US cant escape from its own responsibility for milking Pakistans tryst with terrorism.

In Pakistan, there has never been any pro-peace or pro-India sentiment. There is division of labour between Army, jihadis, politicians and press. They collectively disown terrorist actions emanating from their land be it 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, Pathankot or now Uri. The reaction of Pakistani so-called liberal English press on Uri incident grimly unravel that they are legitimising tools of terrorism.

While Uri is a lesson for war-like alertness even during peacetime, it also finally resurrected our original perspective that it is institutionalisation of jihad masked by nationality. As democracies largely dont engage in war, a democratic-secular state cant expect constructive dialogue and critical solution from a theocratic and rouge state. Sooner we realise our moral and military responsibility to undo the idea of Pakistan it would be precursor for peace in the region. There is no iota of doubt that every Pakistani terrorist considers his sacrifice as a service to the idea of Pakistan and Islam and none in Pakistan disavow them. Therefore, those who disclaim idea of disintegration of Pakistan as hawkish are, ipso facto, still guided by Nehruvian policy of mendicancy to buy peace.

Sometimes peace is born only from the barrels of guns. It was vindicated in 1971 and now time is ripe to change the map of the region. There is no demand in Pakistan for dialogue with India but there are some like CPI(M) and a microscopic but powerful lovers of Pakistan scattered from academia to art gallery and media, who beat their chests not for unprovoked attacks by Pakistanis but for dialogue with unprovoked aggressors.

Moreover, when the country has been facing the difficult choice to deal with a state which is a bunker of terrorists armed with nuclear arsenal, the Congress is engaged in taking political revenge with BJP and Mr Modi for its humiliating defeat in the last elections. The mandate of the people of India is to deal firmly be it the separatists in the Kashmir Valley or Pakistan.

Allow Army to decide its own action: Sandeep Dikshit, Congress spokesperson

The Army has been attacked in Uri. How it should respond and what it could do is best left to them. Tackling terror from Pakistan cannot be led by an open military option. Pakistan is in a state of chaos facing terrorism, internal strife, an Army that runs a parallel government and a clergy that is accountable to none. It is a victim of its own reckless use of religion, Army, international terror and US dependence. The economy cannot survive without external assistance and its Army needs to be armed by outsiders. This has made Pakistan become a willing sidekick of the United States and these days even China, both rogue states as far as India is concerned.

Looking at this, an intelligent strategy should be four-pronged and to hit where it hurts, but will not give a daily dose of nationalistic fervour, and hence would not be particularly understood by our Prime Minister. The four points are: deepen through our security agencies, the vulnerable social, communal and terror situation in parts of Pakistan, as their social and economic systems get fragile. We must refrain from the kind of public pronouncements Prime Minister Narendra Modi made on Balochistan as this will only weaken our stand of Kashmir being a bilateral issue. Next is to pressure the United States and China, if necessary through tightening diplomatic and trade relations, to discipline Pakistan. Both nations need our markets, and Pakistan is a poor substitute.

In both cases, we will have to forget for a while our beliefs that we cannot do without US as a benevolent emperor, and China as a trade ally. We must never forget that the Americans have never been our friends, as they cannot deal with a proud, self-reliant democratic nation. They need slaves, not partners and Pakistan is willing to bend over, as much as the masters ask of it.

Third is to strengthen the military through armament and technology and get them to hit at border areas on a regular fashion, reducing the role of men, thus protecting our lives. Our Army, Air Force and Navy can give hell to the Pakistan in this kind of a situation. The last is to get real about solving the problems in Jammu and Kashmir. There is no option but talking, greater economic opportunities in the Valley, sensitive handling by security apparatus, building confidence amongst younger people, reining in the vicious communal RSS elements that make Kashmiris see red, rein in media to be more responsible and engaging with all parties, in whatever manner government thinks best.

These are all long-term options, and shall be the best to gradually hit our neighbours. An open military option shall give international powers to come on side of Pakistan, as they are needed in the Wests designs on Central Asia, Afghanistan etc., and Pakistan with no qualms is a willing lackey. China has found a willing dog with a wagging tail to give them markets, port access etc. It cannot allow Pakistan to get involved in a direct conflict. No nation can balance the internal conflicts of Pakistan, nor can they strengthen them to wade off our pressure on the border.

Right now let the military decide how and when it shall avenge the Uri attack. They are far more capable than anyone else, provided this inept government lets them be. The Prime Minister and his bumbling team should restrict themselves to empty rhetoric in television studios and selling patriotism till the next elections.
When I first underwent surgeries, people thought Id be bedridden throughout my life with servants helping me, said Deepa Malik, silver medallist at the just-concluded Rio Paralympics. She added, Now, I hope my journey and medal serve as inspiration for differently-abled individuals. Paralympic medallists like Malik, Mariyappan Thangavelu, Devendra Jhajharia and Varun Singh Bhati inspire not only differently-abled persons but us all.

Ours is a wounded world. Daily, were wounded by accidents, injuries, social stigmas, psychological breakdowns, spiritual dryness and religious darkness. How do we heal them? Curse God and others? Or, like our Paralympic medallists turn wounds into wins? Wounds can be physical, social, mental, psychological or religio-spiritual. In the Bible, wound usually refers to a bodily injury received through combat or some accident. It is also seen as the judgement of God. The Book of Job is one of the deepest examinations of the problem of evil and suffering. Jobs declaration: The souls of the wounded cry out for help echoes the mental and emotional aspects of wounds, which call for response.

Prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah identify God as both, the one who inflicts some wounds, while healing others. Indeed, true prophets and mystics bear the wounds of their people as if there were their own, while trying tirelessly to heal them. Thus, wounds are also a wakeup call for us to respond to woundedness and darkness. Deepa said: I thank my husband for being my skill trainer and my daughters for being my strength and motivation. Isnt that great? Thats love! When we love others, their wounds become our own. We suffer too. But, we also have the capacity to launch wounded persons from wheelchairs to Olympic victory stands. Today, we celebrate the feast of a saint, Padre Pio (1887-1968) known for receiving the so-called stigmata i.e., experiencing in his hands and feet the marks of Christs crucifixion. Padre Pio desired to identify totally with Jesus.

After the first appearance of the stigmata Pio wrote: Im dying of pain because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment which I feel deep within. Will Jesus who is so good grant me this grace? Will He at least relieve me of the embarrassment which these outward signs cause me? He was embarrassed because he received widespread admiration from believers. Known for his holiness and wisdom, the news of Padre Pios stigmata made people flock to him. Pio would spend hours daily listening to the woes of people, praying with them, helping out to heal their wounds. He founded the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, Italian, meaning House for the Relief of Suffering. In our wounded world, you have two choices: curse wounds or turn wounds into wins. What will you choose?

Francis Gonsalves is a professor of theology. He can be contacted at fragons@gmail.com
Norfolk: A space station supply mission by a Virginia company has been pushed back to October. NASA said Tuesday that Orbital ATK plans to launch sometime between Oct. 9 and Oct. 13. The mission is to return the company's unmanned Antares rocket to flight after nearly two years. It also would be Orbital ATK's first mission from Wallops, Island, Virginia, since a launch failure in October 2014. The explosion damaged the launch pad and destroyed $51 million in NASA cargo.

Since then, Orbital ATK has used another company's rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to fulfill its obligations to NASA. Orbital first planned to launch in August and September. The company said previously that it needed more time for inspections and tests and also had to fit into the space station's schedule.

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An explosion on the launch site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is shown in this still image from video in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. September 1, 2016. U.S. Launch Report/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

SpaceX on Thursday said efforts to develop and certify a space taxi for NASA are not being slowed by an investigation into a launch pad fire that destroyed its rocket and a $200 million Israeli communications satellite.

Boeing Co and SpaceX, owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, are building spaceships to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, a $100 billion laboratory that flies 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

NASA, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is looking to turn over crew transport to SpaceX and Boeing before the end of 2018, breaking a Russian monopoly. SpaceX is aiming for its first test flight to the station in 2017.

Were full-steam head for certification. Were still trying to remain on schedule, Abhishek Tripathi, director of certification for SpaceX, said during a webcast panel discussion at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference in Long Beach, California.

I know what I need to do in the next day and in the next month, Tripathi said, adding that his work is not being affected by the accident investigation.

SpaceX, with oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration, is working to figure out why one of its Falcon 9 rockets burst into flames on Sept. 1 as it was being fueled for a routine prelaunch test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The blaze destroyed the communications satellite, owned by Israels Space Communication Ltd, which was scheduled to be carried into orbit two days later.

SpaceX has not yet disclosed how much damage was done at its primary launch site.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said on Wednesday the company was hoping to resume flights in November at a second, nearly complete launch pad at NASAs Kennedy Space Center, adjacent to the Air Force base.

The company, which has a backlog of 70 missions for NASA and commercial customers, worth more than $10 billion, also flies from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

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Local hotels, restaurants and bakery owners have also been informed about the app.

An innovative mobile app has been developed by the Madhya Pradesh administration using which the food left over after any function will be collected for distribution among needy people.

The app, named "Aahar", was recently launched under the 'Annadan scheme' of the government. Food left over after functions like marriages will be collected with the help of

NGOs for distribution among the needy, Indore Division Commissioner Sanjay Dube said today.

Local hotels, restaurants and bakery owners have also been informed about the app so that they can use it to prevent food from getting wasted, he said. It also has a feature with which any person can pay a certain amount for serving food the needy people, he added.

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Vietnam will start to teach Chinese language in its primary school starting from 2017.

This was according to the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) on Monday.

The MoET is known to build a general education program for Japanese, Chinese and Russian languages and the three languages will be reportedly taught as the first foreign language to the local students of Vietnam starting from grade three to grade 12.

Nguyen Minh Chau, deputy head of education and training department of Vietnam's northern Lang Son province, said on local Dan Tri (People's Knowledge) online newspaper on Monday that as his province borders China, it will be favorable to develop Chinese language teaching, as per Xinhua News Agency.

Lang Son will continue to teach the students English as the first foreign language and teach Chinese as well to meet with pupil's demands.

Moreover, French, Korean and German is expected to be taught as the second languages in academic year 2016-2017.
To recall, the smartphone was earlier tipped to feature a 5.15-inch display with 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution. It was also said to be powered by a Snapdragon 821 processor and 6GB RAM.

The China-based electronics company Xiaomi is expected to organize an event at the China National Convention Centre in Beijing on September 27 to launch the latest device and rumours regarding it are already making the rounds.

A Weibo user recently posted a screenshot of Note 2 that suggested that the device will be running Android 7.0 Nougat. To top the stock of rumours, Xiaomi Mi Note 2 may also be consisting of 8GB of RAM and a built-in storage of 256GB.

The screenshots posted Weibo user.

To recall, the smartphone was earlier tipped to feature a 5.15-inch display with 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution. It was also said to be powered by a Snapdragon 821 processor and 6GB RAM.

Additionally, the smartphone is also expected to have Adreno 530 GPU. Equipped with 16MP rear camera, the device is surely something to look forward to if the rumours are true.

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Washington considers al-Qaeda's Yemen-based franchise to be its most dangerous and has kept up its drone war throughout the conflict. (Photo: Representational Image)

Aden: An apparent US drone strike in Yemen killed two suspected al-Qaeda members and caused a large explosion when munitions they were transporting blew up, a security official and witnesses said Wednesday.

Washington is the only government to operate drones over Yemen but only periodically releases statements on its long-running bombing campaign against the country's powerful al-Qaeda branch.

Tuesday evening's strike hit the Wadi Abida district of Marib province, east of the capital Sanaa.

The security official named one of the dead as Abu Yaqin al-Waeli, a local al-Qaeda commander.

Marib is largely in the hands of loyalists of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and his allies in a Saudi-led coalition.

But al-Qaeda has taken advantage of fighting with the Shiite rebels who control the capital to expand their presence in the province.

Washington considers al-Qaeda's Yemen-based franchise to be its most dangerous and has kept up its drone war throughout the conflict.
Kampala: A Ugandan official says police will arrest organizers who are planning a gay pride parade in the capital, Kampala.

Simon Lokodo, a cabinet minister in charge of ethics and integrity, said in a statement Wednesday that the event had not been cleared by the police and would offend the country's laws.

Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda under a colonial-era law.

In 2014, Uganda's president signed an anti-gay bill that originally had proposed the death penalty against some homosexual acts, but a court later jettisoned the law as unconstitutional.

Frank Mugisha, a gay rights leader, says he had been awaiting police authorization to hold a parade this weekend at a beach on Lake Victoria.
Washington: A bipartisan group of two powerful American lawmakers has introduced an act in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a State Sponsor of terrorism.

"It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is Ranking member of this influential Congressional Committee on terrorism.

"Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe said.

"From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he alleged.

Poe said the bill will require the Obama Administration to formally answer this question.

The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said.

"Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a State Sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," Poe said.

In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack.

"I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace," he said.

"I support every effort to find out who committed this heinous act, so that the perpetrators are brought to justice. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims," Olson said.

Senator John Cornyn, Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest stack in a decade.

Indian-Americans continued to call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.

"Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state," said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA.

"OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan," it said.
United Nations: In a criticism of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's rhetoric, US President Barack Obama said if America turned away refugees simply because they are "Muslim", it would reinforce the terrorists' propaganda and the "ugly lie" that the US is opposed to Islam.

Obama, who hosted a 'Leaders Summit on Refugees' during the 71st UN General Assembly session in United Nations on Tuesday, said the world was facing a refugee crisis of "epic proportions" with more than 65 million people having been driven from their homes, more than any time since the World War-II.

"Among them are more than 21 million refugees who have fled their countries - everything and everyone they've ever known, fleeing with a suitcase or the clothes on their back," he said.

"And if we were to turn refugees away simply because of their background or religion, or, for example, because they are Muslim, then we would be reinforcing terrorist propaganda that nations like my own are somehow opposed to Islam, which is an ugly lie that must be rejected in all of our countries by upholding the values of pluralism and diversity," he said at the summit attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Bangladesh Prime Minsiter Sheikh Hasina.

He highlighted that in recent years, the US has put in place intensive screening and security checks to take in refugees as well as ensure the nation's security.

"Refugees are subject to more rigorous screening than the average tourist. We've seen in America, hardworking, patriotic refugees serve in our military, and start new businesses and help revitalise communities. I believe refugees can make us stronger," he said.

"So the challenge to our security is because when desperate refugees pay cold-hearted traffickers for passage, it funds the same criminals who are smuggling arms and drugs and children.

"When nations with their own internal difficulties find themselves hosting massive refugee populations for years on end, it can risk more instability. It oftentimes surfaces tensions in our society when we have disorderly and disproportionate migration into some countries that skews our politics and is subject to demagoguery," he said.

For the past year, Trump has been warning that letting refugees in would make the US vulnerable to new terror attacks. The brash tycoon has sparked a wave of criticism over his comments on race, immigrants and refugees, including calling for a ban on Muslim travellers to the United States.

And this week, one of Trump's sons triggered an online storm with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl containing an assortment of tainted and untainted candies.

Obama said he called the summit because the refugee crisis is "one of the most urgent tests of our time - our capacity for collective action. To test, first and foremost, our ability to end conflicts, because so many of the world's refugees come from just three countries ravaged by war - Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia," he said.

Obama, who is attending the last UN General-Assembly session of his presidency, said nations cannot excuse the mentality that allows for violence with impunity.

He added it was not fair that a handful of countries, mostly with limited resources, are bearing the burden of hosting the maximum refugees.

"And collectively, we continue to make excuses. It's not the subject of this summit, but we all know that what is happening in Syria, for example, is unacceptable. And we are not as unified as we should be in pushing to make it stop.

"It's a test of our international system where all nations ought to share in our collective responsibilities, because the vast majority of refugees are hosted by just 10 countries who are bearing a very heavy burden - among them Turkey, Pakistan,

Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia. Countries that often have fewer resources than many of those who are doing little or nothing," he said.

The refugee crisis also tests the nations' shared security. "Not because refugees are a threat. Refugees, most of whom are women and children, are often fleeing war and terrorism. They are victims. They're families who want to be safe and to work, be good citizens and contribute to their country who are interested in assimilating and contributing to the society in which they find themselves."

He underlined the need to recognise that refugees are a symptom of "larger failures" such as war, ethnic tensions or persecution.

"If we truly want to address the crisis, wars like the savagery in Syria must be brought to an end - and it will be brought to an end through political settlement and diplomacy, and not simply by bombing."

He told the summit that as President, he has increased the number of refugees America is resettling to 85,000 this year, which includes 10,000 Syrian refugees.

In the coming fiscal year, the US will welcome and resettle 110,000 refugees from around the world - which is a nearly 60 percent increase over 2015.
An official stands in an alley near the First American Fried Chicken restaurant. (Photo: AP)

They dot the landscape in this working-class New Jersey city, popping up every few blocks with names like US Fried Chicken, Royal Fried Chicken and New York Fried Chicken and Burger and giving immigrants a foothold in a new country.

One of these fried chicken restaurants, First American Fried Chicken, was thrust into the international spotlight on Monday when authorities arrested the owner's son, Ahmad Rahami, after a shootout with police.

Rahami is suspected of planting several explosives in New York City and New Jersey, including one that blew up on Saturday night in Manhattan and injured 29 people and two in New Jersey that exploded over the weekend but did not hurt anyone.

Local restaurant owners in Elizabeth said on Tuesday that many of the fried chicken restaurants are operated by Afghan owners like Mohammad Rahami, who employed his sons including Ahmad, at his eatery.

Joshua Sanchez, an Elizabeth resident who frequented Rahami's restaurant, said "chicken shacks" are part of daily life in the city. And Flee Jones, a rapper and producer who has known Ahmad Rahami since they were teenagers, helped write a song praising Rahami's shack and its friendly service.

In many immigrant communities, the success of a few individuals in a particular business may inspire others to follow the same path.

"A lot of immigrants feel that if my old neighbor in Turkey or Afghanistan is able to do it, I can do the same thing," said Aisha Wahab, a board member of the California-based Afghan Coalition, which helps Afghan immigrants and refugees in the United States.

That was the case for Ali, owner of a nearby chicken shack in Elizabeth, who opened his business in the early 1990s after coming to the United States as a 15-year-old war refugee.

"There were people from my country doing this business," said Ali, 43, who declined to give his last name for fear he might face harassment after the bombing.

Ali said the business was a good fit for recent immigrants with limited English and a lack of professional skills.

Another chicken shack owned by an Afghan family flanks the Elizabeth train station, where Rahami is suspected of leaving up to half a dozen explosive devices on Sunday.

Mohammad Hassan, 23, the owner's son, said his father has been in the fried chicken business for many years, first in neighboring Union and now in Elizabeth.

Elizabeth has a sizable and well established Muslim population with a wide range of professions, according to religious and community leaders.

Afghans, however, make up only a small portion of that group, though their numbers have been rising.

Census data showed approximately 200 Afghans living in the city, according to the federal government's latest five-year survey that covered 2010 to 2014.

Hassen Abdellah, president of the Dar-Ul-Islam mosque, said Elizabeth was a first stop for many immigrants, including Muslims seeking a town with a large and active community.

"We're a seaport town. You get off the plane, and you're in Elizabeth," he said in a telephone interview. The mosque has been in Elizabeth for 75 years and typically has about 500 to 700 people at Friday prayer, he said.

"If there's tension, I haven't heard about it," he said. "The beauty of what we have going on in Elizabeth is the Muslim community here is no stranger to other people."

The Rahamis clashed with some neighbors, though others described them as friendly and sociable. The suspect's family engaged in a protracted battle with the city after numerous complaints from local residents about noise and late hours at First American Fried Chicken, and Mohammad Rahami filed an unsuccessful federal lawsuit against the city claiming religious discrimination.

US authorities are still investigating what possible motives Ahmad Rahami may have had for placing bombs in New York and New Jersey and if he was radicalized during trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Several local Muslim leaders told a news conference on Tuesday that the acts Rahami is suspected of committing were not representative of their religion.

"This individual perpetrator, these terrorist acts do not represent Islam or Muslims in any sense," said Ali Chaudry, the president of the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge.

But Ali, the chicken shack owner, said he was worried about retaliation, even though he has rarely faced discrimination in diverse Elizabeth.

"It's very scary," he said. "Who knows who's going to walk into the store?"
New York: Donald Trump's hardline stance on immigration after two bombings in the New York area again sparked debate on the White House campaign trail on Tuesday, as his son sparked a firestorm by comparing Syrian refugees to lethal candies.

The Republican presidential hopeful's uncompromising position on illegal migrants -- even calling them a dangerous "Trojan horse" who enter the country with the aim of doing harm -- is inextricably linked with his meteoric political rise.

Most Republicans approve of his tough talk, with polls showing that a majority of party members agreed with his call last December to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

Since then, Trump has refrained from specifically targeting Muslims, but he has championed police profiling of suspects and promised to bar immigrants and travellers from certain countries deemed dangerous, like Syria.

The candidate has repeatedly warned of the risks posed by Syrian refugees, citing the arrival in Europe of Islamic State operatives disguised as simple refugees, and says US immigration officials are not properly screening new arrivals.

But immigration is nevertheless not one of the major issues on the minds of voters, placing only fourth according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, making it unclear if Trump, 70, can use it to persuade those who are still undecided.

But national security and the anti-terror fight are number two on that list, and with less than 50 days to go before Election Day on November 8, Trump is attempting to blur the lines between the two issues.

"This is a question of qualify of life," Trump told a rally in key swing state Florida yesterday. "We want to make sure we are only admitting people in our country who love our country."

Trump's son Donald Jr, one of his surrogates on the campaign trail, has meanwhile courted controversy with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of multi-colored Skittles candy -- some of them lethal, but not to the naked eye.

"This image says it all," he said on Twitter, with a picture of a white bowl filled with the popular sweets.

Written above the image is, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take ahandful? That's our Syria refugee problem."

Trump Jr thus argued that it is too dangerous to welcome migrants when a tiny number of them could later launch attacks. The man accused of planting bombs in both downtown Manhattan and near a race in New Jersey is a naturalised American of Afghan descent.

At his rallies, Trump Sr has repeatedly recited the lyrics to a 1960s song, "The Snake," which recounts how a woman who aided an injured snake ended up being bitten, and used the Trojan Horse imagery to warn of hidden dangers.

"We cannot let this evil continue. Cannot do it," he said on Tuesday.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attends a Leader's Summit on Refugees during the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly. (Photo: AP)

United Nations: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has raised the Kashmir issue with almost every world leader he has held talks with on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, but his efforts to internationalise the dispute with India appeared to have gained no traction.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday made no reference to Kashmir and the situation in the Valley in his last address despite Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's repeated calls to the world body to help resolve the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan.

He addressed tensions in the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, the South Sudan tensions, violent extremism and its impact on regions from Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan to the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin.

Read: Nawaz Sharif consults Pak army chief ahead of UNGA address

However, Ban did not make any mention of Kashmir or the tensions in the Valley, that have escalated in the recent months, even as Pakistan made repeated pleas to the UN to help resolve the dispute between India and Pakistan.

Ban has repeatedly said his "good offices" are available to help resolve the Kashmir dispute only if both India and Pakistan request for it, a clear indication that the issue is bilateral and should be solved by the two countries only.

Sharif raised the issue with the leaders of the US, the UK, Japan and Turkey and sought their intervention to resolve the matter. He met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in New York on Tuesday.

"PM Sharif briefed Japanese PM about the grave turn that the situation in occupied Kashmir is taking. Reminded him about UNSC resolutions," Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi tweeted.

"PM Nawaz Sharif also apprised his Japanese counterpart of the human rights violations being committed by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir," Lodhi said in another tweet.

Erdogan and Sharif "agreed that OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) Committee on Human Rights should send a fact-finding mission" to Kashmir, Lodhi said.

On Monday, Sharif held bilateral talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry and UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

According to a readout of his meeting with Kerry by the Pakistan mission, Sharif told him that more than 107 people have been "assassinated" in Kashmir, thousands injured and "worst human rights violations are being committed at the state level."

"I still remember President (Bill) Clinton's promise that US will play its role to help out in resolving bilateral disputes and issues between Pakistan and India," Sharif said, according to the release.

"I expect US Administration and Secretary Kerry to use his good offices to help in resolving bilateral issues between Pakistan and India," he added.

In his meeting with May, Sharif urged her to play her role in convincing India to stop the use of force against the people in the region.

He said Pakistan's support for Kashmiri people "in their legitimate struggle for self determination and its commitment to the Kashmir cause are non-negotiable."

Kashmir will be the focal point of Sharif's address to the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

Tensions have heightened between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attack by heavily-armed militants, suspected to be from Pakistan, on an army base in Uri in which 18 jawans died.
Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, was shot multiple times and captured by police Monday after being spotted in the doorway of a bar in Linden, New Jersey. (Photo: AP)

New York: The Afghan-born American held on suspicion of bombing New York had a violent past, allegedly stabbing his brother after returning from a year in Pakistan, and reportedly possessed a notebook that mentioned Al-Qaeda.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, was shot multiple times and captured by police Monday after being spotted in the doorway of a bar in Linden, New Jersey. The FBI had released his name and mugshot, setting off an intensive manhunt.

Rahami underwent surgery and was in "critical but stable" condition, New York police chief James O'Neill said Tuesday. But so far he has not spoken to interrogators.

He has been charged with unlawful weapon possession and five counts of attempted murder of a police official. US media reported he was captured with a bullet-torn notebook that contained pro-Al-Qaeda writings.

He has yet to be slapped with terror charges over Saturday night's bombing in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, which wounded 29 people, and a pipe bombing along the route of a US Marine Corps race in New Jersey.

The FBI is now analyzing eight other unexploded bombs recovered from Manhattan and New Jersey, fingerprints and DNA, for clues as to how he may have become radicalized, and whether he acted alone.

The notebook found on Rahami included references to US-born Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011, and the 2013 Boston bombers, CNN reported.

"He doing bad, he stabbed my son, he hit my wife," Rahami's father Mohammad told reporters when asked why he called authorities in 2014 to tell them his son was a danger and reportedly calling him a terrorist.

Email from Pakistan

In August 2014, Rahami was charged with aggravated assault and unlawfully possessing a knife after being accused of stabbing Nasim Rahami in the leg.

He reportedly spent three months in jail but was never prosecuted.

Two years earlier in February 2012, he was also accused of violating a domestic violence restraining order, according to court filings in Elizabeth.

Investigators suspect that Rahami built 10 bombs, only two of which exploded -- the one in Chelsea and the pipe bomb in the New Jersey town of Seaside Park.

Two other pipe bombs in Seaside Park failed to detonate, as did a pressure cooker device in Chelsea, and five pipe bombs in his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, which were defused safely on Monday.

"I think it's a good sign that he was found in a doorway. Hopefully that means he had nowhere to go," O'Neill told CBS News.

Officials say Rahami travelled "extensively" in recent years to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he married his wife, who then fell pregnant.

Local congressman Albio Sires said Rahami sought his help to obtain a visa for his heavily pregnant wife to travel to the United States in 2014.

"He sent an email to my office from Pakistan, and he had said to me that he had been in Pakistan since April 2013 and we received the email on March 2014," Sires told CNN.

- Love child -

==============

His wife left the United States shortly before the attack and was stopped in the United Arab Emirates, US media reported.

Officials say so far they have found no connection between Rahami and any militant groups, including the Taliban or Islamic State (IS).

He worked at the family's fried chicken restaurant, where The New York Times quoted friends as saying that he started praying and wore traditional clothes after returning from Afghanistan.

He was also father to a child with his American high school girlfriend, who is now requesting full custody, filing court documents that list Rahami as "under terrorist investigation."

The woman complained to Fox that he failed to pay child support. In court papers, she said she last spoke to him on the telephone in January.

Another line of inquiry may be whether the family's tussles over their business could have played a role in radicalizing Rahami.

His family sued the city of Elizabeth in 2011, accusing it and local police of discrimination, because they were Muslim and Afghans, in forcing them to close their chicken restaurant by 10:00 pm. The suit was settled in favor of the city.

In Minnesota, police also say they have uncovered nothing to tie a Somali American man who went on a stabbing rampage at a Minnesota shopping mall on Saturday to organized extremist groups or the East Coast attacks.
New York: Pakistan's lack of will in dealing with insurgents stems from its "India phobia", its military and civilian tensions and its trust deficit with neighbours,

Afghanistan's foreign minister has said while demanding the dismantling of "safe havens" in Pakistan to defeat terrorism.

"The way Pakistan behaves is because they have India phobia, there are military and civilian tensions and there is trust deficit between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Salahuddin Rabbani said here when asked what motivates Pakistan in dealing with insurgent groups and its "lack of will" to help deal with Taliban and other terror groups.

In a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday, Rabbani said out of these three reasons, Afghanistan and Pakistan can work on the issue of the trust deficit.

"After the formation of the national unity government, we did our best to go and work with Pakistan and we tried to open a new chapter of relations. On India phobia and the military and civilian tensions of the Pakistani leaders, this is something that they (Pakistan) have to sort it out," he said.

He said Afghanistan does not expect the violence and terror to subside anytime soon "as the Taliban and affiliate groups are sustained with logistical, financial and material support from elements in Pakistan."

Kabul has repeatedly underscored that terrorism will not be defeated in Afghanistan or elsewhere "as long as the distinction between good and bad terrorist continues" coupled with the lingering problem of terrorists' safe havens and sanctuaries which remain unaddressed.

"As our fight against terrorism continues, we have not closed the widow of opportunity for peace and reconciliation with the elements of armed opposition ready to give up violence. Yet we know that any prospect for the success is strictly contingent on the extent to which the government of Pakistan is ready and willing to clamp down on extremist groups," he said.

On the safe havens provided to terror groups in Pakistan, he said the spike in violence in Afghanistan shows that terror groups have continuous support "from somewhere" otherwise they would not have been able to fight in several provinces at the same time.

"We saw where their leader (Mullah Akhtar Mohammad) Mansour got killed," he said referring to the Taliban leader killed in an airstrike in Pakistan in May this year.

"Their sanctuaries, bases are somewhere in Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership should take this seriously and should make sure that these groups don't operate in those areas," Rabbani said.

Afghanistan is concerned about the sanctuaries and safe havens that the terror groups enjoy in Pakistan, with Rabbani hoping that the government in Pakistan "will take this issue seriously."

Rabbani said the US can play a role in persuading Pakistan to "change course and act in good faith."

He noted that despite the fact that peace efforts with the Taliban have not met with desired results, Afghanistan is optimistic about making progress in talks with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former prime minister of Afghanistan and founder and active leader of the Hezb-e Islami group. "This is an important development," Rabbani said.

On whether Afghanistan has a vision on how it will manage its ties with India and Pakistan, he said Kabul's relation with one country is not at the expense of its relations with any other country.

"If you are close with one country, it does not mean we are moving away from other countries. We want to have good relations with all the countries in the region, that includes Pakistan and India," he said.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Russ Feingold said Tuesday that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should not be pardoned for leaking classified documents exposing the scope of mass surveillance and data collection by the agency and its counterparts abroad.

Also Tuesday, Feingold described as a myth a claim by his opponent, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, that the exit of U.S. troops from Iraq led to the creation of the Islamic State terror group.

Feingolds comments came in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal Editorial Board.

Snowden has lived in Russia since 2013, where he was granted asylum shortly after he gave documents to media outlets, including The Guardian and the Washington Post, that showed the NSA and intelligence agencies in other countries were collecting phone, email and other data from hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The disclosure led to international scrutiny of the previously secret surveillance efforts  and outrage from many who viewed them as infringing on the privacy of innocent people. Congress later passed a law curtailing bulk data collection by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Interest in Snowden has rekindled with the recent release of a movie about him, Snowden.

Some, including former President Jimmy Carter, have said Snowden may deserve a presidential pardon for sparking a national debate about the extent of U.S. surveillance powers.

Feingold, seen by many as a civil-liberties champion during his three terms in the U.S. Senate, said he disagrees.

I think he (Snowden) should face the proper authorities, Feingold said. Im glad we know what he told us. .... But I basically think youve got to acknowledge that people cant be revealing American secrets without any consequence at all.

Snowden faces criminal charges in the U.S. for allegedly stealing government property and violating the Espionage Act.

Feingold said it may be appropriate for prosecutors to weigh the value of Snowdens disclosures against the fact that he broke the law.

Maybe there would be a choice not to prosecute, Feingold said.

Feingold became most closely associated with the civil-liberties cause after casting the lone vote in the U.S. Senate against the USA Patriot Act in 2001  a vote for which he has been criticized by Johnson in the current U.S. Senate campaign.

One of the provisions of the act of which Feingold was most critical, Section 215, was used to justify some of the mass surveillance efforts exposed by Snowden. A federal judge later ruled it did not authorize surveillance to that extent.

Feingold also described as completely counter-factual the Johnson claim that Obamas decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq was a historic blunder that allowed the Islamic State to rise from the ashes.

Johnson has made the claim as part of his push for sending U.S. ground troops back into Iraq and into Syria to battle IS.

Feingold said that it was the U.S. decision to enter Iraq, which he voted against in the U.S. Senate in 2002, that ultimately enabled the ascent of IS.

Feingold said the U.S. made a critical error by imprisoning Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now the IS leader, together with other extremists during the Iraq War.

Al-Baghdadi and all his buddies were thrown into a prison together. That was our stupid mistake. We put them all together, and they created ISIS then, Feingold said. So the idea that somehow this was the result of leaving? Its the result of going there.
Washington: Russia poses the most dangerous threat to the US with China being a close second, a top Pentagon general has said, a viewpoint also echoed by a prominent American lawmaker.

"The way I look at the threats across the world. I think that Russia's the most dangerous threat, China's a close second, but the most likely threats and the most concerning are North Korea and then Iran, because North Korea is very unpredictable," General John E Hayten said in his confirmation hearing to be the Commander of the Strategic Command.

"It's hard to tell exactly what they're going to do, but I do want to caveat the unpredictability of North Korea a little bit, because if you look at what they are doing with their missile programs, as well as the nuclear testing programs, and you compare it to where we are today, it looks very beginning," he said on Tuesday.

China and Russia have been looking at themselves for the last 20 years in relation to the US which has developed an incredibly powerful, conventional military that can dominate any battlefield in the world, Hayten said, adding so they have taken those lessons and started building capabilities to respond to that.

"One of those lessons is in the electromagnetic spectrum, they see us dominating the electromagnetic spectrum. They see us using GPS, satellite communications, they see us basically conducting information aged warfare where at - in a not-too-distant past it was industrialised warfare," he said.

"So they're developing layers of capabilities, in the electromagnetic spectrum, in cyber, in space, to try to gain a strategic advantage in those areas. Our job is to make sure they never get an advantage in those areas. But it's clear that that's what they're trying to do," Hayten said.

Senator John McCain, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said North Korea's fifth nuclear test earlier this month was the latest reminder that it's "corpulent boy dictator" remains intent on developing the capability to strike the US with nuclear weapons.

"And then there is China, which continues to modernise its nuclear forces while placing a new emphasis on mobile missiles and submarines," he said, adding but perhaps the most pressing challenge is Russia.

Russia's aggression in Ukraine and destabilising actions in Syria take place under a nuclear shadow, he said.

"Russia is threatening our NATO allies with nuclear strikes, modernising its strategic nuclear forces, developing a new nuclear ground launched cruise missile capable of ranging most of Europe, and has fired air and sea launched cruise missiles against targets in Syria, missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads and flown against European and US targets," McCain said.

McCain also expressed concern over modernisation of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan.

"Pakistan has rapidly expanded its nuclear arsenal and reportedly developed new tactical nuclear weapons. Not to be outdone, India continues to modernise its nuclear triad. Even under the best of circumstances, the Iran nuclear deal gives Iran a free hand to develop nuclear weapons in a decade," he said.
Montreal: Some 60 schools and universities in eastern Canada were evacuated today over an unspecified possible threat, police said.

Students at all primary and secondary schools across Prince Edward Island were taken to safe locations, federal police said, while Nova Scotia police received an anonymous bomb threat against three university campuses in the province.

The police said the students were being taken to safe locations in their communities around the island, which is off Canada's Atlantic coast and is the country's smallest province with a population of approximately 146,000.

There are about 19,000 students in PEI's schools, according to the Public Schools Branch website. CBC television showed a long line of children being escorted down a street.

"We're on the phone working with drivers and schools," said an employee at the Public Schools Branch who did not provide her name. It was not immediately clear whether the evacuation was complete.

The University of Prince Edward Island said it was closed for the day, "given the situation happening across the province."

Police in the nearby province of Nova Scotia also closed some college and university campuses. A Nova Scotia Community College campus in Halifax was evacuated after an anonymous threat, Halifax Regional Police said in a press release.

It said an explosive disposal unit went to the scene but found that a suspicious package was only garbage and reopened streets in the area.

The college's Marconi campus in Sydney, Nova Scotia also shut down. Local media reported there had been a bomb threat.

Cape Breton University, also in Sydney, said on its website that it was closing.
Dan Ruedinger, the owner of the Treats Family Restaurant had put up a 'Muslims get out' sign outside his eatery. (Photo: Videograb)

Washington: A restaurant owner in the US, who had put up a "Muslims get out" sign outside his eatery as he was upset over the recent stabbing in Minnesota, has been invited to a mosque to learn more about Islam and the Muslim community.

Dan Ruedinger, the owner of the Treats Family Restaurant, has said that he had put up the controversial sign because he was upset over the stabbings at a St. Cloud mall in Minnesota.

A man making "some references to Allah" stabbed and injured eight people in the shopping mall, before being shot dead by an off-duty officer.

"We are not targeting the Muslims in general, just the extremists," Dan Reudinger has said. "That's all I can say. It's my right and I'm going to stand up, and I wish more people would do it," CBS Minnesota reported today.

Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota (CAIR-MN), plans to invite Ruedinger to a mosque in Faribault.

CAIR-MN hopes a meeting with local Muslims will change the business owner's view of the state's Islamic community, it said.

"Our experience has shown that interaction with ordinary American Muslims and enhanced knowledge of Islam are key factors in the reduction of Islamophobic attitudes," Hussein said.

Hussein also thanked community members of different faiths and backgrounds who demonstrated outside the Lonsdale restaurant and spoke out against the sign on social media.

Ruedinger's sign drew protesters. They said that while the business owner had the right to say what he wanted, his message reflected badly on the Lonsdale community.
Six of the worlds richest countries  the US, China, Japan, Britain, Germany and France  hosted only 1.8 million refugees last year, just seven per cent of the world total.

United Nations: At a summit hosted by US President Barack Obama, 50 countries have pledged to take in 3,60,000 refugees.

Seven countries  Romania, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, France, Luxembourg  committed to resettle or admit at least 10 times more refugees than in 2015.

While the new pledges would allow more asylum-seekers to rebuild their lives, it represented a fraction of the 1.1 million refugees who are in need of resettlement in 2016, according to the UN refugee agency.

Countries also boosted financial contributions to UN appeals and international humanitarian organisations by about $4.5 billion over 2015 levels.

The pledges included funds to ensure access to schools for one million refugee children and enabling one million refugees to work legally.

Canadas Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country has taken in more than 30,000 Syrian refugees since December, said the refugee crisis posed a challenge but also an opportunity.

After admitting one million refugees last year, Germany pledged to continue welcoming those in search of refuge. German Chancellor Angela Merkels party suffered electoral setbacks this month in the face of a surge of anti-migrant parties.

Only eight countries currently host more than half the worlds refugees: Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda.
In June, Taiwan protested after Cambodia deported 25 Taiwanese internet scam suspects to rival China in the latest snub of the self-ruled island. (Photo: AP)

Phnom Penh: Cambodia has deported 50 Chinese and 13 Taiwanese citizens to China over an alleged internet scam, complying with demands from Beijing, a senior police official said on Wednesday.

The suspects were flown out of Cambodia on Tuesday, said Gen. Ouk Haiseila, chief of the Cambodian Interior Ministry's Immigration Investigation Bureau. He said the Chinese government sent a special plane from Beijing to take them back.

In June, Taiwan protested after Cambodia deported 25 Taiwanese internet scam suspects to rival China in the latest snub of the self-ruled island. Cambodia regards Taiwan to be part of China.

The latest group of 63 suspects was arrested late last month in a rented house in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. They were accused of defrauding victims in China using phone calls made over the internet.

Since 2012, at least 982 Chinese and Taiwanese accused of taking part in internet scams have been arrested and deported back to China, according to Ouk Haiseila.

Although Taiwan's constitution formally decrees that it and the Chinese mainland are part of a single Chinese nation, Taiwan functions like an independent country and does not acknowledge Beijing's claim of authority over it.

Rights activists and Taiwanese authorities say such deportations reflect the great influence China exercises over Cambodia through aid and investment.

China is a key ally and economic partner of impoverished Cambodia. It has provided millions of dollars in aid and investment over the past decade, agreed to write off debts and granted it tariff-free status for hundreds of items.

Kenya and Malaysia have also deported Taiwanese internet scam suspects to China despite protests by Taiwanese officials.
Dublin: Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Wednesday he expected his British counterpart Theresa May to begin the formal process of leaving the European Union at the end of January or in early February next year.

"It is strictly a matter for the prime minister but it is my impression from discussions is that it will happen sometime toward the end of January or early February," he said.

Speaking to reporters in Dublin ahead of the resumption of parliament next week, Kenny said the indications had come in separate meetings held recently in Dublin with UK Secretary of State for Exiting the EU David Davis and Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire.

He added that Irish finance minister Michael Noonan will meet his British counterpart Philip Hammond in London on Thursday as Ireland is the EU member most-affected by Britain's decision to leave.

Kenny's remarks echo those of European Union president Donald Tusk, who also said at last week's EU summit that he expected formal talks would begin early next year based on conversations he had had with the UK prime minister.

However, a British government source in response to Tusk said that May did not mention a specific time frame during discussions the previous week and that the comments were based on an interpretation of the conversation.

The British government has so far declined to declare when it will trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, so beginning the formal process of leaving the EU following the referendum vote on June 23.
Mazher Mahmood, 53, was known for his scoops for The Sun. (Photo: YouTube screenshot)

London: A top British undercover reporter known as the "Fake Sheikh" for his elaborate disguises when meeting celebrities went on trial Wednesday accused of doctoring evidence in a pop star's drug case.

Mazher Mahmood, 53, was known for his scoops for The Sun on Sunday newspaper in which he would pose as a wealthy figure from the Middle East and encourage celebrities into making embarrassing revelations.

He and his driver Alan Smith deny conspiracy to pervert the course of justice over the 2014 trial of Tulisa Contostavlos, a former member of hip-hop group N-Dubz and "X Factor" talent show judge.

Contostavlos was accused of arranging for Mahmood to be supplied with half an ounce of cocaine, a story which landed him an exclusive for The Sun on Sunday and, when he handed evidence to police, led to her prosecution.

Prosecutors claim Mahmood, who dubbed himself "King of the Sting", and Smith altered a police statement from Smith to remove negative comments by Contostavlos about cocaine which could have helped her lawyers.

"Mazher Mahmood had a vested interest in the prosecution succeeding in terms of his reputation and his standing," lead prosecutor Sarah Forshaw told the Old Bailey central criminal court in London.

"In effect, the hearing in June 2014 put Mr Mahmood and his journalistic process on trial," she added.

He knew that if it could be shown that he had acted improperly as an agent provocateur, inducing Miss Contostavlos to do something she would not otherwise do, his own credibility and standing and the prospect of conviction in the case might both be severely damaged."



'Anti-drug comments'

In his "Fake Sheikh" guise, Mahmood posed as a film producer when he met Contostavlos in 2013, knowing she wanted to break into the movies, and told her she could be cast alongside Leonardo di Caprio, Forshaw said.

After meeting at a five-star hotel in London's exclusive Mayfair district, Smith drove Contostavlos and some companions home.

He overheard a conversation in which "Tulisa had spoken about someone in her family being dependent on cocaine" and was "negative" about the drug, she added.

At the original trial, which collapsed, the pop star was alleged to have arranged to supply Mahmood with cocaine after that.

At first, Smith recounted the car conversation as part of his evidence to police but the day after, he allegedly contacted officers saying they should remove the anti-drugs part.

"A second statement was prepared and it was how that change of account came about that lies at the heart of this case," Forshaw said.

In the intervening 24 hours, Mahmood and Smith allegedly exchanged a string of texts and calls.

But texts and emails between them had been destroyed by the time police accessed their phones, the prosecutor added.

Mahmood, of Purley in south London, and Smith, from Dereham in Norfolk, eastern England, watched silently from the dock as the case against them was outlined.

Their lawyers will outline the defence case later in the trial.
Schaffheausen: In a shocking case of child neglect, a Swiss mother left her two-year-old son locked in her car, late in the night, to go clubbing with her friends in Schaffheausen, which is located in northern Switzerland.

Left alone in the vehicle, the terrified child soon started screaming and crying, drawing the attention of many passers-by. Concerned and outraged, a group of witnesses started looking for the owner of the car, but called up the police to rescue to the child when they failed to locate his mother.

According to a report in MailOnline, one witness was so furious over the incident that he attacked the car.

When the police arrived at the spot, they immediately called up for a mechanic to free the child. The 25-year-old mother finally arrived at the scene much after midnight; 20 minutes after the cops had reached the spot.

The woman is now facing charges of 'dereliction of the duty of care of her child'. In her statement to the police, she said she had left her son in the car to go clubbing with her office friends.

The woman has also lodged a complaint against one of the witnesses, who caused damaged to her car in his anger.
Jet2 said the group caused problems on a flight from Newcastle to Tenerife on Saturday. (Photo: Twitter)

London: British low-cost airline Jet2 on Wednesday said it has banned six "drunken" passengers from its flights after they behaved rudely to the crew, amidst growing incidents of "air rage" in the country.

Jet2 said the group caused problems on a flight from Newcastle to Tenerife on Saturday.

The airline has banned three people for a year and is refusing to fly another three home from the holiday island. A spokeswoman said the group had been drinking "illicit alcohol", which refers to alcohol bought before they boarded the plane.

The company said: "This group were rude and aggressive to our cabin crew after drinking illicit alcohol, and they should be in no doubt that the consequences of such behaviour will not be accepted.

"We want our customers to have an enjoyable flight experience without the actions of a disruptive few spoiling it and we will take all necessary action to stamp it out."

The company is asking for duty free spirits sold at airports to be sealed in bags amid calls for the government to review the issue.

This week, the BBC reported that there were 386 dangerous incidents in the UK in 2015 - compared with just 85 in 2013.

More than 250 million passengers pass through UK airports every year with close to two million flights.

Internationally, too, the problem of air rage seems to be growing.

The International Air Transport Association has seen a growth in the number of reports of unruly passenger incidents every year since 2007, with more than 10,000 reported last year.

A quarter of them mention drugs or alcohol as a trigger, the report said.
"[If] Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision," the committees report said.

London: British MPs are demanding a "grand strategic revision" in UKs policy to deal with the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group and to ensure it does not spread to Asia and Africa.

The House of Commons Defence Select Committee warned that the terrorist group, like al Qaeda before it, could transform into an international movement with off-shoots if squeezed out of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

"The UK and coalitions strategy to counter Daesh [another name for ISIS] is predominately focused on Iraq and Syria and relies on the removal of territory from Daesh in order to eliminate it. That is a necessary, but not sufficient, strategy.

"[If] Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision," the committees report said.

"Our counter-Daesh strategy should be as effective in Nigeria, Afghanistan or Libya as it is in Iraq or Syria. There needs to be a grand strategic discussion about the threat posed by Daesh and how we can defeat it," it added.

The UK has been taking part in air strikes against Islamist militants in Iraq since 2014 and Parliament authorised their extension to Syria last year.

The committee found there had been 550 Royal Air Force (RAF) missions in Iraq since December 2015 and 65 in Syria.

It also called on the government to put more information about the targets for air strikes in Syria into the public domain, in order to "justify and validate" its policy of military action.

Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said the UK must focus on the long-term risks.

"If Daesh transforms itself into an international movement or a network of affiliates - like al-Qaeda before it - which can survive the loss of territory - the UK government approach will need to adapt," he said.

"For example, if Daesh is defeated in the Middle East but then grows strong in Africa, the current strategy will require major revision. Assuming Daesh is squeezed out of both countries, we have to focus too on what happens next - both in other countries to which Daesh may migrate and in Syria especially where there is no shortage of other Islamist groups, just as dangerous, which are planning to take control," he added.

A UK government spokesperson said: "We have conducted over 1,000 air strikes, which is second only to the US in both countries, and have helped train more than 25,000 Iraqi forces."
Sharif devoted much of his 20-minute speech at the UN General Assembly session to Kashmir and the current situation in the valley. (Photo: Twitter)

United Nations:Raking up Kashmir at the UN,Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today glorified slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "young leader" even as he expressed readiness for a "serious and sustained dialogue" with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.

Sharif devoted much of his 20-minute speech at the UN General Assembly session to Kashmir and the current situation in the valley and said Pakistan "fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination". He demanded an "independent inquiry into the extrajudicial killings" and a UN fact-finding mission to Kashmir "so that those guilty of these atrocities are punished."

Insisting that peace and normalisation between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, Sharif made a number of allegations with regard to the current unrest in the valley. India has blamed Pakistan for engineering and fuelling the unrest. While talking about the situation in Kashmir, the Pakistan Prime Minister referred to Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, as a "young leader" and said he has "emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement..."
The boy was allegedly in touch a with person who has ties to the IS. (Representational Image)

Berlin: A 16-year-old Syrian refugee has been arrested in Germany on suspicion of having ties to the Islamic State jihadist group, officials said Wednesday, describing him as a "serious threat".

The youngster, thought to have been radicalised only recently, was detained in a special forces operation late Tuesday at a shelter for asylum seekers in the western city of Cologne, police and local prosecutors said in a statement.

Information gathered from the teenager's mobile phone indicate he was in touch with a person abroad who had ties to IS and "wanted to recruit the young Syrian for Islamist activities", the statement said.

Germany's state security authorities believe the youngster posed a "serious threat" and have assigned a 35-strong team of investigators to the case.

Germany is on edge after suffering two attacks claimed by IS in July -- an axe rampage on a train in Wuerzburg and a suicide bombing in Ansbach. Both were carried out by asylum seekers.

In Wuerzburg, the 17-year-old attacker was shot dead by police after injuring five people.

In Ansbach, 15 people were injured after a Syrian failed asylum seeker detonated an explosive device outside a music festival, killing himself.

The attacks rattled Germans' sense of security and fuelled concerns over the country's record influx of migrants and refugees last year.
10-year-old Yara breaks down as she appeals to the world to stop the war against her country. (Photo: YouTube screenshot)

Sanaa: 26th of March 2015, almost 12 am, the night before my second terms concert, I was really excited to attend it, but as I woke up and got dressed, mommy told me that war against Yemen has started, says 10-year-old Yara to the camera on her mother's mobile phone. She lives in war stricken Sanna held by rebels of the Houthi militia group.

Dressed in a striking blue frock, her curly hair tied in green ribbons, Yara speaks in clear English, delivering a heart-rending speech, making it clear, that she does not want it to be her turn to die and that the war against her country needs to stop.

I dont want it to be my turn to die, as a child, I want to live all my life, I want to be a doctor, I want to be an engineer, I want to grow up and be something important in this world, she says in a video that had been striking chords across the world.

The United Nations says that at least 10,000 people have been killed since March 2015, including many civilians and Yara fears that her family could be counted in the next fatalities. She talks of how scores of people lost their jobs, her father being one of them and now, they live in fear for their lives.

In her speech, Yara also makes her contempt for the Saudi-led coalition clear, which has been fighting the Houthis to try to restore the Saudi-backed government of exiled president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi since March 2015.

The Saudis are lying, they are lying to all the countries that are giving them money to fight against us and destroy our country. They are telling them we are just helping them, but they are not helping us, they are destroying us, helping us means destroying our schools, our factories, making children die, my families, all families are maybe gonna die, she says.

I wish they can stop the war against Yemen, I wish they can stop the war against Yemen, please, please, please, STOP war against Yemen, every day I get really sad, tonnes of people are dying, the 10-year-old breaks into tears as she appeals for an end to the war.

The 10-year-old hopes that the international community hears her voice and ends the turmoil her country is facing.
Tehran: Iran's chief of staff of the armed forces says a $38 billion aid deal between the United States and Israel makes Iran more determined to strengthen its military.

In comments broadcast live on Iranian state TV, Gen Mohammad Hossein Bagheri says the U.S.-Israel aid deal "will make us more determined in strengthening the defence power of the country."

Last week the US signed an unprecedented new security agreement with Israel that will give the Israeli military $38 billion over 10 years.

Iran does not recognise Israel and supports anti-Israeli militant groups such as Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Bagheri's remarks were given during an annual military parade Wednesday marking the anniversary of Iraq-Iran war in 1980.
Cairo: Egyptian authorities say a boat carrying African migrants headed to Europe has capsized off the Mediterranean coast near the city of Alexandria, killing at least 29 people.

Health Ministry official Alaa Osman from Beheira province says that 155 people have been rescued, but that bodies are still being found in the area. He says the migrants were from several African countries.

Egypt's official news agency MENA said the boat had been carrying 600 people.

Thousands of illegal migrants have made the dangerous sea voyage across the Mediterranean in recent years fleeing war and poverty, mostly via lawless Libya. Thousands have drowned.
The incident, in which 18 trucks from a 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed, looked likely to deal a death blow to diplomatic efforts to halt a civil war now in its sixth year. (Photo: AP)

Beirut: The United States believes two Russian aircraft attacked an aid convoy near Aleppo in a strike that shattered a one-week truce, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, but Russia denied involvement.

Despite the military blame game over Monday's deadly attack, diplomats struggled to save the US-Russian ceasefire agreement that took effect on Sept. 12.

The incident, in which 18 trucks from a 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed, looked likely to deal a death blow to diplomatic efforts to halt a civil war now in its sixth year.

Two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the exact time it was struck late on Monday, two U.S. officials told Reuters, citing U.S. intelligence that led them to conclude Russia was to blame.

Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman denied the assertion, telling reporters at the United Nations the U.S. administration "has no facts" to support the claim, adding: "We have nothing to do with this situation."

Ben Rhodes, a deputy U.S. national security adviser, said the White House held Russia responsible for what he called an "enormous humanitarian tragedy" but he did not address whether the attack was carried out by Russian aircraft.

Earlier Russia, which denied its aircraft or those of its Syrian government allies were involved, had said it believed the convoy was not struck from the air at all but had caught fire because of some incident on the ground.

The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and "around 20 civilians" had been killed, although other death tolls differed. The attack prompted the United Nations to suspend all aid shipments into Syria.

Senior officials from 23 nations emerged from a one-hour meeting on Syria at a New York luxury hotel with little more than an agreement to meet again, on Friday, about how to end a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions from their homes. They also differed on the chances of renewing the ceasefire.

"The ceasefire is not dead," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said after the meeting, which he hosted with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"Is there still a chance this ceasefire will be effective? I can't answer that question," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters. He said that without a ceasefire there would be a "spiral of war, but we have to be honest, the U.S.-Russian negotiation has reached its limits."

The UN Security Council is due to hold a high-level meeting on Syria on Wednesday.

The United Nations, Red Cross and United States had all described Monday's incident as an air strike, implicitly pinning the blame on Russian or Syrian aircraft that fly in the area for breaking the ceasefire with an attack on a humanitarian target.

But the U.N. revised a statement to remove the phrase "air strikes" and replace it with references to unspecified "attacks". UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said the original reference to air strikes was probably a drafting error, saying the U.N. was not in a position to determine if they were air strikes but was sure the convoy was "attacked."

War crime if deliberate

The ceasefire was meant to halt all fighting and allow aid to reach besieged areas, at a time when pro-government forces, with Russian and Iranian military support, are in their strongest position for years and civilians in many rebel-held areas are cut off from food and medical supplies.

"If this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime," U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien said in a statement.

Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Defence Ministry, said in a statement: "We have studied video footage from the scene from so-called 'activists' in detail and did not find any evidence that the convoy had been struck by ordnance."

"There are no craters and the exterior of the vehicles do not have the kind of damage consistent with blasts caused by bombs dropped from the air."

He said the damage to the convoy visible in footage was caused by its cargo catching fire. It had occurred at the same time as militants from the group formerly called the Nusra Front had started a big offensive in nearby Aleppo, he said, appearing to point the finger at rescue workers from a group called the "White Helmets" who filmed the aftermath.

"Only representatives of the 'White Helmets' organization close to the Nusra Front who, as always, found themselves at the right time in the right place by chance with their video cameras can answer who did this and why."

Hussein Badawi, head of the White Helmets in the town, said he was 100 metres (yards) from the aid depot when the air strikes took place and was injured by shrapnel in the hand.

"There were fires, martyrs, wounded people. We were able to pull out four survivors and five dead bodies at first," Badawi said. "The bombardment was continuous, continuous. The rescue teams weren't even able to work. Those who arrived in ambulances couldn't come in."

Diplomatic cable

The ceasefire deal was a gamble on unprecedented cooperation between the United States and Russia, despite trust between the two Cold War-era foes being at its lowest point for decades.

They support opposite sides in the war between Assad's government and insurgents but are both fighting against Islamic State militants. The deal calls for Washington and Moscow to share targeting information eventually.

Following Monday's attack, there were reports of intensified clashes across Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said clashes took place between the army and rebels in the Jobar district of Damascus and areas northeast of the capital, after the army tried to advance.

Near the central city of Homs, the army shelled one village, while helicopters and warplanes bombed several other places, including the rebel-held town of Rastan, it said.
Ankara: A mentally disturbed Turkish man wielding a knife tried to storm the Israeli embassy in Ankara on Wednesday but was shot before reaching the building, Turkish and Israeli officials said.

The man, armed with a 30-centimetre (12-inch) knife, ran towards the embassy shouting slogans and was shot in the leg, the governor's office in the Turkish capital said in a statement.

It said initial investigations showed that the man, named as Osman Nuri Caliskan, "appeared to be mentally disturbed" and had no record of links with any militant group.

Suat Gencer, a florist working nearby, said he heard four shots and then ran to the embassy to see what had happened.

"I saw a man who had been shot in the leg. I didn't see a knife but other witnesses said he had a knife and he would set a bomb off," he told AFP at the scene.

Large numbers of police vehicles were at the scene and the local road was closed, an AFP correspondent said, while news channel CNN-Turk reported that a suspicious package was being investigated.

Israel's foreign ministry said the assailant was shot by a local guard and that all its embassy staff were safe.

"The assailant was wounded in the foot. We don't know if he was attacking police officers or the embassy itself," foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in a statement.

He added that the man reached the "outer perimeter" of the embassy and investigations were ongoing.

Embassies on high alert

The incident came with foreign missions in Turkey on a state of high alert following a spate of attacks across the country this year blamed on jihadists and Kurdish militants.

The British embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara was closed on Friday over security concerns while the German embassy offered only limited services.

Three months ago, Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship that left 10 Turks dead.

Under the deal, they are to begin the process of exchanging ambassadors to fully restore their diplomatic ties, although this has yet to formally take place.

Despite the crisis, the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul have carried on working in the last years, under heavy security.

Israel had already offered compensation and an apology over the raid, but with the agreement it also eased the naval blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, allowing Ankara to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.



'Change the Middle East!'



Turkey's NTV television said employees of the embassy took refuge in a shelter during the incident on Wednesday.

The health condition of the attacker was not clear but the Hurriyet daily said he had been detained by police, showing a picture of him sitting on the road with his hands tied behind his back.

It reported that he had shouted "I will change the Middle East!" when advancing on the embassy building.

Three Israelis and an Iranian were killed in March in a bombing in central Istanbul blamed on Islamic State (IS) jihadists. Israel subsequently upgraded its security advice for Turkey, encouraging citizens to leave.

Israel was quick to give its support to the Turkish government in the aftermath of a July 15 coup bid, condemning it while repeating its faith in the reconciliation process.

Turkey appears to be moving back to its previous "zero problems with neighbours" foreign policy after the country also normalised relations with Russia damaged after Turkey shot down a Russian jet in November last year.

Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has also indicated interest in improving relations with Egypt -- damaged after the ousting of pro-Ankara president Mohamed Morsi -- and even Syria amid the over five year civil war.
Boat accidents are common in Bangladesh, which is criss-crossed with some of the world's mightiest rivers including the Brahmaputra and the Padma, the main tributory of the Ganges. (Photo: Representational Image)

Dhaka: An overcrowded ferry capsized and sank in southern Bangladesh on Wednesday, leaving around 30 people missing after the latest in a long series of river accidents in the country.

While some passengers managed to swim to shore, others were feared to have drowned in the River Sandhya shortly after the single-tier vessel set off from the town of Banaripara in Barisal district, police said.

"At least 30 people are still unaccounted for. No bodies have been found," Mohammad Akhteruzzaman, the police chief in Barisal, told AFP.

Another local police official said between 70 and 80 people were reported to have been travelling on the ferry and witnesses had reported it as being overcrowded.

The initial figures for the number of missing in Bangladeshi boat disasters are often revised downwards as details emerge of passengers who manage to swim to shore.

Boat accidents are common in Bangladesh, which is criss-crossed with some of the world's mightiest rivers including the Brahmaputra and the Padma, the main tributory of the Ganges.

Every year hundreds die as boats sink due to overcrowding and the poor condition of the craft. A ferry accident in February last year left 69 people dead in central Bangladesh, just a fortnight after five others were killed when an overloaded ferry sank.
Some of the food packets and laptop bags the Indians were carrying were stuffed with cocaine.

Beijing: Five Indians who were recently caught carrying cocaine in China today pleaded innocence, saying they were merely couriers transporting consumer goods between Kolkata and Kunming and may have been cheated by drug gangs.

The five men who were caught in two batches in the last few weeks at the Kunming airport were today provided consular access with Indian officials in Kunming city during which they sought Government of India's support to get them repatriated.

They have been transporting goods between the two cities as couriers for some time and they claim they have no inkling that some of the food packets and laptop bags they have been carrying were stuffed with cocaine, officials said.

They said the goods were procured from different markets in Kolkata but did not disclose any specific details or names.

The five men, all residents of Kolkata, were identified as Sheikh Ahmad Ali (46), Akrar Khan (33), Feroz Khan (31), Sheikh Ismail (24) and Maqsud Alam (24).

Ismail is reportedly a student in one of the colleges in Kolkata.

It appears that they were caught because of extra security mounted ahead of the G20 summit held Hangzhou city on September 4-5.

Security was beefed up all over China during that time with airports equipped with special scanners. The five will face investigations followed by court proceedings.

Besides them, seven Indians are being currently held in prions at Guangxi and Guangzhou cities on drug smuggling charges.

Drug trafficking is a very serious offence in China which in some cases even resulted in death penalties or long periods of imprisonment.

Also, India and China have no prisoner swap agreement for the five to be repatriated to Kolkata to serve their prison terms there.

In July, a Colombian model was sentenced to 15 years in jail for drug smuggling in China. She was arrested last year at Guangzhou airport over allegedly attempting to smuggle drugs in her laptop bag.
Both India and Pakistan are important regional countries and we hope they have more dialogue and properly deal with disputes, China said. (Photo: PTI)

Beijing: Voicing concern over the "strains" in Indo-Pak ties after the Uri terror attack, China on Wednesday appealed to the two countries to exercise "restraint" and engage in more dialogue to "properly" deal with disputes while remaining committed to regional peace and stability.

"Recent violent clashes and attacks caused some casualties and strains in India-Pakistan relations," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told media briefing in Beijing.

"We are concerned about that. We hope all relevant parties can exercise restraint and avoid escalating tensions," he said about the Sunday attack on an army camp at Uri in Kashmir in which 18 soldiers were killed and several injured.

He was replying to a question about India's charge that the Uri incident was a cross border terrorist attack from Pakistan, and Islamabad's allegation that New Delhi is trying to divert attention from tensions in Kashmir.

In a guarded reply, Lu said, "Regarding counter terrorism our position is consistent. We oppose all forms of terrorism and believe in enhanced international cooperation to deal with this threat and safeguard peace.

"Both India and Pakistan are important regional countries and we hope they have more dialogue and properly deal with disputes and remain committed to peace, stability and security of the region," he said.

This is the second time China reacted to the Uri attack. On September 19, Lu appealed to India and Pakistan to have dialogue and consultation to resolve their differences and "enhance counter terrorism cooperation".

"Only this way can they safeguard peace," he said. About today's meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Foreign Ministers in New York on sidelines of UN General Assembly - where they called for early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against terrorism, Lu said BRICS countries met to discuss international and regional issues of common interest including the convention on terrorism.

"We believe BRICS will work together and follow this consensus and push forward our common goals," he said.
Lahore: Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects have challenged the legality of a Pakistani judicial commission that travelled to India in 2013 to probe the 2008 attack, which could further delay the case proceedings.

Lakhvi's counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi on Wednesday said the defence lawyers on Monday challenged the proceedings of the judicial commission that travelled to Mumbai to record the statements of four Indian prosecution witnesses in the Islamabad High Court.

When asked had not the trial court already declared the commission's proceedings 'null and void', Abbasi said, "No, the trial court had not declared the commission's proceedings null and void and we have challenged the legality of the commission in the IHC early this week."

Earlier, the defence lawyer had challenged the legality of the commission before the trial court in 2013 but it was dismissed.

A Pakistani panel comprising special prosecutors and the defence counsel in 2013 had visited Mumbai to record the statements from prosecution witnesses, including Magistrate R V Sawant Waghule, who recorded the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab; Ramesh Mahale, the chief investigation officer of the case, and Ganesh Dhunraj and Chintaman Mohite, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the terrorists killed during the attack.

The commission in 2012 had recorded the statement of these witnesses but due to an "official understanding" between the Pakistani and Indian governments, had not cross-examined them.

Lakhvi's lawyer has filed a plea the commission that went to India had not been allowed to cross-examine four key Indian witnesses.

A prosecution lawyer said the defence lawyers challenging the legality of the commission and saying it was not allowed to cross-examine the key Indian witnesses was aimed at delaying the case further.

He said this is evident from the fact that the legality of the commission is being challenged over three years after it had travelled to Mumbai.

"As the case is already not heading further because India has yet to decide whether to send 24 witnesses to Pakistan to record their statement the defence lawyers challenging the Pakistani commission's proceedings in the IHC may further delay it," he said.

The court has not fixed the date of hearing. LeT operations commander Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people in November, 2008.

Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attack, is living in undisclosed location after being released from jail on bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi. The case has been underway in the country for more than six years.
Pakistani officials did not give any reason for closure of air space. (Photo: Representational Image/AFP)

Islamabad: Pakistan's national flag carrier PIA on Wednesday cancelled flights to northern Pakistani cities due to "air space restrictions" in the wake of Uri terrorist attack.

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) called off flights to Gilgit and Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan- occupied-Kashmir (PoK) and Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

"As per directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the air space over Northern areas will remain closed on Wednesday. Inconvenience regretted," PIA spokesperson Danyal Gilani said on Twitter.

He did not give any reason for closure of air space but officials said that Pakistani warplanes might be in the air to keep vigil due to Indo-Pak tensions after the Uri attack.

Eighteen soldiers were killed and over a dozen others injured as heavily armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the Indian Army in North Kashmir's Uri town early Sunday. Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed by the Army.
Islamabad: Continuing with efforts to internationalise the Kashmir issue, Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz has briefed foreign ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland about "human rights violation" in Kashmir.

Aziz, on the sidelines of 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, separately met with the foreign minsters -- Fumio Kishida of Japan, Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland, Pakistan's Foreign Office said.

Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Indo-Pak relations and the situation in Kashmir.

Highlighting "human rights abuse perpetrated by Indian security forces with impunity" in Kashmir, he stated that settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability of South Asia, the Foreign Office said.

It claimed that while acknowledging the "sacrifices" rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three foreign ministers appreciated "successful counter -terrorism operations" conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country.

Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistan's economy to grow at steady and sustainable rate.

He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria and Switzerland in Pakistan.

The Foreign Office said that Japan, Austria and Switzerland have underscored commitment to further strengthen existing cordial relations with Pakistan and promote mutual understanding on regional and international issues of common concerns.

Foreign Minister Kishida stated that Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistan's power sector.

Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz welcomed the prospects of investment in Pakistan due to improved security situation. He recognised significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy.

Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter stated that Swiss development cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan, the Foreign Office statement said.

Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organisations, Pakistan's application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly, the statement said.
Sindh: The Sindh Assembly today unanimously passed a resolution against exiled Mutthaida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain, demanding action against him under the treason laws for making anti-Pakistan remarks.

"The house condemns all sorts of crimes, torture, terrorism and anti-Pakistan slogans and activities carried out by any side and the most strict action should be taken against those responsible as per law and the Constitution," said the resolution which was also backed by the MQM lawmakers.

The resolution also stated that the assembly expresses solidarity with the parliament, armed forces, media, judiciary and all democratic institutions in Pakistan.

It was the first sitting of the Sindh Assembly since August 22 when the MQM chief made anti-Pakistan comments while addressing a hunger strike camp outside the Karachi Press Club which led to violence in the area and an attack on the ARY news channel offices.

The MQM lawmakers supported the resolution just a day after the MQM's Pakistan leadership removed Altaf's London- based advisors from the party's top decision-making forum.

The MQM leadership in Pakistan had distanced itself from Altaf and the other leadership in London after the August 22 incident which led to the demolition of around 138 sector and unit offices of the party in Karachi by law enforcement agencies and its headquarters has also been sealed.

MQMs Leader of the Opposition in the Sindh Assembly Khawaja Izharul Hassan said, "We could have fled the country after what happened and the shame brought on the party but we decided to remain in Pakistan and deliver the party from the pressure it faced after Altaf's speech. We reached this decision without anyone dictating to us what to do."

MQM lawmaker Faisal Sabzwari said that while he supported the resolution against his party leader for his anti-Pakistan comments but what about those people from other parties who had made similar comments in the past.
Lahore: A 17-year-old Christian boy has been arrested under Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws for sharing on Facebook an "inappropriate" photograph of Kaaba in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, police said today.

"We have arrested Nabil Masih, for sharing a page on Facebook which had derogatory content about Kaaba, the holy place of Muslims," said Muhammad Jamil, police officer of Phoolnagar police station, Kasur district of Punjab province.

Nabil is the resident of Deena Naath village of Kasur, some 50 km from Lahore.

Jamil said Nabil has been booked under blasphemy law of Pakistan Penal Code. He faces up to 12 years imprisonment under the charges.

"Police acted on the complaint of Nabil's neighbour who alleged that he checked the Facebook ID of Nabil and found him having 'liked andshared' blasphemous photograph of holy Kaaba which hurt his sentiments and of other Muslims," Jamil said.

Soon after arresting and registering FIR against Nabil police sent himto jail, anticipating attack on the police station by angry locals in the area.

Nabil's father, two brothers and three sisters had to leave the village to avert any possible attack on them.

"Police reached the village in time and managed to stop the people from taking law into their hand," Jamil said.

The enraged people wanted to burn the house of Nabil but the police stopped them from doing so.

"Had Nabil not been arrested, a law and order situation could have arisen in the village," the police officer said.

Allegations of blasphemy can trigger beatings and mob violence in the conservative Muslim-majority country, which has strict blasphemy laws including the death penalty.

A Christian couple were lynched and burnt in Punjab in 2014 after being falsely accused of desecrating the Quran.

Rights campaigners say blasphemy laws are often used to settle personal disputes in Pakistan.
Delhi Commission of Women chief Swati Maliwal was on Tuesday booked by the Anti-Corruption Branch for alleged nepotism in hiring of 91 contract employees, mostly AAP supporters, in the commission.





Maliwal denied any wrongdoing even as the Delhi BJP met Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung and sought her removal from the post.





The registration of an FIR by the Anti-Corruption Branch against Maliwal came a day after she was questioned for over two hours in connection with the allegations made by former DCW chief and Congress leader Barkha Singh.





The due procedure was not followed in appointments, said the an ACB official explaining that the FIR was booked under the Prevention of Corruption Act and penal provisions for criminal breach of trust and conspiracy.





Maliwal called the FIR an attempt to prevent her from doing good work. Maliwal took to Twitter to deny any wrongdoing and described the FIR as a cost she was paying for attempts to change the system.





I am an armymans daughter...nobody can scare me, she said, also blaming a former chief secretary of Delhi for the conspiracy against her. She said the retired official himself was facing a complaint of harassing a woman.





If anyone can prove corruption of even one rupee in my entire life, I will commit suicide, said an angry Maliwal, claiming that she only followed the mandated recruitment process for DCW.





She called Singhs complaint against her as a motivated one. The former AAP leader said under her leadership the DCW handled 11,500 cases in one year and attended 2.25 lakh calls on helpline number 181. She alleged Barkha Singh, as chairperson of the DCW, handled only one case.





Nepotism





Talking of alleged lapses under Maliwal, former DCW chief Barkha Singh pointed to the hiring of the daughter of AAP leader H S Phoolka, Prabhsahay Kaur, who is drawing a monthly salary of Rs 35,000 in the commission.





She also pointed out that former president of AAP women wing, Promila Gupta, is working with the commission for a salary of Rs 25,000. Singh accused Kejriwal of rewarding his old aide Raj Mangal Prasad, a child rights activist, who is drawing a monthly salary of Rs 1,00,000.





The said employees are enjoying lucrative monthly salaries from the exchequer of the NCT of Delhi, thereby causing misappropriation and misuse of government funds... Singh said in her complaint to the ACB.





The Delhi BJP submitted a memorandum to Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung on Tuesday seeking Maliwals removal over the alleged irregularities.





Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay said with the registration of an FIR by Anti-Corruption Branch a constitutional and administrative breakdown has occurred at the commission.
Some students and academics at the Ghana University are demanding the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, saying he was racist against black people.





The Gandhi statue, currently installed in the premises of the varsity, was gifted by President Pranab Mukherjee during his recent visit to Ghana. The students and teachers argue that Gandhi's reference to black Africans as "kaffir" in some of his early writings reflected his 'racist' mindset.



The campaign has been led by Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo, former director of the Institute of African Studies. The students and teachers have also launched an online petition, asking authorities to facilitate "the removal of the statue of Gandhi" at the earliest.



"How will the historian teach and explain that Gandhi was uncharitable in his attitude towards the black race and see that we're glorifying him by erecting a statue on our campus?" wrote a professor in the petition.



The campaigners have been raising slogans like 'Gandhi Must Fall' and 'Gandhi For Come Down'.



Ampofo is urging members of the University of Ghana Council to heed her petition, arguing among other things that, Gandhi was racist against black people and honouring him will set a wrong example for students, as per local media in Ghana.But there have been voices which oppose the demand.



Ocqauye, a professor of political science and a lawyer, said a decision to demolish the statue might have implications on diplomatic ties between Ghana and India.



"It will be most unnecessary, most uncalled for and not in the supreme interest of Ghanaians and we must know what serves our interest best," he said.



The petitioners referred to Gandhi's open letter to "The Natal Mercury" in 1894, saying he called black Africans as "kaffirs," a derogatory term for black people.



"A general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir," they quoted Gandhi as saying in the letter.
A Delhi Police team probing the mysterious death of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, is in the US to collect her viscera samples that have been lying with an FBI lab for nearly a year now.





The team is likely to return by the end of the week. The US agency has already given its report which will be discussed with a medical board, a senior police officer said.



It is just a routine exercise to bring back the samples lying with the FBI lab. The team will also seek details on some points mentioned in the US probe agencys lab report, he said.



The step was taken after the Ministry of Home Affairs in a letter reminded Delhi Police to get the samples back as was asked by the FBI lab.



Sunanda, 51, was found dead at a suite in a five-star hotel in South Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014, a day after her spat with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar on Twitter over her alleged affair with Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.



Delhi Police had in January last year registered a case of murder in connection with Sunandas death. An AIIMS medical board had earlier found poisoning as reason for her death following which the police had sent her viscera samples to the FBI lab in the US.



The FBI lab report, sent to Delhi Police in November last year, endorsed the findings of the AIIMS forensic report. As police could not firm up about cause of the death based on the FBI report, they requested a medical board of AIIMS to analyse its content.



Several persons including Shashi Tharoor have been questioned in connection with Sunandas death. The police have also conducted polygraph test on six persons, all prime witnesses in the case, including Tharoors domestic help Narayan Singh, driver Bajrangi and Sanjay Dewan, a close friend of the couple.



In February, Tarar was questioned about her relation with the Congress leader and his wife, her fight with Sunanda over Twitter, and other issues revolving around Sunandas death.
Suspended AAP MLA from Bijwasan, Devinder Sehrawat, on Tuesday called Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a liar and blamed his government of ignoring court directions to save commuters from overcharging by app-based cabs.





Kejriwal is an ambitious and power-hungry leader who misled many who trusted him, he said.



Kejriwal was has let down founding members of the AAP like me and lakhs of other supporters, he said, at a press conference here against the AAP governments alleged collusion with app-based cab operators who overcharge commuters through surge pricing.



"The Delhi government is not implementing the high court order to benefit the radio cab companies," Sehrawat alleged. Sehrawat claimed that radio cab operators earned over Rs 9,239 crore due to surge pricing and it should be refunded to the consumers.



He said he had given a complaint to the National Consumer Commission over the alleged fleecing of commuters. Sehrawat has joined hands with NGO Nyaybhoomi to raise the issue of commuters fleecing.



Sehrawat was suspended from AAP on September 12 after he accused party men in Punjab of "exploiting women" in return for tickets. Sehrawat said his attempts to apprise Kejriwal about alleged wrongdoings of other party leaders resulted in his victimisation and suspension from the party.



On September 4, Sherawat wrote a letter to Kejriwal on the issue. "I saw disturbing reports about women being exploited in Punjab in return for, or on promise of, a ticket. Am meeting people in Chandigarh... Delhi MLAs are unaware about what is being done by (senior party members) in Punjab," Sehrawat's letter said.



The MLAs letter came close to arrest of sacked women and child development minister Sandeep Kumar over a sex CD scandal allegedly involving him. Kumar is in judicial custody.
A 42-year-old man bludgeoned his father-in-law, and two brothers-in-law to death at his in-laws house in North East Delhis Nand Nagri.





Two more relatives were seriously injured in the incident in the wee hours of Tuesday when they all were sleeping on the terrace of their house.



The accused Rajesh spared his 14-year-old son Vineet who was also sleeping with the victims. Police are speaking to the minor to know about the incident. Sources said, the boy has confessed to the police about the involvement of his father in the killing spree which lasted for a few minutes.



The deceased are identified as Ram Kishen, 60, Raju, 26, and Kiranpal, 36, while the injured are Tarun, 28, Karan, 17. Ram Kishen was a retired MCD employee, while Raju and Kiranpal used to work as sweeper and guard respectively.



After the act, Rajesh jumped off from the second floor balcony of the house in a bid to run away from the scene and fractured his leg. He was caught a few metres away from the house by the local people and handed over to the police.



A resident of Alwar, Rajasthan Rajesh is a carpenter by profession. He is married to Rakhi, the daughter of Ram Kishen and has two sons Vineet and Aditya, 11. On Monday, Rajesh had come to Delhi from Alwar with his son Vineet without informing his wife.



As his wife was searching for her husband, his parents told her that Rajesh has come to Delhi with their elder son. In the evening, Rakhi also came to Delhi with her younger son Aditya and joined her husband.



On Monday we had a feast at home with many of our relatives joining us, said Kuldeep, grandson of deceased Ram Kishen. After having dinner, some relatives returned home while others went up to the terrace to sleep.



Around, 1.30 am we heard a loud thump. We woke up fearing if someone might have fallen off from the terrace, Kuldeep said. When we came out, we saw Rajesh lying on the ground. He then rose up and started running towards the park, he added.



Someone then shouted about several bodies lying on the terrace, and people started chasing Rajesh. He was caught a few hundred metres away from the house, and handed over to the policemen of a PCR van stationed nearby.



Family members of the deceased alleged that Rajesh had made his victims unconscious by having them sniff some intoxicating substance. He then bludgeoned them with sticks and a grindstone lying on the terrace.



We suspect that he used some intoxicating substance on the victims as no one did make any noise while being bludgeoned with grind stone and sticks. We suspect that it was a pre-planned killing, said a member of the family.



Rajeshs relatives said that although he didnt betray any signs of abnormal behaviour. However, ever since he had arranged the wedding of his sister-in-law with a known person in March this year, he had been tense.



Relatives alleged that he was perhaps unhappy with less amount of dowry being paid to the groom by deceased Ram Kishen. Police however refused to speculate on the reason of the murders.



Investigation is at an early stage right now. We are waiting to be able to grill Rajesh who is in hospital right now. He did arrange wedding of his sister-in-law with one of his known person. Whether it was the reason of murders or not is a matter of investigation, said Ajit Singla, Deputy Commissioner of Police (North East).
The counter-infiltration operations along the Line of Control in Kashmir today entered the second day even as the Army conducted a search to recover bodies of terrorists killed in the failed infiltration bids in Nowgam and Uri sectors.





"The operations along the LoC in Uri and Naugam sectors continue," an Army spokesman said. One soldier was killed yesterday as Army foiled two infiltration bids in the two sectors of Kashmir.



While bodies of militants have been spotted nearly 300 meters short of the Line of the Control, a search is on in neighbouring areas to find out if there are more casualties on ultras' side, official sources said.



About 15 terrorists had attempted to cross the Line of Control, the sources said.

However, the sources said it was not possible to retrieve the bodies of the militants as that could bring the jawans in the enemy line of fire.



The sources said there is remote possibility of recovering the bodies of terrorists killed in these areas. The sources said a search operation was being conducted thoroughly in both the areas which is densely forested.



The infiltration bid was made days after the bloodiest attack by four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists on the Army camp in Uri which had claimed the lives of 18 soldiers.



After the Uri attack, the terrorists had again made an audacious attempt to cross the Line of Control in Uri and Nowgam sectors with Pakistani troops violating ceasefire and firing at Indian positions to give cover to the terrorists.



Army has refrained from making any comment on the number of terrorists killed during its operations to neutralise the infiltration attempts as the operations are still going on.



They said any confirmation about the number of terrorists can be made after it retrieves the bodies which is a "remote" possibility now considering the area in which they might be lying.



The Pakistan Army had violated the ceasefire and started firing across the LoC. There were reports that the firing took place apparently to give cover to terrorists trying to sneak into the Indian territory.
Music composer Vishal Dadlani today met Jain monk Tarun Sagar and apologised to him in person for his sarcastic tweet on the spiritual figure that had kicked up a storm.





The monk asked him to seek forgiveness from the Jain community for hurting their sentiments.



After the composer apologised as per the Jain community's tradition of seeking "Panch Mafee" that included holding of ears, Sagar said though he had already forgiven Dadlani, now he would appeal to the community to forgive him and withdraw protest against him and treat the matter as closed.



"I have been saying this right from the start when these events unfolded (when controversy broke out after Dadlani's tweet) that personally I don't feel hurt or sad. I was talking to Vishal today and I told him that Jain community has been hurt, it was their demand that he should come to me in person and apologise only after which they will stop protests against him.



"He came from Mumbai today and brought 'shriphal' from there to seek apology," Sagar said on Dadlani apologising for the tweet on the address made by the monk to the Haryana Assembly last month.



Sagar said, "Anyone can make a mistake, even me, it is not a big thing, but realisation of the same is important and one should forgive such a person."



"It was Jain community's request that if Vishal appears before me, he should be asked to seek Panch Mafee and the matter will end there," Sagar said.



After this, Vishal stood before Sagar with folded hands and was even made to hold his ears and apologised as directed that also included the composer saying that in future he will never hurt anyone's religious sentiments.



Afterwards, Sagar appealed to the Jain community to forgive Dadlani.

Sagar also appealed to those who had registered FIR against the composer to end the matter against him.



Dadlani later told reporters, "I apologised over Twitter 32 times and Tarun Sagarji also forgave me, but only thing is that I appeared in person now. I wanted to come personally earlier, but there was a FIR registered, so I did not want that people should feel that I have come here just because a case has been slapped against me."



"I felt it from my heart that my remarks generated so much controversy and people felt hurt.

"What I had wanted to say is that religion and governance should not be mixed together.



What people understood from that tweet of mine was unfortunate. It was not my intention to hurt anyone's sentiments. What I had said was as per Constitution, religion and governance should not be mixed because we are a secular nation..," Dadlani said.



Dadlani said after meeting "Guruji, I felt like we are friends. Before coming here I watched many of his pravachans and realised the good message he was sending across to the world."

Earlier today, Dadlani reached the Digambar Jain Temple, Sector 27 here and held a close door meeting with the monk that lasted for about 20 minutes.



Recently, a court in Ambala had directed music composer Dadlani to join investigation at Ambala Cantt Sadar Police Station today in connection with a case registered against him by Haryana Police for allegedly hurting religious sentiments with his alleged sarcastic tweet on the Jain monk Tarun Sagar.



Ambala Cantt Police had registered a case over three weeks back against Dadlani and one more person under relevant sections including 153A (promoting enmity between classes), 295A (maliciously insulting the religion or religious beliefs of any class) and 509 IPC (uttering any word or making any gesture to insult the modesty of a woman etc).



The case was registered on the complaint filed by Punit Arora, a resident of Ambala Cantonment and he is stated to be a follower of Jain monk.



The complainant said that the accused had hurt religious sentiments intentionally with his sarcastic tweet.



Dadlani came under sharp criticism from several quarters including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for his sarcastic tweet



After a barrage of criticism, Dadlani had tendered an apology for his tweet and also deleted it.

The Jain monk had delivered a lecture 'Kadve Pravachan' at Haryana Assembly last month on the invitation of the state government.


The Cabinet today cleared the long-pending compensation of Rs 1,250 crore for public sector telecom company BSNL to support rural landline connections installed before April 1, 2002.





"The Cabinet approves subsidy of Rs 1,250 crore to BSNL as compensation for deficit incurred by BSNL in operating rural wire-line connections," said Frank Noronha, the government's Principal Spokesperson, on Twitter.



The BSNL subsidy support will be given from the Universal Service Obligation Fund for the rural connections installed prior to 1 April, 2002, he added.



The state-run telecom firm has asked the government to provide Rs 2,000 crore to support rural wireline connections.



On the basis of the submission of BSNL and the detailed information in respect of working rural wire-line connections installed before April 1, 2002, the deficit per rural wire-line connection was estimated at Rs 4,876 for 2011-12.



Accordingly, the deficit from the rural wire-line connections installed before April 1, 2002 for 2011-12 and 2012-13 were estimated at Rs 1,593 crore and Rs 1,265 crore respectively.



The Department of Telecom had paid subsidy for these connections to BSNL up to July 17, 2011.



Based on the trend at that point, regulator Trai estimated subsidy of Rs 1,500 crore for 2011-12 with effect from July 17, 2011 and Rs 1,250 crore for the subsequent year effective July 18, 2012.



BSNL has received Rs 1,500 crore subsidy and the Cabinet approved the pending amount of Rs 1,250 crore today.


The Union Cabinet on Wednesday hiked the pension for freedom fighters, including those who were imprisoned in the Cellular Jail in Andaman and Nicobar Islands or suffered outside British India, by around Rs 5,000 each.



The increase will be around 20% to all categories of freedom fighters, their spouses and dependents. The decision was taken at a Cabinet meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.



The revised scale of pension has taken effect from August 15. The revised total amount of pension will be taken as basic pension for the respective categories of freedom fighter pensioners for calculating Dearness Relief, an official statement said. The existing Dearness Relief system based on the All India Consumer Price Index for industrial workers, which was so far applicable to freedom fighter pensioners on an annual basis, is being discontinued and replaced by the Dearness Allowance system applicable to Central government employees twice a year. This will be termed as Dearness Relief, the appropriate term in case of pensioners, it stated.
Voicing concern over the "strains" in Indo-Pak ties after the Uri terror attack, China today appealed to the two countries to exercise "restraint" and engage in more dialogue to "properly" deal with disputes while remaining committed to regional peace and stability.





"Recent violent clashes and attacks caused some casualties and strains in India-Pakistan relations," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told media briefing here.





"We are concerned about that. We hope all relevant parties can exercise restraint and avoid escalating tensions," he said about the Sunday attack on an army camp at Uri in Kashmir in which 18 soldiers were killed and several injured.



He was replying to a question about India's charge that the Uri incident was a cross border terrorist attack from Pakistan, and Islamabad's allegation that New Delhi is trying to divert attention from tensions in Kashmir.



In a guarded reply, Lu said "regarding counter terrorism our position is consistent. We oppose all forms of terrorism and believe in enhanced international cooperation to deal with this threat" and safeguard peace.



"Both India and Pakistan are important regional countries and we hope they have more dialogue and properly deal with disputes and remain committed to peace, stability and security of the region," he said.



This is the second time China reacted to the Uri attack.



On September 19, Lu appealed to India and Pakistan to have dialogue and consultation to resolve their differences and "enhance counter terrorism cooperation".



"Only this way can they safeguard peace," he said.



About today's meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Foreign Ministers in New York on sidelines of UN General Assembly - where they called for early conclusion of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Convention against terrorism, Lu said BRICS countries met to discuss international and regional issues of common interest including the convention on terrorism.



"We believe BRICS will work together and follow this consensus and push forward our common goals," he said.


Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects have challenged the legality of a Pakistani judicial commission that travelled to India in 2013 to probe the 2008 attack, which could further delay the case proceedings.





Lakhvi's counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi today said the defence lawyers on Monday challenged the proceedings of the judicial commission that travelled to Mumbai to record the statements of four Indian prosecution witnesses in the Islamabad High Court.



When asked had not the trial court already declared the commission's proceedings 'null and void', Abbasi told PTI: "No... the trial court had not declared the commission's proceedings null and void and we have challenged the legality of the commission in the IHC early this week."



Earlier, the defence lawyer had challenged the legality of the commission before the trial court in 2013 but it was dismissed.



A Pakistani panel comprising special prosecutors and the defence counsel in 2013 had visited Mumbai to record the statements from prosecution witnesses, including Magistrate R V Sawant Waghule, who recorded the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab; Ramesh Mahale, the chief investigation officer of the case, and Ganesh Dhunraj and Chintaman Mohite, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the terrorists killed during the attack.



The commission in 2012 had recorded the statement of these witnesses but due to an "official understanding" between the Pakistani and Indian governments, had not cross-examined them.



Lakhvi's lawyer has filed a plea the commission that went to India had not been allowed to cross-examine four key Indian witnesses.



A prosecution lawyer said the defence lawyers challenging the legality of the commission and saying it was not allowed to cross-examine the key Indian witnesses was aimed at delaying the case further.



He said this is evident from the fact that the legality of the commission is being challenged over three years after it had travelled to Mumbai.



"As the case is already not heading further because India has yet to decide whether to send 24 witnesses to Pakistan to record their statement the defence lawyers challenging the Pakistani commission's proceedings in the IHC may further delay it," he said.



The court has not fixed the date of hearing.



LeT operations commander Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people in November, 2008.



Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attack, is living in undisclosed location after being released from jail on bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi. The case has been underway in the country for more than six years.


Tamil Nadu Chief Minister today inaugurated services on the second elevated corridor of Chennai Metro Rail Project here and lauded the Centre for supporting development in the state.





"I acknowledge support of the government of India in implementation of the Metro Rail project," she said while inaugurating the project from the Secretariat through video conferencing.



The second elevated corridor covers a distance of 8.6 km from the Airport to Little Mount Station.



This stretch covers stations at Airport, Meenambakkam, Nanganallur Road, Guindy and Little Mount, besides St Thomas Mount Metro Station on Corridor II of Metro Rail.



Noting the presence of Union Ministers Venkaiah Naidu at the event, the Chief Minister said she had no doubt he would continue to steadfastly support Tamil Nadu's development.



Jayalalithaa also said that Union Minister of State Pon Radhakrishnan, who was also present there, had consistently endeavoured to bring into Tamil Nadu large development projects.



The first metro train, piloted by woman loco pilot Amsaveni, was flagged off by Jayalalithaa and Union ministers from the Airport station.



Jayalalithaa had inaugurated the 10.15 km elevated Koyambedu-Alandur section on June 29 last year.



She said services on the 1.28 km stretch from Alandur to St Thomas Mount would also commence soon after obtaining clearance from Commissioner for Metro Rail Safety.



When that becomes functional, the entire 20 km elevated sector of Chennai Metro Rail Project would be operational. It would connect with suburban train services and mofussil and other bus services. Trains to be soon run on a loop line at Alandur would ensure direct connections from Koyambedu to the airport, without having to change at Alandur, she said.



"All these are steps towards realising my vision of making Chennai a truly modern city of the 21st century with all amenities for its residents," Jayalalithaa said.



She expressed confidence that the share of public transport in Chennai would go up substantially with seamless integration of buses, suburban train services, air services, metro rail and eventually the monorail.



Thanking Japan for its support, she said it was India's and Tamil Nadu's largest development partner today and that she was confident that Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) would continue support for the CMRP.



"We also request support for other important projects in the pipeline like the 400 million litres per day Desalination Project near Chennai, Chennai Peripheral Ringroad Project and Tamil Nadu Investment Promotion Programme Phase II," she said.



She congratulated all those associated with the project, "who have brought a modern mass transit system to the city of Chennai."


The much awaited commercial contract between India and France to purchase 36 Rafale fighter jets may be inked later this week as the Cabinet Committee on Security is said to have been given the go ahead on Wednesday to seal the deal.



As the French Defence Minister Jean Yves Le Drian is slated to land in New Delhi on September 22, the contract could be inked on September 23 if the last round of talks between the two sides progress well.



Le Drian will be coming with the top officials of the companies involved in the Rafale project, sources said. The fighter aircraft is manufactured by Dassault Aviation.



A team of French officials is already in the national capital scouring through the pages of the inter-governmental agreement, to be signed by the two countries. The deal to purchase 36 fighter jets for the Indian Air Force may cost around 7.87 billion Euro (around Rs 59,000 crore). However,there is no official word on the deal as well as on the negotiated price.



Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had stated earlier that the deal was taking more time because the defence ministry was negotiating hard for a price reduction. In the new deal, India has been able to save over Euro 590 million. Last month, the ministry cleared a report submitted by the price negotiation team, headed by an Air Force officer. The file was subsequently sent to the Prime Minister's office for review and clearance, following which the CCS reportedly has given its approval.



The fighter aircraft will come with a modern weapon package, which may include MBDA's Meteor missile, capable of destroying an enemy aircraft or an oncoming missile.






Talking to DH, Ducati India Managing Director Ravi Avalur said, Cruisers are the largest segment in the luxury motorcycle category in India. We wanted to enter this segment with a product that revolutionises the cruiser concept, and we brought in the XDiavel.





The cruiser market has been growing exponentially, occupying 50% of the luxury bike market (includes motors in the range of 500 cc, priced from Rs 4 lakh). It is estimated to touch 8,000 units this year  from 6,500 units last year  growing at 15%.





Indian consumer tastes have been shaped by early entrants into the market. Globally too, there has been a growing trend towards cruiser bikes. When people opt for a cruiser, they want performance and comfort. Ducati addresses both aspects and sets the benchmark, Avalur said.





The XDiavel is a cruiser that enables people to travel in style and performance, and take advantage of the growing infrastructure, he added. In terms of popularising the XDiavel, Ducati would be bringing the Desmo Owners Club to Bengaluru in the next few months, having already launched it in Mumbai. The cruiser owner likes to ride long distances with company. Hence, clubs are important. Also, typically, cruiser owners like to customise their bikes. Therefore, each of our dealerships has been equipped with parts, training, and skills to guide consumers towards an optimised and customised product, Avalur said.





Accordingly, Ducati India, which currently has dealerships in Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad, has plans to open one showroom in Kochi later this year, with three more across other cities, next year.





Meanwhile, the XDiavel  which is powered by the Ducati Testastretta DVT 1262 engine, achieving maximum power of 156 hp  is imported from the companys facility in Thailand. The XDiavel is priced at Rs 16,15,000, while the XDiavel S is available at Rs 18,80,000 (all ex-showroom prices).

Ducati has sported a new set of wheels. The Italian motorcycle legend, synonymous with superbikes and performance machines, has announced riding into the cruiser segment  launching the XDiavel in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
Raking up Kashmir at the UN, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today glorified slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "young leader" even as he expressed readiness for a "serious and sustained dialogue" with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.



Sharif devoted much of his 20-minute speech at the UN General Assembly session to Kashmir and the current situation in the valley and said Pakistan "fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination".



He demanded an "independent inquiry into the extra- judicial killings" and a UN fact-finding mission to Kashmir "so that those guilty of these atrocities are punished."



Insisting that peace and normalisation between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, Sharif made a number of allegations with regard to the current unrest in the valley. India has blamed Pakistan for engineering and fuelling the unrest.



While talking about the situation in Kashmir, the Pakistan Prime Minister referred to Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, as a "young leader" and said he has "emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement..."



Sharif said the "Indian brutalities are well documented" and that "Pakistan will share with the Secretary General a dossier containing detailed information and evidence of the gross and systematic violations of human rights committed" in Jammu and Kashmir.



"The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self-determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under UN auspices. The people of Kashmir have waited 70 years for implementation of this promise," he said, adding the Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions.



Sharif, who spoke amid heightening tensions between India and Pakistan, insisted that his country wants peace with the neighbour as "confrontation should not be our destiny in South Asia."



The Pakistan Prime Minister claimed that he had "gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues but India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue.



"Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to avert the danger of any escalation."



While insisting that peace and normalization between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, he said, "This is an objective evaluation, not a partisan position."



"Today, from this rostrum, I would also like to reiterate our offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir," Sharif said.



He also said that Pakistan was "open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions." Pakistan is "ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty," he added.



Claiming that Pakistan "neither wants, nor is engaged in an arms race with India", Sharif said, "We have consistently urged the conclusion of bilateral arms control and disarmament measures between Pakistan and India to prevent conflict and avoid wasteful military expenditures."



"The international community ignores the danger of rising tensions in South Asia, at its own peril," the Pakistan Prime Minister said.



He said Pakistan is "committed to the establishment of strategic stability in the region" but "we cannot ignore our neighbors unprecedented arms build up and will take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence."



Sharif, while speaking about the unrest in Kashmir, said, "We demand the immediate release of all Kashmiri political prisoners; an end to the curfew; freedom for the Kashmiris to demonstrate peacefully; urgent medical help for the injured; abrogation of Indias draconian laws; and removal of the foreign travel ban on Kashmiri leaders."

To this end, he said, "steps should be taken by the United Nations to de-militarize Jammu and Kashmir and undertake consultations with India, Pakistan and the true representatives of the Kashmiri people to implement the resolutions of the Security Council." In this context, Sharif said he welcomes "the offer of good offices by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon."India has always maintained that Kashmir is a bilateral issue and not third party, including the UN, has any role.



"We will also open consultations with members of the Security Council to explore the modalities for implementation of the Security Council resolutions on Kashmir," Sharif said.



He claimed that Pakistan is the "principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored and financed from abroad" and has the resolve of eliminating the scourge. "Our comprehensive strategy of law enforcement and targeted military operations has produced remarkable results and enabled Pakistan to turn the tide against terrorism," he said.



Sharif also made a pitch for Pakistan's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group, claiming that it is a "responsible" nuclear weapon state.



"As a responsible nuclear weapon state, Pakistan will continue to cooperate with all international efforts that seek to promote fair and equitable solutions to disarmament and non-proliferation challenges," he said.



"We have introduced state of the art measures to strengthen the safety and security of our nuclear materials and facilities. We have adopted a comprehensive export control regime that is fully consistent with international standards," the Pakistan Prime Minister said.



"Judged on the basis of objective criteria, and without discrimination, Pakistan is fully eligible for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group," he said.



Sharif also talked about Afghanistan, which earlier alleged that "merciless" terror attacks against its civilians are being planned and organised in Pakistan which trains, equips and finances terror groups like Taliban and Haqqani network.



He said Pakistan has been "facilitating the process of reconciliation in Afghanistan" but "progress will be assured only when the Afghan parties themselves conclude that there is no military solution to the Afghan war."


The Members of Parliament should tender resignation opposing the direction of the Supreme Court to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water for seven days to Tamil Nadu and thereby protect the interest of the farmers, said activists of Karnataka Kavalu Pade.





Staging a protest in Kushalnagar, the activists shouted slogans against the state and Central governments.



By directing Karnataka to release water to Tamil Nadu, the Supreme Court has done injustice to the State.



Deficit rainfall



With the deficit rainfall, the reservoirs are not filled in the state. Karnataka is facing a drought-like situation. The crops have gone dry. In such a scenario, Prime Minister Narendra Modi should intervene and solve the row over sharing river Cauvery water among the neighbouring states, they said.



The members of Harangi Water Users Federation formed a human chain at Field Marshal Cariappa Circle and shouted slogans against the government.



Road block



Condemning the direction of the Supreme Court to release water to Tamil Nadu, the members of Karnataka Rakshana Vedike staged a road block on Toll Gate Road in Kushalnagar.



By remaining silent over row over Cauvery, the prime minister is silent and is neglecting Karnataka, said the protesters.




In the backdrop of increase in traffic congestion inside the city, the authorities are contemplating over restricting the movement of old buses that are passenger-unfriendly, said Deputy Commissioner Dr K G Jagadeesha.



Speaking after receiving the public complaints as a preparatory to the RTA meeting here on Wednesday, he hinted at restricting plying of old buses and directed the private bus operators to go for modernisation of their buses.



Private bus operators said that the relaxation of District Magistrates (DM) Notification to allow 18 JnNURM buses to ply from State Bank bus terminus has increased the traffic congestion in the city. The DM Notification of 1992 restricts the entry of buses to State Bank terminus. Refuting such allegations of the operators, the deputy commissioner said, Majority of the private buses that ply in the region have old buses. They are not passenger-friendly. As a result, they take more time when compared with modern buses.



This is also one of the reasons for increase in traffic congestion in the city. The private bus operators should stop patting their own back. They should serve the public and get appreciation from the public. The private bus operators should hold sensitisation programme for their conductors and drivers on how to behave decently with the public, the deputy commissioner said and warned that if he continues to get complaints against private buses, then action would be initiated against them.



Fail to serve



A few residents from Konaje, Kaikamba, Gurpura, Adyar and Chelyar said the private bus operators do not operate buses after 7 pm on a few routes in spite of having permit to ply night service.



The deputy commissioner said the private bus operators and KSRTC should not worry only of profit, instead, they should serve the public. The private bus operators should also serve in the rural areas as well, he added.



He also directed the RTO to formulate a policy for the operators to serve in the rural areas as well. If there is no legal binding on it, then the district administration will appeal to the private operators and KSRTC to serve the areas where there are no bus facilities, he said.



Legal opinion



The deputy commissioner said that 17 JnNURM buses were issued permits in the last RTA meeting on July 7. However, the private bus operators have approached the High Court against the modification of the DM notification for issuing the permits to ply KSRTC buses from State Bank terminus and the HC has stayed the order. After seeking the legal opinion on the stay order, the future course of action will be taken on JnNURM buses, he added.



Meanwhile, Nooyi Balakrishna Rao sought a KSRTC bus from Mangaluru to Polali via Gurpura and Kateel to Dharmasthala via Kaikamba-B C Road for the benefit of the devotees.



Nagarika Hitarakshana Samithi President Hanumantha Kamath said buses should stop at designated places and not at the places where passengers show hand to stop. This will help in arresting the traffic congestion to some extent.



Preparatory meeting



Deputy Commissioner Dr K G Jagadeesha said that instead of holding an open RTA meeting, a preparatory meeting will be held and later the RTA meeting will be restricted to its members.



In the preparatory meeting, the grievances of the public, bus operators and KSRTC and other stake holders will be heard. The RTA meeting will be held once in two months. Those who wish to take part in the preparatory meeting should submit their grievances in writing to the RTO and collect the acknowledgement.








Water has ignited fire in Bengaluru, which is an unfortunate incident the IT city has witnessed, Chouhan said. Chouhan claimed that Madhya Pradesh was the first state to opt for interlinking major rivers. We linked rivers Narmada and Shipra within 13 months and brought over 16 lakh hectares of land under irrigation. We spent over Rs 400 crore for this project, Chouhan said.





The state has already realised former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayees dream of river interconnectivity, he said. We did the interlinking before Kumbh Mela in May. The Shipra river was full of water, though it was the month of May. We were drawing water from Narmada and putting it in Shipra. We had to link the two rivers over a 200-km distance, he added.





Now, we plan to link Gambhir, Parvati and Kalisindh rivers with the Narmada. Fortunately, Narmada is a perennial river, Chouhan said.





Power surplusWith no scarcity of water in Madhya Pradesh, the state is now surplus in power. We are selling power to Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. We have been surplus for the past three years. At least, 20% of the power that we actually produce is sold to other states, Chouhan said.





Madhya Pradesh has shown a nearly seven-fold increase in the installed capacity of renewable energy in the last five years (332 MW in financial year 2011 to 2,567 MW in financial year 2016), Chouhan said.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Wednesday that linking rivers could help solve water crises faced by many states. Talking to DH here on the sidelines of a road show for the upcoming Global Investors Summit-2016, on October 22 and 23 in Indore, Chouhan said, River-linking is one of the solutions which all states should consider.
The heritage city on Wednesday witnessed a series of protests, urging the government not to release 6,000 cusec of Cauvery River water to Tamil Nadu as directed by the Supreme Court.



Activists of Cauvery Kriya Samithi staged protests in front of Chamarajanagar MP R Dhruvanarayan and Mysuru-Kodagu MP Prathap Simhas houses, urging the duo to exert pressure on the Centre to intervene in the issue.



Students, under the banner of Bahujan Vidyarthi Sangha (BVS), boycotted classes and staged a protest demanding the resignation of the legislators. The students of 45 departments of Manasagangotri boycotted classes on Wednesday and gathered near the Round Canteen. They raised slogans against Tamil Nadu and also staged a streetplay that stressed on sorting out the differences between the riparian states by holding discussions. Parivarthana team of BVS, comprising 12 students, participated in the 30-minute play, which highlighted the problems faced by farmers. The rising incidence of farmers suicide, politicisation of the Cauvery issue, the importance of unity among farmers were stressed. Later, they took out a bike rally and joined the students of Maharajas College in their protest on the college premises. They demanded Prime Minister Narendra Modis intervention to resolve the problem.



Indefinite protest



Members of the Bar Association launched an indefinite stir near the Gandhis bust, in front of the Courts complex, demanding the state government to take a firm decision. The lawyers, who boycotted the court proceedings, formed a human chain at the circle.



They resolved to continue with the indefinite stir until the state government take a decision to stop releasing Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu. Mysuru Bar Association president B R Chandramouli claimed the SCs directive as unscientific and unfair. The apex court has issued orders without considering the ground realities of the state, he opined.



Simple Dasara



Meanwhile, members of Kannada Vedike have urged the district administration to celebrate simple Dasara this year, following the Cauvery imbroglio. The farmers of Mandya, Hassan and Mysuru are worried as the water level in the dams have depleted. At this juncture, it would be appropriate for the District Administration to celebrate Dasara in a simple manner, they suggested.



Members of Mysuru District Journalists Association also took out a protest march against the release of water from Tyagaraja Road to the DCs office.






Writers and artists who met at Ravindra Kalakshetra on Wednesday to discuss the Cauvery issue, passed three resolutions. Writer K Marulasiddappa said the members who participated in the meeting felt strongly that Modi should intervene and protect the interests of Karnataka. The members also resolved that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah should stop releasing water to Tamil Nadu, and that all Karnataka MPs tender their resignation.





As many as 40 to 50 writers and artists will travel to Mandya on Thursday to extend their moral support to the protest being carried out by Cauvery Hitarakshana Vedike, led by its president G Madegowda.





Writers and artistes, including Chandrashekar Patil, Govind Rao, B T Lalitha Naik and Mukyamantri Chandru, were among those who participated in the meeting.

A section of the writers and the artistes in Bengaluru has sought Prime Minister Narendra Modis intervention and settle the water dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu amicably.
Strengthening the policing system in violence-hit Jammu and Kashmir, the Centre on Wednesday cleared a proposal to recruit an additional 10,000 Special Police Officers (SPOs) for the state force.



Home Minister Rajnath Singh gave his approval for engaging SPOs in the Jammu and Kashmir Police, especially for the security related requirements, a Home Ministry spokesperson said.



"The orders have been implemented with immediate effect and the additional numbers is over and above the existing strength of the SPOs. The reimbursement of expenditure to the State Government by the Centre in respect of 10,000 SPOs will be as per existing approved Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Guidelines," a statement said.



There are currently 25,000 SPOs in Jammu and Kashmir. An SPO will initially draw a salary of Rs 5,000 per month, Rs 5,300 after completion of one year and Rs 6,000 after completion of three years.



This is part of the central government move to provide employment opportunities to 1.40 lakh youths in the state through skill development training, jobs in police and paramilitary forces and other avenues.



Around one lakh youths will be given job training under 'Himayat' scheme in the next five years. Since inception, 60,000 youths have been given training under this scheme.



The Udaan scheme launched in 2013 aims to provide skill development training to 40,000 mostly graduate and post graduate youths over a period of five years.

So far, 21,000 youths were given training. The Centre is also in the process of recruiting 5,000 youths in five newly created India Reserve battalions in Jammu and Kashmir.


Naga peace talks is facing a major hurdle as the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (IM) is insisting that the Central Ceasefire Monitoring Committee allow them to extort money, which they call professional taxes, from the officials of Nagaland.





Though there are no official figures of the amount extorted by the private militia every year, NSCN (IM) claims in its official notification that it collects annual tax from individual officials at the rate of 2% a month. The outfit runs a parallel government in the state, which it calls Peoples Republic of Nagalim, and entered into a peace deal with the Modi government last August.



The Naga insurgent group wrote a strongly worded letter on September 13 to central ceasefire monitoring committee chairman D K Pathak, a former BSF director general, taking objection to the government cautioning them against extorting money from officials and others.



NSCNs ceasefire monitoring cell convenor Kraibo Chawang claimed in his communique that the bilateral agreement did not bar their cadres from collecting taxes. The government for its part calls it extortion.



The agreed ground rules do not prohibit collection of tax by the NSCN. Therefore, it cannot be construed as violation of the ground rules, said Chawang in the letter. The NSCN pointsman asked the Centre not to invoke Indian judicial system against the private militia, which he said was against the spirit of the ground rules.



The NSCN also expressed its concern over several cases unnecessarily filed against its cadres and senior officials. The punitive action, the letter said, undermined sincerity of the ongoing political talks as the two entities recognise unique history and situation of Nagas. The outfit issued a couched threat to Pathak to cooperate in the interest of the Naga peace talks. Your esteemed office is humbly requested to reflect the progress of the talks while dealing with the ground situation in order to facilitate the talks to arrive at an honourable and acceptable solution, the letter said.


After having destroyed 38,000 tonnes of Maggi noodles, Nestle India on Wednesday approached the Supreme Court seeking permission to dispose of about 550 tonnes of recalled stock that passed shelf life.



A bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and C Nagappan agreed to hear on Thursday after senior advocate Harish Salve said the company would follow the due procedure.



Maintaining the storage of such stocks at 39 locations across the country would lead to health hazard, he submitted that the food regulator Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has not opposed the companys plea.



The company said that pursuant to withdrawal announcement and ban order on June 5, 2015, Nestle India Ltd had recalled stocks of Maggi Noodles and till September 1, 2015 and destroyed around 38,000 tonnes of Maggi Noodles.



The firm said it had 490 tonnes of stock pending destruction and 60 tonnes were received from the market. Hence, 550 tonnes of stock stored in 39 location across the country need to be destroyed.



This entire stock of approximately 550 tonnes is well past its best before date and its storage is giving rise to conditions that may lead to health hazard at the said locations," the plea said.



The procedures agreed for destroying the stocks include destruction in the incinerators of cement plants identified by FSSAI and its intimation to FSSAI, which if required may depute officials at these sites.



Test report



On April 5, a Mysuru-based government laboratory had given its test report on Maggi noodles in a sealed cover to the apex court.
In a span of just three days, two cases of suspected dengue deaths have been reported in the city.





Two girls aged two and 14 have succumbed to the flu. A two-year-old died of suspected dengue fever on Monday. Pratika,14, a student of Bishop Cotton School, succumbed to the flu on Tuesday. According to sources in the Health department of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Pratika, a resident of N R Colony, failed to respond to treatment.

She was initially taken to Cloud Nine Hospital from where she was refered to Apollo Hospital, Jayanagar. We are yet to confirm that she died of dengue, said Komala, senior health officer, BBMP South.



She said officials from the health department visited the girls house and looked for any possible cases in the vicinity. We found that all mosquito control measures were in place. There was no source for the mosquito to breed either, she added.

The two-year-old girl died at Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS). She was initially rushed to Vani Vilas Hospital. As there was no ventilator there, she was taken to KIMS, said BBMP officials.



So far, 476 cases have been reported from the city, according to the statistics available with the Health department of the BBMP. Going by the number of cases that have come to light, Palike officials have identified Bengaluru South and Bommanahalli as sensitive areas and intensified mosquito control measures there.



Usually, a large number of fever cases are seen only till July. However, this year it has extended beyond July, according to doctors. Dr K G Suresh, senior physician, K C General Hospital, said they have been seeing a good number of flu cases. It is mostly viral fever or patients with upper respiratory infections. Last year, we saw cases only till July. This time, we are seeing a plenty in September as well, he added.


The Bengaluru Urban district authorities have decided to take over the land on which actor Darshans house and SS Hospital owned by former minister Shamanur Shivashankarappas family are built.



Along with them, 194 houses in Ideal Homes Layout where Darshans house is located, will also be taken over in a weeks time.



Following floods in the city on the night of July 28, the department of survey, settlement and land records conducted a survey where encroachment of a stormwater drain by Ideal Homes and SS Hospital in Halagevaderahalli village, Rajarajeshwari Nagar, was found. A detailed report with a survey sketch superimposed on Google Earth satellite image was submitted to the BBMP for action. Palike commissioner N Manjunatha Prasad referred the matter to the Bengaluru Urban district authorities, citing some court directions to the deputy commissioner of the district.



Speaking to DH, Bengaluru Urban deputy commissioner V Shankar said he had not yet received the documents from the BBMP, but the matter had been reviewed. We verified the revenue documents and found that the land in question is B kharab (wasteland), which includes stormwater drain. No construction activities are permitted on B kharab land. We are going to have a meeting in this regard, prepare a file and soon take it into our custody, said Shankar.



The decision to retain or demolish the buildings will be taken in the meeting which would take place shortly. The district authorities are also awaiting a detailed report from the BBMP commissioner, sources said.


The police inspector attached to the Byatarayanapura police station on Mysuru Road was shunted out for laxity in controlling the mob during the September 12 arson and riots in the city during the Cauvery protests.



A top police source said the inspector, Hemanth Kumar, was transferred as he failed to control the mob. He has been transferred for dereliction of duty and his posting is not known. A report has also been submitted to the Director General and Inspector General of Police (DG&IGP) recommending suspension of Satyanarayana Kudur, assistant commissioner of police (ACP), Kengeri Gate sub division, a senior officer said.



Meanwhile, on Wednesday, there were no untoward incidents in the city. Around 16,000 police personnel were keeping tight vigil on the streets. Constant patrolling and route marches were carried out in sensitive areas. Announcements were made asking people to refrain from indulging in any kind of violence or disturbing normal life.



City police commissioner N S Megharikh said, The situation is peaceful. All deputy commissioners of police have been directed to keep a watch in their jurisdiction. Special forces will camp in the city till September 25 and if required, their stay will be extended.



Members of various pro-Kannada organisations staged a protest near Town Hall, State Bank of Mysore circle and other places. They were all detained and later released in the evening.



Kannada Vatal Paksha leader Vatal Nagaraj and his associates were also detained when they tried to stage a protest in front of Vidhana Soudha. They were taken to Sheshadripuram police station and released later. Karnataka State Reserve Police (KSRP) and Rapid Action Force (RAF) platoons were deployed near Vidhana Soudha, Chief Minister's residence and Legislators Home.



827 arrested



A senior police officer said, Around 827 people have been arrested and 204 cases have been registered in various police stations so far in connection with arson and violence which took place on September 12.



The arrested people were questioned and based on their information, more people will be arrested. A detailed investigation will be carried out at the earliest. For now, the law and order in the city is our prime concern, added the officer. Liquor shops remained closed for the second consecutive day on Wednesday as a precaution.


For the first time in the last two decades, prohibitory orders under section 144 of the CrPC have been clamped across Bengaluru for 14 straight days.



The restriction on the assembly of more than five people was first imposed on September 12 when large-scale violence broke out in the city, especially in the western parts, over the release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu. As the situation remains edgy, prohibitory orders remain in force till September 25, and may be extended, if required. The September 12 violence left a man dead when the police fired to disperse the mob. The imposition of section 144 also bars people from carrying any weapon and trying to protest.



A senior police officer, who did not want to be named, said that it was the first time in decades that prohibitory orders had been clamped for so long. Previously, prohibitory orders were imposed for two straight days when Kannada actor Dr Rajkumar was kidnapped by forest brigand Veerappan in 2000 and again when the thespian died in 2006, he said.



Ajai Kumar Singh, who served as the Bengaluru police commissioner and also headed the police in Karnataka, recalled the imposition of section 144 for several days near the Vidhana Soudha during a legislature session. But now, it has been imposed across Bengaluru. I do not remember if it was imposed for a long time during my tenure. But the current situation is normal and people are going about their chores, which shows that policing is tight, he told DH.



When asked as to why the prohibitory orders have been imposed for more than 10 days, a police officer said, The Cauvery problem is a sensitive issue and we do not want to take any chances. We do not want a repetition of the 1991 violent protests. The prohibitory orders remain in force to ensure there is no law and order problem unlike that of September 12.



The city should not be held to ransom and the life of common man should not be affected.

Another officer conceded that people in sensitive areas might be unable to move around freely due to the large deployment of special forces and the local police. We were not in favour of imposing section 144 but the situation created by the rioters gave us no other option, the officer said. The imposition of prohibitory orders has created fear among anti-social elements and they are not to be seen anywhere. If they were not in place, these elements would have tried to disturb the law and order.


The Karnataka Cabinet on Wednesday decided to defer further release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 23, when the state legislature takes a call on the issue.



Briefing reporters after the meeting, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said the Cabinet deferred a decision on releasing water to Tamil Nadu till the session meets. The session has been convened in the wake of the Supreme Court directive to Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu from September 21 to 27.



Siddaramaiah did not explicitly say that Karnataka would stop water to Tamil Nadu with immediate effect. At a meeting of the leaders of the ruling Congress and the Opposition JD(S), held earlier in the day, it was unanimously decided that Karnataka should stop further release of water to Tamil Nadu given the severe distress situation in the river basin.



Siddaramaiah had convened an all-party meeting to decide on the states next step of action following the Supreme Court order. However, it turned out to be a meeting of two parties  the Congress and the JD (S)  with the BJP boycotting the meeting, stating that it had no faith or confidence in the ruling dispensation.



However, BJP state president B S Yeddyurappa later welcomed the Cabinet decision and announced that the party would attend the session. The BJP has been insisting that the government should not release water to Tamil Nadu due to the distress situation.

Many senior Congress MPs, including Mallikarjun Kharge, Oscar Fernandes, Rehman Khan and Veerappa Moily, attended the meeting, along with JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowda and his son H D Kumaraswamy.



Siddaramaiah is under pressure from various quarters, including farmers associations and politicians, that Karnataka should stop further release of water to the neighbouring state. Ahead of the meeting, Siddaramaiah called on former prime minister Deve Gowda at his residence.



The chief minister spoke to Deve Gowda for more than one hour on the Cauvery issue. Gowda attended the meeting later in the day and stated that Karnataka should take a tough stand and stop releasing water to Tamil Nadu. He, however, told the chief minister that resignation would not solve the issue. Wednesdays meeting also decided that the resolution passed in the state legislature should be placed before the Supreme Court when it takes up hearing of the Cauvery issue on September 27.



It will be submitted before the Supreme Court that the state is not willfully disobeying its order but is forced to take the decision due to the existing circumstances.


Strongly reacting to Pakistan Prime Minister's remarks at the UN, India today described them as non-factual and full of "threat bluster" and said glorification of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani by him at the world forum is an act of "self-incrimination" by Pakistan.



"We just heard a speech full of threat bluster and rising immaturity and complete disregard of facts," Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar said at a press conference at the India's permanent mission here after Sharif's address to the UN General Assembly.



He also criticised Sharif for glorifying Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, and said India "will not succumb to blackmail tactics of the Pakistan Government that seems eager to use terrorism as policy".



"We heard the glorification of a terrorist. Wani is declared commander of Hizbul, widely acknowledged as a terror group. It is shocking that a leader of a nation can glorify a self-advertised terrorist at such a forum. This is self incrimination by Pakistan PM," Akbar said.



Rejecting Sharif's offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, the minister said, "Talks and guns don't go together".



"Pakistan at this moment seems to be run by a war machine rather than a government. Pakistan wants dialogue while holding a terrorist gun in its hand," he said.



He also rejected Sharif's allegations against India with regard to the current unrest in Kashmir and said, "Kashmir occupation is by Pakistan occupation army. The world also knows that Pakistan has been indulged in ethnic cleansing of its own people," he said.



Vikas Swarup slams Wani's reference in Sharif's UN speech



"Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA glorifies Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani in UN's highest forum. Shows continued Pak attachment to terrorism," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.



During his address to the UN General Assembly session today, Sharif raked up Kashmir issue and described Wani as a "young leader".



Pakistan Prime Minister said Wani, who was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, has "emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement".



Sharif also claimed that he had gone the extra mile to offer "a dialogue to address all outstanding issues but India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue."



Responding to Sharif's allegations, Swarup said India's only condition for talks is an end to terrorism. "PM Sharif at #UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. India's only condition is an end to terrorism. This not acceptable," Swarup said.
Dayna Dyjak left her hometown of Solana Beach for Panama this summer. It was the Canyon Crest Academy juniors first time traveling outside the country.

You really have to go to Latin America to see what its like, Dayna said. Its not what people make it out to be.

The seven-week summer program was hosted by Amigos de las Americas, a nonprofit organization that offers service and leadership programs in Latin America for high school and college students. Dayna decided to apply after hearing about her neighbors positive experience with Amigos.

She inspired me by saying a lot of great things about it, she said.

The Panama summer program, which took place June 24 through Aug. 13, focused on public and environmental health. Participants carried out public health activities and supported environmental projects, including constructing wheelchair ramps at a local church, clearing trash and planting trees throughout the community.

I chose Panama and it was my first choice because it was about environmental sustainability, Dayna said. Being able to sustain the Earth and keep it healthy is a key thing in everyday life.

Having never traveled overseas, Dayna said she experienced culture shock at the start, but quickly adapted to her new surroundings.

Despite studying Spanish in school, she was surprised to discover how different the language sounded when immersed in the culture of Panama. She was also pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming warmness of the Panama people.

It was easy to adapt to, said Dayna, who stayed with a host family in Panama. It was kind of like Solana Beach, not the houses but how the area looked.

Since 1965, Amigos has provided international youth leadership programs for high school and college students. More than 27,000 students have participated in programs in 17 countries throughout Latin America during the last 50 years.

I want to go back to Panama, Dayna said. The program gave me a second home. That was my favorite part  now I know I have a second home.

For more about Amigos, visit amigosinternational.org.
Although September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, a local mother and daughter raise awareness and help promote resources to prevent suicide all year long.

Its an important cause for anyone and everyone because nobody is immune to being touched by suicide, said Terri Wyatt, a longtime resident of Solana Beach.

Its been more than five years since Terri Wyatt lost her son to suicide. Preston Grover was 23 when he took his life in June 2011.

Since their tragedy, Wyatt and her daughter, Kelsey Grover, have spent time educating the public about suicide, in an effort to prevent others from losing a loved one to suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 41,000 people in the United States die by suicide each year.

Wyatt and Grover have been SafeTALK instructors for the past year. SafeTALK is a three-hour program that prepares anyone over the age of 15 to become a suicide-alert helper.

Program participants learn to identify people who may have suicidal thoughts, ask them directly about the possibility of suicide, and connect them to lifesaving resources. The safe of SafeTALK stands for suicide alertness for everyone, while talk stands for the actions that one does to help those with thoughts of suicide: tell, ask, listen, and keep safe.

It was something that we always wanted to do together because it just means a lot to us, said Wyatt, who has been a nurse for 37 years, spending 27 years at Sharp Memorial Hospital. It has helped our healing.

Wyatt and Grover have provided SafeTALK classes to different organizations and consistently teach classes every couple of months at Sharp Memorial Hospital.

Their next class is from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, Nov. 5, at Sharp Memorial Outpatient Pavilion, located at Conference Rooms A-B, 3075 Health Center Drive in San Diego. The free course is designed by Living Works Education and is sponsored by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

To register, call 1-800-82-SHARP or visit www.sharp.com/health-classes.

Its important that everyone is trained and feels comfortable talking about suicide, said Grover, a child life specialist in the emergency department at Rady Childrens Hospital. She has worked with children for 10 years.

One thing we learned in losing my brother is the stigma around suicide, she added. People really are not comfortable talking about it and they are not comfortable asking about it. This course engages people and helps them feel comfortable.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention put the mother-daughter duo through the training to become SafeTALK instructors and continues to sponsor their classes in the community.

Following the death of their son and brother, Wyatt and Grover first became involved with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention through its Out of the Darkness Walk in San Diego. The family participated in their first walk just months after Prestons death.

I found something for my own healing and encouraged my family to get involved, Grover said.

Its been really important for us to help give back because going through the loss of a sibling or a son is something thats extremely difficult, she added. We want to be able to prevent as many suicides as possible.

Since their first walk in 2011, Wyatt and Grover have become very involved with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

They both became SafeTALK instructors, and now, Wyatt serves on the board of directors for the San Diego Chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a national nonprofit dedicated to understanding and preventing suicide through research, education and advocacy, and to reaching out to people with mental disorders and those impacted by suicide.

They both also participate in the nonprofits San Diego walk every year. The Out of the Darkness Walk is the organizations signature fundraising event, bringing together family, friends and supporters in nearly 350 communities nationwide.

A total of 2,179 walkers participated in the San Diego walk last year, raising $141,000 for research, education, advocacy, outreach and support.

We want to educate the public as much as possible and remove the stigma around suicide, Grover said.

This years walk takes place Saturday, Oct. 22 at NTC Park at Liberty Station, located at 2600 Cushing Road in San Diego. The San Diego chapter expects 2,500 walkers this year and hopes to raise $170,000.

Its a very powerful and moving experience, Wyatt said. If youve lost someone, theres support and resources. If youre struggling, we have a lot of organizations there to offer support. Its a very supportive and healing environment.

There are so many other people going through this, Grover added. Youre not alone.

Registration, along with a resource fair and survivor activities, start at 8:30 a.m. The opening ceremony begins at 10 a.m. To register, visit the American Foundation for Suicide Preventions website at afsp.donordrive.com.
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Mary Devlin of Bethel, Alaska has earned a Bachelor of Science, Nursing degree from Western Governors University (WGU). The online, nonprofit university has graduated over 190,000 students from across the country since its inception in 1997.

WGU has recognized 7,734 undergraduate and 5,254 graduate degree recipients who have completed their degrees since April 1, 2020. Their areas of study include business, K-12 education, information technology, and health professions, including nursing. The average time to graduation for those earning a bachelors degree was 2 years, 3 months, while the average time to degree for graduate programs was 1 year, 5 months. The average age for those who graduated is 37 years old.

WGU pioneered competency-based education, which measures learning rather than time spent in class. Designed to meet the needs of working adults, students study and learn on their own schedules with individualized, one-to-one faculty support. They complete courses as soon as they demonstrate that they have mastered the subject matter; allowing them to move quickly through material they already know so they can allocate time for what they still need to learn. As a result, many WGU students are able to accelerate their studies, saving both time and money. This model has also served students especially well amid the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing them to continue their programs successfully.

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by Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon

April 28th, 2017: On Tuesday evening the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee took public testimony on HB 115the Education Funding Actand afterward much was made of the fact that a majority of the more than 100 people who called in were in favor of this tax for schools. The testimony went on until after 10:00 p.m., and many people waited hours to put their views on the record.

While a marathon run of public testimony might not exactly qualify as a scientific sample of the entire Alaskan electorate, the stats were heartening. But what impressed me even more than the numbers was the tone and considerateness of those Alaskans in support of the bill.

Testifiers spoke of their willingness to personally contribute to the most fundamental and important of state servicesthe education of the next generation of Alaskans. I was stirred by their sense of caring and responsibility for the wellbeing of their communities, and I was impressed by their understanding of how that moral and material investment is also essential for ensuring a thriving economic future for Alaska.

No one, including me, wants to pay tax on their income, but the majority of Alaskans who testified on Tuesday night had clear beliefs about what kind of Alaska they want for themselves and their children, and they know that with oil revenues a small fraction of what they once were, we will need to take more responsibility to maintain and increase the quality of our lives here.

I recently wrote to a thoughtful constituent of mine in McGrath:

Our House Majority Coalition is offering a solution to the fiscal dilemma that we think is practical and as evenhanded as possible. As you clearly understand, there is nothing out of the ordinary about our proposals.

Our cuts to the Operating Budget were modest compared to recent years because weve reached a point of diminishing returns. If you cut so much that you simply cripple programs and services, then youve removed the value from those dollars you do spend and youve set up government to fail.

We believe that what state government currently provides is justifiedlegally and morally, as you say, but also according to what our constituents tell us they think is necessary and worthwhile. All the tools needed to pay for it are at hand, and as I mentioned above, in most parts of the country theyre considered pretty conventional methods.

Youre right that there is a wide chasm between our plan and what the Senate is offering. The negotiations that need to happen in the coming weeks will not be easy. Still, I have some hope that reason and practicality will carry some weight.

To reason and practicality I would also add caring and responsibility. I was moved by the dedication of those dozens of people who waited hours to put their views on the record Tuesday night. It heightens my pride in the people of Alaska, and its the kind of encouragement we need as the Alaska House Majority Coalition forges ahead in its effort to do what we know to be best for our constituents and our future economic prosperity.

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ALET 1802 boasts large class of recruits for multiple police agencies.

The Alaska Law Enforcement Training (ALET) Academys second session of the year began Sunday, with 47 recruits for police agencies across the state. The class is one of the largest in recent memory, and roughly 25% of the recruits for ALET 1802 are female.

The Public Safety Training Academy time and again produces some of the highest quality peace officers in the nation, Commissioner Walt Monegan said. I congratulate the recruits for making it this far, welcome them to ALET 1802, and wish them the best of luck as they begin their training to protect and serve the people of Alaska.

Recruits will complete over 1,000 hours of training during the 16-week basic ALET. The training incorporates intensive instruction in law enforcement-related topics, physical fitness, and scenario-based exercises, all designed to prepare entry-level police officers, Village Public Safety Officers, and Troopers for successful careers in law enforcement.

Academy instructor staff consists of Alaska State Troopers and Alaska Wildlife Troopers who have been promoted to the rank of Corporal.

The Public Safety Training Academy is proud to welcome the students of ALET 1802, Academy Commander Lieutenant Chad Goeden said. They will be vigorously trained and tested so that upon graduation, they will be well-equipped to protect Alaskans. I look forward to seeing their progress and development.

Upon graduation, ALET 1802 recruits are slated to join police agencies across the state, including 17 to the Alaska State Troopers, five to the Alaska Wildlife Troopers, three Court Service Officers, 10 to the Anchorage Airport Police and Fire Department, four Village Public Safety Officers, and eight more recruits to seven different municipal police departments.

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 5/11/2022 16:57 EMS responded to a person reporting to be in pain.

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15 September 2016 (Amnesty)  Video footage and satellite images showing makeshift grave sites and burial mounds offer a rare glimpse inside a desert no mans land between Jordan and Syria where tens of thousands of refugees who have been virtually cut off from humanitarian aid for two months are stranded, said Amnesty International. The video footage was obtained from Tribal Council of Palmyra and Badia, which has a network of activists operating inside the area known as the berm, and independently verified using satellite imagery. Fresh accounts gathered by the organization, paint a desperate picture of human suffering and highlight the tragic consequences of the worlds failure to share responsibility for the global refugee crisis. Next week, world leaders will gather in New York for two high-level summits to discuss refugees. The situation at the berm offers a grim snapshot of the consequences of the worlds abject failure to share responsibility for the global refugee crisis. The knock on effect of this failure has seen many of Syrias neighbours close their borders to refugees, said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International. Its a desperate picture for people trapped at the berm, food is running out and disease is rife. In some cases people are suffering or even dying from preventable illnesses, simply because they are not allowed into Jordan and the authorities have blocked access for aid, medical treatment and a meaningful humanitarian response. Starvation, sickness and death Humanitarian assistance to the berm, which was already limited before, stopped completely when the Jordanian authorities sealed off the Rukban and Hadalat border crossings after a deadly attack killed seven border guards on 21 June. Since then, only one delivery of food aid was made in early August to more than 75,000 people stranded there. Aid agencies are barred by the Jordanian authorities from accessing the no mans land area and were forced to drop supplies over the sandy ridge (berm) using cranes.

Abu Mohamed, who has been living in the informal camp at Rukban for five months said the situation there has sharply deteriorated since the 21 June attack. The humanitarian situation is very bad, the situation of children in particular is very bad. We have drinking water but hardly any food or milk [it] is awful, he said. Many people have died They distributed just rice and lentils and a kilo of dried dates, but that was all for a whole month, they gave us nothing but that. The mood among the people in Rukban is below zero. Video footage obtained by Amnesty International shows two makeshift grave sites in Rukban revealing dozens of burial mounds in close proximity to refugee tents. The lack of access to proper medical care and the dire conditions is a deadly combination. Poor hygiene, sanitation conditions and limited access to clean water are reported to have led to an outbreak of hepatitis, which is believed to be the leading cause of child deaths in Rukban. Humanitarian sources indicate that since June there have been at least 10 deaths from hepatitis. Sources in Rukban and members of the Tribal Council of Palmyra and Badia said many of those who have died are children who were suffering from jaundice which occurs as a result of hepatitis. Aid workers have also reported that at least nine childbirth-related deaths took place since 21 June. A significant number of pregnant women are reportedly among the refugee population unable to access medical care. The total number of deaths that have occurred is difficult to verify given the lack of access to the berm. According to sources inside Rukban, in late August a 20-year-old man died from complications of jaundice most likely as a result of hepatitis. He is reported to have bled to death from gastrointestinal bleeding. The lack of medical treatment meant there was nothing that could be done to save his life. Among the other most prevalent illnesses spreading in the camp are respiratory infections, dehydration, leishmaniasis and diarrhoea. Satellite images obtained by Amnesty International show that since the end of 2015 the population density near the two informal border camps at Rukban and Hadalat has risen significantly.

Although the number of refugees at Hadalat decreased slightly following the halt to the humanitarian response in June and nearby Russian airstrikes in July, overall there has been steady rise in the number of refugees at the berm. At Rukban the overall number of shelters rose from just 368 a year ago to 6,563 in late July 2016 and most recently increased to more 8,295 in September 2016. This dramatic influx highlights the fact that over the past few months thousands of people have continued to flee the conflict in Syria where war crimes and other grave violations are being committed on a daily basis. Security concerns heighten restrictions The Jordanian authorities have repeatedly cited security concerns as their reason for closing the border, halting humanitarian operations at the berm. Jordans Minister of State for Media Affairs Mohammed al-Momani told Amnesty International that the area around the berm is becoming a Daesh enclave (controlled by the armed group calling itself Islamic State). While he acknowledged that the humanitarian situation there is difficult and said that Jordan is ready to assume its share of responsibility he also called on the UN and international community to do their fair share for the refugees at the berm. There is no question that security is an important consideration, but protecting people in Jordan should not come at the expense of providing humanitarian assistance and protection to those desperately in need, said Tirana Hassan. Jordan has previously welcomed refugees from Syria through its borders and carried out rigorous screening and registration processes prior to allowing their entry into the country. The authorities can use these processes again to open their doors to refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria, while ensuring security at the same time. The UN is negotiating plans with the Jordanian authorities to shift humanitarian aid distribution points some 2km into the no mans land area, away from the Jordanian border creating a buffer zone, to allow humanitarian operations to resume.

Whether aid is distributed at the berms edge or 2km away does not change the fact that there are tens of thousands of people seeking international protection on Jordans doorstep, nor does it absolve the authorities obligation to offer a safe haven to those fleeing conflict and persecution, said Tirana Hassan. Directly or indirectly forcing refugees to return to Syria by refusing access and imposing intolerable living conditions on them is a flagrant violation of Jordans international obligations. The authorities must allow unfettered humanitarian access to refugees who are trapped. Any attempt to coerce or ask them to move should be rejected. Any longer term solution however, needs to be a global one. Internationally, resettlement places for refugees from Syria remain woefully insufficient. Countries in the region continue to bear the brunt of the refugee crisis, with more than four million refugees in just three countries. Without real commitments to boost resettlement followed by concrete action, next weeks refugee summits will serve as little more than a token gesture, said Tirana Hassan. Failing to provide a long term solution for refugees stranded at the berm will point not just to the worlds failure there, but their failure of refugees worldwide.

Syria-Jordan border: 75,000 refugees trapped in desert no mans land in dire conditions
By Amr Salam

16 September 2016 JEDDAH (Saudi Gazette)  A large number of dead sardines have washed ashore the Corniche here because of sewage water thrown in the sea, according to marine experts. Several Corniche visitors expressed great concerns over the dead sardines and even captured videos and took photographs and posted them on the social media websites, warning that the problem can exasperate. They called upon pertinent authorities to step in and contain the problem before it gets out of hand. The dead sardines emitted stinky smell that even birds could not put up with. Muhammad Ahmad was fishing near Al-Nauras Square when he saw tons of dead sardines. After a while, he could not bear the stinky smell and had to leave, wondering why the sardines died. He called upon authorities to take necessary measures to protect the marine life in the Red Sea and public health. He said the dead sardines could cause serious diseases. Fikri Abdulwahab, a citizen, blamed sewage water for the problem and warned of severe environmental consequences of dumping sewage water in the sea. He said even birds could not eat the sardines because of their bad smell. Khalid Saeed, a fisherman, blamed Jeddah Municipality and the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture for this disaster and called upon them to take swift action. He said the general public can sue the municipality and the ministry if it was proved that they neglected their job. Ali Ishqi, an environmental expert, blamed the poison of floating marine plants for killing tons of sardine, stressing that these plants pose public health risks as well. Getting rid of hazardous chemical waste in the sea can cause these plants to multiply and kill more marine creatures, he warned. Nasser Al-Ahmad, an environment expert, agreed that the disposal of waste material in the sea can produce plants that kill fish and sardines, warning against the negative effect of improper environmental practices.
Turkcell has announced the launching of its mobile application Merhaba Umut  Hello Hope to facilitate the integration of Syrian refugees living in Turkey.

The app has a Turkish language learning component, instant audio translation between Turkish and Arabic, a frequently asked questions section which offers guidance on essential issues like registration and access to services and one-click access to Turkcells Arabic language call centre.

Turkcell CEO Kaan Terzioglu stated that Turkey has shifted the conversation about Syrian refugees from basic survival to integration a long time ago: With Syria in ruins, having the chance of a safe and meaningful life now requires a prospect of integration for Syrian refugees. Communication technologies are powerful tools to meet the challenges of integration, including living in a country with a different language, accessing education and having employment prospects.

He added: I am proud to note that Turkcell has been a pioneer in mobilising the power of communication in one of the biggest humanitarian challenges of our time. Our new app Hello Hope will be the basis of our future work to use connectivity to bring essential services to the Syrian community in Turkey.

With about 3 million Syrian refugees, Turkey is the worlds top refugee-hosting country. Serving about 1.2 million Syrian customers, Turkcell is the operator of choice for Syrian refugees. The company operates Turkeys first bilingual call centre, serving customers in Arabic language. It has invested heavily in its network both in the urban centres near the border zone, and in refugee camps which host about 10% of the Syrian population living in Turkey.

With Turkcell Academys Hello Hope app, Turkcell now takes its services-focused approach to serve a community for which communications technologies have been a lifeline. The app is available on iOS and Android platforms.
Google faces an investigation by the Indonesian tax office over allegedly unpaid taxes on billions of dollars worth of advertising revenue.

Accrued over the past five years, the tax payments that Google Indonesia owes for last year alone are believed to total over $400 million. The tax office has claimed that the tech giants Indonesian unit has paid less than 0.1% of the income and value-added taxes that it owed for 2015.

Google denied the Indonesian tax authorities access to its tax reports after they requested an examination in April. This prompted the investigation into the companys tax payments. Google reports most the revenue that it generates from Indonesia at its regional headquarters for Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore.

Finance Minister Mulyani Indrawati issued a statement saying that Google must fall in line with Indonesias tax laws. Google Indonesia countered that it has been fully cooperative with local authorities and claims to have paid all required taxes.

Indonesias investigation is in line with a global move towards preventing corporate tax avoidance. Major multinational firms such as Apple, Google and Starbucks have all come under fire for using loopholes to dodge sales tax. Muhammad Haniv, who heads up the Indonesian tax offices branch for special cases, confirmed that other internet companies face investigation over unpaid taxes.

Haniv added that if the investigation concludes that Google has avoided paying tax, it will be fined up to four times the amount owed, meaning its total tax bill for 2015 would hit IDR5.5 trillion ($418 million). He did not speculate at the full amount over the five-year period under investigation.

Mulyani added that there must be a permanent establishment associated with all business conducted in Indonesia, and that by virtue of this all business conducted in the country is subject to taxation. While she acknowledged that this stipulation is complicated by online-only business transactions, the government was working to make sure that tax regulations were obeyed by all companies.
A new report collating figures from 50 fire services in the UK reveals that rescuing obese people trapped in homes is a recurrent issue for firefighters today.

The findings highlight that obesity can compromise quality of life for patients in serious ways, in addition to being a major risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes.

The data, obtained by BBC Radio 5, shows that there were 944 incidents where obese people needed to be moved by rescue services in 2015/16.

This has increased by a third compared to 709 interventions in 2012/13. The same year, a new category was created for the fire and rescue services to report bariatric rescues.

When responding to this type of call, rescuers often have to use lifting equipment such as special slings and sometimes have to remove windows, walls and banisters in the victims homes.

Typical scenarios which rescuers that were interviewed were involved with included helping the ambulance services with lifting equipment to remove an overweight patient stuck in furniture and carrying a 40-stone man from the upstairs of a pub.

Many incidents also consisted of moving obese people who had died from their homes for an undertakers ambulance to take over.

Of the 50 UK services polled, South Wales Fire and Rescue Service had the highest number of incidents (77) in 2015/16 followed by West Wales Fire and Rescue Service (46).

Other fire brigades that have seen an increase in such rescues over that time period are Humberside Fire and Rescue Service (45), London Fire Brigade (38), and Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue Service (37).

Reacting to these figures, Tam Fry from the charity, the National Obesity Forum, told BBC Radio 5 that they were on the increase because obese patients were getting bigger.

This is not about more people being obese. This is about those who are already obese now getting to a size where they now need assistance, Fry said.

Dr David Kerriga, one of the UKs leading bariatric surgeons, believes that many of these people dont leave their homes as they feel less confident about engaging with the outside world.

Patients who become that big are prisoners, not just within their own body but within their own homen, Kerrigan explained.

This not only represents an immediate threat to their health, it also makes some of the rescues very complicated for firefighters.

The figures show that the UK is currently struggling to provide the right treatment and support to prevent people from growing super-obese and housebound, and the nation will need to address this.
Google has finally launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered messaging app, Google Allo. The app was first announced at Google I/O 2016 along with the companys video calling app Google Duo. While Duo was launched in August, hitting 10 million downloads on Android in its launch month, Allo is following suit as the Hangout replacement we have all been waiting for.

So what is Google Allo all about and can it potentially get users off of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp? Lets find out

Google Allo signup and account creation

Just like its sister video calling app Duo (and of course competing messaging app WhatsApp), users can signup to use Google Allo with their mobile numbers. One always has the option of tying their Gmail account with the app, and that is helpful for those who are looking to use the built-in AI powered Google Assistant to scour through their emails and appointments. What is Google Assistant? Well, its one of the biggest USPs of the messaging app and we will get to it soon.

App interface and design

One thing I like about Allo is that it carries forward Googles philosophy of creating an extremely easy-to-use app. Frequent app users will find that they will take anywhere between 10-15 minutes to understand the app's interface and go through all of its settings and features. What you get is pretty basic. On opening the app, users can view their ongoing individual as well as group chats. A noticeable difference with WhatApp here is that on startup, Allo takes about a second longer to take users to the chat list, something Google could have avoided. The options button on the top left corner brings up the app menu which allows users to change their profile pictures, block contacts and access the app setting.

What you get in the settings menu is also a default we have seen in most messaging apps including, the ability to toggle the auto save and download for incoming media such as photos and videos; send app feedback; toggle in-app sounds; an option of linking other Google apps like Chrome, Maps, YouTube, Docs, Drive, etc; another option of linking a Google account; unregistering a phone number; viewing terms of use and so on.

A standard message icon at the bottom right of the screen enables users to start a new chat with their contacts, groups or the Google Assistant. Fairly simple and self-explanatory.

Google Assistant

If you have used chat bots on Skype, Facebook or even Slack, it will not take you long to understand how the in-built virtual assistant works on the Allo App. Google Assistant was also first introduced at the companys annual developer conference in May. What seems to be an upgrade to Google Now, Google Assistant enables users to ask a variety of questions which it then separates into different queries to produce an intelligent answer. While launching it back in May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, Think of the assistant, we think of it as a conversational assistant, we want users to have an ongoing two-way dialog. A competitor to Apples Siri and Amazons Alexa, the Google Assistant will also be integrated with Google Home in the future.

Inside Allo, Google Assistant integrates Search directly into your chats. Typing @Google or just Google will enable users to share search results within their chat windows. For example, if you and your friend are making plans to head out for a movie and want to know the shows playing near you, you can simply type in your query in the chat window to bring up these results. Of course, you need to give Allo permissions to use your location for the same. These suggestions works similarly for any search related queries, giving users the power of Google Search without having to leave the chat app at all.

While the Google Assistant is great for in-chat search, it also has the ability to give users suggestions for chat replies. Google has used its learnings in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to make Assistant a smart tool for quick reverts. So if your friend shares a picture of a beautiful sunset, smart reply allows you to send a response such as what a beautiful sunset just by tapping on the suggested reply. This is a pretty nifty feature considering most users are frequently chatting on-the-go.

The prowess of Google Assistant does not end here. Users can have an individual chat with Assistant and bring up various types of information. Assistant can tell you the weather, recite you a poem, play a game with you, search inside your emails, set reminders and alarms (alarms can only be set on Android devices, since Apple does not allow the app to access the system clock), bring up the top news stories of the day, translate from one language to another, convert currency, bring up flight information and much more.

Google has definitely packed Assistant with a long list of abilities and the best part about it is that the more you use it, the more it learns about you. However, this may sound scary to some, considering privacy is the price to pay here. If you have time, go through Googles privacy terms which can be accessed through Allos options menu. This is also one of the reasons why Allo received a lot of flak from the security community when Google announced that end-to-end encryption on the app is an option and not a default setting, like it is on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iOS iMessage.

Chats

Google seems to have borrowed a bunch of chat features from the likes of Messenger, Snapchat, iMessage, WhatsApp and Instagram, and bundled them into a single messaging app. Now thats not necessarily very controversial. If you actually sit down and start noting who borrowed what feature from whom, Google Allo will definitely not be the first name that will pop up in the list. Nevertheless, Chats on Allo allow users to take advantage of a bunch of expressions, stickers, emojis and more. Be sure to check out a bunch of India specific stickers available in the stickers menu. In addition, users also get the ability to doodle on images they share (only on Android), increase or decrease the font size of their messages (by dragging the send button up and down to change the font size) and share their locations.

Chatting on Incognito Mode

Since end-to-end encryption is not a default on Allo, Google has taken the Chrome concept of Incognito mode and applied it to chats on Allo. Users have the ability to start an individual chat with someone on Incognito mode, which ensures that messages are encrypted end-to-end. Google has also given users an option to put an expiration time on chats, which is similar to Snapchats disappearing message. One can set a time of anywhere between 5 second to an hour for messages to expire. The only problem here is that once a message expires, it disappears from the chat window of the user, and one can never know if the message was eventually read or not.

Why go Incognito? Well, the Google Assistants bot-like functionality will only work if it's able to throw data back to Googles servers to process a users query or to make suggestions based on conversations. The AI is also supposed to learn and adapt to a users preferences over a period of time. It cannot do so if chats are encrypted end-to-end. So naturally, this puts a user in a catch-22 situation. If the conversations are encrypted the Assistant cannot be used and If they are not, chats will no longer be private and will give government (or hackers) the ability to tap into them. Which is maybe why when the company had introduced the feature, FBI Director James B. Comey was happy with Googles decision to make end-to-end encryption optional. In a recent speech he remarked that he is largely in favour of encryption, but that a balancing act is necessary keeping in mind safety and security concerns.

Google's decision to disable end-to-end encryption by default in its new #Allo chat app is dangerous, and makes it unsafe. Avoid it for now.  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 19, 2016

So, that is essentially everything you need to know about Google Allo. Personally I think Allo is a great step forward in Instant Messaging for Google and while its functionality cannot be compared with Hangouts, its very probable that the company will see a shift in user base to simpler apps like Duo and Allo. One crucial feature which I feel is missing from Allo is the ability to share files, but I have been told by the company that the feature may make it to the app eventually. Having said that, privacy is a concern considering that the Google Assistant reads each and every word of your messages (except for the incognito mode), but sadly that is the price to pay if one wants to use the most coveted feature of the app. Another factor that will count towards the success of the app is of course the user base. Chat apps like Messenger and WhatsApp already command the majority of the user market. Whether users will be willing to move to or even adopt a new chat app like Allo, is a question which will be answered in time.

Download Google Allo from the App Store or the Play Store and let us know what you think of it in our comments section below.
A Mumbai resident asked the home ministry whether India is ready to defend itself against aliens, without Will Smith.

If aliens were to attack tomorrow, would India be able to defend itself? That, is the question Ajay Kumar, a resident of Mumbai, posed to the Home Ministry, in an RTI. The RTI was posted on Twitter by Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State (Home), as an example of the frivolous RTI requests that the ministry gets from people. The subject matter is too scientific, Rijiju tweeted. Were guessing he meant that the subject is a matter of science fiction. These kind of RTIs waste the previous time of the office staff, he added.

The subject matter is too scientific.

This kind of RTIs will waste the precious time of the office staffs. pic.twitter.com/gVWbqt53PY  Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) September 21, 2016

Kumars RTI asks the ministry what plans India has in place for attacks by aliens, zombies and extraterrestrial beings. So, you know, the plots of Independence Day, Resident Evil and Pacific Rim. Further, Kumar asks what means the government has to defeat them, and what are our chances of successfully defending ourselves. Perhaps for complete clarity, Kumar also asks whether we can do it without Will Smith.

Ok, lets face it, an alien invasion is not likely anytime soon. And, if it is, then its obviously going to happen in the US, right? Thats where all the movies are made, AND, they have Will Smith and all the Avengers.
Personalised mobile health company Concepta announced on Wednesday that it has moved its UK laboratory operations to a new site at Colworth Park in Bedfordshire, doubling the size of its operational headquarters.

The AIM-traded firm said the new laboratory opening is in line with its strategy of increasing its operational capacity and economies of scale as it moves towards launching its My Lotus product for unexplained infertility into China in H2 2016 and, following CE marking, into the UK and Europe in 2017.

It said the state of the art laboratory will house four employees in research and development, and another two employees in quality assurance.

Additionally, a separate area for assembly can accommodate a further ten people producing testing strips for Concepta's 'My Lotus' meter, the board explained.

Aside from manufacture, assembly and testing, the lab will primarily be used as a research and development hub for My Lotus product enhancements and new product development.

Following our highly successful AIM listing in July 2016, this new laboratory is a key part of the company's growth strategy and extends both its capacity and capabilities as we begin the process of launching our proprietary product into China prior to a European launch in 2017, said CEO Erik Henau.

Concepta's research team will be working in the new lab effective immediately to accelerate new product development, both within our core business area of fertility as well as other areas in the wider mobile health space.

We look forward to updating the market on these exciting developments in due course.
AIM-listed self-care company Venture Life , which focuses on developing and manufacturing products for an ageing population, reported a rise in half-year revenues thanks in large part to a recent acquisition.

For the six months ended 30 June, revenue increased by 40% to 6.1m, when compared to the same period last year, which resulted in a 47% rise in gross profits to 2.3m and helped increase gross margin to 37%.

Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) rebounded to 0.1m after a 400,000 loss last year.

Revenue for the brands business, where the company develops under license-branded products manufactured at its Biokosmes facility in Italy, grew significantly to 1.2m from 100,000, which represents about 20% of total revenue.

Revenues for the development and manufacturing business at Biokosmes increased by 15% to 4.9m due to a combination of organic growth for existing products and the development and manufacture of new products for customers.

Loss before tax, amortisation and exceptional items narrowed by 25% to 300,000.

Cash by the end of June was 1.6m, down about 45% from December 2015.

In March, the company bought the UltraDEX oral care products brand with Periproducts for 5.7m, which was funded by a 1.7m share placing and the issue of a 1.9m convertible bond.

During the six-month span, the company also inked nine long-term exclusive distribution agreements, including supplying UltraDEX in Spain, Malaysia and China and the Benecol once-a-day liquid sachet in Turkey and Jordan.

Chief executive Jerry Randall said strong revenue growth and moving into positive EBITDA for the first time were a testament to the companys strategy to utilise its operational leverage to drive revenue and profitability and that it was already realising the anticipated synergies from the UltraDEX acquisition.

He added: This is now the second successful acquisition we have undertaken in two years, and I expect us to continue to explore merger and acquisition opportunities to complement our core organic growth, and drive sustainable profitability for the group over the long-term."

Shares in Venture Life were down 0.95% to 52p at 1256 BST.
Precious metals futures added to gains from earlier in the session as the US central bank announced its decision to keep its main policy levers at their current settings, albeit amid divisions between the top policymakers at the monetary authority.

As of 1909 BST the US dollar index was down by 0.49% to 95.54 following the US Federal Reserve's policy announcement, as the Bloomberg commodity index advanced 0.71% to 94.89.

Silver futures clocked in with the biggest rise, gaining 2.58% to trade at $19.78 an ounce, while spot platinum was up by 1.65% to $1,046.95 per ounce.

Industrial metals ended the session on a mixed note, with three-month LME-traded copper futures closing off by 0.4% to $4,764 per metric tonne.

To take note of, China's refined copper output grew by 12.4% year-on-year in August to reach 743,000kt, analysts at Macquarie pointed out.

The Australian broker also referenced the results of recent research of its own which pointed towards a clear shift in ownership of aluminium smelting towards China.



Over in the energy space, early gains in West Texas Intermediate had largely petered out by the early afternoon in New York, despite US Department of Energy figures showing an unexpected drop in commercial crude oil stockpiles during the latest reference week.

West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures were edging higher by 0.32% to $43.44 per barrel, having hit an intra-day high at $43.95 in NYMEX trading.

According to the Energy Information Administration, fell by 6.2m barrels a day over the latest week to reach 504.6m barrels.

However, October 2016 gasoline and heating oil futures on NYMEX were seeing significant buying pressure, with the former advancing 2.49% to $1.3986 per gallon.



Agricultural futures were generally higher too, with the sole exception of just a 0.15% dip in December 2016 corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade.
US oil corporation ExxonMobil is to have its assets examined by the Securities and Exchange Commission, after questions have emerged about how they are reported by the company.

The US regulator adds further pressure to Exxon, which is already being investigated by the New York attorney general concerning its public statements on its climate change actions.

The news of the SEC investigation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, with Exxon saying it has nothing to hide.

"We are fully complying with the SEC request for information and are confident our financial reporting meets all legal and accounting requirements," Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said.

New York attorney general Eric Schneidermann launched an inquiry last year, whom the company accused of unfairly targeting fossil fuel companies.

In the wide-ranging investigation, Schneidermann has looked at the possible misleading of Exxon's investors about the dangers of climate change, and just last week turned to the corporation's practice of not writing down its assets despite a global downturn in oil prices.
Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf faced a US Senate Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday in which senator Elizabeth Warren told him he should resign over his role in the bank's fake accounts scandal.

The third largest bank in the United States by assets was recently found to have created over 2m unauthorised accounts and credit cards for its customers, in order to reach sales targets set by senior executives. It was fined $185m by regulators.

Stumpf was called before the committee to explain the actions of the company and cut a hapless figure as he was grilled by Warren and her colleagues.

"You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchanges Commission," she told him.

Warren went on to criticise Wall Street as a whole, and used Wells Fargo as an example of how employees at lower levels are held accountable for their actions, but top executives often escape prosecution.

"The only way that Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds."

CEO Stumpf struggled to provide responses to the committee's probes, but did apologise for the actions of the bank. However, he fell short of admitting to orchestrate the bogus scheme.

"I am deeply sorry we failed to fulfil our responsibility," Stumpf said. "We never directed nor wanted our team members to provide products and services to our customers that they didn't want. That said, I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices."
The European Commission said on Wednesday that it now wants to abolish roaming fees entirely, having previously suggested a limit on free mobile phone roaming.

The EC said there should be no limits in terms of timing or volume imposed on consumers using mobiles abroad in the European Union.

The proposals would enable all travellers using a SIM card of a member state in which they reside or with which they have links to use their mobile in any EU country just as they would at home.

However, the Commission said there would be safeguards against abuse based on residence or permanent links to an EU country.

It said the new draft would allow operators to check usage patterns to avoid the Roam like at Home mechanism being abused. These include insignificant domestic traffic compared to roaming traffic, long periods of inactivity of a given SIM card associated with use mostly while roaming, and subscription and sequential use of multiple SIM cards by the same customer while roaming.

If such abuses are detected, operators will be able to apply small surcharges.

The EC added that abuses could also be related to the mass purchase and resale of SIM cards for permanent use outside the country of the operator issuing them.

Gunther H. Oettinger, Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, said: "Commission action on roaming prices has delivered for European consumers. Today's draft rules ensure we can end roaming charges as of 15 June 2017 for all people who travel periodically in the EU, while ensuring that operators have the tools to guard against abuse of the rules."
The biggest initial public offering (IPO) since 2014 has seen the Postal Savings Bank of China set a lower than expected price of $7.6bn, on the back of disappointing demand for the state-owned bank in the Hong Kong market.

Shares in the company are expected to begin trading next week, after reporting $25bn in sales and $5.2bn of profits last year.

The bank, China's largest by number of branches, originally sought to raise $8.1bn but investors had questioned whether the valuation was too high.

PSBC had tried to get a valuation of between 0.94 and 1.02 times its price-to-book ratio, which would have been far ahead of the 0.76 average for its Hong Kong-listed peers.

The IPO is the biggest in the world since Alibaba's huge $25bn offering in November 2014.

Beijing reportedly provided assistance for PSBC in its flotation, putting up 75% of the figure from its state-owned companies.

The high percentage of investors from the state would suggest demand was lukewarm or the IPO, with the so-called "cornerstone investors" receiving shares on a preferential basis, on the commitment that they do not sell within six months.
Britains older brewer Shepherd Neame announced its results for the 52 weeks to 25 June on Wednesday, claiming a record set of results with impressive progress against its strategic objectives.

Turnover increased by 1.2% to 139.9m over the period, with underlying operating profit up 3.5% to 14.2m.

Statutory profit before tax rose 4.7% to 14.4m, with basic earnings per ordinary share up 13.1% to 84.0p and underlying basic earnings per share up 12.3% to 54.7p.

The board proposed a final dividend per share up of 22.05p, up 3% year-on-year, making total dividends for the year 27.50p, up from 26.70p in the 2015 financial year.

 am delighted to report a record set of results, with managed pubs our key driver of growth, and an impressive performance against our strategic objectives, said chief executive Jonathan Neame.

In recent years, we have worked hard to improve the quality of our pub estate and modernise our brand portfolio.

Neame said the company has created a much stronger business with sustainable cash flows and the skills and ambition for further growth.

We have made a good start to the new financial year, with a particularly strong performance from our coastal pubs.
Londons FTSE 100 was up 0.1% to 6,839.33 in afternoon trade, with broker notes dominating the movers.

Barclays was the standout gainer after HSBC upgraded the stock to buy from hold and lifted the price target to 190p from 150p saying the pending disposal of Barclays Africa will be positive for sentiment.

The disposal of business held within the Non-Core businesses is a management priority for 2016, and the expectation is that negative income and expenses within Non-Core will be significantly lower in future years, HSBC said.

Anglo American also benefited from an upgrade, as Barclays upped it to equalweight from underweight and lifted the price target to 845p from 550p on strong valuation support and solid earnings momentum, particularly from the recent rally in coking coal which leaves the balance sheet in a much better position than the bank had expected.

Had it not been for our cautious outlook on the diamond and platinum group metals markets, and continued labour/political uncertainty in South Africa, we would have been more positive on the investment case, Barclays said.

Imperial Brands was hit by a broker note, after Credit Suisse downgraded the stock to neutral from outperform and cut the price target to 4,000p from 4,250p.

A combination of a low take-out multiple, cheap debt and strengthening dollar means we estimate the Lorillard acquisition will have added 23% to earnings (and a similar increment in free cash flow) by the end of FY16.

However looking into FY17 the 'Lorillard story' will have largely run its course (with a risk that Winston/Kool's momentum slows as the impact of the price reset subsides) and we anticipate a significant headwind in the UK.

Anglo-Dutch publisher RELX Group, formerly known as Reed Elsevier, was also under the cosh after Macquarie downgraded the stock to underperform.

The bank said it was difficult to improve operating performance further and the stock is already trading at a 20%-30% premium to its closest peers.

We argue it is time for a transformational deal, but that will likely raise RELXs risk profile, it said.

Risers

Barclays (BARC) 171.45p 3.00%

Legal & General Group (LGEN) 220.70p 2.79%

Anglo American (AAL) 878.60p 2.45%

Aviva (AV.) 447.50p 2.31%

Sainsbury (J) (SBRY) 249.80p 2.17%

Kingfisher (KGF) 376.50p 2.09%

Fresnillo (FRES) 1,704.00p 2.04%

Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY) 57.45p 1.79%

Randgold Resources Ltd. (RRS) 7,660.00p 1.59%

London Stock Exchange Group (LSE) 2,841.00p 1.57%

Fallers

Imperial Brands (IMB) 3,924.00p -2.07%

Ashtead Group (AHT) 1,191.00p -2.06%

BAE Systems (BA.) 534.00p -1.93%

Burberry Group (BRBY) 1,353.00p -1.89%

Mediclinic International (MDC) 927.00p -1.44%

Rolls-Royce Holdings (RR.) 723.00p -1.36%

Relx plc (REL) 1,448.00p -1.36%

TUI AG Reg Shs (DI) (TUI) 1,061.00p -1.30%

National Grid (NG.) 1,059.50p -1.21%

Intu Properties (INTU) 287.80p -1.17%
Shares in miners provided the biggest lift for the market, as at least two more top brokers weighed in with positive views on the space.

Barclays upgraded its view on Anglo American and Kaz Minerals, to equalweight from underweight in both cases.

On Anglo American, the broker's analysts said: "Had it not been for our cautious outlook on the diamond and platinum group metals markets, and continued labour/political uncertainty in South Africa, we would have been more positive on the investment case."

Macquarie was the other broker with an improved view of the mining space on Wednesday, lifting its recommendations on BHP Billiton and South 32 to 'outperform', mainly on the back of upwards revisions to its price forecasts for coal and manganese.

Its upgrade on South 32 was in fact a double-notch one, from 'underperform'.

On the back of its "276-day" supply reform initiative, China's domestic production of coking and thermal coal had dropped by between 10% to 20% year-on-year since late March, the Australian broker explained in a research note sent to clients.

That led the broker's analysts to hike their price forecasts for thermal and coking coal in 2017 by between 24% to 35%.

The recommendation on Anglo American on the other hand was revised up to 'outperform'.



Evraz's shares extended their mercurial rebound despite further falls in the most heavily-traded rebar future on the Shanghai Futures Exchange.

UK life insurers were also on the up, benefiting from Credit Suisse's decision to reiterate its 'overweight' stance on the group.

Going the other way, stock in BAE Systems came under pressure as analysts at Barclays reaffirmed their underweight on the aerospace and defence engineering group, referencing a recent downgrade from Standard&Poor's, the deteriorating UK pension environment and the growing political sensitivity regarding defence exports to Saudi Arabia.

Top performing sectors so far today

Industrial Metals & Mining 1,520.64 +4.18%

Technology Hardware & Equipment 2,172.41 +2.35%

Oil Equipment, Services & Distribution 15,161.87 +2.02%

Life Insurance 7,117.71 +1.94%

Mining 11,872.01 +1.77%

Bottom performing sectors so far today

Aerospace and Defence 4,516.33 -1.39%

Gas, Water & Multiutilities 6,509.54 -1.27%

Health Care Equipment & Services 7,618.94 -1.02%

Travel & Leisure 8,549.21 -1.00%

Personal Goods 30,785.06 -0.95%
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Digitimes Research: Notebook players see August shipments up on month

The top-5 notebook vendors and top-3 notebook ODMs saw their shipments rise 27% and 31% on month in August thanks to inventory preparation for the year-end holidays in Europe and North America, Windows 10's annual upgrade, and mass shipments of Intel's Kaby Lake processors.

Hewlett-Packard's (HP) new product releases for August successfully widened the vendor's shipment gap by nearly 700,000 units with number two Lenovo. HP stayed firmly as the largest notebook vendor in the month. Dell turned its focus to the consumer sector in August, but its shipments only grew a single-digit percentage on month, according to Digitimes Research's latest report on notebook shipments.

Asustek Computer and Acer both enjoyed over 10% on-month growths in August thanks to seasonality.

With HP's significant shipment growth in August, the top-3 ODMs, which are all suppliers of HP, together achieved higher on-month growth than the top-5 vendors combined, while ODM's combined on-year shipment growth also turned positive for the first time in the past 16 months.

Quanta benefited from HP's orders the most in the month, growing nearly 40% from July.

Content from this article was part of a complete Digitimes Research Chinese-language report that has not yet been translated into English. If you are interested in an English version of the report or wish to receive more information about the report, click here to contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Digitimes Research also provides quarterly tracking services for market sectors such as China Smartphone, China Smartphone AP, Taiwan ICT and Taiwan FPD. Click here for more information about Digitimes Research Tracking services.
Why are so many Black women starting their own businesses?

Black women are finding more freedom, opportunity and fulfillment in entrepreneurship. But they often face special challenges in starting a business.
Organic architect' takes inspiration from snakes, whales and mushrooms

Javier Senosiain has a design for prefab, low-income micro-homes that look like an Airstream trailer or, as he describes it, a peanut.



By MARK STEVENSON

Associated Press

AP Photo/Marco Ugarte [enlarge] Nest of Quetzalcoatl was designed by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain. People who live here pass through gigantic snakes mouths to reach their surprisingly spacious dwellings, filled with soft angles and curves.

NAUCALPAN, Mexico  Architect Javier Senosiain looks out over his sinuous snake's nest of a building, which seems to writhe amid a green and tranquil vista on the very edge of Mexico City's urban sprawl, and reflects on over 30 years of building egg- and cocoon-like dwellings that are quite literally out of the box.

When a child is born we put him an incubator, which is a box, said Senosiain, 68. Then we put him a playpen. The child is placed in a succession of boxes throughout his life, and then when he dies, he is put In another box.

The idea here is to break with the box, he said, pointing to the 10-apartment complex that, like much in the 2-acre compound, looks like a snake with eyes in its body  architectural homage to Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered serpent god of light and knowledge.

At the project known as the Nest of Quetzalcoatl, enormous snakes are conformed into passageways, bridges, fountains and walls. The people who live here have to get used to passing through gigantic snakes' mouths to reach surprisingly spacious if cave-like dwellings filled with soft angles and curves.

Senosiain isn't offended by cave comparisons; in fact he kind of likes his homes to look caves. Or wombs. Anything but boxes. He's used whales, snails, sharks and mushrooms as inspiration for previous projects . Buildings often merge into the landscape, sometimes half buried.

True to his form, Senosiain is reflecting on his world view while sitting in a hand-like fiberglass floating chair in the middle of a pond that serves as part of the compound's water treatment and rain-water collection system.

The Nest sits in front of a rare green patch on the city's outskirts  a graveyard on one side keeps the urban sprawl hemmed in  but from certain angles you can get an eyeful of ticky-tacky cement boxes crawling up bare hillsides, jostling each other shoulder to shoulder and disappearing in the smoggy haze of the distance.

It is this reality that Senosiain wants to take on, to cure, in a sense.

He has just opened a retrospective exhibition of his work at Mexico's premiere cultural venue, the capital's Palace of Fine Arts, and the display includes a proposal for prefabricated, low-income housing in a shape that can be be compared to an organic Airstream trailer made of concrete or, as he describes it, a peanut.

Given the super-light spray-concrete-over-metal-frame design, the homes can just be picked up and placed on a footing with a crane.

You just hook up the light, water and sewer lines, and it's ready, Senosiain said.

He proposes placing about 60 of these 300-square foot (28-square-meter) micro-homes (they're modular and can be combined into bigger houses) together in a neighborhood, where no house is more than an eight-minute walk from urban services like schools or stores.

So far, no developer has taken him up on the plan, though its time could be near.

Mexico's big low-income housing builders were hit by a crisis in 2011 and 2012: Some went bankrupt, and others came close, after building hundreds of thousands of units of precisely the kind of housing that Senosiain  and apparently homeowners  don't like: tiny, rectangular, cookie-cutter boxes placed outside city centers, far from services, jobs and schools.

Hundreds of thousands of those houses now sit abandoned, and the government, which financed many of the homebuyers, now acknowledges the projects were a mistake.

It wasn't easy before; there wasn't any interest, Senosiain said of his contacts with the government's low-income housing agency two decades ago. But now, I think it is a lot more likely ... I think now there is interest.

That can be said of much of his work. It has attracted so much attention that he is building a visitor center and extensive gardens and plans to turn the Nest complex into an educational park for school visits.

When we built the first house 31 years ago, people thought it was strange. They said, I like it, but I wouldn't live there,' Senosiain recalled

Today, people see it very differently. There is a lot more environmental consciousness, and that is an advantage.




Subscriber content preview

WASHINGTON (AP)  Homebuilders pulled back on construction in the South, causing the pace of August housing starts nationwide to fall to their lowest level in three months.

Despite the monthly decline, construction activity has accelerated for much this year. Builders are increasingly optimistic about sales growth, a reflection of how steady job gains are leading more Americans to purchase new houses and sign leases for new apartments.





. . .
Subscriber content preview

Federal experts are investigating a leak in a 53-year-old section of the gasoline pipeline.



By JEFF MARTIN

Associated Press

ATLANTA  A main gas line is expected to restart today with a temporary bypass after a leak and spill in Alabama led to surging fuel prices and some gas shortages across the South, a company official said Tuesday.

The roughly 500-foot section of pipe that will serve as the bypass is now complete, and the company expects that will allow it to restart the main gasoline line, Colonial Pipeline spokesman Steve Baker told The Associated Press.





. . .
Jobs, Justice, and the Clean-Energy Future

BY JEREMY BRECHER | September/October 2016

This article is from Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics, available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org

This article is from the

September/October 2016 issue.

Today, there are 400 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, far above the 350 ppm climate scientists regard as the safe upper limit. Even in the unlikely event that all nations fulfill the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction pledges they made at the Paris climate summit at the end of 2015, carbon in the atmosphere is predicted to increase to 670 ppm by the end of this century. The global temperature will rise an estimated 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. For comparison, a one-degree increase was enough to cause all the effects of climate change we have seen so far, from Arctic melting to intensified hurricanes to desertification.

Limiting climate catastrophe will require drastic cuts in the burning of the fossil fuels that cause climate change. But many workers and their unions fear that such cuts will lead to drastic loss in jobs and economic well-being for working peopleaggravating the shortage of good jobs and the burgeoning inequality we already face. Is there a way to escape the apparent lose-lose choice between saving the climate and saving jobs?

A Possible Clean Energy Future

A series of reports by the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS), and partners provides good news: The U.S. can meet the targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction that climate scientists say are necessary while also creating half-a-million jobs annually and reducing the cost of energy to consumers. The reports, gathered in the LNS Climate, Jobs, and Justice Project, also show that protecting the climate in a way that maximizes the benefit for working people and discriminated-against groups will take deliberate public policies and action by unions and their social movement allies.

Jobs and Climate Policy In the States The Climate, Jobs, and Justice Project includes three reports that take a closer look at what the Clean Energy Future will mean in three states, Illinois, Maryland, and Connecticut. These states were selected both because they present very different problems and potentials for climate policy and because they all have active organizing around climate and jobs that can test the relevance and usefulness of the Clean Energy Future. If Illinois were an independent country, it would be the 20th largest economy in the world and the 34th largest emitter of GHGs. It is also a state with enormous potential for wind and solar energy. As a result, the state can phase out its coal and nuclear production while adding enough renewable energy capacity not only to replace it but also to run a new electric-vehicle fleet and export energy to other states. The Illinois Jobs and Clean Energy: Protecting the Climate and the State Economy report lays out a climate protection strategy that will produce more than 28,000 net new jobs per year over business-as-usual projections through 2050. That represents almost 0.5% of total employment in the state, so it should reduce the unemployment rate by one-half percentage point. Three-quarters of the jobs created will be in the relatively high-wage construction and manufacturing sectors. The report indicates that even more jobs could be created if Illinois accelerated its climate timetable and made itself a center for export of renewable energy and renewable-energy-related manufactured goods such as wind-turbine components and solar-energy equipment. Marylands Clean Energy Future: Climate Goals and Employment Benefits presents a plan to reduce Marylands net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to 80% less than the 2006 level by 2050while adding more than ten thousand jobs per year. It identifies the states major industrial emitters of GHGs and lays out strategies for reducing their emissions. The report also indicates that Maryland can use the burgeoning state and national demand for clean energy to create good, stable jobs in a growing climate-protection sector: manufacturing jobs, jobs for those who have been marginalized in the current labor market, and jobs for skilled union workers in the construction trades. It argues that Maryland needs a robust job-creation and clean-industry development strategy to realize that potential. The Connecticut Clean Energy Future: Climate Goals and Employment Benefits shows how a largely non-industrial state with extreme economic inequality can create a rapidly growing climate-protection sector that creates stable jobs for unionized workers, effective job ladders for those previously excluded from good jobs, and expansion of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other sectors. It presents a plan that meets the states official goal of reducing GHG emissions 80% below the 2001 level by 2050 while adding more than 6000 jobs, most of them in construction and manufacturing. Connecticut can achieve many of its other goals, such as reducing poverty and inequality, improving air quality, raising workforce skill levels, and reducing unemployment while implementing an aggressive climate-protection plan, but to realize these co-benefits it will need policies designed to do so. Public policy must assure that Clean Energy Future jobs are good, secure, permanent jobs with education, training, and advancement. New, high-quality jobs and/or dignified retirement must be provided for approximately 600 workers who may lose jobs in the Clean Energy Futureless than one-tenth of the jobs that will be gained. Existing inequality and racial, gender, and other injustices must be counteracted through job pathways, strong affirmative action provisions, and local hiring requirements. And a more local and less top-down energy system can be created through a rising Renewable Portfolio Standard requiring in-state electricity generation; shared solar generation; electric grid modernization; and encouragement for local clean-energy initiatives.

In 2015, LNS asked Frank Ackerman of Synapse Energy Economics to assess the employment effects of meeting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) target of reducing GHG emissions by 80% by 2050 (or 80x50). Ackerman developed a Clean Energy Future model based on Synapses many years of analysis of energy systems. [Disclosure: Ackerman is a longtime associate of Dollars & Sense and a former D&S collective member. Eds.]

Ackerman and his coworkers set themselves the task of meeting three challenges simultaneously. The Clean Energy Future scenario should meet the IPCC target of reducing GHG emissions 80% by 2050. It should provide more good jobs than the business-as-usual scenario (what would happen if no changes are made to address climate change). And it should not place higher costs on American consumers. The resulting report, The Clean Energy Future: Protecting the Climate, Creating Jobs and Saving Money, shows that the United States can reduce GHG emissions 80% by 2050while adding half-a-million jobs annually and saving Americans billions of dollars on their electrical, heating, and transportation costs. The Clean Energy Future constructs a baseline business as usual reference case based primarily on projections from the federal Energy Information Administrations Annual Energy Outlook. It compares that reference case to a clean energy alternative based primarily on scenarios developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and original research by Synapse. It uses IMPLAN, a widely used model of employment impacts, to evaluate the jobs impacts of each of the two scenarios.

In the Clean Energy Future model, energy efficiency programs match the performance of todays most effective state programs. A national Renewable Portfolio Standard requires 70% renewable electricity by 2040. The cost of solar photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity drops 75% from 2010 to 2020. (The reference case already projects a 40% reduction.) Coal is entirely phased out. No new nuclear plants are built and existing plants are retired at the end of their 60-year life expectancy. By 2050, gas cars and light trucks are replaced by electric vehicles, and 80% of gas- and oil-fired space-heating and water-heating is replaced by electric heat. Wind and solar power grow enough to provide electricity for the new vehicles and heating. The Synapse team has prepared detailed analyses showing these projections are realistic, even conservative.

Emissions Reduction

The Clean Energy Future plan covers electricity generation, cars and light trucks, space and water heating, fossil fuel supply, and waste management. It reduces GHG emissions across these sectors by 86% by 2050, compared to emissions in 1990.

If these reductions are made, meeting the 80x50 target (at least 80% reduction in emissions by 2050) for the entire economy will require far less stringent reductions in the remaining sectors. If non-electric industry, mass transit, freight transport, and agriculture reduce their emissions by 42%, the entire economy can meet the 80% reduction target. The report discusses a variety of studies indicating how those reductions could be achieved or indeed exceeded.

Creating New Jobs

The Clean Energy Future will create a substantial number of new jobs. The increase in jobs created, compared to the business-as-usual scenario, will start around 200,000 per year in 20162020 and rise to 800,000 a year in 20462050. The average job gain compared to business-as-usual scenario is 550,000 per year for the entire period. There are several reasons for this advantage. The Clean Energy scenario spends less on imported oil and less money ends up in the pockets of the owners of gas pipelines, coal mines, and oil wells and refineries, many of them overseas. Much of that money is spent instead paying workers to produce more labor-intensive forms of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Nearly 80% of the new jobs provided by the Clean Energy Future will be concentrated in manufacturing and construction. The scenario will immediately start to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in energy efficiency, ranging from insulation to high-efficiency heating and cooling, to fuel cells and combined heat and power (CHP) installations, to use of tree planting to cool urban areas. In the 2020s, a second wave of jobs will develop producing, installing, and maintaining wind turbines, solar panels, and other forms of renewable energy. In the 2030s, new jobs will develop in the auto industry due to the increasing production of electric cars and trucks. Starting in the 2040s, the clean energy scenario will save so much money that a significant number of jobs will be created by the money saved on fossil fuels that will be spent instead on job-creating expenditures. Over the 35-year period, the average of 550,000 extra jobs per year will include 187,000 jobs in manufacturing and 240,000 in construction.

The Clean Energy Future will provide many new jobs for each that is lost. There will, however, be fewer jobs in coal, oil, and gas extraction and burning and in nuclear energy. For example, there will be about 100,000 fewer jobs each year in mining and extraction compared to the business-as-usual scenario. The report calls for a just transition for the workers who hold those jobs, including assistance in training and placement in new jobs, or retirement with dignity. (For a just transition plan, see Jeremy Brecher, A Superfund for Workers, Dollars & Sense, November/December, 2015.)

Some studies have projected a far higher number of jobs created by climate protection policies, sometimes running in the millions. There are several reasons the numbers in the Clean Energy Future scenario are lower. It is based on the large and continuing reduction in the cost of renewable energy, which makes it possible to meet GHG reduction targets at far lower costbut therefore also with considerably less labor. Unlike some studies, it is not based on extensive expansion of biofuel production, which creates large numbers of low-paid agricultural jobs. The program is designed to keep the cost of transition to a minimum, which also holds down the number of jobs created. Finally, the projections are based on conservative assumptions derived from a detailed knowledge of the electrical system. The report emphasizes that if society is prepared to spend more money, a far more rapid and job-intensive program could result.

The Costs Will Be Less

Over the 35-year period, the Clean Energy Future will actually cost slightly less than the business-as-usual case. It will actually save $7 per person annually in electricity, transportation, and heating costswhile meeting climate goals and creating jobs.

Why are the costs so modest? One reason is that the costs of solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy have been getting dramatically lower and, according to Synapses projections extrapolated from those of the federal Energy Information Administration and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, they are likely to continue to do so.

The Clean Energy Future points out that there is another reason as well. Economists often assume that the status quo already represents the greatest possible efficiency; if it were possible to do things more efficiently, people would already be doing so in order to maximize their gains in the market. This is often put in the form of such adages as there is no such thing as a free lunch and if there were pennies lying around on the ground someone would have already picked them up.

But in the case of energy in particular, the evidence indicates that there is so much waste in the current energy system that major cost savings can be realized by such available means as insulating buildings and co-generating heat and electricity. Investment in such measures will be highly cost-effective and provide a high return. There are various reasons these pennies are not currently being picked up, including the market power of large energy corporations, the monopolies held by energy utilities, counterproductive government regulations, and incomplete knowledge. But those pennies can be picked up and utilized as part of the transition to the Clean Energy Future.

Pacific Northwest: Fossil Fuel vs. Clean Energy Jobs Whenever there is opposition to a pipeline, fossil-fuel power plant, oil well, or other fossil-fuel project, it raises a legitimate question: Where are the people who would have built and operated the project going to find jobs? An LNS Climate, Jobs, and Justice project report, The Economic Impact of Clean Energy Investments in the Pacific Northwest: Alternatives to Fossil Fuel Exports by Noah Enelow of Ecotrust Knowledge Systems, examines job prospects for such an area, Grays Harbor County in western Washington state. The report compares a recently defeated oil-export terminal to possible clean-energy projects. The Grays Harbor Westway and Imperium crude-oil storage-and-export terminal would have received oil brought by train from Utah and shipped it to Asia. The project would have created an estimated 231 construction jobs during its year of building and 148 operations jobs thereafter. Enelow developed plans for two complementary clean-energy initiatives as an alternative. The first is a utility-scale solar photovoltaic array, with electrical components manufactured in-state. It would produce 478 construction jobsmore than twice as many jobs as the coal export terminal. But once built, the solar facility would produce only seven direct operations jobs compared with 148 direct operations jobs for the export terminal. The report proposes a complementary investment in energy efficiency for commercial buildings, such as those financed by Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs. This would create 262 direct jobs in Grays Harbor Countyexceeding the Westway/Imperium proposal by 114 jobs. In short, the combined utility-scale solar and energy-efficiency proposal would create far more jobs both in construction and in permanent operations than the oil-export terminal. : Noah Enelow, Labor Network for Sustainability, The Economic Impact of Clean Energy Investments in the Pacific Northwest: Alternatives to Fossil Fuel Exports, March 2016 (labor4sustainability.org).

A Floor, Not a Ceiling

The Clean Energy Future plan provides a floor, not a ceiling, for what can be accomplished. It shows how we can meet climate goals with no net cost, and that doing so will create more jobs. But we can, and indeed should, do more. For example, mass transit can be expanded far faster. GHG reduction targets can be met earlier. GHG emissions can be reduced to near zero. We can achieve such goals just by accelerating the same basic plan.

We can also achieve other goals besides climate protection as part of the same process. To achieve maximum benefit from the Clean Energy Future, the project advocates four basic policies:

Climate protection will require the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs. But there is no guarantee that they will be good jobs. Indeed, depending on other economic trends, spending on climate protection could increase inequality and provide increasingly insecure, contingent work. Climate protection strategy should be designed to provide the maximum number possible of good, secure, permanent jobs with opportunities for education, training, and advancement. The deterioration in the quality of jobs is directly related to the reduction in the size and bargaining power of labor unions; reinforcing the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively should be an explicit part of public policy for climate protection.



Because some jobs will be lost in fossil fuel-related industries, we need a vigorous program to provide new, high-quality jobs and/or dignified retirement for workers in those industries. A Superfund to protect workers and communities from negative side effects of climate policies should be a central part of any climate program. Anything less will be unjust to workers and will undermine political support for climate protection programs.



The Clean Energy Future plan opens up new opportunities to counter the growing inequality and rampant racial, gender, and other injustices of our society. But many of those opportunities will be lost unless we have deliberate policies to realize them. Climate protection programs should include job pathways and strong affirmative action provisions for those groups that have been most excluded from good jobs in the past.



The Clean Energy Future also opens up a wide range of opportunities for creating a more democratic economy and society. It allows for a less top-down and more distributed energy system, potentially reducing control by centralized utilities and increasing that of local and grassroots entities. It provides many opportunities for local economic initiatives, ranging from energy coops to local and community-based enterprises of many kinds. It will reduce the wealth and power of the fossil fuel corporations that have such a dominant role within our political system. These opportunities should not be squandered.

A Worker-Friendly Approach to Climate Protection

The Clean Energy Future laid out in the Climate, Jobs, and Justice Project represents a practical plan to reduce GHG emissions 80% by 2050. It shows that climate protection is not only affordable, but that it can actually save Americans money. The plan will create half a million more jobs than continuing on a fossil-fuel pathway, most of them in manufacturing and construction. It shows thatshould we choose to do sowe can reduce carbon emissions enough to stabilize the climate, create growing numbers of good jobs, and at the same time avoid imposing new costs on consumers and taxpayers.

For unions, the Clean Energy Future presents a worker-friendly approach to climate protection. It overcomes the false assumption that workers must make a choice between climate protection on the one hand, and jobs and economic well-being on the other. It can form a key element in a workers program for climate protectionone that can unify trade unionists, environmentalists, and the growing majority of Americans who are deeply concerned about climate change.

More and more unions are making climate protection a central part of their program. Unions and federations ranging from SEIU to the California Labor Federation have passed resolutions on climate change in the past few months. Climate caucuses have been formed in central labor councils up and down the West Coast. In January 2016, LNS organized the first Labor Convergence on Climate which brought together 75 labor leaders to forge a common strategy to change organized labors approach to climate protection; the Convergence included invited representatives of state AFL-CIOs, city central labor councils, and individual unions, including building trades, manufacturing, public employee, and service unions, including elected officers. Such efforts open the way for organized labor to become a significant participant in the climate protection movement.

As the devastation caused by climate change grows the consciousness of the need to halt it is likely to grow as wellnot only in the labor movement but throughout society. Whether it will grow strong enough fast enough to limit climate disaster is today an open question. (For discussion of the obstacles to climate protection and strategies for overcoming them, see my book, Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival (2016) and my forthcoming books Climate Solidarity: Workers vs. Warming and Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual (PM Press: 2017).) The Clean Energy Future represents a pathway away from climate destruction that is also far better for workers and consumers than our current pathway based on fossil fuels. Should we let greed and inertia prevent us from taking it?

(jeremybrecher.org) is author of Strike! (revised, expanded, and updated edition, 2015) and Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival (2015, available at jeremybrecher.org), and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability (www.labor4sustainability.org).

: Clean Energy Future, 2016-2050, Climate, Jobs, and Justice Project, Labor Network for Sustainability, September 21, 2015 ( www.labor4sustainability.org );Brian Kahn, A Global Milestone: CO2 Passes 400 PPM, Climate Central, May 6, 2015 ( climatecentral.org ); Scoreboard Science and Data, Climate Interactive ( climateinteractive.org ); Andrew Jones, John Sterman, Ellie Johnston, and Lori Siegel, With Improved Pledges Every Five Years, Paris Agreement Could Limit Warming Below 2C, December 14, 2015 ( climateinteractive.org ).

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The attack on the Indian Army base in Kashmir's Uri sector in which 18 soldiers was killed on Sunday has drawn condemnation from across the world, and also got considerable media attention (See: Militants storm Indian Army base in Uri, kill 17 soldiers). Heavily-armed militants stormed a battalion headquarters of the Indian Army in North Kashmir's Uri and killed 17 jawans immediately, while one more soldier succumbed to his injuries on Monday. The US, Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany, Japan, Canada and Bhutan were among the nations which denounced the attack, though expectedly the perspective and message in each of their condolences were different. In the United Nations Security Council, two of the five permanent members - France and Russia directly named Pakistan or Pakistan-based organisations. The US and the UK, while condemning the attack, refrained from naming Pakistan. Germany too strongly backed India. While China and Germany supported India in their statements, they also warned against it leading to a "spiral of violence". "We must not give in to this logic, including in conflicts between India and Pakistan," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. France was more forthcoming, directly naming the Lashkar-e-Tayibba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the latter of which is accused by India of masterminding the attack. Russia supported India's wholeheartedly. Russia also cancelled its planned joint military exercises in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. However, Russian officials said that the decision not to hold the exercises in PoK was taken independently of the Uri attack, keeping in mind India's insistence that the area is illegally occupied. "Regarding the Pathankot Indian air base attack in January 2016, we are very concerned about the terrorist attacks near the Line of Control. We are also concerned about the fact that, according to New Delhi, the Army base near Uri was attacked from Pakistani territory. We believe that this criminal act will be investigated properly, and that its organisers and perpetrators will be held accountable," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday.








Swedish court rejects Assange plea to lift arrest warrant

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange saw another setback in his legal stand-off with Sweden on Friday after an appeals court rejected his request to lift an arrest warrant for him over a 2010 rape accusation.

The Stockholm appeals court upheld a district court's ruling to maintain the European arrest warrant, and also rejected Assange's request to hold a hearing over the matter.

Assange ''is still detained in absentia'', the court said, adding that it ''shares the assessment of the district court that Julian Assange is still suspected on probable cause of rape ... and that there is a risk that he will evade legal proceedings or a penalty.''

Assange's lawyer Per Samuelson told AFP he would appeal against the ruling.

The 45-year-old Australian has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, having obtained refuge there after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden.

Assange has refused to travel to Stockholm for questioning over the rape allegation, which he denies, due to concerns Sweden will extradite him to the US over WikiLeaks' release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is the eighth time the European arrest warrant has been tested in a Swedish court. All of the rulings have gone against Assange.

The appeals court said Assange's four-year embassy sequestration ''is not a deprivation of liberty and shall not be given any importance in its own right in the assessment of proportionality''.

Assange's lawyers had urged Sweden to follow the non-binding ruling of a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which said his confinement in the embassy amounted to arbitrary detention by Sweden and Britain.

The appeals court noted that the length of his stay in the embassy and ''the earlier passivity'' of police investigators were ''arguments for setting aside the detention.''

''However, the relatively serious offence of which he is suspected means that there is a strong public interest (in) the investigation being able to continue.

''At present, continued detention therefore appears to be both effective and necessary so as to be able to move the investigation forward. The reasons for detention therefore still outweigh the intrusion or other detriment that the measure entails for Julian Assange.''

Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny hailed the decision.

''The court has here shared our opinion that upholding the arrest warrant is in line with the principle of proportionality,'' she said in a statement.

Even if the Swedish warrant were ultimately lifted, Assange is still liable to arrest in London for having evaded justice after his appeals against extradition were rejected, according to British police.

Assange is accused of having sex with a WikiLeaks supporter in her 30s without a condom while she was asleep on 17 August 2010.

The statute of limitations on the rape allegation, which could lead to up to four years in prison, expires in August 2020.

Assange denies the accusation, insisting that the sex was consensual and that there is a political motivation for the investigation. He fears Stockholm will send him to the US, though Washington has not asked for his extradition.

Technically, Sweden could hand him over to the US. It has repeatedly stressed that it cannot guarantee Assange it won't extradite him until there is an actual extradition request to consider, because it needs to know on what charges the US wants him.

Friday's ruling came a day after WikiLeaks released medical records claiming Assange's mental health was at risk if he remained confined in the embassy.

''Mr Assange's mental health is highly likely to deteriorate over time if he remains in his current situation.... It is urgent that his current circumstances are resolved as quickly as possible,'' said a report published by the organisation on Twitter.

Ecuador announced earlier this week that Assange had agreed to answer questions from Swedish investigators at the embassy from 17 October.

Despite Assange's confinement, Wikileaks has continued to release documents influencing world events. These include a trove of US Democratic Party emails in July showing how party chiefs sought to undermine potential presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.


These became opportunities for new powers to transform the system of the city. A new earthquake is going on but this time it is political.

Everything started on the 12th of April. The president of Macedonia decided to pardon 56 people accused of heavy crimes. Among those 56 people were two of the most powerful people in the country: the fprmer Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his cousin Sasha Mijalkov, head of the secret police. So this decision to pardon these politicians was met with huge revolt on social networks. People were so furious with this decision that they began to coordinate protests in the streets immediately through social networks. They announced a protest and several thousands people went out in the streetall over the country.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has denied claims made by a man who says he was a IRA informer that he sanctioned the murder of former Sinn Fein official Denis Donaldson in Donegal ten years ago.

The man,who says he was a former IRA and Sinn Fein member turned British agent, made the allegation to BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme on Tuesday night.

Mr Adams has denied any involvement in the killing of Mr Donaldson.

Mr Donaldson was shot dead in Glenties months after admitting in 2005 he had been an MI5 agent for more than 20 years.

He had worked for Sinn Fein as an administrator at Stormont.

No one has ever been prosecuted for the murder and the inquest in Letterkenny has been adjourned repeatedly following applications from gardai.

In a statement, Mr Adams' solicitor said the Sinn Fein leader "has no knowledge of and had no involvement whatsoever in the killing of Denis Donaldson".

He added that Mr Adams "categorically denies the unsubstantiated allegation that he was consulted about an alleged IRA army council decision or that he had the final say on what had been sanctioned".

The programme included testimony from an anonymous IRA agent referred to as 'Martin' who himself worked as an RUC agent from 1997.

In a series of meetings with the makers of the programme over a series of months, Martin claimed that the killing was sanctioned by Mr Adams.

Martin told the programme that he had been told that the IRA had killed Donaldson, despite the organisation's denials at the time.

The programme claimed that it was sanctioned on foot of a request from republican Thomas 'Slab' Murphy and other leading republicans in South Armagh for the purpose of maintaining army discipline.

Martin claimed that murders had to be approved by the political and military leadership of the IRA which meant Mr Adams.

The inquest was adjourned last month for two years.
Many grain farmers in Donegal are on the verge of giving up, according to Donegal IFA chairman Michael Chance.

People are loathe to leave what they are doing, but with it costing more to produce grain than we can get paid for it, the high cost of credit, and especially with the bad weather this year, people are really questioning whether they should continue, he told the DD/DPP.

Farmers have been losing on average 25 per tonne for the last three years; the introduction of tariffs on grains imported from outside the EU would be a big help, he said.

And because of the horrendous weather, farmers need to be able to get extensions on their credit. Around 70 per cent of the spring crop still has to be cut in Donegal and there's no sign of drier weather.

Credit is a big problem," he said. "In Europe the rate is 1-2 per cent for long term loans, here it's 5-6 per cent.

Jimmy Rankin, a grain farmer in Carrigans, agreed. "I don't like putting farmers across as criers but things are really tough. Grain prices are on the floor. Market prices are what they are and I know everyone, no matter what they do, is under pressure. But the bad weather is making it worse.

And we are getting hammered on bank rates. I have friends in the UK who are paying 4 per cent on their overdrafts but here it's 8 per cent and we're being told it's a great rate.

Peter Lynch, who has 210 acres in Newtowncunningham and also does contract work, summed it up. Everything is wrong. Ground conditions are as poor as I've ever seen and this is the worst harvest I can remember.

There is still 100 per cent of the spring crop to cut in our contract work. The ground is that wet that it can't support the machines. We need 3-5 days of dry weather be able to get in and cut the spring crop and we can't even think of ploughing for the next crop on our own land.

In light of the crisis farmers are facing, Donegal IFA hosted a meeting, with speakers Bill Vaughan of Mental Health Ireland and a Teagasc expert on dealing with the fodder shortage, last night in Ballintra.
Donegal public representatives have called on Fianna Fail to make their position on water charges clear, following Saturdays national protest against the charges, which saw thousands take to the streets in Dublin.

Speaking to the DPP/DD yesterday, Sinn Fein Cllr. Albert Doherty was also critical of the reporting of the march by the national media.

A considerable number of people from Donegal travelled to Dublin to take part in the march. I have gone through all the papers this morning and to be honest you would think that this protest never happened. As usual, anybody that did report on it have grossly underreported the numbers attending.

He said, The figures mentioned were in the region of 15,000 people - it is a recognised and accepted fact that the numbers were in excess of 50,000 protestors.

Cllr. Doherty added that the protest had drawn, a large cross section of people from every strata in Irish life - it was not, as some have often said, a rent-a-crowd. These are people who are simply opposed to yet another unfair tax.

In Dublin on Saturday, there was a feel-good feeling, but that has not translated down to rural Ireland. It is time for Fianna Fail once and for all to make their position totally clear.

Thomas Pringle, independent TD, said: This is the eighth time that massive crowds have gathered to to oppose water charges. Even though the charges have been suspended we need to keep the pressure on to make sure they are ended once and for all.

We cannot rely on Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to abolish the charges and we know from our painful history that they will double-cross us, so we need to be vigilant, he said.

In response, Leas Cheann Comhairle and Fianna Fail TD, Pat the Cope Gallagher said: I would like to remind people that but for the intervention of Fianna Fail in the negotiations leading up to the formation of government, these charges would not have been suspended. Fianna Fail were instrumental in having a commission set up to examine these charges and it will report back to the Dail for decision.

However I would confirm that as per the recent statement of Micheal Martin, Fianna Fail are opposed to the charges, he said.
In a week when a cheque for 62,000 euro was handed over to the Irish Cancer Society from the Donegal Relay for Life committee, it was revealed that Letterkenny will be at the centre of a significant new cancer research project that will come on stream in the coming months.

Addressing a special presentation evening in the town on Monday, Dr Rob OConnor, Head of Research with the I.C.S., said they had been approached with an idea and hoped to get a full proposal to bring the project forward.

We are recognising the need for more research for patients who have been through a cancer journey and while this project is at its preliminary stages at present, Letterkenny will be at the forefront of it, he revealed.

Accepting the cheque for 62,681,25 euro, handed over to the I.C.S. representative by local Relay for Life Treasurer, Drew Corry  the proceeds from the event held last June  Dr OConnor (pictured right) spoke of the vital need for research and the funding required to keep it going.

Around 170,000 Irish patients are alive because of cancer research, said the I.C.S. representative who said they were moving away from just focusing on the tumour and are now focusing on the person as a whole.

Survival rates from the disease were increasing every year, he acknowledged.

But we cannot undertake this research without the support from you and the community, he told the attendance.

Letterkenny was, he indicated, one of fourteen centres around the country where clinical trials are held.

I was in Dungloe and one lady came up to me and said that she had been involved in that study.

In all up to 2,000 patients all over Ireland took part in clinical trials last year, Dr OConnor disclosed.

Speaking after the presentation, the I.C.S. chief said Ireland boasted some of the top researchers in the world and ongoing research was offering real hope to patients and families dealing with the issue of cancer.

Donegal, he said, was a significant contributor to this research and the latest cheque handed over by the Relay for Life committee would significantly benefit the projects.

Introducing the proceedings at the Mount Errigal Hotel, the chairperson of Donegal Relay for Life, Robert OConnor said that cancer did not pick and choose. It knocks on the door without any warning and research is key in the fight against it.

Relay for Life was a wonderful event on the Donegal calendar and helped raise both funding and awareness. From the latter perspective, they focused on education and two secondary schools, the Loreto Convent in Letterkenny and Mulroy College in Milford, had established projects as part of a thirteen week programme.

We hope to get other schools throughout the county involved in addition, said the chairperson.

On an evening when a number of presentations were made, the most surprised recipient was the chairperson himself who was heralded for his ongoing work and dedication to the Relay cause.

That work was recognised by all involved, Relay committee member, Ena Barrett, told the gathering, adding that Robert ensured that everything was done right and they were transparent and accountable.

He has been doing this for the past five years and we hope to have him here for the next five years, she maintained.

Dr OConnor also acknowledged the unstinting efforts of his namesake and spoke of his clear vision and dedication and how he challenged people to come out and help for the cause.

There was also a special singalong presentation to Maggie McAteer, musical director with the Survivors Choir, without whom, Donal Kavanagh insisted, there would be no choir and a presentation to Caitriona Kelly Gillespie for her involvement with the Candle of Hope ceremony.

Tributes were also paid to two members of the Relay committee who are stepping down from their respective roles, Mags Coyle and Suibhan Gillespie. They have been extremely dedicated to our committees objectives over the past few years and have worked tirelessly. They may be taking a break from the committee but I know they both will be present for the next Relay, chairperson OConnor pointed out.

That next Donegal Relay for Life event will be held, he confirmed, on May 27th and 28th, 2017, at the LYIT campus.

Meanwhile, the Letterkenny Shopping Centre will be sponsoring a fashion show at the Clanree Hotel on Thursday November 12th with all proceeds going to the Relay for Life.

During Monday evenings presentation event, there was a moment of reflection for those who succumbed to their illnesses since the last Relay for Life weekend.
October is National Bullying Prevention month. We have all heard the phrase bullying, but what does it actually mean? Bullying is defined as unwanted aggressive behavior; observed or perceived power imbalance; repetition of behaviors or high likelihood of repetition.

Bullying is unfortunately a reality for far too many in our communities both young and old. Much like any other form of violence, bullying is not isolated to any particular age group, gender or demography. Just about everyone of us can look back in our lives and recall a time where either we were personally bullied or witnessed one of our friends or schoolmates being bullied. Its hard to believe that with all of the advancements and awareness, this type of behavior still exists, but it does and with the advent of social media, it had actually gotten much worse. This is because unlike in the past, the bully not only impacts your life on the playground or classroom; they now are able to follow you into your personal life due to the constant presence of social media.

There is good news in that we have learned a great deal about what creates these bullies and how to neutralize their ability to isolate and intimidate. The key is for those in authority to respond to reports of bullying immediately to show without question that bullying will not be acceptable. That message needs to follow to our homes with the messages we send our children not only by what we say but by our own actions in how we treat fellow adults. Bullying is without question a learned behavior. It is learned on the playground, in the classroom and follows through to the workplace and social interactions as adults. We need to send a strong message to our own children, a message of empathy and compassion not of ridicule and rumor.

Who are at risk of bullying the most? Typically those who are bullied have one or more of the following risks:

Are perceived as different from their peers, such as being overweight or underweight, wearing glasses or different clothing, being new to a school, or being unable to afford what kids consider cool

Are perceived as weak or unable to defend themselves

Are depressed, anxious, or have low self esteem

Are less popular than others and have few friends

Do not get along well with others, seen as annoying or provoking, or antagonize others for attention

However, even if a child has these risk factors, it doesnt mean that they will be bullied. The important lesson is that we as adults set the tone for how the next generation will interact with each other. Chances are if we show acceptance of others, our children will show acceptance of others. If we engage in demeaning others or spreading rumors, our children will follow suit. So often we as adults underestimate the influence, we have not only on our own children but even those who dont know us but witness our behavior.

While school or workplace policies are an important component, the only way to truly decrease bullying is by denying the bully their victim. We do this by raising strong, confident, resilient children, and speaking out and supporting those who find themselves on the receiving end of this type of behavior. We are all teachers in life lessons and we teach by our actions. Lets all be aware of what we teach.
Ronald Moede was born on December 21, 1934, in Rio Creek, WI. The son of the late Fred and Emily (Hanamann) Moede, he married Bonnie Neinas in Brussels on June 4, 1960, and they were married for 62+ years. He was a life-long resident of Rio Creek and was an innovative dairy farmer. He owned and managed a large dairy operation, Meade Manor Farms, which had been homesteaded by his grandfather, August Moede, in 1895. The log cabin home, barn, and herd grew to become one of the larger dairy farms in Kewaunee County under his guidance. Upon his retirement, it evolved into Meade Manor Pet Clinic, a vet service for small animals, but the land continued to flourish and produce. Ron graduated from Casco High School, Class of 1952 and Graham School for Cattlemen, Kansas. He was a member of the Wisconsin Holstein Breeders, Kewaunee County Holstein Breeders, and the National Holstein

Association. He was a charter member of the Algoma FFA Alumni. His family exhibited champion dairy cattle at local, state, and national dairy cattle shows. In 1984, in Madison, the Wisconsin FFA named him Outstanding Farmer and in 1995, he was named and honored at the Wisconsin State Fair as a Century Farmer. He served as an elder in his church for many years as well as a trustee and various committee appointments. In his younger days, he was active in dartball and also high school sports. He received the Algoma Honorary Chapter Farmer Award, and the Unified Board Business Award. In his retirement, he drove school bus for 15 years for the Algoma School District and was a member of the Great Lakes Sports Fishermen. A hobby later enjoyed was his chicken farming. He raised a small flock of chicken, and he enjoyed passing out extra eggs to friends and relatives when the supply was greater than the family could handle. He was an avid sports fan and he and Bonnie attended both Packers Super Bowl games in 1996 and 1997, and also the Milwaukee World Series in 1983. He enjoyed hunting and fishing, both here and in upper Michigan and Minnesota. He even got Bonnie to go along with him to Lake of the Woods on the Canadian border to do some ice fishing. He held Packers season tickets since 1960 and at the time they bought their tickets they were allowed to pick out where they wanted to sit on the sidelines --there were no end zone seats yet-- and the tickets cost $5.00 a piece! He traveled through most of the U.S. including Alaska and Hawaii as well as traveling to the Caribbean and Europe. He enjoyed a summer place in Door County for 20 years. He told many stories of farming with his dad and the fact that at the age of 12, he had his own team of horses to work with on the farm. Responsibility came early as he was left in charge whenever it was necessary for his parents to be gone for a few days. He learned to drive a truck at an early age and often drove himself to school in 8th grade and parked the vehicle a few doors down at a relatives. This was because chores need to be done before and after school. The first tractor purchased was in 1937. In his retirement, he had it restored and displayed in local fairs and tractor shows. He would tell of shocking grain and threshing crews traveling from neighbor to neighbor and the wonderful table his mother would set full of food. A vivid memory was the day WWII ended. The whole neighborhood and working crew quit in the early afternoon (unheard of) and celebrated With beer and music! Even the clergy arrived and joined in. It was a day to remember! In his lifetime he went from horses and the depression, to the digital age and unimagined luxuries. There was no electricity and no running water in his youth and now he had wireless phones, computer screens in his vehicles, along with heated steering wheels and heated seats. Who would have thought that back then.

Ron is survived by his wife Bonnie; son Robert (Debbie Harms) Moede; grandson Michael and granddaughter Megan; siblings, Terry (Jane) Moede, Paul (Roxie) Moede; sisters-in-law, Diane Fontaine, Sheila (Don) Baudhuin; and brothers in-law, Dan (Mary) Neinas. He was preceded in death by his parents, Fred and Emily Moede; sister, Marilyn (Arno) Schneider; father- and mother-in-law, Herman and Madeline Neinas, and brother-in-law, Gary Fontaine.

Visitation will be held at Kinnard Funeral & Cremation Services  Algoma, on Friday, October 7, 2022, from 4-7:30 pm with a prayer service at 6:30. Visitation will continue on Saturday, October 8th at St. Johns Lutheran Church  Rankin, from 9-11:00 am. Funeral service will be held at 11:00 am with Dr. Rev. Christopher Jackson officiating. Burial to follow in Evergreen Cemetery. Online condolence message may be shared at KinnardFCS.com. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the Kewaunee County 4-H Dairy Fund and the Projection Screen Fund at St. Johns- Rankin.
The monument erected in the memory of largemouth bass Leroy Brown, dedicated when the fish died in 1980, returned to Eufaula on Tuesday afternoon after being retrieved by the City of Eufaula from its latest home near the lake owned by fishing entrepreneur Ray Scott in Pintlala. Scott was given the monument when Mann passed away in 2005. Mann, who invented numerous artificial lures and helped Eufaula become known as the Bass Fishing Capital of the World, had taken in the bass when it weighed just over a pound in 1973 and Mann put it in his 38,000-gallon tank. The fish lived to be 6 1/2 pounds before it died in 1980. Mann named it Leroy Brown after the Jim Croce song Bad Bad Leroy Brown because, despite much larger fish in the tank, the bass ruled all others. He was buried in a velvet-lined tackle box and hundreds attended his memorial service. Scott gave the eulogy and said people were crying in the audience. Then-Alabama Gov. Fob James declared a day of mourning in Alabama. Telegrams were received from the likes of Hank Williams Jr., Jerry Reed and Porter Wagoner, and fishing luminaries Orlando Wilson, Roland Martin and Hank Parker were among those in attendance. Eufaula Mayor Jack Tibbs recently asked Scott if he could get the monument back for Eufaula and Scott agreed. The monument was brought to JJ Jaxons Eufaula Monument Company, where it will have additional engraving listing Tom Mann and Ray Scott. Tibbs said the monument will eventually be placed on the median on Broad Street across from Southern Charm, signifying Manns importance to the history of Eufaula.
What is it?

Holden has recently updated its Colorado range with new styling, technology and safety. The overhauled ute (oops, sorry "pick up truck" as Holden now refers to the vehicle) is part of a GM global design and engineering effort headed by GM Brazil and the GM Thailand manufacturing facility with significant input from Holden's engineers. This here is the top-spec Space Cab version, the 4x4 LTZ, that costs $51,190 (plus on-road costs) with the optional six-speed automatic fitted to our test car.

How does it drive?

It's definitely an improvement over the outgoing model, as the Colorado overall feels quieter and a little more refined. The engine is quieter and smoother although the transmission in our Colorado had some harsh gear changes at times with a thud sometimes on up shifts in different situations. The auto also drops into a high gear too soon at times which labours the vehicle, creating a vibration and humming noise that is felt through the seat of your pants. if you manually drop back a gear, it's much better.

The steering definitely feels improved as well with a new electric system, combined with a revised quicker rack ratio, making it more direct and responsive than the last model. The ride and handling attributes have also been improved with a series of changes to the chassis, culminating in the ute (I'm sticking with calling it a ute) not seeming to skip across road imperfections and is less truck-like on bumpy roads than before.

What's the interior like?

Once again, it's a big improvement over the outgoing model and does look nicer but it's still a simple, workman-like cabin. The dash has a hard plastic top with the fascia is made out of a softer touch material. The door trims are the same, but there are a few different textures throughout the cabin and it's a little bland with only chrome trim on the gear selector and some coloured trim around the centre A/C vents, lower console and steering wheel controls that look a little different. Only the passenger's sun visor has a mirror, but there is a sunglasses holder in roof, cup holder in centre console and front doors while the door pockets are now lined with carpet. A USB outlet is mounted in the bottom of the centre console, so if you fill the console you will need to remove everything to get to it, but there are two 12-volt outlets under the radio for extra charging points. The glove box is shallow but there's plenty of space in the rear of the cab itself when not occupied with passengers. The headlight height adjustment, dash illumination and 4WD controls are all easy to use.

What's the payload and towing capacity?

Total payload on this variant is 1086kg and the Colorado's braked towing capacity is 3500kg while the unbraked capacity is the legal maximum of 750kg.

What about load space dimensions and anchor points?

For this Space Cab model, the tray measures 1790mm in length, it's 1534mm wide and between the wheel arches is 1122mm. Tie down points are sparse and in less than ideal positions with one at the bottom of each corner of the tray. There is no tub liner standard but there is a tonneau cover.

How does it perform under load?

The engine has plenty of grunt, and even with our test weight on board it still shoves you back in the seat on takeoff - so, no complaints here as it feels as strong, if not stronger, than its competitors. The suspension coped with the test weight of 840kg really well too; we could obviously tell the weight was there in every aspect but the Colorado had no problems, was composed over rough roads at all speeds and left the driver feeling confident. The brakes do the job but could have done with more bite with the weight on board.

Any special features worth mentioning?

It fetures Holden's MyLink infotainment system in the 8-inch colour touchscreen as well as a reversing camera, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity, Satellite Navigation and Digital Radio. Forward Collision Alert (FCA) with Head up warning, Lane Departure Warning (LDW), Tyre Pressure Monitoring System and remote start on auto models are some things you can brag about at your mates' bbq.

Any criticisms?

The driving position isn't ideal. The seat itself is reasonably comfortable with mild bolstering on the top and base, but the lack of adjustment in the seat base left me feeling like the seat was tipping me forward and I had no support under my legs. This is made even worse by a lack of telescopic adjustment on the steering wheel (there's only height adjustment) leaving you constantly looking for a comfortable position.

There are a few small quality issues with our loan vehicle too; the passenger side A-pillar trim is clipped in firm but has a gap at the top and where the hood lining meets the B-pillar trim it was slightly exposed.

Holden has added a new feature to the Colorado range that is designed to ease cabin pressure and make closing the door easier by dropping the window four to five centimetres. However, it doesn't really work, as the front doors on our test vehicle weren't the easiest to close. With no centre pillar on the space cab model the doors tend to bounce off each other when closing and you still need to give the door a good shove to lock it in place. Another downer is when it's raining and you shut the door the window vibrates and flicks water straight onto your face before it closes = that's if it closes properly. Over our week loan we had a 50/50 chance the windows would close, half the time they stayed the 4-5 centimetres down when you get in the vehicle.

How does the warranty and servicing costs rate?

The warranty is three years or 100,00km, whichever occurs first. Holden offers lifetime capped price servicing, and the Colorado has 15,000km or nine-month service intervals which are $349 each up to your 60,000km 36month service and $409 up to the 105,000km mark.

What else should I consider?

There is plenty to look at in this popular class but the Ford Ranger, Toyota HiLux and Mazda BT-50 are all on the top shelf, plus a new VW Amarok is around the corner - although it only comes in dual cab or single cab configurations.

Verdict

This is the Colorado Holden needed when it launched this model back in 2012, a vehicle to go head to head with rivals in the category and give customers a compliant package that is up to date with the times. They have it now, even if it doesn't set any class benchmarks.

Read all the latest Holden news and reviews here

The Checklist

0-60km/h time: 4.6 seconds, 5.7 seconds (loaded)

0-80km/h time: 6.9 seconds, 8.9 seconds (loaded)

0-100km/h time: 9.9 seconds, 12.9 seconds (loaded)

Load testing weight: 840kg

Safety rating: 5 star ANCAP

Holden Colorado Space Cab LTZ Price and Specifications

Price: $51,190 (plus on-road costs)

On sale: Now

Engine: 2.8-litre four cylinder four-cylinder turbo diesel

Power: 147kW at 3600rpm

Torque: 500Nm at 2000-2200rpm

Transmission: 6-speed automatic, 4WD

Fuel usage: 8.6L/100km (we averaged 7.2 freeway, 9.1 combined and 11L/100km with the weight)

Thanks to Belle Narellan for their assistance; www.belletiles.com.au
Home Four wheelers Ford GT Prototypes Caught Speeding In Colorado oi-Sreejith

2017 Ford GT prototypes caught speeding yesterday in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado. The test mules are painted in matte green and the prototypes have been seen testing throughout the past 18 months.

Police officers from Eagle County Sheriff's office and Colorado State Patrol has pulled over three prototypes. There is no news about whether the ford engineers were fined or not, but the admitted that they were going way faster than the 50 mph speed limit.

The third-generation GT were in the area for high-altitude testing when they were caught.
A Colorado judge has sentenced two Lincoln men to decades in prison for the home-invasion robbery of a licensed medical marijuana provider in the Denver area last year.

David Tatum, 19, got 20 years on two counts of aggravated robbery Friday, First Judicial District Attorney Pete Weir said in a news release Monday.

Tatum was a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when he was arrested.

Spencer Siroky, 24, got 27 years earlier this month for kidnapping, aggravated robbery and two counts of burglary.

Both had pleaded guilty.

A third man who was arrested with them, Fredy Pedraza Castillo, is being sought in Colorado and Nebraska after jumping bail.

Weir said police in the Denver suburb of Westminster went to a home early July 19, 2015, where the victims had been robbed at gunpoint, tied up and pistol-whipped by armed intruders wearing dark clothing and masks.

The thieves broke in overnight and burst into the victims' bedrooms as they slept, then ransacked the house before leaving with money, firearms and marijuana plants.

Weir said the two victims worked in the retail marijuana industry and one of them was a medical marijuana provider for the other.

Later that day, he said, an off-duty, vacationing Boulder County Drug Task Force detective came across the suspect's car at a rest stop in Nebraska near the Colorado state line.

The detective took a picture of the license plate and alerted local law enforcement.

Based on that information, a Nebraska State Patrol trooper pulled the car over for changing lanes without signalling about half an hour later on Interstate 80 near Ogallala.

In court documents filed last year in Lancaster County District Court, a patrol investigator said the trooper gave the driver, Pedraza Castillo, a warning, then asked about the marijuana he could smell.

After Pedraza Castillo admitted smoking marijuana in his car in Colorado, where it's legal, and the trooper said that was probable cause to search in Nebraska and said he found a loaded gun under the front passenger seat and marijuana in a backpack in the back.

A search turned up 10 pounds of marijuana plants, 2 pounds of dried marijuana, 30 grams of THC concentrate and six guns, including one stolen in the Westminster robbery, plus masks, gloves, wigs, rope, an airsoft gun with silencer, more than $5,000 ($500 of it counterfeit) and scales, according to the investigator.

Pedraza Castillo and his passengers, Siroky and Tatum, were arrested.

Investigators came to believe the three had gone to Colorado to commit the robbery to get marijuana for Siroky to sell in Lincoln. A search of his Lincoln apartment two days later turned up marijuana, a scale, dispensary wrappers, ammunition and body armor.

The men, who have ties to Lincoln and David City, also face charges in Keith County, Nebraska, in connection to the stop.

Pam Russell, a public information officer with Weir's office, said because Siroky and Tatum were convicted of crimes of violence they likely will have to serve 75 percent of their sentences before they are eligible for parole.
The Dundalk Men's Shed in Seatown, celebrated it's fifth birthday in style last week.

The choir was in fine voice and gave a choral recital and among those who dropped in was local TD Peter Fitzpatrick.

Afterwards a barbecue was held in the early autumn sunshine.

There was much to celebrate. The men's shed provides activities, camaraderie and skill sharing for over 70 retired and semi-retired men in Dundalk with an average attendance of 30 to 40 people each day.

"The ethos behind the men's shed is quite simple. It provides a friendly, inclusive environment where men can gather and work on meaningful projects.

These include woodturning at their own pace, in the company of their peers. It can also be a place just to come for a chat, a cup of tea or a game of pool" said Eva Beirne, Men's shed co-ordinator at Netwell Casala.

"It's fantastic to see this in action, and the men in Seatown are a great example of what can be achieved.

It's been a wonderful five years and we're all looking forward to the next five and on into the future" she added.

If you would like any further information on the Men's Shed, please contact Eva on 085 8895471.

The Minister for Health Simon Harris was hugely impressed by Dundalk Men's Shed when he called to their premises at Seatown recently.

Dundalk is one of the finest Men's Shed operations in the country and was one of the first in Europe.
Fine Gael TD for Louth and East Meath, Fergus O'Dowd has welcomed the fact that farmers in Louth have received just under 1 million euros in payments under the 2016 Areas of Natural Constraints Scheme.

My colleague, Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, today announced that payments under the 2016 Areas of Natural Constraints Scheme and Areas of Specific Constraint (Islands) scheme, worth over 140 million, have started issuing to almost 65,000 farmers.

Under the scheme, farmers in Louth have received 947,915.82 in payments.

These payments represent a significant and timely financial boost for farmers in Louth and for the wider rural economy here in the County. The Department of Agriculture will continue to clear remaining cases for payment over the coming weeks as a matter of priority.

Fine Gael in Government is committed to working to ensure that the economic recovery reaches all parts of the country and the benefits are felt inside every doorstep and in every community.

ANCs are divided into mountain areas, severely handicapped, and less severely handicapped areas. The Scheme provides payments on a per-hectare basis for those farming these areas.The areas designated as ANC are the same as those designated under the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme, with the exception of land situated on offshore islands, pending a review of the areas by 2018. In the meantime, there is no change to the areas which cover approximately 75% of the country.
"We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose." - President Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address
Columbus will again celebrate National Manufacturing Day, or MFG Day, on Oct. 7. Clearly, there arent many places with more of a vested interest in manufacturing than we have here.

Through the work of Dream It. Do It. and Drive for Five, student tours have been organized at local firms. This gives us the opportunity to open the eyes of these young people to the tremendous careers waiting for them in manufacturing, and specifically, in Columbus manufacturing.

What is particularly exciting about MFG Day is the response of schools and students to these opportunities. Again this year, well have hundreds of kids signed up to get out and experience Columbus manufacturing. It is so encouraging to see that number of students exposed to the realities of todays advanced manufacturing.

I think its encouraging, not only in the exposure for our students, but also because it indicates the school systems are supportive of this effort to connect their students with local careers.

MFG Day is still a fairly young national event promoting the importance of manufacturing to the nations economy. The event is a project of the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, with partners like the National Association of Manufacturers and others. As of yesterday, this years MFG Day includes 1,679 events across the country  not bad for being only a few years in.

Im sure all of us in Columbus recognize the key role that manufacturing plays in our regions economy. Taking one day out of the year to recognize that impact is important. Otherwise, Id imagine its pretty easy to take for granted all the jobs and wealth created in this industry in our region.

Coming up next week is the annual State Chamber Legislative Fall Forum hosted by our local chamber. As I mentioned last week, the forum on Wednesday is a great chance to interact with our partners at the Nebraska Chamber as well as our own state senator, Paul Schumacher. All employees of any chamber member are welcome, and its just a $5 breakfast starting at 7 a.m. at the chamber office. Please RSVP to the chamber office.

Members are also invited to Business After Hours on Monday. Midwest Medical Transport is your host at their hangar at Columbus Municipal Airport. Stop by to enjoy some food, drink, and networking. You can attend Monday anytime between 5-6:30 p.m.
New podcast will focus on ideas shaping key development challenges

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) today launches a new podcast titled Pocket Economics - a guide to changing lives.

The series of short discussions, available on our podcast page, SoundCloud and iTunes, will bring together leading economists and experts to discuss the ideas that shape key development challenges in the EBRD regions and beyond.

The conversations between guests and Jonathan Charles, EBRDs Managing Director, Communications, will focus on topics central to the development agenda, among them inequality, climate finance and political economy and reforms.

The first episode examines the notion that microfinance is a miracle cure for global poverty. Our guest Ralph De Haas, the EBRDs Head of Research, analyses the effectiveness of microcredit, looks at the benefits of peer pressure in group lending vs individual loans and the use of microcredit as a development tool rather than a consumer loan product.

Microfinance is not lifting people out of poverty on a large scale but its also not harming people in a structural way. Its a useful financial product, he says.

There is a demand for it and people are using it to make their lives less risky.

The next episode will feature the EBRDs Chief Economist Sergei Guriev and look at the evolution of political economy and the importance of governments popularity to their ability to prosecute reforms. Do successful reformers also have to be popular?

The EBRDs strategic plan for the period 2016-18 has three priorities: strengthening economic resilience, addressing global challenges and supporting regional integration.
First ECB Annual Research Conference

About the conference

28 and 29 September 2016

Main Building, European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main

Conference Room C5.01, Grossmarkthalle

The global financial crisis has spurred renewed interest in research on central banking issues. To support the dissemination of such research, the European Central Bank is launching its First Annual Research Conference, organised by the Directorate General Research. This conference will be the ECBs flagship research event covering the fields of monetary economics and finance. The conference will consist of paper presentations by leading academics in these fields, a panel discussion on a topic of current policy interest, and a keynote lecture. The keynote lecture is named in honour of Jean Monnet and will be delivered by an outstanding academic on a topic of relevance to strengthening European Monetary Union.

Programme
I used to think that anyone who rose to a position of power and prominence in the world of education had to be smart, well-informed, and have significant teaching experience. The last few years of following the education reform debate, however, has disabused me of that notion. It seems as though so many of the people who hold positions of authority and prestige in the education sector (i.e., Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, Bill and Melinda Gates, David Coleman, Peter Cunningham) have had little to no actual experience in education before assuming leadership posts in the field. In fact, if you didnt know better, youd think that a degree in education, teacher certification, or experience as a teacher were disqualifications for obtaining a leadership role in the profession. [wink wink]

A stream of recent online conversations with a few well-known reformsters has also revealed an alarming lack of logic and common sense informing the understandings of these leaders with respect to what teachers do, how students learn, and how education works. I think of these disconnects as education reform paradoxes, and share a few of the more puzzling examples below:

Traditionally-prepared teachers need more student teaching experience, but TFA recruits are better with less student teaching experience

In a Twitter discussion with one prominent education reform communications guru, who happens to be a big supporter of Teach for America, the following accusation was made: Most teachers feel unprepared on day one. Why not build more student teaching into the program?

Almost immediately, an astute reader commented: advocating for more student teaching, right after you claim a 5wk program [TFA] is as good as a 5yr one [a traditional teacher preparation degree program]. Which is it?

The communications guru responded: both

Now, you can be a fan of alternative pathways to certification, like TfA and The New Teacher Project. And you can believe that graduates of traditional teacher education programs (who spend 4 to 5 years studying their content area, pedagogy, learning theories, child development, and gaining experience in school classrooms working with actual students and practicing teachers) arent as good as the graduates of elite colleges and universities (who didnt major in education and only get a few weeks of training before entering the classroom.)

But you cant claim that the former group would benefit from more experience in schools, while the latter group would not. Especially when the traditionally-prepared teachers have far more of this kind of experience already, and the alternative route recruits have so little.

Well, you can claim this paradox is true, I supposebut no one should believe you, and your credibility on this point should be called into question.

Teachers are heroic saviors that save childrens lives, but they place their own self-interests above the needs of their students

In another Twitter conversation about the amount of difference in student learning attributable to in-school factors like teacher quality (which happens to be less than 10%, with out-of-school factors, like poverty, responsible for the bulk of these differences), the same guru responded with this comment:

That implies teachers make little to no difference, which is absolutely not true. They save lives. They deserve the credit.

On first blush, this seems like an endorsement of the power of good teaching and the impact that excellent teachers can have on their students lives. But if we dig just a bit deeper, this comment can be seen as playing into the teacher as savior narrative that is so popular in the reform community.

The truth is that teaching is not a calling, like being a priest or a ministerits a job, and a difficult one at that. Portraying teachers as heroes who save lives is a simplistic and disingenuous attempt on the part of the reformers at glorifying what teachers do without recognizing the challenges and difficulties that the reform agenda has created.

It has also been my experience that whenever a reformer waxes poetic about the power of good teachers, an attack is coming in the very next breath. And indeed, the guru followed up with this response:

Teachers succeed despite profession, which does a poor job training, supporting and honoring them. I dont attack teachers.'

Then, the coup de grace, stringing together a series of attacks:

Most people coming out of ed school are unprepared to teach but you still have a job. We need accountability in higher ed.

Not instead of, but 4 same reason we have civilian oversight of military. Self-interest must defer to public interest.

A reader responds:

so there we go, we are back to the attack, the heinous assertion that teachers are self interested

the assertion also makes the assumption that teacher best interest and student best interest are in opposition

The paradox here couldnt be more clear: toss out a faux compliment about how wonderful teachers are while simultaneously denigrating their preparation and readiness to do their jobs and inferring that teachers place their own self-interest (reformer code for teachers union membership) above their interest in meeting their students needs.

If this is how the reform crowd shows their support for teachers, I dont want any part of it.

The reformers insist that school choice will allow poor kids to escape failing schools, but the evidence shows that school choice leads to more segregated schools and fewer options for black and Hispanic children

Perhaps the most important foundation of the reformers creed is their devotion to competition and school choice as the levers that will solve all of the problems of public education. In some places this comes in the form of schools of choice initiatives, while in others we see it expressed in renewed calls for vouchersnow marketed under the misnomer, education savings accounts.

In Michigan, where school choice has been the law of the land for several years, the results of this increased competition in the school sector have been a decidedly mixed bag:

The outcomes we can measure show its leading to increased segregation and increased burdens for districts, said Gary Miron, a researcher and education professor at Western Michigan University who studies school choice data. If we are talking about choice as a market tool and we apply it as a market tool, theres going to be winners and losers. Mostly kids are losing and your public schools are being damaged.

Of course, the reformers dont really care about the education of poor childrenthey see the lure of school choice and charter schools as the bait for parents frustrated by the systemic defunding of their local public schools, especially in urban centers, and who are desperate for any option that promises a better alternative.

And if theres one thing the charter industry does well, its marketing their product. Consider the findings of a new study by Catherine DiMartino and Sarah Butler Jessen on the aggressive promotion tactics undertaken by some charter school management corporations:

Certain organizations have great resources and seemingly a greater institutional goal of making marketing a central piece. And there are good reasons for it if youre, say, a new school of choice, or a charter management organization trying to create some kind of national identity with schools scattered across the country. But its completely unregulated at this point and completely inequitable as far as the degree of resources that certain organizations have to to get their message out there. It takes time too. What principal or teacher has the time to keep up a Twitter page? I cant even keep up my own Twitter page. And then the more formal branding process takes real knowledge. Schools are hiring experts to create marketing campaigns that target a specific population, and help with branded imagery. Its a whole new world and theres an industry that has emerged around it.

So, if your goal is to improve the educational experience for students in urban schools, many of whom are Black and Hispanic, why would you pursue an agenda that contributes to increased segregation, while damaging the public schools these children attend, and instead of spending precious resources on classroom instruction, redirecting that money towards glitzy advertising and marketing campaigns? Another paradox of the reform agenda.

Teachers should be subjected to increased accountability because they are paid by the public but reformers, who support charter schools (which are funded via public tax revenues), arent accountable to taxpayers and the public

The final paradox focuses on another one of the reformers favorite tropes: the need for accountability for teachers and schools. Never mind that public education is already one of the most accountable institutions in our society, and that teachers welcome and embrace accountability, building it in to their everyday practice in the form of assessment.

The reformers would have us believe that public school students are lazy and uninterested in learning, their teachers are union thugs trying to get away with working as little as possible, and our public schools are money pits run by corrupt staffers looking to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

Making matters worse, the reformers have only a single tool in their tool box to accomplish this goal: standardized test scores. For the corporate reform crowd, student test scores are the gold standard, the coin of the realm, the ne plus ultra of accountability measures. These folks have never seen a standardized test they didnt think could unlock the secrets of the universe, and they are just not having any questions about silly notions of validity, reliability, or appropriateness of these tests.

But theres a different tune being sung when we ask the reformers how they are to be held accountable. Consider the following recent exchange of Twitter messages with a prominent reformer:

MR: U seem very committed to accountability, *****. how are U held accountable? Is it public? Do I get to weigh in?

Reformer: Isnt that what you are doing right now?

MR: Really? a Twitter convo is your accountability? then lets get rid of teacher eval and VAM. how silly

Later

Reformer: Plenty of evidence that 5-yr teacher is better than a 1-yr teacher. Less evidence that 20 is better than 10.

MR: are you better at your job now than after 5 years of experience, *****? answer honestlyI know I am.

Reformer: Getting better every day  but if I wasnt I wouldnt have a job.

MR: so youre untouchablegot it. good to know. i guess accountability is for the great unwashed, not the ruling classes

Reformer: I was appointed by an elected president. Now I work in the non-profit sector. How do you want to hold me accountable?

And there you have it. As a political appointee, now safely ensconced in the non-profit sector of the education business, this high-level corporate reform official enjoys tremendous power, prestige, and protection.

He has the connections and access to play a major role in the development and implementation of public policy, but is insulated from any form of accountability that may result from the effects of his decisions on our children, teachers, and schools.

He has a virtually unlimited war chest with which to work, and a team of paid assistants and bloggers to do his bidding, quickly and forcefully attacking the attempts of anyone emboldened enough to push back against the reform mantra of competition, choice, and accountability.

The enterprise of public education is complicated and complex, and encompasses many issues on which reasonable persons may, and do, disagree.

But is it too much to ask that ones positions on these issues be based on logic, informed thought and study, and a sincere interest in helping children learn?

That shouldnt be a paradox for anyone.

[CC image credit: Brett Jordan | Flickr]
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Early Sunday morning, Maxima Acuna, a 2016 recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, was reportedly attacked at her home in Peru when hitmen illegally entered the property. Maxima was awarded the 2016 Goldman Prize for her fight against the expansion of the Yanacocha Mine, a subsidiary of Colorado-based mining giant Newmont and Peruvian-based mining company Buenaventura. The hitmen that attacked Maxima and her partner, Jaime Chaupe, were reportedly hired by the mining companies.

Maxima Acuna, 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize winner for South and Central America, stood up for her right to peacefully live off her own land. Goldman Environmental Prize

It is with healing thoughts and a heavy heart we wish Maxima and her partner a quick recovery from this outrageous attack. Maxima has been an inspiration in the fight to protect her land, her livelihood and her community from the greed and destruction of the mining companies operating in Peru. Her bravery and persistence have helped shape the world in untold ways, and we are intensely disturbed by Sundays events.

The continued attacks and assassinations of the brave environmental and indigenous rights activists around the world is a clear indication that we still have a long way to go to ensure a world that is truly safe, equitable and inclusive for all.

Indigenous Activist Murdered in Honduras Just Two Weeks After Berta Caceres Was Killed https://t.co/pS3PudOJzd @EARTHWORKS @foeeurope  EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 19, 2016

We stand with our friends and allies in Peru and around the world in demanding that those responsible for this atrocity be brought to justice.
By The Goldman Environmental Prize

The Goldman Environmental Prize honors grassroots environmental heroes from the worlds six inhabited continental regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands & Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America. The prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk. The Goldman Prize views grassroots leaders as those involved in local efforts, where positive change is created through community or citizen participation in the issues that affect them. Through recognizing these individual leaders, the prize seeks to inspire other ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the natural world.

The 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize winners. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

Here are the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize winners:

Baltimore Youth Changes Hearts and Minds to Prevent Toxic Incinerator in Community Beset by Pollution

Last year Freddie Grays death put Baltimore at center stage in the national dialogue about race in America. Much of the focus has been on police brutality and differential treatment of racial minorities by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. There has been less attention to the environmental consequences of institutional racism, which are disproportionately experienced by poor people of color.

Destiny Watford. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

For decades, residents of South Baltimore have been plagued by pollution from heavy industry. The area hosts the nations largest medical waste incinerator, alongside chemical plants, coal piers and associated diesel-truck traffic. The small neighborhood of Curtis Bay is the epicenter of a communitys fight against South Baltimores aggressive industrial expansion. In recent years, it was determined to have the worst toxic air pollution in the U.S., but development continues apace.

The latest threat is another behemoththe nations largest trash incinerator. The projects legal approval was secured by developer Energy Answers under the pretense that the facility would produce renewable energy as clean as solar and wind by burning waste. The reality is different. Although Energy Answers incinerator was ranked in tier 1 of Marylands Renewable Portfolio Standard, research revealed that it would wreak havoc on the communitys health and environment. It would emit vast quantities of toxic heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic that have been linked to lung cancer, asthma and heart diseasein a community already plagued by industrial pollution.

The only thing standing in the way of the incinerators construction is Curtis Bay native and college student Destiny Watford. From the age of 16, she mobilized her disaffected community to fight the incinerator using social media and performing arts, coupled with a creative strategy to limit Energy Answers ability to fund the project.

Watford, now 20, became an environmental activist when she learned about Energy Answers proposal to build the incinerator in Curtis Bay. Her first-hand experience watching neighboring towns wither from industrial pollution motivated her to protect her battered community. With clear-eyed enthusiasm, Watford and other public high school students united the people of Curtis Bay in support of their efforts.

After attempts to halt the project by invoking local health-related regulations were unsuccessful, Watford turned to arts and information as modes of activism. Inspired by a play she saw about pollution and deception, Watford called for her schoolmates to utilize their passions in videography and design to put pressure on 22 local organizationsincluding the Baltimore City Public School systemthat had pledged to purchase energy generated by the as-yet-unbuilt incinerator. Through education she provided about the incinerators impacts, Watford convinced 18 of the 22 organizations to nullify their contracts, effectively cutting off the main source of revenue for the incinerator.

However, the threat of the incinerator looms. Energy Answers still holds the lease on the 97-acre site, and Watford has reached an impasse with the Maryland Department of Energy, which has the ability to force Energy Answers out since it violated its permit by not beginning construction.

Despite this, Watford is not sitting idle. She has a vision to transform the site for the true benefit of the community by exploring alternatives like solar technology, filling the site with community-owned panels to make it the largest solar farm on the eastern shore board. This would provide clean energy jobs for locals and would be a first step to encourage sustainable development. Toward this end, Watford is collecting signatures and video testimonials appealing to the Maryland Department of Energy to enforce the law and evict Energy Answers. With enough support, Watford hopes to begin the process of re-claiming Curtis Bay for its resident.

Watch here:

Uncovering Phnom Penh: Cambodian man reveals governments destruction of indigenous farmers homes and forest land for timber sales

In Cambodia, where eighty percent of the population depends on the land for its livelihood, large swaths of forest and arable land are being taken from farmers and destroyed. The seizures are permitted by a 2001 law that allows the government to take over citizens property for development purposes through deeds called Economic Land Concessions (ELCs). Under the guise of clearing space for agricultural and industrial projects, the government has used ELCs to force 300,000 rural Cambodians off their land. Once the people are removed, timber companies illegally fell rare trees such as the Siamese Rosewood to make luxury wood furniture for the international market, mostly in China and the U.S. While a handful of companies with powerful political allies have made a fortune on the illicit sale of exotic timber, Cambodian villagers have been left homeless, jobless and hungry.

Ouch Leng. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

Ouch Leng, 39, grew up in the post-Khmer Rouge era when government corruption, violence and impunity for elites were ubiquitous. Ouch vowed from an early age to dedicate his life to protecting Cambodias forests and defending the human rights of his people. As land grabbing via ELC deeds accelerated, Ouch founded the Cambodian Human Rights Taskforce (CHRTF), a nonprofit organization focused on exposing human rights violations behind ELCs. His work bridges human rights and environmental defense because ELC-initiated deforestation ravages wildlife habitat and devastates indigenous populations. Through his investigations into ELC-related human rights violations, Ouch found that most illicit logging occurred under deeds issued to Try Pheap, a Cambodian logging tycoon with close ties to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

For years, Ouch worked undercover, posing as a Try Pheap Group employee or hiding in muddy fields near logging sites to gather firsthand evidence of Try Pheaps criminal activity and of his companys alliance with the Cambodian government. Following multiple clandestine research initiatives, Ouch released findings to the international media, which demonstrated that Try Pheap and high-ranking government officials were colluding in illegal timber trade. Since then, Ouch and CHRTF have released a series of reports detailing the malfeasance. When the government was undeterred by the embarrassing revelations, Ouch mobilized Cambodian citizens to stage peaceful protests in the streets of Phnom Penh and block the illegal loggers from accessing their land. The added pressure from the protests led the government to nickname Ouch the Land Revolution, as his activism was beginning to threaten the ELC system and the governments timber fortune.

In 2014, much as a result of Ouchs persistence, the government cancelled nearly 50,000 acres of ELCs granted to Try Pheap Group inside the Virachey National Park, which is home to sun bears, small-clawed otters and dholes, an endangered species of wild dog.

Ouchs work has put him at immense personal risk. It is unusual for a whistleblower in Cambodia to be so openly critical and willing to identify himself. A Global Witness report released last year revealed that Cambodian activists have been killed for standing up against these injustices. Today, Ouch lives in hiding following numerous threats to him and his family. Despite this danger, he continues fighting rampant government corruption to save the Cambodian forest for future generations.

Ouch wants to make the international community aware of the devastation caused by ELCs and illegal logging. To discourage the government from continuing this practice, Ouch calls for people around the world to make sure any wood furniture they purchase is sourced sustainably.

Watch here:

Puerto Rican Man Saves One of the Islands Last Few Pristine, Undeveloped Coastal Strips

For more than 15 years a battle has been fought over a segment of pristine coastline on the Atlantic tip of Puerto Rico known as the Northeast Ecological Corridor (the corridor). The 3,000-acre area nestled between the seaside municipalities of Luquillo and Fajardo is highly biologically diverse. Comprised of a patchwork of public and private parcels, the corridor is home to nearly 900 varieties of flora and fauna, including several endangered species such as the leatherback sea turtle. Often referred to as an ecological wonderland, the corridor packs coastal wetlands, mangroves, tropical rain forest and desert-like habitat into a relatively small area.

Luis Jorge Rivera Herrera. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

In the 1990s, private developers seeking prime real estate for luxury hotel projects quietly arranged with politicians to build two mega-resorts along corridor beaches. Residents and environmental advocates didnt want the untouched area to succumb to development like so many other places in Puerto Rico. One local man has steadfastly combined legal savvy and traditional organizing to unite communities against the development.

Luis Jorge Rivera Herrera, 43, is an environmental scientist who grew up on a family farm near Luquillo that has been passed down through four generations. Living and surfing in the corridor, Rivera Herrera was awestruck by nature from an early age. Rivera Herrera was especially taken by the massive female leatherback sea turtles that haul themselves onto the beaches to lay eggs. Then hatchlings, scarcely the size of a human hand, scamper into the ocean. The corridor is one of a dwindling number of suitable nesting sites for the largest species of sea turtle. Rivera Herrera believes the corridor is Puerto Ricos natural patrimony, and that it should be kept safe for humans, sea turtles and other wildlife to enjoy.

When the Puerto Rican government announced proposals to build the San Miguel and Dos Mares resorts in 1999projects that were backed by Marriott and Four SeasonsRivera Herrera sprung into action. He gathered data about the corridors ecosystems and paired it with details about the resorts construction plans. Rivera Herrera brought this information to the communities, and he also brought community members to the proposed resort sites to emphasize what was at stake.

After years of raising awareness among local people, Rivera Herrera founded the Coalition for the Northeast Ecological Corridor (NECC) in 2005 to formalize his volunteer efforts and those of community groups. This included the Puerto Rico chapter of the Sierra Club, which had recently been established on the island with the corridors conservation as its flagship issue. This marked a turning point for the campaign.

Rivera Herrera initiated a legislative act to protect the corridor as a nature reserve. The bill failed to pass in the legislature, but Governor Anibal Vila saw enough public support to pass an executive order in 2007. However, in a stunning example of the precariousness of legal protections, the next governor, Luis Fortuno, repealed the corridors designation a mere two years later. This repeal caused speculation about the independence of Fortunos decision given that Dos Mares resort contributed funds to his campaign.

In spite of this crushing setback, Rivera Herrera parlayed widespread public outcry over Fortunos reversal to mount a second attempt to pass a bill that would permanently protect the corridor. His legislative campaign found success in 2012, and the following year, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla signed the bill into law, protecting the corridors public lands and ending the threat of development.

Due to financial constraints that have prohibited Puerto Ricos Department of Natural and Environmental Resources from hiring a manager for the newly protected corridor, Rivera Herrera is acting as interim manager. He is working with others to develop a plan to develop sustainable tourism in the corridor. His biggest challenge, however, is raising funds to purchase the private parcels that remain in the corridor, a condition of the bill that must be met within eight years. The government earmarked funds for this purpose but they are in jeopardy due to Puerto Ricos fiscal crisis.

Watch here:

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Environmental Lawyer Breathes Life into the Law to Stop Landfills in Slovakian Villages

For years, Slovakia has been a cheap and willing customer in the dumping of Western EU countries waste. Its loose construction lawswhich govern the management of waste disposal facilitiesdo little to prevent under-the-table deals between the national government and private developers, while individual municipalities are left with little choice but to store unwanted waste that they have no hand in approving. As a result, in villages across Slovakia illegal landfills sit just meters away from residential areas and leach toxic chemicals into the soil and groundwater. They also release pollutants into the atmosphere, creating environmental and human health hazards that last for decades.

Zuzana Caputova. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

At a glance, the town of Pezinoklocated just 13 miles outside the capital of Bratislavaseems to be an exception. Vineyards that once produced royal wine surround the small town at the base of the Little Carpathian Mountains. Yet, the rate of leukemia in Pezinok is eight times higher than the Slovak average. A landfill built in the 1960s, without any permits, sits at the towns edge, containing waste from medical facilities and chemical factories. Despite Pezinoks 2002 urban plan, which prohibited landfills within the city limits, construction began on a second landfill in 2003 due to the owners connections with regional authorities. Though the countrys nascent democratic system that operates on clientelism would have ordinarily provided an easy path for this new project, one community member began a fight that would challenge business as usual.

Zuzana Caputova, 42, resides in Pezinok with her two young children. Having been born and raised in the town, the environmental lawyer was all too familiar with the negative effects of its illegal landfill. When the local people needed a leader to fight against the new landfill, they reached out to Caputova for help. But Caputova did more than mobilize her community. She combined legal know-how and bottom-up activism to take on the Slovakian peoples illegal dumping problem in law and in practice.

Noted as one of the largest grassroots efforts since the Velvet Revolution, Caputovas fight to stop Pezinoks landfills marked one of the first times local residents took a stand on the waste dump issue. Caputova filed injunctions to shut down the older landfill, then turned her attention to halting construction on the new landfill before it was too late.

While Caputova and her public advocacy law firm, Via Iuris, filed petitions with officials to stop the new landfill, she also encouraged residents to organize. What resulted was a citizens initiative called Dumps Dont Belong in Towns, as well as the uncovering of illegal permits that gave Caputova the indisputable evidence she needed. By empowering others, Caputova inspired a demonstration involving 67,000 locals that convinced the municipality to acquiesce and cease the landfill construction.

But Caputovas fight did not end in Pezinok. In 2014, residents of nearby village, Smolenice, contacted her. They had heard of Pezinoks success and sought Caputovas help to stop a waste gasification plant that would convert garbage into fuel and electricity using a new, untested technology. The people of Smolenice didnt want to be guinea pigs. Caputova helped them prevail and since then eight other municipalities in Slovakia facing similar struggles have received help from Caputova.

Notably, Caputova has set her sights at the federal level to address the legal root of the landfill issue once and for all. She recently assisted in drafting an amendment to Slovakias 49-year-old Construction Lawthe source of the problem when it comes to the harmful effects of waste storage. The amendment would give a larger voice to municipal governments and increase public participation in the waste disposal and landfill development process. The Construction Law will be reviewed by parliament in March of 2016 and many have indicated support for the amendment.

To further the legal assistance of many Slovakian municipalitiesand strengthen the countrys judiciary system through advocacyCaputova is encouraging all supporters to donate to Via Iuris, the not-for-profit public advocacy firm that she has partnered with to fight these landfills and challenge the Construction Law.

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Peruvian Grandmothers Struggle to Stop Mega-Mine in Andean Highlands

Like many developing countries, Peru is the site of natural resource extraction projects that drive out local people with legal rights to their land. Corrupt private partnerships with regional governments and international investors leave the ordinary people whose lives are affected with nowhere to turn. But in a remote corner of Perus northern highlands, one woman has put a wrench in the plans of Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corporation, which is angling to build a huge mining project in her backyard.

Maxima Acuna. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

Maxima Acuna, 47, is a subsistence farmer, grandmother and unwitting activist whose fight to prevent Newmont from building the Conga Mine was born of her drive to protect her land and her right to peacefully live off of it. An unconventional environmental champion, Acuna has no formal schooling nor is she affiliated with any advocacy organization. Yet her iron spine and deep sense of injustice have put her at the forefront of a movement to stop the Conga Mine.

More than 20 years ago, Acuna and her husband purchased the land that they live on and farm. Their 60-acre homestead is located at the edge of Laguna Azul (Blue Lake), one of several high-altitude lakes that supply fresh water for her family and that of countless others downstream. The stark Andean mountain terrain has rich soil in which Acuna grows her crops, and native grasses that sustain her livestock.

In 2011, the Peruvian government granted Newmont a 7,400-acre concession to build the Conga Mine that included Acunas property. In order to move forward with the project, Newmont would need access to Acunas land. Her parcel provides optimal access to Laguna Azul, one of four lakes that Newmont plans to drain and convert into tailings ponds to collect toxic mining byproducts such as cyanide and arsenic.

After receiving the concession, Newmont representatives tried to persuade Acuna to sell her property. She refused, knowing that the mine would poison the regions fresh water, and because she feels a deep connection to the land she has tended for more than two decades. A year later, in 2012, Newmont won a lawsuit against Acuna in a local court, having accused her family of squatting on land Newmont claims it purchased as part of a bundle of properties.

Acuna enlisted the help of GRUFIDES, a local NGO that provides legal assistance for rural communities against mining companies. With GRUFIDES help, Acuna appealed the local verdict in a higher regional court, often walking 10 hours over treacherous mountain paths to make her court appearances. In 2014, the higher court overturned the original verdict, lifting the criminal charges against Acuna. While this victory meant that Newmont couldnt proceed with building the mine, it has come at a high personal cost for Acuna as the company continues to dispute Acunas land rights and harass her family.

Since refusing to be bought out, Acuna and her family have been monitored and threatened. Peruvian state police, working as private security contractors on behalf of Newmont and its subsidiaries, tried to evict her and they forbade her from planting crops on her land. Newmont put up a fence around her land, restricting Acunas movement. Agents have destroyed her home two times, razing the structure and absconding with her possessions. When Acuna and her daughter tried to intervene they were beaten unconscious.

Despite relentless harassment, Acuna is standing her ground. She never sold her land to Newmont and wont hand it over. In the oral tradition, Acuna sings about her struggle to protect the land and her way of life. The lyrics of her songs communicate her wisdom and her voice reflects the trauma she has endured. However, Acunas open expression and warm smile convey that she wont allow her spirit to be crushed.

Newmont may appeal the regional courts decision in the Peruvian Supreme Court in order to move forward with the mine. For the time being, Acuna has managed to block the construction of the Conga Mine in a region of Peru where one-half of all land has been granted to extraction projects.

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Tanzanian Community Leader Secures Indigenous Land Rights through Innovative Use of Land Law

The native people of Tanzania are better known for their colorful cultural expressions than for their innovative approaches to addressing land rights disputes. Despite enduring decades of displacements, pastoralist and hunter-gatherer indigenous communities like the Maasai and the Hadzabe have co-existed with wildebeests, gazelles, rhinoceroses and other mega-fauna in Tanzanias arid rangelands for more than 40,000 years. Due to government policies that have prioritized foreign investment and development over traditional land use practices, the Maasai and Hadzabe constantly face the threat of losing their land, and with it their ways of life. One man has been able to secure hundreds of thousands of acres of indigenous territory via the creative application of a law intended to manage village land.

Edward Loure. Photo credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize

Edward Loure, 44, is a member of the Maasai people and is the Program Coordinator for the Simanjiro region with nonprofit Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT). Having grown up during a time when the government forcibly evicted the Maasai from their communities in order to create national parks, Loure was inspired to demonstrate that native peoples are good stewards of the land, caring for ecosystems while practicing traditional livelihood activities such as livestock grazing. Recognizing that the lack of legal documentation demarcating indigenous territory allowed outside actors to buy up land they considered to be unclaimed, Loure set about making the Maasai and Hadzabes plans for their ancestral lands intelligible to the state.

During the last 50 years, land that was historically populated by endemic peoples has been sold to commercial hunting and eco-tourism operations, or to large-scale commercial farmers who produce crops for export. To date, the Maasai have lost more than 150,000 acres of rangeland across northern Tanzania. As the supply of available land in Tanzania decreases, pressure on areas managed by the Maasai and Hadzabe, often perceived as empty, increases. This has resulted in multiple clashes between indigenous people and outsiders. The Maasai and Hadzabe defend against encroachments on their land and reject assumptions that they dont protect habitat and wildlife.

In 2003, Loure and UCRT set out to address the problem. They began meeting with indigenous community members and village leaders to discuss an unprecedented approach to documenting land rights. Loure used a provision called the Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO) from the Tanzanian Village Land Act to formalize land rights for the Maasai and Hadzabe. The rule was meant to manage individual land holdings within villages; however, Loure used it to recognize land rights on behalf of a community.

When they approached communities about creating CCROs, Loure and UCRT were met with apprehension. Maasai and Hadzabe people had been misled in the past. But over many conversations, Loure worked with communities to map the boundaries of their territories and create land use plans. In the years Loure spent shepherding the creation of CCROs, and navigating conflicts, he gained the trust of the people and earned a reputation for fairness and inclusion. It is not common for a Maasai man to work on behalf of the Hadzabe people but they knew he had their best interests at heart.

By 2013, after nearly a decade of work, Loure had secured more than 200,000 acres of land for the Maasai and Hadzabe using CCROs. For the Hadzabe, Loure negotiated an agreement between the group and Carbon Tanzania, a nonprofit, for the Hadzabe to be paid for the carbon sequestered in their forests.

Loures success has inspired other indigenous groups to use the same tactic to protect land, and Loure is currently working on 12 additional CCROs to secure rights for more than 970,000 acres of land, mostly in northern Tanzania.

Looking ahead, Loure hopes the success of CCROs will draw awareness to the issue of land rights for indigenous people and increase support in Tanzania. To further the development of CCROs, Loure and UCRT need funds to support their work. Those interested in helping are encouraged to donate to the local fund for UCRT, here.

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One of Monsantos former companies, among nine contractors responsible for creating Agent Orange, sprayed more than 20 million gallons of the herbicide on an area of South Vietnam about the size of the state of Massachusetts between 1962 and 1971.

In a caustic plot twist, the Vietnamese government says it hopes to have 30 to 50 percent of its cropland planted with GMOs by 2020exactly 55 years after the U.S. government first devastated Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding areas.

U.S. Huey helicopter spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam. Wikimedia Commons

Monsanto and the U.S. government alike have issued statements saying Monsanto deserves no blame for making chemical agents that have caused hundreds of thousands of birth defects and contaminated Vietnams land so inexorably that even without applying additional herbicides to transgenic crops, they shall remain toxic for decades.

Babies are still being born today with horrific birth defectsdecades after Agent Orange was sprayed so haphazardly across Vietnam. Nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese people have been exposed, causing 400,000 deaths and a grab bag of health issues that would make a haunted house seem cheery. An estimated 650,000 victims are suffering from chronic illnesses linked to Agent Orange in Vietnam, alone.

The Vietnamese government has never officially stated its stance on the grievous actions of Monsanto and other military contractors for the U.S., focusing instead on reparations for victims of Agent Orange. As one of the makers of Agent Orange, Monsanto claims they were just following the recipe for the formula as directed by the U.S. government.

Instead, the country seems to be embracing a company headquartered in the U.S. and its incessant propaganda promoting genetically modified organisms.

Furthermore, dioxin, found in Agent Orange, is one of the most dangerous chemicals ever made by man. Though the U.S. military carries out orders to help remove dioxin hot-spots, their actions include heating the old Da Nang air base to temperatures above 600 degrees Fahrenheit, a level said to render the toxin harmless. There is no scientific proof that this even works.

A draft report released for public comment in September 1994 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency clearly describes dioxin as a serious public health threat, yet Cao Duc Phat, Vietnams former agriculture minister says theres no problem. GMOs are a scientific achievement of humankind, and Vietnam needs to embrace them as soon as possible, he stated.

This is a surprising statement since dioxin and other herbicides are part of the overall platform upon which genetically modified crops are sold. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in recent years, more than 93 percent of soy planted in America was herbicide tolerant, meaning it was engineered to withstand herbicides (sold by the same companies who patent and sell the seeds).

Although the toxicity of dioxins harms human health through other means of contamination, such as through industrial emissions, Enlist Duo, the latest herbicidal development by Dow Agrochemical and Monsanto is a combination of both 2,4-D and glyphosate. It has been called the Agent Orange of GMOs by environmentalists, though others dispute this fact.

Meanwhile, Monsanto, who has absolved themselves from any responsibility in practically defecating on Vietnam with their insidious chemicals, is creating yet a new herbicide for use in the U.S. Companies like Dow Chemical and Bayer are also implicated in putting more dioxin into the environmentand they too promote the GMO agenda.

Enlist Duothe latest herbicide, which is a combination of 2,4-D (another component of Agent Orange), choline and glyphosateis set to be approved anytime.

Dekalb Vietnam, which operates under U.S. mega-corporation Monsanto; Pioneer Hi-Bred Vietnam, under the U.S.s Dupont; and Syngenta of Switzerland have been licensed to carry out lab research and tests on genetically-modified seeds in Vietnam since 2011.

Moreover, Monsanto received the endorsement of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, which announced that their worm- and weed-killer-resistant varieties are environmentally friendly.

Fifty-five years after rendering almost an entire country cancerous, chemical companies like Monsanto are welcomed with open arms into Vietnam. It boggles the mind.

Reposted with permission from UndergroundReporter.org.
During his final UN General Assembly address, President Obama pressed for a sense of urgency in bringing the Paris agreement into force and for scaling up ambition on climate action. He also called for more clean energy investment in developing countries.

According to the United Nations, 30 countries are expected to formally join the Paris agreement during Wednesdays event at the UN.

A group of 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, warned that a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement would hurt the nations international credibility and undermine the climate pact.

In an open letter, the scientists voiced concern about Donald Trump, saying, It is of great concern that the Republican nominee for president has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord. The U.S. should continue to be a global leader on climate no matter the result of the election, the scientists advocated.

#Trump Promises an 'Energy Revolution': Roll Back Env Regs, Bolster Coal Industry & 'Cancel' Paris Agreement https://t.co/PxObkkHKbq @NRDC  EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) August 9, 2016

Climate change is a known fact, and todays letter speaks to the disastrous threat that those who deny science pose to our country and the world, Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce said. In signing the Paris climate agreement, more than 190 countries recognized the need to act, yet America now faces the possibility of electing a candidate who would tear up this accord and steer us straight into further climate disruption.

Stephen Hawking to Larry King(@kingsthings): 'We Certainly Have Not Become Less Greedy or Less Stupid' https://t.co/jpU6W08FkL  EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) June 28, 2016

For a deeper dive:

Politico Pro, NPR, Climate Home, VOA News, New York Times, Guardian, AP

News: Reuters, New York Times, Mercury News, Minnesota Public Radio, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Times New Herald, Xinhua

Commentary: Guardian, John Abraham column

For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.
(Photo: WCC)Olav Fykse Tveit (L), general secretary of the World Council of Churches, and Pope Francis meeting during a Sept. 18-20 interreligious conference in Assisi, Italy.

Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist religious leaders met this week in Assisi to discuss peace, while across the ocean in New York City global political leaders assembled at the United Nations also focused on a troubled world, discussing refugees and migrants.

The Sept. 18-20 interreligious conference in Italy organized by the Community of Sant' Egidio was titled "Thirst for Peace: Faiths and Cultures in Dialogue" and drew some 450 religious leaders.

Among ecumenical participants were the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, and other leaders of the ecumenical movement, such as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew; and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

Pope Francis participated in the closing ceremony of the World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi on the afternoon of 20 September.

Quoting Matthew 5:9, "Blessed are the peacemakers," Francis said, "We thirst for peace. We desire to witness to peace. And above all, we need to pray for peace, because peace is God's gift, and it lies with us to plead for it, embrace it, and build it every day with God's help."

He said, "Our religious traditions are diverse. But our differences are not the cause of conflict and provocation, or a cold distance between us. We have not prayed against one another today, as has unfortunately sometimes occurred in history."

Continuing his remarks, the Pope said, "Peace means welcome, openness to dialogue, the overcoming of closed-mindedness, which is not a strategy for safety, but rather a bridge over an empty space. Peace means cooperation, a concrete and active exchange with another, who is a gift and not a problem, a brother or sister with whom to build a better world."

THE ROOTS OF RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

Tveit led a panel on terrorism and religious extremism, entitled "Terrorism - A Denial of God."

"No one can claim the name of God to use terror or violence," said Tveit. "Terror is a blasphemy against God our creator, who created all of us equally in the image of God. Terror is sin against other human beings, against the sanctity of life, and therefore against God.

Tveit noted that, "The ideology underlying those attacks is a mixture of political, cultural and surely religious justifications of violence. A key factor is the denial of the humanness of the 'others' that become the target."

"Terror is not a matter of figures or pictures from somewhere, it is about us as human beings. We can all become the victims of terror," he said, telling of how he himself escaped a terror attack in Bologna on Aug. 2, 1980, and how he later was reminded of it when reading the list of names in the new Bologna station years later.

In terrorism, Tveit noted, "The transcendent, transformative and holistic dimensions of religion are reduced to a totalitarian ideology that justifies and imposes itself in destructive ways and does not accept any responsibility for life-giving relationships beyond their own group and even within their own group as a collective entity.

But religions themselves are part of the problem, he insisted. "We should be critical and self-critical. There must be space for self-critique and repentance, for constructive imagination that opens doors for healing and reconciliation and the life-giving presence of God who renews all life."

Din Syamsuddin, chairman of the advisory council of the Indonesian Council of Ulama, expressed "high appreciation" to the lay Community of Sant'Egidio for "having kept alive the spirit of Assisi" by organizing the event each year.

Noting that Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country, Syamsuddin said the cooperation "has brought concrete fruits of peace such as our common work in interfaith dialogue, peace education among youth, peace process and conflict resolution in Mindanao, South Philippines."

The gathering each year has helped moreover, he added, "to materialize our common ideals for peaceful coexistence and collaboration. To say, and to show, with concrete actions, that violent extremism in the name of religion is indeed misuse and even abuse of religion."

RABBI RECALLS NAZI CAMP

In his remarks, Rabbi David Brodman, Chief Rabbi of Savyon, Israel, recalled his own childhood at a Nazi concentration camp, and his frequent talks to young people today "because [he] who does not know history is condemned to repeat it."

The Spirit of Assisi, he affirmed, "is the best example for humility and holiness and it is the answer to the tragedy of the Shoah and of every war."

In Assisi, he stressed, "We say to the world that it is possible to become friends and to live together in peace, even if we are different." With the courage of dialogue, he said, conflicts can be prevented and a human world created "where everybody can recognize in others the image of God."

PRECONDITIONS OF PEACE

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said in his remarks that peace "needs a few cornerstones to uphold it even when it is endangered."

He said, "There can be no peace without mutual respect and acknowledgment.... There can be no peace without justice; there can be no peace without fruitful cooperation among all the peoples in the world."

Bartholomew said humanity needs to be able reflect on where it goes wrong or where it has not taken care, "because fundamentalisms have risen, threatening not only dialogue with others, but even dialogue within our own selves, our very own consciences.

"We have to be able to isolate them, to purify them, in the light of our faiths, to transform them into richness for all," he said, Vatican Radio reported.

Bartholomew was granted an honorary doctorate in international relations by the University for Foreigners of Perugia during the conference.

Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby reflected in an ecumenical prayer ceremony on the misconception in today's world that money makes one rich.

"We think ourselves rich," he said, "Our money and wealth is like the toy money in a children's game: it may buy goods in our human economies which seem so powerful, but in the economy of God it is worthless. We are only truly rich when we accept mercy from God, through Christ our Saviour."

The conference marked the 30th anniversary of the first interfaith "World Day of Prayer for Peace" held in Assisi first under then-Pope John Paul II, who has since been elevated to sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church.

Assisi was the home of St Francis, in whose honour the current pope chose his papal name.
(Twitter/Sense8)"Sense8" season 2 has been plagued with rumors of cancellation, but filming goes in different parts of the world. The show is about eight individuals with a special connection.

Rumors about the cancellation of "Sense8" season 2 have been making the rounds for months now. Netflix has not commented on it, but it looks like there is no truth to such talks as the cast and crew are spotted in Malta going on with production.

A local newspaper, Malta Today, gathered news that creator, director, and producer Lana Wachowski, together with actresses Tuppence Middleton and Doona Bae, will shoot some scenes at the Mediterranean Water Tanks in Kalakara. At the time of publication, it is not known how long filming in Malta will take place, but it is possible that more of the cast will follow.

Production for the second season of "Sense8" has faced production problems earlier on. Actor Aml Ameen, who played Capheus in the first season, left the show while filming for the second season for unconfirmed reasons. It is widely speculated, however, that he was in constant conflict with Wachowski brought about by creative differences.

Ameen has since been replaced by actor Toby Onwumere, who seems to have hit off with the others right away. It is not known whether scenes already filmed by Ameen have been reshot or the change in appearance will be included in the plot.

After Ameen, another problem with new cast Sikander Kher has been reported. According to rumors, he has been demanding something the network cannot afford to give him. Budget constraints also plagued the show; however, no representative has come out to deny or confirm rumors.

It may look like there may be no truth to talks surrounding difficulty with Kher, however, as his character is reportedly bound to play a big role in the conflict between sensates Wolfgang (Max Riemelt) and Kala (Tina Desai) who already figure in a love triangle.

If earlier news were to believed, Netlflix will release the first episodes within this year and the rest follows when another year starts.
Terrence Rideau was a middle school student when his mother, Breggett Rideau, noticed his unexplained injuries at the end of the school daya severe bruise on his head, a dislocated knee, a fractured thumb.

Now 21, Terrence has severe cognitive and physical disabilities and uses a wheelchair. He could not tell his parents what was happening in his classroom. But what the Keller, Texas, family learned over years of legal battles led to a $1 million jury verdict against the school district, and eventually to a law that makes Texas the first state in the country to require cameras to be installed in self-contained special education classrooms at parent or teacher request.

That law, which went into effect this school year, has raised complex questions about the cost to districts, student and teacher privacy, and even whether cameras will meet the goal of protecting children.

On the cost issue, for example: Texas districts have interpreted the law to mean that when a parent or teacher makes a request, cameras need only be installed in the classroom where that parents child is taught or where that teacher provides instruction.

But well after the start of the school year in Texas, the state attorney general said that the law as currently written means that one request from a parent or teacher will trigger installation of cameras in all the self-contained classrooms in a district. Thats not what the camera-law sponsors said they intended, but that interpretation means that districts might need to shoulder a potentially multimillion-dollar expense all at once.

Rideau sees the attorney generals guidance, which was released last week, as a triumph. She wants to help all children in the state who are as vulnerable as her son was to abuse.

There is nothing you do in the United States outside of your house that is not on camera, said Rideau, who said that her son is doing well in his last year in the 35,000-student Keller district. If youre a not a thief, it doesnt bother you when youre at Walmart. But if youre a thief, a camera is a hindrance. Were going to protect canned goods more than we protect children?

Rideau eventually learned that Lil Ts middle school teacher had kicked him and other students, and dropped him at least once when moving him to and from his wheelchair. She has been called by families from around the country, who ask how they can have similar camera laws passed in their own state.

How these states write these laws that protect the teachers and the staff and not the reasons for their jobs, which are the students, Ill never know, Rideau said.

Long Path to Passage

The road to cameras in Texas for those classrooms was a long one. And it started with Terrences bruises and injuries.

School officials first told his family they didnt know how Terrence was being injured. But later, the Rideaus found out that other school staff members had reported that Terrences self-contained classroom teacher was handling students roughly, particularly those who needed the most care, such as Terrence. The teacher reportedly even engaged in petty slights, such as eating the cookies that were part of Terrences lunch.

The Rideaus didnt find out about those concerns until two years after they were reported. The $1 million jury award is believed to be one of the largest of its kind against a school district for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, said the Rideaus lawyers.

The federal government does not keep records on how many children are injured in special education classrooms. However, it does keep track of how many special education students are restrained and secluded at schools, which can lead to injury. According to the U.S. Department of Education, about 12 percent of all students receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but special education students were 67 percent of students restrained or secluded during the 2013-14 school year.

Rideau said that cameras in the classroom would have made it easier to prove what was happening to her son. She visited with lawmakers dozens of times, arguing for a camera bill. During the last legislative session, she drained her retirement savings and hired a lobbyist to shepherd the bill through. It passed in 2015.

But some disability advocates say that cameras, while seeming to provide protections, may cause additional problems.

TASH, an advocacy organization that works on behalf of people with severe disabilities, released a position paper in 2015 saying that it opposed cameras in special education classrooms. Among the organizations concerns: Cameras might drive abuse underground into private areas that are unmonitored. Schools and parents might also be swayed into placing children in self-contained classrooms with cameras for their perceived safety, when the child could be more fully included in general education classrooms, which are camera-free.

Self-contained classrooms are those designated specifically for students with severe disabilities. Often, the students in such classrooms require assistance with personal needs, such as feeding or toileting, and instruction is generally focused on life skills. But many students with complex support needs can still learn in regular education classrooms, TASH argues.

These camera laws have the potential for new and more entrenched types of discrimination and abuse to emerge, the organization said in its position paper.

School districts, on the other hand, focused primarily on the costs. The legislators estimated that classroom cameras might cost districts around $150 each, but thats way too low, said Amanda Bigbee, the lawyer for the Keller district. Theres no way you can do all the functionality that is required at that cost. The video recording must cover the entire classroom, in some cases must capture audio, and the video must be saved for no fewer than six months. Theres no provision in the law for removing the cameras, other than if the room is converted to something other than a self-contained special education classroom.

The Keller district has had requests for seven cameras and has installed six already, at a cost of $2,500 to $3,000, Bigbee said.

Attorney General Ken Paxtons legal guidance has districts particularly concerned. Nothing in the law restricts requests to one classroom, he wrote in a letter to the Texas Education Agency.

That guidance represents a paralyzing financial burden, to be honest, said Bigbee. The Keller district has about 120 self-contained special education classrooms. I suspect were going to take a deep breath and see what the [TEA] has to say.

A Delicate Situation

Sarah Orman, a senior staff lawyer for the Texas Association of School Boards, said that districts might decide its worth it in the long run to interpret the law in accordance with the sponsors intent, which is that requests be handled on a classroom-by-classroom basis. Doing so would be counter to the attorney generals assessment, but with the legislative session starting again in a few months, districts may decide that it is worth waiting to see if the law is amended, she said.

Also, the Texas law does not cite a time frame for when cameras must be installed after a request is received, Orman noted.

Its going to be a very delicate situation, she said. When districts receive camera requestsand dozens have come in since the start of the school year, Texas newspapers report"were encouraging them to see it as an opportunity to build trust with parents.

The funding concerns might be unimportant if the cameras protected students with disabilities from harm, but thats not clear. Janna Lilly, the director of governmental relations for the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, said a camera vendor told her that people tend to forget the cameras are there. Lillys organization supported the bill but wanted state funding to help pay for it.

TASHs concerns, in addition to the potential of prompting abuse out of the cameras view and less inclusion, is that the cameras might be used to provide surveillance on students themselves. Instead of cameras, the organization wants more widespread adoption of schoolwide behavior-management programs and fewer students placed in isolated, self-contained settings.

Emotional Topic

Such arguments may find it hard to make headway against the power of video, however. More than 27,000 people have joined the Cameras in Special Needs Classrooms Facebook community, which features troubling images of cut and bruised children and news stories about students injured at school.

A Plano parent, Beth Watson, testified on behalf of the camera bill in Texas. A classroom camera recorded a 2012 incident in which a Plano teacher dragged Watsons then 8-year-old son with autism into a calm room and knocked the child to the floor as he removed the boys shoes. The teacher then held the calm-room door closed with his body.

The camera didnt prevent the teachers behavior. But it did provide evidence that backed up the students story. An investigation of the incident did not start until two years later, when a local television station started asking questions.

With her son sitting on her lap, Watson told the committee that the video gave her family power. Because that video is there, she said, we are now able to seek justice for Micah and make a difference in other childrens lives by making sure that these things cannot happen to other children.






Japfa strengthens consumer food capabilities through joint venture with Cargill



PT So Good Food, a wholly-owned Indonesian subsidiary of leading agri-food company Japfa Ltd, and PT Cargill Food Investment Indonesia, a part of global agri-business leader Cargill Inc., have entered into a 40-60 joint venture to produce and supply fully-cooked poultry products in Indonesia.

The strategic partnership will further boost PT So Good Food's capabilities in consumer food processing technologies, product innovation and quality assurance by leveraging Cargill's broad industry expertise. Both Japfa and Cargill will also work together to produce a new range of value-added consumer food products.

Besides toll manufacturing for PT So Good Food, the joint venture company, PT Cahaya Gunung Foods, will supply high quality products to well-established and reputable quick service restaurants as well as hotels, the food service sector, convenience stores and petrol kiosks in Indonesia. The joint venture will also have the capability to export products to the region.

Cementing partnership, strengthening capabilities

On Japfa's latest partnership, Tan Yong Nang, CEO of the company, explained: "We are pleased to further cement our relationship with Cargill, whom we have had a long standing business relationship with. To be selected as Cargill's JV partner is testament of Japfa's high quality, food safety and welfare standards. We look forward to strengthening our capabilities and know-how with Cargill's broad industry expertise, and deliver even better quality chicken products."

Derek Schoonbaert, managing director of PT Cahaya Gunung Foods, stated: "Indonesia is an important growth market for Cargill. This is our first venture in the poultry business in Indonesia and we are excited to be partnering with Japfa. We will implement our world-class systems and processes to ensure high quality chicken products through our broad industry expertise and quality standards.

The joint venture will initially operate out of PT So Good Food's existing value-added meat plant at Boyolali, Indonesia, and take over the employment of employees at the processing facility. Both companies will look to invest and expand the operations together, focusing on new premium products.

Meanwhile, PT So Good Food will continue to operate its four meat processing plants in Indonesia, focused on producing downstream branded ready-to-eat consumer food products such as chicken nuggets, meat balls and shelf-stable sausages.

Growing appetite in Indonesia

According to Euromonitor, Indonesia is the largest foodservice market in ASEAN. The value sales for Indonesia's foodservice market grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.7% from 2010 to 2014, reaching US$36.8 billion in 2014, which was about US$14 billion higher than the next largest ASEAN market, Thailand.

Full-service restaurants, fast food and street stalls / kiosks are the top three growth drivers for Indonesia's foodservice market. The sales value of the foodservice market is estimated to increase at a CAGR of 9.0% from 2015 to 2019 to hit US$56.3 million by end 2018.

"As the world's fourth most populous nation, Indonesia's foodservice market offers immense opportunities. Today, our So Good, So Good Sozzis and So Nice brands are already award-winning household brands in Indonesia for processed meats such as chicken nuggets, meat balls and shelf- stable sausages. Our (joint venture) with Cargill will take us a step further into new growth segments with a wider range of consumer food products," concluded Tan.




FAMSUN continues to contribute to safe grain processing in Africa





In March 2013, FAMSUN funded the establishment of FAMSUN Industrial Co., Ltd. Egypt in cooperation with the China-Africa Development Fund (CADFund), and the company continues to improve the safe storage and processing of grains in African countries.

The project was operational as of October 2015. Supported by the latest automatic equipment, the quality of the products from FAMSUN Industrial Co., Ltd. Egypt takes the lead in the industry. The total silo capacity of the steel silos manufactured by the company has reached up to 4.9 million tonnes, significantly improving the safe storage and processing of grains in African countries. The company has also continued to drive local employment and the development of agriculture and animal husbandry in Africa.

Beginning from 2005, FAMSUN has successfully completed over 115 projects in Africa. The company has fulfilled a number of agricultural assistance projects in Angola, Congo and Mozambique, boosting food safety and the general development of the countries, and is said to have gained their recognition and advocacy.
To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020.




1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
Manx smokers urged to quit in October

Manx smokers are being encouraged to take part in the annual Stoptober campaign.

The Department of Health and Social Care is backing the UK event - which encourages smokers not to light up for 28 days from October 1st.

Studies suggest smokers who manage four weeks smoke-free are five times more likely to kick the habit for good.

Those interested in taking on the challenge can get a free quit kit from the Government's Quit4You service, which includes tips and a progress chart.
Woman and child taken to hospital after lifeboat rescue



Peel lifeboat helps the stricken vessel into the harbour.

A woman and child had to be taken to Noble's Hospital after being rescued from a sinking trawler in the early hours of the morning.

Peel lifeboat crew were called out at 1.30am after a converted fishing vessel started taking on water during a trip from Glasgow to Conwy.

Two war ships, three helicopters and a Northern Irish fishing vessel all took part in the operation, which was 11 miles west of Peel.

The lifeboat started to bring the trawler back to the town, but dropped the tow to rush the woman and child to the port when they fell ill.

After the pair were met by an ambulance, the lifeboat returned to the stricken vessel, escorting it into the harbour at 5am.
Airline with Manx routes votes for strikes

One of the airlines that serves the Island could be heading for strikes after voting in favour of industrial action.

Employees of easyJet - which operates three routes in and out of Ronaldsway - are unhappy at having to work while fatigued.

Union BALPA is hoping to avoid a walkout though, with talks between workers and the company due to take place tomorrow.

The airline has come under fire from Manx travellers recently because of punctuality and cancellations.

88% of pilots and 96% of workers in total voted in favour of action.
Gibbs' team is on the case once more, albeit with a few fresh faces. NCIS returns tonight, and fans can catch all the action with an online live stream.

Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) departed the long-running drama last spring, and it will take three characters to fill his shoes. Starting in the premiere, McGee and co. will join forces with Special Agent Alexandra "Alex" Quinn (Jennifer Esposito), a former field agent who Gibbs (Mark Harmon) will pull back into the fray, and Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), an agent who emerges from deep cover to act as the catalyst for the opening episode. MI6 Officer Clayton Reeves (Duane Henry), who made his debut in season 13's finale episodes, will come back into play later this fall.

Titled "Rogue," tonight's premiere will center on Nick's investigation and his fiery return.

"The NCIS team investigates a deadly car explosion in D.C. that connects to NCIS Special Agent Nicholas "Nick" Torres, who disappeared six months ago while on a deep undercover assignment in Argentina," CBS teased. "Also, Gibbs asks NCIS Special Agent Alexandra "Alex" Quinn to shadow his team after rejecting eight agents she instructed and referred for the open position."

Despite Weatherly's departure, NCIS will continue to deliver the same high-quality stories viewers are accustomed to.

"It's a new season, a different season, but it's the same NCIS," executive producer Gary Glasberg promised, according to TV Guide. "It's the same recipe. We just added some new ingredients. I'm excited for everybody to see what our new team is like."

Catch tonight's episode at 8 p.m. ET on CBS or tune in for an online live stream here.
Last Tuesday, 24-year-old Jacqueline Vandagriff was seen leaving Shots and Crafts in Denton's Fry Street bar district with a man. That was the last time she was seen alive.

The man she was leaving the bar with, 30-year-old Charles Dean Bryant, had been previously accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend. His former lover was so bothered by his repeated acts of harassment that she called the police on him. A judge later issued a protective order against the stalker.

Vandagriff's body was found the next day, dismembered and burned in a park in Grapevine, Tex., several miles away from the bar where she was last seen alive. A witness later linked Bryant to the murder, after he was seen standing by the fire and driving away in an SUV.

What was rather unusual, however, is that a day after Vandagriff was found dead, a tweet appeared on her personal Twitter account. The message was very brief, but it raised numerous questions.

Never knew I could feel like this  boring blonde (@nochillblonde) September 16, 2016

Investigators have stated that Vandagriff's phone was traced in the vicinity of Bryant's house. Her purse has also been found in the accused stalker's trash. Authorities are also investigating if Vandagriff and Bryant knew each other prior to their meeting in the bar.

Vandagriff's death has sparked an outpouring of sympathy for the slain girl and her family on social media. One of her friends, Jackie Tox, has set up a GoFundMe page to help Vandagriff's family pay for her funeral.

"As you have all found out, Jackie was killed in a horrific and unexpected event on September 14, 2016. This disgusting act is uncalled for and justice will be served. She had a passion like no other and a heart as pure as an angel. Her drive inspired me to be better every day. She was a nutrition major at Texas Women's University as well as a Paul Mitchell School graduate," Tox wrote.

"She wanted to make people the best they could be, a trait she had since the day we met in 2006. She always picked up your phone call no matter what time it was, she would lift you up when you would feel the lowest. Her spirit was one of a kind. One that will be remembered forever. That little strawberry redhead girl will always be in our hearts."

So far, less than 24 hours since the page was set up, 144 people have donated and raised $4,345 of the fundraiser's $5,000 goal.
India was among those countries which had insisted on adding recognition of right of all peoples to self-determination to the International Bill of Human Rights which the United Nations adopted in 1976 to give a legal form to the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly in 1948. By virtue of this right people freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

As long as this principle was applied to the liberation struggle of the colonies, there was not much controversy. For colonial rule had lost its moral and political legitimacy in the post-war period. Thereafter, gradually colonial powers conceded independence to the colonies either voluntarily or after violent or non-violent struggles of the people of the colonies in pursuit of their right of self-determination. Till then the right was synonymous with independence. But ethnic consciousness, inequitable growth, concentration of political power and other real or perceived grievances have encouraged some communities in many nations to seek a distinct and separate identity, which in some cases assert their right of self-determination. The phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the case of geographically and emotionally peripheral communities away from the centre of power. But after decolonisation, their pursuit of the right, through constitutional or non-constitutional means, with or without support of a foreign power, became a source of controversy.

Today India is among those countries where official position  as also its dominant non-official opinion  is no longer committed to the right of determination of peoples within the country. Its emphasis has shifted to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations. The shift is most pronounced in case of application of the right of self-determination to Kashmir. Or has the shift taken place because of the movement for self-determination in Kashmir? Leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, particularly the Marxists, had championed this right of its people before independence. It was one of the main reasons which attracted the people of Kashmir towards India in 1947 as Pakistan had refused to recognise it. Their later alienation from India tempted Pakistan to become its champion. It can be argued that if India had consistently respected the spirit of the right, the alienation may not have taken place. India could not resolve the dilemma of choosing between national integrity and right of self-determination of a part of the nation. In this context it may be pertinent to quote Hurst Hannum (Autonomy, Sovereignty and Self-determination) who maintains that neither sovereignty nor self-determination is an absolute right. For sovereignty is limited not only by the right of other states and the innumerable political and economic ties that bind them but also by a legitimate international interest in human rights, the environment, and other issues formerly considered the sole jurisdiction of the state. The international community refuses to accept right of a sovereign state to, for instance, ethnic cleansing. If nation states voluntarily share a part of their sovereignty in a larger supra national identity, sub-national identities may be better satisfied. Globalisation and localisation reinforce each other. The European Union has facilitated the process of regional autonomies in countries like UK, Spain, Italy and France. Likewise, SAARC may be at least a partial answer to the assertion of transnational and ethnic identities within India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.

That sovereignty and territorial integrity are not absolute and permanent rights were amply demonstrated by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethopia and emergence of Bangladesh after the split up of Pakistan. But elsewhere the right of self-determination has not worked. It, too, is not absolute, not only from the point of view of practical possibility but also on moral and political grounds. In no case it is synonymous with independence. For attainment of this right which the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, quoted above, defines as to freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development, freedom is more important than independence.

Failure of Indian Democracy

There are many independent countries, where people are not free to pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Mere change of political status may not ensure their freedom for these pursuits. Would there still be the urge for self-determination if people in such countries are able to get freedom? Particularly if the self-determination movement does not believe in the values of freedom and, as it has happened in some cases, becomes intolerant, fascist and terrorist in character. In such cases democracy and federalism can satisfy the urge of self-determination better than secession or independence. It was through democracy and federalism that Tamil nationalism, which was more fierce and which had sought a secessionist outlet earlier than Kashmiri nationalism, got reconciled with Indian nationalism. Above all, it was failure of Indian democracy and federalism in Kashmir.

Ethnic identities are not only ascriptive but also evolved and constructed. Some dialects, in the process of growth, acquire the status of languages. For geographical, cultural and other reasons, some regions acquire self-consciousness. Over time, such emerging identities may seek self-determination and separate identity within every nation. As no identity can be perfectly homogeneous and all identities contain potential new identities, should not the process of separateness of ethnic identities be endless? As Strobe Talbot has argued, if this concept is carried to an extreme, it means every one of the thousands of nationalities on earth should have its own state(Foreign Policy, Spring 2000).

Meanwhile should not right of the dominant ethnic identity be limited to the extent it respects the rights of sub-identities and freedom of individuals within it? When the question of Quebecs secession became a real possibility, Mathew Coon-Come asserted the right of the natives and indigenous peoples. He argued that their rights are as compelling and justifiable as those of Quebec. According to him, the internal right of self-determination of the natives basically provides for a people to be able to have a full voice within the legal system of overall nation state, control over natural resources, the appropriate ways of preserving and protecting their culture and way of life and to be able to be a visible partner or participant with strong powers within the overall national polity. If this concept is not accepted, Coon-Come asserts, the right to full sovereignty comes into play. In other words, if Quebec does not concede adequate autonomy to the indigenous people, they would secede from Quebec. Thus there are layers of rights of self-determination which can be exercised within or outside the larger polity.

Swings in Popular Mood

The Quebec case also reminds us that the apex court of Canada conceded its right of self-determination in the form of secession only if it is supported by a substantial majority. Though the court did not specify the concept of substantial majority, it is obvious that a bare majority at a particular moment is not entitled to take the vital decision for all future generations. For at another moment, under the influence of some other event, the popular mood may be different. The popular mood in Kashmir is known to have varied widely between pro-India and anti-India. Is there any sanctity for a particular moment, the popular mood of which should be made binding for ever? Should in such cases the right of self-determination in the sense of secession be reversible? Can a people exercise this right repeatedly?

Again the stated and articulated demands of a people need not reflect their real urges. The crudest method of understanding the urges of the people is through posing the option in yes and no form which polarises and provokes public opinion into extremes but through patient dialogue the extremes may be found to be compatible and reconcilable and the resultant position may be closer to the peoples real urges.

Another difficulty of conceding the right of self-determination in the sense of independence is in the case of identities which have no territorial base. The demand for Pakistan, as a right of self-determination for the Muslim nation of the whole of India could not meet its logical end. For it culminated in a separate state of north-west provinces of the united India only and did not provide for a homeland for the Muslims who were left in the rest of India. However, it is not a decisive argument against the right of self-determination for the non-territorial identities. But it is certainly a decisive argument against equating the right of self-determination with independence or secession for such identities. Adequate constitutional and institutional arrangements within a larger framework may in many cases safeguard the rights of territorial as well as non-territorial identities better than can be done through secession.

Such cases include communities whose independence may not be viable from defence or economic point of view. They may need a broader federal polity to protect their identity and interest against outside threats. But the federal polity must ensure their legitimate claims of autonomy. This brings us to the concepts of internal and external right of self-determination. While right of self-determination has been universally accepted, the same cannot be said about secessionist movements in non-colonial states. Even in extreme cases of proven popular backing, the claims for independence by, say, Taiwan, Tibet, Chechnya, Kurds and Sri Lankan Tamils lack any active international support, notwithstanding lip sympathy for their urges. Dissolution of east European countries was voluntary while in Bangladesh, under exceptional circumstances, local upsurge, with the support of the Indian army, brought about its secession from Pakistan. While secession is an exception, claims of national sovereignty no longer prevent international support and even intervention for protecting the internal right of self-determination, which includes right of ethnical groups, minorities, dissent, fundamental rights, empowerment of the people through federalism and non-centralisation, gender justice, egalitarian economy and cultural autonomy. Some of the secessionist movements which deny these rights lack moral legitimacy to that extent. However, while legitimacy for external right of self-determination in the sense of secession and independence may not be ruled out in extreme cases, it may not be considered desirable and necessary if internal rights are implemented in letter and spirit. The Kashmir issue was internationalised not on the basis of right of self-determination as such but on account of the allegation of human rights violations, i e, non-implementation of internal right of self-determination. Similarly the secessionist movement lost much of international sympathy when it was taken over by terrorist outfits which committed excesses on innocent civilians.

In short the principle of right of self-determination need not be inconsistent with the enlightened national interest of India. It can draw comfort from the latest thinking on the subject in the corridors of the only superpower in the world. Speaking on behalf of the power most often expected to step in when, in far corners of the world, forces yearning for self-determination clash with those defending sovereignty, US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbot, has said: we are trying to define and apply the concept of self-determination in a way that is conducive of integration and not disintegration; in a way that will lead to lasting peace than recurrent war (Foreign Policy, op cit).

Indian democracy and federalism have become mature enough to lay firmer basis of national unity  emotional, political and cultural  through acceptance of the right of self-determination of people and thus recover its moral elan internationally also.
When targets for social welfare schemes become more important than actual outcomes, warm human beings become cold statistics. During the Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was instrumental in implementing a forced sterilisation programme. This one programme contributed to the unpopularity of the Indira regime and her eventual electoral defeat in March 1977. More importantly, the overall healthcare programme of the government was wrongly equated with nasbandi, thereby damaging it considerably. In 1994, the government abandoned the concept of setting targets in family welfare initiatives after it made an international commitment at the United Nations Conference on Population and Development. Has the Narendra Modi government failed to learn lessons from the experience of previous governments in its zeal to meet targets for various welfare schemes, including the ones aimed at achieving financial inclusion (Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana), improved sanitation (Swachh Bharat) and providing electricity to all villages (Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana)?

A detailed investigation by the Indian Express, based on information obtained under the Right to Information Act together with interviews conducted with 52 individuals living in 25 villages and four cities across six states, has arrived at conclusions that should make the authorities sit up and think twice about the way targets are being met. After the financial inclusion schemeessentially a repackaging of existing programmeswas announced by the Prime Minister on 15 August 2014 with much fanfare, nationalised banks went on an overdrive to open new accounts. Thereafter, when it was pointed out that the mere opening of zero balance accounts would achieve little, bank officials decided to pursue a devious strategy to meet targets. They started illegally seeding a single rupee into a zero balance account to change its nomenclature. Until two years ago, at least two out of five Indian families did not have a member with a bank account. This proportion has since improved. However, opening a bank account is just the first step towards financial inclusion and bringing the poor within the ambit of the organised financial sector. If there is such gross manipulation of data at this very first stage, claims about empowering the poor by ensuring direct cash transfers to the accounts of beneficiaries of welfare programmes have to be questioned.
The European Union and the United States have rejected the plan of the United Nations to resettle about ten percent of refugees annually as part of the struggle of the international community to solve the ongoing global refugee crisis. The EU and the US were not the only parties that have rejected the proposal. Russia, China and India were among other major players that voiced their concerns.

The United Nations estimates that about 24 million people worldwide left their countries because of conflict in 2015. About 244 million people are estimated to be currently drifting around the world as migrants  people who left for other reasons than war. Human rights groups expressed their disappointment, saying that the document was just a mere political declaration and warning that the upcoming meeting at the UN in September would be a missed opportunity. However, Karen AbuZayid, a member of the board of directors of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and advisor to the Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said she was very pleased with the agreement and was looking forward to the September talks.

Under the proposal of Secretary General, the international community should have agreed on a new global compact on responsibility-sharing to address the refugee crisis and start negotiations on a second deal on migration. However, the final draft does not mention a responsibility-sharing but it proposes talks on migration beginning 2017 with the aim to adopt the accord in 2018. According to Charlotte Philipps from Amnesty International, the Refugee Summit was a historic opportunity to find a desperately-needed global solution to the refugee crisis but instead  world leaders delayed any chance of a deal until 2018, procrastinating over crucial decisions even as refugees drown at sea and languish in camps with no hope for the future.
The European Union has been asked by Jordan to observe its upcoming parliamentary elections in September 2016. It will be the second time that the EU will deploy an Election Observation Mission (EOM) in this Middle Eastern country following the previous mission that took place in 2013. Federica Mogherini, chief of EUs diplomacy, appointed Mr Jo Leinen, a MEP, as Chief Observer of the EOM, reflecting the EUs continuous commitment to supporting transparent and inclusive elections in the country.

Mrs Mogherini commented that Jordans determination to pursue political and electoral reform, despite the many challenges the country faces sets a very positive example for the rest of the region. The decision to deploy the EOM is more proof of our full support to the countrys reform efforts and to a transparent, credible and peaceful process. These elections will further strengthen democratic governance in Jordan. I am confident that the EOM, under the leadership of Mr. Leinen, will make an important contribution to the electoral process.

The EUs EOM Core Team will consist of nine election experts that will arrive in Amman on 13 August and stay until the elections are completed. The team will be expanded by 26 long-term observers and 40 short-term observers who will be deployed across the country approximately one week before the poll. On the Election Day, the mission will be reinforced by a delegation of the European Parliament and EU diplomats. The main aim of the EUs EOMs is generally to contribute to the transparency of electoral processes and respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms. Since 2000, Brussels has deployed approximately 150 EOMs  or Election Observation Missions  around the world.
The US Democratic Party has said it was deeply concerned about the future of the transatlantic relations between the US and the EU, if Donald Trump is elected the next US President in the November presidential election. The Socialists and Democrats (S&D), who attended the Democratic Party Convention, said that they were internally having serious and honest discussions about what impact the possible election of Donald Trump would have on the US ties to Europe.

Senator Bernie Sanders commented that a Trump presidency would be a scary and a very difficult to handle scenario for the EU-US relations. Mr Sanders added that with Trump as the US president, Europe would not know what to expect, as he is very unpredictable. In diplomatic language, one needs to think twice before saying something, the S&D commented on Mr Trumps rhetoric.

Senator Sanders also commented on the most recent developments in Europe saying that the Brexit was an unfortunate reflection of the fact that populism takes advantage of peoples fears. He also touched upon the current situation in Greece, hinting that he appreciates Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras efforts to stabilize the country.

S&Ds President Gianni Pittella has recently written an op-ed where he said that Europe has been infected. The virus of populism, racism, xenophobia has affected Europe. This virus in Europe is named Le Pen in France, Farage in Great Britain, Orban in Hungary, 5 Star Movement in Italy, Kaczynski in Poland, he wrote. Democrats also admitted that the US is inflected with the same virus but it has a bit different mix.
The European Union has condemned the human rights situation in Guatemala and expressed its sincere condolences to the families of the assassinated human rights defenders. Over the past half a year, the country has witnessed the assassinations of ten activists. Most recently, armed men posing as policemen forced their way into the house of Ramon Cadena Ramila, Director of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and one of Central Americas most prominent human rights lawyers. Mr Cadena, who played a key role in high-profile human rights cases, was not at home at the time of the raid.

The attacks on human rights defenders and lawyers have intensified as Guatemalan prosecutors are making progress in cases of corruption and extrajudicial killings. Yet, the efforts to punish the perpetrators of atrocities committed during the 1960-1996 civil war have had mixed results and impunity for human rights abuses is still widespread. Violence against human rights defenders, lawyers, trade unionists and journalists thus remains a major concern. The EU supports the countrys efforts to step up the fight against collusion and impunity.

In the previous 2007-2013 budgetary framework, human security and social cohesion were among the main sectors together with economic growth and trade. The EU has played a crucial role in supporting the fight against impunity by strengthening capacity on criminal investigation and special investigation methods, witness protection, fight against organized crime and money laundering. Moreover, Guatemala has had a substantial portfolio of EU thematic projects, which amounted to a over 30 million for the 2007-2013 period. This portfolio includes 52 projects in the sectors such as democracy, human rights, civil society organizations, food security, environment and health.

In 2014-2020, the key development challenges remain to be ensuring human security, defending and developing the rule of law and ending impunity. Other goals include fighting against structural economic and social inequality and discrimination, guaranteeing respect for human rights, in particular those of indigenous people, women and children and combating widespread poverty and malnutrition, in particular in rural areas. The indicative funding for this period is 186.8 million.
Francois Godement (European Council of Foreign Relations)

By 11 December 2016, the European Union will have made a decision on whether China should join the exclusive club of countries with market economy status. However, the rules against Chinese dumping, which are being applied in the Union and are about to expire in December 2016, seem to be more important than the market economy status itself. Should trading with China, if its market economy status is recognized, be subject to the policy of specific duties or not? And what will happen once anti-dumping rules have expired?

China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and with that began its 15-year interim period. During this period, other WTO members have had the opportunity to apply anti-dumping duties in response to the unfairly low prices of the Chinese exporters. China has promised to carry out economic reforms during this period with the aim to become a market economy. However, since 2004, China has met only one of the five criteria set by the European Commission, which the country must meet before it can be granted the market economy status. With the end of the interim period, China has also begun to focus on a intermediate target, which is the cancellation of anti-dumping measures by European states, since Beijing perceives the market economy status to be more less of a symbolic value.

China is certainly not yet a market economy. Unlike in Europe, the price of land for business, energy prices and other forms of financing, which the companies acquire, are determined by the government. Thanks to these relative comparative advantages, Chinese companies are capable of buying even such European companies as Volvo and Syngenta. As a result of the government support and subsidies, China floods the international market with products with the prices lower than their actual production costs. Thus, the question is how should the EU deal with this market asymmetry? There are several possibilities that may occur after 11 December. The Union may change anti-dumping criteria without implementing mitigation measures that would protect European producers, it can modify the criteria and implement mitigation measures, or may not do anything at all. In that case, a lawsuit from the Chinese side can be expected.

Granting the market economy status for China could be a possible approach. The status is moreover poorly defined and the failure to grant it would cause an unnecessary conflict. Moreover, it can also encourage Chinas current efforts to transform to a market economy. The Union should not change its anti-dumping measures for the time being since the overall reform of the protective instruments is not possible before 11 December. Brexit will also most likely delay this process even more. The EU should also renew its efforts to prompt China to commit to the economic dialogue and take measures to avoid a sudden surge in exports.

(The study can be downloaded here:http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/chinas_market_economy_status_and_the_european_interest_7050)
Alessandro Marrone, Olivier de France and Daniele Fattibene (Istituto Affari Internazionali)

In the current unstable times, it is very important to monitor the military and defense trends of the European states and critically evaluate them. But what direction are the European military capabilities and the cooperation between countries across Europe headed? A detailed analysis of the defense budgets of the European countries reveals a growing trend of expenditures in this area and their likely increase by an average of 8.3 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year. This positive trend is, however, not the only factor and it is also necessary to look into the development of military and defense cooperation.

In recent months, this cooperation has given risen to several major trends that have been reported in 31 European countries. Bilateral cooperation remains to be its main form. Poland, which signed bilateral military cooperation agreements individually with Sweden, Germany, the United States, Bulgaria and Italy, is one example. France has started an important bilateral cooperation with Great Britain with the aim to develop a new generation of airborne anti-ship missiles. Overall, 22 cases of bilateral cooperation have been identified out of the total 39 that have been analyzed. It is also important to note that countries prefer to establish relations in defense and military exercises with neighboring countries rather than with others. 16 cases of such neighborly military cooperation have been recorded.

Another trend reveals an increased importance that countries have been lately attaching to multilateral cooperation, which is being manifested especially in the EU and NATO. In the case of the Union, these positive developments have been positively connected especially with the projects focused on improving the automation of remotely controlled aircraft and on the support of the research by the European Space Agency. Regarding the Alliance, it has been most active in the field of crisis management operations and collective defense.

Increasing defense spending and intensive cooperation within Europe are, however, not the only thing that can lead 31 European states to a greater defense self-sufficiency and responsibility. From this perspective, the latest significant trend that has been recorded is the fact that the Central, Eastern and Southeastern European countries seek to reduce their dependence on Russian military equipment. Finalizing the intergovernmental agreement between the Polish and Bulgarian Ministries of Defense, which focuses on logistical support for MIG-29 fighters, only confirms this trend. Moreover, a training center should be built in the Slovak Republic, which is designed to promote cooperation among the European owners of the UH-60M helicopters.

(The study can be downloaded here:http://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/defence-budgets-and-cooperation-europe-trends-and-investments)
The European Union has condemned the escalation of conflict and violence in the Syrian city of Aleppo. The continuous bombing and the siege of the city is putting the already suffering population in even more danger and is moreover hindering the efforts of the international community to provide humanitarian assistance. The EU has also reminded that the Syrian authorities are primarily responsible for the protection of the Syrian people and that disproportionate attacks by the Syrian regime are unacceptable.

Brussels also reminded that the only way of ending the five-year long conflict is to create conditions for restarting intra-Syrian talks in Geneva under the auspices of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), endorsed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and agreed in talks convened by the United Nations. According to the EU, there is no military solution to the civil war and there will be no peace in the country without a genuine political transition, which is inclusive and representative of all Syrians.

The EU is vigorously pushing for the resumption of the Geneva talks as soon as possible in cooperation with the two ISSG co-chairs. Brussels calls for an immediate halt of fighting in Aleppo to facilitate medical evacuations, resume deliveries of humanitarian aid and repair water and electricity infrastructure. The EU also calls for all parties to the conflict to restore the cessation of hostilities, lift all sieges and allow a country-wide access of humanitarian aid to those in need.

Aleppo, Syrias second largest city and economic hub, has turned into a major battlefield since President Bashar al-Assads troops seized control of the last supply route into rebel-held areas in mid-July. The EU and its Member States are leading the international response to the Syrian conflict. They have mobilized more than 5 billion for relief and recovery assistance to Syrians in their country and to refugees and their host communities in neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt. The EU estimates that there are about 13.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance inside Syria out of which about 4.5 million are in hard-to-reach besieged areas.
Angela Merkel said that there was no reason to lift sanctions against Russia, as the Kremlin has not fulfilled all of its commitments under the Minsk peace agreement. She said that Russia had triggered a major crisis by annexing Crimea in 2014 and by its support for separatists in the Donbas region. Europe had to react against this violation of basic principles, Chancellor Merkel said. She also reassured that herself and French President Francois Hollande were working hard to persuade both Russia and Ukraine to implement the Minsk ceasefire despite all difficulties. This is and remains the yardstick for the future of the sanctions, Mrs Merkel said.

In June, the EU agreed to extend sanctions to include energy, finance and defense but some policy makers, and most notably German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and other leading German Social Democrats, have been promoting a milder approach to Russia by saying that the EU should gradually phase out the punitive measures if there is some progress in the peace talks. However, Ukraines UN envoy said that there had recently been a military build-up of Russian army on the countrys Eastern border, which could reflect very bad intentions. Ukrainian UN Ambassador, Volodymyr Yelchenko, said that Russia had amassed more than 40,000 troops in the region and on the Ukrainian border.

EUs sanctions against Russia include asset freezes and visa bans that apply to 149 persons while 37 entities are subject to a freeze of their assets in the bloc. This includes persons and entities responsible for actions against Ukraines territorial integrity, persons providing support to or benefitting Russian decision-makers and 13 entities in Crimea and Sevastopol that were confiscated or that have benefitted from a transfer of ownership contrary to Ukrainian law.
The European Commission is planning to introduce an EU-wide system of visa authorization for the citizens of countries that can enter the blocs territory without a visa. The first draft will be presented in the upcoming autumn and it will modeled based on the American ESTA  a US scheme requiring international travellers who do not need a visa to enter the US territory to apply online and pay an administrative fee of $14.

Germany and France have been pushing for a pan-European visa-free authorization travel for long and the proposal comes right at the time of heightened security concerns. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed that the system would be inspired by the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) in the United States, an automated system that determines the eligibility of visitors to travel to the country. Similar systems also exist in Canada and Australia.

The idea has not only been triggered by increasing security concerns but also in the light of the latest visa liberalization proposals for counties such as Georgia, Ukraine, Kosovo and Turkey. The main goal of the scheme is to make sure that travellers do not overstay their visa. On top of the ESTA planning, the EU has also stepped up anti-terrorism coordination with proposals for new EU rules to make operators of mobile messaging services provide access for terrorism investigators to encrypted content. Brussels is also planning a pilot project called ADEP, which will enable automated transmission of judicial records between police services. Six EU Member States are already part of the initiative and if it proves to be working well, all members will be included.
Visegrad EU Member States have called for a joint EU army as their leaders met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Warsaw prior to the Bratislava summit on Europes post-Brexit future. The meeting of German, Czech, Polish, Slovak and Hungarian leadership is part of a series of talks ahead of the September 16 summit.

Viktor Orban, Hungarys Prime Minister said that the EU had to prioritize security when he suggested lets start by building a common European army. His Czech counterpart Bohuslav Sobotka supported Mr Orban by saying that We should also begin a discussion about creating a common European army. Polands rightwing leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski had supported a common military before, right after Britains vote to leave the bloc. Mrs Merkel who is generally supportive of stronger security said that security is a fundamental issue but the German leader also believes that plans and concrete steps should be cautiously gauged. Brexit is not just any event, its a breaking point in the history of EU so we need to work out a very careful response, she added.

The issue of a common EU army has been traditionally a problematic one. While all Visegrad countries are members of the NATO, six EU members  Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Malta and Sweden  are not. Moreover, the relations between the EU and NATO have been at their worst since the Cold War as a result of Moscows 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Security concerns and the idea of an EU army will be high on the agenda of the upcoming Bratislava summit along with other thorny issues, such as migration policy and the further path of EU integration. While EU members often have opposing views on these issues, Mrs Merkel urged everyone to find common ground despite divisions and focus on ensuring economic wellbeing of the bloc.  We must be leaders in the area of technology. We want to offer well-paid jobs. We have a lot to do, she added.
EU observers have urged Gabons electoral commission to make sure that the votes in the last weekends presidential elections are counted with transparency and speed while the incumbent President Ali Bongo is aspiring for a second term. Ali Bongo is the son of the former President, Omar Bongo, who had ruled the country for 41 years until he passed away in 2009.

However, Ali Bongo has a credible challenger, Jean Ping, who had been supported by a prominent part of the opposition, which may jeopardize Mr Bongos chance for a straightforward re-election for another seven years in the office. The vote is decided by a simple majority after a single round. There are increasing concerns in the international community that the election could spark unrest in the country as was the case following Mr Bongos 2009 victory against Andre Mba Obame. The 2009 unrest saw several people killed and buildings looted. Earlier in August, the United Nations, the EU, and the US appealed for a peaceful, free and fair vote.

Its essential that political figures favor dialogue and negotiation and refrain from all incitement to violence, to hatred or the stigmatization of certain communities, the embassies of four major EU members and the United States said in a joint statement. It is also essential that national and international norms in fundamental freedoms and human rights be respected, notably in the maintenance of law and order, they added. The statement was also signed by the representatives of the EU delegation, the UN Secretary General for Central Africa and the International Organization of La Francophonie.
The European Court of Auditors yesterday (1 September) criticized the way the EU spends money in Moldova. Following the banking scandal that saw $1 billion disappear from the banking system, which corresponds to about an eighth of Moldovas gross domestic output, EU funds as well as IMFs and the World Banks aid for the country were frozen. The EU-Moldova relations are based on the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership. Under both programs, the country was given 782 million in bilateral aid allocated to Moldova from 2007 to 2015.

Being Europes poorest country, Moldova received 37 per inhabitant in 2014  the highest among the EUs eastern neighbors. The 50-page report published by the Court of Auditors, however, says that the country is struck by rampant corruption and weak public institutions that have been top recipients of EU support since 2007. Auditors targeted the sector to evaluate whether the money actually helped to improve the institutions and public governance  they concluded that little progress and difference had been made. The auditors also criticized the EU Commission, which should have responded faster when first signals of risks associated with the aid materialized.

Programs were not sufficiently aligned to Moldovan strategies. The potential benefit of the programs was reduced by the fact that the Commission did not make full use of its ability to set preconditions for disbursement. Some specific conditions were fulfilled between program negotiation and the start of the sector budget support or were not directly measurable. The Commission could have been more stringent when assessing whether they had been fulfilled. Also, the granting of additional incentive-based funds was not fully justified, the auditors concluded.
According to France, strict aid accounting regulations prevent the international community from financing security operations in Africas Sahel region, a stripe of land between the Sahara desert to the north and the Sudanian Savanna (historically known as the Sudan region) to the south. The region has for long been neglected by the worlds leading players due to the persisting security issues that no one wants to get involved in. France is the only major Western economy that has the motivation to address this sensitive area. The financing of security operations in poor countries has long been off table for most donors, who are often not willing to fund the maintenance of order.

Sylviane Guillaumont Jeanneney, the President of the Foundation for International Development Study and Researchs (FERDI), commented that We have launched a consultation on security and development in the Sahel, and we found that the cost of inaction would be far higher than the cost of the investment needed to develop the region. Frances efforts have been among most important actions in the region. Since the 2012 crisis in Mali, the number of interventions has been on the rise and focused on development.

In 2015, the country allocated 650 million on military operations in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso compared to development assistance of 240m in the same year. Unlike France, the international community spent about five times less on security and stability in the region than on development aid. The international community is very reluctant to finance security operations because they cannot be accounted as development spending. But in the Sahel, the two are inextricably linked, Ms Jeanneney added.
According to Pierre Moscovici, European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, the EU should focus on continuing trade negotiations with the United States and scaling up its efforts to push for its agenda. Mr Moscovici said that it was not wise to heed to Paris calls to suspend the negotiations between the EU and the US over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). I think it would be much more sensible to pursue the talks, but to raise the level of our demands, he added. The Commissioner admitted though that the talks were a difficult and demanding process.

Commmisioner Moscovici also reminded of the strict demands regarding Europes agricultural and environmental standards as well as health standards and cultural co-existence. We should not behave as if this was just some agreement we could take or leave, the Commissioner said, adding that the context in which the discussions are taking place cannot set us on the path to demagogy. To that end, Mr. Moscovici also stressed that For my part, I would like to see Europes trade ministers supporting the Commission and asking it to be strong and ambitious with our American partners.

Last week, Matthias Fekl, the French Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, called on Brussels to stop the TTIP negotiations, which are in his opinion very unbalanced in favor of Americans. French President Francois Hollande has also added fuel to the issue saying that it was virtually impossible for the Commission to finalize the deal before the end of Barack Obamas mandate in January 2017. In this light, Commissioner Moscovici called upon the French government not to abandon the community method, which is one of dialogue, because opposition between the EU and France is pointless.
Four Visegrad countries are going to team up to formulate and push through their joint agenda before next weeks Bratislava summit on the future of the EU after Brexit. Polish PM Beata Szydlo said that the Visegrad Group consisting of 4 Central European countries  Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland and Hungary  has enormous potential  (and) a recipe for the EU. Ms Szydlo believes that the EU needs reforms to bring it closer to its citizens.

Prime ministers of the Visegrad countries, who all became EU members in 2004, met during an economic forum in the Polish town of Krynica and discussed the consequences of the British vote to leave the EU. Nationalists in the region argue that Brexit pointed to the fact that EU citizens are dissatisfied with the block as they feel estranged from Brussels and mainly from its agenda on migrants and human rights. According to one of such voices, Hungarys Viktor Orban, Brexit offers an opportunity to fix the EUs mistakes.

The summit will take place in Slovakia, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said that the summit would launch a major process, a diagnostic on the health of the EU and defining a remedy to cure it. The Visegrad leaders also seized the opportunity given by the summit in Krynica when they met with their Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Groysman. They expressed support for Ukraines European vision and both Mr Fico and Mr Orban called for a visa-free travel for the Ukrainians. Its a moral issue, Mr Orban said, referring to the visa-free facility for the Ukrainians and added that the bloc should hold on to its promise to bring Ukraine closer.
Germanys defense minister called for a European defense union during his visit to Lithuania. The Baltic state will host about 1,000 troops as part of a deterrence program against Russia. The EU has for long been pondering a closer defense relationship on top of the NATO structures in the face of a revisionist Russia and escalating conflicts in the Middle East.

Britain, which has been a vocal critic of an EU army, is not going to block the tighter European defense cooperation following its decision to leave the EU anymore. Germany, France and many Eastern European countries are, by contrast, supporters of the idea of more joint defense. Baltic countries moreover think that it is time for Europe to move towards a defense union, which is basically tantamount to a defense of the Schengen area.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also endorsed the idea of having more military operations with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as the Alliance and EU members. The Baltic states have started feeling more and more vulnerable following Russias annexation of Crimea. Germany has also renewed and strengthened its ties with Poland, France and the Netherlands outside the structures of the Alliance, although neither Berlin nor Paris wants to establish a full-scale army.

When we have threats that are surrounding us, we all know no country by its own will be able to manage that. But we together, we Europeans, we are very strong if we improve our capabilities as Europeans, Ursula von der Leyen said. Ms von der Leyen who has been the Minister of Defense since 2013, is the first woman in German history to hold that office. She added that there will be a comprehensive air defense as there are many European friends who want to join, like the Dutch or the French, for example.
President of the European Commission Juncker yesterday (14 September) addressed the European Parliament in his annual State of the European Union speech, which comes right before the Bratislava summit on 16 September. The speech kick-starts a dialogue with the European Parliament and Council to prepare the Commissions 2017 Work Program and the discourse on the future of the EU among the 27 Heads of State.

President Juncker spoke about the need of investment in young people, job seekers and start-ups to boost innovativeness and job creation. Mr Juncker further proposed an ambitious Investment Plan for Africa to prevent migrants from having to risk their lives for a better life. The EU leadership has also presented plans to guarantee that every European village and city has a free wireless Internet network by 2020. The EU also wants to ensure fair pay for journalists, publishers and authors wherever their work is published and shared.

On top of these issues, the speech also addressed the protection of EU borders and the project of an EU army. The Commission President said in Strasbourg that the EU needed a military headquarters to work towards a common military force. According to the EU leadership, the lack of a permanent structure resulted in money being wasted on missions. Mr Juncker emphasized that the EUs common military force would be an addition to NATO as more defense in Europe doesnt mean less transatlantic solidarity. All EU member countries have military forces and some of them are members of the Alliance. As such, many of them have extensive experience with operations abroad, while the EU aims to improve command and the control of facilities.
After nine years of delay, the European Union has finalized The Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with six developing African economies (Namibia, Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland, South Africa and Lesotho). The EPA was originally due to be completed by 2007 but due to protracted negotiations that lasted till 2014, it had taken another 2 years after the Parliament finally ratified it on Wednesday (14 September). During the process, Angola dropped out and is not a signatory country.

According to Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, chief rapporteur for the talks, EPA places a lot of emphasis on human rights and development  the language on human rights and sustainable development is one of the strongest that you will find in any EU agreement, Mr Lambsdorff said. While the EU has always included human rights, this policy has recently been reinforced again under the Trade for All banner and the promise of Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom to make human rights a factor in all future trade talks.

Mr Lambsdorff further added that this agreement will help our African partner states to reduce poverty and can also facilitate their smooth and gradual integration into the world economy as there are also many safeguards in the deal to ensure that local people truly benefit from this cooperation. The EPA will in effect positively discriminate against the six African states by an immediate duty-free and quota-free access for their exports to the EU.

The deal covers development cooperation and trade but omits intellectual property, public procurement and investment, which has been criticized in the past as the worlds poorest countries often have very little to export to the EU single market and only open their borders to EU corporations. In order to avoid this problem, the EU has decided not to subsidize its agricultural exports to the countries of the deal.
The leaders of 27 EU member countries, leaving out the United Kingdom, met in Bratislava last Friday (16 September), to set a new course for the Union. Angela Merkela, German Chancellor, said that the EU was in a critical condition and urged Member States to  show with our actions that we can get better. The bloc had to improve in the domain of security, internal and external security, the fight against terrorism, the cooperation in the field of defense, as well as defense and jobs, she said.

The overall main topics on the agenda were the refugee crisis, the defense union and the state of the Union in general. The summit ended with a declaration and a roadmap, which both highlighted the goal of dealing with the uncontrolled influx of refugees to the EU and protection of its external borders. Moreover, the EU leaders promised to channel 160 million to Bulgaria, which is bearing the brunt of the crisis, to help secure its borders.

However, despite the general focus on security, Council President Donald Tusk, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, and Slovak Premier Robert Fico, who hosted the meeting, sent straightforward messages to the UK towards the end of the summit. They reminded that the EU treaties were clearly stipulating that the interests of the remaining Member States must be protected and not those of the leaving country. Its not against the UK, but its an important guideline, Donald Tusk said.

The most recent information regarding Article 50 from the UK government is that it is very unlikely that London will trigger it this year. The process of leaving the EU might be started in January or February next year but the Council President said that the EU had no choice but wait for the UK to start the process.
I leave it to our scientists to weigh the merit of Professor Josh Swamidasss cancer disproves intelligent design thesis. But a Facebook friend points out one glaring oversight in our commentary so far.

Evolution News observed, Such mutations [as cause cancer] would not build anything new, mutations cant build anything truly novel. Biologist Ann Gauger writes:

Its definitely not to the benefit of the organism in question. Imagine that the oil in your cars engine turned to sludge. The finely tuned machine will not respond well, even if the sludge is novel, an innovation in the system.

My friend chides me, noting that there are indeed instances of mutations building up fantastic new functions: You have obviously never watched a Marvel movie. Actually, I havent in a while. He explains: X-Men, Incredible Hulk, etc.  all genetic mutations (gamma rays, etc.) that give you superpowers.

Ah yes, hes right. Heres a list of radiation-induced superheroes, including the Hulk, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, etc. Evidently the X-Men are born mutants. Creator Jack Kirby observed, Possibly, radiation, if it is beneficial, may create mutants thatll save us instead of doing us harm. I felt that if we train the mutants our way, theyll help us.

In an appropriate tribute, one of the X-Men is actually called Darwin, who after a catastrophic battle regained physical form as his mutation quickly rebuilt his body.

Unfortunately I dont know much more about this popular comic-book trope, as Im behind in my movie viewing. But you could ask my teenage son.

Photo credit: Sam Howzit via Flickr.

Im on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.
With the outlook for the UK economy still far from clear the Pound Sterling has remained under pressure, helping the US Dollar (USD GBP) to make fresh gains

The US Dollar to Pound (USD/GBP) exchange rate plunged further on Thursday afternoon, hitting a new weekly low and slipping further away from the pairs highs.

While this was largely due to Wednesdays Fed-influenced US Dollar selloff, Sterling capitalised thanks to Thursday Bank of England (BoE) comments.

BoE policymaker Kristin Forbes took a hawkish stance on Thursday and argued that she did not see the case for further easing measures from the bank in the coming months. This indicated that motions to ease rates further may not be unanimous.

Despite the door being left open for interest rates to be raised before the end of the year, and the fact that three policymakers voted for an immediate hike, the Feds September meeting failed to impress.

Latest Dollar/Pound Exchange Rates

On Sunday the US Dollar to British Pound exchange rate (USD/GBP) converts at 0.861

Today finds the pound to us dollar spot exchange rate priced at 1.161.

FX markets see the pound vs euro exchange rate converting at 1.165.

The GBP to JPY exchange rate converts at 171.247 today.

Please note: the FX rates above, updated 30th Oct 2022, will have a commission applied by your typical high street bank. Currency brokers specialise in these type of foreign currency transactions and can save you up to 5% on international payments compared to the banks.

The US Dollar weakened across the board after the Fed downgraded its long-term forecast for the US economy, leaving investors less than convinced by the hawkishness expressed by policymakers.

The US Dollar to Pound exchange rate solidified its levels on Wednesday afternoon as US markets prepared themselves for the results of the latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decision.

While analysts do not expect the Fed to hike up US interest rates in Wednesdays meeting, markets have been fixated on the possibility due to hawkish comments from Fed policymakers.

GBP/USD would plummet in the event of a Fed interest rate hike, but analysts believe this has a less than 20% chance of happening.

Despite investor uncertainty over the degree of hawkishness that is likely to emerge from the Federal Reserves September policy meeting US Dollar (USD) exchange rates have seen some measure of strength so far this week.

Data from the US housing market has proved decidedly mixed, with a stronger-than-expected September NAHB Housing Market Index contrasting disappointing August housing starts and building permit figures.

Even so, the US Dollar to Pound Sterling (USD/GBP) exchange rate has benefitted from the relative softness of the Pound, which has remained under pressure from ongoing Brexit-based uncertainty.

Confidence in Pound (GBP) exchange rates remained limited following Augusts UK public sector borrowing data, which contrasted sharply with the better-than-expected public finance surplus that was posted in July.

While the deficit proved narrower than forecast the government remains on track to miss its deficit reduction goals, demonstrating the UKs continued reliance on borrowing and the limited fiscal manoeuvring room left to Chancellor Phillip Hammond in the Autumn Statement.

As a result Pound Sterling remained under pressure, although the USD/GBP exchange rate was only able to make limited gains on Wednesday morning due to the risk-on mentality of markets.

However, commenting on the Bank of Englands (BoE) latest Agents Summary James Smith, economist at ING, noted:

More interestingly, while agents had noted a marked rise in business uncertainty post-Brexit, there was little evidence to suggest any knee-jerk reaction in terms of major employment or investment decisions. The main message was that firms, for the time being, were seeking to maintain business as usual and this suggests that it may be a while (possibly after UK-EU negotiations get underway) before we see any material Brexit impact show up in UK data.

USD/GBP Exchange Rate Volatility Forecast on Fed Decision

Demand for the US Dollar is likely to remain muted ahead of tonights Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, with greater investor cautiousness expected to set in ahead of the policy decision.

Should the Fed opt for a hawkish hold, leaving the door open for rates to be raised in December, then the USD/GBP exchange rate is predicted to trend sharply higher overnight.

However, if policymakers opt to take a more cautious tone on monetary policy in the light of recent disappointing data then the Greenback could extend its slump further, particularly given the heightened risk appetite of investors in the wake of the Bank of Japans (BoJ) fresh stimulus barrage.

Optimistic BoE FPC Statement Could Bolster Pound Sterling

The appeal of the Pound could improve if Thursdays CBI trends data proves encouraging, with any further signs that the economy is shrugging off the impact of the Brexit vote likely to prompt a fresh rally.

Also in focus will be the BoEs Financial Policy Committee (FPC) statement, which could offer a further show of confidence in the outlook of the UK economy, in the short-term at least.

Still, with the UK yet to trigger Article 50 and get formal exit negotiations with the EU underway the USD/GBP exchange rate is likely to continue benefitting from the persistent mood of anxiety.
Hi,



I received a negative assessment from CPA Australia, because of not covering business law. They told me that I can do paper in ACCA which is F4: Corporate and business law.



I applied for ACCA program and I have officially received an exemption against that paper.



Do you think it really worth trying to appeal CPA Australia assessment result by providing more detailed syllabus along with ACCA exemption?



Thank you.
Bevdeforges said: ...snip....what you do outside of work can be held against you.

Cheers,

Bev Click to expand...

Photographs held against you (skin?)...interesting.I agree with Bev - there is legally enforced difference between public and private life here.Also I think France would happily accept the difference between "nude" and "porno" photography or art generally. Not that I'd like to get into a debate about the differentiation between the two.There is a basic difference between France and the US - nudity is not sinful in itself in France. You can do sinful things both nude and fully dressed....and most babies are born nude...but perhaps not in some parts of the US middle west?DejW
From: Emergn Limited For Immediate Release: Dateline: Boston , MA Wednesday, September 21, 2016



This week, Emergn and Swiss Banking Advisors hosted an executive conference centered on business and technology trends in the market. Leaders came from an array of backgrounds, including large, global business, startups, venture capital and organizations focused on improving diversity in leadership roles.

While its always interesting to hear the perspective on innovation from large, global companies  the most informative piece was the emphasis on product management.

Focus on the customer Over the last year Ive heard more and more companies talk about the move from a project to product focus. This change reflects the need to get closer to the customer, create quicker and tighter feedback loops and stop measuring success by whether we delivered a project on time and on budget. It also speaks to how much the business is now taking a lead on innovation and wanting to center on shaping the relationship with their technology organizations.

What does this mean? For the past few years the trend on innovation has been to setup innovation labs, offices and areas where ideas would be developed and tested, often distanced from the companys day to day operations. This was one of the themes shared by organizations like UBS and Credit Suisse. Yet, if you look deeper, there is a trend across many industries to go horizontal on innovation instead of remaining vertical  by taking the thinking and purpose into the business. Recent examples of this include Walmart who has taken a product acceleration approach to innovation that brings together the companys business and technology leaders along with real users to discuss ideas that will not only solve problems but help them go much further, much fast than before. You can read about Walmarts success in this area

In contrast to big business, the startups in the room demonstrated how theyve grasped the concept of modern product management thinking to compete effectively by delivering new products and services into the market faster than larger companies.

Improving the fuzzy front end with faster decisions The other reason that product management stood out was because it highlighted the need to address the fuzzy front end of vetting the most valuable ideas. Budget and development wasnt the obstacle, it was the companys inability to quickly get to a business value proposition around an idea and have more confidence, and dare I say certainty, that an idea would deliver the greatest return to their bottom line. Part of this is also to say no to things that only provide marginal value so they can really deliver great solutions where theyre most needed. In the end, this is what innovation is really describing  the ability and capability to deliver products that meet customer demand, produce a healthy return and an organization that can respond with speed and scale.

All this talk raised another valid point around talent. The talent gap in the market is growing for specific skills needed to work in a forward thinking business. Product managers need to be up-skilled with more design thinking in their DNA. Business leaders and management need a fresh mindset around change, organizational behaviors and how they define agility for their business.

Great products come from great teams Technology teams are lacking the flexibility and thinking to innovate and need to get away from a methodology driven lifestyle where they use the flavor of the month to operate a development lifecycle. Rather, they need to introduce the concepts and practices they can adopt in their context. Anothers process isnt going to produce the best results.

Innovation is all about people. While we get this point inherently, the challenge is that we default to technology discussions instead of extracting the best ideas, understanding our customer and looking at these topics through the lens of human impact.

The post

Zurich is an emerging location for innovative companies looking to compete well beyond the Swiss border. Given that it is well known for being one of the worlds primary banking hubs, its no surprise that many of the startups that are making a huge impact are in the FinTech space and are competing well with the larger establishment.This week, Emergn and Swiss Banking Advisors hosted an executive conference centered on business and technology trends in the market. Leaders came from an array of backgrounds, including large, global business, startups, venture capital and organizations focused on improving diversity in leadership roles.While its always interesting to hear the perspective on innovation from large, global companies  the most informative piece was the emphasis on product management.Over the last year Ive heard more and more companies talk about the move from a project to product focus. This change reflects the need to get closer to the customer, create quicker and tighter feedback loops and stop measuring success by whether we delivered a project on time and on budget. It also speaks to how much the business is now taking a lead on innovation and wanting to center on shaping the relationship with their technology organizations.What does this mean? For the past few years the trend on innovation has been to setup innovation labs, offices and areas where ideas would be developed and tested, often distanced from the companys day to day operations. This was one of the themes shared by organizations like UBS and Credit Suisse. Yet, if you look deeper, there is a trend across many industries to go horizontal on innovation instead of remaining vertical  by taking the thinking and purpose into the business. Recent examples of this include Walmart who has taken a product acceleration approach to innovation that brings together the companys business and technology leaders along with real users to discuss ideas that will not only solve problems but help them go much further, much fast than before. You can read about Walmarts success in this area here In contrast to big business, the startups in the room demonstrated how theyve grasped the concept of modern product management thinking to compete effectively by delivering new products and services into the market faster than larger companies.The other reason that product management stood out was because it highlighted the need to address the fuzzy front end of vetting the most valuable ideas. Budget and development wasnt the obstacle, it was the companys inability to quickly get to a business value proposition around an idea and have more confidence, and dare I say certainty, that an idea would deliver the greatest return to their bottom line. Part of this is also to say no to things that only provide marginal value so they can really deliver great solutions where theyre most needed. In the end, this is what innovation is really describing  the ability and capability to deliver products that meet customer demand, produce a healthy return and an organization that can respond with speed and scale.All this talk raised another valid point around talent. The talent gap in the market is growing for specific skills needed to work in a forward thinking business. Product managers need to be up-skilled with more design thinking in their DNA. Business leaders and management need a fresh mindset around change, organizational behaviors and how they define agility for their business.Technology teams are lacking the flexibility and thinking to innovate and need to get away from a methodology driven lifestyle where they use the flavor of the month to operate a development lifecycle. Rather, they need to introduce the concepts and practices they can adopt in their context. Anothers process isnt going to produce the best results.Innovation is all about people. While we get this point inherently, the challenge is that we default to technology discussions instead of extracting the best ideas, understanding our customer and looking at these topics through the lens of human impact.The post Product Management, Innovation and FinTech appeared first on Emergn


Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Theres nothing quite like using a nationally followed publication to declare your own sons misogynist, insensitive pigs because they have not properly absorbed the feminist cant they have apparently been fed their whole lives. Jodi got her revenge by publicly attacking them in a Washington Post column.

Allard writes in part

I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these. Men who deny rape culture, or who turn a blind eye to sexism. Men who tell me Im being too sensitive or that I dont understand what teenage boys are like. You dont speak out about this stuff, mom, they tell me with a sigh. Its just not what teenagers do.My sons are right about that much. Teenage boys, by and large, dont speak out about slut-shaming or rape culture. They dont call each other out when they make sexist jokes or objectify women. Its too uncomfortable to separate themselves from the pack so they continue to at least dip their toes into toxic masculinity. In their discomfort with action, they remain passive, and their passivity perpetuates the same broken system that sentenced Brock Turner to only six months in jailNo matter how often my sons remind me that they are good men, they dont understand that being good is an action. You dont earn the honor by simply shaking your head when you hear about Turner and other rapists being given lenient sentences. You earn it by acting to end rape culture, and by doing it even when its awkward and uncomfortable as hell.

The rest of her column proceeds accordingly. One of her sons, we learned in a previous article, is clinically depressed and has been suicidal in the past. I bet being called out by his mother in a newspaper read and quoted coast to coast is just what the doctor ordered. Both sons are teenagersminors. To their mother, however, they are just convenient symbols of woman-abusing mankind, and fair game for shame and denigration.

Id guess that these teens have rejected their mothers values because they resent having been indoctrinated their whole lives by an obsessed feminist scold. I grew up (allegedly) decades ago, and I never accepted the values Allards sons (she claims) are defending, because of the way I saw my father treat my mother, and the role model for manhood he provided every second of his life.. An accountable, responsible parent would privately question her own parenting skills rather than impugn her sons character for a newspaper fee.

Allards article has since been reprinted by the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the Bangor Daily News, and the Charlotte Observer. Nice job, mom.



Meanwhile, is it ethical for any of the papers involved to assist a mothers humiliation of two children who assumed they were having conversations with a parent they could trust, and not a vicious ideologue willing to tar her own boys as enablers of rapists to make a well-worn point? Is circulating such standard issue feminist cant really worth being an accessory to child abuse?

____________________

Pointer: The Daily Caller
Wednesday, September 21, 2016

A sure sign of an ethics train wreck candidacy (we have two of them, you know) is that even campaigning for the candidates prompts unethical behavior. This malady has bitten the President hard, for on Sunday, at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, he made his second unethical campaign pitch in a week (here was his first), arguing that Hillary Clinton was the victim of sexism. Here was the section to revile:

Theres a reason why we havent had a woman president.We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women and it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairlyThis should not be a close election but it will be, and the reason it will be is not because of Hillarys flaws.

First, let us all take a moment and have a good laugh over the Presidents glaringly dishonest claim that if the election is close, it wont be because of Hillarys flaws. Does anyone, including Obama, believe that? If Hillary Clinton wasnt a chilly campaigner, an abrasive speaker, a venal master of crony politics, a compulsive liar, didnt risk national security to avoid public scrutiny and lie about it, hadnt been a mediocre Secretary of State involved in a failed foreign policy, didnt aid, abet, deny and excuse her sexual predator husband, and wasnt going to turn 69 before the election and do so in dubious healththese are all flaws, by the wayis there any question that she would be heading for a landslide victory, instead of facing very possible defeat? PBS pundit Mark Shields told a Georgetown University audience last week that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is less qualified for the Presidency than Clinton by far, who supports many of Bernie Sanders nuttier positions and who has some political baggage of her own, would have beaten Trump in a landslide, and hes right.

Yet, oddly, Warren seems to be a woman too.

As has been the habit of Obamas party and supporters in the press for eight long years, the mantra from the Clinton campaign is that one cannot possibly have principled, reasonable, legitimate objections to her corrupt candidacy; the opposition must be rooted in bigotry. Division and hatred are progressive tools of the trade now, for even in his final months in office, Obama seems determined to leave a society shattered along race and gender as his most damning legacy. If you are not a Hillary supporter, it is because you are a sexist bigot who unfairly rejects powerful women. Well, more specifically, since Obama was talking to a pro-Hillary audience, its they who are sexist bigots. Hillarys deplorables, those lesser Americans. Now the President is otherizing those who dont do his bidding. Nice.

Obamas historical assertion that this is a major reason why we havent had a female President is so factually nonsensical that it qualifies as intentional disinformation, a false statement that the speaker knows is false, designed to make his audience stupid. Who are those qualified, experienced female candidates who have lost elections because they were strong? Id like some names.

Most strong women who havent beaten Clinton to the White House didnt do so because women didnt even have the vote until 1920. By then, men had a 130 year head start, and when everyone who has held a prominent job has been a male, it isnt surprising that the idea that its a male job gets firmly embedded in peoples heads. Fear or dislike of strong women isnt the problem. Activist Victoria Woodhull ran for President in 1872 on the Equal Rights ticket, but that was nearly 50 years before the Nineteenth Amendment allowed women to vote in presidential elections. Its fair to say the fact that she wasnt eligible and couldnt appear on any ballots was the reason people didnt vote for her, not because she was a strong woman (and she sure was.)

Margaret Chase Smith (December 14, 1897  May 29, 1995) of Maine, a Republican, was the first woman to serve in both houses of the United States Congress. As a New Englander, I remember her well, though her strongest moment in the spotlight came before I was born, when she attacked Joe McCarthy and his followers for her 1950 speech, Declaration of Conscience. Smith ran for the Republican nomination in the 1964 presidential election, but she was a moderate in a party that was turning to the right (Barry Goldwater was the nominee that year), and the problem with Smith was that she didnt seem strong enough, though like Woodhull, she wasshe had to be to as the only woman in the Senate. Smith looked and sounded like the president of the PTA.

In 1972, as the Democratic Party turned left, the first African-American woman elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm, made a serious bid for the Democratic Partys presidential nomination. Nobody had heard of Chisolm outside of her state; she was a sincere but poor public speaker (she had a speech impediment); and she was laboring under a dual handicap of being both female and black. Most important of all, no man with Chisolms relative lack of relevant experience, especially executive experience, would have had a chance.

Thats pretty much the list. (Well, theres Carly Fiorina, whom Im sure would love to blame her failure to catch on with Republican primary voters on the fact that shes too strong. In truth, she lost because shes dishonest and creepy, and was fired from the only top executive position she ever held.)

As Obama knows, women have been rising in politics, many of them very strong, but most women with the ability and character to be President have, on their own volition, chosen to do other things, in other fields, making up for lost time in the culture and making society increasingly comfortable with seeing women in the positions of responsibility and authority that were practically impossible for them to achieve for so long. Despite Obamas insulting falsehood, most Americans believe it would be a societal advance to have a female President. A New York Times/CBS News poll found broad majorities of both men and women who were pleased that the milestone of a woman nominated by a major party had been passed. They just wished someone other than Clinton was the trailblazer.

The fact that there have been just 36 female governors in our entire history (there are more than 36 male governors in office right now) is among the main reasons we havent had a female President. The pool still isnt very large, and women, for a wide range of reasons, have been more inclined to run for legislatures than for mayor or governor when theyve been inclined to run at all. You may recall that a strong female governor ran for Vice-President against Obama, and she was savaged by a liberal press that suggested that she should be taking care of her special needs son and unwed pregnant daughter rather than running for office, attacked for her governing experience when she had more than their candidate for President, Barack Obama, and mocked as dim-bulb, which she was not and is not. Shes just intellectually lazy and more interested in fame than serious public service. I have never heard or read anyone who suggested that Sarah Palins problem is that he is a strong woman. She had so many other problems, real and concocted, that derailed her ambitions.

So once again, accusations of bigotry against others is the Democratic default tactic to avoid accountability for their own shortcomings, failures and misconduct. Democrats rigged their nomination for a female candidate who is a proven dud as a campaigner, whose resume is full of dubious or elusive achievements and whose character is untrustworthy. That Hillary Clinton is strong is one of her very few legitimate leadership attributes: if she wins, that will be a primary reasonwell, that and the fact that shes running against a nasty, ignorant jerk who is the least qualified major party candidate ever. If she loses, it will have nothing whatsoever to do with gender discrimination, but that will be the excuse. It will be our fault, not hers.

And if she is elected, be prepared for the gender card to be played over and over again, as it is being increasingly played the more panicked Democrats get. Did you know that the public is only concerned about Clintons health because shes female? Funny, I remember some of the same journalists who are claiming this hammering away at John McCains age and health problems in 2008. Dwight Eisenhowers age and heart problems was a major issue in his 1956 campaign, though in those more civil days the topic had to be handled delicately. No, for some reason, it has always mattered to the public that their Presidents and candidates to be President appear healthy and strong, whether they are men or women. Appearing too strong isnt Clintons problem; appearing ill and lying about it is.

The best I am so strong, it will blow your mind! campaign stunt ever was when Theodore Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest from a would-be assassin and gave his speech anyway. Teddy was a little mad, of course, but still: is there any question that if Hillary did that, shed gain support, not lose it?

_______________

Sources: Washington Examiner 1, 2
Matt Andreas milks around 1,250 head of cows and farms an additional 3,500 acres on Andreas Dairy Farm in Sugarcreek, Ohio. He currently has 23 employees with a third of those employees working more than 10 years on the farm. Andreas knows the struggles of finding good help on the dairy farm, but has also put a good system in place to keep him employees happy and working hard for him.

1Training

We are fortunate that we are big enough in size that I have a farm manager who handles the training, said Andreas. Andreas Dairy hires employees on a week trial period, which is explained in the interview and hiring processes. Andreas also offers training and retraining courses in milking. An incentive to getting through the course and passing the test could result in a raise.

2Set expectations

We document everything, said Andreas. We let employees know up front in the interview and hiring process that we will be keeping records.

Andreas says one thing they do not tolerate is tardiness. If you are a no show and you dont call then youre done.

Penn State Extension advises having an employee handbook that lists compensation, hours, sick leave, benefits and disciplinary policies.

3Feedback

Employees want to know how they are doing. Provide performance reviews to workers to let them know what they are doing well and where they can improve. Provide feedback on even the smallest of jobs as frequently as you can. Allow employees to fill out a self-evaluation of their current job. This may reveal where the employer failed to communicate a job to the employee.

We do monthly meetings with the farm manager, herdsmen, nutritionist and vet, said Andreas.

The farm manager then passes the information on to the milkers and other farm hands. Often times feedback is given right in the parlor as things are happening.

4Make it fun

Happy farmers are productive farmers, according to a Penn State Extension article. Treat employees to a cookout, ice cream social or bonfire after putting in extra hours or just working hard. Sometimes a company trip to another farm in the offseason can keep workers engaged or give them new ways of doing things around the farm.

Lead by example and dont be afraid to get your hands dirty, working alongside employees during the tough seasons. You can keep employees motivated and gain some respect.

Employees look to other employees to keep the positivity, said Andreas. If they are not doing their job right it affects the other employees.

5

Create value

According to PSU Extension, job titles, profit shares, bonuses, and team meetings can all help employees feel like they are part of the farm team.

I always try to implement the ideas of the herdsmen, said Andreas. Sometimes things work that I didnt think would.

Andreas said they are the ones on the grounds, working with the cows everyday and often times see more than he can.

6

Benefits

Andreas does provide health insurance and retirement packages for his employees. If you dont offer health insurance it is hard to find people, he said.

Another benefit Andreas has found to be important is vacation time. Im finding that more and more of the younger generations want that personal life, he said.

Ive worked pretty hard to make it a team approach, said Andreas. No job is perfect and we have to do the best we can do.

Andreas said, he has confidence in his team and knows if he wants to take a weekend off, his team will get things done they way they should.

Sources: Penn State Extension, Finding and Keeping Good Employees; Matt Andreas, Andreas Dairy Farm.

(Farm and Dairy is featuring a series of 101 columns throughout the year to help young and beginning farmers master farm living. From finances to management to machinery repair and animal care, farmers do it all.)

More Farming 101 columns:
This papier-mache Halloween lantern is actually horrifying

Most jack-o'-lanterns are made from pumpkins, but this particular papier-mache pear is a unique, antique find.
Northern Ireland has welcomed a delegation from Chinas Jiangxi Province to Stormont today, with the intention to learn about the agri-food industry and livestock production.

The delegation, led by Mr Hu Hangping, Director General of Jiangxi Provincial Agricultural Department, is visiting Northern Ireland to learn about the agri-food industry with a particular interest in livestock production.

This high-level group, made up of five Departmental representatives and three food company executives, met with the Minister as part of an itinerary which included a visit to Moy Park and the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI).

Jiangxi Province, one of Chinas key agricultural regions

DAERA Minister Michelle McIlveen said she is "pleased" to have the opportunity to welcome Mr Hu and the delegation from Jiangxi Province, one of Chinas key agricultural regions.

"They are in Northern Ireland to find out more about our livestock production and what they will see is a sector which is setting the standard internationally from research and development in animal production and food safety through to high quality safe, innovative food products," Miss McIlveen explained.

"We are continuing to build our relationships with China at all levels and I thank Madam Wang, Consul General, for her continued support to our agri-food industry through inward visits such as this one.

"Our visitors from Jiangxi are important to us as they return to China to share the story of our world renowned agri-food industry."

Miss McIlveen said Northern Ireland is "committed to developing opportunities" with China for the NI agri-food industry and "working to enhance relationships."

"There is a lot of good work already taking place and we continue to explore areas of mutual benefit," she explained.
Farmers in Northern Ireland are facing a long winter, with businesses already under financial pressure, Ulster Farmers' Union president Barclay Bell has warned.

Mr Bell said some farmers had faced unexpected bad weather conditions for September, with high levels of rain making field operations impossible and forcing cattle indoors.

"In some cases cattle have already been housed for two weeks  and this is only the middle of September," said Mr Bell.

"While the weather may improve between now and the end of October, it is doubtful, given ground conditions, that it will be possible to get livestock out to grass again.

"That has big cash flow implications, since it means higher feed bills are starting early, with many farmers now looking at what could again be a eight month winter."

Difficult position

The UFU president said farmers in the west were no strangers to difficult conditions, but this is a big blow given there were hopes that better prices for some commodities might ease financial pressure in the final months of 2016.

Banks are having appeals to recognise that cash flow pressures remain acute.

"Early CAP payments will help, but when this funding hits bank accounts next month, its important banks understand that a lot of this is already ear-marked for paying bills. It cannot be used solely for paying down bank borrowings," he said.

Mr Bell said that across Northern Ireland weather conditions were also making life difficult for arable farmers particularly in the North and North West of the province.

"Long, dry spells of weather have proved elusive so far this autumn.

"Many arable farmers are finding themselves in a difficult position of having to deal with poor prices and often disappointing yields, while an over-supplied global cereal markets is pulling prices down further," said the UFU president.
Most dairy farmers continue to receive returns 'well below the cost of production' and milk processors are dragging their feet, according to NFU Cymru.

The market outlook is now much improved and with significant positive moves in recent weeks.

NFU Cymru Milk Board said they were very forthright in its view that much more money should now be coming back to farmers and that processors are clearly dragging their feet in this respect.

"The gap between most producer prices and commodity prices is now quite significant," said NFU Cymru Milk Board chairman Aled Jones.

"All the price indicators point towards a milk price of 25ppl if not more, yet the reality for most farmers is that milk prices are still around 20ppl.

"Global prices are continually moving upwards and the last GDT auction saw the third consecutive increase.

"The AMPE and MCVE price indicators have moved dramatically upwards and are now 26ppl and 28ppl respectively for August 2016. Yet the farm-gate price remains around 20ppl."

'Processors need to reflect on the pressures that milk producers are under'

"We expect farmers to see a fair share of any improvements in markets returned to their own balance sheets"

Mr Jones said it all pointed to the conclusion that processors are very slow to respond to market improvements.

When the market takes a downturn, farm-gate prices respond immediately and processors reduce their price overnight.

"We need to see a similar reaction when the market turns upwards and farming businesses need to see the benefit in their farm-gate prices.

"Processors need to genuinely reflect on the pressures that milk producers are under.

"We hear platitudes that processors and end users have sympathy for producers plight and much of this will be genuine, but the speed in reflecting positive market increase in value is simply not quick enough, particularly in the current exceptional circumstances.

"Actions speak much louder than words and we simply ask of the supply chain to seriously and genuinely consider the long term damage and consequences of not delivering much more back to primary producers.

"We expect farmers to see a fair share of any improvements in markets returned to their own balance sheets and not held back higher up the supply chain."

NI strike

Farmers for Action said a Northern Ireland milk strike is now a 'strong possibility.'

The group said they will be holding a crisis meeting towards the end of November which could enable a strike to be given the go-ahead around the Christmas period.

"All Northern Ireland dairy farmers will be welcome and a vote will be taken after the debate to have a milk strike unless corporate food retailers, corporate food wholesalers and co-op milk processors put their contempt for NI dairy farmers behind them," said William Taylor from the group.

"Northern Irelands dairy farmers now have nothing to lose by striking as milk is in short supply, the EU reduction support is available and not forgetting that milk is worth approximately 10p/l as fertiliser.

"At long last this puts NI farmers in the driving seat where they now have the power to deliver fairness at the farm gate."
A newly updated free app, BCS Cowdition from Bayer Animal Health, is hoping to solve the issue of analysing body condition score and keeping track of herd health.

The app guides the user through the body condition scoring process, while recording, storing, and now also analysing the stats.

These BCS records can also now be sent to farm records, the vet or nutritionist directly from the app.

This provides a useful tool to help spotlight when BCS is not ideal, as in the following months these animals are high risk for lameness, for example cows which lose more than 0.5 points of BCS in the run up to peak lactation, or are calving at score 2.5 or below.

Recently published research papers* have highlighted the important link between dairy cow body condition score (BCS), and the incidence of lameness.

The research has shown that BCS loss can be a precursor to, and help to predict the probability that, dairy cows will suffer an episode of lameness caused by a claw horn disruptive lesion.

The work shows that cows calving at BCS less than 2.5 are more likely to go lame, and less likely to recover. The same has also been shown for cows losing more than 0.5 points BCS after calving.

Being able to highlight high risk cows in a different way may allow farmers to improve the speed of lameness detection and having reliable and consistent body condition scores is vital to ensure informed decisions on-farm.

A Bayer spokesperson explains: "The app will store multiple, dated records for individual cows, and collate these on a graph of the lactation year to give an accurate representation of if and when cows are dropping out of the recommended parameters, and will allow vets to assess how this can best be improved.

"This BCS information can be used to identify cows most at risk of problems, so a high risk group can be monitored more closely, aiding in early detection of lame cows and then allowing prompt, effective treatment with a trim, hoof block, and ketoprofen (non-steroidal (NSAID)."
Primary school pupils from all over Wales are being invited to enter a Christmas card design themed #FarmingMatters for the Farmers Union of Wales annual Christmas card competition.

The FUW is asking children aged from four to 11 to design a Christmas scene showing why #FarmingMatters for its Christmas cards, which will be sold to raise money for the Unions charity British Heart Foundation Cymru.

FUW president Glyn Roberts said: "The competition will be split into Welsh language and English language categories.

"Children can use any media in their entries, such as crayons, coloured pencils, felt tipped pens or paint which must be completed on an A4 sheet of paper.

"The only stipulation is that it must be a Christmas card showing why #FarmingMatters.

"The competition was a huge success last year and we hope we can once again count on the support of our primary schools all over Wales."

The winner of each category will receive a 30 gift voucher for themselves, a packet of the Christmas cards depicting their design, one days free admittance to the 2016 Royal Welsh Winter Fair to receive their prizes and a 50 cheque for their school.

The winning entries, together with a selection of other entries, will be displayed at the FUW stand during the Winter Fair (November 28-29).

The closing date for entries is Friday November 11.

The pupils name, age, class number, school name and home address must be included on all entries, which should be posted or delivered to the FUW, Llys Amaeth, Plas Gogerddan, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3BT, marked Schools Competition, or e-mailed to anne.birkett@fuw.org.uk
Food valued at 1.8bn wasted on UK farms each year, report says
After a show of hands it was quickly decided that the best way out of the situation without insulting the hosts was to pour the first round of drinks into the glasses and down beer on the rocks.
But, as Farm Weekly went to press, a spokeswoman for Mr Barnett said he had indicated he would move as quickly as possible to fill the "two cabinet vacancies" caused by the resignations of ministers Dean Nalder and Tony Simpson on Saturday.
The future of Fauquier Times now depends on community support. Your donation will help us continue to improve our journalism through in-depth local news coverage and expanded reader engagement.

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What was it like to be an Oath Keeper? John Zimmerman can tell you
I cringe when compliance teams rely solely on Google to investigate and make decisions.

No offense intended to Google, but its simply not designed for sophisticated investigations. Yet, an overwhelming majority of compliance teams employ Google as their primary research tool.



The biggest issue with Google searches is the abundance of false positives flagged in the process. If the only information that can put into a single search field is a name and some bad words, numerous incorrect subjects that will be presented. That forces a researcher to investigate each one, creating a drag on time and budgets dealing with extraneous information.

Even if Google returns the right subject it often has the wrong context. A criminal lawyer is not a criminal  but a Google search may miss the context.

Another big problem is that Google can be manipulated. Firms routinely pile in online content to influence search engine marketing and optimization  driving up selected content and driving down content they want to bury. And it works.



All of this SEO activity makes negative information harder to find.

Google was never built to uncover financial crime and corruption. The situation is even worse in jurisdictions where the Right to Be Forgotten legislation allows people and companies to have Google wiped clean.

Compliance teams traditionally perform due diligence and make a decision on a subject based on an information snapshot the teams develop. That one-point-in-time approach is no longer enough. Decision makers need to know if something has changed in the supply chain or with third parties on a much more frequent basis. If an agent was up to no good overnight, will a snap-shot approach catch it?

Adding additional headcount isnt the answer. Its expensive and ineffective. Compliance teams need to assess how theyre using their employees to drive better results.

Individuality is also a challenge for compliance teams. Even with the most comprehensive procedure manuals, people follow the instructions, do tasks, and interpret the found data differently. Some are more thorough than others, while some apply rules less strictly, causing the human error rate to be very high.

Just a few years ago, it was sufficient to say the subject wasnt on a watch list on a certain date. Thats no longer enough. But based on the sheer volume of data available today, employees face a natural challenge keeping up with that volume.

Compliance teams are now rightly focused on doing more than screening against watch lists. But then they soon get mired in documenting the review process for every subject  spending lots of time not only searching but also capturing screen shots and making PDF files for potential future audit reviews. Its a time consuming and expensive process.

Luckily, technology can help. New machine learning or cognitive computing systems can automatically perform these searches and clear obvious false positives. That allows employees to be used in a more productive, strategic way. They can assess the audit reports turned up from monitoring or investigations and make the most informed decisions from them.

These technolgies can also automatically generate an audit log that shows dates, full research, what was captured, where it was captured, what was raised, what was auto-cleared, what was resolved or what was flagged as a potential issue. And crucially important, with the right technology, this process no longer has to be a one-time event but can happen on a continual basis.

Are you monitoring your high-risk portfolio on a regular basis versus a point in time? Are your compliance employees spending their time searching Google and dealing with false positives instead of assessing complete reports and making more informed decisions?

If youre still relying on Google, its time for change.

____



Dan Adamson is the Chief Executive Officer of OutsideIQ, a company that develops investigative cognitive computing, including DDIQ, to address todays growing compliance requirements. He can be contacted here.


For just the second time in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Acts 39-year history, a company was charged with FCPA offenses based solely on a charitable contribution that was intended to buy the influence of a foreign official.

Provo, Utah-based Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. paid almost $766,000 Tuesday to settle SEC charges that it violated the internal controls and books-and-records provisions of the FCPA.

The FCPA violations arose from a $150,000 payment Nu Skins China subsidiary made to a charity so that a high-ranking Chinese Communist party official would intervene in an on-going provincial agency investigation.

The SEC settled the enforcement action with an internal administrative order and didnt go to court.

Nu Skin agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying the SECs findings.

The company disgorged $431,088, prejudgment interest of $34,600, and a civil penalty of $300,000.

In 2013, Nu Skins China unit was investigated by a provincial branch of the Administration of Industry and Commerce (AIC) about non-compliance with laws and local rules for direct selling.

The AIC found evidence of violations and threatened to impose a fine of RMB 2.8 million fine (about $431,088).

Personnel from Nu Skin China decided to ask a party official to intervene with the AIC. In return, Nu Skin China would donate RMB 1 million (about $150,000) to a charity identified by the party official.

The party official had set up the charity in the province.

The head of the AIC in the province had previously reported to the party official.

The SEC said,

Nu Skin China personnel had alerted Nu Skin US of the proposed donation, but failed to disclose the relationship between the donation and the AIC investigation, or the relationship between the request for recommendation letters and the AIC investigation.

Nu Skin US identified that a large donation in China could pose FCPA risks. It advised Nu Skin China to consult with outside U.S. legal counsel based in China to ensure that the donation complied with the FCPA.

Outside counsel recommended that Nu Skin China include anti-corruption language, which included language regarding the illegality of influencing government officials, in the written donation agreement with the charity.

That language was inserted into a draft of the donation agreement between Nu Skin China and the charity. But the anti-corruption language was removed from the final version of the donation agreement that Nu Skin China executed.

Nu Skin US didnt know the language had been removed, the SEC said.

Two days after a donation ceremony, Nu Skin China received notice from the AIC that the company wouldnt be charged or fined.

The SEC said,

In Nu Skin Chinas expenditure authorization form, the [d]etailed [p]urpose for the payment to the charity was inaccurately and/or unfairly described as a donation rather than a payment to influence the Party Official to favorably impact the outcome of the AIC investigation.

Nu Skin also failed to devise and maintain a reasonable system of internal accounting controls over its subsidiarys operations in China to prevent illegal charitable contributions.

The SEC said.

[G]iven the well-known corruption risks in China, Nu Skin US did not ensure that adequate due diligence was conducted by Nu Skin China with respect to charitable donations to identify links to government or political party officials and to prevent payments intended to improperly influence such persons in violation of the companys anti-corruption policy and the FCPA.

The SEC said Nu Skin cooperated in the investigation and took remedial action.

The Nu Skin enforcement action is only the second FCPA case based entirely on a charitable donation.

The other case involved Schering-Plough in 2004.

The SEC said the pharma violated the FCPA when its subsidiary in Poland made improper payments of about $76,000 to a charitable organization called the Chudow Castle Foundation. The director of the foundation was a government official who could influence buying decisions for drugs.

Schering-Plough settled the FCPA offenses by paying the SEC a civil penalty of $500,000.

* * *

The SECs order as Securities Exchange Act of 1934 Release No. 78884 and Administrative Proceeding File No. 3-17556 In the Matter of Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (dated September 20, 2016) is here (pdf).



_______

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. Hell be the keynote speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
'This is what's going to happen,' I explained to Kieran very matter of factly. To my surprise he agreed to go through with it. But as soon as the guy arrived Kieran announced he was going to the gym while the equipment was being set up. Now I know he'd read up on ways to cheat a lie detector test. He'd escaped to neck Red Bull and run on the treadmill so he could get his heart rate up and change his breathing. Talk about deluded! Even the lie detector guy commented on how bad it looked that he'd gone to the gym in the first place. When he did reappear Kieran looked casual, like he didn't have care in the world. He even had me fooled. Why doesn't he look scared? I kept thinking. I'd be shitting myself!

Reborn

Next was the pre- test interview where the polygraph test was explained. We also discussed the questions that I wanted to ask as I'd been told I was only allowed three. That was frustrating. I had so many going round my head. In the end, I narrowed it down from . . . ooh . . . around 100! Overall I was pleased with the questions I chose and Kieran . . . well, Kieran didn't have a say in the matter.

When it came to it, I wasn't allowed in the room while the test was being conducted. Apparently, everything had to be done in a controlled environment. Obviously I was the least controlled person there, so I sat outside with Gaylin by my side. I swear to God, it was the longest hour of my life. A monitor was clipped on to Kieran's finger to measure his pulse, and a strap placed around his chest to measure any changes in his breathing. Attached to his upper arm was an inflatable cuff, like doctors use when they're measuring your blood pressure, and all the wires fed into a laptop computer. The guy told me afterwards that Kieran was calm and collected throughout the whole process. He answered clearly and with no hesitation. So here's what I asked:

1. Apart from the one time Kate knows about, have you passionately kissed Jane? Kieran answered 'No'.

2. Apart from kissing, have you engaged in any sexual activity with Jane? Kieran answered 'No'.

3. Since you've returned from Cape Verde have you had any contact with Jane? Kieran answered 'No'.

The results were analysed on the spot and I was told the outcome there and then. The expert's conclusion read: 'It is the opinion of the examiner that Kieran Hayler was not being truthful during this examination.'

Gotcha!

Katie Price's latest autobiography 'Reborn' will be available from 22 September. Pre-order your copy now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reborn-Katie-Price/dp/1780893469
Will Ferrell has quit new film 'Captain Dad' just days before shooting is schedule to start.

Will Ferrell

The 49-year-old actor had been cast to play lead character Rich Peelman in the comedy romp about a family that go on vacation to Colombia with disastrous consequences, however, he has decided to drop out of the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Filming was due to begin in the South American country next Monday (26.09.16) but now Ferrell is out studio Protagonist Pictures is desperately looking for a replacement.

No official reason for Ferrell's departure is yet to be given.

Some cast and crew are already in Colombia and are awaiting news on what is happening to the shooting schedule.

'Superbad' star Michael Cera and 'Capote' actress Catherine Keener are to star in the movie which is being directed by Sebastian Silva - who has also penned the screenplay.

Following Ferrell's exit, the producers are now working as quickly as possible to fill his role and intend to move forward with production as soon as possible.

The 'Anchorman' star's departure from 'Captain Dad' is the second big screen project he has walked away from in 2016.

Ferrell had been cast to portray late US President Ronald Reagan in 'Reagan' with the storyline focusing on the start of the politician's battle with Alzheimer's during his second presidential term in office.

In the plot an intern is tasked with convincing the Commander-In-Chief that he is an actor playing the American President in a movie.

However, following complaints from Reagan's family he backed out of the movie out of respect for them.

Ferrell is signed up Sherlock Holmes-inspired comedy 'Holmes & Watson' for which he will be reunited with John C. Reilly again.

Ferrell is to play Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective, with Reilly portraying his faithful right hand man Dr. John Watson.
Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla will travel to Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in November.

Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla

The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall will head to the three nations to help "strengthen" the UK's "bilateral relations" in the area.

Clarence House said in a statement: "On behalf of the British Government, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will undertake official visits to the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates in November 2016.

"The tour will help to strengthen the United Kingdom's warm bilateral relations with key partners in the region."

But it's not the first time Charles and Camilla have visited the area.

Just last year, Charles spent time in the UAE and did so beforehand in 2014 along with Bahrain.

He was accompanied by Camilla for a visit to Oman in 2013, and the pair both went to Bahrain and the UAE in February 2007.

Before then, Charles, 67, carried out several solo trips to the region, including visiting Oman and UAE in November 2003 and 2004 respectively.

He first visited Oman in December 1980 and later returned in 1986 when he also went to Bahrain, and three years later the UAE.
Ahmedabad, the gastronomic paradise, never fails to welcome different food varieties entering the city. This time its Thailands famous street food  rolled ice cream. However, the city has made this Thai import its own and rechristened it the tawa ice cream.

What is tawa ice cream?

To make the tawa ice cream, milk or cream is poured on a metal plate, and cooled to around -23 degrees Celsius. Then fruits, chocolate chips, candies, cookies, gulab jamun, sweet paan and more are added to the milk/cream. It is then immediately chopped up using spatulas. The mashed ingredients are then quickly spread on the cold metal surface to form a thin sheet and then scraped into rolls and served.

What is the difference between the Thai rolled ice cream and the Indian version?

While the Thai version uses thick cream, the tawa version uses milk or cream. Some of the ingredients used in the tawa version are frozen specifically to be used in the ice cream. Some uniquely Indian flavours make it different from the Thai version. In the Thai version, fresh and seasonal fruits are used. Also, the tawa version rolls are not as thin as those being served on the streets of Thailand.

Expert take

Food writer Esha Shah says, It is definitely a treat to watch the ice cream being made in front of you, in addition to watching the cold plate do its magic. I think it would be more appealing if fresh, seasonal fruits and milk were used.  But Shah does recommend that everyone try these at least once.
The Jharkhand state government has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Orient Craft Limited for construction of two textile parks at a cost of Rs 1,500 crore on a 140-acre land. The MoU was signed during the launch of a road show named 'Momentum Jharkhand' in Mumbai to promote Jharkhand's global investors summit scheduled for February.

The MoU was signed after the state government released a textile policy which proposes capital investment subsidy of 20 per cent up to Rs 50 crore, VAT subsidy of 100 per cent for seven years followed by 40 per cent for the next three years, and 100 per cent reimbursement of stamp duty.

The new policy also proposes setting up of six training centres to provide locals with jobs in the textile sector, chief minister Raghubar Das said.

The Jharkhand state government has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Orient Craft Limited for construction of two textile parks at a cost of Rs 1,500 crore on a 140-acre land. The MoU was signed during the launch of a road show named 'Momentum Jharkhand' in Mumbai to promote Jharkhand's global investors summit scheduled for February.#

He informed that the MoU with Orient Craft would result in creation of 15,000 jobs.

Stating that his government is investor-friendly with a focus on single-window clearance, Das said, The approvals and clearances for the establishment and operations of the industries will be through an online portal with minimum human interface. The state creates a system which enables the investor to approach a single designated authority and seek minimum number of clearances and approvals to set up and operationalise an industry. As a result, Jharkhand ranked in top 3 in ease of doing business in India.

The new industrial and investment promotion policy focuses on creating a conducive ecosystem which makes industries in Jharkhand innovative and globally competitive, Das said. He explained that the government does not face any land acquisition problem because it already has a land bank of 134,000 hectares. Land belonging to various government departments and corporations has been pooled into one corporation (Jharkhand Industrial Area Development Authority), which allots land to the investor, he said. (RKS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Six Sweden based textile machinery producing companies are participating at the upcoming ITMA Asia to be held October 20-25, who will showcase the latest product innovations in various segments of the textile industry. Among these are Eltex of Sweden, ACG Kinna Automatic AB, ES Automatex Solution AB, Eton Systems AB, Baldwin Jimek AB and IRO AB.In hall 3, booth C15, Eltex of Sweden will present the Eye Compact yarn break sensor system for tufting, which eliminates the need for manual monitoring of yarn, thereby improving quality and efficiency.

Six Sweden based textile machinery producing companies are participating at the upcoming ITMA Asia to be held October 20-25, who will showcase the latest product innovations in various segments of the textile industry. Among these are Eltex of Sweden, ACG Kinna Automatic AB, ES Automatex Solution AB, Eton Systems AB, Baldwin Jimek AB and IRO AB.#

Again in hall 3, booth C01, IRO AB, a producer of yarn feeding equipment, will show new developments especially for technical fabrics and extremely demanding applications.In hall 5, booth B03, ACG Kinna will display their unique pillow closing machine designed to close the open end of the pillow using lock stitch at an output speed of 9 pillows per minute.Also in hall 5, booth D51, ES Automatex will exhibit several new machine concepts, such as the terry towel crosshemmer, which increases production by up to 10 per cent.Eton Systems AB, which offers flexible and unique solutions for apparel, home textile and other light industries, is presenting its latest development, Etonnote, a tool that further controls the production in hall 5, booth B11.Baldwin Jimek, will showcase the latest solutions in finishing, remoistening, and water or chemical management. Baldwin technologies offer reduced consumption of chemistry and water; lower waste of process chemistry and water; and shorter drying times in hall 6, booth A06.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
HON PM BAINIMARAMA ADDRESS TO THE 71ST SESSION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2016





The President of the General Assembly,The Secretary General of the United Nations,Excellencies,Distinguished Delegates,Bula Vinaka and a very good morning/ afternoon to you all.Mr President,This is a special moment for Fiji as you assume the Presidency of the 71st session of the General Assembly  the first Fijian and the first Pacific Islander to attain this high office at the UN.Your nation is honoured and proud. And on behalf of every Fijian, I offer you my warmest congratulations and wish you every success as you guide our deliberations over the next 12 months.I want to thank those nations that supported Fijis bid for the presidency, including our neighbours and friends in the Pacific Small Island Developing States.I also thank His Excellency Mogens Lykketoft of Denmark for his leadership during the 70th session.Mr President,Fiji fully supports the agenda you have outlined for the coming session, which is to persuade the world to begin implementing the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals that the 193 member states adopted last year. As you rightly stated when you took your oath of office last week: for integritys sake, the 71st session must be the year that we witness the wheels turning.We have collectively pledged to mobilise the global community to end all forms of poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change. And we have pledged that as we do so, we will leave no-one behind, wherever they live on the planet.That is our promise to the 7.5 billion people across the world whose interests we represent and it is a promise that must be kept. A Universal Push to Transform our World , as the theme of this session puts it.Mr President,A centerpiece of the 71st session and one of our most critical priorities is the High Level UN Conference in New York next June to Support the Implementation of SDG 14 - the conservation and sustainable use of oceans, seas and marine resources.Fiji is proud to be co-hosting this gathering with Sweden and I ask you all to give this initiative your full support. Because the world must act quickly and decisively to reverse the environmental degradation of our oceans and seas and the reckless and irresponsible use of their precious resources.For a Small Island Developing State such as Fiji, this is as pressing as the need to address the challenges of climate change. And deal with the extreme weather events and rising seas that pose such a threat to our way of life in the SIDS and other vulnerable parts of the world.Many millions of people in maritime and coastal communities the world over are looking to us for decisive action to address the growing crisis of pollution, overfishing and the loss of marine habitats. And we must not fail them.Fiji also comes to the 71st session with a plea to all nations that have yet to do so to ratify the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We are proud to have been the first nation in the world to ratify the Agreement and lodge the ratification instruments. But we also come with the message that Paris must be merely the first step.We are alarmed by scientific predictions that the 2 degree cap on global warming over pre-industrial levels agreed to in Paris is not enough to save us. Seven months ago, the Fijian people were given a terrifying glimpse into the future the experts say awaits us when we were struck by the biggest tropical cyclone ever to make landfall in the southern hemisphere.Cyclone Winston  packing winds of more than 300 kilometres an hour - killed 44 of our people and left many thousands homeless. Mercifully, it spared our main tourism areas  our principal source of income  so our wider economy remained intact. But if this is what awaits us as global warming triggers weather events that are more frequent and more extreme, then God help us.In common with other Small Island Developing States, we are facing a nightmare scenario in which a single event scoring a direct hit could wipe out our economy and set us back for decades. And make it impossible for us to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.So Mr President, our message from the Pacific is this: the 2 degree cap is not enough. We need the world to go one better and embrace the 1.5 degree cap that we are calling for in the Suva Declaration by members of the Pacific Islands Development Forum. Deeper cuts in carbon emissions. More decisive global action than we are currently witnessing.But as a first step, I appeal to you all to ratify the Paris Agreement. And to turn your backs on what I have termed the coalition of the selfish  those countries that would see the vulnerable nations battered and submerged rather than alter their pampered, carbon-driven lifestyles.Mr President,I am proud to report that Fiji is heeding your call to implement the 2030 global agenda. First and foremost, we have placed sustainable development at the core of our national agenda. The Green Growth Framework that I launched last year is a blueprint for the future direction of our nation. And has been incorporated into our new five and twenty year National Development Plans that we will be unveiling in the coming months.This stipulates that no development whatsoever in Fiji will be permitted unless it can be conclusively demonstrated to be sustainable. We regard the preservation of our natural environment on land and at sea as our number one priority. And we are willing to make sacrifices to fulfill our solemn duty to the Fijian people to preserve their surroundings.Our Constitution under Section 40 gives every Fijian the right to  a clean and healthy environment, which includes the right to have the natural world protected for the benefit of present and future generations.I make this solemn pledge to my own people and the wider global community. That while my Government remains in office, Fiji will never be among the ranks of those nations that have compromised their futures for short-term financial gain. We intend to raise our living standards by other means - and especially by making things that other people want to buy and providing services that other people want to access.We are taking the Fijian Made brand of quality products and services to the four corners of the earth. And managing our economy responsibly to international best practice, with a particular emphasis on infrastructure development, service delivery and providing for the less fortunate.Of prime importance is our education revolution, in which we are equipping Fijian young people with the knowledge and skills to have satisfying, sustainable livelihoods and contribute to our nations progress. We are providing free schooling for the first time. Plus our first tertiary loans scheme and more scholarships for gifted students to open up a gateway of unprecedented opportunity to our universities and a new network of technical colleges.We have set our sights higher than ever before - to become a smarter, more dynamic country at the hub of the Pacific, the crossroads of our region. And to evolve into a modern nation state that is a beacon to our neighbours and respected around the world.Mr President,I am pleased to report that we have made a strong start as a nation on the long but determined journey to achieve this goal. Not only are our people being given more opportunity that at any time in our history. Not only are we creating a more equitable society, that includes targeted assistance for the vulnerable and the countrys first pension scheme. Fiji is currently experiencing a record period of economic growth  seven straight years of expansion.Even in the wake of Cyclone Winston, we expect growth of close to three per cent this year. And our message to the world is simple: Fiji is open for business. With attractive incentives for investment and some of the most favourable corporate and personal tax rates in the Pacific region.We have state of the art communications and an educated, English-speaking work force. We are investing in new roads, airports and other infrastructure and have dramatically improved the efficiency of our ports. And we have our pristine environment  our spectacular islands, coastlines, and waters. Plus a standard of hospitality that has made the Fijian people famous the world over.We market ourselves to the world as a holiday destination with the slogan Fiji  where happiness finds you. And whatever the challenges of Winston, I can confidently say that the Fijian people have never been happier. The joy that erupted when our World Champion Rugby Sevens team won the Gold medal at the Rio Olympics was shared by every Fijian. And it has brought us together in celebration and seen us more unified in recent weeks than at any other time in our history.It has also inspired us to imagine what else our small nation can do if we put our minds to it. As many of you know, we have had considerable challenges over the years in forging a common identity and producing an equal and just society for every citizen. But I am here to say that those days are over. And as Fiji approaches its first half century as an independent nation in 2020, we are finally one nation, one people, with a great sense of national optimism and a great deal to look forward to.Mr President,To reflect our new-found confidence, we are also in the process of re-evaluating our relationships with the rest of the world. Last week, I assumed the position of Foreign Minister as well as Prime Minister. And I intend to steadily reform this Ministry and refine certain aspects of our foreign policy. To give it a new direction and a renewed sense of purpose.First and foremost, we are going to place trade at the centre of our foreign policy effort  the promotion of the impressive collection of quality products and services under the Fijian Made brand. Some of these are already making a global impact but we believe we can do a lot more. Whether it is our water, our cosmetics, foodstuffs and other manufactured goods; the more efficient marketing of Fiji as a prime holiday destination; or spreading the wings of our boutique national airline  Fiji Airways  and flying to other destinations in the Asia Pacific and beyond.We intend to immediately boost the level of collaboration between our Foreign Ministry and our Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, which have too often operated in isolation. Our diplomats and trade commissioners will be instructed to make it a priority to work more closely with Fijian exporters to promote the Fijian Made brand. And to access goods and services of international standard from new and old trading partners that benefit Fijian consumers.More broadly, we are rethinking some of our foreign policy positions and objectives. This includes a reevaluation of the central principle of Fijian foreign policy for some years of being friends to all and enemies to none.Of course, we seek friendly relations with all nations and are certainly not in the business of making enemies. But we intend, in future, to choose our friends in a more discerning manner, and to align ourselves more closely with those countries that share our underlying values and principles.These include  above all - adherence to international law and adherence to human rights and human dignity. Along with other shared values such as mutual respect, respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the resolving of disputes by peaceful means and non-interference in each others internal affairs.Mr President,This change of direction will not be sudden. It is certainly not going to produce a dramatic change in the international company that Fiji keeps. But we are definitely seeking closer relations with nations that share our values and basic outlook. And especially those nations that respect human life and the rights and dignity of their citizens, adhere to the principle of social justice, uphold the rule of law and insist on equality and respect for all human beings, as we do in Fiji.As part of our wider commitment to human rights, we are seeking membership of the UN Human Rights Council for the two-year term that commences in 2018. We would be the first Pacific nation to serve on the Council and I ask you all to support our bid.Mr President,Fiji will continue to play a disproportionate role in the international community in relation to its size. Whether it is our continuing commitment to UN Peacekeeping and sending our men and women in uniform to protect ordinary people in troubled parts of the world. Or our lead role in drawing global attention to the urgent need for action on climate change.It is certainly a proud moment for me as the leader of our small but influential nation to stand here before the nations of the world with you behind me as President of the General Assembly.Congratulations again on your appointment. Thank you for bringing such honour to our nation. Every Fijian  indeed the entire community of nations  wishes you well as you preside over the deliberations of this 71st session. And the great issues of our time on which the future of the world depends.Vinaka vakalevu. Thank you.
HON PM BAINIMARAMA REMARKS FOR 21 SEPTEMBER HIGH-LEVEL EVENT ON THE PARIS AGREEMENT





Excellencies,Ladies and Gentlemen,

I wish to express my deep thanks to the Secretary-General for hosting this event, and for his nine years of unflagging commitment and leadership to advancing global progress on climate change.

Mr. Secretary-General, you have elevated climate change to the top of the global agenda, and helped mobilize the consensus needed to adopt the Paris Agreement.

You have consistently focused attention on the critical needs of the small island developing nations, as well as the worlds poorest and most vulnerable communities with respect to climate change.Your leadership has enabled the world to arrive at the point we are at today, here in this General Hall, as we work together to ensure that the Paris Agreement enters into force this year.Today, governments have reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris Agreement, just as they did in April at the Signature Ceremony when 175 countries signed the Agreement.Fiji is proud to have been the first country in the world to complete its domestic processes to ratify the Paris Agreement. I assure you that our country will use its leadership position as holder of the Office of the President of the General Assembly this session to do everything possible to secure the rapid ratification of the Paris Agreement and spur climate action.The need is urgent. This year is on track to be the hottest year ever, as was 2015, and as 2014 was the year before. My country, along with the other small island nations, is on the frontlines of climate impacts. The rapid entry into force and implementation of the Paris Agreement is critical for our national survival.We have a responsibility to our people  and to all the worlds people - to protect them from rising seas, powerful storms, hurricanes and cyclones, crippling floods, devastating droughts and higher temperatures.Todays event shows there is support from the global community to bring the Paris Agreement to life and to work together to achieve all of our Sustainable Development Goals.Mr. Secretary-General, I thank you for convening this High-level event and for your longstanding leadership on climate change.
The release of Dhanush-starrer Tamil action-thriller Thodari, which is completely shot on a moving train, has been delayed in Karnataka owing to the ongoing dispute over the release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu.

In the rest of India, Thodari releases on Thursday (September 22) in cinemas.

"We fear the Cauvery row between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka will affect the release of "Thodari". Hence, we have decided to not release the film even though it will cost us heavily," the film's Karnataka distributor Manjunath told IANS.

Directed by Prabhu Solomon, the film features Dhanush as a pantry worker and Keerthy Suresh as a make-up artist.

The film has been shot on a Chennai-Delhi bound express, and it features stunts shot atop moving train.

Earlier this month, Vikram-starrer Irumugan too, faced a similar fate in Karnataka, as its release was stalled at the last moment.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Also Read: SHOCKER: Soundarya Rajinikanth & Ashwin Decide To Part Ways?
As the saying goes, somethings only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. But when it comes to real estate tax appraisals, figuring out what that is can be more of an art than a science.

With older commercial properties throughout Cumberland County changing hands at a rapid pace, realtors and local government officials alike say that the issue of how properties are assessed for tax purposes is becoming a major factor in redevelopment  and not an easy one.

Its probably the hardest time ever for appraisals of office buildings, and maybe even mixed-use buildings, said Art Campbell of Campbell Commercial Real Estate, a Lemoyne-based broker and one of the regions most influential dealers.

In my world, everything is defined as a potential income and a potential expense, and what the bottom line is you can pay for something and still make money, Campbell said. But youre seeing valuations all over the board.

One of the most extreme examples of this problem can be seen at the Senate Plaza building, located at 100 Senate Ave. in East Pennsboro Township, just north of Camp Hill.

The six-story complex with 230,647 square feet of office space was built in the 1970s, and at one time housed Pennsylvania Blue Shield and Commerce Bank. Buyouts and mergers with Highmark and Metro Bank, respectively, and subsequently First National Bank, saw jobs consolidated elsewhere, and Senate Plaza effectively abandoned.

The purchase

Last month, local real estate investors Triple Crown and J.C. Bar jointly purchased the property for slightly over $2 million. But this transaction happened subsequent to a five-year effort by the buildings previous owner to get the tax valuation on the property drastically reduced.

According to records from the Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas, an entity named McCormick Properties initially petitioned the county in 2011 to reduce the buildings assessment.

At that time, the building was valued at $24,750,000 for tax purposes. The county subsequently cut the assessment to $19,473,500, according to the court filing.

But McCormicks attorney, Gregory Lotz of Montclair, New Jersey, continued to lobby for a lower value. Lotzs office did not return phone calls for additional information.

Ultimately, the court approved a settlement in which Senate Plaza assessment would be retroactively lowered on a gradual scale for each tax year since 2011. The final valuation is $4,749,600  roughly a fifth of where it was before McCormicks inquiry, and still twice what was reportedly paid for the property last month.

Triple Crown COO Deb Hodges said it was hard to say how much the tax cut influenced the companys decision to purchase Senate Plaza.

I can say that we have no further appeals planned on the property at this time, she said.

In many ways, Senate Plaza is a textbook case  an office building thats at least a quarter-century old, and whose property valuation is based on income from tenant companies that were swept away in the corporate consolidations that started in the 1990s.

Assigning value

For tax assessors  who are assigning values to a large number of properties  details like this are often lost, and values are assigned based on what a property is capable of producing, based on averages of demand and appreciation throughout the entire jurisdiction being assessed.

If a property has been empty for a long time, that can have a tremendous impact, said John French, solicitor for the Cumberland County Board of Assessment Appeals.

Appeals of assessments are commonly brought before the county, French said, although the Senate Plaza was an unusually large discrepancy.

There are a lot of different gauges assessors will use, French said. For commercial property, youre often looking at the highest and best use rubric.

If a property is not creating the value that it should on paper, French said, assessors are going to have to look at a number of different issues.

Has the property been empty because it needs updates that are prohibitively expensive? Is the property outfitted for one entity to occupy the whole thing, or can it be split up? French posited as examples. Weve re-valued properties because their sewer is out of date and too expensive to fix. There are a lot of things that can go into the consideration.

For Senate Plaza specifically, its unclear whether the building can turn a profit as is, or whether it will need to be demolished and rebuilt in order to suit modern tenants.

Right now, were trying to figure out our best options down the road. Its too early to tell, Hodges said.

But for older office properties generally, any rehabilitation cost is a negative to the purchase price  even if this isnt reflected in the assessment.

A structure like Senate Plaza may have been worth the equivalent of $24 million in current dollars back in the 1980s. But assuming this value will hold steady and continue to appreciate, as tax assessment calculations often do, ignores the financial effects of age.

I would say its a recurring theme, said Chuck Heller, senior broker with Landmark Commercial Realty. An equity firm from out of town buys a building just for the numbers, for the cash flow. But once the tenants vacate, they realize its an antiquated building with low ceilings, no windows, inefficient utilities, and the cost to rehabilitate may be more than the assessment.

Taxing bodies

Yet the biggest loser in this case isnt necessarily the buyer or the seller, but the taxing body that sees its revenue drastically reduced. Typically, this is the school district.

In the Senate Plaza case, the effect was drastic. Not only did the de-valuation of the property cut future tax revenue, but the settlement stipulated that overpayments made since 2011 were to be returned to McCormick.

East Pennsboro Area School District must return a total of $332,766.16, according to Betsy Holley, business administrator for the district. Half was paid shortly after the settlement, and the other half will be paid next month.

At the school districts current tax rate of $11.5749 per $1,000 of value, Senate Plaza is subject to just under $55,000 per year in property taxes at the new assessment of $4.75 million. If that value had remained at $24.75 million, the school district would be seeing about $286,500 per year from Senate Plaza.

Commercial real estate assessment appeals are always a concern for the district, Holley said in an email.

Its hard to say where this will shake out, according to realtors. Some sectors of the commercial market, such as residential housing complexes and warehouses, are moving at historic highs. Office space, however, is at a low, and will likely sink lower the longer older properties sit.

No one is building a speculative office building, Campbell said. Pretty much all new construction in that sector is medical offices, and they are pretty much all pre-leased.

Corporate consolidation has also coupled with design changes. Most new office buildings are designed for 10 employees per 1,000 square feet, Campbell said  almost double the density of the much more spacious complexes that were being built in past decades.

Money is also tighter. Buildings have to be fully leased in order meet their bottom line, or else theyre essentially worth nothing. Steady appreciation of real estate no longer exists after the 2007 crash. Equity cant finance itself anymore.

If buildings change hands, its because a company buys it believing they can rent it out in a reasonable time frame and the expenses are below the development cost of a new building, Campbell said. Banks underwriting criteria have gotten tougher  which it should be. No one is financing a purchase based on anticipated appreciation. The cash flow has to make sense today.
~ Newly-created role to support opportunities in Europe and emerging freight rail markets ~

LAKE OSWEGO, Oregon, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --The Greenbrier Companies, Inc. (NYSE: GBX) announced today that Jim Cowan has been appointed President, Greenbrier International. Cowan continues to report to William A. Furman, Chairman and CEO of Greenbrier and remains as CEO of GBW Railcar Services, LLC, a 50/50 railcar repair and refurbishment joint venture with Watco Companies, LLC. Ray Pericola, who has served at GBW since its creation in 2014, has been promoted to President reporting to Cowan.

In this newly-created role, Cowan's broad experience in manufacturing and the rail industry will support Greenbrier's rapidly-growing international operations. Cowan's responsibilities extend to all railcar markets outside the Americas and include international project coordination with Greenbrier's Global Manufacturing Organization (GMO). Cowan will work closely with Alejandro Centurion, President of GMO, and Martin Graham, Executive Vice President, GMO.

Cowan is well known in the railcar industry with decades of experience in senior leadership positions. Prior to joining Greenbrier in 2014, Cowan worked for Amsted Rail supporting their activities in Brazil. Previously, Cowan served as President and Chief Executive Officer of American Railcar Industries, Inc. (ARI) where he had oversight of ARI's activities in international rail markets where Greenbrier is currently active.

"Today, Greenbrier serves railcar markets from our facilities in the US, Mexico, Europe and Brazil. Greenbrier's presence is also rapidly growing in emerging railcar markets that we can serve from Europe including markets in the Middle East, Africa and Eurasia," Furman said. "I have asked Jim to take on this new role to more fully focus Greenbrier on global business opportunities. I am pleased that he will bring important new leadership to our international activities."

About Greenbrier

Greenbrier (www.gbrx.com), headquartered in Lake Oswego, Oregon, is a leading supplier of transportation equipment and services to the railroad industry. Greenbrier builds new railroad freight cars in manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Mexico and Poland and marine barges at our U.S. manufacturing facility. Greenbrier sells reconditioned wheel sets and provides wheel services at locations throughout the U.S. We recondition, manufacture and sell railcar parts at various U.S. sites. Through GBW Railcar Services, LLC, a 50/50 joint venture with Watco Companies, LLC, freight cars are repaired and refurbished at over 30 locations across North America, including more than 10 tank car repair and maintenance facilities certified by the Association of American Railroads. Greenbrier owns a lease fleet of over 8,900 railcars and performs management services for over 264,000 railcars.
TOKYO (dpa-AFX) - Japan posted a merchandise trade deficit of 18.711 billion yen in August, the Ministry of Finance said on Wednesday. That was well short of expectations for a surplus of 191.0 billion yen and down from the 513.6 billion yen surplus in July. Exports tumbled an annual 9.6 percent to 5.316 trillion yen, also missing expectations for a decline of 4.7 percent after plummeting 14.0 percent in the previous month. Exports to all of Asia fell 9.4 percent on year to 2,927.184 trillion yen, while exports to China alone were down 8.9 percent to 968.944 billion yen. Exports to the United States slipped an annual 14.5 percent to 971.451 billion yen, while exports to the European Union eased 0.7 percent to 590.772 billion yen. Imports skidded 17.3 percent on year to 5.335 trillion yen versus forecasts for a fall of 16.6 percent after plunging 24.7 percent a month earlier. Imports from all of Asia fell 13.8 percent on year to 2.629 trillion yen, while imports from just China alone skidded 15.4 percent to 1.312 trillion yen. Imports from the United States tumbled an annual 9.5 percent to 609.098 billion yen, while imports from the European Union fell an annual 12.4 percent to 673.280 billion yen. The adjusted trade surplus was 340.0 billion yen - missing expectations for 494.0 billion yen but up from 317.6 billion yen in July. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.


MELBOURNE (dpa-AFX) - Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton plc's (BHP.AX, BLT.L, BBL, BHP) Chief Financial Officer Peter Beaven said that the company is continuing to negotiate with the Australian Tax Office over a higher A$1.02 billion bill for pricing of sales of commodities, including iron ore, to its Singapore marketing unit.



The Australian Taxation Office has issued BHP with an assessment of additional charges liable on sales of commodities from Australia from fiscal 2003-to-2013 to its Singapore marketing unit, the company said in its annual payments to government report. The marketing unit re-sells both BHP and third party material to customers at higher prices, and BHP disputes the ruling, it said.



'BHP Billiton does not agree with the ATO's position. Consequently, we have objected to all of the amended assessments and intend to continue to defend our position, including by initiating court action if necessary,' the company said.



BHP Billiton released its Economic contribution and payments to governments Report which shows the Company's total economic contribution globally in the 2016 financial year was US$26.7 billion. This includes US$3.7 billion globally in taxes, royalties and other payments to governments.



Releasing the report today, Peter Beaven said the Company's adjusted effective tax rate in the 2016 financial year was 35.8 per cent, demonstrating BHP Billiton pays its fair share of tax. When royalties are included, the rate is more than 58 per cent.



'The Company's adjusted effective tax rate averaged 31.9 per cent over the past decade, and 39.8 per cent when royalties are included,' Mr Beaven said.



'Over the last decade, our average effective tax rate was higher than the 30 per cent company rate in Australia and the average OECD rate of 25 per cent.'



In the last decade, BHP Billiton has paid about US$85 billion globally in taxes, royalties and other payments to governments, including US$58 billion or A$65 billion in Australia.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 03/17/17 -- A small envelope brought a flashback of days past to a Union Square hotel in San Francisco last month much to the surprise and elation of hotel associates.

At a time in the hotel industry when room keys are advancing from magnetic keys to RFID key cards to keyless mobile devices, the Courtyard San Francisco Union Square obtained a U.S. Postal Service envelope that contained a true heirloom -- a metal key to Room 1102 of the Maurice Hotel, the original occupant of the hotel property. The treasured heirloom tells its own tale of the history behind the Courtyard. Opened over 86 years ago at the same location on San Francisco's Post Street, the Maurice Hotel followed tradition of the day with metal room keys tagged with return instructions -- "Drop in Any Mail Box -- We Guarantee Postage."

Hardly the "Express Checkout" known to today's travelers, the envelope containing the key was postmarked in San Antonio, Texas and received at the Courtyard San Francisco Union Square in February with $3.27 postage due. The missing key, if removed by a guest, may have been the cause of great stress for hotel staff decades ago when the normal check-out process included leaving the room key at the front desk. Referred to by Courtyard associates as the great-grandparent of today's lodging, the Maurice Hotel opened in 1930.

Now, as the hotel beckons guests to downtown San Francisco with smart amenities and refreshing designs, discovery of this antique has brought new meaning to the legacy of hospitality found just three blocks from the popular SF Union Square.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, total renovation of the building into a Courtyard was completed in 2015, and included modernization of elevators, new mechanical, electrical and life-safety systems, massive seismic and structural upgrades and a complete rebuild of 166 guest rooms over 17 floors. The full-scale makeover also embraced preservation and restoration of original detailed plaster work of the historic hotel lobby.

About the Courtyard San Francisco Union Square

Defining a history all its own, the Courtyard San Francisco Union Square welcomes travelers with a quiet energy that offers a refreshing take on both business and leisure travel. An open lobby, free Wi-Fi and on-site dining at Table 761 offer travelers an opportunity to escape the confines of their guest room and enjoy a change of pace. Kick back and enjoy a drink with friends on our spacious outdoor terrace. GoBoard technology, a business center, library and home theater area offer home-like options, just steps from your room. Additional amenities include a boardroom for hosting small business or social gatherings and a well-equipped fitness center. Explore San Francisco while enjoying a relaxed and uncomplicated stay at the Courtyard San Francisco Union Square.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=3120182



CONTACT:

Courtyard San Francisco Union Square

761 Post Street San Francisco California 94109

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/sfocn-courtyard-san-francisco-union-square/

415-346-3800




IRVING (dpa-AFX) - New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has reportedly launched an investigation on Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) because the oil giant has not written down the value of its assets even two years after a plunge in oil prices. Almost all major oil companies worldwide were forced to write down value of their oil assets after crude prices plunged over 60 percent, however, Exxon has not shown any difference in its asset value. Schneiderman's office is probing the company's accounting practices, according to people familiar with the matter. According to a WSJ report, an Exxon spokesman said that the company follows all rules and regulations in accordance with the accounting and reporting standards of the SEC and FASB. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
FAIRFIELD (dpa-AFX) - Conglomerate General Electric Co. (GE) announced Wednesday that the company and Barata Indonesia signed a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU to collaborate on manufacturing parts and provide services for GE's aero derivatives, heavy duty gas turbines, boilers for coal-fired power plants and renewable energy solutions. In addition, GE committed to support a technology pilot that aims to accelerate rural electrification across Indonesia, a key priority of the Indonesian Government's poverty alleviation program. The decisions followed the Future of Electricity Summit hosted by GE, in association with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry or KADIN. During the summit, business and government leaders discussed the digital transformation of the electricity sector and how digital solutions, now commercially available, can improve power generation and distribution across Indonesia. Summit participants also discussed GE's collaboration with PLN, several of which were completed in six months after initial discussions. GE also announced its commitment to fund a pilot project in Eastern Indonesia to showcase technology which can help electrify remote villages. This pilot is in support of the government's Bright Indonesia program which aims to electrify more than 12,600 villages. The program will deploy digitally-enabled hybrid power solutions. GE is also testing this hybrid technology in India and Africa. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.


STOCKHOLM (dpa-AFX) - Swedish home appliances giant Electrolux AB (0MDT.L, 0GQ1.L, ELUXY.PK) said that the members of the Nomination Committee for Annual General Meeting in 2017 have now been appointed.



Electrolux Nomination Committee shall consist of six members. The members should be one representative of each of the four largest shareholders in terms of voting rights that wish to participate in the committee, together with the Chairman of the Electrolux Board and one additional Board member.



The members of the Nomination Committee have now been appointed based on the ownership structure as of August 31, 2016. Johan Forssell, Investor AB, is the Chairman of the committee. The other owner representatives are Marianne Nilsson, Swedbank Robur funds, Kaj Thoren, Alecta, and John Hernander, Nordea Investment Funds. The committee will also include Ronnie Leten and Fredrik Persson, Chairman and Director, respectively, of Electrolux.



The Nomination Committee will prepare proposals for the Annual General Meeting in 2017 regarding Chairman of the Annual General Meeting, Board members, Chairman of the Board, remuneration for Board members and, to the extent deemed necessary, proposal regarding amendments of the current instruction for the Nomination Committee.



The Annual General Meeting will be held on March 23, 2017, at Stockholm, Sweden.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
Clarabridge, Inc., the leading provider of Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions for the world's top brands, today held its Clarabridge Customer Connections (C3) event in Europe where the winners of its Customer Experience Champion (CXC) Awards for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region were announced. Spanning a variety of industries, the winners have all demonstrated innovation, leadership and measurable results with their customer experience programmes. The judging panel consisted of three industry experts: Jeannie Walters, CEO Chief Customer Experience Investigator of 360Connext; Lorraine Schumacher, Customer Experience Management Evangelist at Clarabridge; and Susan Ganeshan, Chief Marketing Officer of Clarabridge.

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
DUBAI, UAE, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

A team from Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai has successfully treated a patient who required a complex surgical implant of extremely powerful intraocular lenses (IOL) to treat her cataract (clouding of the eye's natural lens) and correct her high myopia (extreme short sightedness). As a result of implanting two lenses with the highest minus power ever implanted in the UAE, the patient's vision and quality of life have improved dramatically. Standard IOLs were not an option and the lenses were delivered from Germany, custom-made specifically for the patient.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/409990 )



The patient, who is a UAE resident, had a complicated history of eye problems including cataract and was unable to see without very thick lenses, due to her extreme short sightedness. The complexity of the treatment included the challenge of very accurately calculating the power of the lenses required to correct the patient's vision, manufacturing the custom lenses, and finally the surgical procedure to implant correctly such powerful lenses.

Professor Robert Scott, Medical Director at Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai, comments: "Though complex, the bilateral surgery to implant these special intraocular lenses was performed without complications and the results have been excellent. Our patient presented us with the challenge of treating her cataract and correcting her extreme short sightedness, which meant that we had to arrange the custom-made lenses with the most minus refractive reading ever implanted in the UAE. We are all delighted that she is now able to see very well and only needs her light glasses for reading; we believe the surgery to improve her vision will significantly enhance her life."

According to the patient, opening her eyes for the first time after the surgery was "an amazing experience and the world seemed brighter and clearer without contact lensesand like seeing the world in a new light. It feels like I've started a new chapter in my life. I'm very pleased that I had the surgery done at Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai where the expert team gave me the confidence and support needed for successful surgery. I can't thank Professor Robert Scott, the anesthesiologist and nurses at Moorfields enough for their kindness and expertise."

Cataract refers to the clouding of the natural lens in the eye; it is the most cause of vision loss in people over the age of 40 and is the leading cause of blindness in the world. Myopia is a very common condition that affects around 25% of the general population. High myopia (extreme short sightedness) is very difficult to treat/correct using standard contact lenses or spectacles, because of the thickness of the lenses needed to correct the vision. This is where an intraocular lens (IOL) - a synthetic artificial lens implanted into the eye to replace the natural lens - is a very effective treatment.

Notes to editors

About Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai

Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai (MEHD) is the first overseas branch of Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the oldest and one of the largest centres for ophthalmic treatment, teaching and research in the world. Located at the Al Razi Medical Complex in Dubai Health Care City, the facility provides day case surgery and outpatient diagnostic and treatment services, for a variety of surgical and non-surgical eye conditions. MEHD will also raise standards for research and teaching in the region. MEHD is owned and managed by the NHS Foundation Trust, and maintains close links with London, to ensure that patients in the GCC receive the best eye care treatment in the world.

Issued on behalf of Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai by WPR.
Focusing on printing- and variable information-related products as the core highlight to establish a global presence

LINTEC Corporation (TOKYO:7966)(ISIN:JP3977200009) announced that it released an English version of its printing- and variable information-related products catalogue in July 2016. The catalogue is available for viewing and download from the company's global website (http://www.lintec-global.com/) which was updated in April 2016. The site also highlights the products covered in the catalogue.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005522/en/

New English language version of the adhesive labelstocks catalogue now available for viewing and download (Graphic: Business Wire)

Building upon its success at Labelexpo Europe 2015, the world's largest event for the label and package printing industry held in Brussels, Belgium last autumn, where it was awarded the Label Industry Global Award 2015 for sustainability, the company aims to expand business in the Global market. The new website will serve as a gateway for users with various labeling needs.

An easy-to-understand visually oriented site

The website, intended to familiarize brand owners abroad with LINTEC's different kinds of labelstock, features abundant easy-to-understand video demonstration and illustrations. There is an assortment of clips that provide an intuitive grasp of the functions of featured products such as the oil-tolerant labelstock which can be applied to oily surfaces, and cryogenic labelstock that stay attached even at temperatures below -196 degrees Celsius.

In-depth descriptions of five highlight products

Lock-tight, oil-tolerant, eye-catching "wobbler", environmentally friendly, and cryogenic labelstock are five labelstock items that typify the characteristic functions and quality that LINTEC offers, and have received special attention from customers abroad. The new website highlights these products and provides detailed descriptions.

Featured products that cater to diverse labelling needs of customers

The new site also introduces six categories of products that can be adopted to foreign markets: daily, food and beverage, stationery, industrial, medical and pharmaceutical, and logistics. Also included is detailed information about labelstocks compatible with digital printing which has become increasingly popular in Global markets and digital label printing machines.

New English language version of the adhesive labelstocks catalogue now available for viewing and download

In July 2016, LINTEC released the new English language version of the adhesive labelstocks catalogue. An electronic format is available for viewing (e-book) and download (PDF file) at the global site.

The catalogue features easy-to-understand explanations of the types and characteristics of the three components that comprise labelstocks: facestock, adhesive, and release paper/film. It also features information on many highlight products that are not available at the global site.

Strengthening communication with our customers abroad

Executive Officer Sumio Morimoto

General Manager, Printing Variable Information Products Operations, Business Administration Div.

"Last year's success at Labelexpo Europe 2015 and resulting media coverage helped increase awareness about the LINTEC brand in the European market and other global domains. This led to many specific inquiries about our new products and high value-added products that we exhibited. I feel that we succeeded in having people understand the performance and quality that our products offer.

Along with our sales subsidiary in the Netherlands and partner in the UK, we hope to continue to channel our efforts to provide products and technology solutions, while also maintaining a stable supply system for our customers."

About LINTEC

LINTEC is a leading company in the field of adhesive materials. The product lineup covers many diversified fields including not only adhesive papers and films for seals and labels, but also shatter-proof window films, adhesive sheets for outdoor signs, interior finishing mounting sheets, automobile-use adhesive products, semiconductor-related tape, and LCD-related adhesive products.

LINTEC also develops and markets a diverse range of specialty paper products including color papers for envelopes, as well as release papers and films, and casting papers. The base paper, release liners used with adhesives are supplied internally and products using this process technology are widely available on the market.

*Photographic data used in this news release can be downloaded from

http://www.lintec-global.com/pub/photo_201609_1.zip [7.6 MB]

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005522/en/

Contacts:

Inquiries concerning this news release:

LINTEC Corporation

Ms. Aya Shoji, +81-3-5565-8419

Public Relations Office

lintec@group.dentsu-pr.co.jp
The topic of immigration and cultural identity has dominated our newsfeeds now more than ever before.

The Susquehanna Art Museum has taken the opportunity to address this timely issue from the sensitive perspective of the young lives affected.

Despues de la Frontera/After the Border is a bilingual group exhibition that honors the stories of recent unaccompanied immigrant youth, families and young adults who fled their homes in Central America for more opportunity and safer lives in the United States. The artistic representations range from intensely personal to searing political commentary.

Valeria Molinaris Who are four screen printed rectangles in red, blue, black and white, which bear an identical poem questioning the notion of who has the right to determine where one is allowed to live and prosper. A jagged line bisects the words, representing the border between Mexico and the United States.

In a more direct form of criticism, Eric Garcias ink-on-paper cartoons express dissatisfaction with state and national policies and procedures. Using strong imagery, which draws inspiration from such artists as Guadalupe Posada and Goya, Garcia employs dark humor to attack the political institutions that he feels oppress the immigrants.

Michelle Angela Ortiz presents two unique creations crafted from cut Masonite, acrylic paint and LED lights illuminating the negative space. The results are shapes that pop from the walls. Ortizs Entangled is the darkened profile of a young man wearing a cap standing behind barbed wire. I Love You depicts the golden necklace worn by woman in honor of her soon to be deported daughter. Both pieces used the oversize scale and lights to draw in the eye to these melancholy images.

Photography is able to capture the real time experiences of many of these young people traveling from Central America. Armando Mejias photos, Marcos and Rachel, feature two young children caught up in the protests of marchers moving from Guatemala and Honduras through Mexico.

The photographs of Levi Vonk examine the travel of Central American teenage boys on buses and trains in order to reach their final destinations with dreams of prosperity. In many of these candid photos, the subjects look directly at the camera and, in turn, make a connection with the viewers eye to create a sense of intimacy and connectedness.

One particularly interesting photo by Vonk captures four young men from El Salvador who intended to skateboard to Los Angeles, California. Their plan is further explored in the short film by Vonk who collaborates with exhibition curator, Tanya Garcia, on The Skaters. The teens describe their experiences as they skate toward the United States. Ultimately only two make it to their final destination with the others deported back to El Salvador.

Tanya Garcia created another short film, titled Keep Walking, which uses tight close-ups of the eyes and mouths of young women and mothers who have left their children behind in order to makes better lives for them all. They share their experiences, both hopeful and painful, and the sacrifices they have made. Their narration is a powerful statement of their determination in the face of utter despair.

Silvia Mata-Marins video presentation, My Path to Legal Residency, is a simple cartoon aimed at the youngest immigrants. It attempts to explain the basic terms and steps an unaccompanied minor can anticipate in coming to the United States. Breaking down the complex legal process they must navigate, she provides a resource that is age appropriate, culturally sensitive and data specific, which is both informative to these children as well as to any American adult who is naive to the complicated struggles they face.

The Susquehanna Art Museum has done a remarkable job in bringing in art that humanizes a very polarizing topic. Through the sensitive treatment of the realities that face these young immigrants, the viewer is given the opportunity to learn about the dangers that face the young people of Central America and their motivations to leave their homelands in search of a new life.

To accompany and enhance the experience of Despues de la Frontera/After the Border, the Susquehanna Art Museum has planned several special events and programming. On Friday at 6 p.m., there will be a free screening of the 2009 Spanish language film Sin Nombre.. The film is about a Honduran teen who intends to emigrate to Mexico and then enter the United States. Following the film, Tanya Garcia will lead the viewers in closing reflections.

On Saturday, Oct. 15 at 2 p.m., Garcia will lead an in depth bilingual tour of the exhibition. The tour is free with admission to the museum. Also on Oct. 15 at 3 p.m., Garcia will lead a panel discussion to explore some of the stories that inspired the exhibition, providing insight into the existing services for youth and families who immigrate to our community.

Despues de la Frontera/After the Border is on display until Dec. 4 at the Susquehanna Art Museum. The museum is located at 1401 N. Third St., Harrisburg. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. General admission is $8; $5 for teachers, seniors and veterans; and free for children younger than 12. Free parking is available at the rear of the building.

For additional information on the museum and exhibitions, visit its website at www.SusquehannaArtMuseum.org.


CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The Canadian dollar strengthened against most major currencies in the early European session on Wednesday, after data from industry group American Petroleum Institute showed that U.S. crude inventories fell last week.



Crude oil for November delivery are currently up $0.87 to $44.92 a barrel.



A report from American Petroleum Institute, or API, showed that U.S. crude inventories fell by 7.5 million barrels for the week ended Sept. 16, the third weekly stock draw.



Gasoline supplies declined by 2.5 million barrels, surpassing forecasts of a 1.4 million barrel draw.



Traders await the official inventory data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), due later in the day.



In the Asian trading today, the loonie held steady against the other major currencies.



In the early European session, the Canadian dollar rose to a 6-day high of 77.88 against the yen, from an early near 3-month low of 76.59. If the loonie extends its uptrend, it is likely to find resistance around the 81.00 area.



Against the euro and the U.S. dollar, the loonie advanced to 2-day highs of 1.4664 and 1.3154 from early lows of 1.4717 and 1.3205, respectively. The loonie may test resistance around 1.44 against the euro and 1.28 against the greenback.



Meanwhile, the loonie dropped to 0.9985 against the Australian dollar, from an early high of 0.9945. The loonie is likely to find support near the 1.01 region.



Looking ahead, U.K. public sector finance data for August is due to be released at 4:30 am ET.



In the New York session, Canada wholesale sales data for July and U.S. weekly crude oil inventories data are slated for release.



At 2:00 pm ET, the Federal Reserve will announce its decision on monetary policy. The Fed is expected to hold its Federal Funds rate in the range of 0.25-0.50 percent.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The FSC certification ensures the consumers that products come from responsibly managed forests

It represents a step forward on the field of environmental and social sustainability and shows up with the publication of the 2015 Sustainability Report

Natuzzi S.p.A. (NYSE:NTZ), the largest Italian furniture company, has been FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certifiedby the Accredited Certification Body, Bureau Veritas.

The FSC Chain-of-Custody certification ensures the consumers that the raw material used to make a wooden product come from well-managed forests, respecting the social, economic and environmental needs of present and future generations.

In addition to the Natuzzi S.p.A., even the Natuzzi production and trading sites based in China and Romania were certified. Beyond the production of sofa and armchairs, the Natuzzi plant in Baia Mare, Romania, houses a large industrial woodwork destined to the procurement and processing of raw wood into finished materials for the entire Group.

"The FSC certification said Pasquale Natuzzi, Chairman and Group CEO confirms our strong commitment to a crucial issue that is the environmental protection. The use of photovoltaic energy, low environmental impact technologies, natural materials such as wood and leather, the stringent corporate policies on deforestation, environmental and quality certifications are all actions that protect the environment and point to a target consumers looking for a beautiful and functional but also sustainable design".

The company had committed to achieve the FSC certification by the year; the FSC joins the ISO 9001 14001 (Quality and Environment) and OHSAS 18001 (Safety in the Workplace) certifications. It represents a step forward on the field of environmental and social sustainability and shows up with the publication of the 2015 Sustainability Report, available here:

http://www.natuzzi.com/en-EN/ir/sustainability

Natuzzi SpA

The Natuzzi Group, founded in 1959 by Pasquale Natuzzi, designs, produces and sells an extensive range of sofas, armchairs, home furniture and home accessories. With revenues of Euro 488.5 million in 2015, the Natuzzi Group is the largest Italian furniture house and the only player with global reach and has eight manufacturing plant, twelve commercial offices and 363 brand stores globally. Ethics and social responsibility, innovation, industrial know-how and integrated management of its value chain are the key strengths which have made the Natuzzi Group the market leader. Natuzzi SpA is included in the list of companies with an outstanding Legality Rating awarded by the Italian Anti-trust Authority. It has been listed since May 13, 1993 on the New York Stock Exchange. The Group is ISO 9001 and 14001 (Quality and Environment), OHSAS 18001 (Workplace Safety) and FSC (Forests, Wood) certified.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005590/en/

Contacts:

NATUZZI INVESTOR RELATIONS

Francesca Cocco, tel. +39.080.8820.493

fcocco@natuzzi.com

or

NATUZZI CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

Vito Basile (Press Office), tel. +39.080.8820.676

vbasile@natuzzi.com
BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - Latvia's producer prices continued to decline in August, though at a slower pace than in the previous month, figures from the Central Statistical Bureau showed Wednesday. The producer price index fell 2.0 percent year-over-year in August, following a 3.1 percent drop in July. The measure has been falling since January 2015. Both domestic and foreign market prices decreased by 2.4 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively in August from a year ago. Among the main industrial groups, prices in the manufacturing sector dipped 1.5 percent, while mining and quarrying prices grew by 1.7 percent. On a monthly basis, producer prices rose 0.6 percent from July, when it dropped by 0.1 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.




GlobalBeacon will provide 100 percent global, real-time flight tracking with no new avionics required

MCLEAN, Virginia, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Aireon LLC and FlightAware today announced a new partnership and the launch of GlobalBeaconSM, a solution providing airlines with 100 percent global flight tracking. GlobalBeacon is designed to ensure airlines are in compliance with Global Aeronautical Distress Safety System (GADSS) recommendations and requirements. Announced by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in March of 2016, GADSS was created largely in response to the disappearance of MH370, and is designed to help prevent the loss of commercial aircraft in distress over remote locations. GlobalBeacon will provide airlines with minute-by-minute, global tracking of Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) equipped aircraft by 2018.

Logo- http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160920/410004LOGO

At the heart of GlobalBeacon's capability is a combination of data from Aireon's space-based ADS-B aircraft surveillance network, due to be operational by 2018, and FlightAware's flight tracking web interface and worldwide flight tracking data - including origin, destination, flight plan route, position, and estimated time of arrival. When implemented, airlines will be instantly equipped to meet or exceed GADSS requirements and recommendations, with no new avionics required.

The core of the GADSS recommendations and requirements stipulate that aircraft report their position to their airline operations center no less than once every 15 minutes. Should an aircraft become in distress, however, position reports then must be provided every minute.GlobalBeacon will provide a permanent, real-time reporting capability, far exceeding the ICAO recommendation. Implementation of GADSS provisions is expected by 2018.

"GlobalBeacon was created to help solve an important problem that has bedeviled the aviation industry since commercial flight began, and together Aireon and FlightAware are proud to offer a true solution," said Aireon CEO, Don Thoma. "No other product can provide 100 percent global tracking, in real-time, without the cost of additional avionics equipage. We've already seen significant interest from airlines in this solution, and you can expect to hear a big announcement on that front in the coming days."

In addition to aircraft location reporting, GADSS also requires aircraft to provide immediate notification of abnormal events, regardless of air traffic control regions and without sacrificing baseline search and rescue services.Other products may require additional equipment and for airlines to create and implement new distress activation procedures in the cockpit and on the ground. However, GlobalBeacon will offer a comprehensive one-size-fits-all global flight tracking solution for ADS-B equipped aircraft with no new required infrastructure, either in the air or on the ground. Further, existing FlightAware customers can seamlessly integrate GlobalBeacon with their current services.

GlobalBeacon will provide airlines with a web-based, real-time aircraft tracking dashboard that features configurable alerts, providing immediate notification of abnormal events.Should an aircraft deviate from its intended flight path, experience severe turbulence or stop transmitting location, the aircraft will automatically enter distressed status and immediately notify its airline operations center, who can take appropriate actions.

"With GlobalBeacon, airlines will have a single GADSS solution for all of their aircraft," said FlightAware CEO, Daniel Baker."Combining FlightAware's vast airline flight tracking data with Aireon's global space-based ADS-B surveillance capabilities will create the first 100 percent global solution for this difficult problem. The industry is about to take a tremendous technological leap forward in the name of safety, and we're proud to lead the way."

FlightAware will also be integrating Aireon's space-based ADS-B surveillance data with its existing products including FlightAware Global and FlightAware Firehose, currently used by thousands of customers to track their aircraft. FlightAware Global provides real-time air traffic control data and RADAR data for flights to, from and within more than 55 countries. The addition of Aireon's capabilities will provide FlightAware Global with 100 percent global coverage. FlightAware Firehose provides a secure streaming data feed of flight positions and flight status data via a combination of worldwide air traffic control data, ADS-B, and aircraft datalink information.

Aireon's space-based ADS-B service will be operational in 2018, shortly after the completion of the Iridium NEXT satellite constellation. The constellation will consist of 66 operational low-earth-orbit satellites providing 100 percent global coverage.The service will also provide Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) with global aircraft surveillance capability, and is expected to help reduce fuel costs, increase safety and enable more efficient flight paths.

About Aireon LLC

Aireon is deploying a global, space-based air traffic surveillance system for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) equipped aircraft over the entire globe. For the first time, Aireon will provide real-time ADS-B surveillance to oceanic, polar and remote regions, as well as augment existing ground-based systems that are limited to terrestrial airspace. Aireon will harness next generation aviation surveillance technologies and extend them globally to significantly improve efficiency, enhance safety, reduce emissions and provide cost savings benefits to all stakeholders. In partnership with leading ANSPs from around the world, NAV CANADA, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA), ENAV and Naviair, as well as Iridium Communications, Aireon will have an operational, global, space-based air traffic surveillance system by 2018. For more information about Aireon, visit: aireon.com.

About FlightAware

FlightAware is the world's largest flight tracking data company and provides over 10,000 aircraft operators and service companies as well as over 12,000,000 passengers with global flight tracking solutions.FlightAware leverages data from air traffic control systems in over 55 countries, from FlightAware's network of over 8,000 ADS-B ground stations in over 140 countries, and using global datalink. For more information about FlightAware, visit: flightaware.com

PRESS CONTACTS:

Jessie Hillenbrand

Aireon

+1 (703) 287-7452

Jessie.Hillenbrand@Aireon.com

Ashley Guinard

FlightAware

+1 713 456 3079

Ashley.Guinard@flightaware.com










LONDON, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

BenevolentAI, a leading British artificial intelligence ("AI") company, today announced it is the first European company to begin using a purpose built version of the world's most advanced deep learning AI supercomputer - the DGX-1 developed by NVIDIA.

The acquisition of the DGX-1 will allow BenevolentAI to accelerate its biomedical insightsinto new therapeutics to treat serious diseases faster than previouslypossible by enhancing BenevolentAI's chemical modelling capabilities and enabling deeperinterrogation of chemicalstructural activity relationships using the Company's own proprietary AI algorithms.

NVIDIA's state of the art AI supercomputer will support BenevolentAI's unique Judgment Augmented Cognition System (JACS), a technology that uses deep natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to formulate new, usable knowledge from complex scientific information. BenevolentAI's proprietary technology creates a new partnership between researchers and computers that augments, accelerates and advances scientific discovery.

One of the first applications of JACS is in the bioscience sector, where it has enabled breakthrough insights by analysing millions of scientific articles and hundreds of medical databases. As a result, BenevolentAI's drug development scientists are able to form hypotheses and draw conclusions faster than any human researcher could alone - facilitating faster breakthroughs and delivering the potential for more precise and targeted medicines.

Ken Mulvany, Co-founder and Director of BenevolentAI, said: "There are 10,000 updates per day on PubMed alone, presenting an impossible challenge to scientists to keep up with the rate at which new scientific knowledge is produced. This new AI supercomputer will boost our processing power and accelerate the creation of new relationships amongst disparate information sources to yield faster scientific innovation. For the current application of our AI technology in the bioscience space, it will mean that new drug discoveries can be made faster and more efficiently than ever before."

NOTES TO EDITORS

About BenevolentAI (http://www.benevolent.ai)

BenevolentAI was founded in 2013 by the management team of Proximagen which was sold to Upsher-Smith Laboratories in 2012 for $553 million. The company is focused on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for the advancement of scientific discovery and using technology as a force for good by applying it to real world problems.

BenevolentAI's technology is currently being used to accelerate drug discovery by using AI to process and analyse the vast amount of highly fragmented scientific research information to discover meaningful, intelligible results that will enable faster medical breakthroughs. Originally called Stratified Medical, the company changed its name in 2016 to better reflect the wider applications for its technology outside of the healthcare and drug discovery sectors.
PUNE, India, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The report "Polyolefins Market by Type (Polethylene, Polypropylene, and Functional Polyolefins, Application (Film & Sheet, Injection Molding, Blow Molding, Fibers & Raffia), and Region - Global Forecasts to 2021", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market size of PO is estimated to grow from USD 206.81 Billion in 2015 to USD 297.09 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 7.82% between 2016 and 2021.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 295 market data Tables and 83 Figures spread through 269 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Polyolefins Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/polyolefins-market-1235.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The market is driven by the increasing demand for plastic products in end-use industries such as packaging, plastic molding, automobile, and other customer products.

Film & Sheet: The Largest Application of PO Market

In 2015, film & sheet application accounted for the largest market share, in terms of volume, followed by injection molding and others. PO films are the most widely used polymers, which have high demand owing to low cost and technical advantages over other polymers. PE film is the substrate used for grocery bags and food packaging. It is thermoformed to manufacture plastic bottles and medical packaging products. PP films are used in end-use applications such as clear films, matte films, hazy films, colored films, metalized films, holographic films, adhesive backed films, and coated films. The important applications of EVA films include modified atmosphere packaging, vacuum bags, shrink films, thermal laminations, and others.

POP and POE: The Fastest-growing Type Segment of PO Market

POP and POE copolymers are estimated to register the highest CAGR between 2016 and 2021, in terms of volume. The high growth is attributed to characteristics such as excellent impact resistance, easy colorability, and excellent melt strength, which drive their use in end use applications such as automotive, wire & cable coating, and injection molding.

Make an Inquiry @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=1235

Asia-Pacific: The Largest Market for PO

Currently, Asia-Pacific is the largest market for PO. China is the largest while India is the fastest-growing market for PO in the region.

The following factors drive the Polyolefins Market in Asia-Pacific:

Growing industrialization in China and India leading to rapid growth of the food & beverage, agriculture, construction, solar energy, and other industries

and leading to rapid growth of the food & beverage, agriculture, construction, solar energy, and other industries Replacement of woods and metals by PO plastic products

Sinopec Corporation (China), LyondellBasell Industries Holdings B.V., ExxonMobil Corporation (U.S.), China National Petroleum Corporation (China), SABIC (Saudi Arabia), The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.), Braskem S.A. (Brazil), Total S.A. (France), Ineos Group AG (Switzerland), and Arkema S.A. (France) are the key players of the PO market.

Browse Related Reports:

Metallocene Polyolefin (mPO) Market by Type (mPE & mPP), Application (Film & Sheet, Injection Molding, and Others), and by Region - Global Forecast to 2021

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/metallocene-polyolefin-market-199596649.html

Metallocene Polyethylene Market by Type (Mhdpe, Mldpe, Mlldpe, Others), by Application (Film, Sheet, Injection Molding, Extrusion Coating, Others) and by Region - Global Forecast to 2020

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/metallocene-polyethylene-market-248864715.html

Know More About our Knowledge Store @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Knowledgestore.asp

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MarketsandMarkets is the largest market research firm worldwide in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to a multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.

M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.

We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository.

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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Packaged-food company General Mills Inc. (GIS) on Wednesday reiterated its key fiscal 2017 targets. The company still expects constant-currency adjusted earnings per share growth of 6 percent to 8 percent from the base of $2.92 earned in fiscal 2016. At current exchange rates, the company estimates a 2 cent headwind from currency translation in 2017. Organic net sales growth is still expected in a range from flat to down 2 percent and adjusted operating profit margin expected to increase approximately 150 basis points. General Mills Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ken Powell said, 'We expect our organic net sales performance will improve over the remainder of the year as key Consumer First initiatives gain traction and as our prior-year comparisons ease.' For the first quarter of fiscal 2017, attributable net earnings totaled $409 million, down 4.1 percent from last year's $426.6 million. Earnings per share of $0.67 dropped 3 percent from $0.69 a year ago. Adjusted earnings per share totaled $0.78 in the first quarter, down 1 percent from the prior year. On average, 15 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $0.75 per share. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Operating profit margin expanded 30 basis points to 16.5% of net sales, and adjusted operating profit margin increased 80 basis points to 19.2%. Net sales declined 7% to $3.91 billion from $4.21 billion a year ago due to lower organic net sales, the divestiture of the North American Green Giant business, and the impact of foreign exchange. Analysts expected sales of $3.91 billion. Organic net sales declined 4%. Increases in U.S. natural and organic brands and emerging markets were more than offset by declines in Foundation businesses and U.S. Yogurt. Net sales performance did not meet expectations due to the challenging macro environment, a difficult year-over-year comparison, and a slower start to the year on certain businesses, the company said. In pre-market activity, shares were gaining 1.24 percent to $65.50. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
OnProcess Technology, a global pioneer in service supply chain management and optimization, today announced it will be a featured speaker at Managed Services World Congress, taking place September 27 28, 2016 in London, UK. Buddie Ceronie, the company's VP of Business Development, EMEA, will discuss how businesses can leverage the Internet of Things to dramatically boost efficiencies, drive profits and improve customer experience in the critical post-sale supply chain.

"The Internet of Things has the power to transform post-sale services, but most companies don't know how to go about leveraging it, or what results are realistic for their business," said Ceronie. "I look forward to showing attendees how IoT can drive much more accurate planning, streamline processes and slash costs in everything from parts and labor dispatch to customer triage to inventory management and asset recovery."

In the session, "Leveraging IoT to Transform Post-Sales Services," on September 28 at 2:40pm, Ceronie will also discuss results of new research by OnProcess and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that using by IoT data to predict machine failures, companies can reduce costly inventory stock while improving their ability to meet service levels.

About Managed Services World Congress

Managed Services World Congress, with its key theme of transformation in 2016, is where senior executives from all over the globe meet and discuss future outsourcing strategies in the world of IT virtualization, advanced networks and the Internet of Everything. MSWC 2016 is focused on the future of communications services operations (4.5/5G, NFV, IoT, big data, analytics) and the journey to get there with the help of strategic partners, with special focus on innovation and integration of examples from other industries. https://tmt.knect365.com/managed-services-world/

About OnProcess Technology

OnProcess Technology is a managed services provider specializing in complex, global service supply chain operations the flow of people, parts and services following the sale of a product. The company's deep expertise, purpose-built technology delivery and embedded analytics-based process improvement, enable clients to quickly optimize and scale operations, grow revenue and profitability, and deliver superior customer experiences. OnProcess provides services in 26 languages and operates in six global facilities, including its Massachusetts headquarters and facilities in Maine, Costa Rica, India and Bulgaria. www.onprocess.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005046/en/

Contacts:

Bedsole Company

Janice Bedsole, +1-781-789-6108

janice@bedsoleandcompany.com
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Editors Note: There are two videos associated with this Press Release.

EFMD Global Network and HigherEd join forces to launch the first global internship portal to connect students, schools and companies worldwide.

Through this strategic partnership every single school and student in the EFMD Global Network will get its own branded internship career portal, making this 600-school network the largest community of top talent in the world.

The portal will give the companies access to an exclusive pool of three million outstanding international intern prospects, creating a unique opportunity to follow the students that are in their target groups throughout the lifecycle of their specific education and career paths. Tapping into a vast pool of selected quality graduate talent in one single place is at the heart of this initiative.

Every single student that is admitted to one of the EFMD member schools will have the possibility to build his or her own fully customised career portal, based on their educational track and interests. This unique feature will be based on the preferences specifically tailored for each of the students based on their education track and matched with the corporate members recruiting preferences.

This will make HigherEd the largest and most targeted recruitment tool available in the education industry.

This groundbreaking initiative will connect students, schools and companies at an unprecedented level. Adding great diversity and corporate innovation possibilities for the corporate members, and unique international possibilities for the students.

This initiative will only be available to EFMD full member schools and corporate members of EFMD Global Network.

We are launching a pilot phase of this initiative over the next months and are gradually on-boarding schools and corporate members, so if you are interested in seizing this unique opportunity, please visit highered.efmdglobal.org (for schools) or http://www.highered.no/for-companies/ (for companies) and contact Bernt Blankholm, CEO of HigherEd or Matthew Wood, COO at EFMD at highered@efmdglobal.org.

About EFMD

EFMD is a leading international network of business schools and companies at the forefront of raising the standards of management education and development globally. More information about EFMD is available via efmd.org.

To view the videos associated with this press release, please visit the following links:

https://youtu.be/ockuthQKe14

https://youtu.be/tElxAxRr2yU

Contacts:

HigherEd

Bernt Blankholm

CEO

highered@efmdglobal.org

www.highered.no



EFMD

Matthew Wood

COO

highered@efmdglobal.org

www.efmd.org




Sonic Voyage Fest, an event that started as a three-band gig but has now grown into a touring festival, comes to Gulliftys in the Cedar Cliff Plaza in Lower Allen Township at 8 p.m. Sept. 28.

Festival organizers say that the purpose of the concert is to create a night of music that dazzles with virtuosity, ignites the senses and pushes boundaries. Beyond visiting the Midstate, the festival will also have stops in Ohio and New York.

Mechanicsburgs own Cell15 will tour with Sonic Voyage Fest as the opening act, and two other rock bands, Circuline and Stratospheerius (featuring Joe Deninzon), will be the main acts. All three bands play in the progressive rock (or prog rock), a genre first made popular in the late 1960s with groups such as Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Yes and Genesis. In this style, songs are often replaced by musical suites that frequently feature a storyline, complex arrangements and a fantasy-like ambiance.

Cell15 is the brainchild of Robert Scott Richardson, a keyboardist who also plays with the rock bands Hybrid Ice and The Badlees. Influenced by King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd, Richardson formed the band to create a concept album chronicling the dark years of his life. The successful release of the recording Chapter One in 2014 earned the band a Debut Album of the Year nod from ProgRock.com. Richardson is joined in the band by Jim Fagan on guitar, Jon Pyle on bass, and Kevin Thomas on drums.

Circuline describe its music as modern cinematic progressive rock. The band combines the talents of two excellent theatrical lead vocalists, Natalie Brown and Billy Spillane, with a pretty impressive backup group that includes the well-known Uruguayan guitarist, pianist and composer BELEDO, keyboardist Andrew Colyer and drummer Darin Brannon. The bands sound is big and bombastic, showing a variety of influence ranging from King Crimson dissonance to cinematic soundscapes.

Although squarely in the prog music camp, the band refuses all kinds of labeling and is not afraid to experiment with different musical ideas.

Led by electric violinist Joe Deninzon, who has been called The Jimi Hendrix of the violin, the New York-based Stratospheerius has brought its unique blend of alt-bluegrass, progressive rock, jazz fusion and funkabilly to venues throughout the world. The group has opened for Tim Reynolds, Mickey Hart, John Scofield and others.

Its live performances are a riot of funky dance grooves, spirited guitar and violin jams, and an anything goes mix of genres with the playing of Deninzon as the vocal point. Stratospheerius was a winner of the John Lennon International Songwriting Competition, and was also named Best Jam Band in the Musicians Atlas Independent Music Awards. The band has been featured in many prestigious publications including Relix, Downbeat and Jazziz.

Admission for the Sonic Voyage Fest is $10. Gulliftys is located at 1104 Carlisle Road in Camp Hill. For more information, visit www.gulliftys.net or call 717-761-6692.
ATLANTA, GA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Dominovas Energy Corporation (OTCQB: DNRG) today announces it has entered into formal negotiations with key officials at the University of Johannesburg to become the exclusive supplier of electricity for the campuses of the University of Johannesburg in Johannesburg, South Africa utilizing Dominovas Energy's RUBICON Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology. The Company has submitted its Energy Solutions Technical Survey to facilities managers of the University that will determine the overall need of the campuses and will ultimately set the stage for the execution of a formal Power Provider Agreement (PPA) between Dominovas Energy and the University of Johannesburg. The total number of Megawatts (MW) expected from the PPA will be a minimum of 12MW.

"As we have been working very closely with University officials over the last number of months, this was a natural progression of business, having first come together to facilitate the 50kW Showcase at the University of Johannesburg. As the 'right' individuals have become more educated on the prowess and efficiency of Dominovas Energy's RUBICON system, the inquiries became more specific as to what the Company could do for the University at large to deliver a cleaner, more efficient use of resources for the generation of electricity," Dominovas Energy COO and president of its fuel cell division Michael Watkins commented. "The key was to first determine the energy need of the University and those steps are underway as we speak. The second step was to insure a dedicated fuel source was in place to power the RUBICON," Watkins went on to say.

The RUBICON has the ability to reform multiple hydrocarbons to be utilized as a fuel source, however, the reliability of delivery of said fuel source and the consistency of the fuel source is critical to the overall operation of the system to generate continuous electricity. Dominovas Energy and the University of Johannesburg officials are working in tandem to insure the delivery of a reliable natural gas fuel source, as the logistics for other fuels such as Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and Diesel fuel do not support a seamless, reliable and consistent delivery in the University that can be used in the RUBICON.

When asked how this will impact the launch of the 50kW Showcase, Watkins said, "This is a long-term play for Dominovas Energy to provide utility-scale electrification to Africa, and as soon as a reliable natural gas source is in place, the Company will be ready to fire up the 'Showcase' and show its capabilities to the public at large. I will be able to offer a concrete timeframe for the delivery of the fuel source and subsequent launch in a matter of days. However, while we work to insure the delivery of dedicated natural gas infrastructure to the University, I am excited that the exercise of working in collaboration has now led to our becoming an exclusive electricity provider. It speaks an awful lot about the dedication of effort and the technical work that is happening behind the scenes in an effort to deliver our system to the sub-Saharan region and beyond," Watkins concluded.

University officials are finalizing Dominovas Energy's Energy Solution Technical Survey, which will allow Dominovas Energy to be able to conduct a complete and thorough analysis of the overall "State" of electricity at the University of Johannesburg. With this analysis, the Company will create a report on current inefficiencies within the current infrastructure and will further show the potential savings that will be realized utilizing the RUBICON to generate electricity.

About Dominovas Energy Corporation (OTCQB: DNRG)

Founded in 2005, Dominovas Energy Corporation (DEC) is a publicly traded company, based in Nevada. With its operating headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Dominovas Energy Corporation is a leading power solutions provider to emerging markets around the world. DEC employs its proprietary RUBICON Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology for deployment in multi-megawatt power generation units worldwide. The worldwide pursuit of clean and efficient production of electricity via Solid Oxide Fuel Cell technology inspired its founders to create an "energy solutions" company. Recognizing that "green" and "alternative energy" markets offer immense potential for growth, Dominovas Energy is aggressively moving to allocate its intellectual and financial capital forthwith, in order to strategically address a green energy solution that is 100% reliable, efficient, and measurably cleaner than GenSets and CCGT. Additionally, unlike wind and solar solutions the RUBICON provides baseload power 24/7/365 days a year. By manufacturing and deploying the RUBICON throughout of the world, Dominovas Energy is committed to creating shareholder value by not only generating guaranteed revenue streams, but also by increasing the value of "human and community capital." Devoted to core values by operating under the utmost of honesty and integrity in all its business transactions, Dominovas Energy is additionally dedicated to respecting the rights of all individuals, while acknowledging and respecting all cultures necessary to support the growth and development of the communities and countries in which it operates. The Company strongly believes in the impact this singularly advanced technology will make on the world and is resolute in its mission to provide electricity where and when economically viable.

For more information, visit www.dominovasenergy.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release, as well as other statements made by Dominovas Energy Corporation (the "Company"), contain forward-looking statements that reflect, when made, the Company's current views with respect to current events and financial performance. Such forward-looking statements are subject to many risks, uncertainties and factors relating to the Company's operations and business environment, which may cause the actual results of the Company to be materially different from any future results. All statements that address future operating, financial or business performance or the Company's strategies or expectations are forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements as is applicable would be discussed under captions as follows: "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in the Company's filings as would be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as required. New risks and uncertainties arise from time to time, and it is impossible for us to predict these events or how they may affect the Company. It should be remembered that the price of the ordinary shares and any income from them can go down as well as up. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events and/or otherwise, except as may be required by law.

Media and Investor Contact:

QualityStocks

Scottsdale, Arizona

www.QualityStocks.com

480.374.1336 Office

Email Contact



Investor Questions:

Email Contact




TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - September 21, 2016) - Patient intelligence health solution provider Self Care Catalysts today announced its health solution platform, Health Storylines, is being used in a small-scale study to examine its usability in an adult radiation oncology population. Investigators Susan Birkhoff, MSN, RN, PhD candidate and Robert Lustig, MD, FACR are spearheading the Health Storylines project with support from Self Care Catalysts Chief Medical Officer, Jared R. Adams, MD, PhD.

The overall aim of this study is to examine the usage and acceptability of a patient-facing mobile app platform in a sample of adult radiation therapy patients. There is a significant dearth of literature supporting the use of patient-facing smartphone mobile health apps in the adult radiation oncology population; thus, this study will be a first of its kind.

Health Storylines empowers the patient through the daily provision of bite-sized nuggets of information and support; engages and motivates the patient through customized health tools; and connects health allies (also known as the 'circle of care') through a networked messaging system.

"Ultimately, Patient Storylines strives to increase patient engagement and improve adherence by offering a window of insight for the patient into their own data and the interconnection of all the domains of daily living and psychological well-being," says Grace Soyao, CEO and founder of Self Care Catalysts. "We are incredibly excited to work with the research team at Penn Medicine and Villanova University College of Nursing and to be involved in helping bring new interventions and innovative technologies in consumer-centric mobile health to the field of radiation oncology."

About Self Care Catalysts

Self Care Catalysts is a health solutions company powered by patient intelligence and analytics. Our mission is to build innovative, patient-centered, and technology-driven self-care solutions for patients and meaningful analytics and insights for healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical companies. For more information visit us on the web at www.selfcarecatalysts.com.

Social Media Links

Twitter

LinkedIn

Dr. Jared Adams

jared@selfcarecatalysts.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Cameo Resources Inc. (TSX VENTURE: CRU)(OTC PINK: SIDNF) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has signed a Letter Of Intent with Diamond Hunter Ltd. for the purchase of 4 claims totalling 3,759 ha. Cameo has until Oct 18th to review information regarding purchase.

Akash Patel, President, states: "With new management in place, the board has a new perspective and an opportunity to increase shareholder value with this new and exciting acquisition. Though it is still at its early stages, we feel that cobalt will be recognized as an important technology enabling metal."

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Akash Patel, President

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts:

Cameo Resources Inc.

Akash Patel

President

akashp006@gmail.com

www.cameoresources.com




CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Suncor reports that it has been advised by the operator of the Shelburne Basin joint venture exploration project, Shell Canada Limited, that the drilling of the first exploration well has been completed and it is non-commercial.

As a result, in the third quarter of 2016 Suncor will write off its share of the cost of the well which, under the commercial terms of Suncor's farm-in agreement, is expected to be approximately $105 million (after-tax).

The Shelburne Basin deepwater exploration project is located approximately 250 kilometres offshore, south of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Joint venture participants are operator Shell Canada Limited (50 per cent), ConocoPhillips Canada East Coast Partnership (30 per cent) and Suncor (20 per cent).

Legal Advisory - Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements (collectively referred to herein as "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements in this news release include references to: the anticipated write off of Suncor's share of the cost of the exploration well and the expected amount to be written off. Some of the forward-looking statements may be identified by words like "expected", "will", and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on Suncor's current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions that were made by the company in light of its information available at the time the statement was made and consider Suncor's experience and its perception of historical trends, including expectations and assumptions concerning: the accuracy of reserves and resources estimates; commodity prices and interest and foreign exchange rates; capital efficiencies and cost savings; applicable royalty rates and tax laws; future production rates; the sufficiency of budgeted capital expenditures in carrying out planned activities; the availability and cost of labour and services; and the receipt, in a timely manner, of regulatory and third-party approvals.

Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve a number of risks and uncertainties, some that are similar to other oil and gas companies and some that are unique to Suncor. Suncor's actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by its forward-looking statements, so readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on them.

Suncor's Management's Discussion and Analysis dated July 27, 2016 and its Annual Information Form, Form 40-F and Annual Report to Shareholders, each dated Feb. 25, 2016, and other documents it files from time to time with securities regulatory authorities describe the risks, uncertainties, material assumptions and other factors that could influence actual results and such factors are incorporated herein by reference. Copies of these documents are available without charge from Suncor at 150 6th Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta T2P 3E3; by email request to invest@suncor.com; by calling 1-800-558-9071; or by referring to suncor.com/FinancialReports or to the company's profile on SEDAR at sedar.com or EDGAR at sec.gov. Except as required by applicable securities laws, Suncor disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

For more information about Suncor, visit our web site at suncor.com, follow us on Twitter @SuncorEnergy, or come and See what Yes can do.

Contacts:

Media inquiries:

403-296-4000

media@suncor.com



Investor inquiries:

800-558-9071

invest@suncor.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Trevali Mining Corporation ("Trevali" or the "Company") (TSX: TV)(LMA: TV)(OTCQX: TREVF)(FRANKFURT: 4TI) announces results from twelve new drill holes of the ongoing 2016 underground exploration drill program at its Santander Zinc Mine in Peru. The aim of this current phase of drilling is to further extend the down-depth expression of the Magistral Central deposit and associated Fatima vein zones, in addition to test for the potential presence of hanging-wall hosted "Oyon" mineralization similar to that discovered at Magistral North early this year (see TV-NR-16-09 for details). The program has been hugely successful on all counts with the drill holes intersecting and extending both the Magistral Central and Fatima zones in addition to discovering new massive sulphide replacement mineralization in the hanging-wall to the Magistral Central deposit.

In excess of 90% of the holes returned zinc grades, over mineable intervals, materially higher than those in current mining operations where run-of-mine head grades typically range from approximately 4-4.5% Zn (Table 1). All mineralization remains open for expansion and further underground drilling is in progress (Figure 1 & 2).

"These latest results from our successful ongoing 2016 exploration drill program remain highly encouraging and continue to add very tangible, near-term value to the Santander Zinc Mine where our experienced operations team has a proven track record of translating exploration successes into mill feed in a timely manner," stated Dr. Mark Cruise, President and CEO of Trevali.

To view Figure 1: Cross section looking west showing Magistral Deposits with drill hole intercepts, please visit http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/1070095fig1.jpg.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zone / Core Borehole Length Ag oz/ton (dip/azimuth) From - To (metres) Interval(i) Zn (%) Pb (%) (g/tonne) (metres) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-160-16 91.15 - 115.40 FA / 24.25 5.57 0.85 2.86 (97.9) ------------------------------------------------------------- 218.15 - 234.70 MC / 16.55 13.84 4.62 3.25 (111.4) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 218.15 - 229.15 11.00 16.30 6.67 4.37 (149.9) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-161-16 268.45 - 289.75 MC / 21.3 5.42 0.14 0.31 (10.6) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-162-16 305.05 - 315.65 MC / 10.6 3.90 0.02 0.13 (4.4) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 305.05 - 309.05 4.00 9.54 0.03 0.06 (2.2) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-163-16 154.95 - 161.20 FA / 6.25 6.80 0.63 2.61 (89.6) ------------------------------------------------------------- 256.75 - 260.00 M1 / 3.25 9.07 0.01 0.07 (2.02) ------------------------------------------------------------- 265.60 - 268.50 M2/ 2.9 12.81 0.01 0.06 (2.2) ------------------------------------------------------------- 270.65 - 284.60 MC / 13.95 5.96 1.29 1.70 (58.2) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 270.65 - 276.50 5.85 5.20 2.46 2.40 (82.4) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-164-16 288.80 - 301.65 MC / 12.85 7.33 0.12 0.38 (13.1) ------------------------------------------------------------- 312.65 - 320.95 OYO / 8.30 1.80 0.06 0.44 (14.9) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-165-16 112.80-119.50 FA / 6.70 9.32 0.06 0.17 (5.9) ------------------------------------------------------------- 127.40-147.40 FA / 20.00 4.26 0.07 0.24 (8.4) ------------------------------------------------------------- 150.80-158.90 MC / 8.10 5.45 0.07 0.54 (18.4) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-166-16 140.90 - 149.60 MC / 8.70 7.39 0.29 0.22 (7.5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-167-16 187.20 - 199.50 11.10 4.74 0.29 0.97 (33.3) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 187.20 - 192.45 MC / 4.05 6.26 0.27 0.85 (29.2) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 195.50 - 199.50 OYO / 4.00 6.11 0.43 1.55 (53.2) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-168-16 260.90- 287.10 26.20 7.50 0.39 1.44 (49.5) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 260.90 - 276.85 MC / 15.95 10.18 0.49 1.97 (67.5) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 282.20 - 287.10 OYO / 4.90 3.52 0.21 0.59 (20.2) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-170-16 200.80 - 226.10 25.30 5.13 1.37 2.63 (90.2) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 200.80 - 203.90 MC / 3.10 16.86 2.49 6.03 (206.9) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 206.30 - 217.65 OYO / 11.35 4.40 1.65 2.68 (91.8) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 224.30 - 226.10 OYO / 1.8 3.73 2.33 3.95 (135.4) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-171-16 137.40 - 139.50 MC / 2.10 12.23 9.57 11.69 (400.8) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MC-172-16 195.60 - 202.50 6.90 4.09 1.48 2.57 (88.1) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 195.60 - 196.80 MC / 1.20 8.36 5.36 7.30 (250.5) ------------------------------------------------------------- incl. 196.80 - 202.50 OYO / 5.70 3.01 0.49 1.36 (46.7) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1: Summary of latest Santander Mine underground drill assay results (i)True widths of the mineralized intervals are estimated at 60-80% of core length MC-Magistral Central, FA-Fatima, OYO-Oyon, M1/M2-new undefined mantos

MAGISTRAL CENTRAL AND CENTRAL-OYON ZONES

In detail, underground exploration drilling intersected multiple stacked lenses of high-grade mineralization and has extended the sulphide shell in a previously untested area towards the Magistral North zone around and below the 4300-metre elevation level.

These holes define an area of approximately 120-metres in length by at least 200-metres vertical between the Magistral North and Central deposits that was untested and outside the current resource estimate (Figures 1 and 2). Several of the drill holes intercepted (e.g. MC-160, MC-163, MC-168 and MC-171) exceptionally high grade zinc-silver-lead mineralization. The mineral assemblages (silver-rich sulphosalts) and geochemistry observed in these drill holes is indicative of distal to source setting and assumes the presence of a large hydrothermal system with very significant depth and lateral potential remaining for drill testing. This observation is supported by the presence of large EM conductor at depth (Figure 1).

Early this year the Santander exploration team discovered a new mineralized zone (veining and replacement) termed the "Oyon Mantos" in the hanging wall to the main Magistral North deposit (see TV-NR-16-09 for details). Geological modelling and follow up targeting suggested that similar style mineralization should also exist in the hanging wall of the Magistral Central deposit - a hypothesis proven by recently completed hole MC-170 that intersected a 3.1-metre wide zone of exceptionally high-grade replacement mineralization at the main MC deposit returning 16.9% Zn, 2.5% Pb and 6.0 oz/ton Ag followed by 11 metres of Oyon manto mineralization (4.4% Zn, 1.6% Pb and 2.7 oz/ton Ag) located in the hanging wall (Table 1). The area has very limited drill coverage and additional follow up drilling is planned in order to expand and better define the mineralization in the area (Figure 2).

The Company is currently fast-tracking ramp development in order to enable exploitation of this high-grade area at the earliest opportunity in addition to providing additional exploration windows to extend both zones.

Magistral Central, the Fatima Zone and the emergent Oyon Mantos zone all remain open and expansion/definition drilling is ongoing.

To view Figure 2: Cross section view looking east-southeast and illustrating geometry of the Oyon mineralization and location of recent drillhole intercepts in the Magistral Central Deposit at the Santander Zinc Mine, please visit http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/1070095fig2.jpg.

Qualified Person and Quality Control/Quality Assurance

EurGeol Dr. Mark D. Cruise, Trevali's President and CEO, and Daniel Marinov, P.Geo, Trevali's VP Exploration, are qualified persons as defined by NI 43-101, have supervised the preparation of the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for this news release. Mr. Marinov is responsible for all aspects of the work, including the quality control/quality assurance programs. Dr. Cruise is not independent of the Company, as he is an officer, director and shareholder. Mr. Marinov is not independent of the Company as he is an officer and shareholder. Drill core samples were processed and assayed in the Santander mine onsite laboratory. Zinc, lead and silver, assays were obtained by Aqua-Regia dissolution followed by Atomic Absorption measurement. Values of lead and zinc over 15% are assayed by volumetric method. Analytical accuracy and precision are monitored by the analysis of reagent blanks, reference material and replicate samples. Quality control is further assured by the use of international and in-house standards. Blind certified reference material is inserted at regular intervals into the sample sequence by Trevali personnel in order to independently assess analytical accuracy. The onsite laboratory is outsourced and managed by SGS-Peru personnel. SGS-Peru's quality system complies with the requirements for the International Standards ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 17025: 1999. Finally, representative blind duplicate samples are routinely forwarded to an ISO compliant third party laboratory for external quality control.

ABOUT TREVALI MINING CORPORATION

Trevali is a zinc-focused, base metals mining company with two commercially producing operations.

The Company is actively producing zinc and lead-silver concentrates from its 2,000-tonne-per-day Santander mine in Peru and its 3,000-tonne-per-day Caribou mine in the Bathurst Mining Camp of northern New Brunswick. Trevali also owns the Halfmile and Stratmat base metal deposits, located in New Brunswick, that are currently undergoing a Preliminary Economic Assessment reviewing their potential development.

The common shares of Trevali are listed on the TSX (symbol TV), the OTCQX (symbol TREVF), the Lima Stock Exchange (symbol TV), and the Frankfurt Exchange (symbol 4TI). For further details on Trevali, readers are referred to the Company's website (www.trevali.com) and to Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors of TREVALI MINING CORPORATION,

Mark D. Cruise, President

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States private securities litigation reform act of 1995 and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Statements containing forward-looking information express, as at the date of this news release, the Company's plans, estimates, forecasts, projections, expectations, or beliefs as to future events or results and the Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation to, update such statements containing the forward-looking information. Such forward-looking statements and information include, but are not limited to statements as to: the intended use of proceeds in connection with the Offering, the accuracy of estimated mineral resources, anticipated results of future exploration, and forecast future metal prices, expectations that environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, socio-economic, political, marketing or other issues will not materially affect estimates of mineral resources. These statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies.

These statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the company has made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation: fluctuations in spot and forward markets for silver, zinc, base metals and certain other commodities (such as natural gas, fuel oil and electricity); fluctuations in currency markets (such as the Canadian dollar and Peruvian sol versus the U.S. dollar); risks related to the technological and operational nature of the Company's business; changes in national and local government, legislation, taxation, controls or regulations and political or economic developments in Canada, the United States, Peru or other countries where the Company may carry on business in the future; risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining (including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected geological or structural formations, pressures, cave-ins and flooding); risks relating to the credit worthiness or financial condition of suppliers, refiners and other parties with whom the Company does business; inadequate insurance, or inability to obtain insurance, to cover these risks and hazards;

employee relations; relationships with and claims by local communities and indigenous populations; availability and increasing costs associated with mining inputs and labour; the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development, including the risks of obtaining necessary licenses and permits and the presence of laws and regulations that may impose restrictions on mining, diminishing quantities or grades of mineral resources as properties are mined; global financial conditions; business opportunities that may be presented to, or pursued by, the Company; the Company's ability to complete and successfully integrate acquisitions and to mitigate other business combination risks; challenges to, or difficulty in maintaining, the Company's title to properties and continued ownership thereof; the actual results of current exploration activities, conclusions of economic evaluations, and changes in project parameters to deal with unanticipated economic or other factors; and increased competition in the mining industry for properties, equipment, qualified personnel, and their costs. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty or reliance on forward-looking statements. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated, described or intended. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements or information to reflect changes in assumptions or changes in circumstances or any other events affecting such statements or information, other than as required by applicable law.

Trevali's production plan at the Caribou Mine is based only on measured, indicated and inferred resources, and not mineral reserves, and does not have demonstrated economic viability. Trevali's production plan at the Santander Mine is based only on indicated and inferred mineral resources, and not mineral reserves, and does not have demonstrated economic viability. Inferred mineral resources are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is therefore no certainty that the conclusions of the production plans and Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) will be realized. Additionally, where Trevali discusses exploration/expansion potential, any potential quantity and grade is conceptual in nature and there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

We advise US investors that while the terms "measured resources", "indicated resources" and "inferred resources" are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the US Securities and Exchange Commission does not recognize these terms. US investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the material in these categories will ever be converted into reserves.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities described herein have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the securities laws of any state and may not be offered or sold within the United States, absent such registration or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements.

The TSX has not approved or disapproved of the contents of this news release.

Contacts:

Trevali Mining Corporation

Steve Stakiw

Vice President, Investor Relations and

Corporate Communications

(604) 488-1661 / Direct: (604) 638-5623

sstakiw@trevali.com




OAKVILLE, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Saint Jean Carbon Inc. ("Saint Jean" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: SJL), a carbon science company engaged in the exploration of natural graphite properties and related carbon products, is pleased to announce the Company with the University of Western Ontario has created the first graphene that has magnetic field referred to as Magnetoresistance (MR). Creating this effect at an atomic scale is a tremendous step forward in the overall research and development of the Company's future in graphene products.

Jin Zhang Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at University of Western Ontario, commented: "Magnetoresistance (MR) refers to the significant change of electrical resistance of materials under a magnetic field. Magnetoresistance effects have been applied in magnetic sensors, spintronic devices and data storage. Magnetic sensors are extremely useful for today's industry for measurement and control purposes. The noncontact switching with magnetic sensors allow airplanes to fly with higher safety standards. Sensitive magnetic sensors allow automobiles to determine positions in several places such as the engine crankshaft and wheel braking. The miniaturized magnetic sensors used in magnetic data storage allow computers to have significant memory. Magnetic sensors can turn home appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines into smart devices. This happens by detecting changes in electrical resistance brought on by the presence of a magnetic field. This is also known as magnetoresistance (MR). The market size of the magnetic sensor is increasing with annual growth rate at 10% because of new nanomaterials. As part of the University of Western Ontario, we have being developing magnetic sensors by using graphene-based products with MR effects."

(1). Magnetoresistance (MR) of 8 is observed in our developed hybrid nanosheets. A time-efficient process was developed to deposit magnetic crystals on graphene sheets. The microstructures of the hybrid nanosheets were investigated by transmission electron microscope as shown in Figure below;

http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/921SJL.jpg

Paul Ogilvie, CEO, commented: "As the Company continues to move deeper into graphene production, the closer we get to the materials that have real life applications. As in energy creation and energy storage that will help the performance of the electric cars in the future, through greater efficiency, more conductivity and lighter, smaller parts."

About Saint Jean Carbon

Saint Jean is a publicly traded carbon science company, with interest in graphite mining claims in the province of Quebec in Canada. For the latest information on Saint Jean's properties and news please refer to the website: http://www.saintjeancarbon.com/

On behalf of the Board of Directors

Saint Jean Carbon Inc.

Paul Ogilvie, CEO and Director

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: This news release contains forward-looking statements, within the meaning of applicable securities legislation, concerning Saint Jean's business and affairs. In certain cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "intends" "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved".

These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, and are naturally subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results to differ materially. The forward-looking statements in this news release assume, inter alia, that the conditions for completion of the Transaction, including regulatory and shareholder approvals, if necessary, will be met.

Although Saint Jean believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that these expectations will prove to be correct.

Statements of past performance should not be construed as an indication of future performance. Forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties, should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of whether or not such results will be achieved. A number of factors, including those discussed above, could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. Any such forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement.

All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking information is provided as of the date of this press release, and Saint Jean assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Saint Jean Carbon Inc.

info@saintjeancarbon.com

(905) 844-1200




A single cloud platform set to simplify communications infrastructure across 50 countries and cut IT spend by 3 million euros

Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones), the leader in global voice, video, messaging, and collaboration, today announces a new contract with FLSmidth A/S, one of the largest engineering companies in the world, to deliver a new business communication solution to 11,000 employees, across a single, cloud platform.

The new Fuze solution replaces Skype for Business and brings together FLSmidth's disparate communication systems, including 27 separate PBXs, into one global, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform, integrating all voice, video, messaging, and collaboration.

The deployment will result in significant cost savings for FLSmidth, particularly on telephony bills as international calls will be charged at local rates, following the launch of Fuze's global unmetered calling, which gives customers free calls between Fuze endpoints and unmetered calling to over 100 countries.

Upgrades and maintenance of legacy PBX systems have also been eliminated and the Fuze deployment will facilitate the removal of 90 percent of desk-based phones.

The improved communications infrastructure will create a consistent user experience for FLSmidth employees, including 5,000 mobile workers and field service technicians, who can access and use Fuze from anywhere, using a desktop or mobile device. The Fuze platform will also support collaboration of global business functions such as finance and HR that operate distributed teams, with contact centre capabilities enhancing the customer support operation.

Geir-Tore Botten, Global Infrastructure Manager, FLSmidth, says: "FLSmidth is a huge organisation that has doubled in size over the last 10 years, resulting in a complex and costly communications environment, with end-of-life equipment and disparate systems. With Fuze we have found a solution that will simplify our global infrastructure, bringing all our communications requirements into a single platform, allowing us to eliminate legacy technology, better support our customers and, critically, drive significant cost out of the business."

This new customer win follows Fuze's exceptional first half of 2016, which saw the Company achieve record growth and momentum, with more than 150 percent growth in net-new customer sales, with nearly 50 percent of new business now coming from Europe and Asia Pacific.

In 2016, Fuze has added 200 new customers, with the top ten deals representing a combined $40 million in contract value and 48,000 additional users globally.

"Fuze is disrupting the UCaaS market with a communications platform that offers a truly user-centric experience for the modern workforce and brings compelling business benefits for customers across the world," said Luca Lazzaron, SVP International Operations, Fuze. "Our partnership with FLSmidth is indicative of our ability to deliver enterprise-grade solutions and serve the needs of companies with 10,000+ users, cementing our position as a leader in the UCaaS market."

About Fuze

Fuze is a global, cloud-based unified communications platform that empowers productivity and delivers insights across the enterprise by enabling simplified business voice communications, flexible video conferencing, and always-on collaboration. Formerly ThinkingPhones, Fuze allows the modern, mobile workforce to seamlessly communicate anytime, anywhere, across any device. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Fuze has additional locations including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Ottawa, London, Amsterdam, Aveiro (Portugal), Paris, Munich, Zurich, Madrid, Copenhagen, and Sydney. For more information, visit www.fuze.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005314/en/

Contacts:

PAN Communications for Fuze

Matthew Briggs, 617-502-4357

fuze@pancomm.com
OXFORD, England, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Professor of Bioengineering Recognized for the Personal Challenges She Overcame to Undertake Ground Breaking Research in Nanomaterials

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has announced that Professor Kytai Nguyen is the winner of thefirst Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award. Prof. Nguyen was given the award for the personal challenges she overcame to make a significant contribution to nano-materials research and education.

The Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award aims to recognize researchers in the field of materials science and engineering who have overcome difficult circumstances to pursue their research career, however early or advanced, and are contributing meaningful insights in their particular field of investigation. Difficult circumstances may include challenges arising from gender, socioeconomic background, ethnicity/culture, disability, and/or the local economic environment.

The Materials Science Council, chaired by Professor Subra Suresh, former Director of the NSF and current President of Carnegie Mellon University, selected the winner based on her achievements and the challenges she overcame in realizing these achievements. The prize includes USD $5,000 and all-expenses-paid attendance at the award reception.

The Council were impressed with the way Prof. Nguyen overcame several challenges during her formative years including her difficult upbringing in Vietnam, and the challenges she faced when she studied in the US while learning English and working several jobs to support her studies. Most recently, she managed to successfully balance family life with an active research and teaching career.

Prof. Nguyen will receive her award on Tuesday, November 29 at a special reception during the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston, USA.

"I am truly honored to receive the Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award," said Prof. Nguyen about her recognition. "I am grateful for the help that I received from my family, mentors, students and colleagues at the University of Texas at Arlington. There are many opportunities out there for young scientists that can be attainable even though there may be challenges in your life. Trust yourself, persevere through your challenges, and use your inner determination and strength to seek your own success."

"Kytai's story really stood out from the nominations, and the Materials Science Council were unanimous in their decision to award her," said Subra Suresh, chair of the Materials Science Council and President of Carnegie Mellon University. "Not only has she been a pioneer in the development of nanoparticles for controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering application but she achieved this having overcome substantial obstacles throughout all of the formative stages of her life and career. We hope that this award will inspire other researchers who are facing challenges to see what can be achieved when working in and overcoming difficult circumstances."

Nominations for the 2017 edition of the Materials Today Embracing Challenge Award are now open. Applications can be submitted until February 28, 2017.

Read more on Elsevier Connect.

Notes to editors

Reporters wishing to attend the award ceremony on November 29 in Boston, or who would like to interview Prof. Nguyen can contact Joe d'Angelo: j.dangelo@elsevier.com.

About the Materials Science Council

Commencing in 2014, the Materials Science Council is undertaking a range of activities with Elsevier to help support the research community in three ways: supporting the sharing and communication of scientific information and data through new technology platforms and pathways; helping researchers communicate the importance of materials science to the general public; and rewarding researchers, particularly those working in difficult conditions or in countries with limited infrastructure.



About Materials Today

Materials Today is a community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience. Supported by Elsevier, we publish high impact peer-reviewed journals and industry magazines, organize academic conferences, broadcast educational webinars and much more.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions - among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Research Intelligenceand ClinicalKey - and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries.

Media contacts

Joe d'Angelo

Elsevier

+441865843700

j.dangelo@elsevier.com


Ann Cairns expected to become Chair of ICE Clear Europe Board in January 2017 and join ICE Board during 2017

Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE:ICE), a leading operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of data and listings services, today announced that Thomas E. Noonan has joined the Board of Directors of Intercontinental Exchange. Mr. Noonan is an entrepreneur who has started and sold companies focused on technology and cybersecurity, including Internet Security Systems, and today is a General Partner of TechOperators which is an early-stage venture fund. Mr. Noonan was also appointed as a member of ICE's Risk Committee.

ICE also announced that Ann Cairns is expected to join the Board of Directors of ICE Clear Europe as Chairperson in January 2017 as well as joining the Board of Directors of Intercontinental Exchange shortly thereafter. Ms. Cairns' appointment as Chairperson of the ICE Clear Europe Board of Directors will follow the retirement of Sir Bob Reid, the current Chairperson of ICE Clear Europe. Ms. Cairns is currently the President of International Markets for MasterCard, and previously held banking and operational roles at global institutions such as ABN-AMRO and Citigroup, while starting her career at British Gas in the North Sea oil division.

"We are pleased to welcome Tom to our Board and the wealth of expertise he brings in technology and cybersecurity at the Board level," said Jeffrey C. Sprecher, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Intercontinental Exchange. "We also look forward to Ann joining in the near future to bring strong risk management experience to our Board. Each of these individuals are successful business leaders in their respective industries and will provide valuable insights and experience."

Mr. Noonan commented on the opportunity to serve on the Intercontinental Exchange Board by stating: "I am pleased to be joining ICE's Board of Directors at this important time in the continued evolution of financial markets and I look forward to contributing to the governance of the company as well as its growth initiatives. Jeff and his colleagues have done a fantastic job growing the ICE business and diversifying its product base over the last decade and I enjoy working with innovative companies like ICE."

Ms. Cairns added: "I look forward to working with the ICE Clear Europe Board during a time of significant change and opportunity in the UK and Europe, as well as the chance to join the Intercontinental Exchange Board to further build on the strong governance and risk management practices across the company. The role of regulated market infrastructure is increasingly critical to markets and economies with the goal of driving stable and sustained growth, and ICE's position as a global leader brings tremendous responsibility and opportunity."

Paul Swann, President and Managing Director of ICE Clear Europe stated "On behalf of the ICE Clear Europe Board, I would like to thank Sir Bob for his exceptional guidance and leadership since we launched ICE Clear Europe in 2008. We welcome Ann as incoming Chairperson of the ICE Clear Europe board. Our stakeholders will benefit from Ann's international business experience, technology insights and financial markets knowledge."

About Intercontinental Exchange

Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE:ICE) operates a leading network of global futures, equity and equity options exchanges, as well as global clearing and data services across financial and commodity markets. The New York Stock Exchange is the world leader in capital raising, listings and equities trading.

Trademarks of ICE and/or its affiliates include Intercontinental Exchange, ICE, ICE block design, NYSE and New York Stock Exchange. Information regarding additional trademarks and intellectual property rights of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. and/or its affiliates is located at www.intercontinentalexchange.com/terms-of-use.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 -- Statements in this press release regarding ICE's business that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of additional risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see ICE's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors in ICE's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015, as filed with the SEC on February 4, 2016.

SOURCE: Intercontinental Exchange

ICE- CORP

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005905/en/

Contacts:

Media Contact:

Claire Miller

+44 20 7065 7745

claire.miller@theice.com

or

Investor Contact:

Kelly Loeffler

+1 770 857 4726

kelly.loeffler@theice.com
B2Gold Corporation hat am 8. Dezember weitere 23.450.000 Stammaktien von Calibre Mining Corporation erworben. Die Transaktion, welcher eine Vereinbarung von B2Gold, Minera Glencairn S.A., einem zu 100% eigenem Tochterunternehmen von B2Gold, Calibre und CXB Nicaragua S.A., einem zu 100% eigenem Tochterunternehmen von Calibre, zugrunde liegt, war bereits im November angekundigt worden. Pro Aktie zahlte B2Gold demnach 0,14 CAD und damit insgesamt 3.283.000 CAD.



Im Rahmen der Vereinbarung verkaufte B2Gold seine Anteile an den Konzessionen der Borosi-Liegenschaft in Nicaragua gegen 23.450.000 Stammaktien von Calibre und eine Netto-Schmelz-Royalty in Hohe von 1,5% fur die bei dem Projekt erzielte Produktion.



B2Gold hat seine Anteile an Calibre damit auf 53.450.000 Stammaktien bzw. 18,5% der ausstehenden Aktien erhoht.



 Redaktion GoldSeiten.de / Rohstoff-Welt.de / MinenPortal.de

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
Asked/Answered is a weekly feature for reader-submitted questions. Follow the blog online at www.cumberlink.com:

When am I allowed to carry a firearm?

This depends on whether the person carrying the firearm has a concealed carry license or not.

A concealed carry license allows a person to carry a firearm but out of site of the public.

If a person does not have a concealed carry license, is allowed to lawfully own and possess firearms and wishes to carry one, it must be done out in the open.

Pennsylvania allows for open carry, and both forms of carrying are generally acceptable except where expressly prohibited, such as at schools, the county courthouse and military posts.

Cumberland County Sheriff Ronny Anderson said owners of private property, like a private business, may also prohibit firearms from the property.

He explained that carrying a firearm in one of these areas would likely not be a violation of the firearms code, but the person carrying the weapon could be asked to leave and could be charged with trespassing if they dont comply.

A person with a concealed carry license may also carry a loaded handgun inside a vehicle, something a person without a license cannot.

Anderson said that does not mean a license is required for a firearm to be in the vehicle under certain circumstances.

Its almost like a safety to get that license to carry, he said. If you get into firearms not to be carried without a license, thats where it gets complicated.

Pennsylvania law allows firearms to be carried in a vehicle for circumstances like going to and from a shooting range, transporting a firearm to a home or business following a purchase or taking a firearm to be repaired.

Anderson said in those situations the firearm must be unloaded and should be secured in a location that is not readily accessible.

This also means a handgun cannot be kept in a vehicle for any reason other than expressly allowed by the law without a concealed carry license, Anderson said.

If you read the law and you go by the black and white, that means to and from the range, from your house to the range and back, he said. That means not stopping to grab something to eat, not stopping to gas up or anything like that.

Certain individuals like law enforcement officers and military members while on duty may also carry firearms without a license.

The full text of 18 Pa.C.S.A. 6106, which defines firearms not to be carried without a license and its exceptions, can be found at goo.gl/ua997z

Send us your questions

Need an answer? We can help.

The Sentinel wants to know what you have always wanted to know.

Whether its politics, crime, history or just something youve always been curious about, if you have questions, The Sentinel will look for the answer and provide it in our online blog and as a weekly feature in the Sentinel print edition.

Shoot us an email at frontdoor@cumberlink.com, call 240-7125 or stop by the office to submit your questions.

The best questions will be featured in weekly Asked/Answered columns online and in print.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 9, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Crown Bioscience, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Crown Bioscience International (TWSE: ticker 6554) and a global drug discovery and development services company providing translational platforms to advance oncology and metabolic disease research, has expedited their access to study data with the release of a new, secure online data portal.

The proprietary, client data portal was created in alignment with an ongoing strategic initiative to utilize digital platforms to drive increased customer value. Developed internally by CrownBio's bioinformatics group, the platform provides real-time research results allowing clients continuous access to their data.

This innovative tool enables client to perform data manipulation online, or download the study results in multiple formats. Clients may also import their data into their systems and perform further analysis within their chosen application.

"We live in an era where technology allows people to access data when and where they choose. At CrownBio, we want to bring this high-speed standard to our clients in a secure and user-friendly manner," stated Laurie Heilmann, SVP of Global Strategy, Marketing and Business Development. Heilmann continued, "We understand how important the data is to our clients; and therefore, we have developed a portal that will permit our clients to have secure access to their project updates and datasets at any time."

This first release of the data portal contains essential filtering capabilities. Future releases will add to the core feature set and be driven entirely by a customer advisory and governance panel.

"This governance group will shape the development of the portal, ensuring that our digital tools reflect the needs of our customers and solve real-world challenges," commented Gavin Cooper, Executive Director of Marketing.

For more information on CrownBio's commitment to furthering the field of oncology and metabolic disease drug discovery, visit https://www.crownbio.com

About Crown Bioscience Inc.



Crown Bioscienceis a global drug discovery and development solutions company providing translational platforms to advance oncology and metabolic disease research. With an extensive portfolio of relevant models and predictive tools, Crown Bioscience enables clients to deliver superior clinical candidates.

Logo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/351602/crown_bio_Logo.jpg
Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Global LNG Tanker Market 2016-2020" report to their offering.

The analysts forecast the global LNG tanker market to grow at a CAGR of 6.21% during the period 2016-2020.

Global LNG Tanker Market 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

The global LNG tanker market is highly reliant upon the state of the global oil industry and the connected crude oil and natural gas prices. The recent rout in the global crude prices is expected to have a significant effect on the course followed by the LNG tanker market over the forecast period.

One of the major trends that has been seen in the current LNG tanker market is the revamping in the carrier propulsion systems. Ever since the very first LNG vessel was inducted into service, some half a century ago, these LNG carriers have undergone a paradigm shift in their design. The historical fleet of LNG tankers in the global trade had been fitted with a reliable, but moderately efficient steam turbine-driven propulsion systems. The only fuel option these systems had was related to the boil-off gases, which was a by-product of the storage of natural gas under cryogenic conditions.

According to the report, stringent marine pollution laws will be a key driver for market growth. As with any form of energy consumer, the marine transportation industry also affects the environment adversely in many ways, and the LNG tanker industry provides a potential exception. One of the major trends seen over the past decade is the significant increase in the marine pollution. The result of this has been increase in the focus of the marine environment protection and attempt to revive the marine ecosystem. However, being a relatively cleaner fuel than the counterparts, the LNG tanker market is expected to reap tons of benefits from the imposing of the stricter marine pollution laws.

Key vendors

Samsung Heavy Industries

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries

Hyundai Heavy Industries

DSME

Mitsui OSK Lines

YK Lines

Yamal LNG

Key Topics Covered:

Part 01: Executive summary

Part 02: Scope of the report

Part 03: Market research methodology

Part 04: Market landscape

Part 05: Market segmentation by containment technology

Part 06: Geographical segmentation

Part 07: Market drivers

Part 08: Impact of drivers

Part 09: Market challenges

Part 10: Impact of drivers and challenges

Part 11: Market trends

Part 12: Vendor landscape

Part 13: Key vendor analysis

Part 14: Appendix

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/jrg3vg/global_lng_tanker.

Related Topics: LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas)

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160921005953/en/

Contacts:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Degreed, the fast-growing company that has created an engaging, beautiful and intuitive way to empower and recognize all forms of professional and lifelong learning, today announced that it has won a coveted Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Award, receiving the Silver for the Best Advance in Learning Technology Implementation category. Degreed achieved this distinction for its work with Xerox Learning Solutions, helping Xerox Services to create a strong learning culture for its more than 100,000 employees.

Xerox Services University, the company's internally branded instance of the Degreed platform, delivers an employee-focused system to enable real-life learning habits and preferences. Through Degreed's innovative learning solution, Xerox Services has expanded its learning options, enabling employees to benefit from both personalized and curated learning experiences that blend formal and informal learning resources, including courses, videos, articles, blogs and podcasts from thousands of sources. At the same time, the company's HR and Learning and Development teams can now target development opportunities based on each employee's unique learning needs and career goals and gain much more comprehensive insights into all the learning that employees are doing.

"Providing a holistic approach to learning enables employees to expand their skills and knowledge, while increasing the expertise and value of the entire team," said David Blake, CEO of Degreed. "Our work with Xerox Learning highlights our ability to help clients make everyday learning part of their cultures. We are proud to have helped Xerox Learning's team to transform learning across their enterprise, and honored that Brandon Hall Group has recognized the success of this implementation."

"To remain competitive and an industry leader, we recognized the need for a more innovative approach to learning -- one that allowed our more than 100,000 employees to engage, connect and grow every day," said Gina Ann Richter, Ph.D., senior consultant/learning strategist for Xerox Learning Solutions. "In searching for a cost-effective, comprehensive learning ecosystem that could inspire our entire global employee network, Degreed delivered exactly what we were looking for. We have already seen significant increases in employee engagement as employees take learning into their own hands, and we expect continued positive results going forward."

"Winning a Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award means an organization is an elite innovator within Human Capital Management. The award signifies that the organization's work represents a leading practice in that HCM function," said Rachel Cooke, Chief Operating Officer of Brandon Hall Group and head of the awards program. "Their achievement is also notable because of the positive impact their work in HCM has on business results. All award winners have to demonstrate a measurable benefit to the business, not just the HCM operation. That's an important distinction. Our HCM award winners are helping to transform the business."

The award entries were evaluated by a panel of veteran, independent senior industry experts, Brandon Hall Group analysts and executives based upon the following criteria: fit the need, design of the program, functionality, innovation, and overall measureable benefits.

About Degreed

Degreed is an award-winning learning platform built for the way today's workers really build their expertise and grow their careers. Degreed integrates organizations' internal talent systems with the world's largest ecosystem of open learning resources -- over 3 million courses, videos, articles, books, podcasts and more from nearly 1,400 sources. As a result, organizations and their people can discover, share and track all their development, however and wherever they learn. Founded in 2012, Degreed is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Salt Lake City and Amsterdam.

Learn more about Degreed at: Website | Facebook | Google+ | YouTube | LinkedIn | Twitter

About Xerox Learning Solutions

The speed of change in today's business world means that to stay relevant and competitive, companies and their employees must perform at the top of their game. Xerox Learning Solutions is an award-winning provider of global end-to-end corporate learning services, designed to accelerate productivity and growth of our clients' business. Xerox Learning's diverse expertise allows us to deliver impactful, performance-based learning solutions that align with strategic business goals, accessible to our customers at the point and time of need. Our brand recognition, global presence, and superior innovation give us a powerful competitive position and offers our customers a true trusted partner. We build learning solutions so that Work can Work Better.

About Brandon Hall Group

Brandon Hall Group is a HCM research and advisory services firm that provides insights around key performance areas, including Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition and Workforce Management. With more than 10,000 clients globally and 20 years of delivering world-class research and advisory services, Brandon Hall Group is focused on developing research that drives performance in emerging and large organizations, and provides strategic insights for  2016 Brandon Hall Group, Inc. 3 executives and practitioners responsible for growth and business results. (www.brandonhall.com)
DALLAS, TX -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- TierPoint LLC today announced plans to build a new state-of-the-art data center in the Dallas metropolitan area.

Partnering with Compass Data Centers, TierPoint's ultimate plan calls for approximately 90,000 sq. ft. of building space in Allen, Texas, with the initial phase including an investment of over $20 million and 16,000 sq. ft. of raised floor. The new carrier-neutral facility will also include infrastructure support and office space and is expected to be operational by spring 2017.

"The location we selected in Allen is beneficial for several reasons," said Chris Parsons, TierPoint's Regional Vice President for the area. "It offers an ideal disaster recovery option for our current customers and provides expansion capabilities for them while remaining local. Allen is a high-tech community in the rapidly growing US 75/State Highway 121 corridor, offering easy access from all points in North Texas and close proximity to the IT workforce, rapidly expanding population, and business growth in the area."

Allen Mayor Stephen Terrell said: "We're proud to support the new TierPoint facility in our city. This is yet another example of how the proactive efforts of the Allen Economic Development Corporation attract new and beneficial business investment to our community."

TierPoint's roots can be traced to Dallas and the company's first data center acquisition, Colo4Dallas, in 2010. The original 68,000 sq. ft. facility, built in 2000, was one of the first in the area to provide true 2N power, an important factor in preventing outages and giving the company a strong entry into the market. Since then, TierPoint has added 38 more data centers. The new Dallas-area facility will bring the total to 40 nationwide.

"Dallas is one of the fastest growing markets in the U.S., offering a technology hub with abundant power, connectivity, and a business-friendly climate," said Jerry Kent, TierPoint's Chairman and CEO. "Our decision to invest in this second facility in the area is based on strong, regional demand for hybrid IT services and is a testament to the unique blend of world-class products, top-rate professionals, and superior customer service for which TierPoint is increasingly known."

About TierPoint

TierPoint is a leading national provider of best-in-class IT infrastructure services that help clients improve agility, drive performance, and manage risk. TierPoint offers multi-tenant, private, and hybrid cloud solutions; disaster recovery, business continuity and other managed services; and colocation -- all backed by a commitment to superior customer service and highly-redundant, carrier-neutral data centers coast to coast.

Contact:

Patrick Baczenas

314-720-3136

Patrick.Baczenas@tierpoint.com




LONDON, March 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Scaling its Circular Economy based mission to reduce, reusable Construction & DIY Waste.

Today marks the relaunch of peer-to-peer marketplace start-up http://www.enviromate.co.uk, a new impact venture that keeps surplus and reusable materials from the construction and DIY industries out of the waste stream.

(Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/482636/Enviromate_Relaunch.jpg )

Founded at the beginning of 2015 by two disruptive innovators and UK Eco-Entrepreneurs Reiss Salustro-Pilson and Nigel Van Wassenhoven, whose belief that business should be a force of good whilst collectively protecting our planet by shaping our ecological impact through building businesses that work and collaborate for the good of both humanity and nature.

As an alternative to the linear economy of "take, make and dispose", the revamped Enviromate marketplace makes it easy to recirculate, redistribute and reuse materials that would otherwise end up in the skip. It's open to anyone - from tradesmen

to DIY enthusiasts - and allows users to buy or sell anything from a few tins of paint to pallets of bricks, timber and roof tiles.

Users can sign up for Free or Premium - premium members get exclusive partner discounts, unlimited image uploads and 3 free listing bumps per month. From there one can explore items for sale locally or nationally on the marketplace, watch items and connect with other members through messaging. Selling is just as simple as browsing for materials; simply take a photo of the items, enter a description, price and simply list it on the marketplace. If the item doesn't sell straight away, Enviromate Ad Bump boosts the listing straight back to the top of the marketplace to increase chances of selling the item - one can even create wanted ads to the community if there is something that one can't find throughout the listings.

The platform also connects larger developers to community projects and charities that could benefit from their surplus materials. 'Enviromate Donate' is a separate area that lets communities and charities list projects with material requirements, so a developer or wholesaler with a larger amount surplus can match their unwanted materials to a suitable project.

enviromate.co.uk's founders have been dubbed "industry disruptors" for revolutionising the construction and DIY sector and tackling an industry that is the largest contributor to waste globally. Whilst within the UK alone equates to 32% of all landfill waste using over 420million tonnes of material per year generating 120m tonnes of waste over half reusable. It is estimated that 13% of that material ends up within the waste stream without ever being used, with a value of over 1.5 billion.

Reiss Salustro-Pilson, Co-Founder & CEO, said:

"We're in the business of embracing change. We have developed an innovative, vertical marketplace to help build the world of tomorrow. Harnessing and embracing the rise of both digital technology and sharing economy principles to help propel the growth of the circular economy. Where reusable material is kept out of the waste stream and value is not destroyed; instead, it's preserved and also created, through the sharing and trading of under-utilised resources."

Enviromate is a completely self-funded platform with growth of over 15,000 members across the UK. Winners at 2016's P.E.A Sustainability Awards, Pioneer of The Year and most recently The Great British Entrepreneur Awards, Eco Entrepreneur of the Year Natwest Boost Award. To date over 4,000 tonnes of material has been reused on the marketplace and kept out of the waste stream - enough to fill over four Olympic swimming pools with a value of close to 1m. This coupled with over 20 charities and community projects across the country, benefiting from national developers donating larger surplus through the platform seeing the benefit of waste reduction and increased corporate social responsibility. Showing the Enviromate brand's ethos of having a real positive and disruptive impact is well underway in the UK and with international expansion plans opening exciting prospects of delivering a tangible global impact.

People, Environment, Achievement Award Judges;

"The best online portal for the sharing of unwanted building materials, helping to make the building sector more circular. A real boost for reuse in a sector with so much waste."

About enviromate.co.uk

Enviromate is the multi-award winning, closed loop marketplace start-up where people connect to buy, sell or donate leftover building materials. Helping build a future where we share, upcycle and reuse surplus. Reducing the impact the industry has on our environment and building toward a more circular economy. Say hello at http://www.enviromate.co.uk | T @Enviromate_UK | FB @enviromate.uk
Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "3rd Anti-Counterfeiting Pharma Conference 2017" conference to their offering.

While the pharmaceutical industry has to constantly evolve tech and research to fight the new challenges in the health care sector on the one hand, it is kept on its toes due to the rampant counterfeit products on the other. Designed in the guise as genuine, these spurious products often lead to adverse reactions or lack of effective healing properties, diminishing confidence in medicines in general and healthcare providers/health systems in particular.

As per the 2016 International Trade Administration Top Market Reports on Pharmaceuticals, estimates on the size of the global Fake Drugs market range from $75 to $200 billion and can make up half of all drugs sold in some low-income countries.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that up to 30 per cent of branded drugs sold in developing nations are counterfeit which can have profound implications for both patients and the brand.

Wielding a double edged sword, counterfeit products pose a peril to pioneering and generic industries as well as raise the price of the genuine products by diverting the R&D corpus towards devising stricter methods to control counterfeiting.

To secure your brand and build a veritable future, Recunnect invites you to the Anti-Counterfeiting Pharma Conference 2017, where the experts of pharma industry will share their valuable insights on the following:

Anti-Counterfeiting the current picture

Contemporary anti-counterfeiting and brand protection technologies

Review the EU &US anti-counterfeiting legislation

Measures to secure the Supply Chain

Optimise the outreach of anti-counterfeiting resource deployment

Understanding global regulatory laws

Best practices for fighting online counterfeiting

Sensitizing the environment about counterfeit pharma products

Developing the right serialization strategy

Improved tools for patient safety

For more information about this conference visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/dwcg2l/3rd

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161213005974/en/

Contacts:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

Related Topics: Pharmaceuticals
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - With just few days left for the first of the three presidential debates, Donald Trump has advised his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to 'sleep well.' 'Hillary Clinton is taking the day off again, she needs the rest. Sleep well Hillary - see you at the debate!,' the Republican presidential nominee tweeted on Tuesday. Recuperating from a pneumonia attack last week, Clinton appeared at no public events yesterday, apparently to take a break from her grueling campaign schedule. Trump posted this comment before heading to North Carolina for two big rallies. 70-year-old Trump, who is a year elder than Clinton, has not shown any sign of fatigue all through his campaign days. In the preceding Twitter post, Trump alleged that Clinton was copying his airplane rallies. 'She puts the plane behind her like I have been doing from the beginning.' With less than two months before the presidential election, opinion polls have shown her lead waning, and the GOP nominee catching up with the former Secretary of State. The first presidential debate is scheduled to be held next Monday at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. The topics are 'America's Direction,' 'Achieving Prosperity,' and 'Securing America.' The other two presidential debates have been scheduled for next month. A record 100 million people are estimated to view Monday's crucial debate, according to the Hill newspaper. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
PALO ALTO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- NTT Innovation Institute Inc. (NTT i3), the prestigious Silicon Valley-based innovation center for NTT Group, one of the world's largest ICT companies, announced today that is has formed an Executive Advisory Board (EAB) comprised of esteemed global technology experts and business leaders from various industries. The Executive Advisory Board's goal is to exchange ideas on key insights and industry trends, while providing external perspectives that challenge the status quo which is critical to NTT i3's success as a global innovation center. The EAB will work closely with NTT i3's executive leadership team.

"The creation of an Executive Advisory Board is essential to our future successes and NTT i3 is honored to welcome Cindy Padnos, Brian Spector, Dr. Stuart Evans, Wilf Russell and Gokul Rajaram as board members," stated Nina Simosko, CEO and President, NTT i3. "Each advisor provides diverse perspectives and vast experiences from their years of dedication and work in the technology industry that will contribute greatly to our innovation exploration in the world of the enterprise. This compilation of industry stalwarts joining our Executive Advisory Board is a testament to our company's commitment to 'being innovative' in ways that really matter -- for individuals, society and business."

NTT i3's Executive Advisory Board members include:

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures.

Leveraging 25 years of high tech industry experience, Cindy focuses primarily in the Enterprise/B2B cloud and mobile computing sectors, with a particular emphasis on SaaS applications and platforms, solutions leveraging big data for business impact and new business models that accelerate customer acquisition. She is an investor and board member for Bedrock Analytics, BrightEdge Technologies, ChannelEyes, Hoopla Software, Litbit, Peerlyst, Xactly Corporation and Yozio and is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.





Leveraging 25 years of high tech industry experience, Cindy focuses primarily in the Enterprise/B2B cloud and mobile computing sectors, with a particular emphasis on SaaS applications and platforms, solutions leveraging big data for business impact and new business models that accelerate customer acquisition. She is an investor and board member for Bedrock Analytics, BrightEdge Technologies, ChannelEyes, Hoopla Software, Litbit, Peerlyst, Xactly Corporation and Yozio and is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Brian Spector, CEO and co-founder of MIRACL.

Brian Spector is the CEO and co-founder of MIRACL, a distributed cryptography company that guarantees the identity integrity of the people, apps, and things needed to run a digital business. Brian began his information security career more than 20 years ago in cryptographic development at Silicon Valley's first full disk encryption software company and has held leadership positions in development, product management and sales at Thales, RSA Data Security and McAfee.





Brian Spector is the CEO and co-founder of MIRACL, a distributed cryptography company that guarantees the identity integrity of the people, apps, and things needed to run a digital business. Brian began his information security career more than 20 years ago in cryptographic development at Silicon Valley's first full disk encryption software company and has held leadership positions in development, product management and sales at Thales, RSA Data Security and McAfee. Dr. Stuart Evans, Director of the Emirates/CMU i-Lab, Silicon Valley.

Dr. Evans is a Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Integrated Innovation Institute. He teaches "Innovation & Entrepreneurship", "Commercializing IP", and "Enterprise Innovation". His professional career spans research (SRI International, Stanford Graduate School of Business,), teaching (The Judge Business School, Cambridge University), consulting (Bain & Company, Menlo Park, California), investing (Sand Hill Venture Group, Menlo Park, California) and executive management (Shugart Corporation, a Xerox subsidiary, Sunnyvale, California).





Dr. Evans is a Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Integrated Innovation Institute. He teaches "Innovation & Entrepreneurship", "Commercializing IP", and "Enterprise Innovation". His professional career spans research (SRI International, Stanford Graduate School of Business,), teaching (The Judge Business School, Cambridge University), consulting (Bain & Company, Menlo Park, California), investing (Sand Hill Venture Group, Menlo Park, California) and executive management (Shugart Corporation, a Xerox subsidiary, Sunnyvale, California). Wilf Russell, Formerly VP, Consumer Technology Officer, Nike Inc.

A technical visionary and change agent, Wilf brings 25+years of experience and business acumen providing a competitive edge to companies ringing from enterprise organizations to SMBs. At Nike, Wilf helped shape the digital future for the global brand, by managing the strategy and execution related to all consumer-focused technology, working with the Digital Commerce, Brand and Nike+ teams.





A technical visionary and change agent, Wilf brings 25+years of experience and business acumen providing a competitive edge to companies ringing from enterprise organizations to SMBs. At Nike, Wilf helped shape the digital future for the global brand, by managing the strategy and execution related to all consumer-focused technology, working with the Digital Commerce, Brand and Nike+ teams. Gokul Rajaram, Product Engineering Lead at Square.

Gokul is Product Engineering lead at Square. Prior to Square, Gokul was Product Director for Ads at Facebook. In that role, he drove the product roadmap and execution for Facebook's advertising products, which account for the bulk of Facebook's revenues. Earlier, Gokul was Product Management Director for Google AdSense, where he helped conceive and crystallize the product in early 2003, and played a key role in its launch and growth from 2003 onwards into a multibillion dollar product line.

About NTT Innovation Institute Inc. (NTT i3)

NTT Innovation Institute, Inc. (NTT i3) is the Silicon Valley-based innovation center for NTT Group, one of the world's largest ICT companies. Focused on fostering strategic innovation, NTT i3 works with established enterprise companies to investigate new approaches to evolving into technology-first, digitally-driven businesses. Likewise, NTT i3 partners with early stage digitally-native businesses looking to expand their presence and challenger advantage. Accelerating the movement of innovation from initial idea to marketplace implementation, NTT i3 combines access to the significant global infrastructure resources, investment fund, research knowledge, and trusted long-standing customer relationships of NTT Global with its own software startup expertise and deep enterprise relationships.

For more information, please visit NTT i3 at www.ntti3.com or on Facebook and Twitter

Media Contact:

Beth Trier

Trier and Company for NTT i3

beth@triercompany.com

415-285-6147




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario

Early-stage businesses in the Greater Toronto Area and across southern Ontario will have greater access to capital, mentorship and advice as a result of Government of Canada support of up to $300,000 to Maple Leaf Angels Corporation.

This non-repayable federal contribution, provided through FedDev Ontario's Investing in Business Innovation initiative, was announced today by the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for FedDev Ontario.

The Government's Innovation Agenda aims to make Canada a global centre for innovation - one that creates jobs, drives growth across all industries and improves the lives of all Canadians. Investing in Maple Leaf Angels Corporation, a not-for-profit angel network that connects investors with innovative early-stage technology companies, is helping to make that vision a reality.

This funding will help Maple Leaf Angels Corporation expand its angel investor membership, increase the pool of angel investment funds, and improve its investment and reporting tools as well as the mentoring support available to entrepreneurs.

Quotes

"The Government of Canada's Innovation Agenda is focused on fostering an entrepreneurial and creative society, and growing businesses. Investing in angel networks, like Maple Leaf Angels Corporation, is a great example of supporting these two key pillars, as it will provide more opportunities to connect investors with innovative companies and help them to secure the tools and capital required to scale up and be successful."

-- The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario

"Our members seek out capable entrepreneurs to help turn their bright ideas into great Canadian companies. FedDev Ontario's capital injection provides a critical lever for us to connect more experienced investors with more great entrepreneurs."

-- Probal Lala, Chair, Maple Leaf Angels Corporation

Quick Facts

-- Maple Leaf Angels Corporation, established in 2007, has developed a network of accredited investors in Ontario, who have invested more than $17 million in over 30 companies. -- This project is expected to attract up to 60 new angel investors to Maple Leaf Angels Corporation, as well as up to $12 million in new investment for up to 30 early-stage businesses. The project will also support outreach, education and engagement activities for both investors and entrepreneurs. -- Maple Leaf Angels Corporation previously received $300,000 through FedDev Ontario's Investing in Business Innovation initiative, which helped the Corporation grow its membership from 12 to 74 accredited investors.

Associated Links

Investing in Business Innovation initiative

Maple Leaf Angels Corporation

Subscribe to our news updates and follow us on Twitter @FedDevOntario

Contacts:

Media Relations

FedDev Ontario

416-954-6652

fdo.mediarel-relmedias.fdo@canada.ca



Toll Free: 1-866-593-5505

Website: www.FedDevOntario.gc.ca




Journalists in the mass media love to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidates. Well, I just dug up some dirt on Hillary Clinton.

In Bob Woodwards 1996 book, The Choice, Woodward reports that Hillary once conducted seances to summon the spirits of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi.

Through some crack investigative work  I paid a Russian hacker 20 bucks to access Hillarys server  I determined that Hillary is still talking to dead people.

Heres a transcript of her most recent seance:

Hillary: Its tough being a strong, smart woman, Eleanor. What should I do?

Eleanor: You must pretend to be humble, right Mahatma?

Mahatma Ghandi: Yes, humble, and she must change her hair style.

Hillary: Change my hair style again?

Mahatma: Try the Mary Tyler Moore look from the old Dick Van Dyke show.

FDR: Eleanor, come back to sleep, dear.

Hillary: President Roosevelt?

Eleanor: Go back to sleep, you old philanderer.

Mahatma: And try some zippity doo.

President Truman: Hillary, I have some advice for you.

Hillary: President Truman?

Truman: If you cant take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

LBJ: I couldnt take it and I got out.

Hillary: Lyndon?

President Nixon: You were run out, Lyndon!

LBJ: A subject you know well, Dick!

Shirley MacLaine: Hello! Hello!

LBJ: MacLaine, what are you doing here? Youre not dead!

Shirley: There is no death, Lyndon.

Nixon: No death to LBJs commie government programs, anyway!

President Jefferson: Good God, what have you people done to the country!

Hillary: President Jefferson?

Jefferson: It takes a village, my eye! Individuals get things done.

President Washington: Jefferson, hows it going, old boy?

Jefferson: Theyve run up $20 trillion in debt, George!

Jimmy Hoffa: You people want to keep it down?

Hillary: Youre the real Jimmy Hoffa?

Hoffa: Does a bear 

Shirley: Jimmy!

Ghandi: Alberto VO5 also offers some very nice products to make your hair shiny.

Ben Franklin: What did you people do to the Constitution?

Bill Smith: Hey, Hillary, Ive got a bone to pick with you.

Hillary: Who are you?

Bill Smith: A Trump supporter. I got so mad when you called me and my friends a basket of deplorables that I had a massive coronary and now Im stuck in your damn seance.

Shirley: Anyone hear from George Burns?

Franklin: What happened to limited government!

Hillary: Eleanor, I summoned you and Mahatma for inspiration.

Eleanor: But youre not getting inspired?

Hillary: No, Im suffering more abuse than I get from the living.

Truman: If you cant take the heat...

Eleanor: Ignore them, dear. Theyve been moaning about FDRs programs for 60 years.

Hillary: I feel so down lately. I feel so heavy, like someone buried me in concrete.

Hoffa: Lady, you dont know what youre talking about.

Hillary: Eleanor, I need your help. Im falling in the polls. What do I do?

Eleanor: Just as I was a revolutionary First Lady, you, the first major-party female presidential candidate, are a revolutionary. Revolutionaries ruffle feathers, dear.

Hillary: But I should be slaughtering Trump. If Im not careful, I could lose this thing. What can I do to make people like me?

(Silence.)

Hillary: Eleanor?

Ghandi: Eleanor left, Hillary. But she said you might try a good conditioner. Be sure to rinse thoroughly.

Tom Purcell is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist and is nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.
Hong Kong: HKTDC Communication and Public Affairs Department Joe Kainz Tel: +852 2584 4216 Email: joe.kainz@hktdc.org Bangkok: Vero Public Relations Piyachat Nambundid Tel: +66 (0) 2684 1552-2 ext 21 Mobile: +66 (0) 86 093 9019 Email: piyachat@veropr.com Papatsorn Pisutpunya Tel: +66 (0) 2684 1551 ext. 19 Mobile: +66 (0) 89 499 8349 Email: papatsorn@veropr.com

HONG KONG, Sept 21, 2016 - (ACN Newswire) - The mega promotion, "In Style Hong Kong", is making its debut in the Thai capital Bangkok, starting this month. Organised by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), the campaign will engage business leaders and entrepreneurs, as well as consumers in Thailand to showcase Hong Kong's vibrant lifestyle and creativity and explain how the city's world-class services can help Thai companies expand overseas, especially to the Chinese mainland."Thailand is the second-largest economy in Southeast Asia. As the country's capital, Bangkok is a commercial hub in Asia with a thriving retail market," said Dannie Chiu, Regional Director, Southeast Asia & India, HKTDC, at today's press conference. "With the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), we can expect to see greater potential for cooperation between Hong Kong and Thailand. "In Style Hong Kong" aims to strengthen economic and trading ties between Hong Kong and Thailand, capitalising on all forms of growth opportunities. We look forward to bringing the best of Hong Kong's services and products to Thailand as the HKTDC celebrates its 50th anniversary."The "In Style Hong Kong" Symposium, on 6 October, will highlight Hong Kong's advantages as a trendsetting hub, and reveal the potential of Hong Kong services sectors as partners for Thai companies. An invitation-only Gala Dinner will be held for 450 members of the business community, while a citywide promotion will combine retail and gourmet specials at venues across Bangkok for the public.The promotion aims to deepen the already strong trade links between Thailand and Hong Kong, which is consistently rated as the world's freest economy by the United States-based Heritage Foundation. In 2015, bilateral trade between the two economies reached US$17.18 billion.Services under the spotlightRimsky Yuen, Secretary for Justice of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government, will officiate at the opening session of "In Style Hong Kong" (6 Oct) at the Plaza Athenee Bangkok. Following the opening session, Hong Kong business leaders including Royce Yuen, CEO, MaLogic; Jason Chiu, CEO, cherrypicks; Dr King Fai Pang, Group President and Executive Director, VTech Holdings Ltd; and Chansak Fuangfu, Senior Executive Vice President and Director, Bangkok Bank Public Company Ltd, will offer insights on how Hong Kong can facilitate the business expansion of Thai companies.Services sector leaders and professionals from Thailand and Hong Kong will speak at five thematic sessions:- The Fast Track to E-commerce LogisticsThe establishment of the AEC is helping to fine-tune Asia's supply chain network. Meanwhile, cross-border trade, particularly e-commerce development, is also driving huge changes in the traditional logistics industry and distribution networks. Hong Kong can facilitate Thai companies to tap these opportunities. Participants of this session will include moderator, Ruth Banomyong, Associate Professor, Department of International Business, Logistics & Transport, Thammasat University; and speakers Gary So, Deputy Managing Director, Kerry Logistics; Vincent Cheung, President, BPS Global Group; Michelle Leung, Senior Vice President, Fung Omni Services; and James Chang, Chief Operations Officer, Cross-border, Lazada Hong Kong.- RMB Internationalisation and Corporate TreasuryAs the premier offshore renminbi centre with proximity to the Chinese mainland, the session will explain Hong Kong's advantages to attract companies to set up their corporate treasury centres in the city, in turn deepening the offshore renminbi capital markets. Speakers will include Yuthadej Putamanonda, Managing Director and Head of Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered Bank Thailand; Chen Shuang, Executive Director and CEO, China Everbright Ltd; Council Member, Financial Services Development Council, Hong Kong; and Kanit Si, Executive Vice President, Bangkok Bank Public Company Ltd.- The Belt and Road Initiative: Digital Framework for Connecting Smart CitiesAt this seminar, experts will share the latest developments in cross-border payment instruments, smart identity, smart-city infrastructure, interoperability and legal framework, which are essential in strengthening connectivity among smart cities. Eva Chan, Vice Chairperson, Hong Kong Public Key Infrastructure and Surangkana Wayuparb, Executive Director & CEO, Electronic Transactions Development Agency, Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Thailand will deliver remarks. Speakers will include Clarence Hui, Senior Manager, Financial Infrastructure Development, Hong Kong Monetary Authority; Chaichana Mitrpant, Deputy Executive Director, Electronic Transactions Development Agency, Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Thailand; and Eric Yeung, Convener, Smart City Consortium.- Integrating Creativity with InnovationUnlock Asia's Business Success in the Digital Era with Jason Chiu, CEO, cherrypicks Ltd as the moderator and Tommy Li, Creative Director, Tommy Li Design Workshop Ltd; Keith Lam, co-founder, Dimension Plus; and Francis Kwok, founder and CEO, Radica Systems Ltd as speakers, Thai companies will gain insights into digital marketing, including innovative branding strategies, big data and new media with art and design.- Legal Risk Management: Key to International Trade and InvestmentExperts will share tips on how Thai enterprises can protect their intellectual property and settle cross-border business disputes through arbitration in Hong Kong. Speakers will include Denis Brock, Council Member, The Law Society of Hong Kong; Pui-Ki Emmanuelle Ta, Counsel of the Secretariat, International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce - Asia Office; Winnie Tam, SC, Barrister-at-law, Arbitrator and Mediator, Chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association.(Please see the complete list of symposium speakers at http://symposium.instyle-hk.com/en/about-symposium/speakers.html.)Gala Dinner showcasing Hong Kong: "Day and Night"An invitation-only gala dinner, to be held on the evening of 6 October, at the Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok, will welcome about 450 business leaders from Thailand and Hong Kong. Under the theme, "Hong Kong: Day and Night", a "Thai Silk Crossover" fashion parade will be a highlight of the gala dinner. Six Thai silk-themed fashion collections by celebrated Hong Kong designers, Doris Kath Chan, Bonita Cheung, Koyo William Cheung, Polly Ho, Henry Lau and Mountain Yam will be showcased during the parade. Miss Hong Kong 2015, Louisa Mak has been invited to be among the models in the fashion parade. The gala dinner will also feature "Lifestyle Chemistry", an interactive display window graced by live models, to present selected lifestyle brands from the HKTDC Design Gallery. A unique culinary experience featuring Hong Kong and Thai star chefs: Albert KK Au, Group Executive Chef (Chinese Division), Lai Sun F&B Management Ltd and James Norman, Executive Chef, Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok, who will collaborate on a fusion menu with dedicated wine-pairing by the Hong Kong Sommelier Association.Hong Kong lifestyle for everyoneThe centrepiece of the citywide promotion is a Hong Kong galleria at the Siam Paragon shopping mall (3-9 October), spotlighting Hong Kong fashion, and lifestyle and gourmet products. Thai consumers can try on collections presented by the six Hong Kong designers and take photos using an e-wardrobe. Selected lifestyle products from the HKTDC Design Gallery via Lazada.co.th and hktdc.com Small Orders will also be featured, bringing a convenient O2O shopping experience to Thai consumers.Complimentary tea tasting by Hong Kong's premium tea brands - Contact Design, Gianna, MingCha and OrTea - and food tasting sponsored by Lee Kum Kee, will also be available. As part of an extended In Style Hong Kong campaign, a range of products from the HKTDC's Design Gallery will be sold at Betrend and The Selected from September to December 2016, offering local consumers a chance to experience Hong Kong's design and creative excellence in lifestyle and household products.Meanwhile, a "Hong Kong Lifestyle Products" promotion is underway in Bangkok, with well-known Hong Kong fashion brands Bossini, Episode, Esprit, Giordano, G2000 and Jessica, as well as popular retail watch brand City Chain and optical boutiques eGG and Optical 88 offering discounts and other consumer incentives. To enjoy these offers, simply pick up a Citywide Promotion coupon booklet at more than 100 participating outlets across Bangkok, featuring over 30 Hong Kong and local brands from 1 September to 31 October, or visit Hong Kong Galleria in Siam Paragon from 3 to 9 October. More exciting Hong Kong products and gourmet can also be found at online retailer Lazada Thailand and gourmet website Openrice Thailand.Website and social media:In Style Hong Kong http://www.instyle-hk.comFollow us on Facebook: HKTDC Bangkok https://www.facebook.com/HKTDC.BangkokFollow us on LinkedIn: HKTDC https://www.linkedin.com/company/hong-kong-trade-development-councilHKTDC Photo Link: http://bit.ly/2cTPo0lAbout HKTDCThe Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The HKTDC is the international marketing arm for Hong Kong-based traders, manufacturers and services providers. With more than 40 offices globally, including 13 on the Chinese mainland, the HKTDC promotes Hong Kong as a platform for doing business with China and throughout Asia. The HKTDC also organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to provide companies, particularly SMEs, with business opportunities on the mainland and in overseas markets, while providing information via trade publications, research reports and digital channels including the media room. For more information, please visit: www.hktdc.com/aboutus. Follow us on Google+, Twitter @hktdc, LinkedIn.Google+: https://plus.google.com/+hktdcTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/hktdcLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/hong-kong-trade-development-councilSource: HKTDCContact:Copyright 2016 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Thomson Reuters Third-Quarter 2016 Earnings Announcement and Webcast Scheduled for Tuesday, November 1, 2016





Conference call and webcast scheduled for 8:30 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2016 -- Thomson Reuters (NYSE, TSX: TRI), the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, announced today that its third-quarter 2016 earnings will be issued via news release on Tuesday, November 1, 2016.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130208/MM57185LOGO

Jim Smith, president and chief executive officer, and Stephane Bello, executive vice president and chief financial officer, will host a conference call and simultaneous webcast that morning at 8:30 a.m. EDT. Discussions may include forward-looking information.

You can access the webcast by visiting the "Investor Relations" section of the Thomson Reuters website. Registration for the webcast is now open. Additionally, an archive of the webcast will be available following the presentation.

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of news and information for professional markets. Our customers rely on us to deliver the intelligence, technology and expertise they need to find trusted answers. The business has operated in more than 100 countries for more than 100 years. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges (symbol: TRI). For more information, visit http://www.thomsonreuters.com/.
TROY, MI--(Marketwired - September 21, 2016) - Innovative Computer Systems, developer of the Finys Suite (Finys), a complete core administration solution for property and casualty (P&C) insurance organizations writing personal and commercial lines, is pleased to announce that Wayne Insurance Group (the Group) recently selected Finys to replace an aging core administration system.

Comprised of a trio of mutual insurance companies operating in Ohio, the oldest of which stretches back to 1878, Wayne Insurance Group offers a full range of P&C insurance products, including personal auto, homeowners', dwelling fire, farm, and commercial lines, through a network of more than 130 independent agency partners.

"Each company in the Group had a different imaging system, and there were two policy/claim/billing suite systems," said Tim Suppes, vice president of operations and CIO at Wayne Insurance Group. "We were looking for single vendor who could deliver a web-based system that would handle all three companies and the various lines the Group offers, as well as a system that was agent focused vs. internal focused. We felt that Innovative Computer Systems and Finys fit that bill, and would work with us as a partner, not just a client."

With the Finys implementation only 40 percent complete, Wayne Insurance Group has already been able to roll out a unique new property offering called New Century which offers agents and consumers the opportunity to choose packaged or a la carte options. Via a pre-integrated Finys portal offering, the Group's agents now have access to transactions and information that was not available to them before. And, unlike the Group's previous core administration system, Finys uses the same user interface (UI) for all stakeholders, including internal employees, agents and consumers, to improve processing times and increase ease of doing business since everyone is literally "on the same page." Finys is one system for all users and not a front-end with a separate back-end. After the conversion is complete, Wayne Insurance Group looks to add additional functionality for their policyholders using the Finys system.

"Part of the beauty of Finys is that it is one system for ALL users," said Scott Hinz, director of sales at Innovative Computer Systems. "It is architected more holistically than other systems in that we didn't create a back end solution and then front it with different UIs for different audiences. That single difference significantly speeds the process from rate/quote to bind. We believe this will be a key ingredient of Wayne Insurance Group's satisfaction with the suite."

Available as a pre-integrated suite or as standalone components, Finys can be hosted onsite by any insurer customer, or implemented via a SaaS delivery model for maximum efficiency, uptime and scalability. Finys includes components for core administration (policy, billing and claims), as well as regulatory reporting and agent/consumer portals which support mobile access on-demand.

About Innovative Computer Systems, Inc.

Innovative Computer Systems, Inc. offers a modern enterprise platform, the Finys Suite (Finys), for property and casualty (P&C) insurance organizations. Finys includes components for core administration (policy, billing and claims), as well as portals and mobile access to support all personal and commercial lines of business for insurers, agents, vendors and insureds. Used by dozens of insurers to reduce operational costs and improve time to market, Finys is available for onsite or SaaS deployment. For more details please visit www.finys.com.

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/9/21/11G115085/Images/Tim_Suppes_Cropped-5463a104111ea06d948eb3db0841fa38.jpg

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/9/21/11G115085/Images/ScottHinzCropped-e8dc75684c10bc11bfe7a3a33bd9954a.jpg

Media Contact:

Jennifer Overhulse

St. Nick Media Services

(859) 803-6597

jen@stnickmedia.com
NEW YORK, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Infrastructure as a Service is a way of delivering cloud computing Infrastructure which includes servers, storage devices, networks and operating systems. Infrastructure as a Service is purchased on-demand providing scalability and flexibility to Enterprises along with high computational power and storage services at a reasonable price over the internet.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140117/663730 )



India Infrastructure as a Service Market: Outlook

Infrastructure as a Service is witnessing exponential growth on the back of rising demand to reduce capital expenditure on IT hardware to store data, generated through various smart devices by Individuals and enterprises which includes audios, videos, data files etc.

Infrastructure as a Service market is majorly dominated by key players, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Netmagic, IBM & Rackspace etc., however with growth in entry of new players offering low-cost infrastructure support in terms of storage devices, servers and network equipment's, the market is posed to witness rapid adoption in India.

India Infrastructure as a Service: Key Drivers

Over the past few years, Infrastructure as a Service has witnessed rapid adoption among large enterprises and at Individual levels as well. With easy availability of low-cost infrastructure and exceptional transparency in utilizing the services and their costs, with high scalability and instant implementation along with pay per use model is striving growth for Infrastructure as a Service.

Various companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Netmagic and so on has already announced expansion of their services portfolio in Infrastructure as a Service, offering high speed performance and less price product and services to organizations and Individual, which is positively propelling growth of Infrastructure as a Service market.

India Infrastructure as a Service Market: Emerging Trends

Infrastructure as a Service market, being one of the revenue generating market among IT Enterprises, is witnessing high traction due to continuous innovation in centralized data storage capacities, servers and applications to increase operational efficiency with no additional capital outlay for enterprises infrastructure. The need for shared resources to access data anywhere, anytime with extremely low latency is trending the market for Infrastructure as a Service.

Indian Infrastructure as a ServiceMarket: Segmentation

Infrastructure as a Service can be segmented on the basis ofType, Application, End-UserandRegion.

Based on the DeploymentType, the Indian Infrastructure as a Service can be divided into the following segments:

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

Based on theSolution, the India Infrastructure as a Service Market can be divided into the following segments:

Managed Hosting Services

Storage as a Service(STaaS)

Disaster Recovery as a Service(DRaaS)

Network as a Service(NaaS)

Based on theEnd-User, the Indian Data Storage Market can be divided into the following segments:

Banking, Financial Services & Insurance

Information Technology

Telecommunications

Government

Education

Defense

Others (Healthcare, Retail)

Based on theRegion, the India Data Storage can be divided into the following segments:

East

West

North

South

India Infrastructure as a Service Market: Key Players

Leading players in the India Infrastructure as a Service Market include Amazon Data Services Pvt Ltd, Hewlett Packard Pvt Ltd, IBM India Pvt Ltd, Netmagic India Pvt Ltd, Rackspace India Pvt Ltd, Microsoft Corporations Pvt Ltd, Verizon Data Services India Pvt Ltd, Oracle Corporations, Google India Pvt Ltd, VMWare Software India Pvt Ltd.

Information on these key players is covered in India Infrastructure as a Service report. The report provides detailed company profiles including key segments including business segments, product offerings, financial facts and figures along with the historical data and operating history of the company.

Why Should You Buy This Report?

To gain an in-depth understanding of the India Infrastructure as a Service Market

To identify the on-going trends and anticipated growth over next five years

To help industry consultants, and Infrastructure as a Service provider to align their market-centric strategies

To obtain research-based business decisions and add weight to presentations and marketing material

To gain competitive knowledge of leading market players

To avail 10% customization in the report without any extra charges and get the research data or trends added in the report as per the buyer's specific needs

The report is an outcome of in-depth secondary and primary research by industry experts. This market research report is a strategic guide to market players offering India Infrastructure as a Service. The key trends and growth drivers, challenges, end user industry adoption trends, etc. have been taken into consideration before devising the regional market size and market share in the India Infrastructure as a Service market. The report discusses in detail about the reasoning behind current market growth as well as historical market size and analysis, along with the forecast market size and key reasons and analysis for the same.

Report Highlights:

Market Size & Forecast

Market Share & Forecast - By Type, By Application, By End-User, By Region, By Company

Emerging Trends & Upcoming Opportunities

Market Attractiveness Index

Competitive Landscape

Strategic Recommendations

Key Questions This Study Will Answer

What is the trend for Infrastructure as a Service market and how the market will grow in future?

Which are the key opportunity areas to invest in the market?

What are the key drivers which will take the market to next level?

What are the challenges prevailing in the market?

Which are the dominating regions and how these regions in countries will grow in the coming years?

Which are the key players providing Infrastructure as a Service? What is the market share of key players in the Infrastructure as a Service market and how market share dynamics will change in the coming five years?

About TechSci Research

TechSci Research is a leading global market research firm publishing premium market research reports. Serving 700 global clients with more than 600 premium market research studies, TechSci Research is serving clients across 11 different industrial verticals. TechSci Research specializes in research based consulting assignments in high growth and emerging markets, leading technologies and niche applications. Our workforce of more than 100 fulltime Analysts and Consultants employing innovative research solutions and tracking global and country specific high growth markets helps TechSci clients to lead rather than follow market trends.



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VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Salaries for technology professionals in British Columbia have risen once again, indicated by results from HR Tech Group's annual BC Tech Salary Survey, released today.

Overall, salaries for intermediate technology professionals in British Columbia went up 5.8% from the previous year, according to HR Tech Group's findings. The increase demonstrates that companies are growing and prioritizing retention to keep their employees engaged.

Tech jobs with the highest salary increases include:

-- Product Development Managers: up 16.5% -- Sales Managers: up 10.5% -- Senior Animators: up 7.6%

The 2016 BC Tech Salary Survey, conducted for HR Tech Group in partnership with Willis Towers Watson, includes data about 15,904 individual salaries from 112 companies.

"Tech salaries in BC are growing faster than the national average," says Allison Rutherford, Executive Director of HR Tech Group. "In 25 years of conducting the BC Tech Salary Survey we have not seen such large salary increases. This demonstrates what tech companies across the province are experiencing first hand: there is increasing competition for tech talent in BC."

"HR Tech Group's BC Tech Salary Survey has been instrumental in responding to the growing needs of BC's technology sector," said Amrik Virk, Minister of Technology, Innovation and Citizens' Services. "Attracting and retaining the best and brightest talent is an important component of the BCTECH Strategy, and we are thrilled that an increasing number of tech companies recognize that we have the talent and are choosing to open offices in BC."

This year's survey expanded to include British Columbia's growing visual effects/animation industry. Ten major film and/or animation companies took part in survey, including SONY Pictures Imageworks, Industrial Light & Magic and Technicolor's MPC. Some of the highest salaries in that industry include Specialist Lighting Artists and VFX Artists ($105,000/year) and Senior Animators ($93,000/year).

"The VFX/animation sector is one of the most dynamic and fastest growing industries in the BC economy and the increased participation from these firms in the BC Tech Salary Survey proves that," explained Rutherford. "HR Tech Group is pleased to be able to showcase, in detail, how much this industry is thriving and providing high-paying jobs in our province."

While visual effects and animation jobs are finding their place among the top paying jobs in BC, more traditional technology positons in the software industry remain lucrative and also saw steady gains:

-- Junior Software Developers (with two to four years of experience) earned an average salary of $75,400/year (up from $73,000 in 2015). -- With four or more years of experience behind them, Senior Software Developers earned an average of $93,900/ year, up 5.4% from the previous year.

A full version of the BC Tech Salary Survey is available for purchase online at hrtechgroup.com. This year, HR Tech Group is also providing the BC Tech Salary Survey for Startups, which is a condensed version of the survey that provides the same in-depth information, but for 10 roles that are crucial to startups. Learn more about both surveys, here.

About the BC Tech Salary Survey

HR Tech Group, in partnership with Willis Towers Watson, releases the annual BC Tech Salary Survey. For more than 20 years this Survey has been the definitive resource for the high tech sector in BC. While the survey is based in BC, the data is relevant for all Canadian high tech markets, with several national and international organizations participating.

About HR Tech Group

HR Tech Group is an association of human resources professionals employed in B.C. tech companies. The group produced the leading BC Tech Salary Survey, and provides new and benchmark data that keeps members up to speed on local business practices in tech. HR Tech Group serves over 150 mid to large member companies in all tech sectors including ICT, film/ VFX, digital media, clean tech and life sciences.

Contacts:

Alison Gallagher

Talk Shop Media

604.738.2220

alison@talkshopmedia.com




ROWAYTON, Connecticut, Sept. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Eaton Partners, one of the world's largest placement agents and advisory firms for private fund sponsors, announced today the appointments of Gianluca D'Angelo as Managing Director - Head of Europe and James Townend as Director. Both executives are based out of Eaton Partners' London office, representing continued investment in and expansion of the firm's capabilities in Europe.

Mr. D'Angelo, who has over 15 years of experience in financial services, is responsible for leading the origination, execution and distribution of alternative funds for Eaton Partners in Europe. Prior to joining Eaton Partners, he was a Partner for global placement agent Probitas Partners UK, where he was responsible for the origination, execution and distribution of private equity and real asset funds. He also previously worked in the Private Banking Unit at Credit Suisse Italy and began his career at UBS-Paine Webber in New York.

"Gianluca comes to us with a great deal of experience in sourcing and marketing European investment managers and we have brought him on board to build out our European team," said Charlie Eaton, CEO of Eaton Partners. "With the support from our new partnership with Stifel Financial and under the leadership of Gianluca, we see a great opportunity for Eaton Partners to increase the number and quality of our European mandates and further diversify our revenue base."

Mr. Townend is focused on the development and distribution of Eaton Partners' hedge fund and public market strategies. He has over 12 years of experience in European financial services markets, most recently as a Business Development Director for Nomura Asset Management in London where he was responsible for raising institutional capital for the firm's hedge funds. He has also previously worked as an International Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch, as a member of the Multi Manager Team at Global Asset Management, and as a Consultant at Statistical Decisions.

"James is a seasoned professional with excellent relationships and we're excited to provide our clients with an additional resource to help them raise capital from European institutional investors," said Thomas Kreitler, Partner at Eaton Partners.

In the coming months, Mr. D'Angelo will be hiring additional executives to support the continued expansion of Eaton Partners' European platform.

Eaton Partners opened its London office in 2003, and now has a total of seven offices internationally, also including Chicago, Hong Kong, Houston, Rowayton, San Diego, and Shanghai.

About Eaton Partners, LLC

Founded in 1983, Eaton Partners is one of the largest and most experienced fund placement firm in the world, having raised more than $69 billion across 91 highly differentiated funds. With over 60 professionals across offices in North America, Europe and Asia, the firm raises institutional capital for investment managers across a full range of alternative strategies -private equity, real assets, real estate and hedge funds/public market strategies. Eaton Partners is currently in the market with funds whose strategies include: private equity, sector-specific andgeneral buyout, real estate, energy, agriculture, growth equity, opportunistic credit/special situations/distressed, event driven, long/short equity, midstream and MLPs, and emerging marketsequity. Partnering with a select number of the highest-quality fund managers, Eaton Partners has represented some of the most innovative funds of the last three decades. With extensiveinstitutional relationships, deep sector knowledge, and fresh insights, Eaton Partners is dedicated to every client's success.

Eaton Partners, LLC, is a Registered Broker-Dealer and a member of FINRA and is also registered as an Introducing Broker with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and member of the National Futures Association (NFA). Eaton Partners (UK) LLP is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Eaton Partners Advisors (HK) Limited is approved as a Type 1 License company under the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) in Hong Kong. Eaton Partners and the Eaton partners logo are trademarks of Eaton Partners, LLC, a limited liability company  Eaton Partners, LLC, 2016. To learn more, please visit www.eatonpartnersllc.com.

In January 2016, Eaton Partners became a wholly owned subsidiary and affiliate of Stifel Financial Corporation, a leading middle-market investment bank, to further ensure Eaton's success at the highest level of the global placement business.

For more information, please contact:

Dukas Linden Public Relations

eaton@dlpr.com

+1-212-704-7385

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eaton-partners-bolsters-european-team-with-the-addition-of-two-industry-veterans-300331882.html
NEW YORK, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

UN General Assembly -- The Clooney Foundation for Justice has launched a private sector initiative designed to educate all out-of-school children in Lebanon, including Syrian refugees. Google.Org, Virgin Unite, the Radcliffe Foundation, and the SABIS Foundation are among the founding partners who, along with the Clooney Foundation, are contributing funding and resources to the initiative.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160921/410374LOGO )



The private sector initiative comes amid growing estimates of the number of out-of-school Syrian refugees in Lebanon. It comes in answer to an UNHCR call "for governments, donors, humanitarian agencies, and development partners as well as private-sector partners to strengthen their commitment to ensuring that every child receives a quality education." Of the half-million Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, 200,000 of them are not enrolled in school, even with a significant increase in refugee enrollment thanks to initiatives undertaken by the Lebanese government.

George and Amal Clooney, both staunch supporters of human rights, made the official announcement of the project and showed a video in a UN General Assembly session calling the private sector to action."We want to get every single out-of-school child in Lebanon an education," remarked Amal Clooney. "Let's not lose an entire generation of people because they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time," George added.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice will be working with SABIS, a global education management company, to roll out a phased plan to open schools starting in September 2017. In the first year of the plan, the schools will enroll between 5,000 and 10,000 refugee children as well as Lebanese children who are not enrolled in school. In subsequent years, additional schools will be added to increase capacity by up to 50,000 students per year.

The schools, which will be located in areas of Lebanon most heavily populated by Syrian refugees, will implement the SABIS Educational System', a proven educational program that is backed by 130 years of success in the region and currently used to provide over 70,000 students enrolled in SABIS Network schools around the world with a high-quality education.As with all SABIS Network schools, the schools serving the refugee children will leverage technology to drive and monitor the learning process, using digital resources that are highly interactive and capture valuable data on individual student progress to facilitate learning.

"The SABIS Network is proud to be a part of this project," said SABIS president Carl Bistany. "SABIS has worked over the past 130 years to build a reputation for excellence in education and to make a difference in the lives of the students in our schools. This project allows us to mobilize our experience and resources to give Syrian refugee children access to education so that they have a solid foundation they can continue to build on wherever they may find themselves in the future."

Speaking on behalf of Google.org, Jacquelline Fuller, the organization's director said: "Access to learning and access to information is so much a core part of our values,and we're supporting the Clooney Foundation for Justice with a $1 million grant focused on education for refugee children in Lebanon through their work with SABIS. This grant will support expanding their efforts to develop a new school model, using digital tools, for up to 10,000 out-of-school children in Lebanon. Through our employee volunteering program, we'll also provide technical expertise to help with everything from connectivity to cloud storage by having Googlers helping both on the ground and remotely."

"If you saw what I saw, you too would want to help," said Radcliffe Foundation Founder and President Frank Giustra after witnessing firsthand the plight of refugees in receptor countries. The Radcliffe Foundation has actively been responding to the refugee crisis by brokering the first private sector partnership with the Greek Ministry of Migration to create the Elpida, a residence in northern Greece with capacity for 800 of the most vulnerable refugees, 60% of them youth. It also funded the building of a receiving center with capacity for 1500 refugees arriving in the island of Lesbos. "In continuation of this important work," Mr. Giustra said "the Radcliffe Foundation is proud to be part of this coalition to educate children in Lebanon as destabilization will come when you have a lost generation of children growing up in an environment where there is no education or social support. It is in our self-interest to address the humanitarian needs of displaced people. Our failure to do so can only fuel resentment, exacerbate conflict, and further destabilize the world."

Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Unite, the non-profit foundation of Virgin Group that unites people and entrepreneurial ideas to create opportunities for a better world, also shared his remarks about the project: "The global business community and citizens of the world must embrace refugees and migrants who have escaped the daily horrors of war in their countries with love, kindness, and access to basic rights. Access to a quality education will help vulnerable young people realize their goals and aspirations and instill in them the knowledge, skills, and hope to build a future of peace for us all."

Start-up funding totaling $7 million USD is being provided by the project's founding members. Additional funding is being sourced from the private sector on an ongoing basis. To learn more about how to join the coalition, contact info@cfj.org.
A 100% interest in terrain showing the best copper and gold prospects in Jamaica as defined by exploration work to date;

The substantial benefit of $14M of exploration work by OZ Minerals over the last 3 years.

An excellent mix of advanced targets with promising drill intersections to follow up;



Over 30 untested blue sky targets



Large geophysical, geological and geochemical databases

Ottawa, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 21, 2016) - Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV: CUC), Mr. Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper announces that the company has finalized a heads of agreement (HOA) with OZ Minerals Limited to acquire 100% of OZ Minerals' holdings in Jamaica, which will include:

OZ Minerals' 70% interest in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture licenses;

OZ Minerals' 100% interest in five licences covering 276km2 acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014;

For clarification, Carube Copper will retain its 100% interest in the Above Rocks Project.

Under terms of the HOA, OZ Minerals will transfer 100% of its interests in the properties described to Carube Copper in return for cash payments totalling $14 million due after the commencement of commercial production together with a 2% Net Smelter Return Royalty. All matters will be concluded via a final all inclusive definitive agreement to be signed within 60 days. At that point Carube Copper will have 100% interest in eleven licences covering over 535km2 (subject to underlying royalties) covering the best copper-gold prospects identified to date in Jamaica by historic work and the recent exploration work by Carube and OZ Minerals.

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper comments: "The acquisition OZ Minerals' large land package, together with our own licences gives Carube Copper control of over 500 square kilometres of the most prospective ground in Jamaica based on historic showings, the work completed and reported in 1993 by the Canadian International Development Agency ('CIDA') and the recent work by Carube and OZ Minerals. We are excited to be in a position to commit to the exploration and development of all assets. By building on the work completed by OZ Minerals and Carube Copper and with our new strategic flexibility, we will be able to prioritize organic growth or potential joint venture funding on a project by project basis."

Bellas Gate

Previously announced results at the Bellas Gate Joint venture included drill intercepts from the Connors and Provost Prospects.

At Connors

Hole DDH-CON-14-005 intersected 294m of 0.56% CuEq (0.41%Cu, 0.27 g/t Au); including 96m of 1.00% CuEq , (0.67%Cu, 0.58 g/t Au)

Hole DDH-CON-14-003 intersected 297m of 0.53% CuEq, (0.40%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au) including 55m of 1.00% CuEq (0.67%Cu, 0.59 g/t Au)

At Provost

Hole PVT-16-002 intersected 339m of 0.34% CuEq (0.28%Cu, 0.12 g/t Au), including 10m of 1.79% CuEq (1.28%Cu, 0.90 g/t Au)

Hole PVT-16-001 intersected 82m of 0.46% CuEq (0.37%Cu, 0.16 g/t Au), including 29m of 0.63% CuEq (0.49%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au)

The intervals do not necessarily indicate true width of mineralization, as its geometry is not known. Copper equivalents are calculated using a US $3.00/lb. copper and a US$1200 per ounce gold price assuming unlimited internal dilution and 100% recovery of both metals.

The Provost Prospect will be one of several high-priority areas where copper-gold porphyry mineralization has been identified to be followed up with additional drilling.

During OZ Minerals' tenure at the Bellas Gate JV over 14,000 metres of drilling was completed on 11 of the more than 20 prospects on the property. High-resolution airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys were completed over the entire property and 46 line kilometres of Induced Polarization (IP) surveying was completed. Geological mapping was completed on the previously identified prospects and over 400 rock samples and 4000 soil samples were collected and analysed. All data generated during the Bellas Gate and Above Rocks joint ventures will be handed over to Carube Copper by OZ Minerals.

Five Additional Licences

The five additional licences acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014 are strategically located to cover known copper and gold prospects and anomalous stream sediment sample drainage basins within the Cretaceous aged inliers in the interior of Jamaica. The Shirley Castle licence is located within the Blue Mountain Inlier, The Above Rocks, Windsor Castle and Berkshire Hall licences are located in close proximity to Carube Copper's Above Rocks project and the Arthur's Seat licence is located between the Bellas Gate and Main Ridge projects in the Central Inlier. All were covered by detailed airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys. The company is currently reviewing the recent geophysics and historic work in order to prioritize exploration targets.

Above Rocks

Carube Copper will retain 100% interest in the Above Rocks Joint Venture which it signed with OZ Minerals in February 2016. The property has been covered by detailed magnetic and radiometric surveys. Follow-up work carried out by OZ Minerals between February and August 2016 includes 200 soil samples, 85 rock samples, 92m of trenching and over 400 metres of drilling in 3 holes.

Heads of Agreement

Under the terms of the HOA:

To regain the 70% interest that OZ Minerals' had earned in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $8,500,000 within one year of commencement of commercial production;

b. pay a further $4,000,000 within two years of commercial production; and

c. grant OZ Minerals a 2% NSR with a buy-back of 2/3 of the NSR for $1.3M, royalty payments to be capped at $20M



To acquire the 100% interest in the five OZ Minerals licenses, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $1,500,000 within a year of commencement of commercial production

on any of the five licenses;



Carube will retain its 100% interest in Carube Copper's Above Rocks Project free and clear of any obligation to OZ Minerals.



The final agreement will be signed within 60 days of September 21, 2016.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO  1-613-839-3258  jackert@carubecopper.com

Vern Rampton, Executive VP of Corporate Development  1-613-839-3258  vrampton@carubecopper.com

Alar Soever, Chairman  1-705-682-9297  asoever@carubecopper.com

www.carubecopper.com

QP Statement: This press release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Vern Rampton, P. Eng. in his capacity as a qualified person as defined under NI 43-101.

Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV:CUC), is a Canadian exploration company focused on the exploration and development of copper and gold projects in Jamaica and Canada. In Jamaica, Carube Copper will hold, subject to finalization of the final agreement with OZ Minerals, a 100% interest in 11 projects, totalling over 500 square kilometres. In Canada, Carube Copper holds a 100% interest in three porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum properties, totalling 593 square kilometres within the Tertiary-aged Cascade Magmatic Arc in southwestern British Columbia. Exploration continues on these properties with the goal of joint-venturing them to larger exploration and mining companies. Carube Copper continues to seek opportunities in Canada and the Caribbean for acquisition and development.

DISCLAIMER & FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" which are not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, and by their very nature involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on currently available information, Carube Copper Corp. provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Factors which cause results to differ materially are set out in the Company's documents filed on SEDAR. Undue reliance should not be placed on "forward looking statements".

IMPORTANT NOTICE: By reference herewith, Carube Copper incorporates into this release the entire disclaimer set forth on its website at http://carubecopper.com/disclaimer.htm.
PUNE, India, September 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The report"Fats & Oils Marketby Type (Palm, Soybean, Rapeseed, Sunflower, and Olive), Animal Fat (Butter, Tallow, and Lard), Application (Food & Industrial), Source (Vegetable & Animal), Form (Liquid & Solid), Brand, and Region - Global Forecast to 2021", The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.4%, in terms of value, from 2016 to reach a projected value of USD 247.78 Billion by 2021.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 117 market data Tables and 74 Figures spread through 206 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Fats & Oils Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/fats-oils-market-6198812.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

Fats & oils are widely accepted in food applications due to their functional properties. They play an important role in determining the desired physiochemical and sensory attributes such as smooth, creamy, and rich texture; milky and creamy appearance; and desirable flavors. Fats & oils are used in oleochemical industries and for the production of biodiesel. Hence, fats & oils as a raw material will be viewed as a business opportunity in the next five years for the growth of the oleochemicals and biodiesel industries.

The palm oil segment, with respect to type of oil, is projected to dominate the Fats & Oils Market.

Malaysia is a leading producer of palm oil and a major exporter of processed palm oil products. The demand for palm oil is increasing in bakery & confectionery and processed foods, due to its neutral taste and low cost as compared to other vegetable oils. The demand for fuels from renewable sources is growing; hence, there is an increase in demand for palm oil, which is preferred for biodiesel production.

Vegetable oils: The most widely consumed type of fats & oils.

The vegetable oils segment accounted for the largest share in the Fats & Oils Market, in terms of value and volume, in 2015. Vegetable oils from sources such as sunflower, rapeseed, soybean, palm, cotton seed, and coconut find applications in foods and other industrial applications. Increase in health concerns among consumers and the wide range of products with different tastes and textures fuel the demand for vegetable cooking oils. Vegetable oils with qualities such as low-fat, low-cholesterol, and low-calorie content are registering growth in the Fats & Oils Market.

Make an Inquiry: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=6198812

Asia-Pacific is projected to be the most lucrative market for fats & oils.

In 2015, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for the largest share of the global Fats & Oils Market, in terms of volume, and is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Increase in population, change in consumer eating habits, and demand for high-quality fats & oils are the drivers for the Fats & Oils Market in the Asia-Pacific region.

This report includes a study of marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios of leading companies. It includes the profiles of leading companies such as Cargill, Inc. (U.S.), International Foodstuff Company Limited (UAE), Wilmar International Limited (Singapore), Archer Daniels Midland Company (U.S.), and Bunge Limited (U.S.).

Browse related reports:

Global Vegetable Oil Market (Edible & Industrial), by Types, Application, Geography & Extraction Methods-Forecasts up to 2017

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/vegetable-oil-394.html

Oilseed Market and Grain Seed Market By Types (Oilseed and Grain Seed), Biotech Trait (Herbicide Tolerant, Insecticide Resistant, Other Stacked Trait) & Geography (North America, Europe, South America, Asia-Pacific & Rest Of The World) - Global Trends & Forecast To 2018

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/oilseed-and-grain-seed-market-1215.html

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M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.

We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository.

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THUNDER BAY, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Alset Energy Corp. (TSX VENTURE: ION) ("Alset" or "the Company") announces an amendment to the terms of its previously announced private placement (news release dated July 29, 2016) (the "Offering"). The Company will now raise up to $1 million on the following basis:

Each flow through unit ("FT") will be issued at $0.30 and will consist of one (1) flow through common share and one common share purchase warrant, each common share purchase warrant being exercisable at $0.40 cents for 24 months. Flow through funds will be used to advance the Wisa Lake spodumene and Champion Graphite projects in Ontario.

Each non flow-through unit ("NFT") will be issued at $0.25 and will consist of one (1) common share and one (1) common share purchase warrant, each exercisable at $0.30 cents for 24 months.

The common shares comprising the FT and NFT units and the common shares issuable upon exercise of the common share purchase warrants will be subject to a four (4) month hold period commencing on the closing date, being the date of issuance of the units. The Company will pay reasonable expenses and fees incurred in connection with the Offering and agents or finders may, in accordance with TSX Venture Exchange policy, be paid a negotiated cash fee as a percentage of the gross proceeds raised in the Offering. The proposed financing and associated terms are subject to TSX Venture Exchange approval.

Tim Oliver, President of Alset commented: "After we announced the initial private placement we took another look at our work programs. We've now refined our plans and have revised the costs for the screening and resource definition drilling downwards. A combination of low drilling costs and the decision to limit resource definition drilling to the three most attractive salars, should allow a lower cost program than we initially planned for. We also discovered some valuable new information regarding the extensive inventory of sediment samples from prior investigations, and the history of commercial salt production from pumped brine in three of the seven salars. If our programs are successful, we hope to come back to the market for another raise at a higher price than the current private placement."

The Company believes that the proceeds from the revised financing will be sufficient to fund all of the planned work including:

1. completion of the permitting for the drilling program; 2. the drilling program itself; 3. a process chemistry assessment of the technical feasibility of correlating brine quality with the chemical make-up of residue remaining within the sample soil voids after drying. Alset possesses thousand of sediment samples. If the correlation is possible, it will provide a valuable tool for assessing the chemical nature of the brine; 4. a concept assessment for refurbishing retired commercial salt production wells in three salars: Caliguey, Saldivar and Colorada (The Colorada salt works were active just four years ago). The purpose will be to determine the feasibility of conducting pump tests and pilot evaporation tests using existing infrastructure. The assessment will include research into the technical feasibility of well refurbishment, determination of salt production facility ownership and owner's willingness to assist with the program, permitting requirements, and coordination with local communities and landowners.

Qualified Person

Clinton Barr, PGeo, Vice-President of Exploration for Alset, is the qualified person responsible for this release.

About Alset Energy

Alset Energy is a TSX-V listed junior exploration company focused on exploring and acquiring mineral properties containing the metals needed by today's high-tech industries. The Company is actively exploring in Mexico and Canada.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of Alset Energy Corp.,

Timothy Oliver, President

THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections

Contacts:

Tim Oliver

(520) 603-9258

www.alsetenergy.ca




FORT LAUDERDALE, FL and DAVIE, FL--(Marketwired - September 21, 2016) - Nova Southeastern University (NSU) officially opened its Center for Collaborative Research (CCR), one of the largest and most advanced research facilities in Florida.

As part of the ceremony, which was held September 21, NSU announced a gift from AutoNation to name NSU's AutoNation Institute for Breast and Solid Tumor Cancer Research, located within the CCR. The Institute is focused on developing and advancing improved methods of prevention and treatment to ultimately eradicate cancer. The gift to name NSU's AutoNation Institute brings the company's cumulative giving to NSU to more than $10 million.

"We are extremely privileged to have the world-class AutoNation Institute right here in our backyard," said Mike Jackson, chairman, CEO and president of Fort Lauderdale-based AutoNation, the country's largest automotive retailer. "We've made a commitment to direct our charitable resources to help drive out cancer and initiatives like 'Drive Pink' have resonated profoundly with our customers and associates from coast to coast. It's through innovative research facilities like the AutoNation Institute that our greatest progress is sure to be made."

Indianapolis 500 Champion Ryan Hunter-Reay joined the festivities to unveil the new AutoNation/Hunter-Reay Research Lab, which is located within NSU's AutoNation Institute. Hunter-Reay is helping support cancer research at NSU through his non-profit, Racing for Cancer, Inc.

Located adjacent to the university's Health Professions Division complex on NSU's Fort Lauderdale/Davie Campus, the 215,000-sq.-ft., six-story CCR is equipped with wet and dry labs; state-of-the-art research equipment, including access to a high-performance computing environment; and other resources, such as Florida LambdaRail, a high-speed broadband service delivery network with connectivity throughout the nation. The CCR building has been submitted to the United States Green Building Council for review with the intent of receiving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold certification. The CCR took two years to complete and reflects an investment of nearly $100 million in Broward County.

"NSU is a knowledge-based industry with a $3.2 billion economic impact in the state of Florida," said NSU President Dr. George Hanbury. "The CCR is purposely designed for researchers, students and industry to come together, pool resources and develop effective and innovative solutions in health care, bioinformatics, technology, cybersecurity and business. This is a key part of achieving a larger vision to further integrate higher education research, business and health care for the benefit of the residents of Broward County, South Florida and beyond."

In May 2016, HCA East Florida received state approval to build a hospital on NSU's campus. Design of the hospital is underway. Once completed, the new hospital will be within walking distance from the CCR and NSU's Health Professions Division complex, providing opportunities to even further integrate research and clinical trials.

"With access to HCA's vast resources for clinical trials and opportunities to partner with private ventures, our university is poised to become a national and international hub for startups and established technology companies, resulting in high paying jobs and innovative discoveries," said H. Thomas Temple, M.D., NSU's senior vice president for translational research and economic development.

In order to efficiently address key issues facing humanity, NSU has established several research institutes and centers using a multidisciplinary, interprofessional approach. The CCR is the hub for this research, conducted at locations throughout the university and its regional campuses. The established institutes include:

NSU's AutoNation Institute for Breast and Solid Tumor Cancer Research

NSU Cell Therapy Institute (a partnership with researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden)

NSU's Institute for Natural and Ocean Sciences Research

NSU's Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine

NSU's Rumbaugh-Goodwin Institute for Cancer Research

Emil Buehler Research Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics at NSU

In addition, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) occupies the entire first floor of the CCR. The USGS and NSU partner on research involving greater Everglades restoration efforts, hydrology and water resources, and more.

All occupants of the CCR benefit from its core facilities including:

Genomics Core Facility for sequencing human genes associated with disease

Flow Cytometry Core Facility for isolating special cell types such as immune and stem cells

Cell Therapy Core Facility for developing immunotherapies and regenerative medicines

Imaging Core Facility with advanced digital microscopy capabilities

NSU is classified as a national doctoral research university with "high research activity" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. More than 200 research projects are currently underway at NSU, including studies on cardiovascular disease, anti-cancer therapies, chronic fatigue syndrome, autism, coral reef restoration, stem cells, disorders that cause blindness, wildlife DNA forensics, and more.

NSU's research programs are funded by the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and other prestigious organizations and private supporters.

NSU is actively ramping up its fundraising for research with the goal of raising $300 million in sponsored research, service, and training projects by the end of 2020. The university is also in the public phase of the largest philanthropic campaign in its history, Realizing Potential, which aims to raise $250 million for student, faculty and 21st century education initiatives, with research integral to all three priorities.

The CCR was constructed by ANF Group and designed by ACAI Associates, both of which are headquartered in Broward County.

About Nova Southeastern University (NSU): Located in beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Nova Southeastern University (NSU) is a dynamic research institution dedicated to providing high-quality educational programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional degree levels. A private, not-for-profit institution, NSU has campuses in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Miami, Miramar, Orlando, Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, as well as San Juan, Puerto Rico, while maintaining a presence online globally. For more than 50 years, NSU has been awarding degrees in a wide range of fields, while fostering groundbreaking research and an impactful commitment to community. Classified as a research university with "high research activity" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, NSU is 1 of only 50 universities nationwide to also be awarded Carnegie's Community Engagement Classification, and is also the largest private, not-for-profit institution in the United States that meets the U.S. Department of Education's criteria as a Hispanic-serving Institution. Please visit www.nova.edu for more information about NSU and realizingpotential.nova.edu for more information on the largest fundraising campaign in NSU history.

About AutoNation, Inc.: AutoNation is America's largest automotive retailer, currently owning and operating over 360 new vehicle franchises from coast to coast. AutoNation sold its 10 millionth vehicle in 2015, the first automotive retailer to reach this milestone. A commitment to delivering a peerless experience through customer-focused sales and service processes is what drives AutoNation's success. AutoNation supports the Breast Cancer Research Foundation through its Drive Pink Campaign. AutoNation is transforming the automotive industry through bold leadership, technology and innovation.

Please visit investors.autonation.com, www.autonation.com, www.autonationdrive.com, www.twitter.com/autonation, www.twitter.com/CEOMikeJackson, www.facebook.com/autonation, and www.facebook.com/CEOMikeJackson, where AutoNation discloses additional information about the Company, its business, and its results of operations.

Jeremy Katzman, M.B.A., APR

Office of Public Affairs

954-262-1535 (office)

954-661-7000 (cell)

j.katzman@nova.edu
TORONTO, ONTARIO and NEW YORK, NEW YORK and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM -- (Marketwired) -- 09/29/16 -- BMO Capital Markets, the investment and corporate banking arm of BMO Financial Group (NYSE: BMO)(TSX: BMO), today announced that its 2016 Equity Through Education program raised C$1.6 million from institutional equity trading commissions to donate toward educational scholarships for students in North America and Europe.

Each year, BMO Capital Markets donates a day of institutional equity trading commissions from the United States, Canada and Europe to charities that provide greater access to education for less advantaged students through scholarships, bursaries and other academic programs. The initiative has raised C$17.9 million since it was launched in 2005.

"Equity Through Education allows bright and deserving students - those who may not have had the opportunity otherwise - to reach their full potential," said Alan Tannenbaum, Managing Director and Co-head of Global Equity Products, BMO Capital Markets and Executive Sponsor of the program. "BMO is committed to supporting charities focused on education and student success across North America and Europe, helping to promote diversity in the workplace."

"We are grateful to BMO Capital Markets for helping Say Yes to Education explore ways we can support students across our communities in several key areas of need," said Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey, President of Say Yes, which partners with cities around the goals of making college accessible and affordable for every public high school graduate, and is one of the nine charities benefiting from Equity Through Education this year. "One initiative under consideration would provide Say Yes Scholars with assistance in visiting minority-serving institutions. Another would support the efforts of Say Yes Scholars to be placed in high quality internships - and, one day, full-time employment."

Since it was launched, Equity Through Education has helped more than 3,000 students. This year, the proceeds from the BMO Capital Markets Equity Through Education trading day will go to nine charities:

- The Financial Women's Association

- Imperial College

- Indspire

- The Jackie Robinson Foundation

- The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP)

- Lime Connect

- The Loran Scholars Foundation

- Say Yes to Education

- Women in Capital Markets Return to Bay Street Program

About BMO Capital Markets Equity Through Education Program

Equity Through Education is a charitable initiative aimed at creating a more diverse workplace by offering support to help people realize their educational ambitions by giving them opportunities they might not otherwise have. On one day each year all institutional equity trading commissions are donated to organizations dedicated to the education of bright and deserving individuals. To date, Equity Through Education has provided assistance to over 3,000 students through scholarships, bursaries and job search strategy forums.

To learn more about Equity Through Education visit: http://www.bmocm.com/in-the-community/equity-through-education.

About BMO Capital Markets

BMO Capital Markets is a leading, full-service North American financial services provider. With more than 2,200 employees operating in 30 locations, including 16 in North America, BMO Capital Markets offers corporate, institutional and government clients access to a complete range of investment and corporate banking products and services. BMO Capital Markets is a member of BMO Financial Group (NYSE: BMO)(TSX: BMO), one of the largest diversified financial services providers in North America, with total assets of CDN $692 billion as of July 31, 2016, and over 45,000 employees.

Contacts:

Media Contacts:

Pav Jordan, Toronto

(416) 867-3996

Pav.jordan@bmo.com



Internet: www.bmo.com

Twitter: @BMOMedia




CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Veresen Inc. ("Veresen") (TSX: VSN) announces that its Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend for September 2016 of $0.0833 per common share. The dividend will be paid on October 21, 2016 to shareholders of record at the close of business on September 30, 2016. This dividend is designated an "eligible dividend" for Canadian income tax purposes.

About Veresen Inc.

Veresen is a publicly-traded dividend paying corporation based in Calgary, Alberta that owns and operates energy infrastructure assets across North America. Veresen is engaged in three principal businesses: a pipeline transportation business comprised of interests in the Alliance Pipeline, the Ruby Pipeline and the Alberta Ethane Gathering System; a midstream business which includes a partnership interest in Veresen Midstream Limited Partnership which owns assets in western Canada, and an ownership interest in Aux Sable which owns a world-class natural gas liquids (NGL) extraction facility near Chicago and other natural gas and NGL processing infrastructure; and a power business comprised of a portfolio of assets in Canada. Veresen is also working to advance Jordan Cove LNG, a six million tonne per annum natural gas liquefaction facility proposed to be constructed in Coos Bay, Oregon, and the associated Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline. In the normal course of business, Veresen regularly evaluates and pursues acquisition and development opportunities.

Veresen's Common Shares, Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares, Series A, Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares, Series C, and Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares, Series E trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbols "VSN", "VSN.PR.A", "VSN.PR.C" and "VSN.PR.E", respectively. For further information, please visit www.vereseninc.com.

Contacts:

Veresen Inc.

Mark Chyc-Cies

Director, Corporate Planning & Investor Relations

(403) 213-3633

investor-relations@vereseninc.com




WEST KELOWNA, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- COLORADO RESOURCES LTD. (TSX VENTURE: CXO) ("Colorado" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the successful completion of its 2016 field work and drilling program on the KSP Property and reports the assay results from Inel drillholes 31- 45 (see following table).

Since drilling commenced on June 18, 2016, 59 drillholes (totaling 8,861.8 m) have been completed at KSP with an emphasis on the Inel Area where 53 holes were drilled. Consistent with the Company's earlier news releases, Inel drillholes INDDHI1631- INDDH1645 returned several high grade gold intercepts, as well significant intercepts at multiple horizons as noted in the following table. These results also document the first drill intercept in the interpreted southern extension of the AK Trend in Hole 42 more than 500 m south of the AK Adit and 500 m west of the Discovery Adit.

In addition to the drilling, a total of 990 soil and 511 rock samples were collected, and a further 50 square kilometres of geological mapping were completed. Geophysical surveys consisting of 10.0 line km of IP and 47.0 line km of ground mag were also conducted by Walcott and Associates and a 126 line km helicopter airborne VTEM time domain system was undertaken by Geotech Ltd.

Adam Travis, Colorado President and C.E.O states: "We have had a very successful exploration season at KSP completing more than double the amount of work required under our joint venture this year with an emphasis on drilling a portion of the gold in soil anomaly at the Inel target. Our 2016 Inel first pass drilling program tested a 500 m x 600 m area at approximately 75-100 m centres and has returned, several intercepts with multi-ounce gold values over 1 m apparent widths. Several of these higher grade intersections are also enveloped by broader intervals such as INDDH16-025 which returned 99 m of 2.11 g/t gold. Drillhole INDDH16-042 returned 4 metres of 16.02 g/t gold, including 53.1 g/t gold or more than 1.7 opt gold across a drill indicated width of 1.0 m. This drillhole is located 500 m east of the Discovery Adit which reinforces the fact that the large target zones at Inel are only partially tested and that we have barely scratched the surface of this large, robust system. Although the 10 km 2 Inel- Khyber area is very significant, it is still only a small portion of the 305 km 2 KSP district, which hosts numerous kilometer scale mineralized, alteration centres. We look forward to continuing to advance what is undoubtedly one of British Columbia's best exploration projects"

Upon the completion of this year's exploration program, it is anticipated that approximately $6.0M in cumulative exploration expenditures will have been incurred at KSP over the last three years. This would be one year ahead of schedule as per the underlying agreement with Seabridge Gold Inc. Under this agreement, Colorado has the right to earn an initial 51% interest in the KSP Property by incurring $6.0M in exploration expenditures and completing total cash payments of $500k (of which $225k has been paid to date). Colorado has the further right, at its sole election, to increase its interest to 80% by incurring an additional $4M in exploration expenditures.

Over the next few months Colorado will be compiling and interpreting the remaining results from the 2016 surface exploration work and diamond drilling program and planning next year's exploration program at KSP.

------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inel 2016 Drillholes 31-45: Significant(i) Intercepts ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hole Au Ag Hole ID Length From (m) To (m) Interval Au (oz/t) (g/t) Zn (m) (m)(1) (g/t) (2) (3) (%)(4) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-031 120.0 63.0 65.0 2.0 5.73 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-032 96.0 58.0 74.6 16.6 0.64 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-033 183 162.0 176.0 14.0 0.59 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-034 159.0 97.0 138.0 41.0 1.00 1.32 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 97.0 103.0 6.0 3.57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 102.0 103.0 1.0 15.75 0.51 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 109.8 121.0 11.2 1.17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-035 199.4 157.0 173.0 16.0 1.16 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-037 150.0 102.0 144.0 42.0 0.94 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-038 153.0 9.3 28.0 18.7 0.72 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 41.0 74.0 33.0 0.82 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 72.0 74.0 2.0 5.86 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-039 111.0 25.7 34.5 8.8 1.21 2.32 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-040 156.0 59.0 71.0 12.0 0.86 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 114.0 134.0 20.0 0.89 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-041 219.0 25.0 45.0 20.0 1.09 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 40.0 44.0 4.0 3.15 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-042 222.0 35.0 52.0 17.0 4.23 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 35.0 39.0 4.0 16.02 0.52 37.85 2.07 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 35.0 36.0 1.0 53.10 1.71 39.20 1.12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 146.0 220.0 74.0 1.02 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 171.0 187.0 16.0 2.69 1.10 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-043 147.0 62.7 92.1 29.4 0.76 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-044 189.0 29.0 39.0 10.0 1.28 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 145.5 177.0 31.5 1.46 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 145.5 147.0 1.5 7.02 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 169.0 170.0 1.0 12.50 0.40 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDDH16-045 171.0 80.0 81.0 1.0 10.50 0.34 77.60 3.09 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 92.0 93.0 1.0 16.55 0.53 62.30 6.95 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- and 133.0 150.0 17.0 1.06 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- including 133.0 134.0 1.0 10.85 0.35 27.50 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- (i)Significant Defined as the product of metres x grade greater than 10 with grade greater than 0.5 grams Au, e.g.: greater than 10 g/t Au over 1.0 m or greater than 1 g/t over 10 m, No Significant Results for INDDH16-036 1 - The intervals reported in this release represent drill intercepts and insufficient data is available at this time to state the true thickness of the mineralized intervals and all values are uncut. 2 - Gold Values over 10.00 g/t Au converted to troy ounces per metric ton (Au g/t / 31.10348) 3 - Silver greater than 30.00 g/t Ag Reported 4 - Zinc greater than 1% Reported

Results from the work to date at KSP have highlighted a number of points:

1. Inel Hosts Three Significant Mineralized Trends (see Figure 1) - At least three stacked, gold enriched, zinc bearing sulphide zones at Inel have been intersected in the 2016 drill holes. These zones or horizons have been defined by drilling over a 350 m dip distance and over a 600 m strike length. Anomalous surface geochemistry and geological mapping suggests that the Inel target area is at least 1000 m in strike length and 1500 m in width. http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/1070202b.pdf 2. Inel Makes the Grade - Both high grade gold (including values of 165.5 g/t Au over 1.0 m in INDDH-029) and broader lower grade gold (99 m of 2.11 g/t Au in INDDH-025) have been reported from the 2016 drilling to date, demonstrating the potential for Inel to host significant gold mineralization at all three stratigraphic and structural horizons. 3. Multiple Alteration Centres (see Figure 2) - Highly anomalous gold, copper +/- molybdenum surface geochemistry and the interpretation of geological mapping have characterized several target alteration centres not only in the Inel - Khyber area but also at Pyramid Hill (4 km south of Inel), Sericite Ridge (6km SE of Inel), Nee-Lake Zone (9km SE of Inel) and at Pins (14 km SE of Inel), all of which are associated with the Sky - Khyber Thrust Fault System. Similar zones of hydrothermal alteration are also noted at Black Bluff (10 km east of Inel) and Big Rock (2.5 km NE of Inel) associated with long strike length second order structures. http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/1070202a.pdf

Two short exploratory drillholes (TMDDH16-001 and 002), totaling 183 m, were drilled south towards the Tami Showing from the same location (due to poor recovery in the first drillhole). They were located approximately 20 m north of a 2014 channel sample (CH14-006 B) that returned 15 m of 2.94 g/t gold and 0.51 % copper. These short holes failed to intercept the mineralized intrusive as noted in the channel sample. Subsequent detailed geophysics and geological structural mapping have determined that the 2016 Tami drillholes were drilled underneath a shallow dipping mineralized panel that dips away from these holes, and as a consequence, they did not test the Tami target.

Four exploratory drillholes (KBDDH16-01 to 04) were drilled in the Khyber area. These holes tested surface gold-copper mineralization in the East Khyber area (KBDDH16-01), an anomalous zinc and gold in soils target along the Khyber ridge crest (KBDDH16-02 and 03) and in the vicinity of high grade zinc boulders (KBDDH16-04). KBDDH16-01 was drilled 2.5 km southeast of the main drilling area at Inel and more than 240 metres lower in elevation and intercepted 0.14 % copper and 0.01% molybdenum over 100 m from 32-132 m suggesting that Khyber may be zoning to a copper- molybdenum +/- gold system at depth. Drillholes KBDDH16-02, 03 and 04 located 1.2 to1.5 km southeast of Inel returned highly anomalous zinc values. For example KBDDH16-02 returned 0.32 % zinc from the collar (2.57 m) to 133 m down the hole suggesting that zinc is forming a halo to the higher grade gold mineralization such as KBDDH14-003 (located 600-900 m to the west) which returned 18.1 g/t Au over 2.4 m in the 2014 drill program.

Qualified Person

Dr. Jim Oliver, Ph.D, P. Geo is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 who supervised the work program and/or preparation of the technical data in this news release

QA/QV statement on Assay Results where required.

The 2016 samples were analyzed by ALS Minerals of Vancouver, British Columbia. Samples were prepared by the Prep-31b method, which involves crushing the entire sample to 70% passing -2mm, splitting off 1kg and pulverizing the split to better than 85% passing 75 microns. Base metal assays were first determined using the ME-ICP61 method, which reports results as parts per million (ppm). Any samples containing greater than 10,000 ppm zinc were analyzed by the Zn-OG62 method, which reports results as percent. Any samples containing greater than 100 ppm silver were analyzed by the Ag-OG62 method, which reports results as ppm. The gold assays were determined using the Au-AA25 fire assay method which reports results in ppm and are equivalent to grams per tonne (g/t). Any samples returning greater than 100 ppm gold were analyzed by the Au-GRA21 fire assay method with a gravimetric finish. The analytical results were verified with the application of industry standard Quality Control and Quality Assurance (QA-QC) procedures.

For more information on the KSP Project the reader is directed to the Company's website at www.coloradoresources.com.

About Colorado

Colorado Resources Ltd. is currently engaged in the business of mineral exploration for the purpose of acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia and is also seeking opportunities in Southwest USA and Latin America.

Colorado's current exploration focus is to continue to advance: the KSP property under option with Seabridge Gold Inc., located 15 km's along strike to the southeast of the past producing Snip Mine(i); its 100% owned North ROK property, located 15 km's northwest of the Red Chris(i) mine development, both located in northern central British Columbia.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF COLORADO RESOURCES LTD.

Adam Travis, President and Chief Executive Officer

Cautionary Note

(i)This news release contains information about adjacent properties on which Colorado has no right to explore or mine. Readers are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on the Company's properties.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release, constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions, including: that the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events, that the Company obtains required regulatory approvals, that the Company continues to maintain a good relationship with the local project communities. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to prove not to be valid or reliable, which could result in delays, or cessation in planned work, that the Company's financial condition and development plans change, delays in regulatory approval, risks associated with the interpretation of data, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis reports filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts:

Colorado Resources Ltd.

Adam Travis, President and Chief Executive Officer or

Terese Gieselman, Chief Financial Officer

T: (250) 768-1511 or TF (855) 768-1511

(250) 768-0849 (FAX)

www.coloradoresources.com




Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft).

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
LOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwired - September 21, 2016) - Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are correct when they say the system is rigged against the average American. But they don't say how.

A new book, Lobbycratic Governance, sums up the answer this way: Voter disgust over government excesses and mistakes since 1963, along with Citizens United money, have combined to allow organizations and administrative agencies to make public policy without much political interference.

The book, to be released in October by The Americas Group, describes how a cabal of technocrats and lobbyists, abetted by their lawyers, now determines public policy. Author Godfrey Harris, a Los Angeles-based consultant, has observed, taught and worked in American politics and government since 1952.

President Eisenhower warned of an "industrial-military complex." That concern eventually evolved into an alliance of powerful private corporate and nonprofit interests working with government bureaucrats to determine the course of American policy.

"Rather than a government of, by and for the people -- as Lincoln described the goal of American governance -- we now have a national government in which citizens are essentially superfluous (except to pay taxes, of course)," Harris notes.

Harris offers detailed examples at the federal and local levels of how lobbyists and technocrats promote projects for the benefit of private groups. Kelo v. New London is an infamous example of how local officials used eminent domain to condemn waterfront property to enable a real estate developer to build a shopping center to create jobs. Ironically, it was all for naught.

"[T]he private developer was unable to obtain the financing needed for his project," Harris writes. "No shopping center was built; no jobs created. The land was left as an empty lot, a reminder of the greed, insensitivity and uncaring attitudes of technocrats, lobbyists and politicians. . . ."

In a closing chapter the author proposes a daring but controversial way for voters to regain control of lobbycratic governance.

LOBBYCRATIC GOVERNANCE: How to Limit the Power Technocrats and Lobbyists Exercise over Public Policy

Godfrey Harris

Published by The Americas Group

520 S. Sepulveda Blvd., #204, Los Angeles CA 90049-3534

www.americasgroup.com

290 pages, trade paperback

$24.95

Request review copy from hrmg@mac.com

Art Detman

310 454 2277
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Orsu Metals Corporation (TSX: OSU) -

Highlights of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project

-- Transaction: Orsu Metals Corporation ("Orsu" or the "Company") has agreed to acquire, subject to the conditions as described in this release, the Sergeevskoe Gold Project located in the Mogocha District of the Zabaikal'skiy Region of the Russian Federation. -- The Russian style P1 to P3 categories: The most recent study conducted in July 2016, prior to discussions with Orsu, estimated a total of 29.736 million tonnes of mineralization in several prospects within the Sergeevskoe license area with a total of 59.31 tonnes (approximately 1.91 million ounces) of gold to a depth of 100 metres. -- A long-established gold-mining province: the area around the Sergeevskoe Project is a known host to a cluster of producing gold deposits. The Sergeevskoe Gold Project has a common license border with the Klyuchevskoe gold mine immediately to the east of Sergeevskoe, which contains 4 million ounces in Russian-style A+B+C1 and C2 categories. To the west, it neighbours the recently commissioned Alexandrovskoe open- pit operating mine with Russian-style resources in excess of 2 million ounces of gold. -- Excellent infrastructure: the Project is located in an economically developed area of Russia with ready access to all significant infrastructure: (1) federal highway M58 is approximately 8 kilometres away, (2) the Trans-Siberian railway is approximately 35 kilometres away; and (3) access to the national electricity grid. Water is readily available in the area, as is a local skilled labour force. -- Analogous deposit nearby: the Klyuchevskoe mine has produced over 1.3 million ounces of gold in its history. The Klyuchevskoe mine hosts an analogous mineralization and historical information published about that mine greatly helps to evaluate the geological and metallurgical risks of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project. According to the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Agency, the Klyuchevskoe mine is in the advanced stages of being sold to China National Gold Group. (See footnote 4.) -- The Sergeevskoe Gold Project has extensive historical exploration data: In Soviet times the project was extensively explored with, inter alia, approximately 8 500 meters of drilling performed and 16 200 meters of trenches excavated. Historical exploration works at the 7.6 km2 license area of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project identified intrusion-hosted gold mineralization over an area of 5x2.2 km (including a 1.1 km2 license area of the Klyuchevskoe gold deposit). In its eastern part, the historically identified mineralization forms a western continuation of the orebodies extending from the Klyuchevskoe deposit, with most prospective mineralization identified at the Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences. -- At the Zone 23 occurrence, Soviet era drilling intercepted wide intervals of gold mineralization. -- Historical hole C-222 intercepted mineralized intervals (at a cut- off of 0.5 grammes per tonne of gold) of: -- 3 metres grading 0.63 grammes of gold per tonne (from 46 metres); and -- 5 metres grading 1.56 grammes of gold per tonne (from 51 metres); and -- 38 metres grading 1.48 grammes of gold per tonne (from 58 metres), including: -- 6.5 m grading 2.23 grammes of gold per tonne (from 62 metres), -- 3.0 m grading 2.97 grammes of gold per tonne (from 84 metres). -- Historical hole C-215 intercepted five mineralized intervals (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of: -- 3.5 metres grading 0.86 grammes of gold per tonne (from 16.5 metres); and -- 3.5 metres grading 1.11 grammes of gold per tonne (from 23.5 metres); and -- 31.6 metres grading 1.2 grammes of gold per tonne (from 54.1 metres), including: -- 2.1 m grading 2.20 grammes of gold per tonne (from 59 metres), -- 5.5 m grading 2.13 grammes of gold per tonne (from 63.1 metres), -- 2.0 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 70.6 metres); and -- 44.8 metres grading 0.82 grammes of gold per tonne (from 95 metres), including: -- 4.0 m grading 1.73 grammes of gold per tonne (from 101.2 metres), -- 6.8 m grading 1.08 grammes of gold per tonne (from 107.2 metres), -- 3.8 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 135 metres); and -- 27.5 metres grading 0.71 grammes of gold per tonne (from 167.5 metres), including: -- 5.0 m grading 1.26 grammes of gold per tonne (from 176.5 metres). -- At the Kozie occurrence, historical drillholes intercepted (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne): -- 7.5 metres (from 65 metres) grading 2.59 grammes of gold per tonne in hole C-140; -- 7.5 metres (from 125 metres) grading 1.53 grammes of gold per tonne in hole C-141. -- At the Karamaevskoe occurrence, historical hole C-197 intercepted a mineralized interval (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of: -- 20.0 metres grading 1.55 grammes of gold per tonne (from 28 metres).

All potential quantities and grades referred to in this announcement are conceptual in nature; there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

The results referred to are primarily based on historical data prepared between 40 and 60 years ago, and as such their relevance and reliability may be uncertain. Further analysis will be required, including confirmatory drilling and/or trenching and assays of the core plus updated analysis and assessment of the historical data in order to verify the historical estimates as current mineral resources or reserves.

A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. The Company is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves.

Orsu, the London-based TSX listed company (TSX: OSU), today announces that it has entered into Exclusive and Binding Heads of Agreement ("Heads of Agreement") for the potential acquisition of 100% of Sibzoloto Investments Limited ("Sibzoloto"), a Cyprus registered company which is the sole owner of LLC GK Alexandrovskoe ("LLC GK Alexandrovskoe"), which in turn is the sole holder of the Sergeevskoe licence area in the Russian Federation ("Sergeevskoe Project"), from two arm's length parties, (1) Metalsib Group (BVI) ("Metalsib") and (2) OC Management Group (BVI) ("Olympia Capital"); (Metalsib and Olympia Capital, together defined as the "Sellers").

Summary of the Heads of Agreement

The following sets out the key terms of the Heads of Agreement, which will be filed on the Company's SEDAR profile:

1. Orsu has agreed to acquire:

-- 100% of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project via the acquisition of Sibzoloto, and -- 100% of a nearby work camp via the acquisition of LLC Davenda, a company under effective control of the Sellers, (the "Proposed Transaction") conditional upon good faith negotiation of formal definitive sale and purchase documentation (including a formal sale and purchase agreement), and completion of due diligence, for the consideration set out below. The exclusivity period runs until January 31, 2017 ("Exclusivity Period") and may be extended by mutual agreement of the parties.

2. The consideration for Sibzoloto will be the issue of new common shares of Orsu as follows:

-- The Company will issue 146,605,683 new common shares in Orsu to the Sellers for the acquisition of 30% of the outstanding shares of Sibzoloto at closing such that, post-closing, the Sellers will own approximately 44.5% of the enlarged share capital of Orsu (or 42.5% of the total enlarged and fully diluted share capital of Orsu, assuming exercise of all issued and outstanding options). The Sellers shall transfer the remaining 70% of the outstanding shares of Sibzoloto at the time the Company completes the sale of its Karchiga Project (as announced on April 11, 2016). -- In the event that the proceeds from the sale of the Karchiga Project are not received by June 30, 2017, the Company will issue a further 378,731,348 common shares of Orsu (the "Top-up Shares") to the Sellers such that the Sellers will own in aggregate a combined total of 525,337,031 common shares of Orsu or, approximately, 74.2% of the enlarged share capital of Orsu (or 72.5% of the total enlarged and fully diluted outstanding common shares of Orsu, assuming exercise of all issued and outstanding options). The issuance of the Top-up Shares will be conditional upon the Sellers transferring the 700 remaining shares in Sibzoloto such that Orsu owns all 1,000 shares (100%) of Sibzoloto. Any subsequent receipt of proceeds from the sale of the Karchiga Project will inure to the benefit of all shareholders of Orsu as at a date to be established in the definitive sale and purchase documentation (excluding the Sellers).

3. Orsu will acquire 100% of LLC Davenda, a company under effective control of the Sellers, that owns the fully operational work camp located near the Sergeevskoe Gold Project area for aggregate cash consideration of US$600,000, with US$180,000 to be paid on closing of the Proposed Transaction and the balance of US$420,00 to be paid within ten days after completion of the sale of the Karchiga Project. In the event the sale of the Karchiga Project is not completed by June 30, 2017, the balance of US$420,000 within ten days after June 30, 2017. The acquisition by Orsu of LLC Davenda is inter-conditional with the acquisition by Orsu of Sibzoloto.

4. The Proposed Transaction will be subject to the completion of technical, legal and financial due diligence by each Party. Orsu's due diligence requirements will also include the production of a technical report compatible with the requirements of Canadian National Instrument 43-101.

5. The Proposed Transaction is subject to the following Conditions Precedent:

1) Execution of a Sale and Purchase Agreement ("SPA") and definitive documentation; 2) Necessary approvals, if any, from the Russian Federation for the transfer of ownership of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project to Orsu; 3) Approval of the Proposed Transaction (including the issue of new shares) by any applicable governmental, corporate and shareholder approvals that may be required for completion of the transaction, including, inter alia, the approval by the Orsu shareholders at a Shareholders' Meeting; 4) TSX approval of the Proposed Transaction (including the issue of shares) and any other regulatory approvals required by the TSX or by the applicable securities commissions or regulatory authorities in Canada.

6. Pursuant to the Heads of Agreement, Orsu has been granted an exclusivity period expiring on January 31, 2017 in order to complete its due diligence and enter into definitive documentation to complete the Proposed Transaction. The Heads of Agreement will automatically terminate on the later of January 31, 2017 or any extension of the Exclusivity Period agreed by the parties. In addition, Orsu has the right to terminate the Heads of Agreement without any obligation at any time during the due diligence process in the event of material adverse finding during the course of such due diligence.

7. A representative of the Sellers will be granted the right to attend board meetings of Orsu as an observer prior to completion of the Proposed Transaction. Upon completion of the Proposed Transaction, the Sellers will have the right to appoint two directors in total to the Board of Directors of Orsu and the total number of directors of Orsu will be five. The appointment of such directors will be subject to any approvals required by the Toronto Stock Exchange or other applicable regulatory bodies for such individual appointee.

8. Orsu has agreed not to authorize any additional expenditure over and above current contractual obligations and those required for its ordinary course of business in excess of US$5,000 without the prior written consent of a Representative of the Sellers.

9. Shortly following completion of the Proposed Transaction, Orsu will make available no less than US$1,500,000 to fund the exploration of the Sergeevskoe Project.

10. Orsu intends to consolidate its common shares on a ratio of one post-consolidation common share for every ten common shares currently outstanding prior to completion of the Proposed Transaction. The number of common shares of Orsu to be issued as consideration pursuant to the Proposed Transaction will be adjusted according to the final ratio of such share consolidation.

11. Immediately prior to completion of the Proposed Transaction, Orsu will have a minimum of US$3,000,000 cash and cash equivalents on its books (including the initial payment of US$180,000 in respect of Orsu's acquisition of Sibzoloto and the total consideration of US$600,000 in respect of Orsu's acquisition of LLC Davenda).

12. The structure and form of the Proposed Transaction will be more particularly defined in a formal sale and purchase agreement to be negotiated in good faith and entered into by the parties.

About the Sergeevskoe licence area

The Sergeevskoe licence covers an area of 7.6 km2 and is located approximately 40 km to the southwest of the town of Mogocha, Zabaikal'skiy Region of the Russian Federation. Mogocha is an administrative centre of the Mogocha District and hosts a large railway station on the Trans-Siberian Railway which runs within approximately 35 km of the licence area. The newly built Chita-Khabarovsk motorway (M58) is approximately 8 km to the south of the licence area. The distance to the Sergeevskoe Project area from the city of Chita, an administrative centre of the Zabaikal'skiy Region in eastern Siberia, is approximately 650 km.

The Sergeevskoe licence area is located immediately west of the Klyuchevskoe gold deposit (see image below), which is owned by Sun Gold Ltd ("Sun Gold"). According to Dr BI Benevolskiy, who published detailed accounts of historical production of gold in a monograph "Gold of Russia" (Benevolskiy, 2002; see footnote 3), the Klyuchevskoe deposit has historically produced over 1.3 million ounces of gold from an open pit, whose western wall is located 300 metres from the eastern margin of the Sergeevskoe license area. According to public information published by Vestnik Zolotopromyshlennika (Gold Miner Bulletin) on August 31, 2016 (see footnote 4), the Klyuchevskoe deposit has estimated mineral resources containing 47.8 tonnes of gold in Russian style A+B+C1 categories, 26.6 tonnes of gold in Russian style C2 category and 4 tonnes of gold in 'out of balance' category, complying with Russian Code for the Public Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, all grading up to 2 grammes of gold per tonne. According to the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Agency, the Klyuchevskoe mine is in the advanced stages of being sold to China National Gold Group (see footnote 4). The nearby Alexandrovskoe gold mine, which was commissioned in September 2013, lies to the west of the Sergeevskoe license area (see image below). Alexandrovskoe Gold Mining Limited has disclosed on its website that in the end of 2012, the Russian style reserves were approved by Protocol No.2853 of the Russian State Reserves Committee, amounting to 7.898 million tonnes in Russian-style 1+ 2 categories (balance + off-balance) with 23.894 tonnes (715 381 ounces) of gold grading 2.9 grammes of gold per tonne. Alexandrovskoe Gold Mining Limited also reported Russian-style resources at Alexandrovskoye ore field estimated to be more than 2 million ounces of gold (see footnote 4).

To view the map accompanying this press release, click on the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/Orsu921.jpg

Orsu conducted a site visit in July 2016 and, based on this and a review of the technical information made available, believes that the geology of the Sergeevskoe Project area is principally similar to the Klyuchevskoe deposit area. Some orebodies from the Klyuchevskoe deposit extend into the Sergeevskoe license area. Granitoid intrusions are a principal host for 150 million years old mineralization.

The Sergeevskoe Project area hosts numerous gold occurrences, discovered and partially drill tested in the 1950s and 1960s, with geophysical and geochemical works performed in the 1970s. No field exploration activity was undertaken from the mid-1980s until 2013, when the Sellers acquired the Sergeevskoe Project via public auction from the Government of the Russian Federation. No approved historical Soviet-style or JORC compliant mineral resources exist for mineral prospects within the Sergeevskoe Project area. However, several reports estimated potential resources of the Sergeevskoe Project area in Russian-style "P" category. These historical estimates, combined for several prospects within the license area, range from 2 to 4 million ounces of gold grading 1.67 to 1.77 grammes of gold per tonne, which is not compliant to the standards of the Canadian National Instrument 43-101, but can be possibly treated as an indication of exploration potential.

On July 7, 2016 the Technical Board for the Department of Subsoil Usage, Zabaikal'skiy Subsection, Central Siberian Region, Russian Federation has approved Protocol N81 with the Russian-style P1 to P3 categories, containing a total of 29.736 million tonnes of mineralization in several prospects within the Sergeevskoe license area with a total of 59.31 tonnes (approximately 1.91 million ounces) of gold, calculated to a depth of 100 metres. The mineralized system in all prospects remains open to depth.

All potential quantities and grades referred to in this announcement are conceptual in nature; there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

The results referred to are primarily based on historical data prepared between 40 and 60 years ago, and as such their relevance and reliability may be uncertain. Further analysis will be required, including confirmatory drilling and/or trenching and assays of the core plus updated analysis and assessment of the historical data in order to verify the historical estimates as current mineral resources or reserves.

A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. The Company is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves.

Historical works included soil-geochemistry sampling at 1:10 000 scale as well as different ground and airborne geophysical surveys resulting in the delineation of a number of gold, copper and molybdenum anomalous areas. The most advanced occurrences include Zone 23, Koziy, Vodorazdelnoe (Peak Klyuchi) and Karamaevskoe (see image above). Gold mineralization is arranged along the 5 km long west-east trending quartz vein-veinlet system, which is often accompanied by alteration (tourmalinization, sericitization) together with primary sulphide mineralization. Judging from a visit to the nearby Klyuchevskoe open pit, primary sulphides are oxidized down to 180 meters, with drilling-confirmed vertical extent of gold mineralization at the Klyuchevskoe deposit to 600 meters.

Numerous trenches (totaling more than 16,200 metres at the Zone 23, Koziy and Vodorazdelnoe (Peak Klyuchi) occurrences) intercepted wide gold-mineralized intervals within a 1 000 x 600 metres west-east trending area in the eastern part of the Sergeevskoe license area, including Zone 23, Kozie and Vodorazdelnoe occurrences. The historically identified mineralized intervals range in width from 2 to 48 metres with grade variations from 1 to 5 grammes per tonne of gold. The 850 metres long historical trench K-679, cross-cutting both the Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences, intercepted several intervals separated by low grade or unmineralized material (from south to the north).

In the south, over 325 metres across Zone 23 occurrence:

-- 2 metres grading 1.0 gramme of gold per tonne, and -- 24 metres grading 1.4 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 2 metres grading 3.2 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 2 metres grading 1.6 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 48 meters grading 1.7 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 7 metres grading 1.3 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 8 metres grading 1.7 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 16 metres grading 1.8 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 6 metres grading 3.1 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 4 metres grading 2.0 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 4 metres grading 2.1 grammes of gold per tonne.

This was followed by approximately 200 metres of unmineralized interval before reaching the Kozie occurrence, where the same trench intercepted the following intervals over 200 metres across the latter:

-- 3 metres grading 1.8 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 9 metres grading 2.3 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 1 metre grading 3.0 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 2 metres grading 2.0 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 38 metres grading 2.1 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 1 metre grading 3.2 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 40 metres grading 3.8 grammes of gold per tonne, and -- 2 metres grading 1.4 grammes of gold per tonne.

Approximately 8 500 meters of drilling was historically completed at the Sergeevskoe Prospect in the 1950s and 1960s, with approximately 4900 metres drilled at Zone 23, Koziy and Vodorazdelnoe (Peak Klyuchi) occurrences and remaining balance drilled at the Karamaevskoe and other occurrences. No drill core from the historical holes is preserved. The reported historical core recoveries were approximately 50 percent. There were also some limited underground developments (shallow shafts and one adit with cross-cuts).

Historical drillholes at Zone 23 returned wide intercepts of gold mineralization. In particular, hole C-222 was drilled in the southern direction at 75 degrees to a depth of 160 metres and intercepted mineralized intervals (greater than 2 metres in thickness at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of:

-- 3 metres grading 0.63 grammes of gold per tonne (from 46 metres); -- 5 metres grading 1.56 grammes of gold per tonne (from 51 metres); -- 38 metres grading 1.48 grammes of gold per tonne (from 58 metres), Including -- 6.5 m grading 2.23 grammes of gold per tonne (from 62 metres), -- 3.0 m grading 2.97 grammes of gold per tonne (from 84 metres).

Hole C-215, which was drilled to a depth of 200 metres in the southwestern direction at approximately 74 degrees to the surface. This hole intercepted five mineralized intervals (greater than 2 metres in thickness and above 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne cut-off):

-- 3.5 metres grading 0.86 grammes of gold per tonne (from 16.5 metres); and -- 3.5 metres grading 1.11 grammes of gold per tonne (from 23.5 metres); and -- 31.6 metres grading 1.2 grammes of gold per tonne (from 54.1 metres), including: -- 2.1 m grading 2.20 grammes of gold per tonne (from 59 metres), -- 5.5 m grading 2.13 grammes of gold per tonne (from 63.1 metres), -- 2.0 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 70.6 metres); and -- 44.8 metres grading 0.82 grammes of gold per tonne (from 95 metres), -- including: -- 4.0 m grading 1.73 grammes of gold per tonne (from 101.2 metres), -- 6.8 m grading 1.08 grammes of gold per tonne (from 107.2 metres), -- 3.8 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 135 metres); and -- 27.5 metres grading 0.71 grammes of gold per tonne (from 167.5 metres), including: -- 5.0 m grading 1.26 grammes of gold per tonne (from 176.5 metres).

The combined width of the mineralized intervals in hole C-215 is 102.4 metres, indicating that more than 50% of the total length of this hole is mineralized above the 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne cut-off.

Historical drillholes at the Kozie occurrence, located some 350 metres north from Zone 23, are also reported to intercept gold mineralization (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne). In particular, historical hole C-140, which was drilled to a depth of 110 metres in the southern direction at approximately 75 degrees to the surface, intercepted 7.5 metres (from 65 metres) grading 2.59 grammes of gold per tonne. Historical hole C-141, which was drilled to a depth of 170 metres in the southern direction at approximately 70 degrees to the surface, intercepted 7.5 metres (from 125 metres) grading 1.53 grammes of gold per tonne. The 15.8 metres deep shallow vertical shaft (N28) intercepted mineralization grading between 0.4 and 4.3 grammes of gold per tonne. Another 25 metres deep shaft (N29) intercepted mineralization grading between 2.4 and 15.2 grammes of gold per tonne.

At the Karamaevskoe occurrence, historical hole C-197 was drilled in the southwestern direction at 70 degrees to a depth of 104 metres and intercepted a wide mineralized interval (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of 20.0 metres grading 1.55 grammes of gold per tonne (from 28 metres).

Despite promising intercepts, none of the prospects has been systematically drilled.

Orsu collected 15 lump samples during its site visit and inspection of the historical trenches. These samples were submitted by Orsu to the SGS Vostok Limited laboratory ("SGS Vostok") in Chita, which is a Russian subsidiary of SGS Societe Generale de Surveillance S.A. and member of SGS Group, the inspection, verification, testing and certification company, independent from both Orsu and the Sellers. SGS Vostok has assayed 15 samples, including one field duplicate, but no blanks or external standards were included by Orsu. SGS Vostok used a standard fire assay technique with detection limit of 0.03 grammes of gold per tonne. Of these, 13 assays returned between 0.18 to 5.69 grammes of gold per tonne for samples, generally collected randomly from the mineralized intervals shown on the historical maps for the above-mentioned trench K-679 at Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences. The duplicate samples Ser-003 returned 0.53 and 0.55 grammes of gold per tonne, indicating good correlation for this limited sampling programme.

Dr Sergey V Kurzin, Executive Chairman of Orsu, commented: "I am very excited by this opportunity. Gold is a commodity in which management and partners of Orsu have extensive experience, especially in the Former Soviet Union. We believe that the Sergeevskoe Gold Project has significant potential value to be added. I am looking forward to working with the group of new partners who are also very experienced in Russian gold geology, finance and the industry. The combination of the project's potential, Orsu competencies and a strong local team will allow us to fast-track the exploration works to its fruition."

Notes to Editors:

1. Dr Alexander Yakubchuk, Chief Operating Officer for Orsu and a qualified person as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the contents of this press release. Dr Alexander Yakubchuk has verified the data disclosed in this press release, including sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information or opinions contained in this news release.

2. All $ figures are United States Dollars unless otherwise indicated.

3. Benevolskiy BI, 2002. Gold of Russia: Problems of the Use and Replacement of Mineral Resources. 2nd Revised Edition. Moscow, ZAO Geoinformmark, 464 pp. In Russian.

4 Based on publicly available information, which was not prepared, or independently verified, by Orsu.

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws that reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future events. Forward-looking information involves risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events, results, performance and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Forward-looking information contained in this press release includes, but may not be limited to, the anticipated completion of the Proposed Transaction or the completion of the Karchiga Transaction and the terms and timing related thereto, the Company's use of the proceeds from the Karchiga Transaction, and the expected effect of the Proposed Transaction on the Company, including (but not limited to) management's belief that the Sergeevskoe Gold Project could have significant value for the Company.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, the inability of the parties to satisfy any conditions to the completion of the Proposed Transaction disclosed herein, which include the negotiation and execution of a definitive SPA before the end of the Exclusivity Period, unsatisfactory due diligence results, the failure to obtain the necessary approval of the Russian Federation for the transfer of ownership of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project, the failure to obtain approval of the Proposed Transaction by Orsu shareholders, the failure to obtain the required authorizations and/or approvals from the TSX. Other risks relating to the completion of the Proposed Transaction include the regulatory framework in Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation, adverse changes in the laws or political environment in Kazakhstan or the Russian Federation, adverse changes in commodities prices, as well as certain other risks set out in the Company's public documents, including its annual information form dated March 30, 2016, filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

The forward-looking information in this press release reflects the current expectations, assumptions and/or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. In connection with the forward-looking information contained in this press release, the Company has made assumptions about: the Company's business, the economy and the mineral resources development and extraction industry in general; available historical information will be useful in the Company's evaluation of the geological and metallurgical risks for the Sergeevskoe Gold Project; the Company's ability to obtain the requisite regulatory approvals; and the seller's ability to obtain the requisite governmental approvals. The Company has also assumed that no significant events occur outside of the Company's normal course of business. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking information are reasonable, forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such information due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

Any Russian style "A, B, C1, C2 and P" category figures referred to in this press release are historical estimates and no assurances can be given that the indicated levels of minerals will be verified and/or produced. Such estimates made at a given time may significantly change when new information becomes available. By their nature such estimates are imprecise and depend, to a certain extent, upon statistical inferences which may ultimately prove unreliable. Due to the uncertainty that may be attached to such estimates, it cannot be assumed that all or any part of such estimates will be upgraded to mineral resource as a result of continued exploration.

Any forward-looking information speak only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise.

Contacts:

Alexander Yakubchuk

Chief Operating Officer

Orsu Metals Corporation

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7518 3999



Kevin Denham

Chief Financial Officer

Orsu Metals Corporation

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7518 3999

www.orsumetals.com




NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 09/21/16 -- Korea Equity Fund, Inc. (NYSE: KEF) (the "Fund") announced that it will hold its 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders (the "Meeting") at the offices of Nomura Asset Management U.S.A. Inc., Worldwide Plaza, 309 West 49th Street, New York, New York, on Monday, October 31, 2016, at 10:30 A.M. The purpose of the Meeting is to consider the election of two Directors to serve as Class I Directors of the Fund, each to serve for a term to expire in 2019, and one director to serve as a Class III Director of the Fund, to serve for a term to expire in 2018. The record date for determining shareholders entitled to participate in the Meeting is October 3, 2016.

The Fund primarily invests in the securities of companies domiciled in Korea and is designed for investors seeking long-term capital appreciation. Nomura Asset Management U.S.A. Inc. ("NAM USA") acts as the Manager of the Fund pursuant to a management agreement. Pursuant to such management agreement, NAM USA has retained its parent company, Nomura Asset Management Co., Ltd., to act as investment adviser to the Fund, and Nomura Asset Management Hong Kong Limited and Nomura Asset Management Singapore Limited, as investment sub-advisers to the Fund.

Contact:

Maria R. Premole

Nomura Asset Management U.S.A. Inc.

Worldwide Plaza

309 West 49th Street

New York, NY 10019

(800) 833-0018




(ASX:RSG)

John Welborn: Resolute is an ASX listed gold producer. We have been an explorer, developer and operator of gold assets for more than 25 years and consistently been one of the largest gold producers on the ASX. We currently own and operate the Syama mine in Mali, the Ravenswood Mine in Queensland and we own the Bibiani Gold Project in Ghana.The biggest highlight for shareholders is the share price is up 500 percent since the start of the year so it has been a fabulous year for Resolute, and that was most obviously represented by a record profit of $213 million, a fantastic result driven by our operating success. Revenues were up 30 percent to $555 million and that drove an increased operating profit which was up 130 percent to $167 million and we use that money to pay off debt. We started the year with more than $100 million in debt and ended the year with $100 million in cash, so a fantastic turnaround in 12 months. That was driven by on-budget production of 315,000 ounces and we actually sold 340,000 ounces. A very,very good strong cash-flow generation period for Resolute.Resolute is going into a very interesting period of transformation. As Syamais an asset that we have been operating for more than ten years, we are going underground and have completed a very large open pit and weve announced an underground project that will be the focus of the next 18 months. Syamais an interesting asset; its in Mali and represents two mines on one site. We have a completely independent oxide processing service, where we are mining surface satellite ore bodies and we have the historic sulfide circuit which will be fed from stockpiles while we develop the underground. Thats going to be an exciting development opportunity for Resolute and it will take the total site production from Syama up to 250,000 ounces a year.In Queensland we have announced we are going back to open pit mining, so its almost the opposite in our Ravenswood asset where we have been successful in mining underground and were going back to an open pit operation. That asset has 4 million ounces in reserves and resources within a four square kilometer radius of a mill that we have previously run at 5 million per annum, currently running at 1.3 and were in the closing stages of a feasibility study on what we target to be a ten year mine life extension.So in our two existing producing assets in Syama and Ravenswood were working on long mine life extensions to continue the profitable production of gold from those two sites. The third project, the Bibianigold project in Ghana we have completed a feasibility study and had strong indications that will be our lowest cost mine. We havent made a development decision yet and we anticipate further work through the financial year and would see the growth prospects of Bibiani taking the total production for Resolute up towards 450,000 ounces when we develop that asset.Resolute has had a very strong focus for the last 12 months of strengthening our balance sheet and preparing for development execution at Syama, at Ravenswood and in the future Bibiani. That transformation goes broader than just in our balance sheet and now moves into a very strong focus on bringing the overall cost of our operations down as we look to responsibly increase production and all across our company we are looking at ways we can actually be better. One of the interesting points about result is that we have a very long term history, we have been around for 30 years and producing gold for 25, but we are also very keen to be innovative and bringing in new ways of thinking to leverage our experience and our operating success at all of our assets and to bring in a new edge to our operations. Part of that has been demonstrated by our record profit over the last 12 months and we will look to continue to drive value with the ultimate ambition to providing excellent returns for our shareholders.
Allset, a San Francisco, CA-based wait-free dining startup, raised $2.35m in seed funding.

The round was led by Metamorphic Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, FJ Labs, and previous investors  SMRK VC Fund and private investor and entrepreneur Alexandr Chernyak.

The company plans to use the new funds to expand into new markets (Los Angeles and Chicago) as well as for product research, development, and marketing.

Launched in 2015 by Stas Matviyenko, CEO, Allset focuses on the dine-in restaurant experience, enabling customers to book, order & pay for their lunch at local restaurants before arrival. Earlier this year, the company released a Facebook Messenger bot to enable diners to book, order & pay ahead for lunch at local restaurants without downloading the app, directly from Facebook Messenger on their phones and computers. Also, Allset has launched Allset for Business letting local companies to provide company-paid lunches at restaurants to their clients and employees.

The company currently operates in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Manhattan serving over 8,500 diners per month with more than 180 restaurant partners.

Allset earns 10% from each order charged to the restaurant. The service is free for users.

FinSMEs

21/09/2016
Quark Venture Inc., a Vancouver, Canada-based venture capital investment firm, appointed Karimah Es Sabar as Chief Executive Officer and Partner.

Ms. Es Sabar, who most recently led the Centre for Drug Research and Development as President & CEO, and before that, Life Sciences BC, has an expansive global career spanning multi-national pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies, startups, not-for-profit organizations and venture investment.

She will help the firm launch the Global Health Sciences Venture Fund.

Established in 2015 by Jesson Chen, Chairman and Partner, Quark Venture provides equity financing to innovative biotechnology and health sciences companies with innovative technology platforms and projects.

Partners in the Global Health Sciences Venture Fund include investment banks and institutional investors, with GF Securities as lead strategic fund partner.

FinSMEs

21/09/2016
Mobilize, a San Francisco, CA- and Tel Aviv, Israel-based network relationship management platform, secured $6.5m in Series A funding.

The round was led by Trinity Ventures with participation from Floodgate Ventures, Hillsven Capital, Array Ventures and Upwest Labs as well as angels Eoghan McCabe, CEO of Intercom.io, and Sanjay Subhedar.

The company will use the funds to continue to develop the platform adding new features and partner integrations and expand its teams in both San Francisco and Tel Aviv.

Led by CEO Sharon Savariego and newly added COO Laura Yecies, Mobilize provides a communication solution that enables companies to manage and motivate external groups such as on-demand workers, developer groups, contractors, resellers, and influencers.

In the past year while still in stealth mode, the company worked with brands such as Microsoft, Docker, Etsy, MakerFaire, The United Nations, MasterCard, Salesforce, and Prezi and over 100 others as design partners. They have adopted Mobilize to allow over 5,000 network managers to manage over a quarter of a million global partners.

Mobilize has now launched a self-service version of the platform. Key Features include a centralized contact database for all members, who can always access and update their profile information, a flexible structure for groups and sub-groups to segment into cohorts dynamically and deliver custom communication, APIs allowing integration into the most important business tools, a unified communication center with all the tools people need to mobilize your network, email, SMS, events, calendars, surveys and polls.

FinSMEs

21/09/2016
SecurityMatters, an Eindhoven, The Netherlands- and Richmond, VA-based provider of advanced cyber security solutions for Industrial Control Systems, raised a funding round of undisclosed amount.

The round was led by Emerald Technology Ventures with participation from Robert Bosch Venture Capital, KPN Ventures and Phoenix Contact Innovation Ventures.

The company will use the funds to expand sales & marketing and support teams internationally.

Co-founded by Damiano Bolzoni (CEO), Sandro Etalle (president) and Emmanuele Zambon (CTO), SecurityMatters provides SilentDefense, an automated network and situational awareness platform that enables critical infrastructure organizations worldwide to operate cyber-resilient industrial control systems.

Introduced in 2013, SecurityMatters has expanded SilentDefenses installations across three continents, covering multiple market verticals including power generation, power transmission & distribution, drinking water, oil & gas, manufacturing, chemical, pharmaceutical and infrastructure.

Following the transaction, Markus Moor Partner at Emerald, and Sandro Etalle joined the supervisory board of SecurityMatters; Etalle assumes the role of chairman of the board.

FinSMEs

21/09/2016
Just after the first world premiere of Ajay Devgn's production Parched was held in Toronto, the film's agent asked director Leena Yadav to come on stage, minus the woman actors in the movie, Radhika Apte, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Surveen Chawla, and Lehar Khan.

"Dont tell them to come on stage", Yadav was instructed. She was left wondering why this request was made, especially since the entire cast was flown down from India to be part of the big day. The agent replied, "Because everybody will ask them questions in English."

This was such a huge compliment, said the Parched team in unison, as they burst out laughing. Giggling with them was Kajol, who has gone all out to support her husband with this film. Parched follows the journey of the liberation of four women from a small, drought-affected rural Indian village in Gujarat.

After watching the film, I couldn't remember the names of the actresses, as I was so engrossed into their portrayal. I came out only with the characters in my head: Bijli, Lajjo, Rani and Janaki. I think that's the best compliment for any actor. Honestly I didn't expect that I would love the film so much. I read the script so I knew what it is about," says Kajol.

Parched has been a festival favourite since last year, with thunderous response at 24 International Film Festivals across continents. It gears up for a release this Friday, 23 September.

Radhika Apte, who plays one of the women in the film, looks back at her experience. "What came with the film is the abandonment of fear and the knowledge of choice. To jump at what you believe is true is my take-away from Parched. The film questions lot of things that we take for granted. It explores relationships between women, says Radhika, who was particularly kicked about working with whole lot of female crew for two months.

For Tannishtha, Parched was a simple choice as Yadav and the actress have been wanting to work together for a long time. "One day we were brainstroming and I was telling her a story about the women I had encountered in Kutch. Leena got inspired and we ended up travelling together to Kutch. She then wrote the script and within one year we made the film," says Tannishtha.

Surveen Chawla, who plays Bijlee, added, "It was a phenomenal role for me and it came to me at the most appropriate time of my life. I wanted to evolve as a woman. For the first time I bonded with so many women. We may not be the best of friends but it's very important to bond as women, to stand up for women, and our whole process of filming has brought us so much closer. You begin to believe that not every woman is out to pull you down. It was a revolutionary experience for me."

While the film takes up the topic of women breaking free from the shackles of century-old traditions in a bold and brazen manner, Kajol tackles the question on feminism in a light-hearted manner. Kajol says with a laugh, If there is feminism there should be masculinism."

She continues, albeit on a serious note, "There may be several issues of women that bother me, but I believe that we are all equal; that is my idea of feminism. As long as we have strong, honest, good people, we are sorted. That is where human race is lacking."

"Parched shows us that we have a long way to go as good human beings. The film doesn't refer to just one section of society. Womens issues are everywhere. There is rape and child molestation taking place in every section of society.

Commenting on the leaked nude video, and Adil Hussain-Radhika Apte's love-making scene, Kajol strongly believes that the film's message and its purpose will not get lost. For whatever reason you go and see the film, really for whatever the reason it maybe, you will definitely not come out remembering just one thing or one scene. You will come out thinking that women are cool, women are powerful and that women have power over their own lives, says the actress.

Kajol further adds, After watching Parched, you will come out thinking that you have a choice and it just could be happiness without guilt. That is a fantastic message, it is a message of hope. The choice is in your hands unlike most of the situations that you see in life. You do know what to do, it may be difficult and time consuming but the choice is definitely in your hands.

Incidentally, Kajol says that she drew inspiration from the film in many ways. The film inspires you to stand up for women. It inspires you to make better friends. It inspires you to look at women as awesome specimen of the gender and it definitely inspires you to go out and chill and call up all your girl friends and say, 'Listen girls, lets go out, lets party, lets spend some time with each other.'

However, she refused to comment on the ongoing controversy between Ajay's Shivaay and Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.

Kajol merely says, "Shivaay is going to be amazing. The title track is fantastic. It is written like a poem and at the same time it is so today, so contemporary and I absolutely love the trailer of Shivaay."
The long arm of law is catching up with Jignesh Shah, founder promoter of Financial Technologies India or FTIL (at present 63 Moons), a company that provides technical and software solutions for online trading.

CBI has charged Shah under IPC sections related to criminal conspiracy and cheating besides provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act for alleged abuse of official position. The case relates to getting extension of recognition for MCX-SX in 2009. According to CBI, Shah, in connivance with some Sebi officials, suppressed material facts to get the extension.

This is the second time Shah is getting arrested this year. In July, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested him under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in connection with the Rs 5,600 crore NSEL scam.

For a middle class man, who was born and brought up in Kandivli, a Mumbai suburb, Shah's journey easily resembles a Bollywood style rags-to-riches potboiler.

In 1963, his father, Prakash Shah, who was an iron and steel trader, moved from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. Jignesh Shah graduated as a software engineer from Mumbai University. He started his career in the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Here's a time line of his rise and fall

April, 1988: Jignesh Shah-led Financial Technologies (India) Ltd (FTIL) was incorporated as a company in Chennai. It overtime became a giant with nearly 40 subsidiaries.

November 2003: Jignesh Shah enters into the business of commodity futures market and commences MCX operations.

October 2008: FTIL subsidiary National Spot Exhange Ltd (NSEL), which is at the centre of the Rs 5,600-crore scam, commenced live spot trading in commodities.

May 2012: The Consumer Affairs Ministry issues show cause notice to NSEL saying that the spot contracts allowed on the bourse violated forward contract law.

July 31, 2013: After government order, NSEL suspends most spot trading contracts in view of violation of certain regulatory norms.

August 6, 2013: The government bans trading in e-series contracts on NSEL, resulting in the complete halt of trading at the exchange.

August 15, 2013: NSEL submits 33-week settlement plan to regulator Forward Markets Commission (FMC).

August 20, 2013: NSEL defaults the first settlement and sacks exchange CEO & MD Anjani Sinha.

September 2013: The finance ministry takes over regulation of commodity futures markets from the consumer affairs ministry after the payment crisis surfaced at NSEL.

October 9, 2013: NSEL Vice-President Business Development Amit Mukherjee arrested, the first arrest in the scam.

October 10, 2013: Jignesh Shah resigns as vice chairman and shareholder director of another group exchange MCX-SX.

October 17, 2013: NSEL's former MD and CEO Anjani Sinha arrested.

October 31, 2013: Jignesh Shah resigns as Chairman of MCX.

December 17, 2013: Regulator FMC declares Jignesh Shah and FTIL as unfit to run any exchanges and orderd FTIL to reduce its stake in MCX from 26 percent to 2 percent.



December 20, 2013: FTIL moves high court against the FMC order.



March 13, 2014: CBI files case against NSEL, questions Jignesh Shah for the whole day.



May 7, 2014: Mumbai Police arrests Jignesh Shah.

September 23, 2014: MCX-SX renamed Metropolitan Stock Exchange.

August 7, 2014: Shah gets bail from the high court for an amount of Rs 5 lakh.

November 20, 2014: Shah steps down from FTIL Managing Director position.

December 9, 2014: To comply with the conditions imposed by Sebi, MCX-SX issues shares to 12 new investors, including Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. Promoter FTIL completely exits from the bourse.

April 2015: ED files chargesheet in the Rs 5,600 crore NSEL scam.

July 12, 2016: ED arrests Shah, alleges he is not co-operating in the probe. PMLA court remands him to five-day police custody till July 18.

September 20, 2016: CBI arrests Shah on charges of cheating and suppression of facts while getting extension for recognition of MCX-SX in 2009.

With PTI inputs
Current Affairs 2022

Welcome to the Adda247 Current Affairs website which provides you with the best compilation of the Daily Current Affairs 2022 taking place across the globe: National, International, Sports, Science and Technology, Banking, Economy, Agreement, Appointments, Ranks and Report and General Studies. Adda247 has been a fantastic buddy in assisting you in reaching your full potential in terms of knowledge and learning by providing you with the top academic information.

Adda247 is one of the most popular Current Affairs website in India for UPSC, SSC, Banking / IBPS, IAS, NTSE, Railways, NDA, CDS, Judiciary, UPPSC, RPSC, BPSC, MPSC, MPPSC, and other state civil services / government job recruitment examinations in India.

Current Affairs is a major part of the exams like UPSC, UPSC CSE, IBPS, SBI, RBI, SSC, Railway, UPPSC, RPSC, BPSC, MPPSC, TNPSC, UKPSC, APPSC, MPSC etc. Many Govt job aspirants have benefited from our Current Affairs website now its your turn. This is the best current affairs site to find recent updates on Daily Current Affairs not only for competitive exams but also for interviews and updated with the latest information happening in nation and around the world.

Current Affairs plays a vital role in all government examinations. To secure your selection with a vast margin, one needs to prepare this section in a holistic way. The current affairs section tests your awareness and how inquisitive you are. A basic understanding of current events will not only help you to secure a job, but will also help you grow in your job later.

Check out the link below or visit www.currentaffairs.adda247.com to get daily current affairs updates. This post will provide you a general overview of how to prepare current affairs and several approaches you can utilise in your upcoming banking exams.

The three main bank exams:- IBPS, RBI, and SBI are administered nationally each year and thousands of candidates sign up for them, raising the stakes in the race to the top. A significant portion of these bank exams is the GA Section, which contains the majority of the current events questions. This section is quite challenging because there is no set syllabus for it. This segment requires careful planning and continuous preparation on the part of the candidates.

To get ready for the current affairs section, you can use the advice below:

Candidates must first look at the previous years questions to understand what is asked in the exams. The previous years questions will guide what to read in newspapers.

GA section requires consistency; one must read newspapers daily.

Make crisp notes of important news.

Revise the notes on regular intervals.

Another method is to follow news channels or current affairs YouTube channels to remain updated with current affairs.

If you do not have time to read daily current affairs, you can follow monthly magazines provided by various institutes. Such magazines are available online as well as in PDF form.

It is very important to test your preparation on regular basis. Solve quizzes according to the exams you are targeting.

NOTE : READ- NOTE- REVISE-TEST to ace current affairs.

Why Adda247?

Adda247 provides you with every kind of current affairs sorted under various sections like national, international, sports and awards to ease your preparations. The current affairs are divided into various sections and some of the important topics are depicted below:

National Current Affairs:

Every single essential piece of news on whats going on in the country is included in this section

International Current Affairs:

As for the banking exam, a candidate must prepare well for both national as well as international news going on since last year.

Economic related issues:

This section of economic current affairs will include every little news about the economy of India and the economic corridor with other countries. You can also find other relevant topics related to daily current affairs like product rate, economic growth, new economic frisking zone, and schemes indulged in the growth of the economy.

Banking Current Affairs:

All the recent changes in rules, policies of banking sectors will be discussed in this section. As you are preparing for the banking exam, you must be aware of stock market, and other banking activities for economic growth.

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This section covers all the tournaments and sports events held recently in the nation or outside the nation.

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Current affairs on both national and international awards are included in this section for your preparation.

Appointments Current Affairs :

This section covers all the new appointments done in various departments of the government of India and other countries of the world. At Adda247, we provide detailed information with designation and name for your convenience to prepare for your bank exam.

You can find the most relevant and updated current affairs for your bank preparation with us. Just join us and we will help you out with your preparation in the best possible way we can.

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Current Affairs 2022: FAQs

Q.1 What are the latest types of question asked in recent exams?

Ans. In RBI assistant mains it was asked when Ramsar convention was signed. This is a static question in context of current affairs as India got new ramsar sites. Adda covers the static part with its current affairs.

In SBI PO mains 2021, TIME Magazines Person Of The Year For 2021 was asked it was covered in current affairs.

Q2. How to cover the static portion in context of current affairs?

Ans. Candidate should look into political, historical background of the news. These aspects need to be prepared. Static portion is covered along with current affairs.

Q.3 What aspects to cover while reading government schemes?

Ans. For central level schemes: Amount allotted, ministry, year of launch, main characteristics are to be learnt. For state level schemes purpose and state is to be read.

Q.4. What are the various sources of Adda247 current affairs?

Ans. Adda 247 current affair sources are: PIB, NewsOnAir, RBI website, Various newspapers like Hindu, Indian express, financial express and many more.

Q.5 Does Adda247 provide Current Affairs PDF?

Ans. Yes, Adda247 provides weekly and month-wise current affairs pdfs in both Hindi and English languages.
As protests over releasing of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu continues in Mandya and other parts of Karnataka, there are reports that the state government is thinking of calling in drought in the state earlier than usual.

Although Karnatakas expert panel and a legal team took the stand that Karnataka was in distress and had no more water to release to its neighbouring state, Tuesdays Supreme Court ruling to release 6000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu till 27 September is not likely to go well among agitating farmers and activists. On Monday, the Cauvery supervisory committee ordered Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs of water per day to Tamil Nadu from 21 to 30 September.

The state government machinery is on alert mode to prevent being caught on the back foot like last week when the Cauvery water protests turned violent leading to two deaths and major damage and loss to property.

The reason why Karnataka will be forced to call in drought earlier than usual is that it is facing depleting water levels in all the reservoirs, with some reservoirs in danger of reaching dead storage levels. The Karnataka State National Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNDMC), which has a live scroll on its website, shows less or no rain in several districts. The levels in the four reservoirs in the Cauvery basin as on 20 September, is:

1. Harangi 3.88 TMC as against a storage level of 8.07 TMC

2. Hemavathi is 6.12 as against a storage level of 35.76 TMC

3. KRS is 8.64 as against a storage level of 45.05 TMC

4. Kabini is 7.57 as against a storage level of 15. 67 TMC

The India Meteorological Department (IMD), had predicted above normal monsoon this year, but the country had only a normal June-September monsoon. With only 10 days to go before the monsoon season officially ends on 30 September, IMD has said that the rainfall deficit as against normal was 5 percent for the country. Many southern states, including Karnataka, have been badly hit by failing monsoon this year.

As early as March this year, I wrote in Firstpost about the dire drought situation in the state. Karnataka had been the first state to declare drought in 136 taluks across 27 of its 30 districts as drought-hit as early as August last year. In north Karnataka alone, several districts received less rainfall last monsoon. Many farmers had even suspended sowing operations for the Rabi season. Last year, 10 states declared drought in their districts, following Karnataka.

Usually, a state waits until the end of September to declare drought but given the Cauvery situation and continuing farmers agitations in various parts of the state, it makes sense for Karnataka to call in drought early and not wait till September end. The State government has already convened a Cabinet sub-committee meeting on 28 September to review the impact of drought in the wake of weak south-west monsoon.

Firstpost reported on Tuesday, that the June-September monsoon as the most important for India as it accounts for 70 percent of Indias annual rainfall. It is also critical for the countrys 263 million farmers and the crops of rice, sugarcane, corn, cotton and soybean, which are largely dependent on rainfall because nearly half of Indias farmland lacks irrigation.

There are media reports that this year, the total area of cultivation in Karnataka has already come down from 96,200 hectares (for major crops like paddy, sugarcane, ragi, maize and pulses) to 61,600 hectares, according to the state agriculture department. Farmers missed sowing during both the kharif and rabi seasons.

Television and newspapers have been reporting in the last six months of farmers beginning to migrate to cities, including Bengaluru, looking for alternate jobs. That Karnataka is facing drought for the third year consequently is in itself bad news but what makes it worse, is that it is estimated to be the worst in 40 years.

Business Standard reported of farmers facing a severe drought-like situation in several regions, including Raichur and other northern districts such as Kalburgi, Bijapur and Bidar which are considered among the worst drought affected districts for the second year. NDTV reported of a jeans manufacturing unit in Ballari being hit because of water shortage. Karnataka, being a major garment production centre with several multinational designer labels sourcing from the state, this is worrying news.

Much before the recent imbroglio of the Cauvery dispute leading to violent protests and bringing national attention to farmers plight in the state, in March this year, 10,000 farmers came on their tractors and protested in Bengaluru. The farmers came from the drought-hit districts of Kolar, Chikkaballapur and Bengaluru rural, demanding a permanent solution, crop loss compensation and loan restructuring.

Farmers have been protesting ever since September last year, even calling for a bandh in December 2015. They have been demanding a solution to the severe water crisis they were facing, irrigation projects, increasing ground-level water and rejuvenation of tanks and lakes in their region, with all tanks, wells and bore wells having gone dry.

It is estimated that some 1000 farmers have committed suicide in Karnataka last year alone. Crop loss and severe drought conditions, leading to heavy debts were some of the causes for these farmers suicides.

While, with the prevailing situation in the state, the government would be looking for immediate damage control measures to prevent farmers protests from turning violent again, its time that the government looked at long-term measures to alleviate the farmers plight:

Firstly, the government should announce a compensation package to farmers, facing huge crop losses. If the state has to ask the centres help to announce and implement speedy compensation packages, so be it.

Secondly, the government has to think of providing alternate jobs to farmers and their families in the same regions, so as to prevent migration of labour to cities, including Bengaluru. The government would have to look at the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and other such schemes to do so.

Thirdly, the government has to find means to augment drinking water needs of Bengaluru and other cities through alternative methods, like ground water replenishment and other long-term solutions like rainwater harvesting (RWH).

Fourthly, the government has to find ways and means to sustain the industries that are dependent on water so that they can continue functioning and not face closure, leading to loss of jobs and more hardship to people.

And finally, the Karnataka government has to now press for immediate intervention of the Centre on the Cauvery issue, by highlighting the dire plight of the farmers of the state. Karnataka has to ask for the Ministry of Water Resources to come up with a scientific and permanent distress sharing formula between riparian states, taking into account deficit rainfall; depleted storage in reservoirs; cropping pattern and its resultant demand on water by both upstream and downstream farmers; depleting ground water table; and drinking water needs of the two states.
Bhagalpur: The Examination Board of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TMBU) in Bihar on Wednesday recommended cancellation of the law degree of former Delhi Law Minister and AAP MLA Jitender Singh Tomar, who was arrested on charge that his degree was fake.

The Examination board of the university found true the findings of an interim committee constituted earlier on Tomar's degree and recommended cancellation of the degree, Pro Vice Chancellor AK Rai told PTI.

The Board's recommendation would now go to University Senate for necessary action, Rai said. If due to any reason the Senate, whose Chairman is state's Governor Ramnath Kovind, fails to meet, then the recommendation would go to Syndicate and then to the Chancellor, he said.

The interim committee in its report a few months ago had found the migration certificate of the former Law Minister of the Arvind Kejriwal cabinet wrong and on the basis of it had recommended cancellation of the Law degree. The controversy relates to the acquisition of Law degree by Tomar on the basis of a doubtful enrollment at Biswanath Law College in Munger in the academic session 1994-95.

He had claimed to have passed the law examination in 1998-99. Tomar was arrested and later released on bail last year in the Law degree issue and had to resign from the Kejriwal ministry.
In a terrifying incident on Tuesday, a 21-year-old teacher was killed in broad daylight when her stalker stabbed her as many as 22 times on a busy road in front of onlookers in north Delhi's Burari area.

The murder was caught on CCTV and the victim was identified as Karuna Kumar, a teacher at Novel Riches School. The attacker was identified as 34-year-old Surender Singh, who was stalking Karuna for the past year-and-a-half.

Surender attacked Karuna with a pair of scissors as she was on her way to work with her cousin Neha, near Labour Chowk in Burari.

The 21-year-old was stabbed some 22 times, after which the attacker was subdued by the onlookers, who beat him up. He was later arrested by the authorities.

Preliminary reports suggest that Surender Singh, who also goes by Aditya Malik, is the son of a retired police officer, who stalked Karuna after she refused to marry him.

Police investigation revealed that Karuna met Surender in his computer training classes in 2012 where they fell in love. Karuna's aunt revealed that Surender had asked the 21-year-old to marry him while she resisted. The girl's family asked her to discontinue the classes after which Surender started harassing her and threatening her with morphed pictures of herself on Whatsapp.

Karuna soon threatened to approach the police, after which Surender left her alone.

In May 2016, Surender attacked Karuna with a beer bottle near the GTB Nagar metro station, after he saw a picture of her with his friend. He threatened to kill her, but Karuna managed to escape. When the matter reached the police, Surender's relatives intervened and worked out a compromise.

The mother of the victim, Rama, revealed that the accused had continued to stalk her and pass indecent comments at her. He would also secretly click pictures of Karuna and circulate them amongst his friends. "He even threatened to kill her once, but since Singh's family requested us, we did not report the incident."

According to her mother, Karuna was a bright young girl who was very keen on her career. She continued her job, despite the constant threat and fear she lived in.

Karuna's uncle Vinay revealed that she used to support her two younger brothers, Manish and Himanshu, who are studying. "My brother Naresh has a shop in Sant Nagar where he sells bags. He makes around Rs 8,000-Rs 10,000. Since Karuna finished her BA through a correspondence course and got a job, she had been helping her father. Even though she earned Rs 5,000, she would help her brothers," he said.

The victim's brother Manish demanded stringent punishment for the accused.

With inputs from agencies
Chennai: A division bench of the Madras High Court referred to the Chief Justice an appeal filed by the father of the sole accused in the murder of a woman techie, challenging a single judge's order, rejecting the plea for a doctor of his choice to be present during the autopsy of his son, who allegedly committed suicide in prison.

The bench of Justice Huluvadi G Ramesh and Justice S Vaidyanathan, who differed in their views on the prayer of appellant R Paramasivan, father of P Ramkumar, directed that the appeal be placed before the Chief Justice for getting the opinion of a third judge.

Justice TS Sivagnanam had on Tuesday turned down the plea of the petitioner and appointed a panel of four government doctors to conduct the autopsy on the body of Ramkumar, who died on 18 September after reportedly biting a live wire at Puzhal Central Prison, where he was lodged.

Challenging the order, Ramkumar's father filed the appeal seeking a direction that one of the doctors during the post-mortem should be of his choice to ensure transparency since it was a custodial death.

He wanted Dr P Sampathkumar, Vice Principal and HoD, Ramachandra Medical College, Porur, to be present during the post-mortem.

When the bench said the doctor was from a private institution, the appellant's counsel cited Supreme Court judgments, allowing the presence of a doctor of the victims' choice.

Opposing this, Additional Advocate General Mani said the government had nominated reputed doctors. If the appellant had any doubt, he could challenge the post-mortem report but could not seek a doctor of his choice on "mere apprehension".

Besides, he said, the appellant had not questioned the competency of the doctors appointed by the government.

After the submissions, the judges expressed a difference of opinion on allowing a doctor of the appellant's choice.

Justice Ramesh was for allowing an independent forensic expert to be present during the autopsy, saying it would be in no way prejudicial to the case of the prosecution and would, in effect, fortify the stand of the state about its fairness.

However, Justice Vaidyanathan, concurring with the view of the AAG, said an independent person with forensic knowledge would, in fact, lead to creating a doubt in the minds of the public about the arbitrary nature of the conduct of the state machinery. He suggested one more government doctor in the panel, instead of an independent person of the appellant's choice.

"Since there exists a difference of opinion with regard to appointment of an independent person to be present at the time of autopsy, between us, Registry is directed to place the matter before the Hon'ble Chief Justice for listing it before a third Hon'ble judge for his opinion," the bench said.

It also ordered that the autopsy be not conducted till the decision was taken by the third judge.

Ramkumar was arrested for allegedly hacking to death Swathi, a software engineer, on 24 June at Nungambakkam suburban railway station.
Mumbai: After the unrest of the Patidar community in Gujarat for reservation, neighbouring Maharashtra is on the boil as the Marathas have hit the streets for a similar demand. While the Patidar stir led to the sacking of Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel, the series of agitations by Marathas in Maharashtra has become a cause for concern for the BJP leadership.

What's worrying the state government more as the Marathas have, in addition, asked for various other things, including scrapping of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PAA) 1989 to rein in Dalits.

The rape and murder of a teenage Maratha girl at Kopardi village in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra has polarised the Maratha community. What started as a local outrage to demand death penalty for the Dalit accused after the incident in July was nurtured into a show of strength almost a month later in Aurangabad on 9 August, triggering a series of silent processions in various districts. The demands include scrapping of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PAA) 1989 and reservation for Marathas in education and employment.

New demands are being added as the response for the stir grows, like asking the state to take back the Maharashtra Bhushan award conferred on a Brahmin bard Babasaheb Purandare for allegedly insulting Jijamata, mother of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. The indignation has come at a time when the 16 percent quota granted by the state is in litigation and the powerful Maratha leaders are in political wilderness with a Brahmin Devendra Fadnavis becoming the Chief Minister after the BJP swept the polls in 2014.

The protesters claim that the community has been neglected by its ruling elite, Dalits are misusing the PAA, Maratha farmers have become paupers and their progress has been stalled by the reservation system. This is despite the fact that 10 out of the 18 chief ministers have been Marathas and in rural Maharashtra, Maratha leaders dominate socio-economic and political activities through cooperative empires in several sectors like sugar, dairy, banking, credit societies and educational institutions situated mainly on government land obtained at a nominal lease.

It is true that a section of Marathas engaged in traditional farming for decades is yet to come to terms with the changing world. Taking pride in lineage, landholdings and socio-political dominance, the emotionally secure Maratha neglected education as well as the changing scenario in agro-business. This is in sharp contrast to Dalits who had little or no land, but got educated and employment, guided by BR Ambedkar, who asked them to migrate to cities and get educated to counter caste apartheid. The Marathas attribute the success of Dalits to the quota system and want to shed their traditional opposition to caste-based reservation. The community feels further challenged by the Kopardi incident, which is viewed as caste arrogance of Dalits, especially after the success of a recent Marathi blockbuster Sairat (in which a Dalit boy falls in love with a Maratha girl). The community apparently feels helpless, with its powerful leaders in wilderness, the Maratha quota challenged in the court and constitutional provisions giving an edge to Dalits.

The moot question is whether the community is so naive on both issues (of PAA and quota) as not to understand the implication of their demands. The PAA is a Union law and the state government can neither repeal nor amend the Act, under which the conviction rate in the state is just six percent. Also, can a legislation be scrapped even if some people are misusing it? Many laws, like section 498 (a) of the IPC (against dowry harassment) and the PCPNDT Act (against sex determination tests) have been misused by some people, but overall, they still provide protection in genuine cases and nobody demands that they be scrapped.

The demand for Maratha quota had been rejected by the Girish Bapat committee, after which the previous government in the state rejected the committees report and appointed the Narayan Rane panel in the run up to the last elections. Since the OBCs were up in arms to share their quota with Marathas, the Rane panel granted a separate 16 percent reservation to Marathas. The percentage of reservation in the state, which was 52, went up to 73, violating the maximum limit of 50 percent set by the Supreme Court.

The major issue now for the Fadnavis government is how to accommodate the Maratha quota within the stipulated limit. The Dalits have traditionally voted for the Congress and NCP. The BJP is struggling to build its base among Dalit voters in Maharashtra and its prize catch has been Republican Party of India leader Ramdas Athawale, who has been accommodated in the Rajya Sabha and made a minister of state in the Modi cabinet. Athawale was an ally of Sharad Pawar till 2009 when the former was defeated in the Lok Sabha polls in Shirdi, attributing his defeat to local Maratha leaders from Congress and NCP. Athawale eventually formed an alliance with the Shiv Sena and later, became an ally of the BJP.

The BJP is trying to prevent a caste flareup in Maharashtra with the help of Athawale. A joint rally of Marathas and Dalits has been planned in Ahmednagar district to pacify raging tempers from both sides. Dalits have opposed scrapping of the PAA and blamed Maratha leaders for misusing Dalits to settle scores with their rivals in rural Maharashtra.

A veiled demand is now being made by Maratha protesters that the entire reservation system should only be based on the economic criterion, so that only the poor get benefits. Since the OBCs already have a creamy layer criterion, the demand hints at scrapping the caste-based system altogether, or applying creamy layer to quotas for SCs and STs.

The current fury of Marathas is largely silent and constrained, but has the potential of a casteist flare up in the state. On both the demands (quota and PAA) the Marathas may find takers in other states, making it a national issue.

The whole exercise is not just for economics, but a battle of socio-economic-political supremacy by appealing to sentiments of Marathas. Or else, why would the demand to strip Purandare of the state award be on the list of the protesters? It is reminiscent of the traditional rivalry between Marathas and Brahmins, especially Brahmin historians who wrote on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, influencing James Laines controversial book on Shivaji.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked its Registry to consider listing a pending plea filed by Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) leader Bhim Singh seeking imposition of Governor's rule in the troubled state, for early hearing.

"The Supreme Court Registry may give an early date of hearing," a bench comprising Justices AR Dave and L Nageswara Rao said when senior advocate and JKNPP leader mentioned the matter seeking its hearing.

"The petition has now been listed for hearing in December. Whole of Kashmir is on fire. I am seeking early hearing," Singh said. The apex court, on 26 August, had said that Singh may visit Srinagar to assess the "ground reality" there.

The court had said that Singh cannot just say that Governor's rule under section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir was the only panacea for everything and should file a reply to the Centre's affidavit on the ground situation in the state.

The bench had also directed solicitor general Ranjit Kumar to arrange for the visit of the activist lawyer and allow him to meet local people, divisional commissioner and deputy commissioner, so that he can assess the situation by himself and submit a report.

Earlier, the apex court had said that the ongoing trouble in Kashmir should be "dealt with politically" as everything cannot be managed within judicial parameters. The Centre, in its status report filed on 5 August, had said the law and order situation in the Valley had improved considerably with incidents of violent protests having gone down from 201 on 9 July to 11 on 3 August.

Bhim Singh's petition had said that due to the use of pellet guns by the security forces, people were being blinded and there was a shortage of medicines and medical facilities available to the citizens. His plea had said that Governor's rule under section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir should be imposed and had sought a direction to the Governor to dissolve the Assembly, claiming it "has failed to discharge its duties and functions".
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear next week a PIL alleging the apathy of Delhi civic bodies which has led certain areas to look like garbage dumps and the outbreak of diseases like chikungunya.

"Let it be listed for hearing on Monday (26 September)," a bench comprising Justices AR Dave and L Nageswara Rao said when senior advocate Colin Gonsalves mentioned the plea for urgent hearing.

"Certain areas falling under the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) have become garbage dumping grounds where mosquitoes are breeding," Gonsalves said.

The PIL, filed by Delhi-based doctor Anil Mittal, has sought a direction that a panel of experts be set up to ascertain the steps taken to tackle diseases like chikungunya in country in general and Delhi in particular.

The senior lawyer referred to photographs, annexed with the PIL, showing heaps of garbage lying in residential areas of south Delhi and alleging that the civic body (SDMC) was not rising to the occasion.

The plea also soought directions for authorities in Delhi and the central government on how to deal with the crisis.

During the hearing, the bench, in a lighter vein, asked the lawyer as to whether the doctor has made "mosquitoes as parties" to the PIL or not.

On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court expressed concern over rise in dengue and chikungunya cases and asked all city hospitals, including those run by the Centre and AAP government, not to deny treatment to patients.

It also ordered that steps be taken by both governments to increase the strength of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals by engaging "retired personnel, if so required, to meet the exigencies".

Over 2,600 chikungunya cases have been reported in Delhi till 17 September and the disease has caused 15 deaths so far. Chikungunya is a viral disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes, causing high fever and severe joint pain.
Hours after Sundays deadly attack on one of its base in north Kashmirs Uri town  that left 18 soldiers dead  the Army said four militants who carried out of the attack belonged to the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant outfit based in Pakistan.

"All four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings. Initial reports indicate that the slain terrorists belong to Jaish-e-Mohammad tanzeem (outfit), Lieutenant-General Ranbir Singh said in South Block in New Delhi after the attacks.

Investigators probing the Uri suicide attacks are working overtime to identify the four fedayeen who stormed into 12 Infantry Brigade in Uri, and all the initial indications are leading towards Jaish outfit. The NIA, which overtook the investigation of the Uri attack from Army, is looking into the case from different angles, which also include studying the previous successful infiltration attempts made by the outfit and the attacks carried out by the group along the LoC.

A majority of the attacks carried out by Jaish in recent years have been suicide attacks, in fact, the outfit introduced the concept of the suicide bombing in Kashmir insurgency when it carried out its first suicide attack in April 2000. An 18-year-old Srinagar boy detonated a car-bomb outside the Armys 15 Corps headquarters in Srinagar. It was also for the first time that a militant laced with explosives blew himself up in the conflict-ridden state.

What is alarming for the security agencies is the increasing number of attacks carried out by the group in recent years, particularly along the LoC. The majority of these attacks have taken place along the LoC and all of them were suicide attacks. The outfit has fast replaced Lashkar-e-Taiba in launching suicide missions on military and other security formations in the state.

"The life of a Jaish militant once he leaves Pakistan to carry out attack is very short, most of them have been killed along the LoC. In recent years all the attack carried out by the group almost mirror each other. They attack the first Army installation they encounter after crossing the LoC, an intelligence officer told Firstpost.

So when Baramulla police early this year in February arrested Mohammad Sadiq, a member of the outfit, alive from Kanispora area, everyone was shocked. On 25 November, Jaish militants attacked a Gorkha Rifles Camp along Kalsuri Ridge in Tangdhar area near the LoC in north Kashmir's Kupwara district, leaving a military contractor dead before three attackers were gunned down. What rattled the forces was the recovery of bags inscribed with Afzal Guru Squad from the three slain militants. All the four militants infiltrated through Tangdar area and struck the camp but Sadiq managed to flee from the spot. He was one among the four tasked to carry out suicide attacks in Kashmir.

Earlier Colonel Santosh Mahadik, the Commanding officer of 41 Rashtriya Rifles, was killed during an encounter in Haji Naka forest area of Kupwara. The outfit took the responsibility of the attack saying three militants, who attacked the camp in Tangdhar, were its members.

Jaish was founded by Maulana Masood Azhar, a fiery orator, in January 2000 after his release in Taliban-governed Kandahar, Afghanistan, from Jammus Kot Balwal jail in exchange for passengers of hijacked IC-814 Indian Airlines plane. Azhar was arrested in Srinagar in 1994 on terrorism charges.

Revenge has begun and it will reach where you cannot even imagine, Azhar said in January 2014 in a rally organized by the outfit in Muzaffarabad in PoK.

Since then, the signature of Jaish-e-Mohammad was found in attacks on army bases at Mohra and Tangdhar in north Kashmir, at Kathua and Samba in Jammu region, and at Pathankot airbase in Punjab. The comeback was lethal.

The outfit was once considered to be the most infiltrated group by Kashmir police, which led to its decline in valley and by mid 2013 it was on the verge of extinction when two of its last three surviving commanders were killed in that year, leaving the outfit with a total cadre capacity of eight militants in Kashmir, the lowest since it was formed 13 years ago, according to the Jammu and Kashmir Police.

Earlier it was considered the deadliest group only second to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). But after the killing of Gazi Baba, a top brass of the outfit and the mastermind of the Parliament attack, the outfit was never able to regroup in Kashmir. Jaish has been accused for the 13 December, 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament in New Delhi. The outfit was banned by the Indian government under provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) on 25 October, 2001.

However in recent years it has carried out a sustained trail of attacks on Army installations along the LoC, one in which Colonel Mahadik was killed.

Army on Tuesday dealt a major blow to militants who tried to sneak into Uri region in Kashmir, killing ten militants. It is not clear who carried out the infiltration but dont be surprised if the fingers are pointed at Jaish as it fast replaces Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Kashmir again.
Salwa Judum is dead. Long live Bastar Sangharsh Samiti.

Bastar Sangharsh Samiti is dead. Long live Samajik Ekta Manch.

Samajik Ekta Manch is dead. Long Live Agni (Action Group for National Integrity).

In a Chhattisgarhi version of William Shakespeare, an anti-Maoist group by any other name would still be an anti-Maoist group. All the four groups mentioned above are men without uniform backed by men in uniform. A mask to show that civil society wants a Maoist-free Bastar. Nothing wrong with it but for the strong-arm tactics reportedly practiced by using civilians as shields.

In official parlance, this is referred to as 'Mission 2016'. Which means to get Bastar in South Chhattisgarh rid of Maoists by December this year. With time running out, on the ground, it means to nudge the tribals to push the Naxals out of the villages of Bastar and target all those journalists, lawyers and activists who stand up to the extra-constitutional methods adopted by the security forces in the war against Naxalism.

In the last few days, three different developments have taken place in south Chhattisgarh. This is that part of India in whose goings-on the rest of India remains largely disinterested unless there is statistical pornography on display, which means when the security forces or the Maoists kill each other in large numbers.

On Saturday, the newly formed group Agni organised a rally titled 'Lalkar', a bid to raise the decibel levels against Maoist violence and their supporters. But the organisers were unable to hide the fact that Agni was merely Samajik Ekta Manch, reborn in a new avatar. Old anti-Maoism in a new bottle. The mai-baap remained the same men in CRPF and police uniform, firmly holding the remote control in their hand, with this vigilante group tasked to play its part in the narrative.

The other development involves Manish Kunjam, a CPI leader who was part of the team of mediators to negotiate with the Maoists when Sukma district collector Alex Paul Memon was abducted by Naxals in 2012. There has been a public outrage to one of his Facebook posts in which he wrote objectionable matter about a Hindu Goddess. Given that Kunjam is seen as a pro-Maoist ideologue, the angst against him is being milked by his detractors as well.

And finally, Prabhat Singh, a Dantewada-based journalist who went missing for two days after Saturday. His family was in panic, fearing he had been picked up by the Bastar police. Prabhat has managed to get out of Dantewada now, but according to his friends, he fears arrest and is seeking legal advice on how to stay safe. Prabhat knows he is a marked man, as earlier this year, he was arrested for using a slang term against a senior security officer on a Whatsapp group. He has been out on bail.

In the theatre of terror in Chhattisgarh, the eyeball to eyeball confrontation between the state and the Maoists is only making many go blind with hatred.

Ever since united Andhra Pradesh with a sustained police offensive in 2005-06 pushed the Maoists out of its territory, they have made the other side of the Godavari river their safe haven. Over the last decade, Maoist sympathisers have claimed that 70 percent of south Chhattisgarh is under the control of the heavily armed outlaws.

In fact, the National Highway 30 that starts from Konta, just when you get into Chhattisgarh from Andhra Pradesh, exists only in name. It is a highway of dust, extreme poverty and governmental neglect where you will find the Maoist sarkaar taking charge if you move 5 km inside on either side of NH 30. The Chhattisgarh government admits this as well on record, saying at least 15 gram panchayats in Konta are absolutely no-go areas. Many other villages are approachable only after a thorough security check.

The Maoist regime, by the police's own admission, has at least 5000 armed cadres in the seven districts of south Chhattisgarh, with over 20000 sympathisers, acting as their eyes and ears. The Naxals have formed Regional Political Councils for every cluster of ten villages whose representatives  up to 14 in each village  are armed with countrymade weapons.

Warzone Bastar has been, for all practical purposes, outsourced to the CRPF, whose heavily fortified camps one can find every 5 km. It has been a long-drawn war against India's greatest internal security threat. And with no signs of any end soon, the forces are getting weary and want to fight to the finish.

Which is why the focus all through 2016 has been to cut off their (what the police calls) 'propaganda' funnels overground. Earlier this year, two lawyers, Shalini Gera and Isha Khandelwal of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group were forced to leave Jagdalpur for providing free legal assistance to tribals since 2013. But like with all such actions, the police was nowhere on the scene. It was the landlord who served them the eviction notice. The plan seems to be to cut the lines of communication to wage a war without witnesses. Keep the outsiders out, while forcing the locals to fall in line.

Journalist Malini Subramaniam's articles made the establishment see red. Especially when she chronicled alleged human rights violations by the forces. Just like Isha and Shalini, the landlord was forced to make her vacate her house in Jagdalpur this February, forcing her to flee to Hyderabad.

The journalistic space has indeed shrunk in south Chhattisgarh over the years. Most scribes know the price they will have to pay if they write against the government or against the Maoist. Boundaries are defined. In the past, Naxals have killed while the police have arrested journalists. The pen or the camera is no match for the gun. News organisations based in Chhattisgarh also do not encourage criticism of the system.

Vijay, a member of the Samajik Ekta Manch who I met in March talked about how the outsiders do not know about the ethos and the ecosystem of Chhattisgarh and are backing the wrong guys. The Chhattisgarh template of the national vs anti-national debate paused when the Samajik Ekta Manch was wound up after criticism of its strong arm tactics. Now having taken birth in a new form with Agni, it is expected to ignite a fresh fire in the anti-Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh. The labeling, most expect,will begin all over again. And Bastar will remain a land at war with itself.
New Delhi: On Wednesday Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal alleged that ACB has registered an FIR against him at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in connection with the "administrative and financial irregularities" in the functioning of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

The AAP chief also distributed copies of the FIR which named him along with DCW chief Swati Maliwal as "known/suspected/unknown accused".

Continuing his tirade against Modi, Kejriwal said the AAP government will soon call a Special Session of Delhi Assembly where he will expose the "conspiracy" behind the registration of the FIR.

Maliwal was on Monday booked by the Anti-Corruption Branch of the Delhi government on charges of alleged irregularities in recruitment in the women's panel.

"In the FIR registered by the ACB, my name is also there...But it does not contain any details on my alleged role. One does not put the name of the Chief Minister in the FIR just like that.

"It cannot happen without the Prime Minister's approval. It is clear that the FIR has the PM's nod. We will soon call a Special Session of the Delhi Assembly where we will expose the conspiracy behind this," the Delhi CM told reporters at his official residence.

Kejriwal's deputy Manish Sisodia alleged that it is an attempt to "destabilise" the Delhi government. The FIR was registered on a complaint by former DCW chief Barkha Shukla Singh. A case under sections 13(D) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 409 (criminal breach of trust) and 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy) of the IPC was registered against Maliwal, ACB chief Mukesh Kumar Meena had said.
National Board for Wildlife clears first phase of Ken-Betwa interlinking project

Published: September 21, 2016

The National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) has given its approval to Rs. 10000 crore Ken-Betwa river interlinking project. It is Indias first inter-State river interlinking project.

Decision in this regard was taken at the NBWL meeting chaired by Minister of State (MoS) for Environment and Forests Anil Madhav Dave.

Key Facts

The Ken-Betwa river interlinking project is divided into two phases and these clearances are only valid for the first phase.

are only valid for the first phase. The clearance from NBWL will pave the way for the forest clearance and environment clearance process.

The main feature of the project is a 230-km long canal and a series of barrages and dams connecting the Ken and Betwa rivers The key projects are Makodia and Dhaudhan dams.

Significance of Project

Ken-Betwa river interlinking project will irrigate Indias worst drought-affected and drought-prone Bundelkhand region.

It will irrigate 3.5 lakh hectares in Madhya Pradesh and 14,000 hectares of Uttar Pradesh, in Bundelkhand.

It will benefit 5 districts of Madhya Pradesh (Chhatarpur, Raisen, Panna,Tikamgarh, and Vidisha) and 3 districts of Uttar Pradesh (Mahoba, Jhansi and Banda) by assured irrigation supply, domestic and industrial water supply and power.

On the other hand, about 20000 people in 38 villages will be affected due to the submergence by Daudhan reservoir and Makodia reservoir.

Environmental Concern

Ken-Betwa river interlinking project will be the first river project that will be located within a tiger reserve.

It will submerge about 10% of the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh which has been feted as a model tiger-conservation reserve.

Month: Current Affairs - September, 2016

Topics: Environment  Ken Betwa River Project  National  NBWL

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Kanpur: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday demanded the Narendra Modi government to come up with a 'Kisan Budget' to ensure farmers get the right price for their produce.

"I have heard the Railway Budget is being merged with the General Budget. If this can be done, I would ask Prime Minister Narendra Modi to prepare 'Kisan budget'," he said at a khaat sabha in Ghatampur.

The Kisan Budget will ensure that farmers get right prices for their crops, as they are not getting it now, he added.

Accusing the Centre of waiving off loans of industrialists but not of farmers, the Congress vice-president said, "A Congress government's priority will be to waive off loans to farmers, because for us farmers and the youths are more important."

Attacking Modi, he said, "The Prime Minister had promised to provide employment to two crore youths. But I have come to know that in the last two years only one lakh have got employment."

Rahul assured that as an Opposition, Congress was executing its role responsibly.

Attacking the current and previous UP governments, he said, "When Congress was at the Centre, it sanctioned funds for different projects. I wonder where the funds have disappeared."

Taking a dig at BSP, he alleged, "The BSP has indulged in corruption, moreover it has moved away from the ideologies on which Kanshi Ram had established it."

Alleging the SP cannot run without corruption, he questioned why the ministers, who were dropped from the

Cabinet on corruption charges, were reinstated by Mulayam Singh Yadav.

"If the Congress forms government in Uttar Pradesh, it will order probe on works done by the SP and BSP," he assured.
New York: Donald Trump's hardline stance on immigration after two bombings in the New York area again sparked debate on the White House campaign trail on Wednesday, as his son sparked a firestorm by comparing Syrian refugees to lethal candies.

The Republican presidential hopeful's uncompromising position on illegal migrants  even calling them a dangerous "Trojan horse" who enter the country with the aim of doing harm  is inextricably linked with his meteoric political rise.

Most Republicans approve of his tough talk, with polls showing that a majority of party members agreed with his call last December to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

Since then, Trump has refrained from specifically targeting Muslims, but he has championed police profiling of suspects and promised to bar immigrants and travellers from certain countries deemed dangerous, like Syria.

The candidate has repeatedly warned of the risks posed by Syrian refugees, citing the arrival in Europe of Islamic State operatives disguised as simple refugees, and says US immigration officials are not properly screening new arrivals.

But immigration is nevertheless not one of the major issues on the minds of voters, placing only fourth according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, making it unclear if Trump, 70, can use it to persuade those who are still undecided.

But national security and the anti-terror fight are number two on that list, and with less than 50 days to go before Election Day on 8 November, Trump is attempting to blur the lines between the two issues.

"This is a question of qualify of life," Trump told a rally in key swing state Florida on Tuesday. "We want to make sure we are only admitting people in our country who love our country."

Trump's son Donald Jr, one of his surrogates on the campaign trail, has meanwhile courted controversy with a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of multi-colored Skittles candy  some of them lethal, but not to the naked eye.

"This image says it all," he said on Twitter, with a picture of a white bowl filled with the popular sweets. Read Firstpost's analysis on the tweet here.

Written above the image is: "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syria refugee problem."

Trump Jr thus argued that it is too dangerous to welcome migrants when a tiny number of them could later launch attacks. The man accused of planting bombs in both downtown Manhattan and near a race in New Jersey is a naturalized American of Afghan descent.

At his rallies, Trump Sr has repeatedly recited the lyrics to a 1960s song, "The Snake," which recounts how a woman who aided an injured snake ended up being bitten, and used the Trojan Horse imagery to warn of hidden dangers.

"We cannot let this evil continue. Cannot do it," he said on Tuesday.
        :         ,     FIR    
Can you hack the US election?

Yes, says Professor Andrew Appel of the prestigious computer science wing at Princeton University.

In at least 9 states the answer is yes and you dont have to be from Russia to do that. All it takes is an intense geek-out.

Nine states in the US use touch screen voting machines which dont have any paper trail. Once youve pushed some buttons and it beeps or lights up and youre out the door, how do you know that youve voted Clinton and that machine has not understood it as Trump?

These touch screen voting machines riddled with bugs and security holes will be in full force in Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Delaware, Kentucky.

The low level game of election fraud is to just rig the machine to behave badly, the high stakes game end is to create cheating programs that shift votes around and are taught not to cheat while they are being tested.

44 million registered voters, accounting for 25 percent of the total US voters, live in jurisdictions that rely on paperless systems, including millions in contested states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

That means one in four registered voters in America live in areas that will use electronic voting machines that dont produce a paper backup.
Islamabad: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif held a telephonic conversation with powerful Army chief General Raheel Sharif ahead of his speech at the UN in which he is expected to raise the Kashmir issue, amid signs he may tone down his rhetoric to reduce tensions with India.

An official from the Prime Minister's Office said the two last nigh discussed the situation in Kashmir and tense relations with India following the terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri on Sunday in which 18 soldiers were killed.

Sharif had a plan to forcefully highlight the Kashmir violence, but the scenario changed after Uri terrorist attack which spotlighted the issue of cross-border militancy.

"The prime minister might strike a balance in his speech. He would talks about the Indian atrocities in Kashmir but also would be conciliatory to end tension," said the official.

Sharif may also offer proposals to address the Kashmir issue, including emphasis on implementing UN resolutions and the mediatory role of the international community.

No statement was issued after the talks between the two Sharifs, which was their first contact since the Uri attack.

Geo TV reported that the conversation between the two leaders shows that the situation after Uri attack was serious.

The Uri incident was one of the deadliest attacks on Indian Army in recent years, as heavily-armed terrorists stormed a battalion headquarters of the force.

Four militants involved in the terror strike were killed.

India's DGMO Lt Gen Ranbir Singh has said the four killed were foreign terrorists and had carried with them items which had Pakistani markings and that initial reports indicated that they belonged to Pakistan-based Jaish-E-Mohammed group.

Sharif is poised to address the 71st UNGA session in New York later on Wednesday.
The 21st day of September has been marked since 1981 by the United Nations as the International Day of Peace.

Before you groan, bear in mind that there's all sorts of 'International Days of...', so why not one for peace? As the UN puts it, "The General Assembly has declared this as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, both within and among all nations and peoples." The website also notes that the theme for this year's Day of Peace is 'The Sustainable Development Goals: Building Blocks for Peace'. Which is fantastic!

And to mark the occasion, the Peace Bell is rung at the UN headquarters. A quick aside: The Peace Bell, cast from coins donated by delegates from 60 countries and collected by children, was presented by Japan to the UN in 1954. All of which is very wonderfully wholesome and historic  much like the UN itself. But also like the UN, the Peace Bell and International Day of Peace are in danger of losing relevance.

In a world where the Islamic State exists, where people are hacked and slashed for what they believe or eat, where terrorism is a thriving industry and Donald Trump can spew the sort of hate he does and still could be mere weeks away from being appointed the most powerful man on the planet, you have to wonder if peace is even relevant. At least there's no war though, right?

Sure, one definition of peace is the absence of war. But then if we're defining a concept by what it is not, are we really defining it at all?

via GIPHY

But, for a moment, let's put aside all those theories  about whether war and peace are true binaries, whether 'absolute world peace' (as inscribed on the Peace Bell) is at all attainable and if we should even be talking peace when those around are plotting anything but peace for us  and look elsewhere for an understanding of peace in the world we inhabit.

It's been 30 years (and two days) since Megadeth's second studio album Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? was dropped on an unsuspecting world. Obviously, the world knew of frontman Dave Mustaine and his abilities  as showcased in his time in Metallica and on the 'Deth's rough-around-the-edges debut album Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!  but few could have predicted the quality of the band's alloying of breakneck thrash with political commentary.

Tracks like Wake Up Dead, The Conjuring and Good Mourning/Black Friday are the staple of mix-tapes ... compilations CDs ... MP3 playlists across the world, but it's the title track that seems the most appropriate candidate to be the anthem for 2016's International Day of Peace. And if that's not good enough for you, how about the prescience of the track in predicting (almost) that someone as clueless as Trump would become POTUS:

What do you mean, "I couldn't be the president of the United States of America"?

Tell me something, it's still "We the people", right?

Remember that line?

What do you mean you don't remember?

Go and listen.

Now.
Lahore: Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects have challenged the legality of a Pakistani judicial commission that travelled to India in 2013 to probe the 2008 attack, which could further delay the case proceedings.

Lakhvi's counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi said on Wednesday that the defence lawyers had challenged the proceedings of the judicial commission that travelled to Mumbai to record the statements of four Indian prosecution witnesses in the Islamabad High Court on Monday.

When asked if the trial court has not already declared the commission's proceedings 'null and void', Abbasi told PTI: "No... the trial court had not declared the commission's proceedings null and void and we have challenged the legality of the commission in the Islamabad High Court early this week."

Earlier, the defence lawyer had challenged the legality of the commission before the trial court in 2013 but it was dismissed.

A Pakistani panel comprising special prosecutors and the defence counsel in 2013 had visited Mumbai to record the statements from prosecution witnesses, including Magistrate RV Sawant Waghule, who recorded the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab; Ramesh Mahale, the chief investigation officer of the case, and Ganesh Dhunraj and Chintaman Mohite, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the terrorists killed during the attack.

The commission in 2012 had recorded the statement of these witnesses but due to an "official understanding" between the Pakistani and Indian governments, had not cross-examined them.

Lakhvi's lawyer has filed a plea stating that the commission that went to India had not been allowed to cross-examine four key Indian witnesses.

A prosecution lawyer said the defence lawyers challenging the legality of the commission and saying it was not allowed to cross-examine the key Indian witnesses was aimed at delaying the case further.

He said this is evident from the fact that the legality of the commission is being challenged over three years after it had travelled to Mumbai.

"As the case is already not heading further because India has yet to decide whether to send 24 witnesses to Pakistan to record their statement, the defence lawyers challenging the Pakistani commission's proceedings in the IHC may further delay it," he said.

The court has not fixed the date of hearing.

LeT operations commander Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people in November 2008.

Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attack, is living in undisclosed location after being released from jail on bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi. The case has been underway in the country for more than six years.
After nearly two years since its last event, the Madison County Chamber of Commerce may be operating again soon.

A group of local business people and government officials met Tuesday at Follis Place to discuss the future of the chamber.

The Madison County Chamber of Commerce ceased operations at the end of 2014.

At the time, the Chamber Board of Directors issued the following statement: Due to circumstances beyond our control the board of directors of the Madison County Chamber of Commerce regretfully announces the suspension of operations of the Chamber effective January 1, 2015. It is our hope that in the future a group of the business people and community members will take the initiative to revive the organization. Support from local businesses is vital if our community is to have a Chamber and if it is to be revived it will need new board members representing local businesses and it will need an increased membership from the businesses of Madison County.

"Both of these are key areas of support which have been lacking in recent years. Ultimately the Chamber is a reflection of the strength and interest of the local business community.

Kent Marler, a vice president with New Era Bank, led the meeting Tuesday.

If we are going to be a viable community we need a chamber in place, Marler said.

He said he had contacted the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and was told the Madison County Chamber of Commerce's articles of incorporation and 501c3 (not-for-profit) status were in good standing.

We can move forward under that charter, Marler said.

There were 23 people in attendance at the meeting Tuesday and Marler said there were many more who indicated an interest in the chambers resumption.

Those in attendance agreed board members needed to be elected and a membership committee formed. Another meeting is planned for 11:30 a.m. Oct. 19 at Follis Place.

According to the Missouri Secretary of State website the local chamber received its state charter as a benevolent organization on September 23, 1946.
PARK HILLS  Two Mineral Area College professors are planning an opportunity for community to travel and for students to study abroad this summer, from May 23-30. Having previously visited Cuba, the pair is organizing a trip to Greece.

Sarah Stahl and Stephanie Campbell will hold two information sessions about the upcoming travel plans to Greece. The first session is at 10 a.m., Sept. 21, in Rice Lecture Hall A in the Arts & Sciences Building on MACs Park Hills campus. The second is later that evening, also in Rice Lecture Hall A, at 6 p.m.

For more information about MACs Greek Culture Trip, contact Stahl at 573-518-2128 or sstahl@mineralarea.edu, or Campbell at 573-518-2203 or campbell@mineralarea.edu.

Stahl said the informational meeting will be particularly interesting to those interested in visiting the cradle of Western Civilization.

The Greek Culture Trip is a wonderful opportunity for us to be immersed in Greek culture, she said. We are staying in Athens and the itinerary includes day trips to exciting locations around Greece. It will be an experience to remember for a lifetime and one for students to put on their resume.

The trip will be organized through WorldStrides, a travel company associated with Smithsonian Universitys travel programs.
LeEco today announced that it has sold over 70,000 smartphones, over 2000 SuperTVs and about 20,000 accessories and achieved of Rs. 100 crores revenue during the sale, which is more than its expectation.

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LeEco said that response in India was very much in sync with the other markets such as China, Russia and USA. During EPIC 919, LeEco registered total sales revenue of nearly Rs. 5200 Crores across India, China and Hong Kong markets. In China, LeEco sold more than 866,000 Super TVs and 1,178,000+ smartphones during the sale.

The sale went live from midnight of September 19 on LeMall.com and Flipkart and was concluded on September 20, 23:59 hours. LeEco extended discounts and deals on its phones, Super TVs and accessories for one more day, even though it was planned for only 24 hours.

Commenting on the achievement, Atul Jain, COO, Smart Electronics Devices, LeEco India said:

919 is LeEcos biggest online sales festival that is highly celebrated across the world. Were thrilled to bring it to India this year and are over-whelmed by the encouraging user response. In-line with the global record-breaking sales performance, weve achieved incredible sales milestones in India as well. It is truly humbling that user response that helped us exceed our target sales figure and notch up a Rs 100 crore+ record. We remain committed to extending similar rewarding deals on our Super products in the future as well to our swiftly expanding user community.

Ajay Yadav, Vice President- Mobiles, Flipkart, said:

Our partnership with LeEco has come a long way. From being the Launchpad for the brand in India, Flipkart is currently working with the LeEco team to significantly expand their market share. Through this journey of hyper growth, LeEco has been a part of few record sale events at Flipkart. And the brand has also undertaken hugely successful stand-alone sale events on Flipkart.
Failed South Korean cargo line Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd found the money to unload a full container ship waiting outside a New York-area port. But before the vessel was allowed to dock, it faced another problem: a plan to get back out to sea.

The predicament of the Hanjin Miami, one of 10 U.S.-bound ships stranded by the Hanjin bankruptcy, illustrates one way that disputes over ships, ocean containers and even truck trailers to haul the shipping boxes have stranded at sea some $14 billion of goods around the world.

Since filing for court receivership on August 31, the world's seventh-largest container carrier has caused chaos for many retailers at a time when they are getting goods for the holiday shopping season.

The National Retail Federation on Tuesday urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to find a way to clear up the confusion. "The impact on small and medium-sized companies could be particularly devastating if this situation is not resolved in a timely manner," the group said in a letter.

Hanjin has the money to dock its Hanjin Miami, Federal Maritime Commissioner William Doyle, whose agency regulates international shipping, told an industry event on Friday.

But the Miami has not been allowed in port because of a dispute about empty Hanjin shipping containers, which the Miami normally would load up as ballast to exit port.

Without those empties, the ship "will not be able to depart the harbor because it would not have the air clearance to navigate under the Bayonne Bridge -- even at a dead low tide," said Doyle. Without a way to leave, the ship could tie up a berth.

"There are so many disputes right now attached to empty containers that the terminal is not going to load the empties back onto the ship," Doyle said.

By Tuesday evening, two sources familiar with negotiations said that the Miami had been scheduled to dock and that it would pick up empty containers to leave port. Shipping tracking site shipmentlink.com said it was due to arrive on Thursday and depart the next day.

An attorney for Maher Terminal, which operates the marine terminal in Newark where the Hanjin Miami is expected to dock, declined to comment.

The Hanjin Miami is currently off the U.S. East Coast, about 300 miles (480 km) from New York, according to Reuters Eikon data.

The Bayonne Bridge, which held the title of world's longest arch bridge for 45 years after it opened in 1931, presents a unique challenge to Hanjin.

But other ports also are struggling with questions of who pays for terminal charges and what to do with empty containers. The complexity increased on Monday after a South Korean judge told Hanjin to cancel its ship charter agreements and return empty vessels to their owners.

In the wake of the decision by the South Korean judge, an empty Hanjin Miami may become the responsibility of Reederei NSB, which manages the ship on behalf of its owner, an affiliate of Conti Holding of Munich, according to Reuters Eikon data.

A spokeswoman for Reederei and a U.S. lawyer for Hanjin did not respond to requests for comment.

Port terminals, meanwhile, have stopped accepting returns of empty shipping containers because they doubt Hanjin will pay to store them.

"The Hanjin boxes are radioactive. Nobody wants to take responsibility for them," said Mark Hirzel, chairman of the Los Angeles Customs Brokers & Freight Forwarders Association Inc.

As containers on chassis pile up in far-flung storage lots, it has created a shortage of the trailers used to transport containers on land.

Darren Azman, an attorney for Bermuda-based Textainer Group Holdings Ltd said cargo owners and other Hanjin parties are working out an agreement that they hope will normalize the movement of shipping containers.

But U.S. retailers and manufacturers who own the cargo are caught in the confusion.

 Alex Rasheed, president of Pacific Textile and Sourcing Inc, a Los Angeles-headquartered importer and wholesaler of apparel, is anxious to receive $300,000 worth of seasonal fall clothing in two containers on the Hanjin Jungil, which is waiting off the coast of Southern California.

"We're going to start feeling the pressure unless there is some kind of resolution," Rasheed said.

Hanjin's bankruptcy also has U.S. exporters that were relying on the company scrambling to find alternatives, including flying goods to foreign markets at a loss, said Hirzel.

 "I've even heard about air transport of agriculture exports," Hirzel said. "Economically, it's a guaranteed loser ... The only reason you would do that is to meet an order to get a contract in the future."

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, editing by Peter Henderson and Alan Crosby)
Automakers embraced guidelines rolled out by the Obama administration to oversee the creation of self-driving cars, saying the new policy strikes a balance between safety and fast-moving technological developments.

Advocates for the technology have urged federal regulators to issue a standard set of rules, arguing that variations between state laws would hold back innovations in autonomous driving. The U.S. Department of Transportation said Tuesday it will ask car manufacturers to complete a 15-point checklist that covers design, testing procedures and other areas before putting autonomous vehicles up for sale.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the regulatory unit that governs automakers, will also explore greater authorities to seek recalls for autonomous systems or approve new technologies before they hit the road. Currently, automakers self-certify their vehicles for safety and tailpipe emissions. Its likely NHTSA would need to seek more authority from Congress to be directly involved in approving self-driving features.

General Motors (NYSE:GM) supports DOTs and NHTSAs efforts to speed deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) as a technology that has the potential to dramatically improve safety on our roads and highways and expand mobility options, GM said in a statement provided to FOXBusiness.com. We welcome the effort, will review the guidance and look forward to continuing the constructive dialogue on how to safely deploy AVs as quickly as possible.

Ford (NYSE:F) also applauded the move, adding that it plans to work with states on areas that complement the DOTs national framework.

Ford appreciates Secretary Foxxs leadership and NHTSAs thoughtful efforts to advance the future of mobility and ensure the United States continues to drive transportation innovation. Importantly, the guidance will help establish the basis for a national framework that enables the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles. Strides in this technology have the potential to improve safety on our roads and reduce congestion in urban areas, Ford said.

Toyota (NYSE:TM) issued a statement saying the company is pleased that NHTSA is addressing the emerging patchwork of state laws.

We also welcome NHTSAs plans to use existing authorities to allow automakers to bring this technology safely to market, Toyota continued. There are other concepts in the guidance that will take further analysis and careful consideration, but we look forward to working with NHTSA to finalize a federal framework that is best for consumers and their safety.

Hondas (NYSE:HMC) American Honda said it welcomes NHTSAs leadership in providing federal guidance regarding on-road usage of connected and automated vehicles. Nationwide consideration of this guidance will help avoid a patchwork of differing state regulations and enable all automakers to continue rapid advancement of ongoing research in this area. Ultimately, this will bring these safety and convenience technologies to market more quickly for consumers.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry group consisting of the top car companies, said its members want to deploy autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible, and federal guidanceas opposed to regulations that are backed by lawis the appropriate path to take.

As automakers continue to pioneer these technologies in concert with hundreds of global technology partners, the Alliance urges policymakers at all levels to proceed cautiously in creating new frameworks that could delay the introduction of these technologies, the AAM said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, which is collaborating with Alphabets (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google self-driving car project, referred questions to the AAM.

Several automakers, including Ford and GM, have been testing self-driving cars on public roads in hopes of first introducing the technology in fleets of on-demand taxis in five years or so.

Silicon Valley, which includes companies like Google and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), is also heavily involved in developing the technology. Uber, the ride-hailing app, has a new fleet of self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh, albeit with a driver behind the wheel for safety. The fleet is comprised of Ford Fusion sedans equipped with GPS tracking, lasers and cameras. Ubers top rival, Lyft, formed a partnership with GM to accelerate its own efforts.

In advance of the federal governments official announcement, President Barack Obama wrote an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to pitch the regulatory measures.

Americans deserve to know theyll be safe today even as we develop and deploy the technologies of tomorrow, he said. Regulation can go too far. Government sometimes gets it wrong when it comes to rapidly changing technologies. Thats why this new policy is flexible and designed to evolve with new advances.

The anticipated actions by federal authorities were put in the spotlight following a fatal crash in Florida involving a Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Model S that was running with Teslas Autopilot function engaged. Last week, Tesla revealed details of a software update that CEO Elon Musk believes will make Autopilot safer.

Marta Tellado, president and CEO of Consumer Reports, argued that Tuesdays announcement comes with a lot of bark, but not enough bite, and that federal regulators need to go beyond guidelines that dont hold the same power as formal regulations. However, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said he expects automakers to comply with the safety guidance on their own accord.
Image source: Getty Images.

Silver Wheaton (NYSE: SLW) isn't all that appealing to income investors at the moment. Not only is its current yield less than 1%, but the company's dividend has fallen in recent years due to slumping silver and gold prices. However, with the price of precious metals spiking this year, and new cash flow streams coming online, Silver Wheaton's dividend could head meaningfully higher.

A unique dividend policy

Most mining companies have a pretty standard dividend policy. They pay a flat rate each year, increasing the payout when market conditions are favorable, and cutting it when conditions are not. For example, senior gold miner Goldcorp (NYSE: GG) adjusted its dividend policy earlier this year, shifting from monthly payouts to quarterly distributions. Further, Goldcorp reduced the annual flat rate due to weak market conditions; the company's desire was to maintain an investment-grade balance sheet by reducing its leverage while still paying a sustainable dividend. That said, in its view, a sustainable dividend is a flat rate that it can maintain throughout the precious metal price cycle.

Silver Wheaton takes a different approach. It links its dividendsto operating cash flow, with a policy of distributing 20% of the previous four quarters' operating cash flows to investors via dividends. Under that policy, the dividend fluctuates on a rolling basis.

SLW Dividends Paid (TTM) data by YCharts

While the dividend has been relatively steady (and low) over the past two years, it could be on its way up given the company's recent improvement in cash flow, and its projections for even higher cash flows in the future.

Following the money trail

As the chart below shows, Silver Wheaton's dividend has not budged for nearly two years despite a noticeable improvement in operating cash flow over the past few quarters.

Data source: Silver Wheaton.

In fact, over the trailing twelve months, Silver Wheaton generated $1.17 per share in operating cash flow, but only paid $0.20 per share in dividends, which is about $0.03 per share below the 20% target. Contrast this with the prior twelve months, when it generated $1.11 in operating cash flow and paid out $0.21 per share in dividends, which was within a penny of the 20% target. This suggests that the company has some wiggle room to increase the payout in the near term, likely by $0.01 per share on a quarterly basis.

That said, cash flow could increase substantially in the future due to rising precious metal prices. This was something CEO Randy Smallwood hinted at last quarter. He praised the performance of the company's assets during the recent volatile period for precious metals prices, while further noting that those assets position the company to "reap even more robust cash flows when commodity prices turn." In fact, he said that the company "look[s] forward to demonstrating to investors how powerful our cash flow generation can be in an environment of increasing precious metals prices."

The implication here is that Silver Wheaton could be right on the cusp of a substantial surge in operating cash flow if silver and gold prices continue rising. If that happens, the company's dividend could move sharply higher over the next year as that rising cash flow gets factored into the equation.

Investor takeaway

Based on its dividend policy, it would appear that Silver Wheaton's dividend has some near-term upside, given that it has not paid out 20% of its operating cash flow over the trailing twelve months. That said, there's a potential for even greater increases if precious metal prices improve because the company anticipates a windfall of cash flow. If that comes to pass, it could make Silver Wheaton a compelling dividend growth stock.

A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

Matt DiLallo has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of Silver Wheaton. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image source: Getty Images.

Energy Transfer Equity (NYSE: ETE) is a behemoth in the energy infrastructure space. However, as the company has grown, it has become increasingly complex, which makes it tougher for some investors to understand what it owns and how it makes money. For visual learners, the following three charts should help to demystify the complexity.

The Energy Transfer Equity family: Understanding the relationships

The best way to understand Energy Transfer Equity's corporate structure is to see the big picture of how the company and its various entities relate to each other:

Source: Energy Transfer Equity Investor Presentation.

As that chart shows, Energy Transfer Equity is in a sense the parent company to four subordinate entities: Energy Transfer LNG, Sunoco LP (NYSE: SUN), Energy Transfer Partners (NYSE: ETP), and Sunoco Logistics Partners (NYSE: SXL). That said, it has a different ownership relationship which each entity. For example, it owns 100% of Energy Transfer LNG, which is a natural gas import facility and a future LNG export facility. As a result, it directly collects 100% of the profits earned by that entity. Meanwhile, it has varying ownership interests in the three publicly traded MLPs. Moreover, one of the MLPs (Energy Transfer Partners) has ownership interests in the other two. However, what is most important to understand is that each ownership interest entitles Energy Transfer Equity to an underlying cash flow stream.

Following the money trail

This next chart shows what those various streams mean for Energy Transfer Equity's bottom line.

Source: Energy Transfer Equity investor presentation. Chart by author. Note: In millions of dollars.

That chart makes one thing abundantly clear: Energy Transfer Equity derives the bulk of its income from its ownership interest in Energy Transfer Partners, withincentive distribution rights (IDRs) providing the bulk of its earnings. In fact, through the first six months of this year, $543 million of its $846 million in revenue came from that one entity, which is 64% of the total.

At first glance, that might seem odd, given that Energy Transfer Equity has a larger ownership stake in Lake Charles LNG and owns a greater percentage of Sunoco LP's units. However, the reason Energy Transfer Partners supplies more cash flow to its parent is that it generates substantially more distributable cash flow than its fellow affiliates. Last quarter, for example, it produced $774 million in distributable cash flow, compared to $92 million at Sunoco LP and $44 million at Lake Charles. The reason its higher cash flow matters is due to the IDRs, which give the owner an increasing share of the underlying MLP's growing stream of distributable cash flow. So, because Energy Transfer Partners generates the most cash flow, it supplies its parent company with more IDRs.

The other thing that is important to understand about Energy Transfer Equity is that it collects a significant portion of the cash flow generated by its MLPs. For example, while Energy Transfer Partners produced $774 million in distributable cash flow last quarter, it distributed only $527 million to its public unitholders. It sent the rest (and then some) up to Energy Transfer Equity via four distinct revenue streams:

Source: Energy Transfer Equity investor presentation. Chart by author.

Overall, the partnership paid a net $323 million, or 38% of its total cash distributions, to the parent company. To put that into perspective, Energy Transfer Equity owns only 1% of Energy Transfer Partners' outstanding units, and yet it gets paid roughly 38% of its cash flow due primarily to those lucrative IDRs. Further, that share would have been 45% if the company did not relinquish a substantial portion of its IDRs to support Energy Transfer Partners' growth program.

Investor takeaway

Energy Transfer Equity is much more complicated than the average general partner MLP. That said, at its core, it is a holding company for ownership stakes in four other entities, with the bulk of its earnings coming from IDRs at its namesake MLP. Those IDRs are critical because they give it an outsize share of the cash flow generated by its MLPs.

A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

Matt DiLallo has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Warren Buffett, Wells Fargo's largest shareholder, tells the FOX Business Network he won't be commenting 'anywhere for now' about the bank's growing scandal.

Reached late Tuesday night in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett, who as of June owns nearly 500 million shares of the embattled financial giant, said, "If I start commenting on that or anything else, it will lead down too many paths so I will wait until November to speak about it, the election or any other subject."

Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.B) holds a near 10% stake in Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC). The Oracle of Omaha has been a longtime fan of the company but his silence may speak more loudly after Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf gave a rocky performance on Capitol Hill before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday morning.

Stumpf endured two hours of withering questioning from the bi-partisan committee who accused him of "gutless leadership." Stumpf apologized for employee behavior but stopped short of saying he would pursue the claw-back of compensation for top executives who might be involved.

Senate committee members came armed with both bank compensation information and definitions of words like "fraud" and "scheme." They specifically asked him about the bank's years-long practice of opening two million fake bank and credit card accounts and charging customers for them without their knowledge.

Employees, who risked missing out on bonuses if they didn't hit lofty sales goals, reportedly resorted to setting up the accounts to hit the aggressive goals. The bank paid a $185 million settlement to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this month after the scheme was uncovered years ago by the Los Angeles Times, but as of yet has not fired any C-suite or top echelon management over the practice.
U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday blasted steep price increases for Mylan's EpiPen emergency allergy treatment as they grilled the company's Chief Executive Heather Bresch at a congressional hearing.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called Bresch to testify after the company raised the list price for a pair of EpiPens to $600 compared with $100 in 2007, when it acquired the product.

Congressman Elijah Cummings, ranking Democrat on the committee, said Mylan "jacked up" the price of the life-saving product "to get filthy rich at the expense of our constituents."

"After Mylan takes our punches they'll fly back to their mansions in their private jets and laugh all the way to the bank," Cummings said.

The EpiPen is an automatic injector designed to treat life-threatening allergic reactions to anything from nuts to bee stings, delivering a dose of epinephrine through a quick jab in the thigh.

The price increases ignited a national controversy in August, as a growing number of families protested and said they were unable to afford the device through their health insurance.

Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah noted that Mylan said it would soon sell a generic version of EpiPen for about $300. "Suddenly feeling the heat Mylan has offered a generic version and cut the price in half, so that does beg the question what was happening with that other $300?"

Holding up an EpiPen, he said: "the actual juice that's in here that you need costs about a dollar."

The hearing comes after Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton previously called Mylan's price increases outrageous, while both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called on federal agencies to investigate Mylan's business practices. Several U.S. states are probing the impact of the price increases on government healthcare programs such as Medicaid.

Mylan has responded to the criticism by offering discounts more widely to families, and said it plans to launch a half-price version of EpiPen soon, a move Bresch said on Wednesday would cannibalize its brand-name product.

"Our concern was absolutely that anyone who needs an EpiPen has one," she said.

EpiPen has more than a 90 percent market share for emergency epinephrine auto-injectors. In 2015 it accounted for $1 billion of Mylan's overall sales of $9.45 billion. The device accounts for about 20 percent of company profits.

Critics say EpiPen would remain profitable at a lower price.

A recent analysis by the consumer watchdog Public Citizen found that an EpiPen two-pack costs $69 in the United Kingdom, $181.81 in Canada and $210.21 in Germany.

"The EpiPen clearly is profitable at prices far lower than Mylan's U.S. prices," Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. "Mylan has dramatically hiked the price simply because it could, not because it needed to recover any cost of making the product."

Bresch said during testimony that after rebates, fees and costs, the company makes about $100 per EpiPen pack.

Lawmakers are also trying to determine whether Mylan made more money on the EpiPen than warranted from state Medicaid programs by having it classified as a generic product rather than a branded drug, resulting in much smaller rebates to the government health plans.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies EpiPen as branded but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services classifies it as a generic for the purposes of Medicaid's drug rebate program.

Every company that participates in the Medicaid rebate program pays 13 percent in rebates back to the states on generic drug prices. They pay back 23 percent on the price of a branded drug. Mylan has said it complied with all laws and regulations regarding rebates.

Senate Republicans have asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General to investigate whether its agency CMS made sure states were getting the correct rebates on covering EpiPen prescriptions.

EpiPen has also increased the cost burden to the Medicare program for the elderly, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research group. Before rebates, EpiPen costs for Medicare Part D increased more than 1,000 percent between 2007 and 2014, from $7 million to $87.9 million, the report said.
South Carolina joined 20 other U.S. states in filing a lawsuit against the Labor Department on Tuesday concerning the new overtime pay rule.

The lawsuit alleges that the rule, which would allow millions of Americans to qualify for overtime pay, is unconstitutional. According to the White House, the new rule doubles the salary thresholdfrom $23,660 to $47,476 per yearunder which most salaried workers are guaranteed overtime.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson joined the FOX Business Network to explain why he opposes the overtime rule, set to go into effect on December 1, 2016.

This administration is completely circumventing the rule of law, Wilson said. Its a power grab of Article I of the Constitution. Theyre completely circumventing the will of Congress. Members of Congress who represent the states should have the ability to opine and debate these issues. This administration has completely ignored the will of the people and wants to implement policies that are going to be devastating and catastrophic for small businesses.

Wilson said small businesses across America, and their employees, will take a significant hit as a result of the administrations change in policy.

A lot of people are going to be taken off salaried positions because the business cant afford to pay them a salary time and a half beyond that certain threshold, and theyre going to be put on hourly positions, he stated.

The South Carolina AG added: This is an arbitrary and capricious act by this administration and they havent taken into account the concerns that many of the businesses around the country have been voicing. Its going to be extremely onerous for compliance costs. Its going to actually hurt the very people theyre intending to help. In South Carolina, 90% of the businesses in this state are small businesses who cant afford to comply with this unconstitutional mandate.
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Rescue trucks are cool. They use technology to save lives. And the Nissan Navara EnGuard concept is one of the coolest, most cutting-edge emergency vehicles we've seen in a long time. Revealed at the Hannover Motor Show in Germany, this capable truck has portable battery packs than can be recharged by the truck's diesel engine. The 2-kilowatt units have seven internal battery modules, similar to the ones used by the Leaf and other Nissan electric vehicles. They have seven outlets and are designed to power heavy machinery in hazardous places, like caves, where gasoline-powered tools could prove cumbersome or flammable.

The EnGuard isn't just a charge port. The truck is raised two inches, runs on snazzy neon green wheels underneath custom fenders, has LED roof lights, and a high powered winch. It runs a 2.3-liter twin-turbo diesel making 187 horsepower. Fiberglass trays hold radios, an axe, and ropes. There are also oxygen tanks and life jackets. Naturally, there's a drone, a DJI Phantom 4, that can fly to nearly 20,000 feet and relay images that are displayed on a 20.5-inch HD screen in the truck.

Nissan is using the Navara EnGuard concept to highlight its Intelligent Mobility vision, which is a company goal to develop vehicles with lower emissions and traffic fatalities. The Navara is the global version of the Frontier pickup sold in the United States, though they are engineered differently for their own markets.


Some stars of The Avengers and other top Hollywood celebs teamed up for a three-minute anti-Donald Trump video that encourages Americans to vote on Election Day.

The ad does not feature Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but it is a clear its a protest against the GOP nominee. The stars emphasize the importance of voting -- just not for Trump.

In the video, Don Cheadle asks America if they want to elect a racist, abusive coward who could permanently damage the fabric of our society.

The ad also features Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johannsson, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, James Franco, Martin Sheen and many others. The stars warn voters not to make the wrong choice, referencing Trump's past "Apprentice" catchphrase, "You're Fired."

Joss Whedon, creator director of The Avengers, released the video Wednesday.

Whedon told Buzzfeed he was able to gather his famous friends letting them know they would be participating in a PSA to help get out the vote and stop orange Muppet Hitler.

He has already shot seven videos and plans to shoot five more, all to be released before November 8th.

Whedon also launched a Save the Day PAC on his website. On the website he describes the company as a short-form digital production company dedicated to the idea that voting is a necessary and heroic act.

In 2012, Whedon released a video that said implied voting for Republican Mitt Romney would lead to a zombie apocalypse.

[Warning: The video contains some strong language.]
The local labor club recently held a volleyball fundraiser at Hubs Pub in Bonne Terre to benefit the Special Olympics.

Mineral Area Labor Club Treasurer Nate Sellinger said the volleyball tournament was strictly a fundraiser and all of the proceeds went to Special Olympics of Southeast Missouri.

My wife worked for the state school in Park Hills and was a physical education teacher there for a while, said Sellinger. She would take them to do the Special Olympics and they did it in town a couple of years ago. They dont always get enough money to do stuff like that so I thought it would be good to give to them and hopefully it will benefit that school.

Sellinger said they did the volleyball tournament and Hubs Pub Owner Brandon Hubbard had a live band that night. He added Hubbard donated all the proceeds from the door and they also did a 50/50 raffle.

The proceeds from the 50/50 raffle also went to the Special Olympics, said Sellinger. We didnt do a silent auction, but what we did do was hand out door prizes so everyone would get something. For the first time we werent sure how it was going to go, but it worked out and we hope to make this an annual event.

Seelinger said Hubbard would be more than willing to host a fundraiser for Special Olympics once each year since it did so well to help.

Carolyn Bullock with Rock Star Tattoo probably donated the most and she also put a team in the tournament, said Sellinger. She went well above and beyond anybody else. We received donations from several businesses and I want to thank everyone who helped make the event possible.

Sellinger added he went around to mainly local businesses and those who did donate were the small, locally-owned private businesses.

I felt more of a need for the local people to participate than to try and go after cooperate sponsors, said Sellinger. I think it means a little bit more coming from the smaller businesses and everyone who donated was more than willing to donate.

Special Olympics Staff Member Penny Williams was very surprised with the donations presented to her for the Special Olympics.

She said just the fact the kids get to participate and do something different is such a joy for them because they struggle each and every day.

What these guys do allow Special Olympics to do what they do, which is provide alternatives for them to be with their friends and compete just like everybody else gets opportunities to do that, said Williams. Without help from people like Nate and the school systems who allow them to come, every day would be the same.

Williams said they get to provide something different for the athletes and they are so grateful to be able to have that opportunity.

I should have brought some athletes with me, because that is where the true story lies, said Williams. For so many of them, that is their one opportunity. The public school system doesnt always allow for them to join regular school teams to be a part of things. What Special Olympics does, is include them and let them go with their friends, wear a uniform and come out to a track meet during the day.

Williams said those teachers work very hard to be sure those students get the very same opportunities.

Its because of events like this and time people like Nate gives that we are able to do this for them, said Williams. So we are extremely grateful for that.
The Hollywood power couple known as Brangelina is no more, but their joint bank accounts live on, and along with custody decisions regarding their six kids, who gets what will be one of the big questions going forward for the blockbuster celebrity split.

Angelina Jolie filed for a divorce from Brad Pitt on Monday citing irreconcilable differences. The Hollywood A-listers have a fortune of around $400 million and shared real estate in Los Feliz, Santa Barbara, New Orleans and the winery Chateau Miraval in France.

Los Angeles based family law attorney, Lynda Sheridan told FOX411 that while the couple has been together for 12 years, their two-year marriage was relatively short in the eyes of the court.

I understand their marriage is only two years. Spousal support is not being sought and even if it were the length of the marriage is so short it's a non-issue, Sheridan said. Their jointly owned, that means both parties are on title properties will be divided equally, except to the extent either of them makes a claim for reimbursement of separate monies used to acquire said properties.

Sheridan added who gets what property depends when each property was purchased.

Keep in mind most of these properties were probably acquired before marriage, so only if both parties are on title do I believe there will be contentions of joint ownership, she said. The Community property presumption applies to assets and property acquired during marriage.

New York-based Steven Rabinowitz, a partner in Pryor Cashmans Litigation, Family Law and Labor + Employment Groups, explained what happens should the stars not have pre-nup.

Generally speaking, in the absence of a pre-nup, assets acquired during a marriage are split 50-50, he said. Assets acquired before the marriage typically remain each spouse's separate property unless those assets were comingled with marital assets or were converted to marital assets (such as by changing the title on the asset from separate to joint).

Court documents filed by Jolie stipulated that community and quasi community property would be determined.

Sheridan advised that Jolie and Pitt should resolve the division of assets in private arbitration away from the publics prying eyes.

If they're smart, the case will be resolved through a private judge so that their laundry isn't fully aired out, she said. They can afford that and that's what they should do.


Angelina Jolie's father, Jon Voight, seems just as shocked as the rest of the world upon hearing that the actress filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after two years of marriage.

"It must have been pretty severe for this to happen," Voight tells ET. "I don't know much yet, but [I] plan on speaking to her and the kids very soon."

WATCH: Brad Pitt Talks Marriage and Children -- 'Angie and I Were Aiming for a Dozen' Kids

The 77-year-old actor adds that he will be there to support Jolie and his six grandchildren as he's been doing.

On Monday, Jolie filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences, and lists the separation date as Sept. 15, 2016, according to court documents obtained by ET. The 41-year-old actress is asking for physical custody of their six children -- Maddox, 15, Pax, 12, Shiloh, 10, Zahara, 11, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 8.

EXCLUSIVE: Brad Pitt on Working With Angelina Jolie -- 'She Knows When I'm Faking It Better Than Anyone Else'

An attorney for Jolie, Robert Offer, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the decision was made "for the health of the family."

Voight, 77,did not attend his daughter's wedding back in August 2014, but did issue a statement after news broke of her very private nuptials in France. "It seems like it was a beautiful simple ceremony with all the kids involved," he said at the time. "Must have been a lot of fun. I am very happy for them."

MORE: Angelina Jolie Reveals Her Kids Think She and Brad Pitt Are 'Dorky Mom and Dad'

He's also gushed over Pitt to ET in June 2013 after Jolie spoke out about her decision to have a double mastectomy to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer. "You want your children to be surrounded by love and I like Brad very much," he said.

Jolie and Pitt, 52, met in 2005 while on set of their film "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston. The last sighting of the two together was in July, when Pitt and Jolie took their twins out for a birthday breakfast at the Griddle Cafe in West Hollywood, California.
The family of JonBenet Ramsey has threatened to sue CBS over "The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey" for suggesting the beauty queen's brother was her killer.

A lawyer for the Ramsey family told Reuters the documentary is riddled with "lies, misrepresentations, distortions and omissions."

"I will be filing a lawsuit on behalf of Burke Ramsey," L. Lin Wood told Reuters in a statement. "CBS' false and unprofessional attacks on this young man are disgusting and revolting."

CBS responded telling Reuters they stand "by the broadcast and will do so in court."

Burke Ramsey was 9 when his 6-year-old sister JonBenet was found dead in the basement of the family's Boulder, Colorado, home on Dec. 26, 1996. Public suspicion immediately focused on the girl's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, and Burke.

In 2008, the three were officially cleared by prosecutors who said that DNA found on the girl's underwear didn't match anyone in the family.

Burke Ramsey, who's now 29, says in an interview on "Dr. Phil" broadcast Monday that the crush of attention was "a chaotic nightmare" and turned him into "a very private person."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Federal health officials are asking the public for mobile app designs that would help connect opioid abusers to carriers of the prescription drug naloxone, which can help reverse overdose. In 2014, 2 million Americans were dependent on opioids and 28,000 died of opioid overdose, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the 2016 Naloxone App Competition on Monday to recruit computer programmers, public health advocates, clinical researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators from all disciplines to create apps that would aid in the nationwide opioid abuse epidemic, according to a news release.

With a dramatic increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths in the U.S., theres a vital need to harness the power of new technologies to quickly and effectively link individuals experiencing an overdose or a bystander such as a friend or family member with someone who carries and can administer the life-saving medication, said FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf. Through this competition, we are tapping public health-focused innovators to help bring technological solutions to a real-world problem that is costing the U.S. thousands of lives each year.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, naloxone accessibility nearly tripled between 2010 and 2014, but individuals and their loved ones may not always have the life-saving drug on hand or know where to get it in the event of an overdose.

The goal of this competition is to develop a low-cost, scalable, crowd-sourced mobile application that addresses this issue of accessibility, Dr. Peter Lurie, associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis at the FDA, said in the release. Mobile phone applications have been developed to educate laypersons on how to recognize an overdose and administer naloxone, and to connect bystanders with individuals in need of other medical services, such as CPR. To date, however, no application is available to connect carriers of naloxone with nearby opioid overdose victims.

The competition is part of the FDAs Opioids action Plan and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Opioid Initiative.

Registration for the competition ends Friday, Oct. 7. For more information, visit FDA.gov.
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One-year-old Pookie the Bullie used to have to do a bunny hop to move around, but now, thanks to custom technology, she can waddle around like any other bulldog.

Fox 5 Atlanta reported that the Georgia English Bulldog Rescue helped outfit the pup, who was born with elbow and shoulder deformities, with prosthetic blades that strap around her front legs and work like tires with thick treads. The prosthetics lift her legs and help her step. Before, she used to hop like a bunny to move around, Cara Hergenroether, Pookies foster mom, told the news station.

The first time Pookie tried walking with the blades, she fell on her face. But the next day, she was on the move. The $1,500 blades are just for practice once shes comfortable using them, shell get a 3-D printed version for permanent use, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

"I think she'll be able to live her life like a more normal dog, Hergenroether told the news station.
President John F. Kennedy understood that sharing art and culture brought people together, broke down barriers and established a connection that transcended policies and politics. It could go a long way toward improving relations with people in foreign countries.

In 1963, the Kennedy administration founded the Arts in the Embassies program, a public/private partnership between the U.S. State Department and more than 20,000 partners from museums, galleries, collectors and others that enabled more than 4,000 artists to share and show their art in U.S. embassies around the world. Every president and secretary of state has embraced this program since. It has become an important part of American foreign policy.

Having served as the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Hungary from 2001-2003 and as chief of protocol for the U.S. from 2007-2009, I can attest to the programs success. I have learned the power of using the arts as a tool of diplomacy.

When I arrived in Hungary shortly after the September 11 attacks, our embassy was advised that enhanced security and safety concerns would delay approvals to get American art. So instead of waiting to decorate the ambassadors residence with American art, I invited artists from Budapest to loan their art to adorn the walls. That gesture created a bond between the art community and the U.S., and it went a long way toward gaining the appreciation of the Hungarian government.

I quickly became an admirer of Hungarian art, and with the help of local experts and advisers, I began purchasing artists works for my personal enjoyment and collection.

My interest in the art and culture of Hungary heightened my understanding of the Hungarian people and their government, and it helped me carry out my official responsibilities. I knew where they were coming from, and I had great success working with the Hungarian government to accomplish Americas goals. We established better security cooperation; we resolved commerce transparency issues; and we established the first conference on human trafficking and the exploitation of workers, which was attended by neighboring Balkan States.

Today, my Hungarian art collection spans more than a century, from just before the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the present. One of the largest art collections outside of Hungary, it includes the works of the acknowledged masters of Hungarian modernism, as well as artists of more modest reputations who never would have gotten the recognition they deserve if I had not been able to share their works with museums in the U.S. that have shown my collection.

Although I am no longer the ambassador to Hungary, my work to educate the American people about Hungarian art and culture continues. I am pleased that my art collection will be exhibited from Oct. 18 to Jan. 8 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.

If you want to know a people, you need to take the time to learn about who they are and where they came from, their hopes and aspirations, their art and culture.

The world would be a more peaceful place if we took the time to understand one another, and art and culture are good places to start. That is the art of diplomacy.
A North Carolina history teacher is facing a firestorm of controversy after he allegedly stomped on an American Flag inside a public school classroom.

The incident happened Monday at Massey Hill Classical high School in Fayetteville  home to Fort Bragg and one of the most patriotic communities in the nation.

Click here to join Todds American Dispatch: a free must-read for Conservatives!

What that teacher did was a gut punch to all the military kids at that school, one outraged parent told me. More so to the ones with deployed parents and unforgivably so to Gold Star kids who lost a parent who fought under that flag. It is indefensible.

A spokesperson for Cumberland County Superintendent Frank Till Jr. told me they are investigating the allegations and will not comment until the probe is completed. The spokesperson could not say if the teacher has been removed from the classroom.

Read more at ToddStarnes.com
Hillary Clinton and her fellow progressives shout things like "Health care is a right!" They've also said that education, decent housing and child care are "rights."

The U.N. goes further. Its bureaucrats declared that every person has a "right" to rest and leisure, food, clothing, housing, "necessary" social services, free education, periodic holidays with pay and protection from unemployment.

Wow. I guess Abe Lincoln, Thomas Edison and Mark Zuckerberg were denied basic human rights.

Clinton and the U.N. busybodies are wrong. Health care, housing and food are not "rights." They are "gifts" bestowed by politicians. These "gifts" violate other people's rights because politicians take from people to give to favored groups.

When America's founders talked about rights, they had something else in mind.

In the Bill of Rights, each right is a right to not be meddled with, a right to be free from government -- the right not to have your speech abridged, your religion banned, your guns taken or your property searched without a warrant.

The founders were tired of kings and dictators bossing them around. In their new country, they wanted to vote for presidents and other officials. But they also knew that over time even elected officials lust for more power. So they wanted clear limits on what those officials could do.

They created three branches of government -- to check each other.

"Gridlock is a feature, not a bug," says Ilya Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the Cato Institute's Supreme Court Review journal. "The founding system was not to make government more efficient. It was meant to pass policies that have large agreement that's sustained across time."

Because presidents think Congress is failing when it doesn't pass legislation they like, they nominate Supreme Court justices who may give them leeway. Franklin Roosevelt tried to increase the size of the Court to squeeze in more justices who supported his programs. George W. Bush nominated his own White House Counsel.

The media call President Obama's current nominee, Merrick Garland, "a centrist." But he is "centrist" only in that he sides with Democrats who want to ban guns and Republicans who want government left free to do most anything in Guantanamo Bay. Garland repeatedly supports increased government power -- and fewer checks.

Shapiro went to Chicago Law School when Obama was a professor there. He says Obama understands the limits the Constitution places on presidents but ignores them. He ignores them so often that the Supreme Court has overruled Obama unanimously more often than any modern president.

When Congress rejected Obama's immigration plan, he just imposed it via executive order. The Supreme Court overturned that, but the final vote blocking it was close, 4-4. But what will the next court do?

I hope Hillary Clinton doesn't get to replace Justice Scalia because she sounds a lot like President Obama. On her website, she says things like, "If Congress won't act, I will ask the Treasury Department ... to use its regulatory authority!"

Donald Trump is no better. He says he'll impose the death penalty on anyone who kills a cop.

"But the executive has no say over that," points out Shapiro.

Presidents cannot pass laws. They execute laws passed by Congress. Congress is supposed to reject legislation it doesn't like. That's its job. Most legislation is bad.

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson understands that. The Libertarian presidential candidate promises to only appoint judges who will ask whether any power or program proposed by the government can be found in the Constitution.

One judge he mentions as a possible Supreme Court pick is my fellow Fox commentator, Judge Andrew Napolitano.

"I'm flattered by that," says Napolitano. "Johnson would clearly choose a small government, maximum individual-freedom court."

Gary Johnson understands that the Constitution keeps us free by restraining government.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, like many politicians, treat the Constitution as an annoying obstacle.

It is an obstacle to their plans. Good.

But I worry. The current court is not young. Our next president may get to choose five new justices.
Some 15 long years after the horrors of 9/11, much of America remains trapped in a 9/10 mindset. The latest evidence involves the alleged bomber who wreaked havoc in New York and New Jersey last weekend.

The blood ran when the Chelsea blast injured 29 people, but now come reports that make the blood boil: The feds failed to connect the dots that might have prevented the weekend from hell.

The reports reveal several critical facts, starting with the most important: The father of alleged bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami called law enforcement authorities in 2014 and said his son was a terrorist.

The New Jersey police turned the information over to the FBI, and agents interviewed the father, the New York Times reports. But when the father recanted his charge, the bureau apparently closed the case.

Yet we now know that Rahami had visited Pakistan and Afghanistan several times for extended periods before and after 2014. One trip lasted for 13 months, CNN reports, and another involved a stay in Quetta, Pakistan, a notorious hotbed of the Taliban and other terror groups that is so dangerous, the Pakistan army avoids it.

To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
You may recognize my name. Ive been in the news recently because I was one of the three prisoners with dual US-Iranian citizenship that Iran released in January. This week I was scheduled to testify to a congressional committee but my testimony was cancelled.

I was set free the same day that the Obama administration paid the Iranian government $400 million dollars in cash.

Heres how it happened:

I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1980, and grew up in a devout Shia Muslim home.

I knew some people involved in the process legitimately cared about me, but I also know the truth. I am not free because I am a U.S. citizen. I am free because I was useful for negotiations. And only for a brief moment in time. If I hadn't been useful I would still be there.

When I was 14 years old, Hezbollah  the Iranian terrorist militia  recruited me. They said I was one of the best and the brightest of young Iranians and they had big plans to groom me as a jihadi warrior, fighting Irans enemies.

At first I was dazzled by this golden opportunity, but didnt take long to figure out that the mullahs who were in charge were not especially pure and righteous.

More and more I asked myself, Is this really Islam?

A few years later, I left Islam altogether. In 2000, I converted to Christianity and gained a wonderful new life.

But it was a dangerous decision.

Even more dangerous was my preaching. But, I was determined to serve God and not man.

Then, on September 26, 2012, I was arrested and locked up in Irans notorious Evin Prison.

The cruelty of Irans prison system is notorious. They violate the human rights of those imprisoned for sport. I was severely beaten during interrogations, kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time, lied to, threatened, and frequently abused. On one occasion, I suffered life-threatening internal injuries. This continued for 3 and a half years. I am a U.S. citizen.

Then, on January 16, 2016, a prison guard roughly awakened me.

Now what?

I had been through so much violence and deception that I didnt know what to expect.

I prayed and tried to calm myself, but remained uneasy, even when I was told that I was to be released and flown to America.

Soon two other American prisoners and I were driven from Evin Prison to Mehrabad Airport.

The plane and the pilot and everybody else is ready, one of my former interrogators told me. Youre going to be free.

But it didnt happen that way. At the airport, we waited while an Iranian intelligence officer talked on a cellphone just beyond our hearing.

Something has gone wrong, he reported after he hung up, and you cant leave yet.

Instead, the three of us were led into a closed room  no windows, no way out, no further information. We guessed that the Iranian authorities were playing psychological games with us. Again. It was one of their favorite tactics.

After many hours, we heard the latest spin: Our plane couldnt take off until another aircraft had arrived.

Something was also said about money changing hands.

At the time I didnt believe it  I thought America would never give Iran money. As much as I was concerned for my own well being, I knew the mullahs. I knew they would use that money to torture thousands more people, maybe hundreds of thousands. They would use it to boost their power on the backs of the millions of Iranians who are good people and who want freedom.

I wanted to be free so badly, but I didnt want my freedom to cause more death and more torture.

In the end, it wasnt my decision.

We tried to sleep as we awaited our release, increasingly unsure what the next day would bring.

Finally, after 20 hours we were led to a plane. We buckled ourselves in and I breathed a sigh of relief when the aircraft finally left the ground.

Only months later did I learn about the $400 million in cash that was loaded on the other airplane.

Thats why Im speaking out now.

I knew some people involved in the process legitimately cared about me, but I also know the truth. I am not free because I am a US Citizen. I am free because I was useful for negotiations. And only for a brief moment in time. If I hadn't been useful I would still be there.

During the 3 and a half years of my imprisonment, there was no income for my family. When I returned to America, I was virtually homeless. My wife, my family and I were victims of unbelievable trauma. We are still suffering because of it in countless, painful ways.

Yet I was informed when our flight from Iran landed in Germany that I would have to buy my own plane ticket back to the US. They didnt even intend on helping me get home. Without the kindness of friends like the Rev. Franklin Graham, I would have been stranded in Germany. In spite of all I had experienced, I felt completely dispensable.

How could so many people go to such great lengths, including a airplane full of $400 million in cash, and yet a plane ticket home for me was, as I was told, not in the budget.

I love America and am proud and honored to be an American citizen. I am so grateful for all those who advocated for my release: pastors and church-goers, Democrats and Republicans.

But it is clear to me that I was a bargaining chip in a much larger political game. And once that process was over, well, I nearly had to buy my own plane ticket home.

Today I am deeply thankful to God and the United States that Im free. Please, do not read an ounce of ingratitude in this.

But as a Christian, I was willing to die for my faith.

Now for the rest of my life I will wonder if my freedom has made it financially possible for Iran to abuse and imprison countless others  those like me who reject their radical theology and dictatorial oppression.

If thats the case, I pray I can make up for it with my own courage and commitment. The Iranian regime is the single greatest financier of terrorism in the world and the foremost abuser of human rights. They kill innocent people for fun. Ive seen it with my own eyes. Now they can kill with some American money.

For the rest of my life I will stand against the Iranian regime, and for the rest of my life I will oppose anyone who enables their evil.

Thats what I would have told Congress this week if I had the chance.
It was a night of terror in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A rioting mob shut down Interstate 85 -- attacking terrified motorists.

One female truck driver cried as she told a reporter that her cargo was being set on fire.

Looters pillaged and plundered a Walmart.

More than a dozen police officers were injured -- along with civilians and at least three reporters.

To continue reading Todd Starnes column, click here.
Next weeks presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could determine the outcome of the election. As polls show Trump leading in some swing states and closing the gap in others, it appears the only burden he must overcome is the one Ronald Reagan shared, looking presidential enough that voters trust him with so much power.

The way these debates have usually gone in the past is that the Republican candidate is asked about abortion, gay rights and other social issues and the Democratic candidate is asked about subjects that appeal to a wider range of voters.

Lester Holt, the NBC Nightly News anchor, will moderate the first debate. Here are some questions he should ask:

For Clinton: You once supported traditional marriage, but now favor same-sex marriage. Polygamists now want to be next in line to receive legal and cultural approval. Do you oppose polygamy, and if so on what basis? If elected president, how would we know you wouldnt change your mind on this issue?

Follow-up: What is your standard for defining right from wrong?

For Trump: You were pro-choice, you said, until you heard about a baby that was going to be aborted, but wasnt. You called the child a total superstar. Do you have a utilitarian view of human life  that a baby is only valuable if it grows up to be a superstar  or is every life valuable?

For Clinton: You said you would have a bunch of litmus tests for Supreme Court nominees, including requiring potential nominees to have a commitment to preserving a womans right to an abortion. Would you overlook qualified candidates because they oppose abortion?

For both candidates: North Korea is developing nuclear weapons that will fit on top of missiles capable of reaching the U.S. Would you authorize a missile defense system able to shoot down North Korean missiles, despite Chinas opposition to such a system?

Also for Clinton: You appear to have an interventionist foreign policy record. What is your standard for sending American forces into battle, especially in the Middle East where nothing ever seems to get resolved?

Follow-up: In one of your emails you praise Sidney Blumenthals son, Max, for his virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments, favoring the dismantling of the State of Israel. Since Israels enemies have also vowed to destroy the only democracy in the Middle East and one of the United States few allies in the region, as president, would you support the Jewish state or demand that it give up more land to Palestinians when the land it has already relinquished has brought it no closer to peace?

For Trump: Many voters are worried about your praise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who routinely behaves like the KGB agent he once was. Putin has invaded and occupied territories, censored the news and been accused of murdering his opposition. Why do you admire his leadership? Should you become president, what do you think your public praise of Putin will accomplish that will be in Americas interests?

Follow-up: Under what circumstances would you use military force against Russia or our enemies in the Middle East?

For both candidates: North Korea is developing nuclear weapons that will fit on top of missiles capable of reaching the U.S. Would you authorize a missile defense system able to shoot down North Korean missiles, despite Chinas opposition to such a system?

For Clinton: The federal government took in record amounts of tax money in 2015  $3.18 trillion  but the debt is approaching $20 trillion, and you want to spend more. Why wont you propose cutting programs that arent working?

For Trump: What agencies and programs would you eliminate or reform?

Public interest for the debates will be at Super Bowl level. These and similar questions would produce the information undecided voters need to cast their votes wisely.

The future of this country hangs in the balance.
The Weekly Standards Steve Hayes said Tuesday on Special Report with Bret Baier" that President Obama's last speech to the U.N. General Assembly could have been shorter because "he doesn't have that much to celebrate."

"What struck me, as I listened to the speech, it sounded almost like professorial," Hayes said. "This was Barack Obama, the university professor and he gave a speech that was filled with the kind of buzz words that might have impressed undergraduates about international relations but really bore very little resemblance to the kinds of things we are seeing on the ground unfold today."

Hayes said the president sounded like he was giving a "valedictory victory lap" and added that it was the president's inaction that led to the atrocities in Syria. "He did nothing," he said.

Obama said that the United States and other world powers have limited ability to solve the most profound challenges facing the world.

Hayes, however, claims it was the president's job to prevent atrocities from being committed.

"He's talked about Syria, he laments the fact that nothing was done to prevent the slaughter in Syria, who's the leader of the free world?" he said.

"This is the guy who gave the speech defending his Libya policy, his decision to go into Libya, so the United States occupies a special role to prevent such atrocities and he did nothing," Hayes added.
Donald Trump narrowly leads Hillary Clinton in the battleground states of Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.

Thats according to Fox News statewide likely voter polls conducted Sunday through Tuesday evenings.

Trump is helped by strong support from working-class white voters, while Clinton is hurt by a lackluster performance among younger voters and women.

In each state, Trumps advantage is within the margin of sampling error. Heres how the numbers breakdown state-by-state:

Nevada

Trump has a three-point advantage over Clinton among likely voters in the Silver State (43-40 percent). Libertarian Gary Johnson receives eight percent. Nevada voters also can cast a ballot for none of these, and that option takes four percent. Green Party candidate Jill Stein is not on the ballot in Nevada.

Independents back Trump (42 percent) over Clinton (23 percent) and Johnson (21 percent).

The Democrat is trailing expectations among women and younger voters.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEVADA POLL RESULTS

Those under age 45 are almost equally likely to back Clinton (42 percent) as they are to back Trump (39 percent) -- and Johnson garners double-digit support (11 percent).

Women in Nevada backed Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 16-point margin in 2012, according to the Fox News Exit Poll. Clintons up by just six points.

Both Clinton and Trump supporters have a high degree of vote certainty (93 percent each).

There is a huge geographic disparity in Nevada, notes Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who conducts the Fox News Poll with Republican Daron Shaw. Clinton is ahead in Vegas and urban areas, while Trump leads outside Vegas and in rural areas -- this is an obvious advantage for Clinton in get-out-the-vote efforts.

The race is mostly unchanged in a head-to-head matchup without Johnson: Trump 46 vs. Clinton 42 percent.

Views of President Obamas job performance are divided: 49 percent approve, while 48 percent disapprove. He won Nevada in both 2012 (by 6.7 points) and 2008 (by 12.5 points).

North Carolina

In North Carolina, Trump is up by five points among likely voters. He receives 45 percent to Clintons 40 percent, and 6 percent favor Johnson. Stein is not on the ballot.

Whites back Trump by a 31-point margin (58-27 percent), while blacks support Clinton by 82 points (85-3 percent).

Independents favor Trump (41 percent) over Clinton (24 percent) and Johnson (14 percent).

And while voters under age 45 prefer Clinton by 46-32, Johnson gets 11 percent of them.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE NORTH CAROLINA POLL RESULTS

Ninety-five percent of Trump supporters and 90 percent of Clinton backers feel certain of their vote choice.

In the two-way ballot, Trumps also up five (47-42 percent).

North Carolina was red in 2012 (Romney by two points) and blue in 2008 (Obama by less than one point). By a 50-46 percent margin, more voters disapprove than approve of Obama today.

Ohio

The Buckeye State is another must-win for Trump, and the poll finds him up by five points among likely voters: 42-37 percent. Johnson receives six percent and Stein gets two percent.

Trumps edge over Clinton comes mainly from independents (+20 points) and working-class whites (+26). Clintons up by just three points among women. Obama won them by 11 in 2012.

Most of Clintons (89 percent) and Trumps supporters (88 percent) are certain they will back their candidate.

Clintons mistakes on the campaign trail have driven many disaffected Republicans into Trumps camp, says Shaw. Just as consequential is the fact Trump is ahead of Clinton among independents by 17-20 points in these states. If that holds, he might actually pull this off.

Meanwhile, by a 58-30 percent margin, voters approve of the job Republican John Kasich is doing as governor. Among those who approve, 45 percent support Trump, 33 percent back Clinton, and 7 percent Johnson.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE OHIO POLL RESULTS

Without third-party candidates in the mix, its Trump over Clinton by 45-40 percent.

Currently, 47 percent of voters approve of the job Obama is doing, while 48 percent disapprove. He won Ohio in both 2012 (by three points) and 2008 (by almost five points).

Trump has been much more disciplined in his comments recently and is almost certainly benefiting from keeping his attacks focused on Clinton as opposed to other Republicans or Gold Star families, says Anderson.

Meanwhile, Clinton trails Trump by two points among voters living in union households. That voting bloc went for Obama over Romney by 23 points in 2012.

Senate Races

The polls, released Wednesday, also ask about the senate races in these key states, and find the races within the margin of error in Nevada and North Carolina, while Republican Rob Portman holds a double-digit lead in Ohio. In each state, the GOP senate candidate fares slightly better than Trump.

Theres good news for Republicans in Nevada, where they hope to pick up the seat of the retiring Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid. Joe Heck leads his Democratic opponent Catherine Cortez Masto by seven points: 43-36 percent. Independent American Party candidate Tom Jones trails with 6 percent and none of these gets 5 percent.

In North Carolina, incumbent Sen. Richard Burr bests Democratic challenger Deborah Ross by 43-37 percent, with Libertarian Sean Haugh at 6 percent.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman holds a 14-point lead over Democrat Ted Strickland: 51-37 percent. The incumbent senator tops the former governor by 28 points among independents. Portman also garners the support of most Republicans (88 percent), as well as 15 percent of Democrats. He won the seat in 2010 with 57 percent of the vote.

Winning the four-to-five seats needed to regain control of the senate becomes a tricky proposition for the Democrats if the GOP gains the Reid seat and Burr holds on, notes Shaw. The Democrats have to win their tight races in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and even that might not be enough.

Theres also a gubernatorial race in North Carolina. Republican incumbent Pat McCrory tops Democrat Roy Cooper by 46-43 percent. Libertarian Lon Cecil receives 3 percent.

The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R). The polls were conducted September 18-20, 2016, by telephone (landline and cellphone) with live interviewers among a sample of likely voters selected from statewide voter files in Nevada (704), North Carolina (734), and Ohio (737). Bilingual interviewers were used in Nevada. In all three states the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for the total sample of likely voters.
Despite public outcry and sharp questions from lawmakers, the head of Mylan Inc. - the maker of the EpiPen - defended her companys massive price hike for the life-saving allergy medication by claiming it offers rebates and discounts to customers.

"Price and access exist in a balance, and we believe we have struck that balance," CEO Heather Bresch said in her opening statement before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday.

The price of EpiPens has grown to $608 for a two-pack, an increase of more than 500 percent since 2007.

Bresch downplayed the profits and said the company only makes about $100 on each two-pack of the auto-injectors it sells for $608.

"The misconception about our profits is understandable, and at least partly due to the complex environment in which pharmaceutical prices are determined," Bresch said. "The pricing of a pharmaceutical product is opaque and frustrating, especially for patients."

House Oversight chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said families struggling to pay for the emergency allergy shots had the right to be outraged by the rapid rise in cost from a company whose sales are in excess of $11 billion.

The panel's top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, also blasted Mylan -- accusing the company of raising prices to get filthy rich at the expense of our constituents.

Bresch, who sat emotionless while lawmakers condemned Mylan and other big pharma companies for engaging in greedy business practices, said she wishes Mylan had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising prices for some families.

"We never intended this," she said.

Bresch said the company has made strides to more widely distribute the drug to schools and others.

EpiPens are used in emergencies to stop anaphylaxis, the potentially fatal allergic reactions to insect bites and stings and foods like nuts and eggs. People usually keep multiple EpiPens handy at home, school or work, but the syringes, prefilled with the hormone epinephrine, expire after a year.

"We don't want to go back to a time -- not that long ago -- when awareness of anaphylaxis was much lower and epinephrine auto injectors were only available in schools with a prescription for an individual child," she said. "Achieving this level of expansion of awareness requires significant investment."

Bresch has some familiarity with Capitol Hill -- she is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. But lawmakers so far haven't cut her any slack because she is related to a colleague. Several other committees also have called for investigations into the matter.

Bresch said the company has confronted the EpiPen issue head on by announcing the first ever generic version of the EpiPen product, which will be priced at $300.

This unprecedented move is the fastest and most direct way to reduce the price for all patients, she said.

Bresch also said the company is creating a direct ship option which will allow customers to purchase the generic product directly from Mylan for $300. She added Mylan also doubled the eligibility of patients receiving free pens from $48,600 to $97,200 for a family of four.

Critics have said the coupons, discount cards and patient assistance programs aren't real solutions because many customers won't use them or won't qualify for them.

In the Senate, leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' investigations subcommittee said earlier this month that they have begun an inquiry into the company's pricing and competition practices. The Senate Aging Committee requested briefings on the issue, and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has written several letters to Mylan demanding answers.

Fox News' Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The surge of unaccompanied children pouring across the Mexico border has spiked in recent months, putting the kids in danger and jeopardizing the safety of U.S. citizens, a powerful lawmaker told the Department of Homeland Security in a blistering letter earlier this week.

The Obama administration is not taking the matter of shocking and alarming increases in the number of children flooding in seriously, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., wrote in the letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson. The lawmaker said the crisis has only worsened since it gained national prominence two years ago, with nearly 6,000 unaccompanied children and more than 9,000 families from Central America apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol last month, Johnson, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said.

Over the last several years, the United States has experienced a surge of illegal immigrants entering the country through our porous southwest border, Johnson wrote in the September 20 letter. Since 2014, over 100,000 unaccompanied children and a similar number of family units have arrived at our border. I am concerned the surge appears to be spiking in recent months, with the number of people apprehended doubling and even tripling from the same months in previous years.

Department of Homeland Security statistics show that in July, its U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency apprehended 5,068 unaccompanied children, compared with 4,182 in 2015, a 21 percent increase, and they took in 7,574 families this year compared with 4,503 families in 2015, a 68 percent increase.

This current flood of illegal Central American migrants making the perilous journey to America is on par with the inundation Border Patrol contended with in 2014, Johnson said. But the Obama administration is not taking the current emergency seriously, Johnson added.

As a result, many children sent by their families to cross the border alone and make their way in the United States are finding themselves in treacherous predicaments, Johnson said.

Specifically, unaccompanied children have been forced to work in unsafe conditions, miss school and become the victims of sexual predators after being dispersed by the U.S. government throughout the country, Johnson said.

The reason the illegal immigrant apprehension numbers from Central America are going up: They know they are not getting detained, or removed and that is encouragement for them to keep coming, said Claude Arnold is a retired U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations.

When we dont detain people, and dont remove people, it encourages more people to come, Arnold said. It does not take long to get back to populations inclined to cross illegally into the U.S. that this is happening.

The spike in new illegal arrivals from Central America alarming, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Washington-DC based Center on Immigration Studies, and can create a host of problems for Americans.

Unfortunately it is not working out well in the American communities where they are resettled, which have had to cope with the social and public safety strains that have resulted, particularly in the schools, Vaughan said.

Most concerning, Vaughan said, is that law enforcement agencies have noted a significant increase in violent gang crime activity that is in many cases attributable to gang members allowed in as part of this influx.

Further, the administrations emphasis on speed in processing the unaccompanied children, as opposed to taking care to make sure the kids are placed in an appropriate and safe environment, has resulted in a litany of child abuse and trafficking cases, Vaughan said.

"The Obama administrations handling of this phenomenon has been disastrous for some of the migrants, and most definitely problematic and costly for the communities where they have been resettled, Vaughan said.

DHS could not immediately be reached for comment, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security director has been asked to provide Johnsons committee with the most recent Southwest Border Threat Assessment, all DHS policies, memorandums and directives related to the release of apprehension data, and a plan to address the worsening crisis at the U.S. border by Sept. 26.
It was inevitable, once that bomb exploded in lower Manhattan, that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would be engaged in a war of words over terrorism.

The medias conventional wisdom is that terror attacks help Trump, given his tough rhetoric about immigration and bombing the blank out of ISIS. That was certainly true in the primaries. But now hes up against a former secretary of State who is more hawkish than many in her party.

The press has been quick to jump on Trump for his language, such as when he called Clinton, and Barack Obama, a founder of ISIS. That is literally untrue, of course, and Trump was using it as provocative shorthand for the argument that their policies enabled the rise of ISIS.

But now Clinton, in the wake of the bombs in New York and New Jersey, says that Trumps language is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries. She also described Trump as a recruiting sergeant for ISIS.

Aid and comfort? Is that over the line? Its right there in the Constitution: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Indeed, the Trump campaign fired back in saying that the Democratic nominee had accused him of treason.

So did the mainstream media question Clintons overheated language? Not really. It was reported matter-of-factly. Now imagine if those words had been uttered by Trump.

The GOP nominee, for his part, said the latest attacks show we need a new playbook and dramatize how the Clinton/Obama policies have failed. These attacks and many others were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system, which fails to properly vet and screen the individuals or families coming into our country, he said.

Trump also said: Her weakness, her ineffectiveness, caused the problem, and now she wants to be president. I dont think so.

Trumps answer, in part: profiling.

Bill OReilly asked him: Are you worried that sometimes when you say these things like peaceful Muslims will be the victim of backlash, the victim of people just lumping everybody into the terror jar?

Well, first of all, Trump responded, I never said that they were Muslims. You did. You told me Muslims. I didn't say that. I am saying, you go into profile, people that maybe look suspicious. I didn't say they were Muslims.

Asked by OReilly how they look suspicious, Trump said: I don't know. These are experts. That's what they do.

Trump created a firestorm during the primaries by pushing a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants. He has since modified that to say the U.S. must engage in extreme vetting from countries where terrorism is a problem.

CNN, reporting on the Fox interview, ran this on-air banner: Trump Says Racial Profiling Will Stop Terror. But Trump never used the word racial. We can debate whether thats the net effect of his proposal, but CNN inserted an inaccurate word into that headline.

Clinton says that ISIS is looking to make this into a war against Islam because that makes it easier to recruit new terrorists. Its also a fact that most of the recent attacks have been carried out by Muslim extremists in the name of Allah. And thats the conundrum.

The Washington Posts Chris Cillizza is among those who see the current climate favoring Trump: When Jeb Bush famously described Trump as the chaos candidate in late 2015, the former Florida governor meant it as a pejorative. But the truth is that chaos, uncertainty and anxiety will work in Trump's favor over the final 50 days of the presidential campaign.



Salon pushes back on that: Its worth pointing out first that the chaos Cillizza has described seems to be a creation of cable news; all those injured except but one person were not seriously harmed by the incidents, the authorities clamped down on the suspect with incredible speed, and New Yorkers are apparently taking the whole thing in stride.



True, no one was killed in these latest bombings, or in the Minnesota knifing attack, but that may have been pure luck. Such attacks, in the wake of Orlando and San Bernardino, foster a sense of fear and uncertainty, that you could become a victim just by walking down the street in Chelsea or shopping at a mall in St. Cloud. And that sense could help a challenger who is vowing to shake things up--though we've never seen a race like this before.
The state of Texas on Wednesday announced that it is withdrawing from the Obama administrations refugee resettlement program due to the administrations inability to ensure that refugees resettled in the state do not pose terror threats, according to an announcement by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

Texas informed the Office of Refugee Resettlement in a letter that it will be withdrawing from the program on Jan. 31, 2017. The letter comes on the heels of several weekend terror attacks across the United States

The administration has refused to approve a security plan by the state of Texas aimed at ensuring that refugees are only resettled following in-depth security checks.

Texas officials drafted a plan that would require federal national security officials to provide assurances that none of the individuals being resettled pose a terror threat. The administration has declined to approve this plan.

Abbott said Texas would not accept a single refuge until proper security measures are put in place.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.
The White Cliffs of Dover, the steep, chalky cliffs that fringe England's southeastern coastline, formed about 100 million years ago thanks to a "Goldilocks" set of ocean conditions, new research suggests.

What's more, a massive new set of cliffs could be forming right now in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica as tiny algae shed their calcium-laden shells. However, depositing enough of that mineral, called calcite, to form similar cliffs could take millions of years.

"While we don't have the great cliffs of the Southern Ocean, there is solid evidence that the calcite is making it to the seafloor," William Balch, a biological oceanographer at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine, and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. [Photos: The Strangest Places on Earth]

White cliff formation

The White Cliffs of Dover, which overlook the English Channel, formed from the chalky detritus of single-celled algae called coccolithopohores. Looked at under a microscope, coccolithopores form a kaleidoscope-like set of intricate, interlocking shapes, thanks to outer shells made up of overlapping wheel-like plates of calcite. When the coccolithophores die, their calcite plates sink to ocean depths, accumulating in heaps on the seafloor. Over millions of years, the shells were squashed as more shells accumulated, the heaps rose, and the cliffs of Dover eventually emerged from the sea.

While researchers already knew that England's iconic cliffs formed about 100 million years ago, they didn't know exactly what caused the prolonged coccolithophore bloom in the first place.

Shimmering belt of water

To answer that question, the team decided to analyze coccolithophores in their natural habitat. They traveled to the remote reaches of the Southern Ocean, where a ring of blinding-bright blue and green water pops out in satellite imagery. This shiny circle of water forms the Calcite Belt, and it gets its brilliant shimmer because the water is teeming with tiny coccolithophores whose chalky armor reflects sunlight, brightening the water's hue.

"If you take the Earth and look at it upside down, it looks like a bullseye," Marlon Lewis, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia who was not involved with the study, said in a statement.

The team then did a detailed analysis of the water conditions that allow the Calcite Belt to thrive. It turned out that coccolithophores bloomed when conditions simultaneously allowed them to grow quickly, while starving out ecosystem competitors such as diatoms, another type of algae.

For instance, coccolithophores bloomed with high nitrate levels, while iron levels had to be too low for diatoms to bloom but high enough for coccolithophore needs. Since diatoms use silicate, the coccolithophores did best when silicate concentrations were low, preventing their competitors from thriving, the researchers reported Aug. 10 in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

The coccolithophores also seemed to do well at the nexus of ocean currents, where upwelling brings nutrients and minerals from the deep.

"These regions can be oases of fertilizer coming up to the surface for these plants," Balch said.

Original article on Live Science.
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New close-up photos of Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, show its mysterious and massive dunes in more detail than ever before.

NASA's Cassini orbiter obtained these images when it flew by Titan for the 122nd time on July 25, 2016. The spacecraft was just 607 miles above the alien moon's southern hemisphere, according to NASA officials.

The new images include an area called the "Shangri-La Sand Sea," a large dark region with hundreds of long and linear sand dunes. A part of this region had been imaged before, but the new image covers more ground and in greater detail. You can see new video of Titan's 'Shangri-La Sand Sea' by NASA here.

Another image reveals the never-before-seen "Xanadu annex," which lies just south of Xanadu, a region with an Earth-like landscape first imaged by Cassini in 1994.



Because Titan's atmosphere is thick and hazy, its surface is not easily visible with ordinary cameras. But Cassini comes equipped with a special radar instrument that allows it to see through the obstructing fog by beaming radio waves down to the surface.

Cassini's radio waves bounce off of Titan's surface, and the different ground features reflect the waves back at Cassini with different timing and slightly altered wavelengths. By recording these changes to the radio waves, Cassini's radar instrument can construct an image of the landscapes beneath Titan's atmosphere.

Titan's surface is teeming with dunes similar to sand dunes here on Earth, but they aren't made of silicates like our sand. Instead, Titan's sand contains grainy hydrocarbons that formed in its atmosphere before precipitating onto the ground.

The dunes reach heights of more then 300 feet, which is aboutas large as the tallest sand dunes on Earth. Compared with the average Earthly sand dune, though, Titan's dunes are gigantic. Their structures can reveal information about Titan's surface topography and wind patterns. [Titan Sand Dunes Reveal Clues of Saturn Moon's Past]

"Dunes are dynamic features. They're deflected by obstacles along the downwind path, often making beautiful, undulating patterns," Jani Radebaugh, a Cassini radar team associate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said in a statement.

These new images of Titan's southern terrain will also be Cassini's last. The spacecraft will spend the remainder of its mission checking out lakes and seas in the north. After four more flybys of Saturn's giant moon, Cassini will end its mission by plunging straight into Saturn's atmosphere.

Original article on Space.com.
The body of a missing hiker was found in Tucsons Saguaro National Park West after extensive search and recovery efforts on Saturday evening.

Pima County Sheriffs officials say search-and-rescue teams and a helicopter were called around 5 p.m. Saturday to look for a 57-year-old man who had gone missing while hiking on the Hugh Norris Trailhead.

Authorities say the man had separated from his hiking group before noon in 95-degree weather and now believe the death may be heat related.

Searchers found the man dead about a quarter-mile from the trailhead around 8 p.m. Saturday.

Sheriffs officials say searchers found an empty water bottle and an empty water container with the man, whose name hasnt been released yet.

The body was taken to the countys Office of the Medical Examiner for an autopsy. Results from the autopsy were not yet available Tuesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A former Islamic extremist who now works to steer young Muslims away from militant groups told Fox News Tuesday night that U.S. authorities should have been concerned by the New York and New Jersey bomb suspect's recent trips to Pakistan.

Ahmad Rahami first visited the city of Quetta, a hotbed of support for the Taliban and other extremist groups, in 2011. He went there again two years later, remaining from April 2013 to March 2014.

"Quetta isnt just a city you go and visit in Pakistan," Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation told "The Kelly File." "Its a war zone ... That in itself should have raised alarm bells for American authorities."

Rahamis activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan are unknown, and authorities have said the excursions didnt raise any red flags at the time.

Nawaz pointed out that Rahami was an ethnic Afghan while the Quetta area is populated by ethnic Balochs, making it unlikely that he had any family ties in the area.

"That is not normal behavior," Nawaz said of Rahami's visits. "It's incredibly unusual even for Pakistanis to go and visit Quetta."

Nawaz also said that he believed that Rahmani's wife, whom the suspect married overseas and brought back with him to the U.S., had at least some knowledge of the bomb plot.

"I think its almost impossible for close family members, especially spouses, to not notice anything," Nawaz said. "And all of the indications here point to awareness at least."

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that Rahami's wife, who has not been publicly identified, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates days after leaving the U.S.

Nawaz added that terror groups such as ISIS will likely attempt more attacks as the November presidential election draws closer.

"ISIS in their chat forums [have] been suggesting that they would seek to influence the US elections," Nawaz said. "I think they would favor a Donald Trump win because it makes it makes it easier for them to radicalize others against America.

"Im always wary of saying ISIS wants this, so lets not do it,'" Nawaz added. "But it is important for us to be aware that extremists are interested in being able to point to a head of state that they can clearly identify as being antagonistic to them, which then helps their narrative that they want to posit the West as being at war against Islam and Muslims."
The top U.S. intelligence official says he could never agree with a decision to pardon Edward Snowden.

Snowden was an National Security Agency contract employee when he took more than a million documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programs begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The programs collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas.

Human rights groups are seeking a presidential pardon for Snowden.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Tuesday that he might understand a pardon if what Snowden exposed was limited to domestic surveillance.

But Clapper said at an event hosted by The Washington Post that Snowden damaged U.S. capability to battle foreign threats and erased U.S. capabilities used to protect troops in Afghanistan.
Failure sucks. Theres no way around it. It is painful, uncomfortable and humiliating. Ive been there. I failed. I got stuck. But then I learned to get unstuck.

I see many other entrepreneurs in the same position as I was, with my first .com company a total bust. I spent two years and thousands of dollars trying to get it off the ground.

Eventually, I had to swallow my pride and admit that the business was over. It had failed. By that point, I was discouraged, broke, tired and 100 percent confident that I couldnt make money online.

Yet those two years of being scrappy werent a complete waste. I learned a few things. I took those lessons, imported them into my next venture and experienced some success. And then I experienced more failure. And then more success. Some more failure. A little more success.

Related: You Tried and You Failed. Here's How to Rebound.

Ive started around ten internet businesses, but youve only heard of a few of them. Why? Because all the others died. They failed. My point is this: Failure happens. And when it does, you need to have a plan for coming back around. After more failing than I care to admit, I developed a rough framework for handling it. Here it is:

1. Accept any failure as part of the path toward future business success.

Honestly, I had trouble with the very first step in the process.

My first failed startup took two years to die. It should have taken two weeks. The mantra fail fast wasnt part of my vocabulary at the time. As a result, I denied defeat and kept the nightmare alive for way too long.

The first step in any recovery program is to admit and  embrace failure, as Jeremy Boom powerfully explains in his must-read article. This probably sounds defeatist or discouraging, but theres a reason why I place it as my number one recovery tactic: If you dont view your failure as a path to success, youll never get over it. Instead, you might make the same mistake that I did -- pour thousands of dollars into a company thats already dead.

You have to accept what has happened. You wont enjoy it, but you have to accept it and realize that there is nothing you can do to change the mistakes that were made in the past.

The cloud has a silver lining, though. You have one failure behind you. That means youre one failure closer to success.

Related: 5 Keys to Rebounding From a Failed Business Strong

2. Feel the pain of failure, but avoid staying in emotional limbo.

While this may sound counterintuitive, there are few things that are more damaging to a successful rebound than pushing all of your emotions down and pretending that you are okay. You need to give yourself adequate time to grieve your loss.

I realize that we're talking business recovery here. But emotions are a real thing, and they do get mixed up in business. And thats okay.

Once the failure is final, give yourself the time you need to be upset, sad or angry. That could take three months. It could take 30 minutes. Take whatever time you need.

You should avoid staying at this emotional nadir, however. There is benefit in negative emotion. The benefit is to give yourself the inspiration to pick up, move on and build again.

3. Accept full responsibility for the failure.

Now that you have accepted what happened and given yourself time to grieve, it is time to own the failure of the business.

This is going to sound harsh, but you need to hear it. The person responsible for the failure is you. Not your business partner, not your employees, not your investors. You.

Why is this important? You have to be willing to own this truth before you can ever truly move on and rebound from your failure. Doing so improves your capacity as a leader, enhances your level of responsibility and increases your endurance when times get tough again (which they will).

There is another reason why accepting full responsibility is important. When you do, you give yourself permission to learn from the experience. To staunchly deny your culpability is to refuse to learn from the experience.

When you take 100 percent responsibility for the failure, you can also take action to start your recovery.

4. Create a list of the things that went wrong.

Write a list of all the things that went wrong. Feelings. Conversations. Spending problems. Hiring problems. Team conflict. Marketing mistakes. Everything.

Maybe you got into business with the wrong partner. Perhaps you werent careful enough with the legal work. Maybe you did not invest enough time into mastering your marketing skills.

I made all those mistakes. And more. I recognize them as problems now, because I took the time to reflect on the death of the business, create a list of the mistakes and chart a path toward success.

Creating a list of your business oops is a serious exercise in humility. Theres nothing personally validating about seeing where you went wrong.

5. Outline an action plan for building a new business.

The fifth and final step to rebounding from your failure and getting back on path to success is to distill everything you have learned from this failure into a simple and actionable plan.

Its easy, on the one hand, because you know what went wrong and what to do instead. Theres a reason we went through four steps to get to this point. Its hard, however, because creating a detailed plan is some serious brain work and takes considerable time.

You have a powerful force working to your advantage: You know what lands a business in hot water. And you know how to avoid it. Take your knowledge and use it in your next business.

6. Hustle.

So, whats next? Plain and simple, start your next business.

Theres nothing like the taste of failure to light you up and make you hustle. You want to get as far beyond failure as possible. The only way to do that is through the passionate, relentless, energetic and all-consuming hustle.

Once you are back out on the court making shots and scoring goals, you will smile at your previous failures, and be grateful for the lessons that they taught you.

A little older. A little wiser. And a little closer to success.

Related Book: Fueled By Failure: Using Detours and Defeats to Power Progress by Jeremy Bloom

Conclusion

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, J.K. Rowling: All of these people failed. But all of them were able to come back stronger than before.

And you will, too. Keep your head up and keep moving forward. Failures lessons are harsh, but invaluable. Youre going to rebound. Youve got this.
A person with an outstanding arrest warrant is dead following an officer-involved shooting at Foxwoods Casino Tuesday, State Police Trooper Kelly Grant confirmed.

"The assailant was a patron of Foxwoods with an outstanding arrest warrant," Trooper Grant said. "The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Police confronted the assailant on the 4th floor of the parking garage. The assailant produced a weapon, and shots were fired."

The person fell from the 4th floor of the parking garage and died. State police said it is unclear at this time whether they died from a gunshot or from the fall.

No one else was injured, police said. Police did not say what the person had an arrest warrant for.

The incident happened in the garage of the Fox Tower around noon. That area was closed to the public through most of the evening, but has since reopened along with the rest of the casino, resort and outlets.

Foxwoods Casino released a statement Tuesday afternoon:

"This morning, there was an isolated incident on property in the Fox Tower Garage that was quickly contained by the Mashanucket Pequot Tribal Police; an investigating remains open with the State Police. The safety and well-being of our guests and employees remains Foxwoods' top priority, and there is no current threat to anyone on the premises. All incoming and outgoing traffic from the Fox Tower Garage is presently restricted, but the rest of the property remains open and accessible to guests. We will update the public when the garage re-opens."
Charlotte police warned 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott again and again to drop his handgun before an officer shot and killed him, the police chief announced Wednesday morning, after riots damaged patrol cars and injured at least 16 officers, one of whom was hit in the face with a rock.

Police Chief Kerr Putney said during a news conference that officers were searching for a suspect Tuesday when they saw Scott exit a vehicle with a handgun at an apartment complex on the city's northeast side. "The officers gave loud, clear verbal commands which were also heard by many of the witnesses. They were instructing the subject, once he got out of the vehicle, to drop the weapon... Mr. Scott exited his vehicle armed with a handgun as the officers continued to yell at him to drop it."

Putney said Officer Brentley Vinson shot Scott because the man posed a threat. Vinson is black, as was Scott.

"It's time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the story's a little bit different as to how it's been portrayed so far, especially through social media," Putney said.

His comments were an apparent reference to a profanity-laced, hourlong video that a woman claiming to be Scott's daughter posted to Facebook soon after the shooting, saying that her father had an unspecified disability and was unarmed. In it, she appears to be at the shooting scene, which is surrounded by yellow police tape, as she yells at officers.

She claimed her father was unarmed and had a book, not a gun. Police say they found no book at the scene. The woman did not respond to Facebook messages, and her claims could not immediately be verified by The Associated Press. It also was not clear if she witnessed the shooting.

The police chief said officers requested medical help and performed CPR on Scott. Vinson has been placed on administrative leave while the shooting is investigated, police said. He's been with the department for two years.

Meanwhile, An outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam, B.J. Murphy, called for an economic boycott of Charlotte at a news conference of black leaders, saying if black lives don't matter, black money shouldn't matter.

The police chief said 16 officers sustained minor injuries during protests Tuesday night and that one person has been arrested.

TV footage early Wednesday showed dozens of protesters on Interstate 85 apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire on the highway.

Tuesday night, a larger group of demonstrators gathered near the scene of the shooting. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. Photos and TV video showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Some officers were in riot gear.

Broken glass and rocks littered the ground where one police car had been vandalized. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance of a Walmart that had apparently been looted.

The unrest in Charlotte came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police officers went to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott  who was not the suspect they were looking for  inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said.

Officers saw Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

Scott was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.

Some protesters were heard yelling "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One person held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."

Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.

One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that "the community deserves answers."

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Shelby's attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he were carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson formally announced on Wednesday that the department will be adding 970 total positions to the force by 2018.

More than 500 of these positions are officers. The rest include detective and lieutenant positions. The entire force will jump from roughly 12,500 to 13,500.

Johnson says these 970 positions are all added positions, currently not budgeted. Retirements and vacancies will be filled as well.

Johnson did not explain how the city would pay for the added officers. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is set to make a much-anticipated speech tomorrow on the state of public safety in Chicago.

Johnson said the pressure was greater than ever for officers constantly being recorded with cellphone cameras. He said he would not tolerate misconduct and added that he owed Chicago a department that stronger in numbers, equipped for the 21st century.

Chicago has seen a dramatic rise in the number of shootings and homicides this year. In August alone, there were 90 homicides, marking the first time in two decades there've been that many in a single month. Overall, the city has recorded more than 500 homicides this year -- higher than all of 2015 -- and is on pace to climb past the 600-homicide mark for the first time since 2003. There have also been more than 2,500 shooting incidents so far this year, about 700 more than in the same time period last year.

The plan to hire hundreds more officers marks a departure for Emanuel, who has relied on overtime -- more than $100 million annually in recent years -- to combat crime, arguing that it was an effective and less expensive way to combat crime than hiring more officers.

Alderman Howard Brookins Jr., who had expressed concern about the effects increased overtime was having on officers, says he thinks the new hires may reduce stress among officers, which could in turn cut down on the number of citizen complaints and police misconduct lawsuits that the city has settled for tens of millions of dollars.

Last year, the city was forced to release a video of a white officer fatally shooting black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, sparking major protests as well as federal and local investigations. The fallout prompted Emanuel to fire his first police superintendent, Garry McCarthy at the end of last year.

The Chicago police union didn't immediately respond to The Associated Press' request for comment on the new proposal.

Fox News' Matt Finn and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Federal authorities formally charged 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami Tuesday with planting a number of bombs in New York City and New Jersey over the weekend.

Rahami is accused of use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use, destruction of property by means of fire or explosive, and use of a destructive device during and in furtherance of a crime of violence. Criminal complaints against Rahami were unsealed in New York and New Jersey Tuesday.

Investigators believe Rahami planted bombs in New York City, as well as in Elizabeth and Seaside Park, N.J. One of the devices exploded in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood Saturday night, wounding 31 people.

The court filings allege significant premeditation by Rahami. An affidavit claims that he began buying bomb components in June, purchasing citric acid, circuit boards, ball bearings and electric igniters on eBay.

In a statement, the online auction site said it was "proactively working with law enforcement authorities on their investigation." The company later added, "The types of items bought by the suspect are legal to buy and sell in the United States and are widely available at online and offline stores."

In addition, video recorded two days before the bombings and recovered from a family member's phone shows Rahami igniting incendiary material in a cylinder, then shows the fuse being lighted, a loud noise and flames, followed by billowing smoke and laughter, the complaint said.



The court filings also include excerpts from a handwritten journal found on Rahami following his arrest Monday. Investigators say Rahami accused the U.S. government of "slaught[er] against the mujahidean [sic] be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham [Syria], Palestine ..."

The journal also lauded Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric killed in a 2011 drone strike, and Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army major who went on a 2009 rampage at the Fort Hood military installation.

Prosecutors say the document ends: "The sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION."

Before the federal charges were filed, Rahmani was already being held on $5.2 million bail, charged with the attempted murder of police officers during the shootout that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, N.J.

Ealier on Tuesday, Rahami's father claimed he called the FBI on his own son two years ago -- but a source told Fox News that he immediately recanted. And according to a neighbor, the father said in 2014 that his son may have been in contact with people overseas collecting explosives, ABC News reported.

Rahami's father, Mohammad, spoke to reporters outside his home in Elizabeth, N.J. "Two years I called the FBI, my son, he's doing very bad, OK? But they check it almost two months... They say he's not a terrorist. I said, 'OK.' Now they say he is a terrorist. I say, 'OK.'"

Rahami's father said that two years ago, his son "was doing bad. Yeah, he stabbed my son, he hit my wife and I put him to jail two years ago."

Mohammad Rahami added that Ahmad stabbed his brother Nasser "for no reason." Later Tuesday, he told reporters that FBI agents "[did] not do their job."

The FBI's Newark field office looked into the accusations, a federal law enforcement source told FoxNews.com. Ahmad Khan Rahami was in jail on an assault charge at the time, the source said, but agents interviewed his father.

"He recanted immediately  he left that part out. He said he didnt mean his son was a terrorist, just that he was interested in gang activity and watching violent videos. There was no derogatory information on him, and no basis to continue the investigation," the source said.

FBI's scrubbing of the allegations made against Rahami at the time did not turn anything up -- or as a law enforcement source close to the investigation described, the lead "washed out." Fox News is told a full-blown investigation into Rahami was not opened.

Rahami was arrested for stabbing a person in the leg and possession of a firearm in 2014. But a grand jury declined to indict him, despite a warning from the arresting officer that Rahami was likely "a danger to himself or others."

While the hunt for Rahami has ended, the investigation into his alleged path from server at a family restaurant to terrorist bomber is just beginning. Friends of Rahamis who spoke with media outlets trace the roots of his radicalism to his trips to jihadist hotbeds in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Its like he was a completely different person, a friend of Rahamis, Flee Jones, told the Times. He got serious and completely closed off.

Rahamis first documented trip to Pakistan was in 2005, when he visited Karachi as a 17 year old, The New York Times reported. Rahami stayed in Karachi, known as a jihadi hotbed, for a few months before returning to New Jersey in January 2006. In 2011, Rahami made another lengthy trip, visiting Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Quetta, Pakistan. He again visited Quetta from April 2013 to March 2014. Multiple sources told Fox News that Rahami visited Afghanistan at least three times. Rahami was stopped on one trip for secondary screening, but he satisfied the questions and was cleared, a source told Fox News.

Rahamis activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan are unknown, and authorities said the excursions didnt raise any red flags at the time. Officials said at a Monday news conference they didnt know if Rahami had received any weapons or explosives training. He did have a firearms license, however, The Washington Post reported.

But regardless of what he did during these trips, Rahamis demeanor changed when he came back to New Jersey. Rahami began wearing traditional Muslim robes after one trip to Afghanistan, two friends, Amarjit Singh and Jonathan Wagner, told the New York Times. He grew a beard and began praying in the back of his familys chicken restaurant.

Rahami also exhibited anti-Western and anti-military sentiment when he was around his young daughter, a former girlfriend, Maria, told FoxNews.com.

One time he was watching TV with my daughter and a woman in a [military] uniform came on and he told [her], Thats the bad person, she said.

There are family influences on Rahami, too. Rahamis dad, Mohammad, told Wagner that he fought the Soviet Army in the 1980s as a member of the mujahedeen, the same group that spawned Usama bin Laden and a generation of terrorists. Wagner said the elder Rahami didnt approve of the current U.S.-led fighting in Afghanistan.

One of Rahamis brothers, Mohammad K., posted at least one jihadist message on Facebook, The Daily Beast reported. While Rahami had little presence on social media, his brother posted a meme in 2013 showing extremist fighters with the quote: I bring men who desire death as ardently as you desire life. The same brother also posted a 9/11 conspiracy theory video last month.

Rahamis social life also was upended.

He stopped seeing Maria, allegedly ceased paying child support and in 2014 married a woman in Pakistan. He wrote to New Jersey Rep. Albio Sires that year seeking a visa to get his wife into the U.S. Sires said Rahami was kind of nasty.

At the time she was pregnant and in Pakistan, Sires said on MSNBC. They told her that she could not come over until she had the baby, because she had to get a visa for the baby.

The wife, who has not been identified, was eventually allowed into the U.S. She returned to Pakistan just days before the New York and New Jersey bombings and was detained by authorities in the United Arab Emirates on Monday, a U.S. official told The Los Angeles Times.

Separately, a sister of Rahami's accused him of trying to stab her but later recanted, Rep. Peter T. King, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told The Washington Post.

Rahami was born in Afghanistan in 1988 and came legally to the U.S. in January 1995, several years after his father arrived in America as an asylum seeker, CNN reported. Rahami became a naturalized citizen and was known as a class clown in high school, Maria told FoxNews.com. Maria said Rahami got along with his classmates; however, he still criticized American culture, comparing Western values to the strict version of Islam practiced in Afghanistan.

Rahami majored in criminal justice at Middlesex County College in Edison, N.J., but he dropped out of school before finishing his degree, according to media reports.

Mohammad reportedly opened First America Fried Chicken in 2002 on the ground floor of a home in Elizabeth. Family members lived on the second floor. Its unclear when Rahami last lived at the address, but the location was raided by authorities on Monday during their dragnet for Rahami.

Zobyedh Rahami, who said she was a sister of Ahmad's, wrote online, "I would like people to respect my family's privacy and let us have our peace after this tragic time. I would not like to answer any questions."

FoxNews.com's Perry Chiaramonte, Fox News' Matt Dean, Kathleen Foster, Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Authorities say the heroin that led 27 people to overdose in a five-hour span in a single West Virginia city had been mixed with the powerful painkiller fentanyl.

The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington (http://bit.ly/2cKrwSD ) reports that investigators for the first time detailed the potency of the concoction in a federal indictment Tuesday.

Twenty-two-year-old Bruce Lamar Griggs of Akron, Ohio, is charged with drug distribution in connection to the Aug. 15 spate of overdoses in Huntington. At least one man died.

Griggs was arrested by Tallmadge, Ohio, police officers late last month and is now in federal custody.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says fentanyl is an opioid that is about 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine.

The indictment does not mention whether Griggs has an attorney.

___

Information from: The Herald-Dispatch, http://www.herald-dispatch.com
The only clues are on the wall behind the front counter: thank you cards. In front of the wall, the business owner converses with customers like he would on any busy Tuesday afternoon.

The scene hints at what the business owner did: end a stabbing rampage at a St. Cloud, Minn. mall. It also shows how he has responded to questions about his actions: humbly, while calmly avoiding details as the investigation continues.

Investigators say Jason Falconer, owner of Tactical Advantage, in Waite Park, is responsible for stopping 20-year-old Dahir Adan from stabbing any additional shoppers at Crossroads Center on Saturday night. Falconer was at the mall, looking for a birthday gift for his son, when he saw the attack.

Falconer is avoiding on-camera interviews and any specific comments related to the attack, while the investigation continues. However, he told Fox 9 he is grateful for the support he has received.

I work for a very good man. He did what needed to be done, Pete Jansky, an employee at Tactical Advantage, told Fox 9. Jansky, like Falconer, was once the police chief for the Albany Police Department. In fact, many of Falconers employees have law enforcement experience. A Thin Blue Line flag hangs in the retail area.

A tour of Falconers business reveals his priority: safety. There are always safety signs within eyesight  on his range and in his classroom.

One thing is were very safety conscious here, Jansky told Fox 9. Tactical Advantage offers training as far as conceal and carry, beginning firearms, a lot of safety programs we teach here.

Falconer told Fox 9 he provides firearm training to the Avon Police Department, where he works part-time.
DEAR ABBY: I am 23, married for four years and have three children. My wife and I have always had strong sex drives. I recently accepted a dream job that pays very well. On the downside, I work 12 to 14 hours a day, and by the time I get home I'm exhausted.

I love my wife very much and want to meet her needs, but she wants sex every night. I'm afraid if I tell her I have to save my energy for my job, it will cause problems. How can I get around this? -- OVERWORKED IN ARKANSAS

DEAR OVERWORKED: The shortest path to a goal is a direct line. One thing more important in a marriage than sex is communication. Talk to your wife. If you don't, she may think that after three children you find her less attractive.

Sex is most satisfying when both partners enjoy it. To some women, their standard of living is at least as important as frequent sex. It's time to find out if the woman you married is one of them. (If she's not, you may have to change jobs.)

DEAR ABBY: How do I tell my ex I no longer want to baby-sit her son? The boy is not mine. When we lived together she found a job, and I told her I would watch her son on weekends while she was working.

I moved out of the apartment we shared a year ago. Between working nights at my job and her son having special needs and requiring full-time attention, I'm exhausted and losing patience. Is there a graceful way to bow out? -- GETTING STRESSED OUT IN VIRGINIA

DEAR GETTING STRESSED: Probably not. However, because you feel the responsibility has become more than you are able to handle, you need to tell your ex she needs to make other arrangements for a sitter for her son. Because your relationship with her ended a year ago, I doubt she'll be surprised. But do not expect her to welcome the news or like it.

DEAR ABBY: I can't wait until election season is over. One side of my family is liberal; the other side is conservative. At my request, they don't argue when we are all together. There are occasional disagreements, but fortunately, they never escalate.

The problem is, when I spend time with any of them separately I am lectured nonstop about the "evils" of the other side. They don't quit. I just want to scream, "Shut up! Shut up! I don't care!" I am at the point that I no longer want to vote. I don't know what to do. There's no way I can avoid my family completely. Please advise. -- "SHUT UP!" IN NEW MEXICO

DEAR S.U.: Please don't allow your family drama to stop YOU from voting. Try this: The next time your relatives inject politics into the conversation, smile, look them in the eye and say, "Let's talk about something pleasant, shall we?" and change the subject.

DEAR ABBY: I have many friends with grandchildren, two of whom love to show me photos of them. I don't mind looking at a few, but recently, during a two-hour lunch, one friend insisted on showing me pictures and videos the entire time. I swear I'm not exaggerating. Another friend has four five-minute videos I'm supposed to watch.

I show pictures of my grandchildren only occasionally. Would it be rude if, the next time this happens, I say something like, "I'd love to see a couple, but remember -- I have eight grandchildren and more than 700 photos and videos on MY phone"? -- BLEARY-EYED IN CALIFORNIA

DEAR BLEARY-EYED: I don't think it would be rude. It might be an effective reminder that granny-bragging is a two-way street.

DEAR ABBY: My niece is soliciting donations for her boyfriend's young daughter's upcoming operation. I'm hesitant because they both smoke, and with the price of cigarettes these days, it's taking a chunk out of his paycheck -- not to mention the health risks. I realize the child isn't to blame. Should we go ahead and donate, knowing some it is being used to finance their tobacco habit? -- NO FAN OF SMOKING

DEAR NO FAN OF SMOKING: This is not a referendum on smoking; it's a request for help to pay for needed surgery for a child. Yes, you should give them a donation if you have it to spare.
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Lee Parker still pictures the explosion that could have happened if he had dropped the backpack he took from a garbage can on Sunday night while a friend bought beer.

"I see it sometimes in the back of my mind and I know I need to get past it," said the 50-year-old homeless man from Elizabeth, New Jersey. "But, I feel good. I'm OK, and I'm grateful."

Authorities say Parker and a friend contacted police after finding the bag near the Elizabeth train station Sunday. One of the bombs exploded while a police robot was trying to disarm it. Other devices found inside were taken away by investigators.

Police say the bag was left by Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was charged with planting bombs that exploded in Saturday in Manhattan and Seaside Park, New Jersey.

Rahami, also of Elizabeth, was captured Monday morning after a shootout with police in the doorway of a bar in nearby Linden. He remains hospitalized and has yet to make an initial court appearance.

Investigators say it was the second time a bomb planted by Rahami was uncovered by someone scavenging for luggage. The FBI released an image Wednesday of two men seen Saturday night leaving a pressure cooker device behind while taking a suitcase in Manhattan. That device didn't explode.

Parker said he realized something was wrong with the heavy backpack after seeing wires from something that he first thought were decorative candles. Parker dropped the bag and went with friend Ivan White to the police.

"I don't like to think about what could have happened, but I'm just so blessed and glad it didn't," Parker said. "I still have my nine lives, I guess, and I'm going to keep trying to live them well."

Parker is staying at a local hotel paid for by an Elizabeth nonprofit that helps the homeless and working poor. He has also received food and clothes and thousands of dollars have been donated to a GoFundMe campaign for Parker and White.

Linda Flores-Tober, executive director of the Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless, is glad Parker is being recognized.

"These men were first identified as homeless, but they shouldn't be anonymous," she said. "They did the right thing and deserve all of the attention for what they are  heroes. They deserve to be known."

Flores-Tober said her group will continue to work with Parker, who says all he wants is a good job.

"Under the so-called hero's cape, I'm just a regular dude," Parker said.
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The Latest on explosive devices being found in New York and New Jersey (all times local):

10:30 a.m.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the Justice Department intends in the "near future" to bring Ahmad Khan Rahami to New York to face charges in a Saturday night bombing there.

Lynch spoke Wednesday at an International Bar Association conference.

Federal prosecutors in New York and New Jersey issued criminal complaints Tuesday evening charging Rahami in weekend bombings in both those states.

Lynch says she has full confidence in prosecutors' ability to bring Rahami "to justice for his heinous actions." She says the charges reflect the Justice Department's "unwavering determination to finding, capturing and prosecuting all those who attempt to commit or commit acts of terror against our nation."

Rahami is being treated in a hospital after being injured in a shootout Monday with police in New Jersey.

___

10:20 a.m.

A judge has granted temporary sole custody to the mother of a child whose father has been charged with planting bombs in New York and New Jersey.

A New Jersey judge on Tuesday granted the woman's request, which cited the terror investigation against Ahmad Khan Rahami.

Rahami often was hundreds of dollars in arrears in child support and their custody case was called before a family court judge six times in five years.

A judge approved a visitation agreement between the two in May 2014, ordering that the child spend Christmas and Thanksgiving with the mother and the Muslim holy days Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha with Rahami.

___

1 a.m.

Federal prosecutors say bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami bought components online and recorded a video of himself igniting a blast in a backyard. They say he vowed in a handwritten jihad journal that "the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets."

Court complaints filed Tuesday give a chilling glimpse into what authorities say motivated the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives last weekend in New York and New Jersey. One bomb injured 31 people in Manhattan.

The blasts came two years after the FBI looked into him but found nothing tying him to terrorism.

Rahami remains hospitalized with gunshot wounds from a shootout with police that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, New Jersey.

It's not immediately clear whether Rahami has a lawyer who can comment on the charges.
A seventh-grader in Michigan was suspended from school after he mistakenly took a knife with him to school and reported it to a counselor, the boys foster mom told WWMT.com.

Branch Co. student suspended from school after reporting knife found in backpack. @BrittanyGray1 reports. https://t.co/PKfC7vubuz  WWMT-TV (@wwmtnews) September 19, 2016

Denise Davies, the foster mother of 12-year-old Kyler, said she had recently purchased a backpack at Goodwill for his first day of school. She did not check the contents of the bag, and her son brought it to Legg Middle School in Coldwater, Mich., which is near the states border with Indiana.

"He pulled it out and his counselor was standing there, and he says, 'Can I call my mom?'"

The mother said Kyler was hysterical and swore that hed never seen the knife.

Terry Boguth, the schools superintendent, told the station that it is the boards policy not to comment on individual cases, but said in a statement, Discipline procedures are in our student handbook and are consistent with Coldwater Community Schools Board of Education policies which comply with the current laws of the State of Michigan regarding student discipline.

The foster mother said, under current rules, the punishment is an automatic one-year suspension,but officials reduced it to 30 days. Davies said she does not believe the boy will return to the school.

"We cannot say with absolute certainty that this event did or did not occur. If it did, we apologize and hope that the School Board takes this statement into consideration when making its decision about this student," Goodwill Industries of Central Michigan's Heartland responded.
An Oregon woman is searching for answers after an incident on a bike trail left her with facial fractures, seven missing teeth, a fractured jaw, brain bruising, a concussion, a broken hand and no memory of the incident.

KOIN-TV reported Tuesday that Skjelse Rapoch was riding her bike along the Columbia Slough River Trail when the incident happened. She told the station she slightly remembers leaving the house to meet her husband at the Portland International Raceway at around 8 p.m. when his friend found her injured.

I got a phone call from my friend Eddie saying, Hey, I found your wife. You need to get here right now, Jeff Rapoch said. She was in the middle of the path and her bike was on one side she was sort of sitting up and looking around really kind of bewildered.

Her husband thought at first that she went over the handlebars. But doctors examined her and determined that her injuries werent consistent with someone who had been in a bike crash. She wouldve broken her neck or shoulder.

Jeff Rapoch said that he found a rock near where his wife crashed, which makes him think she couldve been assaulted. However, police determined the bloodied rock wasnt enough to investigate.

Skjelse Rapoch said she will now think twice about biking alone at night and said she was grateful for wearing a helmet while riding.

It saved my life, she added.

Anyone with information about the incident is urged to call Portland police.

Click for more from KOIN-TV.
A day after the body of a North Texas college student was found dismembered and burned in a plastic kiddie pool in a park, a mysterious tweet appeared on her Twitter account that read, Never knew I could feel like this.

Authorities in Grapevine told KHOU.com they were investigating the tweet as part of wider investigation into the man charged in her death.

Charles Dean Bryant, 30, is being held on $1 million bond on a charge of capital murder in the death of 24-year-old Jacqueline Vandagriff. He was released from jail on a stalking charge just days before meeting Vandagriff at a bar Sept. 13. Her body was found the next morning after firefighters extinguished a fire in a Grapevine park.

According to an arrest warrant, Vandagriff is seen on a security video meeting Bryant at the bar in Denton, where she attended Texas Woman's University. They are later seen going to another bar, then leaving together at about 9:45 p.m.

Grapevine police Sgt. Robert Eberling has said that it's not known if the two knew each other before meeting at the bar. KHOU.com reported that Bryant posted on Facebook the day after her body was found: Full moon, lets see what trouble I can get into.

Cellphone data indicate that early on the morning of Sept. 14, Vandagriff's phone was in the vicinity of Bryant's home in Haslet, about 25 miles southwest of Denton, according to the arrest warrant. Video evidence showed Bryant buying a shovel at 4:41 a.m. at a Walmart, and there was evidence at his home that someone had tried to dig a hole in the ground.

Officials responding to a fire about 6:30 a.m. found Vandagriff's body in a plastic kiddie pool in a park in Grapevine, located about 20 miles from Haslet. The arrest warrant says a witness saw a man standing over the fire before leaving.

Jail records show Bryant was arrested Sept. 7 by University of North Texas police on a stalking charge and posted bond at the Denton County jail on Sept. 9. He was also arrested by UNT police Sept. 6 and released the same day on bond for criminal trespass.

According to Denton County court records, the stalking and criminal trespass arrests came after Bryant continued to contact his former girlfriend, despite her desire that he not after she ended their dating relationship Aug. 23. Upon Bryant's stalking arrest, a judge issued the emergency protective order.

Court records show that on Saturday -- three days after Vandagriff's body was found -- his ex-girlfriend told police she'd received emails from Bryant saying he missed her and wanted to talk to her.

Police on Sunday arrested him, and he was later charged with capital murder. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.

Texas Woman's University said Vandagriff was a nutrition student there. Eberling said Bryant had worked at the Urban Cowboy Saloon in Fort Worth. The gay dance club said on its Facebook page that he was fired on Sunday for not showing up for his shift.

According to the arrest warrant, officials executing a search warrant at Bryant's home found Vandagriff's purse in the trash. The document also said the search found a kiddie pool in the backyard that looked similar to the one found with Vandagriff's burning body in it, and saw a patch of dead grass where it appeared a similar pool had been. Bryant's roommate told police that there had recently been two kiddie pools in the backyard.

Vandagriff's cause of death has not yet been released.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
No one will be charged in the shooting death of a woman during a standoff with police that she posted on social media, a Maryland prosecutor said Wednesday.

A review of the police investigation into the shooting of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines in Randallstown last month found the officer who fired was justified, and the state will not take any further action, Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger announced in a statement.

"Criminal charges are not warranted," the statement said.

Gaines, who was black, was fatally shot on Aug. 1 after she barricaded herself inside her apartment and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant, Baltimore County Police spokeswoman Elise Armacost has said. Gaines' 5-year-old son was with her and was wounded in his left cheek and an elbow. The warrant stemmed from a March 10 traffic stop that included disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Lawyers for Gaines' family have said she was shot because officers ran out of patience during a seven-hour standoff. Gaines posted video of the standoff on Facebook, but her account was taken offline in the midst of the standoff after a request by police. Police Chief Jim Johnson has said that people on social media were encouraging her not to comply with officers.

Shellenberger met with Gaines' family before announcing that no charges would be filed. The family's attorney, J. Wyndal Gordon, says the meeting reinforced the family's belief that the officer shot Gaines "out of frustration rather than fear." He called the officer a "cowboy" who "wanted to use his weapon." Gordon said Gaines' family is frustrated.

Gaines' death led to protests affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement. A wrongful-death lawsuit filed last week against the police officer and Baltimore County contends that officers illegally entered Gaines' apartment after persuading the manager of her apartment complex to give them a key despite the fact that nobody answered the door when officers knocked.

In a letter to County Executive Kevin Kamenetz on Tuesday, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund called for an independent review of county police department policies, saying Gaines' shooting raises questions about policies, including use of force and execution of arrest warrants. The Baltimore Sun quotes a spokeswoman from Kamenetz's office as saying that he has directed the police chief to begin "a study of practices and procedures in barricade situations."

The police department has identified the officer who shot Gaines as Officer First Class Ruby, using only his last name and rank, per departmental policy. Ruby was one of two officers who shot and killed 24-year-old Adam Benjamin Rothstein in 2007 after he pointed what turned out to be a pellet gun at the officers.

Armacost said officers received a call on Aug. 19 of that year for a suicidal man who had told the 911 dispatcher that he had guns, knives, pepper spray and a Taser. When police confronted Rothstein, he said he would start shooting if he didn't get what he wanted by 3:30 a.m. At the designated time, Rothstein raised a gun and pointed it at the officers, who both fired. Rothstein's weapon turned out to be a BB gun.
Ahmad Rahami, the suspect accused of planting bombs in New York City and New Jersey, is currently unconscious and unable to speak with FBI case agents about the attacks, two law enforcement sources close to the investigation tell Fox News.

As of Wednesday afternoon Rahami is incapacitated following multiple surgeries for the gunshot wounds he sustained during a shootout with Linden, New Jersey police officers on Monday, Fox News is told. Doctors were treating him at a hospital in Newark after police reportedly shot him 10 times.

Fox News is also told that FBI agents are near his hospital bed waiting for Rahami to wake up so they can begin questioning.

Additionally, two law enforcement sources confirm to Fox News that Rahamis wife, Asia Bibi Rahami, is cooperating with authorities. Fox News is told that she voluntarily gave a statement to U.S. officials in the United Arab Emirates. These sources tell Fox News she left the country in June and is slated to travel back to the United States imminently.

Federal prosecutors in New York and New Jersey issued criminal complaints Tuesday evening charging Ahmad Khan Rahami in weekend bombings in both those states. Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the Justice Department intends in the "near future" to bring Rahami to New York to face charges in the Saturday night bombing there, which wounded at least 31 people.

Fox News' Matt Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Authorities in Texas were investigating an incident of alleged child abuse at a Walmart Tuesday after a father was seen dragging his daughter around the store by her hair.

Cleveland police Chief Darrel Broussard told KTRK-TV they were meeting with the family featured in the viral photos.

Police are concerned at this time for the children who may be in the home with the dad who appeared to have been a little aggressive at the time," Broussard said.

Erika Burch, the person who filmed the video, confronted the family about the punishment. She received some heat on Facebook about intervening in someone elses affairs.

"People are telling me I'm wrong for stepping up for this little girl, but you can discipline a child without dragging them by the hair on their head, especially in Wal-Mart," she told KTRK-TV.

Burch added that she wanted the girl to know what proper discipline looked like.

Child protective services said children usually remain in their homes while abuse allegations take palce.

Click for more from KTRK-TV.
Federal authorities are making their case in New York against a Virginia man accused of interfering in a same-sex couple's child custody fight.

Opening statements began Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Buffalo in the trial of Philip Zodhiates (zo-dee-YA'-taze). Prosecutors say he helped a woman and her daughter flee the country in 2009 when it was clear the woman was losing a custody battle to her former partner.

Zodhiates has pleaded not guilty to international parental kidnapping and other charges.

Prosecutors say that after Lisa Miller renounced her homosexuality, Zodhiates drove her and her then 7-year-old daughter from Virginia to the Rainbow Bridge in New York where they crossed into Canada on their way to Nicaragua.

A Vermont family court had given Miller's former partner, Janet Jenkins, visitation rights.
DEAR HARRIETTE: Recently, I stayed my first full night at my girlfriend's place. While I expected a peaceful night, I found I couldn't sleep because of her snoring! I realized she snores when she'd fall asleep for a little while at my place, but this snoring is so loud, I'm concerned for her health. She snores so loudly, it sounds like she chokes herself and then begins to cough. She does all of this while sleeping, but I feel like there is no way she's lived 26 years without someone telling her she snores! Needless to say, I got no sleep that night, and I don't know if this will be a deal breaker in our relationship. We can't move in together if she refuses to try to fix her snoring problem. -- Up All Night, Detroit

DEAR UP ALL NIGHT: You are getting way ahead of yourself. Sure, it could be uncomfortable to bring up the snoring issue with your girlfriend, but don't jump all the way to you not being able to live with her because she refuses to address the situation. You will not know how she is going to react until you bring it up.

Do some research on the topic. There are any number of medical concerns that have snoring as a side effect -- from allergies to sleep apnea. Some have simple solutions, and others are more dramatic. Read up so you can share your research with your girlfriend if and when it's needed.

Start your conversation with her by asking her if she knows that she snores. Do not speak in an accusatory tone. Just ask. Then tell her what you experienced and how disturbing it was. Tell her that you are concerned for her health and want her to get it checked out. Share the research that you have done. Encourage her to go to the doctor to see if anything is wrong. If, over time, she does not follow up and you experience the snoring repeatedly, tell her that you won't be able to sleep with her until she figures out how to modify her breathing. I hate ultimatums, but sometimes they get well-meaning but slow-moving people to take action.
A 19-year-old U.S. Marine shot in the head while on weekend leave in Los Angeles has died and police are searching for suspects, authorities said Tuesday.

Lance Cpl. Carlos Segovia Lopez died at a hospital Monday night, according to coroner's spokesman John Cades.

The young Marine had been on life support since he was found Friday night slumped over in the driver's seat of his car in South Los Angeles.

No suspects were identified and investigators did not have a motive.

Officials named the victim as Carlos Segovia Lopez, but a family friend, Claudia Perez, referred to him as Carlos Segovia.

"We ask everyone to please keep his family and Carlos in your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time," Perez posted to Facebook on Tuesday morning.

Perez told the Los Angeles Times that the Marine was visiting family and friends while on leave from Camp Pendleton near San Diego.

The Marine had spent time with his girlfriend and was on his way to Perez's home, where he usually stays while in Los Angeles, when he was struck by gunfire, she said.

A vehicle pulled up beside the Marine's car, and at least one person opened fire, striking him once in the head, LAPD Officer Norma Eisenman said Monday. He was not in uniform.

Police contacted the U.S. Marine Corps, which in turn notified his family.

He was born in El Salvador and came to the U.S. with his mother. Both are U.S. citizens, Perez said.

He joined the Marines about six months ago.

"The overwhelming support and prayers we witnessed in support of this young man are a testament to the mighty son, friend and warrior that he was," the Marine Corps said in a statement.

It went on to say his "unselfish and honorable legacy will live on in our Corps. Once a Marine, always a Marine."
In our ongoing psychological warfare series, former Green Beret Sergeant Major (retired) Karl Erickson has shared simple methods you can use to tell if someone is lying, as well as a couple of tricks to get a liar to tell the truth.

This week, he turns his attention to partnerships. While commanding special forces missions over the past decades, Erickson had to quickly learn how to find reliable partners that wanted to help him succeed, and avoid bad partners that wanted him to die.

While life and death (hopefully) isn't factoring into your business relationships, here are some of his tips to see if youre signing up for a fruitful or frightful partnership.

Know your enemy.

"Or in this case, know your potential new partner. The first thing I'd advise you to do is to do your research prior to your initial meeting. Gauge their past performance. Did they have success? Were those successes one-sided or did both partners do well? Meaning, did he or she make money for everyone or just for themselves? Ask around and find out. Forget resumes, everyone flowers them up and makes it seem like they single-handedly parted the Red Sea. Talk to people who have done business with them before. So many say that this person screwed them over, but did everyone say the same thing?"

Related: How to Tell if Someone Is Lying

Realize that people can change.

"Talk to people, but understand that you cant always go off of past relationships. Just because one guy says I knew that guy back in college and he is a piece of shit doesn't mean he still is. Most psychologists say that your values are established by the time you are 12 years old, developed by your environment and experience. But I have seen that time and education can change a person. Ive dealt with new guys in special forces who were too cocky and were just terrible to work with. Then you fast forward 15 years and the guy is in a much higher leadership position, making larger-scale strategic decisions and you realize that people can mature. So don't base everything on one person's negative experience."

They should distrust you.

"In Afghanistan, the Army would roll into a village and tell the tribal leader, 'We have money for you, we're going to build you a well, we're here to help. We just need you to tell us where the bad guys are.' And they'd get the stink eye. And they'd get labeled as 'hostile.' But then the Special Forces guys went in, and besides being much better looking, realized that that isn't how the culture functioned. They'd accept an offer of tea from the tribal leader, and just have a pleasant, informal chat. It might take three meetings like this, but, eventually, the leader felt that trust was earned and they could talk business.

"So a person who is keeping you at arm's length at first shows that they are skeptical and are thoughtful. That's good! If someone is 'yes, yes, yes,' you need to wonder why they are so willing to help. They're either dumb or see an opportunity to take you for a ride, neither of which is what you want. I want a partner who is as suspicious of me as I am of him. Im looking for a long-term trustworthy partner and I want him to be looking for the same thing."

Related: 7 Trust-Building Tips To Use In Your Business

Look for we vs. me.

"An 'A-team' is the 12-man team that Army Special Forces is built on. You have to trust the guys to your left and right with your life. I believe in the idea of 'One Team, One Fight.' Is he willing to work to benefit all partners or just himself? One simple way to know that is just by listening to the person talk about their company. Do they say "I did this" or does they say "we did this"? That's a good indicator."

Related: 11 Ways to Make Money While You Sleep

Can they embrace the gray area?

"You want to work with someone who understands the black and white of legal issues -- but understands that to get things done, sometimes you need to operate in the gray area. For example, when I was in Fallujah in 2004, I needed a crane to fix this safe house we were in. I had an operations fund, but I couldnt take the taxpayers money to buy a crane. The money was only to be used for food and things like that. So I took some of that opfund money and bought some steaks, some alcohol and I invited two Marine generals and the heads of a security contractor company for dinner. We relaxed, talked informally, and by the end of it, they said, 'Karl, if you ever need anything, you just let us know.' And I said, 'Well, as a matter of fact, I need a crane tomorrow morning.' And at 8 the next morning, I had a crane and an operator parked right outside my gate. I didnt break any laws, but I operated in that gray area to get what needed to be done. That's what I want in a partner.

"So in conversing with a potential new partner, I'll talk about what is going in the news and pose a few hypotheticals. 'If we could get away with it, we should do this.' See how they react. There are a lot of companies who are willing to eagerly cross the line and hope they dont get caught. I cant do that."

Trust your gut.

"Everything can seem perfect on paper, but if something doesn't seem right, just walk away. I can't tell you how many times on a convey that the lead vehicle will stop and the driver will say, 'Something doesn't feel right.' Even though there is nothing in particular to point out as wrong, we'll divert the convoy and go another route. And time and time again, you'll learn afterward that there was an IED or an ambush waiting. Don't overthink it and don't override your instincts. If something feels wrong, it probably is."

Erickson tests tactical gear on his site Tactical Rifleman. Follow him at @TacRifleman.
Investigators said they found the journal on Rahami after the shooting that ended with the suspect in handcuffs.
Kurdish forces battling ISIS in Iraq are suffering severe health effects and pleading with the international community for help after being attacked with chemical weapons including mustard gas, according to a western military expert embedded with them who provided gruesome photos backing the charges.

Exclusive images obtained by FoxNews.com show Kurdish fighters afflicted with the telltale burns and blisters sustained after fierce fighting as recently as last week in the mountainous Barzani Province. Fighters described being targeted by mortars that exploded to unleash clouds of toxic chemicals. Several are now being treated as recently as last week for severe burns and blisters, debilitating breathing problems and even blindness.

The Kurdish forces have been attacked multiple times with chemical weapons - the last time was a week ago, said Tony Schiena, of MOSAIC, a private military and intelligence outfit based in the U.S. and London that trains foreign militaries in tactical operations and intelligence gathering. They are horrified, not only by the Islamic States use of mustard gas, but also chlorine, as well as another unidentified chemical agent they were told by foreign advisors could be sarin.

 ... the way these symptoms changed over time, and the patients testimony about the circumstances of the poisoning all point to exposure to a chemical agent.  Pablo Marco, Doctors Without Borders

Sarin, a designated weapon of mass destruction, is a colorless and odorless nerve agent, while mustard gas is a chemical warfare agent widely used by the Germans in World War I.

Schiena, a former South African special operator hired to train Kurdish Peshmerga Special Forces in Iraq in counter terrorism and defensive tactics, told FoxNews.com he traveled with the head of Peshmerga military intelligence over the last several days through the mountains of the Barzani Province to the front lines. There, he met with base commanding generals, medics and victims of chemical weapons attacks who, in some cases, are still struggling a month after exposure.

Schiena said the fighters described a yellow gas that smelled like rotten onions and garlic, descriptions consistent with mustard gas. He said the Kurds desperately need masks and protective suits to continue their fight against the black-clad jihadist army. ISIS is armed with sophisticated weapons seized from Iraqi forces, plundered stockpiles from the arsenals of Saddam Hussein and an increasing number of improvised weapons, including chemicals, Schiena said.

For example, the Islamic State uses propane canisters filled with bolts and nails, valves added to either side, with a tail and wings welded on, to create a rocket that explodes on impact. The rocket disperses flaming hot bolts and nails as well as chemical weapons and can set off vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices such as a Hummer laden with explosives, or ordnances attached to suicide bombers.

One Kurdish soldier said that of 52 mortars ISIS launched at his team during one attack, three released yellow smoke that caused their skin to immediately water, discharge liquids, blister and create large wounds. Soldiers exposed to the gas vomited and experienced extreme abdominal pain and severe burning and itching eyes. Other mortars discharged a silver glittery substance that stuck to their skin like glue. The Kurdish soldiers said the Iraqi military also said ISIS used these chemical weapons on their forces.

Imagine being the only organized force fighting this great evil on the front lines, getting hit by chemical weapons and you have nothing, not even a mask to protect yourself, Schiena said.

Schiena appealed to Prince Ali of Jordan, who he said arranged for delivery of 1,000 gas masks, but said many more are needed. He questioned why the U.S. and other countries arent providing more support to the Kurdish fighters.

Ryan Mauro, national security analyst for the Clarion Project, said one key question is where the chemical weapons originated from.

Are they from the old stockpiles that Saddam Hussein supposedly didn't have, or did they come from the Syrian regime's stockpile that they claim to have disarmed? Mauro asked.

Germany's Federal Intelligence Service BND has documented the Islamic States use of mustard gas, according to a Sept. 7 article in the German daily newspaper Bild, which said agents took blood samples from Kurds injured in clashes with ISIS in Northern Iraq.

While the U.S. Defense Department wont confirm the Islamic State is using mustard gas, Pentagon spokeswoman Cmdr. Elissa Smith said officials have reviewed the most recent reports detailing the alleged use of chemical weapons by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

While we will not comment on intelligence or operational matters, let us be clear: Any use by any party, be it state or non-state actor, of a chemical as a weapon of any kind is an abhorrent act, Smith said. Given the alleged behavior of ISIL and other such groups in the region, any such flagrant disregard for international standards and norms is reprehensible.

She said the U.S. military continues to work with coalition partners to ultimately destroy ISIS.

More than 60 partners are contributing to this coalition along the key lines of effort including military support, countering ISIL's finances, countering foreign fighters flows, exposing ISIL's true nature, and providing humanitarian support, Smith said.

The coalition also has been working with the government of Iraq to provide support through training and equipping. In addition, the U.S. is spending an average of $9.9 million a day, or $3.7 billion since Aug. 8, 2014, for 373 days of operations.

We have seen that with effective training, equipping, and command and control, and backed by Coalition airpower, that the Iraqi forces absolutely have the will to fight, Smith said. We have seen this repeatedly from the Iraqi Security Forces, including the Kurdish Peshmerga -- in Tikrit, in Baghdadi, in Haditha, at Sinjar Mountain, at Rabiya, and at Mosul Dam.

Civilians also have been targets of the chemical weapons, according to the international medical organization Doctors Without Borders.

A family in the Azaz District in Northern Syria was attacked in their own home on Aug. 21 with a mortar that discharged a yellow gas.

The three-year-old girl and a five-day-old baby girl along with their parents arrived at a Doctors Without Borders hospital one hour after the attack, suffering from respiratory difficulties, inflamed skin, red eyes, and conjunctivitis. Within three hours they developed blisters and their respiratory difficulties worsened, the group reported.

[Doctors Without Borders] has no laboratory evidence to confirm the cause of these symptoms, said Pablo Marco, Doctors Without Borders' program manager for Syria, in a statement. However, the patients clinical symptoms, the way these symptoms changed over time, and the patients testimony about the circumstances of the poisoning all point to exposure to a chemical agent.
US general: North Korea 'will' develop nuclear capabilities to hit America

By ,

The U.S. general expected to take over the military's nuclear forces had a sobering assessment of North Korea's capabilities, telling Senate lawmakers on Tuesday that the rogue nation "will" build up the capabilities to hit the United States.

"What concerns me most is: They will get there. They're gonna get there. And then once they have those capabilities, what are they going to do with them? That's my biggest concern," Gen. John Hyten, commander of the Air Force Space Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Hyten has been nominated to lead U.S. Strategic Command.

His comments came after North Korean state media reported the dictator Kim Jong Un oversaw a ground test of a new rocket engine and ordered a satellite launch preparation, an indication the country might soon conduct a prohibited long-range rocket launch.

The United Nations and others view the North's space launch development project as a cover for tests of missile technology, as ballistic missiles and rockets in satellite launches share similar bodies, engines and other technology. North Korea is also openly working on developing nuclear-armed missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland.

Kim directed the ground test of a high-powered engine of a carrier rocket for a geo-stationary satellite at the Sohae Space Center in the country's northwest, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

Kim was quoted as ordering officials and scientists to complete preparations for a satellite launch as soon as possible, amid "the enemies' harsh sanctions and moves to stifle" the North.

Jeon Ha-kyu, a spokesman at South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said South Korea believes the test was for a new engine for a long-range missile. South Korean media speculated the North could conduct a long-range rocket launch around Oct. 10, which is the 71st founding anniversary for the North's ruling Workers' Party.

Earlier this month, North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test, prompting South Korean and U.S. officials to vow to apply more sanctions and pressure on the North. The test explosion, the most powerful to date, was conducted on the 68th anniversary of the founding of North Korea's government.

The North was already slapped with the toughest U.N. sanctions in two decades following its fourth nuclear test in January.

Since late 2012, the North put two satellites into orbit with long-range rockets, each time inviting international sanctions and worldwide condemnation.

North Korea has said it needs nuclear weapons and missiles to cope with U.S. military threats. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

URL

https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-general-north-korea-will-develop-nuclear-capabilities-to-hit-america
Last December, two evangelical pastors from the Church of Christ in Sudan were taken from their churches and thrown into jail. Last month, the Rev. Abdulraheem Kodi and the Rev. Kuwa Shamal Abu Zumam were charged with numerous offenses, including waging war against the state, espionage and undermining Sudans constitutional system.

Their trial has begun. They could get the death penalty if they're found guilty.

Two other men, Czech aid worker Petr Jasek and Darfuri human rights activist Abduelmoneim Abdulmwlla, have also been detained. They, too, are accused of conspiring against the state, provoking hatred against or among sects and spreading false information.

Kodi and Zumam hail from the Nuba Mountains, a region that continues to be bombed and brazenly targeted by Sudans president, Omar al-Bashir, in what human rights and Christian groups say is an effort to rid the country of the Nuba people  indigenous groups who do not fit the regimes vision of an Islamic nation and are accused of supporting anti-government rebels.

Bishop of Kadugli Diocese, Reverend Andudu Adam Elnail  who is now based in South Carolina after fleeing Sudan in 2011 after government forces allegedly burned down his property when he refused to use his extensive church leadership outreach to endorse the President  told FoxNews.com.

Al-Bashir, the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court  there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest in connection to war crimes in Darfur  took power in a 1989 coup and has long taken a stance of one language (Arabic), one religion (Islam).

Sudans National Intelligence and Security Services have accused the pastors of exposing state secrets. But their defenders say the claims against them have been concocted, and that they are being persecuted by al-Bashir and the Sudanese government. They are appealing desperately to the international community to intervene.

We call for their protection and immediate release and urge that the U.N., U.S. government  including Congress  and other world communities demand the freedom of these two men of God and other prisoners, said the Rev. Andudu Adam Elnail, bishop of Kadugli Diocese.

Elnail fled from Sudan five years ago after he refused to endorse al-Bashir and government forces allegedly burned down his property. Now based in South Carolina, he said Kodi and Zumam are in solitary confinement and are not allowed visits or phone calls with family members. He described Zumam whom he has known for many years, as a humble and good man in his mid-40s, a father of seven who has dedicated his life to family and faith.

The government is not interested in the Christian religion. There is no freedom for us, we cannot build churches, we are treated as second-class citizens, Elnail lamented. We need the international community to pressure the government of Sudan to give us our freedom of religion.

The pastors are accused of sharing evidence of the government burning down churches in Khartoum and bombing churches in the Nuba Mountains, said Philip Tutu, a native of the Nuba Mountains, who now resides in the U.S and advocates for the rights of the Nuba people.

The government says its security policy is to keep this information confidential to avoid pressure from the international community.

Clearly, the pastors are unfairly targeted. The hearings are postponed repeatedly. A lot of people are showing up for the hearings and not everyone is able to attend, including some attorneys for the pastors.

The attorneys, who asked not to be identified, fearing government retaliation, stressed that more action is needed to support the pastors and to protect Christians in the Nuba Mountains, where they are deemed to be atheists.

A spokesperson from the U.S State Department said senior officials at the U.S Embassy in Khartoum have been tracking this case since the pastors were arrested and have repeatedly raised concerns about the matter.

We are committed to working with countries to make tangible improvements in respect for religious freedom and continue to look for opportunities to address these issues with the government of South Sudan, the spokesperson said.

Christian persecution is nothing new in war-torn Sudan, where churches are routinely razed and church leaders are targeted and taunted. And though Sudan has been designated a Country of Particular Concern by the U.S. State Department since 1999, the situation has worsened.

Members of Sudans minority Christian community have been arrested, their religious buildings attacked, churches and educational institutions closed and their religious literature confiscated, said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, S.J, chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The government will no longer issue permits for the building of new churches. Government policies and societal pressure promote conversion to Islam. Christians are pressured to deny their faith or convert to gain employment.

Kiri Kankhwende, of the U.K-based advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said the situation for Christians in Sudan has particularly deteriorated since the secession in 2011 of South Sudan, which was championed as a foreign policy success story by the Obama administration but has since descended into civil war.

Since then, the government has called for a 100 percent Islamic nation with a constitution based wholly on Shariah law, Kankhwende told FoxNews.com. The restrictions placed on Christians over the last five years indicate that the government is moving toward this goal.

Amnesty International issued a joint letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council this month condemning the lack of freedom of religion in Sudan and calling on the government to release all individuals who have been arbitrarily detained. The independent Sudanese Human Rights and Development Organization has appealed to Pope Francis to exert his influence on Khartoum to help the jailed church leaders.

Open Doors USA, a Christian human rights organization, has called the persecution of Christians in Sudan akin to ethnic cleansing and stressed that the right kind of attention in the case of the Sudanese priests is vital.

The more influential voices that can be heard on this issue, the more likely the government of Sudan is to at least consider objections to this miscarriage of justice, said Open Doors president and CEO David Curry.

The Embassy of the Republic of Sudan in Washington, D.C., could not be reached for comment. The pastors trial is set to resume Wednesday.
Authorities in Finland have arrested a neo-Nazi activist accused of killing a 28-year-old man during a demonstration in Helsinki.

The Helsinki District Court on Wednesday remanded the 26-year-old suspect in custody on suspicion of homicide and assault.

The suspect is accused of assaulting the victim who reportedly spat on the ground in front of members of the Finnish Resistance Movement at a demonstration on Sept. 10. The victim was hospitalized after hitting his head on the ground. He died of his injuries six days later.

The neo-Nazi group admits the victim was "confronted" during the rally but denies any wrongdoing. Police didn't release names of the victim or the suspect.

The incident has been widely condemned by politicians and local media with calls for banning racist and extreme organizations.
ISIS fighters are believed to have attacked U.S. and Iraqi forces with a "crude" chemical weapon Tuesday evening, a U.S. official told Fox News.

The U.S base outside Qayyarah, 25 miles south of Mosul, was struck by a rocket and traces of a "mustard agent" were believed to be present, the official said. The attack was first reported by CNN.

A Pentagon official told reporters that a tar-like black oily substance was found on the shell, which landed within the base hundreds of yards from U.S. forces. An initial test for the agent was positive, but could be false," the official said. The second test was negative, possibly because the shell had been exposed to the elements.

No one was injured in the attack and there were no signs of exposure shown by any U.S. troops, including the two soldiers who inspected the shell. Two to four soldiers who were near the shell received full decontamination treatment.

Unless you are right next to [the shell], exposure is unlikely, the official said. U.S. troops at the base are equipped with chemical weapons exposure suits.

The official said the base is attacked "fairly often" with conventional weapons, but Tuesday's assault is believed to be the first chemical attack on U.S. forces in Iraq since they returned to the country in 2014. Nearly 5,000 U.S. troops are currently on the ground in Iraq and "hundreds" of those forces are located at the base, the official said.

The ordinance and residue from the shell are being sent to Ft. Detrick, Md. for processing to confirm the presence of a chemical agent. Unlike mustard gas, which can spread, mustard agent leaves an oily residue behind. The official said the security posture at the base had not changed.

Mosul is the last major Iraqi city controlled by ISIS, which overran much of the country more than two years ago.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report.
Pakistani police say they have arrested a 16-year-old Christian boy on blasphemy charges after he "liked" an "inappropriate" photograph on Facebook of the Kaaba in Mecca, one of the holiest sites in Islam.

Senior police official Akhtar Ansari said Wednesday the arrest was made this week in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province.

He says police have sent the boy to jail pending trial.

Ansari says police made the arrest after being alerted of the Facebook post by a Muslim, who said he found it insulting.

Under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, anyone accused of insulting Islam can be sentenced to death. However the laws are also sometimes used to settle personal scores and target minorities.

In 2015, Muslims beat a Christian couple to death and burned their bodies for allegedly desecrating the Quran.
The Russian military said Wednesday that a U.S. drone was flying over the area when an aid convoy was attacked in Syria on Monday, a charge that U.S. officials swiftly denied.

Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said a Predator drone, which took off from the Incirlik base in Turkey, flew into the area where the convoy was attacked near the Syrian city of Aleppo minutes before it came under fire. He said the drone left the area about 30 minutes after the attack.

We can confirm that NONE of our aircraft -- manned or unmanned, US or Coalition -- were anywhere in the vicinity of Aleppo when the strike against the humanitarian convoy occurred, Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff A. Davis said.

A U.S. defense official told Fox News the only other entities that fly in Syria right now are Russia and Syria.

U.S. officials said earlier that two Russian Su-24 aircraft were flying over the area at the moment of the attack. Both Russia and Syria have denied their aircraft struck the convoy.

The attack drew international condemnation and prompted the U.N. to temporarily suspend aid shipments in Syria, where some 6 million people live in besieged or hard-to-reach places. THe U.N. announced Wednesday it would eventually resume those convoys.

In New York on Tuesday, Russian and U.S. diplomats insisted that the cease-fire, which went into effect nine days ago, was not dead, despite soaring violence. The Syrian military said the truce expired Monday night, shortly before the attack near Aleppo.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Key quotes from world leaders at the U.N. meetings on Wednesday.

____

"This is not a joke."  U.S Secretary of State John Kerry during a Security Council debate on Syria, sharply criticizing those who engage in "word games" to dodge responsibility over questions of "war and peace, life and death."

____

"I believe this is like a PR exercise."  Venezuelan Ambassador Rafael Ramirez, describing the Security Council meeting on Syria.

____

"With regard to the Syrian crisis, the international community is still unable to take concert decisions to save the Syrian people from the crimes that take place there, murders, destruction and displacement all of which is made by President Bashar Assad."  Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, the deputy prime minister.

____

"The terrorist component of the undeclared hybrid war that Russia wages against Ukraine is evident."  Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

____

"This indigenous uprising of the Kashmiris has been met, as usual, with brutal repression by India's occupation force of over half a million soldiers."  Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

____

"Today - ladies and gentlemen - we have a reason for hope: There is one less war on the planet. And that is the war in Colombia."  Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

____

"In Japan we are holding our breath and watching the course of your presidential campaign."  Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the U.S. presidential election.

____

"We must not treat women only as victims of conflict and violence. Women are powerful agents of change."  Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic.
The Russian navy will send its sole aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean as part of Moscow's efforts to reaffirm its influence in Syria and showcase its resurgent military might.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday that the Admiral Kuznetsov will sail to the eastern Mediterranean to join other Russian ships in the area. He didn't specify when the carrier will be deployed, but Russian media have earlier reported that the mission was planned for the fall.

The Soviet-built Admiral Kuznetsov, the only aircraft carrier in the Russian navy, has recently been re-equipped with new Su-33 and MiG-29K fighter jets. It carries about 40 aircraft and is smaller than U.S. aircraft carriers.

The ship is based in Sevoromorsk on the Kola Peninsula and is part of the Russian navy's Northern Fleet.

Russia has waged a year-long military campaign in Syria that has shored up President Bashar Assad and allowed his troops to seize some key ground. Last week, Moscow and Washington brokered a cease-fire in Syria, which is now teetering on the brink of collapse amid renewed fighting and Monday's attack on a humanitarian convoy.

Since Moscow launched its air campaign in Syria on Sept. 30, 2015, the military has used it to test its latest jets and missiles. In a demonstration of its new precision strike capability, Russian strategic bombers, surface ships and a submarine have repeatedly launched cruise missiles at targets in Syria.

By sending the Admiral Kuznetsov to Syria's shores, Russia would significantly beef up its forces there. It would also give the military a chance to test its carrier-born aircraft in combat for the first time.

In 2013, the Russian navy restored a constant presence in the eastern Mediterranean for the first time since the Soviet collapse, using the Soviet-era facility in the Syrian port of Tartus to replenish supplies.

Tartus is the only such facility the Russian military now has outside the former Soviet Union.

Shoigu pointed at the Cold War times, saying that the Soviet navy presence in the eastern Mediterranean helped protect Moscow's interests in the region.

"In 1967, the presence of the 5th squadron in the area helped prevent the escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict and later served as an important deterrent against unfriendly actions against the Soviet Union," he said.
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Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams has rejected an ex-member's accusation that Adams authorized the 2006 Irish Republican Army killing of a high-profile informant.

The BBC's Spotlight investigative program in Belfast broadcast an interview with the man making the allegation on Tuesday night but shielded his identity, citing fears the IRA might try to kill him too.

The man, whom the BBC identified as a former member of the outlawed IRA and legal Sinn Fein who also informed for the British, said Adams approved the 2006 killing of former senior Sinn Fein official Denis Donaldson.

The BBC Spotlight documentary said senior IRA figures came under internal pressure to sanction Donaldson's killing by IRA commanders in South Armagh, a border region where suspected turncoats frequently were taken to be interrogated, tortured and slain. The man said Adams had "the final say."

Donaldson in December 2005 admitted he had secretly briefed police and British intelligence officers on IRA and Sinn Fein activities for two decades, an offense that typically merited the death penalty within IRA circles.

He moved from Belfast to live alone in an isolated farmhouse with no running water or electricity in the Republic of Ireland, where police found him shot to death five months later.

Nobody ever has been charged with Donaldson's killing. A splinter group nicknamed the Real IRA claimed responsibility three years later, but suspicions have persisted that Donaldson's former colleagues in the dominant IRA faction, the Provisionals, were responsible.

The interviewed informer attributed the killing to the Provisional IRA.

Adams said Wednesday he had no role in Donaldson's slaying and accused the BBC of reckless journalism, but stopped short of saying whether he would sue for libel.

"I very specifically and categorically and in a very unqualified way deny these allegations," Adams told Irish broadcasters RTE.
A fire has started in a building belonging to Stockholm's Royal Institute of Art, sending a plume of smoke over large parts of the Swedish capital.

Dozens of firefighters struggled to contain the blaze, which raced through the attic and roof of the building on Skeppsholmen island near downtown Stockholm on Wednesday. There were no reports of injuries.

A thick column of smoke rose from the island and spread out over much of the city center.

The cause of the fire wasn't immediately clear.

The Royal Institute of Art offers undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate studies in fine arts and architecture.
A United Nations official on countering torture has criticized a Turkish government decision to postpone his visit to the country saying the move "sends the wrong message."

U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said Wednesday that Turkey delayed his four-day visit that would have started on Oct. 10.

Turkey declared a state of emergency after a failed coup on July 15 and began a massive crackdown on a movement led by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who it accuses of orchestrating the attempt.

Mendez said his visit would have been crucial in light of the thousands of arrests and the allegations of overcrowding and poor conditions in detention centers following the coup.

Mendez, whose term ends at the end of October, urged Turkey to allow his successor "unfettered access."
Gap Launches Its Fifth Limited-Edition Collection With GQ Featuring The All-Stars Of The Best New Menswear Designers In America

Michael Bastian, Saturdays NYC, John Elliott, and Steven Alan Create Limited-Edition Menswear Collection, Available at Select Gap Stores and Gap.com

NEW YORK - Sept. 21, 2016 // PRNewswire // - Gap is pleased to release the new exclusive menswear collection of GQ's Best New Menswear Designers in America. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the program and its fifth year of partnering with Gap, this year's collection features the best-of-the-best All-Stars who have gone on to build successful careers with their distinct take on American menswear.

"Gap is thrilled to celebrate this milestone and bring to life the visions of these talented designers," said Wendi Goldman, executive vice president and chief product officer for Gap. "They are true All-Stars who have played an important role in shaping contemporary American style and we couldn't be prouder to offer their signature takes on menswear with this new collection."

"We wanted to make the 10th anniversary of this program feel like its own declaration, a snapshot of the state of American fashion," said GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson. "We also wanted to make the clothes instantly wearable, easily attainable, and flat-out covetable. With these four exciting designers, and with Gap's exceptional partnership, I think we hit the sweet spot."

The collection includes tailored trousers and denim, overcoats, leather jackets, classic tees and sweatshirts, sweatpants, and a variety of button down shirts along with accessories - including hats, bags, and socks. The collection is available startingSeptember 27th, at select Gap stores in more than seven countries, including the United States, Canada, China, Hong Kong,Japan, and throughout Europe. It will also be available online at www.gap.com with prices ranging from $18 to $595.

The four designers below, along with the pieces from their limited-edition Gap capsule collections, will be featured in a special advertising insert in the October 2016 issue of GQ magazine.

Michael Bastian (New York, established 2006, GQ Class of '07, '11) - The beauty of Bastian's clothes is that they can be remixed a hundred different ways. "It's a great challenge," Bastian tells GQ of creating his capsule collection. "It's the difference between a novel and a good short story. They're equally powerful." But as the only designer to ever be given repeat recognition in the program (he participated in both 2007 and 2011), he was top of the list for this year's All-Star roster.

(New York, established 2006, GQ Class of '07, '11) - The beauty of Bastian's clothes is that they can be remixed a hundred different ways. "It's a great challenge," Bastian tells GQ of creating his capsule collection. "It's the difference between a novel and a good short story. They're equally powerful." But as the only designer to ever be given repeat recognition in the program (he participated in both 2007 and 2011), he was top of the list for this year's All-Star roster. Steven Alan (New York, established 1994, GQ Class of '08) - Most designers build their collections and work their way up to opening a storefront. Steven Alan did it backward. The clothes he did make (shirts, mostly) were basically private-label pieces to fill his own shelves. He opened a showroom in 1997 and gradually diversified: a striped tie here, a polo there, until he was a capital-F fashion designer. Today he's a one stop shop with everything from shirts and shoes to sunglasses and watches, all stocked next to those under-the-radar brands he's found through his travels. That collection-curation combo is a move many major menswear retailers have since borrowed - but nobody ever nails it quite as well as Steven Alan.

(New York, established 1994, GQ Class of '08) - Most designers build their collections and work their way up to opening a storefront. Steven Alan did it backward. The clothes he did make (shirts, mostly) were basically private-label pieces to fill his own shelves. He opened a showroom in 1997 and gradually diversified: a striped tie here, a polo there, until he was a capital-F fashion designer. Today he's a one stop shop with everything from shirts and shoes to sunglasses and watches, all stocked next to those under-the-radar brands he's found through his travels. That collection-curation combo is a move many major menswear retailers have since borrowed - but nobody ever nails it quite as well as Steven Alan. Saturdays NYC (New York, established 2009, GQ Class of '12) - Founded by Morgan Collett, Colin Tunstall, and Josh Rosen, Saturdays showed up out of nowhere, a magpie line that fathered all the style touch points of the moment: the surf-culture explosion, the shrunk-in-the-wash fit, and the crisp graphic designers aimed at city kids partying on the tiki-torched decks in Montauk and Malibu. What Saturdays does best, is make the brand feel like a way of life. From publishing their own in-house magazine to developing a coffee blend, their shops (now in New York, Japan, and Australia) feel like your most stylish buddy's weekend home.

(New York, established 2009, GQ Class of '12) - Founded by Morgan Collett, Colin Tunstall, and Josh Rosen, Saturdays showed up out of nowhere, a magpie line that fathered all the style touch points of the moment: the surf-culture explosion, the shrunk-in-the-wash fit, and the crisp graphic designers aimed at city kids partying on the tiki-torched decks in Montauk and Malibu. What Saturdays does best, is make the brand feel like a way of life. From publishing their own in-house magazine to developing a coffee blend, their shops (now in New York, Japan, and Australia) feel like your most stylish buddy's weekend home. John Elliott (Los Angeles, established 2012, GQ Class of '14) - When Elliott first participated in the program just two years ago, he was working out of an apartment with three other guys, and the quartet has since revolutionized menswear with their side zip hoodies and tapered sweatpants. "One of the most incredible experiences of my life was going to the Gap near where I live in L.A. to look at my first GQ collection, and they didn't have anything left," reflects Elliott. He has since ascended to street wear-demigod status with his signature layered look, creating a style movement that is still gathering steam.

GQ's Best New Menswear Designers in America project, which was established in 2007, works to advance and bring attention to emerging American menswear designers. The recognized designers were selected by GQ's editor-in-chief, Jim Nelson, creative director Jim Moore, and the magazine's fashion editors, and took part in a mentoring program led by GQ and Gap.

About GQ

GQ is the leading men's general-interest magazine, with a monthly readership of 7 million readers. It is available in print, online at GQ.com, and as an app at iTunes.com. The magazine is published by Conde Nast, a division of Advance Publications. Conde Nast operates in twenty-five countries and is the world leader in exceptional content creation.

About Gap

Gap is one of the world's most iconic apparel and accessories brands and the authority on American casual style. Founded inSan Francisco in 1969, Gap's collections are designed to build the foundation of modern wardrobes  all things denim, classic white shirts, khakis and must-have trends. Beginning with the first international store in London in 1987, Gap continues to connect with customers online and across the brand's about 1,700 company-operated and franchise retail locations around the world. Gap includes Women's and Men's apparel and accessories, GapKids, babyGap, GapMaternity, GapBody and GapFit collections. The brand also serves value-conscious customers with exclusively-designed collections for Gap Outlet and Gap Factory Stores. Gap is the namesake brand for leading global specialty retailer, Gap Inc. (NYSE: GPS) which includes Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta and Intermix. For more information, please visit www.gapinc.com.

SOURCE Gap

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Launch Of New Digital Marketing Agency In Horsham, West Sussex, UK

BusinessMoJo is celebrating the launch of their new digital marketing agency in Horsham, West Sussex, UK area. Further information can be found at http://www.businessmojo.biz/.

--

In a slightly different approach to launching its new digital marketing agency, BusinessMoJo, a new digital marketing agency in Horsham, West Sussex, UK has decided it will offer a discount, and this is expected to take place during September 2016.

Where most businesses tend to just post some flyers and leave it at that, BusinessMoJo has decided to be a little more exciting with the start of its new digital marketing agency.

Chris Venter, Founder at BusinessMoJo, says: "We wanted to be exciting with the launch of our new digital marketing agency because we wanted to put our name on the map.

It should be really worthwhile and we're hoping it will give people something to talk about. It should go great unless we anger the Gods in some way!"

BusinessMoJo aims to stand out when compared to other digital marketing agencies in the Horsham, West Sussex, UK area. This launch celebration is just one of the many ways it will do so.

This is a great chance for businesses in Horsham, West Sussex, UK to get a great deal and support a dedicated local business.

Chris Venter also said: "While BusinessMoJo may not be the only business with this kind of offering, local business are choosing BusinessMoJo because we really listen to what our customers say. Our aim is to help small businesses (in the West Sussex area and London) compete with the big guys in the online marketing world. We think it's going to be a hit because its affordable and gets results."

When asked about the new Digital marketing agency, Chris Venter said: "We offer a range of services from website audits, reputation management, SEO, social media management, video marketing and much more."

Further information about BusinessMoJo and the new digital marketing agency can be discovered at http://www.businessmojo.biz/.

For more information, please visit http://www.businessmojo.biz/

Contact Info:

Name: Chris Venter

Organization: Libertatem Eligendi Limited



Release ID: 132690

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New Leaf Cabinets & Counters Celebrates Military Hero With Dream Kitchen

The company completed the renovation as a show of support and thanks to the veteran for his service and sacrifice, reports www.nlpps.com.

--

New Leaf Cabinets & Counters has recently celebrated a military hero by giving them the kitchen of their dreams. Using custom kitchen cabinets and countertop selections from their extensive collection and a plan that the veteran and his wife had already put together, the team at New Leaf was able to thank the military hero for their service by overhauling their current design and creating something modern, beautiful, and convenient.

Robert Cole, a representative of New Leaf Cabinets & Counters, commented "We want our customers to know that we proudly support our military men and women and are thankful for the sacrifices they make each day to protect our freedom. Because of our gratitude, we were beyond excited to have the opportunity to create new kitchen experience for a 12-year Special Forces veteran who has paid a significant price for his country. Not only did we outfit the kitchen with the best natural stone countertops and custom cabinets, but we included features that were in the family's dream kitchen plans such as a corner drawer cabinet, pull-out trash cans, a tray divider cabinet for baking sheets and cutting boards, and roll-out shelves."

New Leaf Cabinets & Counters provides custom marble, granite, and natural stone fabrication for homes both large and small. Their custom cabinetry and countertop selection is one of the largest in the country, which means they carry items in a wide array of colors and styles to suit any homeowner's personal design aesthetic. New Leaf Cabinets & Counters extends discounts to all active duty military members and veterans who purchase items from their store and invite these customers to contact them for more details.

As Cole goes on to say, "It was so rewarding to experience the love and joy that this family felt once the project was completed. It was one of the most rewarding things that our team has gotten to be a part of since we started this business. As a local cabinet store, we know that we wouldn't be here without our customers, and this is especially true of our military customers. Everyone here at New Leaf is beyond grateful for every opportunity that we get to serve our customers in excellence, and we look forward to continuing to be their go-to provider for their kitchen renovation needs."

Those who would like to learn more about or see the final results of this military hero's dream kitchen renovation can visit http://www.nlpps.com/massive-marble-island-tacoma-wa.

About New Leaf Cabinets & Counters:

New Leaf Cabinets & Countertops specializes in all aspects of custom kitchen cabinets from basic cabinet replacement to complete custom kitchen and cabinet designs. New Leaf also offers a large selection of quartz, granite, and other natural and engineered stone countertops. Whether the job is large or small, New Leaf's cabinet designers meticulously review all orders to make sure no detail is overlooked, and their 'hands-on' approach and experience in the construction industry are unrivaled in speed and precision.

For more information, please visit http://www.nlpps.com

Contact Info:

Name: Robert Cole

Organization: New Leaf Cabinets & Counters

Phone: (253) 200-1173

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/new-leaf-cabinets-counters-celebrates-military-hero-with-dream-kitchen/132966

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Certified Public Accountant Named 2016 Local Leader

QED Business Solutions won the 2016 Local Leader Award sponsored by Local Leader TV, coming out on top over many other competitors.

--

QED Business Solutions was named one of the top Local Leaders, beating out many other competitors to take home top honors. Local Leader TV presented the award to QED Business Solutions via their website. Details about the award can be found on the company website at http://LocalLeader.tv.

Potential award recipients were required to selected by staff of Local Leader TV based on in-house criteria in order to be in contention for the Local Leader Award, and were judged based on honesty, integrity, and hard work. Lewis Carness, CPA CGMA, Founder and President of QED Business Solutions was pleased about the company's performance, saying:

"Who would you want to give all of your confidential information and bank statements to? having been the person in charge of vetting new ISO's (Independent Sales Organization), many of the principals and owners of these companies have extensive criminal backgrounds and or sanctions or bans from FINRA or the SEC or have family associates in organized crime. There is even one broker in New York City calling clients while wearing a GPS ankle bracelet while awaiting sentencing for Federal drug trafficking charges, and Many of them make their wives or children the owners of these businesses on paper to get away from being the subject of background searches. Now finally business owners have an 'honest broker' on their side. "

Said Carness, "The entrepreneur that created QED is a business owner just like you. Our team and partner companies are made up of people with the skills and experience to find you the right financing, help you cut your expenses, improve your accounting and reporting, and assist you with any aspect of running your business. We can help you achieve the success you deserve from your hard work."

QED Business Solutions provides $5,000 to $500,000 Merchant Advance, Term Loans and Lines of Credit, Invoice Factoring and Accounts Receivable Lines of Credit, Equipment Finance & Leasing, and Small Business Administration Loans (From $300,000 to $5 Million).

Persons interested in learning more about QED Business Solutions and the award can visit the website at www.qedbizsolutions.com.

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Barkily Gets Featured In Top Spot On Huffington Post List Of Interesting Kickstarter Campaigns

Dog app Barkily has been featured in the top spot of interesting Kickstarter campaigns on the Huffington Post website. The team at Barkily says they are honored the startup has garnered attention from a prestigious publication and hope it will raise awareness of the campaign.

--

Barkily, an app that helps dog owners organize and manage the many aspects of responsible dog ownership, has been featured in the top spot on a list of interesting Kickstarter campaigns on the Huffington Post website.

Matt Janaway, CEO of Marketing Labs and a regular Huffington Post contributor, recently unveiled five Kickstarter campaigns that caught his interest as an entrepreneur, putting Barkily as his No. 1 choice.

Janaway praised Barkily's features, saying it will help dog parents with the many tasks that come with owning a canine, especially for people who have multiple animals.

"Being a dog parent is not easy, especially if you have more than one pooch," the Huffington Post contributor wrote. "Each dog needs a lot of TLC and regular walks, food and even trips to dog parks/dog beaches. You'll need to take them for grooming and keep a check on their health at regular intervals. This and other activities related to your pet pooch take up a lot of your time, most of which can be spent locating the best dog care services and then scheduling the visits.

This is where you need Barkily - an app by dog lovers, for dog lovers."

Barkily co-founder Serhat Pala says he's appreciative of the coverage from a highly regarded publication like the Huffington Post.

"We were pleasantly surprised to be featured in the Huffington Post considering that we just launched on Kickstarter last week," Pala said. "But, since we're offering something totally unique for dog owners, maybe it's not that surprising. We're hoping this will give us the exposure we need to help us reach our relatively low goal of $20,000. If we can get the word out to enough passionate dog lovers and dog enthusiasts, we're confident we can reach our goal and the support shown by Mr. Janaway by highlighting our Kickstarter project as one of interest is greatly appreciated."

The Barkily Kickstarter campaign was launched to raise money for the app, which is meant to act as a "doggie day planner" to help dog owners take better care of their pets. The app will allow dog owners to easily find dog service providers and schedule appointments with them and share their dog's health information with them, eliminating the need to fill out multiple forms when sharing their dogs' information.

Barkily will also provide users with a special dog tag that contains a QR code holding their dog's information. They can customize which portion of the information can be viewed by certain individuals, making some public and some only viewable by their veterinarian and other portions viewable to their groomer or other service providers.

The app also serves a purpose for small businesses that offer dog related products and services, as it will enable them to accept bookings through the app.

For more information, please visit https://barkily.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Rob Swystun

Email: rob@rhinoforce.com

Organization: Barkily



Video URL: https://ksr-video.imgix.net/projects/2529769/video-680457-h264_high.mp4

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/barkily-gets-featured-in-top-spot-on-huffington-post-list-of-interesting-kickstarter-campaigns/133056

Release ID: 133056

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Sixth Annual Information Security and Hacking Event to be Held in Louisville, KY

ACE Hackware will be participating in DerbyCon 6, an information security conference to be held in Louisville, KY September 21st - 25th at the Hyatt Regency Louisville.

--

Security professionals looking for the latest information on computer, network and information security can register to attend DerbyCon 6, scheduled for September 21st - 25th in Louisville, Kentucky.

ACE Hackware is attending and vending new gear and hackware at this year's event, which will cover key issues like:

- Mind Reading for Fun and Profit using DISC: Christopher Hadnagy will discuss how use a quick and easy profiling tool to make targets feel as if attendees can read their minds. Attendees will also learn how to release chemicals in their targets' brains to make them more agreeable to suggestions.

- Body Hacking 101 (or a Healthy Lifestyle for Security Pros): For attendees wondering how to get started in a healthier lifestyle without the inundation of pseudo/false information from fitness magazines, Nathan Magniez' workshop is the talk to attend. Every attendee will walk away with the knowledge and ability to control their own body weight and shape their own health goals.

- Hacking for Homeschoolers: STEM projects for under $20: This talk by Branden Miller will show how to teach STEM at home with minimal amount of money. Each project has been built by kids ages 9+. With only the interwebz, tin foil, and foam board, attendees will learn to build an HDTV antenna. With a couple of empty 2 Liter bottles, PVC pipe, bicycle pump, and duct tape, learn how to make soda bottle rockets! MacGyver will be jealous! Kids will love it!

Full details on the event can be found on the website at http://derbycon.com.

When asked about the reasons behind creating this event, host Dave Kennedy explains:

"DerbyCon isn't just another security conference. We've taken the best elements from all of the conferences we've ever been to and put them into one. DerbyCon is a place you can call home, where you can meet each other, party, and learn."

ACE Hackware founder and Chief Hacktologist, Taylor Banks adds: "It's easily one of my favorite events to attend and participate in. It's a great conference with great organization and great speakers, made even better by great attendees."

The DerbyCon website has full details about the sessions at this year's event. Interested parties can visit the website at: http://derbycon.com.

For more information, please visit https://acehackware.com

Contact Info:

Name: Taylor Banks

Organization: ACE Hackware

Address: 1270 Caroline St Suite #D120-127, Atlanta, GA 30307



Release ID: 133345

For more information visit r



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Critical Systems Inc. Open New UHP Fabrication Center in Boise, Idaho

Critical Systems, Inc. has created a state of the art, purpose built fabrication center to give them ten times the output capacity, thanks to multiple manufacturing innovations.

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Orbital welding equipment, gas scrubbers and gas cabinets are a vital part of a wide range of different industries, from technology to pharmaceuticals. As such, there are a huge number of companies in the US and beyond who need to source gas cabinets and related items at the highest quality, for the best price. Critical Systems Inc. has been providing these products for nearly twenty years, and has now completed construction on a brand new, state of the art UHP Fabrication Center, which will form part of their new headquarters in Boise, Idaho.

The new design has given the company five times the fabrication space to work with, while improving the efficiency of all workspace by 50%, thanks to a new 'work cells' concept. Combining these improvements in scale and efficiency means a tenfold increase in capacity over their previous expansion in 2011.

The new facility puts the company on the forefront of manufacturing capability throughout the world. It is the result of a multimillion dollar investment over five years. This means companies can buy the very best American-made equipment at a scale never before seen, all while creating new jobs in partnership with Boise City Business Development and Idaho State Representatives.

The innovation in manufacturing is only one side of the story: the company has posted three new patents in just the last 18 months, meaning the new facilities will help them to diversify their product offer as well as increase production capacity.

A spokesperson for Critical Systems, Inc. explained, "Controlled systematic growth continues to be our company edict, and this work is the culmination of an 18-year effort to become the world leader in gas management systems. With this new facility, and with our new and innovative products poised to hit the market, we feel confident in saying that goal is now within arm's reach."

About Critical Systems, Inc.: Since 1998, Critical Systems, Inc. (CSI) has provided the best Gas Cabinet, Valve Manifold Boxes & Gas Abatement Systems including Gas Cabinets, Gas Scrubbers, and more. In addition, they provide Orbital Welding Rental, Lease, Repair and Training Services related to process tool facilitation for the Semiconductor, Biotech, Pharmaceutical industries and related fields. Their company headquarters is in Boise, ID, with additional locations in Burnsville, MN, and Shrewsbury, PA, Austin, TX and Draper, UT.

For more information, please visit http://www.criticalsystemsinc.com/

Contact Info:

Name: PRWhirlWind

Organization: Critical Systems Inc

Address: 7000 West Victory Rd. Boise, Idaho 83709

Phone: (877) 572-5515

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/critical-systems-inc-open-new-uhp-fabrication-center-in-boise-idaho/133575

Release ID: 133575

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Annual Missions Emphasis Week to Take Place in Liberty Corner, New Jersey

Liberty Corner Mission USA is the foreign mission arm of Fellowship Deaconry Ministries

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"Facing the Unfinished Task" is the theme of CROSSroads 2016, the annual missions emphasis weekend hosted by Liberty Corner Mission USA. Missionaries from various denominations and sending organizations share from their wealth of experience of church planting, evangelism, and Bible translation. They come from Japan, Taiwan, Pakistan, Great Britain and the United States.

The conference begins on Friday, September 30 with registration from 5:00 - 6:00 p.m., followed by dinner and the first session. The conference concludes on Sunday, October 2 after the midday meal.

Keynote speakers Stuart and Jill Briscoe have ministered on every continent and written more than 40 books. Stuart pastored Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for 30 years before founding a ministry media company called Telling the Truth, which now broadcasts daily worldwide. Jill has served on the boards of Christianity Today and World Relief, served alongside her husband's ministry, and is currently the Executive Editor of the women's magazine Just Between Us.

Derick Wilson leads worship at CROSSroads, drawing from his 24 years of experience as a musician and worship leader. Originally from Scotland, Derick and his wife Beverly came to the U.S. in 1998 to serve as missionaries and he is now the Associate Pastor at Somerset Hills Baptist Church in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

More information, including the weekend schedule, list of missionary speakers, and location can be found at www.deaconry.org/retreats/crossroads-2016. Come to any or all scheduled events. There is no conference fee for the meetings, but a freewill offering will be taken. Overnight accommodations and/or meals must be registered and paid through Fellowship Conference Center at 908-991-3212.

Liberty Corner Mission USA is the foreign mission arm of Fellowship Deaconry Ministries, located in Liberty Corner, New Jersey. Since 1951, as an interdenominational faith mission, LCM has brought God's Word of salvation and transformation to the people of Japan and Taiwan.

For more information, please visit http://deaconry.org/

Contact Info:

Name: Shanti Fabiunke

Organization: Fellowship Deaconry Ministries

Address: Fellowship Deaconry Ministries P.O. Box 204 Liberty Corner, NJ 07938

Phone: (908) 991-3212

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/annual-missions-emphasis-week-to-take-place-in-liberty-corner-new-jersey/133564

Release ID: 133564

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LiveViewGPS Inc Unveils Plan To Help Businesses Save On Fuel Costs

The company has introduces tracking technology that will help business owners curb their fuel spending and save money at the pump, reports http://www.liveviewgps.com.

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LiveViewGPS Inc., a nationwide provider of location tracking products, has recently announced the unveiling of their plan to help companies both large and small save on fuel costs. Their aim is to help business owners understand how using GPS tracking devices can help them monitor their fuel spending and create a solid strategy to change their employees' habits so that they can finally get it under control. Those who would like to see LiveViewGPS' tips for reducing business fleet fuel consumption can do so at their website.

George Karonis, a LiveViewGPS Inc representative, stated "These days, fuel costs can fluctuate wildly from day to day, and business owners are constantly on the lookout for ways to make sure they aren't negatively impacted by price increases. It's important for them to realize that meeting this goal requires careful monitoring of their employees' driving habits, ensuring that they are staying on route and aren't doing things to waste fuel unnecessarily. The good news is that this isn't as hard as it sounds. We're showing business owners how they can make use of our GPS tracking devices to monitor vehicle speeds, fleet location, and engine idling and then use the information they gather to reduce fuel consumption and, in turn, save money."

LiveViewGPS' fleet fuel consumption management plan focuses on three main aspects of driving: engine idling, vehicle speeds, and route optimization. The company has found that using GPS tracking to reduce idle time for vehicles, ensure that employees are consistently driving at speed limits, and make sure that they stick to the most efficient delivery routes not only keeps expensive wear and tear at bay, but these things can also help businesses save gas and reduce the amount they spend at the pump.

"Gas prices are certainly a concern for businesses that require daily driving," Karonis continued. "However, rising fuel costs don't have to pose a threat to the budget when business owners take the necessary steps to mitigate any possible negative impact. Our team is happy to offer solutions that will help business owners accomplish that goal so that they can spend less of their funds on keeping the fleet running and put more of their resources toward expansion and growth."

About LiveViewGPS Inc:

LiveViewGPS, Inc. located in Southern California, is a Location Based Service Company (LBS). They provide wireless location products and services for businesses, law enforcement and family safety. Their GPS tracking devices include vehicle and fleet-tracking systems, asset trackers, trailer tracking systems, surveillance monitoring tools, people tracking devices and GPS asset protection equipment.

For more information, please visit http://www.liveviewgps.com

Contact Info:

Name: George Karonis

Organization: LiveViewGPS Inc

Phone: (661) 294-6805

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/liveviewgps-inc-unveils-plan-to-help-businesses-save-on-fuel-costs/133628

Release ID: 133628

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Dyersburg Pest Control Service Celebrates 54 Years In Operation

Okeena Termite and Pest Control is a termite and pest control company that has been operating in West Tennessee and parts of Missouri since 1962.

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Okeena Termite and Pest Control and CEO Scott Riley are pleased to announce that the firm has reached a milestone of 54 years in business. The family-owned pest control Dyersburg company has been serving residences and businesses, in West Tennessee since1962. The company has a service area which covers the Missouri cities of Kennett and Caruthersville, as well as nearly two dozen Tennessee communities and their surrounding areas. The philosophy of the company is to do the right things and do things right.

A spokesperson for the company explained, "At Okeena Pest Control, we take our role in keeping you pest-free year-round very seriously. We want to ensure that you are delighted with the service we provide. We are bonded, insured and licensed and our technicians participate in initial and on-going training to stay current with the latest methods and products, including safety methods and products. "

Achieving a healthy and pest-fee home requires both customer and specialist efforts. The pest control technicians at Okeena offer suggestions and direct action steps which can be taken to help eliminate pests. These include some do-it-yourself tips available on the website.

In order to maintain affordability and to stay within the EPA guidelines, pesticides must break down over time. The most popular plan takes this time into consideration and treatments are done every sixty days. More demanding customers may prefer to have the monthly plan. A quarterly plan fits the needs of many other customers. Special services include bed bug treatment, mosquito control, flea and tick control, Brown Recluse Spiders, flying insect control and termite control programs.

The services provided by Okeena include cleaning of air ducts to ensure clean and healthy air in the home or business. The average air duct can contain dirt, dust mites, chemicals, viruses, bacteria, carbon monoxide, mold, allergens, pet dander, tobacco smoke, cooking residues, and fecal matter from pets and insects. The company also provides blown-in cellulose insulation services.

For more information, please visit http://okeena.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Scott Riley, CEO

Organization: Okeena Termite and Pest Control

Address: 319 Depot St, Ridgely, TN 38080-1339

Phone: (731) 285-4982

Source: http://okeena.com/pest-control-services/

Release ID: 133602

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Floristopia Unveils Verified Local Listings

The local florist search engine announces up-to-date verified listings at the 2016 SAF convention

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The trend in consumerism these days is to shop locally, and finding a locally-owned "florist near me" is becoming easier than ever, thanks to one online service. Floristopia, the largest and most comprehensive local florist search engine, has made some major changes to improve its directory. Floristopia owners will unveil their new verified local listings at the 2016 Society of American Florists (SAF) convention in Maui, Hawaii.

Unfortunately, many local florist directories do not offer up-to-date, accurate listings. To remedy this situation, Floristopia engaged in a six-month call campaign, reaching out to more than 36,000 local florist listings throughout the U.S. and Canada to ensure the accuracy of their directory. The call center surveyed local florists to verify their contact information, including website and email. As a result of the intensive call center campaign, Floristopia will unveil its new database, which will only include local retail and wholesale florists whose information could be validated through conversation with a Floristopia call center agent.

While founder and CEO Brad Denham and Floristopia expect to maintain their dominance as the largest local florist directory, they don't claim to have 100% of the florists. "While we would love to say we have 100% of the florists that exist," said Denham, "unfortunately, there are florists who simply would not take the time to answer the questions necessary to validate their shop location. If a flower shop didn't want to share their local information, we simply removed them from the directory."

The good news is that local florists not included in the latest version of the website can always log on and create a profile to include their shop and become verified as a local florist. This opportunity will only be made available for free to florists for a period of time, after which a florist will have to pay a small fee to verify his or her listing.

Denham stated, "We listened to our consumers' and florists' concerns regarding the inaccurate and outdated florist information that exists on the web. Our goal is not only to have the most comprehensive local florist directory but also the most accurate and helpful." Users only need to input a city and state or zip code to find detailed local listings with information about location, products, and services. The site's content also includes customer reviews of local florists around the nation and articles designed to help consumers find the best local florist to meet their needs.

About Floristopia

Floristopia is the largest and most comprehensive online florist directory on the web, dedicated to making it easy for consumers to find "flower shops near me." Floristopia's mission is to transform the way consumers shop for flowers. The website owners are committed to providing the easiest and most transparent way for consumers to find and connect with the perfect local florist. Visitors to the website can search and review thousands of real local florists.

For more information, please visit http://floristopia.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Brad Denham

Organization: Floristopia

Address: 7047 E Greenway Pkwy 250 Scottsdale, Arizona 85254

Phone: 480-257-7111

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/floristopia-unveils-verified-local-listings/133673

Release ID: 133673

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DirectorySpot.net Reports More than 50 Million Children Attend School in the USA

Connecting with the families of these children needs to be effortless and Directory Spot ensures it is, the company announces

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According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States currently provides education for approximately 50.4 million students. Of these students, 35.4 million attend prekindergarten through eighth grade, 15 million attend high school and an additional 5.2 million are enrolled in a private school. 98,300 public schools provide this education, along with approximately 33,600 private schools. To ensure all staff members can remain in communication with their students, parents, PTO and more, the majority turn to an online school directory, as opposed to the binders used in the past to retain this information.

"Finding the right online school directory software remains crucial in this situation, as it needs to make the job easier for all staff members and those who need to communicate with individuals in the school system. First and foremost, the privacy of those included in the directory must be maintained at all times, thus a program that is encrypted and password-protected is required. Once a program has been established to be compliant in this area, other features may then be examined," Eric, spokesperson for Directory Spot, states.

Additional features a group, school or organization may wish to have in a program of this type include the ability to customize the directory and search it for the desired information. Determine the ease of use and how many steps are required to connect with members and find out which devices the directory may be accessed on. People are busy, thus they want to be able to gather information any time and anywhere, and the right program ensures they can.

"Directory Spot currently operates in three countries and 36 states within the United States. More than 115,000 individuals now actively use the program, and more than 50,000 emails have been sent. Now is the time to see why so many turn to us for their online directory needs, and be sure to take advantage of the free trial to check out the features personally," Eric continues.

Individuals may be part of numerous groups. Parents often have children in school, belong to a religious organization, work and need to communicate with others in their organization and take part in hobbies and other personal activities. The directory needs to allow a person to identify which database they are searching at any given time, thus customization is another element to consider when selecting a directory of this type.

"This software benefits large groups of all types. Churches often rely on this type of program to connect with their members, and other organizations find they benefit from its use. Visit our site today to learn more about how it can help to reduce your workload and ensure that everyone in the group is informed on the latest news and information. In today's hectic world, the ability to access this information quickly and easily should never be discounted, and that is exactly what our program allows individuals to do," Eric declares.

About Directory Spot:

The leading provider of online and mobile directories for schools, churches and organizations, Directory Spot has specifically designed programs to fit into a school's model and now offers a group directory to assist organizations of other types. The program can be customized with the logo and color of the organization's choice and is accessible on mobile devices anywhere the user is.

For more information, please visit https://www.directoryspot.net/

Contact Info:

Name: Eric

Organization: Directory Spot

Phone: 888-360-7893

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/directoryspot-net-reports-more-than-50-million-children-attend-school-in-the-usa/133654

Release ID: 133654

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Life Insurance Premium Financing Specialists Announce the Launch of Web Presence

The concept of Premium Financed Life Insurance allows qualified clients to borrow funds to pay life insurance premiums, High net-worth clients can purchase the life insurance they need without liquidating investments. It is also becoming a popular retirement vehicle for professionals including physicians and attorneys.

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The partners of Elite Financial Services today announced the availability of their online resource that addresses life insurance premium financing. The website www.Assets.net , launched by entrepreneurial experts from the insurance and digital marketing arenas, is offered as the "go to" source for professionals in the small and medium sized business market. In providing an educational overview and a detailed on-demand webinar, professionals can quickly decide if life insurance premium financing vehicle is right for them.

The premium financing strategy allows high net-worth individuals to secure a high payout life insurance policy without having to tie up much, if any, of their personal assets in order to cover the policy premium. According to Principal, Marc Schulman, "These instruments are architected to the unique needs of high net-worth individuals, and as a result we are typically issuing policies with a death benefit payout of at least $1 million or more. As an alternative to paying cash upfront or having to liquidate personal or business assets to cover the annual premium, favorable terms are arranged with financial institutions to have them pay the premium. This cost is covered by a short-term loan from a major bank like Wells Fargo or US Bank, or a handful of other banks that specialize in this highly complex area. In turn, the policy holder makes the regular interest payments while the insurance premiums are paid by the financial institution, thus keeping the life insurance policy in force for the term."

Available for more than 80 years and used by many in the Fortune 500 including IBM and Wal-Mart, but only in the last several years have regulations changed to make this available to the SMB market. As a result, more and more businesses are assigning life insurance policies on their executives, owners and important employees. These are often referred to as "Key-Person" policies, and can provide the funds necessary guide a company through the difficult time of a loss of a key player in their team.

"An even more exciting variable to Premium Finance Life Insurance is that it serves as an investment vehicle for the SMB professional, such as a physician practice, law office or manufacturer," said Schulman. The policy provides business owners the flexibility to finance a future income stream for the business, while keeping any extra funds within the business. During this time, the value of the policy can continue to grow on a tax-deferred basis. In consideration of tenuous economic conditions, this strategy provides an extremely attractive shelter for businesses.

For more information and informational webinar, please visit http://www.Assets.net

For more information, please visit http://www.Assets.net

Contact Info:

Name: Scott Hall

Organization: Difference Media Inc



Release ID: 133659

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Rip Toned Announces Launching Their Line of Fitness Accessories on Amazon UK

Popular fitness gear brand on Amazon.com expands their business to United Kingdom.

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Rip Toned, top selling brand of fitness products on Amazon.com is unveiling its products in United Kingdom. The company has recently announced its expansion to cater to the needs of athletes, weightlifters and fitness enthusiasts in United Kingdom.

With the growing number of weight lifters and fitness enthusiasts in the UK, Rip Toned is pleased to launch its successful line of weight lifting products on Amazon.co.uk. Its best-selling wrist wraps are all the rage after a year of its release. The company, which prides itself on well-made fitness gear, says their high performance wrist wraps enhance workout routine and wrist strength without compromising safety. It's said to get rid of disastrous lifts & protect wrist joints from injury in lifting heavier weights such as bench press, deadlifts, cleans, jerks, shrugs, overhead or shoulder press.

Rip Toned is also known to deliver excellent customer service. An Amazon customer, Jesus Cortez, commends the company's product and service said, "Highly recommend these wraps. The customer service was great very impressed by them. I will continue my loyalty to them. Very impress with the service I can't say enough!!!"

Another Amazon customer, Avid Fisher, who was unconvinced at first revealed, "Great wrist wraps and the customer service is PHENOMENAL. At first I was unsure about this wrist wraps because of their low price, but once I received them I knew they were the real deal."

Mark Pasay, Co-Founder of Rip Toned says they stand by the company's mission to provide positive buying experience to their customers. Apart from attention to customer satisfaction, the company has been a provider of relevant free content on the web as value-added bonus such as this YouTube video https://youtu.be/VmS1XqCulCY. He shares, "To express our gratitude to our customers, we provide helpful online content for free. At Rip Toned, we are driven to offer quality products and content to aid our customer's fitness goals."

Rip Toned products are backed with lifetime replacement warranty with free web content which includes images, videos, instructions, workout routines and more.

Rip Toned weightlifting and fitness gear are now available in Amazon.co.uk.

For more information, please visit http://riptoned.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Mark Pasay

Email: media@riptoned.com

Organization: Rip Toned

Address: West Kelowna, BC Canada V4T 1L3

Phone: 1-888-552-0225

Release ID: 133646

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Best Hunting Boots Review And Blog Post Launched

AliveOutdoor has just released a new hunting boots review and buyers guide. The website serves as a guide to products, locations, and all outdoor activities.

--

Aliveoutdoor and David S. Boone are pleased to announce the launch of a new blog entry on the topic of hunting boots. The article is entitled "How to Select the Best Hunting Boots for You!" You can read about this best hunting boots reviews of David by click here. The website and blog have many other articles of interest and reviews of a wide range of products associated with having fun in the outdoors. David likes outdoor activities such as hunting, fishing, and other outdoor sports. This personal experience gives him the credentials to help others find the right products and tips.

When planning a hunting trip, it is important to use the best hunting boots in order to be comfortable while moving about, as well as to protect the feet from injury and painful sores. The new blog entry offered by the website points out several tips to consider when deciding on a pair of hunting boots. The article also reviews and selects five top hunting boot options, depending upon the tips which are provided.

It is important to consider the type of terrain in which the boots will be worn. The flexibility of the sole will vary, depending upon whether the ground is rocky, steep or marshy. Weather conditions are another factor to think about. Cold weather may require more insulation, especially if not much walking is involved. Rain or snow requires boots which are water-resistant. Different brands of the same size may fit differently. Some brands run small while others are large.

Describing the blog entry, David explained, I have presented four tips for purchasing boots which will help to obtain a good fit. I applied the suggestions described in my blog to choose five top boots. My picks include LaCrosse Men's Adder Scent 18" HD Snake Boots; Kamik Men's Nationplus Boot; Danner Men's Pronghorn 8 Inch Hunting Boot; Kenetrek Men's Mountain Extreme Ni Hunting Boots; and Bog Men's Classic High Camo Winter Snow Boot. A full review of each boot is presented with pros and cons listed."

For more information, please visit http://aliveoutdoor.com/

Contact Info:

Name: David S. Boone

Organization: Alive Outdoor Inc.

Address: 12 S. Wacker Dr., Chicago IL 60622

Phone: 1 (888) 336-9543

Source: http://aliveoutdoor.com/best-hunting-boots/

Release ID: 133789

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ENT Associates of Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Pasco Counties Launches New Website

ENT Associates, a Florida-based practice dedicated to the care of the head, neck, ears, nose, and throat, has launched its brand new website at www.entflorida.com.

--

With nine locations throughout Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Pasco counties, ENT Associates has stood as a pillar of Florida's medical community for more than 30 years. Now this preeminent Ear, Nose, and Throat practice has launched its brand new website to help patients better discover and explore its patient-centered services and resources.

The new website boasts an expansive menu of options for all visitors, including in-depth descriptions of their many services that address allergies, ear disorders, hearing care, facial plastic surgery, pediatric care, nose and sinus concerns, sleep problems, and throat and neck issues. The comprehensive information provided for each service helps patients understand key ENT problems and resolutions.

In addition, the patient resources provided on ENT Associates' new website include a patient portal and even an education library for patients wishing to delve even deeper into specific health concerns like dizziness, Meniere's Disease, and Thyroid Disease.

Other perks of ENT Associate's new website include cohesive organization and attractive design, courtesy of website designer and developer Best Edge SEM of Tampa, Florida. Patients browsing www.entflorida.com can read patient testimonials, catch up on practice news, and scroll through ENT Associates' social media platforms.

ENT Associates is known for providing patients with total care for diseases and disorders of the head, neck, ears, nose, and throat, as well as for utilizing the most advanced technologies available to help patients return to optimal health. The practice provides expert care to adults and children alike. This new website will help all patients more efficiently explore how ENT Associates can help them overcome their ears, nose, and throat problems.

Members of the media interested in learning more about ENT Associate's contributions to the medical community in Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Pasco counties can use the following contact information.

For more information, please visit http://www.entflorida.com

Contact Info:

Name: Layne Maly, Director of Marketing

Organization: ENT Associates

Address: 1330 South Fort Harrison Clearwater, FL 33756

Phone: 727-441-3588

Source: https://www.facebook.com/entflorida

Release ID: 133770

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Victorville Podiatrist Launches Informative Website

Webbing Doc explains the types of foot surgeries in a new website posting. The information helps to determine when foot surgery is needed, as well as defining what a podiatrist is.

--

Webbing Doc is pleased to announce the release of an informative site which helps individuals determine whether or not a foot surgery might be necessary. The Victorville podiatrist explains what the function of a podiatrist is. The website also describes how to know if a foot surgery might be necessary. Full explanations and images are offered to better explain the many different types of foot surgeries.

According to a spokesperson for webbingdoc.com, a podiatrist is able to address many of the problems with the feet and ankles. "Your podiatrist can help to determine when surgical intervention may be necessary or helpful. When a deformity or pain is a growing problem, we can determine whether surgery may be the answer to relieving discomfort and restore the function of the foot. It is better to deal with the problem sooner rather than later, in order to avoid permanent damage."

According to the website, the podiatrist will require pre-operative testing before beginning a surgical procedure. Specific tests, as well as general health indicators, will be reviewed. For insight into the history and condition of the patient, the foot doctor may require tests such as blood studies, EKGs, a urinalysis, x-rays, and biomechanics function. Additional evaluations may include checking for specific diseases, allergies, illnesses and current medications.

Some of the specific types of surgery are explained in further details. Fusion surgeries, for example, can include open ankle, arthroscopic ankle, hindfoot, midfoot, and great toe fusion. Additional surgical procedures include tendon surgery, metatarsal surgery, bunion surgery, neuroma surgery, heel surgery and hammertoe surgery. Podiatrists offer other treatment procedures, such as care of tendonitis patients.

Before recommending surgery, the podiatrist will discuss all the options and possible results. Patients are kept fully informed about the expectations for pain relief, symptom relief, and a full recovery. The patient is also apprised of any possible side effects which may occur.

For more information, please visit http://www.webbingdoc.com

Contact Info:

Name: josh candid

Organization: webbingdoc.com



Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb13MFGFDZ8

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/victorville-podiatrist-launches-informative-website/133754

Release ID: 133754

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Free Freightnet Membership

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He has been cited by Rush Limbaugh, quoted in the New York Times, featured at Real Clear Politics and Lucianne.com and interviewed on radio, TV and in social media.





Inducted into the Philadelphia Public Relations Hall of Fame, for many years he served as a Lecturer in Corporate Communication at Penn State University. A former President of the Philadelphia Public Relations Association (PPRA) he has lectured at Rowan University, Temple University, The College of New Jersey and Arcadia University. He has conducted workshops on public relations for thousands of participants throughout the nation and has taught countless others the art of public speaking. He has also advised numerous lawyers, judges, public officials and political candidates.





Cirucci is a prolific writer and his op-ed pieces have appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Courier-Post and other publications.



A native of Camden NJ, Cirucci is a former President of the Philadelphia chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators. Cirucci served as Associate Executive Director of the Philadelphia Bar Association for nearly 30 years. He served as Chair of Penn State University's Professional Advisory Board for the Corporate Communication major at Penn State Abington and on the Pennsylvania Bar Association's Judicial Selection Commission.



He received his MA degree from Rowan University and his BA from Villanova University. He has been named a Distinguished Alumnus of Rowan's public relations program and received the E. A. "Wally" Richter Leadership Award, the highest honor from the National Association of Bar Executives' Communications Section. He has also been honored by numerous other local, state and national groups.









Cirucci's passions include politics, the popular culture, books and authors, art, communication, music, theatre, movies, dining and travel. In his hometown of Camden, Cirucci taught fifth grade at the Ulysses Wiggins Elementary School named for the founder of the Camden NAACP. There he was one of the first teachers in the country to teach African-American history to inner city students. He later served as editor of a local weekly newspaper, as Assistant to the Township Manager of Cherry Hill Township and as Associate Director of Communications at the New Jersey State Bar Association.

He's Dan Cirucci, the founder and editor-in chief of the Dan Cirucci Blog, Matt Rooney's sidekick on Save Jersey's videocasts and one of the most widely honored public relations professionals in his field. He's also been a public relations consultant to numerous organizations and individuals and hosted The Advocates on RVN-TV.
Iconic poultry business Bernard Matthews has been bought by the Boparan Private Office  the investment company of poultry tycoon Ranjit Singh, owner of the 2 Sisters Food Group  securing around 2,000 jobs.

The acquisition ends months of speculation since Bernard Matthews owners, Rutland Partners, appointed PriceWaterhouse Coopers in June to look for possible buyers.

This acquisition will create a strong platform for future growth and ensures Bernard Matthews is well positioned to develop into a sustainable, growing business, said a Boparan spokesman.

See also: Accounts reveal further losses at Bernard Matthews

We intend to respect and build on the 66-year heritage of a much-loved British brand. We have a proven track record in turning around businesses and we aim to make Bernard Matthews great again.

The spokesman added that, without Boparans intervention, the company would probably have gone bust.

Given that Bernard Matthews supplies about 40% of the turkeys consumed at Christmas, the acquisition ensured that British consumers would still have a ready supply of turkeys for their festive dinners.

Acquisition

The sale includes production and processing operations in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire and Hungary. Around 2,000 employees and agency staff have transferred to the new owners and the group continues to trade as normal.

Trade union Unite gave the takeover a cautious welcome. However, in takeover situations, there are always matters that need to be clarified, said regional officer Steve Harley.

Unite is meeting the company today where searching questions will be asked on future employment, pay, and terms and conditions.

We will also be asking about the status of the pension scheme under new owners.

It is understood that Boparan Private Office offered to take on the pension scheme, which serves around 725 former employees and has a 16m deficit, as part of the takeover deal.

But this is now being transferred to the government-backed Pension Protection Fund, which could result in lower pensions for scheme members.

Substantial

The spokesman would not reveal what Boparan paid for the company, other than to say the sum was substantial.

Rutland acquired a majority shareholding in Bernard Matthews in 2013 for 25m and last year injected a further 10m of capital into the firm.

Despite this, turnover has slid from 346m in 2012-13 to 277m in 2014-15.

Cost cutting, rebranding and renewable energy investments have not been enough to allow the firm to turn a profit over that period, with latest accounts reporting an 860,000 loss before exceptional items.
Story Highlights 53% want leaders to compromise; 21% want them to stick to principles

Democrats and Republicans both favor compromise over strict principles

Democrats remain more likely than Republicans to favor compromise

PRINCETON, N.J. -- A majority of Americans continue to believe that political leaders in Washington should compromise in order to get things done, while less than half as many say leaders should stick to their beliefs even if little gets done. These attitudes are particularly relevant to the current situation in Washington, where Senate and House members face a Sept. 30 deadline to pass a stopgap budget resolution to avoid a government shutdown.

Although Congress' job approval ratings have edged up to 20%, they are still historically low and reflect Americans' general antipathy toward their elected representatives. Previous Gallup research shows that gridlock is the top reason Americans give for disapproving of Congress, and leaders seem to agree. President Barack Obama said in his latest weekly radio address, "This is America -- we can do anything. We just need a Congress that works as hard as you do. At the very least, we should expect that they do their jobs."

Gallup has asked Americans seven times since 2010 to indicate where they stand on this issue using a 1-to-5 scale, where "1" represents the belief that it is important to compromise in order to get things done and "5" represents the belief that it is important for leaders to stick to their principles even if little gets done. Americans have favored "compromise" over "sticking to principles" in each of these surveys, ranging from 53% this year and in 2013 to 47% when the question was first asked in late 2010 and early 2011. The current 21% of Americans who prefer that their leaders stick to their principles is the lowest Gallup has recorded; 28% in 2011 was the highest.

Democrats and Republicans continue to look at this philosophic question through somewhat different lenses, although some evidence suggests that both partisan groups are shifting their positions. The current 56% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who favor the compromise position is down from 67% in 2014 when Gallup last asked this question. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, by contrast, have become somewhat more likely to favor compromise than in 2014 and less likely to believe leaders should stick to their principles. This means the gap between Republicans' and Democrats' preferences for compromise is smaller than it was in either 2013 or 2014.

More Important for Leaders in Washington to Stick to Beliefs or Compromise? 2013 2014 2016 % % % Republicans/Republican leaners More important to stick to beliefs 33 32 22 Neutral 25 31 29 More important to compromise 42 37 48 Democrats/Democratic leaners More important to stick to beliefs 19 13 20 Neutral 17 18 24 More important to compromise 63 67 56 Gallup

The reason for Democrats' and Republicans' shifts are not clear. Republicans' increased interest in compromise could reflect House Speaker Paul Ryan's apparent interest in passing legislation rather than holding out for specific provisions at all costs. It's also possible that in September 2014, when Gallup last asked this question, Republicans were focused on winning the Senate and attempting to limit Obama's influence and thus less interested in compromise.

Rank-and-file Democrats could be less interested in compromise because of the possibility that it would be GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump with whom they would be compromising -- or perhaps because of the lingering influence of Bernie Sanders and his strongly held, uncompromising beliefs. Whatever their reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, by a ratio of more than 2-to-1, say they want their leaders to compromise rather than stick to their principles.

Bottom Line

Americans continue to want their leaders in Washington to find a way to compromise and get things done rather than hold out for what they believe at the cost of inaction. Both presidential candidates appear to agree. Trump has said that when dealing with Congress, he would get everyone together in one room and get them to act for the good of the people. Hillary Clinton has pointed out that "the tendency to put ideology ahead of political progress [has] led to gridlock in Congress." The data show that more Democrats and Republicans would agree with these sentiments than would disagree. Of course, when either Trump or Clinton wins the presidency, how much Americans who identify with the opposite party will actually want their representatives to compromise and go along with the new president remains to be seen.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 7-11, 2016, with a random sample of 1,020 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.

View complete question responses and trends.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.
September 21, 2016  GOP nominee Donald Trump was holding a narrow 2-point lead in the critical swing state of North Carolina in the latest poll released Wednesday by the Public Policy Polling. That same poll, however, also showed that North Carolina voters who are undecided would prefer four more years of President Obama to the "sharp pivot to Trump's vision for the country." Trumps odds were still averaging -150 while Clintons featured too wide a range, anywhere from -120 to +137. A $15 bet would be required to win $10 on Trump (with the $15 refunded only if he wins). These state-by-state odds are constantly in flux so be sure to monitor Gambling911.com regularly.

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Swing State Betting Odds as of September 21, 2016:

Florida  Trump -150, Clinton +110

Georgia  Trump -500, Clinton +500

Ohio  Trump -187, Clinton +125

Pennsylvania  Clinton -300, Trump +210

New Hampshire  Clinton -250, Trump +150

North Carolina  Trump -150, Clinton (range is -120 to +137)

Virginia  Clinton -450, Trump +300

Iowa  Trump -250, Clinton +175

Arizona  Trump -400, Clinton +275

Colorado  Clinton -200, Trump +175

Michigan  Clinton -300, Trump +250

Wisconsin  Clinton -333, Trump +220

- Gilbert Horowitz, Gambling911.com
September 21, 2016  The latest poll numbers out of New Hampshire look good for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as Gambling911.com continues to monitor odds for both Clinton and GOP nominee Donald Trump for each state with the upcoming US Presidential election. After losing some momentum over the past two weeks, a new Monmouth University poll of likely voters in New Hampshire released on Wednesday showed Clinton with a 9-point advantage, 47 percent to 38 percent for Trump. Oddsmakers had Clinton -250, Trump +150 as of Wednesday afternoon. By comparison, neighboring Vermont had Clinton at -5000 odds.

AD: Get Up to $1000 in Free Bets  Bet on Every State Election Results at BetOnline

Swing State Betting Odds as of September 21, 2016:

Florida  Trump -150, Clinton +110

Georgia  Trump -500, Clinton +500

Ohio  Trump -187, Clinton +125

Pennsylvania  Clinton -300, Trump +210

New Hampshire  Clinton -250, Trump +150

North Carolina  Trump -150, Clinton (range is -110 to +137)

Virginia  Clinton -450, Trump +300

Iowa  Trump -250, Clinton +175

Arizona  Trump -400, Clinton +275

Colorado  Clinton -200, Trump +175

Michigan  Clinton -300, Trump +250

Wisconsin  Clinton -333, Trump +220

- Gilbert Horowitz, Gambling911.com
MacBook Air 2016 Release Date, News & Update: Is Apple Stalling the Release to Q4 2016? Expected Specs Detailed

MacBook Air 2016 may be one of the most awaited pieces of hardware talked about within the year. Naturally, the question as to when is what boggles the mind of many patrons, which up to now leaves these said followers wondering.

As much as Apple fans expected something more than just the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the disappointment cannot be entirely altered just yet, especially with the talk of the MacBook Air 2016. Those who believe firmly in the tendency of the hardware to surface sometime this year, a few rumors may be enough to enlighten some news.

According to Mirror, it was apparent that the attention and efforts of Apple were addresed towards their iPhone 7 and Apple Watch releases, as it was seen during the September 7th event. Because of this, both the awaited iPad and MacBook Air 2016 were seemingly crossed out of the wish list.

Rumors, however, speak otherwise when it comes to the MacBook Air 2016. Chinese analyst Ming Chi Kuo claims that the rest of the Apple products could come at a last quarter release potential.

As per Christian Today, some suggestions talk of October being the month to look at for MacBook Air 2016. Recalled facts point to the same October release back in 2014, wherein the iPad Air 2 and the iMac were introduced to the world.

For those curious on what the MacBook Air 2016 could have, a slimmer, more compact design is one of the most popular calls that fans are thinking of. The other is the USB-C ports which have been long discussed theoretically, as well as the Kaby Lake processor application.

Generally, fans can only be patient when it comes to certainties for the MacBook Pro 2016, as well as the relative iPad products that many have been waiting for. At the moment, the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch 2 will have to do the trick for loyal Apple patrons.
Sony Xperia C4 Release Date, News & Update: OS Boost From Google Android 6.0 Marshmallow; Sony Xperia X Compact With Quick Charge 3.0, Finger Sensor US Pre-Orders Start At $499

Sony Xperia C4 has just received Google's highly-anticipated Android 6.0 Marshmallow update which includes features such as Doze Mode, Google Now on Tap, among others. Sony has also launched the Xperia X Compact that comes with a disabled fingerprint sensor and Quick Charge 3.0 technology. The new Sony phone will also come with Android 6.0.1.

Sony Mobile has officially confirmed in a blog post that the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update will be rolling out for Sony Xperia C4, Xperia C4 Dual, among others, Sony Mobile reported. The update will unlock a range of exciting new features and UI changes, Sony Mobile said. Sony had introduced the Xperia C4 in May 2015 which hit the stores a month later. It is hailed by Sony as a PROselfie smartphone with its 5MP secondary camera. Previously, the smartphone came pre-loaded with the Android 5.0 Lollipop.

Sony Xperia C4 features a 5.5-inch full HD IPS display with 1920x1080 resolution and 401ppi of pixel density. It also boasts an octa-core Cortex-A53 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage which can be expanded to 200GB with microSD card support.

Sony Xperia C4 and its main feature is the 5-megapixel front-facing snapper with LED flash support, 25mm wide-angle lens, 13-megapixel primary camera and Exmor R sensor support, that is able to take quality pictures in low-light conditions. The device is LTE-compatible and has 2600 mAh battery with up to 12 hours of talk time and is dual-SIM.

In other news, Sony will be launching the Sony Xperia X Compact months after it released the Sony Xperia C4. Pre-orders can now be placed in the US through in Amazon.com for a pre-order price of $499.99. The unlocked version has three color options: Universe Black, White, and Mist Blue. Delivery is expected on Sept. 25, Phone Arena reported.

The smartphone will have a disabled fingerprint sensor that may require a different ROM. It has a 4.6-inch display with HD 720p resolution, 23-megapixel rear-facing camera with IMX300 sensor and f/2.0 lens.

It will be powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 processor clocked at 1.8GHz, and includes 3GB of RAM, 32GB expandable memory or up to 256GB. It has a non-removable 2700 mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0 technology and Android 6.0.1.

The Sony Xperia C4 will require a minimum of 500MB free storage space and at least 50 percent battery charge to install the Android 6.0 Marshmallow. To manually update, go to Settings > About Device > Software Update > Check for Updates. The Android 7.0 Nougat is expected to roll out a few months later.

How To Install Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow on Sony Xperia C4 and C4 Dual Custom Rom CyanogenMod 13:
Political prisoner, activist, journalist, hymn-writer, emerging think tanker, aspiring novelist, "tribal elder", parliamentary candidate for North West Durham, Shadow Leader of the Opposition, Speedboat, proudly banned from Twitter so officially more dangerous than the Taliban, eagerly awaiting the second (or possibly third) attempt to murder me.
MacOS Sierra Release Date Details, News & Update: Siri Now Available on Mac Desktops; More Exciting Features Revealed

American tech giant Apple has recently announced the release of macOS Sierra, the highly anticipated operating system that is packed with amazing features and improvements. While fans are focusing on Apple's flagship operating system, the iOS10, tech fans should not be overlooking the new macOS Sierra as it arrives as the world's most advanced operating system for desktops.

Initially dubbed as OS X 10.12, the macOS Sierra has officially been rolled out by the Cupertino-based company. It is now available as a free update. According to the company's official website, the new operating system will bring Apple's most famous virtual assistant, Siri, to Mac. The helpful and intelligent feature, which fans love from iPad and iPhone, will certainly give Mac fans something to get excited about. The new software will also bring along new features that are designed specifically for desktop use such as iCloud Desktop and Documents, Auto Unlock, Universal Clipboard and Apple Pay.

Apple Pay is a popular app from Apple's handheld devices. The new macOS Sierra will bring this useful tool to PCs, which will make life easier for users in dealing with e-commerce services. Once software is updated, an integrated "Pay with Apple Pay" button will show up on the browser. However, it will need a nearby iPhone or Apple Watch for fast security authentication. According to reports, if a user decides to use the Apple Pay app, a confirmation must be made through Apple Watch or iPhone by simple pressing a button on any of these devices. Unfortunately, for now, it is only available for a selected number of merchants.

Fans who were excited when Apple released the OS X 10.10 Yosemite and 10.11 El Capitan should love the new macOS Sierra. The new desktop operating system is not only a compilation of performance updates and bug fixes, it is a major follow up from last year's Apple software update. Stay tuned for more news and updates about Apple's latest operating system, macOS Sierra.
My Little Pony: Legend of Everfree Release Date, News & Update: Soundtrack Features Solo & Group Performances

Hasbro Studios has recently debuted the digital release of the official soundtrack of their latest project "My Little Pony: Legend of Everfree." This album collection boasts of six new and original songs from the latest instalment in the animated series "My Little Pony," which will be out on October 1 on Netflix.

Comicbook reported that the original soundtrack features a great selection of all original music performed by the cast of the movie and is produced by multi-awarded composer Daniel Ingram. Aside from enjoying the awesome music, one would get a chance to catch up with Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Gloriosa and many more as one gets ready for the Netflix series. Toy News Online that the songs of "My Little Pony: Legend of Everfree" will showcase a preview of the adventures in store for them. This includes a healthy mix of group and solo performances from their favorite ponies from the show in "Mane 6" at Camp Everfree.

Executive Vice President Stephen Davis says that "My Little Pony fans love the Equestria Girls series, and the original music from the movies is a huge part of the magic." He also adds that the songs which were written for the cast are better than ever and the performances are absolutely wonderful. The soundtrack in itself is a fantastic means for fans to get immersed in the Equestria Girls ahead of the movie's premiere in October.

The songs included are "Legend of Everfree performed by Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, Apple Jack, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Fluttershy and Sunset Shimmer and "The Midnight in Me" by Twilight Sparkle. "Embrace the Magic by Sunset Shimmer," "We Will Stand for Everfree" by Gloriosa Daisy and "Legend You Are Meant to Be" also by Twilight Sparkle also come with the collection. Lastly, it includes another group performance, "Hope Shines Eternal" by Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, Apple Jack, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Sunset Shimmer and Fluttershy.

The soundtrack for "My Little Pony: Equestria Girls - Legends of Everfree" is available in English, Latin and Castilian Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and Polish across major digital service providers. The movie, which is introduced by the soundtrack entitled "My Little Pony: Legend of Everfree," will be out on Netflix for fans to watch on October 1.
Rotary got started in Long Beach in 1917 when seven local businessmen met with a New York Rotarian who talked about his club there.
Youth-Friendly DC is the official blog for the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates (DCAYA). We are dedicated to the mission of providing DC's children and youth with a safe, healthy and productive future.
The decision, a victory for Angelina Jolie over Brad Pitt, means that the custody fight over their five children, which was nearing an end, could be starting over.
This log includes incidents in which there might have been a public disturbance or a risk to the public. Information comes from the Corvallis Police Department and Benton County Sheriff's Office. It does not include all calls for service. The status of incidents might change after further investigation. Locations are approximate. People arrested or suspected in crimes are considered innocent until proven otherwise.

Corvallis Police Department

MONDAY, SEPT. 19

CHASE: 12:06 p.m., 400 block of Southwest Tunison Avenue. An officer responded to home for the report of a man refusing to leave. The officer reported locating the man, later identified as Matthew Aaron Jordan, 43, no address listed, riding away from the scene on a motorcycle. The officer turned on his overhead lights, but Jordan reportedly kept driving and "committed several additional violations" in the process. Police followed Jordan to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center. Jordan reportedly ignored commands to get on the ground and the officer "took Jordan to the ground using an arm bar takedown." Jordan was arrested and charged with first-degree trespass, attempting to elude and reckless driving. He was booked into the Benton County Jail.

Benton County Sheriff's Office

SUNDAY, SEPT. 18

METH: 11:50 p.m., Southwest Avery Avenue and Allen Street. An officer arrested and charged Wilburt Joseph Kelly, 51, of Albany with possession of methamphetamine following a traffic stop. Kelly was booked into the Benton County Jail and later released on a citation.

BOAT THEFT: 3:45 p.m., 1500 Southwest Allen Street. A man reported that his 12-foot fiberglass row boat was stolen. After interviewing involved parties, the deputy concluded that there was a dispute about who owned the boat.
The out-of-state magazine salesman accused of raping a woman in Philomath and harassing another in Corvallis was indicted Tuesday on new charges in connection with another incident involving another alleged victim.

LaDerrick Monquell McCray, 20, of Gulfport, Miss., was indicted Tuesday by a Benton County grand jury of additional charges of rape, sexual penetration and sexual abuse in connection with an Aug. 18 incident in Benton County.

Those charges are in addition to the previous charges against McCray, so all told the jury returned an indictment with 12 total charges in connection with incidents involving three alleged victims over four days. McCray has been booked at the Benton County Jail on $500,000 security.

McCray pleaded not guilty on Aug. 22 in Benton County Circuit Court to seven felony charges related to a rape case on Aug. 20 in Philomath and one charge of harassment related to an Aug. 21 incident in Corvallis. The original charges stemmed from incidents that occurred in Philomath and Corvallis while McCray was working as a door-to-door magazine salesman, prosecutors said previously.

In addition to the new charges related to a third alleged victim, the grand jury amended charges in connection to the two original incidents. Originally, McCray was alleged to have had sexual intercourse with a 17-year-old female in Philomath who was incapable of consent by reason of mental incapacitation and/or physical helplessness. According to court records, the grand jury amended the charges Tuesday in connection with the Philomath incident to replace the reason of mental incapacitation and/or physical helplessness with forcible compulsion.

Prosecutors have said that McCrays drivers license listed his residence as Mississippi and that he has no ties to Oregon.

McCray was arrested on Aug. 21 in Corvallis after a woman reported to police that he touched her in an offensive manner and made sexually suggestive statements while McCray claimed to be selling magazines door-to-door from an out-of-state company.

According to Corvallis police, the woman reported that McCray led her from the doorway of her residence by putting his arm on her lower back and then insisting that she let him come inside. McCray later left and the woman called to report the incident, according to police. McCray was later located based on a description and arrested, police said.

Court-appointed defense attorney Rob Corl is representing McCray in the case. Corl did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

McCrays next court date has been set for 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 31.
Nearly a year after Jones 5 Auto Sales shut down amid a criminal investigation, the owner of the Corvallis used car dealership has been charged with fraud in federal court.

Shannon Jones of Corvallis was charged last week with a single felony count of wire fraud in U.S. District Court in Eugene.

Specifically, Jones is accused of defrauding a customer of $23,450 for the purchase of a van that was never delivered. The money allegedly was transmitted electronically from a bank in New Mexico on Nov. 18, the day Corvallis police descended on Jones used car lot at 1475 N.W. Ninth St. and creditors hauled off the dealerships inventory on transport trailers.

According to court documents filed Sept. 13 by the U.S. Attorneys Office for Oregon, that was just one example of a much larger criminal enterprise spanning three years and amounting to more than $1.3 million in unlawful profits.

Between January 2012 and November 2015, prosecutors claim, Jones fraudulently obtained over $800,000 in loan proceeds and approximately $500,000 in vehicle sales proceeds.

In the court filings, federal prosecutors say that Jones preyed on clients, lenders and associates to obtain money through a variety of fraudulent means, including taking payment for vehicles that were never delivered; obtaining loans for vehicles for which he falsely claimed to hold title; and selling vehicles on consignment without paying the owners.

Jones also is accused of misrepresenting to lenders and associates the financial health of his business, the existence of collateral and the intended uses of short-term loans.

No hearings have been scheduled yet in the case, and a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office declined to say whether any additional charges might be filed.

Walter J. Todd, the Salem attorney representing Jones, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

The collapse of Jones 5 Auto Sales appears to have left dozens of victims in its wake, including individuals who consigned vehicles for sale, other area car dealerships that did business with Jones 5 and at least one national finance company.

At least seven businesses and individuals have filed claims in Benton County Circuit Court for a share of the surety bond filed by Jones 5 with the state of Oregon. But the bond totals just $40,000, and the claims against it total far more than that.

No claim in that case was filed by Next Gear Capital, a company that local auto industry insiders say had a long-term business relationship with Jones 5.

Next Gear provides flooring loans to car dealers to finance operating expenses. The loans are typically secured by the titles to vehicles in the dealers inventory, but according to the federal charge against Jones, he allegedly obtained loans by falsely claiming to have titles that were not in his possession.

Next Gear has declined to comment on the Jones 5 case.

There also have been numerous reports of other financial losses in the case stemming from unpaid personal loans, bounced checks and misplaced title documents.

The whole thing has John Robinson shaking his head. The Corvallis resident consigned his 2012 Cadillac SRX with Jones 5 at an asking price of $26,500 but was left with nothing when the dealership shut down in November.

After several fruitless attempts to recover his car, Robinson said, he eventually received a settlement from his insurance company.

I feel lucky Im not in the shape that most people are in, he said.

But he was recently reminded of his lost Cadillac when he received a bill in the mail from the Washington Department of Transportation. Apparently the current owner of the SRX went through a toll gate in the Seattle area, and the bill went to Robinson.

Its one of these things where the guy who got stung keeps getting stung, he said.

But what really galls Robinson is the fact that Jones remains out of jail when so many people suffered financial losses in the collapse of his business.

The guy is just walking around like nothing, Robinson said. That just isnt right.
Its become an annual tradition for a group of truck drivers to get together for a trek through Santiam Pass. It serves as a chance to enjoy time in a classic rig, take in Oregons backcountry beauty and share stories over a barbecue up at the Hoodoo Ski Area.

But this year, the stretch of Highway 20 between Sweet Home and Bend was closed because of the Sheep Creek bridge construction.

We just do it for fun and games, David Hull, one of the participating truckers, said about the get-together. I had told them, if you ever want to do a west-side run, let me know  Ive got a good trail figured out.

The routes change this year included a stop in Philomath for the barbecue. No doubt, some of that conversation included memories of Bob Maddux, one of their own who died Sept. 4 just shy of his 83rd birthday. The event was staged on Sept. 10, the same day as Madduxs funeral.

They were going to bring his truck and worked on it for most of the day Friday, but the brakes were froze up, said Denny Bennett, who hosted the truckers in Philomath at Timber Supply and had the barbecue ready for them upon arrival. They just couldnt get it functional and had to leave it home.

Bennett was referring to Hull and a 1966 rig that he owns that used to belong to Maddux.

We were going to try to get it out but we didnt get it up in time, Hull said. Its been sitting for quite a long time.

Maddux and his wife, Joy, raised three sons and two daughters in Philomath. He drove trucks for more than 50 years, hauling logs all over the state. In 1975, the Corvallis Gazette-Times published an insightful story on a day in the life of a log truck driver.

Maddux drove his truck in the Philomath Frolic parade on and off for over a half-century. In later years after retirement, he enjoyed restoring a 1962 Kenworth and driving it to car and truck shows.

A son, Don Maddux, and a daughter, Ruth Post, still live in Philomath.

The truckers traditionally go on what they call the Tombstone Run  the route includes a 4,200-foot climb at Tombstone Pass east of Sweet Home  on the second Saturday in September. Keith Cowan and Roger Emmert came up with the idea in 2007 over a cup of coffee.

It kind of started off with antique trucks and then over breakfast one day, we said we ought to do that to keep the trucking industry alive, said Cowan, who has a rich family history that revolves around a love for trucks.

The west-side route started out with breakfast north of Monroe at the RFP Family Store. Owner Justin Burnett opened it up earlier than usual and worked up a truckers breakfast, Hull said.

The route went south down to the Alpine Cutoff and headed west through Alpine and Glenbrook and over to South Fork Road past Alsea Falls. It continued past Alsea south down to Lobster Valley Road and Five Rivers Road before hitting Highway 34 and the drive into Philomath.

They called and wanted to know where they could gather up and have their get-together and lunch and sit down and BS and I offered them the lot out there, said Bennett, adding that the group arrived around 12:30 and stayed three or so hours.

Denny did an outstanding job of volunteering his shop and property, and I understand he did the cooking, too, Hull said. When we came in, the food was ready. He went out of his way.

Cowan said the run started off with 17 trucks. The number of participants on the regular event usually numbers around 25, but the reorganized west-side route was put together only through word-of-mouth.

Hull said we had a great day and organizers are thinking about adding another trek each spring to go along with the Tombstone Run in the fall.
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United Nations : International Day of Peace recognized in Bonn

Bonn Peace is the theme for September 21 as Bonn holds events in connection with the UN proclaimed International Peace Day.

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Since 2001, International Peace Day has been celebrated annually on September 21 all across the world. The United Nations General Assembly declared it as a day for strengthening ties of peace between all people and countries. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon kicked off the event on Friday in New York by ringing the peace bell and observing a minute of silence. The theme for 2016 is The Sustainable Development Goals: Building Blocks for Peace.

In Bonn, there will be many events from Tuesday to Saturday in recognition of the peace days, including speeches, discussions and a concert. Mayor Ashok Sridharan is the patron. On Tuesday evening, an opening event was held at the old town hall in the city center; it was a podium discussion about how civilian groups can contribute more effectively to peace negotiations. Oftentimes, certain groups such as women and minorities do not have a place at the negotiation table. Some of the podium participants were Vanessa Prinz from the NGO Berghof Foundation, Nicole Birtsch from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Foundation for Science and Politics), and Ferdinand Durr from the Adopt a Revolution project which supports a peaceful stand against the Assad regime in Syria.

Prinz explains that many scientists believe peace is more sustainable when all of the important groups are drawn into the peace negotiations. Still, even such negotiations can lead to instability and it is important to have a mechanism which involves civil society in the peace process. Nicole Birtsch reported on efforts in Afghanistan to bring as many Taliban groups as possible to the negotiation table. Soon there could be at least an agreement with another group of fighters, which could have symbolic meaning and influence for the Taliban. Durr says Syria is a long ways from peace negotiations. But still, even today there are young people in Syria who are actively trying to build up civilian projects, he says.

Scheduled events (presentations held in German):

September 21, Wednesday

The Volunteer Program of the UN (speech), 6:30 pm at Otto Kuhne School, Otto-Kuhne-Platz, (0228) 8 15 2000, e-mail: jennifer.stapper@unv.org

Peace Assessment 2016 - Causes of Flight (refugees) and International Responsibility, (speech and discussion), 6:30 p.m. at BICC, Pffarer-Byns-Strae 1

September 24, Saturday

20 Years of Womens Network for Peace -Focus on Gender in Peace Engagement - German and European Perspectives, 1:30 pm. at the Regional representation of the EU Commission, Bertha-von-Suttner -Platz 2-4

Celebration of 20 years of the Womens Network for Peace, at EU Commission, 5:30 p.m.
Salafists in NRW : NRW sees a threat in Koran distribution campaign Lies

Dusseldorf Many cities are calling for a stop to the Salafist campaign Lies (Read). Constitutional protection authorities are proofing legal possibilities.

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The call for a ban on a controversial campaign of Koran distribution is getter louder in North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) municipalities. Major cities, especially in the Ruhr area, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Aachen are working with the NRW Interior Ministry to see what can be done. According to Burkhard Freier, head of NRW Constitution Protection, the countrys laws do not allow a blanket ban but they are proofing whether or not individual events can be stopped. Lies is the German word for Read and Salafists, who practice an ultra-conservative form of Islam, go into town centers to hand out free Korans under this motto. Only the federal government has the authority to shut down the underlying organization.

In NRW, there is apparently some leverage to shut down individual distribution campaigns if criminal offenses can be proven. An information stand was prohibited in Aachen for that reason and a court will decide in early October whether that was legal. Other cities are observing this and keen to follow suit.

The NRW Constitution Protection authorities have confirmed the danger of the Lies initiative. Connections to the Salafist scene and radical Islamists were evident. Freier says, We have long warned the public against the Lies events. Behind them is a large membership network of extremist Salafism. One in five of those Salafists from NRW who traveled to Syria or Iraq had earlier contact with Lies. Last year, there were 350 distribution campaigns.

In parliament, the FDP party has put forth a motion to immediately suppress the activities of Lies GmbH from Islamist preacher Abou-Nagie of Cologne. Vice Chair Joachim Stamp suspects that the Lies campaign mainly serves commercial purposes. There is reason to suspect money laundering and tax evasion, which could allow a ban.




Cemeteries after dark. Why are we so scared by the concept? I mean, it is a place for human remains and memorials, not necessarily anything dark and scary and we know the soul would not want to linger, right?

Part of that has to do with the fact they are parks of a sort, and after dark no one attends. They are silent and still.



But, still they unsettle us as a reminder of mortality, the sadness of having an actual eternal resting place, and then there's Hollywood's influence on our general uneasiness.





Some cemeteries, however, have very haunted backgrounds with multiple witnesses, or urban legend powerful fears associated with them.

















Some cemeteries get a reputation for someone who is buried there of great power, like the St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana.





Marie Laveau, a voodoo queen, was laid to rest in the cemetery and ever since, visitors go out of their way to visit her grave, scratch out three x's and ask her for a wish. They then leave a gift at the grave. Her apparition in brightly covered garb and red and white turban has been seen wandering the streets of New Orleans and the cemetery.





Other cemeteries, get a reputation for having had ghosts photographed and seen there. Bachelor's Grove is such a cemetery near Chicago, Illinois (Midlothian).









The cemetery has been reported to have lots of phenomena, from spirits caught on film to balls of lights. When the road to it was closed, people had to take to foot into the woods. Then, over the years it became more and more isolated from the surrounding city. It became a place where vandals went to test their fear tolerance and unfortunately, do damage to the unattended graves. Its reputation is spoken of by many in the area as fact.

There are a few cemeteries known for association with Hell or the Devil. Stull Cemetery in Kansas has a reputation of having the gateway to Hell.









The legends goes that there are seven gateways to hell and Stull Cemetery is one of them. The cemetery was left beside an abandoned church in Stull, Kansas. It is said that the Devil used the church as his lair and that two days of the year he passes through, the spring equinox and Halloween. It's a delicious legend that likely drives the locals nuts with lookie loo's, but some places look the part of their reputation.









Most cemeteries are posted that you do not enter after sunset. They aren't playgrounds to rush around like children and cause mayhem. They are memorials for those who have passed and sacred sites to those who miss them.





If you want to contribute to the cemetery while also getting the creepy mood and ambiance that many of them have, I suggest you bring a trash bag and clean up any trash, set vases of flowers upright that have fallen over, bring a handful of flowers and leave one on each grave that is so old that no one visits them anymore. Say their name out loud so that is has been spoken in this decade.





Now, enjoy a sunset photographing session with the sun at a tilt, the headstones casting shadows, the wrought iron looking gothic. Don't just take shots of headstones, come at them at angles, perhaps one upshot as if someone were looking up from inside the grave, involve the plants, or the interesting offerings left behind to be captured in the foreground.

























Let's have a look at some supposed ghost videos taken at cemeteries -













Haunted cemeteries -

















How about some creepy photos of cemeteries? They do make moody subject matter -

























Cemeteries are amazing places to take a sketch book and draw. They lend themselves well to pencil work and black and white. As well, some people perform grave rubbings of interesting headstones and there are some good tutorials online. Just be certain you follow the instructions to do so in a respectful and neat way. The bodies buried in that cemetery are immortalized there in stone relief, so remember that when you consider you own eventual demise.





















Safety Coffin bells

The Victorian Era was fraught with nervousness about death and especially the idea of being buried alive. So, some graves were rigged with a bell the person could ring if they awakened in their coffin.



Bells are hung in cemeteries even today as a way for the dead to communicate. In Feng Shui, if you place windchimes inside your house in the southwest corner, the dead will be attracted. Don't be surprised if they ring....





Cemeteries don't always provide amazing findings, but one particular one at a geologic feature in Arizona on the ancient land of the HoHoKam (a tribe that went missing in the 1400s), I found one particular family grave of about 19 members whose patriarch was ironically involved in placing the modern day canals along much of the land the HoHoKams put their canals a thousand years ago.





Over the years, I have gone back with several photographers and cameras and still we all get unusual phenomena in perfectly fine weather. Sometimes we can take consecutive pics with the phenomena developing in each shot and then disappearing suddenly. There are no lights in the cemetery. These are only a few samples of many dozens of photos.









































And one thing folks don't realize about cemeteries is that they are also known to often have spooklights and Bigfoot seen in them at night, as well as shadow people.





Why is this?





Well, any guess will do. I'd say it's likely because cemeteries can be areas within natural settings that humans don't tend to go to at night, allowing them to become an open playground or thru-way for inhabitants of the woods. Spooklights often happen in the woods.



When I was a kid, I saw blue ball orbs of lights dancing in a cemetery across from our summer home. I wrote in detail about it in my book, Vacationing With Ghosts. They didn't seem particularly purposeful or long-lived, but my sense as a kid was some sort of natural energy. When I was a kid, I sawdancing in a cemetery across from our summer home. I wrote in detail about it in my book,They didn't seem particularly purposeful or long-lived, but my sense as a kid was some sort of natural energy.





Abandoned cemeteries are super creepy -




















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Protecting the worlds oceans  an important goal of Germanys climate diplomacy

The worlds oceans are vital to our survival. They regulate the global climate and are a source of food and income for billions of people. Only a very small part of the seas enjoys legal protection, however. Our diplomats are working in New York right now to change this state of affairs.
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5 Essential Recharge Tips & Tricks to Follow on India Phone Numbers Tips Tricks oi -Sneha

Without leaving the comfort of your house, visiting mobile stores to solve each and every problem related to your phone is often a pain for many. However, as technology has made our life easy, so has the telecoms.

The telecoms today have come up with numerous ways and initiatives to make their user's life easy.

SEE ALSO: Here're 10 Hot Deals on Amazon India to Spice Up Your Tech Lifestyle

Whether it's about online recharge or choosing the best recharge plan from the overflowing offers, or in case you require an emergency recharge, the telecom giants have a solution for all your problems.

SEE ALSO: How to Use Whatsapp 'Mention': 5 Important Terms and Conditions You Need to Know

Here're the tips for you to consider, before recharging your number, rather than just choosing the wrong plan for you, or wasting time on searching for a recharge shop.

Click Here for New Smartphones Best Online Deals

In emergency, transfer balance from you friends So are you in an emergency to call someone and is unable to do so, thank you the 'Your account balance is low' message from your mobile operator. Here how you can ask your friend or transfer them some balance in just a few click: For Airtel Users: STEP 1: Dial *141# STEP 2: A dialog box will appear, Click on 1-Share Talk Time STEP 3: Type the mobile number and amount you wish to transfer money to STEP 4: Processing will take some time For Aircel Users: STEP 1: Dial *122*666# STEP 2: Enter the mobile number and amount you want to transfer STEP 3: You can transfer balance from minimum Rs. 5 to above For BSNL Users: STEP 1: Type GIFT_mobile number_amount on your message option STEP 2: Send the message to 53733 For Tata DoCoMo Users: STEP 1: Type BT_mobile number_amount on your message option STEP 2: Send the message to 54321. For Vodafone Users: STEP 1: Type *131*amount*mobile number# STEP 2: The minimum recharge you can do in Vodafone is of Rs. 50 Offers for 'Only' your number The telecom giants have launched their official apps like that of MyAirtel, MyVodafone (India), My BSNL and more. The users are required to subscribe to their respective network apps, in case they have one, by downloading it from the play store. Signing up with your account on these apps can guide you onto which talktime or data plan suits you the best, based on your previous usage. This helps you to not spend unnecessarily on recharges. In case you are low on balance or your data pack is getting over, these apps can instantly notify you on which recharge plan. The app will keep a track on your previous recharges and would accordingly best suite as per your usage. Online Recharge Offers Recharging online can be often beneficial to the users. There are apps including Paytm, Freecharge, and other instant recharging apps that not only lets you easily recharge your number, but also offers you with a whole lot of perks on doing so. Users already catching up with the latest trend of recharging online, must have come across these terms: "Get 50% cashback", "Apply these recharge coupons", "Recharge Coupon offers", "Mobile recharge offers", and so much more. These online recharging apps come up with various such offers every single day. The user is just required to check for the offers that their network providers are showcasing. Click Here for New Android Smartphones Best Online Deals Full Talktime Offers` Mobile users often prefer going for recharges that would not be a loss for them, and would offer a full talktime, for an uninterrupted chat with their friends. These offers often keep changing, and the new ones continue to add up to the list, the best way to check for them is by downloading the networks official apps. Internet and Talktime Loans In an emergency, one can sure ask a friend to transfer balance to their number. But what is there's no one around? The user can go for the talktime or internet loans option. Avail Talktime loan with just a few clicks: For Airtel users: Dial 141*10# (Airtel Loan Number) or Call 52141 For Vodafone users: Either dial 1241 or Send SMS CREDIT to 144 Or *111*10# For Idea users: Dial *150*(Enter the amount)# For Aircel users: Dial *414# or call 12880 or SMS LOAN to 55414 For BSNL users: Type CREDIT and send it to 53738 For Tata DoCoMo users: Dial *444# or *369# Avail Internet loan with just a few clicks: For Airtel users: Dial *141*567# to get 50MB Internet Loan for 2 days For Vodafone users: Send SMS CREDIT to 144 Or *111*10# to get 30MB 3G for 1day For Idea users: Dial *150*06# for 2G Internet Loan and to get 3G Internet Loan, dial *150*06# For Aircel users: Dial *414# or call 12880 or SMS LOAN to 55414 For BSNL users: Type CREDIT and send it to 53738 For Tata DoCoMo users: Dial *444# or *369# After you recharge user number, the loan amount taken will be eventually deducted by your mobile operator. Recharge Coupons Top online stores like Paytm, FreeCharge, Mobikwik, Helpchat, Airtel and much more come up with special recharge coupons and offers every day. The already existing users must have come across various recharge coupons stating-"Get 50% cashback" "Get Rs. 100 cashback" "Flat Rs 20 off on recharge and bill payments of Rs. 100." So online recharge is important, and will fetch the user more talktime or data, as compared to going out to mobile stores for recharging. So, these tips and tricks should be followed by everyone before you decide to spend a heavy amount on recharges, as you might just be lucky enough to get a free cashback and wouldn't have to spend anything. Click Here for New Smartphones Best Online Deals

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Nominee for Top Stratcom Post Details Threats at Confirmation Hearing

By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20, 2016  Russia and China are America's biggest threats, but North Korea and Iran are the most likely threats, President Barack Obama's choice to be the next commander of U.S. Strategic Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee today in his confirmation hearing.

If the Senate confirms his nomination, Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten, now the commander of Air Force Space Command, would succeed Navy Adm. Cecil D. Haney as the commander of Stratcom, which is responsible for the nuclear command and control mission; space operations; global strike; global missile defense; and global command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as combating weapons of mass destruction.

"The way I look at the threats across the world,  I think Russia is the most dangerous threat, China is a close second, but the most likely threats and most concerning are North Korea and then Iran," Hyten said.

North Korea is unpredictable, the general said. "It's hard to tell exactly what they are going to do," he added.

Nuclear Capabilities

North Korea is building a capability that could mean a nuclear strike on the United States. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is developing a rocket that could launch a nuclear warhead at the United States, Hyten said.

But all potential adversaries are investing in their militaries, the general told the senators.

"As our potential adversaries upgrade their own capabilities, it is essential that we move forward to update and modernize the three elements of the nuclear triad and also ensure our plans are fully integrated with the other combatant commands," he said.

U.S. Cyber Command also comes under the aegis of Stratcom, and Hyten said if confirmed he would participate in "extensive and intensive" cooperation across the government and with allies to prepare for, defend against and answer cyberattacks.

Space a Concern

Space also is a concern, and Hyten said Russia and China are building capabilities targeting U.S. assets in space  assets that are key to the military advantage America currently enjoys.

"We must not only be ready to respond, but we must build a more resilient national security space enterprise," he said.

DoD has developed responses to the threats foreseen in space from China and Russia, Hyten said. "I believe it is essential that we go faster with our responses," he added. "We've worked with the National Reconnaissance Office, and all our joint space forces and developed  a joint space vision that looks out and says,' This is the kind of capability we need to operate in a world where conflict extends into space.'"

Speed Essential

Speed is essential, the general said. "We are moving much slower in certain areas than our adversaries," he told the Senate panel. "We need our industries and our acquisition process to move faster."

Russia is modernizing its military and its nuclear capabilities, and the United States must be aware of this process and keep pace, the general said. "The second piece of this is they've watched the power of our alliances  the power of our partnerships," he said. "They are challenging the status quo across Europe and in Crimea and a number of areas, pushing and creating tension within our partnerships and alliances."

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'Noose Tightening' in Battle to Retake Mosul, Dunford Says

By Lisa Ferdinando DoD News, Defense Media Activity

ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT, Sept. 20, 2016  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he expects Iraqi forces to be successful in their assault to retake Mosul and deliver a sharp blow to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Speaking to reporters after a trip to Europe, Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford listed recent gains leading up to the eventual battle to retake the key northern city. Those advances, he explained, include Iraqi forces bridging the Tigris River near Qayyarah and securing the airfield there.

"The noose is gradually tightening around Mosul," he said.

The liberation of Mosul will "chip away" at the idea of a physical caliphate for ISIL, he said. Taking back Mosul and Raqqa, ISIL's so-called capital in Syria, will severely limit ISIL's operational capability and ability to operate in the region and beyond, he said.

"In my view, it'll be a very significant blow to the Islamic State as they lose Mosul and Raqqa and they can no longer talk about holding a physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq," Dunford said.

Iraqi Forces to be Ready in October

Iraqi leaders have identified Iraqi forces that are required for the operations to take back Mosul, the chairman said. Those forces will be ready in October, he noted.

The timing of the assault, Dunford said, is a political decision that rests on Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

"Our job is to actually help the Iraqis generate the forces and the support necessary for operations in Mosul and we'll be ready for that in October," the top U.S. general said.

President Barack Obama, after meeting with Abadi yesterday in New York, said he expects a tough fight for the city of more than two million people, noting ISIL has "embedded itself deeply" within Mosul.

'Sense of Urgency' in Defeating Terrorists, Ideology

Dunford told reporters that hearing about ISIL-inspired terrorist attacks worldwide further steels his resolve to defeat ISIL's ideology and eliminate the terrorists in Mosul and Raqqa.

"What it continues to give me is a sense of urgency for getting after the physical caliphate, undermining the virtual caliphate and eliminating the ability to conduct supported, directed or inspired attacks," he said.

This will be done through military means in cooperation with the coalition and through partners on the ground, the chairman said.

"The more aggressive we are at taking the fight to the Islamic State, wherever they happen to be, the more successful we will be in eroding their physical capability to direct attacks and support attacks," Dunford said.

When the narrative is undermined, people will no longer be inspired to carry out attacks, he said.

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Over three dozen killed by DR Congo police in two days: HRW

Iran Press TV

Tue Sep 20, 2016 3:37PM

Human Rights Watch says security forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have killed more than three dozen people in the latest bout of protests against President Joseph Kabila that turned violent.

According to Ida Sawyer, the Africa researcher for the New York-based human rights group, the HRW has "credible reports" that at least 37 people lost their lives during two days of the violent protests.

Sawyer said at least 20 people died on Monday and 17 were killed overnight on Tuesday.

Interior Minister Evariste Boshab earlier said a total of 17 people including three policemen had died in the violence. He also referred to the protests as an "uprising."

However, other sources reported much higher figures. Close to 200 people are believed to have been arrested.

The fighting broke out in Kinshasa on Monday as thousands of opposition supporters marched against President Kabila and his bid to extend his term.

The protests came amid increasing local and international pressure on Kabila to step down when his mandate ends in December. Opposition parties claim that he will attempt to extend his term by pushing back the elections.

UN urges restraint amid violence

Meanwhile, the United Nations has called for restraint amid deadly clashes between security forces and protesters in the African country.

Spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Rupert Colville told a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday that the international body was "deeply worried" by the latest round of violence.

"We have received reports of excessive use of force by some elements of the security forces as well as reports that some demonstrators resorted to violence yesterday. We call on all sides to show restraint and we urge the authorities to ensure that existing national and international standards on the appropriate use of force are fully respected by all security personnel. We call for a credible and impartial investigation to bring those responsible of human rights violations and criminal acts to justice, and we stand ready to support such an inquiry," Colville said.

The UN official added that the violence underlined the urgent need for dialogue on the electoral process in the country.

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Indian Army Eliminates 10 Militants Near Kashmir

Sputnik News

15:38 20.09.2016(updated 15:43 20.09.2016)

In a massive search operation against infiltrated militants, the Indian Army eliminated 10 militants in the Lachipura area of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir.

New Delhi  The India Army has foiled 17 infiltration attempts along the Line of Control this year alone.

Army sources say that nearly 15 terrorists had infiltrated into Indian territory. The army intensified search operations in the area for others. This comes two days after terrorists killed 18 Indian Army soldiers in an attack on an army base near the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir. The army has also foiled an infiltration attempt in the Uri sector on Tuesday morning.

India's Ministry of Defense said that the infiltration attempts by terrorists have shown a marked increase in comparison to the past 3-4 years. In 2016, there have been 17 infiltration attempts eliminated by the Indian Army along the Line of Control. Of a total of 110 terrorists eliminated in J&K, 31 were killed while attempting to cross the Line of Control.

Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, Director General Military Operations (DGMO), said, "It actually indicates a desperate attempt from across the Line of Control to infiltrate more terrorists into Kashmir with with the aim of creating a disturbance and fomenting unrest in our area. The last two infiltration attempts i.e. Sept 11, 2016 in Punch and on Sept 18, 2016 at Uri were successfully thwarted by the Indian Army by killing four terrorists in each of the operations."

 Sputnik

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Obama Gives Sobering View of World Politics in Final UN Address

By Margaret Besheer 20 September 2016

In his final address at the United Nations, President Barack Obama reiterated his strong commitment to multilateralism and the world body.

"We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration or we can retreat into a world sharply divided and ultimately in conflict along old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion," he told leaders Tuesday.

"I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward and not backward," he added.

Obama, who will leave office in January, spoke of progress during his eight-year tenure, including reducing extreme poverty, resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, opening relations with Cuba, and agreeing to an international deal on climate change.

"This is important work, it has made a real difference in the lives of our people, and it could not have happened had we not worked together," he said.

Obama warned that there are deep fault lines, however, in the international order causing the massive refugee crisis, economic disruptions and insecurity.

"We see too many governments muzzling journalists and quashing dissent and censoring the flow of information," he said. "Terrorist networks use social media to prey upon the minds our youth, endangering open societies and spurring anger against innocent immigrants and Muslims.

"Powerful nations contest the constraints placed on them by international law. This is the paradox that defines our world today," Obama added.

Taking aim

On the crisis in Syria, he said there is no ultimate military victory to be won and said a diplomatic solution must be pursued.

Obama also warned that "the embers of extremism will continue to burn" in the world, but that "the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall" and prevent it from affecting society.

In addition the U.S. leader took aim at Russia for its interference in Ukraine and at North Korea for its defiance of the international community on the nuclear front.

And in a preview of the leaders' summit he is hosting Tuesday afternoon at the United Nations, Obama urged countries to do more for refugees.

"Imagine what it would be like for our family, our children if the unspeakable happened to us?" he asked.

Obama spoke for about 45 minutes. Traditionally, the U.S. holds the second speaking slot of the debate, but Obama arrived late to the hall and the president of the General Assembly skipped over him to the next speaker, Chadian President Idriss Deby.

Ban's ire

Earlier, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened the annual meeting for the final time. He leaves office after a decade at the end of this year.

Ban released years of pent up anger at leaders and countries who have contributed to suffering and conflict across the globe.

He took particular aim at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in the wake of an attack on a humanitarian aid convoy Monday that killed 20 people.

"Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower," Ban said. "The humanitarians delivering life-saving aid were heroes. Those who bombed them were cowards."

The United Nations has been forced to suspend aid convoys because of the attack.

"A political transition is long overdue. After so much violence and misrule, the future of Syria should not rest on the fate of a single man," Ban said of Syria's Assad.

The U.N. chief also expressed "regret and sorrow" for two of the biggest blights of his tenure  the cholera epidemic in Haiti and the sexual abuse and exploitation of civilians by U.N. and foreign troops in Africa.

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Opposition Parties' Offices Torched in Congo After Anti-Government Protests

By William Clowes 20 September 2016

The mood is tense in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, following a day and night of deadly violence involving security forces and anti-government protesters. A human rights group reports more than 40 people have been killed, most of them civilians.

There were sporadic clashes between police and groups of young men early Tuesday in some parts of the capital. Unusually for Kinshasa, trucks full of soldiers from the Republican Guard were out on the streets.

Heavier violence took place overnight, as armed men set fire to at least five headquarters of opposition parties that helped to organize protests Monday. Several pro-government parties saw their offices burned down during those protests.

Felix Tshisekedi, a leading figure in the largest opposition party, the UDPS, spoke to reporters Tuesday as people picked through the remains of his headquarters in Limete, an opposition stronghold.

Tshisekedi says commandos from the ruling party camp arrived at 2 a.m. and went to work until 4.30 a.m. They attacked and killed our guards, he says. There are five dead. Tshisekedi went on to say that the DRC is a dictatorship and he says this government deserves the popular revolt that is coming to topple it.

He later told VOA by phone that the death toll from the overnight attack has risen to seven and others are still missing.

Emery Okundji, a parliamentarian from another party targeted during the night, told VOA that heavily armed men smashed down the door just before 5 a.m. and threw bombs, setting fire to the building.

Government spokesman Lambert Mende told VOA by phone that the government has called on the public prosecutor to expand his investigation into Monday's unrest to include the violence overnight.

We do not know who is responsible for these attacks, Mende said, but as a government we condemn anyone who takes it upon themselves to seek vengeance. He said the government will wait for the prosecutor to finish the inquiry into who is responsible for the violence.

The opposition coalition known as the Rassemblement, or the Assembly, had organized a march Monday to demand that President Joseph Kabila step down in December when his second term ends.

The electoral commission has delayed the elections, saying it may need until 2018 to create a new voter roll. The opposition asserts that Kabila simply wants to stay in power.

Opposition leaders say security forces obstructed their planned march on Monday, firing tear gas to disperse protesters as they gathered. The government says it had withdrawn authorization for the demonstration after violence from protesters.

The interior minister said 17 people were killed  three policemen and 14 civilians.

But, Human Rights Watch says it has received "credible reports" that security forces have killed at least 37 people since the protests began.

The group's DRC researcher, Ida Sawyer, told VOA that most were killed when the security forces fired on crowds of protesters. She says others died when security forces burned down opposition party headquarters.

Sawyer says HRW also received credible reports that protesters have killed at least six police officers and a supporter of Kabila's party, and have also burned and looted several shops and police stations.

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Officials Provide Details of Latest Counter-ISIL Strikes in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, Sept. 21, 2016  U.S. and coalition military forces continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq yesterday, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

Officials reported details of yesterday's strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

Strikes in Syria

Attack, bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted eight strikes in Syria:

-- Near Abu Kamal, two strikes destroyed 23 ISIL oil tanker trucks and four wellheads.

-- Near Raqqah, a strike produced inconclusive results.

-- Near Dayr Az Zawr, three strikes damaged nine supply routes.

-- Near Mara, two strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and destroyed three mortar systems and two fighting positions.

Strikes in Iraq

Attack, bomber, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft and rocket artillery conducted 14 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:

-- Near Baghdadi, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle.

-- Near Qaim, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle bomb facility.

-- Near Albu Hayat, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle bomb.

-- Near Bashir, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle and an anti-air artillery system.

-- Near Kisik, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and suppressed a second tactical unit.

-- Near Mosul, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit.

-- Near Qayyarah, three strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and destroyed six vehicles, six watercraft, two vehicle bombs and a heavy machine gun.

-- Near Ramadi, two strikes engaged an ISIL tactical unit and a staging area and destroyed a vehicle, a building, a mortar system, a fighting position, a fuel tanker and two rocket rails.

-- Near Sultan Abdallah, a strike destroyed two ISIL improvised weapons facilities.

-- Near Tal Afar, two strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and destroyed two vehicles and a weapons cache.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a strike.

Part of Operation Inherent Resolve

The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat it poses to Iraq, Syria, the region and the wider international community. The destruction of targets in Syria and Iraq further limits ISIL's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.

Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

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China donates trunked radio system to Cambodia

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 19:49, September 21, 2016

China's Ministry of Defense on Wednesday handed over equipment and material for assembling a trunked radio system to Cambodian Ministry of Defense, officials said.

Trunked radio system is a complex type of computer-controlled two-way radio system that allows sharing of radio frequency channels among a large group of users.

Col. Li Ningya, military attache of the Chinese embassy to Cambodia, delivered the equipment and material to Phorn Nara, director of the Cambodian Defense Ministry's telecommunications department, with the presence of Cambodia's Defense Ministry Secretary of State Cheang Am.

Li said fast and reliable communications were crucial for national defense sector, expressing his confidence that the assistance would contribute further to strengthening efficiency in communications among the armed forces.

Phorn Nara said it was the second time that China's Ministry of Defense provided the trunked radio system to Cambodia along with a total of 1,477 walkie-talkies.

Cheang Am expressed his profound gratitude to China for the donation, saying the aid truly reflected China's high attention to helping develop Cambodia's defense sector.

"The assistance is very important and responds timely to the need of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, particularly in the field of communications," he said.

At the event, Chinese-owned Southeast Asia Telecommunications, or Seatel-Cambodia, also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Cambodian Ministry of Defense.

The MoU was inked between Phorn Nara and Seatel-Cambodia's general manager Han Hanchou.

Under the deal, Seatel-Cambodia would help train human resources in information technology and develop telecommunications infrastructure such as fibre optics and networks for the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, said Phorn Nara.

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Sudan hosting 400k South Sudan refugees: Minister

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 21, 2016 2:42PM

Sudan says it is hosting about 400,000 refugees, who fled the civil war in South Sudan that erupted in late 2013.

Sudan's Interior Minister Babiker Digna told reporters in the capital Khartoum on Wednesday that more refugees continued to pour into the country.

"The number of South Sudanese refugees registered by Sudanese authorities is 400,000," Digna said, adding, "The influx of South Sudanese continues until now... and the process of registering them is also ongoing."

The United Nations earlier said that as of August 31, the total number of South Sudanese refugees in Sudan had exceeded 247,000.

Responding to a discrepancy between the two figures, Digna said "many times" there was disagreement with the UN on the numbers.

On September 16, the United Nations refugee agency said in a statement that fighting in South Sudan had forced more than one million people to flee the war-stricken country. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said another 1.61 million people had been displaced inside the country.

On the same day, Noriko Yoshida, the UN refugee agency's representative for Sudan, appealed for more global aid to help address South Sudan's refugee crisis, adding, "If we don't have sufficient resources, it is also difficult to protect and assist these refugees."

The Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda are also hosting thousands of refugees from South Sudan.

The country gained independence in July 2011, but descended into war in December 2013, after President Salva Kiir accused the former vice president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup to usurp power.

Numerous international attempts to reach a truce between the warring sides have failed.

South Sudan has experienced a new wave of conflict since July 8, when gunfire erupted near the state house in Juba as President Kiir and Machar were holding a meeting.

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NATO Rejects Russia's Plan to Ensure Air Safety in Baltic Region

Sputnik News

20:09 21.09.2016(updated 20:13 21.09.2016)

NATO has rejected Russia's proposal aimed at improving air safety over the Baltic Sea. Russian envoy Alexander Grushko noted commenting on the matter that the Alliance is seemingly seeking to justify its decision to halt cooperation with Russia.

NATO has rejected a Russian proposal aimed at ensuring air safety in the Baltics, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing the Alliance's officials.

In accordance with Moscow's plan all planes flying in the Baltic Sea region would operate with their transponders turned on.

"Allied officials say the proposal would do little to improve air safety-or prevent Russian aircraft flying dangerously close to ships or planes flown by western allies," the media outlet remarked, adding, however, that "key NATO allies are keen on advancing the military dialogue with Russia."

At a July meeting of the NATO-Russia Council Moscow came up with the plan meant to reduce tension in the Baltic region. In addition to turning transponders on Russia proposed an exchange of military experts on air safety.

"Russia proposed a way forward on how we can address issues related to transponders and air safety. We stated clearly that we welcome that Russia is ready to sit down and discuss air safety, transparency, including transponders. But we also asked for more details, and I think it's up to Russia to discuss the details of the proposal, but we welcome that Russia is showing more interest on the issue," Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg told journalists following the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council.

The issue was raised following a series of incidents involving US reconnaissance aircraft approaching Russia's airspace and Russian fighter jets.

In late April the Pentagon officials claimed that the Russian Su-27 performed a "barrel roll" "dangerously close" to a US Air Force RC-135 spy plane flying over the Baltic Sea, in close proximity to Russia's border.

It is worth mentioning that the incident occurred after Russia's Su-24 had flown over the US Navy missile destroyer Donald Cook heading on to Russia's waters in the Baltic Sea.

The Pentagon complained that Russian aircraft fly with their transponders turned off.

In response to the US' allegations Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov drew attention to the fact that US spy planes had been repeatedly spotted "creeping" toward Russia's airspace with disabled transponders.

"The reports of foreign media saying that a Russian Su-27 allegedly flew in dangerously close proximity to a US RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft in the skies over the Baltic Sea on April 14 are not true," Konashenkov told reporters.

"To identify the target, one of the Su-27s of the Baltic Fleet aviation forces on duty was sent. It performed its flyby and identified the object as a reconnaissance plane RC-135U of the US Air Force," he elaborated, stressing that the Russian aircraft acted within the frame of international law.

In early July, Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu ordered to take measures to improve air security over the Baltic Sea, signaling that the Russian Air Force is ready to carry out missions with their transponders activated if NATO military forces do the same. The initiative was announced after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinisto.

However, NATO officials rejected Russia's proposals to switch transponders on and to organize a meeting of the countries' military experts.

The Wall Street Journal remarked that the Alliance's planes usually fly missions with enabled transponders. However, "some allies, including the US and Norway, occasionally operate without transponders while flying national reconnaissance or surveillance missions," the media outlet admitted.

Needless to say that NATO's unwillingness to establish the working relationship with Russia does not add to the region's security.

Commenting on the issue Russian envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko told journalists last Thursday that the Alliance is seemingly "seeking to justify its decision to suspend practical cooperation with Russia."

Speaking to Russian online newspaper Vzglyad back in May Russian military experts noted that the US reconnaissance planes are violating "their own rules."

In particular, Russian test pilot Magomed Tolboyev underscored that US spy planes are using the flight paths of civil aircraft, which is strictly prohibited by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

"Our pilots are more disciplined than their US counterparts," he noted, adding that the Americans are routinely violating the rules not only along Russia's borders but elsewhere in the world.

For his part Russian military and political analyst Alexander Perendzhiev suggested that NATO is deliberately aggravating tensions with Russia seeking yet another "pretext for new accusations" against Moscow.

 Sputnik

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Germany Ready to Assist Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict Resolution

Sputnik News

14:17 21.09.2016(updated 14:51 21.09.2016)

Germany is ready to contribute to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict peaceful settlement.

YEREVAN (Sputnik)  Germany is ready to contribute to the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, German President Joachim Gauck said on Wednesday in a congratulatory message sent to his counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Armenia's independence.

"The settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is of paramount importance to your country. As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE], Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict," the German president said, as cited by Yerevan-based newspaper Aravot.

Joachim Gauck also noted that Berlin intended to support Armenia as a partner nation and encouraged the state's will to continue political and economic convergence with the European Union.

Azerbaijan's Armenian-dominated breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh proclaimed its independence in 1991. After the military conflict ended in 1994, Azerbaijan lost control over the region.

Violence erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh on April 2, and led to multiple casualties. The parties to the conflict signed a Russian-brokered ceasefire on April 5, but mutual accusations have not stopped so far.

The Minsk Group of OSCE has been attempting to resolve the conflict since 1992. Azerbaijan insists on maintaining its territorial integrity, while Armenia defends the interests of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

 Sputnik

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Afghan Peace Process Hopes to Build Momentum

By Ayaz Gul 21 September 2016

War-torn Afghanistan marked International Peace Day Wednesday amid hopes that a widely-anticipated peace deal with a key insurgent group might ease security challenges by encouraging others fighting alongside the Taliban to join the peace process.

Afghan officials have been negotiating for months with Hizb-e-Islami, an insurgent group led by controversial warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Despite repeated breakdowns, both sides are expected to finalize a draft agreement.

Some opposition to the deal reportedly has been inside the Afghan government. However a statement published earlier this week by President Ashraf Ghani's governing partner, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, said that he was not opposed to the peace agreement. That move has now set the stage for the government to sign the landmark truce likely to enhance its political credibility inside and outside Afghanistan.

A member of Hekmatyar's negotiating team, Said Naqibullah Hashmi, while addressing a seminar in Kabul in connection with the International Peace Day disclosed that the peace agreement would be announced "within 24 hours."

Taliban deal still distant

Despite the reported progress with Hekmatyar, there is widespread skepticism about whether the Taliban is ready to engage in a similar peace effort.

Afghan authorities say they are open to talks with all armed opposition groups but continue to blame neighboring Pakistan's military and its spy agency for covertly support to the Taliban and its key ally, the Haqqani Network. They suspect Islamabad is trying to retain influence in Afghanistan to halt rival India's growing influence there.

"We don't expect the violence and terror to subside anytime time soon as the Taliban and affiliate groups are sustained with logistical, financial and material support from elements in Pakistan," Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani said Tuesday in Washington while delivering a public talk at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He again alleged that Pakistan's military offensive aimed at uprooting terrorist groups in the country's tribal regions are sparing some groups that launch attacks in Afghanistan. He said instead, the groups are still being helped to prolong hostilities across the border.

"We know that any prospect for the success [of our peace initiative] is strictly contingent on the extent to which the government of Pakistan is willing and ready to clamp down on extremist groups while persuading other groups and individuals ready to renounce violence to engage in direct peace talks," Rabbani asserted.

But Pakistan vehemently rejects the Afghan allegations as an attempt to divert public attention from multiple challenges facing the Kabul government. Officials point to Pakistan's willingness to host around three million Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil for decades, saying insurgents hide among the refugees and use them as cover for their operations.

Pakistan sees risks in broad anti-militant push

Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, Maleeha Lodhi, told last week's Security Council meeting on Afghanistan that the international consensus on seeking a negotiated settlement of the Afghan war must be preserved to ensure for long term peace and stability in the strife-torn country.

"A military solution [in Afghanistan] is even more unlikely now. Nor should anyone expect that Pakistan would fight Afghanistan's war on its soil. Unfortunately, the Afghan parties themselves appear to have moved away from the international consensus that peace can only be achieved through negotiations. Neither side appears willing to talk except on their own terms," insisted Lodhi.

She reiterated that the NATO-led military operations for nearly 15 years in Afghanistan have not helped end the conflict. She said opening a front against the Afghan Taliban on Pakistani soil could force the insurgents to join hands with the anti-state militants hiding in Afghan border areas, threatening Islamabad's years of counterterrorism gains.

Mutual counterterrorism allegations and intensified Taliban attacks in Afghanistan are at the center of tensions between Kabul and Islamabad, dampening hopes for cooperation to seek an early revival of peace talks between the Afghan government and the Islamist insurgent group.

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China, Ukraine, Zimbabwe Among Leaders to Speak at UNGA

By VOA News 21 September 2016

The second day of the U.N. General Assembly annual meeting kicked off Wednesday with speeches from leaders of China, Japan, Ukraine, the European Union, Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others.

Forty-two leaders are to speak at the 71st General Assembly meeting in New York by the end of the day.

U.N. Secretary General Ban ki Moon cited the day as the International Day of Peace, calling on warring parties around the world to observe a 24-hour cease fire.

Chinese Premier of the State Council Li Keqiang spoke during the morning session, stating China is committed to peace and opening "its door even wider to the outside world".

But on the topic of the disputed South China Sea, Li said China encouraged more discussion, and that it is and has always been committed to peace.

"China also, maintains that disputes concerning territory and maritime rights and interests should be resolved through dialogue and negotiation. We need to expand the common ground to regional peace and stability," he said. "China has all along worked for the peaceful settlement of the hotspot issues."

Afghan Vice President Sarwar Danesh also spoke, reminding world leaders the country still struggles with the constant threat of terrorism, and in particular, seeks to protects journalists.

"Afghanistan requests the United Nations to appoint a special representative for the safety of journalists, focused on the protecting all journalists including those serving in Afghanistan," he said.

Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi and long-time Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe also spoke during the morning session.

Syria, refugee crisis

Many of Tuesday's speeches focused on Syria and the refugee crisis. President Obama said there is no ultimate military victory to be won in Syria and said a diplomatic solution must be pursued.

Obama also warned that "the embers of extremism will continue to burn" in the world, but that "the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall" and prevent it from affecting society.

This year marks both Obama and Ban's last U.N. addresses. Obama will leave office in January, and after nearly a decade of leading the international body Ban will step down by yearend.

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US Files Terrorism Charges Against Alleged New York Bomber

By VOA News 20 September 2016

U.S. officials unsealed a criminal indictment against Afghan-born bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami, charging him with planting a series of bombs in New York and New Jersey over the past three days in an act of terrorism.

Charges against Rahami included an allegation that he tried to use a "weapon of mass destruction."

The young man already had been charged with attempted murder following a shootout with police in New Jersey. He now is in a hospital recovering from gunshot wounds suffered at the time of his arrest.

Past suspicions

The disclosure of the terrorism case against the 28-year-old man followed the FBI's admission earlier Tuesday that it looked into Rahami's activities two years ago, but found insufficient evidence to launch a full-scale investigation.

The FBI said it carried out an "assessment" of Rahami in 2014, based on a tip from his father, who told agents at the time that he was concerned about his son's possible involvement with extremists.

However, during a subsequent meeting with investigators, Mohammad Rahami revised his story, saying the source of his worries were the young man's associations with criminals and thugs. The FBI said it took a look at the younger Rahami's activities and found nothing that would warrant further investigation.

At the time of the FBI's involvement in 2014, Rahami was in jail for allegedly stabbing his brother.

Prosecutors in New Jersey initially charged the 28-year-old with five counts of attempted murder stemming from his shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey, where he was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar Monday morning. Two police officers were wounded in that clash.

Other bombs

Rahami was born in Afghanistan, emigrated to the U.S. when he was 7 years old, and has since become a naturalized American citizen. Surveillance video has shown him in the vicinity of the spot where a bomb went off Saturday night in New York City, and also walking near the spot several hundred meters away where another, unexploded bomb was recovered hours after the original explosion.

The bomb blast wounded 29 people, most of whom suffered only slight injuries  apparently because the explosive device was placed beneath a heavy metal container that absorbed most of the force of the blast. Police and federal authorities said the second explosive device apparently failed to detonate because it was faulty. However, recovery of the intact bomb presented clues that helped police in their search for the attacker.

Police also have linked Rahami to an explosion in a garbage can Saturday morning in Seaside Park, New Jersey. The blast was relatively minor, because part of the device failed to detonate, but it forced cancellation of a charity foot race organized by members of the U.S. Marine Corps.

No one was injured.

Rahami also is believed to be the source of multiple pipe bombs found abandoned near a railway station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. That town, where the family lived and where Rahami's father operated a small restaurant, is adjacent to Linden, where the son was arrested.

'Extremist ramblings'

Rahami is known to have traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan several years ago. When he was shot, investigators said, Rahami was carrying a notebook containing "extremist ramblings," including references to Anwar al-Awliki, an American-born Muslim cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Customers at the Rahami family's fried chicken restaurant described the young man as friendly, saying he liked to talk about cars, give away food, and let local bands practice in the restaurant.

But other friends wonder if his trip to Pakistan changed him. They say he grew a beard and wore Muslim clothes after he returned, became more serious, and prayed in the back of the store.

An Afghan presidential spokesman, Menapal Dawa Khan, told VOA Tuesday that even though Rahami is a U.S. citizen, the Kabul government is ready to fully cooperate in the investigation.

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Investigators: NY Bombing Suspect Bought Parts on eBay

By VOA News 21 September 2016

Federal investigators say the suspect in Saturday's bombings in New York and New Jersey bought components on eBay and used as triggering devices cell phones purchased from a store 500 meters from an address he once listed as his home.

The details are contained in criminal complaints made public Tuesday spelling out multiple federal charges against 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami. Most of the charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Authorities arrested Rahami on Monday after an exchange of gunfire with police that left him and two officers wounded.

According to the court documents, investigators believe Rahami used an eBay account with the username "ahmad rahami" to buy citric acid, a circuit board, electric igniters and hundreds of ball bearings between June 20 and August 10. The items were shipped to a business in Perth Amboy, New Jersey where Rahami worked until September 12.

Ball bearings were found in two pressure cooker bombs placed four blocks apart in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York late Saturday. One of them exploded, injuring 29 people, while the other was recovered intact. Investigators said the second bomb had "numerous" electric igniters.

That second device was tested for fingerprints, and the criminal complaint said all 12 prints found were matches for Rahami. The documents say his prints were also found on items inside of a backpack that was discovered late Sunday at a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey, just outside of New York. The bag contained multiple explosive devices, including one that blew up as police tried to disarm it with a robot.

Authorities also tied Rahami to a bomb that blew up in a trash can in Seaside Park, New Jersey early Saturday.

That link involved one of the cell phones that investigators said were shipped last year to a store in Perth Amboy near the address that Rahami provided as his home in a 2012 passport application. They said a second phone shipped to the same place was used in the bomb that blew up in Chelsea.

A third phone, one found with the other Chelsea bomb, was once registered to one of Rahami's family members, the documents said.

Investigators also said they used surveillance video to tie Rahami to the Chelsea bombs, with cameras putting him near the explosion site about 37 minutes before the blast and near where the other bomb was found two minutes after the first one went off. That second video, they said, showed him pulling a suitcase and then a short time later walking without it.

The documents contain some pieces of writing from a journal found on Rahami when he was arrested. The messages include praise of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011, and "Brother Osama Bin Laden," the former head of al-Qaida who was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in 2011.

"Inshallah the sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION," one message reads.

The FBI said Tuesday it assessed Rahami's activities in 2014 after his father told agents he was concerned about his son's possible involvement with extremists.

The agency found insufficient evidence to warrant further investigation.

Rahami was born in Afghanistan, came to the U.S. at age 7 and became a naturalized American citizen.

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Brazil's Former President to Stand Trial for Corruption

By VOA News 20 September 2016

A Brazilian judge has ordered former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to stand trial on charges of corruption and money laundering.

Judge Sergio Moro ruled Tuesday that Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2011, will be tried for allegedly accepting $1.15 million in bribes connected to a sweeping kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras. Also on trial will be the former first lady and six others.

Lula's hand-chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, was found guilty of breaking budget rules and was dismissed from the presidency last month.

Rousseff's successor, former Vice President Michel Temer, has pulled the country to the political and economic right, trying to boost Brazil out of its worst economic recession since the 1930s.

In explaining his decision, Moro said Silva and others benefited from renovations at a beachfront apartment in the coastal city of Guaruja in Sao Paulo state. The improvements were made by the construction company OAS, which is one of those involved in the kickback scheme at Petrobras.

Lula has denied all charges against him, but the decision may prevent Brazil's power player from making a political comeback in the 2018 presidential campaign. It could also derail any hopes the Workers' Party (PT) had of returning to power, according to some experts.

Despite the corruption allegations facing the PT and several of its former coalition parties, the most recent polls have shown Lula remains a leading candidate for 2018.

Lula was charged with three counts each of corruption, which carries a maximum sentence of 16 years per count, and money laundering, with a possible sentence of up to 10 years per count. If found guilty, however, the sentence would be determined by the judge.

Some information in this report was provided by Reuters.

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China-Russia naval drill ends with island-seizing mission

People's Daily Online

(China Daily) 08:31, September 20, 2016

China-Russia naval drill ends with island-seizing mission

The Chinese and Russian navies stage a mission to seize an island on Sunday, marking the end of the two countries' joint drill this year.[Photo by GAN JUN/CHINA DAILY]

The Chinese and Russian navies staged a mission to seize an island on Sunday as part of an eight-day exercise in the South China Sea.

As the key element of the annual drill, the navies dispatched warships, marine forces, helicopters and amphibious armored equipment for the mission.

The exercise demonstrated the Chinese and Russian navies' capacities in command management, telecommunications coordination, and intelligence and information sharing, said Senior Captain Li Xiangdong, who commanded the Chinese warships.

The mission marked the end of the China-Russia Joint Sea 2016 drill, which started on Sept 12 in eastern waters off Zhanjiang, the southernmost city in Guangdong province and the base of the Nanhai Fleet. A closing ceremony was to be held on Monday.

Compared with previous years, the 2016 drill focused more on confrontational capacity such as surface warships, submarines and land-based defenses, Li said, adding that the use of an advanced command system made communication between the two navies smoother.

It was also the first time the China-Russia joint exercise had been held in the South China Sea.

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U.S. Reckless Moves for Preemptive Attack under Fire

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

Pyongyang, September 20 (KCNA) -- Kim Kwang Hak, researcher at the Institute for American Studies of the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK, released a commentary titled "U.S. reckless moves for preemptive attack precipitate self-destruction only" on Tuesday.

The Council on Foreign Relations of the U.S. recently made public a report claiming that the U.S. would consider a military strike if the DPRK continues bolstering up its nuclear and missile capability, refusing to respond to the negotiations with the U.S., the commentary said, and went on:

The report issued by the above-said council is nothing but an empty theory and talk of windbags who forgot the strategic position of the DPRK which had access even to H-bomb.

The U.S. heinous hostile policy toward the DPRK and ceaseless nuclear threat and blackmail compelled the DPRK to bolster its nuclear force hour by hour and it has sufficient military muscle to retaliate against the U.S. in the air and on the ground and on and under the seas.

The U.S. is the chieftain of all evils in the world, and the U.S. heinous hostile policy and reckless war moves for aggression should be countered with the toughest counteraction and immediate and preemptive strike. This is the conclusion finally made by the DPRK.

The DPRK remains unperturbed by the U.S. dangerous saber-rattling. If the U.S. makes even the slightest provocation against the DPRK, the latter will blow up the stronghold of the U.S. including Washington and settle accounts with the U.S. This is the iron will and steadfast stand of the army and people of the DPRK.

The U.S. would be well advised to clearly understand that the military preemptive attack on the DPRK will only precipitate its self-destruction.

If the U.S. ignites a nuclear war at last on this land, defying this warning of the DPRK, it is bound to perish in the flames. -0-

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U.S. Air Attack on Base of Syrian Government Force Is Intentional Aggression: DPRK FM Spokesman

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

Pyongyang, September 20 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry gave the following answer to the question raised by KCNA on Tuesday as regards the fact that fighters of the U.S. forces made an air raid on the base of the Syrian government force:

According to press reports, U.S. fighters made an air attack on a base of the government force in Syria on Sept. 17, leaving many people killed or wounded.

The DPRK vehemently denounces the U.S. recent air attack as it was not made by "mistake" but intentional aggression against a sovereign state.

The incident made it clearer that the "anti-terrorism war" being staged by the U.S. in Syria is aimed to bring down the independent Syrian government.

The U.S. is the arch criminal who intruded into other country under the signboard of "war on terrorism" without any approval of the legitimate Syrian government and ceaselessly dropped bombs over cities and villages, reducing them to ashes and causing the serious refugee crisis.

The tragic events taking place in different parts of the world at present go to prove that all countries and nations should have their own muscle if they are to smash the U.S. evermore high-handed and arbitrary practices, aggression and infringement upon their sovereignty and protect it.

The DPRK had access to the most powerful nuclear deterrence, true to the strategic line of simultaneously pushing forward economic construction and the building of nuclear force, in order to protect the sovereignty and security of the country and the nation and achieve fair international justice in the face of the U.S. high-handed actions and nuclear threat and blackmail.

The DPRK government extends full support and solidarity to the government and people of the Syrian Arab Republic in their struggle to beat back the aggression and terrorism by the hostile forces including the U.S. and protect the country's sovereignty, stability and territorial integrity. -0-

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DPRK People Determined to Work Miracles in Recovery Efforts

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

Pyongyang, September 20 (KCNA) -- We will emerge victorious in this anti-disaster battle under the guidance of supreme leader Kim Jong Un. All the inhabitants in flood-hit Musan County are now filled with deep yearning for him who works heart and soul to stabilize their life.

Nam Sung Il, department director of the Musan County People's Committee of North Hamgyong Province, stressed this in an interview with KCNA.

The sudden flooding and landslide severely devastated the county, cutting off power and drinking water supply systems, he noted, adding:

At that time, the respected Marshal Kim Jong Un sent precious relief aids to the inhabitants in the disaster areas and the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea issued an appeal for channeling all human, material and technical potentials into the recovery efforts in the flood-hit northern part of the country.

Such steps of love have instilled great strength and courage into the mind of all the county inhabitants who were at a loss what to do.

Realizing again that we can not live even a moment without his care, we will surely achieve the miraculous victory of converting misfortune into favorable conditions on the recovery efforts.

Pak Jong Hyok, an officer of the Korean People's Army, said:

Construction units from different parts of the country began the building of houses in the disaster areas all at once.

We, servicepersons, got down to ground-breaking project for housing construction the moment we arrived here in Hoeryong City. One more miracle will be wrought in this housing construction. -0-

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U.S. sends B-1B bombers to S. Korea in show of force against DPRK's nuke test

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 18:08, September 21, 2016

The U.S. military on Wednesday sent two strategic bombers to South Korea in a show of force against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) over its latest nuclear test.

Two B-1B Lancers flew low over the Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, some 70 km south of capital Seoul, at about 1:10 p.m. local time (0410 GMT), according to local media reports. The supersonic bombers had made a sortie from the U.S. air base in Guam.

One of the two bombers returned to the Guam base after the fly-over, but the other unusually landed in the Osan base. How many days the U.S. supersonic bomber will stay in South Korea is unknown.

On Sept. 13, the U.S. military dispatched two B-1B bombers to South Korea, but all of them returned back to the Guam base right after flying low around the Osan base for about 10 minutes.

The move came after the DPRK said on Sept. 9 that it successfully conducted an explosion test of nuclear warhead to fit on ballistic rockets. The fifth nuclear test was staged just eight months after the fourth in January.

The fifth test was seen as the most powerful nuclear detonation ever by the DPRK as it produced an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, stronger than 6 kilotons recorded in the previous test.

Pyongyang said Tuesday that it tested an engine jet on the ground of a carrier rocket for geo-stationary satellite, which Seoul military saw as a long-range missile.

The DPRK is expected here to launch a new long-range rocket at or around Oct. 10 to mark the 71st anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea.

Several B-1B Lancers were reportedly dispatched to the Andersen base in Guam in early August from Ellsworth air base in South Dakota to replace B-52 strategic bombers.

The B-1B supersonic bomber, which went into operation in 1980s, is known to be capable of carrying as heavy as 61 tons of weapons, including joint direct attack munitions (JDAM), conventional bombs, air-to-surface missiles and cruise missiles.

The high-speed bomber can fly at a maximum speed of Mach 2, faster than B-2's Mach 0.9 and B-52's 957 kilometers per hour. It can travel as far as 12,000 km without refueling.

Three B-2 stealth bombers also arrived in Guam last month from Whiteman base in Missouri. The stealth bomber, which began to be deployed from 1990s in the field, can be armed with a maximum of 22-ton weapons, including 16 nuclear bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. It can travel as far as 12,230 km without refueling.

The B-52 bomber can travel as far as 16,000 km without refueling, carrying as heavy as 31 tons of weapons including nuclear bombs and "bunker buster" missiles that can destroy underground facilities.

Four days after Pyongyang's January test of what it claimed was its first hydrogen bomb, the U.S. military conducted an armed protest by flying a B-52 strategic bomber over the Osan air base.

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US lands 1st B-1B bomber on Korean Peninsula in 20 years

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 21, 2016 9:53AM

The United States has landed a supersonic bomber in South Korea which Washington said with an aim to remind Pyongyang of American powerful military assets in the region.

The move came after North Korea successfully ground-tested a new high-power rocket engine, saying it would be used for launching geostationary satellites. However, South Korea said it was designed to demonstrate progress towards attaining a long-range missile.

Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency made the announcement on Monday, adding that the test was supervised by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the country's Sohae satellite-launching site.

On Wednesday, two American supersonic B-1B Lancers flew low over the US Osan Air Base at Pyeongtaek, 64 kilometers south of Seoul. One of the aircraft landed at Osan, but the other flew back to the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

The B-1 Lancer, which is a four-engine strategic bomber, would stay at Osan for an unidentified amount of time.

The aircraft capable of reaching speeds of Mach 2 can carry the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the US Air Force inventory.

Lieutenant General Thomas W. Bergeson of the US Air Force said, "The bond between the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is ironclad and the strength of that commitment will not be shaken by North Korea's aggressive behavior."

"What we are showing today is just one tool we have to choose from a wide array of options. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region," Bergeson said.

Last week, two US planes flew over South Korea, days after the North's fifth nuclear test, but they both returned to Guam.

Critics believe that the US move came in the light of an apparent increase in the pace of North Korea's nuclear and missile testing program.

On September 9, the North conducted a nuclear warhead explosion -- its fifth -- saying it was meant to counter US hostility.

In February, Pyongyang launched a long-range rocket, which it said placed an earth observation satellite into orbit. Washington and Seoul denounced it as a cover for an intercontinental ballistic missile test.

A month before, North Korea said it had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb, and vowed to build up its nuclear program as deterrence against potential aggression from the US and its regional allies.

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Forces in Iraq meet to coordinate Mosul liberation

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Erbil, Sept 20, IRNA -- Officials from the Iraqi Army and Peshmerga fighters from the Iraqi Kurdistan Region along with the international coalition forces have recently met to discuss a joint operation for liberating Mosul from terrorists.

Jabbar Yavar Spokesman of Iraqi Kurdistan region's Peshmerga fighters told the Islamic Republic News Agency that during the meeting all sides urged the need for coordination and cooperation between the forces in their operation against the terrorists.

According to Yavar, they have also raised the issue of how to address the refugees and people displaced following the operation for liberating Mosul.

The meeting was headed by Masoud Barzani President of the Iraqi Kurdistan.

2044**

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Iraqi forces, tribal fighters liberate strategic district in Anbar

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 21, 2016 10:35AM

Iraqi army soldiers, backed by fighters from pro-government tribal units, have fully liberated a strategic district in the western province of Anbar from Takfiri Daesh terrorists.

A high-ranking military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arabic-language al-Sumaria television network on Wednesday that government forces and their allies had taken control of the Jazira al-Hadithah region, which lies east of the city of Hadithah and about 240 kilometers northwest of the capital, Baghdad.

There are reports that Iraqi forces are advancing towards the Jazirah al-Baghdadi area in an operation to drive out Daesh Takfiris from the region.

Additionally, 15 Daesh members were killed in al-Kasiriyat as 11 Daesh rocket launching pads were struck in the village.

The developments came a day after army troops and allied paramilitary tribal fighters managed to free the villages of Jirnaf, Eitha, Ba'ajah, Khanouga and Jmesah on the outskirts of the northern town of Shirqat.

They later entered the village of Houriyah on the northern edge of Shirqat, and freed the village of Jumaila on the western flank of Shirqat.

Late on Tuesday, Iraqi air force fighter jets targeted a Daesh convoy of nine vehicles traveling along a road in al-Rashad district, located 55 kilometers southwest of Kirkuk, killing 10 Takfiris in the process.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Daesh ringleader Ibrahim al-Samarrai aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has shown up in the western al-Risalah neighborhood of the militant-held city of Mosul.

An unnamed source in Iraq's northern province of Nineveh told al-Sumaria television network that al-Baghdadi emerged in the area on board a white sport utility vehicle.

Masked and heavily-armed men dressed in black clothes were guarding his convoy of four vehicles.

The source noted that Daesh has placed most of Mosul neighborhoods under curfew, and that the presence of gunmen has been beefed up near state organizations and offices.

Mosul, which is the second largest city in Iraq, has been under Daesh control for more than two years.

Gruesome violence has plagued the northern and western parts of Iraq ever since Daesh Takfiris launched an offensive in the country in June 2014, and took control of portions of Iraqi territory.

Iraqi army soldiers and fighters from allied Popular Mobilization Units are seeking to win back militant-held regions in joint operations.

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Fight Against Islamic State Looks Like A Cover For Russia's Imperial Gamble

September 21, 2016

by David Patrikarakos

Karl Rove is relaxed but adamant: "The threat from Russia is definitely growing," he says. "Putin is becoming more bellicose; he feels he can push the edge of the envelope further than ever before."

The former senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff to U.S. President George W. Bush has no interest in being diplomatic as we sit on a pristine white sofa inside the Mystetskyi Arsenal in central Kyiv, Ukraine's capital city.

The arsenal is a grand building with high and rounded brick ceilings and large, arched, almost church-like, windows. Completed in 1801, it once housed the garrison charged with guarding Kyiv; now it stands as a monument to Ukrainian culture and art. Today, however, it houses the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference, sponsored by Ukrainian businessman Viktor Pinchuk, which has brought politicians and diplomats from all corners of the world to discuss the situation in Ukraine -- and that is simply impossible to do without discussing Russia.

Rove continues: "[Putin is doing] anything that can and will expand Russian influence to U.S.S.R.-era levels of power. Russia is back in the Middle East for the first time since 1972. As well as Ukraine, he is menacing the Baltics and the Nordic countries, and critically, he is willing to tolerate the cost to his country, which is considerable."

He's right. Putin first began to reassert Russian power in the Georgian war of 2008. He followed this, in 2014, by illegally annexing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine. Late last year, Russian forces entered Syria. It's been a heady few years for the Kremlin.

But Russia has suffered considerably as a result of all this adventurism. International sanctions and declining oil prices have combined to pummel its economy. When he began to consolidate his power in the early 2000s, Putin's deal with the Russian people was simple: They would receive economic stability -- and, critically, much higher standards of living -- in exchange for a loss of freedoms. Today, that deal no longer looks sustainable, so a new, unspoken one now lies on the table: In exchange for a (further) loss of freedoms and (now) economic hardship, the Russian people will swell with national pride at a Russia -- once mocked and belittled by the West -- now retaking its rightful place at the center of global power politics. Economic growth is out; chauvinism is in.

Mass Support For Putin

At the moment, it is a deal that seems to be holding. During my visit to Moscow and Siberia in April, it was clear that beyond educated and globally engaged millennials, mass support for the president still existed. "Russia is strong once more" was a comment I heard, in various formulations, again and again during my time there. Criticism of Putin was largely confined to journalists or tattooed youths in the capital's hipster bars.

Putin has arguably played his cards well, especially when it comes to his latest global show of strength: Syria. The emergence of the self-declared Islamic State extremist group (IS) in the region allowed Moscow to intervene in the conflict under the guise of combating the group's horrific atrocities. In essence, it has assumed a leadership role in Washington's largest foreign-policy initiative of the 21st century: the "Global War on Terror." Putin is using American policy to further Russian ends. He has used the doctrine as cover to further expand Russia's sphere of influence; for Putin, Islamic State is a geopolitical gift he can use to secure his country's strategic influence in the Middle East.

And some argue that he has been allowed to do so by exploiting Western indecision. Rove adds: "President [Barack] Obama has mishandled Syria from the beginning. You don't say the use of chemical weapons is a red line and when they are deployed not take any effective action. Now we are seeing close coordination between Russia and the U.S. in combating Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, which may not be the best of moves -- we will have to see how it works in practice. [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad is a Russian client and Russia is merely concerned that he remain in power, despite the destruction of Syria and the threat to Sunni Muslims he poses. Moscow is merely concerned with strengthening Assad's hold over part of the country, which also includes its [Russia's] naval facility [at Tartus]."

Depressingly Prophetic

Rove's words proved depressingly prophetic. The cease-fire that had been brokered between the U.S. and Russia between forces loyal to Assad and the assorted rebel groups opposing it -- designed to allow Moscow and Washington to join forces and smash IS and the other jihadist groups -- agreed upon on September 12, is over. Even worse, U.S. air strikes that were first believed to have mistakenly killed 60 Syrian troops instead of IS now appear to have killed regime prisoners forced to put on Syrian army uniforms.

Putin claimed that while the Syrian regime was "fully abiding" by the cease-fire, rebel groups (some of which the U.S. backs) were using it merely as an opportunity to regroup, and he accused Washington of being more concerned with retaining its military capacity in the area than with trying to weed out the extremist rebel groups from the more "moderate" ones.

On the ground, things appear to be in more disarray than ever. Perhaps most shockingly, footage emerged of Free Syrian Army rebels (FSA), the group with arguably the closest ties to Washington, ordering U.S. Special Forces out of the town of Al-Rai in northern Syria, screaming in the process that "Christians and Americans have no place among us." Hours later, U.S. soldiers reportedly returned to the town accompanied by FSA fighters, and the rebels who led the protest were reportedly "discharged," likely under orders from Ankara.

A 'Net Loss'

All of this suits Russia just fine -- for the moment. The question remains: How long can it sustain its imperial adventures? Rove concluded: "Putin has temporarily succeeded through the popular support of the Russian people, but that will decline after another year of economic stagnation. At the same time, his actions have forced Europe to rethink its energy policy" -- whereby Europe is heavily reliant on Russian gas -- "so at the same time he is also losing customers. Overall, this is going to be a net loss for him."

In the meantime, however, Putin marches onward, with troops still massed on Ukraine's border while he swaggers across the global stage, trying -- ostensibly -- to bring "peace" to Syria while at the same time trying -- ostensibly -- to eradicate the threat from IS. The reality that Russian forces have in fact spent their time in Syria mostly attacking non-IS targets who are hostile to Assad in order to prop up their client is merely the final layer of hypocrisy within which the brutal cynicism of Russia's Syria policy -- especially regarding IS -- is coated.

At a panel discussion at the YES conference on September 17, the former director of policy planning for President George W. Bush, Richard Haass, struck a glum note. "[Former Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev still had to deal with the Politburo during the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis," he told an audience of Ukrainian MPs, foreign diplomats, and journalists.

"But I see no equivalent checks and balances for Putin. In fact, I'm not even sure there is a Russian expression for 'checks and balances.'"

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/ tracking-islamic-state-russia-syria- imperial-gamble/28004581.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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No signs of airstrike in Aleppo convoy incident: Russia

Iran Press TV

Tue Sep 20, 2016 10:18PM

Russia says there are no signs indicating that a United Nations (UN) convoy that was apparently attacked in the Syrian province of Aleppo on Monday was hit by an airstrike.

Igor Konashenkov, the spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said in a statement on Tuesday that a close study of video footage captured by a Russian drone revealed no signs of munitions having hit the aid convoy.

"We have closely studied the video footage from where the incident took place and we did not find any signs of any ammunition having hit the convoy. There are no craters, while the vehicles have their chassis intact and they have not been severely damaged, which would have been the case from an airstrike," Konashenkov said.

He concluded that "the convoy caught fire, which strangely happened almost at exactly at the same time as militants started a large scale offensive on Aleppo."

Konashenkov said the convoy was in an area in Aleppo Province that was controlled by militants. He said Russia had used drones to monitor the convoy but only to a certain point.

"Around 13:40 Moscow time (10:40 GMT), the aid convoy successfully reached the destination. The Russian side did not monitor the convoy after this and its movements were only known by the militants who were in control of the area," the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman explained.

He also said that a pickup truck with a large caliber mortar used by the militants can clearly be seen in the footage. "The video clearly shows how the terrorists are relocating a pickup truck with a large-caliber mortar."

The UN had said earlier that at least 18 trucks in the 31-vehicle convoy were destroyed late Monday as they came under an "airstrike" while en route to deliver humanitarian assistance to the hard-to-reach town of Urum al-Kubra. The world body later reversed that assertion, however.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement that the airstrike killed around 20 people, including one of its staff members.

UN backtracks, US doesn't

Russia, which has been carrying out an aerial campaign in Syria on a request by Damascus, said soon after the incident that neither its military nor that of Syria had conducted any airstrike against the convoy.

In his Tuesday statement, Konashenkov reiterated that position. "Russian and Syrian warplanes did not carry out any airstrikes on a UN humanitarian aid convoy in the southwest of Aleppo."

Nevertheless, the United States said it held Russia responsible.

On Tuesday, Ben Rhodes, US President Barack Obama's national security adviser, said all indications are "that this was an airstrike."

"That means," he said, "there only could have been two entities responsible: either the Syrian regime or the Russian government. In any event, we hold the Russian government responsible."

The US insistence came even as the UN, which had earlier said an airstrike had targeted its convoy, backtracked by saying it could not determine whether an airstrike had actually occurred.

"We are not in a position to determine whether these were in fact airstrikes. We are in a position to say that the convoy was attacked," UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. Over the past few months, the militants active in the Arab country have suffered major setbacks as the Syrian army has managed to liberate several areas.

Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, has been divided between government forces and foreign-backed militants since 2012.

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US Sets up Coordination Center in Syria's Tell Abyad to Prepare for Raqqa Storm

Sputnik News

20:56 20.09.2016

According to the information received by Sputnik from sources in the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the United States as part of preparation for the operation to free Raqqa from Daesh militants has set up a coordination center in the Syrian town of Tell Abyad, which is controlled by the Kurdish forces.

As was reported a few days ago in Tell Abyad of al-Hasakah province about 50 US soldiers have arrived in 15 armored cars. They set up a coordination center near the village of Mnbeteh, 2 kilometers from the city center. They put up a US flag marking their center.

The area around the center, which is located near the Turkish border, is guarded by soldiers of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

The representative of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, in Tell Abyad, Cudiya Kurdo spoke with Sputnik and confirmed the information about the US center in the city.

"A few days ago in Tell Abyad the US military arrived and set up a coordination center, they hung their flags. As part of the center's task, the US forces will assist the Syrian fighters of the Democratic Forces, by providing them with consulting services in the field of military tactics and strategy," Kurdo said.

Tell Abyad, which is located 90 km from Raqqa, has a strategic importance for the Syrian Kurds since its location joins two Kurdish cantonments of Kobani and Jazira.

Syria has been mired in civil war since March 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups.

 Sputnik

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Syrian Army Destroys Leading al-Nusra Unit in Aleppo

Sputnik News

06:35 20.09.2016(updated 10:33 20.09.2016)

Syrian government troops supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed a leading unit of the Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham group in Aleppo.

HMEIMIM (Sputnik)  Syrian government troops supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed a leading unit of the Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham group, formerly known as al-Nusra Front, in Aleppo, the Russian center for Syrian reconciliation said in statement Tuesday.

According to the statement, the Syrian government troops on Tuesday night repelled an offensive by Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham militants near military schools and 1070 quarter in Aleppo.

"During the counterattack, the Syrian forces supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed the leading Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham unit, including four tanks, three infantry combat vehicles, nine pickup truck with heavy machine guns and up to 100 militants," the statement reads.

Al-Nusra Front terrorists launched on Monday a large-scale offensive on Syrian army positions in south-western outskirts of Aleppo City following a massive artillery shelling.

 Sputnik

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Despite Errant US Strike, Syrian Regime Presses IS in Deir Ezzor

By Sirwan Kajjo 20 September 2016

Despite Saturday's errant U.S. airstrike that Russia claims killed 62 Syrian troops, the Syrian government is upping the battle against Islamic State fighters in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Soon after the smoke cleared from the U.S. raid over the weekend, at least 1,000 additional Syrian soldiers were deployed to the besieged desert city, which has strategic significance for both the regime and the Islamic State group.

Syrian troops counter-attacked Monday and Tuesday at one neighborhood near a mountain area that IS extremists temporarily controlled following the U.S. strike. Social media reports say several IS fighters were killed as the regime regained control of the area.

The offensive came as the Syrian government unilaterally ended a truce in the Syria war, even as U.S. and Russian officials sought to keep the truce alive.

"Deir Ezzor presents an opportunity for the [Syrian] regime to show its effectiveness after the cease-fire has failed," said Daryous Darwish, a Syrian affairs analyst who lives in exile in France.

City under siege

Deir Ezzor is a virtual island surrounded by hundreds of square kilometers of desert, not far from the Iraq border. IS has controlled nearly the entire province since mid-2014, except for small pockets of the city that remained in the hands of Syrian government forces.

"It is located in the heart of [Islamic State's} so-called caliphate, connecting Syria with Iraq," Darwish said.

Due to continued fighting, more than 250,000 residents in different parts of the city have been under siege for months, according to the United Nations and Syrian rights groups. The area sees nearly daily bombardments, both from Russian warplanes supporting the Damascus regime and from planes of the U.S-led coalition targeting IS strongholds.

Targeting oil fields

IS fighters control most of the oil fields in Deir Ezzor, and oil production has been a major source of revenue for the extremists. U.S.-led airstrikes mainly target the oil facilities and Islamic State's supply routes.

"At least 30 percent of oil and natural gas production in Syria comes from Deir Ezzor," said Musallam Talas, a Syrian economist who teaches at the Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey.

IS has been increasing its presence in eastern and central Syria, after having been routed from much of northern Syria by Turkey-backed rebels and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces.

Troops fighting IS expect the next big offensive will try to oust the extremists from their remaining major strongholds in two big cities, Deir Ezzor and Raqqa.

Russian airstrikes key

Observers say Syrian troops are hampered in their fight against IS because they must travel a long way from government strongholds near Damascus. The Syrian regime said the weekend strike by U.S. jets against Syrian troops was a setback, but that continuing Russian air support for government forces is crucial.

"That effectiveness can only occur with surgical Russian airstrikes against [Islamic State]," said analyst Darwish.

The Assad government's attempts to expand its holdings in Deir Ezzor are limited, because manpower and supplies must come through the city's embattled airfield, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Many residents in Deir Ezzor have fled IS tyranny to regime-held areas. But aid groups have no access to assist them because of the fighting, the Observatory told VOA. Most people survive on a few rations and some bread provided by the government.

"After six days of outage, drinking water is now running again in [government-held] neighborhoods of al-Joura, al-Qusour and al-Mouazafeen," said Deir Ezzor 24, a website that reports news on the city.

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White House Holds Russia Responsible for Deadly Attack on Syrian Aid Convoy

By Steve Herman 20 September 2016

The United States is holding Russia responsible for an attack on a humanitarian convoy in northern Syria that killed 20 civilians and an official of the Syrian Red Crescent society.

Ben Rhodes, a senior White House official, said all evidence shows the aid convoy was targeted by an airstrike, and since rebels in Syria have no air force, the strike could only have been conducted by Syrian government forces or their Russian allies.

The deadly airstrike west of Aleppo on Monday also destroyed 100 tons of desperately needed food and medicine.

Rhodes, President Barack Obama's deputy national security advisor, spoke to reporters Tuesday evening on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. He noted Russia had pledged to keep its warplanes away from "places where humanitarian aid is flowing."

Moscow and Damascus deny they were involved in the attack. The Russian Defense Ministry said the wreckage -- charred remains of 18 large trucks that had been parked close together, ready to distribute supplies -- suggests that a cargo fire caused the damage and fatalities.

"We've established it was not a fire," said U.N. humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke in Geneva.

Syria's military also denied any of its aircraft was involved in an attack.

The convoy's "movements were only known by the militants who were in control of the area," said Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov in Moscow.

The attack killed 20 civilians and the head of a local Syrian Red Crescent office, the humanitarian organization said.

Obama official: US holds Russia responsible

U.N. humanitarian officials temporarily suspended all such relief efforts in Syria, while diplomats in New York tried to salvage the tattered cease-fire.

On Tuesday, the 20 member states and organizations of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) met for about an hour in New York and decided to convene again on Friday.

"They agreed that, despite continued violence, there was still an imperative to pursue a nationwide cessation of hostilities based on the arrangement reached last week in Geneva between the United States and Russia," said State Department spokesman John Kirby.

"The cease-fire is not dead," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters as he emerged from the ISSG meeting.

Condemn airstrike

World leaders condemned the attack in speeches at the General Assembly.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the attack was an outrage.

Ban called the humanitarian workers' attackers cowards and said "accountability for crimes such as these is essential."

Leaders such as French President Francois Hollande blamed Syria's government for the cease-fire's failure.

"I say to the Syrian government's foreign backers that they must compel the regime to enforce peace," he said in his address to the world body. "Otherwise, they will bear the responsibility for the splitting up of the country and the chaos."

'Sent a very clear message'

"The Syrian government sent a very clear message by attacking the aid convoy and bombing Aleppo," Middle East scholar Daniel Serwer from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University told VOA. "The Russians don't seem able or willing to restrain [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad. The Americans aren't willing to intervene."

After seven days of relative calm and a resumption of critical aid, according to the terms of the cease-fire deal, the United States and Russia were to coordinate separate strikes on Islamic State and al-Qaida-affiliated rebels.

That was viewed as a remarkable diplomatic accomplishment, considering Washington and Moscow have not been allies in any hostilities since World War Two.

"Washington and Moscow have different long-term interests in Syria, support different sides of the war, and no longer trust each other based on recent breaches of the Syrian cease-fire and broader disagreements over Ukraine, the Baltic states and cyberattacks," Seth Jones, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, told VOA on Tuesday.

'Flagrant aggression'

Syrian state media quoted Assad as saying separate airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition that hit Syrian positions near Deir Ezzor on Saturday were a "flagrant aggression" that showed support for terrorists.

The airstrikes near Deir Ezzor may have hit a battalion of Syrian prisoners, VOA learned. U.S. officials have said Syrian government prisoners may be fighting for the regime as an alternative to being jailed.

The prisoners appeared to have been providing an "extra layer of protection" outside the perimeter of the Syrian forces. A senior defense official told VOA a brigadier general would begin investigating the strike "very soon."

The U.S. has expressed condolences for the losses suffered in the strike and is still working to determine what happened.

Carla Babb at the Pentagon, Nike Ching at the State Department and VOA's Lou Lorscheider contributed to this report.

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In Controversial Syria Strike, Critical Minutes Lost Sorting 'Cryptic' Phone Calls

By Carla Babb 20 September 2016

Three days after a U.S. airstrike hit a group of people who Russia and Syria say were Syrian troops, there is still little clarity on who they were, and why Russia did not warn the United States that there were Syrian soldiers in the target area.

U.S. officials have said that they notified their Russian counterparts before carrying out airstrikes in Deir Ezzor Saturday, which the Russian Defense Ministry says killed 62 Syrian troops.

After the attack got under way, a Russian officer called the coalition's air operations center; however, the U.S. official assigned to handle calls from the Russians was not near the phone, and someone else took the call.

Col. John Thomas, the spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said that this first phone conversation was "cryptic."

"We weren't exactly sure what they were saying," he said.

He told VOA in an interview later that the coalition took a "good while" before the appropriate U.S. official and his or her Russian source made contact via a second call.

"I'm not sure how long the delay was or why," Thomas told VOA, "but it wasn't immediate."

During that call, it became clear that the Russians believed coalition aircraft were hitting Syrian government forces, and the airstrikes were called off in less than five minutes.

From start to stop, the coalition strikes in Deir Ezzor Saturday lasted a little less than an hour, Thomas told reporters Tuesday.

The U.S. and Australia, whose planes also took part in the strike, have expressed deep regret for any unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces.

Thomas said that while Saturday's airstrike was a dynamic strike, or one that requires more immediate responsiveness, it was not rushed.

"For roughly two full days we were observing this target and believed that we had pretty good intelligence on what we were looking at," he said.

Syrian soldiers or prisoners?

The latest news on the U.S.-Russian communication comes a day after U.S. officials told VOA the coalition in Deir Ezzor may have struck a battalion of Syrian prisoners who were aligned with Syrian government forces but were in a separate location from the Syrian army.

The investigation into the strike is ongoing, but three officials say internal military reporting suggests the people hit in Saturday's strike were not dressed in Syrian military attire and were using technicals - trucks modified with guns strapped on their backs - which are frequently used by Islamic State fighters and different from the tanks used by Syrian government fighters.

The officials say Syrian government prisoners may have been fighting for the regime as an alternative to captivity and appeared to be providing an "extra layer of protection" in an area outside the perimeter of the Syrian forces.

U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. John Thomas would not confirm or deny the details provided to VOA, saying only that the U.S. military was looking into several possibilities "to see if and how a mistake may have occurred."

A brigadier general is being appointed by the U.S. military "today or very soon" to lead the investigation into the strike, a senior defense official said.

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John Kerry calls on Russia to ground Syrian fighter jets

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 21, 2016 4:56PM

US Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Russia to force the Syrian government into halting its airstrikes against terrorist groups, saying no-fly zones in certain areas of the country are the only way to revive hopes for an end to the Syrian conflict.

Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting about Syria on Wednesday, Kerry demanded Moscow to take responsibility for recent attacks on a UN aid convoy and a field clinic in Syria's Aleppo province before Syrian peace talks could be resumed.

"I believe that to restore credibility to the process we must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and to give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded," he said at the presence of his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

"And if that happens there's a chance of giving credibility back to this process," he said of an agreement with Lavrov in Geneva earlier this month to mediate a cessation of hostilities for humanitarian purposes.

Syria's army announced the end to the week-long ceasefire on Monday, blaming militants' lack of commitment for the failure of the truce.

Shortly after that, a UN aid convoy was targeted in an alleged airstrike in Aleppo's Urm al-Kubra region.

Washington quickly held Moscow responsible for the attack that killed 12 aid workers and destroyed 18 of 31 Syrian Red Crescent trucks carrying UN-provided food.

In another strike on a field clinic in Aleppo on Tuesday, 4 medical workers were killed and a nurse was critically injured.

American officials blame Russia for the attacks, arguing that Moscow had agreed to making sure that the shaky ceasefire stays in place.

"In Geneva, Russia related that Assad was prepared to live by the cessation of hostilities and would accept the idea of not flying over agreed upon areas," Kerry said at the UNSC.

"But because of what's happened in the past few days my friends we have no choice but to do that sooner rather than later, move immediately to restore confidence and implement a genuine ceasefire now," he added.

Moscow has firmly rejected the US accusation that Russian or Syrian planes carried out Monday or Tuesday's attack.

During the UNSC session, Lavorv said there would be "no more unilateral pauses" on part of Syrian forces as previous breaks had only allowed the Takfiri terrorists to re-arm and re-group.

The five-year conflict in Syria has left more than 400,000 people dead, according to UN special convoy Staffan de Mistura.

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Two Turkish troopers killed during Syria operation

Iran Press TV

Tue Sep 20, 2016 12:31PM

Two Turkish forces have lost their lives during an incursion into Syria which Ankara says targets Daesh terrorists and Kurdish militants operating in the violence-wracked Arab country.

Turkey's Dogan news agency reported that the soldiers sustained injuries in a blast south of the Syrian city of Jarablus on Tuesday while engaged in alleged clean-up operations against Daesh.

The troopers were taken over the border to a hospital in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep, but they succumbed to their wounds.

Turkish military sources said Tuesday's explosion was caused by either a landmine or an improvised explosive device (IED).

The latest deaths raised to 10 the total number of Turkish soldiers killed since August 24, when Turkish special forces, tanks and jets backed by planes from the US-led coalition launched their first coordinated offensive in Syria.

Damascus has denounced Turkey's military intervention as a breach of its sovereignty.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the operation, dubbed "Euphrates Shield," was aimed at "terror groups" such as Daesh and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a US-backed Kurdish group based in Syria.

Hours after the beginning of the offensive, Ankara-backed militants seized Jarablus, with Turkey now controlling a 900 square-kilometer area inside Syria.

On Monday, Erdogan stressed that the Turkish military will expand its offensive to create a 5,000-square-kilometer sanctuary.

Syria has been the scene of a foreign-backed crisis since March 2011. Turkey is said to be among the main supporters of the militant groups active in Syria, with reports saying that Ankara actively trains and arms the Takfiri elements there and facilitates their safe passage into the conflict-ridden country.

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Turkey Braces for Possible Spike in Ethnic Tensions

By Dorian Jones 20 September 2016

Fears are growing in Turkey about rising ethnic tensions between Turks and Kurds. The country is in the midst of a wave of Turkish nationalism in the aftermath of July's failed coup, at the same time Kurdish rebels of the PKK stepped up their military campaign for autonomy.

The dangerous combination of conflicting forces spilled into violence earlier this month in the Black Sea town of Sinop. Scores of Turks, armed with sticks and knives, marched into the town's Kurdish neighborhood, attacking residents and smashing shop windows, to"Turkish nationalist chants." The fighting, which saw dozens injured, was so bad security forces were forced to declare a curfew. A media blackout on the story quickly followed.

The incident follows a Kurdish builder being burned alive by a fellow worker in Istanbul only days after complaining to his family about being targeted by Turkish nationalists for being a Kurd. Local media also reported a shipbuilder was attacked and hospitalized in Istanbul for reportedly speaking Kurdish on a telephone on the street.

Ertugrul Kurkcu, a senior member of parliament with Turkey's main pro-Kurdish party, the HDP, says the attacks are part of an alarming trend caused by the wave of Turkish nationalism being stoked by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AKP.

"Tayyip Erdogan is calling for total extermination of the PKK, and this is reflected by the AKP media and, if you are a nationalist, the only solution you would believe is to decapitate opposition politicians and the Kurdish activists and this hatred is growing. And this inevitably provokes anger and, in one night, mobs can start lynch attacks across Turkey's western cities in the Kurdish neighborhoods." Kurkcu said.

Kurkcu is a deputy for Izmir, Turkey's third largest city, located in the western part of the country. Izmir, like many cities, has a large Kurdish minority, many of whom fled fighting in the country's war-torn southeast. Izmir is also a traditional bastion of Turkish nationalism and the power base of the secular main opposition Republican People's Party.

In the aftermath of July's failed military coup, President Erdogan, who narrowly escaped with his life, has sought to take advantage of the unprecedented cross-party opposition to the coup, by creating a consensus under the Turkish flag.

"The only strategy is to consolidate this 60 percent Turkish nationalist Sunni alliance," observes political columnist Kadir Gursel of Turkey's Cumhuriyet newspaper. "But this is not a wise step; it will engender evil dynamics of polarization, which will fuel more and more conflict and empower separatist sentiments."

Many Kurds joined their Turkish brethren and poured onto the streets to oppose the July coup; but, Erdogan, in the aftermath of the coup attempt, excluded the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, from cross-party talks, calling him a terrorist supporter. Demirtas' exclusion was followed by the PKK stepping up its military operations against security forces, killing dozens.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has ruled out any political solution to the decades-long conflict, promising, like all his predecessors for the last three decades, to annihilate the PKK.

The cycle of violence is set to escalate further, with Ankara launching a military incursion into Syria, targeting not only Islamic State, but what it claims is the PKK's Syrian affiliate, the YPG. "The PKK will step up its attacks inside," warns Aydin Selcen, a former senior Turkish diplomat who served widely in the region. "In Turkey, things can spin out of control, especially in the Southeast. In that case, we won't be back to the peace process. It will be very hard to predict what will happen."

"As we saw in the Kobani crisis, the politicized Kurdish population in Turkey is very sensitive," says columnist Gursel. In the autumn of 2014, Kurds demonstrated across Turkey in support of Syrian Kurdish fighters defending the town of Kobani, which faced being overrun by Islamic State. To end the unrest, which claimed 31 lives, the government was forced to turn to the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan.

In the face of renewed ethnic tensions, Ankara, in a move widely interpreted as a gesture to its Kurdish minority, allowed Ocalan to be visited by his brother, his first visit in more than a year. Pro-Kurdish deputy Kurkcu says both sides need to act and pull back the country from the precipice.

"Mutual hatred is growing and if things evolve this way, and there is no hope that a common life of different nationalities and ethnicities is possible, in the near future, then the bells of civil war will be ringing. This is a very, very risky situation."

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Fear Grows in Turkey as Crackdown on Gulen Followers Continues

By Dorian Jones 21 September 2016

The Turkish authorities are continuing their crackdown on followers of Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is being blamed for a failed military coup attempt. With tens of thousands of people arrested, opposition parties are starting to voice concern that the crackdown is turning into a witch hunt.

According to the latest official figures, more than 100,000 people have been removed from their state jobs and 60,000 detained or arrested since July's abortive coup. The firings and arrests are primarily aimed at followers of Gulen.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is promising no let up in the crackdown. "No country or region will be safe for members of the Gulen movement, we will hunt them all down," he told reporters Monday.

Experts say Gulen has hundreds of thousands of supporters in Turkey, who have built a wide network of businesses and private schools and supporters across the country. The government has said it is determined to break up this network, which it accuses of not only supporting the coup attempt, but running a parallel state that favors its supporters and crushes opponents.

Gulen, who lives in the United State, denies all the allegations.

Erdogan has said that Turkish citizens have a duty to report friends or family they suspect of being Gulen followers. A pro-government TV station has set up a telephone line for people to report their suspicions.

In an opinion poll conducted via social media last month, 90 percent of the respondents said they backed the crackdown on Gulen and his followers. That popular consensus extends into politics, with the main opposition CHP party in the forefront of supporting a crackdown on Gulen followers, even claiming it should have been done much earlier.

Popular opinion shifting

But cracks in the political consensus are appearing, with questions over its scale and motivation growing.

"You'll break the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people if you carry out these prosecutions with the feeling of revenge and hatred," warned CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

The CHP claims it has received complaints from more than 30,000 people about the ongoing purge. The scale of the complaints has led to the party set up a telephone hot line and email desk.

The crackdown is being carried out under emergency rule, which has suspended most of the legal checks on the authorities' actions.

"This is a witch hunt," said Kadri Gursel, a political columnist for Turkey's Cumhuriyet newspaper. He believes the government has lost control.

"To please Erdogan, people do compete against each other to hunt more Gulenists, because this purge, this cleansing, is not done according to institutional rules, and due process does not exist," he said. "There are no institutions left in Turkey. There is only fear."

Fear has spilled over into violence. Turkish media reported last week that a police officer shot dead a local official of the ruling AKP, after the official accused the police officer of being a Gulen sympathizer during an argument over who was behind the July coup attempt.

Meanwhile, government ministers have reportedly expressed concern that the crackdown is being used to settle personal scores.

Presidential adviser Ayse Sozen Usluer acknowledged such concerns, but said the country is facing exceptional dangers and will "soon" return to "normal."

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has announced an appeals process, through which people can challenge dismissals and wrongful prosecutions. But how independent that process will be remains unclear. Observers point out a key test of the government's intentions will be whether it honors its commitment not to extend emergency, rule which comes up for renewal next month.

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Alan Burkitt-Gray speaks to Don MacNeil, chief operating officer of GTT, about its company restructuring after coming out of Chapter 11 and its strategic roadmap for the next 12 months.
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Danville City Council updated its ordinance allowing food trailers to operate in downtown parking spots.

The change grants operators of food trailers the same privileges as those of food trucks.

The city had recently amended its ordinance to allow food trucks to operate on a public street as long as they stay within a parking space.

There was a discrepancy about whether a food trailer could operate downtown. Councilmen wanted to clarify the ordinance to allow a trailer pulled by a truck.

A food trailer operator had expressed interest in setting up in a private parking lot zoned for business. City staff wanted to know if he wanted to also occasionally operate in a parking spot downtown.

The city has allowed food trailers to operate in private lots in commercial areas as long as they were properly zoned.

They will still have to get a business license  like any other business  under the change.

During communications from visitors, Danville residents expressed concerns about young people under 18 violating the citys mandated curfew, which is 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday nights, and midnight to 6 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights.

 I am a parent and I am concerned, said Jessica Griffith, part of a group of citizens called The Village.

When young people are outside past the curfew, that can spell trouble, she said.

 An idle mind is the devils workshop, Griffith said. Staying out late leads to sleep deprivation while in school and causes concerns for senior citizens in the neighborhood when they see young people in groups, she said.

Vastish Cooper said some of the children are under 10 and have almost gotten hit by cars. Cooper and Griffith said they wanted to be a part of the solution to the problem.

 It does take a village to raise our children, Griffith said.

During communications from council members near the end of the meeting, Councilman Larry Campbell Jr. and Vice Mayor Alonzo Jones expressed concerns about the curfew violations. Campbell said the city needs to look at the issue closely.

In other matters, council members approved an ordinance to provide for a $25,000 matching grant to be received from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

The VDHR approved Danvilles application for $25,000 matching grant to make repairs at 221 Jefferson Ave. in the Old West End Historic District. The grant money and another $25,000 from the citys Blight CIP Project program will be used for the project.

City council also:

 Adopted an ordinance accepting a $50,000 grant from the Virginia Housing Development Authority to conduct further historical and structural investigations into two remaining properties at the Five Forks Commercial Corner in the Old West End Historic District;

 Held first readings on whether to adopt ordinances accepting $27,524 in Highway Safety grants to pay overtime for police officers to enforce speeding ordinances, safety belt and child safety seat laws and DUI license checkpoints, and to buy field breath testing units;

 Held a first reading to consider a project that would receive $21,605 from the U.S. Department of Justice 2016 Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program. It would provide equipment and software to allow for fingerprinting and photographing of juveniles in the court system.

 Held a first reading on whether to approve a $25,000 grant from the Danville Regional Foundation for Danville Parks and Recreation to focus on and plan open spaces in the River District.

 Approved a change to city code to require members of local governing bodies to file a statement of economic interest bi-annually  or every two years  instead of annually. The change reflects changes at the state level.

Crane reports for the Danville Register & Bee.
A Pelham, North Carolina, man has been charged after a domestic dispute left a woman shot in the foot.

Samuel John Ziccardi, 49, of 107 Woodwinds Drive, Pelham, was charged on Tuesday with one count of felony assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury, one count of misdemeanor assault on a female, one count felony kidnapping, three counts of felony possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and one count felony possession of marijuana.

The warrants were a result of a domestic dispute that occurred on [Friday] Sept. 16, according to a news release from the Caswell County Sheriffs Office.

Ziccardi is being held in the Caswell County Detention Facility on a $100,000 bond. His next scheduled court appearance is Sept. 28 in Caswell County District Court.
GOP congressional candidate Tom Garrett called for opponent Jane Dittmar to retract a television ad Tuesday, after Garrett said it falsely accused him of voting for uranium mining in the Virginia General Assembly.

However, Dittmars campaign said the ad is accurate, citing environmentalist opposition to the 2013 legislation.

Democrat Dittmar and Republican Garrett are running to replace retiring congressman Robert Hurt, a Republican who has represented the 5 th District since 2010.

 Citizens in Virginia Five espouse honesty and integrity, Garrett said in a news release. My opponents ad has neither. I have never voted for uranium mining in Virginia, ever.

Garrett was responding to a 30-second Dittmar TV spot entitled Doing on her campaigns YouTube page. In the ad, Dittmar says Garrett accepted $6,000 in campaign contributions from Dominion Power, and then voted for bills in favor of fracking, uranium mining and ground water drilling.

 Career politician Tom Garrett took Dominion Powers money, then protected their bottom line  putting our communities and our water at risk with his votes, Ditmarr says in the TV spot.

The ad cites House Bill 1790 as the basis for the uranium mining support. The bill  which had bipartisan support in 2013  establishes a Virginia Nuclear Consortium Committee. The legislation tasks the committee with making the Commonwealth a leader in nuclear energy and serving as an interdisciplinary study and research resource for Virginia on nuclear issues.

In a response, Dittmar campaign manager Tom Vandever said environmental groups were opposed to the 2013 bill because it could open the door to uranium mining in Virginia. He cited February 2013 articles in The Virginian-Pilot, where groups like the Sierra Club and the Keep the Ban Coalition said the legislation would allow Virginia to study the Coles Hill site in Pittsylvania County and could lead to a recommendation of reversing the uranium mining ban.

 For him to claim he did nothing about promoting uranium mining is either disingenuous or totally clueless, Vandever said.

However, Garrett said the bill had nothing to do with uranium mining. He said it was a job-creating measure responsible for helping companies like Babcock & Wilcox and Areva bring jobs to the district.

 Voting records are fair game when you run for public office, Garrett said. However, it is a slap in the face to the voters to spend tens of thousands of dollars on deceitful and misleading negative ads.

This year, Virginia Uranium filed lawsuits against the state government in both federal and state court, after Gov. Terry McAuliffe said he would veto any legislative efforts to reverse the ban on uranium mining. A federal judge ruled against the company, and a circuit court judge in Wise County has yet to rule on the issue. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Oct. 7 in Wise County.

Garrett received $1,000 campaign contributions from Virginia Uranium  one in 2011 and another in 2012  according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

Metcalfe reports for the Danville Register & Bee.
Goldman Sachs participated in a private sector roundtable during the Leaders Summit on Refugees held during the United Nations General Assembly on September 20 in New York. Dina Habib Powell, head of Goldman Sachs Impact Investing business and president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, represented the firm at the forum that was hosted by President Barack Obama and convened leaders of member states that are making new commitments to increase humanitarian funding, admit additional refugees and increase refugees access to education and lawful work.

The summit highlighted that the world is facing the largest mass displacement on record since World War II, and that while governments can and must do more to support refugees, solutions to the challenges that refugees face will require contributions from all sectors of society.

Through Goldman Sachs Gives, the firms donor-advised fund, Goldman Sachs announced today that the firm is increasing its overall commitment to $7.5 million to support those displaced and vulnerable from the ongoing refugee crisis as a result of the Syrian conflict.

We are proud of the more than 80 of our firm's partners who made grant recommendations through Goldman Sachs Gives totaling $7.5 million to support those displaced and vulnerable from the ongoing crisis, said Dina Powell, head of Goldman Sachs' Impact Investing business and president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation. "Through this support, we've been able to partner alongside the White House, UK government, UNHCR, and other key players, to give refugees both the humanitarian aid they need, as well as support as they integrate into new communities and the workforce.

Through public-private efforts between Goldman Sachs and the UNHCR, as well as nonprofit organizations including Concern Worldwide, Relief International and German Red Cross, the firms response has focused on the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean region, stabilization in and around refugee camps, and the resettlement of 20,000 Syrian refugees in the United Kingdom. Through Goldman Sachs Gives grants, the firm also provided educational support for 26,000 children in the two main refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey, and provided 3,000 winterization kits to refugees in and around Kobani, Syria.

Looking ahead, Goldman Sachs will continue to work in conjunction with leading nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations to deliver support at various points in refugees lives. Focus areas will include delivering humanitarian aid, including food, shelter, urgent medical care and trauma support; providing children with access to consistent education and safe learning facilities; and supporting the integration of refugees in host countries such as in the UK through access to English language resources and employment opportunities.

In addition, Goldman Sachs will create a new online program that will teach entrepreneurial and business skills to prepare refugees to enter the workforce. This initiative builds on the firms 10,000 Women program, which provides women entrepreneurs around the world with a business and management education, mentoring and networking, and access to capital.

This year, Goldman Sachs colleagues also led eight Community TeamWorks projects focused on refugees in conjunction with the International Rescue Committee in New York, Irving and Salt Lake City. Volunteers hosted job readiness and financial literacy workshops supporting refugees from several countries. Colleagues in Frankfurt also helped staff a refugee registration center managed by the German Red Cross.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA / TheNewswire / September 21, 2016 / MGX Minerals Inc. ("MGX" or the "Company") (CSE: XMG / FKT: 1MG) announces the expiry of its previously announced rights offering. All unexercised rights expired at 2:00 p.m. (Vancouver time) on September 16, 2016 (the "Expiry Time") and are void and of no value. Details of the rights offering are set out in the rights offering notice dated July 28, 2016, and the rights offering circular dated July 28, 2016, which are available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.

Under the rights offering, 27,038,068 rights were exercised prior to the Expiry Time under the basic stand-by privilege entitling the holders thereof to acquire an aggregate of 6,759,516 units of the Company ("Units"), and 3,303,212 Units were subscribed for by rights holders under the additional subscription privilege, for a price of $0.18 per Unit and for gross proceeds to the Company of $1,811,291. Each Unit consists of one common share and one-half of one purchase warrant, with each whole warrant exercisable into one common share at a price of $0.20 per share for a period of 24 months from the issuance date of the Units.

In addition, in accordance with the terms of the rights offering and the soliciting dealer agreement with Mackie Research Capital Corporation ("MRCC"), MRCC will receive the balance of its corporate finance fee of $8,750 plus reasonable taxes and disbursements and a soliciting dealer's fee of 8% of the aggregate gross proceeds raised under the rights offering totaling $144,903. MRCC will also be issued an option entitling it to acquire 1,422,939 Units at an exercise price of $0.18 per Unit for a period of 24 months following the closing date.

Closing of the rights offering is expected to be completed at 10:00 a.m. (Vancouver time) on September 21, 2016. After issue of the Units under the rights offering, the Company will have 51,815,745 common shares issued and outstanding. The net proceeds of the offering available to the Company will be $1,639,068, which will be allocated to the development of the Company's lithium properties and Driftwood Creek property and for general working capital purposes.

About MGX Minerals

MGX Minerals (CSE: XMG) is a diversified Canadian mining company engaged in the development of large-scale industrial mineral portfolios in western Canada that offer near-term production potential, minimal barriers to entry and low initial capital expenditures. The Company operates lithium, magnesium and silicon projects throughout British Columbia and Alberta. MGX recently released a maiden National Instrument (N.I. 43-101) compliant mineral resource estimate for its Driftwood Creek magnesium project, which outlined 8 million tonnes grading 43.31% magnesium oxide. In January the Company received a 20-year Mining Lease for Driftwood Creek. Additionally, the Company recently acquired the advanced-stage Sturgeon Lake lithium brine project in west-central Alberta, increasing the Company's lithium brine land position to over 376,000 hectares throughout the Province. For further information, please visit the Company's website atwww.mgxminerals.com.

Contact Information

Jared Lazerson

Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: 1.604.681.7735

Email: jared@mgxminerals.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively "forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is typically identified by words such as: "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "potentially" and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by the Company is not a guarantee of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking information as a result of various factors. The reader is referred to the Company's public filings for a more complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effects which may be accessed through the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
Believe it or not this Israel funding is one of the few things we might call bi-partisan. Obama has leaned Right on this one and even though he probably can't tolerate Bibi, he will stand behind the GOP initiative. Apparently the dollars will be spent on US military equipment and in essence a form of economic stimulation/subsidy. It cements our relationship with Israel.....don't ask me why we care, but we do. It certainly pleases the pro-Israel lobby/voters. And military assistance in the form of money can be seen as an alternative to a military base in that the US can rely on Israel to act as one if needed without a base actually needed in Israel.

Having said all that....I cannot forgive Bibi's disrespect for our president and I don't trust him. The GOP and the senator from Israel can't be trusted. They are still ranting about the Iran deal and it probably IRKS the heck out of them that 1) It happened--another atta boy for Barack and 2) that so far the Iran deal seems to be working.

But there's a certain quirkiness to our relationship with Israel. Israel has universal health care, and Israeli children's dental care is also paid for with public money. Additionally, they provide government sponsored daycare centers.

If these things were proposed in the US, many people, particularly Republicans (who emphatically support sending aid to Israel), would object that we cannot afford them. If Israel can afford them, why do they need us to give them money? We're essentially helping pay for universal health care in Israel, but not providing it in our own country.

Just another one of life's mysteries.
TSX: TML

TORONTO, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ - Treasury Metals Inc. is pleased to provide an exploration program update on the Goliath Gold Project in Northwestern Ontario and to announce the appointment of Mr. Darryl Boyd as Director of Regulatory and Community Affairs.

The Company has added a second drill rig that will assist in shortening the schedule for the infill drilling of deeper sections of the current underground "Inferred" resource area both in the "Main Zone" central shoot and with supplementary targets located within the western shoots of the main resource within the Main and C Zones (please see press release dated August 18, 2016 for further details). The company is currently awaiting drill assay results from the initial holes and will be releasing these results in due course.

A geological mapping and sampling program has also commenced in an area directly adjacent to and following the easterly extension of the main resource area for another 1.6 kilometres. Condemnation mapping is also underway in areas where the tailings pond and other potential mine infrastructure are being considered. Once the field exploration program is completed, Treasury plans to drill test all significant surface and near surface resource targets as part of a late fall or winter drill program.

In addition, the Company is also pleased to announce Darryl Boyd has been appointed as Director of Regulatory and Community Affairs. Mr. Boyd brings 20 years of mining experience in the Ontario region, with a track record of achieving operating permit approvals for several Ontario-based companies including North American Palladium Ltd., Rubicon Minerals Corp., FNX Mining Company Inc. and Lake Shore Gold Corp. He has led the permitting process for project start-ups from preliminary exploration through to advanced exploration and commercial production (underground and open pit). Mr. Boyd is a graduate of the University of Guelph with a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science.

Norm Bush, Vice President Goliath Gold Project, stated: "We are extremely pleased to have Darryl join Treasury Metals' management team. Darryl's extensive knowledge and experience with mine permitting processes in Ontario are perfectly suited to assist Treasury through the completion of its mine permitting activities and subsequent mine development."

To view further details about the Goliath Gold Project, please visit the Company's website at www.treasurymetals.com.

Technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Mark Wheeler, P. Eng., Director of Projects regarding Mine Permitting and Technical content and Paul Dunbar, Exploration Manager, regarding exploration content who are Qualified Persons for the Goliath Gold Project under the definitions established by National Instrument 43-101.

Forward-looking Statements

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed to be "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that management of the Company expect, are forward-looking statements. Actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Treasury Metals disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save and except as may be required by applicable securities laws.

SOURCE Treasury Metals Inc.
September 21, 2016 / TheNewswire / Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Ron Hieber is a geology graduate of Rhodes University, South Africa, with high school education having been completed in Zimbabwe, in 1968. He began his career with Anglo American Platinum, on the company's Platinum mines in Rustenburg, followed by service on the mines in other Bushveld Complex areas, becoming Chief Geologist at Rustenburg in 1981. In 1986 he was appointed to the corporate office as head of all Anglo Platinum's mining geology and exploration functions, which remained part of his responsibilities until he retired from Anglo Platinum at 58, in 2009. During his service with Anglo, Ron was made a Divisional Director and the Group's Survey, Ventilation, Rock Engineering and Strategic Planning functions were added to his Geological responsibilities. From the time of his appointment at Corporate, he contributed significantly to the accumulation, retention and management of Anglo Platinum's mineral rights portfolio, on the Bushveld Complex and Great Dyke, whilst also directing worldwide PGM Exploration Programmes for Anglo Platinum, in Australia, China, Canada, Russia and Brazil. This included heading-up the River Valley Option/Joint Venture for Anglo Platinum, from Discovery, in 2000, with Pacific North West Capital.

At the time he retired, he was a Director of several Anglo Platinum subsidiaries, including Unki Platinum Ltd. (Zimbabwe) and Rustenburg Platinum Mines Ltd. From 2009, Ron worked as Executive Director: Business Development for Kameni Ltd., which had PGM interests, in the Eastern Bushveld and Zimbabwe. After selling its projects, Kameni closed and Mr. Hieber now runs his own company, with interests in South African and Zimbabwean Gold projects.

About PFN's Platinum Group Metals Division

River Valley is Canada's Largest Undeveloped Primary PGM Deposit.

Achievements to date and Future Plans for River Valley are outlined below as follows:

1.PFN currently has 100% ownership in the River Valley Project, subject to a 3% NSR, with Options to Buy Down 2.Completed Exploration and Development Programs, on the River Valley Property:

Include more than 600 holes drilled, since year 2000, and several Mineral Resource Estimates and Metallurgical Studies

3.Results for the current (2012) Mineral Resource Estimate are below 4.2015 Drill Program confirms New High Grade T2 Discovery 5.Exploration and Development Plans outlined for 2016 6.Ongoing Strategic Partner Search for River Valley Project 7.Results for the most recent Mineral Resource Estimate are summarized below: -Prepared by Tetra Tech (Wardrop) -High Confidence: Measured plus Indicated = 72% of total -Reported on PdEq basis: Pd=40% & Pt=20% of the Payable Metals -Pd to Pt ratio = 2.5:1; Cu to Ni ratio = 3:1 -High Grade Potential: particularly in the north part of the River Valley Deposit -Resources under Evaluation for Development Potential, as Open Pit Mining Operation

CX

Click Image To View Full Size



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8.Results for the 2015 Discovery Drill Program on the T2 Target: -Drill hole intercepts much higher than the average grade, of current Mineral Resource Estimate -Possible New Mineralized Zone at the north end of the River Valley Deposit -Show potential to take the River Valley PGM Project in a New Direction -Additional Drilling is slated for mid-October, 2016



Click Image To View Full Size

9.Exploration and Development Plans for 2016

-Mineral Prospecting and Geological Mapping on surface: In Progress -Drill Programs targeted to add more higher grade: Drilling Slated for Fall 2016 -Geological Interpretation and 2D/3D Modelling of all Drill and Surface Results -Ongoing Strategic Partner Search for River Valley



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 1: Geological map showing the location of the PGM Exploration Property, acquired from Mustang Minerals Corp. The acquired property is south and adjacent to PFN's Mining Leases, covering the River Valley PGM Project. The acquisition increases the strike length of the PGM deposit, to 16 km, 64 km2, or 16,000 acres, on PFN property.

About PFN's Lithium Division

The Company's new Lithium Division will focus on the Discovery, Acquisition, Exploration and Development of Lithium Projects in Canada. In the United States, the Company will use its wholly owned U.S.A subsidiary, to Acquire and Develop Projects in Active Mining Camps in Nevada, Arizona and California.

Management believes that these New Age Metals, Lithium, PGMs and Rare Earths, have robust macro trends with Surging Demands and Limited Supply. Going forward, this New Division will Explore for the minerals needed to fuel the demand for Energy Storage and other core 21st Century Technologies.

The Company has a growing portfolio of Lithium Projects. The Clayton Valley Forks Li Project in Nevada is a recent Lithium Brine Project Acquired by the Company (PFN News Releases April 25th, 2016, May 11th, 2016 and June 16th, 2016). The Company also has Hard Rock Lithium projects in Canada (PFN News Releases April 21st, 2016, May 24th, 2016), July 5th, 2016 and July 21st, 2016) located in the Winnipeg River Pegmatite Field of SE Manitoba.

Lithium and Platinum Group Metal Prices have Improved Dramatically in recent months. Lithium Supplies remain in deficit, relative to their demand. Both Metals Groups are used for the expanding worldwide automobile industry (conventional and electric). In the case of PGMs, demand is increasing for Autocatalysts, a key component for reducing toxic emissions for automotive, gasoline and diesel engines. Regarding Lithium, there is an ever-increasing demand for batteries in cellphones, laptops, electric cars, solar storage, wireless charging and renewable energy products.

An aggressive 2016/17 Acquisition and Exploration Program is underway with the objective to have several projects at the drill ready stage, by early 2017.



Click Image To View Full Size

PFN's 5 New Lithium Projects in Manitoba, Surrounding Tanco Mine



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 1: Company claim blocks in the Clayton Valley area of Nevada

(Figure 1 is a Company-made composite and not intended for redistribution. The Company accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of these claim blocks, other than the claim block associated with the Clayton Valley Forks Li Project)

Clayton Valley is located in Esmeralda County, Nevada, host to the Albemarle Corporation's Silver Peak Lithium Mine and Brine processing operations. The mine has been in operation since 1967 and remains the only Brine based Lithium Producer in North America. The new project acquisition in Nevada provides the Company a project, in an area that is well known for its Lithium Carbonate production. Clayton Valley is a centralized location in Nevada, with highway access, power infrastructure, water and local labour.

The company's new Lithium Brine Project will be approximately 3.5 hours away from Tesla's Gigafactory, which has a planned annual Lithium-ion battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours per year, by 2020. The CV West Li project is located approximately 3 hours north of the Faraday Electric Car Factory to be operated in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clayton Valley is one of the few locations globally known to contain commercial-grade Lithium-Enriched Brines.

QUALIFIED PERSON

The contents contained herein that relates to Exploration Results or Mineral Resources is based on information compiled, reviewed or prepared by Dr. Bill Stone, Principal Consulting Geoscientist for Pacific Northwest Capital. Dr. Stone is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical content.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

"Harry Barr"

Harry Barr

Chairman and CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements: This release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements may differ materially from actual future events or results and are based on current expectations or beliefs. For this purpose, statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements include statements in which the Company uses words such as "continue", "efforts", "expect", "believe", "anticipate", "confident", "intend", "strategy", "plan", "will", "estimate", "project", "goal", "target", "prospects", "optimistic" or similar expressions. These statements by their nature involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially depending on a variety of important factors, including, among others, the Company's ability and continuation of efforts to timely and completely make available adequate current public information, additional or different regulatory and legal requirements and restrictions that may be imposed, and other factors as may be discussed in the documents filed by the Company on SEDAR (www.sedar.com), including the most recent reports that identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake any obligation to review or confirm analysts' expectations or estimates or to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
Vancouver, British Columbia / TheNewswire / September 21st,, 2016. Candente Gold Corp. (TSXV:CDG) ("Company") is pleased to announce that Sun River Gold ("SRG"), has delivered test results and advised the Company that it has identified a treatment process which it believes could be the basis for a gold and silver recovery operation on the Company's Mexico Mine tailings project in El Oro, Mexico (the "Tailings Project").

In March 2016, the Company and Sun River Gold Corp. a private Nevada corporation, entered into an agreement (the "Agreement") granting SRG the right and option to earn a 51% interest in the Tailings, upon developing and demonstrating, at its own cost, an economically viable process for treatment of the Mexico Mine tailings which achieves an internal rate of return that meets the Company's criteria for development and making certain required payments , subject to receipt of regulatory approval (See News Release #053 dated March 8th, 2016).

SRG has made, and continues to make, all payments required as per the Agreement and has delivered to the Company certain test results and reports.

Under the Agreement, all technical and economic studies to be provided by SRG to the Company are to comply with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") requirements and are to be at a level suitable for use in a Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") if required by either party to raise capital.

The Company is evaluating the test results and other information reported by SRG and may engage third parties, together with SRG, to determine if results to date comply with NI 43-101 and are at a level suitable for use in a PEA or if more test work is still required.

The Company will provide a further update once it has completed the review of SRG's test work and findings to date.

About Candente Gold

Candente Gold's flagship asset is El Oro, a district scale gold project encompassing a well known prolific high grade gold dominant silver epithermal vein system in Mexico. The project covers 20 veins with past production and more than 57 veins in total, from which approximately 6.4 million ounces of gold and 74 million ounces of silver were reported to have been produced from just two of these veins (Ref. Mexico Geological Service Bulletin No. 37, Mining of the El Oro and Tlapujahua Districts. 1920, T. Flores)

Candente Gold holds the Mexico Mine Tailings which contain an Inferred Resource* of 1,267,400 Tonnes grading 2.94 Au g/t, 75.12 Ag g/t containing 119,900 ounces of gold and 3,061,200 ounces of silver.

*Note: Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. All figures have been rounded to reflect the accuracy of the estimate. For more information see "National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report on the Inferred Mineral Resource Estimate of the Mexico Mine Tailings" prepared by Nadia Caira, P.Geo. and Allan Reeves, P.Geo., dated August 25, 2014 with an effective date of July 8, 2014 (the "Technical Report") available at www.sedar.com.

Joanne C. Freeze, P.Geo., Director and CEO and Sean I. Waller, P.Eng. and Vice President are Qualified Persons as defined by National Instrument 43-101 for the project discussed above. Ms. Freeze and Mr. Waller have reviewed and approved the contents of this release.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-looking Information

This news release may contain forward-looking information (as such term is defined under Canadian securities laws) including but not limited to the mineral resource estimate for the Mexico Mine Tailings, the potential for discovery in the El Oro district and other statements that are not historical facts. While such forward-looking information is expressed by Candente Gold in good faith and believed by Candente Gold to have a reasonable basis, they address future events and conditions and are therefore subject to inherent risks and uncertainties including those set out in Candente Gold's MD&A. Factors that cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking information include, without limitation, gold prices, results of exploration and development activities, regulatory changes, defects in title, availability of materials and equipment, timeliness of government approvals, potential environmental issues, availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. Candente Gold expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

On behalf of the Board of Candente Gold Corp.

"Joanne Freeze" P.Geo.

President & CEO

For further information please contact:

Walter Spagnuolo

Manager, Investor Relations

mobile: +1 (604) 306-8477

local: + 1 (604) 689-1957 ext 3

toll free: 1 (877) 689-1964 ext 3

info@candentegold.com

NR 059

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
Vancouver, BC / TheNewswire / September 21, 2016 - Durango Resources Inc. (TSX.V-DGO), (the "Company" or "Durango") announces that, further to its news release of September 20, 2016, Durango has completed a detailed geological interpretation and exploration report on its highly prospective, 100%-owned NMX East property in northern Quebec.

Results from the field reconnaissance survey included the discovery of three distinct lithium-bearing intrusions, which have been characterized as LCT (lithium-cesium-tantalum) pegmatites, and the generation of clear drilling targets.

Summary of Assays

Typical LCT (lithium-cesium-tantalum) pegmatites are marked by prominent accumulation of Li, Cs and Ta (sometimes with Rb and other elements), which are exhibited to an anomalous degree in the pegmatite assays returned from the NMX East property.

Out of a total of 79 samples taken at NMX East, 47 samples were taken from pegmatite outcrops. Out of this group of pegmatite samples: 11 samples returned over 129 ppm Li2O, up to 689 ppm Li2O; 5 samples returned over 50.3 ppm Cs, up to 83.6 ppm Cs; 22 samples returned over 481 ppm Rb, up to 2140 ppm Rb; and 11 samples returned over 27ppm Ta, up to 77.1 ppm Ta. Summary and ranges of anomalous results are summarized in Table 1. Assays are shown against pegmatite outcrops in Figure 1.

Table 1: Pegmatite Grab Sampling Highlights

Sample Easting Northing Li2O (ppm) Cs (ppm) Ta (ppm) Rb (ppm) 1008111 443,957 5,725,198 669 24.3 0.8 276 1008119 443,676 5,724,973 323 27.7 40.7 846 1008116 443,753 5,724,983 301 33.5 12.6 1405 1008114 443,771 5,725,022 280 16.4 51.2 738 1008115 443,764 5,725,014 194 24.2 77.1 1015 1008158 444,450 5,717,722 194 50.3 34.5 530 1008112 443,802 5,725,041 172 14.7 30.3 679 1008152 442,962 5,717,112 151 14.1 14.5 52.4 1008118 443,700 5,724,988 86 83.6 4.7 2140 1008175 444,391 5,727,079 86 29.8 47.4 1165 1008113 443,790 5,725,031 65 77.4 1.6 1895 1008122 443,742 5,724,940 65 53.1 3.7 1925

* All coordinates are NAD83 UTM Zone 18N

Cautionary statement: Readers are cautioned that grab samples are selective by nature and are not necessarily representative of mineralization hosted on the property.



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 1: Pegmatite sample map illustrating Li2O Results.

Larger image available at: http://www.durangoresourcesinc.com/projects/nmx-east-quebec/

Interpretation of Lithium, Cesium, Tantalum, and Rubidium Anomalies

Results from the exploration program at NMX East clearly indicate the presence of three distinct pegmatite intrusions which exhibit significant lithium, cesium, tantalum, and rubidium anomalies. One intrusion occurs on the property's East Block, while two intrusions occur on the South Block.

The Nemiscau Region exhibits a markedly limited amount of bedrock exposure, which produces a very challenging environment for surface sampling. On average, there is approximately less than 5% exposure on the NMX East property and a large portion of the surrounding region. Evidence suggests that the majority of pegmatite bodies in the Nemiscau Region are obscured beneath the glacial diamict which blankets the region. Nemaska Lithium Inc.'s recent drilling results also report mineralized intercepts as deep as 500 metres below surface (2). As such, Durango's geological team suspects the three viable lithium-bearing LCT pegmatites, which occur at surface on Durango's NMX East property, may represent smaller exposures of potentially much larger intrusions which may continue both at depth, laterally, and along strike.

Furthermore, most LCT pegmatites exhibit concentric zonation, particularly of spodumene (Li), pollucite (Ce), columbite-tantalite (Ta), and beryl (Be) mineralization. This mineralization is typically concentrated in the core margin to core zone of the pegmatite intrusion, with dilute quantities in the intermediate zone. This zonation is illustrated in Figure 2.



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 2: Zonation in an idealized LCT (lithium-cesium-tantalum) pegmatite intrusion. (USGS Open File Report 2013-1008)

Larger image available at: http://www.durangoresourcesinc.com/projects/nmx-east-quebec/

Durango's geological team therefore interprets these moderate lithium, cesium, tantalum, and strong rubidium anomalies at surface to be a potential indication of significant spodumene mineralization at depth. The next steps at NMX East will include extensive stripping and/or drilling of these mapped pegmatite intrusions in order to determine the real nature and extent of the intrusive bodies.

Marcy Kiesman, CEO of Durango, comments, "The results from this campaign indicate the existence of three newly-discovered LCT pegmatite intrusions on the NMX East property and serve as an excellent first step in the progression of the project. Lithium-bearing pegmatites are a complex deposit type, considering the zonation and nature of mineralization within the intrusions and the challenging region in which they choose to manifest. Durango is exceptionally pleased to have discovered three distinct LCT pegmatite intrusions on the property and plans to explore these targets further in the coming exploration season, by means of stripping and drilling."

All samples were grab samples and were analyzed by ALS Minerals, Val-d'Or (Quebec). The analytical methods used correspond to ALS codes ME-MS81 and Be-ICP81.

The technical contents of this news release were approved by Mr. Case Lewis, P.Geo., a consultant to the Company and a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. The NMX East Property has not been the subject of an NI 43-101 report.

References

(1)Bradley, D., McCauley, A. (2013). A preliminary deposit model for Lithium-Cesium-Tantalum (LCT) Pegmatites. USGS Open File Report 2013-1008. (2)Nemaska Lithium (TSE: NMX) news release, September 6, 2016.

About Durango

Durango is a natural resources company engaged in the acquisition and exploration of mineral properties. The Company has a 100% interest in the Mayner's Fortune and Smith Island limestone properties in northwest British Columbia, the Decouverte and Trove gold properties in the Abitibi Region of Quebec, and certain lithium properties near the Whabouchi project, the Buckshot graphite property near the Miller Mine in Quebec, the Dianna Lake silver project in northern Saskatchewan, the Whitney Northwest property near the Lake Shore Gold and Goldcorp joint venture in Ontario, as well as three sets of claims in the Labrador nickel corridor.

For further information on Durango, please refer to its SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com.

Marcy Kiesman, Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: 604.428.2900 or 604.339.2243

Facsimile: 888.266.3983

Email: durangoresourcesinc@gmail.com

Website: www.durangoresourcesinc.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This document may contain or refer to forward-looking information based on current expectations, including commencement and completion of future exploration or project development programs and the impact on the Company of these events. Forward-looking information is subject to significant risks and uncertainties, as actual results may differ materially from forecasted results. Forward-looking information is provided as of the date hereof and we assume no responsibility to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. For a detailed list of risks and uncertainties relating to Durango, please refer to the Company's prospectus filed on its SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
A 100% interest in terrain showing the best copper and gold prospects in Jamaica as defined by exploration work to date;

The substantial benefit of $14M of exploration work by OZ Minerals over the last 3 years.

An excellent mix of advanced targets with promising drill intersections to follow up;



Over 30 untested blue sky targets



Large geophysical, geological and geochemical databases

Under the agreement, Carube will acquire:The newly combined properties contain:

Ottawa, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 21, 2016) - Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV: CUC), Mr. Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper announces that the company has finalized a heads of agreement (HOA) with OZ Minerals Ltd. to acquire 100% of OZ Minerals' holdings in Jamaica, which will include:

OZ Minerals' 70% interest in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture licenses;

OZ Minerals' 100% interest in five licences covering 276km2 acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014;

For clarification, Carube Copper will retain its 100% interest in the Above Rocks Project.

Under terms of the HOA, OZ Minerals will transfer 100% of its interests in the properties described to Carube Copper in return for cash payments totalling $14 million due after the commencement of commercial production together with a 2% Net Smelter Return Royalty. All matters will be concluded via a final all inclusive definitive agreement to be signed within 60 days. At that point Carube Copper will have 100% interest in eleven licences covering over 535km2 (subject to underlying royalties) covering the best copper-gold prospects identified to date in Jamaica by historic work and the recent exploration work by Carube and OZ Minerals.

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper comments: "The acquisition OZ Minerals' large land package, together with our own licences gives Carube Copper control of over 500 square kilometres of the most prospective ground in Jamaica based on historic showings, the work completed and reported in 1993 by the Canadian International Development Agency ('CIDA') and the recent work by Carube and OZ Minerals. We are excited to be in a position to commit to the exploration and development of all assets. By building on the work completed by OZ Minerals and Carube Copper and with our new strategic flexibility, we will be able to prioritize organic growth or potential joint venture funding on a project by project basis."

Bellas Gate

Previously announced results at the Bellas Gate Joint venture included drill intercepts from the Connors and Provost Prospects.

At Connors

Hole DDH-CON-14-005 intersected 294m of 0.56% CuEq (0.41%Cu, 0.27 g/t Au); including 96m of 1.00% CuEq, (0.67%Cu, 0.58 g/t Au)

Hole DDH-CON-14-003 intersected 297m of 0.53% CuEq, (0.40%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au) including 55m of 1.00% CuEq (0.67%Cu, 0.59 g/t Au)

At Provost

Hole PVT-16-002 intersected 339m of 0.34% CuEq (0.28%Cu, 0.12 g/t Au), including 10m of 1.79% CuEq (1.28%Cu, 0.90 g/t Au)

Hole PVT-16-001 intersected 82m of 0.46% CuEq (0.37%Cu, 0.16 g/t Au), including 29m of 0.63% CuEq (0.49%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au)

The intervals do not necessarily indicate true width of mineralization, as its geometry is not known. Copper equivalents are calculated using a US $3.00/lb. copper and a US$1200 per ounce gold price assuming unlimited internal dilution and 100% recovery of both metals.

The Provost Prospect will be one of several high-priority areas where copper-gold porphyry mineralization has been identified to be followed up with additional drilling.

During OZ Minerals' tenure at the Bellas Gate JV over 14,000 metres of drilling was completed on 11 of the more than 20 prospects on the property. High-resolution airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys were completed over the entire property and 46 line kilometres of Induced Polarization (IP) surveying was completed. Geological mapping was completed on the previously identified prospects and over 400 rock samples and 4000 soil samples were collected and analysed. All data generated during the Bellas Gate and Above Rocks joint ventures will be handed over to Carube Copper by OZ Minerals.

Five Additional Licences

The five additional licences acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014 are strategically located to cover known copper and gold prospects and anomalous stream sediment sample drainage basins within the Cretaceous aged inliers in the interior of Jamaica. The Shirley Castle licence is located within the Blue Mountain Inlier, The Above Rocks, Windsor Castle and Berkshire Hall licences are located in close proximity to Carube Copper's Above Rocks project and the Arthur's Seat licence is located between the Bellas Gate and Main Ridge projects in the Central Inlier. All were covered by detailed airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys. The company is currently reviewing the recent geophysics and historic work in order to prioritize exploration targets.

Above Rocks

Carube Copper will retain 100% interest in the Above Rocks Joint Venture which it signed with OZ Minerals in February 2016. The property has been covered by detailed magnetic and radiometric surveys. Follow-up work carried out by OZ Minerals between February and August 2016 includes 200 soil samples, 85 rock samples, 92m of trenching and over 400 metres of drilling in 3 holes.

Heads of Agreement

Under the terms of the HOA:

To regain the 70% interest that OZ Minerals had earned in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $8,500,000 within one year of commencement of commercial production;

b. pay a further $4,000,000 within two years of commercial production; and

c. grant OZ Minerals a 2% NSR with a buy-back of 2/3 of the NSR for $1.3M, royalty payments to be capped at $20M



To acquire the 100% interest in the five OZ Minerals licenses, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $1,500,000 within a year of commencement of commercial production

on any of the five licenses;



Carube will retain its 100% interest in Carube Coppers Above Rocks Project free and clear of any obligation to OZ Minerals.



The final agreement will be signed within 60 days of September 21, 2016.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO  1-613-839-3258  jackert@carubecopper.com

Vern Rampton, Executive VP of Corporate Development  1-613-839-3258  vrampton@carubecopper.com

Alar Soever, Chairman  1-705-682-9297  asoever@carubecopper.com

www.carubecopper.com

QP Statement: This press release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Vern Rampton, P. Eng. in his capacity as a qualified person as defined under NI 43-101.

Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV:CUC), is a Canadian exploration company focused on the exploration and development of copper and gold projects in Jamaica and Canada. In Jamaica, Carube Copper will hold, subject to finalization of the final agreement with OZ Minerals, a 100% interest in 11 projects, totalling over 500 square kilometres. In Canada, Carube Copper holds a 100% interest in three porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum properties, totalling 593 square kilometres within the Tertiary-aged Cascade Magmatic Arc in southwestern British Columbia. Exploration continues on these properties with the goal of joint-venturing them to larger exploration and mining companies. Carube Copper continues to seek opportunities in Canada and the Caribbean for acquisition and development.

DISCLAIMER & FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" which are not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, and by their very nature involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on currently available information, Carube Copper Corp. provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Factors which cause results to differ materially are set out in the Company's documents filed on SEDAR. Undue reliance should not be placed on "forward looking statements".

IMPORTANT NOTICE: By reference herewith, Carube Copper incorporates into this release the entire disclaimer set forth on its website at http://carubecopper.com/disclaimer.htm.
photos by Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune/TNS A salad of salmon, both smoked and canned, mixed with hot sauce, shopped fennel (for crunch), red pepper and chives, tops slices of rye in this smorrebrod-style sandwich.

SHARE Upgrade the soup and sandwich combo with a cucumber and avocado gazpacho. Top it with red grapes, chives and more avocado. A salad of salmon, both smoked and canned, mixed with hot sauce, shopped fennel (for crunch), red pepper and chives, tops slices of rye in this smorrebrod-style sandwich. Upgrade the soup and sandwich combo with a cucumber and avocado gazpacho. Top it with red grapes, chives and more avocado.

By Jeanmarie Brownson, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Some folks welcome the routine that back to school generates, not just for the kids, but for adults as well.

As parents again step into the school lunch-making routine, I look forward to my own annual upgrade of take-to-work lunches. This year, my inspiration stems from a summertime visit to The Great Northern Food Hall in New York City's Grand Central Terminal. Amazing rye bread and a stunning selection of smrrebrd propelled me into my own kitchen.

Smrrebrd, literally butter and bread, an open-face sandwich tradition from Denmark, deserves attention. One slice of bread with brilliant toppings just works  especially in an era when many of us are reducing our bread consumption.

The smrrebrd in the Northern Food Hall are made on moist, dense, slightly sweet whole-grain rye bread spread with an incredible butter. At home, I look for super-dense whole grain rye or pumpernickel bread. Then I buy the best butter I can afford  these days there are butter choices everywhere  Kerrygold Irish butter never disappoints. I like unsalted butter, but use salted if that's your thing. The butter does more than add flavor and calories  it acts like a moisture barrier between the bread and the topping, effectively preventing soggy bread.

There's no doubt that the artful arrangement of toppings on the buttered bread makes them irresistible. At home, I select top quality meats and cheese, cooked fish, interesting vegetables and crunchy fruit. I also make rich protein salads, like the salmon salad and the egg salad that follow. They hold up well in the refrigerator for most of the workweek. Then I add contrasting textural components just before serving.

True, closed sandwiches are easier to transport (so feel free to add a top layer of bread). When serving them open face, offer a knife and fork, and spend time on some garnishes. Fresh herbs, sliced small tomatoes and shavings of carrot make easy garnishes. So do slices of pickle or radish.

To pack, consider investing in reusable, attractive to-go containers. Separate compartments prove ideal for toting moist fillings, such as egg salad, apart from the bread and lettuce.

I'm so pleased that deviled eggs are back in style  they never left our family. Now, jazzy gourmet versions are offered at all manner of restaurants. I season mayonnaise with a spoonful of dry mustard for zing and capers to help cut richness. For lunch, I skip the fuss of spooning filling into cooked whites and simply chop the eggs and mix everything together. Serve this combination open face on buttered hearty rye. Or tuck it into a ciabatta roll with peppery fresh watercress or baby arugula.

The salmon salad proves super flexible. Thanks to a tangy dairy base, most any cooked or smoked salmon works well. Canned salmon is a fast option, as is canned tuna or shredded cooked chicken.

For those forgoing bread (it's my kryptonite), I must say that both the salmon mixture and the deviled egg salad taste great tucked into romaine lettuce leaves or spread on Belgian endive spears.

To round out my take-along lunch, I make another traditional recipe: Gazpacho  Spain's cold, refreshing soup usually reliant upon tomatoes. For variety, I use herbs and cucumber for a green gazpacho that enlivens any day. Make the vegetable base in advance, and then blend in avocado for a creamy texture. The soup keeps in the refrigerator for a few days; I pack it in jars with tightfitting lids to transport easily.

Soup and sandwich  updated  from timeless traditions.

DOUBLE SALMON AND CHIVES ON RYE

Prep: 30 minutes

Chill: 30 minutes

Makes: about 3 cups, 6 servings

This salmon spread also tastes great on a toasted pumpernickel bagel.

ingredients

1 package (8 ounces) light cream cheese, softened

1/4 cup sour cream

- Finely grated lemon zest from  lemon

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

2 to 3 dashes red pepper hot sauce, optional

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh fennel bulb (or celery)

1/4 cup finely diced roasted red bell pepper (homemade or jarred)

1/4 cup chopped fresh chives

4 ounces smoked salmon, such as Nova salmon pieces, chopped, about 1 cup

1 can (6 ounces) wild Alaskan red or pink salmon, drained, flaked

- Soft butter, optional

6 to 12 slices hearty rye bread

- Garnishes: Fresh fennel fronds, shaved fresh fennel bulb, sliced tomato, thin apple slices

directions

1 Stir softened cream cheese and sour cream together in medium bowl until smooth. Stir in lemon zest, salt, pepper and hot sauce until well mixed. Stir in fennel, red pepper and chives. Fold in smoked and canned salmons. Refrigerate covered up to 3 or 4 days.

2 To assemble sandwiches, spread a thin layer of soft butter (if using) over one side of a slice of bread. Top with a -inch thick smear of the salmon mixture. Garnish as desired. Serve with a knife and fork. (Or top with a second slice of buttered bread, and skip the utensils).

DEVILED EGG SALAD SANDWICHES

Prep: 30 minutes

Cook: 15 minutes

Chill: 30 minutes

Makes: 4 servings

This salad also tastes great on slices of toasted baguette, ciabatta rolls or whole wheat bread.

ingredients

8 large eggs

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 cup finely minced fresh onion, rinsed well before using

1 small rib celery, finely minced

1 to 2 teaspoons drained capers, chopped (or use cornichons or dill pickle)

- Softened butter

4-8 slices hearty rye bread

- Sweet paprika

- Chopped fresh chives

directions

1 To hard-cook eggs, put them in a single layer in the bottom of a large saucepan. Add cold water to cover them by 1 inch. Heat over high heat to a boil. (Watch closely.) Boil for 1 minute  use a timer. Immediately turn off heat and set the timer for 14 minutes. When the timer rings, carefully pour off the hot water and fill the pan with cold water and a couple of handfuls of ice cubes to chill the eggs fast. Let stand until eggs feel cool. Remove from water, and refrigerate covered for several days.

2 Mix mayonnaise, mustard, salt and pepper in a medium bowl until smooth. Stir in onion, celery and capers. Peel eggs. Put 6 on a cutting board; chop roughly with a large knife. Add the chopped egg to the mayonnaise mixture; fold together gently. Taste and adjust salt if necessary. Thinly slice the remaining 2 eggs.

3 To assemble sandwiches, spread a thin layer of soft butter (if using) over one side of a slice of bread. Top with a -inch thick schmear of the egg mixture. Top with sliced egg, a sprinkle of paprika and fresh chives. Serve with a knife and fork. (Or top with a second slice of buttered bread.)

CUCUMBER AND AVOCADO GAZPACHO WITH GRAPES

Prep: 15 minutes

Chill: 30 minutes

Makes: 4 cups

ingredients

1 large seedless cucumber, 14 to 15 ounces, ends removed

1 cup vegetable broth

4 green onions, trimmed, chopped (or  cup roughly chopped chives)

1/2 small jalapeno, halved, seeded

- Leaves from 1 large sprig mint, about 1 tablespoon roughly chopped

1 large ripe avocado, halved, pitted

- Juice of  lime, or more to taste

1/2-1 teaspoon salt

- Seedless red grapes, cut in half

- Diced ripe avocado

- Chopped chives

directions

1 Use a vegetable peeler to remove and discard half of the cucumber peel. (This helps prevent bitterness.) Roughly chop the cucumber. You should have 3 loosely packed cups.

2 Put cucumber, broth, onions, jalapeno and mint leaves into a blender. Process until very smooth. Refrigerate in the blender jar, covered, about 30 minutes or up to 2 days.

3 Scoop avocado pulp into the soup base in the blender. Add lime juice and  teaspoon salt. Puree smooth. Taste and adjust seasoning with additional salt as desired. Refrigerate up to 1 day.

4 To serve, pour into soup bowls. Garnish with grapes, diced avocado and chives.
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By Glenn Dromgoole

Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown have written "A Lawless Breed," a comprehensive 500-page biography of the notorious John Wesley Hardin (University of North Texas Press, $29.95 hardcover).

Parsons, who claimed his many killings were justified, began his violent path at age 16 when he shot to death a former slave in 1868.

"The number of victims," the authors write, "certainly was twenty, maybe thirty, maybe more. He was a violent man in a violent time of Texas' history."

Eventually, Hardin wrote his autobiography, "The Life of John Wesley Hardin, As Written by Himself," in which he explained and rationalized his killings. Parsons and Brown critically examine Hardin's claims.

Hardin was arrested in 1877 and spent 16 years in prison before he was issued a full pardon by Gov. James Stephen Hogg in 1894, only to be killed in a gunfight the next year at age 42.

Capital City: Historian Jeffrey Stuart Kerr tells the story of how Austin became the capital city of Texas in "Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas" (Texas Tech University Press, $39.95 hardcover).

Two of Texas' leading politicians, President Sam Houston and Vice President Mirabeau Lamar, clashed early on over a lot of things. One of them was whether Houston or Austin would house the seat of Texas government. Houston favored Houston, Lamar favored Austin.

Lamar's vision in 1838 was the lush landscape on the Colorado River that would eventually become Austin. But before his dream could come true, he would have to overcome not only the formidable Sam Houston, but Comanches and the Mexican army as well.

"The city of Austin was born in 1839," Kerr writes, "almost died in the early 1840s, and sprang back to life thereafter. But for a few twists and turns of history, my current hometown would likely not exist."

It all started, the author says, with a successful buffalo hunt when Lamar, flush from having killed a huge buffalo, shouted from a hilltop overlooking the Colorado River, "This should be the seat of future empire!"

Drinking in Texas: Austin bartender David Alan is the author of "Tipsy Texan: Spirits and Cocktails from the Lone Star State" (Andrews McMeel, $19.95 hardcover).

The full-color 208-page book includes sections on tools and techniques as well as recipes for drinks categorized as "light, bright and refreshing," "big and boozy," and "sweet, creamy and desserty," and profiles of several Texas-based distillers.

For more see Alan's website, tipsytexan.com.

Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
Letter to the Editor: Vote your values

Dr. David R. Currie writes that public education, health care, economy and religious freedom are important topics to consider as election day nears
JOHN MORITZ/CALLER-TIMES State Rep. Garnet Coleman

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House panel looks at how race factors into DPS traffic stops

By John C. Moritz, USA TODAY NETWORK

AUSTIN  Sandra Bland, the African-American woman who committed suicide in a Texas jail after a traffic stop turned confrontational last year, likely would not have died had the state trooper not been looking for a pretext to pull her over, a key state lawmaker said Tuesday.

State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat who chairs the Texas House County Affairs Committee, said "pretext stops" are used by law enforcement officers to target motorists they believe might be wanted for a more serious matter.

"If a pretext stop wasn't used with Sandra Bland, she probably wouldn't have been arrested," Coleman said. "And I think it's clear that those stops are used to fish for greater crimes."

Such stops are more frequently directed at members of ethnic and racial minorities than at while motorists, Coleman said as he began the hearing at the state Capitol. He is considering filing legislation next year to address race and traffic stops.

Bland was stopped by a DPS trooper near Houston. During the July 2015 stop, which was captured on the trooper's in-car-video, showed the trooper loudly arguing with her over her cigarette. The officer removed from her car and used forced to subdue her.

She later was found dead in her Waller County jail cell.

Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the committee that the trooper who arrested Bland acted inappropriately. He was later fired.

The job of all troopers, McCraw said, "is to treat everyone with dignity and respect."

Later, McCraw and Coleman exchanged heated words over whether troopers are too quick to use what Coleman called "a command voice" to demonstrate that they are in charge of a given situation.

McCraw rejected any assertion that troopers use such a voice to harass or intimidate ordinary citizens. But when dealing with an aggressive individual suspected of a serious crime, he said, troopers must be allowed to use the voice necessary to force compliance.

Meanwhile, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill political science professor who has conducted extensive studies of traffic stops and race, said his findings show that black motorists are far more likely than whites to be treated harshly by law enforcement officers during traffic stops.

"The Texas Department of Public Safety is not a particular outlier on this issue," said Professor Frank Baumgartner, who testified by way of Skype. "This is a national issue that is a concern to every police department everywhere."

Twitter:@JohnnieMo
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By Rashda Khan, Rashda.Khan@gosanangelo.com/@rashda_SAST

Instead of making their appeal to the San Angelo City Council as previously planned, city staff and representatives of local police officers are continuing their meet and confer negotiations.

"In an effort to work with the city and find a possible solution during their financial difficulties, we reached out to them to go back to the negotiations table," Sgt. Doug Thomas, representing the San Angelo Coalition of Police and the San Angelo Police Officers Association, said in an email.

"During situations like this, San Angelo police officers always keep in mind the impact on citizens and other city employees," he said, adding San Angelo officers have made concessions in exchange for competitive salaries in the past,and the improvement in salaries has increased retention of trained police personnel.

At issue is a previously negotiated raise that would have brought them up to 95 percent of what cities comparable to San Angelo pay their police forces. Earlier this year the city's budget manager said the pay increases for the police department would cost about $635,960, but the city has only $322,946 in unallocated funds available for all purposes.

Both sides want to continue with the meet and confer process, and a third meeting on the proposed raises has been set for Thursday.

Lisa Marley, the city's director of human resources, risk management and civil service, updated City Council members on the situation Tuesday and asked them to authorize City Manager Daniel Valenzuela to sign any agreement that comes out of the third meet-and-confer meeting by end of the Sept. 30 business day.

An agreement must be reached by Sept. 30; otherwise the previous agreement becomes null and void. That means police salaries could revert to 2013 pay levels, and the department would stand to lose an assistant chief position and such things as SWAT pay, bilingual pay for Spanish language skills and part-time officers.

The council authorized the city manger to negotiate and execute an amendment to the Meet and Confer agreement with the San Angelo Police Department as necessary.

However, "he is not authorized to make any monetary expenditures without the acceptance and vote of council."

Mayor Dwain Morrison explained that the city manager can only make decisions or approve items under $50,000  anything more than that amount the City Council must approve.

Should the meet and confer result on both sides compromising on a new amount, a special council meeting will be called.

"This gives him (Valenzuela) the right to negotiate this, reach a compromise and keep this Meet and Confer alive or else it is going to die ... until Council can look at it again," Morrison said.

The council went ahead and approved the 2017 budget at its second hearing, while leaving the $322,946 in unallocated funds still set aside until further notice.

Because the meet and confer process is ongoing, members of the SACOP were not allowed to speak to or lobby the council. However, three out of four speakers during public comments spoke in support of police raises. One person in the audience commended the council for taking a wise approach.

"Majority of the citizens here want to make sure we take care of our police officers," said Councilman Harry Thomas. "However, majority of our citizens don't want to see a tax increase to make that happen."

While the council said they appreciated the police for their service, the agreement was that they had to look out for all employees and also retirees.

"I'm opposed to only the police getting a raise," Councilwoman Charlotte Farmer said. "What do I tell the fire department and the rest of the staff?"
FOCUS ON DEFENSE CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND OCEANIA
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Here's an anecdote from last week that indicates that Donald Trump has a credible chance to become the next president of the United States:

I attended a lecture entitled "Where Are We in the War on Terror," presented by retired army Lt. Col. Jeffrey Addicott to several hundred retired residents of Sun City, about 35 miles north of Austin.

Addicott has credentials: He's a professor of law and the director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. His bio says that he is an "internationally recognized authority on national security law." He has testified before Congress and delivered more than 700 speeches. He has written more than 60 books and articles and given more than 4,000 interviews to outlets that range from The New York Times to Fox News.

Nevertheless, he was just plain wrong about a good deal of what he said.

For example, he said that the great majority of the refugees fleeing Syria are men. No, United Nations data, as reported in a number of sources, indicate that males age 18-59 represent about 22 percent of Syrian refugees, less than the 24 percent who are women. Among all refugees, almost 40 percent are children under 12. If these figures are reliable, Addicott is just plain wrong.

Addicott commended George W. Bush (he said that he has met Bush four times) for pursuing the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, but then Bush, he said, made the mistake of listening to bad  if well-meaning  advice about staying in the Middle East to build schools and roads.

No, the bad advice Bush listened to came from his vice president and his secretary of defense, who urged him to use 9/11 as an excuse to pursue an unjustified war in Iraq, which turns out to have been the source of many of our current problems and much of the misery in the Middle East. Again, just plain wrong.

Addicott pictured the 9/11 hijackers as religious radicals, and it's true that few things can radicalize people more than religion. But the hijackers had rational motivations as well, including objections to American support for an oppressive Saudi monarchy and a long history of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern resources. Oversimplification is another way to be just plain wrong.

Addicott quickly moved from misinformation to fear. He claimed to have predicted 9/11  in ALL CAPs, he said  well before the attack, and now he's predicting another attack in the homeland, but this time the casualties will amount to 3 million rather than 3,000. Scary.

At this point he sort of lost track of his theme and began to take generic, condescending swings at "liberals." They're unpatriotic (he's wrong in that blunt generalization). They believe that capital punishment is unconstitutional (again, wrong), and he displayed an unseemly enthusiasm for putting people to death. In fact, if the executioner has to call in sick, let him know and he'd be glad to fly in to throw the switch.

Liberals might whine that, oh, we might accidentally execute an innocent person. But you know, he said, "Nobody's perfect."

Huh? At this point I realized that we had moved into the realm of the surreal.

But it was the ordinariness of the occasion, rather than its surrealism, that was alarming. The speaker had respectable credentials. The audience was made up of educated, successful, well-funded, white retirees. They were not the non-college, blue-collar coal miners and steel workers whose decline in recent decades has inspired them to support a man who has promised to make America great again. No, America has been good to these people.

A few walked out on Addicott and, I understand, a few registered complaints with the lecture's sponsors.

But many applauded him, or at least appeared to be content to reside in a place where facts are held in careless regard and where anyone who's very different from us is someone to be feared and subjected to harsh measures.

In short, a land where Donald Trump could be elected president.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. Contact him at jcrisp@delmar.edu.
The nation's second-largest school system on Tuesday moved away from its brief experiment with an earlier school start, edging back closer to the traditional day-after-Labor Day schedule.Starting next year, school will start a week later than it did this year. In 2018, classes will begin later still, one week before Labor Day.The decision by the Los Angeles Board of Education represents one more tweak to a formula that parents and officials debate endlessly. Proponents of an early start are certain that it is propelling rising graduation rates and other gains in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Opponents are just as convinced that the schedule is academically irrelevant and an inconvenience to most families. They also point to the added cost of air conditioning schools in the heat of August.For years, L.A. Unified started after Labor Day. Then, five years ago, the early start was promoted as a helpful, relatively painless reform. The calendar has been tweaked since, with the first day landing this year on Aug. 16 -- which brought matters to Tuesday's Board of Education discussion."I think we're starting too early right now," said board member George McKenna, who was one of three board members who proposed returning to a school year that begins after the first Monday in September.Before the three could try for a four-vote majority at Tuesday's board meeting, Supt. Michelle King proposed a compromise -- which is what the board passed.Students still receive the primary benefit of the early start: finishing the fall semester before the winter break, King said. That's why school won't begin after Labor Day.There'd also be other changes: Students will get three days off for Thanksgiving instead of five, and winter break will shrink from three weeks to two. The adjusted school year also will end later in JuneThe issue arose because planning already has begun for next year -- and because the board members who favored a later start saw a chance to make a change.Although parents who support a later start have turned in thousands of petition signatures, the school system has not determined what the majority wants.Some observers cast the debate as something of a middle-class conflict. Many families favor the later start to coordinate with summer camp schedules across the country and to plan vacations. On the other side are families of many college-bound high school students, who want extra study days before the Advanced Placement tests.The board's student member raised concerns about starting school later -- especially because AP testing occurs in early May, regardless of when school starts."Changing the calendar by three weeks could have a negative impact on so many students," said Karen Calderon, an Alexander Hamilton High School senior. "These three weeks have been incredibly beneficial to me.... In changing the start date I think we're limiting the future."In the end, however, Calderon, whose vote is advisory, supported the compromise.The final tally of the elected board was 5 to 2. Steve Zimmer and Ref Rodriguez sided with the three original supporters: McKenna, Scott Schmerelson and Richard Vladovic. Voting no were Monica Garcia and Monica Ratliff.Garcia said the change would hurt students.Next year, school likely will start Aug. 22. King will return to the board with the specific calendar dates to present for formal approval.For some parents, of course, a practical advantage of an early start is to get their children out of sweltering homes and parks and into air conditioning.The early start, however, has driven up air-conditioning costs, according to the district, with the reduced June electricity bill more than offset by the increase in August, a difference averaging about $1.4 million over the last three years, when Augusts have been hotter than usual.Getting a handle on all the costs is a complicated matter that King asked the staff to take on.An eight-page report asserted that, on balance, switching to a post-Labor Day start would cost L.A. Unified $134.3 million, a claim that evaporated on closer examination.More than $12 million of that loss is based on the idea that student attendance will decline. The only support for this assertion was an extrapolation that compared attendance rates last year with an attendance estimate for a different calendar.A loss of $122 million was based on the idea that starting school later means that employees, who are paid over the entire 12-month year, would be receiving more of their salary before earning it, said district controller Luis Buendia. But over the entire work year, the payments to employees would remain the same as before, he said in an interview.The staff analysis also asserted that more pay days would fall on nonschool days, causing paychecks to be mailed at an increased annual cost of $10,000.The effort to sleuth out such expenses suggests that senior officials were against the change.There's little doubt about where district managers stood regarding the instructional impact. The report talked of fewer days of access to college counselors prior to college application deadlines and fewer opportunities for students to use the winter break to make up classes they failed in the fall."These are all really critical points central to the main purpose of education and ought to be prioritized over comfort level of elementary school parents who haven't lived through this experience yet," the staff report said.
Colorado

Florida

Georgia

Iowa

Michigan

Missouri

Nevada

New Hampshire

North Carolina

Ohio

Pennsylvania

Virginia

Wisconsin

The outcome of the presidential election is determined by the Electoral College.But in many cases, it comes down to the ballots cast in just a handful of the country's more than 3,000 counties.We've put together a cheat sheet listing the counties to watch in this year's key battleground states.To compile the list, we asked nearly two dozen state- and national-level political experts for either longstanding bellwether counties -- those that tend to swing from year to year -- or ones that are experiencing demographic or ideological shifts that will impact the 2016 presidential election. (Some sources asked not to be identified.)In alphabetical order by state, the counties are:One political observer in the state calls"one of the most important counties in the nation and symbolic in every way of the battle for the soul of the middle class. As 'Jeffco' goes, so goes the state, and probably, the country." Voters from this older suburb that lines the western edge of Denver backed George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, then supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. More recently, voters there ousted three conservative school board members in an election that drew more than $1 million from local and national donors.is another Denver-area county and includes the large suburb of Aurora. Formerly Republican, it has morphed into a purple battleground due to a large number of immigrants who have moved there in recent years. There are 120 languages spoken in the Aurora Public Schools. Obama beat Mitt Romney by double digits in the county in 2012. At the same time, Arapahoe still has many working-class and middle-class whites and veterans, creating a measure of social and political friction., in southern Colorado, is a steel town and a union bastion. But as with other blue-collar Democratic places, it has recently begun to lean more conservative. Home to the so-called Three Plumbers, who successfully mounted recall efforts against several lawmakers for supporting gun control legislation, the county's working-class demographics could make it an area where Donald Trump does well.falls within the Interstate 4 corridor that links Tampa Bay and Orlando. "It's the most predictive swing county in the largest swing state," said University of Central Florida political scientist Aubrey Jewett. Except for 1992, Hillsborough County has backed the winning presidential candidate all the way back to 1928. It has also picked the overall winner in every statewide vote since 1996. And the margins have tended to track the statewide vote closely. "Hillsborough has been growing and becoming more diverse, thus it is also an excellent demographic reflection of Florida and to some degree the United States as a whole," said Jewett., which includes St. Petersburg, is somewhat less swingy than Hillsborough, but it's still competitive territory. It has voted for the Democratic nominee for president since 1992, except for 2004 when the county went narrowly for George W. Bush. Registration has been trending Democratic for several election cycles, but there are indications this year that the GOP may be regaining some of its strength., which includes Daytona Beach, has historically leaned Democratic, but Romney won it narrowly in 2012. "No place demonstrates our struggles with working-class white voters as clearly as Volusia County," said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who added that Romney's victory there "should be an alarm bell for Democrats." The Democrats' best hope for returning it to their column is to leverage the growing Hispanic population, primarily of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent.Similarly,, in the Orlando suburbs, moved somewhat toward the GOP in 2012. "It is a place where Republicans will try to run up the score to counterbalance Orlando, and a place where Democrats think they can blunt it," said Schale. Seminole has seen significant Hispanic growth. "In a few cycles, I could see this being the new bellwether county in Florida," he added."With its massive demographic churn, there's no place else in Georgia quite like," said veteran Georgia political journalist Tom Baxter. Gwinnett, which is northeast of Atlanta, is emblematic of counties in Georgia (and elsewhere) where moderate, affluent, college-educated Republicans -- especially women -- could defect from Trump.If Hillary Clinton is to win Georgia -- something no Democratic presidential nominee has done since her husband in 1992 -- she will also have to pump up African-American support in places like(Atlanta),(Savannah) and(Columbus).In Iowa, there are 99 counties, but just 10 of them make up about half of the electorate in a general election. And of those 10,, which includes the state capital of Des Moines and has 14 percent of all active registered voters, carries the most weight. Obama won the county by 14 points in 2012, and Clinton will have to keep up those numbers to offset Trump's strength in more rural areas of the state. "If a Democrat doesn't win Polk County by double digits, or at least the high single digits, the rest of the state doesn't bode well," said Christopher W. Larimer, a University of Northern Iowa political scientist.Another county to watch is, based in the Quad Cities area along the Mississippi River. It's the most evenly balanced metro-based county in the state: Six of Iowa's 10 metro counties lean Democratic and three lean Republican. Obama won Scott in 2012 by 14 points, but Republicans like Gov. Terry Branstad have done well there, and the blue-collar tinge could mean greater-than-average strength for Trump.On a much smaller scale, keep an eye on, a lightly populated region located between the more populous Cedar Rapids and Davenport areas. The county has received attention ever since Al Gore and George W. Bush tied there in 2000, with Gore narrowly winning on a recount. Cedar has gone for the popular-vote winner every four years since 1992, and observers say the results usually align with the statewide outcome., in the suburbs of Detroit, is the state's second-most populous. With its high incomes and recent Democratic lean -- Romney lost to Obama by eight points in 2012 -- the county could be a place where Clinton does well due to favorable demographics.By contrast, another Detroit suburb --, the state's third largest -- could be more promising territory for Trump. The fabled epicenter of the working-class "Reagan Democrats" went for Obama narrowly in 2012, but a Republican, George W. Bush, won it as recently as 2004.Beyond the Detroit area, keep an eye on, west of Grand Rapids. It has a heavy Dutch conservative legacy, but an influx of Mexican-Americans has helped rein in Trump's prospects in this part of the state.And, the Upper Peninsula's biggest county, is historically Democratic, but it's overwhelmingly white and rural, making it a good spot for inroads by Trump.Missouri has for a century been the nation's ultimate bellwether state in presidential elections. That is, until it turned Republican during Obama's two victories. Still, it's been somewhat more competitive in 2016, making three counties worth keeping tabs on.is the biggest in the state, with about 19 percent of the vote. Democrats have to carry St. Louis County with 57 percent or more to win the state, said Ken Warren, a Saint Louis University political scientist., also in the St. Louis metro area, is the largest Republican county in the state. To win a state election, Republicans need to win about 56 percent of the vote in St. Charles.Similarly, inin southwestern Missouri, Republicans need to get around 60 percent of the vote to win the state, according to Warren.Nevada has only 16 counties, of which two are easily the most important.Populous, which includes Las Vegas, is solidly Democratic and 29 percent Hispanic. The question for Democrats is whether turnout will be high enough to boost their chances in the state.The other county is Reno-based, which is a much more competitive area politically -- Obama won in 2012 with just 51 percent of the vote.The Granite State has only 10 counties, but two have been particularly competitive in recent history:, which includes Manchester and Nashua, and, which includes Portsmouth. They are the state's most populous, and they have flip-flopped regularly in presidential support -- usually by close margins., an urban-suburban area in the state's Research Triangle, has more voters than any other North Carolina county and is increasingly diverse. Originally Republican-leaning, it has become Democratic-leaning -- Obama won in 2012 by 11 points. "The winning formula for any Democrat in North Carolina is a big turnout and a strong percentage of the vote in Wake County," said one political observer in the state. A political journalist in the state added that "if the Trump campaign has a problem with GOP women, this is where it's going to show up."Like Wake,, home to Charlotte, is a large urban-surburban region. When Democratic turnout was weak in 2014, Democrats did poorly in the state. "A big Democratic turnout here, plus weak support from Republicans, could be a sea anchor that drags down Trump and other statewide Republican candidates," said the journalist.Far smaller in population than Wake and Mecklenburg -- with only 45,000-odd registered voters -- isin the western part of the state. It's rural and mountainous but also home to a university -- Appalachian State -- and the high-end tourist community of Blowing Rock, making it a microcosm of the state's urban-rural and young-old divides. It's one of just four counties in the state with more unaffiliated voters than either Republicans or Democrats, and it has been a hotbed of controversy over election rules.In Ohio, there's no shortage of counties to watch. That said, we narrowed it down to a handful.Specifically, Trump could do well in these historically Democratic manufacturing and mining areas:(Youngstown),(Canton) and(Warren).But those gains for Trump could be outweighed by Republican defections in more educated and affluent areas.A good indicator would be fast-growingin suburban Columbus, where Romney won 69 percent of the vote in 2012. It has voted Republican all the way back to the 1920s, but it was among Trump's worst-performing counties in the GOP primary, said Kyle Kondik, a University of Virginia political analyst and author of the bookDelaware and Trumbull "will cast about an equal number of votes in the election, about 100,000, and they are exact opposites in some ways," said Kondik. "I'm curious how much Trump loses off Romney in Delaware and how much he adds in Trumbull."On a smaller scale,, the home to Ohio University, voted by a more than 2-to-1 margin for Obama in 2012. But Clinton could see her vote tally diluted by support for third-party candidates Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.Like Ohio, Pennsylvania has a surplus of counties to watch, particularly in two areas: blue-collar western Pennsylvania and suburban southeastern Pennsylvania.In the latter category, four counties in the Philadelphia suburbs --and-- stand out. Historically these counties are Republican, but they have trended Democratic in recent election cycles. Their income and education levels are a poor demographic fit for Trump.Trump needs strong showings in blue-collar counties in the western part of the state, such asand. "They all went for Romney," said Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall University. "[But] Trump needs to exceed Romney there."Two other counties that Trump could contest are in the northeastern part of the state: He could do unusually well for a Republican in(Scranton) and(Wilkes-Barre), even though both Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden have roots in Scranton.Virginia has three urban-suburban regions that form what's sometimes called the Urban Crescent. There are two counties and one city to watch in these three regions, which account for a good proportion of the votes cast in 2012.In exurban Washington, D.C., it's, which was won by George W. Bush and then by Obama twice. It's home to both a growing minority population and blue-collar white voters.Near Richmond, it's, another historically Republican area that has diversified and voted for Obama by 12 points in 2012.And, finally, it is the city of Chesapeake in the Hampton Roads area."It's possible to win without winning all three -- Mark Warner narrowly won re-election for Senate while losing both Loudoun and Chesapeake by 0.5 percentage points -- but winning all three is a good indication of a statewide win," said Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia. Clinton's running mate, former Virginia governor and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, could boost her chances in these swing counties.To win the turnout battle in Wisconsin, Democrats will be looking to, home to the state capital of Madison and the University of Wisconsin. Clinton should win big in Dane, but it's unclear how much of her potential university vote will bleed to Johnson and Stein.On the Republican side, it's the overwhelmingly white trio ofandin suburban Milwaukee. All are usually solidly Republican, but Trump has been a harder sell than most GOP candidates. In Waukesha, according to the Marquette University Law School poll, Trump led Clinton during the summer by 13 points -- compared to the 30-to-40 point margins Republicans typically get, according to the Milwaukee. Whether Republicans in these counties come home and support Trump on Election Day will have a major influence on the result.Finally,is a swing area anchored by Green Bay. Trump will hope to ring up a better-than-average showing there.
Its always been risky for governors to meddle too much in legislative primaries. If the candidates theyre backing dont win, governors can be stuck working with political enemies. But that hasnt stopped a slate of top executives in 2016 from taking their chances.Governors such as Maines Paul LePage and South Carolinas Nikki Haley have picked several legislators to campaign against this year. Haley targeted eight lawmakers, with backing from a big-money political action committee run by her former chief of staff. Just four years ago, it was big news when Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback actively campaigned against a cadre of moderates from his own party who were holding up his agenda in the state Senate. Now its almost common, particularly among Brownbacks fellow Republicans.But it can backfire. It did in Haleys case. She managed to knock out three incumbents, but was unable to unseat the other five. To make matters worse, two of the legislators who survived are now chairs on two of the state Senates largest committees. When that happens, GOP consultant Chip Felkel says, youre forced to pick up the pieces and try to get something done with people you actively opposed.All of this years infighting is indicative of continuing splits within Republican ranks. Just as 17 different Republicans sought the presidency, different Republicans are tussling with one another to implement their various policy visions within states. Governors by their natures tend to be pragmatists. Nowadays, they have more ideologically driven legislators to contend with.Thats why governors in Arkansas, Nevada and South Dakota have sought in this years legislative primaries to prop up allies who had stuck with them on tough votes. In the case of Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, six out of the eight legislative candidates he supported won their primaries, despite hundreds of thousands of dollars devoted to their defeat. The governors in Nevada and South Dakota, however, batted little better than .500 in races where they played a role. As in 2012, the governors contributions to GOP legislative primary candidates in 2016 appear to have produced no better results than flipping a coin, commented Cory Allen Heidelberger, editor of a liberal blog called Dakota Free Press.Being political animals, governors have always played some role in legislative elections. Typically, though, this amounts to raising money for the party. Given the natural tension between branches, many legislative leaders would prefer their governors stay on the sidelines.Intruding in legislative elections, particularly in primaries, is perilous. Even when governors succeed, they can make lasting enemies. Thats certainly true in Brownbacks case. Last month, Brownback supporters in the legislature faced a backlash from moderates seeking revenge. In June, a bipartisan group of former governors sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of that group, accusing Brownback and his allies of carrying out the calculated destruction of state functions and finances.
38 Studios founder Curt Schilling, other executives from his failed video-game company and their insurer have agreed to pay a $2.5-million settlement to the state to resolve their part in the four-year legal battle against the architects of the state's failed $75-million loan deal.If Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Michael A. Silverstein accepts the proposed settlement, the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation expects about $2.05 million would be available to help pay down the principal and interest owed on the bonds, spokesman Matthew Sheaff said. That's after the state's legal team is paid its 16.67-percent contingency fee of $416,667 and the state pays other legal costs associated with its lawsuit.That $2.05-million would lower the taxpayers' cost for paying down the bonds from $53.9 million to $51.8 million, a Providence Journal analysis shows.In 2010, the state's Economic Development Corporation sold $75 million in bonds to help pay for 38 Studios to move to Providence and create a multiplayer online video game. Although Schilling's company was expected to pay the vast majority of the $112.6 million owed on those bonds, the state guaranteed the payback to investors who bought the "moral obligation" bonds.The state has been paying those bills since 38 Studios collapsed into bankruptcy in 2012, leaving Rhode Island taxpayers holding the bill.This proposed settlement apparently ends Schilling's legal entanglements over the matter. However, settlement documents specify that he and the other company executives will make themselves available to testify at the state's upcoming trial with First Southwest Company, the solitary remaining defendant in the state's civil lawsuit. The other 38 Studios executives settling are Thomas Zaccagnino, Richard Wester and Jennifer MacLean.In 2014, the same four executives agreed to pay $300,000 out of their Starr Indemnity and Liability Company insurance policy, to the lawyer handling 38 Studios' federal bankruptcy case in Delaware. Although that case and the receivership of the company in Rhode Island Superior Court are proceeding, Schilling and his executive team face no further liability in those matters, receivership lawyer Richard J. Land in Providence and lawyer Mark Felger in Delaware told The Providence Journal Monday.Schilling and the other 38 Studios executives were not named in the ongoing complaint filed by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, which charged the Commerce Corporation and bond underwriter Wells Fargo Securities with defrauding investors.In the proposed settlement filed in court Monday, the 38 Studios executive team denied any wrongdoing. Eight other defendants who reached past settlements in the case also denied wrongdoing.No court date for Silverstein to consider the settlement has been scheduled. He has approved three prior settlements.Schilling declined a Providence Journal request for an interview."No, I will talk in my forum, directly to the tax paying citizens of Rhode Island," he wrote Monday in an e-mail. For now, Schilling noted he will be called to testify as the First Southwest matter proceeds.This proposed settlement was the result of court-ordered mediation with retired Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr.The money to pay this settlement would come from the $10-million "directors and officers" insurance policy from Starr Indemnity that Schilling and the 38 Studios team have relied on to pay their legal bills. Those costs have whittled away at the $10-million top limit of what that policy could pay.Lawyers refer to the kind of policy Schilling and his team have as a "wasting" policy or an "eroding" policy. They have one more term for it: a "cannibalizing" policy."A cannibalizing policy gives you a total limit of coverage, but out of those limits comes the cost of defense," said Max Wistow, the lawyer at the Providence firm of Wistow, Sheehan & Loveley who is leading the state's legal fight against the architects of the loan deal.In considering this proposed settlement, the Commerce Corporation's outside legal counsel, Thomas Carlotto of Shechtman Halperin Savage, LLP, conducted a detailed and confidential analysis of the defendants' assets, Darigan told reporters at a news conference Monday morning. Darigan said Carlotto was satisfied the defendants had no other assets that could help pay any settlement or court judgment. Carlotto determined any recoverable assets were expected to be less than $2.5 million, the Commerce Corporation said.Reacting to the proposed settlement, Governor Raimondo said in a statement: "My team and I remain focused on recovering as much taxpayer money as possible, and we are preparing for trial with the remaining defendant."Darigan said he has not asked First Southwest back into mediation, but he hopes to. First Southwest lawyer Gerald J. Petros did not return a Journal phone call.As the state's Oct. 18 trial date approaches, Roger Williams University School of Law professor Niki Kuckes said Monday the vast majority of civil cases reach settlements short of trial, since that reduces legal risk and cuts litigation costs."A very, very, very small percentage of [civil] cases get resolved at trial," Kuckes said.Contrary to the way most civil cases play out, she said the 38 Studios proceedings have been unique in that Silverstein made many of the sworn statements and documents produced during the discovery process available for public review."I suspect that is much of what would come out at trial," she said.In addition, she said, First Southwest will now be under "a lot" of pressure to settle as it could be on the hook for the remaining damages if it loses at trial.
State Rep. Leslie Acosta vowed Tuesday to remain in office and to continue her reelection campaign even as leaders of her party -- including Gov. Wolf -- called for her to resign over the revelation last week that she secretly had pleaded guilty to federal felony charges earlier this year.What's more, a lawyer for the North Philadelphia Democrat said that Acosta intends to launch a legal bid to keep her seat even after she is sentenced next year."It is Rep. Acosta's intention to let the legal process run its course so she can continue to serve her constituency for as long as possible," her lawyer Christopher Warren said. "If the courts ultimately determine that she is unfit to hold public office, she will of course abide by that decision."Generally, the state constitution bars public officials from holding office if they have been convicted of felonies, a process that is not considered complete until a sentence is imposed. But Warren said Tuesday that Acosta has a convincing argument that those restrictions should not apply in her case."Admittedly, it could go either way. However, she's entitled to present it to a court and let the court make that decision -- not Bob Brady," he said, referring to U.S. Rep. Robert Brady, chairman of the City Democratic Committee, who earlier this week called for Acosta's immediate resignation.On Tuesday, Gov. Wolf added his voice to the chorus calling for her to step aside."I don't think any public official who is guilty -- pleaded guilty to corruption -- should be in public life," he said, adding: "We need to be above board, transparent, open and honest. If we can't do that, we shouldn't be here."Pressed to say whether she should be allowed to remain in office until the day of her sentencing, Wolf said: "No public official should be in office who is guilty of a crime."Brady expressed frustration Monday that Acosta had not informed party leaders earlier of the case against her or her decision to plead guilty in March to one federal count of conspiracy to commit money laundering in a proceeding that remains under court seal.His comments came even as her colleagues in the House mulled plans to refuse to seat her for her second term should she return to Harrisburg when the new, two-year legislative session begins in January, nine days before she is scheduled to be sentenced in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia.Acosta -- who is running unopposed for reelection in a district that includes Fairhill, Hunting Park, and parts of North Philadelphia -- has not spoken about her case since the Inquirer first reported on it Friday.She did not return to the Capitol on Monday as the House reconvened for the first day of its fall session, and informed her party's leadership that she did not intend to return this week, a spokesman for the House Democratic caucus said.The case against her involves an alleged embezzlement scheme involving Renee Tartaglione, scion of a Northeast Philadelphia political dynasty and Acosta's former boss at the Fairhill mental health clinic at which she worked prior to taking office.Facing trial in November, Tartaglione is accused of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Juniata Community Mental Health Clinic, a publicly funded facility she founded with her husband in 2002 to serve low-income patients.According to court filings unsealed the day of Acosta's plea, she was charged with knowingly aiding Tartaglione in her theft by accepting checks from the clinic worth thousands of dollars between 2008 and 2012 for work she did not perform. She purportedly cashed them and kicked the money back to her former boss.Sources familiar with the case say Acosta is cooperating with the government against Tartaglione and could testify at her trial.Until then, Warren said, he has instructed the representative to make no statements about her legal woes.The lawyer declined to discuss details of her case, except to point out that prosecutors had not accused his client of personally benefiting from her crimes and that they occurred years before she took office last year."Obviously, she has no control what, if anything, her Republican adversaries in the House may or may not do," he said. "Until she is sentenced, however, she is not disqualified from holding public office."
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has declined to rule on a historic pardon request involving the wrongful conviction of an Illinois man.In a letter Tuesday, the governor's general counsel told Keith Cooper's attorney they first must exhaust all possible judicial options for appeal. The letter essentially allows the Republican vice presidential candidate to avoid ruling on the Country Club Hills man's claim of innocence until a new Indiana governor takes over in January."It crushed me a little bit," Cooper, a 49-year-old forklift operator, said after reading the letter. "I haven't give up hope. My hope is what keeps me strong, but I'm human and it hurts."Cooper spent nearly 10 years in prison for a 1996 armed robbery in Indiana before a co-defendant's conviction was reversed. Cooper was offered a deal in 2006 to take his chances at a new trial or be freed from prison with a felony conviction on his record. He chose immediate release, but Cooper said he struggles as a convicted felon to find a better paying job.DNA evidence points to another man in the armed robbery, and the victims and former Elkhart County prosecutor who helped convict him now say Cooper is innocent. The Indiana Parole Board recommended in March 2014 that Pence grant the pardon, which experts believe would be the first pardon based on a claim of innocence in state history."Although the judicial system may not be perfect, given the extraordinary nature of Mr. Cooper's request, we need to be certain the judicial process is complete and has been given every opportunity to address any error that may have occurred," general counsel Mark Ahearn wrote on behalf of Pence. "When Mr. Cooper made a deal to be released from prison he withdrew his pending post-conviction relief petition, but it is unclear from the official record whether this precludes Mr. Cooper from refiling a petition."The letter continued, "Out of respect for the judicial process, before this office will consider Mr. Cooper's request further, he will need to exhaust his judicial remedies."Attorney Elliot Slosar, who represents Cooper, said the letter was not an outright denial. Still, Slosar described it as a delay tactic that has the potential to prolong Cooper's quest to clear his name for several years. Slosar said it's unclear whether they will be allowed to file another post-conviction petition after the original was withdrawn. Even if they overcome that hurdle, Slosar said, prosecutors may argue the new evidence is too old to meet the requirement of being new."He's punting to the next governor," said Slosar, an attorney with Loevy & Loevy in Chicago. "It's so punitive for them to hold on to a pardon petition this long and may prevent him from getting justice in court."Late Tuesday, a Pence spokesman reiterated that the governor has not ruled yet on Cooper's pardon request."When Mr. Ahearn talkesd with Mr. Slosar (Tuesday) he made clear that this is not a final decision from the governor," said Matt Lloyd, the governor's deputy chief of taff. "He also made clear that because of the unique circumstances regarding this request, the nature of which are outlined in the letter, Mr. Slosar must exhaust all of the possible judicial options for appeal before the governor can consider the pardon request."Given the Donald Trump-Mike Pence ticket's "Make America Safe Again" theme, delivered amid a difficult time of violence and unrest nationwide with police shootings and racial tensions, political pundits say granting a pardon -- even one based on innocence -- may be tricky.The pardon request also has possible political implications for Curtis Hill, the Republican nominee in the race for Indiana attorney general. Hill, an Elkhart County prosecutor, was not involved in Cooper's conviction but he did play a role years later when Cooper was offered the deal.Cooper was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the robbery, in which a teen survived being shot in the stomach. The Indiana Court of Appeals overturned a co-defendant's conviction in 2005 and prosecutors dropped charges against him when he elected for a new trial. The man later received a nearly $5 million settlement in a civil rights case against police.Cooper, though, said he chose to go home to his wife and three young children who at times were homeless during his incarceration. Cooper said he does not regret his decision, but living with the felony conviction on his record has stunted his ability to earn a better living.Slosar argues that Cooper was wrongly imprisoned based on flawed police work, tainted witness identifications, an unreliable jailhouse snitch and a trial attorney who mishandled key DNA evidence. The witnesses and the snitch later recanted.Now, long after advances in DNA testing and a nationwide offender database excluded him as the perpetrator and identified another man, which sparked eyewitness recantations, even the original trial prosecutor who secured Cooper's conviction urged Pence to support the pardon.Cooper began his pardon quest about four years ago. More than 100,000 supporters have signed an online petition at change.org. Cooper also has an active social media following.The case was the subject of a Chicago Tribune investigation last year. The Tribune's review of trial transcripts, police reports, witness interviews and depositions showed the case was fraught with problems.For example, Cooper's former defense attorney agreed to a stipulation that DNA test results from inside the sweatband of the shooter's hat showed Cooper could not be excluded as a suspect. But the Indiana State Police lab report stated the opposite. Years later, the DNA evidence was linked to a man serving a prison term in Michigan for his role in a 2002 murder. He has denied involvement in the Elkhart case and has not been charged.Pence has pardoned three people, none claiming actual innocence, since he became governor in 2013. His predecessor, Republican Mitch Daniels, pardoned more than 60 people during his eight years in office."This doesn't make sense," Cooper said. "How can you pardon guilty people and here I'm innocent and you pass it forward? I just hope I'll still be alive (when pardoned) because I'm tired of walking around with the stigma of being a convicted felon."
On Tuesday, in the morning, at Government House, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey hosted an Investiture Ceremony for residents of Queensland, recipients of Australian honours and awards announced on Australian Day 2016 and Queens Birthday 2016.

In the afternoon, at Government House, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey hosted an Investiture Ceremony for residents of Queensland, recipients of Australian honours and awards announced on Queens Birthday 2016 and 21 June 2016.
Description

GIS - 21 September, 2016: The knowledge and use of evidence-based or judgment-based human rights indicators, as supportive tools to assess and to show the progress made in implementing human rights obligations in any State is becoming more and more imperative, particularly with the coming into prominence of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The knowledge and use of evidence-based or judgment-based human rights indicators, as supportive tools to assess and to show the progress made in implementing human rights obligations in any State is becoming more and more imperative, particularly with the coming into prominence of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This statement was made this morning by the Secretary for Home Affairs of the Prime Ministers Office, Mr P. Jhugroo, at the opening of a two-day workshop on Human Rights Indicators which is being held at Gold Crest Hotel in Quatre Bornes.

Some 40 participants from different Ministries, Statistics Mauritius, National Human Rights Commission, Equal Opportunities Commission, Ombudsperson for Childrens Office, and NGOs are attending. The workshop is a joint initiative of the Prime Ministers Office, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Development Programme.

According to Mr Jhugroo, the need to develop new and also use existing human rights indicators as a tool to provide an empirical assessment of the progress made in the implementation of the provisions of the nine Regional and International Conventions on human rights to which Mauritius is a party has long been felt. One of the main obligations of the country under these Conventions, he added, is to submit regular periodic reports to the treaty bodies on the progress made in the implementation of the Conventions. Hence the need to provide information that are evidence-based.

The Secretary for Home Affairs recalled that the Prime Ministers Office, with the technical assistance of University of Mauritius, developed a database of human rights indicators in 2013.  We want now to build on what has already been done and strengthen the capacity of the human rights focal points of the different Ministries and Departments so that they are eventually in a better position to choose the appropriate indicators or category of indicators and statistical data to assess the progress made over the years in their respective field of activities , he concluded.

Also present at the workshop, the UN Resident Coordinator, Mr Simon Springett, said that clear, identifiable and measurable indicators can be developed for use in human rights assessments and in furthering the implementation and realisation of human rights. The progress made in response to the various recommendations submitted to Mauritius by regional and international human rights mechanisms, he pointed out, can only be shown in a concrete and effective manner with the use of data. Measurement shows us not only where we are, it also enables us to take stock and change course to make sure we are on the right path. It helps us turn data into meaningful information we can utilise to foster positive change in society, he added.

Technical Assistance Mission

The workshop forms part of the technical assistance from OHCHR aimed at strengthening the capacity of national stakeholders to use indicators to measure and monitor the implementation of human rights in the country.

A team from OHCHR, who is currently in Mauritius till 23 September, will help identify human rights indicators focal points among national human rights stakeholders, provide a mapping of relevant indicators on identified issues and population groups who may be vulnerable, and suggest recommendations and avenues to put in practice human rights norms and principles in relevant data collection and human rights policy affairs. The delegation comprises Mr Nicolas Fasel, Adviser on Human Rights Measurement, and Ms Aleksandra Plesko and Mr Jack Conroy from the OHCHR Regional Office in Pretoria.

The mission is in two parts: bilateral meetings with national stakeholders to discuss about expectations, opportunities and possible actions for the way forward as regards human rights indicators; and a workshop whose aim to enable better understanding, identification and use of human rights indicators.
Description

GIS - 21 September, 2016: Mauritius and India will open up a new chapter of development and embark on several avenues of cooperation in view of reinforcing the existing bilateral and friendly ties between the two countries whereby India has pledged to further support the socio economic development of Mauritius. Mauritius and India will open up a new chapter of development and embark on several avenues of cooperation in view of reinforcing the existing bilateral and friendly ties between the two countries whereby India has pledged to further support the socio economic development of Mauritius.

The Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Pravind Jugnauth, made this statement yesterday at a meeting with the press following his recent mission to India from 13 to 18 September 2016.

Finance Minister Pravind Jugnauth expressed appreciation with regards to his meetings with several eminent personalities from India which he qualified as positive and very fruitful, among whom, the Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, the Minister of Finance of India, Shri Arun Jaitley, the Minister of External Affairs, Mrs Sushma Swaraj, the Minister of Railways of India, Mr Suresh Prabhu, and the Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Mr Kalraj Mishra.

He pointed out that various issues of strategic importance were discussed namely: the Comprehensive Economic and Partnership Agreement, implementation of the Metro Express, development of Ocean Economy, port development, visa on arrival, Overseas Citizen of India, liberalised remittance system, the Double Tax Avoidance Treaty as well as Mauritius Sovereignty over Chagos Archipelago.

Minister Jugnauth stated that a grant of Rs12,7 billion has been allocated by India for development projects in Mauritius particularly for infrastructure projects among others. He further pointed out that in addition to this financial envelope, Mauritius has solicited the assistance of India to extend an additional financial aid amounting to some Rs 7 billion hence bringing the total allocation to Rs 20 billion for the implementation of other major projects.

The Government of Mauritius has also sought the assistance of the Indian Government for a financial grant of some USD 4 million for the setting up of the new Headquarters of the National Coast Guard, he added.

During his visit, Minister Pravind Jugnauth also met captains of the business community as well as potential investors and entrepreneurs whereby he appealed to them to tap the new economic pillars in the Mauritian market and also use Mauritius as gateway to Africa. The issue of increasing air links frequencies between India and Mauritius was also raised for a reinforced triangular cooperation connecting Mauritius-India-Africa.
(TNS)  State legislators crafting regulations for self-driving cars will work to align their bill with federal guidelines on autonomous vehicles issued this week.Parts of proposed legislation sitting in the Senate Transportation Committee will have to change to conform to the federal guidelines, Nolan Ritchie, committee executive director and a staffer in state Sen. John Rafferty's office, told the Tribune-Review on Tuesday.The policy announcement by the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Monday will change our approach, Ritchie said.We have been awaiting NHTSA guidance, and now that we have it, this will certainly be a game changer in how we model our state legislation.Uber launched its fleet of self-driving Ford Fusions last week in Pittsburgh, making them available to select users. Mayor Bill Peduto said the federal guidelines consider the balance between encouraging innovation and protecting public safety. He said the city will work with federal officials on the policy.Ritchie hadn't fully examined the 116-page Federal Automated Vehicles Policy, but said some proposed state policies and reporting requirements might be in conflict.PennDOT Secretary Leslie Richards told the Tribune-Review on Tuesday she felt the federal guidelines paralleled the work of state regulators.We don't have to make any changes, Richards said. We can continue down the path we have set for ourselves.Richards said she is watching Uber's pilot test closely. Ashwini Chhabra, head of policy development at Uber, is a member of PennDOT's task force to develop self-driving regulations.U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx held a news conference Tuesday to further discuss the guidelines. Foxx was flanked by self-driving prototypes including Carnegie Mellon University's autonomous Cadillac SUV.Several parts of the state's proposed legislation appear in line with the federal guidelines, including provisions that require companies, universities and others using self-driving cars to obtain state approval before testing, carry hefty insurance policies and register and title the cars as autonomous vehicles. Ritchie said the state's administrative structure also follows the federal model.However, certain reporting requirements in the state bill may have to be changed to match the federal policy, Ritchie said. Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1268 required self-driving car testers to report to the state all crashes and each time the autonomous technology failed, causing a human to take control. The federal guidelines appear to reserve the right to require reporting, but stops short of mandating it. The guidelines ask that manufacturers submit and share data.Ritchie and Richards said they expect the legislature to act on the bill before the end of the year.
LEBANON  Paul Aziz will continue his bid to be elected to a third term as Lebanons mayor, although he will be undergoing treatment for throat cancer in coming weeks, he said Tuesday.

Aziz said the prognosis was made recently, after he went to the doctor due to a persistent sore throat.

It started off, it felt like a sore throat, about a month ago, Aziz said. I just wasnt feeling right and went to my doctor. He gave me antibiotics, but after they didnt seem to be working, I went back. I also saw a lump in my throat.

Aziz said his doctor thought it might be an inflamed tonsil, but an ear, nose and throat specialist found the lump was solid, leading to a cancer diagnosis.

The good news is the doctors say this is the 'better' kind of cancer to have  if there is such a thing  and it is treatable and highly curable, Aziz said. They are expecting a clean bill of health at the end of a seven-week treatment plan.

Aziz said that treatment will include radiation and a nonchemotherapy biological medicine.

This means no chemo side effects, and for that I am very grateful, Aziz said. Its treatable and curable.

Aziz said he will be treated at the Samaritan Cancer Center in Corvallis.

He will continue to operate Pauls Computer Repair and take care of city business.

The last couple weeks of treatment may get a bit hard and I will probably have to cut my schedule down at that time, Aziz said. I am a realist. I do understand how hard the last part of treatment could be. Thankfully our city is in the capable hands of our city manager, staff and City Council. Even if I have to take a couple of weeks vacation I will still be in touch and fully aware of what is happening in town.

Aziz said he expects treatments to be completed by mid-November, in time for setting up his annual Cascade Christmas Lights at his home.

Aziz considers the diagnosis as just another one of lifes challenges to be overcome.

One of my most rewarding challenges was spending 18 weeks of hard labor at the Los Angeles Sheriffs Academy to become a police officer and working at the Glendale Police Department, Aziz said.

But he said his biggest challenge was recovering from diving into the Colorado River and breaking his neck when he was 23 years old.

I had to learn how to live life being paralyzed and using a wheelchair for mobility, Aziz said. I learned how to do everyday activities a bit differently.

Aziz will face Forest Bosley for mayor in the November election.
What the Feds Say

What Harrisburg Says

(TNS)  The future is here in the form of self-driving cars, and western Pennsylvania is at the forefront as a testing ground of the new technology.Its been nearly two years since Uber hired dozens of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to develop the technology that drives autonomous vehicles. That technology became a reality last week when Uber began offering its very first rides in autonomous vehicles in downtown Pittsburgh.Despite those advances, not everyone is thrilled.Both the state and federal governments have released statements in the last week saying self-driving cars need more oversight and testing before they become widespread, and the two are jockeying over who should have the final word when it comes to policy and regulations.A handful of committees and commissions are already assembled to study the new technology. PennDOT formed a committee earlier this year while the U.S. Department of Transportation has a similar entity.Dozens of experts and elected officials in both levels of government are working to craft the future of autonomous transportation. But who has the final say when the reports are released and recommendations made?The U.S. Department of Transportation on Tuesday unveiled a 100-page report, the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy, which serves as an ambitious approach to accelerate the (autonomous vehicle) revolution.The policy is an important early step in laying the groundwork for rules and regulations governing the technology, according to Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. Despite that, the policy is only a guidance rather than a set-in-stone frame of rules.The report outlines a detailed approach to governing self-driving cars. It includes a 15-point safety assessment to set clear expectations for manufacturers developing and deploying automated vehicle technologies.Perhaps most important, the lengthy report has a section that lays out a clear distinction between federal and state responsibilities when it comes to regulating the technology.That section also contains recommendations from the federal government to the states in regard to what kinds of policies and rules the states should focus on, with a goal of generating a consistent national framework for the testing and deployment of highly automated vehicles.States will still have the power to issue drivers licenses, collect registration fees, make rules governing inspections and oversee insurance laws.But when it comes to setting the foundation for the rules that will govern this emerging industry, the federal government is trying to make clear that its in charge.(The federal) DOT strongly encourages states to allow DOT alone to regulate the performance of (autonomous driving) technology and vehicles, the policy said. If a state does pursue  performance-related regulations, that state should consult with (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) and base its efforts on the Vehicle Performance Guidance provided in this policy.Uber has been touting its driverless technology in Pittsburgh lately by offering free rides to residents, but the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission is telling the company to pump the brakes when it comes to charging a fee for those rides.In a statement released late last week, the PUC said it encourages innovation and advances in technology. Despite that, Uber has not applied for or received the necessary approval it needs from the PUC to start charging people for rides in autonomous vehicles.Any business offering transportation services to the general public for compensation must secure proper authority from the PUC before beginning that service, and clearly demonstrate the technical ability to operate safely, the PUC said in a statement. To date, no entity has applied for such authority in Pennsylvania, and the commission has not authorized any use of fully autonomous vehicles for transportation services that fall under the jurisdiction of the PUC.PUC spokesman Nils Hagen-Frederiksen said Tuesday there is a very broad structure for transportation oversight, which includes many federal and state agencies.He reaffirmed that any company that wants to engage in transportation services must first get permission from the PUC, something Uber hasnt done.But when it comes to which governmental agency has the final say?We expect this to be an ongoing state and national conversation, and we look forward to a vigorous national discussion about innovations in public services, he said.Uber has not charged local residents for rides, and it hasnt given any indication it plans to do so any time soon.Despite that, the PUC has a statutory obligation to ensure autonomous vehicles operate in a safe and reliable manner, the agency said, and new rules will undoubtedly be needed as the new technology rises in popularity and usage.Those new rules will likely be crafted by oversight committees like the Autonomous Vehicle Task Force, a group of educators and industry stakeholders brought together by PennDOT.In addition, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also starting to develop its own set of guidelines for autonomous vehicles. Despite that, its important for companies like Uber to allow time for these regulations to be crafted, the PUC said.In a statement released Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf said the federal guidelines are in-line with work underway since June by the Pennsylvania Autonomous Vehicle Policy Task Force.Both we and the federal government agree that safety is paramount as we set policies that encourage and guide the dramatic mobility changes offered by the rapidly developing automated vehicle technology, Wolf said.The state task force will now use the federal guidelines to craft its own rules, but PennDOT Secretary Leslie Richards said in the statement that the new federal policy does not impact testing now underway in Pittsburgh.In addition, the Autonomous Vehicle Task Force is working to deliver policy recommendations to Richards in the fall while, at the same time, the state Legislature is crafting a bill that would allow PennDOT to implement its own policies on automated vehicle testing.If those policies differ from the federal guidelines, its not clear which laws or regulations supersede the other, although its important to note federal laws typically trump state laws.Regardless, the PUC said a continuing conversation needs to take place between state and federal lawmakers, transportation and insurance company executives and other stakeholders.Its likely that the PUC will continue to monitor Ubers activities very carefully. Besides the statement issued last week, the PUC in April fined Uber $11.4 million for operating a transportation business without a license, the largest fine in the history of the PUC.A representative from Uber did not return a request for comment.
ORLANDO, Fla.  Cybersecurity is a hot topic these days, and a report released by the National Association of State CIOs and consulting firm Deloitte has honed in on the many issues state chief information security officers (CISOs) grapple with when it comes to securing a states IT infrastructure.According to, cybersecurity is becoming part of the fabric of government operations. For the first time in this biennial survey, all respondents reported having an enterprise-level CISO position.Governor-level awareness also is on the rise, according to the survey, which found that 45 percent of respondents discuss cybersecurity monthly at agency or office executive leadership meetings  up from 30 percent in the 2014 survey.Thats a phenomenal increase, said Srini Subramanian, principal with Deloitte. On the contrary, communication with the legislature is not seeing a positive trend. Theres not a consistent [connection with] state legislators.In Indiana, CISO Tad Stahl said when he first landed the role, The governor [Mike Pence] said, I want you to lean into it, he said, and I didnt know what that meant. But, he added, We definitely have increased exposure to the governors office. Its not a direct from me to the governors office; normally I go through the CIO [Dewand Neely], who has monthly updates and that goes to the governor through him.Despite this increase in awareness, however, a confidence gap remains  two-thirds (66 percent) of state officials indicate theyre very or extremely confident that adequate measures are in place to protect against cyberattacks, while only one-quarter (27 percent) of CISOs maintain the same level of confidence.This, Subramanian said, just underscores the importance of transparency in cybersecurity operations.On the whole, the survey found that having a formal cybersecurity strategy in place can lead to more resources that are necessary for combating consistently evolving cyberthreats. And the top barriers for CISOs are insufficient funding and a shortage of quality cybersecurity professionals.Cyber is an enterprise risk management issue, said Deloitte Managing Director Michael Wyatt, who shared a cautionary tale about how CISOs can express the status and priority of their program.When asking about investment in the program  balance the need with providing confidence to the legislature and governor about what youre doing and what youre doing right, he said. But be careful of co-mingling that with the ask.In other words, Wyatt said, share pockets of goodness to show that what youre doing is working  but also stress what you need and why.In the state of Washington, CISO Agnes Kirk said she and her team have made a concerted effort to educate over time.We realized our legislators have to make policy and funding decisions about vast topics, she said. Everybody has a need and at varying degrees. I just hope legislators understand that if you dont invest in cybersecurity up front, you'll invest on the back end."The survey also found consistency in what the state CISOs are doing when it comes to cybersecurity. Theyre starting to focus on areas that they can control, Subramanian said.Those top two areas, according to the survey, are strategy and planning, and awareness and training.According to the survey, 67 percent of states have cybersecurity strategies documented and approved, 14 percent have strategies documented but not approved, and 18 percent have neither, but intend to get a cybersecurity strategy documented and approved within the next 12 months.And the states with an approved strategy, Subramanian said, seem to have more success in getting additional resources and budget.When we established our funds, we put together a strategy [about] what we needed to do to address the most significant risks at the time, Stahl said. Largely for us, the strategy has stayed the same while tactics have changed.Washington also has a formal strategy that has been communicated not only within government, but also to the Legislature and the states private-sector partners.People can get behind a common vision once they understand what your agendas and goals are, Kirk said, because they understand that to execute on our strategy, we need to work together, to have a vision all can work toward.Connecticut, however, is in the third category: We dont have a strategy in Connecticut, state CIO Mark Raymond said. Nobody wants to give you money when you have problems. They want to give you money when you have a strategy to fix the problems.As for how cybersecurity relates to third-party services, it was noted that the confidence level on these is a bit questionable.Kirk noted that state agencies are focused on their mission, not on cyberprotection. When we talk about third parties, for us I look at it from the perspective that its less about the security controls but more concern about the real shared responsibility or viability, she said. I think thats something were beginning to see in some of the new contracts. But until theres true shared liability, were always going to struggle with how much and how to work that out.Many of todays contracts were established well before cybersecurity became an issue, Kirk said, so its difficult to incorporate them. Thats an area I believe were going to need to address, she said. Until theres shared responsibility, I think CISOs will be a little reluctant to share data.Kirk also said that if we don't do security well, we wont be doing anything, adding that she and her team are learning to leverage relationships, because relationships are a force multiplier.And Wyatt made sure to mention that the term "cyber" must be used  not information security  in order to get policymakers attention
The Albany Downtown Association is forming a Business Watch, which is similar to a Neighborhood Watch program but meant for merchants, in order to deter crime and suspicious activity.

Downtown Albany is far safer than it was a year ago, but there has been a recent increase of nuisance behavior, disturbances such as fights and homeless issues like dumpster diving, said Peggy Burris, executive director of the ADA.

Were trying to be proactive with that, Burris said.

News of the Business Watch was presented to business owners during a meeting at the Pix Theatre on Wednesday morning.

The goal is to report all crime and suspicious activity to fellow businesses, as well as law enforcement.

We all need to be a community down here and we all need to look out for each other, Burris told the audience.

Participating businesses will have stickers to affix to their windows or doors. A private Facebook group also has been set up so merchants can communicate with each other about problems.

Use it, because if you dont use it, its useless, said Oscar Hult, owner of the Natty Dresser.

Brad Conners, Albany Police Department crime prevention specialist, talked with the audience about the Business Watch program.

He added that the program should result in increased safety for shoppers, residents and employees downtown.

Youll see results, Conners said.

The key to a successful Business Watch is participation.

Its one of those things where if only 10 percent are participating, we might as well not spend the money on the stickers, Conners said.

Conners also discussed when to contact authorities and what details to provide  and added that business owners shouldnt assume someone else will call.

If you dont call us, we dont have the opportunity to catch bad guys.  We rely on the extra eyes and ears, he said.
Felipe Massa says he has been heartened by the reaction to his decision to retire from F1 at the end of the year.

The 35-year-old Brazilian made his debut in 2002 and won 11 races for Ferrari and almost the 2008 title, but at Monza announced that after three final seasons for Williams he will call it a day in late November.

"I have felt a respect and a very great affection from all over the world" after the announcement, Massa told Brazil's UOL Esporte. "I was even a little surprised.

"I am very happy with the messages I received, both from fans and the people who worked with me throughout my career," he added.

"I was even a little surprised."

Massa also said he is satisfied with his 15-year F1 career, which will tick over to 250 starts once the five lights go out in the 2016 Abu Dhabi finale.

"There are 22 drivers in formula one but not many who managed to stay 15 years and be as successful as I could," he said.

(GMM)
Toto Wolff is the latest F1 figure to hit out at the driving of Haas racer Esteban Gutierrez.

Lewis Hamilton infamously gave the Mexican 'the finger' earlier this year, and Daniel Ricciardo has also criticised Gutierrez after trying to lap him.

Now, Mercedes chief Wolff hit out at the way backmarker Gutierrez behaved when Nico Rosberg and Daniel Ricciardo were battling for the win in Singapore.

"Felipe (Massa) immediately got out of the way," Wolff told Auto Motor und Sport.

"But Esteban, who is a nice guy, just kept going and was happy that has gap to Felipe was increasing. I think Gutierrez always behaves like this when someone is trying to pass him.

"Every time, it's always the same driver," he added.

Haas team boss Gunther Steiner defended his driver.

"He was battling well against Massa who why should he get out of the way? He did so when he needed to and I think he was pretty fair," he said.

"I saw no problem with what he did, we received no penalty and the FIA did not complain. So I think if they (Mercedes) have a problem, they need to ask the stewards."

And Gutierrez was quoted by Speed Week: "If Toto Wolff has something to say, he should tell me to my face. I find that disappointing.

"Basically, people can say what they want, but there are rules. And if the stewards don't say anything, then I have done nothing wrong."

(GMM)
In an editorial last month, we discussed the first batch of recommendations from a task force that's been examining the sorry state of Oregon's public records laws.

Those recommendations struck us as a worthwhile step forward, but we also warned that any significant overhaul to the records laws could be a tough sell.

Sure enough, opposition already is beginning to surface to at least one of the proposals, which would specify how long governments have to respond to requests for public records.

The recommendation, which comes from a task force convened by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, calls for public bodies to acknowledge a request for records within five days and fulfill them within 10. (Schools not in session would be exempted from this particular requirement.)

That timetable for records requests drew fire from a lobbyist who represents local governments. Rob Boyett, who works for the Association of Oregon Counties, said that establishing such a deadline might represent an unfunded mandate from the state if governments needed to pay overtime or hire additional staff to meet those deadlines. Boyett warned that if the Legislature failed to pass the proposed revisions with a supermajority, the state was opening itself to lawsuits filed by local counties.

If that general argument seems familiar, it's the same case that local governments have made against state laws regarding mandatory sick leave and increases in the minimum wage. The argument carried little weight with legislators, who went ahead with the sick leave and minimum wage proposals.

It could be, though, that Boyett was just starting to lobby for changes in the proposals even before legislators take them up next year. In fact, lobbyists for local governments have suggested that the proposal be amended so that governments have 15 business days to respond to a request for records. That seems reasonable, and Michael Kron of the attorney general's office said revisions to the proposal would include that suggestion.

But Kron added that the proposed legislation would make this expectation clear: that records requests would be fulfilled as quickly as possible.

In fact, the recommendations produced by the task force (which includes journalists, government officials and members of the public) include an acknowledgment that the default mode for government should be to make records available to members of the public.

That "default mode" was the foundation on which Oregon overhauled its public records law back in 1973. Without going into detail about how we got from that high-water point to now, let's just say that the records law no longer is considered as being among the strongest in the nation.

This particular fight over deadlines could just be the opening salvo in the battle to put fresh teeth into Oregon's records law. For example, we haven't made much progress yet on a particularly tricky issue: How much should governments be allowed to charge to fulfill requests for records?

And still waiting in the wings is the task force's effort to streamline (and possibly eliminate) some of the hundreds of exemptions to the records law  in other words, records that once were open but which now have been placed off-limits by some sort of governmental action. Some of those exceptions are legitimate  but certainly not all of them. Nevertheless, you can be sure that whoever fought for those exemptions in the first place will be watching closely.

So this is shaping up as a fight. But for Oregon residents with an interest in open state government  and that includes all of us  the stakes here are huge. (mm)
You can't protest violence with more violence.

Yesterday's shooting of a black man by a Charlotte police officer might have been justified, it might have been a tragic mistake, it might have been an unjustified abuse of power.

It will be investigated, the facts will be determined and the public will see the outcome.

The eruption of violence and criminal behavior in response is an outrage against the public.

Traffic blocked on I-85 ... rocks and other objects thrown from an overpass onto traffic below ... goods taken from tractor-trailer trucks and burned ... a Wal-Mart looted ... police cars damaged and officers injured.

It goes without saying there's no excuse for mob violence like this.

Sadly, it feeds a narrative that some politicians will be only too happy to exploit.

You can read the racist comments below the Charlotte Observer story linked above to see the conclusions some people reach. (Don't put comments like those on this post; I'll remove them.)

You can create a narrative that our country is in a struggle between Black Lives Matter and Law & Order, but this is a false conflict. Law & Order means that Black Lives Matter, that policing must be even-handed and respectful of all people whom police protect and serve.

Greensboro offers a good example, showing again that, when police make mistakes, openness and accountability is the best policy to restore public trust. The council voted yesterday to release body-cam video of a confrontation in which an officer  now a former officer  apparently acted improperly. Thank you, council.

Police, and the civilian authorities that oversee the police, deserve the opportunity to do the right thing.

Mob "justice," as seen in Charlotte, is no justice at all. It's criminality, and it only makes matters worse.
Just as I have been in a late-summer rush to chow down on lots of summer vegetables while they are still in season, I have been ramping up my grilling, too.

Of course, grilling in North Carolina doesnt end with the beginning of fall. And I know plenty of folks who will grill even while snow is falling around them on the patio.

Still, once we get into October, my grilling adventures begin to drop off simply because I get hungry for all kinds of fall dishes  most of which are cooked indoors.

So until the cool breeze of autumn whisks me inside to make soup, stew and chili, Im grilling as much as I can.

I found a few grilling ideas in the latest book by Melissa Cookston, a champion on the barbecue competition circuit and the owner and pitmaster at Memphis Barbecue Company restaurants, based in Horn Lake, Miss., a few miles south of Memphis.

Cookston is a two-time Memphis in May Grand Champion. She has been a judge of Destination Americas BBQ Pitmasters and has appeared on such Food Network shows as Chopped and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

Smokin Hot in the South (Andrews McMeel) is Cookstons second book after Smokin in the Boys Room, which came out in 2014.

Three recipes in particular caught my eye.

One, which Cookston calls smoked chicken bacon bombs, is a sure winner for those who believe that bacon makes everything better. And isnt that everyone who likes bacon? And isnt everyone who likes bacon about 98 percent of the population?

Cookstons idea  which Ill admit is a bit over the top  involves stuffing chicken breasts with bacon, garlic, jalapeno and red bell peppers. Oh, and she throws in some spinach so we can get our green veggies. But just for good measure, she wraps the outside of the breasts in bacon, too.

OK, I will admit this isnt the healthiest way to cook a chicken breast, Cookston said in the book. So just decide to eat a salad or something tomorrow, and enjoy these today. See? All the guilt is gone.

Cookston said that the stuffing ingredients arent critical. Feel free to experiment. Its the bacon on the outside that really makes the dish. When checking the internal temperature, make sure the probe is in the chicken, not the stuffing, she said, so you can get an accurate reading.

Im not sure the chicken really needs a sauce, but Cookston does serve it with a classic American barbecue sauce.

I also like Cookstons take on pork tenderloin, which marries an Asian marinade with a watermelon garnish. Like with the bacon on the chicken, Cookston doubles up on the watermelon, serving the pork with watermelon rind pickles plus a fresh watermelon salad flavored with mint.

Her recipe for the pickles is a refrigerator-pickle recipe that doesnt involve time-consuming canning procedures. These will perk up any meal! she said of the pickles. They take a little effort but are well worth it.

Finally, I like Cookstons recipe for flank steak with chimichurri sauce. Its not new to me, but I love Argentinean chimichurri sauce  basically a blend of parsley, garlic and vinegar  with any steak.

Cookstons version of the sauce is expanded to include onion, cilantro, red bell pepper and jalapeno, all of which adds some complexity to the dish. To top it off, she serves the steak with a lime-cilantro slaw.

Flank steak is one of my favorite meats to cook, Cookston said, but throw it on a spit and flame-roast it and I really love it!

Though Cookstons flank-steak recipe was originally written to be cooked on a spit, it also can be cooked on the grill.

One thing youll notice in Cookstons recipes is that they tend to have several components. Consider all these mere suggestions. You can skip the watermelon salad with the pork tenderloin or the poultry rub with the smoked chicken bacon bombs.

But you also might want to save the component recipes for other uses, too. Her spice rubs can be used on a lot of different foods. And the lime-cilantro slaw will taste good with almost any meat, poultry or fish coming off the grill.
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The 2016 Oktoberfest has kicked of to a rainy but festive start.

Originated in 1811, the 16 to 18 day-long beer festival and travelling funfair (Volksfest) has become the largest of its kind. Every year millions of people from all over the world head to Munich, Germany to partake in the festivities.

VINTAGE OKTOBERFEST: See what Munich's largest festival used to look like

Because of the size and nature of the event and the series of attacks in recent months, security installed more cameras, a metal fence and security checks on the festival grounds, but that didn't stop hordes of people from heading out for a good time.

Take a look through the gallery above to see highlights from Oktoberfest's opening day.
National Hispanic Heritage Month is the period from September 15 to October 15, and in honor if that, WalletHub analyzed the Hispanic population of each state and Washington DC to see where Hispanic residents are most and least integrated.

In order to determine which states are home to the most integrated Hispanics, WalletHu compared states in "Cultural & Civic Integration," "Educational Integration" and "Economic Integration."
GREENWICH  The Greenwich League of Women Voters and town political parties gave voter fraud a thorough airing during a discussion that couldnt reach a decision on whether it even existed.

Nearly 200 people packed the Greenwich Library earlier this week to catch the debate between John Fund, national affairs columnist for the National Review, and Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Waldman contended voter ID laws were discriminatory and blocked people from voting; Fund contended laws were needed to keep elections from being stolen.

Lets not lose sight of the fact that we are having this conversation at a time when one of the two major party candidates has said that the election in the United States of America is rigged because of massive voter fraud, Waldman said. Mr. Fund says its one of those special secret crimes thats so secret you cant find it and thats how you know its there.

Fund, the author of several books including Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy and Whos Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk, said fraud was rampant and largely undetected. Waldman, a constitutional lawyer and author of The Fight To Vote, said voter fraud was an excuse to disenfranchise voters, particularly minority voters.

Waldman called Funds claims of rampant in-person fraud-stealing elections nonsense and cited a University of Arizona study that found 10 confirmed prosecuted cases in elections all over the country and a Washington Post examination of a billion ballots cast in the last decades that found only 31 cases.

But to Fund thats exactly the problem, using the comparison of how much insider trading takes place compared to how little the Securities and Exchange Committee is able to prosecute.

You cannot judge the extent of a problem by the fact you only catch a small part of it, Fund said. Its the same with the IRS and tax evasion. This is a quote from Christopher Coates, a former chief of the voting section in the Department of Justice who has been honored by the NAACP and ACLU. He said, For any crime such as voter fraud, convictions are a fraction of prosecutions, which are a fraction of investigations, which are a fraction of known offense which are in turn a fraction of crimes.

He also cited the case of former State Rep. Christina Ayala, who pleaded guilty in 2015 to violating state election law by voting in districts that didnt match her listed address. Ayala received a a one-year suspended sentence and a promise not to run for elected office for two years, which Fund mocked for being too light.

Connecticuts Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, a third panelist, discussed advances the state has taken to make voter registration easier, including having DMV clerks ask people registering their car if they want to register to vote. Online voter registration, Merrill said, has revolutionized the way people register.

At least 100,000 people have registered to vote in Connecticut online over the past three years, she said, 15,000 in the past month, which Merrill called an extraordinary number even in a presidential year.

In Connecticut I have taken the attitude, and I think many people in Connecticut are with me on this, that the more people that participate and the more people that register to vote and are part of democracy the better off we all are, Merrill said.

Panel member Michael Brandi, executive director and general counsel to the Connecticut State Elections Enforcement Commission, said wholesale voter fraud was not a problem in Connecticut.

Honestly, I think the risk of in-person voter fraud is basically non-existent, Brandi said. But I will say there are areas of fraud that do exist and our commission, in particular, has to remain vigilant. Connecticut has a system of supervised absentee ballots to protect the integrity of that part of the process, but if someone is looking to game the system, they will try.

Nationally, strict voter ID laws have run into legal problems in federal court, most recently in North Carolina, where the evidence showed they specifically targeted minority voters for disenfranchisement.

Under Connecticut law, polling places ask for a drivers license, credit card with name and signature, a checkbook with name and address, a utility bill or other form of photo ID.

Merrill said she didnt want anything that would penalize people who left their wallets at home. Provisional ballots also can be used if needed.

Brandi urged the public and watchdogs to help guard the voting process against fraud. He said his small commission only had limited tools.

We need the eyes and ears of every citizen out there, Brandi said. If you see something, report it to us. If you have an issue, call us. We are there to assist and to help as best we can. We are also there to investigate and prosecute any examples of voter fraud or election fraud.

kborsuk@scni.com
Georgia prison officials have accepted a plan to let a Sherman man avoid extradition to the prison system he escaped in 1968  if Connecticut officials agree to supervise him.

Robert Stackowitz lived a quiet life in Sherman as an escapee who had 15 years left on his sentence for armed robbery, as previously reported by Hearst Connecticut Media.

Now reportedly in poor health, he still faces a possible return to Georgia Department of Corrections custody. But Stackowitz has passed a major hurdle from the seat of his wheelchair as he lobbies for Connecticut to keep him and to avoid an immediate return to a jail cell.

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles has granted the medical reprieve and the case is currently being submitted through the interstate compact for his supervision to be with the state of Connecticut, board spokesman Steve Hayes said in an email.

Hayes said the move would only be final if approved by Connecticut.

Stackowitz suffers from deteriorating heart disease, diabetes, bladder cancer and other illnesses, according to his attorney, Norman Pattis, who said the ailing fugitive and mechanic has been told by doctors that he has only a few years to live.

Pattis heralded the decision and thanked Georgia officials on behalf of his client, saying that it saved his life.

But the news may be bittersweet for the motorcycle- and boat-loving man who is now immobile.

This is not a granted parole, but a release based on his medical/health condition, Pattis said. He would be under supervision by that states community supervision agency. If his medical/health condition or prognosis was incorrect or it improves, or if he violates terms of his release and supervision, he would be returned to prison to complete his sentence.

If approved for community supervision, Stackowitz would be allowed to live freely, with monthly check-ins with a parole officer, according to Pattis.
Does not get down with artisanal potato chips.

Anthony Bourdain hopped on Reddit Tuesday to do one of the forums famous Ask Me Anythings. Hes fresh off winning yet another Emmy for Parts Unknown, and his working-class joint meal with President Obama in Vietnam will air on the shows next episode. Now a veteran of interrogations by internet users, he happily answered questions about his turn on Yo Gabba Gabba! and the most embarrassing things that have happened to him while filming television. Here are a few of the very best bits.

On his fast-food cravings: During the morning I get these horrendous cravings for Popeyes mac and cheese, and, uh, I will often disguise myself to try to slip into Popeyes.

The word that really bothers him: [O]veruse of the word artisanal. You know, an artisanal potato chip? What does that mean other than its an expensive potato chip?

He also doesnt want attitude with his microbrew: Oh, Im also no big fan of the judgmental barista and beer nerds. I mean, I like a good craft, but dont make me feel bad about my beer choices. You know what kind of beer I like? I like cold beer.

On his dream project: You know the show I havent been able to make yet, Id like to do a show with Keith Richards. Im working on it. Hes an enthusiast and a voracious reader. Hes very interested in British naval history. Maybe visiting the site of great British naval battles with Keith Richards, eat bangers and mash, cooking steak and pie together would be really fun.

Hinting at a possible wardrobe change for Parts Unknown: It would be interesting to show up on a show with like a Trumpian Cheeto tan. Actually, I should try that.

On the most dangerous experiences hes had filming, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya after Benghazi, Beirut in 2006, and: immediately after eating Nashville Hot Chicken, that was truly, truly terrifying. And if youre considering going to Nashville, by the way, please notice that Nashvillians themselves dont eat the extra-hot fried chicken. They know better. Unless youve got three or four days to spend in a bathroom, I really advise against that.

On the guiding principle behind editing Parts Unknown: If Im miserable and humiliated and everything goes wrong we show you that. I would draw your attention to the notorious Sicilian octopus fishing scene as a particularly unpleasant example of that. We really dont cut much out, if anything. Another example, Thailand. The famous Lady Boy Cabaret. Its filled with outrageously good looking transexuals or transvestites. Who kisses me on the mouth? The one girl who looks like Ernest Borgnine.

Discovering that Obama is super chill: Rarely have I seen someone enjoy drinking a beer from the bottle as much as the President.

How his daughter reacted to his guest appearance on one of her favorite shows, Yo Gabba Gabba!: But crazy enough when my daughter saw the show and saw me doting over Tootiewho as I recall, I was helping through an illnessshe became really jealous and pissed off at me, that I was being so nice and attentive to Tootie.

Why he stopped taking every shot offered to him by a fan: I know people offer those things with the best intentions but Im a dad now. Im the 60 year old dad of a 9 year old. I have to at least try to stay live long enough to get to the eye rolling stage of my daughters life.

On realizing he has nowhere to go but down after Archer: It was pretty much the high watermark of my career. After that, everything is meaningless.

Hes still taking potshots at Guy Fieri: Anyone who would insist on putting BBQ in a Nori roll, kind of offends me.

What kind of restaurants he doesnt approve of: There is a restaurant in Vegas, I think its called The Heart Attack Grill, where if you are over 350lbs you eat for free. I think that should be pretty much a war crime.

His advice for young aspiring chefs: Look, youre either the sort of person who likes the restaurant industry, or youre a normal person  Youre probably not going to be on TV, youre going to go home every night smelling of smoked salmon and garlic.

Finally, he weighs in on the very crucial hot-dog debate: No. I dont think its a sandwich. I dont think a hamburger is a sandwich either. The fact that its in between breadthe bread is a delivery system, a ballistic delivery system. It is not a classic sandwich, in my view.

I mean, if you were to talk into any vendor of fine hot dogs, and ask for a hot dog sandwich, they would probably report you to the FBI. As they should.
The Snapdragon 821-powered Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe - which was officially announced back in July, but launched only a couple of weeks ago in Taiwan - has now arrived in China. The device - which comes with 6GB RAM, 256GB storage, and 23MP/8MP camera combo - carries a price tag of RMB 4,999 (around $750) in the country.

In addition, a Snapdragon 820 variant of the device, which comes with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage has also been announced. It is priced at RMB 3,299, which translates into around $495 at current exchange rates.

Finally, the Asus ZenFone 3 Ultra as well as the standard ZenFone 3 (Snapdragon 652 variant with 4GB RAM) have also been made official for China. They carry a price tag of RMB 3,999 (around $600) and RMB 2,699 (around $405), respectively.

Via
There has been quite a bit of fuss surrounding the LeEco Le Pro 3 these past few months. After sneaking a quick peek of the device in September and then coming across it on Geekbench yesterday, now its time to finally see it in full. Today LeEco officially unwrapped its new flagship and its specs do mostly live up to the original hype.

The "mostly" part refers to a couple of prevailing rumors that fueled pre-release excitement. One is having 8GB of RAM on board and the other has to do with a promised battery capacity of 5000 mAh. Neither of these became reality in today's release, but there is still the distinct possibility of a higher-end 256GB storage model yet to come.

But we can also safely look past these two details and what we are left with is still a really powerful handset. It has a 5.5-inch, 1080p IPS LCD panel at its disposal, with a stylish 2.5D glass finish on top.

Underneath it is Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 821 SoC - the overclocked version with a maximum clock of 2.35GHz on its CPU and 653 MHz on the Adreno 530 GPU.

The RAM configurations still go up to 6GB and the list of available models includes:

4GB RAM + 32GB ROM

4GB RAM + 64GB ROM

6GB RAM + 64GB ROM

6GB RAM + 128GB ROM

The camera setup includes a 16MP main shooter, with an advertised 0.1 second PDAF focus speed and a few proprietary features like: Increased Sharpness, Intelligent Beauty Mode, Gender Recognition and others. On the front, there are 8MP at your disposal.

The Le Pro 3 is powered by a 4070mAh, which although still a far cry from 5000 mAh, is impressive nontheless, especially in a 7.5mm thick body.

The phone also supports 24W QuickCharge 2.0, which LeEco is confident can get you from zero to 50% in 30 minutes (impressive for a 4 thousand amp battery).

Speaking of the phone's body, it has a premium all-metal built with a brushed finish. In fact, the manufacturer claims a 98% metal content for the devices shell.

The front has a trio of capacitive buttons, the middle one shaped like the LeEco logo and complete with a "breathing light" feature.

On the back, there is a fingerprint reader and not much else, besides an edged logo. The Le Pro 3 uses a USB Type-C connector and doesn't really have another one. There is no 3.5mm jack, but before you assume some Apple plagiarism is in play, we'll remind you that the Le Max 2 and Le 2 also rely on the USB CDLA standard for audio since before the iPhone 7 was announced.

Other details worth noting include dual SIM support and dual Wi-Fi MIMO antennas for a maximum transfer speed of 866 Mbps. 4G LTE is pretty fast as well with 3x CA, adding up to around 600 Mbps.

The Le Pro 3 also has two speakers and runs on the Marshmallow-based EUI 5.8.

Currently color options include Silver, Gray, Rose Gold and Gold.

Pricing is as follows:

4GB RAM + 32GB - CNY 1799 ($270)

6GB RAM + 64GB - CNY 1999 ($300)

4GB RAM + 64GB - CNY 2499 ($375)

6GB RAM + 128GB - CNY 2999 ($450)

The latter are special "Zhang Yimou" Edition. The edition named after the famed Chinese film director will be themed after the upcoming movie 'Great Wall', starring Matt Damon. The phone will come with a custom "Great Wall" theme and wallpaper, an exclusive access to a behind-the-scenes video about the movie, a signature Great Wall leather flip case and a movie-themed retail box.

Pre-orders are live now, but there is no info on availability. We will definitely be looking forward to learning more about that.

Source (in Chinese) | Via
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Sony hasnt necessarily had the best year when it comes to smartphones. Many were quick to put the new Xperia X lineup down because of its drastic change over the previous Z models and higher-than-expected retail pricing; not to mention the lack of a fingerprint scanner in US variants of all Xperia Z models.

Sonys pre-orders in Taiwan, however, for the Xperia XZ smartphone have already sold out in only 45 minutes. Sonys pre-order promotion offered early buyers a charging dock, 16GB USB-C storage connector, and two cases: one flip cover and a back cover. This was incentive enough for people to go nuts with pre-orders in HTCs home country.

If you missed the first wave of orders, Sony is going to throw in some other extras like a pair of Bluetooth headphones (SBH70) and additional year of warranty for those who buy the phone once its released in October.

The Xperia XZ features a 1080p 5.2 inch LCD display, Snapdragon 820 CPU paired with 3GB of RAM in either 32 or 64GB of internal storage. That also includes the IP68 immersion protection that always came standard with all Xperia Z models. Theres a 23MP rear camera capable of taking 4K video and a 13MP front facing camera. Note that the global model has a fingerprint scanner on the power key while the US variant will not feature this scanner.

Will you be pre-ordering the Xperia XZ once it becomes available locally?

Thanks for the tip!

Via
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From its inception, and well before it made $10 billion of earthquake aid money disappear, Bill and Hillary Clintons Interim Haiti Recovery Commission ( IHRC ) was a vicious joke on Haitians. The original name, Commission Interimaire pour la Reconstruction dHaiti , should have been simply translated as Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti. After all, it was the commission that was temporary, not Haiti . There was also no need to change the word reconstruction to the vague term recovery, unless one deliberately wanted to suggest the collection of something. As the I-HRC, however, the organization not only acquired Hillary Rodham Clintons initials but also boasted that it would scoop up Haiti s reconstruction funds and turn the worlds first black republic into a temporary construct. If Mrs. Clinton has become a zombie and the I in I-HRC has faded, this could easily be interpreted as a sign of the Haitian gods wicked sense of humor. The great writer Toni Morrison once described Bill Clinton as our first black President, because of his background as a poor boy in Arkansas from a single-parent home, his fondness for junk food, and the political attacks on his sexuality. If so, then he has graduated to being Haiti 's first black-American dictator. For six years of a full dictatorship of the Clintons and their surrogates, on earthquake anniversaries Haitians at home and in the diaspora have made a ritual of searching through the rubble for the reconstruction funds that were donated by good people from all around the world. Where did the money go? everyone asks. The answer is simple: for a while it probably sat in the Swiss and Caribbean offshore banks where dictators stash their loots. In 2012, the United States presidential elections cost a record $2.6 billion. The Republican challenger Mitt Romney raised $0.99 billion, and the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama managed to raise an unprecedented $1.07 billion. Both politicians are regarded as champion fundraisers because of their feats. In 2016, by all estimates, the cost of the U.S. presidential elections doubled or quadrupled to about $5-10 billion. This is the most expensive presidential bid in history, and Hillary Clinton has vastly outspent Donald Trump. Where did the money come from? As of Aug. 22, 2016 , Clinton had officially raised only $436 million, and her top six donors had contributed about one tenth of these funds. Donald Trump, for his part, had raised $129 million, and the money from his top six contributors amounted to $11 million. These sums fell quite short of the money being spent by the two politicians, especially Clinton , who had already spent about $100 million on television advertisements alone by the end of August and had planned to spend $77 million more for advertisements in September and October. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton has relied on a large and well-paid entourage that has probably included medical personnel, and during her busy campaign schedule, she has used private airplanes like some of us take buses and taxis. Most of the money for her campaign has probably come as disbursements, which are not counted as carefully as money donations. These include out-of-pocket funds from the candidates and friendly donations of various services. Such disbursements have obscured the engine of the 2016 U.S. elections to an unprecedented degree. It is not possible to raise billions to tens of billions of dollars legitimately for political campaigns. More and more, in the West and in emerging market economies, these astronomical sums for elections are extracted from unsuspecting taxpayers. We have Brazil to thank for some insights into the machinations of politicians to finance their campaigns. In Brazil , the state energy company, Petrobras, was granting contracts to construction companies with the understanding that a percentage of the funds would be applied to the campaigns of various corrupt politicians. The money-laundering scandal, which involved more than $15 billion and led to President Dilma Rousseffs impeachment, is estimated to have touched every political party and 70% of the countrys ministers and legislators. For the Clintons , the boon from Haiti s earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010 came while HRC was Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton was the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti . As soon as massive numbers of Americans began to donate small sums of money for earthquake relief, Bill and Hillary Clinton transformed themselves into the face of Haiti . In their most calculated compassionate voices, they told stories about their marvelous honeymoon on the island and implored the public for donations. In reality, in the U.S. State Department, the mood was festive. On Feb. 1, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti , Kenneth Merten, cheerfully titled a section of his situation report, THE GOLD RUSH IS ON! By Mar. 8, 2010 , Bill Clinton had applied sufficient pressure on President Rene Preval, to force Haiti s Lower House to vote yes on a State of Emergency that would allow a group of rich donors to run the country for 18 months via the IHRC. During the same month, Hillary Clinton went to Montreal to raise money, ostensibly for Haiti s reconstruction, and Bill Clinton went to Davos to collect the rich donors. The next month, Bill Clinton worked to push his project on Haiti s Senate, where it was ironically called a coup detat durgence. The Senate voted no on Apr. 8, but President Preval insisted on another vote. In the next vote on Apr.13, 10 out of 25 senators stayed home to prevent a quorum. On Apr. 14, Michelle Obama made a special trip to Haiti , and the next day the deal was done. The vote was 9 away, 2 abstaining, 1 no, and 13 yes. All but one of the yes votes had come from Prevals party. Thus slightly more than three months after the earthquake, on Apr. 21, 2010 , the IHRC was inaugurated. With the IHRC, the Clintons established in Haiti their dream government, which I described, when I first observed it, as pay-to-play, meaning: an unelected government where political participation is based on money invested. In the IHRC, there were two parts: one foreign and the other Haitian. Bill Clinton chaired the foreign section, which included the representatives of 14 donors [US, European Union (EU), France, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), United Nations, World Bank, Organization of American States, CARICOM, the private donors, the diaspora, and the NGOs]. Each donor had to pledge to the IHRC $100 million over two years or forgive $200 million of Haitian debt. The poorer, Haitian, section of the IHRC had only seven members. Haiti s Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, formally led it as the nominal Co-Chair of the IHRC. The other six members were President Preval, who was allowed only a symbolic veto, plus one per son each to represent the Lower House, Senate, judiciary, business sector, and unions. Every Haitian member had to be approved by the foreigners, and Clinton ran the whole show. As the reconstruction money poured in, the IHRC became increasingly arrogant and opaque. According to the IHRC charter, Clinton and Bellerive gained the right of final approval over all major construction projects in Haiti . In addition, they even gave themselves the power to grant titles. Meanwhile, Haitian ministers and elected officials were blocked from IHRC meetings because they were not on the list. The IHRC is estimated to have collected $5.3 billion over two years and $9.9 billion over three years, without reconstructing much of anything. This represents more than five times the money that the Clintons have collected by other mechanisms like the Clinton Foundation or Laureate Education. Bill Clinton has claimed at various times that he only received 10% of the funds that had been pledged to the IHRC, but even if this were true, a vast sum of money would still have disappeared. By July 2011, Haiti s Ministry of Public Works, Transportation and Communication (MPTC) had approved $3.2 billion of IHRC projects, but only $84 million (2.6%) worth of projects had been completed. In a meeting of the Senate Public Works Committee with the MPTC on Aug. 11, 2011, the Senate Committee Chair, William Jeanty, said that the IHRC had not only appropriated for its balance sheets the projects of several Haitian ministries but also claimed credit for financing MPTC projects that had been funded by the European Union (EU) and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) before the IHRC was formed! To date, the only notable IHRC project has been the Caracol Industrial Park, a sweatshop complex in northern Haiti , far from the earthquake damage. Its construction was financed by USAID ($124 million) and the IDB ($105 million), and its unstated purpose was to force the construction of modern seaports and airports in northern Haiti to support mining. To create a few thousand slave-wage jobs, this industrial park, built without regard to its environmental impact, has destroyed the homes of hundreds of farmers and polluted a pristine river and bay. The IHRC barely lasted through its 18-month term. After this, Haitian politicians publicly declared it to be dysfunctional, and the Haitian Senate did not renew its mandate. On Apr. 10, 2014 , two Haitian lawyers, Newton Louis St. Juste and Andre Michel, filed a legal action against Bill Clinton in Haiti s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes. On Oct. 13, 2014 , the court asked Clinton to provide an audit of the IHRC funds. Rather than abide by the courts request, Clinton claimed immunity based on the fact that he had been the UN Special Envoy to Haiti . It is unlikely that Haitians will ever recover the funds that have vanished into the IHRC, and that are now probably financing HRCs campaign. At best, one might hope that Hillary Clinton will lose the election and thus be prevented from gathering more power. The big prize in her sights now is the United States , where she and Bill Clinton should be able to charge billions of dollars to each participant in a pay-to-play government. Political arguments about racial justice and the lesser evil entirely miss the point that in a pay-to-play government, those who are poor or even middle class, will count only for what they can furnish of themselves to the rich. This will certainly mean low wages, prisons, and an unprecedented predation on those who are directly hit by climate-change catastrophes. For Haitians at home and in the diaspora, who have seen the devil itself in I-HRC, she could never be a choice for anything. As for the ancestors: if they have their way with her, she will come close enough to the presidency to taste it, touch it and smell it, and then, she will lose it. This article was originally published on News Junkie Post . Dady Chery is the author of We Have Dared to Be Free .




Harlow is a former New Town in Essex with a population of 86,000. Located in the upper Stort Valley, it was built in the decades after the Second World War to ease overcrowding and London and provide homes for people bombed out during the Blitz. It includes Britain's first pedestrian precinct and first modern residential tower block, The Lawn. Old Harlow, the historic part of the town, was mentioned in the Domesday Book. David and Victoria Beckham's former home, Rowneybury House, nicknamed 'Beckingham Palace', is nearby.

09:44, 30 OCT 2022
href="/au/companies/westpac/148822">Westpac has recently announced it will introduce the corporate hijab, making it the second major Australian bank to upgrade its uniform in this way after Commonwealth Bank made the move earlier this year.Westpac has a long proud history of ensuring diversity and inclusion for our people, and introducing the corporate hijabs is another way we can show our support for our people and ensure they feel great at work, a Westpac spokesperson told HC.The branded hijabs have been designed by Carla Zampatti and will be launched as part of the new corporate wardrobe in April 2017 for the banks 200th anniversary.Although the Westpac hijab has yet to be introduced, feedback from staff has been very positive, and those who have seen the design say it blends beautifully with the broader uniform, the spokesperson said.As Commonwealth Bank employees had been wearing the corporate hijab for some time, HC sat down with Deb Howcroft, executive general manager of organisational development, to talk about how this new uniform item had been developed.The idea for the hijab was brought forward through the banks Mosaic network, she said, which is a volunteer employee network that focuses on cultural diversity. The network looks at ways to make people feel more inclusive across different cultural backgrounds.One of the things that they identified was that for some women who were wearing the hijabs, they didnt feel as included as we would want them to feel in the organisation, Howcroft said.One employee in the network conducted focus groups with female employees from an Islamic background in order to pinpoint what a great hijab looked like.She spent time understanding different fabrics, looking at different colours, and understanding how to wear the hijab. She didnt come from an Islamic background so it really her reaching out to say How can I support you, my colleagues, in feeling more included in the organisation?After working with the corporate uniform people and advising them of the preferred design and fabric, the branded hijab was corporate hijab was launched at an Iftar dinner on 15 June this year which was hosted by Commonwealth Banks Retail Bank.The main aim was to listen to employees from different cultural backgrounds and understand whats important to them to help them feel included.Its one thing to have an intent around being inclusive but if youre not listening to people and understanding what inclusion and exclusion means for them, then its very hard to achieve that inclusive intent, Howcroft told HC.Feedback has been really positive by staff too, she said, with a number of them participating in videos talking about how they feel with the corporate hijab as part of the uniform.Weve had good feedback from a whole range of our employees around this being a really inclusive approach to take. This is both from people who choose to wear the hijab and from others who dont but recognise that by having the hijab it is a very visible example of an inclusive environment.Having the employee volunteer network was a crucial part of driving this type of cultural change, she added.Its not just about having senior leadership commitment; its also about enabling people to get involved in creating an organisation and culture that theyre passionate about and theyre proud of. That makes a phenomenal difference for us.
quo;I have witnessed the complete and utter disenfranchising of the voices of men and women of colour, and the fault lies not only in the direct management staff but in the response of those tasked with protecting employee rights.This quote was taken from one out of a series of emails leaked to media firm Mic , allegedly from current and former employees of Apple.The emails were said to contain examples of discrimination and sexual harassment by staff employed by the tech giant.I do not feel safe at a company that tolerates individuals who make rape jokes, one current employee said. I feel *incredibly* unsafe at Apple now. I have tried to escalate to my manager several times that the culture was toxic, yet nothing has appeared to change.The specific instance the author was referring to was an online chat between colleagues talking about the "Bed Intruder" song that went viral in 2010.Mic also reported on other alleged discriminatory behaviour conducted by staff at Apple found in the leaked emails.The conversation turned to all of the men being dismissive about their wives and their significant others, a former staff member said. I felt very uncomfortable of the reality that I was the only woman in the room as all of my male co-workers stereotyped women as nags and this was not countered by my manager as being inappropriate.Another recounted a job interview in which she claimed the interviewer opened by asking, You're not technical, are you?If he were familiar with my actual work, he could not in good conscience say such a thing, she wrote. My response to his condescension was to discuss advanced learning theory and the use of metaphor and semiotics along with the theoretical foundations of design patterns.She never got the job.Some emails sent to Mic were written by men within the company. One former staff member said he sent a complaint of sexual harassment to multiple people at Apple, including CEO Tim Cook.Why I felt I would be retaliated against was the fact that I would consistently be referred to as an emotional man that resembled having the qualities of a woman, he said. Any male can tell you that being referred to as a woman is an insinuation that you are not strong enough or stable enough to handle the difficulties of life or work in the way a man can.Apple responded to the claims in an interview with Recode , a tech news publication under the Vox Media brand.We take these things not just seriously, but personally, said Apples HR chief Denise Young Smith. I have been grieved over this ... that someone may have had this kind of an experience.She noted that commensurate actions had been taken although she declined to give details of exactly what this entailed due to privacy concerns.In a workforce that is 32% female, Young Smith said she hoped to develop a culture where people could call each other out.I dont think people are too shy about doing it, she said, but I am also very cognisant that we are still 70/30 in our very hard-core engineering team. We have to be cognisant that someone may not feel that their voice is heard or valued.She admitted that the leaked emails may have led to people being afraid of speaking up about discrimination in Apple.The unfortunate consequence of this is that we may have lost the trust of others.
Confirming North Carolinas status as a battleground state, the latest survey of likely voters in the state by the Elon University Poll found Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are virtually tied for the lead with less than two months to go until Election Day. Trump has a 44-43 percent advantage among likely voters in the state, a lead that falls within the polls margin of error, with 6 percent of voters backing Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.

Most voters feel Trump would be better for rich people, white people and men, while most believe Clinton would be better for poor people, women and minorities. Neither candidate fared well when asked how they stacked up against previous presidential candidates from their parties, with a majority saying both are worse than usual.

This election is so tight right now, that small swings of a few points should be expected between now and November, said Jason Husser, assistant professor of political science at Elon and director of the Elon University Poll. North Carolina has been extremely important over the last several election cycles with very tight election outcomes. These numbers suggest that will continue to be the case, and both campaigns would do well to continue to focus on the Old North State.

Exploring other opinions within the presidential contest, the poll found that voters familiar with Trumps Make America Great Again campaign slogan who think the past is better than today were most likely to say that the decade of the 1980s was better overall.

Also, while Trump has praised the leadership qualities of Russian President Vladimir Putin, 60 percent of likely voters said President Obama is doing a better job leading his country than Putin is doing leading his.

The health of the candidates, which has been elevated into a campaign issue in recent weeks, continues to be on the minds of likely voters, with more voters concerned about the impact of Clintons health on her ability to serve as president than Trumps, according to the poll. However, nearly half of voters say neither candidate has released enough information about their health at this point in the campaign.

The live-caller, dual frame (landline and cell phone) survey of 799 registered voters was conducted from Sept. 12-16, 2016. Of those respondents, 644 are likely voters in the November election. Survey results in this news release present responses from those self-identified registered voters who say they are likely to vote in the Nov. 8 election and has a margin of error of +/- 3.86 points.

TRUMP VS. CLINTON

A closer look at the results in the presidential contest reveals a strong divide in voter preferences along racial lines. Among black voters in North Carolina, 98 percent say they plan to vote for Clinton while just 2 percent plan to pick Trump, when the two are compared head-to-head. Nearly two-thirds of white voters  65 percent  plan to vote for Trump, while 35 percent say they will pick Clinton.

Republican strategists have long known that they need to tighten the racial gaps between the parties, Husser said. However, we dont see that happening with African-American voters in North Carolina. Just 2 percent of likely black voters we talked to plan to vote for Donald Trump.

Trump is attracting more male voters, with 55 percent of men picking Trump, and Clinton maintains an edge with women voters, who prefer her to Trump by a 53-47 margin.

Those affiliated with both major parties appear to be aligning behind their partys nominee, with Trump attracting 94 percent of Republicans and Clinton garnering support from 92 percent of Democrats. But among self-identified independent voters, Trump holds a sizable advantage, with 65 percent of those voters choosing Trump.

Trump is also generating support from those who sat out the last presidential election. Among those who did not vote in 2012, 78 percent say they plan to vote for Trump this year.

Following multiple polls showing high disapproval ratings for both Trump and Clinton, the Elon Poll found that despite their preferences, a majority of voters say this years candidates are worse than those on the ballot in previous years. Among likely voters, 62 percent said Trump was worse than Republican candidates in years past, and 51 percent said Clinton was worse than past Democratic candidates.

According to Husser, in a contest this close, the segment of voters still making up their minds has the potential to tip the election one way or the other and third-party candidates that experience a late surge can influence the final tally. In North Carolina, leading third-party candidate Gary Johnson, a Libertarian, is the preference of 6 percent of voters, while 5.8 percent of voters say they are undecided or dont know who they will vote for in the presidential race this fall. Another 1.1 percent of voters say they prefer another third-party candidate or refused to say who they will vote for.

If elected president this year, Hillary Clinton will make history as the first female president of the United States, but that fact doesnt seem to be having much of an impact on the race, the Elon Poll has found. Asked whether they were more or less likely to vote for Clinton because she would be the first female president, the vast majority of voters  87 percent  said that makes no difference in their decision.

Q: Are you more or less likely to vote for Hillary Clinton because she would be the first female president in American history, or does it not make much difference to you either way?

 More likely: 8.4 percent

 Less likely: 3 percent

 No difference: 87.3 percent

A GREAT DECADE FOR AMERICA?

On hats, T-shirts and in speeches, Trump has been consistently pushing the theme that his election is a step toward making America great again. So the Elon University Poll asked  considering American culture, do you think there was a better time in the past than today, and if so, when was it?

Nearly two-thirds of voters  63 percent  said there is some decade in the past that tops the one in which we now live, while 31 percent said past decades dont top today.

Q: Over the course of the presidential campaign, you may have heard Donald Trumps campaign slogan, Make America Great Again. Thinking about American culture, do you think there was a better time in the past than today?

 Yes: 62.8 percent

 No: 30.5 percent

 Dont know: 5.9 percent

Among those seeing greatness in past decades, the 1980s was the most popular period, with 35 percent saying that decade was better than today. The 1990s came in second as the choice of 16 percent of voters, and the 1950s ranked third, with 14 percent of voters selecting that period.

The state of the economy during a past decade was the most common reason given when voters were asked why things were better in years past. Trump voters were more likely to cite morals as a reason why a past period was better, while Clinton voters were more likely to say unity made a past decade better.

Democrats and Republicans are so polarized that even their views of the past are divided, Husser said.

Looking at the decades voters said were better than today, the state of the economy and the leadership of President Ronald Reagan were top reasons given for picking the 1980s. For another popular decade, the 1950s, morals was the top reason given, followed by the economy and unity.

Black voters were more likely than white voters to say today is better than previous decades, with 45 percent selecting our current time rather than some time in the past, compared to 28 percent of white voters. Of those black voters who did prefer a time in the past, only 7 percent picked a time before the 1980s.

BETTER LEADER: PUTIN OR OBAMA?

Trump voters nearly unanimously disapproved of the job that President Barack Obama is doing as president, and Clinton voters offered their approval of Obama by nearly the same margin. But how do the leadership qualities of Obama stack up against another world leader  Russian President Vladimir Putin?

When asked who is a better leader, 59.5 percent of voters said Obama, while 23 percent said Putin, with 18 percent either saying they dont know or refusing to answer.

Q: Who do you think is a better leader: Barack Obama, president of the United States, or Vladimir Putin, president of Russia?

 Obama: 59.5 percent

 Putin: 22.8 percent

 Dont know: 13.7 percent

THE QUESTION OF HEALTH

Recent weeks have seen the health of the two candidates for president come to the forefront as an issue. The Elon Poll found that voters are less concerned with the health of 70-year-old Donald Trump than the health of 68-year-old Hillary Clinton.

About Clinton, who recently recovered from a bout with pneumonia, 56 percent of likely voters said they believe she will be physically healthy enough to serve as president, while 32 percent said she wont be. That compares to 77 percent who say Trump will be healthy enough to serve as president and 11 percent who said he wont be.

But close to half of likely voters say neither candidate has disclosed enough information about their health. 47 percent of voters say Clinton has not disclosed enough information about her health, and 45 percent said Trump hasnt disclosed enough health information.



Elon University Poll

Conducted in the fall and spring of every academic year, the Elon University Poll was started in 2000 and is fully funded by Elon University as a public service to citizens. It is a neutral, independent operation that does not do contract work. The poll uses live, trained interviewers operating in a computer-assisted telephone lab on campus.

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Compiled by Jesse Wood

On Tuesday afternoon, a Charlotte Police Department officer shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott. Later on Tuesday, protests erupted. See reaction from Sen. Thom Tillis and the ACLU inside.

Read a timeline of the shooting and protests here.

Tillis Statement On The Violent Protests In Charlotte

WASHINGTON, D.C.  Today, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) issued the following statement:

The response to the shooting that occurred yesterday was utter chaos that resulted in the looting of private property and injuries to the very officers who were working to protect the safety of the protestors. It was an embarrassing moment for the city that was only redeemed by the brave men and women of the CMPD who demonstrated incredible composure, which likely prevented the violence from escalating further.

Charlotte is better than this, and I hope that the mayor and other city elected officials will join Chief Putney in demonstrating leadership that is guided by the facts and not political considerations of a given day.

ACLU Calls on Charlotte Police to Release Video Footage of Keith Lamont Scott Shooting

CHARLOTTE  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of North Carolina today called on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to release any body or dash cam footage that captured yesterdays police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, the 194th Black person killed by U.S. police this year. Police say Mr. Scott was shot and killed while officers were trying to execute an arrest warrant for a different person.

A new North Carolina law, HB 972, will prevent law enforcement agencies from releasing body camera footage in the public interest without a court order, but the law does not take effect until October 1. All Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers are supposed to be equipped with body cameras while on patrol and the cameras should be in use any time an arrest is made, according to department policy.

Karen Anderson, Executive Director of the ACLU of North Carolina, released the following statement:

We join the people in Charlotte and across the nation in sending our deepest condolences to Mr. Scotts family. We demand a full investigation into why yet another Black person in the United States has died at the hands of a police officer. The public and Mr. Scotts family deserve answers, and we urge the State Bureau of Investigation and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation.

In the interest of transparency and accountability, and particularly in light of conflicting accounts about the shooting, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department should quickly release any and all footage it has of the events leading up to the shooting, as well as the shooting itself. The department should also explain why the officer who shot Mr. Scott was not wearing a body camera.

HB972, the disgraceful law passed by the North Carolina General Assembly and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory that prevents law enforcement agencies from releasing body camera footage without a court order, does not take effect until October 1. As we seen elsewhere, video footage of police shootings can provide crucial evidence of what took place  especially when there are conflicting accounts from police and community members. Charlotte should set an example for North Carolina by releasing footage of the shooting promptly before the obstacles imposed by the new state law take effect.

What we already know is that far too many people of color are victims of wrongful targeting and excessive use of force by law enforcement officers across the country, and last night we were once again harshly reminded that North Carolina is not immune to that reality.

Roy Cooper on Events in Charlotte

RALEIGH, N.C.N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper released the following statement:

Violence will not bring justice. I urge everyone in Charlotte tonight to heed the call for peaceful demonstration.

We must come together as a community to get answers and find a better path forward.

Already tonight we have seen civilians, police and emergency responders injured. This must stop.

Ive spoken to Mayor Roberts and have offered her the full assistance of the N.C. Department of Justice.

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The lessons from Finland's schools can inspire any nation and any school system.

Despite a wide range of ongoing social and economic challenges, Finland's education system - its teachers, schools, and teacher training universities - are the envy of educators around the world.

In the world of childhood education, no nation on Earth has a better reputation than Finland.

The principal of a huge school in South Korea recently toured one of Finland's elite teacher training universities, a network of schools that is so selective and so intensely focused on research and practice that they represent the "Global Ivy League" of teacher training.

"What do you want to take back home with you?" asked the Finnish school principal.

The Korean school principal sighed, as if it was difficult for him to absorb everything he was experiencing and how different it was from his own nation's education system.

"Everything," he replied.

If you asked many teachers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere, they would reply much the same.

For these reasons, Finland should award its own "Nobel Prize" for education.

Every year, a panel of Finnish and international educators can select the schools, teachers, and programs from around the world that offer the strongest benefits for children's learning, health, and well-being. And every year, Finland's national leaders and universities can co-host a ceremony for the world's most prestigious education award: Finland's Prize for Global Education.

Good precedents already exist. Finland issues the Millennium Technology Prize. Sweden awards Nobel Prizes. Hollywood has the Oscars, the Academy Awards.

Partners for the event can include Finnish and Nordic universities, foundations, scientific bodies, and companies.

Every year, the world's attention should focus on Finland as the Global Capital of Childhood Education.

It will be a great thing for Finland, and for the world.



William Doyle is a 2015-2016 Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Eastern Finland, where he lectures on media and education.
The District Court of Pirkanmaa has found five members of the national volleyball team of Cuba guilty of the aggravated rape of a woman in a hotel room in Tampere on 2 July, 2016, sentencing four of them to five years and one to three years and six months in prison.

Helsingin Sanomat reports that three of the offenders admitted in court to having sexual intercourse with the woman but insisted that the intercourse was consensual.

Their arguments, however, failed to convince the District Court of Pirkanmaa. The five defendants were collectively ordered yesterday to pay 9,000 euros in damages for pain and personal injury and 15,000 euros in damages for temporary disability to the victim.

Reports in the media indicate that the men used physical force to rape the woman several times over a period of one-and-a-half hours before she managed to flee to the hotel lobby. She was also filmed during the ordeal by one of the offenders, according to Helsingin Sanomat.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Kalle Parkkinen  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
I am a retired newspaperman. I am 69 and live in Poca, WV, with my wife of 45 years, Lou Ann. We grew up in Cleveland. Three kids. Grandfather.

More on who I am is here.

Report all errors to DonSurber@GMail.com
Darrell Issa has the most sordid past of anyone in Congress today



In the last couple of weeks, you may have read about a poll of likey voters in Orange and San Diego counties that shows progressive Democrat and first time candidate, Doug Applegate, a former Marine colonel, closing in rapidly on Trump-backing extremist Darrell Issa. The new poll confirms another showing the race iall tied-up at 43-43% , in an increasingly swingy district where Obama beat McCain 50-49% and where Romnney beat Obama 52-46%.





This year, though, the district, which is almost entirely suburban and very well-educated, is swinging back in a Democratic direction, primarily because of the offensive presence of Trump at the top of the Republican ticket, a presence that Issa enthusiastically welcomed and supported. Hillary is leading Trump in CA-49 by 5 points-- 46-41% and Trump "is deeply unpopular, holding a 37-60% favorable-unfavorable rating."





The polling firm's memo makes it clear that "Issa is weighed down by the drag of Donald Trumps presence at the top of the ticket and a rapidly shifting electorate that combine to make the 49th a level playing field. Most importantly, voters have had enough of the party politics at the center of the broken system in Congress, and they are looking for independent leaders like Marine Colonel Doug Applegate... Applegate holds a 14-point lead among self-ascribed Independents (45-31 percent), and an even bigger 51-33 percent advantage among No Party Preference (NPP) voters. This will be a difficult trend for Issa to reverse, as Independents favor a Democratic candidate over a Republican on the generic ballot, 39-30 percent."





Issa's response was to launch an ugly attack on Applegate over a divorce 2002, which backfired in Issa's face when Applegate's ex-wife went to the press and said she is voting for Applegate. "Im disappointed that someone is making disrespectful and uninformed personal attacks against our family," his ex-wife said. "Doug and I are parents first, and we raised two amazing children together. I support his run for Congress and I will be voting for him in November." I have a feeling that none of the people whose businesses Issa burned down when he was making his living as an arsonist-for-hire, are willing to tell the press they are planning for vote for him in November.





As you may know Blue America endorsed Doug's campaign-- you can contribute here -- and a few days later, the DCCC added him to their Red-to-Blue page. Friday, Veterans For Bernie Founder and National Director, Tyson Manker, announced his group had endorsed Applegate as well.





Manker's statement was that "Colonel Applegate deployed to Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. He shouldered the burden with the 2.5 million Americans who laced up their boots and headed down range after September 11th. I know the Colonel will ask the right questions and ensure we are only sending our forces overseas when it is the last choice, not our first option... Veterans swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Veterans For Bernie Sanders believes that the oath we took did not end the day we discharged, it continues into civilian service as well. First and foremost we must elect Representatives that are accountable to the people. We must elect Representatives with proven leadership. We must elect those that have the skills to reach across the aisle to end the paralysis that has brought our Congress to a stand still. Colonel Applegates opponent, Darrell Issa (U.S. Army veteran), voted to authorize the Iraq war, voted to cut an increase to military benefits, and dismissed 9/11 as 'just a plane crash.' That is why we endorse our brother, retired Marine Colonel Doug Applegate to be the next Representative of Californias 49th Congressional District... We have trusted commanders just like Colonel Applegate with our lives on the battlefield, which is why Veterans For Bernie knows he will do what is right for the people when elected to Congress on November 8th."

UPDATE: New Ad





The Applegate campaign just started running a strong new TV ad in Orange and San Diego counties. What do you think?
Measures proposed by the Government to reduce homeless numbers may come too late, a leading homelessness charity has warned.

Dublin Simon Community has called for swifter action to get people off the streets and into homes, as it launched its annual report.

It came as the charity counted 168 rough sleepers in Dublin's inner city this week, as well as an additional 60 people in the Merchant's Quay cafe.

Speaking at the report's launch, Sam McGuinness of the Dublin Simon Community said it supported the Government's action plan for homelessness, Rebuilding Ireland.

The plan intends to build 200 homes by the end of the year, a further 800 next year and another 700 by 2018.

But Mr McGuinness said the progress "may be too late".

"These (rough sleeper) numbers are not going to stop. There's nothing presently that will stop these numbers."

He also called for more support in mental health, addiction and medical services as numbers on the streets increase.

"The problem is this may all take too long. We are having a lot of suicidal ideation, and health problems. We're seeing them a lot more often, and across many services," he said.

The charity's annual report revealed that just 10pc of people in emergency accommodation had moved into a home in 2015.

Meanwhile, 59pc of people in emergency accommodation have been homeless for more than two years.

Mr McGuinness also commented on the charity's most recent rough sleeper count, which revealed a sharp increase in people forced to sleep on the streets.

The figure was the highest seen since December 2014, before the Merchant's Quay night cafe was set up.

"That means there were 228 people without a bed," he said.

He also pointed out that the Dublin Simon Community's count did not include people who may have been sleeping in the city's parks, explaining that the parks were difficult to get into at night.

Proud

Dublin Lord Mayor Brendan Carr was also at the report's launch yesterday.

"In 101 ways, I'm very proud of this city," he said.

"I'm proud of the people, but I'm ashamed at the way the homeless situation has escalated over the past number of years.

"Any Dub would be ashamed of the situation."

But he thanked the Simon Community for their efforts, and stressed that tackling homelessness was the responsibility of everyone living in or visiting the city.
Notorious criminal Alan 'Fatpuss' Bradley is enjoying his first taste of freedom in four years today.

Fatpuss was yesterday granted bail and released pending the outcome of a legal challenge against his imprisonment for trying to rob a security van.

Finglas mobster Bradley (42) was jailed for conspiring to steal from a security van transporting almost 1m in cash as part of a raid organised by slain crime lord Eamon 'The Don' Dunne's gang.

Fatpuss (42), with his brother Wayne and other 'Don' gang members, pleaded guilty in the Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring to steal cash from Chubb Ireland in November 2007 at Tesco, Celbridge, Co Kildare.

Appeal

He had been sentenced in April 2012 to nine years, dating from February 14, 2012, with the final two years suspended. This sentence was reduced on appeal to eight years with 18 months suspended.

Younger brother Wayne (37) was released from prison last December.

Fatpuss was the second-in-command of the 2007 crime, just behind gang boss Eamon 'The Don' Dunne and also has close links to several major gangland criminals in the capital.

He was considered a major player in robberies in the 1990s and early 2000s.

He was suspected of involvement in at least a dozen robberies, including a 1996 heist at the Santry Omniplex which netted about IR600,000 and, at around the same time, a robbery at Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt, Dublin, worth about IR400,000.

There were also an exceptional number of robberies in 2005 to which his gang was linked.

Fatpuss's legal team said he is entitled to enhanced remission on various grounds, including that he has engaged in crime awareness, anger management and peace education programmes.

He also says he has the skill-set to start his own business on release in personal training and event management which, he believed, made him less likely to reoffend.

Fatpuss - whose current address is Churchfields, Kentstown, Co Meath - has applied to the Minister for Justice seeking enhanced remission, but had twice been refused.

Quash

He launched a High Court challenge against the minister seeking to quash that decision.

On the basis of a one-third remission, Bradley claims he should have been released from Portlaoise Prison towards the end of June last.

If granted the normal one-quarter remission he would be entitled to his freedom this December.

At the High Court yesterday, Ms Justice Miriam O'Regan heard that the while the State is opposing Alan Bradley's action it was consenting to him being released on bail until the action has been determined.

Micheal P O'Higgins, SC, said the conditions of Bradley's bail include that he is to live at his home in Kentstown and be the subject of a curfew where he must remain in his home between 11pm and 7am.

His passport was surrendered and he undertook not to leave the jurisdiction.
Gardai have seized 150,000 worth of heroin from a Dublin mob who are closely linked to gangland killer Brian Rattigan.

In a planned operation yesterday, armed officers searched six properties in the south inner city and made the seizure of one kilo of heroin in James Street.

A well-known 26-year-old criminal from the Basin Street area and a 54-year-old woman from the Pearse Street flats were arrested and were being questioned last night at Kevin Street and Kilmainham Garda Stations.

It is suspected that the heroin was about to be "bagged" into smaller quantities for lower level drug dealers when officers pounced and seized the drugs.

The arrested male is extremely well known to gardai and he has served jail time for violent disorder and other crimes.

He has been involved in a localised feud in the south inner city for a number of years.

The arrested woman is also known to gardai for her association with organised criminals.

Sources say that the mob linked to Brian Rattigan continue to be one of the capital's most dangerous criminal groupings.

Rattigan (35) is one of Ireland's most notorious criminals and is serving a life sentence for the 2001 murder that started the bloody Crumlin/Drimnagh feud which claimed up to 15 lives.

Stabbed

Drug dealer Declan Gavin, who was the first fatality of the feud, was labelled a 'rat' before Rattigan stabbed him to death at an Abrakebabra fast-food outlet on the Crumlin Road on August 25, 2001.

Rattigan, who became the first drug dealer to be found guilty of charges connected to directing the supply of drugs while in prison, was also jailed for 17 years by the Special Criminal Court in March, 2013.

It has long been suspected that he still continues to exert major influence on the Dublin crime scene from his cell in Portlaoise.

The same mob who were targeted in yesterday's raids are suspects in the gruesome murder of south inner city criminal Philip Finnegan last month whose body was found in remote woodland near Carbury in Co Kildare on September 2.

However, neither of the duo arrested yesterday are suspected of involvement in that murder.

Sources described yesterday's bust as "significant".

"As part of an ongoing investigation into the activities of an organised crime gang, gardai from Kevin Street and Kilmainham Detective Units assisted by gardai from the Garda Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau stopped and searched a male and female on James's Street," a garda spokesman said.

"During the course of the search gardai discovered a kilo of heroin with an approximate street value of 150,000," the spokesman added.
A senior midwife at Cavan General Hospital said it is "possible" that the circumstances in which a baby boy died just hours after his birth could happen again at the hospital.

In an incident form filled out on May 14, 2014, Ann Arnott, who was the midwife in charge when Siobhan Whelan presented at the hospital the day before, said a re-occurrence was possible.

Conor Whelan was delivered by emergency section on May 13 2014 and died just 17 and a half hours later.

His mum Siobhan and his dad Andrew were present in court this week to hear testimony in an inquest into his death.

Ms Whelan said she wants to know how she fell "through the cracks" of the system. She believes a red flag raised about a low-lying placenta which could have diagnosed a condition that was found after her son's birth was not followed up on.

She had been suffering from a case of undiagnosed vasa praevia, an obstetric complication in which foetal blood vessels cross or run near the internal orifice of the uterus.

On the day she presented at the hospital, Ms Arnott took a call from Ms Whelan who rang to say she believed she was in labour at around noon.

At 12.50 she said she "heard a scream coming from the corridor outside". Ms Whelan had blood on her trousers but Ms Arnott said she determined it was not an active bleed. She was overdue and was scheduled to be induced on May 14.

Bleeding

A number of steps were taken in relation to Ms Whelan after she presented with bleeding, including a CTG scan which was set up to monitor her baby's heartbeat.

Two junior doctors, a registrar and a senior house officer, were called to assess her. It was decided to carry out an artificial membrane rupture.

The midwife said she wanted the consultant Dr Rita Mehta to carry out the procedure but she told the doctor, who was at a statistics meeting, that it could wait 10 minutes.

However just a minute or so later, due to a deceleration in the baby's heart rate, it was decided the procedure should be carried out immediately.

Dr Mehta was summoned immediately and the procedure was carried out. Ms Whelan was then rushed to surgery as staff had trouble accessing a foetal heart rate. Baby Conor was born at 13.49 on May 13 and was transferred to the Rotunda in Dublin for treatment.

However he was subsequently brought back to Cavan where he spent his final hours with his parents and two sisters.

The court heard that Ms Whelan's placenta was divided into two discs, joined by vital arteries and veins via the membrane.

The condition was not picked up during a scan in March 2014, although a radiographer, Dr Angela Mortimer, who compiled the report based on the scan said it would have been present.

Ms Whelan said she was told her consultant would likely carry out an internal exam later to follow up, but this was disputed by Dr Mortimer, yesterday who said she would "never say that".

The inquest continues.
The bike scheme gets cars off the road and boosts health

Dublin Bikes can not expand without help from the National Transport Authority (NTA), says Dublin Lord Mayor Brendan Carr.

Any hope of rolling out the popular bike scheme further to suburbs will likely require funding from the NTA as Dublin City Council currently spends upwards of 350,000 to keep the current 101 stations open.

"It is hitting the budget of the council and while it is worth it at the moment as we're getting cars off the roads and helping to improve the health of the city, there is a major cost to the city even with the current sponsorship of the bikes," the Lord Mayor told the Herald.

Cog

"The scheme has become a major cog in the city's public transport system and an objective of the NTA is to get people using public transport, so I do believe that they should come in and assist [with funding]."

The city's bike scheme currently costs 1.9m a year to run, with subscriptions and usage charges coming to 1.2m.

Coca Cola pays 312,000 for its advertising on the bikes and stations, with the council covering the remaining shortfall.

"We're happy to ask anyone to come in and help fund public transport, but it is costing money to put the scheme on, so if the NTA could come in and assist we'd be delighted," Mr Carr added.

NTA chief executive Anne Graham said she would "of course love to provide funding" for DublinBikes to expand but "maintenance costs" for the programme were an issue.

"Where do you find the funding for that? Does it go on to the users? We need to find the appropriate funding model for Dublin Bikes in the future," she added.

From today, commuters can use a Leap card to collect a bike at any of the Dublin Bike scheme's 101 stations across the city. The caveat is that Leap card accounts can not be used to pay for bike trips, as the system currently still only operates for Dublin Bus, Dart and Luas services.

Instead Dublin Bikes customer accounts will continue to be the source of payment.

However, Leap cards can now hold registration details for both schemes.

"People can use the bike to a certain point, jump on a bus or Luas, then get a train if needs be, all with the same smart card," Mr Carr said.

"People have been calling for it for a long time and after a long testing period we've got it sorted now. Hopefully people will see the advantage of using the system."
As the evolving needs of DCs move beyond the capabilities of simple automation, the risksof damaged, expired, or lost products, too-slow processing, and other inefficienciesand productivity challenges grow. Industry 4.0 technologies can allow DCs to evolve to meet the new demands placed upon them, while improving productivity and reducing risk through much more reliable and consistent productivity and output (table 1).

E-commerce fulfillment centers perhaps best typify the above challenges: They experience fast-enough throughput to justify automation, but they also must house a wide variety of extremely diverse products and endure volatile seasonal demand. Thus smart automation should be highly flexible in terms of product handling, as well as be able to adapt to variable demand and to interact with other systems and human employees during peak demand periods that may require additional resources to handle increased workloads. These pressures, in turn, make the facilities more complex and their actions more labor-intensive.

At the same time, the ways in which DC facilities are being used are changing. This evolution is, in turn, driving a growing need for smarter, more adaptable automation. DCs are expected to accommodate a shorter, faster supply chain by supporting shortened product life cycles, and to move products as quickly as possible, so much so that DCs now are also known as throughput centers. 11 They are increasingly expected to offer critical supply chain capabilities such as omnichannel capabilities, reverse logistics, return handling, and value-added services ranging from product assembly to product labelling, repacking, and repair. In addition, DCs are also increasingly expected to store a broader range of products with specific requirements in terms of dimensions, temperature, fragility, and safety obligations. 12 While this increases the range of products that can be handled, it also increases the resources needed to handle them to support the value-added services.

Historically, however, automation in DCs has been limited, allowing only for similar product shape and type handling and requiring high levels of standardization, as in the examples described above. Additionally, many robots and automated systems have been kept separate and cordoned off from human workers due to safety concerns, limiting the ways in which these tools could streamline and improve warehouse processes. 10 Thus while automation could speed processes and lower costs, it could only do so under highly prescribed conditions.

Automation has long provided cost-effective solutions for meeting market needs, such as space savings and improved productivity. For example, automated depalletization and palletization processes, as well as pallet or case storage, are increasingly being adopted by DCs because they offer very low costs for high volume and standardized products. 9 Likewise, dock unloading and loading can also be fully supported by automated equipment, although it requires standardized trailers, products and containers, and high throughput to ensure economic viability.

Going from automated to truly smart: Using Industry 4.0 technologies to adapt to changing DC demands

Meeting the objectives and enabling the benefits described in table 1 necessitates the implementation of intelligent monitoring and control technologies capable of managing and optimizing supply chain networks and adapting to the new demands placed upon DCs. Advancements in Industry 4.0 technologies have made it possible for DCs to leverage both standalone and integrated automation and other robotic technologies for truly intelligent systemswhile working safely alongside humans.13

Many new Industry 4.0driven technological advancements (such as vision picking) are evolutions of current technologies (such as voice picking) deemed to be standard capabilities in most technologically current DCs. Several other, more novel technologies are in the development phase and may be only a few years away from more widespread use. Each, however, harnesses smart Industry 4.0 technologies, such as sensors, artificial intelligence, AR, and autonomous vehicles, to create a more adaptable facility. Notable technologies include:

Vision picking as an extension of voice picking via AR

Adaptive robots and connected automated guided vehicles

Semiautonomous, flexible machines for value-added services

Fully automated picking and quality assurance to adjust to rapid changes in demand

Next-generation distribution operation systems

Smart, automated facility management for greater efficiency

Safety enhancements and modularity

From voice picking to vision picking via AR

Voice picking

Also known as voice-directed warehousing, voice picking uses speech recognition to direct warehouse workers where to go and how to find desired objects in a DC. Using voice picking rather than scanning barcodes, completing paper documentation, or typing in a computer system frees up workers hands and enables them to work more efficiently and quickly.14 Voice-centric solutions have helped DC operations redefine and streamline processes and further reduce operational costs. Further productivity gains achieved from voice picking include improved accuracy in processes such as replenishment, processing, and loading. Voice picking can also improve worker flexibility, enabling them to condense tasks and work across multiple warehouses to cope with seasonality.

Vision picking

Vision picking represents an evolution in the process toward less standardized activities. Vision picking uses AR to overlay graphical images over workers line of vision, enhancing the view of physical objects with additional information and providing digital information about physical objects.15 Vision picking often also provides a real-time user interface capability with objects and digital devices and can be used within warehousing operations, transportation optimization, last-mile delivery, and enhanced value-added services.

Although AR and vision picking are in relatively early stages of adoption in logistics, the technology could offer significant benefits. It can enable users to find objects faster and more accurately, reducing costs and lowering inefficiencies. DHL and Ricoh, for example, tested the devices in a Netherlands warehouse and observed a 25 percent increase in picking efficiency during the testing period.16 The process is also hands-, scanner-, and paper-free, and has the potential to reduce training time for new employees and bridge language barriers with staff.17 It can also reduce the need to segregate different types of products as well as help identify the precise positioning of one case among many. This can greatly impact warehouse layout, and receiving and putaway productivities.

Several companies are in the late field-test phase of mobile AR tools, such as head-mounted display cameras.18 Some of these vision-picking systems offer real-time object recognition, barcode reading, indoor navigation, and integration of information with the warehouse management system (WMS).19 Vision systems may also offer features such as digital picking lists in the pickers field of vision via augmented-reality-enabled glasses that show the best route for completing the task, thus reducing total travel time. The systems image recognition software could use automated barcode scanning capabilities to check whether the worker has arrived at the right location, and then guide the worker to the shelf with the right item. The worker can then scan the item and register this process simultaneously in the WMS, enabling real-time stock updates. 20

Adaptive robots and connected automated guided vehicles

Although assembly lines and automation worked fine for repetitive tasks, changes in shopping behaviors, increasingly complex demands on DCs, and the wide variety of objects contained in a facility necessitate a smarter, more flexible solution. Typically, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are used to transport goods throughout the warehouse by following markers or other navigation guides.21 These advanced sensor technologies, coupled with connectivity, enable robots to adjust to their surroundings and even correct for errors they may encounter, establishing a digital record about the physical environment and using it to generate how they move about the physical space.

Amazon Robotics, formerly Kiva Systems, has designed robots to move racks irrespective of product size and shape of objects within the racks. The robotsor podsare controlled by a centralized computer using a secured Wi-Fi network for communication. They use infrared technology for obstacle detection and floor cameras to read QR codes on the ground to determine their location and direction. The key to the robotic warehouses success is not the robot but the brain behind the system; robots can learn, self-adjust, and crowdsource (aggregate and share data from other pods to troubleshoot issues they may encounter).22 Amazon uses the robots in its DCs, stating that they improve productivity and jobs within its warehouses.23 By the second half of 2015, Amazon had deployed more than 30,000 of these robots across 13 facilities.24 The Amazon Robotics system can also point workers to objects within the factory, speeding picking processes, and can self-organize the warehouse.25 While the Amazon Robotics system is proprietary, similar technologies are available more broadly, such as those that can pick individual items from shelves or work alongside humans, gathering the objects they pick manually.26

Another company has autonomous mobile robots, called bots, that use a mix of sensors and wireless communications to autonomously move cases and totes around without colliding with each other.27 These autonomous machines can be reassigned to different tasks as required. Their software guides them within a configurable and dense storage structure while maximizing the use of each bot. The bots are not only leveraged for tasks such as transportation of products to and from storage, but also for moving products between different processing areas, including to fully automated robotic depalletization and palletization areas.

Semiautonomous, flexible machines for value-added services

Several companies are also working on automating outbound packaging (bag or box), shipping, and gift wrapping for unit picking. One sensor manufacturer has designed universal final packaging machines using sensor detection technology with automatic format adjustment capabilities.28 The sensors embedded in these machines can detect changes in product characteristics such as size and shape, and automatically notify the control system to reset the packaging configuration to ensure the correct packing box is used. This smart, automated process reduces the time required to manually change configuration, adjust the machine, and put the machine back into operation. Additionally, in cases of incorrect classification, the product is automatically rejected without having to stop the system, reducing productivity slowdowns. In these cases, sensors provide digital information about physical conditions; that digital information enables the machine to adjust its physical movement accordingly. The sensors also provide data to enable predictive maintenance.

Fully automated picking and quality assurance to adjust to rapid changes in demand

While many tasks, such as visual recognition, are still better done by humans, current developments in advanced, automated technologies may begin to tip the balance toward machines. For example, companies such as Dematic and Invata Intralogistics are working on AS/RS29 multi-shuttle technology targeted to DCs experiencing rapid growth and changes in product demand profiles. The system is flexible and can adapt to almost any shape or size building, including existing buildings with lower ceilings.30 Another organization is working on fully automated picking with its Pick-It-Easy Robot.31 The device has image recognition and processing capabilities, is highly flexible, and can accept almost any dimension of source containers. The company is also working on developing receiving and order-picking validation technology, which can perform full checks of articles picked automatically, ensuring higher inbound processing accuracy.

While many tasks, such as visual recognition, are still better done by humans, current developments in advanced, automated technologies may begin to tip the balance toward machines.

Next-generation distribution operations systems

The increasing focus on omnichannel capabilities places great pressure on DCs to keep up with a higher number of orders, including rapid processing, to improve economies of scale and ensure high throughput. These throughput pressures are paving the way for the emergence of new modular technologies that bridge real-time, automated materials handling systems on the floor (including warehouse control software, programmable logical controllers, and electrical systems) and complex transactional systems that manage orders, customers, and inventory (including WMS and enterprise resource planning systems).

These technologies, known as warehouse execution systems (WES), optimize warehouse performance by constantly monitoring automated assets and balancing them through changes in order fulfillment requirements and labor resources.32 WES capabilities span from higher-level functions such as order processing and wave management,33 down to more traditional WCS-level functions such as routing and controlling automated equipment. One critical function is called waveless (pull-based) processing, where WES constantly receives order requirements from host systems and releases the related work to the optimal machine and labor resources, rebalancing the workload if processing in one zone is moving faster than in other zones.34 In this way, digital information drives and adjusts physical movement.

Smart, automated facility management for greater efficiency

Industry 4.0 technologies are also finding applications within DC facility management. For example, complex and intelligent management systems can be remotely controlled to closely monitor environmental features such as humidity or HVAC, and to maximize energy efficiency. Sensors can be used by IoT applications to gather data about operating conditions. These data points are then analyzed to proactively manage buildings to better ensure efficiency. Those technologies also enable the identification of different layers of the building to analyze possible interdependence between systems, services, and operations. IoT applications and cloud-based devices are expected to ease building management.35

Safety enhancements and modularity

Safety enhancement is a crucial feature of robot actuation and sensors, enabling highly automated technologies to operate in an environment in which human and robots can work together. Embedded sensors automatically detect when a human enters or approaches their zone and immediately adjust robots activity to promote human safety. Humans and robots can then work in collaboration in DCs. Those technologies maximize machine efficiency while allowing for more flexible operations, and digitally analyze data to adjust physical movement and improve safety.36

Moreover, Industry 4.0 eases programming of automation equipment with capabilities such as over-the-air updates. It also paves the way for modularity, allowing robots to self-reconfigure to perform different tasks and to adapt to new conditions.37 Robots can thus evolve in a constantly changing DC environment by dynamically tailoring themselves to various tasks and being redeployed on different duties as needed, without more programming or integration. They can also adapt to hazardous environments and handle items of various sizes and positions.

Integrating the digital and the physical in the warehouse: DC transformation has ripple effects across the supply chain

Each technological advancement has the potential to transform the DC in meaningful ways: making it more flexible, efficient, competitive, and increasing the role it plays along the manufacturing and distribution value chain. Industry 4.0driven technologies such as those described here can be leveraged to transform the supply chain; with respect to DC, Industry 4.0driven transformations to supply networks and logistics are more broadly relevant. Yet it is important to note that DC operators can leverage smart, automated technologies to realize additional benefits, using information from throughout the supply chain to inform DC operations, and vice versa.

Below, we discuss the impacts of Industry 4.0driven transformations in planning and inventory, and supply networks and logistics, as well as their impact on DC growth and innovation.

Information shared inside the organization and across the chain

Within the supply chain, Industry 4.0 technologies can enable organizations to better plan for demand and more accurately manage inventory within the DC. This is due, in part, to the higher traceability of products enabled by connected technologies.38

Industry 4.0 technologies can also have an impact beyond the confines of the facility, by collecting large amounts of operational data and making it available to the up- and downstream supply chain. This can enhance operations planning, provide valuable product information for upstream R&D and planning, or even allow business intelligence programs to guide future improvements in the DC itself.

Industry 4.0 technologies can also have an impact beyond the confines of the facility, by collecting large amounts of operational data and making it available to the up- and downstream supply chain.

Procurement

Industry 4.0 technologies can also impact procurement as well, via the ability to automatically compare characteristics of all products received such as quantities, weight, dimensions, and colors, with expected characteristics (based on purchase order data) in order to control for discrepancies. In the case of unexpected differences, the entity in charge of compliance can be alerted, or revised characteristics can be automatically updated in inventory management systems to ensure accuracy. Solutions such as automated depalletizing cells can manage receiving processes and automatically communicate accuracy-related issues regarding received quantities, dimension, UPC, weight, color, or condition of the product to suppliers, who can make adjustments as needed or confirm shipments.

Supply planning and optimized resource allocation

Since Industry 4.0 technologies offer the promise of gathering and exchanging data through the cloud, they can enable real-time sharing of information across supply chain stakeholders.39 As a result, the accuracy of customers supply and lead time planning can be improved due to better visibility of inventory levels within DCs. As more smart devices exchange information, improved data flow and activity synchronization, such as order status updates to logistics providers and customers, can help supply chain stakeholders better allocate resources to critical tasks, maximizing the efficiency of supply chain.40 Additionally, data generated through Industry 4.0 technologies can be used for pricing optimization, accounting, and billing.41

Adapting to a brave new world: Making the transition toward increased DC automation

The move toward smarter, more flexible systems and advanced technologies inherent in Industry 4.0 also necessitates a shift within the organization itself. While automation technologies can be configured to match the organizations goals, the organization may likewise need to be reshaped to maximize gains from automation. Most specifically, the organization may experience changing talent needs due to the need for a different spectrum of qualifications and a growing need for more sophisticated data management capabilities.

Changing talent needs

Despite the developments in Industry 4.0 technologies for DCs and the increasing development and use of automated technologies, total automation of DC operations seems unlikely in the foreseeable future. While it would be technically feasible to automate day-to-day operations in an ever-increasing number of situations, full automation is seldom the most cost-effective solution, especially when operations are not always the same day after day. Peak inventory or throughput periods, one-time value-added tasks, and product replacement periods are still more effectively addressed with human intervention.

As the level of automation increases in distribution centers and overall labor is reduced, the need for highly trained professionals to manage these highly automated operations, such as IT engineers, maintenance employees, and operations analysts, may increase. These roles have consistently been ranked as some of the most difficult to fill by employers globally in the past 10 years, with talent shortages mainly due to the lack of available applicants (35 percent), lack of technical competencies (34 percent), or lack of experience (22 percent). These talent shortages are particularly notable among DCs located in sparsely populated geographic areas, where there may be a smaller talent pool.42 Organizations may need to consider approaches to reskilling or upskilling current workers, or training local talent to meet the needs of the DC.43

As the level of automation increases in distribution centers and overall labor is reduced, the need for highly trained professionals to manage these highly automated operations, such as IT engineers, maintenance employees, and operations analysts, may increase.

A growing need for data management

A continuous increase in the number and complexity of connected devices, and a corresponding growth in information generated, has created more data. This wealth of data does not come without its challenges, however; organizations must be able to aggregate it from numerous sources, store it, analyze it, secure it, as well as sort through it to determine what is useful.44 Thus design of the system architecture is critically important to ensure machines and systems can interoperatea challenge when dealing with both older and Industry 4.0driven machinery. Moreover, data must be shareable, understandable, and able to be processed and updated reliably, all while limiting security risks arising from increased integration and expanded access between systems.45

While the troves of data generated through automated processes can improve DC management, managers need advanced tools to support data analysis. The tools provided with the applications are often limited in terms of variety and depth of analysis and can track only operational and system KPIs. A newer breed of data analytics and visualization tools, however, can be directly connected to the ecosystem to gather and analyze terabytes of data. Industry 4.0 technologies using complex algorithms, pattern recognition, or machine learning capabilities can further use the data to plan and optimize operations.

Implementing Industry 4.0 for the distribution center

As DCs evolve into an increasingly crucial element of the supply chain, they need to adapt to new expectations for quickly handling an ever-more diverse set of goodsall while performing additional value-added tasks not traditionally associated with warehouses. Current and emerging Industry 4.0 technologies can enable greater operational flexibility, reduce operational costs, drive more modular and adaptable automation, and promote business growth. The transition toward Industry 4.0 technologies in distribution centers will drive changes throughout the DC, from reconfiguring the workforce to managing, analyzing, securing, and acting upon data.

As DCs look to implement Industry 4.0 technologies, they can:

Assess current needs within the supply chain to determine when and where Industry 4.0driven automation can help, and where it may be worth waiting. Consider which technologies are already available to significantly reduce costs and risk, and which investments may be worth waiting to make at a later time, when technological advancements may result in significant improvements over current capabilities.

within the supply chain to determine when and where Industry 4.0driven automation can help, and where it may be worth waiting. Consider which technologies are already available to significantly reduce costs and risk, and which investments may be worth waiting to make at a later time, when technological advancements may result in significant improvements over current capabilities. Develop a talent strategy to address new talent needs created by Industry 4.0driven technologies, and continuously assess the organizations evolving needs to proactively prepare for talent gaps that may exist in the future, particularly those focused on maintaining and managing Industry 4.0enabled assets. 46 This can also help DCs evaluate what can be done today to find talent that can both support and be ready for an increased level of automation.

to address new talent needs created by Industry 4.0driven technologies, and continuously assess the organizations evolving needs to proactively prepare for talent gaps that may exist in the future, particularly those focused on maintaining and managing Industry 4.0enabled assets. This can also help DCs evaluate what can be done today to find talent that can both support and be ready for an increased level of automation. Monitor emerging trends that might influence supply chain requirements or demands on DC functionality, examine new opportunities to improve distribution operations, and gather competitive intelligence to benchmark performance and monitor potential market threats. This will enable effective planning and decision making in a field that will be evolving at a rapid pace in the next decade.

that might influence supply chain requirements or demands on DC functionality, examine new opportunities to improve distribution operations, and gather competitive intelligence to benchmark performance and monitor potential market threats. This will enable effective planning and decision making in a field that will be evolving at a rapid pace in the next decade. Plan for data management, reliability, and security in an increasingly complex system. Data management systems are a major part of the implementation and functioning of Industry 4.0 technologies and should be considered critical to the success of the endeavor. The ability to gather, analyze, act upon, and safeguard information is crucial to the Industry 4.0driven DC.

The impact of Industry 4.0 technologies on distribution centers can enable more effective facilities. It is critical for leaders to proactively evaluate the impact of distribution trends along with the potential benefits of using Industry 4.0 technologies, as this can allow executives to plan effectively to meet the businesss future objectives in a field that will be rapidly changing over the next decade.
Chinese traders seem to have lost their taste for local crab, forcing prices down by 50 percent.

Chinese crab traders normally descend on Vietnam's southernmost province of Ca Mau in the run up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but this year many have stayed away, leaving many households in heavy debt.

Pham Thi Cuong, a local trader, said: In previous years, we were unable to collect enough crabs to meet the Chinese demand, but this year, we don't have anyone to sell our catches too.

The provincial agriculture department said that Ca Mau has one of the largest crab farming areas in the Mekong Delta region, and some people have profited strongly from the crustaceans.

Statistics showed that each year tens of thousand tons of Ca Maus crabs reach foreign markets, and China is the main recipient.

This year, China has reduced its volume of crab imports, sending the price down by 50 percent from three months ago to VND110,000-180,000 ($5-8) per kilo.

Vo Ngoc Hung, a dealer in Nam Can District, said that Chinese traders used to accept high prices to buy large quantities of crabs from local traders, but this year there's hardly been any sign of them in town.

To maintain business relationships, many traders have accepted small export orders from China yet at very low prices. I used to send three tons of crabs to China each day, but now that figure has collapsed to just under one ton, a trader said.

While crab traders are struggling to find substitute buyers, thousands of local farmers are moaning about the losses they have made.

Nguyen Thi Tien from Cai Nuoc District said that after estimating all costs for baby crabs and crab feed, her family will only make a profit of VND1 million ($44) from this crop.

Many households have not been as lucky as Tien and fallen into debt after spending huge amounts of money to expand their farms.

This isnt the first time Chinese traders have offered high prices for Vietnamese products and then stopped purchasing unexpectedly. They have played this trick with many other products like rice, cassava, dragon fruit and pork.

Chinese traders recently turned their backs on catfish produced in Mekong Delta provinces after specifically asking local farmers to raise catfish following Chinese standards.

According to economic experts, the fact that Chinese traders are saying no to Vietnamese products could be viewed as a good sign because it will force local farmers and enterprises to improve the quality of their products so they can reach other export markets.

Related news:

> Vietnam warns over unofficial pig exports to China

> Macadamia millionaire dream slowly dies in Vietnam's Central Highlands
BARNSTABLE, Mass. (AP)  Police in Barnstable, Massachusetts, were stumped when a woman from a nearly identically named town in the United Kingdom called to report a car crash.

The Boston Globe reports (http://bit.ly/2df5W4n) the call came in to Officer Mark McWilliams on Thursday.

The woman tells McWilliams she was "driving back from Barnstaple to Muddiford" when she saw the crash. A perplexed McWilliams asks the woman where she is, to which she replies: "Ilfracombe." Ilfracombe is on the northern coast of England, about 13 miles north of Barnstaple.

McWilliams and the woman go back and forth for about two minutes before realizing they're on different continents.

The two share a laugh and McWilliams deadpans: "Our response time is going to be about six hours."

The BBC says the woman misdialed after searching online for the police department's number.
The rise of cars in Vietnams capital has exacerbated congestion issues on the streets. Photo by Reuters/ Nguyen Huy Kham

The buzz of motorbike engines could fade from the city by 2025.

Transport authorities in Hanoi have unveiled a three-step plan aimed at removing all motorbikes from the city's streets, initially in the central downtown area during peak hours, and later from suburban streets.

The citys transport officials were quoted by the media as saying that there will also be a ban on non-residential vehicles driving on some main roads and in downtown areas, but this has met with opposition.

When there is a motorbike ban in Hanoi, it will be an outright ban," said Ha Huy Quang, deputy head of Hanoi's Transport Department, adding that the plan is still on the table for further consideration. "There will be no discrimination between Hanoi locals and non-residents.

Opponents of the plan to remove motorbikes from the streets said the ban was currently unfeasible due mainly to undeveloped public transport in Hanoi.

Quang responded by saying that while motorcycles are being phased out, the city promises to improve public transport and infrastructure.

Hanoi will not restrict or ban the use of private vehicles until it can clear hurdles such as underdeveloped infrastructure, limited street space and insufficient public transport, Quang said.

Nguyen Van Thanh, chairman of the Car Transport Association, is among those in favor of the ban. Thanh said traffic congestion in Hanoi has become critical in recent years, so there should be a prompt solution.

However, the idea of imposing a ban on non-residential vehicles is hardly feasible because people will eventually find a way to circumvent the rule, for example, simply buying additional motorbikes with a Hanoi-registered license plate, he added.

Currently there are roughly 5 million motorbikes and scooters on Hanois roads and the number of new vehicles is on the rise, exerting mounting pressure on the citys infrastructure. Statistics show around 19,000 new vehicles are registered in the city each month, and it is estimated that by 2020, there will be more than 6 million motorbikes.

More noticeably, less than 10 percent of Hanoians use public transportation. The citys only bus operator carried 5-6 percent less passengers during the first half of this year, said Nguyen Hoang Hai, head of the Hanoi Transport Management and Operation Center.

Ngo Van Du, living in the western urban area of My Dinh, is worried that the ban would make his commute to the inner city a struggle.

Public buses are cheap, but petrol to fill up a motorbike is even cheaper, he said. More importantly, poorly-run buses and worsening traffic congestion are making people stick with their vehicles rather than catch a bus to get around the city.

Although Hanoi has tried to improve traffic infrastructure and boost public transport, buses are still the citys only transit option.

Hanoi has invested $55 million in a bus rapid transit line, known as a BRT. The installation of the BRT, however, has been anything but rapid.

The citys urban rail projects, which started in 2011, have also been delayed several times. The official said that when the two elevated railway routes are completed in 2018, traffic in the city should improve.

Hanois Transport Plan aims to increase the share of public transport from the current low figure of 9 percent of trips to above 60 percent by 2030, by which time Hanoi is slated to have five new elevated train lines and three BRT lines.

Motorbikes account for more than 90 percent of the traffic transport in Hanoi, which has a population of about 10 million.

Almost everyone has a motorbike to travel through the narrow streets and alleys, which are often too small to access by car, so it won't be easy to convince people to ditch their motorbikes and jump on a bus instead.

Bui Danh Lien, chairman of the Hanoi Transport Association, said the only way to talk people into leaving their vehicles at home is to have a well-developed public transport system.

There is a long distance between talking and doing. The ban is totally based on a highly subjective point of view rather than facts, said Lien.

Related news:

>Choking streets force Hanoi to mull ban on more vehicles from city center

>Vietnam kick-starts plans for motorbike emissions tests

>Minor accident causes severe traffic jam in Hanoi
The days are shorter, but not the list of things you can do.
A woman who has been cured of a rare genetic disorder and its hepatic complication with her doctor at Cho Ray Hospital. Photo by Le Phuong/VnExpress

The patient spent three years fighting a genetic disorder and then hepatic TB.

Cho Ray, a leading public hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, has announced it has successfully treated a rare case of hepatic tuberculosis caused by a genetic disorder, reportedly only the second successful case in the world.

The hospital on Tuesday said it had cured a woman with nodular hepatic tuberculosis, an unusual complication found while she was being treated for Wilsons disease, which is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder in which copper accumulates in tissues.

The previous patient cured of the disease was a 16-year-old Moroccan in 2014.

The Vietnamese patient, 20, from the Mekong Deltas Dong Thap Province, was admitted in 2013 with amnesia and liver damage, which darkened her skin and caused acne. Her eyes also had a strange color due to copper accumulation.

Doctor Le Huu Phuoc, a liver expert at the hospital, said the patient was first diagnosed with Wilsons disease, a rare condition that only occurs in one in every 30,000 people.

She appeared to have recovered after 18 months of treatment, but an ultrasound scan on her stomach six months later found a tumor on her liver 30mm in diameter. A biopsy identified the tumor as hepatic tuberculosis, a rare and sometimes fatal complication which usually occurs only in people with weak immune systems like those with HIV.

When we found it was hepatic tuberculosis, we were very surprised because that is extremely rare, Phuoc said.

His colleague Nguyen Thanh Xuan said hepatic tuberculosis is rare as organs are not a suitable environment for the tuberculosis bacteria. She said medication prescribed for Wilsons disease could have shut down her immune system and allowed the bacteria to take hold.

The patient has now properly recovered and can return to school, but she will need regular checks for the rest of her life to prevent dangerous complications, doctors said.

Related news:

>Who will pay for HIV/AIDS treatment in Vietnam?

>District-level hospital makes breakthrough with successful liver cancer treatment
A fishing market in Ha Tinh, one of the affected provinces. Photo by VnExpress/Duc Hung

The agriculture ministry will monitor the quality of seafood in four affected central provinces.

Vietnams Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development says it will monitor the quality of seafood at fishing ports in four central provinces to ensure it is safe to eat following a toxic spill a few months ago that caused mass fish deaths.

The ministry will take samples of seafood for analysis every two to three days when boats arrive with their catches.

The public on Tuesday were warned again to avoid seafood caught along the central coast.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development will provide fishermen with a list of seafood for them to avoid.

Ship owners and fishermen will have to brief local authorities about the areas they are fishing.

Seafood caught from the seabed will be classified and tested before it is sent to markets, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Ha Cong Tuan said.

Vietnams Health Ministry on Tuesday warned the public against eating deep-sea marine life caught within 13.5 nautical miles of the coast of the provinces of Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri and Thua Thien-Hue.

Health officials also strongly advised against eating fish caught within 20 nautical miles of the area.

The Vietnamese government announced on June 30 that the Vietnamese unit of Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group was responsible for discharging toxic chemicals from its steel plant into the ocean, killing marine life and poisoning fish in the four central provinces.

The steel plant took responsibility for the disaster in June and pledged to pay $500 million to clean up the pollution and compensate those affected.

Related news:

> Health warning for fish from central Vietnam adds to uncertainty after toxic spill

> Compensation from Taiwanese fish killer to reach Vietnamese fishermen next month
Vietnam's rice basket is facing a tough choice.

The Mekong Delta, Vietnams rice bowl, might just avoid saltwater intrusion risks if farmers abolish the third rice crop and give the environment enough time to recover from the stressful farming cycle, environment experts said.

The Vietnam authorities earlier this year predicted in a report that about 45 percent of the delta, where nearly half of the countrys rice is grown annually, will be affected by saltwater intrusion by 2030.

Rice farmers in the region have built thousands of dykes to stop floodwater flowing from upstream in the Mekong River and cultivate an extra crop in the final months of the year.

For example, a total 1,100 kilometers of embankment embracing the provinces of Kien Giang and An Giang and the city of Can Tho have reduced the volume of floodwater by half to 4.5 billion cubic meters in 2011 from 9.2 billion in 2000.

Larger dykes built in the 2000s allow farmers in the countrys stronghold of booming rice industry to plant a third crop on the same acreage.

However, the ongoing construction of an elaborate embankment network across the region has not only been extremely costly but also disrupted the regions ecological complex in significant ways, said Nguyen Huu Thien, an independent environment expert.

High dykes are blamed for blocking the natural flows of water and depriving downstream floodplain farms and fisheries of key source of nutrients, which has in turn contributed to a gradual decline in fish populations, Thien explained.

Besides, with the high dykes, farmers can extend their rice cultivation period, using more agricultural chemicals, which then pollute and cause water and soil to acidify, he continued.

Studies show that after 20 years, the amount of fertilizers, used to produce 1 kilogram of rice during the extra crop, is forecast to increase by 40 percent.

Preliminary statistics show that after 15 years of planting the extra annual rice crop in tandem with seasonal floods, we have lost VND47.8 million ($2,000) per hectare or VND7 trillion ($300 million) in total, said Thien.

He stressed that, unlike popular belief, the third crop has not lifted freshwater rice farmers out of poverty since the extra income from extending the traditional rice growing season is small, about VND5 million ($200) per hectare, compared to the damage.

The environment scientist called on the government to abandon the third crop, a move that he said will benefit both the farming output and the environment in the long term.

The Mekong Delta will be able to prevent saltwater intrusion during the dry season. Enacting such a measure is much better than asking China to release water from its upstream hydropower reservoirs, Thien said.

This year Vietnam has struggled with the worst drought since French colonial administrators began recording statistics in 1926.

The Department for Agricultural Economy under the Ministry of Planning and Investment said the country's south central region, Central Highlands and southern Mekong Delta have been hit the hardest.

Saltwater has encroached nearly 80 kilometers inland in the Mekong Delta, official statistics show.

The intensified saltwater intrusion has negatively impacted Vietnams 2015-2016 winter/spring paddy crop, which accounts for about 45 percent of annual production.

The Mekong Delta, whose winter/spring output makes up half of the national number, recorded the highest losses.

Official reports show that the historic natural disaster has hammered its production down by almost 10 percent to 10 million tons from the same period last year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States said in a food security brief released on July 5.

Reuters cited industry analysts last month as saying that Vietnams rice exports this year will dip 4.45 percent from last year to 6.44 million tons.

The country produced a record 45.21 million tons of paddy in 2015 and exported around 30 percent of the amount, mainly to China, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Related news:

> Saltwater threatens to drown nearly half of Vietnam's paddy fields

> Vietnamese farmers indignant as Mekong Delta prays for flood waters to arrive

> Mekong Delta loses $210 million to drought and salinity
The seventh edition of Vung Tau international kite festival is scheduled between December 6 and 12. Photo by Vietnam National Administration of Tourism.

60 foreign artists from 25 countries and territories will be flying their colors at the event.

An international kite festival will return for the seventh year to Vietnam's southern beach town of Vung Tau this December, local authorities have confirmed.

The festival will be held from December 6-12, with performances by around 60 foreign artists and 50 Vietnamese fliers, according to a statement from the National Administration of Tourism.

Artists from 25 countries and territories, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, the U.K. and the U.S. will take part in the competition along Vung Taus popular Bai Sau beach.

The event is expected to cost VND2.5 billion (US$112,000), with funding from both public and private sources.

Related news:

> Spectacular kite festival takes flight in Hanoi

> Vung Tau citizens in uproar against new ban on beach food stalls
Plenty of local governments open their meetings with a quick, generic prayer from a member of the clergy. But is it different when the lawmakers themselves say "Let us pray" and then supplicate God to open everyone's heart to the message of Jesus Christ? Does that violate the Constitution?

In a significant defeat for religious liberty, a federal appeals court has upheld a continuous practice of sectarian, public prayer by the members of a North Carolina board of county commissioners. The dissenting judge, the distinguished conservative J. Harvie Wilkinson, said the "seat of government" in the case was made to resemble "a house of worship." The court's majority said it was just following Supreme Court precedent.

At the start of all the meetings of the Rowan County commissioners, one of the five -- all of whom are Christians and have been as long as anyone can remember -- invites those present stand for the invocation and the Pledge of Allegiance. The commissioners take turns, but each typically opens by saying "Let us pray" or "Please pray with me."

Then the commissioner assigned to that meeting offers a prayer that would be entirely normal and appropriate in any evangelical church.

One representative prayer quoted by the court went like this: "Let us pray. Holy Spirit, open our hearts to Christ's teachings, and enable us to spread his message amongst the people we know and love through the applying of the sacred words in our everyday lives. In Jesus's name I pray. Amen."

A federal district court in North Carolina struck down the prayer practice, concluding that among other constitutional problems, it impermissibly coerced residents attending the meetings into participating in prayer.

On Monday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the district court. It applied the controlling Supreme Court precedent, the 5-4 decision in the 2014 case, Town of Greece v. Galloway.

The Supreme Court held there that it is in principle permissible for legislative prayer to be sectarian. The government body in the case designated local clergy to offer prayers before town council meetings, and the record showed that although no non-Christian clergy had been denied, the prayers were normally Christian. The court also held, in a plurality opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, that residents weren't coerced to participate in the prayers.

The 4th Circuit majority held that the Rowan County commissioners weren't coercing residents to pray any more than the councilors in the town of Greece. But Judge Wilkinson, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan and when younger was frequently mentioned as a potential Republican Supreme Court nominee, strongly disagreed.

Wilkinson noted that the prayers, given by the legislators themselves, were "bordering at times on proselytization and exhortation." They were delivered by the legislators themselves to open meetings of what he called "our most basic unit of government." Wilkinson wrote that he had "seen nothing like" the Rowan County practice before. In effect, the place of government was turning into a church. "It cannot be right," the judge concluded.

Wilkinson is surely correct. It's true that if legislative prayer by clergy is permitted under the Town of Greece precedent, then logically there shouldn't be a bright line rule against prayer by a legislature. It's also true that the Town of Greece case held -- rightly in my view -- that the Constitution doesn't require legislative prayers to be non-sectarian.

But the Constitution's establishment clause, from its founding until the present, has been interpreted to prohibit coerced participation in public prayer. The Founding Fathers understood very clearly that there was a long tradition of established churches requiring attendance at public prayers and sermons.

And anyone who wants to appear before the Rowan County board of commissioners has no choice but to attend the deeply and sincerely religious prayers that open its session. The prayers include in their language not only the commissioners themselves but also everybody who is present. There is no way to opt out of the prayer if you are standing there. The Framers would have recognized this for exactly what it is: an establishment of the religious beliefs of the government.

Correctly interpreted and applied, Kennedy's plurality opinion in the Town of Greece case would recognize this. In that opinion, Kennedy called for a "fact sensitive" inquiry. And he said that legislative prayer could not permissibly be used to "proselytize."

Spreading the gospel is the very definition of proselytizing. That's what one commissioner was doing in a 2007 Christmas prayer when he said, "We'd like to thank you for the virgin birth, we'd like to thank you for the cross at Calvary, and we'd like to thank you for the resurrection. Because we do believe that there is only one way to salvation, and that is Jesus Christ."

There's a name for spreading the gospel in an official government setting: It's called an establishment of religion. The full 4th Circuit should rehear this case and reverse itself. If it doesn't, the Supreme Court should take the case and clarify that the Town of Greece precedent doesn't allow a legislative chamber to become a de facto church.

Bloomberg View columnist Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University.
No cruise ships are seen along the now brownish Perfume River in Hue. Photo by Vo Thanh/VnExpress

Tourists are turning away from the muddy waters, and the situation is likely to get worse.

Road projects along the Perfume River have caused the icon of the ancient town of Hue to lose its attractive crystal turquoise color and turn a reddish brown in recent days.

Many tourists to Hue, one of the most popular destinations in Vietnam, have been turned off by the sight of the river over the past week as the water has darkened with a strong alluvial color.

Cruise ships operators along the river said they have had a difficult time attracting customers as the river, known as Huong in Vietnamese, no longer looks so poetic.

Nguyen Van Binh, a boat owner, said he has not had any customers for days.

The water company in Thua Thien-Hue Province has had to increase the use of chemicals to purify the water before pumping it to local families.

Nguyen Thi Huong, a 43-year-old local, said the river has never been so dark for so long.

Huong said flood water from the upstream turns the water brown once in a while, but it usually takes only a couple of days to clear again.

Tran Viet Hung, head of the environment protection unit at Thua Thien-Hue Provinces Environment Department, said two road projects further upstream were the cause of the problem, but erosion from recent typhoons is also a factor.

Hung said the situation will last for some time and could become worse because the road projects have only just started and the worst rainy days in Hue are still ahead.

The department has asked the Environment Ministry to increase supervision on the projects to limit their impacts on the river.

Related news:

>Salted coffee in the Imperial City of Hue

>Thua Thien-Hue sets up council to evaluate pollution damage from Formosa
HICKORY The old Regal Manufacturing Building in the Viewmont neighborhood may be history, as a local firm stepped forward to help the City of Hickory demolish the vacant building.

The Hickory City Council voted unanimously to provide a vacant building demolition grant to land buyer Jerry Lee Pruitt, LLC on Tuesday night.

Jerry Lee Pruitt, LLC applied for the grant to help the City of Hickory demolish the building located at 212 12th Ave. NE. The firm plans to spend approximately $157,000 to cover demolition costs, according to an agenda memo from Hickory City Community Development Manager David Leonetti.

The 59,000 square-foot, two-story building has been vacated for more than 20 years, according to the application submitted by Jerry Lee Pruitt, LLC.

City councils Vacant Building Revitalization and Demolition Grant Program is set to help Jerry Lee Pruitt, LLC cover up to $15,000 of total demolition costs. The purpose of the grant program was to provide funding assistance to applicants planning to demolish vacant buildings to help revitalize the area.

The firm plans to market the property for redevelopment following the demolition. Leonetti said representatives from Jerry Lee Pruitt, LLC do not have set plans on what they will do with the vacant land, but the firm has been advised by real estate professionals that demolition of the building is necessary to help develop the area.

Hickory City Mayor Rudy Wright said he is thankful for someone like Pruitt to step up and help get rid of an unused building.

This is one of those classic cases where its better to have a vacant land with nothing on it, than a land with a building, Wright said.

Jerry Lee Pruitt, LLC and the City of Hickory did not provide a potential demolition date.

Leonetti said the city advertised a public hearing to local newspapers, including the Hickory Daily Record, earlier this month to see if local citizens would speak for or against the proposed demolition.

No one spoke against the demolition during Tuesday evenings meeting.
HICKCORY  From the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Massachusetts to the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory at Duke University, this summer was a big one for three students in Lenoir-Rhyne Universitys School of Natural Sciences.

Luke Lynch, Miguel Sanchez and Thinh Truong  all seniors now  each spent 10 weeks getting a first-hand look at their futures in science through summer research programs.

Its exponentially increased my already abnormally and weirdly high love of science, Lynch said of the program he attended.

Their time working in the real world highlights an opportunity many students fail to take advantage of while theyre in college, sometimes because they dont know they exist, dont think theyd qualify or because they dont prepare enough to get them.

Luke Lynchs summer journey

For Lynch, his summer internship journey began while staring at flyers for undergraduate research opportunities for people interested in physics. He is a biology major, and those flyers got him wondering if similar opportunities were out there in his field.

After a few Google searches, it became really apparent they do exist, and so I talked to some of the professors about it, Lynch said.

He also quickly discovered some of the programs were at really prestigious institutions which interested him even more.

I figured why not, the application is free and thats how I approached it, Lynch said.

Lynch, from Pinehurst, was accepted into a research program at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston, Mass. He worked in the Frank Slack Laboratory at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, under the mentorship of Jeff Haswell, a second-year Harvard graduate student employed at the lab.

The project I was involved with the most had to do with something called the chromatin remodeling complex, which is basically a big machine in your cells that physically alters how DNA is arranged, Lynch said. We were looking at exploiting mutations in that complex that would kill cancer cells because it wouldnt remodel the chromatin accurately.

The experience in a working lab opened Lynchs eyes to opportunities in the field of biology he had never even thought existed.

It broadened my horizon in the sense that going into this I didnt have legitimate laboratory experience and I had a naive understanding of what science is, Lynch said.

Miguel Sanchezs summer journey

Miguel Sanchez is majoring in biology with a chemistry minor and was accepted into the Biology and Biotechnology Undergraduate Research Experience Program (BITURE), offered through the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He knew about his summer research program the year prior but wasnt prepared at that time to apply. Sanchez, who is from Conover, made sure he was ready in 2016.

I looked through the application and prepared in advance and knew what to expect, Sanchez said. He even contacted the professors who coordinated the program at UNC Charlotte for a little extra information on what to expect in the application process.

His job at BITURE was to verify the cultures used in the programs research were Burkholderia multivorans and not just contaminants.

Basically the whole goal of the program was to show you techniques and methods that are applicable to your future careertechniques that are applied in real life situations, Sanchez said.

Specifically, he worked with Todd Steck, Associate Professor and member of Biotech Advisory Committee to conduct Microbiome analysis to determine antibiotic resistance.

I developed a good relationship with my professor and some of the lab members I worked with so now if I decide to pursue graduate school there I have contacts there, Sanchez said.

He got a chance to sharpen his presentation skills as well.

Usually I have a hard time speaking in front of big crowds so this helped me, Sanchez said. I did two presentations and that helped me gain some knowledge.

Thinh Truongs summer journey

Thinh Truong is a double major in physics and mathematics and plans on going into nuclear engineering. He saw his research opportunity as a solid step towards building contacts in his field of study as well.

Truong  who was born in Vietnam but now lives in Hickory  was accepted into the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program hosted by Duke University. Truong helped with nuclear data evaluation used for theoretical model development of nuclear physics and for applications involving radiation and nuclear power technologies.

People have said it over and over, its not what you know, its all about who you know, so to be able to have interaction with professors or maybe future employers, that is always a great thing to have once you graduate, Truong said.

Definitely, always honing communication and social skills is a need for everybodyopportunities are out there, it just takes encouragement and a curiosity from the person to find what they really want.

Truong spent hours searching for these opportunities online. He eventually found the National Science Foundation and from there he learned about different REU programs.

I learned a lot of different skills and precautions and also details as a future researcher I need to really develop and also nurture in order for me to succeed in the research field, Truong said. In addition to that, I also got a chance to work in their particle collider accelerator.

Truong saw the program as an opportunity to have a glimpse into what graduate school will look like.

LRUs School of Natural Sciences

These programs have a big impact on the students. They come away with more confidence after they see they can do research work at big institutions, LRU Professor Marsha Fanning, Chair of the School of Natural Sciences, said.

Fanning added it also helps them see what theyre future may look like, leaning more towards the practical in research than the theoretical, and help them plan ahead past graduation.

For more information about Lenoir-Rhyne University, visit lr.edu.
NEWTON  Temprano Techvestors, a Newton-based, newly-formed company aimed at helping European software companies open operations in North America, announced its first client Tuesday.

Safetica Technologies is a European firm that specializes in data loss prevention software, according to a release from the company.

Safetica markets its products as easy to use and cost effective for small- and moderately-sized organizations.

The software's dashboard allows company managers to keep an eye on data usage to stop data loss and theft before it occurs.

Files that are inappropriately shared or taken out of a company's system, whether intentionally or accidentally, can be made inaccessible to outside users through the software's enycrpytion.

Companies also can lock or wipe devices that are lost and stolen remotely through Safetica Mobile.

By monitoring employee behavior, including things like social media usage and online job searches, the software can help companies determine areas of vulnerability.

"It is capable of spotting when people become disengaged with a company and are ready to quit and potentially do harmful things, such as stealing sensitive data and taking it to a competitor," according to the release.

The software's alert system can help companies spot potential data breaches before they occur.

Safetica offers free data audits and risk assessments to companies as part of an evaluation for companies looking to use the software.

The company's prices start are "as low as $46 per endpoint per year," according to the release.

Temprano's relationship involves building Safetica's North American presence from "top to bottom," Temprano founder and Safetica North America General Manger Luke Walling said.

Temprano helps European companies develop their presence by assisting with multiple aspects of doing business in the United States and North America, including marketing and strategy.

In the future, Temprano is looking to build relationships with several more companies.

"I'd say this is 100 percent of what Temprano is designed to do," Walling said.

For more information about Safetica, visit www.safeticausa.com.
HICKORY  The North Carolina Department of Labor fined Sherrills Ford-Terrell Fire & Rescue on Tuesday for the death of Capt. Bradley Long during a June 6 recovery operation in Lake Norman.

The citation states SFTFR must pay $5,600 within 15 days or contest the citation.

According to the citation, the department was in violation of N.C. general statute 95-129(1), which states employers must provide a workplace free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious injury or serious physical harm to his employees.

The citation lists out eight violations:

 Failure to monitor the air supply of two divers

 At least one diver attached a body recovery bag and a search rope bag to his rig, creating an entanglement hazard

 Failure by at least one diver to perform an equipment check prior to the dive

 Lack of a redundant air supply by one of the divers

 Failure to train at similar depths and conditions to where the recovery was taking place

 Lack of an annual evaluation of the rescue dive team

 Failure to maintain consistent dive records

 Failure to maintain training documentation, medical evaluations and certifications

Long failed to perform safety stops while surfacing, according to an autopsy report released Aug. 18. The Associated Press reported Aug. 19 that one of the divers said Long motioned he was out of air and panicked, removing both mens masks.

The men were between 35 and 75 feet from the surface when the incident occurred, Catawba County Emergency Management Coordinator Karyn Yaussy said in June.

A rescue attempt was made to rescue Long after the other two divers surfaced.

The two men were hospitalized with non life-threatening injuries and released the next day.

My son loved what he did and he loved helping people, Longs father, Jerry Long, said during a June 8 press conference. He passed doing what he loved doing.

If the department does not contest the citation, they also must complete corrective actions.

The citation gives potential actions, such as implementing additional safety practices and improving training standards.
MORGANTON -- One of the bodies found inside a burned vehicle has been identified, and the case has been declared a homicide.

The burned body of Albert Alexander Austin was discovered over the weekend along with the remains of another person that has yet to be identified.

Police are now offering a $1,000 reward for information in the case.

Deputies with the Burke County Sheriffs Office were called to Canoe Creek Way in Morganton on Sunday morning around 8 a.m. When they arrived, officers found a burned Cadillac Deville with human remains inside, according to a press release from BCSO.

The Sheriffs Office Criminal Investigation Division and SBI are continuing to aggressively investigate the case, Sheriff Steve Whisenant said.

Investigators learned the Cadillac belonged to Austin, 35, of 555 Poors Ford Road, Lot 5, in Forest City. However, the vehicle was registered to Spencer Jermain Murray, 29, of 165 Astrid Lane, in Forest City, the release said.

Law enforcement is asking for the publics help with any information on the location of Murray.

Along with BCSO, the Burke County Fire Marshalls Office, Burke County Medical Examiner, North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, North Carolina License and Theft Bureau, Forest City Police Department and the Rutherford County Sheriffs Office are all assisting in the ongoing investigation.

Anyone with information is asked to contact BCSOs Criminal Investigation Division at 828-438-5500, or Burke County Crime Stoppers at 828-437-3333 anytime day or night.

Without providing their name, Crime Stopper callers will be assigned a number. If the callers information leads to an arrest of the suspect(s) the caller will be paid a reward. A check will be used to the callers number (not their name) and the caller can pick up the check at a designated location.
Every time India suffers a major terror attack from across the border, there is an immediate call for India to adopt Israels policy of reprisal. Some form of what Israelis call peulot ha tagmul  acts of retaliation  could become an option in future, but only if a proper domestic political environment is created.

Israels reprisal policy was not born fully formed. It was calibrated to diplomatic and military circumstances. The Israeli leadership was careful never to let public emotion be the primary determinant.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Egypt and Jordan carried out and encouraged cross-border attacks by armed Palestinians. Israel, then militarily weak and friendless, carried out counter-attacks against Jordan but held its fire against Egypt.

In the latter case, it chose to absorb casualties on its soil in favour of the larger goal of preserving the postwar peace. Only when Israel decided Egypt was rearming for another war, its leadership gave the green light for retaliation against Cairo.

While the Israelis occasionally used airstrikes, the bulk of their reprisals were carried out by what would today be called special force units. Israeli forces often incurred heavy casualties in these attacks as it was militarily on par with its Arab neighbours. The attacks also spun out of control, devolving into massacres.

The lesson for India which faces a much tougher opponent and worse terrain  is that ground attacks are only possible if New Delhi recognises many missions will fail, and that casualties and prisoners among Indian troops should be expected.

This primitive tit-for-tat largely came to an end with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and Israels capture of land pushed the borders deep into Arab settled areas.

By then, however, Israel had begun a more covert form of reprisal: assassination. The kidon, spear tip as this small group of assassins was called, set up inside Mossad became a central part of Israels retaliation policy after the Munich Olympic massacre in 1972 but has since been used across the world.

I had the opportunity to meet the then head of Israeli internal security several years ago and asked him his success rate. He replied, Over 80%. But I am trying for 90.

This is the Israeli policy many hawks in India feel the country should embrace. However, training and equipping a pool of official killers is the easy part of the whole game. Guns are easy. It is the mental stuff that is difficult.

I have asked former Mossad officers and high-level Israeli security officials over the years about what is their secret sauce. Their reply has always been the same:Such a policy is only feasible if you have an iron-clad political consensus in favour of assassination.

Roughly, they all said executioners can take years to track down targets and fulfil their missions. During that time, they must know that irrespective of whether the bureaucrat in charge, the minister above them and even the whole government changes, they can count on the full support of their system.

Even if a new prime minister opposes that specific mission, he must support it just to maintain the credibility of the programme, explained one former Mossad official.

This political consensus does not exist in India. Prime Minister IK Gujral was notorious in security circles for rolling up Indias entire covert network in Pakistan  an action Indian intelligence has yet to recover from. Prime ministers such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh had ambitious peace plans regarding Pakistan and felt covert operations would threaten such larger diplomatic plans.

Singh would have seen the two policies as being in conflict. His views were the same as Vajpayees, said a former member of the Prime Ministers Office during Singhs tenure.

The Narendra Modi government could begin an internal and, later, public debate about the wisdom of taking such a path as a step towards such a consensus. But a consensus should not be expected anytime soon.

Israel too has been wary of allowing assassination to be run on laissez-faire lines. Mossads rules for assassination, laid down by one of its earliest chiefs, Meir Amit, require judicial levels of evidence and very clear political sanction. These rules, according to Gordon Thomass book Gideons Spies, included that Each execution had to be sanctioned by the prime minister of the day. And everything must be done by the book. Minutes kept of the decision takenOur actions must not be seen as some act of state-sponsored murder but the ultimate judicial sanction the state could bring. We would be no different from the hangman or any other lawfully appointed executioner.

Again, this would cause a severe problem for India. Even in normal police cases, it is a struggle to come up with sufficient evidence to convict terrorists and insurgents. In the case of covert operations outside Indian soil, securing that level of evidence would require an intelligence gathering capability that India has shown only occasionally.

Again, this would require a long-term investment and firm political commitment that would have to run for decades. Notably, when Mossad has carried out missions demanded by Israeli political leaders simply to win votes, the missions have gone terribly wrong. The botched attempt to kill Hamas leader Khalid Meshal is a well known example.

The Israeli experience tells us a successful reprisal policy needs the following elements.

One, it must be embedded in a larger diplomatic and security policy. Allowed to drift apart, such executions would become little more than killing without purpose.

Two, a consensus is needed across the political and bureaucratic spectrum on the necessity of such a policy. Without that, the necessary long-term investment in intelligence, equipment, training and strategising that is needed will never happen. The policy will never be sustainable.

Three, assassination must never be allowed to drift away from a legal process, even if the process lies behind closed doors. A system of weighing evidence, passing sentence and civilian control is important. Otherwise, the executions become just another form of state-sponsored terror and the assassins could become a threat to the government that created them.

Finally, covert violence will never provide genuine security. It can be used to send a message, but it will not mean the end of violence. Israels founding father, David Ben-Gurion, in a speech explaining why he had decided to allow a reprisal policy in the 1950s, made its limitations and its benefits clear:

We do not have power to ensure that the water pipe lines wont be exploded or that the trees wont be uprooted. We do not have the power to prevent the murders of orchard workers or families while they are asleep, but we have the power to set a high price for our blood, a price which would be too high for the Arab communities, the Arab armies and the Arab governments to bear.

It can be argued, over 60 years later, that even the benefits were exaggerated.
Students walk along a street as they are released from school to return home earlier due to the haze in Jambi, Indonesia's Jambi province, September 29, 2015 in this file picture taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/Wahdi Setiawan/via Reuters/File Photo

Indonesian government records show only 24 deaths related to forest fires in 2015.

Harvard and Columbia university research showing smoke from land fires in Southeast Asia led to more than 100,000 premature deaths last year "makes no sense at all," an official at Indonesia's Health Ministry said on Tuesday.

Indonesian government records show only 24 deaths related to forest fires in 2015, but the disaster was estimated to have left more than half a million Indonesians suffering from respiratory ailments.

Indonesia is under global pressure to put an end to slash-and-burn land clearances for palm and pulp plantations which send clouds of toxic smoke over the region each year.

Police and a fire fighter from a local forestry company try to extinguish a forest fire in the village in Rokan Hulu regency, Riau province, Sumatra, Indonesia August 28, 2016 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Picture taken August 28, 2016. Antara Foto/Rony Muharrman/via Reuters

The university research estimates pollution exposure from last year's fires killed 91,600 people in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore in 2015 and 2016, significantly higher than government records.

"Given the severe haze in Equatorial Asia in 2015, the 100,000 premature deaths in that region are not so surprising," said Loretta Mickley, a senior researcher at Harvard focusing on atmospheric pollution, who contributed to the research.

Health Ministry director general of disease prevention and control Mohamad Subuh told Reuters the research data was wrong.

"Data on deaths is clear. We have surveillance," Subuh said, adding that the assumptions of mortality based on mathematical calculations were "irresponsible".

Every year, Indonesia faces criticism from its neighbors Singapore and Malaysia over the smog, euphemistically known as "haze", and its failure to stop the fires from being lit.

Last year's fires were among the worst in the region's history, with billions of dollars worth of environmental damage, weeks of flight and school disruptions and thousands suffering from respiratory disease.

Buildings are shrouded by haze in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia August 28, 2016. Photo by Reuters/Edgar Su

People take photos near the Singapore Flyer observatory wheel shrouded by haze August 26, 2016. Photo by Reuters/Edgar Su

Environment team threatened with death investigating haze

The ministry said a group of up to 100 men detained seven investigators for about 12 hours on the weekend and threatened to burn them alive and dump their bodies in a river at an oil palm plantation in Rokan Hulu, Riau province.

The incident illustrates the difficulties Indonesia faces tackling the illegal burning of vegetation to clear land for palm oil and pulp and paper plantations that causes clouds of smoke every dry season, which at times blanket the region, raising fears for public health and air travel.

The team was following up on satellite images showing "hot spots", or suspected fires, in a concession of PT Andika Permata Sawit Lestari (APSL) oil palm plantation company.

There were "strong indications" the mob was deployed by the company, the ministry said in a statement.

"With this incident, the investigation of PT APSL will become our top priority," Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya said in the statement, referring to both suspected forest encroachment by the company and the detention of the team.

"The environment ministry will investigate this and take strict action in accordance with the law," she said.

A company official, contacted by Reuters on Monday, declined to comment.

The team was released only after lengthy negotiations involving police and after they agreed to delete photographic evidence and to leave behind two vehicles and equipment. The equipment and vehicles were recovered the next day.

The investigators, however, managed to retrieve video footage shot by a drone showing thousands of hectares of forest had been burned illegally in and around the APSL concession.

"As far as the eye can see, an area that was once peatland has been converted into oil palm plantation," Nurbaya said.

Plantation companies drain swampy peatland before planting their crops and the dried-out peat is particularly flammable and often catches fire when companies set fires to clear vegetation.

More than 450 individuals have been arrested in connection with land and forest fires this year.

Under Indonesian law, companies found guilty of clearing land by burning can be fined up to 10 billion rupiah ($735,000), and the management faces up to 10 years in jail. Companies that fail to control fires started elsewhere but which spread into their concession land also face punishment.

Related news:

> Indonesia faces environmental time bomb after coal bust

> Indonesia radio denies Singapore's radical preaching claim
Wildlife activist Ajay Dubey will challenge the clearance given to Ken-Betwa river link project Phase-I by standing committee of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL).

Dubey told HT that he would approach principal bench of National Green Tribunal (NGT) soon.

It is not just a matter of Panna Tiger Reserve, the whole area around it has rich biodiversity. Against this backdrop, Panna Biosphere Reserve, the third reserve of the state and 18th in the country, was notified by the union ministry of environment and forests on August 25, 2011, Dubey told HT.

What about the environmental impact and damage to the biodiversity in the whole biosphere reserve. How are authorities going to compensate the losses in the biosphere due to this interlinking project? I have decided to approach the principal bench of NGT soon on these issues and challenge the clearance given to Ken-Betwa river link project Phase-I. There is no detailed compensatory mechanism for the whole biosphere reserve, Dubey said.

The Ken Betwa project was cleared in the meeting of the standing committee of NBWL chaired by union environment minister Anil Madhav Dave. The minutes of the meeting, which was held on August 23, were approved recently.

Panna Biosphere Reserve (BR), spread over in Panna and Chhatarpur districts, is one of the 18 BRs established in India and among the three in MP. The two other BRs in MP are Pachmarhi (1999) and Achanakmar-Amarkantak (2005).

It consists of three well delineated zones, core (792.53 sq km), buffer (989.20 sq km) and transition zones (1219.25 sq km).

Panna Biosphere Reserve has rich biodiversity - 34 mammalian species, including tigers, lesser cats like Siyah Gosh (Felis caracal) and Jungle cat (Felis chaus), black buck (Antilope cervicapra) and so on. It has over 280 species of birds and a total of 1255 species of plants. Out of its area, 64.1% falls in Panna district and the remaining 35.84% in Chhatarpur. It has three protected areas - Panna National Park, Gangau and Ken-Gharial sanctuaries, said Dubey.

Narmada Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar, who was a member of interlinking of rivers (ILR) committee, told HT that not many know that Ken-Betwa link had six dams on it.

Before they execute this project, the government has to study of the impact of the interlinking project on each one of these six dams and the surrounding areas in detail, she said.

Patkar said as she was a member of the ILR committee, she had studied the ramifications of the project in detail. I think, the river interlinking project needs to be reviewed with more studies and fresh data for the long term effects, she said.

In September last year, the Madhya Pradesh wildlife advisory board gave its go ahead to the Ken Betwa river link project amid dissent from some non-official members like MK Ranjitsinh, Belinda Wright and Khageshwar Naik.

The proposed interlinking of Ken-Betwa is said to irrigate drought prone Bundelkhand and provide drinking water to 1.34 million people in MP and Uttar Pradesh. The project would submerge 58.03 sq. km (10.07%) of critical tiger habitat (CTH) of the Panna Tiger Reserve and 50% loss to the existing unique habitat of highly endangered vulture species, according to wildlife officials.
Amitabh Bachchan said Pink has already become a movement providing women with the opportunity to speak out.

Pink is no longer perhaps a colour. Pink no more connotes the favourite colour of a young girl and her Barbie doll. Pink means you have the freedom and liberty to walk at night. Women got the opportunity to speak out through this film, Bachchan told a press conference in Kolkata.

Amitabh Bachchan interacts with media as Taapsee Pannu (L) looks on during promotion of their film Pink in Kolkata on Wednesday evening. (PTI)

Turning to Pink actress Taapsee Pannu, who was sitting by his side, Bachchan said, You know what experiences she went through while travelling in DTC buses but she did not muster the courage to protest. The film will now teach girls like her to go to police station and lodge protest. This is the victory of Pink.

Bachchan, who also described the stabbing of a woman in full public view in New Delhi as despicable, said people lacked the courage to come the aid of victims fearing harassment at police stations and courts.

But Pink talks about the rights of women to lodge protest during day and night hours.

Some things are common everywhere. A Swedish girl wanted to take the film (Pink) to her country. Pink has given rise to such a movement, Bachchan said adding in real life in such a situation, he would have mouthed the same lines like Pinks crusader lawyer enacted by him.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Actor Shilpa Shetty Kundra hasnt been seen on the big-screen for a long time now as she has her hands full with television commitments and is also taking care of her son, Viaan.

Shilpa who is also a businesswoman was recently seen walking the ramp at a fashion week, had everyone talking about her washboard abs. She is also considered to be a style icon, fitness enthusiast and has been a role model for many women.

Read: Coming soon on app | The Shilpa Shetty Kundra way to a flat stomach, naturally

According to sources, a contemporary Indian wear brand has approached Shilpa to sport their outfits on the dance reality show, Super Dancer she is currently judging.

A source close to her, says, The brand has an interesting collection of cocktail saris and other Indian wear options they definitely arent the typical and conventional looking Indian wear and the brand believes that Shilpa sporting their designs will grab major eyeballs and generate interest in their outfits. It is no coincidence as Shilpa has often been quoted as saying that a sari is the sexiest outfit for an Indian woman.

Read: Festive food for Diwali | Shilpa Shetty turns chef on social media

Watch the Episode 1 of Super Dancer here:

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Amidst all negative criticism for Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif for winning the Smita Patil Memorial Award, actors Swara Bhaskar and Juhi Chawla have extended support and claimed that the Baar Baar Dekho star deserves the award.

Swara Bhaskar at an event in Mumbai. (Yogen Shah)

Actor Swara Bhaskar lauded Katrina for winning the award. Hitting back at the critics, the Nil Battey Sannata actress wrote in a blog for Huffingtonpost India: Whether or not Katrina Kaif is a good actor notwithstanding, there is no denying that she is a hugely hard-working, disciplined and diligent person. It reflects in her work.

Any artist of any field will tell you that hard work is something to be respected, she added.

Thank you thank you! :) I feel like we all need to just calm down!!! https://t.co/ecsX1lonBH  Swara Bhaskar (@ReallySwara) September 18, 2016

While Katrina received the Smita Patil Memorial Award for her outstanding contribution in Bollywood, Juhi was the recipient of the Priyadarshni Academys 32nd Anniversary Global Awards. I think our memory is very short. Just a few years ago, I remember Katrina Kaif was in a row. She had about 10 super-duper hit films to her credit. I think she deserves an award. She is very beautiful and a committed actress, the 48-year-old actress said.

Juhi and Katrina graced the Priyadarshni Academys 32nd Anniversary Global Awards function in Mumbai on Monday.

Katrina, 33, who has worked in films like New York, Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani, Raajneeti, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dhoom 3, ensured that she will keep her sincerity towards her work intact. I believe the most important thing in art is truth. And I promise my attempt to be truthful and sincere to the craft which has largely given me the purpose of my life over the last 15 years, she said at the award function.

The one thing I do hope is that I continue to entertain the audience who have given me so much love and support. I hope I can make them proud of me, she added.

On the work front, the Namastey London actress is shooting Anurag Basus comedy-mystery film Jagga Jasoos with Ranbir Kapoor. Katrina has also confirmed to reprise the role of Zoya in Ali Abbas Zafars Tiger Zinda Hai, the sequel of the 2012 hit Ek Tha Tiger opposite Salman Khan.

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Job prospects for Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) graduates look better this year with public sector undertaking (PSUs) planning to increase to direct hiring from campuses.

PSUs put direct recruitment from IITs on hold after a public interest litigation was filed in 2014 in the Madras high court that said such hiring made it difficult for students from other institutes to get into such companies.

The stay meant PSUs relied only on GATE scores and company-specific exams to recruit engineers. GATE is a nationwide exam for engineering graduates, score of which can be used for post-graduate studies and PSU recruitment.

The Madras HC dismissed the plea in September last year allowing institutes to approach PSUs for direct recruitment again. To be sure, PSUs still recruit using GATE scores and exams to recruit candidates.

The All-IIT Placement Committee (AIPC), the panel responsible for campus placements across IITs, had urged PSUs to recruit from IITs this year. HPCL and CIL have already visited IIT Bombay in April this year offering jobs to around 20 students in Rs 10-12 per annum range.

We are expecting a positive response from PSUs this year, because of the initiative of the AIPC to reach out to PSUs for their active involvement in the campus placement process, says Prof Manu Santhanam, placement advisor, IIT Madras.

Prof Debasis Deb, chairman of the career development centre of IIT Kharagpur told HT that they have already received positive responses from PSUs. IITs Gandhinagar and IIT Roorkee too confirmed that PSUs have already confirmed plans to visit the campus. The institutes, however, did not disclose names.

IIT (BHU) Varanasi has been approached by Mishra Dhatu Nigam Ltd (Midhani  a miniratna) for campus hiring. IIT Indore is also in talks with HPCL, Coal India and BPCL.

These placements will happen when the final season starts across IITs in December. However, as on September 15, several companies, mostly in the core engineering sector, have already made pre-placement offers (PPOs) to pick up talent from these institutes.

At IIT Kharagpur, 37 companies have offered 128 PPOs. IIT Roorkee saw 71 PPOs from 16 companies, with Rs 29 lakh being the highest package on offer. IIT Madras saw 35 PPOs from 14 companies, while IIT Indore, one of the newer IITs, received seven offers with Rs 27 lakh being the highest package on offer. These were marginal improvements over last year.

However, students who accept the PPOs will not be able to sit in the final placement season as most IITs plan to stick to one-student-one-job policy despite the recent startup placement fiasco which involved blacklisting of 30 companies. Any problematic issues, arising due to companies not keeping their promises, will be dealt with on a case by case basis, Prof Santhanam said.

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In a bid to pin down the management of companies and avoid a Union Carbide-like situation in case of accidents and casualties, the government is making significant changes to the Mines Act, among them a move to shift liability to local management and fix compensation.

Auction of mines in India has always seen lukewarm response; to counter this, the government is trying to make significant changes to the Mines Act of 1952. A major concern for global mining companies is the liability for accidents and casualties in mines. The delay in giving licences to begin mining is also a big concern.

We all remember what happened with the Union Carbide tragedy of Bhopal. The question still remains who should be held liable for the any human failure at the site of a plant when tragedy strikes, said a top official in the government.

Should the top management be held liable, is the question. Sources said that government is trying to fix the liability on the local management instead of the global heads of mining companies. This would entail changes in the Mines Act and also in the labour laws that prevail in the country.

The government has formed a group comprising of the ministers of law, labour, coal, mines and finance to discuss this issue of responsibility.

Sources say that this group of ministers is also looking at fixing a 45-day time-frame for clearing a mine after it is auctioned.

There is no set norm globally as far as liability of mine accidents are concerned. It changes from country to country since the nature of the accident will also vary. But where private entities are the owners, the liability for compensation falls on them, said Hiranyava Bhadra, global leader of operational excellence in mining in KPMG.

With Piyush Goyal heading the mines ministry, the government proposes to auction over 100 mines in the next two years, which has the potential of adding 3 lakh crore to the exchequer. Currently, the second round of auctions are on, mines containing minerals like iron ore, bauxite, limestone, gold, copper, phosphate and potash are on the table.

In the first phase, 17 blocks could not be sold due to insufficient interest.

While taking over the ministry, Goyal had said: We will make sure that its share in GDP grows at least by one percentage point in next two to three years. The share of mineral production in GDP is 2.4% now. But to better the situation, the government has to introduce ease of doing business and predictable laws.

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The landmark 7 RCR, the official address of Indias Prime Minister, is history.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday approved renaming the Race Course Road in New Delhi as Lok Kalyan Marg.

The decision was taken at meeting of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) under the chairmanship of Kejriwal, who is a member of the civic body.

New Delhi MP Meenkashi Lekhi had earlier submitted a proposal to the NDMC to rename the road based on the philosophy of BJP ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyay as Ekatma Marg.

Kejriwal and AAP Delhi Cantonment MLA Surinder Singh demanded renaming this road after Guru Govind Singh.

Earlier in the day, Kejriwal tweeted, A no. of Sikh groups met me. They want RCR to be named after Sh Guru Gobind Singh ji.

However, a consensus was reached at the council meeting on Wednesday to rename the road as Lok Kalyan Marg.

This is the second road in the Lutyens zone of Delhi to be renamed in recent times. Last year, Aurangzeb Road was renamed as APJ Abdul Kalam Road after the former president.

The council also decided to name a roundabout near Rakabganj Gurudwara as Guru Govind Singh roundabout.

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While late actor Jiah Khans mother Rabia Khan is going about town, brandishing a report from a private forensic expert that she claims questions the CBIs theory that Jiah Khan committed suicide, legal experts have cast doubts over the admissibility of the report as evidence in a court of law.

The said report, dated September 13, 2016, has been made by UK-based forensic physician Jason Payne-James. Its findings are based on secondary sources such as copies of the medical boards opinion submitted before the CBI, the photographs from the spot including those of the dead body, CCTV footage, and a dupatta provided by Rabia Khan that was similar to the one that was found tied around Jiahs throat.

Legal experts though, have raised questions on the method based on secondary evidence. There are very specific methods of collecting and studying forensic evidence all specified by law, said senior criminal lawyer Rizwan Merchant. Now in this case, the private expert had no access to such evidence and had to rely upon only the photographs and the documents that were provided to him by his client. Thus, serious doubts can be raised on the reports veracity. The court will have to see whether it is credible enough to be admitted as evidence, he said.

Senior lawyer and CBIs counsel advocate Hiten Venegaonkar too said once the report is produced in court, the agency will urge the court to question its credibility. This is a private foreign forensic staff who has only relied upon what was provided to him by his client three years after the incident, Venegaonkar said. The CBI has gone through all medical and forensic evidence and ruled out homicide in the case based on solid evidence.

Sooraj pancholi at a promotional event for his Bollywood debut Hero.

Experts have also questioned the admissibility of the report in the light of the fact that it was procured at the insistence of Rabia Khan as well as her then lawyer Dinesh Tiwari, who is now the special public prosecutor in the case. Tiwari himself however, has brushed aside all talk of a potential conflict of interest considering that he is no longer the complainants counsel. The state appointed me as SPP only after considering the fact that I was well versed with the facts of the case and even though the complainant had first approached this private expert while I was her counsel, the report itself is an unbiased, factual document, he said.

Venegaonkar though disagreed and said the CBI plans to approach the court against Tiwaris continuation as SPP.

Rabia Khan meanwhile, has said that the CBI left out much of significant forensic evidence that help prove that Jiah Khans suicide was staged. There is no question of raising doubts over the credibility of this new report. Of course, the court will look at it because the CBI has been unable to come up with right answers, she said.
Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa inaugurated a section of Chennais metro, an 8.6 km stretch connecting the airport to Little Mount station, on Wednesday.

Like the residents of the city, I look forward to the commencement of operations on the underground section of the Metro Rail which I am confident will be before the end of 2016, she said as she opened Rail Corridor 1.

Once clearances come from the commissioner of Metro Rail Safety for Alandur-St Thomas Mount, the link will eliminate the need for changing trains to reach the airport.

With that the entire 20 km elevated section of the Chennai Metro Rail Project, would become operational, the chief minister said and thanked the Japanese government for its support.

Union minister for urban development, M Venkaiah Naidu was present at the station to flag off a train after Jayalalithaa waved the green flag from the Secretariat.

Naidu called on the Chennai Metro Rail Limited to expedite the remaining work of phase-I.

The newly commissioned stretch covers six important stations that cross the airport, Meenambakkam, Nanganallur Road, Alandur, Guindy and Little Mount. Over 260 trains will run in each direction and transport an estimated 60 lakh people daily once the project is completed.

The state government is also planning to expand the Chennai Metro Rail project along three corridors and add an orbital corridor at an estimated cost of Rs 44,000 crore.

With Chennais metro line, about 324 kilometres of metro rail is operational across the country including Delhi-NCR, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Jaipur and Mumbai.

Also read | Steered by woman driver, first Chennai Metro train chugs off
NEW DELHI: An interstate supplier of arms and ammunition, who allegedly supplied weapons to Maoists in Jharkhand and gangsters of Bihar, has been arrested from near Dwarka Sector-18, Delhi police said on Tuesday.

The accused, identified as Raj Kumar Yadav (27) alias Raju, had come near a cremation ground in Dwarka on September 18 to supply weapons to a client. Police nabbed him from the spot. Yadav was carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh for his arrest. One pistol along with 3 cartridges has been recovered from his possession.

During interrogation, Yadav said that he came in contact with gangsters of Najafgarh while working for a man named Harcharan Singh Sardar. Sardar apparently lured Yadav to earn huge money by supplying weapons in Delhi from Bihar, said Ravindra Yadav, joint commissioner of police (crime).

Yadav further said that he had supplied hand grenades to Vikash Dagar, alias Vicky, to kill his rival Krishan Pahalwan. Police said Yadav smuggled the arms from Bihar and supplied them to criminal gangs of Najafgarh. He said that he had contacts with Left Wing Extremists (LWE) in Jharkhand and claims to be their source of supply also.

Yadav, police said, was born in Bindapur, Delhi. His father was a rickshaw puller. Yadav studied till class 7 in a school in Janakpuri. Later, he dropped out and began to work as a motor mechanic in Dwarka. He was arrested for the first time in 2009 in an Arms Act case registered at Uttam Nagar police station.

Yadav, along with his family, had shifted to their native place after being released on bail.
NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party government announced on Tuesday every road in the national capital would be fogged to get rid of mosquitoes, the vector responsible for the outbreak of dengue, chikungunya and malaria.

The fight against mosquitoes will now see fogging on all roads and byroads every alternate day for the next one month.

Keeping in mind the dengue, malaria and chikungunya crisis, the Delhi government has launched a campaign to make Delhi mosquito-free, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said, after chief minister Arvind Kejriwal declared a war on mosquitoes.

The announcement came on a day the Delhi high court directed the Centre and city government to step up efforts to tackle the outbreak, suggesting measures such as deploying retired personnel to increase the number of doctors, nurses and other hospital staff. The high court asked government-run hospitals not to deny treatment or admission to patients, and directed civic authorities to visit houses, particularly slums, with fogging machines and spray insecticides.

The AAP governments push for a determined fogging exercise capped days of denial over the scale of the crisis despite hospitals struggling to cope with the growing number of patients.

The city recorded over the past month more than 4,000 cases of mosquito-borne diseases, with 15 chikungunya-related deaths, though officially no one has died of the condition. Dengue has claimed four people on official records till September 17, while the unofficial count is 20.

Hundreds of cases of chikungunya, the illness that causes high fever and joint pain, are being unreported because most patients avoid the test to confirm the disease once the fever subsides in four or five days. The test can detect anti-bodies in about a week since the fever sets in.

Although fogging and sanitation are the responsibility of the MCDs (civic agencies), we now understand that there is a crisis. And since people have complained that fogging hasnt happened, so this will supplement the efforts of the MCDs and increase its band-width, Sisodia said.

The move is viewed as an attempt to not only kill the aedes aegypti and anopheles mosquitoes  carriers of dengue and chikungunya viruses and the malaria parasite  but also silence mounting criticism against the AAP government, which has been accused of passing the blame on the BJP-ruled municipal corporations.

The health crisis has sparked a political row over who is to blame for failing to properly prepare for the outbreak.

We do not wish to get into why the primary duty of prevention of vector-borne diseases and cleaning of garbage did not happen despite all funds having been released before time and repeated meetings, Sisodia said.

The Delhi government will acquire 600 fogging machines on contract.

The fogging will continue for one month, till the end of October. The machines will work day and night in every ward, every lane, Sisodia said.

People can ring up 1266 (North and South MCD), 155303 (East MCD) and 23340108 ( NDMC) to make fogging requests for their localities.

Doctors were not convinced that fogging can stop mosquito breeding, which is most active during the monsoon season from June to September. The chemicals used in the smoke during fogging kill adult mosquitoes, but extensive anti-larvae measures are needed to weed out a population.

Besides, sustained exposure in high doses to chemicals such as melathion and cyphenothrin can cause skin and eye irritation, and headache.

Fogging every week or 10 days is fine, but doing it on alternate days will aggravate allergies and chronic respiratory problems like asthma, said Dr Vikas Maurya, senior pulmonologist at BL Kapur Super Speciality Hospital.

People are advised to cover their face with an anti-pollution mask or wet cloth during exposure to smoke from fogging.
NEW DELHI: At a general ward in outer Delhis Ambedkar hospital, a 23-year-old woman is admitted with multiple fractures on her arms, face and legs.

A man she met on Facebook two years ago threw her off the balcony on Monday afternoon because she reportedly refused to marry him.

Police arrested him in connection with the case. The incident was reported from Avantika in Rohini at 6 pm Monday.

The woman, a beautician, met Amit on Facebook in 2014, said an investigating officer.

After a few weeks of chatting on the social networking site, the two exchanged phone numbers. They switched to chatting on WhatsApp, said the womans brother.

In 2015, Amit proposed marriage, but she refused. She told us about the proposal. On enquiring about him, we did not hear good things about and found out that he was jobless, the brother said.

He said she severed all ties with Amit and stopped taking his calls. Amit allegedly refused to accept it and started threatening her over text messages.

The family alleged that Amit had been troubling her for the past three-four months.

On Monday at 2.30 pm, her mother said, Amit called her asking her to meet him at a nearby shopping mall. My daughter refused, but he blackmailed her and started threatening her. She stopped taking his calls, the mother said.

At 6 pm, Amit came to their house with his nephew and two sisters, said the mother. The four allegedly asked the womans mother to return Rs 1 lakh they allegedly borrowed from Amit.

Amit, furious over the woman refusing to marry him, caught her by her hand and threw her off the balcony with his sisters help, she said.

Amit allegedly tried to flee the house when the woman fell. Residents caught him and handed him over to police.

Police registered a case of attempt to murder against him. They are also verifying Amits claims that the womans family borrowed money from him.
AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan was arrested by Delhi Police on Wednesday afternoon on charges of sexual harassment. This is the second time he has been arrested in the last three months.

Khan was reportedly called to the DCP office for questioning, following which he was placed under arrest.

He was asked to join the investigation after his sister-in-law alleged that she was sexually harassed by him. He was arrested after a thorough round of questioning, DCP, southeast, MS Randhawa said.

Khans relative alleged that he had pressured her to get into a physical relationship with him. She also complained that her husband allegedly demanded dowry and forced her to do as Khan asked.

Following her complaint, a case of sexual harassment, criminal intimidation, criminal conspiracy, insulting the modesty of a woman and subjecting a woman to cruelty was registered against Khan and his brother.

Khan had denied the charges and said that he has no connection with the woman at all.

The arrest came three days after Khan reached the Jamia Nagar Police station on Sunday to surrender but the police refused to arrest him. He had accused the police of working under pressure to arrest him and said they didnt do so fearing a backlash from the public, a charge rubbished by senior officials.

A few hours before his relative pressed sexual harassment charges against him, the Okhla MLA had resigned from the post of Waqf Board chairman citing conspiracy. T

he AAP government, however, refused to accept it and said the resignation was given in pain. Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia had said that an internal inquiry revealed that it was a family dispute, which was being given a political colour.

In July, Khan was sent to 14-day judicial custody after being arrested in a molestation case.

He was arrested by the police on July 24 for allegedly threatening a woman with rape and murder. The woman, who had gone to his house to discuss the issue of power cuts, had alleged Khans men stalked her and threatened to kidnap her children. She also claimed that Khan tried to run her over with his car. Khan had denied the charges and called it a conspiracy to frame him in false cases. Khan is presently out on bail in the case.

Earlier this month, former AAP minister Sandeep Kumar was arrested after a woman alleged that she was drugged, raped and secretly filmed about a year ago by the Delhi lawmaker. He was sacked by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal over the sex scandal.
At a general ward in outer Delhis Ambedkar hospital, a 23-year-old woman is admitted with multiple fractures on her arms, face and legs.

A man she met on Facebook two years ago threw her off the balcony on Monday afternoon because she reportedly refused to marry him.

Police arrested him in connection with the case. The incident was reported from Avantika in Rohini at 6 pm Monday.

The woman, a beautician, met Amit on Facebook in 2014, said an investigating officer.

After a few weeks of chatting on the social networking site, the two exchanged phone numbers. They switched to chatting on Whatsapp, said the womans brother.

In 2015, Amit proposed marriage, but she refused. She told us about the proposal. On enquiring about him, we did not hear good things about and found out that he was jobless, the brother said.

He said she severed all ties with Amit and stopped taking his calls. Amit allegedly refused to accept it and started threatening her over text messages.

The family alleged that Amit had been troubling her for the past three-four months.

On Monday at 2.30 pm, her mother said, Amit called her asking her to meet him at a nearby shopping mall. My daughter refused, but he blackmailed her and started threatening her. She stopped taking his calls, the mother said.

At 6 pm, Amit came to their house with his nephew and two sisters, said the mother. The four allegedly asked the womans mother to return `1 lakh they allegedly borrowed from Amit.

Amit, furious over the woman refusing to marry him, caught her by her hand and threw her off the balcony with his sisters help, she said.

Amit allegedly tried to flee the house when the woman fell. Residents caught him and handed him over to police.

Police registered a case of attempt to murder against him. They are also verifying Amits claims that the womans family borrowed money from that.
The examination board of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TMBU) on Wednesday recommended cancellation of law degree of former Delhi law minister and AAP MLA Jitender Singh Tomar, who was arrested on the charge that his degree was fake.

However, the board would give Tomar an opportunity to state his position. The disciplinary committee, a statutory committee of university, would seek explanation from Tomar as to why his degree should not be cancelled.

Vice chancellor (VC) Rama Shanker Dubey, who chaired the meeting of examination board, said the approval of disciplinary committee, syndicate and senate and finally nod of chancellor of universities was required for cancellation of degree.

He said the committee would decide nature and quantum of punishment for employees indicted for lapses in issuing the degree.

Sources said about a dozen employees of the university, including those of Viswanath Singh Institute of Legal Studies (VSILS), Munger, an affiliated college of TMBU, were among those indicted in report of internal inquiry committee.

Read more: Fake degree case: Will Jitender Singh Tomar lose assembly seat if expelled?

The committee in its report a few months ago had found the migration certificate of former law minister of Arvind Kejriwal cabinet wrong and had recommended cancellation of the law degree.

The controversy relates to the acquisition of law degree by Tomar on the basis of a doubtful enrollment at VSILS in the academic session 1994-95. He had claimed to have passed the law examination in 1998-99.

Tomar was arrested and later released on bail in 2015 in connection with the case. The former Tri Nagar legislator sent his resignation letter as minister in the Kejriwal government through his lawyer after being charged with cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy.

The FIR against Tomar was registered on June 8 in 2015 following a letter written by the Bar Council of Delhi secretary Puneet Mittal in May requesting the Delhi Police to conduct a detailed preliminary investigation with regard to the alleged forged documents and submit a report to it.

It took the police over a month to investigate the case against Tomar and make watertight grounds for his arrest.
Old Delhi is not getting any newer. There has been no development since an underground utility duct was completed in Chandni Chowk in 2014.

Following a month-long series run by Hindustan Times on the state of the Walled city last August-September, Delhi had initiated the Shahajanabad redevelopment project. Heres a status report:

Lack of staff

Sources said the government did not have enough workers and funding to carry out the redevelopment project.

Construction of utility duct on southern side is yet to begin. Its drawings and designs have not been finalised, which should have ideally been prepared six months ago. There are 12 vacancies in Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation (SRDC), which have not been filled. The corporation requires engineers, architects and archaeologists to move forward, said a source.

Frequent transfer of control

Administrative shifts between departments and frequent transfer of officers were another stumbling block. Initially, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was the head of SRDC. Then, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia was given charge. Thereafter, administrative powers of the corporation were shifted to the Public Works Department (PWD) and minister in charge Satyendra Jain was made the chairman. This led to confusion with regard to seeking approvals. Later, PWD Secretary was appointed as its chairman a month ago, said the source.

Fund shortage

According to a Comptroller and Auditor General ( CAG) report, Rs 150 crore was allocated for the project till 2014-15. However, only Rs 5.93 crore was released. Rs 20 crore was to be allocated to incentivise haveli owners to keep their structures in their original form. But the money did not come. A proposal for funding and assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for the project was prepared, but never submitted. The proposal has not been deliberated on even once, a source said.

Departure of architect

The original architect left the project in March citing lack of clarity over decisions. Several decisions were reversed or decisions were not taken at appropriate level. The entire project became mundane. It has turned into merely a street improvement plan, said Abhimanyu Dalal, the former architect of the project. The government has assigned the job to a new consultant.

Delay in encroachment removal

To remove illegal occupation and encroachment, Delhi Police constituted a committee on August 29. This committee has not met. Madhur Verma, deputy commissioner of police (DCP), said: The committee was formed 20 days ago and police have contacted all stakeholders. Meetings will be convened next week in which vendors, RWAs, market associations will be present. We will discuss encroachments and modalities for relocation of vendors.

The official word

Nitin Panigrahi, deputy general manager, project and administration of SRDC said all proposals are lying with the government for consideration. The work is likely to be expedited after receiving drawings from the newly appointed consultant, said Panigrahi, who is also nodal officer of the project.

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Delhis Race Course Road became Lok Kalyan Marg on Wednesday, but historians and urban planners are not happy.

Urban planning expert AGK Menon called the renaming of Race Course Road unnecessary.

Some names have a loaded cultural perspective, for example, the conversion of Aurangzeb Road to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road. People thought he was an evil ruler and as dont want to be associated with a tyrant. Another aspect of the renaming of the road was to Hinduise the city, Menon said.

The name, Race Course Road, however, does not carry any cultural baggage, he said. The road was named after Delhis only race course in the city.

The only purpose that is served by this road being renamed is a sense of accomplishment among politicians. There are many layers of history to a city and names of places are a symbol of these layers, which should not be erased, Menon added.

Many others too questioned the decision to change the roads name.

Historian Sohail Hashmi said that if the government wants to work towards lok kalyan (public welfare), then they should build new roads instead of renaming the existing ones.

Read: Address update for PMs residence: Race Course Road is now Lok Kalyan Marg

What lok kalyan is the government doing by taking credit for the name of a road which was not even built by them? The worst part is that there is no thought behind the renaming these roads, Hashmi said.

Other roads in central Delhi that were renamed in the past include Curzon Road to Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Irwin Road to Baba Kharak Singh Marg, King Edward Road to Maulana Azad Road and Kingsway to Rajpath.

The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) officials said that proposals to rename roads can be considered and acted upon at the discretion of the council.

However, minister of state for home Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhary had told the Lok Sabha on April 21 that such decisions are governed by ministry of home affairs guidelines (1975). The guidelines read that changes in names of streets create confusion for post offices and the public, and deprive people of a sense of history.

Historian Swapna Liddle said, Race Course is one of the landmarks of the city. Road names show us how a city was built and tell us what its landmarks were.
After making headlines as Indias rape capital, Delhi ranks second among Indian states in terms of number of stalking cases registered, according to National Crime Records Bureau data for 2015.

Of the 6,266 complaints under stalking  Section 354D of the Indian Penal Code  1,124 were from the Union Territory of Delhi. It accounts for 18% of all stalking cases in India. The Capital also contributes to 97% of all such complaints from all Union Territories.

The city leads in numbers even against other states that are perceived as being unsafe for women such as Uttar Pradesh, which registered 519 stalking complaints in 2015.

The Capitals number of cases is second only to Maharashtra, which registered 1,399 stalking cases.

However, the state has a higher sex ratio compared to Delhi. While Maharashtra has 929 women for every 1,000 men, Delhi has 868 women for every 1,000 women.

In August, Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal wrote a letter to the Union home ministry pointing out the high rate of stalking crimes. According to data of National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) for 2015, Delhi is not just rape capital but also stalking capital.

Last week, a 23-year-old girl was set ablaze because she turned down a stalkers proposal. I met that girl who has suffered 95% burns and is battling for life in a hospital, she said in the letter dated August 16, 2016.

The difference is also in the population. If one combines the population of all UTs, then Delhi will still have a higher population. Also Delhi women are more aware of their rights, says advocate MS Khan, who regularly deals with stalking cases.

On Tuesday morning, in the Burari district of northwest Delhi, a 34-year-old man allegedly stabbed a 22-year-old woman 22 times. The young woman died on the spot. A police source said the accused claimed that he and the woman knew each other and were in a relationship previously.

There was a complaint registered in March, but that was compromised after parents of the accused met with the parents of the victim, police sources told HT. The woman did not register a police complaint after April, sources added.

The complaint is the subject of investigation, said deputy commissioner of police (north) Madhur Verma.

Delhi was the state with second highest number of stalking cases (541) in 2014 as well, according to NCRB data.

CASES THAT SHOOK DELHI 29 Aug, 2016: A DU student was set afire by her stalker in Mukundpur after the girl refused to marry him. A dairy owner, who lived near her house, allegedly followed her everywhere. He went to the girls house one day and started beating her family members. When the girl retaliated, he allegedly poured kerosene on her and set her on fire.



18 July, 2015: A 19-year-old from Anand Parbat was stabbed to death allegedly by a man she had accused of stalking. She had filed a complaint against the accused in 2013 but nothing much came out of it. Police denied that such a complaint was filed.



11 May, 2012: Harassment by a stalker pushed a 19-year-old beautician from Vasant Kunj to suicide. Before killing herself, she told her sister that she had been humiliated in public.



8 March, 2011: March, 2011: A DU student was shot outside her college in South campus. The killer, identified as a mentally unstable man told police he knew the womans route to college, and was waiting near the bridge to kill her. His immediate provocation came three days before the crime when he tried to speak to her but she snubbed him. A labourer at a knitting unit, he bought a gun from Gurgaon to kill her.



23 Jan, 1996: Priyadarshini Mattoo case Law student, Priyadarshini Mattoo, was found dead on at her uncles house. Her senior, Santosh Kumar Singh, who had been stalking her for years, was the main accused. Later, it was revealed Santosh, the son of an IPS officer, strangled her with a wire around her neck. He smacked her face many times with a helmet making her face unrecognisable. The Delhi HC on Oct 30, 2006 sentenced him to death. It was later changed to life term. A DU student was set afire by her stalker in Mukundpur after the girl refused to marry him. A dairy owner, who lived near her house, allegedly followed her everywhere. He went to the girls house one day and started beating her family members. When the girl retaliated, he allegedly poured kerosene on her and set her on fire.A 19-year-old from Anand Parbat was stabbed to death allegedly by a man she had accused of stalking. She had filed a complaint against the accused in 2013 but nothing much came out of it. Police denied that such a complaint was filed.Harassment by a stalker pushed a 19-year-old beautician from Vasant Kunj to suicide. Before killing herself, she told her sister that she had been humiliated in public.March, 2011: A DU student was shot outside her college in South campus. The killer, identified as a mentally unstable man told police he knew the womans route to college, and was waiting near the bridge to kill her. His immediate provocation came three days before the crime when he tried to speak to her but she snubbed him. A labourer at a knitting unit, he bought a gun from Gurgaon to kill her.
National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Wednesday slammed the three municipal corporations, New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), Delhi government and Delhi Development Authority (DDA) for not taking strong measures to control the spread of dengue and chikungunya in the capital.

What were you doing for the last two months, looks like you have no plan. Every one in Delhi is sick, the panel headed by NGT chairperson Swatanter Kumar said.

The green court also constituted a principal committee, which will be headed by Delhi chief secretary, to formulate an action plan to control the outbreak.

The committee has been asked to submit a comprehensive report to the court within a fortnight. The committee has also been asked to conduct an urgent meeting on Thursday at 11am at the chief secretarys office.

The green court also roped in Delhi Police to check and prevent breeding of mosquitoes in their areas.

The order came while hearing a petition by former Central Pollution Control Bureau (CPCB) scientist, Mahendra Pandey, which has stated that fogging is anti-environment and is causing more harm to residents.

Chemical fogging can cause brain diseases, abortion and other diseases, the petition read.

It has also directed the principal committee to look at NCR (National Capital Region including Noida, Ghaziabad and Gurgaon) and seek help from the civic agencies there.

Read: Delhis dengue bluff: Just 4 died officially, but HT finds 19 in one locality
To draw the attention of corporation officials towards a non-operational water tank constructed in June 1999, along with other pending civic issues, Bahujan Samaj Party councillor from Ward 39, Shekhar Tyagi, climbed a water tank on Wednesday and threatened to commit suicide if it was not made operational soon.

After the water tank was opened in 1999, water was supplied to residents for nearly a year. Thereafter, the motor pumps went out of order and were never repaired or replaced. When I became the councillor, I started protests and dharnas over the issue, Tyagi said.

Tyagi had staged five dharnas since 2012. The last time, a pump was installed but it was not efficient enough to pump up the water to the tank.

Sixth time, instead of a dharna, I decided to commit suicide. Now, the police, administration and corporation officials arrived and promised that the issue will be taken up before the election code of conduct comes into effect. It was after this that I decided to come down from the tank, he added.

Fearing any untoward incident, the administration summoned an ambulance, fire tender and police officials to persuade Tyagi from taking any extreme step

After nearly two hours of efforts, Tyagi and his supporters were brought down. The protestors later handed over their representation to corporation officials and city magistrate BS Yadav.

We received a representation from the councillor that included the issues of water tank, bad roads, blocked drainage, overflowing sewage and other issues from the locality. We assured him all the issues will be forwarded to the departments concerned and taken up on priority, said SK Tiwari, deputy municipal commissioner.

The residents said that the water tank is a much needed necessity for a population of nearly 15,000 residents of several residential blocks of Nehru Nagar and other adjoining settlements.

The officials paid no attention to our water tank for all these years. Now, residents have started using bore wells and submersible pumps to draw water. The overflowing sewage, blocked drainage and bad roads are other important issues that need attention. There is hardly any fogging activity while residents are falling ill due to viral fever, dengue and chikungunya, said Ravinder Chibber, a resident.

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In this issue: interview with Nicolas Veron, and the latest podcast  on recent EU measures to tackle the energy crisis.
Surender Singh (34) travelled seven kilometres from Jahangirpuri to Burari early every morning just to follow second-year BA student, Karuna (22), to school. He would wait for six hours outside the gate till she was done teaching to follow her back home.

Singh had reportedly been stalking her for the past six months. After he found about her alleged affair with another man, he stabbed the woman, a part-time teacher of Class Four at a private school, 22 times on Tuesday.

He would click photos, make videos and send her hand-written notes. He claimed to love her, but she had turned down his proposal.

Wherever my daughter went, she found him there, said Karunas mother, Rama.

She changed her route to school, but he followed her there as well. She used to dread going out at night as she knew he would be waiting for her outside the house. He had all the information about my daughters whereabouts.

He threatened to tarnish her image by morphing and circulating her photos and threatened to kill her and both her brothers. One day, he cornered her and put a knife to her throat. We went to the police with a complaint, but Singhs father urged us to come to a compromise, assuring that his son would behave, she said.

Singhs father, a retired Delhi Police official, told HT he disowned his son six years ago. I have nothing do with him. He has behavioural issues. We used to get a lot of complaints about him. I tried to put him on track but he never listened...

He added, Karunas mother had come to our house, but she accepted that she used to entertain Singh by inviting him to her house for lunch. I had warned the family to stay away from him.

Read | Fatal obsession: Why people turn into stalkers and how to recognise the signs

Singh told police he was in a relationship with Karuna and that he was enraged when she cheated on him.

On Tuesday, Singh reportedly saw Karunas WhatsApp chats with another man. She reportedly sent the man photos which made Singh angrier. He called Karuna to the GTB Nagar Metro station. The two met, hours before he killed her.

He claimed he had given Karuna a SIM card. He took it back from her and put it in his phone to check who all she spoke to. He said he got mad when he saw her sending photos to another man. At the GTB Nagar Metro station, the two had an argument. Karuna reportedly threatened to report him to the police and left. Hours later, he intercepted and killed her, an investigator told HT.

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Four months before Karuna, 22, was stabbed to death by her stalker in north Delhi on Tuesday, her family had settled for a compromise with her stalker Surender Singhs family.

Karunas case is similar to Laxmis, 28, who was also stabbed by her stalker in southwest Delhis Inderpuri on Sunday. Last year, Laxmis family had also approached the police with a complaint against her stalker Sanjay, but the matter was settled when Sanjays family gave the police a written statement that he would not trouble Laxmi.

Stalking, an offence under Section 354 D of the India Penal Code, is bailable. Senior Delhi Police officers say stalking is more of a social than a law and order issue.

An officer who handles cases of crime against women said, If somebody is stalking a woman without any physical contact, we can only register an FIR. We have to grant bail at the police station.

Gender expert Kalpana Viswanath, co-founder of SafetiPin, a women safety app, told HT that most men who stalk women need psychological help. Men cannot handle rejection due to which such cases are reported. Stalking must be taken seriously both by the family of the victim and the police. When a parent decides to report it, the police feel it is not a serious case and the person is let off after a warning.

Former Delhi Police commissioner Ajai Raj Sharma said there is no legally ready-made solution to tackle stalking. A girls family happens to be the weaker side in such cases. After a compromise is reached, in some cases most stalkers feel undeterred and continue their acts which at times take unfortunate turns. This issue can be handled only when the police, the stalkers family and the society come together.

Sharma also said that fear of punishment must be instilled in the minds of the stalkers.

Another gender expert, Madhu Vij, said mostly, the two families reach a compromise because of the fear of the consequences like the police coming to question and the uncertainty over justice. The reputation of a girl, her family also plays an important role when two individuals decide to compromise, she said.

Sociologist Patricia Uberoi said that people agreeing to compromise is very common in India even in rape cases. One of the main reasons is the time-consuming judicial system. Even if someone decides to take them to court, it takes a lot of time for justice to be delivered. At other times, it is the cultural context which is in operation which leads to the compromise, she said.
For those of you have visited the Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Madhya Pradesh would vouch that its one of the countrys best parks: Its terrain is characterised by plateaus and gorges, the landscape is handsomely rugged. The Ken river, which flows through the reserve, is its lifeline. In 2009, the park lost all its tigers but now there are 30 of those, thanks to a successful reintroduction programme. But the beauty of the park, the successful programme and even the chance of making the park a centre of wildlife tourists have failed to impress the Centre. On Monday, it cleared the Ken-Betwa river linking project, which will submerge about 100 sq km of the reserve for the project. This includes 50 sq km, or about 10%, of the critical tiger habitat. According to reports, the wildlife panel contended with and rejected the idea of bringing down the reservoir levels to protect some wildlife areas. The project is so dear to the Centre that Union water resources minister Uma Bharti had threatened to go on hunger strike if the project did not get approval.

Read: Environment ministry wildlife panel clears Ken-Betwa river linking project

Many would say that projects such as these are unavoidable in a developing economy like India. While the conservation of forests and wildlife shouldnt mean turning ones back on construction and industrialisation, the approach to such projects with caution to ensure that the economic benefits do not damage the countrys ecological balance. Environmentalists such as Himanshu Thakkar have raised one more critical question about the data that has been used to push through the clearance. According to him, the wildlife panel was informed in February that the proposed project would result in the submergence of 5,803 hectares of the reserve and the loss of 10,523 hectares of the Core Tiger Reserve area. However, he pointed out, that the environmental impact assessment (EIA) report submitted to the panel that the project said only 4,141 hectares of the tiger reserve would be submerged.

Read: The roar is back: Indias tigers are on their prowl again

If this complaint of the green lobby about the approval system is true, then the full process is not just flawed but illegal as well because the EIA notification says that false and misleading data can lead to scrapping of projects.

Read: Wildlife activist to challenge Ken-Betwa river project in NGT:
In one of the best scenes in Shoojit Sircars new film PINK, lawyer Deepak Sehgal (played by Amitabh Bachchan) tells a court that most men in this patriarchal country dont understand that when a woman says no to any sexual overture, she means no, and a man  a friend, boyfriend or husband  must respect that decision. On Tuesday, India got a rude reminder of this inability to take no for an answer: A man stabbed a 22-year-old schoolteacher more than 20 times on a busy road in north Delhi. Police said the assailant claimed to be in love with the woman for more than a year but she had turned down his marriage proposals. The No enraged the man, who began to stalk the woman. The victim had informed her family about the harassment and a complaint was lodged. Both were called to the police station and advised to compromise as her family members did not want to file an FIR after the man promised to mend his ways.

Read: Stalker stabs 22-year-old Delhi woman over 20 times on busy street

That stalking is not a crime and can be brushed under the carpet is evident from the fact that since 2015 the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) has started recording it separately after the law was changed two years ago. Delhi ranks second among the states in terms of the number of stalking cases registered. Of the 6,266 complaints under stalking  Section 354D of the Indian Penal Code  1,124 were from the Union Territory of Delhi. In August, Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal wrote a letter to the Union home ministry, pointing out the high rate of stalking crimes. Though Delhi is right there on the top of the heap on gender crimes, stalking-related violence is a pan-Indian phenomenon. In June, a 24-year-old woman working for Infosys was hacked to death on a railway platform in Chennai, allegedly by a man who had followed her for months. But data always does not reveal the full story because many stalking cases go unreported since many perceive stalking as a harmless activity, and not a crime that can lead to a jail term.

Read: Delhi, Indias rape capital, ranks 2nd in stalking cases

This view that stalking is harmless is gaining ground due to inaction on the part of society and the police. Parents often dont want to lodge a complaint against a harasser due to shame, social pressure and a long-winded legal process; and policemen often think a compromise is the solution. Sometimes such cases are hushed up till they end in a fatality. Its time both realised that stalking is not a petty crime. It is a form of gender violence and cannot be resolved through mere compromises. An FIR needs to be filed against a stalker when a complaint is lodged.

Read: Infosys employee hacked to death by stalker at Chennai railway station
A typical Indian Institute of Management (IIM) classroom comprises graduates from diverse backgrounds  engineering, commerce, medical, arts and humanities and law.

As every IIM has the autonomy to frame the curriculum for post graduate programmes in management (PGP)  the flagship programme for IIMs  the institutes are doing their bit to ensure that the curriculum is inclusive. No student from a particular background has an advantage.

IIM Ahmedabad, when asked by HT Education about diversity, responded: The postgraduate programme in management covers a wide range of first courses from diverse functional areas such as communication, HR, economics, finance, operations, and statistics. In the second year, students take elective courses of their choice. Hence, no student from any particular academic background has an advantage and all are equally encouraged to apply.

Read more: IIM bill: Filling up faculty quota seats will be tough, say directors

However, despite all attempts to ensure that every student in the classroom finds the curriculum easy, In the first year, engineers will find quantitative techniques easier, non-engineers (might) find it difficult. Business policy, strategy, business environment courses in the second year are neither friendly to non-engineers nor to engineering graduates, says Professor Prafulla Agnihotri, director, IIM Trichy.

To ensure that students dont feel left out because of their educational background, IIMs are going the extra mile to help them.

IIM Trichy offers tutorials in quantitative methods as well as accounting and finance courses to assist all those who may need extra support, says Abhishek Totawar, chairperson, placement and external relations.

IIM Udaipur, right after admissions, expects all students to take up a short online mathematics course on the institutes website. Students are expected to complete the hour-based exercises and quizzes by paying `5,000. Those who score 70% in the course are eligible to get a refund of 75% of the enrollment fee. We encourage everybody to go through it even if students have not done basic level for three years. This way, we are trying to ensure that students get to do some basic revision before they come into the classroom. We also recognise students who have difficulty in following a particular subject and schedule regular tutorials to help them catch up, says Professor Janat Shah, director, IIM Udaipur.

It is also not necessary for every student to clear each subject, Shah adds. Even if they score a D grade in up to four papers and still manage to get the minimum CGPA in the aggregate, it is fine. We understand people come from different backgrounds. We allow this flexibility. If they do well in some and badly in some and choose their career accordingly, it is fine. Professor Anindya Sen, director, IIM Ranchi adds, Usually many courses do not need prerequisites and if anything is needed, it is taught either in class or with extra hours.

Statistics, accounting and financial reporting are some courses which non-commerce graduates might find difficult. However, most experts believe that it is a myth that MBA is commerce-based, Engineering students in general perform better than commerce students even in finance-related courses, says Sen.

Making life easier for all

1. Extra classes in subjects like accounting and statistics for non-commerce graduates are conducted across IIMs on regular basis.These subjects are taught in a slow-paced manner, making it easy for them to grasp the content

2. Specially designed revision courses for students after they make it to the IIMs and before the classes start, help them update their knowledge of math and catch up. This, experts believe, is extremely helpful for those who plan to join IIMs after working for two to three years

3. One need not pass in all the subjects. Scoring low in an particular paper doesnt mean that the student needs to repeat the semester

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A 32-year-old woman allegedly shot at by a man she had refused to marry was miraculously left unharmed when the bullet hit her metal locket.

The accused, Ashok Kumar, 27, a deputy manager at an electronics showroom in Sahara Mall on MG road, was arrested from the spot and sent to jail on Tuesday, police said.

The incident, police said, took place at 8pm on Monday when Ashok came to meet Tabasi Nandi at Sadbhavna Apartment in Sector 55 where she lives. Ashok, a resident of Surat Nagar was in a relationship with Tabasi for seven months now and had proposed to marry her several times. Tabasi, who works with a private company in Udyog Vihar, turned down his proposal.

During an argument that unfolded in the compound of the block, Ashok took out a country-made pistol and shot at Tabasi from a close range, police said. Tabasi hails from West Bengal.

Fortunately, the bullet hit Tabasis locket and she was left unharmed. Soon, hearing the sound of the bullet shot , residents came out and nabbed Ashok who was later handed over to the police. Tabasi was taken to a private hospital where she was discharged after treatment.

Based on the complaint of an eyewitness, Chander Das, the police at Sector 56 police station lodged a case against Ashok under Section 307 (attempt to murder) of Indian Penal Code (IPC) and various other sections of Arms Act.

Ashok was arrested from the spot, produced before a court where he was sent to a judicial custody, said sub inspector Babu Lal, the investigation officer.

The incident happened close on the heels of a 22-year-old schoolteachers death after a man, whose marriage proposal she had rejected, stabbed her more than 20 times on a busy road in north Delhis Burari on Tuesday.
Actor-musician Jared Leto has signed on to star as pop artist and cultural icon Andy Warhol in a biopic, titled Warhol.

The 44-year-old frontman of 30 Seconds to Mars will also produce the film along with Michael De Luca, said The Hollywood Reporter.

The actor, who most recently played the Joker in Suicide Squad, will produce the film through his Paradox production shingle with De Luca, whose credits include Oscar-nominated movies The Social Network, Moneyball and Captain Phillips.

No director has been attached yet, but The Wolf of Wall Street scribe Terence Winter is on board to pen the screenplay based on Victor Bockris 1989 book Warhol: The Biography.

It is not the first time Warhols life has been adapted into the big screen. Several actors including Crispin Glover, David Bowie, Guy Pearce and Bill Hader have played the artist in 1991s The Doors, 1996s Basquiat, 2006s Factory Girl and 2012s Men in Black 3 respectively.

Andy Warhol (L) and Jared Leto. (Shutterstock)

Warhol began exhibiting his work during the 1950s. The artist was best known for his painting of significant American objects which included dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Campbells Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles along with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

Warhols Campbells Soup.

Warhol, who was openly gay, was 58 when he died in 1987.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Two military operations against infiltrators in north Kashmir entered its second day on Wednesday.

In a statement, a Srinagar-based army spokesperson confirmed that both the operations were ongoing, but refused to confirm the number of militant casualties.

There was an infiltration bid by a group of 10 to 12 militants. We are not confirming the number of militants killed till the bodies have been retrieved and operation is over, the spokesperson said.

However, sources in both police and the army confirmed that at least eight militants were killed when the army foiled an infiltration bid at Lacchipora in the Uri sector, a few kilometres from the 12 Brigade headquarters, where 18 soldiers were killed in a militant attack on Sunday.

The army spokesperson did not refute these reports.

In a press statement, the United Jihad Council, an alliance of Kashmiri militant groups, dismissed media reports about the killing of eight militant infiltrators as a pack of lies.

It is a fabricated story aimed at diverting the world attention from the worst ever atrocities unleashed by India on Kashmiris, the statement said.

One soldier was killed in a separate anti-infiltration operation in the Naugam sector of Kupwara district in north Kashmir, the army said.

Pakistani troops reportedly broke ceasefire to distract Indian soldiers to help the militants cross the Line of Control, the de-factor border with Pakistan.

An official in Srinagar said the firing from across the border lasted half an hour from 1:10 pm on Tuesday. No Indian posts were affected by the firing, which the army described as a violation of the 2003 ceasefire agreement.

The Indian offensive came amid a bitter war of words between New Delhi and Islamabad following the Uri attack, blamed on the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) by New Delhi.

In New Delhi, Union home minister Rajnath Singh reviewed the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir with top officials, including national security adviser Ajit Doval and foreign secretary S Jaishankar on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead a meeting of the cabinet committee on security on Wednesday to discuss the Uri attack. Sources said the three service chiefs are likely to participate.

Pakistan has denied Indias allegations of Islamabads complicity in the Uri attack, though the Indian army said it had recovered arms, ammunition, food and medicine packets with Pakistani markings.

Islamabad accuses New Delhi of using the attack to deflect attention from continued street protests in Kashmir following the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani by security forces two months ago. More than 80 civilians have been killed in those protests.

Meanwhile, the bodies of the four militants killed in the Uri camp attack were buried on Monday, apparently to prevent public sympathy for them. The quick burials were in contrast to standard practice.

The militants were buried close to the garrison in Uri, though foreign militants in north Kashmir are usually buried at Kitchama graveyard, 25 km from the town.

The National Investigation Agency began its formal probe into the attack by registered a case on Tuesday.

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The long-awaited deal between India and France for 36 Rafale fighter aircraft will be inked here on Friday between defence minister Manohar Parikkar and his French counterpart Jean Yves Le Drian.

New Delhi on Wednesday cleared the deal amid indications that the French government waived off the advance guarantee, allowing India to save 134 million euros.

The 7.878-billion euro deal is crucial for the Indian Air Force that is grappling with a drawdown of its fighter fleet.

The IAF has 33 fighter squadrons, each consisting of 18 fighter planes. It requires 45 combat units to counter a combined threat from China and Pakistan. The IAF admits it does not have sufficient number of warplanes for a two-front war.

The Centre had initially planned to purchase 126 fighter planes but later opted for just 36 jets in fly-away condition from France with Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing the revised deal in Paris last year.

Defence sources said the first fighter jet deal in 20 years comes with a huge saving besides a 50% offset clause. This means business worth at least three billion euros for Indian companies, both big and small, and generation of hundreds of jobs in India through offsets.

The delivery of the jets will begin in 36 months and will be completed in 66 months from the date the contract is inked.

The fighter jets will have state-of-the-art missiles like Meteor and Scalp that will give the IAF a capability that had been sorely missing in its arsenal.

Rafale jets will enable the air force to hit targets inside Pakistan from within India. Pakistan currently has only a beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile with 80-km range.

During the Kargil war, India had used a BVR having 50-km range while Pakistan had none. With Meteor, the balance of power in the air space has again tilted in Indias favour.

The vanilla price or the price of only the 36 aircraft is 3.42 billion euros. The armaments cost 710 million euros and changes specific for India will be done for 1,700 million euros. The total price also includes spare parts and maintenance.

Read | All you need to know about Rafale deal
Prime Minister Narendra Modi met on Wednesday his top ministers and military commanders to agree a response to a deadly weekend attack on an army camp in Kashmir that the government has blamed on militants based in Pakistan.

It wasnt immediately known what was decided, but Modi has been under pressure to come good on his election promise two years ago to deal firmly with any attacks on India from Pakistan. The army has said it will retaliate at a time and place of choosing.

Politicians, army veterans and others have called for a muscular response, including air strikes on training camps on the Pakistan side of the de facto border that divides Kashmir between the two countries.

But analysts say India has not carried out such strikes before and runs the risk of triggering a full-scale war.

Among the options are moves to diplomatically isolate Pakistan, government sources had said after the attack.

Ahead of Wednesdays meeting of the PM-headed Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), experts listed out several options, including isolating Pakistan internationally, carrying out surgical strikes to destroy terror infrastructure in PoK, back-channel talks to engage the neighbouring army and scaling up the offensive over Balochistan.

The army on Monday said it will retaliate at a time and place of its choosing, indicating that the force will target the Pakistan army in operations limited to the Line of Control.

The government could authorise commanders deployed at the LoC to use artillery fire to inflict significant casualties and destroy Pakistan posts that often provide covering fire to terrorists to help them infiltrate into Kashmir, sources said.

Despite the growing clamour for punishing Pakistan, India is unlikely to act in a rash manner and its moves will be well calculated, the sources added.

There are expectations that the NDA government will respond strongly, given that its top leaders consistently accused the previous UPA regime of going soft on terror.

Former army chief General Bikram Singh (retd) believes the political and strategic climate has changed and the government has clearly spelt out a more robust policy vis-a-vis Pakistan.

The cautious and too idealistic approach of the past has been replaced by more realistic policy, General Singh told ht. Thereby, Pakistan will be paid back in its own coin and spoken to only in the language it understands.

The CCS met on a day Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif was to address the 71sth session of the United Nations general assembly in New York.

The Pakistani foreign office says Sharif will specifically focus on the current situation, particularly the continuing grave violations of human rights by Indian troops in Kashmir. He will also call on the world community and the UN to live up to their promise of the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people.

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Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah will hold an all party and cabinet meeting on Wednesday to discuss the next step after the Supreme Court ordered the release of 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 27.

As he faced a fresh challenge on the raging Cauvery row at a time when protests were abating, Siddaramaiah said that Karnataka does not have water and it would be difficult to implement the SC order. It is an unimplementable order, he said.

The Cauvery Supervisory Committee had on Monday asked Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs per day from September 21 to 30 but the apex court doubled the quantum to 6,000 cusecs till September 27 on Tuesday after Tamil Nadu pressed for water to save its samba paddy crop.

The chief minister said Karnataka had placed facts based on ground reality before the Cauvery Supervisory Committee but it still passed an order directing the state to release 3,000 cusecs per day between September 21 and 30.

He said the Supervisory Committee was constituted by the apex court, which had given a direction on September 5 to Tamil Nadu to approach the panel and asked Karnataka to file a response to the neighbouring states plea.

Farmers tied noose around their necks to protest against the fresh SC order at Mysore road in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

Protest by farmers at Mysore road in Bengaluru (Karnataka), tie noose around their necks #CauveryProtests pic.twitter.com/TOv7kRdjmr  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Police have been deployed across the city to ensure that no untoward incidents happen, a senior Bengaluru police official said on Tuesday.

Karnataka state reserve police, city armed reserve police, rapid action force and quick reaction teams have been deployed across Bengaluru, where prohibitory orders under section 144 of CrpC are in force, he said.

Read | Cauvery water row explained: Heres why Karnataka, Tamil Nadu fight over river

Siddaramaiah said the state government was awaiting the copy of the Supreme Court order and the state cabinet will meet on Wednesday followed by an all party meeting to chalk out the future course of action after consulting legal experts.

... we will discuss the pros and cons of this order. After taking views and opinion of leaders from all parties, we will proceed further, he added.

A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and UU Lalit has directed the Centre to constitute the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) -- as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) -- within four weeks.

Keeping in mind the violence that ensued last week over the Cauvery issue in Bengaluru, Siddarmaiah said, I appeal to the people, especially to people from Cauvery basin to maintain peace; they should not get carried away by emotions.

The government is committed to protect the interest of the state, its people and its farmers. Every one should cooperate, he said.

Soon after the Supreme Courts order, Siddaramaiah held meetings with senior ministers and officials.

As the Supreme Court order came, sporadic protests erupted in Mandya, Mysuru, Srirangapatna and nearby areas erupted, with farmers demonstrating on the streets.

In Mandya district, the epicentre of Cauvery agitation, protesters at several places blocked the Bengaluru-Mysuru highway.

(With inputs from ANI)

Read | Cauvery dispute: Conflicts, gaps and institutional spaces for reconciliation
Most parts of Karnataka, including Bengaluru, remained calm on Wednesday ahead of an all-party and cabinet meeting to be chaired by chief minister Siddaramaiah to take a call on the Supreme Court order to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu.

As he faced a fresh challenge on the raging Cauvery row at a time when protests were abating, Siddaramaiah said that Karnataka does not have the water and it would be difficult to implement the SC order. It is an unimplementable order, he said.

The Cauvery Supervisory Committee had on Monday asked Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs every day from September 21 to 30 but on Tuesday, the apex court doubled the quantum to 6,000 cusecs till September 27 after Tamil Nadu said it needs water to save its samba paddy crop.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has, however, decided to boycott the all-party meeting accusing the state government of not representing the facts properly before the court.

Former Karnataka chief minister BS Yeddyurappa said on Wednesday that the SCs order was unfortunate and accused the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government of not taking up the issue properly.

Read | Cauvery water row explained: Heres why Karnataka, Tamil Nadu fight over river

We are not happy. We never expected such a verdict from the Supreme Court, he said, asking the government not to abide by the order.

Home minister G Parameshwara on Tuesday said that the government was still waiting for the final copy of the top courts order and that a decision would be taken about the future course of action following the cabinet meet.

Farmers in Mandya district held protests against the fresh SC order and have asked the government not to release water.

In Bengaluru, additional security personnel have been deployed and prohibitory order under section 144 has been imposed as a preventive measure till September 25.

Read | Cauvery dispute: Conflicts, gaps and institutional spaces for reconciliation
A CoBRA commando, who was critically injured in an encounter with the Naxals in Chhattisgarhs Sukma district last week, died at a private hospital in Raipur on Wednesday.

Head constable Uday Narayan Goud, 41, belonging to CRPFs specialised unit Commando Battalion for Resolute Actions (CoBRA) 206th battalion, succumbed to his injuries at Ramkrishna Care Hospital in Raipur, a CRPF official said.

Wreath-laying ceremony of the jawan will be held at the police battalion camp at Mana in the outskirts of the capital at 4 pm on Wednesday, the official said.

The body will be sent by air to his native place in Buxar district of Bihar, he added.

The jawan had sustained bullet injuries in his stomach during the gun-battle with ultras which took place in the restive Karigundam forests under Chintagufa Police Station limits of Sukma on September 16 while they were returning after an area domination operation in the region.

Soon after the incident, he was airlifted to Raipur for the treatment.
The government expects to finish the process of appointing and transferring 75 judges  whose names were cleared by the Supreme Court collegium till July  within the next two months, a top source has said.

The appointment and transfer process involves 24 high courts across the country.

There are no files pending with the ministry. The appointments are in process and should be completed within two months, said the senior official in the law and justice ministry.

The source said that for a majority of the pending vacancies, the high court collegiums were yet to send names to the ministry to start the appointment process.

The names were cleared by the Supreme Court collegium  a body of five senior-most judges led by the Chief Justice of India  but are still pending.

This prompted the SC to question the government on the delay.

The collegium has cleared 75 names of high court judges, but they have not been approved. I dont know why, where these files are stuck, a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice T.S. Thakur had said on August 12 while hearing a PIL on the vacancies.

A large batch of 15 judges is likely to be appointed by next week, sources said.

Last week, President Pranab Mukherjee had approved the elevation of five judges as chief justices in their respective high courts. Two judges were transferred in the first week of September.

Ministry sources said that out of 478 vacancies, recommendations have not been sent by the respective high court collegiums for over 280 vacancies to initiate the process.

In the last hearing in the Supreme Court on September 14, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had argued that the delay was on part of the judiciary.

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Statements by the Congress and the partys Jammu and Kashmir unit are at variance with each other of late, betraying a disconnect.

When the Uri ambush happened on Sunday, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) condemned it, with party president Sonia Gandhi expressing shock and deep distress over the martyrdom of Indian soldiers in the dastardly terrorist attack.

The statement released by the AICC media department said Gandhi hoped the perpetrators of the act will be severely dealt with and brought to book.

Minutes later, the Jammu and Kashmir Congress, too, came out with a statement  but not on Uri. The state unit condemned the killing of a teenager and the pellet attack on a mentally-challenged person in Srinagar.

Demanding an immediate probe into the killing of the pellet-struck teenager, the J-K Congress also blamed the forces for seriously injuring a mentally-retarded person and termed it as an attack on humanity.

Terming the innocent killings and injuries to thousands as the cause behind the extremely volatile situation in the Valley, a party spokesperson asked the government to come clean on such gruesome incidents and demanded that security personnel involved be brought punished as per the law of the land.

Stating that the Peoples Democratic Party-led government is still not waking up to the incidents of killings and injuries to innocent people, the spokesperson lashed out at it for closing its eyes and behaving as silent spectators to the unabated killings and shameful incidents.

Prior to this, on July 28, the state unit quoted Gandhi having expressed anguish over the loss of lives in clashes between protesters and security forces in Kashmir, and urged people to shun the path of confrontation and embrace peace.

While expressing anguish over the loss of lives and grievous injuries caused to people, Gandhi appealed the people to shun the path of confrontation and maintain calm, a spokesperson quoted the Congress president as saying. Gandhis statement released by the AICC was modified by the state unit.

The AICC statement read: Congress president Sonia Gandhi has expressed deep anguish at the loss of innocent lives in the senseless violence in parts of J-K in past few days. There can be no compromise on matters relating to national security.

Terrorism must be dealt with firmly. Even so, the death of so many of our citizens and attack on security forces is very painful. The political process has made many gains in J-K particularly over the last two decades and these must not get lost. I appeal to my brothers and sisters in the Valley to allow political parties to find durable and enduring ways of fulfilling their aspirations meaningfully in a peaceful and democratic manner.

Perhaps local political compulsions are driving the J-K Congress to change or issue differing statements from those released by the AICC.

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Karnataka will defer the release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu, the state Cabinet decided on Wednesday, defying a Supreme Court order that had sparked large-scale violence in countrys IT hub Bengaluru last week.

The decision was taken at an emergency Cabinet meeting called a day after the top court revised an earlier order and asked the Karnataka government to release 6,000 cusecs of water to the neighbouring state till September 27.

The cabinet has decided to defer the release of water, chief minister Siddaramaiah said after the meeting, adding that an all-party meeting held earlier in the day decided to convene a special assembly session on September 23 to discuss the issue.

Tamil-speaking people, their properties and vehicles registered in Tamil Nadu were damaged across Bengaluru on Monday when mobs vented their anger against the Supreme Courts earlier order directing Karnataka to release 12,000 cusecs of water to the neighbouring state till September 20. The state challenged the order.

Karnataka, where farmers are facing water shortage due to a deficient monsoon, stores the rivers water at the reservoir on the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam in Srirangapatna near Mandya.

Read | Sensation flows: How Kannada media added fuel to the Cauvery fire

The state has witnessed sporadic protests, especially at Mandya the epicentre of the Cauvery agitation, since Wednesday morning, where agitators blocked the Bengaluru-Mysuru road at various places.

Bengaluru police imposed prohibitory orders banning assembly of five or more people till September 25. Additional security forces have also been deployed all over the city.

Earlier during the day, the BJP skipped the all-party-meeting attended by JD(S) leaders including former prime minister HD Deve Gowda, leader of Congress in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, former chief minister HD Kumaraswamy.

State BJP president BS Yeddyurappa said the party did not want to be a culpable partner in the Congress governments sins of omission and commission.

Deve Gowda is understood to have advised Siddaramaiah against releasing water to Tamil Nadu stating the drinking water requirement of Karnataka was more important.

Drinking water should be given priority. If they (Tamil Nadu farmers) suffer crop losses it can be compensated but we cannot compromise on drinking water, Gowda told media persons.

Read | Cauvery water row explained: Why Tamil Nadu, Karnataka fight over river usage?
Pakistan may have strongly denied a hand in an attack on the Uri army base in Kashmir but the countrys chief justice has blamed political parties for backing terrorists to further interests.

In a public meeting on Monday, Pakistans chief justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali said courts in the Muslim-majority country were being attacked to instil fear among judges and lawyers, news channel Geo News reported.

It is disappointing to see some political parties supporting terrorists for their own interest, he was quoted as saying by the channel.

Channel 24 news reported that Jamali called for exposing any contact between terrorists and the countrys political and religious parties.

Read | Should India have waited? Hurried burial for Uri attackers raises eyebrows

His comments came a day after four heavily armed militants sneaked into a military base near the Line of Control and killed 18 soldiers, the worst attack on the army in years.

India has blamed Jaish-e-Mohammad for the strike and described Pakistan as a terror state that needs to be isolated. But Islamabad has rebuffed the charges and said New Delhis hostile narrative was a knee-jerk reaction not based on facts.

But according to Geo news, the countrys top judicial authority said terrorism flourished in Pakistan because of external powers and internal patronization. In the Karachi and Balochistan law and order cases, I have discussed these issues, he said, according to the channel.

Channel 24 News quoted Jamali as saying that judicial institutions in Pakistan were facing terrorist attacks.

Jamali also urged Pakistans security agencies to provide foolproof security to courts and judicial institutions because extremists wanted to spread terror by attacking the countrys courts, Ary News reported.

Read | Full coverage of Uri attack

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Even in the face of criticism over the terror attack in Uri, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif raised the Kashmir issue as he spoke at the General Debate of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday night.

Heres the full text of his speech:

Mr President,

Today, three decades after the end of the Cold War, our multipolar world is more free and vibrant, yet still chaotic and turbulent; more interdependent, but more unequal; more prosperous, yet still afflicted with poverty.

We see spectacular progress, but also unprecedented human suffering.

The world is at a historic inflection point.

The international order established after the Second World War is passing away, but a new order has yet to emerge. Competition between the major powers is becoming more confrontational. This can pose serious threats to peace across Asia.

A new Cold War threatens to engulf Europe. The momentum there towards greater union has already reversed. Barricades and walls are going up, especially against the tide of misery flowing out of a turbulent Middle East. In many countries, intolerance has revived the ghosts of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Turmoil is intensifying in the Middle East. International efforts to defeat Daesh are therefore urgent. For this, it is essential to reconcile the divergent objectives and priorities of regional and external powers.

Peace cannot be built when injustice prevails. The long festering tragedy of Palestine demands determined action by the international community.

After decades of strong growth, the world economy has reached a plateau.

Despite this adverse international economic environment, my government has, in three short years, moved the country towards robust growth.

We have fully integrated the 2030 Development Agenda into our own economic and social strategy.

This rests on our conviction that people are the true wealth of our nation and that it is human development, which will determine our future destiny.

A view of the United Nations General Assembly as Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan addresses (Reuters )

Our priority goal of economic development requires internal peace and stability. My country has been the principal victim of terrorism including that supported, sponsored and financed from abroad.

We will not allow externally sponsored terrorism and threats of destabilization to cause turbulence in Pakistan.

Tens of thousands of our citizens and thousands of our security personnel have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks.

This has only reinforced our resolve to eliminate the scourge of terrorism. Our comprehensive strategy of law enforcement and targeted military operations has produced remarkable results and enabled Pakistan to turn the tide against terrorism.

Pakistans Zarb-e-Azb Operation is the largest, most robust and most successful anti-terrorism campaign anywhere in the world, deploying 200,000 of our security forces.

Our comprehensive National Action Plan has the complete endorsement of our people and our Parliament as well as our security forces, all of whom have made heroic sacrifices to defeat terrorism.

Terrorism, however, is now a global phenomenon, which must be addressed comprehensively and in all its forms, including state terrorism.

The international community must coordinate its efforts to accomplish this. These efforts should be taken collectively and not unilaterally by the passage of any laws with extra-territorial application targeted against certain countries.

We will not win the fight against terrorism and violent extremism so long as we do not address their root causes. These lie in poverty and ignorance, political and social injustice and oppression, foreign intervention and occupation and denial of the legitimate rights of peoples and nations, especially the right to self-determination.

Until these underlying causes are addressed, it will be difficult to counter the twisted narrative of violent extremists and terrorists.

After 15 years of the current war in Afghanistan, the international community agrees that the only road to a lasting peace in that country is through a dialogue between the Government in Kabul and the Afghan Taliban.

Pakistan has long proposed this as the most viable course to end decades of conflict and suffering in Afghanistan.

Based on this belief in a negotiated peace, and in response to requests from President Ashraf Ghani, we have been facilitating the process of reconciliation in Afghanistan.

There have been setbacks. That, however, is not a sufficient reason to abandon the path of peace and rely on the military option, which has failed, for the past decade and a half, to stabilize Afghanistan.

Progress will be assured only when the Afghan parties themselves conclude that there is no military solution to the Afghan war, and work assiduously, through a meaningful dialogue process, for achieving reconciliation and peace at home.

Over three and a half decades of conflict and chaos in Afghanistan has had grave security and economic consequences for Pakistan. Almost three million Afghan refugees, to whom we opened our homes and hearts, remain in Pakistan.

We hope to see them return to Afghanistan, voluntarily and with dignity.

Until they do, the international community must shoulder its responsibilities to sustain them.

Confrontation should not be our destiny in South Asia. Pakistan wants peace with India. I have gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues.

But India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue. Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to avert the danger of any escalation.

Peace and normalization between Pakistan and India cannot be achieved without a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. This is an objective evaluation, not a partisan position.

Our predictions have now been confirmed by events. A new generation of Kashmiris has risen spontaneously against Indias illegal occupation  demanding freedom from occupation. Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces, has emerged as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada, a popular and peaceful freedom movement, led by Kashmiris, young and old, men and women, armed only with an undying faith in the legitimacy of their cause, and a hunger for freedom in their hearts.

This indigenous uprising of the Kashmiris has been met, as usual, with brutal repression by Indias occupation force of over half a million soldiers. Over a hundred Kashmiris have been killed, hundreds, including children and infants, blinded by shotgun pellets and over six thousand unarmed civilians injured over the past two months.

These Indian brutalities are well documented. I would like to inform the General Assembly that Pakistan will share with the Secretary General a dossier containing detailed information and evidence of the gross and systematic violations of human rights committed by Indian forces in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

These brutalities will not suppress the spirit of the Kashmiris; it will only intensify their anger and fortify their determination to see India end its occupation of Kashmir. From Srinagar to Sopore, the men, women and children come out each day, defying curfew, to demand freedom.

Sharif is seen on a monitor in a booth as he addresses the UNGA (Reuters )

Pakistan fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination, as promised to them by several Security Council resolutions. Their struggle is a legitimate one for liberation from alien occupation.

International law and the declarations of the United Nations on Self Determination, give the Kashmiri people the right to struggle for their freedom. Every year, the General Assembly unanimously adopts the resolution, which reaffirms the right of all peoples to self-determination and calls on the states concerned to immediately end their occupation and all acts of repression.

On behalf of the Kashmiri people; on behalf of the mothers, wives, sisters, and fathers of the innocent Kashmiri children, women and men who have been killed, blinded and injured; on behalf of the Pakistani nation, I demand an independent inquiry into the extra-judicial killings, and a UN fact finding mission to investigate brutalities perpetrated by the Indian occupying forces, so that those guilty of these atrocities are punished.

We demand the immediate release of all Kashmiri political prisoners; an end to the curfew; freedom for the Kashmiris to demonstrate peacefully; urgent medical help for the injured; abrogation of Indias draconian laws; and removal of the foreign travel ban on Kashmiri leaders.

The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self- determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under UN auspices. The people of Kashmir have waited 70 years for implementation of this promise. The Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions. This General Assembly must demand that India deliver on the commitments its leaders solemnly made on many occasions.

To this end, steps should be taken by the United Nations to de-militarize Jammu and Kashmir and undertake consultations with India, Pakistan and the true representatives of the Kashmiri people to implement the resolutions of the Security Council. In this context, we welcome the offer of good offices by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. We will also open consultations with members of the Security Council to explore the modalities for implementation of the Security Council resolutions on Kashmir.

The international community ignores the danger of rising tensions in South Asia, at its own peril.

For its part, Pakistan is committed to the establishment of strategic stability in the region. It neither wants, nor is it engaged in an arms race with India.

But we cannot ignore our neighbors unprecedented arms build up and will take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence.

We have consistently urged the conclusion of bilateral arms control and disarmament measures between Pakistan and India to prevent conflict and avoid wasteful military expenditures.

We are open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions.

We are ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty.

(Reuters)

Today, from this rostrum, I would also like to reiterate our offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.

As a responsible nuclear weapon state, Pakistan will continue to cooperate with all international efforts that seek to promote fair and equitable solutions to disarmament and non-proliferation challenges.

We have introduced state of the art measures to strengthen the safety and security of our nuclear materials and facilities. We have adopted a comprehensive export control regime that is fully consistent with international standards.

Judged on the basis of objective criteria, and without discrimination, Pakistan is fully eligible for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

In our turbulent and interdependent world, the United Nations remains an indispensable Organization to restore order and ensure global peace, stability and prosperity. Its principles remain the crucial pillars of international legality, the guide for the conduct of Member States and the guarantor of the legitimate rights of all nations and peoples.

The UN must regain its credibility as the central instrument for the promotion of peace, prosperity and liberty.

To that end, it should become more representative, transparent and accountable. A comprehensive and democratic reform of the Security Council, which Pakistan supports, should enhance its relevance and representation. Creating new centers of privilege will do the opposite.

Pakistans unwavering commitment to the UN is well established. We have played a pioneering and consistent role in UN Peacekeeping.

Despite our own security requirements, we will remain one of worlds largest troop contributing countries and maintain our record of success in multiple UN peacekeeping operations.

Pakistan has a vital stake in ending conflicts, fostering peace, fighting terrorism, strengthening democracy, promoting human rights, generating global growth and overcoming the challenges of environmental degradation. We can achieve these goals, and create a new and peaceful world order, only through the United Nations and by strict adherence to the principles of its Charter.

I thank you, Mr. President.

Read | UNGA: Sharif hits out at India, says Kashmirs struggle is legitimate
The media must respect an individuals right to privacy, right to reputation and should refrain from conducting media trial that goes against the presumption of innocence of an accused, Chief Justice of India (CJI) TS Thakur said on Wednesday.

Delivering the second Justice JS Verma Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Expression: Evolution in Seven Decades of Independence, CJI Thakur said: If media wants to be free, it must be fair. If it ceases to be fair, it cant remain free.

Justice Thakur said the media didnt have an absolute immunity, adding that it didnt have an absolute right to free speech under the Constitution, which prescribed several reasonable restrictions on it.

Highlighting the problem areas in the exercise of free speech by the fourth estate, the CJI said medias right to free speech was often coming into conflict with an individuals right to privacy, right to reputation and right to fair trial and also issues of national security.

Dwelling on the impact of technological advancement and investigative journalism on media, he questioned the intrusive methods often used by media, saying such practices clashed with an individuals right to be left alone.

They (media) will have to be governed by some ethics, the CJI said in the presence of many media barons and TV news channel heads who were there as members of the News Broadcasters Association.

Justice Thakur underlined the role of judiciary in protecting free speech, saying that right from the 1950s, the Supreme Court has been coming to the rescue of the press.

After the function, the CJI said differences with government over most of the issues relating to memorandum of procedure for appointing judges had been sorted out and the remaining ones would be sorted out in two weeks.
Curfew was in force in only three police station areas of Srinagar city in Kashmir on Wednesday, as the curbs were lifted from other parts following improvement in the situation.

However, normal life remained affected in the Valley for the 75th consecutive day.

A police official said curfew continued in Nowhatta, MR Gunj and Khanyar police station areas of the summer capital.

The authorities had on Tuesday lifted curfew across Kashmir, except from six police station areas of Srinagar. This morning, the curbs from three areas were lifted.

The official, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people under section 144 CrPC continued to remain in force in the Valley.

The separatists, who are spearheading the current agitation in the Valley, extended the protest programme till September 22. They did not announce any period of relaxation in the strike for the week.

Read | Kashmiri journo injured in stone pelting as protests continue in Kashmir

Shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut in Srinagar and elsewhere in the Valley, while public transport was off the roads. Schools, colleges and other educational institutions also remained shut.

Mobile internet services remained suspended, while the outgoing calls on prepaid numbers continued to remain barred across the Valley.

As many as 81 people, including two cops, have been killed in the unrest that broke out a day after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces in South Kashmir on July 8.

Read | Sharif raises Kashmir issue with leaders at UN but gets no traction
Hours after chief minister Arvind Kejriwal reacted sharply after an FIR was registered against him in connection with the irregularities in the functioning of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), the Anti-Corruption Branch said it wont investigate him yet as his name doesnt figure in the inquiry report.

ACB chief Mukesh Kumar Meena said Kejriwal, whose name figures in an FIR pertaining to irregularities in the functioning of Delhi Commission for Women, is not an accused in the case.

Till now, we are not probing the role of Arvind Kejriwal since his name doesnt figure in the report. As on date, he is not an accused, he said,

In the FIR, the essence of the complaint is written. If someone gives a complaint, it is written verbatim in the FIR. We dont have any power to manipulate the language of the complaint. This is procedural law, Meena said.

Read | Kejriwal named in FIR against DCW chief Maliwal, blames Modi

The ACB had taken up the probe on a complaint by former DCW chief Barkha Shukla Singh, who alleged that several AAP supporters were given plum posts in the womens panel since Swati Maliwal was made its chief.

Maliwal was on Monday booked by the ACB on charges of alleged irregularities.

Singh, in her complaint, had listed 85 names who, she claimed, got jobs without requisite credentials.

Meena said the CM hasnt been named in the inquiry report prepared on the basis of the preliminary inquiry.

He needs to read the report in totality and not in isolation. His name doesnt figure in the inquiry report. The inquiry report will be considered final, he asserted.

He said the inquiry is based on documentary evidence.

Till now, we have found irregularities in appointments made in DCW by Swati Maliwal and others, he said.

Read | ACB officials question Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal

Earlier in the day, Kejriwal had reacted angrily saying the ACB has registered the FIR against him at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In the FIR registered by the ACB, my name is also there...But it does not contain any detail on my alleged role. One does not put the name of the Chief Minister in the FIR just like that, he had said.

It cannot happen without the Prime Ministers approval.

ACB has already sent a notice to Maliwal that a team will be interrogating her on September 29 at her office, Meena said. He said other officers will also be probed.

The role of Deputy Director (Finance), Delhi government is also under scanner and he has been summoned to explain why he authorised DCW as a body with financial autonomy, said Meena.
After being pushed into political oblivion for six years, Samajwadi Partys Rajya Sabha member Amar Singh has been finally rehabilitated--slowly, steadily and firmly.

Shortly after the 2009 Lok Sabha election result, Amars relationship with many party leaders soured and this eventually led to his ouster from SP for six years.

A month before Amars expulsion, SP president Mulayam Singh Yadav had said: I accept his resignation with a heavy heart.

Amar had resigned from all party posts, including that of the national general secretary, in January 2010.

Even as Amar broke ties with the SP, Mulayams feelings for him seemed like Amar Prem (eternal love). It did not wane even when Amar spewed venom against top party leaders and attacked Mulayam a couple of times in the run up to 2012 UP assembly elections.

Amar floated a party, Rashtriya Lok Manch, which fared poorly in assembly polls.

By the time the results of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections were out, Mulayam started inviting Amar to his public and private events. The two were back together.

Sensing the inevitable, the anti-Amar lobby started making efforts to prevent his return. Mulayam had expelled Amar by bucklling under pressure from party leaders, mainly his cousin and SP national general secretary, Ramgopal Yadav.

Akhilesh camp attacks outsider Amar; Shivpal says take everyone along

However, when it came to execute Amars rehabilitation, Mulayam turned a deaf ear to all the hue and cry in the party. He not only ignored SPs Muslim poster boy Azam Khan and Ramgopal but also his chief minister-son Akhilesh Yadav.

Mulayam revived Amars party membership in May. A few days later, he was elected to Rajya Sabha as SP candidate.

After some time, Mulayam named Amar as a member of SPs national executive, amid growing clamour within the party to throw the outsider out of the party.

But ignoring all the voices of dissent, SP supremo eventually on Tuesday, made Amar national general secretary in the national executive, the position he held before his ouster from the party.

Why is Amar so important to Mulayam?

Mulayam often says: There were only two persons stayed glued to me during my times of crisis  one is Janeshwar Mishra, who is no more, and the other is Amar.

Amar joined SP in 1996 when the party was trying to create an identity for itself on the national level. The party was also, reportedly, starved of funds. Amar Singh, who was known for his acumen of a negotiator and mediator in the corridors of power and business at the national level, came in handy to the party.

Mulayam headed a regional party and had emerged as a master politician in Uttar Pradesh. Ahead of his entry to SP, Amar began making Mulayam and his politics count at the national level.

Eventually, Amars entry into the party fold coincided with Mulayam becoming the defence minister in the United Front government.

Amar was instrumental in mediation between the Congress and the SP and played a key role in SPs support to the UPA governments.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh recently highlighted the role of Amar Singh and Mulayam in the Indo-US civil nuclear deal and Amar was close to Mulayam when Trinamool Congresss Mamata Banerjee pulled the rug from under the UPA government. Mulayam had then saved the Manmohan government.

It was Amar Singh through whom Mulayam began interacting with Ambanis or Godrej. It was due Amars effort that Mulayam as a chief minister hosted the former US President Bill Clinton in 2006.

To put all doubts to rest, Mulayam made it clear on Tuesday that Amar would have a role in the 2017 UP assembly poll campaign and would help in strengthening the party.

Amar is a native of Mulayams Lok Sabha constituency, Azamgarh, and holds influence in the area. He is the only Thakur face of the party.

After Amar was expelled from the party in 2010, Mulayam tried to promote his senior associate Mohan Singh as a Thakur face, but it did not work. The party also tried to project Akhileshs team member, Arvind Singh Gope, but no one accepted him as a Thakur face.

Amar was the one who brought Bollywood stars close to the SP. He made Jaya Prada contest and win election from Rampur. SP had finalised Sanjay Dutts ticket from Luckow in 2009 Lok Sabha polls but due to the Supreme Court order, he had to withdraw his candidature.

And it was Amar who turned around the rural festival, Saifai Mahotsav, into a glitzy affair.

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The National investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the terror attack in Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir, will be seeking the help of the army, the Intelligence Bureau and RAW to verify the identities of the slain militants.

The agencies will be asked to provide the NIA with intercepts of the last two to four months in the region.

Sources said Kashif Jaan, who had escorted the Pathankot terrorists till the border, could also have been the handler of the terrorists in Uri. NIA sources said the Uri attack may have been masterminded by Kashif Jaan, Rauf Asgar and Masood Azha.

The NIA on Wednesday filed an FIR in the Uri terror strike case and a six-member team will soon visit the site of the attack to gather evidence in the matter.

NIA will collect blood samples and finger prints of the four killed terrorists in Uri, sources said.

The army is set to handover all items recovered from the terrorists, including weapons, navigation maps to the NIA for further investigation.

The NIA will also send the GPS and icon satellite set to the United States for forensic investigation to find out what route the terrorists took and when and how they entered Indian territory.

In one of the worst attack in recent times, at least 18 soldiers were killed and over 20 were injured post the terror strike on an army camp close to the headquarters of the 12th Brigade at Uri in Baramulla district.

Director general of military operation Lt Ranbir Singh said the four terrorists belonged to Pakistans banned terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Of the 86 people who died in the anti-India protests across Kashmir since the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in July, the highest number  22  died in the southern district of Anantnag.

Yet when the army announced a recruitment drive in the district from Wednesday, over 2,200 applications were received.

Brigadier JS Samyal said they started a recruitment drive in Kashmir, beginning in Anantnag district, from Wednesday.

We will be conducting the recruitment rallies from September 21 to 24 in south Kashmir. In north Kashmir, the drive will be held from September 29 to October 02, he said.

So far, over 2,200 youth from Anantnag applied for jobs, the process for which includes grilling physical tests.

Despite the situation here, we decided to go for the recruitment rally to give opportunity to the youth to serve army, an army official said, adding the recruitment drive is conducted across the country.

Anti-India and pro-freedom protests have become routine in Kashmir since the killing of Wani, the Hizbul Mujahideen commander who was gunned down in an encounter with security forces on July 8. His death sparked a law and order crisis on Kashmir, leading to the Valley being put under curfew for more than two months and disrupting normal life.

Read | Despite injuries, Kashmir pellet victims stay defiant, yearn for azadi

As violent protests spread, 86 people were killed and hundreds injured in stone pelting and from the security forces pellet guns. Fifty of these deaths occurred in south Kashmirs districts of Anantnag, Kulgam, Shopian and Pulwama.

Abid Ahmad, a local form Anantnag who was selected during the drive, said he signed up because he wanted to achieve something in life.

I want to request the youth to stop pelting stones so that we could reach to some level in life and show our talent, he said.

The armys decision comes amid the state governments recruitment drive for special police officers in the state. More than 23,000 youth have applied for posts amid the Azadi wave across the Valley.

The violence in the Valley has led to a dearth in jobs. Thus, despite the pro-independence calls, many of Kashmirs youth are stuck in the conundrum of seeking a government job.

Separatists called on people to desist from joining the forces while militants have threatened to attack those signing up for the recruitment drive.

Also read | Prepare for the worst: The Indian State is in retreat in Kashmir
Nawaz Sharif has prepared his ground. Over to the podium later Wednesday, the Pakistan prime minister is readying for a showdown with India over the Kashmir issue at the UN general assembly.

Given that his UNGA address comes amid a diplomatic spar between the neighbours heightened by a deadly militant attack in Uri on Sunday, Sharif will go for high-voltage diplomacy. This, Indian sources maintain, doesnt wash given an overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that Pakistan is a terror sponsor.

As India, too, works overtime to garner support, Sharif seems to be seeking a third-party intervention on Kashmir. This, when India maintains the dispute is a bilateral affair, which is the essence of the 1972 Simla Agreement and Lahore Declaration of 1999.

Sharif, on the sidelines of the UNGA, has already held discussions with the leaders of the US, UK, Japan and Turkey. On Tuesday, Sharif met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a close ally of India, and Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in United Nations.

Pakistans envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi said Sharif briefed Japanese Prime Minister about the grave turn that the situation in occupied Kashmir is taking. Reminded him about United Nations Security resolutions, he said in a tweet.

PM Nawaz Sharif also apprised his Japanese counterpart of the human rights violations being committed by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir, Lodhi said in another tweet.

According to Lodhi, Sharif and Erdogan agreed that OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) on Human Rights should send a fact-finding mission to Kashmir.

Indian officials said Pakistan, which exports terror and destabilises the region, blaming India will not make an impact among the world leaders when the whole world is focused on fighting terror.

But Sharif will take to the podium and set the stage again for a showdown with India.

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Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday made a fresh offer of peace talks to India even as he called for an independent inquiry and a UN fact-finding mission into rights violations in Kashmir.

Against the backdrop of tensions triggered by the terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri, Sharif used his speech at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to call for a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Kashmir.

However, some of his remarks angered New Delhi  such as his description of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani as a young leader murdered by Indian forces who has become the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada.

Kashmir has been rocked by two months of violent protests in which 86 people have been killed and thousands injured in the aftermath of Wanis killing in an encounter on July 8.

Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA glorifies Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani in UNs highest forum. Shows continued Pak attachment to terrorism, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Sharif dwelt at length on Kashmir during his speech that lasted about 20 minutes, and demanded an independent inquiry into the extrajudicial killings and a UN fact-finding mission to investigate brutalities perpetrated by the Indian occupying forces, so that those guilty of these atrocities are punished.

He said Pakistan will share with the UN Secretary-General a dossier with evidence of rights violations. He also contended that a new generation of Kashmiris had risen spontaneously against Indias illegal occupation and said Pakistan supports the Kashmiri peoples demand for self-determination.

Sharifs remarks went against Indias assertion that the unrest in Kashmir is instigated and backed by Pakistan. India has also rejected repeated attempts by Pakistan to portray Wani as a Kashmiri leader.

He also raked up Pakistans long-standing demand for a plebiscite under UN auspices in Kashmir and asked the world body to de-militarise Jammu and Kashmir and undertake consultations with India, Pakistan and the true representatives of the Kashmiri people to implement Security Council resolutions.

At the same time, Sharif also made a fresh offer of dialogue to settle all issues with India.

Confrontation should not be our destiny in South Asia. Pakistan wants peace with India. I have gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues, he said.

But India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue. Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to avert the danger of any escalation.

PM Sharif at #UNGA says India poses unacceptable conditions to dialogue. India's only condition is an end to terrorism. This not acceptable?  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA in complete denial of Uri terror attack. 19 infiltration attempts stopped at LoC this year. Indigenous??!!  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Sharif said peace and normalisation between the two neighbours could not be achieved without resolving the Kashmir issue.

Today, from this rostrum, I would also like to reiterate our offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir, Sharif said.

Sharif said Pakistan is committed to establishing strategic stability in the region. He also called for bilateral arms control and disarmament measures to prevent conflict and avoid wasteful military expenditures.

We are open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions. We are ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty, he said.

While Pakistan does not want an arms race with India, it could not ignore our neighbors unprecedented arms build-up and will take whatever measures are necessary to maintain credible deterrence, he added.

Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj is expected to give her reply to the issues raised by Sharif when she addresses the UNGA on September 26.

Read: Full text of Nawaz Sharifs speech at UN general assembly
Defence minister Manohar Parrikar dismissed on Wednesday a nuclear threat from Pakistan, describing the neighbours provocative statements after the Uri strike as a case of empty vessels make more noise.

His statement came hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met his top ministers and military commanders to weigh an effective response to the deadly weekend terrorist attack at the north Kashmir army base that killed 18 soldiers.

The stronger man doesnt make too many arguments, Parrikar said, responding to a question on Pakistans nuclear saber-rattling amid calls for a swift retaliation.

How to punish, that is for us to work out. We are serious about it.

It wasnt immediately known what the Modi-headed cabinet committee on security decided, but he has been under pressure to keep his election promise two years ago to deal firmly with attacks on India from Pakistan. The army has said it will retaliate at a time and place of its choosing.

Something obviously went wrong in Uri, Parrikar said, stressing the government will take steps to prevent such attacks from happening again. He said he believed in the principle of zero error and India needed to ensure wrongs are not repeated.

What next? Parrikar said he preferred to execute things rather than talk.

Read | Five reasons why isolating Pakistan globally wont be easy after Uri terror attack

India is a responsible power but that doesnt mean I will sleep over this kind of terrorism that is being pushed from across the border, he said.

Politicians and army veterans have called for a muscular response, including air strikes on training camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Despite growing clamour for punishing Pakistan, India is unlikely to act rashly and its moves will be well-calculated, senior military officers said.

Parrikar said: If required I can have a knee-jerk reaction. Sometimes knee-jerk reaction is required.

He was quick to add he was talking in general terms and not specifically about the Uri attack.

Read | Day after Uri, Pak top judge accuses parties of backing terrorists: Report

There are expectations that the NDA government will respond strongly, given that its top leaders consistently accused the previous UPA regime of being soft on terrorism.

Former army chief General (retd) Bikram Singh believes the political and strategic climate has changed and the government has clearly spelt out a more robust policy on Pakistan.

The cautious and too idealistic approach of the past has been replaced by more realistic policy, Singh said. Pakistan will be paid back in its own coin and spoken to only in the language it understands.

Full coverage of Uri terror attack
Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez continues to be lodged in a police station in the city even after a Srinagar court ordered his release.

Parvez, 39, who is the chairperson of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) and the programme coordinator of JKCCS, was put under preventive detention last week.

On Tuesday evening, principal district and sessions judge, Srinagar, Rashid Ali Dar, ordered Parvezs release from a sub-jail in Kupwara and said the earlier order for his detention was not in accordance with the law.

Parvezs family and lawyers have claimed that even after being released from the sub-jail following the court order, he was detained for over three hours in Kupwara police station.

From there, he was shifted to Kothi Bagh police station in Srinagar in the wee hours of Wednesday, without informing his family and lawyers the reason behind his continued detention.

On Wednesday noon, at the time of filing this report, Parvez continued to be under detention at the Srinagar prison. A JKCCS official said they fear the police might come up with a fresh allegation against him.

IGP Kashmir and SSP Srinagar did not answer their phones, while SHO Kothi Bagh police station said he was not at the station and thus unaware of any news pertaining to Parvez.

Parvez was arrested on Thursday night and lodged at a prison in Srinagar. About 24 hours later, he was shifted to a sub-jail in Kupwara. The police said it was a preventive detention over an apprehension of breach of peace.

According to a media report, police wrote to an executive magistrate, accusing Parvez of instigating people outside a mosque. But Parvezs family termed the allegations a complete lie. The JKCCS also questioned the legal basis of his transfer to Kupwara jail.

Read | Blocked from leaving India for attending UN council: Kashmiri activist

On Monday, the JKCCS said Parvez, who is disabled, was being helped to a great extent by other inmates as the jail isnt disabled-friendly.

Parvez had lost a leg in a bomb blast in 2004 while on election monitoring duty in north Kashmir.

Parvez apparently told his family and lawyers that his specific request about his special needs due to his disability was ignored.

Meanwhile, support for the Srinagar-based activists release gained steam after international support grew and a social media campaign pushed for it.

A group of 52 prominent scholars, activists, academics and writers  including Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Partha Chatterjee, Harsh Mander and Basharat Peer  wrote an open letter on Sunday, demanding his immediate release.

The actions against Mr. Parvez are symptomatic of the escalated repression in Kashmir by institutions of state since July 8, the letter said.

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The stalemate over the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court is likely to continue, with Justice J Chelameswar reportedly refusing to reconsider his decision to boycott the collegium meetings unless the procedure becomes transparent.

HT has reliably learnt that Justice Chelameswar has conveyed his decision to Chief Justice of India (CJI) TS Thakur at a meeting between the two on September 19.

Sources said the CJI asked Justice Chelameswar to reconsider his August 26 decision not to participate in the collegium meetings.

In a letter to the CJI, the judge had expressed his displeasure at the way discussions take place during the collegium meetings. He had earlier accused his senior judges in the collegium of closing ranks to have their way in appointments.

Justice Chelameswar will retire in 2018. At present, his presence is required to appoint SC judges and decide transfer of high court judges, which is done by the five senior-most judges.

With Justice Chelameswar refusing to attend meetings, sources said that the only option available is circulation of the agenda.

In collegium meetings, the five judges sit together and arrive at a decision. In circulation, there would be no direct interface among the judges and it might become necessary for the judges to record reasons for approving or rejecting an appointment.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear the petition of bar owners challenging the Maharashtra governments new law imposing new regulations on dance bars in the state.

The BJP-led state government has defended the new restrictions in the top court, saying the guidelines intend to protect the dignity of women performing a dance in the bar rooms.

Contesting the restaurant owners claim that the law makes obscene dance punishable without defining the word obscene, the state said it was not necessary to define the word.

An ordinary prudent man can certainly tell that which dance is designed only to arouse the prurient interest of the audience, the government affidavit, filed through the states counsel Nishant R Katneshwarkar, stated.

The document also gave reasons why the new law stipulates that a bar room, where dance performances would take place, should shut down by 11:30 pm.

In case the women who perform dance are required to stay back for long hours at night, there may be some untoward incidents which may result in an increase in sexual and other offences related to women, it said.

It also strongly opposed the owners request to do away with the stipulation that prohibits showering of money on dancers.

Performance of a dance is neither a table service nor a service. Therefore, no question of giving of tip for the performance of a dance arises, the affidavit said.

The state said it was not desirous of banning dance performance in hotels or bars. But it desires to regulate the dance performance in a bar so as to protect the dignity of women performing a dance.

The Maharashtra government banned dance bars in the state in 2005, rendering an estimated 150,000 people  half of them dancers  jobless. The Bombay high court struck down the government order in 2006 but the state challenged it in the SC, which allowed a stay on grant of licence.

The top court upheld the high court ruling in 2013 before finally lifting the ban in October last year.

The Dance Bar Regulation Bill was passed by the Maharashtra assembly on April 13, which included 26 conditions bar owners needed to comply with to get licences.

However, dance bar owners petitioned the top court, protesting some of the provisions in the Maharashtra Prohibition of Obscene Dance in Hotels, Restaurants and Bar Rooms and Protection of Dignity of Women (working therein) Act, 2016.

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Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt has been taking a page from his grandfathers playbook in recent weeks touring various communities in the state with some of his staff and conducting townhall meetings with concerned citizens in what he calls AG for a Day.

He says the idea is a homage to grandfather Paul Laxalts practice of touring the state with his cabinet and staff members while governor. The senior Laxalt called it his Capital for a Day tour.

A couple of weeks ago Adam Laxalt crisscrossed Northern Nevada and this week he has been meeting constituents across Southern Nevada.

Our goal has been to try to bring our office to the people  he explained in a recent interview. I think government is best that is closest to the people, and so for us to get out there and make sure we are up to date on what is on everyones mind. Its been very successful in that respect.

Laxalt said one of the most common concerns expressed to him and his staff has been about federal government overreach when it comes to regulations and restrictions. To address this he has created a solicitor general office in his agency, which is essentially the states lawyer.

That office, he said, has been able to work very aggressively to create some federal-state boundaries and bring Nevada to the negotiation table on some of the big issues.

People are pretty excited that this office has been active in that federalism space and working hard to try to give our local economy and some of our most important sectors some space to survive in some cases and ideally to be able to grow and thrive down the road, Laxalt said. Were working very hard to do the best we can with our limited resources.

The attorney generals office is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the Interior Department and its Bureau of Land Management over land use restrictions being imposed on agriculture, mining, oil and gas and recreation in the name of protecting greater sage grouse habitat.

Laxalt has argued that the BLMs sage grouse protection efforts blatantly disregard the input of Nevada experts and stakeholders in violation of federal law.

The attorney generals office also has been actively involved in the waters of the United States (WOTUS) rules that were being promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to wrest control of every stream, ditch, wetland or muddy spot that might eventually spill a few drops of water into any rivulet, even though water rights have always been under the purview of the states.

Laxalt joined 22 other attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in this case. A couple of months ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the current regulations are too broad, but there is more legal wrangling to come.

In addition to the battle over sage grouse and water, Laxalt joined other attorneys general to challenge the presidents executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants with U.S. citizen children. A recent 4-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling put the executive order on hold for now.

His office also has worked with Elko County in its attempts to keep open a road in the Jarbidge Wilderness area and with a church fighting for water rights in Nye County.

Laxalt said he and his staffers have also fielded questions about his offices program to help military personnel, the first of its kind in the nation, as well as efforts to stem domestic violence, fraud and Open Meeting Law violations.

I think that attorneys general across the country have been what we like to call the last line of defense and, as we face the coming months of the close of this administration, typically presidents take their lame duck status gracefully and slow down on the way out, Laxalt observed, but this president and his administration has signaled that theyre going to crank up the rule making process and try to change as many rules as possible. So attorneys general are standing ready to prevent any of these rules that have not gone through the proper rule making process or that we think are outside of their legal jurisdiction.
Delhi saw the steepest rise in cases of stalking among states and Union territories in 2015 as compared to 2014, according to latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

At least 1,124 stalking cases were registered in Delhi in 2015, up from 541 in 2014 or a 107% increase, NCRB said.

After Delhi, Karnataka registered a 98% increase and Telangana saw a 79% rise in stalking cases in the same period.

Only states and UTs with at least 15 registered stalking cases, in both the years, have been considered for this analysis.

Only four states - West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Uttar Pradesh - saw a decrease in the number of stalking cases in 2015 as compared to 2014.

Women stalkers on the rise

Police arrested 78 women for stalking in 2015, a 240% increase when compared to 23 such arrests in 2014. But women are less than 1% of the total number of people arrested for stalking in both the years.

The following table shows gender-wise split of stalkers arrested in 2014 and 2015

Year Men Women Total 2014 5416 23 5439 2015 6616 78 6694

Under-age stalkers

A major chunk of people who are arrested for stalking fall under the 18-30 age-group. In 2014 about 62% and in 2015 about 59% people arrested for stalking fell under this group.

Under-age stalkers are also arrested but their numbers are not as much compared to adults. Around 3% in 2014 and 2% in 2015 under-age or less than 18 years of age were arrested.

Stalking data is only available for 2014 and 2015 as before that the NCRB classified them in the category of other crimes.

The first high-profile case of stalking in India was reported from Delhi in 1996 after a young Delhi University law student, Priyadarshini Mattoo, was murdered by Santosh Singh. It turned out that Santosh, the son of a senior police officer, had been stalking her before he killed her.

But it took Parliament another 17 years and the gang rape of December 2012 to recognise stalking as crime and specifically incorporate the offence into the statute.
In an interim relief to senior advocate Nalini Chidambaram, wife of former Union minister P Chidambaram, the Madras high court on Wednesday directed the Enforcement Directorate to not proceed further on its summons till further orders. Instead, it asked her to appear before the court in connection with its money-laundering probe in the Saradha chit fund scam.

Passing the order on Nalinis petition seeking quashing of the last ED summons dated September 7, issued under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), Justice TS Sivagnanam said the court was inclined to grant the interim relief as not doing so would render the writ plea infructuous.

The judge directed the Assistant Director, ED, Kolkata not to proceed further, pursuant to the impugned order (summons) and said the matter shall be kept in abeyance until further orders.

The matter relates to the professional fee of Rs 1 crore, paid to Nalini by Saradha Group chairman Sudipto Sen for her appearance in a Delhi court and the Company Law Board (CLB) on behalf of former Union minister Matang Singhs wife Manoranjana, over a deal involving the purchase of three television channels.

Sen had paid the fee as part of an agreement between him and Manoranjana.

The ED had issued the summons to Nalini, asking her to appear before it on September 29.

Read | ED summons Chidambarams wife Nalini over Saradha scam probe

Alleging political reasons behind it, Nalinis counsel had pointed out in court that the CBI had already filed a chargesheet in the Saradha chit fund scam before a court in West Bengal and her name did not figure in it either as an accused or a witness. Yet, she was summoned by the ED.

Contending that the professional fee was received before the scam came to light, Nalini had submitted that as per section 160 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), a woman could not be summoned by the police and the inquiry had to be conducted at her residence.

Appearing for the ED, assistant solicitor general G Rajagopalan submitted that the matter was only in the stage of summons and mere summoning itself could not be assumed as the person had been made an accused.

In Wednesdays order, the judge said, This court is of the considered view that the respondent (ED) should file counter affidavits, not only meeting the factual allegations made, but also the legal contentions raised.

Referring to Nalinis objection to summoning a woman to the police station, he said it had to be examined if the provisions of the CrPC or that of the PMLA would prevail in the light of certain judgments cited by both the sides.

The judge directed the ED to file its counter within four weeks and posted the matter to November 8.
Cauvery, the largest river in South India, originates from Talakaveri, Kodagu, and moves through Karnataka for 316 km before going through Tamil Nadu and ending up in the Bay of Bengal. It was a cause of major conflict between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu for more than a century before the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal was set up in 1990 to mediate between the two states.

The first negotiations between the states of Mysore and Madras, dated 18th February, 1892, are old enough to contain the piercing observations of British colonels about the arrangements which have been come to in an informal manner both by personal discussion and demi-official correspondence between the Chief Engineer, Madras Irrigation Branch and the Chief Engineer in Mysore. Things became difficult again in 1924, with the construction of the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam at Kannambadi, a village near Mysore. Although another agreement was signed between the two states with limits on the extension of areas for irrigation, after 1960 Karnataka began the construction of more irrigation projects on the Kaveris tributaries, which further reduced the water flow to Tamil Nadu and created further resentment between the states.

In 2007, 17 years after the Tribunal was set up, it used the riparian water rights system of water sharing (which organises water into partition units based on the possession of the land on which the water runs) to allocate 419 thousand million cubic feet (tmcft) for Tamil Nadu and 270 tmcft for Karnataka, with the rest of the 726 tmcft of water being allocated to the minor shareholders, Kerala and Pondicherry.

The deal was that in distress years, i.e., when there was a rainfall shortage, the upper riparian state which in this case is Karnataka, would share water proportionally with Tamil Nadu. Both states were not pleased, and challenged the tribunals order in the Supreme Court. Karnataka wanted to triple its share of the water, claiming that it has not got an adequate share so far. Tamil Nadu on the other hand, said it needs more water to help with the extensive farming plans that were initiated because of Karnataka conceding to provide the additional water it needs. Until 2013, the friction between the two states continued and Karnataka often released less water to Tamil Nadu, justifying this by saying that there wasnt enough in the states reservoir.

Whats up with this years trouble?

In years when there is an ample monsoon, there havent been too many skirmishes about the quantum of water being released. But earlier this year, the dispute was stirred up again when Karnataka announced that it would be unable to release any water because of an 80 tmcft deficit in its four reservoirs after inadequate rainfall from the southwest monsoon. The state feared that it would have drinking water shortages and irrigation problems if it were to release more water, while farmers said their livelihoods were at stake despite their recent transition from sugarcane (a water-intensive crop) to paddy. According to a recent analysis, however, Tamil Nadus reservoirs were 49 percent short of water, whereas Karnatakas reservoirs were 30 percent short

All this meant that the Supreme Court had to intervene.

Kannada activists are arrested in Bengaluru while protesting against the Supreme Courts order to share Cauvery water with Tamil Nadu. (PTI)

What did the Supreme Court have to say?

On September 5, the Supreme Court ordered Karnataka to release 15,000 cubic feet per second (cusecs) to Tamil Nadu every day for 10 days, which would effectively mean giving away 24 percent of the water available in Cauvery basin reservoirs.

Although it altered this to 12,000 cusecs for eight days, because of escalating protests in Karnataka, when the new verdict came out a week later, riots broke out on the streets in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The government filed a plea on September 17 asking for another modification of the order. Yesterday, yet another body associated with this conflict, the Cauvery Supervisory Committee (put in place by the Ministry of Water Resources in 2013 to ensure that the tribunals order is enacted) ordered Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs of water per day to Tamil Nadu between 21st September and 30th September, but the state vehemently refused.

There have been several critiques of the way in which the judiciary has handled the dispute. Ramaswami R Iyer, former secretary at the Union Ministry of Water Resources, said last year that the Supreme Court should not have allowed states to use Special Leave Petitions to contest the 2007 order made by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal and accused it of prolonging the matter.

The Supreme Court heard the case again on September 20 and reduced the amount yet again, to 6000 cusecs over six days. Predictably, the two states had contradictory reactions, with Tamil Nadus Chief Minister Jayaraman Jayalalithaa praising the decision even as officials in Karnataka dismissed it as unimplementable. Meanwhile, experts are suggesting that the dispute will ultimately have to be resolved between the states rather than through litigation.

Violence and strikes

September this year has been witness to large-scale agitations, street violence and arson across Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in response to the courts verdicts. Mandya in Karnataka was worst-affected, with protests and roadblocks initiated by farmers and activist groups like the Cauvery Horata Samiti breaking out in Srirangapatna and other areas in the district on 6th, 12th and 19th September. There were state-wide strikes in Karnataka on 9th and 13th September.

Meanwhile, a video of a 22-year-old Tamil engineering student being beaten up by Kannadigas did the rounds on social media and some news channels and managed to rile up protestors prior to the courts directive. Cars and trucks were set on fire by mobs, residents with license plates belonging to the rival state were harassed and prohibitory orders including Section 144 had to be imposed in both Bengaluru and Chennai.

Is much of the water lost anyway?

A recent study put out by India Spend suggested that Bengaluru, despite receiving 19 tmcft (about 7%) of the Cauvery water (and currently waiting on a proposal to increase this amount to 30 tmft) that is allocated to Karnataka, loses 49% of the water in distribution because of leakages and damages in the citys water service pipes and supply system. It is, however, almost entirely dependent on the Cauvery as its groundwater resources are polluted and over-used. While 20% of the total Cauvery water is used for rural and domestic purposes, the remaining 80% is used in agriculture and industry in Karnataka. It appears that Cauvery water in Tamil Nadu has also been affected by pollution, sand-mining and over-exploitation, and farmers claim that the river will be dead in ten years.

Arent there any solutions?

There is no obvious formula for managing the situation during years of rainfall shortage. Experts have suggested that Tamil Nadu improve its water management, reduce the number of water-intensive crops and begin to rely more heavily on its ground water resources, but whether any of these solutions have been taken seriously remains to be seen. Meanwhile, environmental activists have expressed their concerns about the damage that the Cauvery will undergo with the increasing demand for its water and activities like sand-mining that have a serious impact on the river, stating that the river is being approached by both states as a mechanistic producer of water, not as a dynamic life-giving system that is responsive to local and global triggers of use and abuse.

The Cauvery is by no means the only river that has been the subject of bitter conflict between states in India. Joint water regulation boards have been established in the past and have successfully negotiated projects between members from the riparian states as in the case of Parambikulam-Aliyar. There are many disputes still stuck in deadlock, however. Only three days ago, the Odisha government announced that it plans on approaching the Supreme Court to request another tribunal to be set up under the Interstate Water Dispute Act to resolve its dispute with Chhattisgarh over the Mahanadi river. Sound familiar?

(In arrangement with GRIST Media.)
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addressed the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday night.

Sharif talked about the Kashmir issue even as his country was facing criticism from New Delhi over an attack on an army camp in northern Kashmirs Uri that killed 18 Indian soldiers.

Here are the highlights:

* A new cold war threatens to engulf Europe.

* Turmoil is intensifying in the Middle East.

* Sharif stresses the importance of fight against Daesh, or the Islamic State militant group.

* Pakistan has been a victim terrorism. This has reinforced our resolve.

* Sharif praises the Pakistan governments efforts to defeat terrorism.

In many countries the ghost of intolerance has revived xenophobia and Islamophobia: Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif #UNGA  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

* Terrorism is now a global phenomenon, the international community has to address it .

* We have to address the root causes to eliminate terrorism.

We will not allow externally sponsored terrorism and threats of destabilisation to cause turbulence in Pakistan: Nawaz Sharif #UNGA pic.twitter.com/ny6V8RfQVt  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

* Pakistan wants peace with India. We have gone the extra mile.

* The solution of Kashmir dispute a must for peace and noramalisation between India and Pakistan.

* There is a peaceful freedom movement led by Kashmiris.

Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces has emerged as a symbol of latest Kashmiri 'Intifada': Nawaz Sharif #UNGA pic.twitter.com/gohl6iiAFy  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

* The Kashmiri uprising has been met with Indias brutal force.

* Pakistan supports the demand of Kashmiri people.

* I demand a UN fact-finding mission to Kashmir to take stock of extrajudicial killings.

* Sharif demands UN-backed plebiscite, also pitches for the demilitarisation of Jammu and Kashmir.

India posed unacceptable pre conditions to engage in dialogue. Talks are no favour to Pakistan,they are in interest of both countries: Nawaz  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

I demand an independent inquiry into the extrajudicial killings in Kashmir,demand an end to the curfew: Nawaz Sharif #UNGA  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

* Pakistan committed to peace in South Asia.

* We are open to talks with India without any conditions -- at any forum.

* Ready to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.

* Pakistan is fully eligible for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Sharifs UNGA address came amid a diplomatic spar between the neighbours heightened by the deadly Sunday attack.

As India plans to isolate Pakistan through diplomatic means, Islamabad seems determined to rake up the recent Kashmir unrest triggered by the killing of a militant leader in July.

The militancy-hit state has been rocked by two months of violent protests in which 86 people have been killed and thousands injured. The Pakistani leadership has accused the Indian government of using excessive forces on civilians.

But the attack in Uri has put the spotlight once again on cross-border militancy. Hours before Sharifs address, India summoned Pakistani envoy Abdul Basit and offered evidence for a possible probe.

Ahead of his speech, Sharif held a telephonic conversation with Pakistans powerful army chief General Raheel Sharif amid signs he may tone down his rhetoric to reduce tensions with India, the Press Trust of India reported.

Reports said the two discussed the situation in Kashmir and tense relations with India.
In the wake of the Uri attack, India has vowed to isolate Pakistan internationally by highlighting its alleged support to terror elements. It had tried to adopt a similar strategy after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which left 166 people dead. However, turning Pakistan into an international pariah is a task thats more easily said than done. Here are a few reasons why:

Little condemnation of Pak

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed for the Uri attack. However, few countries have directly named Pakistan in their condemnation messages. While the UK referred to Uri as a part of India-administrated Kashmir, the US dubbed it as an attack in the Valley without specifically referring to Pakistan. Even Russia made a qualified mention of the Islamic country, stating: We are also concerned about the fact that, according to New Delhi, the army base near Uri was attacked from Pakistani territory.

Leverage problem

Pakistan is a useful ally to superpowers, including US and the UK, and this gives it considerable leverage on the international arena. The fact that the Islamic countrys economy is in a shambles doesnt seem to matter.

Read | Should India have waited? Hurried burial for Uri attackers raises eyebrows

The China wall

India has been trying to use the United Nations sanctions committee to tighten the noose on Pakistan-based individuals who are targeting India. However, such efforts have consistently run into opposition from China. Unless India procures Chinese support through painstaking diplomacy and a smart give-and-take approach, Beijing would have little incentive to annoy Pakistan.

Two-timing US

The US has been playing both sides for years now, as far as Indo-Pakistan relations are concerned. One of the main reasons why the Americans are loathe to upset Pakistan is its geographical position. As long as its troops are stationed in Afghanistan and the peace process in the strife-torn country remains a non-starter, the US will continue to perform the balancing act.

OIC support

In spite of all its shortcomings, Islamabad always plays smart when it comes to shuffling its diplomatic cards. Pakistan enjoys the backing of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), even though many of its member nations share Indias concerns in private.

Read | Full coverage of Uri attack

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With 18 soldiers dying in a pre-dawn terrorist attack in North Kashmirs Uri area on September 18, 2016, the armys combat death toll in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is 64 this year (until September 18), the highest since 2010, when 69 soldiers died, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP).

In contrast, civilian casualties along the line of control (LoC)the de facto border between India and Pakistan in J&Kin 2016 were the lowest in three decades, SATP data reveal. About 800 civilians died every year, on average, between 1990 and 2007.

Over the last three decades, the 20-year period between 1990 and 2010 was the most violent, while the period after 2011 relatively more peaceful, according to the SATP data.

The year 2012, when 16 civilians and 17 soldiers died, was the most peaceful. After that, the death toll rose.

A series of infiltration attempts along the LoC were stopped this year, which has seen a marked increase over the previous three years, according to an army statement.

As many as 31 terrorists were killed along the line of control this year in the course of 17 infiltration attempts stopped by the army, the statement said.

Ceasefire violations along the LoC and the international borderwhich runs south of the LoC beyond J&Kpeaked in 2014 and 2015, IndiaSpend reported in August 2015 and April 2016.

Indianswhile content with Indias foreign policy with regard to US, Russia and Chinaare unhappy with Prime Minister Narendra Modis policy on Pakistan, according to a 2016 research released on September 19, 2016, by Pew Global Research, a USA-based global research organisation.

With regard to security and road infrastructure along the international border in Jammu & Kashmir, 97% of a floodlit fence and 63% of planned roads have been completed, according to this August 2016 Rajya Sabha reply.

The story was first published by IndiaSpend, Indias first data journalism initiative.
India summoned Pakistan high commissioner Abdul Basit on Wednesday over the cross-border militant attack on an army base in northern Kashmir and offered to provide evidence for a possible probe by Islamabad into the brazen strike that killed 18 soldiers.

Hours before Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Shairfs scheduled address to the United Nations General Assembly, New Delhi also expressed concern over the neighbours territory being used for attacks in India.

#UriAttack Foreign Secretary Jaishankar summons Pakistan High Commissioner Basit to MEA, ministry of external affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The government told Basit that New Delhi was ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of the militants killed in the Uri and Poonch attacks if Pakistan wanted to conduct an investigation .

Read | Sartaj Aziz says Indias allegations against Pak in Uri attack baseless

Militants believed to be from Pakistan launched an assault on the army camp in Uri on Sunday as India blamed Islamabad for harbouring terrorist. A week before the army base attack, a policeman and four intruders were killed in a gunfight in Jammus Poonch.

The latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India, said a statement from the external affairs ministry.

Read | Avenging Uri: Seeking global sanctions against Pak Indias best option?

Beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack in January, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the Line of Control and the International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India, the foreign secretary said.

The day the siege of Pathankot airbase ended in January, Pakistan condemned the attack and said it was working on leads provided by India about the perpetrators. But in case of Uri, there has been no offer of cooperation so far.

India said seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of 31 terrorists.

India said there was strong evidence that Pakistans territory was used by militants. They include: GPS devices found on the bodies of intruders, grenades with Pakistani markings and communication equipment and food items, medicines and clothes made in Pakistan, among others.

The high commissioner refuted allegations. India wants to divert attention from Kashmir issue. Instead of propaganda, issues should be resolved through dialogue and under UNSC resolution, Pakistan sources said.

Read | Indias fallen heroes: The 18 soldiers who lost their lives in Uri attack

Full coverage of Uri attack

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Music director Vishal Dadlani met Jain monk Tarun Sagar, whom he had lampooned after his address to the Haryana assembly last month, apologised to him at his headquarters in Chandigarh on Wednesday. However, after the apology, Dadlani stuck to his stance that religion and governance should be kept completely separate, in the secular interest of the country.

The in-person apology at the Sector-27 Digambar Temple followed 32 apology posts on the social media website Twitter by Dadlani, who said after holding his ears and seeking forgiveness from the monk, Unknowingly, I had commented about guru-ji, but after hearing his kadve pravachan, I found them sweet and close to life. Sagar is known for his kadve pravachan (bitter sermons or truths).

Dadlani had termed Sagars address monkery of democracy  over which a case was registered against him at Ambala  and then had to face criticism most prominently from leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), for which he has campaigned in the past. After the FIR, he had approached the Supreme Court for protection from arrest, but it had told him to approach the high court instead.

I have not apologised because a case has been registered against me, he said on Wednesday, I have come as I felt that I should apologise for my folly out of humanity... Whatever I said was out of ignorance and I misinterpreted the media reports circulating on Twitter that showed the monk in negative light. I tweeted without applying my mind.

At the temple, Dadlani apologised five times as per a Jain tradition. Main kaan pakad ke maafi maangta hoon (I hold my ears and seek your forgiveness), he expressly had to say.

Sagar said he had forgiven him already anyway, but the Jain samaj (community) was hurt. We all are humans and make mistakes. But the ones who realise their folly should be pardoned. The issue should be finished there and then, he added, urging that the person who has filed a case against Dadlani to take it back.

Dadlani got from the monk a bracelet of white beads and a set of books of his kadve pravachan.

As for his future with the AAP, which he had apparently quit after the controversy, Dadlani said, No one forced me to join or leave the AAP. I do not have the temperament to be a politician, but I will surely be an activist.

Congress leader Tehseen Poonawala had also tweeted along the same lines and a complaint was lodged against him too. But Sagar said, I dont want to comment on the other man who had also tweeted and passed comments.

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Lacha from Uruguay, chakori from Vietnam, Dubai and Oman, hilsa from Myanmar, basa from Indonesia  this festive season fish from foreign waters will tickle the palate of Bengalis. Traders are importing these exotic varieties in large quantities to add that spice to Bengals favourite dish.

Though imported, these foreign fish will also come cheap than the local varieties. Plus, they will add variety to dishes that have long dominated the menu  pabda, parse, pomfret, bhetki, hilsa, lobsters, kajri, rohu and katla.

Traders told HT that lasha, chakori and basa dont have much bones and lend themselves to a variety of cooking styles as they quickly absorb the flavours of different spices.

Read:Four-kilo giant Hilsa sells for Rs 22,000 on Jamai Sashthi

As the countdown for the Pujas begins, we have decided to flood the city markets with fish imported from several foreign countries like Uruguay, Vietnam, Dubai, Oman, Myanmar and Iran at moderate price, Anwar Maqsood, secretary of the Hilsa Fish Importers Association (HFIA), told HT.

During the Pujas, we will import around 60 tons of lacha from Uruguay, 300 tons of chakori from Vietnam, Dubai and Oman and 150 tons of hilsa from Myanmar and Iran. The price of lacha will be around Rs 150Rs 200 per kg, while chakori will hover around Rs 150 and Rs 220 per kg mark. Myanmar hilsa will cost around Rs 800-Rs 1,000 per kg, Maqsood daaded.

This is the time when local varieties of fish sell for sky-high prices. Pabda, parse and pomfret are anywhere in the Rs 600-Rs 700 a kg range. And hilsa is always in short supply when the demand shoots up. Traders hope the foreign varieties will fill this gap. Otherwise, it will be difficult for middle-class Bengalis to savour their favourites, said Ganesh Das, a fish-seller at Kalibabur Bazar in Howrah.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday said dance bars in Maharashtra will continue to operate under the old terms and conditions that permitted serving of liquor with CCTV cameras at the entrance.

Without putting on hold the new rules that limited the timings of the dances up to 11.30 p.m., prohibiting serving of liquor and installation of CCTV cameras in the dance bar itself, Justice Dipak Misra and Justice C Nagappan said the persons granted licence should be allowed to continue under old terms and conditions.

You ban liquor in the state, the bench said, taking exception to the new rules that prohibits serving of liquor at the dance bars.

Somebody has a bar licence and a dance bar. You cant say dont serve liquor. Anybody who has a bar licence, you cant say that you cant serve liquor, Justice Misra said told the Maharashtra government.

You fight for the dignity of women. You protect the dignity of women.

Senior counsel Shekhar Naphade told the court: I have a right to prohibit liquor in the bar and it (right to prohibit liquor) will remain unless it is taken away by the court.

Appearing for the Maharashtra government, Naphade also defended the new rule that mandates the dance bars to install CCTV in dance area, saying it was a part of the police power of the state.

I have a power to regulate and I have a right that my regulations are complied with. The only way I can do it is through CCTV, Naphade told the court.

An apparently unimpressed bench said: We understand logically and constitutionally the powers of the police.

The bench asked senior counsel Jayant Bhushan, appearing for the dance bar owners, if they could make some arrangements so as to assist the police if needed.

Bhushan told the court that CCTVs had a chilling effect on the people coming to dance bars. People have some right to privacy.

Read | Norms meant to protect womens dignity: Maharashtra defends dance bar law in SC
Donald Trump was overwhelmingly selected by the grassroots of the Republican Party after a grueling primary with over a dozen excellent potential choices.

And he did it with the greatest number of votes in GOP history, and in the very teeth of sneering pundits, a hostile media and a united GOP establishment hell-bent on forcing another Bush on the Party.

The reaction to Trumps triumph by the national GOP establishment was, and remains, a painful eye-opener for many GOP faithful. For years they have been mystified why, when Republicans are in control of the ship of state, Republican principles get, if anything, lethargic efforts at implementation.

What Trump has exposed is the oligarchy Washington DC has become, an incestuous nest of K Street lobbyists, political consultants, mass media operatives, international corporate financiers  and with both parties answering behind the scenes to this cabal, not a dimes worth of difference, despite which Party is in charge.

In President Andrew Jacksons day, he called a similar group a nest of vipers, and gentlemen, I intend to drive you out!

Republicans in Nevada face a similar problem, with the base of the Party still in shock when, with GOP control of the entire legislative process, the largest tax increase in Nevada history was enacted  promises to do the exact opposite to the contrary.

Worse, the titular head of the Nevada GOP, Governor Brian Sandoval, has refused to endorse Trump. Why? In anticipation of a probable federal appointment  in the Democratic Hillary Clinton Administration!

If you are wondering why there is a rift in the Nevada GOP, re-read those last two paragraphs. More stark examples of why is hard to imagine.

Donald Trump is the clear and overwhelming choice of Nevadas Republicans  its time all of Nevadas elected officials, including Governor Sandoval and US Senator Dean Heller, unite behind the Partys selection. I call on ALL Nevada GOP elected officials to unite behind the next President of the United States  Donald J. Trump.
The air intelligence unit (AIU) of Customs intercepted an 83-year-old man at the Mumbai international airport on Tuesday night for allegedly attempting to smuggle gold bars worth Rs19 lakh.

The AIU suspect the accused, Harjinder Singh Chhabra, may be working as a carrier for a gang operating from across the country. Chhabra was apprehended while returning from Dubai. The passenger was followed on suspicion and he was found entering the toilet cabin near the immigration counter, said a high-ranking AIU officer.

An AIU official said Chhabra concealed gold in a tissue box in the cabin. There are two possibilities. He may have had a doubt that we are following him after which he decided to abandon the gold in the toilet or this could have been the plan, with the receiver picking it up later, said the officer.

He said Chhabra initially denied keeping the gold, which was wrapped in a black carbon paper. He, however, confessed later. We checked his bag and found the same black carbon paper, which was used in wrapping the gold in the toilet. After this, he agreed, said the officer.

Chhabra has not been arrested as the value of the seized gold is less than Rs20 lakh. On September 9, the AIU arrested seven men, who were part of a gang involved in smuggling gold. Sources said hundreds of carriers are sent to places such as Dubai and Bangkok. The carriers include people from all age groups and from different cities.

Some carry undeclared foreign currency to pay up in places such as Bangkok and Dubai, while others bring smuggled gold into the country. The agency is trying to catch the mastermind.

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Owing to exceptional circumstances, a 47-year-old advocate from Mumbai with end-stage kidney disease has been allowed to receive a kidney from his 45-year-old brain-dead brother, bypassing 3,000 people in line for a transplant.

The decision to approve the transplant was taken on Wednesday. Dr Jagdish Prasad, director general of the Directorate of Health Services (DHS), Delhi, decided to allow Nitin Vhatkar, the recipient, to jump the queue on humanitarian grounds as he has no blood relatives other than his younger brother Sandeep, who was declared brain-dead last Friday, after suffering a brain haemorrhage. A kidney is more likely to be compatible with a recipient if the donor is a blood relative. Dr Prasad also took into account the fact that Nitin is willing to donate his brothers heart, liver and one of his kidneys  provided he gets the other.

The director of DHS, Maharashtra, had approved the transplant on Tuesday night but there was a debate on whether it contravened the law, so the matter was sent to DHS, Delhi. Dr Prasad said that he gave his approval as the two are blood relatives and because others will benefit from Nitins decision to donate his brothers organs.

I was informed about the condition that [Sandeeps] organs will be donated only if [Nitin] gets a kidney. I gave the approval in the morning because they are brothers and because others will benefit from the donated heart and liver. We will now include a clause in the law that will allow us to bypass the usual conditions in such cases, he said.

Officials from DHS, Maharashtra, and the Zonal Transplant Coordination Committee (ZTCC) said they discussed the matter until late on Tuesday night. They said Nitin, an advocate, said he would consent to donating Sandeeps other organs provided he received one his kidneys.

Both brothers are unmarried. Their parents died two years ago and their elder brother more recently. Sandeep, a doctor with the Maharashtra Medical Council, suffered a brain haemorrhage on Friday and was found unconscious at his home in Airoli. He was pronounced brain-dead at SevenHills Hospital, Andheri.

[Nitin] has been on dialysis since he suffered complete renal failure two years ago. We checked for possible financial gains or other possible vested interests in the case but found none, said a DHS official, who did not wish to be named.

If not for the exceptional circumstances, Nitin would have had to wait years for a new kidney. A persons eligibility for a new organ depends on his or her position on a list maintained by ZTCCs. Nitin is on the Mumbai ZTCCs recipient list, but he would have got a chance to undergo a transplant after probably five years, considering the number of end-stage kidney disease patients, said a DHS official.

Some experts cautioned that allowing such exceptions for blood relatives could make the rules governing cadaver organ donations more vulnerable to fraudsters. The existing norms for cadaver donations are foolproof and dont allow for any fraudulent activity. But considering the recent kidney scam, which documents were forged to prove a relationship, it is possible that people will misuse the [exception] clause for personal benefit, said a senior urologist from Mumbai.

But Dr Gustad Davar, president of ZTCC, Mumbai, said there is a very little room for foul play as such cases are rare. Unlike with live donations, there is an elaborate system for identifying cadaver donors and recipients. Moreover, this the first time we have come across such a case, which proves how rare it is. Such decisions will be taken case-to-case and wont be generalised, he said.
Women and children development minister and senior BJP leader Pankaja Munde met senior Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Chhagan Bhujbal at JJ Hospital on Wednesday morning, sparking speculations of a possible coming together of the Other Backward Class leaders in the state against the backdrop of the silent protest marches of the Maratha community.

Pankaja met Bhujbal, who is under arrest in connection with the Maharashtra Sadan scam but admitted to the hospital recently after he complained of fever, before starting for her scheduled tour of Mokhada in Palghar that has been in the news for malnutrition deaths.

Pankaja and Bhujbal belong to the Vanjari and Mali communities and fall under the Other Backward C lasses (OBC) category. Pankajas father Gopinath Munde and Bhujbal were regarded as the tallest OBC leaders in the state and had come together in the past on a united OBC platform just when they were getting sidelined in their own parties.

Political observers say Panjakas overtures to Bhujbal can be read from two different angles.

The meeting between the two OBC leaders may help the ruling party to offset some steam from the ongoing chain of agitations by Marathas. Personally, this may help Pankaja to claim her position as the sole voice of the OBC community just when it is unsettled due to the Maratha agitation. It will help her bolster her position in the party by playing the OBC card.

Pankaja has been sidelined in her party and the government by the Fadnavis camp. After the Khadse episode, the OBC leaders in the government are hurt. The Munde-Bhujbal meeting seems to be a systematic attempt to lend a voice to the unrest, said Hemant Desai, a political analyst.

Though the BJP has reacted cautiously, the NCP said that its time for the government to rectify its mistakes by putting Bhujbal in jail.

Munde must have realised about the injustice done to Bhujbal. She should now convince the CM and help in getting the OBC leader bail, said NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik.

Bhujbal has been in jail for more than five months for alleged irregularities in the Maharashtra Sadan construction that is being probed by the Anti Corruption Bureau.

It may be recalled that Pankajas father and senior BJP leader late Gopinath Munde shared political ties and once had announced his desire to forge an OBC front.

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The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) seized 24 star tortoises from a person selling the protected species from Airoli, Navi Mumbai on Monday.

The accused, Mayuresh Nathuram Shirke, resident of Shastri Nagar, Dombivili (West), was arrested under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 with the help of wildlife activists from NGO Plants and Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). However, after paying a fine of Rs 25,000 to WCCB, he was let off.

After receiving a tip-off from our sources on Sunday, five of our officers were deputed near Gopinath Patil Parsik Janata Sahakari Bank, sector 1, Airoli where they nabbed the accused, said M Maranko, regional deputy director, WCCB. Trading star tortoise is a compoundable offence if the number of animals in trade is less. Apart from paying the fine, the accused gave an undertaking that he will not repeat it.

WCCB officials said the accused had purchased each tortoise for Rs 400 and had planned to sell each for Rs 1500. However, the price for each tortoise in the international market is ten times the amount that the accused was selling it for in Mumbai, said Maranko.

The tortoises have been currently housed at the WCCB headquarters in Navi Mumbai. The species are protected under schedule IV of the Wildlife (Protection) Act and trade, possession, transport, sale or offer for sale of an animal attracts an imprisonment for a term, which may extend to three years depending on the number of species.

WCCB officials said there had been five cases of turtle, tortoise trade this year from Mumbai as opposed to twice the number last year. There has been a drop in the number of cases owing to heightened awareness among people. We are also surveying different avenues of social media through which the trade is currently being organised, said Maranko.

Experts confirmed that while there had been an increase in awareness, traders had also achieved secure means for carrying out their operation. There is increased vigilance for traders and investigators on social media now. However, the number of cases has not decreased as closed groups on social media apps such as Whatsapp are being used to communicate and all numbers have unique codes making them untraceable, said Jose Louies, head of trade control, Wildlife Trust of India.

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In a bid to accelerate the digital progress of the state, the Maharashtra government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Oracle Corporation, an American multinational computer technology firm, on Tuesday. The firm will help the state develop the smart city program with the goal of making cities more livable and inclusive.

The corporation  which primarily specialises in developing and marketing database software and technology, cloud engineered systems and enterprise software products  will set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to modernise the states technology.

The MoU was signed between Oracle CEO Safra Catz and chief minister Devendra Fadnavis at Oracle Open World Conference held at San Francisco. Fadnavis addressed one of the sessions and invited technocrats present at the conference to partner with the state.

I am here to find solutions. By 2020, we want to put all government processes on an auto pilot mode for maximum efficiency and complete transparency. Technology is the only solution to this. I want all of you to partner with us to achieve this target, Fadnavis said.

Fadnavis also said an international panel will be set up to advise the state on technological advancements. He invited Catz to be a member of the panel and she agreed.

The CoE will be set up in Mumbai and will serve as a research platform to design, develop and test new capabilities to deliver better Government to Customer (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) services. The state and Oracle will invest in IT infrastructure, training and skill resources as well as management of the CoE.

Indias strength is its youth and its aspirational population. We cant wait anymore and want to convert our population into human resources, Fadnavis said.

He said the state is trying to bring all government services to smart phones to deliver them in a timely and cost-efficient manner. He said Maharashtra is going through a massive digital transformation. We will connect all the villages digitally by December 2018, he said.

State signs MoU with Volkswagen

The Maharashtra government on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Volkswagen India Pvt Ltd to provide skill-development training to students at a government-run Industrial Training Institute at Pimpri-Chinchwad. State skill development minister Sambhaji Nilangekar Patil and Dr Andreas Lauermann, chairman and managing director, Volkswagen were present.The firm will spend Rs2 crore in the next five years to train students and supply machineries and equipment to the institute.

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The Supreme Court (SC) on Wednesday dismissed the special leave petition (SLP) filed by a student against the Bombay high court (HC), validating the states first common entrance test (CET) for law courses.

Around 30,000 students had taken the states first law CET. The first round of admissions for more than 20,000 seats at government and private law colleges under the Centralised Admission Process (CAP) culminated on Tuesday.

While dismissing the appeal, which was perhaps the last hurdle in the way law admissions that were marred by delays and confusion, the SC bench consisting of justices Madan B Lokur and RK Agrawal held the counsels for petitioner Kedar Warad, a law aspirant from the state, suppressed the facts. The petitioner had moved the SC after the HC, on July 5, had refused to scrap the CET as pleaded by Warad and Shalini Kotian, another law aspirant.

The court took objection to the petitioners failure to disclose the fact that he had appeared for the entrance test, which makes him an aggrieved party. The counsel didnt submit an averment -- a formal statement by the petitioner -- as required by the SC.

We had submitted the CET mark sheet of the petitioner, along with other documents, which clearly demonstrated he had indeed appeared for the examination. But the court kept asking for an averment. The judges didnt look into the merit of the case, and instead dismissed it on the basis of a technicality, said Talekar.

The petitioner had argued the students didnt get adequate time to prepare for the examination, as the syllabi and exam notification was put up only a couple of months before the examination.

The HC, in its judgment, had noted, The court would have been happier had the state notified the students about the exam pattern, syllabus etc. well in advance and granted them more time to prepare. But merely because the exam was not conducted in a manner suggested by the petitioner, we cant declare the common entrance test and the entire process around it illegal, invalid, or unconstitutional.

The SC judgment comes as relief to thousands of law aspirants, who were anxiously waiting for it. If the CET had been scrapped, we would have had to go through the entire process again, said Rhea Gupta, an aspirant.

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SRINAGAR: An Indian soldier was killed and at least eight suspected intruders were shot dead on Tuesday as the Army battled two groups of militants along the border with Pakistan two days after an attack on a military camp in Kashmir.

Troops also exchanged fire with Pakistani soldiers in the Uri sector, close to the armys 12 Brigade headquarters which was attacked by militants on Sunday. The attack left 18 troopers dead and more than 20 injured.

Two infiltration bids by militants from across the Line of Control (LoC) have been foiled in Uri and Naugam sectors today (Tuesday), an Army spokesperson said, adding the gunfights were on.

One soldier was killed in the Naugam sector, he said.

The Indian offensive came amid a bitter war of words between New Delhi and Islamabad following the Uri attack, blamed on the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) by New Delhi.

The Army also said Pakistani troops were distracting Indian soldiers with cover fire to help the militants along the LoC, the de-factor border, sneak into the country.

An official in Srinagar said the firing from across the border lasted half an hour from 1.10pm. There was no damage from the firing that the Army described as a violation of a 2003 ceasefire agreement.

In New Delhi, Union home minister Rajnath Singh reviewed the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir with top officials, including national security adviser Ajit Doval and foreign secretary S Jaishankar.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead a meeting of the cabinet committee on security on Wednesday to discuss the Uri attack. Sources said the three service chiefs are likely to participate.

Pakistan has denied Indias allegations of Islamabads complicity in the Uri attack, though the Indian army said it had recovered arms, ammunition, food and medicine packets with Pakistani markings.

Islamabad accuses New Delhi of using the attack to deflect attention from continued street protests in Kashmir following the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani by security forces two months ago. More than 80 civilians have been killed in those protests.

Meanwhile, the bodies of the four militants killed in the Uri camp attack were buried on Monday, apparently to prevent public sympathy for them. The quick burials were in contrast to standard practice.

The militants were buried close to the garrison in Uri, though foreign militants in north Kashmir are usually buried at Kitchama graveyard, 25 km from the town.

The National Investigation Agency began its formal probe into the attack by registered a case on Tuesday.

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NEW DELHI: A 22-year-old schoolteacher died after a man, whose marriage proposal she had allegedly spurned, stabbed her more than 20 times on a busy road in Delhi on Tuesday, the latest in a string of stalking-related crimes in the city.

Police said the incident was witnessed by a large crowd but no one came to help the victim, identified as Karuna Kumar. Nearly 20 people on foot passed by as Surender Singh, 34, went on the stabbing frenzy. Fifteen vehicles also passed the spot.

CCTV footage of the incident showed the accused approaching the victim and stabbing her multiple times with a pair of scissors after confronting her at Burari in north Delhi.

After she collapses on the ground, he sat on her body and stabbed her on her face and chest, police said. He then circled Karuna and even kicked her, apparently to ensure she was dead.

Singh was later caught by passers-by who assaulted him before police arrived. Latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that Delhi recorded 1,124 cases of stalking last year, almost a fifth of all such incidents across India.

Stalking was made a separate category crime in India in 2013 but such incidents continue across.

Tuesdays incident came a day after a 28-year-old woman was stabbed to death in southwest Delhi by a man who claimed to be in love with her. Another woman survived after a shot fired by a man she had refused to marry hit her locket in Gurgaon on Monday.

Police quoted Singh as claiming that they were in a relationship but she cheated on him with another man.

In May, Singh, who is already married, allegedly attacked Karuna who managed to escape.

We approached police (then) but Singhs father fell on our feet asking us to reach a compromise, Rama, Karunas mother told HT. Police said Karunas family members did not want to file a case.

Police said that on Monday he took a SIM card he had given to her earlier, inserted it on his phone to read her Whats-App chats with another man. He told police Karuna had sent her intimate photos to the other man.

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A Siwan judge is moving to Patna on a request transfer nine months after he pronounced RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin guilty in a 2004 murder case, fuelling speculation about administrative patronage to the ex-MP who is out on bail.

The ruling Janata Dal (United) was quick to dismiss the charge that was spreading on social media, even as Siwan additional district and sessions judge Ajay Kumar Srivastava chose to be silent on receiving an order shifting him to the state capital a day ahead of Shahabuddins release from the Bhagalpur prison.

According to sources, Srivastava is likely to join in Patna on Wednesday as additional district and sessions judge-3.

Read | Invoke any law, I will live in my style: Shahabuddin

Shahabuddin, who is accused in over 30 criminal cases, was released from Bhagalpur jail on September 10 after 11 years. A high court bench of JM Sharma, on September 7, granted him bail in connection with the murder of an acid case eyewitness, Rajiv Raushan, in Siwan, for want of evidence.

Two days after Shahabuddin secured bail, Srivastava was transferred to Patna.

High court sources said Srivastava was moved out on the basis of a representation he submitted to authorities. The contents of the representation were not available.

The high court notification dated September 9 states: Ajay Kumar Srivastava-1, additional district and sessions judge, Siwan is transferred and posted at Patna in the same capacity.

A man staying at one place for too long always wants transfer. It is also required for freshness, said a senior court functionary, terming Srivastavas as routine transfer.

Not many took it in the face value, as Srivastava was the judge who pronounced Shahabuddin guilty on December 11 last year in the 2004 acid bath that killed Rajiv Roushans two brothers Girish Raj and Satish Raj.

Read | SC notice to Shahabuddin on plea seeking cancellation of bail

Srivastava termed the twin murder as a rarest of rare case, and gave Shahabuddin a life sentence.

Last week, as the news of Srivastavas transfer spread, people sought to link it to Shahabuddins release. Social media was abuzz with posts claiming that the RJD leaders imminent exit from jail led Srivastava to seek transfer.

HC sources refuted the speculation. Srivastava, when contacted, refused to speak, saying no comments, no comments.

Patna HC registrar general Vinod Kumar Sinha said he was busy in a meeting. He could not be contacted till Tuesday night.

JD(U) spokesperson Neeraj Kumar said Srivastavas transfer was a result of individual choice. There is rule of law in Bihar. Nobody can terrorise the judiciary under the Nitish Kumar government, he said. Whether Shahabuddin is inside jail or outside, the rule of law will prevail.

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The children of Surjit Singh of Muhawa didnt want to go to school on Tuesday that turned tragic.

They were excited that my younger brother was coming over from Dubai, he said. In the morning, they spoke to him on telephone and told him they were staying at home and waiting for the toys. He told them not to miss school, or he wouldnt bring them anything.

Read | 7 children die as school van falls into drain in Amritsar; 20 hurt

I wish I had let them stay, said the man who lost his daughter, Sehajdeep Kaur, and son, Yuvraj Singh in Tuesdays accident on the village bridge near Attari. The parents standing outside Amritsar hospitals, hands folded in prayer for the injured schoolchildren, had a bigger regret. They were aware that the narrow bridge without railing was dangerous. But they never expected their children to be its victims.

Residents gather at the bridge where the accident took place. (Sameer Sehgal/HT Photo)

Gursahib Singh of Tibbi village came to the hospital to look for his daughter, only to be told doctors had declared her dead and sent the body home. Tuhanu Eh Kam Sujh Reha hai (All you worry about is this)! he told television reporters heckling him for a byte. Meri kuri ghar mari pai aa (My daughter is lying dead at home). The governments negligence has ruined me.

Then there was Amarjit Singh of Muhawa. My children  Jobanjit Singh (15) and Gurleen Kaur (13) are my entire capital, he said. I was at home when my neighbour came rushing in with the news that the school bus had fallen into the drain. My capital was saved but my thoughts are with the families who lost their assets.

Injured students of MKD DAV Public School, Neshta, undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Amritsar on Tuesday. (Sameer Sehgal/HT Photo)

Jagroop Singh has both his children fighting for life at Arora Hospital. DAV was the only good school in the area, so I put Gurnoor (5) and Abhijot (7) there, he said. The boys were happy when we saw them off in the morning.

Villager Kuldeep Singh took a jibe at the government: Have the ministers and the legislators who make tall claims of development every day ever passed over this bridge? Even now when we have lost so many children, will they care to renovate it?

We warned the authorities concerned many times that a tragedy on the bridge was waiting to happen, he said. They ignored even written requests, villager Sardara Singh said. Harpreet Singh, father of victim Gurmanpreet Kaur, said: Well not let any callous minister enter in the village.

A senior police official from the area, who had come to look at the injured students, said on the condition of anonymity that: People avoid the bridge, for they know the risk, and the reputed school should also have thought about the childrens safety.

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A late night joyride for four Nepalese youngsters  all working with a private construction company  ended in a high-speed car crash killing one of them and critically injuring the other three. Khag Bahadur, alias Deepak, was killed when the driver Bahadur, alias Badal Rana, lost control over the Maruti Ciaz (CH 01 BB 9681) and it rammed into a pole near the TDI City.

The impact was so strong that the pole was uprooted. All passengers were in their mid-20s. Badal Rana had brought out the car of his employer and they had got on to Airport Road after a trip to Chappar Chiri at around 2am on Tuesday.

They were on their way to Kharar.

The injured have been identified as Asa Ram, alias Anshu, and Raj Bahadur, alias Raju. They were taken to SAS Nagar civil hospital, from where one was referred to a private hospital.

SECOND DEATH AT THE SAME POINT THIS MONTH

With 11 people losing their lives on the killer Airport Road over the past eight months, the authorities need to work to ensure no more deaths take place on the stretch.

RESIDENTS STARTLED BY SOUND OF IMPACT

A loud sound woke me up and I rushed outside my house to see the mangled car with four people stuck inside the vehicle. We rushed to their rescue. One was dead and the others were seriously injured, said Satbir Singh, a resident of Ballomajra, SAS Nagar.

The vehicle is registered in name of West Tower Mundi, Kharar. The driver lost control. The speedometer shows the speed at 200 km per hour. We have registered a case against Badal Rana for rash and negligent driving, said SAS Nagar senior superintendent of police Gurpreet Singh Bhullar.

A case has been registered under Sections 279 (rash driving), 337 (causing hurt by endangering life or personal safety of others), 338 (causing grievous hurt by endangering life or personal safety of others) and 304-A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code.

POLICE TAKE 12 HOURS TO ESTABLISH VICTIMS IDENTITY

The police took more than 12 hours to establish the identity of the deceased as well as the injured.

Till noon, the Balongi station house officer under whose jurisdiction the area comes did not have any information to share either with the relatives or the media. The statements of the victims had also not been recorded.
Notorious gangster Ranjodh Singh Jodha Kothaguru and another person were killed while three others were injured in a road mishap in Sikar district in Rajasthan on early Tuesday morning.

The accident took place at about 4 am when five were travelling in Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire car bearing registration number RJ 31 CA 6427 to Baran district in Rajasthan to attend a court hearing. Rajasthan police said an unknown vehicle hit the car resulting in death of Jodha Kothaguru and Gurjit Singh. The injured were identified as Karamjit Singh, Jagseer Singh and Kulwinder Singh and were referred to a Jaipur hospital.

Ranjodh Singh, a resident of Kothaguru village in Bathinda, was facing at least 10 cases against him including a murder, attempt to murder, theft and dacoity. He was out on bail. He was also an accused in a firing incident at erstwhile Peoples Party of Punjab rally at Adampur village in Bathinda during panchayat polls in May 2013. The firing resulted in the death of one person.

While locked in Nabha jail, he had also hailed the murder of gangster-turned politician Jaswinder Singh Rocky who was shot dead in Solan district in Himachal Pradesh April this year by writing on his Facebook.
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national council member Pavitar Singh on Tuesday alleged that party Delhi MLA and Punjab affairs co-incharge Jarnail Singh had gathered unaccounted for party funds prior to the 2015 Delhi assembly elections.

Addressing a press conference here, Jarnail, accompanied by NRI Harpal Singh, said he had deposited a cheque for Rs 1 lakh in Jarnails bank account in January 2015. The money was supposed to be for the party. He kept demanding cash but we insisted on paying in cheque. Finally, he gave an account number which we later found was his personal and not of the party, said Pavitar showing details of the transaction. Pavitar added that he was never given receipt for the amount he donated.

Harpal added that he too gave Rs 50,000 for Delhi polls to Jarnail for which he never gave him any receipt.

When contacted, Jarnail said he was the AAP candidate in January 2015 and had requested party volunteers and supporters to gather funds for elections. What is wrong in that? I dont understand what Pavitar is trying to prove? He is the one who deposited the money. I did not force him or did not promise a quid pro quo. And when the transaction is through a bank, how does it matter if a receipt was given or not. I have declared everything to the election commission. Regarding Harpal, I dont even know who he is, he added.

Pavitar said that he was ready to face a defamation suit to prove the authenticity of his allegations. Let the party take me to court. I will prove it that Jarnail collected money from volunteers, he said.
The Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) has slapped a fine of Rs 5.5 lakh on Punjabi University for unauthorised use of electricity.

The action has been taken after a raiding team detected the illegality at a private hostel, which is outside the boundary of the university, but still was provided power connection from the varsity campus.

The PSPCL raid was conducted on the complaint of Pushpinder Gill, a professor of management studies, who had lodged a complaint with the chancellor, alleging financial and administrative bungling in the varsity.

In fact, the raid has opened the lid off the can of worms as it has come to the fore that the university had taken this 25-room private hostel on rent for an exorbitant rent of Rs 35 lakh per year. Also, an illegal passage to the hostel has been given from the varsity campus by breaking the boundary wall and the power connection to said building was being provided from the varsity. The hostel is named as NRI Hostel where South African students stay.

The PSPCL conducted a raid and found university indulging in unauthorised use of electricity. After disconnecting the power supply to the hostel, we have imposed a fine of Rs 5.5 lakh and sent a notice to the varsity registrar, said Gurjant Singh Chahal, executive engineer, PSPCL.

The university was illegally supplying electricity to a hostel where more than 20 air conditioners, geysers, and other appliances run. The whole cost is borne by the university. I raid was result of my complaint, said Prof Pushpinder Gill.

He said varsity was spending about Rs 40 lakh on rent of an illegal hostel belonging to a known contractor. This hostel has been given passage from the campus. Normally the rent for such an accommodation shouldnt have been more than Rs 15,000 per month, whereas the university was paying him Rs 3,32,750 per month. If one looks at the money paid by the varsity as rent to this contractor over the years, a new hostel could have been constructed, said Gill, demanding a probe into the matter.

He also alleged large-scale irregularities in the construction works and purchase of items, saying the e-tendering process was not followed, causing losses to the varsity. He had also named several varsity officials in his complaint to the chancellor. He had urged chancellor to order a CBI inquiry into all acts of commission and omission going on at the varsity.

Despite repeated attempts registrar of the university, Devinder Singh, didnt pick up the phone.
After failure in previous rounds, the holy city has finally made it to the list of cities across the country that will be developed under the smart city project. The Union urban development ministry on Tuesday announced the names of 27 new cities that have been included in the third list. Along with Amritsar, Jalandhar has also made the cut. Now, the state has three cities, including Ludhiana that was selected in the second round, which will be developed as smart cities.

This is a moment of privilege and happiness for all of us. Amritsar, a holy city, has made it to the third list of the smart city project. We are very happy with this development, Amritsar mayor Bakshi Ram Arora said during a press conference soon after the announcement was made. He was accompanied by senior deputy mayor Avtar Singh Truckanwala and other local Bharatiya Janata Party and Akali leaders.

Talking to HT on the municipal corporations future course of action, Arora said: The entire city will be transformed. The existing projects will get a fillip and all modern facilities will be provided to residents.

Arora said traffic flow will be streamlined, closed-circuit television cameras will be installed, global positioning system will be employed for tracking garbage collection vehicles and emphasis will be laid on e-governance in various departments as well as facilitation centres. The mayor also promised round-the-clock electricity and water supply under the project.

For implementing the project, a total of `1,000 crore will be released in a period of four years. While in the first year, both the central and state governments will release `200 crore each, `100 crore will be released in consecutive years. Meant to change the way urban India lives, India plans to have 100 smart cities by 2022. Sixty have been chosen, including 20 in January and 13 in May; the remaining will be picked by 2018.
Though the civic body here was confident that Jalandhar will make it to the first 20 cities in the country under the Smart City mission but it missed the chance against Ludhiana with a difference of some points.

The reason for the debacle in the second round the officials here mentioned was less public participation and having failed to state the independent financial source that the city has for carrying out various projects.

For the third round, the municipal corporation Jalandhar (MCJ) carried out the digital voting system where the public were able to do multiple voting. MCJ asked people to vote on its citizen consolation website where they were asked to choose their priority area of development.

In addition to this, people were also to vote on other social networking platforms. The civic body had succeeded in gathering around 3.5 lakh votes on its Smart City project, which was 35% more from the last time. More than 55% of population participated in the citizen consultation process.

It is to be mentioned that citizen participation was the major component of Smart City competition.

In addition to this, the MCJ asked various government departments to provide the various details of the funds that they are investing for carrying out various projects and also for mentioning as to whether they are funded by the state and the central government.

After synchronising the funds received by various government offices for various projects along with their own independent earning status, the document was included in the upgraded Smart City vision that was submitted in the third round.

In addition to this, the civic body also mentioned that they are carrying out geographic index survey (GIS) in the city.
Following the escalating tension between India and Pakistan after the terror attack on the Uri army base, the Punjab Police have started strengthening security in border towns.

Punjab director general of police (DGP, law and order) Hardip Singh Dhillon visited two border districts of Gurdaspur and Pathankot on Tuesday, where he took stock of the law and order situation.

He also met the top brass of the Air Force, and reportedly discussed the outer security cover of the Pathankot airbase, for which the Punjab Police is responsible.

DGP Dhillon said he was here to interact with officers active on ground. Questioned on measures being taken to prevent infiltration across the border that has led to three terror attaks in recent past, Dhillon said the security forces equipped with modern gadgets is the answer to Pakistans ill-designs.

We now have thermal image sensors, bullet proof and antimine vehicles and bullet-proof bunkers besides nearly 6,000 jawans ready to join the Punjab Police, he said.

Pathankot senior superintendent of police (SSP) Rakesh Kaushal said nearly 700 closedcircuit television (CCTV) cameras have been installed in the district and more will be installed in future.
Somewhere, Tamil Nadu stubbornly refuses to let go its cultural right and heritage to hold the blood-thirsty sport of jallikattu or bull fighting. While Catalonia in Spain banned this in 2012 and Indias Supreme Court proscribed jallikattu in 2014, Tamil Nadu politicians have been persisting with its plea to conduct the sport. And in the latest development, jallikattu advocates have lambasted Tamil superstar Rajinikanths daughter, Soundarya, for having accepted the membership of the Animal Welfare Board of India. They feel that the board was singularly responsible for the ban.

It is in this context that the recent announcement of debutant director J Julian Prakashs period film, Ilami, on jallikattu assumes significance. Starring Yuvan (who is best known for his performance in Sattai) and Anukrishna (Kaththi), the movie tells an 18th century story. In fact, the plot unfolds 300 years ago, in 1715.

The period setting is probably an intelligent ploy to steer clear of the reigning controversy. Jallikattu was just about the only sport in 18th century Tamil Nadu, and there was no administrative disapproval of it then. Prakash told this writer on Wednesday morning over the telephone that Ilami is a period piece, set in the temple town of Madurai -- which even today is the centre of bull fight.

In ancient times, jallikattu was almost sacred and taming or killing a bull was considered an unmistakable sign of male strength and superiority.

Perhaps, this was the beginning of male arrogance, which India is increasingly witnessing today -- on the streets, in films like Who Killed Jessica Lal and, most recently, Pink.

Ilami -- while focussing on Tamil culture (part of which was jallikattu) -- will also have a romantic sub-plot. But, of course. Can there any Indian movie without this or at least a trace of this?

Period film Ilami is being directed by J Julian Prakash.

Prakash and his team constructed a huge set in Talakona -- a forested area in Andhra Pradesh. Although we did build a smaller set at Theni, near Madurai, in Tamil Nadu, we found it very difficult to find any place in the state that was untouched by 21st century development. We found pucca roads and electric wires everywhere, and it was only Talakona that looked pristine and suitable for our narrative, Prakash averred.

He made an interesting parallel when quizzed why he chose a period work for his debut. Like children whose first drawings are their parents, their schools and classrooms, jallikattu is so much in my psyche, in my blood that I thought it would be best to give expression to my feelings through the creative medium of cinema.

Ilamis music by Srikanth Deva will be launched in October. The film will open in November.

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Heavy rains lashed Hyderabad, turning several residential localities into virtual cess pools and bringing normal life to a grinding halt.

The downpour which started at around 10pm on Tuesday night continued till early on Wednesday. But after a few hours of respite, it resumed in the afternoon. Qutbullapur on the city outskirts received the maximum rainfall of 16.4 cm, while several other areas recorded rainfall ranging from 3 to 12 cm in five to six hours.

Hussainsagar Lake in the heart of the city reached its full reservoir level of 514.3 ft, with inflows crossing 4,000 cusecs, forcing authorities to lift all sluice gates. This resulted in several colonies downstream being flooded.

People wait outside an emergency block of a private hospital surrounded by floodwatwers, following heavy rain in Suraram, a low lying area on the outskirts of Hyderabad on September 21, 2016. The Meteorology Department has forecast rains for the next 24 hours. (AFP)

The heavy rains also caused overflowing of storm water drains, wreaking havoc in densely-populated localities such as Kukatpally, Miyapur, Nizampet, Begumpet and Alwal. Several tanks on the city outskirts were breached and water entered into residential dwellings. In prime localities like Begumpet, Punjagutta, Sanathnagar and Kukatpally, water entered the cellars of several apartments submerging vehicles and confining residents to their apartments.

It was a nightmare for thousands of software employees who were stuck in traffic jams while trying to reach offices in the IT hub of Madhapur, Kondapur and Gachibowli. Roads in these areas were also heavily damaged due to the rain. At Secretariat on the banks of Hussainsagar, the main road caved, causing another traffic situation.

Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Raos office said the army and disaster management teams had been called on to help stranded people.

Children wade through a waterlogged street as it rains in Hyderabad, on September 21, 2016. Low lying areas have been the worst affected. (AP Photo)

Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) commissioner, G Janardhan Reddy, also said people could call on National Disaster Response teams to rescue them by boat.

Reddy further asked locals to avoid coming out of their homes in the wake of a heavy rain forecast for the next 24 hours. Traffic police also appealed to locals to avoid using four-wheelers.

To help mitigate the situation, Rangareddy district collector declared a holiday for private and government schools in Balanagar, Qutbullapur, Malkajgiri and Serilingampally mandals.

Chief minister Rao, who is in New Delhi to attend the Apex Council meeting convened by Union Water Resources Ministry, reviewed the situation with GHMC authorities. He asked officials to take necessary steps to evacuate those in low lying areas if required.

(With inputs from agencies)

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A speeding car hit a person crossing the road and travelled for three kilometres with his body on its roof before it was stopped by locals at Jadecherla in Mahbubnagar district on the Hyderabad-Bengaluru national highway on Monday night.

According to Jadcherla sub-inspector of police Madhusudhan Goud, 35-year-old Srinivasulu, a labourer from Nimmagaddabavi village, was crossing the road near the new bus stand at around 10 pm, when a speeding Chevrolet car with registration number AP-28CK-8477 coming from Kurnool hit him.

The impact of the accident was so intense that the man was flung into the air and landed on the roof of the car. However, instead of stopping the car, the driver tried to escape by increasing the speed, not realising that the body was lying on the roof of the vehicle.

A couple of local youth who were passing by on their motorbike alerted the police of the highway patrolling squad and chased the car for about three kilometres. They managed to bring the car to a halt at Macharam village on the highway, Goud told HT. Even before the locals approached the vehicle, the driver fled the spot (on foot) and disappeared in the darkness.

He said the car belonged to Rajasekhar Reddy, the owner of a biometric equipment manufacturing unit in Hyderabads Kukatpally, and was registered in the name of his wife, Chandrakala.

We are yet to find out whether the car was being driven by Rajasekhar himself or somebody else, Goud said.

The victims body was taken to the Jadcherla hospital for autopsy.

This is the second such incident in Telangana this year. On January 2, a 62-year-old farmer from Nalgonda district, Venkat Reddy, was hit by a speeding Maruti Swift car belonging to a wristwatch dealer, 25-year-old Md Raheem Khan, at Narketpally on the Hyderabad-Vijayawada national highway.

Here too the victims body landed on the roof of the car, but Khan continued to drive for over 20 km, before being caught by police.

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One can only imagine what it would be like to direct Oscar winning actor Lupita Nyongo (12 Years a Slave). But for filmmaker Mira Nair, it was a cakewalk. Well, not literally since her next project Queen Of Katwe took a lot of research but when it came to casting, Nair was almost sure that there was no one better than Nyongo to play the protagonists role. In fact, not too many people know that Nyongo had previously interned with Nair in Uganda when the filmmaker was editing The Namesake.

Lupita Nyong'o attends the Queen of Katwe premiere on day 3 of the Toronto International Film Festival. (Jesse Herzog/Invision/AP)

Working with Lupita is an absolute joy. Directing her was like working with my daughter. She is a family friend and I have known her for over 10 years. Queen of Katwe is a real-life story about a strong and fiercely independent woman, Harriet whos illiterate daughter, Phiona becomes an international chess champion in Uganda. I couldnt think of anyone else besides Lupita for Harriets role because she has the same fire inside her. Like Harriet, she is also deeply anchored in life. When I sent her the first draft, she called me 10 hours later, shaking and crying with emotion. It was a matter of minutes before she decided to do the film, Nair says.

Read: Films of Dev Patel, Mira Nair emerge runners-up in Toronto fest

Nair is often credited for being the torch-bearer for cross-border films doing well all over the world. Whether it is Monsoon Wedding, Misissippi Masala or Salaam Bombay, all her films have a distinct Indian flavour while addressing socio-political issues. It is no surprise then that the filmmaker is an inspiration to a lot of young directors, especially women. Nair, too, is more than happy to be the inspiration for youngsters in the country. Nothing excites me more than seeing genuine talent and extraordinary intelligence. I love Zoyas work. Just recently, when I was unwell, I ended up watching Dil Dhadakne Do  twice. Her films give me so much joy. Nitya Mehra is a talented girl, she has assisted me. Reema Kagti, Sooni Taraporevala, Konkona Sen Sharma, are all wonderfully gifted women, says Nair.

Co-incidentally, her son Zohran is the music curator of the Afro beat soundtrack in the film. He is a young rapper and has composed the track No 1 Spice in the movie. It will be played in the end credits and is already very popular, she beams. As we talk about Monsoon Wedding and its immense popularity and relevance till date, she reveals that she is revisiting the film, albeit differently. Monsoon Wedding is being made into a Broadway show that will open next year. It has been in the making for 9 years.

Read: Listen to Alicia Keys original song for Mira Nairs Queen of Katwe

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In boilerplate remarks reprising Pakistans long-standing rant on Kashmir and India, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday went further than any leader from his country before perhaps taking aim at the United States.

Terrorism is now a global phenomenon, which must be addressed comprehensively and in all its forms, including State terrorism, he said as he proceeded to bash India.

Read | Pakistan PM Sharif offers peace talks, but needles India on Kashmir at UNGA

The international community must coordinate its efforts to accomplish this. These efforts should be taken collectively and not unilaterally by the passage of any laws with extra-territorial application targeted against certain countries.

The context here seemed to be H.R.6069, the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act, a legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday. If enacted, the legislation will require the US President to give congress a report detailing instances of Pakistan supporting international terrorism or state unequivocally it is not. Within 30 days of the report, the secretary of state will be required to determine Pakistan has indeed done that, or say it hasnt.

It is time we stop paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism, Ted Poe, a Republican heading House sub-committee on terrorism, said in a statement announcing the introduction of the Bill.

The legislation, moved jointly by Poe and Dana Rohrabacher, also a Republican, reflected a deep sense of betrayal felt by US lawmakers over Pakistans dodgy record on counter-terrorism; duplicitous is how they describe it.

The designation of state sponsor of terrorism  currently bestowed by the US on Iran, Syria and Sudan  would entail restrictions on foreign assistance and sale of arms, and will hurt Pakistan which is a major beneficiary of both.

The Poe-Rohrabacher bill may or not make it through, but its introduction had the desired effect on Pakistan.

If our current efforts in Pakistan are not producing the results we seek then what are out of options, Representative Matt Salmon, a Republican, said during a recent congressional hearing about Pakistan, adding, We could simply turn the money off we could enforce sanctions or declare Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Richard Grenier, a former CIA operative who was once state chief in Islamabad, told lawmakers at another recent hearing that the US had nearly designated Pakistan as state sponsor of terrorism in the 1990s, around the time of escalation of terror activities in Kashmir.

It escaped then, as it may this time.

Also read | Full text of Nawaz Sharifs speech at UN general assembly
Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte demanded on Wednesday the European Union show him respect worthy of a president, despite giving the bloc a one-finger gesture and a vulgar four-letter rebuke after its legislators expressed concern about his drug war.

Angered by last weeks call by the European parliament for restraint in his deadly 11-week crackdown, the former mayor of the southern city of Davao took aim for a second day at the European Union and said he did not deserve insults.

Even the EU is scolding me, Duterte said in a televised speech at an army base.

When I was mayor, that was OK but it is different now because I am the president. Why would you insult me?

He added: It is as if I am your subordinate.

After lambasting the United Nations, the United States and its president and Nobel laureate, Barack Obama, the EU is the latest high-profile recipient of a Duterte dressing-down that has become part of his appeal to millions of Filipinos.

Read | Philippine President Duterte regrets son of a whore remark against Obama

Duterte swept to power in a May election promising an assault on the drugs trade and at least 3,800 people have been killed since he took office on June 30.

The European parliament appeared to strike a nerve when it issued a statement calling on his government to put an end to the current wave of extrajudicial executions and killings, while expressing concern about extraordinarily high numbers killed during police operations.

During a speech on Tuesday, Duterte hit out at the EU, using obscene language and gesture.

The European Union delegation in Manila issued a diplomatically worded statement from its ambassador but later retracted it, for reasons not explained, replacing it with another, saying We dont comment on comments.

The European Union and the Philippines enjoy good relations, and we will continue to discuss this issue, among many others, in our bilateral contacts, it said in the revised statement.

Duterte said on Sunday he may have to extend the campaign against drugs into next year, having understated the depth of the problem.

Also read | Foul is fair for Duterte: The Philippine President insulted everyone
Ahmad Khan Rahami, a US citizen born in Afghanistan, was charged by federal officials in two states on Tuesday with planting bombs in New York, and at a military charity run and train station in New Jersey.

He remains hospitalised after a shootout with police on Monday, hours after investigators say he dumped a package with bombs in a trash can near a train station. Investigators are looking into his previous overseas travel and other run-ins with the law.

Heres whats known about Rahami:

Stabbing charge

Rahami was accused of stabbing one of his brothers in 2014, but a grand jury declined to indict him, despite a warning from the arresting officer that Rahami likely was a danger to himself or others, court records show. He also was accused of violating a domestic-violence restraining order in 2012.

Rahami has a child with a woman he dated while attending high school in Edison, New Jersey, but the two have since had a tumultuous relationship. Rahami often was hundreds of dollars in arrears in child support and their custody case was called before a family court judge six times in five years, records show. She went to court on Tuesday to seek full custody of the child, citing the terror investigation.

Members of the FBI investigate at the scene of Saturday's explosion on West 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, New York. (AP File Photo)

In 2011, the woman went to court to stop Rahamis overnight visits with the child, but a judge found she hadnt provided evidence to show that their child was in danger of being removed from the country. A judge approved a visitation agreement between the two in May 2014, ordering that the child spend Christmas and Thanksgiving with her  and the Muslim holy days Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha with Rahami.

Investigated by FBI

After the 2014 stabbing incident, the FBI looked into Rahami after his father expressed concern his son might be a terrorist, law enforcement officials said Tuesday. During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd and acting like a thug, the officials said.

Rahamis father told reporters Tuesday that he called the FBI at the time because Rahami was doing real bad.

William Sweeney, the FBIs assistant director in New York, said on Monday that at the time of the bombing, Rahami apparently was not on the FBIs radar.

Where he worked

Federal investigators said that Rahami purchased components for the bombs on eBay, and had them shipped to a business where he worked in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. They said he worked there until September 12, but didnt identify the store.

Rahami had worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an Associated Press administrative technology office in New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

This video grab image by the New Jersey State Police allegedly shows Ahmad Khan Rahami. (AFP Photo)

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said Rahami worked night shifts and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for US military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

Customers at a fried chicken restaurant owned by Rahamis father where he had worked said his demeanour changed after taking trips overseas and he started wearing more ethnic clothing.

A wife from Pakistan

On a trip to Pakistan in 2014, Rahami emailed his local congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport.

Democratic New Jersey Republican Albio Sires said his office wrote a letter to the US embassy in Pakistan to check on the status of the case and the woman received a visa.
The 2008 Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and six other suspects have challenged the legality of a Pakistani judicial commission that travelled to India in 2013 to probe the 2008 attack, which could further delay the case proceedings.

Lakhvis counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi on Wednesday said the defence lawyers on Monday challenged the proceedings of the judicial commission that travelled to Mumbai to record the statements of four Indian prosecution witnesses in the Islamabad high court.

When asked had not the trial court already declared the commissions proceedings null and void, Abbasi told PTI: No... the trial court had not declared the commissions proceedings null and void and we have challenged the legality of the commission in the IHC early this week.

Earlier, the defence lawyer had challenged the legality of the commission before the trial court in 2013 but it was dismissed.

A Pakistani panel comprising special prosecutors and the defence counsel in 2013 had visited Mumbai to record the statements from prosecution witnesses, including magistrate R V Sawant Waghule, who recorded the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab; Ramesh Mahale, the chief investigation officer of the case, and Ganesh Dhunraj and Chintaman Mohite, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the terrorists killed during the attack.

The commission in 2012 had recorded the statement of these witnesses but due to an official understanding between the Pakistani and Indian governments, had not cross-examined them.

Lakhvis lawyer has filed a plea the commission that went to India had not been allowed to cross-examine four key Indian witnesses.

A prosecution lawyer said the defence lawyers challenging the legality of the commission and saying it was not allowed to cross-examine the key Indian witnesses was aimed at delaying the case further.

He said this is evident from the fact that the legality of the commission is being challenged over three years after it had travelled to Mumbai.

As the case is already not heading further because India has yet to decide whether to send 24 witnesses to Pakistan to record their statement the defence lawyers challenging the Pakistani commissions proceedings in the IHC may further delay it, he said.

The court has not fixed the date of hearing.

LeT operations commander Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people in November, 2008.

Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attack, is living in undisclosed location after being released from jail on bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Adiala Jail Rawalpindi. The case has been underway in the country for more than six years.
The United States has urged Pakistan to cooperate in the investigation into the terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp at Uri in Kashmir on Sunday, suggesting by implication that it can help.

A state department spokesman said on Wednesday that secretary of state John Kerry and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif discussed the incident at their meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Sunday. The secretary urged Pakistani cooperation in the investigation (at that meeting), the spokesman said.

The US also offered India assistance in the investigation, which was conveyed when deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken made a phone call to foreign secretary S Jaishankar.

India has said the attack, in which 18 soldiers were killed, was carried out by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed. New Delhi had also blamed the terror group for the attack on the Pathankot airbase in January.

A source said while the US had strongly condemned the attack in Pathankot, as it has now, it had not followed up by asking Pakistan to cooperate in the investigation.

Implied here in the present instance is a suggestion of a certain leverage Islamabad has with these groups, the source said, pointing to a similar call from the US after the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Asked who the US believed was behind the Uri attack, the state department spokesman said, We are still awaiting further information. We have offered our assistance to the government of India, and we also urge Pakistan to cooperate in the ongoing investigation.

In its first response to the Uri attack, the US had said it strongly condemned it, and it was committed to our strong partnership with the Indian government to combat terrorism. There was no reference to Pakistan, which, many experts here with experience of the region, said looked clearly implicated.

The state department spokesman went on to reiterate the clear and longstanding US view that Pakistan needs to take steps against externally focused militants including against groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The spokesman also addressed the question of US policy on Kashmir, saying, The US position on Kashmir has not changed. It is an issue for India and Pakistan to resolve.

The pace, scope, and character of any discussions on Kashmir is for the two sides to determine, but we support any and all positive steps India and Pakistan can take to forge closer relations.

India and Pakistan stand to benefit from practical cooperation, and we encourage them to engage in direct dialogue aimed at reducing tensions.

There were reports in the Pakistan media that Sharif had urged Kerry at their Sunday meeting for US intervention to resolve the Kashmir issue.
Even as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is trying to shore up support in the UN general assembly for Pakistan over Kashmir, two American lawmakers introduced a bill in the US Congress on Tuesday proposing to designate Islamabad a state sponsor of terrorism. But Pakistan may still escape the terror tag.

Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the United States for years, said Ted Poe, chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism, in a statement announcing the introduction of the bill, H.R.(H.R stands for House of Representatives) 6069, the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act.

From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the war on terror, he added.

Poe, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Texas, introduced the Bill jointly with Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California who heads the Houses sub-committee on Europe, Eurasia and emerging threats.

If enacted, the Bill will require the President to give a report to Congress within 90 days on whether Pakistan had supported international terrorism, or not. Within 30 days thereafter, the secretary of state will either determine Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism, or say why not.

It is time we stop paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism, Poe said.

The Congressman did not cite Pakistans role in the Uri attack, as alleged by New Delhi, among the reasons for introducing the bill, but there was an unmistakably direct link given the time and the context. There has been a steady stream of bipartisan expressions of support for India and condemnation of the attack on the army base in Uri by Pakistan-based Jaish-i-Mohammad since Sunday, from members of both chambers of Congress.

Frustration with Pakistans patchy record on counter-terrorism was so high that members had been mulling state-sponsor of terror designation for Pakistan for a while.

If our current efforts in Pakistan are not producing the results we seek then what are our options?, Representative Matt Salmon, a Republican, had asked during a recent Congressional hearing about Pakistan. We could simply turn the money off  we could enforce sanctions or declare Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, he added.

Richard Grenier, who was once CIA station chief in Islamabad, told lawmakers at another hearing recently that the US had nearly designated Pakistan as a state sponsor of terror in the 1990s, around the time when militancy was escalating in Kashmir.

Pakistan escaped then, and will possibly escape this time as well.

What could work in favour of Pakistan is that there is not enough time left for this Congress to consider the Bill and ensure its passage through many stages. And even if it is passed, it may not get presidential assent given that the Obama administration is at the fag end of its term.

But the thought of a such a bill in the US Congress is unlikely to sit well with Prime Minister Sharif as he seeks to draw the worlds attention to an area frequently targeted by terrorists based in Pakistan.

The US currently has three countries on its list of state sponsors of terrorism  Iran, Syria and Sudan  who under the rules are subject to foreign assistance restrictions, ban on defence exports and sales, export control on dual use items and various other forms of restrictions.
Canadian police evacuated all schools in the eastern province of Prince Edward Island on Wednesday after a bomb threat, but found no explosive device.

About 19,000 students at 62 schools were taken to safe locations in their communities around the island off Canadas Atlantic coast. It is the countrys smallest province with a population of about 146,000.

The minister of public safety just informed me that all of the schools children and personnel are safe. The situation is under control, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa.

In Prince Edward Islands capital of Charlottetown, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Kevin Bailey said at a press conference he was aware of separate threats in the nearby province of Nova Scotia and the United States.

He said later in a telephone call that police analysts had identified threats against schools in North Carolina, Connecticut and Arizona, but there was no immediate indication that they were linked.

Bailey said the threat against Prince Edward Island schools came by fax to the police in Ottawa.

The message stated that the bombs had been placed in a number of schools and would be detonated today but it did not specify the time, Bailey said. There is an active investigation to identify the person or persons responsible.

The University of Prince Edward Island said in note on its website that it was closed for the day, given the situation happening across the province.

They didnt say there was a bomb threat or any specific threat; they just told us that school had been suspended for the rest of the day, Charlottetown student Peter Keedwell, 17, said in a telephone interview. It was pretty calm. ... People werent running out of school or anything.

Parker Grimmer, director of Prince Edward Islands public schools branch, said students would be able to return to school on Thursday.

Police in Nova Scotia closed some college and university campuses. A Nova Scotia Community College campus in Halifax was evacuated after an anonymous threat, Halifax Regional Police said in a press release.

It said an explosive disposal unit had gone to the scene but found that a suspicious package was only garbage and reopened streets in the area.

The colleges Marconi campus in Sydney, Nova Scotia, also shut down. Cape Breton University, also in Sydney, said on its website that it was closed for the day.
The paperboys in Madrids central Puerta del Sol square shouted out the tragic news that chilly February morning in 1916: The prince is dead! The prince is dead!

The deceased heir to the throne was in fact a Nicaraguan-born poet and diplomat, Ruben Dario, who had passed away at the tragically young age of 49 at the height of his powers as the founder of the modernist movement, a literary style in which he had played a leading role.

When Dario passed away, Francisca married and started a family, working hard to preserve the poets legacy

Hearing the tragic news, Francisca Sanchez, his lover for two decades and who had said goodbye to Dario a few months earlier, wept as she held their child in her arms, and sent her sister down to buy a newspaper.

Dario had been in poor health in 1914 when he sailed to the United States on a peace mission at the outbreak of World War I, leaving Sanchez behind in the Spanish capital. In the preceding years she had followed him tirelessly from Paris to Barcelona and then to Madrid, taking not only their belongings back and forth, but keeping her mother and sister in tow.

Among those belongings were an old trunk where, to the end of her days, she kept all the documents pertaining to the man she fell in love with through his words, recalls her granddaughter, Spanish journalist Rosa Villacastin.

A letter written by Dario to Francisca Sanchez. UCM Historical Library

An exhibition at the library of Madrids Complutense University sheds new light on the life of Dario, helping reconstruct the 20 years he and Sanchez spent together.

There are copies of the modernist magazines that he edited such as Mundial Magazine or Elegancias. There are also exchanges between the writers within the modernist movement: in one, Spanish poet Manuel Machado chides Dario for his poor management of Mundial Magazine. Another letter suggests he abandon writing and open a bakery. There is also a menu with dishes named after Darios work that were served at a gala dinner in Argentina in 1912. And there is a note from his friend Rufino Blanco Fombona, asking him to attend a duel.

A womanizer and bon vivant, Dario abandoned his wife in Nicaragua after a lengthy drinking session. He fled to Spain and found refuge with Francisca Sanchez, who is shown in all the photographs of the couple wearing a black, high-necked dress. Her unmarried relationship with Dario caused a scandal in a deeply conservative, Roman Catholic society.

The poet was unable to divorce his wife, but he lived for the last two decades of his life with Francisca, and had four children with her, three of whom died in infancy.

The Madrid exhibition includes some of Darios many bar bills, receipts for his road trips across several countries, and a simple-looking oilskin notebook that is particularly significant because it reveals how he wrote on a day-to-day basis, explains Rocio Oviedo, a lecturer in Latin American literature at the Complutense University.

In some ways, the notebook sums up the authors entire home life within a few pages. There are handwritten poems, complete with corrections that help scholars understand Darios creative process. There are also drawings by his son, as well as notes added by Sanchez.

In one letter, his aunt asked him to reform so she could die in peace

Considering his itinerant lifestyle and taste for the nightlife, it is hard to imagine how Dario found the time to write so many books and poems, edit magazines, participate in conferences, deliver lectures, and work as a diplomat to boot.

The exhibition suggests that his style of life would catch up with him sooner or later, illustrated by a telling letter from his aunt, whom he called Mama Bernarda, begging him to reform so she could die in peace.

When Dario passed away, Francisca married and started a new family that worked hard to preserve the poets legacy. The trunk and its 5,000 documents were eventually donated to the Spanish state.

English version by Susana Urra.
We support Pakistan and will speak for Pakistan at every forum, said the Chinese Premier when he met Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York on Wednesday.

Attaching great importance to Islamabads position on Kashmir, Li Keqiang on Wednesday hoped that there will be a better understanding of Pakistans position on Kashmir by the international community, Geo News reported.

Stating that Pakistan was a victim of terrorism, the Chinese premier hoped the situation between India and Pakistan would not escalate. We are ready to play constructive role in improvement of relations between Pakistan and India, the Chinese Premier added.

Li said China will stand with Pakistan; we support Pakistan and we will speak for Pakistan at every forum.

We are thankful to Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif for investing huge resources for the safety and security of Chinese personnel in Pakistan, Li Keqiang said, according to Geo.

Nawaz said that things are going well in Pakistan-China relations, and that the relationship has entered a different phase.

He thanked China for expressing concern regarding Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir.

He said that Pakistan and China were iron brothers.

The meeting came ahead of Sharifs address at the UNGA on Wednesday, where he flagged the Kashmir issue.
The Sikh-American who helped police capture the man wanted for the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey, said he feared he might have been mistaken as the perpetrator because of the misconceptions about his faith.

Harinder Singh Bains, 51, said he does not like being called a hero for accurately identifying 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born American man behind the bombings.

Asserting that he is what America looks like, Bains said he did what any other American would have done.

When I heard about the attacks and realised the suspect was sleeping in a doorway across the street, I did what any American would do. I called the police. Im not a hero. The police are heroes; the EMTs are heroes; everyone who is working to bring New York and New Jersey together today is a hero, Bains, who owns a bar in Linden, told reporters.

He said as a Sikh-American, he understand that I could have been mistaken for the perpetrator. My faith teaches me justice and tolerance for all and I know that Im lucky to live in a community that shares this view.

Bains, who had emigrated from Chandigarh in 1996, stressed that after any attack, Americans should target people based on evidence of their role in the crime and not because of their faith or their country of origin or their accent.

I came to this country from India 20 years ago to create a better life for my family. I am a father of four and a proud American citizen, he said.

Bains said America is strongest when all Americans stand together in the face of violence intended to divide us.

On the morning of September 19, Bains unlocked the door of his deli when he noticed Rahami sleeping in a vestibule next to a tavern across the street.

He later recognised Rahamis face from television reports following the failed attacks and contacted police.

When police arrived, Rahami allegedly shot an officer in the abdomen and began a shoot-out with police that led to his arrest.

Bains had earlier said he thought Rahami looked very familiar and exactly like the guy whose picture is being shown on TV channels.

I kept wondering is he the same guy, Bains has said adding he then asked a friend of his who visited him that Rahami looked exactly like the person whose pictures were being circulated by law enforcement agencies in connection with the bombing.

Bains then called the police but didnt not immediately tell them that Rahami was in front of his store.

He initially told the police that there is a guy in front of his bar who looks a little suspicious and does not look good to me and that the police should come and check.

The police then came within five minutes and all the while Bains kept an eye on Rahami as he had a strong feeling he is the same person wanted for the bombings.

Im just a regular citizen doing what every citizen should do. Cops are the real heroes, law enforcement are the real heroes, Bains has said.
Authorities said a Florida man grabbed his drugs but left behind an infant and two caged dogs after accidentally causing a drug-related explosion that burned his house down.

News outlets report 24-year-old Steven Brown of Port Richey turned himself in to Pasco County investigators Monday. He faces arson, drug and aggravated cruelty to animal charges.

Pasco County Sheriffs Office spokesperson Kevin Doll says Brown was trying to cook butane hash oil inside his home September 3 when the fire started.

Deputies say Brown took his drugs and fled the residence, leaving behind a 1-year-old child and two dogs. The child wasnt hurt, but the dogs died.

Authorities had been searching for Brown, who they say fled from a traffic stop September 9.

Jail records dont indicate whether he has an attorney.
The five Indian men arrested in China for allegedly smuggling drugs will finally be able to send word to their families in Kolkata weeks after they were nabbed at Kunming airport.

On Tuesday, the five men were allowed to share their personal details with an Indian diplomat from the Guangzhou consulate  the first time an Indian official was given access to the group.

The suspects themselves are barred from contacting their families under Chinese law. The Guangzhou consulate is expected to contact their families on Thursday.

The families could be in for some harsh news. Chinese lawyers have told Hindustan Times that if convicted, the men will face prison sentences of 15 years or more.

Chinese authorities have alleged that the men were caught with large caches of hashish.

It is a very serious offence. According to the law, any deals related to the sales of marijuana over 1 kg could attract a punishment of a jail term of 15 years, Shanghai-based lawyer Wang Chune said last week.

For example, four Indians arrested with drugs at Nanning in south China in 2008 are serving life sentences, which could run for decades.

The five men, residents of Kidderpore in Kolkata, have been identified as Sheikh Ahmad Ali, 46, Akrar Khan, 33, Feroz Khan, 31, Sheikh Ismail, 24, and Maqsud Alam, 24. Ismail is a student of Syama Prasad College in Kolkata.

The Indian diplomat is learnt to have met each of the men separately and heard their version of events.

Two of them were arrested on August 24 and the others were nabbed on September 6 after they disembarked from a flight from Kolkata.

Officials have said that around 24 kg of hashish, an extract from the cannabis plant that is smoked after mixing with tobacco, were hidden in their luggage among packets of Indian snacks and scores of laptop bags.

The men have denied knowledge of the drugs and said they were employed to transport the bags and snacks to traders in China.

Except for Ismail, the rest have travelled to China several times to supply Indian goods to traders and pick up Chinese goods on their way back.

The excess luggage, the mens shabby appearances and heightened security for the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in east China resulted in the men being stopped during airport checks. Besides the bags and snacks, the five were carrying a single change of clothes.

Chinese police are preparing the charge-sheet in the case, which has to be filed in court within 30 days of arrest.

It remains to be seen whether the suspects can hire a lawyer through the Indian embassy or the police will provide a defence lawyer.
More than 50 leaders from business and politics on Wednesday called on the British government to extend to Indian nationals the new 87 two-year visitor visa pilot programme currently underway in China.

The call was made in a letter by the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) in The Daily Telegraph. It was signed by Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry; entrepreneur Karan Bilimoria and senior Labour MP Virendra Sharma MP, among others.

The letter follows a RCS report in July in partnership with leading aviation, tourism and industry groups that outlined the case for visa reform.

The pilot visa scheme lasting two years was offered to China in January. However, Indian visitors pay 330 for a two-year visa, or 87 for six months.

The reports author, Tim Hewish, director of RCS Policy and Research, said: This letter demonstrates the broad support for reform of the UK-India visitor visa scheme across tourism, aviation, business and politics. We urge the UK government to listen to these individuals as leaders in their field and proactively discuss this proposal with the Indian government without delay.

The reform is expected to help reverse the UKs falling market share of global Indian tourists, which has halved over the past decade. The estimated cost to the UK economy is almost 500 million a year and more than 8,000 jobs.

France has now leapfrogged the UK as Indias most visited European nation, attracting 500,000 visitors from the subcontinent in 2015, the RCS analysis said.

The visa reform was also sought in view of 2017 being designated the UK-India Year of Culture, marking 70 years of Indian Independence. It is expected there will be much interaction between the two countries in areas such as business, art, music and design.

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Pakistans state-run airline cancelled all flights to Gilgit-Baltistan on Wednesday after airspace over the region was closed by the aviation regulator against the backdrop of a spike in tensions with India.

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) spokesperson Danyal Gilani attributed the cancellations to airspace restrictions. He added, "As per directives of CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), the airspace over Northern Areas will remain closed on Wednesday, September 21. Inconvenience regretted.

Gilani also tweeted that flights to Chitral, Gilgit and Skardu had been cancelled. Chitral is in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province and the other two cities are in Gilgit-Baltistan, which was earlier known as the Northern Areas and was part of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir state.

Due 2 northern areas airspace restrictions PIA's 21st Sep's flights to Gilgit, Skardu & Chitral ve been cancelled. Inconvenience regretted.  Danyal Gilani (@Danyal_Gilani) September 20, 2016

TV news channels and reports on social media speculated that the move was part of Pakistans preparations for possible hostilities in the aftermath of a terror attack on an Indian Army camp at Uri on Sunday that killed 18 soldiers. India has blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group for the attack.

A report on Geo News channel on Wednesday morning suggested Pakistan's armed forces were going on high alert as there were fears India might attack in response to the terrorist strike in Uri. "We are told that the armed forces are on high alert and are ready for any eventualities," the anchor on Geo News said.

The Express Trbune reported on its website that the airspace over Gilgit-Baltistan was closed because Pakistani warplanes were engaged in take-off and landing rehearsals following the spike in tensions.

The media also reported that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, currently in New York for the UN General Assembly, and army chief Gen Raheel Sharif discussed various options on Tuesday night against the backdrop of the tensions with India.

Telephonic conversations took place between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and COAS General Raheel Sharif. At length discussion on prevailing regional situation took place, said a brief statement issued by the Prime Ministers House.

On Monday, Gen Sharif had described Indias reaction to the Uri attack as a hostile narrative and said the armed forces were prepared to respond to the entire spectrum of direct and indirect threat.
Pakistans reliance on terror as an instrument of foreign policy has backfired, and its role as a perpetrator of terrorism is now beyond doubt, experts and academics told a seminar here.

The seminar, organised by The Democracy Forum and Henry Jackson Society, debated the issue Is Pakistan a victim or perpetrator of terrorism? It included British MP Bob Blackman, US academic Christine Fair and Pakistani writer and journalist Irfan Hussain.

According to Fair, there has been ample proof over the past 20 years that Pakistani security agencies were supporting religious extremist groups. She analysed the spatial distribution and support for such terrorism and showed that the largest support base is in Punjab, from where the Pakistan Army draws the maximum recruits.

Based on quantitative evidence, Fair concluded Pakistan is a perpetrator of terrorism. She said Pakistans reliance on terrorism as a foreign policy instrument has backfired and it is now fighting those terrorist groups that it could no longer control.

Whenever there appeared to be the possibility of reconciliation with India by Pakistans democratically elected government, the Punjabi-dominated military undermined it by mounting terror attacks on India, she added.

In a talk titled Pakistan both victim and source of terrorism, Hussain said Pakistan began using terror as a strategic tool from its inception.

It started by sending non-combatant tribesmen in 1948 who captured a part of Kashmir and resulted in the states division. Pakistan used proxies such as the Jamaat-e-Islami to carry out the killing of Bengalis in 1971 and there is the ongoing cross-border export of terrorism, he said.

Pakistan, Hussain added, is using the nuclear threat as a terror method. He concluded that Pakistan is now plagued by its own monster as the military never expected the jihadists to turn against their former sponsors.

According to Aqil Shah of the University of Oklahoma, the Pakistan Army was not fighting terror, but simply fighting a few terrorist groups. He said the Pakistani military distinguished between good, bad and ugly terrorists. Good groups, such as the Haqqani Network and Lashkar-e-Taiba, are free to roam the country and collect funds.

Other groups classified as bad can still be brought under control and used by the state. Ugly groups, such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, are irreconcilable and are being fought by the military. There was no attempt to acknowledge the blowback against Pakistan from this policy or the operational links, manpower and ideology shared by these groups, he said.

Speaking on the dangers of the $46-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Blackman said the massive project was designed by China in conjunction with Pakistan to encircle India as part of its attempts to control the regions sea and air routes.

He said there cannot be peace in the region until Pakistan stops using terrorism, and called for democracies like India, the UK, the US, Australia and Israel to come together and have more cooperation.

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Britain is taking forward plans to tighten its ban on trade in ivory after campaigns by Prince Charles and Prince William brought the issue into the spotlight in recent years - and some priceless ivory items from colonial India have been at the centre of the discourse.

Prince William and environment secretary Andrea Leadsom are due to speak at an international conference to be held simultaneously in London, Tokyo and Johannesburg on Thursday, when the issue will again be highlighted.

It is already illegal to sell post-1947 ivory in Britain but antique dealers are known to exploit the difficulty of determining the age of an item. Under new rules that are to be announced, dealers will be told to prove the age of items using carbon dating or face having them confiscated and destroyed.

A spokesman for the department for environment, food and rural affairs said: We have some of the strictest rules governing ivory anywhere...We know there is more to be done and we want to work with traders to strengthen documentary proof on the age of items and ensure greater confidence that antique items are genuine.

Prince William, who has been passionately campaigning to ban ivory trade, was in the spotlight in February 2014, when he reportedly remarked he would "like to see all the ivory owned by Buckingham Palace destroyed".

After the remark, one of the ivory items from colonial India in royal possession mentioned in the media was the exquisite throne gifted by the Maharaja of Travancore to Queen Victoria in 1851, which has rarely been seen in public since it was first displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.

Reflecting the craftsmanship of Travancores (now Kerala) artisans, the throne with a footstool was despatched to London in October 1850 and displayed in the exhibition at Crystal Palace the next year.

Queen Victoria wrote to the Maharaja after the exhibition: Your Highnesss chair has occupied a prominent position amongst the wonderful works of art which have been collected in our metropolis and your highnesss liberality and the workmanship of the natives of Travancore have there received due admiration from the vast multitude of spectators.

In recent years, Prince Charles too has reportedly asked for ivory items at Clarence House and Highgrove to be put out of sight.

The new government plans were included in the Conservative manifesto during the 2010 elections.

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The Pakistani-origin mastermind of a 113 million high street bank cyber-fraud, who made so much money that he flew team of valets from Scotland to Lahore to polish his fleet of luxury cars, has been jailed for 11 years by a UK court.

The 25-year-old mastermind of the biggest cyber-fraud Scotland Yard has ever seen, Feezan Hameed Choudhary was jailed for 11 years last week at Southwark crown court, The Sun reported on Wednesday.

Nicknamed Fizzy, the Glasgow-based criminal, partied with pop stars while splashing out on Rolex watches, jewellery, trips to Dubai and shopping sprees in Harrods.

He owned several luxury motors including a Bentley and a Lamborghini after the scam raked in more than 3 million a month.

He was so obsessive about his motors that he flew staff from Platinum Polish in Glasgow on an 8,000-mile round trip to buff up his fleet of Porsche Cayennes at his luxury villa in Lahore.

He also flew the polishers to Dubai to treat a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.

He fleeced 750 business customers of Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland and other banks after tricking them into revealing their account details by claiming they had been hacked, the report said.

Funds were then moved to other accounts in the blink of an eye before being withdrawn in cash by a team mules. In total, 66 million was laundered abroad to Dubai and Pakistan.

Pitman Blackstock Solicitors were fleeced out of 2,260,625.89 after getting a call from Peter claiming he was calling from the security department Lloyds Bank.

Prosecutor Michael Shorrock described the fraud as a nationwide conspiracy to defraud companies and businesses by hacking into their bank accounts and stealing large sums of money between January 2013 and last October.

He said: Literally, within a blink of an eye, this money was being moved from one account to another... On occasions the breach is accomplished by corrupting bank employees who pass on customers information to those committing the fraud.

The fraudsters were able to interfere with the telephone system of the bank customers so the customer was unable to receive calls while the fraud was taking place.

Fizzys personal take from the racket was between 5,00,000 and 1.5 million a month which he lavished on a pop star lifestyle.

He even hung out with Pakistani singing star Bilal Saeed and claimed to have been producing a music video for the star, the court heard.
Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda is facing criticism over the joint communique issued during his visit to India, with some accusing him of surrendering Kathmandus foreign policy to New Delhi.

Besides his own Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Centre, Prachanda has been criticised by the main opposition CPN-UML and former premier Baburam Bhattarai, who was his deputy during the decade-long Maoist insurgency.

During a meeting of the CPN-MC to review his India visit, some leaders accused Prachanda of surrendering Nepals foreign policy to India and putting the government and the Indian embassy on an equal footing, sources said.

The leaders expressed reservations over two points in the communique. One point states the prime ministers of India and Nepal believe both countries hold similar views on major international issues, including reforms of the UN and other global organisations, which affect developing countries and that they would work in close coordination at the UN and other international forums.

Another point stated the two premiers had directed officials from both sides to form an oversight mechanism to review ongoing India-funded projects and to take steps to expedite their implementation.

Following the criticism, the foreign ministry defended the communique, saying it was normal practice for Nepal to share the same position as India and China at international forums. Nepals support for Indias bid to join the UN Security Council was declared in 2014, it said.

Prachandas deputy Narayan Kaji Shrestha and some Maoist leaders criticised the premier for being over-confident with India and said New Delhis policies towards the country had not changed.

The CPN-UML accused Prachanda of inviting foreign intervention in Nepal and criticised him for holding unnecessary discussions with India on issues such as amending the Constitution.

Some of the points of the joint statement made Nepals foreign policy dependent on IndiaThe party has put its strong reservations over the attack on Nepals independent foreign policy, said a statement issued by the CPN-UML.

Bhattarai accused Prachanda of making several serious mistakes while agreeing to the contents of the joint statement.
Felipe VI greets President Obama at the UN in New York. AP

Speaking to a packed hall at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, King Felipe VI on Tuesday sought to assuage international concerns about Spains prolonged lack of government.

The Spanish monarch underscored the nations ability to overcome difficulties in the past, and said that this attitude will prevail again despite the complex context that Spain finds itself in.

All advanced democracies such as ours go through complex situations at some point

King Felipe VI of Spain

We Spaniards have always overcome hard times, he told the crowd of dignitaries gathered for the opening of the UN General Assemblys annual debate.

All advanced democracies such as ours go through complex situations at some point. But they overcome them through the resilience and cohesiveness of their societies, the strength of their institutions, and the enforcement of their system of liberties, said the 48-year-old monarch.

To illustrate Spaniards resilience, Felipe VI talked about the economic crisis that hit his country particularly hard, although the Spanish economy has since returned to a path of growth.

Spain has been in political deadlock since late December, when an inconclusive election yielded a fragmented parliament, breaking the traditional two-party system. Inability to reach governing deals led to a fresh election in June, with similar results. If no progress is made, Spaniards could be facing a record third election at Christmas.

International projection

Felipe VI also defined Spain as one of the countries that has most intensely contributed to the course of History, and mentioned the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, to underscore the authors civic legacy: the need for peaceful coexistence.

When we live together in a democratic framework that safeguards our hard-won rights and freedoms and respects our diversity, that is when we give the best of ourselves, and when we best contribute to the peace, security and prosperity of the international community. And we will continue to do so.

Later on Tuesday, the Spanish monarchs attended an event hosted by US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Gibraltar Felipe VI also had a few words about Gibraltar, the disputed British overseas territory located on the Iberian peninsula. "As Spain has always done in this forum, I cannot fail to remind you that Gibraltar is the only existing colony on European territory. In observance of a UN mandate, I urge the United Kingdom to end this anachronism with an agreed solution between both our countries that will restore Spain's territorial integrity and be beneficial for the population of the colony and of Campo de Gibraltar".

English version by Susana Urra.
Police say a fearful 11-year-old Georgia girl who took a knife to school told officers she needed the weapon to fend off clowns.

The Athens Banner-Herald reports the girl was arrested on Friday at Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School in Athens amid reports and social media posts about clowns frightening children in Georgia and other states.

An Athens-Clarke County police report states the girl said she needed the knife to protect her and her family because she had heard the stories about clowns jumping out of the woods and attacking children.

Police say they released the girl to her mother on a charge of possession of a weapon on school grounds.

In neighbouring Alabama, law enforcement officials are warning that people involved in a rash of creepy clown hoaxes across the state could be prosecuted.
The United States on Tuesday charged an Afghan-born American restaurant worker, who was critically wounded in a police shootout, with detonating and planting bombs in New York and New Jersey.

US prosecutors said Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, carried out twin bombings on Saturday in Manhattans Chelsea neighbourhood and along the route of a US Marine Corps run in the New Jersey town of Seaside Park.

The 13-page indictment slapped him with four charges, including use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use and destruction of property by means of fire or explosives.

He was captured on Monday while carrying a handwritten journal that lauded Osama bin Laden and US-born al Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, and criticised US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, it said.

Inshallah (God willing), the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death to your oppression, Rahami, who came to the US at age 7, wrote in a journal.

Read | A New York City tale: Two gentlemen find bag, remove bomb, take bag

He will be transported to Manhattan to face the charges, said federal prosecutors in New York. If convicted, he risks spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Prosecutors said 31 people were wounded in the Chelsea attack, including a victim from Britain, a driver knocked unconscious and a woman whose body was pierced with ball bearings, metal and wood.

The bomb was a pressure cooker device, packed with ball bearings and steel nuts, placed in a dumpster and detonated by a timed device -- similar to a second pressure cooker bomb discovered four blocks away.

Five pipe bombs found in Rahamis hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey and the second device safely defused in Chelsea, were covered in the suspects fingerprints, the indictment alleged.

Surveillance footage also put him in Chelsea, and Rahami bought the ingredients for the bombs from eBay over the summer, prosecutors said.

New York City police officers stand guard at Times Square in New York. (AFP Photo)

As the charges were made public, the White House for the first time said it appeared the attacks were an act of terrorism. Earlier in the investigation, officials had withheld such an assessment until they could discern a motive.

It does appear this was an act of terrorism, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said during a press briefing in New York City.

Video on relatives phone

A video recovered from a relatives cell phone also allegedly showed Rahami igniting an incendiary device just two days before the bombings in or near his home in Elizabeth, the indictment alleged.

Rahami was shot and captured on Monday in Linden, New Jersey, just four hours after the FBI released his mugshot and sent an emergency cellphone alert to millions of people.

He has been charged separately with unlawful weapon possession and five counts of attempted murder of a police official.

Rahami, who was operated on after sustaining multiple bullet wounds, is in critical but stable condition, police said.

Ahmad Khan Rahami is taken into custody after a shootout with police in Linden. (AP Photo)

A still image captured from a video from WABC television shows a conscious man believed to be New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami being loaded into an ambulance after a shootout. (Reuters Photo)

The terror charges come after the FBI admitted that they investigated Rahami for terrorism in 2014 following a complaint from his father, but found no link despite alleged acts of violence.

Mohammad Rahami, an immigrant from Afghanistan who brought his children to the United States, said he warned the FBI that his son was a danger and a terrorist in 2014.

He doing bad, he stabbed my son, he hit my wife, he told reporters on Tuesday, explaining why he had alerted agents two years ago.

In August 2014, Rahami was accused of stabbing Nasim Rahami in the leg, and charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a knife.

He reportedly spent three months in jail but was never prosecuted.

The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks, and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.

Year in Pakistan

It still remains unclear how and why exactly Rahami allegedly become radicalised, and whether he definitively acted alone.

Officials say so far they have found no connection between Rahami and any militant groups, raising the possibility that the weekend bomb attacks could be another lone-wolf-style operation.

Officials say Rahami travelled extensively to Afghanistan and spent around a year Pakistan, where he married and his wife became pregnant.

Albio Sires, a New Jersey congressman in the US House of Representatives, said Rahami had sought his help to obtain a visa for his heavily pregnant wife to travel to the United States in 2014.

FBI personnel search an address during an investigation into Ahmad Khan Rahami in New Jersey. (Reuters Photo)

She left the United States shortly before Saturdays attacks and was stopped in the United Arab Emirates, US media reported.

He worked at the familys fried-chicken restaurant, where The New York Times quoted friends as saying that he started praying and wore traditional clothes after returning from Afghanistan.

He was also father to a child with his high-school girlfriend.

Another line of inquiry may be whether the familys tussles over their business could have played a role in radicalising Rahami.

His family sued the city of Elizabeth in 2011, accusing it and local police of discrimination because they were Muslim and Afghans, in ordering them to close their restaurant by 10:00pm. The suit was settled in favour of the city.

(With inputs from Reuters)
The United States and Russia blamed each other for Syrias failing cease-fire on Wednesday, illustrating why a fractured UN Security Council has been unable to do anything to stop the Arab countrys civil war for more than five years .

In a public session originally envisioned to enshrine Syrias September 9 truce, world powers were left to rue the possibility of the conflict entering an even darker phase after a series of attacks on humanitarian workers.

Washington, Moscow and the councils other nations all sought to revive the US-Russian cease-fire deal, but seemed stuck on fundamental differences old and new: Who bears ultimate responsibility for the war and whose actions over the last days scuttled perhaps the best opportunity for peace?

Read | UN chief opens General Assembly with call to end Syria fighting

Supposedly we all want the same goal. Ive heard that again and again, a clearly angry US secretary of state John Kerry told the council, referencing oft-repeated international objectives of a united, secular and democratic Syria. But we are proving woefully inadequate in ... making that happen.

Kerry outlined a litany of US complaints against Syrian President Bashar Assads government and its chief backer, Russia. He recited Moscows changing narrative over a deadly attack this week on an aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counterterror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.

To restore credibility, we must immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded, he said.

The top American diplomat spoke just after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered his own set of barbs, underscoring the breakdown in trust in the 12 days since he and Kerry clinched a cease-fire agreement and a potential US-Russian military partnership against the Islamic State and al-Qaida. The former Cold War foes and much of the international community hailed the outcome, only to watch it unravel amid an upsurge in violence that even included an accidental US strike that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers.

Unlike Kerry, who stressed the importance of Assads government ending military operations against rebels and allowing in unfettered aid, Lavrov said the US had the biggest responsibility.

The key priority is to separate the opposition forces from the terrorists, Lavrov said.

Responding to the wide criticism of the convoy airstrike, which American officials are blaming on Russia, Lavrov cited various possible explanations. Twenty civilians were killed when the Syrian Red Crescent convoy was struck.

Larvov and Kerrys speeches laid bare their widely divergent views of a war that has killed up to a half-million people, contributed to Europes worst refugee crisis since World War II and allowed the Islamic State to emerge as a global terror threat. At one point, Kerry said listening to his Russian counterpart was like hearing about a parallel universe.

Read | Putin questions US commitment to Syria cease-fire

On Tuesday, the two diplomats met with more than a dozen Arab and European foreign ministers belonging to the International Syria Support Group, hoping to hold onto what might be salvageable from a week of relative calm in Syria.

We are at a make-or-break moment, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, opening the session.

His peace envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said after the Security Council meeting: Everything now depends on the renewal of the cessation of hostilities, and there is a chance ... and you will know it in two days time.

De Mistura was referring to a follow-up meeting of the International Syria Support Group on Friday.

Also read | Diplomacy, not force, way to end brutal Syria conflict: Obama at UNGA
US First Lady Michelle Obama took a dig at the allegedly plagiarised speech by Donald Trumps wife Melania during the partys Republican National Convention last month.

Michelle, who made her second appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night, was asked if she was sympathetic to the plight of a fellow political spouse.

Do you understand how that might be sympathetic, for what happened to her? the CBS host asked.

Yeah, that was tough, Michelle deadpanned, prompting laughs from the audience.

In an embarrassment to the Republican nominee and real estate tycoon, parts of speech of his wife at the convention in July were lifted verbatim from remarks Michelle made in 2008.

Michelle also spilled some beans on husband President Barack Obamas off-duty demeanor, saying he is really into gossip.

In a preview clip from the episode that will air on Star World Premiere in India on Thursday, she says the president tries to set his work aside and focus on his family when he crosses the threshold into the executive residence.

Its all about the kids, she said. How were your days, whats going on, whats the latest gossip? Hes really into gossip, so you can get him really focused because he doesnt have a life.

The 52-year-old First Lady also asked Colbert a very serious question: If you got stuck on a desert island with one famous person, whod you pick? And Colbert immediately picked the US president. When he asked Michelle How about you? She said Beyonce.

Colbert went on to ask, with an added dig at Donald Trump, Do you know that if you eat too many carrots, you turn orange? And if you turn really orange, you have to start saying crazy things and run for president.

Colbert also asked the first lady if she was sympathetic to political spouses who are required to stand behind partners whose political beliefs are antithetical to their own - a premise Michelle flatly rejected.

Do you have any sympathy for the people who have to go there and stand by the person running for president?

No, Michelle replied. Because if - you know, you have to be, you know, in it. If youre in it, and if you dont agree, you should have agreed before they ran. Bottom line is, if you didnt agree with what Barack was saying, I would not support his run. So I stand there proudly, and I hope they are, too, standing with their spouses proudly. So no, no sympathy.

He also asked Michelle what it would be like to leave the White House, but she was not as sentimental as he might have guessed.

Its definitely bittersweet, she said, before adding, but Ive made my kids start packing their rooms already.

Read | Trump staff writer takes responsibility for Melania speech controversy
KATHMANDU: A little-known group demanding free education for all Nepalese children exploded cylinder bombs outside three schools here on Tuesday, causing minor damage. No one was injured in the explosion, police said, adding unexploded bombs were also found at five other schools in the city. The bombs exploded at Akash Deep Boarding School and Manakamana Higher Secondary School in Jorpati, Kathmandu, police said.

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NICE: French police on Tuesday arrested eight associates of the jihadist who killed 86 people when he ploughed his truck into a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, an investigation source said.

They are associates of the perpetrator. We are carrying out checks and they are in custody, the source said.

They are all men, of French and Tunisian nationality.

The men were arrested in Nice and in the neighbouring towns of Saint-Laurent-du-Var and Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Police were also searching properties on Tuesday, the source said.

Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian, rammed a 19-tonne truck through a crowd of more than 30,000 people gathered on the seafront Promenade des Anglais in Nice on July 14 before police shot him dead.

The Islamic State group claimed he was one of its followers. Bouhlel was initially thought to have planned the attack alone but anti-terror investigators later said he had received help from several people and had spent several months planning it.

The Paris prosecutors office said the suspects detained Monday were French and Tunisian and had links to Bouhlel, who plowed a 19-tonne truck down Nices Promenade des Anglais and into a crowd assembled for a July 14 fireworks display.

All eight were arrested in the Alpes-Maritimes region in the southeastern corner of France that includes Nice. At least five people already face preliminary terrorism charges in the attack, accused of helping Bouhlel obtain a pistol and providing other support.
BERLIN: A German immigration official was arrested and charged with espionage for an Indian secret service for allegedly spying on members of the Sikh religion, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The 58-year-old German national, identified only by the initials TSP, was accused of espionage activity and violation of professional secrecy rules in 45 cases, they said in a statement.

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DURBAN: Some students and academics at the Ghana University have demanded the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, saying he was racist against black people.

The Gandhi statue, currently installed in the premises of the varsity, was gifted by President Pranab Mukherjee during his recent visit to Ghana.

The students and teachers argue that Gandhis reference to black Africans as kaffir in some of his early writings reflected his racist mindset.

But there have been voices which oppose the demand. The campaign has been led by Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo, former director of the Institute of African Studies.

The students and teachers have also launched an online petition, asking authorities to facilitate the removal of the statue of Gandhi at the earliest.

How will the historian teach and explain that Gandhi was uncharitable in his attitude towards the black race and see that were glorifying him by erecting a statue on our campus? wrote a professor . The campaigners have been raising slogans like Gandhi Must Fall and Gandhi For Come Down.

Ampofo is urging members of the University of Ghana Council to heed her petition, arguing among other things that, Gandhi was racist against black people and honouring him will set a wrong example for students, as per local media in Ghana.

Ocqauye, a professor of political science, said a decision to demolish the statue may impact Ghana-India relations.

It will be most unnecessary, uncalled for and not in the supreme interest of Ghanians, he said. The petitioners referred to Gandhis open letter to The Natal Mercury in 1894, saying he called black Africans as kaffirs, a derogatory term for black people.
DOHA: As many as 400 migrant staff working for an electrical company in Qatar have gone unpaid for up to four months, a leading figure in the Indian community said today. The workers are set to meet the Indian ambassador in Doha within the next two weeks to discuss their plight, Arvin Patil of the Indian Community Benevolent Forum charity told AFP. The staff are thought to be employed by an Abu Dhabi-based firm. Around 300 to 400 people have not been paid, said Patil. We could give money if there were one or two people but 300 minimum is very, very difficult. We are interested in helping these people. Patil said people from other migrant groups based in the emirate had also not been paid by the firm.

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MINNEAPOLIS: Dahir Ahmed Adan, the Somali American named as the perpetrator of the weekend stabbing rampage in Minnesota, was a high-achieving student with no known history of violence.

Adan -- who police said was 20 years old, but community members said was 22 -- was shot and killed by an off-duty policeman after Saturdays attack, which the Islamic State group claimed as the work of one of its soldiers.

Members of St Clouds close-knit Somali refugee community expressed shock that one of their own had stabbed 10 people at a mall in the city 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of the state capital St Paul.

Adans father, in an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said his son was born in Kenya but grew up in the United States. He said he had no suspicion of his son having any ties to terrorism.

The younger Adan graduated with honours from a local high school and was attending a nearby university, said local Abdul Kulane. He worked part-time as a private security officer, Kulane told a Sunday news conference.

He was helpful to his family and as far as we know, he never had a violent history, as far as his family and the community can remember. He was a friendly and active community member.

Adam Hammer, a spokesman for St. Cloud State University, told AFP that Adans intended major was information systems.

Hammer said Adans last semester at the college was in the Spring of this year.
Lula da Silva at a press conference on September 15. REUTERS

More information El juez deja a Lula da Silva al borde del banquillo por corrupcion

Brazils former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption charges, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

Judge Sergio Moro said that Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2011 and who left office as the countrys most popular politician, will face charges of accepting $1.1 million in bribes connected to a wide-ranging kickback probe at state-run oil company Petrobras.

The former shoeshine boy and union leader led nationwide strikes against Brazils military dictatorship during the 1970s and 1980s

Moro wrote in his ruling that according to the prosecutors charges, Lula was a direct beneficiary of bribes from OAS, one of the engineering and construction firms at the center of the graft scandal, and therefore must stand trial.

The corruption case will also put Lulas wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva in the dock, as well as OAS Chief Executive Jose Aldemario Pinheiro and Paulo Okamotto, the president of the Lula Institute, along with four others.

OAS was one of several leading Brazilian companies that allegedly overcharged the oil giant for contracts and split the extra money with corrupt Petrobras executives while setting aside some of the loot to pay off politicians who provided cover for the graft.

Responding to the news, Lulas lawyers insisted on Tuesday their client had committed no crime, accusing Moro as impartial, and leading a witch hunt to see the former leader jailed.

Lula, speaking via video link, told an event held by his lawyers in New York that the charges were a farce.

Lula is accused of benefiting directly from bribes

What's happening isn't getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more, said Lula, adding that he will keep fighting.

The two-year-old Operation Carwash anti-corruption investigation, based in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba, has uncovered how political appointees named by Lulas Workers Party (PT) and its allies handed out overpriced contracts to engineering firms in return for illicit party funding and bribes.

As well as receiving $1.1 million, Lula is accused of accepting a luxury apartment in Guaruja on the coast of Sao Paulo from OAS. Lula has denied ownership of the three-floor condo, and his lawyers have dismissed the charges as a political plot to stymie his political comeback.

The scandal contributed to the fall from power last month of Lulas chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached by Congress in a separate case of breaking budget rules, amid rising anger over her handling of Brazils worst recession since the 1930s.

Lula has separately been indicted by a court in Brasilia for obstruction of justice in a case related to an attempt to persuade a defendant in the Petrobras scandal not to turn states witness.

The former shoeshine boy and union leader who led nationwide strikes against Brazils military dictatorship during the 1970s and 1980s, contributing to its downfall, Lula was elected the nations first working-class president in 2002 after three failed campaigns. He became a hero of Brazils poor, with his policies helping millions to escape poverty.

English version by Nick Lyne.
BEIJING: Nepal will lose out by putting its relations with China on the backburner and returning to Indias fold of influence, the Chinese state media has warned, adding that tricking Beijing will stall Kathmandus development.

The recent visit of Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda to India was closely followed by the Chinese state media, which clearly looked for signs that New Delhi-Kathmandu ties were on the mend following a period of chill.

Signs of a turnaround in the relations were easily detectable during Prachanda visit and meeting with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, according to two separate opinion pieces in the nationalistic tabloid Global Times. And this means Beijing is no longer a foreign policy priority for Kathmandu, the articles said.

The apparent postponement of President Xi Jinpings visit to Nepal in October hasnt really helped stop the speculation.

When Prachanda received Modis invitation and kickstarted a turning point in bilateral ties with India, concerns and warnings made by Nepals former prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli over the possibility that agreements signed between Kathmandu and Beijing might not be carried out in a timely manner began to widely spread. Prachanda had no other options except sending an envoy to China to explain, wrote Xu Liang, executive director of the Indian Studies Center from Beijing International Studies University.

It seems that the relationship between Nepal and China stalled abruptly, and a visit by Chinese leaders to Nepal has allegedly been suspended - an unprecedented situation, Xu said.

It looks like the bilateral relationship between China and Nepal has suddenly turned fragile and sensitive, Xu wrote.
WASHINGTON: The wife of New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami left the US days before the explosions in New York and New Jersey, a law enforcement source told CNN.

Officials are working with counterparts in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to get in touch with her, according to the official, who was not identified.

Rahami, who is suspected in the weekend bomb plots, had married his wife in Pakistan and brought her to the US, according to media reports.

Official said Rahami travelled to Afghanistan from Pakistans Quetta in 2013. He was taken into secondary questioning upon return to US, but told officials he was visiting his wife and relatives.
GENEVA/ BEIRUT: The United Nations suspended all aid shipments into Syria on Tuesday after a deadly attack on a convoy carrying humanitarian supplies, while Washington, expressing outrage at the attack, said a week-old ceasefire was not yet dead.

The attack, described by the United Nations, Red Cross, Western countries and rescue workers on the ground as an air strike, drew condemnation from much of the world.

Russia and the Syrian government denied that their air forces were responsible for destroying a convoy unloading aid. Moscow presented an entirely different explanation, saying it believed the convoy had not been struck from the air at all but had been destroyed by fire, and suggesting that rescue workers who filmed the aftermath were somehow to blame.

The Syrian Red Crescent said the head of one of its local offices and around 20 civilians were killed. Other death tolls differed.

The incident appeared likely to deliver a mortal blow to the ceasefire, the latest attempt to halt a war now in its sixth year, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and made a mockery of all previous peace efforts.

Still, US Secretary of State John Kerry, who personally negotiated the truce during months of intensive diplomacy with Russia despite scepticism from other senior figures in the US administration, told reporters: The ceasefire is not dead.

He spoke after emerging alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov from a meeting of foreign ministers of 20 countries, gathered to discuss Syria in New York.

The United Nations peace envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said the ceasefire was in effect until its co-sponsors Moscow and Washington declared it over, and neither had done so at Tuesdays meeting.

The state department said the ministers agreed at the meeting of the Syria Support Group to continue pursuing the ceasefire under the US-Russian plan.

Syrias army had declared the initial ceasefire period over on Monday, hours before the attack on the convoy.
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The Mayflower Pilgrims are probably the most celebrated immigrants to America, and this CD-ROM from the Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., spans 10 generations and records the names of almost 82,000 people descended from Mayflower passengers. The entries provide information on spouses, children, lines of descent within each marriage, causes of death, addresses at the time of death, occupations, land prices and acreages, and names of heirs.
Father Abraham spent hours comforting the wounded of both sides near the wars end.

One of the most profoundly symbolic and emotionally intense moments of Abraham Lincolns presidency occurred at midday on April 8, 1865, near City Point, Va. In a move unequaled in American history, Abraham Lincoln undertook to honor the wars wounded.

Lincoln knew that his stay at the Army of the Potomacs supply base, which had begun on March 24, would have to end soon. He had hoped to hear from General Ulysses S. Grant that the Army of Northern Virginia had been defeated during his visit, but much as he wanted to linger at City Point until that happened, he could no longer justify remaining absent from the Oval Office. Before he left, however, there was one important duty he wanted to perform. The president had spoken during his second inaugural address of the importance of caring for him who shall have borne the battle. In December 1863, he had written of the honor due the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause. On April 8, Lincoln was determined to turn his own words into deedson a grand scale.

Wounded troops were not unfamiliar with the president, whose lanky form had often been seen in hospital wards around the Northern capital. Now he was determined to visit one of the largest hospitals in the United States and personally greet every wounded soldierat least 5,000 men, perhaps as many as 6,000. A chapter of history was nearing its end, and before he turned to the challenges of a postwar American nation he needed to meet with the men whose sacrifices had bought that victory. He had been waiting to do so for some time, and now the time had come.

Lincoln made his intentions known during his morning visit to the telegraph office, and word was passed to the medical director of the 200-acre Depot Field Hospital. Carriages were waiting when a little after midday, the president and his wife, plus Marys entourage, clambered aboard. Their route eased along the riverbank, crossing a special spur added to the military railroad to facilitate transporting wounded troops. Lincoln and his party could see a wooden boundary fence and, behind it, row after row of temporary buildings and tents.

Dr. George B. Parker, the surgeon in charge, met the procession and started steering the president toward one of the kitchens when Lincoln objected, saying he had come to visit the troops. Then several of Parkers assistants started explaining how the place functioned, annoying Lincoln even more. Gentlemen, you know better than I how to conduct these hospitals, he exclaimed, but I came here to take by the hand the men who have achieved our glorious victories. When someone mentioned the large number of patients involved, Lincoln said that he guessed he was equal to the task; at any rate he would try, and go as far as he could. Parker promptly conducted the Lincolns and their group into the nearest ward, operated by the II Corps.

It would appear the party traveling with the president remained with him to varying degrees. Mrs. Lincoln appears to have dropped out early, prompting a disdainful observation from a regular nurse: One lady in rich garb sauntered through our worn walks, leaning on the arm of a Congressman, noting what we lacked in our appointments. My bed-tick dress made a sorry contrast to her costly-attired figure, but I looked at my hands, which were not afraid to touch the dirty blouse of a wounded soldier, and wondered if her jeweled fingers would shrink from the contact. The Marquis de Chambrun stayed the course, but not always alongside Lincoln. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner seems to have remained nearby the whole time. (Theres no mention of Tad Lincoln, who may have remained aboard the vessel River Queen, which had brought the Lincolns to City Point.)

By the time the president entered the II Corps compound, all the ambulatory patients had been lined up outside their tents to receive him. Sometimes it was a straight line, sometimes circular. Lincoln alternated between greeting those in line and ducking inside the tents to meet those who couldnt stand. He was often preceded by a corps surgeon who announced, Attention: the President of the United States!

The II Corps had taken part in the actions against the White Oak Road and participated in the April 2 breakthrough of Confederate lines, suffering some 917 casualties, of which 628 were wounded. Weather clear and pleasant, wrote a II Corps Pennsylvanian. Old Abe passed through on a shake hands with all the patients. One New Yorker added that Uncle Abe gave us each a word of cheer. For many of those standing outside the tents, the presidents words were a simple How do you do. Some of those unable to stand heard him say, I hope you will soon be able to go to your friends. A Vermont man serving as a sharpshooter recalled that they were told we could uncover our wounds, but must not speak to him. I threw the blankets off so he could see that my right leg was gone, above the knee, and when he reached my bed he said: What, a leg gone? I said: Yes. He stopped at the head of my bed and looked at the card, saying, and a Vermonter. I said: Yes, sir, I pride myself on being a Green Mountain boy. I was born within seven miles of Mount Mansfield, the highest peak of the Green Mountain range. He then took my hand in both of his. I asked him:

Well, Father Abraham, have we done our work well.

He said: Very well, indeed, and I thank you.

I never shall forget the pressure he gave my hand, nor can I forget that sad, careworn face.

Recollecting that day 50 years later, the soldier wrote: I often see that sad and worn face in memory, and I can hardly keep back the tears.

Also witness to Lincolns visit were members of the Depot Field Hospital support staff, both army and civilian. An aide known to the readers of a hospital newspaper only as Frank said the president passed around and cordially shook hands with nearly all the boys. It pleased them greatly. He had, as ever, kind words for all, and now and then found utterance in some jokes, for which he is so well known, and thereby would arise the sounds of mirthful laughter.

He had the manner of a gentlemanI may say of a gentle gentleman; added an agent for the U.S. Christian Commission, his voice as we heard it was subdued and kindly; his eyes were mild but all-observing; and his face that he once himself described as poor, lean and lank, was a strong face marked with lines of a mingled gentleness and sadness that redeemed it from being homely. The close grasp of his hand attested the sympathetic great heartedness of the great man.

Many of those in the V Corps wards had fought at Quaker Road, White Oak Road and Five Forks, where the totals for killed and wounded exceeded 2,800. A soldier with a shoulder wound remembered the Lincoln mantra, Be of good cheer, boys; we are at the beginning of the end at last. To another he said that the war will soon be over and then well all go home. In one tent the president encountered 12 officers of the Maryland Brigade, 2nd Division. With them was a Confederate major who had fallen at the same time as the Union men. According to one of the Marylanders, Lincoln gave this officer a hearty grasp of the hand and inquired what State he was from and where he resided before entering the Army.He thenwished him a speedy and hasty recovery from his wounds and [told him] that in a few days the war would be over and he would be able to see his dear ones at home. After Lincoln left, the dazed Rebel asked who the man was who had spoken to him and was stunned by the answer. My God, is that so? he exclaimed. Is that the kind of a man that we have been fighting for four long years?

There was an even more distinguished Confederate officer in the V Corps wards, Colonel Harry L. Benbow, who had been captured at Five Forks. Benbow later recalled that the president walked down the long aisle between the rows of cots on each hand, bowing and smiling.Arriving at length opposite where I lay, he halted beside my bed and held out his hand. Looking him in the face, as he stood with extended hand: Mr. President, I said, do you know to whom you offer your hand?

I do not, he replied.

Well, I said, you offer it to a Confederate colonel, who has fought you as hard as he could for four years.

Well, said he, I hope a Confederate colonel will not refuse me his hand.

No, sir, I replied, I will not, and I clasped his hand in both mine.

I tell you, sir, he had the most magnificent face and eye that I have ever gazed into. He had me whipped from the time he first opened his mouth.

Dr. George Mendenhall was not present when Lincoln visited the Depot Field Hospital, arriving just minutes after he departed. It was like the visit of a father to his children and was appreciated in the same kindly spirit by the soldiers, he wrote. They loved to talk of his kindness and unaffected manner & to dwell upon the various incidents of this visit as a green spot in the soldiers hard life. From Surgeon Parker, in charge of the facility, he learned that at one point in his visit he observed an axe which he picked up & examined & made some pleasant remark that he was once considered to be a good chopper. He was invited to try his hand upon a log of wood lying near from which he made the chips fly in primitive style. According to another doctor, Lincoln was swinging the ax around in a powerful manner, which I would hardly have expected in a man of his sedentary habits.

Those hospitalized from the IX Corps had seen hard fighting at Fort Stedman and in the April 2 attacks along the Jerusalem Plank Road, which had resulted in over 2,500 killed and wounded. One Pennsylvanian who had been hit on March 25 remembered when Abraham Lincoln came along, took off his hat, grasped him by the hand, asking if there was anything he could do or any word he could send for him to the folks back home. Massachusetts officer Cyrus T. Goodwin would write home that the president looks very thin and as though he has not much rest. [H]e must have had a good deal on his mind the last four years and it would broke many a tougher looking man than what he is. He had a kind word for us all[.] The Dr told me he said the war would be over in six weeks [but] we can tell better about that when the times comes around. Lincoln was a bit more definite speaking with a New York colonel, telling him to cheer up, and get wellfor this dreadful war is coming to a close. Another man whose hand he shook was Sergeant John H. Strickler, struck down on April 2, who afterward said that he felt he was in partrecompensed for the wound. A young medical aide trailing the president through the wards was deeply impressed by his genuine interest in the welfare of the soldiers.

Two of the IX Corps boys seen by the president were struggling to survivea fight that would claim the life of one. Pennsylvania Lieutenant Levi R. Robb had been terribly wounded on April 2. A less severely injured soldier lying next to him recalled the moment when the president stopped by: Suddenly his eyes opened wide and his face lit up with a happy expression of recognition as he spoke in a clear but feeble voice, The President.When he reached Lieutenant Robbs cot he grasped his feebly extended hand as he cheerily said, God bless you. Slowly and deliberately came the reply, He has, Mr. President, and may it be your happy portion, too. The President paused just a moment; as he looked with compassion into the wan face of the wounded officer, and said, It is, but cheer up, my boy, well meet again, and then passed on to cheer others. Robb died on April 9.

One of the others was Captain Charles H. Houghton, who had been wounded three times during the Fort Stedman fighting, after which he lost part of his left leg. Another wounded officer lying next to Houghton recorded how Lincoln paused at the captains cot, bent over and gently kissed him on the cheek. Then in voice so tender and so low that only my near proximity enabled me to hear, he began to talk to him, telling him how he had heard from Dr. McDonald all the story of his bravery in battle, his heroic fight for life and quiet cheerfulness in hospital.

Poor Houghton could only reply with faint smiles and whispers that were too low to reach my ears, but Mr. Lincoln heard, and a smile came to his grave face. Turning to the surgeon the President asked to be shown the majors wounds, especially the amputated limb. Dr. McDonald tried to dissuade him by saying the sightwould be too shocking. But the President insisted, turned down the light coverings, and took a hasty look. Straightening up, with a deep groan of pain, and throwing up both his long arms, he cried out, Oh, this awful, awful war! Then bending again to Houghton with the tears cutting wide furrows down his dust-stained cheeks, and with great sobs shaking him, he exclaimed, Poor boy! Poor boy! You must live! You must! This time[his] whispered answer,

I intend to, sir, was just audible.

Captain Houghton survived his wounds.

The final ward contained soldiers from the VI Corps, whose breakthrough on April 2 had cost them 958 wounded or missing. When the president stopped at the bed of amputee patient C. Hull Grant of the 43rd New York, Grant reminded him that he had previously greeted the then president-elect in 1861, during a stop in Albany en route to Washington. As Grants friends like to tell it, On the first occasion he shook hands with his own good right hand, but on the second occasion he was obliged to use his left, for the other was on the field.

A Vermont soldier recalled years afterward that Lincolns tall form and loving face bent over every one of us. Not one did he pass by. And to every one he had some word of good cheer tenderly spoken, while his homely face became absolutely beautiful as it beamed with love and sympathy. He would say to each, God bless you, my boy! Keep up a good heart. Youll come through all right. Well never forget you!

Ah, I tell you, boys, we felt like reaching up our weak arms to clasp his neck yes, even to press our lips to his rough cheek. We all felt impatient to get well as fast as possible that we might fight as never before for our President, the great heart who came to cheer and love us while we lay disabled from our wounds.

One soldier who had a more comprehensive view of the proceedings was Private Wilbur Fisk, a hospital guard. Everything passed off in a very quiet manner, he wrote the next day, there was no crowding or disorder of any kind.Mr. Lincoln presides over millions of people, and each individual share of his attention must necessarily be very small, and yet he wouldnt slight the humblest of them all.

It was late afternoon by the time the president finished greeting the wounded warriors, each of whom, as he said, bravely bears his countrys cause. Senator Sumner remarked, Mr. President, you have taken the hand of some thousands of men to-day: you must be very tired. When he afterward recalled that day while speaking to Secretary of State William Seward, the president described it as having worked as hard at it as sawing wood. Only when he returned to the privacy of his stateroom on River Queen did Elizabeth Keckly hear him admit to Mary Lincoln: Mother, I have shaken so many hands to-day that my arms ache tonight. I almost wish that I could go to bed now.

In an age when people were as apt to bow as clasp hands when they met, Lincolns hand-shakings were an integral part of the man. His actions at the hospital were not perfunctory, but rather an expression of sympathy and honor from the heart to men who had sacrificed so much. In taking their hands, Lincoln was affirming for each Union soldier the righteousness of their cause. And for the Southerners he encountered, the presidents firm grip said clearly, Welcome back to the Union.

Noah Andre Trudeau is the author of numerous award-winning books on the war, including Bloody Roads South and Like Men of War. This article is adapted from his latest, Lincolns Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days That Changed a Presidency, March 24  April 8, 1865, published by Savas Beatie LLC.
He has revealed an eerie secret---that he was abducted by Aliens in a black flying saucer. Rivera was later told that most of the Earth were going to be "wiped out" by a huge asteroid impact, leading to a post-apocalyptic era. That would begin the "New World Order (NWO) government of the Antichrist."

Amaury Rivera Toro, the abductee, managed to click a photograph of the UFO. His snap also revealed a USAF jet following the UFO, which has made UFO seekers charge that the US government seemed to know in 1988 that aliens would be dropping at Puerto Rico from a remote planet.

The visitors revealed that an asteroid impact event would soon destroy most of the Earth, following an invasion by Aliens. They said they would set up a "one-world" NWO government, whose headquarters would be planted on an artificial island in the middle of a "dark, dirty black sea."

In 1991, Jim Cunningham interviewed Rivera at the First International UFO Conference at Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas. Recalling all the events, Rivera said that the aliens captured him on the morning of May 14, 1988 when he was driving home from a nightclub. He had a camera to shoot a musical group at the nightclub the previous night.

According to Phantoms and Monsters, it was 4.30 a.m. at a deserted spot, when he was suddenly overwhelmed by thick fog.

"Suddenly I heard what I initially thought were the sounds of hooves on the paved road. Calves?" he wondered. "The sound was coming from the left side, the driver's side, my side."

He spotted "a small dwarf - or midget-like humanoid creature" that sprinted with the car. It did not occur to him that it could be extraterrestrial. They were midgets, "just about 3- to 4-feet-tall, pale-skinned, with a huge, over-sized head and large, black, bulging eyes." They wore what looked like olive green one-piece suits.

"Jogging alongside my old car was a... midget. What the ****," he exclaimed. "I remember thinking to myself that my mind was going wild. I didn't know what to think... Oh, my God, it's a demon... I was scared beyond description."

The ET in the strange clothes emerged from the spaceship. Another small ET approached the car from the other passenger's side. It frightened Rivera so much that he just wet his pants and passed out.

"I encountered two small beings... I didn't think they were men from outer space."

After he came back to consciousness, he found that he was still in his old car. He had been transported to what looked like an underground parking lot, with grey metallic-looking walls, without either doors or windows. He could not detect any "Exit" sign anywhere nearby. It stumped him, as he could not find any cars around either.

One of the ETs came again and touched his forehead, making him lose consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a room with 14 frightened humans.

"They took me somewhere... there were other human people... from Puerto Rico I guess."

This was followed by the entry of a "man in black" shirt, pants and shoes, with two of the ETs on either side.

"He [the man in black] claimed to be from a distant planet," Rivera said. "He was dressed in black, had dark skin but he was not a Negro. He had a long black hair to the shoulders and he spoke to us with the mouth - no telepathic speaking."

The man seemed to be about five feet, seven inches tall, and talked to the abductees in "flawless Spanish." He said that he had come from a distant planet in an alien star system.

Through a series of holographic projections, he took the abductees through a space journey, showing everyone his planet, people and their homes. He also showed a "catastrophic apocalyptic event" that would impact the Earth near the Caribbean islands and Puerto Rico. And finally, it would be followed by a one-world NWO government run by an Antichrist alien, with its headquarters on an artificial island in the midst of "a dirty, black sea."

Rivera came back to Earth in his car, but to a different spot. When he looked up, he again saw a black disk UFO trailed by three jet fighters. Although the picture shows only one USAF jet trailing the UFO, there were actually three that flew behind it and took turns to approach it.

One UFO researcher confirmed that Rivera had not been the sole abductee. Many Puerto Ricans had been nabbed and shown the holographs, and had undergone experiences similar to his.

Still, no one had ever admitted it in public.

"None of the other abductees have ever been identified, and probably tried to hide the experience from all others, but not this brave guy in Puerto Rico," Scott C. Waring commented on his UFOSightingsDaily blog. "He not only reported it, he got some great photos of military jets making flybys of the UFO when he got off."

Does the entire episode suggest a UFO assault?

Perhaps. Yet, the number of sceptics are probably more in number, which is why this story never crossed the borders of a few media sites. Critics said that the "man in black" might have actually been "a human agent of the globalist Illuminati cabal." Perhaps he was trying "plant the seeds of a False Flag alien invasion" in order to pave the way for the notorious Project Blue Beam, bringing in a New World Order government of the Antichrist, said some opponents.

One opinion by the conspiracy theorists explained that NWO-Illuminati cabal has penetrated governments. While there are plans to have a "false flag alien invasion of the world" with the help of holographic projection technology, the theorists affirmed that they would try to convince authorities through the United Nations as well as the Pope that the "one-world government of the Antichrist" would be able to save the world.

To those who believe in Biblical prophecies, the aliens can be interpreted as probably "demons and fallen angels" who will be running the Anti-Christ government from a Hades-type sea.

Some prophets of doom predicted that an asteroid would hit Puerto Rico in September 2015. But that never happened. NASA's dismissive statement anyway said that "there is a one in 345 chance of a 500-metre asteroid hitting Earth from 2175."

Hence, till that happens, we are probably safe!

YouTube/bipyramid

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As 2016 is about to come to a close, smartphone aficionados and fanatics alike are turning their attention to new smartphones that are set for release in 2017. Apple and Samsung, two of the world's biggest smartphone manufacturers and developers, are now gearing up for next year. With people having nothing to say and learn about the iPhone 7 at this point, which is currently facing criticism for its omission of the headphone jack, many now turn their attention to Samsung's upcoming Galaxy 8.

Galaxy 8, which will replace the Galaxy 7, will include several upgrades concerning camera lens and other important specs. Samsung dubbed Galaxy 8 as "Project Dream," which many believe will make the South Korean company regain its stature as the world's leading technology conglomerate.

According to Christian Daily, after iPhone 7's launch, Samsung seems to be mulling over upgrading their headphone jack design - probably not omit it altogether, in order to be able to compete against its biggest rival. The report also stated that the South Korean tech giant will not be using the USB-C unlike what is done on the newest iPhone.

Rumors also abound that the Galaxy 8 will continue to feature a flat-screen design with a dual-edge display. It stands as an improved better version of that of the Galaxy S7 edge, which faced criticisms for its screen design when it first came out.

University Herald also reported of rumors that the Galaxy S8 will feature a 12 and 13-megapixel dual-lens rear camera. This will allow Samsung to compete head-on with Apple's cameras in both the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. There are also rumors, however, that the newest top-tier Galaxy smartphone might get right of its headphone jack as Apple just did with its latest release, but those reports continue to be unverified.

Nevertheless, Samsung has announced that they want to keep up with Apple in the smartphone competitiion. If rumors are true, Samsung will reveal the Galaxy 8 at Mobile World Congress in 2017 and would likely release the new smartphone sometime in February or March next year.

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Forget about the real health situation of Hillary or the antics of Donald, Americans are focused more on how brave these presidential candidates will be in protecting the land of free if elected to the presidency.

Over the weeks, the U.S. once again made the headlines for the explosion in New York City and New Jersey and incident that happened in Minnesota that involves terrorism.

As for Donald Trump, excessive profiling is a must for any immigrant. He will not allow thousands of refugees from Syria or any Muslim country to enter the U.S. and be an American.

"Hillary Clinton wants to allow hundreds of thousands of these same people," said Trump on "FOX & Friends" today.

The threat is serious, the number of domestic terror increased and the suspects are American Muslim.

On the other hand, Clinton, despite the left and right threats, she assured that all preventive measures will occur. She said that despite all the tight security, strict profiling and intelligence approach, it cannot prevent terrorism. It could happen to U.S. as it could happen to other countries in the world.

Hilary Clinton wants balance diplomacy while Trump is on iron fist.

As the recent poll of Fox News, Americans still believe that Hilary Clinton can handle the terrorism situation over Donald Trump. A slight and tight poll showed that 47 percent trust Clinton while 45 percent favor Trump on national security. She has 49 percent trust poll over his 47 percent, according to Quinnipac University.

Going back to the Fox News polls, although Clinton led over Trump, when it comes to Islamic State attacked, American voters believed that Trump will constrain attacked against the Islamic State.

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Activists unfurl a banner protesting against illegally let apartments. GIANLUCA BATTISTA

Barcelona residents fed up with the huge increase in illegal apartment lets in the city through accommodation sites such as Airbnb found a novel way to protest the problem on Tuesday.

As part of an ongoing campaign to protest what they say is a virtual siege from tourists, the members of two local activist groups in the Catalan capital rented a holiday apartment near the citys cathedral using Airbnb. They picked up the keys, entered and then called the town hall asking them to arrange an inspection of the property.

In May locals protested against the docking of huge cruise liners in Barcelona during the busy summer season

Municipal Inspectors who turned up to carry out a spot check confirmed the owner of the apartment  who also advertises four other properties on Airbnb  did not have the necessary paperwork to rent out the apartment.

That owner would now be banned from renting out the apartments, the officials said.

A spokesperson for one of the groups involved, the Association of Neighbors for Sustainable Tourism (ABTS), Daniel Pardo, said the purpose of Tuesdays protest was to highlight the damaging effects of the proliferation of holiday apartments in the city and the impunity of Airbnb.

The presence of those apartments in one of the worlds most popular tourist destinations was squeezing out locals because it was pushing rents up and turning local communities into theme parks, Pardo said.

The activist highlighted the complicity of Airbnb saying the company knows who has a license and who doesnt but prefers not to make distinctions so as to exploit everybody and make money for large property owners.

Airbnb knows who has a license to rent out apartments and who doesnt but prefers not to make distinctions

Daniel Pardo, Association of Neighbors for Sustainable Tourism (ABTS)

The online accommodation portal defends the sharing economy but is actually speculative, Pardo said. Any property owners found using the site in an illegal manner should be banned, he concluded.

Around 40 percent of Barcelonas 16,000 holiday apartments are rented out illegally by sites such as Airbnb, according to figures from the citys town hall.

In July, Barcelona City Hall decided to tackle the problem by introducing a 1.3 million raft of measures to crack down on owners letting out apartments using sites like Airbnb without a license. The authorities set up a website and called on residents to report apartments being rented out illegally. As of mid-August around 500 complaints have been made.

But Airbnb has defended itself by saying European legislation does not require accommodation sites to systematically monitor for illegal activity on the part of owners. The responsibility for that falls instead to local authorities.

The companys director general in Spain, Arnau Munoz, said: What Airbnb is calling for is the regulation of home sharing, a temporary arrangement, which is different from people who make a living from renting holiday accommodation. Home sharing leads to responsible and professional tourism which fits in with a city."

More than 70% of accommodation hosts using Airbnb in Barcelona only advertise one property, Munoz added.

City inspectors on Tuesday said the owner of the holiday apartment near Barcelona cathedral would be issued a notice forbidding further operations on the site.

They added that notice could be issued when it was clear an apartment was being rented out for more than 31 days a year with evidence of a financial transaction having taken place. But the officials also stressed their job was not an easy one, saying that often intercoms in apartment blocks didnt work or were incorrectly marked. Property owners also refused to simply open the door to them, something which had already happened on Tuesday morning, they said.

Barcelona - the fifth most popular Airbnb destination globally - receives almost 9 million visitors annually and tensions have been high in recent years with complaints that low-cost tourism is making life in the city unbearable.

In 2014, there were spontaneous protests in the citys popular Barceloneta neighborhood against drunken tourism while protesters also took to the streets in May to complain about the docking of huge cruise liners in the citys port, highlighting the downside of 2.6 million tourists pouring into the city during the summer season.

English version by George Mills.
It was revealed that an important breakthrough in the field of quantum teleportation has been done by two separate teams of scientists funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The two teams have reportedly transferred quantum information in an urban network over a few miles using the city's existing fiberoptic cables. Researchers believe that this breakthrough could lead to a significant improvement in the communication systems.

2 DARPA-funded teams have performed #quantum #teleportation over several kilometers of metropolitan fiber networks. https://t.co/Bdknpn0Ccv  DARPA (@DARPA) September 19, 2016

As engaging as it sounds, quantum teleportation does not necessarily mean that photons are disappearing from one place and appearing in another like the kind we see in sc-fi movies. Futurism has simply put quantum technology as a process by which quantum information can be transferred from one place to another, with the particles actually meeting.

The International Business Times have also explained how physicists understand quantum teleportation:

Here's how quantum teleportation works. Imagine, if you will, three people - Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants to send information to Bob. In order to do so, she prepares a photon she wants to teleport and sends it to Charlie, while Bob entangles two photons and sends one of them to Charlie. When Charlie receives the two photons - one each from Alice and Bob - he carries out what's known as a Bell-state measurement, which actually forces the two to become entangled. This, in turn, causes the photon Bob has to collapse into the state of Alice's original photon, thereby teleporting quantum states between Alice and Bob, who can, in theory, be separated by a distance of miles.

It was reported that scientists have long before studied the concept about quantum information and teleportation and testing it out. It happened twice - in 1977 and 2012 when two particles, each year, have experienced teleportation and since then, the concept has been further explored.

It was until the recent breakthrough that scientists believe quantum teleportation is indeed possible. According to New Scientist, the researchers are from Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China that conducted the world's first quantum teleportation. Both teams used different methods and produced different results, but they have both successfully teleported information using the existing optical fibre networks and those are hugh achievements.

A defense researcher from DARPA said that photons are a valuable resource for many military applications ranging from communications systems to visible and infrared sensing platforms. "The broad availability of advanced communications technology possessed by adversaries makes it increasingly difficult to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of DoD information," the defense researcher added.

Furthermore, it has been reported that the biggest application is likely to be in encrypting information. It's reportedly much harder for an outsider to read information if two photons communicate with each other through quantum entanglement.

Both teams' successful findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Phonotics.

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The US believes that the air strike that attacked Syria's aid convoy on Monday was from Russia's two warplanes. The aid convoy was reportedly hit Monday night in the area of Urum al-Kubra, west of Aleppo.

#BREAKING:Today, @SYRedCrescent #Aleppo delivering aid convoy of 31 trucks will reach the western rural side of Aleppo pic.twitter.com/fqGiCUyc3t  SARC | Aleppo (@SARC_Aleppo) September 19, 2016

One of the US officials said that all the evidences point out to Russia being responsible fo the incident. CNN reported that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said that all of the information indicates clearly that the incident was an airstrike, which means there only could have been two entities responsible.

Rhodes added, "We hold the Russian government responsible for airstrikes in this airspace given their commitment under the cessation of hostilities was to ground air operations where humanitarian assistance was flowing."

According to BBC, there is one unconfirmed report which stated that 12 people were killed in the attack. A UN spokesman said that at least 18 of the 31 trucks that were initially prepared to deliver aid across the city have been hit.

"Those who bomb the aid convoys are cowards."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attack "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate." He added, "Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the power of depravity sinks lower. The United Nations has been forced to suspend aid convoys as a result of this outrage. The humanitarians delivering life-saving aid were heroes. Those who bombed them were cowards."

It has been a great concern for humanitarian agencies that hundreds of thousands of civilians have been short of water, food and medicine. The attack has forced the UN to halt its aid operations in Syria.

Russia denies involvement.

Meanwhile, the Russian government denies any involvement from the incident. According to reports, it believed that the struck that attacked the convoy was not from the air but from the ground that caught fire.

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George HW Bush, 92, plans to vote for Hilary Clinton in November presidential election. During a small gathering with former lieutenant governor of Maryland and daughter of later Robert F. Kennedy, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy, said Bush informed people that he will vote for Clinton.

There is no verification if the people heard it clearly but there are sources confirming the former president's statement as reported by CNN.

Kennedy also posted a photo in her social media account with Bush with a caption, "The President told me he's voting for Hillary!"

In a telephone interview with POLIITICO, Kennedy reiterated that Bush informed her that he would prefer to vote for Democrat.

Spokesperson of Bush, Jim Mc Grath, however explained that the former President will not inform who he will choose prior to the casting of votes. The former first couple George HW Bush and Lady Barbara Bush stayed out from political limelight when their son Jeb Bush lost in the Republican bid for president.

Sources that is close to the former President were disappointed when Kennedy posted the conversation that should be confidential. But the latter chose to not to comment and removed the picture and caption.

Former GOP officials during the Bush administration vocally announced their support to the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton including Brent Scowcroft, former national security, and Carlos Gutierrez, former Commerce Secretary.

If this is confirmed, Republicans remain hopeful that Bush will support Trump before casting the votes some 50 days from now.

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Columbia and Harvard universities disclosed that Indonesia haze in 2015 most probably was responsible for more than 100,000 premature deaths in areas closest to fire.

The new study that would be published in journal Environmental Research Letters, was using satellite information with images of health impacts from smoke exposure and combined them with readings from pollution monitoring stations in order to know the consequences of last year's haze.

It's estimated that 100,300 had died prematurely across the three countries - 2,200 in Singapore, 6,500 in Malaysia and 91,600 deaths in Indonesia.

Those deaths were related to respiratory illnesses and added pressure on the government to deal with the crisis while triggering calls for action to tackle the "killer haze".

The pollution occurs every year. It's caused by the burning of forests and carbon-rich peatlands that people in Indonesia practice in order to clear the land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations as quick and cheap as they possibly can.

The fires happen mainly on the Indonesian part of Borneo and Sumatra Island. But monsoon winds usually blow the haze over Malaysia and Singapore. So, the smoke flows across South East Asia and it can last for several months (like in 2015).

Indonesia has frequently been accused of not taking appropriate measurements to tackle the big problem.

Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaign Yuyun Indradi says: "If nothing changes, this killer haze will carry on taking a terrible toll, year after year."

"Failure to act immediately to stem the loss of life would be a crime."

A representative of Indonesia's environment ministry didn't immediately give any comment. The authorities have formerly insisted they are constantly working on improving their haze-fighting efforts like banning the giving of new land for palm oil plantations to farmers. They have also established an agency for restoring devastated peatlands.

The sad fact is that Greenpeace only saw health impacts on adults and what is the effect of dangerous fine particulate matter, also known as PM 2.5. The effect on youngest population and the other toxins produced by the fires haven't been examined.

That is disturbing acknowledgment because infants are at much bigger risk from the haze than grown-ups.

"We are the doctors who care for the vulnerable groups exposed to toxic smoke in every medical centre, and we know how awful it is to see the disease symptoms experienced by babies and children in our care," said Nursyam Ibrahim, from the West Kalimantan province branch of the Indonesian Medical Association on Borneo

Last year's haze inception was the worst since 1997 because of a strong El Nino weather system that created tinder-dry conditions in Indonesia. As a result, forests and peatland are more vulnerable to going up in the blaze.

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The devastating results of heat waves hitting Europe in 2003 and China in 2013 are still vivid to many up to this day. With the temperature rising by 20 to 30 percent higher than the average, such an occurrence has its deadly effects, not just on land but also on sea.

A heat wave, characterized by an extremely warm or humid weather during the day and night, would usually last for two to three days. It is brought about by the high atmospheric pressure and causes an increase in temperature with air from the upper portion of the atmosphere descending and circling as it goes out.

Here are the reasons why they are considered really deadly:

1. They cause health problems and take thousands of lives

Heat waves cause fluid loss, which when not sufficiently replaced will result to dehydration. It can also result to excessive sweating, muscle cramps, headache, dizziness, nausea, fainting, organ damage and hyperthermia which may lead to heat stroke.

2. They bring agricultural loss

Heat waves trigger forest fire, which damages or kills plants and trees.

3. They lead to bigger consumption of energy

As the unbearable heat brings an increase in the use of water and electricity, a power outage is most likely to happen. Human energy is likewise consumed with too much sweating and dehydration.

4. They stress marine organisms and ecosystem

VOA News reported that Swiss environmental physicist, Thomas Froelicher, who examined warm blobs of water in the Pacific Ocean, points out that with the water becoming warm, a great number of fish moved to cooler depths of the ocean where there is insufficient oxygen, sunlight and plants for food. It added that according to NASA, "starving of starving sea lions and fur seals were found stranded on California's beaches."

5. They dry up bodies of water

Heat waves also bring drought and cause bodies of water to dry up.

With all of these ill effects that heat waves are likely to carry, they are certainly deadly to living creatures found on land and sea.

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No less than 12 police officers were injured in a clash with protesters in Charlotte, North Carolina on Tuesday evening.

This was after police officer, Brentley Vinson, shot Keith Scott, 43, who was mistaken to be the man that the law enforcers were hunting earlier. Both Vinson and Scott are black.

Police department spokesperson Keith Tritely said the officers rounded up an apartment complex around 4 p.m. They had with them an outstanding warrant as they searched for a suspect.

They spotted Scott, who was then sitting in a car, going out with a gun. He returned inside shortly after. When the officers went near him, Scott got out of the car holding the gun, Trietley added.

The police officers thought that he was a threat and this prompted Vinson to fire a weapon.

Scott, who has seven children, was brought to Carolinas Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

The story from the police contradicts the statement of Scott's family who said that the man was actually disabled and was just inside the car with a book on his hand.

According to The Guardian, Scott's daughter, Lyric, was heard shouting to investigators not to plant a gun inside her father's car. A video on this has been posted on Facebook.

Scott's sister tells media that her brother has no gun and that "he sits in the shade, reads his book and waits on his kid to get off the bus."

The Telegraph reported that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department claimed demonstrators were destructing police vehicles. About 12 officers were injured, with one being hit by a rock on his face.

Jennifer Roberts, mayor of Charlotte, called everyone to stay calm as full investigation is being done.

Vinson, who has been with the local police department for two years, is now placed on administrative leave.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The new presidents of Argentina, Brazil and Peru  all of whom have made a sharp turn to the right in terms of their social and economic policies  took the floor at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on Tuesday to share their optimistic vision of their countries. Argentinean President Mauricio Macri, Brazilian President Michel Temer and Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski all said they wanted more participation in the international community and defended a return to classical economic policies. They also said that their administrations have renewed peoples faith in the future after the economic crisis.

Brazilian President Michel Temer delivers his speech at the UN General Assembly. Drew Angerer (AFP)

More information Las nuevas voces latinoamericanas debutan en la Asamblea General de la ONU

As per tradition, ever since Brazilian Ambassador Osvaldo Aranha presided over the first General Assembly in 1947, Brazil was the first country to take the floor. Temer defended the recent impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, saying it showed the strength of institutions under the watchful eye of a plural society. The rules apply to everyone, including the most powerful. That is what Brazil is showing the world, he added.

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was indicted in a corruption probe last week, while one of Temers ministers resigned after he was implicated in the bid-rigging and bribery scheme at Petrobras, the state-owned oil company. The Brazilian president himself was drawn into the controversy in June after a witness named him in the case.

Representatives of six countries left the chamber during Temers speech in protest against Rousseffs impeachment

Temer, who assumed full presidential duties in early September, sold the crowd an optimistic image of Brazil. Trust is being restored and a more prosperous horizon lies ahead, he told the roomful of international leaders after defending the path of fiscal and social responsibility his government has chosen. His administration has also launched an ambitious program to grant government contracts and privatize various public companies.

Meanwhile, the representatives of six Latin American countries  Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica  left the chamber during his speech in protest against Rousseffs impeachment.

Peruvian President Kuczynski, who took office in July, was the only speaker to mention the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. He called for absolute respect of democratic rights and dialogue, praising his own countrys firm commitment to the definitive consolidation of democracy 16 years after the administration of jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori. He also said his government favored modernization and the free market, even in the face of growing protectionist temptations in the world.

Macri urged the UK to be receptive to dialogue in order to amicably resolve their dispute over the Falklands

Argentinean President Mauricio Macri also showed enthusiasm about his countrys volte-face in economic policy after 12 years of kirchnerismo. Macri, who took office in December, said that he was already noticing the results of his administrations efforts to repair ties with international institutions in the form of investments that he believes will revive the economy. Macri hosted 1,900 international business leaders in Buenos Aires last week to promote foreign investment in Argentina.

Argentineans are ready to enter the 21st century and fulfill our role in international society, he added.

Macri also talked about some of the issues his predecessor, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, often brought up on the floor. He called for greater international cooperation in the ongoing investigation of the 1990s terrorist attacks in Buenos Aires, which some have attributed to Iran. He urged the United Kingdom to be receptive to dialogue in order to amicably resolve their dispute over the Falkland Islands.

His remarks came just a week after the two countries published a joint statement saying they wanted to strengthen ties and even extend the list of flights between the United Kingdom and the islands. The announcement has revived the Malvinas-Falklands controversy in Argentina.

All three Latin American leaders asked for greater representation of emerging market economies at the United Nations and argued that every country has geopolitical significance. They also pledged to continue their fight against climate change and applauded progress made in the region, such as renewed diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States and the peace accord the Colombian government negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to bring an end to that 50-year-old conflict.

English version by Dyane Jean Francois.
A n architectural intervention by British artist Conrad Shawcross has arrived on the Greenwich Peninsula in south-east London, bringing a jagged 49-metre slice of perforated aluminium to Londons skyline.

The Optic Cloak is on a scale to rival Antony Gormleys Angel of the North, but the gigantic sculpture has a practical function far beyond being purely decorative.

Designed in collaboration with the architectural practice CF Mller Architects, the 49-metre high by 20-metre wide building will house an energy centre providing hot water and heating for 15,000 homes.

The eye-catching metallic chimney flue covered in aluminium cladding is sited in Europes largest-single urban regeneration area covering 160 acres.

When the Greenwich Peninsula mega-district regeneration is completed it will include seven new neighbourhoods, 15,000 residences as well as 3.5m square foot of commercial space  all of which will be heated and served hot water by the low carbon energy centre housed within The Optic Cloak saving an estimated 15-20,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

Shawcross said he wanted to "celebrate" the sculpture's function as part of the energy centre's flue (Marc Wilmot, courtesy of Greenwich Peninsula) / Marc Wilmot_Greenwich Peninsula

The undulating surface of Shawcross creation serves to reflect the light differently during daylight to give the impression it is gradually changing shape.

IMAGE GALLERY: TAKE A TOUR AROUND GREENWICH PENINSULA 1 /20 IMAGE GALLERY: TAKE A TOUR AROUND GREENWICH PENINSULA Greenwich Peninsula Greenwich Peninsula is the site of London's biggest single regeneration project. This riverside district has plans for a lively 24-hour community with 15,000 new homes. City dweller Matthew Ma, 33, is a fan of this emerging district. He works for a Canary Wharf bank and was quick to buy a two-bedroom flat on the 24th floor of a new tower.



The location, the quality of the architecture and the landscaping and all the restaurants and leisure places are coming together nicely", he says. Family appeal Sanjeev and Sharmilee Nellicherry decided to buy a three-bedroom duplex with views across one of the new parks at Greenwich Peninsula.



With two children, the couple wanted to live in a safe, clean neighbourhood buzzing with activity  and with good investment prospects. The Waterman The Waterman, part of the Lower Riverside district, has flats with corner balconies providing dual-aspect views, plus a communal roof garden and residents club with a cinema (scroll right...) The Waterman The residents' club also features a lot of shared space with private workstations (scroll right...) The Waterman The interiors are designed by Conran + Partners, inspired by the vibrancy of the Watermans river and parkside (scroll right...) The Waterman The apartment colour palette creates bold monochrome contrasts, using brass and timber. Call 020 3713 6153 Upper Riverside Leading British designer Tom Dixon has put his name to a limited edition of flats and double-height, loft-style apartments at Upper Riverside, one of the five quarters (scroll right...) Upper Riverside The towering combination of glass and stone facades at Upper Riverside created by architects SOM, have been designed to maximise light and views across London in every apartment (scroll right...) Upper Riverside These homes include penthouses with up to 2,385sq ft of space and 2,350sq ft of terracing (scroll right...) Upper Riverside The interiors strike a contemporary balance combining natural and warm materials like copper, leather and wood with bold sculptural forms (scroll right...) Upper Riverside Weve tried to bring in some warmth and realness, and make the apartments less international-looking and a bit more British, says Dixon, who has come up with custom-made copper kitchens and anodised rolled steel baths (scroll right...) Upper Riverside Residents will be able to use Londons highest swimming pool, part of a glass-walled spa with views of Canary Wharf (scroll right...) Upper Riverside There is a cardio and separate weight-training gym, steam room, changing rooms and a rooftop sun terrace overlooking the river (scroll right...) Upper Riverside The stunning lobby provides a sociable meeting place with dedicated concierge, meeting rooms and a bookable private dining room. Call 020 3713 6153

Shawcross was inspired by Cubism and Op Art movements, but also by military techniques. I became particularly interested in a type of maritime camouflage called Dazzle Camo which was used on ships during the First World War, he said.

The idea is to break up the surface of the object, creating false perspectives and vanishing points. I thought it was important to give [it] a dynamic quality. For those passing, it will evolve radically as you pan by and under it.

This is the first time Royal Academician Shawcross has created a work embedded into a piece of architecture. He was commissioned by Richard Margree, CEO of Greenwich Peninsula developer Knight Dragon.

The Optic Cloak will be visible to thousands of people as they approach London by car daily (Marc Wilmot, courtesy of Greenwich Peninsula)

The external structure of The Optic Cloak will be completed this week but the actual energy station will not be up-and-running until later this Autumn.

The low carbon energy centre means the homes and buildings under development will not be fitted with individual boilers.

Around 2,000 homes have already been built as part of the Greenwich Peninsula development which is expected to be completed over the next 25 years.
The fall Arts and Humanities Symposium at Hope College on Friday, Sept. 30, will explore Am I Not Human? Racial Identities in Modern America, featuring scholars from multiple institutions and disciplines who will be focusing on depictions of African Americans across the nations history.

The symposium will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the Cook Auditorium, room 141 of the De Pree Art Center and Gallery. Following the symposium, there will be a reception from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the gallery and lobby area.

The public is invited. Admission is free.

The purpose of the Arts and Humanities symposium is to bring to important and timely topics an interdisciplinary conversation that displays the academic disciplines at their best. Each academic discipline equips its practitioners with particular skills and training that, when juxtaposed to other disciplines, can provide the best solutions to the problems society faces.

This falls symposium is taking place in conjunction with Hateful Things | Resilience, a dual exhibition highlighting the importance of racial healing and equality that is being featured in the De Pree Art Center and gallery through Friday, Oct. 7.

Each part of the symposium will last approximately 50 minutes, will include a question-and-answer period, and will be followed by a brief break. Everyone attending is free to come and go through the three symposium hours.

The events will begin with a welcome from Marc Baer, interim dean for the arts and humanities at Hope.

At 1 p.m., Kenneth Goings, professor of African American and African studies at Ohio State University will present Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles before Black Lives Matter; or, When it was fun to lynch and torture Black people. The response will be by Charles Green, professor of psychology at Hope. The student convener will be Kristen Szalontai.

At 2 p.m., Leonard Harris, professor of philosophy at Purdue University, will present Against Minstrelsy. The response will be by Jack Mulder, associate professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Hope. The student convener will be Taylor Mills.

At 3 p.m., Rachel Stephens, assistant professor of art history, American art and architecture at the University of Alabama, will present From Aunt Chloe to Aunt Jemima: The Static Image of the African American Housemaid. The response will be by Kendra Parker, assistant professor of English at Hope. The student convener will be Curissa Sutherland-Smith.

Hateful Things is a traveling sample from Ferris State Universitys Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and features a collection of racist objects that trace the history of the stereotyping of African Americans. The exhibition contributes to and is in dialog with the scholarly examination of historical and contemporary expressions of racism and visual culture. It also seeks to promote racial understanding and healing. The exhibit was created by David Pilgrim, who is a professor of sociology, vice president of diversity and inclusion and museum curator at Ferris State University; and Carrie Stermer, who is director of Ferris State Universitys Fine Art Gallery.

Resilience was curated by Dr. Heidi Kraus and features world-renowned contemporary African-American artists from the Kruizenga Art Museum and Chicagos Monique Meloche Gallery, including Faith Ringgold, Sanford Biggers and Lorna Simpson.

The works in Resilience, while in conversation with the history of African-American oppression, focus on demonstrating a resilience of spirit and hope for racial equality.

The De Pree Art Center and Gallery is located at 160 E. 12th St., on Columbia Avenue at 12th Street.
As an increasing number of business travel apps become available, given your organization allows you a choice, finding the most effective solutions can be a real chore. In an effort to help, we are sharing information about our opinion of the most useful and innovative apps that exist in today's app market across several categories:

Travel Booking Management

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from using travel booking management apps to improve accuracy, reduce duplication, and increase efficiency.

Concur's mobile app is a valuable choice for a broad range of businesses, providing an efficient means to reduce the effort and time spent on managing travel details. In addition to offering the basic tools that all expense-tracking services provide, including custom reports and expense categories, this solution features photo receipts. Users can capture a receipt, invoice or business card using their device's camera and attach it to their expense record to store the information securely. The app also allows users to book their travel needs directly, including rental cars and hotel rooms. Concur's solution can be linked to other apps, such as financial and GPS tracking applications, providing a convenient method for storing all travel information in one location.

KDS Neo is a popular app (and recently acquired by American Express), which uses a timeline approach for booking travel and submitting expenses. The innovative solution is designed to provide a fully priced itinerary based on three simple questions: Where does my journey start? Where does it end? What time do I need to be there? KDS Neo automatically creates an expenses report, while analyzing the preferences and previous behavior of each individual traveler to offer personalized itineraries.

Trip Tracking

There are many trip tracking apps available, but some stand out from the others as exceptionally useful for the majority of business travelers.

TripIt (owened by Concur) is described by many users as creating the feeling of having a highly efficient personal travel assistant by their side. The app allows users to forward all travel details to a TripIt email address, including flights, hotel reservations, car rentals, restaurant bookings, and more. These travel plans are subsequently converted to a succinct itinerary that is accessible on a mobile device, even when it's offline. The "Pro" upgrade provides a great deal of additional functionality, including real-time flight alerts, a place to store points from different rewards programs, and some special perks, such as access to the Hertz Gold counters and the ability to jump to the front of some security lines.

TripCase is another very strong trip tracking app. The straightforward interface, and my personal preference, allows users to store all travel details, including flights, rentals, hotel reservations, and more, as well as sending alerts for flight information. The app also provides the ability to add all other plans associated with a trip to create a single, complete itinerary.

App in the Air features a streamlined interface and all of the functionality that you expect to find in a robust trip tracking app. This solution stands apart from others due to its social component, allowing you to provide feedback on the flight experience, report delays, engage in airport specific chat with other users, and share your trips with friends via social networks.

KAYAK offers a trip tracking component to its already popular travel search app, which allows users to search for, book, and view trip itineraries. For users who book travel arrangements on several different websites, this solution offers the added convenience of compiling the information into a single itinerary.

Expenses Processing

Processing travel expenses is typically a time-consuming task, which can be significantly alleviated by utilizing one of the top apps that are currently available.

Chrome River has created a fantastic solution, providing streamlined functionality that takes a lot of the work out of the process. The app allows users to capture and approve expenses while traveling, as well as to view and approve third-party invoices. It provides the ability to edit and modify the features and reports in the tool, and will seamlessly audit all of the uploaded expenses to create a concise final report.

Expensify is another excellent option for accurately recording and extracting expenses details. The app also provides the ability to use the GPS functionality in a mobile device to automatically track the miles traveled during a business trip, in addition to including a convenient currency converter and rate-exchange calculator to process international expenses efficiently.

Concierge Booking

As an option to some of the services of a traditional travel agent, several companies have created concierge-focused booking solutions, which employ "bot technology" mixed with traditional services to handle traveler requests.

Pana

is a useful concierge app that helps make travel booking easier by shopping for flights, making hotel reservations, and arranging transportation. The solution utilizes a combination of live travel experts and artificial intelligence "bot" technology to create a robust service that may be especially appealing to frequent travelers.

Mani provides what the company calls "full-service travel concierge bots" to handle all aspects of customers' travel requests, including booking, rescheduling, and cancellation. The service also utilizes artificial intelligence technology to learn about its users' preferences to deliver personalized recommendations, taking details such as rewards points and hotel amenities into account.

App development in the travel marches on, with new bot augmented solutions arriving at a fair pace. While there is always room for improvement, the apps described in this article are likely to reduce the tasks associated with light managed or unmanaged travel, allowing both businesses and individuals to leverage technology for a streamlined experience.

What did we miss? What are your favorite practical biz travel apps? Let me know by reaching out to me on Twitter @jgabbott or LinkedIn.

About DataArt

DataArt is a global software engineering firm that takes a uniquely human approach to solving problems. With over 20 years of experience, teams of highly-trained engineers around the world, and deep industry sector knowledge, we deliver high-value, high-quality solutions that our clients depend on, and lifetime partnerships they believe in.

www.dataart.com

@dataart

Andrew Sanders

VP, Travel & Hospitality - North America

+1.919.762.6599

DataArt
Beirut  On the 1st of September, Royal Tulip Achrafieh, part of the Louvre Hotels Group, opened its doors to welcome its first guests. Beirut's newest luxury boutique hotel is the first five-star hotel in Lebanon under Louvre Hotels Group. The hotel is located in a strategic location in the heart of Lebanon's capital, only minutes away from prime business and leisure attractions, conveniently close to ABC mall, Hotel Dieu hospital, and AUST University, making it the perfect destination for the business and leisure travelers alike.

The Middle East has proven to be an important market for the global expansion of Louvre Hotels, hence the branding and management of Royal Tulip Achrafieh. The owners of Royal Tulip Achrafieh expressed their strong belief in investing in Lebanon and their trust in the success of the partnership they have made to manage the hotel under the Royal Tulip Luxury Hotel brand.

On the occasion, Amine E. Moukarzel, President of Louvre Hotels Group MENA, says: "Our growth momentum in Lebanon after last year's opening of The Golden Tulip Lili's Resort and Spa Aley, is well complimented by the Royal Tulip Achrafieh opening today, bringing our hotels portfolio to seven hotels in Lebanon, becoming the largest hotels group by the number of hotels, and aiming to open two more in the next two years."

Royal Tulip Achrafieh is designed to meet the practical needs of a modern day traveler with its contemporary design and state-of-the-art facilities, bringing together luxurious comfort and personalized service. Mr. Nicolas Anghelopoulos, Royal Tulip Achrafieh's General Manager, says "we look forward to having our guests experience the luxurious, and personalized, service at Royal Tulip Achrafieh that will make their stay a memorable one. The Hotel is here to cater to local and international guests, and is also the perfect place for the Lebanese diaspora."

About Royal Tulip Achrafieh

Located in the heart of Lebanon's capital Beirut, Royal Tulip Achrafieh  the latest addition of Louvre Hotels Group in Lebanon  is the five star luxury boutique hotel that offers contemporary elegance and luxurious personalized service to its guests. 76 spacious rooms and suites offer business and leisure guests a memorable and convenient stay and the hotel's facilities that include an all-day dining restaurant, a cafe lounge, a rooftop lounge, meeting rooms and a fitness center, are designed to carter to all guests' needs.

About Louvre Hotels Group

The Louvre Hotels Group is a major player in the worldwide hotel industry, whose portfolio today includes over 1500 hotels in 54 countries. It offers a range of hotel stays from 1 to 5 stars, with the historical brands of the Louvre Hotels Group: Royal Tulip, Golden Tulip, Campanile, Tulip Residences, Kyriad, Kyriad Direct, Tulip Inn, and Premiere Classe; the five brands of the Sarovar network in India; the Hotels et Preference Group, as well as the Chinese brand Metropolo. The group also has a distribution agreement with the Barriere Group. The Louvre Hotels Group is an affiliate of Jin Jiang International Holdings, Co, Ltd., the 2nd largest hotel group in the world.

Glorie Ann

Golden Tulip

Louvre Hotels Group
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Spains Popular Party (PP), which has been heading a caretaker government since December, on Wednesday used King Felipe VIs speech at the United Nations General Assembly as ammunition against the main opposition Socialists.

King Felipe VI of Spain addresses the United Nations General Assembly. EDUARDO MUNOZ (REUTERS)

In his Tuesday address in New York, the monarch had sought to allay international concerns about the prolonged lack of government in Spain, offering the assurance that Spanish politicians will overcome the complex context through dialogue, commitment and a sense of duty.

A day later, acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said that he shared the kings view on the need for political dialogue to avoid a potential third national election on Christmas Day.

In the end, a political problem is going to become a jobs problem and a social problem

PP congressional speaker Rafael Hernando

Campaigning on his home turf of Galicia ahead of regional elections there this coming Sunday, Rajoy said that Spain needs to be offered a way out.

Rajoy then laid responsibility for the stalemate at the door of Socialist Party (PSOE) leader Pedro Sanchez, who voted against the formers reinstatement at a recent investiture session in Congress. I tried, but it did not go well, Rajoy said about that vote.

Following the first elections in December, Sanchez had made a bid of his own for the prime ministers office, but was voted down by Rajoys party.

In between shows of support for Galician premier Alberto Nunez Feijoo, who stands a good chance of winning a third term in office, Rajoy noted that Spains legislative activity has been at a standstill for the last nine months. Bills cannot be brought to the floor for debate, and the 2017 budget cannot be approved  which in turn means missing EU deadlines and running the risk of sanctions.

Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez should heed the kings words, says the PP. OSCAR CORRAL (EL PAIS)

The PP speaker in Congress, Rafael Hernando, echoed Rajoys thoughts.

What the king did was to voice the majority opinion among Spaniards: that Spain deserves a government, he said on Wednesday. Some people should realize that the situation they are taking the country toward is absurd and enormously detrimental to citizens as a whole. In the end, a political problem is going to become a jobs problem, and thus a social problem.

Hernando blamed Sanchez for the impasse, and said there will be an economic price to pay because the political uncertainty is keeping investors away.

Meanwhile, the PP candidate to the premiership in the Basque Country, which is also holding elections this Sunday, said that while all Spanish politicians should heed the kings words, it is Sanchez who should be listening most closely.

Sanchez is chiefly responsible for the deadlock because he is stuck with his no, he wont budge from that position yet he has no alternative to offer, leading to the deadlock, said Alfonso Alonso, whose chances of winning the Basque elections on Sunday are next to none.

English version by Susana Urra.
Compared with August 2015, the U.S. hotel industrys occupancy was nearly flat (-0.4% to 70.2%). However, average daily rate for the month increased 2.5% to US$125.42, and revenue per available room grew 2.1% to US$88.10.

The U.S. hotel industry recorded mostly positive results in the three key performance metrics during August 2016, according to data from STR.

Compared with August 2015, the U.S. hotel industrys occupancy was nearly flat (-0.4% to 70.2%). However, average daily rate for the month increased 2.5% to US$125.42, and revenue per available room grew 2.1% to US$88.10.

The slowdown continued in August with the second-lowest RevPAR growth figure of the year, said Jan Freitag, STRs senior VP for lodging insights. With year-to-date supply growth (+1.5%) ahead of demand (+1.3%), ADR is the sole driver of RevPAR, and the 2.5% ADR increase matched May for the lowest this year.

On the bright side, we sold more roomnights than any other August on record, and ADR and RevPAR are still at all-time highs, Freitag said. RevPAR has now grown year over year for 78 consecutive months, and even with muted expectations, we dont anticipate that changing anytime soon.

Among the Top 25 Markets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-New Jersey, posted the largest year-over-year increase in occupancy (+5.2% to 76.7%) as well as the only double-digit increases in ADR (+11.3% to US$132.68) and RevPAR (+17.1% to US$101.71).

The next highest RevPAR increases were reported in Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida (+8.4% to US$70.15); Los Angeles/Long Beach, California (+7.4% to US$165.14); Nashville, Tennessee (+7.2% to US$95.78); and Detroit, Michigan (+7.0% to US$73.19).

In absolute values, San Francisco/San Mateo, California, reported the highest occupancy level (89.3%).

Oahu Island, Hawaii, recorded the highest ADR (US$243.51) and RevPAR (US$211.63).

Houston, Texas, reported the largest declines in occupancy (-8.8% to 59.7%) and RevPAR (-12.7% to US$58.46).

New Orleans, Louisiana, reported the largest drop in ADR (-6.2% to US$106.29) and the second-largest RevPAR decrease for the month (-9.0% to US$60.62).

The top markets (RevPAR +2.0%) performed pretty closely to all other markets (RevPAR +2.1%), Freitag said. The bad news continued for Houston with a significant supply and demand imbalance. We also saw supply growth affect RevPAR performance in markets like New York and Miami.

View monthly U.S. hotel performance review

About STR

STR provides clients from multiple market sectors with premium, global data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights. Founded in 1985, STR maintains a presence in 10 countries around the world with a corporate North American headquarters in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and an international headquarters in London, England. For more information, please visit str.com.
4 Things You Need to Know to Market to North American Travelers

According to Adobe, 82% of US summer travelers plan on staying domestic. With domestic flight prices down 6.6% year over year, and lower gas prices, American travelers have lots of spending power. Canada joins the US in a love of travel - pending an estimated 11.4 billion on domestic travel alone.

Reaching and converting these high flyers - and spenders - is important for any tourism or travel marketer. But, first you need to understand their planning and searching patterns to ensure that your campaigns are timely and relevant. Our 2016 North American Travel Trend Report has all of the insights you need to do just that. Heres a quick peek into some of the insights and how you can use them to improve your marketing campaigns:

1. The average searched trip duration for US travelers is 7 days, while for Canada its 11 days. Canadian employees are entitled to two weeks of paid time off every year in all provinces except Saskatchewan, where employees get three weeks. Canadian employees get an additional 6-10 paid public holidays as well. Canadians seem to be spending these days off traveling, while their US counterparts, who have no legally required paid holidays, enjoy shorter trips on average.

Knowing the average search trip duration for each region can help you plan your marketing campaigns: offering 12 night free deals to US travelers isnt going to be as effective as doing the same for Canadians, for instance.

2. But, not all US states plan the same. Georgia and Florida, for instance, are two of the US latest planners, searching an average of 52 days out. California on the other hand, averages 65 lead time for their trip searches. Understanding that each state is different, and treating them accordingly, will make your travel marketing efforts strategic and timely.

3. The fastest rising international destinations include Cuba and Iceland. Cuba is seeing a 50% increase in US travel, and a 67% increase in Canadian travel from last year to this year. Iceland is also up 50% in US interest and 37% for Canadian travelers.

Knowing the emerging markets means if youre a marketer in that area, you can get a big bang for your buckride the rising tide of interest with more ads to North American travelers. Alternatively, if your destination is losing US interest, knowing where its going can help you plan proactively and try to steal interest away.

4. France and Japan are on the upswing. For most popular destinations, France and Japan jumped up in ranking for popular destinations for both Canada and US. For US travelers, Japan is up three spots and France is also up three.

For Canadian travelers, Japan rose one spot while France jumped up two spots to claim the number one most popular international destination. Understanding the popular destinations and how theyve changed over time can give you insights into what markets are hot for your destination and which are not.

Want more North American travel insights? Get our latest report!

About Catlyn

Catlyn is Sojern's Content Marketing Manager. She loves playing video games and hiking with her dog, Dottie. Her favorite part of travel is the food, preferring street food to fine dining.
If youve been on social media today, youve likely heard about another senseless killing of a black man, Terence Crutcher, by a police officer.

The Oklahoma residents SUV reportedly broke down on September 16th, exactly a month after Crutchers 40th birthday, when the police responded to a 911 call about the car. As we reported on earlier today, police dash cam footage shows Crutcher walking back to his SUV with his hands above his head, when one office tased him and another office shoots him. The conversation between the two officers in the dash cam footage is also incredulous Time for a Taser, I think, an officer can be heard saying, while another says, That looks like a bad dude, too.

Were sending our condolences to Crutchers family at this extremely difficult time. Celebrities have been reacting to the news of Crutchers death across the web today. Take a look at some of the reactions below.

Well update you as the police investigation into Crutchers murder continues. R.I.P.

Terence Crutcher
It appears Kanye West has had a change heart since he angrily fired back at Kid Cudis response last week in Tampa Bay during his Saint Pablo Tour. On Tuesday night, the Chicago legend was in Houston for the latest stop of the Saint Pablo tour, where he had nothing but nice things to say about his former collaborator & G.O.O.D Music partner.

In footage thats circulating online, Ye can be heard calling Cudi one of the most influential artists of the last 10 years and sends him well wishes after calling him my brother. No word for why the sudden change of feelings, but its definitely for the better.

I just wanna take this time out to say Kid Cudi is my brother and I hope hes doing well. Hes the most influential artist of the past ten years.

Peep the fan-captured footage (below).

Kanye West
The Wall Street Journal posted an article back in April that linked to a site called Fact Check Armenia, which called the killing of over 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Government in 1915 propaganda rather than genocide. Kim Kardashian West, who is of Armenian descent, took great offense to the article- and the fact that the Wall Street Journal even published it.

Outraged, Kim put pen to paper and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, blasting the Wall Street Journal for their report and shedding some light on the facts of the matter.

Its one thing when a crappy tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocide  its shameful and unacceptable. Advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for it  thats not publishing a provocative viewpoint, thats spreading lies. When we allow ourselves to be silenced by money, by fear and by power, we teach our children that truth is irrelevant. We have to be responsible for the message we pass on to our children. We have to honor the TRUTH in our history so that we protect their future. We have to do better than this.

This isnt the first time that Kim has spoken out about the Armenian genocide though. Just last year she wrote an open letter to President Obama in TIME, asking him to label the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide.

You can check out her full-page ad in the gallery above.

Kim Kardashian
Serzh Sargsyan receives congratulatory messages

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence, Serzh Sargsyan received congratulatory messages from heads of foreign States, international organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, clergy representatives and individuals. RF President Vladimir Putin congratulated Serzh Sargsyan on Armenias national holiday. The message reads in part: Dear Serzh Azatovich, I cordially congratulate you on your National Holiday - Independence Day. Deeply rooted in history, relations between Armenia and Russia are developing in the spirit of strategic partnership, enriched with promising projects in different sectors. It is largely facilitated by our States integration-driven close cooperation in the Eurasian Economic Union, CSTO and CIS. I am convinced that aimed at addressing urgent issues of regional and international relevance, through joint efforts we will provide for the development of the whole complex of strategic relations and constructive cooperation. This undoubtedly is in the best interest of the fraternal peoples of our two countries. Dear Serzh Azatovich,, I wish you good health, happiness and every success. Also, I wish peace, prosperity and progress to all your citizens. President of the United States Barack Obama sent a congratulatory message to Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Independence Day of the Republic of Armenia. Dear Mr. President, On behalf of the United States, I congratulate you and the people of Armenia as you celebrate 25 years of independence this September 21. The United States has been a steadfast partner of Armenia from the first days of its independence. We remain committed to the promise of those early years, when Armenians proudly raised their tricolor flag for the first time since 1920. Today, we again affirm our belief that a secure, prosperous, and democratic Armenia is essential for the security for the Armenian people and for the region more broadly. We thank Armenia for its support of our shared goals, particularly its response to the Syrian refugee crisis and its contributions to global peacekeeping operations and nuclear security. We will continue to work together to help Armenia realize its full potential. I wish you and the people of Armenia all the best as you celebrate 25 years independence, the U.S. Presidents congratulatory message says. President Francois Hollande of the French Republic sent a congratulatory message to Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of the Holiday. Mr. President, On the occasion of the national holiday of the Republic of Armenia, I am pleased to extend to you, as well as the whole Armenian people my best wishes for happiness, prosperity and success. Armenia can be proud of the path covered during 25 years of independence, where it often met with numerous challenges and a difficult regional environment. I know that the people of Armenia will be able to continue with their efforts toward stability, democracy and development. As you may know, our historically deeply-rooted relations are dear to me. Rest assured, Mr. President, I will advocate and support any link that binds our two countries. In conclusion, let me reaffirm my commitment to finding a fair and lasting settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. As I had the opportunity to tell you during our Warsaw meeting on July 9, I am ready to host a meeting in Paris with a view to consolidating the ongoing peace process and discussing measures for the advancement of this extremely lengthy conflict, the message of the French President says. President Xi Jinping of the Peoples Republic of China sent a congratulatory message to Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of Independence Day Excellency, On the 25th anniversary of Armenias independence, on behalf of the Government and the people of the Peoples Republic of China, as well as on my own behalf, I offer heartfelt congratulations and best wishes to you and, in your person, to the people of the Republic of Armenia. During the past 25 years of independence, Armenia has achieved significant success in various fields of activity. Under your leadership, Armenia has maintained political stability, along with developed national economy and increasingly growing living standards. China is sincerely happy for it. Attaching great importance to the development of relations between China and Armenia, I stand ready to join our efforts toward advancing bilateral ties and cooperation in all areas to achieve new progress to the benefit of our countries and peoples. I wish prosperity to the Republic of Armenia, and happiness - to its people. I wish you good health and all the best, the Chinese President said in his message. On Armenias Independence Day, President of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic Bako Sahakyan sent a congratulatory message to Serzh Sargsyan. Honorable Serzh Azatovich, On behalf of the people and authorities of the Republic of Artsakh and my own behalf, I cordially congratulate you on the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence, a holiday, which is dear and memorable for all of us in Armenia, Artsakh and the Diaspora. The Armenian people had a centuries-old desire to restore their statehood and live freely and independently. Our national dream came true in September 1991 when the two Armenian Republics were founded on the ancient Armenian land. The whole Armenian nation embarked on the way of building the Armenian statehood, persistently overcoming numerous challenges and difficulties and registering brilliant victories. We are confident that the Republic of Armenia will be able to overcome all of the existing problems, and the Armenian people will live a proud and dignified life. Distinguished Mr. President, I once again congratulate you and all our compatriots on this glorious holiday and wish peace, wellbeing and great achievements to Mother Armenia and our people, the congratulatory message of the NKR President says. The congratulatory message of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, addressed to the President of the Republic of Armenia, reads as follows: It gives me great pleasure to send your Excellency my congratulations on the celebration of your National Day, in the year in which Republic of Armenia celebrates 25 years of independence, together with my best whishes for the people of Armenia in the coming year. Serzh Sargsyan received a congratulatory message from Federal President of Germany Joachim Gauck. The message reads in part: Mr. President, On behalf of my fellow countrymen and myself, I offer heartfelt congratulations to you and your compatriots on the 25th anniversary of declaration of Armenias independence. German-Armenian ties have developed over the past 25 years to grow into a close and trusting friendship as evidenced by your visit to Germany in April this year. Supportive of Armenias commitment to continue political and economic rapprochement with the EU after joining the Eurasian Economic Union, Germany will back your country as a partner nation. The settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is of paramount importance to your country. As the presiding country of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Germany is willing to contribute to the speedy and peaceful resolution of conflict. In addition to my independence-dated congratulations, I offer my best wishes for your personal well-being, as well as for your countrys peaceful, free and prosperous future. Serzh Sargsyan received congratulations and best wishes from Emperor of Japan Akihito, Swedens King Carl Gustav XVI, Belgiums King Philippe, President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo, President of the United Mexican States Enrique Pena Nieto, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, Australian Union Governor-General Peter Kosgrove, Republic of Moldova President Nicolae Timofti, President of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq Haider al-Abadi. Serzh Sargsyan keeps receiving congratulatory messages on the occasion of Armenias Independence Day.
If you had told me five years ago that one day, Mac Miller would be making expansive jazz-rap concept albums about dating one of the countrys most talented and attractive pop stars, I would have either called you crazy or offed myself before I arrived in a future that held such a terrifying prospect. 2011 Mac was part of the post-I Love College frat rapper wave that also included Hoodie Allen, Sammy Adams, and Mike Stud, and even though he claimed that he hate[d] college parties at the time, his weed, booze, and girls-focused music fit right in with his more Greek Life-oriented contemporaries. He wasnt outright abhorrent in the way that modern-day Lil Dicky is, but in his early days, he was part of one of the most regrettable music scenes of this century. However, much like the guy responsible for the definitive frat rap anthem, Mac eventually grew up and out of his Kickin Incredibly Dope Shit phase.

Hoodie Allen moved onto pop music, Sammy Adams and Mike Stud are still touring college towns and seem to have never grown up, but Asher Roth quickly ditched the, Heres your song about weed, and heres your girl song, and heres your club banger approach that he said he disliked about his early work, and did his own thing. His later projects havent sold well or captured much of the medias attention, but at least theyre honest and purposeful. As Max Goldberg wrote in his excellent guide to frat rap a couple of years ago, it feels like Asher made a blueprint that Mac Miller not only followed but mastered, and since then, Macs only gone further afield from his beginnings and gotten even better.

Ill admit that the first thing that got me to show an iota of respect towards Mac was a beat by one of my favorite producers, Flying Lotus, on his track S.D.S. in 2013, and I still never thought Id overcome my grudge. Then came Watching Movies With The Sound Off, which may have been a tad scatterbrained, but was at least interesting and had a handful of great tracks. Then Faces, despite its length, blew me away with its inventive tracks and collaborations with some of the finest minds in hip hop. Then GO:OD AM topped that! I still wouldnt say Im head-over-heels about any of those projects, but the progression was undeniable. In the time it takes to get an undergrad degree, Mac Miller transformed from a Wiz Khalifa wannabe with an teaspoon-sized capacity for original thought to a songwriting and production wizard whos best friends with every forward-thinking musician in L.A. Whats more, he kicked his drug problem along the way. You usually only see this degree of consistent evolution and maturation in artists who take two or three years between albums, but since Mac released I Love Life, Thank You almost exactly five years ago, each of his seven ensuing projects (not counting live albums or ones released under pseudonyms) has been better than the last.

The Divine Feminine fits right in line with Macs existing trajectory, meaning that its far and away his best album, and that it makes direct improvements on its predecessor. The problems that WMWTSO, Faces, and GO:OD AM all shared were their length and lack of focus, and even though the 53-minute TDF was originally an EP project that spiraled out into a full-length, its cohesiveness and relative brevity read as a wise response to the most common critiques Macs received in years past. This would reflect poorly on the project if it felt uncomfortably cramped, but in actuality, the opposites true. Songs are given room to breathe, often ebbing and flowing past the five-minute mark, and although Im unwilling to calculate it, Id bet that TDF has the least words-per-minute of any Mac project. Relaxed and confident, Mac comes through with an album thats just as much jazz and R&B as it is hip hop.

Much like Isaiah Rashads recent Suns Tirade, all of TDFs songs sound like theyre part of the same body of work despite the fact that a wide array of producers, and an even wider array of session musicians, collaborated on them. GO:OD AM personnel I.D. Labs, Frank Dukes, DJ Dahi, and Thundercat return, and Mac also gets valuable assists from R&B killer JMSN, space funk master (and former Snoop Dogg collaborator) Dam-Funk, jazz keyboardist Robert Glasper, and TDE mainstay Tae Beast. Although all the above have distinctive styles and knock around in different music scenes, throw all of them on a scatter plot based on genre, and TDF forms a pretty logical line of best fit. Theres delicate piano riffs, tastefully subtle funk, languid jazz horns, in-the-pocket grooves, and minimal-but-hard modern rap drums, all wrapped in strings (courtesy of Juilliard students) to give things a more cinematic feel. As he showed on last years great two-part banger 100 Grandkids, Mac is an expert at finding various grooves in the same melodic backdrop and letting songs evolve in a seemingly organic fashion, so no matter the genre him and his collaborators are playing with, everythings bound together by his deft rhythmic sensibility. Concept albums are usually best when the music matches the lyrics attention to thematic consistency, and TDF achieves that with ease, its music overshadowing Macs attempts at boiling down the idea of love into an album-length summary.

While hes undoubtedly had some explosive lyrical moments (Diablo and his verse on Riff Raffs Aquaberry Dolphin spring to mind), Macs rapping has failed to capture my attention as much as his talent as a producer and collaborator. That holds true on TDF, which has its fair share of awkward lines (I do you like a chore, Your legs like a store, they open up and you got people in the aisle), but again, this is the Mac Miller album with the least bars-per-second, so just by virtue of scarcity, his rapping is more bearable. Where he has noticeably improved is his singing, which is still ragged and a bit nasally, but is now inoffensive and even beautiful at times, such as the end of Cinderella or the harmonizing with Ariana Grande on My Favorite Part. The latter even had Mac surprised at the result. Our voices sound so nice together, he said recently in an interview, Youd expect to hear us sing together and go, She makes him sound like an idiot.' That self-deprecating sincerity makes Macs clunkiness, as well as his lyrical and conceptual shortcomings, endearing, in a way that reminds me of two actors that are clearly among his favorites.

Robin Williams (sampled on Soulmate) and Bill Murray (previously sampled on Faces It Just Doesnt Matter) began their careers as exuberant slapstick comedians, the former on 70s sitcom Mork And Mindy, the latter on frat comedies Meatballs and Caddyshack, but eventually grew into misty-eyed sad clowns equally adept at inciting laughter and tears. Having been through the tumult of drug addiction, Macs gained some life experience and moved away from the happy-go-lucky weed raps of his youth. WMWTSO and Faces both dealt with the black comedy Williams and Murray are known for, with Mac laughing in the face of his demons, and even now that hes in a better headspace, some of that melancholic sense of mortality has followed him. When hes singing the parts of TDF that arent explicitly happy or sex-focused, I can envision him looking at Grande like Murray looks at Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation: enamored, longing, and just under the surface, a little sad. Hes come a long way from his Best Day Ever, but it continues to seem like his best days are ahead of him.
The Midnight Navy Air Jordan XVI, thats Air Jordan 16 for those who arent roman numeral experts, is making a return 15 years after the original release, but they wont come cheap.

The bizarre looking Air Jordans, complete with the tumbled leather, removable shroud, will reportedly retail for $250, similar to the way the Copper Air Jordan 17s were priced. Many sneakerheads will agree that the Air Jordan line fell off after the 14s, but theres still plenty of folks who will be happy to see this cult classic returning- even if its with an increased price tag.

A release date has been pegged for next Thursday, December 22nd. You can check out official images of what to expect from the Midnight Navy Air Jordan XVI in the gallery above.

Would you like to see Jordan Brand keep going with the 16s and bring back colorways like the Ginger and Black/Varsity Red or should they shut it down after this release?

Air Jordan 16
Tickets go on sale this Friday, 23 September at 9am

With the imminent announcement of their new album Valuables, Enemies will play their biggest headline show to date, at Dublins Vicar St on December 18.

With a lifespan of almost ten years behind them, Wicklow 4-piece Enemies continue surprising listeners by constantly tweaking and perfecting their own brand of intelligent, pop-infused rock. Not content to fit neatly into any particular category or sub-genre, the band are consciously evolving their sound into something that goes beyond the labels of math or post-rock.

Enemies have become synonymous with powerful live performances featuring intricate, yet melodic guitar lines played over groove-focused bass & drums.

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Tickets priced 20 go on sale this Friday, 23 September, at 9am.
The Dublin pop-R&B trio are heading for the biggest European music showcase of the year

RTE 2fm has nominated Dublin trio Hare Squead to represent Ireland at Europes largest music industry event, Eurosonic Festival, in Groningen, The Netherlands, which takes place 11th  14th January 2017.

Hare Squead have burst onto the music scene with an infectious and dominating pop sound, along with an explosive live show, and theyre ready to unleash it on an international audience at Eurosonic; the festival renowned as the biggest hunting ground in Europe for festival bookers, agents, promoters and radio stations across the continent.

Musicians from a young age, Hare Squead members E-Knock, Tony Konstone, and Jessy came together through a love of skating, song-writing, flexing, and bonhomie. Having just signed to Columbia Records UK, Hare Squead are definitely ones to watch.

As one of the founder radio partners of Eurosonic, 2fm has picked a top Irish act to represent Ireland since the festival began. Hare Squead will join the ranks of previously-selected 2fm acts such as The Academic, The Riptide Movement, The Strypes, Little Green Cars, The Frames, James Vincent McMorrow, The Coronas, Cathy Davey, God Is an Astronaut, Heathers, Julie Feeney and JJ72.

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Each year, countries from around Europe send their freshest, most promising acts to showcase their wares at the major, city-wide festival in the university city of Groningen. Over 40,000 industry professionals and music lovers converge on the city to hear the best up-and-comers in Europe perform in 50 diverse, intimate and eclectic venues. It is the key exchange and networking platform for European music, with a proven track record for helping new acts break into the international music scene.

Eurosonic has been instrumental in kick-starting the careers of top European acts such as Kodaline, George Ezra, Hozier, Jungle, Milky Chance, Villagers and Royal Blood after industry heavyweights from across the continent saw them perform live at the festival.
These are exciting times for Seana Kerslake whose star on both sides of the Atlantic is firmly in the ascent.

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Twenty-one states including Texas sued the U.S. Department of Labor on Tuesday, seeking to stop the Obama administration's implementation of new overtime rules set to go into effect in December.

A similar case also was filed Tuesday by a group of trade associations and chambers of commerce, including many in the Houston area such as Clear Lake, Baytown and Galveston. Among the trade associations that signed on to the case include the National Association of Manufacturers, National Retail Federation and Associated Builders and Contractors.
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WASHINGTON - The more the chief executive of Wells Fargo tried to explain, the more skeptical the senators became.

For more than two hours testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, John Stumpf expressed regret that Wells Fargo had created as many as 2 million bogus bank and credit card accounts without its customers' consent. He apologized for failing to stop the illicit behavior sooner and vowed to make amends.

Some of the senators on the committee scoffed. Stumpf, they said, was offering little more than platitudes while allowing his top executives to avoid any real consequences - like being fired or having their enormous pay packages clawed back.

Instead, the bank's lowest-paid workers have borne the brunt of the punishment, the senators noted. Senior management, they said, seemed to ignore this practice because it helped turn the bank into a profit machine.

Addressing Stumpf directly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren took the unusual step of telling the bank chief executive that he should resign.

"Have you returned one nickel of the money that you earned while this scandal was going on?" asked Warren, D-Mass. "Have you have fired any senior management, the people who actually oversaw this fraud?"

"No," Stumpf answered.

Warren added: "Your definition of accountability is to push this on your low-level employees. This is gutless leadership."

Easy to understand

It has been several years since a banking scandal has consumed Wall Street and Washington the way Wells Fargo's problems have in recent weeks. The extent of the problems came to light on Sept. 8, when Wells Fargo agreed to a $185 million settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Los Angeles city attorney.

Unlike some of the arcane trading scandals that have befallen large investment banks recently, the illicit activity at Wells Fargo is easy for the public to comprehend: Bank employees were creating fake bank accounts to pad their sales numbers.

As a result, thousands of Wells Fargo customers nationwide paid overdraft fees and late fees on credit cards and deposit accounts they never knew they had. The bank has refunded more than $2 million to its customers and is still reviewing whether other bogus fees were charged.

The bank has said that it learned about the illegal practice in 2013 and traced it back to 2011, but in his deposition on Tuesday, Stumpf said that the unwanted account openings may have started earlier and that the bank was looking to see if it extended as far back as 2009.

The Banking Committee, one member noted on Tuesday, showed a rare display of bipartisanship in denouncing Wells Fargo.

Stumpf's testimony is likely to fuel public outrage rather than contain it.

Stumpf disagreed with senators when they described the illicit sales as part of a deliberate scheme to increase the bank's bottom line. He said the 5,300 employees who had been terminated over the issue - many of them earning $12 an hour - deserved to lose their jobs.

"The 5,300 were dishonest, and that is not part of our culture," Stumpf said. "That is not scapegoating."

Stumpf said the employees who were fired included "managers, and managers of managers, and an area president."

They ranged in pay from about $35,000 to $65,000.

The 63-year-old chairman and chief executive's right hand was wrapped in a large bandage. A Wells Fargo spokeswoman said that Stumpf had hurt his hand playing with his grandchildren.

He was repeatedly asked whether he would seek to claw back compensation from top executives who should have done more to stop creation of the sham accounts.

Many of those questions centered on Carrie Tolstedt, who ran Wells Fargo's community banking operations, in which all of the problems occurred. She was allowed to retire at age 56 in July, with a compensation package totaling tens of millions of dollars. She is still eligible for additional compensation this year, the Senate panel revealed.

"Explain to the public: What does accountability look like when an executive departs with millions of dollars?" asked Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the committee's chairman.

Stumpf said he had talked weekly with Tolstedt, first discussing the problem with the fake accounts in 2013, the same year it was exposed in a Los Angeles Times article.

Yet, the illegal activity continued for another three years, and employees were still being fired for creating the questionable accounts well into this year.

Despite this, Stumpf said he had not wanted to fire Tolstedt because she had performed well in other duties like branding and improving customer loyalty, which he said were "top of class" among large banks.

Up to the board

Stumpf said that the decision on getting back compensation rested squarely with the bank's board. Even though it was pointed out to Stumpf by the committee that he was the board's chairman, he was adamant that he could not get involved.

He suggested that the board would also consider whether he should also lose some of his compensation, which last year totaled more than $19 million.

But Stumpf did not say whether he thought his pay - the highest among the nation's top bank executives over the last five years - should be docked.

"You keep saying, 'the board, the board,'" Warren said. "You describe them like they are strangers you met in a dark alley. Mr. Stumpf, you are the chairman of the board."

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo faces a separate investigation by the House Financial Services Committee. Stumpf has been invited to testify before that committee too.

Prosecutors in New York, North Carolina and California have opened inquiries into the sham accounts. But it is too early to say whether those investigations are focusing on potentially criminal behavior or civil offenses.
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If you think the North American Free Trade Agreement exported too many jobs, allowed big corporations to exploit workers and damaged the environment, then you should support the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The usual anti-trade activists would have you believe the TPP is nothing more than NAFTA on steroids, a new way to move factories overseas, boost corporate profits and hurt American workers. But in reality the TPP would dramatically lower barriers to U.S. goods and, for the first time, allow financial sanctions against countries that abuse workers or pollute.

In short, it is an opportunity to improve existing trade deals, and we'd be foolish to pass it up.

The TPP would overhaul NAFTA and expand trade with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. China would not be included.

A key misconception is that TPP would increase the flow of cheap, foreign goods and encourage U.S. companies to move overseas. But in fact, 80 percent of goods from TPP countries already enter duty-free, and while the TPP would decrease tariffs on most of the other goods, other nations are required to drop much higher tariffs on U.S. goods.

"We face 70 percent tariffs on autos, 35 percent on chemicals, 55 percent on machinery, 50 percent on beef, 40 percent on poultry, 30 percent on cowboy boots, and all of those tariffs would go to zero or be greatly reduced," U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in an interview before speaking at Rice University's Baker Institute. Froman is President Barack Obama's top trade adviser and completed the TPP negotiations.

"We are disproportionately opening other markets since we already have an open market," he added.

The TPP is unlike previous trade agreements that created a list of goods and services and then forged rules about tariffs and quotas. The TPP aims to create a broader framework that establishes principles for trade in any good or service.

Another key difference from NAFTA is that policies enforcing labor and environmental standards, intellectual property rights, freedom of digital commerce and limits on government-owned companies are written into the agreement, and any country violating them will suffer punitive sanctions.

"We're raising these standards in other countries, which makes it a more level playing field and creates more incentives to keep production here, rather than moving abroad," Froman said. "If TPP doesn't move forward, then we don't have the ability to enforce labor rights in Mexico or any other TPP country."

By eliminating other countries' tariffs, the advantage of moving a factory disappears, since U.S. technology and worker productivity more than make up for lower wages elsewhere.

Globalization will always mean that low-skilled jobs will move to where labor is cheapest. Some Chinese companies have moved factories to Africa because Asian labor is too expensive. But with 95 percent of the growth in the global middle class taking place outside the United States, our companies need access to those markets to export goods and create more high-skilled U.S. jobs.

Houston is the classic example. This city, and this state, are the largest exporters in the United States. Skilled labor is in such high demand that hundreds of thousands of people have moved here over the last decade. And while the collapse in oil prices has hurt the energy industry, other sectors, including non-energy manufacturing, are still hiring.

Critics blast the TPP because it includes a mechanism for corporations to bring a complaint about government regulation using the Investor-State Dispute Settlement arbitration system, which exists in more than 3,100 trade agreements, 51 of which include the United States.

Critics say the Investor-State Dispute Settlement system allows companies to force governments to repeal labor and environmental laws, and while there have been abuses overseas, the U.S. government has never lost a case. Again, the TPP would improve this system.

"We're sympathetic to a lot of the criticisms of ISDS. We want to make sure governments have the right to regulate, that you can't overturn a regulation through ISDS, and that you can't file frivolous cases," Froman said. "We closed certain loopholes that exist in other countries' agreements. We've raised the standard to make it more difficult to bring these cases."

The TPP is also critical to maintaining U.S. leadership. China is offering an alternative to the TPP called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. That trade deal would include 16 countries and would not have any provisions for labor, food safety, environmental protection or government procurement.

James Baker III, former President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and the Baker Institute's namesake, said the TPP is essential to improving trade and protecting national security.

"Trade is the foundation of our prosperity and our international influence. The TPP is too important an issue to be decided by political posturing and pandering," Baker said. "Failure to pass the agreement will cede economic and strategic leadership in Asia to China and other countries."

Read the TPP for yourself. It's online at ustr.gov/tpp/. The TPP is not more of the same old stuff. It could make trade fairer and freer, and therefore it deserves our support.
Arguments over the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan start at the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. next week, which means it's time to start talking about the odds of this landmark rule ever going into effect  and what happens either way.

The rule, issued a year ago, directs states to reduce emissions from power plants. You may be familiar with the basic outlines of the debate.

Coal companies and the 29 states suing the federal government over the rule say that compliance will make electricity dramatically more expensive, and the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its legal authority in requiring it anyway. Environmentalists point to the Supreme Court's decision upholding the EPA's authority to regulate carbon dioxide, and argue that many states are already well on their way to meeting targets the Clean Power Plan sets, which are essential to prevent catastrophic levels of global warming.

But here's an argument that's somewhat novel, of the "hurting the people you're really trying to help" variety.

On Tuesday night, at a debate put on by the University of Houston, lawyers for coal, oil and gas companies faced off against representatives from environmental groups over the legality and the merits of the Clean Power Plan. Mark Walters, an Austin-based attorney at Jackson Walker who used to work in the environmental division of the Texas Attorney General's office, claimed that in abandoning its dirtiest source of power  coal  the United States would abdicate its responsibility to help developing countries that have no other option.

Curbing climate change, he added, won't happen without China and India, which rely heavily on coal to power their fast-growing economies.

"India is going to continue to use coal to create power, they don't have a cheap natural gas option," Walters said. "The road not taken here is that we are giving up the chance to develop the technology that would allow these countries to continue to provide this power to their citizens while keeping their carbon emissions under control."

So, is that true? Could ditching coal be counterproductive for global climate progress, even as it helps the United States meet its emissions goals? There are a few reasons to be skeptical.

First of all, countries like China have already made lots of progress in making their coal plants more efficient, both using their own scientists and with international help. That's in response to China's commitment to shut down its most polluting power plants by 2020, and introduce a carbon market that would incentivize cleaner technology. Even the most advanced plants still aren't great from a carbon emissions standpoint, but it's not as if improvement is impossible without American involvement.

Second of all, Americans have been trying to come up with technology that could let us burn coal without consequences. Or at least, the federal government has; private coal companies haven't put much of their own money into cutting edge research. And so far, those big projects have been abject failures, most recently at Southern Company's Kemper plant in Mississippi. That doesn't mean there couldn't be a huge breakthrough in carbon capture and storage, but at this point it seems about as likely as curing cancer, and burning coal until that happens would cause further damage.

Finally, requiring states to find their power elsewhere would force them to more aggressively pursue solar, wind, energy storage, and energy efficiency. That will accelerate the development of technology that can then be shared with others, allowing the Indias and Chinas of the world to wean themselves off coal over time. That seems like a better use of America's innovative capacity than making a polluting source of energy into something it's not.
Artsakh President sends congratulatory address to Serzh Sargsyan

On 21 September, Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan sent a congratulatory address to President of the Republic of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, in connection with the Independence Day. The address runs as follows: "Respectful President Sargsyan, On behalf of the people and authorities of the Artsakh Republic and personally myself I cordially congratulate You on the 25th anniversary of the Republic of Armenia's Independence, a holiday, which is dear and memorable for all of us in Armenia, Artsakh and the Diaspora. The Armenian people had a century-long desire to restore its statehood and live freely and independently. Our national dream came true in September of 1991 when the two Armenian republics were proclaimed on the ancient Armenian land. The whole Armenian nation embarked on the way of building the Armenian statehood persistently overcoming numerous challenges and difficulties, gaining brilliant victories. We are confident that all the issues will be solved in the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian people will live a proud and worthy life. Respected Mr. President, I once again congratulate You and all our compatriots on this glorious holiday and wish peace, welfare and great achievements to Mother Armenia and our people".
The Texas Legislature does not reconvene until January, but school officials already are prepping to lobby. The Houston school district's internal lobbyist recently met with school board members to discuss their priorities.

As the state's largest district, Houston tries to drive the agenda, at least for urban school systems. Here are seven key education issues to watch as lawmakers gear up for the 2017 session, based on the talk in Houston:

1. School finance  Districts across the state no doubt want funding to be front and center in the session, but the Texas Supreme Court didn't do them any favors by ruling in May that the school-finance system was constitutional. Still, interim committees have been studying certain key issues at the request of House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio. One of those issues involves the growing reliance on the so-called recapture, or Robin Hood, system, which requires property-rich districts to forfeit local property tax dollars to the state to help fund poorer districts. The Houston Independent School District expects to owe $162 million in 2017  its first-ever major recapture payment. As Ashlea Graves, HISD's internal lobbyist put it, getting the district out of recapture status is "all we want for Christmas."

Graves also warned the school board about a potential move to base funding on academic performance. Such a system could deal another financial blow to HISD, which has the most academically low-rated schools in the state.

2. School choice  Call it vouchers or tax credits or savings accounts, the concept of spending taxpayer dollars on private schools (or private tutoring or private online classes) is spurring intense debate again after a failed attempt in 2015. Senate Education Chairman Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, invited advocates of the idea to testify at a hearing this month  two days after opponents held a news conference in anticipation of the ongoing interest by Senate Republicans, led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Houston.

3. Pre-kindergarten  Lawmakers in 2015 approved a pre-kindergarten grant program aimed at improving the quality of early childhood education, a priority of Gov. Greg Abbott. Roughly half of the state's districts and charter operators shared the $117 million. The question for lawmakers in 2017 is whether they will continue the grant, slate the money as part of the regular school-funding formula (districts can dream), or scrap it entirely. The Texas Education Agency has asked for the grant funding to continue and double, requesting $117.7 million in year one and also in year two of the biennium.

As a temporary grant program, many districts have been reluctant to spend the money on hiring staff to reduce class sizes  a key indicator of quality. During a legislative hearing over the summer, some lawmakers questioned whether the results of pre-K last as students get older, offering a preview of the looming debate on an issue that used to unite Democrats and Republicans.

4. Special education  A recent opinion by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton likely will lead lawmakers to revise a bill requiring video cameras in certain special-education classrooms. Paxton said the 2015 bill was written so broadly that a request by one parent would require cameras across the district, which could be costly.

Several lawmakers also have committed to reviewing the state's unusually low target for special-education enrollment following a recent investigative report by the Houston Chronicle's Brian Rosenthal. HISD's draft legislative agenda speaks broadly to the issue of special-education, expressing support for ensuring that "students with special needs receive the support and access to services they require." The district's draft agenda also mentioned pushing for funding to evaluate virtual-school students who live across the state who may need special-education services.

5. Testing and accountability  To the dismay of many parents, Graves of HISD said she does not predict a major overhaul to the state's standardized testing requirements or to the school rating system. However, a committee ordered by the 2015 Legislature to study assessments and accountability did recommend several changes in an Aug. 1 report. The committee's proposal included allowing the use of locally developed writing exams, instead of the standardized ones that are part of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. The STAAR writing exams are given at grades 4 and 7 and in high school.

The committee also called for streamlining the state's curriculum standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, and for testing only those "that are most critical to student success." In addition, the committee proposed extending the exception that allows school committees to graduate students who fail one or two of the five required state high school exams. The state also may have to tweak its accountability system to fall in line with new federal requirements.

6. Transparency  School districts seeking voter approval for bond measures could be required to include more detailed information on the ballot under expected bills. Graves expressed concern about the idea, prompting questions from Houston school board Anna Eastman, who said more transparency with voters sounded like a good thing. Houston attorney David Thompson, who represents HISD and numerous other districts, said he saw the move by lawmakers as a way to intervene in local politics and to sway voters against bond measures.

Lawmakers also may try to require school board members to disclose more information about possible conflicts of interest and to focus on professional ethics. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, has said he plans to file a bill to give the Texas Education Agency more investigative powers in light of the Houston school board pushing out its chief auditor and other issues.

7. Dual credit  The state's higher education commissioner, Raymund Paredes, has expressed concern that dual-credit courses, which allow students to earn both high school and college credit, are not challenging enough. In turn, school district officials are worried the state may try to scale back the options. Districts increasingly have turned to dual-credit as an alternative to the Advanced Placement program. In AP, students must pass a standardized test to quality for college credit  a process that some argue helps ensure quality control. Another issue for lawmakers: Dual-credit courses are supposed to automatically translate into college credit at the state's public colleges, but some students have reported problems with the classes counting only as electives.

Lawmakers can start pre-filing bills Nov. 14. The session starts Jan. 10. The final bill filing deadline is in March.
A local group of Native Americans on Tuesday asked the City Council to stop celebrating Columbus Day and instead mark Indigenous Peoples' Day on the federal holiday named for the Italian explorer.

Christopher Columbus "did not discover us," Anna Edwards, a member of the Ohkay Owingeh tribe, told council members at their meeting. "In fact, we discovered him lost at sea. When he set foot on this land, it was not barren and desolate. But instead there were over 400 independent nations that covered the northern and southern continents, rich with our own governments, culture, and rich with our own histories."

Tuesday's pleas follow several years of efforts by local Native Americans to end the celebration of Columbus Day in the nation's fourth-largest city. Indigenous Peoples' Day is also known as Native American Day.

Plans to return monthly

Chance Landry, founder of the Southern Apache Museum in Houston, said she and other Native Americans have gathered for the last four years at Bell Park in front of the Columbus statue to protest the holiday. This was their first time addressing city council members, and the group plans to keep coming back every month until something changes.

City council members acknowledged the group's frustrations, but declined Tuesday to change the holiday.

Columbus Day honors Columbus' arrival to the Americas in 1492, but the holiday has been met with criticism because European settlement led to the enslavement and death of indigenous peoples.

Seattle and Minneapolis are among the cities that already observe Indigenous Peoples' Day on the second Monday of October, which is the day Columbus Day is observed. Columbus Day has been a federal holiday in the U.S. since 1937, and many Italian-Americans consider it a day to celebrate their heritage.

Berkeley, Calif., was the first city to recognize the holiday as Indigenous Peoples' Day in 1992. Other cities have followed suit. The group hopes Houston will be next.

"This is not an attack on any nationality at all," Landry said. "This is an attack on a sadistic individual who was ruthless, heartless, and a serial killer who condoned slavery and murder, and should not be hailed for landing by happenstance in the wrong place where a civilized society of people existed for thousands and thousands of years."

Other controversies

Some council members were sympathetic to the group's cause.

"We should not be celebrating something like this," council member Jerry Davis said. "We should acknowledge it, understand what happened, and what was wrong. I don't celebrate this holiday with my son and my daughters."

Council members also mentioned recent historical controversies, such as over a Mexican American Heritage textbook that characterizes Mexicans as lazy and the Houston school district's efforts to rename schools named after Confederate leaders.

"I know HISD spent over a million dollars trying to rename some schools named after Confederates and this is the very beginning with Columbus," council member Robert Gallegos said. "I commend what you're doing and hope you have luck on this."

Council members encouraged the group to continue having talks with city officials.

"It's sad when you study history and you learn of slavery and learn of the mistreatment of the native Indian tribes," council member Michael Kubosh said. "It's a very disturbing story. It's so heartbreaking to read it and understand it as an adult."
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A Texas woman's Twitter account had a new tweet the day after she was found dismembered and burned. Her accused killer, who was arrested Sunday in Fort Worth, posted strange things on his Facebook page before and after her death.

Jacqueline Vandagriff, 24 and from Frisco, was discovered in Acorn Woods Park on Wednesday by the Grapevine Fire Department. Charles Dean Bryant, 30, was charged with capital murder, according to the Grapevine Police Department.

READ MORE: Body found burned, dismembered in North Texas

On Sept. 13, the last night Vandagriff was seen alive, she tweeted that she was thinking of going on a date with a Tinder match but decided to go to the bar instead when the date fell through.

According to the Associated Press, Vandagriff and Bryant met at a bar in Denton on Sept. 13, the night before she died. The two were seen leaving a bar together at about 9:45 p.m.

READ MORE: Police release new photos of scene where man was dismembered, burned in San Antonio

That same night, Bryant left an eerie post on his Facebook page with a timestamp of 10:56 p.m.

On Thursday, the day after Vandagriff's body was found, a new tweet appeared on her Twitter account.

Bryant also posted a cryptic message on his Facebook page.

Other posts on Bryant's Facebook page have check-ins to different parks in Grapevine and Dallas. Bryant's posts between the time of Vandagriff's death and his arrest are similarly strange. "Early mornings and sleepless nights but she got you feeling alright," Bryant wrote on a Friday check-in at Colorado Park in Dallas.

Police have not commented on who was tweeting on Vandagriff's account after her body was found.

The Associated Press reports Bryant was arrested Sept. 6 by University of North Texas police for criminal trespass. On Sept. 7, Bryant was arrested again by UNT police, this time on a stalking charge. He posted bond at the Denton County jail on Sept. 9, the Associated Press reports.

Bryant's arrest warrant, which news station KXAS obtained, states Vandagriff's body was found in a blue plastic pool, similar to one Bryant owned. The warrant also reads Bryant was seen on video purchasing a shovel from Walmart at 4:40 a.m. Sept. 14.

Vandagriff's cell phone data indicates that she used it near Bryant's Haslet home, the warrant reads.

Bryant is held on $1 million bond in Vandagriff's death.
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AUSTIN - A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Texas to amend its voter ID education materials, including news releases, polling location posters and websites, to correctly conform with her earlier mandate, a rebuke of the state's $2.5 million outreach effort.

The Obama administration accused Texas earlier this month of using everything from a state website for voting to training documents for elections officials to narrow "dramatically the scope of voters protected" under a voter ID order signed last month by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos.

The U.S Department of Justice asked Ramos to force Texas to change the wording of public education and poll worker information moving forward and to ensure television and radio ads "accurately reflect the text of the Remedial Order."

Ramos on Tuesday sided with the Justice Department, ordering Texas to reissue voter ID press releases, revise websites with voting information, edit a poster to be used at polling locations and make sure all education materials reflect the court's order moving forward.

Ramos also required Texas to share copies of documents and scripts for radio and television ads with the Justice Department and several minority groups. However, the judge stopped short of requiring Texas to amend training materials for poll workers and election officials that already have been published.

"If it's possible to be fixed, it has to fixed," said Chad Dunn, a lawyer representing U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, and the League of United Latin American Citizens in the case. "The more the public has an understanding there's procedures in place to make voting secure and easy the better."

A July ruling from the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the state's voter ID law discriminates against minorities.

The appeals court ordered Ramos to soften the measure for the November election by providing a safety net for those lacking one of the seven acceptable forms of photo identification approved by lawmakers.

She did that last month with an order allowing voters to cast a regular ballot with an alternate ID, such as a voter registration card, utility bill or a bank statement, and by signing an affidavit declaring a "reasonable impediment" to obtaining one of the state-mandated identifications.

Legal brouhaha

Ramos also required Texas to inform voters and election officials about the changes, an effort state officials pledged $2.5 million to execute. Attorney General Ken Paxton agreed to the terms, which significantly dilute what once was considered the strictest voter ID law in the country.

The latest court quarrel arose in recent weeks as Texas started rolling out the early phases of its education effort.

The Justice Department argued Texas had recast the language of the court's order in public education materials and in poll worker documents in an attempt to limit voting eligibility to those with photo IDs or those who "have not obtained" and "cannot obtain" such identification.

The issue, essentially, boiled down to Texas excluding the word "reasonable" from some of the materials, according to the filing.

In court documents, Texas said its wording was in line with Ramos' mandate and argued that the Justice Department was trying to "bring the state's election machinery to a halt over the alleged omission of a single word in its voter education and election official training materials."

A Paxton spokesman on Tuesday said the state was pleased Ramos did not require it to amend all of its voting materials. The spokesman also said the state plans to file an appeal later this week on the 5th Circuit's decision with the U.S. Supreme Court, a move that Paxton's office first publicly signaled more than month ago.

"Our office still maintains the common-sense measures in Texas voter ID law are valid," spokesman Marc Rylander said in a statement.

Motion denied

Ramos on Tuesday also denied a motion from minority groups that stemmed from recent statements made to the news media by Paxton and Harris County's chief election official, Stan Stanart, a Republican.

The groups accused Paxton and Stanart of trying to intimidate voters by saying those who use the affidavit process put in place under the voter ID court order could be subject to investigation.

They had asked Ramos to issue an order to preclude Texas officials from making future statements that "turn this court's remedy into a threat."

Stanart said his messaging was vindicated by the court.

"What I said reflects what I think we've seen from the secretary of state," he said. "It also reflects what apparently the court agrees with because they didn't object to my statements."
STATEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARTSAKH

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Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

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There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

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The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces

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STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments

Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan

Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement

With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building

OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh

USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens
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In todays workplace, employers are challenged with the accurate capture of time & attendance of their employees. Mobile access to schedules, shift swaps, or employees owning multiple roles are just a few of the complexities that organizations are facing. Keeping track of employee hours is difficult even when employees are all following the right procedures. When employees are less than perfect it becomes even more difficult. Thats why the issue of time theft is plaguing countless organizations. As time theft has become a prevalent and ongoing problem, it has cost employers billions of dollars each year. Whether it is through buddy punching, taking extended breaks, or simply not being productive, employers are left paying employees for their time when no work has been completed. A 2015 study from Software Advice revealed that 43% of employees commit time theft. Employers can fight time theft by integrating modern HCM technology into their time and & attendance practices. Gone are the days when traditional time clocks sufficed. They require just a simple card swipe so buddy punching is easy. If youre late or leaving early, a work colleague could easily swipe in or out for you. Biometric clocks help with this but they can be problematic. Errors can occur in trying to match scans. Delays and long lines are frustrating. Employers need reliable time tracking solutions that provide accurate and detailed time & a...
Successful entrepreneurs thrive on active staff absence policies that reduce costs and maintain optimal productivity. In this article, we bring you a list of five things you should know about staff absence policy to improve your business. When I think back to some of my first jobs, I am quickly reminded of how strategic management and policy have the power to make an entrepreneurs dream come true, or crush it within a few months because the business owner failed to prepare for something like the cost of staff absence. During the summer between my junior and senior year of college, I had two full-time jobs at a couple of newer local restaurants. From 9 am to 4 pm I tossed salads for business professionals, lawyers and health nuts alongside coworkers who were mostly college and high school age students at the fast-casual restaurant Vinaigrette Salad Kitchen. My second job started at 5 pm, giving me about an hour to drive home, change clothes and think about all of the things I could be doing instead of working. From 5 pm to midnight I prepared overpriced appetizers, salads, and desserts at the French bakery-market-beer hall-restaurant National Provisions. Most of the staff were in their 20s or 30s and shared an appreciation for craft beers, cocktails, and creative expletives; a recipe for which the food service industry is known. Going from one restaurant to another had the effect of bringing out the types...
Addressing stress, poor time management, overworked employees and more Technology advances have made it possible to work smarter and faster. Yet, people seem to be putting in more and more hours each day. While productivity becomes the new mantra, stress levels are on the rise. The World Health Organization estimates the annual cost of employee stress-related expenses as $300 billion. With employee burnout staring everyone in the face, people have begun asking questions. So what is wrong with the workplace today? What are the key contributors of productivity? Does employee wellness play a crucial role in improving productivity? What role does work-life balance have in this? Is the open office a productivity thief? Does productivity and efficiency have to come at the cost of wellness and personal happiness? Will taking personal time continue to derail an employees success? Is walking out and quitting jobs the only option when employees want to lead an aesthetically good and enriched life? Does everything have to be an either /or option? Many future-ready organizations have identified that the key reasons for low productivity in their organization are stress, poor time management, low employee engagement and overworked employees. To address this, organizations need better workforce management, and towards that many have employed new technology by adding collaboration tools, making office design that is more conducive to productivity. Some h...
LONDONThe Court of Justice of the European Union has confirmed the EUs 2013 ban on cosmetic animal testing and trade with a verdict today that expressly forbids companies from relying on results from animal tests conducted outside of the EU after March 2013 to substantiate the safety of cosmetic products in the EU. Humane Society International welcomes the ruling as a win for animal welfare advocates. The European Federation for Cosmetics Ingredients brought the case seeking a narrower interpretation of the ban by the court, under which new animal tests conducted under legislation in non-EU countries could be used to substantiate the safety of cosmetics under EU law. Such a narrow interpretation would have rendered the EU ban toothless.

Help win more victories for animals used in experiments.

We are pleased that this cynical attempt by the industry to circumvent the EUs restrictions on cosmetics animal testing and sales has failed, said HSI #BeCrueltyFree campaign director Claire Mansfield. The courts ruling does justice to clear consumer demand for an end to cruel cosmetics, and reinforces the ongoing work of Humane Society Internationals global #BeCrueltyFree campaign to extend the EUs precedent-setting bans on cosmetics animal testing and trade to all major beauty markets. With this positive momentum we may be only a few years away from a world where cosmetics companies will have to go cruelty-free to remain profitable.

Humane Society International was a major player in convincing the EU to implement its 2013 sales ban on newly animal-tested cosmetic products and ingredients, and together with regional #BeCrueltyFree campaign partners was the leading force behind the adoption of similar bans in India, New Zealand and South Korea. #BeCrueltyFree campaign teams are currently working with the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Taiwan and other nations to enact additional air-tight bans. Become a Lab Animal Defender.

 30 

Media contacts:

Europe: Susie Wilks, swilks@hsi.org, +44 7900 953507

North America: Raul Arce-Contreras, rcontreras@humanesociety.org, +1 301-721-6440
Warren: Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?

Stumpf: First of all, this was by one per cent of our people

Warren: Thats not my question, my question is about responsibility. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?

Stumpf: The board will take care of that

Warren: Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam was going on?

Stumpf: And the board

Warren: I will take that as a no, then.
STATEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARTSAKH

SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Google Ad

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces

LEVEL UP ONLY FOR STUDENTS: UCOM OFFERS X2 AND X3 MORE INTERNET

STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments

Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan

Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement

With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building

OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh

USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens
UNITED NATIONS  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unofficially kicked off Canadas campaign for a Security Council seat Tuesday, telling the United Nations General Assembly: Were Canadian. And were here to help.

In a 12-minute speech, Trudeau told the gathering of world leaders that they need to bring people together rather tear them apart.

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He spoke about economic inclusion, tolerance and diversity  themes that were also raised by U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Exploiting [fears] is easy, Trudeau told the half-empty room.

But fear has never created a single job or fed a family, he said in a speech that he later denied was aimed directly at U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Blaming or rejecting other groups because they look or pray differently doesnt solve anybody's problems, Trudeau told the UN.

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To allay peoples anxiety, we need to create economic growth that is broadly shared, because a fair and successful world is a peaceful world.

Trudeau used his first speech at the General Assembly to highlight Canadas re-engagement with the United Nations, saying: It doesnt serve our interests  or the worlds  to pretend were not deeply affected by what happens beyond our borders.

Narrative of diversity

He told reporters Canada that wants a Security Council seat to push the message of diversity as a source of strength.

The issues we see right now resonating around the world are worries about globalization, withdrawing support for trade and [for] economic policies that will create growth, and an anxiety whether it is about migration or security that leads people to wanting to close in  what Canada is talking about is the need for inclusive growth, opportunities for all, understanding that diversity and differences are a tremendous source of strength and helping promote that, he said.

That is a narrative that, right now, the world needs, in terms of dealing with the very real anxieties that citizens are feeling the world over.

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To allay peoples anxiety, we need to create economic growth that is broadly shared, because a fair and successful world is a peaceful world.

As if listing off Canadas resume, Trudeau noted in his speech how his government had:

Helped negotiate the Paris Agreement on climate change

Pledged $2.65 billion over five years to finance clean growth and lower carbon emissions in developing countries

And, just last week, announced more than $800 million for the Global Fund  a 20 per cent boost  while successfully urging other nations to step up with a $13-billion pledge to help end AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 2030.

To promote peace and security in unstable parts of the world, Trudeau said, Canada reaffirmed its commitment to NATO and promised to contribute more to United Nations peacekeeping operations.

The Liberal government is considering where it will send the up to 600 Canadian Forces already pledged. As of August, only 19 Canadian military personnel were serving as UN peacekeepers. But among the list of possible missions being studied is Mali  the deadliest active peace operation in the world. This year alone, 32 peacekeepers have died there.

When asked how he would explain to Canadians that the cost of a Security Council seat and re-engaging in the UN might be measured not just in dollars and cents but in lives, Trudeau replied, Canadians expect us to play our role in the world, promoting peace and stability, preventing the kinds of instability and strife that lead to poor outcomes  not just for citizens across different regions but citizens around the world.

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The government is carefully deliberating where Canada can play the role best suited to its strengths, he said. An announcement will come later this fall.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion told The Huffington Post Canada Tuesday that peacekeeping missions come with inherent dangers.

If there was no risk, they would not be missions, he said, in the cafeteria of the United Nations.

Dion said it is cynical to view the governments actions multilaterally  such as its peacekeeping pledge or Tuesdays announcement that Canada is partnering with the UN and billionaire George Soros to export its program of private sponsorship of refugees  as part Canadas four-year campaign to win a Security Council seat.

We push what we believe in, he said.

Canada hasnt had a seat since 2000, but it isnt in Canadas or the worlds interest that Canada is not efficient at the United Nations, Dion said. One way to be efficient is to be on the UN Security Council.

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Canadas former ambassador to the United Nations, Paul Heinbecker, told HuffPost that the Liberal government is currently hitting the right notes as it begins its campaign for a two-year rotating seat in 2021.

The Liberals promises, for example, to boost contributions to UN peacekeeping and foreign aid spending would not go unnoticed with voting members, Heinbecker said as he stood in the luxurious Qatar lounge of the UN.

But campaigning for a Security Council seat takes vision and a lot of effort, said Henbecker, who helped Canada win a Security Council seat in 1998. Its a real election campaign.

In 2020, when the secret-ballot voting takes place, Canada faces off against Ireland, a member of the European Union and the worlds largest aid donor, and Norway, which is the worlds largest aid donor per capita.

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The Norwegians walk on water around this place, Heinbecker said, noting the countrys well-known diplomatic work in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as well as in Sri Lanka and Colombia.

We have our work cut out for us; it is not a slam dunk.

Campaigning for a seat is complicated by some intricacies. While Canada will no doubt use its embassies and consulates to try to lobby local governments for support, about a third of ambassadors wield considerable autonomy and do not receive instructions from their home government, said Queens University political science professor Kim Nossal.

That will lead to a huge lobby effort waged from New York City and Ottawa to win over the UN representatives. Already, HuffPost has learned there is talk at the Department of Global Affairs about bringing UN ambassadors to Canada to help sell the candidacy.

The voters need to be given a reason why it would be a good thing to have Canada sit on the United Nations Security Council.  Kim Nossal, political science professor

There will also be a lot of horse-trading between countries, warned Heinbecker. One vote for one UN council seat in exchange for another, he said.

In 2010, when the Conservative government pulled out of the race after embarrassingly losing support on the second ballot, Heinbecker said, many countries that had pledged to support Canadas Security Council bid failed to show up to vote. There were also many that promised to vote for Canada but simply didnt.

Some people broke their word, absolutely just straight up broke it, he said. But what was significant, the former diplomat said, was that the switches happened on the first round of voting.

Everybody believes that they are committed for the first round. If you dont win on the first round, its a free-for-all, he said. On the second round, Heinbecker said, countries vote according to what they think of you. And our numbers dropped dramatically. The third round they were going to drop further when we threw in the towel.

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Heinbecker believes Canada needs to rebuild its reputation after spending 10 years mocking the UN and showing contempt for the institution.

Nossal thinks the Liberals need to promote an actual platform, just as the government did in 1998 when it focused on human security, the responsibility to protect and the International Criminal Court.

The voters need to be given a reason why it would be a good thing to have Canada sit on the United Nations Security Council, he told HuffPost in an email.

The Trudeau factor

For now, the Liberal government seems satisfied with pushing a dialogue of inclusion and re-engagement in UN projects that matter most to many members.

Its not because we deserted all these sectors for the past 10 years that people dont remember what we represent, Dion told HuffPost. Canada is stronger than the government of the day, and people are happy that Canada is back.

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There is lots and lots of interest in Justin Trudeau  he is probably the political personality who is most popular in the world right now  so we will push.

Also on HuffPost
It's no secret the East Coast is known for seafood.

If you're looking for something that's still local but a little on the wild side, you'd best roll up your sleeves and make your way to St. John's.

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That's where you'll find "Like A Tourist" host Dan Rodo alongside Cod Sounds Culinary Adventures as they forage for wild greens like beach pea flowers.

Now, no one has ever gotten full off a plate of flowers, but watch what happens in the video above when they're paired with some foraged scallops or sea urchins. Just try not to drool.
A Conservative MP has compared Ontario's sex-ed curriculum with Canada's former residential school system, which pulled more than 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children from their families and forced them to attend church-run facilities.

Brad Trost, who intends to run for the federal Conservative leadership, spoke at a rally against the province's curriculum outside Queen's Park on Wednesday.

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Conservative MP Brad Trost has been vocal in his opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. (Photo: The Canadian Press)

The most tragic violation  which I dont think this one rises to that level  but the most tragic violation in Canadian history of parental rights was residential schools, so I think the underlying issue is the same, Trost said, according to the National Post.

"Parental rights were not respected, the rights of the family are not respected. These are a fundamental civil right here in Canada."

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The paper said protesters at the rally also made the comparison.

Another view of the crowd at sex ed protest. Bit bigger now pic.twitter.com/ARkoPAGAhd  Ashley Csanady (@AshleyCsanady) September 21, 2016

The Saskatchewan MP later spoke to VICE about his comments, saying that he was comparing the "underlying principle" between the curriculum and residential schools.

"This is an illustration of incidents in Canadian history where parents' rights are not being respected," Trost told the outlet on Wednesday. "The absolute worst case, much more severe case in Canadian history, is of the residential schools."

Federal Conservative leadership hopeful Brad Trost speaks at anti-sex ed rally at Queen's Park. #cdnpolipic.twitter.com/x1ByavwnwG  Allison Smith (@QueensParkToday) September 21, 2016

The province's new curriculum, introduced in February 2015, included updates such as warnings about online bullying and sexting. Protesting parents have taken issue with its discussions of same-sex marriage, masturbation and gender identity.

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Trost, who has yet to file official paperwork for the Tory leadership race, has also spoken out against the party's decision to abandon its opposition to gay marriage at its convention in May.

On Tuesday, he told The Canadian Press that conservatives who are against gay marriage are now "feeling discriminated against."

With files from Althia Raj and The Canadian Press

Also on HuffPost
Shh, shh. Just curl up under the covers. It'll all be over by April. We hope.

After a warmer-than-normal winter last year, Canada is due for an old-fashioned deep freeze in 2017, according to the Canadian Farmer's Almanac.

Most of the country will see a cold or very cold winter, the publication says, with the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, the north and the Maritimes expected to shiver until spring.

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British Columbia, however, will be "stormy and mild." Of course.

Don't you dare brag, B.C. (Photo: Canadian Farmers' Almanac)

The Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut and the Prairies will see average levels of snow, but an active storm track will dump above-average levels of precipitation on Quebec and the Maritimes.

Another active storm track will bring B.C. more precipitation than normal, but with the temperatures expected to be mild, we're going to assume that for the coast at least, that just means more rain.

The Almanac also forecasts a chilly February. It said between Feb. 16 to 19, a small, powerful storm near the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast will gift heavy snow to Nova Scotia  potentially up to 30 centimetres  along with powerful winds.

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A man shovels snow during a winter storm in Ottawa, Feb. 16, 2016. (Photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters)

The middle of the month will also bring chilly temperatures over the eastern three-quarters of the country, with temperatures dropping as low as -40 C in some places.

Apparently the Almanac is usually right

In an interview with CBC Radio's Metro Morning, the Almanac's Pete Geiger predicted that the cold will start in October and won't really go away. He said, however, that mid-January and February will be the worst.

"It'll be winter in Canada, just as we always dreamed it would be."

But how does the publication come up with its predictions? It uses a formula that takes into consideration factors like the position of the planets, sunspot activity, and the way the moon affects the tides.

We don't like the forecast either, but according to Geiger, the publication is usually about 80 to 85 per cent accurate, during years without an El Nino weather pattern.

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Even if it's often right, it doesn't mean we have to be happy about it.

Also on HuffPost
A Royal Canadian Mint employee has been accused of smuggling around $180,000 worth of gold by hiding it in his booty, according to the Ottawa Citizen.

Please, remain calm. This story gets even wilder.

Leston Lawrence, who was fired from the corporation, has been at the centre of a court case that  besides revolving around smuggling gold in a rectum  has shone a light on security protocols at the facility.

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According to the Hamilton Spectator, the gold-butt madness began in 2015, when a bank teller in Ottawa grew suspicious of Lawrence's alleged activities.

The court was told that Lawrence, 35, allegedly sold several gold "pucks"  nuggets worth about $6,800 each  to an Ottawa Gold Buyers store.

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The teller was concerned not only because Lawrence was a Mint employee, but he also had an unusual number of deposits and frequently asked for overseas transfers.

The Toronto Sun reports the RCMP was eventually notified. When Mounties began investigating, they found four of the aforementioned gold pucks in Lawrence's safety deposit box, as well as a container of Vaseline.

'Compelling evidence'

Prosecutors presented the idea of Lawrence smuggling the gold in his butt. His defence lawyer, Gary Barnes, said a security employee tested this prior to the case.

Barnes said there were many ways the former employee could have legitimately obtained the gold pucks, according to the Sun.

This is the Royal Canadian Mint, your Honour, and one would think they should have the highest security measures imaginable, Barnes said, according to the Citizen.

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And here the gold is left sitting around in open buckets.

The Crown, however, said it had "compelling evidence" of someone secreting (gold) on his person and taking it out of the Mint.

Lawrence faces charges of theft, possession of stolen property, breach of trust and laundering the proceeds of crime.

The case concluded on Tuesday, and Justice Peter Doody  yes, Doody  is scheduled to deliver a decision in the case by Nov. 9.

Also on HuffPost

English Coins That Look Like The Canadian Toonie See Gallery
The Edmonton Humane Society saved 71 dogs over the weekend  the organization's largest rescue ever.

Working with Pet Food Bank of Parkland County, the dogs were found in reserve communities near Peace River in northern Alberta.

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Staff worked around the clock to transport the dogs, some of which were pregnant or young puppies, to Edmonton.

One of the dogs rescued by the Edmonton Humane Society this weekend. (Photo Edmonton Humane Society/Facebook)

"Because these pups are from all different walks of life, theyll need a little TLC before being placed up for adoption," said the humane society in a statement posted to Facebook on Monday.

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The organization says it will be working to house the pups and give them medical treatment before they're put up for adoption.

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TORONTO  The chief of the Grassy Narrows First Nation in northern Ontario says the federal and provincial governments must help his community overcome the effects of decades of mercury poisoning.

Chief Simon Fobister Sr. said in addition to serious health impacts, there was social and economic devastation when Grassy Narrows lost the basis for its economy when the local fishery was shut down in the 1970s because of the mercury poisoning.

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"There were marital breakdowns, there was social upheaval, some suicides,'' said Fobister.

Japanese researchers reported Tuesday that they found more than 90 per cent of the people in Grassy Narrows and the Wabaseemoong (White Dog) First Nation show signs of mercury poisoning, including a new generation of residents.

Grassy Narrows lost the basis for its economy when the local fishery was shut down in the 1970s because of the mercury poisoning. (Photo: Toronto Star via Getty Images)

The researchers say people who were not born when 9,000 kilograms of mercury was dumped into the English and Wabigoon River systems by a paper mill in Dryden, Ont., in the 1960s show symptoms of mercury poisoning.

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Fobister calls it "shameful'' that communities and people impacted by mercury poisoning have to fight for every bit of help they can get, and said he still wants a commitment from the province to clean up the local river.

"There's been no real, solid, clear commitment that a cleanup will take place if the scientists say it can be cleaned up,'' he said.

"There isn't an easy solution."

Premier Kathleen Wynne said the government remains reluctant to take any steps that could make the situation worse by stirring up mercury in the sediment of rivers and lakes.

"There isn't an easy solution,'' Wynne said Tuesday. "There is a contentious discussion about how to actually get the mercury out of that river system ... and so we need to work with the community to ensure that as that work is done, there isn't further poisoning or further contamination of people.''

Fobister wants financial assistance for people suffering from mercury poisoning and help to restore the local economy, which was devastated in the 1970s when their commercial fishery was shut down because of the contamination.

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Masanori Hanada of Kumamoto Gakuen University has studied mercury poisoning in the Japanese town of Minamata, where the first human patient of what later became known as Minamata disease was identified.

In 1975, residents of Grassy Narrows Indian Reserve demonstrated on Queen's Park steps against Mercury poisoning. (Photo: Globe and Mail via CP)

Hanada has also been the lead organizer of followup research trips to Grassy Narrows since 2004, and says the majority of the population is experiencing sensory deprivation, starting with the loss of feeling in fingers and toes.

"The mercury levels in the fish in the English and Wabigoon River are still high,'' Hanada said Tuesday as he released the results of his studies. "This confirms there is still mercury in the river system.''

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The symptoms of mercury poisoning can include usually permanent impairment of brain functions such as speech, sight and hearing, in addition to convulsions, uncontrollable limb movements and loss of balance.

Hanada called the fact that young people are affected by mercury poisoning "surprising,'' and said more research is needed to determine the root cause of their symptoms.

May be an ongoing source of contamination: report

The New Democrats said every day the Ontario government fails to act on the mercury poisoning things get worse for people in Grassy Narrows and White Dog.

"It took researchers from halfway across the world to undertake this serious study, while the Wynne government continues to stall on taking action, putting families and the future of these communities at risk,'' said NDP environment critic Peter Tabuns.

Another report in June found mercury levels in Grassy Narrows remain dangerously high even though the plant that dumped 9,000 kilograms of it into the water closed in the 1970s, and suggested there may be an ongoing source of contamination.

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Fobister called for an investigation after a former worker at the Dryden mill wrote the government saying he had buried more than 50 barrels of mercury and salt in a pit in 1972.

"It took researchers from halfway across the world to undertake this serious study, while the Wynne government continues to stall on taking action, putting families and the future of these communities at risk."

The environment ministry took some samples from the area last June in response to the claim, but the government said Tuesday it was not in a position yet to share the results.

Fobister admits many residents ignored the order to stop eating fish when the government closed the local fishery the 1970s.
If you think your kid has a lot of homework, think again. In 2014, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducted a study and found that schools in Shanghai, China gave kids the most homework in the world. On average, their students spent 14 hours per week on homework.

This is significant considering Canadian and American kids only spent about six hours per week on after-school assignments, while kids in other countries, such as Finland and Korea, reportedly spent less than three.

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To get their findings, researchers looked at 15-year-olds from 38 countries. Besides China, Russia also topped the list of countries that gave the most homework, with their students spending about 10 hours per week on extra work. Italy, Ireland, Poland and Spain also gave their students over seven hours of at-home assignments per week.

So does more homework equal smarter kids? Not necessarily. Korea and Finland give their students the least amount of homework per week and their education systems are the top in the world.

Additionally, some studies have shown that too much homework can be harmful to kids. Specifically, in 2014, 56 per cent of U.S. students cited homework as their number one cause of stress. This triggered a number of other negative effects in kids as well.

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We found a clear connection between the students' stress and physical impacts -- migraines, ulcers and other stomach problems, sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and weight loss, Denise Pope, a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education, told CNN in regards to the study.

Despite these findings, the debate over whether homework is good or bad is ongoing among parents. Watch the video above to hear more.

Also on HuffPost
Jesse Lipscombe wasn't just minding his own business when he was the victim of drive-by racism a few weeks ago. The Edmonton actor, athlete and entrepreneur was in the midst of making a PSA for the city about how great its downtown is and the best ways to get there. (You can watch the video below.)

Aside from capturing the irony of the racist incident, the cameras also filmed Lipscombe's reaction when a passenger in a passing car yelled "the n****rs are coming, the n****rs are coming!"

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See, rather than ignore it or get angry, Lipscombe walked over, opened the passenger side door and calmly asked the man to explain himself: "You have something to say? Tell me about it. We can talk about it."

The guy cursed at Lipscombe to "get the f**k out of here," yelling the n-word again for good measure as the car drove off. But the video was posted to Facebook and, thanks to Lipscombe's measured but uncompromising response, it went viral.

Soon, Lipscombe and his wife Julia met with Edmonton mayor Don Iveson to brainstorm what to do about what happened. Julia came up with a hastag  #MakeItAwkward  that they hoped would encourage people to join her husband in calmly calling out racism as well as homophobia, sexism, etc. rather than just ignoring it or getting angry.

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Well, that went viral, too, making it all the way to 24 Sussex:

Congratulations @thelipscombe & Mayor @doniveson for their bold campaign against racism. In Edmonton - in any city - let's #MakeItAwkward.  Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) September 4, 2016

The Lipscombes have since been hard at work turning the hashtag's momentum into a movement.

The evidence that it's working can be seen in the hundreds of emails Jesse has received, the invitations to speak to students and the hashtag's Twitter takeover. Most recently, government leaders used #MakeItAwkward to amplify their outrage over racist anti-Sikh posters at the University of Alberta.

and we're proud of the enormous contributions Sikhs make to this country every day. #MakeItAwkwardhttps://t.co/qjDK4TKe2W  Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) September 20, 2016

Never stop celebrating your identity, diversity is a strength not a weakness. We were meant to stand out, not blend in #makeitawkward  Jagmeet Singh (@jagmeetNDP) September 21, 2016

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HuffPost Canada spoke to Lipscombe about whats next for Make It Awkward, the inevitable racist push back he's faced, those Trudeau tweets and how he's explained what's going on to his two young sons .

Oh, and this is the video PSA he was shooting when the incident happened. Interview below:

Had anything like that ever happened to you before?

It has happened to me probably twice in the last five years in Edmonton. Exactly like that. One time I was just in my car with my business partner singing and a car drove by and screamed "shut that 'N' music up."

It also happened on a golf course once last year.

How big of a problem is racism in Edmonton?

I'm not taking the stance that Edmonton is a racist city by any means [but] everyone has their own experiences. If you don't have a lot of friends from different races you probably don't hear about it a lot. Video is amazing for just putting it in your face and allowing you to have a discussion about what's actually real.

Interestingly enough, still with video I've been having people commenting that it's fake, that it's not real. So even when you have the actual video evidence it's very difficult for them to accept the fact that this is actually happening.

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We've had other recent call-out campaigns from #OscarsSoWhite to Black Lives Matter. How much does your Make It Awkward campaign tie into the broader race conversation happening on social media right now.

It ties into it, obviously, because it was a race incident that happened. But it's more about hate incidents and not just racism, there's sexism, homophobia, xenophobia or people making fun of people with disabilities.

So it ties into a number of different campaigns that exist but the underlying platform is awareness and conversation about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable.

"This one is more about empowering everybody to do a little something. It's all those little somethings that equal a really big thing."

Make It Awkward is really trying to start from a very small small spot  the social circle that you already are involved in, your friends and your family. These other movements are important, but they go after large issues at the very top. Sometimes that can be very frustrating, like I'm just waiting for someone else to step up and fix it.

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This one is more about empowering everybody to do a little something. It's all those little somethings that equal a really big thing.

I'm glad to see more NFL players joining @Kaepernick7 in his stand against racism. #MakeItAwkwardhttps://t.co/wy5Fztyqu8  Marcel Huculak (@fatTireBikeBoy) September 10, 2016

Today I was speaking at a junior high school about the Make It Awkward campaign and there were already all these anecdotal stories of what they've done. Like around the dinner table when a comment is thrown and asking the question "why did you say that, dad? Why'd you say that, mom? That's not really funny, would you say that if they were there?"

If we can just be responsible for the three metres around us, keeping that peaceful and respectful, then that's a pretty big change.

What's the most gratifying response you've heard so far from it?

One that caught me off guard completely, I was at the world triathlon series in Edmonton and a young girl wearing full hijab, probably 16, came up to me. I saw her kinda lurking and I knew she probably wanted to come chat. So she came up and asked me to get a picture. And then she turned around really quick with tears in her eyes and said "You're my hero," and then ran away.

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There wasn't a lot of words but there was so much in that.

There was another one, whole family came up, mom, dad, and the children, and they were so thankful that it took the doubt away from the things that they've been saying over and over and over. Oftentimes their words had been diminished: "Oh no, it's not that bad in Edmonton." Now their stories got a co-sign.

"One man told me, 'I've been so exhausted trying to explain that I couldn't have done it better than this campaign.'"

There's story after story. One where a man told me, "I've been so exhausted trying to explain that I couldn't have done it better than this campaign. You've given me more words and more tools to be able to express and explain what I'm going through and in a not aggressive, not angry way."

I've never really had to talk about this with my children. So I posted a video of Julie and I and the boys for the first time going through racism and what it's like. That video got a lot of comments from parents, and a lot of people saying "I can't believe you have to have a conversation like that, it didn't even cross my mind."

And there's been a lot of people asking how can I help, what can I do  and that's taken us to the next step.

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So what are the next steps?

I had a meeting with the mayor  we were discussing everything that's happened and what are the takeaways. People want to know how can we be involved, how can we donate money, how can we donate time. I want to make sure that it didn't get handcuffed by becoming a completely government city objective.

This thing was very grassroots, it grew from the people. But obviously it takes money to create a website, PR material, even small things like buttons and T-shirts.

So I asked the city what they're going to contribute. But we also have a lot of private people who want to donate so we created a GoFundMe that people can go on and give their support in anyway they can, and we can show what we're going to use our funds for and the Board of Directors that we're putting together.

"... even when you have the actual video evidence it's very difficult for [people] to accept the fact that [racism] is actually happening."

But the big thing we need is the kind of support to keep the conversation going and to make it more than just the hashtag.

I get that it's good PR for the city but for me, it's real life. It's real life that this happens to people on a daily basis, it's real life this happens to women and aboriginals and people with disabilities on a daily basis. So as good as a PR thing as it is, it's gonna take a lot more to make these things not occur on a daily basis.

We need to make sure we have something tangible, real clear objective, short-term medium term and long term, so that this can become what I hope it can be.

"I get that it's good PR for the city but for me, it's real life.'"

I'm watching it resonate with children. I'm watching it resonate with seniors. We got lucky with this unfortunate incident turning into something that became a collective experience for so many people.

Where do you see it in one year or five years?

In one year I would like to see it become a very colloquial term that's being used on a day-to-day basis. So that Make It Awkward can become one of the responses to bigotry on many different levels. Not just a hashtag but a proactive reaction to make our environment a little bit better to live in.

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In five years I'd like to see something that just exists with branches in all the major cities around Canada, and everybody working collectively together with different community organizations and making it something tangible to the everyday person.

I just don't ever want it to look like a me thing. I'm trying my best to keep it at the forefront, I'm trying to raise money, trying to speak at different places because it's important to me but I also want to be extra clear that it's not for me, it's for me and everybody else. I'm a good candidate to help lead it right now but I want others on board doing the same thing.

Has there been any racist push back to this campaign?

Oh man, goodness gracious, so much. I read all the comments, I don't know why. I can't help it. My mom calls social media the new bathroom wall. But I think that will also change, social media is pretty new as well so we'll start to see the change of what's OK on social media. People will be in awe that this was ever OK before and I think that's just a matter of figuring out what this new environment looks like.

But yeah, definitely they're there. They affect Julia a little bit more than me. I'm not OK with it, but it doesn't affect my forward progression.

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But I'm looking forward to when there's less of it.

On the other hand, Justin Trudeau has also tweeted your campaign out.

That was awesome! Julia and I had said we'll know we've hit critical mass when we get the Prime Minister, Ellen and Obama. She's like, I guess we got one of them.

It was really neat to know that the message had spread that far and that quickly, it lets me know that it just resonates.

Also on HuffPost
In his first question period in months, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced down rivals who raised doubts about both his motivations for a looming United Nations peacekeeping mission and respect for Parliament.

Trudeau returned to the House of Commons Wednesday after a trip to the UN that was widely seen as the kickoff to Canada's campaign for a Security Council seat.

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Interim Tory Leader Rona Ambrose and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are shown in the House of Commons in September 2016. (Photo: CP)

Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose pointedly welcomed him back "to this place called Parliament," and charged that Trudeau hasn't given any straight answers for weeks about where hundreds of Canadian troops could soon be deployed in Africa.

"This mission will be dangerous and Canadian troops could die," Ambrose said. "It's clear that the prime minister wants a seat at the UN Security Council and is using our troops as a pawn to achieve his goal."

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Ambrose said Canadians deserve to know why a peacekeeping mission is in the national interest.

"What's his real motivation and are Canadian lives worth it?" she asked.

'We can create peace and security'

Trudeau responded that Canadians made it clear in the last election that they want to be engaged in the world, not just because of a "moral responsibility" that comes from being fortunate enough to call Canada home.

"We can create peace and security that will have positive impacts in Canada and around the world," Trudeau said. "Canada has a role to play and we take that very seriously."

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair pushed Trudeau on his apparent refusal to let members of Parliament vote on a future peacekeeping mission, as well as the deployment of hundreds of troops to Latvia.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair speaks in the House of Commons on Sept. 21, 2016. (Photo: Adrian Wyld/CP)

Liberals have suggested there will be a debate on the future peacekeeping mission but have ducked questions about a possible vote.

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Though the deployment of troops is a decision for Trudeau and his cabinet, the former Tory government let MPs vote ahead of missions. Liberals also permitted a vote last March on Canada's revamped mission against the so-called Islamic State.

'How about a vote?'

"Canadians thought they were electing a government that was going to respect Parliament," Mulcair said. "They wanted that change."

Mulcair demanded to know why the prime minister "no longer believes" Parliament should get a say on missions.

Trudeau said he has deep respect for every MP and looks forward to debates over the coming months and "indeed years."

"How about a vote?" Mulcair shot back.

"How many Canadian lives is the prime minister willing to risk for his own personal aspirations and political gain?"  Tory defence critic James Bezan

Tory defence critic James Bezan later said Trudeau went to the UN to show he is "willing to put Canadians in harm's way to achieve his political desire" for a temporary spot on the Security Council.

Bezan reminded the House that missions in Africa are exceedingly dangerous because of jihadist terrorists in the region who target peacekeepers.

"How many Canadian lives is the prime minister willing to risk for his own personal aspirations and political gain?" Bezan asked.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said the past government "closed their eyes" to atrocities in Africa, including disease that he said was the "root cause" of what motivates young people to join radical groups.

Canadians, Sajjan said, will be proud of the work the Armed Forces will do in Africa.

"We need to do our part."

Also on HuffPost

Current MPs With Military Experience (2016) See Gallery
Mauricio Abreu via Getty Images Pizza romana and salads. Rome, Italy

At first thought, a fusion of Japanese and Italian dishes might seem odd. For Francesco Apreda, however, the melding of these two cuisines came across as a natural progression. Apreda spent years in Japan learning about that nation's flavours and cooking techniques. When he returned to Rome, he applied what he had learned to his native cuisine, and the results are marvellous.

At Imago, whose name translates to "magician" or "magic," Apreda sublimely blends textures and flavours of the far east with Italian ingredients. Perhaps the best example of his unique cuisine is a fava bean soup that tastes like miso soup but with a flavourful nuttiness. His reliance on exceptional ingredients and his ambition to create worldly flavours in one of the planet's great food and cultural cities is what makes dining at Imago a distinct experience.

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A quail's egg is breaded and fried and appears like a bird's nest when presented on a canape block. Sfogliatella, a classic Italian pastry, is made to resemble a samosa and served with green tea ice cream, further evoking the Asian theme of Apreda's food. Other menu items that showcase Apreda's mix of Japan and Italy include sake-glazed black cod, rigatoni with shies pesto, soy vermicelli, and a delicious octopus dish served with seaweed.

In a city where it's difficult to have a bad meal, Apreda elevates Rome beyond its culinary roots and deserves the accolades he's received. Imago has earned a Michelin star and distinction as one of the Italian capital's most elite and elegant dining rooms. Its service is incredible -- one waiter who fillets a hen tableside tells me he practices the task at home because "I love my job so much" -- and the setting couldn't be more opulent.

The restaurant is on the sixth floor of the Hassler Hotel, one of Europe's most highly acclaimed properties. Adjacent to the top of the Spanish Steps, the Hassler provides a dazzling view of the city. At Imago, guests can gaze out to the sweeping view of the city and the stunning sunsets over the ancient landmarks. While dining on such contemporary flavours, you will realize Rome's present is just as brilliant as its past.

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Location: Piazza Trinita dei Monti, 6, 00187 Rome, Italy

Menu Price Range: For pasta dishes and main courses, the range is 32-65 euro ($46-$95 CAD); the chef's classic 10-course tasting menu is the recommended choice and it costs 150 euro ($215 CAD).

More Places to Dine in Rome

Osteria Pesce Fritto e Baccala: You'll want to glimpse how the citizens here live. San Lorenzo is the place to do that. This district just beyond the walls of the ancient aqueduct features loads of good, inexpensive dining options. The best I found was Osteria Pesce Fritto e Baccala, where you can dine along the cobblestone streets of Via dei Falisci. Order cuttlefish pasta, mussels and prawns, and enjoy with a glass of red wine -- all for less than 15 euro ($21 CAD).

Location: Largo dei Falisci, 4, 00185 Rome, Italy

Menu Price Range: Most items are less than 15 euro and a half carafe of good wine is about 4 euro ($5.80 CAD).

Canova: A classic Italian cafe, Canova is in a terrific location next to Piazza del Popolo, a large square near the city's northern gate and not far from the Tiber River. Canova is in a touristy spot, so prices are higher than in San Lorenzo. Pizzas will cost you about 12-15 euro ($17-$21 CAD). But you must have a coffee here. Canova's blends are smooth and easy to enjoy in the morning sunshine on a Rome patio. A cappuccino costs 5 euro ($7.25 CAD)

Location: Piazza del Popolo, 16-17, 00187 Rome, Italy

Menu Price Range: Most pizza and pasta dishes cost between 12-25 euro ($17-$36 CAD)

Verde Pistachio: No stay in Rome is complete without lots of gelato. An ice cream shop with a popular food truck, Verde Pistachio has a brick-and-mortar outlet on Via Nazionale. For 2.50 euro ($4 CAD), you can have a cone or cup with three scoops of up to three flavours. Try the pistachio -- it tastes like peanut butter.

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Location: Via Nazionale, 239, 00184 Rome, Italy

Menu Price Range: Gelato services for 2.50-5 euro ($4-$8 CAD), plus a range of smoothies, crepes and biscotti each for less than 10 euro ($16 CAD).

Getting to Rome

Canadians who opt to book their plane trip on Air Transat will depart with direct flights from Montreal or Toronto -- I connected there from Vancouver and took advantage of the upgrade to the Option Plus level.
William Andrew via Getty Images King's Crown

The following excerpt is from the new humour collection entitled "King Donald I":

I'm not a psychologist nor do I play one on TV but I've watched enough television dramas to know a narcissistic egomaniac when I see one. And, not surprisingly, when it comes to narcissistic egomaniacs, Donald Trump is number one.

The problem, of course, is that this self-centered blowhard could become president and do a lot of damage. With his know-it-all, bull-in-the-china-shop approach to politics, the U.S. and the rest of the world would be at risk.

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The solution is to find out what would satisfy Trump's egomaniacal cravings without putting him in a position to actually affect the lives of others. In short, what would it take to make The Donald go away?

Some say Mr. Trump wants to be America's all-powerful dictator, a modern day fascist demagogue. I don't think that's true. After all, when Ohio Governor John Kasich was offered the VP slot on the Republican ticket and was asked what responsibilities he would have, he was reportedly told that he could take on both domestic and foreign affairs.

In other words, Donald Trump doesn't really want to deal with the actual duties of the presidency. He desires the fame and attention that comes with the office but not any of the hard work. He just wants to use the presidential bully pulpit to become the Bully in Chief.

If we can come up with a new, highly visible position that gives Trump maximum exposure and public recognition without providing any actual powers, I suspect Mr. Trump would be more than happy to take it.

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Some have suggested that his enormous ego needs could be met by making him Secretary-General of the United Nations, perhaps the closest thing we have to the leader of the world. While it's true that this position has the definite advantage of having no real power, it probably wouldn't work for The Donald since the incumbent must be skilled in diplomacy and seldom gets much attention.

A more fitting title for Trump might be emperor. The title connotes an all-powerful ruler over a wide-ranging domain. The question then becomes emperor of what? Wall Street? A small South Pacific island? The moon? It's not likely he'd settle for such a limited empire and unlikely that Americans would want to grant him more.

For Donald, the trappings of the position are far more important than the responsibilities. He needs public recognition 24/7 but without any obligation to read, research or learn. To that end, he might be happy as grand vizier or grand wizard, although the former suggests a Muslim incumbent and the latter a KKK supporter.

The neatest solution, in my view, is to adopt the British approach and have a constitutional monarch. All the pomp and circumstance rests with the king while the true power remains with the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

There is a precedent for this approach. In the beginnings of the American nation, George Washington was offered the position of king but turned it down.

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Today, if Donald Trump were offered that same position, there's little doubt he'd snap it up faster than he'd buy a foreclosed, undervalued casino in Atlantic City. And that would solve America's Donald problem.

It might cost several hundred million dollars to provide all the royal trappings including a Trump Palace but that's a small price to pay to keep the nuclear codes out of Trump's tiny hands. Maybe the rest of the world (including Mexico) could be convinced to help pay for it all.

So, let's get on with the project as soon as possible. Why risk Trump winning the election in November? Set up a new American monarchy now and put it on offer to King Donald I. God save the King and probably America, too.

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There's an Olympic event in which athletes race cross-country on skis, then shoot a rifle at a target. I've always marveled at their combination of precision and speed.

Most mornings at home, I feel like those athletes. My challenge: getting breakfast into our 14-year-old son. Derrick appears in the kitchen for mere seconds as he rushes out the door to school.

That's when the clock starts. My current record for a hot breakfast wrapped to go is about 55 seconds. It's just toast and peanut butter, with a swig of orange juice. But it does the job.

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Eating to learn

Why do this? Why not let him suffer? If a growling tummy were the end of it, I may let Derrick be. But as a World Vision worker, I know that children really struggle to learn without food.

It's hard to focus on math when your head is pounding. Or decipher complex instructions with your stomach gurgling. And essays are a write-off if you have no fuel.

Children filled with nutritious food -- and enough of it -- are fortified to learn. Studies have shown that children who've eaten well can concentrate better and perform better in class.

Enrollment goes up, attendance is more frequent and children progress better when their bellies are full.

School meals can help

Tragically, too many Canadian families face a bare cupboard at breakfast time. A recent blog here in the Huffington Post outlined some of the painful challenges many teachers witness when children don't have enough to eat.

Thankfully, the connection between eating and learning is recognized by school boards across Canada. There's still a long way to go before every child's nutritional needs are met. But I'm grateful that in the Toronto District School Board alone, more than 400 schools offer breakfast to a total of 150,000 students per day.

The hunger barrier

There's something so heartwarming about seeing children digging into a nutritious meal -- especially when you know how it helps their learning.

However, in a developing country, there are multiple factors that can come between children and their education, not just a lack of food. Some parents need their kids to work, while other families live many kilometres from school, meaning children walk for hours a day just to attend. Kids get sick from things like dirty water, meaning they're absent more.

In short: every day spent at school has to count. That's why World Vision provides school lunch or snack programs for many of the children we serve.

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The incentive of the meal often makes the difference for families weighing the benefits of sending their kids to school. And for a child, success in school could make the difference between remaining in poverty -- or breaking free from it.

And it works. Enrollment goes up, attendance is more frequent and children progress better when their bellies are full. Here's some of the evidence, from children and families themselves!

(Photo: World Vision)

Above: Young children in Sri Lanka dig into juicy papaya, today's dessert at their local preschool. School lunch helps little ones focus during this foundation period in their learning, preparing them for harder lessons later on.

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(Photo: World Vision)

Above: In war-torn South Sudan, Ring says he wants to be president one day. He comes to school to learn and have a hot meal. "Before the food arrived, we were too tired even to play. Now we are very happy. In the last tests, I only failed science."

(Photo: World Vision)

Above: At this school in Peru, lunch is peanut and rice soup. It's made with vegetables from the school's new greenhouse, one of several World Vision helped the community to build. "The children are learning better now," said the school's principal.

(Photo: World Vision)

Above: In the Philippines, mothers from one village found a way to address malnutrition among children in their community. They make lunches at school, including home-made, organic noodles made of nutritious vegetables like squash.

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(Photo: World Vision)

Above: "I love this food. I don't often get this at home," says preschooler Win Pa Pa in Myanmar, referring to a curry and rice dish. A tasty lunch or dessert helps hungry little ones realize that school is a great place to be.

Throughout the month of October, World Vision will be celebrating food! Between now and World Food Day October 16, check the Huffington Post for more stories, ideas and news about food.

Visit hungerfree.ca to learn how you can celebrate food in meaningful ways with your family and friends.

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My mother calls me a banana. In her words, I'm white on the inside, but yellow on the outside.

She's not wrong. As a Chinese-Canadian, I often call myself the whitest Asian you'll ever meet. While this used to stem from a rejection of my Asian culture, being a banana has become my identity as a child of a Chinese immigrant.

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Me at age two.

My rejection of my Chinese heritage started at an early age. If you ask my mother, she'll tell you that at the age of two, I matter-of-factly told her to stop speaking Cantonese to me. "Mom, don't talk to me in Chinese," I told her. "I'm Canadian."

Growing up, I remember frequently telling her to speak English. This wasn't because I couldn't understand her -- I could pick up on words and phrases -- but because I had no desire to put in effort to learn the language. I just didn't care. My father (who is also Chinese, but born in Australia) never bothered to learn Cantonese, either. Plus, everyone else in Canada spoke English and I wanted to fit in.

I didn't want to be seen as different. I just wanted to fit in.

As a kid, I also hated Chinese food. I preferred hamburgers and pizza over dim sum and congee any day. I hated having school lunches that I had to explain to my friends and, even worse, not having the oh-so-coveted Lunchables that all the other Canadian kids had.

Then, as I entered my preteen years, I not only rejected my culture, but became completely embarrassed by it. For one, my mom, who was born in Hong Kong, had an accent. While I had become immune to it, a friend mentioned to me one day that she couldn't understand a word my mother was saying because her accent was so thick.

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My mom's English is fine, I thought, feeling both offended and embarrassed.

Me at age five with my parents and sister.

From then on, I was careful about what I shared about my Chinese culture. After all, being Asian wasn't cool. It didn't help that all the heroes I saw in the media were white. The only real heroine I had to look up to was Mulan. While I couldn't have asked for a better hero, the kids' movie was the only one of its time to combat film stereotypes of Asians, who were (and are) often portrayed as anti-social, awkward nerds. One film wasn't going to change the world.

All of this added up to me rejecting everything Chinese and embracing everything "Canadian" -- hence the nickname "banana." I even went as far as hiding my Chinese name, which is one of my middle names, because I was ashamed. I thought Chinese names were something only foreign kids had, and I wasn't foreign. In my eyes, I was Canadian, born and raised. I didn't want to be seen as different. I just wanted to fit in.

Funnily enough, my mother never minded that I felt this way. In fact, she was (and still is) so accepting of my Canadian identity that she openly calls me a banana in front of other people and often tells little anecdotes about that fact, laughing to herself. Oh, that silly Canadian girl.

After recently speaking to my mother, I realized it was her Canadian mentality of being open to other cultures that really led me to accept my own.

I recently asked her why she was so open to letting me "Canadianize" myself, despite my otherwise strict Chinese upbringing. Her answer surprised me.

"I can't ask my kids to follow the way I was brought up in Asia, because it doesn't work that way," she said. "It's just too hard for you kids to be here and adapt to two different lifestyles."

While most parents would consider a child distancing themselves from their family's roots completely unacceptable, my mom saw no issue. She never pressured me to be "more Chinese." While my cousins were forced to go to Chinese school, speak Cantonese in the house and visit the motherland, I was never pushed. I did what I wanted.

It wasn't until I grew up and entered the dating world that I really began to celebrate my cultural differences with other Canadians. People were actually interested in my heritage and didn't make me feel like my Chinese roots were something to be ashamed of.

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My mom and I on our mother-daughter trip to London, U.K. this year.

By meeting new people who were also open to talk about their backgrounds, I was able to overcome my embarrassment for my Chinese culture and learn to be proud of it.

After recently speaking to my mother, I realized it was her Canadian mentality of being open to other cultures that really led me to accept my own. Her world views influenced my perspective, whether I realized it or not, and showed me that all cultures should be embraced equally. Canada is a mosaic after all.

While I regret not coming to terms with my culture earlier, I'm glad I've learned that being Chinese is something to be proud of, in addition to being Canadian. I love teaching people about the Chinese zodiac, our red packets and our lion dances. I love eating bolo bao, laksa and dim sum. I think cheongsams are beautiful and so are our Chinese symbols. I'm proud to rep my Chinese culture, but I'm also proud to be Canadian.

I'm a banana. Always have been and always will be.

Born And Raised is an ongoing series by The Huffington Post Canada that shares the experiences of second-generation Canadians. Part reflection, part storytelling, this series on the children of immigrants explores what it means to be born and raised in Canada. We want to hear your stories -- join the conversation on Twitter at #BornandRaised or send us an email at bornandraised@huffingtonpost.com.

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Lucas Oleniuk via Getty Images TORONTO, ON - SEPTEMBER 21: Toronto, On- Sep 21, 2015Moderator Laura Payton(left) and panelists Alejandra Bravo, Katherine Hensel, Kate Mcinturff and Angela Robertson participated in the Up For Debate event at the Isabel Bader Theatre. The panelist viewed and commented on a series of interviews from all of the leading candidates in the federal election with the exception of Stephen Harper who declined to participate. (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Written by Kelly Bowden, Manager of Campaigns for Oxfam Canada

I sent an email to Google earlier this week because I had an idea. I told them they should make a Google doodle on women's rights advocacy, or smashing patriarchy, or even Justin Trudeau as a "this is what a feminist looks like" caricature. I wasn't sure how you would draw any of those things, but I was sure that September 21st was the day to celebrate. It is an important marker for the women's movement here in Canada.

The end of summer usually brings to mind canoes and cottages, but last summer was coloured by Canada's federal election. It reminds me and thousands of other women's rights advocates across the country of late nights, long phone calls and lots of meetings.

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That's because the organization I work for, Oxfam Canada, and dozens of women's organizations across the country were in a buzz. It looked like we were on the brink of achieving something that hadn't happened in 30 years: federal leaders were going to debate women's issues publicly.

Over 170 women's organizations and their allies from unions, the health sector, faith based groups and beyond had come together to put women's rights on the political agenda. The result was the Up For Debate campaign calling on all federal leaders to participate in a televised leaders' debate on women's rights and gender equality.

In 2015, the "Up For Debate" campaign sparked incredible energy among women's groups and their allies around the country. In this picture, Oxfam Canada's Kelly Bowden and Melanie Gallant show their excitement at seeing women's rights on the front page.

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We negotiated for months with broadcasters and the press, got politicians on board, and inspired thousands of Canadians to take a stand. Some people challenged the notion that women's issues should be debated at all, and the debate around election debates got messy, so ultimately we shifted gears, choosing to do one on one interviews with each of the political leaders. Those interviews were first aired on September 21st, 2015.

When women come together and get organized, they bring about change.

Since the election, people have been applauding some of Trudeau's gender-informed decisions: the gender parity cabinet, his coming out as a feminist, and the commitment to include the full range of sexual and reproductive health rights as part of Canada's aid abroad. These steps are worthy of applause. But what we tend to forget is how these ideas became embedded in, and accepted by, government in the first place. It's because women's organizations -- last year, and for decades before that -- fought for them. Hard.

If you watch the full interviews produced by the Up For Debate campaign (you can see Trudeau's interview here) you'll see him call himself a feminist, commit to the gender parity cabinet and confirm that yes, Canada will fund abortion overseas -- months before he was ever elected. Would the government have supported these policies without the Up For Debate campaign? Perhaps. But they wouldn't have political salience and mainstream support if it wasn't for the tireless work of grassroots women's organizations and feminist activists.

A Google doodle is the least we could do to recognize their contributions to Canadian society.

Research shows that the strength of national women's movements contributes to all kinds of well-being indicators: decreased rates of violence, improved health outcomes, and increased participation of women in public and political life. When women come together and get organized, they bring about change. Fundamentally, if we want to build a world in which women are more equal, we need to support women to organize and claim their own rights.

At different times this has looked different all over the world. In the United States it was consciousness raising groups. In Argentina it was the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In India it was the Womanifesto. Women in Canada gained suffrage in 1918 and we recognize the contribution of the Famous Five.

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The Up For Debate campaign sparked incredible excitement and energy among women's groups and their allies around the country. It goes to show we still have so much more to do for women to be equal in this country, and around the planet. There is an enormous strength in women's organizations and feminist movements coming together to do this.

Not every battle that women and their organizations take on is won, or even recorded in our history books. But they are each a piece in a collection of experiences that make our movements stronger. So even if there is no Google doodle, we know that something important happened on September 21st 2015 in Canada.

Women were united in saying that we wanted to be heard, and that governments had a responsibility to build a country for us too. We're already starting to see the results of that work.

One thing we know for sure is that women in Canada and around the world will continue to fight for equality. That certainly isn't up for debate.

Kelly Bowden was one of dozens of coordinators during the Up For Debate Campaign

She is currently the Manager of Campaigns at Oxfam Canada and you can follow her @kbowds where you can see a copy of the letter she sent to Google

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Aerial view of a pod of beluga whales in Lancaster Sound, Canada. (Photo: DOUG ALLAN VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Written by Bettina Saier, Vice President, Oceans

Barack Obama's presidency is going out with a splash.

In August, Obama expanded the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument near Hawaii to 1,510,000 square kilometres. That's about the size of Quebec, Canada's largest province, making it the Earth's largest protected area, in land or at sea. On September 15, he announced the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, America's first Atlantic marine monument. This latest area is smaller, but also closer to shore and therefore used more intensively. The monument will protect biologically significant areas, including the habitats of deep-sea coral, whales and critically endangered sea turtles.

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He made the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts announcement at the U.S. Department of State's Our Oceans conference -- and remarkably, that wasn't the only big announcement to occur. Britain announced it would ban commercial fishing in a marine protected area (MPA) around Pitcairn island, creating a "no-take zone" of 1 million square kilometres. The European Union announced it was halfway to its goal of 10 per cent marine protection by 2020. Chile spoke of its success with the marine protected area it created in 2015, one the size of Italy.

All told, 20 countries lined up the announce the creation of 40 new marine protection areas, totalling 1.2 million square kilometers, aimed at protecting the ocean from threats like overfishing and pollution.

Protecting Lancaster Sound, an area twice the size of Nova Scotia, will more double the ocean space protected by Canada.

Canada has its own commitments to live up to: to protect five per cent of Canada's marine territory by 2017 and 10 per cent by 2020. We know we can get there. We just need to get going.

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For instance, now that oil rights near Lancaster Sound in the Arctic have been relinquished, the marine protected area that the community has been demanding for 40 years can be expedited. Protecting Lancaster Sound, an area twice the size of Nova Scotia, will more double the ocean space protected by Canada.

To help illustrate what else could happen in terms of marine protection, WWF-Canada has created this interactive map highlighting proposed Marine Protected Area sites with information about existing MPAs.

But it's not just about the target number: MPAs have to offer meaningful protection, too. Take a deeper dive into Marine Protected Areas and find out what science tells us about the kinds of ocean protections are most effective.

International expectations have been raised now that the United States has become serious about marine protection, and WWF-Canada applauds this global sea change. If Canada makes good on its targets, we can expect MPA announcements to start coming quickly in the coming months.

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Jack Taylor via Getty Images

Leader's Report

Jeremy Corbyn gave the Leader's report. He talked about his work to make politics more engaging. He welcomed the increase in Labour Party membership and talked about the positive difference new members could make, particularly in parts of the country where Labour has not traditionally been active. He thanked Labour Party staff for their continued hard work. He spoke about the importance of uniting the party after the leadership election. He thanked the NEC for all their work on Party Reform and welcomed discussions about shadow cabinet elections. He also touched on a range of topics including Orgreave, tackling anti-Semitism, workplace 2020, economic development, Brexit, Post Office closures and justice for blacklisted workers. He took questions on government education policy, grammar schools, tackling bullying and harassment, recent TV documentaries, 2017 elections, gender based violence in the UK and internationally, devolution, preparing for a snap general election, Lords Reform and Labour's constitutional convention. The NEC endorsed Jeremy's comments on support for staff. The NEC also agreed that after the leadership election people must put aside their differences and unite to form a credible and effective opposition.

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Deputy Leader's Report

Tom Watson's report covered a range of areas. He introduced a new safeguarding policy for young members, agreed a social media code of conduct to tackle online abuse, talked about the significant improvements Labour is making to digital campaigning, training new community organisers and Party Reform.

The NEC agreed a number of key rule changes and new guidance notes to be put to Labour Party Conference this weekend:

New Powers for Women's Conference

The NEC agreed to establish a formal policy-making Women's Conference. Important campaigns on issues like the minimum wage, the Living wage, fairer pensions, affordable childcare and protecting the NHS have been supported and driven by women in the Labour movement at Women's conference. The exact details have yet to be finalised but this commitment was welcomed by everyone as an important step forward.

Support for Councillors

It was very positive that the NEC supported my Local Government Party Reform Paper, with recommendations to make our processes and procedures fairer and more transparent, increase diversity and better support Councillors. Thank you to the thousands of Councillors over the past year who contributed to the consultation and final report.

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New changes to guidance includes:

Family members should not sit on assessment team interview panels for their own spouses or relatives.

All assessment team interview panels should be chaired by somebody from a different local authority area.

Sitting councillors should face an assessment interview at least every two terms.

Shortlisting meetings will decide whether to automatically shortlist sitting councillors individually in multi-member wards.

Labour Group leaders may be elected for a four year term with a right of recall triggered by two-thirds of the Labour Group if the Council has adopted a four year 'strong leader' model.

Labour Group leaders will be entitled to Labour Party membership lists for the area they represent.

Increase training and support for under-represented groups in local government.

Work to phase-out all male-member wards.

Young Labour groups may be constituted along local or combined authority boundaries.

Consider further representation on NPF for councillors and ALC elected representatives.

Annual Report to the ALC from the General Secretary on the use of the Levy.

New rule changes we agreed included:

Combined Authority Mayors and PCCs to be accountable to CLPs, Labour Groups and Affiliates with regular reports to those units and to regional conferences.

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Combined Authority Mayors and PCCs to uphold Labour's commitment to diversity and under-representation in any appointments they make.

Councils and Labour Group Executives should reflect the wider community and gender balance of the executive should reflect the group as a whole.

Members of the Labour Group shall not support any proposal to set an illegal budget.

We also asked for two additional places for local government representatives on the NEC. Decisions about expanding or reforming NEC membership has been deferred to a future meeting. I will keep pressing the case for more NEC places for Councillors.

Devolution: Scotland and Wales

The NEC agreed to devolve significant new powers to the Labour Party in Scotland and Wales. This includes:

The Scottish and Welsh Labour Party each to be directly represented with voting rights on the NEC by a frontbench member of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.

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The Leaders of the Scottish and Welsh Labour Party to attend Clause V meetings.

Scottish and Welsh Executives to administer the procedures and selection of Westminster Parliamentary Candidates in Scotland and Wales.

Scottish and Welsh Executives to manage and administer selection of candidates for devolved institutions and local government in Scotland and Wales.

Scottish and Welsh Executive to set procedural rules for the election of the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Scottish and Welsh Labour Party.

The Leader of the Scottish Labour Party Kezia Dugdale attended the meeting to make the case for these changes in person. (The Leaders of the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties are currently ex-officio members of the NEC already - the new changes grant them full voting rights.) The NEC often discusses how to rebuild the party in Scotland. It makes sense to fully involve the Leader of the Scottish Labour Party in these discussions.

Financial Support for Working Class candidates

The NEC agreed a new bursary scheme to support members seeking selection to Parliament from working class and low income backgrounds. We will also continue to develop of range of training and support programmes to encourage more working class, BAME, female, disabled and LGBT candidates to stand for elected office at all levels of the Labour Party. As part of this Labour will be launching the Jo Cox Leadership Programme to train women for leadership roles within the Labour Party. This will be a fitting tribute to Jo's memory. More will be announced on this at Labour Party Conference.

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Shadow Cabinet Elections

The PLP put forward a motion on bringing back Elections to the Shadow Cabinet. As part of the Collins Review Ed Miliband introduced a new rule banning Shadow Cabinet elections. The NEC discussed a variety of ways forward. The consensus was that the Leader, Deputy Leader, Chief Whip and Chair of the PLP should continue discussions to find a unifying way forward. I suggested a compromise of deleting the rule that forbids Shadow Cabinet elections and leaving the rule book silent so elections can be introduced if there is a consensus agreement that they should be introduced, but equally that they are not imposed on the Leader if they do not want to use them. The NEC agreed that the most important thing was for Labour to have a strong, effective Shadow Cabinet that can hold the government to account and present Labour's alternative vision for Britain.

Local Government Report

I gave the Local Government Report, which touched on a range of issues including LGA and ALC events at Labour Party Conference, preparation for the 2017 elections, supporting and working with our Metro Mayor candidates and how Councillors can work constructively with local government Trade Unions on areas like use of agency workers, facility time and insourcing. Earlier this month I attended a meeting hosted by LGA Labour Group Leader Nick Forbes and Andy Burnham to discuss the positive difference Labour Councillors make to our communities and how we can work together to deliver for local people. I look forward to campaigning for our fantastic Mayoral candidates in Greater Manchester, Merseyside, the West Midlands and elsewhere.

General Secretary's Report

Iain McNicol gave the GS report. We now have over 550,000 members - an amazing achievement that presents Labour with fantastic opportunities. Ann Black very sensibly suggested that CLPs be given more resources to manage the administration of larger local parties. Iain also reported that finances are in the best shape for decades. We have paid off all our election debts and now also paid off all our mortgage debts.

Boundary Review

Labour is in the process of co-ordinating our response to the first stage of the parliamentary Boundary Review. I am a member of the NEC Boundaries Steering Committee and will report back on our meeting in October. It is outrageous that the boundaries are being draw-up on the old election register, which ignores almost 2 million new registered voters.

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Disciplinary issues and membership appeals

We discussed the administration for the Leadership election, including issues relating to disciplinary cases. A number of concerns have been raised by members and should be properly examined and addressed, with recommendations for improving the process in future. A full discussion will take place at the next relevant subcommittee meeting. Please do keep passing your feedback to NEC members. The NEC once again thanked staff for all their hard work administering the Leadership election. 2015 and 2016 have been busy years with General Election, referendum campaigns and two leadership elections. I hope everyone finally gets a well-earned break in the summer of 2017!

Finally.....
"It's long overdue. For a long time we've needed a group or somebody that can actually support us because we have no rights. And when any of us have tried to stick up for our rights we've been victimised or bullied by individual managers or social workers from the local authorities. I think there's a lack of respect there. Although I'm not afraid to challenge them, many of my colleagues are afraid to do so because if you complain you might not be given a child, and so you won't earn any money. We should be able to speak up without any fear and be able to challenge decisions about the children that we look after, decisions about our employment rights. That is the biggest issue. It infuriates me that we can't be seen to be talking about our pay and conditions because, if we do, then we're seen to be chasing money."
The Guardian published a story on September 7th about a study which found that US doctors and therapists are struggling to give transgender patients the best medical care.

The author, Stef Shuster, makes the [very valid] point which is just as pertinent here in the UK: there is very little scientific evidence and clinical experience on which to base medical decisions relating to the best treatment for transgender patients and it is "this particular feature of trans medicine [that] introduces the potential for providers to bring bias or limited knowledge into their work with trans people."

The NHS has approved care for transgender people in the form of counselling, hormone therapy, voice therapy, laser hair removal and surgery but why are so many patients struggling to gain access to these services?

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The majority of trans people do not want to have full reassignment surgery, and would be very relieved to just receive timely, compassionate support and simple hormone treatment.

So why are healthcare workers struggling to give the best care? The US study cites reasons such as personal bias and limited knowledge.

Here in the UK, the GMC is very clear that no doctor should allow their personal beliefs to hinder the care that they offer to someone with gender variance. This means that your doctor is not allowed to:

a) not believe you

b) refuse to offer help and support with your condition on the NHS

c) refuse treatment based on any religious or ethical grounds

The key issue, here in the UK at least, appears to be a perceived lack of knowledge on the part of the GP which is further exacerbated by the lack of evidence-based research which GPs can refer to in order to help with any decision making on the best care pathways for a patient with gender variance.

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The medications we use are often unlicensed for the use in this situation. We are short of large and comprehensive research studies to examine the best medication and the best age to start it. Of course there is information out there and resources are available to support any GP who wants to learn more about how to treat patients in this very specific area of gender health but, for many, the lack of precedents leads to a fear of making a mistake and ultimately the withdrawal of care from a vulnerable patient.

There may be a lack of evidence on the best treatment pathways for these patients, but does that mean they should have no care at all or, at best, care filled with prejudice and bias? Why is it that so many of my patients tell me that they were the one telling their GP what to do next?

As for lack of available care, if we start offering more care then we will have more case studies on which to report successful and unsuccessful outcomes. Doing nothing is not a neutral option, it causes terrible detriment to the future mental and physical health of these patients.
Tom Braekeleirs (center) leads an age friendly hackathon. Image (C) I Spero

We live in a fast changing society. It seems we are reaching the limits of the capability of humans to digest technological advancements. And with singularity on the horizon, things tend to speed up even more. The question that has to be raised in this perspective is twofold: will we create a society at two speeds with those who can and those who cannot keep up the pace? And secondly, how can we synchronize this evolution with the changing dynamics of the ageing population?

Both are equally interesting but not that easy to answer questions. It's not like you can pass a law that prohibits technological advancements, or a quick win solution to the challenge of the ageing population. We will reach the point in roughly two decades where the active population will be smaller than the 65+ group. How will we cope with that as a society?

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This is a challenge being addressed by organizations across the planet, including Microsoft Innovation Centres (MIC,) which is a founding member of the Agile Ageing Alliance. AAA has joined forces with the European Commission and cross sector stakeholders in a united effort to accelerate development of smarter age inclusive homes that will empower citizens to enjoy more meaningful, healthy and creative lives, whilst seizing new opportunities for learning and social engagement.

To this end AAA conceived Neighbourhoods of the Future, a series of fact finding roadshows co-created with partners across member states. This month there are two: 22 September Utrecht, Netherlands (in collaboration with Economic Board Utrecht and Utrecht University,) and St. Gallen, Switzerland in collaboration with the AAL Forum.

On October 19th, the roadshow will be hosted in Genk, Belgium by Microsoft Innovation Center Flanders in partnership with Life Tech Valley. Genk is the most multicultural city of Belgium, so has quite some challenges of its own when it boils down to different approaches to ageing in these different cultures. Click here if you would like to attend.

Nerds will Rule

When we think about an ageing population and our neighbourhoods of the future, there are a couple of perspectives that spring to mind. Let's start with the essence - but one that is too easily forgotten - and that is the end-user him/or herself. We hear, see, read so many opinions and proposals derived from the desks of people that are often not considered "the target group". That is why a project like CareVille, is so important, giving senior citizens a voice in informing development of product and service concepts that are directed at them as potential users, even to the point they can test and make-or-break the proposed approach.

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We must also pay more attention to the infrastructure side, taking account of the need to construct new homes and facilities, retrofitting older buildings and changing building codes, whilst implementing new IoT enabled technologies such as beacons, sensors and the related network infrastructure that seamlessly transits into the ICT dimension. It's typically a world buzzing with acronyms, slang and hollow phrases, but... If we want to tackle this challenge at scale, we will need IT infrastructure, software, cloud solutions and so much more. Whether we like it or not, nerds will rule the world (or as Bill Gates once said: "Be kind to nerds, chances are you'll end up working for one.")

That said, the sheer unlimited possibilities of technology combined with infrastructure will raise even more challenging questions. How will we protect the individual when every little step, every detail is measured, monitored and stored? Where do we find the balance between convenience, privacy and public good and service? That is the legal aspect of it all. One we are just starting to tackle and of which we cannot yet predict what we will have to put into these laws, because - let's face it - no one has a crystal ball to read the future. But one thing is sure. The future is coming...

Neighbourhoods of the Future is part of a wider European Commission initiative, seeking input from stakeholders with a professional interest in the Silver Economy - to inform a European Reference Framework for Age Friendly Housing and a Blueprint for Innovation. See this short video for further information.

Written by Ian Spero and Tom Braekeleirs, Director Microsoft Innovation Centers Belgium.
Brexit continues to lie untouched in the dog's breakfast bowl, no more appetising in the cold light of day than it was when the smell started on the night of June 23. Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, Brexit over easy on rye, nobody's quite sure what they ordered. The Scots aren't planning to shut up and eat what someone else requested on their behalf, that's clear. Alex Salmond said recently there will be a new independence referendum in 2018.

The US is facing a similar binary choice with one indigestible option on the menu: here are some lessons from a still-suffering Remain supporter.

Denial doesn't help.

In the run up to the referendum on EU membership, I found myself almost unable to believe that the British people would vote Leave. Reading reports of the poll results, I discounted the ones I didn't like.

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When MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered, I thought, as many others did that people would vote the way she wanted, to honour her memory. But it wasn't a turning point, in fact it was an indicator of how bad things were getting in that part of England. Even her own constituency voted 'Leave'. We were in denial.

There was a recent article in the New York Times about Democrats seeing Trump eyeing the White House. "The possibility of that is too horrifying to broach," Larry David, the "Seinfeld" co-creator and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star, wrote in an email. "It's like contemplating your own death. I can't go there". Go there.

Beware the filter bubble

A British entry has more chance of winning Eurovision than Trump has of carrying Massachusetts, where I am now. I read the New York Times which does not carry their voices; a friend pointed to this interview with an imaginary Trump supporter. I don't know them.

Similarly, my home city of Edinburgh was the most Remain of any in the UK. I know people who were pretty unenthusiastic about the European Union, but none who voted 'Leave".

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On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, wrote" I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook's custom search that I can't find anyone who is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today* and despite the fact that I'm *actively* looking to hear what they are saying... We're getting countries where one half just doesn't know anything at all about the other." (Quoted by the Guardian's Katharine Viner in "How Technology Disrupted the Truth".)

Disproportionately old, poor, socially unconnected, living in deprived areas, Leavers were heavily reliant for information on tabloid news outlets punting out cheap populism.

Avoid "mansogyny" and other inverse prejudice

After the Brexit vote in the UK, I listened on a radio phone-in. One woman called the show in tears to say she had been told: "White trash shouldn't have the vote."

And on an important TV debate in the run-up to the referendum, we watched an all-female team on the Remain side make repeated personal attacks on Boris Johnson. "That's mansogyny," my teenage son commented. A joke, but perhaps his word captured how some male viewers felt.

The new poor, the new marginalised, are sensitive to their loss of status. Don't insult them.

Think harder

In the Brexit referendum campaign, the boring case for continuing to work towards a better Europe didn't measure up to the grandiose false promises of "Leave".

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Apparently the Chinese followed the Brexit campaign with fascination - the Chinese media reported it in detail, as an example of what a silly system democracy is. The Chinese media have also described the rise of Trump the "big-mouthed clown" as an illustration of scarey and pointless democracy.

But what really lies behind his rise in support? In France, Emmanuel Macron describes a new split in politics superseding the left-right divide, between those afraid of globalisation and those who see it as an opportunity. But has unfettered globalisation has been too harsh for too many people? Dani Rodrick in the NYT argued that a more strategic approach could have been taken.

Democracy, as Winston Churchill put it, is the worst form of government except for all the others.

Be Ready.

It is likely that Hillary Clinton will be elected the next President of the United States. It will be a historic moment - the election of an older woman, a grandmother, a woman of as the leader of the free world. It is still unlikely that Trump will win. But it's possible.

The night of June 23 was a memorable low for British democracy. It was a shambles. It was only when Scotland's SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon appeared on television, looking poised, flanked by Scottish and European flags that it seemed as if we were watching someone who had prepared for this moment. For her, the end of the Brexit referendum was the beginning of the next electoral campaign.

One of the strengths of democracy is in its resilience. As long as the other institutions which underpin it remain strong, and an autocrat isn't able to seize power, there will be another election coming up.

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When talking about the health service, it is often more prudent to use the language of theology rather than policy. Phrases such as "hands off our NHS" and "the NHS saved my life" are common place and demonstrate the reverence the British people have for it, and the personal ownership many of us feel we have over it. Nigel Lawson's adage that it is the closest thing we have to a national religion still rings true.

There is no doubt that our health service is a world leader, and I myself have personally benefitted from the care it gives, and was grateful for not being handed a bill at the end of it. But, at risk of committing blasphemy, are we worshiping a false idol?

This week I attended a fascinating workshop of cancer patients (as part of my work with Empower: Data4Health) where I got to hear first-hand what they feel the health service has done for them, what they thought it could do better and things they don't want it to do. I also heard from a number of health experts on research they had conducted into public and patient attitudes to the health service. In particular, the research was focussed on patient and public attitudes towards the data the health service does (or does not) hold on us as individuals and what it does (or does not) do with it.

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What struck me in their findings was what seemed to me a lack of understanding of what our health service actually is and how it works. By that I don't mean the public lack a detailed understanding of medical practice, or the bureaucratic processes of the NHS (few have the need for that knowledge), but rather a lack of understanding in a general sense of what the fabled acronym that is our National Health Service actually is.

For a start it's not national. The health services in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are devolved to a large extent, and work quite differently in each part of the UK. The service a patient gets, the priorities each individual health organisation has, and indeed the funding that underpins it, varies significantly from Land's End to John O'Groats and everywhere in between. The main commonality is the fact that it's free at the point of delivery (though even how free does vary across the UK).

Secondly it doesn't make medicine. The privatisation fear that constantly frames any discussion this country has about the NHS often demonstrates, I believe, a misconception of where the medicines we take and the equipment our doctors use comes from. There is no army of NHS public sector workers squirrelling away making medical compounds and MRI machines. That is the work of professionals in the pharmaceutical and medical engineering sector. The NHS buys their products in and prescribes them to you.

This misconception and the idolatry that surrounds what the NHS does for us, and indeed what it doesn't do for us, is important. As it has direct implications for our expectations of it, who we think is accountable in it, and crucially what information we're willing to share with 'it'.

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The research presented at this workshop (organised by the fantastic www.usemydata.org team) showed that patients are very happy to share as much of their medical information as possible with the NHS to further the pursuit of medical research (their altruism was tremendous). But that willingness falls considerably when they are told there will be private sector involvement in their data, i.e. it will be shared with pharmaceutical companies, or health analytic specialists, etc. Consent disappears almost entirely if you say it would end up in the hands of an insurance company.

Though this may be unsurprising to hear, it really matters to how "our NHS" meets the challenges of the modern world. Private providers, third sector providers, academics and more, are all deeply interwoven into the technicoloured patchwork that is the NHS across the UK. You cannot simply give one part of it access to medical data, whilst cutting the other part out.

The private sector, academia, charities too, all team up to do medical research. We can't simply give research data to the charities and academics and not give it to the pharma companies that have the labs and technicians. It would be nonsensical.

In short we need to be far more grown up about how our medical data is used. It isn't about handing over huge amounts of meta data so that companies can better tailor your internet pop up ads so that you buy the latest innovation in ibuprofen. It is about collecting data to create the medicines and treatments that save lives.

In an age where we tick a box handing over great swathes of our personal information to the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google, we should not be so frightened to share and leverage our most valuable health information. This generation and the ones to follow do and will expect information to be available at the touch of a button; why shouldn't we be able to access our own medical records like we do a LinkedIn profile?

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Martin Novak via Getty Images

Sexual violence has nothing to do with educational background, career, salary or belief. There is no fitting description of a sexual abuser, other than sexual abuser. Pretending otherwise can cloud our views and even create a dangerous narrative that somehow sexual predators can be profiled because of their profession or what school they went to, and consequently, stopped.

On Wednesday, a number of media outlets reported that an Oxford University student had been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman and actual bodily harm (ABH). Articles about the arrest carried quotes from a source who described the accused as "brilliant" followed by "shock" over his arrest.

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The first two words of one headline described the accused as "highly intelligent", painting a picture of a very smart and educated individual. A degree of respectability is established before the allegations of sexual assault are even revealed to the reader.

Incidentally, we do not know whether the alleged victim in this case is also "highly intelligent". If both are students at Oxford University then it could be a safe assumption to make.

But what today's articles about this arrest show is how we in the media are still reporting outdated and, as some experts have called it, "toxic" stereotypes of sexual assault suspects and alleged victims.

Fay Maxted, CEO of The Survivors Trust, which supports those who have experienced rape and sexual assault, said that the UK is still battling stereotypes that have been in place for decades.

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"Reinforcing stereotypes is really unhelpful," Maxted told me.

"I think it continues the general feeling that people have, that perpetrators can be separated out someway from ordinary people, so they couldn't possibly be intelligent or have good jobs."

She adds: "We make it safer for ourselves by pretending the offenders are some kind of breed, and that it's impossible for a normal person to behave in that way."

Rape Crisis estimates about 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales every year. When a woman is the alleged victim of a rape or sexual assault, what she was wearing and how intoxicated she was are details that often hit headlines.

In contrast, the achievements of the suspect - usually male - are often reported ahead of the alleged crimes.

Earlier this month, convicted sexual offender Brock Turner was released from jail in the United States after serving half of his six-month term. But how did media outlets choose to introduce him? First and foremost Turner was a "Stanford swimmer". That was the most important detail in the eyes of editors in my profession.

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This description of Turner did not go unnoticed, with many lambasting the publishers for not immediately identifying Turner as someone who had committed a sexual assault.

Time and time again we in the media build up the suspect - or even convicted criminal - and assassinate the character of the alleged victim.

Katie Russell, spokesperson for Rape Crisis England and Wales, told me that there is a common and widespread problem with the way sexual violence, and indeed sex and gender, are discussed and portrayed in the media in general. Women and girls are so often described primarily according to their looks and presentation, while men's and boys' intellectual abilities or sporting prowess or achievements are foregrounded.

"In stories about alleged sexual violence, focussing on the accused's positive attributes first and foremost can insidiously imply their innocence or mitigation, while disproportionate interest in the complainant's clothes or alcohol intake is used to discredit them or imply their culpability."

Just as there is no 'typical' rapist or sexual offender, there is no 'typical' victim.
BBC 5 live reporter Lucy Grey spent twelve days on MV Aquarius with Medecins Sans Frontieres and SOS Mediterranee as they searched for migrants in the Mediterranean 25 nautical miles from the coast of Libya

I have received quite a few sexually explicit messages on social media over the past couple of years, particularly when we live-stream one of the radio programmes I present, but I had never been trolled and I hadn't experienced such deep hatred and vitriol until this trip.

I join the Aquarius in Sicily. During the 36-hour journey to the 'Libyan search zone' we have first aid refreshers and safety drills because an MSF ship was recently shot at and boarded by armed men in the same area. Just after sunrise, once we reach our stopping point 25 nautical miles North East of Tripoli, a white dot is spotted on the horizon. 142 people crammed onto what looks to me like an oversized lilo with an engine on the back. 29 of them are under 18 and travelling alone. The rescuers say this flimsy rubber dinghy and the many like it leaving the Libyan coast every week have no chance of making the 300 mile crossing to Sicily.

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Everyone is exhausted and anxious and the rescue crews work tirelessly to keep them all calm so they don't capsize the boat. After several hours everyone is brought safely on board the rescue ship. Later they're all transferred to the Italian coast guard who will take them to Italy. The Aquarius stays in the rescue zone to search for more dinghies. And so we wait. And while we wait I decide to broadcast a live Q&A with two of the rescuers for the BBC World Service, so we punt for questions on Facebook and twitter. And that's when the hatred comes pouring into my phone.

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Another hopes that I, and the rescuers, are raped by those on board and sends me a picture of a blonde woman having sex with someone with darker skin.

And the messages keep coming.

But beyond the pure hatred there is an important discussion to be had about whether the existence of these rescue ships 25nm from shore is encouraging people to set off in the first place. Aren't they just acting as a taxi service for migrants? Why not take them back to Africa? In response to this Dr Sarah Giles the MSF doctor on board asks "where would you have us send them back to? To their burnt villages, places where they have enforced military conscription and aren't paid for years on end, to terrible situations all round? People come to the Mediterranean because they're pushed there, not necessarily because they're pulled by Europe. Are we a taxi service? If so we're a pretty poor taxi service because there's a one in 19 chance they'll drown... people only take to the boats when it's not safe on land."

I meet a 30-year-old woman from Cameroon, I won't give her name, she tells me she fled Cameroon after she was raped by members of Islamist group Boko Haram who also killed many of her relatives. She made it to Nigeria where she was attacked again by Boko Haram militants. So she walked for three weeks through the desert. When she arrived in Libya she and a friend met a Libyan man who said he'd help them with food and lodging. Instead of looking after them, he forced them to have sex with him and soon he forced them to have sex with many other men. She says the men liked to beat her during sex. Her friend didn't survive the beatings. Finally when it was deemed that she had slept with enough men she was allowed onto one of the rubber dinghies on the beach. When she climbs on board the rescue ship Aquarius she looks deeply shattered, and along with many of the other women with equally harrowing stories, she falls asleep within minutes of being given a blanket. As we talk about her rescue her emptiness is palpable. I ask her how she feels about going to Europe, she says she has no morale and no hopes about the future. But then she says being in the hands of a humanitarian organisation is the most beautiful moment of her life.

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There are a lot of people on board, however, who aren't fleeing persecution or war; like the two men I meet from Ghana who say they can't find work at home and want to get a job in Europe to send money to their family. The same answer comes from many of the Nigerians who tell me there's no money for them if they stay in Nigeria. But that doesn't change the fact that they are willing to risk everything to make the crossing. Many of those I meet have spent days in pits dug into the sand on a Libyan beach covered with tarpaulins, not even allowed out to go to the loo, this is where the people smugglers hold them until the weather clears. Then they send them off in unseaworthy dinghies with enough fuel to make it to international waters, but not much further. The rescue teams look for them and pick them up. Because if they don't they won't make it. It's not up to the crews from MSF or SOS Med to decide who deserves a life in Europe, the authorities they hand them over to can do that, they're there to try to stop people drowning at sea.

So far this year more than 3,000 people have died trying to make this crossing, it's the deadliest year on record in the central Mediterranean. As for whether the rescue ships' presence encourages people to take these risks, I ask the people whose only possessions are the pants and t-shirt they're wearing and they say they didn't know about any rescue ships, they thought the journey would take five hours (not three days). That's what the people smugglers told them. The smugglers don't care if they make it to Sicily or not, they only care that their bodies don't wash up on Libyan beaches and deter others paying them for the next dinghy.

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In countries that have welcomed large number of Syrian refugees, cases of labour exploitation and child labour have been detected. It is well known that in Europe, the trafficking and labour exploitation of migrant workers, sometimes in slavery-like conditions, is present for example in the tomato picking in the South, berry picking in the North, and generally speaking in the forestry, construction, and tourism industries.

How many of today's refugees and migrants are victims of human trafficking? The UN Migration Summit, which begins today in New York, must also be a Summit for Trafficked Migrants. The Summit must take action to break the chain of human trafficking, and tackle the driving factors of exploitation. One of the most powerful among them is the lack of regular channels for migration.

Some countries continue to adopt restrictive approaches, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to human trafficking. These policies contribute to denying trafficked persons their rights to assistance, protection, access to justice and remedies regardless of their residence status or whether perpetrators are identified, investigated or prosecuted. A policy shift is urgently needed. To prevent trafficking, it is necessary to protect the rights of all migrants, and of all vulnerable people, be them foreigners or nationals. The fight against trafficking is incompatible with restrictive migration policies that place people in a situation of irregularity and vulnerability to exploitation and trafficking. Walls, fences and laws criminalising irregular migration not only do not work, they increase the vulnerabilities of people fleeing conflict, persecution, crisis situations and extreme poverty, who can fall easy prey to traffickers and exploiters.

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Just in the first half of 2016, 2,856 people have died, or are missing, after trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, according to IOM estimates. Despite generating tremendous emotion and solidarity in public opinion, these tragedies have not substantially advanced the terms of the discussion at the governmental level. As world leaders gather today to discuss a global response to the international migration crisis, let us uphold the values that bring together "We the Peoples of the United Nations" - to "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity & worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men & women in nations large and small."
Yui Mok/PA Wire

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to reunite the Labour Party after the leadership election, but how can he do that? And what might be the terms on which unity is achieved?

The wounds in the Labour Party run deep. There is talk of de-selecting MPs, sacking headquarters staff, gossip about a new party and proposals for shadow cabinet positions to be being elected by MPs or by party members. This feels like a civil war, which means that a spirit of compromise essential for unity will be hard for both sides to find.

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Voters know that a party fussing about its constitutional structure has turned inwards. Winning elections requires politicians to face outwards and talk about the problems of the people. Corbyn can never be Prime Minister if he leads a divided party.

As a leader Jeremy Corbyn has many strengths. He is tough, principled, unspun and authentic. He has inspired the idealism of many young people and has helped to create the largest party membership ever. But there are weaknesses too. He has never articulated a clear vision for the party and he has lost the confidence of 82% of Labour MPs. Rebel MPs claim Corbyn is uncommunicative, makes policy announcements without consulting shadow Ministers and that he hides behind a praetorian guard of advisers. Perhaps, the most personally hurtful allegation is that he is more out of touch with his fellow MPs than Tony Blair ever was.

Winning the leadership election will not deal with these concerns. And, as a past rebel, Jeremy Corbyn knows that relying on the power of the whips or the threat of de-selection does not secure loyalty. Corbyn needs the active support of the Parliamentary Party from here until the next election if he is to be Prime Minister. Threatening de-selection or, even worse doing it, will create more enemies.

Despite these problems Corbyn retains the capacity to surprise. Few expected him to be elected leader in 2015 and few believed he could survive a vote of no confidence by four out of five MPs. Reuniting Labour will be a tough challenge, but he might surprise people again. It is likely that for a month or so after the election he will have a window of opportunity to spell out the terms on which he will seek party unity. It remains to be seen whether that period will be about building bridges to unity or not.

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Party policy matters in the search for unity. Like Kinnock, Smith and Blair, Jeremy Corbyn will need to set out his policy priorities. It can take years to convince the party and the voters about just one or two big policy changes and trying to change too much in one go will make party unity impossible. Leaders have to negotiate their agenda with MPs, with party members and, most importantly, with the voters. Dictats from the leaders office just provoke unnecessary rows and going over the heads of MPs to appeal to party members sows the seeds of future problems.

To unite the party Corbyn has to bring around his MPs. He can start doing that by talking to his colleagues and particularly spending time in the tearoom where MP's gather for meals and a cup of tea before votes. Even Blair and Brown turned up in the tearoom when things got tough. Listening and talking to people enables criticism to be absorbed and managed. It's worth remembering that earlier this year, when Hilary Clinton wanted to address doubts about her role in the deaths in Benghazi, she offered a Republican dominated Congressional Committee an open ended question session to absorb the flak. And it worked.

Times are tough for Corbyn. If he wants change, he needs to better engage with colleagues, let them get their doubts off their chest; he can absorb their pain and also let them know he cares about them as people. It requires patience, humility and time, but it is a political skill that gets results.

Corbyn also needs to spend time developing a clear vision of what the Labour Party stands for in the post New Labour era. The failure to have a serious debate after 2010 was a major error, committed in the name of party unity. The world has changed since 1997, but the party has never really addressed the question, what is the purpose of a modern socialist party in the era of the global market? This is not about what Jeremy Corbyn stands for as a leader. The question is 'what is the party here for?' This debate could be Corbyn's opportunity. It is a debate that can easily embrace and energise both Blairites and Corbynistas. Many issues are neither right wing nor left wing, but they matter.

The coming months could be a seminal moment for the party, determining its direction of travel on equality, globalization, climate change, foreign policy, Brexit, the Internet, porous national borders, Muslim religious revival, the neglect of the North of England and the management of global financial services.

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So Corbyn should take this opportunity to reach out as leader. But Labour MPs must also recognise that unity is a two way street and they must respond to any olive branch. Corbyn was elected to bring policy change, which means that MP's schooled in the New Labour shibboleths must be ready to reassess them.

One issue on which Corbyn appears to want change is Trident. This really is a difficult issue for many Labour MPs and some unions. Yet Tony Blair in his biography revealed that he and Gordon Brown discussed scrapping it. It seems Blair and Brown decided not to do it primarily on political rather than military grounds. The military arguments were finely balanced, but they decided that the political price was just too high.

The only serious military argument for an independent nuclear deterrent is the 'rogue state thesis'. What if North Korea or Iran tell us to obey - or else? But the weakness of the argument is that Trident is not completely independent anyway. The Americans supply the kit, so they would have to give us permission to threaten others with it.

Some military voices say Britain would be safer spending the money on its armed services. But the real argument on Trident that persuaded Blair was the political one. For fifty years voters have bought into the notion that "our bomb" is an insurance policy and it would be risky to give it up. Convincing voters to change their mind on Trident could take years. Corbyn will need to work hard to convince his MPs that this really is the priority policy change we need now.

Trident is an unsurprising priority for Corbyn because he has always had a keen interest in peace and foreign affairs. His vision of Britain's role in the world is different to that of Tony Blair. He looks more to the Scandinavian model, than an Atlanticist one.

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Norwegian foreign policy involves being a member of NATO, but using diplomacy, military clout and wealth to create a global role as a trusted arbitrator by resolving wars, providing peacekeepers and taking the long view on international issues. Notably, it was Norway that managed the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine. When Blair later tried Middle East peace negotiations, he made little progress. Yet, interestingly, Norway is seen by the USA as a close friend and also an international asset on the world stage. So there is nothing ignoble about Corbyn learning lessons from the Scandinavian model. Of course it would mark a change from New Labour, but it is not unprecedented for the Labour Party. It refers back to the 'ethical foreign policy' of Robin Cook, but also to the international ambitions of early leaders like Keir Hardie, George Lansbury and even Ramsey McDonald. Corbyn's views therefore have roots in Labour history, so they cannot be dismissed.

His attitude also combines internationalism and, surprisingly, nationalism. It sees a new role for Britain on the world stage but it also enables him to keep our servicemen safe by avoiding foreign wars such as Libya, Syria and Iraq.

But ethical policies can cause dilemmas. After all, the interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo undeniably saved lives and the most shameful foreign policy of the last thirty years was arguably the UK refusal to do anything to stop the Rwanda massacres.

Israel is another dilemma for Corbyn. As an MP he could easily side with the Palestinians; but as party leader he has to come to terms with the fact that Labour is a Zionist party; that is, if Zionism is defined as supporting the existence of the state of Israel. Of course, Labour has opposed settlements and supported Israel based on the pre-1967 boundaries. In the recently published book "The Left's Jewish Problem", the author David Rich argues that Corbyn's speeches reveal that he has tended to see Israel through the prism of Western colonialism. This perspective really annoys British Jews. But it is easy to deal with. Corbyn could pledge unequivocally to support a democratic Israel, at least within the 1967 borders, and a negotiated settlement over Jerusalem. He should also support and recognise Palestine. In the final analysis, Britain has a massive interest in a peace settlement in Middle East and Labour leaders must not be partisans for one side or the other, but should be advocates for a fair and just peace settlement.

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Thankfully Corbyn now seems to be acknowledging that anti Semitism is a unique type of racism. His speeches in the past tended to use the phrase, "anti Semitism and other kinds of racism", lumping it all together. Racists see others as of lesser worth, but historically, anti-Semitism has presented the Jews as a threat due to their supposed wealth and power. These are different kinds of prejudice. They need to be condemned for what they are. British Jews suspect Corbyn doesn't get that. He should be able to reassure people that he does now understand it.

Labour's greatest weakness has always been the economy. Gordon Brown convinced people he would be prudent with their money; in other words that he could say "no". Sadly, Ed Balls didn't convince people. The weakness of John McDonnell as Chancellor is not his economic views, which are actually conventionally Keynesian and much influenced by the American Nobel prize winners, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. McDonnell probably frightens the City less than he thinks he does. Rather the problem is that having a sense of humour, which borders at times on the flippant, does not fit with controlling money. McDonnell needs to learn lessons from Brown about acting like a dour, humourless, boring banker.

One problem for Corbyn is that McDonnell is a strong media performer and this has led to him being used too often to firefight minor flare ups in Labour's civil war. As Shadow Chancellor he ought to be seen as singularly focused on the most important task for Labour, restoring its credibility on the economy. When he gives a speech it should be a serious event. Corbyn trusts McDonnell, but a move to the post of Shadow Employment Secretary might allow him to have a more flexible media profile, whilst retaining influence on economic policy. It could also help Corbyn to mend fences with the MPs by appointing a new Shadow Chancellor, such as Ed Miliband.

Another area where Corbyn needs to develop his policy is on immigration. Workers voted for Brexit because they wanted the government to manage the numbers coming into the UK. There is nothing socialist about the free movement of labour. It benefits the bosses not the workers. A socialist should want a planned immigration policy that is neither racist nor xenophobic. Corbyn tends to see immigration though the prism of racism, but he ought to be calling for a planned socialist management of our borders. That must be in the interest of working people.

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But does Corbyn really want a united party? The answer is that he wants unity on his own terms.

There will be policy changes and compromise is going to be difficult for someone whose unique selling point is that he is a man of principle.

Corbyn also faces pressure from those who would like to split the party. Some of his supporters in Momentum are instinctive sectarians who lack a history in the Labour Party. They distain Blairites and believe that because their captain has the helm, all Blairites should be thrown overboard.

Momentum acts as Corbyn shock troops in the constituency parties. They have struck fear into the hearts of many loyal party members who have canvassed for Labour for years. Some in Momentum have never canvassed for Labour and some may have canvassed against Labour. Whilst pretending that the fringe hard left parties control Momentum is wrong, it is also undeniable that the hard left is infiltrating and trying to get control of it.

Factional organisations do not foster unity. Corbyn needs to curb the growing intimidation in the party. It would be a good step toward unity if Corbyn said Momentum activists must all be Labour Party members.

Labour has always been a coalition of the working class, the unions and the left, so it can include socialists, liberals and sometimes religious social conservatives. In the 1980's it looked like the forward march of Labour had been halted as the decrease in the numbers in the working class. Tony Blair, from the right of the party, rebuilt the crumbling Labour coalition by charisma, guts and skill. Miliband later tried to do it from the soft left, but lacked the charisma to do it.

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Today, to the surprise of many of us who have known him for decades, Jeremy Corbyn seems to have emerged from obscurity with that indefinable something people call charisma. It has enabled him to spring surprise after surprise. His next big surprise must be to show he can unite the Labour Party, including the Parliamentary Party, behind him. But nothing can better unite a party like a charismatic leader who looks like he can win. Corbyn has got to start looking and thinking like the man who could be Prime Minister.

After all, getting the leadership of the Labour Party is merely the qualifying race to get to the starting line for the race to become Prime Minister. It is the moral duty of the Labour leader to win that race and only a united party can win a general election.

So the qualifying race has just finished and the next race against Teresa May is about to begin.
DIMITAR DILKOFF via Getty Images

The UK Home Office has begun working on its latest measure intended to stem the flow of immigrants to its shores. This time, it takes the form of a "big new wall". The concrete construction, which will stretch one kilometre along the motorway from the Calais port, is to be equipped with cameras and a lighting system - specifically designed to stop refugees and displaced people in their tracks. "We've done the fence, now we're doing the wall," immigration minister Robert Goodwill confirmed.

It was an odd statement. Primarily because Goodwill appeared to be acknowledging that the fence - roughly 7million of metal and razor wire - hasn't worked. Throwing yet another 1.9million at the same old strategy seems equally unlikely to provide a sustainable solution to the ongoing problem. In fact, it has become increasingly clear that, if the UK and France are to resolve the humanitarian crisis on their doorsteps, a fresh approach is needed.

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Since January, the Refugee Rights Data Project (RRDP) has been collecting data among refugee communities in northern France. Its findings are striking, and they shed light on what steps the British and French governments could take to ease the situation - reducing the number of people trying to enter the UK illegally, while abiding by universal humanitarian standards.

The wall won't work

Goodwill's plans underestimate the sheer determination displayed by the 10,000-plus refugees and displaced people currently residing in northern France. During the course of RRDP's research in July and August, 27.5% of respondents in the Calais camp said they had been living in the settlement for at least six months - 12.7% for a year or more.

That means a quarter of the camp's residents stayed put despite the French authorities' forceful eviction of the southern part of the camp in March. Regardless of the winter's unforgiving weather conditions, 60.4% lived in leaky shelters and 68% relied solely on blankets or burning rubbish to keep warm.

Almost half of those surveyed had experienced violence from citizens, and three quarters from police in Calais. They had been exposed to verbal abuse, tear gas, beatings and attacks by aggressive dogs - both while trying to travel to the UK illegally, and while getting on with their day-to-day lives in and around the camp. Meanwhile, 76.7% experienced health problems - predominately as a result of the camp's unsanitary environment.

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Despite these dire conditions, many residents said they would never stop trying to reach their goal. Some 86.4% said they would stay in Calais, sleep in the street, move to the nearby Dunkirk camp, or admitted they didn't know what they would do if the camp was destroyed. Building a new wall is unlikely to change these existing dynamics. It'll simply shift the problem further from the port, or encourage refugees and displaced people - often coerced by people smugglers - to take even riskier measures in their attempts to cross the Channel.

It's time for some fresh thinking

If building barriers isn't working, what else can be done? RRDP found that providing refugees and displaced people with the advice they need to make informed decisions about their future would be a good place to start.

A third of people interviewed in the Calais camp said they wanted to know why it's so difficult to go to the UK, while 46.7% said the most important information for them was how to make the journey legally. Three quarters said they had no information about European immigration rules. This suggests that with adequate guidance, many may choose another destination or seek a legal entry route.

In this context, it is alarming that there is no government-funded information provided in the camp. A few smaller voluntary organisations work tirelessly to fill this gap, including the Refugee Info Bus which provides free immigration advice from the back of a revamped horse box. However, given the huge demand for information, these groups are under-resourced and over-worked. As a result, many residents end up taking the law into their own hands and striving to reach the UK by any means possible.

The British and French governments' plan to build a wall demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of these issues, leading - once again - to the misallocation of resources intended to tackle the problem. Rather than spending public money on a symbolic but largely ineffectual wall, they should instead establish information points in northern France. This would provide refugees and displaced people with the tools they need to bust myths picked up along their journeys, identify which countries would be best to seek asylum given their own specific circumstances, and kick start this lengthy legal process.

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Meanwhile, the UK also needs to step up and honour its own legal obligations. Earlier this month, legal group Safe Passage identified 178 children in Calais who were eligible to be reunited with family members in the UK under the Dublin III regulation. Another 209 should be provided sanctuary under the 'Dubs amendment' to the Immigration Bill as agreed by MPs in May. So far, not a single child has been relocated under the new rule.
Children and women suffer the most in any conflict and arguably their needs are deemed secondary to the pressing matters facing the international community until the world is shocked by tragic images like that of Aylan Kurdi, Omran Daqneesh, victims of Kony, or Maimuna aged 2 amputated by rebels in a senseless civil war that had gone on for far too long.

Sadly in every conflict horrendous crimes against children are committed daily, but are often underreported or left to continue until they hit a crescendo, by which time it is too late for Ali (Omran's brother) and many others.

I was aged 4 when the war broke out in Liberia where my parents were living at the time. Here they ran a boarding school, clinic, farms, and led a church community. The war started shortly after my father left Liberia to learn about pig farming in the UK, and was stuck overseas whilst my mother was left with me and scores of children and young people from the boarding school to look after.

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Initially living was bearable so we stayed and sought to co-exist with the shelling and constant attacks from warring factions. But life steadily became worse; there was no food; we were living under constant threats; and my mother was forced to move the family when the girls in the boarding school were threatened with abduction and rape by the rebels. By the age of 13 my family had been forced to move seven times between three countries and in five of those times we lost everything and had to start all over again.

Each move was precipitated by a real danger and threat to life, especially because my parents had opened our home to child soldiers, unaccompanied children and war orphans rescued and rehabilitated over 800 children. And those dangers are multiplied in the Middle East today. Our partners in Iraq tell us of thousands of children and women stuck in conflict zones, and unable to find a way out.

Take for example Iman a 15 year old Yazidi girl abducted by ISIS as she tried to flee and was sold off to the highest bidder.

Being captured at the age of 4 by rebel forces threatening to kill my mother and keep me, but both of us later being released, and hearing the stories of some of the children rescued by my father made me very aware of the big impact a safe passage can have in a conflict.

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I was fortunate that wherever we found ourselves, my mother made time to teach me how to read and write. My father placed a lot of emphasis on education, he wrote "to educate a child is to build a nation" on the walls.

And today the truth of that saying can be seen in the work of these child soldiers and war orphans now men and women with whom I run Lifeline Nehemiah Projects, the charity and social enterprise set up by my father and focussed on rebuilding Sierra Leone.

But this is not the case for majority of the young people in Sierra Leone where 70% of young people remain unemployed or underemployed. The workless situation is severe for young adults, many of whom had their education disrupted by the civil war that ravaged the nation in the 1990s.

As world leaders gather at the UNGA, my call to them would be for them to ensure safe passages for people stuck in conflicts, and to ensure that adequate education is prioritised for these young people. Education is a key protection tool and a tangible guarantor of our hope for a better future.

I conclude by restating that the world must create safe passages for children and refugees in every conflict.

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This week the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, will begin in Johannesburg, South Africa (24th September to 5th October). High on the agenda this year will be the alarming decrease in the number of African elephants, which is due to the rise of ivory poaching and threatens to wipe out the species entirely over the next decade. With poaching at such high levels, the conference will be a critical game-changer in rescuing what is left of the savannah elephants.

The recent results from the Great Elephant Census has identified that 30% of Africa's elephants have disappeared in the last seven years. At the current rate of decline, half the continent's remaining elephants will have vanished in just nine years.

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The survey identified that some of the worst effected areas are Tanzania, Angola, Cameroon and Mozambique. This year my team and I decided to travel to Mozambique to investigate the violent and corrupt world of elephant poaching and examine what appeared to be the inadequate official governmental response to the crisis.

Mozambique is one of the world's poorest countries and is still reeling from the legacy of 16 years of civil war. The country is on the front line of a new conflict, however: the possible extinction of beautiful elephants owing to widespread poaching.

In the northern town of Pemba, for example, we discovered that just by asking the right questions it was very easy to purchase large quantities of ivory. After going undercover, I was surprised to find out that the trader we met could immediately offer us an astonishing amount of ivory that day: up to 100 kilograms.

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We also found that, over the last 10 years, trafficking ivory has become far more organised. Criminal gangs have now begun taking over the trade, drawn by the vast profits to be made particularly in the South East Asian market where ivory is seen as a status symbol.

It is a startling realisation but - with the increasing demand for ivory in China and the Far East coupled with poor governance and corruption in Mozambique - if the Poachers maintain their killing rate their will be no more elephants in Mozambique in five years' time.

Nonetheless, we met local people who approved of the killing trade: many blamed the elephants as the cause of their suffering, as they would often trample their fields destroying their crops and leaving their families hungry. We were shocked to discover how this worked, with the local government providing civilians with a gun to shoot the elephants, then collecting the ivory and meat, took back the gun and left. With the high levels of poverty and the extensive belief that elephants are "vermin" it is easy to comprehend how criminal organisations can exploit the local population into poaching elephants, not to mention the vast profits to be made.

For the first time in a very long time we are now armed with concrete evidence behind the threat of elephant extinction. We can only hope that CITES and the African countries affected find and determine a feasible and sustainable strategy going forward to safeguard such a spectacular species.

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President Obama has long stated a deep-rooted commitment to human rights, both at home and abroad. In 2012, he said, "People everywhere long for the freedom to determine their destiny; the dignity that comes with work; the comfort that comes with faith; and the justice that exists when governments serve their people -- and not the other way around. The United States of America will always stand up for these aspirations, for our own people and for people all across the world. That was our founding purpose." Yet, for an individual so rooted in the traditions of community organizing towards the pursuit of civil liberties, President Obama has struggled to adequately promote human rights, particularly outside of our borders. So what explains the gap between rhetoric and reality? Corporations. The incredible capture of our democratic systems and processes by powerful corporations and elites has significantly impacted the way all levels of our government are protecting the rights of individuals, including the most vulnerable. In the past years, corporate control over Congress has been under increased spotlight, but similar attention has not been placed on corporate influence over the major policy decisions of the Obama Administration.

Recent developments showcase the extent and consequences of corporate influence on President Obama's policy agenda.



Take for example the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement created with corporates holding the pen. Records reveal that, of the twenty-eight U.S. government appointed trade advisory committees, 85 percent of committee members represent powerful corporate interests. This is particularly problematic when considering the ways in which the TPP addresses potential conflicts between investors and corporations--namely, Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). ISDS systems are increasingly under intense scrutiny from the public, and rightly so. Private courts staffed by corporate lawyers and operating under rules written by corporate interests should not trump domestic legal obligations. Support for such systems is particularly baffling as the U.S. government is currently subject to a challenge using ISDS under NAFTA by a Canadian mining company seeking $18 billion dollars in damages.



Similarly, recent actions with respect to Burma provide an example of how corporate interests have trumped commitments to human rights under President Obama. In 2012, under the leadership of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the first-ever human rights-based reporting requirements were created to ensure that investment in Burma was rights-respecting. Under these requirements, companies were required to assess whether their investments were associated with the Burmese junta, along with other human rights risks. Despite this short-term leadership, President Obama has yet again backtracked on human rights.



This past week, during the visit of Aung San Suu Kyi, President Obama removed these reporting requirements, as well as all remaining sanctions on Burma. This premature executive action comes after intense lobbying from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate interests who argue that reform has fully taken place in Burma and that investment in the country is being stymied. These assertions are simply not true. According to statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, trade in goods with Burma in the first half of 2016 far surpassed 2015 numbers.



There is also evidence that members of the military junta have now expanded control into the commercial sector, creating companies in Burma and seeking foreign investors as partners. A recent report by Global Witness uncovers the amount of control former military junta leaders, including Than Shwe, have over Burma's jade industry. The removal of sanctions and reporting requirements creates a dangerous precedent of impunity and reinforces the growing power of corporate elites in the country. This fails to serve the Burmese people.



How did we get to a place where corporate interests are defining our trade and foreign policy? We need to drastically tip the scales back - towards a system where human rights are a hallmark of our policy responses, not casualties.



To do this will require real leadership and commitment - not just at the highest levels of government, but also across government. We need human rights experts within economic and trade divisions, advising procurement policy and export credit, and within the judiciary. We also need to see visible coordination of this expertise within the Domestic Policy Council and the National Security Council. In short, we must move beyond compartmentalizing human rights to centralizing human rights.



Only with this shift - one that prioritizes a consideration of impacts on people over profits of corporate entities - will our democracy flourish. Without it, the "founding purpose" that President Obama often references will never be realized.
People take pride in the food they eat, and ethnic communities especially form and retain their identities around their traditional cuisines. What's Italian without pasta? Or the Thai without their Tom Yum Goong?

For the Vietnamese, it is, of course, pho soup, that delectable and aromatic noodle dish that have Vietnamese fighting each other over how best to make it--northerners and southerners have their own interpretation--and pho now finds itself in a controversy over a video made by Bon Appetit featuring a white chef telling people how to enjoy the dish.

At one end, there are those who bristle at a white man telling them how to eat their own food, claiming that Bon Appetit is practicing cultural appropriation. At the other end, there are those who speak of freedom of expression-- freedom to eat and cook whatever they want, it's a free a country, and it's all protected by the first amendment. [The Bon Appetit video has since been pulled].

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My feeling on this is a little complicated. To even get to the issue of cultural appropriation, it is inevitable that one should ask first and foremost, "what is authentic?"

If you go for back far enough, everything is borrowed. Pasta it is a combination of noodle and tomato. Marco Polo, as legend has it, brought back the noodle from China, and the tomato which makes the sauce came back with the conquistadors who conquered South America.

Vietnamese cooking has been anything but authentic if you go back far enough. Vietnam had her hands in many pots, from India to France, from Thailand to China. The Banh Mi, which now dominates the sandwich industry in the U.S., is a borrowed fare from the French baguette. Yet in Vietnam, hardly anyone thinks about France when they sit down and eat their favorite dish in the morning.





Pate' Chaud is a Vietnamese dish adapted from the French, eaten daily in Vietnam. Photo by Andrew Lam.



Indeed, appropriation and adaptations are the survival instincts of the Vietnamese who have to deal with a long and arduous history of being dominated and colonized by one powerful country after the next. Vietnamese language itself is an almagamation of Chinese, French, Khmer and an array of colliding local tribal dialects. The same can be said of its spirituality: Atop a traditional Vietnamese altar, a visitor will find various Buddhas, faded images of grandpa and grandma, and statues of Taoist saints. This combination of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism known as tam giao is the result of efforts to integrate religious ideas that arrived in the country over the millennia. Ancestor worship is mixed with yearnings for Buddhist nirvana while the temporal world is measured through the Taoist flow of life force known as the qi.

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Then there is the story of Vietnam's indigenous religion, Cao Dai, established in the mid-1920s, which goes so far as to integrate and reconcile the world's major religions. In its cosmos it perceives Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam all as human efforts to worship and communicate with the one Supreme Being. It numbers Moses, Joan of Arc, Louis Pasteur, Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-Sen, Jesus Christ, and the Vietnamese poet Trang Trinh among its many prophets and saints. Graham Greene, in his Vietnam novel The Quiet American, called Cao Dai the "prophecy of planchette," as its spiritualists receive messages of wisdom from the various saints in seances.

Little wonder that we would see a mixture in Vietnamese cuisine as well. In bo kho, or beef stew, to cite but one example, there's beef, carrot, and tomato brought by the French, curry powder from India, cinnamon from Ceylon, star anise from China, and chilies, lemongrass, and fish sauce from Vietnam itself. If you feel like it, pour in a little red wine from Bordeaux and it will still work beautifully. Vietnamese cooking thrives on integrating new ingredients to achieve new balances. What is invention, after all, if not one part theft and two parts reinterpretation?

Pho, too, arguably the most authentic Vietnamese dish, didn't come into being without the help of other civilizations. What's almost certain is that it came from North Vietnam, specifically Hanoi, about a century ago. What is less certain is how. Seminars on the dish have scholars from all over the world arguing whether the word came from the French word feu (fire) - as in the dish pot-au-feu - or whether it descended from the word Fen - Chinese for rice noodle. Star anise, native to southwest China, is used in combination with Vietnamese fish sauce to give it its distinct flavor, but French onion is also used to sweeten the broth. Cardamom comes from India but noodle is definitely Chinese. Yet in Vietnam, beef was rarely eaten until the French came in the late 1800s.

The nature of all creativity is to borrow and remake - that is to say, transgression and appropriation. Some of today's newly invented dishes are a marriage from various traditions, an add on, a homage. The Chicago deep dish pizza was once thin and simple from Naples. And if you haven't tasted a Korean barbecue short-rib taco, popularly known as the Kogi, you must. Chased with chili salsa, kimchi and crushed sesame seeds, the Kogi is an invention daring that it started with roaming trucks in Southern California but people lined the street waiting for their arrival. What is avant-garde today may very well become traditional fare tomorrow.

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Having said all this, however, as a Vietnamese American, I confess to sharing that feeling of being slighted in seeing my own traditional dishes being "explained" by an "outsider." Why? Because in the modern world, those who sell themselves off as experts while ignoring those who have been practicing their living culinary tradition for generations are committing the sin of omission. It is like having an intellectual panel on America's diversity but the panelists are all white males. Or casting Matt Damon as the lead hero in films like The Great Wall, or god forbid, a white actress to play Mulan in the next Disney film, inserting whiteness at the center of the story when historically there was none. That insistence on being the center of someone else's story is both at once myopic and narcissistic, and the lack of awareness or perhaps mere laziness of not reaching out to the other is jarring, if not damning, and that self importance backfires in the age of social media and global consciousness.

I wonder: would it be a lot of work for Bon Appetit to ask an array of Vietnamese American chefs known for cooking amazing pho to chime in on what makes a Vietnamese dish taste good and how to prepare it? Wouldn't it be more wonderful if we see different interpretations of the dish but still nodding to the living culinary culture of a people as practiced everyday?

In our world, free and full of creativity, you should have the right to make any dishes you like, and reinvent and resell it.

But at the same time, you shouldn't be able to get away with it when you pretend to have expertise of others' cultures while ignoring the people who practice them. You should at the very least pay the proper homage, and be humble as one the many practitioners in the tasting game - and not claiming yourself as its master.

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This piece is running in newspapers in my conservative congressional district in Virginia (VA-06).

*******

Winston Churchill said: "Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party."

No one who feels allegiance to a political party wants to have to choose between party and principle. But sometimes history compels people to make that choice.

That is how a large group of prominent people, who describe themselves as "members of the Republican national security community," see their situation in this year's presidential election.

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On the one hand, these are people who have loyally served Republican presidents from Reagan through both Bushes. Their connection with the Republican Party runs deep. (Just one example, Tom Ridge--former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, and the man Pres. George W. Bush appointed to be America's first Secretary of Homeland Security.)

On the other hand, these 121 people with extensive experience in both governance and national security, have felt compelled to conclude that "[Trump] would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country's national security and well-being."

In their open letter to the nation, they provide numerous examples of what Mr. Trump has said and done which leads them to conclude, reluctantly, that "he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world."

The idea that one will act to protect America against anything or anyone that threatens to harm her is the principle of patriotism. And these Republican patriots, perceiving that this presidential race had brought their party loyalty into conflict with that fundamental principle, have chosen principle.

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Unhappily, but resolutely, these Republican patriots declare that not only will they not vote for Trump, but "We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office."

In view of this letter, can there be any honest way that any Republican patriot can act otherwise?

Can a loyal Republican voter argue that these people don't know what they're talking about?

The signers of this open letter include some of the most prominent Republican experts in defense and intelligence matters, such as Michael V. Hayden, former director of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency; Michael Chertoff, whom Bush appointed Secretary of Homeland Security after Tom Ridge; John D. Negroponte, a deputy secretary of state and a former director of national intelligence; Eric Edelman, a top national security adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney; and Robert Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state, United States trade representative and president of the World Bank.

Are these not the very people whose judgments Republicans would most respect on such questions as what Donald Trump would be like as President, and what kind of damage to America could result from having someone like Donald Trump wield the powers of the presidency?

Has not their wealth of experience enabled them to assess such things with far greater insight than the average citizen?

And is there not every reason to believe that these officials - with a life-long commitment to the Republican Party - have given all due weight to party loyalty?

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So if Republican voters have no reason to second-guess these Republican experts' judgment about the seriousness of the danger of a Trump presidency ("he would be the most reckless President in American history" they write); and if Republican voters have no reason to doubt that these prominent figures take this step only because they are convinced that the threat Trump poses to America outweighs their partisan commitments; how can an average Republican voter justify voting to make Donald Trump president?

Every candidate has downsides. Party loyalty deserves to be given weight, and a loyal Republican should not lightly choose to go against party.

But when party loyalty means endangering "our country's national security and well-being," what kind of person will put their loyalty to party ahead of their commitment to the good of America? Not a patriot.

Churchill was saying that there are two kinds of people: those who will sacrifice their principles to get power through their party; and those who will struggle against party when their principles require it.

The letter to the nation from these Republican national security officials compels every Republican to decide now which kind of person they are. Partisan or patriot.

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An investigation by Larry Pynn at the Vancouver Sun has revealed a cruel underbelly to B.C.'s dairy industry--the province and ag sector that have historically been thought of as among the less inhumane for animals.

Under freedom of information legislation, Pynn obtained farm inspection documents from the provincial Milk Board (a public body created by statute to regulate the production and marketing of milk). The animal welfare inspection program started on Jan. 1, 2015.

Over the span of just 18 months, the documents reveal numerous shocking problems, including an inexcusably high number of severely lame cows (some so lame they needed to be euthanized), dirty and wet living quarters, insufficient access to food, such severe crowding there wasn't sufficient space for lying down, and careless barn design causing neck lesions and tails being torn off.

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These conditions were found during announced inspections--the farmers knew someone would be coming to check up on the conditions of the farms and animals and that they'd possibly face sanctions for non-compliance. This is the best the farmers could do with time to prepare and be on their best behaviour. And on follow-up inspections with specific orders for what to improve, a tenth of all farms still weren't compliant with minimal animal welfare standards.

Such cruelty is illegal under animal welfare laws and perhaps even criminal anti-cruelty laws. So surely these heinous acts were prosecuted, right?

Wrong. According to the vice-chair of the Milk Board, Tom Hoogendoorn--himself a dairy farmer--they don't want to "wield a big heavy stick," instead favoring the time-honoured penalty of stink eye: "Believe me, if farmers are found to be a little off side, they feel the peer pressure." Yes, really. They won't even slap you on the wrist--disapproval should do it.

Meanwhile, Pynn reports, BC's animal welfare law enforcement body--the BC SPCA--hadn't seen any of these inspection reports and wasn't aware of any of these problems. No investigation is underway to enforce BC's animal protection laws. The Milk Board doesn't have to turn over the results of its inspections to law enforcement, and evidently, it's choosing not to.

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By law, the composition of the Milk Board is four dairy farmers, one non-farmer selected by a Milk Industry Advisory Committee, and a chair (whose qualifications, the job posting reveals, include involvement with the agriculture sector). In other words, the Milk Board is a milk industry body enforcing the rules it created with methods of its own choosing.

In doing so, the milk industry is effectively opting itself out of animal welfare laws, shutting out the public and governmental oversight, and relying on peer pressure within the insiders' club to (fingers crossed!) hope animals will stop enduring egregious and illegal suffering.

It's so obviously a conflict of interest--not to mention undemocratic--for the dairy industry to be policing itself while unilaterally exempting itself from animal welfare laws, and yet, this scheme is actually better than what's happening in the rest of the country.

Animal agriculture is an unregulated industry when it comes to animal welfare: no required standards, no independent inspections to ensure minimal animal welfare conditions are met, and no compliance mechanism to correct the behaviour of neglectful and abusive farmers or to get them out of the business.

Plain and simple, Pynn's investigation shows self-policing doesn't work.

Farmers are fond of saying they love animals, but it's not a form of "love" I'd wish on an enemy. Here's Hoogendoorn's explanation for why they use electric prods on gentle, grieving mother cows: "It's better than kicking her in the ribs 10 times -- and less painful." That's not love--it's an abusive, toxic relationship that the victim needs out of.

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And anyway, as Pynn noted, cows used for milk "stick around for an average of 2.5 years before being shipped to the slaughterhouse for meat -- proving there is a financial limit to a farmer's love for his livestock."

Indeed. The entire industry is premised on impregnating cows, taking their babies away, and killing them for hamburgers at a young age when their bodies collapse from the back-to-back pregnancies, all in the name of profit.
Alan Dershowitz, the famous lawyer and law professor, is clearly a super-smart guy. He recently wrote an article in the Boston Globe, picked up by RealClearPolitics.com, titled "Why It's Impossible to Predict This Election." In supporting his argument, he used the surprise result of Great Britain voting to leave the European Union in July: "Think about the vote on Brexit. Virtually all the polls - including exit polls that asked voters how they voted - got it wrong. The financial markets got it wrong. The bookies got it wrong."

I wrote in my Huffington Post blog right after the Brexit vote that a number of bankers, based on their public comments, did not seem to understand what bookmakers do - and what we all do when we allocate resources based on our assessments of the probability of differing outcomes occurring. When we make a prediction based an assessment of which result has the highest probability of happening, there is some chance things won't turn out as predicted by definition (unless the probability of any other outcome was 0%). So even if the markets predicted that Remain was 90% and Leave was 10%, it doesn't mean that predicting Remain was wrong since the prediction included that 10% of the time Leave would win the day. Leave winning was included in the prediction.

In the case of the bookmakers, it is even more clear they weren't wrong since bookmakers actually offer no opinion at all. Bookies adjust betting odds with the goal of equalizing the amount of money bet on both sides of a proposition. So the high price of betting on Remain and the low price offered on Leave simply reflected that more of the betting public was willing to bet that Remain would win. The bookmakers had to make betting on leave a bargain in order to get the even out the betting on both sides.

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The betting houses had no goal to determine the actual probability of either side winning. They only cared what proposition would get enough people to bet on both sides. And because they adjust the odds in this way, to equalize the action on both sides and take a percentage of winners' bets for their fee, whether bookies got it wrong or right couldn't depend on how the vote turned out at all.

If Dershowitz missed this, declaring the markets and bookies wrong, that tells me that a lot of people are doing the same.
[An elephant-headed Hindu God Ganesh lies on a beach before its immersion in the sea after the Ganesh festival./ Photographed by Jeong In-seo]

By Jeong In-seo, New Delhi correspondent, AsiaToday - While mosquito-borne diseases chikungunya and dengue are taking the toll on New Delhi and Mumbai, the Indian government's "Clean India" initiative is garnering attention.

Floating pieces of idols thrown into the rivers and beaches during Ganpati festival for elephant-headed God Ganesh across India, are becoming breeding hotspots for mosquitoes that cause dengue and chikungunya and the Indian government and local governments are promoting their clean up drive extensively, reported Hindustan Times (HT) on September 19.

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Following the last day of Ganesh idols immersions on September 17, tons of garbage were thrown into the ocean at Juhu beach in Mumbai. Some idols and broken pieces floated away and resurfaced near on the banks. However, citizens enjoyed swimming in the water as if it were something ordinary.

[Tons of garbage are thrown into the ocean after the festival./ Photographed by Jeong In-seo]

To have a look at the beach and nearby beaches, I've walked 3 kilometers along the Juhu beach looking around. Most of the beaches were full of waste. It was hard to say whether I was walking in the sand or dumping ground. Obviously, I began to feel doubtful about "Clean India", one of the major policies in India.

As the sky became brighter, cleaning men dressed in colorful uniforms as well as some residents visited the beach area with a clean-up purpose rather than walking. The cleaning up started at 8 o'clock in the morning, and finished in two hours.

[Citizens participate in the beach clean-up initiative./ Photographed by Jeong In-seo]

Arun, who was taking pictures of floating pieces of idols on the beach, said, "The government's 'Clean India' initiative is working. Compared to last year, there is certainly much less amount of waste." When asked why he is taking the pictures, he replied, "I upload these pictures online in order to disarm any resistance to cleaning up and motivate people to participate. Broken pieces of idols and thrown wastes become hotspots for mosquito breeding. Last year, I suffered from dengue fever."

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[Streets became cleaner after cleaners and residents cleaned the streets./ Photographed by Jeong In-seo]

Delhi government agencies and volunteers are cleaning the Yamuna river, which passes through capital New Delhi, after Ganpai festival.

Shalini Ramachandran, senior researcher at IIT Delhi, said, "Mosquitoes can live in shallow water of 5 milimeters. Thrown pieces of idols and garbage are hotspots for mosquito breeding. Clean environment can prevent mosquito breeding."

Environmentalist Joshi emphasized the "Clean India" initiative, stating, "The basic cleanliness should be sustained." He said, "The 'Clean India' initiative is not about simply making bathrooms. It also includes training on awareness of the people." He added, "If people continue to clean up and not to throw waste, the number of mosquito will naturally reduce."

[Broken pieces of idols become hotspots for mosquito breeding./ Photographed by Jeong In-seo]
At the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Annual Legislative Conference last Friday, Sept. 16, I heard a black former director of the National Park Service describe its development since it was formed in 1916 to protect the first 34 national monuments. He's been a leader in the agency for almost half its existence, since Director Stewart Udall sought to integrate the system in the early 60's, and sent aspiring park ranger Bob Stanton from Texas into exclusive Jackson, Wyoming to work in Grand Teton National Park.

I heard 95-year-old Ranger Betty Reid Soskin whose American experience spans more than half of the 240 years since we became a Republic - her enslaved grandmother being a role model in her life till she was 27. The sprightly ranger who not only worked in the Richmond shipyards during WWII but returned to lead the creation of the park commemorating that legacy said, "The National Park System attracts and educates the middle class. So if we want more people of color to utilize our parks, we can start by bringing more of us into the middle class."



Congressman Alcee Hastings (c) with from left former NPS Director Bob Stanton, Audrey Peterman, Betty Reid Soskin, Clarence Fluker, Rachel Stewart, Dr. Carolyn Finney and Supt. Cassius Cash.

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"Standing with National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis on the street in Marion, Alabama between Zion United Methodist Church and the old city jail just blocks away from where Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered in 1965, on the day before the designation ceremony for the Marion to Selma Connecting Trail was a life changing experience," reported millennial Clarence Fluker, Deputy Associate Director of National Parks and Youth Engagement at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "Never had it resonated with me so intensely the importance of the National Park Service's role in protecting, preserving and sharing America's diverse history through our cultural and historic sites. There is something so salient and powerful in the reflections about the past, while making sense of the present and looking toward the future brought on by standing in a place where history was made and you can see yourself in it."

"I never imagined I would become a diver and work with other young people like myself to identify underwater wrecks in South Florida," said Rachel Stewart, a junior at Tennessee Technological University majoring in Civil and Environmental engineering. "Some of those ships may have brought our enslaved ancestors to these shores. Because of my mentor Kenneth Stewart and the Tennessee Aquatic Project, I was able to spend the summer diving and teaching at Dry Tortugas National Park, capturing invasive lion fish and experiencing the amazing coral reefs. I'd like everyone to know that we have these opportunities."

"I took my parents to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site when they visited me in Atlanta," said Dr. Carolyn Finney. "My father grew up in the South and has terrible memories. We walked into an exhibit and suddenly he grabbed my arm. I turned to look at him and his face was frozen. I followed his eyes and saw the sign, 'Whites Only.' Then he relaxed and smiled in relief. He told me that for a moment he thought he was back in the old south. At the end of the day he said 'You know, when you told me we were going to a national park I didn't think I'd have a good time. But I really did.' Seeing himself in that exhibit and what he went through in his life was a cathartic experience."

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The Superintendent of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the most highly visited and accessible to 50% of the American population within a day's drive, Cassius Cash' boyish energy and enthusiasm boiled over when he held up his old Boy Scout belt that his mother brought out on a recent visit home. "It's funny how your life follows a path," he said, "because the first badge I won was for the environment." Superintendent Cash talked about the importance of showing Americans that the parks belong to everyone and they can be life changing. He mentioned the vital process of "on-boarding" new employees in a way that makes them feel part of the family, and invited the audience to join him on a "100-mile hike" that he's been making with citizens for the past several months.
Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis. Troy was killed by the state of Georgia on September 21, 2011 despite a mountain of newly discovered evidence pointing to his innocence. The day he died, Troy said, "The struggle for justice doesn't end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me."



For more than 20 years, courts and prosecutors refused to entertain the notion that a mistake could have been made and that Troy could be innocent. In fact, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia famously wrote in a dissenting opinion in Troy's case, "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

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This has become a hallmark of the American death penalty: don't look too hard, don't ask too many questions. Once a jury has reached a verdict, avoid at all costs the question of whether they might be wrong. Finality over fairness or accuracy.

I started my journey with Troy 20 years ago, though I didn't realize it at the time. I was working as an organizer for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). During NCADP's annual convening, a woman, with her three-year-old son in tow, came up to me and told me that her brother Troy was on death row in Georgia, and that he was innocent. I told her, "Bring us the evidence and we'll fight like Hell to set him free."

Fifteen years later, while I was President and CEO of the national NAACP, I was asked by the President of the Georgia NAACP to meet with Troy. I agreed. In that meeting I was moved by Troy's religious conviction, his commitment to criminal justice reform, and the role he played in raising his nephew from the confines of his prison cell on death row. As I was leaving the prison, I ran into Troy's sister, Martina, in the parking lot. Her son De'Jaun, who was now 18 years old, was with her. She asked if I recalled the promise I had made her. Then, she showed me a picture of us that she had taken 15 years earlier, and opened the trunk of her car.

Inside of the trunk was mountains of files and folders. She was showing me the evidence.

In the intervening years between our first meeting and that day, seven of the nine original witnesses from Troy's trial had recanted. The only two that hadn't were a notorious criminal--the probable perpetrator of the crime--and a witness with a remarkably implausible claim about what he had seen that moonless night from a significant distance away. No physical evidence linked Troy to the crime.

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From that day forward, I kept my promise to her. I spent the next two years fighting to prove Troy's innocence, but in 2011, Troy--a young Black man from the South--was executed--despite enormous doubt about his guilt.

We've learned time and time again, that proving one's innocence after one has been condemned to die is nearly impossible. Troy is not the only innocent person to be executed in recent memory. Evidence suggests that executed prisoners Cameron Todd Willingham and Carlos De Luna were also innocent. More than 150 men and women have been released from death rows across the country after evidence of their wrongful convictions emerged, some coming within just days or hours of execution. Two-thirds of of these men and women have been people of color.

As long as we have a death penalty, the risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated. This November, in California, voters will have the opportunity to ensure that their state never makes the ultimate mistake by voting yes on Proposition 62, which will replace the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison without parole. In an attempt to confuse voters, however, prosecutors and prison guards have placed a second initiative on the ballot, Proposition 66, that promises to "speed up" the death penalty by removing important legal protections, imposing arbitrary timelines, and forcing inexperienced attorneys to handle death penalty cases. It is a recipe for disaster that will greatly increase the state's chance of executing an innocent person. The idea behind Proposition 66 is to bring Texas-style justice to California so they can operate death row like a conveyor belt.

The problem: Texas has executed innocent people. Both Carlos De Luna and Cameron Todd Willingham were executed in Texas, where introducing new evidence of innocence is nearly impossible. It is unfathomable that California would want to replicate Texas laws that have led to the execution of innocent people.

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Both sides agree the California's death penalty is broken - there hasn't been an execution in over a decade, despite billions of dollars spent maintaining death row, and three innocent people have been released from death row in this state since 1989. Now voters have a choice about what to do with California's failed system.



In making this choice, I hope they will remember Troy. Troy knew that as long as the specter of the death penalty continues to haunt the American justice system, more innocent men and women would be executed. We must admit to ourselves that infallibility is beyond our grasp. It isn't a question of if we will execute another innocent person, but when - unless we recognize that the cost of this failed system is just too high. California voters should vote Yes on Proposition 62, and No on Proposition 66 this November.
When Flavia Cabral leaves her first job at 5 p.m. to head to her second job at a midtown fast-food restaurant, she has no idea when she'll see her family or even when she'll get a full night's sleep.

Flavia's schedule -- like that of 65,000 fast-food workers in New York City -- is at the whim of her employer.

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Fast-food chains aren't required to provide hourly workers with reasonable advance notice of upcoming shifts -- how many they're getting or even when those shifts are.

A manager can call a worker who's just gotten home and tell them to be back at work in an hour.

And if that conflicts with a scheduled doctor's appointment for an elderly parent, or a parent-teacher conference? If the number of hours workers get isn't enough to pay the rent or buy groceries? Tough.

File an objection, and your hours could be cut, or you could lose your job.

It's no surprise children and families suffer. Kids in homes where parents have unpredictable schedules tend to do worse in school, and struggle to develop memory and communications skills.

Too many of Flavia's college-age coworkers find that their best efforts to improve their prospects and opportunities continue to be thwarted. How can they afford or commit to attending college classes when they never know in advance how much they're going to take home... or even when they can go home?

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And at a time when two or more jobs are necessary for too many New Yorkers, unpredictable scheduling makes it that much harder to find a second job.

But Flavia and her co-workers have been fighting back.



Treating workers with respect and fairness lifts up all our communities, our city and our country.





Four years ago, a small group of courageous New York City fast-food workers walked off the job and sparked what grew into the international fight for $15 -- a fight that was won earlier this year in our state.

Today, we are proud to stand with Flavia and fast-food workers to create change.

In the months ahead, we're going to work with the City Council, advocates, labor groups, and the business community to create a law that helps provide fast-food employees with fair and transparent scheduling practices.

This law will require fast-food employers to post a schedule two weeks in advance. If hours need to be changed on short notice for reasons within the business' control, employees must be appropriately compensated.

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We're also going to address the problem of "clopenings," or shifts that require employees to consecutively work during closing and opening with fewer than 10 hours between them.

Treating workers with respect and fairness -- and giving them the chance to pursue the American dream -- lifts up all our communities, our city and our country.

As Flavia says, without an education our young people are much more likely to get and stay in the same job she has now. "It won't be a successful country," she says, "if so many families can't send people to school."

She's right.

Bill de Blasio is mayor of New York City and Hector Figueroa is president of 32BJ SEIU.
Edward Albee changed my life when he gave me a residency to his Foundation in Montauk. It didn't make my career as a playwright. It confirmed my commitment to be a writer for the rest of my life. In honor of his life and his passing, September 16, I am sharing this piece I wrote for Backstage West.

===

Edward Albee, arguably our greatest living playwright, is sitting in his Tribeca loft home, pondering the lingering effects of his Tony Award-winning play The Goat or Who is Sylvia? (recently seen at the Mark Taper Forum). Adamantly opposed to the idea of purposeful shock or controversy in playwriting, he nonetheless enjoys the imprimatur of a theatre artist who has shaken the thematic boundaries of commercial theatre. The Goat, a play in which a man admits to his wife, best friend and gay son that he has a physical relationship and is in love with a goat, manages to both amuse and upset in the best tradition of the theatre.

"You know," Albee muses, a slight smile curling about his lips, "it's nice to trap people into laughing until it finally catches in their throats. That's nice. I like that."

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Ever since he wrote The Zoo Story in time for his 30th birthday, and in 1960 shook up the New York theatre world, and beyond, with its production, Albee has been an agent for change, clearly set against the safe, the overly commercial, the reassuringly mundane.

The playwright's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf has reopened on Broadway at a time when powerful dramas in that district are in short supply. Scattered among the musicals, one can find challenging straight plays like Michael Frayn's Democracy at the Brooks Atkinson and at the Mint Theatre, Arthur Schnitzler's The Lonely Way, never before performed in America.

Albee's bold playwriting requires exceptional performance skills from the actors involved. But the playwright is dead set against his conceptualizing casting before or during the writing process. "I don't think about actors while I'm writing. I see and hear the play being performed before me as I write it. And I see the characters. I don't necessarily see faces. If I ever have to start thinking about actors while I'm writing a play, I stop until that goes away."

As a playwright and director, Albee recognizes the contributions of the many actors he has worked with over the years. He recalls with great fondness the late Myra Carter, who along with Albee regular Marian Seldes and Jordan Baker, performed in his third Pulitzer Prize winning play, Three Tall Women.

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"I've had a lot of good experiences with actors and actresses over the years," Albee acknowledges, "starting with Virginia Woolf and Uta Hagen, Colleen Dewhurst and Jessica Tandy and Marian and a lot of good people."

The landmark 1962 stage production of Virginia Woolf led to a widely heralded film version, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton famously descending into the bowels of the married characters George and Martha. Here, Albee pays tribute to the male performer. "I think Elizabeth Taylor did...the best film acting she could. I couldn't believe her as being six years older than Richard for a second. He was marvelous. He was absolutely right on top of it." To this day, Albee claims Taylor's work has unfairly overshadowed Burton's accomplishment, even more notable because many film roles Burton accepted were beneath his stature and ability, what Albee gently refers to as "hack work."

Time passes and the only constant, apparently, is that everything gets more expensive. Albee cites the initial cost of Virginia Woolf as $42,000. The version that just opened in March on Broadway with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin came in at one and a half million dollars. But the playwright is ebullient regarding this pairing. He has admired Irwin's mime and clowning abilities for years, and they share a particular fondness for Samuel Beckett.

"He and Kathleen have to work in different ways in this production," Albee explains, and a sense of delight enters his voice. "She goes over the top toward her motive and he goes underneath and back up towards his. Just an acting way to describe what happens there. They both end up going where they should be and the fact that they can--they are so different and play it so differently--it's very exciting to watch that happen."

While Albee exhibited great patience in finding Turner and Irwin for the production, and revels in their unique chemistry, he is quite adamant that variance in acting technique can destroy the chances of a production before the first day of rehearsal. "Well, here's one of the most important things...You have to understand that some actors just will not mesh with other actors. They won't be believable to the others in the same reality, the same stage reality."

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Albee emphasizes how crucial it is for playwright and director to recognize incompatibility between otherwise talented actors during auditions and readings and he stresses the importance of musicality in playwriting, referring to Beckett's work as a prime example. He has advised his playwriting students to listen to the music of Bach to both clarify the mind and explore the association between playwriting and musical composition, which must then be communicated to the actors. "So, you've got to have actors who are capable of doing the rhythms of the play and a director who understands the rhythms of the speech of the play, and the way different characters have different speech rhythms and speech patterns. And you start realizing that you can indicate all of this very, very clearly for directors and actors by the way you notate."

Albee recognizes that there must be room for both honoring the sound, rhythm and flow of dialogue and the shadings brought to same by the actors. But he draws a clear distinction about the problems of performers who throw off the somewhat delicate balance, as it were, between writer and performer: "That's what I hear when a character speaks and that's what I put down and that's I expect the actor to do. I expect them to pay attention to the score the same way a musician does playing a piece of music. No less. Exactly the same. Interpretation is based on doing things right and finding the individuality in doing them the way they are intended, not distorting them. That's the problem with so many actors. They feel they have the freedom to distort, to fit their temperament. That's not allowable, as far as I'm concerned."

As a coda to his musical monologue on the relationship between playwright and actor, Albee wryly adds, "There's more than one way to skin a cat. So I want you to--as long as you say my lines correctly, in the order I wrote them, paying some attention to indications--I want you to do whatever you want, as long as you end up with exactly what I intended."

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His love for and commitment to the theatre is borne out in his Edward Albee Foundation, providing residency grants for artists and writers, and his work at conferences around the country. He refers to as "destructive" the development process that had proliferated throughout theatres across America. Albee was particularly repulsed by numerous regional theatres and their failed attempts to force him and his cohorts at the Dramatists Guild to accept contracts forcing playwrights to work with dramaturges.
Because of Israel's growing ethno-nationalism, embarrassment has replaced guilt as many young Jewish Americans' dominant feeling toward Israel.

"Here I Am" is Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel after 11 years. Jacob Bloch, its anti-hero, after one well-received novel published when he was very young, is writing for television, and doesn't like it. His marriage which, like most marriages, started with hope, intimacy and tenderness has gradually emptied of content after 15 years, and both Jacob and Julia, his wife and future divorcee, feel that they are losing their own selves in the family they have created.

The bulk of the book is composed of scenes from a Jewish family life, much of dialogue; some of it scintillating, much of it reminds of the self-consciously virtuoso writing we have come to know from Foer's first two highly acclaimed novels that made him a household name of the American - and ever more so the Jewish American - literary scene. His standing is reflected in the dozens of reviews appearing days after the publication of Here I Am.

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My goal is not to write a literary review, but to formulate some thoughts about what this book, written by one of the most prominent younger American Jewish writers, says about the relation between younger Jewish American liberals and Israel. This theme is quite explicit in the book, for the narrative of the Bloch family - filled with longing, conflict, hope, expectation, disappointment and pain, and conflicts about Judaism, Jewishness and Israel, written in a variety of voices - intersects with another theme.

Israel and Jewish American liberals

About in the middle of novel, a second story line emerges: Israel and the Middle East are shaken and largely destroyed by a powerful earthquake. [Spoiler alert: If you don't want to lose the tension of reading, skip the next two paragraphs!] The Arab countries around Israel see the opportunity of finally destroying the Jewish State. Israel's prime minister declares "Operation Moses," with the goal of moving a million American Jews to Israel to help in the war effort (I don't know whether Foer was aware that there actually was an Operation Moses to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel). Only 55,000 actually arrive, tellingly mostly over 45 years of age.

Younger Jewish Americans, it seems, can't really see much meaning in moving to Israel and fighting for its survival, and those who come to help play no role in Israel's surviving the ordeal. Israel's central strategy is withdrawing from the West Bank and maintaining a blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Furthermore, Israel refuses any humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and the Israel-Palestine conflict is largely solved by Palestinians dying of a variety of illnesses.

"Infinite debate corkscrewed the question of whether those new borders were good for the Jews. Although, tellingly, the expression most often used by American Jews was good for the Israelis. And that, the Israelis thought, was bad for the Jews ... [Many can't forgive Israel] the complete and explicit abdication of responsibility for the non-Jews - the withdrawal of security forces ... the blockade of aid shipments to Gaza and the West Bank."

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Nevertheless, Irv, Jacob's father, a somewhat one-dimensional portrait of the older generation of American Jews for whom being pro-Israel is non-negotiable, continues to defend Israel's every step in his inflammatory and controversial blog.

Toward the end of the novel, Jacob rethinks his relationship with Israel. For most of his life "[Israelis] were more aggressive, more obnoxious, more crazed, more hairy, more muscular brothers [...] over there. They were ridiculous, and they were his. They were more brave, more beautiful, more piggish and delusional, less self-conscious, more reckless, more themselves." But now all of this has changed: "After the near-destruction, they were still over there, but they were no longer his."

Foer's description of the cataclysm that befalls Israel is very schematic and feels more like a pretext than a fully developed story; a ploy that allows him to describe what many young American Jewish liberals feel toward Israel today without offending anybody's sensibilities too much.

Jewish American liberals of Foer's generation have still been brought up with the idea that fervent love for Israel is essential to being a good Jew and that Diaspora Jews should feel slightly inferior to, and guilty toward, the "more hairy, more muscular, more piggish and delusional" Israeli Jews, who live in constant danger and fight for the existence of a Jewish homeland where Jews are fighting against the whole Arab world, as they did in 1948, 1967 and 1973.

But for Foer's generation these three wars are not lived experience, but only something they have been taught about by their parents, at Sunday school and in some Jewish youth movement, if they attended one. The Israel they have gotten to know in person, if they have been here at all, is a successful startup nation, not really endangered by any of its neighbors, filled with excellent restaurants and cafes that serve an espresso macchiato better than anything that you can get in Manhattan.

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Most importantly, the Israel to which they are supposed to feel allegiance doesn't give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks - including American Jewish liberals committed to universal human rights and political correctness, and instead consistently moves toward ethno-nationalist right-wing politics, often with racist undertones. The process is difficult to understand: Israel's top security brass thinks that Israel's existence is safer than it has ever been, even if Bibi keeps droning on about Israel's imminent destruction. And yet, the safer Israel has become, the more it has moved to the right.

The likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman as well as the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on religion in Israel make many Jewish liberals of Foer's generation feel that Israel and Israelis are no longer "theirs." Israel's total disregard for the Western ideal of religious pluralism is driving an ever deeper wedge between Jewish American liberals and Israel, and so is its treatment of Palestinians.

Foer is not inventing the growing alienation of his generation from Israel: There are plenty of social science data that show that young Jewish Americans no longer have the deep connection to Israel their parents had, and voices like Peter Beinart have been warning for years that this trend is exacerbating with Israel's continual disregard of liberal values, and by its creating facts on the ground that make a future implementation of the two-state solution impossible.

Israel has become more nationalistic than ever; mainstream Israelis no longer care about liberal values, sophistication and sensitivity for other ethnicities, races and religions. Reform Judaism's ideal of tikkun olam - healing the world with universalist values and commitment to humanity as a whole - is utterly foreign to Israel's mainstream.

Foer refers to the racism that has become the bon ton of Israel's dominant political right within the context of the fictitious earthquake: Israel's government refuses any humanitarian help to "non-Jews" - Foer seems uncomfortable writing "Arabs" - and lets them die, even though it could save them.

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As a result of Israel's growing ethno-nationalism, embarrassment has replaced guilt as the dominant feeling toward Israel for Foer's generation - and certainly the generation coming of age now. Hence "Here I Am" is the story of the fraying not only of the Blochs' marriage, but also of the relationship between young Jewish Americans and Israel.

The sacrifice of Isaac

This novel is not just an indictment of Israel, or a meditation about the vagaries of marriage. It reflects a seismic change in American Judaism in its non-Orthodox forms, which comprise 90 percent of all United States Jews. "Here I am" is the translation of the Hebrew hineni, which Abraham utters twice in one of the most famous - or notorious, depending on perspective - stories in the Book of Genesis: the sacrifice of Isaac. The first time Abraham says "Here I am" is when God turns to him to tell him to take his beloved son Isaac and sacrifice him. The second time he utters it is when Isaac, after a three-day journey, turns to his father asking where the sheep for the sacrifice is, answering evasively that God will show the offering.

Here we come to what for me is the core moment of Foer's "Here I Am." Sam, Jacob and Julia's eldest son, is about to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The novel begins when Sam is accused by the rabbi running his bar mitzvah class to have written racist expletives on his desk. Julia thinks that he needs to apologize; Jacob tends to believe Sam's denial of having written this including the "N-word" (Foer, with some irony, keeps returning to this specific sin, the ultimate atrocity for political correctness).

Sam, an introvert, precocious child, also lives a "second life" through the avatar of a Latina called Samanta, and through her voice he writes his bat mitzvah speech (after all, he's a girl in his "second life"), which, of course, he will never deliver at his actual bar mitzvah. It is a soaring indictment of our forefather Abraham: How, he asks, could Abraham use the same "Here I am" toward God and toward his son? Whose was he anyway? Isaac's or God's? Obviously he couldn't be both, as God demanded the slaughter of Isaac. Analogously, how could his parents not have taken a clear stance and made clear that they were his, and defended him against the rabbi?

Foer does not really elaborate on this point, but the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is, I believe, the shibboleth that separates Jewish liberals from conservative Orthodoxy. For millennia, Abraham's willingness to follow God's demand to slaughter his son has been hailed as the ultimate expression of faith by Jews, Christians and Muslims. But for many of us nowadays, the present writer emphatically included, the sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most dramatic expressions of the profound moral faults of most traditional religions, and Judaism in particular.

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El Kana, the jealous god who accepts nothing but total submission to his will, for most Jewish liberals is an atavistic, inhuman idea, more akin to a cruel, wanton king insistent on total obedience than a benevolent god, and they recoil from Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son just to demonstrate total submission.

This is by far not the only aspect of the Torah that they can no longer accept: After all, it also commands the genocide of all non-Jewish tribes of Canaan, the extinction of Amalek, the execution of homosexuals and it rejoices in Moses' ordering the killing of 3,000 sons of Israel after they built the Golden Calf.

Jewish liberals have made an enormous effort to humanize Judaism; to de-mythologize it and turn it into a religion compatible with modern humanism. This project started in 19th-century Germany, and has come to its fruition in American Judaism, where the vast majority of Jews, if they are affiliated with any religion at all, have cleansed historical Judaism of its anachronistic attachment to what is ultimately a cruel God, epitomized in the sacrifice of Isaac.

Judaism after the sacrifice of Isaac

The name "Isaac" plays an important role in "Here I Am." At the novel's beginning, Sam's great-grandfather Isaac is still alive. He has survived the Holocaust, partially by hiding in a hole for so long that he can't fully straighten his legs for the rest of his life. Like the biblical Isaac, he is almost sacrificed by history. He survives, crippled for the rest of his life. But ultimately his life will end tragically in old age, after having raised a family in the New World. He commits suicide, feeling betrayed because his family insists on his moving to an old-age home against his will.

We don't get to know much about Isaac Bloch, no more than we know about his biblical namesake, the blandest of the three mythical forefathers of the Jewish people: Passive, he lets himself be manipulated and never becomes a personality, and in due time Abraham will even send his servant to find Isaac a bride, Rivka, apparently convinced that he'll never get something done on his own.

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In contemporary psychological lingo we would say that the biblical Isaac never recovers from the trauma of understanding that his father was willing to sacrifice him to satisfy the whims of a totalitarian God. About his contemporary namesake Foer writes "Isaac had been the embodiment of Jacob's history; his people's psychological pantry, the shelves collapsed. His heritage of incomprehensible strength and incomprehensible weakness."

Jacob Bloch is named after biblical Isaac's son, Jacob, who steals his brother Esau's primogeniture and then flees, only to become the forefather of the 12 tribes that will become the People of Israel, fulfilling God's promise to Abraham that he will become a great people. Like his biblical namesake, Jacob Bloch is not much of a hero. He's the typical young Jewish liberal; highly sensitive, politically correct to a fault, indecisive almost to the point of paralysis, living his family life conscientiously but not quite sure that this life is actually his.

His divorce is initiated not by a full-fledged affair, but by Julia's finding out that he was sexting with a co-worker in the TV series that he is involved in. But Jacob and Julia are fervent believers in modern humanist values in all aspects of their lives: They separate on amicable terms, collaborating in the effort to create familial continuity for their children.

I imagine that their divorce doesn't include any of the ancient Jewish rituals that are so profoundly humiliating for women, but was conducted according to the beliefs and the way of life of their Jewish-American cohort, which is far removed from the ancient creed that religion trumps human morality. They have also rejected the primacy of the ancient Jewish injunction "honor your father and mother" and adopted the modern liberal creed that parents who choose to put children into this world have the duty to be attentive to their needs and try to meet them as sensitively as possible.

Not only the second-rate status of women is jarring for modern Jewish liberals, but another theme currently very much en vogue in certain circles in Israel. There are Orthodox groups that want to restore the Temple, and are creating models for the tools used in the Temple among others to resume the endless series of animal sacrifice that were central to its rituals. This, to Jewish liberals, seems the relic of a pagan past, and the idea of animal sacrifice seems outrageous to them.

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Foer refrains from stating his opinions on the matter, even though one can guess what his position on slaughtering animals for ritual purposes is likely to be. Instead of lashing out at animal sacrifice, "Here I Am" ends on a chapter that compresses these themes poignantly: Jacob has moved into a house of his own, and the kids are beginning to share their time between his house and Julia's, who, we find out, has finally transformed from an architect dreaming about projects to an architect who builds actual houses.
"Oh music, in your depths we deposit our hearts and souls."

~Kahlil Gibran

The ability of music, sound, and harmony to heal the body, mind, and emotions has been recognized as far back as ancient civilizations of Greece. The field of Music Therapy is a widely recognized field and has applications in hospitals, hospices, and institutional settings.

I have been involved with music for almost all of my life. My mother had a small collection of classical music records that, even as a young child, I listened to, over and over. I started playing the piano when I was 8, but it was the day that my band instructor placed a French horn in my hands that the love affair with music really took hold. A seed was planted that day that has grown into a mighty oak. The story of my life includes spending 20 years as a professional musician and now enjoying playing as an enthusiastic amateur.

Playing my horn is very healing for me. It's fun and I've found that it can be a spiritual experience for me too. The energy of 100 or so people (in a band or orchestra) concentrating intently together on one moment in time - then the next, then the next - and putting their hearts and souls into the effort of making their most authentic sounds with their instruments; that is something that I find completely addictive. It's a practice of being in the present moment and producing moments of beauty, nobility, sadness, sweetness, ecstasy, fury, etc. all strung together, measure by measure, moment by moment, note by note. When I'm doing that, all my upsets, pains, worries simply drop away. I feel the music in my body, mind, emotions, and soul. I let myself merge with it and I come away from the experience exhilarated, happy, and peaceful. It opens my heart.

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I listen to music all the time. I know why music is therapeutic. It is energy in motion and draws a person into it, to entrain with it (match its energy) and let it flow through, releasing energy blocks and restoring the natural balance and harmony of their system. It has been well documented by musical scholars how listening to certain pieces of music can release tension, anger, negativity, grief, and can transport the listener through these feelings and into a state of calmness and peace. In psychotherapy, techniques like Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) are extremely effective for this exact reason. A person can process their feelings in the present moment without having to talk about them (or get stuck in the story about the feelings). This leads to emotional release and healing.

Hearing, playing, composing music has the potential to bring us into the higher energies of creativity, transcending the small, petty, complaining, victimized self and placing us in the realm of the transcended self where we experience Unconditional Loving.



What's a practical way to experience this? One way is to go out into nature with the intention of listening deeply to the sounds and experiencing the natural harmonies of birds singing, wind rustling the leaves of trees, water flowing in streams, the sound of the ocean, etc.

Take up a musical instrument, if you don't already know how to play. The guitar, harp, piano, recorder, drums - there are so many possibilities. Or, use your natural instrument and sing. There are endless opportunities to learn through classes, individual teachers, and even online instruction.

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Listening to music can also be an important part of your day. Making playlists for your every desired mood is a creative way to shift from negativity to what you want to be feeling. Moving to the music by exercising or dancing is a great way energize yourself and increase physical stamina at the same time. I encourage you to let it be fun.
A serial about two artists with incurable neurological disease sharing fear, frustration and friendship as they push to complete the most rewarding creative work of their careers.



In Hadley's studio, one of the two panels for the Montana Women's Mural Project begins its life

On December 5, 2013, five months after she was diagnosed with multiple system atrophy, Hadley received the thrilling news that she had been selected to be the artist for the Montana State Capitol Women's Mural. She signed a memorandum of understanding a few days later and eagerly awaited the contract that, once signed, would provide a deposit for her work. The timing for this was critical, as Hadley and John were burdened with several large medical bills.

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There was more good news: The Stephen King Haven Foundation, which Hadley had applied to in November, had granted her $7000. And, she finally managed to secure affordable healthcare for her family. For days, she'd been trying to sign up on healthcare.gov but the website had been jammed; awake one morning at three-thirty, she finally got through. The new insurance plan was significantly more affordable -- they'd been paying $1100 per month with their old insurance and their new fee would be $780. With their old plan, her family's individual deductibles added up to $26,000 and didn't include prescriptions; the new plan offered a family deductible of $2500 and prescriptions would be free. These financial gains were an enormous relief for Hadley and John.

In addition to her talent and experience with painting history-themed murals, two other factors had made Hadley's proposal especially appealing to the selection committee. The request for proposals had asked for a single mural on the east wall under the barrel vault of the Capitol's third floor, but Hadley felt a second mural on the west wall would create a more balanced composition for the space. In effect, she was offering them two murals for the price of one. One panel would depict the lives of Montanan women, both settlers and Native Americans, during the mid to late 1880's, pre-railroad; the second would illustrate women in roles of leadership, entrepreneurship, social activism, and service following the arrival of the railroad and the 20th century. Another strong selling point was that she stressed her interest in approaching the project collaboratively in all phases. Part of her proposal read:



The best and most important part of any project is the collaborative work that goes into design and painting elements... if selected, the Artist looks forward to collaborating...Details about clothing, choice of women illustrated in the mural, subject matter, colors, final presentation, and all aspects of design are elements that become even richer when collaborated on and thought out as a team.

When Hadley received the contract for the Montana Women's Mural one week before Christmas, she was excited and terrified. From small things said and unsaid, she gleaned that she'd nearly lost the commission to one of the other finalists who pulled out of the process because of scheduling conflicts. In light of this, the committee's repeated praise for Hadley's spirit of collaboration temporarily shook her confidence, making her wonder if they doubted her artistic abilities. At night, she lay awake worrying. There was, of course, the expected nervousness any artist would have about whether they had the skills to meet expectations for this major public project. But also, what if she became too sick to follow through on the mural -- would it be possible to get help with it? Once the project was underway, would she be able to be honest about her health situation, or would she have to put extra energy into hiding it?

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The schedule for the mural project would be tight. Hadley would need to complete a design by mid-March and deliver the two finished panels to Helena by mid-October, 2014. In November, they would be unveiled in honor of the 100-year celebration of the women's suffrage movement in Montana.

With the Women's Mural Project looming, the pressure was on for Hadley to finish the murals for the Missoula Catholic Schools.

Also in progress was work for the University of Montana Department of Forestry and Conservation. In the 1930's and 1950's, the department had commissioned an artist to paint scenes of logging and now, they wished to complement these with illustrations of post-1950's conservation work: the restoration of rivers and streams, controlled burns and protection of wilderness areas. In the mornings, Hadley scaled a stepladder at the Loyola Sacred Heart School to work on finishing the twelve-foot-tall murals there; in the afternoons, she'd work on laying out the designs on the three, five-foot-tall Forestry murals for the University. Her pattern was to work intensely when she had the energy and then crash for a day or two. "I need to keep going while I can because I feel like I'm at the bottom of a huge mountain and if I stop, I'll never be able to get going again," she told me. Standing for long periods of time was exhausting and often made her dizzy. Her hands cramped up and big movements with her paintbrush were difficult enough that she worried the paint would dry faster than she could keep up with it. And her balance had deteriorated to the point that she had to be ever vigilant to avoid falling.

Late at night getting ready for bed, she'd look in the mirror and wonder about the stranger looking back at her. Her face was losing its animation and softness, no longer expressing the spark she felt inside. She told me there was some relief in knowing that at least the finished murals wouldn't reveal her struggle to create them, "working from the cage" around her body.

Hadley had another critical task to attend to before the start of the Montana Women's Mural--creating a large enough work area in their home to execute the two five-foot-by ten-foot panels. Her painting studio was in a large room upstairs in her house, but she would need to expand into an office area that was crammed with files and paperwork generated by thirteen years of her artist's practice. She dug in, dismayed to discover that mice had taken up residence in the piles of old contracts, drawings and research. Most of the files had to be discarded and the rest sanitized. It was a physically exhausting ordeal, and emotionally trying to go through the business of her past. She couldn't help wondering: will I be around in another thirteen years?

Several weeks after signing the contract for the Montana Women's Mural, Hadley drove to Helena to meet with the mural committee members -- former state Senator Lynda Moss, who has a background in art and history and has worked extensively in community development; Mary Murphy, a history professor at Montana State University who has a special interest in women's history, gender in the American West and American women; Kim Hurtle, a member of the Montana Arts Council; and Julie Cajune, Executive Director of the Center for American Indian Policy and Applied Research at Salish Kootenai College and Director of the HeartLines Project. Julie is also a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The collaboration of these women professionals exemplified the murals' theme of "women as community builders."

Hadley felt honored to be working side-by-side with such accomplished women. As they discussed the issues they had with her original design and brainstormed solutions, she was invigorated by the conversation. But at times, she realized they were veering away from the subject of "women as community builders" and after the meeting, she kicked herself for not having had the presence of mind to pull the conversation back on course. As an excellent listener, conceptualizer and with a great memory for details, she'd always felt on top of things at meetings; if the discussion digressed, she would be the one to rein it in so that everyone would leave with a strong sense of direction.

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This time, Hadley came away from the meeting muddled and realized she was very likely experiencing mild cognitve impairment, a symptom of her disease. During a follow-up conference call, she didn't contribute much, but listened hard to her collaborators' ideas and questions while they tried to nail down the mural's content. Her mind churned--how would she convey all the ideas discussed on the two canvases? She'd determined that each painting would be grouped into several sections: a large center image within the shape of an oval surrounded by four small corner images. Scenes from Montana women's history would fill the two ovals; one would depict Native American women trading goods with European American women, perhaps medicine and food for cloth. To contrast with this rural image, the women discussed creating an urban scene for the other mural's oval. Hadley wanted to make the scene more poignant than a simple depiction of life "in town" and the committee exchanged ideas about images that would reinforce the community-builders theme. They settled on an illustration of the women's suffrage movement. The four corner pieces bracketing the two ovals would add supporting images: women digging bitterroots, women sewing or beading, teaching, nursing, canning, women with children, as aviators, cowgirls. Hadley felt more settled after the conference call, but still not satisfied that the ideas for the mural were gelling.

In the meantime, Montana, like other areas of the country that winter of 2014, was experiencing one of several "polar vortexes" and daily, temperatures plunged to the negative digits, worsening her stiffness. Missoula was plagued by storms that would break a 1939 snowfall record. An avalanche slid down Missoula's Mount Jumbo, burying the house of Hadley's friends, a couple in their sixties; the man was pulled from the snow and survived, but tragically, his wife died from her injuries.

The week before her big mural meeting, Hadley had planned to do research at the library but when Sarah came down with a virus, she didn't leave the house for four days. If she'd felt confident in her vision for the project, such a delay wouldn't have thrown her, but the disruption came at a sensitive point in the process. Her spirits sank with her energy. She told me her mind felt like a huge messy pile she had to sift through every time she needed to find something, mirroring the actual experience of sorting through her collection of images and her own paintings to pull visual elements for the murals. Sometimes, she would forget what she was searching for; other times she'd lose track of what she'd found and what she was going to do with it. An added frustration was that it was taking her longer to complete tasks that in the past would've been simple for her -- a drawing that might have taken several hours to complete just a couple of years ago was taking her several days.

It was a Herculean task for Hadley to fend off anxiety about what was happening to her mind and body so that she could drive the mural project forward.

She rallied. The next week, on February 20, she would have a meeting with the committee in Helena and she scolded herself: "Get your act together." At least the four days at home with Sarah had allowed her necessary rest, and her body felt stronger. She pulled out her computer and organized the documents and notes from her design discussions, made a list of all the ideas that had come forward, and spent the next three days researching images that would illustrate those ideas. One of her most exciting finds was a photograph of three women hanging posters on a building during the suffrage movement; this was a perfect jumping off point for the urban scene she would paint. As the images piled up, she began to see an opening into her vision. There was hope!

For the meeting, the committee wanted to see Hadley's design projected in situ to satisfy their concerns about scale and proportion. With paper, she created a five by ten foot mock up divided into the five sections onto which they'd be able to project images. The day of the meeting, she loaded her car with the mock-up, her pile of images, and eight new drawings. She felt almost like the old Hadley, productive and prepared to impress. Still, she would remain cautious until she could read the reactions of the committee.

The roads to Helena were a mess from snowstorms. The usual 1- hours drive took her 2 1/2 and it was white-knuckle all the way. By the time Hadley arrived at the State Capitol, she was so stiff she could hardly get out of the car; this was one of the few times she knew there would be no hiding her condition. After hauling all her materials up to the third floor of the Capitol building, she had to recruit the committee to help her hang the paper mock-up. They were supportive and happy to help.

Hadley held her breath as she walked away to view the mock-up from across the stairwell. She turned and knew immediately that the mural was going to be everything she'd hoped for. When the others saw the layout with scenes projected on it, they were as excited as she was. Together, they went through the images Hadley had culled and the conceptual and visual pieces began to form a coherent and compelling vision of women as community builders. Hadley was elated to get the green light to move forward on the murals.

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At home in her upstairs studio, she prepped the two 5 x 10 foot powder coated aluminum mural panels, sanding and then brushing them with two layers of gesso to create a more textured, uneven surface. Then, she drew the borders that defined the center ovals, triangular corners, and outside edges of each panel. She used a computer-generated template for these so the dimensions and curves would be accurate; for their design, she borrowed the details of the Capitol building's interior moldings. She made transparencies of the 11 x 14 inch detailed pencil drawings she'd created for each mural so that she could project the images at a larger size onto the panels. Then, she began the long process of drawing, stopping as she went along to correct proportions that were inevitably sometimes off.



Because she populates her murals with many figures, Hadley often uses live models and a camera. In spring, when the Missoula skies had cleared, Julie Cajune, the Native American member of the mural committee, took Hadley to the Flathead reservation, home to the Salish Kootenai tribe. Julie had arranged for friends to pose for Hadley so that she could photograph them in authentic Native American clothing and accessories. One wore a buckskin dress and braids decorated with traditional "otter wraps," one carried a cradleboard, another rode a horse. Hadley positioned her models for a scene in which two women would be trading blankets and another that would illustrate the granting of Native American citizenship rights by the Indian Citizen Act of 1924. In addition to establishing historical authenticity, the photographs helped Hadley to accurately represent natural head angles, gestures and the drape of fabric. On one of her favorite days during the mural project, Julie took her and Sarah digging for bitterroots so they would experience this piece of history that would be included in the mural.

When Hadley transferred the drawings to the panels, the larger scale created empty spaces she needed to fill. She researched artwork and objects to decorate walls and tables, making sure every detail of a room, including lamps, rugs and curtains, was historically accurate. Often, she referred to old Sears and Roebuck catalogues for furnishings. She studied hairstlyes and obtained swatches of material from every decade from a historian of fabrics in Bozeman, Montana so that clothing would be appropriate. In outdoor scenes she was careful to be seasonally accurate when choosing flowers in bloom and produce being harvested or sold in the marketplace.

The Women's Mural Project committee made a studio visit and everyone had a thought or two about something a little different they'd like to see, but at the end of two days of discussion that generated a few changes and some compromises, everyone was satisfied. The project had hit a major turning point. Finally, Hadley could dive in with her paintbrush and bring to life the colorful history of Montana's women.

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Cherri Delesline organized her neighborhood against the Ku Klux Klan. Photo source: Cherri Delesline

By Marisol Bello

Cherri Delesline does not quietly observe injustice. She acts.

Cherri was 17, a high school dropout and working in a fast food restaurant in Charleston, S.C., when she began to organize. She just didn't know what to call it.

At the time, she worked with a male manager who inappropriately flirted with young female workers. She remembers how that manager fired a young woman on the spot because she wasn't cleaning the restaurant lobby in the way he demanded. So she led a walkout with the other teenagers in the restaurant in protest.

"He fired her for no reason; she was doing her job," Cherri says today about that moment. "I told the other workers, 'You all can put up with it, but I'm not about to do it.' So I grabbed my stuff and the whole store walked out with me."

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For about three hours, only the supervisors were left to take the orders and serve customers. The district office called Cherri to negotiate, and they returned to work with a small raise. By the next week, that manager was no longer working in the store.

And so it's always been with Cherri Delesline. The single mom is humble but outspoken for what she knows is right. She knows she can't sit on the sidelines.

On Thursday night, September 22, the Center for Community Change (CCC) will recognize Cherri as its first Emerging Change Champion. The award was established this year in partnership with the Petra Foundation to recognize emerging or overlooked champions of change who work to build power for communities of concentrated poverty and communities of color.

It is one of five awards that CCC presents each year to honor leaders and partners in the fight for economic equity and social justice.

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Given her youthful experience as an inadvertent social justice warrior, her path to organizing seems inevitable. It is no surprise that today Cherri has become a leader in the national Fight for $15 movement.

Two years ago, on an afternoon shift at the McDonald's where she worked, a labor organizer drove up and asked her if she liked working in fast food and whether she felt her pay was fair.

Cherri was clear: no. She'd been working at McDonald's for almost 10 years by then and had received only a 10 cent raise during her time with the company, from $7.25 to $7.35.

She worked full time at the restaurant, often eight to 10 hours a day, and held a second job at a convenience store. But as a single mom with four girls under 12, all of her work did not pay enough to cover rent and utilities and her family's food and clothing.

"By the time you paid all your bills, you were broke," she says.

It didn't take much convincing for her to join the burgeoning movement of fast food workers fighting for higher wages, demanding respect, and calling for an end to racial discrimination on the job.

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She remembers meeting with the organizer to talk about the movement that same night. She brought four other people with her, and by the next week, they had signed up the whole store to join the Fight for $15.

"It's hard work because people are scared," she says. "They feared they could lose their jobs."

But to do nothing is even worse, Cherri says. She shared her reasoning with her co-workers and other fast food workers throughout the city of Charleston.

"If we do not stand up for ourselves, if we do not do this now, our kids will suffer," she says. "I don't want to let them suffer like me. Something has to be done. For me, my kids were my motivation."

Organizing became a family affair. Cherri often brings her girls to rallies and strikes of fast-food workers across the city.



Cherri Delesline, center, at a SC Raise Up Fight for $15 rally. Photo source: Cherri Delesline

With all the fire and heart of a born organizer, Cherri is determined to fight for what is right - whether alongside her co-workers or her neighbors.

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Last year, while the nation grieved the killings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Ku Klux Klan posted recruitment flyers on cars to intimidate residents of Cherri's north Charleston community.

"I wanted to let people know what was going on," she says. She organized community meetings and spoke out about the Klan's efforts.

The neighborhood hasn't seen one Klan flyer since.



"Cherri does not draw attention to herself," says Kerry Taylor, a history professor at the Citadel and social justice advocate who has worked with Cherri. "But somehow she commands the complete respect of her co-workers. If she says, this is what we are going to do, people just followed her. They trust her."

He says Cherri embodies what it means to be an organizer: someone who commands respect, who articulates the struggle and who is thinking about the broader mission of social justice.

Charleston's fast food workers remain underpaid--South Carolina is one of five states with no minimum wage. But Cherri's not done organizing. She and her co-workers have vaulted the Fight for $15 into a national--and now global--movement. At least a dozen cities and counties as well as California and New York have approved a $15 an hour minimum wage.

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Cherri no longer works at McDonald's. She is finishing her course work to get her GED--hopefully by next month. She's not quite sure what campaign she will focus on next. But she knows there will be another campaign.

"I consider myself an organizer," she says. "It's been instilled in me. I will forever be an organizer."
If the scientific and scholarly world has an equivalent of filmdom's annual, pre-award "Oscar fever" of late February, it's just about upon us: Beginning on October 3rd, the committee that decides the Nobel Prizes will notify a select group of honorees that they've won science's highest award.

Since 2002, to mark Nobel Prize week, the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters has released its own list of Nobel-worthy researchers. These are the Web of Science  Citation Laureates - scientists whose published work has won special recognition among peers by being read and footnoted, or "cited," at a level far above the norm. The latest group of Laureates

has just been announced.

Because citations serve as quantifiable markers of influence and significance, a high citation rate attests to work that has truly made a difference to ongoing research. The Citation Laureates, therefore, are scientists whose work has proved itself worthy of possible Nobel recognition - perhaps soon, perhaps a decade or two in the future, depending on the prize committee's inclinations and deliberations.

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To select this latest class of Citation Laureates, analysts turned, as always, to the Web of Science, an online database that compiles publication and citation statistics in science, the socials sciences, and the arts and humanities, reflecting scholarly inquiry back to the year 1900. Scientists whose papers have attracted an unusually high number of citations, and whose work is clearly associated with a specific and notable discovery or advance, win the distinction of being "of Nobel class."

Continuing a feature introduced in last year's presentation of Laureates, an online "People's Choice" poll permits readers to vote on their favorite Nobel-worthy candidates, either from this year's new batch or from among previous Citation Laureate selections who still await the call from Stockholm. Register your vote here.

As always, the new Laureates represent all four science fields honored by the Nobel: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. A trio of scientists recognized in Physics, for example, represent a recent breakthrough in a longstanding astrophysical quest: Roland W.P. Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss were the key drivers behind the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facility, an installation in Pasadena built to detect gravitational waves. Earlier this year, LIGO captured evidence of these ripples in space-time, predicted more than a century ago by Albert Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

In Chemistry, George M. Church and Feng Zhang are recognized for their contributions to another recent breakthrough, the genome-editing method known as CRISPR-Cas9. This "find and replace" utility for gene sequences has been the subject of highly active research since the method was originated in 2012, as it raises the prospect of actually re-writing genetic code to cure or avert disease. But the method has also spawned qualms about the ethics of such gene-tampering, along with a bitter legal battle over who should own the lucrative patent rights for the method, pitting Zhang against another Citation Laureate, Jennifer A. Doudna, who was selected last year with another CRISPR inventor, Emmanuelle Charpentier. Furthermore, Nobel rules stipulate that no more than three researchers may share any given prize, so the selection by the Nobel committee for CRISPR, if and when it comes, seems certain to stir controversy.

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Other new Citation Laureates are honored for findings that harness the immune system to attack tumors, or that permit non-invasive screenings for pregnant women, or provide a deeper understanding of why unemployment is a persistent problem in developed economies.

One of this year's selections, Stuart L. Schreiber, is tipped in Physiology or Medicine for work on a gene known as TOR, whose intracellular workings have provided insights for the targeting of therapeutic drugs. A decade ago, Schreiber was selected as a Citation Laureate in the field of Chemistry for work on small molecules. Thanks to groundbreaking work in these two areas, Schreiber may have doubled his chances for an invitation to Sweden someday.



The 2016 Thomson Reuters Web of Science Citation Laureates



PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE

James P. Allison of the University of Texas Houston, and Jeffrey A. Bluestone of the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and Craig B. Thompson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

For explaining how CD28 and CTLA-4 are regulators of T cell activation, modulating immune response

Gordon J. Freeman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, and Arlene H. Sharpe of Harvard Medical School

For elucidating programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its pathway, which has advanced cancer immunotherapy

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Michael N. Hall, University of Basel, Switzerland, and David M. Sabatini of the Whitehead Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Stuart L. Schreiber of the Broad Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

For discoveries of the growth regulator Target of Rapamycin (TOR) and the mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR)

PHYSICS

Marvin L. Cohen of the University of California Berkeley

For theoretical studies of solid materials, prediction of their properties, and especially for the empirical pseudo potential method

Ronald W.P. Drever of the California Institute of Technology, and Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that made possible the detection of gravitational waves

Celso Grebogi of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Edward Ott of the University of Maryland, and James A. Yorke of the University of Maryland

For their description of a control theory of chaotic systems, the OGY method

CHEMISTRY

George M. Church of Harvard Medical School, and Feng Zhang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For application of CRISPR-cas9 gene editing in mouse and human cells

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Dennis Lo Yuk Ming of the Chinese University of Hong Kong

For detecting cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, a revolution in noninvasive prenatal testing

Hiroshi Maeda of Sojo University and the University School of Medicine, Japan, and Yasuhiro Matsumura of the University of Tokyo

For discovering the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect of macromolecular drugs, a key finding for cancer therapeutics

ECONOMICS

Olivier J. Blanchard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For contributions to macroeconomics, including determinants of economic fluctuations and employment

Edward P. Lazear of Stanford Graduate School of Business

For his development of the distinctive field of personnel economics
The hacked emails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell have been widely noted because of Powell's candid remarks about topics including Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and nuclear weapons. But Republic Report is intrigued by a series of exchanges about the for-profit college industry between Powell and Jeffrey Leeds, a key private equity investor in, and advocate for, schools that have been sued by law enforcement agencies for defrauding students and taxpayers.

The email messages capture Powell and Leeds not only musing about politics but also addressing unfavorable media coverage of their joint involvement with the for-profit colleges, discussing possible acquisition of campuses of disgraced Corinthian Colleges, flagging business opportunities with Bill Gates and investors in Kazakhstan, and contemplating how they could persuade perceived kindred spirits in the Obama Administration to end the government's supposed "war" on their schools.

Powell, Leeds, and for-profit colleges

Last time I had checked, in June, Powell was listed as the chair of the advisory board of Leeds' firm, Leeds Equity Partners, which invests in for-profit education and until 2014 owned a major stake in the second largest for-profit college company, Education Management Corporation (EDMC). It's not clear if and when Powell ended his involvement with Leeds, but today he no longer appears on the Leeds website.

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Pittsburgh-based EDMC, operator of the Art Institutes, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, and South University, once had a reputation for providing quality higher education, but that reputation went downhill during the George W. Bush years, as a lax regulatory environment gave for-profit colleges incentives to aggressively recruit students, raise prices, and cut funding for actual instruction. EDMC's descent became even more rapid, as faculty, staff, and students have told me, after Leeds Equity Partners, Goldman Sachs, and another private equity firm took over 85% of the company's stock in a 2006 leveraged buyout.

Many students, including low-income single mothers, and U.S. military veterans like Chris Pantzke and Mike DiGiacomo, fell prey to EDMC's deceptive and coercive recruiting and financial aid practices, and they ended up dropping out, without degrees or enhanced job prospects but deep in debt. Pantzke, who suffered from brain trauma during combat and severe post-traumatic stress disorder, was recruited for a two-year art degree at an EDMC school with the promise of special disability services. He was then denied assistance after enrolling, had difficulty attending the online classes because of his disability, and found that the school had used all of his $65,000 in GI Bill benefits, while he incurred another $26,000 in student debt.

With his firm invested in EDMC, Jeffrey Leeds joined EDMC's board of directors. He also served on the boards of other for-profit education companies, including Datamark, then led by CEO Arthur Benjamin. And Leeds' company also invested in EduK Group, "the largest private sector provider of postsecondary education in Puerto Rico."

EDMC, which has been getting as much as $1.8 billion annually in taxpayer-funded federal student grants and loans, was sued in 2011 for $11 billion by the U.S. Justice Department, which claimed the company defrauded taxpayers of that amount between 2003 and 2011. Five state attorneys general joined that lawsuit, and many more have been investigating EDMC.

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Last year, EDMC agreed to pay fines or forgive loans worth some $200 million to settle claims with the Justice Department and 39 state attorneys general.

At the time of the settlements, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, "Operating essentially as a recruitment mill, EDMC's actions were not only a violation of federal law but also a violation of the trust placed in them by their students - including veterans and working parents - all at taxpayer expense."

By then, EDMC's enrollments and stock price had plummeted, and Leeds and Goldman Sachs lost control of the collapsing company, which was taken over by its creditors, led by the firm KKR, in 2014.

With his company heavily invested in higher education companies, Jeffrey Leeds had become an aggressive advocate against accountability for for-profit schools. Leeds has long served, and still serves, on the board of directors of the troubled for-profit college lobby organization APSCU/CECU, and he has sharply criticized regulations issued by the Obama Administration to prevent career colleges from leaving students with crushing debt.

For his part, Colin Powell, the advisory chairman of Leeds' private equity firm, gave the keynote speech at the annual convention of Leeds' for-profit college lobbying group, APSCU, in 2011, in Grapevine, Texas. Speaking at a time when congressional investigations and media reporting had exposed abuses at EDMC schools and other for-profit colleges, and the Obama Administration was seeking greater accountability for the industry, Powell reportedly gushed, "Our society has such a need for education and no field has more to help than career and private sector education." He exhorted the for-profit college owners and executives at the event to "Make the case. The purpose of private sector education is to help ... people strive for a brighter future."

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Concern about a news story

In their email exchanges, Powell and Leeds traded thoughts about government and media scrutiny of their for-profit college investments.

In one discussion, Leeds assured Powell that he had pressed the publisher of the New York Post to look into an article in his paper that called attention to Powell's role in EDMC.

The article, by reporter Michelle Celarier, explored how for-profit colleges under scrutiny for misconduct frequently employ "Beltway heavy hitters" to gain political clout. In a sidebar that accompanied the print edition of Celarier's story, the Post noted that Powell was an "adviser to the owner of Education Management Corp," a company "exposed for abusive targeting of veterans" and that the company was facing the $11 billion federal fraud lawsuit.

The morning the story was published, May 26, 2015, Leeds emailed Jesse Angelo, a News Corporation executive and publisher of the New York Post, to complain that the piece was "All opinion and all wrong. Just drivel. Clearly fed by the left and shorts," referring to Wall Street short-sellers of education stocks. Leeds added, "I think I know who her main source was. He's a nut ball."

I don't know which nut ball Leeds had in mind; neither he nor Powell have responded to my requests for comment.

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Leeds further complained to Angelo that the "sloppiness extends to accusation against Colin Powell ... she says he and others 'went to bat for' for profit colleges," Leeds wrote, claiming Powell has never promoted the firm and was "never asked to do anything."

"Don't know anything about it - will have a look," responded Angelo.

The exchange was forwarded by Leeds to Powell. "I was tough," Leeds wrote. "Jesse is the publisher and a very dear friend. Pure hatchet job. No factual basis whatsoever." Powell later responded regarding the sidebar that mentioned his name: "they should take it off their site so it doesnt google up in future."

The online version of Celarier's article does not include the sidebar mentioning Powell. The sidebar, however, is preserved by the news archive website Nexis, and the original print edition of the paper.

As the day wore on, Powell seemed worried that, notwithstanding Leeds' aggressive complaints to the Post, aspects of the article might be accurate. Powell emailed Leeds, "I was an adviser to the owner of EMC. Duh, is that you?" and quickly followed up, "Are you/EMC being sued for $11B?" and "Until recently didn't you own more than 10%?" Leeds replied to the last question, "Never." Leeds explained to Powell, "we are virtually out of EDMC completely. Now controlled by the bondholders." Leeds apparently did not respond to Powell asking whether EDMC was being sued for $11 billion, which it was. For fraud. By the U.S. Justice Department.

In truth, the Post article was entirely accurate, except for the reference to Powell having been an adviser to "the" owner of EDMC; Leeds was actually "an" owner of the company.

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Countering the Obama "war" on for-profit schools

Despite the billions of dollars going to EDMC and other for-profit colleges from the Department of Education, Leeds had written to Powell in 2014 that the Obama Administration was at "war" with their industry. He seemed confident that direct conversations with top administration officials could turn things around.

"If you and I had an hour with Valerie I bet we could make some progress on ending the war," Leeds wrote to Powell, apparently referencing Valerie Jarrett, one of President Obama's closest advisors. "The problem is really the government," Leeds noted. "We need them to stop trying to kill us."

Leeds' confidence that he and Powell would quickly be able to sway Jarrett is notable, especially given that President Obama's prior comments made clear that he personally understood how some for-profit colleges were scamming veterans and other students, as well as taxpayers.

In the same 2014 email chain, the pair discussed the fate of Corinthian Colleges, a large for-profit college operator that declared bankruptcy the following year as it faced a barrage of government lawsuits and fines over fraud. Powell noted that Corinthian is "going under" and that "for-profits" were "under attack." Powell asked: "What do you make of it all?"

Leeds responded with an overview of his thoughts on the industry and mused that Corinthian's collapse presented a potential business opportunity:

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Everyone is struggling in higher ed, other than those with elite students and massive endowments. School is hard, many students aren't prepared at all, it is expensive and running colleges is people intensive, even with a creative deployment of technology. So it ought to be an extraordinary time to innovate.... COCO [Corinthian] was easy for the Feds to attack. The CEO was a jerk (though I kind of liked him -- he's as affable as he is arrogant) and, more importantly, his students were really high risk, so the numbers looked bad. No one bothers to risk adjust when the college is for profit... So where's the opportunity? It's all over the place...maybe. For example, the Feds are making COCO sell most of their schools, I'd love to buy them BUT not if the Feds are going to continue to wage war.

Leeds followed up by floating a plan to use the purchase of Corinthian Colleges' campuses as leverage to shape the behavior of then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell. Leeds wrote to Powell, "the creative way to do this is to approach Arne or his new guy, Ted Mitchell, who is well liked and respected, and say we will help and buy this schools, but here are the conditions. We lay them out and see if they really do want to save the schools, jobs and kids. We could even approach them with our new friends, the SEIU." (Leeds' reference here is interesting, given that the Service Employees International Union has for years been part of the coalition of groups that had taken a strong stand against for-profit college abuses.)

If Leeds saw Ted Mitchell as a potential ally within the Administration, he must be bitterly disappointed now; Mitchell has worked diligently to hold bad actors accountable, getting tougher in his actions as the depth of abuses have been exposed, most recently with the now-collapsed predatory for-profit ITT Tech.

For his part, in the emails, Powell did not express skepticism about for-profit colleges, although he seemed well aware of the criticisms of the industry.

After a taping of Bill Maher's HBO show, Powell wrote to Leeds that another guest, "a guy named Matthew Segal," (a founder of the youth organization Our Time), was "bashing for-profit colleges." In another message, Powell asked Leeds if he had read a Wall Street Journal editorial condemning the administration for its crackdown on for-profit college abuses.

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Expanding the business

The emails reveal that Leeds sometimes asked Powell, beyond publicly lending his reputation to Leeds' firm and investments, to help him make connections for his education properties.

In one exchange, Leeds asked Powell for help luring former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates into for-profit education ventures, writing in April 2o15, "My guys met with some Gates people this week who are signaling strongly that they will be investing, for the first time, in private equity funds in the education space. Would you consider calling Bill and letting him know about us and your relationship to us?"

The previous year, Leeds sought a Powell connection in a Central Asian dictatorship: "Question for you: did you or do you know people in Kazakhstan? One of our companies (INTO) is working on a large contract with leading business people in that country to facilitate their sending students to the UK and US. Would you know senior political and business leaders? The daughter of the former head of security is involved."

Leeds' employment of Powell was not unusual. Many of the largest for-profit colleges have retained well-connected lobbyists and esteemed former government officials -- from Trent Lott to Dick Gephardt, Marc Morial to Bob Dole -- as they sought to expand business, prevent accountability measures, and soften bad publicity. These respected figures have seemed all too happy to oblige, in exchange for fees, notwithstanding the mounting accusations that the patron schools have engaged in widespread fraud.

As a private company, Leeds Equity Partners is not required to disclose how much it has paid Powell for his services. But the emails reveal multiple financial arrangements between Leeds and Powell.

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In a message to his son, a former chairman of the FCC turned lobbyist for the cable industry, Powell noted that he was in negotiations to be paid an additional salary "in the ball park" of $100,000 by one of Leeds' leadership training academies.

"Don't know if I ever mentioned that I am on a nice monthly retainer with Leeds equity," Powell added to the message. "I chair his advisory committee over all his holdings and have an equity position in one."

Leeds, once a law clerk to iconic liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, has apparently done well for himself through his investments in for-profit education and other industries -- and his high-profile connections. He hosts dinner parties with celebrity guests at his Manhattan residence. His ex-business partner is William Weld, the former Massachusetts governor and current Libertarian candidate for vice president. And Leeds has made generous campaign contributions to politicians including Rudolph Giuliani, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Lamar Alexander, Chuck Schumer, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), his Yale College roommate.

Undaunted, Senator Whitehouse is a strong advocate for students harmed by predatory schools.
Donald Trump's startling ascendancy is primarily seen as a manifestation of nearly a half-century of white working and lower middle-class economic decline and status anxiety rooted in economic globalization, changing demographics, and the improved opportunities for non-whites and women in American society. The trauma of 9/11, failed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession and domestic terror, which have impacted all Americans, added 21st century fears, all of which are now amplified by right-wing talk radio, cable television and the internet.

These factors allegedly culminated in an entirely new political culture, enabling a vulgar, ignorant, proto-fascist, celebrity billionaire to openly embrace white nationalism, xenophobia and misogyny and possibly become President. However, I believe this ideological cocktail might have succeeded to a significant degree, if embraced by any Republican candidate since the Lyndon Johnson's civil rights agenda flipped the Democrats' "solid South" Republican.

What if George Wallace, for example, was the Republican nominee in 1968, instead of Richard Nixon? Blue collar workers were not losing jobs to Asia. Unemployment was low, unions were strong and wealth and income inequality not nearly as skewed as now. There was no significant feminist movement, let alone the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe V. Wade, rape shield laws or sexual harassment suits.

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Peaceful civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests were, however, happening, and there had been urban riots in some major cities. However, the ever-calm Walter Cronkite was the dominant voice in broadcast media. Rush Limbaugh and Fox's Network's political agenda were unimaginable under the then existing Fairness Doctrine requiring television and radio licensees' programs to balance political points of view. The internet did not exist.

Wallace was the poor man's Trump. He was a segregationist, but courts, not voters, ended Jim Crow--- de facto segregation in housing, schools, and jobs still exists. He pledged to leave Vietnam in 90 days if we didn't win, as people increasingly turned against the war. He never attacked Medicare and Social Security---just the civil rights struggles, anti-war demonstrators and hippies. He demanded "law and order."

How did Wallace fare in 1968 as a third party candidate? Would that have changed if he was the GOP nominee? Wallace got 13 percent of the vote and won in five southern states. But, he took blue collar votes from Hubert Humphrey in Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan and Wisconsin. He was supported by a third of AFL-CIO members, despite the powerful union's leadership vigorously supporting Humphrey, one of the most pro-working class Democrats ever to run for President.

Had he run as the GOP standard-bearer, Wallace would have won the entire South, as Goldwater did in 1964. But, like Trump and every other Republican nominee since Eisenhower, he would have taken the white working-class and a significant portion of the college-educated as well. Trump, it is rarely acknowledged, is still edging Clinton among white college-educated males and is doing better with college-educated white women than Clinton is doing with non-college-educated white men. Maybe Wallace would have lost to Humphrey, but still gotten well over 40 percent of the vote.

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While Trump is openly bigoted, the Republicans have only been successful in elections since 1968 because of dog-whistles communicating they are the white people's party and, beginning in the 1980s, that of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. Without such appeals, albeit in code, to "states' rights," "law and order," or "family values," they would always have a losing hand: laissez-faire economics and government services limited to the military and local police.

Not all, or possibly most, of Trump's supporters (or Wallace's in 1968, had he run as a Republican), could be classified as rabid bigots. Perhaps half, about 20-25 percent of the US population. But, most critically, an equal percentage will simply vote for whomever the GOP nominates. High party loyalty is also true for Democrats, but they don't nominate bigots.

The non-prejudiced Republicans might abhor lots of the things Trump says, or what Wallace would have said as GOP nominee. But, corporate owners, managers and small businessmen worry more about keeping their taxes low---corporate, personal and estate. They also detest business and environmental regulations, increases in the minimum wage, and any other impingement on free-market economics. Moreover, they fear a Supreme Court majority which might overturn Citizens United and make "disciplining" candidates harder. Do GOP Senators deny the human impact on climate change? Senator Al Franken thinks it's true for only 10 percent of them. Desperate to avoid being "primaried" by a well-funded opponent often make candidates support donors' interests regardless of their own beliefs.

Another large bloc, the Christian right, supports Trump even though he could be an atheist when not running for President, and is not homophobic (Roy Cohn was his mentor). Republican officeholders typically cater to their desire to turn the country into a theocracy when it comes to legislating against sex, censoring culture and policing women's bodies. Democrats rarely do.

Finally, there are low-information voters swayed by conspiracy theories involving Democrats. President Obama has been viewed as a Muslim, born outside the U.S., and a dangerous radical "palling around" with Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weathermen. Their equivalent among Democrats might believe 9/11 was an inside job, but Democrats running for office don't.

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Nothing fundamental separates the Republican electorate today from that of fifty years ago. What has changed is that the Republican Party made winning primaries the essential path to the nomination. Thus, someone like Trump, whose flamboyance meant he did not have to rely on raising donor money to get media exposure, could win. This was especially true when running against a legion of flawed opponents who excluded him from their circular firing squad and eliminated each other.
Co-Authored by Ellen Offner, Principal, Offner Consulting, LLC, health care strategy and program development.

What do Papua New Guinea, Oman, and the United States of America have in common? They are the only three countries in the world with no paid-maternity-leave law. The United States tops the list of the ten worst countries for parental benefits, tied with Lesotho and Swaziland.

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Hillary Clinton has advocated paid family leave for maternity, and the Clinton Foundation offers a generous benefit: 12 weeks of fully paid leave if they are primary caregivers and six paid weeks if they are secondary caregivers. Men and women choose who is primary and who is secondary, an expansion since 2015, when Chelsea Clinton said in an interview that the foundation offered mothers 12 weeks of paid leave and fathers two weeks.

Ivanka Trump designed a maternity leave policy for her father to present to the nation (labeled as Ivanka Trump Memorial by the Wall Street Journal), one that falls far short of Secretary Clinton's. And according to New York Magazine she has mischaracterized her father's opponent's long record of advocating for family leave and lying about such benefits in Trump companies. "His campaign has, as recently as mid-August, refused to address whether it provided paid leave to its employees. Of nine former Trump employees who were willing to speak to the Daily Beast in August, only one was able to recall any maternity leave offered by Trump, and remembered it as unpaid." Further, Ivanka has claimed that the Trump Organization offers fully paid leave for all of the company's thousands of employees, but a Huffington Post investigation found that workers at Trump's Soho, New York, and Miami hotels had not been offered paid maternity leave but rather unpaid leave in accordance with FMLA. The unveiling of this proposal so close to the end of the campaign may appear opportunistic to some observers, but if perceptions of what the populace wants in a candidate can influence the candidates that is a positive impact.

In Italy, known for its fine wines, gastronomy, art, and music, a Fertility Day campaign trumpeted to men: "Don't Let Your Sperm Go Up in Smoke." The main welfare system is still the grandparents, resulting in working women unwilling and in many cases unable, from a financial point of view, to have babies. This is creating a challenging demographic situation in the country, which has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. This is the result of the lack of meaningful support by the government and many employers. "Many working women, without an extended family to care for a child, face a dilemma, as private child care is expensive. Some also worry that their job security may be undermined by missing workdays because of child care issues. Many companies do not offer flexible hours for working mothers. . . . Italian families have been shrinking for decades. In 2015, 488,000 babies were born in Italy, the fewest since the country first unified in 1861. It has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, with 1.37 children per woman, compared with a European average of 1.6, according to Eurostat figures.

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It is thrilling that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for President of the United States have put forth plans that are responsive to the need for maternity leave. The Clinton plan, however, is considerably more gender neutral than the Trump plan. Trump's plan calls for six weeks of paid maternity leave for mothers who do not already receive leave from their employer. Clinton has proposed a guaranteed twelve weeks of paid family leave for parents caring for newborns, parents caring for sick children, children caring for sick or elderly parents, or any other circumstance in which someone might need time off from work to care for a family member in some way.

Congratulations are due to Ivanka for highlighting this pressing issue with her father. But Hillary Clinton has shown leadership on this issue for many years, and her proposed program is far more comprehensive and gender-neutral than her opponent's. In addition, she recognizes the growing need for family members to provide care for elderly parents. With life expectancy in the United States having risen to 78.8 on average, eldercare has rapidly become as big a challenge for families as childcare. Clinton's broad vision is impressive, taking into account the full spectrum of current and prospective caregivers. Trump's proposal, while commendable, is limited, benefits affluent families more than poor ones, and has the appearance of being hastily pulled together to gain votes from young mothers like Ivanka.

If the presidential candidates are looking for inspiration, they need look no farther than our neighbor on the north, Canada. Canada has both unpaid pregnancy leave of up to seventeen weeks and unpaid parental leave of up to 35 weeks for women who have taken pregnancy leave and up to 37 weeks for birth mothers who have not taken pregnancy leave and all other new mothers as well as for fathers. In most cases, employees must be given their old job back at the end of their pregnancy or parental leave.

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Now for a parental paradise: Sweden has some of the most generous parental leave laws in the world -- and the government not only considers the mother, but also the father. Parents are allocated a total of 480 days per child, which they can take any time until the child is 8 years old. They can share these days, although 90 are allocated specifically to the father. And they are entitled to receive 80 percent of their wages, although this is capped at a certain level. And to make this benefit even sweeter, parental leave can be taken until the child is eight years old.
By, Molly McElwee

Donald Trump's camp has repeatedly targeted Hillary Clinton's supposed frailty throughout the 2016 presidential race.

However, the seemingly flimsy and unfounded attacks gained legitimacy, after Clinton nearly collapsed while leaving a 9/11 memorial event at Ground Zero. She had been at the ceremony for about 90 minutes and before feeling "overheated". Clinton's camp then belatedly confirmed their candidate had been diagnosed with pneumonia, and she has since taken three days off the campaign trail.

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This followed on from Clinton being forced to backtrack on comments calling Trump supporters "a basket of deplorables".

A Reuters poll found Clinton leading by 29 points among likely millennial voters last week, but the lasting effects of the camp's debacle over the weekend is starting to show some worrying signs.

However, Laura Epstein of The People for the American Way adamantly believes that there is little that will change the mind of these millennial voters supporting Hillary.

"Millennials just aren't going to trust Donald Trump on issues like education," said Epstein. "They're not going to trust him on issues like LGBT rights where we know that he'll appoint Supreme Court justices who are against LGBT rights."

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Epstein went on to say that Trump encourages women, who are sexually harassed in the workplace, to find another career, and that if women aren't making the same as men they're not putting in the same amount of effort.

"We're going to see through that."

Trump has particularly struggled throughout his campaign with women voters, and Epstein insisted that Clinton's history of championing women's issues would continue to overpower his campaign's attempts to reign in her lead.

"We know that Hillary Clinton has fought for women her entire life, she's this incredible role model and she has so much experience," Epstein explained. "Kellyanne Conway's role as campaign manager isn't going to change the fact that we know that Donald Trump is just not standing with women."

Polls have shown that since Conway, the Republican pollster, became Trump's campaign manager his numbers have fluctuated among women. This inconsistency in results may suggest he could still gain women's support should Clinton's campaign suffer - as it did this weekend. On Tuesday, Trump made a pitch to young mothers and women by announcing an extensive childcare plan with his daughter Ivanka.

Like Epstein, Democratic political commentators are playing down the potential effects of Clinton's worrying weekend, and are instead directing attention to Trump's failure to match the same level of disclosure in health records and tax returns as Clinton.

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Despite this, Clinton's poor handling of the events has caused many to question her trustworthiness once again, and played into Trump's on-going "Crooked Hillary" rhetoric. A poll by YouGov for The Times has shown that 46 percent of US voters do not believe Clinton's explanation of the illness that led her to almost faint on Sunday afternoon.
By, Jacob Smith

The final stretch until election day has become a battle of personalities over policies. As a result, mass incarceration and criminal justice have taken a backseat in the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

With a shift away from debating over policies, the candidates are doing a great disservice to millennials. A recent Rock the Vote/USA Today poll found that nearly a quarter of millennials believe that the issue of criminal justice should be the top priority of the next president.

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According to the http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5387, the U.S. has seen a 500 percent increase in state and federal prison populations over the past 40 years. Only occupying five percent of the world's population, America holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Adam Bates, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, says that the high incarceration rates are largely due to the prohibition of drugs.

"Very few other countries treat drug addiction the way we do in this country, which is to just throw everyone into prison," said Bates.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons , 46 percent of inmates in federal prisons are there for drug-related offenses.

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"Mass incarceration makes our entire country worse off, and we need to do something about it," said President Barack Obama at an NAACP Conference last July.

Obama has taken steps in recognizing the issue by commuting prison sentences and visiting inmates, however, the future of criminal justice could face uncertainty in a Trump or Clinton presidency.

"Between the two main candidates, this is kind of a scary time for criminal justice reform," said Bates, recalling that both candidates have had a history of standing on both sides of the issue.

Though the government's future stance on the issue remains unclear, millennials are voicing their concern, and Bates recognizes it.

"This is a 'we have a problem and we need to find out ways to fix it' generation and I think that's hopeful."
I say "penultimate" because chances are, reading this article won't be enough for you to choose the perfect host for your website. In fact, it won't mean anything at all without the discretion and research coming from you, the entrepreneur. The final decision as far as any business is concerned must come from you, the entrepreneur, and creating a perfect website is a crucial business decision if there ever was one. Choosing a proper web hosting provider for your website is literally one of the most important decisions you will make in regards of getting your business online. This is because before your audience takes a good look at the stunning web design, before they even come to read the beautiful content you have created for them, they must be able to access your website in the first place. This last bit, quite obviously, depends almost entirely on your web host. A proper web host will make sure that your website is accessible at all times throughout the day, with zero downtime and zero server errors. This becomes especially crucial during the peak times of day when your website gets a sudden upscale of traffic, one that will cause lesser hosting servers to falter and fail. Just like a broadcasting station is responsible for keeping a television or radio channel live and functioning, a web hosting server is responsible to make sure your website is up and accessible at all times. Needless to say, it is vital to your online presence.

Your budget is important, but perhaps not the first thing you should be latching on to when considering a proper web host, especially so if your website is meant for commercial purposes. To start with, let us put a myth to bed first. There is no such thing as a free web hosting provider. Not if you want your website to look and seem professional. For casual bloggers, on the other hand, there might be some options. The reason behind this is simple. Nothing is really free. When someone offers you a "free" web hosting service, there is almost always a catch. Perhaps it won't allow you to use a top-level domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) and force you to settle for a subdomain instead (.blogspot.com, .wordpress.com). Perhaps they will force your visitors to watch ads when they visit your website, without paying you any of the profits derived from the advertisements. Perhaps they will impose strict rules on monetizing your website in any way (advertisement, donations). Chances are, they'll do all of these.

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Of course, no business needs that kind of trouble, especially when a few bucks a month can't spare you all this trouble. There are several "cheap" options to consider as well. But anything you get for $5 or less is bound to be jumpy and unreliable. If you want a web host that you can rely on, consider investing at least $10 or above each month on a shared server and invest it on a trusted provider like GoDaddy or Hostgator. This will do just fine for a small to medium-scale business. If, however, you are a mogul like Amazon or Microsoft, you will need to consider costlier options such as virtual private servers or even dedicated servers to host your business online. However, most businesses will do completely fine with a shared server available with any of the popular web hosting providers. If you would like a more in-depth comparison of popular web hosting providers along with price tags, Cheap Web Hosting can offer you some really nice advice. However, the server isn't the only thing worth considering. The human factor in your web hosting provider also plays an important part.

Next up is customer service. No matter how good your hosting, chances are, it will fail you at least once at some point of your lifetime. To get your website back up and running immediately, you will have to put your money on your web host's customer service. Only consider companies that offer 24/7 customer service via live chat and telephone hotline. Also do some research to determine the kind of customer service they provide, whether they actually assist their clients or just walk out on them in times of need. You can do that quite easily by looking at some of the reviews written by popular websites and blogs and on community forums like The Warrior Forum or Digital Point.

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A web hosting service is not just as easy as choosing a standard plan based on the amount of hosting space you need. You must also consider the technical specifications of the server that will be hosting your website, such as processing power and RAM. Not only will this determine the amount of traffic your website can take, but also the amount of content it can hold and the kind of addons and services it can support. Wordpress, for example, can eat up a decent amount of RAM if you were to leave about 50+ plugins running on your site for various purposes.

From the last paragraph, it is probably clear to you that there is a lot to your web hosting service than just money and space. Therefore, you will want to choose a web hosting provider that will allow you to swiftly and easily upgrade your hosting plan and server as and when your business grows and you need a server with higher specs. Upscale ability is an important consideration when choosing a proper web host, though most popular options like GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost and so on do quite well on upscaling.

Then there is the consideration of specialization. Do you want a web hosting provider specifically designed for WordPress blogs? You may consider using BlueHost, a service provider recommended by WordPress itself when it comes to feasibility and standards. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a web hosting provider designed to go well with a phpBB forum or a static HTML website, choices will obviously differ. When choosing your web hosting provider, always keep its area of specialization in mind. It can come really handy later on as you try and integrate your website to the hosting provider's backend.
As President Obama gave his valedictory speech to the United Nations General Assembly and recently returned from a farewell tour of East Asia, it sure seemed like other countries were dissing him. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines--a small, poor country that has a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea and depends on the U.S. military to defend it--launched a personal profane diatribe against Obama not usually used in diplo-speak. Obama's response was to cancel a formal meeting with Duterte, but then the next day met with him informally anyway. The Chinese insultingly refused to provide a stairway for the president to exit Air Force One when he arrived in China, making him exit through his own stairway at the back of the aircraft. Obama was also reluctant to press small Asian countries--such as Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, and the Philippines--on human rights, for fear these countries will be driven into China's orbit.

And the problem is not confined to East Asia. Media reports always seem to paint Obama as being hoodwinked and disrespected by Vladimir Putin of Russia--for example, by his brazen annexation of Crimea, his meddling in eastern Ukraine, and his military intervention in Syria to help his ally Bashar al-Assad. And concerning Syria, Obama has been belittled around the world and at home for drawing a red line on Assad's use of chemical weapons and then not enforcing it.

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Yet the problem is not so much that Obama is personally weak as is it that the United States has been debilitated by the lack of a global grand strategy--that is, the country has a muddled vision of what it wants to or can sustainably do in the world. The United States still tries to operate as the world's policeman, yet is overextended--accounting for 38 percent of global defense spending but only 16 percent of its GDP--and has a national public debt of more than $19 trillion. And U.S. foreign policy remains stuck in the Cold War, as it attempts to woo allies in East Asia to contain a rising China and to continue to expand NATO in Europe to contain a reawakened Russian bear. Thus, as during the Cold War, smaller countries can extract goodies from competing big powers, which simultaneously try to entice and intimidate these lesser players.

Using this Cold War-lite strategy, the United States and its president are thus likely to do some things half-heartedly--such as leaving a small force in Afghanistan while hoping somehow the war will be turned around even though success was elusive at much higher force levels, reinserting a small number of U.S. forces back into Iraq and facing the same problem, and making only a nominal effort to bomb in Syria and provide aid to opposition groups there to pretend to keep up with the Joneses (Russians). The reason all of these efforts are half-baked is because the world's policeman and its citizens have been exhausted by two lengthy quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, an attack on Libya, and drone wars in many other counties that just keep...well...droning on.

With an overextended empire, the worst thing to do is be half in and half out of interventions, but that is all of the effort that can be currently mustered. As Fredrick the Great, one of the greatest commanders in military history, once said, "To defend everything is to defend nothing"--meaning that no military has enough resources to defend everything effectively and that choosing where to fight is the key to victory.

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Therefore, what if the United States--to return resources to the private economy and thus ensure its status as a great power for decades to come--decided to retract its defense perimeter and abandon its role as the first line of defense against regional powers, such as China and Russia? Our rich allies in East Asia and Europe could band together to be the first line of defense against these powers, respectively. The United States could then become the "balancer-of-last resort" if either of these regional powers turned aggressive and tried to take over its respective region. This strategy worked during World Wars I and II and better fits America's intrinsically secure situation oceans away from the world's centers of conflict than does the expensive world's policeman strategy that the United States adopted from the end of World War II to the present.
Last week, the AFL-CIO came out in support of the Dakota Access Pipeline. For many climate advocates, such as myself, the news was disheartening. The Dakota Access Pipeline will poison water supplies, destroy priceless heritage sites, and lead us farther away from the transition to a low-carbon economy. Here on Huffington Post, a headline read, "AFL-CIO To Planet Earth: Drop Dead." But, this is a red herring. The enemy is not the AFL-CIO. The enemy is not those advocates rightfully trying to stop the pipeline from being built at Standing Rock. Instead, these two seemingly at odds interests have a common enemy: the fossil fuel industry, which puts profits over workers and is the worst contributor to climate change.

It's no surprise that the fossil fuel industry is hostile to any attempt to transition to a low-carbon economy. For decades, the industry led a targeted, well-financed campaign to deceive the public on climate change. Evidence shows that the world's largest fossil fuel companies knew of the dangers of climate change for over 20 years and continued to spend tens of millions of dollars on their deception campaign. The industry secretly funded "independent" scientists, created front groups, and even forged letters from nonprofit organizations, desperate to prevent the transition to a low-carbon economy.

But, the fossil fuel industry is also no friend to workers. As just one example, Peabody Energy, the largest private sector coal company in the world, shifted millions of dollars in health care liabilities to a subsidiary, Patriot Coal, that then filed for bankruptcy and sought to, "limit or discharge its pension and health obligations to 22,000 retired miners and their spouses." By shifting the health care costs to a subsidiary that then filed for bankruptcy, Peabody Energy increased its profits at the expense of coal miners' health. Health benefits for retired miners is particularly essential considering black lung disease is at its highest levels in 40 years, indicating that miners now are being exposed to ever more toxic working conditions. Despite what it may say, environmental regulations or the need to shift away from coal doesn't seem to be hurting the company. Peabody Energy's revenues for 2015 topped $5.1 billion.

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Without a drastic shift away from fossil fuels, we will see the worst impacts of climate change. At the same time, if you can't feed your family, it's difficult to focus on anything apart from that. Base pay for workers on the Dakota Access pipeline can start at $37 an hour plus benefits, overtime, and per diem pay. The median pay for solar PV installers is $18.19 an hour.

But, it doesn't have to be this way. Research has shown that solar jobs can be good jobs. In California, utility-scale solar construction built by union members paid $39 per hour plus health and pension benefits. In addition to providing good jobs, all unionized employers participated in state-approved apprenticeship programs to train a new generation of solar workers. The mean hourly wage for an apprentice electrician is almost $24 an hour plus benefits and increases with skill acquisition as they move through their apprenticeship program.

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Pitting unions against climate change advocates only benefits the fossil fuel industry. Investing in climate jobs that pay family sustaining wages and meaningfully decrease carbon emissions makes our economy stronger and saves us from the worst impacts of climate change. Labor and environmentalists must work together and not be driven apart by fossil fuel greed. We are stronger together.
Last year's recall of Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams is widely considered a huge factor in this year's Arvada/Westminster state senate race that will likely determine whether Republicans retain control of the state senate.

Jefferson Country voters threw out Tea Party conservatives on their school board, with special ire directed at Williams, who was denounced by both sides. Even Dave Kopel, a researcher at the conservative Independence Institute, said Williams had a lot of "foolish" ideas.

The Jeffco vote was overwhelming, with 60 percent favoring the recall, and analysts believe the voters' anger may carry over to Jeffco candidates aligned with Williams.

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Williams has ties to Republican State Sen. Laura Woods, who's defending the Arvada/Westminster Senatte seat against Democratic challenger Rachel Zenzinger.

Williams makes no secret of her support for Woods, and Woods, who doesn't return my calls, has apparently accepted Williams' backing, which makes sense since Woods and Williams align in their support for Trump and guns, among other links.

Here's Williams' Sept. 17 Facebook post, obtained from a source, endorsing Woods:
Your future and that of your family is on trial at a court in Washington, DC. On Sept. 27, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear oral arguments about the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the country's most significant federal initiative to fight climate change, and then decide whether it will ever be implemented.

Attorneys from both sides will present their views and answer the judges' questions about the legal arguments submitted to the court months ago.

And for us Latinos, this is a critical decision. We disproportionately suffer the consequences of climate change and the fossil fuel pollution that causes it.

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The Obama administration's EPA finalized the CPP in 2015 to curb power plant carbon emissions for the first time ever. These plants generate 40 percent of the climate change pollution. The initiative would reduce these emissions by 32 percent in relation to 2005 levels by 2030.

For Latinos these reductions are literally a matter of life and death. Almost 40 percent of us live dangerously close to a coal-burning plant, which translates into high rates of asthma --especially among our children--, emphysema, heart disease, cancer and premature death.

By 2030, according to the EPA, the CPP would prevent 3,600 premature deaths, 1,700 heart attacks, 90,000 asthma attacks and the loss of 300,000 school and work days every year. Also annually, the plan would save us all some $54 billion in health care costs, prevent the emission of 870 million tons of carbon and drastically reduce the dumping of dangerous compounds, such as sulfur and nitrogen oxides.

Speaking of savings, the CPP could bring down your electric bill by up to $17 a month, something hundreds of thousands of Latino households would really welcome as we pay a higher percentage of our income in power bills.

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And to top it all off, the CPP could usher in a full-force clean energy economy generating millions of jobs, mainly in the sectors of the economy that employ the most Latinos, such as construction and manufacturing.

A plan that fights climate change and the fossil fuel pollution that causes it, that saves money for electricity users and creates good paying jobs? It's no wonder 82 percent of Latinos support the immediate implementation of the CPP. The plan could and should go even further to ensure that communities of color benefit from pollution reductions, so some environmental justice groups do not support it because it does not go far enough.

Attorneys general from 27 states, upon the urging of the dirty energy industry, early this year persuaded the Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the CPP, while the Circuit Court decided the merits of this brilliant idea.

The plaintiffs and their allies brandish the absurd argument that the hopes of our community's prosperity rest on a dirty energy economy, which in reality inflicts a daily punishment on the health of millions of Latinos and puts the future of the planet in grave risk.

The fossil fuel industry are trying to scare us all with fantastic predictions of impending ruin if the initiative is implemented, the same predictions polluters and the dirty energy industry have been foretelling for decades and that have never become reality.

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Co-author: Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History, University of Kent, Canterbury, England



In 2013 the influential German magazine Der Spiegel published an expose about clinical trials conducted by Western drug companies in East Germany during the Cold War. The magazine reported that at least 50,000 people had been test subjects for around 900 studies done by manufacturers that included leading companies from Switzerland, the United States, and West Germany. Fifty hospitals were sites of the research, including the prestigious Charite in East Berlin. The principle motivation for the East Germans was money: they desperately needed hard currency for their failing medical system. For their part the companies appreciated the far greater efficiency of recruitment in the East, and paid the East Germans up to 800,000 West German marks per study.

The agency responsible for setting up these contracts? The notorious Stasi, the East German secret police force that included hundreds of thousands of paid agents and hundreds of thousands of more informants.

Der Spiegel's series about the drug trials contained language and themes familiar to many landmark bioethics cases. The revelations were described as a scandal that used the oppressed East Germans as human guinea pigs, including deaths and injuries that had not been properly reported, the indiscriminate use of low-birthweight infants and depressed patients, inadequate informed consent, powerful drug companies and physicians largely eager to cooperate in spite of the occasional protest. Complete with interviews with former test subjects and regretful doctors, the study had all the elements of a classical bioethics case study that could take its place along with the U.S. Public Health Service's Tuskegee syphilis study; the Guatemala sexually transmissible disease experiments; and some of the well-documented human radiation, biological, and chemical warfare experiments in the U.S. and the U.K. The magazine's series concluded on a hopeful note that justice would be served when the distinguished German medical historian, Volker Hess, reviews the study archives.

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Hess and two co-authors recently concluded their exhaustive review, published in German as Testen im Osten or "Testing in the East." They concluded that, far from the scandal that the press anticipated, the East German trials were conducted largely within acceptable standards of medical ethics, especially by the conventions of the day. The authors do allow that consent procedures might not have been as thorough as in the West and in some cases there are serious questions about placebo controls and the adequacy of comparative treatment arms, but the practices were not dramatically different from those in West Germany at the time, they say.

Several other groups of historians and ethicists in Germany have also examined the material and published their results. Yet this dramatic episode has received virtually no attention in the bioethics literature, in spite of the fact that it raises compelling questions about the functioning of medical ethics standards and practices in an authoritarian system. With the glaring and extreme exceptions of the Nazi concentration camp experiments and the abuses of Soviet psychiatry, these are questions that are largely absent from the literature. Medical ethics in Central and Eastern Europe during the socialist period is a matter of near total ignorance among scholars.

In the years ahead other scholars will want to weigh in on the conclusions of Hess and others. But one lesson that can already be drawn is that expectations about medical ethics in authoritarian regimes should be critically received. More investigation needs to be conducted about these seemingly contrarian results. Usual explanations don't seem to be available. For example, although East Germany was not a member of the World Medical Association and therefore not philosophically committed to its Declaration of Helsinki, they do not appear to have violated that international agreement. And although Western firms had good reason to want to conduct trials that were in line with Helsinki requirements in order to ensure that their intellectual property would be protected, they often seem to have breached those requirements in other parts of the world. And yet in East Germany they seem to have complied with those requirements. Why was this the case?

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Understanding the unique conditions of medical ethics in East Germany and the other socialist states in that period will require incorporating expertise from cultural history, law, and the social sciences, as well as dogged archival work. Challenging though it is, this often troubled region presents an exceptional opportunity to assess the development, interpretation, and application of ethical theories, standards, and practices under circumstances that were quite different from those anywhere else in the world, and to obtain an illuminating comparison with our own place and time.

Originally published on the Hastings Bioethics Forum, September 21, 2016.
I won't say that I am a person of great consequence to the UN. But for about 40 years, I have been known in its hallways, as my life and the survival of my country have been intimately intertwined with the UN's workings. I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly.

I arrived in a snow-covered Manhattan in early December 1975, just as Indonesian forces, with US blessing and weapons, invaded my country, East Timor (now Timor-Leste). I was 25, having grown up on a small island that was a remote Portuguese tropical colony. I'd never seen snow. I'd never being to a major city at all, let alone one as fabled as New York. I hadn't even brought a coat.

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Shortly after my arrival, I walked into UN and addressed the UN Security Council, pleading with the powers that be to roll back the occupation of my impoverished country. As I spoke, my countrymen and women were being lined up on the docks and hillsides in our capital, Dili, and executed at point blank range.

I believe I remain the youngest person ever to address the Security Council. I remember how the then Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN Yacob Malik dozed off as I tried to explain the plight of my people. Not wanting to disturb the powerful Soviet Ambassador's well-deserved siesta, I spoke politely and softly. I looked at his aide, seeking a hint on whether to stop talking or continue; he gestured to continue, suggesting that Malik, though sleeping, was also listening.

For the next two decades I walked the corridors of the UN and got to know its strengths, imperfections and failings, sometimes too well. While one third of the population of my country perished, I was mostly ignored in the hallowed halls of the UN. Sometimes I was treated with undisguised disdain by diplomats. American diplomats were instructed not to talk to me.

I also met some caring diplomats and UN officials. I remember each and every one of them --- the kind ones and the unkind ones. I learned to swallow my pride and stay focused on the cause, for there was no other institution like the UN. All of our hopes, literally our hope for survival as a people, were pinned on the world body.

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In 1999, the international community, still shaken by Srebrenica, Kosovo and Rwanda, was galvanized into action by reports of unfolding killings in remote Timor-Leste, prompting the UN Security Council to authorize a multinational force that was deployed in record time. In a conversation with President Clinton in September 1999, he said: "It was Antonio Guterres who most touchingly and persuasively pleaded with me to do something." In fact, without President Clinton's leadership the UN would have been again witness to another tragedy without doing anything to prevent it.

In 2013-2014 I served as the Secretary-General's Special Representative in Guinea-Bissau, helping to walk the country out of a military coup and into peaceful democratic elections. In 2014-15 I co-chaired the High Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations and co-chaired the Independent Commission on Multilateralism, a project of the International Peace Institute.

Coming from one of the world's smallest and poorest countries I value the UN and multilateralism. And it pains me deeply as I see how world and regional powers consistently undermine the only truly global institution created by Member States to prevent wars.

For all it has accomplished in the world, for the fact that no further World Wars have occurred since the UN was formed to foster international dialogue, today the UN is adrift and is in danger of sliding into irrelevance. This is not the fault of the Secretary-General, current or past. Even a charismatic and inspirational leader like President Barack Obama, notwithstanding his many remarkable achievements, wasn't able to influence the course of world events through the UN, whether in Syria or South Sudan. He failed in his 2009 pledge to see a Palestinian State sitting side by side with Israel in the United Nations. The mightiest of all, the US with a truly inspirational President, has not been able to turn our illusions, hopes and expectations into reality.

For better or for worse, through bad and good times, my experiences in the UN have brought me into direct engagement with a fair percentage of both UN and world leaders. One such world leader I came to know well over 20 years is Antonio Guterres, former Prime Minister of Portugal. As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for 10 years, Guterres showed exceptional leadership skills in carrying out reforms in the organization, slimming down the bureaucracy without causing dissension and anger, and elevating more women to senior positions. More importantly, he showed a genuine commitment and compassion towards those he was mandated to serve --- the tens of millions of refugees caused by man-made and natural disasters worldwide.

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It is not in question that the UN needs substantial reforms from the top down. It must be more field-focused and less New York, Geneva, Paris, Roma or Vienna based. It needs a Secretary General with proven, tested skills in managing complex political and humanitarian challenges. It needs a person of unquestionable integrity and inspiring humility; someone who knows how to reach out, build bridges and inspire the people under his/her command and the world at large.

Among the candidates in the running, Antonio Guterres is unmatched, uniquely qualified to lead the UN in the next five to 10 years.

Guterres comes from a country, Portugal, that though an active NATO member, is too small and too far in the Western fringes of Europe to have quarrels with anyone. His country enjoys excellent relations with all of its European partners as well as countries of the developing world in the Arab-African region, Asia and Latin America. While being a historical ally of the US, France and UK, it has also maintained exceptionally good relations with Russia and China as well as with India. A global statesman and a true believer in multilateralism, Guterres is highly regarded by all.

Because of his integrity, humility and accessibility, he is immensely popular both inside and outside the UN. One senior Nordic diplomat who has been among the most ardent advocates of a woman for Secretary-General told me recently: "I have become a fan of Antonio Guterres." The eloquent Russia's Permanent Representative to the UN Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin was quoted as having said "Antonio Guterres is a good man."
Last Saturday my beautiful teenage daughter and I spent the day in a crowded New York hotel ballroom getting her ready to model in a fashion show.

This might not seem that unusual, given that our daughter is 5'8" and has adored makeup, shoes, and clothes almost from infancy.

One of her first complete sentences was, "I need my Chanel perfume," and she has always loved the pictures in Vogue and Glamour. That she would like modeling didn't really come as a surprise.

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But we never thought she would have this opportunity. Unlike most of the other girls and women who were busy getting ready to model new fashions all over Manhattan, our daughter has significant special needs.

Lizzy was only two years old when it was strongly suggested by a pediatric neurologist that she have an MRI. The doctor said he was not one to routinely order this test for a child so young, but the size of her head and the shape of her eyes concerned him.

My husband and I had been deeply worried that something was profoundly wrong with our daughter for more than a year and had already taken her to every doctor her pediatrician recommended. Each visit ended with us being told that she most likely just needed some speech therapy and she would catch up.

But Lizzy had been getting speech therapy for six months and was making very spotty progress. Now a top specialist was telling me that he saw something wrong, too. I was beyond scared.

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Her MRI revealed major brain damage, but we have never learned the origin or extent of it. We have never been given a name for the disorder that causes so much havoc in every aspect of our daughter's development. Though she is 14 years old, cognitively Lizzy has more in common with a three- or four-year-old child. She attends a school for children with special needs and will most likely always require full-time care.

Yet despite of her limitations, Lizzy was one of two special needs models walking the runway that day in creations by designer Sharon Gary-Dill.

Gary-Dill said it was important to her to include people with special needs. In her work, she tries to counter "the stigma that society has placed on them. I want the world to see that that they can be glamorous and stylish just like anyone else in professional shows."

We had learned of this opportunity over the summer when special needs advocate, Norma Stanley contacted me after reading a piece I did about Lizzy on Huffington Post Parents. Stanley's 28-year-old daughter, Sierra, has been modeling for a year-and-a-half and was the other special needs model wearing one of Gary-Dill's designs.

I hesitated to say yes. I knew Lizzy would love the idea of it, but I really wasn't sure if she would be able to handle a long day of hair, makeup, and a lot of rushing to wait around for hours. And to be honest, I wasn't sure if I was up to the stares and questions that sometimes accompany us when we are at events that are not exclusively for people with special needs.

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As it turned out I had nothing to fear. Every model, designer, makeup artist and hair stylist was professional and lovely toward the both of us. They treated Lizzy as just another model and that in turn helped my daughter rise to the occasion.

She enjoyed having her makeup and hair done and had no problem with the craziness backstage and the last-minute decision to change the hat she would wear. She loved seeing the different clothes and the women and girls modeling them. When it was time for her to walk, she confidently strutted her stuff, and she loved the applause and cheers she got. She earned her place in the limelight.
Editor's Note

A HuffPost article that previously existed at this URL has been removed.
U.S. President Barack Obama waits to speak during a ceremony marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon in Washington, U.S., September 11, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

This week, President Obama has been talking up his foreign policy accolades in New York and sending his surrogates to applaud all of his many successes, from opening up Cuba to inking the Iran nuclear deal. The trouble is the gaping wound that goes untreated in the cradle of our civilization: Syria.

Overlooking this, or at least failing to even nod at it, as speeches by Obama's foreign policy advisors appear to indicate, is an abdication of the responsibility to protect innocent civilians. It also is a way to dodge the proverbial elephant in the UN General Assembly: that Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have played this administration for fools.

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This administration needs to acknowledge Russia for what it is: a global pariah that in any sane world would be ostracized and called out for the atrocities it commits time and again. Instead, it is embraced by this administration, as if it were just a misunderstood uncle who means well.

Indeed, the single greatest impediment to world peace today is not China's rise but Russia's arrogance. From the bombing of hospitals and humanitarian shelters in Syria to the hacking of computer servers of U.S. political parties, Russia, it would appear from a God's-eye-view, exists merely to exact mayhem. Its motives reflect those not of a revisionist state but rather of a Neanderthal caveman or locker-room bully with a Napoleon complex - it literally hacked the World Anti-Doping Agency's website as retribution for being shut out of parts of the Olympics for doping allegations - itself a heinous crime that got off with a slap on the wrist.

But arrogance, especially in the hands of a country whose diminutive yet cocksure leader is an analogy of his country's place in this world, only works if there are gullible enablers. It requires suckers.

Some of Obama's handlers recently voiced on NPR that historians will look back kindly on this administration for its many accomplishments and for taking the long view. Doubtful. Obama and Kerry's fool-me-twice foreign policy on Ukraine and Syria will be analyzed by historians who will be slapping their foreheads in dumbfounded astonishment, much the way today's historians do when they look at the ascendancy of fascism in the 1930s. The counterargument of this administration's shills is equally as puzzling. Well, if Obama had carried thru on his 2013 "red line" pledge in Syria, we'd be knee-deep in a Vietnam-like morass and unlikely to have changed the outcome. Plus, what about ISIS? Terrorism loves nothing more than a power vacuum, after all. These arguments are nonsense, and they reflect the kind of rationalization bystanders do when they fail to stop a crime. Well, it would not have made a difference or I could not have intervened in time. It's a tragedy but it's not on my conscience. The Syrian civil war is the international equivalent of the Kitty Genovese murder. If the resurgence of right-wing parties in Germany and other parts of Europe is any indication, perhaps we are living in a post-humanitarianism world. Perhaps we are growing numb to the bite-size morsels of suffering we get from our social media feeds. Perhaps we are living in a world where evil and insidious crimes go unchecked. Perhaps Obama is just a creature of the turbulent times we live in.

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Ah, but the world today, we are told, is a safer place. Intractable wars are swiftly wrapping up in places like Colombia. Countries from Cuba to Myanmar are slowly opening up. Ebola was kicked in West Africa. Nominally all the above are true, even if they do not warrant a victory lap by this White House.

Indeed, whenever Obama glides confidently across the world stage at UNGA each fall, I always wince. That is because all roads, and deep down I believe he knows this, lead back to Syria. It is not Rwanda or Iraq, arguably the greatest blunders of the two previous administrations. In some ways it is worse, given that it is a slow-moving train wreck that has allowed his administration more than ample time to fix the tracks. Rwanda was a blur. Iraq deteriorated rapidly yet give Bush credit for his course correction (however late it came).

I would argue that if we get Syria wrong, we have only ourselves to blame. To those who say the decapitation of the Assad regime would lead to a worse civil war or the imminent takeover of ISIS, consider the alternative of doing nothing - the world's largest humanitarian and refugee crisis since World War II. To others who fret that Syria could become another Vietnam for American forces, I posit that Syria is much more strategically important than Vietnam ever was, and we arguably have more partners in the region to shoulder the burden now than we did then.

Obama has maintained his cool swagger as the commander in chief who does not do stupid stuff even as places like Syria burn to the ground on his watch. He is perpetuating this myth that the US military cannot solve the world's problems, and while humility in international relations is a welcome antidote to hubris, it is not a strategy for preventable suffering.

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If the slaughter of some 500,000 civilians in the heart of the Middle East is not seen as significant enough to warrant even a modicum of military intervention, then we as a nation need to have a long and serious conversation on why we have such a large military in the first place. If passive retrenchment will define us in the decades ahead, fine. But let's get our military ends, ways, and means inline to reflect this new reality and international redistribution of power. As the world's erstwhile policeman, let's put away the proverbial baton but let's also be frank about the dire consequences of such a policy. Call it what you want - retrenchment, restraint, realism - but inaction in the face of global suffering is a recipe for brushfires turning into barnyard infernos.

This is not a naive retread of Madeleine Albright's line from the Balkans, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" I go to school every day teaching cadets about the laws of war, the theories behind military innovation, and the way the international system is supposed to work. I believe, perhaps naively, in the power of the US military to do good and to protect lives. Far from those who say we have gotten too involved overseas militarily, I believe we have become a hapless bystander to world events.
It was the Cold War, and it was a potential race to Armageddon. The Soviet Union produced an excessive number of nuclear warheads, and we did likewise.

Now another war rages bitterly-- but not on the front pages -- over what to do with the legacy of cold war: plutonium from the warheads.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in the honeymoon period that followed between Russia and the United States, it was obvious that there were way too many warheads and the number needed to be reduced. In particular the key ingredient, plutonium, had to be contained and, preferably, disposed of.

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In 2000, the United States and Russia agreed to dismantle large numbers of nuclear warheads known as "pits."

But getting rid of plutonium is not easy. It is a transuranic element, made in special reactors and, up to this point in time, with only one purpose: to make hydrogen bombs. It also is possible to use it as a fuel in power reactors, if they are the light water reactors now in service around the world. This can be done by mixing the plutonium with uranium reactor fuel in the proportion of 95 percent uranium to 5 percent plutonium.

This is not a great rate of disposal, but it works.

The French process is the one the Clinton Administration committed to using to burn up 34 metric tons of pit plutonium from warheads being dismantled at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

The Russians committed to burning their equivalent excess plutonium in fast reactors. These are reactors with a high-neutron-flux -- a technology that the United States abandoned during the Carter Administration.

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To accomplish the U.S. commitment to the Russians and get rid of the plutonium, the Department of Energy commissioned the building of a facility at its huge Savannah River Site nuclear reservation (310 square miles) near Aiken, S.C., on the Georgia border.

The plant -- a massive structure with double walls (each 10-feet thick) of the highest grade concrete and with a dense matrix of steel reinforcing -- is as close as humans can come, in my view, to building something that will last for thousands of years. It is awesome.

But the plant is troubled.

The DOE wants to halt construction and abandon the idea in favor of mixing the plutonium with a granular substance and burying it in a waste facility in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which is having its own difficulties after an accident. The process is called "down blending." It does not get rid of the plutonium which, with a half-life of 240,000 years, is essentially indestructible, unless it is burned in a reactor. It just stabilizes it and makes it hard to retrieve.

The suggested change has exacerbated tensions with Russia at a difficult time in U.S.-Russia relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the proposed change of plan, saying, "This is not what we agreed on."

John MacWilliams, the DOE's point man on the issue, told me that the root of the problem is money. The South Carolina facility, known as the MOX (mixed oxide fuel) plant, has cost more than anticipated with $5 billion spent and a dispute over how far along construction is.

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The DOE maintains that it is only 40 percent complete, and the contractor says it is 70 percent complete. Both have relied on outside consultants for their numbers.

Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, himself a nuclear scientist, told a meeting in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 13 that the South Carolina plant would cost $50 billion to $60 billion over its life-cycle. He estimated it would cost between $15 billion and $20 billion for the alternative down blending proposal. That is a number that is likely to be challenged in Congress.

The South Carolina congressional delegation and other supporters, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), are passionate in their support for MOX. But Congress is funding the construction at just $350 million a year, less than the $500 million needed to keep to the construction schedule, thus making the whole enterprise more expensive.
It's not fair. You could argue that we shouldn't even be having this conversation. It really isn't close.

But with less than two months left in his presidency, there is an understandable interest in assessing President Obama's legacy, including on climate change. During his recent trip to China and the Pacific islands, the President continued to pile up climate-related achievements and was in full legacy mode in an extended segment with the New York Times.

Can we get this, quite important, point out of the way: No US president has done more to advance the fight against climate change. By a long shot. Whether driving domestic policy through the Environmental Protection Agency as Congress dithered, or using his diplomatic powers to make climate change a legitimate top foreign policy issue, President Obama has elevated climate and clean energy as no president has before.

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Not the least of these accomplishments is moving quickly after December's Paris climate deal to mobilize countries to bring the agreement into force this year, rather than waiting for its proposed 2020 deadline. In January, the smart guys would've laughed at you and said this was impossible. But this week in New York we nearly reached the twin thresholds of at least 55 countries with 55% of global emissions joining the agreement. It's certainly going to happen before the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve.

This is a really impressive climate CV. If only Mother Nature graded on a curve; we would be so winning.

But she doesn't, and we can't, because we aren't yet winning. We are finally waking up, but that's different. Which is why what happens over the final 100 days or so of the Obama presidency may be nearly as important as what happens in the first 100 days of the next president. Here are 4 things that need to be on the White House's short list of remaining priorities:

End Arctic Oil and Gas Drilling, forever: Cognitive dissonance isn't a top-ten attribute of a laudable leader. So it is hard to see how to square the goal in Paris to fully decarbonize the world economy and the US Interior Department's draft proposal to open up vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean to risky oil and gas drilling. Doing so would undermine progress towards the Paris deal and put America's Arctic at risk. There is still time for the President to permanently remove the Beaufort and Chukchi seas from dangerous drilling. He should do it.

Close the 747-sized Loophole in the Paris Deal: Today the carbon footprint of global aviation is larger than all but six of Earth's 200+ countries. If left unchecked, this pollution would eat up more than 25% of the remaining carbon budget to the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement. But the deal in Paris does nothing to address the emissions from international flights which fall outside of countries domestic targets. The US needs to bring countries together to deliver a strong deal at the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) meetings starting next week. The cards on the table at ICAO aren't looking great, so the best we can do may be a small step forward. The key is to forge a deal that allows for future progress to ensure airlines do their fair share to meet the Paris goals global decarbonization and limiting warming to 1.5C.

Deliver a Global Agreement on Super-Pollutants: Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Solving it was arguably one of the greatest achievements of modern international diplomacy. One problem: the chemicals used in newer refrigerators, air conditioners and other appliances to replace the ozone eating old ones turned out to be super-potent greenhouse gases. Whoops. This month, governments are trying to hammer out a deal to phase out those super GHGs. If successful, it would take a huge bite out future climate emissions. This has been a high priority for the Administration and they need to bring it across the finish line.

Chart a Course for the United States to Go Zero-Carbon before Mid-Century: The Paris deal determined that the global economy must be carbon neutral by the second half of the century. It called on countries to develop national plans to show how they will contribute their fair share toward the global Paris goals. Research shows the US 'fair share' will require being carbon neutral before 2050. So before they turn out the lights, the Administration should create a long-term plan that shows how the US will prepare for climate change and contribute to the Paris decarbonization goal by zeroing out US carbon pollution before 2050. By including key steps that future administrations should take to end fossil fuel development and move to renewable energy, such a plan can set a high bar for other countries while leaving room for the next Administration to define the more detailed steps.

This is a hefty 100-day agenda. And let's be clear: it won't solve the climate crisis; we've long-since missed that boat and entered the Age of Climate Change where all future presidents (and really all of us) will be judged by their ability to minimize the harm that's headed our way. But seizing this remaining agenda would round out an impressive push, especially over the past 3 years, by the Obama administration to move the climate and energy issue to the forefront of national and international priorities. And that would be a legacy worth having.
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, as in this Amazonian ant-mimic treehopper, is another reason to preserve carbon storing forests. Credit Andreas Kay at flickr

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

A Key Preserver of Carbon Storage in Rainforests - are tapirs, which help disperse the seeds of the largest carbon-storing trees.

OO The Surprising Link Between The Tapirs Of Costa Rica And Climate Change - They disperse seeds of the largest trees that store the most carbon, suggest new studies. Protecting tapirs and other large seed-eating mammals is key to preserving carbon storage capability in rainforests.



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OO The Alarming Number Of Fires In The Brazilian Amazon is an undeniable sign that predatory exploration in the Brazilian Amazon has not yet been properly tackled.



OO Humans Have Destroyed A Tenth Of Earth's Wilderness In 25 Years and there may be none left within a century if trends continue, says an authoritative new study.



When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

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SPEAKING OUT

@@ Obama On Climate Change: The Trends Are 'Terrifying'

More than health care, race or the economy, President Obama believes his efforts to slow global warming will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency.

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As one historian recalled Obama saying in 2012, 'If we don't do anything on the climate issue, all bets are off.' So what has Obama done since then?

carved a climate agreement on reducing emissions with China;

had US lead negotiations resulting in the 2015 Paris climate agreement;

unaided by Congress, enacted the US Clean Power Plan to reduce pollution hazardous to health and climate.

On the world role of the US, Obama says, "if we're going to actually solve a problem, then our most important role is as a leader, vision setter and convener."



OO An Open Letter Regarding Climate Change From Concerned Members Of The U.S. National Academy Of Sciences - excerpts:



"Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy.

It is a physical reality."

and:

Our fingerprints on climate are visible everywhere;

We are certain beyond a reasonable doubt

that human-caused climate change is

real, serious, and immediate,

and that

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Credit AP photo, Jae C Hong

This problem poses significant risks:

to our ability to thrive and build a better future,

to national security,

to human health and food production,

and to the interconnected web of living systems.

Enjoy It While It Is Still Clean - activists are calling for a ban in the large southern bay of Australia, known as the Great Australian Bight. Coincidentally, it looks like some giant took a big bite out of the continent long ago... Source www.skynews.com.au

OO Call To Halt Great Australian Bight Oil Drilling amid faulty equipment fears. The Oil rigs could use faulty equipment that US regulators say is very likely to cause a "catastrophic incident" like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.



OO Pope Francis: Environmental Destruction A Sin, Causes Ecological Debt - that humanity has caused and should act against.



OO Catholic Bishops Org Director: G20 Still Promotes Climate Changing Growth -



"The G20 failed to set the right priorities," said Pirmin Spiegel, general director at the Catholic Bishops' Organization for Development Cooperation.

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"While climate change is only one of 'Further Significant Global Challenges Affecting the World Economy', the biggest problem and -- at the same time -- the one-size-fits-all solution G20 offers to these challenges is growth.

They stick to the same old tools that have not been able to solve the climate crisis and global inequality."

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CALIFORNIA DRYIN'... FOR CENTURIES?

OO Danger: Pacific Ocean's Response To Global Warming Could

Extend California Drought For CENTURIES Warming forces have caused millennia of dryness in California's recent (6,000 to 1,000 BC) prehistory, and greenhouses gases could do the same, says a new study published in a major scientific journal.

The physical warming of the atmosphere from trapped sunlight , aka radiative forcing,"in the past appears to have had catastrophic effects in extending droughts," said the lead author, a distinguished geographer and ecologist.

Source NOAA

The Warm Blob Is Back and has never entirely gone away, in any case. Now a new study indicates that it - and our California drought - could be around for a long time: think centuries. Source NOAA

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Correlating its own with all other prehistory California climate studies, the researchers showed that such heated periods also showed prolonged heating in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures.

Changes in ocean temperatures are linked to El Nino and La Nina conditions, which increase and decrease precipitation in California. History now shows us this link to precipitation can be a long term one.



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HOT NEWS

OO U.S. Endures Its Hottest Summer Nights On Record



This past summer (June through August) saw the highest average minimum temperature on record., 60.8 F, placing fifth hottest among the 122 summers since records began in 1895 for the contiguous U.S., say recent NOAA analyses.

The average daily summer low in the contiguous 48 states has climbed about 1.4F in the last century. That's double the increase of 0.7F in the average daily summer high.

OO Long, Hot, Soggy Summer - No single extreme weather event can be proved to be due to human-induced climate change. But this summer's weather anomalies are entirely consistent with what scientists and computer models predict about a global warming world.



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OO La Nina Fizzles, Making Record Warm Global Temperatures More Likely say forecasters.



MELTDOWN

Credit De Agostini at Getty Images

OO Open Water Nears North Pole As 2016 Melt Season End Nears a sign of the rapid pace of warming taking place there.

Unseasonably powerful storms have broken up the sea ice up there, which helps speed melting.



Related Headline:

Storm-whipped Ice Rubble At The North Pole shows how global warming is shattering our planetary thermal shield there. Source NASA via TERRA satellite

OO This Is What Near-Record-Low Arctic Sea Ice Looks Like - An exploded down pillow - not the unbroken ice of the good old days.

It's the "new normal" says NASA, and it's not a good one. As Arctic temperatures soar, ice cover is shrinking, thinning, and breaking up.



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NATURAL REPERCUSSIONS

OO Soaring Ocean Temperature Is 'Greatest Hidden Challenge Of Our Generation - A new report warns that the 'truly staggering' rate of warming is changing the behavior of marine species, reducing fishing zones, and spreading disease.



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OO Asian Typhoons Becoming More Intense - 50% more intense in the past 40 years due to warming seas, shows a new study.



Related Headline:

OO Landfalling Typhoons Have Become More Intense - causing far more destruction where they land in east and southeast Asia.



OO Climate Change Threatens Birds Migrating Along Great Lakes - prompting them to begin early, which can disrupt a delicate natural balance and put entire species at risk.



Endangered Valuable Insect Eaters - lizards expend energy both to find shade and to cool down, making their survival that more challenging in a global warming world. Credit Mark Eastburn at AP

OO Climate Change Far More Dangerous For Lizards Than Once Thought - a previous study estimated that 20% of these valuable insect eaters could be extinct by 2080, but new research indicates it could be far worse.



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Bye-Bye Birdie? Many colorful Hawaiian honeycreepers are, like this Apapane, already rare due to habitat destruction, are facing extinction as a warming climate lets malaria-carrying mosquitoes into the only habitat they have left. Source www.mauiforestbirds.org

OO Endemic Hawaiian Birds Are About To Go Extinct

Because Of Climate Change as mosquitoes threaten honeycreepers with disease -- and warming temperatures let the pests reach the birds' habitat, suggests a new study.



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OCEANIC SLOWDOWN POSSIBLE

Slowing An Ocean, Changing the World as melting glaciers add fresh to salt water. Credit Mariusz Kluzniak at flickr

OO Danger: How Climate Change Could Jam The World's Ocean Circulation - Takeaways:

The Atlantic current is part of the global oceanic conveyor belt;

It shuttles warmth to Europe.

It has weakened up to 30% since 2004;

Further weakening could chill Europe dramatically,

As the recent past shows.



g

Source wordpress.com

Not As Farfetched As It Looks - as global warming ultimately rises sea levels and slows oceanic currents, it could dramatically chill the North Atlantic, plausibly creating such a scene from the movie, "Day After Tomorrow", although not as quickly as it happens in the film. Source wordpress.com

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When the Atlantic current slows, it has major impacts:

The entire Northern Hemisphere cools;

Indian and Asian monsoon areas dry up;

North Atlantic storms intensify;

Less ocean mixing results in less plankton and other life in the sea.

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GOOD CLEAN NEWS

Source ktla.com

@@ VIDEO: Jerry Brown Signs Major Climate Bill:

'This is big, and I hope it sends a message across the country.' - he held California out as a beacon for the nation on efforts to reduce climate change, signing into law recently a sweeping expansion of California's greenhouse gas emission standards.



OO California Becomes A Global Laboratory In Fight Against Climate Change - The state already has:



been ramping up solar power generation,

handing out subsidies for drivers to buy electric cars

prodding developers to create denser communities connected to mass transit.

OO Renewables, Imports Replace Natural Gas In California Energy Mix - natural gas use went down 20% this summer.



<>

Source www.greentechmedia.com

OO The US Deployed 40+MW Of Energy Storage In Q2 2016

On Pace For Another Historic Year



OO EU Hits Energy Reduction Target Six Years Early - slashing its energy consumption and cutting greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to switching off about 400 power stations.



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OO Global Coal Power Plans Fall In 2016, Led By China And India -driven by oversupply, and efforts to promote clean energy.



OO One New Wind Turbine Built Every Day Across Scotland with a current total of 3,400 onshore turbines - and growing.



OO Think Wind Power Is Cheap Now? Wait Until 2030 - onshore and offshore cost reductions will be significant, say surveyed experts.



OO Kenya To Install 23 Solar Mini-Grids To Power Its Remote North



Going Volcanic on Geothermal - Costa Rica extracts geothermal energy from several of its volcanoes, including Rincon de la Vieja, which forms part of the larger "Pacific Rim of Fire." Source volcano.si.edu

OO Costa Rica Has Gone 76 Straight Days Using 100% Renewable Electricity mostly hydropower and geothermal.



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OO Morocco To Give 600 Mosques A Green Makeover by March 2019 in a national consciousness-raising initiative that aims to speed the country's journey to clean energy.



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SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

OO Blame Global Warming For Your Bad Attitude - Climate change is making us angry and may cause more assaults, murders, and even poor math grades for your kids. It also:

Raised the risk of conflict in Africa by 11% since 1980;

Causes heat that fuels hot tempers;

Slows economic growth by .25% annually.

Source www.sweatblock.com

Disrupts human reproduction ("Not tonight, honey -- I'm too hot!")

Raises post-storm infant mortality;

It also threatens plants and animals vital to our survival.

Seriously, It Will Get A Lot Worse - as turbulence on flights increase due to climate change. Always wear your seat belt. Source www.digitaltrends.com

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OO Fasten Your Seat Belt - Turbulence Is On The Rise As climate change creates more extreme shifts in wind and pressure on flights; the number of injuries from inflight turbulence is also rising.



OO New Threat: Ice Avalanches From Melting Glaciers - as a recent catastrophic avalanche in Tibet showed, this could be an expanding threat to montane communities worldwide living downstream from melting glaciers.



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GOOD IDEAS

OO Use Solar And Wind To Rid The U.S. Of Fossil Fuel says Columbia Business School economist Geoffrey Heal in a recent working paper, to meet an 80% reduction of 2005 levels by 2050.

His price tag, $1+ - 5+ Trillion, is too low, since it only accounts for the 30% of US emissions created when generating electricity, says Marc Jacobson, a Stanford University clean energy policy expert.

When Marc modifies the analysis to reduce a larger chunk of US emissions, its results encompass Jacobson's own central estimate: $14.6 Trillion.

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Why is the answer so critical? Two Harvard economists extensively researched the possibility of a catastrophic climate finale to our civilization in 2015, and estimate a 10% chance of it happening now - and increasing over time.



Another Energy Storage Venue - is taking advantage of how much electric vehicles can store. Source NREL at energy.gov

OO California Proposes No Fossil Fuels Backups For Demand Response there, and a far larger role for third parties, such as smart thermostats, electric vehicle energy sources, and more, says a new public utility commission plan.



OO California Nears Adoption Of Energy-Saving Rules For Computers and monitors, gadgets that make up 3% of home electric bills and 7%of commercial power costs in the state. Every little bit counts!



A Future Power Plant - smart thermostats can cut enough energy demand to replace aging plants with higher efficiency.

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OO A 50,000-Home Virtual Power Plant planned by Nest could ultimately replace a utility in southern California, using smart thermostats that automatically power down to reduce peak loads when needed.



OO Tackling Food Waste As A Way To Save The Climate, Too -

Recycle Food - the staggering amount of food that's wasted into livestock feed - is increasingly being seen as a tool in the U.S. effort against climate change.



OO Hybrid Solar And Wind Systems Attract Turbine Makers In India to provide a reliable and cost-effective power supply.



OO An Ocean Of Threats Must Be Tackled To Protect The World's 'Blue Economy', US undersecretary says. Takeaways:

1 in 6 US jobs are connected to the marine environment;

Only a third of US oceans are protected.

Humans are greatly stressing oceans via:

Warming from global warming;

Ocean acidification from rising CO2 levels;

Dead zones from agricultural runoff;

Pollution from plastics, industrial activities, and more;

Overfishing;

Destruction of habitats by humans.

Credit Rick Loomis at the Los Angeles Times

Solutions involve:

Tackling illegal fishing;

Developing sustainable fishing policies;

Creating more efficient fertilization methods;

Developing truly biodegradable plastics;

Oh, yes - and tackle climate change.



OO It's Too Late To Save Glaciers, But Pieces Are Being Saved in an Antarctic vault by concerned scientists to retain some of their important paleoclimate data. Such data help scientists predict how climate change will affect our planet.



Creating Green Gold when the real stuff is gone, this old Aussie mine will be used to create a solar storage facility, by pumping water to be stored in the higher crater until needed to create power. Source www.mining.com

OO Australia: An Old Gold Mine Will Be Converted

Into A Large Solar Storage System - to be integrated with a large, 50 MW solar power farm, a world first.

A pair of high and low craters will be used to create a PHES, a pumped hydroelectric energy storage system*, the most affordable and popular industrial scale system used worldwide today to store solar and wind energy until needed.

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*Energy pumps water to the high crater; water drives turbines to generate electricity when it is released into the low crater.



OO How New York Grocery Stores Plan To Use Ice Batteries - storing energy to make ice during off-peak hours at night, saving money as it shifts peak load for stressed utilities - and using more efficient salt water ice tanks to keep things cool.



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FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

Black Death, Not Gold poisons a community water supply from a recent oil spill in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit Barbara Fraser at mongabay.com

OO Negotiations And Protests Ongoing In Wake Of Oil Spills

In Peruvian Amazon



OO Shell Begins Production At World's Deepest Underwater Oilfield Almost 2 Miles beneath the sea surface in the Gulf of Mexico. What could possibly go wrong ... again?



OO Australia's "Fair Share" Of Global Carbon Budget To Be Exhausted In Six Years if the more-ambitious global warming goals agreed to at the paris climate summit is to be met, says a respected european think-tank.



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Credit Prakash Singh At Getting Images

OO India: The Hidden Cost Of Death Is In The Air as the latest work bank report reveals that the cost of combating air pollution is much less than the economic loss due to loss of workdays.



CLUELESS LEADERSHIP

OO Conservative Media Bias Is Inflating American Climate Denial And Polarization shows a new study which finds political polarization on climate change is growing in the US.



OO US Companies Tout Climate Policies, Fund Climate Skeptics shows a review of public records.



OO Why Is USA Today Willingly Confusing Its Readers About Climate Change? Presenting both sides of thought on an issue is valid, but not when one side includes factual inaccuracies.

OO Temperatures Rise, And We're Cooked - One of Donald Trump's 100 wackiest ideas is that climate change is a hoax fabricated by China to harm America.



OO Big U.S. Networks Ignore Epic Native Protest For Months, but coverage is finally picking up.



WHERE GREEN IS AN ELECTION ISSUE

OO 15 House Races Where Green Issues Are Prominent

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ELECTION YEAR:

If You Don't Vote For Climate Action, You Can Forget The Rest - in a climate-changing world of famine, drought, rising seas, giant storms and heat waves, there will be no security in jobs, health, wealth, or national safety. There will be chaos ensuing from increasing crises and disasters. Vote.

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OO Global Warming Policies We Set Today Will Determine The Next 10,000 Years - of global warming, a new study shows -- and whether our civilization survives or not: history shows that harmful climate change has destroyed civilizations before.

This time, it could be worldwide. Let's keep "The Hunger Games" in the realm of fiction.

If we do not grow sustainably,

Our children will die inhumanely.



@@ Myth vs Truth: The Huge Value of Contraception is an incisive, heartfelt recognition of the value of contraception by Sarah Brown, CEO, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy



Unintended Pregnancy Costs US Taxpayers:

Unintended Pregnancies Cost US Taxypayers Nearly $11 Billion Yearly

-the Guttmacher Institute

Teen Childbearing Alone Cost US Taxpayers $9+ Billion In 2010

And the costs of raising a child usually ensures decades, if not a life, of poverty for its mother.

- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Help prevent unintended pregnancies in your community:

publicize where women can access affordable contraception.

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They can go here to find locations:

And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

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SOLAR KEEPS DANCING

OO America Has Seen 11 Consecutive Quarters With 1+ Gigawatt Of Solar PV Installed



OO $300 Million For Solar-Plus-Storage Financing Becomes Available Loans and leases will be available in 17 states.





OO India Wants To Build 10 Gigawatts Of Pumped Hydro Storage To Support Solar as PV capacity soars.



Check it out here, right now!

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, Sep 21, 2016

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is "caused" by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Looking above at recent temperature anomalies, much of the US and the waters surrounding it are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures: the eastern Pacific warm spot continues and so does the drought in California. A new study shows how this drought could continue - for centuries, based on recent prehistory.

Much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures - not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.

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There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I've compiled, "Climate Change News Resources," at Wordpress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

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To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!
Cityscape of Cape Town in South Africa a venue of the 2010 World Cup, February 17, 2010. The 2010 World Cup soccer finals will take place in South Africa from June 11 - July 11. WORLD CUP 2010 PREVIEW - CITYSCAPE REUTERS/Euroluftbild.de (SOUTH AFRICA - Tags: SPORT SOCCER CITYSCAPE) BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE

Over the last eight years, America has written a new chapter in our relationship with Africa. Under President Obama's leadership, we have worked to transition our support for the continent from aid to trade and empowerment. We have started to build a full, equal, advanced economic partnership -- a partnership that holds as much promise for African countries as it does for America. This week's U.S.-Africa Business Forum is a key component of that new partnership.

Africa is primed to be one of the great economic success stories of this century. Incomes are rising. Investments in infrastructure and technology are accelerating growth across a range of industries. Africa today is home to 700 companies with revenues greater than $500 million. Consumer spending is on track to climb to $1 trillion over the next four years. The workforce is projected to be the largest on the planet by 2040. The continent could make up a quarter of the global economy by the year 2050.

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African markets are also poised to benefit from several long-term trends, including the fastest-growing middle class in the world, an expanding urban population, and increasing access to mobile technology and the internet. By the end of this century, some estimates predict that 40 percent of the world's youth will be African, which would be an unprecedented concentration of young consumers.

Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there is a clear desire to deepen our ties of trade and investment. Doing so will spur growth and support new jobs across both the U.S. and the countries of Africa. But with only 2% of total U.S. exports going to Africa, we still have a long way to go before we fully realize the promise and potential of our economic relationship.

The U.S.-Africa Business Forum was created two years ago to accelerate our progress in realizing that potential. The forum brings together heads of states and business leaders for a conversation focused on strengthening our commercial ties. So far, the results of this dialogue have exceeded our expectations.

Today, the billions in investments that were announced during the 2014 forum are on track to be completed -- investments in everything from manufacturing and worker training to clean energy and IT modernization. There have also been private-sector deals in aviation, banking, construction and transportation. In addition, the Department of Commerce has doubled its presence in Africa to better serve American firms looking to access markets and create business partnerships, and last September conducted the largest trade mission to Africa in the history of our country.

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At this year's forum, the scope of that progress has widened to include billions more in new partnerships and investments in areas critical to Africa's future, like technology and the digital economy. Investments in thermal and wind power in Senegal, urban solar farms in South Africa, TV white space and low-cost bandwidth to rural areas of Kenya, and the building of a metro-fiber network in Liberia are just some of the exciting announcements being made this week.

Other programs are helping to spur these and other new investments. The Commerce Department's Power Africa initiative has helped fuel power-generation projects that are essential for economic growth across sub-Saharan Africa. Trade Africa has increased trade both within the continent and between Africa and the world. And the extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act for another 10 years will help more African products reach American customers duty-free.
I thought I was prepared to be my mother's healthcare proxy, but I was not.

A year before she died, I got a call from an endocrinologist who had just examined my mother and believed that she should have surgery for a thyroid condition that had gotten worse over the previous year. My mother had just turned 100 and had a year or so earlier reaffirmed her desire never to go to a hospital -- except for fracture care -- and never to have surgery that required inpatient care. I told the endocrinologist that my mother had an advance directive not to have surgery. The doctor was not happy with my decision and pressured me a bit, but I insisted on respecting my mother's wishes.

Later, I discussed my decision with my mother's primary healthcare provider at the life care community where she lived. She agreed with my decision even though we both believed that it would probably lead to my mother's death sooner rather than later.

But I was uneasy about our decision. The facility did not believe that my mother had capacity to make medical decisions because she had a form of dementia that severely limited her memory. They cleared all significant medical decisions with me as her healthcare proxy. I, however, believed that my mother had some decision-making capacity even though she could not remember her decisions. For example, even though I had power of attorney, I consulted with her about major financial decisions such as large gifts to her great grandchildren and heirs.

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So I was uncomfortable about making this decision for her, even though her healthcare provider and I had met with her some months earlier to reaffirm her advance directives and to have her sign a new form that consolidated her directives. She had reiterated at that meeting what she had told me years before when she was fully competent, that she did not want treatment just to extend her life. She wanted to avoid suffering but not to fight death when treatment would rob her of functional ability, when she had, in essence, reached a natural end to her life.

But I remained uncomfortable even after consulting with the alternate healthcare proxy -- my younger brother -- who fully agreed with the decision not to permit surgery.

Pretty clearly I was emotionally distressed to let my mother die without a fight to preserve her life. My distress probably should not have surprised me, but I come from an insistently rational family, which had been open about the inevitability of death at least since I was 12 when my grandfather died. My parents had wills prepared before they were 40, had identified healthcare proxies, and had made arrangements to contribute their bodies to science. Over the years I had met with them several times to clarify their wishes regarding end of life care, the disposition of their bodies, and funeral arrangements. After my father died, I continued to check in with my mother on occasion in case she had changed her mind.

I could not have been more prepared, I thought. But now that it was real, I was finding it very painful to let my mother die.

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In addition, I felt ethically uncertain about my moral authority to make this decision on my mother's behalf. I tried to find literature regarding the ethics of being a healthcare proxy and did not find any. I talked with a friend who was studying medical ethics, who didn't know of any literature either. Finally, I talked with a friend who is a retired surgeon, who thought that the ethics were clear. I had no authority unless my mother was unable to make a decision and then I was bound by her advance directives.

No authority unless my mother was incapable of making a decision -- how obvious is that? But it had eluded me because of the general assumption that I would make decisions for my mother and because of my own emotional distress.

I told my mother's doctor I believed that my mother had decision-making capacity and that I wanted the decision about thyroid surgery to be hers. We met with her, and once again she said that she never wanted to have surgery. Though I was unhappy about the imminence of her death, I was immensely relieved not to be the person deciding that she should die without treatment.

But that is not the end of the story. Several months later I again got a call from my mother's endocrinologist, to whom she had been taken for a routine follow-up visit because of a clerical error. The endocrinologist was very distressed about my mother's condition because the goiter she had developed was now so large that it was beginning to limit her ability to swallow and to breathe. My mother's doctor and I were aware of her condition and had called in hospice care believing that she would die relatively soon. But the endocrinologist was very insistent that she see a surgeon and threatening when I repeated that my mother did not want surgery. Finally, I said to her, "Did you ask my mother?" "Yes," she responded. "What did she say?" I asked. "When I told her that the growth would reduce the quality of her life unless she had surgery, she said, 'Well, I guess I will have to do it.'"

That changed everything. If my mother was now open to having surgery, we were, I believed, ethically bound to explore it. I immediately arranged to meet with my mother and her doctor so that we could ask her if she wanted to see a surgeon.

It was a very difficult meeting, which lasted about 20 minutes, longer than my mother's usual memory span. But she stuck with it. I reminded her that the endocrinologist thought she should see a surgeon, which she had no memory of, that she had previously insisted that she did not want surgery, and that her doctor, who was with us, believed that surgery was ill-advised if not impossible because of the risks. What, I asked, did she want to do? "I won't decide now," she answered several times, leaving us, I believed, no choice but to schedule an appointment with a surgeon.

We could, I suppose, have decided that my mother really was not competent to make a decision and continued with palliative care. But it seemed clear to me, and I think to her doctor as well, that she could not bring herself to say that she was ready to die -- indeed, that she wanted to live. Perhaps she had changed her mind about living as long as possible. Perhaps her advance directives were null and void.

My mother's "companion," a staff member from the facility, brought her to the appointment with the surgeon. My wife and I joined them in the waiting room. "Why am I here?" my mother asked. I explained it was to see a surgeon about the massive growth on her neck. "But I don't want surgery," she said. A minute or two later she asked again, "Why am I here?" I explained again. "But I don't want surgery" she repeated. She asked again and then again and then again, as usual because of her impaired memory.

I considered leaving since she was so insistent that she did not want surgery but decided that we should know whether the surgeon thought that surgery was advisable if even possible.

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I was worried, of course, that he would be one of those surgeons who thinks that surgery is almost always worth the risk, a doctor -- like the endocrinologist -- who opposed the palliative care approach that we were pursuing with my mother.

Quite the contrary as it turned out. He gently examined my mother, and he talked with her about her condition and her wishes with great respect. Surgery he thought was absolutely ill-advised, but draining the growth might give her some temporary relief and a little extra time without additional suffering.

That was what he recommended. That is what was done. It gave her a few extra days or perhaps weeks. About two months later she died -- without pain, in her own bed, after visits from all of the family who mattered to her on the last day she showed any signs of consciousness. There was a particularly poignant exchange between her and her 4-month-old great granddaughter just before she lapsed into unconsciousness.

It had been a painful and confusing journey for me as her healthcare proxy. Even near the end when the hospice team made decisions that moved her closer and closer to death, particularly by withholding food and water, I questioned whether I should intervene and insist that she be given more care. I controlled myself and let the process play out -- let my mother die. It was, I think, the right decision. But it was far from easy.

As I said at the beginning, I thought I was ready to be my mother's healthcare proxy, but I was not. I was not prepared for my own emotions. I was not prepared for the ethical questions. And I was not prepared for the difference between the idea of death and its concrete reality.

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Earlier on Huff/Post50:
"Hello Murali? DC here."

Those are words I've heard almost weekly on the phone for over three years now. It's become ingrained so much that I almost mouth the words every time DC Rao calls me.

Rao, whom I (and the rest of my colleagues at HAF) affectionately call Dr. Rao, has been the guru behind the Hindu American Foundation's "Hinduism 101" program and a longstanding leader in the Hindu American community. But it's the way he has lived his life that makes him a true inspiration to so many people. He's about to quietly start his second retirement, which is why recognizing what he has done is so important to understanding our community's progress.

Dr. Rao retired from the World Bank over 20 years to pursue a greater study of Hindu philosophy, while also helping to increase the Hindu voice in interfaith dialogue in the Washington, D.C. area. He served as president of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, where he not only brought the Hindu voice into focus, but forged strong ties with leaders in the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh, and Jain communities. His knowledge of yoga developed through the deep study of the Yoga Sutra and practice at the Himalayan Institute. He also became a trustee of the Washington regional center of the Chinmaya Mission, leading study groups that drew both the young and young at heart.

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About 10 years ago, Dr. Rao began getting invitations to speak to teachers. His ability to explain Hinduism clearly and succinctly made him an in-demand speaker throughout the region, and he selflessly traveled from district to district. When I met him in 2013, he was working on a series of brief essays explaining Hindu concepts to lay audiences. From our first conversation at his home, Dr. Rao and I developed a partnership based on a shared vision of how Hinduism should be better taught. Both of us wanted to develop a program that respected the "teach, don't preach" approach when teaching about religion in public schools. And so, Hinduism 101 was born. The essays he started working on also turned into a very popular e-book.

Since then, more than 2,000 teachers from 34 states and the District of Columbia have been trained on better approaches to teaching about Hinduism. Dr. Rao volunteered his time and energies to traveling to a number of locations around the country to train teachers. Last year, we also helped to start a training program for members of our greater Hindu American community. Dubbed "Dharma Ambassadors," the program has energized community members to become more engaged on issues such as education, interfaith dialogue, and better representing Hinduism in the public sphere.

What makes Dr. Rao's contribution to a more culturally competent understanding about Hinduism so remarkable is his unwillingness to take any credit for what he has done. He shies away from praise and the spotlight, living out the principle that any action should be done without expectation of reward. I've been inspired by his focus, his inner peace, and his willingness to patiently teach my HAF colleagues and me a more nuanced way of talking about Hinduism. As one teacher recently gushed, "Dr. Rao creates a disarming environment in which the participant is drawn in to Hinduism in a very special way. He simply has a way about him that is both patient and wise."

Even as Dr. Rao's impact can now be felt across the country, he is now moving onto the next stage of his life. He is retiring from public engagement, channeling his energies towards deep study of scriptures, and a journey inwards.

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While I know Dr. Rao will move into private study and away from the public eye, I'll still relish hearing his voice from time to time, if only to remind me that he's still around and as prescient as ever. "Hello Murali? DC here."
Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that's in the works. "[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together," Ellison says.

In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product's capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?

Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor's degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP's five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he's planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.

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"Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what's happening on campus, and they're not accessing resources until it's too late," Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling "processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources." ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who's coming in and who's been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app -- allowing them to reach more students all at once.

Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. "That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank," he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn't fully comprehend higher education's blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison's grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.

That's not to say Ellison was giving up. "I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically," he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn't provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security -- a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.

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Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink's current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama's reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City's public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.

In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx's Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn't seem to know how to navigate the school's bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don't know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn't provide all the help needed. "I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn't know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point," he says. "The mentors were not checking in on them. It's not a seamless transition."

After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink's platform. "By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way," says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink's sales pitch, "our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience." Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.

Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school's history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?

His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he's asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school's chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained "a key adviser." Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those "new understandings and unique opportunities for growth" proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.


Photo by Olivia Deng

A host of issues occupy the center stage in the upcoming presidential election, but largely missing from the discussion is the environment. In 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry started an initiative to save oceans from overfishing, pollution and climate change. Two years later, a lot remains to be done. In an interview with National Geographic published September 16, Kerry said oceans are "life and death issues" that deserve the same amount of attention as critical foreign policy.

"If we don't preserve the oceans from nitrate runoff and plastic and chemicals, and if we don't preserve it from acidification, and if we don't preserve it from grotesque overfishing--too much money chasing too few fish -- we're going to have the most massive ecosystem on the planet in peril," Kerry said in the interview.

The fishing industry's economic impact is wide-reaching, affecting coastal communities, seafood wholesalers, processors and retailers. A sizable market, estimates from a 2016 IBISWorld report state that the U.S. fishing industry is worth $6 billion. Despite these robust numbers, the fishing industry faces challenges. In the U.S., 17 percent of fisheries are classified as overfished in 2014, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In some areas of the U.S., the fishing industry was once booming, but is now struggling to stay afloat.

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"Obviously it [fishing industry] has gotten a lot smaller. I mean, fishing techniques haven't changed much," said Bert Jongerden, general manager of the Portland Fish Exchange. An industry that has not been quick to adapt to new technology according to Jongerden, Jongerden said that the fishing industry is now past the "heydays in the 90s," adding that they were lucky to catch "5 million pounds per year."

Dissenting standpoints between different fishing industry players paint a less-than-rosy picture. Some fisheries and scientists spar on topics such as climate change and overfishing in the Gulf of Maine.

According to National

Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2015 was the warmest year on record, 10 warmest years in the 134-year record have occurred since 2000 with the exception of 1998 and global temperature has increased by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. But according to Jongerden, climate change is an overused buzzword, saying that he'd prefer if people spoke of weather in "trends."

"Climate change is a big catchphrase everybody likes to use. Right now, everybody likes to say that because it's the boogeyman. Climate change, climate change. I think more people would prefer to speak about this in trends. There are trends in the weather," Jongerden said. He added that the temperature in the Gulf of Maine has "gone up and down over the past couple years."

Jongerden said that climate change has not affected the Gulf of Maine, stating that fishermen reported they haven't witnessed any changes in the species they're catching, or the amount they're catching. "Actually they're catching more," he added. "There was a point that people were saying they had all these species coming from the South that were not typically in these waters. That's just not happening. So I think people need to step back and say climate change is whatever it is, but it's not affecting the Gulf of Maine."

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However, the notion that climate change is not affecting the Gulf of Maine is contested by scientists. A report in Science noted that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine increased faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.

"Based on studies by Pershing et al. from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Gulf of Maine is one of the most warming oceans in the world other an area North of Japan," said Esperanza Stancioff, associate professor and extension educator with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant.

Peter Baker, director of ocean conservation at Pew Charitable Trusts, said that climate change will become a major factor in future fisheries management.

"Fish are moving from their traditional waters to cooler, deeper waters, though their patterns remain unpredictable. As time goes on, climate change will force new and different models to emerge in fisheries management."

Besides climate change, another consensus that cannot seem to be reached is overfishing.

Jongerden said that overfishing is not happening in the United States, citing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act as the reason. Passed in 1976, the act pledges to "prevent overfishing, rebuild overfished stocks, increase long-term economic and social benefits and sustainable supply of seafood."

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"Part of the Magnuson-Stevens Act was to ensure that overfishing never occurred. Now, the U.S. government regulates what people can catch around the whole United States. Overfishing may be occurring elsewhere but not in the U.S. waters," Jongerden said.

"When people say there is overfishing going on, I really don't believe that because the government regulates fishing efforts in the United States. And part of the Magnuson-Stevens Act says that overfishing will not occur, so there's no overfishing happening. Unless the government's not doing their job, which I believe they are."

Not all would agree that overfishing doesn't exist in the U.S.



"Overfishing has been an issue. One example in Maine is the urchin population, which was decimated by overfishing. There are complex biological and ecological relationships affecting our marine resources. And, as far as climate change goes, long term ocean and coastal acidification will change our ocean chemistry composition the most," Stancioff said.



Photo by Olivia Deng

Furthermore, among the fishing community, there is distrust for scientists, according to Jongerden.

"Fishermen have always wanted to collaborate more with scientists. The scientists have always put up a wall saying, 'no.' On the West Coast, it's almost 80 percent cooperative research. On the East Coast it's less than 10 percent. The science [community] needs to open up their doors and do things transparently," Jongerden said.

According to Jongerden, there is a disparity between what fishermen and regulators see in the water, saying that their viewpoints are on "completely opposite spectrums."

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"This real issue, is the lack of trust of what scientists are saying...typically they're two to three years behind the trends, what's happening in the ocean," Jongerden said. "So I think a lot of fishermen are concerned with the issues with the science right now, saying what's in the ocean. Across the board, that's an issue with the fishing community."

Conflicts can arise between fisheries and scientists, preventing collaboration, Baker said.

"For instance, in June of 2015 the New England Fishery Management Council was asked by the marine scientific community to set aside a small area for scientific research. The area was part of the Stellwagen Bank Marine Sanctuary and an area that fishermen covet," he said. "The fight against setting the area aside for scientific research was led by recreational fishing interests and supported by commercial fishing lobby groups. In the end, the Council sided with the fishing industry instead of the scientific community."

However, some collaboration efforts have been successful. Stancioff, for example, collaborated with lobstermen for a project funded by NOAA.

"We really wanted to look at how environmental decisions are made and if these tools we are applying could be used to increase learning towards decision making," she said.

The project worked in three states and included the towns of South Thomaston, Maine with the lobster industry, Wellfleet Massachusetts with the oyster industry and Beaufort, South Carolina with their blue crab fishery.

"We started with the Maine project because the timing here in order to get the lobstermen's participation is based on when they aren't fishing in the winter. And this happened after the ocean heat wave crisis in Maine," Stancioff said. "The lobstermen were concerned about the crisis in 2012 based on the most extreme warm water temperatures and early molting of lobsters...Maine was really in the hot seat in terms of climate change and warming temperatures."

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The socioecological model that "links together equations describing economics, biology and fishing effort" can help fishermen and women build predictive models that shed insight on pricing changes during the fishing season, according to Stancioff. Research such as Stancioff's can set the stage for efficient participatory planning.
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 17: Police, firefighters and emergency workers gather at the scene of an explosion in Manhattan on September 17, 2016 in New York City. The evening explosion at 23rd street in the popular Chelsea neighborhood injured over a dozen people and is being investigated. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

We had just put our son to bed on Saturday night when a thunderous boom shook the apartment where we live in Chelsea. "What was that?" my partner asked. But we both knew it wasn't just another loud noise in New York City. Soon sirens rang as fire trucks and police cars roared by and helicopters hovered above.

"I'm going out," I told him. "You have a son, and you don't know what is out there," he responded. Eventually, I did go to the end of my block where the blast was visible from barricades and lit by red, flashing lights.

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I spent way too much time on Twitter that night as people shared news, argued about whether the location was Chelsea or Flatiron, and the professional media tried to determine what actually happened. The brightest moment of the night happened when it was reported that nobody had died, and that all injuries were relatively minor. Given the intensity of the blast, it could have been much, much worse.

Now, tragically, it appears to be getting worse. The investigation led to a man with a Muslim name. His fingerprints were found on another device that was meant to do harm, also near our home. In what was described as a 'shoot-out' with police, the man was injured and captured.

Violence is all around us. Guns and fingers pointed at all sides. These last months have seen horrific violence. It goes around and around, getting stronger as it sinks to new depths.

It is up to all of us to stop it.

I condemn violence in the name of any religion. I also condemn the use of the recent bombings near my home for political showboating or blanket blaming of our Muslim American neighbors and friends. Those who are whipping up backlash or demonizing Muslims are serving the devil's lust for conflict. Unfortunately, they are all too successful. At a meeting about national security that I went to last month, it is clear that some of Daesh's best recruiting tools are Islamophobia in America that is used in propaganda reinforcing the narrative that this is a battle of the West vs. Islam.

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It is not.

It is an existential struggle between those humans who celebrate difference and strive to live together in peace with justice; and those who turn to violence and hate in a deadlocked commitment to dominate and destroy the "other".

I have chosen sides.

Today, I will bring my Muslim allies even closer to my heart and tell them how much I value their friendship and their work for building a tomorrow where my family and their families can flourish together. I need to hear their voices and provide a space where they can share their own heartbreak in this moment.

To that end, my colleagues and I at Auburn reached out to our Muslim friends and here are some of the responses we got back.

Thank you so much. Knowing I've got friends and allies like you is enough for now. I do fear the backlash, remembering that Muslims are human is critical. At every moment, we simply seem to be the object for someone else to talk about. -- Hussein Rashid



An attack one is an attack on all of us. We must stand together with Chelsea, with New Jersey, and with St. Cloud. We cannot allow these attacks to taint the way we view each other, or even worse, stand by as some use these incidents to justify attacks against others. -- Dr. Debbie Almontaser





Why would this man who claims he is a Muslim take aim at innocent people and disrupt the unity of purpose that all New Yorkers share? The answer is simple: he is consumed with hate. And hate does not distinguish between Muslim and non-Muslim - it wants to divide us and instill fear in all of us. His actions say, "I am different than you and I do not recognize myself in you." -- Daisy Khan



These are just three voices from the Muslim community in New York who are equally as sick as I am about the events of the last days and the continuous circle of violence that plagues us. They are my friends, I am their ally. Together we shall not be moved. We shall stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder and in our faith in our God and in our faith in one another we will get through this moment, and the many moments to come, until all humanity can be safe and free from violence. The circle of hate stops with us.

Join us.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., listens to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testify before the Senate Banking, Housing, Urban Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, July 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was on the hot seat Tuesday when he faced Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other angry lawmakers at a Senate Banking Committee hearing designed to investigate the bank's widespread rip-off of its customers.

Warren told Stumpf, who earns $19 million a year: "You should resign...You should be criminally investigated."

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Warren's verbal assault on Stumpf generated considerable publicity. But this issue wouldn't have surfaced in the first place without the hard work of grassroots community and labor organizations - especially the Committee for Better Banks -- that first brought the scandal to the attention of the media, elected officials, and regulators.

Warren also demanded both the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission criminally investigate Stumpf for the bank's practice of pressuring its low-level employees to create over 2 million unwanted checking and credit-card accounts without consumers' knowledge or permission in order to grow the bank's stock price. She told Stumpf that during the years that Wells Fargo engaged in this "scam," Strumpf's own portfolio of company stock increased by $200 million.

She urged Stumpf to return the compensation he received while these practices went on.

"So, you haven't resigned, you haven't returned a single nickel of your personal earnings, you haven't fired a single senior executive," Warren told Stumpf. "Instead, evidently, your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don't have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It's gutless leadership."

"You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket," Warren said.

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Warren questioned Stumpf about the fraudulent accounts, asking how such an operation could have occurred without the knowledge of top management. Wells Fargo employees say they did so because of what they've called the bank's "sell or die" quota system which put pressure on them to engage in these practices in order to keep their jobs. They've said it was a routine practice that employees referred to as "sandbagging."

Wells Fargo's official line is that the employees were acting on their own to skim extra pay from the bogus accounts.

Activists are up in arms over Wells Fargo's double standard in dealing with its employees. After the scandal was exposed by grassroots advocates, the media, and government regulators, the bank fired at least 5,300 employees and refunded millions of dollars to customers. But bank reform activists are skeptical that so many employees could have acted on their own without the knowledge of higher-up bank executives.

Meanwhile, in July, in the wake of the scandal, Carrie Tolstedt, Wells Fargo's director of consumer banking, the operation that opened fake accounts, abruptly left the bank where she worked for 27 years. She took with her a $124.5 million bonus. After her retirement announcement, Stumpf praised Tolstedt as "a standard-bearer of our culture" and "a champion for our customers."

Warren criticized Stumpf for failing to withdraw Tolstedt's bonus (a practice known as a "clawback) in light of the revelations about her division's behavior. Stumpf said it was up to the bank's compensation committee, comprised of board members, to decide whether to rescind Tolstedt's bonus.

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"If you have no opinions on the most massive fraud that's hit this bank since the beginning of time, how can it be that you get to continue to collect a paycheck?" Warren asked.

Moreover, activists say that the problem goes well beyond Wells Fargo and is an industry-wide scandal.

Ruth Landaverde, a former employee at both Wells Fargo and Bank of America, said the pressure from her supervisors at both banks was so intense that she developed a tic in her eye and had trouble sleeping. She told the Associated Press that in order to keep her job she was required to sell four credit cards and four auto loans each week in addition to three home mortgages or refinances.

"I wasn't going to do something unethical, but the sales pressure was very real," she said. "I can see why some employees did what they did."

Landaverde is now a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a statewide advocacy group that works on housing and banking issues and is a member of the Committee for Better Banks, a coalition of community and labor groups. In an email this week to ACCE members and supporters, she wrote:

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"When I worked for Bank of America, I felt uncomfortable when I was given a list of bank customers and told to call them and push new accounts and credit cards that could end up sticking them with unnecessary fees and debt. What's worse, we were targeting customers in low-income communities of color much more than the customers in more affluent zip codes."

Landaverde explained that "there are still many more banks that have not committed to stop requiring their employees to push unnecessary products in order to keep their jobs. And now, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is throwing his own employees under the bus rather than accepting responsibility for the outrageous high-pressure sales culture that he and other Wall Street executives are creating!"

"I know first-hand that predatory sales exist across the U.S. banking industry," said Cassaundra Plummer, a former teller at TD Bank and member of the Committee for Better Banks. "At TD bank, sales goals made it impossible for frontline bank workers to help customers find the financial products best suited to them. My manager would encourage customers to take out home equity lines to go on vacation which is the worst financial advice I've ever heard! We need to end predatory sales goals across the industry not just Wells Fargo."

Last year the Committee for Better Banks delivered a petition signed by more than 11,000 people to Stumpf, along with a letter noting that workers faced "pressures to meet sales quotas under strict monitoring and threat of losing their jobs, often forcing them to push unnecessary products and fees on to their customers, causing them stress and financial hardship," and that loan servicing departments have been using similar tactics to push consumers toward riskier products they can ill afford.

The group has now launched a petition asking elected leaders in Los Angeles and other cities around the country to ban all city business with banks that force their employees to meet sales goals for high fee products such as credit cards, new accounts and home refinance loans. They say that these incentive programs create a system where bank workers are forced to engage in predatory practices against their professional and ethical beliefs.

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"Wells Fargo's action to eliminate sales quotas is a hard-won victory for front-line bank workers who have been denouncing abusive sales goals for over two years," said Reuben Traite, an organizer with the Committee for Better Banks. "The fact that Wells Fargo turned a blind eye is appalling. But these high pressure sales goals are rampant across big banks and we need to end it across the industry."

Activists with the Los Angeles chapter of ACCE brought the issue to the attention of the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story in 2013. Once it made the papers, Los Angeles City Attorney Michael Feuer conducted his own investigation and then sued Wells Fargo. All this got the attention of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal agency.

Last week, CFPB Director Richard Cordray, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry, and Los Angeles City Attorney Michael Feuer announced that they had reached settlements with Wells Fargo over its "a major breach of trust." Wells Fargo agreed to pay the CFPB $100 million (the largest fine the agency has ever imposed) in addition to $50 million to the city and county of Los Angeles, and $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Wells Fargo did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlements, although it issued an apology to its customers, promised to revise its sales practices, and agreed to pay consumers refunds for fees assessed on checking and credit cards accounts they didn't authorize.

Activists point out that the fines being levied against Wells Fargo are a drop in the bucket compared with Wells Fargo's 2015 profits of $20 billion. It is even less than the more than $200 million in company stock that Strumpf owns. Last year Wells Fargo -- the nation's fourth largest bank by assets and its leading home lender -- paid Strumpf $19.3 million. He serves on the board of directors of Target Corporation and Chevron Corporation and, until recently, on the board of the Financial Services Roundtable, a powerful industry lobby group.

The bank's apology and refunds won't make the issue go away. Many consumers are suing the banks as are former employees who say they were fired (or forced to resign) when they refused to engage in the fraudulent practices in order to meet the bank's unrealistic sales quotas.

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The issue first emerged last year when the Los Angeles Times uncovered Wells Fargo's illegal practices. In response to the Times story, Feuer initiated his own investigation and sue the bank, alleging that it had "victimized their customers by using pernicious and often illegal sales tactics," including unattainable quotas that pressured bank employees to "engage in fraudulent behavior."

The CFPB - the federal agency created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank bank reform law -- undertook its own investigation. He discovered that Wells Fargo employees opened as many as 1.5 million checking and savings accounts, and more than 500,000 credit cards, without consumers' knowledge or permission.

The LA and CFPB investigations, the resulting media coverage, and Wells Fargo's attempt to blame its lower-rung employees for the scandal led five Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee -- Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jack Reed (R.I.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Warren -- to push its Republican chairman, Richard Shelby of Alabama, to hold Tuesday's hearings.

The Democrats are particularly interested in asking CEO Strump if he intends to retract lucrative bonuses for management-level employees in the wake of the scandal. They sent Strump a letter last week expressing concern that consumers and low-level employees will bear the burden of the bank's misconduct "while senior executives walk away with multi-million dollar awards based on what the company later finds out are fraudulent practices."

The San Francisco-based Wells Fargo has long been a target of bank reform activists for its troublesome track record of risky and reckless behavior. For more than a decade, grassroots groups have challenged Wells Fargo's racially discriminatory lending practices and aggressive foreclosures. They have picketed at the offices and homes of the bank's top executives, sued the bank for violating laws against racist mortgage lending, and testified before Congress, state legislatures and City Councils demanding that they investigate and reign in Wells Fargo's troublesome practices.

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The activists have primarily been bank consumers and residents of neighborhoods harmed by Wells Fargo's redlining and other practices. But the two-year old Committee for Better Banks is comprised of bank employees as well as consumers, representing a new and potentially powerful coalition.

The CBB is aligned with the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of local activist groups that work on housing, bank, and workers rights issues. CPD helped set the stage for the current campaign with its study of bank workers. The CPD report revealed that some of the nation's largest banks, including Wells Fargo and Citigroup, pressure its front-line employees to engage in fraudulent practices to keep their jobs. According the report, these bank employees try to serve customers responsibly, but feel pressure from higher-ups to meet the quotas in order to keep their jobs.

A report last year by the National Employment Law Center on banking industry wages found that almost three quarters (74.1 percent) of U.S. bank tellers and almost half (44.2 percent) of bank customer service representatives earn less than $15 an hour. The median hourly wage for bank tellers is $12.44. A study by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education found that nearly one-third of the families of all tellers are on public assistance. In New York City--the capital of the nation's banking industry--39 percent of tellers and their family members are on some form of public assistance program.

Not surprisingly, the Committee for Better Banks is now part of the broader movement to raise wages for service-sector employees like bank tellers to $15 an hour.

Other groups involved in the better banking campaign include Move On, the Communication Workers of America, New York Communities for Change, ACCE, Jobs with Justice, Make the Road, and Americans for Financial Reform, a DC-based watchdog group.

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The idea for the CFPB was first proposed by Elizabeth Warren when she was still a professor at Harvard Law School. Before she was elected to the Senate, she helped shepherd the plan for the agency through Congress in the wake of the Wall Street crisis and nationwide mortgage meltdown that began in 2008. President Obama supported the idea and helped get it incorporated into the Dodd-Frank reform bill that was enacted over heavy opposition from the bank industry lobby.

Since 2010, banking and business lobby groups, with the help of Republican allies in Congress, have sought to undermine the agency by reducing its budget and authority.

Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Davidson pointed out that the CFPB's entire budget is little more than $600 million. In contrast, he wrote, "Wells Fargo's revenues are more than eighty billion dollars. And Wells is just one of thousands of banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that the C.F.P.B. is mandated to monitor."

Senate Banking Committee chair Shelby, an Alabama Republican, is one of many GOP members of Congress who complain that the CFPB is too powerful and that its tough regulations lead banks to offer fewer consumer products. But a recent article in American Banker, an industry publication, suggested that Wells' settlement would make it difficult for bank lobbyists and Republicans in Congress to attack the CFPB.

Even so, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has called for dismantling nearly all of the Dodd-Frank reforms. In contrast, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton last week touted the CFPB's "forceful response" to the Wells Fargo scandal, adding that it was "a stark reminder of why we need a strong consumer watchdog to safeguard against unfair and deceptive practices."

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Echoed Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a DC-based watchdog group that has played an important part in defending the CFPB from its opponents: "The current Wells Fargo scandal reveals why we need a strong regulatory agency that has the backs of bank consumers as well as employees."

"Wells Fargo's action to eliminate sales quotas is a hard-won victory for front-line bank workers like me who have been coming together in the Committee for Better Banks and working to end to high-pressure sales goals that hurt our families and communities," said Julie Miller, a former Wells Fargo branch manager and a member of the Committee for Better Banks.

"Wells Fargo got into this scandal because it turned a deaf ear to the alarms sounded by consumers and its own workers, and its experience proves that these sales goals have no place in the consumer banking industry," Miller observed. "Predatory sales goals are rampant at big banks across the country, and we will keep on working and organizing to make sure Wells Fargo makes good on its word and that other banks follow suit by implementing fair business practices for workers and customers."
Sitting at the Alcove Cafe this morning enjoying my coffee and conversation with my BFF the subject of what is the definition of elegance vs. sexiness came up when we saw an elegantly dressed young woman in a long but casual summer dress stroll in and pause, addressing her surroundings as if looking for someone. At long last she turned and walked out slowly, still with great elegance, perhaps not finding what she was looking for.

We looked at each other and at the same time said "wow!" It's not that the woman was tall or even that beautiful. It was how she carried herself and how she came across.

Elegant people were rare before, and they're still rare now.

It is even more rare today to find someone who is both elegant and sexy, two qualities that in my opinion largely describe every attractive person out there, man or woman.

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Women. We are pretty, cute, curvy, skinny, sexy, sultry, voluptuous... we have been described in many ways. However, when was the last time you heard a man describe a woman by something that compliments her soul and her inherent elegance? Or even as beautiful for that matter? Alternately when was the last time you did not hear a man describe a woman with an adjective that wasn't dripping in sexual innuendos? Men tend to judge women solely on sex appeal, failing to understand the concept of natural beauty and uniqueness in flaws.

Our society has been programmed to believe that sexuality in a woman comes in the form of a sculpted body and bronzed skin. That is the woman who is considered attractive. They don't recognize the difference between "hot" and beautiful. That "hotness" doesn't last past midnight when the make-up has smudged off and the hair extensions removed, or ultimately when the spray tan has washed away.

The admiration has shifted towards describing women as objects rather than people to be appreciated for our individuality, beauty and our intelligence. This is the illusion that women have struggled to conform to and keep up with for way too long. How sad.

We discount the woman who doesn't care to impress the opposite sex, but would rather dress comfortably just to feel good in her own skin. Is there not an attractiveness and appeal to that sense of self-confidence?

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If you watch old American films, the way the actresses dressed and moved, slowly and with great confidence you would see that elegance was what every woman aspired to be back in those days. Gone are the days when women would dress up their entire family just to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon at the park.

Sexiness on the other hand is a conformist trait - it's not a coincidence that most of the blatantly sexy people either work in industries where they need to mingle and interact with those of the opposite sex they must impress. Here being sexy is rewarded- both in terms of more career success and more plaudits from their admiring peers.

Sexiness is sexual suggestiveness rather than attractiveness. But when you are comfortable in your own skin, and keep yourself from conforming to how others want you to be, to dress, to behave and to find yourself boxed in by subconscious conformist impulses, then you come across as naturally beautiful and elegant.

It takes sexy and elegant people to recognize people who are sexy and elegant. The way you dress, the way you behave, and the way you move impacts your overall placement on this rudimentary scale.

Is it possible then to be both elegant and sexy, you may ask? My feeling is yes, it's just more challenging that's all. Especially given the atmosphere we live in. The modern era includes very few emblems of elegance. "Style" today is reminiscent of spikes, faux leather, sheer fabric and minimum coverings, all with an overtly suggestive and aggressive, and utterly un-feminine, aesthetic.

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So, how to dial up your own sexiness or elegance?

I would say first master the art of elegance and then add a subtle suggestion of sexiness. Too much blatant sexuality and you would have lost that elegance that is the hallmark of classiness. Style is cultivated over time and involves lessons and choices as one matures. It is never too late to develop or refine one's unique style.

Your overall appearance and mannerisms make a nonverbal, emotional appeal, a branding statement and often form the first impression of you. And as we all know first impressions count in business and in life. Besides, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Know that true elegance is ageless, wholesome and more than skin deep. It is unique and enchanting. It's time for women to start showcasing their individuality and stop giving in to the illusion of sexy created by man. It's time that men are reminded of the difference between sexy and elegant and to realize that women have more to offer than just a body.

For those who want to embrace elegance they must look to women with power and stop following the pop stars and reality show personalities. It's unfortunate that we live in an era of exhibitionist fashion paraded in the crafted couture runway and street styles.

Rather than looking to the cult of celebrity for advice we need a modern muse to bring back the sense of style and elegance. To inspire this generation towards what true elegance is we need a parallel force of fabulous and class to stir young people's imaginations and re-direct their preferences from trashy and scandalous to true style and elegance .

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Elegance is like modesty and class all done up in a really feminine and inviting way. Certainly it has to do with the way we dress: our clothing and makeup. However, it has equally as much, if not more, to do with our attitude and behavior, being polished, mannerly and gracious. Pride of self is a big part of elegance. And when confidence, poise and grace are combined with elegance that can come across as very sexy.

Trashy is not sexy.

People often confuse vulgarity and nakedness with sexiness. They do not realize that there is sexiness in the mystery of leaving some things to the imagination. A rare balance between elegance and sexiness can be achieved without looking provocative, nude, offensive or any variety of adjectives that accurately describe many celebrity fashion icons of today.

I'm nostalgic for the time when women took pride in their appearance, and the level of skill and attention to detail that went into dressmaking. There has been a radical shift in style literacy and it is apparent in the collections being shown on the runway, on the streets, and by the mainstream media today.

Most young adults have no clue what personifies 'elegance'. Most don't even own formal clothing and have no idea what it looks like. Their everyday lives are spent living in jeans, leggings and T-shirts, so that they find it out of character and extremely challenging to dress formally except when they go out on big dates, or the day they get married.

Who can blame them? The only time they see women fully clothed is in magazines that feature women in technology, business or finance, which only goes to prove that curating one's signature style is crucial for success in any professional field.

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For those young women who aspire for aesthetic excellence and wish to achieve grace and elegance with ease and naturalness it would serve them to study such notable elegant icons of the past as Princess Diana, Audrey Hepburn and Princess Grace of Monaco.

Elegance is a statement, an attitude, a way of being. It is timeless.

"Elegance is the only beauty that never fades."

~Audrey Hepburn
Nurse talking to patient in hospital room

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously passed the Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act (H.R. 2713), bipartisan legislation I authored with Representative David Joyce (OH-14) to strengthen the nursing workforce and improve access to health care. While this is an important step forward for the millions of nurses and aspiring nurses in our country, it is particularly poignant as my 18 years in Congress draw to a close.

When my late husband, Congressman Walter Capps, passed away in office, I was not a politician. I was a public health nurse working in our local schools. And while some said that I couldn't be a Member of Congress because I was "just a nurse," it quickly became clear to me that the work I did every day was exactly what Washington needed.

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As nurses, we often wear many hats. We spend much of our time listening to our patients and their families to find the root cause of their ailments and truly understand their needs. We are advocates, navigating a complex system to ensure that our patients receive the best care possible, while gaining valuable insight to our health care system's strengths and weaknesses as a whole. And we are consensus builders, rolling up our sleeves to do whatever is needed to help our patients stay healthy. Simply put: nurses have a critical voice that must be heard.

So when I came to Congress, it was clear to me what I had to do. And I never stopped being a nurse.

That is why one of the first pieces of legislation I championed was the Nurse Reinvestment Act, a bipartisan effort signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002 to expand our nation's federal nursing workforce training programs. I also founded and continue to co-chair the bipartisan House Nursing Caucus, the first caucus established to highlight the critical role nurses play in our health care system. And for the past nine years, I have led efforts to improve nurse staffing numbers in hospitals to help ensure better care for patients and protect against nurse burnout.

Nursing issues were also a key component of the Affordable Care Act. When it became law in 2010, our nation took its first steps toward moving our health care system from one that only focused on those who were sick to one that also emphasizes wellness and prevention. In this law I spearheaded efforts to continue nursing workforce programs, as well as expand access to care through school-based health centers for students, nurse-managed health clinics for primary care in underserved areas, and nurse home visiting programs to support new moms and babies. It also included a Graduate Nurse Education demonstration program to explore ways to give more clinical experience to Advanced Practice Registered Nurses, like nurse practitioners. More broadly, the law highlighted the importance of our health care system working in collaboration as a team while helping patients be more active participants in their care.

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Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, more Americans than ever have health insurance. That has made the need for nurses at all levels of care even clearer. Our country has an increasingly dire shortage of primary care physicians. This shortage is especially problematic among rural and vulnerable populations. But nurses, especially graduate-level prepared Advanced Practice Registered Nurses, have the training and expertise to help fill this gap.

And that is why getting the Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act into law is so important. First enacted 50 years ago, Title VIII programs have helped make it possible for more nurses to deliver high-quality care as demand has increased. The bill bolsters nursing education at all levels, from entry-level preparation through graduate study, and supports institutions that educate nurses to help open spaces in nursing school programs. It helps nurses repay student loans in exchange for working in underserved areas or for going into academia to teach the nurses of tomorrow. And it places a special focus on ensuring nurses are ready and able to care for our nation's aging population.

As anyone who has received medical care can attest, nurses have a powerful presence in medicine. They are caring, attentive and integral members of the health care team. As we look ahead to looming nursing shortages, reauthorization of these critical programs is more important than ever to help bring more nurses into the field, better educate them for the needs in our communities, and keep them in the profession, providing high-quality care to communities across the country.
Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server--its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. 'It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get,' says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. 'If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?'
George Christie was a Hell's Angel for forty years. He was president of the high-profile Ventura chapter of the club and biker legend holds that Songs of Anarchy is modeled after his own story and struggles with the club. For a long time he acted as Sonny Barger's right-hand man, a public face for the club that hung out with the Grateful Dead and other celebrities, even carrying the torch at the 1984 Olympics. After years of dealing with MC politics he decided to retire from the club, but the Hells Angels blackballed him. Now he has a book out telling his tale- Exile on Front Street: My lIfe as a Hells Angel and Beyond. I talked to Christie about the vicious Hells Angels/Mongol war, what it means to be an outlaw and how life in the Hells Angels changed.

There's been a lot of media sensation over the years on the Mongol/Hell's Angel conflict. Can you give us an insider's perspective?

I think I became a lot more level-headed as the war unfolded. We were in the middle of an urban war in downtown southern California towns. We had Mongols get machine guns off their bikes. We had an explosion in a downtown LA in a bike shop that killed two people. I soon became the president of the charter in Los Angeles and tried to lead everybody out of that war. The whole thing started at the Great Western Expo. We went to the Great Expo one night and there was a member there whose wife had run off with a Mongol and that's what really kicked off the whole thing.

We got into a brawl with them. It was like nine of us and anywhere from 40 to 80 Mongols there. We fought it out on the floor of the Great Western and the Mongols fought us and I think they saw us as being a little bit vulnerable. Up to that point we hadn't been challenged in California by anybody - we're like the heavyweight champions of the world. Within three or four hours after the fight, we had a sit down with them. We resolved everything and then several weeks later, probably not even a month, the Mongols called up and they said, hey, you know what we decided to go to a California rocker and the leader at that time said that's not going to work out, but he was a bad negotiator and ultimately he wound up getting killed a few months after that. Somebody shot him in the head.

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The Mongols were an unknown club. I wanted to make peace with them, because I said, look, every time we engage these guys people watch them and observe them. And I go, why don't we just make friends with them, let them wear the California rocker and let them drift off into obscurity and people just didn't want to accept that. Today the Mongols are one of the premier outlaw bike clubs in the world and I think the Hell's Angels helped them get there. I think we played the whole thing wrong. As soon as they retaliated and killed one of our guys in a bar I could see their whole posture was changing.

I've always said that the difference between and outlaw and a criminal is that an outlaw breaks a law that he thinks is wrong and a criminal is just out committing crimes for money. Break down your theory on this.

I think a criminal wakes up in the morning and tries to figure out how he's going to work his trade that day [be it] robbing, breaking and entering, things of that nature. I always saw myself as an outlaw, not a criminal. There were things that the government imposed on society at large and I didn't agree with it. By society's norms it was against the law. I went by a moral standard, not a legal standard. If I did something and I felt it was morally correct I had no problem doing it. If I felt it was immoral to my standards then I stayed away from it.

But I think it has to do with a position of morality and if you think something is moral or immoral. Sticking a gun to someone's face and taking what they've worked for, that's an immoral act. Jesse James was an outlaw, but I thought there were extenuating circumstances what drove him to that situation. Albert Einstein was also an outlaw. I mean he came up with theories and people ridiculed him. They thought he was crazy. There's all kinds of outlaws out there. It just depends what your perception is.

How did life in the Hell's Angels change and what made you decide to leave?

Back in the old days being a Hell's Angel and being a leader in the Hell's Angels was very intoxicating. It's a lot of power, a lot of ego involved and we got to a point where we had to be very cautious of who we let in, because the Hell's Angel patch, especially in the underworld, it became like a carte blanche for people. As our reputation grew and we went from state to state and then country to country it became a worldwide organization that wielded a lot of power, you know, rolling into a bar, rolling down the highway, wherever we went. We created a lot of interest and our presence was known.

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When you're riding across country with 25 guys and you ride into Utah and you're on Highway 70, you're leaving Utah going into Colorado and they've got a roadblock set up, because they want to explain what they expect and don't expect from you that's a big impact. Imagine going on vacation with your family and there's a road block set up to welcome you into the state and to tell you what they expect and don't expect. This is because they have a preconceived notion of what you're all about and what you're capable of, whether it's real or its legend it doesn't matter because that's what they believe and that's their reality. It's a very powerful image. It's a very powerful feeling. You have to learn how to balance the two if you want to stay successful year after year and if you want to stay on the street year after year.
Voters received a useful look yesterday into the administration of justice that might characterize the presidency of Donald Trump, should they elect him in November. Responding to the arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami in connection with bombings in New York City and New Jersey, Trump, at a rally in Florida, expressed his frustration with what will happen next.

"But the bad part is now we will give him amazing hospitalization," Trump said. "He will be taken care of by some of the best doctors in the world. He will be given a fully modern and updated hospital room. And he will probably even have room service, knowing the way our country is," he said.

Two troubling assumptions are embedded in this statement. The first is that suspects deserve a secondary, presumably less competent, level of medical care while in custody. Seemingly, Trump would be more satisfied if Rahami received poor medical care in a rundown hospital and was made to walk somewhere, though injured, to get food. The second, implied in the first, is that Rahami is guilty (and thus not deserving of the best medical care). Admittedly, this is what most Americans believe, and it may turn out to be true, but the Constitution guarantees a presumption of innocence, pending the verdict of a jury. Guilt or innocence in the United States is not decided in a campaign rally. For a presidential candidate (or president) to presume guilt is to prejudice the judicial system and treat Constitutional protections as inconvenient barriers.

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"And on top of all of that, he will be represented by an outstanding lawyer. His case will go through the various court systems for years, and in the end, people will forget and his punishment will not be what it once would have been. What a sad situation", Trump said. "We must have speedy, but fair trials, and we must deliver a just and very harsh punishment to these people," Trump told the Florida rally.

Unpacking this part of Trump's statement, we again see the presumption of guilt. We note Trump's admiration for a speedy trial but his anger that the provision of the best possible defense, also a feature of our justice system, is a barrier to delivering the "just and very harsh punishment" that he has concluded, prior to a trial, Rahami deserves. Further, he assumes that, in the end, the punishment will not fit the crime, though he presents no evidence that a softer penalty will come just because time has passed.

"We're trying to be so politically correct in our country," Trump also told supporters at the rally. He has also urged the government to allow police to "profile" citizens. What that profiling would entail, such as stopping people because of their race, ethnicity, or religion, was left unsaid. Rahami, we should remember, is a U.S. citizen, and profiling has been banned by law and court decision.

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Perhaps the gravest danger of Trump's comments is that his words foster delegitimizing the nation's justice system. If it does not produce the result he wants,, it is ipso facto corrupt. He has done this before, claiming that the federal judge in the trial of Trump University would not be impartial because "he has an inherent conflict of interest" - his Mexican heritage.

Delegitimizing American institutions appears to be a conscious strategy of the Trump campaign. He previously applied this approach to the Republican Party primary process ("rigged") and the Pennsylvania electoral system ("the only way I can lose Pennsylvania is if . . . cheating goes on"). He has applied it to the media ("totally dishonest") and to the fairness of presidential debates: "By the way, Lester [Holt - moderator of the first debate] is a Democrat. It's a phony system. They are all Democrats. It's a very unfair system." (Holt has been a registered Republican since 2003.)

Perhaps Donald Trump prefers a country where you get a very fast trial, only a cursory defense, and can be declared guilty by the president in advance. Perhaps he prefers a nation where suspects are thrown in jail with little or substandard medical care. Perhaps he prefers a political process that is much more predictable for the "obvious" choice of the people and a press much more likely to be cowed by the attacks of politicians.


By Charanya Kannan, Harvard Business School, Class of '17 & Harbus Contributing Writer

"It is like looking for a needle in a haystack" describes Jim Searing with a mild chuckle, when asked to describe the executive search business. The founder and retired CEO of Lochlin Partners, a top notch executive search firm, has spent an impressive 32 years in the "head-hunting" industry. A Marine Corps veteran, he graduated from HBS in the summer of 1979, before setting out to hone his sales and marketing skills at behemoths like AT&T and Arthur Young. After learning the executive search consulting business at Arthur Young, he became driven by the desire to start-up on his own, anchored with his core skill and interest of personal sales. He struck out with a partner to found Kirkman & Searing, and grew it into a highly successful Mid-Atlantic search firm.

The executive search industry can be broadly classified into contingency search and retainer search. Contingency search is typically for entry or mid-level positions, where agencies get paid a commission upon recruitment. It typically involves quick and efficient matching through database searches. Retainer search, which is the space in which Searing has always specialized, is the more elite search space where firms are paid a retainer fee to find the perfect person for the upper echelons of the managerial tree. The search often involves several months of vetting scores of candidates, narrowing to a finalist slate of a handful, interviewing them many times, as well as, often, their family, friends and business colleagues.

After running his own firm for about ten years, his firm was acquired by the largest global retainer firm, Korn / Ferry Inc. As a senior partner, he headed their mid-Atlantic market and technology practice. After several years there, he was again driven by the entrepreneurial motive and moved to help found Foster Searing, Ltd. which was eventually renamed Lochlin Partners to ensure perpetuity beyond just the founding members.

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Searing explained that some searches can be quite difficult; such as finding an outsider to run a family business for the first time. Yet, Searing recalls one of as his most difficult assignments as the search for a Chief Information Officer for the IRS. "The IRS has some of the most archaic technology systems that could be put in a museum, while also having some of the most advanced IT systems in the world. When tethered together, the end result is that it almost never works" he mirthfully remarks. "We had to find a CIO who could not only make sense of and improve upon all of this, but who was willing to move to the IRS salary level which was about one-tenth of what that level of expertise commanded in the IT industry".



How does one go about these searches? "Putting on the HBS market segmentation hat is the first step" he says. The search process begins by narrowing down the entire universe of applicable industries into specific, relevant sub-segments. A list of companies is then populated, from which evolves a list of potential executives. "But this linear and logical process must be complemented by a more random and parallel process of networking" he says. A search person's labyrinth of network becomes critical to obtaining informal pieces of information and other referred potential candidates. After all, recruiting firms seldom look for someone who is looking of job, in fact, they usually prefer someone who isn't necessarily looking for a situation.

Once the finalist potential three or four candidates have been identified and vetted, they are interviewed multiple times in multiple settings. Their references and spouses are interviewed too, and flags will be raised if only positive attributes are heard. It is equally important to understand their shortcomings while evaluating the overall fit. The whole process involves around 80 interviews from start to finish. "We brief and debrief not only the client firm's executives but also the candidate to make sure that each understands everything possible about the other" says Searing. Candidate selection is only one part of the process. A smooth onboarding process until they are well settled into their role is another part of the consulting. Helping them negotiate and find their way through the complicated maze of a new company and culture, having an open dialogue with them and the firm to ensure alignment and redressal of teething problems are all part of the retainer firm's work. There are no typical metrics in place to measure the success of a candidate search, but if the hire stays in the job for about 3-5 years, it is reasonable to assume that the search was a success. And whenever it doesn't work, it is seldom for lack of skills. It is almost always a case of cultural or expectation misfit.

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Do recruiters look for candidates outside the client's industry? "It all depends on the client's requirements. At the CXO level, some clients do look for people with specific skills rather than industry expertise - but that is somewhat rare. When an industry is faced with a major shift, or when the company is looking to change its focus, candidates may be hired outside their traditional industry. IBM recruited Gerstner who didn't have a tech background because they wanted to focus more on marketing. Most client companies do have a strong preference for candidates within their industry. Even if the client is open to looking at outsiders, at the interview stage the connection is usually stronger with people from their own industry and most companies end up hiring them. As a recruiter, our role is to find what the client wants. We do advise them if we find an exceptional outsider, but this isn't the norm and is not our primary role. If someone is looking to change their current industry, my suggestion would be to use their functional expertise to pivot. Changing industries is easier earlier on one's career and, again, at the CXO level, but is more difficult in the 5- 20 years experience bracket."

How has he seen the industry transform throughout his long career? Searing says technology, especially Linkedin and Google searches, has drastically changed and shortened the candidate identification piece of the search cycle. "In the dark ages, candidate identification was about 60-70% of the work; it was pretty labor intensive" he laughs. Now, it's also easier to directly & confidentially connect with candidates. But it is harder to "administer the truth serum" in interviews as candidates have become much more interview savvy. Therefore, candidate evaluation and fit are now some of the most difficult and value-added parts of the search process.

What is Searing's advice to the batch of HBS graduating 37 years after he did? "I have three pieces of advice to give. First, if you know what your passion is - just go do it. No excuses there. If you do not know your passion, join a large firm. It provides you with more scope and leverage to experiment while looking solid and legitimate on your resume. And whatever you choose, do the job really well. It simply provides you with more opportunities".

"Second, network. Develop relationships not only with colleagues and bosses but also with juniors, vendors and clients. 80% of jobs are sourced through networking, and 90% of those are through networking with a person who is about three to five degrees-of-separation away. Figure out smart ways to keep in touch: it could be a simple act of emailing relevant articles once in a while. Create a list of 50 most important people you'd like to stay in touch with, refresh the list periodically, and make sure you actively reach out to them. Don't hesitate to ask people out for coffee".

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"Third, save 'exit money'. If you find yourself caught in an ethical dilemma or a tough spot, having saved money can make your correct exit that much easier. And, if you followed my first and second pieces of advice, your exit shouldn't be tough either".

I promptly asked him out for coffee as the interview ended, when he visits Boston that is.

Did Searing find the right CIO for IRS? "Yes we did. We found an extremely qualified candidate who didn't mind the drastic pay cut as he was looking to give back to the society. We not just find the needle in the haystack, we find the perfect needle in the haystack - at least 80-90% of the time" he laughed.

__________________________
1.Love. We like to believe love conquers all, we like to also believe that being in love is forever, but often we fall out of love, or our love evolves into a more platonic love. Sometimes we realize that in fact we were more in lust than love even.

2.Career. We want to support each other's careers, be there for each other every step of the way, but what if one or like the Pitts careers, both, are very time consuming and take you away from home often. What happens when your careers actually drive you away from the people you marry, it's a common theme, whether in the military, airline industry or film industry, constant demands of being apart is hard to battle during a marriage.

3.Children. We don't like to admit that children can drive us apart in our marriage, but it's something I hear daily from divorcees. Being married and purely focused on each other's needs is a lot easier to keep a marriage together, than when you start a family, and now all your attention, love time is divided between, your spouse and 1-2-3-4-5-6 as the Pitts children. There are only so many hours in the day to fill everyone's needs, and rightly or wrongly as parents, I know I did, we shift that attention to fulfilling our children's needs first, which can make our spouses feel neglected.

4.Money. Money can always be a battle field, it doesn't matter if you have a ton of it or none of it, having two people who do not have the same thoughts, spending habits or ideas about money can lead to added stress.

5.Spotlight on you, OK chances are we don't have the spot light on us or our marriages like the Pitts do, but we can all relate to the feeling of having any external people trying to influence, or cause trouble within our own marriages. The Pitts may have Hollywood and the paparazzi but maybe we have in laws, family member, friends who exaggerate issues by putting a spot light on our partners or our shortcomings.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a rally with supporters at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina, U.S. September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

We might as well be watching a 30-car pile-up the way Americans are holding hands over their eyes trying to avoid the grisly bits of the most grotesque presidential race we have witnessed in this, the second decade of the 21st Century. Of course, it's only the secnd election during that time, but still.

That is not to say 2012 wasn't genuinely gruesome with more than its share of cataclysmic collisions and demolition derby debacles, but this time, they're headed downhill faster than an 18- wheeler with burned out brakes carrying a load of nitroglycerine on the western slope of the Andes.

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This is a race to rock bottom to see which team ends up least wrecked and right now they're both jostling for pole position. Everybody is losing paint riding into each other while running over rocky roads gouged by their own staffs. Must be why they call them pit crews.

You've heard the term "Accidents waiting to happen?" Well the opposite is "accidents waiting for a break in the action." The two most polarizing drivers in the history of American politics have veered into so many walls, both their nicknames could be "Crash."

Recently the Donald and the Hillary pulled into the paddock to attack their opponent's foreign policies. Which has come as a shock to the majority of spectators who were unaware either had a foreign policy that didn't consist on calling in air strikes on the other's campaign. And tire irons swung at their fuel lines.

Now we're getting to the point in this short track race where driver fatigue kicks in, and the unforced errors have begun to accumulate. Hillary Clinton said she was wrong to call half of Trump's supporters a basket of deplorables. And she was wrong. It's more like 63 percent.

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Donald Trump used the Mexican president as a prop, then gave an immigration speech that spurred most of his Hispanic advisory board to resign. Although to be honest, Trump Hispanic Advisory Board sounds like Democratic Leadership Council. Trump also praised Vladimir Putin for being a strong leader with an 84 percent approval rating. Would be higher, but the KGB hasn't been able to track down the other 16 percent. Yet.

Even the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, got in trouble for not knowing what Aleppo was. Presumably he was thinking a small leopard or someone suffering from the initial stages of Hansen's Disease.

Time is running out for all the major candidates to grab some clean air. Hillary needs to prove she's not a robotic automaton who will do or say anything to get elected. And she intends to do that as soon as she installs a larger hard drive & updates her operating system. Pneumonia, right.

Trump knows he needs to assure the electorate he's more than some spoiled rich guy whose diplomatic horsepower is measured in arrogant smirks; he's even gone so far as to hire a female campaign manager to smirk for him.

The good news is the finish line is only two months away. The bad news is one of these lug nuts is going to take the checkered flag. The upside being, on November 8th, our long national nightmare will be over. Until November 9th, when the funny car race for 2020 begins. Gentlemen and ladies, prepare to start your engines.

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"We knew that stripping of the rights began immediately after the coup attempt. There are severe restrictions on social converstaions and medical treatment. The prisoners (in need) are told that because of emergency rule, they can not be taken to hospital. The prison filled beyond its capacity. We know for certain that those held in there are able sleep in turns. Small cells are serving as wards for many, where one has to wash dishes in toaletts, no ventilation. prisoners told us they had to stick their faces to the window glasses to be able to breathe. Those kept there for long now have health issues. There are nude body checks when entering and exiting these tiny wards. There is talk about hunger strikes now. Chaos is reigning in the prisons, as a matter of fact."

"Let me tell you about a woman who came to IHD. She said to us: 'We have no relation at all with FETO ('Fethullah Gulen Terror Organisation', as the official saying goes). We are just a conservative family. My husband was fired. I could meet him in his fourth day in prison, with bruises in his face. When I asked what happened, police officers intervened. If I asked anything, he said, I would also be arrested. My husband was told that if he had said anything to me he would remain in prison for 30 years. My husband was truly frightened. 'Please' he said to the officer, 'don't put me back to police detention room! I prefer to serve 30 years here."'

"We visited as a 18-people delegation to Diyarbakr and Nusaybin. We were told that 'old style torture had come back', that electric tools and strappados were taken out from where they were hidden."


By Yiannis Giokas

In the last few years, we have seen a shift in the way heists, fraud, terrorist attacks and cross-border disputes are executed. In an effort to minimize their chances of being identified, adversaries have moved from the material world to a cyber one.

Today, we have security silos that don't communicate with one another. Security vendors won't talk to each other due to fierce competition for market share, and in the news, we are constantly hearing about new data breaches and successful heists.

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Incidents like these highlight the need for cyber collaboration between public authorities, international organizations and private companies. If you are a founder, CEO, CTO or board member, you should be sharing the forensic data you collect each time you are under attack to help build counter-measures faster, and alert other companies and governmental agencies in the event of a larger outbreak.

When I was the founder of my former company, our team developed "MOREAL," a threat intelligence platform that was later acquired by my current employer. Platforms like this have been around for a few years now; they're developed primarily by startups and established security vendors. But while they're a very good start, they're only touching a small fragment of the problem. Many companies are not yet fully aware of the cost of cybersecurity attacks, and these platforms have been out of reach. The cost to have them implemented is substantial, and it's not guaranteed that vendors would exchange information with one another.

The U.S. Government has been taking a number of cybersecurity measures: They've initiated the processes for naming a federal CISO (a chief information security officer) and have introduced a threat-level scale and a directive for cyber cooperation on incident handling. Other nations, like the United Kingdom and the European Union, are also moving in this direction. I expect more countries will follow the same path.

But the cooperation between involved parties from both the public and private sectors shouldn't only be on the responsive end. Sharing information would help show early indicators of attacks, promote a faster detection of threats and lead to a shorter resolution time for the public, without hurting the growing industry of security startups and enterprises.

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By creating a threat intelligence exchange, all threat-related information would be available anonymously, all stakeholders would have access to it, and each participant could use this information to protect their operations (e.g. a public authority or a private corporation) or to make a profit (e.g. a security venture).

Why would the exchange of threat intelligence be critical to success? Data runs over multiple layers, vendors, apps, systems and operators. Cyber attacks originate from multiple sources and come with multiple vectors. What organizations need is the capability to address an attack before it happens: Trend data and insights can enable attacks to be foiled proactively. Threat intelligence platforms can identify abnormal patterns and behaviors and provide customers with relevant alerts and mitigation strategies. The coverage of the data analyzed is key to ensuring success.

As carriers of high-volume, global internet traffic, telecom operators can play an important role. If they can exchange threat intelligence with these platforms in place, they will be able to provide organizations with a unique behavioral-based security of all the data running through their network. Now, imagine the advantage of having not only operators but vendors, enterprises, academia and governmental agencies participating in a threat intelligence exchange that shares details of past attacks and malicious activities at a multi-layer level. The sheer volume of data insights to analyze and the knowledge that would be attained regarding malicious behavior and threats would put us one step further towards achieving optimal security.

If something like this materialized, news of cyber fraud arrests and state-sponsored campaigns would be more common instead, and stakeholders would live in a much safer cyberspace.
By Sam Mulopulos

By now almost everyone has heard the bleak story: climate change will soon end civilization unless humanity does something. Population engineering is the newest proposed answer to dealing with the issue. Unfortunately, population engineering is not really a solution at all; it is merely a twenty-first century rebranding of discredited Malthusian views.

Population engineering, as it's euphemistically called, contends that if human beings have fewer children, the climate would be better off. They assert that fewer children would result in a greater reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than tripling nuclear energy or doubling vehicular fuel efficiency. People beget more people, and more people beget pollution. However, the population engineering crowd has things backwards. Instead of focusing on population reduction efforts, those concerned about climate change should focus on pollution reduction and improving energy efficiency, which are themselves impossible without human capital.

Aspiring population engineers argue that state-sponsored ad campaigns combined with ending tax breaks for families or levying fines on each additional child a couple brings into this world are the right ways to reduce pollution and save the Earth.

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Yet, population engineers misunderstand where solutions to problems come from. For example, Johns Hopkins bioethicist Travis Rieder argues that more people will only yield further climate disaster, effectively resurrecting the thoroughly discredited arguments of Thomas Malthus. In 18th century England, Malthus argued that humanity's burgeoning population would outstrip global food production, causing widespread famine and misery. Ever since, fearmongers have invoked Malthus to persuade others of the hopelessness of humankind's future sustainability as a species.

This is all to say that population engineers have been beguiled by the ghost of antiquated thinking. Solutions don't just appear out of nowhere. They are developed, tested, and tried through the collaborative efforts of countless people and communities. Malthus was wrong not because enough food appeared to prevent famine at the eleventh hour. Malthus failed to account for the fact that more people meant more brains and hands to develop increasingly effective, efficient methods of food production to provide more calories to more people.

The same logic is true for climate change. Yes, the population engineers are right that it is unlikely that any one single child will be the one to save the planet. But that misses the point. We shouldn't think that the solution to international climate change will come at the hands of some savant messiah, but it will come from the deliberate work of millions of people: diplomats, engineers, inventors, teachers, and, yes, parents who work collaboratively in a free market to share ideas, institute best practices, and design and implement the technology to fix the planet's problems. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it wasn't built by a single person either.

Take the airplane for example. The commercial jet aircraft is not the product of a lone individual. The Wright Brothers demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was possible, but it was hundreds of thousands of other people, working over the course of a century, who developed the technology for jet engines, cabin pressurization, and fine-tuned instruments. Even today, thousands of people are working on the next round of innovations to make air travel cleaner and smarter. At this moment, Airbus is not just hiring a single engineer to develop better products. In fact, in 2012, Airbus had 12,000 openings for new innovators, for which they hired 9,000 employees.

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Another example comes from the Atlantic coast, where scientists and engineers at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute worked with experts and stakeholders in the fishing community to design a new net that reduces bycatch of the region's diminished cod stock. After much collaboration, these eco-innovators realized that because cod consistently swim downwards after being ensnared, an ultra-low-opening bottom trawl net provides a means for cod to swim free while still catching the trawler's preferred fish, the haddock.

No single person on this project woke up one morning with this solution in mind. Creative ideas, like this one, originated collectively from the research and experiences of many different people. Limiting the number and diversity of individuals who can contribute to the development of solutions is a shortsighted and self-defeating approach to environmentalism.

Fortunately, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute isn't alone. There is plenty of inspiring work being done by people to address global environmental challenges. More people with the brain power to dream up solutions and the muscle power to implement them is exactly what the countries of the world need. No matter what anyone says, people are much more than just pollutants.
This year's 'Best of' goes to local
iHeartMedia Set To Launch 2 Paid Streaming Music Services

iHeartMedia, the parent company of broadcast and online giant iHeartRadio, is set to announce two paid streaming music services this week, according to multiple reports. While it will face stiff competition, the move is a logical brand extension; and given its reach, could find traction.

__________________________________

Terrestrial radio behemoth iHeartMedia is set to announce a paid streaming music service this week.

"The paid streaming service, the first of its kind for a traditional radio outfit, will include a $5-a-month ad-free radio station and a $10-a-month on-demand music service, " reports the New York Post.

iHeartMedia has yet to secure all of the needed licences, according to multiple sources. So, while it may be announced this week, it could be several months before launch.

The company's advantage is its 800+ broadcast radio stations and multitude of online channels. But iHeartMedia is also burdened by huge debt, and losing money at the rate that other music streamers have would only ad to its woes.

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Cheshire's 1898 Town Hall has been listed on the National Register.

Cheshire Town Hall Accepted Into Register Of Historic Places



The Selectmen hope the designation will allow for grant funding for repairs to Town Hall.

CHESHIRE, Mass.  Town Hall has been accepted into the National Register of Historic Places, which will allow the town to apply for historical restoration grants.

Historical Commission Chairwoman Diane Hitter told the Selectmen on Tuesday that the commission attended a Massachusetts Historical Commission meeting at the State Archives in Dorchester last week for application approval.

"There were only six buildings for the entire year, and we were put up for the nomination over a number of applicants that never got as far as ours," Hitter said. "We were accepted without any question ... it's a great thing."

After the nomination, town representatives were asked last month to attend the meeting.

Now that Town Hall is on the Register, the town can apply for restoration grants to make repairs to the 1898 Colonial revival brick building.

"Hopefully with that, we can get some money to spruce this place up," Chairman Paul Astorino said.

The Selectmen opened up bids for the Windsor and Wells road paving project. A combined total of nearly 9,800 feet of road will be paved.

Lane Construction came in the highest at $67 per ton of blacktop. Warner Brothers came in at $66.50, DelSignore at $66 per ton. HMA was the lowest at $65.88.

Department of Public Works Director Peter LeFebvre said he would review the bids and this round of surface paving should finish the two roads.

He said next he would like to resurface part of West Mountain Road.

He said many roads in Cheshire, but specifically West Mountain Road, need a lot of work but currently the town can only afford to pave.

"It needs a lot of work but you cant afford it," LeFebvre said. "Thats why blacktopping is the answer for a few years but not the remedy."

He said there are two West Mountain Road culverts that will have to be replaced. He said the town can expect a hefty bill.

"What used to be a $5,000 project is $120,000 now on most of them," he said. "You can't just throw one in anymore, especially if is a perennial stream or a river bank.

Astorino said he also had concerns about the guardrails on Route 116 that are washing out.

LeFebvre said they are under the town's purview and he estimates it would cost between $2 million to $3 million to do the proper culvert work.

"You have 300 feet of 6-foot diameter culvert and if you go by today's rules and regulations it is all going to have to be put in as an open-bottom culvert," he said. "There isnt much we can do."

Selectman Robert Ciskowski said even if the road is repaired, it is still vulnerable to washouts. He said it may be beneficial to move the troublesome part of the road.

LeFebvre said the state has looked at this and it would be very expensive and difficult.

"There is no room to do anything. You are right on top of the river and to make the road wider you have to either remove the whole river or pipe in the river and go over the top of it," he said. "Which I don't think is going to pass."

In other business, LeFebvre said Geobash, the local geocache group, cleaned up Stafford Hill Monument as a community service project. He said the group plans to come to the board next year and ask permission to use the area for an event.

Cheshire Town Hall Nominated to National Register by iBerkshires.com on Scribd
Southern Vermont College Joins Community Organizations on Hydroelectric Contract

BENNINGTON, Vt.  Southern Vermont College will participate in the local effort that is bringing back hydroelectric generation to Vermont.



SVC and its campus neighbor Southwestern Vermont Medical Center have both signed on as part of the Pownal Tannery Hydroelectric Net Metering Group, which will help offset some of their electrical use with a local renewable resource.



"This is a win-win partnership for our college, our community and the state we live and work in," SVC President David R. Evans said. "This hydropower project not only helps to change the energy landscape in Vermont away from non-renewable resources, it also creates new jobs, helps to bring back fish passages that have not existed for years, and substantially remediates streambed pollution from earlier industrial uses. While the college will not be directly powered by the hydro plant, we can offset most or all of our electricity use through our participation in the net-metering group."



Evans and Jennifer Macksey, vice president for Administration and Finance at SVC, met with North Bennington resident and entrepreneur William Scully, the head of Hoosic River Hydro, early in 2016 to discuss the partnership, and immediately knew that SVC wanted to be a part of the project.


Alex Tierney of Pittsfield is enrolling in George Mason University's Master's Program in Assistive Technology.

Young Man Living With Disability Awarded Reiter & Walsh Scholarship

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Alex Tierney of Pittsfield is the recipient of Reiter & Walsh P.C.'s second annual birth injury scholarship.



Alex wrote about his diagnosis of fetal stroke, as well as his use of assistive technologies during his academic career. While doctors predicted he would never walk, talk or be in a mainstream classroom, he graduated from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts with high honors and devoted his time to tutoring and mentoring children with disabilities.



Alex used his essay to explain his motivations for enrolling in George Mason University's Master's Program in Assistive Technology. He describes his own personal use of assistive technologies and explains how critical these technologies were to his academic success.



He cites his volunteering experience at a local elementary school as the event that spurred his interest in assistive technology advocacy. While mentoring a second-grade student labeled as a "non-reader," he found alternative communication methods that worked for the boy. As the child began reading his first words, Alex found his passion.



He began volunteering at United Cerebral Palsy of the Berkshires, leading to employment as an AT assistant. As he continued his work with UCP, he began to wonder why the public schools he attended never offered assistive devices to the students that needed them to achieve their maximum academic potential  in spite of Congress' 2004 IDEA Act, which was meant to provide students with disabilities with necessary aids and services to assist in their education.
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Montreal, 21 September 2016  The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is launching the recruitment campaign for the 2017 Young Aviation Professionals Programme (YAPP) today.

The programme, which is managed under ICAOs leadership, is a joint initiative with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Airports Council International (ACI).

It provides a unique professional development opportunity as selected candidates will contribute to one or more of ICAOs Strategic Objectives under the mentorship of an ICAO subject-matter expert. Focussing on the inter-relationships between the work of ICAO and that of the airline and airport industries, they will also work in close collaboration with IATA and ACI experts.

Talented professionals embarking on their aviation careers from around the world are invited to apply.

Applicants must hold advanced university qualifications and have already acquired a minimum of two years of employment in the aviation industry or in aviation-related regulatory activities. Due consideration will be given to gender equity and geographic diversity as part of the selection process.

ICAO is forecasting that air traffic volumes will double within fifteen years, and so ensuring the international civil aviation network has sufficient human resources available to manage this growth will be critical to ensuring its sustainability and the sustainability of aviations contributions to socio-economic development, explained ICAOs Secretary General, Dr. Fang Liu. Along with the ICAO programme for the Next Generation of Aviation Professionals, ICAOs continuing support of the Young Aviation Professionals Programme is one of the measures that we are implementing to help States address this challenge.

Interested candidates who meet the selection criteria are invited to submit their application at ICAOs employment site by the closing date of 21 October 2016. The target date for the commencement of the programme, and the reporting of the selected candidates to ICAO Headquarters in Montreal, will be towards the middle of February 2017. Any questions relating to eligibility criteria, the application process, and the selection of candidates must be addressed to pod@icao.int.

Human Resources Contact for Applicants

pod@icao.int

Media Contact



William Raillant-Clark

Communications Officer

wraillantclark@icao.int

+1 514-954-6705

+1 514 409-0705

Twitter: @wraillantclark
Tenaskas 2nd Solar Project in Imperial Valley Begins Commercial Operation

El Centro, California - The 150-megawatt (MW) Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy Center West, a new solar plant near Seeley capable of powering 55,000 homes, is now fully operational. Southern California residents and businesses will be able to take advantage of this renewable resource via the projects 25-year agreement with San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E).

Tenaska Imperial West, located 14 miles west of El Centro on Interstate 8, consists of 1.8 million photovoltaic panels. Construction began in November 2014. The project employed more than 800 construction workers at peak, approximately 75 percent of whom were from Imperial County. Construction spending totaled more than $20 million in local contracts and resulted in $2.8 million in local sales taxes.

Were pleased to deliver another strong project to the California grid. A lot of credit goes to SDG&E for building the Sunrise Powerlink as a renewable energy pipeline that has helped to facilitate renewable energy growth in the region, said Jerry Crouse, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-based Tenaska.

Tenaska Imperial West is Tenaskas second project in the Valley. In 2011, Tenaska was the first energy developer to begin construction of a utility-scale solar project in Valley and the first to connect to the Sunrise Powerlink with Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy Center South. It began commercial operation in 2013. First Solar, Inc., managed construction and operates both plants under contract with Tenaska.

Our projects would not have been possible without strong collaboration with state and local leaders, and we look forward to building on that foundation into the long term, Crouse said.

Over the past five years, the two plants hired more than 1,300 construction workers, more than 70 percent of whom were from Imperial County communities, and paid approximately $6 million in local sales taxes. Contracts with local vendors and suppliers totaled more than $40 million. Together, the plants can supply enough energy for approximately 100,000 California homes.

Powering homes and businesses with universal solar is good for our customers and our state, said Emily Shults, SDG&E vice president of energy procurement. Sunrise Powerlink is the foundation for giving all of our customers access to renewable energy. We look forward to all of the innovations on the horizon that will unlock clean, safe and affordable energy choices for our customers.

California law requires utilities to secure 50 percent of their power from renewable energy resources by 2030. The states Renewables Portfolio Standard law, combined with the added access to transmission infrastructure, created a strong market for utility-scale solar projects in the Valley.

Since Tenaska Imperial South began commercial operation, Tenaska affiliates have awarded $24,000 to Imperial County students pursuing post-secondary education, in addition to supporting community organizations, such as Imperial Valley Community Foundation, Imperial County Food Bank and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Imperial Valley.
Companies use instincts to elicit behavior from consumers, employees

West Lafayette, Indiana - The obvious strategy for a clothing retailer is to have as much product on the sales floor as possible to yield high sales. The clothing needs to be available to be bought, right?

For women, it turns out, thats a counterproductive strategy. Research shows that women want to feel a sense of individuality when buying clothes. They dont want to know that hundreds of other women in town also bought that dress.

The clothing store, Zara, capitalized on this instinctual behavior by limiting the quantity of items and regularly moving those items around the store, so each time a woman shops at Zara, shes not sure whether those pants she loved last time will be there or if theyll ever go on sale. This tactic makes her think that she should buy them as soon as possible or they might be gone.

Purdue University Professor Karthik Kannan calls the concept employed by Zara design for instincts, and it has far-reaching effects, from creating products to developing processes for multinational corporations.

As businesses grow in this age of rapid technology changes, theyre having to pivot more quickly as technological innovation happens. Design for instincts essentially tells businesses they need to stop and consider the consumer  and human nature  to be successful. This seems obvious, but it can get lost on our next big thing technology landscape.

Its a very simple, but yet profound, concept, says Kannan, a professor in Purdues Krannert School of Management.

He will explore how the concept may play into the future economy and how to best prepare the next generation for it during his presentation at Dawn or Doom 16, a conference on the risks and rewards of new technology at Purdue University. Dawn or Doom will be held Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 3 and 4, on the Purdue West Lafayette campus and is free and open to the public.

A focus on human instincts also is important to major companies like General Electric, a big employer of Purdue graduates, both from the perspective of its customers and its employees. To keep up with rapid change, and to attract top talent, GE decided it would have to develop intentional and dynamic processes and policies. This led to the technique called FastWorks.

FastWorks incorporates a cross-section of departments to form teams that are then in constant communication with the consumer. This way, theyre better able to stay on top of what works and what doesnt, regardless of trends.

Its thinking about what the consumer need is and designing systems with their input, Kannan says. Before they would do all the deep data dives and then figure out what best to do. Theyre now saying, Let me go ask the consumer; its about understanding the end user.

Employee policy-wise, GE is trying something less common in companies of its size and maturity, but in place routinely at some startups in Silicon Valley: unlimited vacation days. The idea is that managers and executives are responsible for seeing that what needs to get done gets done, and as long as it does work schedules are fluid. Kannan says this appeals to an employees instinctual desire to be independent in their job.

He thinks that soon well see many traditional jobs become much like jobs at GE and at tech startups. Theyll require a value-add component, where employees need to be constantly innovating and finding new ways of reaching consumers, are adept at teamwork and have a level of freedom in their work that would have seemed odd in the past.
International Brain Station

Washington, DC - The U.S. Department of States Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State, in collaboration with The Kavli Foundation, The U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Global Partnerships Forum, hosted a side event during the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) high level week to elevate brain science as a foreign policy priority.

The world confronts tremendous social and economic burdens derived from brain diseases, with an estimated global cost of $6 trillion USD spent on issues related to mental illness alone by 2030. Developing and deploying new technologies to improve mapping of the brain and its functions will be critical for understanding the biological underpinnings of neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimers disease, Parkinsons disease, autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression, and traumatic brain injury. Understanding such diseases is a G7 priority under Japans leadership and contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3  ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all.

International collaboration among governments, the private sector, academia, and philanthropic organizations will be essential for tackling a task as complex as understanding the human brain. Toward this end, the United States, in collaboration with Japan, Germany, Argentina, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development, announced the launch of an International Brain Initiative, part of which is a virtual International Brain Station, to enhance and facilitate global collaboration on both basic and disease-focused brain science research.

The International Brain Initiative launch event featured remarks by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology John Holdren, and Director of the U.S. National Science Foundation France Cordova, and followed the Coordinating Global Brain Project conference (www.rockefeller.edu/globalbrain) at Rockefeller University where scientists, funding agencies, and private foundations from around the world met to coordinate global investments in brain research. The International Brain Initiative aims to foster coordination of large-scale brain projects around the world in partnership with governments, research institutions, private sector, foundations, advocacy groups, and social innovators. With its genesis in the scientific community, the International Brain Station concept will be a community-based mechanism for coordinating data and information from brain science projects around the world.
Meeting of the International Syria Support Group

New York - Members of the ISSG met this morning in New York City to take measure of the situation in Syria.

They agreed that, despite continued violence, there was still an imperative to pursue a nationwide cessation of hostilities based on the arrangement reached last week in Geneva between the United States and Russia.

Secretary Kerry condemned the airstrikes conducted yesterday, which killed aid workers attempting to deliver food, water and medicine to besieged areas of Aleppo. He and the other ministers expressed their condolences for the loss of innocent life and reaffirmed the absolute necessity of establishing immediately the unimpeded, safe and sustained flow of access for humanitarian supplies.

The members also discussed the importance of continuing to put pressure on the terrorist groups Da'esh and Al Nusra, while recognizing the difficulties of separating al Nusra from the moderate opposition in some areas of the country. They emphasized, in this context, the imperative of ending indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilians, which is exploited by terrorist groups. And they stressed the absolute criticality of creating the conditions necessary to resume UN-led political talks in coming weeks.

Finally, they agreed to meet again later in the week to discuss next steps.
United States Welcomes Cooperation With Sudan on Counterterrorism

Washington, DC - The United States welcomes Sudan's recent efforts to increase counterterrorism cooperation with the United States. In recent months, Sudan has taken important steps to counter ISIL and other terrorist groups and has sought to prevent their movement into and through Sudan. Sudans continued cooperation will bolster international efforts to combat terrorism in the broader region. Subject to and consistent with U.S. law, we will work cooperatively with the Government of Sudan on counterterrorism to enhance the security of both our countries.

While countering terrorism is an important objective for the United States, we continue to engage the Government of Sudan on protecting human rights, resolving internal conflicts, addressing humanitarian needs, improving regional stability, and advancing political freedoms, accountability and reconciliation.
Secretary Kerry's Meeting with Kuwaiti Amir Shaykh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah

Washington, DC - Secretary Kerry met in New York with Kuwaiti Amir Shaykh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah to discuss a range of issues, including counterterrorism, regional security, and the refugee crisis.

The Secretary thanked the Amir for his support in hosting negotiations designed to reach a political solution to the crisis in Yemen, and for the important and generous role the Government of Kuwait is playing to bring stability to the region.

The Secretary also expressed his appreciation for Kuwaits continued partnership in helping to bring humanitarian aid and stabilization assistance to Iraq.




This Isnt Our Last Love Letter



Dear Don Don,

Way back in 92



I walked into the room and knew



Never felt this way before



I shook your hand while gazing into your eyes



And the feeling grew



As I took a seat I knew



A love that would have my heart



Forever



I knew



Way back in 92





They say love at first sight doesnt always last or isnt true



We were the exception to that rule



Our love had no where to hide



A spark set fire



As if this is how the universe started





I never doubted our love or what we could do



Together we grew



Forming a bond everlasting



That became our glue



My euphoria was YOU



Im eternally grateful for the love and life we shared



For how fortunate we were :



to have and to hold

through sickness and in health

Til death do us part



Until we are together again



This isnt our last love letter



I love you with all my heart and soul



Yours forever,



Deirdre (Mrs. Hank Snow)





Im fortunate to have fallen in love with, marry and make a life with the sharpest, coolest, funniest, most rare, bad ass, tender loving, loyal man on the planet, my husband Don Imus.









A True American Hero

I dont know why it has been so hard for me to write about my dear friend Don Imus.



I certainly know what he meant to me, my family, my charity, my hospital and the millions of fans that listened and loved him for so many years.



I keep reading all the beautiful condolences that people are writing about how much a part of their lives were effected by listening to him over the years.

But what most people dont talk enough about is what he did for all of us.

In every sense of the word, he was an American Hero. His work with children with so many different illnesses and his dedication to their future was unmatched by anyone I have ever known or heard about.



Besides raising over $100,000,000 for so many causes, he took care of young people for over 20 years in a state where he could not breathe. Along with his incredible wife Deirdre, he created a world where children were not defined by their disease. That was a miracle! He was a miracle.

I will miss him ever day for the rest of my life.

I was blessed to be a part of his and Deirdes life.

No one will ever do what he did.

I love you Don Imus - A TRUE AMERICAN HERO





David Jurist

IMUS IN THE MORNING

FIRST DAY BACK!
Kohli's Photo With Tricolour During National Anthem Goes Viral, Twitter Calls Him 'Pride of India'
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Sixteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling returned to India after a miserable childhood, and slightly less miserable adolescence in England, to take up the perfect job for a precociously gifted but possibly unemployable son of empire. He was to be 50 per cent of the editorial staff  as he describes in his memoir Something of Myself  of the Civil and Military Gazette, the newspaper for Anglo-Indian Lahore society.

While Kipling is famous for his fiction, particularly for his Jungle Book and Just So Stories, he wrote thousands upon thousands of words of journalism before his fictional daemon, as he called it, awoke. His newspaper apprenticeship helped him develop his distinctive concise prose style, the limited spaces forcing every word he wrote to tell, carry, weigh, taste and, if needed, smell.

It is this ruthless weighing of words which enabled Kipling to get more layers of meaning, more subtlety and complexity into one of his short stories than another novelist could in a whole book.

Journalism uncapped the creative geyser. Shortly after his editor sent him on his first trip as a correspondent for his newspaper, the short stories that would make him famous started appearing. His newspaper reports  many unpublished since they first appeared in the gazette in 1884-5  show not just what a precocious child Kipling was, but also how observations made as a teenage reporter would influence his later fiction.

Many themes and concepts of his short stories, from the cautionary tale to the idea of the unreliable narrator and the redemptive innocence of children, are first expressed in his newspaper articles. Kiplings early journalism also reveals his much-decried attitude towards native India: early articles criticise laziness, corruption and lack of hygiene. But it also reveals wonder and love for the vast, mysterious country. While a selection of his journalism was published in Kiplings India, edited by Thomas Pinney, hundreds more articles languish in microfilm copies of the Civil and Military Gazette, which I have been studying over the summer.

The Jungle Book was originally published in 1894, followed by The Second Jungle book a year later

One of Kiplings first assignments was to report on the viceroys visit to the Maharaja of Patiala, some 200 miles from Lahore, in March 1884. Though still in his teens, the young reporters words capture brilliantly the dazzling show:

"Elephants with silver havedahs and trappings of gold  swung to and fro like ships at anchor, the sunlight lit up gold stiffened jhools and bejewelled earrings till the roadside seemed to be ablaze with all the treasures of the Arabian Nights and the elephants themselves shone like glorified fireflies."

Culture news in pictures Show all 33 1 /33 Culture news in pictures Culture news in pictures 30 September 2016 An employee hangs works of art with "Grand Teatro" by Marino Marini (R) and bronze sculpture "Sfera N.3" by Arnaldo Pomodoro seen ahead of a Contemporary Art auction on 7 October, at Sotheby's in London REUTERS Culture news in pictures 29 September 2016 Street art by Portuguese artist Odeith is seen in Dresden, during an exhibition "Magic City - art of the streets" AFP/Getty Images Culture news in pictures 28 September 2016 Dancers attend a photocall for the new "THE ONE Grand Show" at Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin, Germany REUTERS Culture news in pictures 28 September 2016 With an array of thrift store china, humorous souvenirs and handmade tile adorning its walls and floors, the Mosaic Tile House in Venice stands as a monument to two decades of artistic collaboration between Cheri Pann and husband Gonzalo Duran REUTERS Culture news in pictures 27 September 2016 A gallery assistant poses amongst work by Anthea Hamilton from her nominated show "Lichen! Libido!(London!) Chastity!" at a preview of the Turner Prize in London REUTERS Culture news in pictures 27 September 2016 A technician wearing virtual reality glasses checks his installation in three British public telephone booths, set up outside the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands. The installation allows visitors a 3-D look into the museum which has twenty-two paintings belonging to the British Royal Collection, on loan for an exhibit from 29 September 2016 till 8 January 2017 AP Culture news in pictures 26 September 2016 An Indian artist dressed as Hindu god Shiva performs on a chariot as he participates in a religious procession 'Ravan ki Barat' held to mark the forthcoming Dussehra festival in Allahabad AFP/Getty Images Culture news in pictures 26 September 2016 Jean-Michel Basquiat's 'Air Power', 1984, is displayed at the Bowie/Collector media preview at Sotheby's in New York AFP/Getty Culture news in pictures 25 September 2016 A woman looks at an untitled painting by Albert Oehlen during the opening of an exhibition of works by German artists Georg Baselitz and Albert Oehlen in Reutlingen, Germany. The exhibition runs at the Kunstverein (art society) Reutlingen until 15 January 2017 EPA Culture news in pictures 24 September 2016 Fan BingBing (C) attends the closing ceremony of the 64th San Sebastian Film Festival at Kursaal in San Sebastian, Spain Getty Images Culture news in pictures 23 September 2016 A view of the artwork 'You Are Metamorphosing' (1964) as part of the exhibition 'Retrospektive' of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo at Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. The exhibition runs from 25 September 2016 to 1 January 2017 EPA Culture news in pictures 22 September 2016 Jo Applin from the Courtauld Institute of Art looks at Green Tilework in Live Flesh by Adriana Vareja, which features in a new exhibition, Flesh, at York Art Gallery. The new exhibition features works by Degas, Chardin, Francis Bacon and Sarah Lucas, showing how flesh has been portrayed by artists over the last 600 years PA Culture news in pictures 21 September 2016 Performers Sean Atkins and Sally Miller standing in for the characters played by Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell during a photocall for Tim Burton's "Miss Peregrines Home For Peculiar Children" at Potters Field Park in London Getty Images Culture news in pictures 20 September 2016 A detail from the blanket 'Alpine Cattle Drive' from 1926 by artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is displayed at the 'Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporary Arts' in Berlin. The exhibition named 'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Hieroglyphen' showing the complete collection of Berlin's Nationalgallerie works of the German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and will run from 23 September 2016 until 26 February 2017 AP Culture news in pictures 20 September 2016 A man looks at portrait photos by US photographer Bruce Gilden in the exhibition 'Masters of Photography' at the photokina in Cologne, Germany. The trade fair on photography, photokina, schowcases some 1,000 exhibitors from 40 countries and runs from 20 to 25 September. The event also features various photo exhibitions EPA Culture news in pictures 20 September 2016 A woman looks at 'Blue Poles', 1952 by Jackson Pollock during a photocall at the Royal Academy of Arts, London PA Culture news in pictures 19 September 2016 Art installation The Refusal of Time, a collaboration with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh and Peter Galison, which features as part of the William Kentridge exhibition Thick Time, showing from 21 September to 15 January at the Whitechapel Gallery in London PA Culture news in pictures 18 September 2016 Artists creating one off designs at the Mm6 Maison Margiela presentation during London Fashion Week Spring/Summer collections 2017 in London Getty Images Culture news in pictures 18 September 2016 Bethenny Frankel attends the special screening of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" to celebrate the 25th Anniversary Edition release on Blu-Ray and DVD in New York City Getty Images for Walt Disney Stu Culture news in pictures 17 September 2016 Visitors attend the 2016 Oktoberfest beer festival at Theresienwiese in Munich, Germany Getty Images Culture news in pictures 16 September 2016 Visitors looks at British artist Damien Hirst work of art 'The Incomplete Truth', during the 13th Yalta Annual Meeting entitled 'The World, Europe and Ukraine: storms of changes', organised by the Yalta European Strategy (YES) in partnership with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation at the Mystetsky Arsenal Art Center in Kiev AP Culture news in pictures 16 September 2016 Tracey Emin's "My Bed" is exhibited at the Tate Liverpool as part of the exhibition Tracey Emin And William Blake In Focus, which highlights surprising links between the two artists Getty Images Culture news in pictures 15 September 2016 Musician Dave Grohl (L) joins musician Tom Morello of Prophets of Rage onstage at the Forum in Inglewood, California Getty Images Culture news in pictures 14 September 2016 Model feebee poses as part of art installation "Narcissism : Dazzle room" made by artist Shigeki Matsuyama at rooms33 fashion and design exhibition in Tokyo. Matsuyama's installation features a strong contrast of black and white, which he learned from dazzle camouflage used mainly in World War I AP Culture news in pictures 13 September 2016 Visitors look at artworks by Chinese painter Cui Ruzhuo during the exhibition 'Glossiness of Uncarved Jade' held at the exhibition hall 'Manezh' in St. Petersburg, Russia. More than 200 paintings by the Chinese artist are presented until 25 September EPA Culture news in pictures 12 September 2016 A visitor looks at Raphael's painting 'Extase de Sainte Cecile', 1515, from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence during the opening of a Raphael exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Russia. The first Russian exhibition of the works of the Italian Renaissance artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino includes eight paintings and three drawings which come from Italy. Th exhibit opens to the public from 13 September to 11 December EPA Culture news in pictures 11 September 2016 Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd perform during Otis Redding 75th Birthday Celebration - Rehearsals at the Macon City Auditorium in Macon, Georgia Getty Images for Otis Redding 75 Culture news in pictures 10 September 2016 Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus and the BBC Singers at the Last Night of the Proms 2016 at the Royal Albert Hall in London PA Culture news in pictures 9 September 2016 A visitor walks past a piece entitled "Fruitcake" by Joana Vasconcelo, during the Beyond Limits selling exhibition at Chatsworth House near Bakewell REUTERS Culture news in pictures 8 September 2016 A sculpture of a crescent standing on the 2,140 meters high mountain 'Freiheit' (German for 'freedom'), in the Alpstein region of the Appenzell alps, eastern Switzerland. The sculpture is lighted during the nights by means of solar panels. The 38-year-old Swiss artist and atheist Christian Meier set the crescent on the peak to start a debate on the meaning of religious symbols - as summit crosses - on mountains. 'Because so many peaks have crosses on them, it struck me as a great idea to put up an equally absurd contrast'. 'Naturally I wanted to provoke in a fun way. But it goes beyond that. The actions of an artist should be food for thought, both visually and in content' EPA Culture news in pictures Culture news in pictures Culture news in pictures

The alchemy of the 18-year-old Kiplings language transforms these giant, earthy beasts, first into almost weightless boats swaying at sea and then, defying physics, they become airborne.

Who also can read this passage and its deliberate reference to the Arabian Nights fables without calling to mind the mystical elephant dance of the Jungle Book and Hathi who appeared to Mowgli:

"Swaying and rocking and shifting from one foot to another  his three sons rolled side by side."

The Just So Stories were written by Kipling and published in 1902 (Rex)

As well as their passages of beautiful description, the articles, which appeared in March 1884, contain the first sighting of Kiplings use of the unreliable observer/narrator, who is such an ubiquitous character in his early short stories, particularly the Indian Plain Tales From The Hills. Observing the soldiers accompanying the viceroy, Kipling the reporter admits it is difficult at first sight to assign each man to his proper regiment, as he confesses he cannot see much from his vantage point, a surprising and brave admission from a professional journalist out to prove himself to his editor on his first assignment.

This was followed in another article by his admission of massive ignorance of music and musical criticism in a write-up of an evening event. To help him, Kipling brings in a second, unnamed correspondent who really knows about both subjects. This effectively absolves Kipling from any errors that may creep into the article, another technique he uses in his short stories, to unsettle the reader and to distance the narrator from the story he tells.

Another piece of reportage about an agricultural exhibition in Jullundur (now Jalandhar) and published in January 1885 also shows how Kipling the storyteller is bursting to be rid of the straight-jacket of factual reporting. He reports, as if starting a fireside tale: One of the exhibitors, a certain artist, one Mahammed Sharif, possesses the secrets of all the colours and glazes of the old Mughal tile-work as it exists to perfection on the Nakodar tombs.

But Sharif, though his skill could make a fortune, refuses to make the tiles because he is too lazy. Instead he wastes his talents on turning out simple domestic pottery and suggests the character of the camel in the Just So Stories who lived in the middle of a howling desert because he did not want to work.

Even an apparently banal account of the visit of a travelling entertainer to Lahore has, for Kipling, creative potential. In a January 1885 report, Mr Hudsons Surprise Party, Kipling tells his readers that the itinerant Mr Hudson has been to Lahore before. He then casually drops in a reference to the painful reminiscences connected with his last visit, tantalisingly hinting at nocturnal criminality  but not quite satisfying the reader with all the facts. This technique, which invites the reader to fill in the gaps with horrific conjecture would also later be employed in his short stories.

The lines that are supposed to delineate firmly the boundary between journalism and fiction, become, in Kiplings reportage, very blurred. His early journalism reveals his delight in observation and storytelling  but also an experimental approach to his writing that would by turns surprise, unsettle and beguile readers of his later fiction.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com). Sarah Lonsdale is a Lecturer in Journalism at City, University of London
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It's a wonder the works of Stephen King hasn't been exhausted considering how many film adaptations exist.

Still, it's rare that one of his properties is revisited when it's already been adapted - but that's exactly what's happening with upcoming film Hearts which will serve as a fresh take on King's novella Hearts In Atlantis.

The collection - released in 1999 - is comprised of two novellas and three short stories; the film will focus on the titular tale which follows a group of college boys who experience their first time away from home in 1966.

Which recent movies will become classics? Show all 21 1 /21 Which recent movies will become classics? Which recent movies will become classics? Birdman - Undoubtedly Alejandro G. Inarritus masterpiece will surely be remembered for years to come - fiercely original in its concept, brave in its single take(esque) format and the perfect satire of a very specific and bizarre era of cinema we find ourselves in. What perhaps was so astonishing about this Best Picture Oscar winner was that in spite of its experimental format and lofty intentions, it still also managed to be hugely entertaining, and is eminently rewatchable. - Christopher Hooton Fox Searchlight Pictures Which recent movies will become classics? There Will Be Blood - Potentially Inherent Vice feels like its been forgotten already, The Master was great but too weighty for some, but There Will Be Blood is the Paul Thomas Anderson film that comes up time and time again in pub film conversations, whether theyre between cinephiles or more casual fans. A blank yet brutal indictment of lucre, Daniel Day Lewis gave one of his best ever performances as oil man Daniel Plainview, and Jonny Greenwoods fearsome score is still being performed live several years after its release. But mainly, I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I DRINK IT UP! - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Avatar - Probably not Its undeniable that James Camerons gargantuan blockbuster Avatar will find its place in the cinematic history books. With a worldwide gross of over 2.7 billion, its currently the highest earning film of all time - even Star Wars' The Force Awakens return couldn't topple it. But will it actually be remembered fondly? Its ground-breaking special effects already betray the first signs of aging, and though its use of 3D was revolutionary at the time, its now so pedestrian as to be found in a Glee concert movie. What is there to revere then? The patronising narrative re-hash of the plot to Dances With Wolves? Or the bit where two cat-aliens had sex by plugging their hair braids into each other? - Clarisse Loughrey Which recent movies will become classics? Whiplash - Within its own genre at least Whiplash was perhaps the most buzzy, "have you seen it yet?" film of 2014, and winning major Oscars off a budget of $3.3 million was no mean feat. Damien Chazelle managed to make a film about drumming absolutely edge-of-your-seat stuff, and succeeded by not patronising his audience - trusting that even if they didnt understand the music theory detail, they would still be able to revel in it. Unfortunately, it might just be too small a film to be remembered as a classic, but will certainly be circling the top of best movies about music lists for some years to come. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Skyfall  Depends whos Bond next Best Bond of all time? Skyfalls slick, true, but its status as an icon seems heavily premature. Were still clinging onto the Craig era, and its hard to argue that Skyfall doesnt do the same; trading its entire dramatic tension on the premise that weve long been deeply attached to this grizzled Bond and equally grizzled M. In Silvas personal vendetta, or in the neat metaphors of Skyfall Lodges crumbling exteriors and Bonds crumbling interiors of a post-Vesper Lynd world; its only once the franchise has moved on to new pastures that well truly start to see whether Skyfall can go the distance. Doesnt help that Spectre was a bit of a disappointment, though. -CL Which recent movies will become classics? Mad Max: Fury Road - A gutsy yes Yes, its a madly confident move to already claim Fury Roads going to a bonafide classic within its first year of release, but Fury Road is a mad movie. 36 years after its original incarnation, George Miller returned to the wasteland to conjure the greatest adrenaline hit of the cinematic decade. Breathlessly edited, hued with the colours of dust and dirt and rage; packed to the brim with practical stunt work unseen in the digital age. Plus, its a film that actively dismantles the patriarchy through a gun-slinging, metal-armed Charlize Theron. If its not remembered as one of the greatest blockbusters of its time, itll certainly be remembered as one of the gutsiest. - CL Which recent movies will become classics? The Great Beauty - No, but it damn well should be It won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2014, but this Paolo Sorrentino masterpiece is still unknown to most. It centres on a group of aging intellectuals partying on rooftops across Rome to Eurodance, and within this frame of superficiality it manages staggering profundity. The dialogue is rich, the cinematography sumptuous, and if Fellini is considered classic, this fellow Italians work certainly should be too. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Little Miss Sunshine - Within its own genre, yes The Sundance Effect has unfortunately developed a near plague of insufferable, self-conscious mawkishness over the years. Misfit boys finding new meaning to their existence in the arms of pink-haired manic pixie dream girls; sun-dappled bike rides as the latest band to feature a ukulele solo play softly in the distance. Some have indeed come off this false and cloying (Zach Braffs Garden State), others smarter and keener (last years Me and Earl and the Dying Girl); but as the fires of kook devour all in sight, there will always remain one film left standing in the ashes: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris Little Miss Sunshine. One scene that guarantees its elevation above the rabble sees teenager Dwayne (Paul Dano) realise hes colour-blind, and thus will never be able to achieve his dream of becoming a jet fighter. Danos meltdown here is so raw, and so positively tragic, that itll be a hard job to ever forget that epic f-bomb as the years pass. - CL Which recent movies will become classics? Lost in Translation - I'll still be watching it in my 80s at least Really a perfect movie. The casting couldn't have been better and Sofia Coppola conveys the choking feeling of an overly air-conditioned hotel room like no-one else. So many of the shots were beautiful in their simplicity. Bill Murray making a nice crisp, clean golf shot before walking off down the course. The flower arranging scene. Bill lightly grabbing Scarlett Johansson's foot and this subtly serving as the film's 'kiss'. It's the unconventional romance at the heart of the film that makes it so great, though, which is as much about companionship as physical and emotional love. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Crash - Hahahahahahahahaha Seriously, how did it win that Oscar? Even the director doesn't know. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Pans Labyrinth - Absolutely Guillermo del Toro dreams on celluloid; hes a weaver of fairy tales in an age where innocence is presumed dead. Its through innocence, through innocent eyes, that we witness the darkest excesses of human nature in a way that so exposes the incomprehensibility of evil committed in the pursuit of power. Through young Ophelias perspective we watch the horrors of Francos Spanish regime play out, the barbaric cruelty of her stepfather Captain Vidal; she fears not the horned faun who lives in the labyrinth when its so clear her own patriarchal figurehead is the true monster. And though its finale may be heart-breaking, del Toro still allows innocence a certain victory. Victory through Ophelias eyes, those pure and hungry enough to see beyond the borders of her bleak reality to find an escape from the seemingly unstoppable monstrosities of adulthood. - CL Warner Bros. Which recent movies will become classics? Im Still Here - When everyone realises its genius Initially admonished for being exploitative of Joaquin Phoenixs condition, it was astonishing that, when this Casey Affleck-directed mockumentary was revealed to be a hoax, most critics didnt give it a second review, and those who did still disliked it. In hindsight this was so much more than a prank. Phoenix stayed in character as a failed actor turned hip-hop artist for months on end. This dedication wasnt for nothing either (unlikely say, DiCaprio in The Revenant), Im Still Here is actually a very funny, moving and subtly satirical film, and definitely original. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Boyhood - I doubt it While it too was an unprecedented piece of cinema, Boyhood for me faded from the memory very quickly. Dismissing this film as essentially a puberty timelapse might be a little harsh, but the set-up did ultimately come off gimmicky and as a coming of age story it failed to resonate. Admirable, but not a classic - CH Universal Pictures Which recent movies will become classics? The Social Network - Yes I was less than thrilled at the prospect of a movie about Facebook, but then pleasantly surprised upon watching it. A holy production trinity of David Fincher (director), Aaron Sorkin (screenwriter) and Trent Reznor (score) told a story that changed all of our lives with such panache. Texting, the internet, social media etc are so prosaic that many authors and filmmakers disingenuously leave them out of their stories, but here they were central and yet still the film was engrossing, stylish and human. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Django Unchained - Hell yeah/hell maybe Swiping its titular characters name from a 1966 Spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Corbucci, Tarantino utilised his trademark flair for ultra-violence and nihilistic humour to create the perfect meeting point between revisionism and classicism. Django channeled brutality in the name of righteous fury, allowing the freedom fighting slaves of a pre-Civil War Deep South their own legendary cowboy of the John Wayne or Clint Eastwood type. - CL Which recent movies will become classics? The Tree of Life - A few people will kid themselves its classic Terrence Malicks experimental drama couldnt really have been more ambitious or tried to chip away at a bigger chunk of existence. As such, it was automatically lauded by many who didnt really know what to make of it, but looking back, was it worthy of the praise? The Brad-Pitt-is-a-family-man-in-the-50s plot strand was actually pretty unremarkable, and were it not for the brazenness of the extended shots of the universe being formed I doubt it would have made top ten lists the way it did. - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Her - Yes, as a historical document Films depicting the future remain fascinating decades later because they show, in retrospect, how we wanted the world to progress and what developments we simply couldnt have conceived. As such Her will definitely still be getting talked about in years to come, whether or not we do indeed end up falling in love with our computers. (Also see: Ex Machina) - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Any of the space movies? Maybe Interstellar We seem to get a big budget space movie annually these days, and while none of them really have the creativity of Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar stands a chance of staying atop VOD libraries. Gravity and The Martian, while technically brilliant, were pretty forgettable, and dont get me started on Sunshine. Interstellar was very impressive though, and if a Christopher Nolan films going to stand out Id rather it be this one than - CH Which recent movies will become classics? Inception - Please no Yes, its insanely watchable and the plot zips along nicely, but seriously, can we stop pretending people falling backwards off chairs and out of camp, alpine sub-dream worlds amounts to anything more than an overly convoluted, albeit pretty, action movie? - CH Which recent movies will become classics? The Wolf of Wall Street - Not compared to Scorseses earlier work If theres a burden of the artistic revolutionary, its that revolution is only ever momentary in its form; Martin Scorsese made his mark back in 1973 with Mean Streets, and its one thats been difficult to paint over in the 43 years which have since passed. The Wolf of Wall Street faults itself only in being pure Scorsese; its a film which trades purely in the breathless, macho style already so entrenched in cinematic culture. Essentially, Scorseses own genre-defining genius has doomed to obscurity any latter work which dares to fold into the directors own natural form of expression; its made derivative any work which doesnt actively rebel against what hes been most celebrated for. A tough reality, but a reality nonetheless. - CL Paramount Pictures Which recent movies will become classics? Nymphomaniac - Maybe if Part II hadnt happened Even the truest of arthouse directors are culpable for the whims of Hollywood franchises. Yes, with his dual Nymphomaniac films, Lars von Trier managed to ruin the potential classic of his career by needlessly stretching his narrative across two films; churning out the NC-17 answer to Peter Jacksons Hobbit trilogy in the process. Strip Nymphomaniac of the controversy and media hysteria surrounding its use of pornographic actors in its sex scenes; and theres a torn, throbbing soul at its centre. For all its salaciousness, von Triers exploration of the crippling effects of shame society burdens those, especially its women, who dare seek sexual pleasure is genuinely haunting. Thats in Part I, however; by the time Joes life story sees her grow from Stacy Martin into Charlotte Gainsbourg, von Triers epic dissolves into the bang of a drum in continuous, endless cycles. Shes horny and sad; we got it, Lars. - CL

British director Johannes Roberts will oversee the project that's been adapted alongside writing partner Ernest Riera; the two previously worked together on horror The Other Side of the Door.

Roberts said: As a teenager, discovering Stephen Kings books and their cinematic counterparts was what led me to want to become a filmmaker. [This] story is my favourite piece of Kings writing. Turning this story into a movie had been a lifelong dream.

While named Hearts in Atlantis, the novella's 2001 adaptation - which starred Anthony Hopkins and Anton Yelchin - focused on the collection's other stories Low Men in Yellow Coats and Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling.

There's been something of a resurgence of King adaptations this past year: Cell - which starred John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson - received a recent on-demand release while The Dark Tower is currently being filmed with Matthew McConaiughey and Idris Elba in the lead roles. A new version of It is currently filming (see the new Pennywise here).

 Cell - Official Trailer

Other King novellas to have received big screen adaptations include Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption.

Today (21 September) is King's 69th birthday.
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Following the news that Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt yesterday, several British tabloids reported the (almost certainly scurrilous rumour) that it was in part down to him having an affair with Allied co-star Marion Cotillard.

It was either bad timing, excellent timing or with a disregard for showbiz news, then (depending on your level of cynicism), that Paramount tweeted out a new teaser for Allied last night.

Heres the tweet, which capitalises on the pairs names and features plenty of kissing.

And the inevitable responses:

Pitt and Cotillard star in Allied as intelligence officers who fall in love and start a family, but run into marital trouble when war breaks out in London.

The TV spot will air Tuesday night during NBC's ensemble drama This Is Us, and according to a Hollywood Reporter source, the plan to put it online last night ahead of the TV broadcast had long been in the works.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes Show all 6 1 /6 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes I think it's a reality of marriage that you go through hard times and that you have to embrace those hard times and challenges and know that it's a part of your marriage and its the pulling through together that actually makes the bond. - Jolie AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes There's a more profound feeling when I look back at all the things my wife and I have gone through; all the successes and failures and great passions and great fights and that we have that together is something I cant quite get my arms around but, to me, its much more enticing than the newness of relationships. - Pitt Getty Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes [Brad] has expanded my life in ways I never imagined. We built a family. He is not just the love my life, he is my family. I hold that very dear. - Jolie Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom. - Pitt Getty Images for Cinema for Peac Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes You get together and you're two individuals and you feel inspired by each other, you challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy.' - Jolie Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes There are no secrets at our house. We tell the kids, 'Mom and Dad are going off to kiss.' They go, 'Eww, gross!' But we demand it" - Pitt Getty Images

Official synopsis:

ALLIED is the story of intelligence officer Max Vatan (Pitt), who in 1942 North Africa encounters French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard) on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Reunited in London, their relationship is threatened by the extreme pressures of the war.

The Robert Zemeckis-directed film opens in cinemas on 23 November.
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Daniel Radcliffe has spoken candidly in an interview which saw him asked tough questions about the current state of Hollywood.

BBC host Victoria Derbyshire referenced the lack of diversity in this year's Oscars nominations when asking the 27-year-old actor whether he believed Hollywood was "racist."

"It's pretty undeniable," Radcliffe replied. "We like to think of ourselves as being a very, very progressive industry, but we have been lagging behind in all kinds of areas."

This week, the actor stars in two new films - one of which, Imperium, sees him play an FBI agent who infiltrates a white supremacist group.

The actor went on to suggest that gay actors are afraid to come out through fear of being typecast, commenting: "I suppose then people just want to cast you as gay."

Considering his history playing boy wizard Harry Potter, Derbyshire asked whether he would consider returning to J.K. Rowling's world following rumours that stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child could be turned into a film series.

"No-one's asked me about it and I definitely don't think that I would do it at this point, certainly," he stated. "It's only been six years [since last playing Potter] and I'm really enjoying being able to do lots of different stuff at the moment.

"Maybe if 30 years had passed I would be thinking differently. They will be doing remakes, and I could play his dad, or something."

Radcliffe's other new film release is Swiss Army Man in which he plays a flatulent corpse alongside Paul Dano.
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Last week, Kid Cudi ranted on Twitter about his fellow rappers using ghost writers, singling out two in particular: Kanye West and Drake.

Everyone thinks theyre so great, he wrote on the social media website. Talking top 5 and be having 30 people write songs for them My tweets apply to who they apply. [Kan]Ye, Drake, whoever. These n****s don't give a f**k about me. And they aint f**king with me.

Just hours later, West responded in Tampa, Florida, saying from his floating stage while performing on the Saint Pablo tour: Dont never mention Ye name. I birthed you.

However, things seem to have calmed down between the two. According to NME, during his Houstons Toyota Center show, West said he "just wanted to take time out to say Kid Cudi is my brother," calling him one of "the most influential artist of the past 10 years adding , "I hope hes doing well."

Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Show all 12 1 /12 Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Kanye West's greatest self comparisons God: I am God's vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live. Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Steve Jobs: I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. Getty David Paul Morris/Getty Images Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Walt Disney: I'm more of a Walt Disney or something. Rap is just a chamber of my thoughts. [They're] something that I really wanted to express as a modern day poet. Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Braveheart: I feel like a little bit, like, Im the Braveheart of creativity. Getty 20th Century Fox Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Willy Wonka: I want to be as unrealistic as possible. The worst thing about me comparing myself to Steve Jobs in that it's too realistic of an idea. What I need to stay is I'm more like Willy Wonka. Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Picasso: No matter how they try to control you, or the motherfucker next to you tries to peer pressure you, you can do what you motherf**king want. I am Picasso." Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Hermes: "Visiting my mind is like visiting the Hermes factory. S**t is real. Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Michelangelo: "When I think of competition it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know..." Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons The Pyramids: "... the pyramids." Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Thomas Edison: "I am Thomas Edison." Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons Soldiers: "You're literally going out to do your job every day knowing that something could happen to you." Getty Getty Kanye West's greatest self comparisons The Police: This is like being a police officer or something." Getty Getty Images

The accusations of ghostwriting from Cudi came as quite a surprise considering their long standing relationship, the rapper having broken out thanks to a guest spot on Wests 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak.

Cudi then signed to Wests label G.O.O.D. Music, leaving in 2013 but remaining on good terms with the rapper, appearing on this years The Life of Pablo.

Meanwhile, Wests Saint Pablo tour has made headlines for various reasons, from scarring fans off stage to the stage itself.
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Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has denied sanctioning the murder of a British spy in the IRA.

The allegation about the 2006 killing of Denis Donaldson was made by a man who claimed he was also a paid state agent in the IRA.

The man made a series of claims, on an anonymous basis, to BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme.

The most explosive was that Mr Adams sanctioned the killing of Mr Donaldson.

Mr Donaldson, 55, a Sinn Fein official and close colleague of Mr Adams, was shot dead at an isolated cottage near Glenties in Co Donegal in April 2006.

He had been living in the remote area of Donegal following his exposure as a state agent a year before his death.

Dissident republican group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the murder in 2008 but the circumstances surrounding Mr Donaldson's outing as a British agent and subsequent death have long been shrouded in mystery.

The man interviewed by Spotlight said the IRA was responsible for the murder and Mr Adams sanctioned it.

The claim was rejected by the Sinn Fein leader, who has always denied he was in the IRA. His lawyer told the programme his client had no knowledge of or involvement in Mr Donaldson's death and denied being consulted about it.

Mr Adams's party colleague Gerry Kelly dismissed the documentary as a "collection of discredited conspiracy theories".

"The programme makers have had no regard for the feelings of families of the victims of the conflict, including the family of Denis Donaldson," said the North Belfast Assembly member.
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Police have rejected a claim by family members of a black man shot and killed in North Carolina that he was unarmed and sitting reading a book.

Peaceful protests turned violent late on Tuesday night, after the shooting of 43-year-old Keith Scott that afternoon by officers in the city of Charlotte. At least one police vehicle was set on fire and officers used tear gas to disperse the crowds.

Protesters had said that Mr Scott, who had seven children, was not armed, but was carrying a book. They also said he was disabled.

Relatives of Keith Lamont Scott said was sitting in a car with a book (Facebook)

He didnt have a gun, a woman identifying herself as his sister told local television. He wasnt messing with nobody.

But amid calls for call and dialogue coming from the citys mayor, police on Wednesday insisted that Mr Scott was carrying a handgun and had represented a threat to the officer who approached him.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said officers were searching for a suspect Tuesday when they saw Mr Scott exit a vehicle with a handgun.

Officers told Ms Scott, who was not the suspect they were looking for, to drop the gun. He got out of the vehicle a second time still carrying it, the chief said, and he was shot because he posed a threat.

 Protests erupt after officers kill black man in North Carolina

Its time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the storys a little bit different as to how its been portrayed so far, especially through social media, he said. He said a weapon had been recovered from the scene, but they had found no book.

The Associated Press said his comments were an apparent reference to a profanity-laced, hourlong video that a woman claiming to be Mr Scott's daughter posted to Facebook soon after the shooting, saying that her father had an unspecified disability and was unarmed.

In it, she appeared to be at the shooting scene, which is surrounded by yellow police tape, as she yelled at officers.

Oh my gosh yall, look the police just shot my daddy four times for being black, she says at the beginning of the hour-long live video stream. They tased him first and then shot him.

(AP (AP)

As the various narratives collided, protesters took to the streets of Chartlotte and a number of police vehicles were destroyed in the area near to where the fatal shooting took place.

A large group of demonstrators gathered near the apartment complex where the incident happened. By the early hours of Wednesday morning, demonstrators occupied a segment of Interstate Highway 83.

At least 16 officers were injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock.

The shooting occurred at 4 pm on Tuesday, a day after police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released video showing the Friday shooting death of Terence Crutcher by one of their officers, adding to ongoing scrutiny of local police departments across the US for the almost routine killing of unarmed black people.

The black officer who shot Scott, Brently Vinson, has been placed on administrative leave as is standard procedure in such cases. Mr Vinson has been with the department for two years.

BJ Murphy, an outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam, called for an economic boycott of the city. He said if black lives dont matter, black money shouldn't matter.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm.

We are calling for peace, we are calling for calm, we are calling for dialogue, she said. We understand that with these events everyone has different viewpoints and perspectives.

She added: That makes it even more important for us to treat each other with dignity and respect and to wait until we have all the information.

She said she had been in touch with the White House along with state and local leaders. The city was preparing to handle more potential demonstrations by bolstering its police presence.

We all see this as a tragedy, the mayor said. We all want to work toward a peaceful community. We know that we have work to do.
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Googles Allo has finally been released. But it hasnt been going well.

The launch of the new chat app  which Google had hoped would focus on its use of artificial intelligence and the huge amounts of information it stores  has in fact revolved around the threat to privacy and safety that it represents. It culminated with a warning from Edward Snowden that nobody should use the app.

It was just the latest reminder that our messaging apps might not be as private as they seem. And that is very private indeed  unlike social networks and other semi-public spaces, messages are perhaps the most sacred and private spaces on the entire internet.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Allo was intended as a demonstration in part of the way that Google can use its access to all the worlds information to make life easier for people. It includes an assistant that can be asked things in natural language and will provide an answer, for instance, and a smart replies feature that can scan what people tend to say and help suggest things for them.

Google says that collecting the data makes that more useful  the better and more information it has, the better and more helpful the suggestions will be. But many people said that it makes it more worrying, too, since by collecting that information it appeared to be putting people at risk of government spying and other worries.

And the complaints were further compounded by the fact that Google appeared to have walked back its initial commitments to privacy. It had first suggested that it would only store some information, and get rid of it after a short time  but now it seems that all the data is readable by Google, and will be forever unless a user deletes it, which Google gives them the option to do.

There is a way to turn off Googles data collection in Allo. But that means starting a specific kind of conversation  an Incognito one  in which it also doesnt use any of its special features and becomes like any other chat app.

We've given users transparency and control over their data in Google Allo," said a Google spokesperson. "And our approach is simple -- your chat history is saved for you until you choose to delete it. You can delete single messages or entire conversations in Allo.

"We also provide the option to chat in Incognito mode, where messages are end-to-end encrypted and you can set a timer to automatically delete messages for your device and the person youre chatting with's device at a set time.

Google isnt the first company to run into trouble with chats recently. WhatsApp announced last month that it would start sharing data with Facebook  not chats, which are encrypted and unreadable, but details about who people speak to and have in their contacts.

A controversy erupted, perhaps one of the biggest privacy stories in recent years. And it seemed to be a result of the personal nature of what was at stake, since messages to our friends seem like one of the most sacred things we do with our phone.

That was something that has led many companies to adopt a commitment to end-to-end encryption. That feature  present in WhatsApp and iMessage  means that messages are scrambled so that they can only ever be opened by the phone that theyre being sent to, and so cant be intercepted even if the companies wanted to.

Such decisions have got companies including Apple and WhatsApp itself into trouble in the past. Apple has been pursued by the FBI over access to a phone, and WhatsApp officials have been detained in Brazil and the app has been shut down for not being able to hand over information.

It might be such problems that Google was looking to avoid with its change. Since the information isnt encrypted when stored, it makes it far easier to comply with government requests, and the information will be available to anyone with a valid warrant.

But its just as likely that its the result of a decision about how much we value our privacy. We have to decide whether we want to give our data to Google and companies like it  whether the fun of smart suggestions and all the worlds knowledge is worth everyone eventually knowing a lot more about us, too.
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Edward Snowden has warned people not to use Googles new chat app, because it lets the company read everything that they say.

Google has finally released its new chat app after showing it off over the summer. It comes with a robot that watches everything people say and then stores it for later analysis, using that data to improve the app itself.

But that also means that chats are stored on Googles servers indefinitely, and are able to be read by it. The company had initially indicated that the messages would only be stored temporarily, limiting the possible impact of any data breach and retaining some privacy for users.

 Google Allo released, letting people chat while being watched by its robots

But it now appears that Google wont be doing that after all. Instead it will keep hold of all conversations.

Google will use that data to improve parts of the app, such as its smart replies feature. That will allow the app to read through conversations and try and work out how people talk  it can then use that data to suggest what they might want to say to their friends.

Recommended Read more Google launches chat bot that lets robots watch you

But Google would presumably also be able to use that same data at a future date to target ads at users. Since their personal conversations might include some of their most sensitive data, that could lead to prying of a kind that most people would object to.

Making the change does probably keep Google on the right side of the law. By keeping track of all messages, Allo conversations will be accessible by law enforcement with warrants  something that cant happen on apps like iMessage or WhatsApp, both of which have run into trouble over not being able to give up information to authorities.

All of those problems led Mr Snowden to send out a flurry of tweets telling people not to use Allo.

Free for download today: Google Mail, Google Maps, and Google Surveillance, he wrote. That's #Allo. Don't use Allo.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Another read: What is #Allo? A Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request.

Snowden already called Allo "dangerous" after it was revealed at Google's I/O conference earlier this year.

Google does allow people to switch into a different mode, called Incognito, where conversations will be end-to-end encrypted so that they cant be read by Google. But that isnt turned on by default and leads most of the apps features to break, turning it into just a conventional chat app.

"We've given users transparency and control over their data in Google Allo," said a Google spokesperson. "And our approach is simple  your chat history is saved for you until you choose to delete it. You can delete single messages or entire conversations in Allo.

"We also provide the option to chat in Incognito mode, where messages are end-to-end encrypted and you can set a timer to automatically delete messages for your device and the person youre chatting with's device at a set time."
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Patient safety is being put at risk by overtired and stressed out doctors, according to a new report.

The study, from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), found huge issues with rota gaps in hospitals around the country and some doctors so busy they have no time to get a drink of water.

Many are discouraged from taking naps on night shifts despite evidence they would perform far more safely after a short sleep, it said.

The findings are part of a wider report on how the NHS is suffering due to an overstretched workforce, a recruitment crisis and underfunding.

The RCP is calling for the Government to increase NHS funding or hold an honest debate with patients about what can and cannot be provided by the health service.

Even with planned efficiency savings, the NHS faces a massive funding gap as it tries to tackle an ageing population, cuts to social care and growing demand, the report said.

It found that most doctors (85 per cent) believe that current health funding is insufficient, with NHS funding set to increase by just 0.2 per cent per year in real terms to 2020.

The RCP argues there are no longer enough doctors to staff our hospitals safely.

The report added: Between 2013 and 2015, the number of doctor vacancies increased by 60 per cent. Seven out of 10 doctors in training now report working on a rota with a permanent gap. Over half of doctors in training report that rota gaps are having a serious or extremely serious impact on patient care.

Hospital consultants tell a similar story. According to new, unpublished data from the 2015/16 consultant census, eight in 10 consultants report gaps in the rotas of doctors in training; more than one in four report gaps so serious and frequent that they cause significant problems for patient safety.

The study said NHS staff increasingly feel like collateral damage in the battle between rising demand and squeezed budgets, and argued the situation is untenable.

A quarter of doctors in training said their working pattern leaves them feeling short of sleep on a daily or weekly basis. The report said: Yet, despite compelling evidence showing the benefits to patient safety, many doctors are actively discouraged from taking naps during night shifts. Three-quarters (74 per cent) of doctors in training go through at least one shift per month with insufficient hydration, and over one-third (37 per cent) do not drink enough water on seven shifts per month.

Over one-quarter (28 per cent) have worked four shifts per month without a meal, while over half (56 per cent) have worked at least one shift per month without a meal.

On average, doctors work an extra five weeks per year on top of their rostered hours, the report added.

It said that even with planned efficiency savings - which it argues are largely unachievable - the NHS faces around a 2.5 billion black hole in its finances.

It concluded: The NHS needs a new plan - no more quick fixes or temporary solutions, but a plan designed to meet the UK's health and care needs in the long-term.

The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? Show all 19 1 /19 The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36454.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36456.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36455.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36457.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36458.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36459.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36460.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36461.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36462.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36464.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36463.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36466.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36467.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36468.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36469.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36470.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36472.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36473.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk The NHS at 60: has the dream been matched by reality? 36474.bin Nick Wilkinson/Newsteam.co.uk

RCP president, Professor Jane Dacre, said: As a doctor, I realise that this is a tough diagnosis for the NHS. However, a diagnosis is the first step towards working with colleagues to find solutions. We are keen to find the best treatment for the NHS over the coming weeks, months and years.

RCP registrar, Dr Andrew Goddard, said: It is clear to all of us working in the NHS that we are at a point of no return and the NHS in its current form is unsustainable without a significant increase in funding.

We can't continue to provide ever-more expensive treatments to an ever-increasing group of patients and not expect the system to collapse. As doctors, we see the problems this creates on a daily basis, be it at the front door of the hospital, in A&E or in out-patients.

Dr Johnny Marshall, director of policy at the NHS Confederation, welcomed the report but said care and treatment must be moved closer to people's homes.

PA
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More than 500 people have donated one of their kidneys to save a stranger's life, according to new figures.

Data from NHS Blood and Transplant shows 509 people have given their kidneys to a stranger over the last decade after living organ donation became legal in 2006.

Giving a kidney to a stranger now makes up 8% of all living kidney donations, with other live donations coming from family and close friends.

The majority of kidney donations still come from deceased donors.

Despite the figures, 5,338 people remain on the transplant list waiting for a new kidney or a combined kidney and pancreas transplant.

John Forsythe, associate medical director for organ donation and transplantation at NHS Blood and Transplant, said: "As a surgeon, when you are retrieving a kidney from an altruistic donor, you are very aware they do not need the operation themselves.

"They have instead volunteered to make a special contribution by saving or improving the life of someone who they will probably never know. These are spontaneous and voluntary offers of donation, motivated by a decision to do something genuinely good for someone in need.

"When the Human Tissue Act was passed into law many of us thought few people would come forward to do this. We are now amazed and very grateful that so many people have chosen to donate a kidney to a stranger."

There were 83 altruistic kidney donations during 2015/16, down on the 107 in 2014/15.

In 2015/2016, 1,035 living kidney donor transplants were performed in the UK.

Valerie Noble, 57, from Bexleyheath, became the 501st altruistic kidney donor.

She had surgery at the Royal London Hospital after watching a documentary about organ donation.

The self-employed interior decorator and mother of two daughters said: "It was so sad to watch. I just thought I could help someone.

"I thought 'I have lived my life, I still have two functioning kidneys, and I could give one away'. The team at the Royal London looked after me so well and my good health was paramount to them."

Valerie donated to a man she has never met and the transplant was a success. She added: "I just hope it gives the recipient a new lease of life. In the hospital were three young women, one was very ill and waiting for a pancreas and kidney transplant, and the others had kidney infections. It was so sad it made me even more determined to go ahead."

Katie Ledger, 29, who lives in Gloucester, received a kidney from a stranger in 2014. She had kept her illness a secret before revealing it in a Facebook post.

She said: "I never told anyone apart from my immediate family about my dialysis or that I had end-stage renal failure.

"I thank my donor every day for my gift of life. It's my goal to not waste the gift of life I was given."
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Holding fees, deposits, tenancy agreement fees, payment for reference checks, inventory charges, check-out costs. Its an expensive time to rent a home in the UK, even before you consider figures from referencing firm HomeLet that show rents rose by more than 5 per cent in the 12 months to April.

This week a major charity added its voice to growing demands that letting agents be banned from charging fees to tenants. Citizens Advice has warned that letting agent fees have risen 60 per cent in the last 5 years alone and that tenants are suffering as a direct result

It has argued that all UK letting agency fees should be paid by landlords as they can shop around, whereas renters have to deal with whichever agency is marketing the home they want. Not only are tenants paying higher bills but theres also concern that high letting agent fees discourages tenants from moving out of unsuitable homes, because the cost of fees and deposits can be so significant.

Last year it became a statutory duty for letting agents to fully publicise fees in advance, but the Letting Fees campaign organised by Generation Rent has found that 14 per cent of agents still do not list their fees publicly.

But even with greater transparency, the issue of fees is a pressing one for the UKs 11 million private renters that in spring this year there was a Commons debate on the subject.

Conservative MP Maria Caulfield said then that increased competition for properties has led to rocketing agent fees. In her constituency of Lewes alone the local Citizens Advice charity has found fees ranging from 175 to 922. She told the House: Not only has the amount charged by letting agents increased, but there has been an increase in the types of fees charged.

However, the Government does not agree that an outright ban on fees for tenants is necessarily the answer. Such a ban already exists in Scotland and Marcus Jones, under-secretary of state in the Department for Communities and Local Government, says the evidence strongly suggests a connection between banning fees and higher rents for tenants.

Despite that, campaigners say it is the only solution. A spokesperson for the Letting Fees campaign argued: A landlord is more able to shop around than a tenant and so has a more powerful position to avoid and force down uncompetitive charges. Even if the costs are returned to the tenant through higher rent the total amount paid would be reduced  and importantly spread over the length of the tenancy, which reduces the financial shocks of renting.

An outrageous example

The Citizens Advice research will come as no surprise to tenants, who have been paying these rising fees for years. Just last week one Twitter user, Magnus Jamieson, posted an example of the various fees chargeable through one agency, opining that letting in London is ****ing bananas.

His succinct outrage was easily explained by the fees listed by the agent. There would be a non-refundable holding fee of 500 to secure the property (although this would be deducted from the first months rent). Referencing fees of 60 per tenant plus 60 each for any guarantors, there was also a tenancy agreement fee of 250. To renew their tenancy the household would pay 120, and when the tenants came to leave there would be check-out fees of up to 175.

With fees that high, a couple with two guarantors who remained in a two-bedroom property for two years would pay almost 800 in fees alone. Thats a substantial amount for tenants who face paying high fees when they move again, potential before any remaining deposit has been released. Whats more, its on top of what the agent charges the landlord.

That is not even a particularly extreme example. We found agents charging tenants all that and more, including 30 and more for a right-to-rent check and check-out fees exceeding 250.

Paying but not the customer

Tenants are also in a peculiar position as they are paying for a service when the landlord is the customer. The landlord is also able to shop around for an agent, while tenants are forced to use whatever letting agent is advertising the property that best suits their needs.

Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, says: Letting agents are hiking up their fees for a service thats often not up to scratch.

With fees rising year on year for letting agents, many tenants will rightly be wondering why they are paying hundreds of pounds for a simple contract renewal or for management services that leave them waiting months for essential repairs

Private renters shop around for properties, not for letting agents. Landlords are better able to choose agencies based on performance and cost and it should therefore be landlords paying letting agent fees, not tenants picking up these rising costs.

How much? Tenants rights group The Tenants Voice suggests tenants should not pay more than 50-100 for an inventory fee in a furnished tenancy, 50-100 for a tenancy reference, and 100 for an administration fee. Unreasonable charges might include: a penalty payment if you dont pay the rent by standing order, a reservation fee to hold a property while you get a reference or deposit, and both moving in and moving out charges.
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The chief executive of mining giant BHP Billiton had a pay cut of more than 50 per cent in the 2016 financial year on the back of the Samarco dam disaster in Brazil.

Andrew Mackenzies salary dropped from $4.58m (3.53m) to $2.24m, with his base salary maintained at $1.7m.

He received no short term or long term bonuses.

The company said the Samarco dam disaster in Brazil, which claimed 19 lives and caused widespread environmental damage, was a key consideration in this decision.

Financial year 2016 has been a very challenging year for the company  our remuneration outcomes reflect this and are aligned with performance, said Carolyn Hewson, chairman of BHPs remuneration committee.

The company reported a record $6.4bn annual loss in August due to the Samarco dam disaster and a commodities slump.

BHPs boss Andrew Mackenzie toured the disaster site (AFP)

Even excluding $7.7bn in writedowns and charges, underlying profits slumped 81 per cent to $1.2bn for the year to June 2016 from $6.4bn a year ago, hit by weak iron ore, copper, coal, oil and gas prices.

BHP Billiton is committed to doing the right thing to help those affected recover and to work closely with our joint venture partner, Vale, and the operator, Samarco, to achieve this, Mr Mackenzie said in a note to shareholders.

Almost a year after the spill at the Samarco mine, owned jointly by BHP and Brazilian miner Vale, there is still no date for restarting operations, complicating attempts to restructure Samarcos debt and increasing the possibility the miner may be allowed to run out of money.

The news came as BHP revealed it planned to contest a massive A$1bn (582m) tax bill from the Australian Taxation over the price at which it sold commodities to its Singapore-based marketing business over more than a decade.

Additional reporting by Reuters
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The president of US bank Morgan Stanley has warned that Londons financial services will be hit by the UKs vote to leave the EU.

In an interview with BBC Radio, Colm Kelleher said that the uncertainty surrounding the negotiations over the exit process from the EU will slow down the investment into the UK.

It is that uncertainty which is causing problems, youll see a slowdown in investment into the UK because people, corporations, like certainty before they invest. So the sooner we get some clarity on where we are heading, the better, he said.

Recommended Read more OECD halves UK growth forecast due to EU referendum vote

I do believe, and I said prior to the referendum, that the City of London will suffer as result of Brexit. The issue is how much, he added.

Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, revealed the scale of the threat to the UKs financial services sectors on Tuesday saying almost 5,500 British firms hold at least one passport to do business in another member state of the EU or the wider European Economic Area (EEA).

It is the first time that the number of companies that will be hit by a hard Brexit option  favoured by some leading Conservative Eurosceptics  has been set out.

Mr Kelleher warned that some companies will pull their headquarters out of the UK unless passporting arrangements are retained.

I'm convinced that London will retain its reputation and prestige as a global financial services centre, but clearly some size of our businesses will have to be moved out of London into Europe, into European headquarters, with the absence of any passporting agreement, he said.

In July, James Gorman, the chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, said Britains decision to leave the EU bloc means Morgan Stanley will need to set up headquarters on the continent and potentially reshuffle some of its employees.

6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Show all 6 1 /6 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you More expensive foreign holidays The first practical effect of a vote to Leave is that the pound will be worth less abroad, meaning foreign holidays will cost us more nito100 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you No immediate change in immigration status The Prime Minister will have to address other immediate concerns. He is likely to reassure nationals of other EU countries living in the UK that their status is unchanged. That is what the Leave campaign has said, so, even after the Brexit negotiations are complete, those who are already in the UK would be allowed to stay Getty 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Higher inflation A lower pound means that imports would become more expensive. This is likely to mean the return of inflation  a phenomenon with which many of us are unfamiliar because prices have been stable for so long, rising at no more than about 2 per cent a year. The effect may probably not be particularly noticeable in the first few months. At first price rises would be confined to imported goods  food and clothes being the most obvious  but inflation has a tendency to spread and to gain its own momentum AFP/Getty Images 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Interest rates might rise The trouble with inflation is that the Bank of England has a legal obligation to keep it as close to 2 per cent a year as possible. If a fall in the pound threatens to push prices up faster than this, the Bank will raise interest rates. This acts against inflation in three ways. First, it makes the pound more attractive, because deposits in pounds will earn higher interest. Second, it reduces demand by putting up the cost of borrowing, and especially by taking larger mortgage payments out of the economy. Third, it makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow to expand output Getty 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Did somebody say recession? Mr Carney, the Treasury and a range of international economists have warned about this. Many Leave voters appear not to have believed them, or to think that they are exaggerating small, long-term effects. But there is no doubt that the Leave vote is a negative shock to the economy. This is because it changes expectations about the economys future performance. Even though Britain is not actually be leaving the EU for at least two years, companies and investors will start to move money out of Britain, or to scale back plans for expansion, because they are less confident about what would happen after 2018 AFP/Getty Images 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you And we wouldnt even get our money back All this will be happening while the Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, is negotiating the terms of our future access to the EU single market. In the meantime, our trade with the EU would be unaffected, except that companies elsewhere in the EU may be less interested in buying from us or selling to us, expecting tariff barriers to go up in two years time. Whoever the Chancellor is, he or she may feel the need to bring in a new Budget Getty Images

Clearly we and other banks will have to have a European-style headquarters in one of the major markets, whether its Frankfurt or one of the other cities there, Gorman said.

Morgan Stanleys warning came as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) slashed its 2017 growth forecast for the UK in half as a result of the Brexit vote in its latest economic outlook.

The institution now expects 1 per cent GDP growth in 2017, down from 2 per cent in its June forecasts.
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The OECD has slashed its 2017 growth forecast for the UK in half as a result of the Brexit vote and warned of very high uncertainty ahead.

The multilateral economics institution had projected UK GDP growth next year of 2 per cent in June, but today reduced that to just 1 per cent in its latest Interim Economic Outlook.

That was easily the largest downgrade for any major advanced economy.

The OECD acknowledged that financial markets had stabilised since the immediate volatility in the wake of the referendum and that swift action by the Bank of England had helped.

But the Paris-based institution, which is funded by member countries, said it still saw major risks ahead.

Uncertainty about the future path of policy and the reaction of the economy remains very high and risks remain to the downside, it said.

The UKs 2016 forecast, however, was revised up from 1.7 per cent to 1.8 per cent.

OECD

In response to the latest forecast Chancellor Phillip Hammond, said: The OECD highlights uncertainty in their outlook, and while I recognise that there may be some difficult times ahead, I am confident that we have the tools necessary to support the economy as we adjust to a new relationship with the EU and take advantage of the opportunities that it offers.

However, the OECD forecast for the UK is much less dire than what its chief economist, Catherine Mann, presented in June.

She said then that the possible economic impact of Britain voting to leave the EU would be in the same ball park as a hard landing for the Chinese economy, the second largest in the world.

 Theresa May tells UN the UK will not turn inwards after Brexit vote

In April, OECD forecast that a Brexit vote would cost each UK household around 2,200 by 2020.

Many City of London forecasters have been revising away their initial forecasts of a recession this year in light of better than expected economic data in the wake of the vote  although like the OECD they generally still expect a sharp slowdown next year.

As the available information grows, the referendum result appears, so far, not to have had a major effect on the UK economy. So it hasnt fallen at the first fence but longer-term effects remain to be seen, said the chief economist of the Office for National Statistics Joe Grice today, pointing to resilient retail sales data for July and August.

Various forward-looking economic survey indicators present a clouded picture.

A report from Markit, also released today, showed that British households expectations about their personal finances held steady in September in another indication that consumers are so far riding out the referendum result.

Markits Household Finance Index was 44.8 this month, largely flat on the 44.9 in August and maintaining the recovery from July in the immediate aftermath of the referendum when it dipped sharply to 42.

Consumers still buoyant...

However, the latest survey from the Bank of England regional agents, released today, showed the confidence of businesses has been slipping in the third quarter of the year, pointing to stagnant investment spending and hiring over the next 12 months.

...but business bruised

Bank of England

The annual rate of activity growth has slowed overall as uncertainty had risen following the EU referendum, although it remained positive, the Bank said.

Matthew Whittaker, chief economist at the Resolution Foundation, said the figures highlight the divergence between nervous businesses and apparently resilient consumers.

How the sentiments of these two groups converge over the coming months will play a key role in determining how well the economy performs in the lengthy period between the decision to leave the EU and the moment we pass through the exit door, he said.

The OECDs 2016 global growth forecast was shaved down to 2.9 per cent from 3 per cent previously.

The 2017 forecast was also reduced slightly to 3.2 per cent from 3.3 per cent before, which the OECD stressed was well-below historical norms.

The OECD warned the world economy was in a low growth trap with persistent growth shortfalls, which lowered expectations and prompted weak trade, investment and wage growth.

The OECD gave encouragement to the Chancellors signal that he will increase infrastructure investment in the Autumn Statement on 23 November, to help boost the UK economy in the wake of the Brexit vote.

All countries have room to restructure their spending and tax policies towards a more growth-friendly mix by increasing hard and soft infrastructure spending, and using fiscal measures to support structural reforms, it said, warning that monetary policy had become overburdened with supporting growth.

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Chinese authorities are investigating a company that researchers say sold North Korea materials that can be used by its growing nuclear weapons program in a crackdown that reflects Beijing's growing frustration with its isolated neighbor.

The announcement about Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. in Dandong, a northeastern border city in Liaoning province, was unusually explicit for Beijing, whose dealings with the North are shrouded in secrecy.

Hongxiang is suspected of unspecified serious economic crimes, according to separate announcements by police in Liaoning and China's foreign ministry. They gave no details but a South Korean think tank said last month it supplied aluminum oxide and other materials that are used in processing nuclear bomb fuel.

Beijing has long been North Korea's main source of aid and diplomatic support but President Xi Jinping's government is showing growing frustration with Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons in defiance of foreign pressure.

China signed on in March to U.N. sanctions that limit trade with the North and has tightened controls on cross-border flows of goods. Security Council resolutions prohibit nuclear weapons development by the North and all ballistic missile activity.

The government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un conducted its fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9. That raised concern abroad it was moving closer to its goal of a nuclear-armed missile that could one day strike the US mainland.

China will definitely take harsher measures including economic sanctions and more proactive measures to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, said Lu Chao, director of the Border Study Institute of the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank.

North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone Show all 13 1 /13 North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP North Korea trading despite nuclear sanctions - Inside the country's special economic zone AP

Although It is rare for China to announce the punishment of its own companies, it shows the firm determination to implement relevant U.N. resolutions, said Lu.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week US officials suspect Hongxiang and its chairwoman, Ma Xiaohong, of helping Pyongyang evade U.N.-imposed restrictions on trade.

Ma founded Hongxiang in 2000 and the company has expanded into trade, hotels and tourism.

Washington has pressed Beijing to lean harder on Pyongyang, but Chinese leaders have resisted for fear of destabilizing Kim's government and setting off a flood of refugees or a political collapse that might lead to US and South Korean troops being stationed in the North near China's border.

Phone calls to Hongxiang's headquarters in Dandong on Wednesday were not answered. People who answered the phone at Dandong police headquarters said they had no information about the investigation. The Liaoning provincial police headquarters didn't respond to questions sent by fax.

In April, China banned imports of North Korean coal and iron ore, an important revenue source for the impoverished country. Beijing also banned sales of jet fuel to the North, though it said civilian aircraft would be allowed to refuel on flights to China.

That was followed in June by a ban on exports to the North of dual use items with possible civilian and military applications including metal alloys, cutting and laser-welding equipment and materials that could be used in production of chemical weapons.

Beijing is making unremitting efforts to driving forward denuclearization on the Korean peninsula and performing our international obligation of nonproliferation export control, said a foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang.

 North Korea carries out fifth nuclear test

The South Korean think tank, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said in its report Hongxiang supplied the North with possible dual use products including pure aluminum ingots, aluminum oxide, ammonium paratungstate and tungsten trioxide.

Tungsten trioxide can be used in making more aerodynamically stable missiles, while aluminum oxide is used to resist corrosion in gas centrifuges during uranium enrichment, according to Asan. It said those could qualify as potential military and nuclear dual use products under US Department of Commerce restrictions.

Hongxiang is one of the biggest traders with North Korea and carried out imports and exports worth a total of $532 million in 2011-15, said the report.

Companies affiliated with it also helped to maintain North Korea's cyber infrastructure and traded with entities in Myanmar that also are subject to international sanctions, Asan said.

There was no indication why the large scale of Hongxiang's trade failed to attract official attention earlier.

AP
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The worlds biggest clothing retailer, Inditex which owns Zara among other brands, beat its competitors as well as stock market expectations with an 8 per cent profits boost as it focused reported a jump in profits as it focused on quicker deliveries and a slicker online presence to drive up sales.

First-half operating profits jumped to 1.61bn (1.38bn) and the company said sales continued to rise in the first few weeks of the third quarter.

Inditex, which owns more than 7,000 stores in 91 countries, this year lowered its target for retail space expansion as it focuses on bolstering online shopping. The strategy also includes bigger stores in key markets, as part of an attempt to maintain growth after revenue increased eight-fold since the companys 2001 initial public offering.

Recommended Read more Zara joins the gender fluidity wave with new unisex clothing line

Inditex has outperformed fast fashion peers such as H&M, whose August sales disappointed the markets.

In light of the difficulties being experienced among clothing peers, todays results act as another reminder of the quality of the Inditex business model, Exane BNP Paribas analyst Simon Bowler said in a note.

As part of its digital expansion, Spain-based Inditex is set to roll out online sales for its brands in Turkey, a market of 75 million people. Its also on track to open its first Zara store in Auckland that same month. Like-for-like sales, which exclude currency movements, increased 11 per cent in the first half.

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Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Rogue trader A French court cut the damages owed by rogue trader Jerome Kerviel from 4.9bn (4.2bn) to just 1m (860,000). The court ruled on that Kerviel was partly responsible for massive losses suffered in 2008 by his former employer Societe Generale through his reckless trades. Kerviel has consistently maintained that bosses at the French bank knew what he was doing all along. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Barclays CEO under investigation for trying to identify whistleblower - Monday Paril 10 Authorities have launched an investigation into Barclays chief executive officer Jes Staley for trying to identify a whistleblower, the bank said on Monday. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are both investigating Mr Staley after the bank notified them that Mr Staley had tried to identify the author of two anonymous letters, which were sent to the board and a senior executive in June 2016. 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Inditex is not alone in betting on online fashion. Amazon has moved aggressively into the space, and sold 12.6bn of clothing last year, more than the combined online sales of its five largest online clothing competitors, including Gap, and Victorias Secret owner L Brands.

Inditex is also benefiting from the steady pace of economic growth in Spain, where the retailer gets about a fifth of its sales. The local clothing market grew an average 3 per cent in the three-month period through July, according to the Spanish statistics agency.

Currency fluctuations hurt Inditex on two fronts as the strong dollar raised costs for the 35 per cent of garments the retailer sources from Asian countries. Meanwhile, the weakness of the Russian ruble, British pound, Mexican peso and Turkish lira eroded sales growth.

Bloomberg
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Companies could be missing out on talented staff due to their outdated attitudes towards people who have a tattoo, a new report says.

Acas, an employers advice group and conciliation service, urged firms to change their attitudes and relax their dress codes.

It argued that a third of young people have a tattoo, but some companies and individual managers were still worried about the image it would give to potential customers.

Businesses are perfectly within their right to have rules around appearance at work but these rules should be based on the law where appropriate, and the needs of the business, not managers' personal preferences, Stephen Williams, Acas head of Equality, said.

Whilst it remains a legitimate business decision, a dress code that restricts people with tattoos might mean companies are missing out on talented workers, he added.

The groups decision to update its dress code guidance follows the recent case of a temporary worker who was sent home without pay for refusing to wear high heels at work.

Any dress code should be non-discriminatory and should apply to both men and women equally, according the group.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Margaret Mountford, the former right-hand woman of Lord Sugar, recently warned that tattoos were a real problem for British young people, seriously decreasing their chances of getting a job.

Last year, Charlotte Tumilty, a trainee teacher, was sent home on her first day of work at a Catholic primary school when staff objected to her tattoos.

Her case prompted debate about whether anti-tattoo discrimination should be made illegal.

Under UK law, workers have no protection under discrimination legislation for having a tattoo.

"Under UK law job applicants and employees do not have any stand alone protection from being discriminated against for having a tattoo," Matt Gingell, an employment law partner at Gannons solicitors, told The Independent

"This means that it could be easy to reject a job candidate for wearing a tattoo. Employers may also be able to fire an employee for contravening a dress code, which requires employees to cover up visible tattoos. Employees with two years service or more do have greater rights  though could still be dismissed fairly in certain situations," he added.



Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity Show all 15 1 /15 Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity This penguin was carefully designed by Ganji Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity This delicate tree is based on one simple line Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity The black and white tattoos are all based on linear designs Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity Ganji designed this map of the world Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity The simple linear tattoo lines have become a trademark of Ganji's work Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity This bird, squirrel and turtle are all designed by Ganji Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity The artist derided the culture of "more is better than less" in an interview Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity The Star Wars themed tattoo is also based on Mo's one line principle Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity This chest piece was designed by the German based tattoo artist Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity Mo Ganji left a job in fashion to work as a tattoo artist Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity Ganji gave an interview to tattoo artist directory Tattrx Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity This elephant is borne of one single tattooed line Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity Believe it or not, this fox is also made up of one single line. Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity These three trees are one of Mo Ganji's designs Mo Ganji Mo Ganji's linear tattoos are beautiful in their simplicity This mountain scene was designed and tattoo by Ganji Mo Ganji

However, a separate study suggested having a visible tattoo can be an advantage for job seekers in some kinds of employment.

Andrew Timming from University of St Andrews in the UK found that managers were more likely to select applicants with a tattoo on their face for a hypothetical job as bartender in a nightclub but also in the arts industry where it can be a sign of creative thinking.

In 2012, it was estimated that 1.5 million British people get a tattoo every year.
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Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt met on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith in 2004, that much the world knew. But what happened between this meeting and the moment they officially announced their relationship was a period in Hollywood subjected to more scrutiny and speculation than any other.

In an interview with Vogue magazine, Jolie was asked how her and Pitt, who divorced from Jennifer Aniston in 2005, eventually became a couple.

While most would have immediately thrown their guard up at such a question, Jolie instead lowered hers and spoke at length about how they fell in love after meeting on the set of the action film.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures Show all 35 1 /35 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2014 Actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the World Premiere of Disney's "Maleficent" at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2015 Actress/director Angelina Jolie Pitt and husband actor Brad Pitt arrive at the AFI FEST 2015 presented by Audi opening night gala premiere of Universal Pictures' "By The Sea" at the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures June 2014 Angelina Jolie, Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and her partner actor Brad Pitt, look at displayed pictures of victims of violence during the third day of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London. Pitt added his A-list support to his partner Angelina Jolie's efforts to eradicate rape in war zones when he joined her in a flashbulb-popping appearance at a global conference in London AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures March 2014 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attend the Oscars held at Hollywood & Highland Cente in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures February 2014 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the EE British Academy Film Awards 2014 at The Royal Opera House in London Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2013 Angelina Jolie, Maddox Jolie-Pitt and actor Brad Pitt arrive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Governors Awards at The Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures February 2012 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the Cinema for Peace Gala ceremony at the Konzerthaus Am Gendarmenmarkt during day five of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival Getty Images for Cinema for Peac Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2012 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive on the red carpet for the 69th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2011 Accompanied by their children, Brad Pitt and Angellina Jolie appear before photographers upon their arrival at Haneda Airport in Tokyo AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2011 Brad Pitt and Angelina Joiie attend the Premiere of DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2" at Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2011 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend "The Tree Of Life" premiere during the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2010 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (with camera) on the 'Romeo and Juliette' film set in Budapest, Hungary Rex Features Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures July 2010 Angelina Jolie and actor Brad Pitt arrive at the premiere of Sony Pictures' "Salt" at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures December 2009 Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie and their son Maddox arrive at the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' and Spyglass Entertainment's "Invictus" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Theater in Beverly Hills Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2009 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attend the Inglourious Basterds Premiere held at the Palais Des Festivals during the 62nd International Cannes Film Festival Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2009 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at Narita International Airport with their children (L to R) Maddox, Vivienne, Zahara and Knox in Narita, Chiba, Japan Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2009 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie pose on the red carpet for the German premiere of the film 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' in Berlin AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures December 2008 Angelina Jolie and actor Brad Pitt arrive at the premiere of Paramount's "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" held at Mann's Village Theatre on Decemeber 8, 2008 in Westwood, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images) Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2008 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose as they arrive to attend the screening of US actor and director Clint Eastwood's film 'The Exchange' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2008 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose as they arrive for the screening of US directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne's film 'Kung Fu Panda' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2008 Angelina Jolie and actor Brad Pitt attend the cocktail party during the 14th annual Screen Actors Guild awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures September 2007 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford premiere on the Day 5 of the 64th Annual Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2007 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie depart the premiere for the film 'Ocean's Thirteen' at the Palais des Festivals during the 60th International Cannes Film Festival Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2007 Angelina Jolie poses as she arrives with actor and producer Brad Pitt at the Festival Palace in Cannes AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2007 Angelina Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt, have a drink in a Prague restaurant "U Sevce Matouse" ("At Matous' Shoemaker") prior to the shooting of Jolie's new film "Wanted". The couple and their children Maddox, Pax Thien, Zahara and Shiloh Nouvel, arrived in Prague aboard a private plane. They are to spend five weeks in Prague AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2007 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the 64th Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2007 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at Newmarket Films premiere of "God Grew Tired of Us" at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures December 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the World Premiere of "The Good Shepherd" presented by Universal Pictures at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2006 Brad Pitt and his partner Angelina Jolie ride on a motorcycle on a busy street in downtown Ho Chi Minh city. Jolie and Pitt are expected to adopt a three-year-old Vietnamese AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2006 Angelina Jolie holds daughter Zahara as husband Brad Pitt carries son Maddox during a stroll on the seafront promenade at the historic Gateway of India AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures June 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt give a press conference at a Swakopmund hotel. Hollywood's hottest couple became the proud parents of daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt on 27 May in Namibia AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt leave Hotel Belvedere in Davos . UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie was in Davos for the World Economic Forum AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt leaving the session opened by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan "A new Mindset for the UN" at the the World Economic Forum in Davos AFP/Getty Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2005 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, accompanied by Jolie's children, arrive at Narita Airport in suburban Tokyo) AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures June 2005 (L-R) Regency Enterprises' David Matalon, actor Brad Pitt, Producer Arnon Milchan, actress Angelina Jolie and News Corp. President/Chief operating officer Peter Chernin arrive at the premiere of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" at the Mann Village Theater in Westwood Getty Images

This interview would establish the forthcoming tone for the rest of their relationship: first pictures of their children would be sold to magazines and the rights to their wedding secured by Hello! (the seven-figure proceeds of which would go to charity). This transparency and declarations of affection for each other would earn them the moniker Brangelina, Hollywoods golden couple that could and would - in the eyes of their fans, at least - survive the immense pressure of fame.

The interview would also be pivotal in establishing the division between Aniston and Jolie after an unimpressed Aniston reacted in her own Vogue cover story one year later. Many things she did say about Jolie were off the record because she asked for the tape recorder to be switched off, only perpetuating the fascination around them further. But on the record, she branded Jolie's detailed recollections of the way they began to feel towards each other on set"uncool".

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston in 2004 (Getty)

Jolie spoke to Vogue in 2007, before their brood expanded from three to six.

Brad was a huge surprise to me, she explained.

I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasnt. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad. And I didnt know much about exactly where Brad was in his personal life. But it was clear he was with his best friend, someone he loves and respects. And so we were both living, I suppose, very full lives.

 George Clooney 'very sorry' to hear of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt divorce

Because of the film we ended up being brought together to do all these crazy things, and I think we found this strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened. I think a few months in I realised, God, I cant wait to get to work. Whether it was shooting a scene or arguing about a scene or gun practice or dance class or doing stuntsanything we had to do with each other, we just found a lot of joy in it together and a lot of real teamwork. We just became kind of a pair. And it took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realise that it might mean something more than wed earlier allowed ourselves to believe. And both knowing that the reality of that was a big thing, something that was going to take a lot of serious consideration.

And while from this moment in, the division between Jolie and Aniston was pushed in gossip columns and made the front of T-shirts, Jolie said she would welcome talking with Aniston - but it would have to be Anistons decision to meet. It would appear Aniston did not take her up on this offer, and the rest is history.
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The news that "Brangelina" has been relegated to the archives of history has travelled as far as Madame Tussauds and the museum has chosen to physically rip apart its wax figure replicas of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

Jolie's lawyer said the actress had filed for divorce from Pitt on Tuesday. The pair officially got together in 2006 after appearing on Mr and Mrs Smith together and then married at Chateau Miraval in the French village of Correns in 2014.

According to TMZ, who broke the news, Jolie is filing for physical custody of their six children but for Pitt to have visitation and joint legal custody. The site, which claims to have viewed a legal filing, said Jolie was extremely upset by Pitt's parenting methods.

The most shocking celebrity divorces Show all 20 1 /20 The most shocking celebrity divorces The most shocking celebrity divorces depps.jpg The most shocking celebrity divorces ben-afflect.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces gwen-stefabi.jpg Getty Images for L.A.M.B. The most shocking celebrity divorces melanie-griffith-antonio-banderas.jpg Getty Images for Children's Hosp The most shocking celebrity divorces miranda-kerr-orlando-bloom.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces tom-cruise.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces heidi-klum-seal.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces russell-brand.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces demi-moore-ashton-kutcher.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces jennifer-lopez-marc-anthony.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces gwyneth-paltrow-chris-martin.jpg Getty Images for Entertainment I The most shocking celebrity divorces tiger-woods.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces madonna.jpg Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces 20293.bin The most shocking celebrity divorces 20296.bin GETTY IMAGES The most shocking celebrity divorces 20298.bin GETTY IMAGES The most shocking celebrity divorces 20299.bin GETTY IMAGES The most shocking celebrity divorces 20300.bin GETTY IMAGES The most shocking celebrity divorces 20295.bin Getty Images The most shocking celebrity divorces 20297.bin Getty Images

Madame Tussauds have wasted no time in placing Hollywood's golden couple at what they described as a "respectful distance from each other".

"We reacted quickly to yesterday's news of the separation of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their plans to divorce by mirroring the separation in the attraction," a Madame Tussauds spokesperson told Press Association.

Recommended Read more How the tabloids pitted Jolie and Aniston against each other

"The couple's wax figures, which were launched in 2013, have been split up and are now featured at a respectful distance from each other. Angelina is keeping Nicole Kidman company and Brad Pitt is with his several time co-star Morgan Freeman."

News the couple will be walking away from their decade-long relationship has sent their devoutly committed fans into shock and a number of high-profile figures have come forward to give their view. Clooney has said he is "sorry" and the news is "unfortunate for a family", while Jolie's father said "something very serious" must have happened for her Jolie to decide to file for divorce.

 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt: A timeline of their relationship

The pair have six children together - Maddox, 15, Pax, 12, Zahara, 11, who are adopted, and biological children Shiloh, 10, and twins Knox and Vivienne who are eight.
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After Hollywood was blindsided by Angelina Jolie's decision to file for divorce from Brad Pitt, it appears her now estranged husband was too.

The news was confirmed on Tuesday, not in a statement from the couple affirming their determination to co-parent and reiterating their love, as Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner were so careful to do, but in a statement from Jolies lawyer, who said the decision was made for the health of their family.

It broke early in California, then more details trickled in; Jolie, 41, had hired Laura Wasser, dubbed the disso queen for dissolving high profile marriages and who recently represented Johnny Depp in his divorce from Amber Heard; TMZ, which claims to have seen a legal filing, said Jolie was extremely upset by Pitt's parenting methods; Jolie had listed their date of seperation as 15 September, citing irreconcilable differences, and asked for full physical custody of the children.

Celebrity couples who met on film sets Show all 7 1 /7 Celebrity couples who met on film sets Celebrity couples who met on film sets Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender The couple met on the set of The Light Between Oceans Getty Celebrity couples who met on film sets Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling The couple met on the set of The Place Beyond The Pines Getty Celebrity couples who met on film sets Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem The couple starred in Jamon Jamon in 1992 and began dating in 2007 AFP/Getty Images Celebrity couples who met on film sets Jenna Dewan and Channing Tatum The couple met on the set of the 2006 film Step Up Getty Celebrity couples who met on film sets Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds The couple met on set of the 2011 movie Green Lantern Getty Celebrity couples who met on film sets Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth The teen couple met filming the 2010 film The Last Song Getty Celebrity couples who met on film sets Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy The couple met on the set of Evening in 2006 Getty

Pitt, 52, responded separately a few hours later, saying the wellbeing of their children is paramount.

In a statement to People magazine, Pitt said: I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids.

I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.

Her father Jon Voight, was surprised by the news: Something very serious must have happened for Angie to make a decision like this, as too was George Clooney, a long-time friend of Pitts, who was told during an interview with CNN: This is the first I've heard of it.

A source told US Weekly Pitt had only been made aware of her decision to file for divorce a day before.

The couple were together for 10 years, married for two. They have six children together: Maddox, 15, Pax, 12, Zahara, 11, Shiloh, 10, and twins Knox and Vivienne, eight.

Amid swirling speculation over their reasons for splitting, Paramount Pictures, in either awkward or impeccable timing, released the trailer for Allied, the turbulent love story of two resistance fighters starring Pitt and Marion Cotillard.

The couple successfully sued the News of the World in 2010 for undisclosed damages over false allegations they were separating.
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Kendall Jenner has found herself the centre of attention after she failed to impress dancers by dressing as a ballerina for a photoshoot.

The 20-year old model was featured in a video for Spanish Vogue, dancing and spinning around, dressed in ballet-inspired outfits.

During the video, she reminisces about her youth and how she likes to spend her free time.

Yet Ms Jenner came under heavy criticism by professional dancers for a lack of technique.

In one photo, she poses en pointe in ballet shoes, but is not standing "over the box" - the hard part at the top of the shoes.

The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments Show all 5 1 /5 The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments Kim Kardashian The photo of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West getting married had the most likes on Instagram for a long time... The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments Kendall Jenner ...until Kim's half-sister Kendall Jenner posted a picture of herself lying down with her hair arranged in heart-shapes, which has 2.6million likes and counting Instagram The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments Kylie Jenner Kylie Jenner was criticised by Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg for 'appropriating black culture' with cornrows selfie Instagram The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian selfie endorsing morning sickness drug taken down after FDA warning for not communicating medical risks Kim Kardashian/Instagram The Kardashian/Jenner sisters and their most memorable Instagram moments Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian posted her naked selfie on Instagram to shut down speculation about her pregnancy and incessant comments about her body Instagram

Twitter was flooded with criticism of her outfit and dancing moves. Plenty of bile was also directed at Vogues for its decision to feature the model rather than a professional dancer.

Social media users said the video was an "insult" to the ballet industry.

"If you go into ballet class looking like Kendall Jenner in her new photos you WILL get kicked out," one user wrote.

Another person said: "I am exhausted yet cannot sleep because Im having NIGHTMARES about Kendall Jenner trying to do ballet and Im so OFFENDED it hurts."

Dance Spirit magazine called the video facepalm-y and wrote: "To our eyes, the whole thing reads as pretty disrespectful to the artists who devote their lives to this demanding craft."

Reality show Dance Moms star Abby Lee Miller said she was not a "fan" of the shoot.

"There are so many amazing dancers in the world Kendall Jenner is not one of them! Shame on Homager, Kriss Jenner!!! She never made these kids take dance class."

Ms Miller made no mention of her other parent, Caitlyn Jenner.

Ms Jenner could not be immediately reached for comment.
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The more Marc Jacobs has attempted to apologise and clarify the cultural appropriation furore which erupted over the dreadlocks modelled in his New York fashion show, the more criticism the fashion designer has received.

Immediately after his show aired last Thursday, critics jumped to condemn the 53-year-old fashion designer for choosing to cast mainly white models to model the dreadlocks. They accused him of cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity and argued dreadlocks were more than a fashion vogue and could not be appropriated with no mention of their black origins or history.

Jacobs subsequent response to the criticism then compounded the problem and triggered an onslaught of broadsides on social media. In an attempt to quell allegations of racial insensitivity, he did the opposite by calling cultural appropriation nonsense and saying he did not see colour or race but just people.

People news in pictures Show all 18 1 /18 People news in pictures People news in pictures 7 October 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in an ice hockey match between former NHL stars and officials at the Shayba Arena in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Vladimir Putin spent his 63rd birthday on the ice, playing hockey with NHL stars against Russian officials and tycoons EPA People news in pictures 6 October 2015 German designer Karl Lagerfeld (R) and model Cara Delevingne (C) appear at the end of his Spring/Summer 2016 women's ready-to-wear collection for fashion house Chanel at the Grand Palais which is transformed into a Chanel airport during the Fashion Week in Paris, France Reuters People news in pictures 5 October 2015 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne addresses the Conservative party conference in Manchester. The Chancellor argued that reducing the payments to people in low paid jobs would give them economic security by reducing the Governments spending deficit Getty Images People news in pictures 4 October 2015 Cowboys captain Johnathan Thurston takes a moment in the centre of the field with his daughter Frankie Thurston, holding dark-skinned doll, after winning the 2015 NRL Grand Final match between the Brisbane Broncos and the North Queensland Cowboys at ANZ Stadium in Sydney. The image quickly became the talking point of Australias National Rugby League Final and provoked a strong reaction on social media, with many praising Thurston for giving his child a toy that promotes inclusiveness and diversity Getty Images People news in pictures 3 October 2015 Pope Francis gives a thumbs-up as he greets people at the end of an audience to the participants of a meeting organized by the "Food Bank" at the Paul VI audience hall in Vatican Getty Images People news in pictures 2 October 2015 Britain's Finance Minister George Osborne (L) throws an American football as he meets with former American football players Dan Marino (2nd R) and Curtis Martin (not pictured) at 11 Downing Street in London, ahead of the New York Jets playing against the Miami Dolphins at London's Wembley Stadium on 4 October Getty Images People news in pictures 1 October 2015 An honor guard opens the door as Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall to attend a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia People news in pictures 30 September 2015 Former Mrs America Lisa Christie, who alleges misconduct by Bill Cosby, holds up photos of her younger self during a news conference at the law office of attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Matt Damon has defended himself against claims that he instructed gay actors to remain in the closet. He had said I think youre a better actor the less people know about you and sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether youre straight or gay, people shouldnt know anything about your sexuality but an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show said, I was just trying to say actors are more effective when theyre a mystery. Right? Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Marion Cotillard has said that there is no place for feminism in Hollywood. Speaking to Porter magazine, she saidFilm-making is not about gender/ You cannot ask a president in a festival like Cannes to have, like, five movies directed by women and five by men. For me it doesnt create equality, it creates separation. I mean, I dont qualify myself as a feminist." Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Paul Walkers daughter, Meadow, is suing Porsche over her fathers death in a lawsuit that claims he was trapped in the burning car because of design flaws and the seat belt. The Fast and Furious star was killed when the Porsche Carrera GT he was a passenger in hit a pole in California in 2013. The driver, his friend Roger Rodas, also died when the vehicle burst into flames. AP People news in pictures 28 September 2015 Robert Mugabe waits to address the United Nations General Assembly. The leader of Zimbabwe reportedly exclaimed 'We are not gay!' as he criticised Western nation's "double standards and attempts to prescribe new rights that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs. In 2013 he described homosexuals as worse than pigs, goats and birds. Reuters People news in pictures 28 September 2015 South African comedian Trevor Noah hosts the first 'Daily Show' since taking over from Jon Stewart as host. Stewart had presented the US satirical news show since 1999 and was described by Noah during the show as a 'Political father' 2015 Getty Images People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Sir Elton John may have received a phone call from the real Vladimir Putin. Mr Putin's spokesman announced he had made contact weeks after the singer was duped by pranksters pretending to be the Russian President. Getty People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was mistakenly declared as the artist who produced the Mona Lisa by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. It was in fact Leonardo da Vinci. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 A new biography claims Donald Trump expected to be dead by 40 and never marry. The Guardian says the a new book also claims that in 1980, Mr Trump manufactured a fake vice-president of his real estate conglomerate, whom he called John Baron. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 The Dalai Lama has said that Britain's policy towards China is just about 'Money, money, money.' And asked 'Where is morality?' People news in pictures 24 September 2015 Puff Daddy secured the number-one spot on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings list, with the publication calculating he made an estimated $60million (39m) between June 2014 and June 2015.

All who cry cultural appropriation or whatever nonsense about any race or skin colour wearing their hair in any particular style or manner - funny how you dont criticise women of colour for straightening their hair, he wrote on Instagram. I respect and am inspired by people and how they look. I dont see colour or race - I see people, he added.

Marc Jacobs official apology for the above reply has now garnered yet more criticism, with social media users dubbing it a lazy, condescending, non-apology.

Accompanying the apology alongside a picture which said I have read all your comments, he apologised for the lack of sensitivity he unintendedly expressed in his brevity.

I thank you for expressing your feelings, he wrote on Sunday. I apologise for the lack of sensitivity unintentionally expressed by my brevity. I wholeheartedly believe in freedom of speech and freedom to express oneself though art, clothes, words, hair, music, everything. Of course, I do see colour but I DO NOT discriminate. THAT IS A FACT! Please continue to express your feelings freely but do it kindly. Nothing is gained from spreading hate by name calling and bullying.

Recommended Read more Marc Jacobs triggers more criticism after defending dreadlocks

Some social users have taken issue with the apology and argued it did not go far enough in recognising why he had been subject to criticism in the first place.

Was this supposed to be an apology? I see no self-evaluation nor any comprehension of the comments call his behavior and views out. When you're sorry, you DO better. This was not an apology and he has no intention of doing better, wrote one Instagram user.

Marc Jacobs needs a better to team to craft his non-apology apology, wrote one Twitter user.

Another said: "Think of how this total non-apology could be improved, like casting more black women in your shows @marcjacobs".

One more said he had "composed a lazy, faux apology".

Nevertheless, others were more positive about his fashion show, with Naomi Campbell commending it on Instagram. Amazing show Marc Jacobs and sis Jourdan Dunn, the supermodel wrote. Looking gorge. Loved every outfit !! From a Jamaican Girl who has been in your life for 30 years . Keep your head up #alwaysintheart.

Others argued Jacobs needn't have apologised in the first place, with one user saying cultural appropriation was an example of political correctness gone too far.

Debates over cultural appropriation have raged in recent years and the issue continues to divide many. The question of white dreadlocks and cornrows are particularly contentious, with Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus and Kylie Jenner having all been rebuked by the public for their culturally appropriative hairstyles.

A representative for Jacobs declined to comment.
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Amid reports Angelina Jolie is holed up in a Los Angeles bunker planning her next move in her divorce from Brad Pitt, their split after 10 years has happened, according to the official line from lawyers for Jolie, to ensure the health of the family.

The couple who were so transparent in the media (Jolie once uttered the words every interviewer dreams of, but rarely hears: "ask me anything") is now surrounded by unanswered questions over what precipitated the breakdown of their relationship.

Less than 24 hours after confirming the divorce, Hollywood's ultimate power couple has been dogged by rumours of what led to the demise of Brangelina amid unsubstantiated allegations about Pitts relationship with his Allied co-star Marion Cotillard. There is no suggestion Cotillard had any involvement with Pitt other than professionally or in his divorce, and a source quoted by the Mail Online says Cotillard is devastated by the reports. Cotillard did not respond to a request for comment from the Independent.

 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt: A timeline of their relationship

A source close to Pitt dismissed the claims as totally untrue, telling the Independent: Its disgraceful that someone would introduce a completely innocent third party into an issue that has nothing to do with them.

Marion Cotillard (Getty Images)

The front of their Los Angeles home is now decorated with a string of paparazzi and police have been stationed outside to ensure their safety.

In a filing obtained by TMZ, Jolie reportedly expressed concerns over the way Pitt, 52, was parenting the children. The actress, 41, has filed for physical custody and joint legal custody of their six children and asked for Pitt to be granted visitation rights.

TMZ, the site to break the news of their divorce, claims their split is related to parenting concerns solely, with no other factors or issues identified.

Pitt has accused Jolie of unleashing hell", according to TMZ. Sources claimed Pitt had pleaded with Jolie to keep the divorce low-key and is now fearful for the children because of the paparazzi now surrounding their home.

But the source said instead of being negative, Jolie and Pitt both wanted to reach a resolution quickly for their children. Ange is a great mother and Brad is a very committed father and they both just want what is best for kids. Unfortunately, people are introducing baseless allegations as a way of trying to ratchet up negativity when in fact the two of them want to resolve this for their children.

The point is that from him - and both of them - he went out of his way to make sure people around him are not being negative.

Jolie has enlisted the formidable divorce lawyer Laura Wasser, nicknamed the queen of 'disso' - dissolving marriages - who represented Johnny Depp in his acrimonious divorce from Amber Heard.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes Show all 6 1 /6 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes I think it's a reality of marriage that you go through hard times and that you have to embrace those hard times and challenges and know that it's a part of your marriage and its the pulling through together that actually makes the bond. - Jolie AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes There's a more profound feeling when I look back at all the things my wife and I have gone through; all the successes and failures and great passions and great fights and that we have that together is something I cant quite get my arms around but, to me, its much more enticing than the newness of relationships. - Pitt Getty Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes [Brad] has expanded my life in ways I never imagined. We built a family. He is not just the love my life, he is my family. I hold that very dear. - Jolie Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom. - Pitt Getty Images for Cinema for Peac Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes You get together and you're two individuals and you feel inspired by each other, you challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy.' - Jolie Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt In Quotes There are no secrets at our house. We tell the kids, 'Mom and Dad are going off to kiss.' They go, 'Eww, gross!' But we demand it" - Pitt Getty Images

Meanwhile, Us Weekly claims an unspecified incident that took place a week ago prompted Jolie's decision to file for divorce, while a source speaking to the Mirror has suggested Pitt had anger problems".

Documents filed in Los Angeles Superior Court show Jolie is asking to keep miscellaneous jewellery and other personal effects and additional separate property assets, the exact nature and extent of which are not presently known. She has not asked for spousal support.

Pitt and Jolie have not been seen together at a red carpet event since the 2015 premiere of their film, By The Sea, a tale of the demise of a marriage that is now taking on greater significance in light of recent events.

Recommended Read more What Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have said of their divorce

Pitt and Jolie have released statements through their representatives and lawyers but have otherwise declined to comment on the claims. As a couple, they spoke fondly of each other during interviews throughout their relationship and marriage. Speaking after undergoing her double mastectomy in 2013, Jolie said of Pitt: He has been extraordinary. He is such a wonderful man and a wonderful father and I feel very lucky.

In a statement to People magazine, Pitt said: I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids.

I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.

Representatives for Jolie did not respond to a request for comment.
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World leaders are poised to sign a "landmark" UN declaration and commit more than 600 million to fighting what has been termed "our biggest global health threat" - antibiotics.

The rise of so-called "superbugs" that are resistant to antibiotic treatments, and the threat they pose to modern medicine, will be recognised in a pledge signed by officials from 193 countries at the UN General Assembly in New York.

It follows a UK-led drive to raise awareness of the potential impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which Englands chief medical officer described as "the greatest future threat to our civilisation".

Professor Dame Sally Davies, Englands chief medical officer, said: This declaration is the culmination of six years of hard work and I am extremely proud that every UN member state is now engaged in the enormous task of tackling the greatest future threat to our civilisation.

Drug-resistant infections are firmly on the global agenda, but now the real work begins. We need governments, the pharmaceutical industry, health professionals and the agricultural sector to follow through on their commitments to save modern medicine.

Every signatory of the UN declaration will agree to:

Develop surveillance and regulatory systems on the use and sales of antimicrobial medicines for humans and animals

Encourage innovative ways to develop new antibiotics

Educate health professionals and raise public awareness on how to prevent drug-resistant infections

The special meeting on Wednesday will be only the fourth time in its 70-year history that the UN has met specifically to discuss a health issue.

 Antibiotics crisis is global

Recommended Read more WHO warns against use of entire class of antibiotics for gonorrhoea

If antibiotics lose their effectiveness then key medical procedures  including gut surgery, caesarean sections, joint replacements and chemotherapy  could become too dangerous to perform.

Health leaders from around the world have raised serious concerns about the growing resistance to antimicrobial drugs, which destroy harmful microbes. Antibiotics are the best known of these drugs, but there are others  such as antivirals, antimalarial drugs and antifungals.

Around 700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant infections such as TB, HIV and malaria. If no action is taken, it has been estimated that drug-resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: Antimicrobial resistance is perhaps our biggest global health threat  it could nullify the progress of over a century of modern medicine and kill millions.

So I am proud that this country has led the charge and rallied the international action necessary to tackle the problem.

We are determined to build on our domestic achievements  thanks to the hard work of NHS staff, hospital-acquired infections have been halved, and GPs prescribed 2.7 million fewer items this year compared to last  but well couple that with global leadership as together we face up to a huge challenge.

Earlier this year, Lord ONeill called for a $2bn (1.53bn) investment in global innovation funding to tackle AMR by 2020 following his review on the subject.

At the event in New York, global leaders will pledge $790m (606m).

Lord ONeill set out a series of key recommendations to help combat the threat of AMR.

One of his proposals suggests that big pharmaceutical companies should play or pay  meaning they either join the search to hunt for new antibiotics or be forced to pay a fine. Those who do and find successful new treatments should be rewarded handsomely.

Another called for better use of diagnostic tools to prevent patients being given antibiotics unnecessarily.

Antimicrobial Resistance Q and A

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

Germs have higher chances of developing resistance to a drug if the drug is not used properly. If a drug is not used long enough or taken for the wrong reason, or if low levels of the drug are common in the environment, the germs can survive and adapt.

Doctors are already facing situations in which they are helpless against infections that used to be easily treated with antibiotics, Fukuda said. All types of microbes, including bacteria, viruses and fungi have been shrugging off attacks from the medicines designed to stop them. Experts estimate that 700,000 people die around the world each year from drug-resistant germs, and they expect the number to grow sharply.

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the problem may also affect doctors' willingness to do chemotherapy, organ transplants, or other treatments that might put a patient at risk of uncontrollable infections. "It can undermine modern medicine," he said.

WHY DO WE OVERUSE THESE DRUGS?

Often because of good intentions and bad decisions. For example, antibiotics don't work against viral illnesses like colds and flu. But doctors often prescribe them anyway to patients looking for some kind of treatment for their respiratory infections, experts say. Companies that raise livestock routinely prescribe antibioticsto try to stave off costly infections in herds and flocks.

WHY ARE THERE SO FEW NEW ANTIBIOTICS?

A major reason is that it is very hard for drugmakers to earn any money selling new antibiotics, so they don't want to spend the money needed to develop them. Patients don't need to be on antibiotics for very long, which means they won't be buying large amounts of the drug. And doctors are likely to prescribe any newantibiotics only in cases where older, cheaper ones don't work first.

WHY NOW?

One factor is that world leaders are starting to worry about the economic threats from the problem. A 2014 report commissioned by the United Kingdom projected that by 2050 it will kill more people each year than cancer and cost the world as much as $100 trillion in lost economic output.

The World Bank this week released a report saying drug-resistant infections have the potential to cause at least as much economic damage as the 2008 financial crisis.

WHAT CAN THE U.N. DO?

For now, just draw more attention to the problem. That's what happened on the three other occasions the U.N. held a special session on a health issue  on the AIDS virus in 2001, on non-communicable diseases in 2011, and on Ebola in 2014.

The U.N. will adopt a declaration that endorses an action plan approved last year by an international meeting of health ministers. The declaration recognizes the size of the problem and encourages countries to come up with plans  and money  to cut back on antibiotic use, make better use of vaccines to prevent infections in the first place, and fund development of new drugs.

"We need new antibiotics, but in all likelihood we're not going to invent our way out of this," Frieden said.

Associated Press
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Finding a nest of spiders in a bunch of bananas is terrifying at the best of times, but when theres a risk that they could be a nest of deadly Brazilian wandering spiders set loose in your house, terror levels can go off the charts.

Thats what Ashley Gamble and his partner Sophia Newcombe discovered when a bunch of bananas delivered as part of their local Asda shop was found to be harbouring a small nest of spiders, which began falling out of it onto the floor.

He told The Sun he and his family have left the house and will not return until it has been fumigated.

Recommended Read more Family discover of nest of deadly spiders in Aldi bananas

It has been reported that the spiders are Brazilian wandering spiders, a deadly breed that can kill people in a matter of hours, though these spiders are known to nest on the ground and not in trees. The types of spiders known to nest in bananas are understood to be harmless to humans.

However, a Brazilian wandering spider carrying a sac of thousands of eggs was found under a bunch of bananas after a Waitrose shop in South London in 2014. The spider and its eggs were killed.

An Asda spokesperson said these incidents are extremely rare and that its bananas are washed and sprayed before they are transported to the UK and every single piece of fruit is manually checked for quality and stowaways.

We sell one billion bananas every year and the chance of finding a spider is incredibly low, but very occasionally one hangs around to give us a fright. We are sorry for any upset this has caused and remain in touch with Mr Gamble while we investigate further.

Where do Brazilian wandering spiders come from?

Fortunately, it is very rare to find Brazilian wandering spiders in the UK or anywhere outside their natural habitat in South America.

They live in the forests of Costa Rica, Columbia, Peru, Brazil, and Paraguay and gain their name from the habit of moving across jungle floors at night in search of food.

In the day, they like hiding in places that are dark and moist and are known to favour piles of wood, garages, cupboards, shoes and even heaps of clothes.

The apparent tendency to hide in banana bunches  like in the latest incident  has given them the nickname banana spider.

Their scientific name translates as murderess in Greek and they are also known as the armed spider, because of their unusual attacking stance, and horse stinger.

 Weatherman freaks out live on air after spotting spider on camera lens

How deadly is this breed?

The Guinness Book of World Records has named it the most venomous spider in the world for possessing the most active neurotoxic venom of any living spider.

The toxin PhTx3 causes extreme pain, swelling, paralysis, skin cell destruction, fatal breathing complications, heart attacks and painful erections (priapism) in men lasting up to four-hours.

Victims of a Brazilian wandering spider bite can reportedly be killed in an hour.

But few deaths occur because an effective anti-venom is available in Brazil and Guinness claims that people are killed, it is usually in children under the age of seven.

Scientists have reportedly considered investigating the use of the deadly venom as a possible ingredient for drugs treating erectile dysfunction.

What do Brazilian wandering spiders look like?

There are eight known species, with the most dangerous being the Phoneutria fera and the Phoneutria nigriventer.

All vary slightly in appearance but are known for their size, with a leg span of up to 15 cm (6 ins) and body length of up to 5 cm (2 ins).

They are covered with hair and usually dark brown in colour, with some displaying bright red hairs on their venom glands.

When Brazilian wandering spiders feel threatened, they adopt a distinctive attacking stance with their front legs in the air, swaying from side to side.

How do they attack?

The spiders use bites as their main form of attack but do not always deliver venom, using it only in an estimated third of bites.

They eat insects and small mammals, including other spiders, amphibians, reptiles and mice, hunting them on the ground and killing with an ambush or direct attack.
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Vets have warned people to stop buying dogs with fashionable flat-faced features.

Concerns have been raised over the creatures' welfare in the wake of their "increased popularity" in the UK, the British Veterinary Association (BVA) has said.

Bulldogs, pugs, French bulldogs and shih-tzus have become popular due to their wrinkled noses and squashed faces.

The dogs are known to suffer from a range of health issues including breathing difficulties and eye ulcers.

President of the BVA, Sean Wensley, said people should look at getting different breeds instead.

Vets are seeing concerning trends in dog health and welfare because of the rise in ownership of brachycephalic breeds, he said.

Prospective dog owners need to consider that these dogs can suffer a range of health issues throughout their lives from eye ulcers to painful spine abnormalities and severe breathing difficulties that can result in otherwise preventable surgery.

The surge in popularity of these dogs has increased animal suffering and resulted in unwell pets for owners, so we strongly encourage people to think about choosing a healthier breed or crossbreed instead, he suggested.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA

The dogs were apparently bred that way because people liked the flat-faced look, but their short muzzles cause issues as it means the dogs have short throats and airways.
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An Oktoberfest beer festival due to be held in the centre of Glasgow has had its request for an alcohol licence refused, following outbreaks of violence at the event last year.

The citys licensing board turned down the application after Police Scotland submitted a report detailing a number of concerns over disorderly and aggressive revellers.

Event organisers were told the planned Blythswood Square venue in the north of the city was unsuitable, as festivalgoers pose a threat to pedestrians and a significant burden on the surrounding streets.

At last years event, police said they were forced to send in several riot vans after a number of fights broke out among the estimated 2,200 attendees  the majority of them incited by drunkenness.

Officers also highlighted the lack of security staff attending the event, which organisers attributed to staff sickness on the day of the festival.

In all, 25 revellers were ejected from the festival and several detained over their behaviour.

The report told of how three males were arrested and issued with fixed penalty notices for a breach of peace for their conduct on the evening of the event, and others restrained for attempting to assault police officers.

A statement from the Oktoberfest organisers said: "We are working on the best suitable venue as the licensing board did decide that Blythswood Square is not the right one to be.

"We are working on a perfect venue and will announce this shortly."

Tickets for the event cost 36 for beer and food, and up to 56 for the VIP package, and many tickets have already been sold. A table for eight guests at the festival costs up to 288.
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Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in awareness of transgender communities among wider society. In 2014, Time magazine declared society has reached a "transgender tipping point" and figures like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have become household names. However, despite the welcome interest in transgender communities, some transgender identities have received considerably more attention than others. Transgender identities and lived experiences can be much more varied and complex than binary 'male to female' or 'female to male' transition stories which dominate the press.

Non-binary people can identify as transgender, but often not within the traditional gender binary of male or female. Rather, some non-binary people can identify as a mix of genders, or none at all. Some can feel their gender identity is steady and fixed, while others feel it can fluctuate by the day, by the hour or depending on the situation they are in. For many non-binary people, life can feel like being a minority within a minority.

Here, four non-binary people share their experiences of what life is like for them living in the UK and their hopes for greater understanding and visibility for the future.

J is 39-years-old and works at a university in London

How would you describe being non-binary?

Being non-binary feels like having this hole in your chest where something  my sense of gender  used to be, where you know that almost everyone else has something, and now I just... don't. It's not a painful lack, just a noticeable one that sets me apart from most other people.

It means people who don't identify all of the time as a man or a woman. Maybe they switch between those genders, or feel like a different gender entirely, or they don't have a gender at all, or something different.

What are the biggest misconceptions about non-binary people?

That we're all just confused, or it's just the latest teenage rebellion trend (I'm 39!).

What more needs to be done to support non-binary people?

I'd like to not have to give details about my gender, or choose a gendered title, when interacting with government  it's generally not necessary! In some parts of the NHS you can use Mx which is my preferred title.

I wish nonbinary people were explicitly included in laws and policies that protect trans people.

We don't all want hormones and surgery, but for those of us who do, we are often policed by health care workers who resist helping us if we don't fit into their very narrow linear binary narrative of what trans people are like.

What advice would you give a young non-binary person who is considering coming out or being more visible?

Line up a support system  make sure you've got friends who have your back; try to do what you can to keep yourself safe and housed.

Look up support groups and useful websites online; sometimes it's really just such a relief to read the voices of other people going through similar things, even if you don't reach out and participate in any discussions yourself.

Remember that no one is required to come out, and your assessment of the risks and benefits for you is the most important.

Lola Phoenix (Lola Phoenix)

Lola Phoenix is a 29-year-old writer who works in the charity sector

What is being non-binary like?

Non-binary is an umbrella term used within Eurocentric cultures to describe an individual who doesn't feel that man or women fit their entire gender.

I'm misgendered on a daily basis because there isn't anything I can do in this society to have people read me as non-binary. I don't feel I present as any gender because I am agender. And people will read me as having a gender and they will pick either man or woman.

I don't see why I ought to blame myself for being misgendered just because this society is backwards enough to think gender can be read from clothing and appearance. Instead of blaming myself for not presenting well enough for people to read my gender (which I don't believe is possible in this society), I blame this society for failing to understand gender and its complexity.

What are the biggest misconceptions about non-binary people?

My experience coming out to friends who aren't within the LGBTQ community (most of my friends are) is that they have tried to understand it and don't really get it completely. I usually still get misgendered by those people and have to politely remind them about it. But they at least haven't been hostile, just interested in knowing more about what it means and perhaps a bit confused by the concept.

What more needs to be done to support non-binary people?

I'm only interested in laws and policy changes that help trans women and transfeminine people because they are the most at risk.

It would be great if I could go by Mx. on forms, but that isn't enough.

Gender Identity Clinics (GICs) need to improve. They need to stop assessing the validity of people's genders and asking people about their past history. I was discharged from the GIC for not socially consolidating my gender role. I have yet to be told what a non-binary person needs to do to socially consolidate their gender role despite a year later complaining. I am now fundraising for surgery.

Fixing the GICs so that they actually treat people would help all people.

(Fox and Owl (Fox and Owl)

Ugla Stefania known as Owl and Fox Fisher, a non-binary couple. Fox is an artist, film-maker and campaigner who co-created and organises the annual Trans Pride Brighton, as well as founding the My Genderation film series. They are currently making a documentary about being non-binary and have recently returned from filming in Russia with members of the local trans community.

What is being non-binary like?

Society has established two opposite categories of people: men and women. Non binary includes all the areas in between, describing it as shades of grey, something other than the binary.

With close friends it doesn't really matter and especially not in queer spaces. But in other spaces it can be tedious or even marginalising to be constantly equated to just a man or a woman. It can really affect your sense of self and you can feel your identity being erased or not thought of in general discussion or mainstream media or discussions.

There is also no way to be legally recognised as non binary so all official documents or papers only offer male or female. It can also affect you in social situations where people refuse to acknowledge your identity or don't really believe your identity is authentic.

What more needs to be done to support non-binary people?

Non-binary people should be recognised legally and there should be options as to register your gender as neither male nor female. The whole idea of registering gender on documents seems outdated in so many ways that we'd actually like to see it totally abolished - but within the current system taking steps to include at least a third option in registrations seems like a more realistic approach at this point.

Trans issues and non binary issues should be discussed as a part of a curriculum and diversity in general should be mainstreamed into all stages of education to give a better picture of human diversity.

What are the biggest misconceptions about non binary people?

People wrongly think these identities aren't really authentic and it's just a political statement. While it is a political statement, it is also a vital part of people's identity. Being non binary and being true to yourself is often a political act, and not just for trans people or non binary people. I think that people need to realize that identities that are political or challenge the current social order aren't any less personal or authentic. On the contrary, that is what makes them even more personal and real to people. Because you have to stand up for yourself in a world that tries to convince you otherwise.

People also tend to mix up sex and gender and make the misconception that non binary are therefore intersex. Sex or sex characteristics are things related to our body such as hormone production, genitals, chromosomes and so on while gender is the socially constructed idea of what men and women are, how they behave, how they express and so on. While non binary people can be intersex, non binary people are not automatically intersex nor vice versa.
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Boris Johnson has been accused of playing with his phone instead of listening to the Prime Ministers first major address at the opening of the 71st UN General Assembly.

Theresa Mays speech to the UN touched on a range of lofty and pressing concerns; the threat of global terrorism, an international refugee crisis the size of the entire UK population, and a commitment that Britain would not shy away from the world just because it voted to leave the EU.

But despite the severity of her subject matter, not everyone in the audience at the General Assembly in New York found the speech completely gripping.

Recommended Read more Theresa May tells UN the UK will not turn inwards after Brexit vote

Live video streamed from the hall cut away a number of times to the UK delegation, and each time the Foreign Secretary was seen clutching his mobile phone, only occasionally looking up to take in what was happening around him.

It could be put down to unfortunate timing on the part of the TV cameras - except The Independents correspondent at the UN on Tuesday also noted Mr Johnson spent much of the speech sending messages on his phone.

Viewers of the address took to Twitter, and they were unimpressed by Mr Johnsons performance.

In a long session of addresses by world leaders, each allocated around 20 minutes, Ms May was not the only speaker who struggled to maintain the interest of her audience.

But she did pledge hundreds of millions of pounds to help fight international terrorism, while stressing the importance of helping people displaced by conflict to find aid, education and employment.

She condemned the air strike on a UN aid convoy in Syria which killed multiple aid workers and has put the US-Russian ceasefire in jeopardy.

Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Show all 7 1 /7 Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson plays rugby with Japanese elementary school children in Tokyo Getty Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson bumps into a schoolchild during a Street Rugby event at Tokyo Square Gardens building EPA Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson collides with 10-year-old Toki Sekiguchi during a game of Street Rugby with a group of Tokyo children Reuters Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson falls down after colliding with 10-year-old Toki Sekiguchi during a game of Street Rugby with a group of Tokyo children Reuters Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson falls down after colliding with 10-year-old Toki Sekiguchi during a game of Street Rugby with a group of Tokyo children Reuters Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match Boris Johnson takes down boy during rugby match

And she stressed the important contribution made by British troops abroad, particularly in Somalia, where they are supporting local forces to fight established militant groups.

So this is not the time to turn away from our United Nations. It is the time to turn towards it, she concluded.
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Boris Johnson has been urged by two senior MPs to back an independent probe into whether international law has been violated during the Yemen conflict.

The Commons committee chairs told the Foreign Secretary the matter was urgent in the light of a growing death toll in the country, where Saudi Arabian forces have led an intense bombing campaign.

It comes after Mr Johnson controversially refused to block UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, saying it was not clear the states military action had breached laws.

Chris White, chairman of the Committees on Arms Export Controls, and International Development Committee Chair Stephen Twigg said an inquiry was needed because almost 7,000 people have died in the Yemen conflict, including some 1,100 children.

Their letter to Mr Johnson said: We urge you to seize this opportunity and support the establishment of an international, independent mechanism under the auspices of the UN.

Hopefully this will serve to deter future violations of international humanitarian law as well as providing independent and conclusive evidence in relation to allegations that have been levelled at both sides of the conflict.

They said the international community could not be sure inquiries already set up by Saudi Arabia and Yemen were transparent and credible.

A Saudi-led air campaign was launched in March last year and aimed to put down a rebellion by Houthis, a Shia Muslim minority from the north of the country, who have backing from Iran.

 Footage shows extent of child malnutrition in Yemen as Britain continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia

There have been reports that the bombardment has hit schools and hospitals, but the UK has continued military exports, licensing arms sales of 3.3bn according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade.

Earlier this month, Mr Johnson said the test of continued arms exports is whether those weapons might be used in a commission of a serious breach of international humanitarian law.

He then went on to say that having regard to all the information available to us, we assess this test has not been met.

The Committees on Arms Export Controls were recently left split after MPs on them were unable to agree what to do about the sale of British weapons to Saudi Arabia.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: It is important that Saudi Arabia in the first instance conducts thorough and conclusive investigations into incidents where it is alleged that international humanitarian law has been breached.

They have the best insight into their own military procedures and will be able to conduct the most thorough and conclusive investigations.

It will also allow the country to really understand what went wrong and apply the lessons learnt in the best possible way. This is the standard we set ourselves and our allies.
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Jeremy Corbyn's ex-wife has revealed she voted for rival Owen Smith in the Labour leadership contest because she believes her ex-husband lacks the skills, felxibility and media savvy to do the job.

Jane Chapman became Mr Corbyn's first wife after they married in 1974. Despite supporting his successful bid in 2015, she claimed to have been "saddened and really upset" by his performance since and now cannot back him for leader.

The professor in communications went on to say that the longer he takes to get to grips with his job, the more Labour will lose in the polls, and then questioned whether his '1970s politics' were suitable for the 21st Century

Prof Chapman divorced Mr Corbyn five years after marrying him at age 25. Both had just been elected as Labour councillors for Haringey, London.

The University of Lincoln academic said: "I voted for Owen Smith. Last time I voted for Jeremy out of personal loyalty, but I've been so saddened and really upset...it's been such a painful sideshow this last year that I just feel that Owen's policies are also radical and that's good.

"So I dont think there's much difference in policies, but there's more difference in felxibility, media ability, because remember I'm a professor of communications now, so I look at media performance very critically, rightly or wrongly.

"The ability to unite the party and to have a longer term post-Brexit vision, I think that's something that's been missing."

Speaking to BBC radio she explained that it was not a question of his policies, but of leadership and "inspiring the parliamentary party to work with him in ways that are effective."

 Jeremy Corbyn visits boxing club for homeless

Discussing his expereince, she said: "Jeremy never had a chairmanship of a select committee, despite the fact he's been in the House of Commons a very long time.

"He never had local authority leadership, only at the sub-committee panel level, and he's never had trade union leadership...and he's never had outside expereince in industry, or third sector, or anything like that."

Pointing out that there is a necessary managerial skills set that every leader should have, she went on: "He could develop it, but it's been a bit slow and it's been a bit chaotic and I think we are running out of time.

"The longer he takes to devlop it, and his team, the more Labour is losing in the polls, that's the reality of it."

Prof Chapman said Mr Corbyn is "totally committed, totally principled", and had been for the whole of the time that she had known him.

Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Show all 8 1 /8 Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith clash at a leadership hustings in Gateshead, where Mr Smith was scarcely able to answer a question without being booed by Mr Corbyns supporters PA Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Jeremy himself admitted he was seven out of 10 in terms of his faith in the European Union. He said it, said Mr Smith during his second live debate with Jeremy Corbyn Getty Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Ballot papers are currently due to be sent out on 22 August and returned a month later, with the result being announced at a special Labour conference on 24 September Getty Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Jeremy Corbyn supporters cheer and wave placards as the Labour Leader addresses thousands of supporters in in Liverpool, England Getty Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Labour Party leadership candidate Owen Smith poses for a picture with supporters during a picnic for young members in London Fields, Hackney in London Getty Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith The Labour leader has a spring in his step at a leadership rally in Sunderland Screenshot Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Labour leadership contender Owen Smith delivers a speech at the Open University in Milton Keynes, where he promised to reverse Conservative cuts set to leave millions of low paid workers thousands of pounds a year worse off PA Labour leadership contest: Jeremy Corbyn vs Owen Smith Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has urged Owen Smith to distance himself from those saying they want to split the Labour party Getty

But she went on: "One of the things about Jeremy is he hasn't actually changed that much politically.

"Now, that is what a lot of people admire. But that begs the question, are the politics of the 1970s relevant to the 21st century and to post-Brexit Britain."
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New Labour members will be required to sign a pledge promising not to abuse anyone online or face being kicked out of the party.

The tougher stance on internet behaviour was agreed by Labours National Executive Committee (NEC) after centrist MPs protested about a torrent of abuse from supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.

It came as one of those MPs - Stoke-on-Trents Ruth Smeeth - revealed she will be taking a "minder" to the partys annual conference in Liverpool, starting this weekend.

Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Show all 14 1 /14 Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Israel and Palestine The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians; and theres one stark fact that virtually no one in the British media ever reports, in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Now, any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but its like we have a double standard about the policies of the Israeli government Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Antisemitism in the Labour Party As Ive said, Ive never heard anybody say anything antisemitism-Semitic, but theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Naz Shah Its completely over-the-top and rude, but who am I to denounce anyone with all of that. It was wrong. I dont think she is antisemitic, it was incredibly rude but I dont believe she is an antisemite. When the NEC investigation is finished they'll say it was rude and over the top but they wont find any evidence that she actually hates Jews. Weve got to investigate all these charges and the context in which they are made. If she is antisemitic like the other three or four members weve found who are antisemitic, shell be expelled Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On other alleged antisemites in Labour That is part of the classic antisemitic thing about an international Jewish conspiracy  that is the reason we need to have an investigation. Ive got an open mind. Ive seen nothing to suggest to me that she is antisemitic. I wouldnt have supported her if I [thought] she was antisemitic Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On whether what Hitler did was legal, as stated by Naz Shah Thats a statement of fact  Hitler, Im sure, passed all those laws that allowed him to do that  its history  literally, Hitler was completely mad, he killed six million Jews. Shes not saying its legal to kill six million Jews: what they were doing in that country allowed them not just to kill six million Jews, kill all the communists, kill all the leftists like me, my father almost died when a Nazi sub sank his boat. I have no sympathy with Hitler Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On another alleged antisemite in Labour No, that is, and thats why shes been suspended or expelled. What Ive said is that in 47 years of the party in all the meetings Ive been in Ive never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. There are bound to be in a party of half a million people youll have a handful of antisemites, youll have a handful of racists. Youve managed to dig out virtually every antisemitic comment that Labour members have made out of half a million people. Ive never met any of these people. Theres not a problem. Youre talking about a handful of people in a party of half a million people. Jeremy Corbyn has moved rapidly to deal with them Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Jeremy Corbyns response to the allegations He met with Naz and she agreed she would stand down while the investigation is going on. He called her in to see her. Theres been a huge investigation of virtually everything that anybody put on the internet  many of these people are quite new and recent members of the party that joined in the big influx. 300,000 new people came in Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On his meeting a man accused of antisemitism in London This is the man who called for Muslims around the world to donate blood after the attacks of 9/11 when he came to London I went with him to the Regents Park mosque where he said no man should hit a woman and you should not discriminate against homosexuals. So I cant equate what I heard him say he made no antisemitic statement while he was here in London. I dont investigate people. Ive simply said what I believe to be true which is that Naz was not antisemitic. She was completely over the top, very rude, but that does not make her an antisemite Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Manns comments He went completely over the top. I was actually doing a radio interview at the time that he was bellowing that Im a racist antisemite in my ear. Ive had that with John Mann before a few weeks ago screaming that I was a bigot down the phone. Im not an apologist for anyone who makes antisemitic statements. What Im saying is dont confuse antisemitism with criticism of the Israeli government policy Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On calling a Jewish journalist a concentration camp guard whilst Mayor of London I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On claims about Hitler and Zionism I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Mann Id simply say to John Mann go back and check. Is what I say true, or is it not? The BBC, youve got a huge team of researchers, it will take just an hour or two to go back and confirm. I was asked a question, I answered it. I have never in 45 years since I won my first election, I have never lied. I have always answered the question Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On raising the issue if Hitler It lays you open to people smearing and lying about you. Ive always answered the questions put to me and that simple fact is weve had a handful of people saying antisemitic things in the Labour Party, theyve been suspended, some of them are on their way to being expelled, some of them have been expelled already Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On people calling for him to be suspended All my usual critics  but the simple fact is I agree with them; there is no place for antisemitism in the Labour party. For them to suggest I am antisemitic is a bit bizarre considering we worked with Jewish groups and put on exhibitions about the scale of the holocaust, we worked with Jewish groups to tackling the scale of antisemitism back in the 1970s. Ive always opposed every form of racism whether its against black people or Jews. Im going to stay in the Labour party and continue to fight against all forms of racism and discrimination as I have my entire life

I will have someone with me. I havent felt the need to do this before, but it is a sensible security precaution for obvious reasons at the moment, Ms Smeeth, who is Jewish, told The Sun.

But Ive been to conference every year since 1999 and Im not going to stop going now.

The MP has been taking advice from the police about security after receiving death threats online and a total of 25,000 abusive messages, many of them anti-Semitic attacks.

The NEC, which deferred a decision on a return to Shadow Cabinet elections, unanimously agreed the beefed-up code of conduct on social media behaviour, to be included in the terms and conditions of membership.

 Clive Lewis talks about deselection of MPs within the Labour Party

Party members will have to promise explicitly to act within the spirit and rules of the Labour party in my conduct both on and offline, with members and non-members.

The statement adds: I stand against all forms of abuse. I understand that, if found to be in breach of the Labour Party policy on online and offline abuse, I will be subject to the rules and procedures of the Labour Party.

Punishment could include being suspended from the party or eventually expelled.

The signed pledge will be linked to an existing social media code of conduct, drawn up by the party, which warns that "harassment, intimidation, hateful language and bullying" will not be tolerated.

It also lists discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

The code reads: Abusing someone online is just as serious as doing so face to face. We stand against all forms of abuse and will take action against those who commit it.

Ms Smeeth said she has been called a "CIA/MI5/Mossad informant", and a "f***ing traitor". She maintained abuse had become normal for many of her colleagues.

She hailed the pledge as a great step forward, adding: MPs have been subject to a tsunami of abuse. It is unfortunate that we've got to this place but, given the changing nature of social media, I welcome the proposal.

Some MPs have criticised Mr Corbyn for not taking strong enough action to protect Labour politicians from abuse from his own supporters.

But the party leader backed the tougher stance and has said he has also suffered abuse  which must never be tolerated.
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Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has said that her working-class constituents found it offensive that Jeremy Corbyn said he doesnt consider himself wealthy, despite a 137,000 salary.

In an interview with the London Evening Standard, in which she also revealed the extent of anti-Semitic abuse she has suffered over the summer, Ms Smeeth, the MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, added: He [Mr Corbyn] earns 130,000 a year.

"My constituents are doing well if they earn 10 per cent of thatperhaps its easy to be an ideological purist if you can afford to live under the Tories. My constituents cant.

Recommended Read more Jewish Labour MP to take bodyguard to party conference

The former shadow minister added her constituents found it offensive when it emerged the Labour leader had said: I don't consider myself highbrow or wealthy, but I still enjoy some aspects of classical music.

The MP, who is also Jewish, was the centre of media attention at the launch of Labours inquiry into anti-Semitism in the partys ranks when she left the meeting early after an activist accused her of colluding with the right-wing press.

Since then, she revealed in the interview, she has been called a yid c***, a CIA/ MI5/Mossad informant, a dyke, and a f***ing traitor.

The former shadow minister has been taking advice from the police about security after receiving death threats online and a total of 25,000 abusive messages, many of them anti-Semitic attacks. One, she claimed, had sent her a 1,000-word essay on how he would kill her.

Her comments appeared after she had earlier revealed she will be taking a minder to the partys annual conference in Liverpool at the weekend. I will have someone with me. I havent felt the need to do this before, but it is a sensible security precaution for obvious reasons at the moment, Ms Smeeth, who is Jewish, told The Sun.

But Ive been to conference every year since 1999 and Im not going to stop going now.
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Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary since July, has been allegedly linked to offshore businesses in the Bahamas by leaked documents.

Ms Rudd has reportedly been a director of two companies based in the Caribbean tax haven, a Guardian investigation has claimed.

Before her political career, she was also director of a British-based company where a co-director was later imprisoned for fraud.

While defending former Prime Minister David Cameron regarding his father's investment company in the Bahamas, Ms Rudd did not mention her own reported links to the tax haven.

The Home Secretary was allegedly included in a list of 175,000 Bahamas registered companies leaked to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The leaked files name Ms Rudd as a director of the Bahaman companies Advanced Asset Allocation Fund and Advanced Asset Allocation Management between 1998 and 2000. Companies House records identify the her as a director of Monticello plc which was investigated for share ramping.

10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Show all 10 1 /10 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Luxembourg There are an estimated 2.5 trillion shares of mutual funds registered in the Grand Duchy, 1 trillion of which cannot be traced to an owner 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Cayman Islands The Cayman Islands contain 6% of the world's total banking assets, but just 0.000008% of its population 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Isle of Man David Cameron has said the Isle of Man, where there is no corporation, capital gains or inheritance tax, should not be considered a tax haven 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Jersey There are over 3.5 billion assets per square mile on the self-governing Channel Island 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Ireland Ireland made headlines last year when it emerged Apple was registered in the country in order to dodge over 40bn in taxes 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Mauritius The Mauritian government notionally charges corporation tax, but companies can easily make this back through generous tax credits for foreign businesses 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Bermuda Google holds more than 30bn in offshore cash reserves, primarily via Bermuda 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Monaco A popular domicile for super-rich private individuals, Monaco has the most expensive property in the world. 1 million will buy just 225 square feet 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Switzerland Switzerland has such secretive banking laws that it took until the 1990s to secure the release of Nazi cash reserves 10 of the biggest tax havens in the world Bahamas David Cameron's father ran an offshore fund which hired Bahamas residents to complete paperwork, thus dodging British tax bills

Co-director Mark O'Hanlon gave an interview in January 2000 where he was later found to be making false statements about its prospects.

Following the interview, Monticello's share prices increased rapidly before trading was suspended. Ms Rudd resigned five months later, two days before she also resigned her directorship of Advanced Asset Allocation Management.

 Who is Amber Rudd

Following an investigation by the Department of Trade and Industry, O'Hanlon was convicted of making a false statement and was sentenced 18 months later.

The Home Secretary's spokesperson told the Guardian: It is a matter of public record that Amber had a career in business before entering politics.

"Monticello was thoroughly investigated 16 years ago and those who acted wrongly were identified and prosecuted.
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The Ministry of Defence is facing a judicial review over alleged lack of support for troops facing accusations of abuse during the Iraq War. A firm of solicitors have been instructed by a number of service personnel facing allegations following a Government-appointed investigation.

Theresa May has declared her opposition to what she described as an industry of vexatious allegations being levelled against British troops. An inquiry being carried out by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) has led to more than 1,500 claims of murder, false imprisonment and torture, amid recriminations about the way it is being conducted.

While travelling to the UN General Assembly summit in New York, the Prime Minister said: We should be absolutely proud of the fact that men and women are willing to put themselves on the line for our safety and do things that most of us would not contemplate being willing to do in terms of our own safety. They put themselves on the line.

Armed forces personnel under investigation believe that the Government has failed to stand by them and provide adequate legal support. There had been several high-profile claims of IHAT investigators supposedly being over-aggressive. The MoD has paid compensation to one woman, Sergeant Rachel Webster, who was released without charge after being arrested and restrained at her home in an early morning raid.

Downing Street had stated that IHAT was independent of Government control and any member of the armed forces subjected to its probe would receive all necessary support including legal advice. But solicitor Hilary Meredith, who has been asked by clients to start judicial review proceedings, maintained that the support system was inadequate and, as a result, troops were being hung out to dry.

She added, I passionately believe that the MoD should be held to account when it fails our servicemen and women. A framework of support and assistance needs to be put in place.

Ms Meredith said former forces personnel want the right to independent legal advice which should be funded by the Government; time limits to be imposed on cases; and the right to a fair trial.

Johnny Mercer, a Conservative MP and former army officer, said, This is a national disgrace, we asked a generation of young people to conduct a deeply unpopular war, poorly resourced, poorly planned. And when they return to the UK they are then pursued for decades afterwards by spurious allegations, what has become a self-inflicted industry, financed by the taxpayer which is yet to produce a single prosecution.

But Nicholas Mercer [no relation], former legal adviser to the British Army during the Iraq War, speaking to BBC Radio 4, responded I hear the words vexatious and spurious bandied about but, to date, there have been 326 settled cases and the Government has paid out 20m. If the Government paid out, these are not vexatious and not spurious. They are proven and the MoD have admitted liability.
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Theresa Mays government is committed to introducing an Alan Turing law and will, in due course, pardon thousands of gay men convicted under historic gross indecency crimes.

Sources close to the Prime Minister confirmed to The Independent that Ms May's government is committed to introducing the legislation, which will effectively act as an apology while the Ministry of Justice added they would now find the right legislative vehicle to push this through.

This government is committed to introducing posthumous pardons for people with certain historical sexual offence convictions who would be innocent of any crime now. We will bring forward our proposals in due course, a government spokesperson added.

Mr Turing, the Enigma code breaker responsible for decrypting Nazi messages, was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013  61 years after he was charged at Manchester police station over homosexual activity.

The pioneering mathematician, whose code-breaking skills are said to have shortened World War Two by two to four years, lost his job with the secret service following a conviction for gross indecency and was forced to undergo chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. Two years later Mr Turing took his own life  and it is estimated that around 49,000 were convicted under similar outdated laws until homosexuality was decriminalised in England in 1967.

The family of Alan Turing deliver the change.org petition to Downing Street signed by almost half a million people calling for more than 49,000 British gay men convicted under historic anti-gay laws in the UK

Speaking to The Independent, Rachel Barnes, Mr Turings great-niece said she had been disappointed that there had been no progress since she and others had originally launched a petition in 2015 to extend her great-uncles pardon to all men convicted under the historic laws. I will give my backing towards any progress, she added.

Its something the family of Alan Turing have always, always backed and we really do want justice for everybody who was affected by the anti-gay laws. I am very pleased to hear the current administration will give it their backing."

It comes after campaigners, and the family of Mr Turing  who according to Winston Churchill made the single biggest contribution to the allied victory" in World War II  delivered the petition to Downing Street in 2015 before the general election. Public pressure led to the major political parties pledging to right the wrongs of the past and introduce what was dubbed as the 'Alan Turing law', in memory of the Bletchley Park codebreaker.

The 2015 Conservative manifesto stated: We will build on the posthumous pardon of Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing, who committed suicide following his conviction for gross indecency, with a broader measure to lift the convictions of this nature. Thousands of British men still suffer from similar historic charges, even though they would be completely innocent of any crime today.

Codebreaker Alan Turing (Rex Features)

"Many others are dead and cannot correct this injustice themselves through the legal process we have introduced while in government. So we will introduce a new law that will pardon those people, and right these wrongs.

Caroline Dinenage, the equalities minister, had secured clearance from the home affairs committee in April to draft a hand-out bill to pardon deceased men convicted of offences relating to consensual sexual activity between men over the current age of consent. However, the bill was not picked up.
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Theresa May has made clear she will not allow an industry of vexatious allegations against British troops over claims of abuse in Iraq.

But the Prime Minister refused to bow to pressure and dismantle the Government body, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT), which is handling approximately 1,500 allegations of murder, abuse and torture carried out by British soldiers.

It was reported earlier this week that the former Prime Minister David Cameron had attempted to shut down the investigations but was overruled by government lawyers. Johnny Mercer MP, a Conservative member of the Commons defence committee and a former army officer, said the Mr Cameron told him he wanted to shut down IHAT but the move was vetoed by the attorney general.

Speaking to reporters travelling with her to New York, Ms May said: "We should be absolutely proud of the fact that we have in our armed forces men and women who are willing to put themselves on the line for our safety and do things that most of us would not contemplate being willing to do in terms of our own safety. They put themselves on the line.

"We can be proud also of the disciplined way in which our armed forces operate.

"But what is important is, if there are allegations - proper allegations - of criminal activity, those need to be investigated.

Concerns have been raised over the "industrial scale" of claims lodged with IHAT supported by the legal aid system. Ms May insisted that action had been taken to address false claims and IHAT's work would be completed by the end of 2019, after a review of the system by former director of public prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith.

"We should all be proud of our armed forces, Ms May added. Our armed forces do a fantastic job for the United Kingdom in defending the UK, but also in the work that they do around the world in peacekeeping initiatives, on issues like Ebola - the way our armed forces went out and helped there.

How the British media covered the Iraq War Show all 6 1 /6 How the British media covered the Iraq War How the British media covered the Iraq War Daily Mirror, 6 January 2003 How the British media covered the Iraq War The Guardian, 21 March 2003 How the British media covered the Iraq War The Daily Mail, 22 March 2003 How the British media covered the Iraq War Daily Telegraph, 21 March 2003 How the British media covered the Iraq War The Sun, 20 March 2003 How the British media covered the Iraq War

"But what we do need to make sure is that there isn't an industry of vexatious allegations coming forward. I think measures have been taken.

"The review of IHAT has said that they will be able to focus on cases where there may be questions of allegations which are not the vexatious ones and report within the timescale."

IHATs caseload of allegations of ill-treatment or unlawful killing by British forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 has risen tenfold since it was established. In 2010, it was dealing with cases involving 152 victims. It is now dealing with more than 1,500 victims, according to IHATs latest quarterly update. Of these, 280 are victims of alleged unlawful killing by British forces in Iraq, but more than 200 of these cases have yet to be investigated, with just 25 under investigation.

Of 1,235 alleged cases of ill-treatment, including accusations of rape and torture, only 45 are under investigation.
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A specialist police unit that was set up to tackle Nigerias alarming rise in violent crime has instead become a hotbed for alleged corruption, where suspects are claimed to be detained in horrific conditions and tortured until they or their relatives can pay for their freedom, according to a damning new report.

Amnesty International said it had investigated facilities run by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), and found multiple cases where confessions were allegedly obtained through torture, where people who had not been charged with any crime were claimed to be beaten and starved, and where suspects were detained for months longer than the maximum 48 hours defined in Nigerias constitution.

SARS was set up with a specific remit to investigate serious violent crime, predominantly armed robberies and kidnappings. Nigerian officials deny allegations of torture or any intentional ill-treatment of detainees at SARS stations, saying thet SARS officers receive training in human rights.

Yet according to Amnesty Internationals report, the unit has become seen as a comfortable posting in the police force where officers allegedly know they can earn a substantial amount of money in a short time, in part through extortion and in part through the theft of valuables from suspects.

In one case featured in the report, a 29-year-old man was detained along with four friends by SARS officers  not for armed robbery or kidnapping, but after getting into a fight with a neighbour.

The mans wife and neighbours told the human rights organisation they saw him being badly beaten by police officers during the arrest.

When the mans brother went to the station to see those arrested, he was allegedly told to pay 1,000 Naira (about 3) each for every person he wanted to visit.

The family was reluctant to pay, until on a third visit six relatives had put together enough and went to the station. They paid, went in, and were then told that the man they wanted to see had died in custody.

They said they were not responsible for the death, the brother said. We were not allowed to ask any questions or seek clarification.

In another case, a 24-year-old university student named Ekene was arrested by SARS officers in Awka, Anambra state. According to his lawyer, the officer in charge of his case told the mans mother she had to pay N100,000 (about 240) to secure his release.

The investigating police officer (IPO) told me that he will not guarantee the life of Ekene if we fail to pay the money before the end of that day, the lawyer told Amnesty International. I advised my client to pay. My client practically paid for the life of her son. We did not take any further action because my client is afraid of SARS.

Amnesty International said that over the course of 44 interviews with former detainees at SARS facilities across Nigeria, victims described alleged torture methods, including hanging, starvation, beatings, shootings and mock executions.

One detainee, a petrol station attendant, said he was accused by his employer of a burglary at the premises, and arrested by SARS officers.

He claimed to Amnesty International: The policemen took me to a hall. They brought a plain sheet and asked me to sign. When I signed it, they said to me you have signed your death warrant.

They took me to the back of the building and tied my hands to the back. They also connected the rope to my legs, leaving me hanging on a suspended iron rod. They put the iron rod in the middle between my hands and the leg with my head facing the ground.

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Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

I went limp. The IPO came at intervals and told me to tell him the truth. I lost consciousness. When I was about to die they took me down and poured water on me to revive me. People carried me back to the cell. I was detained for two weeks.

The man was released without charge after lawyers filed a rights case against the facility. No one has yet been held to account for the mans alleged torture, or for any of the other cases raised by Amnesty International, its report said.

Amnesty International said that in two meetings where it raised concerns with the Inspector General of Police, the authorities generally denied allegations of torture or any intentional ill-treatment of detainees at SARS stations.

And senior officers told the charity that because of its elite status, officers in SARS receive training on human rights. One Commissioner of Police said: In some instances, there is special training for SARS personnel. Not every police officer can work in SARS. They need to be tough to deal with the rough demands of their job. And human rights are part of the police training. The human rights manual is simply a tool for affecting the training.

Nigeria's national police force denied the allegations, saying it did "not employ torture or any form of unauthorised technique in criminal investigation". "Investigators are trained to conform to international best practices," said spokesman Don Awunah.
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On Saturday, the international community will meet in South Africa to decide the future of elephant conservation, with an international ban on sales of ivory poised to expire next year.

There are some who argue that, like the war on drugs, the war on poaching has failed. A block of southern African countries, where elephant populations are currently thriving, argue that ending the blanket ban would allow them to put the money raised into conservation.

Elephant poaching remains a thriving industry, with one animal slaughtered for its tusks every 15 minutes, and the crisis has only worsened in recent years despite a ban on trade that has been in place since 1989.

It is the opinion of the governments of Zimbabwe, Namibia and now South Africa that the ban has been an expensive and ultimately unsuccessful experiment in trying to end poaching.

Recommended Read more Zimbabwe to lobby for lifting of international ivory ban

They are of the view that a ban is not necessarily the best option for every country, and will argue that they have a right to sell off their national stockpiles when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) meets for its 17th annual summit in Johannesburg on Saturday.

The EU has yet to come out in favour of a blanket ban, and may play a pivotal role in which way the vote goes.

Yet the southern African proposal is fiercely opposed by some individual western powers such as the US and UK.

Speaking to The Independent, Paul Gathitu of the Kenya Wildlife Service said there was a fundamental flaw to the argument, put forward in southern Africa, that stockpiles of ivory taken from elephants who died naturally  and seized from poachers  can be sold to help the living herds.

The moment you start selling, you are placing a value on that ivory, he said. And if you give a little bit of ivory this year, they will want more next year.

Our argument has been that you put it beyond economic use, you remove the value that you are placing on it. And the idea that you sell it now and put the money back into conservation  it is never enough. The one-off sale really doesnt add much, and you can see the impact straight away on the black market.

On Thursday, Prince William will speak on the issue of the ivory trade in his capacity as royal patron of the UK charity Tusk.

He will be joined at an address in the Shard in London by Andrea Leadsom, the environment secretary, and together they will highlight the 33,000 African elephants slaughtered each year, out of a continent-wide population of 400,000 to 630,000.

The Duke of Cambridge will highlight the results of the Great Elephant Census, published earlier this month, which showed a decline of 30 per cent in African savannah elephant populations in the space of just seven years to 2014.

And he will argue that domestic markets, such as the UKs in pre-1947 ivory, can mask illegal trade, reinforce the value of ivory and create demand for more ivory on an international scale.

The Government is reported to be considering plans to clamp down on the domestic ivory trade, forcing dealers to provide authenticated documents that show items are more than 70 years old.

In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Show all 15 1 /15 In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Traditional Maasai tribesmen pose for a photograph near elephant tusks, part of an estimated 105 tonnes of confiscated ivory to be set ablaze, stacked onto a pyre at Nairobi National Park near Nairobi, Kenya, April 28, 2016. Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history A Kenya Wildlife Services ranger guards the burning of an estimated 105 tonnes of Elephant tusks confiscated ivory from smugglers and poachers at the Nairobi National Park near Nairobi, Kenya, April 30, 2016. Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters In pictures: Kenya stages largest ivory burn in history Reuters

Back in Kenya there is a growing population of 35,000 elephants, which Mr Gathitu said had only been maintained thanks to strict anti-poaching legislation and a commitment of resources spanning government agencies. In neighbouring Tanzania, he says, the latest analyses suggest elephant numbers are badly down.

And Mr Gathitu said even just the talk of lifting the ban had resulted in an increase in poaching activity, because they are trying to collect as much ivory as possible in preparation for next year.

Botswana, home to the world's largest population of elephants, has traditionally argued against the destruction of ivory stockpiles. Last year it transformed much of its stock into a life-size elephant sculpture, placed in the main hall at Gaborone international airport as a tribute not about the tusks, but about the elephant.

Yet Botswana has broken ranks with its southern African neighbours, by arguing at the Cites summit that restrictions on the trade must be maintained.

A life-size ivory elephant sculpture after it was unveiled at the Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gaborone, Botswana in July (Getty Images)

Asked in a Reuters interview on Wednesday if he would support the Namibian and Zimbabwean proposals for sales to be allowed, Botswana's President Seretse Khama said: Were opposed to that... We need to keep elephants on Appendix I [the highest level of protection] so that theres no trade in ivory.

Charlie Mayhew, CEO and co-founder of Tusk, told The Independent ahead of Saturdays summit that the charitys position has always been clear and simple.

We strongly believe that the international ivory ban has to remain in place indefinitely, and that any moves towards the potential reopening of trade in the future must therefore be blocked, as these would stimulate further poaching and hasten the elephants demise.

We believe that an unambiguous message should be communicated to the world that elephants are globally protected and that buying ivory is no longer socially acceptable.
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A refugee boat carrying 600 people bound for Europe has capsized off the coast of Egypt, killing at least 29.

Local officials said 150 of the 600 had been rescued, describing it as one of the largest operations off Egypts coast in the Mediterranean refugee crisis so far. Of the dead, 18 were men, 10 were women, and one was a child.

An illegal migration boat has capsized off the coast of Kafr al-Sheikh carrying 600 migrants in the largest illegal migration operation through the Kafr al-Sheikh coast so far, state news agency MENA quoted a local official as saying.

Initial information indicates that the boat sank because it was carrying more people than its limit. The boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water, a senior security official in Beheira province, told Reuters.

The boat was carrying Egyptian, Syrian, and African migrants, security sources said. It was not immediately clear what destination the boat had been trying to reach, but it is believed to be Italy.

The sinking came as world leaders met for a special summit on the refugee crisis in New York.

Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.

US President Barack Obama, who called the Leaders Summit on Refugees, said the crisis was one of the most urgent tests of our time.

This crisis is a test of our common humanity  whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in another, he said. Those girls being trafficked and tortured, they could be our daughters. That little boy on the beach could be our son or our grandson. We cannot avert our eyes or turn our backs.

More than 200,000 people have attempted to cross the Mediterranean from Egypt, Libya and Turkey so far this year, the International Organisation for Migration says.

More than 2,800 deaths were recorded between January and June, versus 1,838 during the same period last year.
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The government of Zimbabwe has warned that anyone who sells or displays the national flag could face up to a year in prison, after it became a symbol of protest against the regime of President Robert Mugabe.

Sales of the flag boomed after it was worn by the pastor Evan Mawarire in a video despairing at the countrys economic crisis, sparking the #ThisFlag social media movement.

State media outlets have accused protesters of using the flag to whip up political emotions against the constitutionally elected government.

And a warning has now been issued reminding citizens that, under Zimbabwean law, it is illegal to manufacture, sell or use the flag without the written permission of the Justice Secretary, Virginia Mabhiza.

In a statement on Tuesday, she said: Members of the public who engage in any action or activity which involves the manufacture, sale or use of the national flag in contravention of the law are therefore warned that they are liable to prosecution and are liable to imprisonment if they are found guilty by a court of law.

Under the Flag of Zimbabwe Act, the maximum sentence for bringing it into disrepute stands at 300 or a prison sentence of one year.

Speaking in Gweru last week, Ms Mabhiza was asked about the use of the flag in protest movements.

Then, she said: Our flag is very important and we therefore encourage the public to respect it.

Failure to respect the national flag can land one in prison or be forced to pay a fine of $300 or both. There are certain things that people do that are tantamount to abuse and disrespect of the national flag.

Mr Mawarire has fled Zimbabwe to the US, where he is leading protests against Mr Mugabes delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

He has emerged as an unlikely protest leader amid growing anger at the countrys desperate financial situation. The government has repeatedly been forced to delay salary payments to civil servants, and this week it released a schedule showing members of the armed forces would be paid before all other branches of public office.

Promise Mkwananzi, leader of #Tajamuka movement, which has used social media to organise protests together with the #ThisFlag, said his group would continue to use the flag despite the government threat.

It is total insanity that government should ban citizens from using their own flag, Mkwananzi told the Reuters news agency. We are going to continue to make use of our flag. It is our identity.
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Federal authorities have filed charges against the man suspected in the series of executed and attempted bombings in New York and New Jersey.

Recommended Read more All 29 injured released from hospital after bombing in New York City

Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, faces four charges, including use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use, destruction of property by means of fire or explosive, and use of a destructive device during and in furtherance of a crime of violence.

The charges were filed late Tuesday in a federal court in Manhattan.

Rahami was apprehended Monday afternoon following a shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey, two days after a bomb went off and injured 29 people in New York's Chelsea neighbourhood.

Court documents lay out a timeline of incidents, which begins at 9.35 am before a 5K run in Seaside Park, New Jersey, 11 hours before the "23rd Street Bomb" detonated in Manhattan, and expanding to the bomb found at an Elizabeth train station.

The complaint also goes over evidence that led investigators to Rahami, including fingerprints found on an undetonated pressure cook a few blocks north of the Chelsea explosion ("27th Street Bomb"). Investigators say Rahami used the online auction site eBay to purchase many of the bomb components, including chemicals found in improvised explosives  like citric acid  circuit boards, and triggering devices. Rahami allegedly made the orders with the username "ahmad rahami" between June and August of this year.

Rahami also faces attempted charges in connection to his shootout with police.

The federal charges come after Rahami's father, Mohammad Rahami, told the press about his 2014 suspicions about his son.

Two years ago I go to the FBI because my son was doing really bad, O.K.? Mr Rahami said. But they check almost two months, they say, Hes OK, hes clean, hes not a terrorist. I say 'OK'."

"Now they say he is a terrorist," he added. "I say 'OK'.

The New York Times confirmed Mr Rahami's account with officials, who said the investigation ended when he withdrew his accusations.

Now investigators are looking into recent trips Rahami  a naturalised US citizen  took to Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2013 and 2014. He passed multiple screenings upon re-entrance to the US.

But a friend of his told the Boston Herald that he seemed different when he returned from his trips.

"At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious," Flee Jones said. "And it was shocking. I'm trying to understand what's going on. I've never seen him like this."
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For the time being it is the closest thing we have to a glimpse inside the mind of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the 28-year-old man arrested in connection with bomb attacks in New York and New Jersey.

Listed in the criminal complaint against him are details of a YouTube account associated with the username yaafghankid786, believed to be Rahami.

Among his favourite videos are Bollywood music songs, an instructional video on how to tie a Windsor knot and viral cat films.

Then there are the darker nasheeds, or Islamic chants, which glorify jihad.

The criminal complaint lists one of the videos as jihad nasheed ya shahid - a martyrs anthem.

Another best jihad nasheed is a collection of images of battle scenes in a desert along with a running commentary.

The filthiest of bandits have attacked us, reads one section. So where are the swords? They have forgotten we are defiant ones who defend like lions. We are those who built our forts out of skulls.

While nasheeds are a popular part of worship for Muslims all around the world, extremists shun those that celebrate the worlds beauty or peace and instead favour the ones that glorify violence or martyrdom.

Their strict interpretation of Islam means they also listen only to those that feature only the human voice, without accompaniment.

However, the rest of the list of favourites linked to yaafghankid786 shows a rather broader range of interests.

How to tie a tie: The full Windsor knot

A slow motion instructional video spelling out how to tie a Windsor knot.

Scary evil clowns

A slideshow of some of the most sinister clowns you are ever likely to see.

Jhalak Dikhla Ja

One of a string of Bollywood songs in the list - this one from a 2006 Hindi thriller.

How to replace install change front bumper replacement

An instructional video that does pretty much what it says in the title.

Cat backflip onto couch

And no list of YouTube favourites is complete without a viral cat video.
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Anthony Weiner, the disgraced New York politician, is caught in a new scandal after it was alleged he sent topless photos of himself to a 15-year-old girl.

Last month he announced he was separating from his wife Huma Abedin, a senior aide to Hillary Clinton, after he was reported to have sexted a woman as his son lay in bed beside him, the latest in a series of similar episodes.

Mail Online reports that Mr Weiner carried out a months-long online relationship with the girl despite knowing her age.

Recommended Read more Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin to separate in wake of sexting scandal

He sent her photographs, called her baby and talked in sexually explicit terms, according to the report.

When confronted about the details, he declined to deny the allegations but instead offered two emails that he said showed it was a hoax.

In a statement, he said: 'I have repeatedly demonstrated terrible judgement about the people I have communicated with online and the things I have sent. I am filled with regret and heartbroken for those I have hurt.

"While I have provided the Daily Mail with information showing that I have likely been the subject of a hoax, I have no one to blame but me for putting myself in this position.

"I am sorry."

Weiner sent nine pictures of his son to the woman, claiming being a father made him more attractive (Getty)

Mr Weiner has been caught in several scandals since 2011 when he was forced to resign from Congress after the discovery of sexual messages sent to a college student.

Two years later his run for mayor of New York - and a political rebirth - ended when it emerged he had been sexting 22-year-old Sydney Leathers using the pseudonym Carlos Danger.

The family of the 15-year-old girl said they did not want to press charges but in an interview with Mail Online said they wanted the make the case public in case Mr Weiner posed a wider threat.

The girls father said: If there's anybody out there that has a similar story that they can come forward, maybe use my daughter's example to have the courage to come forward.

A timeline constructed by Mail Online suggests the girl first contacted Weiner in January when she noticed his Twitter page allowed people to contact him whom he did not follow.

She also admitted during interviews that she had developed an obsession with Weiner.
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A summit hosted by US President Barack Obama garnered pledges from dozens of countries to resettle or allow the lawful admission of some 360,000 refugees, doubling the number of slots that were available last year, the US envoy to the United Nations said.

But Ambassador Samantha Power said that was "still only a fraction" of what was needed because the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has assessed that some 1.2 million refugees need to be resettled.

Countries could only attend Mr Obama's summit at the annual UN gathering of world leaders if they made a pledge.

Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.

Mr Obama told the summit that the refugee crisis was "a test of our international system where all nations ought to share in our collective responsibilities, because the vast majority of refugees are hosted by just 10 countries."

"We must recognise that refugees are a symptom of larger failures - be it war, ethnic tensions or persecution," he said.

Obama said the more than 50 countries and international organizations that participated in the summit had collectively increased their contributions to humanitarian groups and UN appeals this year by some $4.5 billion (3.5 billion).

 Carey Mulligan speaks at War Child event ahead of UN refugee summit

Ms Power said there were also pledges to increase the number of refugees in school by some one million globally.

"As we've seen in the past, countries have a bad habit of coming to pledging conferences and making commitments and then not delivering," she said. "We have to do better on this occasion."

"The real measure of the summit will only be what countries do and who they help," she added.

Mr Obama has also rallied businesses to help address the refugee crisis and met with business leaders just before the summit on Tuesday, who he said had made commitments worth more than $650 million (500 million) to empower refugees.

With a record 21.3 million refugees globally, the 193-member General Assembly adopted a political declaration on Monday in which they also agreed to spend two years negotiating global compacts on refugees and safe, orderly and regular migration.

Reuters
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Protests erupted in North Carolina after police shot and killed a black man who was unarmed and had a disability, witnesses said.

A large group of demonstrators gathered near the apartment complex where Charlotte Police fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott. Early reports showed police in full riot gear deploying tear gas canisters at the protesters, while some demonstrators reportedly threw rocks and water bottles at officers. By Wednesday morning, demonstrators occupied a segment of Interstate Highway 83.

The shooting occurred at 4 pm on Tuesday, a day after police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released video showing the Friday shooting death of Terence Crutcher by one of their officers, adding to ongoing scrutiny of local police departments across the US for the almost routine killing of unarmed black people.

Charlotte Police officers were searching the apartment complex for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they gunned down Scott. The victim was not the person they were originally trying to find.

Scott reportedly exited his vehicle at his apartment complex, but got back inside when he saw officers. The police report said Scott then re-emerged from his vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers.

Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Show all 7 1 /7 Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Police officers clash with protesters after police fatally shot Keith Lamont Scott in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Charlotte REUTERS Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Charlotte Police officers were searching the apartment complex for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they gunned down Scott. The victim was not the person they were originally trying to find REUTERS Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte The shooting occurred at 4 pm on 20 September, a day after police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released video showing the shooting death of Terence Crutcher by one of their officers REUTERS Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Scott reportedly exited his vehicle at his apartment complex, but got back inside when he saw officers. The police report said Scott then re-emerged from his vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers REUTERS Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Police officers wearing riot gear block a road during protests REUTERS Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Police identified two-year veteran Brentley Vinson as the officer who fired the shots. A law enforcement source told WBTV that Mr Vinson is African American REUTERS Police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparks riots in Charlotte Protesters demonstrate in front of police officers REUTERS

I dont believe [the man shot] was the one with the warrants, but we dont know if there was a connection, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said. At this point, all we know theyre in the apartment complex parking lot and this subject gets out with a weapon, they engage him and one of the officers felt a lethal threat and fired his weapon because of that.

Police identified two-year veteran Brentley Vinson as the officer who fired the shots. A law enforcement source told WBTV that Mr Vinson is African American.

CMPD said they recovered a firearm in their report, but witness accounts conflict with authorities official story.

A woman who identified herself as Scotts daughter streamed the aftermath on Facebook Live. Her profile was deactivated at the time of this writing.

WBTV reported that, in the video, the woman said Scott was sitting in his car reading a book before the officers deployed a Taser and shot him four times. She said he was unarmed and disclosed that he had a disability.

The police just shot my daddy four times for being black, she reportedly said.

Another woman, identified as Scotts sister, said undercover detectives jumped out of their truck, shouted he had a gun, and opened fire.

He sits in the shade, reads his book, does his studies, and waits for his kids to get off the bus, she said. He didnt have no gun. He wasnt messing with nobody.

Large crowds gathered in the neighbourhood by 9 pm, with residents holding signs that read Black Lives Matter and It Was a Book.

CMPD reported via Twitter that at least 12 officers had been injured by demonstrators.

Police have deployed tear gas to disperse the crowd, and one police cruiser was reportedly towed away after sustaining damage during the demonstration.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts called for calm while promising to launch a full-scale investigation into the shooting.

"The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue," she tweeted. "Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together."

Keith Lamont Scott is the sixth civilian killed by CMPD. The District Attorneys office determined that officers were justified in the previous five cases. But Scott's death is a symptom of a larger problem in Charlotte, where the black population is disproportionately impacted by the practises of local law enforcement.

According to CMPD data compiled by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, while black people are only 35 per cent of the Charlotte population, they make up 50 per cent of stops by police, 68 per cent of searches, and 74 per cent of cases involving use of force.
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A Minnesota business owner who wrote "Muslims get out" on the sign outside his restaurant has defended the move, claiming that people were taking the sign "in the wrong way".

Protesters of different faiths gathered by the Treats Family Restaurant with banners that read: Love trumps hate and attempted to pull down the letters from the board, which also advertised food and ice cream.

Owner Dan Ruedinger in Lonsdale, Minnesota, told Fox News: "I didnt want to put 'terrorists' on the board. So we were going to put 'Muslim extremists', but we didnt have room on the board."

Recommended Read more CAIR thanks library for using picture of Muslim woman on its vehicles

"Now, people started taking it the wrong way, thinking we were against Muslims in general, and were not," he added.

"Quite the opposite. We are not racists."

He told the Lonsdale News-Review that the incident of the Somali-American man who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall in St Cloud, Minnesota, this month had prompted him to put up the sign.

"Ive had enough and Im standing up," he said.

"With all the bombs and shootings weve had, were supposed to welcome refugees here who want to kill us? This has nothing to do with race, it has to do with a religion of hatred that preaches violence.

"Some Muslims are good people and want a better life. They need to step up, take control and hold the others accountable."

When protesters arrived, Mr Ruedingers wife, Karen, added the letters "In Support of St Cloud" to the sign.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations invited him to meet with Muslim community leaders at the Islamic Centre of Faribault.

Our experience has shown that interaction with ordinary American Muslims and enhanced knowledge of Islam are key factors in the reduction of Islamophobic attitudes, said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota CAIR chapter.

The meeting was reportedly cut short as Mr Ruedinger became agitated and shouted about his sons service in Iraq, saying he could not be silent any longer.

Mr Hussein told the newspaper: It was a short conversation. He did not agree. We are here to talk to people; to start a dialogue. We wanted to talk to him about the sign and about issues.

The restaurants Facebook page has been flooded with negative reviews, accusing the owner of racism.

This anti American BIGOT hates people of other religions. I wouldn't eat at a hate filled place like this! wrote Ferrin Brooks.
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Sometimes it is hard being a Hillary Clinton supporter.

Charlie Crist, the former governor of Florida, found out the hard way when his words of support for the Democratic candidate provoked laughter during an election debate as he campaigns for a seat in Congress.

The trouble came when he was asked why he supported Ms Clinton in her bid to become president.

I am proud of Hillary Clinton. I think shes been a very good Secretary of State, a very good senator from the state of New York, he said.

Not everyone agrees that her record as Americas most senior diplomat was unblemished. But so far, so good.

His woes really began when he praised her integrity.

The thing I like most about her is she is steady, he said. I believe she is strong. I believe she is honest.

Cue laughter and a smattering of jeers.

Ms Clintons honesty has become an important issue in this year's election.

Critics say she has failed to explain why she set up a personal email server during her time as Secretary of State, why her initial accounts of an attack in Benghazi were incorrect and why she failed to disclose the fact she had been diagnosed with pneumonia until she was taken ill in public earlier this month.

Then there is the Clinton Foundation, which has been frequently accused of taking money from world leaders keen to win influence over one of Americas most powerful political couples.

A new poll of higher earners for Bloomberg Politics reinforces the issue, finding that only 25% rated Ms Clinton honest, compared with 26% for Mr Trump.

Doug Usher of the Washington-based Purple Strategies, which conducted the poll, said: Clintons fundamental weakness on trust has been consistent throughout the campaign, and has only been reinforced by events during the campaign.
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A dozen police officers have been injured and a city is on edge after protests broke out following the shooting dead of a black man by police in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Police used tear gas to disperse demonstrators who took to the streets after the shooting of 43-year-old Keith Scott by officers on Tuesday afternoon. Police claimed the man had emerged from a car with a gun and was threatening them, while family members said he was sitting in a car reading a book. They also said he was disabled.

He didnt have a gun, a woman identifying herself as his sister told local television. He wasnt messing with nobody.

Charlotte police said officers had gone to the complex at about 4pm looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Mr Scott, who was not the suspect they were looking for, inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers said they saw Mr Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Mr Trietley said.

Relatives of Keith Lamont Scott said was sitting in a car with a book (Facebook)

When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least of them one fired a weapon, he said.

As the various narratives collided, protesters took to the streets of Chartlotte and a number of police vehicles were destroyed in the area near to where the fatal shooting took place.

 Protests erupt after officers kill black man in North Carolina

The Associated Press said that a large group of demonstrators gathered near the apartment complex where the incident happened. By the early hours of Wednesday morning, demonstrators occupied a segment of Interstate Highway 83.

The shooting occurred a day after police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released video showing the moment Terence Crutcher was shot dead by one of their officers on Friday, adding to scrutiny of police departments across the US for the apparently routine killing of unarmed black people.

Relatives of Keith Scott have questioned the police's version of events (AP)

Later on Wednesday it appeared that traffic was flowing again on Interstate 85, hours after protesters blocked the highway and television footage showed some apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire.

No protesters could be seen around 5am, but broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalised during protests earlier.

Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Mr Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Mr Vinson, who is also African American, has been with the department for two years.
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The FBI has published an image of two men who took a suitcase from a street in New York City on Saturday night, after removing a bomb that never exploded. The agency said it wanted to speak to the two unidentified men as witnesses, not suspects, in the case against 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is accused of planting one bomb in New Jersey and two in New York.

The FBI issued a CCTV image of the men on Wednesday, saying they had been seen removing the bomb from the bag and leaving it behind while making off with the luggage.

James Waters, the New York Police Departments counter-terrorism chief, told reporters there was no reason to believe the men are connected to Rahamis alleged plot. In fact, given that the explosive device was very shock sensitive, he said, theyre very, very lucky.

The second New York bomb, packed with ball bearings and steel shrapnel, was left in a rubbish bin in Manhattans Chelsea neighbourhood and exploded, injuring 31 people and causing millions of dollars of property damage, according to court documents.

Rahami remained hospitalised on Wednesday with gunshot wounds sustained in the firefight with police that led to his arrest on Monday in Linden, New Jersey. He was charged with nine federal terrorism offences on Tuesday, including using weapons of mass destruction, and faces life in prison if convicted.

US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Wednesday that the Justice Department intended to bring Rahami to New York to face prosecution for Saturdays bombing in the near future.

In a journal found after his arrest on Monday, Rahami reportedly wrote of his hopes of staging a suicide attack. The journal, which was stained with blood and appeared to have been struck with a bullet during his gunfight with police, praised Osama bin Laden and criticised US military involvement in countries such as Syria and Afghanistan, where he was born before moving to Elizabeth, New Jersey with his family when he was seven.

The journal reportedly made no mention of the Islamic State, and the terror group has not claimed responsibility for Rahamis attacks.

The FBI admitted on Tuesday that it had investigated Rahami in 2014 after his father, Mohammad Rahami, warned authorities that his son was a terrorist. In the same year, Rahami was accused of stabbing his brother in the leg, though he was never prosecuted. He had also visited Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, but investigators found no ties to terrorism.

Since his arrest, the mother of Rahamis young daughter has been granted temporary sole custody of the child by a judge in New Jersey. The couples custody case was called before a family court six times in the past five years over Rahamis repeated failure to pay child support, the Associated Press reported.
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The alleged gold heist was an inside job  in more ways than one.

The theft of about $140,000 worth of gold ($180,000 in Canadian dollars) came from within the Royal Canadian Mint, investigators said Tuesday. Leston Lawrence, a 35-year-old employee of the government mint in Ottawa, has been accused of foiling the facilitys high security through a back-end exploit:

Lawrence smuggled out gold nuggets inside his rectum, prosecutors alleged.

After a trial that concluded in Ottawa on Tuesday, Lawrence faced a number of smuggling-for-cash charges, including theft, laundering the proceeds of crime, possession of stolen property and breach of trust, the Ottawa Citizen reported. Ontario Court of Justice Judge Peter Doody will deliver a decision by Nov. 9.

A suspicious bank teller raised the alarm in 2015. Lawrence sold 18 gold pucks  each a circular 7.4-ounce nugget worth about $6,800  to an Ottawa Gold Buyers store between Nov. 27, 2014, and March 12, 2015, according to court records obtained by the Toronto Sun. Three observations tipped off the bank teller: Lawrence was a mint employee, he had an unusual number of deposits and he frequently requested overseas transactions.

Alerted by the tellers red flags, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pursued the tip. Adding to the body of evidence, inspectors said, were four more pucks in Lawrences safe-deposit box. Though the pucks were not stamped with identifying markings, the prosecution demonstrated that the nuggets matched a custom scoop the refinery uses to spoon molten gold. They also found a tub of Vaseline in his locker at work. Lawrence was fired in 2015.

In his defense, Lawrences lawyer argued the evidence was circumstantial. Lawrence could have purchased the gold legitimately, said Gary Barnes, the defense attorney. Nor had the Royal Canadian Mint reported any missing nuggets. Finally, Barnes pointed out that the mint left gold sitting in open buckets.

This is the Royal Canadian Mint, your Honour, and one would think they should have the highest security measures imaginable, the lawyer said, as reported by Ottawa Citizen columnist Kelly Egan, who had followed the case since catching wind of the charges in September 2015.

The Canadian Crown corporation mints coins and houses a refinery as well as a precious-metals storage facility. It was Lawrences job, as a refinery worker, to test the purity of the pucks in the buckets.

The mint describes itself as fort-like in its defenses: The refinery is a restricted environment controlled by security personnel, according to the mints website, supported by state-of-the-art surveillance technology.

Prosecutors on behalf of the Canadian Crown, however, said that handheld wands  a secondary measure supplementing metal detectors  may fail to register a nugget tucked between an employees buttocks. The Crown argued that Lawrence set off the metal detectors with an atypical frequency, though it was not unusual for employees to trigger the systems. Lawrence was not found with gold on his person during any secondary searches.

Should Lawrence be found guilty, he will join at least two other mint employees convicted of stealing from the Ottawa facility in recent decades. In 1996, a machinist named Richard Gauthier was caught trying to abscond with eight gold bars. A few years earlier, inspectors found gold in the locker of George Allen, a janitor, after he set off a newly installed metal detector. Giving the heist away was a chunk of purloined gold in his underwear.

A representative for the mint told the Ottawa Citizen it has recently installed more cameras and added other upgrades to its security measures.

Copyright: Washington Post
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A lawyer for the unarmed black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in Oklahoma has presented images challenging the account of the officer who shot him.

Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby claims she shot Terence Crutcher in self defence when she saw him reach for something through the window of his car, her attorney claims.

"He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that's when she fired her shot," Ms Shelby's attorney, Scott Wood, told The Tulsa World on Tuesday.

However, lawyers representing Mr Crutcher's family have released an enlarged photo of police footage taken after the shooting appearing to show that the window of Mr Crutcher's SUV was closed and streaked with blood after the shooting.

Attorney Benjamin Crump, center, one of the attorneys for Terence Crutcher's family, speaks about Mr Crutcher during a news conference about the shooting death of Crutcher Tuesday, 20 September, 2016 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (AP)

An enlarged photo of police footage taken after the shooting appears to show Mr Crutcher's SUV window was closed and streaked with blood after the shooting (AP)

"He is not threatening to anyone", Crutcher family lawyer Benjamin Crump said at a news conference. "How can he be reaching into the car if the window is up and there is blood on the glass?"

The shooting was captured in graphic detail by dashcam and helicopter footage released by Tulsa Police, which shows Mr Crutcher walking away from police towards his SUV with his arms held high.

One officer deployed a Taser shortly before the other, identified as Ms Shelby, fatally shot Mr Crutcher.

Officer Betty Shelby (Tulsa Police Department/EPA)

Police were initially responding to reports of a stalled vehicle in the middle of the road. It is unclear from the footage what led Ms Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers gave to Mr Crutcher.

Tulsa Police Sergeant Dave Walker told The Tulsa World that investigators recovered one vial of PCP from Mr Crutcher's SUV, but he declined to say where in the vehicle it was found or whether officers had determined if Mr Crutcher used it Friday evening.

An autopsy and toxicology results are pending.

The Crutcher family attorney says he committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Ms Shelby has been placed on paid administrative leave while the department investigates the shooting.

Protesters calling for the arrest of Officer Betty Shelby, who shot dead unarmed motorist Terence Crutcher, demonstrate outside the Tulsa Police headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 20 September, 2016 (Reuters)

People hold signs at a 'protest for justice' over the shooting of Terence Crutcher, sponsored by We the People Oklahoma, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 20 September, 2016 (AP)

Hundreds of protesters rallied outside the police headquarters in downtown Tulsa on Tuesday night calling for her to be fired.

Ms Shelby's mother-in-law has said she is not guilty of wrongdoing, and called for sympathy from others for the pain suffered by the Shelby family.

She wouldnt harm anyone, were all sick, we feel for the [Crutcher] family, Lois Shelby told the Associated Press. But, you know, we have a family that goes out every day and faces life and death.

"And when she is being accused of things she didnt do wrong, its too much, and they dont think about our family.

Additional reporting by AP
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Texas officials have threatened to withdraw from a federal refugee resettlement program as President Barack Obama announced plans to increase the number of resettlements in the US by 2017.

Citing safety concerns, Texas Gov Greg Abbott said the Office of Refugee Resettlement must unconditionally approve the states plan to exhaustively screen refugees hoping to enter the US and only accept people who are fully vetted and do not present a security threat.

Despite multiple requests by the state of Texas, the federal government lacks the capability or the will to distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, and Texas will not be an accomplice to such dereliction of duty to the American people, Mr Abbott said.

Mr Abbott will follow the lead of Kansas and New Jersey and opt out of the funding if the US government does not meet his criteria by 30 September.

Conservative leaders have continuously attempted to block the migration of Syrian refugees since the aftermath of the November attacks in Paris that claimed the lives of 130 people.

The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Show all 8 1 /8 The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Basheer Basheer, a 3-year-old Syrian boy, lying on his father leg, lives with his family in a rent-free house as part of NRC's shelter programme in the village of Bair-Ras, in Irbid governorate, northern Jordan. Photo 11 October 2015 NRC/Hussein Amri The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Hisham Mustafa has fled from Aleppo, and is currently at Idomeni in Greece. Here he is playing with his nephew Hisham, 3 NRC/Tiril Skarstein The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Ahmaydi Bouchra Little Ahmaydi, 3, and her family of eight fled from fighting in Mali to the Goudebo camp in Burkina Faso in 2013. Neither of her two older sisters went to school in Mali. The whole family lives in a tent that is approx. 7m x 6m. The family bed is stored outside to make space inside the shelter during day time. In the evenings, they carry the bed back in. NRC/Ingrid Prestetun The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Farah Farah, 4, lives with her family in Irbid in a rent-free apartment. She stays home with her mother as her four sisters and three brothers leave for the day to their various schools. Photo 11t October 2015 NRC/Hussein Amri The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Batane Yacouba Batane Yacouba, 4, lives with his two older sisters and his mother in the Goudebo camp in Burkina Faso. A Tuareg family, they were forced to flee Mali fearing for their lives. Their father is dead NRC/Ingrid Prestetun The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Hassan Syrian boy Redor, 12, plays with Hassan, 3, after arriving at the port in Chios, Greece NRC/Tiril Skarstein The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Fatin Fatin, 4, and her family fled Syria to Irbid, northern Jordan. Her father has issued a birth certificate for her, in order for her to have access to health centres. NRC/Hussein Amri The other Alan Kurdis: Refugee children who survived the journey Born a refugee Alice Digama (24) sits on the tent floor with her two-week-old baby. Her son is one of many children born a refugee. Alice was heavily pregnant when she escaped South Sudan and crossed the border into Uganda, after her husband left her for another wife NRC/Sofi Lundin

The halt to Syrian refugees is a familiar rallying cry for the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has previously called for an outright ban to Muslims entering the country.

Mr Trump recently linked the bombings in New York and New Jersey to an apparent weakness in the immigration vetting system.

You cant have vetting if you dont look at ideology, Mr Trump said at a campaign event in Fort Myers, Florida. Hillary Clinton refuses to consider an applicants worldview and thus their likelihood of being recruited into the terror cause at some later date, which is going to happen in many, many cases.

 Refugee crisis: Stranded refugees face deteriorating conditions in Greece camps

Echoing the message, Mr Trumps eldest son and audacious surrogate, Donald Trump Jr, sparked controversy with a tweet on Monday that likened Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles candy.

If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? the caption, accompanied with an image of a bowl holding the candy, read. Thats our Syrian refugee problem.

The suspect charged in the series of explosions and attempted detonations in the two states, 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami, is a naturalised US citizen who was born in Afghanistan. He came to the US in 1995 when his family was granted asylum  which requires a different process than admitting refugees.

Refugees currently go through an admitting process through the State Department that can take up to two years, until they are placed in a specific city and receive assistance finding a home, work, schools for their children, and learning English from area nonprofits.

Should Texas withdraw from the federal refugee resettlement program, the federal government can allocate funding directly to a nonprofit organisation per the US Refugee Act of 1980  which allows the US to grant a non-state organisation the authority disburse federal refugee funding.

In the 2016 fiscal year, Texas accepted 7,633 refugees. Texas officials the state would only accept that number in 2017, rejecting a 25 per cent increase proposed by the US government.
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Welcome to our Donald Trump quote tracker.

We'll be monitoring the motormouth Republican's campaign speeches, interviews and utterances to bring you all his choicest words.

Be sure to keep checking back here for the latest updates.

25 September

Recommended Read more Everything you need to know about the first US presidential debate

Another quiet day for the man who is probably the most bombastic candidate in election history. Presumably it's another day preparing for Monday's debate.

Anyway, there was still enough time to meet the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. No quotes but a readout of the meeting. Very presidential.

Finally, Mr. Trump acknowledged that Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish People for over 3000 years, and that the United States, under a Trump administration, will finally accept the long-standing Congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.

No need to start panicking. Barack Obama made the same promise in 2008 but US policy remains to fudge the issue so as to keep alive what remains of the two-state solution.

24 September

He's been on the straight and narrow for a few days as we get to the business end of this campaign. Maybe someone took his Android phone away. Whatever. His public comments have been relatively measured.

Until today that is, when he appears to have had his cage rattled by Mark Cuban and the Clinton campaign. Following a string of public put-downs by Mr Cuban, a businessman and investor, the Clinton campaign offered him a ringside seat at Monday's debate.

If it's an attempt to get under Mr Trump's skin it appears to have worked.

23 September

A rare day off for the Donald with no campaign appearances. Is he finally preparing for the first presidential debate?

His campaign was bolstered by Ted Cruz's announcement that he would was endorsing Mr Trump.

The Republican candidate responded with a statement: "I am greatly honored by the endorsement of Senator Cruz. We have fought the battle and he was a tough and brilliant opponent. I look forward to working with him for many years to come in order to make America great again."

Rather difference to what he said just a few short weeks ago after the Texas senator snubbed him at the Republican National Convention: "I dont want his endorsement. If he gives it, I will not accept it, just so you understand. I will not accept it. It wont matter. Honestly, he should have done it. Because nobody cares."

22 September

The New York billionaire endorsed a policing method that a federal judge said New York City had used unconstitutionally because of its overwhelming impact on minority residents.

I think Chicago needs stop and frisk, he said during a phone interview with Fox News. When you have 3,000 people shot and so many people dying, I mean it's worse than some of the places we're hearing about like Afghanistan, you know, the war-torn nations.

21 September

Mr Trump addressed the shooting of an unarmed black man in Oklahoma by a white police officer during a visit to Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

It was part of his effort to win the support of black voters and he began by expressing his horror at the killing, before going on to explain his admiration for the police.

Great people, you always have problems," he said. "You have somebody in there that either makes a mistake, that's bad or that chokes.

He then accused the officer, Betty Shelby, of choking.

Now did she get scared? Was she choking? What happened? he asked.

20 September

Mr Trump was on the campaign trail addressing the concerns of black voters in North Carolina on Tuesday night.

His outreach has not been an overwhelming success.

And the latest attempt will not have helped.

You take a look at the inner cities. You get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street!' he said.

They're worse  I mean honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities.

The result was a mix of bafflement and anger at the comparison with a country riven by war and riddled with Taliban insurgents who have seized territory in the past two years since American combat troops left the country.
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A British rights activist has been found guilty of defamation at a court in Thailand, after he helped write a report accusing an international fruit wholesaler of severe labour abuses.

Andy Hall, an activist working for the Migrant Worker Rights Network, was given a three-year suspended sentence for criminal defamation and cyber crimes at the trial in Bangkok, in a ruling heavily criticised by human rights groups.

In 2013, Mr Hall worked with the watchdog Finnwatch to compile a report containing a series of allegations against the Natural Fruit Company, which supplies pineapples to countries across Europe.

The report detailed alleged labor abuses at processing plants owned by the firm in Thailand, specifically involving excessive working hours and cramped conditions for migrant workers.

The revelations prompted several companies to terminate their contracts with the Natural Fruit Company, and a year later Natural Fruit brought their defamation case against Mr Hall, accusing him of misrepresenting their practices.

The court found Mr Hall had failed to interview a large sample size while compiling his research, and said state auditors had found no widespread abuses at the company during subsequent investigations.

Natural Fruit also complained it was not given enough time to respond before the report was submitted to Finnwatch, according to Reuters.

Human rights attacks around the world Show all 10 1 /10 Human rights attacks around the world Human rights attacks around the world China Escalating crackdown against human rights activists including mass arrests of lawyers and a series of sweeping laws in the name of national security. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Egypt The arrest of thousands, including peaceful critics, in a ruthless crackdown in the name of national security, the prolonged detention of hundreds without charge or trial and the sentencing of hundreds of others to death. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Gambia Torture, enforced disappearances and the criminalisation of LGBTI people; and utter refusal to co-operate with the UN and regional human rights mechanisms on issues including freedom of expression, enforced disappearance and the death penalty. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Hungary Sealing off its borders to thousands of refugees in dire need; and obstructing collective regional attempts to help them. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Israel Maintaining its military blockade of Gaza and therefore collective punishment of the 1.8 million inhabitants there, as well as failing, like Palestine, to comply with a UN call to conduct credible investigations into war crimes committed during the 2014 Gaza conflict. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Kenya Extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and discrimination against refugees in its counter-terrorism operations; and attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court and its ability to pursue justice. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Pakistan The severe human rights failings of its response to the horrific Peshawar school massacre including its relentless use of the death penalty; and its policy on international NGOs giving authorities the power to monitor them and close them down if they are considered to be against the interests of the country. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Russia Repressive use of vague national security and anti-extremism legislation and its concerted attempts to silence civil society in the country; its shameful refusal to acknowledge civilian killings in Syria and its callous moves to block Security Council action on Syria. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Saudi Arabia Brutally cracking down on those who dared to advocate reform or criticise the authorities; and committing war crimes in the bombing campaign it has led in Yemen (pictured) while obstructing the establishment of a UN-led inquiry into violations by all sides in the conflict. Getty Images Human rights attacks around the world Syria Killing thousands of civilians in direct and indiscriminate attacks with barrel bombs and other weaponry and through acts of torture in detention; and enforcing lengthy sieges of civilian areas, blocking international aid from reaching starving civilians. Getty Images

Mr Hall had his prison sentence reduced from four years to three due to his history of doing public good and his record as a rights defender, the judge told the court.

I do not feel shame or regret, Hall said following the ruling. I am fighting for the rights of migrant workers. This ruling will send shockwaves in the international community.

Sunai Phasuk of Human Rights Watch added: The verdict against Andy Hall sends a chilling effect to the human rights community in Thailand.

The Thai governments strict defamation laws have drawn criticism from rights groups concerned about curbs on freedom of speech.
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Chinas first space station will meet a fiery end next year when the 8.5-tonne module comes crashing down to Earth, amid concerns authorities have lost control of the craft.

The Tiangong-1 space station was launched in September 2011 and currently orbits Earth at an altitude of 230 miles (370km).

But in July, amateur astronomers suggested China had lost control of the satellite, after Chinese media reported the countrys space agency had struggled to get in contact with it.

Officials have now confirmed that after four and a half years in orbit, Tiangong-1 (meaning Heavenly Palace) is expected to plummet to Earth in late 2017.

Speaking at a satellite launch for the space stations successor in the Gobi Desert in northern China, officials from Chinas manned space programme said the craft had ended its service in March this year having comprehensively fulfilled its historical mission.

Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office said: Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling.

 Nasa launches rocket to asteroid that could hit earth

According to Space.com the less than precise landing time indicates the operators had lost control of the unit, as if they were still able to communicate with it, they could steer it to a guided re-entry over an empty stretch of ocean at a specified time.

Like other lost satellites, its likely that the freefalling station will burn up on its way back into Earth and come back down in smaller chunks of molten metal rather than with a big crash.

However, some denser engine parts are unlikely to burn up completely and could potentially cause problems on the ground.

Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the Guardian the announcement suggested the doomed craft would now re-enter the Earths atmosphere naturally, making it near impossible to predict where any debris will fall.

You really cant steer these things, he said. Even a couple of days before it re-enters we probably wont know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when its going to come down. Not knowing when its going to come down translates as not knowing where its going to come down.

There will be lumps of about 100kg or so, still enough to give you a nasty wallop if it hit you, he added.

He said that even small changes in atmospheric conditions would be enough to nudge the craft from one continent to the next.

But according to Chinese news agency Xinhua, Ms Wu said the space stations re-entry was unlikely to affect aviation activities or cause damage to the ground.

China has always highly valued the management of space debris, conducting research and tests on space debris mitigation and cleaning, Wu said.

The most incredible space images of Earth Show all 30 1 /30 The most incredible space images of Earth The most incredible space images of Earth Striking Africa Explore ESA astronaut Tim Peake's stunning photos of Earth, taken from the International Space Station during his six month mission (captions by Tom Peake) "The striking colour and texture of Africa Illizi, Algeria" The most incredible space images of Earth Favourite Reef "Every day spent living in space is a great day, but today was particularly special. I got to speak with one of my inspirational heroes Prof Stephen Hawking and his amazing daughter Lucy, who developed the Principia Space Diary to engage children with STEM subjects. As well as talking about dark matter, quantum entanglement, alien life and light beam powered nanocraft we also got to see an amazing pass over the Bahamas and this - my favourite reef smile emoticon" The most incredible space images of Earth Russia's north-east coast "Sunrise approaching Russia's frozen north-east coast" The most incredible space images of Earth Hello London "Hello London! Fancy a run? :) #LondonMarathon" The most incredible space images of Earth Bahamas "50 shades of blue: Bahamas" The most incredible space images of Earth Yinchuan "Snow on the mountains next to Yinchuan in China" The most incredible space images of Earth Rocket flames in Africa "Is it just me or do I see some rocket flames down there? These strange land features are in the Erg Iguidi desert, with its yellow stripes of sand stretching from Algeria to northern Mauritania in the Sahara" The most incredible space images of Earth Stunning colours "Sunlight reflecting the stunning colours of this Himalayan lake" The most incredible space images of Earth The real Everest "The real thing: found Everest! Last picture turned out to be third-tallest mountain Kanchengjunga" The most incredible space images of Earth Go Exomars "Go #Exomars  have a great mission. Earth has more in common with Mars than you might think #AfricaArt" The most incredible space images of Earth Tenerife "Amazingly clear view of Tenerife" The most incredible space images of Earth Midday winter sun "Some midday winter sun glinting off Greenlands snow-capped peaks" The most incredible space images of Earth Sand dunes "Great texture in these huge sand dunes, Saudi Arabia" The most incredible space images of Earth Dragon Dam "The dam makes this river look like a dragons tail. Oahe Dam north of Pierre, South Dakota in the United States. (North is to the right)" The most incredible space images of Earth Smoking volcano "Spotted volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning  heat has melted snow around top" The most incredible space images of Earth New Zealand "New Zealand looking stunning in the sunshine. Mt Cook centre left with the Grand Plateau to the front and Mt Tasman (3,497m) to the right of the Grand Plateau. Fox Glacier in the middle then Franz Josef curving right. Tasman Lake (largest at front) is at the foot of the Tasman glacier which runs along the front of them. The Hooker Glacier flows out behind Mt Cook coming down to meet the Mueller Glacier on the left of the photo. The Murchison Glacier is at the front of the photo running parallel with the Tasman Glacier" The most incredible space images of Earth Plankton bloom "Another great pass over Patagonia and a swirling plankton bloom off the coast" The most incredible space images of Earth Alaska "We dont often get such clear views of Alaska" The most incredible space images of Earth Lights along the Nile "Lights along the Nile stretching into the distance from Cairo" The most incredible space images of Earth Kamchatka "The Pacific Ring of Fire clear to see amongst the volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia" The most incredible space images of Earth Cumulonimbus "Im guessing there was an impressive storm going on under that cumulonimbus cloud" The most incredible space images of Earth Night Sahara "Night-time Sahara  you can really see how thin the Earths atmosphere is in this picture" The most incredible space images of Earth Japan "Tokyo and Japanese coast. This image shows most of Japan with the largest mass of light corresponding to Tokyo. The white lights on the left are fishing boats" The most incredible space images of Earth Morning sun volcanoes "Morning sun striking active volcanoes in Guatemala" The most incredible space images of Earth Tapajos River "The vast waters of the Tapajos river, Amazonia" The most incredible space images of Earth Patagonia "Beautiful glacial river water flowing from this Patagonian ice field Lake Viedma, West is up" The most incredible space images of Earth Dubai Palms "Minus the #Dragon photobomb this time..." The most incredible space images of Earth Sediment in Ethiopia "Sediment spilling into this mountain lake, Ethiopia" The most incredible space images of Earth Italy "We have phases of short nights on the International Space Station  sunlight is nearly always visible right now. No prizes for guessing where this is" The most incredible space images of Earth Panama Canal "From one mighty ocean to another  ships passing through the Panama canal"

Tiangong-2, Chinas replacement for the space lab, was successfully launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket on 15 September from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in north west China.
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Chinese authorities have said they are unable to act over the treatment of an eight-year-old girl who has been tied to a tree by her grandparents for nearly six years.

Zhao Ziyi, from Louyang village in the Henan Province, was first tethered with rope in 2010 after her grandparents claimed she started attacking people.

Her grandparents have said Zhao started acting strangely after a series of high fevers, according to the South China Morning Post.

Her grandfather told reporters:"She would attack other children and older people.

"She is dangerous to others, so we have to tied her up here."

Zhao, who it is claimed suffers from mental health problems, lives with her two healthy brother with her grandparents. Her father, who is disabled, works at a factory in another town.

Her mother is also disabled and is thought to live elsewhere.

 Can China eradicate poverty by 2020?

It is not known whether she attends school or is allowed inside the house to wash.

Authorities have stated they have provided the family with a low-income allowance but otherwise are unable to intervene.
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Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has launched an expletive laden attack on the EU after it called on the Filipino authorities to launch an immediate investigation into the rising death toll in the country's war on drugs.

President Duterte said he responded with the words "f**k you" before accusing the EU of hypocrisy, asking: "How many have they killed?"

Speaking at the Sulong Pilipinas-Local Governance Dialogues in the southern city of Davao, the President said: "When I read the EU condemnation I told them f**k you.

"You are doing it in atonement for your sins. They are now strict because they have guilty feelings.

"Who did I kill? Assuming that its true? 1,700? How many have they killed?"

In a resolution last week, the European Parliament said that while it agrees drug trafficking and abuse in the Philippines remain a serious and national concern, it is also concerned by the high numbers killed during police operations in the context of an intensified anti-crime and anti-drug campaign.

It urged the Filipino government to launch an 'immediate investigation' into the killings and adopt 'specific, comprehensive policies and programmes', in full compliance with national and international obligations and respect for human rights.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Earlier this month President Duterte was said to have referred to US president Barack Obama as a "son of a whore", prompting Mr Obama to cancel a formal meeting between the two leaders.

Following the accusations, Mr Duterte said he regretted the verbal attack against the American president, and later denied he had been referring to Mr Obama at all.

Since gaining power in June, Mr Duterte has drawn international criticism over his bloody war on drugs, which has seen thousands of deaths.
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University students who founded a club for sexually assaulting women have been convicted of sexual assault, it has been reported.

Kensuke Matsumi, a 22-year-old student at the University of Tokyo, co-founded The University of Tokyo Birthday Research Group along with male students, The Japan Times reports. The aim of the group was to conspire to intoxicate female students and then sexually assault them as a gang.

Tokyo District Court heard that in April, Mr Matsumi and other male classmates committed a sexual assault on a female student. The men reportedly deliberately got the young woman intoxicated, before forcibly undressing her and groping her body. Mr Matsumi was accused of beating the woman, blowing hot air on her genitals with a hairdryer and pouring a cup of hot ramen noodles on to her breasts.

He reportedly told the court he looked down on female students at other universities as intellectually inferior and therefore acceptable targets for sexual assault.

He was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison suspended for four years

Judge Hajime Shimada reportedly told the court the crime deserved condemnation as it had disrespected the woman. However the judge reportedly gave Mr Matsumi a suspended sentence because the student had expressed regret and the judge therefore felt rehabilitation was a possibility.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Another man, Taichi Komoto, was convicted earlier this week of participating in the attack. He also received a suspended sentence.

A third man is standing trial in relation to the incident.
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Taiwan has asked Google to blur out images of military buildings on the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, amid mounting tensions over Chinas territorial claims to the region.

The Coast Guard Administration in Tapei confirmed it had asked the technology giant to erase details of four large structures on the northern shore of Taiping Island from its Maps and Earth services, as the function of the buildings counted as classified military information.

The structures were recently discovered on the map service and raised suspicions that Taiwan is attempting to increase its military presence in the region.

Coastguard Director General Lee Chung-wei confirmed Google had been notified about concealing the structures, but they currently remain visible on Google Earth pending a review by the tech giant.

It is inconvenient for us to reveal any military facilities we are installing on Taiping island, and what their purposes are, as they are all considered secret, Taiwans defence minister Feng Shih-kuan said, according to the Guardian.

Military experts have said the four-storey buildings are likely to be used for detection and surveillance rather than to launch missiles from, despite initial speculation that they were anti-aircraft towers.

Imagery that reveals major infrastructure or engineering projects is frequently blurred by Google Earth at the request of governments worldwide.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The Spratly Islands are situated in the middle of several important sea trade routes and are the subject of an ongoing historical dispute between China, the Philippines, and Vietnam over their ownership.

Taiwan is planning to contest a ruling by the Court of Arbitration in The Hague in July, which stated that the so-called islands in the Spratly archipelago should be considered as large rocks.

The Taiwanese said they were not consulted throughout the arbitration process, which was initiated by the Philippines against China.
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A teenage boy has been arrested in Pakistan after liking an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post.

Police say the teenager, who is Christian, has been jailed pending trial in the province of Punjab for sharing the post on social media.

Some reports said the defendant was 16, while others named him as 18-year-old Nabeel Chohan.

Previous reports of a 'blasphemous' Facebook post sparked deadly riots and arson in Gujranwala, Pakistan, in 2014 (EPA)

Akhtar Ansari, a senior police officer, said the boy was arrested this week after the inappropriate post was reported by a Muslim viewer who found it insulting.

Police did not detail its contents but said it included a photograph of the Kaaba in Mecca, one of the holiest sites in Islam, which is visited by thousands of Muslims on the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

Shahbaz Ahmed, another police official, told the AFP news agency the informant had lodged a complaint over hurting religious sentiments of Muslims and desecrating the religious place.

Blasphemy against the Prophet Mohamed is punishable by death in Pakistan, which has several religious offences listed in its penal code including wounding religious feelings, derogatory remarks and defiling the Quran.

 Pakistani actress gets 26 years in prison on blasphemy

Human rights organisations say the laws disproportionately target religious minorities in the country, where around 95 per cent of the population identify as Muslim, and are used to settle personal scores.

Rumours of blasphemy have previously sparked lynchings and riots in Pakistan, with a Christian couple beaten to death by a mob that burned their bodies after claims they desecrated the Muslim holy book in 2014.

In the same year, an Ahmadi woman and two children were killed in riots over an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post in the city of Gujranwala .

Religious minorities have also been the target of recent terror attacks, with the Talibans Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction sending gunmen into a Christian colony in Peshawar earlier this month.

Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Show all 9 1 /9 Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts Pakistani security officials inspect the scene of a suicide bomb attack in Lahore, Pakistan Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts Pakistani rescue workers remove a dead body from the site of bomb explosion in a park in Lahore, Pakistan Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts A Pakistani injured man from a bomb blast talks on his cell phone at a local hospital in Lahore, Pakistan Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts A woman weeps for her injured family members as she tries to speak to security at a local hospital in Lahore, Pakistan Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts An injured Pakistani child victim of a suicide blast rests in a hospital in Lahore Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts An injured Pakistani child victim of a suicide blast rests in a hospital in Lahore Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts A woman injured in the bomb blast is comforted by a family member at a local hospital in Lahore, Pakistan Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts Most of the dead and injured are women and children, officials say Lahore Blasts kill at least 70 Lahore blasts The bomb reportedly exploded next to children's swings and rides as families were leaving the park this evening

The group carried out a bombing that killed more than 70 people during Christian Easter celebrations at a park in Lahore.

Isis is also attempting to expand into Pakistan with its Wilayat Khorasan branch, seeing more than 300 alleged sympathisers and members arrested in recent years.

Human Rights Watch said the government has failed to take adequate steps to prevent and respond to massacres targeting Christians, Shia Muslims and Ahmadis, who have been officially declared non-Muslims by the government.

Its 2016 world report also found Pakistans draconian blasphemy laws were overwhelmingly targeting religious minorities, with 19 convicts on death row.

There have been localised moves to acquit victimised suspects in cases lacking evidence, or those found to be mentally ill, but no nationwide changes are planned for the laws dating back to the British Empire.

Additional reporting by AP
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Landing in Ashgabat, there's no sign telling you where you are. No "Welcome to Ashgabat", no "Ashgabat International Airport, Terminal One" or anything of the sort. Instead, atop the terminal building, there is simply an embossed shiny head; the profile of a middle-aged man in gold.

Turkmenistan has done its best to keep out journalists for the past decade, and has long been an unattainable dream for Moscow correspondents like myself. But due, it seemed, to some kind of administrative error, they had let a few of us in, ostensibly to cover a tedious-sounding Investment Forum, and here I was stepping off the plane into one of the world's most isolated and bizarre countries.

The gold head was the first sighting of a man that would follow me around for the whole time I spent in Ashgabat. He was Saparmurat Niyazov, the local Communist party boss who had taken over as president when the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and created a personality cult unrivalled anywhere else in the world, except perhaps for North Korea. He decided he wasn't going to be boring old Mr Niyazov, he would be Turkmenbashi  Leader of all the Turkmens. He was Saparmurat Turkmenbashi the Great; he was the All-powerful and Fearless Serdar; he was the Eternal Sun of Turkmenistan and the Great Architect of the Golden Age of the Turkmens; he was the Father, the Prophet, and the President for Life. Since December 2006, he was also dead. But nevertheless, he was very much still here.

A scruffy, miserably inhospitable patch of desert with nothing much going for it, Turkmenistan is watched closely by the rest of the world due to the vast reserves of gas  the fourth largest in the world  that lie under its arid sands and off its Caspian coast. With the cash that flooded into the country as the gas flowed out, Turkmenbashi built possibly the oddest city in the world.

Ashgabat is not simply bizarre. It's world-class nuts; Olympic-Gold-level bananas; truly and utterly bonkers. For years it provided pithy news stories written from Moscow or London (it was rare for anyone to gain access to check for themselves). Turkmenbashi renamed the days of the week and the months of the year after himself and his mother. He banned opera, ballet and the circus, but opened a giant theme park based on Turkmen fairy tales. He made his book, the Ruhnama, compulsory reading for all schoolchildren, and everyone needs to sit an exam on it to get a driving licence.

On a first walkabout, the city more than lived up to its bizarro billing. Turkmens are an eye-catching bunch, especially the women. They wear ankle-length dresses made of silk or velvet, which come in a whole host of bright purples, oranges, blues and greens; the necks adorned with intricate gold-thread embroidery that comes down in a sweeping column from the throat to the navel. Any gathering of Turkmens turns even the most mundane setting into a kaleidoscopic whirl of colour and excitement.

But none of them were here. Nobody. Over in the old part of town, the bit they don't want foreigners to see, locals live in a normal, shabby Soviet city, many neighbourhoods of which were simply bulldozed down to make way for the new city. This ever-expanding new section consists solely of huge white marble buildings, set along broad avenues completely bereft of people, save the armies of cleaners who keep them so spotless you could eat your dinner off them. As few people can afford the new apartments, most of them are empty. I felt as though I was an extra in an apocalyptic disaster movie, walking along these long, wide avenues framed with shimmering new buildings but with hardly a soul in sight. Here in the very heart of Central Asia, that romantic region of teeming bazaars, mysterious alleyways and ancient mosques, is a brand-new city full of sterile white-marble high-rises and glimmering gold statues of the man who ordered them built.

At its centre is (of course) Turkmenbashi Square. On three sides are vast palaces; the too-new shine of their white marble facades marking them as recent creations. On the fourth and final side of the square is the city's crowning glory. Three wide white legs stretch down dozens of metres, straddling a roundabout; a giant tripod base on which is mounted a white, somewhat phallic structure in the shape of a space shuttle. And atop this, high in the air, a statue all in gold, of a middle-aged man with his arms outstretched above his head in a pose of religious ecstasy, like a maniacal preacher. Yes, it's Turkmenbashi, rotating throughout the day to always face the sun.

To make things more complicated, the country is now afflicted with a bipolar personality cult. When Turkmenbashi died in 2006, his former dentist, and then Minister of Health, the tough-to-pronounce Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, took over as the new leader. While the golden statues of Turkmenbashi remain, the more transient elements of his personality cult  portraits on buildings, banknotes, and so on  have been slowly removed, and Berdymukhammedov has instigated his own, creeping personality cult.

Younger than his predecessor, Berdymukhammedov's jet-black hair is swept back over a pudgy face in the same way as the great Turkmenbashi, but with a more sinister effect  he looks like a slightly vampiric librarian in the giant posters that adorn almost every building in the city. When he came to power, there was much talk of liberalisation, but in Turkmenistan, everything is relative. Previously, nobody except a select few government officials was allowed to use the internet. Now, there are four internet cafes in Ashgabat, but there are only five computers in each, the connection is medievally slow, and surfers have a double reminder that Big Brother is watching  not only does a portrait of Berdymukhammedov stare down from the walls, but in the one I visited an officious young man with slicked back hair took note of everyone's name and passport number before they were allowed online.

Berdymukhammedov has also carried on Turkmenbashi's penchant for vanity mega-projects. His big idea is the construction of one of the world's best tourist resorts at a cost of billions of dollars at Avaza on the Caspian Sea. No matter that the water is too cold to swim in most of the year, the beach is covered in sea snakes, and it's almost impossible for anyone to get a visa and visit the new paradise. The order was given to build a giant resort, so a giant resort is being built. Nobody questions the president. The television news follows his every move, and he's followed everywhere by hordes of clapping, grinning schoolchildren. Recent televised stunts have included driving across the desert country in a race against two professional racing drivers (no prizes for guessing who won), and the inauguration of a new cancer centre. Berdymukhammedov, a dentist by training, performed complex surgery to remove a tumour from a patient, although informed sources told me that he simply wielded a scalpel and grinned for the cameras, while the real work was done by two German surgeons who had been specially flown in.

The Investment Forum was held in a vast white hall with delegates seated around dining tables laden with fruits, nuts and drinks, and was meant to be opened by the Big Man himself, but he pulled out at the last minute, leaving everyone to make do with the enormous portrait of him that was hung above the podium. (Though he was unable to find 15 minutes to talk to the biggest-ever gathering of international investors to descend on his country, Berdymukhammedov did, however, find time to spend several hours ceremonially opening a chicken farm the next day.)

The Turkmen officials at the forum spoke in a tedious monotone, droning imaginary statistics and making obligatory references to the "marvellous initiatives of respected president" roughly every 30 seconds.

I cornered the deputy health minister at the end of one session to ask if the country had a problem with HIV. She shot me a look of worried suspicion, and said: "We are building a big new HIV prevention clinic. But luckily so far we don't have a single case." This in a country that borders Afghanistan and its heroin supplies, where prostitution is widespread, and where all the other countries in the region admit to a serious HIV problem. She later suggested it would "perhaps be better if you didn't write an article about this".

"People don't solve problems here," a foreign resident of Ashgabat told me. "They simply deny them."

Not that this seemed an issue for companies looking to invest in the country. Speech after speech of praise from Western companies drew smug smiles and nods of approval from the Turkmen officials listening through their translation headsets. The parade of foreigners telling them in obsequious language how wise and talented their president is was reminiscent of emissaries sent to the courts of ancient Khans to win trading concessions with gifts and beautiful words, and hardly seemed like the best way to drag the country out of its self-imposed isolation.

"Zis Prezident it trruly an innovator," chirped one overexcited German from the podium, urging delegates to invest in the gold-plated haven of Turkmenistan. A Brit, representing the EBRD, spoke of the country's wise political course. Nobody deemed it fit to remark that we were in one of the weirdest and most autocratic countries in the world. And of course, few of the companies actually wanted to make-long term investments in such an opaque country.

"Most people here are vendors, not investors," one delegate confessed quietly on the sidelines of the forum. They're happy to build any palace or five-star hotel that the Turkmens ask them to. But actually invest long-term and expose their money to risk? Not a chance.

I escaped from the conference and got chatting to a group of young Turkmens sitting in a cafe. They were well dressed and tapping on i-Phones, and it transpired they all worked in international companies in Ashgabat  they were some of the lucky few who had been allowed to study abroad for a year, and had picked up English in the US.

"I learnt more in six months in the US than I did for four years at the best faculty of the best university in Turkmenistan, where I learned absolutely nothing," one of them told me.

"All the really talented professors were fired in the Nineties and replaced with idiots who were happy just to talk about Turkmenbashi and the Ruhnama," he continued, talking quietly so as not to attract too much attention. "Everything was destroyed under the old president. Everything. I'm patriotic, I love my country and I want to stay here. I could've got citizenship in the States if I'd tried hard enough, but I wanted to come back here. But if things don't improve in the next decade, people like me will start to leave. I want my kids to have a decent education, and right now, that's impossible here."

While there might not be brutality on as widespread a scale as in neighbouring Uzbekistan, this is only because Turkmens on the whole appear to have accepted their lot, and know not to talk out of turn. This is partly due to the most spectacular dumbing down of society. No books are printed except the Ruhnama  Turkmenbashi's turgid ramblings on life, morals and Turkmen history  and Berdymukhammedov's tomes. Despite being in office less than three years, he's already managed to knock out a book on cooking, one on horses and one on herbal medicine, and the TV news features nothing but Berdymukhammedov and dancing children.

To test out just how isolated the place really was, I played a game on a Friday night out at one of Ashgabat's few nightclubs. I asked 10 different people, all young well-to-do types in their twenties, if they could name the current US President. Seven of them expressed total bemusement, one guessed "Bush", and one of the bartenders disappeared to phone a "friend who knows everything", and returned a few minutes later proudly brandishing a piece of paper on which was written in neat Cyrillic letters, "Vagassa Avama". Only one, a shy young ethnic Russian girl, guessed Obama, but then collapsed in a fit of giggles and said she was sure she must be wrong.

***

While the personality cults of both Berdymukhammedov and Turkmenbashi were on display at every street corner, it was only when I arrived in Gipjak, the village about 15 miles outside Ashgabat where Saparmurat Niyazov had been born in 1940, that the utterly outrageous extravagance of his cult really became clear. This was where the Turkmenbashi Mosque had been built.

The shiny white marble and vast gold dome meant that, like all the new buildings in Turkmenistan, it was somewhat tacky, resembling what Hotel Mecca, Las Vegas, might look like if such a thing was ever built. But while it could hardly compete with the great mosques of Iran and the Middle East for elegance, its sheer size meant it was hard not to be impressed. Approaching the mosque from the road, I walked past over a hundred fountains bursting from lush green grass by the roadside, before entering a walkway surrounded on both sides by fountains and green Turkmen flags. The mosque itself was on a platform about four metres above the earth, and water cascaded down all the sides. The four soaring minarets were of white marble ringed with gold bands, and the mosque itself encased by a grand wall with marble columns and eight porticos.

Under the main gate of the mosque was not a quote from the Koran, but a long quote from the Ruhnama and the words "Turkmenbashi is Great".

Inside, around the base of the dome, blue-lettered slogans extolled both Allah and Saparmurat Turkmenbashi the Great. This was perhaps the crudest attempt to fuse the personality of a dictator with that of God in modern times. Turkmenbashi had got billions of dollars of Saudi aid after completing the hajj in the Nineties, and had promptly built a mosque with his own name scrawled all over it. Visible behind the mosque were the hazy Kopet Dag mountains, and behind them, Iran, just a couple of dozen miles away. I imagined that the penalties in Iran for writing one's own name inside a mosque were not pretty. Even the pictures of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khameini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution and his successor, which are everywhere in Iran, are never to be found blasphemously adorning the outside or inside of a mosque, still less would their names be allowed to be inscribed on a mosque interior. I felt a bit sorry for Salman Rushdie and the Danish artist who drew the infamous Mohamed cartoons  surely Turkmenbashi, when he was still alive, was a far better candidate for a fatwa.

A guard told me the mosque could seat 20,000 worshippers, but when I returned for Friday prayers, 100 were there at most. The Turkmenbashi Mosque was only one of thousands of monuments that the odious man had dedicated to himself, but it stood out as perhaps the biggest and most obnoxious squandering of money of all.

It had some fairly stiff competition though. Back in Ashgabat, I took myself off one afternoon to a new museum and library complex that had been built just before Turkmenbashi's death. Another Vegas-style extravaganza, this featured three marble buildings with golden domes facing onto a courtyard, each with four enormous stone lions roaring from pedestals at the front. The streets around it were completely deserted, but as I approached the entrance, I saw two Turkmen guys get out of a car and walk up to the complex, taking pictures of the building on their mobile phones. I went over to say hello to them, and they expressed expletives of amazement at the fact that I was from England. We spoke in Russian, which most Turkmens speak along with their native, Turkic tongue, in a legacy of the Soviet period.

Murat and Ali turned out to be oil specialists from one of the regional capitals, in town visiting family. It was the first time they had been to Ashgabat for four years and they had all the marks of the wide-eyed provincial in the big city as they looked in awe at the imposing buildings around them. Ali was quiet and affable, while Murat wouldn't stop talking and had a rather unpleasant hectoring tone. He also turned out to be the first real Turkmenbashi enthusiast I'd come across.

"This complex was built by our first president, the great Saparmurat Niyazov  Turkmenbashi," he shouted unnecessarily loudly into my ear. "Have you heard of him?"

I refrained from the obvious response that it would have been fairly difficult to have been in Turkmenistan for more than two minutes and not have heard of him, and went for the non-confrontational: "Yes, he seems to have built a lot."

"Not just built, Shaun. He also did a lot; he did so much for the Turkmen people."

The first floor of the cavernous museum was devoted to gifts that had been given to Turkmenbashi  malachite vases, elaborate timepieces of solid gold, crystal dining sets, enormous carpets. Murat would call me over every now and then to bellow about a particularly lavish gift, peppering his speech with the Russian expletive pizdets, a vulgar expression of surprise derived from the word for the female genitalia.

"Pizdets, this thing is solid crystal! Can you believe it? Solid! That's how great he was, pizdets! Can you imagine? They gave him something of solid pizdets crystal!"

Who exactly the "they" was for the most part remained a mystery. Most of the exhibits had a label explaining what it was but not designating the giver, which led me to wonder whether he hadn't given most of them to himself. Especially suspicious were several carpets woven with verses from the Ruhnama and the Turkmen national anthem (first line: "Turkmenbashi made Turkmenistan great").

Afterwards I went for a beer with Ali and Murat. The talk moved to the inevitable subject of money. They asked me how much was the lowest that a skilled worker could expect to be paid per month in England. I said about 1,000, to keep it on the low side, and reminded them that they had to remember that taxes were higher in England and so were prices. They looked at each other in amazement. Then they asked how much rent I paid per month for my apartment in Moscow. I halved the amount and they were still gobsmacked. They told me that they earned about 100 per month. This for the employees of a state oil company with higher education and 15 years of specialist experience. Even though utilities were free and prices in general were low in Turkmenistan, it was still a shockingly low amount of money. Ali spent his weekends working as a carpenter to make ends meet.

"With that money I have to buy food and clothes for my wife and two kids," said Murat. "It's terrible how we live. We have no money." There was of course a giant elephant storming around the cafe that I couldn't help but mention. "Murat," I began, as tactfully as I possibly could. "What good are all these monuments and fountains, that the government has spent billions of dollars on, if hard-working people like you don't have enough money to put food on the table for their family?"

Murat paused for a while. Then he said: "As Saparmurat Turkmenbashi said, 'He who works hard will have his rewards.'"

It was unclear whether these rewards would come in a few years, or in the afterlife, but it was fairly obvious they weren't here yet. I didn't think it was worth probing this logical crevice any further. Not for the only time in Turkmenistan, I was left wondering if someone had been fully taken in by the years of propaganda they'd been subjected to, or if they were well aware how messed up the situation was but were trying to persuade me  or themselves  that Turkmenbashi really had been a wise and just leader.

***

I'm at the departure lounge of the airport, waiting for my less-than-convenient 4.50am flight back to Istanbul. Two of the handful of destinations that Turkmenistan Airlines flies to turned out to be Birmingham and Amritsar, and the small, shabby departure area was crammed with around 200 exhausted Sikhs with Midlands accents waiting for their connecting flight. It's almost impossible to book tickets on Turkmenistan Airlines  they have no website and aren't bookable at online sites like Expedia. But a few Birmingham travel agents had apparently got hold of tickets and were selling the Birmingham-Amritsar via Ashgabat route at knock-down prices.

I asked a few of them if they'd ever heard of Turkmenbashi or knew anything about the country. "To be honest I'd never even heard of it until we got the tickets. I've got no idea where we are. Are we somewhere near Russia?" one of them asked me in a heavy Birmingham accent. I started telling them about Turkmenbashi, the Ruhnama, the statues, and so on, but they didn't seem to believe me.

Giving an impromptu 4am lecture on Turkmenbashi's political thought to a group of Brummies in turbans was not how I expected to end my time in Turkmenistan. But on balance, it was an appropriately surreal way to end my stay in the world's most bizarre country.

A nation in numbers: Turkmenistan revealed

* Turkmenistan occupies 188,456 square miles, an area slightly larger than California.

* Major languages are Turkmen (spoken by 79 per cent of the population) and Russian (12 per cent). Nine per cent speak Uzbek.

* Religion: 89 per cent are Muslim.

* Main exports are oil, gas, textiles and raw cotton.

* Life expectancy for men is 59 years, 68 for women.

* Infant mortality rate is 45.36 deaths per 1,000 live births.

* Annexed by Russia between 1865 and 1885, the country became a Soviet republic in 1924, called the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic.

* Gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

* Large reserves of natural gas, produce roughly 70 billion cubic metres each year, but it has suffered from a lack of adequate export routes. The economy remains undeveloped and much of the population still lives in poverty.

* The average wage is 120 to 220 a month.

* The gross domestic product for 2008 was estimated at $30.332 billion.

* Currency is the Manat, which subdivides into 100 Tennesi. Previous president Saparmurat Niyazov appears on the 500 manat (107) note, currently the highest denomination.

* Although official figures place unemployment at five per cent, international organisations estimate it is closer to 50 per cent.

Holly Williams
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A former priest who was jailed for child sex abuse has said the boys in his old parish were out to get him.

John Farrell, a defrocked priest from Moree, New South Wales, was imprisoned in May for a minimum of 18 years after committing 62 child sex offences in the 1980s.

His comments were revealed during a royal commission into how church authorities responded to allegations against him in 1984.

In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims Show all 10 1 /10 In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign A campaigner holds a banner at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, during an event organised by the White Flowers Campaign Group, in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Pictures, messages and floral tributes left at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the WhiteFlowers Campaign Group in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Jenny Tomlin, the mother of Martine McCutcheon, attends a gathering at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the White Flowers Campaign Group, to lay white flowers in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Child abuse campaigner Bill Maloney speaks to relatives, supporters, victims and survivors of abuse as they gather at Old Palace Yard in Westminster to lay white flowers in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Rotherham MP Sarah Champion speaks during a gathering at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the WhiteFlowers Campaign Group, to lay white flowers in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Simon Danczuk MP speaks during a gathering at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the WhiteFlowers Campaign Group, to lay white flowers in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign John Mann MP attends a gathering at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the WhiteFlowers Campaign Group, to lay white flowers in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign A woman leaves a floral tribute at Old Palace Yard in Westminster In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Relatives, supporters and survivors of abuse hold a minutes silence during a gathering at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the WhiteFlowers Campaign Group, in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse In pictures: White Flowers Campaign to support child abuse victims White Flowers Campaign Jenny Tomlin, the mother of Martine McCutcheon (left) supports Esther Grace of Cardiff, a victim and survivor of abuse, during a gathering at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, organised by the WhiteFlowers Campaign Group, to lay white flowers in commemoration of victims and survivors of child abuse

During an interview with the commission, Father Brian Lucas, national director of Catholic Mission, recalled how Farrell made reference to the boys in Moree that he said were all making up lies and telling lies about him, were out to get him and things like that.

According to John Usher, the former Vicar General of Sydney, the comments were made during a 1992 meeting with himself, Mr Lucas and Father Wayne Peters.

By this point, Farrell had been defrocked.

 Pakistan child abuse activists push for government action

"I was never sure... whether it was fantasy or truth. He was just very defensive and evasive was my impression of his demeanour," Mr Lucas told The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Although Mr Lucas intuited Farrell had done something wrong, he maintained there was never an explicit admission of guilt.

Mr Lucas statement directly contradicted a letter to the bishop of Armidale that stated Mr Farrell had confessed to abusing the boys. Mr Lucas maintained if the letter was true, "we would have got him out of the church and that would be the end of it", according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

During Farrells trial, one of his victims alleged the priest operated with the protection of the Australian Catholic Church.

The commission is set to further investigate the matter.
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Former French presidents cost France more than 10 million a year.

That's according to a report by the country's court of auditors and the state council, which has revealed how much the French public pays to keep its former leaders in clover.

The findings were reportedly given to the current president Francois Hollande two years ago, but have only just been disclosed by French investigative media outlet Mediapart.

According to the report, former leaders receive 65,000 a year, along with a furnished apartment, a car with two drivers, seven assistants, two domestic employees and free rail and plane travel.

The amount spent on the country's three surviving former presidents alone comes to 6.2 million.

According to French newspaper Liberation, 226,290 worth of French taxpayers' money goes towards former president Nicolas Sarkozy's apartment in the plush eighth district of Paris, with additional funds going on the right-wing politician's 26 phone lines and almost 7,000 worth of vehicle expenses.

Mr Sarkozy, who served as leader from 2007 until 2012 and is seeking re-election in 2017, is also reported to recieve 400,000 in staff salaries.

Meanwhile Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who took office between 1974 and 1981, owns offices on the up-market Boulevard Saint-Germain that cost taxpayers a reported 276,683 a year. Mr Estaing, who is now 90, is also said to recieve 5,000 a year for petrol costs and 10,571 for press subscriptions.

The report suggests former French prime ministers also receive a considerable amount of taxpayers' money, with Alain Juppe taking the highest payment of 102,171 in 2014 alone, and Dominique de Villepin receiving 96,000in 2015, including 40,000 on his chauffeur.

According to Mediapart, the report calls for "control of public expenditure" and its authors suggest reducing payments over time.

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The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

In the UK, the Public Duty Cost Allowance was introduced in 1991 to assist former Prime Ministers who are still active in public life. Payments are made only to meet the actual cost of continuing to fulfil public duties.

In addition to the public duty allowance, former British Prime Ministers are entitled to claim a pension allowance to contribute towards their staff pension costs, which is limited to a maximum of 10 per cent of their staff salary costs.

In 2012 it was reported that Tony Blair amassed a fortune of 30 million through a range of interests including speeches and consultancy work.
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The Hungarian government has issued a leaflet that labels London a no-go zone because it contains too many migrants.

It suggests there are more than 900 areas in Europe which are overrun by migrants whom the authorities cannot keep under control. In these neighbourhoods, it warns: the norms of the host society barely prevail.

The pamphlet was released as part of a government campaign to reject the European Unions plans to impose migrant quotas on its member states.

On 2 October, Hungary will hold a referendum on whether to accept the European Unions quota system. If the refugee resettlement is accepted, Hungary can expect to receive 1,294 migrants.

Appearing on Newsnight on Tuesday, Peter Szijjarto, Hungarys foreign minister, maintained: There are no-go zones in Europe and we dont want no-go zones in Hungary.

The government leaflet suggests there are a dozen no-go zones in England, including London, Southampton and Peterborough.

751 of the alleged no-go zones are in France.

Mr Szijjarto did, however, maintain: I like London a lot, no problem. He also admitted the British ambassador to Hungary protested about the leaflet.

A government website explains its anti-migrant stance stems from its fear of a terrorist attack. A ticking clock warns an immigrant arrives every 12 seconds and we do not know how many of them are disguised as terrorists.

As part of its campaign, the government recently plastered Budapest with a number of anti-migrant posters. One read: Did you know? More than three hundred people died in terrorist attacks across Europe since the start of the migration crisis.

Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis Show all 7 1 /7 Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis The Solidarity With Refugees group said Saturdays protest aimed to show our Government and the world that Britain is ready to welcome more refugees. Rex Features Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis People march through central London as they take part in a protest rally organised by Solidarity with Refugees in a bid to urge the Government to take more action on the migrant crisis Press Association Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis The protest comes days before world leaders meet to discuss crisis at UN General Assembly Press Association Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis Demonstrators made their way from Park Lane to Parliament Square in London on Saturday afternoon Press Association Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis Marchers chanted refugees are welcome here and waved banners reading no-one is illegal and lets help people Press Association Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis The march was supported by charities and groups including the Red Cross, Asylum Aid, Save the Children, Hope Not Hate, Oxfam and the UN Refugee Agency Rex Features Refugees welcome here: Protesters demand UK resettle more migrants in response to refugee crisis In the wake of Alans death, David Cameron pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees in the UK over the coming five years but there have been additional calls to re-home those who have already reached Europe, as well as asylum seekers coming from other conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan Rex Features

The claims in the leaflet follow those of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who claimed London and Paris contain Muslim no-go areas.

In 2015, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned: If we let the Muslims into the continent to compete with us, they will outnumber us. Its mathematics.

His comments seem to resonate with Hungarys population, too, as Hungarys far-right Jobbik party is currently polling at 10 per cent.

 Aylan Kurdi - A year on, has anything changed

In August, Mr Orban also announced plans to construct a second razor-wire fence to stop migrants from entering Hungary.

Just last week, Luxembourgs foreign minister called for Hungary to be expelled from the European Union for treating asylum seekers worse than wild animals.

A recent poll showed 73 per cent of the Hungarian population intend to reject the EUs migrant quotas.
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A man wielding a knife has been shot after attempting to attack the Israeli embassy in Turkey.

The suspect was shot in the leg and detained after trying to carry out a stabbing attack on Wednesday.

Authorities are believed to be investigating links to Islamist terrorism after police told Reuters the man was shouting "Allahu Akbar", meaning "God is Great" in Arabic, during the incident.

Investigators outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara after an attempted attack on 21 September (Reuters)

A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in London confirmed an attempted attack but said the assailant was prevented from entering the embassy building in Ankara.

"There was an attempted attack outside the embassy but all staff are safe and the attacker was stopped outside," he told The Independent.

Shira Ben Tzion, the deputy consul general of Israel, said a Turkish security guard was responsible for shooting the attacker.

The Embassy trusts the Turkish forces to control and investigate the incident, she added. We thank the Turkish police for its professional work.

Bomb disposal squads were seen examining a bag outside the building following the incident.

Police outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara after an attempted attack on 21 September (Reuters)

Police have launched a terror investigation into the attack, which comes after calls by Isis and al-Qaeda for supporters to launch "lone wolf" attacks in countries perceived as enemies.

The arrested man was locally identified as a 38-year-old construction worker from Karaman province, who was said to be mentally ill.

Both Kurdish separatists and Islamist extremists have targeted Turkey with recent attacks, including a rocket and shooting attack on a police station in the province of Van on Monday.

Authorities attributed the assault to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose militants are waging an insurgency against Turkey in the south-east.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Isis has also claimed responsibility for suicide bombings and attacks including the assault on Istanbul Airport in June, while the group was also blamed for an explosion at a wedding party in Gaziantep.

Turkey launched an offensive against the so-called Islamic State and Kurdish rebel groups in Syria last month in an attempt to push both groups back from its border.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Wednesday's attempted attack.

It came three months after Israel and Turkey agreed to resume full diplomatic relations after a six-year rift that followed the killing of Turkish activists on a Gaza flotilla stormed by the Israeli military.
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An Italian mayor has been sweeping the streets of his town after a bureaucratic blunder left the municipality with no manual workers to do the job.

Although the town has 150,000 (130,000) available to spend on projects for the unemployed, the vagaries of red tape prevented them from hiring new cleaning staff.

The final remaining worker in the central Sardinian town of Zerfaliu retired six months ago and nobody has been hired to replace them.

All the exact reasons for the impasse are unclear, Mayor Pinuccio Chelois said it was the result of a senior employee going on sick leave - which he suggested had automatically triggered a temporary recruitment freeze.

"We can't do anything - we are blocked by bureaucracy," he told La Stampa on Thursday.

With the town market due to open that day in Zerfaliu, which has a population of just over 1,000 people, Mr Chelois opted to stand in.

While the mayor swept the central square, he was joined on his new job by a town councillor - armed with a hose - and the deputy mayor's father, who took responsiblity for the sewers.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

"We had no other option", said Councillor Sandro Murtas. "The people expect solid responses from us, not bureaucratic bungling,."
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A 25-year-old mother in Switzerland is facing charges of neglect after she left her young son alone in a car late at night so she could go clubbing.

The mother's two-year-old son was found alone and screaming in a parked car after midnight on Sunday in the city of Schaffhausen.

The boy was discovered by passers-by, The Local reports. Police at the scene called a mechanic to open the door after the adult responsible for the child could not be found.

Twenty minutes after the boy was discovered, the mother of the child returned to the vehicle before the mechanic arrive, and informed police she had been in a night club with colleagues.

Schaffhausen police said in a statement the mother is facing charges of dereliction of duty of care.

A passer-by is also facing charges following the events of the evening. Schaffhausen police said in a statement a man at the scene could not hold back his anger at the mothers actions and damaged her car as a result. He is facing charges of criminal damage.
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A Muslim boat captain has been put on trial for the murder of six Christian refugees, after he was accused of pushing them overboard as their craft travelled to Spain.

The Cameroonian captain, identified as Alain NB, was guiding the craft from Morocco and allegedly "blamed the rough seas which were rocking the boat on the prayer led by a Catholic pastor" and "believed that the weather worsened every time they prayed", according to several of the surviving refugees who were on the boat.

Prosecutors in Almeria, Spain, argue the captain should face a prison sentence of 90 years if found guilty - 15 years for each of the offences he was accused of.

During the incident in December 2014, police say Alain NB and his second in command beat the Christian refugees severely with wooden boards before throwing them off the 50-man inflatable boat into the "raging sea". One of the bodies was discovered off the coast of Granada the following week.

The men have even been accused of searching passengers for crosses and jewellery which would identify them as Christian, before singling them out for beating according to the Telegraph. Alain NB's second in command is said to have died in Spain before the start of the trial.

The prosecution said Alain NB "was aware that the victims could not possibly survive and that they would die, either by drowning, from the cold, or from the physical injuries they had suffered.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

"He was aware of the low temperature, the rough seas and the great distance from the coast and the absence of any nearby boats which could rescue them."

At least 21 of the passengers on board the craft are thought to have died during the journey, as the boat was hit by high winds and dangerous waves.

The 29 survivors of the voyage were all given psychological assistance for their trauma and were found to be too afraid to state what had happened.

Alain NB has denied all the charges brought against him, and the trial continues.
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A 15-year-old Muslim schoolboy studying in Switzerland has been told he must agree to shaking hands with female teachers or face being fined and disciplined.

Amer Salhani lost his appeal after refusing to shake hands at the school in Therwil in April, an action he said went against his religious beliefs. He and his fellow pupils will now receive fines of up to 5,000CHF (4,000) for refusing to comply.

Mr Salhani and his older brother were initially granted a temporary waiver while the local teaching authority discussed the issue, but education officials agreed a teacher has the right to demand a handshake from any of their pupils.

The school initially tried to reach a compromise by allowing the pupils to refuse handshakes from female teachers, but the ruling was met with international criticism and quickly abolished.

The older brother left the school in June, but the younger has remained and reportedly still refused to shake hands with female teachers at the start of the current academic year, according to the news website Blick.

Monica Gschwind, the head of Therwil's education department, said: "Shaking hands with teachers is deeply rooted in our society and culture. For me it is clear: the handshake is enforced - no ifs, no buts."

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

At the time of the incident, the regions education authority said: The public interest with respect to equality between men and women and the integration of foreigners significantly outweighs the freedom of conscience (freedom of religion) of the students.

The disciplinary measures could take the form of an oral warning or debate with parents, and the education authority are considering passing a bill to provide future clarity on the issue.

The boys parents have been given another chance to launch an appeal which will have to be brought to the local authority.
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Romes first female mayor is under threat after a catalogue of errors have dogged her first few months in office, leading to rumours she may be forced to resign.

Virginia Raggi was swept into office in June on a ticket of transparency and anti-corruption, part of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement founded in 2009 by comedian Beppe Grillo.

The 38-year-old lawyer, who has virtually no political experience, was handed the keys to the city with a promise to clean up the physical and moral filth of Rome.

But three months in, her tenure has been plagued by claims of ill-management, scandals involving her staff and a lack of perceived action on some of the citys critical problems.

Recommended Read more Rome elects first female mayor in protest party breakthrough

During the hot months of summer, rubbish bags piled up in the streets, partly due to the lack of waste disposal sites and the crippling debt the citys sanitation service is experiencing.

Videos widely circulated online showed young children counting the number of rats by overflowing bins, with 16 vermin spotted by one.

And the situation deteriorated when Paola Muraro, who is responsible for the environment, marched into the city-run rubbish company demanding answers and a plan to fix the problem.

It later emerged she was an advisor to the company for a decade, and was under investigation for wrongdoing as part of a wider inquiry into waste management in Rome. At first Ms Raggi denied all knowledge of the investigation into one of her top team, but later admitted she had known for at least a month.

A string of high-profile resignations have also tainted her first steps in office, with her chief of staff quitting after provoking outrage with an eye-watering salary. The finance chief left after it was revealed he too was under investigation for abuse of office, while her budget advisor also quit, along with top managers of Romes transportation and waste departments.

Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy A man is carried away after having been rescued alive from the ruins following an earthquake in Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016 Reuters Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy A man is carried away after been rescued alive from the ruins following an earthquake in Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016 Reuters Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy A man is rescued alive from the ruins following an earthquake in Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016 Reuters Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy Rescuers work following an earthquake that hit Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016 Reuters Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy Rescuers work following an earthquake that hit Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016 REUTERS Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy Rescuers carry an injured man among damaged homes after a strong heathquake hit Amatrice on August 24, 2016 AFP/Getty Images Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy A general view following an earthquake in Amatrice, central Italy, is seen in this August 24, 2016 handout picture provided by Italy's Fire Fighters REUTERS Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy Rescuers and people walk along a road following an earthquake in Accumuli di Rieti, central Italy, August 24, 2016 REUTERS Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy People survey the devastation in the town of Amatrice Reuters Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Major earthquake hits Italy The earthquake hit the border of three regions, and the USGS measured an additional seven significant tremors in its aftermath Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures A mother embraces her son in Amatrice, central Italy, central Italy, 24 August 2016, following a 6.2 magnitude earthquake EPA Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Residents look in collapsed buildings in Amatrice, central Italy, 24 August 2016 EPA Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures An injured woman is carried by rescuers amid the rubble of collapsed buildings in Amatrice, central Italy, 24 August 2016, EPA Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Resident survey the rubble in Amatrice, central Italy, on 24 August 2016 EPA Magnitude 6.2 earthquake hits Italy - in pictures Collapsed buildings in Pescara del Tronto, in the Marche region of central Italy, 24 August 2016 EPA

A letter recently published in the Italian media, signed by 70 city hall managers, criticised Ms Raggi and pointed towards a lack of direction and paralysis gripping the administrative system.

Her appointment has been wrought with questions over her experience and qualifications for the job, with some within her own party criticising her political appointments.

In a bid to shore up support for the ailing Ms Raggi, founder Mr Grillo stepped in to drum up support and avoid an early resignation.

We are demolishing a system that has been in place for 50 years. And the system is compact against us.

Virginia will go on, and well monitor, The New York Times quoted Mr Grillo at a rally to endorse her.

The entire Five Star Movement is potentially under threat due to her performance, losing four percentage points in one week according to some polls.

The party, one of Europes biggest, has steadily risen in popularity to match Prime Minister Matteo Renzis Democratic Party.

An upcoming referendum in November, which Mr Renzi has pledged to resign over if he loses, could be make or break for both parties.
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A Syrian asylum seeker is on trial for allegedly throwing his three children out of a first floor window in Germany because his wife wanted greater freedom.

The 36-year-old man has been accused of attempted murder after his two daughters, aged one and seven, and five-year-old son were injured at refugee accommodation near Bonn.

Police arrived at the scene in February to find the two elder children suffering broken bones and skull fractures, with the baby girl left with bruising and a liver contusion after landing on her brother.

According to an indictment seen by Germanys DPA news agency, the suspect admitted the crime and said it stemmed from anger with his wife.

 Europe: Germany and France to beef up security

Prosecutors said he could not accept she no longer wished to accept the roles they had at home, and did not want to put up with everything he wanted anymore after fleeing to Europe, according to a translation by The Local.

The suspect had been put under a 10-day restraining order after previously attacking his wife in January but moved back in, before launching the assault on their children on 1 February.

He is also accused of using a metal saucepan to hit his wife in the face on the same day, sparking an additional charge of aggravated assault.

Bonn Police said officers were called to the refugee accommodation, in a former Chinese restaurant in Lohmar, at 4.30pm local time on the day.

Witnesses said they had seen three children thrown from the first floor windows.

Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Show all 13 1 /13 Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Women protest against sexism outside Cologne Cathedral on 5 January after the assaults Oliver Berg/EPA Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Women protest against sexism in Cologne following the rash of sex attacks on New Year's Eve Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police initially failed to mention the assaults in report the following morning EPA Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police officers patrol in front of the main station of Cologne, Germany AP Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks German far-right supporters demonstrate at Cologne`s train station (Reuters) Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement Pegida in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016. Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police used pepper spray to control supporters of Pegida, Hogesa (Hooligans against Salafists) and other right-wing populist groups as they protested against the New Year's Eve sex attacks on 9 January, 2016 in Cologne, Germany Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police use a water cannon during a protest march by supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement Pegida in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016 Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Police use pepper spray against supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement Pegida, in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016. Reuters Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Artist Mira Moire protests naked in Cologne against the mass sex attacks on New Year's Eve AP Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks A demonstrator holds a sign in German that reads 'No violence against women' during a demonstration in the wake of the sexual assaults on New Year's Eve, outside the cathedeal in Cologne, Germany, 09 January 2016. EPA Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Counter demonstrators hold up a sign reading "Against sexism, against racism" as they protest against a demonstration of the islamophobic movement PEGIDA at the train station in Cologne, Germany, on January 9, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Germany reacts to Cologne New Year's Eve attacks Demonstration by a womens group on Saturday (AP) AP

All three were taken to hospital by road and air ambulances for treatment for what police described as serious injuries.

The defendant left Syria alone in 2014, travelling through Turkey, Bulgaria and France before arriving in Germany last year, where his family joined him.

His trial started in Bonn on Tuesday and was expected to last several weeks.

Germany has accepted applications from more than a million asylum seekers, with refugee accommodation opened up in disused buildings and schools to accommodate them.

Terror attacks by Isis supporters in the country and elsewhere in Europe have fuelled anti-refugee sentiment, with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party seeing huge gains in local elections.

But Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has repeatedly called for tolerance and refused to change her administrations policies, criticising proposals by some EU states to refuse Muslim migrants.


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The explosions are relentless, the sense of danger palpable. And that is from a distance of almost 8,000 miles away.

This week, commuters in Buenos Aires had the chance to have a brief, if imperfect insight into life on the front lines of Syrias deadly civil war. Campaigners who want Argentina to implement a plan to welcome refugees from the war, set up a replica of a Syrian home in a busy subway stop and invited people to take a look. Images of bombings were projected on screens on its windows.

A banner outside the installation along the corridors of the Carlos Pellegrini subway station, read: To understand what is happening in Syria, nothing better than being there for a minute.

Nairouz Baloul went to Argentina from Syria and hopes her family members can join her (AP)

We have simulated a living room, which could be any house in Syria and through the windows, we simulated using television screens, the reality seen from a house in Syria, said Amnesty International Argentina Director, Lea Tandeter. You can see bombings, destruction and the consequences of these years of sustained civil war afflicting the country.

The Associated Press said also present was Nairouz Baloul, who fled Syria and found sanctuary in Argentina. She hopes the government of President Mauricio Macri will welcome others like her.

If he has the key to unlock this, I think he shouldn't hesitate to open the door to other human beings, Ms Baloul, 29, an English teacher who escaped what she calls a living nightmare, told the news agency.

One of her brothers was killed by a bomb in Damascus in 2014. She preferred not to speak about it but since she arrived in Buenos Aires last month with another brother, she has become hopeful that the rest of their family will be able to join them.

I feel safe now, but Im not totally happy because I want others to be safe as well, she said.

Mr Macri has said he wants to allow more than 3,000 Syrian refugees into Argentina. But the plan has stalled, and organisations and members of Argentinas Syrian community are pressuring the administration to keep its promise.

The house is an attempt to give people an insight into life on the Syrian front lines (Reuters)

I think the Argentine state has the good intention to help in this humanitarian crisis, but it is limited (by resources). But for us, the economic excuse is not valid, said Ms Tandeter.

Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra said on Monday that the government was fully committed to bringing in 3,000 Syrians, though a timeline has not been set.

This will not happen from one day to the next, she said. But we have a commitment because Argentina is a country of immigrants, of refugees, and it's unlikely that any of us doesn't have a grandfather, a great-grandfather who hasnt escaped a war, a famine.

Anywhere up to 500,000 people have been killed in Syria civil war, that has not entered its sixth year. More than 10m people have been displaced, either internally or else forced to flee their country.

In the US, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a suspension of Muslims entering the country. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama told the UN that 50 countries had agreed to take 360,000 refugees from countries affected by conflict this year.

There are currently over 60 million people worldwide who have been displaced from their homes.

A thirty-six-year-old businessman, Julio Cesar Montenegro, said he could not imagine living in Syria at a time like this.

You don't even think about it. You see it only on the news. To see it from an angle as though you were in the place is something that gets to you, he said.

It gets to you because, if you have children, just imagine to be in a place like that. It makes you feel bad.
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Barack Obama has told Israel it cannot permanently occupy and settle on Palestinian land in a speech to the United Nations.

The US president said both sides would benefit if Israel recognised it cannot permanently occupy the land and if Palestinians rejected incitement and recognised Israel's legitimacy.

Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel," he said on Tuesday.

"But Israel must recognise that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land."

The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Show all 10 1 /10 The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Medics evacuate a wounded man from the scene of an attack in Jerusalem. A Palestinian rammed a vehicle into a bus stop then got out and started stabbing people before he was shot dead AP The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Israeli ZAKA emergency response members carry the body of an Israeli at the scene of a shooting attack in Jerusalem. A pair of Palestinian men boarded a bus in Jerusalem and began shooting and stabbing passengers, while another assailant rammed a car into a bus station before stabbing bystanders, in near-simultaneous attacks that escalated a month long wave of violence AP The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Getty Images The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Palestinians throw molotov cocktail during clashes with Israeli troops near Ramallah, West Bank. Recent days have seen a series of stabbing attacks in Israel and the West Bank that have wounded several Israelis AP The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Women cry during the funeral of Palestinian teenager Ahmad Sharaka, 13, who was shot dead by Israeli forces during clashes at a checkpoint near Ramallah, at the family house in the Palestinian West Bank refugee camp of Jalazoun, Ramallah AP The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies A wounded Palestinian boy and his father hold hands at a hospital after their house was brought down by an Israeli air strike in Gaza Reuters The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Palestinians look on after a protester is shot by Israelis soldiers during clashes at the Howara checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus EPA The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies A lawyer wearing his official robes kicks a tear gas canister back toward Israeli soldiers during a demonstration by scores of Palestinian lawyers called for by the Palestinian Bar Association in solidarity with protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, near Ramallah, West Bank AP The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Undercover Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian in Ramallah Reuters The IsraeliPalestinian conflict intensifies Palestinian youth burn tyres during clashes with Israeli soldiers close to the Jewish settlement of Bet El, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, after Israel barred Palestinians from Jerusalem's Old City as tensions mounted following attacks that killed two Israelis and wounded a child

He added: "We all have to do better as leaders in tamping down, rather than encouraging, a notion of identity that leads us to diminish others."

Following his speech, the president will raise concerns about Israeli settlement activity in Arab lands during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Wednesday.

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said that the United States has discussed its concerns about Israeli settlements and "the potential viability of a Palestinian state in the face of that settlement activity".

"I'm sure President Obama will do so tomorrow [Wednesday] as well," he added.

 Israeli army escorts Palestinian children to school

Mr Obama's efforts to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement have failed over the nearly eight years he has been in the White House, with the latest push by US Secretary of State John Kerry collapsing in 2014.

US officials have held out the possibility Mr Obama could lay out the rough outlines of a deal - "parameters" in diplomatic parlance - after the 8 November presidential election and before he leaves office in January, but many analysts doubt this would have much effect.
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US Secretary of State John Kerry has accused his Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, of living in a parallel universe as the two exchanged heated remarks over the breakdown of the ceasefire in Syria at a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York.

The fragile ceasefire between the Assad regimes forces, supported by Russia, and the US-backed opposition, lasted just a week. Mr Kerry was speaking in the aftermath of two air strikes on aid convoys in northern Syria on Monday and Tuesday, in which more than 20 humanitarian workers were killed.

Here is what he said:

Mr President, good morning, and good morning to all of our colleagues here on the United Nations Security Council. I want to thank my colleague from New Zealand particularly for hosting this very important session on the crisis in Syria. And I think its appropriate that we are gathering here a couple of rooms over from where yesterday so many heads of state came together in what I thought was a remarkably moving and eloquent statement of the consequence of this war in Syria.

Recommended Read more UN to resume convoys to Syria after attack that killed aid workers

I listened to King Abdullah particularly talk about the impact on his country of these millions of people who are distorting their economy, putting huge pressures on the social structure of their country, living under the worst circumstances, and in some areas, presenting a threat because of the ability of Daesh/ISIS to  or Nusrah to slip people in and present a security threat to a country. We listened to the young Olympian tell us about her dreams and how she was able to compete this year because of a refugee Olympic team. And we saw the images in a beautifully Bono-narrated video that really made us think about the consequences of this.

And I hope everybody will come here today really focused on these consequences and not engage in word games that duck responsibility or avoid the choices that this great institution has in front of it with respect to war and peace, life and death.

I listened to my colleague from Russia, and I sort of felt a little bit like theyre sort of in a parallel universe here. He said that nobody should have any preconditions to come to the table. Well, we met in Vienna twice. We met here in New York and embraced a United Nations Security Council resolution. We met again in Munich. And in each place, the International Syria Support Group, and here in the Security Council, the Security Council embraced a ceasefire applicable to all parties. Thats not a precondition. Thats an international agreement, four times arrived at. Four times, countries have said, We will do this, and four times, its been shredded by independent actors, by spoilers who dont want a ceasefire.

 John Kerry: You don't drop barrel bombs on children

So this is not a precondition. How can people go sit at a table with a regime that bombs hospitals and drops chlorine gas again and again and again and again and again and again, and acts with impunity? Are you supposed to sit there and have happy talk in Geneva under those circumstances when youve signed up to a ceasefire and you dont adhere to it? What kind of credibility do you have with any of your people?

Its not a precondition; its something we all agreed on in the United Nations and in the International Syria Support Group. And I have to say the documents which were prepared to release  weve told people, we announced that yesterday at the International Syria Support Group, people in the support group have the documents  but you dont need to read these documents to understand its against international law to bomb hospitals. You dont need these documents to understand that you dont drop barrel bombs on children. These are flagrant violations of international law.

So I dont want to obfuscate this process, folks. I didnt come here this morning to do that. Supposedly we all want the same goal. Ive heard that again and again. Russia, Iran, the United States, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, everybody sits there and says we want a united Syria  secular, respecting the rights of all people, in which the people of Syria can choose their leadership. But we are proving woefully inadequate in our ability to be able to get to the table and have that conversation and make it happen.

And lets face it: Everybody in this room understands that there are proxies at this table and proxies outside of this room  and we know who they are  who have the ability to have an impact on the players in this conflict that has provided the greatest humanitarian catastrophe since World War II.

So lets just review the bidding a bit. I was privileged to serve in the United States Senate with a fellow who spent a lot of time here. He was the ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And he would famously remind us that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. And as President John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things.

So I dont think we can let anybody here, if were going to deal with this situation, have their own set of facts about Syria. Everybody here understands the depth of human tragedy. Everybody  I mean, the words are getting  you wonder why people in various parts of the world are so angry about governance. Its because all they hear are words and we know how many times weve demanded action and it doesnt take place.

So I want to share some facts with you this morning  facts. Last night, we have reports of airstrikes that hit a medical facility near Aleppo, and four aid workers were killed  despite the fact theres supposed to be a cessation. There are only two countries that have airplanes that are flying during the night or flying at all in that particular area  Russia and Syria.

On Monday  and Sergey just said, well, lets examine the facts and see what happened  on Monday, 20 aid workers were killed in an outrageous, sustained, two-hour attack directed at a fully authorized humanitarian mission near Aleppo  fully authorized. All of the permits had been given. Everybody was on notice.

Now, this attack has dealt a very heavy blow to our efforts to bring peace to Syria and it raises a profound doubt about whether Russia and the Assad regime can or will live up to the obligations that they agreed to in Geneva. It also raises questions  not this attack, but other events raise questions about some of the opposition. Those are facts.

And the simple reality is we cannot resolve this crisis if the major parties who come to the table and agree to do something are unwilling to do whats necessary to avoid escalation. But we dont get anywhere by ignoring the facts and denying common sense. Yes, the coalition did hit people on Saturday. We did it, a terrible accident. And within moments of it happening, we acknowledged it. We didnt put out a bunch of obfuscating facts. We said, yeah, its a terrible thing, it happened. Defense Department apologized and we tried to find out how that happened. But I got to tell you, people running around with guns on the ground, from the air, is a very different thing from trucks in a convoy with big UN markings all over them.

Now I am saying this and I want to lay out these facts because it underscores why at this moment we just cant do business as usual. We cant walk out of this room and say, okay, were going to try to continue or well have a ceasefire that everybody knows cant work. The facts require countries to restore credibility to this process. Thats whats critical.

And just think about what happened in the last couple of days. First, President Putins press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, claims that the attack on the humanitarian convoy was somehow a necessary response to an alleged offensive by al-Nusrah elsewhere in the country. Thats the first claim.

Then a Russian ambassador said that Russian and Syrian forces were not bombing the area but they were targeting Khan Tuman.

Then we heard a completely different story. The defense ministry said that the aid convoy had been accompanied by militants in a pickup truck with a mortar. Weve seen no evidence of that. But that, in any case, would not justify a violation of the cessation of hostilities. And by the way, that mortar could never have inflicted the damage that has been caused on those trucks.

Then the defense ministry switched completely and it denied Russias involvement. It said, according to spokesman Igor Konashenkov, I quote, Neither Russia nor Syria conducted airstrikes on the UN humanitarian convoy in the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo. Thats a quote.

Then Konashenkov went further and he said the damage to the convoy was the direct result of the cargo catching fire. The trucks and the food and the medicine just spontaneously combusted. Anybody here believe that? I mean, this is not a joke. Were in serious business here. If we can stand up and say, yes, accidentally, we had a strike, we should have some responsibility  maybe its an attempt to distract attention or to somehow deflect this, but I think what it underscores is that we have a responsibility here to find a way forward.

And guess what? Everything I just said is contradicted by public information, by conclusions already reached by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation of Red Cross, the Red Crescent Societies, the Syrian Arab Crescent, independent journalists, and aid workers on the ground, eyewitnesses.

The eyewitnesses will tell you what happened. One of them said that he was standing on the ground and all of a sudden the place became hell, and the fighter jets were in the sky. Thats an eyewitness report  the place turned into hell and fighter jets were in the sky. Theres a lot more. Im not going to go into it all because I really want the key here to be an acceptance of responsibility to change this equation by everybody here.

The primary question is no longer: What do we know? The primary question is: Collectively, what are we going to do about it? In other words, this is a moment of truth. Its a moment of truth for President Putin and Russia; its a moment of truth also for the opposition; and its a moment of truth for the people who support the opposition. And for too long, some elements of the opposition have relied on an unholy alliance with al-Nusrah, and al-Nusrah is al-Qaida  al-Qaidas branch in Syria  and we cant look the other way if groups are on the ground fighting alongside al-Nusrah, an organization that overtly rejects a political solution to this crisis and is an enemy of all of us in this room. So its a moment of truth for the international community too. Okay?

If we allow spoilers to choose the path for us  the path of escalation  if we decide not to do what it takes to make this work, this cessation of hostilities, then make no mistake, my friends, the next time we convene here, were going to be facing a Middle East with even more refugees, with more dead, with more displaced, with more extremists, and more suffering on an even greater scale. That is a certainty.

There is only one choice, and its to get to that table with Staffan de Mistura and it is get to a negotiation and get a ceasefire so we stop the flow of refugees, stop the suffering, and provide the people of Syria with a chance to breathe, to live.

When this ceasefire first began a few weeks ago, guess what, it worked. People actually  months ago, people actually were out in the streets, they went to cafes again. Some people even demonstrated and felt their political rights. Other people were able to walk from one place to another with a sense of safety. And all of that dissipated.

So I want to emphasize this, and I emphasize this to Russia: The United States continues to believe there is a way forward that, although rocky and difficult and uncertain, can provide the most viable path out of the carnage. Our shared task here is to find a way to use the tools of diplomacy to make that happen, and thats exactly what weve been trying to accomplish.

For weeks over the summer, experts from my government worked with our counterparts from Russia in good efforts to develop a plan that would take into account the lessons learned from the original cessation, and the key elements of that plan launched in Geneva two weeks ago include the renewal of a cessation of hostilities, excluding only Daesh and al-Nusrah.

Importantly, it included arrangements for the unfettered delivery  unfettered delivery  of humanitarian aid to people in Aleppo and elsewhere in the country, and it envisioned the possibility  providing humanitarian assistance was unimpeded and sustained, and provided there were at least seven days of consecutive adherence to the cessation  that the United States and Russia would begin to coordinate their efforts against Daesh and al-Nusrah. And I want to make it clear, under President Obamas orders, all preparations were being made in order to achieve that cooperation in terms of our military and intelligence community and the work we would do. So were committed to that.

It was also very importantly part of the plan that when those efforts of cooperation commenced, Syrian war planes would be prohibited from flying over areas where the legitimate opposition and al-Nusrah were present in order to give us the opportunity to work at the separation. Now, I have said to Russia many times it's very hard to separate people when they are being bombed indiscriminately and when Assad has the right to determine who hes going to bomb, because he can, quote, go after Nusrah but go after the opposition at the same time because he wants to. You create a confusion that is impossible to separate out, and therefore preserve the ceasefire.

So we need to get to the prohibition on flying, my friends. That would prevent Syria from doing what it has done so often in the past, which is to attack civilian targets with the excuse that it is just going after Nusrah. Our purpose in this negotiation was to put an end to the kind of horrific and indiscriminate attacks that have been the primary cause of fear, of suffering, of displacement. And under our plan, all of this could be quickly accompanied by serious negotiations between the parties aimed at a political transition and a conclusion to the conflict.

So, my colleagues, I want you to know the United States remains convinced that the objectives outlined in the Geneva agreement are the right objectives, and the tools  many of them are the right tools but it may not be complete. Our hope was that the renewal of cessation of hostilities and the resumption of aid deliveries, the isolation of al-Nusrah and Daesh, and the beginning of a Syrian-led negotiating process could provide a pathway out of the conflict and make possible the restoration of a peaceful Syria.

Now, clearly, there are some people  it includes Assad and his allies, and al-Nusrah and Daesh on the other side  who fear this very outcome. Assad is a spoiler  he doesnt believe in the ceasefire; and al-Nusrah and Daesh are spoilers  they dont want a ceasefire, they want to keep fighting Assad. So the question for us here today is whether we bend to their will or continue to pursue our agenda  as best we can and in every way that we can  a diplomatic solution to this conflict.

Now, those who believe the crisis in Syria cannot become even worse are dead wrong, as are those who believe that a military victory is possible. This could be like Carthage with the Romans, if you call that a victory. The plan announced in Geneva is far from perfect, but I have yet to hear an alternative that is remotely realistic that will lead to a better outcome. And if we could get monitoring on the ground, that would be ideal. Wed love to have monitoring on the ground, but most countries you talk to and say, Would you go in and monitor? are very, very quick to say, Not on my life.

Now, as my colleagues from the International Syria Support Group will attest, yesterday we had a meeting and there was near unanimity in that room that this process, the ceasefire, as troubled as it is, gives us the best chance available to bring relief to the people of Syria. Now, heres the nub of it: We have said for days that it will take significant and immediate steps now to try to get things back on track. How do we get things back on track? How do we restore the concept of the ceasefire? How do we give people who have again and again seen this fall apart some sense of credibility? Believe me, there are a lot of people who believe it cant happen, and there are some people who believe that major parties dont want it done.

So I believe that to restore credibility to the process, we must move forward to try to immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded. And if that happens, there is a chance of giving credibility back to this process.

In Geneva, Russia related that Assad was prepared to live by the cessation of hostilities and would accept the idea of not flying over agreed-upon areas. But because of whats happened in the last few days, my friends, we have no choice but to try to do that sooner, not later, move immediately to restore confidence, and demonstrate the readiness to implement a genuine ceasefire now. The future of Syria is hanging by a thread and I urge this council not to give up, but instead to support the steps outlined by the United States and Russia in Geneva. And I call on every party in Syria and those who support them, I call on all members of the opposition, to cooperate and revive this plan. And I call on every country to cease providing support of any kind to any party that is trying to sabotage this plan. I call on the international community to support UN efforts to begin a real negotiation in Geneva on a political transition that can provide the only durable route to peace. And I urge the entire international community to get behind the best chance that we have yet had to reduce the violence, to provide humanitarian assistance, and to open up the space for negotiations. I thank you for your patience.
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Russia has denied US claims its planes hit a UN aid convoy near Aleppo, releasing drone footage which it claims shows the trucks were travelling with a rebel vehicle carrying a heavy mortar.

Senior US officials speaking anonymously have said they have evidence that the Monday night attack on a UN and Red Crescent convoy, which killed around 21 people and destroyed aid for thousands, was carried out by two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 jets which were seen above the vehicles within one minute of when they was struck.

The White House said it couldnt confirm the information, as both the Syrian and Russian air forces use the plane, but intelligence reports suggested it was indeed an attack from the air carried out by Russian planes.

On Tuesday, however, Russia released video from the incident which it says "clearly shows how terrorists are redeploying a pickup with a large-calibre mortar on it using the convoy as a cover." In the footage, the truck can be seen travelling alongside the aid vehicles. The drone moves away before the incident takes place.

The vehicle travelling next to the convoy was reportedly carrying a heavy mortar

A spokesperson from the Russian Foreign Ministry rejected accusations of culpability from the US. We are considering, with resentment and indignation, attempts by some foreign curators of rebel units and terrorists in Syria to put the blame for the incident on the Russian and Syrian air forces who allegedly bombarded a relief convoy, a statement given to Russian news agencies said.

The Russian Defence Ministry added it believed the attack did not involve the sort of damage consistent with an air strike, and instead was caused by the presence of field artillery and a subsequent fire. The US government had no facts to support the allegations and Russia has nothing to do with this situation, a spokesperson added.

In pictures: Aleppo bombing Show all 14 1 /14 In pictures: Aleppo bombing In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo Smoke rises after airstrikes on the rebel-held al-Sakhour neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria April 29, 2016. Reuters In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo A Syrian family runs for cover amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Al-Qatarji in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, on April 29, 2016. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo A man reacts as he stands on blood stains at a site hit by airstrikes in the rebel held area of Aleppo's al-Fardous district, Syria, April 29, 2016. Reuters In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo The damage of the airstrikes in the rebel-held area of Aleppo on April 28 Reuters In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo The damaged the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)-backed al-Quds hospital after it was hit by airstrikes, in a rebel-held area of Syria's Aleppo Reuters In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo Syrians evacuate an injured man amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following an air strike on a rebel-held of Aleppo on April 29, 2016. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo People inspect the damage at a site hit by airstrikes, in the rebel-held area of Aleppo's Bustan al-Qasr AP In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo A man leads a woman in tears and child out of the scene after airstrikes hit Aleppo AP In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo Civil defence members search for survivors after an airstrike at a field hospital in the rebel held area of al-Sukari district of Aleppo Reuters In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo A Syrian boy is comforted as he cries next to the body of a relative who died in a reported air strike in the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Soukour in the northern city of Aleppo Getty Images In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo A Syrian family walks amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported air strike in the Bustan al-Qasr rebel-held district of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo Getty Images In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo Syrian civil defence volunteers and rescuers remove a baby from under the rubble of a destroyed building following a reported air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Kalasa in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo Getty Images In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo Syrians help a wounded youth following an air strike on the Fardous rebel held neighbourhood of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo Getty Images In pictures: Aleppo bombing Bombing in Aleppo Syrian civil defence volunteers evacuate people from a damaged building following a reported airstrike in the rebel-held neighbourhood of Tareeq al-Bab in the northern city of Aleppo

Eyewitnesses reported that the attack was an aerial bombardment, which destroyed 18 of 31 trucks and damaged a warehouse and health clinic in the rebel-held town of Uram al-Kubra in Aleppo province.

Local paramedic and media activist Mohammad Rasoul, said the prolonged attack lasted for two hours, and erased the convoy from the face of the earth. He estimated 100 tonnes of medical equipment, baby food and winter clothes had been destroyed.

I've never seen anything like this attack, he told Reuters. If this had been a military position, it wouldn't have been targeted with such intensity.

As the Syrian opposition doesn't have an air force, the White House and State Department said that by the process of elimination, the attack was carried out by either Russian or Syrian aircraft.

Damaged trucks carrying aid, in Aleppo (AP)

Damaged Red Cross and Arab Red Crescent medical supplies are seen in a warehouse in the town of Orum al-Kubra on the western outskirts of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo (Getty Images)

While both the Russian and Syrian governments have denied carrying out the attacks or deliberately targeting humanitarian workers, Washington has insisted it ultimately holds Moscow responsible, since under the recent ceasefire agreement Russia was supposed to coordinate with and prevent President Bashar al-Assad's government from carrying out air strikes. White House spokesperson Ben Rhodes said on Tuesday that US coalition jets were not in operation around Aleppo, adding, "In any event, we hold the Russian goverment responsible."

 Syria: UN aid convoy hit by airstrikes in Aleppo

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon used his last UN General Assembly address to condemn the attack as sickening, savage and apparently deliberate.

Despite inflamed relations with Russia, US Secretary of State John Kerry emerged from international talks on the Syrian conflict in New York on Tuesday to say that the recent ceasefire brokered by the two superpowers isnt dead.

The UN has said the incident is potentially a war crime. The international body's humanitarian wing suspended all aid operations in the country after the attack, jeopardising the health and safety of millions of Syrian civilians.
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The Government is failing to implement its policy of making war on Isis in Syria which it was supposed to have launched nine months ago after rancorous debate.

A report by the House of Commons Defence Committee published on Wednesday says that there have been only 65 UK air raids in Syria during this period, compared to 550 in Iraq. Some 31 of these were in the first two months of the air campaign, since when the number has fallen to between three and seven air strikes a month

Drawing attention to the small number of British air attacks in Syria, Dr Julian Lewis, the chairman of the committee, asked in an interview with The Independent why we had the great debate and vote on beginning military action in Syria when the number of air strikes there are so minute. He added that, despite the committees best efforts, it had been unable to get the Government to identify the 70,000 armed moderates who are meant to be Britains local partners on the ground in Syria.

The muddled British political and military strategy in Syria was exemplified last Saturday when British aircraft took part in an air strike that mistakenly killed 62 Syrian army soldiers who were apparently fighting Isis near the besieged provincial capital of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria. The British government has maintained that the Syrian army is not fighting Isis, but was seeking to crush moderate rebels opposed to Isis and the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

The committee said the failure of the Ministry of Defence to provide it with a full analysis of UK air strikes in Syria may undermine the Governments assertion that the bombing campaign in Syria is in support of credible moderate ground forces.

Several witnesses leading the air campaign told the committee that there was a big distinction between British air action in Iraq, which is in support of the Iraqi government, and in Syria, where it is unclear whom British air strikes are meant to help. The question the report makes by implication is: that if such moderate forces are more than a myth  and Dr Lewis refers to them as phantoms  why have we not supported more vigorously with air strikes?

Asked about difference between UK air action in Syria and Iraq, Lieutenant General Mark Carleton-Smith, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Military Strategy and Operations) said that in Syria the UK was marginally engaged, from the air only, across a much less homogenous battlefield, where the identification of the multifaceted parties, agencies and militias is much more difficult to determine.

The report is the most rigorous and best-informed attempt to determine the nature of the political and military battlefield in which the UK is engaged in Iraq and Syria. It seeks to get to the bottom of what British forces are supposed to be doing in the war and how far these aims are attainable. It focuses on the lack of a coherent political strategy and, in particular, on the lack of allies on the ground in Syria. It notes that not only have there been very few British air attacks and that only a minority of the 65 UK air strikes in Syria appear to be in support of opposition forces on the ground.

In Iraq, enemy forces constitute 55 per cent of the targets, whereas in Syria they were 35 per cent up to the end of May, since when they have risen to 40 per cent, mostly around Manbij in northern Aleppo province where the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces captured the city after a long siege.

Having ruled out acting in concert with the Assad government, whose displacement is a centrepiece of British policy, British military action in theory presupposes the existence of a powerful third force on the ground in Syria. The report says that despite extensive correspondence with the Ministry of Defence, the committee was unable to obtain the Governments list of which groups the UK was supporting in Syria. It concludes that the real reason why the UK air operation in Syria is so small, despite rhetorical comparisons with resisting Hitler during last years Commons debate, is mainly the lack of partners on the ground, other than Kurdish forces.

The Governments explanation on why it cannot reveal the identity of the potent but invisible Syrian armed moderates is that this information would help the Assad government. But Dr Lewis and the report strongly suggest that the very limited nature of the British air campaign is a tacit admission that no such force exists on the ground in Syria which British air strikes might assist. But the existence of such a moderate body is a necessity if both Isis and Assad are to be removed simultaneously.

In the light of this, the report is sceptical about government goals in Syria which are not only to defeat Daesh [Isis], but also to help bring into being a government which will be neither authoritarian and repressive, on the one hand, nor Islamist and extreme on the other. It says that these aims cannot be achieved by military means alone.

British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria Show all 10 1 /10 British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria A Tornado jet takes off from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, as RAF Tornado jets carried out the first British bombing runs over Syria British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria Pilots and ground crew prepare combat aircraft Panavia Tornados at RAF Marham at RAF Marham, UK Getty British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria A Eurofighter Typhoon jet takes off from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, as RAF Tornado jets carried out the first British bombing runs over Syria British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria A RAF Tornado arrives at RAF Akrotiri to begin operations in Akrotiri British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria A Tornado jet ahead of taking off from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, as RAF Tornado jets carried out the first British bombing runs over Syria, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed. The air strikes were carried out within hours of a vote by MPs in the Commons to back extending operations against Isis from neighbouring Iraq British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria Personnel work on a British Tornado after it returned from a mission at RAF Akrotiri in southern Cyprus British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria Two RAF Tornado GR4's, both with remaining weapons ordnance, approach RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, as they return to the base after carrying out some of the first British bombing runs over Syria British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria A RAF Tornado takes off from RAF Akrotiri, on the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria A Tornado jet leaving RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland British jets prepare for air strikes in Syria AKA RAF Tornado arrives at RAF Akrotiri to begin operations in Akrotiri, Cyprus. The RAF has sent two further Tornado aircraft and six Typhoons to bolster aircraft now flying sorties to both Iraq and Syria

The report is much happier about the UK military role in Iraq where the UK is heavily involved in training. It says that over a third of troops trained by the [US-led] Coalition have received this training from US military personnel. Nevertheless, though the report does not address this, the successes of the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmerga have mainly been as mopping up forces aided by the devastating fire power of the coalition air armada without which their performance is much less impressive.
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The volunteer Syrian Civil Defence, or White Helmets, has told The Independent that the suspension of UN aid deliveries following an attack on a UN and Red Crescent aid convoy will adversely affect Syrian civilians who are already in dire need.

The claim was echoed by Save the Children. A representative from the charity said this latest delay could push [people] over the brink.

Madaya, a town where at least 63 residents died of starvation and malnutrition earlier this year, was expecting its first delivery of aid since June this week.

Thousands of children and their families are already sick, starving and desperate for food and medicine, Save the Children told The Independent. Their sources say, by Whatsapp messages, that families in the town are surviving on handfuls of bulgar wheat, and schools are shut because of a meningitis outbreak.

The UN announced that aid delivered around the country would be suspended after a convoy carrying blankets, medical equipment and baby food to Uram al-Kubra in Aleppo province came under attack on Monday night.

21 volunteers were killed in the incident, and 18 out of 31 trucks carrying assistance for 78,000 people were destroyed.

The attack on the aid convoy has been widely condemned (AFP/Getty Images)

The US, which backs some rebel groups in Syria's five year conflict, and Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad's government, have disagreed over who is responsible for the attack.

US officials claimed that Russian jets were filmed observing the convoy within the same minute it was struck, whereas the Russian and Syrian governments have denied their aircraft carried out an attack. The Russian Defence Ministry released drone footage on Tuesday which it says shows a rebel vehicle carrying a heavy mortar travelling with the convoy, which it said was responsible for the damage.

As a result of the incident, the UN's humanitarian agency, OCHA, announced that it would suspend aid operations until security could be reviewed, although air drops to besieged areas appeared to continue as normal. Officials said that if deliberate, the aid convoy attack would be classed as a war crime.

Supplies are left scattered by the attack in Urm al-Kubra, near Aleppo, in which more than a dozen humanitarian volunteers were killed (AFP/Getty Images)

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent echoed the UN in calling the bombing unacceptable. 54 of their staff members and volunteers have died in six years of war, it said in a statement, calling the latest deaths an attack on humanity.

Unfortunately, those who will suffer from the fall out are Syrians already in desperate need: the UN estimates around 5.4 million people in Syria live in besieged or hard to reach areas, mostly in east Aleppo, Madaya and al-Waer, a suburb of Homs.

SiegeWatch, an independent project by The Syria Institute and PAX, claims different figures to the UN. It says that as of July 2016 around one million Syrians live in 40 siege areas, and another 1.4 million are at risk of a deteriorating situation and already live in siege-like conditions.

Only nine per cent of aid was able to reach these communities in August. Save the Children says that in 2016 so far, fewer than a quarter of people in need have received any aid at all.

Stock photo of a little girl from Madaya, Syria (Courtesy of Amnesty International)

In Madaya, media activist Wassim al-Ahmad sent a text message to the AP, saying residents were devastated to find out aid had been stopped.

In the end, the burden falls on the besieged, he lamented.

The aid convoy attack has further complicated international talks taking place in New York trying to salvage a recent US and Russian brokered ceasefire, which was in tatters by the end of the week.

The suspension of aid resulting from the aerial bombardment of the convoy only serves to further politicise humanitarian assistance, a representative from the White Helmets said.
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The gaping rift between the US and Russia over the war in Syria has been publicly exposed as the two countries accused the other of allowing a scrappy, days-old ceasefire to fall apart.

At an event that was supposed to enshrine the truce between various factions that was agreed on 9 September, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, exchanged barbs and heated words at the UN Security Council on Wednesday morning. Mr Kerry suggested Mr Lavrov was living in a parallel universe.

The testy exchange, that took place as the world watched, came after two attacks on medical convoys. In one, on Monday, 20 civilians were killed when the Syrian Red Crescent convoy was struck. On Tuesday, an air strike in northern Syria killed five members of mobile medical emergency unit.

The attacks prompted a temporary suspension on UN overland aid convoys to priority areas in Syria, but the UN said on Wednesday it would be resuming operations on a case-by-case basis.

Sergey Lavrov leaves the chamber after listening to John Kerrys comments (Reuters)

Supposedly we all want the same goal. Ive heard that again and again, Mr Kerry told the council, according to the Associated Press. But we are proving woefully inadequate in making that happen.

He then outlined a series of US complaints Syrian President Bashar Assads government and its chief backer, Russia. He recited Moscows changing narrative over Mondays attack on the an aid convoy that has included everything from claims of a justifiable counterterror strike to vehicles spontaneously combusting.

This is not a joke, said Mr Kerry, criticising those who engaged in word games to dodge responsibility over questions of war and peace, life and death.

Mr Kerry added: To restore credibility, we must immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to de-escalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded.

The top American diplomat spoke just after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered his own set of barbs, underscoring the breakdown in trust in the 12 days since he and Mr Kerry clinched a cease-fire agreement and a potential US-Russian military partnership against Isis and Al-Qaeda.

Unlike Mr Kerry, who stressed the importance of Mr Assads government ending military operations against rebels and allowing in unfettered aid, Mr Lavrov said the US had the biggest responsibility.

The key priority is to separate the opposition forces from the terrorists, Mr Lavrov said.

Responding to the wide criticism of the convoy attack, which American officials are blaming on Russia, Mr Lavrov cited various possible explanations.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defence Ministry yesterday said a US Predator drone was in the area when the aid convoy was hit and had appeared on the scene minutes before the incident.

Repeating denials of Russian involvement in the episode, Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the ministry, said Western allegations that Moscow was responsible were an attempt to distract attention from the US-led coalition's bombing of Syrian soldiers near Deir Azzor airport on Saturday.

In New York, Mr Kerry said at one point that listening to his Russian counterpart was like hearing about a parallel universe.

On Tuesday, the two diplomats had met with more than a dozen Arab and European foreign ministers, hoping to hold onto what might be salvageable from a week of relative calm in Syria. No one spoke of any progress, beyond a decision to hold follow-up discussions later this week.

We are at a make or break moment, said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, as he opened the session.

His peace envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, described his long-delayed plans for a multi-step Syrian peace process and transition that appeared, even by his own admission, untethered to reality on the ground. I know, it looks like a dream, Mr de Mistura said.

After the meeting, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Russia and Syria were the only two potential culprits and the UK had doubts that Syria would be able to carry out such a strike at night.

Mr Johnson told the BBC: I think it's too early to say anything about criminality and that kind of thing, or indeed to make conclusive judgments about responsibility.

But, put it this way, when you look at what happened to the aid convoy, there are only two possible culprits, only two forces that are capable of having carried out that strike flying in that area  they are the Syrians and the Russians, and we have our doubts about the Syrian capability to fly at night, he added.
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The United Nations has resumed aid convoys within Syria after an attack which killed more than 20 civilians.

"The preparation for these convoys has now resumed and we are ready to deliver aid to besieged and hard-to-reach areas as soon as possible," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted the ceasefire was "not dead" despite the attack, in which a Red Crescent warehouse and health clinic were also seriously damaged, and aid supplies for thousands of people were destroyed.

The attack came amid a resumption of hostilities following the fragile, week-long ceasefire, which it was hoped would mark the beginning of the end of Syria's bloody five-year civil war.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) representative in Syria, Elizabeth Hoff, said: "We are definitely preparing health items to go to Moadamiya as soon as possible. "The convoy is being loaded today and scheduled for tomorrow."

The strike hit at least 18 of the 31 trucks in the convoy, which was bringing food relief from UN stores to the town of Urm al-Kubra, west of Aleppo, in an area controlled by rebel groups.

The US made it clear on Monday night that it held Moscow responsible for the deaths, regardless of whose planes carried out the strike.

 Russia and Syria deny responsibility for aid convoy strike

A US State Department statement said: We dont know at this point whether it was the Russians or the regime. In either case, the Russians have the responsibility certainly to... refrain from taking such action themselves, but they also have the responsibility to keep the regime from doing it."

Both Russia and Syria have denied responsibility for the attack.
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Prime Minister Theresa May has announced the UK will backs it commitment to climate change by ratifying the Paris Agreement before the end of the year.

Currently, only 29 of the 197 signatory countries have ratified the landmark treaty agreed in December 2015.

In her maiden speech to the UN General Assembly, Ms May said: "We will continue to play our part in the international effort against climate change.

"And in a demonstration of our commitment to the agreement reached in Paris, the UK will start its domestic procedures to enable ratification of the Paris agreement, and complete these before the end of the year."

The Paris Agreement committed the world to trying to limit global warming to as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as possible.

However, a subsequent analysis found that individual country's pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could actually allow a rise of up to 3.1C.

This year has smashed previous temperature records with the first half of 2016 1.3C warmer than the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century, according to Nasa, although this figure was inflated by the el Nino effect. Every month for the last 14 in a row has broken the record average global temperature for that month.

 Theresa May to UN summit: Uncontrolled migration must be stopped

The Prime Minister also announced that post-Brexit Britain will remain at the heart of international affairs, and pledged hundreds of millions of pounds in aid to tackle terrorism.

She said: "The United Kingdom has always been an outward-facing, global partner at the heart of international efforts to secure peace and prosperity for all our people. And that is how we will remain. For when the British people voted to leave the EU, they did not vote to turn inwards or walk away from any of our partners in the world.
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Human rights campaigners have criticised Prince Charles over a scheduled visit to Bahrain amid claims torture and oppression remain a concern in the Gulf state.

The Prince of Wales is due to make an official visit to Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates on behalf of the British Government in November to help strengthen the United Kingdoms warm bilateral relations", according to a statement released by Clarence House.

But the trip to the strategically important Gulf state has been attacked as "totally inappropriate" by anti-arms trade campaigners, and Human Rights Watch have described the visit as "extremely disappointing".

Nicholas McGeehan, Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Independent: "Prince Charles has taken a free-thinking, principled stance on many important issues, so its difficult to credit that hes not aware of the serious and worsening human rights situation in Bahrain.

"It's extremely disappointing that hes agreed to help the British government ingratiate itself further with such an abusive government."

Earlier this year the Palace was criticised by a leading human rights organisations for the decision to seat Queen Elizabeth next to the King of Bahrain during a celebration for her 90th birthday.

Human Rights Watch described the decision to place the Queen next Bahrains head of state as an "error of judgement".

In response, representatives of the King of Barain told The Independent: "In 2011, His Majesty King Hamad set up an independent inquiry of international experts to investigate human rights abuses in Bahrain. His Majesty accepted its findings in full and has since implemented significant human rights and socio-economic reforms in Bahrain. As part of his reform programme, His Majesty established the office of the Ombudsman at the Ministry of the Interior which is an independent body aimed at ensuring compliance with professional standards of policing and investigating complaints. "

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Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

A report by Amnesty International last year accused Bahrain of overseeing "rampant abuses including torture, arbitrary detentions and excessive use of force against peaceful activists and government critics."

Despite reports of abuse, British arms sales to Bahrain have increased significantly over the past five years, with the UK covering arms such as machine guns, assault rifles and anti-armour ammunition in deals worth 45 million, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) organisation.
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The US Senate voted to allow the $1.15bn sale of military equipment  including tanks and armoured vehicles  to Saudi Arabia amid the countrys ongoing conflict with Yemen.

The 71 to 27 vote killed a bipartisan effort led by Republican Sen Rand Paul and Democratic Sen Chris Murphy that would have stopped the deal, announced by the Pentagon on 9 August. If the sale goes through, Saudi Arabia would receive more than 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armoured recovery vehicles, and other military equipment, Reuters reported.

The announcement comes after US-backed Saudi coalition bombed a childrens school, a Doctors Without Borders hospital, and destroyed a bridge humanitarian aid groups to bring supplies into Yemens capital, Sanaa.

Mr Murphy rebuked the Riyadh government for their role in human rights violations against Yemen. He also noted Saudi Arabias apparent role in fueling radical Islamism through its support for a conservative form of the Muslim faith.

If youre serious about stopping the flow of extremist recruiting across this globe, then you have to be serious at the  brand of Islam that is spread by Saudi Arabia all over the world, is part of the problem, Mr Murphy said before Wednesdays vote.

 Footage shows extent of child malnutrition in Yemen as Britain continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has been a source of particular concern for US government officials following the release of previously classified documents, which were believed to disclose the Saudi government's possible role in funding a number of the 9/11 hijackers. Saudi officials denied such allegations, and said the declassified documents were proof of their non-involvement.

Congress is expected to back a bill that would allow the families of 9/11 victims and first responders to file a lawsuit against the Saudi government  a bill that President Barack Obama has promised to veto if it passes.

But Congress may overrule the veto with a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

The 18-month-long war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen has claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people  many of whom are civilians  and displaced millions.

Nonetheless, the 71 backers of the billion-dollar funding to the country believe that the US should stand with the longtime ally.

This motion comes at a singularly unfortunate time and would serve to convince Saudi Arabia and all other observers that the United States does not live up to its commitments, said Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Despite their defeat, supporters of the bill saw the vote as a wake up call for Saudi Arabia.

The very fact that we are voting on it today sends a very important message to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we are watching your actions closely, said Minnesota Sen Al Franken, and that the United States is not going to turn a blind eye to the indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children."
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Germany and Sweden have been named the cheapest places to attend university with a combined cost of 6,700 per year - a fraction of the 18,000 needed to study at an institution in the UK.

Combining tuition fees of 9,000 and an average annual living cost of 9,200, currency and service FairFX has found the UK to be one of the most expensive nations in the world to be a student in while those in continental Europe offer free tuition to UK students.

Recommended Read more Oxford University tops world rankings for the first time

The analysis of the top 200 universities in the world has come on the day the new Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings have been published. According to the rankings, Oxford University has become the first UK university to take the crown as the top institution in the world.

FairFX has found a total of 33 universities in THEs top 200 offer either free tuition or fees of under 500 a year for those who are accepted, meaning students from the UK only have to cover their living costs, with 47 offering a year of fees for under 1,000.

Having looked at the averages for 27 countries featured within the top 200, the findings have also ranked South Africa and Finland as third and fourth respectively for being the most affordable countries to study in, with combined tuition and average living costs of just 6,948 and 7,313 a year, also respectively.

Broken down by individual institutions, the cheapest of the worlds top universities to study are Italys Scuola Superiore SantAnna and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa which, not only offer free tuition, but even provide an allowance to cover living costs to the exclusive few successful applicants.

Meanwhile, Germany takes half of the spots in the top ten cheapest universities, led by TU Dresden with no tuition fees but a term contribution which totals just 346 a year - a far cry from the UK average tuition fee of 9,000.

At the other end of the spectrum, the most expensive country to study abroad is the US with average tuition fees of 31,296 and living costs of 14,403, bringing the average total annual university bill to 45,699, with the UK coming in as the sixth most expensive country to study in.

Ian Strafford-Taylor, CEO of FairFX, described how the costs for UK students to attend university are steep compared to many overseas destinations, putting a significant burden on them as they start out on their career path. He said: Studying abroad is certainly a viable option and we could see it becoming an alternative to taking a gap year with its opportunity to expand horizons and gain new experiences alongside an education.

To get the best value, Strafford-Taylor has recommended students to, not only consider tuition fees, but also the local living costs upon arrival, something which can vary considerably. He added: Its worth taking into account trends in long-term exchange rates which will give you even more value for money.

Even though Oxford has taken the top spot for the first time in the THE rankings history, the universitys vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson, hit out at lack of funding, tighter government regulations, and Brexit as being potential threats to the future of the institution.

She said: If our academics cannot secure funding for their research, they will move elsewhere. We, frankly, do not have the resources commensurate with our global position.
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Why go now

Until 25 September Buenos Aires food week is shining a light on the citys passionate food culture, with gauchos (cowboys) barbecuing armadillos in streets overlooked by kitchens where chefs pore over molecular gastronomy. Whether or not youre in time to catch the markets and special tasting menus (a full list of participating restaurants is available at bafoodweek.com), Argentinas capital has started to warm up as spring takes hold, and has plenty to offer those keen to escape the rainy English autumn with a night or two of tango dancing or, in November, the renowned Open Polo Tournament (aapolo.com).

Get your bearings

Buenos Aires sits on the south-west bank of the River Plate, close to the estuary. The districts of Monserrat and San Nicolas sit at its heart, the gentrified docklands of Puerto Madero to the east, historic San Telmo, and the traditionally working-class La Boca, south of the centre. North of San Nicolas are the green, affluent barrios of Retiro, Recoleta and Palermo.

From the airport take a Tienda Leon shuttle bus to central Puerto Madero, near the Sheraton Hotel (1) at 1299 Av Eduardo Madero (every 30 minutes; tiendaleon.com; single AR$190). Taxis charge AR$630 (32). Both take 40 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic.

San Nicolas has a tourist office (2) at Calle Florida 100 (00 54 11 4313 0187; bue.gov.ar)  while Puerto Madero (3) has another at Avenida Alicia Moreau de Justo 200 (00 54 11 4315 4265). Both are open daily 9am-6pm.

Day one

Take a hike

Encounter the citys European history with a walk through Recoleta, where neo-classical mansions jostle with bustling street markets. From Las Heras metro station (4) turn right on to Av Gral Las Heras, then left onto Junin to stop at the haunting Recoleta cemetery (5), open daily from 7am-5.40pm. Eva Peron, the Argentine first lady whose story is told in Evita, is buried among its gothic mausoleums.

Recoleta cemetery (Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)

Then pass the gilded church of Nuestra Senora Del Pilar (6) and continue through the park to Av del Libertador and the Museum of Fine Art (7) at No 1473 (00 54 11 5288 9900; bellasartes.gob.ar; free entry; open 11am-8.30pm on weekdays and from 10am on weekends; closed Mondays). Seek out the classic Argentinian art hidden among its Van Goghs and the Rothkos, then compare and contrast down the road at the Museum of Latin American Art (Malba) (8) at 3415 Av Pres Figueroa Alcorta, where Yoko Onos exhibition Dream Come True runs until 31 October (00 54 11 4808 6500; malba.org.ar; entry AR$100; open 12pm-8pm Thursday through Monday and Wednesday till 9pm. Closed Tuesdays).

Lunch on the run

Bosques de Palermo lies on the edge of Palermo, a barrio so trendy it has subdivided itself into smaller neighbourhoods known locally as Palermo Soho and Palermo Hollywood. Nanas (9) at 499 Pres Hipolito Yrigoyen (00 54 11 4837 9220; nana.com.ar), all exposed wood, brickwork and bare lightbulbs, serves up zingy, colourful salads  but also does a fine line in the Argentine staple, steak.

Window shopping

Pick through beaten up leatherwork and worn books in the antiques markets of cobbled San Telmo, one of Buenos Aires oldest neighbourhoods. On Sunday, Calle Defensa (10) turns into an enormous, bustling street market.

Calle Defensa on a Sunday (David Stanley/Flickr)

An aperitif

Is it a florist? Is it a record shop? No, its a speakeasy: hiding behind the door at the back of Floreria Atlantico (11) at 872 Arroyo (00 54 11 4313 6093; floreriaatlantico.com.ar) lies one of Buenos Aires best bars, serving up classic cocktails with an Argentine twist  like a dash of the herb yerba mate, for example.

Dine with the locals

Argentinian food draws heavily on the influence of its Italian immigrant community, with pizza restaurants on every street corner. One of the best is La Locanda (12) at 2697 Jose Leon Pagano (00 54 11 4806 6343; lalocandabuenosaires.com; closed Mondays); stepping into the cosy restaurant is like stepping into a Sicilian taverna. Try the local cheeses, the octopus or the juicy lasagna.

La Locanda

For a real locals night out, elbow your way to a table at Cerveceria Nacional (13) at 1588 Arevalo (00 54 11 4771 3383; facebook.com/cervecerianacionalbar), a busy craft beer bar that serves excellent, fresh empanadas  a sort of Latin American twist on the Cornish pasty. Hours spent over drinks and small plates is the standard in Buenos Aires  with the added benefit that you wont feel too full for tango dancing later.

Day two

Sunday morning: out to brunch

Puerto Madero waterfront has undergone a glistening refurbishment, and has become a hub for the new rich. Luckily, you dont need to flash too much cash to enjoy brunch at Le Grill (14), a smart riverside spot at 876 Alicia Moreau de Justo (00 54 11 4331 0454; legrill.com.ar) that specialises  like most of Argentina  in grilled meat. Try the steak tasting plate for AR$550/27.

A walk in the park

Walk off your steak in the nearby nature reserve, Reserva Ecologica Costanera Sur (15), which stretches across the old marshlands on the other side of the Rio Darsena Sur. Unbelievably peaceful, considering its central location, the park sits against an imposing backdrop of the citys skyscrapers, but looks out across the Rio De La Plata to Uruguay on its eastern side.

Take a ride

Head out to Buenos Airess outlying districts  like Flores, where Pope Francis was born and grew up  aboard the clean, efficient and mostly air-conditioned underground system, Subte. Two of its six lines run north to south; the others run east to west. You can buy and charge SUBE cards from the ticket office; a ride costs a flat AR$7.50, no matter how many connections you make.

The bus system, with some 180 lines, is not for the faint hearted, but it is cheap  around AR$6 a ride  and does run throughout the night; you can only pay with a SUBE card. The tourist boards interactive map (comollego.ba.gob.ar), is the easiest way to plan your route.

Cultural afternoon

For a peek into Buenos Aires maritime past head south-east to the amazing, technicoloured streets of portside La Boca. The neighbourhoods painted houses once hosted entire families in a single room; now, the floors of its restored homes belong to artists and sculptors who run open studios and galleries.

The colourful houses of La Boca (sandeepachetan.com/Flickr)

The Buenos Aires tourist board offers free guided walks around the barrio, which take in more than just the main tourist drag, the Caminito (16) (turismo.buenosaires.gob.ar/en/guidedtours).

The icing on the cake

Buenos Aires is the tango capital of the world; for an authentic experience, head to a milonga (a tango club) rather than a tourist show. A good place to start is Oliverio Girondo (17) at Vera 574 (facebook.com/OliverioGirondoEspacioCultural), which mixes a relaxed vibe with an exciting, messy vibrancy.

For all milongas, its worth booking ahead if you want a table, and bear in mind that the clubs only really get busy around 1-2am. Entry costs AR$100-150. Casual milongas like Girondo dont mind learners having a go  but if you end up somewhere more conservative, its best just to watch and learn.

Travel essentials

Getting there

British Airways (ba.com) offers the only direct to flights from the UK to Buenos Aires Ministro Pistarini International Airport (18), operating once a day from Heathrow. Indirect options include Iberia (iberia.com) via Madrid and LATAM (latam.com) via Sao Paulo.

Staying there

One of the grandest hotels in town, the Palacio Duhau (19) at (00 54 11 5171 1234; buenosaires.park.hyatt.com) offers plush rooms in both its refurbished mansion and the annexe building developed when it came under the Park Hyatt brand. Doubles from 413, not including breakfast.

Palacio Duhau

The Panamerican Hotel (20) at 551 Carlos Pellegrini (00 54 11 4348 5000; panamericano.us) is minutes away from the Teatro Colon (21) and has a spectacular view of Buenos Aires main thoroughfare, the bustling 9 de Julio, from the 23rd floor. Rooms start at about 130 a night including breakfast.

For budget stays, head to San Telmo. Posada de la Luna (22) at Peru 565 (00 54 11 4343 0911; posadaluna.com) has rooms from AR$400 (20) including breakfast.
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Each week, The Independents travel team go head-to-head to see who can come up with the best version of a particular trip. Today were tackling a budget break to the Caribbean.

Simons choice: Puerto Rico

Price for two people, including airfare and seven nights accommodation: 949

The low-cost airline Norwegian chose shrewdly when it made San Juan, capital of Puerto Rico, its first destination in the Caribbean from Gatwick. You could already fly from the UK airport to Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Cuba  all of them lovely in their own way. But Puerto Rico is distinctive.

Its capital, San Juan, is elegant and friendly  like a cleaned-up version of Havana, which was founded around the same time, early in the 16th century. The varied coastline is studded with enticing beaches, while inland the space traveller will want to see the worlds largest and most sensitive radio telescope: the Arecibo Observatory  an amazing astronomical installation, as featured in the James Bond movie Goldeneye.

Flying out on 30 November, returning a week later, you will pay the ridiculously low fare of 289 return. Early December is a great time to be in Puerto Rico, with the storm season over but the Christmas rush yet to begin. A double room at the city-centre Posada San Francisco GuestHouse is around $70 (53) per night, without breakfast, making the total for two 909  though the wise traveller will spend a couple of nights in San Juan and then wander off to explore the rest of the island.

Simon Calder, Travel Correspondent

Old San Juan (Getty Images) (Getty)

Nicolas choice: Jamaica

Price for two people, including airfare and two weeks accommodation: 1,322

Jamaica might seem like the archetypal fly-and-flop destination, but theres plenty more to it than that, whether you want to lap up the lively music scene or explore the islands natural wonders. Take a hike in the Blue Mountains, splash around in Dunns River Falls and lie back on any number of white-sand beaches.

Package holidays can often be the cheapest way of getting to far-flung destinations like Jamaica, but if you dont fancy a stay in a faceless all-inclusive, just opt for the flights instead. Thomson Airways currently has return fares from Birmingham to Montego Bay for 395 return, departing 2 October. The catch is, this price is only available if you stay for two weeks.

Laid-back Jakes, at Treasure Beach on Jamaicas south-west coast, is perhaps the islands coolest hotel  its boho-chic rooms have attracted celebs including Kate Moss  and while its not incredibly expensive (doubles from $90/69), there is an even cheaper option. In the grounds of Jakes youll find the 42-bunk Jack Sprat Shack hostel, which has dorm beds for $25 (19) a night, plus private rooms for those happy to splash the cash. Its linked to the seafront restaurant of the same name, just across the road, so you can pop over for seafood and sundowners.

Nicola Trup, Head of Travel

Treasure Beach in Jamaica

Lauras choice: Guadeloupe with a bonus city break

Price for two people, including airfare and seven nights hotel accommodation in Guadeloupe: 1,581

Im recommending a route that will give you a varied, affordable Caribbean experience and a bonus city break into the bargain. A flight with Air France to Guadeloupe, the French-Caribbean archipelago known for being gloriously uncrowded compared with neighbours like Antigua, costs around 577 return in November, with a 15-hour stopover in Paris. This is enough time to soak up a bit of the City of Light  and for cheaper than ever, as our expert Simon Calder recently demonstrated  as well as do some preliminary research on all those amazing cheeses and pastries awaiting you in Guadeloupe (it's a French territory after all).

Once in Guadeloupe, theres a surprising variety of perfectly passable budget hotels. Hotels.com currently has a deal at Habitation Grande Anse, a three-star with apartment-style rooms and an outdoor pool thats just 10 minutes walk from the sand at idyllic beach town Deshaies, for 61 per night (without breakfast). Its located on Basse-Terre, the mountainous one of Guadeloupes two main islands, where you can explore the wonderfully jungly Guadeloupe National Park and even climb the volcano, La Grande Soufriere  once the subject of a documentary by the enduringly weird Werner Herzog. And its just a quick hop over a bridge to get to the other main island, Grande-Terre, with its stereotypically bleached-blonde, turquoise-lapped Caribbean beaches. Novembers frequent showers subside towards the end of the month and dry up come December.

If youre up for exploring rather than a simple crash and burn holiday, car hire wouldnt be a terrible idea. Most big companies operate here, with the cheapest models available from around 130 for the week.

Laura Chubb, Deputy Head of Travel
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The news that British Airways is to cut the free food from its short-haul routes has been met with anger by some and relief by others. Is it a real loss, the latter group ask, when inflight food is so bad anyway? With that in mind, we asked a few of our travel writers to tell us about the very worst piles of slop served to them in the guise of an "inflight meal".

"Somewhere in the skies over Central Europe onboard an Oman Air flight to London Heathrow, I was served this limp excuse of an inflight meal (see main picture): a mushroom sandwich. I took one small bite, spat it out, informed the flight attendant it was the sorriest sandwich I had ever encountered and spent the rest of the flight nursing my rumbling stomach."

Nick Boulos

@Nick_Boulos

Part of the "fun" of an inflight meal is trying to figure out exactly what it is you've been served (Twang_Dunga/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

"Vegan inflight meals can be really hit and miss. The worst Ive encountered was an economy breakfast aboard a British Airways flight from Istanbul to London: two miniature triangles of white bread marinated in cold, tinned tomato juice. More a nightmare smoothie than a meal."

Liz Dodd

@liz_dodd

"Dinner aboard a Dakar (Senegal) to Paris flight on Air France in business class in 2014, featuring a steak tougher than the planes tyres and a red wine sharper than jet fuel. An M&S ready meal from Heathrow Terminal 5 never tasted better the day after that."

Julian Eccles

@julianeccles

This is what you could have won: a display of business class meals typical on Sri Lankan Airlines (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty Images ) (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty Images)

"United Airlines by an easy mile served me the worst meal I've ever had anywhere. When I asked what the red-hot package I'd been slung was (containing unidentifiable sludge) the air hostess told me 'how should I know!'"

Georgina Wilson-Powell

@Georgina_WP

"The worst I ever had was the first time I ordered the diabetic meal on a Middle Eastern airline. Half of the things on the tray weren't diabetic friendly at all: there was a yoghurt (full of sugar) and a bowl of fruit (also sugar). Whoever had slung it together seemed to have confused low-fat with low-sugar. For reasons I do not understand there was also a gluten-free bread roll. So half of it was dangerous for me to eat, but I'd have rather forced that down than the main: moist, pungent salmon, served with damp vegetables floating in fish-juice. I no longer order diabetic meals."

Jamie Lafferty

@MegaHeid

The only thing more frightening than the fish noodle breakfast is the deadpan stare of the cabin crew (Stefan Krasowski/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

"No contest: pungent fish noodles for a very, very early morning breakfast aboard a China Eastern flight from Shanghai to Paris, nine years ago. It was the same as wed had for dinner a few hours earlier; unable to stomach a second helping, I declined."

Nicola Trup, head of travel at The Independent

@nickytrup

"Back in the days of the USSR, Westerners with hard currency were in a strong position to procure cut-price travel  particularly in 1991, when the USSR fragmented. Aeroflot, then the worlds biggest airline, flew on, but it took a while before the accountants started pricing flights properly. So I made it from Minsk to Kiev for less than a pound. But the inflight meal wasnt an added bonus so much as a punishment. It was a grey globule of reconstituted gristle going by the name of a 'cutlet'. To raise the colour temperature, passengers were also served a luminous orange liquid that you really wanted to test with a Geiger counter (especially since the route between the capitals of Belarus and Ukraine passed very close to Chernobyl). Yet now I actively seek out Aeroflot flights, because the 21st-century catering is, in my experience, superior to BAs economy offering."

Simon Calder, travel correspondent at The Independent

@simoncalder

The five-strong dessert course in business class beat the pasta coated in cold soup a few rows back (Laura Chubb)

"It absolutely infuriates me when cabin crew offer 'chicken or pasta' - as though there are not multifarious ways in which these ingredients might be served. I will always make a point of asking 'but chicken/pasta with what?', and am disheartened to report that oftentimes the answer is: 'I dont know.' This blatant disdain for economy passengers - who, I might add, are still paying a fair whack for their ticket on long-haul routes - was compounded by the 'safe' pasta option I chose aboard a flight from Tahiti to Los Angeles. Lukewarm, stuck-together penne topped with glutinous cold mushroom soup does not a happy passenger make. Funnily enough, my best ever inflight meal was with the same airline when they upgraded me on the Los Angeles to Paris leg. A lobster starter, followed by a creamy tropical prawn curry, five-strong dessert course and cheeseboard showed what airline kitchens are capable of - and that they appear to be wilfully torturing those in cattle class."

Laura Chubb, deputy head of travel at The Independent

@LauraChubb1
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There was a strange moment at the end of Tuesdays Newsnight when host Evan Davis suggested that serious media outlets around the globe had been desperately casting around for a way to justify coverage of the impending divorce between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Having apparently failed to come up with a particularly novel angle on the story, the closing titles of the BBC's flagship news programme simply played out to a soundtrack of Angelina Jolie talking last year about the stability of the couples marriage  in the context of the pair having just portrayed a crumbling relationship in By The Sea.

But the idea that there must be some sort of deep, public interest justification for reporting the couples split is absurd. The fact of any couple getting divorced is not intrinsically private. When the individuals in question are both incredibly famous in their own right, and among the half dozen most famous couples on the planet, the announcement of their separation (publicly made by Jolie, with a statement following from Pitt) is plainly newsworthy.

The devil, of course, comes in the detail. The fact of a divorce may not be private, but that isnt to say the couples marriage or their personal lives as individuals are fair game.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures Show all 35 1 /35 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2014 Actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the World Premiere of Disney's "Maleficent" at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2015 Actress/director Angelina Jolie Pitt and husband actor Brad Pitt arrive at the AFI FEST 2015 presented by Audi opening night gala premiere of Universal Pictures' "By The Sea" at the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures June 2014 Angelina Jolie, Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and her partner actor Brad Pitt, look at displayed pictures of victims of violence during the third day of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London. Pitt added his A-list support to his partner Angelina Jolie's efforts to eradicate rape in war zones when he joined her in a flashbulb-popping appearance at a global conference in London AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures March 2014 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attend the Oscars held at Hollywood & Highland Cente in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures February 2014 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the EE British Academy Film Awards 2014 at The Royal Opera House in London Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2013 Angelina Jolie, Maddox Jolie-Pitt and actor Brad Pitt arrive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Governors Awards at The Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures February 2012 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the Cinema for Peace Gala ceremony at the Konzerthaus Am Gendarmenmarkt during day five of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival Getty Images for Cinema for Peac Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2012 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive on the red carpet for the 69th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2011 Accompanied by their children, Brad Pitt and Angellina Jolie appear before photographers upon their arrival at Haneda Airport in Tokyo AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2011 Brad Pitt and Angelina Joiie attend the Premiere of DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2" at Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2011 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend "The Tree Of Life" premiere during the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2010 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (with camera) on the 'Romeo and Juliette' film set in Budapest, Hungary Rex Features Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures July 2010 Angelina Jolie and actor Brad Pitt arrive at the premiere of Sony Pictures' "Salt" at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures December 2009 Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie and their son Maddox arrive at the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures' and Spyglass Entertainment's "Invictus" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Theater in Beverly Hills Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2009 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attend the Inglourious Basterds Premiere held at the Palais Des Festivals during the 62nd International Cannes Film Festival Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2009 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at Narita International Airport with their children (L to R) Maddox, Vivienne, Zahara and Knox in Narita, Chiba, Japan Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2009 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie pose on the red carpet for the German premiere of the film 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' in Berlin AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures December 2008 Angelina Jolie and actor Brad Pitt arrive at the premiere of Paramount's "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" held at Mann's Village Theatre on Decemeber 8, 2008 in Westwood, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images) Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2008 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose as they arrive to attend the screening of US actor and director Clint Eastwood's film 'The Exchange' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2008 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose as they arrive for the screening of US directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne's film 'Kung Fu Panda' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2008 Angelina Jolie and actor Brad Pitt attend the cocktail party during the 14th annual Screen Actors Guild awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures September 2007 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford premiere on the Day 5 of the 64th Annual Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2007 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie depart the premiere for the film 'Ocean's Thirteen' at the Palais des Festivals during the 60th International Cannes Film Festival Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2007 Angelina Jolie poses as she arrives with actor and producer Brad Pitt at the Festival Palace in Cannes AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures May 2007 Angelina Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt, have a drink in a Prague restaurant "U Sevce Matouse" ("At Matous' Shoemaker") prior to the shooting of Jolie's new film "Wanted". The couple and their children Maddox, Pax Thien, Zahara and Shiloh Nouvel, arrived in Prague aboard a private plane. They are to spend five weeks in Prague AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2007 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the 64th Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2007 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at Newmarket Films premiere of "God Grew Tired of Us" at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures December 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the World Premiere of "The Good Shepherd" presented by Universal Pictures at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2006 Brad Pitt and his partner Angelina Jolie ride on a motorcycle on a busy street in downtown Ho Chi Minh city. Jolie and Pitt are expected to adopt a three-year-old Vietnamese AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2006 Angelina Jolie holds daughter Zahara as husband Brad Pitt carries son Maddox during a stroll on the seafront promenade at the historic Gateway of India AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures June 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt give a press conference at a Swakopmund hotel. Hollywood's hottest couple became the proud parents of daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt on 27 May in Namibia AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt leave Hotel Belvedere in Davos . UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie was in Davos for the World Economic Forum AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures January 2006 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt leaving the session opened by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan "A new Mindset for the UN" at the the World Economic Forum in Davos AFP/Getty Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures November 2005 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, accompanied by Jolie's children, arrive at Narita Airport in suburban Tokyo) AFP/Getty Images Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt relationship in pictures June 2005 (L-R) Regency Enterprises' David Matalon, actor Brad Pitt, Producer Arnon Milchan, actress Angelina Jolie and News Corp. President/Chief operating officer Peter Chernin arrive at the premiere of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" at the Mann Village Theater in Westwood Getty Images

Even more obviously, the Brangelina brood  six strong, and all under the age of 16  must have their privacy respected. It is primarily for their sake that the media should show a degree of caution when it comes to speculation about the reasons for the divorce. Some information may enter the public domain by virtue of the legal proceedings which a divorce necessitates. But endless tawdry rumours as to why the marriage has failed can end up being intrusive, however much people want to read them.

Putting aside the question of whether reporting on a high-profile celebrity divorce is legitimate insofar as privacy considerations are concerned, there is the broader argument about whether the separation of two movie stars should  from an ethical point of view  be given precedence over other news. To put it another way, when people are being bombed in Syria, or starved in Yemen, or are protesting against the shooting of unarmed black men by police in the US, how really can journalists in all good conscience spend time writing about a rich couple whove decided to call time on their relationship?

 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt: A timeline of their relationship

Recommended Read more Stop waiting for Jennifer Aniston to gloat about Brangelina

But this is a false dichotomy. It assumes that the media doesnt have the capacity to report on a range of issues, and that consumers of journalism cannot be interested in a similarly broad range of stories. If you take this approach to its logical conclusion you might just as well stop news outlets reporting on sport, or publishing cookery supplements, or any number of other items which would not, by their absence, cause the world to stop turning.

It is also the height of intellectual snobbery to conclude that celebrity lives dont or shouldnt matter to "real" people, and shouldnt therefore be the subject of news reports. The reality is we all look up to others. Why should we be forced to feel that looking up to famous people we dont know is somehow less tangible (or even less acceptable) than admiring or individuals we are personally close to?

There are, inevitably, plenty of people on social media and below the line who are declaring their lack of interest in the end of the Brangelina dream. Well fine; we cant all be fascinated by everything. But if there is one thing we agree on, surely it is that the indignant and pious indifference of the pompous social media bore is fascinating to nobody.
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Earlier this summer Jeremy Hunt had the pleasure of being able to echo Mark Twain and announce that reports of the death of his political career had been greatly exaggerated.

The bete noire of the junior doctors hadnt been sacked as Health Secretary by Theresa May, despite widespread rumours to the contrary.

But has yet another obituary been written prematurely?

At the weekend an interview with Damian Green, in which the new Work and Pensions Secretary pledged no new cuts, inspired chatter about the end of austerity.

So can we believe this obituary? No and yes. The no case is straightforward.

 Theresa May to UN summit: Uncontrolled migration must be stopped

There is a major squeeze on public spending and welfare payments still to come over the next five years as a result of government decisions already taken  including the filleting of almost 9bn from the tax credit and working age benefits bill.

These will assuredly diminish the living standards of the less well-off. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has projected that those in the poorest tenth of the population will lose 800 a year by 2020 relative to those in the second poorest tenth at 1,500 a year and the third poorest tenth at 1,200 a year.

The new Chancellor Philip Hammond seems likely to announce an infrastructure fiscal stimulus in Novembers Autumn Statement to help the economy ride out the Brexit shock  but no one expects him to reverse these planned welfare cuts.

What Green was referring to in his interview was the acceptance by ministers that it is not politically feasible for them to impose additional welfare cuts on top of those already outlined.

Similarly, with departmental spending, the question is whether there will be additional cuts to the substantial reductions agreed in last years four-year Spending Review, rather than a reversal of those already pencilled in.

And those spending cuts are, let us not forget, severe. The day-to-day budgets of unprotected departments such as environment, business, communities and local government are set to fall by an average of 18 per cent by 2020 relative to 2015 levels.

What has changed is that the new Government has made it clear that if the economy weakens it will not chase its tail by imposing still more cuts on departments in order to remain on course to deliver an absolute budget surplus by 2019-20, which was George Osbornes lodestar. Borrowing will be allowed to overshoot instead.

This brings us to the sense in which one might reasonably argue that austerity has indeed expired. Austerity was often used by Osborne not so much as a policy tool to rein in public borrowing, but as a political club with which to beat the Labour party and, as a side benefit, to reduce the size of the public sector.

This was why Osborne refused to adopt a fiscal Plan B when massive cuts to state capital spending in 2011 and 2012 helped to stall the economy, even though a discretionary boost to government investment would have been perfectly permissible under Osbornes own fiscal rules at the time and the cost of borrowing for the UK was touching historic lows.

This is why Osborne tightened his borrowing rules still further in 2014, refusing to make any allowance for productive state capital spending at all and setting a fixed date to deliver an absolute surplus in defiance of the advice of the vast majority of the economics profession.

Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images

This was really about painting Ed Milibands Labour as profligate for refusing to match these nonsensical and excessively stringent targets. In this sense austerity for Osborne was about politics, rather than economics. Theresa May has signalled she will no longer play this kind of game.

The international context has changed radically too. Germany is still hectoring governments everywhere to cut public expenditure  and leading by example. But it is losing the argument. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, told Europes largest economy in no uncertain terms earlier this month that it has a duty to boost spending to assist the wider eurozone. Countries that have fiscal space should use it. Germany has fiscal space he said.

In Japan fiscal stimulus is back on the menu. Canada, under Justin Trudeau, has broken with the cuts-heavy approach of his predecessor Stephen Harper. As the US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew remarked last month: The G20 is no longer debating growth versus austerity but rather how to best employ fiscal policy to support our economies.

As evidence of the turn, economists at JP Morgan estimate that fiscal policy in developed countries will (albeit slightly) boost, rather than subtract from, overall growth for the first time this year since 2009.

The dogma that government should impose spending cuts regardless of wider economic conditions remains lodged in the minds of small state ideologues on the right in Europe and America. Yet most mainstream politicians have sloughed it off since the premature and economically damaging global shift to fiscal tightening in 2010.

Yet theres another sense in which austerity, defined as underlying pressure for government economies, is not dead, at least for the UK. Britains budget remains in deficit to the tune of around 4 per cent of GDP at the end of 2015/16  too high to be sustainable in the medium term.

The Brexit vote seems very likely to hit tax revenues in the short term as investment is reduced. They will also probably be weaker in the long-term due to Britains EU withdrawal.

And if Theresa May follows through on her promises to drastically reduce annual migration to the UK that will also take a toll on the states coffers since EU migrants tend to be, whatever right-wing populists assert, a net benefit to the public finances.

It doesnt have to be paid today (and indeed it shouldnt be) but make no mistake: there will ultimately be a big bill for all of us.
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When future historians look back on his presidency, Barack Obama will be remembered for many things  but among them all, perhaps the most stark is his open embrace of unmanned aerial systems, popularly referred to as drones.

Armed drones were first widely used to support American combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2011, they also played a pivotal role in the Nato air campaign over Libya. This included a strike on the convoy carrying Muammar Gaddafi that led directly to the dictators capture and death.

More controversially, drones have also formed the centrepiece of Obamas counter-terrorism strategy. The CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command have conducted hundreds of drone strikes in non-battlefield theatres  countries where the United States has not been at war.

According to estimates published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), 373 strikes were launched in Pakistan between Obamas inauguration in January 2009 and the end of August 2016. Dozens of other strikes are reported in Yemen and Somalia.

 "Has Hilary Ever Called Islamic Terrorists 'Deplorable'?" - Trump

In July 2016, the Obama administration broke its long silence on the human costs of drone warfare. No more than 116 non-combatants, it claimed, had been killed in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya from January 2009 to the end of 2015.

The BIJ, which also publishes its own estimates on the number of people killed in American drone operations, places this figure much higher, estimating that between 380 and 801 civilians had been killed.

These statistics shatter the myth that drones are somehow a uniquely precise and risk-free form of warfare. Whilst they may eliminate the risk to American military personnel, for those living under drones the human, psychological and social costs have been substantial.

Whilst it is often claimed that drone strikes have been successful in killing al-Qaeda leaders, even American military officials have raised the spectre of serious blowback from the ill-feeling that drone strikes create. In the words of the retired four-star Marine General James Cartwright If youre trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, youre going to upset people even if theyre not targeted.

As the presidential election draws closer, this shameful aspect of Obamas legacy raises a troubling question: how worried should we be about the prospect of a Donald Trump drone programme?

While he has only publicly committed to deploying unarmed drones to patrol the Canadian and Mexico borders, Trumps plan to bomb the hell out of Isis is a major cause for concern.

During a December 2015 interview with Fox and Friends, Trump was asked how he would combat the group. His response was startling: When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, dont kid yourself. When they say they dont care about their lives, you have to take out their families.

Let that sink in for a moment. A presidential candidate has suggested taking out the civilian families of Islamic State fighters; that would almost certainly breach Article 51.2 of the Geneva Convention which states that individual civilians shall not be the object of attack.

Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Show all 14 1 /14 Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Isis: "Some of the candidates, they went in and didnt know the air conditioner didnt work and sweated like dogs, and they didnt know the room was too big because they didnt have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?" Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On immigration: "I will build a great wall  and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me and Ill build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Free Trade: "Free trade is terrible. Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people." PAUL J. RICHARDS | AFP | Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Mexicans: "When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists." Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On China: "I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them?... I love China. The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On work: "If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable." AP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On success: "What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate." Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On life: "Everything in life is luck." AFP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On ambition: "You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On his opponents: "Bush is totally in favour of Common Core. I don't see how he can possibly get the nomination. He's weak on immigration. He's in favour of Common Core. How the hell can you vote for this guy? You just can't do it." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Obamacare: "You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high. It's virtually useless. And remember the $5 billion web site?... I have so many web sites, I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a web site. It costs me $3." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Barack Obama: "Obama is going to be out playing golf. He might be on one of my courses. I would invite him. I have the best courses in the world. I have one right next to the White House." PA Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On himself: "Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On America: "The American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." GETTY

Whether he actually means what he says or not, Trump has essentially made plans to commit war crimes as part of his campaign platform. And now that the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have all but normalised targeted killings as a tool of US statecraft, drone strikes potentially offer Trump the perfect tool to accomplish this goal.

To compound this danger, Trump has also gone on record to insist that he would strong-arm any military commander who refused to conduct such attacks. This followed former CIA director Michael Haydens insistence that US military commanders would refuse the order to attack the families of Isis fighters. They wont refuse. Theyre not going to refuse me, Trump later postured during a Republican primary debate in March. If I say do it, theyre going to do it.

There is much to fear from a potential Trump presidency in terms of both US foreign policy and world politics more generally. This is not a partisan Democratic talking point: 50 senior Republican national security officials have already come out publicly and warned that Trump would be the most reckless president in American history.

Of course, it is not possible to predict with complete certainty what Trumps drone policies would actually be if he is elected president. It is also unclear whether the outgoing Obama administration can successfully institutionalise barriers to prevent the next president, whoever that may be, from inheriting the expansive drone playbook that it has developed.

Nevertheless, as with Trumps remarks on torture and nuclear weapons, its important that his comments are scrutinised and taken seriously.

As Trump begins receiving the classified intelligence briefings that all presidential candidates are given during the general election, its time to face the very real prospect that he may soon inherit one of the most troubling components of Obamas legacy.

This piece first appeared in The Conversation.
Religious orders have been urged to offer the state vacant or disused priests' homes, convents and buildings to ease the housing and homeless crisis.

Housing, Planning and Local Government Minister Simon Coveney issued the plea after revealing three properties have been handed over in Cork, Kerry and Waterford in recent months.

Eighteen congregations signed deals with the state to meet 350 million euro of the cost of compensating abuse survivors.

By last year 42 million euro worth of property was handed over but M r Coveney appealed for all religious orders in the country to consider if they could donate any other buildings or homes to put a roof over people's heads.

"If there are any religious congregations listening and you have properties that are no longer in use or you are looking to vacate in the coming months or years we are interested in talking to you. Please make contact with us directly," Mr Coveney said.

The minister issued the plea at the Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government where he was forced to defend plans to build new social houses in his Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness.

Mr Coveney said a number of religious orders have approached him with offers.

One home for nuns in Kerry had recently been handed over to the housing agency Cluid, a former convent in Cork is being consider for housing for homeless women and a former home for priests in Waterford, St John's Training College, has been reopened for similar use.

"We hope to replicate that kind of partnership in other parts of the country," he said.

Ruth Coppinger, Anti-Austerity Alliance TD, said that out of the 47,000 social houses pledged over the next six years, 18,718 will be new builds by councils.

Other figures showed a total of 26,000 homes, both from private developers and in public schemes, will be built exclusively for social housing and another 10,000 homes will be on long-term leases of up to 30 years by local authorities and housing bodies.

Mr Coveney said he accepted that having only 7 to 8% of the houses in Ireland as social housing is not good enough. The rate across Europe averages at 17%.

"We have a lot of catching up to do," the minister said.

"That's why this plan is effectively about increasing the overall social housing stock by 30 or 40% over five or six years. That is a significant ambition and we are going to deliver it."

Mr Coveney also repeated his assertions that the Government was considering an initiative for first-time buyers in next month's budget.

It has been suggested that attempts will be made to easing financial pressures through a tax rebate.

Strict mortgage lending rules currently require first-time buyers to have a 10 per cent deposit for the first 220,000 euro of a house price and 20 per cent for the balance. Other buyers must have a 20 per cent deposit and lending is limited to 3.5 times incomes.
Martin Shanahan says the expansion endorses Ireland's position as a thriving global tech hub

One hundred jobs are to be created with the expansion of an international software company in Dublin.

SoftwareONE said the opening of its new offices at Blanchardstown will see its Irish staff increase tenfold over the next three years.

The company, headquartered in Switzerland, opened an office in Mahon, Co Cork, in 2011.

The majority of the new positions will be based at the Blanchardstown office.

The company is recruiting for technical roles including software developers and test engineers as well as positions in human resources, finance, sales and administration.

Graham Quinn, of SoftwareONE, praised state investment agency IDA Ireland for supporting the 16 million euro expansion.

"I am very much looking forward to expanding our talented team and to continuing our global growth strategy," he added.

Martin Shanahan, chief executive of IDA Ireland, said the expansion endorses Ireland's position as a thriving global tech hub.

"Businesses that locate here can source excellent talent in a business-friendly English-speaking environment with a track record for investment which is second to none," he said.

Set up in 1985, SoftwareONE employs 3,000 staff in more than 80 countries.
Striking workers at Dublin Bus have been warned this week's walkout will leave the company in debt this year.

Management claimed the bill for stopping all services across the city will reach 6 million euro as the pay dispute runs into its third 48-hour stoppage on Thursday night.

In a letter to staff, chief executive Ray Coyne said Dublin Bus will lose 15m euro if the remaining 13 days of strikes go ahead as planned - as bad as its position after the 2010 economic collapse.

The bus chief issued the dire financial warning as the bitter row threatened to spill over into Bus Eireann, where workers will vote on industrial action after management said they have no money for pay rises.

Mr Coyne said: "Unlike the impact of the economic crisis which was outside our control, resolution to the current situation is within our control at this point.

"This ongoing industrial action is undermining all our past efforts and has the potential to return the company to a post 2010 financial crisis."

Mr Coyne also warned about the actions Dublin Bus would have to take if a resolution is not found to the strikes.

"This would naturally require actions to restore the company to a sound financial standing. Returning to such a scenario is totally unnecessary and is at this point wholly avoidable," he said.

Mr Coyne called for the National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU) and Siptu to return to talks at the Workplace Relations Commission.

All Dublin Bus, Airlink and sightseeing services will be off the roads from 9pm on Thursday. The strike runs for 48 hours and no Nitelink services will run this weekend.

The company also said the c ost of funding the workers' pay claim would be 50m euro by the end of 2018.

Meanwhile, Bus Eireann revealed it lost 5.6m euro last year and was predicting a 6m euro loss this year, mainly due to the commercial Expressway operations - which link towns and cities across the country.

"Bus Eireann cannot afford a pay increase," it said in a statement.

Some 2,600 workers are to be balloted for industrial action after the company revealed it was planning to cut costs by bringing in new terms and conditions for Expressway staff and sub-contracting routes.

It vowed to protect routes for customers, but warned it was suffering from increased levels of competition from "low cost operators", increased claims and wage costs.

It also said it cannot compete with buses running on motorways.

Bus Eireann said it needs to save 7m euro immediately and turn Expressway into a profitable business.

"These cost savings must be achieved internally and not through any cuts to service which would impact our customers," the company said.

Dermot O'Leary, NBRU general secretary, said the company plans were a bombshell.

"The current Dublin Bus dispute and this crisis at Bus Eireann are not unconnected," he said.

"There are huge question marks over the Department of Transport and its stewardship of the state-owned public transport services.

"It is now time for politicians from across all parties to step up to the plate on behalf of the communities they purport to represent. The Irish electorate can be extremely unforgiving to those they elect who fail to protect vital social services."
The ESRI altered its forecasts on the Republic's economic growth because of Brexit. Photo: Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg

The fallout from Brexit will hit Ireland's economy for another five years, one of the country's leading think-tanks has warned.

The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) repeated its warning that the Northern Ireland economy would be worst hit by the UK's split from the European Union.

Research professor Kieran McQuinn said investment into Republic has already slowed and businesses with an all-island basis such as farmers and food processors will be among those feeling the most pain.

He added that tourism from Britain is being damaged due to a weak sterling and unemployment would no longer fall as sharply as in recent years.

"There's no doubt there will be opportunities," he said.

"But if you factor in the overall impact of Brexit it will probably mean the Irish economy will be growing at a slightly slower rate over the next four to five years than if Britain had stayed part of the European Union."

He added: "We think, of all the economies, Northern Ireland is going to suffer the most because of Brexit."

The ESRI altered its forecasts on the Republic's economic growth because of Brexit.

It dismissed the 26% economic growth that Ireland reportedly enjoyed last year and said the real figure was around 5.5%.

It said Brexit would mean a slight cut in growth this year to 4.3% and again next year to under 4%.

"Overall we are still quite positive but our output is a little bit down than if Brexit had not occurred," Mr McQuinn said.

"Ultimately you continue to see a fall-off in unemployment in Ireland but that fall-off is probably happening at a slower pace than if Brexit had not occurred," he said.

The ESRI offered a dismal scenario for the Republic and Northern Ireland last year when it examined the possible ramifications of the UK leaving Europe.

It talked about up to 3 billion euro (2.5 billion) in lost trade and higher energy prices every year and it is running new analysis in an attempt to advise the Government in time for next month's budget of the longer term impacts of Brexit.

It is estimated both the Republic and Northern Ireland would suffer a 20% drop in trade.

On the positive side Mr McQuinn said there are significant implications from Brexit for the City of London.

"That could obviously spark opportunities for certain relocation to come and happen here in Ireland," he said.

The ESRI also examined the housing market and Central Bank rules on mortgage lending and repeated its call for the limits to take into account the state of the market.

It said it would take up to four years for the full impact of lending restrictions to play out but its projections pointed to house prices being 3.5% lower and ultimately a 5% fall in the number of houses built.
RYANAIR boss Michael O'Leary - who campaigned for UK voters to shun Brexit - insisted yesterday that the British government will be "screwed" in negotiations with the European Union.

"The European Union is not going to make it easy for the UK. All this kind of arrogant nonsense in London - 'we're the fifth biggest economy in the world, they'll give a good deal...they won't," he told an audience at a Confederation of British Industry (CBI) event in Belfast.

"The European countries are paranoid about being seen to be tough on the UK, because if they are not tough on the UK, the right-wing parties in most of those countries, in Germany, in France, in Holland, will be next.

"Why would you be a member of the European Union if you can have control over your borders? You wouldn't.

"So if the UK gets a good deal, the European Union breaks up, and they care less about the UK than they do about protecting and keeping the European Union together."

He also rubbished London's claims that it will secure favourable trade deals, insisting the UK will be "screwed" in talks. He said most of the British cabinet did not have a clue what Brexit will look like, and said predictions of positive agreements were "arrogant nonsense".

"I have no faith in the politicians in London going on about how 'the world will want to trade with us'," the airline boss argued at the event at the Titanic centre in the city. "The world will want to screw you, that's what happens in trade talks," he said.

"They have no interest in giving the UK a deal on trade."

Turning his attention to Ireland, he said Ryanair would have added a fourth plane to Belfast if the UK hadn't voted for Brexit. "We were certainly planning to put a fourth aircraft in to Belfast International. We have been made nervous by Brexit," he said.

"The challenge for us is if you put that fourth aircraft in to Belfast and we find next year, tor two years the UK leaves the EU and we are no longer free to fly...if there is a hard border...then we are not free to fly."

"Belfast to anywhere in Europe, we are not free to fly into Belfast, Liverpool or London."

Mr O'Leary also argued that Stormont is "throwing good money after bad" by bailing out Northern Ireland's direct flight to New York.

The Stormont Executive is part-funding a 9m package to keep United's Belfast to Newark route - the North's sole transatlantic route. "If it were going to encourage United to commit here for a 10-year period it would fine," he said.

"But you are essentially paying about 160 for every return ticket on that route, and the minute the government here decides, 'look, we can't keep subsidising this', United is going to cut the route."

"They acted on APD [UK air passenger duty] on the transatlantic routes. But then they throw more good money after bad, they subsidise."

And Mr O'Leary also warned that it is likely to eventually pull out of City of Derry airport entirely, taking out its remain Liverpool and Glasgow routes.

Mr O'Leary said the scrapping of APD would be "huge" and could double the number of passengers flying in to Belfast through Ryanair.

He said a combined 16m aimed at boosting City of Derry airport and subsidising the United Belfast to Newark route could be better spent on dealing with the loss of APD.

In 2011, the 'Belfast Telegraph' revealed that the Newark service has been saved, after APD on long-haul flights from Northern Ireland was scrapped. Mr O'Leary said if the Executive had removed the 13-a-flight duty, Ryanair would not have cut its to Stansted flights, which he said remains a "huge" issue.

Speaking about the United route, he said: "They throw more good money after bad."

"That 1.1 million passengers would double to 2 million, just from Ryanair, if APD was scrapped. The spend from those various visitors over here would be a multiple of the APD."
Thousands of farmers have signed up for the EU Voluntary Milk Reduction Scheme despite dairies increasing milk prices for the second month in a row.

Processors report strong interest in the scheme, with a fifth to a third of suppliers applying to join.

Accurate national figures were not available at time of going to press, as processors were still validating the numbers who had applied, and the volumes of milk involved.

The highest application rate was in Kerry Group, where 1,331 of the company's 3,400 milk suppliers applied to join the scheme - or almost 40pc. Farmers applied to put 20m litres into the scheme.

Glanbia confirmed that 13pc of suppliers have applied for the scheme, with the proposed volume reduction being 13m litres. This equates to 25pc of the October to December supply and 0.6pc of annual supply.

Lakeland Dairies estimated that 10-15pc of farmers signed up for the scheme. The co-op had no final figures on the volumes involved but expected it to be small.

Two hundred Arrabawn farmers, 20pc of suppliers, applied to join the scheme, while in Tipperary Co-op, 13pc of farmers applied.

The Tipperary Co-op suppliers applied to put 1 million litres into the scheme.

Eleven percent of Lisavaird's suppliers have put in for a total of 450,000 litres or 0.5pc of the co-op's total annual supply.

A quarter of Drinagh's suppliers put in for the scheme, while 20pc of Bandon's farmers applied.

Dairygold declined to give details of application levels.

A spokesman said co-op staff had not finished validating the data.

Meanwhile, a number of co-ops set their August milk price over the last few days.

Lisavaird confirmed that it was on 27.14c/l, while Tipperary Co-op is on 25c/l.

Arrabawn raised its price by 1.5c/l to a base of 25.17c/l and will pay a bonus of 0.5c/l. Dairygold moved to a base of 24.5c/l, plus a quality bonus of 0.5c/l.

Glanbia, Kerry and Lakeland Dairies all moved to 25c/l, with the Glanbia price including a 2c/l support payment from Glanbia Co-op.

While welcoming the lift in milk returns, ICMSA was critical of the 2c/l being paid by Glanbia Co-op in Glanbia's price.

"Based on the GDT and the Ornua Index GII should be paying 25c/l out of its own resources and not using Co-op funds - effectively farmers' money - to subsidise farmers' milk price," said ICMSA's dairy chairman, Gerald Quain.

Co-ops estimate 20pc-33pc of suppliers have applied
The odds on the new IFA Director General (DG) being in place before 2017, more than a year after the position became vacant, are lengthening.

The delay is also hampering progress on finding a clear funding alternative to the current commodity levy for the organisation. However, a statutory levy on the single farm payment (BPS) is now being seriously considered.

First interviewing of applicants for the top post in the country's largest farming lobby group are now being scheduled for October.

IFA Deputy President Richard Kennedy has confirmed that 25 applications were received for the post and consultants KPMG, who were retained by the IFA for the process, have prepared a shortlist of less than eight candidates, which was handed to the IFA leadership last week.

"Interviews will take place over the coming weeks and we will see how it goes - we are working on it and anxious to get the position filled as soon as possible," he said.

But it is understood that some of the applicants for the position have now indicated that they are no longer interested, which may further complicate the process.

It is unlikely that the position will be offered to the first successful candidate before November and given the likely requirement to serve contractual notice of termination, it may be early spring before the new appointment will be in place at the Irish Farm Centre.

Mr Kennedy said that everyone involved is fully aware of the length of time that the process is taking, and that members want to see more progress with reform of the organisation.

Meanwhile, the IFA's Review Committee on Reform, which has been mandated to shortlist means of replacing the current controversial levy system, has proposed a levy on the 1.2bn annual direct payments to farmers.

Discussions centre on the rate of levy required, with some suggestion that it would need to be more than double the current 0.15pc rate if it was only applied to the Basic Payment Scheme.

Munster Chairman John Coughlan has told farmers in his region, "it would have to be a statutory payment ... with the Department of Agriculture making the deduction from each farmer's entitlement and passing the money on to the IFA."

He added, "I would see a difficulty with that, because it would require legislation and some farmers may feel that it could compromise the IFA in dealings with the Department of Agriculture".

He said that the current rate of 0.15pc would not be adequate and "it would have to go to 0.375pc or higher" if the payments under the BPS were reduced in the future.

Another proposal has been increasing the annual membership from the current average of 100 to 240 per annum, which the organisation fears may have a detrimental effect on membership.

The view of the IFA is that the current levy is the "fairest" system and should be continued with "more accountability and more transparency".
Market volatility has become a major cause for concern in the farm sector. Earlier this month ICOS, in their budget submission, called for an income stability tool, a co-op structured agri-taxation measure that would allow a farmer to voluntarily defer up to 5pc of income.

Further afield, the issue of volatility is also exercising the minds of policy makers. At the recent Rural Development conference in Cork, Commissioner Hogan said he is ready to revamp the EU's income stabilisation tool to make it more attractive to farmers. The tool, which was introduced under the last CAP reform, has not been implemented in Ireland and in fact only in a few countries.

Farmers worldwide are suffering from the current slump in commodity prices. At the end of last month the USDA forecast farm incomes in the US to fall for the third consecutive year to their lowest level since 2009. In July Teagasc economists forecast average farm income to fall for all of the main farm sectors in 2016. So spare a thought for the farmer with significant debt levels. How are they coping in the current market slump and with the volatile future ahead?

While Irish farmers collectively have debts totalling 1.8bn, an interesting, and little known, statistic from the Teagasc National Farm Survey is that almost two-thirds of Irish farmers have no farm business related debt. The incidence of debt varies considerably by farm system. Unsurprisingly, dairy farms are the most likely to have debt and at the highest level, whereas sheep farms are the least likely.

The average level of borrowings on dairy farms is more than three times that on sheep farms.

With significant expansion taking place in milk production over the last number of years it is no surprise that many dairy farmers find themselves deeply indebted.

Dairy farmers invested over 300m on their farms in 2015 alone, a year when the milk price was not particularly encouraging for investment. At current milk prices many dairy farmers are struggling to cope with repayments on borrowings.

What is surprising however, is the debt-to-income ratio on farms.

When the level of debt is compared to the income generated by the farm, we actually see that cattle rearing farms are in the poorest position. The very low incomes generated on these predominantly suckler farms means that despite relatively low debt levels, the debt-to-income position is still not good. But when we look internationally we see that Irish farmers are in a relatively healthy financial position. The average debt levels per farm in Ireland are about three-quarters of the EU average and about just 10pc of the average levels in Denmark.

Despite our strong position internationally, Irish farmers are still struggling with repayments in the current market environment.

More stability around income would help farmers to make more informed investment decisions and to estimate repayment capacity more accurately.

While some initiatives offered by private companies such as Glanbia's Milk Flex fund, which offers suppliers flexible loans where repayments can vary according to movements in milk price, are welcome, more could be done from Brussels.

The EU lags significantly behind the US in offering publically operated or supported risk management tools to farmers.

A report by the Brussels-based think-tank Farm Europe shows that the income stabilisation tool has only served around 10,000 farmers across Europe and that the EU has invested less than 1pc of the CAP budget in insurance related risk management tools.

Greater public support for education programmes around the use of financial risk management tools such as future and forward contracts would also be desirable.

Thea Hennessy is an economist specialising in agriculture and food issues
Two new ranges of high quality sheargrabs developed and produced by SlurryKat have entered the market in time for the winter feeding period.

This is the first time the popular Northern Ireland machinery manufacturer has ventured into producing sheargrabs but was encouraged to do so by a number of farmers who were having problems with their own models.

The design team at SlurryKat heard how other sheargrabs were having difficulty handling silage and maize with high dry matter contents.

SlurryKat realised the importance of operating an efficient sheargrab with plenty of ram power to make the daily chore of feeding cattle as quick as possible without wasting time waiting on a grab closing. The brief for the designers was to come up with a series of grabs that would reduce cutting waste and have enough force to cut the silage block quickly and efficiently.

Two ranges of grabs of various sizes were developed namely the Farmcut range offering four models from 1.35m wide up to 1.95m wide.

The second Procut range consists of four models from 1.95m up to 2.55m.

The Farmcut range is designed for the smaller, less intensive livestock farm and the Procut range has a deeper, higher capacity cutter and is designed for large intensive livestock, dairy farms and Biogas plants.

SlurryKat say the block cutters are manufactured from unique high tensile grade steel and Hardox steel which will provide many years of life in this high stress application.

The larger grabs are available with two or three ram options which are uniquely designed hydraulic cylinders that provide 25 per cent more power compared to what other grab manufacturers use.

These cylinders have Nitox coated rods which eliminates any corrosion fears that can cause oil seal failures. Hardox serrated blades remain razor sharp for 50 per cent longer meaning less maintenance for the operator.

All the grabs have unique extra-long pivot hinge 50mm diameter pins and sleeved bushes which are 200mm long. These are double the length of many competing brands meaning many years of wear free life as this is a major stress point on all block cutters. The cutting arc design and tine relationship gives an undisturbed face meaning there is no secondary fermentation on the silo face.

The grabs are complete with bolt on heavy duty attachment brackets meaning if the operator changes the loader the grab can easily be attached to a different one. Prices start at 2,155 for the Farmcut 1350 model.
Before I started this article, I quickly opened my emails to see a lab result from an aborted calf we had sent in to be tested.

It had come back as positive for salmonella Dublin and this was the cause of the abortion. This is the second case I have identified in the last six weeks. It is not surprising, as autumn time tends to see the beginning of the peak risk time for salmonella abortions.

I also have had a huge amount of questions from dairy clients recently about positive results on their bulk milk screening tests for salmonella. Questions about how worried should they be and should they vaccinate their cows. This is a discussion each farmer must have with their own vet and decide based on risk about vaccination. Where it has been diagnosed on an abortion there is no discussion the vaccine must be used.

Salmonella is a significant disease in Irish dairy farms, and testing indicates it has a high prevalence - meaning it has been identified in a number of herds even though they aren't showing any clinical signs.

The reality, in practice, for me has been the number one disease I have seen associated with the infection in adult cows is abortion caused by a species of salmonella Dublin.

Followed by some herds getting enteritis or scours often caused by S.Dublin or on some occasions S.thphimurium. In calves it tends to cause septicaemias, which can present as calves with high temperatures being sick stiff and sore.

It can also cause scour in calves and a number of other conditions. So, the big question for farmers is 'I have none of these signs at the moment but my bulk screening test says I have salmonella positive antibodies'.

It can be confusing and I have to admit for many farmers frightening that this disease might be lurking in the herd. So to answer the question I have to explain what the test means.

A positive result means that there is evidence that some portion of your cows have encountered salmonella species and have created antibodies against them. This current test does not distinguish which species is in the herd but it can be used as an early warning sign.

So, to understand the significance of this test, we then need to look at how salmonella spreads in herds.

Cows that are infected with salmonella will often appear clinically normal and healthy, however they are carriers of the bacteria. What happens these animals at times of stress is they can begin shedding the bacteria infecting other cows or getting sick themselves. It is no wonder then, in rapidly expanding herds, this is one of the diseases that often causes problems.

Salmonella loves stressed cows under pressure and rapidly expanding herds will often meet the bugs' terms and conditions.

There is also more options around testing with further PCR tests on milk that can be used.

Blood tests can also be used but would prove expensive to run on a whole-herd basis. For me also, it is so important to send any aborted calves to the lab as it dramatically increases the chance of a diagnosis.

The problem for many farmers now is that they know they have some evidence of the disease in healthy cattle and their only option seems to be another expensive vaccine.

Knowing what I know about the disease I can only offer advice to vaccinate where I see a positive result on the bulk milk. I will often for those unsure, offer the option to talk to farmers who have experienced abortion storms or scour outbreaks in calves. Their experience will be to not take the risk.

It can be a devastating disease and the vaccination does present an option for controlling the disease. From my experience, like all vaccinations, timing is critical. Ensuring the vaccine is given pre the risk time, guarantees that the cows have maximum immunity against the disease when they need it. So talk to your vet about salmonella and timing of vaccination for your herd.

One other critical thing I have seen with salmonella is its link to fluke infestations. Fluke affects the liver and adult fluke reside in the gall bladder.

Salmonella carrier cows also have salmonella in the gallbladder so, often where you see fluke and salmonella present you can see a significant increase in the disease.

Just another reason for farms to have a stringent liver fluke control program.

It is also worth remembering of course that it can be spread to humans and great care should be taken handling suspect cases, cows and abortions. For those closed herds and herds that do not have any evidence of infection it is so important to keep the disease out!

The main risk factors for transmission are bought in stock (carriers) and infected animals.

It is also advisable to have a strict biosecurity plan in place to keep the disease out.

I was asked recently by a farmer who said to me 'there was none of this crack years ago why the hell do I need all these expensive vaccines now?'

My answer to him was that our modern herds are different and we face many challenges. I never promote vaccines as a silver bullet but an aid where necessary to remove the risk of disease.

Good husbandry and nutrition are still the backbone of a healthy herd. However, with expanding herds and more animal movement than ever we are playing into to the hands of these infectious diseases.

Vaccines are an aid along with good herd health planning to minimise the risk.

He probably left unhappy but did agree the modern cow and farmer, for that matter, have a more stressful existence.

Tommy Heffernan is a Co Wicklow-based vet email: heffernantommy@yahoo.ie
In the 1960s, many rural women considered farmers to be less than model marriage material.

While urban ladies had piped water at the time, less than half of rural homes had the same luxury so country women were left to pump and carry large buckets of water for hand-washing dishes and scrubbing clothes.

The Irish Countrywomen's Association established a campaign encouraging brides-to-be to refuse to marry until their partner had clean water running in the house.

The organisation even produced clever posters that read "Who said Love, Honour and Carry Water?," urging women to demand better living standards before the big "I do".

For the most part, they listened, and now, five decades later, the farmer has become a highly sought after companion. However, they still need a little guidance every now and again.

Lorna Sixsmith, dairy farmer, mum, blogger and author, has tackled the issue in her new book 'An Ideal Farm Husband'.

"In the past, a farmer wasn't considered ideal at all. It's really in the last 10 years that a farmer is seen as a good catch".

"It comes down to changing stereotypes. The farmer used to be seen as a Beverly hill-billy, then we had the Glenroe farmer. But now we've the farmer calenders, the glossy supermarket adverts with a good-looking farmer standing on a grassy hill, prize cattle around him, looking very wholesome and attractive," she said.

However, his relationship with his family and farm are what really counts. Ms Sixsmith got "a little braver" with her third book, however her trademark humorous vignettes remain central."I dealt with more demanding topics in this book. I wanted to include perspectives from different sides and provide reasonably balanced opinion, while being frank too.

The challenging topics include succession, pre-nuptials, sexism, retirement, living near the in-laws and mental health - these are all important to farming life and while I wanted to explore them sensitively, I want people to find my writing engaging too," she said.

The mother of two, and wife of Brian, said the biggest lesson a farm husband can learn from her new edition is that it's not always possible to keep everyone happy, so he must prioritise.

"Sometimes he needs to put himself first and give himself some "me time" and while at times he might feel he has to walk a tightrope between his wife and his mother, it doesn't have to be like that," she said.

However, she stresses that life will be a lot easier if his wife and kids feel they come first.

She said the biggest lesson a farm wife will learn is that it isn't easy for him to keep two women happy (his wife and his mother) and he does try.

"Particularly for wives from a non farming background, this book will help them both understand each other".

"It's important he knows that conversations with his friends and family about who died last week, who was left what in the will, who cut their silage, who sold cattle, who bought sheep, while fascinating to him, will be exceedingly boring to her if she doesn't know any of the people he's talking about," she said.

All work and no play isnt fun for anyone

Life with Brian, Lornas Sixsmiths husband of 24 years, has helped her illustrate the quintessential farm marriage.

From dosing calves and milking to sorting, counting, feeding and calving on their farm in Garrendenny, Co Laois, Ms Sixsmith believes all the stresses and challenges of farming can bring couples closer together.

I dont think an ideal farm husband really exists but I think it is a man who puts his family first and I cant but describe my husband. Its somebody who is a hard worker, is environmentally aware but also very conscious of animal welfare, someone who is good at what he does and has a positive outlook on life, she said.

We were out dosing calves the other day and that is not just because Im helping him but we actually get to spend some time together and I make the point in the book that as a farmer youre really lucky to be able to spend time with your kids and your spouse in this way because youre around, she said.

Taking the time in the busy day to give each other a hug or take an hour out to spend with the kids, all work and no play isnt fun for anyone, she said.

The former secondary school teacher, who started farming in dairy and beef with her husband 10 years ago when the family returned home to Ireland from the UK always runs themes and topics by Brian before they make the page.

I let him read it to make sure hes happy with the content because I share quite a bit of our personal life in my books but hes very supportive and great to bounce things off, he even comes up with new ideas, she said.

The author believes her new book, which is a companion to her first Would you Marry a Farmer? and her second How to be a Perfect Farm Wife? will also enhance marital relations on farms.

Its mainly written for the man to help him understand the complexities of modern women. However, there are quizzes within so she can gauge how well he is getting on, its a book they can read together really, she said.
Apple played by the rules, Denis OBrien said, criticising the ruling by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager

Businessman Denis O'Brien has revealed plans to personally invest as much as $450m (403m) on a network of undersea telecoms cables linking dozens of countries in the Caribbean.

The Digicel founder outlined the plan in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Television's Vonnie Quinn that also included harsh criticism of the European Commission's Apple tax ruling.

Regarding the underwater project, Mr O'Brien said that it is "one project that we are doing off balance sheet, which I am going to do personally.

"We are going to lay submarine cable to about 30 countries. That project is about $350m, but we're thinking about upscaling it to about $450m to go up to about 40 countries in the Caribbean region, putting high capacity, modern, submarine networks into those countries," he said.

Mr O'Brien's main Digicel business operates telecoms and communications businesses in 31 markets across the Caribbean, Central America and Asia Pacific. However, the submarine cable investment is being done outside of the Digicel group.

"That would be a personal project," he said.

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In addition, Digicel itself has invested $1bn over the past 18 months, including rolling out fibre to the home across markets where the group operates, he said.

Last October Digicel shelved plans for a $2bn stock market listing, citing market conditions. In his latest interview Mr O'Brien said that the company may revisit the stock market flotation plan if the market improves.

"We look upon this opportunistically. We were very fortunate that we never had to go and sell shares in the market," Mr O'Brien said.

"If the market changes we'll probably look at doing an IPO again but at the moment it is not imminent because the market is too unstable," he said. In the meantime, he said Digicel business is growing, and will go into "positive territory" in next 18 months after being hit by the impact of currency swings in some of its key markets, including Haiti and Papua New Guinea.

The group is looking at potential bolt-on acquisitions, and Cuba could be an "interesting" market if the country opens up, he said.

However, he effectively ruled out expansion into Africa, an emerging markets region where Digicel does not operate, saying the plan is to focus on investments in markets where the group already has a presence.

Away from his own interests, Mr O'Brien said US technology giant Apple should not be punished for its tax arrangements in Ireland.

The European Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has ordered the Irish Government to collect 13bn in back taxes from Apple, that the Government here says is not owed.

"Apple played by the rules," Denis O'Brien told Bloomberg Television. "Brussels is out of control in terms of the federalism agenda," he said.

"Vestager just picked on them because they are one of the biggest brands and most valuable companies in the world and said 'we're going to try something here'," O'Brien said. "I don't believe it's going to succeed."

Mr O'Brien, who is a shareholder in INM which owns the Irish Independent, said that with the exception of Ireland, Europe was not a great place to invest. "Europe is in a pretty dangerous place at the moment.

"I think Brussels is out of control in terms of the federalism agenda. I think smaller countries are also concerned about giving up a lot of the decision making to Brussels.

"And also I think the handling, and I have a lot of sympathy for immigrants coming to Europe, the handling of the immigration crisis was a fiasco," he said.

"Europe is not a great place to invest right now. I'd single Ireland out. Ireland is the shining light right now. We've made a fantastic recovery from the banking crisis that we've had.

"And despite Brexit, it really puts attention back on Ireland as a great place to invest because you've got a highly trained workforce and proper governance and rules there."
Domestic spending has overtaken exports as the key driver of growth in the Irish economy, according to the latest research from the ESRI.

It's a shift compared to the earlier phase of the Irish recovery which was driven largely by a surge in exports.

"There is now a considerable contrast between the domestic and external components of growth. With the former, investment and, particularly, consumption are fuelling present growth rates. On the external trade side, there is evidence of a softening of the growth performance," according to Professor Kieran McQuinn of the ESRI.

Over-reliance on domestic demand was a key feature of the Irish economy in the run-up to the crash, especially demand for housing.

Dr David Duffy, also of the ESRI, said it would prefer to see more balanced growth - with exports and domestic demand rising in tandem.

However, he said the latest shift away from export growth appears to reflect external rather than internal factors.

"(It's) not a deterioration in competitiveness, so far," he said.

The ESRI, in its latest quarterly economic commentary, has revised down its growth forecasts for 2016 and 2017, including to take account of the fallout from the Brexit vote in the UK last June. GDP is expected to grow by 4.3pc in 2016. Forecasts for GDP growth in 2017 has been revised down to 3.8pc.

Confusions, including those caused by the surprise 26pc growth rate reported for the Irish economy last year, make forecasting important economic elements, including the State's corporation tax income, difficult, the researchers said.

It says the Irish economy is broadly in balance this year - and therefore says tax cuts or spending increases are not needed, according to the ESRI.

"Budgetary policy should be neutral. It's important to keep the income tax base as stable as possible as a component of the overall tax base," said Prof Kieran McQuinn.

A recent surge in corporation tax should not be used to justify income tax reductions, he said, comparing it to the boom when the State allowed its reliance on income tax to fall on the back of unsustainable stamp duty and capital gains receipts.

"We need to heed the lessons of the past," he said. With evidence that Irish taxpayers are hit with higher rates at lower incomes than workers in other developed countries, he argued that any tax cuts for middle income earners - including reduced USC rates - should be matched by taking more lower income workers into the tax net, or hitting higher earners.

The ESRI said there is no evidence that tax changes are needed to entice more workers into the labour force. However, it favours increased public spending to boost housing supply.
Greencore chief executive Patrick Coveney with Alan Williams, chief financial officer, at the companys 2014 AGM

Greencore chief financial officer (CFO) Alan Williams is to leave the Irish food firm to take up the same position at UK building materials group Travis Perkins.

Mr Williams, who has spent nearly six years at the company, is to be replaced by Eoin Tonge who has overseen the firm's UK grocery business since 2014.

Mr Tonge will take up the role on October 3 when he will also be appointed as a director of the company. Greencore said his predecessor will stay at the company until the end of 2016 to ensure a smooth transition.

The appointment comes ten years after Mr Tonge joined Greencore as capital markets director with responsibility for treasury, investor relations and communications.

In 2014 Mr Tonge was appointed managing director of Greencore's grocery division in the UK and has been a member of the firm's executive board since its inception in 2012.

Greencore chief executive Patrick Coveney praised his new CFO. "In addition to his strong operational leadership of our grocery division, Eoin has played a critical role in shaping our group's 'Food to Go' strategy, led the delivery of the Uniq acquisition, executed several key acquisitions in the US, and spent nearly four years as a leader in our central finance team," he said.

The Uniq deal was seen as a major coup for Greencore five years ago.

In 2011 the company spent 113m (131m) on what was then a main rival in the UK.

Mr Williams's departure comes after Greencore exploited weakened sterling to snap up a UK sandwich business for 17.9m in July.

Shares in the company were hit significantly post-Brexit but have normalised, increasing by 18.6pc to 3.40 (3.94) since the referendum.

The Greencore boss also paid homage to his outgoing CFO, Mr Williams.

"We would like to thank Alan for his outstanding contribution to the growth and success of Greencore since he joined us in 2011," he said.
UK property firm Hammerson has been showing off its recently acquired Dundrum Shopping Centre in Dublin to investors, and detailing its strategy for the Irish market.

The group has brought investors and analysts to Dublin this week for a two-day site visit.

They also visited the Ilac Centre and the Pavilions centre in Swords, in which Hammerson also now owns stakes.

The investors are having a breakfast meeting at Davy Stockbrokers this morning and will then visit Liffey Valley and Blanchardstown shopping centres.

Liffey Valley has been put up for sale by owners Grosvenor, HSBC and Hines and is expected to fetch about 600m. The Blanchardstown centre was sold for 950m this year to Blackstone.

At the Davy event, Hammerson is hosting a panel discussion on the Irish retail environment, while investors will then be brought on a tour of other retail destinations in the capital, including Grafton Street.

Hammerson and the property arm of German insurer Allianz finalised the acquisition of Dundrum Shopping Centre during the summer.

Hammerson and Allianz acquired the so-called 'Project Jewel' loans from Nama, with all of the loans associated with developer Joe O'Reilly and his firm, Chartered Land.

A total of 2.6bn worth of loans attached to the properties were acquired for 1.85bn.

Hammerson secured sole ownership of the 50pc stakes in both the Ilac and the Pavilions that were sold, as well as development sites adjoining each of the three assets.

Hammerson has previously said that it sees huge potential for the city centre development site it acquired. It extends over 5.3 acres and includes property on Henry Street, Parnell Street, Moore Street and O'Connell Street.

In Dublin yesterday and today, senior Hammerson management have been giving presentations on the company's strategy in Ireland, as well as providing an overview on the Irish macro backdrop and the current retail property market.

Among those who are in Dublin this week are Hammerson chief executive David Atkins, chief financial officer Timon Drakesmith, and the company's director of retail for Ireland, Simon Betty.

"We're seeing great demand for space, a good level of retail sales and we've got plenty of ideas we want to put in place," said Mr Atkins regarding Dundrum in an interview with the 'Sunday Telegraph' this week.

"There's a long list of demand [from retailers] because Chartered Land, which was running the asset, was in Nama, so the financial element of what it did was effectively controlled by the Irish government," he added.

"They weren't particularly interested in putting new capital to work so were quite constrained in terms of what they could do."

Among the new chains set to open in Dundrum is US burger brand Five Guys. The Irish franchise for the business was acquired by Brett, Ross and Derry Desmond - the sons of billionaire financier Dermot.

Mr Atkins said that he's confident about the economic outlook for Ireland.

"It's our belief that you have an economy now built on much stronger foundations and enjoying much more sustainable growth," he said in his interview. "So we think the outlook for Ireland looks strong."
Moodys rating is good news in particular for the big two banks

Rating agency Moody's Investors Service has upgraded the deposit ratings of all three domestically-owned Irish bank, and left ratings of the other main lenders unchanged.

Moody's lifted deposit ratings for AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent tsb (Ptsb) and affirmed deposit ratings on KBC Bank Ireland and Ulster Bank.

"The main driver for the rating actions is the improvement in credit conditions in the banking system following the rapid and material deleveraging of the private sector, as well as stronger funding conditions as most banks have regained the ability to issue different debt instruments," said Laurie Mayers, an associate managing director at Moody's.

"These positive developments have been reflected in an increase in Moody's Macro Profile for Ireland," Ms Mayers added.

"The rating actions also incorporate the strengthening of the banks' credit fundamentals, especially the progress they have made in reducing non-performing assets, improving the quality of earnings and strengthening their capital metrics."

In essence Moody's says the Irish banks are operating in an improved operating environment. It increased its Macro Profile of Ireland to 'Strong' from 'Moderate+.

At the same time Moody's said banks have made progress in reducing non-performing assets, improving the quality of earnings and strengthening their capital metrics.

The rating agency believes that Irish banks will continue to maintain their access to the market at competitive prices during 2016 and will potentially increase their debt issuance.

Still, it said private sector debt remains very high compared to other European countries but is declining rapidly.

The latest Moody's assessment is good news for AIB and Bank of Ireland in particular, which have seen shares hit this year on investor fears about the impact of the UK's Brexit vote in June as well as their weak showing in the results of Europe-wide bank stress tests published in July.

The European Banking Authority stress tests found both of Ireland's biggest banks remain among the most vulnerable in Europe to a financial shock.

Moody's said Ptsb's long-term deposits and senior debt ratings reflect improvement in the bank's credit fundamentals, despite the potential decline in the capital and profitability of a planned sale of its remaining UK non-core portfolio.
Here are the main business stories from this morning's papers:

Irish Independent

* Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary - who campaigned for UK voters to shun Brexit - insisted yesterday that the British government will be "screwed" in negotiations with the European Union.

"The European Union is not going to make it easy for the UK. All this kind of arrogant nonsense in London - 'we're the fifth biggest economy in the world, they'll give a good deal...they won't," he told an audience at a Confederation of British Industry (CBI) event in Belfast.

* Domestic spending has overtaken exports as the key driver of growth in the Irish economy, according to the latest research from the ESRI.

It's a shift compared to the earlier phase of the Irish recovery which was driven largely by a surge in exports.

* Businessman Denis O'Brien has revealed plans to personally invest as much as $450m (403m) on a network of undersea telecoms cables linking dozens of countries in the Caribbean.

The Digicel founder outlined the plan in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Television's Vonnie Quinn that also included harsh criticism of the European Commission's Apple tax ruling.

The Irish Times

* New mortgage rules introduced by the Central Bank are likely to curtail the delivery of new homes by up to 5pc over the next four years, according to a new report from the Economic and Social Research Institute.

The report suggest that over the coming years house prices will come down on average by 3.5pc due to introduction of the rules.

* Finance minister Michael Noonan has defended the Government's plan to ease the universal social charge out over the next five budgets.

Mr Noonan said the USC had been introduced as an emergency measure during the crisis and that it was now time to phase it out.

* Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has said Britain will lose out on trade deals if article 50 is triggered, prompting the UK to leave the European Union.

Mr O'Leary also said the majority of the British cabinet wouldn't have an idea as to what Brexit would actually look like.

Irish Examiner

* The ESRI has said there is no rationale for any tax cuts in the upcoming budget and suggests it should focus on expenditure to improve economic growth.

The think tank has called for the Government to issue a neutral budget for next year.

* Ryanair's auxiliary revenue climbed to 1.57bn last year, despite the fact it was without a car rental vendor for part of the year.

Revenue from non-ticket sources rose by 13pc last year for the airline.

* Irish exploration company Clontarf Energy has raised around 460,000 from through a share placing.

The firm placed 80 million ordinary shares with new and existing shareholders, representing around 15pc of the company's new share capital.
Digital solutions firm SoftwareOne has announced it is to add 100 jobs in Ireland in a 16m investment.

The company set up an office in Mahon in County Cork in 2011, and the majority of the new roles will be based there.

The company provides consultative advice for corporates on the latest digital trends and had revenues in excess of $5bn last year.

SoftwareOne is seeking to hire front end developers, test engineers, user experience experts, as well as HR professionals as part of its Irish expansion.

The firm also announced the launch of Pyracloud, a new cloud based platform which will allow companies analyse on premise software spends and will assist in extracting technical and business drivers.

Mike Gestern, SoftwareONEs Global Innovations and Platforms Officer said: This is a very exciting time in SoftwareONEs journey. We are a global leader when it comes to software licencing and now we have developed an innovative solution which offers seamless control of cloud solutions and services to our customers.

Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Mary Mitchell O Connor said: We are all aware that cloud computing is a huge growth area and this company is at the cutting edge of this exciting development. SoftwareOnes expansion builds on our success in developing a thriving software sector in Ireland over recent years following our investment in developing wider skills.

SoftwareONE is headquartered in Switzerland and operates in 82 countries around the globe. The firm currently has around 25,000 clients, along with a global workforce of 3,000.
An increasing number of employers are interested in the social media activities of potential employees, according to a new report.

The report states that over a third of employers expressed a preference for job applicants to include details of their social media accounts on their CVs.

According to research carried out by uCheck, 44pc of employers say discriminatory comments would be the biggest no-no for social media users.

The research also found that 77pc of job applicants are surveying potential employers online to become more familiar with what the firm is looking for.

The survey of 1,000 employers across the UK and Ireland found that 33.5pc would prefer applicants to include their social media details in their CV.

Comments on social media that could be interpreted as sexist, racist or discriminatory in any way were regarded as the biggest turn off for employers.

Bad-mouthing a friend or colleague was unacceptable to 14.7pc of potential employers.

The posting of provocative or inappropriate videos online was also a major bugbear for recruiters, while poor spelling or grammar was viewed unfavourably by 10.9pc of companies.

Evidence of drunken behaviour would be a cause of alarm to 9.9pc of firms, while 6.9pc of respondents say they would view the use of bad language on social media in a negative light.

"Social media can be a bit of a social minefield," says George Griffiths from uCheck.

"Nowadays so much about us is available to be viewed, which we often forget as we assume that it's just our friends or family who will be following our every social media move. But as we've discovered there's a lot that can put people off."

Niamh O' Brien, business director of Irish Recruitment Consultants, agreed that users and applicants needed to be increasingly mindful of the type of profile they are portraying.

"We are seeing an increase in companies using platforms like Facebook and Twitter to apply for jobs. That has the advantage of being a much quicker process of recruitment, because people check their Facebook a lot more than they would things like LinkedIn. But if an applicant applies through that process, obviously their profile is accessible to the company and they will click on it."

Ms O'Brien added that the trend has become particularly pronounced over the past year, but noted that people should not over-egg their personal social media profiles. "The use of social media sites for recruiting has really snowballed in the past 12 months.

"We use it here as a means to access potential employees a lot more efficiently. Obviously, you don't really want to see people passed out lying on the floor, but at the same time we are not expecting people to be wearing suits in all their photos.

"A general sign of a rounded individual who has some hobbies and friends is really what companies are looking for."
Microsoft says it is going to solve cancer in the next 10 years.

The company is working at treating the disease like a computer virus, that invades and corrupts the bodys cells. Once it is able to do so, it will be able to monitor for them and even potentially reprogramme them to be healthy again, experts working for Microsoft have said.

The company has built a biological computation unit that says its ultimate aim is to make cells into living computers. As such, they could be programmed and reprogrammed to treat any diseases, such as cancer.

In the nearer term, the unit is using advanced computing research to try and set computers to work learning about drugs and diseases and suggesting new treatments to help cancer patients.

The team hopes to be able to use machine learning technologies  computers that can think and learn like humans  to read through the huge amounts of cancer research and come to understand the disease and the drugs that treat it.

At the moment, so much cancer research is published that it is impossible for any doctor to read it all. But since computers can read and understand so much more quickly, the systems will be able to read through all of the research and then put that to work on specific peoples situations.

It does that by bringing together biology, maths and computing. Those have long been treated as relatively distinct but are coming closer together in recent years, and have been spurred on by Microsofts investment.

The field of biology and the field of computation might seem like chalk and cheese, Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Researchs Cambridge-based lab, told Fast Company. But the complex processes that happen in cells have some similarity to those that happen in a standard desktop computer.

As such, those complex processes can potentially be understood by a desktop computer, too. And those same computers could be used to understand how cells behave and to treat them.

If that were possible, then those computers wouldnt only be able to understand why cells behave as they do and when they might be about to become cancerous. Theyd also be able to trigger a response within a cell, reversing its decision and reprogramming it so that it is healthy again.

Microsoft says that solution could be with us within the next five or ten years.

Andrew Philips, who leads Microsofts biological computation group, told The Telegraph that in as little as five years it hopes to be able to develop a system for detecting problems. Its long term, but  I think it will be technically possible in five to ten years time to put in a smart molecular system that can detect disease.
How does Mel Gibson like his steak?

Medium rare, according to Dublin restaurant F.X. Buckley.

The restaurant shared a photo of the bearded Hollywood star on their Facebook page and explained that he tucked into "kidneys and a medium rare fillet" for his hearty dinner.

Taking to social media, the venue proudly shared the snap of Mel with their sommelier Albert.

When Mel is in Dublin he eats at FX Buckley. He has kidneys and a medium rare fillet, they wrote.

Gibson is in the capital for eight weeks to shoot The Professor and The Madman, alongside Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn. The film tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is expected to shoot in Dublin for eight weeks, with production beginning at the end of the month.

He previously visited Ireland for professional reasons for the filming of Braveheart, when he made use of the army reserve. The flick was filmed across several locations in Dublin, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow.

The Braveheart director plays professor James Murray, who began compiling the OED in 1857 and led the overseeing committee. Penn portrays Dr William Chester Minor, an inmate at an insane asylum who submitted more than 10,000 entries for the dictionary.

The film is based on a book of the same name by Simon Winchester, which Gibson acquired the rights to almost 20 years ago.

The film will also star a slew of up and coming Irish talent including Rob McCormack, Abigail Coburn, Zoe Moran, Phonsie Wardell, and Nora Cooper, cast from an extensive search as the family of Professor Murray.

Oscar-winning Sean is also no stranger to Irish shores. The actor previously worked in the city with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino on This Must Be the Place in August 2010.
Today FM are raising funds for the Irish Cancer Society with their Dare to Care campaign. Photo: Shauna O'Reilly / Twitter

Today FM dared their female listeners to swap their usual office attire for wedding dresses to raise money for the Irish Cancer Society.

As part of the station's Dare To Care campaign, women (and men) from all over Ireland went to work in their wedding dresses. Those who didn't have one still managed to get into the spirit of the event by donning bridesmaid dresses or tuxedos.

The campaign got a huge response from charitable people all over Ireland; from the school teacher in Naas to the factory worker in Limerick, the lecturer in Galway, the Crossfitter in Clonee and the mother doing the school run in her guna.

Shauna OReilly from The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show came up with the novel idea and is delighted with the response so far: Initially, I thought it would be brilliant to get one or two women to do it but the reaction was just massive, its completely blown me away.

"Irish women were obviously just waiting for an opportunity to get back into their wedding dresses!

Today FM staff are getting in on the act too  presenter Alison Curtis will be making an appearance on TV3s Midday show dressed in her own wedding dress on the day while the stations news team will read the hourly news bulletins in their bridal best.

To sign up for your dare today, log on here

To donate to Today FM, click here
Elaine Hayde from Kilkenny is a mining geologist looking to strike gold in the barren desert east of Perth.

Elaine studied geology at University College Cork. When she didnt find opportunities at home, she decided to try to make it down under. She spends long shifts underground and has learned to hold her own in the male-dominated mining profession.

I was trying to figure out what to do next. At university I met a recruitment agent from Australia for mining companies. I did a phone interview and then two days later they said Youre on a plane next week!

Elaine is based at Goldfields mines, 600 kilometres east of Perth, and has to fly in and out for jobs.

Theres red dirt everywhere and not a whole lot else. Its pretty barren and isolated, she says.

To see more of Elaines story, tune into RTE One for Making it Down Under at 8.30pm tonight.
Denis Donaldson, the senior Sinn Fein official and British spy, who was shot in Donegal in April, 2006. Photo: PA

Denis Donaldson's role as both IRA man and British agent before his death in 2006 sparked speculation over an alleged Republican spy ring at Stormont.

The 'Stormont Gate' scandal in 2002 saw scores of PSNI officers raid Sinn Fein's offices there, after accusations that an IRA spy ring was intelligence- gathering.

Denis Donaldson - Sinn Fein's Assembly Group administrator at the time - was arrested shortly afterwards. Two weeks later the Stormont Assembly was suspended.

The Stormont raid followed a break-in at Castlereagh Police Station on St Patrick's Day in 2002, where three men stole sensitive documents used by Special Branch.

Police said they believed a chef from New York, Larry Zaitschek - who was working in the station's canteen at the time - was the IRA's inside man.

Zaitschek always protested his innocence and the case ultimately collapsed after police revealed they could not disclose new evidence uncovered over the raid.

Donaldson had been working as a British agent since the 1980s, but he declined to tell his handlers about a previous connection to 'Larry the chef'. As an IRA man he had travelled the world working as a recruiter and building contacts with groups such as the Northern aid group, NORAID.

In New York, he met and befriended Larry and encouraged him to move to Northern Ireland. The connection made his spymasters question his true loyalty.

A 'Spotlight' investigation claims that Donaldson also knew about the spy ring at Stormont.

The man identified only as Martin - said he discovered the spy ring after Donaldson "let the cat out of the bag" to him.

"The common belief is Denis Donaldson told Special branch about the spy ring at Stormont, but it was me," he said. The case against Donaldson was dropped in 2005, something 'Spotlight' say they understood was done to protect his identity as a British agent. Before long, his former staunch supporter Gerry Adams held a press conference with the "scoop" that Donaldson was a spy.

Donaldson admitted the truth shortly afterwards. Martin told 'Spotlight' he had "signed his own death warrant".

A Garda investigation into his murder is ongoing.

In July, a 74 year-old man was charged over withholding information in connection with the murder.

'Spotlight' said they understood the investigation is now focused on a separate individual outside the Irish Republic described as "sympathetic to dissident republicans".

A journal written by Denis Donaldson is currently being held by Garda investigators.

He was encouraged to write it by republicans as part of his debriefing process.
Tributes have been paid following the death of Dublin dentist John O'Grady, who was subjected to a vicious kidnapping ordeal at the hands of ex-IRA man Dessie O'Hare in 1987.

It is believed Dr O'Grady had been ill for some time and passed away yesterday afternoon in the Blackrock Clinic.

Expand Close Ex-IRA man Dessie OHare / Facebook

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Whatsapp Ex-IRA man Dessie OHare

"He was such a lovely, decent and generous man. He had a wide circle of family and friends who loved him very much," one friend said. Funeral arrangements are to be announced.

Dr O'Grady, who had his dental surgery in Ballsbridge, was kidnapped from his home in Cabinteely on October 13, 1987, by O'Hare, also known as the 'Border Fox'.

He was held captive for 23 days before his release. O'Hare was subsequently sentenced to 40 years imprisonment. He served 16 years of his sentence before his release in 1999.

Father-of-three Dr O'Grady was reunited with his family on November 5 - some 23 days after his ordeal began. During his time in captivity, O'Hare chopped the tips off two of Dr O'Grady's fingers. Despite his injuries, Dr O'Grady was able to resume his career at his surgery in Ballsbridge and went about his business as usual.

O'Hare and his gang pleaded guilty to the kidnapping - meaning the dentist did not have to relive his ordeal during the trial.

Dr O'Grady was not the intended victim of the gang who had mistaken his home for that of his father-in-law, the high-profile millionaire medical entrepreneur Dr Austin Darragh.

The gang demanded a ransom of IR1.5m. Despite the frequent reports of Dr Darragh's financial success, even he was unable to raise the amount of cash, which would be equivalent to over 20m now.

He was finally freed by gardai during a bloody shoot-out in the suburb of Cabra during which one officer was shot and seriously wounded.

Dr O'Grady also received a gunshot wound to his hand during the shoot-out.

O'Hare had already left the house by the time gardai arrived but was tracked to Urlingford, Co Kilkenny, where he was shot and injured by an Army sniper. His associate Martin Bryan was killed.

O'Hare was sentenced to a minimum 40 years of imprisonment. However, he was granted 'political' status in prison and sought early release under the 1999 amnesty.

Dr O'Grady never spoke publicly about his ordeal.

He was scheduled to address a conference at the Dublin County Stress Clinic in October 2000 but pulled out at the last minute after he was informed of possible legal consequences arising from O'Hare's High Court action for early release under the amnesty.

O'Hare was finally released by order of the High Court in April 2006. O'Hare never apologised for his actions in torturing and mutilating Dr O'Grady.
The largest union at Bus Eireann is set to ballot its members for industrial action over management plans to turn Expressway into a low wage bus service.

The National Bus and Railworkers Union accused the company of dropping an industrial relations bombshell today by revealing proposals that threaten the livelihoods of 800 workers.

Members of the union had already balloted in favour of industrial action if cuts were imposed, but the threat of strikes has grown after the union announced a new ballot after the details of the plan were revealed.

Bus Eireann said it plans to turn the Expressway service into a new business entity and implement new terms and conditions for staff.

And a letter from Chief Executive Martin Nolan ruled out pay rises.

He said the companys finances are in a critical position, with losses of 6m expected this year.

General Secretary of the Nbru, Dermot OLeary, warned that the union will not tolerate the imposition of a low wage bus transport service as a solution to problems that resulted from department policy.

The current Dublin Bus dispute and this crisis at Bus Eireann are not unconnected, he said.

There are huge question marks over the Department of Transport and its stewardship of the state-owned public transport services.

He accused it of cutting off vital financial support and overseeing a licencing regime that has led to the potential decimation of the Expressway service that connects every nook and cranny in rural Ireland.

It is now time for politicians from across all parties and none to step up to the plate on behalf of the communities they purport to represent, he said.

The Irish electorate can be extremely unforgiving to those they elect who fail to protect vital social services.

Staff were informed of the proposals in a letter from the Chief Executive yesterday as their unions attended talks in pursuit of a pay rise at the Workplace Relations Commission.

After eight years of pay stagnation, the company not alone indicated that it would not be in a position to contemplate any pay rises but also dropped an Industrial relations bombshell in relation to the future of the Expressway service he said.

Letter

In a letter sent to staff today, Martin Nolan says that new terms and conditions will be implemented for staff in Expressway, and routes will be sub-contracted.

He warns that the company is in a very serious and difficult situation and has drawn up a survival plan that is the "only course" open to it.

The CEO said management are due to meet unions at the Workplace Relations Commission this morning to discuss a claim for a pay rise lodged on behalf of staff.

But he said the trading position of the company dictates that no payroll increases can be contemplated at this time.

The company finances are in a critical position with losses of 5.6m in 2015 and projected losses of 6m in 2016, he said. A minimum turnaround of 7m is required.

He said the board and management of Bus Eireann are faced with very difficult decisions and have drawn up a plan to address the severe financial difficulties.

Whilst both the schools and public service obligation businesses are performing satisfactorily, the Expressway business  despite extensive promotion and development  is continuing to lose money, he said.

He said there were a number of factors contributing to this including increased competition from low cost operators and increased costs including claims and staffing costs. He said the motorway network is facilitating new business models for competitors.

Mr Nolan noted that a pay cut in 2014, which led to a return to profitability, had been reversed last year.

He said the structural changes required would involve separating Expressway from the rest of the business and implementing new terms and conditions for staff.

In addition, a a number of routes will be sub-contracted although all routes that are currently operated will continue to do so.

He said a new management and support structure will be implemented for the Expressway business.

Other efficiency measures may be required across the entire business, he said. Regulatory issues and market conditions would indicate that the company will need to restructure as it moves into the future.

He said staff will be consulted on these measures with a view to gaining agreement.

In light of the above it should be clear that the overall trading position of the company dictates that no payroll increases can be contemplated at this time, he said..

I would urge staff representatives to engage meaningfully with the company to agree an implementation plan for the Expressway business and seek to return the company to stability so that the reasonable expectations of staff can be met in the future.

The commercial plan is designed to ensure Bus Eireanns future stability under a sustainable financial model and give protection to services for customers as well as providing longer term sustainable employment for staff. The Board and Management of Bus Eireann believe that this action, although very difficult, is the only course open for the company.
An inquest into a newborn baby who died shortly after birth heard on Wednesday that elements of his postnatal care was not acceptable.

Baby Conor Whelan died shortly before 7.30am on May 14, 2014, around 17 and a half hours after he was born in Cavan General Hospital.

Dr Ann Katherine Leahy, a consultant paediatrician, who was called to the theatre after baby Conor was born showing no signs of life gave testimony of extensive efforts to save him.

A blood transfusion was given to Conor 85 minutes after he was delivered. Dr Leahy told the court today that she did not find this timeline acceptable.

The court also heard that the rate of transfusion to Conor in Cavan General Hospital was 40mls over two hours, which compares to the Rotunda where the rate was 60mls in half an hour.

Dr Leahy also said she did not find the rate of transfusion in Cavan acceptable.

She said in reviewing the case one of the factors the Cavan team considered the timing when blood was administered and that it would have been more correct to administer blood earlier although she said she didnt think it would have made a difference [to the outcome].

Guidelines from the Rotunda Hospital in relation to postpartum care in high risk cases were read in court by Roger Murray, counsel for the Whelan family. These guidelines state that a consultant paediatrician should be present at time of delivery if certain risks are identified, including the need for an emergency caesarean.

Dr Leahy did not arrive to treat Conor until after his delivery.

When asked by Mr Murray if this was contrary to those guidelines she agreed it was.

However a doctor, Dr Foran, who works in the Rotunda later said the guidelines indicate a paediatric team and not necessarily a consultant need to be present depending on the risk factors.

The baby had no heartbeat initially which would have moved the blood around his body, but a heartbeat was recovered. He was never able to breathe on his own.

Dr Leahy said she believed the baby was deceased at birth and that successive adrenaline may have been why his heart began beating.

Earlier the inquest heard that Ms Whelan had been suffering from an undiagnosed condition called vasa praevia.

This is an obstetric complication in which foetal blood vessels cross or run near the internal orifice of the uterus.

The court heard that the placenta was divided into two discs, joined by vital arteries and veins via the membrane.

Concerns were raised about a low-lying placenta, which could have been an indicator of this condition, in March and the expectant mum underwent an ultrasound on March 21.

Ms Whelan has claimed that she was told during following that scan that her consultant, Dr Azhar Syed, would likely do a follow up internal exam to follow up on concerns about her placenta.

This exam never took place and staff at the hospital have disputed her recollection in court.

On Wednesday Dr Syed told the court that he was not aware of the report from the March 21 scan and that he was also not aware about concerns about a possible low-lying placenta at any stage during her pregnancy.

He also said that radiologists said they did not feel skilled enough to prepare maternal scan reports and requested a new process to be put in place, in May 2014.

There is nobody at Cavan General Hospital at the moment who specialises in maternal ultrasounds for pregnant women. Work is underway to recruit a specialist in obstetric ultrasounds and a 20 week scan will be given as routine to all women when this happens. If a concern is raised now Dr Syed said he assists by performing a scan and preparing a report himself.

The court heard on Tuesday that a 20 week scan, something mum Siobhan has said she believes all pregnant women in Ireland should get, is safer for women. It is a scan most likely to diagnose abnormalities and also any problems with the placenta.

Dr Syed said today that vasa praevia, a rare condition, is difficult to diagnose but has good outcomes when it is diagnosed.

Following the death of Conor Whelan Dr Syed said there had been learning in the obstetrics department in Cavan General Hospital.

Baby Conor Whelan had to be revived after his delivery and was transferred to the Rotunda for emergency care before he was returned to Cavan to spend his final hours with his family.

The inquest into Conors death continues today before Coroner Mary Flanagan in Cavan Court.
A jury has been selected for the trial of former Anglo Irish Bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick on charges of misleading the banks auditors.

The trial, which is taking place at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, is expected to last three months.

This morning, prior to the jury being selected, Mr FitzPatrick (67) pleaded not guilty to 27 charges put to him.

Wearing a navy suit, light blue shirt and wine tie, Mr FitzPatrick, of Whitshed Road, Greystones, Co Wicklow, spoke only to say not guilty after each charge was read.

The charges include 21 counts of making a misleading, false or deceptive statement to auditors and six charges of furnishing false information in the years 2002 to 2007.

The charges are connected with the alleged non-disclosure of multi-million euro loans held by Mr FitzPatrick or people close to him when auditors Ernst & Young were conducting end of financial year audits.

An enlarged jury of seven men and eight women was selected over the course just over an hour.

Almost 100 potential jurors came before the court. Eight of these were challenged by the defence, while four were challenged by the prosecution.

Neither side is required to give reasons for challenging a potential juror.

Around 70 other potential jurors were excused by Judge John Aylmer for one reason or other.

These included a person who had a connection to Ernst & Young. An AIB employee was also excused.

Another potential juror knew a witness, one woman said she could not commit to a 12-week trial, while another woman said she was decidedly not neutral in the case of bankers and was excused by the judge.

The jurors were asked by Judge Aylmer to return to the court on Monday, but he said they would not be needed after that point for a period of two weeks as there was an issue which required legal argument in their absence.

He told them that they had taken an oath to only give a verdict in accordance with the evidence put before them.

The judge said it was of obvious importance that jurors did not seek out any information outside of what they heard in court. He added that it was of utmost importance that they restrain themselves from seeking information from social media or anywhere else.

Judge Aylmer said it was natural that their families would be curious about the case.

He said he was happy for jurors to tell people the nature of the charges, but said they would have to restrain themselves from discussing things any further until after the trial.

I ask you not to engage in those sort of conversations, he said.

This is a very important case to give you. I hope you realise why it is important, the judge said.

Earlier, the judge outlined to potential jurors several categories of person who were deemed ineligible for the jury in this case.

These included: anyone who knows Mr FitzPatrick or anyone connected to the case, persons who have expressed views in public or on social media on issues connected to Anglo or the banking crisis, and people who have strong feelings in relation to the crisis which would affect their impartiality.

Also excluded were persons in any campaign or protest group or who had been involved in anti-austerity protests.

Current or former bank shareholders were excluded, as were people employed or in any way connected with Anglos successor, the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation.

Other categories of person excluded included people employed or connected to Ernst & Young, persons employed as an accountant or auditor, or current or former employees of the Central Bank, Department of Public Expenditure and Reform or the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.
The seven-year-old daughter of a former university professor had to ask her father to stop punching his wife, a judge was told yesterday.

The eldest daughter of 51-year-old Juan Augusto saw him punch his wife in the face several times, Downpatrick County Court heard.

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But prosecuting lawyer Laura Ievers also alleged "there was an attempt to strangle, there was kicking, there was stamping and it was a sustained incident".

Ms Ievers said the little girl told police in a recorded interview that she saw her father striking her mother. She "told him to desist and not only did he stop, but he immediately expressed remorse and phoned the emergency services", the prosecutor said.

The court also heard there were allegations that Augusto tried to "pull her teeth" and that she was "rendered unconscious" in the alleged strangulation.

Earlier this year, the defendant, originally from Argentina but now living on the Belfast Road in Comber, pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm to his wife, Julie-Ann Augusto, on August 13 last year.

He was handed a three-month jail term by Deputy District Judge Sean O'Hare. Augusto was released on bail pending an appeal scheduled for yesterday, but he came to court carrying a suitcase prepared to go to jail should the sentence remain in force.

The Argentinian academic now works as a computer science professor at Middlesex University after a number of years teaching at Ulster University, where he lectured students and helped PhD researchers.

Mrs Augusto was set to give evidence against her husband until defence QC John McCrudden told Downpatrick County Court that the appeal could proceed "on the papers" using written evidence.

While Ms Ievers contended that other evidence from doctors, A&E consultants and police officers supported the allegations made by Mrs Augusto, she told the court "there's still an issue over the minutiae of that which is alleged".

Mr McCrudden said it was the defence case that Augusto struck his wife "four to five times with punches", but conceded that was also "reprehensible behaviour".

The senior QC submitted that "it certainly would not be to the betterment of the relationship or good of the children or anyone else to have this unfortunately flawed marriage rehearsed again in court", so the appeal against the sentence could proceed without oral evidence.

While Judge Piers Grant said "I entirely agree that it's highly undesirable" to air the matters in a public court, he asked how the court could "properly assess the veracity of that evidence without a proper hearing".

Adjourning the case, the judge urged the prosecution and defence to "see if they can achieve an agreed statement of facts".

Mr McCrudden told the court that during the adjournment, there would be efforts to identify any programmes which Augusto could participate in because "domestic violence must be rooted out by the attitude of the court and by rehabilitation".

The judge granted Augusto continuing bail, but warned that his release may only be temporary and said it did not mean that "you will not necessarily serve a custodial sentence".

"People should know that we will not tolerate the assault of women in any circumstances whatsoever," he added.

The judge said he would fix a date for the appeal tomorrow.
Protesters during the trial of a 17-year-old for false imprisonment at The Childrens Court in Smithfield, Dublin and inset Joan Burton

A DETECTIVE inspector has told the Jobstown trial that he did not mention the teenage accused in his original statement as there were hundreds of people around.

The 17-year-old boy denies falsely imprisoning the former Tanaiste Joan Burton and her advisor Karen O'Connell in two garda cars during the demonstration at the Fortunestown Road in Jobstown in Tallaght, on Nov. 14, 2014.

The hearing resumed for its third day at the Dublin Childrens Court where Judge John King was shown footage of the Jobstown protest obtained from YouTube, RTE and a garda 4X4 which had been carrying the former Labour leader and her advisor.

Detective Inspector Derek Maguire told Judge King the 17-year-old boy who cannot be named because he is a minor can be seen at various points in the footage.

At one stage he is holding a megaphone and at another he is standing in front of a Garda 4X4, which Joan Burton was in, as the public order unit tried to clear the crowd. He agreed that another man was the first to sit down in front of that vehicle.

He said the defendant appears to be clapping in another part of the footage and is gesturing to the crowd with arm movements.

In cross-examination with Giollaoisa O Lideadha SC, defending, Det Inspector Maguire said he did not mention the teenage defendant in his original statement as there were hundreds of people around at the time.

He agreed that in parts of the footage some protesters were calling on the crowd not to throw things.

The court also heard the teenage defendant may have said into the megaphone at one stage joany in your ivory tower  this is called people power.

He agreed that it was a reasonable proposition that when the boy was seen holding his hands up, this was consistent with encouraging others to do the same. He agreed that when the public order unit moved in, the boy had his hands in the air.

He also identified the teen in front of Joan Burton as she walked from An Cosan eduction centre to nearby St Thomas's Church for the conclusion of a graduation ceremony. He accepted that the teenager who was holding a phone was backing up at this point.

He did not accept that later on gardai later made an agreement with protesters to let them slow march the garda 4X4 carrying the Tanaiste away.

It was put to him that a Garda superintendent thanked the protesters at that point but the Inspector said the protesters would not co-operate and dictated events.

He said gardai had been protecting the two cars from being attacked and they were not in a position to use physical force because they were outnumbered.

On Tuesday he had told the court it was like a rugby maul when he tried to escort the then Tanaiste and her advisor through an angry crowd.

The former Labour leader and Minister for Social Protection had been attending a graduation event at 11.30 am at An Cosan adult education centre.

It is alleged trouble broke out and she and her entourage were trapped in cars surrounded by protesters for about three hours. She was struck with a water balloon, had abuse shouted at her and gave evidence that it was not safe to get out garda cars when they were surrounded by protesters who banged on the roof and windows.

Ms O'Connell said someone hit her and she was in a state of shock for some time.

Prosecution barrister Tony McGillicuddy has said that the prosecution case is that the former Tanaiste and her advisor were detained by the actions of the teenage defendant in conjunction with the actions of others.

The trial continues.
A jury is to be sworn in today in the trial of former Anglo Irish Bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick on charges of misleading the bank's auditors.

A specially enlarged jury of 15 members will be sworn for the trial, which is expected to last three months.

The extra jurors are required due to the length of the case, which is being heard at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

Only 12 will get to deliberate on a verdict, but three others shall be present throughout the trial and would act as substitutes should other jurors be unable to continue.

Mr FitzPatrick (66), of Whitshed Road, Greystones, Co Wicklow, has pleaded not guilty to 27 offences under the 1990 Companies Act.

These include 21 charges of making a misleading, false or deceptive statement to auditors, and six charges of furnishing false information in the years 2002 to 2007.

The charges are in connection with the disclosure of loans allegedly given to him or people connected to him by Irish Nationwide Building Society from 2002 to 2007 while he was an officer of Anglo Irish Bank.

Trial Judge John Aylmer said at a previous hearing that after the jury is sworn he anticipates two days of legal argument in their absence before the trial starts proper next week.
Siobhan & Andrew Whelan leave Cavan Courthouse following the second day of the inquest into the death of their beloved son Conor James at Cavan General Hospital. Photo: Teevan Photography

THE coroner presiding over an inquest into the death of a newborn baby has told the jury that a death by medical misadventure is the most "appropriate" verdict.

A jury of seven women and three men have retired to consider the verdict in the inquest of baby Conor Whelan, who died on May 14 in Cavan General Hospital. His time of death was just seventeen and a half hours after he had been delivered by emergency caesarean.

Coroner Mary Flanagan has been hearing testimony in the inquest since Monday. This afternoon she gave a summary of evidence to the jury before offering two verdicts to the jury for their consideration; medical misadventure and a narrative verdict.

Following a summary of the evidence in the case Ms Flanagan said based on the evidence presented over three days she believed medical misadventure was the most appropriate verdict. It did not denote medical negligence she reminded them.

Both legal teams said they would accept a majority verdict in the case.

Conors parents, Siobhan and Andrew, have been in Cavan Court all week.

The jury was also reminded of an obligation to make general recommendations in relation to medical practise following on from the evidence they have heard.

Mum Siobhan presented at Cavan General Hospital on May 13. She had called ahead to say she was in labour, but when she arrived she discovered she was bleeding, causing her to cry out for help.

She was treated by midwives and doctors at the hospital and a decision was taken to manually break her waters, via an artificial rupture of the membrane (ARM).

Shortly after she was rushed to surgery and underwent an emergency caesarean.

Conor was born showing no signs of life but a heartbeat was eventually recovered and the infant was transferred to the Rotunda for emergency care.

However, he was brought back to Cavan to spend his final hours with his family and he passed away around 7.30am on May 14.

On Monday the court heard testimony from Ms Whelan who said she begged staff not to break her waters and asked for a section instead.

After the birth it was established that Ms Whelan had been suffering from an undiagnosed obstetric condition known as vasa praevia. This is when foetal blood vessels cross or run near the internal orifice of the uterus. A bilobed placenta was also identified; her placenta was divided into two discs, joined by vital arteries and veins via the membrane.

Conor Whelan is one of four babies who died in Cavan General Hospital in a period of 30 months.

His death is included in an as-yet unpublished HSE review.

Earlier, the inquest was told by an expert that it is likely the breaking of a womans waters by hospital staff could have caused a rupture which caused her baby to lose blood.

Dr Roger Malcolmson, a consultant paediatric pathologist, based in the UK was present in Cavan Court today to give evidence in the inquest into baby Conor Whelan.

Dr Malcolmson said the babys cause of death was damage to his organs because of blood loss, due to a rupture in the vasa praevia.

Vasa praevia is an obstetric complication in which foetal blood vessels cross or run near the internal orifice of the uterus.

Conors mum Siobhan had been suffering from the condition but was undiagnosed at the time of his birth.

The court heard earlier this week that Siobhan underwent an artificial rupture of the membrane (ARM) which broke her waters, shortly before she was rushed to surgery.

In his deposition, which was summarised in court today, Dr Malcolmson wrote:

Having carefully considered the issues summarised above within the limits of my area of expertise, I consider it likely that the pathologically relevant rupture of the praevia vessel....could have occurred during the artificial rupture of membranes.

In court he accepted the possibility of an earlier spontaneous rupture.

His deposition also states that there was some bruising of the scalp noted, in keeping with a mild degree of trauma during labour/delivery.

Earlier the court heard Dr John Gillan, who carried out the postmortem on the infant, determined that it was "tricky to say" if the ARM was a contributory factor in the baby's death.

Dr John Gillan, who carried out the autopsy on baby Conor, said the infant was deprived of an adequate supply of oxygen due to pressure on the vasa praevia which lead to rupture in the vessels, causing the baby to lose blood.

Vasa praevia is an obstetric complication in which foetal blood vessels cross or run near the internal orifice of the uterus.

Dr Gillan told the Coroner's court today that in his opinion this bleeding could have occurred up to two hours before Ms Whelan attended hospital he said.

When asked if the manual breaking of Ms Whelans waters was a contributory factor in the infants death he said it was tricky to say.

Certainly there was a torn vessel present at the site of the ARM (artificial rupture of the membrane), he said.

The baby was alive when mum Siobhan arrived at hospital.
Brian Murphy (47) twice shouted "this is an insult to all those who died for Irish freedom" and "free the Craigavon two" before Ambassador Kevin Vickers wrestled with him and brought him behind a stand Photo: Tony Gavin

A community worker who interrupted a solemn ceremony to honour British soldiers killed in 1916 was tackled to the ground by the Canadian Ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers.

Brian Murphy (47) twice shouted "this is an insult to all those who died for Irish freedom" and "free the Craigavon two" before Ambassador Vickers wrestled with him and brought him behind a stand.

Mr Vickers was previously hailed a hero when he took down a terrorist gunman in his native Canada.

The ceremony at Grangegorman Military Cemetery was attended by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan as well as the British Ambassador Dominick Chilcott and members of the Irish and British armed forces.

The defendant, of The Heights, Newcastle Manor, Newcastle, Co Dublin, was found guilty before Blanchardstown District Court of threatening and abusive behaviour.

He had denied the charge.

Judge David McHugh imposed a two month sentence which he suspended for 12 months, saying he was satisfied Murphy's behaviour was "greatly insulting" and had "infringed the constitutional rights of others" attending the ceremony.

Garda John Cahill said he was on duty at a memorial service for deceased British soldiers at Grangegorman cemetery on May 26 last when he saw a man stand up from a tiered seated area shortly after 12 noon.

Gda Cahill said the man unzipped his jacket, showing a t-shirt which read "Justice for the Craigavon Two", who were jailed for life in 2012 for killing a PSNI constable in 2009. He then started shouting "free the Craigavon Two" and "this is an insult, this is an insult."

The garda said he saw Ambassador Vickers tackle Murphy and bring him behind a stand, where he was assisted by plainclothes gardai.

The court heard that the event was invite only, was a solemn occasion and was televised live.

Gda Cahill said Murphy was amongst 25 to 30 invited guests, who were seated on a tiered stand reserved for family members and relatives of deceased British soldiers.

The garda also said that when Murphy stood up and started shouting the service stopped for a short while and the band stopped playing.

In his evidence, Murphy said his great grandfather was a member of the British Army, who died before 1916 and who is buried in Grangegorman.

He also said that his paternal grandfather fought at Boland's Mill during 1916, was involved in Republican politics and was elected as a TD in 1921 and 1923.

He claimed the event was "insensitive to all whose who had fought and died for Irish freedom", as the event was commemorating "those who may have been responsible for their deaths".

In cross examination, he denied his behaviour was insulting to those who were attending the ceremony.

Defence lawyer Jennifer Jackson said Murphy, who has no previous convictions, was engaged in "peaceful protest", to which he is entitled to do under the Constitution, and he did not intend to cause a breach of the peace.

Finding him guilty, Judge McHugh said he was satisfied Murphy had intended to cause a breach of the peace.

Ms Jackson said the defendant is married with five children, and has a very responsible job as the manager of the John Bosco Youth Centre in Drimnagh.

She asked the judge to be as lenient as possible, saying Murphy did not resist gardai when they arrested him.

Judge McHugh imposed a two month suspended sentence, saying he believed Murphy's behaviour was "greatly insulting".
Alan Bradley returns to his home holding a copy of the Herald

Notorious criminal Alan Fatpuss Bradley is enjoying his first taste of freedom in four years today.

Fatpuss was yesterday granted bail and released pending the outcome of a legal challenge against his imprisonment for trying to rob a security van.

Finglas mobster Bradley (42) was jailed for conspiring to steal from a security van transporting almost 1m in cash as part of a raid organised by slain crime lord Eamon The Don Dunnes gang.

This morning, the criminal returned to the ordinary regime of domestic life and took a walk to the shops to buy a copy of the Herald to read about his prison release.

He went straight to his home in Kentstown, Co Meath after his release yesterday and was spotted close to a pet farm opposite his home.

Fatpuss stayed at his home, which is protected by multiple CCTV cameras for the night, obeying his 11pm to 7am curfew.

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Fatpuss was out walking this morning with another man returning from the shops after spending the night at his home where he must obey an 11pm to 7am curfew. He declined to make any comment on his way home.

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Fatpuss (42), with his brother Wayne and other Don gang members, pleaded guilty in the Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring to steal cash from Chubb Ireland in November 2007 at Tesco, Celbridge, Co Kildare.

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He had been sentenced in April 2012 to nine years, dating from February 14, 2012, with the final two years suspended. This sentence was reduced on appeal to eight years with 18 months suspended.

Younger brother Wayne (37) was released from prison last December.

Fatpuss was the second-in-command of the 2007 crime, just behind gang boss Eamon The Don Dunne and also has close links to several major gangland criminals in the capital.

He was considered a major player in robberies in the 1990s and early 2000s.

He was suspected of involvement in at least a dozen robberies, including a 1996 heist at the Santry Omniplex which netted about IR600,000 and, at around the same time, a robbery at Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt, Dublin, worth about IR400,000.

There were also an exceptional number of robberies in 2005 to which his gang was linked.

Fatpusss legal team said he is entitled to enhanced remission on various grounds, including that he has engaged in crime awareness, anger management and peace education programmes.

He also says he has the skill-set to start his own business on release in personal training and event management which, he believed, made him less likely to reoffend.

Fatpuss  whose current address is Churchfields, Kentstown, Co Meath  has applied to the Minister for Justice seeking enhanced remission, but had twice been refused.

Quash

He launched a High Court challenge against the minister seeking to quash that decision.

On the basis of a one-third remission, Bradley claims he should have been released from Portlaoise Prison towards the end of June last.

If granted the normal one-quarter remission he would be entitled to his freedom this December.

At the High Court yesterday, Ms Justice Miriam ORegan heard that the while the State is opposing Alan Bradleys action it was consenting to him being released on bail until the action has been determined.

Micheal P OHiggins, SC, said the conditions of Bradleys bail include that he is to live at his home in Kentstown and be the subject of a curfew where he must remain in his home between 11pm and 7am.

His passport was surrendered and he undertook not to leave the jurisdiction.
Protesters during the trial of a 17-year-old for false imprisonment at The Childrens Court in Smithfield, Dublin and inset Joan Burton

A SCHOOLBOY accused of false imprisonment of former Tanaiste Joan Burton during the Jobstown protest told arresting gardai he was sorry for taking part and for the stress he caused her.

The 17-year-old boy denies falsely imprisoning the former Labour leader and her advisor Karen O'Connell who were allegedly trapped in two garda cars for three hours during the demonstration at the Fortunestown Road in Jobstown in Tallaght, on Nov. 15, 2014.

He was aged 15 at the time and has been on trial all week at the Dublin Children's Court.

The Dublin west TD has told the court she was frightened and did not think she had the alternative of being able to get out of Garda cars surrounded by people shouting abuse and banging on windows.

The State closed its case this evening and the boy's barrister Giollaoisa O Lideadha SC has asked Judge John King to return a verdict of not guilty based on the prosecution evidence, the meaning of false imprisonment and the right to protest.

Judge King will consider written submission from the boy's lawyers and replies from prosecuting counsel Tony McGillicuddy BL. The case was adjourned until Friday to set dates for the resumption of the trial.

The hearing resumed for its third day on Wednesday when Judge John King was shown video footage of the protest. The clips were obtained from YouTube, RTE and a garda 4X4 which at one point had been blocked while carrying the former Minister for Social Protection and her advisor Ms O'Connell. Some people were seen chanting slogans while others were hurling abuse at the former Tanaiste and jostling with gardai.

The court also heard details of teen's arrest in February last year when he was detained at Tallaght Garda station to be questioned. His statement was read into the court's record.

Garda Damian Reilly said the boy was questioned in the presence of his mother and he declined to have a solicitor present. He was told he was being questioned in connection with a false imprisonment charge and he said he understood.

CCTV footage and photos were shown to him and he identified himself. He admitted at some stages he had been holding a megaphone. It was put to him that he had appeared angry in footage but he did not think so. He said the megaphone was not his but he was holding it for a lady who was telling people to to stop launching stuff in the crowd. He said he people had been throwing eggs and other objects.

He identified himself in footage doing a slow march but added that he did not engage in a sit down protest. I believe I was influenced by others to say sit down and then slow march out of the area, he also told Garda Reilly. Asked who influenced him he replied I cannot remember it was year.

In the next question put, he was asked if he was under duress to sit down and he replied No. It was put to him that he could be seen instructing the crowd but he denied being a leader or organiser of the demonstration. He said he found out about it online.

Garda Reilly asked him if he was sorry and he replied yes.

He was asked was that for particpating and he said basically yes.

He was then asked if he was sorry for participating or for causing criminality and the teenager answered: for participating, and the stress I am learning I placed the Tanaiste under. He also said he was sorry for wasting his mother's and garda time.

Garda Reilly agreed with the defence that the teen addressed the upset he caused to Joan Burton (67) and Karen O'Connell. The court heard he had not prior criminal convictions or other charges pending and was getting good marks in school. He did not have any family problems and did not hang around with many people, he also told the garda.

Garda Sergeant Michael Phelan gave evidence earlier. He said, "There was constant jostling and pushing and Gardai were being shoved and pushed and had their caps knocked off. One female colleague was pushed from behind and fell into the crowd. The protestors just could not be moved."

Gda Sgt Phelan said protestors sat in front of the Garda jeep and as one was moved another one or two would move in. He said missiles rained down on Gardai including coins, cigarette lighters, branches of trees and other items. He was hit with a can of Red Bull and the window of the Garda jeep was damaged.

He said there was a suggestion from one of the perceived organisers that if the public order unit moved out, the slow march would resume.

During cross examination he was shown footage which showed the defendant moving along the footpath while filming.

Defence counsel Giollaiosa O Lideadha said he appeared for the most part to be moving backwards while filming. He said the pushing and shoving only happened because other people had come behind him and he could not continue moving back.

Sgt Phelan said he had to use force to remove the boy from blocking his way but he agreed with Mr O Lideadha that there were occasional periods of calm during the protest.

Detective Inspector Derek Maguire told Judge King the 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named because he is a minor, can be seen at various points in the footage.

At one stage he is holding a megaphone and at another he is standing in front of a Garda 4X4, which Joan Burton was in, as the public order unit tried to clear the crowd. He agreed that another man was the first to sit down in front of that vehicle.

He said the defendant appears to be clapping in another part of the footage and is gesturing to the crowd with arm movements.

In cross-examination, Det Inspector Maguire said he did not mention the teenage defendant in his original statement as there were hundreds of people around at the time.

He agreed that in parts of the footage some protesters were calling on the crowd not to throw things.

The court also heard the teenage defendant may have said into the megaphone at one stage joany in your ivory tower  this is called people power.

He agreed that it was a reasonable proposition that when the boy was seen holding his hands up, this was consistent with encouraging others to do the same. He agreed that when the public order unit moved in, the boy had his hands in the air.

He also identified the teen in front of Joan Burton as she walked from An Cosan eduction centre to nearby St Thomas's Church for the conclusion of a graduation ceremony. He accepted that the teenager who was holding a phone was backing up at this point.

He did not accept that later on gardai later made an agreement with protesters to let them slow march the 4X4 carrying the Tanaiste away.

It was put to him that a Garda superintendent thanked the protesters at that point but the Inspector said the protesters would not co-operate and dictated events.

In my opinion the accused was orchestrating the crowd with his gestures and his possession of loud hailer he had, in frequent footage, Det Inspector Maguire said. However, Mr O Lideadha suggested the orchestrating seen in the video was encouraging the crowd to move on.

He also pointed to footage which showed him standing while others were sitting. Det Inspector Maguire agreed with counsel that the defendant could be seen holding a megaphone for a woman who called on people to stop throwing eggs.

He said gardai had been protecting the two cars from being attacked and they were not in a position to use physical force because they were outnumbered.

On Tuesday he had told the court it was like a rugby maul when he tried to escort the then Tanaiste and her advisor through an angry crowd. A cordon of gardai had to be placed around them as the crowd got bigger, he said.

The former Labour leader and Minister for Social Protection had been attending a graduation event at 11.30 am at An Cosan adult education centre.

It is alleged trouble broke out and she and her entourage were trapped in cars surrounded by protesters for about three hours. She was struck with a water balloon, had abuse shouted at her and gave evidence that it was not safe to get out garda cars when they were surrounded by protesters who banged on the roof and windows.

On Monday Joan Burton and Karen O'Connell gave evidence and said that they were frightened and did not think they it was safe to get out of a car. They alleged that vulgar abuse was being shouted at them and the Ms Burton said the teenager was present and she said there was an "air of extreme hostility" at the protest.

Ms O'Connell said someone hit her and she was in a state of shock for some time.

Prosecution barrister Tony McGillicuddy has said that the prosecution case is that the former Tanaiste and her advisor were detained by the actions of the teenage defendant in conjunction with the actions of others.
A judge in Naas District Court has allowed the state to take 240 which gardai found in a Kildare-based brothel.

Gardai had made a property application for the sum following a raid in a Kildare brothel.

Four females, believed to be from Eastern Europe, were named in the property application but were not present in court.

When reading his judgment, Judge Desmond Zaidan commented on the amount: Things must be desperately bad, he said.

The location of the brothel was not identified in court, but the Leinster Leader is reporting it was in the Sallins region.

It is not the first time a case involving brothel keeping in the Sallins region has been before Naas District Court.

Back in 2012, two women were found guilty of keeping a brothel in the area.

Gardai carried out a surveillance operation which saw six men entering a property in Sallins over the course of 24 hours.

Each of the men appeared to be directed to the apartment by phone and each stayed for approximately 40 minutes.
Former Tipperary hurler Lar Corbett behind the bar in his premises in Thurles. Photo: Liam Burke/Press22

Counterfeit vodka was discovered by Customs & Excise officers during an inspection of Tipperary hurling star Lar Corbett's pub business, a court heard.

The allegation came as Marlstone Investments Ltd, which operates Lar Corbett's Bar at Coppinger's in Thurles, contested a Revenue Commissioner charge that it had spirits for sale on which the correct alcohol tax had not been paid.

The single charge was brought by the Revenue Commissioners before Thurles District Court under the Finance Act, 2003.

Mr Corbett, who is a director of Marlstone Investments, attended the case before Judge Elizabeth MacGrath but did not address the hearing.

Judge MacGrath adjourned her ruling in the matter until next week to allow Michelle O'Connell, for the State, to address a number of legal issues arising.

Padraig de Burca BL, for Marlstone and Mr Corbett, challenged the Customs & Excise inspection findings and the fact that vodka samples were not taken from either a drinks wholesaler or an off-licence.

Read more: Bottles seized in former Tipperary star Lar Corbett's pub contained 'counterfeit vodka'

This was despite the fact Mr Corbett supplied officials with receipts of the purchase of 36 bottles of 700ml Smirnoff vodka between December 29, 2014, and January 25, 2015.

During an inspection of Coppinger's Pub, a special 'authenticator' device issued by Diageo to Customs & Excise indicated irregularities with 23 bottles of 700ml Smirnoff.

The bottles were detained and a sample from one was sent to the State Laboratory.

Diageo also received a sample.

Diageo official Colin Cushley informed Customs & Excise that the Smirnoff involved was counterfeit.

Mr Cushley said the label and seal were fake - and while the glass bottle was genuine it had originated in the UK.

State Lab official Michael Doyle said he tested one of the 700ml bottles involved and found that it had an alcohol content of 34.1pc rather than the 37.5pc level required by EU law.

"It was not pure vodka...nor was it Smirnoff vodka," he said.

Mr de Burca raised legal issues over the tax and testing elements of the prosecution.

Judge MacGrath adjourned her ruling until September 27.
Irelands has suffered another worrying fall in a universities global league table.

The countrys largest university, UCD, has dropped out of the top 200 in the prestigious UK-based Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.

Meanwhile, the position of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is unknown after red-faced college officials admitted that the college had sent incorrect information to the ratings experts.

Trinity is traditionally ranked as Irelands leading university, but speculation in recent days suggested that a catastrophic fall was putting it outside the top 200, and below UCD.

But as a review of TCD data got underway, THE yesterday released a revised table with no ranking for Trinity, pending a recalculation.

Rankings editor, Phil Baty noted that they had been obliged to exclude Trinity from this years ranking due to a unintentional submission error on their part, which is likely to have given them a lower ranking than would otherwise be the case.

The publication of the rankings and the UCD slide from 176th last year to somewhere between 201-250th this year - a second blow for Ireland in as many weeks after a poor showing in the QS World University Rankings - has sparked a new round of warnings about under-funding of third-level.

After eight years of cuts, the seven universities are receiving 1,838 less per student than they did in 2007/08, as a result of a 50pc cut in State grants, and rising student numbers.

Mr Baty described the 2016 rankings as bad news for Ireland; the countrys best universities are struggling.

He said while the root of the problem was the increased competition among the worlds elite universities, particularly those in Asia, it seems clear that the major funding cuts endured by Irelands universities are causing problems.

On the positive side, he noted that both NUI Galway and The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - both of which join UCD in the 201-205 band - have made gains in the table.

But, Mr Baty warned that most global attention will be focussed on Irelands two flagship institutions - the global magnets for talent  and a strong message should go out that these institutions should be protected as national assets.

Ireland is one of the lowest investors in higher education among all OECD countries and you simply cannot sustain world-class universities on the cheap.

UCD president Prof Andrew Deeks said the university has consistently performed in areas under its control, and these rankings show that we have maintained strong output against a backdrop of falling State investment.

Maynooth University president Professor Philip Nolan said Irish universities were in general, falling rapidly in world rankings as the impact of a decade of austerity and under-funding shows in our worsening staff:student ratio and a greatly reduced capacity to conduct world-class research

He said it was generally accepted that the Irish university system was in crisis, but despite the excellent analysis and proposals presented in the recent Cassells report, we are too slow to act.

This inaction threatens the very future of our university system. The Irish university system is, right now, world class, but it wont be for long.

Meanwhile, Dublin City University (DCU) , whish is ranked between 401-450th in the THE table. has risen two places , to 44th position, in a separate QS ranking of the worlds top 50 young universities.
The news that the Department of Education would be toughening up on under performing teachers was met with mixed reactions - while many parents welcomed the 'fitness to teach' provisions as a form of quality assurance, some teachers fear they will be hounded out of the profession.

The new measures complement existing school complaints procedures and will allow any person, including members of the public, employers or teachers, to make a complaint to the Teaching Council about a registered teacher.

If there are serious grounds for concern, a complaint may end up the subject of a public disciplinary hearing, the first of which are expected to start early next year.

If experience elsewhere is anything to go by, up to 30 teachers a year could face such hearings.

In extreme cases, a teacher may be 'struck off' the professional register or they may be issued with a suspension order, a reprimand or receive an offer of support to improve performance.

The process is similar to that which is already in place for doctors and nurses in this country, while 'fitness to teach' measures have been in place in Scotland and Wales for decades.

Of the teachers who have been removed from the register in the UK, many cases relate to straightforward misconduct, such as sexual misdemeanours, while others concern poor professional performance. In Wales, the Education Workforce Council (EWC) has heard five cases in the past 12 months that involve inappropriate relationships between teachers and learners, representing 18pc of the total number heard in that period.

A case before the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) in June involved a female physical education teacher in a post-primary school in Glasgow, who was struck off following a series of complaints about her competency, including one from the parent of a child who had been instructed to participate in PE despite having an exemption certificate due to a concussion.

In a separate incident, the teacher was found to have made no efforts to contact a senior staff member after a pupil sustained a "serious injury" during her class. There were instances where she excluded pupils from her classes because she said she was "unable to manage a class with uneven numbers" and disciplined a boy with severe communication difficulties for not taking part in social dance. On one occasion, she left the class she was teaching and the school without informing anyone of her departure.

A wealth of support services were put in place between October 2011 and June 2013, including internal and external observations, oral and written feedback sessions, a reduced workload and visits to other classes and schools to observe different teachers at work.

The teachers monitoring her classes said she conducted PE lessons "like a free-for-all", where students were left unattended and could lift weights far above their capacity. Pupils were inactive and disengaged for much of the class time, with one external monitor describing the classes as "the worst two lessons she had seen in 17 years of teaching". The teacher was removed from the register.

Another case in Wales involved a primary school teacher who was banned from teaching last June after leaving a young pupil on his own during a school trip two years ago.

His "unacceptable professional conduct" also included an incident in 2013 where he secretly recorded a staff meeting on his iPad without permission and disclosed confidential information relating to other teachers' lesson observations and the head teacher's draft plans for future staffing - behaviour which was deemed by the EWC committee to be "dishonest". He was handed a prohibition order and will be eligible for re-registration in 2018.

However, teaching councils do not rush to ban teachers from the classroom - far from it. As well as offering plentiful support measures for struggling teachers, if a case goes to a hearing, the panel will take into consideration whether the respondent has learned from his or her mistakes and can be let off with a milder penalty.

A Scottish computing teacher was issued with a temporary restriction order after making a series of inappropriate remarks towards his students, such as asking a female student if it was her "time of the month" because she wore red tights. He was also found to have inappropriately touched another female student's shirt and unzipped her breast pocket.

The teacher told pupils to accept his friend requests on Facebook, where his profile was listed under a false name, and he exchanged messages with them asking about their personal lives.

After being instructed by the head teacher to remove his profile and cease such online 'friendships', he set up a new profile under a different false name and continued to communicate with a pupil, towards whom he was found to have made "overly friendly and inappropriate" comments.

At the time, he was described as being under stress while working long shifts with a lengthy commute.

He moved to another school and the GTCS panel was satisfied that he had since learned how to maintain appropriate pupil-teacher boundaries. The restriction order was cancelled and he was allowed to return to teaching.

In the UK, the findings of each hearing is published on the GTCS and EWC websites in documents that can run to 60 or more pages. The public availability can cause problems for teachers returning to a school.

Drew Morrice of the Education Institute of Scotland, the country's largest teaching union, says the release of this information has been an "ongoing issue" for the union.

"There is something curious about Scotland and you might find that in Ireland as well. The smaller the community the teacher works in, the more well-known they are. Therefore, you get in the rural areas a more disproportionate impact from GTCS procedures.

"You get that in two regards: one is that local newspapers are more likely to do their own reporting based on what's on the GTCS website and that can often be more intrusive than national newspapers.

"The second one is the size of the community - everyone knows each other and it's always a bit more difficult for those teachers to go back into the community." Mr Morrice says he is not aware of hearings having such a detrimental impact on teachers that they choose to leave teaching altogether, but the process can be very intense for the individual concerned.

"Any sort of regulatory system that conducts its business in public does bring a significant anxiety for teachers who are subject to it.

"We are certainly well aware that from more high-profile cases, going through the GTCS can be enormously stressful for individuals and that's a significant part of our work - to try to manage that," he says.

"We take a person through what the hearing process entails and we will alert them to the fact there will always be publicity coming from GTCS proceedings and trying to alert them to the fact they may get doorstepped by local press and to be on their guard about public reaction."
The hospital worker who is accused of raping a 61-year-old woman in Kerry had his criminal history checked twice in the past three years by his employers, the Irish Independent has learned.

The man was employed by an international company with 170 staff in Ireland providing diagnostic scans on hospital sites.

The worker, who is accused of raping the woman at the Bons Secours Hospital in Tralee on September 10, came up clear on both occasions following the routine vetting procedure.

The man, who was not arrested, did not turn up to a garda appointment last week and is believed to have left the country.

A file is now being prepared by the gardai and will be sent to the DPP.

The worker, who was with the company since 2009, is married with one child.

His wife is also understood to have been employed as a health worker here and has now resigned.

He was directly employed by a company contracted to provide diagnostics scans at the Bons Secours and not by the hospital.

Consensual

He told gardai he and the woman had sex but claimed it was consensual.

The woman told gardai she was attacked after she gave him a 10 tip and was changing back into her clothes following a scan.

The woman has undergone forensic examination and been offered counselling.

A spokesman for the diagnostics company said they did not know of his current whereabouts.

Regulatory authorities in Ireland had been notified of the allegation against him and this will also be circulated to similar bodies abroad.

A team of executives in the company from the UK travelled to the Kerry town in the wake of the allegation.

The allegation led to the setting up of a internal inquiry by the company.

The review found that its patient safety procedures are in line with other similar healthcare providers. However, a spokesman said it is now considering if further steps to enhance safety can be taken.

It is checking to ensure all staff have up-to-date registration and garda clearance.

Bill Maher, head of the Bons Secours group of hospitals, said he is to receive a report from the company this week.

The company is providing upgraded MRI and CT technology which allows for better image quality at the Tralee hospital.
The house near the village of Glenties, Co Donegal, where former Sinn Fein member and British spy Denis Donaldson lived and was murdered

Denis Donaldson was shot dead at an isolated cottage near Glenties in Co Donegal

A FORMER IRA member claimed Gerry Adams sanctioned the 2006 murder of Denis Donaldson, the senior Sinn Fein official who was working as a British spy.

Mr Donaldson was killed by a shotgun blast in April 2006 as he opened the door to his cottage in Glenties, Donegal.

He was in hiding after being outed as a British agent of nearly 20 years.

The IRA denied his murder at the time, but a BBC Spotlight investigation broadcast last night said security forces still believed the IRA was responsible.

The BBC spoke to a man who claims to be a former IRA member who was recruited as an agent by RUC Special Branch, identified only as Martin.

He told the programme he knew personally that Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams sanctioned the killing.

Spotlight said they understood Gerry Adams had stepped aside from the IRA army council in 2006, but according to Martin he is consulted in all matters.

I know from my experience in the IRA that murders have to be approved by the leadership, the political (and) military leadership of the IRA, said Martin.

Asked who he was referring to specifically, he said: Gerry Adams, he gives the final say.

A statement from Mr Adamss solicitor has strongly denied the allegations.

He said his client had no involvement and no knowledge whatsover in Denis Donaldsons killing.

He categorically denies he was consulted on what he calls an alleged IRA army council decision or that he had any final say in the matter being sanctioned.

Spotlight said security sources had told them the South Armagh IRA commissioned the killing, something they learned from agents and covert surveillance.

They added that South Armagh IRA leader Thomas Slab Murphy insisted that Donaldson be killed in order to maintain army discipline and that the IRA in the area commissioned the execution.

Mr Murphys solicitor was contacted by Spotlight - but they said they had received no response last night.

Martin said he had had informed his Special Branch sources about what he learned about the murder.

Not too long after Denis was murdered I was told by an active member of the IRA that the IRA had killed him, not anybody else, he said.

I gave that information to the Special Branch. They were just totally mute, there wasnt any acknowledgement of what I had said. The subject was changed to something else.

Asked if he was surprised, he said: No I think they knew themselves. I just think that they had seen Donaldsons death as internal housekeeping, they were happy enough to put up with that.

He said they chose at times not to act on information as it was too politically sensitive to do so.

The dissident group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for Donaldsons killing in 2009  something Martin dismissed.

I believe the Real IRA claimed it three years later for the kudos in the hope that someone might take them more seriously.
Witnesses are being sought to the fatal accident

A mother of three and a teenager have lost their lives in a car crash in Donegal on Wednesday afternoon.

The woman and the teenager, originally from Tallaght, Dublin, were killed after the single vehicle crash on the outskirts of Ballybofey.

The accident happened at around 4.30pm on a sweeping bend on the Glenfin Road, outside Ballybofey, around 800 metres from Jackson's Hotel.

A third person in the car - a male driver - was injured and was being treated at Letterkenny University Hospital after the 4.15pm incident.

The 19-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene, while the 38-year-old woman was brought to Letterkenny University Hospital and was later pronounced dead.

The car they were travelling in left the road, collided with a pole and came to a stop in a parking area for trucks.

A steel lamp post ended up more than 50 metres away after being struck by the car.

Road conditions were wet in the area at the time after a day of torrential rain.

The car was travelling towards Glenfin.

It's understood the deceased women lived in a housing estate on the outskirts of Ballybofey.

A Garda spokesman said: "We would ask anyone who saw this vehicle in the Ballybofey area this afternoon to contact gardai in Letterkenny on 0749161700."

The road has been sealed off for a full forensic examination.

Today is 'European Day Without A Road Death'.

The initiative, organised by TISPOL, the traffic police network in Europe, is aimed at having no road fatalities across Europe on Wednesday.

Following today's tragedy, there have already been 136 deaths on Irish roads in 2016 - 22 more than in the same period last year.

RSA director Pearse White emphasised that road safety was a shared responsibility.
THE Chief Executive of Dublin Bus has warned staff that strike action will cost the company 21m and leave it in a catastrophic financial position.

In a letter sent to the workforce of over 3,400 this morning, Ray Coyne said industrial action is undermining all our past efforts in cutting costs, and has the potential to return the company to a post-2010 financial crisis.

He said he has reviewed the significant impact of the ongoing industrial action and 13 proposed dates on customers and the company.

The news comes as Bus Eireann have warned staff not to expect payrises this year as the company's finances are in a "critical position".

Mr Coyne says to date, the stoppages have cost Dublin Bus over 4m.

A two day stoppage due to begin on Friday will cost an extra 2m, and leave the company in a loss-making position by the end of the year.

In addition, 13 days of planned stoppages will cost the company another 15m.

This will have a catastrophic impact on our financial position, he said.

He said the cost of funding a 15pc pay rise being sought by unions will be 50m to the end of 2018.

Mr Coyne said this additional cost will be on a company that has only recently returned to a sound financial footing is simply not affordable.

Unlike the impact of the economic crisis which was outside our control, resolution to the current situation is within our control at this point, he said.

He also predicted further cuts if the company finds itself in a financial crisis again.

Mr Coyne said this would naturally require actions to restore the company to a sound financial standing.

Returning to such a scenario is totally unnecessary and is at this point wholly avoidable, he said.

It is in everyones interest to resolve this dispute as quickly as possible. I am on record as stating that the Workplace Relations Commission is the correct forum for further engagement.

He said these talks are provided for in a Labour Court Recommendation that has been rejected by staff for an 8.25pc pay rise over three years.

I urge all grades to engage in that process and avoid any further disruption of services, he said.

The strike dates at Dublin Bus:

Friday and Saturday this week (September 23 and 24)

Next Tuesday and Wednesday (September 27 and 28)

Saturday October 1 (day of the All-Ireland replay)

Wednesday October 5

Friday October 7

Monday October 10

Wednesday October 12

Friday October 14

Tuesday and Wednesday October 18 and 19

Monday October 24

Wednesday October 26

Saturday October 29

Meanwhile, Bus Eireanns Chief Executive has warned staff that no pay rises can be contemplated as the companys finances are in a critical position with losses of 6m expected this year.

In a letter sent to staff today, Martin Nolan says that new terms and conditions will be implemented for staff in Expressway, and routes will be sub-contracted.

He warns that the company is in a very serious and difficult situation and has drawn up a survival plan that is the "only course" open to it.

The CEO said management are due to meet unions at the Workplace Relations Commission this morning to discuss a claim for a pay rise lodged on behalf of staff.

But he said the trading position of the company dictates that no payroll increases can be contemplated at this time.

The company finances are in a critical position with losses of 5.6m in 2015 and projected losses of 6m in 2016, he said. A minimum turnaround of 7m is required.

He said the board and management of Bus Eireann are faced with very difficult decisions and have drawn up a plan to address the severe financial difficulties.

Whilst both the schools and public service obligation businesses are performing satisfactorily, the Expressway business  despite extensive promotion and development  is continuing to lose money, he said.

He said there were a number of factors contributing to this including increased competition from low cost operators and increased costs including claims and staffing costs. He said the motorway network is facilitating new business models for competitors.

Mr Nolan noted that a pay cut in 2014, which led to a return to profitability, had been reversed last year.

He said the structural changes required would involve separating Expressway from the rest of the business and implementing new terms and conditions for staff.

In addition, a a number of routes will be sub-contracted although all routes that are currently operated will continue to do so.

He said a new management and support structure will be implemented for the Expressway business.

Other efficiency measures may be required across the entire business, he said. Regulatory issues and market conditions would indicate that the company will need to restructure as it moves into the future.

He said staff will be consulted on these measures with a view to gaining agreement.

In light of the above it should be clear that the overall trading position of the company dictates that no payroll increases can be contemplated at this time, he said..

I would urge staff representatives to engage meaningfully with the company to agree an implementation plan for the Expressway business and seek to return the company to stability so that the reasonable expectations of staff can be met in the future.

The commercial plan is designed to ensure Bus Eireanns future stability under a sustainable financial model and give protection to services for customers as well as providing longer term sustainable employment for staff. The Board and Management of Bus Eireann believe that this action, although very difficult, is the only course open for the company.
Adrian Donohoe: his killers came from south Armagh. Photo: Ciara Wilkinson.

A detective shot dead by a burglary gang in Co Louth is to be awarded a bravery medal on Thursday.

Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe was gunned down outside Lordship Credit Union in Co Louth in January 2013.

Gardai have confirmed that the murdered father-of-two will be posthumously awarded the Gold Scott medal - the highest honour in An Garda Siochana.

The medal will be presented tomorrow to in a special ceremony at the Garda College in Templemore.

Tanaiste and Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald TD, and Garda Commissioner Noirin OSullivan will attend and address the event.

In a statement, gardai said D-gda Donohoe was presented with the medal "for the exceptional courage and bravery he showed at Lordship Credit Union, Co Louth, on January 25, 2013, which saw him give his life to protect others".

Nobody has been charged in connection with the murder.

A number of other members of An Garda Siochana will receive Silver and Bronze Scott Medals, and Commissioners Commendations on the day for bravery in the line of the duty.
The possibility of a third terminal at Dublin Airport is to be examined as part of a review of air traffic at the transport hub.

The Cabinet has approved plans to employ independent consultants to review air traffic congestion at Dublin Airport amid plans for a long-delayed new runway.

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It comes as it emerged that repairs to the main runway due to start in November will take 18 months.

The review of operations at the airport is related to new EU rules on aircraft noise and will include consideration of the need for a third terminal building.

"We are facing an extremely delicate situation at Dublin Airport," Transport Minister Shane Ross said.

"There is an overwhelming case to build a new runway and it needs to be built quickly. If we are to avoid lengthy delays for passengers, construction of the new runway will need to start within a few months if it is to be commissioned, as planned, by 2020," he said.

He said that a public consultation process would take in the "very legitimate concerns" of nearby residents.

Dublin Fingal Labour TD Brendan Ryan said he was glad that the residents' concerns regarding noise pollution will be given consideration.

"The growth of Dublin Airport is vital both for our country and for the local region. However, any new runway proposal needs to be balanced with the quality-of-life concerns for residents," he said.

Fianna Fail transport spokesman Robert Troy said he'd like to see a resolution brought to the issue of the new runway.

Pointed

He pointed out that planning permission was granted in 2007 and that: "We're nine years down the road and a sod hasn't been turned."

The Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) has said that the main runway is an "asset urgently in need of repair".

It has facilitated some four million take-offs and landings at the airport - 95pc of the take-offs and landings in that period.

Due to planes flying in and out of Dublin during the day time, the rehabilitation work can only take place overnight. Some 150 workers will come on to the site each night and work on 100m strips between 11am and 5am.

This means that the secondary runway, which is only used 5pc of the time, will have to be used for overnight flights at the airport. The secondary runway is diagonal to the main flight path and is usually only used during high winds.

The repair works mean that more than 45 overnight flights in summer and 25 in winter will be re-directed to this flight path.

DAA spokeswoman Siobhan O'Donnell said that had the new north runway construction not been delayed due to the economic downturn, there would have been no need to use the secondary path overnight.

She also said that of the 25 flights expected overnight during the winter, 20 of those will be between 11pm and 1am.
There is a large garda presence outside a shop in Co Wexford this morning where a repossession order is being carried out.

Goods are currently being removed from Corrigans Londis in Kilmuckridge by a number of security personnel and loaded on to trucks.

The operation began at 5am this morning and is expected to continue until midday.

A number of anti-eviction groups are protesting against the repossession order and a source told Independent.ie that the high garda presence is to ensure there are no breaches of the peace.

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Gardai tried to repossess the shop last October with KTech Security following the issue of a court order.

Their efforts were subsequently thwarted as they were outnumbered by a large crowd of ant-eviction protesters who reclaimed the supermarket.

A source said gardai were determined to ensure this didn't happen again and have cordoned off the entire shop while the goods are removed from the supermarket.

A number of locals have huddled around the shop and are watching on as the repossession is carried out.
The controversial Oberstown youth detention centre was reported to be in lock-down again last night after another riot by inmates.

Sources said a group of inmates understood to include those who were part of the riot that led to the fire and destruction of one part of the centre in August were involved in a barricade situation.

It is believed trouble started yesterday afternoon after a young man was taken to hospital suffering from a suspected drugs overdose.

It is understood senior management were in the centre all evening but were unable to prevent serious damage being caused to one of the remaining wings of the centre which is supposed to house up to 90 inmates but is thought to contain only between 30 and 40 now.

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Garda sources confirmed that an incident of criminal damage was reported following the latest riot, and is currently being investigated.

The Minister for Childrens Affairs, Katherine Zappone has continued to support the management of the centre.

Read More

On Monday she announced she was calling in a professor from Liverpool University and the head of the UKs Probation Service to examine the running of the centre. They have been given until December to prepare a report.

Since the 56m centre officially opened in January last year, there have been dozens of serious attacks on staff leading to high levels of sickness leave, though both the Department and the Health and Safety Authority have declined to say how many reports have been made about staff injuries.

In the last attempted break-out in August eight young offenders broke out of their secured rooms and onto a detention centre roof after a staff member was overpowered and threatened with boiling water.

The incident that led to the riot and fire was started while staff were protesting about attacks, injuries and fears for their lives at the gates of the facility in north county Dublin.

While the protest was in operation the young offenders were forced to remain in their rooms being monitored by other staff.

But the offenders used the protest to their advantage when one requested refreshments, and a staff member who brought them was confronted, threatened and overpowered at the door and had their keys taken.

The offender was then able to free others who then took over the accommodation block.

Eight offenders then accessed the roof and started pulling the tiles off, and set fire to Blocks 1, 2 and 3.

When emergency services were called it is reported that some of the offenders on the roof threw roof tiles down at them.

There were no reports of injuries to fire crews, but the blaze took hold and eleven units of Dublin Fire Brigade spent hours fighting the fire.

Accommodation Block 3 collapsed due to the extent of the blaze, and Blocks 1 and 2 were left gutted.

One staff member was injured and treated in hospital when searching the facility for detainees who had absconded from their accommodation.
Gardai are pleading with drivers to be safe today in their bid to have a day without a road death across Europe.

Project EDWARD (European Day Without a Road Death) is currently underway across Irish roads.

Gardai from DMR Traffic currently on the Ballymun road as part of #ProjectEdward Please support European Day Without A Road Death pic.twitter.com/0b2j3EYMlP  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 21, 2016

#ProjectEdward ALL drivers Slowdown be extra careful tomorrow. Support European Day Without A Road Death 21st September #ProjectEdward RT https://t.co/EfDl4ihYiH  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 20, 2016

The initiative, organised by TISPOL, the traffic police network in Europe, is aimed at having no road fatalities across Europe on Wednesday.

There have already been 134 deaths on Irish roads in 2016 - 20 more than in the same period last year.

RSA director Pearse White emphasised that road safety was a shared responsibility. He said Irish people had to improve how they used the roads.

"You might think it's OK to drive a little bit above the speed limit, or to just have a couple of drinks and drive home, or to not bother putting you seatbelt on in the car. But the tragic reality is that these actions could have serious and devastating consequences for others."

Gardai are asking motorists to take the following pledge:

I promise that I will:

Gardai from DMR Traffic currently on the Ballymun road as part of #ProjectEdward Please support European Day Without A Road Death pic.twitter.com/0b2j3EYMlP  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 21, 2016
Finance Minister Michael Noonan has further dampened expectations of a major cut to the hated USC, insisting it will take five years to phase out completely.

The minister told TDs that he has limited resources for tax cuts and that "most of what I'd like to do is not affordable. We don't have the money".

And he said taxpayers won't be "throwing their hats in the air on Budget night" given the limited space for tax cuts next year.

Mr Noonan's appearance at the Dail's Budgetary Oversight Committee came ahead of a warning today by the ESRI against cutting income tax in next month's Budget.

The Finance Minister's attendance at the committee was his first public appearance since his hospitalisation last week for cellulitis.

The effects of the painful skin condition were visible on his face but he told Cabinet colleagues yesterday that he is fit and well.

Read more: Noonan tells of plans to phase out USC over five years in first public appearance since hospitalisation

Mr Noonan said he thinks the USC rate is "too high" but that Fine Gael's plan to abolish it will take five years.

"It will not be possible to phase out USC completely over a three Budget cycle but it would be possible to phase it out over a five Budget cycle," he said.

It's a further indication that cuts to the USC in Budget 2017 won't be the 1pc promised by Fine Gael ahead of the election. Ministers are understood to be leaning towards a reduction in the region of 0.5pc.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin meanwhile said he doesn't think abolishing the USC is achievable. He added: "We don't believe it's the right policy or the right approach."

Targeted

He favours cuts targeted at low and middle income workers and said there needs to be a balance between investing in services and giving people a break in their taxes.

And the ESRI has warned against income tax cuts in its quarterly statement, saying there is currently no economic case to stimulate demand by boosting take-home pay.

It says the Irish economy is broadly in balance this year and therefore tax cuts or spending increases are not needed.

"Budgetary policy should be neutral. It's important to keep the income tax base as stable as possible as a component of the overall tax base," said Professor Kieran McQuinn.

It emerged yesterday that Irish taxpayers are hit with high rates at lower incomes than workers in other developed countries.

But Mr McQuinn argued that any tax cuts for middle-income earners - including reduced USC rates - should be matched by taking more lower income workers into the tax net, or hitting higher earners.

The ESRI previously told TDs that it's unconvinced USC cuts are wise.

Several other tax measures that may feature in the Budget were raised during Mr Noonan's appearance at the Committee:

 Vulture Funds

Independent TD Stephen Donnolly said he believes closing tax loopholes used by vulture funds would double the amount available for spending next year - the so-called 'fiscal space' - from 1bn to 2bn.

Mr Noonan has previously said he is moving to stop such firms from avoiding paying tax in property deals.

However, he told Mr Donnelly that his calculation may not come to pass if companies adapt their behaviour due to a change in the law.

"How one would measure future revenue flows is difficult to say because obviously if you close a method of applying a particular tax section people will change their behaviour," Mr Noonan said.

 Fuel

Mr Noonan says he has no plan to equalise excise duty on petrol and diesel.

Different excise rates mean petrol is currently 11 cent more expensive than diesel. Changing that now would give "a fair shock to the system", Mr Noonan said, adding: "So many people have bought diesel cars."

 Inheritance tax

An inheritance tax bonanza in the coming Budget has been ruled out.

Mr Noonan said it was the Government's intention to eventually raise the threshold at which inheritance tax applies to 500,000, but it would not be done "all in one leap".

"It is not going to happen in one budget, but I would like to do something on it," he said.

 Airbnb

Mr Noonan said he is to consider the effect that Airbnb has on the availability of rental properties in his Budget deliberations.

He said that the number or Airbnb rooms is "stacking up" and is one reason for a reduction in rental accommodation in Dublin, particularly for students.

He said that income tax currently applies to earnings from Airbnb but that the issue is "something I want to look at in the Budget".

 VAT

Mr Noonan signalled he doesn't intend to increase the reduced 9pc VAT rate on hotel rooms in the upcoming Budget.

He noted that hotel prices have been rising, particularly when special events are taking place, but argued that restoring the 13.pc rate wouldn't reduce costs.

 Condoms

Mr Noonan says he will not drop the 13.5pc VAT rate on condoms as he doesn't believe the move would help reduce STIs.

The VAT rate for condoms was reduced to 5pc in the UK a decade ago.
FORMER Northern Ireland first minister Peter Robinson is to be invited to appear before TDs to be quizzed on Project Eagle.

Deputy first minister Martin McGuinness is also to be asked to attend a meeting of the Dails Public Accounts Committee (PAC) which is probing the deal to sell Namas Northern Ireland loan book.

Both Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness were participants in a January 2014 phone call with Finance Minister Michael Noonan where the controversial deal was discussed.

PAC chairman, Fianna Fails Sean Fleming, also confirmed that the date that Mr Noonan has agreed to appear before committee members is October 6, just days before he announces the Budget.

Mr Fleming this afternoon outlined the agenda of PACs examination of the Comptroller and Auditor Generals (C&AG) damning report on Project Eagle.

The C&AG found that Nama incurred a potential loss to the taxpayer of 190m (223m) in the Project Eagle sale.

Nama rejected the C&AGs findings claiming its based on an incorrect assumption of the discount rate used in the sale and that the probe was carried out by staff with no market experience of loan sales.

Mr Fleming said that the C&AG will appear at the committee on Thursday September 29, as will Nama chairman Frank Daly and chief executive Brendan McDonagh.

Mr Noonan will appear the following week.

Also we are going to invite people who are involved in the phone call with Minister Noonan in early January 2014, Mr Fleming announced. He said this included Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness.

He said that the PAC intend to invite the current and former secretaries general of the Finance Department before further meetings.

Sinn Fein TD Mary Lou McDonald asked that Mr Noonan be requested to make a further appearance if required.

She said that Nama officials should be told that there appearance next week may not be a one-off.

Its their first appearance and were now engaged in what will be an extensive examination of the C&AG report, added said.
A view of Dublin city centre from the top of Liberty Hall. Photo: Damien Eagers

Gardai are investigating an assault in Dublin city where a male tourist received a serious eye injury.

The assault happened when four tourists were attacked by a group of young men and women on OConnell Street, Dublin 1, at 11.40pm on Friday September 9.

Gardai have appealed for witnesses to come forward.

A garda spokesperson said gardai believe the injured party was initially the victim of a theft in Temple Bar at 9.30pm earlier that evening.

Friends of the victim later recovered his property and seized it from a group of youths on Crown Alley in Dublin city centre.

The injured party was later re-united with his property and friends and the group proceeded to make their way from the south-side to the north-side of the city, the spokesperson said.

The group of youths pursued the victim and his friends onto OConnell Street and a number of altercations took place prior to the victim and his friends being assaulted on the west side of Upper OConnell Street.

Those involved are also suspected of having assaulted other members of the public."

Gardai are seeking to talk to anyone who witnessed events at Crown Alley or Upper O'Connell St, or who may have information that could be of assistance to contact Gardai at Store Street on 01-6668000, The Garda Confidential Line 1800-666-111 or The Incident Room, Store Street 01-6668101 / 01-6668089
TAOISEACH Enda Kenny said that under Fianna Fail's water policy "everybody could leave their taps on" and the taxpayer would be expected to foot the bill.

Mr Kenny hit out at the rival party's policy of abolishing water charges, calling it a return to "populism" for Fianna Fail.

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In a briefing to reporters he reiterated that Fine Gael supports a single utlity to provide water services, conservation measures through metering, and a "fair and affordable contribution" from households.

An Expert Commission is currently examining the future of funding water services.

Fianna Fail has made a submission calling for charges to be scrapped.

Mr Kenny said that under these circumstances water would have to be funded by the central exchequer.

"It would mean that effectively that everybody could leave their taps on and the public would be expected to pay for whatever the outcome would be," he added.

In other issues covered Mr Kenny said that the Citizenz' Assembly to discuss the Eighth Amendment will meet for the first time on Saturday October 15.

Chaired by Supreme Court judge Mary Laffoy, it will examine the law that bans abortion, giving equal status to the lief of a mother and an unborn child.

Mr Kenny says he looks forward to receiving its conclusions.

On Brexit, Mr Kenny said he believes the British government will trigger Article 50 - the beginning of their process of leaving the EU - early next year, but that it's a matter for the Prime Minister Theresa May.

He reiterated that the Budget here will have to be Brexit-proofed.

Mr Kenny was asked about Finance Minister Michael Noonan's hospitalisation for cullulitis last week.

He said that Mr Noonan has assured him of his fitness to work and that he trusts him to tell him if he is not able to work for health reasons.

He said Mr Noonan is to meet his British counterpart Philip Hammond tomorrow to discuss Brexit.

Mr Kenny said that the north inner city taskforce - set up to support the area amid the spate of gangland killings this year - is "an issue that I've taken very much to heart."

He said he's had several meetings with the commintiy and said their resilience is "quite incredible".

"The area's been given a bad name by a small percentage of people," he said,

Mr Kenny said he's against the legalisation of drugs but is in favour of medically supervised injection centres.
Our GP on how the HPV vaccination saves lives

Q. My daughter has just started first year. We received a letter home advising vaccination against the HPV virus. Is this vaccination necessary and safe?

Dr Nina replies: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is a group of viruses that can cause infection in the throat, anus, cervix, vagina and external genitalia. It is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections we know and it is estimated that most people come in contact with this virus within 18 months of commencing sexual activity. There are over 100 different types of HPV. Most are harmless but certain types are known to be associated with cancers of the area they infect. Types 16 and 18 are considered high risk and are known to increase the risk of cancer of the cervix and throat. Types 6 and 11 are low risk and are associated with the development of warts.

Read More

Of those infected, 90pc will clear the virus within two years. Most won't even be aware that they ever had it. Smoking increases the risk of prolonged infection.

Those who are infected with the virus can pass it on even if they have no symptoms. The virus is spread through direct contact with the infected area, usually through skin-to-skin contact, kissing or oral, anal or genital sexual contact. You can have the HPV virus for years and be unaware of this. It isn't unusual for someone to develop changes or warts years after being in touch with the virus. This can cause upset in a relationship as some are concerned there has been a recent infidelity. This isn't necessarily the case.

Read More

The only way the virus can be diagnosed is through direct testing or upon the development of genital warts. Women who are found to have HPV with abnormal smears are at a higher risk of developing cancer of the cervix and do need closer screening.

Until recently, the only way to prevent cervical cancer was through regular cervical screening. A national screening programme, introduced in 2008, invites all women aged 25 to 60 to attend for smears every three years from the age of 25 to 45, and every five years from 45 to 60. Since 2010 we also can give two vaccines, which can prevent infection with certain strains of the HPV virus, which will further reduce the incidence of cervical cancer in Ireland.

The vaccine is currently offered to girls in first year in secondary school. It is most effective when given to those who are not yet sexually active which is why this age group have been selected. The vaccine can prevent seven out of 10 cases of cervical cancer.

Read More

There have been media reports of adverse events related to vaccination, but more than 80 million doses of the HPV vaccine have been given in the USA alone. There is no scientific evidence that backs up the claim that the vaccine is anything but safe and well tolerated. The most common side effect is soreness at the injection site, which is usually mild and short lived.

Read More

Other side effects such as fainting and dizziness are more likely due to stress and are not side effects of the vaccine itself.

There aren't many cancers that we can vaccinate against. Cancers of the throat, cervix, anus and genitalia are still a cause of death in our country. In this instance, it is certainly true that vaccination saves lives.
Maternal instinct is a very powerful feeling and by acting on hers, Farrah Tayob undoubtedly saved the life of her daughter Anabel (1) before the infant succumbed to a deadly strain of meningitis.

This week is Meningitis Awareness Week, and Anabels story is a chilling reminder of how fast this virus can develop and how vital it is to act as quickly as possible.

One night in January, Anabel woke before midnight, which is very unlike her, says the mother of two. She had a slight temperature and I gave her some Calpol before bringing her into bed with me  but instead of settling down, she tossed and turned all night and in the morning when my son Alexander (6), went to give her a kiss, she got really upset and started screaming crying.

She carried on being crabby and out of sorts for a few hours and her temperature was still a little raised, so in the evening I rang the out-of-hours medical service but was told they were too busy to see her until the following day.

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Even though they tried to reassure me that she was probably teething, I knew instinctively that something wasnt right, and decided to take her to casualty, says Farrah.

This swift action probably made all the difference to Anabels recovery, as although Farrah didnt have any idea how much danger her daughter was in, she acted on impulse and not long after arriving at A&E, her babys condition took a dramatic turn for the worse.

Anabel started vomiting in the car on the way to the hospital, says the Dublin woman. Then when we arrived, her temperature had started to rise and all of a sudden she lost all colour and literally looked like death  I was so terrified.

The examining nurse found two tiny pinpricks of a rash  one on each leg  they were so small that I didnt notice them and hadnt once thought she may have had meningitis. I was devastated when they said they had to do tests to rule it out.

Per capita, Ireland has the highest rate of meningococcal disease in Europe and the second highest in the world. There are approximately 150-200 cases of bacterial meningitis here every year, but after various tests it was discovered that Anabel had contracted an extremely rare form of the disease (W135) which only affects one or two people a year in this country.

This diagnosis meant constant monitoring of her condition was imperative. Thankfully following treatment and round-the-clock intensive care, the little girl recovered and was discharged from hospital 10 days later.

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Whatsapp Last year former England rugby union player Matt Dawson shared images of his son Sami suffering from meningitis

Looking back, I still find it very painful as it was a very harrowing time for us all, says Farrah. Anabel went through so much and at the time, we had no idea what her prognosis would be  whether she would live or die or whether she would be left with some sort of disability  it was all very scary.

But thankfully after five days on antibiotics, she finally turned a corner and was let home a few days after that  it was the most terrifying time of my life and even now, I cant believe how lucky we are that she survived the ordeal. If I hadnt trusted my instincts, she may not be here today as we came so close to losing her.

Read More

Meningitis is the most feared infectious disease as it can kill a healthy person within 24 hours and there is no way of knowing who it is going to strike. About one in 10 of us carry the bacteria at the back of our nose and throat at any one time and will never become ill. However it will result in disease in a small percentage of people. It is essentially a race against time to start appropriate treatment  so time really is of the essence.

New treatment for meningitis was reported last month, including plans for a new rapid test which detects sepsis  this breakthrough could help prevent many children from contracting the virus.

Meningitis Research Foundation is proud to have supported research which has led to the discovery of two genes that are switched either on or off depending on whether a child has a bacterial or viral infection, says Caroline OConnor of Meningitis Ireland.

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The international team of scientists hope to use the findings to develop a rapid test which could allow doctors to quickly distinguish between a viral or bacterial illness and could be used in hospital emergency departments or GP surgeries, to identify the children who need antibiotics.

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At the moment, when a child arrives at hospital with fever, doctors have no quick method of distinguishing whether the child is suffering from bacterial or viral form of meningitis. Diagnosis relies instead on taking a sample of blood or spinal fluid, and seeing if bacteria grow in this sample  but this can take more than 48 hours and speed is of the essence.

Differentiating between viruses and bacteria is extremely important, says OConnor. Although viral infections are much more common than bacterial infections, the latter are far more dangerous.

So although the research is at an early stage, the results show bacterial infection can be distinguished from other causes of fever, such as a viral infection, using the pattern of genes that are switched on or off in response to the infection.

Read More

In February 2016 the HSE announced that it will be introducing a new vaccine to protect against group B meningococcal disease (MenB) to the Primary Childhood Immunisation Schedule from December 2016. The vaccine will be routinely offered to all babies born on or after October 1 2016, at two, four and 12 months. But there is no catch-up campaign planned for children who fall outside of this age group  however, the vaccine has been available privately in Ireland since 2013, but there are high costs involved (130-180 per dose.Children require between 2 and 4 doses of the vaccine).

Caroline OConnor, medical information officer, says while there has been some controversy surrounding the new vaccine (high costs and lack of catch-up doses), it will be beneficial to many.

The vaccine is estimated to protect against approximately 78-88pc of the MenB strain circulating in Ireland and the rest of Europe and its impact will be closely monitored following its introduction later this year, she says.

Vaccination offers the best form of protection against meningitis and we have seen great results with the introduction of previous vaccines to help protect against other forms of the disease.

Unfortunately no vaccine offers 100pc protection, so it is vital that people are aware of the signs.
WE Irish have some major reservations about self-driving cars, a new study reveals.

It shows there are seven things that people are worried about in particular.

However, there is a general welcome too for the perceived safety aspects of cars that do most of the driving.

One-in-four motorists said they had 'serious' concerns.

They revealed that the concept of self-driving cars 'scares' them.

The Continental Tyres survey showed that a smaller percentage (11pc) suggested we are becoming too reliant on technology.

Half the motorists surveyed said they would feel 'unsafe' in a self-driving car because they would not be 'in control' (they are really).

And more than one-third (36pc) were worried about the technology behind an autonomous driving car.

The research was carried out as part of Continental Tyres's 'Vision Zero' strategy.

It is a long-term plan to reduce accidents through tyre technologies and automotive systems.

Despite their deep-seated fears, many drivers saw the benefits autonomous driving can bring.

They instanced how it would give 'drivers' time to do productive work or relax. One-in-12 (8pc) held out the prospect that the technology could make a huge stride towards 'accident-free' driving.

However, one-third (35pc) remained unconvinced, if not downright cynical, about claims from automakers on the possibilities around autonomous driving.

They felt manufacturers have exaggerated what is possible, but admitted there is potential for significant safety and efficiency benefits.

Continental Tyres Ireland chief Tom Dennigan said: "Automated driving will surely be the biggest change to motoring over the next 20 years and it is clear from our survey that Irish motorists have some serious concerns in relation to this development."

But he said his company was "confident" that autonomous driving would "bring huge benefits for road safety" with vehicles able to interact with each other.

The challenge, he said, would be to replicate these advances and systems in developing countries.

Here are the top seven concerns/reactions that the study has discovered:

1. Feeling unsafe due to not being in control of the vehicle.

2. Issues with the technology, worries about breaking down.

3. Someone hacking into the system driving the car.

4. Driverless cars making ethical decisions - for example driving off the road to avoid a bigger accident.

5. Not being able to experience the physical act of driving.

6. Having motion sickness, due to not being in control of the car.

7. Worries there will be issues with the technology and not knowing how to fix it.
THE Volkswagen Group is making slow progress on fixing cars equipped with illicit engine software across Europe - and Ireland is no exception.

Senior Irish figures told Motors this week that it could be two years before the 115,000 cars and vans have had the required software (1.2, 2.0 diesels) and software/hardware (1.6-litre) fixes applied.

According to German headquarters, under 10pc of the 8.5m models affected in Europe have been dealt with so far.

Meantime life and business goes on and on Monday, the day before the Ploughing started, we got to see and drive the revised Amarok (above) and especially the new 3-litre V6 diesel engine on the Tullamore site.

The V6 can develop 163bhp, 204bhp or 224bhp depending on the model. The 163bhp doesn't get here for a while and, anyway, I'd say the other two will catch the eye with their levels of power. The 224bhp has a whopping 550Nm of torque.

And towing capacity now ranges up to 3,500kg. Prices start from 31,268 excluding VAT.

With permanent all-wheel drive and Torsen differential as well as an 8spd auto gearbox, I (well the car) made light work of the specially-constructed course at the Ploughing.

Read More: Rivals now 'polluting' more than Volkswagen, study claims

Inside has been upgraded too as have the looks at the front but it is still the same size. There are 17in brake discs on the front axle of the 224HP version and 16in at the rear. The automatic Post-Collision Braking System is also standard.

There are three trim levels: Trendline, Comfortline and Highline with 18in alloys on the latter and Park Distance Control.

The Amarok's arrival begins a transformation of the brand's commercial range here over the next year. There will be a new Crafter van in three months, for example.

Overall, the van market has grown exponentially for some time but there has been so much catch-up that they are forecasting a 6pc increase in sales in 2017 as opposed to the double-digit rises that have marked the past few years.

Volkswagen are, nonetheless, eyeing 5,000+ sales within the next three years.

Many buyers - mostly owner/drivers - are now ordering much higher-spec in their vans. As well as that, one-third of VW commercials are on Personal Contract Plan (PCP) deals with total lending in that part of their business expected to reach 30m this year.

We couldn't let the occasion pass without asking about public reaction here to the emissions scandal over the past 12 months.

Alan Bateson, director of Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles here, echoed what headquarters had announced: progress is slow in getting to fix the engines involved. People are not necessarily choosing to come in specifically for the software fix but are doing so when servicing is due.

He expects the first of the work (software/hardware) on the 1.6-litre Caddy van to start from November.

But it will be a couple of years, Bateson forecasts, before they get through the whole lot.
I had a car accident in July and my Volkswagen Polo 2004 was an economical write-off and was sent for scrappage. I am still trying to find a car, similar size but I don't want a VW this time. My budget is 8,000 max. I am looking for mileage less than 100,000km,1.2 engine, 5dr. Would you have any ideas as purchasing the car is now critical as I have a five-month-old baby and l live in the country.

Aidan: We have had some similar requests to your one recently and all of them at this budget, which explains the strength in values in the supermini segment. There is ample demand to meet supply. The differences in values between one year and another are tiny. This means that you will sometimes compare seemingly identical models with different registration plates but the older one might cost more money. Don't be disheartened.

Compare each of our choices in terms of mileage, condition, seller type (dealer versus private), and service record. If the older car has lower mileage and a happier and more transparent back story, then the reg plate goes out the window. Buy the best car for your money, not the newest. When fielding questions about the used supermini segment, my default choice is always the Mazda2. Great 1.3 litre engine, which is in equal parts reliable, spritely and fuel efficient. Opt for a Sensu model over the Comfort version if you can. All models have ISOFIX for baby seats. With this budget, you are looking at 2011 and maybe 2012 models but remember the advice from earlier.

Sticking with Japanese brands, try the Honda Jazz. You sit taller in a Jazz and it feels a touch roomier than other superminis. It came with a choice of 1.2 or 1.4 litre engines. Don't be put off by the 1.4, but check if your insurer loads your premium for it. The 1.2 is more popular anyway.

When it comes to reliability, a Honda dealer I know once told me that Jazz's are so reliable that "you could weld the bonnet shut on them". I don't doubt it. I like the Jazz for you because the demographic of buyers tends to be the more mature and conscientious type (polite speak for "older").

Truth be told, all superminis are excellent. It's a segment where every brand uses different ingredients but makes equally impressive machines. You are splitting hairs to find any big differences so broaden your search to the Fiesta, Yaris, Fabia, Ibiza, Clio, Corsa as well. As an outside choice, opt for a Nissan Note. It's a little bigger than the superminis. At this budget, you will see plenty of 1.4 litre models. So long as your insurance doesn't spike, there is nothing to fear in terms of running costs.

Eddie: What can I say? Aidan has given you all the options really. The Jazz would be my first pick. The Nissan Micra is one of those cars that drives forever and while not to everyone's taste I think it might be suitable for you. There are plenty of them, parts are plentiful and prices are reasonable. Top two for you.

I wish to change my car. I drive a 2001 Toyota Corolla hatchback. Mileage is 168,824. I used to drive to Cork a lot from Galway, but no longer so mileage now is around 10,000km a year. I would like a new or nearly-new car, not too big but not too small either. Probably 4dr but not bothered. I would like low tax, good mileage to the litre. Budget around 20,000 max. I was thinking of changing in January. I have had a Toyota for long time. I plan in retiring next year. I am on my own so would appreciate some suggestions.

Aidan: You don't want a recommendation overload so here are my two choices; the Hyundai i20 and the Peugeot 2008. The i20 will suit you down to the ground. It is quite a way bigger than the model it replaced and is probably best summarised by your description of wanting a car that is "neither too big, nor too small".

It has a lovely 1.2 litre petrol engine and it costs 200 to tax. While prices start at 15,995 for a Comfort model, I think you should pay the 1500 premium for the Deluxe version. It comes with slightly bigger wheels (actually makes a difference to the i20's appearance), and a smattering of creature comforts such as cruise control, Bluetooth, and rear parking sensors as standard. A comprehensively kitted and refined machine in its entirety.

Onto the Peugeot 2008. The seating position is more elevated than in superminis and Peugeot has done a cracking job of giving the 2008 a facelift this year. No botched surgery or squinting to notice the differences with it. Buy the 1.2 petrol because you definitely don't need diesel.

The Active model with 82bhp will set you back a shade over 20,000 and like the i20, it's annual motor tax charge is 200 (pending the outcome of the forthcoming Budget). I like the 2008 for its well-roundedness. It is spacious, comfortable, stylish, easy to manoeuvre, and represents good value for money. If a new model 2008 stretches your 20,000 budget too much then don't write it off the list entirely.

You could find that some late returning hire drive 162 plate cars are still available come January. These should represent a decent saving but you won't have your choice of colour and you won't be the first owner as the car was previously a rental. Nothing to fear, though. Quality demands on dealers these days means that they have to spend the money to freshen their cars back to as near-original a state as they can.

Eddie: I'd buy a Toyota Auris with the 1.33-litre petrol engine. Your budget may be a tiny bit short for a new one but you should easily pick up a nearly-new model. It's a simple and straightforward car. Lots of room, economical, four doors, reliable.

Your existing Toyota seems to have served you well; I see no reason to change brand.

My mother has an Audi A4 and wishes to change to a smaller car. She is looking for something Polo-sized ideally. We are wondering what is the cheapest car for a 73-year-old woman to insure/run? Her current car is an A4 1.8T quattro, so tax is 780 and insurance is similar.

Aidan: Anything other than your mother's present car will represent considerable savings in fuel costs and annual motor tax.

Though difficult to determine the overall savings in insurance, a brand new supermini is certainly in a less risky insurance category than a petrol A4.

You mention your mother wants something Polo sized. Forgive the obvious recommendation, but what about a Polo? It's brilliant and solidly built. If you are buying a new car then you can follow what most people choose and opt for a 1.0 litre Trendline 60bhp model for 16,155.

For an extra 680 your mother can get a 75bhp version. Check the availability of the Innovation Pack upgrade with your local dealer. As part of the 162-reg period, VW bundled features that usually attract a cumulative cost of 1,980 for a mere 162. Great deal. If it's a used Polo you are after, then depending on your mam's budget you can still buy the latest model with a 1.0 litre engine or the last of the old models with the older 1.2 litre.

A Skoda Fabia is virtually identical in its DNA to the Polo. Equally as good a choice and the specification to watch for is the Ambition model. At 15,340, it is a little cheaper than the Polo. Not sure you need to stray from either of these, but as an alternative option take a look at the Toyota Yaris Hybrid. It costs a little over 20,000 so she is not likely to recover all of this additional outlay, but it will run on battery power at town speeds and they never give an ounce of trouble.

Furthermore, because it is a hybrid it has an automatic gearbox, which will remove the strain of changing gears manually.

Eddie: She's going to miss the pep and response from the 1.8-litre petrol. So she is going to have to adapt her driving a bit and be aware her new car won't be able to do things her A4 can.

The Polo/Fabia is a good option but I feel she might be better off getting into an Audi A3 petrol hatchback. Yes it is bigger than a Polo and it won't be new on your budget but it would be a good stepping stone to a smaller car next time.

Just to say

WE love getting your enquiries but can't reply to all queries in as full a manner as this due to time and space restraints. We try to deal with as many as possible via email. But you can help us help you if you make sure to include the following critical elements in your query:

c Total budget.

c Annual mileage.

c Size of car required (number of seats).

c Present car (make, model, year and mileage).

ecunningham@independent.ie
British Prime Minister Teresa May has been urged to allow flights resume between the UK and Sharm el-Sheikh.

Sir Gerald Howarth MP, head of the cross-party parliamentary group on Egypt, has written to the Prime Minister asking her to end the flight ban.

In the letter, Howarth claimed that significant progress has been made on tightening security checks at the Red Sea resort's airport.

He also warned that there was a risk of people in Sharm becoming "radicalised" if the area's tourism industry continued to suffer.

Flights between the UK and Sharm were suspended by the UK Government in November 2015, shortly after the terrorist bombing of a Russian passenger plane on October 31 killed 224 people.

The Irish Aviation Authority has directed Irish airline operators not to operate to/from its airport or in Egyptian Sinai peninsula airspace until further notice.

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All UK airlines have currently suspended their flights to Sharm el Sheikh, with British Airways announcing earlier this year it has cancelled flights "indefinitely".

'Necessary measures' put in place

During a visit to Egypt in July, Sir Gerald inspected how baggage was handled at the airport and met senior officials.

In an interview with the Press Association, the Conservative MP for Aldershot said: "They really have been listening to what the UK authorities have been asking them to do. They are clearly bending over backwards to try to deliver.

"One of the guys we met was a Department for Transport (DfT) official and when I asked him, 'Are there any showstoppers to the resumption of flights?', he said 'No'.

"I believe that the necessary measures have been put in place to minimise the risk.

"We live in an imperfect world and no government can guarantee 100% security anywhere."

In June, British Airways suspended its flights to Sharm "indefinitely", stating that "the safety and security of our customers will always be our top priorities".

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EasyJet, Monarch and Thomson Airways have previously said they are awaiting for the Foreign and Commonwealth to change its travel advice, which currently warns against all but essential travel by air to or from the resort.

Sir Gerald explained that hotels in Sharm were only 25-35pc occupied and were "clearly hurting" from the UK flight ban.

"They've invested a huge amount of money in these really very sophisticated places," he said.

"They've kept on the staff. They can't do that indefinitely and, if the staff are laid off, we will have a substantial number of people who will be potentially radicalised.

"There is an imperative on ensuring that the resort can resume its contribution to the prosperity of Egypt."

'Working closely' on the issue

Last month, Mrs May welcomed Egypt's efforts to improve security at Sharm airport in a phone conversation with the country's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

An account of the call released by Downing Street gave no indication the Prime Minister was ready to ease Government advice, saying only that the UK would continue "working closely" with Cairo on the issue.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister said she recognised the economic effects of the suspension, given the importance of the tourism industry to Egypt's economy, and she praised the Egyptian government's ongoing efforts to improve security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport."

Sir Gerald said the resumption of flights was "exclusively in the hands of the Prime Minister" and he believed "she is keen to make a decision in the next few weeks".

He added: "We hope that we can resolve this problem."

A DfT spokeswoman said: "The security of British nationals is our top priority, and we took the decision to suspend flights from Sharm el-Sheikh in November last year to protect the travelling public.

"We keep aviation security under constant review."

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Your personal finance questions  Should I give up my tracker mortgage now that interest rates are rising fast?

Q I am on a tracker mortgage so my mortgage bills have gone up twice since last July as a result of the two European Central Bank interest rate hikes. The interest rate on my tracker mortgage was 1.5pc before the ECB started to increase its rate in July. Now it is almost twice that at 2.75pc. Tracker mortgages have always been considered gold dust but I am now considering fixing my mortgage as I am worried the ECB may increase its rates again in the coming months, which would push my mortgage bills even higher. Would it be a good idea to give up my tracker and fix my mortgage?
Over the next couple of months, one of the most critical questions surfacing in Irish political circles will finally be answered.

Is Fianna Fail ready, and indeed willing, to be the lead party in government once again?

Judging by the mood of TDs and senators at the party's think-in in Carlow, Fianna Fail very much believes that redemption is in the air.

Half of the parliamentary party are new on the scene and many have genuine ambitions of becoming ministers.

And so, after five long years in the political wilderness, the party believes it has learned from its many, many mistakes, which left the Irish public feeling battered, bruised and very much betrayed.

Micheal Martin deserves massive credit for bringing his party back from a point of absolute despair.

But, after just four months supporting Enda Kenny's limp coalition, Fianna Fail's mask has well and truly slipped.

The party's U-turn on the issue of water charges smacks of the type of populism we see so often from Sinn Fein.

At the Fianna Fail Ard Fheis and on several subsequent occasions, the party's environment spokesman Barry Cowen said water charges should be suspended for the lifetime of the next government.

Now, according to its submission to the water commission, charges will be abolished under a Fianna Fail administration.

It is some turnaround from 2010, when the Fianna Fail-led Cabinet was preparing to introduce annual charges of around 500 per household.

But the scale of the U-turn does not stop there.

Not only is Fianna Fail promising to scrap charges forever, it has offered to refund the hundreds of thousands of householders who were foolish enough to obey the law and pay their bills.

This will come in the form of a tax credit, the party says.

How much will that cost? Well, the party hasn't put a figure on it.

What if the commission recommends charges should be re-introduced?

Well, the party hasn't explained what it will do in that instance.

At official level, Fianna Fail denies that it has flip-flopped on the issue, instead saying the position is consistent with its election manifesto.

But at the think-in, TDs privately expressed unease about the new-found policy. In fact, one prominent backbencher complained that the first he heard about the stance was when it was reported in the media.

Several deputies also voiced concern that the party has gone so far out on a limb on water charges, that it will be the issue that not only causes the next election, but dominates the campaign itself.

If the expert commission does, as expected, recommend the re-introduction of water charges, Fianna Fail surely will have no option but to reject its findings.

For if it doesn't, how can the party's TDs honestly look their voters directly in the eye when election time comes around again.

As Micheal Martin's gamble was discussed over dinner and drinks at the think-in, TDs spoke of a party that once again can influence everyday life in this country.

They spoke of a party that has reconnected with the people whom on so many occasions gave them their endorsement at the ballot box.

Fianna Fail is back, the deputies say, and it will fight even harder for its supporters this time round.

The first real proof of this commitment, so we are told, will be in the Budget.

Not only will it be 'Brexit-proof', 'rural-proof' and whatever other analogy being used in the customary pre-Budget narrative, but it will also be 'Fianna Fail-proof'.

That is of course if Paschal Donohoe and Michael Noonan can somehow satisfy the multi-million euro demands being sought by various spokespeople in Micheal Martin's party.

While Fianna Fail is enjoying what many in the party say is a rebirth, ordinary families are not.

One thing the political events of 2016 have achieved is the moulding of the public into a much more unforgiving bunch than years gone by.

As Fianna Fail's own TD and Ceann Comhairle Sean O Fearghail said recently, trust between the public and the political establishment is broken.

Unless Fianna Fail fulfils its pledge of acting responsibly, that trust won't be repaired for a long, long time.
I won't be joining the #repealthe8th-ers at the pro-choice march in Dublin on Saturday because I'd feel like a phony. I'm not a card-carrying, jumper-wearing member of the 'pro-abortion' lobby and I'm finding myself less so as each day passes.

They are what the pro-lifers were in the 70s and 80s - aggressive, lacking in empathy, deluded, and condescending. I shall elaborate - aggressive in their blanket dismissal of opinions that don't match theirs, apathetic in their feelings towards the unborn child, deluded in the fact that they think a right to abortion has something to do with 1916 among others things, and condescending of 'Catholic ideologist idiots' who don't follow their mantra.

Exaggeration has also been rampant in recent weeks. The earth-shattering story where a counsellor in a Dublin clinic warned an undercover reporter that she could get breast cancer from having an abortion made headlines. An organisation with direct links to a Catholic anti-abortion group, which is unregulated by Irish law, saying abortions could be dangerous - well I never. An online newspaper called the street where the clinic is housed a 'street of shame'. An entire street, no less.

Liberals and group-thinkers are losing their collective minds. I think a lot of it is due to the fact that many of the repealers weren't around during the last referendum in 1983, otherwise they would have been afflicted with chronic taedium vitae brought on by 'I can't believe we're still talking about abortions 33 years later' syndrome.

If a woman has an abortion and regrets it in 20 years' time, where will the pro-choicers be? I don't understand how a bunch of strangers, who know nothing about someone's personal situation, have the right to manipulate on either side. Women who have abortions because of sexual abuse, foetal abnormality or other health concerns should never have to travel abroad. Women who don't have the financial means should never have to have a backstreet abortion.

I'm neither Catholic, nor anti-abortion, but I find it strange that pro-abortionists - that's what I call them because 'choice' doesn't seem to be on their agenda - can get behind the ending of a human life with such fervour. I had my head bitten off recently when I said I felt sorry for the baby that was aborted into a bin in Northern Ireland.

One journalist recently wrote: "I had an abortion. It's normal." I don't think it should be sold as thus. What if, say, you're 28, about to travel around the world with a friend, and you get pregnant after a one-night stand. Your friends and society will tell you it's OK to have an abortion. It is all about your rights after all. Then 10 years later, your friends all have kids and you don't. Do they care that they talked you into it all those years ago? Probably not.

I fear that more people will have abortions as a result of a possible 'yes' vote and as I am no longer in my 20s, I am better poised to comment on the negative effects of them. When you're 23, you know everything and think you'll be young forever. By 40, all that changes. At that stage, a large percentage of people hope and pray they'll have a baby, rather than get rid of one. Not everyone obviously, but more than would admit it publicly.

Rather than all shout at once, why not examine the fact that more than 100,000 women had abortions between 1994 and 2014 even though clearly pregnancy is the last thing they wanted. Is it down to lack of education, financial means, alcohol?

Unprotected sex, possibly with strangers, means people are putting themselves at risk. According to figures from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, there have been around 7,000 STI cases so far this year, a 13.8pc increase on last year, and 326 cases of HIV, 71 more than last year. Syphilis, which was reduced to negligible levels in the 80s and 90s, is now beginning to re-appear. Having abortions accessible in Ireland won't necessarily change those statistics, it may even increase them. In 2014, 5.2pc of pregnancies in Ireland ended in abortion, while in Spain it was 18pc, and 21pc in England, where abortions are legal.

Young women and men need to be educated properly at school and college, starting with properly taught biology class and access to free condoms, which could be available through sponsored initiatives.

Once a woman is pregnant, she is unwillingly thrust into a situation where fear prevails. No doubt the idea of becoming a single parent is awful for many women. Not only do they get an allowance of just 30 more per week on top of 188 social welfare, but the housing crisis, creche fees and possible problems in the parental home are all good reasons to put them off. But being a single parent is not always as bad as people fear and once the baby arrives, it can be wonderful.

By their very nature, abortions require quick decision-making and it's important for mothers and fathers, who count too by the way, to have as much information as possible should the situation arise.

I also think people who feel empathy towards an aborted foetus, or a baby as I like to call it, should not be ridiculed for exercising free speech. If someone doesn't get why people have abortions, deal with it.

We were once, unless I am very much mistaken, foetuses after all.
Scenes from the film were shot at the Supreme Court in London, making legal history

Makers of the latest Bridget Jones film have created legal history by using the UK Supreme Court as a location.

Scenes in Bridget Jones's Baby were shot in Court One of the Supreme Court building in London.

Audiences can see lawyer Mark Darcy - played by actor Colin Firth - arguing at a hearing before fictional Supreme Court justices.

A Supreme Court spokesman said a courtroom had not been used as a film location before.

He said justices had given their approval.

"(We) agreed to let film-makers use a courtroom as part of a wider programme of generating income to ease pressure on the public purse," said the spokesman.

"A film crew spent one weekend in the building, avoiding any disruption to court business."

He added: "We were pleased to have the chance to open up the building to a new audience through the cinema screen."
David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o at the LA premiere of Queen Of Katwe (Invision/AP)

David Oyelowo has admitted he was surprised Disney decided to set his latest film in the slums of Uganda.

The British actor stars alongside Lupita Nyong'o in Queen Of Katwe, which is based on the true story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi.

At the film's premiere in Los Angeles, Oyelowo said it was rare to see a "positive, life-affirming story" from Africa on the big screen and the movie was a "love letter" to his daughter Zoe.

He told the Press Association: "From page one when I saw Disney on the cover, I just couldn't believe Disney were making this movie.

"That in and of itself caught my attention because these kind of films are normally independent movies that are a real struggle to get made."

He added: "A story about this young girl from a slum in Uganda who becomes a champion. I haven't seen that kind of story coming out of Africa.

"The last film I did in Uganda was The Last King Of Scotland, a very different kind of film. As someone of African descent, to see a positive life-affirming story like this was something I really wanted to be a part of."

Oyelowo, who now lives in Los Angeles, said he had brought his family to the premiere, adding: "My daughter - who I did this as a love letter to - is here as well. My little Zoe.

"It's the first time I've ever done a film that I can take my entire family to."

Nyong'o, who stars as Phiona's mother, said the film was about a "small girl with a big dream".

"At the end of the day it doesn't take big people to make big things happen," she said.

"It takes regular folk and Phiona is one of those people. She's just a regular girl living in abject poverty and she makes some out of herself by playing chess and she's given me a job."

Video of the Day

Queen Of Katwe is released in UK cinemas on October 21.
Johnny Depp is offloading more property after agreeing to hand over $7 million (6.28m) as part of his divorce settlement.

The Pirates of the Caribbean star has put a collection of five Downtown Los Angeles penthouses on the market for over 10.76m.

The actor reportedly acquired the units, all housed in the historic Eastern Columbia building, between 2007 and 2008, according to People.com.

Depp once lived in the penthouses and used the vast space as an art studio and guest quarters.

The units are available to buy separately, but their individual asking prices have not been disclosed.

The news comes just weeks after Depp put his French villa back on the market for $55.5 million (49.76 million) - double the previous asking price.

The actor agreed to settle his divorce from Amber Heard, 30, last month, paying domestic abuse charities she selected to receive all the cash.

The couple was married for just 15 months before the actress filed for divorce in May.

The Los Angeles penthouses and the French villa aren't the only Depp items currently up for sale - author J.K. Rowling is selling off the actor's former yacht, Amphritrite.

J.K. reportedly paid $35 million (31.38m) for the boat in January, but, according to editors at the website Yacht Harbour, it's back on the market for $20 million (17.93m).

Video of the Day

The 156-foot (47.6-metre) yacht was built in 2001 and Depp bought it five years later, renaming it Vajoliroja after his then-partner Vanessa Paradis and their two kids.

After his 2012 split from Vanessa, Depp sold the yacht to an American shipping magnate and it was reportedly sold on to Rowling after she fell in love with the liner while vacationing with her family last year.
Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston at the Oscars in Hollywood in 2015.

Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up 11 years ago - why are people bringing her into his divorce?

It has been over a decade since Jennifer Aniston filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, yet for some reason people still think that she has been sitting at home pining for him all these years.

To recap, Aniston and Pitt wed in 2000 in a lavish California wedding before she filed for divorce five years later. Several months after, Pitts relationship with Angelina Jolie, whom he met while filming Mr and Mrs Smith, was confirmed.

Aniston and Pitts breakup shook the showbiz world. The entire population as we knew it was divided into two  Team Aniston and Team Jolie. T-shirts were even made to parade which team you were on.

Were you Team Aniston, who we had fallen in love with as Rachel Green in Friends, or were you Team Jolie, the other woman in Pitt's life?

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Either way, Aniston and Pitt had divorced and his relationship with Jolie began. There was nothing we could do about it.

But why, 11 years later, are people still hanging on to the fact Pitt fell in love with Jolie on set while he was still married to Aniston, ultimately resulting in their divorce?

As soon as news broke that Jolie had filed for divorce from Pitt, the internet was flooded with memes of a jubilant Aniston.

Clips of the iconic scene in Friends where she says, And that, my friend, is what they call closure, came out of the woodwork, as if they were waiting for this moment all along.

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Smug smiles, eyebrow raises, Jennifer Aniston must be delighted, and "Jennifer Aniston is having the last laugh" photos and comments can be found under nearly every article that mentions the Jolie-Pitts divorce.

Have people forgotten, however, that Aniston wed Justin Theroux in August 2015 after being engaged to the actor for three years?

Video of the Day

That she has gone on to star in several movies and television shows, such as Horrible Bosses, Were The Millers and Marley & Me, making her one of the most sought-after actors of our time? Not to mention that she now adds producer and director to her byline.

Aniston penned an open letter in the Huffington Post in July after rumours that she was pregnant began to circulate for the hundredth time.

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She addressed the rumours, confirming they were untrue, and finished with a statement that echoes someone whos had years of experience in learning to deal with heartbreak and love: We get to determine our own 'happily ever after' for ourselves."

And, considering Aniston does not have any social media accounts or a personal social media presence, we can safely say that she certainly is having the last laugh, but not for Pitt and Jolie.
A tattoo is visible on the arm of a police officer attending an incident in Pagham, West Sussex

Employers are missing out on talented workers because of negative attitudes towards people who have a tattoo, says a new report.

The conciliation service Acas said a third of young people have a tattoo, but some firms, and individual managers, were worried about the image it would give to potential customers or clients.

Acas pointed out that dress codes in the workplace must not be discriminatory, suggesting that employees should be consulted.

Stephen Williams of Acas, said: "Businesses are perfectly within their right to have rules around appearance at work but these rules should be based on the law where appropriate, and the needs of the business, not managers' personal preferences.

"We know that employers with a diverse workforce can reap many business benefits as they can tap into the knowledge and skills of staff from a wide range of backgrounds.

"Almost a third of young people now have tattoos so, whilst it remains a legitimate business decision, a dress code that restricts people with tattoos might mean companies are missing out on talented workers.

"We have updated our dress code guidance today, which also includes advice for employers to help ensure they don't fall on the wrong side of the law with their dress codes."
A still from the video of the shocking attack on the streets of Delhi

A video has emerged showing a 22-year-old schoolteacher being stabbed to death on a busy street in Delhi.

As the man kicks and stabs the woman in the shocking footage, several passers-by run away, with two people meekly attempting to intervene.

The woman, named by police as Karuna, had apparently rejected marriage proposals from the attacker, Surender Singh, 34.

He said he had been in love with the woman for more than a year. Police said he began to stalk her - and threatened to kill her - when she turned down his multiple marriage proposals.

In the footage, Singh walks up to Karuna and stabs her. He then attacks her for several seconds, stabbing her at least 20 times as several people walk past - some scurrying away when they see what is happening.

Two men do appear to approach Singh, but back off quickly, apparently after seeing the knife.

"She was attacked as she was walking with her cousin at around 9am. It seems that the assailant started liking her when they used to be neighbours earlier, but since he was married, she never paid attention," Esha Pandey, a police official told the BBC. Singh has been charged with murder.

Karuna had reportedly gone to police several months ago to claim that Singh was harassing her, repeatedly calling her on the phone.

Both Karuna and Singh were brought to the police station and advised to "compromise".

The fact that no-one intervened has caused outrage on social media in India.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bid each other farewell with a strident affirmation of security ties between their countries.

The leaders were all smiles as they sat down in New York for what the White House said was likely to be their last meeting before Mr Obama's presidency ends in January.

Mr Obama made only a passing reference to his opposition to the uptick in Israeli settlement construction in occupied lands as reporters were allowed in briefly for the start of the meeting.

"We do have concerns around settlement activity," Mr Obama said, adding that the US wanted to help Israel pursue peace.

In private, Mr Obama was more pointed, senior administration officials said, and raised "profound US concerns" that settlement-building was eroding prospects for peace.

Mr Netanyahu challenged that notion, said one official, adding that the two leaders had not "papered over" their differences.

Mr Netanyahu's ardent opposition to Mr Obama's nuclear deal with Iran - perhaps the biggest irritant in the relationship - did not arise during the meeting, said the officials.

The move by both leaders not to air their differences in public reflected their common understanding that if a breakthrough on Middle East peace is to occur, it will not be while Mr Obama is still president.

Following previous failed attempts to broker peace, the Obama administration has opted against a new major diplomatic push.

That means the focus shifts in the US to Mr Obama's potential successors: Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

Both would face similar obstacles to Mr Obama if they sought to pick up where he left off, although Mr Trump has insisted his administration would be anything but business as usual.

Meanwhile, both Russia and France have signalled an interest in taking on a larger role in mediating between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, Mr Obama has not ruled out the possibility that, in his final months in office, he will seek to influence the future debate by laying out what he sees as the contours of any viable deal.

That could come in the form of a major speech or a US-backed UN Security Council resolution - both moves that would increase pressure on Israel and that Mr Netanyahu would be expected to oppose.

White House officials said Mr Obama was not actively planning such a move but would consider it if it appeared likely to influence the situation positively.

In public, Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu spent most of their time touting a 10-year military assistance deal their countries struck this month worth 38 billion dollars (29 billion), the largest tranche of military aid the US has ever given another country.

The White House is hoping the unprecedented aid will curb the perception among Israel's supporters that Mr Obama has been insufficiently supportive of Israel's security

"It is a very dangerous and difficult time in the Middle East and we want to make sure that Israel has the full capabilities it needs in order to keep the Israeli people safe," Mr Obama said.

Mr Netanyahu added: "Your influential voice will be heard for many decades, and I know you'll continue to support Israel's right to defend itself and its right to thrive as a Jewish state."

Ties between the two leaders never fully recovered after Mr Netanyahu showed up on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress against Mr Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been dismayed by periodic comments by the Israeli leader suggesting he was less than serious about the two-state solution that has been the basis of all serious peace efforts for decades.

AP
A boat carrying African migrants heading to Europe has capsized off the Mediterranean coast near the Egyptian city of Alexandria, killing at least 42 people.

The army gave the toll in a statement, saying it had "thwarted an illegal immigration attempt" and that the boat had been 12 nautical miles off the coast when it sank.

Health Ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed said that the total number of dead was still unknown.

Alaa Osman, an official from Beheira province, said the migrants were from several African countries. He said more than 150 people have been rescued but bodies were still being pulled from the water.

Egypt's official news agency MENA said the boat was carrying 600 people when it sank near the coast, 112 miles north of the capital Cairo. Mr Osman said the boat had probably come from Kafr el-Sheik province, further to the east.

Thousands of illegal migrants have made the dangerous sea voyage across the Mediterranean in recent years fleeing war and poverty, mostly via lawless Libya. Thousands have drowned.

The number of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Europe has increased significantly in the past year, EU border agency Frontex said earlier this month.

More than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September, compared with 7,000 in the same period last year, it said.

Experts say smugglers in Egypt mostly use old fishing vessels, stuffed way beyond capacity both below and above deck.

New and more dangerous smuggling practices and attempts to reach Europe by riskier routes have led to a spike in the number of migrants dying as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean, the International Organisation for Migration said in a report last month.

It said newer routes, particularly from Egypt, were longer and riskier, leading to search and rescue efforts often being carried out further away from land. It said 2,901 people died or disappeared crossing the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2016, a 37% increase over the first six months of last year.

Last May, hundreds of migrants died after a wooden boat coming from Libya capsized, even as the Italian navy rushed to the rescue. European rescue boats, including naval vessels, often patrol off the Libyan coast to prevent such disasters.

The migrant crisis has proven deeply divisive in Europe, which has struggled to come up with a unified response. Right-wing nationalist parties opposed to taking in more migrants and refugees have made gains, including in Germany, which has accepted more migrants than any other European country.

Migrants rescued by the Italian navy near Europe's southern borders are brought to processing centres and offered accommodation while they apply for asylum. But many of the thousands registered each month travel further onwards toward Europe's richer north, in hopes of settling there.

More than 60,000 migrants and refugees are stranded in transit in Greece - just across the Mediterranean from Egypt - and those who arrived after March 20 have been restricted to five Aegean islands under an EU-brokered deal to deport them back to Turkey.

The agreement has been fraught with delays however, and most of the people in island camps have applied for asylum in Greece, launching a lengthy process during which they cannot be deported.

AP
Poster provided by the FBI showing two men sought following explosions in New York and New Jersey (FBI)

Video grab provided by the FBI showing two men walking in the Chelsea district of New York

The FBI has released an image of two men who took a suitcase that held a bomb that did not explode in New York City.

Federal prosecutors have charged Ahmad Khan Rahami with setting a bomb in New Jersey and two in New York. One of the bombs left in Manhattan did not explode.

The FBI issued a poster showing "two unidentified individuals" who investigators want to talk to.

The agency said the men were seen on Saturday night removing the bomb from a piece of luggage, then leaving the device behind while taking the suitcase.

Investigators have said the two men are being sought as witnesses, not suspects.

The image was captured on CCTV between 8pm and 9pm on West 27th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, the FBI said.

Earlier, authorities said Rahami vowed to martyr himself rather than be caught after setting off explosives and hoped "the sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets".

Criminal complaints in Manhattan and New Jersey federal courts provided chilling descriptions of the motivations that authorities said drove the Afghan-born US citizen to set off explosives, including a bomb that injured more than 31 people when it blew up in a busy Manhattan street.

More details emerged about Rahami's past, including the disclosure that the FBI had looked into him in 2014, but came up with nothing.

According to the court complaint, a handwritten journal by Rahami, 28, that championed jihad, included a passage that said: "You (USA Government) continue your (unintelligible) slaught(er)" against the mujahideen, or holy warriors, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Death to your oppression," the journal ended.

One portion expressed concern at the prospect of being caught before being able to carry out a suicide attack and the desire to be a martyr, the complaint said.

Another section included a reference to "pipe bombs" and a "pressure cooker bomb" and declared: "In the streets they plan to run a mile" - an apparent reference to one of the blast sites, a charity run in a New Jersey shore town.

There also were laudatory references to Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki - the American-born Muslim cleric who was killed in a 2011 drone strike and whose preaching has inspired other acts of violence - and Nidal Hasan, the former army officer who went on a deadly shooting rampage in 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas, the complaint said.

Before the federal charges were filed, Rahmani was already being held on 5.2 million dollars' (4m) bail, charged with the attempted murder of police officers during the shoot-out that led to his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden, New Jersey.

Rahmani remains in hospital with gunshot wounds.

AP
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, left, smiles next to his wife Priscilla Chan as they rehearse for a speech in San Francisco (AP)

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are committing three billion US dollars (2.31 billion) over the next 10 years to help eradicate all disease by the end of this century.

The money will be used to accelerate basic scientific research, including the creation of research tools - from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques - they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA sequencing have in generations past.

The goal, which they are unlikely to live to see accomplished, is to "cure, prevent or manage all disease" in the next 80 or so years.

They acknowledge that this might sound crazy, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last century - with vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on - following millennia with little progress.

"So if you even just assume that we'll be able to continue to make progress on that same trajectory, then that implies that by the end of this century we will have been able to solve most of these types of things," Mr Zuckerberg said in an interview.

He and Ms Chan have spent the past two years speaking to scientists and other experts to plan the endeavour.

He emphasised "that this isn't something where we just read a book and decided we're going to do".

Through their philanthropic organisation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the commitment includes 600 million dollars (462 million) to fund a new research centre in San Francisco where scientific and medical researchers will work alongside engineers on long-term projects spanning years or even decades.

The goal is not to focus narrowly on specific ailments, such as bone cancer or Parkinson's disease, but rather to do basic research.

One example: a cell atlas that maps out all the different types of cells in the body, which could help researchers create various types of drugs.

Ms Chan's work as a paediatrician seems to be a big driver in their couple's decision to take up this latest cause.

"I've been with families where we've hit the limit of what's possible through medicine and science," Ms Chan said.

"I've had to tell families devastating diagnoses of leukaemia, or that we just weren't able to resuscitate their child."

The couple spoke with The Associated Press in their home in Palo Alto, California, where their infant daughter, Max, had just woken from a nap.

Their dog, Beast, came by to sit briefly during the 25-minute interview.

Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Chan hope that their effort will inspire other far-reaching efforts and collaboration in science, medicine and engineering, so that basic research is no longer relegated to the margins.

"We spend 50 times more on health care treating people who are sick than we spend on science research (to cure) diseases so that people don't get sick in the first place," Mr Zuckerberg said.

He added that the approach reflects a belief that "people are always going to suffer from disease so therefore we should focus on treating people who are sick".

Eric Lander, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, said he has had some 20 conversations with Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Chan over the past year about the initiative and called their goal "the right kind of goal for thinking about that kind of time frame".

He is not involved with the project itself, but expressed confidence in it.

"Mark has brought new models to industry with Facebook," he said, adding that while organisations like the National Institutes of Health are "fantastic", there is "no point in replicating what existing models do".

"It's very hard with today's science funding to build a team to work on scientific problems that are like what you would find at a world-class technology company, that are that scale," Mr Zuckerberg said. "So that's something I think we can concretely help out with."

Their new centre, called Biohub, will run as an independent research centre at the University of California, San Francisco in collaboration with UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

The Chan Zuckerberg science initiative will be headed by Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist who is best known in scientific circles for her research on the behaviour of a tiny worm called C. elegans.

Ms Bargmann said the idea of bringing engineers and scientists together presents a "unique opportunity to take science in a new direction".

Mr Zuckerberg said the couple decided to focus on creating better tools because this is where they see need, based on their conversations with scientists.

"It's not that no one is doing this today, but out of all the money that our society spends on science funding, probably not enough is going towards tool development," Mr Zuckerberg said.

Tools, he added, are long-term investments. It will likely take years for the first tools to be developed through this initiative, and even longer before they are used to cure diseases.

Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Chan, who have committed to donating 99% of their wealth, have spent the past two years meeting with scientists and other experts to come up with the endeavour.

The two stressed that they believe that their goal can be accomplished, if not in their lifetime, then in their child's lifetime.

It was Max's birth last November that inspired the billionaire couple to give away nearly all their money to help solve the world's problems.

At the time, this was valued at more than 45 billion dollars (34.7 billion) worth of Facebook stock, which the couple transferred to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The couple's philanthropy plan will not affect Mr Zuckerberg's status as controlling shareholder of Facebook.

Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Chan often draw comparisons to Bill and Melinda Gates, whose philanthropic work also focuses on health and education.

In an emailed statement, the Gates said investing "in basic science research is at the root of the world's most important innovations and achievements".

Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Chan, they added, "are making an incredible commitment to research and development that will lead to the breakthroughs to cure disease and lift millions out of poverty".

AP
The boat was carrying 600 people, Egypt's official news agency MENA said

A BOAT carrying around 600 people capsized off Egypt's coast, killing at least 29, officials said on Wednesday, in the latest disaster to befall migrants attempting to make the crossing to Europe.

The boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea off Burg Rashid, a village in the northern Beheira province. Of the 29 bodies found so far, 18 were men, 10 were women and one was a child, local officials said.

"Initial information indicates that the boat sank because it was carrying more people than its limit. The boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water," a senior security official in Beheira told Reuters.

Rescue workers have so far saved 150 people, officials said. The boat was carrying Egyptian, Syrian, and African migrants, they added.

It was not immediately clear where the boat was headed, though officials said they believed it was going to Italy.

More and more people have been trying to cross to Italy from the African coastline over the summer months, particularly from Libya, where people-traffickers operate with relative impunity, but also from Egypt.

Some 320 migrants and refugees drowned off the Greek island of Crete in June. Migrants who survived told authorities their boat set sail from Egypt

Some 206,400 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

More than 2,800 deaths were recorded between January and June, versus 1,838 during the same period last year.

World leaders, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, gathered in New York this week at the United Nations General Assembly to discuss the migrant crisis.
Russia was directly involved in the bombing of a UN aid convoy on the outskirts of Aleppo in a "revenge" attack for an earlier air strike that killed 60 Syrian soldiers, according to senior coalition officials.

Eyewitnesses on the ground reported seeing a number of Russian surveillance aircraft circling overhead before the aid convoy was struck by a series of missiles fired by warplanes, killing an estimated 20 civilians and destroying 18 UN trucks carrying vital humanitarian supplies to besieged rebel areas.

In a further suggestion of Russian involvement in the attack, its defence ministry said the convoy had been accompanied by a militants' pick-up truck armed with a heavy mortar gun, Russian news agencies reported.

The ministry uploaded to YouTube what it claimed was drone footage of the convoy which showed "new details" about the incident.

Russia, a key ally of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, denied any involvement in the attack, which took place after the 31-truck convoy had parked in a compound to deliver vital supplies to rebel-held areas outside Aleppo.

The Syrian military also denied involvement.

But senior coalition officials last night said they had evidence of Russian involvement in the attack, claiming it was launched in response to a coalition air strike in eastern Syria at the weekend, in which an RAF Reaper drone took part, which killed 60 Syrian soldiers.

"All the evidence suggests the Russians were involved in bombing the aid convoy as an act of revenge for the coalition air strike at the weekend which killed 60 Syria soldiers," said a senior coalition official. "If this can be proved, then the Russians could find themselves facing war crimes charges."

The missiles and warplanes used in the attack were the same as those used by the Russians to attack rebel positions.

Coalition officials also rejected Russian claims their aircraft deliberately targeted Syrian troops last weekend. "We gave the Russians details of the area we were targeting but they failed to tell us there were Syrian government forces in the area." ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
The United States has blamed Russia for an overnight attack on an aid convoy that killed 20 civilians, as the United Nations announced it was suspending overland deliveries in Syria, jeopardising food and medical security for millions of besieged and hard-to-reach civilians.

Confusion continued about who struck the convoy, but the White House insisted it was either Russia or Syria.

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said either way the US held Russia responsible because it was Russia's job under the week-old ceasefire to prevent Syria's air force from striking in areas where humanitarian aid was being transported.

"All of our information indicates clearly that this was an airstrike," he said, rejecting the claim by Russia's Defence Ministry that a cargo fire caused the damage. Both Russia and Syria have denied carrying out the bombing.

Expand Close A Civil Defence member and a man put out a fire after an airstrike on the rebel held Urm al-Kubra town, western Aleppo city, Syria September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah / Facebook

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Whatsapp A Civil Defence member and a man put out a fire after an airstrike on the rebel held Urm al-Kubra town, western Aleppo city, Syria September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah

Within one minute of the strike, the US tracked a Russian-made Su-24 directly over the region of the attack, officials said. Even that revelation failed to definitively implicate Russia because both the Russian and Syrian air forces fly the Su-24, although the US officials said there were strong indications that the jet was flown by the Russian military.

Witnesses described Monday's attack on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent warehouse and convoy in the rebel-held town of Uram al-Kubra in Aleppo province as prolonged and intense, saying the aerial bombardment continued as rescue workers rushed to pull the wounded from the flaming wreckage and rubble.

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The convoy was part of a routine dispatch operated by the Syrian Red Crescent, which UN officials said was delivering assistance to 78,000 people in Uram al-Kubra, west of Aleppo city. It was carrying food, medicines, emergency health kits, IV fluids, and other essentials supplied by the UN and the World Health Organisation.

Paramedic and media activist Mohammad Rasoul, who was among the first to arrive at the scene, said more than 100 tons of food, medicine, and baby formula had gone up in flames. He said 18 of the convoy's 31 lorries were destroyed.

The attack "erased the convoy from the face of the earth", he said.

"I've never seen anything like this attack. If this had been a military position it wouldn't have been targeted with such intensity."

He said the attack began around 20 minutes after sunset on Monday and continued for two hours.

Pointing to the fact that Syria's rebels do not possess an air force, the White House said process of elimination indicated that either Syria's military or Russia's launched the attack.

Both Syrian and Russian aircraft operate over the province, while the U.S.-led coalition targets the Islamic State group in other parts of the country.

At the same time the attack took place on Uram al-Kubra, presumed Syrian or Russian jets launched a wave of attacks in and around the nearby city of Aleppo, minutes after Syria's military announced a week-long ceasefire had expired.

A cargo fire would not explain the footage filmed by rescuers of torn flesh being picked from the wreckage, or the witness accounts of a sustained, two-hour barrage of missiles, rockets, and barrel bombs - crude, unguided weapons that the Syrian government drops from helicopters.

Hussein Badawi, the head of the town's Syrian Civil Defence search and rescue group - also known as the White Helmets - said that on the night of the attack he heard the sounds of overhead ballistic missiles, helicopters and fighter jets. He and other witnesses reported seeing a reconnaissance aircraft observing the convoy before the attack.

"There were reconnaissance flights before the air strikes," said Mr Badawi. "They filmed and combed the area, and they knew there was a Red Crescent (facility). The target was the Red Crescent, central and direct."

Russia's Defence Ministry confirmed that a drone had followed the convoy from a warehouse in the government side of Aleppo to its destination in Uram al-Kubra.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said 20 civilians were killed in the attack, many of them killed as they were unloading the trucks. Syrian activists and paramedics had said earlier that the air strikes killed 12.

Witnesses said some of the remains were charred beyond recognition.

Among those killed was Omar Barakat, 38, the local director for the Red Crescent and a father of nine. His brother, Ali Barakat, who was also present at the attack, said it took him three hours to reach Omar, who was trapped in his vehicle.

"I stayed with my face on the floor for about an hour because of the intensity of the strikes," said Mr Barakat. Omar died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called it a "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack" in his address to world leaders at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

"Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower," he said, describing the bombers as "cowards" and those delivering aid as "heroes".

The UN's humanitarian agency OCHA announced earlier in the day it had suspended relief convoys in Syria pending a review of the security situation. OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke called it "a very, very dark day for humanitarians across the world".
'Creepy' clown sightings have been reported across the United States CREDIT: FACEBOOK/JAMIE HILL

Worrying reports of creepy clowns scaring members of the public have spread across the United States after a new alleged sighting.

After reports of creepy clowns trying to lure children into woods in South Carolina, Jamie Hill posted a photo of a clown she claims she spotted on the 192 highway in the city of London, Kentucky.

She explained: So, I was a little scared to post this because I didn't think anyone would believe me until Kelly Hill [a Facebook friend] told me that one of her friends just had seen a clown here in London.

And I was out tonight and was headed back home on 192 and saw this. Now, it's not a really good picture because I couldn't stop, there [were] people behind me.

I seriously think this clown thing has gotten out of hand and someone is going to get hurt. Please share this so people around London will know that they are here!

In a follow-up post she added: I didn't post that picture to get famous or any of that. I posted so people would be cautious.

The person behind the clown may or may not have meant any harm. I don't know that. I wasn't going to stay around to talk to it. That's for sure.

People saying it's fake and I just made it all up. I'm sorry to tell you, but it's not. (It) seems like ever since my post, clowns have (been) spotted in or around London.

I just want people to be cautious. People that have kids, keep an eye out on them. They [were] trying to lure kids into the woods. Stay safe everyone and God bless.

Police in South Carolina town have warned that anyone dressed as a clown could face arrest after reports of mystery figures frightening members of the public.

Clowns have also been spotted in North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, WTVQ reports.

At a glance | Strange clown activity around the world

* In 2014, police in Agade, France, arrested 14 teenagers who were dressed as clowns, carrying weapons.

* A man known as the Northampton Clown terrified children and caused parents to become irate when he dressed as a clown and stood on street corners.

* In 2013, Lincolnshire police warned residents that there had been a spate of people dressing as clowns and intimidating locals.

* Also in 2013, police in Kings Lynn warned residents to stay away from clowns after reports of men dressed up in clown outfits terrifying residents.

* Again in 2013, a man known as the Mansfield Clown was known for terrifying residents in Nottinghamshire.

* In 2013, in Normanton, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, residents urged police to take action after clowns were spotted scaring residents.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
US President Barack Obama cited his outreach to former adversaries Cuba and Myanmar as examples of progress. Photo: Reuters

US President Barack Obama has told world leaders they have to do more to open their hearts to refugees who are desperate for a home.

Mr Obama said the world was more secure if leaders were prepared to help people in need. But they had to follow through even when the politics were hard.

He says leaders must have the empathy to imagine what it would be like for their families if the unspeakable were to happen.

The UN estimates there are about 21.3 million refugees forced to flee due to armed conflict or persecution.

Mr Obama warned that the forces of globalisation have exposed "deep fault lines" across the globe, calling for a "course correction" to ensure that nations and their peoples do not retreat into a more sharply divided world.

Mr Obama, in his final speech to the UN General Assembly, lamented that the world has become safer and more prosperous at the same time that nations are struggling with a devastating refugee crisis, terrorism and a breakdown in basic order in the Middle East.

He said governing had become more difficult as people lost faith in public institutions and tensions among nations spiralled out of control rapidly.

"This is the paradox that defines the world today," Mr Obama said. "We must go forward, and not backward."

Mr Obama sought to use his last appearance before the global body to define how his leadership had put the world on a better trajectory over the last eight years.

At the heart of that approach, Mr Obama said, was the notion that the biggest conflicts were best solved when nations cooperated rather than tackling them individually.

It is a theme that Democrat Hillary Clinton has put at the forefront of her campaign for president, casting herself as the natural continuation of Mr Obama's legacy.

In a subtle reference to her opponent, Donald Trump, Mr Obama bemoaned how terrorist networks had spread their ideology on social media, spurring anger toward "innocent immigrants and Muslims".

The president cited his administration's outreach to former adversaries Cuba and Myanmar as key examples of progress, along with global cooperation to cut emissions blamed for global warming.

At the same time, he said he wasn't seeking to "whitewash" challenges across the globe, some of which he attributed to deepening anxieties about the profound shifts inflicted by technology and growing international interdependence.

"In order to move forward, though, we do have to acknowledge that the existing path to global integration requires a course correction," Mr Obama added.
Nothing suspicious has been found after police received a threat that bombs were placed at a number of schools on the small Canadian province of Prince Edward Island.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Kevin Bailey said the threat came via fax on Wednesday morning, and that schools on the normally sleepy island were notified within 10 minutes. More than 19,000 students were evacuated.

"There's been no threat found. Everybody is safe," Mr Bailey told reporters.

The threat was faxed to Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada's capital of Ottawa, Mr Bailey said.

"The message stated that the bombs had placed at a number of schools and would be detonated today," Mr Bailey said.

A suspect has not been identified, he said.

Students at more than 60 English language and French language schools were taken to safe locations by staff outside the schools, where buses met them.

Mr Bailey said bomb threats are hard to evaluate for credibility, but said authorities like to they err on the side of caution. "This disrupts a lot of lives," he said.

Parents and guardians were asked to wait for further instructions before picking up their children.

Parker Grimmer, the island's director of public schools, said police contacted the school system on Wednesday morning about "a threat that was of a significant nature" and asked for the evacuation of all schools. He said he expects all students to return to classes on Thursday.

"This is new to us so we are reacting in a new way," Mr Grimmer said. "But we have plans and procedures and I think we followed them."

At Holland College in the provincial capital of Charlottetown, a woman burst into the classroom to tell everyone to pick up their books and evacuate immediately, student Morgan McNeil said. Outside, everyone was in a panic and helicopters were flying overhead, he said.

"I know there will be a process to look at this afterward but we wanted to ensure the safety of those students," Mr Grimmer said. "This is not a normal day and this is a day that I think we responded to well."

Mr Bailey said similar threats were made to schools and colleges in the nearby province of Nova Scotia, where the NSCC Marconi Campus, Cape Breton University and the NSCC technology campus in Halifax were evacuated.

At least one school in the United States also was threatened, he said. It was not immediately which one was involved or if it was evacuated.
Protests erupted in North Carolina after police shot and killed a black man who was unarmed and had a disability, witnesses said.

A large group of demonstrators gathered near the apartment complex where Charlotte Police fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott. Early reports showed police in full riot gear deploying tear gas canisters at the protesters, while some demonstrators reportedly threw rocks and water bottles at officers. By Wednesday morning, demonstrators occupied a segment of Interstate Highway 83.

The shooting occurred at 4 pm on Tuesday, a day after police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released video showing the Friday shooting death of Terence Crutcher by one of their officers, adding to ongoing scrutiny of local police departments across the US for the almost routine killing of unarmed black people.

Charlotte Police officers were searching the apartment complex for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they gunned down Scott. The victim was not the person they were originally trying to find.

Scott reportedly exited his vehicle at his apartment complex, but got back inside when he saw officers. The police report said Scott then re-emerged from his vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers.

I dont believe [the man shot] was the one with the warrants, but we dont know if there was a connection, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said. At this point, all we know theyre in the apartment complex parking lot and this subject gets out with a weapon, they engage him and one of the officers felt a lethal threat and fired his weapon because of that.

Police identified two-year veteran Brentley Vinson as the officer who fired the shots. A law enforcement source told WBTV that Mr Vinson is African American.

CMPD said they recovered a firearm in their report, but witness accounts conflict with authorities official story.

A woman who identified herself as Scotts daughter streamed the aftermath on Facebook Live. Her profile was deactivated at the time of this writing.

WBTV reported that, in the video, the woman said Scott was sitting in his car reading a book before the officers deployed a Taser and shot him four times. She said he was unarmed and disclosed that he had a disability.

The police just shot my daddy four times for being black, she reportedly said.

Another woman, identified as Scotts sister, said undercover detectives jumped out of their truck, shouted he had a gun, and opened fire.

He sits in the shade, reads his book, does his studies, and waits for his kids to get off the bus, she said. He didnt have no gun. He wasnt messing with nobody.

Large crowds gathered in the neighbourhood by 9 pm, with residents holding signs that read Black Lives Matter and It Was a Book.

CMPD reported via Twitter that at least 12 officers had been injured by demonstrators.

Police have deployed tear gas to disperse the crowd, and one police cruiser was reportedly towed away after sustaining damage during the demonstration.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts called for calm while promising to launch a full-scale investigation into the shooting.

"The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue," she tweeted. "Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together."

Keith Lamont Scott is the sixth civilian killed by CMPD. The District Attorneys office determined that officers were justified in the previous five cases. But Scott's death is a symptom of a larger problem in Charlotte, where the black population is disproportionately impacted by the practises of local law enforcement.

According to CMPD data compiled by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, while black people are only 35 per cent of the Charlotte population, they make up 50 per cent of stops by police, 68 per cent of searches, and 74 per cent of cases involving use of force.
Former US president George HW Bush plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in an unprecedented snub of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, according to a member of the Kennedy family.

Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, the daughter of the late Robert F Kennedy, posted a picture on her Facebook page in which she is shaking hands with Mr Bush, with the caption: "The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!"

Expand Close If Mr Bush Snrs defection is confirmed, it would be a devastating blow to Mr Trump. Photo: Getty / Facebook

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Whatsapp If Mr Bush Snrs defection is confirmed, it would be a devastating blow to Mr Trump. Photo: Getty

She confirmed to Politico that the Republican grandee, who served as president from 1989 to 1993 and vice-president from 1981 to 1989, would be voting for the Democrat candidate for the White House.

Mr Bush's spokesman, Jim McGrath, said: "The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days. He is not commenting on the presidential race."

In May, both Mr Bush and his son, George W Bush, said they would not be backing Mr Trump for the presidency. The fact that Mr Bush Snr has now, apparently, stated that he will vote for Mrs Clinton, raises questions over whether both his sons - the former president and this year's defeated Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush - will follow suit.

In April, Mr Bush Jnr's wife Laura hinted that she'd rather see Mrs Clinton in the White House.

If Mr Bush Snr's defection is confirmed, it would be a devastating blow to Mr Trump (pictured), who has failed to unite the Republican establishment.
'This image says it all' Donald Trump Jr said

Donald Trump Jr's tweet comparing refugees to a bowl of poisoned Skittles has caused much debate and outrage online - but it has been revealed the photograph he used was taken by someone who claims to be a refugee.

David Kittos, 48, from Guildford, England, uploaded the photograph to Flickr back in 2010 and woke up to find it had been used in the inflammatory tweet.

This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN  Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016

He told the BBC: "This was not done with my permission, I don't support his politics and I would never take his money to use it.

"In 1974, when I was six-years old, I was a refugee from the Turkish occupation of Cyprus so I would never approve the use of this image against refugees."

Mr Kittos was unaware his photograph had sparked a political debate, as he does not use Twitter.

His friends alerted him to the fact his picture had been used, and he has emphasised he did not give permission for its use.

Mr Kittos is a keen photographer and told the BBC: "I was just experimenting with something called off-camera flash.

"This was six years ago when there were no Syrian refugees at the time and it was never done with the intention of spreading a political message.

"I have never put this image up for sale. This was not done with my permission, I don't support Trump's politics and I would never take his money to use it."

He also said he wants the image taken down but that the Trump campaign is "probably not interested" in what he has to say.

Mr Kittos told the BBC: "I was thinking about getting lawyers involved but I don't know if I have the patience.

"This isn't about the money for me. They could have just bought a cheap image from a micro stock library. This is pure greed from them. I don't think they care about my feelings. They should not be stealing an image full stop."

On Monday, Mr Trump Jr posted on Twitter a graphic reading:"If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem."

The graphic, which showed a bowl of the sweets and an official Trump logo, that the candidate shares with his running mate, Mike Pence, was accompanied by the comment: This image says it all. Lets end the politically correct agenda that doesnt put America first. #trump2016.

The post borrows from Joe Walsh, a conservative talk radio host and politician, who in 2011 challenged Barack Obama to secure the borders with "moats and alligators", if necessary.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP)  The Latest on police shooting and protests in Charlotte, North Carolina (all times local):

5:50 a.m.

The streets in Charlotte, North Carolina, are quiet Wednesday morning after angry protests over the fatal police shooting of a black man left officers injured and shut down an interstate.

Traffic is flowing again on Interstate 85, hours after protesters blocked the highway and television footage showed some apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire.

No protesters could be seen around 5 a.m. but broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized during protests earlier. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance to a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.

The protests broke out Tuesday after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by a black officer at an apartment complex on the city's northeast side.

___

3 a.m.

Demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of a black man by a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina, have shut down a small section of Interstate 85.

TV footage early Wednesday showed dozens of protesters on the highway facing a line of law enforcement officers. At one point a fire flared up.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation website shows a portion of the highway near UNC Charlotte is closed in both directions. The website says the closure is due to police activity.

Neither the North Carolina Highway Patrol nor Charlotte police could immediately be reached for comment.

The protest comes after police on Tuesday fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott. Demonstrators had gathered earlier near the scene of the shooting before a smaller group moved to the highway.
CONCORD - A Concord woman has been charged with felony child abuse - charges that came two weeks after her infant son died.

Angela Monaco-Spolidoro, 20, of Windrose Lane SW, was arrested Tuesday, Sept. 13, on charges of felony child abuse resulting in serious injury. Monaco-Spolidoro is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 4.

The alleged incident occurred Sunday, Aug. 28. According to law enforcement, Monaco-Spolidoro was released on bond from Cabarrus County Jail.

Cabarrus County Sheriffs Office responded to a death investigation at Monaco-Spolidoros residence the day of the incident. That same day, her 7-month-old son, Micah Xavier Wright, died. The certificate of death from the Cabarrus County Register of Deeds listed the cause of death as pending.

The sheriffs office released the death investigation and arrest reports, but no other information and did not confirm whether the charge was related to the death.

The Cabarrus County Department of Social Services cannot confirm or deny whether they are investigating any specific child abuse case, officials said.

Micah was born January 21, 2016 to Marcus Jay'Quon Wright and Angela Nicole Monaco-Spolidoro, according to the obituary that ran in the Independent Tribune earlier.

Further tragedy struck the family, when another son, Marcus JayQuon Wright Jr., died at Levines Childrens Hospital, just two days after his birth in March, 2015.

Memorials for both children may be directed to the March of Dimes.
KANNAPOLIS- A 28-year-old man is under a $100,000 bond after police said he rammed a police vehicle with his car on Monday.

Quintin Dwon Jordan, who has a China Grove address, was arrested on Tuesday, Sept. 20 after the Kannapolis Police Department said he rammed one of their patrol vehicles with his car and then led them in a short chase.

A representative with the department said the incident occurred in front of T-Mobile near the Walmart on Supercenter Drive.

A detective observed him and was checking for warrants. Once confirmation came he was wanted, the investigator did a three-point turn, Lt. Justin Smith, division director for criminal investigations, said.

Smith said once Jordan realized the officer was trying to stop him, he rammed his vehicle into the officers vehicle in an effort to get away.

Officers followed Jordan on a short pursuit, but then stopped the chase because road conditions were too dangerous. Smith said Jordon continued to drive at a quick pace and eventually wrecked his car with another vehicle and then tried to escape on foot.

Then the Concord Police Department and Cabarrus County Sheriffs Office got involved.

Captain Todd McGhee with the Concord Police Department said Jordan ran a stop sign at the intersection of Deal Road and Corban Avenue and crashed.

He jumped out of the vehicle and ran into the woods and we assisted the Sheriffs Office in establishing a perimeter, McGhee said. Our K-9 units responded to the scene to track the suspect.

Officials with Cabarrus County Schools said W.M. Irvin Elementary and Concord Middle School were put on lockdown as a precaution while officers searched for the suspect.

There was no threat to the school and we quickly determined he ran away from the school, McGhee said.

McGhee said the K-9 units successfully tracked Jordan and he was taken into custody with no incidents.

He is charged with assault with a deadly weapon, flee/elude arrest with a motor vehicle, reckless driving, failure to report accident and hit and run.

He is still in the Cabarrus County Jail.
With the current twist and turns, Star Plus' longest running show Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai is grabbing a lot of eyeballs. While with the latest update from the show, the viewers were surprised to know about one of its main character leaving the show.

Yes, we are talking about Kanchi Singh, who plays Gayu in the show. There was this confirmed news of Kanchi's character Gayu committing suicide in the show. The track that is to supposedly follow this is that Kartik (Mohsin Khan) will propose Naira (Shivangi Joshi) and she will say yes to him, about which Gayu will overhear. Post which, she decides to commit suicide and jumps off the cliff.

However, we have a good news for all the Yeh Rishta fans as nothing is happening what is rumoured elsewhere. And to get the confirmation, we contacted Kanchi Singh, who is currently shooting in the breathtaking locales of Switzerland.

The actress clearly rubbished the rumors and stated, "I am not leaving the show and talking about my character Gayu, she will never do anything of this sort. Yes, there will be a lot of twists and turns coming up, but this is definitely not happening anytime."

A sigh of relief for all the fans indeed!

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In January 2016, the Bureau of Indian Affairs placed nearly 90,000 acres in trust for Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico in what is the largest single trust land acquisition in history. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Isleta Pueblo Gov. Eddie Paul Torres Sr. are seen signing the documents for the acquisition. Photo by U.S. Department of the Interior



As the Obama era comes to a close, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has just four more months to reach its goal of placing 500,000 acres in trust.

The agency certainly appears to be within striking distance. As of the beginning of this week, 428,889 acres have been placed in trust since President Barack Obama came on board in January 2009.

"We've acted on more 2,000 applications during the course of this administration," Larry Roberts, the de factor leader of the BIA, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs last Wednesday.

That marks a dramatic turnaround from the Bush era, when the land-into-trust process all but ground to a halt amid controversy over gaming and conflicts with local governments. But as Roberts and tribal leaders have repeatedly noted, the overwhelming majority of applications aren't in any way connected to casinos.

"This administration has made it a priority to help tribes restore our homelands," said Ron Allen, the treasurer of the National Congress of American Indians , citing housing, law enforcement, education and economic development as top priorities for tribes.

But with a new president due in the White House on January 20, 2017, Indian Country is facing some big unknowns. While Hillary Clinton , the Democrat nominee, has vowed to maintain the gains seen during the Obama years, Republican Donald Trump has remained silent. His party's platform doesn't mention anything about restoring trust lands either.

The uncertainty has tribes pushing for passage of S.2636 , the Reservation Land Consolidation Act . The bill requires the BIA to approve land-into-trust applications for property within or contiguous to the boundaries of an existing reservation. Such "mandatory acquisitions" would speed up the process considerably, regardless of who is in charge of the Department of the Interior

"Currently, Interior has to go through 16 steps -- 16 steps -- just to take a parcel into trust," Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana), the vice chairman of the committee and the sponsor of the bill, said at the hearing on his bill last week.

According to Roberts, the BIA has a land-into-trust backlog "just shy" of 1,200 applications. Of those, about 950 are for on-reservation parcels, he said, so enactment of S.2636 would streamline the process and help the agency to focus its limited resources on other priorities.

"With 1,200 hanging out there in the balance, you're looking at years to clear that," Roberts told the committee.

"Even the simplest application," Roberts added, "right now, under our current process, it takes about a year to get through."

Despite the seemingly laudable goals of the Reservation Land Consolidation Act, Republicans on the committee are against it. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), the chairman of the panel, said the bill could lead to litigation, undermine public confidence and even pit tribes against each other.

President Barack Obama at the White House Tribal Nations Conference on November 5, 2015. Photo by U.S. Department of the Interior



"For example, in my home state of Wyoming, this bill could have a detrimental impact on the Wind River Indian Reservation, where two tribes share a land base," Barrasso said.

As the home of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and the Northern Arapaho Tribe Wind River is unique in Indian Country. Although the reservation was initially set aside for the Shoshones, the Arapahos share an "undivided" interest in the land and its assets, a situation that would not change if S.2636 became law.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), a first-term member of Congress, also opposes the bill. He described Oklahoma as a "non-reservation" state and said mandatory land-into-trust acquisitions could prove disruptive to local and state governments.

"In its current form, I couldn't support it," Lankford said last week.

Oklahoma is unique because some parcels of land are owned by more than one tribe , which has led to protracted disputes. But Roberts said the BIA would still be required to follow existing acts of Congress in those types of situations.

"I don't see your bill as changing that," Roberts told Tester.

A different dispute has arisen between the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians . The Cherokees assert they are the only government with an interest in the historic Cherokee Reservation and filed a lawsuit in 2012 to prevent the Keetoowahs from acquiring trust land within that former reservation.

Although attorneys for the tribes and the BIA submitted proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law two years ago this month, a decision has not been issued, according to a review of records from the federal court for the Northern District of Oklahoma

The disagreement over S.2636 speaks to a larger debate about reforming the land-into-trust process in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carcieri v. Salazar . While tribes and the Obama administration argue for a simple or "clean" fix to clear up uncertainties created by the ruling, Republicans and some Democrats have insisted on addressing other issues, such as public participation, concerns of local governments and, yes, even casinos.

Gaming is the "elephant in the room," Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee , said earlier this month when opposing the inclusion of a limited land-into-trust fix into an unrelated federal recognition bill.

Other partial Carcieri fixes have generated significant controversy as Congress has failed to ensure that all tribes, regardless of the date of federal recognition, can follow the land-into-trust process.

The lack of a Carcieri fix hangs over Indian County and the Obama administration as they prepare for the eighth and possibly final White House Tribal Nations Conference . The two-day event takes place in Washington, D.C., on Monday and Tuesday, with Obama expected to speak to tribal leaders on Monday.

"What I can tell you is, is that we have actually restored more rights among Native Americans to their ancestral lands, sacred sites, waters, hunting grounds. We have done a lot more work on that over the last eight years than we had in the previous 20, 30 years," Obama said earlier this month when he was asked about the #NoDAPL movement during a forum overseas.

"And this is something that I hope will continue as we go forward," Obama added.

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Even before he could make his Bollywood debut, Sooraj Pancholi had been embroiled in the Jiah Khan suicide case. And recently there was a shocking new development in the case.

According to a TOI report, a British forensic expert had concluded that Jiah Khans hanging was staged and that the marks on her face and neck mean that it wasnt a suicide at all.

And now, Sooraj Pancholi spoke to Bombay Times about this new development and the case.

A little progress each day, will surely add up to big results! #SP100DaysFitnessChallenge #Day9 #gymselfie  A photo posted by Sooraj Pancholi (@soorajpancholi) on Sep 9, 2016 at 5:07am PDT



He said, "My case has been a media trial since day one. Things have been in the papers before reaching the court, and sometimes in the papers without the court being aware. But enough is enough, if someone wants justice, they will get it in due time. I hope they get justice, even I want to know what the truth is. People should understand that even I have lost a dear one. I understand what they are going through, but this is not the way to conduct a court case, by leading the court and the people of the country to think differently."

Those days ..when u don't feel like training..  A photo posted by Sooraj Pancholi (@soorajpancholi) on Sep 5, 2016 at 4:04am PDT



He added, "Whenever something good is happening in my life, personally or professionally, someone tries to put me down. It gets difficult. You cannot accuse someone of a crime, without knowing the facts. You have to know the truth before saying whatever you feel like saying."

He also spoke about waiting for court proceedings to commence, "We havent gone against what they are saying, but we have been patiently waiting for over three years for the trial to begin. Like everyone else, I too deserve a fair trial. I dont know why, in my case, things are told to the media before the court. Why not wait for the court to decide the final verdict? They are trying to brainwash people and portray me as a criminal, which is not true."

 #inbetweentraffic A photo posted by Sooraj Pancholi (@soorajpancholi) on Aug 4, 2016 at 5:07am PDT



Finally, he talked about a fair trial. He said, "No accused asks for his trial to begin, but Im asking to open the trial soon. Whatever the accusation, I deserve a fair trial, so that I can move on in life. These things are planned to target my progress and stop my daily life. I want this pain to end for both sides. I dont have any hard feelings for anyone. I just want a fair trial and live my life after that. This has stretched for too long."
elitedaily

The news of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie came out yesterday and sent all their fans into a frenzy! While the people on the internet couldn't handle their emotions, there's another thing about the Brangelina split which has come out. Apparently, their mutual friend of years, George Clooney, had no idea that the couple was headed for a divorce.

In fact, Clooney found out about their split on camera, while he was being interviewed by CNN! During the Leaders Summit for Refugees at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the reporter approached Clooney, 55, and asked him, "Alright, don't shoot me on this last question but you're friends with both of them. Any thoughts?" "What's that? What's happened?" the actor said while the reporter continued, "You're friends with both of them, your thoughts, she's a humanitarian."

When he finally realised that they were talking about Pitt and Jolie's divorce, Clooney admitted that it was the first time he'd heard of it. "I didn't know that," he revealed. "I feel very sorry then. That's a sad story and unfortunate for a family. It's an unfortunate story about a family. I feel very sorry to hear that. That's the first I've heard of it."

Check out his sheer surprise and awkwardness in the video!
Despite losing their father  Naik Sunil Kumar Vidyarthi  in a gun battle with terrorists at Uri base in Kashmir on Sunday, Aarti, Anshu and Anshika Vidyarthi, the three daughters of the brave soldier from Bihars Gaya district, wrote the first-semester examination of class VIII, class VI and class II respectively on Monday.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

While the entire family was in deep shock and waiting for the arrival of the coffin, the three sisters wore their uniform and headed for the DAV school where they along with their classmates appeared in the examination. The elder sisters wrote social science papers while the youngest one wrote Hindi language paper despite the great loss they endured at such a young age.

For them, the martyrdom of their father is a matter of pride. Mere papa ne desh ke liye jaan qurbaan kar diya hai, unki sahadat pe hum teeno bahno ko garv hai (My father sacrificed his life for the nation, we are proud of him), said 8-year-old Anshika wiping tears rolling down on her face.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

Asked how they could gather the courage to appear in the examination at the moment of the gravest personal sorrow, the eldest one  Aarti  said, Beech mein pariksha chhod dene se papa ki atma ko dukh hota (Leaving papers in the middle of the examination would have hurt my fathers soul)."

"He always used to say no compromise with exams. No matter what.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

She said their only aim is to realise the dreams of their father who is no more to guide them.

He has made many sacrifices for our education and therefore, we have to fulfil his dreams. He wanted me to study in IIT and become an aeronautical engineer and my younger sister a doctor. We have to work hard and excel at our studies as that is what our father wanted. He could not persuade his higher studies due to poverty, but wanted us to do so, said the brave daughter who is just 13.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

Despite her grandfather's angry words, Arati said given the chance, she would like to join the army. "I am proud of my father because he did not die... he sacrificed his life for the nation. I wanted to join IIT Delhi... now I don't know whether it will be possible," she said.

She said appearing in the examination in such a difficult time is the salute to our fathers martyrdom and final adieu from us.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

Asked about their family at home, they their mother and grandparents were inconsolable. Their two-year-old brother  said Anshu  is unaware of what has happened but he is also very upset as mother keeps fainting and weeps uncontrollably.

Both Arti and Anshu  according to DAV Principal Ashok Kumar Jana  are brilliant in studies. Consoling the young children, he offered salute to their rectitude and strong willpower for taking the exam barely hours after their fathers martyrdom.

The three sisters sort of redefined bereavement in rural Bihar where loud wailing symbolises mourning the death of near and dear ones. The louder you wail, the bigger is the perceived sense of bereavement.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

Hearing the news that one of their sons had been martyred in the attack, residents of Boknari  Vidyarthis native village  and the rest of Gaya converged at the Vidyarthi house to pay respects to the fallen hero and salute their boy.

Sunil had shifted his family from his Boknari village under the Paraiya police station area of the district to Gaya town for his children's education. His parents and two brothers are all marginal farmers and live in the village.

Tarique Anwar/Indiatimes

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had announced an ex-gratia payment of Rs 5 lakh to the next of kin of each of the three deceased soldiers from the state.

Naik Vidyarthi joined the army in 1998 and served in Nagaland, Punjab, Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi before Jammu and Kashmir. He was planning to retire next year but only after building a home in Gaya and taking care of his father's medical bills.
Moria is a transit camp and a registration point for refugees arriving on the island of Lesvos from Turkey. Overcrowding of the Moria camp has anyway ignited a lot of wrath and distress among the people who are staying  but they too are helpless.

Recently, a massive fire broke out in the area, destroying the camp, dozens of tents, and acres of the nearby field. No serious injuries were reported as a lot of people were able to run away from the area, but it has caused a lot of damage.

trbimg

But the Greek government acted quickly and bang on!

Theyve sent a ship to provide temporary accommodation for more than 1,000 migrants. After the fire broke out, a major part of the camp was destroyed and several lay there unaccompanied by their family members.

Nearly 5,000 people fled the area which was once overcrowded. 9 migrants have been reported as suspects in connection with the fire and they are now under arrest.

bbc

Moria is the biggest migrant camp on the island of Lesvos and a large part of it is destroyed. Through the barbed wire fence, the signs are there: tips of blackened trees and patches of scorched earth where a fire engulfed.

#Lesbos, Fire in #Moira | Greeks Appeal for Aid After Fire Damages Refugee Camp https://t.co/tsxOff5YD1  giulia raffaelli (@giu17raffa) September 20, 2016





The camp has the capacity of only 3,500 people, but as much as 5,000 used to live in stretched facilities.

If necessary, another ship would be sent, says Greek shipping minister, Thodoris Dritsas. He also mentioned that families will be given priority on the ship.
Turning down the marriage proposed by a friend she met on Facebook proved costly for a 24-year-old woman in outer Delhi's Avantika Enclave.

On Monday evening, the rebuffed man and some of his family members allegedly pushed the woman off the balcony of her second-floor residence for refusing to either marry him or pay the Rs 1 lakh he was demanding from her.

samodabiznao.blogspot/representational image

While the victim, who sustained multiple fractures, is fighting for life in Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital, police have registered a case of attempt to murder against Amit, the accused, after detaining him.

Recalling the circumstances that led to Monday's incident, the woman's younger brother said that she befriended Amit on Facebook two years ago. "After a few weeks of friendship, Amit proposed marriage to her, but since she could not take a decision on her own, she shared this with the family," said the brother, a Class XII student. "The family did not flatly turn down the man's proposal. We first carried out a background check. When we found that he was an unemployed, habitual drinker, my sister, on our advice, asked Amit to stop pestering her. This is what the man could not digest."

tvtome/representational image

Even after rejecting Amit, the woman, who worked as a beautician, was often tense and told the family that the man continued to pursue her. "Around two months ago, she told us that Amit had asked her to either marry him or pay him Rs 1 lakh," revealed the brother. "If she didn't, he warned her, she should be ready to face the consequences." Thinking the threat was only a ploy to make the 24-year-old to give in, the family did not pay too much attention.

However, on Monday, around 3.30 pm, Amit called her and said he would reach her home for her final answer. Wary about Amit's motives, the family lodged a complaint at the Mangolpuri police station. "Police asked us to inform them when Amit arrived," said the brother.

wallpaper.zone/representational image

Around 6.15 pm Amit reached the woman's house with two of his sisters and his nephew. "While my mother was talking to four of them, she sent my sister to bring them some water. Amit and one of his sisters followed her into the kitchen," narrated the brother. "They had an argument and the two of them suddenly threw her off the balcony and all four then fled from the house." The youngster broke his leg while trying to chase his sister's assailants.

Vikramjit Singh, DCP (Outer), said that a case of attempt to murder had been registered against Amit. "A crime and forensic team has collected evidence from the spot, and neighbours and potential witnesses are being questioned to determine what exactly happened," said Singh.

What worries the family members now is that the injuries suffered by the victim may leave her paralysed or disabled for life if she survived. They said that the doctors had told them that the next 24 hours would be critical for the victim.
A jawan was killed in an attack on a police post near Handwara on Monday night. This took place a day after the terrorist attack on an Army camp in Uri that killed 18 soldiers.

This was a bid to infiltrate the border, the second one on Tuesday along the LoC. Handwara, in Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district, is about 70 km northwest of Srinagar. It lies close to the Line of Control (LoC).

"Two infiltration bids by militants from across the Line of Control have been foiled in Uri and Naugam sectors today. At both places the operations are in progress," an army spokesman said.

J&K: Encounter underway between army and terrorists in #Handwara; 5 to 6 terrorists suspected to be holed up  Doordarshan News (@DDNewsLive) September 20, 2016

Earlier in the day, Pakistan opened fire at Indian posts along the Line of Control+ in Uri sector, mere two days after the terror attack which claimed lives of 18 security personnel. This ceasefire violation on Pakistan's part comes even as countries around the world continue to condemn Sunday's attack.

After the Uri attack on Sunday, India blamed Pakistan for the act and the Army has come down heavily on Islamabad, saying it will 'give a befitting response' to the attack at a time and place of its own choosing. Pakistan, on the other hand, has denied all allegations even as India claimed to have plenty of evidence to support its claim.
Less than three weeks before the Uri attack by Jaish-e-Mohammad, the ED sought details on six men from PoK living in Italy for funding terror activities through Hurriyat separatists in Kashmir. TOI has accessed the chargesheet submitted by the ED before the district court in Srinagar on August 24 and August 30.

BCCL

The chargesheet says an Italian remittance firm, Madina Trading, at Corso Garibaldi in Brescia, Italy, has been used by two Hurriyat separatists, Firdous Ahmad Shah and Yar Mohammad Khan, to accept money from the PoK-based men.

BCCL

Shah and Khan have been shown as accused in a money laundering case and charged with raising funds for terrorist activities, holding proceeds of terrorism and waging and attempting war against India in the ED chargesheet.

BCCL

The charges put the role of Kashmiri separatists in the unrest under the scanner as Shah is the chief of Democratic Political Movement and member of Syed Ali Shah Geelani's hardline Hurriyat Conference.

Also, the same firm, Madina Trading, was used to create a voice over internet protocol account with software firm Callphonex for the 26/11 attackers in 2008.
Delhi is not just the hotbed of Indian politics, it's also home to many MPs who want to make the city sway to the tunes of their political ideologies.

And if you belong to the national ruling party, your whims and fancies may just sound more justified to most; or do they?

Such is the case with BJP lawmaker Meenakshi Lekhi who wants the Race Course Road in the city to be renamed as 'Ekatma Marg'.

If you like me went WTF? and wondered about the significance of Ekatma marg, let me explain that Ekatma is one of the philosophies advocated by Sri Deendayal Upadhayay who was a great social reformer of the yore.

BCCL

Lekhi on Tuesday proposed to New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) to rename the road on which the Prime Minister's official residence is located. Her reason was that the existing name, Race Course Road, "does not match with Indian culture" (we totally agree with you rolling those eyes!).

Now, the interesting part is not the request but the opposition to it that has arised from Delhi's AAP government.

Yes! AAP did something for the city but before you blow your brains off because this seems like a double WTF, let us tell you it's not cause better sense prevailed among them and they thought there's no need to rename the roads.

According to reports, AAP MLA Surinder Singh has demanded that the road should be rechristened after a martyr instead.

Singh, a former National Security Guard (NSG) commando who suffered injury in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, said several veterans have approached him saying if the road is to be renamed then it should be done to honour martyred soldiers.

Singh, a New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) member, said he would raise the issue in the Council meeting on Wednesday. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is also a member of NDMC.

"Race Course Road should be renamed after any soldier. I propose that it should be renamed after 1965 war hero Flt Lt Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon, who sacrificed his life for the nation. Renaming of road should not reflect the ideology of the RSS," Singh said.

He said Race Course Road also houses two air force stations. "I have been approached by several veterans in my constituency. They want to the road to be renamed after any solider," the Delhi Cantonment MLA said.

Indianexpress.com

Lekhi, who is a member of NDMC, said in her proposal to the civic body that as the residence of the Prime Minister is situated on Race Course Road, the new name - Ekatma Marg - would remind every PM about the last person of the society.

"The nation is celebrating the birth centenary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay this year. To take the philosophy of 'Ekatma' to the mind of the public at large, and as the name of the road, viz 'Race Course Road', on which residence of Prime Minister of India is situated does not match with Indian culture...

"(Lekhi) has, therefore, requested to rename Race Course Road under the NDMC area as Ekatma Marg so that this name would remind every Prime Minister about the last person of the society throughout life," stated an agenda of the Council Meeting of NDMC which is likely to take a decision in this regard on Wednesday.

BCCL

Lekh, who is an MP from New Delhi, also cited the past cases of renaming of roads which fall under NDMC in her proposal submitted to the civic body on September 9. Upadhyay is remembered by his followers for his concept of 'antyodaya' (serving the last man in the queue) and 'ekatma' (integral humanism).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will kick off Upadhyay's 100th birth anniversary celebrations on September 25. Race Course Road was named after the Delhi race course, part of Delhi Race Club, established in 1940.

In August last year, Aurangzeb Road in Lutyens' Delhi had been renamed as Dr A P J Abdul Kalam Road in honour of the late President. NDMC had taken the decision after East Delhi BJP MP Maheish Girri proposed the move to "correct the mistakes made in our history".

Even as Delhi battles major issues of many kinds including a pan-city Dengue and Chikungunya epidemic, our politicians are bickering over trivial and totally unnecessary issues like renaming of roads which have become synonymous with those areas.

While we respect both our veterans and Sri Deen Dayal Upadhyay, I am really sure that none of them would cry over not having a road named after them; it's not like they sacrificed their lives for such glory.

Grow up people and take charge of some real issues please.
India has found support from Afghanistan in its diplomatic offensive against Pakistan. Afghan envoy to India Shaida Mohammad Abdali said that countries in the region should come together to boycott the Saarc summit in Islamabad over the host nation's role in "destabilising" the neighbourhood.

BCCL

In an interview to NDTV, Abdali said the terrorism being unleashed by Pakistan was lethal and systematic as also state-sponsored and called on neighbouring countries to unite to end the violence. Asked if India, Afghanistan and Bangladesh should join hands to boycott the Saarc summit in November, he said there should be a comprehensive effort to stamp out terror.

We have to make sure that we bring the maximum number of countries and I am sure most of the countries in South Asia are in line with what Afghanistan and India think," Abdali said. He said the country spoiling regional stability should be singled out.

BCCL

"Definitely, we should single a country that spoils our unity and spoils regional stability and peace and that stops integration and connectivity," he said. "There must be zero tolerance (towards terrorism). This is state-sponsored terrorism. It is no more an issue of non-state actors. Now, there is ample proof of this as state-sponsored terrorism and, therefore, we have to revisit our mechanisms. We have a global war on terror that must be revisited," Abdali said.
You cannot take away chai time from a Punjabi aunty  this is fact for anyone who grew up in North India.

35-year-old Stuart Gleeson couldnt even manage it with a 7 inch knife. The robber threatened 49-year-old Punjabi lady Karamjit Sangha to hand over her cash. Sangha, who owns a News and Booze convenience store in Hull, UK, was unfazed, and maybe irritated because the robber barged in right when shed begun sipping her freshly brewed cup of tea.

Sangha told him to hold up a bit because she needed to have her chai!

I was just sitting there having my cup of tea when he came in holding this seven-inch kitchen knife. He told me to give him all the money, but I was relaxed. I told him I was having a cup of tea. He demanded I put it down and give him the money. I said OK and picked up the craft knife and waved it at him. I wouldnt have hurt him, but it was enough to scare him. He started shaking and then he ran off, she told Express.co.uk.

Gleeson was arrested soon after the incident after being spotted on CCTV. He has been sentenced to 5 years in jail for robbery and possession of a knife.

The shop worker must have been extremely frightened when you waved the knife at her, said the judge.
At a time when tensions between India and Pakistan are at an all-time high, the head of a temple in Karachi has arrived in Mumbai, from where he will travel to Haridwar on Saturday for the 'asthi visarjan' of 160 Pakistani Hindus.

BCCL

Shri Ram Nath Maharaj, whose ancestors had migrated to Pakistan from UP even before the Partition, heads the Shri Panchmukhi Hanuman Mandir, one of the most revered shrines for the Hindus in Pakistan.

BCCL

Ram Nath Maharaj, whose family name is Mishra, is accompanied by his nephew Kabir, and is staying with relatives in Mulund. "Pakistani Hindus' last wish is to have their ashes immersed in Ganga. We wanted to bring in more urns but only a few of us were able to secure visas," he said.

rediff

He said that ashes immersion in Ganga were so important for Pakistani Hindus that the kin of the deceased were willing to wait for years to get such a chance. "Most of the people whose ashes we will immerse had died three or four years ago," he said, adding that the last time he had visited India was five years ago, when he immersed ashes of 135 people."
India for the first time transported petroleum products through Bangladesh to Tripura.This comes in the wake of the deal signed between the Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL), a Public sector unit under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas of the Government of India, and the Roads and Highways Department of the Government of Bangladesh (RHD).

The two were instrumental in aiding the transport of petroleum products from Assam to Tripura through Bangladesh.

Tanker trucks were received at Kailashahar along the India-Bangladesh border at around 11 PM on Saturday (10th September). Tripura Industries and Commerce Minister Tapan Chakraborty and other state and central government officials were present at the location.

This was following a short term route agreement inked by Bangladesh to allow India to transport petroleum products from the northeastern state of Assam to Tripura through Bangladesh in the wake of floods that has drastically damaged Indian roads.

Because of the hilly terrain, transportation of petroleum products is not only cumbersome but also expensive.

Thus, the agreement was signed as a special arrangement to tide over the difficulties faced in carrying petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas through the national highways linking Tripura.

In the future too, this new route via Bangladesh would save time and costs in carrying petroleum products from Assam to Tripura as the existing over 400 km of mountainous route required more than 10 hours to carry these essential items.

There is only a narrow land corridor to the northeastern region through Assam and West Bengal that passes through hilly terrain with steep gradients and multiple hairpin bends, making transportation, especially of loaded trucks, very difficult.

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The distance between Agartala and Kolkata via Bangladesh is just 620 km.

A statement of the Indian High Commission in Dhaka said that based on the request by Government of India, Bangladesh has granted permission for the movement of petroleum goods on humanitarian grounds through its territory.

Considering the condition of national highways in Meghalaya and southern Assam, IOCL Executive Director, Mr Dipankar Ray, added, "This move by IOCL not only paves the way for future logistic management but also exemplifies its commitment to be the energy accessibility of India in true sense."

Nine tank trucks carrying 108 kl of diesel and kerosene along with one LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) truck travelled from Betkutchi near Guwahati to Dawki, Meghalaya's border point with Bangladesh, and then on to Tamabil and Chatlapur in Bangladesh, eventually reaching Kailasahar and Dharmanagar in north Tripura.

The trucks reached the Dharmanagar IOCL depot on Saturday night after plying 136 km in Bangladesh.

Advantages of the MoU

The MoU will facilitate India to carry petroleum goods (Motor Spirit, High Speed Diesel, Superior Kerosene Oil and LPG) from Assam to Tripura through Bangladesh to make a buffer stock in the northeastern state.

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Earlier in 2012, Bangladesh had allowed state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation to ferry heavy machinery, turbines and over-dimensional cargoes through Ashuganj port for the 726-MW Palatana mega power project in southern Tripura.

The Food Corp of India had also transported 2,350 tonnes of rice earlier this month from Kolkata to Tripura via Bangladesh.

The short-term deal is valid till September 30. Based on the request by the Government of India, the Bangladesh authorities have granted permission for the movement of petroleum goods on humanitarian grounds through the territory of Bangladesh till September 2016, the High Commission of India said in a statement.

Assam - the hub of petroleum products

Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan, earlier this year, had spoken about how the ministry is trying to make Assam a hub of petroleum products for Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Facebook

He also elaborated how the ministry has planned to invest Rs 1,30,000 crore in the sector by 2030, out of which Rs 80,000 crore will be in Assam. Moreover, the ministry has already prepared a roadmap of investing Rs 6,000 crore in the state in the current financial year.

The minister further added that the planned investment includes capacity enhancement of the four refineries in the state including the Digboi refinery, the Guwahati refinery, the Bongaigaon refinery and the Numaligarh refinery.

Plans are on for enhancing the refining capacity of the four refineries to 16 Million Metric Tonnes (MMT). Their existing capacity is only seven MMT per year.
Music composer Vishal Dadlani who had recently come under fire for his remarks on Jain monk Tarun Sagar has met the spiritual leader to apologise for his comments.

PTI

He met Tarun Sagar at his ashram in Chandigarh on Wednesday. This is the third time since his sarcastic tweet which backfired, Dadlani has apologised to Sagar.

"I have realised a lot about myself in the last 10 days. I have come here as my eyes have been opened," Dadlani said.

Sagar on his part said he has forgiven Dadlani "I have forgiven Vishal Dadlani and the Jain Samaj should also forgive him.

'Guruji' (Jain Muni Tarun Sagar) accepted my apology, I think we've also developed friendship bond: Vishal Dadlani pic.twitter.com/DjNotRihwa  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

Dadlani had come under fire from various corners including the Jain community and the Aam Aadmi Party after he took a jibe at Sagar after he addressed the Haryana Assembly last month.

BCCL

Even though he had deleted his tweet and apologised, Dadlani was booked for hurting religious sentiments by his comment on Sagar, widely referred to as "Maharaj-ji by his followers.

Under fire from his own party Dadlani had also announced that he was quitting politics.
Leston Lawrence literally shoved gold up his ass, and almost got away with it. The 35-year-old Royal Canadian Mint employee , accused of smuggling gold from the Crown corporation facility is now facing trial.

Lawrence got access to the gold coins as one of his duties was measuring the purity of gold coins

canada.com

After the theft, the Ontario resident tried to sell them in "in cookie-sized 7.4 oz. nuggets" to a gold buyer, and was paid in cheques, which he soon encashed. The theft was valued at at $179,015.

A bank teller began to get suspicious when she saw the number of deposits he was making, as well as his request to wire the money abroad.

An investigation followed, and his safety deposit box at work was found with four Mint-style packages full of gold coins, and a container of Vaseline. Crown attorney David Friesen, said that this is "compelling evidence" of someone "secreting (gold) on his person and taking it out of the Mint."
AFP/representational image

Nearly 59 per cent of India's land area is vulnerable to moderate or severe earthquakes, according to the latest seismic zone map released on Tuesday.

It also shows how out of the total 304 million households in the country, about 95 per cent are vulnerable to earthquakes in different degrees.

In the next three months, the map will be accessible on your mobile phone to know how quake-prone your home or office is.

The map has been prepared by National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council (BMTPC). Read more here.

Here are 5 more stories that may interest you:

1. Uncle Accidentally Sends A Dick Pic To Couple's WhatsApp Group, Madness Ensues!

One of my uncles just sent a dick pic on the family group.

How's your morning going?  Aashish Mehrotra (@AgniBankai) September 21, 2016

If you thought your day was going to hell, this couple had it much worse.

But it's hilarious nonetheless.

So, this couple who were part of a family chat group received the worst image WhatsApp ever.

And this is how Aashish's dad reacted - which clearly was a brilliant move. check out what happened next

samodabiznao.blogspot/representational image

Turning down the marriage proposed by a friend she met on Facebook proved costly for a 24-year-old woman in outer Delhi's Avantika Enclave.

On Monday evening, the rebuffed man and some of his family members allegedly pushed the woman off the balcony of her second-floor residence for refusing to either marry him or pay the Rs 1 lakh he was demanding from her.

While the victim, who sustained multiple fractures, is fighting for life in Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital, police have registered a case of attempt to murder against Amit, the accused, after detaining him. Read more here

3. Guy Who Filed RTI Asking The Govt If We're Prepared For A Zombie Attack Gets A Reply

It was just yesterday that Mumbai-based Ajay Kumar's RTI application to the Ministry of Home Affairs went viral. The application read "What plans are in place for protecting the public in the event of an invasion by aliens or zombies and even extra-dimensional beings."

The other questions went like "What are our chances against them?" and "can we do it without Will Smith?" Check out the reply

4. 20-Feet-Long Python Gulps Down A Full-Sized Nilgai And Now Forest Guards Are Watching Over Her

ANI

A video of a massive 20-feet-long python has emerged showing it a nilgai (Blue bull). The incident was reported from Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, in Gujarat's Junagadh.

According to ANI the incident was first noticed by a local farmer who then alerted the authorities.

By the time the authorities sent a rescue team the python had already eaten the bull.

They said the python will be released after it digests its prey. Read more here

5. Gurgaon Woman Escapes Murder Attempt By Jilted Lover Thanks To A Locket That Blocked The Bullet

askmen.com/Representational image

You've seen this in films. But this happened right here in Gurgaon, next to a Rapid Metro pillar in Sector 55.

A 27-year-old store deputy manager shot at a woman who had turned down his marriage proposal from point-blank range. But the bullet didn't pierce her body. It was blocked by the only defence she had. A tiny piece of metal.

The woman was wearing a locket and the bullet barrelled straight into it and ricocheted away. She suffered minor bruises and is now safe. Read the details here.
Go the fk back to where you came from read a poster in Canada.

Racist posters targeting Sikhs in Canada were surfacing on the campus of University of Alberta. Although the posters have been taken off the walls, a lot of Sikhs there are highly disturbed and saddened by the scene.

wikipedia

The university said it removed 12 posters found on the campus, including the one that was put on the universitys main library. The posters featured a Sikh man, profanity about the turban and demeaning slogans asking them to leave Canada.

Messaging on the poster included the caption F--K YOUR TURBAN and If you are so obsessed with your third-world culture, go the f--k back to where you came from.

Proud to be Canadian, proud of my service to Canada, proud of my turban. @UAlberta #ualberta

 Harjit Sajjan (@HarjitSajjan) September 20, 2016

Harjit Singh Sajjan is a Canadian Liberal politician, the current Minister of National Defence and a Member of Parliament representing the riding of Vancouver South.

Other than that, the poster also included hashtags like invasion and non-integrative.

Investigation of the entire incident is on and the authority is looking for the people whove put these posters. Surprisingly, the kind of unrest that this scene initiated has led to a lot of support for the Sikhs  a lot of people have come forward to help the group.

gwtoday

We totally condemn the act, organising, said Yadvinder Bhardwaj, a student from the university. He further explained that how unfortunate it was that some people tried to sabotage the kind of harmony students maintain in the university.

Justin Trudeau, the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada, and the leader of the Liberal Party, took it to Twitter to show his support towards Sikhs.

and we're proud of the enormous contributions Sikhs make to this country every day. #MakeItAwkward https://t.co/qjDK4TKe2W  Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) September 20, 2016

People choose Canada because it is known for its diversity he continued.

Amid all the tension, a lot of students are pitching in to subdue the tension and not giving in to the rage, organising awareness campaigns regarding the turban and its importance to Sikhs, while the rest will wear a turban on campus.

dailytexanonline

It is never productive to respond to hate with anger and hate. We can turn this around.

For now, things are under control and everyone is safe.
In a major embarrassment to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ahead of his much hyped address to the UN General Assembly, where he is expected to rake up the Kashmir issue, two american lawmakers have introduced a bill in the US Congress to designate the country as a state sponsor of terrorism.

thinglink

The bill was moved by Congressman Ted Poe from Texas, who is the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California, who is a strong votary of the Baloch cause.

Fox News

After the bill H.R 6069 or the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act, was introduced, the US President will issue a report within 90 days, detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism.

The move comes even as US still considers Pakistan a close ally in its fight against terrorism, especially in Afghanistan. Even though the two call themselves allies, Washington has time and again questioned Islamabad's sincerity in the fight. A number of high-profile incidents including the Kunduz Airlift, during the US invasion of Afghanistan where Pakistan airlifted top Taliban and Al-Qaida commanders to save them from US, when Islamabad was a supposed partner of NATO to fight them. However the biggest double game of Islamabad was exposed when Al-Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, that to in close proximity of the Pakistan Army headquarters.

AFP

Subsequently a number high profile Al-Qaida and Taliban leaders including Mullah Omar and Haqqani Network second in command, Sirajuddin Haqqani were killed inside Pakistan.

Even while Pakistan in 2014 launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb against terrorists, US accused the country of selectively targeting terrorists from the Pakistani Taliban, while the Haqqanis who also operated in from the same area was not touched.

AFP

The US had earlier with-held the distribution of the coalition support fund for Pakistan claiming that the county was not taking decisive action against the Haqqanis.

''Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the United States for years. From harbouring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network , there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's,'' Ted Poe said.

Even though the bill has been introduced, it is highly unlikely to be passed in by the current Congress as it is now in its final days. It however shows a paradigm shift in the US policy and acknowledging something that India and Afghanistan has been saying for years.

If passed Pakistan will join the likes of Iran, Sudan and Syria as countries who have been listed as state sponsors of terrorism.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the self-styled 'Caliph' or supreme leader of the Islamic State has reportedly been spotted alive in Iraqi city Mosul, which has been under their control since 2014.

Alsumaria TV

"A local source in Nineveh province, on Tuesday, [said] that the unrest that rocked the city of Mosul have forced the leader of Daesh named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to come out of his hiding place in one of the citys neighborhoods al-Baghdadi was riding a white four-wheel-drive car color surrounded by three heavily armed militants," Baghdad based Alsumaria TV reported.

Earlier there were reports that Baghdadi was living in Raqqa, Syria the de-facto capital of ISIS.

The report also comes amid rumors that Baghdadi was seriously injured in a US air strike. There were also unconfirmed reports that he could have been killed in the attack.

Twitter

The elusive terror commander has not been seen in public for years. The last time he was seen in public was in 2014 when he lead Friday prayers at Mosul's Great Mosque.
Despite the country's willingness to admit it publically, Pakistan's link with terror outfits has been nothing but a secret.

Now one of the top authority figures in Pakistan himself has come out accusing the political and religious parties in the country of backing extremists.

Pakistan Today

Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Anwar Zaheer Jamali said that political and religious parties contacts with terror elements should be exposed. He said these subversive elements are being supported by parties for their personal interests. Jamali added that judicial institutions of Pakistan are facing terrorists attacks.

His comments on Monday, a day after the terror attack in Uri was in the context of the recent terror attacks in his country targeting the legal system.

Earlier this month a suicide bomber had attacked a court in the northern Pakistani city of Mardan, killing at least 12 people and injuring more than 50 others.

Last month a some 70 people, most of them lawyers were killed in a blast in Balochistan's capital Quetta when terrorists targeted a hospital in the city. The lawyers had assembled there after one of their colleague was killed earlier in the day.

While a number of Pakistani politicians have known to have links to extremist groups the most prominent of them was Malik Ishaq, the founder of a sunni terror group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Ishaq who was killed by Pakistan police in a shootout in 2014 after he tried to escape custody was planning to contest Parliamentary elections.

EPA

Another prominent extremist figure in Pakistan who enjoyed political patronage was Mumtaz Qadri, a former special forces guard turned assassin who was hanged for the murder of Punjab governor Salman Taseer.

Reuters

Qadri was hailed a hero after he killed Taseer accusing him of blasphemy.

He was defended in the court by a elite panel of lawyers including a former judge of the Supreme court. After he was hanged in 2015, some religious parties came out into the streets almost bringing the capital Islamabad to a standstill.
Were excited to announce that indmin.com is now part of fastmarkets.com.

A new look and an improved experience means you can still stay ahead of this fast-moving market with price data, news and market intelligence right here on Fastmarkets.

Discover more than 2000 prices, news and analysis in primary and secondary metals markets. We cover base metals, industrial minerals, ores and alloys, steel, scrap and steel raw materials.

If you already have a Fastmarkets account, youll still have uninterrupted access to your markets by logging in with your current details.
It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discover the
Four ritualists were allegedly arrested with fresh human hearts in Ijebu Igbo, Ogun state. The suspects Nurudeen Adeniyi, 34, Tunde Banjo, 29, Temitope Alaba 20, and Tobi Olukoya , 20, all confessed to commiting the crime. The suspects said their victim- a young lady, was brought from Ago Iwoye area. When the lady was resisting sexual advances from them, they hit her with a charm and she couldnt say anything again. Read their confessions below;

Nurudeen Adeniyi, 34, suspect.

Nurudeen Adeniyi is my name, I am 34 years old. I am selling cement and rice and I am an Alfa.

I told him (Banjo) that I need human heart and he said he has a man that can get it for him.

I just take the delivery of this one (hearts) and I have collected two pieces two years ago.

I am not the person that used the one I collected two years ago, the person that used that one is dead now.

I want to use the parts for eyonu, ebe a won agba.

I regret my actions and I want Nigerians to forgive me.

Tunde Banjo, 29, herbalist, suspect.

This my brother asked me that he needs breast and TOTO (female genitals) and one day I was playing in my house and I see this guy with his friend and I told them that one of my brothers need this thing and he said he could get it for me.

He called me one day that he has seen a lady. I was not there when they killed her o but she was killed in my (herbalist) office.

Temitope Alaba 20, suspect

I was there when they killed the girl but I wasnt the one that killed her. I am an herbalist apprentice.

The girl was killed with a knife.

It was Tobi and Asa (nickname) that killed the girl. They brought her from Ago Iwoye area.

When the lady was resisting sexual advances from them, they hit her with a charm and she couldnt say anything again.

Tobi Olukoya , 20, suspect

I was outside, I dont know how pepe and Tope killed her.

They told me they needed women breast and private part and if I could lure a girl to their place, they would give me 30 thousand naira.

But they only gave me 500 naira to go and eat after the operation.

I picked them from Ago garade.

Commissioner of Police Ahmed Iliyasu has confirmed the incident;

You can see a recession of human being back to cannibalism and we would not allow that, that is why when out operatives got this information, we quickly swung into action and rounded them up.

We have interviewed them. That is bestial and we cannot allow that. We have carried out our constitutional duties by arresting them, he said.

Definitely, the right procedure will be taken and they would be charged to court for prosecution.

Nobody will hide under any guise to perpetrate any criminal act in the state and go free, we will definitely get at him. We have our various tactical deployment, we have our covert operations and we are picking them up, he said.

Source: Trezzy Helm
A former Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will face charges of corruption and money laundering over his alleged involvement in one of the most far-reaching corruption cases in Brazil.

Several politicians have already been charged with receiving kickbacks from a scheme in the state-run oil company, Petrobras. 70-year old Lula has been a principal subject of investigations but was shielded after Rousseff, who has now been impeached appointed him chief of staff.

Lula is accused of receiving $1.11m in bribes laundered through a suspicious purchase and renovation of a luxury penthouse. Lula has called the allegations a farce and has said it is politically motivated.

I am sad, Lula said. It is a big farce, a big lie, a big pyrotechnic show.

Whats happening isnt getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more.

He has shown an interest in running for the Presidency again in 2018 having served a single tenure from 2003 to 2011.
The Ekiti State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has condemned Governor Ayo Fayose for describing President Muhammadu Buhari, as the major problem of the country.

The party said the statement credited to the governor on Sunday was borne out of fear of his impending day of reckoning when he would face the law for the alleged infractions against the constitution and official corruption.

In a statement yesterday by its Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun, the Ekiti APC said rather than describing Buhari as the nations problem, Fayose had proved conclusively that he and his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), represented the threat to democracy.

Olatunbosun said the governors records in the practice of democracy cast a blot on Nigerias integrity as a democracy hub, where economic growth thrived on the observance of the rule of law and transparent conduct of government business.

During his first term between 2003 and 2006, all international development agencies operating in Ekiti State, including the World Bank and British DFID, relocated from Ekiti when the agencies could no longer cope with the opaque manner Fayose was conducting governments business in relation to the agencies partnership with his administration, he said.

The party recalled how the world was outraged when Fayose allegedly invaded the premises of a court in September 2014 to stop delivery of judgment on his perjury case.

It further alleged that Fayose, who was yet to be sworn in as governor at the time, attacked the judges with thugs and tore their coats while court records in the Chief Judges office were torn into shreds after beating his secretary blue and black and windows and doors of the court destroyed.

The statement added: If today Buhari drops his anti-corruption war, Fayose will throw a lavish party to celebrate an open cheque to Ekiti treasury.

He said: Again, Fayoses name rang around the world when he masterminded the greatest electoral fraud in history, mobilising the military for treason to menace the opposition, compromising INEC by illegally obtaining its sensitive materials and drawing on the nations defence vote to manipulate his election in what is Nigerias greatest electoral blues known as Ekitigate.

Fayose is criticising the President again because more illicit wealth of his associates in the looting of Nigeria is being exposed

The greatest fear that always rattles the fearless Fayose is whenever a looter is uncovered by the Federal Government because he knows what is coming for him after the EFCC traced billions of illegal funds to his frozen accounts.
At least 44 people  including 37 demonstrators and six police officers  have been reportedly killed in protests over Congolese President Joseph Kabilas perceived bid to extend his rule.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday that dozens of people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo as political turmoil roils the Central African country.

The unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo started on Monday after its election commission decided to try to postpone the next presidential vote, due in November.

Kabilas opponents say the proposed delay is a manoeuvre to keep him in power although ruling party politicians deny this. Kabila is barred constitutionally from running for a third term and his allies say he will respect the constitution.

With the disturbances forcing schools to close and halting public transport in the sprawling riverside capital Kinshasa, the United Nations expressed fears the situation could worsen.

The United States said Kabilas government should have taken steps to defuse the violence and that it was prepared to impose sanctions targeting individuals involved in abuses.

French President Francoise Hollande blamed Congo authorities and urged them to respect the constitution and hold elections this year.

Adding to the mix of disapproval, Congos influential Roman Catholic Church suspended its participation in talks over the timetable for the next elections and stressed that Kabila should not be a candidate when they are held.

Several people were killed overnight when security forces burned down the headquarters of the main opposition party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), and attacked buildings of other opposition parties, according to Ida Sawyer, an Africa researcher for New York-based HRW.

Twenty people were killed in clashes on Monday and another 17 on Tuesday  most (of them) when security forces fired on crowds of protesters, Sawyer said.

Weve also received credible reports that protesters have killed at least six police officers and a (ruling party) PPRD supporter and they have also burned and looted several shops and police stations.

Interior ministry spokesman Claude Pero Luwara said the death toll stood at 17 and that Human Rights Watchs statement was a typical exaggeration by the group. The ministry had earlier said three of those killed were policemen.
Some families in Kaduna state have been forced to eat leaves so as to survive because the rising cost of food stuff brought about by the current economic recession, could not allow them have the financial resources to visit the markets.

A youth leader, Malam Hassan Ahmed Rufai said that leaves such as tafasa, spinach, etc, had came to the rescue of these near-starving families, while lizards and cats might become endangered specie because some children were already seen hunting them to provide a cheap source of protein for their families.

Lamenting the increasing excruciating economic hardship, Rufai lashed at top political office holders, as well as the rich and affluent people in communities around Kawo, Unguwan Dosa, Hayin Banki and Unguwan Kanawa, saying they had the capability to assist the poor in their midst but were not living up the masses expectations.

Some of them have gone on Hajj for the umpteenth time, while the money they spend making such regular hajj visits could have been used to buy food and feed several mouths. Hajj is incumbent upon a Muslim, once in a lifetime, if the person can afford it, he emphasised.

He added that rice and maize as well as other staple food items have turned into precious commodities which only the rich and privileged could afford. Many of our people now feed on leaves, some cannot even cook the normal pate, they are seriously feeling the pang of an excruciating poverty. We pray the government should come to peoples rescue by establishing free feeding centers.

The other time, I saw some children chasing a big agama lizard. When I asked them what they were doing, they said they want to kill it because its roasted meat was sweet. They added that even cats are longer spared because it is also a delicacy, he said.

The youth leader challenged people in authority to explain how the food items donated to the state by Hajiya Aisha Buhari, were disbursed, alleging that there was little of no adequately publicity, if any, on how the items were distributed.

People here are suffering; hunger is everywhere. If you go to the Masjid, you see people begging for money to buy food. Go to the hospitals, you see malnourished children everywhere needing medicare and the Doctors will say its either malaria or typhoid that is their ailment.

Government should please come to our aid. It is capable of taking the people out of this predicament, he insisted.

-Source: -thebreakingtimes
The Nigeria Army has said it would deploy drones to monitor activities of hoodlums during the September 28 governorship election in Edo State.

It said the use of drones would be to ensure a free and fair election.

Commander of the 4 Brigade Nigeria Army, Brigadier-General Raji Benbela, who displayed one of the drones before newsmen in Benin City, said the drones are to support with aerial view of strategic locations in the state.

He spoke during the operation show of force by combined team of security agencies in the state.

According to him security agents would be deployed to strategic locations to stop unwanted elements from disrupting the process.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has challenged former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, to disclose how she made the $31million that was frozen by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, in four separate bank accounts.

The NLC President, Ayuba Wabba, told newsmen at the NLC National Youth Conference in Abuja, yesterday that the former First Lady should prove the money was earned legitimately.

Wabba also challenged Mrs. Jonathan to tell Nigerians the kind of business she did from which she got the $31 million frozen by the anti-graft agency.

We have said it over and over again that NLC is the first organisation that actually supported, openly, the anti-graft war. We said recover, investigate and prosecute so that it can serve as a deterrent. Our position is clear on the issue. In this respect, the onus of proof is on her. She must inform all of us the sources of the money, he stated.

The NLC leader further stated that She must explain what business she has done to accumulate such wealth. In other climes, people would have forfeited such funds. This is our position and we have always been consistent about it.

According to him, lack of accountability and high scale corruption was among reasons the country is currently passing through economic challenges whereby many states cannot afford to pay workers salaries.

Salaries are not paid in many states not because the resources are not there but because of the inherent corruption in the system, Mr. Wabba said.

Corruption fight should also be extended to states and local governments. Wherever there is element of corruption, whoever is involved, the law must take its course.

There should be investigation. There should be fair trial within the confines of the law and whoever is found wanting, those funds should be recovered and prosecution should follow to serve as a deterrent, he added.
The Network of Civil Society Organisations in Borno State, has raised the alarm over the increasing rate of prostitution by female internally displaced persons in the state.

The Chairman of the CSOs, Ahmed Shehu, said that displaced women and teenagers were engaging in prostitution in order to raise money to feed their families.

Shehu spoke at the presentation of the situational assessment of internally displaced persons in the North-East by a non-governmental organisation, NOI Polls, on Tuesday in Abuja.

He noted that 60 per cent of female IDPs had suffered rape and other forms of sexual harassment, adding that many homes in Maiduguri and environs were now headed by teenagers whose parents had either been killed, missing or in Boko Haram captivity.

The activist stated that the development could worsen the high incidences of sexually-transmitted diseases in the state.

Shehu said, Many females were raped and killed while collecting firewood, particularly as they travelled farther from their communities. Many teenagers are heading their families now because their parents had been killed or captured by Boko Haram. The sad part of it is that many female internally displaced persons have gone into prostitution so that they can feed themselves.

A Borno-based journalist, Mohammed Alfa, said the Federal Government should invite the anti-graft agencies to Borno State, if they were serious about fighting corruption. He noted that foods meant for the IDPs were being diverted and sold by state government officials.

Alfa alleged that some people had threatened his life for publishing a report on the nefarious activities going in the camps, stressing that he was not frightened by the threat.

The NOI, in its assessment, noted the cases of sexual abuse and rise in social vices in the camps and called on the government to address it.

It also affirmed incidences of corruption and sharp practices with respect to the distribution of relief materials donated to the IDPs.

Majority of IDPs (93 per cent) attested that they dont get most of the relief materials such as food, clothes, medicines and so on, allocated to them by the government and donor agencies, the report stated.

Source: Punch
Esteban Gutierrez has rebuffed the public criticism of Mercedes boss Toto Wolff following last Sunday's Singapore Grand Prix.

Wolff directed a few negative remarks at the Haas driver, accusing Gutierrez of 'cruising' in the closing stages of the race and putting Nico Rosberg's lead over Daniel Riccairdo into jeopardy for failing to respect deployed blue flags.

Gutierrez hit back at the Austrian however, not only defending his stance in the race but also Wolff's choice of berating him in a public forum.

"Making fun of me publicly is not a fair way to do things,' the Mexican explained to Autosport.

"He could very easily have come to me and spoken to me face-to-face. If he has something to say he can come to me and speak about it. He knows I am an open person, he knows Im very transparent.

"Its just disappointing what was said [by Wolff]. But people can make fun of me, they can say whatever they want, but there are rules. If I was doing something wrong then I would be penalised, as simple as that."

Gutierrez has come under scrutiny by his peers on several occasions this season. In Hungary, the Haas driver received a five-second penalty for holding up Lewis Hamilton, while Daniel Ricciardo also had a few harsh words for the Mexican after a slow blue-flag response in Germany.

"I did something wrong in Budapest, and I was penalised - although I was only penalised because Lewis complained.

"But I wasn't penalised in Singapore. I was doing my race. I was fighting as well, so I will continue my way. I will continue to move forward, to keep improving, with the consistency in my results showing how close we are to the points, to the top 10.

"Nothing will stop me, I will keep pushing, and getting in the points will happen. I believe in it."

Quotes of the week - 2016 Singapore Grand Prix

2016 Singapore Grand Prix - Driver ratings

REPORT: Rosberg takes title lead after Singapore thriller

Breakfast with ... Bernd Maylander
The Federal Government says the change begins with me campaign which has received several criticisms started with the leadership through the implementation of the national re-orientation campaign.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, stated this while receiving delegates of the National Council of Womens Societies (NCWS), yesterday in Abuja

The minister said the essence of the campaign was for Nigerians to accept and buy made in Nigeria products to improve the economy and create more jobs.

He confidently assured Nigerians that the campaign would be successful and appreciated the NCWS for its willingness to partner with government.

The minister however, faulted the position of some critics of the campaign, who said it was ill-timed because of the state of the economy.

Some people said that we should wait for the economy to improve before we start the campaign, but we say no, for two reasons, he said.

First, if only those before us had launched the campaign, we will not be where we are today. If the campaign had sunk in, there will be no embezzlement, no corruption and no impunity. You cannot say, as a mother, that because you are poor, you will allow your daughter to go out from morning till midnight without correcting her.
Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, has strongly warned principals of Unity Colleges to adhere strictly to the directive on the collection of only authorised school fees.

The Deputy Director, Press of the Ministry, Mr Ben Goong, signed and issued the warning in a statement on Tuesday in Abuja.

The statement said that any principal who is found wanting in regards to this directive would be sacked.

The Minister gave the warning following media reports that some principals of Federal Government-owned schools and the Unity Colleges were collecting fees well over the amount stipulated by the ministry.

He directed that all authorised cost items, including boarding fees, must be communicated to parents in writing and copied to the ministry before any payment could be demanded.

According to the minister, any principal who does otherwise will have his or herself to blame.

For the avoidance of doubt, the authorised school fees for Unity Colleges for the 2016/2017 academic year has been placed on the ministrys website  www.education.gov.ng

Any school principal who collects or has collected a penny outside the authorised fees as clearly stated must refund same to affected parents or guardians immediately, he said.

Adamu also advised parents whose wards were in unity colleges to report any infraction on the directive to the Federal Ministry of Education for appropriate sanction.

SEE ALSO: Lagos Set To Shut 10,000 Schools
A former President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), has exonerated the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of blame over the spate of inconclusive polls in the country.

Mr. Agbakoba, instead, blamed desperate politicians for the development.

The Senior Advocate of Nigeria told journalists yesterday in Abuja that Usually, there is rigging. There is fighting and thugery. The election is not transparent. When INEC cancels it on those grounds, the party that it does not favour will say INEC is bias. Tell me, what do you expect INEC to do?

Our politicians are prepared to stretch the process anyway they can. So I am making the point that INEC is not where to look when we are talking about ending the issue of inconclusive election.

He, however, advised INEC to seek to address the situation by being strict with politicians, saying, INEC should wield a stronger stick. It should exert more authority and sanction political parties and their members who violate the laws. They should follow what the rule says strictly.
The immediate past Governor of Niger State, Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu, has denied speculations that he is convening a meeting in Kano State aimed at setting templates for the 2019 presidential election.

The ex-governor explained that his recent missions in Kano was connected with his son, Mal. Ibrahim Babangida Aliyus upcoming wedding in the state this Saturday, September 24, 2016.

He said that distinguished Nigerians like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Governors Aminu Tambuwal (Sokoto), Abdullahi Umar Ganduje (Kano), Emirs and many other politicians, who have indicated interest to attend, would only be there for the wedding and not political realignment as being speculated.

Mr. Aliyu made the clarification in a statement yesterday, which was signed by his media aide, Mr. Israel A. Ebije.

The attention of the former governor of Niger State has been directed to a rumour alleging that he is convening a political meeting in Kano State ahead of the 2019 presidential election. Let me clarify that he is only planning the wedding ceremony of his son scheduled to hold on Saturday.

He has only extended invitations to friends and associates, as it is customary in any civil society. There is no political coloration as is being insinuated, the statement said.

The former governor urged politicians to avoid acts that are capable of distracting the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, who he said must be given the much needed support to succeed, especially now that the country is in recession.
Manchester United manager, Jose Mourinho looks to be feeling the pressure already just a few months after getting back into management.

Mourinhos United career got off to a great start, landing three key players and winning his first three matches. It definitely looked like the special one was back!

Alas! Mourinhos team was to come unravelled a few weeks later, losing to Manchester City, Feyenoord and Watford in quick succession. He has roundly criticised some of his players for poor performances and the latest to receive a backlash is Luke Shaw.

Sources now say Mourinho has now blamed former United manager, Louis Van Gaal for the teams poor shape. Van Gaals style of play is reportedly the polar opposite of what Mourinho requires of his players and this has created confusion among the ranks at Old Trafford.

United will play Northampton in the EFL cup on Wednesday night and we cant wait to see if United will manage to turn the tide!
Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State on Tuesday described his victory at the Supreme Court as a big honour to democracy in Nigeria.

In a statement shortly after the court affirmed him as elected governor of Kogi, he said the judgment would remain a watershed in the annals of electoral jurisprudence and constitutional law in the country.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the election of Bello of the All Progressives Congress by dismissing the prayers of James Abiodun Faleke, the running mate of late Prince Abubakar Audu, the initial flag bearer of the party.

The seven-man panel, led by Justice Sylvester Ngwata, affirmed the election after listening to the closing statements of all the counsels.

The apex court, however, said reasons for its decision to strike out the case would be made known on September 30.

In his reaction to the ruling, Gov. Bello said It is a long walk to victory which will reshape the nations constitution.

I am humbled and magnanimous in victory; it is a long walk to victory.

The victory belongs to all Kogi people who believe in transforming Kogi State from a potentially great state to a really great state.

In the statement signed his Chief Press Secretary, Kingsley Fanwo, the governor also advised his supporters to guide against wild jubilation but to use the occasion for sober reflections.

He said he would pursue his cardinal goals of improving education, healthcare, infrastructural development as well as raising the capacity of the citizens to reinvigorate the states economy.

Mr. Bello commended the judiciary for rising to the occasion by standing firm with what is true and just.

In its reaction, the state chapter of the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON), in a statement in Lokoja, described the judgment as a victory for the rule of law.

The chairman of the group in the state, Taufiq Isa, commended the justices of the Supreme Court for the judgment, saying it had finally settled the contention over the governorship position.

We are calling on stakeholders in the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state to come together and join hands with the administration of Gov. Yahaya Bello in the interest of the development of Kogi, Mr. Isa said.

On his part, a former acting governor of the state and chieftain of the APC, Chief Clarence Olafemi, described the Supreme Court judgment as a welcome development.

Meanwhile, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, candidate and former governor of the state, Capt. Idris Wada, has declined commenting on the ruling.

A terse statement by his spokesperson, Jacob Edi, said the former governor could not comment as he was yet to get the details of the Supreme Court judgment.
A 42-year-old businessman, Livinus Uwa, has told an Igando Customary Court in Lagos that he married a thief. Uwa made this known when he testified in his divorce petition against his wife, Chineye, on Wednesday in Lagos.

He urged the court to dissolve his four-year-old marriage to Chineye because of her penchant for stealing his money in the wardrobe. I married a thief, on severally occasions, my wife stole my money from my wardrobe, rendering me broke. The last time she burgled my room and stole N350, 000. I reported the theft at the police station and she confessed to the theft, but the money was not recovered, I have reported all her attitudes and stealing habits to both families, they called her but she refused to change, he said. The petitioner accused his wife, who failed to appear in court after several summonses of abandonment, adding that since they married, Chineye had been appearing and disappearing. When she was pregnant, she left the house to an unknown place and came back after she was delivered of the baby. She abandoned our baby when she was 10-month-old; I have to engage a baby sitter to take care of her. When the baby was two years, I enrolled her in school and my wife reappeared, he said.

He described his estranged wife as a lazy and dirty woman, adding that Chineye is lazy, she cannot cook, wash or sweep and I do the house chores. Uwa pleaded with the court to dissolve the marriage, since he could no longer condone her stealing habits, adding that he was no longer in love with her.

In his judgment, President of the court, Mr Adegboyega Omilola, dissolved the marriage. Omilola held that it was obvious from available testimony and the respondents refusal to appear in court that the marriage had hit the rock. He said throughout the duration of this case, the respondent refused to honour court summon, adding that the court had no other choice than to dissolve the marriage. The marriage between Livinus Uwa and Chineye Uwa is hereby dissolved from today, both parties are no longer husband and wife, they are free to go their separate ways without any hindrances and molestation, Omilola said.

Source: Vanguard
The protracted crisis bedeviling the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has finally been resolved with Chairman of the Caretaker Committee, Ahmed Makarfi, and factional chairman of the party, Ali Modu Sheriff, reconciling their differences.

The two factions, which met in Abuja, issued a statement on Tuesday announcing an end to the leadership crisis that rocked the main opposition party for several months.

The statement titled, Rejuvenating The PDP and dated 20th September 2016, was jointly signed by Messrs. Makarfi and Sheriff.

It reads:

This is without prejudice to all outstanding matters in court.

At a meeting held this morning between the two of us His Excellency Senator Ali Modu Sheriff and His Excellency Senator Ahmed Makarfi CON, a holistic review of the state of affairs of our great party The PDP was deliberated upon.

The meeting was held in a most convivial atmosphere of brotherhood and understanding in the best interest of our great country Nigeria and the sustenance of our multi-party democracy.

In reviewing the crisis that has engulfed our party The PDP since the loss of the 2015 general elections, after 16 years of uninterrupted leadership at the center, it became obvious to both of us as principal actors that it is time to heal the wounds, and bring about a united, focused and constructive opposition party that can bring sanity to our democratic process, bringing relief to the teeming supporters of our great party The PDP, and to the benefit of our country Nigeria.

Based on the above, we have agreed to:

a) Consult widely with all relevant organs of the party b) Set up a joint committee that will carry out a holistic reconciliation of all aggrieved segments of our party across the country c) Pursue the vision of the founding fathers of our great party The PDP

The statement also urged all party members to remain calm and refrain from actions and utterances that could further bring about divisions or disputes in the party.
A domestic staff to former First Lady, Hajiya Turai YarAdua, has been arrested by the Police in Katsina State for allegedly stealing N91million from her.

The domestic staff, whose identity was revealed as Yusuf Sarkin Gida, had been serving the YarAdua family for over 40 years, the police said.

The Commissioner of Police, Katsina, Mr. Usman Abdullahi, who confirmed the development, said a formal complaint was received before Gidas arrest.

CP Abdullahi, however, refused to disclose if the theft of the huge sum of money was in bits or at once.

We are investigating, actually it will surprise you to know that the man has been serving the family for over 40 years, he said.

And the key to that house is in his custody. There are materials and even raw cash that got missing.

If I give you the key to a room where I keep things and when I come back and I cannot see those things, who will I ask?

In fact, the rough estimate of some parts of the items is about N91,400,000. I dont want to say more.

We received a formal complaint, we invited Gada and we are investigating.

Asked if the suspect was in detention, the police chief simply said: We are investigating.
The All Progressives Congress deputy governorship candidate in the November 21, 2015 election in Kogi State, Hon. James Faleke, has reacted to the Supreme Court judgment upholding the election of Alhaji Yahaya Bello as governor of the state.

Mr. Faleke, a member of the House of Representatives, said he had no regrets challenging Mr. Bellos election first at the election tribunal and up to the Supreme Court.

A seven-man panel of the apex court headed by Justice Sylvester Ngwata on Tuesday affirmed the election of Bello after listening to the closing statements of all the counsel.

The court said it would provide reasons for its decision on September 30.

In his reaction, Mr. Faleke said he had no regrets challenging Mr. Bellos election, saying he took the step in good faith to protect the interest of the over 240,000 electorates that voted for the Audu/Faleke ticket.

Faleke was the APCs running mate in the November election before the governorship candidate, Prince Abubakar Audu, died before the final declaration of the results.

The running mate, who expected to fill the vacuum created by the demise of Audu, challenged the APCs decision to nominate Mr. Bello instead as the partys new candidate for a supplementary election that held in December 2015.

In a statement signed by spokesperson of the Audu/Faleke Campaign, Duro Meseko, the lawmaker said it would have amounted to a betrayal of the sacred trust of the people who reposed implicit confidence in the Audu/Faleke ticket not to have defended the sanctity of their vote up till the Apex court level.

We have heard the judgment handed down by the Supreme Court jurists upholding Yahaya Bello as governor. We shall wait for the full text of the judgment to know why they came to that conclusion, he was quoted as saying.

But let it be stated here that we have no regrets challenging the declaration of our election as inconclusive by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). What we did was to defend the votes cast for Audu/Faleke by the over 240,000 electorates on November 21, 2015.

The people voted for us as candidates not APC because they believe in the kind of leadership we offer to provide for them during our campaigns. It would therefore amount to crass betrayal of the trust of these electorates not to have defended their votes till the end.

Mr. Faleke said as a member of the National Assembly, he would be glad to read details of the judgment so as to know which areas of our nations jurisprudence require urgent review.

He also urged all his supporters to remain calm, peaceful and law abiding and thanked them for their support.
Hondas head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa says the upcoming Malaysian Grand Prix makes sense for the Japanese constructor to introduce a new power unit upgrade, though it will incur grid penalties.

Honda still has three engine development tokens left for 2016, having used 18 last winter, two in Canada for a new spec of turbocharger, another couple at Silverstone to improve the fuel system, and seven in Belgium last month for a major evolution related to the combustion chamber and turbo.

With Honda unwilling to face a grid setback for its home race at Suzuka, Hasegawa has pinpointed Sepang, which hosts F1 one week before, as a logical venue to spend the final tokens.

We introduced a new engine in Spa and at that moment we had nine races [left] so we need to introduce one more engine, he said. If you split the nine races it could be Malaysia or Japan or the USA.

We do not want to introduce the new engine and get a penalty at Suzuka, so Malaysia makes sense.

When pressed to confirm whether Honda was unsure about where to unleash the upgrade, Hasegawa added: Actually, I have already decided but it is not the time to disclose it!

However, it remains to be decided whether Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button will both receive the evolution at the same time.

This is also another discussion point for the team. I dont want to get both cars behind from a race tactics and a constructors point of view. So we need to sort our tactics for the cars.

While Honda is looking to further improve its internal combustion engine (ICE), Hasegawa admits the upgrade could focus on another area in light of the current feedback.

We have three tokens left. Currently it is not very good on the dyno result, so Im not sure we can introduce the new combustion. We will see.

We may introduce [the upgrade] in a different area because once we change the combustion it will cost us so much setting time we do not want to put a lot of resource on it this year.

The weight reduction or a tougher cylinder block or other area would give more power.

Here is a recap of how many tokens each engine supplier has left at the moment:

Ferrari: 0 (32 used)

Honda: 3 (29 used)

Mercedes: 6 (26 used)

Renault: 18 (14 used)

Scene at the 2016 Singapore Grand Prix

Quotes of the week - 2016 Singapore Grand Prix

2016 Singapore Grand Prix - Driver ratings

REPORT: Rosberg takes title lead after Singapore thriller

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter
The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has emphasized the need for the ongoing war against corruption to continue, stressing that it is mandatory to correct the dark side that has eaten the nations economy.

The VP, perceived that the nation had witnessed excessive corruption, saying that no economy can tolerate the level of corruption seen in Nigeria without consequences.

Look at the North-East, while a war is going, Nigerian lives being lost, some local governments being taken over, yet people cannot account for $15 billion meant for purchases of security equipment, he said.

While giving details of the present administrations determination to the fight against corruption, Prof Osinbajo said that we are not sitting down focusing on it, all we do is to empower the relevant agencies  EFCC and co  to do their jobs. Our main focus is the national economy.

Although, he is convinced that Nigeria was still blessed with honest people, adding that as a nation, it is vital to pay serious attention to issues of integrity. He has, therefore, said it is important that Nigerians insist the problem of corruption must be dealt with.

He made the assertion while receiving a delegation of the University of Lagos Alumni Association, who paid him a courtesy visit at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Tuesday.

Weve watched corruption fighting back. Some people even said bring back corruption, but not the man on the street, he said.

The corruption has been so much. Look at the sheer amount of money stolen and decisions taken that fuel corruption, decisions taken just with the sole aim of cornering national resources.

Continuing, he said what catches our attention is the kind of discoveries we get and hear of daily.

I can say President Muhammadu Buhari is completely focused on dealing with issues that concerns this country. I work everyday with the president, so I can say so. He is totally focused on how to make this country a better place to live, he said.

The Alumni Association of UNILAG was led by Dr Sunny Kuku, who stressed the groups support for the present administration.

He said members of the association were proud that one of them rose to the high office of the Vice-President.
The Nigeria Army says as part of Operation Gama Aiki, troops of Operation Lafiya Dole and Multinational Joint Task Force have captured Mallam Fatori  a border town far north of Borno State.

The Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Colonel Sani Usman, in a statement on Wednesday, said the town was taken by troops after a fierce battle closely covered by air operations.

The statement, however, said the militants regrouped around the border with Niger Republic, adding that: This was while the troops were consolidating on this success.

Col. Usman further said the troops killed several of the Boko Haram militants in the resulting encounter and subsequently had to withdraw to a vantage position.

The operation is continuing, the Army spokesman said.
The Iduwini Volunteers Force (IWF) yesterday linked persistent attacks on oil pipelines and emergence of new militant groups in the Niger Delta region to the unethical and insincere activities of multinational oil companies and their local counterparts operating in the region.

The IWF, which operates from one of the richest oil blocs located in Ekeremor local government area of Bayelsa state, said though the ongoing peace talks initiated by the Federal Government to end militancy in the region is welcomed, multinationals oil companies instigate anger and violence with the divide and rule tactics among host communities.

The new militant group, which made this known in a letter to the National Security Adviser (NSA), Maj.-Gen. Babagana Monguno (retd.), also decried the unethical situation where oil companies owe local contractors who worked for them.

The group, in the letter dated September 16th, 2016, signed by its Commander, Johnson Biboye, and titled THREAT TO LIVES OF CONTRACTORS WHO RENDERED CONTRACTUAL SERVICES TO NESTOIL PLC SINCE 2012, specifically accused one of the oil servicing companies of owing indigenous contractors over $10million since 2012  a situation it said sparked off armed agitation in the area.

The group said they have decided to take the case of the unpaid and suffering contractors by themselves with the belief that if they are paid, it will help some of the young men who have become foot soldiers to several militant groups a reason to discontinue their unholy alliance with violence.

The statement reads, As our name implies, we have used our little resources and wide contacts in within the Niger Delta area in helping to ensure that peace return to the rich oil/gas region once again.

It is in one of such moves that we discovered that an indigenous oil servicing firm NESTOIL PLC belonging to one Dr. Earnest Azudialu Obiejesi with the Exploration and Production License for OML 88, Oriri Oil Field engaged the services of more than 12 indigenous contractors with a debt profile of over $10m and deliberately refused to pay them.

This unconscionable and wicked act was meted out to these contractors despite the successful and qualitative execution of various projects. 90% of the workforce of these companies are not only indigenes of Niger Delta but as of today have been drafted into supporting nefarious activities that is adding to the insecurity in the Niger Delta region.

We took this upon ourselves to make case for these indigenous contractors, who have suffered deliberate frustration from Nestoil Plc to recover their money, believing that if they are paid, some of the young men who are now foot soldiers of several militant groups will have no cause to continue with such unholy alliance and the contractors will be free from incessant attacks from banks and other creditors.

We do not believe in the use of violence again in resolving issues in the Niger Delta but looking at the situation critically we are forced to issue a 21 days ultimatum to the said Dr. Earnest Azudialu Obiejsi, GMD NESTOIL PLC to settle all the outstanding debts as it relates to the contractors or quit all Nestoil Plc operations within the Niger Delta Region because there is no justification to come to our land, operate and cart away huge profits and yet enslave as well impoverish our people.

Some of the companies that employed our boys and rendered services to Nestoil Plc since 2012 and have not been paid include but not limited to the following: Oando Energy, Cooper Cameron, Frigate, Saitob, Petro Dynamics, Herculus Marine, Cledop etc.

We can assure you Sir that we will use our wide contact to prevail on the suffering indigenous workers who have not been paid not to take the laws into their hands since we have officially reported this matter to you and belief in our groups capacity to ensure that the right thing is done.

The Niger Delta Peace Process is a project that we are fully committed to and from time to time we are ready to update your exalted office with the true situation of things on ground.
On the sideline of the 71st United Nations General Assembly holding in New York City, President Barack Obama has held talks with his Nigerian counterpart, President Muhammadu Buhari.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting yesterday, Obama said he discussed ways of countering the Boko Haram militant group, while also lauding Nigerias effort in tackling corruption.

Obama describes Nigeria as a very important country in the comity of nations which is why his administration decided to assist the administration in the fight.

SEE ALSO: President Buhari Joins Other World leaders To Adopt Declaration On Refugees, Migrants

The U.S President also pledged to assist in the area of the economy, agriculture, promising to inject more fund to assist Nigeria to come out of recession.

He wished President Buhari well, pledging to set up a framework for more support from America even while he leaves office.

Responding, President Buhari thanked the American President for the assistance so far in the fight against terrorism, especially in the training of the military.

According to the President, the success recorded so far in the fight is mainly because of the contributions of the United States and other countries.
Samsung said Tuesday that 500,000 new Note7 devices have been shipped to U.S. carriers and retailers to replace the smartphones recalled because of a fire hazard.

The devices will be available for exchange starting Wednesday, the company said in an emailed statement.

In all, 1 million Note7 devices were recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission last Thursday after reports surfaced that Note7s could catch fire. The problem was related to problems with the phones' lithium-ion batteries. The CPSC said Samsung had received 92 reports in the United States of batteries overheating, including 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage.

While Samsung has worked to provide replacement Note7s, the CPSC said consumers could also seek a full refund.

In a video posted Friday, a top Samsung executive in the United States said the replacement units were safe, that the battery issue was resolved, and the findings were affirmed by a recognized battery expert. As of Friday, Samsung had exchanged about 130,000 Note7 smartphones in the United States.

Samsung also announced a software update for the new Note7 devices in partnership with carriers that displays a green battery icon on the phones status bar (in the top right portion of the screen). The green icon indicates that consumers have a new Note7 with a new battery deemed safe.

Samsung and the CPSC said all users of Note7s sold prior to Sept. 15 need to power down their devices. For those who arent aware of the warnings, a software update will be pushed to all recalled devices that prompts the user to power down and exchange the device every time the user powers up or charges the device.

More information is available at Samsungs recall website.

This story, "Samsung ships 500,000 replacement Note7s for recall exchange " was originally published by Computerworld .
Walmart still bullish ahead of earnings according to Wyckoff analysis Trade Precise - Sun Oct 30, 9:09AM CDT Walmart (WMT) price is challenging the $143 with relatively low volume. According to Wyckoff phase analysis, there is a high probability WMT price will break above $143 to test $147 then retrace to around... WMT : 142.51 (+1.26%)

Limit up on Wheat? Banghart Properties - Sat Oct 29, 7:09PM CDT News broke over the weekend that could help wheat trade limit up when it reopens.

Rains in the Plains, Dow soars Sidwell Strategies - Sat Oct 29, 8:38AM CDT 1st winter wheat ratings Monday; consider carbon for cash flow during drought

Open Enrollment 101: Make the Most of Your Benefits Young & The Invested - Sat Oct 29, 6:00AM CDT The 2022 open enrollment season will be a difficult one as workers have to factor in persistently high inflation while they choose their coverage. These tips can help you maximize your benefits.

Cattle Market Fades on Friday Barchart - Fri Oct 28, 4:39PM CDT Live cattle futures ended the weeks last trade day down by 35 cents to $1.02 with soon to expire October down the most. Cash trade picked up later in the week with some Friday catch up sales mostly... LEV22 : 150.375s (-0.68%) LEZ22 : 153.000s (-0.28%) LEG23 : 156.325s (-0.33%) GFX22 : 177.875s (-0.14%) GFF23 : 180.375s (-0.04%)

Hogs Rebound into Weekend Barchart - Fri Oct 28, 4:39PM CDT Lean hog futures ended the Friday round with 32 to 97 cent gains to fade the triple digit losses from Thursday. The USDA National Average Base Hog Price was $90.54 in the PM update, down by $1.15. The... HEZ22 : 86.100s (+1.15%) HEJ23 : 92.700s (+0.62%) KMZ22 : 96.125s (+0.37%)
In a higher education space where naming rights controversies tend to exist on an ambiguous and confusing plane, news that the name of Roger Ailes will be removed from a newsroom at Ohio University is both expected and refreshing. The school will also return a $500,000 gift Ailes made in 2007.

University President Roderick McDavis said that given the allegations against Ailes, a 1962 Ohio University graduate, and the circumstances surrounding his departure from Fox News, the appropriate action is to return his gift in accordance with the school's values.

(For those of you just tuning in, Ailes stepped down as the longtime CEO of Fox News in July after a lawsuit filed by former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson accused him of sexual harassment. More than 20 women came forward with additional allegations during a company internal investigation. The lawsuit was recently settled with Carlson for $20 million.)

This episode reminds us quite a bit of another returned gift we covered as Spellman College moved to distance itself from a past donor, Bill Cosby.

Related:

As we noted in the Cosby case, returning money can be quite challenging. (What if the donor won't take it back, for example?)

Then there was the case back in July, when University of Michigan Regent Mark Bernstein and his wife, Rachel Bendif, withdrew a $3 million gift to rename the school's multicultural building because their name would be replacing William Monroe Trotter's name, and Trotter was African American.

On the bright side, at least the University of Michiganand presumably Ohio Universityavoided a court battle, unlike Paul Smith's College naming rights imbroglio.

But there are some similarities at play, here. The Detroit Free Press reported that after the Bernstein gift was announced, U-M officials began to hear from students, faculty and staff who were glad for the gift, but displeased to have Trotter's name taken off the building. In this case, a number of OU students demanded the removal of Ailes' name from the newsroom and last week, the university's Graduate Student Senate approved a resolution calling for the removal.

I'm also intrigued by the Ailes un-naming because as an inherently cynical individual, I can't help but wonder what's next for Ailes (besides hefty lawyer bills and a new cable news network with Donald Trump, should he lose). After all, there seems to be a highly unscientific causal relationship between individuals who curiously see the philanthropic light soon after their legal troubles hit the front page. Are Ailes' handlers hunkered down in a Manhattan office contemplating a whiteboard listing a dozen or so causes that may be worthy of a portion of his Fox fortune?

Indeed, Ailes and his wife Elizabeth have their own charity, ACI Senior Development Corp., and a rather black box-y one at that. I couldn't dig up any major gifts over the past 12 months. In fact, it sounds like Ailes' handlers may have successfully put a bug in his ear, because the most reported news about ACI involved its recent $500,000 donation toward the completion of a senior center in Cold Spring, Putnam County, New York.

How nice. Ailes and his wife cut a check to a senior center. Straight out of the Philanthropy-for-Good-PR handbook. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, at a August 2nd public hearing, residents voiced their concerns with the donation, citing the sexual harassment accusations against him and, just for good measure, previously undisclosed conditions attached to the proposed gift. The next day, Ailes withdrew the gift.

"This project has never passed the smell test," said Cold Spring resident Kathleen Foley, who spearheaded a petition campaign by Putnam County Taxpayers for Transparency and Integrity. "Hes a bully and morally bankrupt sexual predator."

In related analysis, check out a recent piece titled "Just Say No: When Should Arts Organizations Refuse a Gift?", which examines the more opaque scenarios whereby a donation should be sent back.
Most of us never stop to think about where our food comes from, but the agriculture industry still chugs along contributing about $835 billion annually to the GDP of the United States. The industry needs knowledgeable people to keep running, and that means attracting young people into the business. This is why CHS Inc., a Fortune 100 agribusiness owned by farmers, ranchers and cooperatives, focuses its corporate philanthropy on promoting agricultural education.

The CHS Foundation offers hundreds of scholarships for students pursuing degrees in agriculture-related fields, and funds recruitment and training initiatives to fill a shortage of agriculture teachers across the country. This month, the foundation announced its largest grant ever with an award of $3.44 million to the University of Minnesota to transform agriculture education from kindergarten through higher education.

For the city folk wondering what, exactly, agricultural education might entail, think land management, animal science, horticulture, crop science, and even economics and leadership training. Virginias 2015 Teacher of the Year, Jaclyn Ryan, is an agriculture teacher and advisor for her schools Future Farmers of America program. According to Ryan, this field is not getting the attention it deserves.

Agricultural Education should be in every school, but it isnt, Ryan wrote in an article. The importance of our curricula spreads further than the classroomwe need agriculture to survive. If you eat, you need agriculture. If you wear clothes, you need agriculture. If you take medicine, live in a house or write with a pencil, you need agriculture.

Related:

A dearth of high-skilled workers in this field means that 22,500 agriculture jobs go unfilled each year. According to the CHS Foundation, there are 30 jobs in the industry for every one qualified candidate. So it makes sense that the foundation is investing in programs to develop an ag-savvy workforce.

We've been writing a lot lately about the many funders addressing the mismatch between employer needs and worker skills, but it never occurred to us that this was a significant problem in agriculture. It makes sense that it might be, given how few young people are growing up on farms these days. It also makes sense that the ag industry would see philanthropy as one way to tackle this issue, since the giving of other industries is guided by enlightened self-interest in a similar fashion, as we've reported.

Related: Grants Are Flowing Big-Time to Tackle a Jobs Mismatch Leaving Millions Behind

"The CHS Foundation is committed to growing the next generation of agriculture leaders," Linda Tank, president of the CHS Foundation, said in the grant announcement. "Together with the University of Minnesota, we are cultivating, preparing and helping agriculture leaders thrive now and into the future."

The record-high grant to the University of Minnesota will fund programs such as an creating an agriculture education technology lab, integrating agriculture curricula into K-12 classrooms, and developing agriculture literacy programs. The university will also create a CHS endowed fellowship for agriculture education.

"We are charting a new course for the future of ag education with new technologies, interdisciplinary curriculum and experiential learning that combine best practices in agriculture and natural resource sciences," said Brian Buhr, Dean of the College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences at University of Minnesota, in the grant announcement.

While this domestic philanthropy from CHS Foundation is not surprising, we wrote recently about an unexpected player giving big money to agriculture education in Latin America. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation just revealed a $40 million commitment to EARTH University in Costa Rica to prepare the next generation to contribute to sustainable development in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.
George Soros says that our collective failure to serve the worlds ever-growing refugee population with effective policymaking has contributed greatly to human misery and political instability. That fallout can be seen in teeming refugee camps outside of failed states, but also in the host countries to which millions are escaping.

Soros called out the worlds public and private sectors in a recent op-ed piece he penned for the Wall Street Journal, simply titled Why Im Investing $500 million in Migrants. Soross well-timed announcement comes just as United Nations convened for its General Assembly and hosted a high-level Summit for Refugees and Migrants. The summit called for heads of state to take advantage of the historic opportunity to come up with a blueprint for a better international response to the global refugee crisis.

In the past, such official calls have yielded weak results. At this years London Conference, for example, world governments reportedly pledged some $10 to $12 billion for Syria and its surrounding region. By the end of March, over half of those promised funds were still not allocated and only about 8 percent of the money had actually been disbursed.

I dont have to tell anyone that quick disbursement of funds is critical here. But while governments are a lot of things, quick is not one of them.

Related: Will a World Summit Strike the Match that Lights the Humanitarian Funding Fire?

On the other hand, private donors and investors can move fast, which brings me back to George Soros.

Soros is the wealthiest hedge fund billionaire in the world. With a net worth of close to $25 billion, he's well known as a philanthropist. What he's not known for is impact investing, which is what this $500 million effort is all about. It represents a new and growing element of Soros's philanthropy, but hardly a counterintuitive one, given that Soros made his fortune as a private investor.

Earlier this year, with little fanfare, OSF launched the Economic Advancement Program, which "makes private sector investments that fund well-governed commercial institutions to play a meaningful role in promoting open societies, and to advance the interests of under-served populations."

Strikingly, Soros's big move this week as an impact investor comes in an area we don't associate with impact investing, helping refugees.

Soros writes, Governments must play the leading role in addressing this crisis by creating and sustaining adequate physical and social infrastructure for migrants and refugees. But harnessing the power of the private sector is also critical.

The funds will be allocated to investments specifically geared to addressing and meeting the needs of migrants and refugees as well as their host communities and countries. Soros explains that he plans to invest in startups, established companies, social impact initiatives, and businesses founded by migrants and refugees themselves. Soros big give will focus mainly on refugees landing in Europe, but he promises to keep an eye out for investments that benefit migrants and refugees around the world.

Soros and his team will work with the UNHCR and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to establish the guiding principles of the investments, which will be owned by Soros's Open Society Foundations. All profits from the investments will be plugged back into Open Society to support its programs, including those that benefit migrants and refuges.

And just to make things clear, Soros $500 million pledge is meant to complement the Open Society Foundations ongoing grantmaking commitments. The foundation has a long history of grants and advocacy support for disadvantaged populations, including migrants and refugees, in every corner of the globe. Areas of particular grantmaking interest are migration, human rights related to citizenship and statelessness, protections for migrant workers, and human trafficking.

Related: Open Society Foundations: Fundraising for Disasters & Refugees

In turn, OSF is one of a number of funders that's lately been answering the global refugee crisis call. Others include the UPS, Western Union, Cisco, and IKEA foundations. But that list of funders for refugees remains a short one. Even shorter still is the list of wealthy individuals who are willing to cut large checks to alleviate human suffering on a scale that has not been seen since the Second World War.

With his recent pledge, George Soros joins that exclusive list, which includes Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani. In 2014, he pledged $2 million to the UNHCR and the IRC to aid Syrian refugees. Ulukaya, whose current net worth stands at around $1.97 billion, has also promised to donate half of his wealth to help Kurdish refugees and refugees around the globe.

Related: A Yogurt Mogul and a Group of Corporate Funders Band Together for Refugees

More recently, Ulukaya established the nonprofit the Tent Foundation, to provide rapid response grants for immediate refugee relief operations. A project of the foundation is the Tent Alliance, which brings business, relief organizations, governments, NGOs, and academia together to inspire the private sector to get more involved and end human displacement everywhere. This inspiration to get involved and give is also exactly what George Soros hopes will happen with his $500 million pledge.

Will other billionaires follow Soros and Ulukaya in putting up big money to address the world's most urgent problem?
Apex Self Storage of Manchester, England, recently raised money for two charities catering to local youth: Hideaway Youth Project and The Frost Foundation. Staff from the operators Hulme and Radcliffe facilities dressed up in storage-box outfit and asked people to sign the box. In addition, they took selfies with the public. For every signature and photo, Apex donated money to one of the two causes.

Established 50 years ago, Hideaway Youth Project offers education and activities for people age 11 to 25. The organization also offers volunteer and work programs.

The Frost Foundation assists children who are disadvantaged by illness, circumstance or lack of funding. Through its various charitable efforts, the organization provides specialized equipment to children in need.

Apex Self Storage operates eight facilities in Ardwick, Cheadle, Congleton, Eastlands, Glossop, Hulme, Radcliffe and Warrington, England.
The Dixon, Calif., Planning Commission will vote tonight on a proposed self-storage development that faces opposition from city staff. In a report to the commission, associate planner Scott Greeley wrote that the applicant, Rob Sesar, has been strongly discouraged from pursuing the project due to zoning restrictions, according to the source.

In his quest to build a storage facility at 1445 and 1465 Market Lane, Sesar has requested amendments to the citys general plan as well as zoning text. Hes also asked for a use permit and design review to allow a managers residence as a conditionally permitted use.

The proposed site, off Pitt School Road south of Stratford Avenue, is zoned highway commercial and doesnt currently permit self-storage. Allowing it wouldnt be a valuable addition to the zoning district, city staff said.

The stated intent of the Highway Commercial General Plan land-use designation and its underlying highway commercial zoning district are to promote uses [that] cater primarily to the traffic passing Dixon on [Interstate] 80, Greeley wrote in a March 11 letter to Sesar. Examples of establishments [that] provide services to tourists and travelers include motels, fast food and other restaurants, and gas stations.

The planning commission had approved a conditional-use permit and design review for a self-storage facility on the land in 2011. The proposal by Helmut Sommer, the former property owner, included storage units as well as vehicle storage. The project had strong support from residents and nearby business owners, Sommer said.

In a Sept. 12 letter to the planning commission, Sommer wrote, 1465 Market Lane should never have been zoned highway commercial as the narrow and long depth of the lot made it unappealing to users. As the frontage facing I-80 is attractive, the length of the access road to reach it is a deterrent.

The approvals expired in 2012, and the permits were removed in 2013 after Sommer didnt pursue the building permit, the source reported. A lack of funds, energy and experience at the time led Sommer to abandon the project, he said, adding the new property owners have what he didnt. I am urging you to reinstate the previous overlay zone so that we get some activity in this part of the city. It will be a benefit to the entire neighborhood, Sommer wrote.

The planning commission can process the application and request the city council approve the changes, or recommend members deny them. The planning meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the council chamber.
Real estate firm McGregor Interests Inc. (MII) received approval last week to expand its Lockbox Storage facility in Blair, Neb. The Blair City Council unanimously voted in favor of the conditional-use permit on Sept. 13 for the self-storage property at 240 E. U.S. Highway 30. The planning commission had previously recommended the permit.

MII plans to expand the facility from five to 12 buildings, according to Geoff McGregor, vice president. Some units will be climate-controlled, and an office will be added for a full-time manager. The property will have one entrance controlled by an electronic gate and keypad.

As part of the approval, the council stipulated the entrance and parking areas must be paved. MII is also required to build water-retention basins.

This is the third permit the council has granted for a self-storage project since May. The first was given to Robert Pearson, who plans to build a storage facility with interior units and vehicle parking on a vacant lot on Grant Street.

In August, the council also approved a storage proposal by Kevin and Melissa Wehrli of Marie Gordon Investments LLC. The plans include converting a 4.4-acre retail store to vehicle storage.

MII is a diversified real estate firm that specializes in industrial facilities, self-storage and shopping centers. It operates one Lockbox Storage in Iowa and four in Nebraska.
A self-storage project proposed for Princeton, N.J., faced opposition from homeowners during a Sept. 13 Princeton Planning Board meeting. Vickie Martenson had requested a special-use permit to build a 21-unit self-storage facility on a vacant lot she owns on the northeast corner of Pleasant and Warren Streets. She had tried to sell the property for years before deciding to build storage, according to the source.

Resident Vern Sondgeroth claimed the area wasnt zoned for self-storage. He and other homeowners also voiced their concerns about decreased property values and an increase in water runoff should the project be approved. Another resident said the storage buildings would be too close to Main Street.

Board members also had concerns whether the lot would be large enough for storage units and if there was enough space for trucks and trailers to maneuver without impeding traffic on the city streets, the source reported. The members recommended the Princeton City Council turn down the permit.

The council was expected to vote on the proposal at its Monday meeting.
To view a PDF of the report, click here. [International]

To view a PDF of the report, click here. [Americas]

By Randy Myers

Not so long ago, corporate social responsibility was as much buzzword as serious corporate priority. Too often it referred to activities that companies would undertake to benefit the social good but with little direct connection to, or bearing on, the companys business operations. The idea of a genuine link between CSR and profitability, performance and revenue  involving more than just bolstering the corporate image or rebuffing criticism  met with skepticism.

Remnants of this attitude surely remain, but for leading companies around the globe, CSR has become a strategic imperative. As consumers increasingly demand more accountability from the companies they do business with, those companies recognize that aligning social responsibility initiatives with their business model can help them build a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. The 2015 Nielsen Global Corporate Sustainability Report found that 66 percent of consumers were willing to pay more for environmentally sustainable brands, for example, up from 55 percent in 2014 and 50 percent in 2013.

Today it very much has to do with markets and profit, says Silvia Fernandez de Caleya, head of human resources and corporate social responsibility for Instituto de Credito Oficial, the state-owned Spanish bank more commonly known as ICO. The banks mission is to promote economic activities that contribute to Spains growth and development and to improve the distribution of wealth in that country. The bank pays particular attention to projects with social, cultural or environmental significance or that promote innovation.

Silvia Fernandez de Caleya, Instituto de Credito Oficial The growing awareness that social responsibility is intimately linked to profitability and to better businessperformance is changing corporations

top-down"

The growing awareness that social responsibility is intimately linked to profitability and to better business performance is changing corporations top-down, says de Caleya, noting that pressure to incorporate social good and sustainability into business models is coming from customers as well as other stakeholders. Consider ICOs 1 billion ($866.1 million) social bond issue in January 2015, which aimed at financing small- and medium-size enterprises in regions of Spain where GDP per capita is lower than the national average. The ultimate social goal is to create and maintain jobs. Among the purchasers were socially responsible investors (SRIs), who, de Caleya says, are explicitly interested not just in the financial return on their investment but also in the social benefits it delivers.

If you launch a social bond aiming to create or maintain employment in Spains most economically disadvantaged regions, you have to be able to report your results on that front, she says. SRI investors are not only interested in financial returns but in performance as well.

Chinas new environmental focus

While Europe has long been at the forefront of the social responsibility movement, China, with its intense focus on transforming itself into a modern, industrialized nation, has been viewed as a laggard. But in an increasingly global economy, thats a distinction many Chinese businesses realize they can no longer afford.

Traditionally, a Chinese company that wanted to earn money didnt care whether or not it polluted the water or the environment in general, says Zhou Min, CEO of Beijing Enterprises Water Group, a builder and operator of water treatment and sewage facilities that is 44 percent owned by the Beijing city government. These days, its not like that. We want to run our business in a sustainable way. It must be environmentally friendly.

For China and Chinese companies, this reflects a dramatic shift in thinking that began to take root among government officials at the start of this century. Soon state-run companies fell in line with the new focus on environmental cleanup and protection. Cleaning the air, bringing rivers back to life and encouraging development and adoption of alternative-energy vehicles now rank high on the national agenda.

Like many supporters of CSR, Min says Beijing Enterprises Water, which operates across China as well as in Portugal, Singapore and Malaysia, wants to ensure profitability over the long term, not just quarter to quarter. To be a truly socially responsible business, he argues, all of the companys stakeholders must benefit from its business model, including employees, corporate partners and society in general. This is our concept of social responsibility, he says.

Increasingly, companies find that not embracing that approach can have a material negative impact. We have important recent examples of how a company does instantly lose credibility, its solid reputation and business advantages when involved in environment, social or governance scandals, says de Caleya, and this has an immediate effect on a companys share value and sales. Although she does not mention it, an example can be seen in the explosion and sinking of British Petroleums Deepwater Horizon oil rig at Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, which released an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. BPs stock tumbled in the weeks following the massive oil spill and to this day has not recovered its prespill highs.

A commitment to CSR pays dividends

Conversely, a commitment to corporate social responsibility can pay dividends in multiple ways. At ICO, de Caleya says, the fact that we are seen as a reliable, socially responsible partner makes it possible to obtain funds from the international capital markets. Meanwhile, issuing social bonds has widened the range of investors willing to support the banks activities. ICOs commitment to social responsibility also has expanded its field of influence. We are proud to say, for example, that we have been a very active participant, through our capital markets area, in the working group promoted by the ICMA [International City/County Management Association] in defining social bond principles.

Although it may be hard to quantify the impact on the banks bottom line, de Caleya notes that a program in which ICO employees volunteer to work with specialized NGOs to provide job training to entrepreneurs, the long-term unemployed and other at-risk individuals boosts the morale of employees who participate as well as making a difference in the communities where the bank operates. That too has positive benefits for ICO, which is a certified Family Responsible Company and considers its peopleto be its human capitalits most important asset.

Especially to the extent that it supports the goal of building socially sustainable businesses, CSR today is finally hitting its stride, de Caleya argues. In 2015 sustainability was in the epicenter of global agendas, she says. We could dare say 2015 was the year of sustainable development. She points by way of example to the agendas and work done at three major conclaves: the third annual conference on Financing for Development of the U.N.s Department of Economic and Social Affairs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; the U.N. Sustainable Development Summit in New York; and the sixth annual Paris Climate Conference.

Progress made at these gatherings suggests strongly that CSR is here to stay. There is a global consensus that our planets future and sustainability require responsible business models and coordinated actions, de Caleya says. Concern about how products and services are produced and disposed is growing, and not only among investors. When consumers and clients make a choice, it is an increasingly relevant matter, along with pricing.

In short, corporate social responsibility is no longer just a buzzword or marketing tool. It is a strategic imperative.
Technology will not be the death knell of traditional practices in the broking and insurance industry but will help brokers competing in the SME space, an industry scholarship winner has said.Michael Forster, professional and financial lines specialist at Suncorp Group, was recently announced as the winner of the Australian Professional Indemnity Group (APIG) and Wotton + Kearney scholarship and said that while technology will impact the financial lines area, tradition will remain important.Technology that facilitates a streamlined or automated placement process will be increasingly important for insurers and brokers competing for simple SME risks, Forster told Insurance Business.But traditional underwriting and good service will remain more important than the latest technological advances for insurers and brokers dealing with complex, large or unusual risks.Forster won the industry scholarship earlier this month with a submission that dealt with the potential challenges of managing financial lines portfolios using systems, processes and actuarial or analytical methods in personal lines and commoditised commercial lines areas.With some commercial lines called the next battleground between brokers and direct insurers , Forster noted that the use of actuarial and analytical methods in the commercial space could have limited applicability in financial lines portfolios.This is because financial lines portfolios are, from an actuarial perspective, quite small and comprised of diverse risks with relatively volatile and unpredictable claims; this is not helpful for analysis that relies on a wealth of data and the ability to make reliable projections based on past trends, Forster said, discussing his scholarship submission.Therefore actuarial/analytical methods will need modification in order to provide truly helpful insights and recommendations for financial lines portfolios.Relevant insights and recommendations can contribute to the setting and monitoring of a clear financial lines portfolio strategy that supports the business broader strategy.Forster will travel to the UK as part of his scholarship prize with a trip to Lloyds and the Professional Indemnity Forum, held in Oxford on the cards.With young professionals a hot topic in the industry, whether that be attracting talent or keeping talent in the industry, Forster encouraged others to enter scholarship programs as the financial incentives are not the only benefit.Scholarships and prizes aside, the time spent on your application will help you to develop, refine and clarify your own ideas and views, he said.
Massachusetts appears to be bucking efforts by makers of prescription painkillers to kill or weaken measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids.

The drugmakers say theyre combating the addiction epidemic, but The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found theyve adopted a 50-state strategy  including hundreds of lobbyists and millions in campaign contributions  to resist proposals to rein in drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin and fentanyl helping fuel the nations overdose crisis.

Instead, Massachusetts this year passed one of the countrys toughest laws intended to curb opioid-related deaths.

Between 2006 and 2015, the drugmakers and their allies contributed more than $122,000 to state candidates and parties in Massachusetts, though data for 2015 is not complete.

That may sound like a hefty sum, but it ranks Massachusetts 46th compared to other states.

Among direct contributions to elected officials in Massachusetts. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has received more than $16,000 from the drugmakers and their allies going back to 2009. Thats a relatively small amount considering Baker now has nearly $4 million in his campaign account after nearly depleting the account during his 2014 campaign.

House Speaker Robert DeLeo, a Democrat, has received about $3,600 in similar donations since 2006. Senate President Stan Rosenberg, a Democrat, has received $200. Another top Democrat  Attorney General Maura Healey  has received $750.

Those relatively low numbers may not come as a surprise. Massachusetts  hit hard by the opioid overdose epidemic  has worked to pass tough restrictions on the drugs.

In March, Baker signed what he called the most comprehensive law in the nation to combat opioid addiction, including a seven-day limit on first-time prescriptions for opiate painkillers.

The law also requires overdose victims seeking help at hospital emergency rooms to be evaluated in 24 hours, allows patients to fill only part of their painkiller prescriptions at a time, requires schools to verbally screen students for potential drug abuse and provides doctors with information on non-opioid, pain management options.

The law also requires doctors and other prescribers to check the states Prescription Monitoring Program each time they prescribe an opioid to make sure patients are not seeking multiple prescriptions.

Baker initially proposed tougher measures, including a three-day limit on first-time prescriptions for opiate painkillers and allowing doctors to commit patients involuntarily to drug treatment facilities for up to 72 hours if theyre considered an immediate danger.

The industry says its also committed to solving the problems linked to its painkillers, including encouraging more cautious prescribing.

We and our members stand with patients, providers, law enforcement, policymakers and others in calling for and supporting national policies and action to address opioid abuse, the industry group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said.

Overdose deaths have spiked in Massachusetts in recent years, with 1,379 unintentional, opioid-related deaths recorded last year alone.

The state has also increased penalties on fentanyl, a synthetic opiate estimated to be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

In 2015, Healey pushed for legislation  later signed into law by Baker  making trafficking of fentanyl a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Even with the clampdown, overdose deaths related to fentanyl appear to be on the rise in Massachusetts.

Preliminary data for the first half of 2016 released by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that 66 percent of 2016s confirmed opioid-related overdose deaths showed a toxicology screen that tested positive for fentanyl, up from 57 percent in 2015.

Efforts to restrict access to powerful opioid painkillers go back to 2014, when former Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick pushed a first-in-the-nation ban of the drug Zohydro, arguing the pill could add to the states opioid abuse epidemic.

A federal judge blocked the ban, noting the federal Food and Drug Administration had approved the drug.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Massachusetts Drugs
Zurich Insurance Group AG named James Shea to head a new unit that will combine its global corporate and commercial businesses as part of a company-wide restructuring.

Shea, 50, joins from American International Group Inc. where he headed global financial lines, Zurich said in a statement Tuesday after Swiss markets closed. It also appointed Claudia Dill and Jack Howell, who oversee Latin America and Asia Pacific respectively, to its executive committee.

Thomas Huerlimann, who led the global corporate division for five years, is moving to special projects, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Mario Greco.

Greco, who took over in March, is reorganizing the company along geographical lines and streamlining management. He plans to present his strategy to investors in November. Zurich, one of the worlds largest insurers, has said the overhaul will affect about 8,000 of its 55,000 employees.

It makes sense to combine the units and also clears up the split of responsibilities on the board level, said Sami Taipalus, an analyst at Berenberg with a hold rating on Zurich.

Sylvia Gaeumann, a spokeswoman for the insurer, said the corporate and commercial businesses overlapped, sometimes causing them to compete for the same client. We dont have a target for job cuts, but we assume that there will be synergies through simplification and eliminating redundancies, she said by telephone.

The company has been overhauling general insurance, its biggest unit, since discovering insufficient reserves last year, mainly for North American auto and construction liabilities. That contributed to a third-quarter loss that forced Zurich to abandon a high-profile takeover bid for RSA Insurance Group Plc and led to the resignation of then CEO Martin Senn. He committed suicide in May.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Commercial Lines Business Insurance New Markets
JLT Re, the London-based reinsurance broker and consultant, announced the appointment of Jonathan (Jo) Garnett as managing director, Malaysia, subject to regulatory approvals.

Garnett will be based in JLT Res Kuala Lumpur office and will report to Stuart Beatty, CEO, JLT Re APAC.

In this new role, Garnett will be leading JLT Res recently established Malaysian business, building a team to service domestic carriers in Malaysia. He will also be responsible for helping grow JLT Res footprint in the wider Asia Pacific region. Garnett has over 30 years of re/insurance experience, 19 of which were based in Malaysia.

Stuart Beatty, CEO, JLT Re APAC, said: We are delighted Jo is joining the group. His knowledge and experience of the Malaysian market through many years of living in Malaysia complements our approach to servicing clients locally. Our strategy in the region is focused on developing market leading teams in key countries that will enable us to establish a long-term presence. Jo has an excellent market reputation and is excited about the opportunity here at JLT Re.

Source: JLT Re

Topics Talent Human Resources
The Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services (DIFS) has ordered a Farmington man to stop selling fraudulent automobile insurance certificates through his company, SBS Agency.

DIFS issued cease and desist order to Terrell Lee Smith also known as Sam. Smith is not licensed to solicit, sell or negotiate insurance in Michigan, regulators say.

Smiths resident insurance producer license, and the license for his agency, Excalibur Insurance Agency, were revoked by DIFS on May 21, 2013, after DIFS received complaints that Smith was misappropriating clients premium payments for personal use and was issuing fake insurance certificates.

After having his producer license and agency license revoked by DIFS, DIFS began receiving complaints from various consumers that an individual by the name of Sam sold them a fraudulent insurance certificate.

After receiving several complaints, DIFS Investigators discovered Smith was again misappropriating clients insurance payments and issuing fake insurance certificates.

Complete copies of past orders  April 30, 2012 and May 21, 2013  can be found on the DIFS website.

Source: Michigan DIFS

Topics Auto Agencies Michigan
Chicago-based insurer, Kemper Corp., announced that James Jim J. McKinney will join the company in November as senior vice president and chief financial officer.

McKinney will report directly to Joseph P. Lacher, Jr., Kempers president and chief executive officer. He replaces Frank J. Sodaro, who will serve as a senior advisor to the company through the end of 2016. During the transition period, Richard Roeske, Kempers vice president and chief accounting officer, will serve as interim chief financial officer.

McKinney recently served as chief financial officer for the Banc of California. Prior to joining Banc of California, McKinney was principal accounting officer and global corporate controller for International Lease Finance Corporation (IFLC), a division of AIG. In addition, McKinney worked for RBS Citizens Asset Finance, where he held several senior finance and analytical roles. In his early career, he worked for KPMG, ServiceGas and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Source: Kemper Corp.
Online personal insurance seller CoverHound is adding business insurance offerings including workers compensation and commercial auto to its online platform at CoverHound.com.

The site is starting by focusing on small businesses with fewer than 20 employees and plans to gradually expand to cover larger businesses.

CoverHound will offer coverage from Chubb, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway Direct, Hiscox, Progressive and Employers, with other carriers set to join in the future. Customers can start the quoting process on desktop or mobile, and connect by phone with a licensed insurance advisor.

CoverHound CEO Keith Moore said that CoverHound aims to be a trusted advisor for curated choice and offer the ability to deliver a bindable rate that isnt subject to change, two features he believes sets the online agency apart from other websites promising to deliver real-time insurance quotes to small business owners.

We dont want to inundate a shopper with too many choices, he said during a recent interview with Carrier Management. Even though we work with a great number of carriers on the back end, we curate that choice down to two to four. Moore said that he learned about a shoppers preference for narrow choices and for an advisor to guide them to the right one from a previous position with online lender, Lending Tree.

Having once been a startup ourselves, CoverHound understands the growing pains of a small business, Moore said. Well be there every step of the way to support business owners and ensure they get the coverage they need to satisfy third-party and legal requirements, and protect their property, customers and investment.

Chubb (formerly ACE) and American Family Ventures are among the financial backers of CoverHound, which raised over $47 million last year in two funding rounds.

CoverHound provides six types of insurance coverage for small businesses: general liability, professional liability, businessowners policy package (BOP), workers compensation, commercial auto, and cyber insurance.

CoverHound plans to go live with its CyberPolicy.com website later this year, allowing small businesses to shop for cyber insurance and cybersecurity tools together.

Moore (who along with other insurtech CEOs will be profiled in the next edition of Carrier Management magazine) says his company is focused on one particular metric to drive his own six-year-old growing business forward. The metric is the net promoter score, which measures how likely a shopper is to refer friends and family.

Plenty of Competition

CoverHound is far from alone in targeting the small business market online.

Investors including XL have given $12.2 million to fund Embroker, an insurance broker offering a cloud-based risk and insurance management system for small and mid-sized businesses. Embroker promises to give its customers tools to buy, compare, analyze, manage and store all of their insurance policies and data in one place.

Insureon, an online agency for small business insurance, raised more than $30 million last October. In July, it launched a managing general underwriting agency with capacity from various syndicates at Lloyds to handle wholesale business.

Seattle-based AssureStart, backed by the American Family Mutual Insurance Co., which sells to business with fewer than 30 employees, is backed by the American Family Mutual Insurance Co. Insurer Hiscox has been expanding its online platform for small businesses for a number of years.

Last December, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which owns GEICO, created Berkshire Hathaway Direct Insurance Co. to sell insurance directly to businesses over the Internet. The new insurer planned to initially focus on workers compensation and business owners package policies.

Two other recent InsureTech entrants in the small business insurance space include CoverWallet and Next Insurance.

In April, American International Group, Bermuda-based Hamilton Insurance Group and affiliates of hedge fund firm Two Sigma Investments announced plans to create a technology-enabled insurance platform for sales to the small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) market.

A number of independent agency carriers have joined the TrustedChoice.com online commercial insurance platform backed by the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America (Big I) to sell small business insurance.

Bolt has for several years been providing online access to personal and commercial lines products from national insurance companies, managing general agencies and wholesalers.

The small commercial lines market is both growing and increasingly competitive. A report from McKinsey & Co. predicts the competition in this market will intensify as more small business customers show they are open to buying via digital channels and as more large insurance carriers enter the field. While a segment of small commercial insurance buyers will always value independent agents, an increasing percentage are open to the direct route and may only be using agents to close a deal because direct binding isnt readily available, according to the report.

Related:

Topics Lawsuits Carriers Cyber Agencies Workers' Compensation Commercial Lines Business Insurance
Whole Foods Market Inc., headquartered in Austin, Texas, has reached a $3.5 million settlement with regulators over the disposal of products that were once for sale but later classified as hazardous waste.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced the fine and an agreement for Austin-based Whole Foods to comply with waste regulations and better train workers.

The EPA says the grocer improperly identified or mishandled hazardous waste in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Whole Foods said the matter often involves products  such as nail polish remover, vitamins, liquor and cleaning items  that are purchased, opened, returned and then can no longer be sold and are declared waste. The company says it worked with the EPA and has updated operations and training, plus improved its systems to better track such waste.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Pollution
Worldwide Facilities LLC has added Aaron Perry to its team of brokers in Phoenix, Ariz.

He focuses on construction and manufacturing.

Perry has six years of wholesale insurance experience. He was previously with firms including Horizon Risk Insurance Services Inc., Veritas Recruiting Group and Peachtree Special Risk Brokers.

Worldwide Facilities is a national wholesale insurance broker and managing general agent.

Topics Agencies Arizona
Even six years after the Panama Papers leaked a confidential list of offshore accounts held by the global elite, tax morality is still very much on the table.
Nel terzo trimestre del 2016 il prodotto interno lordo, espresso in valori concatenati con anno di riferimento 2010, corretto per gli effetti di calendario e destagionalizzato, e aumentato dello 0,3% rispetto al trimestre precedente e dello 0,9% nei confronti del terzo trimestre del 2015. Lo sostiene lIstat.

La crescita congiunturale e la sintesi di un aumento del valore aggiunto nei comparti dellindustria e dei servizi e di una diminuzione nellagricoltura. Dal lato della domanda, vi e un contributo ampiamente positivo della componente nazionale (al lordo delle scorte), in parte compensato da un apporto negativo della componente estera netta.

Nello stesso periodo il Pil e aumentato in termini congiunturali dello 0,7% negli Stati Uniti, dello 0,5% nel Regno Unito e dello 0,2% in Francia. In termini tendenziali, si e registrato un aumento del 2,3% nel Regno Unito, dell1,5% negli Stati Uniti, dell1,1% in Francia. Nel complesso, il Pil dei paesi dellarea Euro e cresciuto dello 0,3% rispetto al trimestre precedente ed dell1,6% nel confronto con lo stesso trimestre del 2015.

I dati Istat sul Pil sono in linea con le stime del governo ha commentato il ministro dellEconomia, Pier Carlo Padoan, arrivando alla Camera per lincontro con il gruppo Pd sulla legge di Bilancio. ll titolare di via XX Settembre in un tweet, poco prima, aveva sottolineato come i dati Istat confermano che leconomia e sulla strada giusta e le stime di crescita sono affidabili. Ma occorre spingere per accelerare
Noi siamo fiduciosi del fatto che la Clinton comprenda il ruolo degli Stati Uniti nel mondo, non abbiamo dubbi che lei affrontera in modo assiduo i problemi che il nostro Paese deve affrontare, e lei ha dimostrato la sua disposizione allanalisi ed al duro impegno. E un estratto delleditoriale con cui il magazine The Atlantic ha palesato il suo appoggio alla candidata democratica alle elezioni presidenziali, Hillary Clinton.

Il magazine ha deciso di dare il suo endorsment alla Clinton definendola uno dei candidati piu preparati di sempre e, inoltre, ha bollato Donald Trump come demagogo, xenofobo, sessista, uno che non sa niente ed e un bugiardo, specificandolo che lo considera il candidato piu dichiaratamente non qualificato nei 227 anni della storia della presidenza americana e che sarebbe una minaccia esistenziale per la Repubblica.

Fondata nel 1857, la prestigiosa e storica rivista solo in altre due occasioni si era apertamente schierata a favore di un candidato alla Casa Bianca: nel 1860 con Abraham Lincoln e nel 1964 con Lyndon B. Johnson. A sottolineare limportanza e leccezionalita della decisione e il direttore di The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, che paragona la scelta di sostenere la Clinton a quella fatta nel 1964 a favore di Johnson che si scontrava con il repubblicano Barry Goldwater.
Three infants, including five-month-old twins, were airlifted to hospital last night after suffering severe burns in what gardai described as a domestic accident in West Cork, writes Eoin English of the Irish Examiner.

The children, all under the age of two, were injured when a petrol canister apparently ignited after being brought into their house just outside Drinagh, south of Dunmanway. It is believed a spark from a fire ignited the petrol.

The scene remained sealed off last night as Garda forensic experts tried to establish what caused the accident.

They hope to speak to the parents of the children today, who last night were maintaining a vigil at their bedsides at Cork University Hospital (CUH).

The alarm was raised at around 6pm when the parents called neighbours for help.

Valentia Coast Guard launched a major emergency response operation.

Members of the West Cork Rapid Response team, paramedics from the National Ambulance Service, gardai, and fire crews from both Clonakilty and Dunmanway, responded to the incident.

The childrens injuries were so severe that it was decided not to transfer them by ambulance, but to task the Shannon-based rescue helicopter, R115.

The situation was later deemed so critical that the emergency services opted to land the helicopter in a field close to the house, rather than on a nearby GAA field, which had been designated an emergency landing zone.

The children were flown to Cork Airport, from where they were transferred by ambulances to CUH.

Doctors were last night still assessing the children but it is believed that their conditions are not life-threatening.
The divisions in Labour in the UK have been reinforced as members face deadline day in the party's leadership election.

A crunch meeting of the party's national executive committee (NEC) failed to reach consensus on how Labour's shadow cabinet should be formed, after nearly nine hours of discussion.

Deputy leader Tom Watson had put forward a plan for MPs to vote on membership of the shadow cabinet, a responsibility which currently rests with leader Jeremy Corbyn.

But Mr Corbyn has little support among Labour MPs, who overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence in him earlier this year.

He has instead suggested a system where party members would also have a say on shadow cabinet elections.

A motion from Mr Watson calling for a decision to be made before Saturday's leadership election result was defeated, by 16 votes to 15.

Mr Corbyn was among those to vote against it, but he did agree to further talks with Mr Watson and other senior Labour party figures.

They will then update the NEC at its next meeting, at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Saturday.

Mr Corbyn did not answer questions when members of the NEC finally emerged from the meeting at 8.30pm.

But Mr Watson and other senior figures in the party insisted the discussions had been positive.

Mr Watson said: "I'm very pleased. We had a very positive meeting.

"We have talks arranged to try and bring the PLP back together, reporting back to our national executive committee on Saturday."

Jon Trickett, NEC member and shadow business secretary, also called it "a very positive meeting".

He added: "We agreed to continue conversations. It's important that after this election for a new leader we reunite, because the Tories are doing awful things to our country and we intend to drive forward.

"It was a positive and productive conversation. The NEC meets on Saturday and we'll have further discussions at that point.

"Both sides of the argument felt we'd come to a better understanding of each other.

"It felt like it was a turning point for the whole party and I'm very confident now that we can reunite."

The ballot closes in the leadership race between Mr Corbyn and challenger Owen Smith at noon on Wednesday.

Mr Corbyn is widely expected to win the contest and has already vowed to "reach out" to fellow Labour MPs if re-elected.

Mr Smith has warned that Labour would be "decimated" if Mr Corbyn is re-elected.

In an open letter to party members and supporters, Mr Smith acknowledged the contest with Mr Corbyn has been "long and bruising" and that while many people did not want the challenge to take place, "the truth is it had to happen".

The Pontypridd MP then warned: "Our party is at a crossroads, and the choice we face is between renewing our party to pursue unity and power, or satisfying ourselves with ongoing division and opposition."

The NEC did agree two noteworthy changes to the party's processes. The Scottish and Welsh Labour parties will get to elect one member apiece to the NEC.

It was also agreed that all existing and new members sign a code of conduct about online behaviour or face being barred from the party.

The meeting also heard that Labour now has 551,000 members, reinforcing its position as the largest political party in Europe.

Ruth Smeeth, a Jewish MP who has called for Mr Corbyn to do more to crack down on abuse after she received tens of thousands of offensive messages - including anti-Semitic abuse - said she was pleased Labour is taking steps to tackle the problem.

Ms Smeeth, the MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, fled the launch of Labour's anti-Semitism report earlier this year after one of Mr Corbyn's supporters accused her of colluding with the right-wing press.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme about the new code of conduct, she said: "I think it's a great first step, I applaud Tom Watson and Yvette Cooper for drafting it, and the NEC for adopting it.

"We'll see what happens next, but it's about tangible action and that's what I've been calling for all summer."
A leading university in South Africa has closed for the rest of the week because of violence by protesters demanding free education across the country.

Classes were also suspended on Wednesday at the University of Cape Town because of security concerns.

NOTICE: UCT activities  including UCT Libraries and Jammie Shuttles  are suspended for Wednesday 21 September.  UCT (@UCT_news) September 20, 2016

The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg said it is identifying those who participated in campus violence on Tuesday and will take action against them.

Protesters threw stones at security guards outside a main campus building, smashing some windows.

Some guards threw projectiles back at the students.

South African University Students Clash With Police Officers at Protests Over Fee Increases https://t.co/m42Pj5yknT #presseetrangere  Dimitri Francois (@sommelier50) September 20, 2016

Also, Stellenbosch University said it obtained a court order requiring 30 protesters to leave a campus building they had occupied, or face removal by the police.

The demonstrators have been reacting to a government announcement that universities can increase fees by up to 8% next year.

The government made a concession to student protesters last year, agreeing to freeze fee increases for this year.

The government has promised to pay about 180 million dollars (160m) to cover the costs of poor students.

Blade Nzimande, the South African education minister, has condemned violent student protests, saying the government has "gone a long way" to financially support poor students and that students with resources should pay fees to help cover rising university costs.
The new shares represent nearly 15% of the AIM-listed companys enlarged issued share capital.

The proceeds will provide Clontarf with additional working capital and fund any costs  including legal and nominated advisor fees  associated with its ongoing negotiations regarding its assets in Ghana.

The John Teeling-chaired company  along with sister company Petrel Resources  announced on Monday that it has accepted, in principle, revised acreage co-ordinates at its Tano Basin assets in the African country, but warned that agreement has yet to be reached on certain matters and no assurances can be given on a successful outcome.

The dispute arose when another firm was awarded acreage overlapping the Clontarf/Petrel licences, thus diluting their asset base.

Clontarf also, yesterday, released annual figures for the first half of 2016, showing a near 12% rise in interim pre-tax losses to 96,000.

Clontarf operates in a challenging market environment for explorers, though we are making progress in both Ghana and Peru, said Mr Teeling, who added that, after the equity raise, Clontarf has adequate funding for current activities.

He also confirmed that the company continues to consider new projects and new areas for exploration in a bid to boost shareholder value.
While only around 300m of the proposed 1bn budgetary package is expected to cover tax cuts, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has called for a neutral budget, or one that neither contracts nor stimulates the economy.

It said there is no great rationale for tax cuts and that it is important to maintain income tax as a significant portion of tax revenues, adding that the economy does not need to be further stimulated.

The case for a neutral policy is compounded by the particularly strong increases in personal consumption in 2015, the ESRI outlines in its autumn economic commentary.

This, along with the continuing increases in retail sales observed in 2016, suggests that economic activity does not need to be further stimulated by reducing personal taxation levels.

With consumption and investment set to be the main sources of growth in 2016 and 2017, this has important implications for budgetary policy, said ESRI economist David Duffy.

In particular, the significant pace of economic growth experienced by the Irish economy over the past number of years argues for a neutral fiscal stance in the forthcoming budget.

While domestic demand, rather than external factors, are now underpinning Irish growth, the ESRI said that it views it as a positive that is down to a slowdown in global growth, Brexit uncertainties, and exchange rate weaknesses, rather than because of Irelands national competitiveness being damaged.

It added that it expects to see external demand pick-up once the dust has settled on the Brexit issue in the next couple of years. That said, though, it sees sterling remaining weak against the euro for the foreseeable future.

The ESRI still sees Irelands economic growth remaining strong over the coming two years and continuing to outperform many of its European peers.

However, it has also lowered its expectations for that growth. The ESRI now sees Irish GDP growing by 4.3% this year and by 3.8% next year. Those numbers are down from the respective 4.6% and 4.7% forecasts the Institute made just three months ago.

While most commentators have lowered their forecasts, the ESRI remains one of the more bullish (along with the Central Bank)  with Ibec, last week, dropping its 2016 GDP forecast by almost 1% to 3.9% and Merrion Stockbrokers expected to significantly reduce its existing 4.8% forecast in the coming weeks.

The ESRI also sees Irish export growth slowing to 8.3% this year and further to 7.6% next year.

Personal consumption levels should rise by around 4% this year and next and the unemployment rate should fall to an average of 8.3% by the end of 2016 and hit 7.3% by the end of 2017.

Earlier this year, the institute was forecasting unemployment rates of 7.6% and 6.5% for this year and next.

The think-tank also warned that recent pressure will remain on house prices and rent levels until housing supply levels can meet demand.

While agreeing with the need for mortgage lending caps, it said they should be reviewed to mirror changes in the housing market on a periodic basis.
The once-off incentive would make homes more affordable for those looking to buy their first property, the organisation said.

IPAV is in favour of watering down the Central Banks mortgage lending rules which it has claimed are locking prospective homeowners out of the housing market.

The recent decline in the housing market needs to be arrested and reversed, said IPAV CEO Pat Davitt at the launch of the organisations pre-budget submission.

In the seven months to the end of July 2016, there was a drop of 9.76% in sales, down to 24,509 from 26,904 in the same period in 2015, according to the Residential Property Price Register.

Dublin sales were down a massive 14.75% in the same period.

The deposit subsidy would be paid on a one-off basis and would be repaid to the State if the property was resold within five years.

The result would be to reduce the sum required for a deposit on a 220,000 house from 22,000 to 12,000.

The scheme is similar to that flagged by Housing Minister Simon Coveney, who plans to give first-time buyers up to 10,000 in a tax rebate in next months budget.

The scheme has been criticised by property experts who fear it could re-inflate a property bubble, however.

The European Commission also advised against the plan, labelling it costly and counterproductive.

Demand-side measures could contribute to further upward pressure on prices, the commission added.
The company, which runs the B&Q and Screwfix chains in Britain and Ireland and Castorama and Brico Depot in France and other countries, said the UKs decision to leave the EU had not hurt demand, though it remains cautious on the outlook for French operations.

Chief executive Veronique Laury outlined the transformation plan in January, looking to boost Kingfishers profit by 500m (580m) a year from 2021.
Last year, P&G sold its Nenagh plant to US cosmetics firm Coty, having operated the facility since 1978.

Around 250 staff are employed at the plant and were informed in a staff meeting held in the wake of the sale last year that they would remain as P&G employees until the end of 2016, when the deal is finalised, at which point they will become Coty employees.

Following the announced sale, Siptu lodged a claim for a loyalty payment for its Nenagh-based members. The Labour Court has now recommended that workers at the plant receive a one-off loyalty payment ranging from 5,500 to 12,500 each.

In its argument before the Labour Court, Siptu said P&G is a multinational that could easily afford to make a satisfactory, once-off gratuity to its Nenagh staff to acknowledge their contribution. Siptu was seeking 2,500 per year of service.

P&G said employees loyalty has already been rewarded over the years.

It said there is no contractual or statutory entitlement to a one-off loyalty payment for staff in a transfer situation, nor is there a custom, practice, or policy in the history of P&G.

In its recommendation, the Labour Court noted the profound effect on the workforce of the proposed transfer of ownership of the business.

It stated that it also noted the need for full co-operation by the workforce to efficiently bring about that transfer.

Finally, the court notes the precedent established in the 2008/09 downsizing agreement, in which compensation for co-operation with change was conceded by the company.

The Labour Court stated that in that context and in return for full co-operation with the transfer of the business to the new owners, it was recommending the company pay a range of amounts to affected workers.

It recommended that P&G staff with less than five years service receive 5,500; staff with five but less than 15 years service receive 8,000; and staff with 15 or more years service receive 12,500.

The most recent accounts for P&G (Manufacturing) Ireland Ltd, which also operates a plant in Newbridge, Co Kildare, show that it recorded pre-tax profits of 11.68m last year.
The Dublin-based company yesterday announced the creation of 80 jobs in Hull, England.

The new roles will come on stream following Solar 21s UK biomass plant signing a 10-year contract with feedstock supplier, E. Mercer & Probio-Energy.

Solar 21 chief executive Michael Bradley said that while he was pleased with the creation of the new jobs, he would have rathered they be based in Ireland rather than the UK.

The creation of the 80 new jobs comes on the back of a 10 year contract we have just signed with E. Mercer, said Mr Bradley.

Prior to our agreement with the feedstock supplier the waste wood, which will now be used to fuel the biomass plant, was going into landfill or being exported.

While were delighted with the development and progress we have made in the UK, we would love to be announcing the creation of 80 permanent jobs here in Ireland.

"Had the Irish Government been as progressive in the area of renewable energy as the UK government are, we would have created these, along with hundreds more, jobs here in Ireland.

These jobs could and should have been created in Ireland.

Solar 21 announced the 10-year contract agreement after raising more than 42m from Irish investors since March.

The company said the UKs decision to leave the European Union has not had a negative impact on the pace of investment with the largest level of funds invested since August.

The company acquired the rights to the 22MW plant in Hull in 2015 and is currently more than two-thirds of the way through the fundraising process.

To date our fundraising efforts have been even more successful than initially envisaged which is down to a number of factors  namely, the calibre of the key advisors we are working with on this project, said Mr Bradley.

The high standard of advisors has given both brokers and investors great comfort that this project will have a successful outcome for all involved.

In addition, the builder involved, CF Struthers, has been in Hull for over 80 years. They are ASME certified and have built over 140 similar units for customers such as Shell, BP, Statoil, Exxon and Conoco Philips.

Solar 21 had shareholders funds of 658,224 at the end of 2014 compared with 1.9m at the close of 2013.

Solar 21 currently has assets of more than 100m.
Of course, rural Ireland  and especially those parts that have a high reliance on tourism  lives in a highly seasonal economic environment.

Once October sets in, many restaurants and places offering accommodation close or wind down to a weekend trade. In addition, numerous houses across the countryside, and particularly along the coast, are holiday homes that are often not occupied during school term.

That backdrop poses a strategic challenge to politicians and other societal leaders. Finding a key to unlocking far more all year round economic activity in rural Ireland is one of the big hurdles we should address.

While strolling around Skibbereen, I came across the Ludgate Hub, the tech-savvy centre kick-started by an enlightened group of private and public representatives.

I was given a tour that opened my eyes even further than was the case months ago when the Hub was initially launched.

It is hard to visualise the broad effect of centres such as the Ludgate Hub, but electrification is a good place to start.

"As a 1GB town, Skibbereen's young people can to create the next Google' hear us at #DA16EU https://t.co/M3dV48QOEW pic.twitter.com/3dUeOusUoO  The Ludgate Hub (@LudgateIreland) September 20, 2016

When rural Ireland was electrified during the 1950s it was physical poles and wires that illustrated the real impact on peoples lives.

Lit houses and working domestic appliances brought to life the revolution that electricity provided for people who had relied on fires for heat and food previously.

We are now in the midst of an even more powerful revolution.

This revolution is one of digitisation and it is having a more profound impact on our lives than electricity ever had. It is difficult, however, to provide you with tangible evidence supporting that contention as this revolution is literally in the clouds.

My visit to the Ludgate Hub helped bring that vision to life. Kids in local houses are now attending Coder Dojo classes in the Ludgate Hub, where they learn the basic principles of computer coding.

Courses are taking place to teach anyone who attends, young or old, how to optimise their mobile phones and other devices. Rich Americans  who were sailing in Baltimore during summer O used the Ludgate Hub to hotdesk back to head offices and, in so doing, extended their stay in West Cork.

A number of entrepreneurs are looking for houses as they move businesses from the US and UK to the region and use the Ludgate Hub as their communication base.

All of this is the type of exciting momentum we should not only cheer but actively promote in other towns too. What is stopping companies such as Google, Apple, Dell-EMC, and telecom companies combining with county councils to replicate the Ludgate Hub around rural Ireland?

I read about fantastical housing costs in places such as London and San Francisco and compare those with the the hard facts of living and working in Kerry, Clare, and other counties.

The data shows house prices and rents in rural Ireland remain at very low levels, compared to key Irish cities and other international centres.

The reason that happens is because these areas have, for decades, been cut off from frontline economic activity, where large populations define strong business conditions.

Digitisation turns all of that on its head. By providing entrepreneurs and investors with gigabyte capacity and telco connectivity the Ludgate Hub is hooking rural Ireland into the heart of the global 24/7 and 365 day e-commerce marketplace.

It is bringing a new vision to how an area that is far from large urban centres can be positioned better.

I hope the Ludgate Hub wins awards for what it has already achieved. I hope, too, it incubates and produces a raft of success stories with companies selling themselves for fortunes, joining stock exchanges or staying private and building wealth through re-investing their profits.

If all that can be achieved then it will create a new generation of role models that can show how businesses can be built in rural Ireland that have resonance with investors and customers alike. We should look forward now to other towns waking up and smelling the digital coffee.

Joe Gill is director of corporate broking with Goodbody Stockbrokers. His views are personal.
They're lovely and friendly, but perhaps divulge too much detail information and make you feel slightly uncomfortable.

You might be able to escape their clutches after you've feigned interest in their various woes for long enough to placate them but there are unfortunate souls who have to deal with these people on a professional level and keep a straight face.
The warning comes after gardai received reports of dogs ingesting poisoned sausage meat on canal walks between Ardnacrusha and Clonlara.

Gardai warned owners to exercise caution and keep their pets leashed.

It is believed some of the poison was encased in pieces of sausage meat," said Sergeant Justin McCarthy, crime prevention officer at Henry Street garda station, Limerick.

The ESB who own the walkways have erected warning signs along the routes.

Dog owner, Ann Daly responded via Facebook: "This is about our dog! Rat poison in meat. We picked up 2 separate pieces and there may be more. Luckily she is okay but only because my husband spotted her with it however both dogs were treated with one kept in overnight on drip."

Ms Daly warned others: "Be extra vigilant walking do not leave off the lead. We have already had a dog poisoned 2 years ago in the same place and will not allow this to continue and would appreciate your support when the time comes."

Another concerned dog owner, Sinead Wheeler said: "Our dog Molly died in June after eating a poisoned substance on the bank near Clonlara. She tried her best but despite intensive treatment from the vet, her lungs and kidneys were failing. We said goodbye after 5 long days."

"Paraquat is an awful poison. Our other dog survived after 5 days in the vets - only because we think she ate less. Her lungs have affected by it."

"Awful people out there. I'd never go back and walk a dog anywhere around there," she added.

In 2014, post mortems on a number of dogs found in the area found they died from ingesting strychnine after they had all walked along the same route.

A spokesperson for the Limerick Treaty Vet Clinic said: "We heard there was a warning sign out up in the area. This happened before and what we have found is that whatever was ingested by the dogs worked extremely quickly."

"Our advice would be to keep your dog on a leash, and if you do suspect they have eaten something poisonous get to the clinic quickly for treatment," they added.
More than one in three people living in rural Ireland favour Simon Coveney as the next leader of Fine Gael.

As Taoiseach Enda Kenny comes under mounting pressure to state when he will step down as head of Fine Gael, a clear favourite has emerged among the farming community as to who they would like to see succeed him.

The former agriculture minister is now the favoured candidate to lead the party. Some 35% of people questioned in the the Irish Examiner/ICMSA poll stated they would chose Mr Coveney as leader of Fine Gael.

He is followed by Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar on 23%. This is in contrast to other surveys taken before the Dails summer recess, which had Mr Varadkar slightly head in the polls.

Just one in 10 people would chose to retain Mr Kenny, while both Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald and Finance Minister Michael Noonan are on 5%.

Interestingly, the survey revealed that 22% would prefer someone who was not named among those mentioned above.

This could leave the door open for Public and Expenditure and Reform Minister Paschal Donohoe, who has so far stated he is not interested in the leadership, or could provide an outside chance to Health Minister Simon Harris.

For some time now, a number of Fine Gael backbench TDs have been calling on Mr Kenny, who has led the party since 2002, to made the details of his departure known.

At the party think-in in Newbridge, Co Kildare, last week, Kerry TD Brendan Griffin, and Jim Daly, of Cork South West, were among those who reiterated this stance.

Speaking at the Fine Gael meeting, Mr Griffin said: I certainly feel for the countrys sake and for the partys sake that we need to confront this matter now.

Here we are over six months after the general election, which was a huge loss for Fine Gael  we had 50% more TDs this time five years ago than we have now.

If thats not an alarming wake-up call for a political party in any scenario, what is?

Both Mr Varadkar and Mr Coveney are viewed as the obvious successors, however, both have different styles of politics and would have a different support base.

The latest survey shows that Mr Coveney has strong support in rural and agricultural areas.

However, when broken down by gender, both Mr Varadkar and Mr Coveney are almost neck and neck among female farmers surveyed, with the Cork South Central TD shading it by just one point on 26%, and Mr Varadkar on 25%.

Mr Varadkar scores higher among younger people, with 24% of those under the age of 34 favouring the Dublin West TD, while Mr Coveney has 22% support in this bracket.

The Cork TD, who has been tasked with solving the homeless crisis as minister for housing, planning and local government, fairs best among those over 65, with a significant 46% favouring him to lead Fine Gael.

ANALYSIS: Political ties loosen across rural Ireland

Fine Gael, the party of the big farmer, is losing support across tracks of rural Ireland as people begin to break with their traditional political ties.

While the Irish Examiner / ICMSA poll survey published today shows Fine Gael still remain the most popular party (on 33%), their support is slipping, and the most significant slide has been among the dairy sector who have seen their income head downward over the past 12 to 18 months.

But just as Fine Gaels support has fallen by five percentage points, Fianna Fail have seen their backing increase by seven points according to the Behaviour and Attitudes survey of 526 farmers.

Rural Ireland remains decidedly undecided, with one in four people stating they do not know who they would vote for in an upcoming election, while a further 7% wouldnt cast a ballot at all.

Fine Gaels Keep the Recovery Going slogan of the General Election fell flat in rural Ireland. Many felt little or no boost in their local communities.

In fact, as Enda Kenny and his ministers embarked on a nationwide tour of factories, manufacturing plants and concrete warehouses to show off the recovery during the election campaign, many farmers felt they had been bypassed in the previous five years.

Instead of investment, regional communities witnessed a stripping of resources, and under the reign of the party of law and order they saw an increase in rural crime.

Garda stations closed, post offices and banks shut, and the numbers of families in their localities dwindled, meaning schools lost teachers.

This survey has found that 40% of farmers feel the recovery has not benefited them. This was seen on polling day when Fine Gael lost votes and representatives.

It appears that traditional voting patterns are changing in rural Ireland which historically cast their ballots along well defined political and historical allegiances.

Areas that traditionally had a fertile Fine Gael support base  running down the the spine of the country and into Munster  were diminished in Election 2016.

Former junior agriculture minister Tom Hayes lost his seat in Tipperary, along with his Fine Gael colleague Noel Coonan, other party members to lose out were tillage farmer Tom Barry in Cork East as well as Kieran ODonnell in Limerick.

Although dairy farmers have seen a slight recovery in milk prices over the summer, taking the slumping price per litre in the 18 months into account its no surprise that support for the Government party has also slipped.

The survey also found that dairy farmers feel that the Government has not responded adequately to the current dairy crisis.

Likewise, support for Fine Gael among dairy farmers polled is now at 40%, this is down from 47% in 2015. The figures were reversed for Fianna Fail, with support among the dairy sector up to 23% from 18% last year.

However, tillage farmers appear to remain staunch in their support for Mr Kenny and Fine Gael.

Some 42% of those asked said they support Fine Gael, this is a noteworthy increase on the 30% rating in 2015.

Ger McCarthy, from Rossmore, Clonakilty, Co Cork, with his horses Larry and Fred. Picture: Dan Linehan

Older farmers and those working large farms are more inclined to rate Enda Kenny, according to the survey, while Micheal Martins support lies with middle-aged farmers and those with smaller holdings.

But overall it appears that rural Ireland is loosening the traditional political ties.

This was perhaps reflected in Februarys election where a swathe of  mainly Independent  new faces took up seats on the Dail benches.

But the Examiners survey has revealed that rural voters are not completely convinced by the amount achieved by Independents since then.

Of those mentioned, Shane Ross fares best, but only he received an average rating of 4.44%. Finian McGrath, John Halligan and Katherine Zappone all received average ratings of 3.98%, 3.69% and 3.7%, respectively.

Independents will no doubt be underwhelmed by their ratings in the poll, but this is clear from our survey. Old allegiances are no longer valid and rural Ireland is a changing place for those in politics.

READ MORE: The Irish Examiner / ICMSA farming survey: Methodology

Find more on the Irish Examiner ICMSA farming survey HERE
Jobs Minister Mary Mitchell OConnor confirmed the announcement just 24 hours after another 500m investment programme with the potential for more than 5,000 jobs had been unveiled in Limerick.

She said she was very keen to pursue opportunities for investment and job creation in new sectors.

These are increasingly possible with our infrastructure and talented workforce which enables companies like Fazzi to undertake work for customers in different parts of the world, she said.

It is also very heartening that such a large project has been secured for a regional centre which represents the ongoing success of the Governments Action Plan for Jobs initiative, particularly the new Regional Action Plan for the Mid West.

Medical coding is a regulated process that transforms healthcare diagnoses, treatments, procedures, outcomes and services into universal medical alphanumeric codes, known as ICD.

Most countries, including Ireland, use the ICD process with the majority using the current ICD-10 edition.

This latest edition contains codes for diseases, signs and symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, and external causes of injury or disease.

The new Irish company has already begun providing ICD-10 coding services to the US homecare and hospice sector. Additionally, expansion plans are in the works to add billing and distance learning offerings for International-based insurance companies and governmental healthcare entities.

Speaking about the latest jobs boost for Limerick, Finance Minister Michael Noonan said the city was proud to host an innovative company that combines healthcare and software.

There will be many more opportunities now to join this company which places great value in its employees, said Mr Noonan. Im sure that many people from Limerick will become valuable members of the team at Fazzi.

The companys founder and managing partner, Robert Fazzi said: Our Irish employees are clearly smart, dedicated and incredibly talented.

We are thankful to the IDA and the Irish government for welcoming us and helping us develop our business here. Without question, Ireland has proven strongly supportive to the creation of innovative and growth-oriented companies.

Mayor of Limerick Kieran OHanlon said that Fazzis announcement further strengthens Limericks plans to be a location of choice for foreign direct investment.
After the public accounts committee said it would pencil him in for October 6, and a Cabinet colleague publicly said he should attend, Mr Noonan said he is now willing to face questions on the matter.

However, in a pointed reference to Government concerns the grilling may become party political and previous claims that the PAC has overstretched its remit, Mr Noonan said he wants assurances that any questioning will adhere to existing committee rules.

This means any discussion of the merits of a Government policy and its objectives will be strictly off limits, potentially preventing questions over Project Eagle.

I have decided to accept the invitation of the committee of public accounts to assist in its examination of the Comptroller & Auditor Generals special report on Namas sale of Project Eagle, said Mr Noonan.

I intend to reply by letter to the committee to confirm this and to request assurances that the proceedings of the committee will be conducted in line with its terms of reference.

Mr Noonan had faced increasing pressure to attend the PAC meeting. Despite Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar saying on Sunday there was no precedent for a minister to be grilled by the PAC, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said there was no other option.

Disabilities Minister Finian McGrath said yesterday that in his personal view, Mr Noonan should attend due to the scale of the issues involved. The Independent Alliance TD is understood to have raised the matter at yesterdays Cabinet meeting.

While a Government spokesperson last night said Mr Noonan had brought the matter up himself during the meeting, there was a consensus among ministers that the Limerick TD must now face questioning.

Before Mr Noonans statement last night, PAC chair and Fianna Fail TD Sean Fleming had said the group would pencil him in to appear before it on October 6, regardless of whether he agreed to attend.

Mr Fleming also said there was precedent for a sitting minister to attend the PAC  the then public expenditure minister Brendan Howlin had attended in 2012, to discuss workers pay.

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Enda Kenny yesterday briefed the Cabinet on his discussions with opposition leaders last week concerning a State investigation into Project Eagle.

While he is awaiting feedback from the opposition, due this week, it is understood there is no appetite within Government to extend the investigation beyond Project Eagle.

Separately, yesterdays Cabinet meeting is also believed to have seen Mr McGrath question his Independent Alliance colleague, Transport Minister Shane Ross, on his response to the escalating Dublin Bus strike.

An extension to the Fennelly commissions work into the recording of phone calls at Garda stations was also agreed after Mr Kenny sought a new deadline of Christmas due to the scale of records involved.

Ministers also signed off on an independent review of air traffic congestion at Dublin Airport  a situation which may lead to the construction of a third terminal.
Ministers will this week open discussions with their Fianna Fail counterparts about the details of the budget, with both parties already at loggerheads over how the near-1bn in fiscal space should be spent.

Speaking at the close of Fianna Fails think-in in Carlow yesterday, Mr Martin raised questions about Fine Gaels election promise to phase out USC for workers during the lifetime of the Dail.

Before the election, Fine Gael were trumpeting that this was possible, that they were going to do it, he said. In the immediate aftermath of the election, they resiled quite significantly from their position.

I dont believe its achievable within five years. We dont believe it is the right policy or right approach. We need to keep a balance to making sure we can invest in services, in the infrastructure of the country as well and also give people a break. So its not a position we agree with, its nor provided for in the confidence and supply agreement.

Overall provision in the budget of 1bn was modest, he said. But he added investment was needed in health, housing and education.

Mr Martin also rejected criticism from the EU over government plans to reintroduce a first time buyers grant. The post-bailout report suggests the move will add upward pressure to the housing market.

The Government is set to announce the grant in the budget, which could see first-time buyers getting tax credits for amounts of up to 10,000 or even more. Fianna Fail also promised this grant this in the election.

Mr Martin yesterday said young buyers needed help getting a home.

There was a huge crisis in housing and the capacity of young couples to buy, he said, and a first time buyers grant was perfectly legitimate.

Fianna Fail TDs and senators yesterday discussed Brexit, how credit unions could support social housing, and the economy.

Earlier, Mr Martin told Newstalk the budget had to include a realistic increase in the pension. While senior Fianna Fail figures say this could mean 5 a week extra for the elderly, Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar said such an increase will eat up all his spending.

Mr Martin also reiterated that increased funding was needed for third level education in the budget. While Fianna Fail did not support the idea of student loans, something has to happen in relation to the Casells report, which pushes for more funding in the sector.

Mr Martin, though, did not give a commitment that childcare supports would be prioritised by his party for the budget.

Meanwhile, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe will discuss capital spending projects as well as next months budget when he appears at the Oireachtas budgetary oversight committee today.

He will also this week ask ministers to reduce their budget spending demands from the 3bn in total in requests submitted so far.

Meanwhile, former taoiseach and Fianna Fail leader Brian Cowen last night launched Cinnlinte: Saol an Iriseora, a book written by political journalist Deaglan de Breadun about his career and media work over recent decades.

Mr Cowen told reporters he was surprised at how quick people had rushed to dismiss the future of Fianna Fail after its 2011 election meltdown.

He also said that he thought Nama had got its job done and it looked now on course to make a return.
Mr Corbett, through his company Marlstone Investments, has denied breaching Revenue legislation by having 16.1 litres of spirits for sale at his pub in Thurles, Co Tipperary, without having paid the appropriate tax.

The offence is alleged to have been detected by Revenue officials after a visit to his Coppingers Bar, Parnell St, Thurles, on January 29, 2015.

The case was adjourned yesterday at Thurles district court when Judge Elizabeth McGrath gave the prosecution time to address a legal point made by Mr Corbetts defence lawyer that there was no evidence put before the court in relation to the correct rates of tax.

The court was told by Michael Doyle of the state laboratories that a sample taken from one of 23 bottles taken from the bar was neither pure vodka nor Smirnoff vodka, which it purported to be. EU regulations stipulate that vodka must have an alcohol level of 37.5% while this samples alcohol level was 34.1%, Mr Doyle said.

Colin Cushley of Diageo, said that the closure on a bottle given to him for testing was fake and the Smirnoff labelling was fake.

Customs official Sarah Cushnahan said she sent two of the bottles to Diageo and the state laboratories. A report from Diageo said it was counterfeit vodka and from the state lab said it wasnt consistent with Smirnoff vodka.

She said Lar Corbett named a wholesalers and an off-licence from whom they bought vodka, and gave receipts to Ms Cushnahan. He had never ordered counterfeit vodka, he told her. The customs official visited both named premises and found that bottles of Smirnoff there appeared genuine.

State solicitor Michelle OConnor asked for time to address that issue and the judge adjourned the case until September 27.
The children, all under the age of two, were injured when a petrol canister apparently ignited after being brought into their house just outside Drinagh, south of Dunmanway. It is believed a spark from a fire ignited the petrol.

The scene remained sealed off last night as Garda forensic experts tried to establish what caused the accident. They hope to speak to the parents of the children today, who last night were maintaining a vigil at their bedsides at Cork University Hospital (CUH).
Bridget Majella Daly has brought proceedings against Zurich Life Assurance over the insurers decision to cease paying her a disability allowance to which she claims she is entitled.

The 48-year-old mother of three of The Chase, Clonmel, Co Tipperary, has suffered from ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for many years and has been deemed medically unable to work by the Department of Education.

Ms Daly says that, through ASTI, she signed up to a salary protection scheme with Zurich which ceased paying her benefits in April and informed her her case was under review. She decided to sue Zurich. Last week Ms Daly brought High Court proceedings claiming she and her children were spied on and placed under surveillance by a private investigator because she sued Zurich.

The Court granted Ms Dalys lawyers permission to serve short notice of the proceedings on Zurich Life Assurance Plc. She seeks injunctions directing Zurich to pay her disability benefit under the Salary Protection Scheme. She also seeks orders restraining the defendant and all persons who have knowledge of the order from carrying out any surveillance of her and her children, and that any images be handed over.

The matter returned before Ms Justice Miriam O Regan at yesterdays vacation sitting of the High Court. Barrister Barney Quirke BL for Zurich told the court that the insurer stopped the payment because Zurich wants her to undergo a test called a Functional Capacity Evaluation. She had declined to take this test and Zurich stopped the payment under the scheme which it is entitled to do.

Counsel asked the court to adjourn the matter for a number of weeks so it could address Ms Dalys claim. Counsel said it was consenting to an expedited hearing of Ms Dalys claim concerning the payment, but did not see the urgency of the injunction application. Rory de Bruir, instructed by Burns Nowlan solicitors, for Ms Daly, objected to any lengthy adjournment. He said the test Ms Daly was asked to take had previously been found by the High Court as not being a medical diagnostic test. There were six independent medical reports that show Ms Daly cannot work and she has been retired by the Dept of Education on health grounds. Ms Justice ORegan adjourned Ms Dalys application for injunctions against Zurich to next Wednesdays sitting.

Previously the court heard Ms Daly was followed while driving one of her children to school, was photographed or filmed by a man while walking in a park on another occasion, and also saw a car drive past her home slowly. The court heard that following a complaint Zurichs lawyers informed Ms Dalys solicitors Burns Nowlan it would discontinue the surveillance.
However, the school survey of 15- to 16-year-olds in 35 countries found that Ireland is near the top for use of ecstasy, cocaine, new psychoactive drugs, and inhalants.

The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) said that while Irish school kids were drinking less often, they were still among the heaviest drinkers when they did take alcohol.

The 2015 report, published yesterday, said Irish 15- to 16-year-olds also have one of the highest rates of gambling  a bigger issue among boys.

It also found perceived availability of drugs was highest in Ireland for cocaine, second highest for ecstasy, but around average for both alcohol and cigarettes.

An analysis of ESPAD surveys over the last 20 years show that cigarette smoking among Irish 15- to 16-years olds has more than halved, with significant falls in alcohol and cannabis.

Irish figures for lifetime use (consumption at least once) show:

Cigarette smoking has fallen from the highs of 74% in both 1995 and 1999 to just 32% in 2015;

Alcohol consumption has dropped from the highs of 92% between 1995 and 2003 to 74% in 2015;

Cannabis consumption fell from 39% in 2003 to 20% in 2007 and to 18% in 2011, rising slightly to 19% in 2015;

Ecstasy consumption fell from a high of 9% in 1995 to a low of 2% in 2011, rising to 4% in 2015;

Cocaine rose from 2% in 1995 to a height of 4% in 2007, falling slightly to 3% in 2011 and 2015;

Inhalant use has dropped from a high of 22% in 1999 to a low of 9% in 2011, rising to 11% in 2015.

The 2015 report shows that, among the 35 countries surveyed, Ireland is now ranked 30th for lifetime use of cigarettes and 26th for alcohol consumption.

This translates to current usage, with Ireland ranked 29th and 28th respectively.

The report said Ireland was now one of a handful of countries with low rates of alcohol use. However Irish teens still consume greater quantities of alcohol when drinking  ranked 5th highest.

In relation to illegal drug use, Irish 15- to 16-year-olds are ranked 2nd for lifetime use of ecstasy and fourth for lifetime use of cocaine.

For new psychoactive drugs, also known in some countries as legal highs, Ireland is ranked 4th for lifetime use and 5th for recent (last year) use. Ireland is in joint 7th for inhalant use.

The situation in relation to cannabis is a bit more mixed, with lifetime use just above the average, and current use (within last 30 days) putting us in 11th position.

Howewver, as regards frequency of use, Irish teens are ranked 3rd, with cannabis used 13 times within the last year.

The 2015 report also looked at gambling and found Irish teens were slightly above average for gambling in the last year, but in 9th place for frequent gambling  with it far more common among boys.

The report said measures to prevent adolescent gambling problems  such as debts, psychological deficits and social disadvantage  were of high priority.

Minister of state for health Marcella Corcoran Kennedy welcomed the findings on cigarettes and alcohol, but expressed concern at the easy access to alcohol and the scale of binge-drinking.

Drugs minister Catherine Byrne said tackling the drugs problem continued to be a government priority.

Conor Cullen of Alcohol Action Ireland said: While it is encouraging Ireland is below the European average in a number of important ESPAD categories, it is also notable that exceptions to this include the number of boys and girls who were drunk in the previous 30 days and the average alcohol intake on the last day of drinking.
It was ordered to give 3,000 to charity to avoid a criminal conviction.

The company is being prosecuted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over a delay in completing a 1m project to deal with a water quality problem in Carraroe.

Earlier this year, residents in the Connemara village received boil water notices.

The prosecution was listed before Judge John ONeill yesterday at Dublin District Court.

Irish Water pleaded guilty to charges under the EU (drinking water) regulations that, between December 1, 2015, and January 8, 2016, it failed to comply with a directive issued by the EPA to implement an action programme approved by the agency for the improvement of the quality of water for human consumption from Carraroe public water supply, to react to parametric values specified for trihalomethanes (THMs).

THMs are a group of organic chemicals formed when chlorine is used to disinfect water and reacts with naturally occurring organic matter in raw water.

An action plan had been approved by the EPA on September 9, 2014, but the required work was not completed by Irish Water until this year.

Maeve Larkin, prosecuting, said the offence can carry a class A fine of 5,000.

Darragh Page, a senior inspector with the EPA, told the court that for drinking water to be safe, there should be no more than 100mg of THMs per litre. Tests indicated the levels in the water in Carraroe were in excess.

There had been an elevated level for several years until recently, he said.

He agreed with Ms Larkin that the solution was to pre-treat the water using filtration to take out colour or organic matter before using chlorine so by-product THMs are not formed.

An action plan was agreed with Irish Water but it was not fully complied with until this year, the court heard. In January, five weeks after the deadline, Mr Page visited the treatment plant and saw it had been unchanged and the level of THMs still exceeded the standards expected.

The court heard that Irish Water had no prior criminal convictions.

Judge ONeill said it was not right that Irish Water took for granted that there would not be planning permission difficulties.

However, he agreed to order the company to make a charitable contribution rather than imposing a conviction. He ordered that 3,000 must go to local charity Aras an Dara.

Adjourning the case, Judge ONeill said if the money is donated by September 30, he would apply the Probation Act, which would spare Irish Water a conviction.

I will keep my options open if that is not done, said the judge.
Participants in the third Kyiv international economic forum KIEF 2016, which will be held on October 6-7, will discuss attraction of investment in the country for Ukraine's participation in the global processes of development of the fourth industrial revolution.

"We have changed the slogan of the forum "Ukraine: from the third world to the first" for a new one, which emphasizes that our country has the chance to be among the leaders of industrial revolution 4.0," KIEF Executive Director Yuriy Pyvovarov said.

He expressed hope KIEF 2016 discussions will help improve the state economic policy and propose acting strategies to businesses for Ukraine to become part of the global process of deployment of the fourth industrial revolution.

The release states the key theme of KIEF 2016 will be attracting investments and that all the negatives of Ukraine's recession can be seen as positive if one considers the possibility of obtaining low asset prices.

According to the organizers of the forum, the domestic manufacturing infrastructure is mostly obsolete, but it can get high capitalization with raising necessary investments. The country's educated and cheap labor force, developed transport channels, Ukraine's common border with four EU member states and easy access by sea to Turkey and the Middle East also make the country attractive for investment.

During the second day of the forum the experts will discuss the opportunities open to foreign investors in Ukraine, the investment attractiveness of various sectors of the economy and the investment programs of Ukrainian regions.

According to the KIEF 2016 program, the forum will be attended by many reputable foreign and Ukrainian speakers: famous economists and reformers, representatives of large international companies, public figures, members of the Cabinet of Ministers and deputies of the Verkhovna Rada. Among them, in particular, are scientist-economist Erik S. Reinert, Israeli investor Jonathan Pacifici, World Bank Advisor Peter Lindholm and Nobel Prize Winner Dan Shechtman. Ukraine will be represented by First Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine Stepan Kubiv, Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan, Head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship Viktor Halasiuk.

As reported, the first KIEF 2014 forum was dedicated to finding the contours of structural reforms, which would allow Ukraine to implement an economic breakthrough. The second forum, held in October 2015, brought together 67 speakers from 20 countries, 150 media representatives and more than 800 guests. In the course of it, experts determined the most effective instruments for this breakthrough. In addition, bilateral communication between businesses and the government at an expert level was established on the KIEF forum platform, at which public thematic discussions are held regularly.
Mark Burton of Portland sued Carrey in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, accusing the actor of providing the prescription drugs his Tipperary-born wife Cathriona White used to overdose in September 2015. The wrongful death lawsuit contends Carrey improperly obtained prescriptions for Ambien and the powerful opioid oxycodone under the alias Arthur King.

The suit accuses Carrey of giving White the medications days before she was found dead in one of Carreys homes. White and Carrey dated in 2012 and were photographed together in May 2015.
The invasive species is now out of control in the southwest, and is rampant along major river banks, roads and town centre sites across the region.

A knotweed survey as a condition of planning permission, which would be in line with Britain, is needed, it has been claimed.

Specialised units are being trained to deal with it in public areas in Kerry and their remit should extend to private property, the monthly meeting of the county council was told. The Killarney National Park, a Unesco biosphere reserve was hosting the destructive weed which overcomes other species. Growing through cracks and tarmac, concrete and road surfaces, even tiny fragments of the knotweed (Fallopia japonica) can cause it to spread, it was claimed.

It is a major hazard to the built environment, director of operations Charlie OSullivan said in a report.

While national roads in the county are being treated, hedge cutting on minor roads by landowners actually spread the knotweed, the meeting heard.

Fianna Fail councillor Michael Cahill asked the council to declare war and put a proper budget in place to tackle it.

Will the council consider amending the county development plan to include an invasive weed survey as a condition of planning similar to the UK, and other countries, Mr Cahill asked.

Most people dont know what knotweed looks like.

The weed is on both banks of the River Laune and is threatening to choke the well-known salmon and trout river; an old creamery in Lisselton in north Kerry is over-run; and it is along the Big River in Tralee and on Casements Avenue and Oakpark House, representatives said.

Sinn Fein councillor Pa Daly called for a unit within the council to tackle knotweed on private land countywide.

Meanwhile, the cost of tackling knotweed is growing: Kerry has set aside 100,000 for knotweed control this year. The Department of Transport has allocated 500,000 to map and treat knotweed on the national road network, it confirmed.
Patrick Bassett, with an address at The Farmhouse, Sarsfield Court, in Glanmire, Co Cork, signed a plea of guilty to 12 counts of indecent assault yesterday at Cork District Court.

Joseph Cuddigan, defence solicitor, told Judge Con OLeary yesterday that the accused was prepared to sign pleas of guilty to all charges obviating the necessity for the preparation of a book of evidence.

Once that was done, Inspector Mary King applied to have the accused sent forward for sentencing to the county sessions of Cork Circuit Criminal Court commencing on October 25.

Sergeant Annamarie Guiney arrested Patrick Bassett at the courthouse on Washington St, Cork, last week and charged him with the historical sex crimes.

Sgt Guiney cautioned the accused man that he did not have to say anything but that anything he might say would be taken down in writing and given in evidence.

Bassett made no reply to any of the charges, the court heard.

It was alleged that the 12 indecent assaults were committed between 1968 and 1970 when the complainant was aged between 10 and 12.

No facts in relation to the abuse have yet been given in court.

It is anticipated that a full outline of the facts of the case, and possibly, a victim impact statement, will be presented to the sentencing judge at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
You [the committee] have heard many opinions, and those opinions should be valued but there are other opinions as well. Political parties have felt the USC should be reduced, Mr Noonan said.

As reported in the Irish Examiner yesterday, the European Commission in its latest report on Irelands economy, warned against abolishing the USC which at its height brought in more than 4bn to the exchequer.

Many economists, trade unions and even officials in the Department of Finance have also warned against phasing out the USC.

Mr Noonan said the budget will be cautious and careful saying taxpayers will not be throwing their hats in the air on Budget day, which he confirmed would be October 11.

Dramatic corporation tax revenue spikes in 2014 and 2015 were caused by increased profitability of a small number of companies and some currency fluctuations affecting those firms, Gerry Howard of the Revenue Commissioners said.

During testy exchanges, Mr Noonan fresh out of hospital after contracting a facial infection, rounded on Sinn Feins Pearse Doherty, who challenged his plans to cut taxes. Mr Noonan told Mr Doherty not to be so haughty in his criticisms. Mr Doherty said he was well within his rights to ask questions about policies which wrecked the country, a reference to his criticisms of previous Fianna Fail ministers.

Mr Noonan said republicans had over 30 years done their best to wreck two economies. Meanwhile, tax revenues were running at 449m ahead of target at the end of August, Mr Noonan has said.

This means the Government took in 1.7bn more in the first eight months of 2016 than it did in 2015, he said.

Mr Noonan restated that the amount of additional spending available for the Budget will be around 1bn, despite increased economic uncertainty following the Brexit vote. He said the extra money will be split on a 2:1 basis between spending increases and tax cuts.

He said he and the Government are not complacent to those external risks and said the mistakes of the past will not be repeated.

Scrapping Vat on condoms would not help reduce instances of sexually transmitted diseases, Mr Noonan said in response to questions from Fine Gael TD Kate OConnell.

Shutting down tax breaks to vulture funds could double the available fiscal space from 1bn to 2bn for next year, the committee heard. The State could gain 10bn to 20bn if such loopholes are closed over 10 years, it was claimed.

Independent TD Stephen Donnelly posed the question to Finance Minister Michael Noonan at the committee, calling for a closing of loopholes relating to capital gains tax which such funds benefit from. Mr Donnelly said US fund Cerberus will walk away from its purchase of Namas Northern Ireland loan book known as Project Eagle about 2.8bn better off because of the tax breaks.
In its latest assessment of Ireland, the commission said because of increased house prices since 2013 when valuations were set, the State is essentially forgoing a major tax windfall.

Following from his short hospitalisation, Mr Noonan last night bowed to pressure from the Independent Alliance and will now appear before the Public Accounts Committee over Namas controversial sale of its Northern Ireland loan book.

The Irish Examiner understands Mr Noonan was told by Independent ministers including Finian McGrath and Shane Ross at Cabinet yesterday that it would be better if he attended the committee and try and kill off the controversy.

While ministers agreed it was Mr Noonans decision to make, he was left in no doubt as to the feelings of his colleagues, sources said.

I have today decided to accept the invitation of the Committee of Public Accounts to assist the committee in its examination of the C&AGs Special Report on the National Asset Management Agencys sale of Project Eagle, Mr Noonan said in a statement.

His spokesman last night said it was his inclination all along to go but he wanted to discuss the matter with Cabinet colleagues first.

Michael Noonan

Before the announcement was made, Mr McGrath said he expected Mr Noonan would attend the committee, which is expected to take place on October 6.

It comes as Mr Noonan confirmed a reduction in the countrys economic growth by 0.5% of GDP in the wake of the Brexit vote in Britain in June.

Appearing before the Dails new budgetary oversight committee, he also defended his intentions to abolish the Universal Social Charge by 2021, amid mounting calls for the tax to be retained. Mr Noonan said the decision to reduce the Universal Social Charge is a political one, despite mounting calls for the tax to be retained.

You [the committee] have heard many opinions, and those opinions should be valued but there are other opinions as well. Political parties have felt the USC should be reduced, Mr Noonan said.

Economists have warned against abolishing the USC, which at its height brought more than 4bn in to the exchequer.

Mr Noonan also confirmed that the budget will be announced on Tuesday, October 11, as had been signalled in recent weeks.
Details of the planned upgrade were revealed yesterday as a large number of guests were invited onto the island to celebrate the official opening of its first phase of development, which cost 6.5m.

David Keane, director of the Spike Island Development Company, said the county council, which owns the site, had lodged an application for 5m of Failte Ireland funding for phase two, with the council adding a further 1.25m from its own resources.

We are looking for a new ferry to run from Cobh to Spike, for a road train on the island to ferry people from the pier into the fort, and to develop a childrens playground, Mr Keane said.

The project also includes the creation of a reception area and shop and additional interpretive centres detailing the islands military occupation, role as a prison and site for convict transportation.

We also plan to do up the original prison cells which date back to the 17th century. We hope for a funding decision in November and if successful will start work on phase two next summer, completing it in 18 months, he said.

Many people attended the opening ceremony in period costume and a 16-gun salute commemorating the centenary of the Easter Rising boomed impressively from the forts coastal battery.

Mayor of County Cork, Seamus McGrath, said that when the council took possession of the island in 2010, then county manager Martin Riordan deserved enormous credit for pursuing its development in what was, at the time, a very difficult economic climate.

In 2011, a masterplan was developed and a steering group set up under Brendan Touhy that oversaw implementation of the 6.5m project  3.5m from the council and the remainder from Failte Ireland.

It involved the installation of a pontoon and refurbishing and putting in interpretation centres in the punishment block and shell store.

Seamus McGrath, Mayor of County Cork, and Tim Lucey, CEO, Cork County Council, unveil a plaque to mark the official opening of Spike Island. Picture: Martin Walsh

A military exhibition yard was constructed, cafe extended and proper access created to the gun emplacements.

Spike Island is now a go-to destination, comparable with attractions such as the Guinness Storehouse and Bunratty Castle. We hope by 2020 what is known as Irelands Alcatraz will have 100,000 visitors a year, Mr McGrath said.
A forgotten part of Irish history is vividly conjured up on the big screen in Netflix Original production The Siege of Jadotville.

Its the debut feature from music video guy Richie Smyth, based on the 2005 book by former Irish soldier Declan Power and adapted by Kevin Brodbin.

The hook here is that its all based on a barely believable true story as the UN sends a company of untested Irish soldiers into the wilds of the Congo region of Katanga and all hell breaks loose.

Jamie '50 Shades' Dornan plays Commandant Pat Quinlan who is forced to rise to the challenge without any experience in actual battle, supported by his green troops and the force of Jason OMaras Sergeant Jack Prendergast.

The survivors of this engagement were mistreated in the years since the 1961 incident due to a combination of political factors and seeing their tale told in a positive light is the most impressive aspect of this feature.

Sadly its otherwise a pretty hamfisted production. The dialogue is awkward and unnatural and serious budget limitations leave early scenes at the UN looking like they were shot in someones garage.

Dornan manages a little more inflection here than in his staggeringly dull American appearances but theres still little enough personality to be found in him or any of the other men, bar OMaras fierce turn- he could be striding through a Die Hard sequel.

Then theres Mark Strong- a very fine actor with a wonderful voice and British accent, who is forced to attempt some kind of brogue and fails miserably while wearing a wig which looks like it belongs in a Lego set.

Once the action kicks off things do improve- there are some very attractive explosions and some tense moments- but also a minimal grasp of geography and a lack of any shots featuring the combatants in the same frame. Its almost as though they didnt have the money.

When the dust settles this is certainly a story worth telling and a rare moment for Irish soldiers to make their mark. But a lack of resources and experience behind the camera leaves the result less engaging than it might have been.

The Siege of Jadotville is in cinemas across Ireland now and arrives on Netflix on the 7th of October, 2016.

3/5 -Daniel Anderson
The days leading up to the release of director Oliver Stones Snowden looked like one long movie trailer.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups announced a campaign to win a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of its highly classified documents to journalists.

The US House Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan letter to Barack Obama that advised him against any pardon and claimed Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security.

The week before, Stone had invited me to a private screening of his movie in Washington. I once worked in an NSA facility, and Ive written about the agency for decades, so I was surprised and pleased by how successful Stone was in creating an accurate picture of life in the NSA.

He did a remarkable job of capturing the sense of how rare, difficult and risky it is for anyone in the agency to challenge the ethics and legality of its operations. I was astounded by Joseph Gordon-Levitts doppelganger-like portrayal of Snowden. At one point in the film, when the real Snowden appeared, it took me a moment or two to realise the switch.

Among others at the screening was a small group of former government employees who were whistleblowers before Snowden  and paid a high price for it.

The reason they had been persecuted is that US law makes no distinction between revealing illegal government activity to the press about eavesdropping on Americans or engaging in torture, and betraying the country by passing secrets for money or ideology to foreign governments.

The Espionage Act was enacted nearly a century ago following World War One, and has already been amended several times. One key issue confronting the next president and the new US Congress is whether the law needs to be amended again  this time to separate the whistleblowers from the spies.

The Snowden screening audience included William Binney, a 40-year veteran of the NSA. After the 9/11 attacks, Binney quit the agency because he objected to its illegal secret targeting of Americans.

He was later suspected of violating the Espionage Act by leaking information to the press about the agencys illegal wiretapping. FBI agents showed up at his house with a search warrant. One agent pointed a gun at Binney as he was taking a shower. No charges, however, were ever brought.

Another former senior NSA official, Thomas Drake, was in the audience. He was also suspected of leaking information to the press and, as with Binney, the FBI raided his house. But Drake was later charged under the US Espionage Act with five counts of unlawful retention of classified documents, among other charges.

Years of legal battles drove Drake into near-bankruptcy. His defence was able to show, however, that all the information Drake was charged with leaking was actually available in the public domain  and placed there by the government itself. (I was a member of the defence team.)

As a result, the espionage charges were dropped and Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour  exceeding authorised use of a government computer.

John Kiriakou was also at the movie screening. He was the first former official to confirm that al-Qaeda prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, a practice the Obama administration considers torture.

Kiriakou was later charged with three counts of violating the Espionage Act for leaking information to the press, among other charges. In 2012, he pleaded guilty to one count of passing classified information to the media and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Stone came to my house for a drink after the screening that night. He asked about my own small experiences in whistleblowing.

I had spent three years in the Navy during the Vietnam War, I told him, assigned to an NSA unit at Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii. I was still in the Navy Reserve when I went to law school. During my two weeks of active duty I was assigned to an NSA listening post in Puerto Rico.

While there, I discovered that the agency was conducting warrantless eavesdropping on American phone calls. I later blew the whistle on this to a US congressional investigation committee, led by Senator Frank Church, who conducted the Church Committee investigations into US intelligence operations.

Years later, while I was writing The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, Americas Most Secret Intelligence Organization, the agency threatened me with prosecution under the US Espionage Act for refusing to return declassified US Justice Department documents that had later been reclassified as top secret. The documents outlined numerous illegal actions by the agency.

I never returned the documents. No charges were ever brought against me, however, even though I eventually published details from them in my book.

Today, perhaps more than at any time in history, the battle lines have been drawn between those in government  both the executive branch and US Congress  who view the theft of government secrets as espionage, regardless of the motive, and those in civil liberties groups and the media who see motive as a critical distinction.

Since Snowden first revealed that he had taken the NSA documents, he has said he is willing to admit what he did was illegal and accept punishment  including time in prison. In the summer of 2014, I spent three days with him in Moscow for a cover story in Wired magazine and a PBS documentary.

I told the government Id volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose, Snowden told me as we sat eating pizza in a Moscow hotel room.

I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we cant allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. Im not going to be part of that.

But the key question is: What is fair if the US Espionage Act does not recognise acting in the public interest as a defence?

How fair is it if Snowden were not allowed to present as a mitigating circumstance the fact that because of his actions, Congress changed the law, to stop the government from secretly collecting billions of telephone records on every American all the time? How fair is it if he were not allowed to call as a witness, former Attorney General Eric H Holder Jr, who has publicly acknowledged that Snowden actually performed a public service.

At the same time, how fair is it if Snowdens actions, which caused positive change, were viewed as comparable to those of CIA officer Aldrich Ames or FBI agent Robert Hansson, who both sold secrets to Russias intelligence agency for cash, information that resulted in the death of Russians working covertly for the United States?

These Justice Department actions are odd and counterproductive. Particularly because the United States has no extradition treaty with Russia, which means Snowden is beyond the reach of US law enforcement. Yet the administration does not respond when Snowden says that he is willing to discuss turning himself in.

Meanwhile, many in the intelligence community likely fear the kinds of documents that could emerge during the discovery phases of a trial or during witness testimony.

Snowdens last best hope to return to the United States is probably a pardon from President Barack Obama, because both party nominees in the presidential election have expressed little sympathy for his situation.

I dont think he should be brought home without facing the music, Hillary Clinton told CNNs Anderson Cooper. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said he would like to see Snowden executed.

I think Snowden is a terrible threat, Trump said on Fox & Friends in 2013, I think hes a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country? You know what we used to do to traitors, right? One host interjected, Well, you killed them, Donald. Trump agreed.

These were the risks Snowden knew he was taking when he released the NSA documents. Its really hard to take that step, he told me in Moscow, not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that Im willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.

But Stones sympathetic portrayal of Snowden in his film may shift public opinion to a more positive view. The movie shows how Snowden evolves from a supporter of President George W Bush and the war in Iraq into an NSA whistleblower as he gradually uncovers the agencys massive illegal spying on Americans. So the picture might translate into more support for a pardon.

Only time  and strong box-office results  will tell.
Imagine it is 2020. The director of the CIA requests an urgent meeting with the US president. The reason: North Korea has succeeded in making a nuclear bomb small enough to fit inside the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States.

The news soon leaks to the public. High-level meetings to devise a response are held not just in Washington, but in Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow as well.

This scenario may seem unreal today, but it is more political science than science fiction. North Korea just carried out its fifth (and apparently successful) test of a nuclear explosive device, doing so just days after testing several ballistic missiles.

Absent a major intervention, it is only a matter of time before North Korea increases its nuclear arsenal (now estimated at 8-12 devices) and figures out how to miniaturise its weapons for delivery by missiles of increasing range and accuracy.

It is difficult to overstate the risks were North Korea, the worlds most militarised and closed society, to cross this threshold. A North Korea with the ability to threaten the US homeland might conclude it had little to fear from the US military, a judgment that could lead it to launch a conventional, non-nuclear attack on South Korea. Even if such a war ended in North Koreas defeat, it would be extraordinarily costly.

That said, North Korea would not have to start a war for its nuclear and missile advances to have real impact. If South Korea or Japan ever concluded that North Korea was in a position to deter American involvement in a war on the Peninsula, they would lose confidence in US security assurances, raising the possibility that they would develop nuclear weapons of their own.

Such decisions would alarm China and set the stage for a regional crisis or even conflict in a part of the world with the greatest concentration of people, wealth, and military might.

There is another risk as well. A cash-strapped North Korea might be tempted to sell nuclear arms to the highest bidder, be it a terrorist group or some country that decided that it, too, needed the ultimate weapon.

The US has options, but none is particularly attractive.

As for negotiations, there is little if any reason to be confident that North Korea would give up what it considers to be its best guarantee of survival.

In fact, it has often used negotiations to buy time for further advances in its nuclear and missile capabilities.

Another option is to continue with a version of the current policy of extensive sanctions.

The problem is that sanctions will not be potent enough to force North Korea to give up its nuclear and missile programs. This is because China, fearing large refugee inflows and a unified Korea in Americas strategic orbit should North Korea collapse, will most likely continue to ensure that it gets the fuel and food it needs.

As a result, it makes more sense to focus on diplomacy with China. The US, after consulting closely with South Korea and Japan, should meet with Chinese officials to discuss what a unified Korea would look like, so that some Chinese concerns could be met. For example, a unified country could be non-nuclear, and any US military forces that remained on the Peninsula could be fewer and farther south than they are now.

US soldiers

It is of course possible or even probable that such assurances would not lead to any meaningful diminution in Chinese support for North Korea. In that case, the US would have three more options. One would be to live with a North Korea in possession of missiles that could bring nuclear bombs to US soil.

The policy would become one of defence (deploying additional anti-missile systems) and deterrence, with North Korea understanding that any use or spread of nuclear weapons would lead to the end of the regime and possibly nuclear retaliation. Cyber weapons might also be employed to obstruct and impede the progress of North Koreas program.

The second option would be a conventional military attack, targeting North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities. The danger is that such a strike might not achieve all of its objectives and trigger either a conventional military attack on South Korea (where nearly 30,000 US troops are based) or even a nuclear attack from the North.

Needless to say, Japan and South Korea would have to be prepared to support any US military response before it could be undertaken.

The third option would be to launch such a conventional military attack only if intelligence showed North Korea was putting its missiles on alert and readying them for imminent use. This would be a classic pre-emptive strike. The danger here is that the intelligence might not be sufficiently clear  or come early enough.

All of which brings us back to that possible day in 2020. If much is unknown, what seems all but certain is that whoever wins Novembers US presidential election will confront a fateful decision regarding North Korea sometime during her or his term.

Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming book A World in Disarray.
Burma Army officers tried to convince displaced ethnic Karen on Thursday to return to their villages, despite continuous daily fighting in Karen States Mae Tha Waw area, The Irrawaddy has learned.

One officer, commander of Infantry Division 22, and another, the tactical commander of Infantry Division 44, met hundreds of internally displaced people (IDPs) seeking refuge within the compound of a Buddhist monastery in Myaing Gyi Ngu, Hlaing Baw Township. They told the IDPs that the areas they had fled were, in fact, stable, and encouraged them to return to their homes.

In total, more than 3,800 people have been uprooted since Sept. 9 by fighting between the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) and the Burma Army, who are aided by the allied Border Guard Force (BGF).

Among the crowd were 30 additional families who had just arrived that day after escaping fighting in the area of Ba Thraw village.

The Irrawaddy overheard a conversation between a displaced Karen village head and the Tatmadaw officer from the 44th Division.

They are enjoying their food here, so they dont want to go home, right? the tactical commander said.

The village head replied that this was not the casethat the people in his community were too afraid to return to their land.

Nay Lin Htet, who is managing the makeshift camp inside the monastery, told The Irrawaddy that any decision to go back to their homes should be made by the displaced people themselves, rather than due to pressure from above.

They are saying the areas are stable, but we do not know whether its true or not, he said of the army representatives, pointing out that villagers would rather stay in their own houses, and would do so if it were possible.

Until then, Nay Lin Htet added, he would do his best to make sure they are taken care of.

If they keep staying here [] we will continue to help them, Nay Lin Htet said, pointing out that the Karen State government had donated food to support the displaced; since it is a monastery, all meals are vegetarian.

A nurse, who is treating injured and sick IDPs in the Myaing Gyi Ngu monastery, found the officers pressure disingenuous. They were the people who created the problem, she said of the Burma Army. It is not true what they said.

Maj. Naing Maung Zaw from the Karen BGF argued that it was riskier to stay in the monastery.

Their property will destroyed if they abandon their homes and villages for a long time, he said, insisting that the area had been secured.

The Irrawaddy observed some people leaving the monastery by car and motorbike, as well as in army trucks, but learned that they were relocating in order to stay with relatives in other, safer areas, rather than returning home. When the military transport discovered that the IDPs were not going back to their own homes, they asked them to disembark.

Infantry Division 22 has set up an outpost on the nearby Salween River. A further two hours away, fighting continues in Mae Tha Waw. The road out of Myaing Gyi Ngu used to reach Myawaddy, on the Thai border, but the road is now blocked as skirmishes continue to break out along it, making it difficult to leave the country.
Ukraine's State Fish Agency expects that under a EUR 400 million agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB). Some EUR 130 million would be provided for projects in aquaculture and fishing industry.

According to a Tuesday press release of the agency, parliament has ratified the agreement between the EIB and Ukraine to raise EUR 400 million for projects in agriculture.

"We anticipate that one third of the funds under the EIB loan will go to finance aquaculture and fishing industry, for credits for aqua-farmers, develop small and medium-sized enterprises," Agency Head Yarema Kovaliv said.

He said that it is for the first time when fishing industry was foreseen as a separate direction in the large international financial assistance program.

As reported, on September 20, 2016, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada ratified an agreement between Ukraine and the EIB on the issue of EUR 400 million for projects in the agricultural sector.
Burma Illegal Mosques to be Demolished in Arakan State

A mosque in Arakan States Maungdaw Township located near quarter five. / Maungdaw Community / Facebook

RANGOON  Arakan States Security and Border Affairs Minister Col. Htein Lin has ordered the demolition of illegally constructed mosques, schools, houses and other buildings in Maungdaw Township in a meeting at the local administrative office on Sunday, according to a report in the Rakhine Gazette, a local paper.

The local immigration office stated that 12 mosques, 35 Arabic language teaching schools, 2,543 houses, 604 shops and 132 other buildings had been constructed without official permission from the local authorities, though it is not yet known how many of these are earmarked for demolition.

The Rakhine Gazette reported that Htein Lin summoned Muslim religious leaders and quarter administrators to attend the Sunday meeting, and informed the attendees that they would issue official instructions as soon as possible.

The Muslim representatives encouraged the border affairs minister to consider the wellbeing of the impoverished families living there.

Most of the more than 1 million Muslims in Arakan State, also known as Rakhine State, that identify as Rohingyaaround a third of the states populationare denied any form of citizenship. Buddhist Arakanese insist that they are illegal migrants from Bangladesh, and refer to them as Bengali.

Former lawyer U Kyaw Hla Aung told The Irrawaddy that Muslims from the Maungdaw Township have been living there for several decades but have not been allowed to construct or renovate buildings without a permit from local authorities. It is unclear whether the buildings listed to be demolished received a permit or not.

They have lived here more than 20 years without permission to build or repair, how can they live? Should they live on ground? U Kyaw Hla Aung said.

The Rakhine Gazette report quoted Htein Lins speech during the meeting: We will take action against those who disobey instructions. How can we handle [illegal structures] if the number is increasing year by year? We cant ignore those unlawful things.

The Irrawaddy contacted Arakan State ministers, the Chief Ministers spokesperson, and township administrators who attended Htein Lins meeting on Sunday, but no one was available for comment.

A regional legislator of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, U Htun Hla Sein, confirmed that each quarter has at least one mosque or place of worship in his constituency, but could not verify whether these religious buildings had been constructed with the authorities permission.

An Arakan National Party lawmaker representing Buthidaung Township, Htun Aung Thein, said that the actual number of such buildings is higher than government statistics, and that in his constituency, at least 400 illegal religious buildings have been built over several years.

The Irrawaddy talked to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs Aung San Win on Tuesday to clarify what kind of religious buildings are designated as being illegal and if any other religious buildings (including Christian and Buddhist buildings) fit this criteria. He declined to discuss the process and suggested talking to the state and divisional governments.

Such matters are handled by regional governments. We handed authority to them in 2012, he said.

In early August, the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs announced an investigation into what was described as an illegal mosque in Kachin States Hpakant Township that was burned down by a mob.

A ministry statement in a state run newspaper at the time said that, in early 2014, the government had demolished 24 illegal Buddhist monasteries in the Naypyidaw area. Additionally, legal proceedings against 173 monasteries in Rangoon Division and 86 in other states and divisions had been launched at the recommendation of the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, the government-appointed council that oversees monastic discipline in Burma.

Although the ministry statement cited a total of 283 monasteries that had been previously been charged as being illegal, it did not mention any figures for places of worship related to other religions, such as Christianity or Islam.
Burma MNHRC Claims to Have Acted Accordingly in Child Labor Case

MNHRC members attend a press conference on Wednesday concerning their handling of a case of abuse against two girls forced to work in domestic servitude for a tailoring family in Rangoon. (Photo: J Paing / The Irrawaddy)

RANGOON  Representatives from the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) have defended their response to what has become a high-profile case of abuse against two under-aged domestic workers in Rangoon.

The girls, aged 16 and 17, described being beaten, cut, and forced to work for five years with little or no pay for the family who owns the Ava tailoring enterprise in Kyauktada Township.

Once the girls were rescued, the MNHRC reportedly pressured the families of the victims to accept a cash settlement rather than push for legal action. During a meeting with members of the press on Wednesday, the MNHRC maintained that agreeing to monetary compensationtotalling US$4,000was the most appropriate response in the case.

The case of San Kay Khaing and Ma Tha Zin, from Rangoons Kawhmu Township, drew extensive media attention this week, with the human rights commission receiving harsh criticism for what was perceived as taking advantage of the victims and their families lack of legal knowledge and options.

In the press conference, the MNHRC described their role as that of a mediator, engaging in five hours negotiations on Sept. 15 between the San Kay Khaings mother, Tha Zins aunt, and members of the family accused of the abuse. During this time, the MNHRC detailed previous success stories to the individuals of the commissions past interventions.

We left them alone for 15 minutes to talk on their own and we respected their decisions, either to take compensation or to take legal action, said Zaw Win of the MNHRC.

Daw Mya Mya, another MNHRC member present at the press conference, told The Irrawaddy that their intervention had been carried out in accordance with the Commission mandate to protect and advocate for human rights. The commission had, she said, respected the concerned persons decision to take the monetary compensation for the crime.

Yet it has since been revealed that the MNHRC failed to speak directly to the victims, breaching Clause 22 of the commission law which states that they must investigate human rights complaints after they are received.

Zaw Win said this occurred because the victims family members, the ward administrator, local police and womens affairs representatives were present at the negotiation.

Also on Wednesday afternoon, a group of rights activists protested against the MNHRC, in front of their building, for the commissions inaction in the case.

Following criticisms by media and on social media for what was widely deemed insufficient action taken against the perpetrators, Lt-Col Myo Thein, of the police forces anti-human trafficking unit, filed a case accusing the tailoring family of torture.

Rangoon police apprehended three members of the family on Wednesday afternoon: Daw Tin Thu Zar, aged 57, Ko Tin Min Latt, 37, and Ma Su Mon Latt, 27.

Rangoons Western District Police are investigating the police from Kyauktada Township who initially looked into the case, to uncover whether law enforcement acted in accordance with police procedures.

Police Major Khin Maung Htwe, who is heading the investigative committee, told The Irrawaddy that action would be taken if there is evidence that the police failed to perform their duties, but declined to comment further on the ongoing investigation.

Additional reporting by Thuzar.
Business Microsoft Appoints Country Manager to Burma

A Microsoft press conference in Rangoon on Tuesday. / Hein Htet / The Irrawaddy

RANGOON  US-based technology giant Microsoft appointed a country manager to Burma this week, the company announced on Tuesday.

Microsoft is expanding its presence in the country with the appointment of Sy Wann as the first country manager of Microsoft Burma. The company released a statement that said it aims to contribute to the transformation and growth of the local information and communications technology ecosystem by empowering businesses to increase productivity and accelerate growth, working with countrys conglomerate Shwe Taung as well as the Kanbawza (KBZ) Group of Companies.

The new country manager Sy Wann joins Microsoft after spending three years establishing Cisco Systems in Burma. He was responsible for government and CSR (corporate social responsibility) engagement, sales and technical engagement, and partner enablement. He previously worked for Travelocity and Capital One in the United States, where he held various roles in IT, mainly focusing on data management.

Sy Wann will be at the helm of Microsofts product, service and support offerings in Burma.

I am very excited to be joining Microsoft in Myanmar when the country is undergoing rapid growth and modernization across all sectors. I look forward to this opportunity to lead Microsoft in Myanmar and continue supporting the successes and growth of our customers and partners here, Wann said in the statement.

He added that the companys top priorities in Burma include supporting youth and education in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields; enabling economic empowerment, inclusive national development and civic engagement; developing donor-related partnerships and Microsoft Philanthropies programs; and job creation through building a robust partner ecosystem in Burma.

Microsoft began launching its products in Burma in 2013.
Business New Investment Law Expected to be Approved Soon

Burmese and Japanese officials cut ribbons during the opening ceremony of the Thilawa special economic zone in Thanlyin Township outside Rangoon in Sept 2015. / Soe Zeya Tun / Reuters

RANGOON  The new Myanmar Investment Law has been submitted to Parliament and is expected to be approved by October, following discussion by lawmakers and before the current parliamentary session ends.

Ministry of National Planning and Finance Deputy Minister U Maung Maung Win put forward the investment draft bill to the Lower House on Tuesday, following an announcement by the US government that economic sanctions against Burma would soon be lifted.

The bill has been through various drafts, beginning under the previous government. There was a push to submit it to Parliament following State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyis visit to the United States and call for increased US investment in Burma.

The new draft bill combines the Burma Citizens Investment lawenacted in July 2013 and governing local investmentand the Foreign Investment lawenacted in November 2012 and governing foreign investmentinto one law.

Combining these two laws will help create a better investment environment, said U Maung Maung Win.

The draft law reduces the mandate of the Myanmar Investment Commission (MIC) and provides a more tailored approach to tax exemptions, according to the deputy minister.

U Than Aung Kyaw, deputy director general of the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) told The Irrawaddy that the law had been changed significantly from former versions and that it is expected to be passed before the end of the current parliamentary session, which concludes in early October.

We are trying to approve it soon, as a result of Daw Aung San Suu Kyis visit to the United States, he said.

Under the existing investment law, every investment must have the approval of the MIC. Under the draft law, there will be different guidelines needed for MIC approval.

The government will directly handle the investment proposals that are deemed strategically important, require a substantial amount of capital, or could potentially have social and environmental impacts, according to the planning and finance ministry.

The parliamentary session was scheduled to end Sept. 23 but that has been postponed until Oct 7 so that Parliament can debate and pass the investment law.

The new bill includes more strategic tax incentives. If the government chooses to promote a certain business or sector, related investors will receive tax incentives, U Than Aung Kyaw said.

The bill also incentivizes investment in less developed areas.

Lower House lawmaker and businessman Dr. Thet Thet Khine told The Irrawaddy that the country also needed adequate electricity, clear laws and good transportation in order to attract international investment. He said the country should invite investments that would improve infrastructure.

U Nay Myo Htun, a Lower House lawmaker from Htantabin Township said the new law will boost investor confidence.

The Lower House Bill Committee agreed and called the draft law an impetus for technological and industrial development in line with international norms.

There were some problems having two separate laws in the past. Foreign investors sometimes thought they were being discriminated against, which impeded the countrys growth, Bill Committee Chairman U Tun Tun Hein told The Irrawaddy.

The draft law has been approved by the State Counselors Office. Drafted with the help of the International Finance Corporation, it has 23 chapters and 104 clauses, and the definition of terms in the draft law is in line with other international laws.
Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers seeks to continue the budget deficit cutting policy in coming years, decreasing it from 3.7% of GDP in 2016 to 3% of GDP in 2017 and 2.5% of GDP in 2018.

"These are not only our liabilities to international partners, but also it is the right pragmatic policy allowing the country to live at its own expense," Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk said at the presentation of the draft 2017 national budget in parliament on Wednesday.

He said that in 2017 the deficit is projected at UAH 77.5 billion.

According to data presented by the finance minister, the deficit would be reduced to UAH 72 billion in 2018. It would be UAH 72 billion in 2019, but it would be 2.3% of GDP.

Danyliuk said that it is planned to achieve growth of revenue thanks to economic growth, improvement of administration and fight against infringements in the tax and customs areas, not increasing the tax pressure on business.
The law enforcement agencies of Latvia and Ukraine should cooperate more closely in making the decision on transferring EUR 50 million, recognized as illegal funds in Ukraine, to the budget of Latvia, the presidents of the two countries have stated at a bilateral meeting in New York.

The press service of Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis said that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during the meeting in the framework of the UN General Assembly recognized Ukraine had not provided enough information to Latvia in the investigation in the case.

Vejonis praised the Ukrainian government's determination to implement reforms in public administration and national economy and to fight against corruption, noting this takes place in difficult conditions. The president called on Ukraine to reduce barriers to Latvian investments.

He noted Latvia consistently supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, considers it unacceptable to recognize the annexation of Crimea de facto and maintains its demand for Russia to implement the Minsk agreements.

The Latvian president noted Latvia continues to support a closer integration of Ukraine into the EU and appreciates the debate in the European Parliament on the liberalization of a visa regime with Ukraine. Latvia and the EU are interested in the economically strong and democratic Ukraine, he said.

He also invited the president of Ukraine to visit Riga in 2017.
Major: Communication

Hometown: Brazil, IN

Student Media Involvement: Syc Creations

Favorite Food: Burgers with everything but mustard

Fun Fact: He really loves superhero movies, and wants to make his own someday
Despite the rise of numerous competing technologies, such as Slack and Communities, email remains the number one tool for business communication. According to a report by The Radicati Group, the number of worldwide email accounts continues to grow from over 4.1 billion accounts in 2014 to over 5.2 billion accounts by the end of 2018. With email so widely used, there is a huge opportunity to leverage the data it houses to unearth vast insights into everything from customer interactions to HR processes. This can be invaluable in alerting organizations to key opportunities, trends or risks.

So why arent more businesses analyzing communications information to make smarter decisions about the ways in which they operate, both internally and with external stakeholders like customers, prospects and partners?

To help businesses understand the value email analytics presents, Greg Arnette, founder and CTO of Sonian, has identified five ways enterprises can use email analytics augmented by machine learning to surface insights that can help them ward off risk and meet or exceed goals across their organizations.

Discover the Hidden Value of Email

Click through for five ways enterprises can use email analytics augmented by machine learning to surface insights that can help them ward off risk and meet or exceed goals across their organizations, as identified by Greg Arnette, founder and CTO of Sonian.

Unearth Potential Security Risks

According to PWCs 2014 US State of Cybercrime Survey, more than one in four enterprise data security incidents come from inside. Oftentimes, this is the result of click-happy employees who open virus-ridden emails and unknowingly unleash security threats.

Since employee emails are often the entry point for these attacks, business email analytics can serve as an early warning system, alerting businesses of key risks before they escalate into potential disasters. By leveraging data insights to identify trends associated with security breaches  e.g., suspicious emails from a repeat sender  businesses can implement preventative measures to ensure employees are equipped to handle potential risks. For instance, they may educate employees on ways to evaluate whether an email attachment contains a virus and what to do if they see questionable emails in their inbox.

Prevent the Loss of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property (IP) is an organizations most valuable asset, and companies need to do everything in their power to protect it. According to a report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, organizations worldwide lose five percent of their revenue to fraud  with much of it attributable to the theft of IP.

To mitigate IP theft, businesses can employ proactive tactics to predict and prevent future loss. For instance, using data analytics, businesses can identify if employees are sharing proprietary information over email with competitors or outside groups. While companies cannot stop an IP leak from actually happening, they can put a stop to critical information sharing before it is widely spread, and identify trends in the email so they can flag if suspicious activity arises again in the future.

Pinpoint and Correct Inaccurate Messaging Used by Sales Teams

By gaining a view into how sales teams are positioning a businesss brand or product, data insights can help businesses discover where the brand message is resonating, where its falling short or where its inaccurate. This has huge implications for sales teams ability to be successful: Using the most current, effective messaging that accurately articulates the role and value of a companys solution can ensure that prospects are clear on what is being offered to them and how it can benefit them.

Marketing teams work hard to craft messaging that reflects the companys brand, often in nuanced ways. Unfortunately sales teams dont always stay on brand, a fact that often isnt discovered until its been happening for a long time. Should sales-team leads notice that employees are using outdated or incorrect messaging by analyzing communications data, they can make time to connect with individuals and train them on proper messaging, highlighting why its used and the value of a consistent, compelling brand voice. This will help internal teams ensure better engagement with prospects, customers and partners, and present a consistent brand identity to the world.

Gain Clarity on Sales Forecasting

Sales forecasting charts the course for sales and, ultimately, business success. Accurate sales forecasting sets realistic expectations for what can be accomplished and communicates to higher-ups what they can expect in terms of performance. However, many sales teams have failed to meet their goals due to unrealistic forecasting and its often difficult for managers to trust that whats reported in the CRM system is an accurate reflection of reality.

Now, however, new technologies mean sales leadership can leverage communications data to generate more accurate forecasts by validating their sales teams activities. By analyzing the conversations between their team and prospects, sales managers can get never-before-possible insights into whether salespeople are talking to the right individuals at target companies (i.e., those who have the authority or influence to move a deal forward); benchmarking how well they engage prospects with compelling messaging, how frequently they correspond with targets and how close they are to closing deals. As a result, sales leaders can now have a much higher level of confidence that the forecasts in their CRM systems reflect the true status of deals.

Identify Subject Matter Experts

When tasked with projects that are outside their core focus areas, businesses must decide if they want to use in-house resources or external consultants to get the job done. To help make this decision, companies can utilize data insights to identify potential in-house experts who can help them solve the problem at hand  just as well as or better than consultants.

For instance, if a company wins a project related to content marketing, it can leverage an email analytics platform to pinpoint any email communications around this topic. If an employee has spoken about content marketing a lot, the project lead may connect with that person to see if they can help before looking for help outside the organization. Identifying an internal subject matter expert can not only free up time that would typically be spent on process training for an external source, but can also provide the same amount of value, if not more  at a fraction of the cost.

The identification of subject matter experts, particularly within large, distributed organizations, is a function often filled by internal communities. The reality is that not all SMEs in an organization actively participate in these communities, a necessary prerequisite for generating the data necessary to identify them as such. Emails ubiquity as a communications medium, on the other hand, means that all the breadcrumbs for identifying hidden subject matter experts within large organizations are already there.

Conclusion

A companys email data is the most complete record of its activity, history and resources. These emails  and the information they contain  are largely viewed in a transactional sense and their value as a treasure trove of secondary insights for businesses goes largely unrecognized. With the ever-growing ocean of communications data organizations generate, successful companies will be the ones that can mine that data for additional, often transformative insights helping them identify and take advantage of hidden opportunities and mitigate risk.
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on regulating the greenhouse gas related to emission of cow's gas and landfill emissions. It's not a joke but the question is, how can you monitor a cow's flatulence?

The target of the law is to reduce gas emissions that are harmful in the air. Methane and carbon gasses have very big impact on climate change and especially now that California is experiencing drought. Brown signed the law to stop the chemicals that can aggravate their current situation.

If this law is implemented and strictly followed, the effect of greenhouse gases on climate change will be cut into 50 percent. The Air Resources Board has until Jan. 1, 2018 to establish and meet their goals in the reduction of the dangerous gases.

Environmentalists hope that focusing on short-lived gases will be a bigger solution to a long-term problem not only in California but also the whole world.

The strategy of the board is to promote composting of the cows' manure for lesser methane emission. Of course, there are some farmers who are disagreeing with the new law. How can someone control the release of cows' gases?

Tom Mendes, a land owner who just sold his 500-acre dairy farm said that the new law is a hindrance for the small-time farmers in the business. But whatever other people are saying, the government is starting the change.

What comes out of the factories enters the lungs of the citizens which is the primary concern of Brown. It would also require the state's dairy industry, which produces 20 percent of the country's milk, to find a way to reduce methane produced by cow flatulence and manure. The law also requires the reduction of hydrofluorocarbons present in air-conditioning system and aerosol products.

"We're protecting people's lungs, their health by cutting out a poisonous chemical that comes out of diesel trucks," Brown said at a signing ceremony in the Los Angeles suburb of Long Beach. Long Beach has truck ports that emit particulate matters such as black carbon gas that can cause asthma and other lung problems around the area.

The main concern of this law is to protect the health of everybody and not the businessmen who are concerned in their profits.
Michael Bay's "Transformers: The Last Knight," which is the fifth installment of the "Transformers" series, appears to be the most expensive film yet. Avid fans of the movie are raving non-stop as they first sighted the Autobots and Decepticons strolling its way on set in London. The excitement mounts with the stunts, car chases and flying debris the "Transformers" team have in store and are known for.

With some of its story taking place in the past and characters including King Arthur and Merlin appearing in the film, "Transformers: The Last Knight" will not only boast its technologically advanced supercars and hair-raising explosives, but the viewers will also get a glimpse of something the "Harry Potter" fans have always been familiar to. One of the movie's shooting location is the Alnwick Castle in Northumbria, which is most commonly known as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The castle was used for the first two "Harry Potter" films for the Hogwarts exterior shot, as well as other medieval-themed movies since it is considered an iconic landmark in the U.K. Dark Horizons reported that King Arthur's element in the story will transpire in this castle and so during weekends. The film crew are scattered on the castle grounds while the special effects team are busy creating the astonishing explosion shots that fans definitely look forward to in this movie.

Filming of the "Transformers: The Last Knight" has been going around the United Kingdom and is expected to be held in areas like London and North East.

Mark Wahlberg, 45, returns as the aspiring inventor which he previously played in "Transformers: Age of Extinction." While Anthony Hopkins, who is a real-life knight, will join the "Transformers 5" cast for the first time.

"Nobody understands the ramifications of what the government will do to anybody who holds a transformer," Wahlberg previously told Screenrant. "There's no trying to settle things peacefully, he added.

The "Transformers" series, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, has grossed a total of over $3.7 billion worldwide.
After raising $750 million in additional funding, ride-sharing service provider Grab takes on a defensive stance to protect its market in South East Asia against the U.S. firm Uber Technologies Inc., which is keen on infiltrating the region after selling its Chinese operations.

With South East Asia's huge middleclass demographic, it is the ripe market for ride-hailing services, making it a viable target for Uber. With Uber's move to concentrate on the region, Grab needs to strengthen its position in Southeast Asia. This way, it is in a better position to protect its interests in the region.

Grab's Position On The South East Asian Market

After its launching in 2012, Grab has been a dominant presence in South East Asia expanding its operations to Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. At present, Grab claims that it controls more than half of the private-car services while it saturates the market for third-party taxi-hailing services since it controls about 95 percent.

With the newest cash infusion, Reuters reports that Grab's capital position is now at more than $1 billion while its current valuation is more than $3 billion.

Japan's SoftBank Group, an existing investor, led the latest funding round. In a statement published by Forbes, Grab CEO Anthony Tan stated that this funding will help the four-year-old company's pursuit of its long-term goals while building their market leadership.

Uber Eyeing Southeast Asia

After a costly foreign interest in China, Uber decided to sell out to its rival Didi Chuxing. This move freed up significant amounts of capital allowing it to shift its focus on the more viable Southeast Asian market.

Reports say that Uber is increasing technologies, people and resources in Southeast Asia. The U.S. firm is apparently hiring more engineers to strengthen its presence in the region.

Prior to Grab's cash infusion, its Indonesian counterpart, Go-Jek, raised $550 million to support its operations in the region.

If Didi Chuxing 's strategy is any indication, the best way to fend off Uber from taking over the market would be to raise enough money to combat its attacks. Whether Grab could retain its foothold in the Southeast Asian market would depend on its success in diversifying its services and in fending off Uber's attempts to chip off its current market share.
The LG V20 will be coming out in South Korea first. This is no surprise as South Korea is LG's home market; thus, the smartphone maker would want to have its flagship smartphone out there first to take on its biggest rival, Samsung.

The V20 is LG's latest flagship phone and it needs to have a good showing in its home market more than anywhere else. Samsung dominates South Korea and is LG's biggest rival there. LG could capitalize on the issues Samsung is having with the Galaxy Note 7, though the LG V20 will still have to contend with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge.

According to GSM Arena, the LG V20 will be coming out to South Korea on September 29. It would be priced at KRW 899,800 or the equivalent of $803. The price would only be true for South Korea as pricing might differ in other territories.

While South Korea would be the first to get it, other territories would have the LG V20 soon. The United States and Hong Kong are said to be next in line after South Korea. Rumors say that the U.S. will have it on October 21, though the date has not been confirmed. GSM Arena notes that with regards to LG's announcement, October 21 seems far from the September 29 South Korea release and will likely have a much earlier U.S. release date.

The LG V20 was first announced in San Francisco, as Android Headlines stated in its report, so it's only fitting that the LG flagship phone would be released in the U.S. next after South Korea. The smartphone would not disappoint as it has features such as the secondary ticker screen that was first introduced on the LG V10. The main display is a 5.7-inch QHD screen.

The LG V20 is said to be the first smartphone that would have Android Nougat out of the box. It has a Snapdragon 820 processor and 64 GB of internal storage which could be expanded through microSD. It has a 16 MP and 8 MP dual cameras at the back while the front will have a 5 MP camera. With 4 GB RAM, it will be more than enough memory to have apps open without much lag.

How the LG V20 would be against its main rivals remains to be seen. Its specs though would make it a match to Samsung's flagship phones and could even be seen as an alternative to the troubled Galaxy Note 7.

iTechPost also reports that the Xiaomi Mi 5s is coming out to China soon.
Opera has finally launched a free built-in VPN service into its desktop internet browser.

Opera's VPN Feature

According to PCMag, with the introduction of free built-in VPN service, Opera became the first major desktop web browser to offer this feature. Web surfers that are concerned about their privacy online and security-conscious can now use Opera's free and unlimited virtual private network via the desktop browser.

Krystian Kolondra, senior vice president of Opera browser for computers, declared in a statement that most internet users would use a VPN if they would know how the internet truly works. The VPN service in Opera desktop browser creates a secure connection to the Netherlands, Canada, US, Singapore or Germany, providing online security and privacy as well as easy access to certain content available on location basis.

In order to take advantage of this feature, users just have to download the Opera for computers browser from the company's website, then navigate to Preferences on Mac or Settings on PC. There users have to select free VPN under the Privacy & Security setting. In order to activate the private network and choose a preferred location users have to click on the icon labeled "VPN" that will appear to the left of the address field.

Users who are unsure of where to route their online operations can let the browser select the optimal server based on network location, latency, speed and capacity by turning on automatic location mode. Kolondra explained that the free and easy to use VPN service is an essential tool for those internet users concerned about online safety and privacy.

The new Opera browser is powered by the company's subsidiary SurfEasy and utilizes a secure 256-bit AES encrypted connection. The browser is not storing a user's browsing history. According to PCWorld, Opera's VPN service is an independent company that is operating under Canadian privacy laws.

The launch of Opera VPN service on desktop browser follows the release in April of free VPN on the developer edition of its browser. In May, Opera released free VPN on its Android and iOS mobile browsers.
There's one more exciting phone hitting the stores this year, the Google Pixel series. Google is expected to officially close the doors on its Nexus program this year and replace it with the Pixel brand. The company wants to make top-of-the-line mobile products that will compete against the iPhone better, but Google is still acquiring third-party OEMs to produce the actual phones.

Over the last few months, numerous Google Pixel (Sailfish) and Pixel XL (Marlin) leaks emerged, and now, it's time to look at some "official" ones.

Release date

As some reports stated, Google will reveal the new Pixel smartphones on October 4. The company will live stream the event on YouTube, and Google is already promoting the upcoming mobile event on YouTube and social media. Google is still trying to be somewhat enigmatic about things. However, it's more than clear that the whole thing will be about new mobile hardware, the kind of devices that avid Android fans anticipate.

Leaks and rumors

Google released a video featuring a commercial about an up-and-coming smartphone. The video was first seen in the Netherlands, where there are a lot of Android fans all over. Dirt-cheap Nexus phones will be a thing of the past once the Pixel smartphones arrive.

Google is expected to be moving to a new pricing scheme for its phones, and it won't be pretty. The same Android Police confirms that Google Pixel phones will start at $649, which is the entry price for the Sailfish. The Pixel XL will be cost a lot more, and it's safe to say that more storage on the Pixel means you'll pay more than $649.
Due to the latest firmware update distributed by Microsoft in August, the Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 laptop model is facing battery problems again.

Microsoft Pro 3's Battery Issue

Despite the fact that the Surface Pro 3 is among Microsoft's flagship products, now it seems that the battery problem has resurfaced again. This time it affects unlucky owners of the Surface Pro 3 models that sport batteries provided by LGC.

According to due Digital Trends, Microsoft designed the August firmware with the aim to address another battery issue in its Surface Pro 3 old laptop model. However, the update seems to cause new problems, since a post recently published on Microsoft's Community Forums claims that customers are complaining that the update caused their laptops connected to a power outlet to not fully recharge.

The current battery issue applies to models of the Surface Pro 3 laptop that are packing batteries provided by LGC. According to InfoWorld, for LGC batteries, the design capacity is 42,157 mWh.

Due to degradation of the battery after many recharging cycles, the full charge capacity may not match the design capacity, which is a normal occurrence. However, what it is not fine is to have the battery on the laptop charging only up to around 80 percent capacity.

Microsoft faced a similar battery problem earlier this year in Surface Pro 3 models packing batteries provided by Simplo. Aside of not charging fully when devices were connected to the power outlet, the laptops would shut down right after the battery level reached the 20-percent mark or even once the power cable was removed.

According to company's website, Microsoft released the update on August 29 in order to solve the Simplo battery issue. According to the high-tech company, the issue was caused by a software error that misreported the full charge capacity of the battery by the operating system and the device firmware. This prevented the system from fully charging the battery and caused the Surface Pro 3 to stop working without a power connection.
On Tuesday, Sept. 20, AT&T announced its upcoming network technology initiative called Project AirGig.

AT&T's Project AirGig

According to Android Police, AT&T announced initiative could be the very future of company's network infrastructure - both wireless and wired. The Project AirGig is the result of over 100 patent applications and 10 years of research.

This experimental technology developed by the AT&T company uses plastic antennas positioned along medium-voltage lines in order to achieve high broadband internet speeds. The new technology initiative will allow AT&T to get rid of the necessity of tearing up roads and sidewalls and burying fiber lines and tearing up roads and sidewalks in order to expand its network reach. The company will not need expensive network towers anymore and in their place could use much lower cost access point and repeater equipment operating on advanced network technologies.

AT&T's AirGig project is actually based on some entirely new technology that will allow creating a highly distributed network model able to completely change the way both wireless and wired internet are deployed in the future. The infrastructure used for this new technology exists already and it is nothing else than the current power lines.

AT&T created reliable methods that allow using existing medium-voltage power lines in order to transmit ultra fast millimeter wave signals between many access points. Through various technologies such as complex base stations, powered signal repeaters, or unpowered "guided mode" antennas, AT&T will be able to inexpensively distribute its network at speeds and into places that were never before possible without extremely costly cell tower or fiber line deployments.

According to networking experts, there is a great potential of what AT&T is planning with its Project AirGig. This truly impressive technology has implications for various environments, such as rural, suburban and urban. In AT&T's vision this technology could become the exoskeleton of a 5G network.

According to PCWorld, AT&T already tested its AirGig project in outdoor locations on campus settings. Certainly, with such innovative technologies lower latencies and faster speeds are coming. The future of mobile networks will probably change even the traditional internet access and vastly increase its availability.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde have agreed that the next visit of an IMF mission to Ukraine will be in autumn, the presidential press service reported late on Wednesday.

"Petro Poroshenko and Christine Lagarde have agreed on a new IMF mission's arrival in Ukraine in autumn this year," the press service said following the talks on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York on Wednesday.

Poroshenko thanked Lagarde for the IMF Executive Board's decision in favor of further cooperation with Ukraine and for the disbursement of additional financial assistance.

The parties also discussed the pace of reform in Ukraine. In particular, they touched on the implementation of reform in the financial and banking sector.

Gerry Rice, the Director of Communications at the IMF, in turn announced after the meeting between Poroshenko and Lagarde that "they discussed recent economic developments and the Managing Director strongly encouraged continued implementation of the authorities' economic reform program supported by the IMF."
The European Commission has reworked its plan to end mobile phone roaming fees in the face of widespread criticism of its 90-day annual limit.

It now plans to abolish all hard limits on roaming, but fudged the details by allowing carriers to block or charge for usage they consider abusive in order to prevent Irish consumers bankrupting Latvian mobile operators.

Under the new proposal, mobile subscribers will be able to roam across the European Union year around with no charge -- unless their carrier thinks their usage abusive. In that case, after alerting the subscriber the carrier will be able to levy roaming surcharges of 0.04 (US$0.04) per minute, 0.01 per text message or about 8.70 per gigabyte of data.

If subscribers want to dispute the charges, they would have to justify their roaming usage to the carrier, said European Commissioner for the Digital Economy Gunther Oettinger. Disputes would be referred to the national telecommunications regulator.

Deciding what constitutes abusive usage is left in large part up to carriers, which will also be able to impose the same surcharges year-round if they can convince their regulator that providing free roaming puts their domestic charging model at risk.

The Commission outlined a number of situations it would consider abusive: if subscribers' domestic traffic is insignificant compared to their roaming traffic, if their SIM card is used mostly while roaming, or if they have a number of SIM cards that they use in turn while roaming.

The bottom line, said Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, is whether the subscriber is a resident of, or has stable links entailing frequent and substantial presence in, the SIM issuer's country.

In the case of the mass purchase of SIM cards in a country with low telecommunications charges, and their resale for permanent use in a country with higher charges, the Commission will allow carriers to take "immediate and proportionate measures" -- presumably including disconnecting the lines -- as long as they tell their national regulator.

Oettinger explained the dangers of such resale: "Prices in Latvia, for example, are 6.5 times lower than in Ireland. In commercial terms, a SIM card from Latvia could be operated in Ireland and an Irish person would telephone to Dublin at Latvian prices. So, the Latvian company on the Irish wholesale market would have to pay higher prices than it is earning in the market of the end consumer. In a few days it would become insolvent."

The Commission is sending its new plan to BEREC, the body of EU telecommunications regulators, for comment, and hopes to obtain approval from EU member states by year-end. If hopes to end roaming charges on June 15, 2017.
FROM LEFT: Steve Campbell, chief operating officer; Aracely Smith, compliance officer; Jeff Klicka, president of the board of directors; Larry Lewis, chief executive officer; Linda Rubin, member of the board of directors; and Susan Tucker, honorary director of the Womens Auxiliary of Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District attend the presentation of a $9,588 check to the hospital from the Auxiliary on Tuesday in Brawley. William Roller Photo
Meeting of reps from Russian, Ukrainian energy ministries did not happen as scheduled in Minsk, planned to be held soon

The leadership of energy ministries of Russia and Ukraine may meet in Minsk soon, OSCE Special Envoy Martin Sajdik told reporters.

Previously, it was announced that a meeting between the senior officials from the energy ministries of the two countries was to be held in Minsk on September 21, but the meeting failed to materialize. Anyway, the sides confirmed their commitment to hold the meeting as soon as possible, Sajdik said.

In early September, Sajdik revealed that representatives of the Russian Energy Ministry and the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry of Ukraine would meet in Minsk on September 21 to discuss electric power supply in Donbas.
This Week in Review

A weekly review of the best and most popular stories published in the Imperial Valley Press. Also, featured upcoming events, new movies at local theaters, the week in photos and much more.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has held a meeting with U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

"The interlocutors discussed the situation in Donbas and the implementation of the Minsk agreement," the Ukrainian president's press service reported.

Poroshenko thanked the United States for strengthening sanctions against Russia. The two officials agreed to intensify diplomatic efforts to end the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president also emphasized the importance of the IMF's decision to provide the third tranche to Ukraine and stressed his country's commitment to continue reforms.

Biden told Poroshenko that the U.S. is ready to provide Ukraine with $1 billion in loan guarantees, since Ukraine has fulfilled the necessary conditions.
Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has held a meeting with his Latvian counterpart Raimonds Vejonis in New York.

"The head of state thanked Latvia for its consistent support of Ukraine in the provision of the visa-free regime and the policy of sanctions against Russia over its aggression against Ukraine,' Poroshenko's press service reported.

The two presidents agreed to enhance cooperation between their countries at the international level and within international organizations.

Poroshenko also asked Vejonis to facilitate the investigation by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies into the cases against former Ukrainian leaders and the return of money confiscated by the Latvian government.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his Argentinean counterpart Mauricio Macri have met in the United States to discuss the resumption of political and business contacts between the two countries, paying special attention to cooperation in energy, aerospace, aircraft building, and agriculture.

"The heads of state noted the fact that the meeting between the Ukrainian and Argentine presidents was taking place for the first time in the last 16 years. The parties emphasized the importance of restoring active political and business contacts between the two states at all levels," the Ukrainian presidential press service reported.

The two presidents confirmed mutual interest in developing bilateral trade and economic cooperation and outlined priorities, namely cooperation in the energy sector, aerospace, aircraft building, and agriculture.

They also touched on issues of bilateral history. Poroshenko emphasized that Ukraine would always remember the fact that Argentina had been the only Latin American country to recognize the Ukrainian People's Republic in February 1921 and establish diplomatic relations with it. It has also been the first Latin American country to recognize the independence of Ukraine on December 5, 1991.

Macri in turn said he highly appreciated the contribution made by the large Ukrainian Diaspora to the development of Argentina. Further, he noted that in 2017, his country would mark the 120th anniversary of the first Ukrainian settlements in Argentina.
It's official - Brangelina is over.



In the divorce documents that Angeline Jolie filed on Tuesday, the actress cited irreconcilable differences and seeks for full physical custody of their six children. She also seeks to keep her jewelry and all her properties and assets earned after their date of separation on Sept. 15, just over two years after their marriage.



Brad Pitt broke his silence about the issue through his statement to CNN, where he asked the press to give Jolie and their children "the space they deserve during this challenging time." Jolie's lawyer Robert Offer even mentioned that the actress also asks for privacy and will not be giving any comments during this difficult time. The lawyer also added that the actress filed the divorce for the "health of the family."



It was previously reported that the couple was heading to splitsville and people wondered how the celebrity couple would split their fortune and kids.

According to a November 2015 article of Hollywood Life, the couple might possibly be on the way to a $400 million dollar divorce due to "explosive fights" and allegations that Pitt was cheating on Jolie. The same publication also accuses that the former was getting tired of his wife's dark side and bad habits triggered by the latter's health conditions.



Furthermore, according to Page Six, Jolie found out that Pitt was too caught-up in the movie's atmosphere of hard drugs and Russian hookers thru the eye of her hired private investigator. Reports also hinted a possibility of Pitt's affair with "Five Seconds of Silence" co-star, Marion Cotillard, 40, as Jolie was said to find the closeness of the two stars worrisome.



Meanwhile, TMZ posted that the break-up is due to Pitt's substance abuse of weed and possibly alcohol, which may have led to the actor's bad parenting. Another theory why the couple called it quits is because of their constant busyness as Pitt was busy with his movies while Jolie was busy with her charity works.

It can be remembered that on November 2015, Pitt and Jolie opened up with Today about their relationship while they were promoting their movie "By The Sea." The latter wrote and directed the movie, which is about a troubled husband and wife, but denied that the plot is any close to their real-life relationship.



Pitt and Jolie have six kids in total and Jolie is seeking for full physical custody of all the children. She did not file for shared physical custody but solely asks for shared legal custody. She also asked the court to grant Pitt visitation rights for the children.



The couple have been together for a decade before they got married in August 2014. Pitt met Jolie on the film set of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" where the former at the time was married to actress Jennifer Aniston. The couple have been inseperable since then.



The world reacted in shock with the #BrangelinaBreakUp especially that the two just celebrated their second year anniversary last month.
U.S. President Barack Obama said at a UN General Assembly meeting on Tuesday that there was no "plot imposed from abroad" during Euromaidan events in Ukraine in 2014.

"After all, the people of Ukraine did not take to the streets because of some plot imposed from abroad. They took to the streets because their leadership was for sale and they had no recourse," he said.

"They demanded change because they saw life get better for people in the Baltics and in Poland, societies that were more liberal, and democratic, and open than their own," he added.

Euromaidan protests on Kyiv's Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, began late in 2013 after pro-European activists had been beaten and killed by law enforcement agencies. The protests made the then president Viktor Yanukovych flee Ukraine for Russia in February 2014. It was followed by the annexation by Russia of Ukraine's Crimea in March 2014 and Russian aggression in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, which is dubbed by the incumbent Ukrainian authorities "Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO)."
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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

"The two chiefs of state discussed progress in implementation of the agreements reached at the fifth meeting of the High-Level Strategic Council between Ukraine and Turkey, including trade liberalization," the Ukrainian presidential press service said in a report.

The sides pointed to the busy bilateral agenda and confirmed their aspiration for deepening strategic partnership, the report said.

Poroshenko offered Turkish companies to participate in privatization of Ukrainian enterprises.

The sides agreed on the soonest meeting of the Ukrainian-Turkish energy working group, the report said.

Erdogan said that Turkey would continue to support restoration of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity "both in the bilateral and multilateral dimensions," the report said.
Rowan County commissioners again can open their meetings with prayer  at least for now.

A divided panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision by a Greensboro federal judge and ruled that the mostly Christian invocation county leaders used to open their sessions did not violate the separation of church and state.

In the 2-1 decision, 4th Circuit judges Steven Agee of Virginia and Dennis Shedd of Columbia, S.C., cited a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case involving the town of Greece, N.Y., that upheld prayer at public meetings.

The lower court judge, U.S. District Judge James Beaty of Greensboro, ruled in May 2015 that the Rowan County case differed because the commissioners themselves, not visiting ministers or audience members, were giving the prayers. Some 97 percent of the time between 2007 and 2013, those prayers were Christian.

Agee and Shedd ruled, however, that the commissioners role was immaterial. In his majority opinion, Agee cited a clear line of precedent not only upholding the practice of legislative prayer but acknowledging the ways in which it can bring together citizens of all backgrounds and encourage them to participate in the workings of their government.

In his dissent, 4th Circuit member Harvie Wilkinson, said the commissioners prayers sent a message of exclusion to those who did not ascribe to their beliefs.

... It is the combination of the role of the commissioners, their instructions to the audience, their invocation of a single faith and the local governmental setting that threatens to blur the line between church and state to a degree unimaginable in the earlier Supreme Court case, Wilkinson wrote.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the commissioners in March 2013 on behalf of three Rowan County residents, said it will ask the full 4th Circuit to hear the case.
CHARLOTTE  A dozen police officers were injured Tuesday night in clashes with several hundred people protesting an officer-involved fatal shooting in the University City area.

Shouting protesters continued to block streets well after midnight, despite the use of tear gas by police in riot gear.

The protest began on Old Concord Road at Bonnie Lane, where a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer fatally shot a man in the parking lot of a University City apartment complex Tuesday afternoon.

The man who died was identified late Tuesday as Keith Lamont Scott, 43, and the officer who fired the fatal shot was CMPD Officer Brentley Vinson, a police statement said. Both men were African-American, a police source confirmed.

Police said they had been searching for someone who had an outstanding warrant at The Village at College Downs complex on Old Concord Road when they saw Scott leave his car holding a gun.

Officers approached Scott after he got back into the car. He emerged from the car again armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers, who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject, police said in a statement. The officers immediately requested Medic and began performing CPR.

Medic took Scott to Carolinas Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Scott was not the person officers were searching for to arrest on the outstanding warrants, CMPD Chief Kerr Putney told reporters later.

Police said they recovered the firearm Scott was holding.

But a woman who said she is Scotts daughter claimed on a live-streamed video on Facebook that Scott was unarmed when he was shot. The video went viral, with more than 521,000 views by 9:30 p.m.

In the video, the woman said her father was sitting in his car reading a book and waiting for the school bus to drop off his son. She claimed that her father was Tasered and then shot four times, and that he was disabled.

Police declined to respond directly to the womans accusations.

Protesters began to gather as night fell. They held signs that said Stop Killing Us and Black Lives Matter, and they chanted No justice, no peace.

A CMPD helicopter circled very low over the crowd, shining a bright searchlight on the protesters. Old Concord Road was shut down. Some protesters began to throw water bottles and rocks.

At 10:53, police donned gas masks, and tear gas was soon deployed.

Protesters vandalized at least one CMPD vehicle. One officer was hit in the face with a rock.

At one point, the crowd began pushing down the ramp from Old Concord to Harris Boulevard West, blocking the road.

Around 1 a.m. Wednesday, police were seen handing bottles of water to the several dozen people who were still protesting.

As is standard procedure with any officer-involved shooting, CMPDs Internal Affairs Bureau will conduct a separate but parallel investigation to determine whether CMPD policies and procedures were followed.

Per department protocol, Vinson will be placed on administrative leave.

Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call police at 704-432-TIPS (8477) or Crime Stoppers at 704-334-1600.
Zaporizhia Regional Council at a meeting on Tuesday upheld an address of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine dated October 27, 2015 to the United Nations and other international institutions concerning the recognition of Russia as an aggressor-country, and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics as terrorist organizations.

It took the council three attempts to pass such a decision with the support of 43 members of the council out of a total of 45 registered in the hall, the UKROP party press service reported on Tuesday.

In addition, the council members voted to recognize volunteers as combatants. This decision was supported by 45 lawmakers, the party said.

The UKROP party member also suggested banning pro-Russian performing artists from touring in Zaporizhia region. However, this initiative was not supported.

As reported, Zaporizhia City Council earlier banned concerts by performers who support the aggressor country.
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By Chip Ward | ( Tomdispatch.com ) |  

Americans who dont live in the West may think that the historic clash of Native Americans and pioneering settlers is long past because the Indians were, after all, defeated and now drive cars, watch television, and shop at Walmart. Not so. That classic American narrative is back big time, only the Indians are now the good guys and the cowboys  well, their rightwing representatives, anyway  are on the warpath, trying to grab 640 million acres of public lands that they can plunder as if it were yesteryear. Meanwhile, in the Dakotas, Americas Manifest Destiny, that historic push across the Great Plains to the Pacific (murdering and pillaging along the way), seems to be making a return trip to Sioux country in a form that could have planetary consequences.

Energy Transfer Partners is now building the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.7 billion oil slick of a project. Its slated to go from the Bakken gas and oil fracking fields in northern North Dakota across 1,100 miles of the rest of the Dakotas and Iowa to a pipeline hub in Illinois. From there, the oil will head for refineries on the Gulf Coast and ultimately, as the emissions from fossil fuels, into the atmosphere to help create future summers so hot no one will forget them. Keep in mind that, according to global warmings terrible new math, theres enough carbon in those Bakken fields to roast the planet  if, that is, the Sioux and tribes allied with them dont stop the pipeline.

This time, in other words, if the cavalry does ride to the rescue, the heroes on horseback will be speaking Lakota.

Last Stand at Standing Rock

If built as planned, the Dakota Access Pipeline will snake through the headwaters of the Missouri River, a life-giving source of fresh water for millions of people who live downstream, including Native Americans. Its supposed to pass under that river just a few miles from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. Protestors point out that, eventually, the pipeline is likely to leak into that vital watershed and the contamination could prove catastrophic. The Army Corps of Engineers, which green-lighted the projects design, and Energy Transfer Partners have continued to insist that there is no such risk  even though, suspiciously enough, they decided to change the pipelines route to avoid the water supply of North Dakotas capital, Bismark. As ever, tribal leaders point out, they were ignored rather than consulted in the planning stages, even though the project was to pass directly through their lands.

When the Keystone XL Pipeline, slated to bring especially carbon-heavy tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, was killed thanks to years of fierce environmental protests, the stakes were raised for the Dakota Access Pipeline. Keystone was a disaster for the energy industry. In its wake, opponents claim, the new project was fast-tracked without the usual environmental reviews so that construction could be completed before a Keystone-style opposition formed. Fast as they were, it turns out that they werent fast enough.

Keep in mind that such a project wasnt exactly a first for the native peoples of the region. In the wake of their defeat and confinement to reservations in the nineteenth century, they lived through a profound transformation of their landscape. Settlers let cattle loose on meadows cleared of wolves, cougars, and bears. The rude stamp of progress followed: fences, roads, dams, mines, sawmills, railroads, power lines, towns, condos, resorts, and in the twenty-first century, vistas increasingly pockmarked with frackings drill rigs and service roads.

In the Dakota prairies, hundreds of species of grass and flowers were replaced by monocultures of soy and corn, while millions of cattle were substituted for herds of free-roaming bison. As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, the neighboring Sioux and Cheyenne lost 200,000 more acres of valuable reservation farmland to dams built without their permission. Entire villages had to relocate. The Dakota Access Pipeline is just the latest of these assaults and yet, in every way, its potentially more disastrous. As Lakota Chairman David Archambault puts it, To poison water is to poison the substance of life.

Slaughter, internment, and neglect were bad enough, say tribal leaders, but threatening the peoples life-giving water was the last straw. As a result, thousands of Native Americans drawn from 280 tribes across the country and even around the world are now camping out at the construction site where the Dakota Access Pipeline nears the tip of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Almost two million signatures have been gathered on a petition opposing the pipeline; dozens of environmental groups have signed on to the resistance; and tribes nationwide have expressed their solidarity.

On September 3rd, the private security guards hired by Energy Transfer Partners used pepper spray and dogs on those trying to block the pipeline. This eruption of violence halted work until U.S. District Judge James Boasberg could rule on the tribes request for an injunction to block construction while its case was heard in court. On September 9th, while conceding that the United States relationship with Indians has been contentious and tragic, he denied that request. Then, in a move described even by the Sioux as stunning, the Obama administration suddenly stepped between the protesters and the pipeline construction crews. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and even the Army Corps of Engineers called for a halt to the process until the permitting procedure could be reviewed.

Although putting an oil pipeline under a major river should have triggered an environmental review, the Corps chose not to do one. Now, it will take a second look. The administration also committed itself to finding better ways to include Native Americans in future land-use decisions.

Where this goes next is anyones guess. The construction halt could, of course, be lifted if the protesters were to disperse under a false sense of victory. The Sioux now plan to litigate vigorously against the pipeline. One prediction, however, is easy enough. The unity and purpose experienced by the people in that encampment will resonate powerfully for years to come. A movement has been born along the banks of the Missouri River.

Native Americans have played the crucial role in this campaign to keep it in the ground, just as they were leaders in the successful struggle to block the Keystone XL Pipeline, the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline that would have carried dirty crude across Canada to the Pacific, and the building of a massive coal export port on Canadas Pacific coast. As Native American leader Winona LaDuke puts it, For people with nothing else but land and a river, I would not bet against them.

This Town Aint Big Enough for the Both of Us

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the cowboys have been engaged in a not-so-old-fashioned range war over who can best manage 640 million acres of public lands now owned collectively by the American people. Backed by the Koch brothers and their American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, legislators across the American West, where most of the public lands are located, are calling on the federal government to cede control and management of them to counties and states. This would include some of our most beloved national parks.

In Utah where I live, the Republican-dominated legislature has put forward the Public Lands Initiative (PLI). Its the latest round in a 30-year feud pitting conservationists and businesses tied to tourism and recreation against ranchers and miners. At stake: whether to give the last publicly controlled wild places in the state formal wilderness status and federal protection or (though this isnt often directly said) let private interests exploit the hell out of them. Every few years the Utah legislatures cowboy caucus has pushed just such a wilderness bill filled with poison pills and potentially devastating loopholes that the local conservation community cant abide.

Billed this time as a potential grand bargain to settle who controls public lands and how they can be used, the PLI has proven no different. It was, in fact, generated by local fears that President Obama might use his wide-ranging powers under the Antiquities Act to create a new national monument in the state as he left the Oval Office. This was exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1996, establishing the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument on 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utahs spectacular canyon country, already the home of five national parks.

That 1906 act, passed while Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, gives the president wide-ranging authority to create national monuments from public lands in order to protect significant natural, cultural, or scientific features. Since activities like drilling for oil and gas, mining, timber cutting, and grazing are barred or tightly restricted on such protected lands, Western politicians tend to regard them as a tool wielded by conservationists to suppress economic development.

Grave Robbing for Fun and Profit

Sure enough, the nightmare of the cowboys is being realized. A coalition of five tribes, all either presently in Utah or claiming ancestral lands there, is now pushing a bold proposal for just such a national monument  a park co-managed by the five tribes and the National Park Service (which in itself would be a significant first for the Native American community). It would include 1.9 million acres of the ancestral grounds of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain, and Ute Indian tribes and would be known as the Bears Ears after the areas most famous landmark, twin buttes that are said to resemble a bears ears.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewel recently toured the proposed monument and was amazed by what she saw, including spectacular cliff-house ruins, as well as paintings and rock carvings depicting clan signs, shamanic visions, and ghostly herds of bighorn sheep and elk. Bears Ears would possess more than 100,000 archaeological sites, including many of the oldest and most spectacular ruins in the United States. Members of the coalition of tribes regard them and the ground littered with their ancestors artifacts and bones as sacred.

A grassroots group, Utah Dine Bikeyah, did extensive groundwork collecting data and interviews to create cultural maps of the region. The extraordinary archaeological and historical record they built effectively made their case that the ancestors of the coalition tribes have relied on that landscape for hunting, gathering, and ceremonial activities for centuries. The Utah conservation community, which had mapped out its own plans for such a monument, stepped aside for the tribal proposal.

Protecting the Bears Ears is considered an urgent matter. A mere handful of rangers currently patrol thousands of square miles of rugged canyons where the looting of archaeological sites for fun and profit is a rural tradition. In remote outposts like Blanding, Utah, Indian grave robbing was considered an acceptable family pastime until agents from the FBI infiltrated the black market for artifacts and busted a prominent local family. Ute leader Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk expresses a motivating concern of the tribal leaders. Without swift action, she says, we fear that the archaeological and cultural riches of the Bears Ears will suffer shameful, disgraceful dissolution and obliteration.

Her fear is well founded. In recent years, for instance, rural county commissioners have led illegal all-terrain-vehicle rallies on a route through Recapture Canyon that Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers shut to motorized traffic because it crosses several key archaeological sites. State and county politicians were not content to challenge the BLMs closure of that canyon in court. Instead, they openly promoted such rides to defy the feds. The last of these protests in 2014 did, in fact, significantly damage unprotected archeological sites. The indigenous community saw it as a shocking show of disrespect, like driving directly over cemetery graves. The well-armed vigilantes who rode through Recapture Canyon were led by Ryan Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy and the famous hothead of the Bundy clan.

You may remember the colorful Bundy boys. After all, they became the stars of the cowboy rebellion against federal regulation on public lands. In 2014, BLM rangers were dispatched to Nevada to remove Cliven Bundys cows from lands on which they had been grazing illegally for 20 years. The feds claimed that he owed the taxpayers a million bucks in unpaid grazing fees. He, on the other hand, insisted that such public lands belonged to the ranchers whose grandparents first grazed them. The rangers sent to enforce the law were met by hundreds of armed cowboys, many of whom took up sniper positions around them. Faced with such overwhelming firepower and the prospect of bloodshed, they withdrew and a range war was on.

The Gang That Couldnt Shoot Straight

That retreat in Nevada undoubtedly emboldened the Bundy clan and their militia allies to seize Oregons Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. Well-armed, they occupied the visitor center at that bird refuge, leaning on every cowboy cliche in the book. They dressed the part with chaps, boots, buckles, and Stetson hats, carried American flags, and regularly posed with their horses for news photographers.

In the end, despite the Marlboro Man look and the Clint Eastwood demeanor, the Bundyites came across as the gang that couldnt shoot straight. The constitutional revolution they wanted to spark by seizing Malheur fizzled amid a festival of cognitive dissonance and irony: men carrying assault rifles and threatening to use them proclaimed themselves peaceful protesters and, while declaring it off limits, attempted to return land to the American people  land that they already owned. Federal agents eventually arrested all of the principal players in both the earlier Nevada standoff and the Malheur fiasco, except for one killed at a roadblock when he charged armed rangers and reached for his gun. Trials began on September 7th and are slated to last for months.

Given the open hostility of state and local politicians to the protection of sacred sites, as well as their willingness to break the law and offer tacit support for vigilantes like the Bundys, tribal leaders decided to take their concerns about protecting their ancestral grounds to the top. A delegation traveled to Washington and met with President Obama, while a media campaign was begun to persuade others to endorse the plan.

A broader coalition of tribes and the conservation community rallied to the idea, especially because it was the first time that Native American tribes had proposed such a monument. The vision of a park to honor sacred indigenous lands, shaped and directed by Native Americans themselves, caught the public imagination. The New York Times and Washington Post have both written editorials urging the president to create such a park and Utah polls show a solid majority of citizens in favor of it.

Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes

The genocidal policies that accompanied settlement across North America crested in Sioux country at the close of the nineteenth century. The survivors of the vanquished indigenous nations there were interned on reservations. Their children were taken from them and sent to boarding schools where their hair was cut, and their language and ceremonies banished. This was  and was meant to be  a form of cultural genocide. In the Bears Ears and Sioux country today, however, the culture of Native Americans endures. The descendants of those warriors who died defending their homeland and of those children taken from their families and their native cultures have proven remarkably resilient. They are once again defending their world and, as it happens, ours too, because even if you dont share the Missouri River watershed, you live on a planet that is being rapidly transformed by the sort of toxic cargo that will fill a future Dakota Access Pipeline.

In the Hollywood Westerns of my youth, Indians were often one-dimensional villains who committed atrocities on good white folks trying to bring civilization to the frontier. As with so many notions I inherited in my youth, reality has turned out to be another story.

Certainly, before the onslaught of colonialism, the way indigenous people across the planet viewed what we now call our environment has come to seem like sanity itself. The land, as the Sioux and other tribal peoples saw it, was a living being saturated with spirits that humans should both acknowledge and respect.

The Indians whom the cowboys and bluecoats fought didnt share European concepts of cash, property, profit, progress, and, most importantly, technology. Once upon a time, we had the guns and they had the bows and arrows, so we rolled over them. But heres the wondrous thing: a story that seemed to have ended long ago turns out to be anything but over. Times have changed, and in the process the previous cast of characters has, it seems, swapped roles.

An economy hooked on carbon is threatening life on Earth. The waters of seas and oceans are warming fast; the weather is becoming unpredictable and harsh. Perhaps its time to finally listen to and learn from people who lived here sustainably for thousands of years. Respecting Sioux sovereignty and protecting the sacred sites of tribes in their own co-managed national monument could write the next chapter in our American story, the one in which the Indians finally get to be heroes and heroines fighting to protect our way of life as well as their own.

Chip Ward, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded HEAL Utah and wrote Canaries on the Rim and Hopes Horizon. Returning from hiking trips in the Bears Ears, he long kept his knowledge of the ruins he visited to himself, fearing the vulnerability of ancient cliff houses and granaries to looters. He is hopeful that they will now get the protection they deserve.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardts latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Chip Ward

Via Tomdispatch.com

-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: Bernie Sanders Joins Dakota Access Pipeline Protest
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

Every time a person of Middle Eastern heritage who ought to have been committed to an insane asylum but wasnt (because rich people who dont want to pay taxes successfully lobbied to get rid of insane asylums) commits violence, our press and politicians hit the panic button. This is so even though you are more likely to die falling in your bathtub than of terrorism.

So here are some problems that are demonstrably worse than terrorism:

1. Guns. Between 2001 and 2013, over 400,000 Americans died of gunshot wounds. In the same period, 3,380 died of terrorism. One problem seems orders of magnitude more important than the other, despite the numbers being skewed by the inclusion of the highly unusual mass-casualty event of 9/11. Averaged out, about 282 Americans have died in terrorism per year (it falls to more like 9 if you start in 2002). per year. We are told we have to spend trillions, mobilize police and the military, and give our all to end terrorism.

2. Cigarettes . These nasty nail coffins result in more than 480,000 deaths annually in the USA. But Big Tobacco CEOs are not being threatened with deportation.

3. Suicide: 42,773. Expanded mental health care and ore government-funded suicide crisis centers might help, but no one on Capitol Hill is in a frenzy about this one. Veterans are particularly at risk here. Again, Congress dont care.

4. Automobile collisions (they arent accidents) killed 38,000 people last year, a big rise. Lots of things could be done to decrease this number radically. For instance you could make automobile keys that drunk people dont have enough coordination to use. But no one cares enough to do them.

5. War on terror. Nearly 7,000 Americans have died prosecuting the war on terror. My guess is that well over half a million human beings have died in it. There is no evidence that the war in Iraq, e.g. had any effect in reducing terrorism, and there is every reason to think that the invasion vastly expanded the scope of ME war and terrorism.

6. Heat waves kill as many as 1400 Americans each year. Climate change will cause that statistic to rise 20 times over, to 27,000 a year, in the coming decades. That is, over a 50-year period, some 1,350,000 people will die that otherwise would not have. Yet no one is speaking of deporting the CEOs of big hydrocarbon companies.



Related video:

SCOTUS Rejects Philip Morris Appeal In Smokers Death
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Sept. 21, 2016) -

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION.

THIS NEWS RELEASE IS INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION IN CANADA ONLY AND IS NOT INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

Alabama Graphite Corp. ("AGC" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:ALP)(OTCQX:ABGPF)(FRANKFURT:1AG) is pleased to announce that further to its September 15, 2016 announcement ('Alabama Graphite Corp. Announces Proposed Non-Brokered Private Placement'), the Company has closed its previously-announced private placement (the "Private Placement") consisting of approximately 7,124,000 units (the "Units") at a price of $0.15 per Unit for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately $1,068,000. The Private Placement remains subject to the final approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSX-V").

Each Unit is comprised of one common share in the capital of the Company (each, a "Common Share") and one Common Share purchase warrant (each, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder to purchase one additional Common Share at an exercise price of $0.20 for a period of 24 months following the date of issue, subject to customary adjustment provisions.

No agent or broker commissions or finders' fees were paid in connection with the Private Placement.

This Private Placement brings the Company's total investment raised to more than $2.3 million in the last four months (see the Company's May 20, 2016 announcement, 'Alabama Graphite Corp. Completes Oversubscribed Non-Brokered Private Placement with Insider Participation; Announces Granting of Options' and September 6, 2016 announcement, 'Alabama Graphite Corp. Completes Oversubscribed Non-Brokered Private Placement with Insider Participation; Announces Granting of Options').

AGC intends to use the net proceeds of the Private Placement for working capital and further advancing the Company's development of its metallurgical process for producing coated spherical graphite ("CSPG") for use in Lithium-ion batteries.

Pursuant to applicable Canadian securities laws, all securities issued pursuant to the Private Placement are subject to a hold period of four months and one day, which expires on January 22, 2017.

The President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, Donald K. D. Baxter, participated in the Private Placement as an insider, along with the Chief Financial Officer, an Independent Director and other deemed insiders of AGC. Such participation represents a related-party transaction under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"), but is exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 as neither the fair market value of the subject matter of the transaction, nor the consideration paid, exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization.

The Private Placement was approved by all of the independent directors of the Company. The number of Common Shares potentially issuable to insiders of the Company pursuant to the Private Placement (including any Common Shares issuable upon the exercise of the Warrants) represents not more than 10% of the Company's currently issued and outstanding Common Shares on a non-diluted basis.

Mr. Baxter commented, "Aside from multiple insiders of the Company investing, the overwhelming majority of participants in this Private Placement were existing Alabama Graphite Corp. shareholders. Personally speaking, I am very pleased to report that, in less than 15 months since I joined Alabama Graphite Corp., I have made investments to acquire more than 2% ownership in the Company. I have tremendous faith in the potential of AGC, its stellar management and technical talent, and its unique strategic business model.

"I share my fellow shareholders' enthusiasm as we continue to advance AGC as a leading American graphite downstream development company, intending to become a green-energy supply-chain producer," said Mr. Baxter.

Prior to the closing of the Private Placement, Mr. Baxter owned 770,000 Common Shares of the Company and stock options entitling Mr. Baxter to purchase 1,750,000 Common Shares of the Company, in addition to Warrants entitling Mr. Baxter to purchase 720,000 Common Shares of the Company.

Immediately following the closing of the Private Placement, Mr. Baxter directly and indirectly owns the following securities of the Company:

2,800,000 Common Shares, representing more than 2.1% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares of the Company; Warrants entitling Mr. Baxter to purchase 2,750,000 Common Shares of the Company; and Stock options entitling Mr. Baxter to purchase 1,750,000 Common Shares of the Company.

Assuming the exercise of all Warrants and stock options held by Mr. Baxter, he would own 7,300,000 Common Shares, representing more than 5.4% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares of the Company.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of ALABAMA GRAPHITE CORP.

Donald K. D. Baxter, P.Eng., President, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director

QUALIFIED PERSON

Donald K. D. Baxter, P.Eng., President, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Alabama Graphite Corp., is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 guidelines, and has reviewed and approved the content of this news release.

ABOUT ALABAMA GRAPHITE CORP.

Alabama Graphite Corp. is a Canadian-based flake graphite exploration and development company as well as an aspiring battery materials production and technology company. The Company operates through its wholly owned subsidiary, Alabama Graphite Company Inc. (a company registered in the state of Alabama). With an advancing flake graphite project in the United States of America, Alabama Graphite Corp intends to become a reliable, long-term U.S. supplier of specialty high-purity graphite products. A highly experienced team leads the Company with more than 100 years of combined graphite mining, graphite processing, specialty graphite products and applications, and graphite sales experience. Alabama Graphite Corp. is focused on the exploration and development of its flagship Coosa Graphite Project in Coosa County, Alabama, and its Bama Mine Project in Chilton County, Alabama as well the research and development of its proprietary manufacturing and technological processing process of battery materials.

Alabama Graphite Corp. holds a 100% interest in the mineral rights for these two U.S.-based graphite projects, which are both located on private land. The two projects encompass more than 43,000 acres and are located in a geopolitically stable, mining-friendly jurisdiction with significant historical production of crystalline flake graphite in the flake graphite belt of central Alabama, also known as the Alabama Graphite Belt (source: U.S. Bureau of Mines). A significant portion of the Alabama deposits are characterized by graphite-bearing material that is oxidized and has been weathered into extremely soft rock. Both projects have infrastructure in place, are within close proximity to major highways, rail, power and water, and are approximately three hours (by truck or train) to the Port of Mobile, the Alabama Port Authority's deep-seawater port and the ninth largest port by tonnage in the United States (source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers/USACE). The state of Alabama's hospitable climate allows for year-round mining operations and the world's largest marble quarry (which operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in Sylacauga, Alabama), is located within a 30-minute drive of the Coosa Graphite Project.

On November 30, 2015, Alabama Graphite Corp. announced the results of PEA for the Coosa Graphite Project, indicating a potentially low-cost project with potential positive economics. Please refer to the Company's technical report titled "Alabama Graphite Corp. Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on the Coosa graphite Project, Alabama, USA" dated November 27, 2015, prepared by independent engineering firms AGP Mining Consultants Inc. and Metal Mining Consultants Inc., and filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Note: a preliminary economic assessment is preliminary in nature, it includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized.

* Inferred Mineral Resources represent material that is considered too speculative to be included in economic evaluations. Additional trenching and/or drilling will be required to convert Inferred Mineral Resources to Measured or Indicated Mineral Resources. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no guarantee that all or any part of the Mineral Resource will be converted into a Mineral Reserve.

For further information and updates on the Company or to sign up for Alabama Graphite Corp. News, please visit www.alabamagraphite.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains forward-looking information under applicable Canadian securities laws ("forward-looking statements"), which may include, without limitation, statements with respect to the use of proceeds from the Private Placement and the Company's future development as a green-energy supply-chain producer. The forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs of management and reflect Alabama Graphite Corp.'s current expectations. When used in this press release, the words "estimate", "project", "belief", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "plan", "predict", "may" or "should" and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the current view of Alabama Graphite Corp. with respect to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements.

By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among other things, the interpretation and actual results of current exploration activities; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; future prices of graphite; possible variations in grade or recovery rates; failure of equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; the failure of contracted parties to perform; labor disputes and other risks of the mining industry; delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing or in the completion of exploration, as well as those factors disclosed in the Company's publicly filed documents. Forward-looking statements are also based on a number of assumptions, including that contracted parties provide goods and/or services on the agreed timeframes, that equipment necessary for exploration is available as scheduled and does not incur unforeseen breakdowns, that no labor shortages or delays are incurred, that plant and equipment function as specified, that no unusual geological or technical problems occur, and that laboratory and other related services are available and perform as contracted. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made and Alabama Graphite Corp. undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements (unless required by law) if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. Alabama Graphite Corp. cautions that the foregoing list of material factors and assumptions are not exhaustive. When relying on Alabama Graphite Corp. forward-looking statements to make decisions, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and assumptions and other uncertainties and potential events.

Alabama Graphite Corp. has also assumed that the material factors and assumptions will not cause any forward-looking statements to differ materially from actual results or events. However, the list of these factors and assumptions is not exhaustive and is subject to change and there can be no assurance that such assumptions will reflect the actual outcome of such items or factors.

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICE PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THE CONTENT OF THIS NEWS RELEASE.
Vancouver, British Columbia / TheNewswire / September 21, 2016 - AFRICAN QUEEN MINES LTD. (the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has acquired an additional 1211.9 hectares in four hard rock mineral tenures located along Wright Creek, approximately 20 kilometres east of its Yellowjacket Gold Mine near Atlin, BC. In addition, it has acquired one hard rock mineral tenure totaling 491.4 hectares adjacent to its historic Yellowjacket Project claim holdings, approximately 7 kilometres west of the Yellowjacket Gold Mine.

The Company now controls 51 mineral claims, 3 placer claims and one placer lease covering an aggregate of 271 km2 of strategic ground in the historically significant placer mining areas of Pine Creek and Spruce Creeks. The company also holds hard rock mineral tenures along the headwaters of McKee Creek and its tributary Eldorado Creek plus the new mineral tenures cover much of Wright Creek and its tributary Bonanza Creek.

The Wright Creek claims cover structural trends and favourable geologic contacts along a major gold producing placer creek. The Wright Creek area is underlain by sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Cache Creek Group, intruded by the granodioritic Surprise Lake Batholith. Placer gold deposits have been exploited in the upper reaches of Wright Creek, but the bedrock gold source for these placers remains to be discovered.

The new westernmost claim covers the strike extent of the thrust fault along the ultramafic and volcanic rock contact which hosts the Yellowjacket Mine. Management views the new tenures as highly prospective for their potential to host commercially viable hard-rock gold deposits.

On the Yellowjacket Zone, an initial four-hole diamond drilling program has been completed utilizing a local drilling contractor and assays are pending from Bureau Veritas laboratories in Vancouver, BC. Results will be announced as soon as available to the Company.

According to Irwin Olian, CEO of the Company, "We are delighted with the strides we have made in recent months in assembling what amounts to the largest body of highly prospective hard rock mineral tenures in the Atlin District. These last two acquisitions provide us with an outstanding land package in the Wright Creek basin as well as adding ground to the NW of our historic Yellowjacket tenures covering key geologic elements. We have now positioned the Company and its shareholders with a highly prospective package of mineral tenures for the future that offer the potential for one or more major discoveries."

Linda Dandy, P.Geo., a Qualified Person within the meaning of N.I. 43-101, is providing on site supervision and guidance at the Project and has reviewed and approved the contents of this press release. She previously oversaw exploration activities on the project for a predecessor operator. Overall project leadership at Yellowjacket is being provided by Dr. Reinhard Ramdohr.

About African Queen

The Company is an exploratory resource company engaged in exploration and development of mineral properties in Canada and Africa. It is presently focusing on development of its Yellowjacket Gold Project in Atlin, British Columbia, which covers an aggregate of approximately 271 km2. The Company has its executive offices in Vancouver, Canada. The Company was incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia, Canada, on April 30, 2008, and received certain southern African assets in a spin off transaction related to the acquisition of Pan African Mining Corp. by Asia Thai Mining Co., Ltd.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

AFRICAN QUEEN MINES, LTD.

"Irwin Olian"

Irwin Olian

Chairman & CEO

For more information, contact:

The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of the information contained herein. The statements made in this press release may contain certain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual events or results may differ from the Company's expectations.

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Sept. 20, 2016) - Pasinex Resources Ltd. (CSE:PSE) (FRANKFURT:PNX) (the "Company" or "Pasinex") is pleased to announce that a new third adit has been opened at the Pinargozu mine, 50% owned through the Horzum AS joint venture in Turkey. The new adit has a length of 120 m and allows access to deeper lying mineralization at the 670 m level and below. Future exploration and infill drilling programs will also make use of this new underground development, which is situated proximally to a number of high-priority exploration targets. The new adit's larger dimension can accommodate the use of bigger equipment. As a result, production at the mine has doubled from an average of around 60 tonnes per day ("tpd") to an average of around 120 tpd in the past weeks. The material being mined is all DSO or direct shipping mineralization. The average grade in the first half of 2016 for this material was about 34 % Zn. Production statistics from lot sales in 2016 are given below in Table 1. Shown in Figure 1 is a graphic of the current mine workings at Pinargozu.

Steve Williams, President and CEO of Pasinex Resources commented: "This is a big step forward for our mine. We now have three producing adits into the side of the mountain and this has enabled us to significantly increase the production at Pinargozu. In August the mine output reached a total of 4,000 tonnes of high grade zinc mineralization (130 tpd). About half of August's production was high grade sulphide ore from the new adit. As reported earlier the total production up to the end of July this year was 9,300 tonnes compared to a total of 11,000 tonnes in the whole year of 2015. With the production coming out of the new adit management is confident that the production will sustain a minimum level of 120 tpd over the course of the second half of 2016. On an annualized basis, Pinargozu production is targeting to reach about 25 million pounds of zinc production this year, compared to 10.4 million pounds sold in 2015. We are pleased to demonstrate the rapid expansion at Pinargozu as we develop this important zinc mine."

Figure 1 - Schematic showing underground workings relative to the mineralization halo. The adit indicated in red is the new adit.



Table 1: Horzum AS - Pinargozu Mine Production Sale Summary

Lot # Date of

sale Type Wet

weight

(tonnes) Moisture

% Dry

Weight

(tonnes) Cum Wet

Weight

(tonnes) Cum Dry

Weight

(tonnes) Assay

% Zn 2014/

2015

total 2014/

2015

total 1 24/04/2015 Oxide 5,002.100 6.26 4,688.911 5,002.100 4,688.911 33.08 2 05/05/2015 Oxide 1,453.000 10.39 1,302.000 6,455.100 5,990.911 31.56 3 09/07/2015 Oxide 4,760.000 8.76 4,342.830 11,215.100 10,333.741 31.21 4 09/09/2015 Oxide 1,215.380 7.87 1,119.760 12,430.480 11,453.501 35.20 5 06/11/2015 Oxide 1,478.310 5.12 1,402.555 13,908.790 12,856.056 38.09 6 22/12/2015 Oxide 1,497.380 6.65 1,397.789 15,406.170 14,253.845 35.19 2016

1st Half 2016

1st Half 7 28/01/2016 Oxide 1,556.560 6.83 1,450.295 1,556.560 1,450.295 37.23 8 02/03/2016 Oxide 1,842.500 7.81 1,698.551 3,399.060 3,148.846 35.06 9 30/03/2016 Sulphide 716.200 1.64 704.454 4,115.260 3,853.300 49.42 10 07/04/2016 Oxide 1,685.620 7.68 1,556.234 5,800.880 5,409.534 32.00* 11 12/05/2016 Oxide 1,264.080 7.75 1,166.126 7,064.960 6,575.660 33.27* 12 09/06/2016 Oxide 1,238.040 7.51 1,145.071 8,303.000 7,720.731 31.50* 13 17/06/2016 Oxide 995.780 7.50 921.096 9,298.780 8,641.827 31.12*

* Initial provisional assay

In the first half of 2016 the joint venture company, Horzum AS, sold 9,300 tonnes (wet weight) of zinc direct shipping material at an average grade of 35% Zn (tonnage and assay based on provisional initial sampling and invoice) for a contained metal content of 6.7million pounds of zinc. In 30th March the company sold their first lot of sulphide mineralization. This lot was 716 tonnes of material (wet weight) at an average grade of 49.9 % Zn.

Qualified Person

EurGeol, P.Geo. John Barry, a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, has reviewed the preparation of the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for this news release. Mr. Barry inspected all stages of the direct shipping operation including material crushing, grinding, homogenisation and sampling of material at the facility in Adana. AHK (Alfred Knight) Turkey Samplers and Assayer conducts weight, and humidity measurements and sample taking at load port (at Buyer's designated Warehouse either in Adana or in Mersin). Samples taken are prepared and sealed in triplicate one sent to Alex Steward in England; and two witness samples each delivered to Buyer and Seller. Assays are conducted and certificates issued to Buyer and Seller by Alex Stewart: Labs in Liverpool, UK. Mr Barry has verified the DSO lots reported in Table 1 against the signed certificates issued by Alex Stewart Labs and Sellers official documents of sale. Mr. Barry is a director of the Company.

About Pasinex

Pasinex Resources Limited (CSE: PSE; FSE: PNX) is a metals company which is a 50% owner of the high grade Pinargozu zinc mine which is in production and, under its DSO Program, is shipping directly to zinc smelter / refiners from its mine site in Turkey. The Company has a strong technical management team with many years of experience in mineral exploration and mining project development. The mission of Pasinex is to build a mid-tier zinc company based on building a large land within a productive CRD district in Turkey.

The Pinargozu Mine is included in the 50-50 company, Horzum Arama Isletme AS (Horzum AS), which is a corporate joint venture between Pasinex and Turkish mining house, Akmetal Madencilik San ve Tic. AS (Akmetal AS). Akmetal AS is one of Turkey's largest family-owned conglomerates with the nearby past-producing Horzum zinc mine.

Visit our web site at: www.pasinex.com

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

PASINEX RESOURCES LIMITED

"Steve Williams"

The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

This news release includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause the actual results of the Company to be materially different from the historical results or from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. Although Pasinex Resources Limited believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, continued availability of capital and financing, exploration results, and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.
Ottawa, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 21, 2016) - Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV: CUC), Mr. Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper announces that the company has finalized a heads of agreement (HOA) with OZ Minerals Limited to acquire 100% of OZ Minerals' holdings in Jamaica, which will include:

OZ Minerals' 70% interest in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture licenses;

OZ Minerals' 100% interest in five licences covering 276km2 acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014;

For clarification, Carube Copper will retain its 100% interest in the Above Rocks Project.

Under terms of the HOA, OZ Minerals will transfer 100% of its interests in the properties described to Carube Copper in return for cash payments totalling $14 million due after the commencement of commercial production together with a 2% Net Smelter Return Royalty. All matters will be concluded via a final all inclusive definitive agreement to be signed within 60 days. At that point Carube Copper will have 100% interest in eleven licences covering over 535km2 (subject to underlying royalties) covering the best copper-gold prospects identified to date in Jamaica by historic work and the recent exploration work by Carube and OZ Minerals.

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO of Carube Copper comments: "The acquisition OZ Minerals' large land package, together with our own licences gives Carube Copper control of over 500 square kilometres of the most prospective ground in Jamaica based on historic showings, the work completed and reported in 1993 by the Canadian International Development Agency ('CIDA') and the recent work by Carube and OZ Minerals. We are excited to be in a position to commit to the exploration and development of all assets. By building on the work completed by OZ Minerals and Carube Copper and with our new strategic flexibility, we will be able to prioritize organic growth or potential joint venture funding on a project by project basis."

Bellas Gate

Previously announced results at the Bellas Gate Joint venture included drill intercepts from the Connors and Provost Prospects.

At Connors

Hole DDH-CON-14-005 intersected 294m of 0.56% CuEq (0.41%Cu, 0.27 g/t Au); including 96m of 1.00% CuEq , (0.67%Cu, 0.58 g/t Au)

Hole DDH-CON-14-003 intersected 297m of 0.53% CuEq, (0.40%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au) including 55m of 1.00% CuEq (0.67%Cu, 0.59 g/t Au)

At Provost

Hole PVT-16-002 intersected 339m of 0.34% CuEq (0.28%Cu, 0.12 g/t Au), including 10m of 1.79% CuEq (1.28%Cu, 0.90 g/t Au)

Hole PVT-16-001 intersected 82m of 0.46% CuEq (0.37%Cu, 0.16 g/t Au), including 29m of 0.63% CuEq (0.49%Cu, 0.24 g/t Au)

The intervals do not necessarily indicate true width of mineralization, as its geometry is not known. Copper equivalents are calculated using a US $3.00/lb. copper and a US$1200 per ounce gold price assuming unlimited internal dilution and 100% recovery of both metals.

The Provost Prospect will be one of several high-priority areas where copper-gold porphyry mineralization has been identified to be followed up with additional drilling.

During OZ Minerals' tenure at the Bellas Gate JV over 14,000 metres of drilling was completed on 11 of the more than 20 prospects on the property. High-resolution airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys were completed over the entire property and 46 line kilometres of Induced Polarization (IP) surveying was completed. Geological mapping was completed on the previously identified prospects and over 400 rock samples and 4000 soil samples were collected and analysed. All data generated during the Bellas Gate and Above Rocks joint ventures will be handed over to Carube Copper by OZ Minerals.

Five Additional Licences

The five additional licences acquired by OZ Minerals in 2014 are strategically located to cover known copper and gold prospects and anomalous stream sediment sample drainage basins within the Cretaceous aged inliers in the interior of Jamaica. The Shirley Castle licence is located within the Blue Mountain Inlier, The Above Rocks, Windsor Castle and Berkshire Hall licences are located in close proximity to Carube Copper's Above Rocks project and the Arthur's Seat licence is located between the Bellas Gate and Main Ridge projects in the Central Inlier. All were covered by detailed airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys. The company is currently reviewing the recent geophysics and historic work in order to prioritize exploration targets.

Above Rocks

Carube Copper will retain 100% interest in the Above Rocks Joint Venture which it signed with OZ Minerals in February 2016. The property has been covered by detailed magnetic and radiometric surveys. Follow-up work carried out by OZ Minerals between February and August 2016 includes 200 soil samples, 85 rock samples, 92m of trenching and over 400 metres of drilling in 3 holes.

Heads of Agreement

Under the terms of the HOA:

To regain the 70% interest that OZ Minerals had earned in the Bellas Gate Joint Venture, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $8,500,000 within one year of commencement of commercial production;

b. pay a further $4,000,000 within two years of commercial production; and

c. grant OZ Minerals a 2% NSR with a buy-back of 2/3 of the NSR for $1.3M, royalty payments to be capped at $20M To acquire the 100% interest in the five OZ Minerals licenses, Carube will:

a. pay to OZ Minerals $1,500,000 within a year of commencement of commercial production

on any of the five licenses; Carube will retain its 100% interest in Carube Coppers Above Rocks Project free and clear of any obligation to OZ Minerals. The final agreement will be signed within 60 days of September 21, 2016.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts

Jeff Ackert, President and CEO  1-613-839-3258  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Vern Rampton, Executive VP of Corporate Development  1-613-839-3258  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Alar Soever, Chairman  1-705-682-9297  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

www.carubecopper.com

QP Statement: This press release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Vern Rampton, P. Eng. in his capacity as a qualified person as defined under NI 43-101.

Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV:CUC), is a Canadian exploration company focused on the exploration and development of copper and gold projects in Jamaica and Canada. In Jamaica, Carube Copper will hold, subject to finalization of the final agreement with OZ Minerals, a 100% interest in 11 projects, totalling over 500 square kilometres. In Canada, Carube Copper holds a 100% interest in three porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum properties, totalling 593 square kilometres within the Tertiary-aged Cascade Magmatic Arc in southwestern British Columbia. Exploration continues on these properties with the goal of joint-venturing them to larger exploration and mining companies. Carube Copper continues to seek opportunities in Canada and the Caribbean for acquisition and development.

DISCLAIMER & FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" which are not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, and by their very nature involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on currently available information, Carube Copper Corp. provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Factors which cause results to differ materially are set out in the Company's documents filed on SEDAR. Undue reliance should not be placed on "forward looking statements".

IMPORTANT NOTICE: By reference herewith, Carube Copper incorporates into this release the entire disclaimer set forth on its website at http://carubecopper.com/disclaimer.htm.
Ukrainian army positions came under 13 militant attacks in Donbas in the past 24 hours, the press center of the anti-terrorist operation staff said on Facebook on Wednesday.

Five truce violations were observed in the Donetsk sector, the press center said, adding that militant infantry combat vehicles fired on Luhanske and Zaitseve. In addition, Zaitseve came under attack of a 120mm mortar, and grenade launchers, machineguns and small arms were used against Mayorske, Luhanske and Zaitseve, it said.

Eight truce violations occurred in the Mariupol area. Militants conducted harassing fire from grenade launchers, machineguns and small arms near Mariinka, Starohnativka and Pavlopil, it said.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Sept. 21, 2016) - Calibre Mining Corp. (TSX VENTURE:CXB) (the "Company" or "Calibre") is pleased to announce that Mr. Pierre Lassonde has increased his equity ownership in Calibre to approximately 14.13% by exercising common share purchase warrants* for proceeds to Calibre of CDN $1,250,000.

With exercise of the 12,500,000 warrants Mr. Lassonde now holds 37,500,000 shares in the Company making him the largest single shareholder at 14.13%. Including the additional CDN $1.25 million Calibre now has CDN $3.92 million in cash.

Mr. Pierre Lassonde stated: "I love the huge optionality of the 876 sq km land package owned by Calibre. The diversity of favourable geologic settings is exceptional. Calibre is also fortunate to have attracted quality joint venture partners for part of the lands that continue to spend about $4.5M a year on exploration."

Douglas Forster, Chairman of Calibre stated: "We are very pleased to have Pierre Lassonde continue to support Calibre Mining by exercising his warrants and becoming our largest shareholder. Mr. Lassonde is well known in the international mining community and North American capital markets and the additional funds will allow Calibre to more aggressively advance our 100% owned Projects in Nicaragua."

The proceeds of the warrant exercise will be used to advance Calibre's 100% owned Projects in Nicaragua as well as for general working capital. Exploration and development of the Company's 100% owned projects in Nicaragua will include a maiden drilling program on the high priority Santa Maria gold-silver Target within the Rosita District where previous work by Calibre has defined a high grade low sulphidation epithermal gold-silver vein system with a gold in soil anomaly extending 3 km and high grade surface rock samples including 64 g/t gold and 109 g/t silver. Additionally the Company will complete continued exploration of anomalous zones within the Carpatos District and on the El Paste Concession.

*The warrants, as modified in February 2016, entitled Mr. Lassonde to purchase 12,500,000 Calibre common shares at a price of $0.10 per share (see Calibre news release dated February 19, 2016). The Warrants issued to Mr. Lassonde were pursuant to a non-brokered private placement of 25 million units at a price of $0.08 per unit, which closed on September 22, 2014. Each unit consisted of one common share and one-half of one Warrant, with each Warrant entitling Mr. Lassonde to purchase an additional common share of the Company until September 22, 2016 at an exercise price of $0.15 (subsequently modified to $0.10 per unit).

The technical content in this news release was read and approved by Gregory Smith, P.Geo, President and CEO of the Company who is the Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

About Calibre Mining Corp.

Calibre controls a 100% interest in over 340 km2 of mineral concessions in the Mining Triangle of Northeast Nicaragua. Additionally the Company has an option agreement with IAMGOLD covering 176 km2 of concessions, an option agreement with Centerra Gold on 253 km2, joint venture exploration programs underway with B2Gold Corp. on 66.1 km2 of concessions which includes the Primavera gold-copper porphyry discovery and the Monte Carmelo Gold Zone, and a joint venture on the 33.6 km2 Rosita D gold-copper-silver project with Rosita Mining Corporation. Major shareholders of Calibre include gold producer B2Gold Corp, Pierre Lassonde and Management.

Calibre Mining Corp.

Greg Smith, P.Geo., President and CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "expects" or does not expect", "is expected", anticipates" or "does not anticipate" "plans", "estimates" or "intends" or stating that certain actions, events or results " may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to materially differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements.

Safe Harbor Statement under the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Except for the statements of historical fact contained herein, the information presented constitutes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements including but not limited to those with respect to the price of gold, potential mineralization, reserve and resource determination, exploration results, and future plans and objectives of the Company involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievement of Atlas to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
THUNDER BAY, ON, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ - Wolfden Resources Corporation (WLF:TSX-V) ("Wolfden" or the "Company") announces the key acquisition of the Rice Island Tie-On property (the "RITOP") located adjacent to Wolfden's Rice Island property (the "RIP") that contains the Rice Island nickel-copper-cobalt deposit. The deposit has been targeted in drilling programs completed by Wolfden during 2015 and 2016 and has returned high-grade nickel, copper and cobalt values over mineable widths during these campaigns. Collectively, the 100%-owned RITOP and RIP comprise 2,611 hectares and are located 10 kilometres southeast of the Town of Snow Lake in west-central Manitoba.

THE RICE ISLAND TIE-ON PROPERTY:

The RITOP potentially contains the southwest extension of the Rice Island nickel-copper-cobalt deposit, as evidenced by the presence of a series of conductors coincident with a magnetic high on the RITOP, defined by Wolfden's VTEM airborne geophysical survey. On Wolfden's RIP, the Rice Island deposit is located on the same geophysical trend (see Figure 1). Additionally, Wolfden drill holes located at the southwest end of Rice Island on the RIP, returned significant results including 2.57% Ni, 1.07% Cu, 0.08% Co over 17.4 metres (RI-15-13), 1.14% Ni, 0.70% Cu, 0.06% Co over 14.1 metres (RI-15-13), 1.07% Ni, 0.83% Cu, 0.10% Co over 6.3 metres (Ri-15-14) as well as 1.23% Ni, 0.80% Cu, 0.13% Co over 2.6 metres (see Wolfden website for complete drill results; www.wolfdenresources.com). The magnetic high and associated conductors delineated over a minimum 500-metre long trend on the RITOP have never been drilled and will be given top priority in future diamond drilling programs.

In addition to the first priority drill target located immediately to the southwest of the Rice Island deposit, the RITOP contains several other compelling geophysical anomalies. A parallel geophysical trend located to the west of the Rice Island deposit contains a series of strong discrete anomalies that have a similar geophysical signature with that of the Rice Island deposit; these anomalies do not appear to have been drilled (see Figure 2).

Under the terms of an option agreement with Peter Dunlop (the "Vendor"), to earn a 100% interest in the RITOP, the Company must make cash payments totaling C$250,000 and issue 500,000 shares of Wolfden (subject to regulatory approval) over a five-year period (C$25,000 and 100,000 shares of Wolfden on signing). In addition, the Company must incur C$1.000.000 in exploration expenditures over the same five-year period (C$100,000 in year one). Upon earning a 100% interest in the RITOP, the Vendor retains a 2.5% Net Smelter Return Royalty on the RITOP as well as on the RIP: of which Wolfden can purchase 1.5% of the Net Smelter Return Royalty for the sum of C$1,500,000 (0.5% increments at C$500,00 per each increment) for each of the properties. Wolfden also retains the right of first refusal on the remaining 1.0% Net Smelter Return Royalty held by the Vendor for each of the RITOP and RIP.

THE RICE ISLAND NICKEL-COPPER-COBALT DEPOSIT:

The Rice Island deposit comprises a Main Zone of semi-massive to massive pyrrhotite, chalcopyrite and pentlandite situated at the base of the intrusion and a newly discovered, underlying New Lower Zone of semi-massive to massive sulphides, in sedimentary rocks. Drilling has defined the deposit over a strike length of 500 metres and to a vertical depth of 500 metres with mineralization open along strike and to depth. Both zones are thought to represent conduits or channel-ways, comprising part of a larger, more regional magmatic system. Recent discoveries including the Eagle deposit in Michigan and the Tamarack deposit in Minnesota indicate that relatively small intrusions can host economic Ni-Cu deposits that can form in clusters.

Wolfden's drilling of the Main Zone returned intercepts of up to 3.29% Ni, 1.32% Cu, 0.135 Co over 12.40 metres, and 3.83% Ni, 1.33% Cu, 0.17% Co over 9.90 metres while the New Lower Zone yielded intercepts of up to 2.42% Ni, 1.29% Cu, 0.16% Co over 21.10 metres (true widths are 70% of intersected widths).

Donald Hoy, President and CEO stated, "We are very pleased to complete this transaction that clearly enhances our prospects of adding to the mineral inventory of the known Rice Island deposit and to making additional discoveries elsewhere on the combined properties. We look forward to completing exploration to accomplish these goals."

ABOUT WOLFDEN RESOURCES:

Wolfden is a mineral exploration company that recently acquired the Rice Island and Nickel Island properties in Manitoba. Manitoba is ranked #6 in Canada and #19 in the world as the most favourable jurisdiction to conduct mining and exploration (Fraser Institute (2015-2016).The Company also holds a dominant, 24,000 hectare, land position in the heart of the Bathurst Mining Camp in New Brunswick containing 5 historical base-metal deposits and a 100% interest in the Clarence Stream gold-antimony property in southern New Brunswick that hosts a significant 43-101 mineral resource.

The information in this news release has been prepared and approved by Donald Hoy, P. Geo., President, CEO and a director of the Company. My Hoy is also a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101.

This press release contains forward-looking information (within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation) that involves various risks and uncertainties regarding future events. Such forward-looking information includes statements based on current expectations involving a number of risks and uncertainties and such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance of the Company, and include, without limitation, statements relating to plans and results of exploration and the magnitude and quality of the property. There are numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and the Company's plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information in this news release, including without limitation, the following risks and uncertainties; (i) risks inherent in the mining industry; (ii) regulatory and environmental risks; (iii) results of exploration activities and development of mineral properties; (iv) risks relating to the estimation of mineral resources; (v) stock market volatility and capital market fluctuations; and (vi) general market and industry conditions. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. This forward-looking information is based on estimates and opinions of management on the date hereof and is expressly qualified by this notice. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed in the Company's disclosure materials filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada at www.sedar.com. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward looking information or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from such information unless required by applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation services provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) has reviewed or accepts responsibility for the accuracy and adequacy of this news release

SOURCE Wolfden Resources Corporation
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Sept. 21, 2016) - Golden Arrow Resources Corporation (TSX VENTURE:GRG)(FRANKFURT:GAC)(OTCQB:GARWF)(WKN:A0B6XQ) ("Golden Arrow") is pleased to announce that the Environmental Report ("ER") for exploitation at the Chinchillas project has been submitted to the mining authority in the Province of Jujuy.

This report initiates formal permitting for mine development and is part of the Chinchillas Project pre-development activities funded by Silver Standard (as per the proposed combined mining business with Silver Standard's Pirquitas mine announced October 1st, 2015).

"The filing of this report is a major step forward for the development of Chinchillas with Pirquitas, and we are confident that the stakeholder review will yield a positive outcome. We are now finishing the pre-feasibility studies and look forward to a decision from Silver Standard by the end of the year," stated Brian McEwen, Golden Arrow VP Exploration and Development.

The detailed Environmental Report is the main focus of permitting for mining projects in the province of Jujuy. The report includes a description of the expected environmental impacts of the proposed mining operation, a management plan for those impacts and a plan of action on environmental contingencies. The ER is submitted for review by Jujuy's Provincial Environmental Management Unit, or UGAMP. The UGAMP is a multi-stakeholder group chaired by a technical appointee from the Mining Department who review and discuss the ER, and recommend approval or rejection to the provincial mining authorities. Approval by UGAMP provides the needed social license to obtain an exploitation permit.

Qualified Persons

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Brian McEwen, P.Geol., VP Exploration and Development to the Company. Mr. McEwen is a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101.

About Golden Arrow:

Golden Arrow Resources is a Vancouver-based exploration company focused on creating value by making precious and base metal discoveries and advancing them into exceptional deposits. The Company is currently focused on its Chinchillas Silver Project located in the mining-friendly Province of Jujuy, Argentina. The innovative transaction announced October 1st 2015, positions the Company to maximize shareholder value by fast-tracking Chinchillas to production and becoming a 25% owner of the Pirquitas silver mine.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Mr. Joseph Grosso, Executive Chairman, President, CEO and Director

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. Such forward-looking statements concern the Company's anticipated results and developments in the Company's operations in future periods, planned exploration and development of the Chinchillas project, plans related to its business and other matters that may occur in the future. Statements concerning mineral resource estimates and the interpretation of drill results may also constitute forward-looking statements to the extent that they involve estimates of the mineralization that will be encountered if the Chinchillas project is developed. These statements are based on a number of assumptions which may prove to be incorrect, including, but not limited to, assumptions about the following: assumptions made in the Chinchillas Mineral Resource Estimate, including geological interpretation, grade, recovery rates, silver, zinc and lead price assumptions and operating costs; the availability of financing for exploration and development activities, including Silver Standard Resources Inc. ("SSRI") meeting certain milestones and exercising its election to proceed with the transactions contemplated under the Business Combination Agreement dated September 30, 2015 among the Company, SSRI and certain other parties; the Company's ability to attract and retain skilled staff; the Chinchillas project development schedule; the exchange rates of the Canadian dollar and United States dollar to the Argentina peso; market competition; ongoing relations with impacted communities; and general business and economic conditions.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to precious and base metal price fluctuations; risks related to the transactions contemplated by the Business Combination Agreement; risks related to fluctuations in the currency markets (particularly the Argentinean peso, Canadian dollar and United States dollar); risks related to the inherently dangerous activity of mining, including conditions or events beyond our control, and operating or technical difficulties in mineral exploration, development and mining activities; uncertainty in the Company's ability to raise financing and fund the development of the Chinchillas project, including as recommended in the Chinchillas Mineral Resource Estimate; uncertainty as to actual capital costs, operating costs, production and economic returns, and uncertainty that development activities will result in a profitable mining operation at Chinchillas; risks related to mineral resource figures being estimates based on interpretations and assumptions which may result in less mineral production under actual conditions than is currently estimated and to diminishing quantities or grades of mineral resources as properties are mined; risks related to governmental regulations and obtaining necessary licenses and permits; risks related to the business being subject to environmental laws and regulations which may increase costs of doing business and restrict our operations; risks related to the Chinchillas project being subject to prior unregistered agreements, transfers, or claims and other defects in title; risks relating to inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance; risks related to potential litigation; risks related to the global economy; and risks related to the Chinchillas project being located in Argentina, including political, economic, social and regulatory instability. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The Company's forward-looking statements are based on beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

The information provided in this news release is not intended to be a comprehensive review of all matters and developments concerning the Company. It should be read in conjunction with all other disclosure documents of the Company. The information contained herein is not a substitute for detailed investigation or analysis. No securities commission or regulatory authority has reviewed the accuracy or adequacy of the information presented. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements other than as required under applicable law.

We advise U.S. investors that the SEC's mining guidelines strictly prohibit information of this type in documents filed with the SEC. U.S. investors are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on our properties.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Sept. 21, 2016) - Orsu Metals Corporation (TSX:OSU) -

Highlights of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project

Transaction: Orsu Metals Corporation ("Orsu" or the "Company") has agreed to acquire, subject to the conditions as described in this release, the Sergeevskoe Gold Project located in the Mogocha District of the Zabaikal'skiy Region of the Russian Federation.

Orsu Metals Corporation ("Orsu" or the "Company") has agreed to acquire, subject to the conditions as described in this release, the Sergeevskoe Gold Project located in the Mogocha District of the Zabaikal'skiy Region of the Russian Federation. The Russian style P1 to P3 categories: The most recent study conducted in July 2016, prior to discussions with Orsu, estimated a total of 29.736 million tonnes of mineralization in several prospects within the Sergeevskoe license area with a total of 59.31 tonnes (approximately 1.91 million ounces) of gold to a depth of 100 metres.

The most recent study conducted in July 2016, prior to discussions with Orsu, estimated a total of 29.736 million tonnes of mineralization in several prospects within the Sergeevskoe license area with a total of 59.31 tonnes (approximately 1.91 million ounces) of gold to a depth of 100 metres. A long-established gold-mining province: the area around the Sergeevskoe Project is a known host to a cluster of producing gold deposits. The Sergeevskoe Gold Project has a common license border with the Klyuchevskoe gold mine immediately to the east of Sergeevskoe, which contains 4 million ounces in Russian-style A+B+C1 and C2 categories. To the west, it neighbours the recently commissioned Alexandrovskoe open-pit operating mine with Russian-style resources in excess of 2 million ounces of gold.

the area around the Sergeevskoe Project is a known host to a cluster of producing gold deposits. The Sergeevskoe Gold Project has a common license border with the Klyuchevskoe gold mine immediately to the east of Sergeevskoe, which contains 4 million ounces in Russian-style A+B+C1 and C2 categories. To the west, it neighbours the recently commissioned Alexandrovskoe open-pit operating mine with Russian-style resources in excess of 2 million ounces of gold. Excellent infrastructure: the Project is located in an economically developed area of Russia with ready access to all significant infrastructure: (1) federal highway M58 is approximately 8 kilometres away, (2) the Trans-Siberian railway is approximately 35 kilometres away; and (3) access to the national electricity grid. Water is readily available in the area, as is a local skilled labour force.

the Project is located in an economically developed area of Russia with ready access to all significant infrastructure: (1) federal highway M58 is approximately 8 kilometres away, (2) the Trans-Siberian railway is approximately 35 kilometres away; and (3) access to the national electricity grid. Water is readily available in the area, as is a local skilled labour force. Analogous deposit nearby: the Klyuchevskoe mine has produced over 1.3 million ounces of gold in its history. The Klyuchevskoe mine hosts an analogous mineralization and historical information published about that mine greatly helps to evaluate the geological and metallurgical risks of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project. According to the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Agency, the Klyuchevskoe mine is in the advanced stages of being sold to China National Gold Group. (See footnote 4.)

the Klyuchevskoe mine has produced over 1.3 million ounces of gold in its history. The Klyuchevskoe mine hosts an analogous mineralization and historical information published about that mine greatly helps to evaluate the geological and metallurgical risks of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project. According to the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Agency, the Klyuchevskoe mine is in the advanced stages of being sold to China National Gold Group. (See footnote 4.) The Sergeevskoe Gold Project has extensive historical exploration data: In Soviet times the project was extensively explored with, inter alia, approximately 8 500 meters of drilling performed and 16 200 meters of trenches excavated. Historical exploration works at the 7.6 km 2 license area of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project identified intrusion-hosted gold mineralization over an area of 5x2.2 km (including a 1.1 km 2 license area of the Klyuchevskoe gold deposit). In its eastern part, the historically identified mineralization forms a western continuation of the orebodies extending from the Klyuchevskoe deposit, with most prospective mineralization identified at the Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences.

In Soviet times the project was extensively explored with, inter alia, approximately 8 500 meters of drilling performed and 16 200 meters of trenches excavated. Historical exploration works at the 7.6 km license area of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project identified intrusion-hosted gold mineralization over an area of 5x2.2 km (including a 1.1 km license area of the Klyuchevskoe gold deposit). In its eastern part, the historically identified mineralization forms a western continuation of the orebodies extending from the Klyuchevskoe deposit, with most prospective mineralization identified at the Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences. At the Zone 23 occurrence, Soviet era drilling intercepted wide intervals of gold mineralization. Historical hole C-222 intercepted mineralized intervals (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes per tonne of gold) of: 3 metres grading 0.63 grammes of gold per tonne (from 46 metres); and 5 metres grading 1.56 grammes of gold per tonne (from 51 metres); and 38 metres grading 1.48 grammes of gold per tonne (from 58 metres),

including: 6.5 m grading 2.23 grammes of gold per tonne (from 62 metres), 3.0 m grading 2.97 grammes of gold per tonne (from 84 metres). Historical hole C-215 intercepted five mineralized intervals (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of: 3.5 metres grading 0.86 grammes of gold per tonne (from 16.5 metres); and 3.5 metres grading 1.11 grammes of gold per tonne (from 23.5 metres); and 31.6 metres grading 1.2 grammes of gold per tonne (from 54.1 metres),

including: 2.1 m grading 2.20 grammes of gold per tonne (from 59 metres), 5.5 m grading 2.13 grammes of gold per tonne (from 63.1 metres), 2.0 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 70.6 metres); and 44.8 metres grading 0.82 grammes of gold per tonne (from 95 metres),

including: 4.0 m grading 1.73 grammes of gold per tonne (from 101.2 metres), 6.8 m grading 1.08 grammes of gold per tonne (from 107.2 metres), 3.8 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 135 metres); and 27.5 metres grading 0.71 grammes of gold per tonne (from 167.5 metres),

including: 5.0 m grading 1.26 grammes of gold per tonne (from 176.5 metres).

At the Kozie occurrence, historical drillholes intercepted (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne): 7.5 metres (from 65 metres) grading 2.59 grammes of gold per tonne in hole C-140; 7.5 metres (from 125 metres) grading 1.53 grammes of gold per tonne in hole C-141.

At the Karamaevskoe occurrence, historical hole C-197 intercepted a mineralized interval (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of: 20.0 metres grading 1.55 grammes of gold per tonne (from 28 metres).



All potential quantities and grades referred to in this announcement are conceptual in nature; there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

The results referred to are primarily based on historical data prepared between 40 and 60 years ago, and as such their relevance and reliability may be uncertain. Further analysis will be required, including confirmatory drilling and/or trenching and assays of the core plus updated analysis and assessment of the historical data in order to verify the historical estimates as current mineral resources or reserves.

A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. The Company is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves.

Orsu, the London-based TSX listed company (TSX:OSU), today announces that it has entered into Exclusive and Binding Heads of Agreement ("Heads of Agreement") for the potential acquisition of 100% of Sibzoloto Investments Limited ("Sibzoloto"), a Cyprus registered company which is the sole owner of LLC GK Alexandrovskoe ("LLC GK Alexandrovskoe"), which in turn is the sole holder of the Sergeevskoe licence area in the Russian Federation ("Sergeevskoe Project"), from two arm's length parties, (1) Metalsib Group (BVI) ("Metalsib") and (2) OC Management Group (BVI) ("Olympia Capital"); (Metalsib and Olympia Capital, together defined as the "Sellers").

Summary of the Heads of Agreement

The following sets out the key terms of the Heads of Agreement, which will be filed on the Company's SEDAR profile:

1. Orsu has agreed to acquire:

100% of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project via the acquisition of Sibzoloto, and

100% of a nearby work camp via the acquisition of LLC Davenda, a company under effective control of the Sellers, (the "Proposed Transaction") conditional upon good faith negotiation of formal definitive sale and purchase documentation (including a formal sale and purchase agreement), and completion of due diligence, for the consideration set out below. The exclusivity period runs until January 31, 2017 ("Exclusivity Period") and may be extended by mutual agreement of the parties.

2. The consideration for Sibzoloto will be the issue of new common shares of Orsu as follows:

The Company will issue 146,605,683 new common shares in Orsu to the Sellers for the acquisition of 30% of the outstanding shares of Sibzoloto at closing such that, post-closing, the Sellers will own approximately 44.5% of the enlarged share capital of Orsu (or 42.5% of the total enlarged and fully diluted share capital of Orsu, assuming exercise of all issued and outstanding options). The Sellers shall transfer the remaining 70% of the outstanding shares of Sibzoloto at the time the Company completes the sale of its Karchiga Project (as announced on April 11, 2016).

In the event that the proceeds from the sale of the Karchiga Project are not received by June 30, 2017, the Company will issue a further 378,731,348 common shares of Orsu (the "Top-up Shares") to the Sellers such that the Sellers will own in aggregate a combined total of 525,337,031 common shares of Orsu or, approximately, 74.2% of the enlarged share capital of Orsu (or 72.5% of the total enlarged and fully diluted outstanding common shares of Orsu, assuming exercise of all issued and outstanding options). The issuance of the Top-up Shares will be conditional upon the Sellers transferring the 700 remaining shares in Sibzoloto such that Orsu owns all 1,000 shares (100%) of Sibzoloto. Any subsequent receipt of proceeds from the sale of the Karchiga Project will inure to the benefit of all shareholders of Orsu as at a date to be established in the definitive sale and purchase documentation (excluding the Sellers).

3. Orsu will acquire 100% of LLC Davenda, a company under effective control of the Sellers, that owns the fully operational work camp located near the Sergeevskoe Gold Project area for aggregate cash consideration of US$600,000, with US$180,000 to be paid on closing of the Proposed Transaction and the balance of US$420,00 to be paid within ten days after completion of the sale of the Karchiga Project. In the event the sale of the Karchiga Project is not completed by June 30, 2017, the balance of US$420,000 within ten days after June 30, 2017. The acquisition by Orsu of LLC Davenda is inter-conditional with the acquisition by Orsu of Sibzoloto.

4. The Proposed Transaction will be subject to the completion of technical, legal and financial due diligence by each Party. Orsu's due diligence requirements will also include the production of a technical report compatible with the requirements of Canadian National Instrument 43-101.

5. The Proposed Transaction is subject to the following Conditions Precedent:

1) Execution of a Sale and Purchase Agreement ("SPA") and definitive documentation; 2) Necessary approvals, if any, from the Russian Federation for the transfer of ownership of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project to Orsu; 3) Approval of the Proposed Transaction (including the issue of new shares) by any applicable governmental, corporate and shareholder approvals that may be required for completion of the transaction, including, inter alia, the approval by the Orsu shareholders at a Shareholders' Meeting; 4) TSX approval of the Proposed Transaction (including the issue of shares) and any other regulatory approvals required by the TSX or by the applicable securities commissions or regulatory authorities in Canada.

6. Pursuant to the Heads of Agreement, Orsu has been granted an exclusivity period expiring on January 31, 2017 in order to complete its due diligence and enter into definitive documentation to complete the Proposed Transaction. The Heads of Agreement will automatically terminate on the later of January 31, 2017 or any extension of the Exclusivity Period agreed by the parties. In addition, Orsu has the right to terminate the Heads of Agreement without any obligation at any time during the due diligence process in the event of material adverse finding during the course of such due diligence.

7. A representative of the Sellers will be granted the right to attend board meetings of Orsu as an observer prior to completion of the Proposed Transaction. Upon completion of the Proposed Transaction, the Sellers will have the right to appoint two directors in total to the Board of Directors of Orsu and the total number of directors of Orsu will be five. The appointment of such directors will be subject to any approvals required by the Toronto Stock Exchange or other applicable regulatory bodies for such individual appointee.

8. Orsu has agreed not to authorize any additional expenditure over and above current contractual obligations and those required for its ordinary course of business in excess of US$5,000 without the prior written consent of a Representative of the Sellers.

9. Shortly following completion of the Proposed Transaction, Orsu will make available no less than US$1,500,000 to fund the exploration of the Sergeevskoe Project.

10. Orsu intends to consolidate its common shares on a ratio of one post-consolidation common share for every ten common shares currently outstanding prior to completion of the Proposed Transaction. The number of common shares of Orsu to be issued as consideration pursuant to the Proposed Transaction will be adjusted according to the final ratio of such share consolidation.

11. Immediately prior to completion of the Proposed Transaction, Orsu will have a minimum of US$3,000,000 cash and cash equivalents on its books (including the initial payment of US$180,000 in respect of Orsu's acquisition of Sibzoloto and the total consideration of US$600,000 in respect of Orsu's acquisition of LLC Davenda).

12. The structure and form of the Proposed Transaction will be more particularly defined in a formal sale and purchase agreement to be negotiated in good faith and entered into by the parties.

About the Sergeevskoe licence area

The Sergeevskoe licence covers an area of 7.6 km2 and is located approximately 40 km to the southwest of the town of Mogocha, Zabaikal'skiy Region of the Russian Federation. Mogocha is an administrative centre of the Mogocha District and hosts a large railway station on the Trans-Siberian Railway which runs within approximately 35 km of the licence area. The newly built Chita-Khabarovsk motorway (M58) is approximately 8 km to the south of the licence area. The distance to the Sergeevskoe Project area from the city of Chita, an administrative centre of the Zabaikal'skiy Region in eastern Siberia, is approximately 650 km.

The Sergeevskoe licence area is located immediately west of the Klyuchevskoe gold deposit (see image below), which is owned by Sun Gold Ltd ("Sun Gold"). According to Dr BI Benevolskiy, who published detailed accounts of historical production of gold in a monograph "Gold of Russia" (Benevolskiy, 2002; see footnote 3), the Klyuchevskoe deposit has historically produced over 1.3 million ounces of gold from an open pit, whose western wall is located 300 metres from the eastern margin of the Sergeevskoe license area. According to public information published by Vestnik Zolotopromyshlennika (Gold Miner Bulletin) on August 31, 2016 (see footnote 4), the Klyuchevskoe deposit has estimated mineral resources containing 47.8 tonnes of gold in Russian style A+B+C1 categories, 26.6 tonnes of gold in Russian style C2 category and 4 tonnes of gold in 'out of balance' category, complying with Russian Code for the Public Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, all grading up to 2 grammes of gold per tonne. According to the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Agency, the Klyuchevskoe mine is in the advanced stages of being sold to China National Gold Group (see footnote 4). The nearby Alexandrovskoe gold mine, which was commissioned in September 2013, lies to the west of the Sergeevskoe license area (see image below). Alexandrovskoe Gold Mining Limited has disclosed on its website that in the end of 2012, the Russian style reserves were approved by Protocol No.2853 of the Russian State Reserves Committee, amounting to 7.898 million tonnes in Russian-style i1+i2 categories (balance + off-balance) with 23.894 tonnes (715 381 ounces) of gold grading 2.9 grammes of gold per tonne. Alexandrovskoe Gold Mining Limited also reported Russian-style resources at Alexandrovskoye ore field estimated to be more than 2 million ounces of gold (see footnote 4).

Orsu conducted a site visit in July 2016 and, based on this and a review of the technical information made available, believes that the geology of the Sergeevskoe Project area is principally similar to the Klyuchevskoe deposit area. Some orebodies from the Klyuchevskoe deposit extend into the Sergeevskoe license area. Granitoid intrusions are a principal host for 150 million years old mineralization.

The Sergeevskoe Project area hosts numerous gold occurrences, discovered and partially drill tested in the 1950s and 1960s, with geophysical and geochemical works performed in the 1970s. No field exploration activity was undertaken from the mid-1980s until 2013, when the Sellers acquired the Sergeevskoe Project via public auction from the Government of the Russian Federation. No approved historical Soviet-style or JORC compliant mineral resources exist for mineral prospects within the Sergeevskoe Project area. However, several reports estimated potential resources of the Sergeevskoe Project area in Russian-style "P" category. These historical estimates, combined for several prospects within the license area, range from 2 to 4 million ounces of gold grading 1.67 to 1.77 grammes of gold per tonne, which is not compliant to the standards of the Canadian National Instrument 43-101, but can be possibly treated as an indication of exploration potential.

On July 7, 2016 the Technical Board for the Department of Subsoil Usage, Zabaikal'skiy Subsection, Central Siberian Region, Russian Federation has approved Protocol N81 with the Russian-style P1 to P3 categories, containing a total of 29.736 million tonnes of mineralization in several prospects within the Sergeevskoe license area with a total of 59.31 tonnes (approximately 1.91 million ounces) of gold, calculated to a depth of 100 metres. The mineralized system in all prospects remains open to depth.

All potential quantities and grades referred to in this announcement are conceptual in nature; there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

The results referred to are primarily based on historical data prepared between 40 and 60 years ago, and as such their relevance and reliability may be uncertain. Further analysis will be required, including confirmatory drilling and/or trenching and assays of the core plus updated analysis and assessment of the historical data in order to verify the historical estimates as current mineral resources or reserves.

A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. The Company is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves.

Historical works included soil-geochemistry sampling at 1:10 000 scale as well as different ground and airborne geophysical surveys resulting in the delineation of a number of gold, copper and molybdenum anomalous areas. The most advanced occurrences include Zone 23, Koziy, Vodorazdelnoe (Peak Klyuchi) and Karamaevskoe (see image above). Gold mineralization is arranged along the 5 km long west-east trending quartz vein-veinlet system, which is often accompanied by alteration (tourmalinization, sericitization) together with primary sulphide mineralization. Judging from a visit to the nearby Klyuchevskoe open pit, primary sulphides are oxidized down to 180 meters, with drilling-confirmed vertical extent of gold mineralization at the Klyuchevskoe deposit to 600 meters.

Numerous trenches (totaling more than 16,200 metres at the Zone 23, Koziy and Vodorazdelnoe (Peak Klyuchi) occurrences) intercepted wide gold-mineralized intervals within a 1 000 x 600 metres west-east trending area in the eastern part of the Sergeevskoe license area, including Zone 23, Kozie and Vodorazdelnoe occurrences. The historically identified mineralized intervals range in width from 2 to 48 metres with grade variations from 1 to 5 grammes per tonne of gold. The 850 metres long historical trench K-679, cross-cutting both the Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences, intercepted several intervals separated by low grade or unmineralized material (from south to the north).

In the south, over 325 metres across Zone 23 occurrence:

2 metres grading 1.0 gramme of gold per tonne, and

24 metres grading 1.4 grammes of gold per tonne, and

2 metres grading 3.2 grammes of gold per tonne, and

2 metres grading 1.6 grammes of gold per tonne, and

48 meters grading 1.7 grammes of gold per tonne, and

7 metres grading 1.3 grammes of gold per tonne, and

8 metres grading 1.7 grammes of gold per tonne, and

16 metres grading 1.8 grammes of gold per tonne, and

6 metres grading 3.1 grammes of gold per tonne, and

4 metres grading 2.0 grammes of gold per tonne, and

4 metres grading 2.1 grammes of gold per tonne.

This was followed by approximately 200 metres of unmineralized interval before reaching the Kozie occurrence, where the same trench intercepted the following intervals over 200 metres across the latter:

3 metres grading 1.8 grammes of gold per tonne, and

9 metres grading 2.3 grammes of gold per tonne, and

1 metre grading 3.0 grammes of gold per tonne, and

2 metres grading 2.0 grammes of gold per tonne, and

38 metres grading 2.1 grammes of gold per tonne, and

1 metre grading 3.2 grammes of gold per tonne, and

40 metres grading 3.8 grammes of gold per tonne, and

2 metres grading 1.4 grammes of gold per tonne.

Approximately 8 500 meters of drilling was historically completed at the Sergeevskoe Prospect in the 1950s and 1960s, with approximately 4900 metres drilled at Zone 23, Koziy and Vodorazdelnoe (Peak Klyuchi) occurrences and remaining balance drilled at the Karamaevskoe and other occurrences. No drill core from the historical holes is preserved. The reported historical core recoveries were approximately 50 percent. There were also some limited underground developments (shallow shafts and one adit with cross-cuts).

Historical drillholes at Zone 23 returned wide intercepts of gold mineralization. In particular, hole C-222 was drilled in the southern direction at 75 degrees to a depth of 160 metres and intercepted mineralized intervals (greater than 2 metres in thickness at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of:

3 metres grading 0.63 grammes of gold per tonne (from 46 metres);

5 metres grading 1.56 grammes of gold per tonne (from 51 metres);

38 metres grading 1.48 grammes of gold per tonne (from 58 metres),

Including 6.5 m grading 2.23 grammes of gold per tonne (from 62 metres), 3.0 m grading 2.97 grammes of gold per tonne (from 84 metres).

Including

Hole C-215, which was drilled to a depth of 200 metres in the southwestern direction at approximately 74 degrees to the surface. This hole intercepted five mineralized intervals (greater than 2 metres in thickness and above 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne cut-off):

3.5 metres grading 0.86 grammes of gold per tonne (from 16.5 metres); and

3.5 metres grading 1.11 grammes of gold per tonne (from 23.5 metres); and

31.6 metres grading 1.2 grammes of gold per tonne (from 54.1 metres),

including: 2.1 m grading 2.20 grammes of gold per tonne (from 59 metres), 5.5 m grading 2.13 grammes of gold per tonne (from 63.1 metres), 2.0 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 70.6 metres); and 44.8 metres grading 0.82 grammes of gold per tonne (from 95 metres),

including: including: 4.0 m grading 1.73 grammes of gold per tonne (from 101.2 metres), 6.8 m grading 1.08 grammes of gold per tonne (from 107.2 metres), 3.8 m grading 1.30 grammes of gold per tonne (from 135 metres); and



27.5 metres grading 0.71 grammes of gold per tonne (from 167.5 metres),

including: 5.0 m grading 1.26 grammes of gold per tonne (from 176.5 metres).

including:

The combined width of the mineralized intervals in hole C-215 is 102.4 metres, indicating that more than 50% of the total length of this hole is mineralized above the 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne cut-off.

Historical drillholes at the Kozie occurrence, located some 350 metres north from Zone 23, are also reported to intercept gold mineralization (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne). In particular, historical hole C-140, which was drilled to a depth of 110 metres in the southern direction at approximately 75 degrees to the surface, intercepted 7.5 metres (from 65 metres) grading 2.59 grammes of gold per tonne. Historical hole C-141, which was drilled to a depth of 170 metres in the southern direction at approximately 70 degrees to the surface, intercepted 7.5 metres (from 125 metres) grading 1.53 grammes of gold per tonne. The 15.8 metres deep shallow vertical shaft (N28) intercepted mineralization grading between 0.4 and 4.3 grammes of gold per tonne. Another 25 metres deep shaft (N29) intercepted mineralization grading between 2.4 and 15.2 grammes of gold per tonne.

At the Karamaevskoe occurrence, historical hole C-197 was drilled in the southwestern direction at 70 degrees to a depth of 104 metres and intercepted a wide mineralized interval (at a cut-off of 0.5 grammes of gold per tonne) of 20.0 metres grading 1.55 grammes of gold per tonne (from 28 metres).

Despite promising intercepts, none of the prospects has been systematically drilled.

Orsu collected 15 lump samples during its site visit and inspection of the historical trenches. These samples were submitted by Orsu to the SGS Vostok Limited laboratory ("SGS Vostok") in Chita, which is a Russian subsidiary of SGS Societe Generale de Surveillance S.A. and member of SGS Group, the inspection, verification, testing and certification company, independent from both Orsu and the Sellers. SGS Vostok has assayed 15 samples, including one field duplicate, but no blanks or external standards were included by Orsu. SGS Vostok used a standard fire assay technique with detection limit of 0.03 grammes of gold per tonne. Of these, 13 assays returned between 0.18 to 5.69 grammes of gold per tonne for samples, generally collected randomly from the mineralized intervals shown on the historical maps for the above-mentioned trench K-679 at Zone 23 and Kozie occurrences. The duplicate samples Ser-003 returned 0.53 and 0.55 grammes of gold per tonne, indicating good correlation for this limited sampling programme.

Dr Sergey V Kurzin, Executive Chairman of Orsu, commented: "I am very excited by this opportunity. Gold is a commodity in which management and partners of Orsu have extensive experience, especially in the Former Soviet Union. We believe that the Sergeevskoe Gold Project has significant potential value to be added. I am looking forward to working with the group of new partners who are also very experienced in Russian gold geology, finance and the industry. The combination of the project's potential, Orsu competencies and a strong local team will allow us to fast-track the exploration works to its fruition."

Notes to Editors:

1. Dr Alexander Yakubchuk, Chief Operating Officer for Orsu and a qualified person as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the contents of this press release. Dr Alexander Yakubchuk has verified the data disclosed in this press release, including sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information or opinions contained in this news release.

2. All $ figures are United States Dollars unless otherwise indicated.

3. Benevolskiy BI, 2002. Gold of Russia: Problems of the Use and Replacement of Mineral Resources. 2nd Revised Edition. Moscow, ZAO Geoinformmark, 464 pp. In Russian.

4 Based on publicly available information, which was not prepared, or independently verified, by Orsu.

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws that reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future events. Forward-looking information involves risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events, results, performance and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Forward-looking information contained in this press release includes, but may not be limited to, the anticipated completion of the Proposed Transaction or the completion of the Karchiga Transaction and the terms and timing related thereto, the Company's use of the proceeds from the Karchiga Transaction, and the expected effect of the Proposed Transaction on the Company, including (but not limited to) management's belief that the Sergeevskoe Gold Project could have significant value for the Company.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, the inability of the parties to satisfy any conditions to the completion of the Proposed Transaction disclosed herein, which include the negotiation and execution of a definitive SPA before the end of the Exclusivity Period, unsatisfactory due diligence results, the failure to obtain the necessary approval of the Russian Federation for the transfer of ownership of the Sergeevskoe Gold Project, the failure to obtain approval of the Proposed Transaction by Orsu shareholders, the failure to obtain the required authorizations and/or approvals from the TSX. Other risks relating to the completion of the Proposed Transaction include the regulatory framework in Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation, adverse changes in the laws or political environment in Kazakhstan or the Russian Federation, adverse changes in commodities prices, as well as certain other risks set out in the Company's public documents, including its annual information form dated March 30, 2016, filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

The forward-looking information in this press release reflects the current expectations, assumptions and/or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. In connection with the forward-looking information contained in this press release, the Company has made assumptions about: the Company's business, the economy and the mineral resources development and extraction industry in general; available historical information will be useful in the Company's evaluation of the geological and metallurgical risks for the Sergeevskoe Gold Project; the Company's ability to obtain the requisite regulatory approvals; and the seller's ability to obtain the requisite governmental approvals. The Company has also assumed that no significant events occur outside of the Company's normal course of business. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking information are reasonable, forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such information due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

Any Russian style "A, B, C1, C2 and P" category figures referred to in this press release are historical estimates and no assurances can be given that the indicated levels of minerals will be verified and/or produced. Such estimates made at a given time may significantly change when new information becomes available. By their nature such estimates are imprecise and depend, to a certain extent, upon statistical inferences which may ultimately prove unreliable. Due to the uncertainty that may be attached to such estimates, it cannot be assumed that all or any part of such estimates will be upgraded to mineral resource as a result of continued exploration.

Any forward-looking information speak only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise.
WEST KELOWNA, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Sept. 21, 2016) - COLORADO RESOURCES LTD. (TSX VENTURE:CXO) ("Colorado" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the successful completion of its 2016 field work and drilling program on the KSP Property and reports the assay results from Inel drillholes 31- 45 (see following table).

Since drilling commenced on June 18, 2016, 59 drillholes (totaling 8,861.8 m) have been completed at KSP with an emphasis on the Inel Area where 53 holes were drilled. Consistent with the Company's earlier news releases, Inel drillholes INDDHI1631- INDDH1645 returned several high grade gold intercepts, as well significant intercepts at multiple horizons as noted in the following table. These results also document the first drill intercept in the interpreted southern extension of the AK Trend in Hole 42 more than 500 m south of the AK Adit and 500 m west of the Discovery Adit.

In addition to the drilling, a total of 990 soil and 511 rock samples were collected, and a further 50 square kilometres of geological mapping were completed. Geophysical surveys consisting of 10.0 line km of IP and 47.0 line km of ground mag were also conducted by Walcott and Associates and a 126 line km helicopter airborne VTEM time domain system was undertaken by Geotech Ltd.

Adam Travis, Colorado President and C.E.O states: "We have had a very successful exploration season at KSP completing more than double the amount of work required under our joint venture this year with an emphasis on drilling a portion of the gold in soil anomaly at the Inel target. Our 2016 Inel first pass drilling program tested a 500 m x 600 m area at approximately 75-100 m centres and has returned, several intercepts with multi-ounce gold values over 1 m apparent widths. Several of these higher grade intersections are also enveloped by broader intervals such as INDDH16-025 which returned 99 m of 2.11 g/t gold. Drillhole INDDH16-042 returned 4 metres of 16.02 g/t gold, including 53.1 g/t gold or more than 1.7 opt gold across a drill indicated width of 1.0 m. This drillhole is located 500 m east of the Discovery Adit which reinforces the fact that the large target zones at Inel are only partially tested and that we have barely scratched the surface of this large, robust system. Although the 10 km 2 Inel- Khyber area is very significant, it is still only a small portion of the 305 km 2 KSP district, which hosts numerous kilometer scale mineralized, alteration centres. We look forward to continuing to advance what is undoubtedly one of British Columbia's best exploration projects"

Upon the completion of this year's exploration program, it is anticipated that approximately $6.0M in cumulative exploration expenditures will have been incurred at KSP over the last three years. This would be one year ahead of schedule as per the underlying agreement with Seabridge Gold Inc. Under this agreement, Colorado has the right to earn an initial 51% interest in the KSP Property by incurring $6.0M in exploration expenditures and completing total cash payments of $500k (of which $225k has been paid to date). Colorado has the further right, at its sole election, to increase its interest to 80% by incurring an additional $4M in exploration expenditures.

Over the next few months Colorado will be compiling and interpreting the remaining results from the 2016 surface exploration work and diamond drilling program and planning next year's exploration program at KSP.

Inel 2016 Drillholes 31-45: Significant* Intercepts Hole ID Hole Length

(m) From (m) To (m) Interval (m)1 Au (g/t) Au (oz/t)2 Ag (g/t)3 Zn (%)4 INDDH16-031 120.0 63.0 65.0 2.0 5.73 INDDH16-032 96.0 58.0 74.6 16.6 0.64 INDDH16-033 183 162.0 176.0 14.0 0.59 INDDH16-034 159.0 97.0 138.0 41.0 1.00 1.32 including 97.0 103.0 6.0 3.57 including 102.0 103.0 1.0 15.75 0.51 and 109.8 121.0 11.2 1.17 INDDH16-035 199.4 157.0 173.0 16.0 1.16 INDDH16-037 150.0 102.0 144.0 42.0 0.94 INDDH16-038 153.0 9.3 28.0 18.7 0.72 and 41.0 74.0 33.0 0.82 including 72.0 74.0 2.0 5.86 INDDH16-039 111.0 25.7 34.5 8.8 1.21 2.32 INDDH16-040 156.0 59.0 71.0 12.0 0.86 and 114.0 134.0 20.0 0.89 INDDH16-041 219.0 25.0 45.0 20.0 1.09 including 40.0 44.0 4.0 3.15 INDDH16-042 222.0 35.0 52.0 17.0 4.23 including 35.0 39.0 4.0 16.02 0.52 37.85 2.07 including 35.0 36.0 1.0 53.10 1.71 39.20 1.12 and 146.0 220.0 74.0 1.02 including 171.0 187.0 16.0 2.69 1.10 INDDH16-043 147.0 62.7 92.1 29.4 0.76 INDDH16-044 189.0 29.0 39.0 10.0 1.28 and 145.5 177.0 31.5 1.46 including 145.5 147.0 1.5 7.02 and 169.0 170.0 1.0 12.50 0.40 INDDH16-045 171.0 80.0 81.0 1.0 10.50 0.34 77.60 3.09 and 92.0 93.0 1.0 16.55 0.53 62.30 6.95 and 133.0 150.0 17.0 1.06 including 133.0 134.0 1.0 10.85 0.35 27.50

*Significant Defined as the product of metres x grade > 10 with grade > 0.5 grams Au, e.g.: >10 g/t Au over 1.0 m or > 1 g/t over 10 m, No Significant Results for INDDH16-036 1 - The intervals reported in this release represent drill intercepts and insufficient data is available at this time to state the true thickness of the mineralized intervals and all values are uncut. 2 - Gold Values over 10.00 g/t Au converted to troy ounces per metric ton (Au g/t / 31.10348) 3 - Silver >30.00 g/t Ag Reported 4 - Zinc >1% Reported

Results from the work to date at KSP have highlighted a number of points:

Inel Hosts Three Significant Mineralized Trends (see Figure 1) - At least three stacked, gold enriched, zinc bearing sulphide zones at Inel have been intersected in the 2016 drill holes. These zones or horizons have been defined by drilling over a 350 m dip distance and over a 600 m strike length. Anomalous surface geochemistry and geological mapping suggests that the Inel target area is at least 1000 m in strike length and 1500 m in width.

Inel Makes the Grade - Both high grade gold (including values of 165.5 g/t Au over 1.0 m in INDDH-029) and broader lower grade gold (99 m of 2.11 g/t Au in INDDH-025) have been reported from the 2016 drilling to date, demonstrating the potential for Inel to host significant gold mineralization at all three stratigraphic and structural horizons. Multiple Alteration Centres (see Figure 2) - Highly anomalous gold, copper +/- molybdenum surface geochemistry and the interpretation of geological mapping have characterized several target alteration centres not only in the Inel - Khyber area but also at Pyramid Hill (4 km south of Inel), Sericite Ridge (6km SE of Inel), Nee-Lake Zone (9km SE of Inel) and at Pins (14 km SE of Inel), all of which are associated with the Sky - Khyber Thrust Fault System. Similar zones of hydrothermal alteration are also noted at Black Bluff (10 km east of Inel) and Big Rock (2.5 km NE of Inel) associated with long strike length second order structures.



Two short exploratory drillholes (TMDDH16-001 and 002), totaling 183 m, were drilled south towards the Tami Showing from the same location (due to poor recovery in the first drillhole). They were located approximately 20 m north of a 2014 channel sample (CH14-006 B) that returned 15 m of 2.94 g/t gold and 0.51 % copper. These short holes failed to intercept the mineralized intrusive as noted in the channel sample. Subsequent detailed geophysics and geological structural mapping have determined that the 2016 Tami drillholes were drilled underneath a shallow dipping mineralized panel that dips away from these holes, and as a consequence, they did not test the Tami target.

Four exploratory drillholes (KBDDH16-01 to 04) were drilled in the Khyber area. These holes tested surface gold-copper mineralization in the East Khyber area (KBDDH16-01), an anomalous zinc and gold in soils target along the Khyber ridge crest (KBDDH16-02 and 03) and in the vicinity of high grade zinc boulders (KBDDH16-04). KBDDH16-01 was drilled 2.5 km southeast of the main drilling area at Inel and more than 240 metres lower in elevation and intercepted 0.14 % copper and 0.01% molybdenum over 100 m from 32-132 m suggesting that Khyber may be zoning to a copper- molybdenum +/- gold system at depth. Drillholes KBDDH16-02, 03 and 04 located 1.2 to1.5 km southeast of Inel returned highly anomalous zinc values. For example KBDDH16-02 returned 0.32 % zinc from the collar (2.57 m) to 133 m down the hole suggesting that zinc is forming a halo to the higher grade gold mineralization such as KBDDH14-003 (located 600-900 m to the west) which returned 18.1 g/t Au over 2.4 m in the 2014 drill program.

Qualified Person

Dr. Jim Oliver, Ph.D, P. Geo is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 who supervised the work program and/or preparation of the technical data in this news release

QA/QV statement on Assay Results where required.

The 2016 samples were analyzed by ALS Minerals of Vancouver, British Columbia. Samples were prepared by the Prep-31b method, which involves crushing the entire sample to 70% passing -2mm, splitting off 1kg and pulverizing the split to better than 85% passing 75 microns. Base metal assays were first determined using the ME-ICP61 method, which reports results as parts per million (ppm). Any samples containing greater than 10,000 ppm zinc were analyzed by the Zn-OG62 method, which reports results as percent. Any samples containing greater than 100 ppm silver were analyzed by the Ag-OG62 method, which reports results as ppm. The gold assays were determined using the Au-AA25 fire assay method which reports results in ppm and are equivalent to grams per tonne (g/t). Any samples returning greater than 100 ppm gold were analyzed by the Au-GRA21 fire assay method with a gravimetric finish. The analytical results were verified with the application of industry standard Quality Control and Quality Assurance (QA-QC) procedures.

For more information on the KSP Project the reader is directed to the Company's website at www.coloradoresources.com.

About Colorado

Colorado Resources Ltd. is currently engaged in the business of mineral exploration for the purpose of acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia and is also seeking opportunities in Southwest USA and Latin America.

Colorado's current exploration focus is to continue to advance: the KSP property under option with Seabridge Gold Inc., located 15 km's along strike to the southeast of the past producing Snip Mine*; its 100% owned North ROK property, located 15 km's northwest of the Red Chris* mine development, both located in northern central British Columbia.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF COLORADO RESOURCES LTD.

Adam Travis, President and Chief Executive Officer

Cautionary Note

*This news release contains information about adjacent properties on which Colorado has no right to explore or mine. Readers are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on the Company's properties.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release, constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions, including: that the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events, that the Company obtains required regulatory approvals, that the Company continues to maintain a good relationship with the local project communities. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to prove not to be valid or reliable, which could result in delays, or cessation in planned work, that the Company's financial condition and development plans change, delays in regulatory approval, risks associated with the interpretation of data, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis reports filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
JURIST Guest Columnist Stephen Cooper discusses Proposition 62

No righteous, freedom-loving Californian believes human beings should be executed for possessing or selling pot. Indeed, we rightly cringe at the megalomaniac entreaties (such as, kill drug dealers and Ill give you a medal)of military strongman, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who incites, and has himself been directly linked to mass extrajudicial killings of Filipinos for non-violent drug crimes.

We tsk-tsk and, secretly or not so secretly, we pat ourselves on the back for being so much more evolved.

Putting aside for a minute, the distant and distasteful asterisk of Newt Gingrichs proposed Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996, as conservative and liberal Americans in California, we wonder: How could social mores in the Philippines descend so low it becomes acceptableand more than that, praised by the governmentfor vigilantes to kill over drug crimes? What became of the rule of law?!

We forget, as Don Jackson of The Los Angeles Free Press reported on April 10, 1970, that in California, [t]he death sentence [was once] voted by the Bakersfield City Council for a second conviction of selling marijuana or illegal drugs. Councilman Robert Whitemore, who introduced the legislation said [at the time], Unless severe measures are taken, an entire generation will be destroyed by dope.

As reported that same month by The Desert Sun, even then-Governor Ronald Reagan hinted he might favor capital punishment for some hard drug peddlers. Asked what he thought of [the] Bakersfield City Council resolution calling for life imprisonment or the death penalty for persons convicted twice of selling hard drugs [which at that time wrongly included marijuana, just as the federal government continues to wrongly classify it as a hard drug today], Reagan said he thought there was some justification for considering dope pushers as dangerous as murderers.

In California, and across this great land, we long ago came to the realization as a people, through our democratic institutions and idealseven ardent admirers of capital punishment, Ronald Reagan (and, yes, even Gingrich)that its immoral for the state to execute a person over drugs.

Another famous, former California Governor, the Honorable Earl Warren, who later became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, were he still alive, would observe, our standards of decency have evolv[ed], thereby [m]ark[ing] the progress of a maturing society.

On November 8, by voting for Proposition 62 and against Proposition 66, Californians can take that next critical step forward towards marking our progress as a maturing society.

We arent married to the death penalty but if we were, given its dastardly, dysfunctional and discriminatory history, its well-nigh time for a divorce. By guaranteeing life without the possibility of parole for the worst of the worst, we can, as peaceful, justice-loving citizens, properly and respectfully honor the victims of homicide and their families.

Without compromising our morality, as the competing ballot initiative, Proposition 66 would require, we can finally reject the antiquated, eye-for-an-eye mentality, at capital punishments ignoble rootsan ideology steeped in revenge, hatred, even bloodlust.

As President Lincoln beautifully counseled at the close of his first inaugural address following the United States gloomy upheaval of secession, the time is now for us to look to the better angels of our nature, and end capital punishment. Moreover, also attributable to Lincoln: Lets have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California.

Suggested citation: Stephen Cooper, Proposition 62 appeals to the better angels of our nature , JURIST- Professional Commentary, September 20, 2016, http://jurist.org/hotline/2016/09/stephen-cooper-proposition-62.php.

This article was prepared for publication by Elizabeth Dennis, an Assistant Editor for JURIST Commentary. Please direct any questions or comments to her at commentary@jurist.org
Ahmad Rahami [CNN profile], the suspect in last weeks bombings in New York and New Jersey [USA Today timeline], was charged [complaint, PDF] in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [official website] Tuesday. The charges include: Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Bombing a Place of Public Use, Destruction of Property by Means of Fire or Explosive, and Use of a Destructive Device During and in Furtherance of a Crime of Violence. Rahami is also facing similar charges [complaint, PDF] in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey [official website]. The bombings, which took place on Saturday, injured 29 people in New York, and no one was injured in the New Jersey attack. Rahami was arrested the following Monday after sustaining injuries during a shootout with police. The suspect also faces charges of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer [CNN report] stemming from the shootout.

A bomb went off in Seaside Park, New Jersey, on Saturday morning. The location was serving as the venue for a Marine Corps charity race. That evening an explosion occurred in Chelsea, injuring 29 people. Numerous explosive devices were uncovered in the city throughout the weekend. Ahmad Rahami was identified as the suspect behind the bombings from surveillance video and fingerprinting. Rahamis father reported him in 2014 [NYT report] as a suspected terrorist.
[JURIST] The US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] opened an investigation on Tuesday into the fatal police shooting of Terence Crutcher. Crutcher, an unarmed black man, was shot last week [WSJ report] by a Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer responding to a 911 call of a vehicle blocking a road. The Tulsa police department is investigating the shooting, but US Attorney Danny Williams [official profile] announced [KJRH report] to the press that the DOJs investigation will focus specifically on whether a civil rights violation occurred. A video [AP report] of the circumstances surrounding the shooting was released earlier this week, but the actual moment of the shots being fired was blocked from view. The last images of Crutcher before the shooting showed him walking to his car with his hands up and then placing his hands on the top of the vehicle.

The situation has occurred amid a national conversation about police use of force, particularly against black citizens, and subsequent retaliation. In a press conference held in July in Washington, DC, Attorney General Loretta Lynch gave her response to the shooting of police in Dallas during a peaceful protest. Lynch stated [JURIST report] that the DOJ, including the FBI, ATF, and US Marshals Service and US Attorneys Office were conducting an investigation into the Dallas shooting. In May Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed into law an amended hate crimes bill [JURIST report], referred to as the Blue Lives Matter law, including police, EMS personnel and firefighters in the category of those protected. The bill has drawn the contempt of some civil rights groups, including the Black Lives Matter movement. Earlier this year the DOJ launched an investigation [JURIST report] of the San Francisco Police Department following the shooting of an unarmed African American. In December an Ohio grand jury decided not to indict [JURIST report] two officers involved in a 2014 shooting resulting in the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Earlier that month the DOJ announced that it would be opening a full investigation [JURIST report] into the Chicago Police Department following the 2014 police shooting death of a black teenager.
[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website] on Tuesday ruled [opinion, PDF] that children facing deportation proceedings may not file a class action suit to determine whether they are entitled to an attorney as a due process right. The opinion reversed in part a ruling by Judge Thomas Zilly that determined [ACLU report] the federal courts had jurisdiction to hear the class action lawsuit on constitutional grounds. The three-judge panel ruled instead that the Immigration and Nationality Act [text] exclusive review process applied, necessitating that each individual plaintiff file an appeal in the federal court after all deportation proceedings were exhausted. Interest groups vying on behalf of those facing deportation said it is unreasonable to expect children to navigate the courts to avoid deportation, and the court commiserated. Judge Mary Margaret McKeown wrote in her concurrence to a unanimous decision that it is within the purview of the legislature and executive branches to extend to potential deportees the right to counsel, but she opined that little is likely to be done because the issue lacks [m]oney and resolve.

Immigrants rights and abilities to participate in American governance and judicial proceedings have been hotly contested recently. In July a Kansas judge ruled [JURIST report] that the state must count thousands of votes from people who registered without providing citizenship documents. In April Assistant Professor Michael Morley at Barry University School of Law discussed [JURIST op-ed] a Supreme Court ruling that dealt with voting rights and illegal immigration. Last November New Jersey lawmakers advanced a bill [JURIST report] that allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain New Jersey drivers licenses. Last January the US House of Representatives passed [JURIST report] a $40 billion funding bill for the Department of homeland Security that included amendments to repeal two key facets to President Barack Obamas immigration action. In 2014 Obama announced [JURIST report] executive actions on immigration that would allow 4.7 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the US.
Former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic went on trial for war crimes Tuesday in Croatias Split Court [official website]. Dragan is accused [N1 report, in Croatian] of torturing and murdering civilians and prisoners during the Croation War for independence [GlobalSecurity backgrounder]. Some of the crimes of which he is accused include crimes of aggression that resulted in the destruction of civilian homes, the deaths of a reporter and the murder of prisoners. He has staunchly denied the accusations, claiming he was a defender of his homeland.

In July the 61-year-old pleaded not guilty [JURIST report] to the charges of war crimes brought against him. Vasiljkovic was first arrested in Australia in 2006, following an extradition request from the Croatian government. Vasiljkovic had challenged extradition at least 13 times, but in 2012 the Australian Minister for Justice formally approved Vasiljkovics extradition to Croatia [JURIST report]. The Serbian commander was officially indicted [JURIST report] for war crimes in January of this year.
The police are investigating into the circumstances of murder of the director of Caparol Ukraine firm and criminal proceedings have been opened under the premeditated murder article.

"The police officers are investigating into the circumstances of a murder committed in Krushynka of Vasylkiv district. Criminal proceedings have been opened under Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (premeditated murder)," the police communications department in Kyiv region reported.

According to the report, at noon on Tuesday a call from a passer-by was made. The passer-by said that he found an unknown man who was dead in in Krushynka settlement of Vasylkiv district.

The police established that the killed man was local resident and Ukrainian citizen.

The pretrial investigation is underway.

Earlier the National Police in Kyiv region confirmed to Interfax-Ukraine that the director of Caparol Ukraine was found dead in Vasylkiv district.
[JURIST] The North Carolina Court of Appeals [official website] affirmed [opinion, PDF] a lower courts dismissal of a claim by two former magistrates that their rights were violated by 2014 guidance memos from the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) [official website] that said they could be fired if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. The magistrates resigned after the guidance was issued and filed this suit in April 2015. The magistrates sought a religious accommodation so that they would not be forced to violate their religious beliefs by performing same-sex marriages. The suit was filed against the North Carolina AOC and its interim director, but the court dismissed the claim for lack of standing because the AOC has no statutory authority to appoint, sanction, suspend, remove, or generally supervise magistrates.

Similar disagreement occurred among officials in the Alabama court system regarding same-sex marriage. In March the Alabama Supreme Court dismissed [JURIST report] petitions that sought a ruling declaring the states prohibition on same-sex marriage valid despite the US Supreme Courts June ruling declaring same-sex marriage legal. In January Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore instructed state judges not to issue [JURIST report] same-sex marriage licenses. The Alabama Supreme Court had ruled in March 2015 that the states ban on same-sex marriage is legal and Moores order stated that ruling remained in effect despite the Supreme Court finding [JURIST report] such bans unconstitutional. Moores order had caused confusion among probate judges, with some defying the order and issuing same-sex marriage [JURIST backgrounder] licenses.
The UN Independent Investigation in Burundi (UNIIB) [official website] on Tuesday stated [press release] their grave concern about the current human rights situation in Burundi. The group found, abundant evidence of gross human rights violations, which they believe could amount to crimes against humanity by the government of Burundi and people associated with it. Among the calls for international action, the UNIIB called for the immediate creation of an international Commission of Inquiry into the situation. The UNIIB stated that if the violations continue and the Government continues to fail to prevent abuses, invocation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which authorizes the UN to deploy a force to restore international peace may be necessary.

Violence in Burundi began in the wake of President Pierre Nkurunzizas announcement that he would seek a third term of office, to which he was elected [JURIST report] last year. Last month UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein expressed concern over increased violence and rights violations in Burundi and called for an inclusive political dialogue [JURIST report] to end the ongoing struggle. Speaking to the council about his trip to Burundi last month, the secretary-general stated, I cannot stress enough the profound humanitarian consequences that political unrest, violence and impunity carry for the population. Last November the UN Security Council unanimously adopted [JURIST report] a resolution condemning the political violence and killings currently afflicting Burundi.
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Draft budget: Financing of state programs to treat seriously ill people to be increased by UAH 2 bln

The bill on Ukraine's national budget for 2017 foresees the increase of financing of state programs to treat seriously ill patients by UAH 2 billion, to UAH 5.9 billion.

The Patients of Ukraine charitable foundation has reported that the funds will be sent to buy medicines under cancer, HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis and other disease programs.

In particular, funding of patients with TB is increased by UAH 323 million, with HIV - by UAH 484 million, with pediatric and adult oncology - by UAH 205 and 47 million, respectively, with adult hemophilia - by UAH 301 million, with phenylketonuria  by UAH 39 million, with hepatitis - by UAH 14 million, with cardiovascular diseases  by UAH 43 million. Moreover, additional funds are allocated for treatment of patients with mucopolysaccharidosis (by 218 million UAH).

The draft 2017 budget earlier foresaw the provision of UAH 3.9 billion to finance purchase of medicines.

The Patients of Ukraine said that this was achieved thanks to cooperation of patient organizations with authorities.

Additional 34,000 HIV-positive patients will receive treatment next year. Ukraine will provide treatment for additional 25,000 TB patients. Additional 600 patients will receive access to modern medicines against hepatitis C.

Owing to this reform in 2015 it became possible to save for Ukraine UAH 790 million, as compared to 2014, the foundation said.
Members of the European Parliament Rebecca Harms, Michal Boni and Jaromir Stetina, who together with Vice Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Iryna Gerashchenko and Ukrainian parliamentarians Maria Ionova and Andriy Lopushynsky visited Donbas. They were able to assess the situation in Maryinka, the eponymous check point and nearby positions of Ukrainian military, as well as to talk to local residents.

"As members of the Parliamentary Committee for [EU-Ukraine] Association we wanted to talk to villagers near the line of contact, visit the check point, talk with IDPs and to visit the front line, the Ukrainian military. It is a pity that only three MEPs out of the 20 who originally planned to go to the east, ventured to make this important trip to see with their own eyes whether it is possible to hold elections there when the same European parliament has recommended its members not to go further than Kyiv because of the danger," Gerashchenko wrote on her Facebook page on Monday.

"Today it is Maryinka, Lenin Street renamed into Prokofiev Street. Locals are joking gloomily that every night they are facing the music This morning there was shooting by a sniper. The enemy positions are just 500 meters away... A family with two young children, one child with epilepsy, so each shelling ends in heavy epileptic seizure. They showed pieces of grenades, which hit their home a year ago... the Europeans are shocked. They are going down to the cellar, where the family spends nights when the Grads and mortars are hitting," Gerashchenko said.

According to the Verkhovna Rada vice speaker, there still people living in Maryinka and the neighboring Krasnohorivka. Some 5,000 people currently live in Maryinka alone. "There are problems with gas and electricity, the enemy does not allow maintenance of the electricity grids and people are expecting to go through the winter without heat and light. An excavator, which was holding repairs and laying pipes, has been shelled three times now," she said.

Gerashchenko also spoke about the MEPs visit to Maryinka checkpoint. According to her, everything was quite at the check point on Monday, however a few days ago it was closed due to shelling.

"The European guests were able to talk to people from the occupied territories. They go to the government-controlled areas to get pensions and cheaper products," Gerashchenko said. In her words, it was important for locals to see foreigners in their area.

In addition, the group of MEPs visited the place of deployment of Ukrainian military, where they saw their living conditions.

"Our European counterparts believe that those who argue for lifting of sanctions from Russia, should come here, to see the effects of 'brotherly love' on Maryinka," the vice speaker of the Verkhovna Rada said.
Dallas, TX, USA, 09/21/2016 /SubmitPressRelease123/

This week, in a federal court in New Jersey, two former assistants to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are on trial on federal criminal charges for causing a traffic jam that shut down parts of the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey to New York City, reports John Helms a criminal defense attorney in Dallas. The shutdown caused massive problems in Fort Lee, New Jersey, including delaying emergency responders and children in school buses. The defendants allegedly caused the traffic jam to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, who had refused to support Chris Christies campaign for governor of New Jersey.

A lot of juicy details are coming out about when Governor Christie knew about this, and the text and email messages between the defendants and others are damning. All of this obscures a very basic issue: How is it a federal crime to cause a traffic jam, asks top criminal defense lawyer Helms?

According to the federal prosecutors, the answer begins with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the Port Authority). The Port Authority is like a joint venture between New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority owns and operates the George Washington Bridge. And importantly, the Port Authority receives a lot of federal money to promote transportation between the two states.

In order to protect federal money spent on projects like this, Congress made it a federal crime to steal, embezzle, or misapply money or property from entities that receive at least $10,000 of federal funds annually. See 18 USC section 666(a). The Port Authority received far more than this amount.

So how does causing a traffic jam count as embezzling, stealing, or misapplying money or property from the Port Authority? First of all, Governor Christie had appointed loyalists to key positions in the Port Authority. They allegedly told Port Authority personnel to shut down traffic lanes and toll booths by telling them that this was part of a traffic study to see what would happen if the lanes and booths were suddenly shut down.

The prosecutors argue that the defendants wrongfully took and misapplied the services of Port Authority employees and Port Authority property, like the traffic lanes and tollbooths, in order to carry out a scheme for political retribution.

This is, to be sure, a broad application of the law. The trial judge has allowed the case to go forward, though. If the defendants are convicted at trial, we will have to see whether the United Stated Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upholds this use of the law.

One thing is clear, though: Federal prosecutors often use aggressive interpretations of federal criminal laws in ways that expand their reach into areas that people might not normally expect. Sometimes, aggressive interpretations of the law succeed, and sometimes they dont. As a former federal prosecutor, I drafted a lot of federal criminal indictments, and I have a very good sense of when a prosecutor is stretching a charge. Anyone charged with a federal crime should consult with an experienced federal criminal lawyer quickly. Among other things, a good federal criminal defense lawyer should analyze whether there are good reasons to challenge the scope of an indictment before trial and how to preserve such a challenge for appeal.

If you or someone you know has been charged with a federal offense or are facing other criminal charges, contact John Helms criminal defense attorney in Dallas immediately. Call 214-666-8010.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-helms-69172699

source: http://johnhelms.attorney/criminal-defense-attorney-dallas-weighs-federal-traffic-jam/

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The Ukrainian side has signed the Trilateral Contact Group's framework resolution in Minsk on disengagement of the forces and means of both parties to the conflict along the contact line in eastern Ukraine, says Darka Olifer, a spokesperson of Ukrainian representative in the group, former President Leonid Kuchma.

"Ukraine is consistently implementing the obligations assumed as part of the Minsk Agreements and is strictly observing the ceasefire. Furthermore, the Ukrainian side has signed the framework resolution to ensure the implementation of the Minsk Agreements by separate areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (DPR and LPR)," Olifer wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday.
Lavrov, Steinmeier have one-on-one meeting in New York

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is holding a bilateral meeting with German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the UN General Assembly sidelines.

The Russian minister preferred to have a one-on-one meeting with the German counterpart.

Probably, the primary topics in the bilateral contact are the situation in Syria and surrounding it and in Ukraine.

A UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East will begin in New York in about an hour.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called on the UN General Assembly not to recognize the legitimacy of the Russian State Duma elections in Crimea.

"We also urge you not to recognize the legitimacy of the Russian elections, which were held a few days ago in the occupied Crimea," he said at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

"If you do recognize them this will play into the hands of the aggressor and encourage further repressions," he said.

As Interfax-Ukraine reported earlier, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada on Tuesday declared the elections to the Russian State Duma and its newly elected composition illegitimate due to the fact that the voting was also held in the temporarily occupied Crimea.

A total of 264 lawmakers voted to pass a relevant statement at a plenary session.

In particular, given the fact of holding the illegitimate elections to the State Duma (lower house) of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol temporary occupied by Russia on September 18, 2016, Ukraine's parliament sees these elections as a breach of the law and the Constitution of Ukraine, the main principles and norms of international law, the UN Charter, the Budapest Memorandum, the UN resolution on Ukraine's territorial integrity, and other international legal acts, the parliament said in a statement.

In this statement, the Ukrainian parliament also urged the international community to act in a similar manner.

The European Union, Germany and Poland have already announced they do not recognize the Duma elections in occupied Crimea.
It will be intriguing to see whether, in the coming years, Alexander Lukashenko will be able to produce an antidote to Putins control or agree to maintain the role of a puppet.

By Olga Karatch

It appears that Belarus is slowly drifting towards the West and away from Russia. Evidence in favour of this observation grows by the day: expert opinion, results of independent opinion polls, intensive contact between Belaruss Ministry of International Affairs and the European Union, and multiple groups working on the co-operation between Belarus and various EU countries and departments.

Russian classic playwright, Anton Chekhov, once shrewdly noted, One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. For the second decade in a row Russia has been holding Belarus tight in its brotherly arms  an embrace, which Alexander Lukashenko recently enthusiastically tried to break. But it is not an easy task for Belarus; Russia has got four rather convincing arguments that effectively form their instruments of control over the country.

What will happen if Russia decides to apply all of them at once?

Lets consider the instruments first.

1. Belaruss economic dependency on Russia and its subsidies

Since the late 1990s Belarus has been receiving regular subsidies from the Russian Federation. The subsidies are estimated at about 10 billion US dollars annually. They take a variety of forms  direct investments, intergovernmental credits, reduced rates on fuel, etc.  but the amount of money provided from year to year is almost constant.

Moreover, Russian subsidies have become such an integral part of Belaruss economy and of the state budget that maintaining preferential economic treatment and reduced energy prices from Russia has become the main job of one of the Prime Ministers deputies, Vladimir Semashko.

Belaruss trade is also oriented towards Russia. Although it should be noted that commodity circulation decreased in the recent years, partly due to the situation on the global oil market. In 2015, goods supply to Russia had reduced by a third: in 2014 the trade flow between the two countries was valued at 35 billion US dollars whereas in 2015 this number was only 25 billion US dollars.

The economic independence of Belarus is a myth.

The main foreign policy tasks of Belarus are determined by the economic situation, more specifically by the answer to the following question: Who exactly will provide us with 10 billion US dollars of investment annually? Belarus is ready to accept not only money, but also food, fuel, reduced rates, benefits, nuclear power plants, etc. There is no domestic resource that could be used to patch the hole in the Belarusian economy.

The economic independence of Belarus is a myth; the same is true of the Belarusian economic miracle. Anybody is able to work a miracle with a little help from an annual 10 billion US dollars. One should also be cautious when talking about Belaruss political independence  what sort of political independence is it when economic independence is lacking?

2. The effect of the Russian media on Belarusian public opinion

The Belarusian Analytical Workroom, headed by Andrei Vardomatsky, presented findings in Warsaw of their research regarding the influence of the Russian media on viewers in post-Soviet countries, including Belarus. According to this research, 73.1% of the respondents from Belarus responded in December 2014 that they trusted Russian media (to varying degrees).

This means Russia shapes (or at least significantly influences) public opinion in Belarus. This also means that Russia can potentially promote or destroy any politician of their choice, including Alexander Lukashenko.

The Independent Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies (IISEPS), another independent public opinion poll agency in Belarus, conducted a study in June 2016. Their research demonstrated that 33.6% of the respondents were ready to take the side of Russia should an armed conflict break out between the Russian Federation and the West on the territory of Belarus. Three times less people  13.4%  were ready to stand up for the West. Moreover, 26.1% of Belarusians support Russia as a protector against potential aggression from NATO. It feels like a miracle that, despite the Russian medias influence, 10.6% of respondents in Belarus supported NATO.

Public opinion in Belarus is shaped by Vladimir Putin, not Alexander Lukashenko.

In March 2016, when asked simply, with whom do you want to unite?, 48% of the respondents agreed to unite with Russia; 31.2% of the respondents were against becoming a part of EU. When the respondents were not asked to make a straight choice, Belarusians tended to see Russia exclusively as an ally and preferred national independence: a hypothetical referendum about the unification of Russia and Belarus had 24.8% of respondents in favour of this union and 52.4% of respondents against it.

Another interesting feature demonstrated by the IISEPS research was that young people tended to distance themselves from this geopolitical confrontation and tried not to take sides. Another correlation was observed by experts: the older the respondents were, the higher was the level of their emotional and mental involvement in the conflict in general and on the side of Russia in particular.

This means that in the event of a serious conflict between Belarus and the Russian Federation, the majority may not necessarily be on Lukashenkos side.

3. Belaruss non-profits have a whiff of something Russian about them

There is an unprecedented outburst of activity among various organizations previously in a state of hibernation in Belarus. There are Cossack organizations, unions of Afghan war veterans, Orthodox camps for the youth, patriotic military clubs, you name it.

The Russian-speaking social network Odnoklassniki is full of such groups and the number of their subscribers is estimated in the thousands if not in several tens of thousands. A peculiar feature of these groups is that often they are headed by individuals with battle experience in the past. Why have they become so active today?

The way the state has recently treated Afghan war vets was rather unfair: the veterans lost their well-deserved benefits after an infamous social reform, nobody on the state level was running any rehabilitation programs for them as individuals with traumatic war experience; no adaptation schemes were offered to help their re-socialisation. In other words, nobody cared about how these people were supposed to return to a peaceful life. As a result, the veterans turned into time bombs that the Belarusian state never defused. When these ticking bomb will go off  nobody knows.

The Donbass veterans are ticking bombs that the Belarusian state never defused.

Moreover, there is an emerging group of new veterans of the Donbass war. These are people who in the course of the last two years went to the Donbass (Ukraine) to participate in the ongoing armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Some of them fought on the side of Ukraine, some  on the side of Russia. People who have killed in Ukraine are coming back to Belarus.

Additionally, there is no actual border between Belarus and Russia and anyone could (hypothetically) bring weapons across the border. Now, to have a group of people who know how to use arms, unsupported by their own state and society, is to have an unpredictable force that, in case of social unrest, may be employed to an equally unpredictable effect.

Any manifestation of mass protest or political rally attracts all sorts of individuals. This means that the above mentioned groups will inevitably be involved too, possibly causing armed conflicts and confrontation.

4. Belarusian defence and law-enforcement agencies have a Russian whiff about them, too.

Military and security services, siloviki, form a very influential and important group. In the event of a coup, revolution, uprising, or confrontation with a neighbouring country their decision, which side to join, might have the most determining effect on the way things go.

Upon closer examination, a large number of Belaruss siloviki have a Russian background. Let us start with the Defence Ministry of Belarus and its leaders. The Minister of Defence, Andrei Ravkov, graduated with honours from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School, later he graduated from the Russian General Staff Academy. All of his four deputies studied in Russia; two of them were citizens of the Russian Federation by birth.

Even Alexander Lukashenko does not know. Or does he?

The next logical place to look is at the leaders of the various military branches. There are twelve such leaders in total. Eleven of them studied military science in the Russian Federation at institutions such as the Gagarin Air Force Academy, the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia, the Khroulyov Military Academy of Logistics of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. By the way, three of the above mentioned leaders are Russian citizens by birth. The list could go on and this trend remains evident in other areas of siloviki leadership.

I would like to stress that these are people who are permitted to carry guns. Their decision regarding whom to support in the event of confrontation will determine the outcome of the conflict. Whose side will these people take in case of a conflict between Russia and Belarus? Even Alexander Lukashenko does not know. Or does he?

It will be intriguing to see whether in the coming years Alexander Lukashenko will be able to produce an antidote to these instruments, or whether he will agree to maintain the role of puppet.

As for the European Union, it might be useful to keep in mind that if a dog on a leash sniffs at your hand, it does not mean that it is ready to move to your house with its own collar, leash, and kennel. It only means that the owner of the dog hasnt yanked on the leash. Yet. What if he does?

Olga Karatch is one of the most active Belarusian dissidents and is the founder and director of the civil rights movement Nash Dom, or Our House.



The article was originally published on PoliticalCritique.org.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called on the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to tackle the situation with teenagers who have been taken hostage by illegal armed formations in Donbas, calling such cases inadmissible.

"I was shocked to know that recently Russia-backed illegal armed formations in the occupied areas of Donbas took children hostage. They showed a video of interrogation of the teenagers who they absurdly accuse of conspiring and carrying out subversive operations. This behavior is out of place in the 21st century. We call on UNICEF to intervene and prevent abuses and tortures of these children," he said at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

A number of Russian media reported on September 12, 2016, with reference to the website of the so-called the State Security Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic ("DPR") that seven teenagers had been detained in Donetsk region on suspicion of cooperating with Ukrainian special services and carrying out subversive activity in the "DPR." The oldest was 18 years old, the youngest was 15.

First Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Ukraine's representative in the humanitarian subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group on Donbas Iryna Gerashchenko earlier sent a letter to the OSCE and UNICEF, asking to verify online reports about the detention and tortures of the Ukrainian teenagers captured by "DPR" militants.
Exclusive interview with Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Ukraine Ernst Reichel (Part 1) Nord Stream 2 is not a project of the German government, but of five private companies from four EU countries and Gazprom in total. Two of these private firms are German companies, three others - from other EU countries. The German government or other German state agencies are not directly involved in the project, let alone in the funding of it. Whether the project is economically viable, this is primarily a question concerning the enterprises involved. They must answer it for themselves. Besides, it goes without saying, if the interested firms decide to finally implement it, Nord Stream 2 has to comply with all legal acts on this case, which are applied in the EU to all projects of such nature. The German government is fully aware of Ukraine's concerns regarding the Nord Stream 2 project and the foreign policy context behind it. The German government will continue to stand for using the Ukrainian gas transportation system for providing gas to the EU member countries, for example, the countries of southeastern Europe. With regard to the possible participation of German companies in the management of the Ukrainian gas transportation system, of course, there is a huge need for investment. The network is in poor condition. I believe it is too early to raise the question. Naftogaz has still not been disaggregated. The conditions under which the EU firms could participate in one of the separate successor companies of Ukrtransgaz are still unclear. Regarding the overall economic and investment climate in Ukraine, there is still room for improvement, for example, in reforming the activities of judicial bodies and the fight against corruption. But when we have a clearer vision in all these bulk of themes, I believe German companies will show interest in the activities of Ukraine. They, no doubt, have a fairly high level of expertise.For two years and a half after the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine has moved forward on a number of fundamental reforms: the reform of public procurement and the introduction of the tender system ProZorro, by the way, with the financial support from Germany; the creation of the new police force and new institutions on fighting corruption; the stabilization of the banking sector by Ukraine's central bank; elimination of the system of price subsidies in the energy sector that was particularly prone to corruption; important steps towards visa-free regime and implementation of the agreements within the framework of the IMF program, to name only a few achievements. However, major changes have yet to take place, or they are taking place slowly: the privatization of state owned enterprises, the elimination of shortcomings in the establishment of a state governed by the rule of law, and, perhaps, the most important, a sustainable curb of endemic corruption, because, as you know, Ukraine occupies the last place in Europe in terms of the Index of corruption perception (Transparency International rating). Reforms are definitely going in the right direction, but often times too slowly and they are encountering a lot of resistance in their implementation, as it was the case with the recent introduction of e-declaration system. Therefore, you should not be surprised that, first of all, the lack of legal security and related endemic corruption are the factors that most strongly interfere with increasing activity of German investors.At this forum, which we will hold together, the focus will be on the representation of Ukraine as an attractive trading partner and investment destination. Hopefully, a lot of contacts will be established, through which it will be possible to make certain cooperation agreements.Creation of the German Chamber of Commerce is being held according to the schedule. And it is not correct to talk about delays as no specific date for the opening had ever been announced. The grand opening will take place on October 10. It is perfectly normal that some legal and administrative steps have to be taken before the opening of this chamber. I am convinced that, the Chamber will have a lasting positive effect for German-Ukrainian trade and investment relations.. Germany renders an extensive assistance to Ukraine, which is a targeted combination of short-term emergency aid measures along with medium and long-term support. With regard to humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, Germany is ranked first among bilateral donors. This year we have significantly increased our humanitarian assistance up to EUR 22.4 million. Key measures of the German aid are aimed to assist internally displaced persons in the form of health care, water supply, sanitary equipment and food provision. The federal government has allocated EUR 3.5 million for the restoration of houses that have become uninhabitable because of hostilities. But Germany doesn't only provide humanitarian assistance. Our support at the bilateral level amounted to nearly EUR 200 million last year. In addition, Germany is assisting Ukraine by allocating EUR 500 million under the untied financial loan, of which EUR 200 million have already been transferred to the State Deposits Guarantee Fund. The funds will benefit those Ukrainian citizens, who had savings in banks withdrawn from the market. The remaining EUR 300 million will enable Ukraine to invest in infrastructure and restoration. We can draw a clear conclusion: Germany stands firmly by Ukraine's side, either in the sphere of civil society or in politics or the economy. We provide full support and expect at the same time that Ukraine will purposefully push forward its comprehensive program of reforms.Germany has played a significant role at the stage of formation and conceptual development of Energy Efficiency Foundation, which has been repeatedly publicly stated by Vice Prime Minister Zubko. Germany will also provide financial support to the Foundation, both in a direct way and through its share of the contribution from the EU side. I have already mentioned the support at the bilateral level for the citizens affected by the conflict in eastern Ukraine.The above mentioned EUR 200 million have been allotted some time ago and contributed significantly to strengthening the State Deposits Guarantee Fund. In the context of about 80 banks vanishing from the Ukrainian market in the past two years and the need to refund deposits to many private deposit holders, this support was of significant economic and social importance for Ukraine. As for the remaining EUR 300 million, selection and conception of activities that will be funded in the areas of the respective credits you mentioned, have progressed quite far. Binding agreements on such measures are achieved between the Government of Ukraine and the Federal Government of Germany within the framework of a working group especially established for this purpose. It is true that we are moving forward not quite as fast as we would like. But it is also true that we are talking about projects of significant technical and administrative complexity and the Ukrainian side has to carry out some internal coordination before the final decisions can be taken. But I am sure that you will see the first specific, tangible results very soon.
KEARNEY - A Massachusetts pair face felony drug distribution charges after a traffic stop Wednesday on Interstate 80.Claudette Traver, 41, of Revere, Mass., and John Briasco, 40, of Winthrop, Mass., each are charged in Buffalo County Court with a single count of felony distribution of marijuana after almost 183 pounds of the drug allegedly were found in their vehicle.

A Nebraska State Patrol trooper stopped the pair the speeding on I-80 Wednesday night at the Kearney interchange. Court records say Briasco refused to let the trooper search the vehicle.

However, Briasco and Traver displayed several indicators of criminal activity, records say, and a K-9 was called to the scene. Those indicators included the vehicle's "lived-in" look, the pair's destination, their implausible travel plans, criminal history for narcotics, and their change in behavior when asked about drugs.

The canine alerted troopers to the odor of drugs coming from the trunk of the pair's 2009 Toyota Avalon, and 182 pounds of pot were found in several duffel bags in the trunk.

The pair is being held at Buffalo County Detention Center. Traver is being held on a $5,000 bond, while Briasco is being held on a $10,000 bond. They are both scheduled to appear in court later this month.

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KEARNEY  Eaton Corp. of Kearney faces $8,000 in fines from the Occupational Safety Health Administration after a longtime employee was fatally injured in one of the companys machines.

Kristine Griffing, 52, died Dec. 23 after being injured Dec. 7 by a shearing machine she operated at the Kearney plant at 4200 E. Highway 30. Griffing was working the third shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. when, her family says, she became pinned in the machine.

Eaton Corp. has been cited for the lack of machine guarding between its No. 2 and No. 4 150-ton shear presses and the bar stock feeder tables. Bonita Winingham, the OSHA area director in Omaha, said she couldnt say whether the lack of guards on the shearing machine led to Griffings death.

I cant really say one way or the other just because there are so many factors that go into an accident investigation, she said. If the machines had been guarded, it wouldve protected her.

The shearing machine heats and cuts large pieces of steel into smaller pieces that can be formed into intake and exhaust valves for engines. Griffing had been with the company for 17 years.

Eaton was also cited for not having its OSHA 300 forms for 2009 properly filled out. The form is for companies to report employee injuries and illnesses.

Its something thats required, Winingham said. They werent filled out completely.

The proposed penalty for the shearing machine violation is $7,000, while the penalty for the recordkeeping violation is $1,000.

Eaton has 15 working days after receiving the citations to have an informal conference with OSHA officials, accept the penalty or pay the fine. It also can contest the citations.

In an earlier interview, Griffings family members said they believe she became pinned in the shearing machine, which caused her to suffer third-degree burns the size of a fist on her shoulder blades, burns on her chest and arms, fractured ribs, a punctured lung and spinal fractures. They said her heart stopped and she was without oxygen for an undetermined time, which caused a brain injury.

No one saw the accident, and its unknown how long she may have been pinned or how she ended up in the position she was found in. An Eaton employee pulled her out of the machine and notified authorities.

Today, Eaton spokesperson Kelly Jasko said the shearing machine where Griffing was injured continues to be idle.

We continue to be deeply saddened by Kriss death, she said.

email to:
KYIV. Sept 21 (Interfax-Ukraine)  The committee of creditors and liquidation of public joint-stock company Mykolaiv Shipyard Okean are convinced in the legal invalidity of the court ruling to arrest property of the enterprise under liquidation. They are waiting for the quick unblocking of the shipyard by the appeal court. The shipyard is being prepared for sale.

Okean Shipyard liquidator Iryna Serbin said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday that she learned about the decision of Kyiv's Pechersky District Court to arrest the shipyard's property and transfer it for secure storage by chance and she was shocked.

"No law and the criminal and procedural code do not foresee secure storage. The property under bankruptcy procedure has a special legal status. It is not permitted to arrest it or impose encumbrance. Any actions with property are possible only under the decision of the court that hears the bankruptcy case. In our case this is the business court of Mykolaiv region," she said.

Serbin said that by its decision Pechersky District Court placed all the parties into a collision: according to Ukrainian law, the liquidator is responsible for the property of the bankrupt company. It is shocking that the property was transferred to secure storage to a person who forced bankruptcy of the shipyard, she said.

"I believe that this decision is invalid and not meeting the law on restoring solvency of debtors or declaring them bankrupt," the liquidator said.

Serbin said that the decision of Kyiv's Pechersky District Court has been challenged in Kyiv's appeal court. She is waiting for the quick annulment of the decision by the appeal court to sell the property of Okean Shipyard at an open auction.

Head of the committee of creditors Ihor Voloshyn expressed perplex over the position of Ukrainian law enforcers and courts to the situation around the shipyard in the conditions of new threats and challenges Ukraine faces today.

Voloshyn said that former managers of Okean shipyard who received its property for secure storage are affiliated with the structures under control of former Energy Minister of Russia Igor Yusufov: offshore companies Olympus Investments and Zonel Operations Ltd. He said that the decision of Pechersky District Court opens a possibility of retaining control over the enterprise and blocking development of Ukrainian shipbuilding industry for interested persons with a Russian trace.

"I do not understand the logics [of Ukrainian officials] in the current political situation," he said.

Voloshyn backs the solving of the situation around the shipyard under Ukrainian law. The shipyard could be sold at an auction.

"We invite all interested sides to take part in the open auction with the starting price of UAH 1.8 billion [the total debt of the shipyard]. We believe this is fair," he said.
OMAHA -- Here comes Round 4.

Nikko Jenkins has been declared competent to face a death penalty hearing in the August 2013 murders of Juan Uribe- Pena, Jorge Cajiga-Ruiz, Curtis Bradford and Andrea Kruger.

Douglas County District Judge Peter Bataillon set Jenkins death penalty hearing for Nov. 14.

The judge purposely scheduled the hearing for that date so it would occur after the Nov. 8 election, when voters will decide whether Nebraska should keep the death penalty. State senators repealed the death penalty in 2015  prompting a petition drive to put it on the ballot so voters could decide if it should remain.

If the death penalty remains in effect after the election, a three-judge panel will hear several days of testimony to determine whether Jenkins should receive the death penalty.

Its been a long slog  30 months  since Jenkins pleaded no contest to the random spree killings that rocked Omaha. The then-26-year-old committed the murders within three weeks of his release from a Nebraska prison, where he had spent 10 years for two carjackings.

Since his convictions, Jenkins has had three death penalty hearings set, only to be declared incompetent on the cusp of each.

The judges competency finding Tuesday comes a few weeks after State Sen. Ernie Chambers on Aug. 31 asked for a Department of Justice investigation into how Jenkins has been able to obtain the means to slice various parts of his anatomy, including his neck and penis.

State psychiatrists allege that Jenkins self-mutilations are the result of his attempts to manipulate, rather than any mental illness.

Other psychiatrists have concluded that Jenkins suffers from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder  and that those mental illnesses have driven his behavior.

In his 10-page order, Bataillon echoed Chambers concern about how Jenkins has been able to obtain sharp objects to cut himself, even while in solitary confinement. Prison officials have previously said that Jenkins uses everything from broken-off pieces of floor tile to radio antennas to do it.

The judge called it quite baffling as to how Defendant gets the razors and other devices with which to cut himself.

The judge also called out Jenkins purported suicide attempts. Prison guards have observed Jenkins slip his waist chain over his shoulders and then pretend to hang himself  with his hands between the chain and his neck.

He has also attempted or acted as if he was hanging himself twice in his fenced-in recreation area, Bataillon noted. None of these were serious enough to require hospitalization; however, all the cuttings required medical attention.

Despite various diagnoses or disfigurements, Bataillon ruled that Jenkins is able to understand the proceedings and assist his defense attorneys in fighting the death penalty.

After long evaluations, discussions and other viewings of Jenkins (by doctors), his actions are inconsistent with mental illness, Bataillon ruled. He cant keep up his feigning under close scrutiny.

The judge noted that Jenkins testified at the last hearing and coherently answered questions from both his defense attorney and prosecutors.

Defendant was quite capable of following the questions of his attorney, Mr. Riley, and answered these questions with appropriate answers, Bataillon wrote. Based on the evidence, this Court ... finds that the defendant is competent to proceed with the sentencing phase of this matter.
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Adonie and Lydia Sacallis form a heart with their hands in front of the bear sculpture in Kelownas Stuart Park. The Kelowna siblings are leaving on a 12-month world tour, hoping to collect $1 million for charity.
(Xinhua) 10:51, September 21, 2016

File Photo

SHANGHAI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China's major steel company Baosteel has unveiled a plan to acquire Wuhan Iron and Steel and thereby will become the world's second largest steelmaker, after ArcelorMittal.

According to announcements posted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange website on Tuesday evening, state-owned Baosteel will issue A-shares to all transferring shareholders of Wuhan Iron and Steel to absorb the latter,also a large state-owned steel enterprise based in Hubei Province.

The restructuring plan still needs approval from the shareholders of both listed firms.

Last year, Wuhan Iron and Steel reported a loss of 7.5 billion yuan (1.1 billion U.S. dollars). Baosteel's profits shrank by more than 80 percent to its lowest level in 18 years.

The crude steel output of Baosteel and Wuhan Iron and Steel was 34.9 million tonnes and 25.8 million tonnes respectively last year. After the merger, the output of Baosteel will exceed that of HeSteel Group based in Hebei Province, to rank first in China.

Shares of the two firms have been suspended from trading since late June due to the planned restructuring.

China plans to cut steel production capacity by 100 million tonnes to 150 million tonnes by 2020, according to a government plan unveiled in February.

Chen Derong, president of Baosteel, said the merger will coordinate various aspects of the business, such as logistics and R&D.

Both companies produce and sell auto sheets. Now, long-distance transportation can be avoided and costs cut, he said.

Baosteel already planned to cut 9.2 million tonnes of capacity by 2018.Together, the production of both companies can be cut further, he said.

The market share of certain core products, such as high-end auto sheets, will be greatly expanded in China after the restructuring, according to a research report by Everbright Securities. Meanwhile, the profitability of these products will be improved and the company's pricing ability for upstream iron ore strengthened, it added.

Wang Bei, researcher with mysteel.com, said the restructuring will contribute to the balance between supply and demand through production adjustment and squeeze out ineffective or poor supply.

After the merger, the new entity will account for 7.6 percent of the country's crude steel output. Industry experts expect more acquisitions among steel producers.
Photo of the young artist

A young Shanxi woman is facing heaps of criticism on Chinese social media after posting a picture of an ancient wall mural she restored. The woman originally posted the picture of her restoration as a point of pride, but many are calling into question her technique. Some believe she tarnished a valuable cultural relic.

The mural is located in Hongtong County, north Chinas Shanxi province, inside of the Guangsheng Temple, a place famous for the drama murals from the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368).

In photo: Her work of restoration

However, visitors there were skeptical about the restoration work on the mural. They could not tell any work had been done with the naked eye. Only a professional could determine whether the restoration was done well, one visitor said.

Museum workers explained that the woman had worked here as an intern. She was just one of twenty or thirty engineers contracted by the museum. Her and her team left months ago. It is reported that the woman responsible for the restoration studied at Shanghais prestigious Fudan University, where she majored in restoration of cultural relics.



In photo: The site where the artist "restores" the wall painting

While the female intern initially gained popularity due to criticism surrounding her work, her fame has since sparked an online debate. There are those who sympathize with the young intern, as well as those like her that have innocently been swept up in the snowball effect of online criticism. One netizen said, As soon as something happens, all types of professionals come and show off. When nothings wrong, how come these pros arent coming to restore the murals! Truly ridiculous.

But then there are those who believe an inexperienced hand should never have had the opportunity to touch these precious Yuan dynasty murals. One comment reads, We must severely punish this type of behavior, the destruction of cultural relics.

The restoration photos the woman had taken from two years ago have since been removed from her social media account.
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File photo: Farm sturgeons

A hydroelectric plant in Hubei may have started an ecological crisis when a flood discharge disrupted sturgeon net cages used for fish farming. Nearly ten thousand tons of non-native and crossbred sturgeons escaped from their cage, according to a report by Yangtze River Office of the Ministry of Agriculture.

Geheyan Dam

The Geheyan hydroelectric plant discharged flood into the Qingjiang River, a branch of Yangtze River. The sturgeon eventually made their way into the Yangtze River, where they pose a threat to the delicate ecology. Leading scientist from the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Wei Qiwei, told thepaper.com that the possible number of spilt sturgeons is enormous. He estimated the number might exceed the sum of the standing biomass of fish in the Yangtzes mainstream.

The breached farm fish nets

The danger here, he explained, is that this type of sturgeon is carnivorous and will prey on other fish species. Additionally, once the sturgeons form shoals, not only will they snatch up other fishs food, theyll also aggressively fight for territory. Theyll progressively push other fish out of the ecosystem, ultimately replacing them all together.

There are over 300 types of wild fish in the Yangtze. Each one has struck their own balance with the ecosystem over thousands of years of evolution. How this influx of an alien predator will affect this balance, and to what extent, remains a serious concern.

Besides an imbalanced ecosystem, there is yet another fear: genetic pollution. The critically endangered Chinese sturgeon in the river may mate with the farm fish, making a purebred Chinese sturgeon nearly impossible to find.
Explosions of Samsungs Galaxy Note 7 have made headlines around the world recently. While the U.S. government already issued an official recall of the new device, the Korean phone manufacturers hesitation in China is irking consumers, who are sensitive to being overlooked in mass recalls.

After a few Chinese users took to social media to post pictures of their exploded phones, Samsung released an equivocal response, saying the phones exploded due to external heat, without directly accusing anyone. This caused a stir on Chinese social media, with users challenging the implications behind Samsungs claim. One user asked, Well, do you want me to use my phone in the refrigerator? Another commenter declared, I dont feel even a sliver of sincerity!

However, a day later on September 20th, South Korean media reports accused the affected Chinese users of intentionally cooking their phones. Aside from Samsungs findings that the exploded phones resulted from external heating, they have also made clear that they used a different battery supplier for their Chinese supply chain.

One user brought up an interesting point, though they were asking the question rhetorically, believing their suggestion sounded ludicrous. Well, are Chinese consumers committing  (pengci) then? Looks like the courts will have to solve this case.

Pengci literally translates to bumping porcelain. It is a word used to describe a recent phenomenon in China whereby individuals intentionally hurt themselves. They hope to secure some sort of financial compensation for their injury, either unofficially at the scene of the accident, or through legal assistance. People have run out onto freeways with the aim of getting hit, but not severely enough to die. They would then demand compensation from the driver. These individuals often commit the act together with a group of accomplices ready to accuse the driver.

If Samsungs claims are true, which the evidence seems to suggest is the case, then the users accused of intentionally cooking their phones could indeed be committing a case of pengci. This is especially true assuming the Galaxy 7 explosions are highly dangerous.

But if Samsungs claims are disproven, the phone giant will surely lose a big chunk of Chinas lucrative phone market. Either way, as Apple has launched the iPhone 7 and domestic competitors are offering comparable options at significantly lower prices, Samsung faces an uphill battle.
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We have all heard the grumblings regarding the 80-hour resident workweek. This is due to the opinion that jobs after residency typically require hours that surpass 80 hours a week.

But, why? Why does medicine have to be this way?

I have worked 100 plus hour weeks for over 20 years, and I am exhausted. I am burned out and I can not catch up because of the sleep deprivation.

This is where the culture of medicine needs to change.

Everyone has solutions for burnout: wellness initiatives, mindfulness training, counseling, exercise, work-life balance, and lowering stress. What if the solution for sleep deprivation is what could cure burnout?

Is this from residency where the one who stayed up the longest and did the most admissions would inevitably get the gold star and silent nod of approval? This is the culture where we, as residents felt rewarded for working the longest, getting up the earliest, sleeping the least, essentially being superhuman, which is just impossible.

Yet this culture is still what makes us feel proud when, somehow, you run on adrenaline at work (you can admit 3 patients at 2 different hospitals and do a delivery at noon, then see 15 patients in the day right after a night call) and then you crash at home due to exhaustion, leaving nothing for your kids. You are exhausted and guilty and yet the proud feelings are also still there.

We are all aware of the damaging effects of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation has widespread consequences, causing cognitive dysfunction, weakened immune system, impaired healing, increased blood pressure, increased insulin resistance, increased cortisol levels, increased risk of mental illness, and even increased mortality, by Drew Cotler in an article, Sleep isnt a luxury. It is a medical necessity.

So why is chronic sleep deprivation OK for physicians?

In 2014, there were 893,851 physicians in the United States. Let us subtract 170,000 for the physicians who are part-time, close to retiring, no longer taking call, no longer working, to leave 700,000 working physicians. If everyone was lucky and took 1 in 7 call, there would still be 100,000 physicians taking overnight call at any given moment. I understand that medicine is not a 9 to 5 job and that we need doctors in the most grueling time of the night: 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. However, we have the resources to start change.

1. We need more students in each medical school. There is a prediction of a shortage of physicians in 2025. That is only nine years away.

2. We need to retain female physicians. Studies show that female physicians who have improved work-life balance were happier. They had higher career satisfaction and lower intention to leave employment.

3. We need to decrease the number of hours in shift work. Why does the typical shift have to be 12 hours? What about job sharing?

4. We need to create a new resource: a nurse on-call service that will take phone calls. Why do all 100,000 physicians need to answer the middle of the night phone calls, most of which are non-emergent? In Australia, there is a government funded nurse help line that will answer all phone calls.

5. We have to feel that it is acceptable to work less. The culture of medicine imposes these rules that we are slackers if we work less.

Not only does change need to start, but we, the physicians ourselves have to be comfortable with this change. Physicians are not superhuman individuals that can do everything, and this concept is the first change that needs to take place in the culture of medicine. No one can function without adequate sleep. Sleep is a medical necessity.

Sophy Feng is an obstetrician-gynecologist.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
In photo: China's first over-water highway opens in Hubei province in 2015.

Chinas Ministry of Transport publicly released statistics showing the finances for turnpikes. Revenue generated from passing through tolls totaled RMB 409.78 billion ($61 billion), while expenditures reached RMB 728.51 billion ($109 billion). That leaves an account deficit of approximately CNY 318 billion (USD 47 billion).

Where is all the revenue going?

According to the statistics, revenue generated from high way fees typically does not surpass expenditures. Compared with 2014, revenue generated this year from turnpike tolls increased by 4.6 percent. However, 2015 expenditures increased from last year by 32.8 percent. In fact, starting from 2010, the account deficit for toll-generated income has increased significantly.

The Deputy Director of Chinas Highway Division within the Ministry of Transport, Sun Yonghong, explained that 80 percent of the revenue is used to repay maturing debt. The remaining 20 percent is used on maintenance management, rebuilding roads and ancillary facilities, as well as other expenses such as taxes and fees.

Sun also gave two reasons for the increasing deficit. Firstly, he explained, construction multiply quickly and the debt is growing quickly. The expenditure of repaying the debt increased as the debts snowballed. The second reason is that repaying debt for highway projects currently stands in a critical juncture. Typically, banks provide a grace period of one year added on to the time it takes to complete the construction. During this period, companies are only required to repay interest, pay less for capital, or even temporarily not pay for capital.

Currently, China has 164,400 kilometers tolled-roads, with 117,000 kilometers being highways, according to the report released on September 20. In 2015, China spent RMB 6.94885 trillion ($1.04 trillion) in constructing new roads, and the total debts of the constructions amount to RMB 4.44937 trillion ($0.66 trillion).
Tencent Pictures, the film production company of Internet giant Tencent, has announced plans to make a film about Tuzki, a popular emoji used on a number of social media platforms. The movie is slated to begin production next year, with a likely 2018 release in China.

The Tuzki character, created by designer Momo Wang in 2006, is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. The rabbit was born while Wang was still an undergraduate at Communication University of China, according to Wangs website. It has since gone on to become an immensely popular WeChat sticker, as well as a promotional character for brands like KFC and Motorola.

The Tuzki film is a joint project between Tencent Pictures and Turner Asia Pacific. According to a press release on Turners official website, Tencent will take the lead on the projects production and distribution, while Turner will focus on licensing. Already, Tuzki has acquired something of a presence in the non-digital world, with a Tuzki-themed restaurant open in Shanghai and a prominent appearance by the character at the Beijing Comic Con in June.

The Turner press release quoted Clement Schwebig, Turners SVP of Business Development, Licensing & China, saying: This announcement is a huge milestone as we look to grow the Tuzki franchise and [reinforce] Turners commitment to its growing business in China. Turners dedicated team in Shanghai is really pleased to be working with Tencent Pictures on this project, who themselves are leaders in developing digital IP.

The press release also contained a statement from Tencent, focusing on the potential of the Tuzki brand.

For 10 years, millions of young adults in China have used Tuzkis unique expressions to communicate their feelings with their friends. Now, they can experience Tuzkis story in what promises to be a remarkable story of adventure and excitement, the statement read.

Were looking forward to partnering with Turner to create a film starring a timeless and eminently marketable IP.
1 of 5

Conjoined twins need 2 years to get separated



Wearing their identical red dresses, identical twins Rabia and Rukia even have matching beauty spots. But tragically for these twins, their closeness is also putting their lives in danger.



The sisters were born joined at the head at a clinic in Pabna, Bangladesh, in July. Parents Taslima Khatun Uno and Mohammed Rafiqul Islam didn't learn that the twins were conjoined until after the birth.

Read More...


Minister of State with special responsibility for Disabilities, Finian McGrath T.D. today marked the launch of Someone Like Me, a new national primary schools art competition organised by the Department of Justice and Equality as a way of developing childrens understanding of disabilities to help celebrate the aspects that make them and their classmates unique.

More than 11,000 pupils from 78 mainstream and special primary schools across Co. Kilkenny will be invited to take part in the competition which aims to highlight the similarities that exist between all people and foster more positive attitudes towards people with a disability.

Speaking at the launch, Minister of State with special responsibility for Disabilities, Finian McGrath T.D., said: There are more than 600,000 people in Ireland with a disability, of which 53,000 are children under the age of 15.

Ireland prides itself in being an inclusive society and yet research shows us that there is a hardening of attitudes towards people with a disability across all types of impairments, he continued.

This cannot be allowed to continue which is why this competition is so important. By encouraging primary school pupils to gain a greater awareness of what unites children of differing abilities, we hope to help a future generation of adults to develop a better understanding of disability and form more positive attitudes so that everyone, irrespective of ability or disability, feels that they are a valued member of society.

As a former teacher and school principal, it is particularly important to me to ensure that teachers are given the support they need to introduce this topic into the classroom within the context of the wider curriculum. I would like to congratulate the Department of Justice and Equality for creating comprehensive junior and senior lesson plans which culminate in pupils creating pieces of art in a way that allows them to critically think about disability and to respond in a well-thought out, creative process.

I would encourage as many teachers and pupils as possible to take part in this competition and look forward to congratulating the winners in December.

Someone Like Me art competition literature, to include lesson plans, will be delivered to every primary school in Ireland over the coming days. .

The competition, which offers a range of prizes up to the value of 750, is open to all primary school pupils from junior infants to sixth class and entries are welcome from individual pupils, a class group or even a whole-school as a combined effort. Entries can come in all shapes and sizes and can be anything from a poster or collage to a papier-mache or mixed-media sculpture.

Among the judges will be Dublin based visual artist Beth OHalloran. Beth studied at The National College of Art and Design and at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She has exhibited widely in Ireland and in the U.S, London and Japan. She lectures in Fine Art at NCAD and teaches drawing and History of Art in the National Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery. Through the artist's panel at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Beth facilitates workshops for all ages, connecting the public, through their own practices, with contemporary art.
Four local towns are set to benefit under the Village Renewal Scheme, with applications being finalised for locations in each of the four electoral districts.

Urlingford (north ), Kells (west), Piltown (south) and Ballyhale (east) will see things like streetscape improvements and infrastructure enhancements. The average value of each application is 112,500.

A host workshop will be held this Friday, and village renewal committees will be established as the details are ironed out following liaison with a number of bodies.

Leas Cathoirleach of Kilkenny County Pat Fitzpatrick has welcomed the scheme, but has said more needs to be done to ensure the long term sustainability of rural Ireland.

Im particularly pleased that Urlingford will benefit from an allocation 112,500, he said.

As Chairman of the Castlecomer Municipal District, Im too well aware of the difficulties Urlingford has been facing for several years.

These difficulties are due to motorway development and significant cuts to rural services. This allocation will go some way to supporting the local community in Urlingford and it is important that their views and ideas are put front and centre.

Kilkenny County Council will be hosting consultation meetings in the coming weeks to agree a strategic plan. Interested parties can get involved in this process.

While this scheme is very welcome ,it must be implemented fully and repeated in the coming years, said Cllr Fitzpatrick.

We all have a responsibility to work together to ensure rural Ireland can thrive.
Question: I opened 529 college-savings accounts for both of my grandsons. One of them just won a four-year scholarship to college. If I dont use the money for college expenses, do I have to pay a penalty?

Answer: Generally, if you withdraw money from a 529 for anything other than eligible college expenses, the earnings portion of each withdrawal will be subject to income taxes and a 10% early-withdrawal penalty. (When you take money out of a 529, earnings and contributions are withdrawn proportionately.) However, there are several circumstances in which you avoid the penalty.

One is if your child isnt using the money because he or she received a scholarship. In that case, you can withdraw up to the amount of the scholarship from the 529 without paying a penalty, although youll still have to pay income taxes on the earnings. See What to Do When Scholarships Complicate 529 College Savings for more information.

Subscribe to Kiplingers Personal Finance Be a smarter, better informed investor. Save up to 74% Sign up for Kiplingers Free E-Newsletters Profit and prosper with the best of Kiplingers expert advice on investing, taxes, retirement, personal finance and more - straight to your e-mail. Profit and prosper with the best of Kiplingers expert advice - straight to your e-mail. Sign up

Before you pay taxes on the withdrawal, first see if you can use the money for other eligible expenses. For instance, even if your child received a scholarship for full tuition, you can use the 529 money tax-free for required books and supplies, fees, and room and board. You can even use 529 money tax-free for room and board if your child lives off-campus, as long as he or she is attending college at least half-time. See Using 529 Plan Funds to Pay Rent for more information. You can also use 529 money tax-free for a computer, printer, other related equipment and Internet access (the college student must be the primary user). See New Rules for Tax-Free Spending From Your 529 College-Savings Plan for more information.

Theres no time limit for taking withdrawals, so you can keep the money in the account if one of your grandsons decides to take time off and go back to college later on. Or you can switch the beneficiary of the 529 to another eligible family member. Eligibility is based on the relationship to the beneficiary. Eligible family members include the beneficiarys spouse, child, sibling, parent, aunt or uncle, niece or nephew. See How to Transfer Money Between 529 College-Savings Accounts for more information.

See IRS Publication 970 (opens in new tab), Tax Benefits for Education, for the full list of eligible beneficiaries and more information about eligible 529 expenses (the Qualified Tuition Program section focuses on 529s).
(Xinhua) 13:17, September 21, 2016

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has opened a new branch in Queensland, Australia, signalling new opportunities for the state's investors and exporters.

Queensland state Acting Premier and Treasurer Curtis Pitt said in a statement on Wednesday that the new ICBC branch in Brisbane was a testament to Queensland's strong and growing economy while offering mutually beneficial opportunities to Chinese investors who were interested to invest in the sunshine state.

ICBC is one of the biggest banks in the world, with 5 million corporate customers and 496 million personal customers, and a geographic footprint in 42 countries and regions.

"The new ICBC branch will be able to fully support businesses engaged in trade between China and our state," Pitt said.

ICBC which commenced operations in Australia in 2008 already operates a branch in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and previously held a representative office in Brisbane.

The bank is also the fourth major Chinese bank to establish a presence in Queensland in recent years.

"It (ICBC) will also support Chinese companies seeking mutually beneficial investments in Queensland as well as service Queensland companies doing business in China or interested in entering the market," Pitt said.

ICBC Chairman Huiman Yi said the bank had experienced periods of stable growth and development and has become one of the largest banks in the world with assets totaling 4.4 trillion Australian dollars (1.6 trillion U.S. dollars).

"As part of ICBC's growing confidence in the state of Queensland, we have made the decision to establish a branch in Brisbane," Yi said.

Pitt said China was Queensland's largest merchandise trading partner with exports totalling 11.1 billion Australian dollars (8.39 billion U.S. dollars) largely on coal and base metals and imports totalling 7.2 billion Australian dollars (5 billion U.S. dollars) on clothing, electrical, and manufactured products.

"China is also the largest source of international students studying in Queensland, representing almost 19 percent of enrolments," Pitt said.

"In addition, of the 2.5 million overseas visitors to our state each year China was the largest single source, accounting for almost 20 percent of total international tourists," Pitt said.

"The new ICBC branch will help build on these types of existing bonds and develop new connections that have the potential to generate new business opportunities both here and in China and that means more jobs," he said.
HANOI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Here's a snapshot of Vietnamese dong exchange rates in the official market and indicative SJC gold prices in Hanoi at 0050 GMT.

Sept 21 Sept 20 USD/VND mid-point 21,953 21,953

USD/VND interbank 22,320/22,325 22,315/22,325 SJC gold (mln dong/tael) 35.99/36.26 36.03/36.30

NOTES: As of Jan. 4, 2016 the State Bank of Vietnam has begun setting the mid-point rate on daily basis, allowing dollar/dong transactions to move in a band of +/- 3 percent around the mid point. The dong's exchange rate against other currencies is not restricted by a band. Interbank quotes are indicative bid/ask prices.

One tael is equivalent to 37.5 grams or 1.21 troy ounces. SJC gold prices are quoted by state-owned Saigon Jewelry Co, the gold manufacturer.

Interbank offered rates are indicative, quoted from market sources.

For Vietnam market overview click on: Vietnam's bonds market auctions: Bonds auction results: (Compiled by Hanoi Newsroom)
Azerbaijan oil exports down in Jan-Aug to 33.26 mln T, y/y - govt source



BAKU, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan's oil exports were down in January-August to 33.26 million tonnes from 34.71 million tonnes in the same year-ago period, a government source told Reuters on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova; Writing by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Katya Golubkova)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in precious metal products, commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.

kitco news
* Firmer oil prices support petrochemical shares in Saudi

* Banking heavyweights diverge as worries loom

* Qatar cools day after FTSE index inclusion

* But Ooredoo jumps after quashing speculation over stake sale in Indonesia telco

* Egypt retreats with all shares declining

By Celine Aswad

DUBAI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Bourses in the Gulf were mixed on Wednesday with Saudi Arabia's bourse supported by the petrochemical sector while Egypt lost steam as local and regional funds exited positions.

Saudi Arabia's index rose 0.4 percent in moderate trade as Brent prices firmed over $46 a barrel. Saudi Basic Industries , the petrochemical heavyweight, climbed 0.9 percent.

The insurance sub-index , usually actively traded by day traders, added 1.7 percent as almost all the constituents advanced, recouping some of the heavy losses of the week. BUPA Arabia , a mid-sized medical insurer, rose 2.9 percent.

But banking shares were mixed, with the sub-index losing 0.2 percent as the sector's heavyweights diverged. Al Rajhi Bank , the largest listed Islamic lender, dropped 2.7 percent.

"There is an overhang from the construction sector on Saudi banks, but we believe that the capital buffers in top-tier banks are sufficient," said Kunal Damle, institutional sales for brokerage at Bahrain's Securities & Investment Company (SICO).

Samba Financial Group , which derived 11 percent of its net income from corporate banking in the first half of the year, jumped 4.9 percent.

The exchange will be closed on Thursday in observance of the kingdom's national day holiday and will resume trade on Sunday Sept. 25.

Qatar's stock index slipped 0.04 percent, after advancing 1.0 percent on Tuesday as passive funds flowed into the companies now included in the FTSE's secondary emerging market index.

Seven of the 22 shares which are now FTSE members pulled back, with Ezdan Holding Group dropping 1.2 percent, while five of them advanced with Masraf Al Rayan adding 0.3 percent.

But mobile operator Ooredoo , now a member of the FTSE emerging market index, added 2.4 percent after the company said late on Tuesday it had no intention of selling any of its interest in Indonesian subsidiary Indosat Ooredoo. There had been media speculation it was considering a stake sale to focus on Middle Eastern markets. Dubai's index failed to hold onto small gains from earlier in the day and dropped 0.3 percent as declines in blue chips weighed on the exchange.

Emaar Properties retreated 1.3 percent and Dubai Investments lost 1.0 percent.

But Abu Dhabi's index rose 0.2 percent although activity was lower than previous sessions this week. Union National Bank , which has shed 6.7 percent since Sunday, added 1.0 percent.

CAIRO RETREATS

Cairo's main index retreated 1.4 percent in this week's highest volume of trade as both local and regional funds cashed out, bourse data showed.

All 30 shares declined with real estate developer Amer Group Holding slumping 6.9 percent and Qalaa Holdings dropping 5.3 percent.

"Investors are hopeful, but are not holding their breath waiting for the IMF $12 billion loan and the host of policy actions that should be taken to secure it," said a Cairo based portfolio manager.

WEDNESDAY'S HIGHLIGHTS

SAUDI ARABIA

* The index rose 0.4 percent to 5,949 points.

QATAR

* The index slipped 0.04 percent to 10,253 points.

DUBAI

* The index fell 0.3 percent to 3,446 points.

ABU DHABI

* The index added 0.2 percent to 4,470 points.

EGYPT

* The index dropped 1.4 percent to 7,938 points.

BAHRAIN

* The index gained 0.2 percent to 1,134 points.

OMAN

* The index declined 0.03 percent to 5,750 points.

($1 = 3.7508 riyals)

<^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Emerging markets stocks Frontier stocks Gulf stocks, emerging index ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^> (Editing by Louise Heavens)
(Kitco News) - An employee of the Royal Canadian Mint apparently found an unconventional way to get gold out of the fortress-like facility, successfully smuggling $180,000 worth of the metal, before getting caught.

How did he do it?

During his trial, which wrapped Tuesday, it was speculated that Leston Lawrence, 35, who faces a number of smuggling charges, including theft, laundering the proceeds of crime, possession of stolen property and breach of trust, allegedly stuffed gold pieces in an anal cavity to bypass metal detectors at the facility.

During the proceedings, Crown prosecutors argued that there was compelling evidence that he was secreting (gold) on his person and taking it out of the Mint.

Witnesses claimed that he often set off metal detectors, more so than other RCM employees, and investigators found Vaseline in his locker at the mint.

According to reports, Lawrence was taking small amounts of gold  nuggets known as pucks  from the mint on multiple occasions. Each puck weighs about 210 grams, which at current prices is nearly $9,000. Over the course four months, from November 2014 to March 2015, the defendant allegedly stole 18 pucks, and his theft totaled nearly $180,000.

However, the reports also noted that the Crown was unable to prove, irrefutably, that the gold came from inside the mint and the RCM has not reported any missing gold content internally. Although the case concluded today, Justice Peter Doody has set the verdict to November 9.

In a statement to Canadian newspaper The National Post, a spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mint said that since Lawrences arrest, the mint has upgraded several of its security measures, including high definition security cameras in all areas, improved ability to track, balance and reconcile precious metals, and the use of trend analysis technology.

By Sarah Benali of Kitco News; sbenali@kitco.com

Follow @SdBenali
HANOI, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Here's a snapshot of Vietnamese dong exchange rates in the official and unofficial markets, indicative SJC gold prices in Hanoi and interbank offered rates at 0408 GMT.

Sept 21 Sept 20 USD/VND mid-point 21,953 21,953 USD/VND interbank 22,310/22,370 22,315/22,325 USD/VND unofficial 22,320/22,350 22,310/22,320 SJC gold (mln dong/tael) 36.02/36.29 36.03/36.30

Interbank offered rates Overnight 0.4-0.7 0.4-0.7

1 week 0.4-0.8 0.4-0.8

1 month 1.7-2.2 1.7-2.2

3 months 3.3-4.2 3.3-4.2

NOTES: As of Jan. 4, 2016 the State Bank of Vietnam has begun setting the mid-point rate on daily basis, allowing dollar/dong transactions to move in a band of +/- 3 percent around the mid point. The dong's exchange rate against other currencies is not restricted by a band. Interbank offered rates are the latest indicative bid/ask prices, quoted from market sources.

One tael is equivalent to 37.5 grams or 1.21 troy ounces. SJC gold prices are quoted by state-owned Saigon Jewelry Co.

For more interbank rate fixings released at 0400 GMT, click on .

For Vietnam market overview click on: Vietnam's bonds market auctions: Bonds auction results: (Compiled by Hanoi Newsroom)
ZURICH, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The Swiss blue-chip SMI was seen opening 0.3 higher at 8,262 points on Wednesday, according to premarket indications by bank Julius Baer .

Here are some of the main factors expected that could affect Swiss stocks:

ABB The Swiss power and automation group is selling its high-voltage cable business to NKT Cables NKT.CO in a deal with an enterprise value of 836 million euros ($930 million), part of a strategic review of its Power Grids division. For more news, click ZURICH INSURANCE Zurich is combining its corporate and commercial businesses into a single unit under new leadership, part of its streamlining process under new Chief Executive Mario Greco. James Shea, previously AIG's AIG.N president of global financial lines, will head up the newly combined commercial insurance unit, Zurich said. For more click on VONTOBEL Vontobel said on Tuesday it had signed an agreement deepening its asset management partnership with Raiffeisen and extending the partnership into the next decade. Vontobel further completed its acquisition of Raiffeisen's asset management subsidiary Vescore AG on Tuesday on well. The Swiss private bank said the purchase was financed entirely out of its own funds.

For more click on CREDIT SUISSE The U.S. judge overseeing litigation accusing 16 banks of rigging prices in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market on Tuesday narrowed but refused to dismiss lawsuits against seven large banks, including Credit Suisse, that have yet to settle. For more click on SWISSCOM Chief Financial Officer Mario Rossi expects erosion of the telecom giant's earnings margins to accelerate in the second half-year as a result of heightened price competition falling roaming revenues. "In the first half-year, our Swiss business lost 21 million Swiss francs in EBITDA; in the full year it will be 150 million francs," he told newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft. Swisscom was nonetheless on track to meet its 2016 targets, Rossi said.

For more click on COMPANY STATEMENTS * At components maker SFS , bigger deals could eventually be in the works after a series of smaller acquisitions in previous quarters, CEO Jens Breu told Finanz und Wirtschaft, with a particular eye to new buys strengthening its medical equipment and aeronautics businesses. He added the group wasn't planning to offer shareholders a dividend hike for 2016. * Wisekey completed the acquisition of Inside Secure's integrated circuit solutions and semiconductor business, which generated revenues of $33 million last and is expected to generate $34 million this year, Wisekey said. * lastminute.com acquired social travel network WAYN through an asset deal, the online travel group said, and would not have any impact on the group's reported finances. * Aevis Victoria issued a 6-year 130 million Swiss franc bond it said would be used for refinancing and general corporate purposes. (Reporting by Zurich newsroom)

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By Andrew Binion of the Kitsap Sun

BREMERTON  One judge prospect for Kitsap Superior Court said Tuesday that his lifelong roots in the county and his ability to learn quickly make him the best fit for the job; the other argued that his experience in the courtroom and endorsements from the rest of Kitsap's Superior and District Court judges makes him most qualified.

Judge Jeffrey Bassett, 55, is running to keep the job after being appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee in February. Although all of Kitsap's eight Superior Court judges are up for election, Bassett is the only judge facing a challenger.

"I fit in like a piece of a puzzle with the office," Bassett told the morning group that attended the Bremerton Chamber of Commerce's Eggs and Issues forum.

Dale Magneson, 65, a Silverdale attorney who practices family and civil law, told the group he has a record of getting up to speed quickly and is confident in his abilities.

"I know the county, I know its people," said Magneson, an Army veteran who studied Russian while in the military and said he speaks German. "I'm capable of learning anything."

Bassett and Magneson agreed on most of the issues raised in questions, like supporting the use of therapeutic courts such as drug court or veterans court, which defers prosecution for some crimes to allow defendants to receive treatment.

The two candidates also agreed that the state's sentencing guideline system is neutral when it comes to economic and racial disparities, but those disparities affect people before they wind up in court. Likewise, the two have both practiced for about three decades.

Where they split was on what qualifies them for the office.

Bassett's emphasized the breadth of his experience, having worked in criminal and civil law, including juvenile justice and dependency law. This area of law falls under the remit of Superior Court and involves abuse and neglect of children and can involve removing children from their guardians.

Bassett said that he has the most on-the-job experience and that about half Superior Court hearings are criminal cases.

"The bottom line is I'm doing it," Bassett said.

Magneson emphasized his connection to Kitsap as an East (Bremerton) High graduate. He has never been in a jury trial but said it is because the type of law he has practiced does not result in a trial. Magneson practices civil law, including family law, wills and real estate. He said it was important for Kitsap voters to select Superior Court judges, noting that Bassett was appointed.

Magneson said he decided to run two days before the filing deadline after being encouraged by another Kitsap attorney. However, he said his track record of learning quickly, while working as an inspector at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and then setting up his law practice, showed he could do the job.

"This wasn't something that had a lot of forethought, this was last minute," Magneson told the group. "It's been interesting."

After the forum, Bassett said he was "dumbstruck" by Magneson saying he hadn't given a thought to running before the filing deadline, saying that indicated Magneson was not prepared or serious about the job.

"That's not the kind of person we want to be judge," Bassett said.

Magneson remarked on Bassett's support from the other judges, saying it was a signal to other attorneys not to run for the bench.

"In my opinion they are closing ranks," Magneson said.

Magneson ran unsuccessfully for Superior Court in 2004, against retired Judge Anna Laurie but was eliminated in the primary.

Fellow Silverdale lawyer Bill Broughton approached Magneson about running after talking with other lawyers about running against Bassett.

"(Magneson) is a good guy and a good lawyer, and we need good people on the bench. And I think we need contested races for judicial offices," said Broughton, who said he was puzzled by Inslee's appointment of Bassett.

"Mr. Bassett was a recent appointment and certainly was not endorsed by the Bar and someone unknown to the Bar Association," Broughton said.

Bassett did not place at the top in a Kitsap Bar Association poll for the 10 applicants to replace retired Judge Jay Roof. Bar members are voting in another poll, between Bassett and Magneson, but the results are not yet available.

However, Inslee's attorney, Nick Brown, who coordinates judicial appointments, said Bassett came highly recommended by the other Superior Court judges.
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By Arla Shephard Bull, For the Kitsap Sun

BELFAIR  After nearly 50 years in existence, the Samuel B. Theler trust has been dissolved.

The philanthropist's beneficiaries, the largest of which is the North Mason School District, and the Bank of New York Mellon signed an agreement to dissolve the trust, which has distributed money to the school district, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts since shortly after Theler's death in 1968.

North Mason School Board President Art Wightman signed the agreement at the board's Sept. 15 regular meeting after representatives from the trust's other beneficiaries signed at an earlier date.

"The trust has been in existence for decades (and) it is simply running out of funds," said Raina Wagner, an attorney from the Seattle-based law firm K&L Gates, who represents the school district. "The trust would have nothing left to distribute in less than 10 years if we kept on course."

As of Aug. 31, the trust encompassed an account with $300,294.47 and property south of the Mary E. Theler Community Center in Belfair, being used now as an additional parking lot for the community center.

The Bank of New York Mellon distributed 6 percent of the trust annually to its beneficiaries, and the school district received 80 percent of that distribution, while the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts each received 10 percent.

In 2015, the administrative costs of the trust totaled $30,749.03, including trustee fees of more than $13,000 and real estate taxes of nearly $17,000.

Fees associated with terminating the trust have not yet been finalized, but Wagner doesn't think they will bring the trust's total balance much lower than where it sits now.

The school district will inherit the remaining parcel and will receive 80 percent of the final balance, subtracting $3,700, which is the assessed value of the parcel.

The district already owns the property where the Mary E. Theler Community Center is located, as well as the wetlands behind the center.

Superintendent Dana Rosenbach said the district is moving forward with plans to turn the community center into an early learning center and is pursuing the transfer of the wetlands to another government entity.
The first Silk Road International Cultural Expo is to drop its curtain on Sept. 21 in northwestern Chinas Dunhuang, Gansu province. As the only international cultural festival specifically for Belt and Road countries, the exhibition of over 8,000 exhibits was designed to shed light on multiculturalism and creative designs.

The exhibits, from 16 countries and 15 Chinese provinces and regions, were grouped together under various categories including antiques, fabrics, porcelain, publications, photos, design and animation.

The two-day event centered on cultural exchange, cooperation and innovation. President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the expo on its opening day, calling for more cultural exchange, the promotion of cultural equality, the protection of cultural heritage and improvements to cultural cooperation and innovation.

The expo attracted 95 foreign delegations from 85 countries as well as five international organizations. Coupled with the 66 overseas participants, a total of more than 1,000 guests attended the expo. (Photo/silkroaddunhuang.com)
Five Thirty Eight has forecast that the Democrats have a 59% chance of taking control of the US Senate.

They predict that:

Democrats win Pennsylvania

Democrats win New Hampshire

Democrats retain Nevada

Democrats win Indiana

Democrats win Illinois

Democrats win Wisconsin

This would give the Democrats a fairly comfortable 52 seats.

Trump is now seen to have a better chance of winning the presidency, than the Republicans retaining the Senate. They have him at between 44% and 48% probability (depending on model) to win the presidency. This is the highest he has been apart from the convention bounce.

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Stuff reports:

John Keys audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York was a small but well-heeled one. So a shocked gasp went around the room when one of its armchair generals rose from his seat to ask whether New Zealand was good for much more in the US than a few lamb chops. His gripe was New Zealands anti-nuclear legislation and not pulling our weight which, as Key pointed out, is ancient history, given our decade-plus involvement in Afghanistan and now Iraq. That was not the only history lesson Key felt compelled to deliver to his US audience.

Clark sent troops into both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Key has continued the Afghanistan mission and also approved a training mission for Iraq this time around.

He harked back to the days of fortress New Zealand, the time pre-1980s when we ran one of the more protectionist economies in the world, our manufacturers and even wine makers propped up by tariffs and quotas that freed them from having to compete with companies overseas who did things faster, cheaper and better.

The wine industry used to specialise in cheap wine as tariffs meant no other country could produce wine for NZ so cheaply. Once the tariffs went, the NZ wine industry went for quality. There were predictions it would fail without protection, but instead it flourished and exports increased massively.

As the rest of the world retreats into protectionism, Key is almost a lone voice advocating for free trade and, in particular, the Trans Pacific Partnership deal, on the international stage. US President Barack Obama is now officially into the lame duck period of his presidency and if he cant get the TPP through the US Congress before the election, Key worries there may never be another opportunity. Key didnt pull any punches, meanwhile, in warning what would happen if the US pulled out. Something else would fill the void. And in this case, the something would probably be China, the very bogey used by Trump to scare up opposition to the TPP. Which is why Keys message to the US was an unusually blunt one  sign the TPP now, or watch America slowly slide from great, to waning super power.

Spot on.

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A number of female college students in Sichuan province recently took part in a recruitment exercise for flight attendants. China Southern Airlines, one of the top three airlines in China, held a flight attendant recruitment fair in Sichuan, attracting nearly 2,000 applicants. In addition to requirements relating to appearance and temperament, applicants were also expected to meet high standards for language ability and people skills. (Chinanews.com/Mao Chengshan)
[File photo]

Chinas anti-graft rules are widely supported by the public, who believe that the rules have significantly improved the countrys social morality, a new survey shows.

The survey, conducted by China Youth Daily, suggests that nearly 70 percent of respondents were in favor of the eight-point anti-bureaucracy and formalism rules, with 57 percent indicating faith in the countrys future anti-graft efforts. The eight-point rules were introduced by the Political Bureau of the CCP's Central Committee at the end of 2012.

Making vigorous efforts to tackle corruption in recent years, the central governments determination to curb corruption and implement anti-graft rules is being recognized by the public. Violations of the eight-point rules are decreasing, making Chinas anti-graft campaign a steady cause, said Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Research Center for Government Integrity-Building at Peking University, in an interview with China Youth Daily.

Though the public is generally satisfied with the governments anti-graft efforts, 54 percent of respondents believed that more violations of the eight-point rules took place during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and will take place over the upcoming National Day Golden Week. Both occasions have traditionally been a time for gift-receiving and banquets at public expense.

Sending gifts to friends and relatives is a popular custom during Chinese holidays, but it can also lead to bribery and illicit power-for-money exchanges. Thus, it isn't uncommon for inspections to increase during traditional gift-giving periods. Chinas top discipline watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China, also launches special campaigns during the Spring Festival and Lantern Festival.

Some discipline inspections at the local level have become a mere formality, which can damage the authority of anti-graft rules and the implementation of relevant policies, Zhuang said, adding that such problems should be strictly addressed.
Author Kerri Maniscalco is debuting her first novel, "Stalking Jack the Ripper." She is pictured at her sister's shop, Dogwood Lane Boutique, in Sweetwater, where Maniscalco does some of her writing. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL)

SHARE SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL Author Kerri Maniscalco is debuting her first novel, "Stalking Jack the Ripper." She is pictured at her sister's shop, Dogwood Lane Boutique, in Sweetwater, where Maniscalco does some of her writing.

By Susan Alexander of the Knoxville News Sentinel

East Tennessee resident Kerri Maniscalco's Young Adult novel, "Stalking Jack the Ripper," went on sale this week as the first book published by Jimmy Patterson, the new children's imprint from author James Patterson.

The book is about a feisty young woman, Audrey Rose, who's being schooled in forensic science by her uncle at the time London is being terrorized by Jack the Ripper. Audrey Rose and her uncle, along with an attractive, equally sassy male student, examine the victims, follow clues and draw conclusions, despite the protests of her conservative widower father and her brother.

Maniscalco, 34, is a communications graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She will sign copies of her book at Books-A-Million, 8507 Kingston Pike at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 25, and answered questions via email about her work:

First, tell us about your East Tennessee connections: How long have you lived here and what brought you to Tennessee?

A: I grew up in the Hudson Valley region of New York and absolutely loved the mountains and the river there. It had a small town feeling even though New York City was only an hour away. I'd thought of moving to the Knoxville area in college  I really, really wanted to study at the Body Farm  but I come from a very close-knit family and decided to stay in New York with them. My dad went to school in Atlanta and wanted to move back to Marietta, though my parents decided to wait until retirement to make the big move.

When they drove through East Tennessee on their way to Georgia, they both had an immediate connection to the region and gorgeous mountains. It felt like home. When they told my sister and me about East Tennessee, and the opportunity for my sister to open her own boutique, it was the perfect time for all of us to put down roots here.

We've been here for four years next February, and it reminds me of the Hudson Valley, and the sense of community is humbling. I love Tennessee and am very proud to call it my home.

How did you get connected to the Jimmy Patterson project?

My agent, Barbara Poelle, had sent "Stalking Jack the Ripper" to my now-editor there when we first started shopping it last fall. When I learned of the interest from JIMMY books, I immediately researched everything about the imprint and knew it was the perfect place for me and my novel. Working with them has been the most amazing experience.

Children's literacy  from picture books to middle grade novels to young adult, like I write  is so invaluable to our world and future and is something that's very important to me. My grandma was very poor growing up, and she spent her spare time in libraries. She used to say that she could travel anywhere in her mind for the cost of her library card, and it's stuck with me my whole life.

Why did you choose Jack the Ripper as the focus of your novel?

When I started brainstorming ideas for this novel, I knew I wanted to write a YA version of "CSI." I love forensics and wanted to focus on a young woman who saw beyond the blood and gore to find details that could potentially stop a murderer. My grandmother was a huge fan of mysteries and 'whodunits,' and that set me on the path to choosing the serial killer who committed one of the biggest whodunits in history. She always believed in me and prayed every day that I'd become a published author, so I know she's smiling down from heaven.

The Victorian setting also lent itself nicely to creating tension for my main character; how she had to fight against societal restrictions on top of scientifically piecing clues together. My agent always says, "up the stakes!" And that certainly helped.

Your book is pretty graphic regarding the victims' wounds, autopsy procedures etc, and the language/style is intentionally Victorian. What makes it a YA book?

Since this is based on the Ripper murders and is told through the lens of a forensic student, it was important to accurately describe the victims' wounds and autopsy procedures. A student of forensics would be exposed to things we might want to cringe away from, but I didn't want to hold back because it made me uncomfortable. And I'm pleased that I overcame the creepier aspects, because medical students have reached out to me and have been so excited to see procedures and terminology used in the book. That makes my day.

I did not want to glorify what had happened to those women, but I also didn't want to pretend their injuries weren't horrific, either. It was a fine line to walk in terms of being historically accurate and not being over-the-top or too scary. Young adult novels are amazing and cover a broad spectrum of topics  some darker than others.

What authors influence your work?

I've always been drawn to Poe and the sense of atmosphere and foreboding he created. My favorite books are ones brimming with uncertainty.

Shakespeare is another favorite of mine; his understanding of core human issues is what makes his stories relevant today.

You describe some of the scenes around London in detail. Did you visit the city to research the book? What else was involved in researching the topic?

I have wanted to visit London for years and haven't yet had the opportunity to do so. I'm hoping to travel in 2017, and London is at the top of my list to experience.

I did a massive amount of research to get the details right in the book. London in 1888 was laid out a bit differently, some streets are not the same as they were during the murders, so I had to pick and choose which details to keep historically accurate and which to modernize a bit.

Sometimes I'd spend hours searching for the answer to a question that literally takes up a half of a sentence in the book. It's those fun details that bring the setting to life, and they were worth all the countless hours to find.

How long did the book take to write? Tell us about that process.

The first draft took about four months to write and an extra two-three to revise. (That's all pre-editing and revising with my editor  we did that for another few months together.) I chose to include historical photographs and illustrations, so part of the writing process included searching for the perfect image to go before certain scenes and chapters. Finding Victorian images that were high-resolution enough to be included and locate rights info was extremely difficult and time-consuming.

While drafting, I pored over case details for the Ripper murders, learning everything I could about the women prior to their deaths. It was important for me to portray them respectfully, after they'd been so brutally disregarded by Jack the Ripper. My intention was to treat this in a way that didn't glorify the crimes or murderer, but focused more on the desperate effort in solving this case and the remarkable scientific advancements that were used  some for the first time. I researched actual post-mortem documents for the victims so I could accurately capture what a young forensic student would have witnessed.

But my research wasn't just isolated to the Ripper case. Since there's so much science and new medical technology for the day, I wanted to make sure everything that's said or done in the book was something that was possible in 1888. Everything from Petri dishes to carbolic acid, fingerprint collection, photography at murder scenes, Bunsen burners, sterilization, medical tools and post-mortem procedures. What a body smells like after trauma, even if it's discovered within hours  I'm definitely on some sort of watch list for those searches and am so thankful for current medical examiners posting this info online. All of the science and technology in the book was available at the time, which I was surprised by.

Also, little details: like, if certain wealthier households would have had a telephone, or gas lamps vs. oil lamps, and electricity. What was considered vulgar in polite, upper-class society, and what the rules for society were. Clothing and undergarments for women and what the bustles and corsets both looked and felt like.

What else do you have in the works?

JIMMY books has purchased two more stories in the series, and I couldn't be more excited. Currently I'm finishing up the last chapters of book two. I can't share the title or many details yet, but I can say that it takes place a week after "Stalking Jack the Ripper" ends, and I absolutely love it.

The main characters  well, the ones who survive  travel to a new country, hoping to rid themselves of the darkness from the Ripper murders and become embroiled in another investigation right away.

It's slated to come out in 2017 with the third book following in 2018. I like calling it a "Gothic Nancy Drew" set of companion novels.

For more information: kerrimaniscalco.com or on twitter @KerriManiscalco
SHARE Kelsey Grammer voices top bird Hunter in "Storks."

By Angela Dawson, Special to Go Knoxville

"Where do babies come from?"

For parents who've been dreading addressing that age-old question from their kids, the animated comedy "Storks" is arriving in theaters to help out.

The Warner Bros. comedy tells the story of Junior, a rising winged star at an Amazon-like business operation where storks deliver packages of goods, having long ago ceased delivering babies after a mishap. But troubles arise when our hero accidentally activates the long-dormant Baby Making Machine, which produces an adorable little girl.

Desperate to deliver this bundle of trouble before the boss gets wise, Junior and his friend Tulip, the only human on Stork Mountain, race to make their first-ever baby drop in a wild and revealing journey that could make more than one family whole and restore the storks' true mission in the world.

Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Kelsey Grammer provides the voice of top bird Hunter, who runs his delivery operation with the precision of a military general and is a little more than peeved when he discovers his protege has fouled things up. The veteran actor is no stranger to voiceover roles, most notably that of Bart Simpson's chief antagonist Sideshow Bob on the long-running animated comedy series "The Simpsons." He also provided the voice of Stinky Pete in "Toy Story 2" and Vladimir in 1997's animated feature "Anastasia."

At a press conference, Grammer, a father of six (with another reportedly on the way), spoke about his flighty role, discovering the birds and the bees and finding his inspiration for Hunter.

Q: What parts of the movie or script made you want to be a part of this project?

Grammer: For me, just celebrating babies, celebrating life, celebrating the gift that every child is.

Q: How did you learn about the birds and the bees?

Grammer: Actually my grandfather did have a little bit of a chat about it, but I sort of imagined some things already (He laughs.)

Q: Like what kind of stuff?

Grammer: I had an eye on a couple of girls when I was in kindergarten. There was something special about them so I kind of knew what was coming.

Q: How was going from playing Frasier Crane (on "Cheers" and "Frasier") to playing a Stork?

Grammer: You have stumbled upon the darkest secret of the film. As I watched, I kept waiting for the line when Hunter says, "I'm not a stork. I'm a crane!" It was cut, wisely so, from the final cut of the movie. It was the crux of the film. However, it was attached to a piece of contemporary culture, which I think was wisely eschewed.

Q: Hunter can go so far to the dark side and frighten children with his dark vocal intonations, yet you find a moderation where you can be menacing but still playful. How do you, when you are doing voice acting, find that resonant level for creating the character without going too far into alienating younger audiences?

Grammer: Interesting. (respected British actor) John Gielgud once said, "Style is knowing what play you're in." Now, that may or may not help you. However, it was a question that I'd always have about any performance: How do you do that? Well, you just have to know what play you're in. You have to know you are in a comedy. You have to know that you are actually allowing the audience to participate on some level.

When you go dark and mean it, then you don't let them in. But in this performance, you know that there is something funny going on. It resonates always in the moment but also Nick (Stoller, the co-director) and the rest of the crew always understand that they are making the movie. It's his movie. Whatever that performance is, they guide it a little bit. They also know when to stop and pull back. It's supposed to be a kid's movie so it's okay. He's not going to go too far.

What's interesting about Hunter's role in the movie, the purpose he plays, he's kind of expositional honest. He kind of lays out what's going on. When you do that, you have to just speak clearly and forcefully, with good diction. That can make all the difference.

Q: When you watch the film, do you see yourself in the character? I am sure they filmed you while you were recording your voice. Do you see any of your mannerisms?

Grammer: I always wonder in an animated performance if it's there. A long time ago I did a film called "Anastasia" in which the character didn't look anything like me. I said to (the filmmakers), "Please don't borrow anything I do physically." But then when I did ("Toy Story 2) with (director) John Lasseter and played Stinky Pete, and he said, "Do you mind if we run a camera and grab some of your visuals?" I said, "Now I get it. It would work here."

But in this one, I'm not actually sure if they did anything like that, but I wasn't playing myself in this. I was actually doing (comedic actor) Rip Torn. It didn't matter (if they captured my mannerisms). I was imitating Rip Torn the whole time.

Q: Do you think this film will help parents have "the talk" with their kids?

Grammer: Yes. For the next 10 years, anybody with a kid that's like three or four is off the hook.

Q: You recorded some of your dialogue with some of your fellow voice cast. Did recording with other actors in the room help you or hinder you in how you personified your character?

Grammer: We did our first scene together and I think that was very helpful. The subsequent recordings that I did were alone. It's sort of based on that initial relationship.
SHARE Steven Davis (KNOX COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE)

By News Sentinel Staff

KNOXVILLE  A 28-year-old man was arrested Tuesday afternoon after he allegedly tried to carjack a 74-year-old woman and her 11-year-old grandson, police say.

The incident began just before 4 p.m. when Knoxville Police Department officers and medical first responders were dispatched to a call at the Walmart gas pumps at 120 Green Road, off Chapman Highway, according to a KPD news release.

EMS personnel found a man, later identified as Steven R. Davis of Knoxville, passed out behind the wheel of a U-Haul truck, the release states.

Once officers arrived, Davis became violent and fled on foot, police said, and officers gave chase.

Davis ran across Chapman Highway and into the parking of the US Fuel Plus gas station, 7405 Chapman Highway, according to police.

KPD said the suspect then jumped into the driver's seat of a vehicle sitting at the gas pump and attempted to drive away, but the engine was off.

Davis then ran across the parking lot to the H&R Block office, 7351 Chapman Highway, and attempted to carjack a Toyota Corolla occupied by a 74-year-old woman and her 11-year-old grandson, according to police.

Officers saw Davis force his way into the passenger side of the vehicle, the release states.

As KPD Officer Chris Hutton caught up to the vehicle, the suspect climbed over the 11-year-old passenger and tried to force the driver out of the vehicle, police said.

Hutton struggled with Davis as Officer Chris Williams and his K-9 partner, Loki, assisted in gaining control of the suspect, polices said.

A good Samaritan saw the officers struggling with the suspect and blocked the Corolla in, but the suspect managed to put the car in reverse and rammed the good Samaritan's vehicle, police said.

After "multiple Taser deployments and a physical struggle," the officers were able to gain control of the suspect and help the victims exit the vehicle, the KPD release states.

The 74-year-old woman sustained minor injuries, but her 11-year-old grandson was not injured. The woman was treated by EMS at the scene and released.

Police said Davis appeared to be either intoxicated or under the effects of narcotics.

Davis was later identified as a hit-and-run suspect wanted by KPD Traffic Officer Tim Edwards. The suspect, in the same U-Haul truck, allegedly rammed three vehicles and a bridge abutment earlier Tuesday on Loves Creek near Rutledge Pike.

Police said that at the time of his arrest Tuesday, Davis had six outstanding warrants out of Knox County  including three for felony theft  as well as three pending hit-and-run charges.

Charges pending in connection with Tuesday's incident include resisting arrest, two counts of aggravated assault, carjacking and auto theft.

More details as they develop online and in Wednesday's News Sentinel.
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Gov. Bill Haslam has declared September as Campus Fire Safety Month to raise student awareness of fire hazards and to promote fire safety measures for residences on and off college and university campuses.

Julie Mix McPeak, state fire marshal and commissioner of commerce and insurance said the month offers a chance to stress the importance of campus fire safety.

"We want all college students in Tennessee to live in a fire-safe environment," McPeak said in a news release. "It's important to know your fire risks and how those risks can be reduced. Proper awareness and education can prevent a tragedy."

State records indicate two students have been killed in campus-related fires in Tennessee since 2000.

In 2005, a fire on the top floor of a residence hall killed a 20-year-old student at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tenn., and in 2012, an early morning fire killed a 20-year-old student at the University of Memphis, who lived in an off-campus apartment.

According to the National Fire Protection Association, from 2000-2015, 126 people have been killed in the U.S. in fires that occurred on college campuses, in Greek housing or in off-campus housing within three miles of a campus.

The majority of those fire deaths, which totaled 107, occurred in off-campus housing.

The fire marshal's office also says campus-related fire fatalities have common factors, such as a lack of automatic fire sprinklers, missing or disabled smoke alarms, careless smoking habits, and the misuse of alcohol, which impairs judgment and hampers evacuation efforts.

For more information, visit: http://www.nfpa.org/public-education/by-topic/property-type-and-vehicles/campus-and-dorm-fires/campus-and-dorm-fire-safety-tips.
Oak Ridge firefighters rescued an injured woman who fell about 60 from a retaining wall Sept. 17, one of two rescues that made use of a new rope haul system. (Oak Ridge Fire Department)

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By News Sentinel Staff

Oak Ridge firefighters made two rescues within less than a week of each other using recently purchased rope equipment.

Oak Ridge Fire Department crews began training last month with the quick deployment, 3-to-1 rope haul system, which is designed to move injured people up steep slopes or through confined spaces where it is difficult to lift or carry a person, according to a news release.

On Sept. 14, firefighters responded to a report of an unconscious man in the attic of a house. The man was found disoriented and unable to move in the 120-degree attic when rescuers arrived.

The rope system allowed the fire crew to move the man through the roof trusses and down the attic access opening within "a matter of minutes," the release states.

Three days later, on Sept. 17, Oak Ridge firefighters rescued a woman who was seriously injured when she fell about 60 feet from a backyard retaining wall down a steep slope in a wooded area.

"The rapid deployment of the rope system helped the fire crew and Oak Ridge police officers move the injured woman up the steep slope to the ambulance," according to the release.

Oak Ridge firefighters are continuing their rescue training this week in a three-day joint exercise with a Tennessee Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter.

More details as they develop online and in Thursday's News Sentinel.
Rep. Jeremy Durham looks through papers at his desk in the House Chambers during a special session Tuesday Sept. 13, 2016, in Nashville, Tenn. (George Walker IV, The Tennessean)

By Dave Boucher, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee Reporters Stacey Barchenger and Joel Ebert contributed to this report.

The state agency charged with disciplining attorneys is investigating the actions of Jeremy Durham, potentially jeopardizing the recently expelled lawmaker's ability to continue to practice law.

A source with information of the investigation confirmed the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility is looking into possible "trust account violations," or the possibility Durham misused money given to him by clients.

Durham is also being investigated by the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance, which authorized issuing subpoenas for Durham's tax returns. Tom Lawless, chairman of the registry's board, referenced a possible additional investigation during a recent board meeting.

However, Lawless said his organization, which investigates campaign finance issues, had no current plans to explore questions of how Durham used his attorney trust accounts as that typically falls under the purview of the Board of Professional Responsibility.

Durham's attorney, Peter Strianse, did not respond to a request for comment.

Sandy Garrett, chief disciplinary counsel for the Board of Professional Responsibility, did not confirm or deny the existence of any investigation. She said the board does not make investigations public until formal discipline or disciplinary charges have been filed.

The specific nature of the Board of Professional Responsibility's investigation is unclear, but it appears to relate to Durham's use of his attorney trust account. A University of Memphis law school graduate, Durham operated a title company until he abruptly shuttered it in August.

Many attorneys have separate accounts, called trust accounts, in which they place client funds, according to a 113-page handbook created by the Board of Professional Responsibility.

While the client's money is technically in the possession of the attorney, it is sometimes inappropriate for the attorney to access that money. For example, some clients are required to pay fees in advance, but the attorney isn't allowed to access that money until services have been rendered.

"The legal and ethical obligation to account for those moneys is yours and yours alone, regardless of how busy your practice is or how hopeless you are with numbers. You may employ others to help you fulfill this duty, but if you do, you must provide adequate training ...," the handbook states.

"Failure to live up to this responsibility can result in personal monetary liability, fee disputes, loss of clients and public discipline."

Mixing an attorney's private funds with the funds of a client is a serious offense, called "commingling," according to the handbook.

"The minute you don't keep track of a client's money, you violate the client trust accounting rules. The longer you don't know, the more violations you're likely to stumble into, and if you keep stumbling, sooner or later you're going to stumble into a Board of Professional Responsibility investigation," the handbook states.

It's unclear when the board of professional responsibility's investigation could wrap up. The state investigation is expected to be done by October or November. A separate federal investigation is also ongoing.

The Board of the Registry of Election Finance, an entity within the state Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance, launched its own investigation in June after a former Durham employee told the attorney general the ousted Franklin lawmaker used his campaign funds for his personal business. The attorney general started looking into Durham after The Tennessean launched an ongoing investigation into Durham's conduct, detailing reports from three women who had received inappropriate text messages from Durham's cellphone.

Durham acknowledged some wrongdoing, which was outlined in a scathing attorney general's report, but disputed any sexual misconduct. While Durham also denies the allegations that he misused campaign funds, Lawless previously said he believes there's a strong indication he did something wrong.
Tammy Hutchinson is a nurse who had to move back to Mississippi to be with family. She lost half her investment on her houseboat at a marina on Norris Lake. She managed to get $7,000 for her $15,000 house. Mike Miller updated his will just before cancer surgery last week. His lawyer asked him the value of his houseboat, which cost him $200,000. "I told him somewhere between $200,000 and zero."

The Tennessee Valley Authority board has voted to ban houseboats on its lakes. They are to be phased out over the next 30 years. You might think that timeline is not a problem, but it is. It has already wrecked the market for anyone who needs to sell. Banks won't lend money and cash buyers are hard to find. Imagine asking the bank for a 30-year mortgage on your house if they knew you would eventually lose title to the lot it sits on.

TVA has two very good reasons to ban houseboats: hazards to navigation and dumping sewage in the lakes. But Miller said that an estimated 98 percent of the houseboats on Norris Lake are in marinas. How are they more of a hazard to navigation than all the other boats in slips? All sewage from the boats is pumped ashore and disposed of in a septic tank.

As for anybody who is a hazard to navigation, moored illegally or dumping sewage in the lake, pass regulations to get them into a marina and handle the sewage or else. I can't believe the agency is going to allow boats to be moored illegally or allowed to degrade water quality. But if a boat is doing neither, why the ban?

Miller says Tennessee Valley Floating Homes Alliance members estimate there are approximately 900 floating homes on Norris Lake alone. They are a tremendous boost to the economy of surrounding counties. Over in North Caroline the 400 houseboats are a staple of the economy in Swain and Graham counties. That's why North Carolina's two Republican U.S. senators passed an amendment to the Water Resources Act to rescind TVA's ruling. It awaits action in the House. You might encourage Tennessee's House members to support the amendment. On the Tennessee side the districts most affected are those of Congressmen Chuck Fleischmann, Jimmy Duncan and Phil Roe.

Houseboat owners pay dock fees, sewage fees and property taxes, and TVA has imposed an annual fee of 50 cents per square foot for a permit. It's not cheap. The shorelines of TVA reservoirs are often in rural counties. The influx of the marina traffic is a welcome addition to the local economy. The Asheville paper reported the value of houseboats on Fontana Lake at an estimated $3.4 million. They don't have half the boats as Norris Lake.

The ruling applies to 49 reservoirs in seven states. But it has not gone unnoticed that there are no current members of the TVA board who are from lake-rich East Tennessee, where most of the houseboats reside (Boone, South Holston, Watauga, Norris, Watts Bar). About the only dissenting voice for consumers on the board is Mike McWherter, who voted against the ban. There isn't enough dissent on the board. It is a rubber stamp.

Meanwhile, houseboat owners will have to wait and see if Congress passes the legislation to save their investment. If they have to sell in the meantime, like Tammy Hutchinson, they are just out of luck.
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Something is very rotten in Scott County.

General Sessions Judge James Cotton Jr. is throwing defendants in jail unless they make payments to a man with no legal authority and/or contractual ties to county government.

The arrangement is so extraordinary, it's difficult, at first, to comprehend.

As everyone knows, Americans charged with crimes are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That means they can seek to be released from jail on bond while awaiting trial, and bond is supposed to be based on the risk that defendants will flee and the danger they will present if not incarcerated.

Nowadays, in special cases, judges can require defendants to wear tracking devices while out of jail. For instance, in Knox County (population 451,324), five defendants are wearing such ankle bracelets: a murder defendant, three child rape defendants and a domestic assault defendant.

But in Scott County (population about 30,000), 73 defendants were wearing monitors in August, and they had to pay a man named Howard Barnett $130 up front and $70 a week for the privilege.

Were these violent suspects likely to flee the jurisdiction or commit fresh crimes?

No. Many faced minor charges, including driving offenses, possession of small quantities of drugs, public intoxication and petty theft. Normally they would have bonded out of jail for a few hundred dollars. But instead Judge Cotton ordered them to put on tracking devices and start paying Barnett.

In fact, in a few cases, the defendant had already bonded out. But Cotton revoked their bonds  even after they showed up in court as ordered  and forced them to start wearing a Barnett tracker instead.

If the defendants fell behind in their payments, Cotton threw them back in jail until they paid up.

So what's the connection between Barnett and Cotton? None exists, the two men say.

Barnett says he's a former law enforcement officer  though he won't say with what agencies  who runs his business out of his car. His company is based in his home in Kentucky, and his wife is listed as registered agent.

He has no contract with Scott County. Judge Cotton says Barnett just showed up one day and demonstrated his gear.

"He presented himself and talked about what he did," said Cotton. "I love the technology  Basically, all of this got started because I was looking for another tool in my judicial toolbox."

He uses the tool on the poor, defendants who can't afford to pay for their own lawyers. Yet in nearly every case reviewed by News Sentinel reporter Jamie Satterfield, the defendants racked up hundreds of dollars in monitoring fees while their cases were pending.

Cotton admits it is unconstitutional to throw defendants in jail just because they can't afford to pay fees. But he does it anyway.

"Honestly, I don't know how I could make it financially work any other way," he told the newspaper.

The Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct, which polices judges, needs to look into this situation quickly, and so, perhaps, does the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
A Chinese couple holds a special wedding ceremony in a tunnel after getting stuck in a traffic jam in Ankang, Shaanxi province on Sept. 20. (Photo/HSW.CN)

Few people would be happy to encounter a traffic jam on the highway, and it would be all the more annoying if you were on the way to your own wedding. However, one Chinese couple truly made the best of just such a situation when they held a special wedding ceremony inside a traffic tunnel in Ankang, Shaanxi province on Sept. 20.

The whole scenario was put into motion thanks to a traffic jam, which was caused by an accident that occurred at 10:31 a.m. roughly 100 meters from the exit of Ankang's Fenghuangshan Tunnel. A truck hit a guardrail in the center of the road, which brought traffic to a complete standstill. The driver was injured, and the accident led to a severe traffic jam on the highway. Highway traffic police and a rescue team rushed to the scene to deal with the accident.

One hour later, nearly 100 vehicles were still trapped inside the tunnel. Fortunately for their drivers, an exciting distraction was about to begin.

A Chinese couple holds a special wedding ceremony in a tunnel after getting stuck in a traffic jam in Ankang, Shaanxi province on Sept. 20. (Photo/HSW.CN)

Local customs dictate that wedding ceremonies be held before 12:00 p.m. Therefore, when several cars on the way to a wedding got stuck in the tunnel - including that of the bride and groom - the couple decided to hold a simple ceremony in the tunnel instead. Passersby were invited to witness the special event.

To ensure everyone's safety and minimize the impact on other vehicles, the ceremony was shortened to about 10 minutes.

"I do!" the newlyweds recited to each other.

A Chinese couple holds a special wedding ceremony in a tunnel after getting stuck in a traffic jam in Ankang, Shaanxi province on Sept. 20. (Photo/HSW.CN)

Thanks to workers' rescue efforts, a lane was reopened to traffic by 12:10 p.m, at which point the couple was finally able to continue on toward their wedding venue. Traffic recovered completely by 2:20 p.m.
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Regarding the story "Police promise to arrest violators of gun ban at Tennessee Valley Fair," it is particularly important to note that there is no law saying you can't carry in that park. The state law (Tennessee Code Annotated 39-17-1311) says you specifically have the right to carry there, and TCA 39-17-1314 prohibits local regulation of carrying firearms in parks (or similar public places). TCA 39-17-1359 (the state posting law) specifically states that the posting cannot be used in parks. The Tennessee attorney general's opinion on this specific type of event says permit holders have the right to carry there. There is no city ordinance saying you can't carry there. The sign they post at the fair is not allowed or prescribed by any local, state or federal law. This is a blatant violation of constitutionally protected conduct guaranteed by both the state and federal constitutions and by officers and officials sworn to support and defend the constitutions of the U.S. and the state of Tennessee. It is these officials who are breaking the law and violating their oaths of office. I feel somewhat sorry for the police officers who have been ordered to violate their oaths of office.

I must also point out that the Tennessee attorney general's opinion specifically addresses special events by subcontractors where the contractors sell tickets for their events and control access. In addition, the sign in front of Chilhowee Park reads "Chilhowee Park," the fliers and website for the fair say it is at Chilhowee Park, it meets the definition of a park or similar public place, and is not an indoor venue like the Civic Auditorium and Coliseum.

Steve Mead, Oak Ridge
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In the mid-1930s, Nazi Germany was on the rise and marching into the Saar Land, Rhineland and Czechoslovakia. Japan was invading China and Mongolia without any response, except for a few sanctions placed on the country by America. Italy observed that the West did basically nothing in response to this aggression, and proceeded to invade Ethiopia. Overall, the Western world did nothing and, in fact, was not prepared to fight a large land war. The League of Nations, which had been formed at the end of World War I, was impotent and also did nothing, except some bloviating by the delegates.

Now in 2016, Iran is on the move, fomenting trouble throughout the Middle East and possibly secretly developing missiles together with atomic weapons. Russia is increasing its armaments and eyeing the Baltic states and the rest of Ukraine, where many Russians live. Russian President Vladimir Putin is using Hitler's playbook by having the Russians living in the areas stir up trouble. China is also creating a massive arms industry and is attempting to close off the South China Sea. North Korea has nuclear weapons and is perfecting a long-range missile. America has its smallest Army since the late 1930s, while Western Europe is certainly not ready or capable to fight a land war with Russia. Even Great Britain's General Sir Richard Barrons, retired Commander of Joint Forces Command, stated that the British Army is not equipped to fight a major power, like Russia or China, in a land war.

Americans, if you don't wake up and vote for the Winston Churchill type of candidate, you, your children and grandchildren may have to use the ultimate weapon to defend yourself, with the consequence that the world as we know it may not survive.

Richard M. Osborn, Knoxville
A company in central Chinas Henan province said they will reconsider their new policy to dismiss any employee who buys an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, which has caused an uproar on Chinese social media, Henan based Hnr.cn reported.

Our company forbids all employees from using or buying the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Whoever is found in violation of that rule will be immediately forced to resign, read a notice released by the company on Sept. 18. The notice also called for employees to stop buying other U.S.- and Japan-made products, and to support domestic products instead. The ban was deliberately made public on Sept. 18, the 85th anniversary of the 1931 incident that triggered Japans bloody, 14-year invasion of China.

If we have some disposable income, and if conditions allow it, lets [use the money to] take better care of our parents health. Lets pay more attention to our kids growth, to the value of life and to the prosperity of our country, read the notice. The report by Hnc.cn did not give the name of the company.

Since its release and subsequent media exposure, the rule had become the seventh hottest topic on Sina Weibo as of 10 a.m. on Sept. 21, with more than 6 million Weibo users viewing the discussion. Some netizens accused the ban of being barbarous and coercive. User AND_YOUwu commented, It is my own freedom to determine what phone to buy, while another user, Dunduner, wrote, A company with such a narrow-minded [idea of] patriotism will soon collapse.

At the same time, the ban did have its supporters.

After all, [the ban] comes from a good place, aiming to support made-in-China products and family values, said Weibo user ZaijianXiaodingding.

An employee from the company surnamed Liu told Hnr.cn that the notice was issued directly by the companys chairman, who had read extreme stories about Chinese people being so desperate for iPhones that they traded their own organs for money to buy the phones. The chairman didnt want his own employees to face such pressure. The chairman also hoped that the date of the announcement would stir up employees patriotism.

I will tell the chairman about public opinion toward the rule, and suggest that he reconsider it, Liu said.

Legal experts told Hnr.cn that such a ban is actually against Chinas Labor Law, and doesnt have the legitimate power to void a working contract.
South Korea's antitrust watchdog said Wednesday that it will file a petition against the founder of retail giant Lotte Group with state prosecutors for falsely reporting its overseas affiliates' shareholding.

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) made the final decision to take the legal punitive step after a months-long review of the case that dates back to when Shin Kyuk-ho was in control of South Korea's fifth-largest conglomerate.

Under South Korea's fair trade law, companies with assets exceeding 5 trillion won ($4.48 billion) are obligated to disclose stakes held by the company's head and his or her family members in affiliates at home and abroad.

Prosecutors were already widening investigations into prominent members of the Shin family, including the founder's second son and Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin, on charges of embezzlement and breach of trust.

From 2012-2015, Shin is alleged to have deliberately omitted four affiliates from relevant documents submitted to the watchdog and scaled down his family's stake in Lotte Group, according to the FTC.

"Shin had received warnings from the FTC for the same accusations several times in 2005, 2011 and 2012, but he repeated such violations," the FTC said in a statement. "The FTC will exercise strict control over such false reporting practices."

Earlier in May, the FTC also imposed a fine of 570 million won on 11 affiliates of Lotte Group for the falsified disclosure.

The ownership structure of Lotte, which has operations in food, confectionery, drinks, hotels and amusement parks, has been in the spotlight for nearly a year since the two sons of the founder engaged in a bitter feud to wrest control of the business group from their aging father last year.

The family feud caused state prosecutors to launch an investigation into a string of corruption allegations in which the group's top executives are involved. (Yonhap)
By Park Si-soo



Hanjin Shipping "could face liquidation," said Seoul's bankruptcy court that is managing the debt-ridden Korean shipping company under court receivership.

Judge Kim Jung-man of the Seoul Central District Court made the remark on Tuesday during a closed-door meeting with government officials and Hanjin's main creditors, according sources.

The comment marked the court's departure from its earlier stance favorable to extending the firm's lifeline by any means. Other comments made during the meeting were unknown.

While many say the remark reflects the seriousness of the situation facing the nation's largest container-ship operator, others consider it a tactic to put additional pressure on Hanjin Group Chairman Cho Yang-ho to make a bigger commitment to saving its sinking affiliate.












By Kim Tae-gyu





Lee Jae-yong

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong arrived at his office in southern Seoul at 7 a.m. Wednesday carrying a gold-colored Galaxy Note 7 in his hand, the model users claim caught fire.



Lee had avoided going there at this time due to journalists who swarm the first floor of the Samsung head office to meet presidents of Samsung affiliates who convene there every Wednesday morning.



To one of the journalists who took pictures with a cell phone, he said, "It's an iPhone," which observers say is unusual for Lee, the heir apparent of the Samsung Group as the only son of bed-ridden Chairman Lee Kun-hee



"As the leader of Samsung Electronics, it is no wonder for him to use the firm's latest device. But the thing is that he demonstrated the fact to the media in a unique way," said a Seoul analyst.



"The chances are that he expected many reporters early Wednesday morning. Then again, he might have wanted to promote the handset, which had setbacks in the aftermath of the recall announcement early this month."



Samsung Electronics started a replacement program this week, delivering new Galaxy Note 7 to customers following a worldwide recall prompted by over 30 reports of handset batteries catching fire.



The measure is likely to cause a substantial financial burden to Samsung and negatively affect its brand image as the tech giant sold around 2.5 million of the large-screen phones since its introduction on Aug. 16.



But Samsung tries to brush away such woes by restarting sales of the jumbo phones with features such as an iris scanner soon after wrapping up the exchange program.



Since Vice Chairman Lee was nominated to join Samsung's board of directors last week, he has proactively carried out various activities. Just after his appointment, he flew to India over the Chuseok holidays to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi.



The 48-year-old Harvard-educated businessman is now the de facto head of the nation's biggest conglomerate since his father was hospitalized after a heart attack in 2014.
The U.S. and South Korea should be cautious when it comes to China's criminal investigation into the Liaoning-based Chinese conglomerate that does extensive trade with North Korea. Neither country should stir up the situation before a result comes out, said an expert on Korean Peninsula issues in an interview with the Global Times.

China's Foreign Ministry also reiterated its determination to move forward with the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. At a press conference on Sept. 20, Lu Kang, spokesperson of the ministry, stated that China has been earnestly implementing the UN Security Council Resolution 2270, honoring its due international obligations on export control.

"In respect of customs, China has cut off almost all routes for trade in relation to the nuclear and military industry of North Korea," said Lyu Chao, who specializes in research on the Korean Peninsula at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences.

On Sept. 15, the Public Security Department of Liaoning province said on their official Weibo account that they were investigating Liaoning Hongxiang Industrial, based in Dandong, a major trading center with North Korea. The post stated that the firm had been involved in long-term "serious economic crimes," and that suspects were so far cooperating.

Just after the Liaoning police announced their investigation of the firm, Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) and Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies released a joint report titled In China's shadow: Evolution of North Korean Overseas Networks. The report singled out the firm for dealing in products that can be used to make nuclear weapons, the Wall Street Journal reported.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang agreed on Sept. 19 to step up cooperation after North Korea's fifth nuclear test, the White House said. The two countries are targeting Liaoning Hongxiang Industrial, as the Obama administration believes the company may be playing a role in the development of North Korea's nuclear program, the Wall Street Journal reported.

In recent weeks, Chinese authorities have frozen certain assets held by the company, its founder and top executive, Ma Xiaohong, as well as some of her relatives and associates, according to government and corporate filings. Police did not specify whether Ma was formally under investigation, nor did they say whether the company was the object of scrutiny because of its North Korean business, which makes up the bulk of its trade.

A division of the Hongxiang conglomerate sent two shipments of aluminum oxide worth $253,219 to North Korea last September, according to the U.S.-South Korea joint report. As stated by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, aluminum oxide can be used to avert corrosion in gas centrifuges during uranium enrichment.
Members of Justice Party visit Wolsong Nuclear Power Plant in the country's southeastern resort city of Gyeongju, Tuesday, to check possible damage after a series of earthquakes. / Yonhap



By Jhoo Dong-chan

A series of earthquakes that has jolted North Gyeongsang Province over the last two weeks, including the biggest one ever recorded in the country with a magnitude of 5.8, triggered public safety worries about nuclear plants clustered in the area.

Fourteen people were reported to be injured, and the public is now raising questions about why most of the nation's nuclear power plants were built in the quake-prone East Coast area.

Of the country's 34 nuclear reactors, including ones currently under construction or maintenance, 28 are located in the area. There is also a low to intermediate level radioactive waste disposal facility in Gyeongju, the epicenter of the earthquake, Sept. 12.

Since the earthquake struck the area last week, a taskforce, including geology professors from Seoul, Pusan and Pukyong national universities, has analyzed aftershocks near the epicenter with 27 seismographs.

They have concluded that the epicenter was located just above an active fault line after studying some 300 aftershocks since the tremor, and hinted at the possibility of stronger quakes hitting the area in the future.

"We have learned that an active fault line does exist underneath where the aftershocks took place," Prof. Kang Tae-seop of Pukyong National University was quoted as saying by a local daily.







According to an anti-nuclear power civic group in South Gyeongsang Province, no more nuclear power plants should be built in areas near major cities such as Ulsan and Gyeongju because they are close to the active fault line.

"Government officials claim that nuclear reactors in the area can endure up to a 7.0 magnitude quake. But if they are continuously exposed to minor aftershock damage, they could be destroyed if a powerful earthquake really strikes the area," an anti-nuclear civic activist said.
A local consumer advocacy group said Wednesday it has lodged a complaint with state prosecutors against a former head of South Korean policy lender Korea Development Bank (KDB) over alleged breach of trust and dereliction of duty related to management troubles at Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. and other companies.

The Financial Consumer Agency (FICA) said the complaint against Hong Ky-ttack, who served as the KDB head from April 2013 to February 2016, was filed with the Seoul District Prosecutors' Office on Tuesday.

Hong is facing business malpractice and dereliction of duty charges for mismanaging Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. during his chairmanship at the KDB, FICA argued.

KDB is the main creditor bank and the largest shareholder of the troubled shipbuilder placed under creditors' protection.

The advocacy group further argued that Hong failed to appear as a witness at a hearing at the National Assembly earlier this month to look into the irregularities of the shipbuilding industry, once regarded as the backbone of the country's economic growth and job creation.

"The hearing was to look into last October when the KDB decided to fund 4.2 trillion won to Daewoo Shipbuilding. However, the hearing became meaningless as major witnesses failed to appear," FICA said in a press release.

The consumer group further alleged that Hong, who is known to be staying in the United States, evaded any responsibility after incurring so much loss to the industry.

Hong, who took office as one of the five vice presidents of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in February, triggered controversy by abruptly applying for a leave of absence in June.

The country's top three shipyards, including Daewoo Shipbuilding, suffered a combined operating loss of 8.5 trillion won last year due largely to increased costs stemming from a delay in the construction of offshore facilities and the industry-wide slump, with Daewoo alone posting a 5.5 trillion won loss. (Yonhap)
By Nam Hyun-woo

The Export-Import Bank of Korea (Eximbank) said Wednesday that it has financed 143 million euros ($160 billion) for a project building and operating a hospital in Turkey.

It marks the Eximbank's first hospital financing through project financing (PF), which takes a project's cash flow as a repayment source and holds the project's assets and rights as collateral.

A consortium led by Samsung C&T will run this 600-million-euro Turkish government project. Italy's Salini Group and Turkey's Kayi Group are also involved.

The hospital will be built in Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey, and have 1,875 beds. The local government expects the hospital will improve the medical infrastructure of the city with a population of 1.6 million.

Eximbank extended a loan of 72 million euros and provided debt guarantees worth 71 million euros to Korean financial institutions including Samsung Life Fund, Global Infrastructure Fund, NH NongHyup Bank and KEB Hana Bank.

Eximbank said that the financing comes as another bridge for Korean financial institutions to enter foreign projects.

"With domestic alternative investment slowing, the financing comes as a platform for various domestic financial institutions, such as insurers, banks and funds, to participate in foreign projects through various ways such as investing and extending subordinated loans," Eximbank said in a statement.

Eximbank has expressed its interest in the project since the early stages and agreed to the financing after negotiations with other lending groups, including the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

"The financing bears significance because it is the first hospital project in Turkey led by a Korean construction company and financial firms," said an Eximbank official. "Also, it will contribute to improvements in Turkey's medical services as well as strengthening the two country's mutual economic relations."

The official added that Eximbank is now pushing forward another financing project for the construction of a hospital in Iran and will seek to expand hospital projects in other countries down the road.
The cast members of tvN's new cooking variety show "Go Go with Mr. Paik in Kudat" appear at a press conference in Amoris Hall in Times Square, southern Seoul, Wednesday. From left are Onew of SHINee, Jung Chae-yeon of DIA and chef Paik Jong-won. / Courtesy of CJ E&M



By Park Jae-hyuk

"Go Go with Mr. Paik in Kudat," cable network tvN's new cooking variety show, premieres Friday, at a time when the majority of cooking shows have recently been losing viewers.

"Through the show, I realized my dream to cook with ingredients normally unavailable in Korea," said chef Paik Jong-won, a restaurant tycoon, during a press conference at Amoris Hall in Times Square, southern Seoul, Wednesday.

Produced jointly by tvN Korea and tvN Asia, "Go Go with Mr. Paik" will air in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Australia. Subtitles will be provided in English, Chinese, Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian.

Spearheading the cooking variety show trend with MBC's "My Little Television" last year, Paik has led two other cooking variety shows -- tvN's "House Cook Master Paik" and SBS's "Paik Jong-won's Three Great Kings."

Fans were enthusiastic with Paik who demonstrates simple recipes using easily purchasable ingredients, which were not common on other cooking shows.

However, many imitators arose and viewer ratings gradually decreased amid oversaturation, including JTBC's "Please Take Care of My Refrigerator" or tvN's "Three Meals a Day."

"I am sick of Paik Jong-won and his eating and cooking shows," an internet user commented on the show's official website.

Responding to such remarks, the production crew of "Go Go with Mr. Paik" posted a teaser advertisement titled, "Another Paik Jong-won," parodying tvN's popular drama "Another Oh Hae-young."

Producer Paek Seung-lyong says he strongly supports Paik and trusts Paik's ability.

"Paik Jong-won has created many neo-concept cuisines and recipes for audiences," the producer said. "Paik will show recipes that can also satisfy Southeast Asians' tastes."

"Go Go with Mr. Paik" is expected to attract idol fans, as Onew of SHINee and Jung Chae-yeon of DIA traveled to Kudat with Paik.

"Go Go with Mr. Paik in Kudat" will air every Friday night at 9:15 p.m.
South Korea's presidential office, the prime minister and the ruling Saenuri Party held talks on Wednesday to formulate plans on North Korea's latest provocations and action to be taken to deal with a series of earthquakes that have jolted the southeastern part of the country.

Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, Presidential Chief of Staff Lee Won-jong, as well as Lee Jung-hyun, the head of Saenuri, attended the gathering.

"Now is the moment to set in place a nationwide drive to sanction North Korea in cooperation with the international community," Hwang said.

"The ruling party will make efforts to unite voices in the political realm against North Korean nukes that have emerged as threats to South Korea's security and safety," the Saenuri chief also said, adding the opposition parties should join forces in such an endeavor.

South Korea and the Saenuri have been insisting that a stronger sanction must be imposed on Pyongyang after its fifth nuclear test conducted earlier this month. Opposition parties here, however, say Seoul should take a more dovish stance and try to bring the communists' regime to the negotiating table.

The participants also exchanged opinions on the follow-up measures on the latest series of earthquakes that is fueling public safety anxieties.

Earlier this week, a magnitude 4.5 tremor struck near Gyeongju, located 371 kilometers south from Seoul, only a week after two stronger earthquakes jolted the same city.

"We need to secure the necessary budget so the Korea Meteorological Administration can immediately send mobile alert messages to the public (in case of earthquakes), and provide other administrative and legislative support," Hwang said, adding South Korea must take cues from neighboring Japan.

"Recently, earthquakes and North Korean nukes became realities. There are also mounting challenges in the national security and economic front that needs attention," Lee Won-jong said, adding the government and Saenuri should work more closely to find answers. (Yonhap)
By Lee Han-soo, Lee Jin-a

Three major earthquakes that struck Gyeongju and surrounding areas recently have an odd coincidence: all occurred around 8:33 p.m.

A 5.0-magnitude earthquake hit in waters off Ulsan, an industrial city just kilometers north from Gyeongju, at 8:33:03 p.m. on July 5. It was followed by a powerful quake with a 5.8-magnitude that jolted the historic city of Gyeongju at 8:32:52 p.m., Sept. 12, and a 4.5-magnitude aftershock in the same city at 8:33:58 p.m., Monday.

This extremely rare coincidence has created a massive buzz on the Internet.

Dubbed "Earthquake terror of 8:33 p.m.," rumors include a prediction that another earthquake will happen around the same time on Sep. 26.












By Kim Hyo-jin





Lawmakers receive explanations about North Korea's missile capability during an interpellation session at the National Assembly, Wednesday. / Yonhap

Lawmakers urged the government to consider requesting the redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, Wednesday, as a countermeasure against North Korea's nuclear provocations.



Ruling Saenuri Party lawmakers renewed their calls for nuclear armament during an interpellation session, saying it would be an "effective measure" to defend the country from the North's accelerating nuclear and missile threats.



They claimed redeploying U.S. tactical nuclear weapons can be a feasible option to counter North Korea in a short period of time.



Some opposition lawmakers agreed, saying it is time for the government to overhaul existing measures against North Korea's nuclear program.



"It is a matter of South Korea's survival. So, even if the U.S. is reluctant about the idea, we should keep bringing the redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons to the negotiating table," said Saenuri Party lawmaker Lee Cheol-woo, the chairman of the National Assembly Intelligence Committee.



"We should not remain hesitant in seeking all possible defensive measures in fear of international sanctions or possible discord with China. A chance has come to resolve North Korea's nuclear issue once and for all."



Rep. Yoon Sang-hyun of the Saenuri Party proposed setting the deadline for placing tactical nuclear weapons here in consultation with the U.S.



"We might be able to gain consent on the issue from the U.S. if an agreed-upon condition is met. A possible condition can be an additional nuclear test or intercontinental ballistic missile launch by North Korea," Yoon said.



He added that the government could also seek to have the U.S. deploy its bombers or nuclear-powered submarines.



Kim Jin-pyo, a four-term lawmaker of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK), was in accord, saying South Korea needs to respond to the North's advanced nuclear capability with a "balance of terror."



"The situation has changed. If North Korea's claim that it has standardized a nuclear warhead is true, that means we have a game changer now. We should seek all possible means to better defend ourselves from the North," he said.



"The redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons can be a certain tit-for-tat measure."



Kim argued that a joint Seoul-Pyongyang declaration in 1991, which was signed to make the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons, has been meaningless since North Korea broke the pledge.



However, ministers who appeared at the interpellation session all denied any possible move for nuclear armament, reconfirming the government's stance of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.



"There is no change in the government's stance that supports denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. We will abide by international obligations for nuclear non-proliferation while seeking stringent sanctions against North Korea with the international community," said Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn.



Following North Korea's launch of submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as its fifth nuclear test, some hawkish lawmakers started calling for the nation's nuclear armament including the deployment of the tactical nuclear weapons.



The government has responded negatively, saying the nation's nuclear armament constitutes a direct violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which could lead to international sanctions and jeopardize the South Korea-U.S. Defense Treaty.



South Korea renounced its move to develop its own nuclear weapons in the 1970s and joined the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1975. The U.S. withdrew all tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea following the joint Seoul-Pyongyang declaration in 1991.
A B-1B strategic bomber of the U.S. Air Force lands at Osan Air Base in Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday. Washington flew two bombers over South Korea in a show of force against North Korea. One landed here, while the other returned to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. / Korea Times Photo by Hong In-kee



One makes unusual landing at Osan Base



By Jun Ji-hye

Two B-1B strategic bombers of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) flew over South Korea, Wednesday, in a show of force against North Korea as tension remains high after its fifth and most powerful nuclear test, Sept. 9.

They conducted a low-altitude flight over a firing range near the inter-Korean border, and then over Osan Air Base, 70 kilometers south of Seoul. One landed at the base, while the other returned to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. It is unknown how long the bomber will stay here.

It is very rare for a U.S. bomber to land in South Korea, defense officials said, adding that it was a strong warning from the United States to North Korea.

The move is also aimed at reaffirming Washington's commitment to providing Seoul with extended deterrence amid growing threats from Pyongyang, officials added.

The latest sortie of the U.S. bombers came eight days after two conducted a low-altitude flight over Osan for several minutes, Sept. 13. At that time, they both returned to Guam without landing.

In its latest nuclear test, the North claimed that it successfully detonated a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be placed on a ballistic missile.

"The bond between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea is ironclad and the strength of that commitment will not be shaken by North Korea's aggressive behavior," said Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Bergeson, the 7th U.S. Air Force Commander. "What we are showing today is just one tool we have from a wide array of options to choose from. The alliance grows stronger every day and we remain prepared to defend and to preserve the security of the Korean Peninsula and the region."

Lt. Gen. Lee Wang-keun, South Korean Air Force Operations Commander, said, "The Korean Peninsula faces a grave security crisis as a result of North Korea's fifth nuclear test along with its continued launching of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) and ballistic missiles despite the concerns of the international community."

Lee said that the air forces of the two nations maintain close information sharing and a robust combined operational capability.

"Should the enemy provoke us once again, the combined air forces will respond and eliminate their will and capability to fight," he said.

The B-1B Lancer is a four-engine supersonic, variable-sweep wing, strategic bomber with a speed of Mach 2. The aircraft is capable of carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the USAF inventory.

The ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) said that the Lancer can rapidly deliver massive quantities of precision and non-precision weapons against any adversary, anywhere in the world, at any time. The aircraft holds almost 50 world records for speed, payload, range and rate of climb in its class, it added.

The B-1B was a nuclear bomber but is no longer armed with nuclear weapons in accordance with a bilateral treaty between the United States and Russia on the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms. But the Lancer is capable of carrying the AGM-86B air launch cruise missile (ALCM) and the AGM-69 short-range attack missile, which is capable of striking the North's key nuclear facilities as well as its military leadership.

Washington is also planning to dispatch a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to South Korea next month as part of its efforts to deter further military provocations by the North.

The USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) will sail to the West and South seas to participate in a joint naval exercise with the South Korean military. The drill is slated for Oct. 10 to 15, officials said, adding that the exercise will focus on training the allies' naval forces on joint precision attacks on the North's military facilities and the regime's leadership that would be launched in the event of a war with the reclusive state.
U.S. President Barack Obama and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un



Obama warns Pyongyang of 'consequences'



By Kang Seung-woo

U.S. President Barack Obama warned North Korea that it "must face consequences" for its latest nuclear test in an address at the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly in New York, Tuesday.

However, there were fresh reports suggesting that Pyongyang is preparing for another nuclear test, Wednesday.

"When Iran agrees to accept constraints on its nuclear program that enhances global security and enhances Iran's ability to work with other nations. On the other hand, when North Korea tests a bomb, that endangers all of us," said Obama. "Any country that breaks this basic bargain must face consequences."

In South Korea, the National Assembly passed a new resolution urging the Kim Jong-un regime to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

"We warn that North Korea's reckless provocations will lead to diplomatic isolation and stronger international pressure," the resolution said.

It also urged the North to take immediate and effective denuclearization measures, stressing that it cannot survive with its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Lawmakers also called on the government to seek countermeasures against the North's submarine-launched ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

The moves came as the international community is seeking tougher sanctions on North Korea for its fifth nuclear test, Sept. 9.

The foreign ministers of South Korea, Japan and the United States held a meeting in New York, Monday, and discussed stepped-up sanctions on the North to curtail its nuclear ambitions.












By Jung Min-ho

The government has decided to designate Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, as a special disaster area in the wake of last week's powerful earthquakes that caused damage to the historic city and surrounding region.

Rep. Kim Gwang-lim, chief of the ruling Saenuri Party's policy planning committee, said related ministries, Cheong Wa Dae and the party have agreed to help the city repair the damage as soon as possible.

The announcement comes a day after President Park Geun-hye's visit to the city, where she encouraged residents who still suffer from anxiety.

Once the official designation is made, the city will receive up to 80 percent of the repair costs of the damage from the government and its residents will receive tax benefits in regard to national insurance and public utility charges.

Most recently, after the sinking of ferry Sewol in 2014, the government designated Jin Island, close to where the ferry sank, and Ansan of Gyeonggi Province, where most of the victims lived, as special disaster areas.

In North Gyeongsang Province, more than 4,400 damage reports have so far been accepted. Among them, more than 4,000 came from Gyeongju, the epicenter of the nation's strongest quake last week with a magnitude of 5.8 and more than 400 aftershocks.












Lu Buxuan, a Chinese language major from Peking University, gained some notoriety in 2003 after it was reported that the top-level gradudate chose to sell pork despite his educational pedigree. After the initial controvery, Lu spent over a decade working as a public servant. Recently, he resigned from his government job and returned to the pork business, 12 years after he first stepped away.

In the 1990s, Lu was nicknamed "Peking University butcher" after his story was widely circulated. Pressured by government officials, Lu began to work in a local archives bureau in 2004, though he never truly enjoyed the job. In fact, Lu said the trivial work he did in the archives neither improved his mind nor offered him a sense of fulfillment. Those deficiencies, coupled with the relatively low salary, persuaded Lu to quit - once and for all.

Lu finally resigned in August. Now, he is proud of the nickname "Peking University butcher." With almost 20 years of experience, Lu is also confident about his ability to succeed in the pork industry. Besides trade, he also studied breeding, slaughter and disease prevention when he first entered the industry two decades ago.

Lu said he is taking the pork business quite seriously, and that his dream is to one day be recognized by society as a successful, regardless of his choice of profession.
Mosque in Mecca





This is the congratulatory message from Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Korea, H.E. Riyad Almubaraky, on the occasion of the 86th anniversary of the National Day of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  Ed.





His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud His Excellency Ambassador

Riyad Almubaraky

The occasion of the national day celebration of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia comes every year to remind us of the greatness of the efforts and sacrifice that were introduced by the Kingdom's founder His Majesty late King Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud and his faithful followers who afforded every valuable and precious asset they had for the sake of our beloved Kingdom's survival and continuation. With Allah's help, the Kingdom was reunified and security restored.

The national day anniversary comes to emphasize the firmness of rules and principles on which the Kingdom's great achievements are based. It comes also as the culmination of the process of growth, development and construction since the era of the Founder King to the era of well-being, the prosperous development that we are witnessing today under the great leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and His Royal Highness Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, where the Kingdom stands proudly, side by side with the developed countries, in every field. Thanks to Allah, the Kingdom enjoys a blessed renaissance with more security and stability in spite of the security, economic and political challenges in the region.

Such accomplishments would not have been achieved without, first: Allah blessing on a country that believes in the Oneness of Allah, the Holy Quran, and His Prophet Mohammed, may peace upon Him, a country adopts an Islamic constitution as a way of life. Second, thanks to the future vision of His Majesty King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, a vision seeks to achieve a comprehensive development based on the Kingdom's legitimate principles, to take advantage of the Kingdom's potentiality, its energies, and its strategic location to secure a better future for its citizens, besides adhering to the genuine Islamic faith and to preserve the genuineness of our society and its principles.

The Kingdom's "Vision 2030" policy has emerged from these fundamentals and their guiding lights draw a brighter and glowing future.












Madain Salih



Official name: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Capital: Riyad

Population: 28.7 million

Area: 2.24 million sq. km

Major language: Arabic

Major religion: Islam

Currency: Riyal

Historical sites and sightseeing places



Madain Salih: In 2008, the Archaeological Site of Al-Hijr was added to UNESCO's list of world cultural heritage sites as the first in Saudi Arabia to make the list. Formerly known as Hegra, it is the largest conserved site of the Nabataeans civilization in the south of Petra, Jordan. It features well-preserved monumental tombs with decorated facades dating from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. The site also features some 50 inscriptions of the pre-Nabataean period and some cave drawings.

Al-Hijr bears a unique testimony to Nabataean civilization. With its 111 monumental tombs, 94 of which are decorated, and water wells, the site is an outstanding example of the Nabataeans' architectural accomplishments and hydraulic expertise.

Al-Masmak Palace: Al-Masmak was the starting point for King Abdul Aziz to recover the capital of his grandfathers.





Al-Masmak Palace

Foreign investment policy



The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia realizes that achieving its ambitious economic goals requires a steady flow of technology and expertise into the country. Therefore, its policy is to welcome foreign capital and invite it to participate in the economic development projects in cooperation with Saudi business.

The government policy aims not to impose any restrictions on the movement of capital inflow but to respect private ownership.












David W. Pershing, second from left, president of the University of Utah, poses with staff and a student at the University of Utah Asia Campus in Songdo, Incheon, Sept. 1, during the opening ceremony for the school's new building. / Courtesy of University of Utah Asia Campus



By Chung Hyun-chae



David W. Pershing, president of the University of Utah, said the university's Asia campus at Songdo, Incheon, will offer four new courses  two undergraduate and two graduate  next year.



The undergraduate programs are for film and media arts and city and metropolitan planning, while the master's courses are for biomedical informatics and law.



For the law course, the campus plans to set up the S.J. Quinney College of Law.

The university is seeking approval for the new programs from the Ministry of Education in Korea.



"The film and media course will teach students how to create games and those jobs are very hot," Pershing told The Korea Times.



According to the university, film studies will focus on independent film while media studies will concentrate on computer animation.



"If the education ministry approves, we will have to add more high-performance computers in the computer lab in this new building," Pershing said.



He visited Korea from Aug. 29 to Sept. 3 to attend a ceremony marking the second anniversary of the school's Asia campus located at the Songdo Global Campus complex in Incheon.



The university also held an opening ceremony of a new building of the University of Utah Asia Campus that will be used as the lecture building.



"One of the advantages here is that the facilities are totally brand-new so our students have an opportunity to learn with this equipment," Pershing said.



Another notable course is biomedical informatics in which students can earn a degree from the School of Medicine at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.



The University of Utah has been relatively strong in social sciences compared to the three other foreign universities nested at Songdo.



Currently, the university has three undergraduate programs  communication, psychology and social work  and one master's course in public health.



The number of undergraduate and graduate students attending the university's Asia campus stands at 229.



"Biomedical informatics is focused on big data and how people use big data to help both increase the quality of healthcare and predict what people might be susceptible to," Pershing said.



He said that the biomedical informatics course is a medical related course.



"They are responsible for the discovery of several cancer genes such as a breast cancer gene," said Chris Ireland, chief administrative officer at the University of Utah Asia Campus. "It is the way that people conduct genetic profiling of individuals in trying to identify genes."



"the department we are bringing to this campus, biomedical informatics, is the oldest biomedical informatics program in the world," Michael Hardman, chief global officer at the University of Utah, added.



Hardman also noted that city and metropolitan planning course is promising especially for Incheon.



"We are focusing on urban planning, especially smart city, which draws positive attention from both the Incheon city government as well as businesses," he said.



Pershing was confident in the quality of education at the Asia campus.



"The classes are small and the ratio is better here (than at the main campus in Utah). The students at the Incheon campus are getting more individualized attention," he added.
Kyung Hee University President Choue In-won gives an opening speech at Peace BAR Festival 2016 on the university's Seoul campus, Wednesday, in celebration of the International Day of Peace.

/ Courtesy of Kyung Hee University



Scholars, experts discuss challenges of civilization



By Chung Hyun-chae



Kyung Hee University kicked off the three-day Peace BAR Festival at its Seoul campus, Wednesday, to celebrate the 35th International Day of Peace, introduced by the U.N. General Assembly in 1981 and first observed in 1982.



"Peace BAR Festival 2016 provides a forum in which we can discuss the possibility of an existential revolution that may lie in our near future," Kyung Hee University President Choue In-won said in his opening speech.



"Human civilization is now at a crossroads, in which we face a bleak future if we do not establish a new relationship with our planet."



Choue cited the issue of climate change several times while mentioning threats to the planet.



"The raison d'etre of universities including Kyung Hee University is to create a better future by contributing to the creation of a sustainable human civilization," said Lee Moon-jae, director of the Kyung Hee University Press. "And that will lead to world peace."



Kyung Hee University has hosted Peace BAR Festival since 1982 to seek ways to ensure the future of human civilization amid a series of crises including climate change, terrorism, violence, war, human alienation and polarization.



BAR is an acronym representing the three main values central to this festival _ spiritually Beautiful, materially Affluent and humanly Rewarding.



The Moon Development and Marketing (MDM), a real-estate development firm, and the Korea Asset In Trust(KAIT), an asset management company, sponsored the event.



Under the theme of "Transformative Challenge: The Worlds of Human Mind and Planetary Engagement," this year's event takes a more philosophical approach to ponder world peace and how to create a better future.



For this, Kyung Hee invited three international academic think tanks _ the Club of Rome, the Club of Budapest and the World Academy of Art and Science _ to discuss our common future.



Major participants included Club of Budapest president Ervin Laszlo, Club of Rome vice president Roberto Peccei, World Academy of Art and Science president Heitor Gurgulino de Souza and Global Academy for Future Civilizations rector Chung Jong-pil.



U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also sent a congratulatory video message to the festival.



About 350 dignitaries, scholars and professors, including the university's faculty and students are participating in the event.



The school expects more than 1,000 people to come to the festival by Friday.

Following the opening ceremony, the university's College of Music students gave a congratulatory performance.



On the first day of the festival, representatives of the three international academic institutions attended a roundtable discussion on the topic of "Civic Minds and Politics in This Troubled World."



Kim Min-woong, professor of the Global Academy for Future Civilizations at Kyung Hee University, presided over the session.



The session was planned in light of the recognition that economic and expansionary values overshadow human values.



"We propose to highlight the inner life of human beings in their quest for a new way of thinking," said Choue, who also took part in the discussion

Today there will be two colloquiums that will provide venues for attendants to explore what higher education institutions can do for world peace.



Among the topics that will be discussed in the colloquiums are individualized education and the emerging role of the university in the age of global collaboration.



Scholars from Kyung Hee and other local universities and members of the World Academy of Art and Science are scheduled to speak on such subjects.

Two more colloquiums will be held tomorrow.



Various kinds of events and special lectures will accompany the main programs.

An essay contest for Kyung Hee students with the theme of peace will be held on campus today, while there will be a student debate competition hosted by the university's Humanitas College tomorrow.



An exhibition organized by the Humanitas College on world citizenship education and peace education is open to all visitors.



A special lecture under the theme of "The Earth Spaceship Vision: A New Philosophy for Our Life and Future" will be given by Laszlo on the last day of the festival.
More than half of high-ranking civil officials' children have received favors in carrying out their compulsory military service, an opposition lawmaker said Wednesday, casting concerns over inequality among soldiers.

According to the data compiled by Rep. Kim Joong-ro of the minor opposition People's Party, around 54.1 percent of family members belonging to high ranking public employees were assigned to rear area, non-combat units. He pointed out that on the whole, such positions only account for 33 percent of military positions.

As the country is still technically at war with the North, all able-bodied South Korean men between the ages of 18 and 35 must serve in the military for about two years.

Among those serving at non-combat units, many of them had parents currently working at local courts, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the National Assembly, the lawmaker said.

Kim said a relatively high number of such privileged offspring are also serving at the Defense Security Command or with the United States Eighth Army, which usually only recruits a handful of soldiers.

The lawmaker said the data cannot help but cast doubts on the transparency of the military posting procedures. (Yonhap)
South Korea's ruling and opposition parties on Wednesday continued to debate over whether Seoul should consider its own nuclear armament as an option to defend the country, amid the escalating tension on the Korean Peninsula sparked by Pyongyang's provocations.



Following North Korea's launch of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) as well as its fifth nuclear test, a rising number of hawkish lawmakers mainly from the ruling Saenuri Party claimed that South Korea must consider developing its own nuclear weapon.



"We need to consider every option, including deploying tactical nuclear weapons, developing our own nukes, striking North Korea's related facilities, and demolishing Kim Jong-un's regime," Rep. Lee Cheol-woo of Saenuri said during an interpellation session held at the National Assembly.



"South Korea should not delay the move in fear of international sanctions, or possible discord with China. This is a chance to conclude North Korea's nuke issue once and for all," Lee added.



The Saenuri lawmaker added Seoul should continue its talks with Washington to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula.



Rep. Yoon Sang-hyun from the ruling party, who has been opposing such hawkish claims, also said tactical nuclear weapons can be an option if North Korea crosses the line.



"We can have the United States deploy bombers or nuclear-powered submarines," Yoon said, adding such efforts must be done if North Korea conducts additional nuke tests or launches more missiles.



Yoon, however, said using nuclear weapons may devastate the Korean Peninsula, adding it will be better to induce North Korea to embrace democracy.



Rep. Kim Jin-pyo of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea also supported the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, adding Seoul will have no other choice if China and Russia continues to make sluggish moves on imposing effective sanctions on the North.



In response to such claims, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn reiterated that the South Korean government will continue to support denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.



Hwang added Seoul will continue to coordinate with Washington to deal with North Korean issues, although he agrees that more sanctions must be slapped on Pyongyang.



"If North Korea continues to choose the path of nuclear development, having conversations with Pyongyang will only help them earn more time so they can make more progress," Hwang also said, adding the government is still not considering having talks in the face of provocations.



Hwang also pointed out that North Korea conducted a nuke test even when its residents were suffering from floods, adding Pyongyang should have prioritized its flood-stricken residents. (Yonhap)




By Choi Ha-young







The head of Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province, has faced criticism for his insulting remarks to female residents who attended protests against the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery to the county.



More than 1,000 residents have signed on to file a suit against county head Kim Hang-gon for defamation as of Wednesday.



Kim initially opposed the THAAD battery, even having his head shaved and writing a protest message in blood, when the Korean and the U.S. governments announced in July their selection of Seongju as the site for the planned deployment.



But he changed his position on the THAAD deployment after the government said it would consider an alternative location. Since mid-August, he has been disapproving of residents' anti-THAAD demonstrations held in front of the county office.



During a meeting with local civic groups on Sept. 7, he said there are some people advocating for North Korea. "Women are particularly out of sense, maybe because they didn't do military service. Those women are workers at bars and teahouses," he was quoted as saying by local online news site OhMyNews, which reported it based on the testimony of meeting participants.



A female resident said Kim's words show a narrow-minded disdain for specific types of jobs. "The ralliers are also Seongju residents, who have the right to ensure their own safety," Jeon Young-mi, 45, told The Korea Times.



Another resident said people are even considering a recall vote. "My wife and I are both very angry. He is very arrogant," a 65-year-old realty dealer in the county, surnamed Lee, said.



Many residents have continued their anti-THAAD demonstrations since the deployment plan was announced, and mothers with children have been actively leading the protests, local activist Nam Eun-joo said.



Women's groups in the region held a press conference Monday, calling for Kim not to obstruct their demonstrations and to step down. "His remark infringed on human rights and discriminated against women, and it constitutes defamation," they said. "This showed he is not qualified as county leader."



Facing strong criticism, Kim said, "It was an unofficial dialogue, and I spoke casually as I was personally close with them. I can't remember clearly what I said." He said he will apologize for his remarks but did not reveal when and how he would do so.




Top diplomats from South Korea and Germany discussed ways to expand cooperation in fighting the growing nuclear threat from North Korea, sharing the view that its latest test is a grave provocation that cannot be tolerated, the foreign ministry said Wednesday.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier held a bilateral meeting on Tuesday (local time) in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, according to the ministry.

Yun emphasized that the fifth nuclear test conducted by the North on Sept. 9 runs squarely against U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270 adopted in March and asked for cooperation from Germany in seeking tougher sanctions against Pyongyang along with other punitive measures, the ministry said.

In response, the German foreign minister shared the view that the North's latest nuclear test constituted a grave provocation that cannot be tolerated and promised to do its part to enforce strong and effective sanctions drawn up by the European Union.

They also agreed to keep strengthening cooperative ties, saying that both share the history of pain caused by the division of their countries and fast economic growth in past decades.

On the same day, Yun also held a bilateral meeting with his British counterpart Boris Johnson and discussed cooperation in dealing with the North's nuclear issue.

Johnson was quoted as saying that Britain will play an active role as a permanent member of the UNSC in adopting a resolution in response to the latest nuclear provocation by the North.

On the economic front, both agreed to keep ramping up mutually beneficial cooperation in diverse areas going forward, even after London's decision to leave the EU, the ministry said. (Yonhap)
Drug-associated crime has been the most frequent reason for the imprisonment of North Korea defectors in South Korea so far this year, a parliamentary report showed Wednesday.

A total of 129 North Korean defectors were behind bars in South Korea as of Aug. 26, compared with 51 recorded in 2011, the report released by Rep. Kang Chang-il of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea showed.

Of the 129 imprisoned, 38 were convicted of drug-related crimes while 15 others were guilty of violence, according to the report.

Other main offenses included fraud and murder, the report also showed.

A majority of 111 prisoners out of the total 129 defector convicts behind bars were male, a growth of 136 percent from 2011.

Only 18 prisoners were women, but the number marks an increase of 350 percent from 2011 when only 4 female North Korean defectors were in prison, it said.

"Under the burden of livelihood difficulties and homesickness, more defectors tend to get involved in crimes with the number of defector prisoners on the rise," Kang said. "There's pressing need for a system that consistently provides crime prevention education and job consulting to defectors, especially as the population of North Korean defectors in South Korea is nearing 30,000." (Yonhap)
North Korea's exports of mineral resources like anthracite coal and iron ore have lent big support to the country's economy in the past 18 years, with most shipped to China, a report said Wednesday.

Outbound shipments of North Korean minerals totaled $1.35 billion last year, shooting up more than thirtyfold from $430 million in 1998, according to the report released by the state-run Korea Development Institute (KDI) think tank.

Its total exports tripled to $2.93 billion from $979 million over the same 1998-2015 period.

Moreover, mineral exports accounted for 46.1 percent of the country's total exports in 2015, sharply up from 4.4 percent in 1998.

Some $1.3 billion worth of North Korea's mineral resources were sold in China, the country's strongest ally, last year, taking up 52.4 percent of North Korea-China exports of $2.48 billion.

"North Korea's mineral exports have risen sharply over the past 18 years and become one of the most important sources of hard currency," the KDI report said. "A steep rise in exports of mineral resources has contributed to steady growth of the country's exports amid a series of international sanctions." (Yonhap)
New policies aiming to compress the size of Chinese megacities Beijing and Shenzhen are expected to push up the housing markets of their respective peripheral cities, reported China Business Journal on Sept. 21.

According to details of a new household residency policy released on Sept. 19, Beijing will attempt to reduce the permanent population of its six downtown districts by 15 percent, based on the population recorded in 2014. The city will also aim to cap its population at 23 million by 2020, just a small increase from 2014s 21.51 million. This means that by 2020, 12.15 million Beijing residents will be living in suburban Beijing  an increase of nearly 3.4 million from 2014.

The six downtown districts  Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan  had a permanent population of around 12.9 million by the end of 2015, data from the Beijing Statistics Bureau showed. The capital citys aim to contain residents in these six districts is expected to further raise housing prices in Beijings neighboring cities, including Zhuozhou, Guan and Langfang. These nearby cities, about 50 kilometers south of Beijing, may become targets for investment.

On Sept. 19, Shenzhen issued a land use circulation, which stated that the city would allocate 125 more hectares (12 square kilometers) of land for housing in 2016. That increase is a 26.5 percent reduction from last years allotted area, and nearly one-tenth the area of Beijings 2016 allotment. At the same time, Shenzhen has a population of over 20 million people, which is very close to that of Beijing.

Shenzhen officials have recommended that local workers buy properties in cities just outside of Shenzhen, such as Dongguan, Huizhou and Zhongshan, which are all within 130 kilometers of Shenzhen. Shenzhen has also vowed to further develop its interconnected subway and light-rail systems.

The trend of residents seeking housing in peripheral cities has also been observed in Shanghai, with residents exploring the metropoliss neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Many cities in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, like Jiaxing, Nantong and Huzhou, have seen rising housing prices.
The number of South Korean nationals living abroad who have been affected by accidents and crimes has spiked over the past five years, the foreign ministry said Tuesday.

According to data submitted by the ministry to the National Assembly, 8,298 South Koreans were involved in accidents and crimes in 2015, up 86.1 percent from what was tallied in 2011.

The number also remained high this year, with 4,136 Koreans involved in such cases as theft, murders, and traffic accidents as of Aug. 2.

Of this year's total, theft cases accounted for the largest proportion, with 2,941 victims, followed by frauds with 176. Eleven South Koreans were killed abroad during the first eight months of this year.

Meanwhile, 1,259 South Koreans were behind bars in foreign countries as of June 30, up around 25 percent from 2012.

Japan topped the list with 470 people being imprisoned, followed by China with 320 and the United States with 263. Those incarcerated in the three countries accounted for over 80 percent of the total.

Drug-related crimes were the single biggest reason for people being locked up, with 315 South Koreans in prison for this offense alone. Murders and frauds came next with 177 and 156 cases, respectively, the data showed. (Yonhap)
By Bruce Bennett

China has been a major proponent of regional security for Northeast Asia. This advocacy is only natural: Truly great powers should pursue more than just their own security.

Many had hoped that the Chinese definition of regional security would include Republic of Korea (ROK) security. After all, the ROK is part of the Northeast Asia region and has been heavily threatened on a regular basis by North Korea. Thus many ROK security experts believed that in the aftermath of six summit meetings through 2015 between ROK President Park Geun-hye and Chinese President Xi Jinping, China was committed to stopping North Korean provocations and China was also committed to meeting Chinese international security obligations.

Sadly, China seriously disappointed many in the ROK security community this year. And China has done so not just once, but on multiple occasions.

In January, North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear weapon test, a serious violation of multiple U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Admittedly, the failure to deter North Korea's nuclear weapon test fell on a combination of China, Russia, the United States, the ROK, and Japan. But after such a deterrence failure, what happens next can determine the degree to which deterrence will be effective moving forward.

To deter further North Korean nuclear weapon or missile tests, the regional countries needed to demonstrate that North Korea would pay a cost for its fourth nuclear weapon test that would outweigh any benefits it may have gained. This cost versus benefits trade-off is the essence of deterrence.

While China denounced this January provocation, it refused to take any action against North Korea. The international community has focused on economic sanctions to impose costs on North Korea, but to impose significant costs on the North, China must support such sanctions because China is North Korea's biggest trade partner by far. China's refusal to impose sanctions by early February meant that North Korea had suffered little in the way of costs for its fourth nuclear test. China's inaction apparently made a major contribution to North Korea's conclusion that it could get away with the satellite launch/ICBM test it executed on Feb. 7.

Thereafter, China did support U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270, which imposed serious trade sanctions on North Korea. But China does not appear to be fully following those sanctions: trade between China and North Korea reportedly increased about nine percent year-on-year this June.

On July 7, the ROK and the U.S. announced a decision to deploy the THAAD missile defense system in the ROK to deal with the ever-growing North Korean missile and nuclear weapon threats. This year alone, North Korea has tested 19 ballistic missiles of Scud range or greater, more than in any previous year.

Yet China appears disinterested in ROK security against these North Korean threats. From well before the July announcement, China opposed the THAAD deployment. For example, in February China's Foreign Minister, Wang Yi said China's national security interests could be jeopardized or threatened' by THAAD since its X-band radar' system "has a radius that goes far beyond the Korean peninsula and reaches into the interior of China.  We believe that China's legitimate security concerns must be taken into account and a convincing explanation must be provided to China," he said.

In the regional security context, such Chinese concerns are a little difficult to understand. After all, China does not similarly complain about the U.S. X-band radars deployed in Japan or U.S. satellite based observations of China.

Even more curious, China deploys a missile defense system referred to as the HQ-19 that has many similarities to the THAAD system. Reportedly, China has developed this system in cooperation with Russia, suggesting that it is not intended to intercept Russian theater ballistic missiles. Other than Russia, North Korea has by far the most ballistic missiles that could endanger China. And while China is supposed to be an ally of North Korea, Chinese and North Korean forces never plan together or train together. In fact, the Chinese and North Korean leaders really don't like each other  North Korea regularly defies Chinese direction, raising questions about whether China really is a great power when it cannot influence even impoverished North Korea.

Indeed, in 1993 during the first nuclear crisis with North Korea, former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung called together his senior military personnel and reportedly asked them what North Korea should do if it had to fight the United States over the North's nuclear program and lost that war. His son, Kim Jong-il, the father of the current North Korean leader, replied, "I will be sure to destroy the Earth! What good is this Earth without North Korea?" Chinese leaders know that China is part of the earth.

North Korean NoDong missiles apparently can reach any target in Japan, and thus the longer range Musudan missile, which cannot reach the U.S., is assumed to be a threat primarily against Guam. But North Korea does not need 50 to 100 Musudan missiles to attack Guam. Interestingly, 12 of the 20 largest Chinese cities appear to be within range of North Korean NoDong missiles, and the remaining 8 are within Musudan range. So it's no surprise that China deploys the HQ-19 missile defense system.

China has not sought ROK permission to deploy the HQ-19, so how can China reasonably suggest that the ROK needs China's approval to deploy THAAD? When China says that it is concerned about regional security, does it really mean that it is only concerned about Chinese security?

Even then, China does not seem to understand the regional implications of the THAAD missile defense system. One fully-deployed THAAD battery is capable of destroying perhaps 50 North Korean ballistic missiles. North Korean planners, recognizing the THAAD capabilities, would need to shift missiles away from targeting China to rebalance its attacks once THAAD is deployed in Korea. Thus THAAD would likely reduce the number of North Korean ballistic missiles targeted on China, a significant improvement in Chinese and regional security.

If Chinese opposition to THAAD makes little sense in a regional security context, why would China be making such a major issue of THAAD? Perhaps it hopes to divert attention from its refusal to abide by international law in the South China Sea. Or it might be interested in establishing a precedent of great influence on ROK national security decisions.

Regardless, THAAD offers the ROK important protection against the North Korean missile and nuclear weapon threat. Of the 50 North Korean ballistic missiles that THAAD could destroy, if only five carried nuclear weapons aimed at ROK cities, THAAD could potentially save the lives of half a million or more ROK citizens. How can anyone say that such an outcome would not enhance regional security?

Bruce W. Bennett is a senior defense analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corp.
Union workers in the public and finance sectors are poised to go on strike this week to protest the government's push to expand the performance-based wage system.



On Thursday, about 10,000 members of the Federation of Korean Public Industry Trade Unions plan to hold a rally in front of Seoul Station. The Korean Financial Industry Union will follow suit, demanding the government drop the new wage system. Next week, railway and subway workers and hospital union members will join the strike.



The upcoming walkout is expected to be the largest in the incumbent administration with more than 200,000 people taking part. The public will also experience plenty of inconveniences because the banks, railways and other entities are closely related to their livelihoods.



The labor ministry vowed to take stern measures against illegal acts according to law and principles. Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Ki-kweon said few would support the walkout by public and finance workers who enjoy job security and high wages.



It's not right to blame labor strikes blindly under the pretext of promoting industrial peace if union members follow due procedure. But this is definitely no time for industrial action.



Both exports and domestic consumption are sluggish as the Korean economy is trapped in prolonged low growth. Furthermore, social unrest has been mounting owing to North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship and earthquakes.



The public and finance sectors are peerless when it comes to wages, labor conditions and job security. In the eyes of non-regular workers struggling with low pay and jobless young people eager to get hired, strikes by workers in ''god's workplaces'' would be incomprehensible.



Unionists are pushing for collective action to deter the performance-based salary system the government is pushing to apply to junior-level employees who are still subject to a seniority-based wage scheme. By contrast, executives and senior level managers are already subject to the system.



The system is intended to inject efficiency and competition into the public and finance sectors, which at the moment are imbued with inefficiency and complacency, by giving hard-working employees better treatment. It is quite common in private companies here as well as in other industrialized countries.



There is something to unions' concerns that the performance-based salary system will lead to easier layoffs and undermine job security. But it's long overdue to overhaul the wage system in the public and finance sectors, given the severity of inefficiency there.



Unions should withdraw their strike plan immediately and cooperate with the government's push to improve productivity.




By Choi Ha-young

Cub reporters in Korea undergo a harsh training procedure called "satsumawari," which refers to coverage training at police stations. The term originated from Japanese compound words meaning "police" and "rotation." As seen by the word, young reporters rotate through three to six police stations in Seoul, covering police work.

This reporter underwent the course with cooperation from The Hankook Ilbo, the sister paper of The Korea Times, from Aug. 28 to Sept. 9. Other than well-known practices such as a lack of sleep and competition among cub reporters, the experience left some issues to consider as a journalist, as well as lessons.

In each police station, there is a place with some tables and chairs, a waiting room for people sent from precinct stations to talk with police officers dealing with their cases. There, I faced many alleged assailants and victims, even including a shaman's lover. Reporters ask the reason for their visits and personal information, including surname, age and residence.

Sometimes I revealed that I was a reporter after the interview started, to facilitate my coverage. As soon as I gave my business card to them, they tended to stop talking. It was relatively easy to induce stories from young women of a similar age to me. Some of them told me their sensitive stories, as if I was their sister.

The easiest cases were drunkards, as they are likely to keep talking. Even if they were reluctant to tell me their stories, I could overhear them talking. Sometimes, to enter an injured person's hospital ward, there was no way to make it unless I lied (which I gave up doing). I even heard from another broadcasting company's cub reporter that his boss urged him to take a candid video of a person in case they fail to videotape the interview later.

To what limit is the use of such information allowed? Of course, reporters are directed to double-check facts with police officers in charge before writing stories. However, is that enough?

As time passed, I refined my ability to judge how newsworthy a story was. Due to time limits  we had to report to senior reporters what we were doing and what we found out every two to three hours  I sometimes had to wrap up an interview when I judged a story was "not important," as nobody was killed or the criminal type was far from special.

At the same time, I learned that everybody argues based on their interests and some of them lie. On my second day, an old woman, who said she made a living collecting paper, claimed that a district office accused her of gathering paper in an apartment complex parking lot. I was ordered to find out more about her, as the office's action seemed extreme.

Through additional questions to police officers, however, I found out that the woman was a landlord of the apartment and she misused that parking lot for her own interests, disturbing tenants. The police sent the case to the prosecutors' office.

Korean media outlets are often criticized for unethical reporting activities. On the other hand, I am fully aware of my role to uncover facts and satisfy readers' right to know. The two weeks at the police stations gave me a chance to wander between two vocational ethics. I believe I will be more skillful after a few years in dealing with tricky situations while acting according to my conscience.
By John Burton

The recent explosion of North Korea's fifth and biggest nuclear bomb raises a key question of the whether the test will bring South Korea and China closer together or further apart.

The test has hardened President Park Geun-hye's determination to deploy the U.S. advanced missile defense system, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), with a majority of Koreans supporting the decision. Park recently said the deployment was an "inevitable defensive measure," adding there would be no need for THAAD if Pyongyang abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

A retreat from the THAAD decision now appears to be unthinkable in the face of Pyongyang's accelerated nuclear and missile tests, including the unexpectedly successful launch of a submarine-based missile, which theoretically would lead to North Korea gaining a "second strike capability."

Beijing fiercely opposes the THAADdeployment because the range of the system's radar could help plot Chinese missiles once they are launched, thus undermining its nuclear deterrent. This has heightened Chinese fears of encirclement by a coalition of U.S. allies, including South Korea and Japan.

What has added to Beijing's fury is that it believes it has been cooperative in carrying out the latest round of sanctions against North Korea that were stipulated by the UN Security Council in March in response to previous nuclear and missile tests by Pyongyang. The sanctions ban countries from buying some North Korean mineral products, which are estimated to account for 60 percent of Pyongyang's hard currency income, with 90 percent of North Korean total trade being conducted with China.

China has already made known its displeasure about the THAAD decision by cracking down on imports of Korean cosmetics, banning the appearance of K-pop stars, and preventing Korea electric battery makers from supplying Chinese electric vehicle producers. If Seoul does not back down on THAAD, some fear that China could adopt even tougher measures on imports from South Korea. "Mishandling the issue is not conducive to strategic stability in the region and could intensify conflicts," Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Park at recent G20 Summit in Hangzhou.

It would appear that Seoul's recent attempts to pursue a delicate balancing act between Beijing and Washington are doomed. While South Korea remains a staunch military ally of the U.S., China has been its biggest trading partner, consuming a quarter of Korean exports.

But a counter argument can be made that the fifth nuclear test may now convince China that it must be tougher in vigorously enforcing sanctions against Pyongyang, which threatens to upset the strategic balance in Northeast Asia. North Korea's nuclear breakout could increase support in Japan and South Korea to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Both Japan and South Korea might also seek to forge defense ties with other Asian countries, such as Vietnam and India, which are seen as opposing Chinese regional expansion. Such developments would increase Chinese fears of containment.

One hopeful sign was an announcement by the Foreign Ministry in Seoul last week that China had agreed with South Korea to seek new and tougher UN sanctions on North Korea. How far will China go in accepting and imposing new sanctions remains to be seen. It might also seek a trade-off: in return for implementing harsh sanctions, Beijing would expect the THAAD deployment to be abandoned.

Another issue is how tough sanctions need to be to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear and missile programs. It appears better able to withstand sanctions than five or ten years ago. Market-based economic reforms appear to have improved living standards, which is suggested by the fact that prices of imported goods in North Korea have remained stable. The black market rate exchange rate for U.S. dollars is also stable, indicating that the country is not suffering a foreign currency shortage. This reduces the odds of regime collapse.

The test of China's willingness to tighten the screws on North Korea would not only be more effective implementation of current and future UN sanctions, but its ability to work together with South Korea, and the U.S. in applying economic pressure. Such cooperation would have the added benefit of identifying one area where Beijing and Washington have shared interests and perhaps help reduce mutual mistrust.

This was also conclusion of a report by a U.S. group of North Korea experts released this month by the Council on Foreign Relations. It concluded that "although China remains North Korea's primary patron, it is increasingly willing to exert pressure to curb the [North Korean] regime's erratic behavior." It also recommended that the U.S. and South Korea should talk to China about future scenarios about a reunified Korea.

It suggested that ways to win Chinese support and make it more cooperative would be include offering guarantees that Beijing's interests would not be damaged in the case of Korean unification, such as possibly reducing the presence of the U.S. military on the Korean peninsula.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at johnburtonft@yahoo.com.
U.S. President Barack Obama will stress the importance of holding North Korea accountable for its nuclear test when he delivers his last speech at the U.N. General Assembly this week, a senior aide said.



Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser at the White House, said during a conference call briefing for reporters that Obama will speak to the issue of North Korea in the context of nonproliferation during the address set for Tuesday, according to a transcript of the call.



"This is not simply a bilateral concern of the United States. What North Korea is doing is violating a fundamental international norm against the proliferation and testing and development of nuclear weapons in violation of various U.N. Security Council resolutions, as well as international law," Rhodes said.



"In addition to just speaking to the North Korean issue, I think he'll be laying out why efforts to strengthen the norm against testing are important; why it's important to hold countries accountable when they do violate international law, international norms," he said.



This year's General Assembly is taking place as the U.N. Security Council is working on fresh sanctions on the North for its fifth nuclear test amid questions about whether China, the North's last-remaining major ally, will back fresh sanctions on Pyongyang.



U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power said China should use its leverage over the North.



"It's no secret that the United States is going to enforce that resolution to the T, but for it be effective, as we saw in the case of Iran, all countries need to step forward, and particularly those with significant influence and significant ties with North Korea," Power said.



"I just want to underscore that speaking about U.S. approaches entails also one feature of that approach, which is getting other countries to step up, and not to just sit back and expect the United States to deal single-handedly with threats of that magnitude when other countries have significant influence," she said.



Cooperation from China is key to putting together any meaningful punishment for the North as it is one of the five veto-holding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the main provider of food and fuel to the impoverished North.



China, the North's last-remaining major ally, has been reluctant to use its influence over Pyongyang for fear that pushing the regime too hard could result in instability in the North and hurt Chinese national interests.



Analysts say that China often increased pressure on the North in the past, especially when Pyongyang defied international appeals and carried out nuclear tests and other provocative acts, but China never went as far as to cause real pain to the North. (Yonhap)




U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday North Korea's nuclear test "endangers all of us" and the communist nation must "face consequences."



Obama made the remark during his final address to the U.N. General Assembly, as the U.N. Security Council is working on fresh sanctions on Pyongyang for its fifth nuclear test.



"We cannot escape the prospect of nuclear war unless we all commit to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and pursuing a world without them," Obama said.



"When Iran agrees to accept constraints on its nuclear program, that enhances global security and enhances Iran's ability to work with other nations. On the other hand, when North Korea tests a bomb, that endangers all of us and any country that breaks this basic bargain must face consequences," he said.



Nuclear powers like the U.S. have a "unique responsibility to pursue the path of reducing our stockpiles and reaffirming basic norms like the commitment to never test them again," Obama said.



Addressing global economic problems, Obama also compared the economies of South and North Korea.



"The stark contrast between the success of the Republic of Korea and the wasteland of North Korea shows that central planned, controlled economy is a dead end," he said.



Obama strongly condemned the North's Sept. 9 nuclear test, issuing a rare statement of his own vowing never to accept the North as a nuclear state and pledging to "significant" new sanctions on the communist nation.



But cooperation from China is key to putting together any meaningful punishment for the North as it is one of the five veto-holding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the main provider of food and fuel to the impoverished North.



China, the North's last-remaining major ally, has been reluctant to use its influence over Pyongyang for fear that pushing the regime too hard could result in instability in the North and hurt Chinese national interests.



Analysts say that China often increased pressure on the North in the past, especially when Pyongyang defied international appeals and carried out nuclear tests and other provocative acts, but China never went as far as to cause real pain to the North.



U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urged the North to abide by its international obligations.



"The fifth nuclear test by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has again threatened regional and international security," Ban said in his General Assembly address. "Meanwhile, the people's suffering and plight are worsening. I urge the leaders of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to change course and fulfill their obligations to their own people and to the family of nations." (Yonhap)




LG Uplus' Internet of Things (IoT) business division head Ahn Sung-joon, left, poses with Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO)'s power trading and demand-side management department general manager Jung Geum-young after signing an agreement for business cooperation in combining advanced metering infrastructure-based electricity service with the telecom company's home IoT services at KEPCO headquarters in Naju, South Jeolla Province, Wednesday.

/ Courtesy of LG Uplus



By Yoon Sung-won



LG Uplus will work with Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) to accelerate penetration of smart grid technology and home Internet of Things (IoT) services, the telecom company said Wednesday.



The nation's third-largest telecom said it will offer its home IoT services to households that have adopted KEPCO's electric power service based on the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), aiming at contributing to the expansion of the national smart grid system.



The telecom company said it expects the first-ever cooperation model between a telecom company and a power agency here will ultimately boost energy efficiency and consumer convenience.



"If KEPCO's AMI-based service and our home IoT services are combined, this will be an exemplary cooperation case between a telecom company and a power agency," said Ahn Sung-joon, head of LG Uplus' IoT service division.



In May, the two companies signed an agreement to jointly develop business models for the smart grid system. Under the partnership, the two will provide bundled services combining the AMI system and home IoT services for those participating in the government's smart grid project, launch joint marketing and sales programs for smart grids and seek future business opportunities in overseas markets.
KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu gives a special lecture on the future of the next-generation network technology at the Memorial Hall of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tuesday (local time). / Courtesy of KT



By Lee Min-hyung

The next industrial revolution will be reshaped under the framework of "intelligent networks," connecting billions of devices and creating new value out of this, KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu said Tuesday.

The chief of the nation's leading fixed-line operator made the remark during a special lecture at Harvard, predicting massive growth potential for the data-driven network industry.

"Eleven years ago, I spoke about the arrival of the mobile era, and every part of it has become a reality," he said. "(And today) I have spoken about the future with the intelligent networks. I am certain that this future will bring a broader and greater change to the world than the mobile era."

Intelligent networks refer to the convergence of human beings and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The KT chief expressed confidence that the big data-driven network era will help connect human beings in a more convenient and safe way.

"The network revolution is not just about an improvement in data-processing speed, but the convergence of various emerging technologies," he said. "By 2020, network speed will be ten times faster than the current mobile age, and this will be the same for other technology areas  including big data and cybersecurity."

Under his leadership, KT has been pushing a network revolution in four core areas  speed, surveillance, big data and security. Hwang cited the firm's GiGA Internet as an example of its commitment to lead the new network era.

In 2014, KT launched the gigabit-class Internet service, offering a 10 times faster service than existing ones. Since the firm started its commercialization in late 2014, the company has attracted more than two million subscribers for the service.

This is not the first time that Hwang has delivered a lecture at a renowned technology fair or university across the world.

Last year, he shed light on the blueprint for the fifth-generation (5G) era at the Mobile World Congress (MWC). Under the theme "5G and Beyond" he called on mobile carriers across the world to join hands for the upcoming 5G era.

The company plans to demonstrate its 5G network services for the first time in the world at the coming PyeongChang Winter Games in 2018.

Toward that end, the company is pushing to connect every mobile device with its gigabit network system under the corporate vision of "GiGAtopia."

KT said the GiGAtopia strategy will be used as a textbook for Harvard Business School next year, pinning its hopes that this will further raise its global profile.
(Xinhua) 18:20, September 21, 2016

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday urged the BRICS nations to preserve world peace and help promote global growth.

Wang made the remarks while hosting a meeting of foreign ministers from the BRICS nations on the sidelines of a series of UN conferences.

At the meeting, Wang said efforts by BRICS countries in recent years have made a political solution to the crisis in Syria a real possibility.

"We need to continue to be an advocate for using peaceful means, including dialogue and negotiation, to solve global hotspots," he said.

The Chinese minister noted that with the support of the BRICS nations, the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou was a success and provided ample direction for the future development of the world economy.

He said the BRICS nations should take the lead in implementing the agreements reached at the summit while remaining an engine for global economic growth.

Wang said that the G20 Hangzhou summit has endorsed an 2030 action plan for sustainable development and proposed an initiative to support industrialization in Africa and the world's least developed countries. He said the BRICS bloc should urge the developed world to deliver on its promises to developing countries.

Wang said the current system of global governance should better reflect the transformation of the world' s political and economic landscape. He and urged the group to guarantee broader representativeness and give a bigger say for emerging and developing countries.

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar said the BRICS should take a concerted stance against terror attacks and jointly tackle terrorism.

He also called for an early approval of the Paris Agreement on climate change and a commitment to emission reduction targets.

Cooperation within the bloc should deepen, including establishing a BRICS credit rating agency and an agricultural network, among others, he added.

South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane commended BRICS for reaching historic achievements and implementing a sustainable development agenda.

She further appealed for changes to the current system of global governance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposed the BRICS move toward establishing a fairer and more just international order, with better coordination on key political and economic issues.

While expressing hope for BRICS members to work together in coping with global challenges, Lavrov also cited people-to-people exchanges, agriculture, railway transportation and tourism as among the sectors for further development this year within the bloc.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Jose Serra expects to see positive results from the BRICS leaders' summit to be held in mid-October in Goa, India, in bolstering economic partnerships between members.

BRICS members need to increase cooperation in such fields as innovation, digital economy, poverty reduction and public health, he added.

The Brazilian foreign minister also hopes that the 2017 BRICS summit to be hosted by China will continue to promote exchange and dialogue.

During their discussions, the ministers also exchanged views on international and regional issues, including the recent Hangzhou G20 summit, cooperation in fighting terrorism, the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, climate change, Mideast unrest and peacekeeping missions in Africa.
(Xinhua) 18:22, September 21, 2016

Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao met with foreign leaders attending the International Day of Peace event held in the city of Yinchuan in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region Wednesday.

Meeting with Rosana Alvarado, first vice president of the National Assembly of the Republic of Ecuador, Li said China and Ecuador have deepened political mutual trust and conducted fruitful cooperation in finance, energy, mining, infrastructure and diplomatic exchanges.

Li said the Communist Party of China is willing to cooperate with Ecuador's PAIS Alliance movement to enhance the strategic partnership of the two countries.

Alvarado said Ecuador is ready to cooperate with China in various fields.

When meeting Jennifer Simons, chairperson of the National Assembly of the Republic of Suriname, Li hailed the development of China-Suriname ties since diplomatic relations were established over 40 years ago.

Li called on the two sides to enhance political exchanges to boost bilateral ties.

Simons said Suriname is ready to cooperate with China in agriculture, technology, education and personnel training.

When meeting with Tu'ivakano, the speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Kingdom of Tonga, Li said the consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries injected new energy to bilateral ties, and the Belt and Road Initiative opened up prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries.

Tu'ivakano said Tonga-China ties are at a historical high, and Tonga valued bilateral parliamentary communication and cooperation.
With the release of a national plan, China has again shown its commitment to fulfilling sustainable development goals.

China released its plan for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development on Monday at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

The plan, which includes China's achievements and experience in implementing the Millennium Development Goals, was unveiled by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang when he chaired a roundtable on the issue. It also covers challenges and opportunities, guiding principles, a roadmap and detailed plans for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The 2030 Agenda, endorsed and launched at the UN Summit for Sustainable Development last year, is a blueprint for eradicating poverty worldwide for the years leading up to 2030.

At Monday's meeting, Li stressed eradicating poverty and hunger as the top priority.

As the world's largest developing country, China's commitment and experiences in these fields not only matter to the country and its people but also carry weight globally.

The premier said that as a responsible developing country, China is willing to cooperate internationally, increase investment in South-South cooperation, and share development experience and opportunities.

Earlier this month, the 2030 Agenda was also among the highlights at the Group of 20 (G20) summit, which was held in the east China city of Hangzhou.

Participants at Monday's roundtable recognized the important role China has played in carrying forward the 2030 Agenda within the G20 framework.

They also agreed that China has played a leading and creative role in areas such as implementing the SDGs, poverty eradication, dealing with climate change, and South-South Cooperation.

Monday's plan comprehensively presents China's development policy and its efforts to help other developing countries move forward in implementation.

With its practical actions, China has proved that talks and pledges are more than just lip service.

Prior to the latest plan, China had included poverty reduction targets in its national five-year plan. It has proposed the five development concepts of innovation, coordination, green development, opening up and sharing.

The progress in carrying out this blueprint is also evident.

Over the past 15 years, China has lifted over 400 million people out of poverty. Conditions for health and education have markedly improved as well.

Moreover, between 2011 and 2015, emissions of four major pollutants in China, including chemical oxygen demand, ammonia nitrogen, sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide, decreased 12.9 percent, 13 percent, 18 percent and 18.6 percent respectively.

These achievements will also inspire the world's confidence.

As the world looks to China for advice and answers, the country is more than willing to work with others and share its wisdom.

China has taken concrete steps in securing sustainable development and bringing common development and prosperity to the world. Hopefully more partners will join the cause.
(Xinhua) 19:14, September 21, 2016

China on Wednesday called on India and Pakistanto communicate more and properly handle their differences for regional peace, stability and security.

An army base in Indian-controlled Kashmir was attacked Sunday, and 18 soldiers were killed and 30 others injured. India has blamed Pakistan for supporting the terror attack, while Pakistan has rejected the accusation as "baseless."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said he was concerned about the recent violence in Kashmir and the tension between India and Pakistan.

India and Pakistan are important countries in the region, Lu said, adding that China hopes they will show restraint and avoid action that may escalate the tension.

Stressing that China opposes terrorism in any form, Lu called for more international communication to deal with the threat of terrorism and to maintain security.
(Xinhua) 19:49, September 21, 2016

China's Ministry of Defense on Wednesday handed over equipment and material for assembling a trunked radio system to Cambodian Ministry of Defense, officials said.

Trunked radio system is a complex type of computer-controlled two-way radio system that allows sharing of radio frequency channels among a large group of users.

Col. Li Ningya, military attache of the Chinese embassy to Cambodia, delivered the equipment and material to Phorn Nara, director of the Cambodian Defense Ministry's telecommunications department, with the presence of Cambodia's Defense Ministry Secretary of State Cheang Am.

Li said fast and reliable communications were crucial for national defense sector, expressing his confidence that the assistance would contribute further to strengthening efficiency in communications among the armed forces.

Phorn Nara said it was the second time that China's Ministry of Defense provided the trunked radio system to Cambodia along with a total of 1,477 walkie-talkies.

Cheang Am expressed his profound gratitude to China for the donation, saying the aid truly reflected China's high attention to helping develop Cambodia's defense sector.

"The assistance is very important and responds timely to the need of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, particularly in the field of communications," he said.

At the event, Chinese-owned Southeast Asia Telecommunications, or Seatel-Cambodia, also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Cambodian Ministry of Defense.

The MoU was inked between Phorn Nara and Seatel-Cambodia's general manager Han Hanchou.

Under the deal, Seatel-Cambodia would help train human resources in information technology and develop telecommunications infrastructure such as fibre optics and networks for the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, said Phorn Nara.
The beautiful scenery of Jeju Island in South Korea

South Koreas Jeju Island may soon abandon a program allowing Chinese tourists to enter without a visa. According to a Yonhap report, due to a surge in crime committed by Chinese tourists, a petition is rapidly gaining signatures to reform Jejus visa law and restrict Chinese visitors.

Since 2002 when the visa-free policy took effect, over one hundred countrys citizens are permitted to stay 30 days in Jeju. However, as cases pile up involving violent Chinese tourists, Koreans have begun circulating a petition online seeking to restrict visa rights. Over 10,000 people have already signed.

The petition comes after a 50-year-old Chinese tourist stabbed a praying 61-year-old Korean woman in a chapel on September 17, 2016. Earlier this month, a group of eight Chinese tourists were arrested after they fiercely beat a restaurant owner and two others. The owner had requested the group not drink alcohol bought from outside.

In fact, of the 347 foreigners arrested this year, 240 were from China, according to the Korea Times. The number is less shocking when considering that 85.3 percent of the 2.6 million foreigners who visited Jeju in 2015 were Chinese. And this is why it is doubtful the petition will spark any change in the visa law. Chinese tourists are vital to Jejus tourism and hospitality industry. Restricting the inflow of visitors from China would severely damage the local economy.
Workers take on a Lilliputian look Tuesday as they install a giant basket of artificial flowers, part of the decorations in Tian'anmen Square to mark the National Day holiday on Oct 1. More than 300 artificial flowers will be used for the 17-meter-high installation, expected to be completed this weekend. Zou Hong/China Daily
The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, has called for a 3-day fasting and prayer session for the nation in commemoration of its 56th independence anniversary coming up on October 1st.

The CAN President, Samson Ayokunle, in a statement from his head of media and publicity, Adebayo Oladeji, said the prayers will be for the nation and its president, Muhammadu Buhari.

He noted that although the times were hard, God will show his mercies to Nigeria if the nation prays to God. He called on Nigerians to use the opportunity of the anniversary to talk to God about Nigerias many challenges.

We call on all Christians nation-wide to seek the face of God for divine intervention as our political leaders are seeking for the panacea to the economic recession and the attendant problems, he said quoting 2 Chronicles 7:14.

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A Syrian migrant has thrown his three children out of a window in a rage after his wife insisted on being treated like other European women, a trial has heard.

The children survived the shocking incident which happened at a refugee accommodation in a converted Chinese restaurant in Lohmar, a town close to Colognea, Germany.

The court in Bonn heard how his wife had made it clear that she was not prepared to accept the traditional Arab gender roles anymore and this had infuriated her husband.



Prosecutors said the 36-year-old father, identified only as Hassan Z, threw his three kids out of the first-floor window of the house after being frustrated at his wifes behaviour.

His daughter, seven, and five-year-old son have suffered multiple skull fractures and other bone fractures from the fall. His one-year-old daughter suffered minor injuries from the fall and has some bruises.

The man has been charged with the attempted murder of his three children.

According to local media, the couple clashed frequently because of the womans insistence on being treated equally.

In February this year, the man allegedly beat her with a cooking pot  hitting her repeatedly in the face. He has also been charged with grievous bodily harm.

A month previously he is also said to have attacked his wife, resulting in him being banned from contacting her for 10 days, although she later gave him permission to re-join the family again.

The accused left Syria in 2014, while his family travelled later to join him in Germany.

He first travelled to France via the Balkan route and later went to Germany.

The district court in Bonn has scheduled six days of trials until October 12 for hearings.

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The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) has issued a 21-day ultimatum to the Bayelsa state government to fully pay the four months half salary of all teachers or the teachers in the state would stop working.

This, they said, would affect their expected participation in the conduct of the National Common Entrance and other examinations.

The state wing executive council of the NUT Bayelsa state chapter issued a 9-point communique titled Not Until We Perish highlighting their resolution after an emergency meeting to discuss the lingering non-payment of six months salaries to primary and secondary school teachers.



The state chairman of the NUT, Kalama Tonpre, while reading the communique, said that the union was committed to enhancing public school system but demands improved working conditions.

He highlighted the apparent hardship suffered by teachers on account of the prolonged non-payment of over six months salaries owed primary and secondary school teachers in order to be at par with other civil servants in the state.

Other problems discussed were the planned dismissal of teachers employed in 2008/2009, the non-payment of duty post allowances, shifting the responsibility of funding primary school teachers salaries to local government councils and non-implementation of promotions.

Others are the 18,000 naira minimum wage arrears and non-inclusion of stakeholders in state education law committee.

According to them, if these issues are not resolved, they would stop working.

The chairman continued by saying an ultimatum of 21 days from today is given to the Bayelsa state government to fully pay the four months salaries of all teachers and address other problems.

For some teachers, these months without salary has been hellish as daily survival has been a major challenge, he said.

The government on their part say they would do their best to pay the salaries for as many months as they can afford.

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This shocking photo shows a hysterical toddler screaming for help after being left in a locked car while his mother went clubbing with her work colleagues.

In astonishing scenes, a dramatic confrontation erupted between the party animal parent, 25, and a group of concerned bystanders who called the police.

One angry man damaged the womans car resulting in her reporting him to the cops for vandalism. The two-year-olds cries were said to be heard by the group of passers-by in the early hours of Sunday morning.

When they found the distraught child locked in the vehicle without any adult supervision they phoned the authorities.



The police, who arrived at the scene shortly after, called a mechanic to bust the frightened toddler out of the car before the clubbing-fanatic mother turned up 20 minutes later.

The police in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, said in a statement that the mother had left the child so that she could party at a nightclub with her workmates.

They said the young woman faces charges for dereliction of the duty of care of her child in front of the public prosecutors.

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the ongoing 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, the US on Monday. [Photo/Xinhua]

Premier Li Keqiang voiced Beijing's opposition to the plan by Washington and Seoul to deploy an advanced missile-defense system in the Republic of Korea while meeting with US President Barack Obama in New York.

Li said "it is hoped that all parties will avoid taking actions that lead to escalation of the tense situation".

He and Obama met on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday.

Earlier this year, Washington and Seoul agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, angering Beijing and Moscow. The system's radar has a maximum reach of 2,000 km and could cover parts of China and Russia.

Earlier this month, tension rose anew on the Korean Peninsula after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea conducted a nuclear test in an area near the China-DPRK border.

Li said China endorses the UN Security Council's plan to further respond to the nuclear test by the DPRK.

Beijing remains committed to denuclearization of the peninsula, ensuring peace and stability, and resolving the issue through dialogue and consultation, Li said.

A White House statement released later on Monday said Obama and Li "resolved to strengthen coordination in achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula".

Zhang Tuosheng, director of the research department at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, said China should continue tackling two tasks simultaneously  counteracting the THAAD deployment plan as well as strengthening cooperation with the US and the ROK in boosting denuclearization of the peninsula.

"No efforts should be spared to resume the Six-Party Talks, and even if the resumption is unlikely, support should be given to other dialogue promoting peace on the peninsula and denuclearization," Zhang said.

Jia Xiudong, a senior researcher in international affairs at the China Institute of International Studies, said the DPRK nuclear tests and the US-ROK plan to deploy THAAD are "pushing the peninsula situation to a deadlock, which serves no interest of any party".

The root cause of the nuclear issue is the mutual distrust between the US and the DPRK, and the only way out is to resume dialogue, Jia said.

During their talk, Li and Obama also touched upon bilateral trade and investment, as well as global issues including sustainable development, refugee crises and peacekeeping.
In a rare opportunity to pull back the curtain on theater production in an intimate setting, La Jolla High School graduate and playwright Mike Lew stopped by his Alma Mater to talk to English and drama students Sept. 12. His production Tiger Style is playing at La Jolla Playhouse through Oct. 2.

Joined by La Jolla Playhouse dramaturg Shirley Fishman, Lew explained what his production is about, the experiences that inspired it, his history with playwriting and he answered questions from the students.

Lew, who graduated in 1999, explained that Tiger Style is about an egghead pair of Chinese-American siblings who ruled at academics but suck at adult life  and who decide to go to China. So its an exploration into what all this academic study is for and where are we in terms of race relations in America  told from a Chinese perspective.

Fishman was on hand to explain her role in getting his production from page to stage. Once a play is chosen, a dramaturg is assigned to it. I research the themes and the references in the play, anything that an actor might not understand (such as a type of food), so they have a grounding in what the play is about.  I also work with the playwright and develop the characters and the themes, she said.

During the preview process, which is the first time the piece is shown to an audience, I read the audience to see what people are getting and not getting  when they start to fidget and start unwrapping candy  to help understand what they are connecting with and what needs finessing, she added. You learn a lot about theater, playwriting, directing and the subject matter of each play as a dramaturg. Its a privilege to be of service to the development of plays.

Lew said he was appreciative of Fishmans participation given the play touches on Chinese culture. But in addition to the heavier themes of race relations and how his production can resonate with any number of cultural backgrounds, Lew, who typically writes comedies, gave credence to the lighter medium.

Im trying to use comedy like a weapon to talk about the world.  I feel like if you were sitting through a two-hour drama on these subjects, people would check out, but if you have these people that are acting in a foolish way, you can take in the messages in a different way.

He said his next plays include a comedic, teenage adaption of Richard III called Teenage Dick; a trilogy he is writing with his wife Rehana; and a musical about a dance competition, which Lew said is like Bring It On with Indian dancing.

He encouraged students to use what they know and see for inspiration, particularly their friends and those around them. A lot of my inspirations are my peers, he said, including a friend with cerebral palsy who helped inspire Teenage Dick. He took the story and gave it a new perspective.

Of course, there is always family for inspiration, too. You think your family dynamic is how life is supposed to be, then you meet others from another dynamic and see that things that you think are normal may not be, he said. I learned that when I got married and explained my Christmas traditions to my wife and she looked at me like I was crazy.

As the afternoon concluded, Lew also answered questions about the business side of playwriting, and spoke to the rewarding, but terrifying, aspect of his profession. You are putting some version of yourself out there when you write a play, and there are times its going to feel very raw and you dont know how audiences are going to take it, but there are parts of it that are so rewarding, he said.
BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT:

Suzanne Diamond is the founder, owner and CEO of The Futon Shop chain (11 outlets in California, including one in La Jolla that opened three years ago), but you could also call her the matriarch. Thats how it all started 40 years ago.

I was a young mother looking for natural bedding for my children, said Diamond, and it did not exist. Everything was full of fire retardants. I was kind of a hippie and macrobiotic and was studying the Japanese way of life, and I thought Id start making futons that were all natural. There was no law saying I couldnt make a futon for my kids. So I made a mattress and all my friends started wanting one.

So what began as a little cottage business in Los Angeles following Diamonds move from the East Coast became a mini-empire. We sell over $7 million worth of futons a year, she said. We make futons for peoples boats. We make them for bay windows and custom window sills. Even for RVs.

The Futon Shop sells not only futons, but sofa beds, pillows, mattresses, platform beds, mattress pads and more, all of it non-toxic and chemical free. But lets get back to its futons.

Its not traditional, not what you would think is a futon, explained Diamond. People walk in our stores and go Wow. These are futons? Its a word that has been brutalized by bad merchandising and cheap products. Futons became very generic and everybody had this cheap, ugly uncomfortable futon as a college kid in the 80s. They were horrible looking and cheap. But a futon is a Japanese word that means bedding. A traditional futon is really a mattress, and thats what we make.

If you go to the store and sit on one of my mattresses you will understand why were in business.

At least 20 percent of that business is e-commerce, Diamond said. Whether the customer buys in-person or online, she added, he or she will find attractively priced products.

We make everything, she said. Because were a vertical retailer, we make it and sell it directly to the consumer. We can offer the lowest prices. I have dealers who sell my products for four times more than I do all over the country. The Futon Shop company, headquartered in San Francisco, is completely self-contained, with its own bankers and even its own truck drivers.

Were quite a large organization for a small company, Diamond said. I have employees who have been with me for 20, 30 and 40 years. We are a real family business and we love each other. And were happy doing what we do.

The Futon Shop at 7470 Girard Ave. in La Jolla is open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Friday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday; and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. (858) 729-1892. thefutonshop.com

 The Business Spotlight features commercial enterprises that support the La Jolla Light.
Following a preliminary meeting in June, residents gathered at the monthly Bird Rock Community Council (BRCC) meeting Sept. 6 at the elementary school, for a forum on safety and to discuss the possibility of hiring private security to patrol neighborhoods.

Spearheaded by BRCC trustee Ron Fineman, a group of residents met June 30 to hear a presentation from Doug Frost, founder of the private security firm National Public Safety. The topic was also addressed at the July BRCC meeting, and with questions remaining, Frost agreed to attend the September meeting to answer them. (BRCC did not meet in August.)

We wanted to find a company to patrol the streets and address the types of crimes San Diego Police Department cannot get to because they are short-staffed and dealing with more violent crimes, said Fineman, adding that the website lajollasafety.org was established to provide the community with more information.

Explaining the relationship between his security firm and the police force, Frost said, In my eyes, were the little brother. We go in, find out what the situation is in low-priority crimes  noise complaints, suspicious activity, suspicious vehicles, etc.  and then call SDPD and let them know whether the situation is valid. Instead of tying them up with low-priority calls, we deal with those. We do the leg work and prep work for them. Frost added that when giving a report to SDPD dispatch, his patrolmen file a complete report with all the necessary information a civilian might not think to note or include.

Frost fielded questions from attendees, chiefly on cost and how to justify providing security to residents who dont subscribe to the service, but still reap the benefits. Both these questions were raised at previous meetings.

Fineman explained, We need residents to support the program. Thirty to 40 residents and/or merchants, each paying about $100 a month, would be enough to get the patrol started, and at least establish a presence. With additional subscribers, the number of hours or patrolmen would increase. If we had 100 residents or merchants sign up, we could have more hours.

Frost added he would ultimately like to get two vehicles, with one officer in each car, on patrol 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with additional coverage for Halloween and Fourth of July holidays.

As for distribution of benefits, Frost said there were jurisdictional lines to consider. If one person pays, but their neighbor doesnt, yes they will both see the benefit of reduction in crime by having us here ... but if one subscribes, we can follow up when their home alarm goes off or we can check on their house while they are on vacation. We cant do that for a non-subscriber.

For many, contracting private security is seen as a short-term solution until issues with short-staffing in the police department can be addressed. Down about 200 officers, SDPD has not been able to proactively patrol, or respond to low-priority calls as quickly as some would like.

We have property crime, which is a shame and its awful, but we dont have violent crime. From a realistic standpoint, there are only so many SDPD officers and most of our crime is low priority, said the BRCC Neighborhood Watch chair.

To speak to the current state of the department, Police Community Relations Officer Larry Hesselgesser attended and discussed some of the broader issues that impact the police department and why there is a shortage of officers. His points spanned the city, state and national scale.

Optimistic that changes could come, the Neighborhood Watch Chair advocated for continued reporting of area crimes, so when there are more police officers, the need for their presence in Bird Rock would be apparent. You can make reports online, and when funding does become available, the way officers will be allocated will be based on those reports. Even if its something small that gets stolen, file a report because its still a crime that occurred. If we dont report it, our stats look like we dont have crime and we dont need officers, she said.

San Diego District 1 City Council candidate Barbara Bry was also at the meeting, and spoke about the evenings topic, her campaign, and La Jolla issues she would tackle if elected.

Public safety, Bry said, is the No. 1 responsibility of local government and she described her plan to recruit and keep officers and dispatchers: In the short term, we need to get the vacancies filled. In the long term, I would hire MBA students to investigate the best police practices around the country and compare them to what are were doing now. Then, I would put together a forum to come up with a plan that suits San Diego.

Further, we want to make sure children all over San Diego view law enforcement as a good career. I would develop a badge system of public safety through boys and girls clubs that children could start earning from a young age. If elected, I am going to fight to make sure this district gets the resources it deserves.

In other BRCC news:

Congressmember Scott Peters will attend the next BRCC meeting, 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4 at the La Jolla Masonic Lodge, 5655 La Jolla Blvd. to answer constituents questions. birdrockcc.org
When it comes to La Jollas history and architecture, there are few more significant players than architect Irving Gill (1870-1936). When it came to giving La Jollas early civic, educational and scientific institutions a home, it was Gill who built them.

La Jolla Historical Society executive director Heath Fox opined, Gill and his great patron Ellen Browning Scripps were arguably the most influential (people) in the early architectural history of La Jolla.

He explained, At the time, when Gill came to San Diego in 1893, his early work was Arts and Crafts style, which fit in well with the cottage character of what La Jolla was at that time. But when Miss Scripps discovered him and starting commissioning him, the first building was the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and within 10 years we had the Rec Center, the Womans Club and The Bishops School. When these academic and civic organizations needed buildings  she brought in Gill to build them.

Scripps even contracted Gill to build her house in 1916, now the the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diegos La Jolla location at 700 Prospect St.

Considered a pioneer in early modern architecture, Gills signatures include arches, flat roofs, a severe geometric discipline in terms of straight lines and selective use of the arches and rectangular windows, and use of materials like stucco.

As part of a widespread collaboration recognizing the architect, several Southern California organizations are presenting different Gill-inspired exhibits: The San Diego History Center, AD&A Museum of UC Santa Barbara, Coronado Historical Association, Barona Cultural Center and Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, Save Our heritage Organization; and locally, Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, The Bishops School, and La Jolla Historical Society with Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD).

And yet somehow, Gill is considered under-appreciated as an architect. He really was left in obscurity after he died. He knew Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra and other architects that became famous throughout the mid-century. He was influenced by the same people that influenced Frank Lloyd Wright. And he really was a pioneer in some of that early thinking on modern design. So how did that happen? Thats the question were trying to answer with this exhibition, Fox said.

La Jolla Historical Society

Curated by MCASD deputy director Kathryn Kanjo, the La Jolla Historical Society exhibit has a twofold focus: the artistic aspects of Gills early renderings, and the emphasis on nature as decoration. Hanging on the walls of the Societys Wisteria Cottage galleries, the exhibition will be on view Sept. 24 through Jan. 22, 2017.

Fox said, There are parts of Gills practice that are really art. Architects these days do everything on computers. Not so in Gills days, so all drawings and renderings were hand-done. The other aspect focuses on Gills philosophy that (a rendering) should include its relationship to the landscape, whether that landscape is natural or designed.  He took a very simple approach and designed buildings using new materials such as stucco and concrete, devoid of ornamentation.

Gill reportedly said a building should be like boulder, in that it should sit in the landscape and let the life forms  the landscaping  decorate it. In early renderings of The Bishops School, ivy is painted climbing up the walls, predicting it would one day grow up to the signature flat roof. Now, mature landscaping fills in the school campus, casting shadows and providing decoration for building exterior.

This show is about that. Its about Gill as an artist and the creations he left us and its about his thinking of how vital it was to think of architecture in terms of the landscaping, Fox said. Select pieces show landscaping plans, such as choice of trees and how he envisioned the road and buildings in terms of plant life (now landscaping plans are recommended, if not required, on all new development in La Jolla).

The front gallery focuses on Gills La Jolla and greater San Diego projects, with the back rooms focusing on Coronado, Oceanside, Los Angeles and more, including buildings that were never built. Some of the hand-drawn plans are signed For Miss E. B. Scripps or Alterations in residence of Virginia Scripps (for floor plans of Wisteria Cottage). Wisteria Cottage sits at 780 Prospect St. (More at lajollahistory.org)

Athenaeum Music & Arts Library

To show Gills creative influences and the artistic environment of the time, the Athenaeum will present The Iannellis in California: Selected Works 1910-15, featuring the work of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, on view Sept. 24 to Nov. 5.

Maura Walters, Athenaeum executive assistant director, said, Normally the Athenaeum exhibits contemporary artists, so it has been a treat to work on something a little different. I think the Athenaeums Iannelli exhibition will give Gill fans a broader understanding of the community he was working within and the creative atmosphere of his time.

She added, Margaret and Alfonso Iannelli were a part of the Southern California modernist artist community in the early 20th century  Irving Gill was also a part of this group. Based in Los Angeles, Iannelli Studios produced works of graphic design, fashion, advertisement and commercial projects. The Iannellis also collaborated with Gill on several architectural projects. Several of these sketches, designs and paintings will be on display in the Athenaeums North Reading Room.

The Athenaeum is at 1008 Wall St. (More at ljathenaeum.org)

The Bishops School

With three buildings designed by Gill, The Bishops School will host its tribute next month. Curated by students, the exhibit will be open to the public for one day only: 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29.

The exhibit is going to include five blueprints of the earliest buildings, which the students cataloged, meaning they described them, measured them, considered their condition and gave them titles. We had those professionally framed, explained art teacher Nicky Holland. They will go on view with reproductions of Gill material (drawings and renderings) related to the campus.

The exhibit will also feature short texts written by students about the Gill-designed buildings, and will be posted around campus. Holland added, So everywhere you go for a month, without being glaring, you will see information about the architect.

About nine students in the art history club began working on the exhibit last year, starting with reading essays by Gill and determining what they wanted to do. We only agreed to participate if it was a student-centered exhibition, so the students would come Wednesday afternoons to talk about his work, read his essays and look at the pieces we wanted to display. Its been a great project and joy to see what is important to them about these buildings, she said.

The students in the 2015-2016 Art History Club include Gabe Cappetta, Jiadi Chang, Allison Havermale, Mary Kimani, Eden McColl, Charlie Michael, Evers Pund, Joseph Ramirez-Cardenas, Allison Zau; Faculty Advisors: Emily Grenader and Nicky Holland; Alumni Contributors: Ashley Chang, Nicholas Stougaard and Pieter Stougaard.

The Bishops School will also partner with La Jolla Womans Club (another Gill-designed building) to train and provide docents for a symposium on Gill at the Womans Club on Oct. 20 (time to be announced). The students will arrange tours of the campus before the symposium starts. The symposium will be open to the public, at 7791 Draper Ave.

The Bishops School is at 7607 La Jolla Blvd. (More at bishops.com)

About Irving Gill

Irving John Gill was born in upstate New York. He had no formal education in architecture, but apprenticed with firms in New York and Chicago, and worked with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright , according to a biography provided by the La Jolla Historical Society.

The Arts and Crafts Movement was becoming popular when Gill arrived in San Diego in 1893 and his designs for La Jollas Windemere (1894) and Green Dragon Colony (1894), and for Balboa Parks George W. Marston House (1905), reflect this aesthetic.

By 1908, his mature style characteristic of early modernism was just beginning and his most important commissions, including several of La Jollas mainstays, happened during this period.

A bachelor until age 58, he married Marion Waugh Brashears in 1928. Gill died at age 66 in 1936 in Carlsbad.
The La Jolla Town Council (LJTC) Community Watch Committee  an amalgamation of Neighborhood Watch chairpersons and others concerned with safety in La Jolla  gave their inaugural presentation during the Town Councils Sept. 8 meeting at La Jolla Rec Center.

As LJTC president Ann Kerr Bache explained, In informal conversations with the police, it kept coming across that they need help catching criminals, but cannot be at every Neighborhood Watch meeting or community advisory meeting. We thought we would make it easier on police so there is just one point of community contact. Thats why we formed this committee.

The 16 members hail from La Jolla Shores to Bird Rock, La Jolla Farms to the Barber Tract, and held physical and digital meetings to evaluate criminal activity in La Jolla. The committee is co-chaired by residents Cynthia Chasan and Catharine Douglass.

We heard people in La Jolla say, I feel like crime is on the rise and I dont see police officers anymore,  Chasan claimed. Sometimes people say, your perception is not my reality. But in this case, perception is reality.

Pulling La Jolla crime statistics from the San Diego Police Department website, she reported there have been more residential burglaries in 2016 thus far, than the yearly average for the last 10 years. And we had one last night, so that number is now higher, she said.

As a possible cause, Chasan explained that in 2014, the state passed Proposition 47 which re-categorized crimes, shifting many drug-related offenses so they are no longer jail-able offenses  instead the offenders get tickets and remain on the streets.

Paraphrasing a Los Angeles Times article, Chasan added, Most people who are addicted to crack and heroin generally do not maintain full-time jobs, and they need something to pay for their habit  they usually turn to burglarizing and stealing.

She also said the perception of fewer police officers is also a reality, due to budget cuts, reduction in academy size, suspension of pay raises and more. Chasan reported in the City of San Diego, there are currently 13.7 officers for every 10,000 people served. In cities like Houston, the number jumps to 23.5; in New York 41.8 and in Las Vegas, an even 19.

For our Northern Division  La Jolla, University City, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, Clairemont Mesa, Bay Park and more  that means 4.4 officers for every 10,000 people served, Chasan said.

Town Council trustee Charles Hartford said he sits on the SDPD Foundation Board. He commented, The Police Department is keenly aware of retention challenges here in San Diego. And they are taking acts to rectify that, but there is still a long way to go.

In terms of finding a solution, Chasan said the first step was to form the think tank to come up with the best options for La Jolla. We are going to try and improve communications between San Diego Police Department and our committee; get all the Neighborhood Watch captains in La Jolla organized under one large umbrella so we can meet and work together; and work on nextdoor.com to follow up on leads to make sure when someone posts that something happened to their home or car, they move forward and also file a police report.

Future plans include creating a map of crime trends by area, day and time of day. Chasan said they would start tracking statistics found on crimemapping.com and compile a database spanning six months.

The committee will also compile a list of all the areas covered by Neighborhood Watch programs, and work with areas that do not have such programs.

Following the presentation, Kerr Bache commended the committee for an excellent report.

A full Community Watch Committee report will be posted soon at lajollatowncouncil.org

In other LJTC news



No on Prop 57: Independent of the Community Watch Committee report, Chasan also gave a brief presentation on a proposition up for vote in November, hoping to bring it to the communitys attention.

Titled The Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 (aka Proposition 57), the amendment to the state constitution is intended to address overcrowding in prisons. It would require a judge to determine whether a minor, between ages 14 to 17 accused of certain felonies, would stand trial as an adult or a juvenile. It also places some of those who were tried and convicted as adults in similar situations to be eligible for early release.

In the context of the proposition, applicable felonies include forcible sex offenses in concert with another, discharge of a firearm into an inhabited or occupied building, carjacking while armed with a dangerous or deadly weapon, robbery and more.

I encourage you to, not only take my word for it, but look it up and read up on it yourself, Chasan said. I recommend people read beyond the two-sentence synopsis, but really read into it when you go to vote. The only way we can fight this is to go to community groups and encourage people to educate themselves.

Police captain to visit: The October LJTC meeting will also feature discussion on law enforcement and safety. Kerr Bache said San Diego Police Department Northern Captain Mark Hanten, along with any other officer who might be available, will be in attendance for a meet-and-greet and brief discussion, 5 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13 at La Jolla Rec Center, 615 Prospect St. lajollatowncouncil.org
(Global Times) 08:32, September 21, 2016

China and the US have agreed to step up efforts to pressure North Korea into abandoning its nuclear weapons program, even as Pyongyang conducted another test on a new rocket engine on Tuesday.

Eleven days after the fifth nuclear test, its most powerful one so far, North Korea on Tuesday announced that it conducted a "successful" ground test of a new rocket engine to launch satellites. The country's leader, Kim Jong-un, urged scientists and engineers to make preparations for a satellite launch as soon as possible, Pyongyang-based Korean Central News Agency reported.

"The frequent tests show that past sanctions cannot deter North Korea's nuclear weapons and long range missile development. China may need to impose new sanctions to deliver a tough message to North Korea," Lu Chao, a research fellow on North Korea at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiangand US President Barack Obama agreed on Monday in New York to increase cooperation in the United Nations Security Council and in law-enforcement channels after North Korea's fifth nuclear test, the White House said.

In March 2016, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2270, which imposes the toughest sanctions against North Korea so far.

"In the old sanctions, countries could search North Korea's cargo ships and aircraft and detain crew members and ships once they spot the embargoed materials, but overland transportation to North Korea was not included in the sanctions. This time, the US might ask China to compromise on this point," Zhang Liangui, a professor on Korean Peninsula issues at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, told the Global Times.

However, the sanctions may only make North Korea feel hurt but won't effectively stop its nuclear program, analysts said.

"North Korea started to build nuclear facilities in the 1960s, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was able to collect nuclear materials and recruit experts from post-Soviet states. North Korea doesn't need technology or resource support from outside to conduct its nuclear program. The sanctions are not an effective solution," said Lu.

Delicate choices

During his meeting with Obama, Li said China expects all relevant parties to refrain from any actions that may escalate tensions, and opposes the US deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Lu stressed that if the US refuses to talk to North Korea, current measures such as the THAAD deployment, joint US-South Korean military drills and economic sanctions will only provoke North Korea.

Foreign ministers of the US, Japan and South Korea released a joint statement on Monday reaffirming that they remain open to credible and authentic talks aimed at the full and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea, and Washington said it is willing to negotiate with Pyongyang if it commits to denuclearization, Reuters reported.

Unfortunately, North Korea is unwilling to negotiate on this at present, Zhang said.

Zhang stressed that China's sanctions could be very effective if the country cuts all ties with North Korea, but this would be even more risky than a military attack, because it could force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons but also cause the collapse of a nuclear-armed state, and this is highly unpredictable and dangerous for the region.

Some non-State-run Chinese companies continue to do business with North Korea, which violates the Chinese government's regulations and the UN resolution. So further sanctions will focus on this problem, Zhang said.

The Dong-A Ilbo newspaper reported that 19 US senators sent a joint letter to Obama urging his administration to expand sanctions on North Korea, and to impose a secondary boycott (sanctions against a third party) on Chinese companies and banks, since "the country is reluctant to take action against Pyongyang."

Lu stressed that although China is responsible for controlling its own companies, it doesn't mean the US and South Korea can unilaterally expand sanctions to Chinese firms. "This is the irresponsible act of hegemony," he said.
The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary

Read more
PRESS RELEASE

Clock Is Ticking on JASTA fight

Sept. 20, 2016 (EIRNS)150 activists rallied today on the Senate side of the Capitol Building to demand that the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) be passed into law in defiance of Obamas threatened veto. This was after a similar rally in front of the White House. It was learned during that rally that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced that the Senate would not adjourn until any veto of JASTA were overridden.

The press conference addressed by Terry Strada, a leader of the families of victims of the 9/11 attack, and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) made the point that there is no argument against the passage of the JASTA bill. Strada made the point that the bill was vetted for six years and passed both the Senate and the House overwhelmingly. Blumenthal argued concretely that JASTA covered a loophole in what is called sovereign immunity. In the question-and-answer period, Blumenthal further elaborated the argument: There is no giving-in on Justice for the citizens who were murdered on 9/11.

Strada pointed out that if the Saudis did nothing, they should be happy to exonerate themselves in court. Yet it was the simple statement of Caitlyn Strada, the 19-year-old daughter of Terry who was four at the time of the attack that took her father, drove the point home. She stated that she recalls her father always told her Do the right thing. For her that statement originally meant be good to her brother and younger sister. But now, when she is 19, it means that Justice must be served.
PRESS RELEASE

Majority Leader McConnell: Senate Will Override Veto and Vote on Ending Arms Sales to Saudis

Sept. 20, 2016 (EIRNS)Following a Senate Republican lunch caucus meeting, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told the press there were three issues to complete before a recess: passing a continuing resolution, overriding Obamas expected veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, and voting on a bill to stop arms sales to the Saudis.

Texas Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.) spoke after McConnell, telling Obama to stop stalling on the veto so they can get going on the override. Todays Texasinsider.org reported that Cornyn spoke on the floor of the Senate today, pressing Obama to act.

"In just a few minutes Ill have the chance to meet with several of the families from 9/11, of the victims of 9/11. And these men and women, I have to tell you, have been a remarkable example of resilience and courage for all of us. They want and they deserve a path to justice, and I hope the President stops holding up Congress from voting to override the veto he promised on this legislation. Better yet, I would hope the President would reconsider his stated intention to veto the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. "All it does, is gives these families access to a court of law where they can make their case, if they can. But the President said hes going to veto it. My question is, what is he waiting for? Its been on his desk since about a week ago. Why is he making these families wait even longer for justice? If hes going to veto, he should veto it. He should do it, to stop making everybody wait on his timeline."

McConnell made clear that the Senate would not recess until they override an Obama veto on JASTA. Obama could wait to Friday night for the veto, but McConnell said it was "safe to say" that the Senate would be in town next week.
Cardiovascular diseases have been named the biggest killer of Chinese people in both urban and rural areas, according to a recently released report. Data in the report showed that 44.6 percent of deaths in rural areas and 42.51 percent of deaths in urban areas were caused by cardiovascular disease.

Thanks to China's efforts to control hypertension, the number of deaths caused by hemorrhagic strokes has seen a decline, said Wang Wen, an expert from the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases. However, the death rate from ischemic strokes continues to rise, which indicates a need for comprehensive intervention, as ischemic strokes are closely related to smoking and dyslipidemia.

The report pointed out that hypertension is the most dangerous factor for cardiovascular disease. Wang said that the prevalence of hypertension among Chinese citizens over the age of 18 is currently 25.2 percent, five times higher than the figure back in 1959.

China is now striving to reduce hypertension in order to safeguard against cardiovascular disease, Wang added.
PRESS RELEASE

Italys Prime Minister Renzi Tells Bundesbank Chief To Fix Deutsche Bank

Sept. 20, 2016 (EIRNS)Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi slammed Germanys Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann for telling Italy to cut its public debt, saying that instead Weidmann should fix the German banks, especially Deutsche Bank. Renzi told reporters in New York that Weidmann

"has an ungrateful job. I express my full solidarity, because he must face the big issue of German banks: we wish him to be successful. We give him a lovely hug of good work,"

since "for a few dozens billion [in] non-performing loans in Italian banks, there are hundreds of billions of derivatives in German banks."

Zero Hedges Tyler Durden seconded Renzi, writing yesterday that the potential $14 billion fine against Deutsche Bank, or the fact that it continues to be under-capitalized, or its potential failure to securitize $5.5 billion of corporate loans to offload risk, are the least of its problems. The "elephant in the room," of course, is its huge derivatives exposure, which, as Zero Hedge noted it had already revealed a few years ago, amounted to "$75 trillion at the time in gross notional derivatives which as we said then was about 20 times bigger than Germanys GDP, and 5 times bigger than the entire economic output of the Eurozone."

Zero Hedge says it was ignored at the time, but now

"Italys Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, went there and slammed Deutsche Bank as the true derivative problem facing Europe.... Renzi once again broke with the fine European tradition of ignoring the massively overleveraged elephant in the room, and said on Monday that Germanys central bank chief Jens Weidmann should concentrate on fixing the problems of his own countrys banks ... that Weidmann needed to solve the problem of German banks which had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of euros of derivatives on their books.... And while Renzi may be wrong about almost everything else, he is right about Deutsche Banks hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of euros of derivatives."

Durden puts the figure of Deutsche Banks derivatives pile at 42 trillion "to be precise." He concludes,

"what happens when, not if, another crisis flares up and one or more counter-parties to the banks trillions in various derivatives suddenly is unable to post margin, as its obligation becomes a pre-petition claim, sticking DB with the entire gross notional derivative amount and forcing the German giant to foot the gross, not net."

He adds that in 2013 the "elephant" might have once again been ignored, but 2016 is not 2013. Now Europe is splintering and "more disenchanted political leaders (because the enemy of my enemy is my friend) will join Renzi in admitting that Europes emperorGermanyand its mega-bank, is not only naked but one needs scientific notation to express just how big its financial problems truly are."
PRESS RELEASE

Russia: No Sign of Bombs on the Aid ConvoyAl Nusra Offensive in Area

Sept. 20, 2016 (EIRNS)While the U.S. State Department simply declares that the Russians and/or the Syrians bombed the UN/Red Crescent aid convoy in Syria by air, the evidence is quite otherwise. The official spokesman for the Russian defense ministry, Igor Konashenkov, said today that

"No airstrikes on the UN humanitarian convoy in the southwestern outskirt of Aleppo were carried out by the Russian or Syrian aviation."

Furthermore, the video of the scene released by the militants indicates that the convoy was destroyed by fire rather than bombs, he said.

"We carefully studied the video recordings of the so-called activists from the scene and found no signs that any munitions hit the convoy,"

Konashenkov said, explaining that the vehicles have no destruction by the burst wave from an air-delivered munition.

"Everything shown on the video is the direct consequence that the cargo caught fire and this began in a strange way, simultaneously with carrying out a massive offensive of militants in Aleppo,"

he said.

Russia monitored the convoy by drone up until its delivery of its shipment, which was completed. "At about 13:40 Moscow time all cargoes were safely delivered to the final destination," Konashenkov said.

"After that the center for the reconciliation of warring factions in Syria stopped monitoring the convoy. The Russian side did not follow the convoys further movements. All information about the convoys whereabouts was known only to the militants who control these areas."

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent said that the attack took place at their warehouse as the material was being unloaded.

The UN said it could not establish the circumstances of the incident now, but "various sources" confirm the fire was started from artillery weapons," reported TASS.

Two senior State Department officials, however, declared that the perpetrator was either Russia or the Syria government, with no proof. State Department spokesman John Kirby went so far as to say that as a result, the US "will reassess the future prospects for cooperation with Russia"which is clearly the intent of those in the Administration who oppose any cooperation with Russia.

That would include Obamas Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who said, "All the evidence we have points to the conclusion" that Russia and/or Syria committed the attrocity via air attack. With these headlines, the same CNN report then lets slip:

"For now, there is no intelligence that specifically indicates Syrian aircraft or helicopters were in the area, though that type of information could later come to light, the official said."

This is yet another example of Helga Zepp-LaRouches view that the free press in America means that it is totally free of the truth.
Hacking into a phone is unlikely to physically hurt the victim. But hacking into a car?

A security research team in China hacked into a Tesla Model S and said they took over the cars brakes from 12 miles away. A video released this week shows members of the research team being thrust forward as the remote hacker slammed the brakes on command.

The demonstration took place in an empty parking lot. No one was injured.

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The team from Keen Security Lab, an arm of Tencent, also used a laptop computer to turn on the windshield wipers, retract the side view mirror and pop open the trunk, all while the car was moving.

While the car was parked, the team took over the vehicles 17-inch touchscreen and dashboard display. Keens logo appeared on the screens, which appeared frozen and inoperable.

The team said there was no mechanical connection to the cars computer system, nor had they modified any part of the car.

Keen said it had reported its findings to Tesla, which in turn said it fixed the security holes quickly.

The issue demonstrated is only triggered when the Web browser is used, and also required the car to be physically near to and connected to a malicious wifi hotspot. Our realistic estimate is that the risk to our customers was very low, the company said.

As more cars connect to the Internet and other computer networks, experts say, more hacking is inevitable.

The Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Tuesday released guidelines on autonomous cars and safety, which addressed, in part, cybersecurity.

The guidelines suggest that automakers follow established best practices to thwart hackers, and recommend that they report any and all discovered vulnerabilities whether they happen during testing or on the public roadways. Furthermore, the entire process of incorporating cybersecurity considerations should be fully documented.

At this point, the guidelines are voluntary.

Separately, Elon Musk, Teslas chief executive, tweeted that the company on Wednesday night will begin wireless updates to its Autopilot driver-assist feature.

russ.mitchell@latimes.com

Twitter: @russ1mitchell

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The soaring number of cyberattacks against American companies is causing comparatively little financial damage, which is discouraging many businesses from beefing up security, Rand Corp. said in a study released this week.

Rand researchers estimated that a typical computer breach costs a company about $200,000. For many firms, that figure represents less than 0.4% of their annual revenue.

The researchers also said the losses from cyberattacks are generally smaller than the losses caused by fraud, theft, corruption and bad debt.

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Their findings were published Tuesday in the Journal of Cybersecurity.

Relative to all the other risks companies face, the cyber risks often arent as big a deal as we think, the studys lead author, Sasha Romanosky, said in a statement. It may be bad for you if you are the victim, but it doesnt change the behavior or strategy of a company.

Like you and me, Romanosky said, companies are self-interested and operate in ways that minimize costs.

The Rand findings are similar to those of a 2015 study by Columbia University, which said major data breaches at many Fortune 500 companies ended up costing the firms less than 1% of their annual revenues. The companies included Target Corp., which experienced a data breach in 2013 that revealed information from 40 million debit and credit card accounts.

Rand said its analysis comes partly in response to a request by the Obama administration to help create voluntary guidelines for improving information security, which can vary greatly from company to company.

Romanosky said the number of data breaches increased from 64 in 2012 to almost 250 in 2014. Hackers heavily targeted health, insurance and finance companies, as well as the government.

Murray Jennex, a cybersecurity expert at San Diego State University, offered a different perspective. Its very difficult to determine cost for compromised data because there is only a real cost if someone uses the data to do something bad. Much data is stolen without ever really being used, Jennex said.

Mark Heckman, a cybersecurity expert at the University of San Diego, said a broader context is needed.

A small firm that suffers a cyberattack that might register as a small cost in this reports data might still be out of business as a result of the attack. So the cost in dollars is not the whole story, he said.

Robbins writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

gary.robbins@sduniontribune.com

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For California state officials, the new federal guidelines on testing and deployment of driverless cars come as a bit of a relief.

Until this week, the absence of U.S. government guidance had left the state Department of Motor Vehicles  generally in charge of registering vehicles and issuing drivers licenses  to take the lead role in drafting regulations to ensure the safety of self-driving vehicles.

Though the federal guidelines issued Tuesday are short on specifics, the Department of Transportation will take responsibility for regulating the driving hardware and software, and it has devised a model state policy that probably will take the pressure off individual state agencies.

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That policy, issued jointly by the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, could result in changes to current California draft regulations on autonomous vehicles.

You can imagine how the California DMV would be struggling, with no technological background or engineers at their disposal, trying to figure out whether a particular autonomous vehicle is or is not safe enough to be deployed, said Robert Peterson, a law professor at Santa Clara University.

I expect they will conform their guidelines to the federal guidelines and probably [breathe] a great sigh of relief that they are now off the case, he said.

Jean Shiomoto, director of the California DMV, confirmed as much. Shiomoto said during a panel discussion Monday that the agency does not have the expertise on staff and has relied on NHTSA for guidance and expertise in autonomous vehicle research.

Were not experts, Shiomoto said at a Monday event to discuss the upcoming federal guidelines on autonomous vehicles. Were happy NHTSA has come up with guidance documents.

The 116-page federal policy released Tuesday outlines a 15-point safety assessment letter that manufacturers and other autonomous vehicle technology entities will be asked to submit to explain how their systems address issues such as vehicle cybersecurity and data collection and storage.

The guidelines also include a model state policy addressing regulation of driverless vehicles. In it, the Department of Transportation states that federal regulations must be followed when a car is driven by software. State laws apply when humans are behind the wheel.

States were given the responsibility of designating a lead agency to govern self-driving vehicle testing and a committee focused on automated safety technology.

States will also be responsible for establishing liability rules for self-driving vehicles and determining which party needs to have motor vehicle insurance  the manufacturer, the owner, the operator, or the passenger.

In 2012, California passed legislation requiring the DMV to adopt driverless vehicle regulations. Two years later, the agency released rules governing the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads.

So far, 15 companies, including Google, Honda, Tesla and Nissan, hold permits to test driverless vehicles in California.

In December, the DMV released draft regulations for the public deployment of autonomous vehicles. Industry experts described the proposed rules as extremely restrictive; among other things, autonomous vehicles had to be tested by a third-party organization in California and have a driver ready to take the wheel, eliminating the possibility of fully driverless cars.

The DMV said at the time that subsequent regulatory packages would address fully autonomous vehicles.

If California decides to adopt the model state policy, it would open the proposed regulations considerably, especially for fully autonomous vehicles, said Peterson of Santa Clara University.

The federal regulations clearly contemplate the deployment of all levels of cars, when theyre ready, he said.

On Tuesday, the agency said it would review the federal guidelines and release revised draft regulations for California in the coming weeks. A workshop for public input will be held Oct. 20.

California is an example of the difficulties of regulating and how an effort to encourage and facilitate automated driving has actually complicated and in some ways impeded it, said Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor of law and engineering at the University of South Carolina and an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

Smith said the model state policy was unlikely to lead to a uniform policy across the country  a point encouraged by the Department of Transportation. But in some cases, custom approaches could work.

I think its OK for states to experiment and see what works, Smith said. The kind of patchwork that I think would pose the greater concern is states imposing specific designer requirements on a production vehicle, and thats what NHTSA would push back against.

In a statement Tuesday, the DMV said it worked with NHTSA and the American Assn. of Motor Vehicle Administrators to craft the model state policy and that the agency supports NHTSAs goal of creating a consistent approach and national framework for the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

For more business news, follow me @smasunaga

Times staff writer Russ Mitchell contributed to this report.
The crash of a U-2 spy plane that killed one pilot and injured another during a Tuesday training mission could bolster arguments in favor of unmanned systems, as the long battle against the decades-old planes retirement winds closer to an end.

However, analysts said the crash, which occurred in a rural area near Sacramento, did not necessarily sound a death knell for the U-2.

Its just one data point out of a great many data points that will determine when and if that mission transitions, said Richard Aboulafia, aerospace analyst at Teal Group, an aerospace and defense market research firm.

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In President Obamas recent budget request, the U.S. Air Force proposed the retirement of the U-2 after 2018.

That timeline corresponds with the expected addition of enhanced sensors for Northrop Grumman Corp.s Global Hawk surveillance and reconnaissance drone.

In the presidents budget request, the Air Force said it will maintain the 33-plane U-2 fleet until the Global Hawks capabilities are equal to or greater than U-2 capabilities.

The decision was made, that transition will happen, said Michael Blades, senior industry analyst for aerospace and defense at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. I dont think theres a whole lot more that can affect that debate.

The U-2 took its first flight in August 1955. Since then, the glider-like craft built by Lockheed Martin Corp. and nicknamed the Dragon Lady has gathered intelligence on U.S. adversaries including the Soviet Union during the Cold War and keyed in on locations in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The plane was revealed to the public in 1960 when it was shot down over the Soviet Union and pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured and held for two years.

The plane can soar higher than 70,000 feet, its sensors able to zero in on objects as small as landmines from 13 miles high. The U-2 seats just one pilot who must breathe from an oxygen tank and wear a full pressure suit similar to those worn by astronauts.

The rivalry with the Global Hawk is part of a larger debate about roles for manned and unmanned systems, especially in intelligence gathering including surveillance missions.

Advocates have touted the drones maximum endurance of more than 32 hours. And recently, Northrop Grumman was able to modify the sensors carried by the U-2 so they could fit on the Global Hawk, Blades said. Northrop Grumman currently has 32 Global Hawks in active service.

But analysts have brought up the cost of moving to the Global Hawk and integrating new sensors, whereas the U-2 is already paid for.

Global Hawks are great platforms, said Aboulafia of Teal Group. But if youre going to replace the U-2, youre going to have to replace them at a significant expense.

Future spy planes may not consist solely of unmanned aircraft.

Lockheed Martin has proposed the TR-X, a stealthy plane design that would incorporate major features or components of the U-2 such as its high-altitude flying ability with an optional manned capability.

Going all-robot in the spy fleet would be a dramatic change, Aboulafia said. He noted that when the General Atomics Predator surveillance drone was introduced in the 1990s it represented a new capability and not a replacement.

When unmanned has happened, its almost always been an add-on to inhabited, he said.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

For more business news, follow me @smasunaga

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After doubling down on his French village earlier this year, Johnny Depp is ready to part with another piece of his exotic real estate portfolio up for sale. The actor-producer-musician has listed his collection of residences atop the Eastern Columbia Building in downtown Los Angeles for sale at $12.78 million.

Depps properties include five multi-floor penthouses with the Art Deco building, originally designed by Claud Beelman and modernized in 2007. The downtown landmark is distinguished by its exterior of teal terra cotta and gold leaf tile and a four-sided clock tower that tops the 1930s structure.

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Kept largely separate during the actors ownership, the residences include multiple kitchens, living areas and lofted spaces decorated in a colorful, bohemian style. Multiple terraces and steel-paned windows take in sweeping downtown views.

The units, which total about 11,500 square feet of living space, can also be purchased individually.

The 53-year-old actor has been in sell-mode as of late, but is hardly looking to sell short. Earlier this year, Depp put his compound in Plan de la Tour, France, back on the market for around $55 million  double what he asked for the 47-acre Provencal village a year ago.

Known for his offbeat roles, Depp has starred in more than 50 major motion pictures, including Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon and Donnie Brasco. He gained recognition among television viewers in the 1980s series 21 Jump Street.

More recently, the actor starred in the film Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Kevin Dees and Nick Segal of Partners Trust hold the listing at the Eastern Columbia Building.

neal.leitereg@latimes.com

Twitter: @NJLeitereg

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After investing millions of dollars in education and opening their own private K-12 school this year, pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, announced Wednesday that they will invest $3 billion over the next decade to fight diseases.

The funds will come from the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, a limited-liability company that the couple established last year after the birth of their daughter, with a goal to advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy.

Neuroscientist and geneticist Cori Bargmann was named the Chan Zuckerberg Initiatives president of science and will be in charge of bringing together scientists and engineers to develop medical breakthroughs.

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Chan also announced that the initiative will spend an additional $600 million to establish a bio hub in San Francisco to support researchers from Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco as they develop new tools to understand and treat diseases.

We believe the future we all want for our children is possible, Chan said Wednesday to an audience of city leaders, health professionals and reporters. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates were also present.

We set a goal, Chan said, to work to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our childrens lifetime. That doesnt mean no one will ever get sick, but it does mean our children and their children will get sick a lot less.

In December, Chan and Zuckerberg announced plans to donate 99% of their Facebook shares during their lifetimes to advance the mission of the Chan Zuckerberg Institute. Those shares are currently worth more than $45 billion.

The couple detailed their plans in a 2,220-word letter written to their then-newborn daughter, Max, which covered their views on education, healthcare, technology and a host of other issues.

tracey.lien@latimes.com

Twitter: @traceylien

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Viacom Inc.s leadership was thrown into question Wednesday as the company announced that interim Chief Executive Thomas Dooley would step down and that its financial performance was worse than previously thought.

The surprise move, which came just one month after Dooley was appointed, was one of several announcements by Viacoms board in an attempt to shore up investor confidence at the media company that is under pressure to improve results.

Viacom also said it was ditching a controversial proposal to unload a piece of its struggling movie studio Paramount Pictures and that it would slash its dividend.

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Wall Street has been watching for clues about Viacoms direction since a messy battle for control broke out in May. On Wednesday, the company conceded that its financial performance would fall short of expectations  Paramount is on track to lose $450 million in the current fiscal year. Viacom also owns cable TV channels, including Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon.

Viacoms board said it would look internally and outside for its next leader to replace Dooley, took the top job Aug. 18 on an interim basis with high hopes that he would be given a chance to turn things around. Though widely respected within the company and on Wall Street, his tryout lasted four weeks.

After a great deal of reflection and thoughtful consideration, I have decided this is the right time for new leadership to build on our progress and success and take Viacom into the future, Dooley told employees in an email. He said he would leave Nov. 15 to allow for a smooth transition.

The management upheaval follows a tumultuous period for Viacom in which the ailing Sumner Redstone, 93, and his daughter, Shari, openly clashed with former Chief Executive Philippe Dauman. The fighting ended last month when Dauman, a longtime nemesis of Shari Redstones, exited as part of a legal settlement.

Dauman agreed to leave the company but, as a condition for his departure, he demanded that his longtime lieutenant, Dooley, be given a chance to run the show. The settlement also paved the way for five new members, identified by Shari Redstone, to join Viacoms board.

The newly expanded board met two days last week to discuss next years budget and for new directors to get up to speed on the company business. Following those meetings, Dooley continued conversations with Shari Redstone and other board members about his future, according to knowledgeable people not authorized to comment on board matters. After Dooley informed them of his decision to leave, the board met Tuesday to accept his resignation.

Dooley  who started at Viacom 36 years ago  was viewed as part of the old guard. He was one of the first people who met Sumner Redstone after the mogul prevailed in his hostile takeover of Viacom in 1987. Dooley stands to benefit from a generous golden parachute, which is believed to be more than $50 million, that he negotiated earlier this year. He also will receive nearly $4.4 million to stay on through Nov. 15.

Investors have been demanding improved results. Viacoms stock has continued to slide since Dooley was elevated to the top job. Shares closed down 0.3%, or 11 cents, Wednesday to $36.05. The stock has fallen about 50% in the last two years.

Viacom plans to consider internal candidates, including Robert M. Bakish, chief executive of Viacoms international TV network portfolio, and Wade Davis, the companys chief financial officer, company insiders say. Outside executives mentioned include former Walt Disney Co. executive Thomas Staggs, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sold his DreamWorks Animation to NBCUniversal earlier this summer, and Jonathan Miller, a former News Corp. and AOL executive who is a partner at Shari Redstones investment firm, Advancit Capital. Board members are looking for a candidate knowledgeable about international channels and digital media, one person said.

Whoever it is will be spending a lot of time and money to turn [Viacom] around, Wells Fargo Securities media analyst Marci Ryvicker said in a report.

Analysts say whoever is selected as CEO should shed light on whether Shari Redstone plans to reunite her familys nearly $40-billion empire  Viacom and CBS Corp.  into a single corporate entity. Both companies are controlled by the familys investment vehicle, National Amusements, and were separated in 2006. Picking an insider to run Viacom would point to a Viacom-CBS reunification, said prominent media analyst Michael Nathanson.

The problem for investors, and for analysts, is that we dont know what National Amusements ambitions are, Nathanson said in an interview. I still think this company needs to be merged with CBS, he said. It needs scale, it needs to be run by a programmer and it needs a broadcast network to protect the Viacom cable channels.

Shari Redstone has a strong relationship with CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves, who is widely respected as one of the most savvy programmers in Hollywood. Should CBS take over Viacom, Moonves likely would run the combined operation.

However, since an escalation of the talk of a Viacom-CBS reunification, CBS stock has tumbled more than 10%. CBS shareholders are nervous, Nathanson said.

Moonves has built CBS into a broadcast juggernaut, and trying to revive Viacoms television channels could tarnish his legacy.

Last week, Moonves tried to downplay such talk. We are not in active discussions for anything like that, Moonves said at an investor conference. We are never going to do something that is bad for the CBS shareholders.

Viacoms other alternative is to paddle on its own in choppy waters as cable TV channels lose value as consumers increasingly turn to online video streaming sites.

Viacom said Wednesday that it would cut its dividend in half to 20 cents a share. Analysts had been expecting the company to slash its dividend to conserve cash to meet looming debt payments  and some analysts said Wednesdays action, which would free up $300 million, did not go far enough.

Credit agencies have warned that Viacom faces a downgrade because it might not have the capacity to meet upcoming debt payments, including a $400-million payment due in December.

Viacom said it would take a write-down of $115 million because it anticipates an upcoming release, believed to be Monster Trucks, will lose money.

The steps we are taking will make the company financially stronger and more flexible and will position Viacom to take advantage of future growth opportunities, Viacoms new chairman, Tom May, said.

Viacom reduced its guidance for quarterly earnings, in the range of 65 cents to 70 cents a share, for the current fiscal period.

While there is more work to do, the actions announced today are an important first step towards realizing the value of Viacoms exceptional assets and positioning the company for the future, Shari Redstone said. I also want to thank Tom Dooley for his service and his willingness to stay on through this transition period.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour 

meg.james@latimes.com

Twitter: @MegJamesLAT

UPDATES:

4:40 p.m.:This article was updated with additional details. The article was originally published at 8:15 a.m.
In the world of celebrity splits, it doesnt get much bigger than this: Angelina Jolie Pitt has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, and shes going for full custody of their six kids.

From here on out things could go one of two ways: quick and quiet, or long and loud.

If you remember the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes situation, you barely read any of the actual details of what happened in that case in New York, said attorney Robert Preston, co-chair of Greenspoon Marders matrimonial and family law practice group in New York. It happened very quickly. There was a mutual understanding that if this went to the press it would be impossible to resolve and it would end up in court.

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When two A-list celebrities are involved theres a common goal of keeping things out of the media and out of the court of public opinion, said Preston, who has more than two decades handling high-profile divorces. By contrast, when a megastar is married to a someone whos not so famous, the spouse has a hell of a lot less to lose by going to the press and trying to make the other side look bad.

Preston suspects that this case will have little to do with money or property and everything to do with custody. Theres no indication on the divorce petition of a pre- or post-nuptial agreement, he said, and any custody wishes laid out in such a document would be unenforceable because the court has to act in the best interest of the children, not the parents.

All of this conspires to incentivize Jolie and Pitt to settle their dissolution issues quickly and behind the scenes. Because California is a no-fault state, there doesnt have to be a complaint alleging lots of bad acts, Preston said, if the parties can reach an agreement out of court.

If you go to the next step of the actual complaint needing to be served about why one party is entitled to custody of the kids, he said, youre going to see a lot of very press-worthy stuff.

Already there has been speculation in the media about what might have pushed Jolie to file. Unconfirmed rumors spread by social media are kind of thing that can complicate a celebrity divorce even more than it would affect a run-of-the-mill split.

Stacy Phillips, a family law attorney with Blank Rome in Century City, found one thing about the filing to be a bit odd: The fact that Jolie is asking for sole physical custody of the kids but joint legal custody, which includes the ability to make decisions about the kids lives.

If somebodys not capable of having custodial time then one would surmise that theyre not capable of making decisions, she said. But the fact that all six kids  three of them adopted and three of them born to the couple  are listed on the petition with Pitt and Jolie as mother and father is a good thing.

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It means that these kids are going to be treated as a unit, that he formally adopted them, because theyve known him as their dad, she said. Thats secure and its healthier for the kids.

The kids will sort of go as a pack when it comes to custody, said divorce attorney Christopher Melcher of Walzer Melcher in Woodland Hills. He was the L.A.-based attorney in Katie Holmes divorce.

Travel for work by Pitt or Jolie is unlikely to affect a custody determination, Melcher added, because in this case both parents have more than enough resources to hire nannies, teachers and others to help out, even in the case of 50-50 custody.

At 15, eldest child Maddox Jolie-Pitt has the right to express his custody preference to the court, Phillips said, and if the request is reasonable and rational then it must be taken into consideration.

Hopefully he wont have to do that in court, Phillips said, because putting a child up in court is scary. Having to choose between your parents, no child should have to be put in that position.

Especially when you have kids whove been adopted, they have a fear of abandonment, and putting them through another go-round of that, thats really hard on kids in general, especially adopted kids, she said. I hope that Angelina and Brad can work this through.

Follow Christie DZurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.

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(File photo)

Recently, scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China accomplished the worlds first quantum teleportation between independent sources in the intercity communication network of Hefei, Anhui province, Peoples Daily reported. Quantum teleportation is used to deliver quantum information, which is enciphered in photons, from one place to another.

This research result was published online by Nature Photonics on Sept. 19. The finding of a Canadian research team on quantum teleportation was also published in the same journal. Together, these two research projects demonstrate that it is feasible to conduct quantum teleportation within an intercity network. They have also laid a solid foundation for the construction of a more expansive quantum network in the future.

Zhang Qiang, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, explained that private quantum communication currently uses a quantum key to encrypt classified information. As the technology develops, the transmission of quantum information will be realized, and quantum teleportation - which depends on optical networks - will greatly enhance the security and strength of Internet connections.
Writer and director of The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron Joss Whedon has returned to Twitter after leaving the social media site for 16 months, and hes come back with a cause.

Save the Day.

Its the name of a new super PAC spearheaded by the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fronted by a bunch of Whedons famous friends.

The Save the Day website describes the organization, saying, We are a short-form digital production company dedicated to the idea that voting is a necessary and heroic act. That every voice in this wonderfully diverse nation should, and must, be heard. That the only thing that can save democracy is the act that defines it. We are committed to fighting the apathy, cynicism, and honest confusion that keeps citizens from using their vote. And to reminding an increasingly out-of-touch and compromised set of representatives that they are answerable to the people they were hired to serve.

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In the first video released by the PAC (Warning: Video contains explicit language), a cavalcade of Hollywoods finest appear to underline the importance of voting in Novembers election.

From Avengers alumni Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle and Mark Ruffalo, to Julianne Moore, Keegan-Michael Key, Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr., Nathan Fillion and many more, the video itself mocks the celebrities uniting for an important cause formula in classic self-deprecating Whedon style.

You only get this many famous people together when the issue is one that truly matters to all of us, Taran Killam and Randall Park state in the video. The clip then goes on to list the types of causes important enough for celebrities to stump for  like a disease, an ecological crisis or, as Cheadle states, a racist, abusive coward who could permanently damage the fabric of our society.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour 

Its fair to say that Save the Day isnt an organization without political leanings, though neither candidate is mentioned by name at any point in the video.

At least one person was like, I didnt expect this to be quite so partisan. I dont want to alienate half my fan base. But nobody backed out, Whedon told BuzzFeed of filming the video, which concludes with an extended riff promising that Ruffalo would do a nude scene in his next movie if the country were successful in protecting itself from fear and ignorance.

Whedon has taken this opportunity to return to Twitter because he sees Save the Day as a battle worth braving online trolls for.

Hey! Did I miss anything? Lol jk the world is on fire  here's a thing I made https://t.co/g1SE45Rkrv  Joss Whedon (@joss) September 21, 2016

I have a pathological fear of conflict, but I think this is more important than the fact that Im a fraidy-cat, Whedon told BuzzFeed. You cannot be afraid that people will not like you.

The people with extreme beliefs are willing to yell until the people with more complex belief systems just want to go away, he continued. And if you cant stand up for the thing that you know in your heart and your brain is true at a time when it means a difference to the entire world, then you have no right to stand up at all. If you cannot talk back to these people, then you get what they think you deserve.

libby.hill@latimes.com

Twitter: @midwestspitfire

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In an age where too many celebrities are famous for little more than being famous, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt occupy a spot in the Hollywood firmament matched only by the stars of yesteryear  Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, even Burton and Taylor. The married couple are equals in the way few movie stars are.

Both Jolie and Pitt are accomplished actors  gilded by Oscar, firmly on the A-list  but both have also transcended their acting. She has segued into directing, him producing, and theyve both become champions for social causes at home and abroad. Through a careful management of their image and social media footprint, they conjured the glamour of the movie stars of old.

So when Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt in a Los Angeles court Tuesday, even those who usually steer clear of such tabloid fodder took notice. Pitt, 52, and Jolie, 41, arent your average Hollywood celebrity couple falling out of love.

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They came from an era before celebrities were doing their own social media, said Vanessa Diaz, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and assistant professor at Cal State Fullerton who specializes in pop culture. What celebrity means, looks like, sounds like, is changing. All of the changes in media, like reality TV, make it so Brangelina is one of the last old Hollywood kind of couples. Two of the biggest movie stars coming together.

Now, at a time when a lot of the couples are Kardashians, its a different era of celebrity, Diaz continued. You can turn on any time of day and see what Kanye and Kim are doing. There was a limited window into Brangelinas life. It had mystery and mystique.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said that we dont know anything about their private lives, really, nor is it any of our business, really. But theyre both successful and attractive people who have been forced to live at least some of their lives in public. So the public feels a certain ownership, whether theyre entitled to or not.

Yet together they managed to walk a path that was public when it served their purposes  as when Jolie revealed in a 2013 New York Times Op-Ed that she had a double mastectomy to raise breast cancer awareness  and private when they chose to be. And rather than nurture Instagram followers, they chased their creative passions.

But for all their iconoclastic nature, they met in that most conventional Hollywood way: on a film set. It was 2004, while they were co-starring in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, shortly after Jolie ended her marriage to actor Billy Bob Thornton  and Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston.

And thats when the media, which had always had its eye on Pitt and Jolie separately, became obsessed. Brangelina was born.

 These are the most surprising celebrity divorces that were either filed or finalized in 2016.

Brangelina has a lot of meaning behind it because its not just Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, Diaz said. Brangelina is more than a pronoun. Its an adjective. People use it to describe things. It means whirlwind romance, extravagance, a particular kind of sexiness, lavishness, glamour, an exotic life they represented.

The two became Brangelina before they married in 2014, when they were reinterpreting the modern family by having three children out of wedlock, and adopted three more from various countries including Ethiopia and Cambodia.

While doing blockbuster films like Tomb Raider, Jolie was also busy raising awareness about the plight of refugees, traveling to Iraq and other war-torn regions, eventually becoming a UN special envoy. Pitt worked to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Jolie perhaps took the biggest leap for a celebrity of her caliber when she revealed her choice to have a mastectomy. In promoting breast cancer awareness, she explained that her decision was based on her genetic predisposition toward breast cancer. The piece garnered worldwide attention.

Yet the exposure that either of them sought was often on their own terms. Jolie and Pitt remained strategically aloof by carefully cultivating their celebrity image, showing up on red carpets, working the paparazzi and even selling their own authorized photos of their kids to media outlets.

They have been lead characters in the tabloid soap opera for so long, seldom far from magazine headlines, that this [divorce] is much like a surprise Friday cliffhanger from soap operas of old, said Dr. Karen Sternheimer, author of Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility.

1 / 37 Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt pose on the red carpet for the opening night premiere of their film By the Sea in Hollywood in November 2015. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the AFI Awards luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel on Jan. 9, 2015, in Los Angeles. Jolies Unbroken was named one of 11 movies of the year. (Jordan Strauss / Invision ) 3 / 37 Angelina Jolie, left, director of Unbroken, poses with Miyavi, second from left, Melody Ishihara and Brad Pitt at the films world premiere, in Sydney, Australia, on Nov. 17, 2014. (Glenn Nicholls / Associated Press) 4 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were married Saturday in France, reports say. The couple, seen here at the premiere of The Tree Of Life at the Cannes Film Festival in May, had been engaged since 2012. (Andreas Rentz / Getty Images) 5 / 37 U.N. envoy Angelina Jolie and her fiance, Brad Pitt, attend the fourth day of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London on June 13. (Carl Court / AFP / Getty Images) 6 / 37 The couple attend a global summit to end sexual violence along with representatives from 100 countries governments, more than 900 experts, faith leaders and representatives from international organizations around the world. (Lefteris Pitarakis / Associated Press) 7 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the world premiere of Disneys Maleficent at the El Capitan Theatre on May 28, 2014, in Hollywood. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images) 8 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the world premiere of Disneys Maleficent at the El Capitan Theatre on May 28, 2014, in Hollywood. (Frazer Harrison / Getty Images) 9 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attend the New York premiere of The Normal Heart at Ziegfeld Theater on May 12, 2014, in New York City. (Ben Gabbe / Getty Images) 10 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive for a special Maleficent costume display at Kensington Palace in London on May 8, 2014. (Facundo Arrizabalaga / EPA ) 11 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at a special Maleficent costume display at Kensington Palace in London on May 8, 2014. (Joel Ryan / Invision / AP) 12 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the Governors Ball at the 86th Academy Awards on March 2, 2014, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 13 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the 86th Academy Awards on March 2, 2014, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 37 Jolie congratulates Pitt when 12 Years A Slave, which he produced and starred in, won the Academy Award for best picture. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images) 15 / 37 Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Brian Grazer at the 84th Annual Academy Awards show at the Hollywood and Highland Center in Los Angeles on Feb. 26, 2012. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the 84th Annual Academy Awards show at the Hollywood and Highland Center in Los Angeles, CA on Feb. 26, 2012. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards show at The Beverly Hilton on Jan. 15, 2012. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt during coverage of the 69th Golden Globe Awards show at The Beverly Hilton on Jan. 15, 2012. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the 18th Screen Actors Guild Awards show at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Jan. 29, 2012. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the 68th Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 16, 2011 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Jan.16, 2011, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hill. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 37 Accompanied by their six children, Brad Pitt and Angellina Jolie appear before photographers upon their arrival at Haneda Airport in Tokyo on Nov. 8, 2011. (Toru Yamanaka / AFP / Getty Images) 23 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on the red carpet of the 81st Academy Awards on Feb. 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the 66th Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA on Jan. 11, 2009. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 37 A heavily pregnant Angelina Jolie arrives at the premiere of her animated film Kung Fu Panda during the 61st International film festival in Cannes, southern France. (Matt Sayles / Associated Press) 26 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive for the Critics Choice Awards in Los Angeles, Calif. on Jan. 7, 2008. (Paul Buck / EPA) 27 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive for the 14th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Jan. 27, 2008. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the premiere of Beowulf in Los Angeles on Nov. 5, 2007. (Chris Pizzello / Associated Press) 29 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attend the The Assassination of Jesse James premiere at 64th Annual Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2, 2007. (MJ Kim / Getty Images) 30 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive for the New York premiere of The Assassination of Jesse James on Sept. 18, 2007. (Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images) 31 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive for the premiere of Pitts film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford during the 33rd Deauville American Film Festival on Sept. 3, 2007 in Deauville , France. (Francois Durand / Getty Images) 32 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the New York premiere of A Mighty Heart on June, 13, 2007. (Stuart Ramson / Associated Press) 33 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the Festival Palace for a gala screening of the film A Mighty Heart running out of competition at the 60th Cannes Film Festival, on May 21, 2007. (Daniel Deme / EPA) 34 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive for the 64th Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 15, 2007 in Beverly Hills. (Beatrice de Gea / Los Angeles Times) 35 / 37 Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrive at the world premiere of The Good Shepherd on Dec. 11, 2006, in New York. (Jeff Christensen / Associated Press) 36 / 37 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie visit the Immaculate Conception School in Port au Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 13, 2006. (Brennan Linsley / Associated Press) 37 / 37 Brad Pitt, producer Arnon Milchan and Angelina Jolie arrive at the premiere of Mr. and Mrs. Smith at the Mann Village Theater on June 7, 2005, in Westwood, Calif. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

The pair separated Sept. 15, according to court documents, a little over two years after they married in August 2014.

In her divorce filing Tuesday, Jolie cited irreconcilable differences, and according to People magazine and TMZ, Jolie has asked for physical custody of all six children.

Jolies attorney has said she wouldnt be commenting on the divorce filing, but Pitt released his own statement to People magazine. I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids, he said. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.

But rumors about a troubled relationship dogged them for years.

It was all par for the course for the couple, whose relationship has ended many times over the years in the headlines of gossip publications.

Both actors started out as pretty faces in an industry rife with beauty but soon made names for themselves in breakthrough roles. For Pitt, it was as the lawless love interest in Thelma and Louise. For Jolie, it was as the reckless, troubled young women in Girl, Interrupted (she won a supporting actress Oscar for the role).

Before meeting Pitt, Jolie had a reputation as a wild child. She has admitted cutting herself and using drugs including cocaine, LSD, ecstasy and heroin.

I did the most dangerous and I did the worst and for many reasons I shouldnt be here, she told 60 Minutes in 2011.

In the wake of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Aniston and Pitt separated in January 2005. He and Jolie went public as a couple soon after  famously prompting fans to declare allegiance to Team Aniston or Team Jolie.

Pitt would later admit to falling in love with Jolie while filming but not to infidelity. In May 2006, Jolie and Pitt welcomed their first biological child, daughter Shiloh.

They reinvented themselves over time as they presented a united front and embodied the image of a socially conscious, modern family.

In October 2014, she was named an honorary dame and met with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, and this May it was announced that shed be a visiting professor at the London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security.

Their last film together, 2015s By the Sea, is now being mined for clues into the couples now-defunct marriage. Jolie perhaps knew then it would be scrutinized.

Brad and I have our issues, but if the characters were even remotely close to our problems we couldnt have made the film, she told the Telegraph earlier in 2015. We have days when we drive each other absolutely mad and want space, but the problems in the movie arent our specific problems.

Times staff writer Christie DZurilla contributed to this report.

To read the article in Spanish, click here

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It has been 30 years since the noisy arrival of Lethal Weapon  the film, then the franchise  in which Mel Gibson played Martin Riggs, an LAPD detective with a death wish, and Danny Glover played his partner, Roger Murtaugh, a detective with a family.

Now, 18 years after those characters were last taken out for a spin, they have been dusted off and shrunk down for Lethal Weapon, the TV series, which begins Wednesday on Fox.

The series begins where the original movie did  leaving out Riggs mullet  with some small, mostly enlivening tweaks and elaborations. (It is surprising how little context you can create in the course of four feature films, though less so when you consider how much of that time was devoted to running, driving, shooting and things blowing up.)

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Now Riggs (Clayne Crawford, 38) is newly arrived from Texas with a back story ever so slightly more horrible than his film original. To even the scales, Murtaugh (Damon Wayans, 56, can play 50) has been given a small heart attack. (Also a new baby  no connection is drawn between those events.) As we begin, he is recovered enough to return to work, though not before initiating a sad running joke in which birthday sex never happens.

Written by Matt Miller (Forever) and directed by McG (Charlies Angels movies, The Mysteries of Laura), the pilot ticks off the franchise-defining boxes.

Scene in which Riggs does something to make others question his sanity? Check. Scene in which he faces an impossible number of bad guys in a warehouse? Check. Riggs and Murtaugh are pinned down by gunfire? Check. Riggs does something impulsive because its in his nature  check. Murtaugh does something impulsive though its against his nature  again, check. Car chase? Check. Head-butt? Check. And so on.

In between, Riggs drinks in his ratty oceanside trailer and Murtaugh checks his pulse.

Tonally, the pilot splits the difference between the original film, which offered violent action with touches of comedy, and the later films, which were comedies with more than a touch of violent action. As in the movies, the relationship between the leads is more important than the crime-fighting; the mystery here is not particularly involving. All you need to keep in mind is that these are the good guys, and those are the bad guys, and those other people are just caught in the crossfire.

Alongside the well-cast Crawford and Wayans, a solid ensemble includes Keesha Sharp as Murtaughs missus; Jordana Brewster as the department psychologist; Johnathan Fernandez as the resident pathologist  cant have a procedural without a pathologist  nicknamed Scorsese, because he went to film school; and Kevin Rahm, Ted of Mad Men fame, as the captain.

Lethal Weapon was not the first piece of popular art to make crime-solving partners from a temperamentally mismatched duo  Beverly Hills Cop beat it into theaters by two years, and there were Holmes and Watson a little while before that. But there have been three more decades worth of these pairings since; there is nothing groundbreaking, sensational or spectacular here.

But it does what it does more than acceptably well, and promises to be subtler than its big-screen model  not that subtlety is necessarily what you come for. In any case, the template shows no sign of wearing out, or wearing out its welcome.

Lethal Weapon

Where: Fox

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-LSV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for coarse language, sex and violence)

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

On Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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Imagine a week entirely devoted to dessert (just pretend you dont do this every week). Now heres the guy whos going to make it happen.

Daniel Amitin, who owns a healthcare staffing and recruiting company, has a sweet tooth. About three years ago, he and his roommate started a bet: They would see if they could limit themselves to just one dessert a week. Even a single cookie or a bag of M&Ms would count. Loser would take the winner out to dinner.



For the record: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the winner of the bet will take the loser out to dinner. The loser will take the winner out.

Three years later, they are still going. But Amitin didnt waste his one dessert a week on just anything  he made it his mission to try as many different kinds of dessert as possible, one week at a time. He went through a churros phase, then he experienced the cupcake craze, and currently hes on a red velvet kick. Then the Dessert Week idea came to him.

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I was getting ready for work in the morning one day and was just thinking, man, it would be nice to just have a month off and go crazy eating dessert, said Amitin. Okay, a month is too long, but maybe just a week of eating all the best desserts.

So Amitin created Dessert Week, which will start Oct. 9 and run through Oct. 15. During that time, restaurants, bakeries and ice cream shops are encouraged to offer special desserts and/or discounts.

The list of participating vendors includes Sprinkles, Beverly Hills Beignet, SusieCakes, Coolhaus, Saffron & Rose, Diddy Riese, Hello Sweetie Pies, Frostalicious, Nothing Bundt Cakes, Cheesecake Factory, Portos Bakery, Wanderlust, Pie Hole, Jamaicas Cakes, Cream, Gelateria Uli and Breadologie.

During that time, go to your favorite brick-and-mortar, food trucks  its also an opportunity to try new places, said Amitin, who encourages people to just go out and eat dessert during the week, even if its at a place that may not be participating.

The week will end with an actual dessert festival on Oct. 15 at Pershing Square. Tickets range from $15 to $85 and will include dessert samples from participating vendors at the event.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.dessertweekla.com.

I dont do whipped cream out of a can. Follow me on Twitter & Instagram @Jenn_Harris_

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Lawmakers blasted the chief executive of the maker of EpiPens at a House hearing Wednesday, saying the companys price hikes of more than 500% were stopping families from keeping their children safe.

Do you have a guilty conscience about any of this? Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) asked Mylan Chief Executive Heather Bresch. A mother would cut off her right arm to get that dose of drug.

In her testimony, Bresch tried to defend her pricing of the device that delivers an antidote to potentially deadly allergic reactions.

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Bresch said there was a misconception about how much the company was profiting from the device. And she blamed the controversy on the system of pricing in the pharmaceutical industry, which she called opaque and frustrating.

The story got ahead of the facts, Bresch said at the hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Lawmakers from both parties repeatedly pointed out how Breschs salary had risen even faster than the price of the EpiPen.

According to securities filings, Breschs total compensation increased from $2,453,456 in 2007 to $18,931,068 last year  a rise of 671%.

The greed is astounding. It is sickening, disgusting, Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said. I am a very conservative pro-business Republican but Im really sickened by what Ive heard here today.

 A protest against high drug prices is held outside the USC School of Pharmacy.

Mylan has stirred outrage across the country by raising the price of the EpiPen by 547% since 2007, when it acquired the rights to sell the device from another company. The wholesale price for a package of two autoinjectors has risen from $94 in 2007 to $608 this year, according to data from Truven Health Analytics.

The device is only one of the companys 2,700 products but it now makes up about 10% of its revenue.

Bresch said that although she regretted that some patients had trouble paying for the drug, lawmakers needed to recognize that Mylan had greatly increased access to the lifesaving device.

She said most patients at risk of an allergic reaction now have access to the drug, and that 85% of patients pay less than $100 for a two-unit package.

Looking back, I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients who may have ended up paying the full  price or more, she said. We never intended this.

Bresch said the company was making far less on the drug than the public believed. She said after rebates and fees Mylan received just $274 of the devices $608 wholesale price.

After subtracting the $69 cost of the device and other related costs including marketing, Mylans profit is $100 for the two-device package, she said.

Some members of the committee said they didnt believe the profit numbers provided by Bresch and they chastised her for not providing all of the financial information the committee had requested a month ago.

The lawmakers also pointed out that Mylan was not the only pharmaceutical company to aggressively hike prices. They repeatedly mentioned Martin Shkreli, the former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, which raised the price of an anti-parasitic drug called Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill last year.

Yet another drug company, Mylan, has jacked up the price of a lifesaving product for no discernible reason, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said.

Bresch, 47, is no stranger to politics. Her father is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).

The EpiPen device automatically injects a drug called epinephrine, which reverses potentially deadly allergic reactions.

The House committee is not the only group of officials demanding answers from Bresch.

Mylan is facing a myriad of investigations into its pricing and sales practices. Just this week, Senate Republicans called for a probe of whether Mylan had received tens of millions of dollars of excessive rebates from the federal Medicaid program. And the Republican attorney general in Breschs home state of West Virginia asked a court Tuesday to enforce a subpoena against Mylan as part of his ongoing probe into the skyrocketing price of its EpiPen.

Earlier, New York states attorney general launched a probe into Mylans contracts with school systems to purchase EpiPens, which may have terms designed to keep out competition.

Mylan turned the EpiPen into its first billion-dollar product through the price hikes and by spurring demand. The company has spent millions of dollars on advertising the EpiPen. It also continues to lobby states to pass legislation to have epinephrine injectors available in schools and other public places. In 2013, it successfully lobbied for a federal law that encourages schools to keep emergency supplies of the device.

Mylan has attempted to mollify angry consumers by offering more financial aid to patients, including coupons covering up to $300 of a patients co-payment. But critics point out that the co-pay coupons are a tactic used throughout the pharmaceutical industry to keep prices high. The coupons insulate patients from the price hikes, but insurance companies, employers and taxpayers must still pay more for the rest of the bill for the drug.

To appease critics, the company has also decided to soon begin selling the device as a generic drug at a price of $300  half the price of the EpiPen. Yet that price is still three times its price in 2007.

Epinephrine, the drug inside the EpiPen, has been available as a cheap generic medicine for decades. It was first synthesized more than 100 years ago. Lawmakers said Wednesday that they believed the device held only about $1 worth of epinephrine.

The company stirred criticism in 2014 when it moved its corporate address from Pennsylvania to the Netherlands to lower its tax rate.

melody.petersen@latimes.com

Twitter: @melodypetersen

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UPDATES:

3:55 p.m.: This article has been updated with additional quotes and information from the hearing.

This article was originally published at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 21.
Just when you thought it might not be possible, the California Coastal Commission story has gotten a little more interesting.

As reported by my colleague Dan Weikel, five commissioners have been sued by a San Diego nonprofit called Spotlight on Coastal Corruption.

And people accuse us of never covering good news.

Slapped with a lawsuit were Commissioners Steve Kinsey, the chairman, Wendy Mitchell, Erik Howell, Martha McClure and Mark Vargas.

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They have been accused of collectively violating disclosure laws not a few times, nor a few dozen times.

But 590 times over the last two years.

F-I-V-E H-U-N-D-R-E-D N-I-N-E-T-Y.

According to the claim, the commissioners repeatedly failed to file complete, comprehensive, timely reports on their private conversations  known as ex parte communications  with developers and others before voting on projects.

And heres where it gets really interesting.

The suit was not filed against the California Coastal Commission, which is made up of 12 politically appointed commissioners and more than 100 staff members. It was filed against individual commissioners. If the court rules that there were violations, each could be fined a small fortune, ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than $1 million.

This raises more than a few questions, among them:

Who should pay for commissioners legal defense, and if fines are levied against them, who should pick up the tab  the commissioners or the taxpayer-funded Coastal Commission?

Kathryn Burton is one of the San Diego coast watchers who formed Spotlight on Coastal Corruption earlier this year, and she didnt hesitate for an instant when I put those questions to her Tuesday afternoon.

Oh, absolutely, the commissioners, she said. The public shouldnt be picking up their legal bills or their fines when they werent following the law.

Burton, a retired city attorney, said there could be no greater deterrent to rule-breaking in the future than to have commissioners on notice that misdeeds will cost them. And if the sued commissioners are found liable, its the commission itself  understaffed and underfunded for years  that would receive the fines as dictated by the Coastal Act.

Its a win-win, Burton said.

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Let me be clear that no wrongdoing has been proved, and even if it is, civil fines are not mandatory. Weikel reported that commissioners either refused to comment on the lawsuit or could not be reached. A Coastal Commission spokesperson said the matter is being reviewed by the state attorney generals office.

Burton told me that she has kept an eye on coastal protection issues for years, but stepped up her scrutiny in February. Thats when commissioners whacked Executive Director Charles Lester, a man whose many supporters saw him as a defender of coastal protection rather than a pushover for developers.

Then came the L.A. Times investigations suggesting that some commissioners did not appear to be following the rules on ex parte communications.

Many of their reports on those meetings were only a couple of sentences long, despite the required comprehensive accounts. In one case, Vargas filed the briefest of reports on a meeting with U2 guitarist David Evans in Dublin before voting in favor of Evans massive five-mansion compound in Malibu.

When I began asking Vargas for more details about his meeting, he didnt just refuse to answer. He refused to acknowledge that I was standing two feet away from him, asking questions.

In some cases, rather than write their own reports, commissioners turned in accounts provided by lobbyists. And in other cases, they missed filing deadlines by up to eight months.

It was pretty eye-opening. They were just not following the law, said Burton, whose nonprofit hired San Diego lawyer Cory Briggs. He used Times data and additional research to come up with the tallies.

I think they somehow just think theyre bigger than life.  Kathryn Burton, San Diego coast watcher

The lawsuit alleges that Vargas violated reporting requirements 150 times, followed by Kinsey (140), Mitchell (120), Howell (96) and McClure (82).

And those numbers are all based on known meetings. Its not known whether commissioners failed to report additional meetings, but if this case goes to trial, those kinds of questions are sure to be asked.

Theres a certain arrogance to it, Burton said of the commissioners. I think they somehow just think theyre bigger than life.

Some commissioners did follow the law, Burton noted. Others, in her opinion, tried to circumvent the law.

So Burton and some like-minded San Diegans, including Gerald Sodomka and Susan Turney, formed their nonprofit. The purpose, she said, is to do whatever is possible to bring more transparency to the commission and protect the coast for future generations.

Corruption might be a strong word, Burton said, but if the shoe fits, wear it.

This lawsuit follows four others that were filed to challenge projects that got approved despite disclosure violations. If the San Diego group prevails on its lawsuit, theres no telling how many others might follow.

See the most-read stories this hour 

Meanwhile, a minor stir was created this week involving the search for a new executive director. Activists complained that a draft copy of the job posting  subject to change  did not adequately address the need for the new executive director to maintain staff independence from commissioners, so as to base decisions on science and law, not political pressure.

Coast watchers also took issue with a line about how the new boss should have the ability to instill a culture of customer service within the organization.

This is highly objectionable, former Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan wrote to the staff, arguing that the commission does not have customers, and the agencys job is not to facilitate developers.

The mission, she said, is to make sure any development is consistent with the law, to represent the publics interest and to protect the coast.

I couldnt have said it any better.

Get more of Steve Lopezs work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez

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It will be easier from now on for L.A. students to take community college classes for free  while sitting in their high school classrooms.

The Los Angeles Unified School District board approved an agreement Tuesday with the Los Angeles Community College District that will let high schools enter partnerships with their local community colleges to offer classes on campus, during the regular school day. The schools hope to serve 15,000 L.A. Unified students a year.

This is truly a partnership, said Board President Steve Zimmer. Were going to elevate both the amazing work that is already done on our high school and adult campuses, while at the same time creating new opportunities for our students.

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About 4,000 students last year had concurrent enrollment, which means they took some community college classes either on the community college campuses or at their high schools, said Jesus Angulo, director of the L.A. Unifieds academic and counseling services. Some high schools, he said, already have agreements in which community colleges offer classes before or after school.

The agreement the board endorsed Tuesday has its origins in AB 288, a law approved last year, that allows community colleges to offer classes on high school campuses, open only to high school students. Previously, any community college class had to be open to all students at the college, regardless of location  a problem for the many high schools that maintain closed campuses.

Under the new agreement, each school and community college that entered into a partnership would have to decide how to pay for such costs as textbooks and instructional materials.

Students in L.A. Unified probably will be able to start taking these classes in the spring, though community colleges in other cities already have classes going. Pasadena Community College, for example, has agreements with three surrounding districts.

Existing high school teachers often teach the community college classes, said Ofelia Arellano, Pasadena City Colleges dean of student services. To do so, they have to meet the qualifications to become community college teachers, which include professional experience for technical classes and masters degrees in the subject for many courses, Arellano said. For the courses they teach, they become community college employees.

L.A.s community colleges plan to rely mostly on their own employees to teach courses at the high schools, said Ryan Cornner, vice chancellor for educational programs and institutional effectiveness at the community college district.

The community college classes are different from Advanced Placement classes, which are college-level classes taught by high school teachers in which college credit can be earned on the basis of results from a single test.

Though AP classes often are more difficult classes in a subject already offered at a high school, such as English literature, calculus or European history, the community college classes are meant to introduce new subjects to all students, not just the ones already on advanced tracks. Students who take them are considered to have dual enrollment  so they earn college credits, and their grades are based on coursework.

These may not be the honors students that you see, Cornner said, and theyre still going to get an opportunity to see what its like to be a college student.

Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli.

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A college dropout from Orange County pleaded guilty Tuesday to killing his parents while they slept in their San Juan Capistrano mansion before trying to kill his sister and brother, who was left paralyzed from the shooting.

Ashton Sachs, 22, entered his guilty plea in a Santa Ana courtroom to two counts each of murder and attempted murder from the 2014 slayings, according to an Orange County Superior Court clerk.

His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 14. He is expected to get life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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Before the February 2014 rampage, Sachs, then 19, was living in Seattle, where he had briefly attended college. He reportedly spent his days smoking marijuana, playing video games and harboring a festering resentment for his parents.

He blamed his parents  Bradford Hans Sachs, 57, and Andra Resa Sachs, 54  for his lack of direction and felt the least favorite of the couples five children, sheriffs Investigator Justin Montano testified in court papers.

Sachs was running on four nights without sleep onFeb. 9, 2014, according to court papers. He scaled the wall of his parents tony hillside mansion in the 32200 block of Peppertree Bend, and with a rifle in hand, he walked through the front door.

Officials said he contemplated suicide inside the home  he had a history of trying to kill himself  but instead opened the door to his parents bedroom and fired multiple gunshots.

He shot twice into his 8-year-old brothers room. In his teenage sisters bedroom, he fired a single shot before leaving the home, where detectives eventually recovered 24 bullet casings.

Sachs walked back to his Toyota Prius and drove to his parents business in San Juan Capistrano. A taxi picked him up, took him to John Wayne Airport and he returned to Seattle, according to a grand jury transcript.

It took nearly a month for authorities to link him to the grisly rampage.

Detectives testified that when they searched Sachs phone as part of their investigation, they discovered he had looked up Wikipedia articles on the different degrees of murder, searched for flights out of John Wayne Airport and made arrangements to have his car transported back to Seattle.

Investigators later found Sachs Prius and a loaded rifle.

The Sachses were divorced but still lived together. Court records portrayed the family life as dark and turbulent, with multiple arguments and physical behavior in front of their children.

matt.hamilton@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattHjourno.

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A Rancho Palos Verdes physician was convicted Tuesday of writing prescriptions for powerful painkillers and muscle relaxants to undercover operatives without conducting a physical exam or completing medical charts.

In one case, the physician signed off on prescriptions to a patient who showed him an X-ray of a dog that included the animals tail, authorities said.

A downtown Los Angeles jury deliberated for about two hours before finding Dr. Richard Seongjun Kim guilty of 17 felony counts of illegally prescribing drugs without a legitimate medical need, according to the Los Angeles County district attorneys office.

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Kim, 44, who had been free on $100,000 bail during his trial, was immediately taken into custody after the verdict was read. He faces up to 13 years and 4 months in prison at his sentencing, scheduled for Sept. 30.

He wanted a lot of records  not because he was interested in patients ailments, but he wanted to cover himself.  Deputy Dist. Atty. Emily Street

Defense attorney Steve Meister said he was disappointed by the verdict and planned to argue to keep Kim out of jail.

My client has always been a caring and competent physician, Meister said. While the jury may have concluded that he unlawfully prescribed, custody in this case would be wholly unreasonable.

The case against the general practitioner was investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose operatives posed as patients at Kims Western Avenue clinic over the course of three months in 2014.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Emily Street, the prosecutor who handled the case, said that Kim asked patients to bring in previous charts and X-rays to the sham medical exams.

He wanted a lot of records  not because he was interested in patients ailments, but he wanted to cover himself, Street said.

His office had no staff and he typically exchanged text messages with patients to arrange appointments. He didnt accept insurance  only cash or credit cards, the prosecutor said.

He would open up his office and lock the door behind him, and meet with the patient in his office, Street said.

Without examining patients or writing out medical charts, he issued prescriptions for Norco, Xanax, Adderall and Soma, prosecutors said. During appointments, Kim sat behind a desk and engaged in mostly small talk, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Niedermann said in an earlier interview with The Times.

The undercover appointments were recorded by hidden cameras, and the video footage was shown to jurors.

It was all on video, which was really the crux of the case, Street said. There was no exam whatsoever  no vitals, very little history, if any, taken. It was not much of anything resembling the practice of medicine.

An undercover informant once brought in a chest X-ray from a dog, and the doctor examined it before writing prescriptions for hydrocodone and tramadol, along with Soma, a muscle relaxant, prosecutors said.

Kim was arrested July 1, 2015, outside his clinic. He was initially charged with 21 felonies, but prosecutors dropped four counts before trial.

A canine X-ray was used in at least one previous undercover sting at a physicians office. In 2012, a Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department deputy posing as a patient presented a Glendora doctor an X-ray of a German shepherd to accompany her tale of an injured back and neck.

The X-ray had the dogs name, Recon, and the name of an animal hospital, but Dr. Rolando Lodevico Atiga wrote a prescription for a narcotic painkiller and a muscle relaxant, officials said. The doctor was later charged with multiple counts of unlawful prescription of a controlled substance. The status of his case is unclear.

Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed to this report.

matt.hamilton@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattHjourno.

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An Audi crashed into a traffic police station in Shijiazhuang City, north Chinas Hebei on Wednesday, after colliding with pedestrians. The driver had reportedly consumed drugs before being dragged out of his car and arrested.

The SUV driver first collided with a non-motorized vehicle in the middle of a busy market. After the collision, witnesses say the driver fled the scene, heading west. They then encountered a police officer, who began slamming on the driver-side window with his gun, demanding the driver pull over.

The driver refused to stop and veered off colliding with pedestrians, five of which were hospitalized with minor injuries, as well as parked vehicles. The SUV eventually had a tire blowout, causing the car to lose control crash into a local traffic police station.

The culprit, reportedly a 45-year-old man surnamed Li, is currently in police custody. An investigation is underway.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes reported in California rose 122% between 2014 and 2015, according to a recent analysis by Cal State San Bernardino researchers.

The report by the Cal State San Bernardino Center on Hate & Extremism found that 18 anti-Muslim crimes were reported in California in 2014, while 40 anti-Muslim crimes were reported last year.

The increase followed what appeared to be a national surge in anti-Muslim crimes that further accelerated after the San Bernardino terror attack in December 2015, and a call by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to bar Muslims from entering the U.S., according to researchers.

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After the San Bernardino attack, we saw a marked jump in hate crimes against Muslims within several days, said Brian Levin, executive director of the Cal State center. Among those incidents was an arson attack on a mosque in Riverside County days after the San Bernardino killings.

The reports conclusions were based on hate crime data from 20 states. Although many states have yet to make public their own crime data, the jurisdictions included in the report account for more than half of the nations population, according to study authors.

In 2014, those 20 states reported 110 hate crimes against Muslims, compared with 196 in 2015  a 78% increase.

After Trumps declaration on Dec. 7, 2015, that Muslims should be banned from entering in the U.S., researchers documented an 87.5% jump in acts of hate against that community in the five days that followed his remarks, compared with the same period the year before.

Dr. Kevin Grisham, the centers assistant director for research, said, The study shows statements by political leaders can be followed by distinct changes in hate crime incidents.

Overall hate crimes climbed a little more than 5%  from 4,139 to 4,347  in the 20 states included in the study. By comparison, California saw a 10% increase, with 758 hate crimes reported in 2014 and 837 reported in 2015, according to the studys authors.

Californias disproportionate representation in overall hate crimes might be explained by better reporting, Levin said. Hate crimes in some states are vastly underreported, he said.

richard.winton@latimes.com

Follow @lacrimes on Twitter

To read the article in Spanish, click here

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An illegal stone-and-wood shelter built by a group of territorial surfers at Lunada Bay on the Palos Verdes Peninsula is set to be demolished soon.

The Palos Verdes Estates Planning Commission on Tuesday night approved a permit to raze the structure used by the notorious Bay Boys, a self-appointed gang of enforcers who people from outside the upscale community have, for decades, accused of using violence and intimidation to keep them away from the famous surf spot.

For the record: An earlier version of this article referred to the Bay Boys as the Bad Boys in the headline.

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The commission approved the motion unanimously and without comment. No one from the public spoke on the matter.

In July, after initially seeking delays, the City Council unanimously approved a plan to dismantle the shelter despite strong opposition by residents of the relatively isolated enclave, who urged their elected officials not to honor a request by the California Coastal Commission to remove the shelter or take harassment charges seriously.

Witnesses and pending lawsuits accuse the Bay Boys of congregating at the 30-year-old structure and bombarding outsiders with dirt clods, slashing their tires and assaulting them in the water. The attacks, witnesses said, were sometimes coordinated with small radios and group text messages.

Police reports over the years also show that the shelter, which was constructed without permits near the waters edge at Rocky Point, has repeatedly been the scene of drug and alcohol use.

The so-called fort was built at Rocky Point on the northwestern part of Lunada Bay. It consists of cemented stone retaining walls and a cemented patio with a stone table, fire pit, a stone bench and a wooden canopy. An adjacent seating area contains a wooden bench covered by a wood-frame with palm fronds.

The permit will allow a contractor to take jackhammers to the shelter and cart away the pieces. City officials estimate the job will cost about $50,000.

During the investigation of the Bay Boys shelter, the city found smaller rock structures at Resort Point on the bays south side and the Via Bandini storm water outfall in the middle of the bays crescent-shaped beach..

Planning officials say the removal of the fort and two other illegal structures will return the Lunada Bay shoreline to its natural condition.

dan.weikel@latimes.com

Twitter: @ladeadline16

dan.weikel@latimes.com

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Since her 19-year-old son was shot over the weekend, Sandra Lopez has been asking, Why?

Carlos Segovia had recently joined the Marines and held the rank of lance corporal. He was known for volunteering his time to help those who were less fortunate.

On Friday about 11:30 p.m., Segovia was found with a gunshot wound to his head in his black Dodge Charger in the 2100 block of West 31st Street, police said. Segovia had just left his girlfriends house and was on his way to a family friends home for the night. Its unknown whether someone walked up to his car or shot from another vehicle.

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The killing has puzzled detectives, who are still trying to figure out a motive for the attack. Segovia didnt have any connections to gangs or other illegal activity that would make him a target, they say. Police are trying to determine whether Segovia, who was on a weekend leave from Camp Pendleton, might have witnessed a crime before he was shot.

Theres speculation on different things that may have happened, said Los Angeles police Det. Matt Courtney. Courtney said Wednesday that theres not a significant amount of people coming forward.

We dont operate in a bubble, we dont solve murder cases by magic, Courtney said. We need people to come forward and provide information and do the right thing.

Officials on Tuesday night announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the killer as hundreds gathered to pay their respects near the shooting scene.

As mourners waited for Segovias mother to arrive, people placed flowers and candles at the foot of a telephone pole. The smell of sage filled the air as a man wearing a green Marines T-shirt tacked an American flag to the pole. When Lopez arrived, layers of people parted to let her through. She slowly walked to the front of the crowd and paused, staring at the candles with tears in her eyes before speaking in front of the TV cameras.

Lopez called her son a man with a passion to give. He worked with the homeless and with rescue dogs, and had committed to a life of service with the Marines. Over the past few days, Lopez had to see her son, a born fighter, struggling for his life.

My only boy, Lopez said at a vigil held Tuesday night in honor of her son. My wonderful boy who was killed. I have no idea how Im going to live without him.

 Hundreds attend a vigil Tuesday for Carlos Segovia, 19, a Marine who was shot while visiting friends and family in South Los Angeles.

Eric Marshall met Segovia through work with LA on Cloud 9, a group that helps the homeless and animals, and said he was the epitome of the strong, silent type, one who had a penchant for helping others.

This man was no ordinary person, he said.

Marshall said Segovia had a way with animals and called him the dog whisperer.

We are heartbroken over this tragedy, LA on Cloud 9 said. We were fortunate to witness Carlos become a fine young man who graduated from the Marine camp earlier this year and started his service with the U.S. Marines.

Segovia, who was born in El Salvador, came to the U.S. with his mother. Both are U.S. citizens, Claudia Perez, a family friend, said.

The overwhelming support and prayers we witnessed in support of this young man are a testament to the mighty son, friend and warrior that he was.  U.S. Marine Corps statement

The U.S. Marine Corps said Segovias current assignment was at the student reconnaissance training company. He had earned the National Defense Service Medal and certificate of commendation.

A statement from the Marine Corps said that his death weighed heavily on everyones hearts.

The overwhelming support and prayers we witnessed in support of this young man are a testament to the mighty son, friend and warrior that he was, the statement said.

Although we grieve the loss of one of our own, we will continue to stand with and support Carlos loved ones as they work through this tragedy. In a very short time, [Segovia] deeply impacted those who came to know him and his unselfish and honorable legacy will live on in our Corps. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

Lopez called for people in the community to speak up.

He wanted to give his life to people, she said. He doesnt deserve this.

Near the end of the vigil, a man played taps on a trumpet as men and women began to cry.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Criminal Gang Homicide Division at (323) 786-5110. Those who wish to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477.

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

Twitter: @nicolesantacruz

Times staff writers Veronica Rocha and Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.

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A Burbank man was sentenced, then released Tuesday after serving nearly a year in county jail for punching a 78-year-old shopper who wanted to taste a Nutella waffle sample at Costco.

Derrick Gharabighi, 25, pleaded no contest in October 2015 to one count of elder abuse and agreed to remain in custody until his official sentencing on Tuesday, according to Ricardo Santiago, spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorneys office.

At the hearing Tuesday, Gharabighi was sentenced to two years, and received credit for time served, Santiago said. Gharabighi was released later that day.

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Gharabighi was arrested in September 2015 when he hit Sahak Sahakian for complaining about the number of Nutella waffles samples he had taken.

Sahakian was shopping at the warehouse store in Burbank and approached the Nutella waffle sample cart. There were four samples left.

When Gharabighi reportedly took three, Sahakian made his move and attempted to get the last sample.

But Gharabighi swooped in, pushed Sahakians hand down and grabbed the last one, the victim said.

I said, What are you doing? I want to eat, Sahakian told the Glendale News-Press. He got angry and hit my head, and the blood started to go.

Sahakian suffered a 1-inch cut near his eye and was taken to an area hospital.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

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The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating reports of an oil sheen and strong smell near Vallejo that prompted firefighters to recommend residents shelter in place after some complained they had trouble breathing.

A Coast Guard helicopter planned to conduct a search Wednesday morning to try to locate the sheen near Vallejo and Mare Island. Coast Guard boats and a helicopter crew did not find the sheen on Tuesday.

The ferry Intintoli first reported a strong smell of oil at about 8 p.m. Later, other ferry vessels and crew members from Coast Guard Station Vallejo reported seeing a sheen on the water.

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Coast Guard officials said its unclear if the sheen is related to the strong odor that prompted the Vallejo Fire Department to advise its residents to stay indoors, close their windows and turn off any air conditioning.

Pacific Gas & Electric said a team was working with public safety officials in Vallejo to determine the origins of the odor.

Residents reported difficulty breathing because of the strong odor, with many flocking to Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center to seek medical assistance, KPIX-TV reported.

According to the fire department, natural gas levels in the air were normal.

Due to this evenings wind conditions, we are confident to report that the source of the unknown odor is not from within the Vallejo city limits, the fire department said.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

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Seattle officials are moving forward with a controversial plan for what would be the nations first supervised heroin-injection clinics  government-financed shooting galleries that supporters say can save lives but that critics say will only enable drug users.

A new 99-page task force study envisions at least two safe-use facilities  one in Seattle, another in the suburbs  where heroin addicts can legally take narcotics while being monitored by medical personnel who can administer aid or call 911 if needed.

The project is modeled after North Americas first supervised heroin haven, InSite, a government-funded injection facility 140 miles north in Vancouver, B.C., which in 13 years of operation has never had an overdose fatality, officials there say.

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That success has inspired other cities  including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland  to consider government-approved safe sites for addicts to inject heroin. But Seattle is moving fastest, convinced there is urgent need for action, as the new study puts it.

For me personally, what has worked, says Seattle social worker Thea Oliphant-Wells, a task force member and recovering heroin addict for 11 years, was to have harm-reduction folks engaging me long before I was ready to change my drug-abuse behavior. I promise you, when you give people the opportunity to get better, they will.

Jeff Duchin, head of Seattle-King County Public Health, said the safe sites  officially known as Community Health Engagement Locations  will increase the odds for drug users to return to healthy lives by reducing overdoses, preventing HIV and other infections and cutting down on other drug-related medical problems.

The proposal has the support of King Countys chief executive and the mayor of Seattle, a city once dubbed by Rolling Stone as Junkie Town. Heroin use here and across the U.S. dripped, then spiked in the last decade as Americans addicted to pain killers such as OxyContin and Percocet looked to the streets for cheaper alternatives.

A heroin user prepares to shoot up in New London, Conn., an area hit hard by the surging heroin problem. (John Moore / Getty Images )

A United Nations study released this summer found that use of heroin has soared in the last two decades. U.S. deaths related to the narcotic have increased fivefold since 2000 and the number of U.S. users has tripled to one million in that time.

In King County, with good Samaritan laws that prevent prosecution of anyone who, in good faith, aids an overdose victim, and with wider use of the recovery drug Naloxone by first responders, overdose deaths actually dropped last year  132, compared with 156 in 2014.

But from 2010 to 2014, the number of users seeking treatment here doubled from 1,439 to 2,886, and the death toll in 2015 was a third higher than two years ago.

With no apparent end to the upward trend, local officials say safe-use sites are a worthy intervention.

If its a strategy that saves lives then regardless of the political discomfort, I think it is something we have to move forward, said County Executive Dow Constantine, discussing the plan at a news conference last week.

Seattle police have taken a wait-and-see position, but King County Sheriff John Urquhart told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that he sees the safe-injection plan as workable.

As long as there was strong, very strong, emphasis on education, services, and recovery, I would say that yes, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, he said. We will never make any headway in the war on drugs until we turn the war into a health issue.

The injection clinics are among a list of task force recommendations that include expanding education, treatment and needle-exchange programs. No cost estimates have been given, but pilot-project funding is being sought. The clinics, besides providing overdose prevention and treatment, would include provisions for basic medical treatment and social services assistance.

Mayor Ed Murray is cautiously optimistic about the idea, saying clinic locations must not adversely affect neighborhoods. His office is already getting objections from residents who worry their community could come to resemble Vancouvers Downtown Eastside, Canadas poorest neighborhood, where the InSite clinic operates.

Safe-consumption sites for the addicted are not new in Seattle. The city has established a successful housing project for alcoholics that allow residents to drink in their rooms. Officials say it saves taxpayers $4 million a year in emergency services and other aid for homeless alcoholics.

Shilo Murphy, director of Seattles 25-year-old needle exchange program  the largest in the U.S.  told The Times in June: Weve got to try something different. A task force member, hes pushing for a novel addition to the proposal  a large van, or mobile shooting gallery, with a medical assistant, traveling to targeted neighborhoods and offering supervised injections.

Doing something different is also the hope of Nancy Backus. Thats because, says the mayor of suburban Auburn, Wash., the situation is different today.

There isnt really one face of addiction any longer. We can no longer drive by or walk by any one person and say, Oh, that person is addicted to drugs. Its our sons. Its our daughters. Its our mothers and fathers. Its our friends and loved ones. And we no longer have the luxury of pretending it doesnt impact each and every one of us.

Anderson is a special correspondent.

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The fatal shooting by police of a 43-year-old black man has stoked long-simmering tensions over race and policing in this city, with its large African American population and high levels of segregation.

In some ways, the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott defies the narrative of police violence against black men that has inspired the Black Lives Matter movement. Charlotte, an embodiment of the New South, has a black police chief and a progressive political reputation. And the officer who shot Scott, according to authorities, is black.



For the record: An earlier version of this article said the person shot at a protest Wednesday night had died. Authorities have since revised their earlier report to say that the victim survived but is in serious condition.

But the reaction of many in the citys African American community has been visceral and sharply at odds with official accounts.

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Activists and Scotts family have disputed nearly every detail that has emerged about Tuesdays shooting, leaving residents of North Carolinas largest city grappling with two conflicting narratives.

One person was seriously injured Wednesday night after shots were fired during protests near the Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown Charlotte, according to the Mecklenburg Emergency Medical Services Agency. Authorities said a civilian fired the shots.

Hotel managers closed the hotel and barricaded it with furniture, and police in riot gear fired tear gas at protesters and blocked streets.

Protests and vigils continued peacefully in other areas of the city Wednesday night, including near the site of Scotts shooting and at local churches.

This is a very difficult situation, Mayor Jennifer Roberts said at a news conference earlier in the day as she and the police chief appealed for calm. Roberts promised a transparent investigation.

The refusal by police to quickly release video of the shooting may have undercut that promise in the eyes of many in the community who reject the police description of Scott as armed and threatening. Scott instantly joined a roll call of the names of black men fatally shot by police in the United States in recent months  and may have contributed to a shift in how those shootings are perceived.

Blue-on-black violence is a better metaphor than white-on-black violence, said Nirej Sekhon, an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University who has studied police shootings. There tends to be a visceral reaction: Oh, another white officer has shot another black man. But racism doesnt really help account for these incidents. At least, I dont think its the narrow, individualized brand of racism we typically imagine: a malevolent, white racist enacting violence on the black body.

1 / 24 A protester uses milk to wash tear gas from her eyes after police used the gas to clear demonstrators who were blocking Interstate 277 in Charlotte, N.C., on Thursday. (Dillon Deaton / For The Times) 2 / 24 Protesters raise their hands as they march through downtown Charlotte, N.C., to protest the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. (Dillon Deaton / For The Times) 3 / 24 Police use pepper spray and tear gas to force protesters off Interstate 277 on Thursday. (Dillon Deaton / For The Times) 4 / 24 A protester kneels after police used tear gas to clear demonstrators on the Interstate in Charlotte. (Dillon Deaton / For The Times) 5 / 24 Protesters gather outside a government building in downtown Charlotte on Thursday. (Dillon Deaton / For The Times) 6 / 24 A protester with a biblical message. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) 7 / 24 As curfew in Charlotte approached Thursday night, demonstrators voiced their views loudly. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) 8 / 24 Police Capt. Mike Campagna talks with a demonstrator. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) 9 / 24 Demonstrators march in Charlotte on Thursday. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) 10 / 24 Members of the North Carolina National Guard stand guard outside the Omni Hotel in downtown Charlotte on Thursday. (Gerry Broome / Associated Press) 11 / 24 Police and protesters carry a seriously wounded person into the parking area of the Omni Hotel in downtown Charlotte on Wednesday. (Brian Blanco / Getty Images) 12 / 24 A protester faces off with riot police on Wednesday. (Brian Blanco / Getty Images) 13 / 24 A policeman and a protester face to face. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images) 14 / 24 A protester in downtown Charlotte. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images) 15 / 24 Police fire tear gas as protesters converge in downtown Charlotte, N.C., the day after the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. (Gerry Broome / Associated Press) 16 / 24 Demonstrators take to the streets Wednesday to protest the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C. (Chuck Burton / Associated Press) 17 / 24 A protester sits near a pool of blood after a man was shot during a demonstration over the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C. The man, Justin Carr, later died at a local hospital, and police said they arrested and charged a man with with the shooting. (Chuck Burton / Associated Press) 18 / 24 Demonstrators protest the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C. (Chuck Burton / Associated Press) 19 / 24 Police fire tear gas at protesters in downtown Charlotte, N.C., the day after the fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. (Gerry Broome / Associated Press) 20 / 24 Protesters throw chairs at a restaurant during a demonstration against the use of deadly force by police in Charlotte, N.C. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images) 21 / 24 Protesters march to demonstrate agasint the fatal police shooting of Keith Scott in Charlotte, N.C. (Brian Blanco / Getty Images) 22 / 24 Police face off with protestors on Interstate 85 in Charlotte, N.C., during demonstrations after a man was shot to death by police. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) 23 / 24 Protestors march down a street in the early hours of Wednesday. The protests began after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was shot and killed by police in northeast Charlotte, N.C. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images) 24 / 24 A police officer in riot gear walks past a fire on Interstate 85 in Charlotte, N.C. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images)

Police in Charlotte say 16 officers suffered minor injuries after protesters threw bottles and rocks at them through early Wednesday morning as demonstrators shut down an interstate highway, set ablaze cargo from stalled tractor-trailers, smashed police cruiser windows and looted a Wal-Mart.

Dozens of protesters were injured and one was arrested as police in riot gear dispersed tear gas through crowds gathered near the site of Scotts death in a northeast neighborhood close to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Its time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the storys a little bit different as to how its been portrayed so far, especially through social media, said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney, who said protesters were reacting to falsehoods.

Family members say Scott had an unspecified disability and was reading a book in his truck on Tuesday afternoon as he waited for his elementary-school-aged son to get off a bus near the entrance to an apartment complex. They say he was unarmed.

Some witnesses say a white officer shot Scott with no provocation as he got of of his truck, while police say it was a black officer who shot him after Scott refused to let go of a gun as he opened his door.

Brentley Vinson, the officer police identified as having shot Scott, has been put on routine administrative leave, Putney said.

Police say Vinson was at a University City apartment complex looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant -- not Scott -- but happened upon him shortly before 4 p.m. Scott got out of the truck with a gun, according to police, then got back in the truck. Police said that they told Scott to drop the gun but that he got back out of the vehicle with the gun and posed an imminent deadly threat before the officer shot him.

Scott was pronounced dead at a hospital. Putney said a gun -- but no book -- was recovered from the truck.

Whatever they are saying, its wrong, said Scotts mother, Vernita Walker, who lives in Charleston, S.C. Walker said Scott had seven kids, and described him as a family man.

Another woman, who described herself as Scotts daughter, broadcast over Facebook from the police scene at the complex after the shooting. In a post that went viral and was laced with profanities directed at police, she said that her father was disabled and that his shooting was unjust. The woman, whose video garnered more than 500,000 views, did not reply to a request for an interview.

In a statement, Scotts wife, Rakeyia Scott, said she has more questions than answers about the shooting after hearing police statements, and she called for peace.

We respect the rights of those who wish to protest, but we ask that people protest peacefully. Please do not hurt people or members of law enforcement, damage property or take things that do not belong to you in the name of protesting, the statement said.

The ACLU of North Carolina called on police to release any dashboard-camera or body-camera videos of the shooting, and the U.S. Department of Justice said it was aware of the shooting. Charlotte has a body-camera program for police, but the officer who shot Scott was in plainclothes and not wearing a body camera, Putney said. He added that there is dash-cam video that would not be released, citing a controversial North Carolina law passed in recent months that prohibits police from releasing video without a court order.

On Wednesday, mourners and activists gathered near the site of the shooting to speak against police statements from earlier in the morning and to call on residents to rise up against a virus among officers. They also called for a boycott of white-owned businesses.

Were not going to be doing marches. Its all about fighting the system and getting rid of these dirty cops thats inside. Youve got a virus; you need some chemotherapy to get that virus and that cancer out. Theres some cops who have that same mentality in Charlotte, said John Barnett of True Healing Under God (T.H.U.G.), a civil rights group, who said he was in touch with Scotts family.

What color is the officer? Barnett shouted at one point, as a crowd yelled back, White!

He had a book. Stop giving him a gun that doesnt exist, yelled a woman in the crowd.

Residents and activists said that the unrest in response to the shooting was not about one shooting alone. The city, a Southern headquarters for the banking industry and national nonprofit groups, is known for a strong African American middle class but also is among the states most segregated cities, with large pockets of poverty among minorities.

Black residents make up 34% of the citys population, which is 44% white.

Charlotte is still reeling from a high-profile police shooting in September 2013, when an officer fatally shot a 24-year-old unarmed black man, Jonathan Ferrell, after he crashed his car in a neighborhood a few miles from where Scott died. A white officer hit Ferrell with 10 bullets; police said Ferrell had ignored officer commands.

A jury deadlocked in the officers trial last year, and the state said it would not retry him. Ferrells family settled a $2.25-million civil lawsuit with the city.

Residents have long complained about mistreatment from police. In a force led by a Putney, a black chief, the issues are also bigger than race, activists said.

Black people can also be complicit in police shootings, said Ashley Williams, a 23-year-old Charlotte activist who is involved in the Movement for Black Lives and is helping organize actions in response Scotts death. We acknowledge the police-industrial complex as inherently anti-black. Folks participation in that perpetuates anti-blackness.

Dwight Mullen, a political science professor who studies African American communities at University of North Carolina in Asheville, criticized Charlottes police for their relationship to the black community.

The police force has become more diverse, and youd think that would take it into a more positive direction, Mullen said. Its not enough. What we find is often the mechanisms that are being taken over by black officials encourage the black officials to repeat the behaviors of the people who preceded them.

Amid criticism, the Police Department, which is nearly 76% white and 17% black and also oversees unincorporated parts of Mecklenburg County, has undertaken diversity initiatives and outreach efforts with African American communities since Ferrells death.

Putney, who was appointed last year as chief, has said previously that the department needs to overcome a racist and bigoted history.

Weve got to get through this, he said as he delivered a sermon at a Charlotte church in July. Weve got to confront some difficult things. Weve got to stop sugarcoating everything.

But speaking at a forum on race and policing over the summer -- in the wake of a string of shootings of black Americans across the country and protests that ensued -- he also cautioned against prejudging officers.

Even now when I see blue lights, it hits me in the stomach. Ive had that reaction since I was 8 years old, Putney said. But what you dont know is Im sometimes more fearful when I put this uniform on. Im going to tell you a secret: Im always black -- I was born that way, Im gonna die that way, but I chose to put myself in harms way with the honorable people who wear these uniforms to protect the people who need us most.

Times staff writer Kaleem reported from Charlotte and special correspondent Jarvie from Atlanta.

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UPDATES:

6:45 p.m.: Updated to reflect that the person shot during the protest has died.

6:15 p.m.: Updated with person shot during protest.

5:05 p.m.: This article has been revised throughout for additional details and for clarity.

12:10 p.m.: This article was updated with more information throughout and comment from the attorney general and ACLU.

2:30 a.m., Sept. 21: This article was updated saying protesters were on the highway.

10:05 p.m.: This article was updated with information from the scene of the protest.

This article was originally published at 8:10 p.m. Sept. 20.
Hillary Clinton sketches a vision of Tim Kaine as her vice president

Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are both investing a lot of time in debate prep these days. But theyre also testing each other out in veep prep.

Im storing up what Im learning about him from people, Clinton told People in a newly released interview. I intend to interrogate his three children.

In the interview, the Democratic ticket gave an early assessment of how they see working together in the White House with a job description for Kaine that sounds an awful lot like what Joe Biden does in the Obama administration.

Ive seen it up close and know how important it is, Clinton said of the vice presidency. This is the person - the last person in the room. This is the person that you see every day, that you sit down and talk with. And yes, theres a lot of serious stuff to talk about, but kidding each other, getting some release from all of the constant stress, thats a big part of it, too.

Asked about specific policy areas Kaine might focus on, Clinton first cited his experience as a city councilor and mayor of Richmond, Va.

Weve got work to do in a lot of our cities, and Im going to want him helping to give direction to that, she said.

She also pointed to his experience in Latin America as a former missionary, and his fluency in Spanish.

We want to make sure that our neighbors to the south are going to be good partners with us in so many ways, to fight climate change, to enhance security, to create more links between our people. So its a broad menu of possibilities, she said.

As part of his implementation of the presidents stimulus program, Biden -- who earned the title sheriff-- interacted regularly with local government officials, often insisting they reach out to him directly to report problems.

Biden also has played a big role in the administrations policy in the Western Hemisphere, traveling often to Central America in particular and working closely with Brazil. Hes joked that Obama told him: You do the hemisphere.

For his part, Kaine said he expects to play a role, but noted that ultimately the president is the boss.

The vice president has a wonderful ability to make a case and influence and promote the administration being its very, very best. But at the end of the day its the president who has that weight on the shoulders, he said.

Kaine joked about the hours he and his wife spent with the entire Clinton family before he was named to the ticket, and when Bill Clinton pulled him aside for a private conversation.

I felt like a prospective son-in-law getting interviewed, he said. I really felt like he had to kick the tires, too.
Term limits are forcing Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich from office after a 36-year tenure, and now voters in his far-flung north county district must choose between the veteran supervisors chief of staff, Kathryn Barger, and political newcomer Darrell Park. Residents looking for a change of policy or even just a change of pace might be tempted to vote for Park, but he is unprepared and unsuited for the job of representing 2 million people on a board with broad responsibilities ranging from transportation to management of parkland to delivery of vital human services. Barger is a thoughtful and experienced policymaker who would bring a good balance of continuity and new thinking, pragmatism and creativity, to the board. She is the better choice.

Antonovich has often been derided by liberals in and outside of his district as an ultra-conservative out of step with Los Angeles County, a relic of an era in which the Board of Supervisors was dominated by Republican white men. He has indeed stuck by his conservative principles but is also noted for assembling a talented and diverse policy staff that was responsible for some of the boards best work on child welfare, among other issues. Barger was one of his smartest hires, quickly rising to lead his team.

Her challenge now is to convince voters  in a district that no longer leans as far to the right as it did when Antonovich was first elected  that she would offer more than a mere continuation of her boss tenure.

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She would likely work well with the current board majority on the top challenges that currently face the county: homelessness, mental health and child welfare.

In fact it was Barger who for many years coaxed the pragmatic center from Antonovich and helped him form constructive policy alliances with some of the boards more liberal members. She was not always successful. For example, Antonovich voted to reject federal funding for health care for undocumented immigrants; Barger says she would have taken it. Unlike Antonovich, Barger supports the housing first approach to helping ill or addicted homeless people. She favors abortion rights, not that thats an issue that looms large on the Board of Supervisors.

She would likely work well with the current board majority on the top challenges that currently face the county: homelessness, mental health and child welfare. It is noteworthy that she has strong bipartisan support, with endorsements not just from a host of Republican officials but also from former Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina, and current Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, all Democrats. She also has the backing of the countys large labor organizations.

Thats bad news for Park, who has based much of his campaign on being a Democrat. There is no reason he cant make the most of his party registration in his quest to win this nonpartisan office, but he was politically clumsy and less than honorable about it when he wrote, in material distributed to voters with their sample ballots, that the county cannot afford to elect a supervisor who will support Donald Trumps extreme Republican agenda.

Barger is in fact a moderate Republican but is not a Trump supporter, and Parks attempt to link them through innuendo is a bit, well, Trump-like. A judge ordered the statement stricken from the ballot materials.

On policy, Park offers simplistic ideas more suited to a suggestion box or a comment board than a Board of Supervisors. Move the homeless to the desert, for example  fine for people who want to go there but not much of a solution for people who need jobs, mental health treatment or addiction services. Send L.A.s garbage to Arizona in order to close local landfills  nice for people living near Sunshine Canyon but an environmental nightmare for Arizona, and an irresponsible transfer of problems from one region to another.

Park worked for a decade at the White House Office of Management and Budget and since then has been an entrepreneur, working on solar projects. Many of his ideas for county government, perhaps not surprisingly, revolve around solar energy. When he strays from that subject, he appears out of his depth.

The race offers some noteworthy fodder for pundits. If Park were to win, for example, and Janice Hahn were to win in the Fourth District, all five supervisors would be Democrats for the first time in living memory. If Barger and Hahn were to win, four of the five would be women. And that would mean  well, what, exactly?

Far more important than the partisan lineup on the nonpartisan board, and far more important than the shifting gender balance, is the supervisors ability to address the steep challenges  poverty, health, public safety, transportation, homelessness  that face the nations most populous county. Of the two candidates in the Fifth District, Barger is the one who is up to the task. The Times urges a vote for Barger.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been getting a lot of notice for her tough questioning of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, and thats as it should be. The mega-bank recently settled a lawsuit over its outrageous practice of opening fake accounts for real customers without their permission  and then charging the customers fees for the service. At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Warren branded Stumpf gutless for blaming the mess on employees, called on him to resign and said he should be criminally investigated.

Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into whether Stumpf and other senior bank officials engaged in fraud by imposing impossibly steep sales quotas that they knew  or should have known would pressure bank workers to rack up fees by any means necessary. In the meantime, though, lets remember what landed Stumpf in the Senate hot seat and perhaps in prosecutorial sights in the first place.

It began with investigative stories by now-retired Times reporter E. Scott Reckard beginning in 2013.

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It continued with a lawsuit against Wells Fargo, filed last year by Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer.

Feuer? Why him rather than some state attorney general?

Well, why not? Los Angeles banking customers were among the perhaps 2 million people being charged for services they never sought, and Reckards reporting began with a story on the firing of bank employees in the L.A. region for opening fake accounts. Feuer was elected to represent the municipal entity that is the city of Los Angeles, but also to look out for the interests of its people  and despite Wells Fargos court pleadings to the contrary, he had the power under state unfair business practice laws to act. He acted.

Los Angeles city attorneys are sometimes belittled for operating outside their local job descriptions in search of broader glory, but they could just as easily be chided for thinking too narrowly. Whats the point of voters in the nations second-largest city electing a lawyer if that person cant or wont look out for their interests? L.A.s city attorney represents more people than the attorneys general of nearly half the states and has the power to protect consumers. In the Wells Fargo case, Feuer wielded that power well.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Terrorism has emerged once again as the central issue in the presidential campaign  but not in a way anyone expected. In the wake of attacks last week in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have accused each other of being the candidate Islamic terrorists prefer.

Clinton started it  this weeks round, at least. She came out swinging on Monday, saying Trumps rhetoric made him a recruiting sergeant for Islamic State. The language that Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries, she said. (Aid and comfort is part of the Constitutions definition of treason.)

Trump, who earlier accused President Obama and Clinton of being the founders of Islamic State, fired back. Terrorists all over the world  are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes president, he said. They want her so badly to be your president, you have no idea, he added later. It will be a field day.

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Its dangerous to call anything unprecedented, but I cant remember a presidential campaign in which the candidates accused each other of being in league, wittingly or not, with the nations worst enemies.

On the facts, Clinton has the better of this argument. This spring, spokesmen for Islamic State celebrated Trumps proposals to ban Muslim immigration.

During the Cold War, Republicans sometimes accused liberal Democrats of being soft on communism  but usually painted them as dupes, not co-conspirators.

When many Americans are gripped by fear of terrorist strikes in city streets or shopping malls, this is pretty rough stuff.

It should go without saying that neither Islamic State nor any other terrorist group has endorsed either candidate. (If they did, the result could be dramatic.)

But on the facts, Clinton has the better of this argument. This spring, spokesmen for Islamic State celebrated Trumps proposals to ban Muslim immigration to the United States apparently because they believed it would sharpen the clash of civilizations the extremist group wants to provoke. I ask Allah to deliver America to Trump, one wrote.

Thats why former CIA director Michael Hayden, a George W. Bush appointee, has criticized the GOP nominee on this issue. When Trump says they all hate us, hes using their narrative, Hayden told the Guardian newspaper. Hes feeding their recruitment video.

Contrary to what Trump said, theres no record of any Islamic State spokesmen saying they want Clinton to win. The GOP nominee claimed that the terrorists prefer Clintons policies to his, but theres no evidence of that either.

Trumps argument is that Clinton, as secretary of State under President Obama, shares responsibility for allowing Islamic State to rise. Weve been very gentle to Islamic State, he claimed on Monday, seemingly ignoring the almost 12,000 airstrikes U.S. forces have carried out against the group since 2014.

Were going to have to do something extremely tough over there, he told Fox News.

Like what? a Fox anchor asked.

Like knock the hell out of them, Trump said. Thats about as specific as he gets.

Trump has offered two more proposals: He wants to increase ethnic and religious profiling to identify possible terrorist sympathizers in the United States. (He claims profiling isnt used now, but hes wrong about that; federal policy explicitly allows it in terrorism cases.) And he wants to impose extreme vetting on foreigners entering the United States. (Clinton has called for tough vetting.)

Heres the political surprise in this brawl: Clinton could come out ahead.

Its not at all clear that terrorist attacks, and the fears they sharpen, automatically produce votes for Trump. Thats not what happened after the attack on an Orlando nightclub in June, where 49 died. After that incident, the polls moved only a little  and in some surveys, Clintons standing improved.

Indeed, Clintons quick offensive on this issue revealed how she wants to frame the voters choice: Which candidate do you want to put in charge of the armed forces?

In normal election years, most voters say they think the Republican candidate, with the GOPs hawkish history, is better qualified to deal with terrorism.

But this isnt a normal year. In a Fox News poll released last week, more voters said Clinton would do a better job dealing with terrorism than would Trump, by 47% to 46%. Although those numbers are within the polls margin of error, they still mean the GOP has lost its usual advantage. Other surveys have shown similar results.

Clintons argument is that Trump  with his ill-considered, self-indulgent, hair-trigger responses  is too erratic to be president. Shes doing her best to keep the words commander in chief in the air.

In a focus-group discussion with undecided voters last week, several said that issue was weighing heavily on their minds.

I really dislike Hillary, said Cameron Scott, a retired bus driver from Alexandria, Va. But hes just plain scary. I cant vote for him.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Its hard not to muse  even with little confirmed information  on the demise of such a surreally glamorous, even exotic public couple as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. From the beginning of their relationship, they have invited us to watch them and ponder them.

There was the provocative, edgy photo spread in Palm Springs by Steven Klein in W Magazine to promote the couples film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith which they shot in 2004. By the time the photos came out in July 2005, Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were separated and divorcing. Whether the photos represent just a good modeling job or a couple hot for each other doing a modeling job, the magnetism was there and, soon enough, they would be a public couple.

And, clearly, anyone who negotiates a sale of pictures of themselves posing with their newborn baby, Shiloh, in 2006 to People Magazine for a reported $4.1 million knows the publics appetite for interest in them is insatiable. (Yes, they donated the money to charity  but they would never have gotten the deal if they werent insanely popular.)

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Then last year came the movie they starred in together  By the Sea  a dark tale of a gorgeous, intense couple going through intense marital strife. (I admit I never saw the movie. Not a lot of folks did. It was a box-office flop.) When they did the publicity for the movie, they were peppered with questions about whether the movie was a hint at their own lives, which they laughed off. If you had a bad marriage, you wouldnt make a movie about it, one of them essentially said.

Jolie admitted they fought sometimes  like any other couple. We have days when we drive each other absolutely mad and want space, one British paper quoted her saying. Innocuous enough. Until the Tuesday announcement.

And then this odd grace note: Us Magazine reported they spent their second wedding anniversary late last month together at dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel and stayed one night as well. I cant imagine spending an anniversary at an elegant hotel when I had an inkling Id be filing for divorce about three weeks later. But, then, when Pitt and Aniston were still married, they were seen strolling on a beach in Anguilla one day before they announced they were separating.

Of course, its impossible for outsiders to know the dynamics of a marriage whether its going well or on the verge of collapse. The last time outsiders got that completely right was when Prince Charles and the late Diana separated. Their whole lives were about publicly representing the royal family, and they were so regularly followed by the British press corp that the media could simply count up the days they were apart and know something was awry. Their separation was the most anticipated celebrity marital breakup ever.

I think we were all stunned by the Brangelina breakup because they seemed to have a truly deep love for each other. Long before they got married, he adopted the children that she had adopted on her own. In the very personal articles she wrote about her surgeries  a prophylactic double mastectomy and an oophorectomy  to better her odds of not getting the cancers that had viciously struck her mother, grandmother and aunt, she movingly mentioned the support of her husband. Just a year and a half ago, she wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times about getting a worried call from her doctor, who thought something looked amiss on one of her tests. She wrote that she immediately contacted Pitt.

He would later recall that moment in a joint TV interview that the couple did with Tom Brokaw for The Today Show. I was out in France, and Angie called me and I got straight on a plane to return,' he said. Seeing my wife have to be her strongest and knowing that its the scariest news is terribly moving.

They sat side by side. They were promoting their movie By the Sea, of course. But the memorable parts of the interview were about the medical crises they seemed to have weathered together. She said: I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasnt something where I was going to feel less of a woman because my husband wasnt going to let that happen.

That was in November, not even a year ago.

People break up. Life changes. Neither celebrity nor celebrity couples are immutable. We know all this, but its still a surprise when we are reminded of it.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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To the editor: Thank you, L.A. Times, for connecting the dots between Donald Trumps candidacy and economic and environmental destruction for the U.S. and all of the countries that depend on us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

( Trump denies climate science amid rising seas, Sept. 18)

Among his egregious lies and ignorant statements, the most harmful is his climate science flip-flopping and denial.

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I believe this dangerous pandering to the dwindling Republican minority that ignores rising seas, drought, storm flooding and fires would have an even greater effect on Americans than his bigotry and attraction to tyrants.

Thank you also for highlighting Hillary Clintons plans for reducing our emissions, which although they move us in the right direction, fall short of what we need: a revenue-neutral carbon tax like the one the California Legislature advocated to Congress.

Sharon Markenson, Woodland Hills

::

To the editor: Given Americans current distrust of government, I get that many want an outsider candidate. But one so far outside reality? And with such an outsized embrace of ignorance?

The dangers of Trump are never more evident than when he talks about climate change. And the thing is, market-based solutions are now out there  even gaining ground. Even fossil-fuel companies are getting on board.

Then theres Trump, ignoring reality. I dont believe thats the legacy voters really want.

Dennis Arp, Brea

::

To the editor: Trumps hypocrisy on climate change mirrors that displayed by the petroleum industry.

Last year, The Times revealed in an article titled Big Oil braced for warming while it fought regulations how some in the oil industry funded organizations that sowed doubts about global warming, while covertly hedging their bets with internal plans to mitigate its adverse effects.

I think Trump has made it clear that climate change be damned, he too champions immediate profits over concerns about the staggering price our descendants likely must pay.

Even if Trump loses the election, future generations will be utterly baffled by his improbable campaigns sustained success  and ashamed of ancestors who backed him.

Greg Gilbert, Cool, Calif.

::

To the editor: Trump has a point: What if climate change really is a hoax, and we reduce carbon emissions, promote renewable energy and protect our environment for nothing?

Richard Mandl, Canoga Park

::

To the editor: While I recognized an overall subtle clarification of Trumps opinions and public statements, I take exception to the statement that Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP all acknowledge that burning of fossil fuels causes global warming.

Yes, knowing that public opinion is finally coming around to accepting overwhelming scientific evidence regarding the causes of global warming, the major oil companies have publicly agreed with science.

Behind the scenes, however, I believe its a different story. They certainly are hedging their bets by pursuing alternative fuels, but, in the meantime, like Trumps conflicting public statements, the oil companies actions should be given more weight than their words.

Sharon Graham, Huntington Beach

::

To the editor: For the last five years, Trump has been associated with two bizarre ideas: that human-caused climate change is a hoax, and that Barack Obama is a native of Kenya. Trump has now disavowed the latter idea. Will he disavow the former?

And if not, will Republicans who recognize that human-caused climate change is a growing problem  and who want their party to abandon climate denialism and embrace market-based solutions to the problem of carbon pollution  disavow him?

Devone Tucker, Brockton, Mass.

::

To the editor: The headline to me is a vivid example of the misleading bias against Trump. As the article says, Trump acknowledged that climate does change, but not as a result of human activity.

Despite the intense efforts of the media and many in the science community, I believe there is much evidence that challenges both the theory and magnitude of their assertions.

Kip Dellinger, Santa Monica

::

To the editor: The article by Michael Finnegan makes it abundantly clear that Trump is beyond irresponsible, falling into a category of ignorance and destruction heretofore never seen in a public figure, much less a presidential candidate.

If this violence to our environment and common sense is intended as an attention-getter, it has succeeded in activating intelligent beings to defeat him at the polls.

Roselva Ungar, Santa Clarita

::

To the editor: There is a clear and present reason why Trump should acknowledge Global Warming. Because he alone can fix it.

Craig Rosen, Los Angeles

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Under a scorching September sun, Lauren McCarthy and Anthony Fraijo were unflaggingly chipper as they buttonholed Arizona State University students with one question: Are you happy with the two major parties?

The two recent college graduates were looking to coax voters over to a third option, the Libertarian presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. And they were working doubly fertile territory of both Arizona, home to a particular strain of libertarian-tinged conservatism, and one of the nations largest campuses, full of millennials shown to be more open to outsider candidates than older generations.

That Arizona, a reliably red state, is seen as a potential battleground at all underscores the unpredictable nature of this years presidential contest, into which Johnsons insurgent campaign has injected even more ambiguity.

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Will he build on his partys relatively strong standing here to siphon away would-be voters for Donald Trump, tipping the state to Hillary Clinton? Or will his appeal to younger voters peel off potential Democrats whom Clinton needs to pull off an upset?

Election 2016 | Live coverage on Trail Guide | Sign up for the newsletter | The race to 270

 Gary Johnson is the Libertarian party nominee running for President. Heres a look into how he got there.

McCarthy, 21, a registered Republican and recently converted Johnson supporter, said that short of an outright win, shed be fine with either scenario  so long as the Libertarians factor into the outcome.

The fact that we can start moving away from a two-party system  thats a win, she said.

Recent polls showed Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, fetching between 8% and 12% of support in Arizona, a marked improvement from his 2012 presidential bid when he notched just over 1% here. Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, registered around 3% in recent polls.

Johnson is pulling a substantial share in a race that is unusually close for this Republican Southwest stronghold. Since 1948, Arizona has only sided with a Democrat in the presidential race one time, Bill Clintons 1996 reelection.

The GOP dominance belies an uncommonly strong libertarian presence in the state, fostered by a independent frontier mythos and personified by Arizonas most famous Republican, small-government champion Barry Goldwater, the partys 1964 nominee for president.

Theres a general politics of leave-me-alone libertarianism thats popular out West, said Nicholas Sarwark, the chair of the national Libertarian Party, who lives in Phoenix.

While Republicans are the largest bloc of voters in the state, the faction of voters without a party preference trails close behind, edging out the number of registered Democrats.

When you look at independent voters, they tend to vote conservative, said Fred Solop, professor of politics at Northern Arizona University. Such voters, though, are not fully behind the Republican Party. Theyre willing to consider alternatives.

Like most third-party candidates, Johnson must contend with being a relative unknown to many voters, particularly when compared with Trump and Clinton. His campaign was dealt a setback last week when he failed to qualify for the first presidential debate.

But Johnsons campaign, powered mainly by volunteers and social media, will capitalize on any publicity. Even his recent gaffe in blanking on the name of Aleppo, the war-torn city at the heart of Syrias protracted civil war, was a boost, backers ultimately concluded.

Aleppo was a game-changer for us, said Mike Hernandez, 44, a Johnson campaign volunteer, who noted the stumble led to a surge in Google searches for the candidate and offered Johnson a chance to pitch a noninterventionist foreign policy, a principle of libertarianism.

Similarly, his campaign could capitalize on high-profile defections from Trump among the states Republican establishment. Sen. Jeff Flake, one of Arizonas most popular statewide politicians, has publicly tangled with the GOP nominee and says he cannot vote for Trump. Former Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican who represented a Tucson-area district for 22 years before retiring in 2007, is co-chair for Johnsons Arizona campaign.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) (Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press )

And one of the most prominent early moments of Trumps campaign came last summer when he disparaged U.S. Sen. John McCains years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. McCain, running for a sixth term in Arizona, has neither endorsed nor denounced Trump.

Trumps candidacy, particularly his rhetoric on illegal immigration, spurred Dave Richins, a city councilmember from the conservative Phoenix suburb of Mesa, to look for an alternative.

Ive voted Republican my whole life and I despise Hillary Clinton, Richins said. But contemplating a vote for Trump? I just cant do it.

If Johnson drains once-stalwart Republican votes away from Trump, Clinton could get a boost, Democratic politicos say. They point to other factors tightening the race in her favor, particularly Arizonas changing demographics.

Latinos make up 22% of Arizonas eligible voters, according to the Pew Research Center, ranking it fourth nationally in Latino share of the electorate.

That bloc has typically underperformed in casting ballots. Analysts say a key question will be if Latinos are so galvanized by Trumps inflammatory rhetoric on immigration that they turn out in droves, accelerating Arizonas status as a swing state.

Arizona is trending in the right direction, said Andy Barr, a Democratic strategist not affiliated with the Clinton campaign. Were not really looking at being an on-paper battleground state until 2020 or 2022, but weve been provided an opportunity to speed up that process.

The third-party presence may not entirely be a blessing for Clinton. In Arizona, like other states, Johnson is performing best among younger voters, who typically skew Democratic.

Johnsons strong polling numbers among millennials have prompted alarm in the Clinton campaign; she made a direct appeal to the demographic this week, telling young voters I need you. And Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her primary rival-turned-backer who was immensely popular with voters under 30, warned his supporters: This is not the time for a protest vote.

Currently, there may be more of a bleed on the left, voters who otherwise probably may be for Clinton, said Chuck Coughlin, a GOP strategist based in Phoenix.

As McCarthy and Fraijo, who both work on Johnsons youth outreach team, spent a weekday handing out fliers at Arizona State, they found a generally receptive audience, though some were hesitant.

Lauren McCarthy signs up Arizona State University student Brett Amaral to the Johnson campaign mailing list. (Melanie Mason / Los Angeles Times )

Brett Amaral, an 18-year-old from Surprise, Ariz., said his vote would go to either Johnson or Clinton and likely be based on whoever I approve of more on election day. He said he harbored the hang-up that voting for a third party was akin to throwing away his vote.

Its not going to happen, Amaral said of a Johnson victory. Thats why Im more for Hillary.

Johnson backers are familiar with the wasted vote argument. Third parties generally tend to fall off in the polls as election day nears and voters come home to one of the two major parties.

I would imagine Johnson is peaking here in Arizona, said Solop. I dont expect him to do better in the future.

melanie.mason@latimes.com

Follow @melmason on Twitter for the latest on national politics.

What is Aleppo?: Gary Johnsons misstep exposes shortcomings of his presidential candidacy

Voters on both sides increasingly see a Trump win as a possibility  and that may get more people to vote

Clinton acknowledges that some voters dislike of Trump isnt enough for her to count on their votes
What do voters hear when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in interview after interview, praises his running mate Donald Trumps broad shoulders?

What do they hear when Trump repeatedly criticizes Hillary Clinton for not looking presidential  and you need a presidential look? Or when he time and again calls into question her strength and stamina?

Many people, to use one of Trumps favorite phrasings, hear an effort to raise questions about whether a woman can serve as president.

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Could it be more obvious? asked pollster Christine Matthews, who has studied women voters for years amid work on Republican political campaigns.

Gender now is being wielded in a somewhat more subtle fashion than in the primary season, when Trump blistered Clinton for playing the womans card and said if it werent for her being a woman, I dont think shed get 5% of the vote.

Trump also engaged in a lengthy dispute with Fox broadcaster Megyn Kelly over his history of caustic remarks toward women, and he sniped about the face and voice of opponent Carly Fiorina.

Defenders insist Trump is an equal opportunity offender, as likely to label Republican Jeb Bush as low energy as he is to critique Clinton as weak. And Trump supporters say they do not consider the candidates remarks insulting to women, by any stretch.

I dont think he said she was weak because shes a woman, said Beth Siracuse, who lives in Upper Arlington, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Whatever his remarks, she said as she drew a contrast with Clinton: It isnt as bad as lying to the American people or calling us names.

Others, including Clinton partisans, said they were offended.

Hes racist, misogynist, said Cheryl Shilling, another Upper Arlington resident. His remarks, she said, are terrible  especially toward women.

Its hard to know whether attitudes toward Clinton have to do with her being Clinton, or that shes a woman.  Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University

 During the primaries, Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton was for playing the woman card. Now, according to the Donald, Hill lacks a presidential look.

Testosterone has infused Trumps candidacy from its inception. He has cast himself as a strong and tough leader, and his opponents  including some men  as wimpy alternatives. In one primary debate, taking offense at criticism of his hand size, he made a blunt reference to his sexual prowess.

In the carnival atmosphere that often surrounds Trump rallies, the message is far from subtle. Buttons and T-shirts critique the size of Clintons thighs and breasts, make a play on words about her engaging in a sex act and cast her as a bitch and Trump as someone with balls.

That sensibility is part of what has led women, on average, to be far more skeptical than men of both Trump and the impact he would have on their lives as president. And that in turn has threatened Trumps efforts to defeat Clintons historic campaign.

Asked in a new CBS/New York Times poll whether Trump respects women, 53% of women voters said not much or not at all. Only 20% said he had a lot of respect for women. The sentiment split on partisan lines, but a majority of independent women voters also held a negative view of Trumps respect for women.

Among women voters, 45% felt that a Clinton presidency would be good for women; only 12% said the same about a Trump presidency.

As with many elements of the Republican campaign, its not clear if Trumps use of gender to question Clintons qualifications represents a carefully crafted strategy, the candidates own views or an effort to boost the enthusiasm of his most loyal supporters  white men.

Its also not clear whether Trump will persuade any voters he doesnt already have. Views of Trump  and of Clinton  are very firmly held at this point, according to Matthews, whose partner ran an anti-Trump super PAC earlier this year.

I dont think significant numbers of women will change their minds, she said.

But Clintons candidacy is a first, so some conclusions are unknown.

When you look beyond the presidential level, voters are amenable to women candidates, said Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. At the presidential level its trickier  we only have one case.

Its hard to know whether attitudes toward Clinton have to do with her being Clinton, or that shes a woman.

Women accounted for 10 million more voters than men in the 2012 presidential election, which accentuates the need to get maximum support from them, said Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University.

Election 2016 | Live coverage on Trail Guide | Sign up for the newsletter

Gender gaps  the distance between two candidates support among men and women  have marked every presidential contest since 1980, she said. A double-digit gap between genders secured victory for President Obama in 2012 and Bill Clinton in 1996; in recent polls, Hillary Clinton has narrowly exceeded the gaps that benefited those Democrats.

Bystrom said that Clintons edge derives not only from her own gender pitch  she has detailed her life as a mother and grandmother and cited her long experience in pushing womens rights  but from limitations in Trumps approach.

In his 2004 reelection campaign, George W. Bush delivered two different security messages, Bystrom said. To men, his campaign emphasized law and order; to women, a promise to keep them and their children safe. The latter worked better with some women, she said.

Trump is talking about it in heavily male terms that are less appealing to women, she said.

The Republican nominee has nodded lately to his difficulties among women. Last week, he unveiled a child-care policy  although its rollout was marred by his false claim that Clinton had no such plan herself.

Not long after, he described a woman pastor as a nervous mess and questioned her motives after she calmly asked him to skip anti-Clinton remarks in her Michigan church. He took to Twitter over the weekend to castigate New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd as crazy, wacky and a neurotic dope  the latter adjective one he regularly uses against women.

For Trump, the difficulty in making up much ground among women was demonstrated in recent surveys in this must-win state by Suffolk University. Polls taken in July and September showed that even as Trump overtook Clinton, she retained the same hold on Ohios women voters.

Trumps Ohio campaign leaders insist the candidates comments have had no impact on his standing.

There are the things that the press will focus on at times and then there the things that the voters focus on, and I think were doing much better with what voters are focusing on right now, said campaign director Robert Paduchik.

His campaign recently launched a push to attract women voters with Trumps messages on national security, the economy and social issues. Kamilah Prince, who organized a statewide womens tour for Trump, said voters are concerned with those issues.

Hes not your retail politician where people are taught dont ever say this thing. And that what makes him organic and real.  Kamilah Prince

You know, hes new to this, she said. Hes not your retail politician where people are taught dont ever say this thing. And that what makes him organic and real. Right or wrong, people appreciate that honesty and that hes just organic, and he is what he is.

But Clinton operatives contend Trump has given the Democratic campaign an opening among Republican and independent women unavailable to previous party nominees. To boost those odds, Clinton has been airing ads showing Trumps insults to women and others and emphasizing her proposals.

In a Tonight Show appearance aired Monday, Clinton told host Jimmy Fallon that navigating a presidential campaign in a way that left a candidate appearing both serious and relatable is especially tricky for women. It just is.

But she has generally avoided complaining about gender-based remarks from Trump or his allies, some of whom recently said she had not smiled enough during a recent interview about national security.

She received high-level backup on Sunday from Obama, speaking at a New York fundraiser.

See the most-read stories this hour 

I will also say that theres a reason why we havent had a woman president; that we as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women, Obama said. And it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairly, and that expresses itself in all sorts of ways.

Clinton campaign officials are confident Trump will not be able to convince substantial numbers of voters to question a woman as president. Nor, according to Clintons Ohio director, Chris Wyant, will any softer approach Trump adopts erase memories of his earlier remarks.

He has such a long history of making those comments, Wyant said. We still see a real opportunity.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

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Updates on California politics
When she sat down at a Starbucks in Torrance a few years ago, Michele Sutter was desperately looking for a California legislator to sponsor a bill regarded by many as a nonstarter  a proposition instructing the states congressional delegation to change the U.S. Constitution.

Voters had just passed a similar measure in Los Angeles with 76% of the vote, and Sutter and others at her nonprofit  Money Out, Voters In  wanted to give the entire state a say on whether the 55 Californians they send to Congress should fight to overturn the controversial 2010 Citizens United decision that has allowed money to flood American elections.

For months, Sutter had contacted any likely legislative sponsor and sat down with a half-dozen members without luck, she said. The deadline to file bills in the California Legislature was just a week or so away.

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Its a little like shopping a screenplay, she said, where people liked the idea but didnt want to commit.

Then, in mid-February, she and some local Democratic Party officials had coffee with her state senator at the Starbucks, and he committed immediately to being the sponsor.

I was fairly shocked, frankly, she said.

It hasnt been easy. The bill has made it through the California Legislature twice, been debated before the California Supreme Court, and then Gov. Jerry Brown begrudgingly allowed it to become law. Starting in a few weeks, Californians will get a say when they cast a vote on Proposition 59.

The proposal merely instructs the congressional delegation to work to overturn Citizens United. It is an advisory measure that does not change law.

The state senator whom Sutter met with, now U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, had supported campaign finance reform for years.

My view has always been that the perception of money in politics is corrosive to democracy and if you have too much money in politics, not only do you have a perception issue, you have actual corrosive issues happening, Lieu said in a recent interview in his Capitol Hill office.

Getting the bill through the Legislature was tricky, he said.

The California Legislature had already passed a resolution in 2012 urging Congress to send states a constitutional amendment about Citizens United, and Sutter said a lot of legislators didnt see a reason for voters to do it, too.

When the Supreme Court struck down the limits on how much an individual could contribute per election in its 2014 McCutcheon vs. FEC decision, Sutters group began making the case that Congress had ignored Sacramentos instruction.

Sutters group and other money-in-politics grassroots organizations peppered lawmakers with faxes, letters and emails from constituents. They visited their Sacramento offices by the hundreds.

When you make a noise, you can have an impact, she said. The people have a lot more capacity to impact behavior than we give ourselves credit for.

The bill passed the Senate and Assembly easily and Brown allowed it to become law without his signature, saying he disagreed with the Citizens United decision, but we should not make it a habit to clutter our ballots with nonbinding measures as citizens rightfully assume that their votes are meant to have legal effect.

But before the proposition made it onto the November 2014 ballot, an anti-tax group challenged whether the Legislature had the authority to put such advisory questions on the ballot. The group called it an illegitimate exercise of legislative power. Opponents have also called it an attempt to turn out Democratic Party voters.

The state Supreme Court kept the measure off the ballot that year and ruled in January that lawmakers do have the authority to ask the public what to do through a proposition, but said the California Senate and Assembly would have to start over.

The bill was brought back to the state Legislature by Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who won Lieus district when Lieu was elected to Congress in 2014. Allen is the chairman of the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee.

The people have a lot more capacity to impact behavior than we give ourselves credit for.  Michele Sutter

Im someone who suffered through the madness of a very expensive race myself and got a first hand look at the role of money, Allen said.

The bill passed easily in a matter of weeks, and Brown again allowed the new bill to become law without his signature in June, saying it clutters the ballot with an unenforceable measure. Allen said he understands the criticism.

This is the best I can do as a state legislator. This is a tangible way for a voter to weigh in and make their concerns known, Allen said. I get the critique, but what else can a legislator or voter do in this area but weigh in, but push?

Voters once frequently used such voter instruction measures to tell their members of Congress what to do, but Californians havent used it to tell their representatives and senators to change the U.S. Constitution in 124 years.

California led the effort to have citizens elect their U.S. senators, rather than have them picked by state lawmakers. When legislators referred a proposition in 1892 asking if the change should be made, 93% of voters said yes, according to figures from the California State Archives.

Updates on California politics 

Several states followed Californias lead and put the issue before their voters and, eventually, Congress got the hint. Nearly 17 years later, the 17th Amendment passed, changing how senators are picked.

More than half of the states congressional delegation already co-sponsors legislation that would lead to an amendment to address Citizens United, but none of the bills have even gotten a committee hearing.

Lieu, who called Citizens United a stupid decision, said it will take public outcry before Congress acts.

If you look back at how constitutional amendments happen, they dont happen because Congress wakes up one day and says gee, lets do a constitutional amendment. What happens is you have agitation across America, you have grassroots agitation, you have states saying they want change, Lieu said.

sarah.wire@latimes.com

Twitter: @sarahdwire

Read more about the 55 members of Californias delegation at latimes.com/politics.

ALSO:

State agency under fire for pressuring open-government groups it regulates to change position on legislation

Californias record-setting 224-page voter guide is costing taxpayers nearly $15 million

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A rare and heated dispute has erupted between Californias campaign finance regulators and open-government groups that have accused the watchdog agency of pressuring them to rescind their support for legislation designed to show who is funding political ads.

Supporters of the bill criticized the state Fair Political Practices Commission for heavy-handed tactics that they said included pushing groups the commission has the power to investigate and fine to drop their support for the transparency bill.

Its really inappropriate for a regulator who has enormous power over organizations to call up those organizations over which they have power, and lobby them, said Trent Lange, president of California Clean Money Campaign. Its just inherently intimidating to have your regulator call you and ask you to do something.

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Michele Sutter, co-founder of the group Money Out Voters In, called it shocking behavior by the FPPC.

The bill, which died on the second to last night of the session, would have required political committees that pay for print, radio and television ads on candidates and ballot measures to clearly identify the top financial contributors to the campaigns.

The state FPPC objected to late amendments by lawmakers that it felt affected its ability to prevent donors from secretly funneling money to a campaign in amounts that are higher than legal limits by laundering contributions through a third party.

Currently political action committees and businesses can contribute no more than $4,200 to a legislative candidate.

A business that wants to skirt those rules to give $50,000 to a candidate might illegally try to launder the money by distributing it to 12 employees who would then donate less than $4,200 each to the candidate.

The FPPC said the bill would make it harder to prosecute cases by narrowing the prohibition on earmarking laundered contributions to situations in which the original source of the money expressly consents to earmarking, said Phillip Ung, legislative and external affairs director for the FPPC.

It really narrowed the circumstances in which we could successfully prosecute money laundering to the most obvious cases that we almost never run into, Ung said.

Supporters of the bill, including former FPPC General Counsel Bob Stern, denied that the bill would have made it harder to take action against money-laundering schemes and said the measure advanced the cause of greater disclosure.

Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Echo Park), a co-author of the bill, said that despite widespread support from the political reform community, including 106,000 signatures on petitions, he was surprised when the FPPC opposed the bill, which he said gave cover to Republicans to vote no.

The bill failed to get a two-thirds vote when no Republican senators supported it. GOP lawmakers said during the floor debate that the FPPCs opposition was a factor in their vote.

Many Republicans already had objections to provisions of the bill, including one that would allow organizations including unions and trade groups to collect up to $7,000 from their members for candidates and ballot measure committees.

Gomez shared concerns that the FPPC advocacy effort was heavy-handed.

I think its a legitimate concern, Gomez said. They called every one of our supporters, the good government groups, and tried to peel them off. I think these groups might feel unnecessary pressure to change their positions.

Emily Rusch, executive director of consumer advocacy group CalPIRG, said she was approached by Ung to drop her support for the bill.

She said the FPPC has appropriately taken public positions on bills within its jurisdiction in the past, but this is the first time she remembers getting a call from an official at the agency asking her to change her position.

Updates from Sacramento 

He did make it clear it was a priority of the chair, Rusch said referring to FPPC Chairwoman Jodi Remke. As a result, Rusch said she spent several hours re-reviewing the bill before deciding to maintain her groups position of support.

An agency lobbying an organization it has the power to regulate raises some questions, Rusch said.

An officer with another nonprofit group, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of angering the FPPC, said that Ung also mentioned that Remke was taking note of which groups supported the bill and which opposed it.

He said he didnt like to play hardball, but he did feel compelled to remind me that the FPPC, particularly the chair, would have a long memory on this, the officer recalled. It seems pretty out of line to me.

Ung said he acted appropriately while aggressively representing the FPPCs position.

He said AB 700 was a priority for the commission and that pointing that out to people he spoke with was not meant as a threat.

I said the commission has a long memory about this stuff, Ung recalled. When people push reform, we remember who supported it and who didnt.

Ung said he has no power to punish groups that refuse to adopt a position he is advocating.

The way we have the firewalls designed here I dont know how I could direct enforcement to go after somebody. I dont direct enforcement, Ung said.

Ung also called officials with California Common Cause, according to the groups executive director, Kathay Feng.

They are engaging in very strong tactics that many organizations are finding to be uncomfortable, Feng said. The uncomfortability is that we are simultaneously being lobbied by an entity that is taking a different position on a bill, and also has the power of enforcement of campaign finance laws over us.

Feng and others said they think they know the motivation behind the FPPCs opposition to AB 700 and another bill that would have required those trying to influence state procurement contract decisions to register as lobbyists.

It involves the Political Reform Act that then-Secretary of State Jerry Brown and others won voter approval for in 1974, Feng said. The law limits and requires disclosure of campaign contributions and other political activity.

Feng said the FPPCs opposition to some bills this year reflects a desire by the Brown-appointed panel to simplify the law, not expand it.

I have heard both Jodi Remke and Gov. Brown say publicly that they think its time to trim the Political Reform Act, Feng said. How that plays out in policy is something that we are experiencing right now.

Stern agreed with Feng about the FPPCs opposition to new disclosure bills.

Commissioners have been somewhat resistant to changing the law, he said. I think they want to simplify the law. Thats their main goal. Any time you change the law it makes it more difficult for the agency and the regulated community.

Remke declined comment to The Times, referring instead to a letter the commission sent to legislators about the bill. Agency spokesman Jay Wierenga said the FPPCs priorities include effective enforcement and improved transparency.

Nothing about simplifying the law should be construed as meaning we want to weaken it, Wierenga said. On the contrary, an easier-to-understand law would improve compliance and enforcement and would encourage civic participation, hopefully improving public trust.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Follow @mcgreevy99 on Twitter

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Meeting under the umbrella of the United Nations General Assembly, international leaders on Wednesday launched new efforts to stem the rising tide of antimicrobial resistance, which has blunted the effectiveness of existing medications in treating infectious diseases.

Heads of state and country delegates gathered at a U.N. meeting on the subject vowed to increase international coordination and funding aimed at monitoring the emergence of antimicrobial resistance and reducing the misuse of antimicrobial agents in human and veterinary health and agriculture.

Working from a blueprint drafted in 2015 by the World Health Organization, U.N. agencies overseeing global medicine, agriculture, animal health and economic development are to sketch out a raft of actions for the General Assembly to take up in September 2018.

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In the United States, antimicrobial-resistant bacteria cause more than 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths each year, resulting in an estimated $20 billion in excess medical spending.

Driven by overuse in farm animals and human patients, as well as by organisms natural tendency to evolve resistance to competitive microbes, disease-causing bacteria such as Clostridium difficile, Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Staphylococcus aureus are quickly developing resistance to powerful wide-spectrum antibiotics.

In hospitals, locker rooms and public spaces, disease-causing bacteria that can no longer be vanquished by existing medications are thriving.

The U.N.s blueprints for action can only be useful if they are reflected and implemented at the national level, and if they are the basis on which we create the necessary sustainable change in the way we use antibiotics, said Dr. Monique Eloit, director general of the World Organization for Animal Health.

Eloit told leaders that nations must adopt domestic policies and also work together to reduce the overuse of existing antibiotics and speed the discovery of new ones to replace those waning in effectiveness.

We all know that research on new molecules needs to be boosted through private and public collaboration, Eloit said.

The U.N. initiatives come on the heels of evidence, collected by U.S. monitoring agencies, that E. coli bacteria has begun to circulate inside the United States that is resistant to colistin, a wide-spectrum antibiotic thats a last line of defense for many patients.

Samples of E. coli with a colistin-resistant gene were first found in China, one of the worlds biggest users of colistin in agriculture. In a process that is sapping the power of medicines around the world, scientists surmise that the broad use of colistin in livestock accelerated the evolution in E. coli of resistance genes.

Despite campaigns aimed at discouraging the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, a study released this week suggests that physicians have not scaled back on prescribing the medications.

Research published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday found that overall rates of antibiotic use in U.S. hospitals were unchanged from 2006 to 2012. During the same period, the use in hospitals of some antibiotics, especially those capable of combating a wide range of pathogens, increased.

In more than half of in-patient hospital stays, the study found, a physician prescribed antibiotics. And a growing proportion of those prescriptions were for the kinds of drugs that should be used as infrequently as possible to preserve their effectiveness: third- and fourth-generation cephalosporins, macrolides, glycopeptides, -lactam/-lactamase inhibitor combinations, carbapenems and tetracyclines.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @LATMelissaHealy and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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Halloween is right around the corner, which means Thanksgiving and Christmas will be coming up soon. If youre already worried about putting on extra pounds over the holidays, a new study has some discouraging news: Your fears are justified.

Americans who participated in the study saw their weight increase by 0.2% during the Thanksgiving holiday and 0.4% over Christmas, researchers report in Thursdays edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Though Americans are known to have trouble maintaining a healthy weight  38% of us are obese and another 33% are merely overweight, according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  this pattern of holiday weight gain is hardly unique to the United States.

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In Germany, study participants boosted their body weight by 0.6% around Christmas and another 0.2% around Easter. And in Japan, celebrants got 0.5% heavier over Christmas and 0.3% heavier during Golden Week, a period that encompasses four national holidays.

Different countries celebrate different holidays, but many such celebration periods have one thing in common: an increased intake of favorite foods, study authors wrote.

The researchers analyzed daily fluctuations in the weight of 2,924 people with Withings wireless scales, which automatically transmit weight measurements to a smartphone app. That prevented study participants from fudging their numbers on days when the scale delivered unwelcome news.

The research team  Elina Helander of Tampere University of Technology in Finland, Brian Wansink of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and Angela Chieh of Withings, a consumer electronics company in Paris  examined data collected from the scales between August 2012 and July 2013. The weight readings were converted into daily weight changes, which were used to compute an average for each country.

To measure the effects of big holidays, the team determined the highest weight of each participant during the 10 days after a holiday and compared it with his or her weight 10 days before the holiday. That way, the researchers were able to include the extra pounds people put on while drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes (380 calories per 16-ounce serving) in the days leading up to Thanksgiving and eating gingerbread while waiting for Santa.

The effect of all this binging was visible on scales in all three countries.

The Christmas-to-New-Years season was the biggest doozy in the Western nations, causing Germans to put on an average of 1.75 pounds and Americans to gain an average of 1.3 pounds, according to the study.

In Japan, the most significant toll came during Golden Week, with study participants gaining an average of 1.1 pounds. Although the absolute amount of weight gain was lower than in the other countries, it represented the same percentage increase as was seen in the U.S.

About half of this extra weight was lost relatively soon after it was put on, but the other half persisted until the summer or beyond, the researchers wrote. In all three countries, the average weight of the study participants was lower at the end of the study than it was at the start.

Thats probably a sign that this group of people was more motivated toward weight loss than average, the researchers noted. (And that explains why they invested in Withings scales, which start at about $130.)

A truly representative sample of Americans, Germans and Japanese might gain even more weight over the holidays, Wansink said. Previous studies have found that people tend to gain 3 to 4 pounds over the holidays and take longer to burn it off, but those results were based on self-reported data that arent as reliable as the measurements from the wireless scales.

Wansink said he was surprised the Americans didnt pack on holiday pounds more often. The Fourth of July and Labor Day were two prime candidates, since celebrations often revolve around barbecues.

The study findings demonstrate that if you wait until January to overhaul your eating habits, youre already way behind.

Make an October resolution instead of a New Years resolution, Wansink said.

karen.kaplan@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @LATkarenkaplan and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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There are certainly many perks that come with a job at the top of the corporate ladder, but this is not one of them: When people with prestigious jobs fall into depression, they are less likely to benefit from treatment than their coworkers several rungs below them.

In a study of 654 employed patients who sought help for depression, researchers found that those in occupations with high wages and status showed a poorer response to treatment and higher rates of treatment-resistant depression.

After study subjects got at least two different treatments for depression, 55.9% in those in the highest occupational group failed to see their depression lift. In contrast, only 40.2% of the middle-level workers and 44.3% of those toiling in low-level jobs remained treatment-resistant.

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The researchers, who presented their findings Wednesday at the European College of Psychoneuropharmacology Congress, counted psychotherapy and a course of antidepressant medication as a treatment. They defined treatment resistance as a failure to respond to at least two antidepressant regimens  a change of antidepressants; the addition of psychotherapy to an antidepressant or an antidepressant to psychotherapy; or a shift from one to the other.

By the studys end, only around one in six in the higher-status group had achieved remission from an episode of depression. Among those employed in the middle-level and low-level occupations, one in four did so.

The depressed subjects hailed from Austria, Belgium, Israel and Italy. Those who worked in posh jobs were younger, more educated and more likely to get psychotherapy in addition to antidepressants than were those in lower-status jobs. That combination of treatments is considered the standard of care in treatment of major depressive disorder. But in the United States, especially, psychotherapy is often omitted because it can be hard to access and is time-consuming, expensive and has been poorly reimbursed by insurers.

From 2009 to 2012, the most recent period for which statistics are available, 7.6% of Americans older than 12 were thought to suffer from moderate to severe depression. A 2010 study found that about half of Americans with major depressive disorder did not get any treatment for the condition. That research also found evidence that depressed African Americans and Mexican Americans are more inclined to accept psychotherapy than are non-Latino whites, and that they were less likely than whites to get antidepressant medication.

The authors of the latest research, which is considered preliminary because it has not been published, acknowledged that existing research has consistently shown that people with low incomes and educational levels are more likely to develop depression than people who are affluent and well-educated. Their findings suggest that in recommending depression treatments, doctors and mental health workers should take a patients work into account as well, they added. The results of this study might sound counterintuitive, said Dr. Eduard Vieta, who chairs of the University of Barcelonas Department of Psychiatry and Psychology. But people with highly demanding jobs are subject to a lot of stress, and when they break down with depression, it may be particularly difficult to cope with demands they were previously managing to satisfy. Alternatively, said Vieta, patients in high-status jobs may be less likely to accept antidepressant medications as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Since that combination is generally thought most effective in sending depression into remission, he said, those smart, hard-charging people may be denying themselves the fastest route to remission.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @LATMelissaHealy and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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Underground utilities, a hotly debated topic in Newport Heights for more than a year, could soon become a reality.

After more than an hour of passionate testimony Tuesday in which residents of the Newport Beach neighborhood debated the benefits and challenges of placing utility lines underground, the City Council voted 4-1 to waive a petition guideline and move toward a neighborhood vote, possibly in the fall.

Councilman Tony Petros, who represents Newport Heights, dissented.

Councilman Keith Curry and Mayor Pro Tem Kevin Muldoon recused themselves because of their interests in telecommunications companies. Curry owns stock in AT&T and Muldoon is vice president and general counsel for Irvine-based 5 Bars.

What really tears me apart is the tension and dissension in the community, Mayor Diane Dixon said. A vote will resolve this one way or another.

Poles strung with utility lines have peppered Newport Heights for decades. Homeowners in the area known as District 114  bordered by Tustin and Irvine avenues, 15th Street and Cliff Drive  and the area known as District 114b  bounded by Riverside and Tustin avenues, 15th Street and Cliff Drive  have been collecting petition signatures in an attempt to establish an assessment district to pay to place electric, phone and cable lines underground and out of sight.

Proponents in both districts have received signatures from more than 50% of the contacted homeowners, according to a city staff report. The districts contain a total of about 300 properties.

Typically, the first step before the city can form a utility undergrounding assessment district is that at least 60% of the homeowners in the neighborhood must sign a form expressing interest, according to city rules.

If the quota is met, the city would pay to get an estimate of the projects cost from the utility companies and hold a neighborhood election. If 51% of the homeowners vote in favor, the project is approved and all property owners in the area must pay an equal amount of the cost.

However, state law allows the process to move forward after 50% of homeowners have signed the petition.

Proponents of the Newport Heights project asked the City Council  and it agreed  to lower the threshold to 50% to speed up the process. The urgency stems in part from a $4 million city sewer rehabilitation and alley reconstruction project expected in the next year in Newport Heights.

Placing the utility lines underground at the same time other improvements are underway would likely save homeowners money because they wouldnt have to tear up the alleys again and repave them for the undergrounding project, proponents and city staff say.

Proponents have said placing the lines underground would eliminate the potential hazard of downed power lines and could improve property values.

This will be the lowest-cost opportunity [to underground], said resident Mike Hefner. We feel confident this would pass if given the opportunity to vote.

However, opponents argue the percentage of homeowners supporting the project is likely much lower because some signed the documents without understanding their significance. Twenty-one residents who signed later rescinded their support, according to city staff.

Many opponents who spoke during Tuesdays meeting said they believe the petition process wasnt transparent.

The project cost has been estimated at $20,000 to $25,000 per house, payable in installments, plus variable costs of $1,000 to $4,000 to hook up each homes underground power lines to Southern California Edison.

Resident Tom Newman spoke against lowering the petition threshold and said undergrounding would be a financial burden to many of his neighbors.

They dont have the resources to do this, Newman said. Im asking you to stay the course. We have rules and we shouldnt be changing them for something so important.

Petros agreed, saying the council is beginning to make a habit of ignoring established rules.

At some point we need to follow the rule or change it, he said. I would hope as we move forward we could find a sweet spot to do what we say.

An engineers report that will provide a more exact cost of placing the lines underground will be prepared in coming months before the assessment ballots are circulated.

City staff expects the vote to occur in October.

This isnt the first time undergrounding has been pursued in Newport Heights.

In June, proponents in District 118  bounded by 15th Street, Tustin Avenue, Cliff Drive and Old Newport Boulevard  suspended their signature-collecting effort after a year for lack of support.

Proponents in District 114 also were collecting signatures at the time and continued after District 118 stopped.

District 114b was created as a smaller spinoff of District 118 to continue signature collection among 50 homes. The creation of another district was surprising to some residents who thought the issue was moot.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @HannahFryTCN
A Newport Beach businessman pleaded not guilty Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court to dozens of felonies related to insurance fraud and tax evasion.

Prosecutors allege Darrin Shawn Wilson, 50, underreported more than $5.6 million in payroll at his two companies to avoid paying higher workers compensation insurance rates.

They also accuse Wilson of failing to pay more than over $384,000 in taxes from 2009 to 2013.

Wilson owns two companies, an asphalt paving business called Seal-It and a property management business named Mavrick Company, according to the Orange County district attorneys office.

Prosecutors allege that between 2009 and 2013, Wilson underreported his payroll at the two businesses to Californias State Compensation Insurance Fund and private insurer AIG.

Authorities say they discovered this when an employee submitted a workers compensation claim after falling about 12 feet from a ladder while painting for the Mavrick Company.

Wilson allegedly claimed the worker was a subcontractor, not an employee. As a subcontractor he would not have been required to be included in the Mavrick Companys payroll, according to the district attorneys office.

Investigators allegedly discovered the worker, however, did not have the contractors license required to be a subcontractor, effectively making him an employee of Mavrick Company.

Prosecutors allege Wilson used this technique of mislabeling employees as subcontractors numerous times to avoid paying higher insurance premiums.

In all, Wilson faces 15 felony counts of misrepresenting facts to the State Compensation Insurance Fund, five felony counts of misrepresenting facts to a workers compensation insurance company, 20 felony counts of failing to file a return with the intent to evade tax and 20 felony counts of willful failure to pay tax.

Hes currently free on $500,000 bail, according to the district attorneys office.
An electrical fire caused a power outage at medical offices near Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach on Tuesday, trapping several physically disabled people on the upper floors of the buildings, authorities said.

Firefighters responded to the small blaze at 355 Placentia Ave. around 3 p.m., said Capt. Carlos Medina of the Newport Beach Fire Department.

The fire burned itself out shortly after their arrival, but several individuals had to be helped from the upper floors of nearby medical offices after the elevators stopped working, Medina said.

Southern California Edison workers were called to the scene to fix the malfunctioning wires, Medina said.

SCE workers were expected to fix the outage by 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to the utility companys website, which said 87 customers were affected by the incident.

benjamin.brazil@latimes.com

Twitter: @benbrazilpilot
Envelopes, bottles, hair roots, cellphones and airbags all have one thing in common, at least for crime investigation experts.

During a discussion Friday at Roosevelt Middle School, two criminalists cited them as among the most helpful tools when it comes to collecting DNA evidence. The students in their audience are currently learning about blood and DNA.

If you were to take your pen and just make a dot on the paper, and that was the size of a blood stain, thats all I would need to get a full DNA profile, said Learden Matthies, a supervising senior criminalist with the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.

Matthies encouraged students to volunteer at the sheriffs department crime lab when they turn 17 to get a sense for what the job demands.

So what fluids are present? Blood, saliva, semen, urine, fecal matter...all these things we might be able to get DNA from  another reason for you to come volunteer at the lab so you could see some of this stuff and say, Do I really want to deal with some of this gross stuff all the time?

If the answer is yes, she advised the students to major in biology, chemistry or physics, or any combination of the three subjects in college.

Fellow county criminalist Michelle Madrid showed students photos of a crime scene where they applied Luminol, a substance that detects blood stains that otherwise wouldnt be visible.

Upon applying Luminol, blood, or even bloody footprints, appear as a blue glow.

Its helpful in cases ...where you suspect the blood that was there had been cleaned up, because it can detect blood stains that are not visible to our eye, Madrid said.

The chemical is also helpful years after a bloody crime took place, where the chemical can detect blood stains underneath carpet, on baseboards, sinks, showers, or on clothes that have already been washed, in which case, criminalists are able to pick up a full DNA profile.

For eighth-grade student Aria Tomar, the discussion was fascinating.

I thought that was really cool and interesting, she said, adding that once in a while she watches CSI with her mom. I thought it would be similar [to the show], but its very different from it.

--

Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Azerbaijan reduced import of goods from Georgia by 2.3 times to $76.75 million in January-August 2016 compared to the same period of 2015, said Georgias National Statistics Office (GeoStat) in a report.

The report says that Azerbaijans share in Georgian export is 5.8 percent. The country was a leader in import of goods from Georgia for a long time.

Azerbaijan ranked sixth in that index as of eight months.

For comparison: Azerbaijan was a leader in import of goods from Georgia ($173.2 million) in January-August 2015.

The country mainly imports pipes, iron alloys and others commodities from Georgia.

Major part of goods is exported to Turkey from Georgia - $134.4 million (10.2 percent). Russia with almost $118.2 million (9 percent) and China with $117.68 million (9 percent) follow Turkey.

Trade turnover between Georgia and Azerbaijan amounted to $361.8 million in January-August 2016.

Specific weight of Azerbaijans trade turnover with Georgia is 4.9 percent of the countrys total foreign trade operations.
Members of a citizens group seeking to transfer La Canadas Sagebrush area out of Glendale Unifieds jurisdiction and into La Canada Unified School District, said they were scratching their heads Tuesday over a court order sought by GUSDs attorneys requesting the names of people who signed a petition in support of the transfer.

The 724 signatures Unite LCF collected earlier this year from registered voters living in the Sagebrush area on the west side of La Canada who support the transfer territory into La Canada Unified, were deemed sufficient by Dean Logan, Los Angeles County registrar-recorder and county clerk, according to a July 18 document.

Attorneys representing Glendale Unified subsequently sought the court order to secure the list of signatures, according to the petition filed Sept. 8 in Los Angeles Superior Court. Unite LCFs Tom Smith said hes unsure why the Glendale districts attorneys want the signature data.

Were at a little bit of a loss to understand why its needed. Were a little concerned this is another attempt to slow down the process. We expected Glendale [Unified], at some point, to lawyer up. It came a little earlier than we were expecting, Smith said.

When attorneys for Glendale Unified asked Allison Deegan, the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organizations regionalized business services coordinator, for the signatures in August, she refused without a court order, according to court documents.

We feel very comfortable that theres nothing there that could be overturned or invalidate the [Unite LCF] petition, Smith said, adding that the signatures involved in a territory transfer are not often made public, unless disclosed to school districts through court orders.

Were doing what we can to protect the privacy of the people who did sign the petition, Smith said. Ultimately, how those documents get disclosed is up to the courts.

Glendale Unifieds attorneys made an additional request for a temporary stay on the county committees proceedings on the territory transfer until Glendale Unifieds attorneys secure the signatures, according to a letter sent by Glendale Unifieds attorneys to Nalini Lasiewicz, a member of Unite LCF.

During a Wednesday hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court, Judge Amy Hogue said shed make a determination to grant a temporary stay or not during an Oct. 14 hearing, which will lead to a subsequent decision on the potential release of the signatures to Glendale Unifieds attorneys.

Attorney Stan Barankiewicz, representing Glendale Unified, told Hogue that attorneys would analyze the signatures to potentially build arguments opposing the transfer.

Those arguments would be presented to the county committee in private, he said, adding that attorneys wouldnt try to contact those who signed the petition, or disclose their addresses.

Glendale Unified Supt. Winfred Roberson, Jr. said the residents privacy is valued by school officials.

Government code allows our attorneys to examine this information and use it to prepare our presentation to the county committee. However, [Glendale Unified] has no intention of making this information available to the public, Roberson said in a statement.

Glendale Unifieds attorneys filed the petition seeking a court order one day after the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization formally accepted Unite LCFs petition seeking to transfer the Sagebrush area into La Canada Unified School District.

Smith said hes concerned the GUSDs request could slow the county committees process for deciding on the transfer.

Were concerned this is a little bit of a hunt to delay the process by whatever means, Smith said.

Following Wednesdays hearing, Nick Karapetian, a member of Unite LCF, said he was pleased with Hogues move to hear Glendale Unifieds request for a temporary stay during the Oct. 14 hearing, when she is scheduled to consider arguments from attorneys representing the county committee, registrar-recorder and county clerk, Glendale Unified, as well as members of Unite LCF.

She was conscious not to stop the county committee process and interfere with something without more information, and that was appreciated, Karapetian said.

Lasiewicz said it will give Unite LCF a little more time to prepare.

I was glad she didnt see any need for putting on the brakes on what is this normal process being followed by all these different agencies, she said of the judges action Wednesday.

--

Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
The star of this two-minute video  a barn-red fishing shack  sits at the end of the short granite wharf on the waterfront of Rockport, Mass., a scenic little town about 40 miles northeast of Boston.

Rockport is the beauty spot of Cape Ann. And though Cape Ann is often outshone by Cape Cod (farther south) when tourism is concerned, this red fishing shack is an exception.

Its called Motif No. 1, for reasons that are explained in the video. And the New England Historical Society calls it the worlds most celebrated fishing shack.

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Why? Basically, because it looks the way New England is supposed to look. Even though its a facsimile.

The video can explain some of this. For the fuller version, theres a book, In Search of Motif No. 1, by L.M. Vincent, published in 2011.

Follow Reynolds on Twitter: @MrCSReynolds

See travel videos by Reynolds from around the world.
The Philippine presidents staunchest critic, Sen. Leila De Lima, was stripped of a key post Tuesday, in what she says is an act of political retribution.

And with a hearing now opened into allegations that she took bribes from drug dealers, observers say De Lima could ultimately end up behind bars  becoming the first high-level victim of political persecution under President Rodrigo Dutertes administration and removing the last major obstacle to his war on drugs.

In late August, De Lima, a 57-year-old senator and former justice secretary with a reputation for fiery rhetoric and bold political moves, launched a human rights probe into a wave of extrajudicial killings that has gripped the country in recent months.

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Duterte, in response, accused her of taking bribes from drug lords.

It is possible that De Lima will end up in detention, facing trial, said John Nery, a Manila-based journalist and political commentator. What the dust-up first tells us is that the president calls the shots most of the time, and it is very difficult, and takes a lot of time, before resistance can be organized.

Duterte, 71, has repeatedly vowed to eradicate the countrys widespread drug problem without regard for human rights  and since his inauguration on June 30, more than 3,000 suspected drug users, pushers and family members have lost their lives, most shot by police and vigilantes. The youngest victim was a 4-year-old girl, gunned down as her father took her out to buy popcorn.

On Monday, a group of senators led by Manny Pacquiao, the boxer-turned-politician, accused De Lima of being biased, and voted to oust her as chairwoman of the Senate committee on justice and human rights. They replaced her with a more neutral senator: Richard Gordon, who encouraged Duterte to suspend habeas corpus  a move equated with declaring martial law  after a terrorist attack in early September. (Duterte declared a state of lawlessness, giving the military heightened powers, but did not suspend habeas corpus.)

De Lima said in a speech at the Senate on Tuesday that she was the first target of a new McCarthyism in our time, of being singled out by the powers that be for daring to think differently and to advocate passionately for what one believes in.

Many friends and colleagues have told me, if only I did not call out the president on the murderous consequences of his war on drugs, and decided to be as meek as a sheep, I would not be in this trouble, and I would still have the committee chairmanship, she continued.

As the Bible says, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose his soul? I choose to keep my soul.

De Limas Senate investigation has monopolized the Philippines front pages since its launch Aug. 22, gripping the nation and setting politicians on edge. On Sept. 15, the committee heard testimony from Edgar Matobato, an admitted former assassin during Dutertes 22-year tenure as mayor of the southern city of Davao. During that time, Matobato said, Duterte was involved in about 1,000 extrajudicial killings. Once, Matobato said, he killed a Justice Department agent with an Uzi; another time, vigilantes fed a victims body to crocodiles.

Duterte has hit back against De Lima with a string of personal attacks. He has accused her of having a driver and lover who accepted money from drug lords in the maximum security New Bilibid Prison, and has called her a robber and an immoral woman. As De Limas investigation gained pace, so did his accusations. In late August, he said: If I were De Lima, ladies and gentlemen, Id hang myself.

On Tuesday, Congress called a hearing into the drug trade at New Bilibid, and convicted felons, speaking with immunity, accused De Lima of accepting bribes. A bank robber, Herbert Colangco, told Congress that starting in 2013, he had paid De Lima $62,637 a month so that she would let him hold events in prison and sell beer to other inmates. Another former inmate, speaking on live television, disclosed De Limas telephone number and home address.

What were seeing in Congress now is the full might of the government being used to demolish [De Lima] in the hearings, said Filipino human rights worker who requested anonymity, citing concerns about his personal safety. The investigation is a good thing, to find out the truth of her involvement  its just that the way theyre doing it is questionable.

Experts say that the clash between Duterte and De Lima wasnt unexpected  the two first butted heads in 2009, when De Lima launched an investigation into his role in extrajudicial killings in Davao, during his mayorship. The investigation didnt turn up much, experts say, but it put De Lima in Dutertes target sights.

Many people knew this was inevitable and, to use what may be an Americanism, brought out the popcorn, Nery said. He added that Matobatos testimony likely came as a shock to the countrys political establishment, and may have turned other senators against De Lima. That was too much reality, too soon, for most of the senators, I gather, he said.

Meanwhile, the victims of Dutertes war on drugs continue to pile up. On Sept. 10, a late British barons daughter, on bail while facing drug charges, was gunned down by vigilantes. On Monday, Duterte asked for a six-month extension for the war, claiming that so many people in the country were linked to the drug trade that he cannot kill them all.

I did not realize how severe and how serious the drug menace was in this republic until I became president, Duterte told reporters on Sunday, according to Agence France-Presse.

Duterte enjoys a 91% approval rating, the polling organization Pulse found in July.

The problematic part for me is the dont-care attitude of the president, De Lima told the Los Angeles Times in an interview last month, before the inquiry began.

Hes so popular, she continued. Of course he thinks he has an overwhelming mandate, and thats a license for him to say things which wittingly or unwittingly encourage killings. Now, he doesnt care  because he would repeatedly say that hes ready to lose his life, his honor, and even his presidency [to eradicate drugs]. So how do you argue with a man like that?

jonathan.kaiman@latimes.com

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More than 44 people have been killed in Congo in two days of street clashes between security forces and protesters angered over a delayed presidential election, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher said Tuesday. Police said more than 100 people have been arrested in the unrest.

Thousands took to the streets of Congos capital, Kinshasa, on Monday to oppose an election delay which they call an effort by President Joseph Kabila to stay in power beyond the end of his mandate in late December.

In a statement released Wednesday night, Kabilas office said he was profoundly touched by these sad events and expressed condolences to the families of those killed.

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A high court has determined Kabila can stay in office until a new leader is elected. The electoral commission has filed for a delay in elections that were scheduled for November, saying voter registration lists will not be ready.

Gunshots could be heard Tuesday in Kinshasa as tensions rose. Burnt-out cars smoldered in nearly empty streets.

Leave and let us choose who we want to lead us, Kinshasa resident Jeanne Mongo said. Obama is leaving power, his mandate is coming to an end and he is leaving voluntarily. Why cant he [Kabila] follow Obamas example and cede his position to a woman?

Human Rights Watch received credible reports from witnesses that security forces have killed at least 37 civilians, said senior Africa researcher Ida Sawyer.

Most were killed when the security forces fired on crowds of protesters. Others were killed when the security forces burned down opposition party headquarters last night, she said in an email.

Protesters killed at least six police officers and a supporter of Kabilas party, Sawyer said, adding that demonstrators also burned and looted several shops and police stations.

Police spokesman Pierrot Mwanamputu said that more than 113 people were arrested in connection with Mondays events, and will be brought to justice.

The U.N. human rights office noted reports of excessive use of force by both security forces and demonstrators. Both sides denied responsibility for the violence.

An organizer of the opposition protests, Joseph Olengankoy, earlier had put the toll at more than 25 people killed. Interior Minister Evariste Boshab had said 17 were killed, including at least three police officers.

At least two people were killed after attacks on the headquarters of five opposition parties late Monday, the U.N. and an opposition party said.

Bruno Tshibala, spokesman for the largest opposition party, said five people were wounded in raids on four party headquarters.

We will seek international justice, he said.

Congos government spokesman, Lambert Mende, condemned the burning of opposition party buildings as well as attacks on other buildings, including two ruling party buildings and a school, by opposition protesters.

Mende called on Congolese to regain their composure and let the justice system do its work.

The government can only condemn this mob justice mentality, he said.

Kabila, who came to power after his fathers assassination in 2001, has yet to announce whether he will pursue another term in office, though the constitution prohibits it.

The violence comes amid growing fears that the election delay could lead to prolonged unrest in Congo, a nation as vast in size as Western Europe. The mineral-rich but largely impoverished country suffered back-to-back civil wars until 2003, and previous instability has drawn in armies from neighboring countries.

Appeals for calm and restraint have been launched by the United Nations, Belgium, the U.S., France and the European Union, which also have called for a rapid organization of presidential elections.

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Iraqi forces being trained by the U.S.-led coalition to recapture Mosul from Islamic State will be ready next month, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday.

We assessed today the Iraqis will have in early October all the forces marshaled, trained, fielded and equipped that are necessary for operations in Mosul, he said at the Air Force Assn. conference in National Harbor, Md.

Dunford said Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi will make the decision on when to launch the attack. Abadi met with President Obama this week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

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Iraqi forces backed by U.S. air power secured an airfield this summer in Qayyarah in western Iraq. The facility will serve as a logistics hub for the attack on Mosul, which is Islamic States self-declared capital in Iraq.

We will be in position to provide whatever support, whatever reinforcement those forces need in order to be successful, Dunford said.

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The U.S. military says a rocket that landed within several hundred yards of U.S. troops at a base in northern Iraq may have contained mustard agent.

No one was hurt in the attack on Qayara West air base, according to a U.S. military official who discussed details on condition that he not be identified. Several hundred U.S. troops are on the base.

The official says the attack Tuesday was militarily insignificant. He says a small group of U.S. soldiers who inspected remnants of the rocket found a black, oily substance on a fragment of metal. An initial test of the substance showed it contained residue of mustard agent, but a second test was negative.

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The fragment has been sent to a laboratory for further testing.

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After eight years of tense meetings, awkward public encounters and disagreement over key issues, President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are aiming to leave the impression that the relationship between their nations is on an even keel, much as they found it when they both came to office in 2009.

Each pointed Wednesday to the new deal guaranteeing the U.S. will spend $38 billion on military aid to Israel over the next 10 years as a sign of Americas commitment to its ally.

The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable, Obama said as the two shook hands on the pact at their meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

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I dont think people at large understand the breadth and depth of the cooperation, but I know, Netanyahu said.

The united front, in their final planned get-together as leaders, papered over the tensions that have pervaded their tenure in office. As Obama prepares to leave office, he has built a record on Israel aimed at strengthening U.S. support but often overshadowed by his stormy personal encounters with Netanyahu.

Their relationship started off poorly at their first meeting in the spring of 2009, when Obama said he wanted to see a freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory. The request touched on a sore point for Netanyahu, though he relented that fall, imposing a 10-month moratorium of settlement housing starts as a gesture to the Palestinians.

Yet Obama spent much of the intervening months promising reconciliation with the Arab world and, on a trip to the Middle East, visited Muslim countries but skipped Israel, angering many there.

Obama has battled perceptions among many Israelis and some conservative American Jews that he lacked a true commitment to Israel. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has called Obama the worst thing to ever happen to Israel.

But that viewpoint is largely belied by Obamas track record with the Middle East ally. In addition to increasing U.S. military aid to Israel to record levels and funding the Iron Dome missile defense system, the Obama administration has used its veto power at the U.N. to block Palestinian efforts to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Though Obama pushed aggressively for a peace pact in his first term, including pressing Netanyahu to temporarily halt some settlement construction, the administration all but abandoned efforts once it became clear that a deal was out of reach.

Even the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu vigorously opposed, eased the pressure on Israel  at least temporarily  to consider launching a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. And Syrian President Bashar Assads agreement in 2013 to give up his nations arsenal of chemical weapons to avert an impending U.S. airstrike allowed the Israeli government to terminate a years-long program to distribute civilian gas masks.

But Netanyahu, a nationalist leader with an open affinity for Republicans, never came around, even showing a preference for GOP nominee Mitt Romney during Obamas bid for reelection.

Obama visited Israel in 2013 in an attempt to soothe Israeli sentiment, but tensions peaked when Netanyahu accepted an invitation from House Republicans to address a joint session of Congress last year, surprising the president with the news only after making plans to speak. The end-around to the administration flouted diplomatic protocol, and once in front of U.S. lawmakers, Netanyahu denounced the potential nuclear agreement with Iran as a poor deal that endangered Israel.

Though it is still too early to say whether the nuclear pact, intended to block Irans path to a nuclear bomb for 10 years, is a success, analysts in Israel view the deal as an achievement for Israeli security.

The agreement is significant, said Arie Kacowicz, a professor of international relations at Hebrew University. It avoided a possible war between Israel and Iran.

Aware that his record on Israel might always be colored by Netanyahus portrayals of him, Obama aimed to write the final chapter with the $38-billion aid deal, the largest the U.S. has given to any nation.

He is conscious that people say he is anti-Israel, Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of Obama. He thinks thats unfair, and this lets him leave a marker. Not only can he say he supported Israel, but he oversaw the largest military assistance package ever.

The signing of the memorandum of understanding with Israel was timed to maximize its exposure just before the U.N. General Assembly, when Netanyahu often uses his time at the podium to critique other nations policy toward Israel. Officials in both governments see the security deal as a sign that the strategic ties are robust, despite the political bickering.

Israeli officials still worry that Obama will seek to engineer some sort of diplomatic game changer, whether by enumerating a set of peace parameters or by giving U.S. blessing to a resolution at the United Nations. The period between the U.S. presidential election and the inauguration has served as a time when other presidents have made precedent-setting moves on the peace process.

The Palestinian issue has always sat deep in Obamas heart, Michael Oren, a minister without portfolio in Netanyahus Cabinet and his former ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview with Israel Radio. We cant rule out the possibility that he will say something on this. We need to be alert to the possibility that there might be a move in the Security Council.

Obama has considered publicly outlining what he sees as the path to Middle East peace but will do so only if he thinks it will be constructive, said deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu was under some internal pressure to shake hands with Obama before the cameras, with even some members of his own coalition worried that the prime minister has done too much to alienate the United States.

Over the years, aides have learned to make sure Obama and Netanyahu appear in front of photographers before theyve had a long conversation, not after.

Obama was somber as he spoke, saying he hopes the parties will keep alive the possibility of a stable, secure Israel and of a Palestinian homeland.

Our hope is that we can continue to be an effective partner with Israel, he said, adding, Im only going to be president for another three months.

Times staff writer Parsons reported from New York and special correspondent Mitnick from Tel Aviv.

christi.parsons@latimes.com

Follow @cparsons for news about the White House.

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The historic global climate accord reached last December in Paris is moving rapidly toward enactment, with 60 countries  representing 48% of all greenhouse gas emissions  having formally approved it as of Wednesday.

To become law, the accord must be approved by at least 55 nations and those nations must collectively be responsible for at least 55% of the climate-altering emissions.

The United States and China, the worlds largest emitters, formally approved the agreement this month. Many small nations approved the accord in spring, and 31 other countries -- including Brazil, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates -- formally submitted their approval at a special ceremony at the United Nations on Wednesday.

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Smoke billows from factories in Shanxi, China, in 2015. (Kevin Frayer / Getty Images )

Secretary of State John F. Kerry, speaking at the ceremony, said he was confident we will bring this agreement into force this year, probably no later than the next international climate conference, which begins in November in Marrakech, Morroco.

Most international agreements take several years to become law while they are approved by individual national governments. The blazing pace toward ratification of the climate accord reflects increasing concerns about climate change - 2016 is on track to eclipse 2015 as the hottest year on record  but also political change.

Many world leaders and United Nations officials have expressed concern about the durability of the agreement if Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is elected in November. While President Obama has been a strong supporter of the accord and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, supports it, Trump has repeatedly questioned climate science and said he would cancel the agreement if he is elected.

Patricia Espinosa, who leads the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told ClimateWire this week that everybodys aware of that possibility and just concerned about it.

The concern has prompted a strong push to complete approval - or ratification  before the end of Obamas second term, which ends in January. If the accord became international law before a Trump administration were to take office, rules of the agreement would require at least four years to pass before the United States could pursue withdrawing from it.

Even if a scenario like that unfolded, many experts believe domestic and international pressure would prevent the U.S. from withdrawing.

As Espinosa told ClimateWire, What would happen? What would be the reaction of the international community? What would be the reaction in the U.S., where today most U.S. citizens believe climate change is real and something has to be done about it? Its important that were aware that it would be a very, very complex situation.

The chances of getting from the current 48% of emissions to the necessary 55% appeared promising Wednesday.

An iceberg melts in Kulusuk, Greenland. (John Mcconnico / Associated Press )

At the U.N. ceremony, 14 more countries -- including Austria, Australia, Cambodia, Canada, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, New Zealand and South Korea -- said they would approve the accord this year. The European Commission also said it was prepared to approve the accord this year, though the approval process in the European Union is complicated by different protocols among its 28 nations. The countries of the European Union create about 12% of global emissions.

The goal of the accord is to hold the increase in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. That is a level scientists have said could avert the most damaging effects of climate change, though many scientists want the goal strengthened to 1.5 degrees. The accord includes provisions that could allow that.

The commitments countries have outlined in the accord so far would meet neither of those goals, but the agreement has a rolling set of deadlines that are intended to spur countries to continually increase their goals over time.

This momentum is remarkable, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday. It can sometimes take years or even decades for a treaty to enter into force. It is just nine months since the Paris climate conference. This is testament to the urgency of the crisis we all face.

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Amid a fresh round of bloodletting in Syria, Secretary of State John F. Kerry called Wednesday for the grounding of all aircraft in key opposition-held areas of the country in an attempt to shore up a shattered cease-fire and rush humanitarian aid to those in the direst need.

Speaking at a public session of the United Nations Security Council, Kerry unleashed some of his harshest rhetoric yet at Russia over its actions in Syria. His words underscored the fragility of efforts to not only revive the faltering cease-fire that went into effect nine days ago, but also forge an alliance between Washington and Moscow to confront the militants of Islamic State and Al Qaeda on the battleground.

Kerry said the conflict was at a crossroads. If we decide not to do what it takes to make this work  this cessation of hostilities  then make no mistake, my friends, the next time we convene here, we are going to be facing a Middle East with even more refugees, with more dead, with more displaced, with more extremists, with more suffering on a greater scale. That is a certainty.

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The diplomatic parley came hours after a Paris-based medical relief organization said a mobile emergency unit outside Aleppo was hit by an airstrike, killing five of its staff members.

That strike came on the heels of an attack about 24 hours earlier on a Syrian Red Crescent aid convoy, which left 21 civilians dead and drew blistering condemnation at this weeks convening of the U.N. General Assembly.

U.S. officials believe Russia was responsible, but Russia sought again Wednesday to deflect the blame, asserting that an American drone was in the area at the time.

We can confirm that none of our aircraft  manned or unmanned, U.S. or coalition  were anywhere in the vicinity of Aleppo when the strike against the humanitarian convoy occurred, said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.

The convoy attack prompted the U.N. to temporarily halt aid deliveries in Syria, but the world body said Wednesday that they would resume.

Truckloads of aid at the Turkish border have been ready to roll, but we have not received the clearances we needed, said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general. We still need to hear from the Syrian government that those trucks can come through. They control the borders.

Kerrys appeal came as the Obama administration was debating whether to arm Syrian Kurds in their fight against Islamic State, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly about the program. The plan, devised by the Pentagons Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, could boost the fighting capability of Kurdish militias as they push south into the heart of Islamic State territory.

Administration officials acknowledged it is certain to create tensions with Turkey. At this point, its just a plan, one official said. Any decision will be made by the White House.

At the same time, the number of U.S.-backed armed rebels in Syria has grown as the multisided war continues to expand. There are about 30,000 such rebels in Syria today, compared with a few hundred last year, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech Wednesday to the Air Force Assn. conference in National Harbor, Md.

The force partly comprises Syrian Kurdish militias that Turkeys government considers terrorist groups. Ankara fears Kurdish ambitions to form a contiguous independent region along Turkeys southern border. To allay Turkish concerns, Dunford said that the Pentagon has helped recruit about 14,000 Arabs into the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces.Until now, the U.S. has provided military assistance, including weapons, to Syrian Arab rebels but has refrained from supplying arms to the Syrian Kurds.

The original cease-fire deal, which took effect Sept. 12, did not apply to Islamic State or to Al Qaeda-linked groups, and Syria said it would continue operations against those fighters.

The accord led to an initial drop-off in violence, but then began to unravel at an accelerating pace. It marked the latest in a series of fitful international efforts to stem the fighting in Syria, which has killed more than 400,000 people, sparked what is widely described as the worst refugee crisis to strike Europe since World War II and provided a vital incubator for Islamic State, which has staged terrorist strikes spanning the globe.

Adding to tensions, Russian military officials announced Wednesday that the nations only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, would be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean, joining other Russian vessels in the area.

Just before Kerry spoke, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again declined to accept responsibility for the attack on the convoy.

Kerry responded with anger and incredulity to Russias positing of various alternative scenarios having caused the carnage, saying he felt as if were sort of in a parallel universe here.

Citing theorizing by Russias Defense Ministry that the trucks and the food and the medicine just spontaneously combusted, he demanded: Anyone here believe that?

U.S. intelligence analysts believe two Russian Su-24 attack jets carried out the deadly attack on the United Nations humanitarian aid convoy near Aleppo, according to U.S. officials not authorized to speak publicly on intelligence matters. Analysts have examined the radar signatures and electronic emissions of the aircraft in the skies near where the truck convoy was hit Monday night.

Were still analyzing information, but all signs point to the Russians, one official said.

As for the reports of the latest fatal strike on the medical unit, Kerry again attributed responsibility to Russia and its ally, the government of President Bashar Assad.

There are only two countries that have airplanes that are flying during the night or flying at all in that particular area  Russia and Syria, he said.

It was not immediately clear whether other key players would heed the call for a no-fly zone over the opposition-held areas of northern Syria, a step Kerry said was essential for restoring credibility to efforts to salvage the cease-fire and seek a negotiated end to the brutal five-year conflict.

We must immediately ground all aircraft flying in those key areas in order to deescalate the situation and give a chance for humanitarian assistance to flow unimpeded, he said.

Kerry also expressed remorse over an accidental strike by the U.S.-led coalition over the weekend that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers  but contrasted the American response to that of Russia in the aftermath of the convoy strike.

Within moments of it happening, we acknowledged it, he said. We didnt put out a bunch of obfuscating facts  we said, Yeah, its a terrible thing, it happened.

More discussions on Syria are set later this week in New York, after meetings Tuesday of envoys from across Europe and the Arab world.

laura.king@latimes.com

william.hennigan@latimes.com

Times staff writer Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Cairo contributed to this report.

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UPDATES:

1:14 p.m.: This article was updated with a comment from the Pentagon.

12:46 p.m.: This article was updated with more details about U.N. aid deliveries to Syria.

This article was originally published at 12:05 p.m.
All material is subject to strictly enforced copyright terms & conditions and cannot be repurposed or reproduced.  19882022 Latin American Financial Publications Inc.
French President Francois Hollande has expressed readiness to accept presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan within the negotiation process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts settlement, RIA Novosti reported.

Hollande sent the message to Sargsyan in connection with Armenia Independence Day.

The French president reiterated his commitment aimed at the fair and stable settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations.

Hollande added that he is ready to host a meeting in Paris to discuss measures on making progress in this extremely protracted conflict.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
The Italian Supreme Court has rendered a decision making public masturbation legal, so long as it's not done in the presence of minors.

The ruling stemmed from the case of a 69-year-old man only identified as Pietro L, who was caught pleasuring himself on a park bench by college students in the Catania town east of Sicily.

Guilty Verdict Overturned

Initially, the man was found guilty of the offense in May of 2015, and sentenced to three months in prison and ordered to pay of fine of $3,600. But in June of this year, that verdict was overturned by high court La Corte di Cassazione, and authorities moved to make the decision public earlier this month while citing a recent change in the law that no longer makes just public masturbation a criminal act.

The new iteration of the law now calls for a sentence of nearly five years behind bars if the act is carried out in front of a minor.

The case of the 69-year-old has now been sent back to the lower courts to determine what is an appropriate administrative fine for the man.

Public Masturbation Criminalized in Most U.S. States

Public masturbation remains a criminal offense in many other parts of the world, where it can lead to a jail sentence. Public masturbation in the U.S. relates to indecent exposure laws that criminalizes the "public display of one's genitals in public, causing others to be alarmed or offended," according to Findlaws.com. "Indecent exposure is often committed for the sexual gratification of the offender or committed to entice a sexual response," the site continues. Under this definition, public masturbation would fall under indecent exposure despite not showing the offenders genitals. Some of the toughest domestic laws on the books are in states such as Michigan and Utah, where the public act can lead to jail time.

The Italian ruling immediately sparked criticism from some lawmakers.

"The Renzi government has never given equal opportunities much notice, but to save from the prison cells people who commit obscene acts in front of women is really unjustifiable," said Elvira Savino, a lawmaker from the Forza Italia Party. "The government's law is an invitation to every maniac to molest women."
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Sudan will join the Organization of Islamic Cooperations (OIC) Contact Group on the Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan, Ibrahim Ghandour, Sudanese foreign minister, said.

Sudan supports the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan, Ghandour said at a meeting with his Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov during the 71st regular session of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Mammadyarov informed Ghandour about the process of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement and expressed gratitude for supporting Azerbaijans position in the conflict.

The destructive and provocative policy carried out by the Armenian leadership harms the conflict settlement and restoration of peace and stability in the region, Mammadyarov added.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

Earlier, at the meeting of foreign ministers of the OIC member-states Turkeys representatives took the initiative of establishing the Contact Group on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The Contact Group held its first meeting as part of the 71st regular session of the UN General Assembly.
Germany is ready to contribute to a speedy and peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, read the message of German President Joachim Gauck to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan in connection with Armenia Independence Day, RIA Novosti reported.

Gauck said that the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is of great importance.

As a country that currently chairs the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Germany wants to help achieve a speedy and peaceful resolution of the conflict, said Gauck.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

Azerbaijans Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov will meet with OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs on Sept. 21, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministrys spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev has told Trend.

The meeting will be held during the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York.

The Minsk Group, the activities of which have become known as the Minsk Process, spearheads OSCE's efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is co-chaired by France, the Russian Federation, and the United States.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Azerbaijan has been informed about another attempt of Armenians to present the items of Azerbaijani cultural heritage as Armenian in Hermitage Museum in Russia.

We have been informed about this. This is another Armenian provocation, Hikmet Hajiyev, a spokesman for Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry, told Trend Sept. 21.

Azerbaijans embassy in Russia and the countrys Consulate General in St. Petersburg are taking measures to prevent this provocation, he added.

Armenians plan to present the coins of Azerbaijani khanates as eastern Armenian coins in Hermitage Museum.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
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Do you like steak? If you do, read on. If not, this article is not for you.

A company which prides itself on serving the finest 30 day aged, handcut, British and Irish beef is opening in Leicestershire on Friday.

We have had a look around, and here you can see a sneak peak of the new restaurant.

The Miller & Carter steakhouse, which is part of the Mitchells and Butlers pub group, has capacity for more than 180 customers and a large bar area. It replaces the Red Lion Inn, in Loughborough Road, Rothley.

Miller & Carter says it serves the finest 30 day aged steak, using both wet and dry ageing techniques to provide the optimum succulence and flavour.

There are 12 steak cuts to choose from; including a 30oz Longbone Tomahawk, Fillet-on-the-bone, and its award-winning Sirloin steak. Each are individually hand cut before they are grilled by specially trained chefs.

Jean-Paul Rochebouet, general manager for Miller & Carter's Rothley's branch, said: "We're very excited to be opening Leicestershire's first Miller & Carter on Friday and welcoming the public to enjoy a great dining experience."



"The new restaurant looks brilliant. The showcase night on Thursday is going to be fantastic, and myself and the rest of the staff invite the people of Leicestershire to come and see what Miller & Carter is all about."

Christian Fox, retail business manager at Miller & Carter, said: "Bringing a new Miller & Carter to Leicester is extremely exciting for the brand and we're really pleased to be able to grow the team further. Everyone who works for us is completely obsessed with steak and we're keen to recruit people who share in our love for excellent quality - both food and service."

The Red Lion Inn, which's also owned by the pub group closed for refurbishment on August 13.

It has had both and external and interior makeover, with booth seating and modern artwork to replace the English pub style.

The new steakhouse has recruited about 50 people to join the team, including chefs, dessert chefs and grill chefs.

Ahead of the opening, people were asked to come along to dine at two 'rehearsal events' on Tuesday and Wednesday, where they were given 50 per cent off their food bill in return for completing a short review.

The group has also opened a steakhouse in Wollaton Park, in Nottingham, and will open in Northampton in the future.

For more information and to book, see here.

Here is a small sample of the menu at Miller & Carter Rothley

There are also other sections including 'off the grill', smokey barbecue ribs, burgers, fish, pasta and salad. And there's a fix lunch menu. To see the full menu visit their website.

All steaks are cooked to your liking and are served with parsley butter, seasoned fries, a slice of onion loaf and a balsamic glazed beef tomato, along with your choice of lettuce wedge and steak sauce.

There are also alternative lighter steak accompaniments. Sweet Potato seasoned fries can be added for 1

Off the bone

Bistro Rump Fillet 8oz

16.75

Sirloin 8oz

18.50

Sirloin 12oz

22.95

Rump 8oz

14.50

Ribeye 12oz

20.95

Fillet 8oz

23.50

Guest steak

17.95

50 day aged grain fed ribeye 8oz

19.95

45 day aged rump 9oz

17.95

On the bone

Ribeye on the bone 18oz

25.95

T-bone 16oz

25.95

To share

Chateaubriand16oz

44.95

Long bone tomahawk 30oz

49.95
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva  Trend:

The 13th meeting of the European Union (EU)-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Committee (PCC) was held in Baku on September 20, the EU mission in Azerbaijan said in a message.

According to the message, the European Parliament (EP) delegation chaired by the co-chair of EU-Azerbaijan PCC and head of the EP delegation Sajjad Karim (ECR, UK) included Heidi Hautala (Greens/EFA, FIN, co-president of EURONEST PA), Ramona Manescu (EPP, RO), Alberto Cirio (EPP, IT), Andrejs Mamikins (S&D, LV) and Iveta Grigule (ALDE, LV).

At the meetings at the Parliament of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Chairman of the International and Interparliamentary Relations committee Samad Seyidov stressed the commitment of Azerbaijan to pursue cooperation with the EU, the message said.

Karim highlighted that the EU considered its relationship with Azerbaijan as a very important and mutually beneficial one, the message said.

"There is substantial potential to deepen and strengthen the bilateral relationship, he added. It is essential that the EU-Azerbaijan relationship, which has many aspects, is structured to deliver constructive progress for the people of the European Union and Azerbaijan on an equal basis."

The EP delegation was received by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and also had meetings with Shahin Mustafayev, minister of economy, and Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev, deputy foreign minister, the message said.

According to the message, the delegation also visited an EU-funded project of modernization of public service ASAN.
KILDARE County Council has rejected a motion that it calls on all parties to cease prevaricating and support a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution which would create the conditions to discuss the provision of abortion services in Ireland.

On September 19, the motion was proposed by Celbridge based independent Cllr Brendan Young (Ind) but was defeated by an 18-9 majority.

Three members abstained and ten of the 40 councillors were absent during the debate.

Cllr Young said that with 4,000 women a year going to the UK for abortions, it was likely that there was one from Kildare every second day doing so.

Cllr Darren Scully (FG) proposed that they wait for the Citizens Convention process and said the motion was political grandstanding. He said the issue was going to the people anyway.

Cllr Young said the Convention was simply prevarication.

Cllr Joanne Pender (Ind), supporting Cllr Youngs motion said 147 women from Kildare travelled to the UK last year for abortion. We have to stop living in denial, she said.

Cllr Martin Miley (FF) said the Convention was the best way forward. To rush it you might not get the right result.
We bring you tales of contrasting fortunes this week from two of the oldest institutions in Naas.

The Moat Theatre has launched an appeal for financial support from anybody who can help.

A matter of a few yards away Naas Credit Union is announcing it has pots and more pots of money to lend.

In a sense Naas Credit Union is a victim of its own careful and sterling management.

It has, apparently, at least 30m to lend and its telling that to the membership which includes Maynooth and Newbridge (where that oh-so-fine building at least serves a useful purpose now as office for people dealing with the Department of Social Protection) in no uncertain terms.

Its latest news bulletin informs us that you no longer have to save for ages to get a loan. You can join and borrow on the same day with 10 in your account and your loan is not restricted to three times what youve saved, as it once was. You can borrow up to 75,000. And Naas CU does house loans.

Things are little tighter at the Moat Theatre where a campaign has been launched to ensure that the future of this equally significant institution is guaranteed as far as possible.

The Moat Club has managed to stay in business over the past eight years during it which time it faced a few financial hurdles.

We feel it would be unthinkable that a wonderful facility like this might have to close, Michael Broe said. Hes a member of the fundraising committee which has been meeting for four years to monitor the financial management and to ensure the survival of the Moat.

Unthinkable but not impossible.

Because the Moat owes 200,000 to the Bank of Ireland. In 2003 it took out a 400,000 loan and this is being repaid at a rate of 35,000 a year which in turn means that there is less money available to invest in the building and its fittings.

The Moat faces a bill of 250,000 if upgrading work and repairs and maintenance are carried out. This includes seating, lighting, sound, scenery rigging as well as repairs to the building and redecoration work.

Mary McEvoy, best known from her role in Glenroe and Jon Kenny, one half of DUnbelievables, have been seen a lot around the Moat lately, preparing for The Successful TD to be staged there on September 29 and 30.

But of course its more than a venue for the better known entertainers.

Its a community theatre hosting summer camps, drama classes, youth theatre production, exhibitions and is home to the Moat Club one of the best amateur drama groups anywhere and the Naas Film club.

The theatre needs to get rid of the debt its owes to the bank.

This would allow it to direct the money it makes to tackle the aforementioned maintenance and repair work and to invest in better seating, lighting and sound which would ensure that it remains an attractive place to stage productions.

There are benefits to people who live locally if this happens and the money is raised.

It will continue to be an arts hub for young people to develop artistic talent and it will be also continue to offer a mixed artistic menu for the wider community of Naas.

It helps other businesses when its opens its doors for its own business.

We should hope it succeeds not for their sake alone but for all us.

Well be all the poorer if it doesnt.
The State has been granted the right to take a couple of hundred euros it says it found in a Kildare-based brothel.

At a recent sitting of Naas District Court, Garda Inspector Mel Smith made a police property application to have 240 forfeited by the State.

The money, he said, was found following a raid on the brothel.

Four females, with eastern European names, were named in the property application but were not present in court.

Commenting on the sum found by the Gardai, Judge Desmond Zaidan said the amount was very small.

Things must be desperately bad, he said.

The location of the brothel was not identified in court.

However, Garda sources have told the Leader that it was in Sallins and that the four women named in the application had left the State.

It is not the first time that brothel allegations have been linked with Sallins.

In an unconnected case in September 2015, a woman appeared before the District Court in Naas charged in connection with prostitution offences. The woman, in her forties, with a Dublin address, appeared on two charges relating to a property in Sallins on October 2014.

One was allegedly living on the earnings of prostitution.

The second allegation was that she allowed an apartment to be used as a brothel.

Last October 2015, the woman was convicted on the first, earnings, charge only. She was given a five-month prison sentence.

This is currently under appeal to the Circuit Court.
VILLAGERS in Johnstown village are hitting a brick wall when it comes to try and get noise from the motorway reduced, Kildare County Council has heard.

At the Councils September 19 meeting, Cllr Fintan Brett said that tests done by locals had shown the noise on the M7 to be above the permitted levels.

He proposed that the Council that the members support the residents of Johnstown Village to have noise suppression barriers from Johnstown to the Big Ball roundabout included by Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) and Dept of Transport in their tender documents for the upcoming N7/M7 upgrade works.

Director of Services, Niall Morrissey, told the members that this request will be forwarded to TII for consideration.

Cllr Brett said the issue has been an ongoing one for the Johnstown Community Association, the umbrella body for the grounds.

He said the residents had got professional tests down and the levels were above those committed for the motorway.

The residents had come up against a brick wall with the National Roads Authority. The TII are totally refusing to engage with us," said Cllr Brett.

Cllr Mark Lynch said there was a similar problem at Great Connell, Newbridge. They can get no response either."

Cllr Reada Cronin said they could include the M4.

Mayor, Ivan Keatley, said he suspected it is an issue in the Athy area, as well.
Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Delegation in Baku Elena Ajmone Sessera tells Azernews about the activity of the delegation in Azerbaijan, touching upon works done so far and etc.

Question: You have become the head of ICRC delegation in Azerbaijan recently. What were the main challenges you faced upon your appointment?

Answer: I started my work as the head of the ICRC delegation in Azerbaijan in March and soon after, the April escalation happened. That was challenging for me, being new in the country, I still had to learn a lot about the context, but my previous operational experiences helped me to quickly adapt ICRC response to the situation. We did our best to support civilians in need on both sides of the frontline and still continue our activities to alleviate the suffering of those who face challenges in their everyday life due to the proximity to the conflict. The ICRC has expanded its budget for 2016 to meet the needs of civilians who suffered in the April escalation.

Q.: ICRC is recognized as a key liaison organization on the issues of POWs and hostages. Can you summarize or describe your activities?

A.: ICRC has a long history of visiting Prisoners of War (PoW) and people detained in several countries in the world. It all started at the end of the 19th century with a legal mandate provided to ICRC in the 1929 Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war, later replaced by the third Geneva Convention that is still valid today. The aim of the visits is to monitor treatment of detainees and conditions of detention, while ensuring that people detained are able to maintain contact with their families. The ICRC has standard visiting procedures, which must be followed during all our detention visits. Our findings are treated confidentially and shared only with those responsible for the detention, in the frame of a bilateral, confidential dialogue. The ICRC carries out private interviews with people detained. If detainees agree, the ICRC can raise their concerns with those responsible for the detention.

In the early years of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, there were many captured followed in some cases by exchanges and returns, at times done privately by families themselves who negotiated the release with private people. Many were done without the involvement of ICRC. In that chaotic time, the term "hostages" was used.

However, the term hostage when referred to militaries taking part in the hostilities, or civilians of the other side that represent a threat for the military effort or have contributed to it, captured by the other side, is not the right term. The capture and detention of persons in relation with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as any other conflict, is lawful if carried out in full respect of the provisions of Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law. The sides have the right to capture militaries and civilians of the other side. The aim of such provision is to reduce the number of dead. Militaries have the right to kill their enemy, this is the first thing to bear in mind in a conflict, and they have the right and obligation to capture the enemy when the latter does not represent a threat (wounded, disarmed for example). The first target in a war is to reduce the power of the other side. As the main aim of the Geneva Conventions is to reduce unnecessary suffering and loss of life, capturing instead of killing, whenever possible, is a way to reach the scope of weakening the enemy while sparing lives.

We see that the word hostage is still used, and not only in relation with Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This may lead to confusion and is legally not correct. It is advisable to use the terminology of the Geneva Conventions: Prisoners of war, civilian internees. When referring to non-international armed conflict the term generally used is: people deprived of their liberty in relation to the conflict

Q.: What cooperation do you have with the State Commission on POWs, Hostages and Missing Persons?

A.: We work closely with the State Commission and especially its Working Group to clarify the fate of missing people in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Jointly with the State Commission and Azerbaijan Red Crescent Society, between 2008 and 2011 Detailed Data about the missing people was collected and is gradually being processed by the State Commission. In addition, we are collecting biological reference samples from the relatives of those who are still missing. This is done together with the State Commission and the hospital of the State Security Service. The objective is to preserve important DNA information that may be used to identify human remains in the future.

We are following this procedure with the families and the State Commission, here and on the other side. It will take many years to collect the samples from the close living relatives of all those who went missing. While it is impossible to guarantee that all families will eventually receive an answer one day, it is still important for families to participate to increase their chances to positively identify human remains, which could be exhumed in the future.

The collection of the biological samples from the families of the missing has been completed in Baku and we have started it in Sumgayit. Gradually the relatives of missing persons living in other parts of the country will be approached.

Q.: The fate of Dilgam Asgarov and Shahbaz Guliyev is a great concern for the public of Azerbaijan. What is ICRC doing to assist them and to return them back?

A.: ICRC, has a specific mandate and working modality when it comes to visiting people deprived of freedom, be it in relation to the conflict or not. We work within our boundaries given to us by States through the Geneva Conventions, which practically all States have signed and ratified.

ICRC visits the two Azerbaijanis detained in Nagorno-Karabakh regularly to assess their conditions and treatment in detention and keeps them in contact with their families. Maintaining family contacts is done through letters exchanged between the families and the detainees (RCMs).

The decision to keep or release detainees belongs to the parties in the conflict and not to the ICRC. Only after a detaining authority has decided to release and return someone, then the ICRC steps in as a neutral intermediary to facilitate the hand over at the border or the Line of Contact.

Q.: Can you help us understand the difference between the lists of missing people of State Commission and ICRC? What is being done to minimize the difference?

A.: ICRC offices in Baku, Yerevan and NK register missing people when their families approach the office looking for information about their missing relative. Based on this, the ICRC registered around 4,500 people who went missing as a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, on the sides. The ICRC's criteria for registration is not the same as that of the State Commissions and therefore ICRC's numbers are not identical to those of the sides to the conflict. This is normal and acceptable because the ICRC and the State Commissions do not have exactly the same criteria. It is needed to add that as a result of constant collaboration and information sharing, the difference between the lists has decreased significantly.

Q.: How many persons have been released from captivity through the assistance of ICRC Baku Office since it started working in Azerbaijan?

A.: Our role is to facilitate the hand over between the sides once the decision of releasing them has been taken at the political level.

In terms of handover, we estimate that over 700 people have been returned home with the support of the ICRC offices in NK, Baku and Yerevan since the beginning of ICRC activities in 1992. However, consider that in the early years of the war, things were very chaotic and many people were being captured and returned. ICRC does not have detailed statistics from that time, so we cannot give an exact number.

Q.: Could you please, explain which new elements do you plan to implement to raise the efficiency of your activities in the exchange of captives between Azerbaijan and Armenia?

A.: I do not see today a lack of efficiency in terms of ICRC activities when it comes to facilitate the handover/return of people detained, once we obtain the green light from all sides to go ahead. Our role is rather to remind all sides of their obligations under IHL when it comes to people detained, and encourage them to respect them, what we constantly do.

The legal basis for ICRC activities in this domain is international humanitarian law (IHL) which regulates the conduct of war and seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by protecting persons who are not participating in hostilities. All our actions are based on such provisions and on our ability to negotiate with all sides for their full respect. Hence, rather than ICRC efficiency I would speak of political will of all sides to respect their obligations under IHL. By the way, IHL does not consider exchange of captives but handover. This is because the obligation to release as soon as circumstances allow or latest at the end of hostilities is a unilateral obligation that does not require reciprocity. Moreover, the person should not be considered as a bargain tool as it would happen in an exchange.
The Irish Cancer Society and Irish Heart Foundation have made a joint-call to the Minister for Finance to increase the price of cigarettes by 50c in this years budget.

The two health charities say that this would reduce the number of young people smoking in Ireland even further than its current all-time low of 8.3% of 10-17 year olds.



Higher price will mean fewer smokers, particularly in the under-18 age group, said Donal Buggy, Head of Services and Advocacy at the Irish Cancer Society. We have already seen that the number of children smoking falls with increasing price. We want the Government to move the affordability of smoking further out of reach from young people.

"The Government has committed that Ireland will be tobacco-free by 2025 so every tool we have to discourage children from smoking has to be used to make this vision a reality.

Research conducted by the Irish Heart Foundation and Irish Cancer Society in 2011 found that when choosing which cigarette brand to purchase, price is usually the deciding factor for teens and most will automatically choose the cheapest, irrespective of whether it is their first choice.
Following Saturdays successful motion on tackling homelessness, London Liberal Democrats hosted a fringe event on homelessness in 2016. Despite being up against both Tim Farron and Nick Clegg fringes, the room was packed and it was standing room only at the back!

Alice Ashcroft from Crisis kicked off the debate by outline what is happening in Parliament, particularly focusing on the Homelessness Reduction Bill, more details of which are below. Councillor Jayne McCoy then outlined the problems local government faces when dealing with homelessness especially when facing budget cuts from the Government.

Simon Grainge then described the work of Emmaus which has 28 communities across the UK housing over 750 people. Emmaus believes overcoming homelessness means more than a roof over your head. Thats why Emmaus supports people to work their way out of homelessness, providing meaningful work as well a stable home for as long as someone needs it. Emmaus also helps the state and society as for every 1 spent with Emmaus, there is an 11 return on investment, with social, environmental and economic benefits.

It was then the turn of Graeme Clark who is a companion at Emmaus Brighton to share his story. Graeme outlined how he became homeless and the challenges he faced with the local authority and also on the streets facing abuse from people. Graeme as a companion not only lives at Emmaus but is also and also participates in communitys social enterprise, which helps fund supporting himself and the other companions.

You can find out more about Emmaus here

The remainder of the fringe meeting was handed over for questions from the audience these varied from councillors sharing their frustration of fighting to get people housed and questions about how the audience can help tackle homelessness. One of the key things Graeme said is not to be frightened of engaging with homeless people, do say hello and take time to find out their story and ask how you can help.
Editors Note: This report was actually filed just after the meeting ended at Conference but we waited until we were all home to put it up.

Amidst the talk of Brexit and of our future place on the world as a nation, International Relations Committee met in a spirit of determination to do our part.

At the top of the agenda were opportunities to discuss the impact of Brexit beyond our shores, courtesy of Kerstin Lundgren, the Foreign Affairs spokesperson for Swedens Centerpartiet, and Joseph Garcia, Deputy Chief Minister of Gibraltar and Leader of the Gibraltar Liberal Party. It was apparent that, whilst our Government is attempting to work out what its negotiating stance might be, there are parallel processes going on already within other national governments.

Naturally, from the Gibraltarian perspective, concerns about the border with Spain, crossed by 12,000 Spanish workers onto the Rock each day, are uppermost, along with the implications for the flourishing financial services industry. Indeed, there has been talk of entry into Schengen for Gibraltar.

Kerstin spoke of Swedish concerns about defence, given her partys developing stance on NATO membership (Sweden isnt currently a member) and the unwelcome assertiveness of the Russians. She also noted that, as one of the non-Eurozone member states, Britains influence in ensuring that the interests of those states are not overlooked will be lost.

We will clearly need to take a greater interest in policy developments in our sister parties, particularly in terms of their likely stance on Brexit negotiations, and proposals to exchange policy ideas with other ALDE Party members were on the agenda. It was agreed to explore this further, perhaps working with the ALDE Party itself to establish a broader policy exchange for the benefit of all member parties.

Our new International Officer, Harriet Shone, updated the committee on the work that the International Office are doing in South Africa and Georgia, and reported back on her recent trip to Sierra Leone, where the influence of an over mighty Executive has had worrying effects on the ability of Parliament to do its job, lacking even basic resources. Future projects include training for our Kenyan sister party, and work around the COP22 meeting in Marrakech, with a Liberal International meeting scheduled to take place there.

Were scheduled to meet again in November, in the run-up to the ALDE Party Congress in early December, where the impact of the Partys governance review will doubtless be high up the agenda.
We had some absolutely cracking press coverage this Conference.

In her speech yesterday, Sal Brinton read out a newspaper editorial which said lots of nice things about us:

This Sunday, one papers editorial headline was Lib Dems revival is a blow to sorry Labour, and it then went on to say: fair play to the Lib Dems. under Leader Tim Farron the party has risen from the ashes of electoral oblivion to reposition itself as the only effective opposition The Lib Dems have not only capitalised on the fallout from the EU Referendum but also the disintegration of the Labour Party They are speaking up for ordinary voters on issues that really matter, such as the NHS and education. The Observer on Polly Toynbees day off? The Independent? No, this, my friends, is the Sunday Express! Im delighted that Tim is at last getting the recognition that he deserves, and I suspect that phrase the only effective opposition might appear in a few leaflets and tabloids over the next few months.

Tim got loads of coverage, from Buzzfeed to the Guardian to the Standard in the run-up to Conference, and there has been positive coverage of his speech yesterday, too. George Eaton in the New Statesman says:

In his peroration, Farron resonated passion for this task. The only movement with the desire and the potential to stop the calamity of Brexit and the tragedy of a generation of Conservative majority rule, is this movement, is the Liberal Democrats, he cried. Though the voters may tarry, if they come at all, Farrons centrist radicalism gives his party a chance.

It wasnt all great, though. Last night, the BBCs package on Newsnight included a studio discussion with Anne McElvoy and former Labour SpAd Patrick Diamond, neither of whom, obviously, are particular fans of the Liberal Democrats. Diamond went on about how people didnt like liberalism any more and the way that democracy worked wasnt satisfying people. Such a shame that no party has been calling for people to be given more power and for there to be a fairer system where their votes actually meant something, then, isnt it? If wed had representation in the studio, we could have rebutted this and every other point that they made.

I am a great believer in complaining to the BBC when this happens. If a lot of people do so, then the subject can be featured on their complaints website and a response made public. However, I suspect that they dont often receive complaints from us because, well, were way too busy to take 5 minutes and do it.

But it is only 5 minutes and this matters. We have a unique space in politics at the moment and it isnt being presented to the public because the media ignore us. So, have a watch of the programme here and if you agree that we should have been represented on that panel, complain here.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
10 Cutting-Edge Skin-Care Devices You Can Use at Home

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Indigenous industries in the Shannon Region worried about their export prospects following Brexit will have an opportunity to get expert advice on how to react at a seminar organised by Shannon Chamber.

The fall-out from the Brexit vote will be addressed by senior market adviser Trevor Charsley of AFEX Risk Management Solutions when he addresses the seminar this Thursday, September 22.

A recent Irish Exporters Association survey of members found that ninety per cent of companies export to, or do business with, the UK. For many Irish-owned firms in the region already exporting to the UK or planning to do so, the Brexit issue is of major concern, explained Helen Downes, CEO of Shannon Chamber.

Thursdays seminar, which is free of charge, provides an ideal opportunity for local firms to get a very valuable insight into this complex issue and explore what they can do to help their businesses prosper, she added.

Mr Charsley is a widely acknowledged expert commentator on Brexit and business matters who is often quoted in the leading British and North American media.

Mazars Ireland, the leading professional services firm is the main sponsor of the seminar, which is being organised in association with the German-Irish Chamber of Commerce.

Ronan Harbison, commercial director with the German-Irish Chamber of Industry and Commerce will speak about opportunities in the German market for firms in the Shannon region.

A number of other topics critical to indigenous firms developing export markets will be covered during the event which will feature a number of speakers from Mazars.

Thursdays seminar begins at 8.30am at the Radisson Blu Hotel.
A YOUNG man who admitted driving in an unacceptable manner through the city centre has avoided a disqualification.

Jordan Mitchell, aged 19, of Clarina Avenue, Ballinacurra Weston pleaded guilty to a charge of careless driving relating to an incident at William Street earlier this year.

He had been charged with the more serious offence of dangerous driving but that charge was withdrawn by the State after a guilty plea was entered.

Limerick District Court was told the defendant was initially observed by two detectives while driving his mothers Volkswagen Passat at Sarsfield Street shortly after midnight.

Sergeant Donal Cronin, prosecuting, said as he travelled along William Street he was observed driving at excessive speed and crossing between lanes.

While acknowledging that Mr Mitchell had full control of the Passat he said his speed was inappropriate given the built up nature of the area and the potential an accident taking place.

It was unacceptable conduct but not dangerous, he said, adding the ability of the teenager to drive was not in doubt.

He is a capable driver, we are not questioning his driving skill. He should be more mature in his driving, just because you can doesnt mean you should, he commented.

Judge Marian OLeary was told Mr Mitchell was dealt with pretty sternly on the night and will suffer hugely as a result of the conviction which attracts five penalty points.

Solicitor Tom Kiely said his client accepts his driving on the night was unacceptable and he said the defendant has learned a harsh lesson and is likely to face a major hike in his insurance premium.

He said an accident did not occur and that there was no risk to oncoming traffic as the offence happened on a one-way street.

Mr Kiely told the court the teenager is currently unemployed but that he is hopes to secure work in the construction sector in the near future.

He added that Mr Mitchell, who has no previous convictions, has not come to the attention of gardai since the incident.

Judge OLeary imposed a 300 fine and, in the circumstances, did not impose a driving ban saying Ill give you one chance.
THE family of a toddler who died in a horror road crash on the M20 at the weekend have appealed for privacy in the wake of the tragedy.

Three-year-old Kellycia Nudiri died after she sustained catastrophic head injuries in the collision which happened on the southbound carriageway of the motorway near the Patrickswell exit at around 4.45pm on Saturday.

Kellycias twin brother and her parents were also treated at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) following the collision for non life-threatening injuries.

Three other men who were travelling in another car were also taken to UHL following the incident but they have since been discharged.

It is understood the family of the little girl, who are originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, recently moved to the Abbeyfeale area from Limerick city where they had lived for some time.

There is a very small African community in Abbeyfeale, maybe 10 or 15 people and, as far as I understand, they were here just a few months, said Cllr Seamus Browne.

Both lanes of the motorway were closed for several hours following Saturdays accident and investigations into what happened are being conducted by gardai attached to Roxboro Road garda station.

Kellycia was the eleventh person to die on Limerick roads so far this year.

Doras Luimni, which has been assisting the family since the weekend, has appealed for privacy on behalf of the family as they come to terms with the tragedy.

Meanwhile, gardai are appealing to all road users to support European Day without a Road Death (EDWARD) which is taking place this Wednesday.

The initiative, which has been organised by TISPOL  the Traffic Police network in Europe  is supported by the Road Safety Authority and An Garda Siochana.

Road safety is a shared responsibility, just as our roads are a shared space. None of us has the right to behave in a way that endangers others. You might think that its OK to drive a little bit above the speed limit, or to just have a couple of drinks and drive home, or to not bother putting your seatbelt on in the car but the tragic reality is that these actions could have serious and devastating consequences for others. There are no more excuses - we need to improve how we use the road, said Pearse White, director of the RSA.

Chief Superintendent Aidan Reid, president of TISPOL, is appealing to drivers to do their bit.

Think about how you can reduce risk by always wearing a seatbelt, keeping to speeds that are both legal and appropriate for the conditions, not driving after drinking alcohol or taking drugs, and not using a mobile phone at the wheel.

If everyone commits to making small changes, then the road safety improvements will be huge and we will achieve big reductions in the number of people who are killed or seriously injured, he said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development hopes that two resolutions on conflicts will be adopted at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

These resolutions are titled Protracted Conflicts in the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) Area and Their Implications for International Peace, Security and Development and The Situation in the Occupied Territories of Azerbaijan.

Both resolutions were included to the agenda of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly. The UNGA 71st session started Sept. 13 and will end Sept. 26 at the UN headquarters in New York.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

Altay Afandiyev, GUAM secretary general, told Trend Sept. 21, that during its chairmanship in GUAM, Azerbaijan has made efforts to coordinate the two draft resolutions.

Today work is underway with other countries missions to mobilize international support. I think there is a real chance for the resolutions to get adopted in the current session of the UN General Assembly, he said. I hope the drafts will be supported by the majority of UN members.

As the most respectable forum of international community, the UN can play a very important role in drawing attention to the need of resolving the conflicts in the GUAM countries, he said. Presenting the draft resolutions on the UN platform has become a factor helping the GUAM member-states to defend their interests.

Azerbaijan assumed the GUAM presidency on Jan. 1, 2016.

The GUAM was created by post-Soviet states in 1997 during the summit of heads of states of the European Union in Strasbourg. In 1999, Uzbekistan joined the format and four years later withdrew. In 2006, Ukraine and Azerbaijan announced plans to further increase the GUAM member relations by renaming the organization GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development and establishing its headquarters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
A PRIEST based in Moyross has warned drug dealers that hell awaits them in a hard-hitting homily delivered at Mass.

The parish priest for the area, Fr Tony ORiordan, has said that drug dealers and those profiting from the 'tainted money' of drugs will face hell.

While we are almost 10 years on from the period of murders and shootings, the evil of drug dealing flourishes in this city and continues to wreak havoc, he said in his homily.

Intimidation, threats, extortion, and damage are daily occurrences. Just because the media dont shine a light into this shady and murky world, it is nevertheless a blight on our city and indeed our society, he said.

Addressing drug dealers in particular, he said: If you continue to be an agent of Satan in this life, be warmed - you might not be so content to be in his company for all eternity. Hell awaits you.

To those who deal drugs, and those who extort tainted money, todays Gospel is a warning to you  you might be escaping the reaches of justice in this life, but you will face eternal justice. Your evil actions, your lack of mercy, will exclude you from Gods Kingdom. Your drug and blood money will be of no use to your then. In the words of todays readings at Mass - never will God forget a single thing you have done. The teaching of Jesus is clear - you will have to account for your evil.

He also urged those involved in the drugs business to change, reject the lure of drug money, open your eyes and hearts to damage you do to children, and mothers, and how you destroy individuals, families and communities. Any other good you do in life is worthless because of your evil enterprise. To those profiting from drugs and dealing drugs, In the name of God, stop.

Earlier this year, Fr O'Riordan told Judge Tom ODonnell at Limerick Circuit Court that he was allowing a teenage criminal live at the parochial house, until other suitable accommodation could be found, and help him get his life back on track after securing a new job for him. Last year the outspoken cleric was critical of the Regeneration programme in Moyross, calling for a moratorium on demolitions while so many people are homeless.
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The 12m Cornhill development in Lincoln is well under way and, as these pictures show, a lot of work has gone on since it started last week.

Builders are on site pulling down glass canopies and clearing the market hall as part of Lincolnshire Coop's major transformatiion, due for completion in June 2017.

Shops from 30a to 35 Sincil Street, between the former Christian bookshop and the old chip shop, will be extended and double-height glass windows added, making them visible from the High Street.

Three national retailers have signed up for units at the new shopping complex, which promises to breathe new life into the area around the Cornhill and Sincil Street and complement the city council's 30m plans for a new bus station, shops and a 1,000-space multi-storey car park.

Shoppers told the Lincolnshirelive that despite the chaos the planned improvements will be worth it in the end.

Liam Bradshaw, 26, from Beaumont Fee, said: "You've got to make Lincoln look ugly before you can make it beautiful. Lincoln will benefit from all the improvements.

"I'd like to see more shops, a nice restaurant and some sort of cafe at the Corn Exchange."

Phyllis Priestley, 83, said: "When the Corn Exchange is done, all the disruption would have been worth it.

"But I would have liked to see a market in there still."

Michael Jackson, 70, a retired engineer from Brant Road, Lincoln, said: "You have a have disruption in order to see progress.

"I always thought the upstairs of the Corn Exchange was not fully utilised but it was sad to see the market go."
Sep 21, 2016, 12 PM

Interested collectors are asked to register in advance if they would like to attend the Oct. 5 Diwali stamp first-day ceremony in New York City.

By Michael Baadke

Anticipating a limited-seating event, the United States Postal Service is asking collectors interested in attending the Diwali forever stamp first-day ceremony to register in advance online.

The Oct. 5 event will begin at 1 p.m. at the Consulate General of India, 3 E. 64th St. (between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue) in New York City.

While the ceremony is free and open to the public, those interested in attending should RSVP online.

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The Diwali forever stamp is being issued for the Hindu festival taking place this year on Oct. 30.

The festival, which celebrates the triumph of light over darkness and good over evil, is a significant Hindu holiday. It is additionally celebrated by many people of other faiths, including Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs.
Sep 21, 2016, 3 PM

Three big days on the stamp hobby calendar are approaching: the 130th annual Chicagopex philatelic exhibition takes place in November. (Getty image)

By Denise McCarty

The Chicago Philatelic Society will present its 130th annual philatelic exhibition, Chicagopex 2016, Nov. 18-20 at the Westin Chicago Northwest, 400 Park Blvd., Itasca, Ill.

The Scandinavian Collectors Club and the American Air Mail Society will hold their conventions at the this show.

The bourse will include 75 dealers from the United States and Europe. The United States Postal Service and the United Nations Postal Administration also will attend, and Regency-Superior will conduct the show auction.

Connect with Linns Stamp News:

Sign up for our newsletter

Like us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

There will be approximately 300 frames of philatelic material on display, along with a philatelic literature competition for books and other materials.

Other features of the show will be a youth booth and speakers from local clubs, including the Chicago Philatelic Society and Germany Philatelic Society Chapter No. 5.

The Chicagopex 2016 theme will celebrate 60 years of Europa stamps. Special souvenir show cachets and a cancellation will be available.

Admission and parking are free. Show hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Attendees are asked to contact the hotel, phone 630-773-4000 or 866-716-8104, or through Westins website to make reservations. Mention Chicagopex for the special room rate.

Tickets for the Saturday night awards banquet must be purchased in advance. For details, visit the Chicagopex website.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

Azerbaijan has all conditions and democratic environment for organizing the upcoming referendum at a high level and its free, fair and transparent conduct, Chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Azerbaijan Mazahir Panahov said.

He made the remarks in Baku Sept. 21 at the meeting with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US to Azerbaijan Robert Cekuta, the CEC told Trend.

Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev earlier signed a decree to hold a referendum on making amendments to the countrys constitution Sept. 26, 2016.

Cekuta expressed satisfaction with close cooperation of the US Embassy with the CEC, expressed gratitude to Panahov and inquired about the work done in preparation for the referendum to be held Sept. 26.

Panahov said that the CEC is always open to cooperation with international organizations, and these relations play an important role in further improvement of the election and referendum practice, its successes and in the fact that this practice has reached the current level.

Panahov spoke about large-scale projects implemented in order to better ensure Azerbaijans electoral law, the principles of activity of election commissions and the rights of the countrys citizens to participate in the referendum in connection with the upcoming national voting.

Panahov and Cekuta also exchanged views on possible prospects of cooperation between the structures in different areas and issues of mutual interest.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

Azerbaijans Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov has met with his Australian counterpart Julie Bishop during the 71st session of the UN General Assembly, Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry told Trend Sept.21.

During the meeting, the parties emphasized the necessity of developing the political dialogue between Azerbaijan and Australia within the UN and other international organizations.

The foreign ministers exchanged views on the development of interparliamentary relations, arranging high-level reciprocal visits and the ways of expanding economic and trade relations.

Mammadyarov briefed his Australian counterpart about the process of negotiations on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

As OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs have said at the level of heads of state, the current status quo, which is based on the occupation of Azerbaijani lands by Armenia, is unacceptable, he noted.

During the meeting, the parties discussed the agenda of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly and other international issues of mutual interest.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Elchin Mehdiyev  Trend:

Azerbaijan didnt appeal to the Venice Commission to get a conclusion on the amendments to its constitution, since those amendments dont envisage expansion of the presidents powers, said Shahin Aliyev, head of Department of Legislation and Legal Expertise of Azerbaijani Presidential Administration.

Shahin Aliyev said during a press conference in Baku Sept. 21 that these amendments do not envisage giving additional powers to Azerbaijans president, establishment of vice-presidency does not give additional powers.

This is about improving the governance, he added.

Aliyev said the vice-presidents could be called secretaries as well.

This is about speedy implementation of the reforms. The Venice Commission has never had a negative approach to human rights issues. Therefore, there was no need to submit the amendments related to human rights to the Venice Commission, he added.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has attended the opening of Mingachevir City Museum of History.

The president was informed that the museum occupies an area of 810 square meters.

The museum features a photo section reflecting life and activity of National Leader Heydar Aliyev and President Ilham Aliyev, and their role in the countrys development.

There are a 50-seat conference and two exhibition halls in the museum, the collection of which includes 16,000 exhibits, of them 400 on display.

The president viewed the museum.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) held a ceremony on the occasion of the Oil Workers Day, celebrated on Sep.20. Welcoming the guests Elmar Gasimov, Rector of Baku Higher Oil School, extended his congratulations to the Azerbaijani oil workers, as well as to the BHOS faculty and students on the occasion of the Oil Workers Day, celebrated based on the decree issued by the National Leader Haydar Aliyev.

Speaking about the successful oil strategy pursued by the government of Azerbaijan, the rector said that the Contract of the Century was a remarkable event in the history of Azerbaijans oil industry. He underlined that this strategy has an essential role in the policy initiated by the National Leader Heydar Aliyev and now successfully continued by President Ilham Aliyev.

Petroleum engineering is a traditional profession for Azerbaijanis, and today, BHOS, established based on the decree by President Aliyev, has a significant role in training highly qualified English speaking specialists in the country, said Gasimov.

He added that this higher school could be regarded as role model to ensure implementation of the policy directed to transfer the oil capital to the development of human resources.

Welcoming the freshmen and their parents the rector congratulated them for joining the BHOS students. He continued his speech briefing about the history of the higher school, as well as its perspectives and international partnership with various companies and universities, emphasizing that BHOS applied the curriculum of Heriot-Watt University, UK.

Then Gasimov expressed his belief in the fact that the potential graduates of BHOS would continue their work as honorary oil workers with dignity.

The ceremony continued with awarding notebooks to the newly admitted students.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) has once again passed audit procedure of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) for compliance with the IOSA standard (IATA Operational Safety Audit).

This audit has once again proved AZAL as a reliable air carrier that meets the strictest international safety requirements in civil aviation.

IOSA (IATA "Operational Safety Audit" program) - a few hundred mandatory standards and recommended procedures, structured into several sections. The airline should confirm compliance with them during the audit.

Safety analysis includes not only assessment of production activities of the airline, but also its organizational structure. There is a system to minimize risks from the influence of the human factor and a feedback system that enables timely ensuring the corrective actions. Operations by each employee of the airline are registered down to the smallest details, which suggest flight safety techniques.

"Safety issue has always been among the top priorities in our airline. Azerbaijan Airlines has successfully passed the IOSA audit for the fifth time, which once again confirms that our standards meet international requirements", Vice-president of CJSC AZAL Eldar Hajiyev said.

It should be noted that Azerbaijan Airlines is a member of IATA since 1993.

In June 2015 Skytrax consultancy, which is considered as the most influential ranking company in the world in air transportation sphere, awarded AZAL the prestigious rating - The World's 4-STAR Airline.
Find not too frequent updates from the Livesay family here
Scandium is a silvery metal that is soft and has a density of about three times that of water. Scandium is a transition metal and is also considered a rare earth element due to similar chemical properties (such as difficulty in extracting and in separating from other elements) and existence in the same ores, according to Chemicool.

Scandium is the 31st most abundant element on Earth, according to Periodic Table, with about 22 parts per million abundance by weight in Earth's crust, according to Chemicool.

Scandium is scattered thinly and has been found in over 800 minerals. Within these minerals, scandium is found in its oxide form (Sc 2 O 3 , also known as scandia or scandium oxide), according to Scandium Mining. There are many commercial uses for scandium even though the cost of scandium is typically high  several thousand dollars per kilogram for scandium oxide and up to a few hundred thousand dollars per kilogram for pure scandium, according to Chemistry Explained.

Just the Facts

Atomic number (number of protons in the nucleus): 21

Atomic symbol (on the periodic table of elements): Sc

Atomic weight (average mass of the atom): 44.9559

Density: 1.734 ounces per cubic inch (3.0 grams per cubic cm)

Phase at room temperature: solid

Melting point: 2,804 degrees Fahrenheit (1,540 degrees Celsius)

Boiling point: 5,126 F (2,830 C)

Number of natural isotopes (atoms of the same element with a different number of neutrons): 1. There are also 13 artificial isotopes created in a lab.

Most common isotopes: Sc-45 (100 percent of natural abundance)

(opens in new tab) Shutterstock (opens in new tab) ) (Image credit: Greg Robson/Creative Commons, Andrei Marincas

History

Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, predicted the existence and properties of scandium (which he called "ekaboron"  similar to boron) in 1869, according to the New World Encyclopedia. Lars Fredrick Nilson, a Swedish chemist, when examining the spectra of the minerals euxenite and gadolinite, discovered the element in 1879. The element was named for the Latin word for Scandinavia, "Scandia," due to the minerals in which scandium was at that time found to exist only in the Scandinavian Peninsula, according to Peter van der Krogt, a Dutch historian. Per Teodor Cleve, a Swedish chemist, made the link that the new element discovered by Nilson was the same as the proposed element described by Mendeleev.

In the first attempt to isolate scandium, Nilson and his team processed 10 kilograms of euxenite and were able to produce about two grams of scandium oxide. According to the New World Encyclopedia, metallic scandium wasn't produced for the first time until 1937 by Werner Fischer, Karl Brunger, and Hans Grienseisen, German chemists. In 1960, 99 percent pure scandium was produced.

Who knew?

Current research

The majority of research involving scandium is the use of scandium alloys, particularly with aluminum. Most of these studies discuss the benefits of combining scandium with other metals and what alloys will possibly be used for. There are new methods in working with the alloys, such as a patent filed in 1997 by William Tack, an American inventor, and continuing studies on recovering scandium from various resources, such as this study by Weiwei Wang et al., a group of Australian researchers, published in 2010 in Elsevier in the Hydrometallurgy section.

Tack's patent described a method for using aluminum-scandium alloys to assemble structures such as bicycle frames by use of welding. The alloys that were used contained various amounts of scandium along with other "fillers" including silicon, manganese, magnesium, zirconium, titanium, and copper to determine the best combination of materials for various structures using the author's welding technique.

The 2010 study described several processes for the recovery of scandium from several resources. Scandium is primarily recovered as a by-product of mining other ores such as uranium, aluminum, titanium, zirconium, and other rare-earth ores. Various techniques are used to recover the scandium in the left over ores including leaching, solvent extraction, precipitation, and calcination.

A dissertation study published in 2016 by Claire Parker, an ocean sciences student in California, discusses the importance of scandium in the ocean. Trace metals are essential micronutrients in the health of the ocean environment, and while iron is the most studied, scandium has been one of the least studied trace elements that are found in the ocean. There are no known biological roles for scandium. Therefore, according to the author, the scandium dissolved in the ocean could relate to the non-nutrient side of the oceanic iron cycle.

Based on several studies and discussed in the dissertation, dissolved scandium and iron in the ocean have similar distributions, concentrations and reactivity (based on a similar inorganic compound). The author concludes that studying both iron and scandium and their properties within the ocean can provide "new insights into physical, chemical, and biological processes occurring in the ocean."

Additional resources
Interpretation of where an ancient sites might be in an aerial drone photo taken in the Le Pianelle area.

Ancient Roman ruins that lie hidden below the surface at the Apennine Mountains of Italy have largely escaped discovery because the rugged terrain makes them difficult to spot by foot and dangerous to find by airplane.

Now, using small airborne drones, archaeologists have found that an ancient settlement in the Apennines was much more dense and organized than previously thought, a new study reveals. The study offered evidence that dronescould help uncover more unknown sites in mountains worldwide.

Scientists investigated the area of Le Pianelle in the Tappino Valley in the mountainous southern Italian region of Molise. This area was known as Samnium in antiquity. [7 Bizarre Ancient Cultures That History Forgot]

"The way this mountain society was organized remains poorly understood," said study author Tesse Stek, a Mediterranean archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Aerial drone photo of the Le Pianelle area in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. A grid of features is visible in the middle of the picture. (Image credit: T.D. Stek.)

Previously, construction accidentally unearthed two ancient temples in the area. However, "there was no good knowledge about other sites, such as villages, farms, villas, graveyards and so on, that could tell us more about the ancient inhabitants in the area that visited the cult sites," Stek told Live Science. "They seemed to be cathedrals in the desert, so to say." [5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future]

One theory is that these temples served as road stations and places of commerce along routes where sheep, cattle, goods and information traveled. Another theory suggests that these temples marked the frontier of a large state, such as the territory of the ancient Samnites.

Looking for hidden ruins

Archaeologists might want to conduct aerial surveys to help discover any ruins hidden beneath the surface. These require slow, low-altitude flights where researchers can take pictures of sites from the right angles and with the right lighting reveal ancient complexes.

For instance, on farmland, ancient walls may present themselves "as stripes where the grain is lower," Stek said. "Sometimes this is hard to see from a distance, but it becomes especially visible when the sun is low, and shadow effects enhance the differences in corn height."

However, in rugged terrain, "flying low is very difficult, dangerous, and time-costly," Stek said. "In the mountainous, fragmented area where we work, previously normal aerial archaeology had not had success.

"Drones now change the picture completely," Stek said. "They offer a fast and entirely noninvasive method for discovering and mapping sites hidden in the ground." [Photos: Drones Explore Mysterious Plain of Jars Site]

In 2013, 2014 and 2015, the researchers investigated Le Pianelle using small commercial DJI Phantom quadcopter drones with cameras capable of taking photos both downward and from the side. The scientists remotely programmed the drones with flight plans to examine areas where researchers had discovered artifacts on foot.

The main advantage of using drones "is that you can choose very precisely which angle to take photos at the time you want," Stek said. "You can wait for the exact right moment in a specific field, make a flight of, say, 10 to 20 minutes' length, and take photos from all directions. With a normal airplane, you would need to be very lucky to catch the right moment, or you'll fly too high for good visibility or resolution, or the moment may not be right."

Revealing Le Pianelle

The elements made drone-flying difficult at times. "We actually lost one drone during a long, automated flight due to strong winds in a narrow valley," Stek said.

Despite such challenges, the drones helped reveal what appear to be the remains of several likely related archaeological complexes. "I could not believe it at first, but as they showed up on the computer screen at our base camp, the whole team started to yell, 'Wow!'" Stek said. [Incredible Drone Photos: Contest-Winning Images from Above]

Artifacts previously found in the area suggest these ruins date from the Classical to Late Roman period spanning from about the fifth century B.C. to the seventh century A.D. The researchers found that settlements at Le Pianelle were "much more dense, organized and articulated than previously thought," Stek said.

"We have a very complete overview of the internal organization of the settlement, including its disposition along the road, storage spaces, domestic areas and so on."

These new findings suggest the temples that were previously discovered in this area were not located away from civilization, but were rather "actually located at the center of dense, rural communities," Stek said.

Drones will not replace traditional archaeology, Stek emphasized. "If you do not see anything on drone footage, it does not mean that there is nothing underneath," he said. "There are many different factors influencing the detectability of sites by drones, so other types of research, such as field surveys, geophysics and excavations, remain fundamental, too."

The scientists are talking with local authorities to excavate these sites. "Protecting the site from damage from agricultural use and robbing is the first priority now," Stek said.

Stek added that in the spring, "I plan an aerial campaign in which we aim to investigate a large swath of territory in two weeks." In addition, the scientists are experimenting with near-infrared cameras to detect even more hidden details, "with very good results," Stek said.

Stekdetailed his findings online July 4 in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.

Original article on Live Science.
A computer model simulated human density 80,000 years ago, showing the arrival of humans in eastern China and southern Europe as well as migrations out of Africa along vegetated paths in Sinai and the Arabian Peninsula.

Ancient human migrations out of Africa may have been driven by wobbles in Earth's orbit and tilt that led to dramatic swings in climate, a new study finds.

Modern humans first appeared in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. It remains a mystery as to why it then took many millennia for people to disperse across the globe. Recent archaeological and genetic findings suggest that migrations of modern humans out of Africa began at least 100,000 years ago, but most humans outside of Africa most likely descended from groups who left the continent more recently  between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Previous research suggested that shifts in climate might help explain why modern human migrations out of Africa happened when they did. For instance, about every 21,000 years, Earth experiences slight changes to its orbit and tilt. These series of wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, alter how much sunlight hits different parts of the planet, which in turn influences rainfall levels and the number of people any given region can support. [See Photos of Our Closest Human Ancestor]

Now scientists have developed a new computer simulation of Earth to pinpoint how these changes in orbit and solar radiation levels might have affected rainfall, temperature, sea levels, glacial ice, vegetation, carbon dioxide levels and global modern human migration patterns over the past 125,000 years. The researchers noted that this model's predictions agree well with previous findings regarding ancient climates.

The model suggests that modern humans dispersed from Africa in multiple waves across the Arabian Peninsula and the area known as the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region that includes Israel and Syria. These results closely align with previous estimates garnered from archaeological and fossil data of when modern humans arrived in areas such as the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas.

"Earth's wobble with a periodicity of 21,000 years played a huge role in our dispersal across the planet and most likely also in our evolution and adaptation," said study lead author Axel Timmermann, a climate researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "If the climate had been constant over the past 125,000 years, we would have evolved in a very different way."

Specifically, the researchers found that intensified rainfall in northern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant would have generated habitable green corridors for modern humans to migrate through the Sahara and Arabian deserts. These corridors would have been open during four distinct times  about 106,000 to 94,000 years ago; 89,000 to 73,000 years ago; 59,000 to 47,000 years ago; and 45,000 to 29,000 years ago  "enabling Homo sapiens to leave northeastern Africa and embark onto their grand journey into Eurasia, Australia and the Americas," Timmermann told Live Science.

The model suggests these migrations were not one-way in nature away from Africa, "as is often portrayed in schematics," Timmermann said. "A green migration corridor between Africa and the eastern Mediterranean meant that Africans were migrating into Eurasia, and Eurasians were moving into Africa. The backflow of Homo sapiens into certain regions and the corresponding backflow of genes may be crucial for understanding who we are, why we are, where we are."

The model also suggests that modern humans should have arrived nearly simultaneously in southern China and Europe about 80,000 to 90,000 years ago. However, the oldest-known modern human fossils in southern China predate the oldest-discovered modern human fossils in Europe by about 35,000 to 40,000 years. The researchers proposed that the slow entry of modern humans into Europe might have been due to Neanderthals there.

In the future, "I am planning to include Neanderthals in our computer model" and account for factors such as interbreeding, cultural exchange and competition over food, Timmermann said.

Timmermann and his colleague Tobias Friedrich at the University of Hawaii at Manoa detailed their findings in the Sept. 22 issue of the journal Nature (opens in new tab).

Original article on Live Science.
Researchers have found that Aboriginal Australians are some of the oldest living populations on Earth. Here, Eske Willerslev talks to Aboriginal elders n the Kalgoorlie area in southwestern Australia in 2012.

A group of humans migrating out of Africa some 40,000 to 70,000 years ago mingled with an as-yet unknown branch of humanity, researchers say.

Modern humans originated about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa. However, scientists have long debated when and how the modern human lineage spread out of Africa to nearly every corner of the globe. Nearly everyone outside Africa descended from an exodus that occurred between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago, but recent archaeological findings and climate models suggest that migrations of modern humans from Africa began at least 100,000 years ago.

One way to find out whether, in the past, modern humans dispersed from Africa in one wave or many  and to see if they intermingled with any other human lineages along the way  is to examine the genomes of present-day modern humans. [See Photos of Our Closest Human Ancestor]

"We're interested in understanding how our species has come to be how it is through the lens of ancient DNA," said Swapan Mallick, bioinformatics director at Harvard Medical School in Boston and lead author of one of the three studies appearing in the Sept. 22 issue of the journal Nature.

Previous human genetic databases often sampled a relatively narrow range of populations, which could skew results or miss key details about the migrations of modern humans out of Africa. Now, three studies have collected new, high-quality data from 787 human genomes from more than 280 geographically diverse populations around the world, including typically understudied and rapidly disappearing groups.

Among the understudied groups researchers looked at are African populations, which have considerable genetic, linguistic and cultural diversity. They also examined genomes from Australia, where previous research uncovered some of the earliest archaeological and fossil evidence of modern humans outside Africa.

New branch of humanity?

The genetic analyses revealed the genomes of present-day aboriginal Australians might harbor evidence of ancient interbreeding with an unknown human lineage.

"Who these people are, we don't know," said Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and senior author of one of the three studies.

Previous research unearthed bones from a mysterious extinct branch of the human family tree from Denisova cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossils suggested these "Denisovans" shared a common origin with Neanderthals, but were nearly as genetically distinct from Neanderthals as Neanderthals were from living people. [Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors]

Recent work suggested that Denisovans have contributed about 5 percent of their DNA to the genomes of present-day people of the Pacific islands of Oceania. However, these new findings suggest that what seemed to be evidence of Denisovans in the Pacific were actually signs of an unknown human lineage.

"These guys were very distantly related to Denisovans, but by no means Denisovan," Willerslev told Live Science. "They were even more distantly related to Neanderthals, and they might have been even more distantly related to modern humans. We believe that they interbred with modern humans shortly before modern humans crossed into the ancient continent of Sahul  what is now Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania  some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago."

Leaving Africa

The new findings also shed light on the controversy over whether modern humans dispersed from Africa in a single exodus or in multiple distinct waves at different times. When it came to people from Papua New Guinea, "we could discover, in the genomes of the Papuan individuals analyzed here, small traces of an additional, early expansion out of Africa that was previously hypothesized only from archaeological remains," Mait Metspalu, an evolutionary geneticist at the Estonian Biocenter in Tartu, Estonia, and senior author of one of the three studies, told Live Science.

The researchers suggest that at least 2 percent of the Papuan genome harbors traces of an early migration that happened about 120,000 years ago. Previous research suggested that non-Africans largely descend from an exodus that happened between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago.

"Our results, while for the most part confirming the already accepted model of a single expansion out of Africa as the source event of all non-African populations, show that additional expansions were not as unlikely as we thought," Luca Pagani, a molecular anthropologist at the Estonian Biocenter and lead author of one of the three studies, told Live Science.

Oldest living population

The scientists also discovered that aboriginal Australians "are one of the oldest living populations on Earth, and have been in the same area for the past 50,000 to 60,000 years," Willerslev said.

There was a great deal of controversy "over whether or not aboriginal Australians directly descend from the first humans entering Australia," Willerslev said. "The answer to that question is yes  our data is completely consistent with aboriginal Australians descending from the first humans to enter Australia. It shows a very long connection between those people and the land. [How Did Life Arise on Earth]

"I can't think of any other place in the world where humans have been so long in the same spot as Australia," Willerslev said. "Yes, there are populations in Africa that are older, but we have no idea if they stayed in the same area in Africa for as long a time."

This is the first comprehensive population-level whole-genome study of human genetic diversity in Australia. "We found that because aboriginal Australians have spent such a long time in Australia, they are very genetically diverse," Willerslev said. "An aboriginal Australian from eastern Australia and one from southwestern Australia are almost as different genetically as an Asian is from a European."

The researchers noted that about 90 percent of aboriginal Australians speak languages belonging to a single linguistic family, "but some people in northwest Australia speak other language families," Willerslev said. "It'd be very interesting to see what the story is there when it comes to how they migrated to Australia."

Original article on Live Science.
How many awards ceremonies include Nobel Prize-winning presenters, performing chemists, a miniopera and a double deluge of paper airplanes? Just one  the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

This offbeat yearly event  celebrating somewhat strange scientific studies from around the world  is the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). And on Thursday (Sept. 22), at Harvard University in Boston, scientist winners will take the stage for the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony to accept accolades for their gloriously weird research. [8 Strange Things Scientists Have Tasted]

The presentation is officially identified as both the 26th and the first of its kind because "every year is a new beginning," Abrahams told Live Science in an email. The ceremony will be webcast live on Live Science starting at 5:40 p.m. ET.

Like the more mainstream Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels for science are awarded for outstanding achievements; however, the science they showcase is unusual, to say the least.

The winners of the 2015 Ig Nobel in biology attached weighted sticks to chickens' backsides, to investigate how certain types of bipedal dinosaurs with long tails might have walked. Chemistry winners that year managed to partially unboil a hard-boiled egg, while a winner of the prize for physiology and entomology submitted to honeybee stings on 25 locations on his body, to find out which regions were the most painful.

Even the dress code for the event reflects its lighthearted tone  recommendations on the AIR website include "your old wedding gown," "suit of armor," and "labcoat or longjohns." A winner of the 2015 Ig Nobel in physics wore a toilet seat around his neck, a nod to his research on how long it takes mammal species of different sizes to empty their bladders.

Every year, Nobel laureates hand out Ig Nobel prizes; the 2016 presenters will include past winners of Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine. In a so-called "IgBill"  a theatrical Playbill-like outline of the evening  the event is divided into two parts: "Pointless Preamble"  all activities up until the awards presentations  and "Everything Else," which includes the awards, introductions of past winners and, intriguingly, "Other Things."

An especially novel addition to the Ig Nobels this year is an anniversary celebration commemorating a wedding that took place at the Ig Nobel ceremony in 2001, between two NASA scientists.

Other scientist guests will be delivering 24/7 Lectures, in which they describe their science in two challenging presentations: one that lasts 24 seconds and one made up of only seven words that "anyone can understand," according to the IgBill.

The festivities will also feature a premiere performance of the original miniopera "The Last Second," a nod to the 2016 ceremony's designated theme: Time. Written by Abrahams  his 21st libretto for the Ig Nobel ceremony  it describes a stealthy scheme to add a leap second to all the clocks of the world, for nefarious criminal gain.

Original article on Live Science.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Bulgaria intends to expand cooperation with Azerbaijan in all spheres and considers the country as a transit route to Central Asia, Nargiz Gurbanova, Azerbaijani ambassador to Bulgaria, told Trend Sept. 20.

Gurbanova said that Azerbaijan is also interested in entering the Bulgarian market and further to the European markets.

Of course, a developed transport infrastructure is required to fulfill these intentions, she said.

"Azerbaijan has great potential in the transport sector, delivering broad opportunities for Bulgaria to enter the Central Asian markets," the ambassador added.

The cooperation opportunities in the transport sphere will be discussed during the talks between the two governments during the next meeting of the Azerbaijani-Bulgarian intergovernmental commission on trade-economic and scientific-technical cooperation in Baku in late September.

The Azerbaijani-Bulgarian intergovernmental commission on trade-economic and scientific-technical cooperation was established in 1995.

According to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, the trade turnover between the two countries amounted to $16.5 million in January-July 2016 compared to $6.6 million in the same period of 2015. Such an increase has been achieved through an increase in import operations by 2.5 times.
Otzi the Iceman was discovered in 1991 by hikers in the Alps.

The murder of Otzi the Iceman was likely committed at the end of a harsh personal conflict, researchers at a three-day mummy congress in Bolzano, north Italy, concluded.

Launched to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Iceman's discovery in the Otztal Alps in South Tyrol, the meeting presented new insights on the 5,300-year-old mummy, including a profile carried out with latest criminological methods.

According to this analysis, Otzi did not flee up the mountain to escape his enemies. On the contrary, he was just resting and taken by surprise by his attacker(s) who shot the arrow from behind and at a distance.

The theory is the latest of a series of speculations over Otzi's death. No corpse has been more thoroughly investigated.

RELATED: The Ice Mummy: Little-Known Facts

"In terms of his significance for science, Otzi is not simply an isolated mummy discovery. He could be seen as a typical European from earlier times and is precious for this reason alone," Albert Zink, director at the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, said.

Scientists have learned a lot about Otzi in the past 25 years. Among many things, they discovered that he had brown eyes, was about 5 foot, 3 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds.

He died at around 45, was arthritic, lactose intolerant, suffered from atherosclerosis and had cavities, worn teeth and periodontal diseases. He was also infected with Helicobacter pylori, the pathogen that gives people gastritis and stomach ulcers. Genetic tests revealed he belonged to the European haplogroup K and was probably infertile.

"What concerns us most these days is to know who the Iceman was, what role he played in society and what happened to him in the last days of his life," said Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology where the mummy is housed in refrigerated cell with an observation window.

To help solve the coldest of cold cases, Fleckinger asked chief inspector Alexander Horn, at the Criminal Investigation Department in Muinch, Germany, to probe the "Otzi Murder Case" using behavioral investigative analysis.

Horn began his inquire by examining the crime scene as it appeared on Sept. 19, 1991 when a human corpse was found near a melting glacier in the Otztal Alps.

The corpse was lying with the chest against a flat rock. Only the back of the head, the bare shoulders and part of the back emerged from the ice and meltwater.

He reconstructed the crime scene with the objects that were found in the vicinity and added to his analysis the data from the forensic medical examinations.

"I actually had more information with Otzi than in certain modern crime cases," Horn said.

RELATED: Oetzi the Iceman Suffered From Stomach Bug

The results of his investigation were that Otzi did not feel threatened shortly before his murder.

"He wasn't escaping, but resting. He had placed down his gear and enjoyed a hearty meal," Horn said.

Indeed, previous research established that Otzi had eaten Alpine ibex  a wild goat  just 30 minutes to 2 hours before his death.

"When you run away, you do not just sit and stop to eat a big meal," Horn told Discovery News.

He noted however that a few days prior to the murder, the Iceman had incurred an injury to his right hand.

RELATED: New Tattoos Found on Oetzi the Iceman

"The wound was the result of a defensive action during the course of a physical altercation. Since no other injuries could be found, we believe he came out as a winner from that hostile encounter," Horn said.

Such conflict could explain the surprise attack a few days later. Anger might have mounted after the unsuccessful hand-to-hand fight in Otzi's counterpart and a new attack was planned  by surprise this time.

According to Horn, the arrow shot appears to have been launched from a great distance in an act of treachery, taking Otzi by surprise.

All his objects, including the valuable copper axe, remained at the crime scene a fact that made Horn rule out theft as the reason of the killing.

"A personal conflict is more likely. We are talking of a behavioral pattern that is also prevalent today in most murder cases. It starts with little things and it grows to the extreme," Horn said.

Original article on Discovery News.
This image shows how people's average weights in three countries  Japan, the United States and Germany  changed over a one-year period.

Holiday weight gain isn't unique to the United States: A new analysis finds that people in Germany and Japan also pack on pounds during festive seasons.

But unlike Americans, who gain a lot of weight during Thanksgiving, people in other countries put on pounds at other "celebratory" times of the year, according to the study.

In the study, which was published today (Sept. 21) in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers gave wireless digital scales to nearly 3,000 participants in Germany, Japan and the United States. [11 Surprising Things That Can Make Us Gain Weight]

Over 12 months starting on Aug. 1, 2012, the people in the study weighed themselves each day. At the end of the study period, the researchers used the scale data to calculate how each participant's weight changed over the course of the year, compared to their starting weights.

People in all three countries gained weight, on average, around Christmas, according to the study. Specifically, people's weight went up in the 10 days after Christmas compared to the 10 days before Christmas, the researchers found.

People's average weights also increased around national holidays in their countries. In Japan, for example, there was an increase in weight during a holiday period called Golden Week, which takes place around the beginning of May.

In addition, Germans saw a sharp uptick in weight around Easter, and Americans around Thanksgiving, the researchers found.

But the largest gains were over the Christmas-New Year holiday season, according to the study. During this time, the Germans in the study gained an average of 1.8 lbs. (0.8 kilograms); the Americans gained an average of 1.3 lbs. (0.6 kg); and the Japanese gained an average of 1.1 lbs. (0.5 kg).

The investigators, led by Elina Helander, a personal health informatics researcher at Tampere University of Technology in Finland, noted that shortly after the holidays, people shed about half of their holiday weight gain; however, the other half appears to remain until the summer or beyond.

To help people avoid gaining weight during this time of year, one approach is to advise patients to have better self-control over the holidays, the researchers wrote. "The less one gains, the less one then has to worry about trying to lose it," they wrote.

Originally published on Live Science.
The Library of Congress, in conjunction with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has named five members to the 2016-2017 class of the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program. The 12-month program begins in late September 2016.

The NDSR program offers recent masters-degree graduates and doctoral candidates in specialized fieldslibrary science, information science, museum studies, archival studies and related technologythe opportunity to gain valuable professional experience in digital preservation. Residents will start the program with digital stewardship workshops at the Library of Congress, followed by specialized project work at one of five host institutions in the greater Washington, D.C. region. The projects will allow them to acquire hands-on knowledge and skills regarding collection, selection, management, long-term preservation and accessibility of digital assets.

George Coulbourne, chief of internship and fellowship programs at the Library, announced that the five residents and their host institutions for 2016-2017 are:

Meredith Broadway of Dallas, Texas. She holds a Master of Science in data curation and a certificate in special collections from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Bachelors degree from Rhodes College. Broadway will be a resident at the World Bank Group, focusing on an assessment framework and appraisal guidelines for identification of data for permanent preservation; on a set of analytic-process document guidelines to enable documentation of processes used in the collection and analysis of data; and guidelines for linking datasets to related documents and analytical reports.

Joseph Carrano of Middlebury, Connecticut. He has dual Masters degrees from the University of Maryland in history and library science, and a Bachelors degree from the University of Connecticut. Carrano will be part of a team at the Georgetown University Library developing open-source project guidelines, documentation and workflows for different preservation platforms. He will be involved in all stages of the process of inventory, selection, curation, preparation and ingest of files of all formats.

Elizabeth England of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has a Masters degree in library and information science from the University of Pittsburgh and a Bachelors degree from Drew University. England will be a resident in the University Archives at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, applying core archival functions such as appraisal, accessioning, processing, preservation, description and provision of access to a 50-terabyte collection of born-digital photographs, using scripting languages and tools that are vital to manipulating large datasets.

Amy Gay of Binghamton, New York. She has a Masters degree in library and information science from Syracuse University, and a Bachelors degree from the State University of New York, Oneonta. Gay will be a resident at the Food and Drug Administration, Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, working on the CDRH Science Data Catalog Pilot, a joint project to develop a searchable digital catalog for datasets, software code, computational models, images, and more as part of federally-mandated public access efforts. She will lead catalog content acquisition and curation, as well as refining the metadata schema and taxonomy.

Megan Potterbusch of Nashville, Tennessee. She has a Masters degree from the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, and a Bachelors degree from Earlham College. Potterbusch will serve as a resident at the Association of Research Libraries working in partnership with the George Washington University Libraries and the Center for Open Science to prototype the process of linking the output from a university research unit to a library digital repository through the Open Science Framework, an open source tool that integrates and supports research workflow.

For more information about the National Digital Stewardship Residency program, including information about how to be a host, partner or resident for future classes, visit loc.gov/ndsr/.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nations 123,000 libraries and 35,000 museums. Its mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. IMLSs grant-making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive. To learn more, visit imls.gov External.

The Library of Congress is the worlds largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United Statesand extensive materials from around the worldboth on site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov, and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

Trend:

Aspiring to preserve and protect the national heritage Azer Turk Bank has started a new project. The bank has presented new designs prepared for VISA type payment cards.

Now every citizen of Azerbaijan may proudly carry the card with national values engraved on its surface, as a little part of our Motherland.

By engraving the Kapaz mountain on the surface of VISA Gold, the bank aims to demonstrate its honor of rendering the services to customers and the intention to conquer new heights by constantly improving a quality of rendered services.

The image of the brave Caucasian tiger, the unique heritage of our nature included into the Red Book, on "VISA Infiniti" payment card implies trust, determination and reliability in all cases, which are inherent in the bank.

The iron tree, the unique plant of our Flora, depicted on the surface of VISA Platinum signifies long-term and stable relations of the bank with customers.

Those who want to build happy future may rely with full confidence on the bank, which is illustrated on "VISA Classic" cards by the symbol of vitality and energy - pomegranate.

Our strategic product, the white gold - cotton is depicted on the surface of VISA Electron card what symbolizes transparent, strategic relationships between the bank and its customers.

Specially for demonstrating cards with original design to customers, Azer Turk Bank has prepared a new video.

"VISA" and "MasterCard" type cards offered by the bank enable secure, easy and fast payment within few seconds in trade and service points of more than 200 countries around the world.

Moreover, the paywave and paypass services offered recently to cardholders of Azer Turk Bank, allow customers to pay by a single touch on special POS terminals.
Check out our latest E-Edition

Accessible anytime and anywhere on your desktop, tablet and smart phone devices. The Lodi News e-Edition is enhanced with the latest digital tools, including RSS feeds, social networking and much more.

Check out our latest E-edition!
Classical crossover group Affiniti return to the Backstage Theatre this week with a show-stopping concert and an incomparable guest star.

Made up of Longfords very own star soprano Emer Barry, as well as Harpist Aisling Ennis and Violinist Mary McCague, Affiniti will be joined on stage by Howard Crosby, the nephew of the late, great Bring Cosby for an evening of music from the movies.

We met Howard Crosby about three years ago, Emer told the Leader last week. We were doing a charity event in the Concert Hall.

After discovering that both acts had separately recorded La Vie en Rose, an impromptu duet was performed in the green room and a magical combination was born.

Following on from that, the talented Irish trio soon set out to perform a few gigs in America with Howard, and Howard later returned to Ireland with Affiniti for a Christmas show, which sold out the Mansion House.

This time, they return to Ireland for three unique, intimate and very special gigs.

While the spotlight will be very much on Affiniti, Howards friendly personality will shine through, as he speaks about his uncle and performs a few songs. He will also duet with the girls throughout the show.

Theres something for everyone at this concert as, while the focus is on older movies and music, there will be songs from Disney films including Frozen and Mary Poppins and well known musical movies such as Once. There will also be a tribute to some of Hollywoods best loved leading ladies.

Affiniti will perform at Dublins Sugar Club tonight, Wednesday, before bringing the concert to the Backstage Theatre tomorrow, Thursday, September 22 at 8pm.

Full details and tickets are available on 043 33 47888 or www.backstage.ie
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

The patriotic sacrifice and selfless courage of 9/11s fallen heroes will be honored during the 15th annual Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers (T2T) 5K Run & Walk in New York City.

In its 15th consecutive year, the event has become a beloved tribute to not just the 343 firefighters, but all the first responders who selflessly laid down their lives that day.

New York, NY - September 12, 2016 - The patriotic sacrifice and selfless courage of 9/11s fallen heroes will be honored during the 15th annual Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers (T2T) 5K Run & Walk in New York City on Sunday, September 25, 2016, starting at 9:30 a.m. An expected 30,000 will retrace the final footsteps of Stephen Siller, the late FDNY firefighter who made the ultimate sacrifice during his heroic efforts to rescue survivors of the September 11 terrorist attack in New York City. In its 15th consecutive year, the event has become a beloved tribute to not just the 343 firefighters, but all the first responders who selflessly laid down their lives that day.

Runners from all across the world, including as far away as England, are expected to embark upon New York City to participate in the Tunnel to Towers 5K Run & Walk. Since the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundations inception in 2001, this annual event and other related fundraising activities have raised more than $70 million for its various initiatives and programs, including supporting our nations catastrophically injured service members through the Building for Americas Bravest program. Through the program, the Foundation builds custom smart homes for injured servicemen. At the current time, 56 homes have been delivered, are under construction or are in the design stage.

Event highlights include:

Post run party/BBQ

Event T-Shirt for all race participants (first come, first serve).

Free concert featuring pop star Rachel Platten. Plattens triple-platinum selling single Fight Song rose to number one on adult pop radio before being succeeded by her second platinum selling hit, Stand by You. (Any individual watching the concert this year must have a runners bib to gain entrance.)

Pre-run ceremony featuring an official retirement of Siller the dog, an explosives detection dog who has been working at John F. Kennedy International Airport with his handler, Chris Neeson.

Over the years. Ive watched this Run/Walk evolve into both an annual celebration of everyone who gave their lives that day, as well as a life-affirming event for the future of this great nation, said Frank Siller, one of Stephens siblings and chairman of the Foundation. With the help of volunteers, donations and dedication, we are proud to have the opportunity to honor Stephen and all of his firefighter brothers in this special way.

The Tunnel to Towers 5K Run & Walk is open to the public. Registration is required and participants can visit www.t2trun.org for more information on how to run/walk or volunteer. Online registration will remain open until September 24 at 11:59 p.m. Participants are encouraged to create their own T2T fundraising page online, which allows participants to:

Share their personal or team pages via social media  or encourage friends and family to help them reach their fundraising goals via email!

Fundraise and earn Tunnel to Towers 15th Anniversary items including a commemorative challenge coin, hat, exclusive performance tech t-shirt and a commemorative windbreaker.

Participants can also register in-person the day of the run. Race day registration will take place at the IKEA parking lot in Brooklyn between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Participants may purchase timing chips online only through 11:59 p.m. on Monday, September 19, 2016. After September 19 and through September 24, a timing chip can be obtained only if you register in person at any registration site. Timing chips are not available to those registering on race day.



The run starts at 9:30 a.m. sharp on the Brooklyn side of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) in New York City. The run begins at Hamilton Avenue and Richards Street, then goes through the Tunnel, north onto West Street, left onto Liberty Street, to Battery Park Esplanade, right (east) on Warren Street, right (south) onto West Street and finishes at West and Murray Streets, across from the World Trade Center with one block as walk off area to Vesey Street.



Please note: the MTA & NYPD absolutely prohibits any backpacks, strollers, bags, water bottles and bicycles in tunnel. This will be strictly enforced. For additional details please check the FAQ page.



Although named after Stephen, the Run was created to honor the lives of the 343 firefighters who died during the September 11 terrorist attack, as well as pay special tribute to all the policemen, EMTs, construction workers and special people who lost their lives in their quest to save others.



As always, the Tunnel to Towers 5K Run & Walk is made possible by the support of literally thousands of volunteers including The Home Depot Foundation, presenting sponsor for the event. Other generous sponsors and supporters include GMC, Johnson & Johnson, Carpet One, CBS2 New York, UPS, Bracewell & Giuliani, Southeast Friends of Stephen Siller, Profit One, New York Jets, Fresh 102.7, WCBSFM 101.1, 92.3 NOW, WCBS News Radio 880, 1010 WINS, WFAN 66 AM and Semper Fi Fund, among others.



For more information on the Tunnel to Towers 5K Run & Walk, please visit Tunnel2Towers.org; or find the organization on Facebook at Tunnel to Towers Foundation and on Twitter @Tunnel2Towers.



About The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation

The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation is a charitable organization set up to follow the footsteps of FDNY firefighter Stephen Siller, who ran through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, carrying 60 pounds of gear on his back, to rescue his fellow New Yorkers. Siller lost his life when the towers collapsed, leaving his wife, five children and six siblings to carry on his memory and share his story. One of the primary missions of the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation is to honor the military members who have been seriously injured and sacrificed their quality of life in the line of duty. We believe that the Foundation is a real and concrete way to Follow the Footsteps of an American hero. The Foundation has established the LEGACY OF LOVE and NEVER FORGET programs as our way to make a lasting and positive difference in the lives of others. These programs, together with the Foundations Building for Americas Bravest program, bring hope to grieving children and healing to firefighters and our nations most catastrophically injured service members, who sacrifice life and limb in the line of duty. To find out more about the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, please visit www.Tunnel2Towers.org.
Local News, Business & Finance, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

Long Island Autism Communities, Inc. announced the appointment of Terri Manzione, Esq. as Executive Director.

Deer Park, NY - September 19, 2016 - Long Island Autism Communities, Inc., a recently formed not for profit, 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to developing supportive integrated communities for adults with autism, announced the appointment of Terri Manzione, Esq. as Executive Director.

Manzione brings extensive experience and expertise working on behalf of individuals with developmental disabilities including developing successful grant proposals to the New York State Office for People with Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD), various other agencies and foundations. Her experience also encompasses community outreach, marketing and compliance related initiatives.



Prior to joining Long Island Autism Communities, Manzione served as a Grant Author/Coordinator of Grant Program Operations for The Center for Discovery ASSET (Assessment, Support, Education and Training) Program. While there, she co-authored an OPWDD Balancing Incentive Program (BIP) grant proposal and received the second highest award in New York State. Her role also included collaborating with the organizations Associate Executive Director, CFO and General Counsel in the development of a business plan designed to achieve program sustainability through various funding streams. Additionally, she managed program contracts, helped facilitate participants obtaining OPWDD eligibility and HCBS Medicaid Waivers, conducted outreach with stakeholders across New York City and Hudson Valley region, and presented workshops.



Manziones career also included her roles as: Executive Director and Chair of the Board of Directors for Friends of LArche, Long Island, an organization developing family-like places where individuals with disabilities can live in the community with assistants; Corporate Compliance Officer and Coordinator of Outreach for Nassau Suffolk Services for Autism; and MSC Program Developer and Medicaid Service Coordinator for Ascent, A School for Children with Autism.



Manzione is an attorney who received her Juris Doctorate from St. Johns University and her

Bachelor of Science, Social Science Interdisciplinary from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University). An active member of the community, her past and present affiliations include: Long Island Family Support Services Advisory Council, for which

she has been a member since 2006 and was a Chairperson from April 2013-April 2015; the St. Marys of Roslyn Choir, for which she has been a member since 2005; and Co-Chair of the Center for Discoverys Evening of Discovery Gala, its largest annual fundraiser from 2014-2016.



She resides in Glen Head.



About Long Island Autism Communities, Inc.

Long Island Autism Communities, Inc. was formed in 2015 as a not for profit, 501(c)(3) organization. Its mission is to provide a place for adults with autism to live, work, socialize and thrive in a proactive, integrated community that meets the needs of each individual with person-centered planning and support. This goal will be accomplished by building communities of homes near vibrant villages or towns on Long Island that offer convenient access to hospitals and healthcare providers, potential employers, religious services, supermarkets, drugstores, restaurants, other retailers, service providers and recreational facilities. Our goal is to help each individual to become fully-engaged with the surrounding community, and encourage members of the local town or village to get to know our residents so that they can become part of that community. The organization was founded by CJM Wealth Management CEO Charles Massimo, the father of triplets, a daughter and two sons both of who are on the autism spectrum.



Massimo and his Board have identified an ideal location in Patchogue in close proximity to the village with easy access to transportation, a local hospital, healthcare providers, potential employers, supermarkets, banks, retailers, etc. and all of Patchogues thriving recreational and cultural offerings. It is exactly what the vision called for in giving the residents the best possible future into their adulthood.



Plans are to have the first community completed on or about 2018. The vision is for the first community to include residents with autism and some without a disability including a community director and caregivers. The homes would be designed with warm and inviting decors, while accommodating the special needs of individuals with autism such as sensitivity to certain outside stimuli such as excessive light or noise.



For more information, to get involved or make a donation, visit: www.licommunity.org or call: 631.302.0095
Pets & Animal, Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

Paws of War pairs trained rescue dogs with two military veterans.

Smithtown, NY - September 19, 2016 - Paws of War, a nonprofit organization that rescues dogs, gives them the necessary training, and then pairs them with veterans in need of service dogs, is pairing two U.S. veterans with working dogs. The introduction between the dogs and their new owners will take place on September 29, 2016 at the Beach Front Grill, located at 2444 S. Ocean Shore Blvd. in Flagler Beach, Florida. The ceremony will take place at 1 p.m., when the veterans will receive the service dogs that have been trained specifically for them, free of charge.

Im so excited to once again be a part of this important mission, explains Lauren Driscoll, dog trainer and program director of the Paws of War Florida chapter. Our veterans have given so much to us and we know first hand how trained service dogs can help veterans suffering from invisible wounds. Too many of our veterans are struggling as civilians, so we are making it easier for them.

Both of the dogs that will be given to the veterans were rescued from the Fort Pierce Humane Society in Fort Pierce, Florida and are being placed by the Florida chapter of Paws of War. They were both rescued in February and have undergone extensive training. Service dogs can play an important role in helping veterans to overcome such issues as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury, anxiety, and more. Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motor Cycle Club XXII has offered to provide an escort for the veterans to go from the Paws of War location to Beach Front Grill for the hand off.

The veterans who will be receiving the service dogs are Robin Ramos and Derek Logsdon. Robin was stationed in Panama in 1989 and 1990 and suffers from PTSD. Living in Myrtle Beach, the dog he will be paired with is Colby, a lab/catahoula leopard dog mix, which has been trained among other things to retrieve items for him, as well as turn lights on in a room before Robin enters.

Derek lives in Missouri and also suffers from PTSD, as well as suffers from hearing loss in both ears, and has attempted suicide twice. His service dog, Carly, is a lab/greyhound that has been trained to retrieve items for him, as well as assist with his hearing loss, such as waking him up if a smoke alarm goes off. Derek is a former Army sergeant who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012.

"We are so grateful for our veterans and so happy when we can give back to them, says Dori Scofield, co-founder of Paws of War. We have assisted numerous veterans by pairing them up with rescued dogs that have been expertly trained. Its a win-win situation for everyone.

Driscoll has successfully trained 19 dogs prior to the two being paired up with the veterans this month. She is the owner of Pet Peeves Dog Training Florida, and volunteers her time for the Paws of War organization. The Florida chapter of Paws of War was launched in May 2015 and is located in Palm Coast. Paws of War is an all volunteer organization that provides assistance to military members and their pets, and provides service and service dogs to veterans suffering from PTSD. To learn more about Paws of War or make a donation to support their efforts, visit their site at: www.pawsofwar.org.

About Paws of War

Based in New York and founded by Guardians of Rescue, Paws of W ar is a 501c3 organization devoted to helping both animals and veterans. The Paws of War goal is to train and place shelter dogs to serve and provide independence to our United States military veterans that suffer from the emotional effects of war such as PTSD. In turn each veteran can experience the therapeutic and unconditional love only a companion animal can bring. To learn more about Paws of War, visit the site at www.pawsofwar.org.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Legislator Anker's Office Published: September 21 2016

Legislator Sarah Anker is proud to announce that NYS and the Town of Brookhaven have acquired funding to repair the town-owned jetties.

The dredging project, in conjunction with repairs to the jetties, will make the harbor safer for recreational use, as well as allow police and emergency vessels to safely access the Long Island Sound.

Mount Sinai, NY - September 20, 2016 - After years of advocating for repairs to the Mount Sinai Harbor jetties, Suffolk County Legislator Sarah Anker is proud to announce that New York State and the Town of Brookhaven have acquired funding to repair the town-owned jetties which will allow the County to dredge the harbor. The dilapidated jetties have caused strong currents in the harbor and the inlet, which has made it dangerous for boaters and has caused coastal erosion along the shoreline.

I am pleased that after advocating for the restoration of the jetties, funding is now available for the much needed repairs, said Legislator Anker. Extreme storms over the past few years have caused major damage to this structure. It is imperative that the jetties be repaired to ensure the safety of residents who utilize the harbor for recreational and commercial purposes. The Mount Sinai Harbor Advisory Committee has been a strong advocate for the project, and Id like to thank the members for their dedication and commitment.

The repairs to the jetties will allow Suffolk County to begin dredging in Mount Sinai Harbor. Due to the disrepair of the jetties, the county dredging project was temporarily halted until the structure was mended. Upon completion of the jetty restoration, Suffolk Countys Department of Public Works will be able to return to routine dredging of the harbor. Using $2.1 million that Legislator Anker has continuously earmarked for this project, the dredging will increase the depth of the harbor and remediate coastal erosion that has occurred along the shoreline. The dredging project, in conjunction with repairs to the jetties, will make the harbor safer for recreational use, as well as allow police and emergency vessels to safely access the Long Island Sound.

For more information, please contact Legislator Ankers office at 631-854-1600.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sep. 21

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

The Chairman of the Board of Kazakh Atomic Company Kazatomprom and Ukrainian Energy and Coal Industry Minister Igor Nasalik discussed possible supplies of nuclear fuel from Kazakhstan to Ukraine.

Production of nuclear fuel for Ukrainian nuclear reactors in Kazakhstan was the main topic of the meeting in Kiev, Kazakh company reported on Sept. 21.

Igor Nasalik said that Ukraine is aimed at diversification of nuclear fuel suppliers and interested in cooperation for fuel assembly production in Kazakhstan.

Askar Zhumagaliev, in turn, pointed on the interest in cooperation in this area considering Kazatomproms strategy on production diversification.

The sides had agreed that a bilateral work groups will study economical effectiveness of the project. The parties also discussed a future cooperation in uranium production and supply of ion exchange resin.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

The Nassau County Bar Association (NCBA) provides free monthly legal consultation clinics for Nassau County residents 65 or older.

Mineola, NY - September 20, 2016 - The Nassau County Bar Association (NCBA) provides free monthly legal consultation clinics for Nassau County residents 65 or older. Seniors have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with an attorney who volunteers to provide a half-hour private consultation on any topic of concern. The next Senior Citizen Free Legal Consultation Clinic will be held Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 9:30 a.m.  11 a.m. at NCBA, 15th and West Streets, Mineola. This popular free program regularly fills up quickly. Registration is required by calling 516-747-4070.

Founded in 1899, the Nassau County Bar Association is the leader in providing legal information and community service on Long Island. NCBA consists of private and public attorneys, judges, legal educators and law students who demonstrate their commitment to the community by offering a variety of services for the public, including lawyer referral services, mortgage foreclosure, Sandy recovery and senior citizen legal clinics; judicial screening and public education programs. The Nassau Academy of Law provides the largest program of continuing education for the legal community. We Care, part of the Nassau Bar Foundation, NCBAs charitable arm, assists children, the elderly and others in need, through countless projects and donations. For more information, call (516) 747-4070 (language translation available), email, or visit nassaubar.org.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

The informational forum to focus on educating and protecting senior citizens from scams.

Learn about your rights and how to protect yourself from scams.

Valley Stream, NY - September 18, 2016 - Senator Todd Kaminsky and Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages, in cooperation with Mayor Ed Fare and the Village of Valley Stream, welcome the Office of the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as they present Smart Seniors, an informational forum focused on educating and protecting senior citizens from scams.

Who: Senator Todd Kaminsky, Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages, Mayor Ed Fare and the Village of Valley Stream, Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

What: Smart Seniors

Where: Valley Stream Community Center in Arthur J. Hendrickson Park, 123 W. Merrick Road, Valley Stream, NY

When: Tuesday, September 27 at 10:30 AM
School & Education, Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

Students set the flags outside the school as a display of unity and patriotism.

Stewart Manor, NY - September 15, 2016 - Assemblymember Michaelle Solages and members of the Stewart Manor Elementary School student body addressed classmates, administers, and teachers to recognize the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania. In addition to donating four hundred American flags (one for each student in the building), Assemblymember Michaelle Solages encouraged all students to participate in community service in honor of those our Nation lost.



There are many ways to teach schoolchildren about the tragedy and heroism that took place on September 11, stated Assemblywoman Solages. By providing each student with an American flag to put in front of the school, we instill in our children the significance and value of this historic event.



Students set the flags outside the school as a display of unity and patriotism. Its one of those history lessons you cant just teach from a book, said Assistant Principal Richard Mansfield. I am incredibly honored to have the support of Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages, as well as the teachers, Principal Kranidis, and Superintendent Al Harper. A learning experience like today will outweigh traditional lessons, and will have a greater impact on our children. Together, we continue to display the patriotism and heroism shown on September 11, and reinforce the pride of being an American.
Local News, Crime, National & World News, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

Ahmad Khan Rahami, aka Ahmad Rahimi, has been charged for conducting and attempting to conduct bombings in NYC and various locations in NJ on Sept. 17-18, 2016.

Pictured is Ahmad Khan Rahami, aka Ahmad Rahimi. More than 30 people were injured as a result of the detonation of a bomb in the Chelsea area of New York City.

New York, NY - September 21, 2016 - Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin, FBI Director James B. Comey, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman of the District of New Jersey, Assistant Director-in-Charge William Sweeney of the FBI's New York Field Office, Special Agent in Charge Timothy Gallagher of the FBI's Newark Field Office and Commissioner James ONeill of the New York Police Department (NYPD) announced that Ahmad Khan Rahami, aka Ahmad Rahimi, has been charged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, for conducting and attempting to conduct bombings in New York City and various locations in New Jersey on Sept. 17, 2016, and Sept. 18, 2016.

Rahami, 28, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, is charged in a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York with one count of using and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  2332a, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment; one count of bombing and attempting to bomb a place of public use, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  2332f, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment; one count of destroying and attempting to destroy property by means of fire or explosive, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  844(d), which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; and use of a destructive device in furtherance of a crime of violence, namely, the use and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  924(c), which carries a mandatory minimum consecutive sentence of 30 years in prison, all in connection with Rahamis alleged detonation of an explosive device and efforts to detonate explosives in New York City.

Rahami is also charged in a complaint filed in the District of New Jersey with two counts of using and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  2332a, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment on each count; one count of bombing and attempting to bomb a place of public use and public transportation system, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  2332f, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment; one count of attempting to destroy property by means of fire or explosive, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  844(i), which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; and two counts of using a destructive device in furtherance of a crime of violence, namely, the use and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  924(c), each count of which carries a mandatory minimum consecutive sentence of 30 years in prison and, if convicted of both counts, a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, all in connection with Rahamis alleged efforts to detonate explosives in Seaside Park, New Jersey, and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Rahami will first be transported by the U.S. Marshals Service, pursuant to a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum, to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to face the charges filed in the Southern District of New York. More than 30 people were injured as a result of the detonation of a bomb in the Chelsea area of New York City.

Assistant Attorney General Carlin and U.S. Attorneys Bharara and Fishman praised the outstanding efforts of the FBIs New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, which principally consists of agents from the FBI and detectives from the NYPD, and the FBIs New Jersey Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The prosecution in the Southern District of New York is being handled by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Nicholas J. Lewin, Emil J. Bove III, Andrew J. DeFilippis and Shawn G. Crowley, with assistance from Trial Attorney Brian Morgan of the National Security Divisions Counterterrorism Section.

The prosecution in the District of New Jersey is being handled by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dennis C. Carletta, Francisco J. Navarro, Margaret Ann Mahoney and James M. Donnelly, with assistance from Trial Attorney Brian Morgan of the National Security Divisions Counterterrorism Section.

The charges contained in the complaints are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Rahami Ahmad Khan NY Complaint

Rahami Ahmad Khan NJ Complaint
Police in Search of Person(s) Responsible For Spray Paint Crime in Hicksville

Crime, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 21 2016

The Major Case Bureau reports the details of Criminal Mischief that occurred on Friday, September 16, 2016 in Hicksville.

Detectives ask anyone with information regarding this crime to contact Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS. All callers will remain anonymous.

Hicksville, NY - September 20, 2016 - The Major Case Bureau reports the details of Criminal Mischief that occurred on Friday, September 16, 2016 in Hicksville.

According to Gang Investigations Unit detectives, between 10:00 pm and 11:00 pm on Friday, September 16, 2016, unknown person(s) spray painted MS13 on a fence and multiple vehicles at a Violet Avenue residence.

Detectives ask anyone with information regarding this crime to contact Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS. All callers will remain anonymous.
Looking to stay up to date about all of the news stories and local headlines that are important to Long Islanders? We've rounded up the top coverage for all of the important topics from multiple sources around Long Island, so you can be sure you've got the most recent update on the top stories for Long Island. Have an idea for a news story? Email us at news@longisland.com

Columnists Press Releases
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Anvar Mammadyarov  Trend:

Azerbaijans State Customs Committee has proposed to impose customs duty on the fur export from the country, said the committee head Aydin Aliyev.

He made the remarks during a meeting with members of the Caspian European Club Sept. 21.

Aliyev said this proposal has already been sent to the government.

This proposal is under discussion in the government and I believe it will be adopted in the near future, he said. As we dont have fur processing enterprises, entrepreneurs export the raw material without paying customs duties.

There are also similar proposals regarding the export of agriculture products and construction materials. Their prime cost in Azerbaijan is quite low. Therefore, many entrepreneurs export them. Export duties will make it possible to protect the domestic market, added Aydin Aliyev.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21



By Aygun Badalova - Trend:



Representatives from Italian Snam are expected to arrive in Athens for talks with the Greek government over the privatization of the national gas transmission system operator DESFA, Greek media reported.



According to a report in Ta Nea, Italian company appears to have reached an agreement with SOCAR to purchase 17 percent of DESFA.



SOCAR won a tender in 2013 on the purchase of a 66-percent stake in DESFA for 400 million euros.



Earlier, Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Natig Aliyev said that the deal on SOCAR's purchasing the 66-percent share in Greece's DESFA will be completed after Italy's Snam purchases 17 percent of that share.



In July 2016, Greek Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change Panos Skourletis accused the European Commission of delaying the deal on selling a share in Greece's DESFA to SOCAR. Skourletis said that a number of conditions, set by the European Commission, greatly slowed the privatization process of the gas operator.



In particular, the company will become a passive shareholder, not entitled to vote in the management of the company, as a result of decreasing SOCARs share in DESFA up to 49 percent.



Greek MPs stressed that the problems with the privatization of DESFA may deprive the countrys economy of SOCARs huge capital injections.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21



By Aygun Badalova  Trend



Italian operator Snam wants to be a part of privatization of the Greek national gas transmission system operator DESFA, but only if Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR stays in the arrangement offering 66 percent of the operator, Energypress, Greek energy news portal reported referring to sources that are informed on the sales latest developments.



According to the sources, a Snam representative who met with Greek energy ministry officials on Aug.20, reiterated the Italian operators stance, noting the operator has signed a preliminary agreement with SOCAR for the acquisition of between 17 and 25 percent of DESFA and intends to honor this commitment.



SOCAR won a tender in 2013 on the purchase of a 66-percent stake in DESFA for 400 million euros.



Earlier, Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Natig Aliyev said that the deal on SOCAR's purchasing the 66-percent share in Greece's DESFA will be completed after Italy's Snam purchases 17 percent of that share.



In July 2016, Greek Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change Panos Skourletis accused the European Commission of delaying the deal on selling a share in Greece's DESFA to SOCAR. Skourletis said that a number of conditions, set by the European Commission, greatly slowed the privatization process of the gas operator.



In particular, the company will become a passive shareholder, not entitled to vote in the management of the company, as a result of decreasing SOCARs share in DESFA up to 49 percent.



Greek MPs stressed that the problems with the privatization of DESFA may deprive the countrys economy of SOCARs huge capital injections.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Elena Kosolapova  Trend:

Secretary of State of Kazakhstan Gulshara Abdykalikova will visit Azerbaijan to participate in the V Baku International Humanitarian Forum to be held Sept. 29-30, the Kazakh Embassy in Azerbaijan reported Sept. 21.

Abdykalikova will make a speech at a plenary session of the forum, as well as take part in round table meetings.

In addition, Abdykalikova will hold a meeting with members of the Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan Friendship Society named after Heydar Aliyev within the framework of her visit to Baku. The event will be dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Kazakhstan's independence. In addition, the two countries will discuss issues of cooperation in the fields of culture, art, education.

Azerbaijani MPs, which are members of the Azerbaijan-Kazakhstan interparliamentary friendship group, as well as prominent public figures of Azerbaijan, representatives of Kazakh companies operating in Baku, Kazakh students studying in Azerbaijan will take part in the meeting.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
The Department of Justice has charged Ahmad Khan Rahami with the bombings in New York and New Jersey on Sept. 17, as well as other planned attacks. The charges include Rahamis use of weapons of mass destruction, meaning the pipe bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) he planted in Seaside Park, NJ, the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, and in Elizabeth, NJ.

The most damaging bomb was detonated near 135 West 23rd Street (the Chelsea bomb). According to the Complaint filed in Rahamis case, 31 people were wounded in the blast, which also caused millions of dollars in property damage. The bomb, which used a pressure cooker, was comprised of a high-explosive main charge and packed with ball bearings and steel nuts, hundreds of which were recovered from the blast site.

The Chelsea bomb was placed in a dumpster, which likely limited the efficacy of the shrapnel packed in it. But the impact on the dumpster and the surrounding area demonstrates that it could have been deadly. The dumpster, which was more than 100 pounds, was propelledmore than 120 feet. Windows 400 feet away from the detonation site and up to three stories high were shattered.

A second bomb recovered on 27th street was apparently constructed in a similar fashion.

Rahami allegedly acquired many of the bomb components via eBay in the months leading up to the attacks. In a statement emailed to The Long War Journal, eBay said: Weve been proactively working with law enforcement authorities on their investigation. The types of items bought by the suspect are legal to buy and sell in the United States and are widely available at online and offline stores.*

Rahami apparently didnt do much to cover his tracks. Not only were Rahamis fingerprints found on some of the unexploded bombs, according to the Complaint, he also reused cell phones that were previously subscribed to members of his family. The cell phones served as triggering devices for the bombs. In addition, Rahamis face was clearly visible on surveillance video near where the bombs were placed.

Still another cell phone belonging to one of Rahamis family members was recovered by officials. It allegedly included a video, recorded on Sept. 15, of Rahami detonating a small, black cylindrical object in a backyard near his residence in Elizabeth.

Jihadi references found in notebook and on social media account

During the course of the arrest, authorities recovered a handwritten journal from Rahami. The notebook was damaged during Rahamis shootout with the police. It included a number of jihadi-related thoughts and comments, including praise for Osama bin Laden and Anwar al Awlaki.

One passage reads: You (USA Government) continue your [unintelligible] slaught[er] against the mujahidean [sic] be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham [Syria], Palestine

Another entry, according to the Complaint, expressed concern that the author (presumably Rahami) may be caught before he was able to carry out a suicide attack. The handwritten note references the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security looking for me, and then includes what appears to be a prayer to Allah [t]o not take Jihad away from [me]. The comment continues: I beg [unintelligible] shahadat [martyrdom] & Inshallah [God willing] this call will be answered.

The Complaint cites a passage in the notebook that contains a reference to the instructions of terrorist leaders that, if travel is infeasible, to attack nonbelievers where they live. This has been a consistent theme in the Islamic States messaging over the past several months. Sheikh Abu Muhammad al Adnani, the deceased Islamic State spokesman who also oversaw the organizations anti-Western plotting, told followers to attack in their home countries if they couldnt travel to the lands of the so-called caliphate. The Complaint doesnt cite Adnani, however, and instead focuses on Anwar al Awlaki, who helped pioneer the idea of individual jihadist attacks in the West. Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011, was an al Qaeda ideologue and his teachings have been marketed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He is frequently referenced by both al Qaeda and the Islamic State to this day.

The passage is written in broken English but includes the phrase back to sham [Syria]. The Complaint continues with additional lines from the notebook: But [unintelligible] this incident show the risk are [unintelligible] of getting caught under [unintelligible] I looked for guidance andGuidance came from Sheikh AnwarSaid it clearly attack the Kuffar [non-believers] in their backyard.

A footnote says that Sheikh Anwar is a reference to Awlaki.

Indeed, according to the Complaint, the notebook includes praise for Awlaki, Nidal Hasan (an Awlaki follower who killed 13 people during a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas in Nov. 2009) and Brother Osama bin Laden.

Awlaki has inspired multiple plots in the West. In December 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife killed 14 people in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. Farook had studied Awlakis teachings years beforehand. Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla. in June, also listened Awlakis lectures. Both the San Bernardino shooters and Mateen pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. The Islamic State claimed that they acted on its behalf.

On the same day that Rahami allegedly detonated bombs in NY and NJ, a Somali man stabbed nine people at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud, Minn. The Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack via its Amaq News Agency, which is one of the groups main propaganda arms.

But the Islamic State has not claimed the bombings Rahami is charged with carrying out. Thus far, no group has claimed Rahami as its own.

Regardless, the Complaint makes it clear that Rahami was drawn to the jihadist ideology. A social media account with the user name Yaafghankid78, which is connected to Rahami, favorited jihadi anthems.

And one part of the recovered notebook reads: Inshallah [God willing] the sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION.

Note: eBay emailed a statement to The Long War Journal after this story was initially published. The statement was subsequently included and is marked with a *.

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
The Islamic States Furat Media Establishment has released a short video of a man who allegedly works for Russian intelligence. The Russian-speaking man is dressed in all black with a badge that appears to read infidel on it. He identifies himself as Petrenko Ivgeniy Viktorovich and says he is a captain in the Russian intelligence service based in Moscow, an apparent reference to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). He does not indicate how or where he was captured.

The man is made to address President Vladimir Putin directly, saying the Russian leader took an oath to defend his countrys citizens no matter where they are located. He adds that Putin has good information on the so-called caliphate and, therefore, knows how dire his situation really is. He then pleads with the Russian government and people to do whatever it takes to free him from captivity.

The video, which was posted online on Sept. 20, is nearly three minutes long and is subtitled in Arabic. Curiously, the Russian man does not say what the Islamic State wants his country to do. In past videos, including those showing the executions of American hostages, the Islamic State has demanded that its foreign enemies cease their airstrikes or other operations targeting the self-declared caliphate.

The Islamic State has a large contingent of fighters from the Caucasus region in its ranks. The group established a foothold in Chechnya and Dagestan by winning the loyalty of jihadists who were formerly part of the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Caucasus Emirate (ICE).

The Islamic States Caucasus province was formally established in June 2015. Since then, it has claimed responsibility for a string of small-scale attacks. The first came in Sept. 2015, when the jihadists claimed to strike Russian forces in southern Dagestan. In Mar. 2016, the Islamic States arm said its fighters implanted improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that were detonated underneath Russian army vehicles.

In August, two young jihadis assaulted Russian police outside of Moscow. Amaq News Agency, a propaganda arm of the Islamic State, quickly issued a claim of responsibility. Amaq also released a video of the two terrorists pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. [See LWJ report, Jihadists who attacked Russian police appear in Islamic State video.]

The State Department has designated the Caucasus province as a terrorist organization and added individual leaders to the US governments list of terrorists as well.

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
Earlier today, Mike Levine of ABC News tweeted the image above showing a blood-soaked page from Ahmad Khan Rahamis notebook. The US government has accused Rahami of detonating a bomb in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan on Sept. 17 and planting three other explosive devices in New York and New Jersey.

The page above contains the same passages referenced in the Department of Justices complaint against Rahami, which was released yesterday.

Curiously, the complaint does not include any reference to the Islamic State.

The journal contains clear references to both Sheikh Anwar and Brother Adnani. The former is Anwar al Awlaki, an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) ideologue who was killed in an American drone strike in 2011. The latter is Abu Muhammad al Adnani, who served as the Islamic States top spokesman and oversaw the groups anti-Western plotting until he met his demise in an airstrike in August.

The complaint specifically mentions Awlaki, but does not name Adnani. Here is a screen shot of the language from the complaint:

The complaint cites several lines, which are written in broken English and obscured by blood, including the phrase back to sham [Syria]. It continues with additional fragments from the notebook: But [unintelligible] this incident show the risk are [unintelligible] of getting caught under [unintelligible] I looked for guidance andGuidance came from Sheikh AnwarSaid it clearly attack the Kuffar [non-believers] in their backyard.

However, it appears that this guidance also came from Adnani. The complaint describes these passages as a reference to the instructions of terrorist leaders that, if travel is infeasible, to attack nonbelievers where they live.

As The Long War Journal reported when the complaint was published online, this has been a consistent theme in the Islamic States messaging. Adnani repeatedly told followers to attack in their home countries if they couldnt travel to the lands of the so-called caliphate.

In May, for instance, Adnani told followers that if foreign governments have shut the door of hijrah [migration] in your faces, then they should open the door of jihad in theirs, meaning in the West. Make your deed a source of their regret, Adnani continued. Truly, the smallest act you do in their lands is more beloved to us than the biggest act done here; it is more effective for us and more harmful to them.

If one of you wishes and strives to reach the lands of the Islamic State, Adnani told his audience, then each of us wishes to be in your place to make examples of the crusaders, day and night, scaring them and terrorizing them, until every neighbor fears his neighbor.

Adnani told jihadists that they should not make light of throwing a stone at a crusader in his land, nor should they underestimate any deed, as its consequences are great for the mujahideen and its effect is noxious to the disbelievers.

It appears that at least some of the terrorists who have struck inside Europe in recent months were complying with Adnanis order.

Immediately underneath Adnanis name in Rahamis notebook appears the word Dawla, which is another reference to the Islamic State.

It is not clear why these obvious mentions of Adnani and the Islamic State were not included in the complaint, which did include citations to Rahamis notes on other jihadi figures, such as Anwar al Awlaki and Osama bin Laden.

In June, the FBI released a partial transcript of one of Omar Mateens 911 calls. Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded dozens more during a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Fla. on June 12, pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi during those calls. But the FBIs transcript initially omitted any reference to Baghdadi or the Islamic State, even though Mateen had obviously sworn his fealty to Baghdadi. A subsequent transcript jointly released by the FBI and the Department of Justice filled those references back in. [See LWJ report, Orlando terrorist swore allegiance to Islamic States Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.]

The Islamic State quickly claimed that Mateen was its fighter. But the group has not issued a similar claim in Rahamis case.

Thus far, no jihadi organization has claimed responsibility for the bombs in New York and New Jersey.

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
Shabaabs flag seen flying in Mogokoris town center

Shabaab, al Qaedas branch in East Africa, has claimed control of a town in the central Somalian region of Hiraan in recent days. According to local news and Shabaab-affiliated outlets, the town of Mogokori was captured after Ethiopian troops withdrew from the region. Ethiopian troops first captured the town from Shabaab in 2014.

A Shabaab-affiliated Telegram account released a report earlier today in which the jihadist group claimed control over Mogokori after the Ethiopian troops that were previously stationed there left. The statement, which was later translated into English by al Qaedas Global Islamic Media Front, also states that the Ethiopian fortifications outside of the city were also captured. Photos purporting to show these claims were also released on Shabaabs Radio Andalus website.

However, local media has confirmed these claims. Garowe Online, a Somali-website, reported that the entire Mogokori district has also fallen to jihadist forces.

This comes only a few days after Shabaab also claimed control over the town of Budbud in the Galguduud Region, also after Ethiopian troops reportedly withdrew from the town. Additionally, Ethiopian forces were reportedly ambushed yesterday near the town of Elbur in Galguduud. However, there were no reports of casualties.

In southern Somalia, the jihadist group also claimed it took over the town of Elwak near the border with Kenya. However, Somali troops reportedly recaptured the town a day later. In the capital of Mogadishu over the weekend, a suicide bombing near the Somali Ministry of Defence headquarters left a Somali general and several other troops dead.

Despite an African Union-led offensive that has been backed by covert US airstrikes and has cost Shabaab territory in the south over the past several years, the jihadist group remains a potent force in the country. It continues to exhibit the ability to launch complex operations in the capital, and has harassed African Union and Somali forces in both southern and central Somalia. In some instances over the past nine months, Shabaab has been able to recapture the cities of Marka, El Ade, and Badhadhe after both African Union and Somali troops were forced to withdraw.

As these forces retreat from towns like Budbud or Mogokori, Shabaab will continue to slip into these locations afterwards and claim control.

Photos showing Shabaab in control of Mogokori town and the nearby Ethiopian fortifications:

Caleb Weiss is a research analyst at FDD's Long War Journal and a senior analyst at the Bridgeway Foundation, where he focuses on the spread of the Islamic State in Central Africa.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sep. 21

By Elena Kosolapova  Trend:

Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister Askar Myrzakhmetov banned sturgeon fishing in all the regions of the country, Agriculture Ministry said Sept. 21.

This measure is aimed at combating the illegal fish trade. In order to combat the illegal fish trade, the Ministry of Agriculture plans to introduce a new automated information system which will monitor the fish and fish products trade.

Moreover, the Agriculture Ministry plans to increase the capacity of existing sturgeon hatcheries from 7 million to 12 million of juvenile sturgeons per year.
Luton is a large town, borough and unitary authority area of Bedfordshire. Luton and its near neighbours, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, form the Luton/Dunstable Urban Area with a population of about 258,000. Luton is home to Championship team Luton Town Football Club, London Luton Airport and The University of Bedfordshire. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. For all the latest news from Luton sign up to our newsletter here.
Style / Fashion

Fashion is driven by an insatiable desire for the new but is always teasing with new collections. Burberry says no more as its new collection goes on sale now.

Sep 21, 2016 | By Staff Writer

Fashion is driven by an insatiable desire for the new but is always teasing with fresh collections. Burberry says no more as its September collection goes on sale now, immediately after its showing at London Fashion Week. The British luxury label is hardly alone in making this move, with a number of major names agreeing with fashionistas that the months-long delay between seeing a new collection and having it in your hands is annoying.

Burberry put on sale its entire September collection as soon as it was previewed on the London catwalk, days after Tom Ford and Tommy Hilfiger made similar moves in New York. This is not to say that Burberry is following in anyones footsteps. This move has been in the works for some time and the brand is widely considered to be a trendsetter as far as adopting new ideas goes. Mondays show, live streamed online around the world, was rich in historical references with heavy prints, military embroidery on jackets and ruffs inspired by Virginia Woolfs epoch-spanning novel Orlando.

I like traditional, beautiful, slow crafts, but we are living in a moment that changes everything  and speed is everything, Burberry creative director and chief executive officer Christopher Bailey told reporters. Were changing the way that we all work and think and live.

The move to buy now means ditching the long-established tradition of showing one season ahead, which is pretty radical when you think about it. This change will have an impact right down the supply chain. It has pitted the more business-centric fashion weeks in London and New York against Milan and Paris, where luxury labels such as Dior and Chanel argue that instant gratification will disrupt the creative process. Truly, if ever a fashion season heralded a decisive break with the past, this is it.

But Bailey said the shift naturally follows the democratisation of fashion shows through live streaming, in which Burberry was a pioneer and which is now used in most of Londons on-schedule shows. We will reflect after this show what has worked, what hasnt worked. But I get excited about new things, he said.

Changing the business model

By way of contrast, we already know that Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel is decidedly against instant gratification, a sentiment echoed by the business side of things too. Fashion mogul Francois-Henri Pinault, whose Kering group owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga, has previously said the new model went against the dream and desire that drives the industry.

For Burberry, it coincided with the merging of the brands men and womens lines, resulting in just two shows a year rather than four, which Bailey said had led to a much calmer season. Whatever the case may be there, it will certainly save Burberry money, which is important in the current tough times.

But selling off the catwalk is a challenge for smaller brands. They do not have their own shops and use fashion week as a showcase for buyers, who place orders that the designers fill over the coming months. Take for example Temperley London, a label known for its modern take on bohemian style using artisan techniques with hand-worked details.

This season it sold three items straight after its London show via social media platform Vero, but designer Alice Temperley said any more would be a struggle. We couldnt do the whole collection without changing our entire business model, she told AFP.

With consumers becoming ever more demanding, such brands may have no choice but to speed up the delivery process, however. Consumers now live in a very fluid present, and that is where the brands need to be, said Magdalena Kondej, retail analyst at Euromonitor International.

Fast fashion has an obvious advantage in terms of already efficient supply chains but it is luxury brands that will have to adjust on a bigger scale and shorten the period between runway buzz and retail availability.

Nevertheless, this line of thinking presumes that speed is most important to customers, who obviously dont care about supply chains and logistics. They do care about quality though and we hope the current moves in fashion towards greater currency wont lead to creative and production compromises. Artisans can only stitch things together so fast, after all, and that is part of the charm. After all, we do not live in the age of Star Trek, where advanced technology produces anything you care to ask for, on-demand.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Aygun Badalova  Trend:

Health condition of Kyrgyzstans President Almazbek Atambayev is normal and he is still in Turkey, an official of the presidential press service told RIA Novosti.

The presidents health condition is normal. He has already made a statement today, said the official.

Earlier, the Kyrgyz presidential press service said Atambayev took a short vacation to undergo a medical examination.

The vacation will presumably last until Oct. 1, 2016, the press service added.

Atambayev suddenly felt ill Sept. 19 on the way to New York and was advised by his doctors to pass a preliminary medical exam.

The examination discovered some symptoms of possible heart problems.

He had to cancel the visit to the 71st session of the UN General Assembly in New York as a result.
The Apple car rumor mill has become sluggish in recent months, churning out nothing but staff shakeups and new hires. But things just got interesting: Apple is reportedly in talks to buy Lit Motors, a startup that makes electric self-balancing motorcycles, and McLaren Technology Group, the British engineering company that makes luxury cars, develops advanced automative technology, and happens to own a Formula One car racing team.

Apple, McLaren, and Lit arent commenting on the rumors, first reported by the Financial Times and backed up by the New York Times. According to the Financial Times, Apple is interested in either buying McLaren outright or investing in the company. This wouldnt be the first time Apple invested a huge sum in a car-related companyearlier this year, Apple put $1 billion in Chinese ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing (once Ubers chief rival, before Uber gave up and sold its Chinese assets to Didi).

But why exactly would Apple want McLaren? The answer may be its advanced technology division, which doesnt just make cool car stuff (though there is plenty of that). According to a Wired piece from last year, McLaren has also developed sensors to perfectly engineer bicycles and detect when athletes are prone to injury. Acquiring a well-rounded technology group that could help build a car and perfect the Apple Watch could be a good move for Apple.

Its still unclear which direction Apple is taking its car project, code-named Project Titan. Does it want to take on Tesla with an electric car, or challenge Uber with a self-driving car? Or make the ultimate autonomous electric vehicle? McLarens cars are of the luxury sport variety, but it is an expert in engineering, on-board computer systems, and automotive materials like aluminum (or ah-loo-min-eee-um, as Apple design chief Jony Ive calls it). Lit could contribute the electric car expertise Apple is seeking.

The plot just thickened, and we cant wait to see whats coming next.

Update: A McLaren spokesman told the New York Times on Wednesday that the company is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment. That denial doesnt rule out the possibility of an outright acquisition, however.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Sept. 21

By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:

A meeting with Deyan Keserovich, regional coordinator for Central Asia of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), was held in Ashgabat, the Turkmen State Migration Service said in a message.

According to the message, the sides discussed the key aspects of rendering safe, reliable and cost-effective services for people in need of international migration.

By joining a number of fundamental conventions and protocols on human rights, as well as being an IOM member, Turkmenistan positions itself as a strategic member of the global international processes, the message said.

According to the message, there is a new, effective mechanism for cooperation between Turkmenistan and the IOM in the field of humanism, aimed at protecting the rights and legitimate interests of migrants and refugees in need of assistance.

The IOM mission has been operating in Central Asia since 1998, while in Turkmenistan - since 2005.

A number of joint projects were implemented in the region during that period.
The great Gold Rush Music Festival returns to the township of Waihi, with the first nuggets of gold dropping for the highly anticipated return of the 2023 festival.
Counsel at Red Lobster, Atlassian and two other companies say its hard to register descriptive terms, but that it can be worth the slog in some cases
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 19

By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:

An Iranian senior official has said that cooperation in the steel, oil and gas industries, as well as car manufacturing would contribute to boosting the trade turnover between Iran and Azerbaijan.

In an exclusive interview with Trend, Iran's deputy industry minister for mining and mineral industries, Jafar Sarghini, called for close cooperation with Azerbaijan in steel, oil and gas, as well as car-making sectors in order to help boost the trade turnover between the two neighboring countries.

Elaborating on plans regarding the cooperation in steel sector, he said the two countries have already discussed the ways of increasing the level of this cooperation.

He speculated that Iranian private sector may collaborate with Azerbaijani steel companies in the future.

The deputy minister further called for cooperation in oil and gas sector, saying the two countries have already engaged in cooperation in the sector, but its level is not satisfactory.

Describing oil and gas sector as important for both countries, he added that Iranian companies enjoy proper capabilities in the maintenance of oil refineries and equipment, as well as the construction of oil facilities.

Jafar Sarghini also touched upon the two countries decision to establish a joint venture for producing cars in Azerbaijan, adding that in addition to a car manufacturing factory, new companies will be created in Azerbaijan for providing auto parts.

The deputy minister added that the volume of trade turnover between the two countries has soared by 70 percent over the first seven months of the current year.

According to Azerbaijani officials, Iranian companies have invested $2.6 billion in Azerbaijans economy. About $145 million of the total amount has gone to the non-oil sector. This is while some 450 companies with Iranian share operate in Azerbaijan.

Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Iran amounted to $122.08 million in January-August 2016, $30.66 million of which accounted for the export of Azerbaijani goods to Iran, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.

In the meantime, Hossin Esfahbodi, another Iranian deputy minister of industry, mine and trade, told Trend that the volume of trade turnover between the two countries currently stands at about $100 million and it must surpass $300 million in the near future.
Barely two days after the terror attack in Uri, two infiltration bids were made from across the border in Kashmir on Tuesday but they were foiled by the Army in an encounter in which 10 terrorists and a jawan were killed even as Pakistani troops violated ceasefire and fired at Indian positions.

As the Government mulled various options on Indias response to the cross-border terror attack on Sunday in which 18 jawans were killed, a crucial meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security(CCS) has been convened on Wednesday. Two infiltration bids by militants from across the Line of Control(LoC) have been foiled in Uri and Nowgam sectors today. At both places the operations are in progress, an army spokesman said in Srinagar.

The spokesman refused to comment on the number of militants killed in the ongoing operations so far, saying details will be made public in due course.Army sources in Delhi, however, said that 10 terrorists were killed in the encounter with the army in the Uri sector. The bodies have not yet been recovered, they added. The sources said a group of 15 terrorists had attempted to infiltrate into Indian territory through the LoC.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh again reviewed the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir at a meeting in Delhi with top officials, including NSA Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar.

Separately, Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said that any action against terrorists based in Pakistan will be taken only after examining all relevant issues. On the ceasefire violation incident, an army official in Srinagar said the firing from across the LoC took place between 1.10 pm and 1.30 pm. However, there was no damage in the incident, he said. Pakistani troops resorted to unprovoked firing by small arms towards Indian positions in Uri sector this afternoon, the official said in Srinagar.

PTI
Tehran, Iran, Sept. 21

By Mehdi Sepahvand  Trend:

The US Treasury has started issuing licenses to allow the sale of Airbus passenger jets to Iran.

The Treasury is expected to start approving sales of Boeing jets within days, ISNA news agency reported Sept. 21.

Sources also quoted a spokesman for Airbus as having said the company had received a US license covering a total of 17 aircraft slated for early delivery.

Although based in Europe, Airbus needs US approval because some parts of the jets are made in the US.

Iran and Airbus agreed over the purchase of 118 aircraft back in January.

Iran reached another agreement with Boeing in June. But it was later announced that a deal would be possible to carry out only after it was permitted by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a subsidiary of the US Treasury.

The mere prospects of the deals have benefited the two companies. Shortly after the agreements with Iran were made, the value of Boeings shares on the stock market jumped meaningfully.

Also seeing the positive impact, Airbus increased its prices by about 1.1 percent, with the result that its most economical aircraft, the A318, was priced $1.75 million.

Tehran wants to buy up to 500 aircraft over the next decade to rejuvenate its aging fleet.

The Airbus and Boeing deals push-through will find large political implications in Iran as well.

The government has been under a lot of domestic pressure after its January nuclear deal with world powers. Right-wing activists say the deal has changed nothing because Iran is still unable to carry out international business transactions even after nuclear-related sanctions on Iran have been removed.

If he manages to materialize the Airbus deal, President Hassan Rouhani will have delivered his critics a hard blow, especially as Iran is preparing for another round of presidential election in mid-2017 when Rouhani is expected to run for a second term.
Were New Here

The site design is new and the brand name is shorter. Find out who, what, where, when, and why in one handy little post.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Iran exported 19.5 tons of trout to Russia via Astara customs, Bahram Pourzarb, head of the veterinary department of Astara city, said.

The consignment worth $105,376 was shipped from southern Iran, Pourzarb said, IRNA news agency reported Sept. 21.

This is the first trout cargo to be exported through Astara during the current fiscal year (started March 20, 2016), the Iranian official added.

Russia has recently obtained an official permit to export fish products to Iran.

The press service of the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance (Rosselkhoznadzor) said last week that starting from next week fish products may be supplied to the territory of Iran from all 467 Russian enterprises and ships that have the right for EU exports.

Earlier, Iran said it saw no obstacles for Russian supplies of fish products to the country.

Iran currently exports fish, sea and milk products to Russia.

According to Isa Golshahi, an official with the Iranian Fisheries Organization, about 22,000 tons of shrimp and fish, worth $70 million, were exported from Iran to Russia in the first five months of current Iranian fiscal year (started on March 20).
Putins Ukraine Strategy Could Lay the Groundwork for War

BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN : Tensions between Russia and Ukraine are growing. According to the Russians, a special operations team from Ukraine attacked Crimea in August. The Ukrainians denied the claim. The Russians appeared to be moving forces around in Crimea and increasing their number and posture.

There have been reports of Russian troop buildups east of their border with Ukraine. There is also an unconfirmed report of Russian troops deploying in pro-Russian, rebel-held territory inside Ukraine. The Russians have done nothing to tamp down tensions.

Whatever the truth, the Russians are establishing a justification for taking action against Ukraine. I have predicted that the Russians will eventually move to change the situation in Ukraine, militarily if necessary.

Ukraine is too key to them strategically to accept anything less than a neutral government in Kiev. Therefore, I expect the Russians to take some notable action.

My view is that the military option is likely off the table. Ukraine is a large country. To occupy it against minimal resistance would require a force that Russia didnt have a year ago. Thus, I think the informal truce will hold to at least the end of 2016.

So, an increased tension will likely lead nowhere. But the Russians are talking war, and we must consider why.

Russias Need to Show Strength

The Russian economy has declined sharply. This hurts President Vladimir Putins political position, especially among senior officials and oligarchs who make up the Russian elite. Putin has been increasing his power lately, replacing some governors with his former bodyguards. But actions like that dont make him appear powerful. They make him seem worried.

The other force that is undermining Putins position is his mishandling of Ukraine. While Westerners think of Putin as the aggressor, at the end of the day, Ukraines Russian-friendly government was replaced by a pro-Western government.

All the Russians retained were Crimea (where they already had a massive force) and a presence in eastern Ukraine. There, the Russians tried to incite a broad uprising that never happened.

Putin needs to do something significant since he hasnt been able to do much about the economy or Ukraine. He needs to appear threatening, even if its a bluff.

Given recent regional shifts and improved relations with Turkey, Russia has some advantage. It is not clear, though, whether the Russian military would take action that might lead to confrontation with the US.

If Russia were to get bogged down or lose, it would be Putins end. It would also end Putins attempt to separate Europe from the US. This type of Hail Mary doesnt seem worth it.

Putins Strategy

So what is Putin doing?

If Putin wanted a suitable political settlement, this would be the best strategy. He should create a crisis that makes it appear Russia is on the verge of attacking Ukraine. This would lead countries to send dignitaries to the region in an effort to convince the Russians not to go to war.

Putin would make absurd demands, enraged by the aggression of the Ukrainians. Then as talks appear to be collapsing, he would come to a deal. Given the American sense of weakness after Ukraine, and Germanys distraction, it would be the ideal time for this move.

But, the Russians could also use the same strategy if they made a decision to go to war.

The Russians would create a massive crisis and then reach a reasonable agreement. They would stand downexcept for a few divisions that carry out exercisesand everyone would relax. Then, the Russians would strike.

This is what the Soviets did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and what Russia did in Georgia. And they blame the attack on some action by the targeta target that thinks the Russians have backed down.

Heres the problem. If the Russians wanted a negotiated settlement or if they were getting ready for war, they would act in exactly the same way. The negotiation requires an opening bluff. A war requires a final bluff.

So, as much as I think this is not going to end up in a war right now, we cant ignore that this looks like the early stages of one.

A Poor Economy Wont Stop the Russians

Some believe that a weak economy precludes war. Generally, I believe that isnt true, but with the Russians, it certainly isnt true. The Russians have fought all their wars from Napoleon on with an economy in shambles. It is their normal condition.

Keep in mind, this would be a local conflict, not a world war. The US might be involved but not on a large scale. As for sanctions, they really arent a deterrent on a national security issue. Sanctions are rarely placed on a country that has just won a major war and is now perched on the borders of Europe. And thats one of the attractions. In that position, Russian can try to extract economic benefits.

I would not have been surprised to see this happen in a year. I am surprised to see it now. But while we know what we are seeing, we dont know what it means. The next thing to watch is whether the Russians increase their rhetoric. If they do, things could get very scary indeed.

Watch George Friedman's Ground-Breaking Documentary Crisis & Chaos: Are We Moving Toward World War III?

Russian posturing is part of a storm of instability engulfing a region thats home to 5 billion of the planets 7 billion people.

In this provocative documentary from Mauldin Economics and Geopolitical Futures, George Friedman uncovers the crises convulsing Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and reveals the geopolitical chess moves that could trigger global conflict. Register for the online premiere now.

John Mauldin Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Italy Is the EUs Weakest Link

BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN : German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi met Aug. 22 on an Italian aircraft carrier. They said they were meeting to talk about European policy after Brexit. The real discussion was about Italys economy and the steps needed to revive it.

The EUs Integrity Is in Question

The location of their meeting is notable. It is a more militaristic location than Europeans normally prefer. The choice is even more interesting in light of the rumors that Germany might resume the military draft.

The US has been increasingly critical of Europe's contribution to NATO. The EUs GDP is larger than that of the US, but the EUs contribution to its own defense does not reflect that fact. Europes limited militaries make it dependent on the US.

Holding the meeting on the aircraft carrier was meant to show that Europe has some defense capability. But it also shows how Brexit diminishes the EUs military power. It was a good place to have a meeting as European unity is in question, with Italy as a weak link.

Italys Crisis Is Worsening

Italys economy is weak. There is no growth. The banking system is in bad shape. Unemployment is high. There is substantial public unrest, and Renzi's standing is weakening. Italy has been somewhere between recession and stagnation since 2008. After eight years, the situation shows no signs of improving.

The Italians want to run a substantial budget deficit to stimulate the economy. The EU operates under a stability pact. This requires countries to keep deficits within certain limits but allows for exceptions.

France has operated outside the boundaries of the stability pact for years. Spain and Portugal were given exceptions as well. As Merkel put it, The stability pact has a lot of flexibility, which we have to apply in a smart way.

Im not sure what a smart way looks like, but the issue does not apply to Italy. Renzi said, Italys deficit has been at the lowest level of the last ten years. He said that he would go ahead with structural reforms and deficit reductions for the good of [Italys] children.

In other words, Renzi said that he would further tighten spending. Merkel called his stance courageous. Hollande mentioned that the UKs decision to leave the EU at some point in the future requires a response by EU leaders. Merkel agreed that they need to deliver results.

She was not clear on what those results would be.

Renzis Motives

Increased austerity has not worked in eight years. Accepting that Renzi is not insane, it is hard to understand why he thinks this move will work any time soon.

Merkel conceded that these actions wont show results in four weeks, but it sets the parameters for a sustainable and successful Italy. No one expects it to work in four weeks, but the question is why it should work at all.

This means the Germans and French are going to use Brexit to explain why increased austerity is needed. It is not clear to me how Brexit leads to austerity, but Merkel seemed to be saying that. Also, Merkel made it clear that the European Commission might be willing to accommodate Renzi.

But Renzis proposed strategy hardly begs for accommodation. Renzi, who was seen as a maverick in Europe, is now being more austere than required. If Merkel offers congratulations, she has gotten everything she wants.

Part of this might be political gamesmanship. Renzi needs a victory. He could propose deep austerity and then demand concessions from the EU Commission. Once granted, he can be hailed as a tough negotiator.

But he would be bargaining against his own budget. Politics is strange enough that he might pull it off. An alternative is that by conceding this point, he is setting up an EU concession on the banks. That is pure guesswork, as there wasnt a hint of it in the talks.

Nationalism in Italy Is on the Rise

In either case, the budget will be extremely unpopular and impose several more years of austerity. It will generate an exit movement, with proponents arguing that EU-imposed austerity caused these problems in the first place. The faster they get out of the EU the better.

For all I know, maverick Renzi lives, and he is doing this to trigger this movement. But whether or not he favors leaving the EU, there will be a movement as a result of this budget.

The argument for staying in the EU will be that Italy cant get better without the EU. The argument for leaving the union will be that Italy will never get better if it stays.

In any case, the malaise that has gripped Italy for years will continue. It is important not to expect solutions in four weeks.

The problem with European unity is that after eight years, no one expects an improvement in four weeks. The question is whether this is the permanent condition of Europe. Perhaps this is the best Italy will do for a long time.

The scene on the aircraft carrier was designed to remind everyone that Europe has military power and to legitimize European unity in the face of Britains decision to leave. But it is not clear whether the Italian public will applaud or demand that the carrier be sold.

It isnt clear that Italy will choose to leave by any means. But it is clear that the Italian economic crisis is not on its way to clearing up.

Watch George Friedman's Ground-breaking Documentary Crisis & Chaos: Are We Moving Toward World War III?

The EUs fumbling is part of a storm of instability engulfing a region thats home to 5 billion of the planets 7 billion people.

In this provocative documentary from Mauldin Economics and Geopolitical Futures, George Friedman uncovers the crises convulsing Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and reveals the geopolitical chess moves that could trigger global conflict. Register for the online premiere now.

John Mauldin Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani met with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the state-run IRINN TV reported Sept. 21.

During the meeting the two sides emphasized on fighting against terrorism, in particular in Syria and Iraq.

Terror is a threat to all of us and the role of Tehran and Ankara in the fight against terrorism and insecurity in the region, especially Syria and Iraq is important, Rouhani said.

Iran's president further touched upon the recent military coup attempt in Turkey, saying that the move against the legal government in Turkey was very disturbing.

He also referred to the attempt as a plot of Iran and Turkeys joint enemies.

There is no doubt that the two countries can thwart the enemy plots with joint effort, Rouhani underlined.

Iranian President also met with British Prime Minister Theresa May for the first time in New York.

During the meeting, Rouhani lauded the increasing relations between Tehran and London, and called the JCPOA a great development and a basis for closer bilateral cooperation.

He also called on all parties of the agreement to fulfill their obligations, added that until all the technical obstacles in banking and insurance services are not removed, the other sides commitments are not implemented.

Rouhani added that the UK can take the key step in this regard.

Rouhani also held a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi where he stated that during the post-JCPOA era Italy has the opportunity to become Irans main trade partner in Europe.

The Iranian president is scheduled to deliver a speech at the General Assembly session and hold talks with senior officials of some other countries attending the meeting.
RICHMOND  With the threatened shutdown of the largest national accrediting organization, state higher-education officials moved Tuesday to avoid the abrupt closure of 15 for-profit colleges in Virginia.

In the wake of the shuttering of ITT Technical Institute that stranded thousands of students, including hundreds in the Roanoke Valley, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia approved a contingency plan that would give an 18-month grace period to schools that receive their accreditation from the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS.

More than 9,000 students in Virginia are enrolled in ACICS-accredited schools, including at Salem-based American National University, which also has Virginia campuses in Charlottesville, Danville, Harrisonburg, Lynchburg and Martinsville.

Miller-Motte Technical College, which has a campus at Tanglewood Mall in Roanoke County, also is ACICS accredited, as are Stratford University, Virginia College and Fortis College elsewhere in Virginia.

The federal panel that oversees accrediting agencies has recommended ACICS be terminated.

Under SCHEVs plan, ACICS institutions would keep their authorization to operate in the state during the grace period if the agency is shuttered, and the students could continue receiving federal financial aid.

State authorization is required for the institutions to receive federal Title IV student financial aid, which includes Pell Grants and loan programs. And in Virginia, accreditation by a recognized accreditor is a legal requirement for authorization.

If ACICS is terminated, schools would have 18 months to find a new accreditor. Without accreditation, the schools would lose access to the federal student loans and grants that keep most of them open.

That would be disastrous for students, said Joseph DeFilippo, SCHEVs director of academic affairs and planning.

The shutdown this month of ITT Technical Institute showed that without the support of federal loans, the schools fold in a matter of days, he said.

ITT Technical closed Sept. 6 after the U.S. Department of Education banned the for-profit chain from accepting new students who require federal aid and imposed stringent new conditions for the continuation of loans to other students.

The governors office posted an online portal  www.governor.virginia.gov/ITT  last week to help ITT students continue their education or seek loan forgiveness.

ACICS, which accredited ITT, is under fire for the poor outcomes of students based on their job placement and graduation and loan repayment rates. The agencys fate is expected to be determined within the next few months. Termination was recommended in June by U.S. Department of Education staff members and by the federal panel, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity.

The federal panels recommendation is now under review by senior education officials, with the final call to be made by federal Education Secretary John King.

According to SCHEV, ACICS accredits 245 institutions of higher education whose students receive about $5 billion in Title IV aid annually.

SCHEV said the contingency plan was necessary to avoid abrupt and simultaneous loss of Title IV eligibility for multiple institutions. The plan includes a shorter initial grace period of six months for two institutions, Stratford and American National University, which are not required to go through an annual recertification process because of the length of time they have operated in the state.

But the plan authorizes SCHEV to determine requirements to grant the schools the entire 18-month grace period.
There are now at least 102 Virginia residents, plus 25 people in other states, who have contracted hepatitis A after reportedly drinking smoothies from Tropical Smoothie Cafe, according to state and federal health officials.

The number of confirmed cases of hepatitis A tied to Egyptian-based frozen strawberries served by Tropical Smoothie Cafe has continued to climb since the Virginia Department of Health notified the public on Aug. 19 of the outbreak.

Symptoms can take as many as 50 days to appear, so the number of confirmed cases could continue to rise.

The strawberries, imported from Egypt, were served beginning in May and as recently as Aug. 9, according to the health department.

In the most recent update on Tuesday afternoon, the state health department reported that the 102 ill Virginia residents range in age from 14 to 70, and about 37 percent have been hospitalized.

In Virginia, there are 59 cases in the Northern region, 15 in the Northwest region, 16 in the Eastern region and 12 in the Central region that includes Richmond and surrounding localities.

As of Sept. 14, there were also 12 cases in Maryland, six in West Virginia, three in New York and one each in Arkansas, North Carolina, Oregon and Wisconsin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tropical Smoothie Cafe is facing several lawsuits.

Last week, seven people with hepatitis A filed lawsuits against Tropical Smoothie Cafe, along with 10 other companies and individuals allegedly associated with the distribution of the tainted Egyptian strawberries.

The lawsuits last week came on top of at least two previously filed lawsuits against Tropical Smoothie Cafe, one of which is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people who got vaccines as a preventative measure after reportedly drinking strawberry smoothies from the restaurant.

The restaurant chain has 96 locations in Virginia. The restaurant CEO has apologized, and the company says all of the Egyptian strawberries were removed from the restaurants.
'You should resign': Elizabeth Warren excoriates Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf

WASHINGTON - The most anticipated face-off of Tuesday's Senate Banking Committee hearing did not disappoint: Democratic firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren grilled Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf in a blistering exchange where she accused him of "gutless leadership."

In two turns behind the microphone, Warren, D-Mass., excoriated Stumpf, repeating questions to try to get him to answer them, turning the bank's own words against him, and using the opportunity to make a moral case for banking reforms.

During the hearing, senator after senator expressed astonishment that the creation of unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts by Wells Fargo employees could have gone on for so long without more assertive action by senior management. But Warren turned that line of questioning personal, suggesting the "cross-selling" strategy that prompted some employees to make the phony accounts enriched Stumpf's own stock portfolio.

"While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.75 million shares of Wells Fargo stock," Warren said. "The share price during this time went up by about $30, which comes out to more than $200 million in gains, all for you personally," Warren said.

Warren's plain-language questions, context-setting remarks and call for tough penalties show why she has become such a feared figure among Wall Street executives. "You should resign," Warren said at the end of a near-monologue about the broader failures of the banking system. "You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission."

In his responses, Stumpf was either frequently interrupted or forced into answers that had him repeating his talking points again and again. "Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?" Warren asked three times, before unleashing repeated questions about whether Stumpf had fired any senior executives.

"So you haven't resigned," she said. "You haven't returned a single nickel of your personal earnings. You haven't fired a single senior executive. Instead, evidently, your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don't have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It's gutless leadership."

Warren continued to rip into Stumpf, casting the situation in moral terms and using her time behind the microphone to call for broader, harsher consequences for banking leaders. "The only way that Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds," she said. "We need tough new laws to hold corporate executives personally accountable. We need tough prosecutors who have the courage to go after the people at the top until then it will be business as usual."

In the first exchange, Stumpf got in only about 100 words of his own in response to Warren's questions. When asked if he had fired any senior executives, he first tried to say the bank had made a change at the regional bank level, only to have Warren slam his response; "I just said, I'm not asking about regional managers. I'm not asking about branch managers. I'm asking if you have you fired senior management."

In at least a couple of instances, she used the bank's own words against him. She began by reading from the bank's "vision and values statement," which says "we believe in values lived, not phrases memorized," and "if you want to find out how strong a company's ethics are, don't listen to what its people say. Watch what they do."

So, she said, "let's do that," noting Stumpf had repeatedly said "I'm accountable." Then she drilled into questions where he was unable to affirmatively answer that he had resigned, handed back money he'd earned or fired any senior executives.

Warren also repeated questions that forced Stumpf to awkwardly stick to his talking points. In the second exchange, Warren asked whether Stumpf would personally support -- after he clarified he is not a member of the bank's compensation committee -- recommending a "clawback" of pay awarded to Carrie Tolstedt, the executive who led the community banking division where the false accounts were created. At least eight times, Stumpf replied there was a board process with which he did not want to interfere.

Growing visibly frustrated, Warren was incredulous when Stumpf said he had not considered firing Tolstedt, who the bank announced announced in July would be retiring but remains employed at Wells Fargo. "Seriously? You found out that one of your divisions had created two million fake accounts, had fired thousands of employees for improper behavior and had cheated thousands of your own customers, and you didn't even once consider firing her ahead of her retirement?"

She then commented on a response from Wells Fargo to a letter she and other senators had sent, which said Tolstedt would remain eligible for an incentive bonus this year. "Mr Stumpf, that is unbelievable."
MARTINSVILLE  Recently undergoing two out-of-state job interviews made Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC) President Angeline Godwin realize that the Martinsville-Henry County area is where she should be, at least for the foreseeable future.

She firmly believes that her work at the college is not yet finished  if it ever will be.

My job is to protect (the resources of) and promote this college, Godwin said. Its a very good possibility Ill stay here until I retire, if I have the opportunity to accomplish what (is determined) needs to be accomplished.

But if I decide that I cannot do that or be effective (as a leader)  Im not so for myself that I couldnt give someone else the opportunity to lead the college, she continued.

Godwin, who is originally from Mississippi and has worked in both education and economic development, has been PHCCs president for the past four years. She is only the colleges third president in its 55-year history.

She said that she and her husband, Jim Hatten, a retired community college biology instructor, are happy in Martinsville-Henry County, and she is happy at PHCC.

However, Godwin recently was interviewed for the presidents job at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, one of North Carolinas largest community colleges. She later was told that she was not going to get the job. She said she was not told why, which is common in the business world.

Soon thereafter, she interviewed for the job of president of the S.C. Technical College System. The day after the interview, she withdrew her name from consideration.

They really needed someone on the ground in short order, for good reasons, I understand, Godwin said. One possible reason, she mentioned, is that South Carolinas legislature is preparing to start work for the coming year.

While driving back to Henry County after the interview, she thought about PHCC and the new job opportunity.

She didnt want to leave the college before it could hire another president, she said, for fear of placing it in a bad position.

Also, she sensed that something about the South Carolina job made it not right for her. She has not yet put her finger on, so to speak, the reason.

It was just my intuition, Godwin said. I intuitively thought it might not be the best fit. I trust my gut feelings, and Im rarely wrong. And the time frame (for hiring a new system president), I think, certified that I was right.

Both the Charlotte and South Carolina jobs have since been filled.

Godwin sought out neither opportunity. From what she understands, people she knows recommended her, and she then was contacted about the jobs and agreed to undergo interviews.

She does not know who nominated her, although she has a vague suspicion, she said. She declined to identify those people, saying she thinks that would not be professional.

The jobs were too impressive not to pursue, Godwin indicated. CPCC is recognized as a national leader among community colleges in workforce development, which is a major mission of such colleges, and the S.C. Technical College System is designed to further economic development there, she said, recalling her past work in that field.

Technical and community colleges are much the same, according to Godwin. Basically, technical colleges used to put less emphasis on serving students wanting to transfer to four-year colleges and universities than community colleges, but that has changed in recent decades, she said.

She emphasized that if she ever considers another job, someone will have to nominate her for it.

Im not interested in initiating a job search and just being in a big ol pool with everybody, Godwin said. Im not going to do that.

PHCC and the community

On the way back from South Carolina, Godwin also thought about the importance of PHCCs students, the colleges efforts to boost Martinsville-Henry Countys economy, its goals and her work in the past four years.

Now that the job opportunities are behind her, I can focus on what I do now, she added. Maybe I can do it more boldly.

By that, she said she means that learning about CPCC and South Carolinas technical colleges and their efforts to educate the workforce may give her ideas for improving how PHCCs students are taught and otherwise served, as well as how local businesses and industries can be better served.

During her tenure as its president, she said, PHCC has begun placing more emphasis on doing whatever needs to be done to help students succeed at transferring to four-year colleges or earning workforce and industry credentials, whether it is on or off campus.

Now, everything we do is focused on student success, Godwin said. Not only does that include teaching and providing academic counseling, but also helping students overcome barriers hindering them from getting a college education, such as transportation and child care.

With a lot of students, the greatest challenges to keeping them here are things that happen outside the college, she said. We have some high achievers among lower-income students, but they have complicated lives.

Godwin said she thinks this community is at a tipping point in terms of economic recovery, and it is moving in the right direction.

Gone are the furniture and textile industry jobs provided by factories that either closed or moved elsewhere, but remaining businesses have expanded and new businesses have come to the area, creating new jobs, she said.

From her past experience in economic development, Godwin said she knows that communities bigger than we are (in terms of population) would die to have the newer industries as well as the expansions.

It is harder than it might seem, she said, to convince a company to expand in a community where it is based because it already knows the communitys positives and negatives.

PHCC has developed training programs to meet the employment needs of local companies and stands ready to create new programs to meet needs of firms that come to the community in the future, college officials have said.

Lets face it, Godwin said, pounding her fingers on a table for emphasis. When you think about the positive things about the community, this college has its imprints all over them.

But people must take advantage of the opportunities it provides.

For that reason, PHCC plans to boost efforts to recruit new students, Godwin said.

Ultimately, the only way that we can change things here (economically) is to increase participation in the workforce, and that is done by ensuring that the workforce is trained for jobs available locally, she said.

Never again will there be very many jobs for which you dont need some kind of training (beyond high school) due to the technology involved with them, Godwin continued.

Weve got the student in one hand and the employer in the other, she said, stretching her arms to either side of her. Among students seeking job training, were not letting them go until they learn the skills that employers want them to have.
MARTINSVILLE - Mailings sent to Martinsville and Henry County voters have some confused if theyre eligible to vote in the November elections. The letters, sent out by a group known as Virginia Vote, tells the reader they may not be registered to vote and recommend they fill out a registration form, to be sent to the state board of elections in Richmond.

The letters, which are signed by retired U.S. Army Major General John K. Singlaub, calls on residents to fix the mess in Washington by voting. Before they can do that, the letter states, they have to get registered.

If regular Americans like you dont register and vote, its the same as giving the professional politicians and bureaucrats the authority to keep damaging our country and playing you and other patriotic Americans for the fool, Singlaub says in the letter. He encourages the reader to register to vote right now, pointing out that otherwise, the person wont be able to cast a ballot.

It gives people the impression theyre not registered, said Martinsville Director of Elections Cynthia Barbour, whos had copies of the letter dropped off at her office by residents who wondered if their registration was still valid. Shes concerned that other people will see the letter and assume its intended for each of them specifically. Instead, the content is a form letter, sent out to multiple people in the area, including some staff at the Bulletin.

Barbour said that if people have a question if their registration is valid, they can do one of two things. First, they can go online to vote.virginia.gov and check their status. If they dont have access to the internet, they can also stop by the city elections office at 55 W. Church Street or call (276)-403-5122. In Henry County, people can stop by the county administration building at 3300 Kings Mountain Road or call (276)-638-8278.

While the material is postmarked to be delivered to Richmond, the letters themselves come from a 66609 area code, outside of Topeka, Kansas. Virginia Votes 2016 appears to be a part of the larger group known as Americas Future Inc. and Market Research Foundation. All of the operations paperwork labels it as a non partisan voter registration drive. Attempts on Tuesday to get in touch with the organization were not successful.

Absentee voting starts

Beyond the letters, theres a few other things that local residents need to know about the elections. For example, if youre not currently registered to vote in Martinsville or Henry County, you dont have long to fix that problem. The deadline to register for the November 2016 election is Oct. 17 at 5 pm.

Also, in Virginia there are no times for early voting. Absentee voting, however, starts up this Friday. The difference between the two is that not everyone can qualify for absentee voting. Absentee voting is defined as anyone who knows theyll be unable to make it to the polls in their designated polling place on Election Day. That can be a student attending a university in another state or someone heading out on business outside of the city. Also, all people who work an 11-hour shift on election day from 6am to 7pm are allowed to vote absentee, as well as all first responders, firefighters and search and rescue operators. The state guidelines also allow those with long-term disabilities or illness to vote absentee, along with anyone who serves as a primary caregiver to one disabled or ill.

The caregiver just has to note their relationship to the person theyre taking care of, Barbour said.

Also, any pregnant women or people who are awaiting trial and could be incarcerated on Election Day can vote absentee, as well as any member of the military and their spouses.

How does that work? To apply, the people have to request an application either through the Martinsville-va.gov website or by coming over to the office on W. Church Street. The same goes for Henry County residents, except they have to either go to henrycountyva.gov or drop by the county administration building. Once that application is processed and if the person is approved, then theyll be able to cast a ballot that same day. Everyone has to come with one form of photo I.D. in order to vote, but the elections officials can help with that if needed.

We can provide them with a photo I.D. if they are registered voters in our system, Barbour says. Theres no cost to do that, its free.
Tehran, Iran, September 21

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his Canadian counterpart Stephane Dion met in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly four years after the two countries stopped their diplomatic relations in 2012.

Zarif and Dion talked about mutual relations, regional issues, and consular affairs, ISNA news agency reported September 21.

After the meeting, Dion updated his Twitter account with a post that read: First mtg w/ #Iran FM Zarif at #UNGA : addressed status of relations btw two countries in context of Middle East. Discussed consular cases.

There were no details about the talks, but the conservative Iranian news agency Mashreq raised the possibility that the consular part of the talks may have included the Iranian-Canadian Homa Hoodfar who is under arrest in Iran under security charges.

Tehran and Ottawa halted their diplomatic ties after former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in July 2012 called Iran the worlds most serious threat to international peace.

The current Canadian government, however, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has already expressed willingness to improve relations with Tehran.
Beth Macy gave behind-the-scenes information Tuesday on the writing and aftermath of Factory Man, the book that made her famous not only in the local area but also on the national arena.

The author of Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local  and Helped Save an American Town gave the first of what will be a series of author talks for Patrick Henry Community Colleges new honors humanities program at the college. She talked about that book as well as her next, Truevine, which will be released on Oct. 18.

Macy is a longtime reporter who has won more than a dozen national journalism awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard in 2010. Her book, Factory Man, won the Lukas Prize in 2013.

Factory Man follows furniture heir John Bassett III out of Bassett and to Galax, where he fought to keep his furniture business local despite the industry moving overseas. Truvine is about two albino African-American brothers who were kidnapped in the early 1920s and displayed as circus freaks, and their mothers fight to find them and bring them justice.

Both non-fiction books are about gritty characters who do the counterintuitive thing to get justice for themselves and the people who are important to them, Macy said.

Theres another similarity: Its interesting that I didnt get very far from Factory Man, did I, for my second book, she said. Much of Factory Man is set in Bassett. The actual community of Truevine, from which the book takes its name, is about 25 miles northeast of Bassett.

Macy said she got started on both of the books from time she spent with photographers. She was a features reporter for the Roanoke Times.

Factory Man was inspired by a photography collection by Jared Soares, which showed desolation in Martinsville and Henry County after the closing of its furniture and textile factories. Macy began exploring the area, talking to people and learning the stories which would create the book.

She talked about interviewing Mary Redd, Frances Kissee, Wanda Perdue and others who were struggling to support themselves after losing jobs.

Macy showed a photograph of food lined up on conveyor belts at the Community Storehouse. When she wrote the book, she said, volunteer Evalyn Chapman had told her the lines formed two hours before the food bank opened. Chapman, who was in the audience, confirmed that the food bank still operates  every Thursday, she said.

The author talked about knowing and talking with John Bassett III. A neighbor of hers who operates Virginia Furniture Mart was the first to tell her about Bassett.

The chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company in Galax, Bassett sued China in 2013 in a court of international trade and proved that they were dumping their product in America, Macy said. She explained that dumping means selling products at a loss, below the cost of production, to undersell competitors, force them to close and take over a market.

She said she asked her neighbor, Is he a good story-teller? Oh, yeah, the man replied.

Then she met Bassett. His comments such as The effing Chi-Coms arent going to tell ME how to make furniture was among catchy things he said.

During the writing of her book, she said, she made sure to talk with both the factory workers and the owners and executives of the companies.

She talked about meeting with resistance. It took a year for Stanley Furniture to agree that she may visit their factories in Indonesia. She heard quite a story about Bassett, Bob Spilman and an ambulance driver from 1982, and even though Bassett denied it, she got comments on it from other people. She put their comments as well as Bassetts denial in the book.

When the book was published in 2014, Macy said, I was 50 years old and nervous as a wet cat. The book garnered rave reviews, including three reviews in the New York Times.

Tom Hanks tweeted with a positive assessment of the book and offered an option on a miniseries based on it on HBO. Macy said she doesnt know much about it other than its still in the works.

Someone sent her a handwritten letter which said she did the impossible by making the old white Southern man a hero, which nobody else had been able to do in 50 years.

Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders also gave it positive reviews.

When she told Bassett about the books success, he reminded her to remain humble: The higher the monkey climbs up the tree, the more it shows its ass.

Two weeks ago, a translated version of the book was published in Taiwan.

Macy first got interested in the story behind Truevine in 1989, when she was a features reporter for the Roanoke Times. She heard about the Muse brothers from a photographer and went to Nancy Saunders Good Shop in Roanoke to learn more about them. Saunders is the brothers niece.

Saunders was fiercely protective of the brothers, Macy said, and refused Macys requests for interviews with her uncle Willie Muse, who was still alive at the time. He had been exploited all his life, the niece explained. By then George had died.

After Willie Muse died in 2001, at the age of 108, Saunders agreed to be interviewed about her uncles.

In the course of her investigation, which included interviews and reading press reports from the time, Macy was struck by the day to day realities of segregation and racism.

The brothers mother, Harriet Muse, got her sons back and filed a lawsuit against the circus  a momentous feat for an illiterate maid to go up against one of the most powerful companies in the nation, Macy said.

Segregation was much more than separate water fountains and separate schools, Macy said. The press mocked the family at every turn.

A goal of the book was to describe their life in the circus and what Roanoke was like in the 1920, Macy said.

After her talk, Macy signed books for many members of the audience, who waited their turns in a long line.

Other speakers in PHCCs humanities program will be Sharyn McCrumb, author of St. Dale, who will speak in October; and Adriana Trigiani, who is scheduled for next summer.
COLLINSVILLE-A Martinsville man was indicted Monday in connection with an April collision on Figsboro Road that severely injured another man.

Rufus Daniel Martin, 55, of 441 Flatrock Drive, Martinsville, received the following indictments from a Henry County Grand Jury on Monday: Two counts of maiming another as a result of a DUI; one count DUI  second offense within five years  Blood Alcohol Content .15-.20; one count refuse blood/breath test  second offense within 10 years; and one count reckless driving.

According to previous Bulletin reports, Trooper A.M. Metzger of the Virginia State Police said that about 4:45 p.m. on April 6, an accident occurred in the 3600 block of Figsboro Road.

A Comcast bucket truck, driven by Martin, was traveling north on Figsboro Road and a 2003 Ford Ranger, driven by Cody Layne Hale of Martinsville, was traveling south. The bucket truck ran off the road to the right, lost control, crossed the center line and struck the Ranger, Metzger has said.

Hale and a passenger in the Ranger  Rachel Bernice Lester of Martinsville  were flown by helicopter to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Tuesdays talk by author Beth Macy at Patrick Henry Community College was a kickoff of sorts for PHCCs new humanities program.

The college will start an honors studies program, and the theme will be Appalachian Culture, said Professor Angela Wright, the Director of the Humanities Grant. She is an associate professor of English, communications studies and theater at the college.

The program will be funded through a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH).

The Humanities Honors Program will have the theme of Appalachian culture, according to Dr. Greg Hodges, the colleges Vice President of Institutional Advancement, Effectiveness, and Campus Life.

The basis of the program is six basic classes taught in greater depth than normal. The program also will include enrichment activities such as visits from authors and field trips.

The program will be implemented over three years, Wright said. The first year will focus on preparation. The first of the humanities classes will be offered during the second year, Hodges said: College Composition 1, United States History I and Introduction to Communication.

Also during this first year of the program, several speakers are lined up for talks. Wright said she has started contacting authors to line them up. Everybody is so nice and thrilled to be part of the grant- funded project.

During this year of preparation and planning, faculty will read, discuss, make cultural visits and hear speakers related to Appalachian culture, Hodges announced during a talk Tuesday, in introduction to Macys talk. The year of faculty exploration will be guided by four over-arching themes: the influence of Appalachian culture on music, arts and theater; the relationship between Appalachian culture and economic development; the influence of African-Americans on the development of Appalachian culture; and literature and its reflection on the dynamics of Appalachian culture.

The program will be able to take about 20 students, Hodges and Wright said. Students who successfully complete those courses will be recognized as Honors Graduates.

Through the program, the college in part hopes to attract students who might not (otherwise) consider a community college, Wright said. It is something a four-year college would offer.

The college is working with Virginia universities so that students who are graduated through PHCCs honors program will be able to transfer to four-year universities as honors students, Hodges said.

The funds will pay for the visits by the authors, buy books for the humanities faculty and pay for field trips for the participating students, she said.

PHCC is one of only 12 community colleges across the United States to receive the grant, Wright said.

Holly Kozelsky reports for the Martinsville Bulletin. She can be reached at holly.kozelsky@martinsvillebulletin.com
This road stuff is complicated.

I couldnt even tell you how many stories Ive written over the last year about I-73 and orphan earmarks and connector roads. I do remember the first story I ever wrote about I-73. I wrote it for my school newspaper when I was in the seventh grade.

At the time, it seemed like I-73 was right around the corner. Now, it seems farther away than ever before.

All this is to say that this situation is confusing, but Im going to do my best to break it down.

This week, I spoke to Virginia Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Layne Jr. about an $8.5 million earmark set aside years earlier for the construction of I-73.

Recently, the federal government passed a bill to collect billions of dollars worth of idle earmarks spread across the country. In order to keep the $8.5 million earmark local, Layne has recommended to the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) that it be spent toward corridor enhancements along U.S. 220.

There is little argument that 220 could use some TLC. Certain areas  particularly Bassett Forks, where a big chunk of the funding is going to go  could definitely use some safety improvements. There have been too many accidents along that stretch, and too many fatalities.

But some are going to be disappointed by Laynes recommendation, because the earmark isnt going to the connector road.

At the July meeting of the Henry County Board of Supervisors, the board approved a resolution asking the CTB to repurpose the earmark toward a connector road from Patriot Centre at Beaver Creek industrial park to the Route 58 bypass. The county is even willing to donate right-of-way toward the project.

The biggest proponent of the connector road has been Skip Ressel, president of the I-73 Committee of Martinsville and Henry County. Ressel has argued that the connector road would shave a tremendous amount of time off the drive from the industrial park to 58; that it would make the industrial park more appealing to new and existing businesses; and that it would lay groundwork for a portion of I-73, whenever the interstate finally comes to fruition.

Those are convincing arguments, and I still believe the connector road remains a good idea. Theres nothing to stop Henry County from submitting the road to the SmartScale road grading system, and if it receives a good grade and the state agrees to fund it, that would be a wonderful thing.

But some are going to be upset, because if that $8.5 million earmark couldnt go to I-73, it should have at least gone to the connector road, right?

The problem, according to Layne, is that under House Bill 2  the same bill which created SmartScale  the state cant build a road unless its fully funded, and it cant fully fund a road unless it passes through SmartScale. The connector road has yet to meet either qualification.

$8.5 million sounds like a lot of money at first blush, but in the world of road building, it simply doesnt go very far. At most, that would cover preliminary grading and engineering for the connector road, but it probably wouldnt buy much asphalt.

But theres another issue here worth considering. The main argument for the connector road is that it would be an economic boon to Martinsville and Henry County. I agree that it probably would be.

For CTB and the Virginia Department of Transportation, however, the chief concern is not necessarily economic development; it is safely and efficiently moving traffic from point A to point B. Not traffic that will potentially exist in the future, but traffic that exists right now.

We should be glad of that. If the primary metric that SmartScale took into account was potential economic impact, there would never be another road built outside of northern Virginia and the coast. Like it or not, thats where the big money is in the state of Virginia.

I would absolutely love to see the connector road built in Henry County, just as I would absolutely love to see I-73 built. These roads would have a great impact on our area.

Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that our state  along with the rest of the country  has infrastructure issues that need to be addressed, existing roads that need to be enhanced and maintained before new ones are built. Quite frankly, we barely have the state and federal funding to fix the roads weve already got, and the situation isnt likely to improve anytime soon.

The $8.5 million earmark may not go toward I-73 or the connector road, but it could have gone away entirely. We are fortunate it is at least being spent locally on a worthwhile project.
What is money? Where does it come from? And what does it represent?

The love of money, the Bible tells us, is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). After the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent global economic crisis that continues to plague society today, it is hard not to empathise with these words from The Good Book.

Similar language is repeated in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the early 20th century novel by Robert Tressell, which is often considered a modern-day bible for the labour movement. In this fictionalised account of the lives of the working class, the protagonist, a socialist called Frank Owen, asserts to his incredulous peers that, Money is the principal cause of poverty. (Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Wordsworth Classics edition, p175)

Owen valiantly attempts to explain further to his fellow workers how, while the present Money System remains, it will be impossible to do away with poverty, for heaps in some places mean little or nothing in other places. Therefore while the money system lasts we are bound to have poverty and all the evils it brings in its train. (Ibid, p284)

The present Money System prevents us from doing the necessary work, and consequently causes the majority of the population to go short of the things that can be made of work. They suffer want in the midst of the means of producing abundance. They remain idle because they are bound and fettered with a chain of gold. (Ibid, p286) This systematic robbery has been going on for generations, the value of the accumulated loot is enormous, and all of it, all the wealth at present in the possession of the rich, is rightly the property of the working class  it has been stolen from them by the means of the Money Trick. (Ibid, p299)

Money, then, as Tressell states through the medium of his hero Owen, appears to us a mystical force; a chain of gold that tethers the vast majority of the population to a life of toil and misery; a great trick that swindles the working class of the wealth that they have created. We see it all around us, ubiquitous and abundant; and yet, amidst this plenty we find universal want. Within this Money System, all our needs become relegated to the need for money  in the words of the Bard, Thou common whore of mankind. (William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3)

Whether it is the monetary policies of central banks, such as the euphemistically named Quantitative Easing; the financial alchemy taking place inside the glass towers of Canary Wharf and the City of London; or the utopian alternatives offered by digital currencies such as Bitcoin: for most people, the workings of the modern Money System are shrouded in mystery.

As with all such revered idols in class society, however, whether it be the gods and religion or the Law and the State, by applying the method of Marxism  that is to say, a dialectical and materialist analysis of history and society  we can understand and explain the origins, evolution, and development of money. In doing so, we can strip away the mysticism of this seemingly omnipotent power and understand the solution to removing its grip over us.

Primitive communism

Studying history, we see that money did not always exist, but is tied to the development of class society and, in particular, of commodities  that is, of goods produced not for individual or common consumption, but for exchange. For Marx, the key to understanding the question of money therefore lay in analysing the historical development of commodity production and exchange. The riddle of the money fetish, Marx states in his magnum opus, Capital, is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes. (Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Penguin Classics edition, p187)

Basing himself on the works of the pioneering 19th century American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels  Marxs co-founder of the ideas of scientific socialism  analysed the earliest forms of human society, demonstrating in his classic text the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State how social classes of exploiters and the exploited had not always existed. Instead, Engels explained, early societies were generally based on gens, or tribes, within which there was communal ownership over the tools and products.

Such communities, therefore, were a form of primitive communism, where there was no exchange between individuals, but rather production for the common good, and consumption on the basis of need. At the same time, this communism was primitive since it was on the basis of a general scarcity, resulting from a low level of productivity, technology, and culture.

For example, in his recent book on Debt: the First 5,000 Years, David Graeber, the modern US anthropologist, cites the example given by his predecessor Morgan of the Iroquois gens, a group of Native American tribes whose societal structure Engels also drew upon in his works. By the mid-[19th] century, Graeber notes, Lewis Henry Morgans descriptionsmade clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by womens councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. (David Graeber, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, Melville House publishing, 2014 paperback edition, p29)

Elsewhere, as the author Felix Martin notes in his book Money: the Unauthorised Biography, in the earliest known civilisations that developed around the Mesopotamian rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates  in what is modern-day Iraq  money did not exist either. It was here in ancient Mesopotamia that the techniques of irrigation and agriculture were invented and  in turn  the formation of the first cities began, such as the great metropolis of Ur. By the beginning of the second millennium BC, Martin states, more than sixty thousand people lived within the city itselfthousands of hectares of land were under cultivationand hundreds more were devoted to dairy farming and sheep herding. (Felix Martin, Money: the Unauthorised Biography, Vintage publishing, 2014 paperback edition, p38)

In such urban economies, Martin explains, in place of money we instead find a system of top-down planning and accounting, managed by a bureaucratic caste, in which all produce would be kept in the citys stores (often royal palaces and temples), with inscribed tablets used to keep records; a complex economy governed according to an elaborate system of economic planning that would be familiar to a manager in a modern multinational corporation. (Ibid, p44)

Whether it be the primitive communism of the Iroquois gens or the bureaucratic planning seen in Mesopotamian cities, therefore, such examples clearly demonstrate how money  and all its associated evils  is not a timeless eternal truth. To understand what money is and where it has come from, we must analyse the qualitative transformation in the social relations that took place within society thousands of years ago.

The rise of money

Early Greek societies  as described in the epic poems of Homer, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey  were, like the Iroquois, based around gens, with common ownership over the productive forces and resultant products. Felix Martin describes how, For the provision of the most basic needs  food, water, and clothingit was essentially an economy of self-sufficient households in which the individual tribesmen subsisted on the produce of his own estate. (Ibid, p35)

In addition to this economy of individual subsistence, Martin continues, were three simple mechanisms for organising society in the absence of money  the interlocking institutions of booty distribution, reciprocal gift-exchange, and the distribution of the sacrifice, which were far from unique to Dark Age Greece. Rather, modern research in anthropology and comparative history has shown them to be typical of the practices of small-scale, tribal societies. (Ibid, p36-37)

The historical turning point, Engels explains in the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, occurred with the development of private ownership over the means of production, and the associated conversion of communal products into commodities.

The rise of private property in herds and articles of luxury led to exchange between individuals, to the transformation of products into commodities. And here lie the seeds of the whole subsequent upheaval. When the producers no longer directly consumed their product themselves, but let it pass out of their hands in the act of exchange, they lost control of it. They no longer knew what became of it; the possibility was there that one day it would be used against the producer to exploit and oppress him. For this reason no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own production and the control over the social effects of its process of production unless it abolishes exchange between individuals. But the Athenians were soon to learn how rapidly the product asserts its mastery over the producer when once exchange between individuals has begun and products have been transformed into commodities. (Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chapter V)

The process that Engels describes initially develops, not internally within the community, but at the fringes of a given society with the trade of surplus products between different tribes. Such trade, however, sets the wheels of commodity production exchange in motion, later rebounding to spread internally, reinforce private ownership, and accelerate the dissolution of communal bonds.

With the development of commodity production and exchange came the expansion of trade; and with growing trade came the emergence of the money commodity  a universal equivalent that could act as a means of exchange, facilitating trade over longer distances; a single commodity that acts as a yardstick of measurement, against which all others could be compared.

Such a process does not come about consciously or in a planned manner, but arises out of the needs of society to expand trade and the market. The initial commodity that is elevated to the status of this universal equivalent is largely accidental, in a historical sense; nevertheless, it is rooted in the material needs of that society, and is generally  in the earliest stages  that which is considered the most important commodity to the particular society in question. As Marx notes in Capital,

What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. (Marx, op. cit., p187)

For example, in the case of the Native American tribes, Engels explains, it was cattle that emerged as the money commodity:

Originally tribes exchanged with tribe through the respective chiefs of the gens; but as the herds began to pass into private ownership, exchange between individuals became more common, and, finally, the only form. Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their neighbours was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in exchange for them  in short, cattle acquired a money function and already at this stage did the work of money. With such necessity and speed, even at the very beginning of commodity exchange, did the need for a money commodity develop. (Engels, op. cit., chapter IX)

Ephesos coins from 620-600 BC - Photo: Classical Numismatic Group Inc. CC BY-SA 3.0The expansion and growth of trade in ancient Greece, however, led to the need for a money commodity that was portable over longer distances. For this reason, we see, beginning in Greece in the late-6th century BC, the emergence of coinage, with the use of precious metals  such as gold and silver  as money.

The beneficial material properties of such metals for use as money are clear: they are generally homogeneous and uniform in their quality  one lump of gold is much the same as any other; they are easily divisible (or combinable) into different amounts, and can thus be used to easily represent different quantities of value; they are durable and therefore do not deteriorate and lose value, thus enabling them to be a store of value; and, most importantly, they have a high density of value, with small amounts of precious metal being equivalent to a large quantity of other, less valuable, commodities. Gold, therefore, is money not because of its revered aesthetic qualities, but is considered to be aesthetical pleasing because it is money.

The rise of money and coinage was, as Engels explains, associated also with the increasing division of labour within class society, and the emergence of a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the productsthe merchants.

Now for the first time a class appears which, without in any way participating in production, captures the direction of production as a whole and economically subjugates the producers; which makes itself into an indispensable middleman between any two producers and exploits them both. Under the pretext that they save the producers the trouble and risk of exchange, extend the sale of their products to distant markets and are therefore the most useful class of the population, a class of parasites comes into being, genuine social ichneumons, who, as a reward for their actually very insignificant services, skim all the cream off production at home and abroad, rapidly amass enormous wealth and correspondingly social influence, and for that reason receive under civilization ever higher honours and ever greater control of production, until at last they also bring forth a product of their own  the periodical trade crises. And with the formation of the merchant class came also the development of metallic money, the minted coin, a new instrument for the domination of the non-producer over the producer and his production. The commodity of commodities had been discovered, that which holds all other commodities hidden in itself, the magic power which can change at will into everything desirable and desired. The man who had it ruled the world of productionand who had more of it than anybody else? The merchant. The worship of money was safe in his hands. He took good care to make it clear that, in face of money, all commodities, and hence all producers of commodities, must prostrate themselves in adoration in the dust. He proved practically that all other forms of wealth fade into mere semblance beside this incarnation of wealth as such. (Ibid)

Money then, as Engels explains, is the product of private ownership; the result of an emergent system of commodity production and exchange. Once called into existence, however, money develops its own logic, spreading through social interaction and asserting its cold, callous laws in one sphere of life after another. Money and usury, Engels stated, were the principal means for suppressing the common liberty, breaking apart the old communal bonds of the Greek gens, and reinforcing the inequalities and exploitation of the newly emerging class society of the Athenian state.

From here the growing money economy penetrated like corrosive acid into the old traditional life of the rural communities founded on natural economy. The gentile constitution is absolutely irreconcilable with money economy[it] knew neither money nor advances of money nor debts in money. Hence the money rule of the aristocracy now in full flood of expansion also created a new customary law to secure the creditor against the debtor and to sanction the exploitation of the small peasant by the possessor of money With the coming of commodity production, individuals began to cultivate the soil on their own account, which soon led to individual ownership of land. Money followed, the general commodity with which all others were exchangeable. But when men invented money, they did not think that they were again creating a new social power, the one general power before which the whole of society must bow. And it was this new power, suddenly sprung to life without knowledge or will of its creators, which now, in all the brutality of its youth, gave the Athenians the first taste of its might. What was to be done? The old gentile constitution had not only shown itself powerless before the triumphal march of money; it was absolutely incapable of finding any place within its framework for such things as money, creditors, debtors, and forcible collection of debts. But the new social power was there; pious wishes, and yearning for the return of the good old days would not drive money and usury out of the world. (Ibid, chapter V)

Credit money

Image: Carlos LatuffAs Engels hints at above, with his reference to the yearning for the return of the good old days when money and usury did not exist, as long as there has been money there has been credit and debt; and as long as there has been usury, there has been the forcible collection of debts  a new social powerbefore which the whole of society must bow.

Some monetary theorists, however, try to emphasise that money is  above all  nothing but a system of credits and debts; a set of accounts and balances representing the distribution of societys wealth amongst its population. What we see in terms of the exchange of coin and currency are, within this framework of understand money, merely a means of settling accounts and making transfers between different balances  money as a means of payment.

Such ideas, which are known generally as the credit (or debt) theory of money, were most thoroughly put forward by the early-20th century British economist, Alfred Mitchell Innes, and are supported, according to David Graeber in his book Debt: the First 5,000 Years, by modern anthropological evidence.

According to Innes and Graeber, our modern conception of money  as outlined in academic textbooks  is fundamentally based on a myth: the myth of barter, as Graeber describes it, which has spread into the popular imagination and consciousness as a result of the works of the classical political economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and before them the theories of the English empiricist, John Locke, and even the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle.

For the classical economists, money was primarily considered a means of exchange  a single commodity that rises above all others to become universally accepted in order to facilitate trade. The use of a particular commodity as money, such as gold, lay in its own high value density. Before money, the story goes, there was no way of trading other than through barter. This clearly posed problems, since it would require both that individuals with mutually reciprocating needs crossed paths, and that traded goods be carried around, ready for exchange. Hence the invention of money, to overcome the barriers of barter, and extend both the variety of goods that could be exchanged and the distance over which they could be traded.

The problem, Graeber notes, quoting the Cambridge anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, is that: No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing. (Graeber, op. cit., p29)

It should be noted, however, that this anthropological narrative of the myth of barter is based on the search for a barter economy  that is, for a community in which the internal exchange of goods through barter took place. But as Engels (and Marx also) noted, the development of commodity exchange through barter does not initially occur internally within the community, but externally, at the edges where different tribes interact. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that no example of a barter economy can be found historically.

For those putting forward the credit / debt theory of money  in contrast to the classical economists and their commodity theory of money  the main role of money is not as a means of exchange, but as a unit of account. In this modern age of capitalism, with its highly developed credit system, fractional reserve banking, and electronic transfers, the idea that money is more than just the coins and cash in circulation may seem obvious. But at the time of Smith, Ricardo, et al., such an idea was not considered a self-evident truth. Even today, there are those who  looking around at the collapse of the financial system in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis, not to mention the ever-inflating credit bubbles and printing of money through quantitative easing that continues today  understandably call for a return to the gold standard in order to restore calm and order to the global monetary system.

As a means of account, then, money is primarily a system of credits and debts. As Graeber emphasises: We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. (Ibid, p40)

Felix Martin highlights two examples in Money: the Unauthorised Biography to stress the point. The first is the case of the people of Yap, a remote and secluded island in the Pacific. An American anthropologist called William Furness, visiting Yap in 1903, was amazed to discover that the small islands economy consisted of only a few traded commodities; and, more importantly, there was neither barter, nor any currency acting as a means of exchange. Instead, Yap had a highly developed monetary system involving large stone wheels called fei, up to twelve feet in size, which were used to represent and account for the various amounts of wealth held by individuals within the community.

Notably, Martin says, Furness observed that physical transporting of fei from one house to another was in fact rare. Numerous transactions took place  but the debts incurred were typically just offset against each other, with any outstanding balance carried forward in expectation of some future exchange. Even when open balances were felt to require settlement, it was not usual for fei to be physically exchanged. (Martin, op. cit., p4)

Yaps money was not the fei, Martin continues, but the underlying system of credit accounts and clearing of which they helped to keep track. The fei were just tokens by which these accounts were kept. (Martin, op. cit., p12)

Closer to home, Martin provides another example of such credit money in the form of Exchequer tallies  wooden sticks used in England between the 12th and 18th centuries to record payments either to or from the state. Such sticks would be split down the middle, with the creditor and debtor keeping one half each as a receipt of the payment. Notably, the creditors half could be used as a means of payment  a form of financial security, exchanged with another individual to settle an unrelated debt.

It wasnt until 1834 that these Exchequer tallies were finally abolished, replaced by the Bank of England with a system of paper notes. Those tallies that remained were burnt and destroyed, leaving little evidence of their existence behind. For similar reasons, Martin notes, the physical evidence for all sorts of monetary systems throughout history  and particularly credit systems involving written accounts  may have been lost to us forever, with only the hard currency of coinage surviving today. As a result, both Martin and Graeber hypothesise, we are left predominantly with a concept of money that emphasises tangible commodities, such as the precious metals.

The labour theory of value

So what is money? Is it primarily a universal commodity, or is it above all a system of credits and debts? In the final analysis, the answer is both: moneys dual role as a means of exchange and as a unit of account are two sides of the same coin, so to speak.

What unites this dual nature of money  what both connects the examples of the fei, the Exchequer tallies, and ancient coinage, and separates these cases from the primitive communism or Mesopotamian top-down planned economies described earlier  is, fundamentally, its role as a measure  or representation  of value. The more pertinent question that arises from this, therefore, is: what is value?

As discussed earlier, the origins of money lie in the development of commodity production and exchange; commodities being those products that are made for a market. Marx begins in Capital by grappling with this question, explaining that commodities have two aspects to them. On the one hand all commodities are use-values  things that have a utility in society; on the other hand, such commodities must have an exchange-value  a quantitative relationship to other commodities (generally just referred to as the value of a commodity).

At the same time, Marx noted, there is clearly a divorce between these dual properties of a commodity; the former does not condition the latter  that is, the usefulness of a product bears little relation to its exchange-value. For example, a pen may be useful, and a car may be useful too; but clearly the average car is worth many thousand (normal) pens. Diamonds, meanwhile, are considered highly valuable, and yet they have very little actual social use.

The riddle that the classical economists, such as Smith and Ricardo, sought to solve  and the point of departure for Marx in his analysis of the capitalist system  was: what determined the ratio of exchange between different commodities? Why would a certain amount of one particular commodity be traded for a certain amount of any other commodity? In other words, what is the source of value?

In order to address this question, Marx first asked: what is the only thing that all commodities have in common? What aspect of a commodity exists that is both universal and comparable? What quality unites all the plethora of commodities that are produced for the market, with their multitude of uses, properties, and physical characteristics? The answer that Marx arrived at was labour.

All commodities, in the final analysis, are products of labour; and it is labour, ultimately, that is the source of all value. The exchange-value (or simply value), then, Marx explained, is expressed by the relative quantity of labour contained within different commodities  both in terms of the living labour added by the producer and the dead labour congealed within the raw materials and tools used in the process of production.

Marx, however, was not the first to assert that labour was the source of value. Such an idea had been raised by the classical economists (and even by those in ancient times). Marx developed this labour theory of value, however, by looking at the question not from the standpoint of the individual labourer, but of labour in the abstract  of societys labour in general:

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract. (Marx, op. cit., p128)

The question of value, according to Marx, is not about the labour expended by the individual producer. Under capitalism, where commodity production and exchange is dominant and universal, commodities are not simply exchanged between individuals, but are bought and sold on the market. The producers and consumers frequently never  and, in fact, rarely ever  meet. As such, the individual character of any commodity is lost; instead, it simply becomes one example of a multitude of similar use-values.

In turn, the individual character of the labour contained within each commodity is lost. Buyers in the market do not care about the labour expended to produce any individual commodity, but only about the quantity of labour that is needed to produce such-and-such a commodity in general, on average. Sellers in the market  a truly global market today  must, therefore, compete against the average level of skill, technology, and organisation, found in their industry. It is this fact that forces companies to compete by investing in new machinery and methods in order to increase productivity and thus sell their products below the general average of their competitors.

The value of commodities, therefore, is not determined by examining the labour expended within an individual commodity, but only by looking at the labour required to produce a given, relatively homogenous, commodity in general. In this sense, Marx explained that the value of a commodity was not simply due to labour, as the classical economists had concluded, but due to socially necessary labour-time: the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. (Marx, op. cit., p129)

In a relatively undeveloped market economy, there may be a degree of flexibility over the amount of one commodity exchanged for another in any individual, isolated act of exchange. The different quantities of labour-time congealed within the particular commodities are seemingly random, and in this sense, as indicated above, the value of a commodity appears accidental. As commodity exchange becomes generalised, however, each act of exchange loses its individual character, and the various accidental values  i.e. labour-times  seen in these concrete acts average out and a general, objective value  i.e. socially necessary labour-time  arises. The act of exchange, meanwhile, is the only proof of the social necessity of any given labour.

The general form of value arrives, therefore, historically at the point when the process of commodity production and exchange has become so universal that the relative values  that is, congealed labour-times  of commodities now present themselves, not as accidents, but as objective facts to buyers and sellers on the market.

We see, therefore, how the law of value  like any law in nature, history, and society  is not something timeless that is imposed from without, but something dialectical that emerges from the interactions within. Necessity expresses itself through accident. In the case of the law of value, this law only arises and asserts itself at the historical point where commodity production and exchange is generalised.

Money, in turn, is the ultimate expression of this generalisation of the law of value; the logical conclusion of the development of commodity production and exchange, which requires a universal yard stick  a standard measure  against which the value of all other commodities can be expressed.

Where commodity production and exchange have not taken hold in society, therefore, the concept of value is meaningless and, in turn, there is no social need for money. For example, as Felix Martin notes, the immense sophistication of Mesopotamias bureaucratic, command economy had no need of any universal concept of economic valueIt therefore did no develop the first component of money: a unit of abstract, universally applicable economic value. (Martin, op. cit., p59)

The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money-form. (Marx, op. cit., p163)

Social relations and alienation

Image: Carlos LatuffThe important point that Marxs emphasised, is that value  and therefore money also, in the form of prices  is ultimately a social relation: a relation between the labour of different individuals that, under a system of generalised commodity production and exchange, expresses itself as a relationship between things. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (Marx, op. cit., p165)

Money, therefore, is not a thing, but a set of relations. The monetary system, in turn, is neither merely the cash and coins in circulation, nor the numbers in an accountants books, but a system of social relations; an expression of the distribution of the wealth  produced by labour  within society. An individuals monetary wealth, meanwhile, is simply a claim to an aliquot portion of this social wealth.

These social and economic relations are ultimately backed up by legal  that is, property  relations, which in the final analysis means the backing of the force of the state: special bodies of armed men (to use Lenins expression), which  within class society  act to defend the sanctity of private property relations. Although, as Graeber notes, This does not mean that the state necessarily creates moneyThe state merely enforces the agreement and dictates the legal terms. (Graeber, op. cit. p54)

As the use of money spreads, then, social relationships are increasingly transformed into monetary and financial relationships. In the words of Engels, quoted earlier, money acts as the corrosive acid, breaking apart all existing societal bonds. Commenting on the emergence of money in ancient Greece, Felix Martin echoes Engels, explaining how,

with the invention of coinage, a dream technology for recording and transferring monetary obligations from one person to another was bornThe result was a further acceleration in the pace of monetisation. Everywhere, traditional social obligations were transformed into financial relationshipsIt is difficult to overstate the social and cultural impact of this first, revolution experience of monetisationmoney would be the universal solvent that could dissolve all traditional obligations. (Martin, op. cit., p61-63)

With the development and generalisation of the money form, the divorce between use-value and exchange-value becomes ever wider. Those involved within the money system of commodity production and exchange become increasingly alienated from their labour. The things they produce are not useful to them, but simply for others. All needs, as mentioned earlier, become relegated to the need for money  that universal equivalent that can be exchanged for all other commodities in order to satisfy ever need imaginable.

As discussed earlier, within primitive communities, where production is a communal process, such alienation does not exist and commodity production is initially limited to those objects that are exchanged at the fringes of society with other communities. But the dynamics and laws of commodity production and exchange have a logic of their own that, once started, unravel and impose themselves throughout society. As Marx notes, as soon as products have become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become commodities in the internal life of the community. (Marx, op.cit., p182)

In other words, as soon as the products of labour are externally traded, thus putting the relative labour times of said products in comparison to one another, the same comparison necessarily begins between the products of labour internal to a community, products which were previously not exchanged between private individuals, but instead produced as part of the common good. The laws of commodities thus begin to assert themselves within society and the separation between use-value and exchange-value is established.

In the course of time, therefore, at least some part of the products must be produced intentionally for the purpose of exchange. From that moment the distinction between the usefulness of things for direct consumption and their usefulness in exchange becomes firmly established. Their use-value becomes distinguished from their exchange-value. (Marx, op.cit., p182)

Marxs analysis of the development of money, therefore, is based on an understanding of the development of the commodity, as outlined above. As commodity production and exchange becomes increasingly generalised, we see the general form of value emerge. Each individual producer wishes to exchange their particular product with the multitude of products found on the market.

As this system becomes universal, there grows a social need for a measure of value  for a universal equivalent and a unit of account that can act as a yardstick, against which the value of all other commodities can be compared. It is this universal equivalent or unit of account that forms the basis for money.

The concept of money, then, is the ultimate form of the alienation of the producer from his/her labour. No longer do we see production for direct consumption; nor are commodities produced as exchange-values for the owner, to be simply traded directly for other commodities that are use-values for the receiver. Now, instead, the producer demands money in exchange for his products  money that represents the most abstract and universal form of labour, devoid of any use-value for the owner, save that of its ability to universally represent the value of his own labour.

Money necessarily crystallises out of the process of exchange, in which different products of labour are in fact equate with each other, and thus converted into commodities. The historical broadening and deepening of the phenomenon of exchange develops the opposition between use-value and value which is latent in the nature of the commodity. The need to give an external expression to this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value, which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been achieved by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money. At the same time, then, as the transformation of the products of labour into commodities is accomplished, one particular commodity is transformed into money.(Marx, op.cit., p181)

The enigma of profit

At a certain point, this growing alienation  tied to the separation of use-value from exchange-value  leads to a qualitative transformation. Initially, the circuit of commodity production and exchange is that of C-M-C: commodities (C) are produced, sold for money (M), and the money is then used to allow the purchase of other commodities (C).

Later on, however, this circuit turns into its opposite  that of M-C-M: we begin with money, which is used to buy commodities, in the hope of selling these on. This development of this M-C-M circuit is associated with the rise of the merchant class, as described by Engels in the earlier passage  a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the products.

Of course, in reality, it is not an M-C-M circuit, but an M-C-M circuit, where M represents a sum of money greater than the initial money outlay. The aim of the merchant, in other words, is simply to make money through the act of exchange. The accumulation of money becomes the sole raison d'etre of the system; the fulfilment of societys needs a mere afterthought.

At the same time, as Engels also explains, arises the usurers  the money lenders and financiers who seek to cut out the hassle of buying and selling altogether, hoping to make money from money: M-M.

Whilst both merchants and usurers played (and continue to play) a necessary role within the market system, in that they facilitated the expansion of trade and the uninterrupted continuity of commodity circulation, these social groups were (and are) nevertheless at the same time incredibly parasitic. Ultimately, neither the merchant nor the money lender produces any new value through their own actions. Instead, their profits merely represent a transfer of wealth  a slice of the value produced elsewhere, in real production.

The enigma of profits origins within capitalism was a problem that had baffled and thwarted the classical economists, who maintained that profit was obtained in the process of exchange, like that of the merchant, by buying cheap and selling dear. But, as Marx pointed out, whilst such an act might allow one individual to swindle another, it could not explain how profit was derived for society as a whole. For in a generalised system of commodity production and exchange, we are all buyers and sellers. Even the capitalists are both sellers and buyers: of course they sell a product, but they must first buy in raw materials, invest in machinery, and pay out wages to workers. In other words, what is gained by cheating with one hand will simply be lost later with the other. One mans loss is anothers gain and vice-versa.

Suppose then that some inexplicable privilege allows the seller to sell his commodities above their value, to sell what is worth 100 for 110, therefore with a nominal price increase of 10 per cent. In this case the seller pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer. A third owner of commodities now comes to him as seller, and he too, for his part, enjoys the privilege of selling his commodities 10 per cent too dear. Our friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer. In fact the net result is that all owners of commodities sell their goods to each other at 10 per cent above their value, which is exactly the same as if they sold them at their true value. A universal and nominal price increase of this kind has the same effect as if the values of commodities had been expressed for example in silver instead of in gold. The money-names or prices of the commodities would rise, but the relations between their values would remain unchanged. (Marx, op.cit., p263) The value in circulation has not increased by one iota; all that has changed is its distribution between A and B. What appears on one side as a loss of value appears on the other side as surplus-value; what appears on one side as a minus appears on the other side as a plus...The capitalist class of a given country, taken as a whole, cannot defraud itself. (Marx, op.cit., p265-266)

If not from the act of exchange and in the sphere of circulation, where then does profit come from? Our capitalist must begin with money, purchase commodities at their true cost, sell his product at a fair price, and yet end up with more money that he started with. [O]ur friend the money owner, therefore, must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value. (Marx, op.cit., p270)

In other words, there must be a commodity that the capitalist can buy that itself is able to create value. And as Marx explains, the possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour, in other words labour-power. (Ibid)

This labour-power  the capacity for labour  is normally expressed in terms of employment for a given period of time. For example, workers are employed on contracts that specify a number of hours per week or weeks per year that they are due to work for the capitalist. How efficiently or how hard they work in this time  that is, how much they actually produce in a given week or year  is then a question for the capitalist to optimise separately. The capitalist pays for the workers time; it is then up to the capitalist to utilise this time as effectively as possible in order to produce as much as possible.

The qualitative leap forward by Marx, therefore, was to see that workers themselves are not only the buyers of commodities, but are also the sellers of a very special commodity: their labour power  their ability to work. What the capitalist buys from the worker, therefore, is not his/her actual labour, i.e. the products of his/her work, but his/her ability or capacity to work.

Like all other commodities, Marx explained, The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article...in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner. (Marx, op.cit., p274)

In monetary terms, the price of labour-power is represented by the wages paid to the working class. This wage, therefore, must be able to cover the necessary expenditure for worker to maintain himself/herself, including food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education. Furthermore, Marx emphasises that the value of labour-power must cover not only the expenditure of the individual worker, but also his/her family, and indeed the continued existence of the working class a whole.

The social wage necessary, therefore, is not simply that required for the bare minimal subsistence of the working class, but is that of a given social and historical situation, varying from country-to-country and from epoch-to-epoch. The working class, through a history of class struggle, has raised the expectation of what an average wage  and thus an average standard of living  should be. The value of labour-power, therefore, is ultimately determined by a class struggle between the working class and the capitalist class; a struggle for higher wages on the side of the workers, and greater profits on the side of the capitalists.

The key to the capitalists profits lies in the ability of the workers to create more value in the course of the day than they are paid back in the form of wages. For example, whilst the working day may be eight hours, it might take only half the day  four hours  for workers to produce commodities with a value equivalent to their wages. In other words, the remaining four hours of the workers labour, from the perspective of the capitalists  are effectively free, and the products created in this period constitute surplus value.

The source of the capitalists profits then, lies not in exchange or circulation, but in production. Profits are obtained from this surplus value  the unpaid labour of the working class. The remaining surplus value, meanwhile, is divided up  in the form of rent and interest  between the various parasites that thrive off of the wealth created in real production: the landlords, usurers, and financiers.

It is the pursuit of profit, in turn, that acts as the motor force within capitalist society, with the competition to sell cheaper, capture markets, and increase profits driving investment into new technologies, in order to increase productivity. With the crash of 2008 and the years of crisis and worldwide economic stagnation that have followed, however, it is clear that this engine has stalled.

The growth of finance

It has become popular to blame the crisis on such parasitic layers of spivs and speculators, given the role that the bloated financial sector played in the events leading up to the 2008 collapse of the banking system that marked the onset of the Great Recession. But whilst it is true that finance and banking have ballooned out of all proportion, dominating the world economy today, the reality is that usurers and money lenders have existed throughout capitalisms history  indeed, going back further, as Engels notes in relation to ancient Greece, for as long as money itself.

The most basic elements of banking  a system of accounts and loans  were even present thousands of years ago, within the ancient Mesopotamian societies described earlier. In these early urban economies, and in other later societies such as that of ancient Egypt, not only were individual goods kept and recorded at central storehouses for safe-keeping, but people could borrow from these same storehouses in order to fulfil immediate needs.

The lending system of ancient Babylon was evidently quite sophisticated, Niall Ferguson, the bourgeois historian, writes in his book The Ascent of Money. Debts were transferableClay receipts or drafts were issues to those who deposited grain or other commodities at royal palaces or temples. Borrowers were expected to pay interestat rates that were often as high as 20 per cent. (Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World, Penguin Books, 2009 paperback edition, p31)

Later on in Ptolemaic Egypt and Hellenistic Greece emerged the innovation of credit transfers, allowing cash transactions to be replaced in part with a system of credit receipts and payments. For example, on the Greek island of Delos, individual clients could transfer money simply by sending instructions to the bank to make payments to another persons account. Delos banking methods, in turn, became the model for the Romans. Meanwhile, with the development of international trade and commerce, and the Romans preference for coinage, banking expanded to involve the exchange of minted coins of different origin.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire came the collapse of international trade and the banking system also. As Felix Martin comments, the social and political stability required to underpin professional finance had, it seems, disintegrated. (Martin, op. cit., p83) Markets shrank, the subsistence economy grew, and the money system regressed back both in terms of its size and complexity, primarily consisting of a multitude of coinages catering to local fiefdoms and kingdoms.

Feudal lords and kings, meanwhile, would frequently use their privileged monopoly position as minters to manipulate the money supply and enrich themselves. The sovereign, in effect, could tax the holders of money by debasing the currency, changing the nominal value of the coins in circulation and pocketing the difference  a process known as seigniorage.

This continual process of debasement, over time, served to reinforce the symbolic nature of coins and their primary role as a representation of value, paving the way for paper money (which was originally invented in 8th century China) and even the electronic money we use today  mere digital information on a screen. Money, in effect, becomes a mere token  a symbol of value, as Marx notes:

The fact that the circulation of money itself splits the nominal content of coins away from their real content, dividing their metallic existence from their functional existence, this fact implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic money with tokens made of some other material Relatively valueless objects, therefore, such as paper notes, can serve as coins in place of gold. This purely symbolic character of the currency is still somewhat disguised in the case of metal tokens. In paper money it stands out plainly. But we can see: everything depends on the first step. (Marx, op. cit., p223-224)

At the same time, this seigniorage was sowing the seeds for a monetary rebellion. Those in possession of money were finding themselves consistently robbed by the state; an alternative had to be found.

The shift in power came with the restoration of banking to its former glories. As international trade expanded once again, a new mercantile class emerged, centred on the medieval Italian city-states. A division of labour occurred within commerce, and international merchant houses grew who were concerned less with the transfer of the actual commodities (which was left to lesser mortals), and more with the transfer of wealth and property rights.

Rather than dealing with the myriad of currencies that could be found across the continent, the great European merchant houses in time came to circumvent the sovereign altogether, playing the role of bankers. Local tradesmen would deal with the merchant houses, who in turn would deal with one another to settle accounts, thus creating an international system of IOUs (such as cheques and bills of exchange) and payments.

As the wealth of the rising merchant class grew, so did their power and influence. The state became increasingly reliant on this nascent bourgeoisie as a source of funds for their expenditure  in particular, to wage wars. The major shift in class relations can be seen in the way in which such public funds were obtained, as Ferguson notes in relation to the city-state of medieval Florence: Instead of paying a property tax, wealthier citizens were effectively obliged to lend money to their own city government. In return for these forced loans, they received interest. (Ferguson, op. cit. p72) The merchant bankers had become the states creditors. The era of public debts had begun.

In principle, the idea of state debt makes little sense. The same result  i.e. the government raising money for state expenditure  could just as well be achieved through taxing the rich, rather than borrowing from them. Of course, from the perspective of the wealthy, lending the government money (in the form of credit) rather than giving it over (in the form of taxes) is far more preferable: the rich get to keep their money, and at the same time earn a tidy sum on the side from interest.

The concept of a sovereign debt was not new to the capitalist epoch. Monarchs had frequently borrowed from the rich and wealthy; the problem previously, however, was that such royalty would often default on their loans. Tired of losing their money, the rising bourgeois class in England pushed through with the establishment of a national bank  the Bank of England  in 1694, which would guarantee the repayment of government debts and give the financial lenders monopoly privileges over the money supply  that is, over the issuing of new banknotes.

To be granted the privilege of note issue by the crown, Felix Martin writes, which would anoint the liabilities of a private bank with the authority of the sovereign  this, they realised, was the Philosophers Stone of money. It was the endorsement that could liberate private bank money from its parochial bounds. They would lend their credit to the sovereign  he would lend his authority to their bank. What they would sow by agreeing to lend, they would reap a hundredfold in being allowed to create private money with the sovereigns endorsement. Henceforth, the seigniorage would be shared. (Martin, op. cit., p118)

Alongside the national debt developed the fiscal (taxation) system. With debts to repay, the state was required to establish a means through which to raise the taxes needed to fund these debts and interest payments. The result, however, as seen now in debt-laden countries across the world, is that the tail ends up wagging the dog. Government policy begins to revolve entirely around paying back the debts to its financial creditors, and  as is aptly demonstrated in modern day Greece  new loans are required just to pay off the old ones.

So it comes about that the bourgeoisie takes complete control over the running of the country  not through the electoral apparatus of a country, but by dictating policy to governments using strikes of investment and the threat of national insolvency. This is what we see today, where governments of every colour are carrying out the same policies of austerity under the aegis of international finance capital  and this is what is meant by the dictatorship of capital, which rides roughshod over democracy in this time of crisis.

The national debt, i.e. the alienation of the state  whether that state is despotic, constitutional, or republican  marked the capitalist era with its stamp. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is  the national debt. (Marx, op. cit. p919)

Credit and crisis

Banking and finance are fundamentally based upon moneys role as a means of payment  a promise by the buyer to pay in the future. This function of money as a means of payment, Marx notes, however, is not unique to the capitalist epoch, but develops out of simple commodity circulation, so that a relationship of creditor and debtor is formed.

With the development of trade and the capitalist mode of production, Marx continues, this spontaneous basis for the credit system is expanded, generalised and elaborated. Whereas coinage  that is, money as a means of purchase  once dominated, money now functions only as means of payment, i.e. commodities are not sold for money, but for a written promise to pay at a certain date. (Karl Marx, Capital, Volume Three, Penguin Classics edition, p525)

In other words, with money as a means of payment, it is possible to buy without having first sold; to own without actually paying anything in return. A disconnect develops between the commodities exchanging hands and the actual ability to pay for these commodities. Fragility, uncertainty and risk are introduced into the system, which only increases as the credit system is expanded, generalised and elaborated.

The complexity  and with it, the fragility  of the credit system took a qualitative leap forward with invention of fractional reserve banking in the 17th century. Whereas the banking system up until then had been primarily concerned with exchanges between accounts, or the provision of loans fully backed up by reserves, now banks began lending amounts in excess of its metallic reserveexploiting the fact that money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. (Ferguson, op. cit., p50)

In their role as lenders of credit, the banks play a dual role for the capitalists. On the one hand, relatively short-term credit is required to overcome bottlenecks in production and maintain the flow and circulation of commodities. For example, producers need to borrow money to pay for wages and raw materials whilst they wait for previous produced goods to reach the market and be sold.

On the other hand, credit may be used to allow producers to expand production when they dont have the upfront capital to pay for it. In this respect, the banking and finance system serves to pool together and accumulate all the small savings and idle money within the economy  primarily those of individuals and households  in order to put them to use productively as investment in new means of production.

With the invention of fractional reserve banking, however, banks were no longer mere lenders of credit  they became the creators of credit, and thus the creators of money also. Only a fraction of deposits are backed up by liquid assets, the rest are simply loans created by the bank (at interest) in order to provide greater profits for the bank, thus increasing the money supply in the process. The credit lent appears in the form of a deposit in the bank account of the borrower, who can then spend this just as he/she would spend any other money.

Today, according to the UK-based campaigning group Positive Money, whose aim is to democratise money and banking, upto 97% of the money supply in the British economy is the creation of banks, with only 3% existing in the form of cash.

In this respect, credit plays another key role within capitalism: artificially expanding the market  that is, the purchasing power within the economy. At root, capitalism is a system of production for profit. If the capitalists cannot make a profit, then they will not produce; workers are made unemployed, investment dries up, circulation stops. The economy grinds to a halt and the credit system breaks down  that is to say: capitalism enters into crisis.

As long as the reproduction process is fluid, so that returns remain assured, this credit persists and extends, and its extension is based on the extension of the reproduction process itself. As soon as any stagnation occurs, as a result of delayed returns, overstocked markets, or fallen prices, there is a surplus of industrial capital, but in a form in which it cannot accomplish its function. A great deal of commodity capital; but unsaleable. A great deal of fixed capital; but in large measure unemployed as a result of stagnation in reproduction. Credit contracts, 1) because this capital is unoccupied, i.e. congealed in one of its phases of reproduction, because it cannot complete its metamorphosis; 2) because confidence in the fluidity of the reproduction process is broken; 3) because the demand for this commercial credit declines... So if there is a disturbance in this expansion, or even in the normal exertion of the reproduction process, there is also a lack of credit; it is more difficult to obtain goods on credit. The demand for cash payment and distrust of credit selling is especially characteristic of the phase in the industrial cycle that follows the crash...Factories stand idle, raw materials pile up, finished products flood the market as commodities. (Marx, Capital, Volume Three, p614)

With a default on any debts, the anarchy and chaos within the balance of payments becomes apparent. Creditors demand their repayments and refuse to lend any further. Promises to pay lose any meaning; only hard cash will suffice. Credit is reined in, bringing the motion of circulation  and thus production also  to a halt. In short, the lack of credit does not cause a crisis; the crisis causes a lack of credit.

This contradiction bursts forth in that aspect of an industrial and commercial crisis which is known as a monetary crisis. Such a crisis occurs only where the ongoing chain of payments has been fully developed, along with an artificial system for settling them. Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, no matter what is cause, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. (Marx, Capital, Volume One, p236) In a system of production where the entire interconnection of the reproduction process rests on credit, a crisis must evidently break out if credit is suddenly withdrawn and only cash payment is accepted, in the form of a violent scramble for means of payment. At first glance, therefore, the entire crisis presents itself as simply a credit and monetary crisis. And in fact all it does involve is simply the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. The majority of these bills represent actual purchases and sales, the ultimate basis of the entire crisis being the expansion of these far beyond the social need. On top of this, however, a tremendous number of these bills represent purely fraudulent deals, which now come to light and explode; as well as unsuccessful speculations conducted with borrowed capital, and finally commodity capitals that are either devalued or unsaleable, or returns that are never going to come in. (Marx, Capital, Volume Three, p621)

At the heart of these crises is a fundamental contradiction within capitalism: that of overproduction. This arises from the nature of capitalism as a system of profit, and from the origins of profit itself  as explained earlier  as the unpaid labour of the working class. Since workers produce more value than they are paid back in the form of wages, the working class as a whole can never buy back the full value of the commodities it creates.

Capitalism traditionally overcomes this contradiction of overproduction by reinvesting the surplus value created into new means of production in the search for greater profits. This, however, only serves to create even greater productive forces, and thus an even greater mass of commodities that must find a market, and thus  rather than resolving the contradiction  only further exacerbates overproduction.

Credit, then, is used to artificially increase the consumptive capacity of the masses, and thus to temporarily overcome overproduction, allowing the productive forces to continue growing and the market to expand beyond its limits  but only by sowing the seeds for an even bigger crisis in the future.

Today, the capitalist system has extended far beyond its limits. The expansion of credit over the past thirty years  and particularly since the turn of the century  created the largest credit bubble in history. On the one hand, as a result of globalisation, automation, and a full-frontal assault against the working class, wages were driven down, and an ever-increasing proportion of wealth began to go to capital rather than labour. On the other hand, credit was massively expanded through the use of mortgages, credit cards, student loans, etc., in order to artificially maintain demand. Whilst this had the effect of delaying the onset of crisis, it at the same time paved the way for the almighty collapse of 2008 and the continued chaos that we see today, as all the contradictions that have piled up for decades now come to the fore.

At root, it is the restricted consumption of the masses that prepares the way for crises under capitalism. The market is not only restricted by the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend on goods and services (and the huge debts that hang around their necks), but also by the enormous level of excess capacity that has built up throughout the economy, creating a gigantic barrier to further investment. Today, the world is awash with such excess capacity; the market is saturated and the capitalists have had to cut back on production. Their attempt to overcome the crisis by credit has reached its limits. The productive forces have far outgrown the limits of the capitalist system.

Money and Capital

After the advent of banking and the birth of the bond market, Niall Ferguson comments in his Financial History of the World, the next step in the story of the ascent of money was...the rise of the joint-stock, limited-liability corporation. It is the company, Ferguson notes, that enables thousands of individuals to pool their resources for risky, long-term projects that require the investment of vast sums of capital before profits can be realised. (Ferguson, op. cit., p121)

With the advent of the joint-stock company, business owners were no longer purely reliant on the banks in order to obtain credit for making large-scale investments. Instead, such money could be raised from the accumulation of many small (or large) sums, by selling to shares in the company to anyone who was willing to risk their savings in return for a portion of future profits.

As Marx emphases in Capital, however, such shares are not a share in the actual company itself, but rather are an ownership title, pro rata, to the surplus-value which this capital is to realise; nothing but accumulated claims, legal titles, to future production; a legal claim to a share of the surplus-value that this capital is to produce. (Marx, Capital, Volume Three, p597; p599 ; p608)

Today, giant financial firms, through the stock market, control the process of buying, selling, and trading shares as part of the wider credit system. Anyone with any savings or private pension is tied into this system, with investment banks and pension fund managers amalgamating the populations nest eggs into larger amounts that can be invested to make a profit.

It is clear, however, that there is a qualitative difference between money and capital. Whilst millions of people may have money invested in shares through their savings or pension, this does not make every thrifty saver or pension holder a capitalist. Only a tiny minority have enough money that they can live purely off the returns from stocks and shares.

Despite the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and their mouthpieces (for example, the rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher, who sought to create a middle-class property-owning democracy by selling off council housing and privatising nationalised industries), the stock market does not serve to diversify societys wealth and convert laymen into capitalists. Rather, the main function of the highly developed credit system that we see under capitalism is to do the opposite: to concentrate and capitalise all the small, scattered sums of money in the hands of a rich and powerful elite of bankers and financiers; to convert all money into capital  that is, into value that is capable of creating more value.

Small sums which are incapable of functioning as money capital by themselves are combined into great masses and thus form a monetary power. (Ibid, p529) In so doing, Lenin remarks in his Marxist masterpiece Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, they [the banks and financial firms] transform inactive money capital into active, that is, into capital yielding a profit; they collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class. (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter II)

At the same time, the credit system serves to divorce the capitalists ever more from the process of real production. With the advent of joint-stock companies, the capitalist ceases to be the business owner or manager, and capital itself become less and less about owning actual tangible assets. Instead, the capitalist becomes simply capital personified, and capital ownership - in the form of stock and shares - is transformed simply into a claim to a share of the total surplus value produced in society; an asset that entitles the owner to a constant revenue stream, with a return equal to the average rate of profit. It is, in the words of Marx, the transformation of the actual functioning capitalist into a mere manager, in charge of other peoples capital, and of the capital owner into a mere owner, a mere money capitalist. (Marx, op. cit., p567)

It is the dominance of the banks, stock market, cartels, and monopolies, meanwhile, with the transformation of capital into primarily finance capital, that Lenin noted as being a defining characteristic of imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism:

It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy. (Lenin, op. cit., Chapter III)

The rise of the stock market and the credit system, then, acts to accelerate the socialisation of production, with businesses appearing as social enterprises as opposed to private ones. This is the abolition of capital as private property within the confines of the capitalist mode of production itself. (Marx, op. cit., p567).

On the one hand, this gives as an enormous boost to the development of the productive forces, enabling investment in new means of production on a scale that could never be achieved on the basis of individual private ownership. This provides a glimpse of what could be possible under a socialist plan of production, where the productive forces and resources in the economy were utilised according to a rational and democratic plan, on the basis of societys needs, rather than for the profits of the bankers and bosses.

On the other hand, this same credit system gives rise to an orgy of speculation and reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new kind of parasite in the guise of company promoters, speculators and merely nominal directors; an entire system of swindling and cheating with respect to the promotion of companies, issue of shares and share dealings. It is private production unchecked by private ownership. (Ibid, p569)

Trading and exchange of financial commodities become merely a means of attempting to make money out of money. Financial assets increasingly become mere fictitious capital. Activity on the stock market becomes ever more separated from the state of the real economy below, with prices of such stocks and shares ceasing to reflect the actual health of the companies whose value they are supposed to represent, giving rise to an endless froth of bubbles being vastly inflated only to later burst up against the pinpricks of reality. As Niall Ferguson remarks:

In the four hundred years since shares were first bought and sold, there has been a succession of financial bubbles. Time and again, share prices have soared to unsustainable heights only to crash downwards again. Time and again, this process has been accompanied by skulduggery, as unscrupulous insiders have sought to profit at the expense of naive neophytes. (Ferguson, op. cit., p122)

And, of course, as we see from the financial crash of 2007-08, it is always the working class who are left to foot the bill for such recklessness, whilst the rich and wealthy continue to laugh all the way to the bank.

Far from being a malevolent tumour on the side of an otherwise benevolent system, however, we can see that such financial alchemy and skulduggery of swindling and cheating are an intrinsic part of the capitalist system that cannot be removed. The development of capitalism, from its mercantile beginnings in southern Italy to the Industrial Revolution in England, was only possible due to the development of finance capital and the role it played in concentrating capital, expanding the productive forces, and creating the world market. Any separation between the good capitalism of industry and manufacturing, on the one side, and the bad capitalism of the parasitic and irresponsible finance sector, on the other, is purely artificial and completely idealistic.

Instead of attempting to regulate the unruly beast of finance and banking in order to create the utopia of a responsible capitalism, the leaders of the labour movement should instead put forward the demand for the nationalisation of the banks under the control of the organised working class. Only in this way can the wealth in society be pooled and planned in the interest of the many.

The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market, which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production. The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of others labour, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards a new mode of production. (Marx, op. cit., p572)

The scourge of inflation

Whilst minted coins may bear the faces of the heads of state with whose authority they have been issued, it is important to stress that this does not mean that money was ever invented or imposed from above. Rather, it is an emergent social device within a society where a market economy has developed, as Graeber emphasises:

The reasons why anthropologists havent been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because theres no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever invented than music or mathematics or jewellery. What we call money isnt a thing at all; its a way of comparing things mathematically (Graeber, op. cit. p52)

Although it is emergent, and not imposed or invented, the relations represented by money are nevertheless based on something that is objective and real  that is, the socially necessary labour time embodied within societys total wealth of commodities in circulation.

The real wealth of a society, in other words, consists not in its accumulation of coins and cash, nor in bubbles of credit and debt, but in the level of the productive forces - and resultant use-values - at its disposal. Indeed, as discussed earlier, many a regime or ruler in history has been reminded of this fact when attempting to increase their wealth simply through debasement of the currency or printing money  a technique that universally leads to creating greater economic instability and ultimately, ironically, to the impoverishment of the society in question.

Whilst there is no apparent limit to the amount of money that can be put into circulation, then, it is nevertheless clear that this amount is not arbitrary. As explained earlier, money is above all a measure of value  the universal measure of value. The amount of money in circulation, therefore, must ultimately be linked to the total value of commodities in circulation  equivalent in money terms to the total of the prices  and to the speed (the velocity or turnover) with which this money exchanges hands. For example, all things being equal, if the quantity of commodities remains constant but the amount of notes in circulation doubles, then the price of each commodity will double also.

Inflation is a reflection of market forces: if the money supply increases, there will be a general increase in the demand for commodities, and thus a general rise in prices. Inflation of specific commodities can still occur in the absence of an increasing money supply, however; for example, as a result of a scarcity or restriction in the supply of certain goods, which pushes their price above their value. Similarly, if the costs of production for a particular commodity increase, i.e. there is an increase in its socially necessary labour time, these will be reflected in a relatively higher value and thus a newly inflated price for this commodity in relation to others.

A generalised inflation - that is, a general inflation in the price of all commodities - in society, then, can only take place as a result of an expansion of the money supply and a debasement (devaluation) of the currency; or as a product of a rise in the price of a commodity such as oil, which acts as an important factor in the cost of production for all other commodities.

As discussed earlier, money - both in terms of commodity money and credit money - is ultimately a set of social relations; an expression of the distribution of wealth within society. The role of such a generalised inflation, therefore, is to change the balance of these social relations and redistribute this wealth from one group to another: primarily in terms of a transfer of wealth from creditors to debtors, whose debts in real terms are diminished by inflation.

Since debasement and a generalised inflation ultimately acts to redistribute wealth, the question of who controls the money supply reflects itself historically as a struggle between the classes, as noted earlier in terms of the battle between feudal kings and the nascent bourgeoisie over the money supply. As Marx comments in Capital:

The class struggle in the ancient world, for instance, took the form mainly of a contest between debtors and creditors, and ended in Rome with the ruin of the plebeian debts, who were replaced by slaves. In the Middle Ages the contest ended with the ruin of the feudal debtors, who lost their political power together with its economic basis. Here, indeed, the money-form - and the relation between creditor and debtor does have the form of a money-relation - was only the reflection of an antagonism which lay deeper, at the level of the economic conditions of existence. (Marx, op. cit., p233)

What indebted workers might gain with one hand from a generalised inflation and a decrease in the real value of their debts, however, they risk losing with the other hand in the form of an erosion of the purchasing power of their wages. For if there is a general increase in prices, but without any corresponding increase in pay, then it is clear that workers will experience a decrease in their real wages - that is, a decrease in the quantity of goods that their wages can be exchanged for.

In the 1970s, the trade unions in Britain were blamed by bourgeois politicians and right-wing papers for causing high inflation, with claims that militant strikes demanding (and winning) unreasonable wage increases were leading to rising costs of production across the board. Such a narrative has become a popularised myth that continues to be propagated by the capitalist class and their political representatives in this day and age.

In fact, the reality was the other way around. Workers were generally fighting to increase their wages to catch up with inflation - inflation that arose due to other (international) factors, such as: the expansionist Keynesian policies enacted by all advanced capitalist countries throughout the post-war boom; the vast expenditure on military spending by the USA, who exported inflation across the world through the Bretton Woods monetary system; and the oil crisis of 1973, which saw energy prices soar.

The capitalists vehemently opposed such strikes over wages, knowing that a generalised wage increase for workers could only be achieved on the basis of a generalised reduction in their profits. Ted Grant explained this back in 1971 when responding to the slanders of the Tory government and bourgeois media:

What causes price increases? If the capitalists could arbitrarily raise prices they would not wait for wages to rise. They are interested in gaining the maximum, profits. What stops them is competition, especially under modern conditions, nationally and internationally. In fact in general it is wages which lag behind prices and not vice-versa. If the capitalists could raise prices at their whim, why do they face the prospect of bitter strikes, with consequent loss of production and profits rather than concede the wage demands of the workers? If it was simply a question of passing on wage increases that would be the obvious way to solve the problem. But in fact the profit of the capitalist class is only the unpaid labour of the working class. Consequently an increase of wages for the workers, other things being equal, means a fall in the profit of the capitalists. Hence the cries of woe from the paid hacks of capitalism in the mass media. (Ted Grant, The Truth Behind Inflation, Militant no. 71)

Today, the various capitalist governments around the world are resorting to unprecedentedly loose monetary policies in a desperate attempt to stimulate the economy, with all manner of previously unseen measures being implemented and proposed: from quantitative easing and negative interest rates, to talk of a helicopter drop of money directly into the pockets of consumers.

One would expect such policies to lead to rampant inflation across the board, but this has not occurred. Why? At root, the answer lies with the enormous level of overproduction that exists on a world scale, which reflects itself in a glut of commodities and excess capacity in all sectors, and which acts to put an enormous downward pressure on prices.

For example, unlike in the past - as a result of the slowdown in China, the massive expansion of the fracking industry in the USA, and the rivalry between producers such as Saudi Arabia and Iran - today oil prices have hit rock bottom. But rather than celebrating this fact, bourgeois politicians and economists are instead gravely concerned by the onset of deflation, which is a symptom of the systems sickness.

In short, the market is saturated; capitalism has gone far beyond its limits; the development of the productive forces has come into conflict with the mode of production - that is, our ability to produce has come up against the barrier of private ownership and production for profit.

Monetary (in)stability

In theory, the money supply should remain anchored to the real economy by the demand for money. For example, if a business takes out a loan in order to invest and expand production, or if a family borrows in the form of a mortgage to buy a new house, then the creation of new money will be backed up by a corresponding increase of commodities in circulation.

The reality, however, is not so simple. On the one hand, money acts as the lubricant to the whole flow of commodity production and exchange, enabling universal trade and exchange between individuals or communities who need never meet, and breaking up the act of exchange in both time and space. It thus provides movement and motion, dynamism and change. The rise of money, then, marks a powerful leap in the potential for the market  and thus for the forces of production  to expand.

On the other hand, the pressure exerted by the market to expand also calls forth a demand for a greater supply of money. Hence the development, as discussed earlier, of credit, banking, and finance. But it is within the nature of commodity production and exchange - that is, of private ownership - for this system to go beyond its limits. As discussed earlier, with the development of money and the rise of merchants and usurers, C-M-C is replaced by M-C-M (and M-M); the end goal of production and exchange becomes further removed from fulfilling actual needs, and more and more about the accumulation of money.

This pressure for the money supply to expand is reflected in the tendency towards debasement, and in the evolution of money from coins whose value was equivalent to that of the precious metal contained within, to money in the form of banknotes, etc. which act as a mere representation, symbol, or token of value - a process that has reached its extreme in the modern age where a persons wealth is represented by mere numbers on a screen.

Credit, then, acts to break the link between the real economy and the money supply. As discussed earlier, it allows for the productive forces to temporarily overcome the restrictions of the market. At the same time, it promotes all manner of speculation, resulting in a scourge of bubbles and fictitious capital. Prior to the financial crisis of 2007-08, for example, instead of households coming to the banks and asking for a loan, the banks came to households, encouraging them to join in with their orgy of credit creation in the form of subprime mortgages and credit cards. Meanwhile, the market carried on expanding and the capitalist system continued to grow on the basis of this house of cards, with big businesses able to realise their profits thanks to the artificial demand created by this credit.

In his book on Debt, David Graeber notes that the history of money has alternated between periods where the use of credit money has expanded and periods where the use of precious metals have tended to dominate. As noted earlier, for example, with the collapse of the Roman Empire came the breakdown of trade and banking, and thus a move away from credit towards a system of local and regional coinages, reflecting societys dissolution at the time into feudal kingdoms and fiefdoms.

The collapse of the credit system and the reversion to commodity money (e.g. the precious metals), then, is a reflection of the general political and economic instability in society, which generates a craving for money that is tangible and not merely scribbles on a bankers account book. As Graeber explains:

...while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterised by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by previous metal. (Graber, op. cit., p214)

In this respect, the generally limited and stable amount of precious metals circulating around the world market - along with their advantageous material properties described earlier (homogeneity, durability, high value density, etc.) - helped to enforce their role as money, providing a reliable standard of prices, measure of wealth, and means by which debts could be transferred.

The use of precious metals as the money commodity does not guarantee the stability of prices, however. This was demonstrated by the example of the Spanish Empire in the 16th Century, where, after flooding the country with an abundance of gold and silver looted from their conquests of Central America, the rulers found themselves with an unstable situation of high inflation and low investment, which ultimately led to the collapse of the Spanish economy. Everything is dear in Spain except silver, one proverb from the time remarked. This fateful downfall again highlights the fact that it is not an abundance of money that makes a society rich, but rather the level of its productive forces and ability to produce real wealth.

Leon Trotsky also emphasised this point in respect to his analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet Union, where, under Stalin, an increase in the money supply was desperately and empirically used by the bureaucracy in an attempt to overcome the limits of the planned economy within conditions of economic isolation and backwardness.

Trotsky stressed that even with the establishment of the planned economy and the workers state, money would not lose its role as a measure of value until all last remnants of private ownership, commodity production and exchange, and class society had been abolished. In the meantime, Trotsky noted, any unchecked increase in the money supply would lead to a generalised inflation that would serve to limit the effectiveness of the planned economy. The question, again, is ultimately reduced to a question of the level of the productive forces available to society.

These two problems, state and money, have a number of traits in common, for they both reduce themselves in the last analysis to the problem of problems: productivity of labor. State compulsion like money compulsion is an inheritance from the class society The ruling circles were completely possessed by the opinion that with a planned economy inflation is not to be feared. This means approximately that if you possess a compass there is no danger in a leaking ship. In reality, currency inflation, inevitably producing a credit inflation, entails a substitution of fictitious for real magnitudes, and corrodes the planned economy from within. It is needless to say that inflation meant a dreadful tax upon the toiling masses. (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter IV)

Today, whilst there has not been a general inflation as a result of loose monetary policies such as QE (for the reasons explained earlier), such measures have nevertheless given rise to an enormous instability within the world economy, with cheap money leaking abroad and inflating asset bubbles - for example, of housing and stocks, etc. - across the globe. The effect within those countries that have enacted QE programmes, meanwhile, has been to weaken their currencies, helping to boost exports. In essence, it has become yet another new form of beggar-thy-neighbour economics.

The vast QE programmes undertaken in the USA, UK, Europe, and Japan, then, designed to bring about economic stability in this time of deep crisis, have  as demonstrated by the stock market panic in China and elsewhere  clearly resulted in the exact opposite. A temporary stabilisation for some has merely served to create further instability for the system as a whole. Meanwhile, despite these vast monetary injections, the economies of all the major capitalist powers remain stuck in the doldrums.

The value of money, therefore, whilst being a quantitative relational expression, is not arbitrary or accidental, but lies on an objective material basis: as a representation of the total values that exist in circulation within the economy. As the examples above clearly demonstrate, there is no such thing as an economic free lunch. This important fact has equally important consequences, particularly in relation to the issue of inflation and the money supply that we see today.

As good as gold

Photo: Public DomainThe use of a gold standard emerged historically as a reaction to loose monetary policies, in an attempt to anchor the money supply to something tangible. In Britain, the gold standard was brought in during the first half of the 19th century, in an attempt to combat the inflation seen as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, which had been funded through a massive increase in government debt. This culminated in the 1844 Bank Charter Act, which worked to restrict the money supply by giving the Bank of England a monopoly on the printing of new notes; these notes, in turn, had to be backed up by gold. Nevertheless, fractional reserve banking was maintained, allowing private banks to increase the money supply by creating new bank deposits (i.e. credit) in response to demands for loans.

With the rise and spread of the British Empire, an epoch of stability was created globally that allowed for the expansion of world trade and the emergence of the gold standard as an international monetary system. When capitalism was in its ascendency and the global economy was moving forward, the international gold standard acted a positive force, facilitating international trade by providing a universal comparison of prices in different countries, each with their own national currency.

As the contradictions within the capitalist system accumulated, however, the benefits provided by the international gold standard turned into their opposite and became yet another source of great instability within the volatile world economy. The beginning of World War One represented the global capitalist system reaching its limits, with the various imperialist powers coming into conflict with one another as they attempted to carve up and redivide the saturated world market. In turn, the onset of the Great War led to one country after another abandoning the gold standard as they attempted to fund their war efforts by printing money.

At the same time, the international gold standard acted to rigidly bind the various national economies together, restricting their ability to pursue currency devaluations in response to large balance of payments deficits. Instead, countries with poor trade balances were forced to carry out an internal devaluation - that is, an attack on workers wages and conditions, in order to improve the countrys economic competitiveness.

This was the position facing Britain after the war, whose position on the world stage had deteriorated to the extent that it could not return to the gold standard without an outright assault against the working class. Indeed, it was the implementation of such an assault by the British ruling class that led to the outbreak of the countrys first (and only) general strike in 1926, as the capitalists looked to regain their competitiveness by attacking wages - in particular, those of the miners.

When world trade was expanding and the economy was growing, the tensions and antagonisms between the various capitalist countries could be glossed over. But as the global economy entered into crisis and different national economies began moving in different directions, all the contradictions came to the fore.

After a brief return and window of stability in the 1920s, the international gold standard eventually collapsed and died with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, which again forced country after country to abandon the gold standard as they attempted to pursue expansionist and inflationary monetary policies to stimulate the economy, fund government deficits, and provide liquidity to failing banks. A wave of protectionism and competitive devaluations swept across the world as each capitalist nation sought to export the crisis through beggar thy neighbour policies - a process that merely intensified the crisis on a world scale, as international trade collapsed and markets shrank.

The single currency

The parallels with todays euro crisis - where the straightjacket of the single currency has served to heighten the contradictions within European capitalism - are plain to see. Once again, the weaker European economies such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal have been forced along the path of internal devaluation, which manifests itself in the shape of permanent cuts and attacks on workers; an attempt to bring Chinese working conditions to the shores of Europe. This is the real meaning of austerity today.

Such countries are told that they must become competitive in order to export. We must be more like Germany and China!; we must invest, be more competitive, and export! But not everyone can be like Germany and China. One only needs to ask the simple question of: export to whom? At a time when governments everywhere are carrying out austerity, where is there the demand for increased imports?

Furthermore, every countrys capitalists and political representatives are attempting to do the same thing, and - by definition - not everyone can be a net exporter. International competitiveness is fundamentally no different from the competition between different capitalist firms: under capitalism there will always winners and losers. Imbalances and instability are inherent within the system.

Not everyone can be the most competitive. Competitiveness is always relative. The main difference is that in the competition between firms, weak firms will go under and will be subsumed by the stronger ones; on the international plane, less competitive national economies cannot be so simply assimilated  although that, in essence, is what ever-closer union inside the eurozone and the European Union has come to mean: a single economic zone in which the weaker economies are placed under the direct control of the stronger ones  i.e. of German capitalism.

At the same time, however, it must be stressed that, in both the case of the gold standard and the euro, the root cause of the problem is not the monetary system but the capitalist system. Inside or outside of the euro, the problems facing Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, for example, will not be solved as long as the laws of capitalism remain in place. It is the contradictions of capitalism - with its barriers of private ownership and the nation state - that have created the crisis; the international monetary system in place merely provides the form in which this crisis expresses itself.

Similarly, today there are those who imagine that a return to the gold standard  that is, to a system whereby currencies are pegged to a fixed quantity of gold  would be an infallible defence against the dangers of inflationary monetary policies, global trade imbalances, speculative bubbles, over-expanded credit, financial crises, and so on and so forth. But the gold standard is not a panacea. Ultimately the needs of commodity production and exchange impose themselves; the need for a greater circulation of money arises; and the rigid link between the money supply and a single commodity  be it gold or anything else  becomes a barrier to the growth of the capitalist economy and the development of the productive forces. This is what forced the development from coins of gold and silver  known as a gold specie standard  to a monetary system of paper notes backed up by gold; and this
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has accused Saudi Arabia of financing terrorists against the Islamic Republic.

The public relations department of the IRGC Ground Forces Quds base said in a statement Sept. 21 that the recently arrested terrorists in south-eastern Iran were operating under the financial support from Saudi Arabia.

Certain neighboring countries were also providing intelligence support for the detained terrorists, read the statement.

IRGC said on Sept. 20 that two Pakistani terrorists, linked with the Islamic Republics opposition groups, were arrested during an operation in Saravan District in Sistan and Baluchestan Province after entering the Iranian territory.

Irans security forces seized two bombs from the terrorists. Reportedly, the terrorists planned to explode the bombs in crowded places.

Arms and ammunition were also found and seized from the terrorists hide-out, the IRGC statement said.
hcc logo.jpg

( )

HOLYOKE -- Holyoke Community College has been awarded a $127,741 Workforce Skills Capital Grant to purchase equipment for its EMT Training Program.



The grant, announced this week by the governor's office, will allow HCC to expand the number of students served in its non-credit EMT classes and offer new training equipment and materials at the college's new Center for Health Education, adjacent to the main campus on Jarvis Avenue.



HCC was one of seven community colleges, vocational high schools and educational collaboratives chosen to share in a total funding package worth $2.6 million, according to a news release from the college.



"This was a great opportunity for us to get some needed funding to replace outdated materials and equipment, which, because of the cost, is difficult to keep up to date," said Ken White, dean of HCC Community Services.



The grant will allow HCC to expand the number of students served in the noncredit certificate EMT classes, which are geared for firefighters and other emergency workers who need certification or continuing education; individuals interested in beginning careers as EMTs; and nurses or other heath professionals.



"Students at all levels will have access to state-of-the-art technologies, including simulators that respond to student actions," White said.



Instructors for the enhanced program will be supplied by Springfield Technical Community College, White said. Together, HCC and STCC, through Training and Workforce Options, their collaborative workforce program, will work with area employers to provide customized EMT training opportunies at HCC's Center for Health Education.



"The goal of these grants is to expand the capacity of programs that build skills for Massachusetts residents," said Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito. "We already see the impact these grants are having at educational programs around the state, and we know these investments will strengthen the state's economy for all residents."
John Stumpf

Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf prepares to testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, before Senate Banking Committee. Strumpf was called before the committee for betraying customers' trust in a scandal over allegations that employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts to meet aggressive sales targets. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

It's looking unlikely that

will serve prison time for fraud. Many think bankers should be

when they commit fraud. However, the US government rarely pursues those cases, often because

, and high level executives people almost never get taken down. Instead, the government defers the charges in lieu of fines and reforms. Is this fair? What do you think?

Vote below!

PERSPECTIVES

Most of the time, banks are able to avoid criminal charges by reaching a settlement with the Department of Justice.

Each scandal is different, but they share one commonality, other than the massive sums of money involved: "In all those cases I've listed, not one single individual spent a single day in jail for the criminal activity that justified those monetary penalties," said Jimmy Gurule, a law professor at Notre Dame. And as he pointed out, full-blown investigations have benefits beyond simple punishment and deterrence: Authorities with subpoena powers can uncover important details about exactly who played the biggest roles in orchestrating and perpetuating a pattern of illegal activity, helping regulators and others prevent repeat acts in the future.

However, it's not a guarantee that a criminal investigation would lead to jailing executives.

[A]s one former government official who had been involved in money-laundering cases told me in 2012, sometimes building a strong case against individuals can be difficult given how big and complicated banks are, and sometimes, even when there is evidence, that evidence points not to the C-suite suits, but middle-manager types. It may be, he explained, that at the start of an investigation, there's an appetite among investigators for convictions, but that a few months or a year in, the government realizes that its most favorable bang-for-the-buck outcome is the announcement of a rich-seeming deferred prosecution deal.

Makes you think ...

How many people at Wells Fargo are going to jail? Zero. But if you smoke marijuana in this country, you get a criminal record.  Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 20, 2016

When banks commit fraud, it's not always clear that they've done something illegal. Spending resources to pursue criminal charges, especially when cases tend to drag out, isn't worth it when you can settle and force companies to make the proper reforms.

MORE:

Iceland is held as an example of a country that got it right by jailing bankers after the financial crisis. However, the country still faces issues of fraud and financial corruption. Sending bankers to jail sent a message, but it's not stopping people from engaging in shady deals.

READ:

The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Digital, Inc. property. Join us on Twitter

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, we'd love to hear what you have to say.
Bob Chadbourne.jpg

Bob Chadbourne seen here in his East Longmeadow home on Nov. 19, 1991.

(Don Treeger | The Republican file photo)

Western Massachusetts TV journalist Bob Chadbourne died on Monday after a lengthy illness. He was 81.

Chadbourne worked as a reporter at WGGB-TV, abc40, from 1976 to 1979 and WWLP-TV, 22News, from 1979 to 1984. He also was a producer and reporter for Real to Reel, the Catholic Communications newsmagazine, for 16 years.

A native of Damariscotta, Maine, Chadbourne served in the U. S. Army for 20 years. He worked in Army intelligence in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

"I ran intelligence sources," he told The Republican in a 1991 interview. He said he recruited and trained Vietnamese to do surveillance, adding that most survived his employ.

"We had a lot of good successes and a lot of bitter failures."

After the war, Chadbourne earned an Associate's Degree in Telecommunications from Springfield Technical Community College in 1977. He also attended Westfield State College.

Chadbourne, who later worked as a private investigator, was a trustee for the East Longmeadow Library and Radio Reading Service of Western New England. He was a trustee at STCC and member of the Board of Directors for Mass Association for the Blind.

He is survived by his companion and caregiver, Dorothy Surprenant of Chicopee; a son, David Chadbourne and his wife, Patrice, of Springfield, Virginia; and four grandchildren.

Chadbourne will be laid to rest at the Massachusetts Veterans' Memorial Cemetery in Agawam. All services will be private.
The newest Ken Burns documentary recounts the story of a Massachusetts couple that made the courageous decision to fight back against the Nazi regime.

"Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War" tells the story of Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, and his wife Martha, a Wellesley, Mass., couple who went on multiple missions over two years to help save Jewish refugees and other targeted groups fleeing the growing threat of Nazi persecution in Europe.

After a phone call from the vice president of the American Unitarian Association, the Sharps left their young children in the care of their local parish and embarked on what was to be "the first intervention against evil" by the Unitarians overseas. What followed was a series of missions that secretly helped thousands of potential victims and transformed a minister and his wife into something out of a spy movie.

"He could give a sermon every Sunday. He could minister to the common problems of his parishioners. And then, all of a sudden, he's in Nazi-occupied Prague, suddenly learning how to launder money. And she's trying to escape the Gestapo tail," Burns relayed in an interview with PBS.

For their work in directly saving over 100 people and having a hand in helping over 2,000 people avoid Nazi death camps, the Sharps are two of just five Americans honored at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

"Defying the Nazis," which features Tom Hanks as the voice of Waitstill and Marina Goldman as the voice of Martha, is a joint venture between Burns and Artemis Joukowsky, grandson of the Sharps.

As Joukowsky recalled to PBS, he first learned of his grandparents' missions when his mother suggested he talk to his grandmother for a high school project on moral courage.

"She did some cool things during World War II," he was told. His conversation with her led to a lifelong fascination with his grandparents' work.

When asked what Martha Sharp shared with him that has stayed with him ever since, Joukowsky told PBS, "I think a love for people, a love for difference, a love for celebrating what is good in the world and what makes the world so rich."

"Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War" can be found locally on WGBY.
Travel Trip Sept. 11 New Downtown

In this Aug. 15, 2016 file photo, freshly baked breads are displayed at the entrance to Eataly in New York. Fifteen years after the Sept. 11th attacks, downtown New York has been reborn, not just with the construction of One World Trade, but with a host of attractions both somber and vibrant, including the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, two retail malls, new hotels and restaurants. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

(Mark Lennihan)

BOSTON - Italian marketplace Eataly is set to open at The Shops at Prudential Center in Boston later this year and as opening approaches, the company plans to hire 600 employees in the coming weeks.

The restaurant, bakery and retail store hybrid will completely take over what was the food court at the Prudential Center in Boston's Back Bay District.

While the influx of jobs seems like a great opportunity, some in the Boston restaurant industry told the Boston Globe they believe Eataly will drive out longstanding mom-and-pop businesses.

"It'll obviously exacerbate what is already a very delicate ecosystem as it is today," Bob Luz, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, told the Globe.

"There's no question it's going to have an impact."

Eataly is set to have five locations in the United States, including the three current locations in New York and Chicago along with the two planned openings in Boston and Los Angeles.

For more information on Eataly in Boston, visit www.eataly.com.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21



By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:



Oktay Asadov, the speaker of Azerbaijan's parliament, has officially invited his Iranian counterpart Ali Larijani to pay a visit to Baku.



At a meeting with the Iranian outgoing ambassador to Azerbaijan, Mohsen Pak Ayeen, Azerbaijani speaker called for expansion of parliamentary cooperation between the two countries.



According to the press office of Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan, Oktay Asadov has said that the two neighboring countries enjoy proper capacities for cooperation particularly in parliamentary issues.



Mohsen Pak Ayeen served as Irans ambassador to Baku for four years and he will hand over the office to Javad Jahangirzadeh in the coming days.



Ties between Iran and Azerbaijan have considerably improved over the past several years. The presidents of the two countries have met seven times agreeing on a number of deals.



According to Azerbaijani officials, Iranian companies have invested $2.6 billion in Azerbaijans economy. About $145 million of the total amount has gone to the non-oil sector. This is while some 450 companies with Iranian share operate in Azerbaijan.



The volume of trade turnover between the two countries has soared by 70 percent over the first seven months of the current year.



Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Iran amounted to $122.08 million in January-August 2016, $30.66 million of which accounted for the export of Azerbaijani goods to Iran, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Orkhan Guluzade  Trend:

The US and Turkey are NATO allies, and thats why the US should extradite Gulen, who is directly involved in the military coup attempt in Turkey, the countrys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, the Yenisafak newspaper reported.

The Turkish president also made a proposal to ban activity of the Gulen movement in the whole world.

Previously, Turkish authorities sent two requests to the US for extradition of Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of organizing the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey. An Istanbul court ordered on Aug. 4 to arrest Fethullah Gulen.

On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country. Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.

However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @o_quluzade
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21

By Orkhan Guluzade  Trend:

The state of emergency introduced in Turkey within the fight against the movement of Fethullah Gulen may be extended, the countrys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, the Yenisafak newspaper reported.

The Turkish president didnt specify for how long the state of emergency may be extended. A three-month state of emergency in Turkey was declared on July 20.

Erdogan also said that the movement of Gulen, who is involved in the military coup attempt in Turkey, is a threat to the country's national security.

On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country. Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them. However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had said the death toll as a result of the military coup attempt stood at 246 people, excluding the coup plotters, and over 2,000 people were wounded.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @o_quluzade
The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is offering low-interest federal loans for working capital to small businesses economically impacted by the river conditions resulting in the closure of the Yellowstone River that began Aug. 19, 2016, SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet announced today. SBA acted under its own authority to declare a disaster following a request received on Sept. 15 from Gov. Steve Bullock.

The disaster declaration makes SBA assistance available in Carbon, Gallatin, Golden Valley, Meagher, Park, Stillwater, Sweet Grass and Yellowstone counties in Montana; and Park County in Wyoming.

"SBA is strongly committed to providing the most effective and customer-focused response possible to assist Montanas small businesses with federal disaster loans. We will be swift in our efforts to help these small businesses recover from the financial impacts of this disaster," said Administrator Contreras-Sweet.

"Small, nonfarm businesses, small agricultural cooperatives, small businesses engaged in aquaculture and most private nonprofit organizations of any size may qualify for Economic Injury Disaster Loans of up to $2 million to help meet financial obligations and operating expenses which could have been met had the disaster not occurred," said SBAs Montana District Director Wayne Gardella.

"These loans may be used to pay fixed debts, payroll, accounts payable and other bills that cant be paid because of the disasters impact. Disaster loans can provide vital economic assistance to small businesses to help overcome the temporary loss of revenue they are experiencing," Gardella added.

Eligibility is based on the financial impact of the disaster only and not on any actual property damage. These loans have an interest rate of 4 percent for small businesses and 2.625 percent for private nonprofit organizations with terms up to 30 years, and are restricted to small businesses without the financial ability to offset the adverse impact without hardship.

Applicants may apply online using SBAs secure website at https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela.

The Montana Bozeman Small Business Development Center (SBDC) is offering free, personalized counseling to help affected businesses in their recovery. Businesses may contact the SBDC at https://sbdc.mt.gov, by telephone at (406) 599-0790 between 8 a.m.  5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, or by visiting their office at Bozeman Regional SBDC, Montana State University  TechLink Center, 2310 University Way, Building 2-2, Bozeman, MT 59715.

Disaster loan information and application forms are also available from SBAs Customer Service Center by calling (800) 659-2955 or emailing [email protected]. Individuals who are deaf or hardofhearing may call (800) 877-8339. For more disaster assistance information or to download applications, visit https://www.sba.gov/disaster. Completed applications should be mailed to U.S. Small Business Administration, Processing and Disbursement Center, 14925 Kingsport Road, Fort Worth, TX 76155.

The filing deadline to return economic injury applications is June 20, 2017.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed in a phone call on Wednesday issues of bilateral cooperation and the situation in Syria, the Kremlin said, Sputnik reported.

"The leaders discussed urgent issues on the bilateral cooperation agenda as well as the progress in Syrian peace process," the Kremlin's press service said in a statement.



According to the statement, Erdogan congratulated Putin on the success of the recent parliamentary elections in Russia where the ruling United Russia party won an overwhelming majority of seats in the lower house, the State Duma.
Le Board of Racing Stewards compose de Messrs S. de Chalain (Chairman), P. Kalleechurn, H. Maigrot, A. Rousset et Ms J. Keevy, a rendu public son rapport interimaire sur la 28e journee hippique de 2019.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings, Anadolu reported.

The White House said in a statement that Biden reiterated his unshakeable support for Turkish democracy and praised the Turkish people's commitment to democratic institutions and the rule of law.

Biden also pledged that the U.S. would provide assistance to Turkey in its investigation into the illegal and violent coup attempt there this summer, according to the statement.

Biden visited Turkey in August amid tensions between Washington and Ankara regarding the extradition of the U.S.-based Gulen, who is accused of masterminding the bloody failed coup attempt in Turkey in July.

Turkey has asked the U.S. to hand over the leader of the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), a network within in the Turkish state that carried out the July 15 coup attempt.

The vice president also condemned the PKK terror groups violence against Turkish security forces and civilians.

The sit-down at the Peninsula Hotel occurred on the same day Secretary of State John Kerry asked the UN Security Council to ground all aircraft flying above opposition-held areas in Syria to allow aid to flow to besieged areas. Turkey has pushed for a no-fly zone in Syria.

Most observers believe Erdogan and Biden also discussed the situation in Syria and Operation Euphrates Shield launched by Turkey last month in northern Syria to clear Daesh along the Turkish border.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to combat corruption under his regime. (Photo : Getty Images)

China has further stepped up its anti-corruption drive in the provinces, cracking down on a large number of local officials for alleged election fraud.



A total of 454 members of the Liaoning Province people's assembly's 600 legislators were relieved from their positions following widespread allegations of vote-buying and bribery, Nikkei Asia reported. The sacking comes after the National People's Congress dismissed 45 high-ranking officials over the same issue.



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Earlier this year, the Communist Party of China's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) has sent an investigation team to look into the case. The investigation has led to the ouster of former Liaoning provincial Communist Party head Wang Min from the party itself.



Due to the large number of members dismissed from Liaoning's legislature, the NPC has approved the creation of an ad hoc panel to temporarily stand in for the body's standing committee. However, NPC standing committee chairman Li Jianguo said that a solution to find replacements for the removed officials need to be made soon to avoid problems.



Liaoning has been one of the regions that have been the focus of the government's effort to deal with so-called "zombie enterprises", state-owned companies whose performance ar4e well below expected levels and requires exceedingly large amounts of state funding for continued operations. The province became the first region in the country to post a negative quarterly gross domestic product growth in seven years.



Meanwhile, the CPC has named former Hubei Province Communist Party secretary Li Hongzhong as the new party chief for the city of Tianjin, replacing former city mayor and party secretary Huang Xingguo, who has been accused of corruption, the Japan Times reported.



Huang was dismissed by the CCDI on Saturday following ongoing investigations on the devastating chemical explosions that rocked Tianjin in 2015, which resulted in the deaths of at least 165 people. He remained in his position during the aftermath of the explosions despite several other officials being punished for granting permission for the stockpiling of a lot of chemicals near the city's residential areas, leading to the disaster.


Apple Software Engineering SVP Craig Federighi introduces the new iOS software at an Apple event at the Worldwide Developer's Conference on June 13, 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Photo : Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

Apple set up a series of beta testing for its iOS 10 operating system before releasing the iOS 10 upgrade to make sure it got everything right. However, what came as a surprise to fans, Apple made a new upgrade to its operating system just days after its Sept. 13 release date. The move was so swift and unprecedented that the Chinese hacking group Pangu had no time to create the iOS 10 jailbreak. Pangu has been working relentlessly to bring the iOS 10 jailbreak tool to users.



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The new upgrade, iOS 10.0.1 which is similar to the original iOS 10 can be used on devices such as iPhone 5s and later, iPad 2s and later, iPad Mini 2 and later and for 6th Generation iPods and later. While the upgrade will be notified of the upgrade automatically, it can be done manually by going to Settings, General and then Software Update.



According to Forbes, the iOS 10.0.1 is about 25MB to 60MB and differs depending on the device. However, it is significantly less than the iOS 10 upgrade. From its small size, it is clear that there are no major changes that were made from September 13. Indeed, the upgrade only includes bug and security fixes.



Going by Apple's speed, Pangu needs to hurry things up as the Cupertino-based company will not take much time releasing the next update 10.0.2. There are plenty of reasons as to why users opt to break the Operating system of the iPhone.



Jailbreaking allows Apple users to download apps exclusive to the Android operating system, be it games or any lifestyle app. With this, the user gets the best of both worlds without relying solely on the exclusivity of one or the other. Another benefit includes users being able to personalize their devices look and unlocking the phone in general though they always have the option of reverse jailbreaking.



In its Website, since the release of the iOS 10, the widely known hacking group Pangu has been silent with no official details and this is in contrast to the group's earlier claims, as it was able to successfully break into iOS 10 during beta testing. Also, it could be possible that Apple has found a mean to close the group's entry point into the system.



Users must be aware than updating to the latest iOS 10.0.1 will remove any previous jailbreaking done to their units. Which is why those that opt to have a jailbroken device should wait for some time before upgrading their systems.






BOONEEric Burton, a senior geography major in Appalachian State Universitys Honors College, could be the poster child for the universitys General Education program  a course of study that promotes critical and creative thinking, effective communication, making local-to-global connections and understanding responsibilities of community membership.

A first-year geography class, part of his General Education curriculum, set a course for Burton that has included undergraduate research, two study abroad experiences and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship that included a large academic stipend and a summer internship at NOAAs Princeton, New Jersey, facility.

The Gen Ed program worked out really well for me. Ive had the freedom to explore lots of things and find out what interested me, he said.

Here, and in Peru, Burton is engaged in undergraduate research with educator Baker Perry, whose geography class captured the freshmans imagination. His work with Perry was a huge factor in getting the Hollings scholarship, Burton contends.

The focus on undergraduates here is good, he explained. Im not doing busy work, but working on my own project. Professors have the time and freedom to work with the students and not be totally focused on their own research.

Critical and creative thinking

Burtons 10-week paid internship at Princeton focused on checking weather models for accuracy and mapping predictions for the southern hemisphere. Specifically, Burton was monitoring tropical ozone concentrations in the lower atmosphere. The NOAA facility, he explained, is all about climate modeling, comparing the models to actual observations and seeing how well the model represents what is actually going on. Once youve established that it does a pretty good job, you can use that model to look at cause and effect.

The research collected at the Princeton facility ultimately will contribute to theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report  the word on climate change and specifically air quality, Burton said.

Burton has taken two study-abroad trips to Peru trekking through the Andes, exploring Machu Picchu and learning about the culture and people of the Andes. His second trip included a research expedition onto a glacial icecap. We look at precipitation there. Weve installed weather stations, he said, and (back at Appalachian) I watch that data and determine patterns that result in precipitation and contribute to glacier health or decline.

The glaciers are definitely melting, he said. I dont have a fatalistic view but there are changes that need to be made. We can adapt. I hate it for the people weve met there, who depend on the glaciers for agriculture. Its their water resource and they depend on the melt water.

Local-to-global connections

Burton made a correlation between the mountain dwellers of Peru and the people from the Appalachians.

Both cultures are really knowledgeable about climate. They know whats going on with the weather and have their traditional ways of predicting how the winters going to be. The folk methods, it turns out, are pretty accurate. I saw a lot of connections between the two mountain areas. In Peru, you dont just walk onto somebodys land. But if you do, and are polite and act correctly, theyre glad to see you. Its the same here. And like the people here, they are very self-reliant.

Burtons next step after graduation is to go on to graduate school. The Marion native says he is undecided about whether he should keep going with the environmental side of things, strictly earth science research, or relate it more back to society, or the connections between the two.
The flags represent all nations in the UN headquarters in Geneva.

David Nabarro, special adviser to the United Nations (U.N.) for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, praised China's commitment to end poverty.



"China has committed a real and considered effort to tackle a set of global goals for sustainable development to end poverty, inequality and combat climate change," he said.



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The U.N.'s sustainable development goals (S.D.G.) was set as an agenda and was formalized in Sept. 2015.



According to the website of the United Nations Development Programme (U.N.D.P.), "The SDGs, otherwise known as the Global Goals, build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight anti-poverty targets that the world committed to achieving by 2015."



The site added, "The MDGs, adopted in 2000, aimed at an array of issues that included slashing poverty, hunger, disease, gender inequality, and access to water and sanitation. Enormous progress has been made on the MDGs, showing the value of a unifying agenda underpinned by goals and targets. Despite this success, the indignity of poverty has not been ended for all."



U.N.D.P.'s Administrator Helen Clark explained, "This agreement marks an important milestone in putting our world on an inclusive and sustainable course. If we all work together, we have a chance of meeting citizens' aspirations for peace, prosperity, and well-being, and to preserve our planet."



In China, Nabarro praised the government for its efforts to conserve the environment through its 13th Five-Year Plan. The plan outlined the steps that the government will take to reduce carbon emissions.



"China has also recognized the importance of the equality dimension," he said.



Nabarro has been working with the Chinese government to seek ways to bring tools for development to the country's poor.



The U.N. adviser explained that in meeting sustainable development goals, China must work with other countries.



He said, "You can't just approach the S.D.G. from a single nation perspective. It's all nations, sometimes we call it working for global public goods."



Nabarro also praised Chinese big companies like Tencent and Alibaba, which used technology to achieve milestones for helping the poor.


China's Parliament Session Focuses On Economy, Employment (Photo : Getty Images)

A 2014 survey made by the All China Womens Federation found that 57 percent of 1,200 female students at 15 universities in the country have gone through sexual harassment. Some of the victims experienced it repeatedly.



One example is the taking of photos of female students in the toilet which led to the apprehension of a shy male student who denied the accusation. However, his mobile phone yielded evidence, resulting in the student being expelled.



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Another documentation by a third year undergraduate student recorded 60 cases over the last 10 year at Beijing Normal University. Among the incidents were peeping Toms harassing female students and an assistant dean who allegedly tried to drug and touch the students intimately, reported Financial Times.



But the university allowed the male student to take the entrance exam again and the incident to be excluded from his record. The leniency given the male student is part of the psychological help which experts believe should be extended to offenders as a long-term solution to eradicate sexual harassment incidents in campuses, reported Global Times.



Wu Boxin, an expert on criminal behavior, pointed out that many offenders do not have sufficient sexual education and were raised in relatively closed society. The result is these harassers develop abnormal sexual urges. He said most of the harassers feel social pressure, especially those who are unemployed that harassing others sexually is their way of expressing their negative feelings.



Peng Xiaohui, Central China Normal University, explained that voyeurs are usually people who lack confidence and are not accepted by society. Students who have engaged in sexual harassment should receive counseling, Peng advocated. He added because many Chinese schools view sex education as dispensable, many Chinese students are likely to be influenced instead by pornography.






Warships of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (Photo : JMSDF)

The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, angrily blasted Japan's plan to begin naval patrols of the South China Sea, claiming it was "aimed to instigate tension and viciously disrupt regional stability."



It also said "the so-called arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines was illegal and void from the very beginning because it seriously violated international laws and the usual practice of international arbitration."



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While the paper recognized Japan as an economic power, it derided Japan's military capability. It pointed out Japan's military aggressiveness was only being fueled by the presence of the United States and its armed forces in Asia. It also said Japan was an insignificant player in international diplomacy.



Japan set a goal in the early 1990s of becoming a big country politically, "but years later they realized that they really 'have nothing much to say' on the international stage," said the People's Daily.



"As the US launched the Asia Pacific Rebalancing Strategy, Japan's dream of becoming a political and military big country was ignited again."



It said the U.S. "Pivot to East Asia" launched by President Barack Obama in 2011 revived Japan's dream of reviving its military power, and gave Japan "the green light to challenge the post-WWII international order."



China owns Japan's Senkaku Islands, the newspaper claims, since these islands (which the Chinese refer to as Diaoyu Dao) "have been China's inherent territory since ancient times, which is endorsed by a spate of documents with international authority." It is only natural for China to resolutely defend its territorial sovereignty.



Japan will move more towards confronting China in the South China Sea rather than in the East China Sea closer to home by announcing its navy will conduct more patrols in the disputed sea with the U.S. Navy and the navies of its regional allies.



Last week, Japan's Minister of Defense Tomomi Inada said Japan will increase its military presence in the South China Sea by launching a series of what it termed "training patrols" to support the U.S. and its Asian allies, especially Vietnam and the Philippines.



The patrols will be similar in nature to the "Freedom-of-Navigation" operations regularly conducted in the South China Sea by U.S. Navy warships. China has refused to ratchet down tensions despite losing an arbitration case to the Philippines last July 12.



These training patrols planned by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force will also see the participation of warships from the Republic of Korea Navy, said Inada.



Japan will conduct bilateral and multilateral exercises with regional navies such as the Vietnam People's Navy and the Philippine Navy despite confusing signals emanating from Manila because of the erratic foreign policy of volatile Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. It will also engage in capacity building with these countries.



Inada said Japan remains concerned about China's refusal to abandon its claim to own most of the South China Sea.


by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 20, 2016

Ted Baker's espionage campaign using shoppable video ads launched earlier this month, making waves across the fashion world but little noise in advertising. It integrates all the bells and whistles, including Google voice and retail store window displays that send secret messages to the consumer's phone using location signals.

The ads are powered by Wirewax, which allows brands to add clickable hotspots or tags to any moving person or object in the video. The ad is available on Tedbaker.com, Selfridges.com and Nordstom.com, along with the brand's YouTube channel.

Ted Baker's ad -- a takeoff of "Mission Impossible" -- seems more suitable to view on a mobile device, but it also run on desktop. As the video runs, consumers can touch or click on the plus [+] symbol displaying on the screen over the item to add the shirt, the dress, the purse or the pants into the shopping cart. At first it seems a little confusing as to the way consumers must add the items. Since I viewed the ad on a laptop my initial reaction was to click on the plus symbol on the keyboard.

The items are put into a "vault" and the shopper must visit that vault when the movie concludes to add the items into the shopping cart before making the purchase. Innovative idea, but a few too many steps, in my opinion, during checkout.

The shoppable video ad  Mission Impeccable, produced by Guy Richie  is one in several that consumers can expect to see from London-based Ted Baker.

But does it make more sense to have a shoppable video ad run in an app or on the mobile Web? eMarketer released numbers Tuesday that show people spend 85.7% of their time on smartphones in apps rather than on the Web.

American adults will spend 1 hour and 54 minutes per day using apps on their smartphones -- up seven minutes compared with 2015, according to eMarketer. The analyst firm reports that consumers will only surf the mobile Web on their phones for 19 minutes per day, down two minutes compared with last year.

David Moth, social media manager at Econsultancy, points to a Twitter tweet that led him down the "office stairwell" to the local Ted Baker store in London, where he found the store windows dressed to suit the campaign, complete with a note, "crafted suing Google" with the ability to "tap the mic" to interact with the campaign and receive a discount code.

Moth wrote that the secret Web site was presented as a paid-search result and the landing page displayed as an animated Gif after the password was accepted. He also mentions seeing people speaking the code into their mobile phones through Google voice.
by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 20, 2016

Netflix recently asked the Federal Communications Commission to declare broadband caps and pay-per-byte billing unreasonable.

The Internet service provider Mediacom is now responding by presenting a sweeping defense of pay-per-byte billing -- and taking a dig at Netflix in the process.

"Ironically, those who think ISPs are greedy pigs or evil villains because they charge based on consumption through caps or usage-based pricing do not direct the same moral outrage toward edge providers who price their services in basically the same way," the company writes in a new FCC filing. "Netflix, for example, charges $7.99 a month for its basic subscription. A basic subscriber does not get unlimited usage of Netflixs library for that price but, instead, is limited to videos in standard definition format and on only one screen at a time."

Netflix argues to the FCC that data caps discourage people from watching Internet television. Watching 3.4 hours of its streams in high definition can use 10 GB of data, while watching the same amount in Ultra HD quality would consume almost 24 GB, according to Netflix. The online video distributor argues that data caps (and pay-per-byte billing) don't have any apparent purpose -- other than making online video more expensive for consumers.

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Mediacom, which says on its site that its caps range from 150 GB to 2,000 GB per month, counters that people should pay for bandwidth the same way they pay for everything else -- based on quantity consumed.

The filing begins by asking readers to imagine they have a "sudden, irresistible craving" for Oreos. "You only want to spend two dollars, which means that you will be able to buy a two-pack or maybe even a four-pack but for sure you cannot get the family size of over 40 cookies," the company writes.

"Of course, it would be nice if your two dollars bought you the right to eat an unlimited number of cookies, but you know that is not the way our economy works. It is the same for the Starbucks latte you might want to drink with your cookies and for socks, gasoline and just about every single one of the thousands of other products and services that are for sale in the United States, including essentials like water and electricity."

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently put forward a similar argument, comparing bandwidth to gasoline and air conditioning.

But consumer advocates rightly point out that bandwidth, unlike Oreos or gasoline, isn't a consumable resource. Advocates also note that data caps can't be justified on the grounds that they help ISPs manage congestion, given that the caps are in place at all hours of the day -- whether the networks are congested or not.

"The broadband providers expense comes from installing the wire in the first place, not from customers merely using the internet access service for which theyve already paid," Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood says in an email to MediaPost.

"It makes perfect economic sense for Mediacom and other cable companies to soak up monopoly profits where theyre available," he adds. "But that doesnt make it good for internet users struggling to find affordable options and alternatives."
by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, September 20, 2016

Internet-connected cars, one of the larger promised elements within the Internet of Things, may still have some bugs to be worked out.

Researchers from a Chinese security company say they have remotely tapped into the systems of a Tesla Model S and turned lights on and off, moved seats, opened the sunroof and even shut out the driver from entering the cars system.

In a blog post by Tencents Keen Security Labs, researchers said they discovered multiple security vulnerabilities and implemented remote control of a Tesla Model S in both Parking and Driving mode.

They said the car was unmodified and had the latest Tesla technology installed.

The researchers said they reported the results and technical details to Tesla, which they said was confirmed by the Tesla Product Security Team.

Tesla and Keen Security Lab said it was coordinating with Tesla to fix the issues, based on the blog post.

In a video accompanying the researchers blog post, the windshield wipers were remotely activated while the car was being driven.

In addition, the car was remotely braked (rather abruptly, based on the video), and the trunk was opened while the car was being driven.

Tesla has issued and over-the-air security patch for its cars to resolve the issues, according to a statement Tesla issued yesterday.
by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, September 21, 2016

At a time when the field of conversational marketing is heating up on Madison Avenue, Google officially launched its latest entry into the field: Allo, a messaging app festooned with high-energy emoji features that appears to be crafted to attract the youth marketplace (see demo video below).

Style aside, a post on the official Google blog describes it as a new smart messaging app for Android and iOS that helps you say more and do more right in your chats. Google Allo can help you make plans, find information, and express yourself more easily in chat. And the more you use it, the more it improves over time.

Its far from Googles first foray into machine learning and intelligent recommendations, but it comes as the new practice area is gaining a fever pitch on Madison Avenue and as rivals such as Apple, Facebook and others are investing deeply to become the dominant platforms in the emerging field of peer-to-bot marketing.

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MediaPosts OMMA conference series will devote a day to the subject -- OMMA Bots & Chat -- Sept. 29 during Advertising Week in New York City next week.

While Allos emoji-oriented interface appears carefully designed to appeal to young users, Google makes no bones about the endgame, noting, that Allo is powered by powerful utility dubbed Google Assistant.

In Google Allo youll also be introduced to a preview edition of the Google Assistant. With your Assistant in Allo, you can have a conversation with Google  ask it questions and let it help you get things done directly in your chats. You no longer need to leave a conversation with friends just to grab an address, share your favorite YouTube video, or pick a dinner spot. Just type @google to bring your Assistant into any group chat. And of course, you can also chat one-one-one with your Assistant in Allo.

While the post does not explicitly describe the brand marketing implications of the new platform, it describes features that will enable users to receive recommendations for products, goods and services while chatting with others:

You can easily move from discussing dinner with friends to making plans for the night, right in your chat. Just add the Assistant to your group chat and ask for movie times, local restaurants and more. You can also research travel destinations, flights and hotels together with friends.
by Thom Forbes @tforbes, September 21, 2016

Emma Walmsley, a consumer products marketer for LOreal before GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty convinced her to join the UK-based pharmaceutical giant six years ago, has been named as his successor. Witty, 52, plans to step down March 31. Walmsley, 47, has most recently been in charge of GSKs global consumer healthcare division and, notably, had experience running LOreal's business in China.

In choosing someone with a consumer background, GSK has signaled its intention to sharpen its commercial focus at a time when, like most big pharmaceutical companies, its traditional drugs business has been hurt by generic rivals, write John Murray Brown and Andrew Ward for Financial Times.

Analysts believe her consumer products background probably safeguards the future of the consumer business in GSK for the time being, at a time when some investors favor a break-up of the group, writes Angela Monaghan for The Guardian.

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The Wall Street Journals Denise Roland and Joann S. Lublin point to a strategic shift Witty has been leading at GSK.

While other major drug companies have increasingly focused on expensive new therapies for cancer and other diseases, [he] has put increasing emphasis on consumer-health-care products and vaccines. He achieved that largely through a three-part, $20 billion deal with Novartis that involved swapping Glaxos cancer-drug portfolio for the Swiss companys vaccines business and pooling their consumer-health-care businesses into a joint venture controlled by Glaxo, they write.

The GSK division Walmsley currently runs was formed in March 2015 following the completion of that three-part deal, according to her GSK bio, which also reveals that she holds an M.A. in classics and modern languages from Oxford University.

Consumer products now make up around a third of GSKs revenues. Operating margins for this side of the business are in the high teens, which, while not to be sniffed at, are far less impressive than those for pharmaceuticals and vaccines, writes Ben Wright for the Telegraph, pointing out that some fund managers  have been agitating for a break-up of GSK  with Walmsley's division first for the chop.

Other investors were hoping the new CEO would have more of a scientific or pharmaceutical background, several articles point out.

A breakup of the company is unlikely under Walmsley, Julia Bradshaw suggests in another piece in The Telegraph, saying she is likely to continue to pursue Wittys policy of diversification.

Choosing Emma Walmsley suggests a strategy of evolution rather than revolution, Joe Walters of Royal London Asset Management tells Bradshaw. A big change in the firms corporate structure is less likely.

Walmsley brings considerable international experience to a business that generates most revenue outside Europe. At LOreal, she held a variety of marketing and general management roles in the U.K., Europe, the U.S. and China, The Guardians Monaghan reports. In her last job at the French cosmetics company, Walmsley ran the companys Chinese consumer products business out of Shanghai for three years, overseeing global brands including LOreal Paris, Maybelline and Garnier, as well as Mininurse, a Chinese skincare brand.

In a widely publicized case in 2014, China charged Briton Reilly, the former head of GSKs division in that country, and other executives with bribery. It fined the company $489 million and deported Reilly. GSK said it remained committed to China and promised to become a model for reform in China's healthcare industry, Reuters Adam Jourdan and Ben Hirschler reported at the time.

Walmsley will be only the seventh woman to lead a company listed on the FTSE 100.

She joins Carolyn McCall of discount airline EasyJet, Moya Greene of Royal Mail, Veronique Laury of home improvement retailer Kingfisher, Alison Cooper of tobacco company Imperial Brands, Alison Brittain of Costa Coffee owner Whitbread, and Liv Garfield at Severn Trent, a U.K. water company, Claire Zillman reports for Fortune.

Increasing female leadership in British business was a priority for former Prime Minister David Cameron, whose administration  set the goal of reaching 33% female representation on corporate boards by 2020, Zillman continues.

In a piece written three years ago for the Lean In Web site, Walmsley describes a networking lunch she had with Witty where she was offered the presidency of GSKs global consumer healthcare business.

I spent a week persuading myself I would be insane to do it, she writes, citing several professional doubts as well as the prospect of uprooting her four young children, who had settled into routine in Shanghai after a move from New York three years earlier.

But then she took the job. She credits a conversation with her husband that left her with the takeaway, People regret far more what they dont do rather than what they do.
China Pledges $100 Million to Help Refugees Around the World

China has been an active donor of humanitarian aid to the refugees in Syria. (Photo : Getty Images)

In an announcement made by China's Premier Li Keqiang to the United Nations General Assembly, the Chinese government promised to contribute $100 million to refugees and $1 billion will be set aside for a peace and development fund.



"We are committed to shouldering our responsibilities compatible with our abilities," Li said. "We would like to provide $100 million of additional humanitarian assistance on top of the previous pledges while considering taking further supportive measures."



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The premier said that the government will look into a China-U.N. Peace and Development Fund that would be available to aid nations in times of need. The fund will be built over a period of 10 years.



Aside from humanitarian aid, Li promised that China will deploy 8,000 peacekeeping troops from the country.



The increase of troops to be deployed is a significant addition to the current 3,078 troops.



David Shinn, an international affairs expert at George Washington University, said, "I don't think other countries should be concerned by these announcements by China. UN peacekeeping operations have widespread international support. There is plenty of room for everyone."



He added, "I don't believe China's actions will change the strategies of other countries in Africa. For its part, China gains in international prestige by supporting the African Union and UN peacekeeping operations. It is able to test its troops, police, and equipment in different environments."



Last year, President Xi Jinping said during the U.N. general assembly, "China will never seek hegemony, expansionism or a sphere of influence," he said.



He noted, "The vote of China in the United Nations always belongs to developing nations."



For the peace and development fund, China had already signed an agreement to pay the U.N. $20 million annually for the next decade.


by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 21, 2016

Still in its formative stages when he first took office eight years ago, social media has exploded into a global phenomenon as Barack Obamas presidency draws to a close, with major impacts for social and political activism around the world, as he acknowledged in his final address to the United Nations this week. But the soon-to-be-outgoing U.S. president also warned that social media also has a dark side.

On one hand, social media has become the voice of the people across broad swathes of the globe, including in authoritarian regimes and failed states, where ordinary citizens may be denied basic political rights including voting in free elections, but also in democracies, as Obama noted: An explosion of social media has given ordinary people more ways to express themselves, and has raised peoples expectations for those of us in power."

Although Obama glossed over this fact, in some cases social media has actually enabled revolutions, as in the Arab Spring and the Green Revolution in Iran  but as the aftermath of Egypts Facebook Revolution showed, the unity enabled by social platforms often proves fleeting, as technology cant erase longstanding social and cultural divisions. Looking ahead, social medias ability to facilitate revolutions will probably diminish as repressive governments learn to use social media for their own purposes, including surveillance, disinformation and propaganda.

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Obama also pointed to some of the threats posed by malefactors with access to social media: We see too many governments muzzling journalists, and quashing dissent, and censoring the flow of information. Terrorist networks use social media to prey upon the minds of our youth, endangering open societies and spurring anger against innocent immigrants and Muslims. While governments are working with social platforms to combat extremist messages and remove pro-terror accounts, this will probably be a never-ending task as long as terrorist sympathizers exist and are willing to continue playing a game of cat and mouse.

More broadly speaking, Obama hailed the Internet and mobile medias power as a leveling, democratizing force, especially with its ability to deliver information to individuals in developing countries. On that note he noted, The Internet can deliver the entirety of human knowledge to a young girl in a remote village on a single hand-held device.

But even here, he warned that the increased transparency and flow of information can also stir up social unrest, by allowing people to compare their circumstances more easily: Just as the child in a slum today can see the skyscraper nearby, technology now allows any person with a smartphone to see how the most privileged among us live and the contrast between their own lives and others.
by Karlene Lukovitz @KLmarketdaily, September 21, 2016

Having thus far failed to drive a sales revival with freebie offers and other efforts, Chipotle Mexican Grill has launched ads dedicated specifically to explaining the food safety measures that it has implemented since 2015s multiple food contamination episodes.

Chipotle will be running digital ads that drive consumers to its site to learn about its extensive food-safety measures, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The site has an area that not only spells out the measures in words and diagrams, but features a video in which founder and co-CEO Steve Ells also explains the measures.

We serve fresh food made from ingredients raised responsibly, without added antibiotics, hormones, colors, flavors or sweeteners typically found in processed food, Ells says. But in 2015, we failed to live up to our own food safety standards, and in so doing we let our customers down. At that time, I made a promise to all of our customers that we would elevate our food safety program. Here are the important advancements that we have made

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The list includes work with suppliers and providing local farmers with training and funding in methods that avoid food safety risks; use of advanced technologies to eliminate pathogens without changing food quality or flavor; enhanced in-restaurant food preparation and handling procedures; food safety certification for restaurant and field leaders, and more, according to Ells and the site.

Chipotles first food contamination crisis began in August 2015, with two food-borne illness outbreaks caused by salmonella and norovirus contamination. Those were followed that fall by an E. coli outbreak, and then by separate norovirus incidents in December 2015 and March 2016.

Despite the chains free burritos promotions, Chipotles same-store sales were down 30% in this years first quarter. That quarter marked the first in which it showed a loss as a public company. In this years second quarter, same-store sales dropped 24% versus the same period in 2015. It returned to profitability, but profits missed expectations, and its stock price declined 38% in the previous 12 months.

Apparently, neither its first loyalty rewards program -- launched July 1 for a limited time (just three months, at least initially) -- or a new long animated video (A Love Story) that launched online and in movie theaters in early July have turned the tide.

David Acheson, the designer of Chipotles food-safety system told WSJ that a recently disclosed 9.9% investment by activist investor Pershing Square Capital Management has had no effect on the companys marketing or safety efforts.

But the core issue is that the brand still has a long way to go to restore confidence, win back more customers and get new consumers to try the restaurant.

According to YouGov BrandIndex, Chipotles buzz score was around 11, and its quality score was between 21 and 23, in August 2015, prior to the food-borne illness crises.

In January 2016, the buzz score was at an historic low of -30, and its quality score was -5.

Both have recovered somewhat, but not entirely. Currently, Chipotles buzz score is at -4, and its quality score is at 7.
by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, September 21, 2016



The United Nations has enlisted social media influencer platform Influential to help launch its #HugForPeace campaign which is timed to todays International Day Of Peace. The effort comes in the middle of the UNs Global Leaders Summit taking place at its headquarters in New York this week.

The Influential platform is driven by IBM Watson technology. Using Watsons Personality Insights service, the platform will identify influencers whose social media accounts rate highly for traits like altruism, self-transcendence, emotionality, and dutifulness. Watson can identify these traits by analyzing the last 22,000 pieces of written content that an influencer has publicly released on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Once identified, influencers will be encouraged to spread the #HugForPeace message across all of their social platforms and will drive their followers to visit www.HugForPeace.org, a microsite where supporters can create user-generated photos with a #HugForPeace design overlay that they can then share via Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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This is the second year that Influential is participating in the campaign. Last years campaign, using the hastag #ForgiveForPeace, garnered over 1.6 billion social media impressions on Twitter.

We are excited to have Influential and some of its top social media stars back again this year to spread the message of the #HugForPeace campaign, stated Ray Chambers, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Health in Agenda 2030. Last year, we were able to make some huge strides in raising the awareness of the International Day of Peace and we look forward to partnering with them again to make even greater progress.
by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 21, 2016

In 2009, Netflix said it would release a slew of "anonymous" data about its customers, including their gender, ages, ZIP codes and movie rental history, as part of a contest for a better recommendation engine.

The company hoped that researchers would draw on that data to figure out how to predict people's movie preferences, but obviously hadn't thought through the potential privacy pitfalls. Privacy guru Paul Ohm -- one of the first observers to call attention to the plan -- publicly urged Netflix to reverse course. He warned that researchers will be able to connect the "supposedly anonymized" records to people's identities.

Four Netflix users filed a class-action lawsuit to block Netflix from moving forward. One of the four alleged that she was a closeted lesbian who would be harmed if people figured out that she had rented a number of "gay-themed" movies from Netflix.

Faced with the lawsuit, and pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, Netflix backed away from its planned data dump.

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That incident has now resurfaced in comments to the Federal Communications Commission about its proposed broadband privacy rules. The FCC's proposed rules would require broadband providers to obtain users' opt-in consent before using their Web-surfing history for ad targeting.

Internet service providers and other opponents argue that companies should only be required to obtain consumers' opt-in consent before using "sensitive" information for targeting purposes.

But privacy advocates say that the controversy surrounding Netflix's decision to release data shows that whether information is "sensitive" depends very much on the circumstances.

"It is difficult, maybe impossible, for carriers to distinguish between sensitive and non-sensitive without actually looking at and assessing a customers information to make that distinction -- and it would be administratively difficult for the FCC to oversee any such distinction," dozens of advocates argued to the FCC earlier this month.

"Many people do not consider individual movie ratings (on sites such as Netflix) to be sensitive," the advocates added. "But in a class-action privacy lawsuit against Netflix, the class representative was a person who felt that her sexual orientation could be deduced from her Netflix viewing record."

This week, the trade group Internet Commerce Coalition (members include broadband providers as well as tech companies like Amazon, eBay and Google), argues that the Netflix controversy "is very far afield" of policies relating to online advertising.

"ISPs are not making large swaths of customer data publicly available for researchers to analyze as they wish," the Internet Commerce Coalition argues.

The Internet Commerce Coalition, like other companies opposed to the proposed privacy rules, say the FCC should use the same basic approach as the Federal Trade Commission, which says it views data differently depending on its nature. "ISPs are subject to internal compliance controls and have been subject to privacy enforcement by regulators and presumably will be subject to enforcement under the eventual final rule," the Internet Commerce Coalition contends.

That argument, however, still doesn't address one of the core concerns about different rules for "sensitive" data: No one has come up with a universally accepted definition of "sensitive."

Ohm, who supports the FCC's proposed privacy rules, noted in comments filed with the FCC in June that industry self-regulatory groups use different definitions of the phrase "sensitive health data," as do companies like Google and Facebook.

It's worth noting that the FTC, while endorsing the concept that sensitive data needs more protection than non-sensitive information, defines "sensitive" more broadly than many companies.

Specifically, the FTC said in comments to the FCC that it supports opt-in consent before companies draw on data like financial information, precise geolocation, Social Security numbers, health data and -- critically -- for "contents" of communications, including social media posts, search queries, comments on Web sites, items in shopping carts, books read and movies watched.
by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 21, 2016

A pioneering attempt to reinvent newspaper ownership is underway in Philadelphia, where the owner of the citys two largest newspapers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, is handing control of the papers to a new nonprofit organization, called the Institute of Journalism in New Media.



This week the reinvention took another step forward with the announcement that the institute has found a boss.

Owner Gerry Lenfest, a wealthy philanthropist who received sole control of both newspapers after his former co-owner Lewis Katz died in a small plane crash in 2014, announced that media consultant and venture capitalist Jim Friedlich will assume the role of executive director for the Institute of Journalism in New Media.

In conjunction with this appointment, the IJNM will also acquire Friedlichs consultancy, Empirical Media Advisors, which he helped found in 2011, along with veteran media executive Jack Griffin (who later served as CEO of the newly independent Time Inc. and Tribune Publishing after their respective spinoffs).

The consultancy, which was also working with the IJNM on digital media strategy, will become a nonprofit and continue operating under a new name, adding a new source of revenue to support the nonprofits operations.

Friedlichs career as an investor and consultant has given him an insiders view of both the promise and pitfalls facing traditional media companies as they transition to the digital media age.

Among other projects, he helped the Dallas Morning News execute a sweeping makeover last year, and he also invested in Business Insider, one of the most promising pure play digital publishers, which was acquired by Axel Springer for $450 million in September 2015.

Most recently, Friedlich helped launch Denverite, targeting millennials with lifestyle and events content from the fast-growing Colorado city.

Friedlichs appointment comes nine months after the nonprofit transition began.

Lenfest announced back in January that Philadelphia Media Network, the newspapers publisher, would continue to operate as a for-profit company but would be taken over by the nonprofit IJNM, which also received a $20 million donation from Lenfest as an endowment.

Lenfest and collaborators are now working to raise $100 million for the nonprofits endowment.
There has been no sustained reduction in the prescription of antipsychotics to UK dementia patients, despite government guidance, according to a report published in the medical journal BMJ Open.

A study by five universities has found that there was no sustained reduction in the prescribing of antipsychotics to dementia patients in UK care homes following the government's 2009 National Dementia Strategy (NDS), which recommended a review of their use in light of potential serious side effects.

The research - led by Professor Ala Szczepura at Coventry University and published in the medical journal BMJ Open - examined prescribing data between 2009 and 2012 from over 600 care homes across the country, concluding that there was no significant decline in antipsychotic prescribing rates over the four year period.

Antipsychotics were originally developed for use in patients with schizophrenia or psychosis, but the study shows that 'off-label' prescribing of these drugs to treat the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia is a common practice in care homes.

The 2009 'Banerjee Report', commissioned by the Department of Health as part of the NDS, examined the use of antipsychotics for people with dementia, concluding that the drugs had a "substantial clinical risk" associated with them and that their overuse "must not be allowed to continue".

However, researchers from the universities discovered that - although dosages were usually acceptable - prescribing levels did not reduce over the four years, and length of treatment was 'excessive' in over 77% of cases by 2012, up from 69.7% in 2009 (meaning it exceeded not only the recommended six week course, but also the maximum advised treatment length of 12 weeks).

Findings from the study also indicate that older first-generation antipsychotics (FGA) such as haloperidol and chlorpromazine are still being used extensively, with no measurable shift to safer second-generation antipsychotics (SGA) like risperidone - as recommended in the NDS.

According to the research, which was carried out by Coventry University; University of Warwick; Lancaster University; University of East Anglia; City, University of London; and technology company Invatech Health:

care homes in the highest prescribing 20% are more likely to be located in a deprived area;

care homes in the lowest prescribing 20% are more likely to be served by a single GP practice, which could indicate that those homes benefit from a consistent message that is absent from homes served by multiple practices;

average annual expenditure on antipsychotics was 65.60 per care home resident (based on 2012 prices), which is less than 1% of the annual cost of a UK residential home place for a person with dementia;

there was a six-fold variation between the geographical areas - in this case the areas covered by the former primary care trusts (PCT) - with the highest and lowest prescribing levels.

Professor Ala Szczepura, from Coventry University's Centre for Technology Enabled Health Research, said:

Care homes remain the forgotten sector in UK policy debate around the use of antipsychotics. This appears to be due to a lack of systematic monitoring of prescribing data in these settings. Our study has not only identified a failure of the National Dementia Strategy to produce a sustained decrease in use of antipsychotics, it's also shown large regional variations and has found evidence indicating that their use is higher in care homes in deprived neighbourhoods.

Looking forward, the Prime Minister's challenge on dementia 2020 aims to further slash inappropriate prescribing of antipsychotics by 67%, and reduce variation across the country. It's clear from our research that to achieve this in care homes, a significant change is required in prescription culture and management of vulnerable people with dementia.

George McNamara, head of policy at Alzheimer's Society, said:

This continued reliance on antipsychotics to manage behavioural symptoms of dementia is deeply worrying. Around 90% of people with dementia experience symptoms that affect their behaviour causing aggression, agitation, or even delusions and hallucinations. These symptoms can develop as part of their condition, but may also be caused by other factors - pain, discomfort, or unmet need. When this is the case, prescribing antipsychotics treats the person with dementia as the problem rather than the root cause of their behaviour.

Antipsychotics increase the risk of stroke, falls and even death - it's shocking that the evidence continues to be flatly ignored. With person-centred approaches and training programmes for care home staff, continued inappropriate prescribing is a step backward into the dark ages.

Professor Clive Bowman, a visiting professor in the School of Health Sciences at City, University of London, said:

Our study shows that the National Dementia Strategy has failed to have a sustained effect on the excessive prescription of antipsychotic medicines for people resident in care homes. This is unacceptable, clear standards are required regarding the use of these drugs and a designated responsibility for monitoring medicines and their usage mandated. New technology can do this in real time, allow public scrutiny and free professional time to promote best practise.
Buprenorphine, a medication effective in treating individuals with opioid use disorders, can be prescribed in the United States by addiction specialists or by physicians who complete an 8-hour course and obtain a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration waiver. Waivered prescribers have been restricted to treating up to 30 patients with an opioid use disorder concurrently; after a year, physicians could request that the limit be increased to 100 patients. Policy makers have prioritized increasing capacity to provide buprenorphine to fight the opioid epidemic but lack adequate information about how to do so effectively.

The researchers used a database that contains pharmacy retail transactions from more than 80 percent of pharmacies nationwide, including high-volume national chain pharmacies, resulting in information on approximately 90 percent of prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies in the United States. Data from 7 states with the most buprenorphine-waivered physicians (California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas) were analyzed.

The study included 3,234 buprenorphine prescribers with 245,016 patients receiving a new prescription of buprenorphine from 2010-2013. The authors found that the monthly patient censuses for buprenorphine-prescribing physicians were substantially below patient limits; more than 20 percent treated 3 or fewer patients, and fewer than 10 percent treated more than 75 patients. The median treatment duration (53 days) was lower than expected given clinical recommendations of maintenance treatment for up to 12 months and evidence linking longer treatment to better outcomes.

"Novice prescribers cite insufficient access to more experienced prescribers and insufficient access to substance abuse counseling for patients as barriers to treating more patients. Such barriers might be addressed by web-based or tele-counseling for patients and by programs providing mentoring and telephone consultation from more experienced prescribers. Strategies to help current prescribers treat more patients safely and effectively could complement policy initiatives designed to increase access to treatment by increasing patient limits and number of waivered prescribers," the authors write.

Article: Physician Capacity to Treat Opioid Use Disorder With Buprenorphine-Assisted Treatment , Bradley D. Stein MD, PhD, Mark Sorbero MS, Andrew W. Dick PhD, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula PhD, Rachel M. Burns MPH, Adam J. Gordon MD, MPH, JAMA, doi:10.1001/jama.2016.10542, published 20 September 2016.

The work was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
A team of researchers, including scientists from the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, have linked a faulty gene to the deaths of seemingly healthy children whose hearts suddenly stopped.

Last year the Perkins Neurogenetic Diseases Laboratory received DNA from a family in Scotland whose four-month-old baby had tragically suffered a cardiac arrest and died.

With the family's permission, their doctor sent the baby's DNA to the Perkins laboratory and noted that the family were expecting a second child.

Perkins researcher, Dr Gina Ravenscroft, said the team analysed the child's DNA to find possible disease-causing genes.

"We found two genetic variants in a gene called PPA2 that could be the cause of this disease, but we didn't have any other patients with variants in that gene," Dr Ravenscroft said.

Dr Ravenscroft entered the gene into a research database and found no other researchers had identified it as a disease gene.

Months later the Perkins team were contacted by genetics researchers at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris. The INSERM team knew of two families with similar cardiac death and mutations in PPA2.

The collaborators have been able to quickly translate their findings into a genetic screening test for future babies that might face this silent disease risk.

"Recently, the family we received the initial DNA from had their second baby and last week we screened the baby's DNA and found he only has one of the gene variants. To get the disease you need two copies and he's only carrying one so he won't get the disease," Dr Ravenscroft said.

"The screening test has also helped a family who lost two sons from sudden cardiac arrest linked to PPA2. Their two other children were screened and found to have two copies of the PPA2 mutation, so they have been fitted with implantable defibrillators. If their heart stops the defibrillator will support their heart function."

Head of the Perkins Neurogenetic Diseases Laboratory, Professor Nigel Laing AO, said his research team is dedicated to finding answers for families.

"Our job is to find as many disease genes as we can, as rapidly as possible. We're filling in the map of known disease genes and this is another step in the right direction," Professor Laing said.

The research was published in the high impact journal The American Journal of Human Genetics.
Men who suffer from anxiety are more than twice as likely to die from cancer as men who don't. However, anxiety is not associated with increased cancer deaths in women, according to a large British and European study presented at the ECNP meeting in Vienna.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common mental health problem that is disabling, debilitating, and leads to increased risk of suicide. Affecting around 5% of the adult population, it is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable worry about many areas of life, and those affected can experience symptoms, such as, muscle tension, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and restlessness. Previous studies have looked at whether anxiety is associated with early death from major causes of disease, but findings have been mixed or have varied.

Using data from 15,938 British participants from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer-Norfolk study, researchers were able to link men and women with GAD in the 1996-00 period to death records over the subsequent 15 years, thus identifying those GAD sufferers who went on to die of cancer.

They found that 126 out of 7139 men and 215 out of 8799 women had GAD, and over a period of 15 years, 796 men and 648 women died from cancer. Over the 15 year follow-up period, they found that men with GAD were twice as likely to die of cancer as men who did not have anxiety (Hazard Ratio, 2.14 (95% CI: 1.32, 3.46)). This association was not found with women (Hazard Ratio 1.03 (95% CI: 0.60, 1.76)). Future research should determine whether anxiety is associated with specific cancer types in men.

Lead researcher Olivia Remes said:

"In the past there have been inconclusive studies of the relationship between cancer and anxiety. However our study is the largest one to look at this relationship. We found that men with generalized anxiety disorder are over twice as likely to die of cancer as men without this condition. This holds true even after taking account of a range of additional factors, such as age, major chronic diseases, serious mental illnesses, smoking, alcohol, physical activity, and medications. Women did not show this association between anxiety and cancer.

The work shows that anxiety is associated with cancer deaths in men. We can't say that one causes the other; it is possible that men with anxiety have lifestyles or other risk factors that increase cancer risk that we did not account for completely however this association does raise questions, and society may need to consider anxiety as a warning signal for poor health. Researchers, policy-makers and clinicians don't give enough importance to anxiety, and this needs to change; a large number of people are affected by anxiety and its potential effects on health are substantial. With this study, we show that anxiety is more than just a personality trait, but rather, it is a disorder that may be associated with risk of death from conditions, such as, cancer".

Commenting, Professor David Nutt Ex-President of the ECNP, (Imperial College) said:

"As a psychiatrist who used to run one of the very few clinics in the UK specialised in the treatment of people with severe anxiety disorders these results do not surprise me. The intense distress that these people suffer often on a daily basis is usually associated with a great deal of bodily stress, that is bound to have a major impact on many physiological processes including immune supervision of cancerous cells. As the authors point out other factors such as self-medication with tobacco and alcohol are also likely to be involved. I fully support the authors' statement that much more information and investment need to be given to the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders".

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. Olivia Remes received funding from the National Institute for Health Research.

Presented at the annual ECNP Congress,17th to 20th September in Vienna.
A new study of classical Chinese medical texts identifies references to age-related memory impairment similar to modern-day Alzheimer's disease, and to several plant-based ingredients used centuries ago - and still in use today - to treat memory impairment. Experimental studies of five of these traditional Chinese medicines suggest that they have biological activity relevant to Alzheimer's disease, according to an article in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine website until October 21, 2016.

Charlie Xue, PhD and coauthors from Guangdong Provincial Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences and Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine, China, and RMIT University, Australia, performed a comprehensive, systematic search of the Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a database of more than 1,000 Chinese medical books dating back to the fourth century.

In the article "Memory Impairment, Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease in Classical and Contemporary Traditional Chinese Medicine," the authors describe specific mentions of signs and symptoms of memory impairment associated with aging and the formulas and ingredients most commonly used to treat these disorders.

"Recent research out of UCLA that was the subject of the JACM editorial in August shined a spotlight on the potential role of natural agents in a whole person protocol for reversing Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Xue and his colleagues have provided an important addition from traditional Chinese medicine to this emerging literature," says The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine Editor-in-Chief John Weeks, Seattle, WA.

Article: Memory Impairment, Dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease in Classical and Contemporary Traditional Chinese Medicine, May Brian H., Feng Mei, Zhou Iris W., Chang Su-yueh, Lu Shao-chen, Zhang Anthony L., Guo Xin-feng, Lu Chuan-jian, and Xue Charlie C.L., The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, doi:10.1089/acm.2016.0070, published online 27 July 2016.
The ADB intends to improve China's connectivity to the Uyghur Autonomous Region. (Photo : Getty Images)

An ADB official announced recently that the bank will be participating in China's 13th Five-Year Plan to carry out priorities for national development, including the Belt and Road Initiative.



"When we plan our forward pipeline of projects, we work with the National Development and Reform Commission and with the provinces to identify projects that may contribute to the Belt and Road Initiative within China and crossing the borders into neighboring countries," said Robert Guild, director for transportation of the bank's East Asia department.



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"ADB has more than 40 developing member countries all through Asia. Also in those countries, we finance projects that may contribute to the Belt and Road Initiative on the other side of the border," he added.



According to the bank's website, the partnership between them and China is focused on support for innovation and infrastructure.



The bank stated, "ADB is focusing its support on innovation and value addition in infrastructure while promoting good governance and capacity development, knowledge solutions, private sector development, and gender equity."



The Belt and Road Initiative is a plan started by President Xi Jinping to improve China's connectivity to more than 60 countries.



In the transport sector, the bank intends to add more projects in China in the next three years.



Guild said, "We have planned cross-border facilities - things like warehouses, sorting yards, and places for trucks and trains to interchange their cargo--border crossing posts, support to small and medium-sized enterprises and information systems in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region . . .We also have projects dealing with logistics hubs in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, going to the west."



The bank recently approved loans totaling $17 billion for the construction of roads, improvement of railways, and improvement of information and communication systems.




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Please use the information prudently. If you are not a medical doctor please remember to consult your healthcare provider as this information is not a substitute for professional advice.
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A group of international researchers from Belgium, Italy, Israel and Austria enlisted 654 working adults attending clinics for depression. They were clasified into three groups according to their occupational level. 336 (51.4%) held high occupational level jobs, 161 (24.6%) middle-level, and 157 (24%) low level. Around two-thirds of the patients were female (65.6%), which reflects the normal gender difference in reported depression.Most patients were treated with SRIs (Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors), although other pharmaceutical agents were also used, as well as psychotherapy. Those in the higher levels were found to have received fewer SRIs and more psychotherapy.On analyzing results after treatment, they found that 55.9% in the highest occupational group were resistant to treatment. In contrast, only 40.2% of the middle-level workers remained treatment resistant, and 44.3 of the low-level workers. This difference was also reflected in the degree of remission, with only around one in 6 in remission in the higher status group, as against around one in 4 for the other groups.Commenting, Professor Siegfried Kasper (Vienna, Austria) said "Though these findings should be considered preliminarily, they indicate that high occupational levels may be at risk factor for poor response to treatment. A number of variables may explain these findings. For example, there may be specific working environment demands and stressors; people may find it difficult to accept or cope with illness, or to continue with medication; or there may be other factors, related for example to cognitive, personality and behavioral differences".Co-worker Professor Joseph Zohar (ECNP Past-President, Tel-Hashomer, Israel) said; "This shows that the need for precise prescribing is not only related to the symptoms and genetics but also to occupational level; one might need to prescribe different medication for the same disorder and need to take into account the occupational level in order to reach optimum effect".People with highly demanding jobs are subjected to a lot of stress, and when they breakdown with depression it may be particularly difficult to cope with their previous life.The ideal treatment of depression is, in general, the combination of both pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy.Source: Medindia
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"Black women generally had poorer physical and functional quality of life after the diagnosis of breast cancer, and socioeconomic and other factors explain some of these differences," said study co-author Andrew Olshan, PhD, associate director of population sciences at UNC Lineberger and the Barbara Sorenson Hulka Distinguished Professor in Cancer Epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. "However, for some domains, black women report better quality of life."The study, published in the journaldrew upon surveys that assessed health-related quality of life issues for women aged 20 to 74 years who lived in North Carolina and had breast cancer. The analysis is part of the third phase of the Carolina Breast Cancer Study, a study first launched at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1993 as part of an effort to better understand why black women have been found to disproportionately die from breast cancer. Olshan is the co-principal investigator of the study.Researchers used surveys to gauge the physical, functional, emotional and spiritual health-related quality of life of more than 2,100 women at five months after their breast cancer diagnosis, and at 25 months, when women have typically stopped active treatment and have entered the survivorship phase.For spiritual quality of life, researchers found that black women scored two points higher than white women at five months, when they were in the midst of active treatment, and two years after diagnosis. Specifically, black women scored an unadjusted average of 41.4 points on spiritual quality of life, while white women scored an average of 39.3 at five months. Two years after diagnosis, black women scored an unadjusted average of 40.5 on spiritual quality of life, while white women had an average score of 38.5. Even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, black women continued to score higher than white women for spiritual quality of life two years after diagnosis, the study reports."Black women we surveyed had significantly better spiritual wellbeing than white women, and it was both statistically significant and clinically meaningful," said the study's first author Laura Pinheiro, a doctoral candidate in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.White women's average scores for physical and functional quality of life, which track women's feelings of fatigue, nausea, pain, the woman's ability to work, sleep, acceptance of her illness and ability to enjoy things in normal life, were two to 2.5 points higher than black women at five months. The unadjusted average score for white women's physical health at five months was 20.9, compared to 18.4 for black women. For functional health, white women scored an average of 20.1 compared to 18.2 for black women.At 25 months after diagnosis, the researchers found that white women still scored higher for physical, social, and functional health-related quality of life, but the gap between the unadjusted physical scores for white and black women narrowed compared to what they were at five months for physical health-related quality of life. Pinheiro said that the findings, in-line with previous studies, could suggest that the health care system may have had a positive impact on the black women's overall physical health, helping to narrow those gaps."As these women are entering the health care system, perhaps some of their other health conditions are better managed," Pinheiro said. "That is our speculation, and it will merit some additional investigation."They also report that after adjusting for socioeconomic factors during survivorship, differences in physical health-related quality of life were diminished."Our research suggests that improved social and economic conditions could improve access to care, reduce co-morbid conditions, and other factors that are associated with both the prognosis of breast cancer, quality of life, and the disparities seen between various groups," Olshan said.The study demonstrates the importance of the Carolina Breast Cancer Study in understanding how breast cancer and its treatment impacts the lives of North Carolinians, said the study's senior author Bryce Reeve, PhD, a UNC Lineberger member and professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health."We hope to use these findings to find opportunities to improve the quality of life of women with breast cancer," Reeve said.The study was supported by the University Cancer Research Fund of North Carolina, the National Cancer Institute Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Breast Cancer at UNC, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.Source: Newswise
Phimosis is the inability to fully retract the foreskin (or prepuce) over the glans penis due to a narrow opening. The foreskin is the extra skin attached to the head of the penis and is generally folded onto itself as a sleeve. The glans is the sensitive bulbous structure at the distal end of the penis.

Nonretractile foreskin is present in about 96% of males at birth that slowly becomes retractable by the time they reach their adolescence.

The foreskin cannot be retracted completely before the age of 5 and in some until adolescence

Statistics say that 50% of uncircumcised boys have retractable foreskin by 1 year of age, 90% by age 3, 92% by age 6 to 7, and 99% by adolescence.

Tight foreskin can be caused due to injury or infection of the foreskin

Tight foreskins can cause a ballooning or blowing up of the skin when passing urine

The tightness can interfere with the normal passage of urine and can, in severe cases, cause acute retention of urine

Tight foreskins (not circumcised in childhood) can cause penile tumors

Physiologic Phimosis:

A type of phimosis that is present since birth and is due to the adhesions between the epithelial layers of the inner prepuce and glans penis. The foreskin is not retractable. This is normal and does not require intervention.

Physiologic phimosis resolves with age. As males grow, these adhesions are dissolved with intermittent foreskin retraction and erections. Glanular secretions aid in the process.

As the foreskin retracts, there can be an accumulation of white discharge called smegma. Sometimes urine can accumulate under the foreskin causing a ballooning effect of the penis. These symptoms and the general non retractile nature of the foreskin should be accepted as part of a normal growing process. Forced retraction can be harmful to children and must be avoided. It can lead to soreness and bleeding or pathologic phimosis.

Pathologic Phimosis:

A type of phimosis that is acquired or developed due to underlying causes like poor hygiene, forceful retraction of the tight foreskin and recurring infections of the foreskin and glans penis.

Phimosis Paraphimosis Condition The foreskin is fused with the glans penis and so unable to retract fully over the glans. The foreskin of an uncircumcised penis while trying to retract it, gets trapped behind the glans penis. It cannot be brought back to its flaccid state to cover the glans. Causes Forceful retraction, poor hygiene, inflammation and infection of the foreskin. Improper handling of the foreskin by medical professionals during a penile examination or by parents while cleaning. Treatments Non-surgical treatments are application of a steroid cream to the foreskin with or without manual stretching.Surgical treatments are circumcision and preputioplasty. Lubrication of foreskin and tip of penis and then gently squeezing the tip of the penis while pulling the foreskin forward.

Poor hygiene

Forceful retraction of the foreskin over the glans penis. This could lead to microtears at the preputial orifice and scarring

Balanoposthitis - inflammation of the foreskin along with glans penis

Balanitis xerotica obliterans (BXO) or Lichen sclerosus et atrophicus - a skin condition affecting the male genitalia. A whitish ring of indurated tissue is formed near the tip of the prepuce preventing retraction

Repeated cathertization

Loss of skin elasticity and infrequent erections in elderly males.

Untreated diabetics leads to residual glucose in the urine causing foreskin infection leading to phimosis

Balanitis- inflammation of the glans penis

Preputial pain.

Inability to fully retract the foreskin over the glans

Skin irritation

Local infections

Scarring of the foreskin and bleeding

Ballooning of the foreskin during urination - a bulge can be seen in the tip of penis as urine accumulates under the foreskin.

Pain during urination and weak urinary stream: sometimes urinary retention

Presence of blood in urine

Frequent episodes of urinary tract infections

Meatal opening is small

Tissue in front of the foreskin is white and fibrotic

If Phimosis occurs due to BXO then it is severe with meatal stenosis and / or glanular lesions

Pus from penis in case of balanoposthitis

Painful erections

Pain during sexual intercourse

Severity of phimosis has 6 grades according to Kikiros et al in the Pediatric Surgery

International. They are:

Grade 0 - Full retractability

Grade 1 - Full retraction but tight behind glans

Grade 2 - Partial exposure of glans

Grade 3 - Partial retraction with meatus just visible

Grade 4 - Slight retraction but neither meatus nor glans visible

Grade 5 - Absolutely no retraction

Complications are:

Infected foreskin that can lead to infection of glans.

Paraphimosis - When the foreskin gets hidden behind the glans due to forceful retraction and cannot be brought back to cover the glans

Urine Retention

Penile carcinoma

Type 2 Diabetes - Phimosis with preputial fissures is predictive of type 2 diabetes in patients not previously diagnosed with diabetes (Study conducted in Taiwan and published in Acta Dermato - Venerologica in 2016)

Meatal stenosis or narrowing of penile opening

Risk Factors are:

Forceful retraction of the foreskin

Frequent foreskin infections

Frequent urinary tract infections

A physical examination of the penis and foreskin should suffice to diagnose a tight foreskin. Sometimes non retractibility could be due to a short penile frenulum (an elastic band of tissue that is connected to the foreskin and helps it to contract over the glans).

Doctors might question whether the penis has had any injuries or infections in the past or if the tight foreskin has affected sexual activity.

Other tests might be suggested in specific conditions. Examples are urine test and general blood test to exclude infection and to test for the presence of glucose (sugar). A swab from the foreskin area to check bacterial culture might also be taken.
Following the September 17, 2016 U.S. airstrike on Syrian forces in Deir Al-Zor, several pro-regime Syrian Facebook pages called to attack U.S. forces and "those who collaborate with them" in the Al-Jazirah region (i.e., northern Syria, where Deir Al-Zor is located) and claimed that "popular committees" are already being formed to carry out such attacks.

The following are excerpts from the posts on these pages:

Pro-Regime Facebook Pages: Attack U.S. Troops, Commanders, Interests

On September 18 at 13:05, a pro-regime Facebook page called Kamishli City posted the following message: "Urgent! A call to the honorable, heroic Syrians to attack American interests, troops and commanders, and those who collaborate with them, in the Arab Syrian Al-Jazirah region. Senior sources who did not disclose their names report that, in several parts of the Al-Jazirah region, attacks are being planned against the American forces that are stationed there and against those who collaborate with them, in response to the latest depraved act of aggression carried out by U.S. planes against the Arab Syrian army in Deir Al-Zor. These sources report that honorable Syrians in all parts [of Al-Jazirah] are forming popular committees that will stage retaliation attacks against American interests and forces in the region and against those collaborating with them. [We heap] scorn upon the American enemy and upon those who collaborate with it and betray their country. Tomorrow will not be long in coming."[1]

Several hours later, the Hasakah News Facebook page reposted this message, along with another message: "The military post destroyed by the planes of the U.S.-led international coalition in Jabal Al-Tharda was the strongest military post in the Deir Al-Zor area. The soldiers who were martyred there held fast against ISIS militiamen for three years. In one of their attacks, the ISIS militiamen deployed over 30 booby-trapped vehicles and dozens of suicide [bombers], yet the military post did not fall and the soldiers who manned it did not retreat. The military commander of the Arab Syrian army in the Deir Al-Zor area says that the future will be better and retaliation for the death of the soldiers will come very soon." The message was accompanied by a graphic saying "Death to America."[2]

On 22:42 that evening, the Kamishli City page posted another message: "Would Hizbullah have remained silent over [an attack that claimed] 62 martyrs and 100 wounded [from among its troops?]... Would Iran have accepted it, had the martyrs been from among its ranks? Would Russia or China have accepted it?... The failure to respond is shameful and disgraceful, deceptive and hypocritical. Will [our] eternal commander [Bashar Al-Assad] accept it?"[3]

Page Posts Threats, Along With Photos Of "U.S. Airbase In Syria"

On September 19 at 22:15, the Hasakah News Facebook page posted a photo of what it described as "a U.S. airbase south of Ain Al-Arab," with the caption: "Whoever said 'nine bullets for the traitor within the country and one for the external enemy' was right."[4]

It should be mentioned that similar threats were made by Ibrahim Al-Amin, board chairman of the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which is close to the Syrian regime. In a September 19, 2016 article, he wrote:[5] "We must shoot any American carrying arms outside the U.S., without considering the reason for his presence [outside the U.S.] and whether it is the result of a request by some element or another. This is an occupying force that must be resisted with bullets and fire.

"We will [also] expel all official American functionaries: diplomats, administrators, academics, and especially the peace-lovers, human rights and civil society [activists], and particularly the heads of civil society organizations. [Additionally,] we will expel anyone who interacts with them, whether directly or indirectly. This is just a handful of thieves who will not be swayed by words, requests, and even rebukes. They only understand the language of fire and iron.

"We have no method other than to expel the American occupation from our countries, whether it is military, security, diplomatic, or some other [type of occupation]. We will kill them and expel them and distance them from us. Whoever wants them present will have to pay the price of their filth."[6]

Endnotes:
On September 13, 2016, The New York Times published an op-ed by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif titled "Let Us Rid the World of Wahhabism."[1] In it, Zarif harshly attacked Wahhabism, the branch of Sunni Islam espoused by the Saudi regime, calling it a "death cult" and a "theological perversion" of Islam that is the origin of all terrorist organizations including Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Jabhat Al-Nusra (formerly Al-Qaeda's Syria branch, now called Jabhat Fath Al-Sham), and ISIS. He accused Saudi leaders of spending tens of billions of dollars in recent decades in order to export this Wahhabi ideology to the Muslim world and to the world at large. He called on the UN and the international community to cut off the routes used to fund "ideologies of hate and extremism" and investigate how money and arms are delivered to the followers of these ideologies.



Zarif tweet advertising his New York Times article (Twitter.com/JZarif, September 14, 2016)

In response to Zarif's article, Saudi Foreign Minister 'Adel Al-Jubeir published his own op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that it is Iran who, ever since the onset of Khomeini's revolution, has been striving to spread its revolutionary ideology by sparking sectarian and religious conflict, bluntly interfering in the affairs of other countries, aiding terrorist organizations including Al-Qaeda, and carrying out terrorist attacks around the world. According to Al-Jubeir, Iran's false propaganda regarding its fight against extremism cannot whitewash its record of "death and destruction," whose results are currently visible in Syria and Iraq. He argued that Saudi Arabia is one of the leaders in the global war against terrorism, and would improve relations with Iran if the latter ended its support for terrorism and "subversive and hostile" actions, ceased interfering in the affairs of other countries, and respected its neighbors.[2]



Jubeir tweet advertising his Wall Street Journal article (Twitter.com/AdelAljubeir, September 18, 2016)

Furious responses to Zarif's article also appeared in the official Saudi media. The Saudi press featured numerous articles condemning Zarif and accusing him of participating in a campaign aimed at blackening Saudi Arabia's name in the world, accusing it of supporting terrorism, and sparking conflict within the Sunni world. Some articles criticized the absence of Saudi informational efforts to combat Iran's growing influence on global discourse, and called to expose Iran's oppression of its own people and its sponsorship of terror organizations in the Arab world, while highlighting the tolerance and coexistence in Saudi society. One article stated that the publication of Zarif's article in a paper as prominent as The New York Times indicates that the Americans have traded in their traditional allies for Iran.

The following are excerpts from some of these articles:

Editor Of Saudi Daily: Iranian Propaganda Agents Infiltrate Institutions Influencing Global Public Opinion

'Abd Al-Wahhab Al-Fayez, chief editor of the official Saudi daily Al-Yawm, condemned Zarif's allegation that Saudi Arabia supports terrorism, and called to expose Iran's oppression of its own people and its crimes in Arab countries. He wrote: "The article by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in The New York Times is part of the ongoing propaganda and political ideologization program of the Khomeinist revolution. This propaganda has skillfully managed to create a rift among Arab Shi'ites, and is now working to divide Sunnis by lying about the Wahhabi [stream] and making it the focus of the Iranian propaganda spread by politicians, clerics, researchers at Western centers, and civil society activists.

"Sadly, the Iranian propaganda program, which aims to create a link between Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism and between Wahhabism and terrorism, finds an audience and influences discourse. This is happening after we abandoned the scene to the Iranian propaganda agents, who infiltrate authoritative institutions that influence local and international public opinion - particularly global newspapers and TV and radio networks.

"Iran's strength does not [really] lie in what it spreads and markets about others - specifically the lie regarding Saudi Arabia and its alleged support of terrorism - because [Iran itself] lives in a glass house [and is vulnerable] on many issues, and is the target of condemnation by international institutions. In fact, its allied parties and subordinate militias carry out terrorism and ethnic cleansing in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and the oppressive Khomeinist security apparatuses similarly operate against Arabs in the Al-Ahwaz [region], both Shi'ites and Sunnis.

"This commotion caused by Iran resonates [only] because it operates freely in a vacuum and without any resistance! Of course, reality proves that the rope of lies is short and slack, which is also true for [its lies regarding] us in the region, as we have already exposed the biggest Khomeinist lie. However, we must help the peoples with whom we have good relations and positive interests to quickly expose the Iranian lie for themselves."[3]

Saudi Columnist: "Political Dwarf" Zarif Ignores His Own Country's Bloody Record

Similar criticism of Zarif was also expressed by Saudi writer Fahd bin Jleid in his column in the official Saudi daily Al-Jazirah. He wrote: "Mohammad Zarif penned his article of racism, hatred, and lies... which was published in The New York Times, in order to divert the world's attention towards a new artificial struggle among Sunnis. This is part of a long-term anti-Islamic Persian plot. In his article, this political dwarf ignored the black and bloody record of his own country, which fosters and funds the leaders of terrorist [groups] like Al-Qaeda, Hizbullah, and ISIS, as well as its evil plots to spread the poisons of sectarianism and hatred in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bahrain, and more...

"Zarif's statements in his article are nothing but another Iranian step meant to distort Saudi Arabia's image in global public opinion, while exploiting loopholes in global free speech, as happened in The New York Times. Therefore, we must not simply make do with an identical response [article] in the same newspaper... We must confront with this plot with a series of corrective steps, including by publicizing [Saudi] activity in the fields of culture, art, sports, and society, activity that reflects the real picture: the tolerant [nature] of the Saudis, their life in coexistence, and their peaceful disposition and religion - in contrast to the image spread by Iran and its helpers around the world.

"Iran is currently experiencing a crisis and isolation in the Islamic world after its great Hajj plot failed. Its true place and status among Muslims was exposed when no one attributed much significance to its absence from Hajj ceremonies this season, viewing it instead as Iranian political stupidity.[4] This prompted it to mobilize all its efforts to create new battles and spark fires among various schools in Islam in order to harm the image of the [Saudi] kingdom using international platforms."[5]

Saudi Columnist: Zarif's Article Indicates That The U.S. Is Trading In Its Traditional Allies For Iran

Salem bin Ahmed Sahab, a columnist for the official Saudi daily Al-Madina, claimed that the publication of Zarif's article in The New York Times indicates that the American administration has traded in its traditional allies for Iran. He wrote: "Last Wednesday, the reputable American newspaper The New York Times published an op-ed by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in which he attacked Saudi Arabia... There is no reason to accuse Zarif, the new Safavid, for the publication of his apostasy and lies, lowly as they may be. The accusation should be directed solely at the newspaper, which is considered the most important for decision-makers in the country of Uncle Sam. [And] the worst accusation should be directed at us Arabs, if we think that the appearance of this stupid article was a coincidence or an accident, or that there is some measure of regret there - for [we should have known] that this is not the case at all! The article would have been published even if we had proven [in advance] that it was rife with lies, nonsense, and twisted facts...

"This is an [American] policy of washing one's hands of old allies in favor of shaking hands with new ones. The goal is to destroy the region in order to eradicate the Sunnis, or at the very least crush them so they can never experience revival, prosperity, development, or might. No one is more suited for this despicable task than those with the darkest record of long-term collaboration with the enemies of the ummah - the deviant, hostile, infidel, Shi'ite Zoroastrian Safavids!"[6]

Endnotes:

[1] Nytimes.com, September 13, 2016. The original Persian version of the article was published on the daily the same day.
On September 19, 2016, following of reports that American forces have entered Northern Syria, Ibrahim Al-Amin, board chairman of the pro-Hizbullah Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, published a virulent article titled "For Us, The Americans Are Murderers And Thieves Who Must Be Resisted." In it, Al-Amin attacked the U.S., which he claimed occupies Iraq and now Syria as well, and called to kill every armed American outside the U.S. and expel all "American functionaries," including diplomats, civil society activists and academics, from Arab countries.

The following is a translation of the article:[1]



Ibrahim Al-Amin (image: Siyese.net)

"It is the 'right' of the Americans  the government, the people, and the institutions  to not learn from their experience in maintaining relations with the other peoples of the world. However, the problem lies in the fact that some of our own people do not wish to learn [either], and continue to rely on this group of murderers and thieves. What can be done with such people? Nothing. But every time, and in more than one place in the world, and in every generation, there is a group that realizes that the only way to deal with an arrogant murderer is by using own method, logic, and language.

"The U.S. does not suffice with reoccupying Iraq, but has decided to expand its conquest to Syria. The excuse it uses [to convince] itself is understandable, since all the elements it tasked with toppling the Syrian state, harming the resistance, and preventing any substantial change in the region have failed.

"Ok. It can do what it sees fit. But we too must do what suits us. We must shoot any American carrying arms outside the U.S., without considering the reason for his presence [outside the U.S.] and whether it is the result of a request by some element or another. This is an occupying force that must be resisted with bullets and fire.

"We will [also] expel all official American functionaries: diplomats, administrators, academics, and especially the peace-lovers, human rights and civil society [activists], and particularly the heads of civil society organizations. [Additionally,] we will expel anyone who interacts with them, whether directly or indirectly. This is just a handful of thieves who will not be swayed by words, requests, and even rebukes. They only understand the language of fire and iron.

"We have no method other than to expel the American occupation from our countries, whether it is military, security, diplomatic, or some other [type of occupation]. We will kill them and expel them and distance them from us. Whoever wants them present will have to pay the price of their filth."
Share of international arms exports (Photo : SPRI)

China remains the world's third largest arms exporter and almost doubled its earnings from weapons sales in 2015. More significantly, China is exporting more high-quality weapons commanding higher prices.



China is also pouring money into developing a more advanced arms manufacturing industry more concerned with product quality, said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.



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China's emphasis on low prices helped make it the world's third top arms exporter in 2015, selling nearly $2 billion worth of arms, said SIPRI. From 2011 to 2015, China was also the world's third largest arms exporter, accounting for some six percent of the total arms market. This is nearly double China's arms exports from 2006 to 2010.



China's weapons, however, were bought by only a few and mostly poor countries, a testimony to their low prices.



From 2011 to 2015, 71 percent of all Chinese arms sales went to only three countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Pakistan (China's top ally in the world) accounted for 35 percent of China's arms sales for this period. The remainder mostly went to poorer countries such as Algeria, Sudan and Tanzania, all in Africa.



Despite its surge in arms sales, China accounted for only 5.9 percent of global arms exports from 2011 to 2015, far behind the United States and Russia, the world's two largest arms exporters.



"The Chinese until 10 years ago were only able to offer low-tech equipment. That has changed," said Siemon Wezeman of the SIPRI arms spending program.



"The equipment that they produce is much more highly advanced than 10 years ago, and attracts interest from some of the bigger markets."



The report also noted the volume of international transfers of major weapons (including sales and donations) was 14 percent higher from 2011 to 2015 compared to the five previous years. The U.S. and Russia were the top exporters for this period.


Emplacements on Taiping Island. (Photo : Google Maps)

Satellite photos of four "Y" shaped concrete structures being built on Taiping Island in the South China Sea administered by the Republic of China (Taiwan) suggests Taiwan anticipates an amphibious invasion of the island and is preparing to repel it.



An invasion can only come from mainland China although Beijing has so far shown no indications it plans to invade Taiping or Itu Aba Island, the largest in the disputed Spratly Islands.



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Taiping, which is 1.4 km long, is 1,800 km from Taipei; 860 km from Manila; 1,200 km from Hainan and 850 km from Ho Chi Minh City. Taiwan, China, the Philippines and Vietnam all have claims on the Spratlys.



Taiwan media reports showed Google Maps images of four new structures built in the shape of tetrapods (commonly used to refer to bird feet) or the letter "Y." The structures weren't on Google Map photos of Taiping taken last January, indicating their construction began only a few months ago.



The structures might be from three to four stories tall and face the island's west coast. Some reports said the structures might be emplacements for heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles or 40 mm anti-aircraft guns. The structures might also be used to house early warning radar and other communications facilities.



The structures are located along the shore on the west coast of Taiping, the likeliest place to land an amphibious invasion force. Behind the Y structures is a circular structure still under construction.



Taiwanese Defense Minister Feng Shih-kuan refused to reveal what the structures are for.



"It is inconvenient for us to reveal any military facilities we are installing on Taiping Island and what their purposes are as they are all considered secrets," said Feng.



He did, however, reassure Taiwanese that "Taiping Island has a strong defensive capability."



Some analysts said the towers resemble the massive "flak towers" or "flak turm" used by Nazi Germany to house heavy anti-aircraft guns that attempted to shoot down American and British bombers raining bombs on Germany.



Last July 12, a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the case brought by the Philippines against China also led to the classification of Taiping Island as a "rock" under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.



This ruling means Taiping isn't entitled to a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone and continental shelf. Taiwan rejected this ruling.


A Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is held up with other Note 7 phones on a counter that were returned to a Best Buy on September 15, 2016 in Orem, Utah. (Photo : Getty Images)

Samsung Electronics sought to distance itself from reports of their smartphones catching fire in China on Monday, saying that, for at least one case, it believed the fire was not caused by the battery.



The South Korean tech giant said it was unable to investigate a second reported fire because it could not obtain the phone.



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The two reports of Galaxy Note 7 fires appeared on Chinese social media, with phone owners posting photos online of their blackened phones and said the devices caught fire during normal use.



Samsung China said the damage to one of the phones was caused by external heating based from their investigations.



Amperex Technology Ltd., the battery supplier for the Galaxy Note 7 in China, said on Monday that tests conducted jointly with Samsung on one of the burned devices proved its batteries did not start the fire.



"Based on the burn marks on the specimens, we inferred that the source of the heat came from outside the battery itself," Amperex said in a separate statement. "There is a large probability that other outside factors were the cause of the heating problem."



Samsung has previously blamed the cause for overheating and combustion cases to defective batteries, of which most were from the company's own affiliate, Samsung SDI Co., the Wall Street Journal has reported.



The company announced a worldwide recall of 2.5 million of the Galaxy Note 7 earlier this month after several reports surfaced of the batteries overheating or catching fire, prompting U.S. government officials to issue a government recall last week.



It remains to be seen if the damage to Samsung's brand in China, the world's largest smartphone market, will have a lasting impact. Chinese buyers scrambled for refunds on Monday after photos of the charred Note 7s went viral in China over the weekend, with many complaining that, except for a few test devices, China was not included in Samsung's recall, the Wall Street Journal said in its report.



And while China's three major telecom operators have yet to stop sales of the Note 7 officially, several individual branches were reported to have pulled the device off their shelves. The Note 7 was listed as sold out much of Monday on Chinese online retailer, JD.com, the vendor of the two devices that caught fire, although sales resumed online. The retailer was also inundated with refund requests, based on online posts by phone owners. Many consumers that had exceeded the 7-day refund period still sought to return them.



The two damaged smartphones were purchased after Samsung's official launch in China on Sept. 1, unlike the presale units that Samsung is recalling, according to receipts posted by the owners online.


Android 7.0 Nougat release news for Moto E (3rd gen), Moto G4 Play, G4 Plus, G4, Moto X Play, Force, Style, Moto Z Droid, Moto Z (Photo : YouTube/ Marques Brownlee)

Here is the Android 7.0 Nougat release news for Moto E (3rd gen), Moto G4 Play, G4 Plus, G4, Moto X Play, Force, Style, Moto Z Droid, Moto Z and other devices.



Google has rolled out Android 7.0 Nougat update to Android One, Nexus 6, Nexus Player, Nexus 5X, Nexus 9, Nexus 6P and Pixel C.



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Motorola has not declared Android 7.0 Nougat update schedule for its devices but the operating system roll out is expected to begin soon.



According to reports, the search giant may provide the firmware source code to Motorola this month or in October. It means it will take just a few weeks before the latest operating system is released.



Reports suggest that Moto Z Force Droid, Moto Z Droid, Moto Z and Moto Z Force will get the Android 7.0 Nougat update in October. After that, Motorola devices such as Moto X Style, Moto X Play and Moto X Force will receive the firmware update.



Moto E (3rd gen), Moto G4 Play, Moto G4 Plus, Moto G4 and Moto G (3rd gen) are some of the other devices that will get the new update.



However, Moto X (2nd Gen) will not get the update as its processor is not compatible with the latest operating system.



Android 7.0 Nougat, Google's new operating system, has features such as VR interface, multi-window, Improved file browser, direct reply notifications, Google Assistant, improved Java 8 language support, Extra power efficiency, bundled notifications, new emoji, Seamless updates, Screen Zoom, Clear All, Data saver, Instant Apps and App switch, Digital Trends reported.



This year's Android flagships will all get the latest update sooner or later; however, there is still some waiting in store. The tech company Samsung said that the Galaxy Note 7 will get Android Nougat in November, and it is apparently testing the new Android release on the device.



The company has not announced anything yet, and people cannot get into any kind of beta program that will allow them run an early version of Android 7.0 Nougat on Galaxy S7 Edge or Galaxy S7.



According to a Geekbench result, someone is using a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge that is running a build of Android 7.0. The smartphone version seen on Geekbench has an octa-core chip. Probably, it is an unlocked phone that will make it easier for the company to push updates to.


In the framework of the high-level Week of the UNGA in New York, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias had a meeting, on Wednesday September 21, with Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani.



The two Ministers exchanged views on regional and international issues, as well on ways to further boost bilateral cooperation and discussed potential exchanges of candidacies in International Organizations.

Foreign Minister N. Kotzias briefed his counterpart on the outcomes of the recent Rhodes Conference for Security & Stability and informed him of the shared will on the part of participating countries to include the Gulf Cooperation Council members in the next Conference, which is expected to be held in Rhodes in 2017.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, lastly, extended an invitation to his counterpart to visit Athens and pointed out the need for more intensive political dialogue and consultations between the two Foreign Ministries.
In the framework of the 71st Session and the high-level Week of the UN General Assembly in New York, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias will meet, on Thursday, September 22, with FYROM Foreign Minister, Nikola Poposki.

In addition, the Minister of Foreign Affairs will take part in the meetings Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is having with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Foreign Minister Kotzias will also participate in the plenary segment of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly, where speakers include the Greek Prime Minister as well as Nicos Anastasiades, President of the Republic of Cyprus.



Later in the day, the Minister of Foreign Affairs will meet with representatives of Jewish organizations based in the USA and take part in the EU-NATO Foreign Ministers Conference.



Finally, Foreign Minister N. Kotzias will be accompanying Prime Minister Tsipras to the state dinner representatives of Greek diaspora organisations are hosting in his honour.
In the framework of the 71st Session and the high-level Week of the UN General Assembly in New York, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias had a meeting, on Tuesday September 20th, with Iraqi Foreign Affairs Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

During this meeting, the two Ministers discussed ways to boost bilateral cooperation further, while particular emphasis was placed on historical and cultural ties between their two countries. Foreign Minister Kotzias highlighted the importance of Iraqi cultural heritage and the Mesopotamian civilization, and after having elaborated on his initiative to establish the GC9, an Organisation of the ten oldest world civilizations and peoples, he extended an invitation for his Iraqi counterpart to take part in the relevant upcoming Conference, which is due shortly in Athens.

Foreign Minister N. Kotzias then shared his intention to make a visit to Bagdad soon and also spoke of the need for stronger bilateral political dialogue as well as more intense political consultations between the two Ministries, pointing out the role Greece can play in promoting EU-Iraqi relations.

For his part, the Foreign Minister of Iraq touched on the significance the Greek Foreign Ministers visit to Bagdad is going to have with regard to bilateral relations between the two countries and praised the Greek initiative to organise the GC9 Conference since, as he stated, culture is a soft power tool which can help boost global cooperation.
Deputy Foreign Minister D. Mardas, who is in charge of international economic relations, announced the setting-up of mixed inter-ministerial committees in 12 countries and a total of 22 business and trade missions to markets abroad for 2017.



The planning thereof takes the outcomes of economic diplomacy actions so far into account and is expected to be fully complete by the end of 2016. It, moreover, has a bearing on the need to strengthen the fabric of Greek bilateral economic relations and facilitate entrepreneurial extroversion. To that end, the Foreign Ministry works closely together with collective representation bodies from Greece (Agencies, Organisations, Chambers etc.). Against this backdrop, the following are in store for 2017:



. Mixed Inter-Ministerial Committees



Inter-Ministerial Committees are a useful tool in promoting bilateral economic relations as they do the groundwork and prepare the relevant bilateral institutional framework, help problem-solving or act proactively while, moreover, enhancing the extroversion of Greek businesses. Let it be noted that 12 Inter-Ministerial Committees have been planned through the end of 2016, unlike previous years when a significantly lower number of such committees had been convoked (2010-2014: a total of 14).



Planning for 2017 provides for mixed inter-ministerial committees with Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Georgia, the U.A.E., Iran, Belarus, Morocco, South Africa, Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Chile.



. Business Missions by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, either independently or in conjunction with business agencies.



After having analysed and processed Greek export data with reference to various countries, along with proposals submitted by Embassies/ECA offices as well as suggestions by relevant agencies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided upon new upcoming business missions for 2017 to encompass the markets of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Iran, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Latvia, the Netherlands and Finland.



In addition, out of committees planned, the following will be coupled with respective business missions, i.e. to Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, U.A.E., Belarus, Morocco, Ukraine, Russia and Chile.



Updates and information on business missions are provided on a topical and timely manner, care of Directorate 8 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through posts on agora.mfa.gr, while, moreover, Chambers and professional agencies receive the respective invites.



On the basis of the afore-stated programming which for the first time is done in advance, and prior to years end, Greek businesses will get the opportunity to take part in missions involving a total of 22 countries. For comparison purposes, let it be noted that between 2010 and 2014 there were overall 12 missions, i.e. as many as in 2016 alone. Moreover, as in 2016, business missions are going to focus each and every time on exactly those specific sectors of products and services in which respective market research has indicated there are interesting opportunities on offer for Greek exporters.



Last, some of the aforementioned business and trade missions will, on a case by case basis, materialize in cooperation with Greek business and sectoral agencies.
We express our deep sorrow over the passing of Georgios Hatzimichelakis, Ambassador of Greece to Tbilisi.



Georgios Hatzimichelakis was an excellent diplomat, distinguished for his profoundly democratic conscience, strong sense of duty and great patriotism. Throughout his life and diplomatic career he served Greece with abnegation, ethos, integrity and decency.



In 1974, serving in a company of commandoes in Cyprus, Georgios Hatzimichelakis was injured while defending heroically the airport of Nicosia from Turkish invaders. His heroic involvement was of critical importance as the contingent that defended the airport stood in the way of Attila, thus thwarting the taking-over of a site of strategic importance.



Ambassador Hatzimichelakis joined the Ministry in 1981 and represented Greece, among others, at the Embassies of Greece in Nicosia, Canberra and Cairo. He also was Consul General in Boston, was appointed Ambassador to Georgia (2008-2011) and Latvia (2012-2016) and, as of January 2016, he resumed the post of Ambassador of Greece to Georgia.



Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, the political and civil leadership of the Foreign Ministry as well as his colleagues offer their condolences to his loved ones.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Cyprus, H.E. Mr. Ioannis Kasoulides, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece, H.E. Mr. Nikos Kotzias and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Palestine, H.E. Dr. Riad Malki, held their first trilateral meeting today 21 September 2016 in New York, in the margins of the High Level segment of the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

The three Ministers held a wide-ranging discussion on issues of mutual interest, including developments in the Middle East and their impact on the wider region, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Cyprus issue, as well as areas for future trilateral cooperation. They underlined the strength of their countries' historical relations and their determination to enhance these relations within bilateral and multilateral frameworks.

They reaffirmed the commitment of their Governments to mutually acceptable, political and inclusive solutions on the basis of international law and the relevant resolutions of the UN and to joint cooperation for the promotion of peace and stability in the eastern Mediterranean region.

They stressed the urgent need for intensification of efforts by moderate actors to tackle the regional challenges, jointly fight against terrorism, extremism and incitement to violence, increase information sharing and promote regional security, long-term stability and prosperity.

They called for just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East based on the relevant United Nations Resolutions, the Madrid principles including land for peace and the Arab Peace Initiative. They expressed their support for a two-State solution on the basis of the 4 June 1967 lines, leading to a sovereign, independent, viable and contiguous State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbours. They expressed their serious concern that current trends on the ground threaten to make a two-state solution impossible, reiterated in this regard that all settlementactivities are illegal under international law, and stressed the need for affirmative steps to halt and reverse these trends. Welcoming, in this respect, current efforts, including by France, to revive the peace process, they concurred that a permanentsolution to the Israeli  Palestinian conflict in accordance with international law would greatly boost security and stability across the region and beyond.

They reaffirmed their unwavering support to the ongoing negotiations for a solution to the Cyprus problem that will reunify the island in accordance with international law and the relevant UNSC Resolutions. They highlighted that the solution of the Cyprus problem must address the concerns and aspirations of the Cypriots themselves,without any rights of military intervention, and must respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Cyprus.

They stressed that peace agreements in all their aspects, including as regards security arrangements, must be in line with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law.

Convinced of the potential of their trilateral cooperation, Cyprus, Palestine and Greece will continue working together, for the benefit of their peoples and the wider region, to effectively promote their common values and interests, including cooperation in international fora and organizations as well as on projects inter-alia in the fields of tourism, education and training, environment, conservation and management of water resources, energy and agriculture. It was decided that in order to explore further and in more detail the potential of cooperation in these fields, a meeting of the Permanent Secretaries of the Foreign Ministries of the three parties will take place in the near future.
BAD AXE  Indigent defendants in Michigan are unnecessarily going to jail.

As many receive subpar legal representation, Huron County will get state aid to beef up its defense budget for indigent criminal cases.

The Regional Consultant for the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission briefed the Huron County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday morning on the issue.

Barb Klimaszewski said Michigan ranks 44 out of 50 states in the amount of money spent on and the quality of indigent defense, she said.

A state study was also conducted on 10 counties to see who was doing a good job on indigent defense.

Nobody passed, Klimaszewski said. There is almost nobody doing an adequate job.

A lawsuit went to the Michigan Supreme Court regarding the states Indigent Defense Act, and the court ordered the Michigan Legislature to fix it.

The local share of the funding will be determined by the average spent on indigent defense for the fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012.

The legislation is expected to be passed by the end of the year, and could be in effect as soon as October.

The county will have six months after passage to write a grant seeking funds for requirements of the new legislation, which includes representation at the defendants first appearance in court.

Other funding required under the new law is for:

 Legal education for appointed attorneys

 The attorney must come to the jail to consult with the defendant within three days of appointment. Private space in which to meet the defendant in both the jail and courthouse is required.

 Speedy/electronic use of data for discovery

 Using expert witnesses at trials.

 Using investigators for cases

Any funds in excess of the local share will be covered by the state.

But County Commissioner Rich Swartzendruber questioned how long the money will be available.

Who knows how long thats going to be there down the road, he said.

Klimaszewski presented the information along with Huron County District Court Judge David B. Herrington.

Officials did not immediately know how much the county spends on average for indigent defense.

Of this years $100,000 budget, 85 percent has been spent. The year is 75 percent completed.

Herrington said two years ago, the budget was $129,000.

Klimaszewski said the law is intended to save money, since fewer people will be incarcerated, and fewer defendants will appeal their cases.

No appropriation is in place for the law, but Klimaszewski said she has heard that the state will spend $40-$50 million.

She said Tuscola and Sanilac counties report a shortage of investigators, and a regional public defender plan may work for the Thumb.

The first year may be more costly than subsequent years, since meeting places may need to be built in the courthouse and/or jail, Klimaszewski said.

She said Huron County currently spends $65 per hour on indigent defense.

Your county pays a respectable rate compared to other counties, but it will go up, Klimaszewski said.
HARBOR BEACH  The facts are on the table and a disarmed crossing guard took her first attempt at having a city policy that prohibits city employees from carrying a firearm, open or concealed, removed from the handbook.

And after a lengthy discussion between residents and council members, the policy is still in place  for now.

A recent resolution passed by Harbor Beach city council has prevented Casey Armitage from holstering her gun while working as a city employee for Harbor Beach Community Schools as one of the districts crossing guards.

In the citys employee handbook, a policy states no city employee, other than police, can carry a concealed weapon. The revised policy now prohibits open and concealed carry by all city employees, other than police.

Council previously told Armitage to attend its next meeting with a list of prepared facts on her research. She left that meeting determined to find a solution to councils liability insurance concerns.

Armitage came to Mondays meeting prepared, with a crowd of nearly 20 in attendance, and listed off a number of facts to council. They are:

 Huron County does not have an employee firearms policy.

 Huron County has insurance through the Michigan Municipal Risk Management Authority, a self-insurance pool for municipalities and businesses.

 Only an individual can drop themselves from being self-insured.

 Harbor Beach is self-insured by the Michigan Municipal League, a non-profit self-insurance pool.

 Huron Countys insurance rates havent changed.

 Caseville, Cass City, Elkton, Port Austin, Owendale and Sebewaing dont have employee firearms policies in place.

 None of those six municipalities have reported insurance rate hikes.

No one from any of the municipalities had ever thought of making further restrictions on the law, already provided by the state and federal governments, Armitage explained. So I say to you council, you prove to me that the liability insurance will be affected. I have found no cause for concern.

I have found most local governments allow their employees with a valid CPL to carry while on duty, she added.

Armitage referenced a policy Jackson County passed in 2012 that allows city employees to carry firearms while working. Since the policy was implemented, there have been zero incidents, she said.

To the best of my knowledge, Harbor Beach is the only municipality in Huron County restricting its employees lawful carry, Armitage said.  I ask you to please remove the city of Harbor Beach employee conceal and open weapons policy from the handbook.

Council members then heard from Harbor Beach resident Sue Lloyd who stated she is pro-Second Amendment.

Is an employee that supposedly would not be allowed to carry a gun during the operation of their job only in the physical building or by extension of when they are out doing city work? Lloyd asked.

To tell you the truth, the law is very complicated, Mayor Gary Booms replied. My understanding that what we passed was an employee policy  while you are an employee, you are not allowed to carry a weapon open or concealed.

Joey Sutton, a Harbor Beach resident who previously worked for the city and school district, expressed questions and concerns about the issue.

How long until we know that youre going to allow her to hold a gun where children are crossing? Sutton questioned.

Right now it is not allowed, the mayor responded.

Sutton told council she was against Armitage carrying while working as a cross guard, but noted several times it had nothing to do with Armitage and spoke very highly of her throughout the meeting.

All I want is no guns by my grandsons, Sutton said, adding she would feel safer if police were present.

I think a retired police officer should be there, Sutton said. Somebody that has more experience. Somebody that sees it  somebody that has lifted up body bags of children that got shot by a gun they shouldnt have been near.

Ive done that. Ive seen that happen to little kids, she continued. Ive seen a kids face shot off.

Adam Armitage, Caseys husband, provided council with his opinion.

Theyre (children) already around people carrying all day long, he told council.  Someone is going to be concealed. Someone is going to be armed. Whats the difference?

It hasnt been proven that youre more likely to be shot because youre carrying, he added.

During council remarks, councilmember Al Kleinknecht readdressed the gun policy issue.

If we did not run the city like a business, for one we would look stupid, plus wed put the city at risk, he said. So we have to run it like a business.

We can legally do what weve done, he added, referring to the policy change.

The battle isnt over for Armitage.

I did exactly what I went there to do, Armitage told the Tribune on Tuesday. ... I feel confident in what I did and what I said. Im not finished yet.

Armitage said she will continue putting facts together and prepare for the next meeting.

Council will meet next at 7 p.m. Oct. 3 in city hall.
UNIONVILLE  Consumers Energy officials filed paperwork for special use permits for 19 turbines to be built as phase two of their Cross Winds Energy Park, and there is a possibility 33 more turbines could be built if phase three is developed.

Securing special land use permits would give us the option to build a third phase in the future, said Consumers Energy Community Engagement Manager Dennis Marvin. Columbia Township Zoning members will review the permits, there will be a public hearing  probably in November, are a few of the steps that have to be done.

The proposals for up to 52 wind turbines. They would all be located in Columbia Township because Consumers has about 17,000 acres under contract for development in that township.

Construction of phase two is expect to begin in the spring of 2017 and become operational at the end of that year. If the plan works out, phase three is expected to be constructed and operational in 2019.

The turbines would use the underground collector lines in Akron Township to connect with the grid at the existing Cross Winds substation on West Hoppe Road.

The first phase of Cross Winds Energy Park, which was completed in 2014, consisted of 65 turbines in Akron and Columbia townships. Of that number, 19 turbines were in Columbia.

Township Supervisor Ed Spannagel estimates each of the 19 new turbines will cost about $3.5 to $4 million.

When the first 19 Cross Winds Energy Park turbines were developed, they added about $220,000 to Columbia Townships tax base.

That nearly doubled our tax base, said township Treasurer Christina Parmenter.

When the additional 19 turbines are completed, they will add about $223,000 also, explained Spannagel.

The projects are designed to meet or exceed the zoning ordinance requirements developed by the township, Marvin said.

Although there are still several steps to get all of the necessary approval for phase two, plans are to start construction in the spring.

Phase three is just an option. Its not 100 percent certain, Marvin said. The timing of the project is designed to meet federal requirements for a production tax credit available for projects that meet certain requirements deemed to have begun construction by Dec. 31, 2016.

Last week, property owners within Cross Winds Farm were sent letters about the project and invited to attend a special meeting for them Oct. 11, at the American Legion Hall, 2960 Cass St., in Unionville.

There will be an open house for the public to learn about the Cross Winds Energy Park project from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Oct. 12 at the American Legion Hall, Marvin said.

Marvin and Project Manager Steve Schneider attended Columbia Townships meeting Monday to explain their rationale for moving ahead the timeline to start phase two as well as phase three of the companys Cross Winds Energy Park.

There is an increased demand for renewable fuels and the tax incentives for renewable development will expire Jan. 1, 2017.

Weve had requests from major companies who want more renewable fuel and some who want to develop their own, said Marvin who noted state and federal lawmakers are talking about increasing the renewable energy standard, and the U.S. Department of Energys incentives are contingent on construction be underway before the end of the year and that investment in infrastructure be made.

With the decommissioning of coal operated energy plants because of pollution, there is more of a demand for renewable fuels. Between cost and the amount of land necessary for development, wind energy is considered the best option.

Turbines take up less space, and farm operations can continue around them, where there is limited opportunity with sun, Marvin explained.

Michigan, especially, the Thumb area, is a prime location for wind development, according to a study done by the Michigan Wind Energy Resource Zone Board (WERZ) in 2008.

Although voters strongly rejected Proposal 3 in the November 2012 elections, which would have put into place a 25 percent renewable energy portfolio standard by 2025 as a mandate in the states constitution, that issue was revisited in 2013 when Gov. Rick Snyder requested another wind study.

Michigan is ranked 14th in the U.S. for wind energy potential. WERZ identified four regions as having the highest potential for wind energy harvest. The Greater Thumb Area is Region IV. The areas with potential wind energy development in Tuscola County are in the townships of Akron, Almer, Columbia, Denmark, Elkland, Ellington, Elmwood, Fairgrove, Gilford, Juniata, Novesta and Wisner.

In Huron County, the study shows the townships of: Bingham, Bloomfield, Brookfield, Caseville, Chandler, Colfax, Dwight, Fair Haven, Gore, Grant, Hume, Huron, Lake, McKinley, Meade, Oliver, Paris, Port Austin, Rubicon, Sand Beach, Sebewaing, Sheridan, Sherman, Sigel, Verona and Winsor could have wind energy development.

In Saginaw County, the Blumfield and Buena Vista townships are listed as having development potential, as do the townships of Merritt, Portsmouth and Hampton in Bay County.

Those have been the target areas for wind development.

The 21st Century Energy Plan signed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Oct. 6, 2008, requires Michigan electric providers to achieve a retail supply portfolio that includes at least 10 percent renewable energy by 2015.
Nelnet, Inc. engages in loan servicing, communications, education technology, services, and payment processing businesses worldwide. The Loan Servicing and Systems segment provides loan conversion, application processing, borrower updates, customer service, payment processing, due diligence procedures, funds management reconciliation, and claim processing services. This segment also provides student loan servicing software; business process outsourcing services specialized in contact center management, such as inbound calls, outreach campaigns and sales, and interacting with customers through multi-channels. The Education Technology, Services, and Payment Processing segment offers financial management services; school information system software; website design and cost effective admissions software; FACTS Giving, a donation platform; and customized professional development and coaching services, educational instruction services, and technology products that aid in teacher and student evaluations. It also offers tuition payment plans, and service and technology for student billings, payments, and refunds; solutions for in-person, online, and mobile payment experiences on campus; payment processing services, such as credit card and electronic transfer; faith community engagement, giving management, and learning management services and technologies; and an integrated commerce payment platform, financial management, and tuition payment plan services, as well as a school management platform that provides administrative, information management, financial management, and communication functions for K-12 schools. The Communications segment provides fiber optic service to homes and businesses for internet, television, and telephone services. The Asset Generation and Management segment acquires, manages, and owns loan assets. The Nelnet Bank segment operates internet industrial banks. The company was founded in 1978 and is headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Egypts President El-Sisi has vowed that police officers found to be guilty of wrongdoings would be held accountable

A Cairo misdemeanour court sentenced on Tuesday nine lower-ranking policemen to three years in prison over assaulting two doctors at Matariya Teaching Hospital in January.

The court set bail for the policemen at EGP 2,000 bail.

The verdict can still be appealed.

Prosecution accused the defendants of verbally and physically assaulting doctors in the hospital after a doctor conducting a medical examination one of the policemen refused his request to include fake injuries in the medical report.

The incident sparked anger, leading doctors to hold a protest at the Doctors Syndicate to demand the policemen stand trial and for the health minister to be sacked.

Tuesday's court verdict is the latest in a series of court rulings in cases involving police violations and abuses.

Earlier this year, another low-ranking policeman killed a driver in the working-class Cairo district of El-Darb El-Ahmar following a dispute over a fare. A court sentenced the policeman to life in prison this month, one of the harshest sentences issued against police officials convicted of similar violent crimes. The verdict can still be appealed.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi had vowed that policemen found guilty of "committing wrongdoings" would be punished, and Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar has maintained that such violations represent "isolated incidents" as opposed to a systemic problem.

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Mitie Group plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides strategic outsourcing services in the United Kingdom and internationally. The company operates in eight segments: Business Services, Technical Services, Central Government & Defense (CG&D), Communities, Care & Custody, Landscapes, Waste, and Spain. The company provides security services, such as manned guarding and technology-backed monitoring solutions, fire and security systems installations, vetting and front-of-house services; and general, specialist, and technical cleaning services in offices, buildings, transport and logistics hubs, and high-security environments. It is also involved in the provision of technology-backed engineering; maintenance, repair, and mechanical and electrical project activities; energy, carbon, and water management services; air conditioning and disinfection solutions; telecoms and energy services; and remote asset monitoring, and digital and connected workplace solutions. In addition, the company provides facilities management services across central government and defense contracts; decarbonization solutions; and engineering services. Further, it offers integrated facilities management services to devolved public sector customers, which focuses on community environments in healthcare, schools and universities, emergency services, and local authorities; portering services; public services in immigration, criminal justice, and healthcare; horticultural and winter landscaping services; and waste elimination, reduction, recycling, and treatment solutions. Mitie Group plc was incorporated in 1936 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.
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Egypts state TV aired an interview with El-Sisi by PBS from last year instead of his most recent interview with the network earlier this week

Egyptian state TV has sacked the head of its news department following the airing of an old interview by mistake with Egyptian President Abdel- Fattah El-Sisi.

The state-owned TV channel aired an interview on Tuesday by the American public broadcaster Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) with El-Sisi from last year, instead of PBSs most recent interview with El-Sisi earlier this week with a different host.

The decision on Tuesday by Safaa Hegazy, the head of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union which runs state television, to dismiss Mostafa Shehata was followed by naming his deputy, Khaled Mehanna, as acting chief of the news department.

"The Radio and Television Union apologises for the grave mistake made by the news department," the union said in a statement published on Tuesday, adding that it subsequently decided to sack the head of department.

Mehanna will take office until a new chief is appointed, it added.

This week's PBS interview was conducted by host Charlie Rose while last years was hosted by the networks chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner.

El-Sisi is in New York to take part in the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly during which he has met with top world leaders.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Sherwin-Williams: Acquire Sourcing LLC, CTS National Corporation, Comex North America Inc., Compania Sherwin-Williams S.A. de C.V., Contract Transportation Systems Co., Dongguan Lilly Paint Industries Ltd, Duron, EPS B.V., EPS Shanghai Trading Co. Ltd., Geocel Holdings, Guangdong Valspar Paints Manufacturing Co Ltd., Inver East Med S.A., Inver France SAS, Inver GmbH, Inver Industrial Coating SRL, Inver Polska Spoka Z O.O, Inver Spa, Invercolor Bologna Srl, Invercolor Ltd, Invercolor Roma Srl, Invercolor Torino Srl, Invercolor Toscana Srl, Isocoat Tintas e Vernizes Ltda, Isva Vernici Srl, Leighs Paints, M.A. Bruder & Sons, Omega Specialty Products & Services LLC, Oy Sherwin-Williams Finland Ab, PT Sherwin-Williams Indonesia, PT Valspar Indonesia, Paint Sundry Brands, Pinturas Condor S.A., Pinturas Industriales S.A., Piton Paints Limited, Plasti-Kote Co. Inc., Plasti-kote Limited, Productos Quimicos y Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Quest Automotive Products UK Limited, Quetzal Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Ronseal Ireland Limited, SWIMC LLC, SWIPCO  Sherwin Williams do Brasil Propriedade Intelectual Ltda, Sherwin Williams Colombia S.A.S., Sherwin-Williams Argentina I.y C.S.A., Sherwin-Williams Aruba VBA, Sherwin-Williams Australia Pty. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams Balkan S.R.L., Sherwin-Williams Bel Unitary Enterprise, Sherwin-Williams Belize Limited, Sherwin-Williams Benelux NV, Sherwin-Williams Canada Inc., Sherwin-Williams Caribbean N.V., Sherwin-Williams Cayman Islands Limited, Sherwin-Williams Chile S.A., Sherwin-Williams Coatings India Private Limited, Sherwin-Williams Coatings S.a r.l., Sherwin-Williams Czech Republic spol. s r.o, Sherwin-Williams Denmark A/S, Sherwin-Williams Deutschland GmbH, Sherwin-Williams France Finishes SAS, Sherwin-Williams Ireland Limited, Sherwin-Williams Italy S.r.l., Sherwin-Williams Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Sherwin-Williams Nantong Coatings Technology Co. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams Nantong Company Limited, Sherwin-Williams Norway AS, Sherwin-Williams Paints Limited Liability Company, Sherwin-Williams Peru S.R.L., Sherwin-Williams Pinturas de Venezuela S.A., Sherwin-Williams Poland Sp. z o.o, Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine Coatings, Sherwin-Williams Realty Holdings Inc., Sherwin-Williams Services Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Sherwin-Williams Shanghai Limited, Sherwin-Williams Spain Coatings S.L., Sherwin-Williams Sweden AB, Sherwin-Williams Thailand Co. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams UK Coatings Limited, Sherwin-Williams UK Limited, Sherwin-Williams Vietnam Limited, Sherwin-Williams West Indies Limited, Sherwin-Williams do Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda., Southland Paint Company, Spanyc Paints Joint Stock Company, Specialty Polymers Inc., Syntema I Vaggeryd AB, Taiwan Valspar Co. Ltd., The Sherwin-Williams Acceptance Corporation, The Sherwin-Williams Headquarters Company, The Sherwin-Williams Manufacturing Company, The Sherwin-Williams US Licensing Company, The Valspar Asia Corporation Limited, The Valspar Australia Corporation Pty. Ltd., The Valspar Corporation, The Valspar Corporation Limitada, The Valspar Finland Corporation Oy, The Valspar France Corporation S.A.S., The Valspar France Research Corporation SAS, The Valspar Malaysia Corporation Sdn Bhd, The Valspar Nantes Corporation S.A.S., The Valspar Singapore Corporation Pte. Ltd, The Valspar South Africa Corporation Pty Ltd, The Valspar Switzerland Corporation AG, The Valspar Thailand Corporation Ltd., The Valspar UK Corporation Limited, The Valspar Vietnam Corporation Ltd., UAB Sherwin-Williams Baltic, Valspar Aries Coatings S. de R.L. de C.V., Valspar Automotive Australia Pty Limited, Valspar Automotive UK Corporation Limited, Valspar B.V., Valspar Coatings Guangdong Co. Ltd., Valspar Coatings Shanghai Co. Ltd., Valspar Coatings Tianjin Co. Ltd, Valspar D.o.o Beograd, Valspar India Coatings Corporation Private Limited, Valspar Industries GmbH, Valspar Industries Ireland Ltd., Valspar Industries Italy S.r.l., Valspar LLC, Valspar Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Valspar Powder Coatings Limited, Valspar Rock Company Limited Japan, Valspar Shanghai Management Co. Ltd., Valspar Specialty Paints LLC, Valspar Uruguay Corporation S.A., Valspar WPC Pty Ltd, and ZAO Sherwin-Williams.

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Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:ARE), an S&P 500<sup></sup> urban office real estate investment trust ("REIT"), is the first, longest-tenured, and pioneering owner, operator, and developer uniquely focused on collaborative life science, technology, and agtech campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, with a total market capitalization of $31.9 billion as of December 31, 2020, and an asset base in North America of 49.7 million square feet ("SF"). The asset base in North America includes 31.9 million RSF of operating properties and 3.3 million RSF of Class A properties undergoing construction, 7.1 million RSF of near-term and intermediate-term development and redevelopment projects, and 7.4 million SF of future development projects. Founded in 1994, Alexandria pioneered this niche and has since established a significant market presence in key locations, including Greater Boston, San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Maryland, and Research Triangle. Alexandria has a longstanding and proven track record of developing Class A properties clustered in urban life science, technology, and agtech campuses that provide our innovative tenants with highly dynamic and collaborative environments that enhance their ability to successfully recruit and retain world-class talent and inspire productivity, efficiency, creativity, and success. Alexandria also provides strategic capital to transformative life science, technology, and agtech companies through our venture capital platform. We believe our unique business model and diligent underwriting ensure a high-quality and diverse tenant base that results in higher occupancy levels, longer lease terms, higher rental income, higher returns, and greater long-term asset value.
An airman who braved enemy fire to save fellow troops during a river evacuation in Afghanistan in 2009 will receive a Silver Star for his bravery, a general said.

Airman First Class Benjamin Hutchins, a tactical air control party airman supporting the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team, was approved for the military's third-highest valor award in April and will receive the honor during a ceremony Nov. 4 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an official said.

His heroic actions during a three-day period through Nov. 6, 2009, were recounted during a speech by Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, the head of Air Combat Command, on Tuesday at the Air Force Association's annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, D.C.

"This is an example of our airmen," Carlisle said.

Hutchins and a team of soldiers were on the west bank of the Bala Murghab River looking for a supply airdrop, Carlisle said. One of the canisters fell off target into the swift-moving river, and two soldiers swam out to retrieve it.

But Taliban militants on the east side of the river were watching.

The soldiers were swept out by a "strong current they weren't anticipating," Carlisle said. "Airman Hutchins jumps into the river after [them]  but the Taliban start[ed] shooting at the last man in the water."

Hutchins, swimming around the frigid waters for roughly an hour, evaded Taliban fire by skimming the surface "with [only] his nose and mouth" while diving back down to find the troops.

Additional soldiers with the 82nd Airborne soon came to the aid of all three men. But the Taliban began another firefight -- with machine guns, sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades -- on the east bank the following day.

"They come out, and start running across an open field and take on the Taliban. They take out the rocket propeller, the machine gun. There's still dealing with the snipers, but Hutchins, being a TACP, gets on the radio  calls in a [strike] from an MQ-1 Predator in a danger-close situation, but  it takes out the Taliban," Carlisle said.

The award's narrative, written by the airman's former supervisor, Master Sgt. Donald Gansberger, describes the action in even more detail.

"Airman Hutchins moved under heavy and accurate rocket propelled grenade, machine gun and sniper fire across an open field with little to no cover or concealment," it states. "While continuing to move forward, he managed to direct the sensors of overhead close air support while simultaneously providing accurate supporting fire with his M-4 rifle." "He killed one enemy armed with a rocket propelled grenade launcher, at close range, before the enemy could fire and wounded an additional enemy fighter all while providing targeting and controlling information to an overhead unmanned aerial vehicle that destroyed a second enemy fighting position with a Hellfire missile," the document states.

"Airman Hutchins' quick, decisive actions, tactical presence and calm demeanor enabled friendly forces to eventually overwhelm the enemy stronghold," it states. "His actions forced the enemy fighters to break contact and relinquish critical ground to friendly forces which enabled the safety of the recovery efforts for the two missing Soldiers."

In an ironic twist, Carlisle said, "they did eventually get their container back."

The Air Force previously said Hutchins had been submitted for the Bronze Star Medal with Valor. However, the service later clarified Hutchins had instead been submitted for two Bronze Star medals for his actions, which instead were combined into one Silver Star award. Hutchins medically retired from the Air Force in 2014 with injuries sustained as a result of enemy attack during a separate deployment in 2012, Air Combat Command told Military.com.

The Defense Department is reviewing more than 1,100 post-9/11 valor citations to determine if they warrant a higher award such as the Medal of Honor, officials announced in January.

In 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered a review of all decorations and awards programs "to ensure that after 13 years of combat the awards system appropriately recognizes the service, sacrifices and action of our service members," officials told USA Today at the time.

The latest review is due to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter by Sept. 30, 2017.

-- Editor's note: This story has been updated to include additional details about the date of award, the airman's heroic actions and his current status.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
Despite Flipping in Surf 4 Times in a Year, Marines Say New ACV Is the Future of Amphibious Warfare

Some Marine veterans familiar with the vehicle and its operations have worried about the reliability of the ACV.
U.S. Army tactical radio officials plan to launch a competition for a new handheld radio next year that would give soldiers twice the capability of the current Rifleman Radio.

The Army currently uses the single-channel AN/PRC 154A Rifleman Radio as its soldier handheld data radio. It runs the Soldier Radio Waveform, which small-unit leaders use to download and transmit maps, images and texts to fellow infantry soldiers in a tactical environment.

If they want to talk to each other, they often rely on another single-channel handheld -- the AN/PRC 148 MultiBand Inter/Intra Team Radio, or MBITR, which runs the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio, or SINCGARS, for voice communications.

The Army plans to release a request-for-proposal in 2017 for a two-channel radio that will allow soldiers to run the Soldier Radio Waveform, or SRW, for data and SINCGARS for voice on one radio, according to Col. James P. Ross, who runs Project Manager Tactical Radios.

The change will mean that soldiers will no longer need the 148 MBITR and be able to rely on the new, two-channel radio for both data and voice communications, Ross said.

"We know industry can meet our requirements.  We know it's achievable," he said.

The move represents a change in strategy for the Army since the service awarded contracts in 2015 to Harris Corporation and Thales for a next-generation version of the Rifleman Radio.

"We went out with a competition for the next generation of the [Rifleman Radio]. Two companies, Harris and Thales, competed," Ross said. "We went through testing, and we were on the verge of being able to buy more of them when the Army said, 'Our strategy now is two-channel.' "

The Army had planned an initial buy of about 4,000 Thales AN/PRC-154B(V)1 radios and Harris AN/PRC-159(V)1 radios, according to Army program documents for fiscal 2015.

"We will not be taking action on those," Ross said.

The current Rifleman Radio was developed as part of the Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit, or HMS program. HMS radios are designed around the Army's tactical network strategy to create secure tactical networks without the logistical nightmare of a tower-based antenna infrastructure.

It's also a key part of the Army's Nett Warrior system. It hooks into an Android-based smartphone and gives soldiers in infantry brigade combat teams the ability to send and receive emails, view maps and watch icons on a digital map that represent the locations of their fellow soldiers. The concept came out of the Army's long-gestating Land Warrior program.

The Army purchased about 21,000 Rifleman Radios under low-rate initial production between 2012 and 2015.

Army officials maintain that are enough single-channel, handheld radios already produced under the low rate initial production that are sitting waiting to be fielded. The service plans to field another two brigade combat teams per year with the single-channel Rifleman Radios through 2019.

The Army will conduct testing of two-channel radios in 2017 and early 2018 and then down-select to one or two vendors sometime in 2018, Ross said. Operational testing is scheduled for 2019 and fielding will begin in 2020 if all goes as planned, he added.

For now, the Army intends to field four BCTs a year with two-channel handheld radios, Ross said.

Small-unit leaders would then be able to retire the MBITR radio from their kit -- a weight savings of about three pounds, according to Army officials at Program Executive Office Soldier.

"One thing the PEO Soldier is very passionate about is weight -- driving that weight down that the soldier carries," said Lt. Col. Derek Bird, product manager for Ground Soldier Systems, which helps oversee the Nett Warrior program.

"If we can cut three pounds off a soldier by taking two radios and shrinking it to one  that is a big deal."

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
Enlisted drone pilots will be eligible for the same bonuses the Air Force plans to offer its officers, the service's top enlisted leaders said Wednesday.

"When you think about officers and enlisted in the Air Force, you pay officers more because of where they fall in the organization structure, not because [of] the nature of the technical job they do," Air Force Chief Master Sgt. James Cody said at the annual Air Force Association's Air, Space & Cyber conference near Washington, D.C.

"We absolutely have airmen -- officer and enlisted -- who do the same types of things every day, all day and always have. But if they're doing the same type of technical thing, and we're paying them for doing that technical thing, then yes, they'll get the same money. And that is exactly what will happen with [remotely piloted aircraft] pilots," Cody told reporters during a media briefing.

"They will get the same exact incentive pay; they would just get different base pay because of their rank," he said.

Check out Military.com's coverage of the AFA's Air, Space & Cyber conference.

The Air Force announced last month that it will increase Aviator Retention Pay bonuses by $10,000 this year, up to $35,000 per year, for airmen who sign up for five more years. The bonus is expected to take effect no later than Oct. 1, as part of the fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.

Cody did not say when enlisted airmen would actually start receiving the bonus pay. But the first class of enlisted drone pilots begins training next month, and it will take roughly a year before they're ready for their new duties, the head of Air Education Training Command said earlier this week at the conference.

The training given to enlisted pilots flying the RQ-4 Global Hawk, a move approved in 2015, will be exactly the same as officers receive, said Lt. Gen. Darryl Roberson.

Roberson said the four enlisted pilots beginning class Oct. 1 are "very experienced and familiar with RPA operations  these are tech[nical] sergeants, master sergeants, who are either already sensor operators or other RPAs or are very familiar with the operations that occur."

In the last two years he's been on the job, the staple was to graduate 192 pilots per year -- a number that has since doubled to 384 pilots, Roberson said.

"This is helping establish the RPA community in the United States Air Force," he said. "We had to increase the number of [instructor pilots], simulators and facilities to do that. It's been a monumental effort from the airmen."

Faced with high operational demand and a pilot shortage, the Air Force also recently announced plans to open to all career fields to the job of steering the high-altitude RQ-4, made by Northrop Grumman Corp.

Enlisted personnel will take over most of the slots to pilot the Global Hawk over the next several years, according to Maj. Bryan Lewis, an Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon.

"By 2020, the Air Force hopes to have a little more than half of its 198 RQ-4 pilots be enlisted airmen," he said in an email to Military.com on Sept. 2. "And by that point, roughly 70 percent of the 121 airmen flying Global Hawk missions on a day-to-day basis -- not performing other duties such as staff positions at the wing -- will be enlisted airmen."

As of fiscal 2015, the service had 33 RQ-4s in inventory, according to Air Force documents.

-- Brendan McGarry contributed to this report.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

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El-Sisi spoke about conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa region including between Israel and Palestine as well as in Syria, Yemen and Libya

In a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) speech, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi reiterated for second time since May a call for the Israeli people and leadership to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians that would put an end to the ongoing conflict.

"We have a real chance to write a bright page in the history of the region for a move towards peace," El-Sisi said, asking the audience in the UNGA to permit him to deviate from his written speech to address the Israelis.

He added that Egypt was exerting efforts to push the peace process forward in order to reach a final solution for a constant and fair peace through the two-state solution.

Earlier in September Russia confirmed news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed in principle to meet in Moscow. If the meeting does take place it would mark the first face to face talks between the two leaders in years.

It remains unclear whether Egypt would be a side in the talks and the date of the potential talks remains unknown.

"We welcome the efforts for a real desire to improve the situation in Palestinian lands, El-Sisi said.

In light of the conditions that the Palestinians face, their situation should be solved through ending the occupation and the retrieving of the peoples rights, El-Sisi continued.

This should be achieved through a peace deal in accordance with legitimate international agreements that guarantee the right of Palestinians in their state and accomplishes for Israel security and normal relations in the region, " El-Sisi said.

In May, El-Sisi addressed the Israelis and Palestinians, saying that peace, prosperity and cooperation would only be possible if both parties are able to reach a two-state solution.

He recalled Egypt's experience before and after the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and highlighted that 40 years ago no one at the time thought that such a positive "jump in relations" could be established.

On Tuesday, he set the Egyptian experience as an example, describing it as a "one of a kind experience that could be repeated with a two state solution in order to establish a Palestinian state next to the Israeli one and would secure stability and security for Palestinians and Israelis."

In July, Sameh Shoukry was the first Egyptian foreign minister to visit Israel since 2007. On his trip he underlined to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the two-state solution is supported by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and other state officials.

Shoukry stressed that El-Sisi's vision to establish peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples would bring the long conflict to an end.

Rising Middle East conflicts

El-Sisi also shed light on the conflicts in the Middle East, as well as Egyptian affairs, in an extended speech in front of the UNGA.

"Egypt was still able to maintain its stability during the regional instability due to the consistency of its apparatuses and the Egyptian people's awareness.

This is something that the international community should take into consideration and support the country for the benefit of the region and the whole world so that Egypt remains the main pillar for the Middle East's stability," El-Sisi said.

He recalled Egypt's adoption of the 2014 constitution and an elected parliament that has an unprecedented amount of youth and women represented.

El-Sisi also talked about Syria, saying that the bloodshed there and the absence of a political horizon was a situation that is "no longer acceptable."

"The solution is clear: A complete and comprehensive halt of all hostilities in all of Syria that would contribute to a political solution and prevent bloodshed while also protecting Syrian unity, safety and accomplish the will of the Syrian people as well as stopping chaos that only leads to the spread of terrorism," El-Sisi said.

Egypt has hosted half a million Syrians who are being treated like citizens when it comes to health care, education, and housing, according to El-Sisi.

He hailed the ceasefire that was reached following efforts from Russia and the US, adding that Egypt was hoping for a fast international response to resume talks in the closest possible time so a solution can be reached.

On Monday, the Syrian military announced the agreed ceasefire deal was over amid numerous violations including an aid convoy attack, and the launching of air bombardments on rebel controlled cities.

The United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura has said that there was still hope of reviving the ceasefire but admitted that delegates agreed it was in danger.

Libya

On Libya, El-Sisi said that the war-stricken country lives in a critical and wide political crisis, even after the El-Skhirat agreement.

He said that Egypt was playing a role in an attempt to bring Libya's political factions together, while adding that it supports applying the agreement as a solution to restore the unity of the Libyan state. El-Sisi said that it would have to be done through the states legitimate institutions -- the presidential council, the government of national accord (GNA), parliament, and the army.

He added that Egypt was hosting meetings for the Libyans to help in executing the agreement so a GNA representing all Libyans would be formed, ratified by the Libyan parliament so it would focus on the reconstruction.

El-Sisi stressed on the importance of lifting arm bans to the Libyan army so that it could combat terrorism.

"There is no place for terrorism and militias in Libya," El-Sisi said.

He has repeatedly expressed his support for Libya, while stating that Egypt would not intervene militarily in turmoil-stricken country, describing it as a "sovereign state.

In an August interview, El-Sisi said Egypt supported Libyas national army as well its elected parliament because they represented the will of the Libyan people.

Yemen

El-Sisi said that Egypt spares no efforts in supporting the unity of Yemeni and regional safety, as well as the return of its "legitimate" exiled government of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi who is fighting the Houthis, a rebel group that controls much of the countrys north.

"We support the efforts of the UN's Special Envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Checkh for a political solution to the crisis -- a solution that was approved by the legitimate government for the country's benefit," El-Sisi said.

The U.N. envoy aims to revive frozen negotiations through a repeat of peace talks and an agreement on a new truce to stop the fighting that has shook Yemen for eighteen months.

He stressed on the necessity of continued negotiations, calling on Yemeni factions to announce their commitment to the UN envoys plan to reach a solution that stipulates a general reconciliation in Yemen in accordance with the UN's Security Council decisions.

He announced that Egypt would continue assisting "Yemeni brothers," as well as continuing to secure the Bab El-Mandab strait.

Since March 2015, Egypt has been participating in the Saudi-led coalition which has waged an air campaign aiming to regain cities under the control of the Houthis.

"Most of MENA's conflicts are a reflection of international conflicts. I affirm Egypt's refusal of foreign interference in Arab domestic affairs. I confirm Egypt's solidarity with Arabs states against any attempts at foreign interference in light of the connection of Arab national security from the Gulf to Egypt," El-Sisi said.

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New Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein named the three one-star generals Tuesday who will have the task of carrying out his ambitious plan for revitalizing the service.

Brig. Gen. Stephen Davis will lead the effort to remake the function and formation of the basic squadron, which Goldfein called the "heartbeat of the Air Force."

Davis, currently the Air Force director of manpower, organization and resources, also sets policy for strategic manpower sourcing, performance management, organizational structure, and manpower data systems. He formerly commanded a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile wing and the nation's only ICBM flight test squadron.

Check out Military.com's coverage of the AFA's Air, Space & Cyber conference.

Goldfein has yet to give a detailed outline of his vision for remaking the squadron but said earlier this month at a conference of the National Guard Association of the United States that it would probably incorporate a mix of active duty, Guard and Reserve airmen. "I think there's a full-time/part-time mix that we ought to look at in the squadron level," he said.

Brig. Gen. Brian M. Killough will lead the effort to improve how the Air Force develops joint leaders and works jointly with other services as battlefields become more complex. Killough, a career F-15E Strike Eagle weapons officer, currently is director of strategy, concepts and assessments, deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements.

Goldfein also named Brig. Gen. B. Chance "Salty" Saltzman to lead the effort to overhaul command and control systems throughout the service.

Saltzman currently is director of future operations, deputy chief of staff for operations, at Air Force headquarters. He was formerly a Minuteman III launch officer and satellite operator for the National Reconnaissance Office.

Goldfein made the announcement before an overflow audience in his "Air Force Update" address on the second day of the Air Force Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor in Maryland.

The more than one-hour address by Goldfein, who became the service's 21st chief of staff in July, was mostly autobiographical to introduce himself to airmen eager to learn of his blueprint for reform.

Goldfein noted his Air Force pedigree: His father flew in Vietnam, and his daughter has been on combat missions as an Air Force captain.

He will not be a screamer, Goldfein told the crowd.

"What you need to know about me is that I'm into evolution, not revolution. I'm not coming in with guns blazing," he said. "What you've got to know about me is that I truly believe every airman matters."

In a separate panel discussion with Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, Goldfein said he expects to receive by January proposals on how to move squadrons forward. James, a former executive at the defense contractor SAIC, said she supports Goldfein's plans for reform.

"The chief's vision is to put the squadrons at the top; they are the central core of the Air Force just as the line organizations are the central core of any business," she said. "And the staff that means have to support the squadrons [as] the headquarters support the line organizations in order to grow and prosper."

-- Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct details of the generals' new duties.

-- Oriana Pawlyk contributed to this report.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Despite five broken ships within 12 months, a recent program overhaul, and a wide-ranging and ongoing engineering review, the Navy's top officer voiced confidence in the littoral combat ship program, saying other ship classes experienced similar early struggles.

Speaking outside the International Seapower Symposium in Newport, Rhode Island, on Wednesday, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson praised the vessel as an ideal platform for international engagement by the Navy.

"I think that overall, this program is on track," he said. "As with any program of this complexity, we have some very bright people who are making these decisions, designing this program, getting it to sea. But it's really complicated. So while we have maybe a 90-percent solution, we're going to learn. And that's where we are."

Richardson's remarks came just a week after the Independence-class USS Montgomery (LCS-8) suffered two engineering casualties three days after its commissioning, forcing the crew to postpone a transit to the ship's San Diego homeport and set course for Mayport, Florida, for repairs.

Since last December, the Freedom-class littoral combat ships Milwaukee, Fort Worth and Freedom have all sustained engineering casualties requiring repairs. Another Independence-class ship, the Coronado, was sidelined at the end of August with a seawater leak.

Only two active littoral combat ships -- the Independence and Jackson -- have not sustained engineering casualties since commissioning.

Richardson compared these problems to those that occurred in the early days of the DDG-51 Arleigh-Burke-class destroyer program and the LCS predecessor, the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate.

The destroyer experienced problems with some of its shipboard systems during sea testing in the early 1990s, prompting Navy brass to call for late modifications and another round of testing. The aluminum-hulled frigates sustained a rash of structural cracks before the design problem was addressed.

"We're learning lessons as it starts up -- in engineering -- as we get this class of ship to sea," Richardson said. "In both hull forms, we're finding things we need to address from an engineering standpoint. We're seeing areas where crew training, preparedness of the crew to operate the ship -- we're learning lessons there as well."

At least one of the LCS engineering casualties has been traced to sailor error: The Freedom-class Fort Worth recently departed for its San Diego homeport after eight months in Singapore after experiencing a casualty resulting from a failure to apply lubrication oil to engine gears.

Naval Surface Forces Commander Vice Adm. Tom Rowden announced Sept. 5 the Navy had completed an engineering stand-down of all LCS squadrons, and would undergo an extensive engineering review that includes retraining for all crews and possible follow-on actions.

Days later, Rowden announced that the first four ships -- two from the monohull Freedom class made by Lockheed Martin and Marinette Marine, and two from the Austal-built Independence class -- would become test ships as the Navy overhauls the crewing and deployment concepts.

"The four test ships will not only allow us to get through an aggressive testing program, as we get this class out to sea; it will allow us to learn lessons faster than we would in a deployed context," Richardson said. "And then we'll have the best balance of training and operations and forward deployment, forward presence. That's what I hope we'll find in sort of the adjustments we're making, managing the LCS class."

The ongoing review is being overseen by the Navy's Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport and is expected to be complete by the end of October. The school is also developing a knowledge test and additional specialized training for LCS engineers, to be delivered to them by Oct. 5.

Meanwhile, the Navy has continued its rollout of the 26 planned littoral combat ships. An eighth LCS, the Detroit, is set to be commissioned Oct. 22.

"These ships are going to last for decades, in the ideal, and we're going to be pushing forward into the future," Richardson said. "There's always going to be a risk; we're going to do the best we can."

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at@HopeSeck.

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Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Wednesday military policies on tattoos could be rejecting otherwise qualified recruits, but didn't say whether the guidelines would be changed.

At a recent meeting with recruiters in the Northeast, Carter said he was told, "Well, you really ought to take a look at the tattoo policy." Each service has its own tattoo policy, and the secretary didn't cite a specific branch.

Even so, Carter said recruiters told him they are turning away potential recruits who would "otherwise be great people" for military service, "but they don't meet our tattoo policy."

"I don't know what to do about that," the secretary said, while restating his intention to broaden recruiting efforts. "I continue to want to make sure that we're tapping into the entire population," he said.

Carter's comments came in response to a question during an event billed as a "Worldwide Troop Talk" with service members stationed at bases around the globe.

Tattoo policies vary by service as to location and size, as well as content, to ensure that personnel maintain appearance standards for each service branch. Offensive symbols such as swastikas or gang signs are forbidden. Recruits' tattoos are usually checked when they are given their initial physical.

Last year, the Army eliminated limits on the size or number of tattoos soldiers may have on their arms and legs. The previous regulation limited soldiers to four tattoos below the elbow or knee, none bigger than the wearer's hand.

Face, neck and hand tattoos remain against regulations with the exception of one ring tattoo per hand.

Then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said at the time, "Society is changing its view of tattoos, and we have to change along with that. It makes sense. Soldiers have grown up in an era when tattoos are much more acceptable, and we have to change along with that."

Earlier this year, the Navy eased its tattoo policy specifically to aid recruitment. Under the new regulations, sailors are allowed to have neck and sleeve tattoos, and even tattoos behind their ears.

Most recently, the Marine Corps published an updated tattoo policy in June, allowing slightly bigger arm tattoos and wedding ring ink, but keeping a ban on sleeve tattoos in place. A detailed 32-page policy document included illustrations and diagrams to eliminate confusion with the new regulations.

"The commandant said it best  that we've attempted to balance the individual desires of Marines with the need to maintain the disciplined appearance expected of our profession," Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Ronald Green said when the policy rolled out.

-- Hope Hodge Seck contributed to this report.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi responded for the first time to US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the US in a CNN interview one day after El-Sisi's meeting with Trump, the first the candidate has had with a Muslim world leader.

"It is important for us to know that during campaigns many statements are made and many statements are said, however, actual governonance of a country becomes something different and is subject to many factors," El-Sisi told CNN's Erin Burnett after she asked whether El-Sisi and Trump discussed his anti-Muslim proposal during their meeting.

El-Sisi said that the US already has in place "very strict security measures" for visitors.

Trump had proposed late last year "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," but then suggested in August the "extreme vetting" of immigrants through an ideological test to determine if they hold US values such as religious freedom, gender equality and equal rights for homosexuals.

When asked by Burnett whether the Egyptian president believes Trump might not follow up on his ban proposal, he said that "during electoral campaigns there might be a perception that is based on a certain vision or point of view, then that vision gets corrected and it develops in accordance to governing, experience, reports, advice from experts."

El-Sisi also said that there is "no doubt" that Trump would make a strong leader.

El-Sisi met on Monday with both Trump and his opponent, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Trump said in a statement that the meeting highlighted how Egypt and the US share a common enemy and the importance of working together in defeating radical Islamic terrorism."

The Republican candidate said he told El-Sisi that "under a Trump Administration, the United States of America will be a loyal friend  not simply an ally  that Egypt can count on in the days and years ahead."

In her meeting with El-Sisi, Clinton discussed ways of bolstering counterterrorism operations with Egypt, affirming her commitment to defeating ISIS, to addressing foreign fighters, and to countering radicalisation," according to a press release by her campaign.

The presidential hopeful also "raised concerns about the prosecution of Egyptian human rights organisations and activists" in Egypt, amid growing US criticism of Egypt's human rights record.

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Egypt's health ministry announced on Wednesday evening that the death toll in the capsizing of a boat carrying migrants off Egypt's Mediterranean port city of Rosetta has reached 42.

According to the state-owned MENA news agency, the boat was carrying 600 migrants.

Reuters reported that the migrants originated from Syria, Egypt and other African countries.

According to initial investigations conducted by police in the Nile Delta's Beheira governorate, the boat capsized after it sailed from Kafr El-Sheikh's Meghizal area.

The afflicted boat's planned destination is still unknown.

Wednesday's incident comes two days after Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said at a UN meeting that "illegal immigration" should be at the top of international priorities.

He affirmed that Egypt will combat illegal immigration through updating already existing anti-human trafficking legislation, underlining that the government is currently working on finalising legalisation to combat illegal emigration from the country.

According to El-Sisi, Egypt currently hosts five million refugees of different nationalities.

The UNHCR website's profile on Egypt says that the country is hosting 261,741 registered refugees, mostly from Sudan, Syria and Libya, with the number of unregistered refugees believed to be much higher.

In recent years, thousands of refugees and migrants have attempted to cross the Mediterranean in search of better jobs and opportunities. Hundreds have been arrested in Egypt by naval forces for attempting to migrate illegally.

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ArtPrize at the UICA 08

Part of Jeffrey Augustine Songco's ArtPrize entry "Let's Dance America!" at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) in Grand Rapids, on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016. (Cory Morse | MLive.com)

(Cory Morse)

GRAND RAPIDS - Jeffrey Augustine Songco's 2015 ArtPrize experience was somewhat chaotic.

But despite having his art stripped and rebuilt by viewers who might have misunderstood his bead-strung fencing, the San Francisco artist said last year's episode made it easier to come back.

"Last year taught me to be at a venue with people to watch over your artwork," Songco joked.

"We had great weather though, and being outside, I lucked out. It was the universe's plan and I really got to connect with the Grand Rapids culture. The best benefit was connecting with the people visiting ArtPrize."

ArtPrize Eight, which officially began its 19-day competition Wednesday, is Songco's fourth year entering a piece of his work. Each year he carries over at least one aspect of his art, with the beads being this year's transition.

Attendees can see his piece - titled "Let's Dance America!" - at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) at 2 W. Fulton St. It is one of 15 works in the "Future Talk" exhibition, each with a digital component reflective of and responsive to their time.

Inside a room of its own, "Let's Dance America!" features a projector screen broadcasting a 52-minute video. Wrapping around the room are red, white and blue streamers, showcasing the theme of the piece.

"I knew ArtPrize was going to be smack in the middle of the Summer Olympics and presidential election, and I wanted to share some kind of thought or idea about American culture," Songco said.

Each short interview features Songco answering the question, "When and where did you learn the Macarena?" but from 23 different perspectives.

While his wardrobe and personality change throughout, each character shares the patriotic beads around their neck.

"Of the 23 (stories), some are real and a lot are fictional and sensationalized by me," he said. "I like making them up and that's what artists do; they tell stories, whether you paint a story or write a song about a story, or make a video that tells a story."

By embracing different personalities, Songco said he hopes every viewer can relate to the piece.

Originally performed by Spanish band Los del Rio in 1993, the Macarena became an international hit in 1996 when the Bayside Boys did a version with English lyrics.

The former Billboard No. 1 song is celebrating its 20-year anniversary, which solidified its use by Songco.

"Let's Dance America!" has an interactive element as well with a "selfie station" in the corner, a unique Snapchat geofilter and a "Yay America!" smartphone app. Viewers can also purchase beads in the UICA's gift shop.

"The takeaway is an awesome selfie," he said. "The exhibition is titled 'Future Talk' and how are we talking in the future? Through selfies, through Instagram and social media. I wanted people to remember this and share it with their friends."
As ArtPrize opens today, here are 10 things you need to know

ArtPrize Eight officially begins at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 21 and is expected to attract more than 400,000 visitors during its 19-day run. If you plan to attend, here's a list of 10 things you should know before you leave home.

Don't Edit

Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

Plan your visit ahead of time

With 1,647 artists registered to show or perform in 170 venues in a 3-square-mile area and two venues outside of downtown, you will not see everything in one day. Spend some time reviewing Mlive's coverage and the ArtPrize website to determine which venues you want to visit ahead of time.

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Park your car on the outskirts

Don't sail into the middle of downtown and expect to find a parking meter in front of the ArtPrize venue you want to see. Find a parking spot on the outskirts of downtown and ride one of the free buses to the venue you want to see.

Here's a city map of parking facilities, and here's an ArtPrize guide to event parking. For help finding where parking spaces are available, you can check out the GR Park mobile app.

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Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

Bring water, sunscreen and shades

If ArtPrize Eight is blessed with sunny weather, you will want to bring water, sunscreen and sunglasses as you explore the downtown venues.

If it rains or threatens to rain, having an umbrella will be handy between the indoor venues you'll visit. If it does rain, don't forget the skywalks that connect DeVos Place and the Van Andel Arena with the downtown hotels. They have lots of ArtPrize entries between them.

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Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

Visit an ArtPrize hub

To help you get the most out of the 170 venues and other events and activities, ArtPrize has set up eight visitor service centers, or hubs, that serve as welcome centers, voter registration sites and information centers offering real-time information on venues and events specific to each hubs' neighborhood.

All hubs are stocked with ArtPrize Eight merchandise, maps, event guides and and Metro Passes.

Click here for a list of their locations.

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Register to become an ArtPrize voter

Your opinion counts towards determining the winners in ArtPrize if you register to vote.

You can register to vote by using the ArtPrize app on your smartphone, texting your vote in with any cell phone or by voting from your laptop or home computer. You just have to be at least 13 years old and register within the ArtPrize borders.

Personnel at one of the eight ArtPrize hubs are available to help you get registered.

Why you can and should vote in ArtPrize 2016

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Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

Visit a major ArtPrize venue

Some of the best venues for ArtPrize are the ones with the most exhibits. Be sure to visit some of the larger venues to get a sense of the variety that's on display. Here are some links to some of the more popular venues:

"ArtPrize entries pop up at Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum"

"A look at ArtPrize entries at Meijer Gardens"

Sneak peek at the GRAM's 15 ArtPrize entries"

"Sneak peek at the Women City Club's ArtPrize entries"

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ArtPrize-goers talk with artist Adonna Khare as she continues to work on her piece, Elephants, in the Grand Rapids Art Museum on Wednesday, September 19, 2012.

Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

Meet an ArtPrize artist

ArtPrize gives you the opportunity to meet the artists and discuss their work with them. Most of them will be handing out cards so you remember to vote for their work or share your experience with friends.

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Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck opened a concept restaurant in the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in late 2015. It features a sit-down restaurant and "to-go diner" for those who want to eat on the run.

Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

ArtPrize will make you hungry

Much has changed in Grand Rapids' restaurant scene since ArtPrize 2015. There are 19 new places in town to try when your wandering eyes for art inevitably give way to your grumbling stomach - and 10 more restaurants that are gone for good.

"28 Michigan's Best restaurants to experience during ArtPrize 2016"

"29 Grand Rapids restaurant openings and closings since ArtPrize 2015"

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Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

Hear music on the Blue Bridge

Music and musical performances will play a bigger role in ArtPrize Eight. The organizers are bringing all of the acts and performances to the Blue Bridge, the iconic former railroad bridge that crosses the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids.

ArtPrize musicians take over downtown's Blue Bridge

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Michigan-made feature-length film "The Alchemist Cookbook" will screen on Friday, Sept. 23 at 10 p.m. ArtPrize OnScreen is a four-day film series and competition from Sept. 21 to 24, hosted by ArtPrize in collaboration with Celebration Cinemas and the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office. (Courtesy | ArtPrize )

Jim Harger | jharger@mlive.com

See the ArtPrize Onscreen film festival

ArtPrize OnScreen is a four-day mini film festival hosted by ArtPrize in collaboration with Celebration Cinema and the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office. The festival runs from Sept. 21 to 24 and will show five feature-length independent films and five Michigan-made short films.

ArtPrize OnScreen features independent films, prizes
The multi-day visit comes amid preparation for the resumption of direct flights between Egypt and Russia

A Russian delegation of transport and aviation experts arrived late Tuesday in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada to inspect recently implemented security measures at the city's airport in preparation for resuming direct flights between Russia and Egypt, according to a statement by the civil aviation ministry.

During its visit, the team of eight Russian experts will assess security measures at the airport's departure and arrival halls as well as flight safety procedures, an airport source told Al-Ahram Arabic news website.

A report of the visit will then be submitted to the Russian government, which will decide whether flights will resume.

Russian media had cited a Russian tourism official as saying that flights from Russia to Egypt may be resumed in the second half of October.

The MENA news agency reported that Egypt's civil aviation minister Sherif Fathi is to fly to Moscow Wednesday along with a high-level security delegation to resume talks over the return of Russian flights.

Moscow suspended all civilian passenger flights to Egypt last year over security concerns after the crash of a Russian jet minutes after taking off from the airport at the Egyptian resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh. All 224 people on board were killed in the crash, which was claimed by Islamist militants.

Cairo says investigations into the crash are still underway and that a delegation of Russian investigators is currently cooperating with Egypts general prosecution, which will issue a final report on the cause of the crash.

Britain also halted flights to Sharm Sheikh following the crash, with the suspensions dealing a huge blow to the country's vital tourism industry.

Russian, British and Italian tourists make up more than 50 percent of the total number of tourists that visit Egypt.

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ArtPrize OnScreen.zip

Michigan-made feature-length film "The Alchemist Cookbook" will screen on Friday, Sept. 23 at 10 p.m. ArtPrize OnScreen is a four-day film series and competition from Sept. 21 to 24, hosted by ArtPrize in collaboration with Celebration Cinemas and the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office.

(Courtesy | ArtPrize )

GRAND RAPIDS, MI - As thousands of tourists descend on Grand Rapids to see all that ArtPrize has to offer this year, visitors are invited to take part in a different kind of art form - watching a movie.

ArtPrize OnScreen is a four-day mini film festival hosted by ArtPrize in collaboration with Celebration Cinema and the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office.

The festival runs from Sept. 21 to 24 and will show five feature-length independent films and five Michigan-made short films.

"What's great about independent film is that they really work hard to bring stories to the screen that we might not hear about, from perspectives that we might not see and from storytellers that are often not heard," said Eric Kuiper, director of alternative programming at Celebration Cinema.

It is the second year for ArtPrize OnScreen but the first time that ArtPrize has teamed up with Celebration Cinema. As the producer of the series, Kuiper chose all of the films that will be shown during OnScreen.

"The five films collectively are a really nice snapshot of the variety of films that get clumped together under the banner of independent film," said Kuiper. "Each one has a unique perspective that they bring."

Kuiper paired each feature-length film with a Michigan-made short length film that was picked out of a list of 20 that came from the Open Projector Night series at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA). The Open Projector Night series is a recurring film series hosted by the UICA for filmmakers with ties to Michigan to submit their work to be shown at the art gallery.

Each pair of films will relate to each other in one way, either thematically, with their messages or simply by the genre.

"These (short) films really deserve a platform like this, it feels important to me to set these next to films like 'The Birth of a Nation' or 'The Fits,'" said Kuiper. "The short films and the feature kind of speak to each other and pair well for different reasons."

"The Birth of a Nation," for example, is paired with a short film called "80 to 90 feet." "The Birth of a Nation" is about Nat Turner, a slave and preacher, as he orchestrates a slave uprising. "80 to 90 feet" features Native Americans in Michigan talking about the changes they've seen in the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Kuiper paired the two because the stories they tell are driven by minorities and shine a light on the struggles each of them are facing during the time in which they are set.

On the other hand, "Camp Manna" was paired with "Croissant Man" on the grounds that the two are absurd comedies, said Kuiper.

ArtPrize OnScreen is offered for ArtPrize visitors as an alternative to still art and to those visitors who want to enjoy art in a different format.

"ArtPrize welcomes artists working in any mediums, (including) time-based work," said Jaenell Woods, communications manager for ArtPrize. "Film, music, performances and plays all sit within that category. They're a really important part of ArtPrize. OnScreen offers a film festival-style of highlighting films that are at ArtPrize and bringing highly anticipated narratives to light."

Each of the 10 films, short and feature-length, are eligible for prizes determined by public vote. The winning short film will receive $5,000 from the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office and the winning feature-length film will receive $2,500 from Celebration Cinema.

Tickets are free, but reservations are necessary for seats in the theater. They are available on Celebration Cinema's website. If tickets are sold out, a "rush line" will form outside of the venue 45 minutes prior to the movie screening. 15 minutes before the film, any unfilled seats will be available for those in the rush line.

ArtPrize OnScreen will take place at the Ladies' Literary Club at 41 Sheldon Blvd., next door to the ArtPrize Headquarters. Check out the full schedule below.

ArtPrize OnScreen Schedule

Wednesday, Sept. 21

7:30 p.m.: "The Birth of a Nation"

Preceded by: "80 to 90 feet"

Thursday, Sept. 22

7:30 p.m.: "The Fits"

Preceded by: "Monster, Me"

Friday, Sept. 23

6:30 p.m.: "Author: The JT Leroy Story"

Preceded by: "Beloved"

10 p.m.: "The Alchemist Cookbook"

Preceded by: "Free Pie"

Saturday, Sept. 24

8 p.m.: "Camp Manna"

Preceded by: "Croissant Man"
DEXTER, MI - After the state said it found numerous alcohol violations, The Alley Bar and Grill in Dexter has lost its liquor licenses and is up for sale.

The Alley Bar and Grill in Dexter has sat empty through August into September after the Michigan Liquor Control Commission revoked both of its liquor licenses and removed any alcohol located on the property.

The business at 2830 Baker Road, formerly Dexter's Bowl-N-Bar and Katie's, had its liquor licenses revoked after a Commission penalty hearing on July 28. Business owner Paul Cook was in attendance.

According to a letter sent July 29 to Cook, the Commission stated it was confiscating the Class C and SDM licenses from Dexter's Bowl-N-Bar (doing business as Katie's) as well as any and all alcoholic beverages. This decision came a day after the hearing that detailed three liquor violations within 24-month period.

The three liquor violations occurred within 13 months of each other, according to the state. All involved accusations of selling and serving alcohol to visibly intoxicated employees and guests.

According to the Commission's letter, the state found:

May 10, 2014: A bartender employed by the restaurant was arrested for operating while intoxicated after leaving the establishment around 4 a.m. and found to have a blood alcohol content of 0.248.

September 26, 2014: A patron of the restaurant was arrested for operating while intoxicated, and found to have a blood alcohol content of 0.260.

June 26, 2015: A patron of the restaurant was arrested for operating while intoxicated and found to have a blood alcohol content of 0.236; the bartender who was serving the patron was later administered a preliminary blood test and found to have a blood alcohol content of 0.184.

"The Commission finds that the licensee has failed to demonstrate policies and procedures for prevention of selling and serving intoxicated patrons, and further finds that the Commission has no confidence that the licensee takes these matters seriously or would be able to prevent future violations," the letter stated.

The Alley Bar and Grill is listed for $450,000 through Keller Williams Realty. That includes the building and the property it sits on, but not any of the equipment or supplies inside, said Realtor Jack LeSage, who is representing Cook.

LeSage remembers selling the building and property to Cook about 20 years ago, and said the property was put back on the market a year ago with a price tag of $650,000 with the liquor licenses included.

The price has since dropped to $585,000, then to the current offer of $450,000, without the liquor licenses.

"We've had numerous interested parties," LeSage said, noting that at least three parties are in the process of making or negotiating offers.

Cook could not be reached for comment, and LeSage said he is not sure if his client would decide to appeal his case. Cook has 60 days to appeal, according to Michigan law.

According to the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, the licensing is currently in escrow.

There are no currently pending liquor license applications for the property at 2830 Baker, according to the Michigan Liquor Control website.

Dexter City Council was informed of the status of The Alley Bar and Grill at the Aug. 8 regular meeting by Dexter City Manager Courtney Nicholls, who confirmed the liquor license was revoked.

"I think the report speaks for itself," Nicholls said. "There were definitely several incidents that led up to the revocation."

The Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office had worked with the Michigan Liquor Control Commission and the business owner to address some of the issues, she added, but allege they were unable to achieve compliance as The Alley Bar and Grill.

"Nobody wants to have a vacant building longer than they need to," Nicholls said. "We'd be happy to see it reopen as a restaurant or something different."
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Long Road Distillers announced the release their new 80 proof cherry brandy on Wednesday, September 21.

The spirit was fermented and distilled at Long Road's West Side distillery from 8,000 pounds of tart cherries purchased from Heffron Farms in Belding, according to an announcement on Wednesday, Sept. 21.

"Our goal from the very start was to create world-class spirits from locally sourced ingredients right here in Grand Rapids," said Head Distiller Brian Pribyl. The distillery is headquartered at 537 Leonard Street NW.

Long Road Distillers Cherry Brandy

"We owe a great deal of credit to our suppliers like Heffron Farms and Pilot Malt House for giving us access to the cereal grain and malted grain that we need to produce spirits to our high standards," Pribyl said.

"By using locally sourced ingredients, our line-up of spirits offers a sense of place and terroir, similar to a nice wine,that really highlights all that West Michigan has to offer."

Long Road Cherry Brandy "has the aroma of ripe, dark cherries with hints of mulling spice, cinnamon and pepper," the announcement said.

"The taste is a well-balanced combination of cherry and subtle almond, a result of the cherry pit contributing flavors to the final spirit. A long, smooth finish will delight those sipping the spirit neat, on the rocks, or in a cocktail."

Long Road Distillers was opened in 2015 by owners Jon O'Connor and Kyle Van Strien as the first legal distillery in Grand Rapids that completely manufactures its own product without using rectified spirits.

Heffron Farms of Belding is one of the distillery's largest suppliers, providing it with red winter wheat, corn, rye, and other locally grown produce for the production of spirits and menu items in the restaurant.

From May, 2015 to May, 2016, Long Road processed nearly 300,000 pounds of Heffron Farms grain, tripling the distillery's goals for their first year of production, according to Long Road.
A political solution must be reached between all parties, excluding terrorist groups, to end the Syrian crisis, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said at the United Nations Security Council's crisis meeting on Wednesday in New York.

In his speech in front of the UN Security Council, the Egyptian president stated that there is a necessity to work towards reaching a permanent cease-fire between the fighting parties in Syria, while praising the efforts of Moscow and Washington in attempting to resolve the five-year-old civil war.

President El-Sisi also called on UN envoy Staffan de Mistura to call for another round of talks as soon as possible, adding that the military solution was not the way to end the crisis.

Egypt's vision in resolving the Syrian conflict "is based on two major points; to keep the unity of Syria without destroying the states institutions, and supporting the legitimate aspirations of Syrian people to rebuild their country through a political solution," El-Sisi said, adding that a political solution should satisfy all Syrians.

The Egyptian president stated that Cairo can play a role in the Syrian negotiations as it enjoys good relations with the parties involved in the conflict.

President El-Sisi is currently attending the 71st UN General Assembly in New York.

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Four medics were killed and a nurse critically wounded when an air strike hit a clinic in a village near Syria's second city Aleppo late Tuesday, the aid group that runs it said.

The four staff of the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organisations were in two ambulances that had been called to the clinic to take some patients for more specialised treatment, the group said.

The clinic in the village of Khan Tuman was completely levelled and more dead were feared to be buried under the rubble, the group added.

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An attacker apparently armed with a knife tried to enter the Israeli Embassy in Turkey on Wednesday before being shot and slightly wounded by Turkish security officials, an Israeli official said.

Emmanuel Nahshon told The Associated Press that all Israeli Embassy staff were safe and the attacker was captured.

"The attacker was wounded before he reached the embassy," Nashon said in a statement in Jerusalem.

"A person approached the embassy with a knife. He was lightly wounded by a local security man in the leg," he said.

He said it took place in the "outer perimeter" of the embassy.

Nahshon emphasized that at this stage details were hazy and there still "isn't a clear picture" of what happened.

Police blocked roads leading to the heavily protected embassy building. Turkish media reports said staff at the embassy were moved to a shelter.

Turkey's private NTV television and other media reports said the man walked past the embassy building several times, raising suspicion, before trying to enter the building.

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Three Palestinians imprisoned by Israel without trial agreed on Wednesday to end more than two months of hunger strike after dates were set for their release, a Palestinian NGO said.

Brothers Mohammed, 25, and Mahmud Balbul, 23, as well as 19-year-old Malek al-Qadi "suspended their hunger strikes following an agreement which sets an end to their detention and dates for their release," the Ramallah-based Palestinian Prisoners Club said.

The Palestinian Authority said that Al-Qadi would be freed on Thursday and the Balbul brothers on December 8.

The brothers were arrested in June and have been refusing to eat for 78 days.

Al-Qadi was detained in June and has been fasting for 70 days.

Their hunger strikes were in protest against their internment under Israel's controversial administrative detention law, which allows suspects to be held for renewable six-month periods without being charged.

Al-Qadi's 16-year-old sister Umaya told AFP recently that her brother faced "imminent death."

Several Palestinian internees have staged hunger strikes in recent months. All called off their protests after being given reassurances that their detention would not be renewed.

The UN and Palestinian prisoners' rights groups say that the Israeli military court system in place in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is increasingly imposing administrative detention.

There are around 7,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, of whom about 700 are under administrative detention.

"This is the highest number of administrative detainees at a given time since early 2008," a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said last month.

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Almost 48 hours after a deadly attack on an aid convoy in Syria that killed about 20 civilians, Russia still furiously denies that its jets or Syrian regime planes were responsible.

Here is what we know about Monday's attack that forced the United Nations to suspend its aid deliveries inside the war-torn country:

Trucks carrying food and medical equipment from the United Nations and other agencies were unloading aid into a warehouse in Orum al-Kubra, a town in Aleppo province.

Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA) in Geneva, said: "Every single partner or party to the conflict" was informed in advance about the delivery.

According to the Red Cross, the first report that the trucks and warehouse had been hit came at 8:15 pm (1715 GMT), several hours after the Syrian army had declared an end to a week-long partial ceasefire.

It said "around 20 civilians" had been killed, among them volunteers, as well as Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) staffer Omar Barakat.

Pictures of the convoy published on Twitter by SARC showed several of the trucks draped with blue flags from UNICEF, the UN children's agency.

The raids destroyed at least 18 of the 31 vehicles, the warehouse and much of the aid, the Red Cross said.

The trucks were carrying sanitation and nutritional supplies for 50,000 people, and nine tonnes of medical aid, including antibiotics and surgical materials, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor group, reported Monday night that an air strike had hit the trucks, with a Red Cross spokesman also referring to an air strike.

Although not confirmed, it meant that either Russian or Syrian aircraft were strongly suspected of being responsible as neither opposition groups nor jihadist groups have air power.

Speaking to AFP, an unnamed US official said Washington believed a Russian plane was responsible, saying two Russian SU-24 warplanes had been operating in the area.

"We have a very clear picture of what is going on in the skies over Syria," the official said.

"The reported strike occurred when a Russian plane was directly overhead."

But both Russia and Syria have denied responsibility for the attack, with Moscow furious at the "unsubstantiated, hasty accusations" from the United States.

The Russian military has instead appeared to cast doubt on whether an attack took place, saying footage from activists at the scene showed damage to the vehicles that did not appear to be caused by an air strike or other munitions.

Russia said its drones had tracked the convoy until it successfully delivered its load, hours before the attack, saying a "fire" that destroyed the trucks which "strangely" coincided with a jihadist attack in the area.

But Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said it was impossible for Moscow to draw any conclusions from amateur video of the incident and only an investigation "on the ground" could determine what destroyed the convoy.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at the United Nations, said Russia's claims were "contradicted by public information."

Moscow later released drone footage it said showed a vehicle towing a mortar next to the aid convoy, and the Russian military has also claimed a US-led coalition Predator drone was above the area of the convoy attack -- a claim the Pentagon quickly denied.

Russia's military did announce its planes had destroyed 16 rebel vehicles elsewhere around Aleppo as it helped Syrian forces beat back a jihadist attack on Monday evening.

On Tuesday, the Red Cross issued a statement with slightly-altered language which referred to an "attack" on the convoy, and not specifically an air strike.

The main Syrian opposition group said Tuesday it was certain that either Syrian or Russian planes were responsible.

"No one else has aircraft in that area," said leader Riad Hijab in New York.

Hijab said a member of his High Negotiations Committee (HNC) who was escorting the convoy, had provided him with photographs of the attack that he described as "very precise."

International Committee of the Red Cross head Peter Maurer said an investigation was needed into a "flagrant violation of international humanitarian law."

Laerke said the UN had suspended convoy movements for security reasons, adding that future aid deliveries would depend on a "further assessment of the security situation."

But the Red Cross has not paused deliveries, spokesman Benoit Carpentier told AFP.

Stalled aid deliveries have wreaked havoc across Syria, with the UN, the Red Cross and others repeatedly demanding unhindered access to civilians in desperate need of life-saving supplies.

Even before the strikes, some 40 UN trucks carrying relief supplies destined for rebel-held east Aleppo had remained stuck in a customs zone between the Turkish and Syrian borders since early last week.

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The Ministry of Hotels and Tourism yesterday dismissed a local news report that it had instructed some key regional governments to stop the development of any new hotels.





According to a September 20 article published in the Global New Light of Myanmar, the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism had put a ban on construction of new hotels in Yangon, Mandalay, Taunggyi, Nyaung Shwe and Kalaw, due to concerns over a supply glut of accommodation in those regions.The story, which did not name a source, said that the ministry would hold a ban on new developments depending on supply and demand.

However, U Myo Myint, director of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, said yesterday that the ministry had asked regional governments to weigh up demand for new accommodation before granting project approvals, but that no directive banning new develops had been issued.

We have not prevented new developments, he said. We just said to analyse the situation carefully before granting permission.

Ensuring building standards were applied were also part of the conversation with regional governments, he added. Singapore, a hot spot for foreign firms to structure their investments while Myanmar is under sanctions, is recorded as the largest international source of foreign investment in the hotel industry, accounting for over US$ 1.6 billion since 1989, according to U Myo Myint.

This is followed by Thailand with more than $445 million and Vietnam, which has invested about $440 million into the same period, he added.

Translation by San Layy
The government held a successful inaugural Treasury bond auction yesterday, selling K120 billion to three private commercial banks and another K80 billion to a state-owned lender.





The sale was for K200 billion (US$162 million) of new bonds in an existing Treasury note that matures in May 2018. The government set K80 billion aside for the largest state-owned lender Myanma Economic Bank, and offered K120 billion to other commercial banks.

Daw Thin Thin Su, an official at the governments Debt Management Office, said that AYA Bank, Myawaddy Bank and CB Bank had purchased the K120 billion. The three lenders made eight successful bids between them, and for the first time ever, private bank bids determined the yield on a government bond.

The weighted average yield from the three banks bids was 8.843 percent, which determined the rate at which MEB was allowed to buy its share of the Treasury bond. AYA Bank managing director U Phyo Aung would not comment on the banks purchase of bonds, but said that in general the commercial banks were somewhat satisfied with the yield.

Previous governments simply fixed the yield on their Treasury bond sales at levels most banks found unattractive. This in turn led to weak demand from commercial banks, and prompted the government to rely more on borrowing more from the Central Bank.

U Maung Maung Win, deputy minister at the Ministry of Planning and Finance, said the auction had been a success and offered a good investment opportunity for lenders.

Its a good yield, he said. The [commercial bank] savings deposit rate is 8pc, so its more than that and with very little risk.





Daw Thin Thin Su said she expected more banks and more bids in forthcoming auctions based on the success of the inaugural sale.

There were 22 unsuccessful bids in the auction amounting to K86 billion at yields ranging from 8.899pc to 11pc.

The next Treasury bond auction will be held next month, and Daw Thin Thin Su said the government had yet to decide on the size and maturity.
Agriculture accounts for almost one-third of Myanmars GDP and growth in the sector is key to the countrys economic development. But decades of mismanagement mean providing the necessary infrastructure, financing and organisational reform will be a herculean task, according to international and local experts.





There are a lot of constraints, Daw Thandar Kyi, director at the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation, said at a panel discussion at the annual Euromoney Conference on September 14. These range from what she called micro-level instability  the logistical and financial challenges faced by individual farmers  all the way up to funding for research and development (R&D).

In terms of public expenditure, there is only a limited budget for any one sector given the overall government budget deficit, she said. Some 70 to 80 percent of the budget allocated to the agricultural sector goes to irrigation, and very little to extension services like education and R&D, she said.

Speaking on the conference sidelines, deputy minister U Tun Win told The Myanmar Times that education and R&D have received around 1pc and 0.1pc of the agriculture budget respectively in recent years.

Irrigation is key for production, but developing the agricultural sector requires a much broader approach. In the past we cared about productivity, but now it isnt just about that, Daw Thandar Kyi told delegates. The sector is in desperate need of modernisation, and more focus on agri-business and moving production up the value chain, she said.

[In the past] the country forced the farmers to increase yields but failed to connect them [to the] market, said U Tun Win. The result has been that farmers receive a much smaller share of agricultural profits than traders and middle-men.

The farm gate prices and the free on board [FOB] prices differ by as much as 80pc, he said. Farm gate prices reflect the value of an agricultural product when it leaves the farm, while FOB is the value when the goods are finally transferred to the end buyer. U Tun Win used the example of rice, where the rice trader sells to buyers at a price around 80pc higher than what they paid the farmers.





The farmers will never make money given the low paddy prices at harvest, and the economy will not grow, he said. Forcing farmers to be production-oriented while forgetting about supporting [progress up through] the value chain with affordable infrastructure services has been a problem for the last 50 years.

Despite the focus on productivity, Myanmars production levels across variouos crops are still volatile and lower than neighouring peers, said Daw Thandar Kyi. U Tun Win said efforts to create a regular and sustainable flow of agricultural exports had failed, leading to an inability to commit to export quotas with other countries.

Fellow panelist Vicky Bowman, director of the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, told conference delegates one key problem is that previous governments have never listened to the voices of the producers, and the rest of the voices in the market.

They only listen to the voices of the domestic traders, she said. Agricultural experts tell me that basically nothing changed in the 25 years in agriculture.

The new government needs to listen to smallholder producers as well as to brokers and buyers, she said. Domestic and international agricultural companies and foreign buyers should also be consulted to ascertain which products are in demand, Ms Bowman added.

This should help farmers target more popular and profitable crops for export.

If the country continues increasing productivity without increasing profitability it may have higher output but [farmers] wont have higher incomes and you wont get economic development, said Kenneth Kyaw Shein, group chief executive officer at Prime Holdings, on the same panel.

Californias agricultural production in 2012 measured in farm gate prices prices was US$32 billion, while Thailand's was $25 billion in the same year, he said.

In 2012 California produced $500 million in carrots and $1.2 billion in tomatoes, these two high value crops alone surpassing Myanmar's exports of $1.5 billion or $1.6 billion in beans and rice, he added.

The point here is that you need to look at primary production and the [whole] agricultural sector based on the market, Mr Kyaw Shein said. The solution to agricultural and economic development is to look at what we are producing and for which market.

One example would be looking at Indonesian demand for potatoes and onions, which Myanmar has the climate to grow, he said.

We have a comparative advantage [for certain products], he said. We should be looking at various agronomic zones and focusing on various specific crops mixes in each of these zones. It should not be just rice everywhere.

Mr Kyaw Shein pointed out that Myanmar has comparative advantage in climate, labour and productive land. But in order for Myanmars agricultural sector to meet its potential, which he estimates at $30 billion annually, there must be investment in downstream post-harvest processing such as cold storage and cold chains.

The downstream process is where higher value-added products  potato chips and other processed snacks  can be produced. But this requires the infrastructure to connect the farmer with the market, he added.

Mr Kyaw Shein said increasing primary production of high-value crops at standards compliant with international markets will help bring more investment into downstream processing.

We have an agricultural value chain but part of it either doesnt function very well or isnt functioning at all, Ewan Lamont, chief operating officer at Myanmar Awba Group, told the audience.

But that also means investors have huge opportunities in Myanmar, although the key issue will be making sure that investment allows smallholder famers to participate in the rural economy, he said.

Irresponsible investments in agriculture, however, have created a negative view of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the sector. Firms in some countries have planted crops unsuitable for the local soil or have farmed unsustainably.

Ms Bowman said that international and local NGOs and research institutions should raise concerns about the risks of more FDI. At the moment we hear that FDI in the sector is very small, she said. So I think it is really important for foreign investors who want to invest to be very open and transparent about what they are doing.

Looking at the competitiveness of Myanmar, one sector [that has] everything going for it is agriculture, said Vikram Kumar, country manager for the International Finance Corporation in Myanmar. But to make it a competitive part of the economy you need competitiveness infrastructure and services that do not exist in Myanmar today, Mr Kumar said.

Although there are tremendous opportunities for agriculture, the challenge is how to create the necessary infrastructure and provide financial services over a short period of time with limited government resources, he added.

Without them the sector cannot be competitive, Mr Kumar said.

This article has been updated to correct that Mr Kyaw Shein's estimate of Myanmar's annual agricultural sector potential is US$30 billion, not $3 billion. The Myanmar Times regrets the error.
It is our first experience as a newborn, being swaddled. It is the mark of death, covering the face of the recently departed. Our lives are encompassed by white cloth.





Short or long, the span of our lives, and all the colours they contain, stretches out between those two starched squares.

Artist Phyoe Kyis solo exhibition The White Cloth, held from September 17 to October 1 at Myanm/Art in downtown Yangon, examines this phenomenon.

He presents five kinds of installations: four-sentence poems; fabrics folded, coiled and rolled; deconstruction of language in mixed media; videos; and pop art creations featuring him and his mother.

A man is standing on the water. That man standing on the water is me. A fish is standing on the water. A fish is hiding in the air. The sentences are printed on white cloths hung around the entrance of the show.

In the first sentence, I describe a man standing on the water. Then I describe more specifically that man is me, the artist. Then I change me to a fish. But there is no fish standing on the water. The last sentence means that that fish will die, said the artist.





Phyoe Kyi, 39, transformed the Bagan period poem mya kan using only Myanmar vowels, with each vowel recorded and played.

I would like to summon up the 12 vowels of the Myanmar language. First I chose to use the childs mnemonic ma ma wa wa hta hta ka. However, then I chose mya kan, one of the first poems we studied in school, he said.

Gallery founder Nathalie Johnston said, All the artworks of Phyoe Kyi are simple in lines and installation, though they have very complex meanings. White cloth represents birth and death. It is the cycle of life. Then he expands the concept to reflect the absence of colours, how it relates to his memory. Thats kind of confusing and really interesting.

One of his artworks in the exhibition, named The Route, concerns his mother and his portraits, plus a creation resembling pop art on Shan paper.

Silk screen on Shan home-made paper is his method for portraying his relationship with mother. He was born in Taunggyi, Shan State, and has lived alone with her for the past 30 years, said Johnston.

This is the first exhibition using Myanmar-language text here at Myanm/Art. The artist plays with language. Its almost like you need to be able to speak and read Myanmar to understand. All these poems are vowels, not consonants or full words. I think its an insiders way of looking at art. For example: Myanmar art for Myanmar people, she added.

Visitor Ei Phyu Shane said, A white cloth is nothing special. It could suggest a girl sewing a shirt. But viewed through the eyes of an artist, a mere cloth can stimulate our feelings.

Phyoe Kyi has contributed to 20 exhibitions, including in Thailand, Germany, Japan and Bangladesh, as well as in Myanmar.

Myanm/Art Gallery is open every day except Monday from 11am to 7pm. The gallery is at 98 Bogalay Zay Street, Botahtaung township, Yangon.
Nearly 250 school children displaced by ongoing fighting in Kayin State are continuing their education in makeshift classrooms, without desks, textbooks or whiteboards.





The teachers from village schools around the Mae Tha Wor area are doing what they can to ensure the clashes do not disrupt the school year. So the students gather on the floors of the Myaing Gyi Nguu monastery where over 3800 civilians are taking shelter.

Our teaching plan is to not stop the academic year because of the ongoing battle, said Ko Nay Lin Htet, deputy officer of Hlaingbwe townships General Administrative Office.

The Tatmadaw and an aligned Border Guard Force have been engaged in hostilities against a splinter faction of the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) since August 28.

On September 14, the State Education Office instructed the teachers to go ahead with their lesson plans at the temporary shelter.

Among the families taking refuge at the monastery, there are 233 primary school children and 12 secondary school students from 11 schools in the fighting-affected area. Around 30 teachers came along with the families, according to Ko Myint Aung, a local volunteer in Hpa-an township.

None of the classrooms are fully equipped, and the students from all grade levels have been grouped together.

Most of the makeshift classrooms do not have chairs. The children are sitting and writing on the floor. There are not enough whiteboards, said Ko Myint Aung.





The displaced families are reliant on food and medical supplies donated by the Ministry of Social Welfare Relief and Resettlement and by area residents. According to local aid volunteers, mosquito nets are needed.

A total of 3874 people from 22 villages  1880 male and 1994 female  are staying at the Myaing Gyi Nguu monastery.
My husband forced me to have sex when I was pregnant. He threatened to beat me if I refused. He put me through hell, said the woman.





Daw Lu Bu, a case manager at the Metta Foundation, an organisation combating gender-based violence (GBV), was able to help the woman. She suffered so much, she didnt have the strength to continue her marriage. We asked the village elders to help her get a divorce. Now shes living with her two children in a safe place. The community supported her efforts to escape from her abusive husband.

Sexual violence can occur even in a marriage, says Daw Lum Nai. She was speaking at a recent gender-based violence awareness event at the Mainar IDP camp in Waingmaw township, Kachin State.

Gender-based violence can include physical, mental or social abuse, attempted or threatened with some type of force  including coercion, manipulation, deception, cultural expectations, weapons or economic circumstances, she told the assembled crowd.

In conflict-affected Kachin State, the Metta Foundation is fighting gender-based violence with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). They have established eight centres where IDP girls and women can access GBV experts for advice in government- and non-government zones of Waingmaw township.

Domestic violence and trafficking are the worst forms of GBV in our area. We raise awareness by training, running an empowerment program for girls and women to show that GBV is preventable. We provide support services for the survivors, said coordinator Daw Hkawng Nan.

Gender-based violence happens behind closed doors. Shame and social pressures keep women from speaking out. But the seeds of change are being sown.





In the Nantsanyam camp, the IDPs express their feelings through dance and song.

Ko Thaung Lay, 39, who attended the September 14 training program, told The Myanmar Times, This is the first time Ive come. They told me that partners in a marriage should respect each other. A wife is not her husbands property, and her consent is essential.

He added, The training helps to build peace within the household and the family. Ive learned that sharing household duties is also essential to build a happy marriage, even though the traditional view is that carrying water or washing clothes is a womans job. Men are ashamed to do it.

The foundation started its GBV awareness programs here in 2014, with four staff and two male volunteers in each centre at 11 IDP camps in Waingmaw township.

Most of the funding for UNFPAs GBV activities comes from donor countries that take a special interest in the promotion of gender equality and womens empowerment in Myanmar. The main donors are Australia, Finland, Italy, Sweden and the UK, said Yenny Gamming, a media and communication specialist with UNFPA Myanmar.

Initially, the program was for females only. But later the women said mens awareness should be raised too. Now men also participate in the courses, and male volunteers join the fight against gender-based violence.

Ko Zau Seng Naw, 21, who lives at the Myoma IDP camp, said, Ive been working as a volunteer for about four months. We discuss GBV in our society. We listened to the mens opinions about gender equality and engaged with the problem of violence in the community. Im so happy when my job enables me to make a difference.

Daw Aye Than, who has lived in the Waingmaw camp for five years, said, Its about opening peoples minds. Many people who were willing to go to the training say theyve found ways to solve their problems. The women know men dont have the right to beat their wives when theyre drunk.

The program explains what gender-based violence is, and how to prevent and survive it, said coordinator Daw Hkawng Nan. We encouraged the women to come to us for solutions, and to speak to us in confidence. I dont discuss their cases even with the centre manager.

Now the community wants the trainers to work not just with the IDPs but also with the larger community. Local residents and village heads want training in womens empowerment, said U Aung Htwe, a male volunteer at Nantsamyam IDP camp.

There are few laws to support efforts to fight gender-based violence, however.

Daw Seng Hkham, the GBV coordinator of Metta Foundation, said, Theres no special law against gender-based violence. We need prevention policies and programs that include protection, services and justice support for survivors of violence.

A police officer attached to the GBV training said the police needed more female officers and more trained officers to handle these cases. Response services should be put in place to ensure that women have access to justice, she said.

This article as been updated to correct the spelling of Metta Foundation. The Myanmar Times regrets the error.
Police have uncovered more than 6.2 million tablets of yaba at a factory owned by a local construction materials firm in Maungdaw township, Rakhine.





The record September 19 seizure follows the discovery of nearly 700,000 tablets at the same factory two days earlier.

Sacks of pills were found hidden throughout the companys compound among piles of bricks and in the back of trucks, where they had been covered with sand.

Nearly 7 million tablets, with an estimated street value of K14 billion, were seized during the two raids.

The owner of the factory, a man from East Myoma ward in Maungdaw township, has not yet been apprehended by police. He is believed to have fled.

Police were kept busy on the night of September 19, later discovering another 682,500 tablets in an electrical appliances shop in the nearby Lathar village. The pills were found in an empty pit which had been dug for future use as a latrine.

Police say that the drugs are being transported to other countries through Maungdaw, which is close to Myanmars border with Bangladesh.





In September alone, more than 8 million amphetamine tablets have been seized in Maungdaw, with an estimate worth of more than K16 billion.

Translation by Zar Zar Soe and Khine Thazin Han
In an attempt to preemptively stave-off protests outside a coming hearing, Rakhine State officials yesterday warned the defendants supporters that they will be arrested and charged should they assemble outside the court.





The Rakhine State Ministry for Border Affairs and Security held a press conference yesterday addressing defamation charges filed against an Arakan Liberation Party communications officer.

Colonel Htein Lin, state minister for Border Affairs and Security, said that the detainees arrest was not forced by the Tatmadaw, who had filed charges against the officer in relation to a report detailing accusations of forced portering.

U Khine Myo Tun was arrested on July 25 for incitement and defamation under sections 505(b) and (c) of the penal code.

Col Htein Lin warned the defendants supporters that they will be charged in accordance with the Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Law if they protest the September 26 hearing without obtaining prior permission.

Legally, they will need permission from police. And if they do not apply for permission in accordance with the Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession law, they may be sued, he said.

The ALP, an ethnic armed group, is under pressure to retract its allegations of forced portering and claims that the Tatmadaw had committed war crimes and violated the Geneva Convention. Col Htein Lin said if the group agrees to retract the statement, the Tatmadaw will reconsider the case.

He declined to answer whether that meant the ALP communications officer would be released.





During a meeting between the ALP and the border affairs ministry in June, Col Htein Lin had made an initial request that the offending statement be withdrawn or amended. However, the ALP has continued to not comply and U Khine Myo Htun was arrested.

A hearing in the case is scheduled for September 26.
A research team is conducting a nine-month survey to determine the push and pull factors of migration from Myanmar.





The research will take place in Mandalay and Ayeyarwady regions as well as in Rakhine and Shan states.

We hope to find out where people migrate to, how much they can earn, whether their migration really benefits their families, and who takes responsibility for their family duties while they are away, said Michiko Ito, program manager at the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The IOM is conducting the study, along with the Metta Development Foundation, the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population, and the University of Sussex.

The research will centre on rural development and poverty alleviation. It will consider migration from the perspective of the migrant, their family and society as a whole.

[People] migrate because they want their lives to be better. But they still face many difficulties. Thats why we want to give them information which can show them which form of migration can provide a better life for them, said Ms Ito.

The research will entail both quantitative and qualitative data collection and will be divided into two stages.

The first stage will be conducted from November to December of this year, with the second stage in May and June of next year.





The main difficulty for us is transportation. Its very difficult to travel between villages. Our job will require us to travel all around the country. Also, in Shan State, there are a number of different ethnicities and different languages, Ms Ito said.

In a previous study, the International Labour Organisation found that 3.9 percent of Myanmar nationals are migrant workers who go abroad for work.

Translation by Zar Zar Soe
US Ambassador to Myanmar Scot Marciel yesterday defended the decision to purge the sanctions list, referring to the embargoes as no longer politically expedient and a constraint on trade between the two countries.





The cost of maintaining sanctions is greater than that of easing the sanctions, he said, adding that the decision had been thoroughly weighed.

US President Barack Obama made the surprising announcement last week that nearly all remaining sanctions on Myanmar would be lifted soon.

The US has imposed economic sanctions against Myanmar for nearly 20 years. The Obama administration began to unravel the blacklist starting in 2012.

But the emergency order underpinning the vast remainder of the sanctions has been renewed annually, including in May. Mr Obama pledged on September 14 to lift the order.

Maintaining economic sanctions against Myanmar has been a high cost endeavour, Mr Marciel said, adding that the embargoes were imposed in order to support the countrys democratic transition while it was under the brutal dictatorship of a then-military regime.

The presence of economic sanction has discouraged investments and trade [between the two countries], he said.

He was unable to elucidate a timeline for the erasure of the US Treasury Departments Specially Designated Nationals list. The SDN list includes individuals and businesses that were formerly considered by the government of the United States as slowing and thwarting democratic progress.





All of the 104 SDNs [individuals and companies] will be off the list when the sanctions are lifted, Mr Marciel said. But drug kingpins will remain.

Elaborating the US governments approach to the democratically elected government, Mr Marciel said the fundamental policy of US engagement with Myanmar will not change.

Specific tools will change, he said.

Tools such as GSP [Generalized System of Preferences] are more helpful and effective now than the tool of sanctions, he said.

He added that the shift will support broad-based economic growth, which in turn will fuel job creation in the country.

However, fostering the bilateral relationship does not yet mean a change in military-to-military ties.

We are taking a cautious, careful approach to the military-to-military relationship, he said.

Rights groups responded to the sanctions announcement by slamming the US government as capitulating political leverage in favour of business interests.

The US clearly wants to be able to invest and compete in Myanmars market of human and natural resources and benefit strategically with a strong economic partnership. They fear that restricting investment through sanctions and reporting requirements will put them at a competitive disadvantage in the region and jeopardise the Pivot to Asia, said Daniel Aguirre, a legal adviser based in Myanmar with the International Commission of Jurists.

Transparency watchdog Global Witness has called for new safeguards to be put in place on the notorious and abusive jade and gems industries so that the sanctions removal does not further line the pockets of Myanmars military elite.

Mr Marciel countered that his government will continue to encourage transparent and accountable investment in Myanmar.

He added that the Myanmar government still has much work ahead of it in promoting human rights, rule of law and peace and national reconciliation, as well as in fighting the illegal narcotics trade and resolving the situation in Rakhine State.
Some 60 schools and universities in eastern Canada were evacuated Wednesday over a series of bomb threats, including one received by police, that appeared to have been bogus.

No bombs were found, but administrators said the schools would remain closed throughout the day as police conducted another sweep of the schools, with classes expected to resume in the morning.

Authorities said they are investigating possible links between the threats, as well as to another that targeted at least one school in the United States.

"At this point, we don't know who is responsible for the threats," Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Kevin Bailey told a press conference.

He said the threats were received by fax machine. "The threat said there was a bomb in a school or a number of schools that would detonate today," Bailey said.

So far, searches had uncovered nothing suspicious, he said. "If nothing is found, I'll be satisfied that the threat was a hoax."

Earlier, the RCMP announced in a statement that all Prince Edward Island schools were being evacuated "due to a potential threat."

Students at all primary and secondary schools across the Atlantic island province were taken to designated safe locations, federal police said, with parents anxiously awaiting information about where to pick up their children.

In Nova Scotia, meanwhile, police were probing an anonymous bomb threat against three university campuses in the province.

The campuses of Nova Scotia Community College in Halifax and in Sydney were shuttered after local police received the threat, at about 7:50 am local time (1050 GMT).

Cape Breton University was also evacuated.

The US school or schools possibly also targeted were not identified by Canadian authorities.

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Health officials in Sittwe are inoculating tens of thousands of children aged from nine months to 15 years amid an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis.





Doctors are calling on families to vaccinate their children against the deadly virus before the drive ends on September 26.

We intend to inoculate more than 80,000 children from Sittwe township over the course of 10 days. We consider Sittwe a priority area for vaccination because the virus has widely occurred here. We will inoculate children in other townships next year, said Dr Kyi Kyi Thar, head of the township Department of Public Health in Sittwe.

Japanese encephalitis is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by mosquitoes which breed in water pools and flooded rice fields, and pick up the virus from pigs and water birds. The disease does not spread from person to person.

So far this year, 45 cases of Japanese encephalitis in children have been reported in Rakhine State, resulting in six deaths. Cases have been reported in four of the states townships  Sittwe, Ponnagyun, Pauktaw and Kyauktaw. However, the vaccine drive will take place only in Sittwe as the health department does not have enough jabs to go around, and the state capital has the highest population density, according to Dr Thaung Hlaing, chief officer of public health in Rakhine.

The health department has set aside 33,000 vaccinations for minors in IDP camps in Sittwe.

Most infected people show no symptoms, but among those who do experience symptoms, the disease can be serious, with fever, neck stiffness, seizures and coma. The disease can prove fatal if left untreated. About one in four victims dies and up to 50 percent of survivors may be left with a permanent disability such as paralysis, deafness and intellectual impairment.





In 2016, five of the seven children who contracted Japanese encephalitis in Sittwe have been discharged from hospital but have not regained their ability to speak, Dr Kyi Kyi Thar said.

Rakhine States Department of Public Health urged the public to cooperate with medical officers administering the vaccines and to abide by public health education tips.

Any occurrence of the disease in humans as well as any deaths or disease in domestic pigs should be reported to the relevant officials as early as possible.
Police are to crack down on illegally imported chainsaws in an effort to stanch deforestation. Environmental conservation minister U Ohn Win told parliament on September 19 that state and regional governments have been instructed to exert greater control over the import and sale of chainsaws.





The minister was responding to a question from Amyotha Hluttaw MP U Kyaw Kyaw (ANP; Rakhine 4), who had asked whether there was a plan to control chainsaw use as the government struggles to enforce a logging ban.

Chainsaws can easily be dismantled and carried, they are cheap and they have been smuggled across the border. They can be imported with only an import licence from the Directorate of Trade and can be found on sale in villages near reserve forest areas and protected forest areas. There should be more effective control measures, said the minister.

The government said the Directorate of Trade issued import licences for chainsaws only with the permission of the Department of Forestry. Now the Ministry of Commerce was getting involved in the sale and distribution of the saws, in collaboration with Nay Pyi Taw Council and state and regional governments.

Last June, the Department of Forestry had sought closer cooperation from the other government departments concerned when carrying out its monthly inspections.

Since 2013, officials have seized 716 illegal chainsaws.

In the same hluttaw session, MPs were told that nearly 1000 people, including 176 foreigners, have been arrested over the past five years for illegal logging in Kachin State alone.

Minister U Ohn Win said that a special force comprising Kachin State officials, the police and the Tatmadaw were tracking down suspects along the Chinese border. Last week, the Pyithu Hluttaw was told that 95 percent of Myanmars timber export was comprised of illegal timber smuggled over the border to Yunnan province.





According to the minister, the remote Kachin border area is dominated by regional militias which makes it hard to control.

The minister told MPs that since 2011, the authorities had seized 861 local residents and 176 foreigners, 158 vehicles and 26,233 tonnes of illegal teak. Between April and August this year, 1940 tonnes of teak and 104 vehicles had been seized, and 117 local residents arrested.

The export of raw timber logs was banned starting from April 2014 to preserve forest resources and to reduce illegal logging.

In May, the government announced that teak and hardwood logging would be suspended in 2016-17, and logging would be permitted only by the Myanmar Timber Enterprise.

There are no authorised trading posts in the area. Any vehicle found carrying teak is engaged smuggling, and we will take action accordingly, U Ohn Win said

Translation by Win Thaw Tar, San Layy and Khine Thazin Han
Police are taking extra precautions to stem the tide of narcotics into the nations capital, an official from the Nay Pyi Taw Region Police Force said. The pledge was made following the seizure of hundreds of illegal stimulant tablets from a taxi outside of civil servant housing on September 16.





Anti-narcotic task forces are particularly focusing on Nay Pyi Taws border areas near Mandalay Region and Shan State, according to Police Colonel Zaw Khin Aung.

We are conducting operations to stop the inflow of drugs which mostly enter from the north and northeast of Nay Pyi Taw. We are working as hard as we can to stop drugs from entering Nay Pyi Taw from these places, the police colonel said.

Anti-narcotics operations are being undertaken in all townships across Nay Pyi Taw as well as in the neighbouring townships of Pyimana and Lewe.

Earlier this month, police established a pilot checkpoint scheme in six wards and villages of Pyinmana township, with the aim of later extending it.

A number of individuals were arrested and drugs were seized in 13 anti-narcotics operations carried out in the capital this August.

It is quite difficult to crack these narcotics cases, as by their nature, they are very secretive. We have to invest a lot of time in the investigation before we can undertake the arrests, said Pol Col Zaw Khin Aung.

But we have been able to conduct more seizures than in the past and have successfully tracked [the drugs] back to the sources.





Police hope to eventually make Nay Pyi Taw a narcotics-free zone, though they say that anti-drug operations require significant effort and resources given the level of secrecy with which drug dealers operate.

Pol Col Zaw Khin Aung was confident of the polices future success, stating that the information gained from each arrest makes it easier to uncover other drug-related activities.

Translation by Emoon
The Amyotha Hluttaw approved an amended Civil Service Law in line with recommendations from the upper houses Bill Committee at a parliamentary session yesterday, adding a provision intended to encourage a more merit-based system.





We added an addendum to the law and made some other changes also, Amyotha Hluttaw MP and Bill Committee member Daw Nwe Nwe Aung (NLD; Mon 2) told members of the media.

Sub-section (a) has been added to the original Section 24 of the legislation, with the addendum stating, Dependant on ability and high performance, civil servants will be awarded promotions with the recommendation of the relevant panel on ability adjudication.

Daw Nwe Nwe Aung touted the change as a win for civil servants who otherwise might struggle to advance professionally due to institutional barriers.

In the past, civil servants have had to wait their turn to gain promotion for a long time, she said. Sometimes though, a civil servant is pensioned off and his job given to another person who comes into the pensioners place as an expert. So [in those cases], the civil servants under [the pensioner] cannot gain promotion even though they have abilities.

Civil servants have recently protested the lack of perceived promotion opportunities through rainbow ribbon campaigns. The colour-coded movement takes aim against the militarisation of ministries and government departments, protesting the assignment of retired military personnel to the public sector instead of advancing career civil servants.

Most of the upper houses other amendments to the Civil Servant Law concerned minor changes to the legislations wording.

Daw Nwe Nwe Aung yesterday also explained the reasoning behind the Bill Committees decision to leave unchanged a clause excluding soldiers and members of the police force from the laws remit.





The bills Section 2, sub-section [e] says, [For the purposes of this law], soldiers and police forces shall not be included in the definition of the word civil servant. We have seen a lot of controversy over it. People have asked, Arent soldiers and police forces civil servants?

Actually, soldiers and police forces are civil servants, she acknowledged, while adding that both have separate laws pertaining to their respective professions and so are not included in the Civil Service Law.

The amended legislation will be sent to the Pyithu Hluttaw for further consideration.

Translation by Win Thaw Tar
Swift backlash against a compensation scheme brokered by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission in the case of three girls tortured for years as housemaids in Yangons Kyauktada township has prompted police to pursue legal action against the accused.





Police Captain Myo Thein from the Yangon Region anti-human trafficking unit told The Myanmar Times yesterday that his unit had been alerted to the case via social media, after local news outlet Myanmar Now first reported on it. An investigation has been opened under anti-human trafficking legislation, he added.

Myanmar Now, whose chief correspondent U Swe Win said he had filed a report on the abuse with Kyauktada township police months ago but saw no action taken, initially reported that there were two victims of the abuse, Ma San Kay Khaing, 17, and Ma Thazin, 16. The girls originally hailed from Bawlonekwin village in Kawhmu township and had endured years of physical violence and psychological abuse before eventually fleeing their bondage at the Ava tailoring shop on 40th Street and returning to their parents.

But the Yangon Police Forces Facebook page yesterday said three girls had been victims, including 18-year-old Tin Tin Khaing, also from Bawlonekwin. Its Facebook page named Daw Tin Thuzar and Ma Su Mon Latt, a mother and daughter, as defendants in the case, saying they would face charges on two counts of the Anti-Human Trafficking Law.

According to the Yangon Region anti-human trafficking unit, the three girls have already been questioned regarding their experiences. Their physical injuries ranged from broken knuckles to flesh wounds inflicted with knives and scissors. Police are awaiting the results of a full medical report to complete their case file.

The owners will be jailed at least 10 or 20 years under the Anti-Human Trafficking Law, said Pol Capt Myo Thein.

The mother and daughters whereabouts were not immediately clear, but Daw Tin Thuzars son was called into the Kyauktada Township Police Station yesterday evening for questioning.





The alleged abusers had compensated the families of the girls a combined K5 million (US$4065) on September 15, at the arrangement of the MNHRC.

But human rights groups, lawyers and international organisations quickly condemned the commissions handling of the case once word got out this week.

U Myint Aye, executive director of Human Rights Defenders and Promoters, said yesterday that police must take action against the accused despite the MNHRCs attempt to settle the case monetarily.

No one should be subjected to torture by anyone. Torture is something that we have to be against. Police cant torture, the households family cant torture their home maids and a boss cant torture his/her workers, he said.

Lawyer U Robert Sann Aung criticised police for not taking proper action after the case was initially brought to their attention.

Lets say, if someone dies in a place distant from his/her hometown: Will the police not take action because they worry that the family of the victim will have difficulties in travelling to come to that place? he said, adding, We need to fight for justice in our country.

Aaron Greenberg, chief of child protection for UNICEF Myanmar, said that no child should be subjected to the consequences of physical, sexual and psychological violence.

The current cases that have attracted public attention highlight the urgent need to prevent violence against children, ensure safe reporting mechanisms are in place, and strengthen response and accountability measures, he said.

The 7Days daily newspaper quoted MNHRC member U Zaw Win as saying the commission had done its best to handle the situation by practicing metta, or loving kindness.

Since its formation in 2011, the MNHRC has faced sustained criticism for failing to more vigorously protect and promote human rights in the country. Despite its reputation, MNHRC chair U Win Mra was named last month to the nine-member Rakhine State Advisory Commission, which has been tasked with recommending solutions to ease interreligious tensions, poverty and mass displacement of stateless Rohingya Muslims in the troubled western state.

The MNHRC will hold a press conference today in Yangon to address the compensation scheme it promoted as a means of resolving the abuse case.
State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyis appointment of the Kofi Annan-led commission on Rakhine State clearly evidences the governments recognition that these issues have risen to an international scale. Such a commission, and the inclusion of foreign experts, could not have been conceived of even a year ago.





Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has long taken heat from the international community for allegedly not standing up for the human rights of all in Myanmar. Whatever the reason for her long silence on Rohingya in the past, her recent pragmatic steps to address the issues will have lasting implications for untangling the complex and delicate situation in Rakhine State.

During the joint press conference with Secretary John Kerry on May 22, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi acknowledged the divisiveness of using the terms Bengali and Rohingya. Without mentioning Rohingya specifically, she added that the ability to self-identity is of extreme importance to peoples all over the world.

Such carefully crafted statements by the state counsellor were clearly a prelude to the governments subsequent efforts to address a range of communal issues in Myanmar  curbing of hate speech, delegitimising extremist organisations and assembling an advisory commission headed by the former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan.

It is essential that the commission stay on track without getting derailed by criticism, particularly from those calling for a disbanding of the commission based on its composition and the nationalities of its members.

Kofi Annan has clearly articulated that the commissions mandate is not to police Rakhine State, but to alleviate sectarian tensions. The commission will undoubtedly produce evidence-driven recommendations that could be critical to the governments formulation of a strategic roadmap for a durable solution in Rakhine State.

Distortion of historical facts by any influential individual or group, organised rallies against the commission or anti-commission legislation in the Rakhine State parliament or elsewhere must not undermine the aims of the commission and the joint peace efforts by the government of Myanmar and the international community.





In approaching communal issues in Rakhine State, the commission must strategically review the history of the people of Rakhine State, including by accessing the archives in government institutions and public sectors, and by engaging with both communities. Evaluating monumental historical sites, including mosques and Buddhist temples that have co-existed for centuries, and assessing various cultural attributes of the people of Rakhine State could also prove important.

In order for the commission to probe the cause of violence, the humanitarian situation and the abuses of human rights, one central theme  the Rohingyas identity and citizenship  will require especially close examination.

The issues on the ground in Rakhine State are directly tied to the Rohingya communities loss of basic rights, particularly the right to citizenship. One historic document that can provide legitimate answers to the citizenship question is the National Registration Certificate (NRC), also known as Thone Kauk Sho. NRCs have been issued by the government to all recognised Myanmar nationals, including Rohingya. Additionally, a long list of Rohingya legislators and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya voters since the beginning of the parliamentary system in Myanmar until the 2010 national election serves as a robust testimony to the existence of Rohingya citizenship in Myanmar. Similarly, the Rohingya broadcast program in the ethnic minority section of the governments Radio Broadcasting Service in the early 1960s provides clear evidence of the governments recognition of a Rohingya ethnicity.

In reality, while addressing the citizenship issues may take some time, the humanitarian issues in Rakhine State require urgent attention. Even incremental improvement in the area will help to set the stage for the peaceful co-existence of all communities in Rakhine.

Based on the recent developments in Myanmar, there is a glimmer of hope. The Kofi Annan-headed commission will one day be recorded in the annals of history for its noble undertaking as it sets the stage for peace, stability and, eventually, the long-awaited return to communal harmony in Rakhine State.

Wakar Uddin is a Rakhine State native, professor at Pennsylvania State University and director general of the Arakan Rohingya Union. He is also a founder of the Burmese Rohingya Association of North America.
Related Protest erupts after police kill black man in North Carolina

The mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina appealed for calm Wednesday after a night of violent protests and looting sparked by the fatal police shooting of a black man said to have been armed with a handgun.

Police said 16 officers and several demonstrators were injured in clashes after the shooting death of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, the latest in a string of police involved killings that have fueled outrage across the United States.

"We are calling for peace, we are calling for calm, we are calling for dialogue," Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts said.

The shooting occurred at 4:00 pm Tuesday in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Charlotte after officers arrived in search of a suspect wanted for arrest, police said.

They spotted a man with a handgun -- later identified as Scott -- exit and then reenter a vehicle, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief Kerr Putney told journalists.

Officers approached the man and loudly commanded him to get out and drop the weapon, at which point Scott exited the vehicle armed, according to police.

"He stepped out, posing a threat to the officers, and officer Brentley Vinson subsequently fired his weapon, striking the subject," the police chief said.

Putney added, however, that he did not know that Scott "definitively pointed the weapon specifically towards an officer."

Carrying a firearm is legal under local "open carry" gun laws.

Scott's relatives told local media that he was not carrying a gun, but had a book in his hands when he was shot dead, which police disputed.

"I can tell you a weapon was seized. A hand gun," Putney said. "I can also tell you we did not find a book that has been made reference to."

Putney said Vinson, who joined the force in 2014, was in plain clothes but wearing a vest carrier emblazoned with the police logo, and was backed up by three officers in full uniform.

He said Vinson was not wearing a body camera, but the other officers were.

"The videos that I've reviewed I cannot see in totality everything that occurred," Putney said.

In Charlotte anger simmered in the aftermath of the night's unrest, especially regarding the police chief's assertion that Scott was armed.

"It's a lie," said Taheshia Williams, whose daughter goes to school with the victim's son. "They took the book and replaced it with a gun."

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were quick to weigh in on the violence in Charlotte and last Friday's fatal shooting in Tulsa of Terence Crutcher, which was captured on video.

"Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Too many others. This has got to end. -H," tweeted Democrat Clinton, signing the post herself.

After calling to "make America safe again" in a tweet, Trump suggested later Wednesday that the Tulsa officer who shot Crutcher had "choked."

"I don't know what she was thinking," the Republican said, speaking at an African-American church in Cleveland, Ohio.

"Did she get scared? Was she choking? What happened?"

Roberts, Charlotte's mayor, said she was in touch with the White House along with state and local leaders. The city was preparing to handle more potential demonstrations by bolstering its police presence.

The protests swelled Tuesday evening as news of the shooting spread, with protesters carrying signs that read "Black Lives Matter" and chanting "No justice, no peace!"

Putney said the situation turned violent within about two hours with "agitators" damaging police vehicles and throwing rocks at police officers.

Riot control police were called out and used tear gas to disperse the crowd, Putney said.

A group of protesters nevertheless marched to a major highway early Wednesday, shutting down traffic in both directions. They broke into the back of truck and set goods on fire, according to police.

"We all see this as a tragedy," Roberts said. "We all want to work toward a peaceful community. We know that we have work to do."

Scott's death is the latest in a series of fatal police shootings -- from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to St. Paul, Minnesota -- that have left the African American community demanding law enforcement reforms and greater accountability.

The deadly shooting in Tulsa of Crutcher was recorded by police car dashboard cameras and a police helicopter camera, footage the city's police chief Chuck Jordan called disturbing and "very difficult to watch."

In the video, the 40-year-old Crutcher is seen with his hands up, appearing to comply with police officers before he is shot once by officer Betty Shelby, and falls to the ground. Another officer fires his stun gun.

The US Department of Justice said on Monday it would conduct a federal civil rights probe into the Tulsa shooting, an investigation parallel to the one local authorities in the state are carrying out.

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Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pittafter learning he was cheating on her with his sexy co-star, a well-placed source told The Post on Tuesday.

She hired a private eye because she felt that he was fooling around with her on the set, and it turns out, he was. And that was the final straw,'' the source said.

Pitt, 52, had been rumored to have been cozying up to his Allied'' co-star Marion Cotillard, 40, for months during the pair's filming of the World War II drama in London.

The PI discovered that Pitt was cheating on his wife of two years with Cotillard  while also partying like a single guy on a mission, the source said.

The atmosphere [off-set] was full of hard drugs and Russian hookers, and Angie was told Brad got caught up in it,'' the source said.

He's in the throes of some insane midlife crisis, and Angie is fed up.

But a source close to Cotillard denied the Pitt affair rumors and insisted she is still with her long-term partner, French actor and director Guillaume Canet.

They are still very much together. They have been a couple since 2007 and have one child but have never married,'' the source said of Cotillard and Canet.

The source could not confirm French reports that Cotillard is pregnant with her second child with Canet.

Thats hot: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were rumored to first connect on the set of their hit movie Mrs. and Mrs. Smith in 2005. Photo: Everett Collection

Jolie's manager, Geyer Kosinski, said Tuesday, Angelina will always do what's in the best interest to protect her children.

She appreciates everyone's understanding of their need for privacy at this time,'' he told E! News.

Pitt added in a statement to People magazine, I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids.

I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.

In addition to her husband's alleged affair, Jolie, 41, was sick and tired of constantly sparring over their lifestyle, another source told The Post.

She has increasingly wanted to quit Hollywood in favor of devoting herself full-time to traveling the globe for her humanitarian work, while Pitt prefers Tinseltown and its parties, the source said.

Jolie spoke before the United Nations in Manhattan just this past Friday to ask them to help millions of Syrian refugees.

The older she gets, the more serious she becomes, and she is sick of the Hollywood thing,'' the second source said.

He wants to make movies. She doesn't. It's a fundamental difference. It's how you live your life.''

Making matters worse, Pitt is closer to Jolie's famous actor dad, Jon Voight, than she is, the source said.

Jon's a Hollywood guy, and she's been estranged. Brad hangs out with her father more than she does,'' the source said.

Another source told TMZ that Jolie believes that her hubby's drinking and pot-smoking is affecting their kids.

Add to that his anger problem, and the mom of six said enough is enough, the source told the website.

Its over. After two years of marriage and 12 years together, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are finished. Take a look at the tabloid cover lies that turned out to be premonitions. Photo: OK Magazine.

Jolie filed for divorce Monday, citing irreconcilable differences.

She is seeking physical custody of the couple's kids, TMZ said. She doesn't want Pitt to have joint physical custody, just joint legal custody. He would get visitation, according to her filing.

Jolie is not seeking spousal support, the website said.

Brangelina's French chateau, Miraval  where the couple married in August 2014  has been quietly on the market for a few months, and locals were told they were selling it because they are breaking up, a source told The Post.

Jolie has hired top gun Laura Wasser as her lawyer. The court documents list the couple's date of separation as Sept. 15, 2016.

The couple have been together since 2004. A rep for Cotillard did not immediately get back to The Post.



By: pagesix.com
Egypts reversed on Wednesday its zero-tolerance decision for wheat imports containing ergot fungus, to reinstating a 0.05 percent tolerance policy, which is a widely applied international standard, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported citing the agriculture minister.

In August, the minister Essam Fayed issued a decision to not allow any imported wheat shipment that contains any traces of the fungus.

The government said on Wednesday that the zero-tolerance policy has led to the delay in arrival of 540,000 tonnes of the imported grain to Egypt, the worlds biggest wheat importer, Al-Ahram said.

The Egyptian minister of health Ahmed Emad said today that the imported wheat has been undergoing a purification process that reduces the presence of the fungus to zero percent.

Since February, confusion between the states grain buyer GASC and the agricultural authorities over levels of the fungus caused weariness among suppliers, drivig some of them to boycott tenders.

Egypt's wheat imports for the 2015/16 marketing year were estimated at 11 million tonnes, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) showed in October 2015, "about the same as the previous year and the average for the last five years."

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Agya Koo, Matilda Asare and other Kumawood actors have officially announced their support for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and its flag bearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The actors made the announcement on Wednesday, September 21 at a press conference held at Patasi in Kumasi.

The event was held to also announce a project Agya Koo and his colleague actors have setup dubbed Agenda 57% 4 Nana Addo ahead of the December 7 polls.

The comic actor and his colleagues at the press conference expressed their disappointment in the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) government and asked the public to vote them out of office during this years election.

Aside Agya Koo and Matilda Asare, other actors who were at the press conference were Nyankuta, Ras Nene, Mama Cali and Adwoa Bene.

Below are some pictures from the press conference the actors organised in Kumasi to formally tell Ghanaians that they will be campaigning for Nana Addo to help him win this years general election.
The organisers of Ghana Music Awards UK 2016 have officially announced that the 2016 edition of the award scheme will take place on November 5 at the Gaumont Palace, 9 The Broadway

Wood Green London N22 6DS.

This year's event seeks to foster the development of the Ghanaian music industry and reward those in the industry who have excelled in the four main music genres in Ghana, namely gospel, hiplife, highlife and traditional music.

A number of top Ghanaian music stars have also been invited to perform at the event which is expected to attract all the stakeholders in the showbiz industry in Ghana and Europe.

With a desire to give nominees the best treatment deserving of stars on the night of the event, a series of protocol arrangements are being tabled.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alordia Promotions, Nii Ofori Tackie, known in the music scene as DJ Alordia, who is organising the event in partnership with Edmond Tackie of West Coast UK, said preparations are far advanced to make this year's event historic.

He stressed that this year's event will attract a large number of personalities from the creative industry in Ghana and Europe as well as a number of local and international artistes.


Abraham Attah, Hollywood-based Ghanaian actor known for his role in the Netflix film, 'Beasts of No Nation', has reached an agreement with AfriGold Impact to embark on a peace campaign for the December polls.

He said, I will be in US during the election, however, it is important that Ghana remains peaceful before, during and after election. This is my home and my family is here so I support the cause of AfriGold Impact in its peace campaign.

The Abraham Attah Foundation and AfriGold Impact campaign tour dubbed: 'Ghana Peace Drive', is to educate the public on the essence of maintaining peace in this political season.

The project will begin in October and will end after the December elections.

Abraham with Vice president Amissah Arthur

A statement delivered by Mawuko Kuadzi, the manager of Abraham Attah, after the signing of the memorandum of understanding (MoU), said, Even though I will not be here in person, my input will be seen in different ways and this project will contribute greatly in ensuring peace.

He said the team will tour various communities to show an infotainment documentary, and called on the media and general public to support the effort.

Francis Botchwey, Director of AfriGold Impact, said the documentary brings together messages from Emmanuel Bombande (former Executive Director of the West African Network for Peace Building), Kofi Asante (Chairman of the National Peace Council), Fred Degbee (former Secretary of Christian Council), Bright Kweku Appiah (Executive Director of Child Right International), Sheikh Dr Nuhu Shaributu (National Chief Imam) and Ransford Tetteh (former President of Ghana Journalists' Association), advising the public against violence.

He said over 10,000 T-shirts with peace inscriptions will also be distributed for free as part of the campaign which is aimed at sensitising the public against violence and encouraging peaceful co-existence.

Mr Botchwey said, Not every Ghanaian has access to information and not all Ghanaians are literate. We want to reach out to the deprived communities and make them understand the importance of peace.
The Hague (AFP) - Congolese former rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda has ended an unprecedented hunger strike in his detention cell in The Netherlands after a two-week standoff with the judges at his war crimes trial.

"He has begun to eat again," his lawyer Stephane Bourgon told AFP, adding Ntaganda had decided to end his self-imposed fast late Tuesday after the court granted him some concessions.

The once-feared rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo is on trial at the International Criminal Court where he has denied 18 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But saying he was "ready to die", Ntaganda had decided to refuse food "in the ultimate act of protest" according to his lawyer, after judges maintained tight restrictions on his visitors saying they feared he might tamper with witnesses.

Congolese former rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda is on trial at the International Criminal Court where he has denied 18 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity

Bourgon told AFP "we won permission to appeal the judges' decision and we have made arrangements so that he can see his wife, this week, with a certain degree of intimacy."

Ntaganda, who has not appeared in the courtroom in The Hague since September 7, has also begun instructing his legal defence team again, Bourgon said.

"He is weak, and has lost weight and you can see it in his face. But there is nothing to be alarmed about," added Bourgon.

Ntaganda was however again not present when his trial resumed on Wednesday afternoon, and the judges granted him permission not to attend the trial in person again until September 29 so he can profit from the visit of his family.

But Bourgon told AFP that for Ntaganda, born in 1972, the "fight is far from over as he wants to prove he is innocent of the accusations of interfering with witnesses."

"The restrictions are just the consequence of the allegations which we believe have been evaluated on an insufficient basis by the judges. These allegations could impact the trial because they concern witnesses who have already testified, or who will do so."

Once dubbed "The Terminator", Ntaganda has denied the charges arising out of savage ethnic attacks carried out in the DR Congo by his rebel Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC) in 2002-2003.

His trial opened in September 2015 after he walked into the US embassy in Kigali in 2013.

The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has been mired for two decades in ethnically-charged wars, as rebels battle for control of its rich mineral resources.

Prosecutors say Ntaganda played a central role in the Ituri conflict in the far northeast which rights groups believe alone has left some 60,000 dead since 1999.
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Kinshasa (AFP) - Two days of violence in Kinshasa left over 100 people dead, the Democratic Republic of Congo opposition said Wednesday, their figure more than tripling the police toll.

Police in DR Congo said earlier that 32 people had been killed during the clashes in the capital on Monday and Tuesday, as security forces brought a wave of violence and looting to an end.
The Mandela Washington Fellowship is a flagship program demonstrating the United States commitment to Africa and an initiative to develop young African leaders. The U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa will announce the start of 2017 Mandela Washington Fellowship application on Thursday, September 22, 2016.

At the event, several previous Mandela Washington Fellows will share their experiences in the U.S. universities and lead discussions on how to apply.

The application collects basic information and includes questions about the applicants professional and academic experience, including educational background; honors and awards received; extracurricular and volunteer activities; and English language proficiency.

The United States Embassy in Addis Ababa invites you to attend this important event.

Date: Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 09:45am

Venue: American Center located inside the National Archives and Library Agency (NALA) (Womezekir), Addis Ababa

Please RSVP to Zelalem Befekadu (091-150-9522) or Rahel Zewdu (096-128-4012)
The Mauritius Commercial Bank Group (MCB) (www.MCBAFT.com) hosts 40 top executives representing 40 African banks at the week-long 2016 Africa Forward Together conference which opened this morning at the five-star Ravenala Attitude Hotel. Africa Forward Together (AFT) is an annual event organised by MCB since 2009 to showcase its Bank of Banks initiative. Since its inception, 351 delegates representing 108 financial institutions and representing 27 countries have attended the conference, which also aims at fostering better understanding and mutual cooperation between African banks.

Main focus

Opening the conference, MCB Group Chief Executive, Pierre Guy Noel said: Africa remains our main focus for growth. There are plenty of things we can do in Africa and loads we can achieve together. African banks can leverage MCBs unique position in the region. Established since 1838, MCB is a strong regional leader, currently ranked first in East Africa and 17th among African banks according to The Banker.

The Bank of Banks

 Bank of Banks  aims at positioning MCB as a regional platform offering bundled banking and financial industry capabilities to its counterparts. Bankers attending the Africa Forward Together event get first-hand knowledge of MCBs human expertise and technological capabilities while exploring collaboration possibilities that could allow them to boost their services through outsourcing in Mauritius.

Over the last few years, an increasing number of African banks have teamed up with MCB to serve their customers better and more efficiently. Some have managed to offer new services to their customers in record times without investing heavily in technology or human resources. Others have discovered opportunities to expand their businesses through intelligent collaboration with one of Africas leading banks.

A true partner

The  Bank of Banks  initiative is a key component of MCBs African growth strategy. Instead of opening outlets across the continent and competing with local banks, MCB prefers to position itself as a privileged partner for institutions that want to scale new heights. As Africa gradually fulfils its promises and realizes its enormous potential, the continents banks are facing new challenges and have to meet growing and changing customer needs.

Summing up the challenges Africa has to face, Raoul Gufflet, Deputy Chief Executive, MCB, insisted on the fact that Africa is at a crossroad where it has to choose the right way forward. This is where MCB fits in. AFT is not solely meant to showcase MCBs value proposition but to explore new avenues of collaboration and sharing between African banks. AFT is about you, about your objectives and goals and what you would like to put into practice, Raoul Gufflet, Deputy Chief Executive of MCB, told African bankers today.

Adding value to banking

MCB offers a full range of value added services to banks. This includes the issuance of documentary credits, international payments, management of cards services and electronic banking, internal auditing, risk management, non-banking financial services, custody services, SWIFT transfers and consulting services among others. By leveraging MCBs world-class expertise, rich experience and state-of-the-art technology, other banks have an opportunity to speed up their development while delighting their customers. Raoul Gufflet also indicated that MCB intends to expand its Private Banking arm in Africa.

A regional leader

Established in 1838, MCB is today the largest bank in East Africa and the 17h biggest on the continent. It is a blue chip on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius where it accounts for nearly a quarter of market capitalisation. Its strategy is to continuously diversify its services and its markets. To date, MCBs international operations account for 55% of its results. It is currently present in Mauritius, South Africa, Kenya, Seychelles, Madagascar, Maldives, Reunion, Mayotte and France through a network of branches, associate companies and representative offices. It also has a vibrant network of correspondent banks across Africa and the rest of the world.
On 20 September 2016, the Council renewed the EU restrictive measures against Burundi until 31 October 2017. These measures consist of a travel ban and asset freeze against four persons whose activities were deemed to be undermining democracy or obstructing the search for a political solution to the crisis in Burundi. These activities include acts of violence, repression or incitement to violence, and acts which constitute serious human rights violations.

The EU has repeatedly and continuously called on all parties to refrain from, and to condemn, any acts of violence. This is essential if the conditions for progress in the search for a political solution to the crisis are to be put in place and maintained.

The Council considered that the absence of progress in the situation regarding the four persons under restrictive measures justified the prolongation of the sanctions.

The names of the persons concerned and the reasons for listing them are included in the annex to the decision of 1 October 2015 published in the Official Journal.
On 20 September, curtains were raised on the 23rd Cairo International Festival for Experimental and Contemporary Theatre at the main hall of the Cairo Opera House.

The opening ceremony was attended by Sameh Mahran, the festival's president (and former president of the Academy of Arts), Helmy Namnam, the Minister of Culture, as well as many renowned figures from Egypt's theatre world.

The opening also included a special segment honouring the international guests of honour and the performance from China.



Following its five-year hiatus, and within the idea of change and expansion, the festival returns under a new name, including a "contemporary" genre into its activities.



"The contemporary and experimental might seem incompatible. The first reflects the time while the second term is more technical. But the idea of the festival is to highlight all the theatrical experiences that exist today," the festivals president Sameh Mahran stated during the press conference that preceded the opening ceremony.



Another new procedure is removing the competitive part from the festival. As such, running between 20 and 30 September, the festival becomes an artistic showcase of theatre from Egypt and the world. Mahran added that many of the international festivals, like Avignon Theatre Festival or The Carthage Theater Days do not have a competitive character.



The ten-day-event will also become an opportunity for the theatre-makers to interact, develop contacts and get to know the practical particularities of their colleagues," Mahran explained.



During the festival, a total of 30 plays will be staged. 17 of them are by Arab and international performers. It is definitely a smaller number of shows in comparison to the festival's last edition that took place in 2010, which included over 40 international troupes.



"The selection committee watched 79 performances of foreign troupes and the selection was based on their originality and quality," commented Essam El-Sayed, head of the selection committee.



In parallel to the performances that will run across several stages, the festival will also hold workshops conducted by Egyptian and international experts from countries such as Chile, the United States, Pakistan, and India, among others.



During the ceremony, the festival's president Sameh Mahran, and Minister of Culture Helmy Namnam, honoured the renowned guests of the festival: Gamil Rateb from Egypt, Torange Yeghiazarian from Iran/USA, Mumbi Kaigwa from Kenya, Femi Osofisan from Nigeria, Mohamed Saif Al Afkham from the United Arab Emirates and Lu Ang from China.



Finally, the ceremony concluded with the opening performance of Thunderstorm, from China.

Check the festival's complete programme here

Check the photos of the guests of honour here



For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Benghazi (Libya) (AFP) - An oil tanker left the Libyan port of Ras Lanouf for Italy on Tuesday, in the first shipment since late 2014 when fighting erupted over control of the "oil crescent", an official said.

Oil is war-ravaged Libya's key asset, and rival administrations have been vying for control of its oil wealth and territory since the 2011 uprising that overthrew dictator Moamer Kadhafi and plunged the country into chaos.

"The Maltese-flagged vessel Seadelta has just left Ras Lanouf port with 776,000 barrels of oil, going to Italy. This is the first shipment of oil from Ras Lanouf port since November 2014," said Omran el-Fitouri, oil exports coordinator at the port.

It is the first shipment to leave any of the four ports in the area since they were seized by military strongman Khalifa Haftar last week.

On Sunday, fighters loyal to Libya's UN-backed unity government launched an attack aimed at retaking the key eastern oil ports, but were repelled by Haftar's forces.

The fighting led a Maltese-flagged tanker to turn back out to sea for safety, abandoning plans to load crude oil at Ras Lanouf.

While Tuesday's shipment is the first from Ras Lanouf in nearly two years, other ports in the crescent have been operating intermittently.
Benghazi (Libya) (AFP) - An oil tanker left a key Libyan port early Wednesday with the first crude shipment from the terminal since fighting halted exports there in 2014, an official said.

Oil is war-ravaged Libya's key asset, and rival administrations have been vying for control of territory and oil resources since the 2011 uprising that overthrew dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

"The Maltese-flagged vessel Seadelta has just left Ras Lanuf port with 776,000 barrels of oil, going to Italy. This is the first shipment of oil from Ras Lanuf port since November 2014," said Omran el-Fitouri, oil exports coordinator at the port.

The shipment is the first to leave any of the four ports along Libya's eastern "oil crescent" since they were seized by military strongman Khalifa Haftar last week.

His forces handed management of the ports to the National Oil Corporation (NOC), which said that crude exports would resume "immediately" from Ras Lanuf and another of the ports, Zuwaytina.

Map of Libya's Gulf of Sirte region, locating oil ports and facilities

The NOC says it is loyal to Libya's Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) but also to the parliament based in the east which supports Haftar's forces and has refused to give the GNA its vote of confidence.

On Sunday, fighters loyal to the UN-backed unity government launched an attack aimed at retaking the key eastern oil ports, but were repelled by Haftar's forces.

The fighting had forced the Maltese-flagged Seadelta to turn back out to sea for safety.

Other ports in the crescent have been operating intermittently in recent years, but major exports from Ras Lanuf could pump welcome revenue into the central bank's coffers.

Fitouri told AFP on Wednesday that a second tanker, Maltese-flagged Syra, was preparing to deliver a further 580,000 barrels from Ras Lanuf to Tarragona in Spain.

Markets sceptical

The latest shipment could also help ease a cash crisis for Libya's strapped banks which are in dire need of hard currency.

A tug boat approaches the Malta-flageed Seadelta oil tanker off the coast of Libya's eastern Ras Lanuf port, on September 19, 2016

Libya has Africa's largest oil reserves estimated at 48 billion barrels, but the country's production and exports have slumped dramatically during the years of crisis.

Libya pumped around 1.6 million barrels of crude a day before Kadhafi's overthrow, but the ensuing chaos slammed production, which fell as low as 290,000 in recent months, according to the NOC.

Oil prices rose on world markets on Monday after the tanker was turned back. Prices edged up again on Wednesday.

Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at OANDA, said the Seadelta's successful departure was unlikely to have a dramatic effect given the murky picture for Libyan production.

"The amount of oil coming out of Libya is fairly limited so it won't have a material impact on crude prices today," Halley told AFP. "The fighting means that we don't know how sustained their output can be."

Last week, US envoy to Libya Jonathan Winer told AFP it was essential that money from the resumption of oil exports went only to the UN-backed government.

"Oil needs to be produced throughout the country to generate the revenues necessary to pay for salaries for the Libyan people to have the government be able to function," Winer said.

The GNA is the centrepiece of UN efforts to restore stability in Libya and forge a central authority capable of tackling the twin scourges of the Islamic State group and people-trafficking across the Mediterranean.

But it has struggled to impose its authority amid opposition from a parallel administration based in the east backed by Haftar.
Guwahati: The Delhi government has endorsed the office bearers of Indian Federation of Working Journalists (IFWJ) headed by president K Vikram Rao, as the legal and representative body of the working journalists across the country. The government in the national capital of India took the decision after five months of intensive scrutiny, as a dispute was raised by IFWJs former secretary general Parmanand Pandey.

It may be noted that Pandey, a practicing lawyer in the Supreme Court, claimed before the Registrar of Trade Unions that he was leading the journalists body, founded on 28 October 1950 and registered in 1992 under the countrys trade union act, replacing Rao. However, the Registrar UK Sinha termed his claim as vague & fictitious. The Registrar also directed the Central Bank of India (66 Janpath, New Delhi branch) to allow joint operations of the IFWJ savings account by its treasurer Shyambabu and headquarter secretary Vipin Dhuliya, who were authorized by the IFWJ president Rao.

Meanwhile, the Director General of Press Information Bureau AB Frank Naronha had rejected Pandeys demand for withdrawing the IFWJ representative (Mr Shyambabu) from the Central Press Accreditation Committee. The Bar Council of Delhi is presently examining the IFWJs petition insisting that a lawyer (read Pandey) cannot claim to be a working journalist as the Bar Council Rules specify that a practicing lawyer cannot pursue another profession.

Earlier, the IFWJ complained to the Chief Justice, Supreme Court of India that Pandey was wrongly claiming to be a working journalist and intending to lead a working journalists forum. Honorable Chief Justice TS Thakur had already asked the Bar Council of India to probe into the matter.

In another development, IFWJ president Rao asked the members of its Assam unit to reorganize the committee, as the present body officially shifted its loyalty to the Pandey led faction. He advised the members of Assam Union of Working Journalists (AUWJ) convene a meeting soon and complete the formalities with an aim to reemerge as an active journalist body to safeguard the interest of working journalists across the State.
The Convention People's Party (CPP), has endorsed the decision by the Progressive People's Party (PPP), to sue the Electoral Commission over what the parties have described as high filing fees for presidential and parliamentary nominees.

There has been a 500 percent increase in the filing fees for presidential nominees between 2012 and 2016.

The PPP has thus sued the Commission, and is among other things prayed the court to declare the filing fees as  arbitrary , capricious and unreasonable.

Communications Director of the CPP, Kadir Abdul Rauf Issifu, told Citi News they will also independently continue to oppose the fee hikes until the EC reviews it downwards.

As a political party, the CPP has raised its voice against the exorbitant filing fees and we have also stated on occasional instances that we are going to oppose it using every means possible so if the PPP chose to go to court, which is also a legitimate means I do not think that they should be any qualms with that.

We will encourage them so to do, and that we would also add up our own strategies in our own ways to ensure that the Electoral Commission brings down the cut throat filing fees. I am telling you that it is a democracy, they have chosen that path and that path is legitimate so let them pursue it. We do not have difficulty with that. We would also use all the resources and all the channels available to express and register our displeasure until the Electoral Commission does the right thing by bringing down the fees, he added.

EC to consider review of filing fee

The court action comes few days after the EC said it will soon meet to consider whether or not to review amounts.

The commission has been bashed for pegging filing fees for presidential and parliamentary nominees at GHc50, 000 and GHc10, 000 respectively.

Some of the parties including the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have expressed reservations about the amount, saying it would only limit the electioneering process to a privileged few.

15 presidential aspirants pick nomination forms

So far, About 15 presidential nominees have picked up nomination forms to contest the December 7 polls, and are expected to pay the fees when they return the filled forms.

They comprise 13 political parties and two independent candidates.

The parties are: the Democratic People's Party (DPP), the All People's Party (APP), the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), the United Development System Party (UDSP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the National Democratic Party (NDP), the United Love Party (ULP).

The rest are, the Progressive People's Party (PPP) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the Independent People's Party (IPP), the United Progressive Party (UPP), the Ghana Freedom Party (GFP) and the united Front Party (UFP).



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
The National Accreditation Board (NAB), the body responsible for regulating the activities of tertiary institutions in the country, has raised concern about the operations of two unaccredited schools in Accra.

The two institutions - Alpha College of Technology and Rama University, are accordingly enticing students to enroll to offer their programmes after placing advertisements in the media which drew the attention of NAB.

A statement signed by the Executive Director of NAB, Kwame Dattey and copied to the media, observed that the above mentioned institutions were luring unsuspecting students to register to gain admission into the schools in Accra.

According to the statement, "The NAB has noted with serious concern advertisements by Alpha College of Technology, operating from Accra Academy School Campus and Oyarifa and Rama University supposedly operating from the Academic City College, Ring Road Central, Accra, enticing students to enroll into their tertiary education programmes."

A billboard belonging to the Rama University at the premises of Academic City College at Kwame Nkrumah Circle but it was removed some few days ago for unknown reasons.

Many unsuspecting students, especially Senior High School (SHS) leavers in the country and many foreign students from the sub-region continue to fall victim to the nefarious activities of such institutions in the country.

They lose huge amounts of money in the process of gaining admission into the so-called schools.

It would be recalled that some months ago, a group of Nigerian students were duped by one of unaccredited schools, the Trans African University College based in Accra.

The school was reportedly offering degree programmes to its students and charging them huge fees even though it had no accreditation to run those courses.

NAB, in the statement, contended that the two institutions "have not been accredited by the National Accreditation Board as required by the National Accreditation Board Act, 2007 (Act 744) and the Tertiary Institutions (Establishment and Accreditation) Regulations, 2010 (L.I 1984) to operate as tertiary education institutions."

It therefore called on the public, especially residents of Accra, to ignore the advertisements from the institutions.
21.09.2016 LISTEN

Anita Offe, 23, passed mobile phones, sim cards and charges to Elijah Mochia, 22, while he was a prisoner in Thameside Prison in southeast London

An inmate who sent a love poem to the equality and diversity officer in prison and referred to her as his black beauty has been given an extra year behind bars.

Anita Offe, 23, passed mobile phones, sim cards and charges to Elijah Mochia, 22, while he was a prisoner in Thameside Prison in southeast London.

The court heard records of 4,500 calls between the two had been discovered on the phones and they had exchanged romantic texts.

One deleted text on Offes phone, from Mochia, read: Black beauty of my life, I never thought in prison I could meet a black beauty like you.

The love poem was signed off From E.

The pair were caught when they were spotted on CCTV meeting in a stairwell on January 20.

Alex Matic, for the prosecution, said: It was noticed on CCTV that Miss Offe appeared to be acting in an unusual manner.

Miss Offe had concealed items on her person and took them out of the CCTV area.

She put them in a bag and Mr Mochia then left with them.

Mr Matic added: These are people who should be aware to the possibility of being corrupted and should be in a position to resist.

Inside the bag were phones, charges, USB sticks and sim cards.

Offe was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years. She must carry out 100 hours of unpaid work, as well as a rehabilitation requirement

Offe had initially denied the relationship between the pair but later pleaded guilty.

Michael Smith, for the mitigation, said: She has lost her career and lost her good name.

Sentencing, Judge Anthony Leonard QC said: You began some sort of relationship with him, you knew you should resist and report any such contact.

Offe was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years. She must carry out 100 hours of unpaid work, as well as a rehabilitation requirement.

The judge took into account the complex relationship she had with her son, who was sent to live with family in Ghana for four years when she was 16.

Mochia was imprisoned for a further 12 months.

-dailymail
The Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber for Bulk Oil Distributors Companies (CBOD) Senyo Hosi has stated that the chamber is ready to import diesel with a sulphur level which meets the European limit of 5 or 10 parts per million (ppm).

This follows a report released by the African Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) and its partner, Public Eye, which revealed that Swiss commodity trading firms sell dirty fuel to African countries including Ghana.

According Mr. Hosi, the European requirement of 5 or 10 parts per million (ppm) can be imported but will cost the Ghanaian consumer more money.

Importers will never have a problem because we can always access the product on the international and European market but the refinery is what we must look at the implications it will have on the refinery as it may have to shut it down for the upgrade, he told Citi Business News.

He explained that if we want to do 50ppm instead of the 3000ppm or what we are targeting now, it is possible but the question is will the refinery be able to do 50ppm immediately, it can but it will need some huge investments to upgrade the plant to be able to now do 50ppm.

He pointed out that the standards have been revolving over time, changing from 10,000ppm to 5000ppm.

Though we can do the proposed 50ppm immediately, it comes with some logistical cost and some effect at the pump which will come with some implications on our own Tema Oil Refinery, he said.

Report of dirty oil

A study conducted in Ghana and seven other African countries revealed that the sulphur content of diesel products imported are 150 times and, in some cases 1,000 times, more than the limits allowed in Europe.

The report has prompted the calls for the review of the existing standards with regards to the sulphur content of diesel products imported into the country.

NPA rejects blame

Meanwhile the National Petroleum Authority (NPA) has dismissed reports that it is to blame for the dumping of 'dirty diesel' on the Ghanaian market.

The CEO of the NPA, Moses Asaga said the comments were borne out of ignorance on the authority's responsibilities.

A significant reduction in the sulphur content will cost Ghana about 300 million dollars.



By: Norvan Acquah  Hayford/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana
According to incoming reports, on September 19 opposition supporters who demand the resignation of President Joseph Kabila clashed with security forces in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The protests flared up after the Independent National Electoral Commission failed to announce the date for presidential elections in accordance with the national Constitution that same day. Civil unrest was accompanied by arson, robberies and vandalism. Reports say that 19 people, including three police officers, have been killed and over 100 have been injured.

The Russian Embassy in Kinshasa said no Russian citizens have been hurt.

Moscow invariably advocates settling differences in Congolese society through political methods, stabilising the situation, and resolving all contentious issues in line with the law and through dialogue. We will continue to closely follow developments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Striking railway workers have resolved not to resume work until the Finance Ministry initiates moves to pay all salary arrears and other benefits due them.

The workers are on a sit down strike over government's failure to pay their July and August salaries as well as pension benefits.

Though meetings had been scheduled between the workers' union and the Transport and Finance Ministries, the latter has been unable to attend any of the discussions.

The situation has gotten worse schools have reopened yet the workers have been unable to secure money to support their wards and meet other expenditure. We as leaders have even been considerate by not hitting the streets to express our frustration, General Secretary of the Railway Workers Union, Godwill Ntarmah told Citi Business News.

Meanwhile Citi Business News understands the National Labour Commission (NLC) has ordered the workers to return to work.

But Godwill Ntarmah insists the effect of the delays on the workers is unbearable.

The NLC's statement was a directive that we should not continue with the strikebut we have written back to them and appealed that they help us get our monies from the Ministry of Finance and that is expected to bring an end to the whole matter, he remarked.

The workers fear the failure by the respective Ministries to heed their request may compel them to resort to other legitimate means to get their demands met.

The concerns of we the workers are that we are entitled to a support from the Finance Ministry to facilitate payment of salaries. But this support has since January not being forthcoming. As a result, management has had to rely on internally generated funds (IGF). This option has also been exhausted which has equally affected the payment of salaries and other allowances like SSNIT, he said.



By: Pius Amihere Eduku/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana
On Tuesday, 20 September, the theatre play Thunderstorm, directed by Chen Dalian and performed by the Fujian People's Art Theatre opened the 23rd Cairo International Festival for Experimental and Contemporary Theatre

The 23rd Cairo International Festival for Experimental and Contemporary Theatre kicked off with the Chinese theatre play Thunderstorm, brought to Egypt by the Fujian People's Art Theatre.

The play was especially chosen for the opening of the festival which this year aims to celebrate bilateral cultural relations between China and Egypt.



Written in 1933, Thunderstorm is the first play by the renowned Chinese playwright Cao Yu (born as born as Wan Jiabao, 1910-1996), which saw light prior to the Japanese invasion in 1937.



In four acts, the play looks at the disastrous effects of rigid traditionalism and the hypocrisy of China's wealthy social strata, while wrapping up in times of love and hate.





Thunderstorm transports us to the events of two days of the year 1925 and describes the physical and psychological destruction of a wealthy family, modern and somewhat Westernised, the family of Zhou.

We follow the oppression of the morally depraved and corrupt businessman Zhou Puyuan.



In 2011, to mark the centenary of the birth of Cao Yu, Fujian People's Art Theatre decided to include this play in their repertoire.

The play is directed by Chen Dalian, giving the classical text a contemporary, compact and very rhythmic staging. The play is performed regularly.



Though Dalian's interpretation remains faithful to the original text by Cao Yu, the director opts for an original staging, interweaving acting with percussive instruments and light effects, while the costumes accentuate contemporaneity.





With such an approach, Dalian addresses the socio-political problems of today, not only in China but also worldwide. He denounces austerity and the servility of conservative societies to the corruption of men of power.



The viewer sees a stage devoid of luxurious details: a single chair moved by the actors enough to evoke the spatial frameworks of a room.



Dalian plays with projectors and lighting to draw our attention to a monologue, a scene of love or one of conflict. At times the lights evoke the frigidity of the family; at other times they create an atmosphere of obscurity and darkness. Red lighting is used only once, in a crucial scene when the tragic plight of the family is revealed.





The actors play large percussive instruments. It is here that Dalian draws on the musical heritage of China and allows ancestral cultural factors to play an important dramatic role in the play.



Sometimes the rhythm is repetitive, sometimes it is slow and monotonous, evoking a dark and gloomy day. There are moments when the percussion becomes overwhelming, announcing a disastrous event or a scandalous revelation.

Beyond the plot, the rhythmic patterns also contribute to the depiction of each character, evoking his emotional or dramatic state.



Fusing tradition with contemporary culture and life, despite its substantial length, Thunderstorm is an enjoyable and theatrical experience embedded in rhythm and emotions.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept. If you succeed in deceiving the electorate, do not take them for fools. Realize that the people of Ghana trusted you more than you deserved.

Exactly 78 days from today, the people of Ghana will embark on the extremely important exercise of electing a new president of the Republic and 275 Members of Parliament

In the past four years, Ghanaians have found out the hard way that elections have consequences, which may not always be pleasant.

The choices we make on Election Day will not only determine the direction Ghana will be led on for the next four years, but also the impact of this stewardship on our country long after the four-year term has ended.

The decision in December will revolve essentially around whether Ghanaians should give President Mahama and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) another four years  making a total of twelve straight years in office; or whether Ghanaians will vote for change and bring back, after eight years out of office, the New Patriotic Party, under the new leadership of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

In spite of all the efforts by our main opponents, the NDC, to dumb down the debate and get the electorate to focus less on bread and butter issues, we, of the NPP, understand politics to be nothing but a competition of innovative ideas to propel a country forward. And these ideas can only be successfully executed with the right mix of competence, conviction, discipline and integrity.

So we invited you here today to share a few initial comments and observations we have on the 2016 NDC Manifesto that was effectively re-launched on Saturday, after the President spent two hours to take us through it last Tuesday.

The NDC is coming to the end of its second term in office. As an incumbent government, one expects them to make this bid for re-election based on their performance of the past years.

Instead, we see the NDC making very grandiose promises to Ghanaians of what they would do if re-elected whilst staying silent on how their performance in the past is an indicator of how well they will do, if re-elected.

At the weekend, yet another avalanche of promises were made in Sunyani. Never mind that a litany of broken NDC promises littered their path to Sunyani. One can only predict the future under another Mahama government by judging from what featured in his recent past performance  a future of promises, lies, excuses and more broken promises.

At the end of this news conference, we will share with you a tall list of their failed promises for your perusal.

Voters can be forgiving, if a performing government fails to fulfil some line items in its manifesto. The purpose of government is to improve the lives of its people.

Are people better off as you promised? Are businesses doing well? Have you improved the quality of delivery of public services? Have you strengthened the institutions of state and deepened democratic governance? Have you improved the management of the economy and public finances? Have you tackled corruption and waste in public expenditure?

These are the benchmarks by which Ghanaians should measure President Mahama's performance not the phantom achievements outlined in the Green and promises in the manifesto which they intend to break. In their rule book, promises are made to win an election and not to govern a nation.

However, President Mahama explains his Manifesto's rationale by saying if re-elected he would continue with the work he is doing, saying: We still have more roads to construct, more houses to build, more food to produce, additional educational and health facilities to provide and , most importantly, more jobs to create. It appears he is proud of his achievements of the past four years.

What we have in John Mahama is a president who is so out-of-touch with the problems of the average Ghanaian that he sees his non-performance in these sectors as a success.

And, yet, when you speak to random people around Ghana, it appears their concerns, problems and anxieties are the same. Unemployment, bad roads, the lack of decent and affordable accommodation and the high costs as well as the falling standards in education and health.

President Mahama wants Ghanaians to believe that if re-elected, he would ensure equitable development for all our citizens. The reality, however, is starkly different. Even members of his own party recognise that the President's 'Better Ghana Agenda' has been for the benefit of only his family and friends.

Today, we want to focus our attention on assessing the credibility of the President's intentions, as captured in the four thematic areas, around which the NDC manifesto was prepared.

1. PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST

Putting people first suggests that whatever government policies are in place should benefit the people positively. This leads to the question: How many Ghanaians believe the President has put them first in the last four years?

The NDC believes they can lie their way into another term. On Page 10, they claim: One hundred million (100,000,000) free exercise books have been distributed. They make the exact claim in their Green Book and add that a total of forty two million exercise books were distributed in 2013 and 2014. Does this mean they supplied 58 million exercise books in 2015 alone?

We urge the media to ask for directions to where the evidence might be based.

According to their manifesto: Twelve million and five hundred thousand (12.5 million) English, Mathematics and Science textbooks were distributed to public basic schools between 2013 and 2015. This enabled Ghana to exceed the universal textbook-pupil ratio of three textbooks to one pupil.

We note, however, that the Education Sector Performance of 2016, published by the Ministry of Education, clearly indicates that the 'Core Textbook to pupil ratio' in public basic schools both at the National and Deprived District levels have been in decline since 2013/14. At the national level, it fell from 2.2 in 2013/14 to 2.0 in 2014/15 and to 1.7 in 2015/16. At the Deprived District level, the figures for the corresponding years are 2.1, 1.8 and 1.6 respectively. (See page 21, Table 13)

Also, last week when the President presented highlights of the manifesto, he mentioned specifically that beginning this academic year, 120,000 SHS boarding students will get free education. This promise is completely missing from the published Manifesto.

Perhaps, there is some explanation. Members of the media, please help us unravel this.

Schools are reopening this September and parents are struggling to pay fees for their children. Parents may recall Mahama and the NDC screaming in 2012 from the rooftops that Free SHS was impossible and soon after the NDC was elected saying it now was and they would introduce it progressively. And then they set out to implement a watered down version.

The 2016 Education Sector report captures exactly how badly they have done: The first disbursement of funds for the first term of the 2015/16 academic year was completed in September 2015 with 320,488 day students across the country supported at a cost of GHC 12,178,544.00. Disbursement of funds were made to SHS2 and SHS3 students as SHS1 students had not been placed in schools at the time of payment.

So the NDC gives 320,488 day students a mere 38 cedis for the entire academic year to offset Government-approved fees of 420 cedis per year? This 38 cedis is not even 10% of the approved fees. Meanwhile, day students who entered Form 1 last year did not benefit from this policy. Who are the NDC trying to fool? Stealing ideas they cannot implement and by so doing impoverishing Ghanaians even more.

In today's Ghana, with so much suffering and hardship, nothing shows that John Mahama has put Ghanaians first. After all today, they pay more for their electricity than their rent. They bear testimony to how four years of Dumsor destroyed their small businesses.

And Ghana's young people have lived the nightmare of searching for non-existent jobs, a situation that has led to nearly half of that population being jobless.

A government that puts people first is a government with competence, compassion, foresight, discipline and integrity to implement policies that will help create jobs and not one that will kill jobs with poor policies.

It cannot be disputed that President Mahama has made Ghanaians poorer.

The prices of everyday items have skyrocketed under John Mahama. The price of a gallon of petrol has gone from GH3 to GH16. Bread has moved from GH2 to GH7, milk from GH11 to GH3, kenkey from 30 pesewas to GH2, fish from 50 pesewas to GH2, sachet water from 5 pesewas to 20 pesewas, and a bag of cement from GH12 to GH32.

It is evident that The John Mahama government is not one that can be trusted to put people first. A government that puts corruption first can only pay lip service to putting Ghanaians first.

2. 'BUILDING A STRONG ECONOMY FOR JOB CREATION'

Two weeks ago, Dr.Bawumia provided incontrovertible proof to show that the Ghanaian economy is in crisis by stating: The years under President Mahama's leadership have been characterized by a steady decline in GDP growth.

The data would seem to suggest that the period from 2011 represents the period of the most consistent decline in GDP growth since independence.

This crippling economic environment cannot lead to job creation. This is why graduate unemployment has reached crisis heights, with some 60% of graduates unable to find jobs. This is an extremely dire situation which threatens Ghana's peace and security.

Today, Ghana is currently ranked 114th on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business index. The multiplicity of counterproductive taxes, levies and duties, high cost of utilities, erratic supply of electricity etc led to this ranking. Meanwhile, the NDC manifesto is silent on how these real issues will be tackled.

The biggest source of employment for Ghanaians is the agriculture sector. Under Mahama, this sector has declined considerably. Cocoa production more than doubled from 341,000 metric tonnes to over 737,000 metric tonnes under President Kufuor. In 2015, it declined to 750,000 metric tonnes having hit one million metric tonnes in 2011.

The NDC Manifesto claims that the Youth Employment Agency is offering employment to over 100,000 youth. This is a clever way to hide the fact that the Mahama government has not been able to hit even its modest target of creating 100,000 jobs by the end of this year.

Now, let us compare this to what the YEA replaced. It replaced GYEEDA, which came became a vehicle to steal and loot over GH1 billion of taxpayers' money.

The NPP's National Youth Employment Programme, which became GYEEDA under President Mills, was launched on October 3rd 2006. The pilot project which ushered it in had by this time employed nearly 33,000 youth in community education and agriculture. By the time the NPP left office on January 7, 2009, 110,000 young people were employed under the scheme. In under 2 years with the right policies in place, a positive change was made.

Now compare that to what the NDC has done in Youth Employment. Immediately the NDC, took office, they created a horde of unemployed youth by laying off all these 110,000 young people previously employed.

In these 8 years, the NDC has been unable to recruit even 100,000 youth, with their performance hovering around 70,000. What the NPP achieved in under two years, the NDC has been unable to achieve in 8 years.

It is not surprising that their greatest achievement in this sector has been the creation of ingenious schemes to facilitate the stealing of over one billion Ghana Cedis from the sector and the sharing of this loot amongst themselves and their cronies.

With John Mahama's track record, The NPP cannot fathom how the unemployment situation will improve under a future Mahama-led government.

It is this outright theft from the public purse, fiscal indiscipline, reckless expenditure, mismanagement of our finances that has presented President Mahama with the unenviable record of being the only leader in Ghana's history to superintend over three back-to-back double digit fiscal deficits.

Today, the relative-but-shaky stability that the President claims we are seeing has been made possible because of the IMF bailout.

This simply confirms President Mahama's incompetence and lack of vision. Ghanaians elected him to do a job. He has failed miserably. He then called the IMF who made him agree to all kinds of conditions before they offered their help. Now, Ghanaians have to endure hardship and suffering brought about by the austerity measures of the IMF.

After all, President Mahama agreed with the IMF as one of the conditions for the bailout to lay off public sector workers starting from 2017. The agreement 2015 IMF report spells this out clearly:

The Government will undertake, with the assistance of development partners, a comprehensive plan to rationalize the size and increase the efficiency of the civil service and allied services on the payroll. The related strategic plan will be ready in December 2015, the results of which will inform the actual rationalization of staff, which is expected to begin in 2017.

Source: 2015 IMF Country Report No.15/103, page 17, Sub-heading: CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policy 65 (MEFP65).

'Rationalization' is another way of saying retrenchment, lay-off or downsizing.

What this simply means is that the current freeze on employment in the public sector would not be lifted to give jobs to Ghanaians. Instead, the grand plan is to rob public sector workers of their jobs in 2017.

Public sectors vote for Mahama at their own peril.

His track record in job creation has been totally abysmal. A future with him at the helm would be extremely bleak.

3. EXPANDING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT

Building infrastructure is expected of every government. Nana Akufo-Addo, our Presidential Candidate once said: The people of Ghana have a right to expect a government to improve, at the very least, upon what it inherits from an outgoing one But, that must be done on a value for money basis.

On August 31st, 2011, Akufo-Addo warned against what he called the loan rush of the NDC government. We may have to revisit our HIPC experience if we don't borrow responsibly,

When Nana Akufo-Addo said this in 2011, the loan bill was around $10 billion. Today, it has shot up in real terms to over $39 billion worth of loans (or some $27 billion in nominal terms).

Much of this borrowing was supposed to help accelerate Ghana's development. But, our roads remain so poor that only those with access to helicopters, like President Mahama and his officials, can safely travel across the country without any stress.

Our communities lack proper sanitation because we prefer to pay more than the going rate to companies that have special relations with The Flagstaff House.

To borrow a famous phrase: Na Sika No Wo He? What has been the impact of these massive resources on the lives of the people? Where are the projects?

Mahama and his government should let Ghanaians know what the NDC has got to show for the billions of dollars it has borrowed in our name.

In actual fact, the NPP strongly believes Ghana can and will develop three times as fast, if we got rid of President Mahama and this NDC this December.

This anecdote illustrates why we feel strongly that Mahama at the helm slows our development.

On Nov 8, 2015, the GNA reported that the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Nii Laryea Afotey Agbo, together with the Kpone Katamanso District Assembly had inaugurated a 6-unit classroom block, with dual desks, at Katamanso Presbyterian School at the cost of GH510,000.

Twenty days later, on Nov 28, the GNA reported that the MTN Ghana Foundation had inaugurated a fully-furnished six-unit classroom block, an office and a store at a total cost GH 170,000 for the Asikasu Methodist Basic School in the Upper West Akyem District of the Eastern Region.

What this tells us is that the private sector can build schools at three times less than the Mahama government. This means that for every school built by the Mahama government, three schools could have been built for the same amount.

If the choice then is between President Mahama and MTN or an incorruptible leader like Nana Akufo-Addo, who will provide Ghanaians value for their money, who should Ghanaians choose?

It is clear that Mahama and his government have eaten greatly into the education sector budget through corrupt schemes that have neither protected the public purse nor given Ghanaians value for money.

How many more teachers could have been employed if three schools had been built instead of one? How many children would have had a shorter walk to school because a school had been built closer to their homes? How many more communities would have benefitted from three schools instead of one?

Such examples of such blatant corruption exist in virtually every sector.

Today, under Mahama, Ghana is spending $1.4 million per km to asphalt roads, against the African average of $600,000. (Source; Study on Road Infrastructure Costs: Analysis of unit costs and cost overruns of road infrastructure projects in Africa  AfDB Chief Economist's Report, 2014).

Here is another example why the NDC has achieved so very little with so much. The NDC has presented loans to Parliament to build 12 district hospitals at the cost of $40 million each. President Kufuor built district hospitals at $13 million. The NDC's pricing of infrastructure defies any costing principles and will soon make its way into the Guinness Book of Records.

While, all this incompetence and corruption is going on, our neighbor Burkina Faso, which is drier than Ghana, through various irrigation schemes is growing big, juicy, delicious strawberries for export and processing strawberries into jam.

Meanwhile, here in Ghana we are subjected to leaders who know how to fly 'akomfem' to Burkina Faso, but do not believe the NPP can provide irrigation to help our poor farmers in the North through its One Village: One Dam solution. For lack of vision, Ghanaians suffer!

4. ADVANCING TRANSPARENT AND ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNANCE

The main obstacle to achieving transparent and accountable governance is corruption and the lack of political to fight it.

We will continue to remind Ghanaians that there is a huge gap, running into billions of dollars, between the funds that have come into the hands of the NDC and what they have delivered for country and people. Reports on the Audit Service's website (www.ghaudit/org) show that by 2014, under President Mahama, over GH5 billion of taxpayers' money spent could not be accounted for and nothing has been done by the Mahama Government to trace and retrieve these funds.

This does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars believed to have been lost through inflated contracts as the President has presided over the effective shredding of the Public Procurement Act, giving him and his people the free range to award contracts without the very transparency and accountability he is now promising to deliver if re-elected. Our elders say Agoro b3 so aefiri anopa.

Ghana, as Nana Akufo-Addo, famously remarked, is not poor, but it is bad leadership that makes us poor. President John Mahama can never fight corruption even if he is forced to.

How can Ghanaians expect a Vice President, John Mahama, who was investigated by his boss, President John Atta Mills, over allegations of corruption, be expected to have the moral authority and desire to fight corruption when he is now the boss?

How can we expect a president who admits to accepting a $100,000 gift from a foreign contractor, who was awarded a government contract through the efforts of the President, to have the courage and desire to stop his Ministers and other officials from dipping their hands into the state coffers?

How can we expect a president who has spent four years to protect his friends who were found to have allegedly stolen public funds through instruments such as GYEEDA and SADA to allow any case of corruption to be prosecuted?

Let it be stressed, when it comes to corruption, President John Mahama sees no wrong, hears no wrong and speaks against any wrong. To him that is just the way it is.

The Presidency is a vehicle for amassing wealth for family and friends rather than for looking after the welfare of the masses.

We want Ghanaians to think about this: if this has been his attitude in his first full term as President, what then would his actions be if re-elected for his last and final term?

What then would restrain President John Mahama and his family of corrupt cronies in his last term from pillaging the national coffers?

We want to highlight this because it is extremely scary. Let us not make any mistake about it. John Mahama for another four years, unchecked by the threat of losing another presidential election, is an exceptionally frightening prospect.

WHY MAHAMA CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO DELIVER.

Having poorly managed the economy and blatantly misused public funds, there is evidence that the NDC government would have no money to fund their new catalogue of promises.

Ghana is broke.

There is also evidence that John Mahama if re-elected will not have the credibility, competence and the integrity and the innovative ideas to fix it.

On 28th June, 2016, the Mahama Government published for the attention of all Ministries, Departments and Agencies, 'Guidelines for the Preparation of the 2017-2019 Budgets.'

It provides a caution that finances are extremely tight and states that Due to the continuous increase in the wage bill, as well as interest payments, and amortization among others, MDAs are entreated to budget within the given ceiling.

What an interesting state of affairs. You campaign with a set of promises. You are voted into office. You borrow billions of dollars. You spend these billions recklessly. You cannot fulfil your promises. Money becomes tight. In spite of this, you go on to make even more grandiose promises to Ghanaians. And then behind their backs you tell those who execute these promises to try and work within a small budget. Only John Mahama, for whom making and breaking promises is a way of life, can govern Ghana this way.

So, as Ghanaians listen to the flowery promises, please bear in mind that the Mahama government already knows how much it has programmed to spend and how very little that can do. Also from 2017, Ghana will pay more in servicing our debts than on paying wages and salaries.

Now, before you clever journalists start saying how will an Akufo-Addo government manage to execute the solutions in our Manifesto when, God willing, elected to take charge from January 7, 2017, let me serve notice that in the next few weeks we will outline how we intend to deal with the debt situation.

We found a solution in 2001 after the then NDC regime left Ghana in debt after eight years in office and we want you to trust that we shall find another solution to deal with the current debt crisis created over the last eight years by this NDC government.

Now, I would like us to embark on a little mathematical exercise regarding the budgeting as prepared by the NDC for 2017-2019.

60 billion Ghana Cedis (GH60,293,080,078) out of the resource allocated for 2017, 2018 and 2019 will be used to service the nation's debt.

For 2017, the NDC has already provisioned a total of GH34 billion for MDAs. The total resource envelope for 2017 is 56,689,811,909.

Now, let us look at how much trouble we find ourselves in.

Please pay rapt attention.

Out of this GH 56,689,811,909, salaries and wages, will be allocated GH15.6 billion. (15,604,905,129).

Payment of debts will be GHC17.55 billion Some GH11,178,409,057 for interest payments and GH6,371,656,454 for loan repayments and GH1.9 billion to settle non-road arrears alone.

If you add up these items, the Mahama government will have less than GH3 billion in precise figures, GH2,903,499,974 to spend.

The GH3 billion left will be expected to take care of the following:

GH11.77 billionon grants to other government units;

GH6.6 billion must be spent on capital expenditure;

GH2 billion on goods and services for MDAs;

GH1 billion on tax refund;

GH83.5 million on social benefits

GH50 million on subsidies, which the election-time ONLY 'Social Democratic' government says it intends to use to cushion the hardships it has imposed;

These items come up to a total of GH23.7 billion.

Out of the GH2.9 billion left over, the Government will have to spend GH23.7 billion on all the other things in the Budget.

In the past, faced with scenarios like this John Mahama puts his borrowing cap on or increases taxes.

The Mahama Government has found borrowing a solution to all ails. It used to borrow to pay wages and salaries, now it is borrowing to pay debt and in the process piling up higher the debt mountain.

Unfortunately, the IMF agreement which it sets out in the budgetary guidelines doesn't make room for any more reckless borrowing:

MDAs are to note that, there is a new debt ceiling of the Government of Ghana for the annual budget. This forms part of the Extended Credit Facility with the International Monetary Fund. The performance criteria relates to a ceiling on the contracting or guaranteeing of new external non-concessional debt and it is not even automatic that all concessional loans [if any] can be accommodated within [sic] the ceiling.

Ghana is broke. This is the fact. The NDC manifesto promises pitched against the high level of incompetence that the Mahama government has abundantly displayed when it comes to running the economy is a recipe for failure.

If Ghana is in crisis today, then we hate to warn you that Ghana faces a catastrophe under a future Mahama government. If he could not care, when he knew he still had to go back to the electorate for another re-election mandate, then imagine, just imagine, how very insensitive and even more uncaring he would be if given another four years, after which he doesn't need to go and beg the electorate. There will be plenty trouble.

Dear Ghanaians  it doesn't matter which political party you support  The NPP urges you to fully consider the danger to your own livelihood and the threat to your future. Imagine the further hardship and suffering Ghanaians will be compelled to endure with another four years of a Mahama Presidency.

Dear, President John Dramani Mahama, if you succeeded in deceiving the voters of Ghana in 2012, do not take them for fools. You must realise that they trusted you more than you deserved.

After all, Ghanaians know the manufacturing sector was doing far better under Mills than now under Mahama.

They know the number of manufacturing companies, big and small, that have collapsed over the last four years and the number of people who have lost their livelihoods thereby.

And, yet they hear this economic mismanagement expert, President Mahama promise to revive the factories created by Kwame Nkrumah. A little reminder, John. Many of these factories were completely buried, broken up and sold off by your previous NDC government in which you served as Minister.

The Ghanaian electorate is aware that growth in the industrial sector has declined sharply under Mahama, from 17% in 2011 to 2.0% in 2015. And, yet, he claims to be transforming Ghana.

President Mahama has been the worst manager of the cedi in the last 15 years. The worst performance between 2001 and 2016 has been between 2012 and 2016 (during the tenure of John Mahama as President).

Nobody in the NDC has been able to come out to deny these facts.

Instead, what we have seen are panic reactions all over. The Vice President threatened to respond and then recoiled. And the President to hastily addressedthe nation in a two-hour broadcast to effectively launch the NDC manifesto four days before the scheduled launch.

The fact that remains to be disputed by the NDC and cannot be disputed is that President Mahama has destroyed whatever little performance credibility that he inherited from his predecessor.

And, the Mills performance itself was a retrogression on the Kufuor years.

It is with one eye on this abysmal performance of the President that the voters of Ghana must view the credibility of the long list of promises delivered at the weekend from a Government that has no policy credibility and had to run to the IMF in 2014 for some limited injection of credibility from that external body.

Just last week, Government was compelled to come out to effectively admit to newspaper publications that in order to pay salaries for September it had to take back almost half a billion Ghana Cedis allocated to various MDAs for their work. Among this amount was GH200 million the Treasury took back from the Ministry of Roads & Highways meant to construct roads and pay contractors for work already done.

The future under another Mahama term would indeed be bleak. From their own resource allocation for the next four years, the likely scenario is that we are very likely not to have any money to pay salaries next year.

We can do what others are doing and many others take for granted: schools that work, decent homes, good jobs with good income for those willing to work, roads that are motorable and a public service system that works for the people.

Yes, we can and so we must!

In my capacity as policy advisor to the NPP Presidential Candidate, I wish to assure Ghanaians that in Nana Akufo-Addo you will have a competent, incorruptible, selfless, honest, and compassionate leader with a competent and disciplined team to deliver on the solutions to our nation's problems.

Change is coming. Yes we can. Yes we must.

But it is up to you and I to make that change happen. God bless Ghana.
By Pascal KafuAbotsi& Maxwell Ofori

Policy Advisor to the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr Boakye Agyarko, has described as disastrous, the re-election of President Mahama in the upcoming election, saying he cannot be trusted to put the people first, having destroyed the little credibility he inherited from the late President John Evans Atta Mills.

Speaking at a press conference in Accra yesterday to respond to highlights of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) campaign launch, which took place in Sunyani over the weekend, Mr Agyarko said the Presidents performances in the various sectors of the economy were not encouraging.

For instance, he indicated that with President John Dramani Mahamas track record in job creation, giving him another 4 years would mean an increment in the unemployment rate in the country.

With John Mahama's track record, The NPP cannot fathom how the unemployment situation will improve under a future Mahama-led government, he said.

According to him, What we have in John Mahama is a president who is so out-of-touch with the problems of the average Ghanaian that he sees his non-performance in these sectors as a success.

Mr Agyarko, who is also the Chairman of the NPP Manifesto Committee, relied on the plight of the Ghanaian, substantiating in one breath that when one spoke randomly to people around the country, it appeared their concerns, problems and anxieties were same.

Unemployment, bad roads, the lack of decent and affordable accommodation and the high costs, as well as the falling standards in education and health, he stated.

To push further his argument that the President did not have the interest of the people, leading to his constant deceit of the people, he unveiled a disparity in claims by government to have distributed 12.5million English, Mathematics and Science textbooks to public basic schools between 2013 and 2015 and what was captured in the Education Sector Performance of 2016, as published by the Ministry of Education.

The publication, he said, revealed that: 'Core Textbook to pupil ratio' in public basic schools, both at the National and Deprived District levels have been in decline since 2013/14, adding that at the national level, it fell from 2.2 in 2013/14 to 2.0 in 2014/15 and to 1.7 in 2015/16  while at the Deprived District level, the figures for the corresponding years were 2.1, 1.8 and 1.6 respectively.

The Policy Advisor to Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo reminded the NDC of the key ingredients of a government that put the people first, which he said were competence, compassion, foresight, discipline and integrity to implement policies that would help create jobs and not one that would kill jobs with poor policies.

It cannot be disputed that President Mahama has made Ghanaians poorer. The prices of everyday items have skyrocketed under John Mahama. The price of a gallon of petrol has gone from GH3 to GH16.

Bread has moved from from GH2 to GH7, milk from GH11 to GH3, Kenkey from 30 pesewas to GH2, fish from 50 pesewas to GH2, sachet water from 5 pesewas to 20 pesewas, and a bag of cement from GH12 to GH32, he pointed out.

Mr Agyarko, who was in constant touch with the theme of his delivery  Promises made, Promises Broken, Promises Repeated  made the NDC administration understand that it was a government that put corruption first, which meant they were only paying lip service to putting Ghanaians first. He demonstrated his corruption allegation with what happened to NPPs National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP), which became Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Agency (GYEEDA) under the late President Mills.

In these 8 years, he mentioned, the NDC had been unable to recruit even 100,000 youth, with their performance hovering around 70,000 explaining that what the NPP achieved under two years, the NDC had been unable to achieve that in 8 years.

It is not surprising that their greatest achievement in this sector has been the creation of ingenious schemes to facilitate the stealing of over one billion Ghana Cedis from the sector and the sharing of this loot amongst themselves and their cronies, he decried.

On infrastructure, he reminded the NDC that there was no trumpeting it, which the ruling government had hinged on excessive borrowing, since building it was expected of every government.

Much of this borrowing was supposed to help accelerate Ghana's development. But, our roads remain so poor that only those with access to helicopters, like President Mahama and his officials, can safely travel across the country without any stress, he revealed.

The party, thus believes that NDCs failure to advance a transparent and accountable governance, should send a signal to Ghanaians that the NDC cannot be trusted to deliver to their satisfaction.






From Michael Boateng, Sunyani

President John Mahama's running mate, Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur has replied his counterpart in the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr Alhaji Mahamadu Bawumiah on his recent lecture under the Theme: The State of the Ghanaian Economy  A Foundation of Concrete or Straw.

His Excellency Ammissah-Arthur indicated that the silence of the NDC should not be misconstrued to mean that they (NDC) do not have the brains that would respond to the lies and deceit propagated by Dr. Bawumia in the said lecture.

He said Dr Bawumia has always tried using figures to deceive Ghanaians, which is not proper economics, but mere politics full of inaccuracies and lies.

The Vice President narrated an incident to explain why an amount of money used to buy an item in the year 2000, will not be enough to purchase the same item today.

He narrated a story of a man who sold his house in the year 2000 for GHC25, 000 and the buyer sold the same property ten years later for GHC100, 000.

The man who earlier sold the house, upon hearing the new price, went back to the one who bought it saying that he was a cheat to have sold the house at GHC100,000.

The scenario given is what some Dr. 'B' and his brother 'Opana' has been saying that the Cedi today is the same as it was ten years ago, which is absolutely false, Vice president Amissah-Arthur said.

According to the Vice President, his attempt to respond to Dr. Bawumia was halted by his lecturer friend at Legon, who told him (Amissah-Arthur) not to respond to Dr 'B' because he is doing politics and not economics, so he must use political platform to also respond

On the manifesto, Paa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur indicated that the NDC is a party of progressive change, unlike their opponents whose change is destructive and that the writing of the Manifesto represents the leadership in the NDC that allows the Manifesto Committee to do their work without interferences and imposition.

He said it was only a leader who is compassionate, reasonable and a unifier that allows you to do such a wonderful work of coming out with the manifesto.

Paa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur explained the popular slogan of Zu-Za, saying it is a contract which means I will perform and you will vote.

He continued that it is a contract between government and the people that the NDC government will perform and Ghanaians will vote both presidential and parliamentary to retain them in power.

The vice president urged NDC supporters to go down to the grassroots to explain the manifesto to them, to vote massively for the party, come December 7, saying the manifesto does not vote but it is the people who vote, hence it is prudent for members of the NDC to go house-to-house to explain the content of the manifesto to them.

Our mission is bringing peaceful change to the country, and NDC is the party with peaceful progressive change and not a destructive change, he added.

The Minister of Transport, Mr Fifi Kwetey, on his part taunted the New Patriotic Party (NPP) as a bunch of empty barrels who make the most noise, while the ruling National Democratic Congress makes less noise but do more developmental projects.

He said the achievements of President Mahama's government in the last four years are unprecedented.

Mr Fifi Kwetey took time to outline progress made by the government in Health, Transport, Education and other sectors, and emphasized that the NDC are doers and the opposition New Patriotic Party are 'talkers.'

He said the NPP out of desperation is on a promising spree, trying to deceive Ghanaians with juicy but vague promises.

NPP could not complete even a single room in terms of housing, but now they are promising to provide affordable housing facilities for Ghanaians, they cannot be trusted, their promises are out of desperation to win power, Fifi Kwetey said. He continued that President Mahama is a trustworthy person who promises and delivers.

The Transport Minister called on all supporters to go out in their numbers and vote massively to keep the President in power to continue the changing lives and transforming Ghana agenda.

On his part, the Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, Haruna Iddrisu challenged the flagbearer of the NPP, Nana AkufoAddo, to tell Ghanaians how he intends to fund the numerous projects he is promising Ghanaians.
Ban importation of black holes used to wash gold by galamseyers  Small-scale miners tell gov't
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary candidate for the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem (KEEA) Constituency, Samuel Mills, has challenged the PPP flagbearer Dr. Papa Kwesi Ndoum, to conduct a poll within his companies to test his popularity.

According to Mr. Mills, employees of the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP) leader, will most likely vote against him because Dr. Nduom does not possess what it takes to win any presidential election.

Reacting to Dr. Nduom's recent attacks on his candidature and the NDC government, Samuel Mills asked the PPP flagbearer to rather concentrate on improving his electoral fortunes.

The NDC and the PPP have in recent times engaged each other in verbal exchanges over each others legitimacy and supremacy in the Komenda Edina Eguafo Abirem (KEEA) constituency, which is a traditional NDC seat, but was in 2004 occupied by Dr. Nduom, and now held by the NPPs Nana Ato Arthur.

A recent statement issued by the PPP described the brother of the late President Atta-Mills, Samuel Atta-Mills as an opportunist and a stranger in the constituency. It accused the NDC and President John Mahama of trying to use the death of the late President Mills for political gain.

But speaking in an interview with Accra-based Class FM, Mr. Samuel Mills said Paa Kwesi Nduom needs to be quiet and run his campaign.

He cautioned Dr. Nduom and the PPP to desist from consistently demanding the autopsy report of the late President John Evans Attah-Mills who he says must be allowed to rest in peace.

'Background'

The General Secretary of the PPP, Murtala Mohammed, at a recent national rally of the party dared the NDC to release the autopsy report to prove their innocence.

If you didn't kill Mills and if you are not happy Mills died, produce the autopsy report. We are challenging John Mahama to produce the autopsy report of [late] President Mills.

The Central Region people here, I want you to listen to me: if John Mahama comes to your region, tell him to produce the autopsy report, he insisted.

But according to the NDC, the calls are needless. Komenda Edina Eguafo Abirim (KEEA), constituency organizer of the NDC, Phillip Bosomtwe Amoah in an interview on Eyewitness News said the PPP's demands was an indication it had no campaign message for the constituents.

Follow the hashtag #GhElections on social media for election-related stories.



By: Jonas Nyabor/Citifmonline.com/Ghana
Members of the Graduate Students Association of Ghana (GRASAG), have called off their planned picketing today [Wednesday], at the Flagstaff House.

Last week, GRASAG gave government a weeks ultimatum to pay its members bursary and thesis grant or face their wrath.

The Association had lamented that the delay in the payment of the allowances, amounting to about GHc4 million, has put the students under undue financial stress and stifled academic endeavors.

But speaking to Citi News, National President of GRASAG, Rashid Kwesi Etuaful, said his association had reached an agreement with government over the payment, hence the decision not to picket anymore.

According to him, The picketing is not coming on. We met government, the Minister for Education, and we have had some modalities as to how the monies will be paid and when we will be paid.

Mr. Etuaful also explained that the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education, has made some contact and they have given us the guidelines adding that, Government is going to officially communicate to the country when the payment will be done.

He noted further that, the Association was leaving the official communication to government because we want them to say it to the world so when they dont go by it we can take them on.



By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana
21.09.2016 LISTEN

General Secretary of the governing National Democratic Congress has dispelled rumors president John Mahama wants Kaleo-Nadowli MP Alban Bagbin defeated in the upcoming elections.

Johnson Asiedu Nketia said such rumors can only be peddled by traitors in the NDC who are doing the bidding of the opposition New Patriotic Party.

The General Secretary popularly called General Mosquito, made the comment during a campaign tour of the Upper West Region, Wednesday.

Alban Bagbin had a frosty relationship in the early years of John Mahama's tenure accusing the president of running a family and friends government.

The relationship appears to have been repaired after Bagbin was appointed into government by the president.

With barely three months to go for the December elections, there are reports, the president is scheming to have Bagbin defeated, schemes Asiedu Nketia insisted were not true.

He said it is the NPP members who are using "traitors" in the NDC to cause disaffection for John Mahama.

"It is not everybody who want Bagbin in Parliament and those who dread his name want to find ways of removing him from Parliament. But if they come frontally they know they will be defeated. So they are coming through us, the NDC people.

"The NPP, the name they fear in Parliament is Bagbin. They go behind and use some of the NDC people so that they will appear to be attacking from within and then NPP will say it is his own people who are fighting him we don't have anything to do with it.

"It is a lie. It is NPP that is using playable NDC hands to execute that agenda and Nelson Mandela says a traitor is worse than the enemy himself," he said.

He said President Mahama is not "sponsoring any candidate in Nadowli Kaleo and no genuine NDC person is sponsoring any other candidate in Nadowli Kaleo. So our one and only candidate is Alban Babgin," he maintained.

But the NPP has parried the accusation, describing it as a huge joke from a General Secretary with the reputation of turning Ghana's political discourse into "pure comedy."

Nana Akomea told Joy News' Evans Mensah the NDC General Secretary cannot be taken seriously.

He said during the heat of the election petition in 2013 when hoodlums of the NDC gathered at the Supreme Court to attack NPP supporters the same Asiedu Nketia was on air saying it was NPP members who were wearing NDC T Shirts to cause mayhem.

"This is pure comedy," he stated, asking, "is it NPP who asked Bagbin to say Mahama was executing family and friends government; is it the NPP who asked Bagbin to say Mahama cannot be trusted to fight corrupt?"

He said the NPP has no interest in creating enmity between Bagbin and Mahama. If anything, and if they have money, they would rather use it in efforts to remove Mahama in office and not waste it on Alban Bagbin.

He suspects that the strategy Asiedu Nketia is attributing to the NPP may perhaps be the strategy he has been using to cause disaffection and chaos in other parties.

Story by Ghana|Myjoyonline.com|Nathan Gadugah
Khartoum (AFP) - Sudan said Wednesday it is hosting about 400,000 South Sudanese refugees who fled a brutal civil war that erupted in the world's youngest country after it broke away in 2011.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes since a new conflict gripped South Sudan in late 2013 following its split from Sudan under a landmark peace deal.

"The number of South Sudanese refugees registered by Sudanese authorities is 400,000," Sudan's Minister of State for Interior Babiker Digna told reporters in Khartoum.

"The influx of South Sudanese continues until now... and the process of registering them is also ongoing."

On Friday, the United Nations refugee agency said that the overall number of refugees from South Sudan had crossed the one million mark.

The UN said that as of August 31 the total number of South Sudanese in Sudan had exceeded 247,000, of which about 90,000 had arrived since January this year.

When asked about the discrepancy, Digna said: "Many times we don't agree on the numbers" with the UN.

The UN refugee agency representative for Sudan, Noriko Yoshida, appealed for more global aid to help address the South Sudanese refugee crisis

The UN refugee agency representative for Sudan, Noriko Yoshida, appealed for more global aid to help address the South Sudanese refugee crisis.

"If we don't have sufficient resources, it is also difficult to protect and assist these refugees," Yoshida told reporters at the same news conference.

Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic are the other countries hosting tens of thousands of South Sudanese refugees.

South Sudan fell into civil war in December 2013 when fighting erupted between supporters of President Salva Kiir and former vice president Riek Machar, after Kiir accused his deputy of plotting a coup.

Machar is now in Khartoum where he arrived last month for what the Sudanese authorities said was medical treatment.

He was replaced by Taban Deng Gai as South Sudan's first vice president after hundreds of people died in Juba in July in renewed fighting between Machar's forces and government troops.
United States of America-based law Professor, Stephen Kwaku Asare, has bemoaned the partisan actions of the speaker of parliament and said the head of the legislature has become an 'appendage' of the executive, headed by President John Mahama.

The speaker, Edward Doe Adjaho, was reportedly delegated by President Mahama to represent him at a public function in Ho, Volta Region, over the weekend where he (speaker) used the occasion to push for his (president's) re-election, but the law professor says it is an affront to the 1992 Constitution.

Furthermore, the speaker recently disallowed a Motion the minority New Patriotic Party (NPP) wanted to present to the House, asking it to investigate reports that President John Mahama had received a Ford Expedition SUV as a gift from a Burkinabe contractor.

Volta Assurance

The speaker assured the chiefs and people of the region that it (region) would not be taken for granted by the NDC government or any of its functionaries.

He said in Ho, the regional capital, during the climax of this year's Asogli Yam festival celebration that the region was being accorded the needed attention by the government in terms of development.

I want to pledge in the presence of all the dignitaries and chiefs gathered here that we, the sons and daughters of this region who are in government, won't do anything to deprive this region of its share of development. Whatever we have to do however, to ensure the region's progress we shall do it to the best of our ability, he said.

Mr Doe Adjaho led a high-powered government delegation, including the Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah and the regional minister Helen Adwoa Antoso, to represent President Mahama as a special guest at the festival which coincided with the official launch of the NDC's manifesto in Sunyani, Brong-Ahafo Region.

Executive Appendage

Professor Asare, commenting on the issue said, It seems the speaker considers himself as an appendage of the president and works for the government of the day. Why will a constitutional officer who is required to be non-partisan engage in open partisan politics? The answer is that the Constitution is not self-enforcing. It counts on people to give effect to its words.

He said that in designing the leadership of parliament, a country can opt for either a partisan or nonpartisan speaker and cited the situation in the US where the speaker of the House of Representatives is both the leader of the institution and the highest ranking member of the majority party; and also the United Kingdom where the speaker, while still a Member of the House, is the highest authority of the institution but proactively renounces her political affiliation upon taking office.

UK Model

Prof Asare said that on paper, it seems Ghana adopted a 'supercharged' version of the UK model saying, That is, not only do we expect the speaker to be nonpartisan, but also under Article 97(1) (b) she cannot even be an MP.

Thus, a sitting MP who is elected as a speaker must vacate her position. In practice, however, it seems the speaker can be openly partisan and campaign on any political issue for her political party of choice.

Fundamental Problem

More generally, our fundamental problem is that we have difficulties following laws. This is especially so with those who hold high offices. Thus, our laws have become mere suggestions. Its sinews of life ruptured by the very human agencies to whom the powers of enforcement have been entrusted, he said.

He added, The other sad reality is, unless we start taking laws seriously by injecting it with its sinews of life, we must as well forget about advancing as a country. The key to our governance conundrum then is enforcement.

According to him, the enforcement agencies must have zero tolerance of violations by powerful people. The commoners will not follow the law unless they see the powerful being held accountable for breaching the law.

Constitutional Design

There is nothing inherently wrong with the constitutional design for electing speakers of parliament. It has opted for the nonpartisan model used in UK and actually improved upon it. However, the Constitution assumes that a person who has taken the oath of the speaker will abandon partisan activities and count on the people to hold speakers accountable to this pledge of nonpartisanship.

Prof. Asare noted, Until we adopt an enforcement mindset, we can only say that we have adopted a hybrid approach where the Constitution suggests that the speaker must be nonpartisan, but you and I know that she is allowed to be freely partisan in all her activities.

By William Yaw Owusu
An Accra Central Magistrate Court has ordered state prosecutors to take the two police personnel who attempted to rob the Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB) Bullion Van at Donkorkrom in the Eastern Region to hospital.

The order by the court follows complaints from the two-General Lance Corporals Solomon Elvis Mensah and Daniel Kissi Abrokwah of ill-health.

Solomon told the trial magistrate- Stephen Owusu that his leg was swollen and that he could not go to the hospital on the day he was billed to do so for treatment.

He revealed that on the said day, state prosecutors sent him to the Mpraeso Court to stand trial in another case.

Daniel also told the court that he was suffering severe body pains.

Mr. Owusu said the prosecution must be concerned about the health of the police personnel and ordered them to send the accused persons, who did not have lawyers, to the hospital.

Earlier, DSP Abraham Annor, the prosecutor had prayed the court for an adjournment of the case to enable the prosecution to thoroughly study two reports it recently obtained.

Sitting continues on October 3.

The two and their civilian accomplice- Hafisu are before the court over the death of Daniel K. Sarpong, 52, the driver of the GCB Bullion Van with registration number GN 1354-15 in the Donkorkrom robbery.

According to the prosecution, the two police officers had the intention to rob the vehicle which had always come to Donkorkrom in the Eastern Region to supply money to the Bank.

The two accused policemen, who were on duty at the GN and GCB Banks respectively, decided to exercise their plan of robbing the bullion van of any cash it was carrying, the prosecution's charge sheet stated.

The three on August 16, this year at Mame-Krobo, near Tease in the Eastern Region reportedly conspired to commit crime to wit murder.

The two policemen have been slapped with additional charges of attempted robbery and murder. Their pleas have not been taken.

The prosecutor, DSP Annor disclosed that on the said day, the policemen discussed the plan to rob the van with Danjuma, who is their friend and a cabbie.

He said the policemen, who were each wielding AK 47 assault rifles waylaid the van at a spot between Tease and Mame-Krobo at about 10:30am, stressing that Danjuma drove his vehicle towards Ekye Amanfrom to monitor the arrival of the van.

The police prosecutor said about 20 minutes later, Danjuma signaled the policemen, who upon seeing the van, opened fire killing Sarpong but another police guard on board the Van who got injured managed to return fire, which compelled the accused persons to flee into the bush.

The policemen called Danjuma who picked them in a bid to escape.

The police mobilized men who managed to arrest the accused persons on board the taxi cab.

Two AK 47 rifles, 23 rounds of ammunition, one cutlass and two metal bars were retrieved from the taxi.

The body of the deceased has been deposited at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital mortuary pending autopsy.

Three other occupants of the van escaped unhurt.

[email protected]

By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson
Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have signed the final contracts for the long-awaited technical studies on the impact on downstream countries of a giant dam that Addis Ababa is building, Egypts state news agency MENA reported.

The signing that took place in Sudans capital Khartoum on Monday was made with French consultancy firms BRL and Artelia, as well as British law firm Corbett, which will carry out studies on the potential impact of Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam on the flow of the Nile.

Water and irrigation ministries from the three countries attended the signing ceremony during the 12th session of a tripartite ministerial committee.

In a statement obtained by Ahram Online, the Tripartite National Committee (TNC) of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan said the meeting "was conducted in a very friendly and warm environment and reflected the cooperation among the three countries and all in attendance expressed their support and appreciation for the efforts exerted by the three countries."

The giant hydroelectric dam Ethiopia is building has been the source of contention between Cairo and Addis Ababa. Egypt, which relies almost exclusively on the Nile for farming and drinking water, fears the dam would significantly diminish its share of the river's water.

The studies the French firms will conduct will include the modeling of water and hydroelectric resources as well as an assessment of the cross-border environmental, social and economic impact of the mega project and will take 11 months, Egypts Water Resources Minister Mohamed Abdel Aty said.

A panel of international experts concluded in May 2013 that earlier assessments on the potential impact of the dam was insufficient, and recommended that further, more in-depth studies be conducted.

The Egyptian minister hailed Tuesdays contracts as historic, adding that Cairo aims to cooperate with Sudan and Ethiopia to achieve development in the three countries and reduce wastage of electric power, according to MENA.

We have faced significant challenges and managed to overcome them by making an effort and offering flexibility, the minister said during his speech, in reference to the long delay of sealing the contracts.

The final signing of the contract came following a series of delays, the latest earlier in September, over "outstanding issues between the French consultancy firms [BRL and Artelia] conducting the technical studies and the legal firm's [UK's Corbett&Co] wording of the contracts."

A cooperation agreement of principles was signed in March 2015 between the three countries on the sharing of the Nile water and the protection of the interests of downstream countries when the dam's reservoir is filled. Signatories to the agreement pledged to protect the interests of downstream countries when the dam's reservoir is filled.

Ethiopia began diverting the Blue Nile in May 2013 to build the 6,000 MW dam that has a capacity of 74 billion cubic metres and will be Africa's largest when completed in 2017.

Ethiopia has maintained that the project  which is 70 percent complete  will have no effect on Sudan and Egypt and should benefit all sides.

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Countries which do not honour their heroes stand to lose a lot; the action providing a disincentive for service to the motherland. Such recognitions are opportunities through which new generations learn about makers of their history and emulate their feats.

We do not intend to go into the merits and demerits of the tenure of the first Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah whose birthday we are commemorating today.

The merits and otherwise are minefields which have fed divisive and inconclusive debates for some time now.

Suffice it to point out that Kwame Nkrumah born in 1909, the exact date being a controversial issue, contributed his quota towards the making of his country's history, with others taking over from him to continue from where he left off.

It is good that one of the makers of our history has been honoured with a holiday so we can all reflect and especially recount what he and others went through in the independence struggle which eventually led to the lowering of the Union Jack and the raising of the newly independent Ghana.

Kwame Nkrumah could not have achieved the feat alone, as other members of the Big Six played significant part in getting independence from Britain.

The membership of the Big Six, acting in concert, did the magic of getting the British to grant us political autonomy.

Unfortunately the tendency to ignore the others, when the history of our independence is being discussed is very high; political emotions sometimes holding sway in such discourses.

There have been deliberate distortions of the history of our independence to facilitate the creation of a lone fighter without who the feat could not have been achieved.

We do not seek to underestimate the role of Kwame Nkrumah in the independence struggle but we must simply recognize the critical contributions of his colleagues some of who unfortunately fell out with him. Indeed some of them were instrumental as fate would have it in his return home from his studies abroad. The lone man theory, for us, is a distortion of history whose correction would serve our cause better.

Some of such persons died in detention, having being incarcerated under debatable charges which did not inure to national unity.

The polarization, which continues to thwart our development as a nation, is traceable to the early post-independence days, a period which was characterized by victimizations.

There were high-notched deportations of persons, who according to Ghanaian statutes, were citizens and should not have been subjected to such actions anyway.

The foregone notwithstanding, the sense of nationalism which Kwame Nkrumah sought to instill in the country led him to introduce the Ghana Young Pioneers concept, a replica of the Communist Youth Leagues of communist countries.

The State Farms concept as a means of ensuring food security and the Workers Brigade were part of ambitious programmes the first Head of State brought to the country within the brief but chequered tenure that he was at the helm.

The best we can do on a holiday like today is to reflect upon the times of the late Kwame Nkrumah and examine how much politicians at the throttle are doing.
A comment by the founder and presidential candidate of the Progressive People's Party (PPP), Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom that some members of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) thanked God over President John Evans Ata Mills' death has sparked war-of-words between the two parties.

The fight has drawn in a brother of the late president who is contesting for the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) seat in the Central Region on the ticket of the NDC, threatening to 'expose' Dr. Nduom, an indigene of the area if he (Nduom) did not desist from those comments.

Taboo topic

Dr. Nduom, at a rally in Cape Coast recently, had said some NDC officials put on a public show of sorrow over Prof Mills' demise but privately rejoiced, adding that the death paved the way for the NDC's electoral victory in 2012.

If you didn't kill Mills and if you are not happy Mills died, produce the autopsy report. We are challenging John Mahama to produce the autopsy report of [late] President Mills. The Central Region people here, I want you to listen to me: if John Mahama comes to your region, tell him to produce the autopsy report, Dr. Nduom had fired.

The PPP later re-echoed the demands by many people to get the NDC to disclose the autopsy report so that everybody would know what actually killed Prof Mills.

Bizarrely, within the ruling party the issue over what or who killed the law professor is a taboo topic.

Nduom Attacked

Matters came to a head yesterday when Samuel Atta Mills, younger brother of the late President Mills, attacked Dr. Nduom, threatening to 'expose' him if he fails to stop talking about his brother's death.

Now what Papa Kwesi Nduom (needs to do)  and I'm sorry to call him Papa Kwesi Nduom  is, he needs to explain to Ghanaians why he changed his name from Joseph Yorke to Papa Kwesi Nduom. Look, the fact that we are peaceful doesn't mean that you can take us for a ride. Papa Kwesi Nduom, this is a warning to him, he needs to shut up about always asking questions about who killed Prof, he said on Class FM in Accra.

Now if he keeps on saying that then it means he has some information. If he keeps on doing that his clan will have to come and explain to our clan what happened. My advice to Papa Kwesi Nduom is this: 'If you don't want a dog to lick you in the face, you don't play with it.' I don't know why Paa Kwesi Nduom is making it his crusade. If he doesn't shut up about that, I will make it my project to expose him.

PPP Fires Back

However, PPP has issued a release challenging the NDC and Prof Mills' brother to bring the so-called damning report the ruling party claims to have on Dr. Nduom and reiterated their demand to know what killed the former president.

A statement issued in Accra by PPP Director of Communications, Paa Kow Ackon, described Samuel Atta Mills as the opportunist stranger in KEEA and said the NDC candidate had caused a fight he would live to regret.

It is a fact that President John Mahama and the NDC have repeatedly sought to use the death of the late President Atta Mills for political gain. This obviously has suited the interests of Samuel Mills. Does the younger Mills not know that the late Atta Mills was president for the whole Ghana and not his family only? For crying out loud, what has Samuel Mills done to pursue his brothers death certificate and cure the inconceivable insult of his strange death and illegal burial? the statement averred.

Elmina stranger

The eccentric manners of Samuel Atta Mills and his ilk who in this 2016 year of our Lord think that there is something negative to 'expose' about Dr Nduom's name (Papa Kwesi Nduom) is a confirmation that truly he does not even come from KEEA.

The release said, We cannot also rule out misguided mischief since the NDC from 2001 have tried to call Dr Nduom Peter Yorke, John Yorke, etc. Every Fante has both ancestral and Christian names and this is common among Fante families. So it is only non-proper Fantes like Samuel Mills who will cry over such basic Fante naming values.

Elmina origin

Everyone who is from KEEA and specifically Elmina knows that in Dr Nduom's family there are popular names such as Nduom, Asankoma and Yorke. And it is public knowledge that at birth, Dr Nduom was named Joseph Hubster Yorke Jnr after his father; and Papa Kwesi Nduom after one of their illustrious family members. If Samuel Atta Mills cares to know, both names are in Dr Nduom's baptism and birth certificates. Who in Elmina does not know Dr Nduom as Papa Nduom since his childhood?

The party described Prof Mills' brother as a stranger who is trying so hard and quite unsuccessfully to convince people that he is also from KEEA who can expose himself about his ignorance to the extent of publicly threatening to expose Dr Nduom about a so-called change of name from Yorke to Nduom; when in actual fact, there has not been any change of name.

It added that the NDC parliamentary candidate was only doing that to gain sympathy among the electorate.

To set the record straight, it was Dr Nduom's father who led Teacher Atta Mills to acquire the farm land at Essaman in Elmina for which today, Samuel Atta Mills has hired land guards to terrorize innocent people, even though he is unqualified to contest any election in KEEA. Was it not when the late Atta Mills became president that his family built a house at Essaman? The question is, so at what point did Samuel Atta Mills realize that he is from KEEA? Has he not always pointed to Cape Coast or Otuam as where they come from? PPP queried.

More challenge

Earlier, at a rally in Accra, PPP General Secretary Murtala Mohammed had said the party stood by its demand for the autopsy report to be made public and dared the NDC candidate to go ahead and carry through his threat.

I was the one who made that request The founder of NDC was the first person to tell us this story. Anita De Sosoo also said the same thing. Anyidoho said he was going to speak at the right time; [there are] rumours all over the place about how Mills died and what killed him as the first citizen of the land. The PPP is demanding they produce the autopsy report, Mohammed posited.

By William Yaw Owusu
The man who reportedly hurled a sachet of water at President Mahama during his recent 'accounting to the people' tour at the Agbogbloshie yam market in Accra on September 15, 2016, has been dragged before an Accra circuit court.

The accused, Akwasi Emmanuel, has been charged for offensive conduct.

Although the case was heard in chambers in a court presided over by Aboagye Tandoh, sources claim the plea of the accused was not taken.

According to the source, the court ordered the prosecution to take the accused to the psychiatric hospital for examination to ascertain whether or not he was mentally sound to stand trial.

The paper's source further hinted that the said substance was yet to be sent to the laboratory for analysis.

This is not the first time President Mahama seems to have incurred the wrath of ordinary citizens who are deemed 'mentally unfit.'

On July 28, 2015, one Charles Antwi stormed the Ringway Assemblies of God Church  the church of President Mahama  with intent to kill him over what the accused said was his (president's) bad leadership style.

Charles was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison by an Accra circuit court  a decision which was reversed by an Accra high court on the grounds that the accused was mentally unstable.

Just as the controversy sparked by that bizarre incident was about to settle, one Kwame Gyebi was arrested and detailed at his residence in Dzowulu, Accra, by operatives of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) for saying that President Mahama would die on Independence Day.

[email protected]

By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson
From Alfred Adams, Sekondi

The election of the President and Vice president of the Western Regional House of Chiefs (WRHC) has sharply thrown the House into camps, The Chronicle has learnt.

The 22 Paramount Chiefs, who are eligible to cast their votes, hold allegiance to the contesting candidates. Nana Kwesi Agyemang III, Acting President of the House and Paramount Chief for Lower Dixcove is being fiercely contested by his own pal, Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebi, Paramount Chief for Sefwi Anwiaso for the position of President.

The position of the Vice President is also being contested by Awulae Amihere Kpanyile, Paramount Chief for Atuabo and Okogyeaman Kwaku Gyamprah.

Information available to this reporter has it that whilst Nana Kwesi Agyemang supports Okogyeaman Kwaku Gyamprah for the position of the Vice President, Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebi supports Awulae Amihere Kpanyile for the Vice presidential position.

What this means is that a win for Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebi as President would reflect in a win for Amihere Kpanyile as Vice President, because he is in the camp of Kwesi Agyemang.

The camps, according to information, became imminent following the decision of Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebi to contest Kwesi Agyemang for the position of President.

Members of the House, who are opposed to Kwesi Agyemangs contest are of the firm belief that since the latter had served in that capacity for years, it was just reasonable he contested unopposed.

Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebis camp, however, argued otherwise, claiming the position was not one which could not be vied for, to enable an individual ascend to it.

As to whether or not the House had been divided along the lines of the contesting candidates, Nana Kwesi Agyemang disagreed.

He told this reporter: I have my supporters and same as others who have their supporters. But this, to Nana Agyemang, did not mean the House had formed camps prior to the election.

Asked by this reporter whether he was hopeful he could win the election to continue as President of the House, Nana replied in the affirmative, asking rhetorically: If I will not win, why will I contest?As a Christian I leave everything in the hands of God, he indicated.

It would be recalled that the election of leaders to steer the affairs of the House for the next four years was hit by a series of law suits which adversely affected its administration.

Three injunction motions have so far been served on the House, precluding it from going ahead to elect the President, Vice and other representatives into the National House of Chiefs (NHC).

It is not known when the suits would be withdrawn from court to pave way for the election.

However, commenting further on the issue, the Acting President of the WRHC said he was not bothered that he was being fiercely contested for the position of the President of the House by his own friend.

He explained to this reporter in a telephone interview that he least expected to be contested simply because he had served in that capacity for years, with his leadership style known to everyone. But with the turn of events, he would have no other option than to take solace in his records during his tenure.

'If you follow the history of election in the House, you will realize that there has been no single election where the presidency has not been contested'. With this record, he was not surprised though that having held the front as Acting President he was being contested by his own friend.
21.09.2016 LISTEN

Policy think tank, IMANI Ghana has started the review of the manifestos of the various political parties, especially the front runners in the impending December 7 elections  the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The NPP has officially not released its manifesto, but Imani decided to base its analysis on the promises that have been made by the flagbearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on the various political platforms.

According to the policy think tank, Nana Addo has so far made 29 campaign promises but only one is quantifiable, 14 semi-quantifiable and 14 non-quantifiable.

In the case of the ruling NDC, Imani said highlights of its manifesto released by President Mahama indicate that the party would have to spend a whopping $24 billion to execute 75% of them.

From the ballpark costing exercise performed on the scope of the NDC's planned projects and programs, as detailed in the annexes, the party would need to spend a sum of $24 billion over and above their 5-year spending average if they are to implement 75% of their full manifesto.

From an analysis of revenue growth, donor appetite for budget financing, and other net positives, $22 billion of the amount would have to be borrowed and added to the debt stock taking this country's debt to GDP ratio above 100, it noted.

Both NPP and NDC have reacted to Imani's analysis by condemning the policy think tank for making elementary economic analysis about their manifestos.

The Chronicle, however, thinks that instead of being condemned, Franklin Cudjoe and his team should rather be lauded for coming out with this innovation to ensure that the voter is not bamboozled with figures and promises that may not be achievable.

Over the years, the political parties have come out with phantom promises, but they got away with it because there was no third party to checkmate them.

For example, in the run up to the 2000 elections, NPP promised to construct railway lines from the South to the North of the country. The party also promised to transform the various slums into well planned residential areas. Ghanaians swallowed this hook line and sinker and voted for the party, but after spending eight years in government, the railway lines was never extended to the north as promised. The planned residential areas to replace the slums did not also see the light of day.

In the case of the NDC, they promised to build 200 Senior High Schools, 10 Colleges of Education and also introduced one time premium for the National Health Insurance subscribers. Regrettably, none of these promises have been fully achieved after the Atta Mills-Mahama governments have led this country for eight solid years.

So far, only ten or so Senior High Schools out of the 200 promised have been commissioned by President Mahama.

Yesterday, Mr Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Deputy Minister of Education attempted to explain on Adom FM why they have not been able to build the ten colleges of education, but what he said could best be told to the marines.

The least said about the one time premium for the NHIS card holders, the better, yet these are some of the promises NDC used to hoodwink voters to vote for the party in 2008.

Since Majority of Ghanaians live below the poverty line, they would obviously be enthralled by a political party that promises one term premium payment and vote for it.

The NDC saw this loophole and exploited it to their political advantage, knowing very well that they could not implement the policy.

Indeed, if the Imanis of today were present in those days, these phantom promises would have been subjected to proper financial scrutiny and voters properly educated to sieve the bad promises from the good ones.

Since not all Ghanaians have both finance and economic backgrounds, the country needs independent institution like Imani to subject some of these promises to critical scrutiny and accordingly educate their fellow Ghanaians.

The Chronicle is, therefore, advising both NDC and NPP not to see Imani and others who are reviewing these promises as enemies, but rather as partners in development.

Their critique would enable them to fine tune these campaign promises to make them economically implementable, which eventually benefit the entire country.

The time of atrocious campaign promises are over  our politicians should sit down and do their home work well, before coming out with spook promises which they would not be able to implement at the end of the day.
Cairo (AFP) - A boat carrying migrants capsized Wednesday off the coast of Egypt, killing at least 29 people and sparking an operation in which another 150 were rescued, officials said.

Search and rescue teams were looking for more survivors following the tragedy which took place off the Mediterranean port city of Rosetta, two police officials said.

It comes months after the EU's border agency Frontex warned growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.

Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.

"Twenty-nine people have died and five were injured when a boat carrying illegal migrants capsized off the coast of Rosetta," the health ministry said in a statement.

The total number of people who were on board the boat was not immediately clear.

The health ministry said hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties.

More than 10,000 people have died crossing the Mediterranean to Europe since 2014, according to the United Nations.

With the closure of the Balkans route popular with migrants seeking to reach northern European countries, as well as an EU deal with Turkey to halt departures, asylum seekers have been turning to other options.

"Egypt is starting to become a departure country," Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.

'Deadliest year'

Nearly 100,000 migrants have landed at Italian ports this year, roughly in line with the level of arrivals in the same period in 2015

"The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year," he said.

More than 300,000 migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.

The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015.

Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be "the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea," said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).

In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, drowning at least 169 migrants.

Earlier that month, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the Greek island of Crete and the bodies 104 migrants washed up on a beach in Libya.

Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.

Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period in 2015, said the UNHCR.

But Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against 2015 figures.

Arrivals began falling after a March deal between the European Union and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.
A 50-year-old environmental activist, who is lacing his boots to become president, says President John Mahama lacks ideas to continue to rule Ghana and must be booted out without delay.

According to Kwaku Antwi-Owusu, President Mahama is superintending over corruption and rot and cannot be given a second term to continue the total destruction of the country.

Mr. Antwi-Owusu, Head of an NGO called Ako Verde International, told DAILY GUIDE after picking his nomination forms at the Electoral Commission (EC) in Accra that Ghanaians would choose between visionary leadership and mediocrity being exhibited by President Mahama and his ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) on December 7 elections.

He said there is hopelessness and joblessness under the leadership of President Mahama coupled with heightened insecurity, he would reverse the trend if he becomes president.

The attitude of the President and his ministers in dealing with issues concerning the ordinary Ghanaian is very weak. They are looking unconcerned while the people suffer and I have entered the race to change all these.

The President promises economic take-off but we are never airborne. The state of the economy is not always favourable for investors. Ghana is being drawn back, he said.

He said currently the majority of Ghanaians cannot afford three square meals a day

Mr. Antwi-Owusu said if given the nod, he would unite the country through the traditional authorities and civil society and nip what he called 'undue polarization' in the bud.

He said that the President, instead of focusing on putting measures in place to improve the lives of Ghanaians, is all over the place copying the policies of the opposition.

He should let his works do the campaign for him. If he believes he has done so much, why is he campaigning all over the place?

He said the health sector is collapsing under the current administration and the agric sector was on its knees.

There is a big problem but he can't admit it. He has put square pegs in round holes.

Mr. Antwi-Owusu promised that when elected, he would strengthen the security agencies, particularly the police and stop political influence in their work to engender professionalism.

He said senior officers in the police service would be elected to their positions and help to normalize the police recruitment process, which are currently fraught with corruption and political influences.

He said he would divide the country into three sectors and focus mainly on youth employment, women and quality education for children, as well as tackle indiscriminate mining.

He condemned the remission of the sentences of the Montie trio by President Mahama, saying what the President did was to spite the judiciary.

There is clearly leadership deficit and I am coming in to restore hope. The President is completely exhausted and he must leave for a more prepared leader to take Ghana to the next level.

By William Yaw Owusu
KOFI KONADU Apraku, former MP for Offinso North in the Ashanti Region, has assured that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will win the December 7 election to introduce good governance.

He stated that the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, led by President Mahama, had mismanaged the country and heightened poverty and hardship among the populace.

Dr. Apraku therefore entreated the citizenry to exercise patience, even in the face of extreme hardship caused by the non-performing NDC administration over the past eight years and vote them out of power, come December 7.

According to him, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the NPP presidential candidate, will definitely win the upcoming election to bring relief and hope to the citizenry.

Dr. Apraku was addressing a colossal number of NPP supporters during the Bantama Constituency branch of the NPP campaign launch, which was held at Bantama on Sunday.

He admonished NPP supporters to forgive one another, especially where there was a rift and animosity, so that the party would confront the upcoming elections as a united body.

Dr. Apraku charged NPP supporters to vote for Nana Akufo-Addo and all NPP parliamentary candidates in their large numbers so that the NPP would secure a first round victory to lead the country to affluence.

He noted that the NPP would have won the 2008 election easily had the electorates, notably in the Ashanti Region, voted in their numbers; urging them to vote massively for the party this time.

FROM I.F. Joe Awuah Jnr., Kumasi
The Western Regional Organizer of the New patriotic Party (NPP), Mohammed Abdul Ganiyu has made it clear that the Ghanaian electorate will not vote in the December 7 general elections based on the so-called development projects that the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) claimed to have done.

He indicated that Ghanaians would cast their ballot in the 2016 elections based on their living conditions under the 8-year rule of President Mahama and his NDC government, in comparison to the 8-year rule of the previous NPP regime.

He explained that every government that had come into office since the advent of the Fourth Republic had undertaken developmental projects.

He stressed that the electorate would vote for a political party that had what it takes to improve their living standards adding And the NPP is that political party.

Speaking to DAILY GUIDE in an interview, Abdul Ganiyu pointed out that Ghana's economy was in a mess, and indicated that, that was the sole reason the people of Ghana were suffering and crying for change in 2016.

I am very convinced that the Ghanaian electorate will vote based on their livelihoods. They will take a look at their conditions of living and cast a vote for the NPP and its presidential candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to improve their lives, he stressed.

He urged the electorate in the various constituencies to vote massively for the flag bearer of the party, Nana Akufo-Addo, as well as all the parliamentary candidates of the NPP.

I am confident the NPP will win majority of the 270 seats come December 7 but the people who can make our ambitions come through are the residents and electorate in the constituencies that is why even our flagbearer is always appealing for their votes, he added.

Abdul Ganiyu commended the people in the southern parts of the Western Region for the trust and confidence they had reposed in the NPP candidates to represent them in Parliament over the years.

He, therefore, appealed to them to, this time round, vote massively for NPP to enable the party implement its policies to benefit all Ghanaians.

He also pointed out that the 'One District, One-Factory' policy proposed by the flagbearer of the NPP, Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufo would help create many jobs in the region.

From Emmanuel Opoku, Takoradi
Energy Bank has welcomed 30 National Service personnel posted to the bank for the 2016/17 service year, with a call on them to inculcate the values of integrity and excellence during their stay with the bank.

At an orientation reception organized at the Bank's Spintex Head Office Annex, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Christiana Olaoye, advised the National Service personnel to prepare themselves for their new assignment by working hard and applying themselves to the task with diligence and honesty.

You must have a vision and passion for the work, develop skills and competence along the way, remain committed to the task and ensure completion of set assignments, she explained.

Mrs. Olaoye noted that traditional banking had evolved over the years and that financial institutions were innovating with digital solutions and products and services to suit the needs of consumers.

We are, so far, satisfied with our business in Ghana. We believe banking is all about creating satisfaction for all stakeholders, contributing to the growth of the economy and impacting on the larger society.

Commenting further, she said, We are evolving and creating, compelling value propositions for our banking public and we will not relent in our efforts to be a service-oriented and customer-centric institution.

On his part, Executive Director, Operations, Isaac Shedowo, urged the service personnel to adapt quickly, learn fast and strive to become great leaders in the future.

He cautioned them to be truthful, reliable and committed in whatever they do.

Some heads of department, including Corporate Banking, Treasury, Commercial Banking, Retail Banking, Private Banking, Collections & E-Banking, Foreign Operations and Information Technology, took turns to school the new personnel on their business processes and procedures.

Energy Bank Ghana presently has 11 branches and one agency situated in four regions of the country.

The bank's vision is to build a strong financial institution based on the timeless principles of loyalty and efficient customer service.

A business desk report
Technical studies on the potential impact of Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam on Egypt and Sudan are set to begin soon and will take 11 months to complete, Egypt's irrigation ministry spokesman said one day after a contract was signed with the two firms tasked with conducting the studies.

Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed the contract Tuesday with French engineering firms Artelia and BRL, who will conduct studies on the cross-border environmental, social and economic impact of the mega project on the two downstream countries.

The two firms were chosen by the three countries to conduct the studies late last year.

The French companies will present periodic reports on developments on the filling process of the dam to all the three countries to ensure that it will cause no harm to Egypt and Sudan, Egyptian irrigation ministry spokesman Walid Hakiky told state TV Wednesday.

A panel of international experts concluded in May 2013 that a preliminary assessment on the potential impact of the dam was insufficient, and recommended that further, more in-depth studies be conducted.

Ethiopia began diverting the Blue Nile, the main tributary to the Nile in Egypt, in May 2013 to build the 6,000 MW dam at a capacity of 74 billion cubic metres, which will be Africa's largest dam when completed in 2017.

Egypt, which relies almost exclusively on the Nile for farming and drinking water, fears that the giant hydroelectric dam project could significantly diminish its share of the river's water.

Ethiopia has maintained that the project  which is 70 percent complete  will have no effect on Sudan and Egypt and should benefit all sides.

Ethiopian water minister Matoma Makisa said Tuesday that the outcome of these studies should strengthen cooperation and ensure that the three countries benefit from the dam.

A cooperation agreement of principles was signed in March 2015 between the three countries on the sharing of the Nile water and the protection of the interests of downstream countries when the dam's reservoir is filled.

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By Francis Ameyibor, GNA

Accra, Sept. 20, GNA - The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (AfCHPR) has set out modalities for the establishment Legal Aid Fund and the creation of the Pan African Human Rights Institute.

The AfCHPR is to table the modalities at the 5th Annual Meeting slated for Arusha, Tanzania from September 19 to September 22, which is being organised in collaboration with the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR).

Justice Sylvain OrA, President of the African Court, said the 2016 Annual Meeting would serve as a platform to cement relationship of co-operation based on complementarity between the AfCHPR and ACHPR.

Justice Ore told the Ghana News Agency in an interview that the African Court is a continental court established by African countries to ensure protection of human and peoples' rights in Africa.

It complements and reinforces the functions of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights.

He said the Court was established by virtue of Article 1 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights.

He said it was adopted by Member States of the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in June 1998.

The Protocol came into force on January 25, 2004 after it was ratified by more than 15 countries.

The African Charter established the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights.

The Commission was inaugurated on November 2, 1987 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Commission's Secretariat has subsequently been located in Banjul, The Gambia.

Meanwhile Justice Augustino S. L. Ramadhani, former President of the African Court expressed the need to strengthen judicial systems and African Courts to protect the safety of Journalists and End Impunity.

Speaking at a conference to commemorate the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists (IDEI), Justice Ramadhani noted that on the African scene there are a number of instruments which guarantee freedom of expression.

He cited Article 9 of the African Charter every individual have the right to receive information, the right to express and disseminate his opinion within the law whiles Articles 2 (10) and 17(3) of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance.

He urged African governments to establish the necessary conditions to foster citizen participation, transparency and access to information, freedom of the press and accountability in the management of public affairs.

Justice Ramadhani stated at a day's seminar to launch the 2016 International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists slated for November 2, is on the general theme: "Strengthening Judiciary system and African Courts to protect Safety of Journalists and End Impunity".

He expressed the need to raise awareness and share good practices among judges and other relevant players on key international and regional standards on freedom of expression, freedom of press, safety of journalists and how to combat impunity on crimes against journalists in Africa.

The former AfCHPR President also cited the ECOWAS treaty which also guarantees freedom of expression in Articles 66 even more elaborately.

He said apart from these instruments the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, which has been created under Article 30 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, has in October, 2002 adopted under Article 9 of that Charter a Declaration of principles on freedom of expression in Africa.

These principles reaffirm the fundamental freedom of expression as an individual human right, a cornerstone of democracy and a means of ensuring respect for all human rights and freedoms, he said.

He said the Pan African Parliament also adopted a resolution on October 12, 2012, titled Press Freedom for Development and Governance: Need for Reform.

'The instruments, the declaration and the resolution that I have cited and others, which I have not referred to guarantee freedom of expression but I dare say that what is seriously required is instruments to guarantee the safety of the journalist themselves.

'On the contrary most countries have provisions for the punishment of journalists who go astray in the course of their duties in the form of criminalisation of defamation,' he said.

He said the African Court has developed jurisprudence on freedom of expression and the rights of journalists in the case of Lohe Issa Konate v. Burkina Faso.

He said Lohe Issa Konate, was a contributing editor for a weekly newspaper L' Ouragan and was found guilty of criminal defamation after he had written several articles against the prosecutor of Burkina Faso. He was sentenced to a jail term of 12 months and was also ordered to pay a fine of CFA F1.5 million (equivalent to $ 3000).

Justice Ramadhani said the case was brought to the African Court and it held that: Criminalizing defamation is valid; and custodial sentences for criminal defamation is invalid and that fines are sufficient remedies.

He said the decision of the African Court go a long way to ameliorate the fate of journalists who may be prosecuted for defamation.

However, a number of journalists have been killed or maimed in the execution of their duties; there are instances where the perpetrators of these killings or tortures or mistreatment of journalists have been brought to book and punished. GNA
21.09.2016 LISTEN

By Mercy Manukure, GNA

Accra, Sept. 20, GNA - Mr Patrick Boamah, New Patriotic Party (NPP) Parliamentary nominee for Okaikoi Central, says the party has set its electoral machinery in motion to win 55 per cent of valid votes to be cast in the Greater Accra Region.

Mr Boamah described the Greater Accra Region as one of the critical regions for ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) but the NPP must do everything to win at least 55 per cent of the votes.

He said the party has adopted the door-door campaigns, among other things, adding: 'We must visit people in their homes and work places. We must also help our vulnerable members,' he said in an interview with Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Accra.

Meanwhile Mr Kobina Ade-Coker, NDC Greater Accra Regional Chairman has refuted the NPP's posture for the Region, asserting that the NDC has strengthened its electoral machinery in the area.

He told the GNA that the track record of President John Dramani Mahama and the developments across the Region would be rewarded with massive vote for both the President and NDC Parliamentary nominees.

He said the party had identified its operation shortfall during Elections 2012 that led to the loss of some strategic seats to the NPP and had adopted measures to win 80 per cent of seats in the Region.

"We have adopted a modern political party organisation strategy aimed at propelling the party to retain our seats and win back all other seats we lost marginally to our opponents," Mr Ade-Coker told the GNA in an interview.

Mr Ade-Coker, who is also the Chairman of the NDC Regional Chairmen, has therefore charge functionaries of the Party to intensify the campaign towards marketing the party to retain power in Elections 2016.

'We must focus on propagating the achievements of the government whilst exposing our political opponent distractive agenda to the public,' Mr Ade-Coker said.

He said over the past four years, President Mahama and his government as well as NDC leadership has shown extreme tolerance.

'At the same time, our government has done its utmost to firmly and fairly maintain law and order under all manner of circumstances.'

He said under President Mahama the NDC is projecting a new culture of stable political institutions and friendly competition to guide a common National Agenda with the broad participation of all sectors of the society.

'An atmosphere of security and respect for the individual depends not on government alone, but on all of us. Therefore all must be made to respect this principle, and not use it for their own ends,' he noted.

GNA
Accra, Sept. 20, GNA - Political parties contesting Election 2016, have decorated the major streets with campaign paraphernalia including posters, billboards, and banners in order to attract the attention of the electorate.

A survey by the Ghana News Agency observed that the two major parties - the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have erected huge billboards of their Presidential nominees and in some instances the Presidential and Parliamentary nominees at strategic locations along the streets.

The other political parties including the Convention Peoples' Party (CPP), Progressive Peoples' Party (PPP), National Democratic Party (NDP), and Peoples

National Convention (PNC) also have some few paraphernalia on display.

Some of the constituencies visited include the Dome-Kwabenya; Adentan; Okaikoi Central; Klottey Korle; Ablekuma North; Ablekuma West; La Dadekotopon; Anyaa Sowutuom; Tema- West, and Ayawaso Central.

Most of the political parties have flags designed in party colours with the effigy of either presidential or parliamentary nominee embedded in the middle hanging on electricity poles, trees, and structures in the constituencies.

A number of traders have also joined the campaign euphoria through the wearing of political party branded attires such as scarfs, handkerchiefs and other paraphernalia.

Mr Erasmus Odartey Lamptey, Assembly member for Osu Ringway Electoral area, told the GNA that the projection of the political parties through paraphernalia does not necessary mean the party or candidate with the more projections would win.

Mr Douglas Ansah, a student of the University of Ghana said the use of giant billboards and posters, forms part of the broader campaign tool the candidates use to attract individuals attention and believes that it is very ethical for the establishment of ones identity in the minds of the electorate.

Mr Sheriff Abudu, a resident of Dansoman said: 'My decision has already been made and I am not going to change it, no matter what the parties would say. Am voting for the party I believe can develop the constituency.'

Mr Asamoah Philip, a petty trader residing at Sakaman said: 'I will not vote for any party, which is not serious in executing relevant developmental projects. We need the best corps of leaders who can properly steer the affairs of the economy for the betterment of Ghanaians.'

Mr Ebenezer Sarfo, a taxi driver who resides at Dansoman said 'There is no need for voting in the December Polls. There is no better political party, all the political parties have failed to deliver over the past years.'

GNA
21.09.2016 LISTEN

By Florence Afriyie Mensah, GNA

Kumasi, Sept 21, GNA - The Canadian government has made available US$ 15 million in support of efforts at addressing stunting and micronutrient deficiencies among children, pregnant and nursing mothers in the country.

This is being done through an innovative project, launched by the World Food Propramme (WFP), linking smallholder farmers to local industrial private sector food processors, for the production of special fortified nutritious foods.

In excess of 77,000 people across five regions - Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Upper East, Upper West and Northern, would benefit from the five-year Enhanced Nutrition and Value Chain (ENVAC) project.

This comes against the backdrop of the huge cost to the economy due to child undernutrition. Ghana reportedly has been losing US$ 2.4 billion through inadequate and poor nutrition for pregnant women and children under two years.

Ms. Tina Guthrie, Senior Director, Development, Canadian High Commission in Accra, speaking at the project's launch in Kumasi, said her country recognized nutrition as indispensable to human development.

Providing nutritious food for the most vulnerable, she indicated, 'is a cornerstone of poverty reduction effort'.

She underlined Canada's strong conviction that Ghana's thriving private sector could be increasingly harnessed as a driver for the nation's socio-economic development.

'This project will strengthen the capacity of private producers and processors to increase their production, improve the quality of their products and expand their domestic and international market share', she added.

Ms. Magdalena Owusu Moshi, Country Director of the WFP, said although Ghana had made gains in reducing malnutrition, a lot remained to be done.

She stated that 'aneamia and other micronutrient deficiencies continue to affect high percentages of children and women with dire consequences'.

'Focusing on child undernutrition, especially on providing adequate nutrition during the 1,000 day window of opportunity which is the critical period from conception till a child's second birthday, impacts children's health as well as the country's economic and social development.'

She therefore asked that nutrition was made an urgent priority on the national development agenda.

Mr. Samuel Ntim, Chief Executive Officer of Yedent Agro Food Processing, applauded Canada, which through Global Affairs, Canada (formerly Canadian International Development Agency - CIDA), had shown strong commitment to the fight against malnutrition and food insecurity.

The project launch brought together officials and experts from the Food and Agriculture Ministry, Ghana Health Service, Food Research Institute, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Technoserve, Catholic Relief Services, Farm Radio International, Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) and the Private Enterprises Foundation.

GNA
21.09.2016 LISTEN

Accra, Sept. 21, GNA - The Convention Peoples' Party (CPP) has enjoined Ghanaians to observe 2016 Founders day with sobriety as the nation prepares for the December 7 polls.

Professor Edmund N. Delle CPP Chairman gave the suggestion in an interview with the Ghana News Agency to mark the 107 birthday of the Founder of the Party and nation Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

The Party is observing the day on the general theme: 'Solid vanguard to meet the needs of Ghanaians.'

Prof Delle said: "We need to reconstruct the vanguard that would lead to the attainment of Nkrumah's ideals and transformation of the country, under the new covenant.

He said the CPP have a duty to win Election 2016 to liberate all oppressed people in Ghana, as championed in 1950s across Africa and the world by Dr Nkrumah whose role in the attainment of political independence cannot be overlooked.

He therefore charged the current crop of CPP leaders across the country to provide a vanguard to protect the physical development of Ghana.

Prof Delle said the people's welfare was supreme in Nkrumah's human ideology, placed the human being at the centre and African unity and integration of its markets at the core of development.

Dr Nkrumah became the first President and first Prime Minister of the Republic. Furthermore, he was a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity. 21st September, the birthday of Dr Nkrumah, has been declared a public holiday, to immortalise his memory.

Prof Delle noted that it was the vision of the first President to reach this height, not only for Ghana, but for the whole of Africa.

He quoted the famous statement of Nkrumah: 'The independence of Ghana is meaningless, unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.'

Today, this dream has become true; all African countries are free from colonial rule.

He pointed out that the continent now is indeed politically liberated, but still far away from the dream of Nkrumah of being united.

He claimed that we need to 'take down the artificial borders that divide us', to advance economic co-operation, free trade and free movement between the countries.

He emphasised that Africa as 'one continent with one destiny' has to find solutions for development on its own.

He called Nkrumah 'not only a leader of Ghana, but indeed, a leader of all the people of Africa,' and 'a base for the total liberation of our continent'.

But, he also reminded that the continent is still far away from liberation of poverty, of underdevelopment and of backwardness.

To achieve this, he inspired the people to: 'The slogan Africa must unite must continue to resound in our ears.'

GNA
By Kwamina Tandoh, GNA

Accra, Sept. 21, GNA - Mr Fiifi Kwatey, Minister of Transport, says it is important for politicians to recognise that road crashes and injuries are major health problems for the society.

He said Road Traffic crashes and their resultant causalities pose a developmental and public health challenge militating the socio-economic development especially for low and middle income countries.

In a speech read on his behalf at a meeting between the National Road Safety Commission and representatives of political parties in Accra, Mr Kwetey said the leadership of political parties must assume the role of front line enforcers of road traffic regulations and serve as role models for their supporters to emulate.

He said road traffic crashes account for nearly 1,800 deaths a year and are relatively high during festive and busy periods including election years.

He observed that every election cycle is characterised by increased travels and this often translates into increased risk and causalities on our roads.

Assistant Commissioner of Police Patrick Adusei Sarpong, Director General of the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) noted that road safety is a shared responsibility to be pragmatic by the society.

He said fatalities resulting in road accident deaths from 2012, 2015 and 2016 had no significant improvement giving the statistics.

As in 2012, the MTTD recorded 2,249 deaths with 2,797 pedestrian's knockdowns.

He said in 2015 the MTTD recorded a decrease in deaths to 1,634 deaths with 2121 pedestrian's knockdowns.

ACP Sarpong said at the end of August 2016 1,396 deaths have been recorded with 1,850 pedestrians knockdowns.

GNA
By Josephine Nyarkoh, GNA

Kumasi, Sept 21, GNA - The people of three communities - Atonsu Kuwait, Oti and Aprabo, on Wednesday hit the streets to express fury over, what they say is the insensitivity and indifference of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) to the health hazard posed by its Kaase landfill site.

The overpowering stench from the place has become a huge worry - discomfort and irritant, to residents in those areas.

It has additionally become major breeding grounds for mosquitoes, resulting in high cases of malaria, typhoid and diarrhoea among the population.

To send powerful message to the city authorities that they could no longer cope with the situation, they blocked the road leading to the site to prevent trucks carrying waste from emptying the contents.

Hundreds of residents dressed in red and black, to signal their angry mood, they shouted slogans and carried placards with messages denouncing the assembly.

Mr. Elliot Fosu Bannor, the assembly member, said until the place was fumigated, they would not allow its continued use by the assembly.

The understanding reached between the communities and the KMA was that there was going to be regular fumigation of the place but this had been ignored and not being respected, he added.

He said he could not remember the last time the assembly took the trouble to control the flies, pests and disinfect the site.

Mr. Bannor called on the assembly to take urgent steps to get things done properly to protect the health of the people and avert imminent disaster.

GNA
Wa, Sept. 21, GNA - Mr. Julius Debrah, the Chief of Staff, has urged Ghanaians to return President John Mahama to power in the December Election to transform the agricultural sector towards achieving a prosperous national economy.

Additionally, the Chief of Staff said there were many development projects in other sectors that the government needed more time to bring to fruition for the wellbeing of all Ghanaians.

Mr. Deborah said this when he paid a courtesy call on the Overlord of the Wala Traditional Area, Naa, Fuseini Seidu Pelpuo, and his elders at his Palace, to inform him about his six-day tour of the Upper West Region.

His tour is to explain the NDC Manifesto for 2016 to the people.

Mr. Debrah would visit Wa West, Nadowli-Kaleo, Nandom, Lawra, and the Wa East constituencies, among others, during the period.

Alhaji Amidu Sulemana, the Upper West Regional Minister, the NDC Campaign Coordinator for the Upper West, Mr. Kale Cezar and other leading members of the party, are accompanying Mr Deborah.

The Paramount Chief of Busa, Naa Ali Seidu Pelpuo, who spoke on behalf of Naa Seidu Pelpuo, commended the Government for the numerous projects it had implemented in the Region in the past four years.

The Chief of Staff later held a closed door meeting with party faithful.

GNA

By Prosper K. Kuorsoh, GNA
Ghana has signed a 1.8 billion dollars loan facility for the purchase of cocoa beans for the 2016/2017 crop year.

The facility comes with an all-inclusive rate of 1.468 percent.

The agreement was reached at a ceremony between Ghana and representatives from 24 syndicated banks in Frankfurt, Germany Wednesday, September 21, 2016.

Locally owned bank, Fidelity Bank is also part of the agreement.

Under the agreement, Ghana is entitled to an extra 200 million dollars from the syndicated banks if the cocoa crop performs better and requires further funds.

Speaking at the ceremony, the CEO of COCOBOD, Dr. Stephen Kwabena Opuni, was hopeful the country will meet the output target of between 850,000 metric tonnes and 900,000 metric tonnes for the 2016/2017 crop season.

We are confident of achieving our production target of 850,000-900,000 metric tonnes during the 2016/2017 cocoa season which begins in October 2016, he stated.

He however decried the impact of the extensive harmattan weather which affected crop production for the 2015/2016 crop season.

We must admit that our production target for 2015/2016 cocoa season has been adversely affected by the severe and prolonged dry weather conditions that lasted from December 2015 to March 2016.

Meanwhile Dr. Opuni is confident the country could add at least 500,000 metric tonnes of cocoa in the next ten years following some improvements such as the provision of seedlings to farmers in the sector.

Ghanaian delegation present at the ceremony included the CEO of the Ghana Cocoa Board, Dr. Stephen Opuni; Deputy Finance Minister- Cassiel Ato Forson, Ghanas Ambassador to Germany, Akua Sena Dansoaa as well as other officials.

The 2016/2017 syndicated loan facility

The facility is the 24th since its inception in 1992/1993 crop year.

It has a four months' moratorium and seven months repayment period which starts in February, 2017 and will be completed in August 2017.

The facility was oversubscribed by 640 million dollars.

A total of twenty-four banks are involved in this year's facility with lead arrangers being eight .viz. Deutsche Bank AG, Natixis, Nedbank Limited of South Africa, Rabobank, Standard Chartered Bank, Societe Generale (SG) while the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd and DZ Bank were co-arrangers



By: Pius Amihere Eduku /citibusinessnews.com/Ghana


The National Peace Council (NPC), has condemned the recent acts of provocation, especially the mock burial of the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) flagbearer, Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo, saying it undermines cultural sensitivities.

A statement signed by Most Reverend Professor Emmanuel Asante, Chairman of the NPC, said such acts are divisive, tension-laden and have the potential to plunge the nation into political chaos and violence.

It said the recent violent clash between supporters of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) at Kukuom in the Asunafo South District, Walewale in the Mamprusi West District and the mock burial of the NPP flagbearer, presents to all peace loving citizens a steadily escalating sense of foreboding in respect of the impending 2016 elections.

It said it had become necessary for the NPC in delivering its mandate in the interest of the peace and unity of the country, to continue to urge all political parties, groups and individuals to be decorous and circumspect in view of their campaigning for the 2016 elections.

We humbly urge the eminent leaders of our political parties to take leadership and hold their supporters in check to ensure that they do not engage in such provocative acts, the statement said.

It said the NPC would continue to appeal to the media to be factual in their reportage of such unacceptable acts and behaviour.

It urged all political parties to engage in issue-based campaigning as they market themselves to the nation and avoid invectives.

The statement encouraged the security agencies to act swiftly and professionally in dealing with any infractions of the law to ensure that all political parties, groups and individuals keep the peace and unity of the nation.

As an Institution mandated by the Act 818, Act 2011 to, among other things, promote understanding of the values of diversity, trust, tolerance, confidence building, negotiation, mediation, dialogue and reconciliation.

We call on all political parties, especially the NDC and the NPP to maintain a high sense of circumspection and restraint as they mount their political platforms, the statement added.

-GNA
Italy will operate 11 direct flights to Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh amid efforts by Cairo to revive tourism in the city, which declined over the past year after the crash of a Russian airliner over Sinai in 2015.

The move comes as part of Egypt's efforts to promote tourism in South Sinai and the Red Sea governorate and increase the number of Italian tourists visiting the country, Egyptian ambassador in Rome Amr Helmy said.

Following talks with leading Italian tourism investors, Cairo and Rome agreed to run the 11 trips from a number of Italian cities including Naples, Palermo and Pisa starting October, Helmy was quoted as saying by state news agency MENA.

Sharm El-Sheikh, a popular tourist destination, suffered a sharp decline in tourism after several countries banned flights to the city over security concerns after the October 2015 crash of the Russian passenger jet.

The crash, which occurred in Sinai as the flight was en route from Sharm El-Sheikh to Russia, killed all 224 people on board.

Italians are among the top European tourists to visit Egypt, with over 400,000 Italians visiting the country in 2013.

Russian, British and Italian tourists make up more than 50 percent of the total number of tourists to Egypt.

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The Executive Secretary for the Coalition of Civil Society Groups in the SADA zone, Bismark Adongo, has urged managers of the re-introduced afforestation programme in the savannah ecological zone, to be guided by its past mistakes.

According to him, this will ensure the programme does not experience another failure.

Speaking to Citi News, Mr. Adongo said the idea to green the ecological zone that has experienced serious environmental degradation over the years, is laudable.

I think we need to be properly guided by the lessons that were learnt from the previous tree planting project under the old leadership.

He called for broader consultation to ensure adequate information and resources are gathered on the best way to ensure the success of the programmew.

'SADA to resurrect failed tree planting exercise'

The Executive Director of the Savanna Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), Dr. Charles Abugre, at the 7th Assembly meeting of the Bongo Assembly in the Upper East Region earlier this month, revealed that the authority had initiated plans to re-introduce the tree planting exercise in the savanna ecological zone as a means of promoting its agricultural-led transformational agenda.

In 2012, it emerged that, although part of a 32.4 million Ghana cedis allocation to SADA to implement the afforestation project was spent, there was not much to show on the ground under the leadership of Gilbert Iddi.

Gov't not committed to SADA

The Coalition of Civil Society Groups in the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) zone, had accused government is not showing ample commitment to the development agenda for the area; and has practically shunned its responsibilities to the people in the savannah areas.

It said government had to step up its support for the zone in spite its efforts of constituting a new management.



By: Jonas Nyabor/Citifmonline.com/Ghana
President John Mahama on Wednesday addressed the United Nation's 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The president lamented about challenges some Africans encounter while migrating to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea and also used the opportunity to court support for the continent.

President Mahama also highlighted some of the progress made by African government with regards to governance, free speech, technology among others.

He also appealed to the developed countries not to force democracy on Africa since it could adversely affect the progress of the continent.

The President also expressed gratitude to the United General Assembly and countries that supported the fight against the deadly Ebola Virus which affected some African countries in 2014.

Click here for full speech:



By: citifmonline.com/Ghana
The Millennium Development Authority (MiDA) has denied claims there has been a directive for MiDA to halt all activities in relation to the partial privatization of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) until it receives directive from the president.

Director of Communications and Outreach at MiDA Pamela Djamson-Tettey told Myjoyonline.com the claims attributed to the Secretary of the ECG Senior Staff Association Patrick Binyemi are untrue.

"MiDA wishes to state categorically that these comments are untrue and inaccurate," she stated.

"There was no directive given to halt MiDA's activities in respect of the ECG private sector participation . No such directive was discussed at the last meeting which was held at the flagstaff house.

"The reports are untrue and lacked basis," she said.

Secretary of the ECG Senior Staff Association Patrick Binyemi told Joy News shortly after the meeting that there has been a directive for MiDA to halt proceedings until the president gives a directive.

He said as a result of the directive, the first bidders conference to be organised by MiDA in October to select which concessionaire takes over the management of ECG has been put on hold because of the directive.

But Pamela Djamson-Tettey in an interview with Myjoyonline.com said there was no such directive.

When she was asked what transpired at the meeting Mrs Djamson-Tettey said:

"These discussions are ongoing and MiDA is not in the position to disclose the details at this time."

She said the meeting was held under the auspices of the Chief of Staff but he was unavailable on Tuesday. However, Mr Antwi Boasiako sat in for him.

Asked if the bidders conference was going to take place she said no decision has been taken, at least at the moment.

Below is a statement issued by MiDA:

RESPONSE BY MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY (MiDA) TO MYJOYONLINE ARTICLE: "MiDA DIRECTED TO HALT PRIVATISATION OF ECG".

The Management of the Millennium Development Authority (MiDA), has noted with concern comments attributed to the Secretary of the ECG Senior Staff Association, Patrick Binyemi, and contained in a myjoyonline article on September 21, 2016 entitled: "MiDA directed to halt privatisation of ECG. "

MiDA wishes to state categorically that these comments are untrue and inaccurate.

Indeed, under the auspices of the Chief of Staff, MiDA is participating in ongoing discussions with the Public Utility Workers Union (PUWU) of ECG and ECG Management in respect of their concerns regarding the ECG Private Sector Participation.

As these discussions are ongoing, MiDA is not in a position to disclose details at this time.

MiDA however wishes to inform the public that no directive to halt its activities in respect of the ECG Private Sector Participation has been given, and no such directive was discussed at the last meeting held at the Flagstaff House, Accra.

Story by Ghana|Myjoyonline.com|Nathan Gadugah
21.09.2016 LISTEN

The President of Santa '86, Mr. Philip Yebesi, has underscored the importance of remembering and honouring forebears for their sacrifices and devotion in laying the foundation on which positive progress is being made by the current generation.

He said that even though the present generation cannot match the sacrifices made by their forebears, they should endeavor to match the sense of service of their forebears, adding that the living must also strive to match the courage of the forebears with their devotion.

Mr. Yebesi made the call in an address during the commissioning of a Cenotaph erected by Santa '86, the 1986 year group of Adisadel College, in Cape Coast.

The Cenotaph was constructed with contributions by the Santa '86 year group to honor their forebears and mark the 30th anniversary of the year group after graduating from Adisadel College.

He praised his year group for their contributions, devotion, and sacrifice noting that the commissioning of the Cenotaph is a testament to their work and the many extremely successful partnerships between Santa 86 and the National Executive Committee of Adisadel Old Boys Association (AOBA), the School, and the Board of Directors of Adisadel College.

Mr. Yebesi cited the School Ode of his alma mater, Adisadel on the Hill to emphasise that the current generation should continue to add to the accomplishments of their forebears, noting that, that is the Adisadel continuum.

"Others have laboured and we share the glory, Ours is to do exploits and add to their gain; Those who come after will take up our story, May it be worthy of singing again", Mr. Yebesi added.

Mr. Yebesi, who is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Bayfield Oil Services, also serves on the Board of Directors of Adisadel College and several other boards, including the Africa Center for International Law and Accountability (ACILA), a research and education think tank incorporated under US law as a 501(c) (3) and also under Ghana law.
President John Mahama has called on the world to join forces to fight the terrorism cancer that has plagued the world stressing the world should not give in to terrorists.

The President believes that the world needs a concerted effect curb terrorism because no part of the world currently safe.

According to data from the Global Terrorism Database, more than 61,000 incidents of non-state terrorism claiming over 140,000 lives have been recorded from 2000 to 2014 alone.

President John Mahama, addressing the 71st United Nations General Assembly in New York, noted that, we must confront together as a united world is the threat of terrorism. No part of the world is safe.

He added In our sub-region, the activities of Boko Haram in North-Eastern Nigeria and the Chad basin has displaced millions of people and claimed thousands of casualties. Attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire show that all our countries are at risk.

The president expressed worry that, Terrorism is currently one of the gravest threats to world peace and security today, and that, the world cannot be under any illusions about the eminent threat to all of us even as we go about our daily activities.

President Mahama advocated that the solution to fighting terrorism is not for countries to shut their doors to foreigners who may have genuine cause for visiting a country either for tourism, for business and for sanctuary as refugees.

Shutting the doors is what the terrorists would want us to do to instil fear and panic in us in order that we shut our doors on the rest of the world, the president noted.

He said, Ghana stands in solidarity with all countries that have experienced terrorism recently  Bangladesh, Belgium, France, Germany, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, The Russian Federation, Turkey and of course the United States of America.

President Mahama called on world leaders not give in to terrorists. No! We must not give in to them. The terrorists must not win, they cannot win and they will not win!

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Ernest Dela Aglanu (Twitter: @delaXdela / email: [email protected])
President Mahama has made a case for fairer terms of trade to enable Africa to build on the economic and development progress achieved so far.

The President in a speech to the 71st UN General Assembly touted the opportunities for Ghana and Africa with the advent of democracy.

However, the President was emphatic that improved economic conditions and fairer terms of trade are the way to prevent much-frustrated youth from undertaking the perilous journey to Europe through the Mediterranean.

Some of the young Africans who hazard the desert and Mediterranean Sea to cross to Europe from my country are young poultry farmers or other entrepreneurs who sell their shops and undertake the journey because they can no longer compete with the tons of frozen chicken dumped on African markets annually or the adverse business environment they have to face, he said.

"Africa does not need your sympathy or Overseas Development Assistance. Africa needs a fair chance to trade with the rest of the world and amongst ourselves. The progress towards the creation of a Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) is commendable and must be fast-tracked," the President said.

According to him raising intra-African trade alone from the paltry average of 15 percent will create better opportunities for Africa's youth adding "We can achieve a lot in collaboration with the rest of the world and yet we must realize that a lot rests on our own capacity to achieve as Africans."

On Ghana, President Mahama indicated that business confidence in the country is rising citing the recent decision to allow citizens of other African countries travelling to Ghana to obtain visas on arrival.

He believes this would stimulate trade and investment if it were replicated across the continent.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Abubakar Ibrahim | Email: [email protected]
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is urging the youth to take interest in nation building.

This follows negative attitudes some youth have exhibited over the years towards national agenda.

Youth Director at Northern Ghana Union Mission, Dan Owusu-Ansah believes the youth have the potential to move the country towards development.

Every sector in the country is dominated by young people, it will be very important that all make efforts to ensure development, he said.

Pastor Owusu-Ansah says the churchs role in developing the youth has become greater due to increasing in moral decadence in the country.

Every person has undergone some training but sometimes mess around. We should keep training and be advising them, it is the responsibility of all to train efficient youth for society.

He spoke at the launch of the King Ambassadors Master Guide Club for the youth of the church at the Bantama Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The club aims at ensuring a physical, psychological and spiritual well-being of its members.

It is also one of its mandates to instill discipline in the youth and nurture them to assume leadership roles in the church.

Former Deputy Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Kwame Osei Prempeh speaking on behalf of honorary master guides advised members of the club against violent acts as we approach elections.

He is advising the youth to make right political decisions since choice made in the General Elections can affect their future.
Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - Students from a school in northeast Nigeria, from where more than 200 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, will resume lessons next month, more than two years after the mass abduction, the state government has announced.

Chibok became synonymous with the Boko Haram conflict when fighters abducted 276 girls from the Government Secondary School (GSS) on the evening of April 14, 2014, sparking global outrage.

A total of 218 are still being held.

But residents in the town hit out at the plan, calling it unworkable, as it involves sharing an already overstretched building.

Borno state commissioner for education Inuwa Kubo announced late on Tuesday that all public secondary schools would re-open on October 3 after being closed for more than two years.

"All the damages done to the schools' infrastructure have been repaired," he told reporters in the state capital, Maiduguri.

Some secondary schools in areas still deemed insecure because of militant and military activity will, however, be moved to safe areas, he added.

He said the remaining students of the GSS in Chibok would have to share a building with the local primary school, as the secondary school, which was razed during the attack, has not been rebuilt.

Yakubu Nkeki, from a support group for families of the kidnapped schoolgirls, said the plan was "not feasible".

"The (primary school) pupils use the classrooms between morning and noon while the (junior secondary school) students use them between noon and late afternoon," he told AFP.

"So, the structures are already overstretched."

Primary school in Nigeria typically caters for children aged six to 11, while junior secondary teaches 11 to 15 year olds.

Schools targeted

Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language widely spoken across northern Nigeria means "Western education is sin", has specifically targeted schools teaching a "secular" curriculum.

In March this year, the Borno state government said the Islamists had destroyed or damaged 5,335 classrooms and school buildings in 512 primary, 38 secondary and two tertiary institutions.

The UN children's agency has said more than one million children have been kept out of school since the conflict began in 2009, exacerbating already low levels of education in the northeast

All schools in Borno were shut after a Boko Haram attack in neighbouring Yobe state on February 25, 2014, when at least 43 students were killed at a boarding school in Buni Yadi.

The UN children's agency has said more than one million children have been kept out of school since the conflict began in 2009, exacerbating already low levels of education in the northeast.

Primary schools in the state were re-opened last year, said Kubo, but security remains an issue in Borno, despite military successes against the jihadists.

Nkeki said 57 primary and nine junior secondary schools in the Chibok area remained shut because of sporadic attacks.

Chibok elder Ayuba Alamson Chibok said the re-opening may even come too late for the kidnapped girls' classmates.

"Some of the girls have grown so big that they may hardly go back to school even if it reopens, as their parents may prefer them to get married once their right suitor comes," he said.

But he added: "It is a good development if the remaining girls can have the opportunity to resume school. Although two years have been wasted, it is better late than never."

Alamson Chibok said university graduates have volunteered to teach primary school pupils during the closure, while some parents have sent their children to schools elsewhere in Nigeria.

"We will be happy if the Borno state government can keep to its word of relocating the GSS students to another school while their school is being rebuilt," he added.
Tripoli (AFP) - Islamic State group marriage contracts unearthed by pro-government forces battling the group in Libya reveal that the jihadists offered their brides unusual dowries: machineguns and explosive belts.

Forces allied with the country's unity government discovered the archives as they searched buildings seized during their months-long battle to oust IS from its coastal bastion of Sirte.

The documents belonged to the jihadists' "Judicial and Complaints Department".

Published on pro-government forces' Facebook pages, they include marriage contracts and divorce rulings without any real name or personal information.

In one example from November 31, 2015, Abu Mansour, a Tunisian born in 1977, married a Nigerian called Miriam, in the presence of Sudanese and Malian witnesses.

In contrast to Islamic norms, Abu Mansour did not pay a dowry but vowed to pay compensation in the event of his death or the marriage being dissolved -- in the form of an explosive belt.

Fatima, from Nigeria, was promised a Kalashnikov assault rifle in case of divorce or if her husband, Malian Abu Said, died.

IS jihadists took over Sirte in June 2015 and imposed a reign of terror including executions in public squares.

They patrolled the streets in 4x4s to ensure that men were observing prayer times and women were not venturing out alone.

Forces allied with Libya's Government of National Accord launched an offensive on May 12 to retake the port city that was the home town of late dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

They cornered the jihadists in a small area in central Sirte but were slowed down by snipers and suicide bombings that have killed some 450 pro-government fighters.
Ahram Online takes you on a tour of the picturesque Mediterranean old districts in Egypt's second capital

Alexandria, Egypts second biggest city and the capital of the country in ancient times, is famed for its rich history and glorious past.

Traces of past glory remain standing today despite the adverse and often ugly consequences of so-called modernisation.

The air of the older Mediterranean city can still be best breathed in the Bahari district at the western end of the corniche, a seafront promenade that stretches for over 17 kilometres.

The journey to explore the gems of an old Alexandria, away from the fancy hotels, buildings and restaurants that are now ubiquitous, starts at the Citadel of Qaitbay, a defensive fortress built by Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf Qaitbay, who ruled Egypt from 1468 to 1496.





With an entrance fee of a modest 10 Egyptian pounds, you can get inside the fortress and move through the narrow corridors and get a glimpse of the outside world through tiny and steely windows.

You can also move upstairs and enjoy a stunning view of the Mediterranean from above, where many lovers gather.

At the same complex just outside the citadel, vendors line up to sell souvenirs to tourists and kids enjoy smooth bike rides on a long corridor, while others simply relax by the sea.





A few metres away, the Greek Clubs White and Blue Restaurant stands out with a wonderful view of many fishing boats decorating the sea, offering a variety of dishes and drinks and relaxing Greek music, although its prices are relatively high.

On weekends, you will probably have to reserve a table in advance for a minimum charge of EGP 100 per person.

For more modest prices, the same complex also hosts Al-Kal3a, another restaurant with a superb ambiance including an open air area right by the sea.

Moving outside the complex back towards the corniche, a walk would be enjoyable in the older part of Alexandria. Signs of the bygones are obvious in the architecture, with old and ship-shape residential buildings lined up along the coast.

The wall that separates the corniche from the sea in the Bahari district is another important feature of the good old days, given its small size which allows passersby and daydreamers an unhindered view of the sea. It stands in stark contrast to the eastern end of the corniche where high walls were erected.

During the stroll in Bahari you will find Azza, one of the most famous places to offer cheap ice cream in Alexandria, as well as several humble cafes that all have in common a great view of the sea.

For romance seekers who are willing to spend about 400 Egyptian pounds for an unforgettable lunch, the historic Windsor Palace hotel near Al-Raml Station would be a safe bet, with its sky roof offering a panoramic view of the Mediterranean.

Another stop from the corniche side is Al-Raml Station itself, a commercial hub that includes many cafes and restaurants, from common ones like Kentucky Fried Chicken to decades-old places like pastries kings Delices, which was founded in 1922.

Abul Abbas Al-Mursi Mosque

Just a few steps from Azza Ice Cream and across the colourful boats on the corniche, cross the street and treat your eyes to this beautiful mosque from the 13th century dedicated to the Andalusian Sufi Saint Abul Abbas Al-Mursi, which also contains his tomb.

Sea food restaurants

Abul Abbas Al-Mursi is located in an area called Al-Anfoshi. This area, along with Al-Mansheya just next to it, is home to some of the best sea food restaurants in Alexandria's Bahari.

On the corniche there is the famous Qadora, Hosni, and a few blocks down the road there is Arous El-Bahr. These are local restaurants where you can have loads of fresh sea food delights for relatively cheap prices, but the restaurants lack ambiance. If you are after a more glamorous setting, head to the Fish Market, right by the sea in a posh restaurants complex that includes Chicken Tikka and other restaurants.

Street Markets

Keep walking down the manshiyat on the corniche or delve into the side streets to enjoy the street markets. The oldest of all and the most famous is Zanqet El-Setat, where you can buy anything from handmade scarves to puppets and household stuff.

Also on the corniche is Alexandria's delightful fish market mentioned in Alexandrian literature. It is home to many of Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid's scenes in No One Sleeps In Alexandria. This fish market is delightful for a walk or if you are after some fresh sea food to cook at home.

Keep walking down the corniche and enjoy the sea breeze and the beautiful architecture of some of the old buildings-turned-embassies like the Swedish and French embassies.

The Cecil

Towards the end of this walk you will find yourself at Saad Zaghloul Square, the end of Bahari and beginning of Al-Raml district. This is home to the most famous hotel in Alexandria, the Cecil. It was recently bought by Steigenberger and they are refurbishing it.

The Cecil hotel was built in 1929 by the French-Egyptian Jewish Metzger family as a romantic hotel. It still maintains a magnificent sea view. The Cecil was mentioned in Laurence Durell's Alexandria Quartet and Naguib Mahfouz's Miramar. This hotel is historic, as Winston Churchill stayed here, as well as author Somerset Maugham.

The British Secret Service had a suite there for their operations. The hotel was seized by the Egyptian government after the 1952 revolution and the Metzger family was expelled from the country together with most of the Jewish community, who either fled to Europe or Israel.

This left Alexandria with only traces of what was a real cosmopolitan culture where Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived and owned businesses for generations. You can still see the lovely Greek shop facades in Bahari at many of the shops, cafes and restaurants.

End your walk with a drink and a Chinese dinner and enjoy the breathtaking views of the Mediterranean from the Cecils rooftop restaurant. Try their prawns barbecue and steamed rice, as well as their vegetable spring rolls.

A little bit away from the corniche, Fouad Street represents another landmark of a beautiful and old Alexandria. Named after the late Egyptian king, who ruled the country from 1917 to 1922, it is filled with antique shops, fancy restaurants, and most importantly the Sayed Darwish Theatre, which is now the Alexandria Opera House. It resembles a European street and offers a reminder of what was once the cosmopolitan nature of Alexandria, which used to host many expatriates decades ago.

Alexandria Bahari hotels

Steigenberger Cecil Hotel

The four-star Steigenberger Cecil Hotel in Alexandria was built as the Cecil Hotel in 1929 by the French-Egyptian Jewish Metzger family as a romantic hotel.

Address: 16, Saad Zaghloul Square, 16 El-Gaish Rd, Al Mesallah Gharb WA Sharif Basha, Qesm Al Attarin, Alexandria Governorate 21311

Phone: 03 4877173

Le Metrople Hotel

Dating from 1902, this elegant hotel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea is a two-minute walk from the Alexandria National Museums history exhibits and 2 km from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Casual rooms and refined suites are decorated with traditional European furnishings. All come with free Wi-Fi and satellite TV, and upgraded quarters add sea views.

Breakfast and parking are complimentary. There are 2 sophisticated French restaurant/bars, 1 with regular live music.

Address: 52 Saad Zaglol Street, Raml Station, Alexandria, El-Seifarah El-Etalia, El-Mesallah Sharq, Qesm El-Attarin, Alexandria Governorate

Phone: 03 4861465

Paradise Inn Windsor Palace hotel

Dating from 1906, this palatial, luxury hotel overlooks a waterfront promenade, and is a 6-minute walk from the Alexandria National Museum. It's also 2 km from the modernist Library of Alexandria.

The antiques-filled rooms feature gilded walls and hand-decorated high ceilings, as well as free Wi-Fi and flat-screen TVs. Most have private balconies with Mediterranean Sea views. Upgraded rooms have living areas, while suites add stately living rooms and art from the hotel's collection.

Breakfast is free and served on the rooftop terrace. A restaurant adorned with frescoes serves high-end cuisine, while a cafe and terrace offer light fare.

Address: 17 El-Shohada Street Alexandria, El-Gaish Rd, Alexandria Governorate

Phone: 03 4808123

Budget hotels

These are basic hotels where you can find a clean bed and basic breakfast. Some rooms share a bathroom, others have an ensuite bathroom. Most of the rooms have an unbeatable sea view terrace.

Union hotel

Al Mesallah Gharb WA Sharif Basha, Qesm Al Attarin, Alexandria Governorate

Rooms are clean and spacious, and the sea views are terrific. The hotel serves a basic breakfast of bread, butter, jam and croissant with tea or coffee, and the kitchen can make some basic sandwiches and drinks. The food is nothing special but there are plenty of restaurants, cafes and supermarkets in the area.

Phone: 03 4807312

Le Crillion hotel

Two buildings away from the union hotel, this beautiful hotel is characterized with the old high ceilings and beautiful European wall encriptions. There are a couple of family rooms with a private bathroom, and the rest of the rooms share bathrooms. The kitchen of the hotel provides a very nice traditional Egyptian breakfast with foul, falafel, Egyptian cheese, salads, and omelets.

5 intersection of 26th of July St. Al-Raml Station,Alexandria

Phone: 03 4800330

Ramses Hotel

Al Mesallah Sharq, Qesm Al-Attarin, Alexandria Governorate

Phone: 03 4869620

Triomphe hotel

Al Mesallah Gharb WA Sharif Basha, Qesm Al-Attarin, Alexandria Governorate

Phone: 03 4807585

Hotel Acropole

Al Mesallah Gharb WA Sharif Basha, Qesm Al-Attarin, Alexandria Governorate

Phone: 03 4805980

Getting there

Alexandria is a two-hour ride from Cairo by car, bus or train.





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21.09.2016 LISTEN

By Morkporkpor Anku, GNA

Accra, Sept. 21, GNA - Mr James Asare-Adjei, the President of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), has urged entrepreneurs to structure their visions properly and focus on developing them to grow their businesses.

'You must have vision and stick to that, since this will help you to identify opportunities and problem around it to make money,' he explained.

Mr Asare-Adjei was speaking at the Enhancing Growth In New Enterprises (ENGINE) scale up IV Awards ceremony, in Accra.

ENGINE is a business plan competition and entrepreneurship development programme to award the most promising 100 entrepreneurs with funds to help them in financing the needs highlighted in their business plans and to refine the business model for them.

It is a four and half year project being implemented by Technoserve, with funding from the UK, and it seeks to equip micro, small and medium enterprise with the necessary skills and resources to improve their business plan and internal operations.

The awards are divided into three tiers; with tier one awardees receiving 6,000, tier two taking 3,000 and tier three awardees receiving an aftercare package.

He said the entrepreneur's personal commitment to work was a key ingredient to business growth and development.

The President of AGI, therefore, called on the awardees to use the power of synergies to improve on their business operations to develop the economy.

He said AGI, as an Association, was dedicated to policy advocacy to advance the growth and development of industries, providing members with a vast network of contacts, especially in the West African Sub-region.

'Always bear in mind that there is always room for improvement because you have a world to conquer so make it happen,' he added.

Mr Samuel Baba Adongo, the Acting Country Director, Technoserve, said tier one and tier two category winners would be receiving an additional 12 months aftercare in the form of mentoring, networking and other business development services.

He said the aftercare would also provide support to firms and foster an environment where start-ups and early stage ventures would network among themselves to share ideas.

He said in the future, the management of the programme wanted to see businesses and ideas that would champion the transformation and impact on the economy.

The Acting Country Director said the programme would also develop a robust system to respond to the particular needs of women participants, adding that, they had noticed the poor culture of record keeping among the SMEs.

Mr Adongo commended the UK Government for supporting entrepreneurial development in the country.

Mr Jim McAlpine, the Head of Department for International Development (DFID,) said SMEs were critical to sustainable economic development in Ghana because they made up about 70 per cent of the private sector in Ghana.

However, he said, the SMEs still faced many challenges such as access to a diverse range of services that enabled them to become more efficient and competitive, building their capacity and reducing unit costs.

He said those challenges were the reason that the UK Government was fully committed to supporting Ghana to create jobs and reduce poverty through support for what was perhaps Ghana's greatest asset, 'the entrepreneurial spirit of its people.'

Mr McAlpine said the DFID saw the ENGINE programme as a critical component in our efforts to help.

GNA
By Regina Benneh, GNA

Sunyani, Sept. 21, GNA - Ghana had total annual petroleum receipts of $ 3.208 billion from 2011- 2015.

But from 2010-2015, it produced 161,797,171barrels of crude oil, Mr Roland Affail Monney, the President of the Ghana Journalists Association and a member of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) had said.

Mr Monney was speaking at a stakeholder's forum organised by PIAC on the Management of Ghana's petroleum revenue which was attended by 34 participants including representatives of pressure groups, professional and religious bodies and traditional authorities in Sunyani.

PIAC is a non-whip, non-partisan body with complete independent representation of citizens' interest through compliance and monitoring and provision of platform for public debate among other functions.

He said from 2011-2015 the amount had been spent in the provision of various infrastructure for the socio-economic sectors including health, education, water and housing delivery, energy, transport, roads, agriculture modernisation, capacity building and strengthening of institutions.

Mr Monney cited among the PIAC's key concerns that 'Petroleum revenues have been used to tackle too many national problems at the same time,' and that had weakened the potential impacts of oil revenues on the socio- economic development of Ghana.

'Only 11 per cent of the petroleum revenue has been allocated to the agricultural sector, which is the mainstay of the economy', he added.

Mr Monney said PIAC believed there should be properly-defined guidelines on the selection of the priority areas of project implementation in the country.

He urged the public to show interest about how the petroleum revenues were distributed and used for the general benefit of the country.

He said the amount belong to the citizenry and is the duty of every individual to know how it is being spent for their benefit.

Some of the participants expressed worry about the regular increases in prices of petroleum and its rippling effects on prices of goods and services and appealed to government to introduce measures to stabilise the situation in the interest of ordinary Ghanaians.

GNA
By Lydia Asamoah, GNA

New York, Sept. 21, GNA - The First Lady, Mrs Lordina Mahama says continued focus on adolescent girls, is key to achieving many of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Speaking at a High Level event on the sidelines of the ongoing 71st U.N. General Assembly in New York, Mrs Mahama who is also the President of the Organisation of African First Ladies Association (OAFLA) said adolescent girls face numerous challenges and vulnerabilities, yet until recently, they have hardly been the centre of discussions, at the global and national levels.

'Adolescents continue to experience, elevated HIV vulnerability, with the greatest risk of exposure.

'Globally, AIDS is the leading cause of death among women, and girls, of reproductive age 15 to 49, with about 14 million children orphaned due to AIDS,' Mrs Mahama explained.

The theme for the event was: 'Improving the Sexual and Reproductive Health of Adolescent Girls: The Role of First Ladies.'

Mrs Mahama said in Africa, WHO estimates that one out of every six deaths is due to HIV; and 70 per cent of these are among adolescent girls.

She said OAFLA recognises that, many of its member countries, have large populations of young people and therefore, the year of focus, on this population group, has provided a much needed boost.

She said OAFLA is therefore turning the spotlight, on: 'Improving the Sexual and Reproductive Health of Adolescent Girls' on the sideline event of the 71st UN General Assembly.

Mrs Mahama said in OAFLA's work, it has strongly advocated effective policies, and strategies, towards the reduction of maternal and child mortality and the empowerment of women and children through the building, and sustaining strategic partnerships, at global, regional and community levels.

'Therefore, we have committed to help break down barriers, and with adolescent girls in the lead, we will put importance on their sexual, and reproductive health needs.

'Today, we shall determine ways in which we must all prepare, as players on the field, to support, assist and help pave the way, for our girls, towards improving their sexual, and reproductive health' she said.

She was speaking at a gathering of First Ladies, development and donor partners, Ministers of State, Technical Advisers, Goodwill Ambassadors; representatives of civil Society Organisations and youth Ambassadors.

Mrs Mahama said the United Continental 'All In' Adolescent HIV campaign launched in Ghana in February, on the sidelines of the 7th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights calls on countries, to begin listening, involving, and including young people, in efforts to reduce new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths.

She said the African First Ladies agreed at that meeting that the best practice, was to build adolescents' capacity, and have them lead the efforts.

She explained that OAFLA members have therefore begun operationalising, the campaign, through the development of a number of country-level, and community outreach plans.

'We are organising events, to intensify the momentum generated, targeting adolescents', especially adolescent girls, in our respective countries,' she noted.

She said the UN meeting therefore offers an opportunity, to further advance the course, by reflecting on the current challenges, and gaps, in relation to improving sexual, and reproductive health needs, of our adolescent girls, and then to look ahead at how to make this a reality.

She said various partnerships with donor partners have helped reach many more girls with sexual reproductive health, and rights services, as well as skills building, and empowerment programmes.

'Now, further partnerships, and funding opportunities, need to be identified, to comprehensively scale up interventions' Mrs Mahama said.

She appealed to all to work with OAFLA members to ensure comprehensive sexual, and reproductive health, and rights for adolescents; especially adolescent girls in Africa.

Mrs Mahama expressed the hope that statements, comments, panel deliberations and general discussions as well as ideas that would come out at the sideline meeting would define the course, for the role of first ladies and lead the transformation, for their own health and development as headway towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030.

GNA
By Kodjo Adams, GNA

Accra, Sept. 21, GNA - The Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) has secured a $1.8 billion syndicated loan from a consortium of banks to enable it purchase cocoa beans for the 2016/2017 crop season, which begins in October.

The loan is equal to the same amount secured last year and it would be used to purchase between 850,000 and 900,000 tonnes of beans.

COCOBOD said the loan was oversubscribed by $640 million and there was the opportunity to pick up an additional $200 million when the need arose.

The deal was signed, on Wednesday, September 21, 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany by Dr Stephen Kwabena Opuni, the Chief Executive Officer of COCOBOD and witnessed by Mr Ato Forson, a Deputy Minister of Finance and Ms Akua Sena Dansua, Ghana's Ambassador to Germany.

The lead arrangers are Deutsche Bank, Natixis , Cooperative Rabobank, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Nedbank, Societe Generale , Standard Chartered Bank, Ghana International Bank and DZ Bank.

Mr Opuni said the loan facility comes with an all-inclusive rate of 1.468 per cent with a four-month moratorium and seven months repayment period, which starts in February 2017 and will be completed in August 2017.

He said the cocoa industry was confronted with some challenges, including the decline in soil fertility, ageing cocoa farmers, overaged cocoa farms, climate change and cocoa swollen shoot virus.

Mr Opuni said the Government had supported cocoa farmers to improve upon the soil fertility of their cocoa farms through the free fertiliser distribution programme, fungicides and insecticides to cocoa farmers for spraying their farms against pest and diseases.

He said the Government had distributed 50 million seedlings to cocoa farmers and increase it to 60 million seedlings in 2016 to support farmers to rehabilitate overaged cocoa farms, diseased farms and those starting new farms.

Mr Opuni explained that all these interventions were expected to add another 500,000 metric tonnes to 750,000 tonnes of cocoa after the next 10 years to the current yield.

He said the inflows from the loan would bring in the needed dollars to the economy and help stabilise the value of the cedi.

GNA
21.09.2016 LISTEN

By Kwamina Tandoh, GNA

Accra, Sept. 21, GNA - Professor Kofi Asare Opoku, past Chair of the Kwabena Nketia Centre for Africana Studies at AUCC, has called on the youth to preserve the country's cultural heritage and to avoid negative foreign cultural practices.

He urged the youth to resist all forms of 'cultural adulteration' and to be proud Africans to shape the world and fulfil their destiny.

Prof Opoku made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at a cocktail reception at the African University College of Communications (AUCC) in Accra dubbed: 'Kwame Nkrumah @ 107,' to celebrate the first President's birthday and his achievement for mother Ghana.

September 21 (Founder's Day), has been set aside by government as a statutory public holiday to observe the birth of Ghana's first President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

This is in recognition of his foresight and fortitude, which led top Ghana's attainment of independence from British colonial rule in 1957.

He said the influx of foreign culture had affected the progress of the nation to which people lack confidence in themselves to achieve greater heights to contribute to development of the nation.

'Nkrumah achieved a lot in his life because he believed in himself and stood firmly as an African, which is where his confident came from and we are eroding that confident which belongs to us naturally by merely imitating others.

'We were not brought here to be followers of other cultures or to be imitators of others, we were brought here to be ourselves, we have a lot to stand on and the world is looking down on us because we have abandoned our own culture and are trying to copy others,'' he said.

He decried instances where majority of Ghanaian parents shun their own community by giving their children foreign names instead of Ghanaian names.

Prof Opoku said Ghanaians, especially government, should dig into the visions and plans which the Founder had for the country and work towards improving the country.

He called for educational activities such as quizzes, plays, competition, poems to honour the great leader Nkrumah to serve as inspiration to the younger generation.

In attendance were Prof Francis Nkrumah, former Director of Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and son of the late Dr Nkrumah, Nana Kobina Nketsia V, Omanhene of Essikado, Prof Kojo Yankah, Founder and President, AUCC and Nana Odoru Kwarteng, Chief Director, Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts.

Others were David Dontoh, Veteran Actor, Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, Managing Director, Daily Graphic, Nana Adwoa Awindor, Development Queen mother of Afigya-Kwabre District, Mr Alhassan Andani, Managing Director, Stanbic Bank, the diplomatic community and Government functionaries.

GNA
Rosetta (Egypt) (AFP) - A boat carrying up to 450 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean off Egypt's north coast on Wednesday, drowning 42 people and prompting a search operation that rescued 163 passengers, officials said.

The vessel overturned off the port city of Rosetta, police and health officials said.

Five survivors, handcuffed to beds in a Rosetta hospital room, told AFP up to 450 people were on board.

"The boat sunk. My three children died," said Badr Abdel Hamid, 28, before breaking into tears.

"We were 450 people on board. We left at 2:00 am. An hour an half later, it capsized. Whoever knew how to swim, swam. We even abandoned the women and children," said Ahmed Mohamed, 27.

A municipal official in the Mediterranean city told AFP the

boat sank some 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) from the coast and the victims included one child, 10 women and 31 young men.

They were Egyptians, Eritreans, Sudanese and Syrians, said the official, Ali Abdel Sattar.

The tragedy comes months after the EU's border agency Frontex warned that growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.

Nearly 100,000 migrants have landed at Italian ports this year, roughly in line with the level of arrivals in the same period in 2015

Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.

Egypt's Prime Minister Sharif Ismail ordered police to arrest the smugglers responsible, a cabinet statement said.

The military said in a statement that 163 passengers had been rescued so far, adding that they had stopped another boat elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast carrying 294 migrants.

With the search operating ongoing for an unknown number of people, health ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed told AFP that hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties.

Egypt becoming departure country'

More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for Europe since 2014, according to the United Nations.

Map of Egypt locating Rosetta, the port near where a boat carrying migrants has capsized, with many drowned.

Asylum-seekers have been seeking other ways to reach Europe since March, when Balkan countries closed the popular overland route and the EU agreed a deal with Turkey to halt departures.

"Egypt is starting to become a departure country," Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.

"The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year."

More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.

The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015.

Fatality rates rise

Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be "the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea," said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).

In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, drowning at least 169 migrants.

Earlier that month, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the Greek island of Crete and the bodies 104 migrants washed up on a beach in Libya.

Rescued migrants lie in bed at Rashid hospital in Rosetta, northern Egypt, after a boat carrying migrants capsized in the Mediterranean off Egypt's north coast, drowning 42 people and prompting a search operation in which another 150 were rescued

Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.

Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period in 2015, said the UNHCR.

But Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against 2015 figures.

Arrivals began falling after the deal between the European Union and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.

The European Union launched "Operation Sophia" last year to destroy smuggler boats that could be used to ferry migrants across the sea.

An EU official told AFP this month that almost 300 smuggler boats had been put out of commission in the past year.
President John Mahama addressed the United Nation's General Assembly on Wednesday where he spoke on trade, governance, international relations, human development among other subjects.

The Presidents speech focused heavily on trending international issues such as improving US-Cuban relations, the Palestinian question and went further urging swift reform of the UN Security Council.

He made a case for fairer terms of trade to enable Africa to build on the economic and development progress achieved so far.

President Mahama hailed the UN response and support to the countries worst affected by Ebola in an effort to stop the spread of the disease in 2014 and 2015.

On Ghana, he indicated that business confidence in the country is rising.

Click here for Full Speech

Story by Ghana| Myjoyonline.com
Officials at the Asokore Mampong Municipal Assembly are patting themselves on the back for emerging tops in the Local Government Service Awards.

The Assembly was adjudged the best performing of all 216 metropolitan, municipal and districts assemblies for achieving 80 per cent of its action plan for 2015.

Municipal Coordinating Director, Adam Baba Mohammed, tells Nhyira News the Assembly deserves the award, having delivered excellent services to residents.

Carved out of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly in 2012, the Asokore Mampong Municipal Assembly has become one of the most vibrant in the country.

Despite limited budget allocations, the Assembly has seen improvement in education, health, roads and other infrastructure, security and revenue mobilisation.

It exceeded its targets for the 2015 Functional and Organizational Assessment Tool conducted by the Local Government Service, based on performance contracts signed by the Municipal Chief Executive and Coordinating Director on behalf of the Assembly.

Officials attribute the feat to judicious use of resources scoring high marks in education, health, security and revenue mobilisation.

For instance, the assembly exceeded its property rate collection whilst it constructed three schools against a target of two.

Adam Mohammed catalogued some activities of the assembly leading to the award to Nhyira News at a reception to reward staff for contributing to the achievement.

We were able to construct a police at Asawasi and not just the police station, we also provide them with motorbikes. We also constructed a health center and retooled all the needed health facilities within the Asokore Mampong Municipality," he said.

"We said we were going to collect Property Rate 10 percent above the previous year and we had 11.3 percent which meant that we exceeded the target we gave ourselves, an elated Adam Mohammed said.

On sanitation and education, Adam Mohammed said they were going to ensure that the environment was clean and succeeded in desilting the Aboabo Drain and they also went around to remove all refuse heaps in Asokore Mampong.

Under education, he said they constructed three classrooms out of five.

Member of Parliament for the area, Alhaji Muntaka Mubarak, could not hide his joy at the level of progress the assembly has made in improving the lives of the people.

He appealed to residents to live in unity and harmony in order to promote development in their respective localities.
22.09.2016 LISTEN

A man who allegedly sprinkled some liquid on President John Dramani Mahama at the Agbogbloshie Yam Market during a tour has been put before an Accra Circuit Court.

Akwasi Emmanuel who was charged with offensive conduct had his plea reserved.

The court has, however, ordered the Police to send Emmanuel to the Psychiatric Hospital for examination.

Emmanuel is alleged to committed the offence when the President visited the Market on September 15, this year.

He has been remanded in lawful custody.
22.09.2016 LISTEN

Judges at the lower courts have issued a ten-day ultimatum to government to either pay an outstanding 10 percent salary increment or they will embark on an industrial action after September 30.

The Circuit Court judges and Magistrates, after an extraordinary meeting on Monday, decided to draw the governments attention to the delay in the payment of the increment.

A source close to the Judges and Magistrates, who spoke to journalists in Accra, urged the Ministry of Finance to pay within the stipulated time to avoid legal entanglement.

The source described the industrial action as the last resort to address their grievances, said the Association had been pushed to the wall and the time had come for them to use industrial means to recover what was lawfully due them.

Meanwhile, the Association of Judges and Magistrate of Ghana has fixed September 28 as the tentative date for its Annual General Meeting.

In June, the lower court judges issued a stern warning to the Government to immediately abandon a planned move to revise their conditions of service.

The judges, who work in the magistrates and circuit courts across the country, said they were being short-changed with the proposal presented to them for a review of their salaries.
09.21.2016 13:18

Paul Yang, 48, currently leads one of Asia's largest merchant banks Yang, 48, joined China Development Financial, one of Asia's largest merchant banks, in 2005.

By Yue Yue and Han Wei

(Beijing)  U.S. private equity firm KKR & Co. announced that Paul Yang, president and CEO of China Development Financial Corp. in Taiwan, will become head of its Greater China operations in January.

"Paul Yang brings 20 years of investment experience to KKR," said Joseph Y. Bae, KKR Asia managing partner, in a news release. "He is well-versed in private equity, venture capital, corporate and commercial banking," Bae said, adding that Yang had a strong track record of handling mergers and acquisitions.
business Ducati to increase penetration into India; ramp up dealership Italian super bike maker Ducati is looking to aggressively ramp up its India dealership to increase penetration in the country.
business Rajiv Bajaj says new launches will take fight to Royal Enfield Speaking to CNBC-TV18 Rajiv Bajaj, MD of Bajaj Auto said industry didn't have a good run last year during Onam. The biggest issue for us is Nigeria, where were doing 40,000 motorocyles a month and now we are down to 15,000.a He said it was hard to predict what might happen.
you are here:
budget Importance of railways goes away now: Former Rail Minister Dinesh Trivedi, Former Rail Minister, said: "If you dont have a separate Budget for railways the importance for railways goes away. You dont need a railway minister, merge it with surface transport."
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Mahindra CIE (MCI) is ready to embark on its Phase 2 (2017-20) growth strategy, which mainly focuses on expansion. The company is looking to expand into newer geographies (expand within India & Asean countries) and segments (entry into plastics & aluminium products). It is also redefining its product portfolio and optimising plant locations. Its Phase 1 (2014-17) strategy of consolidation has made good progress in areas of optimising operations, turnaround of various segments, controlling capex, reducing debt, among others. MCIs announcement on acquiring 100% stake in Bill Forge Pvt Ltd (BFPL) for Rs 1,331.2 crore is its first step as a part of its Phase 2 strategy. BFPL is a precision forging & machining with focus on 2-W & PV auto components, primarily for steering, transmission & wheel-related assemblies. It has six manufacturing plants across India with capabilities in cold & warm forging in addition to hot forging. In FY12-16, BFPLs revenue, EBITDA, PAT registered CAGR of 13%, 30%, 29%, respectively. As of FY16, its net debt was at Rs 75 crore while the deal is valued at 11x FY16 EV/EBITDA multiple, which we believe is fairly valued.









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Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions. The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.



MCI has a global footprint with global promoters and is a unique case of valuation considering its massive turnaround possibilities. It has a presence across CV & PV with complementary strengths of dual parents. Its consistent focus on cost rationalisation would improve EBIT margins >8% & RoCE to >15% in CY17E. CIEs track record on turnarounds via cost control and high focus on financial metrics give us confidence. The acquisition of BFPL is largely positive thereby diversifying its concentration risk (hence increasing our CY17E revenue & PAT by 11% & 18%). However there would be equity dilution of 17%. Thus, we continue to value MCI at 11x CY17E EV/EBITDA & maintain our target of Rs 225 with BUY rating.

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(Beijing)  China's central bank on Wednesday authorized Bank of China's New York branch to deal with renminbi clearing, making it the first offshore yuan clearing bank in the U.S.

The People's Bank of China has set up 21 yuan clearing banks in regions that include Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Africa as a way to expand the use of the yuan and to attract capital into the mainland market.

Tokoy is the only major global financial hub without a yuan clearing bank.

In June, China agreed to grant the U.S. a 250 billion yuan ($37.5 billion) investment quota to buy Chinese stocks, bonds and other assets, the largest after Hong Kong, under the Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (RQFII) program.

So far, none of the qualified American institutional investors has secured its own RQFII quota, which requires registration with China's foreign-exchange regulatory body.

Apart from Bank of China, one American bank will get approval to act as a clearing bank in the U.S., which will become the first foreign bank undertaking renminbi clearing services in all the offshore markets. But that bank has not yet been identified.

The original version of this story incorrectly referred to Japan as a major global financal hub.

Contact reporter Dong Tongjian at (tongjiandong@caixin.com); editor, Ken Howe at (kennethhowe@caixin.com)
Dredging corporation of India (DCI) Q1FY17 operating revenues de-grew 21% (down 24% QoQ) to Rs 132 crore. However, due to write back of repair liability to an extent of Rs 6 crore accounted in other operating income the de-growth in total revenues moderated to 15% YoY (down 19% QoQ) to Rs 142 crore (I-direct estimate: Rs 171.4 crore) Following the lower execution, EBITDA for the quarter was impacted by higher fixed costs. Subsequently, EBITDA declined by 37% YoY (down 46% QoQ) to Rs 29 crore (I-direct estimate: Rs 46.7 crore) Dismal operating performance coupled with continued higher depreciation resulted a PAT of Rs 4 crore (I-direct estimate: Rs 19 crore) as compared to Rs 46 crore in Q1FY16 and Rs 54 crore in Q4FY16.



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Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions. The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.

The annual domestic maintenance requirement is 110 mcm out of which ~65 mcm is carried out by DCI. Due to the natural deposition of mud on a regular basis, Kolkata requires continuous dredging, which contributes 50% of total revenues of DCI. Although, DCI added three new maintenance dredgers since 2012, the revenues grew by mere 8% CAGR over FY12 to FY16. The proceeds from Sethusamudram project to the tune of Rs 300-400 crore is taking long time to accrue. Indigenization of spares for spares from BEML and improved efficiency due to refurbishment of aged dredgers would remain key for margins. Given the incessant deterioration in revenues we revise our estimates downwards and reduce our target price to Rs 425 with a HOLD rating.
(Beijing)  China Mengniu Dairy said it has replaced its CEO and three board members because its largest stockholder, COFCO Corp., was unhappy with the company's first-half performance.

The country's second-largest milk producer said last week that CEO Sun Yiping had resigned due to "personal reasons." Lu Minfang, who headed the company's baby-formula subsidiary, Yashili International, was named the new CEO on Sept. 15.

Niu Gensheng, the company's founder and former chairman who retired in 2011, has rejoined the company as a member of its strategy team.

Mengniu Chairman Ma Jianping had told an investor meeting on Monday that the reshuffling was due to pressure from company stockholders, including state-owned food conglomerate COFCO Corp., after Mengniu's profits fell nearly 20 percent, several participants at the meeting revealed.

France's Danone SA is Mengniu's second-largest shareholder. Lu has worked for Danone for over a decade and was part of its infant formula business in China.

Three board members  Ding Yubo, Liu Ding and Liao Jianwen  also left the company last week.

Mengniu's shares dropped 1.8 percent to close at HK$14.04 on Tuesday.

Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com); editor Poornima Weerasekara (poornima@caixin.com)
CULLOWHEE  The Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University will host a reception for its exhibit The Language of Weaving: Contemporary Maya Textiles on Thursday from 5-7 p.m. at WCUs John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center.

The exhibit runs through Friday, Nov. 11, and is part of Maya Explorations at Bardo Arts Center, which also will feature a theatrical performance of Tzakbu, Queen of the Maya from Palenque Rojo Productions and Asheville Sister Cities in the Bardo Arts Center performance hall on Friday at 7:30 p.m.

Through a significant lexicon of designs and patterns, Maya weavers provide rich narratives through their textiles, said Denise Drury Homewood, executive director for the Bardo Center. This exhibit examines the work of four distinct communities of Maya fiber artists in Mexico, with three female-led artist cooperatives located in Chiapas state and works by the Bonilla family in Yucatan state.

The exhibition elegantly translates for both Spanish- and English-speaking audiences the intricately woven tales of these Maya communities while simultaneously challenging traditional Western definitions of literature/.

The exhibit is curated by Paul Worley, WCU assistant professor of English; WCU students Sara Rincon and Alli Rios; and UNC-Chapel Hill student Hannah Palmer. Spanish translations are provided by Lori Oxford, WCU associate professor of Spanish. The exhibit is made possible through support from the WCU Office of the Provost, WCU College of Fine and Performing Arts, WCU Department of English and Asheville Sister Cities.

The museum is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, with extended hours on Thursdays to 7 p.m. Admission and parking are free. To learn more, go to fineartmuseum.wcu.edu or call 828-227-3591.
(Beijing)  Microsoft Corp. has begun co-development of a customized operating system for Chinese government agencies and state-owned enterprises, two years after Beijing banned the use of Microsoft's Windows 8 on government computers.

The American technology company said its joint venture with state-backed China Electronics Technology Group Corp. began operations Tuesday in the central city of Wuhan with a board meeting, according to a statement on China Electronics' website.

The two companies first announced the partnership in September 2015. Microsoft said in a news release that the pair will provide a "localized" Windows 10 operating system for government institutions and "critical infrastructure state-owned enterprises."

Microsoft's Windows is the most widely used operating systems in the country. However, the government banned the installation of Windows 8 on government computers in May 2014 after Microsoft stopped providing security updates and technical support for the 13-year-old Windows XP in a move to encourage the adoption of newer, more-secure versions of Windows.

The official Xinhua news agency said the ban was to ensure computer security, but it did not say how.

China has long been trying to develop its own IT products to limit dependence on foreign companies. This desire only intensified after former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that U.S. government had been collecting internet communications from at least nine major U.S. internet companies.

It's not clear how secure the new operating system will be from security breaches by hackers.

After the Windows 8 ban, some government agencies switched to homegrown operating systems but they were never widely used due to their instability and incompatibility with popular software.

Under the Microsoft-China Electronics deal, Microsoft will provide training to China Electronics and its subsidiaries on the latest technology related to Windows configuration, deployment and maintenance. The Wuhan-based tech company controls 51 percent stake of the joint venture, C&M Information Technologies Co. Ltd., and its chairman, Xiong Qiongli, will lead the new business. Microsoft holds the remaining stake.

Ralph Haupter, the then-chairman and CEO of Microsoft Greater China Region, said in an interview with Caixin in March that Microsoft had completed work on the first version of Windows 10 designed specifically for Chinese government agencies. Haupter is currently president of Microsoft Asia.

Wang Xiujun, deputy director at China's internet regulator, Cyber Administration of China, met board members of the joint venture Tuesday and said she hopes the partnership can "become an outstanding example of a win-win situation where Chinese and foreign companies can collaborate in innovation."

Several foreign IT companies have teamed up with local businesses in recent years to make inroads in the world's second-largest economy.

In January, Shenzhen-listed Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd. signed an agreement with U.S. firm VMware, a cloud and virtualization subsidiary of Dell Technologies Inc., to invest $50 million in China. Data storage company Western Digital Corp. and Nanjing-based Unisplendour Corp. Ltd. launched a joint venture earlier this month to sell Western Digital's data center storage systems to Chinese clients.

Contact reporter Chen Na (nachen@caixin.com); editor Ken Howe (kennethhowe@caixin.com)
A Newton man who was charged with trespassing allegedly told officers he was just at the wrong house.

Dallas Christopher Hopkins Jr., 31, of 4392 Highway 10 W, Newton, was charged with misdemeanor non-forced breaking and entering and assault on a female after he allegedly went to a home in Morganton and let himself in.

When officers arrived at Morgan Drive on Aug. 29, they found Hopkins without a shirt standing between two trailers and noted that it was noticeable that Hopkins was intoxicated, according to his arrest report.

Hopkins told officers that he had never been to his girlfriends grandmothers house and admitted he went into the wrong residence. He said that when he realized his mistake, he backed out and went to the trailer in front where he found his girlfriend, according to the report.

However, the resident of the home that Hopkins entered had a different story.

Sherry Raper said she and her mother were sitting in their trailer when Hopkins forced open the door and came inside. Raper said she asked him to leave several times, but he told her, This is the right place, the report said.

Raper said she tried to push Hopkins back out the door, but he grabbed her by the arm. Thats when she pulled away and called 911, according to the report.

The incident was not Hopkinss first run-in with the law. He has a criminal history going back to a conviction for larceny in 2002, according to information from the N.C. Department of Public Safety.

Since then, he has been convicted numerous times on various misdemeanor and felony charges. Most recently, he was convicted of felony breaking and entering and was released less than one year ago from prison, according to NCDPS.

Following the latest incident, Hopkins was transported to Burke-Catawba jail and placed under a $2,500 secured bond. His trial date was set for Nov. 8.
In recent presidential years, Catholics and white evangelical Christians joined in favoring the Republican candidate. A key reason was a shared opposition to abortion.

This time, Catholics appear to be deserting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and one can understand why. Trump is the most vulgar, least moral presidential candidate in modern memory  by Christian or any other ethical standards.

But why are 78 percent of white evangelicals reportedly sticking with a mobbed-up casino con man gone six-time bankrupt? How can they support a thrice-married libertine who brags about his genitalia?

Do note that some prominent Christian conservatives are appalled by this alliance. Moral Majority co-founder Michael Farris saw the "pilgrimage" of 1,000 evangelical leaders to Trump Tower as "the end of the Christian Right."

Farris was not invited. The event was a Trump sales job, not a discussion.

David Cay Johnston offers a full account of Trump's un-Christian behavior  personally and in business in his new book, (SET ITAL) The Making of Donald Trump (END ITAL). Though he's been covering Trump for decades, the Pulitzer Prize winner still expresses shock at the depths of Trump's moral depravity.

Johnston devotes a chapter to Trump's vindictive campaign to deny health coverage to his nephew's desperately ill baby. The candidate's actions stand out for their satanic cruelty.

In 1999, William Trump was born in crisis. The infant immediately developed seizures; his breathing stopped twice. (He later developed cerebral palsy.) The medical bills to save the infant were enormous.

Fortunately, the patriarch, Fred Sr. (who died days earlier), had provided all family members with health insurance through his real estate business  or so it was assumed. The Trump family lawyer instructed the family health plan to cover "all costs related to baby William's care."

Then Donald stepped in. When Fred Sr.'s will was filed in probate court, William's father, Fred III, learned that (SET ITAL) his (END ITAL) father's line had been pretty much left out of the estate, leaving Donald and the other siblings all the richer.

Fred Sr. had apparently disapproved of Fred Jr.'s decision to become a pilot and of the flight attendant he married. And Donald had his elderly father's ear.

William's parents challenged the will. Donald retaliated by denying the family health coverage.

The New York Daily News queried Trump about William. Donald replied, "Why should we give him medical coverage?"

At a meeting last year with evangelical voters in Iowa, Trump was asked whether he felt bad about William. He responded that he never had a reason to seek God's forgiveness.

"Why do I have to, you know, repent, why do I have to ask for forgiveness if (I'm) not making mistakes?" Trump said the following day. In reporting on the event, (SET ITAL) The Christian Post (END ITAL) carried the quote and referred to Trump's "alleged Christian faith."

"Always get even," Trump wrote in one of his books. "When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder ... go for the jugular, attack them in spades!"

In (SET ITAL) An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics, (END ITAL) 37 leading Catholic thinkers wrote that Trump's record and campaign "promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture." They urged Catholics to reject him.

Trump, meanwhile, has given Christian conservatives almost nothing, not even on the abortion issue. Farris notes that Trump "took at least three conflicting positions on abortion in a 24-hour period."

Others may explain why people purporting to be socially conservative would back a mocker of morality while portraying Hillary Clinton, a devoted Methodist, as some kind of monster. They may not like Clinton on a number of counts. We get that. But surely, there are convictions worth defending.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma, visit www.creators.com.
In its continuing drive to address the needs of home buyers and sellers in the province, the B.C. government has declared Michael Noseworthy as its new superintendent of real estate.Noseworthywho has previously worked for Yukon in a similar capacity, bringing along much experience as a lawyer and a regulatorwill begin his duties in B.C. on October 19, The Canadian Press reported.The appointment came in the wake of Premier Christy Clarks declaration earlier this year that greater government oversight is a must in the current economic environment, as the B.C. Real Estate Councils regulation of the industry wasnt proving effective in addressing the root causes of the housing crisis.Regulatory changes have increased the Councils accountability to the provincial government. The Council is still expected to take care of the licensing of agents and investigating complaints against them.
WASHINGTON  Facing public furor for the price of its emergency allergy shot EpiPen, Mylan Pharmaceuticals quickly pointed to a familiar industry solution: copay discount cards.

Copay coupons or cards have become a ubiquitous part of the pharmaceutical business, offered through websites, mobile apps and doctor's offices. Patient advocates say they can bring down out-of-pocket expenses for patients who face high copays and deductibles. Mylan last month boosted its discount cards to cover $300 of insured patients' copay costs, up from $100.

But they also have a clear business purpose: steering people toward brand-name drugs when cheaper options are often available. Researchers say those higher costs ultimately drive up expenses for insurers, employers and the health system at large.

Here is a look at the pros and cons of copay discount cards:

Pro: Lower out-of-pocket costs

As more employers move to cost-sharing health plans, their workers face higher expenses when filling prescriptions at the pharmacy. The average amount owed by a patient picking up a brand-name drug is $44, according to IMS Health, a health information company. Copay coupon usually offering reimbursement up to a certain level, such as $100.

Advocates say copay coupons are crucial for financially strapped people. Erin Singleton of the Patient Advocate Foundation says she directs patients to websites like needymeds.org and pparx.org, which compile coupon offers. To qualify, patients generally have to provide information about their insurance. But unlike some other patient assistance programs that offer free medicines or deep discounts, the coupons are not tied to income.

"Copay cards are beneficial because they're pretty seamless," Singleton said. "It is something that should be considered regardless of your income."

Con: Higher-priced drugs

While consumers pay less at the pharmacy, research suggests they are actually passing on higher costs to their insurance company. That's because manufacturers tend to offer the coupons on brand-name drugs that are competing against lower-priced drugs, often generics that sell for $4 or less at retailers like Wal-Mart.

When a generic is available, pharmacists often automatically switch patients to the cheaper option. But when a patient uses a coupon, it short circuits that process. The copay is lower, but the insurer ends up paying for the higher-priced drug.

"So those costs are going to come out in higher in premiums," said Wells Wilkinson, an attorney with Community Catalyst, a health care advocate group.

A 2013 study of almost 400 coupons found that nearly two-thirds were for brand-name medications that had cheaper alternatives, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School.

Pro: Prescriptions filled

An estimated 1 in 5 prescriptions in the U.S. goes unfilled, in part due to financial hardship. Some research suggests patients with copay discounts are more likely to stay on their medication than those without them.

One 2014 study of patients taking high-priced specialty drugs for multiple sclerosis and other inflammatory diseases found that nearly half of them used a copay coupon. In most cases, the discounts reduced their monthly expenses to less than $250, a threshold where patients are more likely to stay on their medication.

Con: Short-term solution

Coupon cards can improve access to drugs, but usually for a limited time. Most cards include language that they can only be reused 12 times or that they expire after 14 months. Across all brand-name prescriptions filled in the U.S., copay coupons are only used about 8 percent of the time, according to research published last year by IMS Health. Limiting their use: many mail order pharmacy programs do not accept the cards.

Additionally, the cards cannot be used at all by patients in federal health plans like Medicare, Medicaid or Veterans Affairs, which cover tens of millions of Americans. The cards run afoul of federal anti-kickback laws that prohibit companies from giving enrollees anything of value to purchase items paid for by the government.

When drugmakers like Mylan tout their discount cards as a remedy for rising drug prices, experts say it deflates public debate about medication costs that could lead to real reforms.

"Coupons are not a public health solution, they are a minor fix for a small number of people," said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Midland Childrens Rehabilitation Center will celebrate its 60th anniversary Thursday with Take the Money and Run, a longtime fundraising event that was brought back to commemorate the facilitys milestone.

The story of MCRC begins in 1939 with a small group of women who saw babies with needs and set out to help. Members of the group -- Childrens Service League -- made layette sets for newborns, held immunization clinics, helped with transportation needs for families needing to travel to Dallas for medical care for their child and even maintained a clothes closet for those in need.

The focus of the Childrens Service League began to narrow in 1956, and after identifying 25 children with cerebral palsy in the community, the organization started the Midland Cerebral Palsy Center. For the first time, therapy and education were provided for area children with cerebral palsy. The centers first home was opened that year on Ohio Avenue not far from Midland Memorial Hospital.

Before educational reforms were in place that included disability accommodations, children with special needs had very limited resources to receive an education outside of home schooling. In 1960, the women hired Jim Crawford, the centers first physical therapist, who also served as executive director. The league provided the educational aspect of the center, while Jim handled therapy for the children.

Hippotherapy was added to the center when a woman moved to Midland from England in 1981 and brought the form of therapy with her. Jim was a horseman, so the idea of using horses in therapy made sense. Hippotherapy has been in place and used at the center since that time.

As the schools began providing education for children with disabilities, the Cerebral Palsy Center was able to focus strictly on physical, speech and occupational therapy for the kids. Children with other orthopedic and neurological limitations started seeking treatment, and in 2001 the name was changed to the Midland Childrens Rehabilitation Center to better reflect the population it serves.

MCRCs current building -- located at 802 Ventura Lane -- was built in 1974 and the original portion of the building is still in use. Several expansion projects have allowed the facility to continue to meet the needs of the children in the Permian Basin.

Brooke Mueller, current executive director, said that what makes MCRC unique is that the center has always provided its services at no cost to families. This means we dont charge insurance, CHIP or Medicaid, and we rely solely on community donations, foundations and fundraising to keep everything running.

The community has always provided the support needed for Midland Childrens Rehabilitation Center to provide the therapy that the children need, she said.

The center doesnt bill for services because insurance companies and CHIP/Medicaid have very strict guidelines as to what they will pay for, how much they will pay and how services can be provided. To work under these guidelines severely hampers the cutting-edge therapies the center provides and slows the progress of many children.

Our goal is always to assure each child reaches their greatest potential -- whatever that may be, Mueller said. A child with cerebral palsy may not walk independently, but they may be able to walk with crutches or a cane instead of a walker. Other kids may attain full use of their limbs or overcome a speech difficulty. Every child is unique and should receive the exact treatment that allows them the most progress. That is where we differ from many facilities. We like to see miracles happen.

A number of former clients are expected to attend the 60th anniversary celebration, which will include a display chronicling the centers history.

Gail Heathington is Midland Childrens Rehabilitation Center development director.
CHICAGO  The American Academy of Pediatrics has strengthened its warnings about prescribing codeine for children because of reports of deaths and risks for dangerous side effects including breathing problems.

The academy's advice, published in a report Monday in its medical journal, Pediatrics, mirrors warnings from the Food and Drug Administration about using codeine for kids' coughs or pain.

Studies suggest it is still commonly prescribed by doctors and dentists despite the risks and lack of evidence that it works to relieve coughs.

Doctors and parents should choose another remedy when possible, including acetaminophen and ibuprofen for pain and simple remedies such as ice or popsicles after tonsillectomies, said Dr. Charles Cote, a Boston anesthesiologist and co-author of the report.

"Maybe a little pain is better than the alternative," he said.

The drug

Codeine is an opiate drug once commonly used in over-the-counter cough syrups and as a painkiller, particularly after surgery. But the report notes that a rare genetic variation makes some people metabolize it too quickly, potentially resulting in excessive sleepiness and difficulty breathing. A different genetic variation makes the drug ineffective for pain relief in as many as a third of patients.

It is available by prescription, including in cough syrup sold in pharmacies in 28 states, Cote said.

The risks

Codeine has often been prescribed for pain relief after tonsillectomies but the FDA has advised against this use. These operations are sometimes recommended to treat enlarged tonsils that cause sleep apnea  a common condition involving breathing pauses while sleeping. The condition has been linked with obesity and Cote said children with sleep apnea are particularly vulnerable to codeine-related breathing difficulties.

The academy report cites an FDA review that found 21 codeine-related deaths in children younger than 12 and 64 cases of severe breathing problems over five decades.

The advice

Better education of parents and doctors is needed, along with additional research on risks and benefits of codeine and non-opioid painkillers for children, the report says.

A previous academy report highlighted codeine's risks and lack of benefit in treating coughs. The new report is more comprehensive, adding concerns about using codeine for pain along with information on deaths.

Opioid drug safety issues and the need for better opioid research in children were among topics raised last week at a two-day FDA advisory committee meeting.
As a gentle reminder of the pervasively interconnected nature of Washington politics, a member of the Kennedy family posted a private photo on Facebook of herself with former president George H. W. Bush.

"The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!" the accompanying note read, indicating that Bush -- ousted from office by Bill Clinton -- might now be planning to vote for the former first lady. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend confirmed the conversation by phone to Politico.

A spokesman for the former president said that Bush wasn't going to publicly endorse anyone. As The Atlantic's David Graham noted, this is the son of a Republican senator, is a Republican president, the father of another Republican president and the father of a former Republican governor. That he might be thinking about backing a Democrat, publicly or not, is remarkable.

After the party conventions, we noted that Clinton had lined up the support of all of the living former Democratic nominees for the presidency as well as the living presidents. Trump had the support of two of the five living Republican nominees and none of the past presidents. Trump insulted both of the aforementioned Bush sons during the campaign, so it's probably not much of a surprise that George H.W. Bush wouldn't rush to embrace him. But a public endorsement of the candidate from the opposing party would be pretty unique.

We tend to forget how few moments we're talking about when we consider the endorsements of past presidents. Since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, there have been 50 elections in which a former president has been alive to endorse a possible successor. In 10 of those, no endorsement was offered (per our review of contemporaneous news reports), including George W. Bush this year. (Often, the lack of endorsement stemmed from illness or age, but Richard Nixon doesn't seem to have been a sought-after endorser, for some reason.) In 39, the former president backed the candidate from his own party.

George H.W. Bush is the question mark.

These have not always been rousing endorsements, mind you. In 1972, Lyndon Johnson barely offered George McGovern his support.

Jimmy Carter feuded with Bill Clinton in 1992 but endorsed. In 1996, he skipped the Democratic convention. In 1956, Harry Truman backed someone besides the previous nominee, Adlai Stevenson, in the primary, but eventually came around.

The year 2016 will see the most former (or incumbent) living presidents since 2000, and, unlike that year, all of the public endorsements favor the candidate of one party. Granted, the living Republican presidents are all members of the Bush family, but it's still a remarkable development.

Whether George H.W. Bush casts his ballot for Clinton, it's the first time since 1976 that a living Republican president hasn't endorsed the Republican candidate for chief executive. That, by itself, is significant.
WASHINGTON  The Bush family hasnt exactly hidden its discomfort  and, in some cases, outright disdain  for Donald Trump. But like many Republicans, family members have been unwilling publicly to cross the aisle and state support for rival Hillary Clinton.

Now, though, it appears a member of one American political dynasty has outed the patriarch of another, according to CNN.
Texas is helping lead a lawsuit against President Barack Obama's administration over a new rule that makes millions of more workers eligible for overtime pay.

Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday he is joining his counterpart in Nevada, Adam Laxalt, to file the lawsuit on behalf of 21 states. Paxton said the rule, announced earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Labor, is another example of Obama trying unilaterally rewrite the law.

The rule, set to go into effect Dec. 1, doubles the salary threshold under which workers qualify for overtime pay, from $455 per week to $913 per week. The Labor Department estimates the rule will benefit an additional 4.2 million workers.

Critics of the rule say it will place a new burden on businesses, potentially forcing them to demote or lay off workers whom they cannot afford to pay more. On Tuesday, Paxton warned the rule may lead to disastrous consequences for our economy.

The numerous crippling federal regulations that the Obama administration has imposed on businesses in this country have been bad enough, Paxton said in a statement. But to pass a rule like this, all in service of a radical leftist political agenda, is inexcusable.

A Labor Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

The lawsuit specifically claims that the rule is too broad because it is based on the salary threshold. Such a requirement, the states argue, overlooks the fact that some workers in the salary range perform management duties that would make them ineligible for overtime.

The states are asking a federal judge in Sherman to issue an injunction to prevent the rule from taking effect. Texas and Nevada are being joined in the lawsuit by Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin.
HEMPSTEAD, Texas (AP)  Leaders of a Texas county have approved a $1.8 million settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Sandra Bland, who died in jail days after being arrested last year.

Waller County commissioners on Wednesday formally approved the Houston-area county's portion of the settlement.
We won't be seeing the Dance of the Dragons for quite a while. After that epic season one finale, HBO is making sure viewers don't expect a sequel to House of the Dragon in the new year. "Don't expect it in 23, but I think sometime in
Poverty should not be barrier to ...
Hillary Clinton spoke in Central Florida on Wednesday as her campaign pushes to keep momentum going with supporters.

The Democratic presidential candidate spoke at Frontline Outreach Youth and Family Center, in the Washington Shores neighborhood of Orlando.

Clinton opened her rally by praising Orlando for the unity it showed after the Pulse attack in June, remarking that the community had been through a lot this year.

"What has been so notable is you've responded with grace," Clinton said. "You've shown the world what Orlando is made of  strength, love and kindness. This is something we could all use more of right now."

"You've been through a lot this year. And what has been so notable is you've responded with grace."  @HillaryClinton on @citybeautiful pic.twitter.com/EwydxPOlZY  News 13 (@MyNews13) September 21, 2016

Clinton then talked about recent police shootings in Charlotte and Tulsa, where unarmed black men were shot by police.

"Building an inclusive economy is another reason weve got to break down systemic racism, including under-investment in communities of color," Clinton said.

She also decried the targeting of police officers in Philadelphia, along with violence against police Tuesday night in Charlotte.

"We are safer when communities respect police and police respect communities," Clinton said.

Clinton then turned to a topic that is "near and dear to her heart": increasing accessibility for the disabled, whether in education or in employment.

First, were going to focus on jobs and incomes," Clinton told the hundreds in attendance. "Im going to fight to get more Americans with disabilities the chance to work alongside those without disabilities, and do the same jobs with the same pay and benefits.

Clintons plan, if she becomes president, is to make colleges and businesses more accessible for people with special needs.

Jennifer Allender from Daytona Beach came out to support Clinton because she said Clintons message speaks to her  especially when it comes to rights for the disabled such as herself.

Employers dont want to hire people with problems, said Allender, who has been without a job since 1998, when she hurt her back at work.

You walk in with a cane, and its over."

"When we leave people out or write them off, we not only shortchange them and their dreams, we shortchange our country and our future," Clinton said.

Paulette Edwards, Frontline Outreach's executive director, said she got the call about Clinton's visit less than 48 hours before the candidate stopped in Orlando.

"It's a pretty quick turnaround. But I am very excited that we got the call because of all the issues that are affecting this community are prime issues in this campaign, so we want to hear from both sides," she said.

Edwards and a team of campaign supporters welcomed as many as 500 people to the event.

She said the community center serves many parents concerned about jobs, health care and child care  all topics that have hit the forefront in this campaign.

2016 presidential candidate stops along the I-4 Corridor

Click on the red dots to see campaign stops by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Click on the blue dots to see campaign stops by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;

Meanwhile, former President George H.W. Bush said Monday that he will vote for Clinton in November, reported CNN, citing sources close to the 41st president  meaning that a former Republican president is outwardly rejecting his party's nominee.

It could give a boost to Clinton as polls some show her Republican rival, Donald Trump, closing the gap in some key battleground states.

"I know that even if you are totally opposed to Donald Trump, you may still have some questions about me. I get that. And I want to do my best to answer those questions," Hillary Clinton said recently. "When it comes to public service, the service part has always come easier than me than the public part. I will never be the showman that may opponent is, and that is OK with me."

Bush family representatives declined to respond publicly.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager, told CNN's Erin Burnett on Tuesday that she respects "the 92-year-old former president very much and his decision" but that "it is ironic that he would vote for the wife of the man who knocked him out of the race."

Trump was campaigning Wednesday in another battleground state. He was scheduled to be in Toledo, Ohio this afternoon, followed by a town hall event in Cleveland.

Live Blog LIVE UPDATES: Hillary Clinton rally at Frontline Outreach in Orlando
COLLEGE STATION - Wildlife populations around the state appear in good shape after mid-August rains created good conditions going into fall and winter, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service specialist.

Dr. James Cathey, AgriLife Extension wildlife specialist, College Station, said three years of good rain have created positive range conditions for wildlife to flourish. Wildlife, such as deer, quail and turkey are expected to be healthy and in large numbers due to timely rains.

Ive been traveling around the state the last 10 or so days and Ive never seen West Texas so green, he said. I think conditions are good for most of the state, especially compared to 2011.

Cathey said late-summer rains arrived at a typically stressful time for deer populations and have provided ample forage for a variety of wildlife. The conditions may be good for animals but hunters may find harvesting animals to be more difficult.

I think deer hunters will have to work harder, he said. It will be interesting to see because animals wont come to supplemental feed like they do when conditions are harsh.

Properties that are actively managed for farming and wildlife should expect to have good quality animals, he said. Regions in East Texas, which have been heavily modified for hay and crop production, have lower value for quail and wild turkey due to lack of habitat. In those areas, populations are still having trouble rebounding.

Cathey said there was early concern that deluges of rain might negatively impact quail numbers in the Gulf Coastal Plains, but populations fared well. Quail are even showing up in good numbers in drier areas of the Rolling Plains.

But not just typical game animals are having a good 2016, Cathey noted.

Some other critters out there have done well, he said. For instance, wild pigs are having a good year and thats not good for agriculture or landowners. So people need to thin out wild pigs as much as they can.

AgriLife Extension district reporters compiled the following summaries:

SOUTH PLAINS: Bailey County producers received 8-12 inches of rainfall over the last three weeks. Rains slowed silage harvests and wheat planting. Its too early to tell how much crops will benefit from the rains as cooler-than-normal weather the last three weeks has slowed development. Subsoil and topsoil moisture were adequate. Peanuts, late-planted corn and grain sorghum were doing very well. Some corn was harvested prior to the wet weather, and harvest should resume as fields dry. Reports indicated recent weather conditions were extremely conducive for the development of Alternaria leaf spot on cotton. Pastures and rangeland should improve with wet conditions. Cattle were in good condition.

PANHANDLE: Moisture was received in some areas and brought cooler temperatures. Soil moisture levels rated mostly adequate. Deaf Smith County producers were back in their fields with cooler temperatures and very little rain. Silage cutters tried to find dry fields to keep moving. Corn fields were well into maturity with harvest right around the corner. Grain sorghum fields were doing OK, but planes were still spraying for sugarcane aphids in some fields. Producers were trying to get a wheat crop planted. The cotton crop was at a standstill as cooler temperatures shut down plant growth. Irrigation ceased on all crops. Planting conditions were excellent. Rangeland and pastures were mostly fair to good. Cattle were in good condition.
LUBBOCK -- The Amarillo City Council approved a $15 million grant Tuesday from the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation (AEDC) to the Texas Tech University System to support the establishment of a new College of Veterinary Medicine in Amarillo.

The grant was approved at the Amarillo City Council meeting on recommendation from the AEDC. It is a major step forward for Texas Techs vision of enhancing rural and large-animal veterinary medicine by providing an innovative model focused on improving animal health in the heart of the beef and dairy cattle industry.

We are truly grateful to the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation and the City of Amarillo for their continued generosity and philanthropy to the Texas Tech University System and our universities, Texas Tech University System Chancellor Robert Duncan said. Once again, they have stepped up to support our vision  this time for veterinary medicine and the needs of this community, our region and the agriculture industry.

The new veterinary college is expected to add 100 highly skilled jobs and approximately $10 million in annual labor income to the Amarillo economy. Texas Techs proposal will have an annual impact of more than $76 million on the Amarillo economy and serve as a catalyst for industry partnerships and expanded research in food technology, animal health and prevention of disease outbreaks.

Not only is this a wonderful opportunity for students seeking careers in veterinary medicine, particularly in a region known as the livestock capital of the United States, its an investment in our community and economy, Amarillo Mayor Paul Harpole said.

The new veterinary college will be built in Amarillo on the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center campus, which headquarters the School of Pharmacy and is home to the schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions.

The Amarillo Economic Development Corporation is proud to be a part of this investment in our community, said Doug Nelson, interim president and CEO of the AEDC. Aside from the innovative educational opportunities the TTUHSC College of Veterinary Medicine will offer to our local and regional students, this initiative is an investment into the future of the animal science and food technology industries in our region. The partnerships that will develop as a result of the new campus will solidify our area as an optimal location for companies interested in expansion or innovation opportunities in these two rapidly growing sectors.

In a report approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in July, the need to address the critical shortage of rural and large-animal veterinarians in Texas was reinforced and a door was opened for Texas Tech to move forward with its plans to create a veterinary medicine college in Amarillo.

Texas Tech proposed a non-traditional model for a veterinary school when plans were announced in December. Building on established strengths at two of its universities, Texas Tech University and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, the Texas Tech University System is creating a program tailored to address a specific need as identified by the report in a cost-efficient and innovative manner.

Texas has a severe shortage of rural veterinarians who are crucial to the foundations of our economy, the vibrancy of our communities and the safety of our food supply, Duncan said. There is no better place to transform the future of veterinary education and answer this call than in Amarillo, the heart of our nations livestock production.

Unlike any other in the United States, the new college will enrich the practice of veterinary medicine by producing practice-ready veterinarians who serve and enhance rural communities throughout Texas while substantially reducing the cost of education at the same time. Texas Techs model increases accessibility and affordability, while not duplicating the states existing veterinary medicine efforts.
Sanctus Real will headline a stop in Plainview this weekend as a part of the This Is Love Tour.

The concert, which also features Shawn McDonald and Adam Cappa, will take place at Harral Memorial Auditorium on the campus of Wayland Baptist University at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23. Doors will open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and can be pre-purchased at the Wayland Bookstore or online through the link found at found at facebook.com/kwldfm. Tickets will also be sold at the door.
AMARILLO  Two men from Moore County pleaded guilty Tuesday afternoon to federal offenses stemming from their respective roles in a marijuana trafficking organization, announced U.S. Attorney John Parker of the Northern District of Texas.

Manuel Rodrigues Reyes, 48, and Maximilliano Gonzales, 50, both of Cactus, each pleaded guilty Tuesday afternoon before U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 1,000 kilograms or more of marijuana. Each faces a statutory penalty of not less than 10 years or more than life in federal prison and a $10 million fine. Manuel Reyes, who had been on bond, was continued on pretrial release pending sentencing. Maximilliano Gonzales has been in custody since his arrest in May 2016. Both are scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 18, 2017.

According to plea documents filed in the case, from approximately August 2006 through November 2015, Adan Reyes, along with his brother Guadalupe Reyes, operated a drug trafficking organization (DTO) that trafficked multiple thousands of kilograms of marijuana from El Paso to the Dumas area, and then to locations primarily in the Midwestern United States. They transported the marijuana in various ways, including using vehicles and/or horse trailers with hidden compartments. Marijuana was also sometimes hidden inside bone meal.

Adan Reyes led the DTO. It employed people to transport as well as follow load vehicles from El Paso through the checkpoint, and from the checkpoints usually to the Dumas/Cactus area, where the marijuana was warehoused at a ranch near Gruver. From the ranch, Adan Reyes used pickup trucks to drive 500- to 1,000-pound loads of marijuana to customers in the Midwest, including locations in Dodge City, Kansas, and Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri. Proceeds from the marijuana sales were driven back to the ranch in Gruver. Adan and Guadalupe Reyes shared the drug proceeds. Different drivers were used to drive the money from Gruver to El Paso to deliver Adan Reyes share.

Manuel Reyes performed various tasks for the Reyes DTO, including assisting in tracking marijuana loads from El Paso to Cactus/Dumas, and he would ensure the loads made it to the ranch near Gruver, where he would assist in unloading it from vehicles arriving from El Paso and onto vehicles that would transport it to customers. He also counted the drug proceeds that were returned to the ranch and ensured the drivers were paid. On multiple occasions, he also transported cash proceeds from Cactus/Dumas to El Paso.

Maximilliano Gonzales was a driver for the Reyes DTO. He drove marijuana from the ranch in Gruver to customers and was paid for each load he transported. He used a work truck with a welder containing a false compartment to transport the marijuana.

When law enforcement conducted a search at the ranch in February 2016, investigators located a white Ford truck with a welding machine mounted to the truck bed. The welder contained a false compartment that housed packaging material, digital scales, and other items associated with marijuana trafficking. There were also papers in the truck stating the vehicle was registered to, and insured by, Maximilliano Gonzales. In addition, drug ledgers indicating payments to customers as well as payments to Manuel Rodrigues Reyes and Maximilliano Gonzales were found.

Reyes was paid approximately $1,000 per week for his services in working for the Reyes DTO, thus earning at least $150,000 during his employment. According to his plea agreement, Reyes agrees to forfeit $150,000 that represents a portion of the proceeds he obtained as a result of his criminal conduct.

Adan Reyes is currently being detained in the El Paso Division of the Western District of Texas where he is awaiting sentencing on charges related to his role in the Reyes DTO. Guadalupe Reyes has pleaded guilty to similar charges and is currently on bond pending his sentencing hearing before Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater, scheduled for Nov. 15, in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas.

The case is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Moore County Sheriffs Office and the Cactus Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Long is in charge of the prosecution.
The Plainview Fire Department will participation in the Bells Across America Program on Saturday, Oct. 8.

This ceremony is conducted in conjunction with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation to honor those firefighters who died in the line of duty in 2015 and previous years. The Plainview Fire Department and PFD Honor Guard will be paying respect to the firefighters who have been killed in the line of duty in the State of Texas in 2015.
AMARILLO  Marco Saucedo, 45, of Cactus, was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater to 48 months in federal prison, following his guilty plea in June 2016 to one count of unlawful use of a communications facility, announced U.S. Attorney John Parker of the Northern District of Texas.

Judge Fitzwater ordered Saucedo to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons on Nov. 1, 2016.

Saucedos co-defendant, Guadalupe Reyes, 49, of Etter, who pleaded guilty in June 2016 to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 1,000 kilograms or more of marijuana, is scheduled to sentenced in mid-November. Reyes faces a statutory penalty of not less than 10 years and up to life in federal prison and a $10 million fine. He remains on bond.

According to documents filed in the case, in November 2014, officers with the Cactus Police Department responded to a weapon being discharged at a residence in Cactus that was owned by Guadalupe Reyes, and they determined that the individual who discharged the firearm was renting the property from Reyes. After obtaining consent to search, officers found more than $130,000 in cash inside the residence, which the resident advised was cash that he, at the direction of Reyes and Saucedo, brought back the previous week from Wichita and Topeka, Kansas.

The resident further disclosed he had been working for Reyes for several months, transporting large amounts of marijuana from Amarillo and Fritch to other states, such as Kansas and Ohio. He would also transport large amounts of cash - proceeds from the sale of the marijuana - from those locations to the Cactus area, all at the direction of Reyes and Saucedo, who would pay him a set amount for each of the runs he made.

The resident indicated he had made approximately 10 trips to Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, Kansas, as well as to Toledo, Ohio, to deliver marijuana for Reyes, estimating that he had delivered approximately 8,000 pounds of marijuana while employed by Reyes. He further stated that on at least four occasions, he had returned with approximately $400,000 in cash for marijuana he had delivered. He further stated that Reyes instructed him to keep the money at the residence until it was retrieved by other, unnamed individuals. The individual also stated that both Reyes and Saucedo had directed him to only use pre-paid cell phones when communicating with them or the buyers.

In recorded conversations in November 2014, Reyes stated, among other things, that he was worried about law enforcement taking some of his properties. According to Reyes plea agreement, he agrees to not contest the forfeiture of several of his real estate holdings in Moore County, including two car lots and several residential properties.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Moore County Sheriffs Office and the Cactus Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Long is in charge of the prosecution.
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Benicias rejection of plans to bring trains filled with crude oil to Valero Corp.s big refinery in the city was hailed Wednesday by critics of the countrys expanding oil-by-rail operations, who hope the flexing of local power will reverberate across the Bay Area and the nation.

Of particular interest to environmentalists and local opponents, who for years have argued that Valeros proposal brought the danger of a catastrophic spill or fire, was a last-minute decision by U.S. officials that Benicias elected leaders  not the federal government  had the final say in the matter.

Word of that decision arrived just before the City Council, in a unanimous vote late Tuesday, dismissed Valeros proposal for a new $70 million rail depot along the Carquinez Strait off Interstate 680. Valero had said the project would not only be safe but bring local jobs, tax revenue and lower gas prices.

Were pleased with the decision and the implications it will have across the country, said Jackie Prange, a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of several groups opposed to the project. This issue is live in a number of sites across the country. This is definitely a decision that I think cities in other states will be looking to.

As oil production has boomed across North America, so has the need to send crude via railroad. The uptick in tanker trains, though, has been accompanied by a spate of accidents in recent years, including a 2013 derailment in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic in which a 72-car train exploded and killed more than 40 people.

The authority of communities to limit oil trains has been clouded by the assertion of some in the petroleum industry that local officials dont have jurisdiction to get in the way. Companies like Valero have contended that railroad issues are matter of interstate commerce  and hence are the purview of the federal government.

Shortly before Tuesdays meeting, however, Benicia officials received a letter from the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, which wrote that Valero, based in Texas, was not a railroad company and that the proposed rail terminal fell under city jurisdiction.

Its what I was waiting for to help me make my vote more defensible, said Councilman Alan Schwartzman at the meeting.

Earlier this year, Valero had asked the Surface Transportation Board for preemption protection for the project after Benicias Planning Commission rejected the proposal. The plan proceeded to the City Council upon appeal.

The plan called for oil deliveries from up to two 50-car trains a day, many passing through several Northern California communities en route from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota. Those trains would carry as many as 70,000 barrels of oil.

The company billed the project as a way to keep gasoline prices low in the absence of a major oil pipeline serving the West Coast. Crude is currently brought to the Bay Area mostly by boat or through smaller pipelines.

On Wednesday, Valero officials expressed frustration at the citys decision.

After nearly four years of review and analysis by independent experts and the city, we are disappointed that the City Council members have chosen to reject the crude by rail project, spokeswoman Lillian Riojas wrote in an email. At this time we are considering our options moving forward.

The vote directly hit the citys pocketbook. Nearly 25 percent of Benicias budget comes from taxes on the oil giant, and the city coffers stood to grow with more crude. The refinery employs about 500 people, according to city records.

But the citys environmental study showed that oil trains presented a hazard. The document concluded that an accident was possible on the nearly 70 miles of track between Roseville (Placer County) and the refinery, though the likelihood was only one event every 111 years.

The document also suggested that much of the crude coming to the Bay Area from North Dakota, as well as from tar sands in Canada, was more flammable than most.

Several cities in the Bay Area and Sacramento area joined environmental groups in calling for rejection of the project.

The councils vote is a tremendous victory for the community and communities all throughout California, said Ethan Buckner of the opposition group Stand, who was among more than 100 people who turned out for the councils verdict. At a time when oil consumption in California is going down, projects like this are unnecessary.

At least two other plans are in the works for oil delivery by rail elsewhere in the region  in Richmond and Pittsburg. A handful of other proposals have been put forth in other parts of California, including the expansion of a rail spur at a Phillips 66 refinery in San Luis Obispo County, which is scheduled to be heard by the county planning board Thursday.

Prange, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said this weeks finding by the Surface Transportation Board gives cities the confidence to reject the proposed oil trains, if they wish to do so.

It reaffirms the power of local government to protect their citizens from these dangerous projects, she said.

U.S. oil deliveries by rail have grown quickly, from 20 million barrels in 2010 to 323 million in 2015, according to government estimates. In response, federal transportation officials have worked to improve the safety of oil-carrying cars with new regulations.

But over the past year, rail deliveries nationwide have slowed, in part because of the stricter rules as well as local opposition, falling crude prices and new pipelines.

Critics have complained that the tightened rules have fallen short, pointing to incidents like a June train derailment in Mosier, Ore., which spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the Columbia River. Leaders in Oregon are discussing a statewide ban on crude trains.

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander
Michael Bodley / The Chronicle / /

A 2-year-old boy running into the street after a ball was struck and killed by an AC Transit bus Tuesday in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, authorities said.

The boy ran out into the street and was killed on impact, said Deputy Chief Darin White. The childs name was not immediately released.
Photo courtesy of Inyo County Search and Rescue / Photo courtesy of Inyo County Search and Rescue

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A Stanford medical student died after she slipped and fell hundreds of feet while trying to traverse Bear Creek Spire in Inyo National Forest southeast of Yosemite, authorities said Wednesday.

Described as an avid mountaineer and climber, 26-year-old Maria Birukova was a native of Moscow and a fourth-year graduate student at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said Krista Conger, a spokeswoman for the school.

The accident happened Sunday when Birukova, a resident of Menlo Park, lost her footing on the Sierra Nevada mountain, slipping down the steep slope.

Her climbing partner, identified by Stanford as Ian Isaacson, raced 800 to 1,000 feet down the steep chute of Bear Creek Spire  which has a peak of nearly 14,000 feet  but found her deceased at the bottom, authorities said.

Rescue crews attempted to reach Birukova Monday through treacherous, rocky terrain thats partially covered in snow year-round, but high winds grounded a helicopter, said Carma Roper, a spokeswoman for the Inyo County Sheriffs Office.

On Tuesday, the Sheriffs Office, along with Inyo Search and Rescue and the California Highway Patrol, were able to use a helicopter to recover Birukovas body.

Birukova started at Stanford in 2013 after her graduation from Yale University in 2012. Using her biomedical engineering background, her research focused on innovative ways to treat deadly infections caused by antibiotic-resistant strains of viscous clumps of bacteria known as biofilms.

The medical-school community has suffered a tremendous loss, said Lloyd Minor, dean of the School of Medicine. Marias interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of antibiotic-resistant biofilms brought to bear insights from both chemistry and immunology in an attempt to devise new treatments for patients with few other options.

Her work was a wonderful example of Stanfords focus on translational medicine, he said, and she will be greatly missed, both professionally and personally.

Birukova also worked for the Stanford Healthcare Consulting Group, a nonprofit dedicated to improving patient care. Outside the world of medicine, she was known most for climbing mountains.

It was clear from the moment I met her that climbing was a major part of her life, said P.J. Utz, a Stanford professor of medicine. In fact, she struggled to choose whether to attend Stanford or the University of Utah for her graduate training, because in Utah the mountains are so close.

Birukova is survived by her parents, Konstantin Birukov and Anna Birukova, both faculty members at the University of Chicagos Pritzker School of Medicine. No information regarding memorial services was immediately released.

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @michael_bodley
Frost Bank customers took to social media Wednesday to complain about problems using their debit cards that left several unable to pay for groceries and lunch.

Frost spokesman Bill Day said a technical issue may have caused problems for some of the banks debit-card users for about an hour Wednesday morning. He said the issue was resolved by about 12:30 p.m.
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Vicente Fernandez has used his voice, one that has enchanted generations on both sides of the U.S. border, to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and urge the Latino vote in a newly released corrido directed by a San Antonio media group.

Fernandez, a citizen of Mexico, joined the Latino Victory Project, founded by actress Eva Longoria, to throw his support behind Clinton months out from the U.S. Presidential Election in November, according to a news release from the organization that describes itself as a "movement that builds power in the Latino community."

RELATED: Vicente Fernandez isn't keeping quiet after awesome final concert

The video, directed by Bauhaus Media Group and filmed in Guadalajara this month, is a montage of Fernandez, shots of Clinton's campaign trail and prolific Latinos like U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and mariachi Sebastien De La Cruz  both San Antonio natives.

"Your voice is your vote," Fernandez urges in Spanish to start the video. "Together, we can."

RELATED: Eva Longoria slams Donald Trump at DNC, mentions South Texas upbringing

In Fernandez's ode to "La Hillary," he commends her respect of the Latino community's rights, concerns and notes that the group is a "family" he trusts will move forward under her leadership.

"(Fernandez) has inspired generations of Latinos with his music, and now he has stepped in to inspire us to vote in November and make our voices heard in this election," said Martin Diego Garcia, Latino Victory Project director of campaigns, in a news release. "Vicente's call to action is a powerful reminder that Secretary Clinton is the only candidate who will respect and work with the Latino community, and he is proud to stand with her."

RELATED: S.A.'s young mariachi singer to belt national anthem at Democratic National Convention

Chente retired from the stage on April 16 at a jam-packed farewell concert inside Mexico City's Estadio Azteca, but not before sending a jab to Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

The King of Ranchera and iconic tracks like "El Rey" and "Volver, Volver" said during that show that he would spit at Trump's face and insult his mother, likely in response to his controversial rhetoric on immigration policy.

A Bauhaus representative told mySA.com Fernandez was a "total professional" during the corrido's production and "wonderful to work with."

"For Don Vicente to come out of retirement to do this, is a big deal," the director said. "He truly has his people in mind and is doing it from his heart."

mmendoza@mysa.com

Twitter: @MaddySkye
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Several Texas acts are in the running for Latin Grammy Awards, which primarily celebrate international recording acts.

San Antonio is well represented among the the nominees for best Tejano album, which include Ram Herrera, Jay Perez, Michael Salgado and the Legends, a vocal group with Sunny Ozuna.

Intocable, a formidable Tejano/norteno act hailing from the border town of Zapata, received a nomination for best norteno album for Highway.

And Corpus Christis El Dusty received a nomination in the best urban fusion/performance category for the trippy dance track Cumbia Anthem.

The nominations were announced Wednesday.

Led by accordionist Ricky Munoz, veteran six-man band Intocable has won two Grammy Awards and amassed more than a dozen No. 1 songs on Billboards Regional Mexican Albums chart.

This is the first Latin Grammy nomination for El Dusty (Horacio Dusty Oliveira III), who specializes in mashups of crunk and cumbia and came on the scene a few years ago with the hit K Le Pasa.

It feels good, said Oliveira, 36, who said his music has a connection to Selena and Los Dinos, who also hailed from Corpus Christi. Absolutely, Selena, A.B. (Quintanilla) are a big influence on my style. I love the way they used to put in the electronic drums and R&B chords. Theyve been mashing it up since the beginning.

The Latin Grammys will air live from Las Vegas Nov. 17 on Univision.

Album of the year nominees include the late Juan Gabriel for Los Duo 2 and Andrea Bocelli for Cinema (Edicion En Espanol).

Record of the Year nominees include Enrique Iglesias featuring Wisin for Duele El Corazon and Carlos Vives & Shakira for La Bicicleta.

For a complete list of nominees, go to latingrammy.com.

by Hector Saldana and The Associated Press
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Someone just scored one of the most original animal-themed fashion accessories in the world: A purse made from a dead cat.

Listed as a one off glamour puss purse, taxidermist Claire Hobbs is selling the pelt and head of a cat in purse form on Trade Me, an internet-auction website in New Zealand. The auction closed Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. (New Zealand time).

The taxidermy was valued at $1,400 NZD, and the bag sold for $545 NZD  that's $398.59 in the U.S.

RELATED: Bandera Animal Shelter: Man poured boiling water on adopted cat to teach it a 'lesson'

After hearing from critics that what she was doing was disrespectful, Hobbs told Stuff.co.nz she believes she is doing just the opposite.

To spend all that time on tanning and sculpture and making it brand new shows the utmost respect, she said. I guess because its a domestic animal people get a bit funny about it. I dont kill animals for my work, its not as though I go around snuffing out animals thinking thisll make a nice handbag.

RELATED: Texas vet who killed cat with bow and arrow, bragged on Facebook gets charged with DWI

Hobbs said the cat used for the fashion accessory was roadkill that she kept in her freezer for three months. In that time, Hobbs said she looked for the owner of the animal to no avail.

A spokesman from Trade Me told the website he expects the bag to be a big seller.

RELATED: Woman who was stranded in woods is reunited with escaped cat

It is certainly a statement bag and while its not for me, we suspect there will be a buyer out there who is keen, he said.

Many have commented on the posting saying it was absolutely awesome, while others called it really disturbing.

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
BRIDGEPORT  A jury on Wednesday found a Monroe massage therapist not guilty of sexually assaulting a female client.

My client has been living with this for two years, maintaining his innocence, said Tina Sypek DAmato, who represented the therapist, 60-year-old Bruce Smith. He lost his business, his license, it was a nightmare. But the jury did the right thing, they made the right decision.

The six male jurors deliberated for about three and a half hours over two days before finding Smith, the former owner of Smith Etheric Massage on Monroe Turnpike, not guilty of fourth-degree sexual assault.

During the three-day trial before state Superior Court Judge William Holden, a 26-year-old local woman testified she had gone to Smith on Aug. 14, 2014, after getting a Groupon discount for a massage.

The woman testified she had gotten on the massage table while wearing only a pair of panties, and had covered herself with a sheet. She said Smith told her to roll onto her back and he pulled down the sheet, uncovering most of her body. After working his way down her body, she testified, he put his hands under her panties and began vigorously massaging.

Upset at Smiths alleged actions, the woman complained to police the next day.

Under cross-examination, the woman said she never said anything to Smith while he was massaging her privates, and that when it was over, she tipped him $20 and bought some bath salts from him.

She never said stop, she never called for help. Its clear she was lying, Sypek DAmato said.

Because of adverse publicity following her clients arrest, Sypek DAmato said, Smith will not be able to go back to giving massages.

Instead, he is going to be lecturing to other massage therapists on the dangers involved, she said.
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Brunswick

A Dutch couple who stopped at Tamarac Elementary School to take photos of school buses raised a red flag for school administrators who reported the incident to authorities and district parents.

Rensselaer County Sheriff Patrick Russo, however, said their story checked out and there was never a threat.

Sheriff's deputies were able to locate the couple from Holland through the license plate on their rental car, Russo said, adding that their background and their story checked out.

He said the FBI plans to interview the couple in Boston.

The Rensselaer County Sheriff and State Police began an investigation after the district made reports Monday of a man and woman photographing school buses from the parking lot during Monday dismissal.

School administrators sent letters home with students Tuesday afternoon warning parents of three incidents involving strangers on school grounds Monday.

"I approached these individuals, who stated they were from out of the country and had never seen buses like this at a school," Principal Lindsay Morris said in her letter to parents. "I wrote the make, model, and license plate number down of the car, told the man and woman they could not take photos and to leave school property." After notifying Brunswick Brittonkill Central School District parents Monday evening, Morris received additional reports of strangers interacting with students during the day.

An incident near the elementary playground was reported at 6 p.m. Monday. A student spoke to two European couples in a car, who appeared lost and needed directions back to Albany, Morris said.

"There was no inappropriate contact between the couples and the student," Morris said. "Law enforcement do not feel that this incident was related to the man and woman taking photos of the school buses earlier that afternoon."

In a third incident, a woman reportedly approached the multi-purpose gym exterior doors at the Secondary School Monday afternoon looking for the Rensselaer County ARC, Morris said in her Tuesday letter. Students in the lobby opened the door and told her it wasn't the ARC. Morris said the woman, who did not enter the school, then left. "The students who spoke to the woman were reminded that they are not to open exterior doors for any reason for anyone," Morris said.

Law enforcement and district administrators patrolled school grounds during morning arrival and afternoon dismissal Tuesday.

Russo praised the reports so authorities could investigate the incidents.a
MILFORD  A man was rescued Tuesday afternoon from Long Island Sound after a rising tide trapped him near Charles Island.

The 52 year-old Waterbury man and his 24 year-old son had attempted to walk out on the tombolo from Silver Sands beach to Charles Island but they misjudged the tide and were overcome by the swift current, fire department Capt. Anthony Fabrizi said.

Firefighters set out in the Marine 1 rescue boat after receiving a 911 call from the mans son at 4 p.,m. Tuesday about a swimmer in distress, said Fabrizi, the Milford Fire Department spokesman.

Two marine units responded and the man was brought to safety and treated for minor injuries by fire department paramedics, the spokesman said.

All residents and visitors to Silver Sands are reminded to avoid walking out to Charles Island, Fabrizi said. The rising tide brings a swift current that often pulls recreational walkers out into deeper waters.
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Albany

Despite a small dip in her numbers from last month, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is maintaining a strong lead over Republican Donald Trump in New York, a new poll shows.

Clinton leads Trump 51-30, while Libertarian Gary Johnson is polling at eight percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein is polling at three percent, according to a Siena College poll of likely voters released on Tuesday.

Clinton's lead is bolstered by strong numbers in New York City (70-18).

But the suburbs and upstate are a different story. Clinton leads by a point (39-38) in the suburbs, while she has a comparatively cushy six-point lead (42-36) upstate.

The predictable partisan splits are borne out in the poll results, though both are locked in a tight battle for independent voters that Clinton leads 39-37.

Despite Clinton's continued strong showing in New York, Trump has maintained that the Empire State is still in play for him.

"When we go up there, we get these massive crowds of people that are looking for change and they're looking for hope," Trump said on Talk 1300's "Live from the State Capitol" last week. "And I said, 'Why can't we win, as an example, New York?' And, by the way, if we won New York, the race is over. But why can't we win New York? And it polls well."

Marginally in Trump's favor is other New York polling. Quinnipiac's July New York poll showed a closer race than Siena shows, though Clinton led in the head-to-head matchup in that poll, too (47-35 percent statewide).

Yet Siena again shows that voters statewide believe by a large margin (65-27) that regardless of who they support, Clinton will be the next president. Even with Clinton picking up 16 percent of the Republican vote, 40 percent of GOP voters say they believe she will be the next president.

While voters continue to view both candidates on their own as untrustworthy (Clinton by a 50-39 margin is considered more trustworthy when voters are forced to pick), they do tend to line up behind Clinton more when it comes to policy positions.

"On several key national issues, likely voters in traditionally 'blue' New York identify far more with the positions taken by the Democratic nominee, rather than the Republican nominee," Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg said. "Voters overwhelmingly support giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship rather than deporting them, 76-20 percent, which includes a strong majority of Republicans. And by a similar 76-21 percent margin, voters, also including a large majority of Republicans, say that climate change is a significant threat to the planet rather than not real nor based on science."

In the race between Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer and Republican challenger Wendy Long, the incumbent is up 46 points.

Siena polled 600 likely voters. The margin of error is +/- 5 percent.

mhamilton@timesunion.com  518-454-5449  @matt_hamilton10

The full crosstabs are below:

SNY0916 crosstabs.pdf
GREENWICH  Patricia Wuest, 52, of Division Street, a Stamford school teacher, is facing charges of second-degree burglary and second-degree larceny.

Bond was set at $15,000 in state Superior Court in Stamford on Tuesday, after Wuest was charged with stealing some $45,000 in jewelry from a neighbor in March. Authorities said she sold the stolen items at a store in midtown Manhattan for roughly $2,400, according to an arrest-warrant affidavit filed in Superior Court.

Wuest is a teacher at the Westover Magnet Elementary School in Stamford.

The teacher is currently on leave, was the only comment from district spokeswoman Sharon Beadle on Tuesday, via email.

Greenwich police were contacted in April by a neighbor of Wuests, who had discovered a sizable amount of jewelry disappeared while she and her husband were on a trip out West.

According to the court file, the victim told police: Her upstairs neighbor, identified as Patricia Wuest, contacted her and stated she felt it would be a good idea to let each other know where their spare keys were in case of emergency. She stated this did not seem out of the ordinary at the time, but upon thinking about it further it seemed strange to her.

The victim later contacted the police with a recording she made with Wuest, according to court papers.

During the conversation, Patricia admits to stealing the rings and mailing them off to a business in New York City that buys gold, according to investigators.

Greenwich police, working with the New York Police Department, determined the items had been accepted by the Manhattan business, and payments of $874 and $1,600 were sent to Wuests bank account, the court records state.

An arrest warrant for Wuest was served Monday.

An attorney representing Wuest, Mickey Sherman, said, This is a woman who has led a life devoid of any criminal conduct whatsoever.

She was under a lot of pressure, and she made a mistake, Sherman said, citing financial problems his client faced. She felt absolutely trapped. A tax problem, with her ex-husband, led to mounting troubles, the defense attorney said.

Bond was initially set at $75,000, but after a conference with a judge on Tuesday, it was lowered to $15,000, and Wuest has been released from custody.

She has the support of her family, Sherman added, and he hoped the school community would also provide support.

Staff writer John Nickerson contributed to this article
ATLANTA  Philando Castile. Eric Garner. And now Terence Crutcher. Each was a black man killed in a confrontation with an officer, with the aftermath captured on video. And each time, the video leaves the impression of a wounded man left to die alone, with no sense of urgency to try to save him.

Law enforcement experts say its not a sign of callousness, but of trying to ensure the officers and others are safe before approaching someone who could be armed or remain a threat even after theyve been shot.

Civil rights activists call it the ultimate indignity and one more example of indifference and quick-to-shoot attitudes of police toward minorities.

When the police take actions that result in injury to you and then leave you on the ground to die, well, I think thats a constitutional violation, said Randolph McLaughlin, a civil rights attorney and professor at Pace Law School in New York City.

Crutcher, 40, was killed after his vehicle stalled in the middle of a street in Tulsa, Okla.

A helicopter-mounted police camera recorded Crutcher walking toward his sport utility vehicle with his hands up. The lawyer representing the officer who shot Crutcher says she fired when one of his hands reached through the SUVs window. Attorneys for Crutchers family dispute that, presenting at a press conference an enlarged photo from police footage that appeared to show that Crutchers window was rolled up.

As he lies on the ground, the officers stand nearby but no one provides aid until about a minute or two later.

That gap has stirred questions about why he was left in the street, motionless, unarmed and seemingly no threat.

Law enforcement experts say that in those situations, police are furiously trying to figure out whether there are other weapons nearby, whether other people might be in the vehicle and how much of a threat the person is. Is it safe for police or EMTs to approach? All of that must be determined, no matter how badly injured the wounded person might appear.

Unlike the movies, which often show people falling instantly to the ground, many who are shot can still function and pose a threat.

Beyond the police shootings in recent years, what disturbs civil rights activists are how people shot by officers are treated afterward.

Garner, a 43-year-old man who was accused of selling cigarettes on the street in Staten Island, died after an officer put him in a choke hold. Video of the incident shows no medical assistance was provided for at least six minutes. Castile was shot during a vehicle stop in an incident recorded by his girlfriend, who was sitting next to him. The video shows him sitting in the car, his shirt bloodied, with an officer pointing a gun at him but no one coming to his aid.

McLaughlin, the attorney, said its especially jarring in recent days to see Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect in the bombings in New York and New Jersey, being given aid and put in an ambulance after a gun battle with police. He calls it a double standard that exposes inequality.

If that works for an alleged terrorist  why doesnt that same principle apply when police stop any individual in the street? he asked.
Tulsa

Investigators found the drug PCP in the vehicle of an unarmed black man fatally shot by a white officer, according to Oklahoma police, but attorneys for the slain man's family say discussion of drugs distracts from questions about the use of deadly force.

Tulsa Sgt. Dave Walker told the Tulsa World on Tuesday that investigators recovered one vial of PCP in Terence Crutcher's SUV, but he declined to say where in the vehicle it was found or whether officers determined if Crutcher used it Friday night. Walker confirmed to The Associated Press that what he told the newspaper was true, but declined further comment.

Attorneys for Crutcher's family said the man's relatives did not know whether drugs were found in his vehicle and, even if they were, that wouldn't justify his fatal shooting.

"Let us not be throwing a red herring, and to say because something was found in the car that was justification to shoot him," said attorney Benjamin Crump, one of the family's lawyers.

Crump compared Crutcher's shooting to Monday's arrest of New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami, who police say engaged officers in a shootout.

"He wasn't killed. So why was an unarmed black man who has committed no crime, who only needs a hand, given bullets in his lungs?" Crump said.
MIAMI - After returning from a honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, Jamie Palmeroni-Lavis asked to be tested for the Zika virus. Palmeroni-Lavis, 28, a publicist in Rochester, New York, wants to get pregnant, but not before she knows her body is Zika-free.

But she and other would-be parents are quickly learning that getting a Zika test is not easy.

As worries about the spread of Zika virus in the United States continue to mount, public health department labs in Florida and New York City are running at or close to capacity, while private commercial labs have won emergency approval to run Zika tests and ramped up their testing capacity.

But that does not mean that just anybody can get a Zika test. Even people like Palmeroni-Lavis, who have compelling reasons to be tested for a virus known to cause devastating brain defects in the fetus, cannot walk into a local health department and get tested on-demand.

That is because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued strict guidelines about who can be tested, giving priority to pregnant women with possible exposure to Zika and people with Zika-like symptoms. Already public health officials in Florida say they face a backlog of tests for pregnant women, some of whom may be waiting to make decisions about whether to have abortions if they test positive.

But the CDC's testing policy largely ignores a sizable subgroup of women and men also at risk - those who are trying to conceive but fear they have been exposed to Zika. The CDC recommends women contemplating pregnancy avoid travel to areas where Zika transmission is occurring and, if they have traveled, says they should wait at least eight weeks or more before trying to conceive. But it does not recommend testing.

Guidance for men is inconsistent. Although the virus can persist in sperm for months after exposure, the CDC recommends that men who may have been exposed to the virus have protected sex for at least eight weeks after potential exposure unless they have symptoms. The World Health Organization just changed its recommendation to six months of protected sex for men and women. Neither group recommends testing.

The restrictions are aimed at preventing an onslaught of requests for Zika tests that could clog the system and prevent public health officials from identifying new cases quickly. They also shape medical practice and influence insurance coverage, making doctors reluctant to order tests and insurers unwilling to cover the costs - between $229 and $800 on the private market - if patients do not fit the CDC's testing criteria.

Public health experts say the restrictions are necessary to ensure that people most at risk have access to Zika testing.

"We aren't interested in stimulating the testing of simply anxious people," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist who is head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Laboratories and public health agencies say they are inundated with requests for tests, but declined to provide specifics. Julie Kliegl, president of Viracor-IBT Laboratories, a commercial lab in Lee's Summit, Mo., said demand for Zika testing doubled between July and August.

Clarissa Bradstock, chief executive of Any Lab Test Now, a franchise company with headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga, said its central call center has been getting dozens of calls a day from people asking about Zika testing. The lab briefly offered on-demand Zika testing, in defiance of CDC guidelines, but last week stopped the practice after one of the company's testing partners raised concerns.

"We're just trying to respond to customers' demands," she said. "We don't want to add to the hype, but we're getting many people who want to conceive or are concerned about themselves or their partners being infected."

One problem with private testing, say health officials, is that most commercial labs cannot offer all the tests needed to determine conclusively if a person has been exposed to Zika.

Testing for Zika is surprisingly complex, and may require three tests to be sure of a result.

For men, the story is even more complicated. Men infected with Zika may carry it in their semen for up to six months, but there is no approved test for screening semen.

"Unfortunately, telling someone 'you do not have Zika and never had Zika' can be challenging. There are limitations to the best available tests," said Dr. Jay K. Varma, deputy commissioner for disease control at New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. "There are situations in which we have to tell people, 'We don't know for sure whether or not you've been infected. We can't conclusively say you were infected, and we can't conclusively say you weren't infected.' That's the limitation of the technology."

Some medical groups are pushing back against the CDC guidelines. Last Thursday, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, a membership organization that represents fertility experts, recommended that men and women who may have been exposed to Zika should consider being tested and embark on fertility treatments only if tests are negative.
The son of a Chinese billionaire has given his dog eight new iPhones.

Wang Sicong, whose father is billionaire Wang Jainlin, gave the phones to his Alaskan malamute, Coco and posted pictures on his Weibo account, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Each phone cost nearly $1,200 in China.

Coco is used to getting extravagant gifts from Wang. In 2015, he posted photos of the dog wearing two Apple watches along with designer wristbands, at a cost of more than $37,000.


U.S. and Chinese officials are going after a mid-sized Chinese company suspected of helping North Korea develop nuclear weapons, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The paper said Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. is "headed by a Communist Party member who the Obama administration believes has played a role in aiding North Korea's nuclear program."

Chinese police in Liaoning Province believe Hongxiang committed "serious economic crimes" by trading with North Korea for several years.

A source in Dandong, China told Radio Free Asia that affiliates of Honxiang are also under investigation for tax evasion, money laundering and dealing in counterfeit dollars and illicit drugs.

Chinese authorities have frozen some of the assets of the company, its founder Ma Xiaohong, her family and business partners.

U.S. Justice Department officials visited Beijing twice to deliver evidence linking Ma and her business with North Korea's nuclear weapons program and help to the North in evading international sanctions.

The Asan Institute for Policy Studies and U.S. think tank C4ADS in a report on Monday said Hongxiang supplied North Korea with high-grade aluminum ingots, ammonium paratungstate, aluminum oxide and tungsten trioxide, which are key ingredients in developing centrifuges for uranium enrichment and weapons of mass destruction.


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The driver of an SUV ended up in a pond on Texas State University's campus Tuesday after being cut off while driving on a nearby road, police said.

MORE: Police: Drunk Texas State student, 21, caused wreck that killed man, injured pregnant wife

A photo posted to Twitter, which was retweeted hundreds of times, shows a white Jeep Liberty nose first in a pond near the old Texas State Performing Arts Center near Sewell Park on University Drive and C.M. Allen Parkway.

RELATED: 3 Texas State professors' offices ransacked, blood left on wall

Officials said the incident occurred Tuesday around 5 p.m. when the driver of the Jeep Liberty was cut off in traffic by the driver of a white Nissan Rogue.

The victim attempted an evasive turn to avoid a collision and veered off the road into the pond, officials said.

RELATED: Video: College pool party brawl in San Marcos goes viral

The driver of the Nissan Rogue took off and police are searching for the suspect. The driver who ended up in the pond was not seriously hurt, according to officials.

Staff writer Kelsey Bradshaw contributed to this report.

kparker@mysa.com

Twitter: @KoltenParker
Tonight, the city is holding the first meeting of Mayor Ivy Taylors new Council on Police-Community Relations, but the public and members of the media will not be allowed in.

Thats according to a media advisory released by the city Tuesday night, announcing the creation of the CPCR.

The new council includes almost three dozen community leaders, among them a former county commissioner, religious leaders, a candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, police union members and a district director for a current state representative.

The public and journalists are not being allowed inside the gathering, apparently to ensure members feel comfortable participating in what Taylors spokeswoman Leslie Garza described as a difficult discussion.

We are expecting a very personal meeting tonight where members of the CPCR will speak openly and maybe emotionally, Garza wrote in an email, responding to questions from the Express-News about why the meeting is closed. Some of the participants have expressed that they do not want this meeting to be a publicity stunt and would feel more comfortable without cameras in their faces.

The original media advisory said the mayor and other participants will give interviews after 8 p.m., once the meeting has concluded.

In a follow-up email, Garza said there will not be enough council members present to designate this a public meeting, though Mayor Taylor, Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran and Councilman Alan Warrick will be in attendance.

Police Chief William McManus and City Manager Sheryl Sculley also will likely be at the meeting, said Andrew Solano, the mayors policy adviser and council liaison.

Solano said future meetings will likely be open to the media. But a criminal justice professor working with the group advised at least the first meeting be closed, so people feel open to freely express their concerns about the police.

The meeting will be held at the Career & Technical Education building at Sam Houston High School, 4635 E. Houston St.

The council was created in the wake of a string of police shootings of black men  often unarmed  across the country, and tense community discussions here in San Antonio after local activists unsuccessfully pushed for City Council to reject a police collective bargaining agreement because of rules that limit how much disciplinary evidence the police chief can consider when punishing officers.

vdavila@express-news.net

eeaton@express-news.net
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It has been four years since a young couple was shot execution style after being stripped naked in a park in Corpus Christi.

In a San Patricio County courtroom Monday, the capital murder trial against David Malcolm Strickland, who was arrested at his Helotes home in 2014, began. Strickland is accused of shooting and raping Mollie Judith Olgin and Mary Kristene Chapa on June 22, 2012 at Violet Andrews Park in Portland, a small town just east of the Corpus Christi Bay.

On that day, Chapa and Olgin, a former Texas A&M University student, were in the park and later, their bodies were found by a couple bird-watching. Olgin died on scene from a gunshot wound to the head and Chapa survived, but lost functionality to the left side of her body and had to relearn how to walk and talk, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported.

At the scene, officials found two .45-caliber bullet casings, cigarette butts, beer cans, a can of iced tea and other bottles.

In court Monday, Strickland, who was arrested in 2014 on charges of capital murder, aggravated sexual assault and aggravated assault, said he was absolutely not guilty, the Caller-Times reported.

RELATED: 2 accused in slaying of lesbian A&M student, girlfriend



Police arrested Strickland after receiving an anonymous letter that contained information regarding the case previously unknown in 2014. At the time, officials believed Stricklands wife, Laura Strickland, wrote the letter. She was arrested on one charge of tampering with evidence, which was later dismissed, according to a previous report.

The couple was arrested at their Helotes home at 12000 block of Bandera Road, about 25 miles northwest of downtown San Antonio.

Stricklands lawyers on Monday said a man from Nevada, who was the primary suspect of the case for two years, was the culprit. Originally, officials found the mans DNA on the cigarette butts and beer cans found at the scene and believed he was their suspect until they received the letter regarding Strickland, the Caller-Times reported.

RELATED: Convicted of murder, widow insists she didn't kill San Antonio trucking tycoon husband

Stephanie Chasak, Olgins friend, testified Monday saying she saw Strickland in the park at a memorial days after her friend died there. She described Strickland as a "strange man who approached her and asked if officials knew what kind of gun the suspect used. He also told her he was in the military and owned guns, she said.

The couple who found Olgin and Chapa, who were 19 and 18 at the time, respectively, also testified.

My inner spirit said something was wrong, said Christene Seymour who was in the park birdwatching with her husband Stanley that day.

Seymour said she called her husband to where the girls were laying, originally thinking she was seeing a pile of trash or debris caught in a bush.

RELATED: 'The Case Of: JonBenet Ramsey' points to single murder suspect but twitter isn't sold

Officials said that although many believed Chapa and Olgin were targeted due to being in a same-sex relationship, evidence does not support the idea that the incident was a hate crime.

Since the shooting, Chapa has been a presenter and speaker at the annual Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards in New York.

The Caller-Times reported that the trial is expected to last two to three weeks.

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
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Weeks ahead of its 90th birthday, the Witte Museum gave mySA.com a sneak peek of the threshold to the 174,000-square-foot transformation.

Witte Museum CEO and President Marise McDermott revealed a portion of the estimated $100 million expansion that has been years in the making. When the complete renovations are unveiled on March 4, the Smithsonian-affiliated institution will be "everything Texas and so much more."

RELATED: Witte Museum breaks ground on latest phase of multi-million dollar expansion

"We call it a once-in-100-years transformation," she added. "The Witte is going to turn 90 on Oct. 6, so we decided this is the time to underscore how important the Witte Museum is to all of Texas, and especially San Antonio, so we are debuting the next 100 years of the grand, new Witte Museum."

Next spring, visitors will enter the museum via the foyer, named the H-E-B Lantern, which will house a Quetzalcoatlus dinosaur replica, flying from the ceiling. Museum staff noted the previous Triceratops replica was a hit with visitors and they are excited to expand the collection in the Valero Great Hall with a Tyrannosaurus rex, Acrocanthosaurus and Mozasaurus, which will swim in an "ancient sea."

"We just want to make sure we have enough room for our Texas dinosaurs," McDermott said.

RELATED: Plans for Museum of Science and Technology still in negotiations phase

Eventually, passersby on Broadway Street will be able to view the Quetzalcoatlus and the H-E-B Lantern from the road.

Moving on through the campus, McDermott previewed the People of the Pecos exhibit in the Kittie West Nelson Ferguson Gallery. She said the entire second floor of the New Witte will house the two labs, a rock art formation exhibit, some of the 20,000 artifacts curated by the museum and interactive opportunities building an immersive experience for visitors to discover the way pre-historic hunter-gatherers lived in Texas.

The McLean Family Texas Wild Gallery, a favorite of the original Witte, will also return bigger and better in a 10,000-square-foot space featuring eight ecological zones of Texas with immersive dioramas and a "large Texas sky" blanketing it all, she said.

"The Witte has been known as a natural history museum for many decades and this raises that up even more," McDermott said.

RELATED: Here are 25 of the coolest things to do at the Briscoe Western Art Museum

The gallery will also have a porch classroom, primed for activities like school visits, called the Land Stewardship Lab.

McDermott assured though construction is ongoing, "there's a lot to see right now."

RELATED: Witte Museum opens doors of $15 million Mays Family Center

"There are so many galleries open right now that it's bigger than it's ever been," she said.

National Geographic Earth Explorers is one of the "exciting, high-end" exhibits visitors can enjoy in the meantime when it opens on Saturday, McDermott said.

"It's really setting us up for the New Witte," she said of the 6,000-square-foot exhibit detailing National Geographic's world-wide explorations.

"(The museum) is really coming around, taking shape and it's exciting to see," McDermott said. "We're just counting the days right now."

Click through the gallery above for a preview of the new Witte Museum.

mmendoza@mysa.com

Twitter: @MaddySkye
North East ISDs Community Education program offers Editing Your Creative Writing for Publication, conducted by Jan Kilby, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. on Sept. 22 and 29 and Oct. 6 in room 206 of the North East ISD Community Learning Center Bldg., 8750 Tesoro Drive in San Antonio. The cost is $50. To register, call 407-0140, option 3, email commed@neisd.net or visit https://communityed.neisd.net.

Kilby is a freelance writer with more than 200 publications and writing consultant for businesses and authors.

San Antonio

Free veterans housing summit set for Sept. 24

Active duty, reservists, and veterans thinking about buying a home through the VA Home Loan program can learn more about the process at a summit set for Saturday, Sept. 24, San Antonio Shrine Auditorium, located on the north access road of Loop 1604 between Stone Oak Parkway and Blanco Road. The free event is from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is open to active, reserve and retired military and surviving spouses of all ages.

Credit counseling and information on how to lower or waive property tax will be covered.

Check-in is at 7:30 a.m. For more information, visit veteranshousingsummit.com or email csosa@nat.com.

Award honors service

to veterans, military

The Bexar County Veterans Service Office is accepting nominations for the 2016 LeRoy V. Greene Jr. Memorial Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions by Bexar County residents to veterans, military service members and their families. The LeRoy V. Greene Jr. Memorial Award recipient is announced at the Commissioners Court meeting prior to Veterans Day each year.

Nominations are accepted from individuals who can vouch for the accomplishments of the person they are recommending for recognition. Nominations from spouses, siblings or children will not be accepted.

To be eligible, nominees must have lived in Bexar County for at least two years at the date of nomination; performed noteworthy actions over a period of time as a volunteer; exhibited leadership skills, teamwork, dedication and unselfishness.

For a nomination form, email vets@bexar.org with LRVG AWARD in the subject line. Completed nomination forms may be returned to the same email address; by fax to 210-335-3632; or by mail to Bexar County Veterans Service Office, 233 N. Pecos, Suite 320, San Antonio, TX 78207.

The nomination deadline is Oct. 7.

MLK artwork contest accepting entries

The city of San Antonio Martin Luther King Jr. Commission has announced its second annual citywide contest for the selection of the official artwork for the 2017 city of San Antonio Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration.

The selected artwork by a local artist will be used with the events 2017 theme: Kings Legacy for Peace is Justice for All. Remember! Celebrate! Act! The deadline is 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 30.

The artwork contest is open to Bexar County residents. Student artists are encouraged to submit entries. The selected artist, to be chosen by a panel of judges from the community, will receive public recognition as the creator of the official 2017 commemoration artwork, and receive two all-access passes to official 2017 MLK Jr. Commission events. Guidelines on how to submit entries are available at www.sanantonio.gov/mlk.

Artists sought for new Fiesta poster contest

The Fiesta Commission is asking area artists to participate in a new poster contest to provide an edgier, more urban feel while incorporating the spirit and theme of love and unity for Fiesta Fiesta, the official kickoff to the Party with a Purpose.

Deadline for submission is noon Sept. 30. Entries must be submitted before the deadline to the Fiesta Commission Office, 2611 Broadway. Office hours are Monday through Thursday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 8:30 a.m. to noon on Fridays.

For more information call 210-227-5191, ext. 101, or email mari@fiesta-sa.org.

Universal City

Veterans Park group selling pavers

The Universal City Veterans Park Committee is selling pavers that will be placed in front of the flag pole at the city park.

Standard-size pavers cost $75. Pavers measuring 4x8 and 12x12 are available. Order forms can be picked up at VFW Post 4676 at 202 W. Aviation in Universal City and at American Legion Post 667, 504 Bowie, Universal City.

Police department hosts National Night out kickoff

The Universal City Police Department will host the 2016 National Night Out kickoff event at Universal City Park on Saturday, Oct. 1 from 3-6 p.m.

Organizers said the free event will include public safety demonstrations. Police, fire, emergency vehicles and an Air Life helicopter will be at the family-oriented event.

McGruff the Crime Dog will make an appearance.

From staff reports
The U.S. will send two B-1B supersonic bombers to South Korean skies on Wednesday amid a growing missile and nuclear threat from North Korea.

A military source here said the bombers from a U.S. air base in Guam will fly to South Korea as a show of Washington's "steadfast and unshakable" commitment to its key ally.


When preparing for college, explore the option of on-campus living versus living at home. Many universities in Texas and throughout the United States offer students a place to stay on campus, and it may be the best option for you.

The opportunity to live on campus benefits students academically and socially. Numerous studies show that students who live on campus have higher academic success rates and are more likely to graduate in four years. Residential life increases personal growth, improves peer-to-peer social interactions and open-mindedness toward diversity.
The Texas Department of Public Safety needs help in solving a homicide that occurred in Harlingen back in 1973.

Investigators initially found Candyce Fletcher-Mora, 23, dead in her apartment at the North Star Village Apartments, 411 Lozano St., in Harlingen. Fletcher-Mora was stabbed numerous times. Her husband was overseas serving in the United States military at the time of her death, according to a news release.
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Two men accused of robbing a South Side convenience store Monday and shooting a clerk in the process were arrested Wednesday.

Officer Douglas Greene, a San Antonio Police Department spokesman, said Joseph Tovar, 19, faces a charge of aggravated robbery after shooting a clerk who was retrieving money for him from a cash register just before 9 p.m. on Monday at the Valero Corner Store, 1439 East Southcross Blvd.

Yesterday (police) released some still images and video of the robbery and suspect, Greene said. That seemed to have helped because a person who saw him on TV called our police department.

Tovar was apprehended at about 12:30 p.m. in the 200 block of West Dickson, Greene said.

An accomplice accused of holding the door open during the robbery, Silas Keys, 21, was arrested at about 1 p.m. in the 8000 block of South Flores Street, Greene said. Keys faces a charge of aggravated robbery.

The clerk, who was shot in the abdomen, was taken to San Antonio Military Medical Center.

He was in serious condition. Were hoping that he pulls through, Greene said, noting the charges could be upgraded if he does not.

At the start of the robbery, Tovar can be seen in video surveillance footage hopping over the front counter and holding the clerk who was shot at gunpoint.

A police report states that when the clerk was having trouble opening the register, another who was told to lay on the floor offered to help.

Tovar fired a shot toward the other clerk, who was struck by ricochet fragments, according to the report. He was not seriously injured, police said.

After Tovar obtained money from the register and shot the clerk, witnesses told police he had fired a third shot when he hopped back over the counter.

jbeltran@express-news.net

Twitter: @JBfromSA
The summons came some 100 days after prosecutors raided his home and offices in June. The group in a statement vowed to improve transparency and regain the public's trust.

His arrival at the office was broadcast live and saw the younger scion of the dysfunctional owner family apologize "for causing concerns." He pledged to cooperate fully with the investigation.

The chairman of embattled Lotte Group appeared at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office on Tuesday to answer charges of embezzlement and breach of trust at the retail giant.

Shin was grilled all night. A prosecution source said he was being probed on the broader charges rather than details. The source added that investigators need time due to the "enormity" of corruption in the conglomerate.

Prosecutors suspect Shin of embezzling W200 billion from the conglomerate since he effectively took charge when he became head of strategic planning in 2004 (US$1=W1,121). He denies the allegations.

The prosecution source said, "Some Lotte Group subsidiaries suffered billions of won in losses in stock and asset deals with other affiliates, and these deals were made on Shin's orders."

But Shin claims that the affiliates acted of their own accord.

Prosecutors are also investigating charges that Shin ordered Lotte Group affiliates to outsource orders to other businesses owned by the Shin family.

Korea's family-run conglomerates are nominally public but often still treated as private fiefdoms by the founder families through Byzantine holding structures.

Prosecutors accuse Shin of embezzlement by pocketing around W10 billion in annual pay by merely listing his name on the management roster of a Lotte affiliate in Japan. But Lotte said Shin did visit Japan every month to discharge his duties. Prosecutors have yet to decide whether or not to arrest him.

The conglomerate has been plagued by an ugly feud between the two sons of the nonagenarian founder or over a year. Affiliates have unanimously thrown their weight behind Shin Dong-bin, the younger son, while the older son Dong-joo is allied with his father, who has dementia.
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Although she loved being an elementary school teacher, Dawn Michelle Mulder could no longer ignore her passion for books and reading.

She wanted to teach, but then her love of books kept coming back, her daughter Megan Owen said. She finally decided she wanted to be surrounded by books every day.

Becoming an elementary school librarian, Mulder got the best of both worlds.

She truly loved every aspect of her job, Owen said.

Mulder, 50, died unexpectedly of unknown causes Sept. 15.

As the oldest of four children, Mulder was tasked with caring for her younger siblings from an early age while her parents struggled to make a living.

She had a lot of responsibility at a young age  was playing a mom role, Owen said.

Even so, Mulder made time to read.

My aunt said she always had a book in her hand, Owen said. A small picture book, or a book from the Nancy Drew series, which she read over and over.

Graduating from Roosevelt High School in 1984, Mulder married and started working various secretarial jobs as she raised her two children.

Remarrying after she and her first husband divorced, Mulder enrolled at Southwest Texas State University, having two more children while earning a degree in interdisciplinary studies.

More Information Dawn Michelle Mulder Born: August 14, 1966, Dallas Died: September 15, 2016, San Antonio Preceded by: Father Herchel Welch. Survived by: Husband Steven Mulder; sons John Owen and daughter-in-law Rhiannon; daughters Megan Owen, Mallory Mulder and Madelyn Mulder; granddaughter Rory Owen; stepfather and mother Mike and Rhonda Barnes; a sister and two brothers. Services: Visitation at noon, followed by funeral service at 1 p.m. Saturday at Mission Park Funeral Chapels at Stone Oak, 23755 U.S. 281 North. See More Collapse

Every family vacation she had her laptop, but still was  fully engaged with us, Owen said. She was very focused on finishing, but didnt want it to alter her life with her family.

As a teacher in the Comal Independent School District, Mulder gained a reputation for her caring attitude.

Shes always had students who didnt have anything, Owen said. Mom would be the teacher who took them under her wing and treat them like they were their own kids.

Providing school supplies or even a coat if needed, Mulder made sure she didnt embarrass the student.

Mulders generosity didnt stop once she was a librarian, first at Rahe Bulverde Elementary School and most recently at Rolling Meadows Elementary in the Judson Independent School District.

If a teacher needed books that the library didnt have, Mulder would order them, often paying for them out of her own pocket.

Childrens books were her love, Owen said. She ordered so many childrens books; we always had boxes at the door full of books.

mheidbrink@express-news.net
Paul Chinn/The Chronicle

The Mayors Office of Housing has said it would delay the lottery for an affordable senior apartment complex in the Western Addition because it is hopeful that a federal ruling will give the city more flexibility in setting aside units for current neighborhood residents.

The move means that 6,000 applicants for the Willie B. Kennedy senior housing complex on Turk Street will likely have to wait a week or 10 days to find out if they were lucky enough to land one of the 98 units in the building. The lottery was scheduled to happen on Wednesday. Applicants were notified of the delay at 5 p.m. Monday.
A partnership between two Florida real estate investors has bought the 288-unit Vantage at Alamo Ranch apartment complex on the Northwest Side.

The partners, Electra America and Robbins Property Associates, bought the recently-built complex for $36 million from Vantage Communities, a firm run by local developer David Starr. They plan to rename the complex Verandas at Alamo and renovate the units with granite countertops and other upgrades, according to a news release.
1 Terror arrests: French authorities have made eight new arrests in connection with the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice that left 86 people dead, the Paris prosecutors office said Tuesday. The office said the suspects detained Monday were French and Tunisian and had links to the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who plowed a 19-ton truck down Nices Promenade des Anglais and into a crowd assembled for a July 14 fireworks display. All eight were arrested in the Alpes-Maritimes region in the southeastern corner of France that includes Nice. At least five people already face preliminary terrorism charges in the attack, and are accused of helping Bouhlel obtain a pistol and providing other support. It wasnt immediately clear what the men arrested this week are suspected of.

2 Kashmir conflict: Indian soldiers on Tuesday battled two groups of suspected militants along the highly militarized de facto border dividing the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir between India and Pakistan, leaving one soldier dead, the Indian army said. Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan by a heavily militarized and mountainous frontier called the Line of Control. The two nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars, including two over their competing claims to the Himalayan territory.
OPPOSITION MDC-T leader Douglas Mwonzora held a secret meeting with President Emmerson Mnangagwa at State House in Harare today, NewsDay has learnt.

Mwonzora confirmed meeting Mnangagwa.

He told NewsDay that the two leaders had discussed his partys position on national dialogue following consultations with his structures.

We met President Emmerson Mnangagwa as part of our efforts to forge national dialogue, Mwonzora said curtly.

The meeting was a success and the President said he was yet to consult some of his officials before coming to us. (sic)

Mwonzora declared his interest to join the Political Actors Dialogue (Polad) recently, but set conditions that the grouping should be restructured. The opposition leader also demanded that only political parties that have parliamentary representation should dialogue separately. That leaves him and the Zanu PF leader as key players in the Polad-initiated dialogue.

The meeting was held shortly after Mnangagwa proclaimed that by-elections would be held on March 26, 2022.

Previously, his vice president Thokozani Khupe represented the party in Polad until Mwonzora ousted her in a disputed opposition party elective congress as ordered by the courts.

Mwonzora has also started a process to recall Khupe and her allies from the opposition party as happened with most MPs from the Nelson Chamisa-led MDC Alliance. Khupe is accused of hobnobbing with MDC Alliance, an allegation she is challenging in the courts.

 NewsDay

Breaking News via Email
Analysts think that there will be more pairings like Doritos Locos Tacos and Mac n Cheetos coming soon.

NEW YORK CITY  Weve had Doritos made into taco shells, Cheetos dust on mac-and-cheese and hot dogs stuffed into pizza crust, but those unusual pairings might just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fast-food novelties, The Motley Fool reports.

Chains from McDonalds to Taco Bell to Burger King need reasons to attract marginal customers, said Scott Rothbort, chief market strategist for Seton Hall University. They do so by introducing these limited time offerings of new products.

By associating a product with a highly craveable snack food, it puts in the consumer's head that their taco, burger, or fries are similarly craveable, added Jonathan Deutsch, a professor of Culinary Arts and Food Science at Drexel University.

Deutsch pointed out that the competitiveness of the quick-service sector has heated up even more of late. That means that even more strange products will likely be available soon, as brand mixing continues.

Meanwhile, some fast-food restaurants are testing upscale items. McDonalds recently piloted a Pesto Mozzarella Melt in Southern California, CNBC reports. The pace of innovation at McDonald's seems to be accelerating, said Mark Kalinowski, an analyst with Nomura.

Wendys has begun tests of Truffle Bacon Cheeseburgers and Bacon Truffle Fries in Tennessee and Massachusetts. [They] sound like menu items that play to Wendy's brand positioning within the quick-service industry: 'a cut above' traditional fast food, yet still fully within fast food, Kalinowski said. He attributed the premium offerings to a willingness of consumers to try new products, including millennials who have a more adventurous palate.
Yves here. I wonder if there is a simpler explanation. US immigration policy has come to be about suppressing wages. The suppressing wages operation has been great for those at the top of the food chain at the cost of overall growth.

By Mike Kimel. Originally published at Angry Bear

In a recent post, I showed that looking at data since 1950 or so, the percentage of the population that is foreign born is negatively correlated with job creation in later years. I promised an explanation, and I will attempt to deliver on that promise in this post.

I can think of a few reasons for the finding, just about all of which would have been amplified since LBJs Presidency due to two things: the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act and the launch of the Great Society. The Hart-Cellar Act may be better known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It phased out country quotas in existence since the 1920s. As a result of these quotas, about 70% of all immigrants were coming from England, Germany and Ireland, with most of the remainder coming from elsewhere in Western Europe and from Latin America. The Great Society, of course, included a number of welfare programs, many of which (or their descendants) are still in existence.

With that, reasons why the foreign born population is negatively correlated with subsequent job creation include:

1. Immigrants who are sufficiently similar to the existing population when it comes to language, culture, skillsets and expectations will integrate more smoothly. Slower and more imperfect integration necessarily requires more expenditure of resources, resources which otherwise could go toward economic development.

2. Naturally, skills and values that are more productive and efficient than those of the existing population are conducive toward growth. Conversely, bringing inferior technology and processes does not improve the economy. As the source of immigrants shifted away from sources of sources of high technology like England and Germany and toward the developing and not-developing world, the likelihood that a randomly selected new immigrant will improve productivity diminishes.

3. Eligibility for welfare can change the incentive structure for existing and potential immigrants. An immigrant arriving in the US in 1890 certainly had no expectation of being supported by the state. It may be that most immigrants arriving in the US now also dont have that expectation. However, it is no secret that welfare exists so some percentage of potential immigrants arrive expecting to be supported to some degree by the state. In some (many?) cases, the expectation increases post-arrival. (Like any great economist, Milton Friedman got a lot of things wrong about how the economy works but he had a point when he said you can have a welfare state or open borders but not both.)

4. Rightly or wrongly, reasons 1  3 above may combine to create resentment in the existing population. Think my grandparents came to this country with nothing and nobody gave them anything Resentment can break down trust and institutions necessary for the economy to function smoothly.

5. Over time, transportation has become cheaper and easier. As a result, the likelihood that an immigrant has come to the US to stay has diminished. Many immigrants come to the US for several years and then go back to their country of origin. This in turn leads to four issues that can have negative impacts on the economy:

5a. Immigrants that expect to leave often send back remittances, taking resources out of the US economy. For example, in 2010, remittances from workers in the US amounted to 2.1% of Mexican GDP. 5b. Relative to many non-Western countries, the US taxpayer invests heavily in the creation of a state that is conducive toward acquiring useful skills and education. Often, the acquisition of such skills and education is heavily subsidized. When people acquire those tools and then leave without applying them, the value of the resources could have been better spent elsewhere. 5c. Immigrants who dont expect to stay can have less reason to integrate culturally and economically; any real estate investor can tell you that all else being equal, a neighborhood made up largely of homeowners is almost always nicer than a neighborhood made up largely of renters. 5d. Immigrants who arrive with a non-negligible expectation of leaving are, on average, more likely to take risks which generate private gains and social losses. If the bet goes well, congratulations. If the bet goes bad, so long suckers! The bet may even involve a crime.

6. (This one is more conjecture than the others  I think it is true, but I havent given it enough thought, particularly whether it is entirely separate from the previous reasons.) The non-existence of a lump of labor does not mean there isnt a population to labor multiplier, or that the multiplier cannot change over time. In an era of relatively slow economic growth, economies of scale, and outsourcing abroad, the number of new employment opportunities per new customer (i.e., job creation per resident) can shrink. Weve certainly seen something resembling that since about 2000.

None of this is to say that immigration is good or bad, or even that it should be opposed or encouraged. In this post I simply tried to explain what I saw in the data. I will have one or more follow-up posts.
Making catalysts smarter (Nanowerk News) The industrial catalysts of the future wont just speed up reactions, theyll control how chemical processes work and determine how much of a particular product is made.

A team of researchers led by Phillip Christopher, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riversides Bourns College of Engineering, demonstrated thisas well as how these catalysts look in actionin a paper published Monday, Sept. 19, in the journal Nature Chemistry ("Adsorbate-mediated strong metalsupport interactions in oxide-supported Rh catalysts").

Atomic resolution electron microscopy showing the optimization of a carbon dioxide conversion reaction mediated by the catalyst (Rh nanoparticles, NP, on TiO 2 ) and its unique surface interactions (A-SMSI).

The paper describes a new approach to dynamically tune how a catalyst operates, enabling the researchers to control and optimize the product made in the reaction. The team, which includes scientists from the University of California, Irvine and Columbia University, also used advanced microscopy and spectroscopy approaches to view the catalyst in action on an atomic scale.

The researchers focused on an important chemical reaction that involves the conversion of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and synthetic natural gas. The benefits of this reaction are two-fold: it offers the potential for the removal of harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the carbon monoxide and natural gas produced can be used as a chemical precursor and fuel, respectively. The team focused on understanding how the catalyst drives the reaction at the atomic scale, which will allow researchers to modify the catalysts properties to increase efficiency in the reaction.

Christopher said the findings unlock new opportunities for carbon dioxide conversion chemistry, and the dynamic tuning and visualization techniques demonstrated in this research could be replicated in a variety of other important chemical processes.
Hybrid material opens the door to new possibilities in graphene applications (Nanowerk News) Many scientists consider graphene to be a wonder material. Now, a team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has succeeded in linking graphene with another important chemical group, the porphyrins ("Fusing tetrapyrroles to graphene edges by surface-assisted covalent coupling"). Porphyrins are well-known because of their striking functional properties which for example play a central role in chlorophyll during photosynthesis. These new hybrid structures could also be used in the field of molecular electronics, catalysis or even as sensors.

Hardly any material is currently receiving as much attention in research as graphene. It is flexible, extremely thin and transparent, while at the same time it has very high tensile strength and conducts electricity, ideal prerequisites for a wide variety of application areas. However, using graphene to capture solar energy or as a gas sensor requires other specific properties as well. These properties can be achieved by fusing functional molecules with the carbon layer.

In previous research, scientists were primarily concerned with wet-chemical methods for attaching the molecules to the surface of the material. Together with his colleagues, Molecular Engineering at Functional Interfaces Professor Wilhelm Auwarter decided to take a different approach: They were able to link porphyrin molecules to graphene in a controlled manner in an ultra-high vacuum using the catalytic properties of a silver surface on which the graphene layer rested. When heated, the porphyrin molecules lose hydrogen atoms at their periphery and can thus form new bonds with the graphene edges.

Prof. Wilhelm Auwarter with the porphin molecule.

Clean and controllable

"This method creates a clean and controllable environment," explains Professor Auwarter. "We can see exactly how the molecules bond and what types of bonds occur." Here the researchers use the latest in modern atomic force microscopy to depict the chemical structure of individual molecules, the atomic "skeletons", so to speak.

For the first time the scientists have succeeded in attaching functional molecules to the edges of graphene covalently, i.e. with a stable chemical bond. "We want to modify only the edges of the material; this way the graphene's positive properties are not destroyed," says Auwarter.

The researchers chose the porphyrin molecules as the partner for graphene because of their special properties. "For example, porphyrins are responsible for transporting oxygen in hemoglobin," he continues. The molecules change their properties depending on which metals are at their center and can take on various different tasks, e.g. specifically bonding with gas molecules such as oxygen and carbon dioxide.
In rotating galaxies, distribution of normal matter precisely determines gravitational acceleration

(Nanowerk News) In the late 1970s, astronomers Vera Rubin and Albert Bosma independently found that spiral galaxies rotate at a nearly constant speed: the velocity of stars and gas inside a galaxy does not decrease with radius, as one would expect from Newton's laws and the distribution of visible matter, but remains approximately constant. Such 'flat rotation curves' are generally attributed to invisible, dark matter surrounding galaxies and providing additional gravitational attraction.

Now a team led by Case Western Reserve University researchers has found a significant new relationship in spiral and irregular galaxies: the acceleration observed in rotation curves tightly correlates with the gravitational acceleration expected from the visible mass only.

If you measure the distribution of star light, you know the rotation curve, and vice versa, said Stacy McGaugh, chair of the Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve and lead author of the research ("The Radial Acceleration Relation in Rotationally Supported Galaxies").

The finding is consistent among 153 spiral and irregular galaxies, ranging from giant to dwarf, those with massive central bulges or none at all. It is also consistent among those galaxies comprised of mostly stars or mostly gas.

In a paper accepted for publication by the journal Physical Review Letters and posted on the preprint website arXiv, McGaugh and co-authors Federico Lelli, an astronomy postdoctoral scholar at Case Western Reserve, and James M. Schombert, astronomy professor at the University of Oregon, argue that the relation theyve found is tantamount to a new natural law.

An astrophysicist who reviewed the study said the findings may lead to a new understanding of internal dynamics of galaxies.

Galaxy rotation curves have traditionally been explained via an ad hoc hypothesis: that galaxies are surrounded by dark matter, said David Merritt, professor of physics and astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research. The relation discovered by McGaugh et al. is a serious, and possibly fatal, challenge to this hypothesis, since it shows that rotation curves are precisely determined by the distribution of the normal matter alone. Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this, and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely.

McGaugh and Schombert have been working on this research for a decade and with Lelli the last three years. Near-infrared images collected by NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope during the last five years allowed them to establish the relation and that it persists for all 153 galaxies.

The key is that near-infrared light emitted by stars is far more reliable than optical-light for converting light to mass, Lelli said.

The researchers plotted the radial acceleration observed in rotation curves published by a host of astronomers over the last 30 years against the acceleration predicted from the observed distribution of ordinary matter now in the Spitzer Photometry & Accurate Rotation Curves database McGaughs team created. The two measurements showed a single, extremely tight correlation, even when dark matter is supposed to dominate the gravity.

There is no intrinsic scatter, which is how far the data differ on average from the mean when plotted on a graph, McGaugh said. What little scatter is found is consistent with stellar mass-to-light ratios that vary a little from galaxy to galaxy.

Lelli compared the relation to a long-used natural law. "Its like Keplers third law for the solar system: if you measure the distance of each planet from the sun, you get the orbital period, or vice versa he said. Here we have something similar for galaxies, with about 3,000 data points."

In our case, we find a relation between what you see in normal matter in galaxies and what you get in their gravity, McGaugh said. This is important because it is telling us something fundamental about how galaxies work.

Arthur Kosowsky, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, was not involved but reviewed the research.

The standard model of cosmology is remarkably successful at explaining just about everything we observe in the universe, Kosowsky said. But if there is a single observation which keeps me awake at night worrying that we might have something essentially wrong, this is it.

He said McGaugh and collaborators have steadily refined the spiral galaxy scaling relation for years and called this latest work a significant advance, reducing uncertainty in the mass in normal matter by exploiting infrared observations.

The result is a scaling relation in the data with no adjustable parameters, Kosowky said. Throughout the history of physics, unexplained regularities in data have often pointed the way towards new discoveries.

McGaugh and his team are not pressing any theoretical interpretation of their empirical relation at this point.
There was a full house at the Nagle Centre, in Canopy Street, on September 14, when the Cashel Order of Malta unit celebrated 24 years in the town.

Order of Malta members travelling from as far as Wexford and Athlone.

A lecture, presented by Commander Tom Hanly D.M, Irish Association SMDM gave a fascinating glimpse into the history of the, the oldest order of medieval chivalry, and their connection to Ireland, the order having first come to Ireland in 1172. The current Irish organisation can be traced back to 1938 and its foundation in Galway by Professor Conor O'Malley.

The organisation now has over 5000 members nationally, runs over 160 ambulances and not only offers first aid cover for sporting and community events but also provides transport for sick and infirm people as well as taking member of the public on pilgrimages both in Ireland and overseas, with perhaps their greatest role is now assisting people with daily living activities.

Richard Hennessy thanked everyone for attending and the local unit for their assistance in creating a mini-museum for the celebration of nearly a quarter of a century of service in Cashel.
Jack Reardon is relishing his new role as artistic director of Clonmel-based youth theatre group Stagecraft, having taken over from Shane Dempsey.

"Stagecraft has always been my second home", says Jack.

"Joining at eleven, Stagecraft taught me so much growing up. Its been the place where Ive made my greatest friends, shared the most amazing experiences and created the best memories", he says.

"Stagecraft was always so much more than a youth theatre to me and to so many others. It taught me the skills I needed to excel in all things theatre.

Ive had the opportunity of working with incredible directors and actors, perform on stages around the country and become chairperson of one of the biggest college drama societies in the country at DCU (Dublin City University).

Stagecraft taught me skills no other club could and has made me the confident, energetic person I am", says Jack, who is studying for a masters degree in Theatre Directing at the Lir, which he says is Irelands best theatre training college. The Lir is part of Trinity College Dublin, as well as being affiliated with RADA in the UK, and he's looking forward to studying under Irelands best directors and facilitators.

About his predecessor, Jack says "Shane Dempsey started Stagecraft in 1998 and developed it into one of Irelands leading youth theatres. He has transformed the lives of countless young people in Tipperary.

When Shane asked me to take over what he had started I was honoured. I was privileged to be asked to continue the work he started and further the training of young people in Clonmel".

Looking to the future he says "I hope to continue the amazing training Stagecraft offers and maintain the fun-filled, open space Stagecraft occupies. My dream is to make theatre and Stagecraft synonymous with Clonmel.

When people think of theatre training in Clonmel we want them to think of us. We hope to offer the best training possible and train our actors to be the next Cillian Murphy or Saoirse Ronan. We want the new era of Stagecraft to be all about our students and provide exactly what they want".

Jack will be assisted by Ciara Laste, who has started studying musical theatre at IMT (Irish College of Music Theatre). "Together Ciara and I will be developing workshops designed to teach our students all the skills we are learning, ensuring they are receiving the best training possible on offer.

The skills and knowledge shared between Ciara and I will offer a theatre experience unlike any other in Tipperary".

Stagecraft is open to anyone aged between 5 and 21 years old. They are hoping to see as many new faces as possible this year. Rehearsals take place at The Hub theatre at 49 Albert Street, just off Irishtown.

The senior classes run on Friday evening while the junior groups meet on Saturday morning.

Classes resume this Friday and Saturday, September 23rd and 24th.

For more information log onto Stagecraftyt.com or call Jack on 087-2805375.
The investment company that owns seventeen units in Market Place, Clonmel have entered into an agreement to purchase the former Super Valu premises.

The acquisition of the former supermarket by the owners of the Market Place units would represent a significant step towards the regeneration of the area.

Owners Ramcoll confirmed this week that a sale had been agreed and that they hoped to complete the purchase of the property by the end of the year.

Matters are at a very sensitive stage now. The sale is agreed, a deposit has been paid, contracts have not been signed yet but we hope to complete the purchase by the end of the year. said Paul Collins of Ramcoll, Ltd the owners of the Market Place units.

It is the intention of the company to establish a Kildare Village type quality development at Market Place.

The purchase of the former Super Valu premises represents a huge piece of the jigsaw and we are in the process of acquiring that.

The former Super Valu premises was always crucial to the whole plan said the Ramcoll spokesperson.

The huge premises which was previously occupied by both Superquinn and Super Valu would become the location for the anchor tenant in the development earmarked for Market Place.

The regeneration of the area has already started with new tenants moving into the corner cafe in Market Place.

We are very pleased that the cafe is now open and we are in discussion with three or four more people interested in opening units in Market Place said Mr Collins.

The owners of Market Place received a massive boost earlier this year when a

decision was taken by the office of the Commissioner of Valuation in Dublin to award a massive rates reduction concerning the units.

For years the rates applicable to Market Place were a multiple of what business owners had to pay in O'Connell Street and Gladstone Street.

Mr Collins said since the decision , made in July , there has been a significant increase in interest in the units.

Mr Collins said inquiries had picked up considerably since the crucial decision.

When we invested in the property in 2013/2014 there was a big belief in the dynamic of Clonmel and its big catchment area.

We were aware of the difficulty concerning the rates applicable to the units and we felt that common sense would prevail.

That process took longer than expected

The hands of the local council were tied.

They were aware of our plans for investment and development of the site but nothing could be done until the Dublin office solved it.
Alex Sifakis never raised this much money this fast.

The house flipper from Jacksonville, Fla., crowdfunded nine deals totaling more than $9 million through RealtyShares over the last two and a half years. A July deal for $1 million took him just 12 hours.

"Generally, raising money takes so much time," said Sifakis, 33. "This offers so much flexibility and time savings. It's so much better than going to family offices, banks or Wall Street firms."

House flippers and property developers are increasingly crowdfunding  tapping the virtual wallets of anonymous internet backers on platforms such as RealtyShares, LendingHome, PeerStreet and Patch of Land. For riskier ventures, such as building new homes and buying, renovating and selling existing ones, they're finding quick financing can be easier to get online than from banks. That's contributed to an increase in home flipping. In the second quarter, 39,775 investors bought and sold at least one house, the most since 2007, according to ATTOM Data Solutions.

Marketplace Lenders

The crowdfunding sites are part of the multibillion-dollar ecosystem of marketplace lenders, like LendingClub Corp. and Prosper Marketplace Inc., that match users who need money with people who want to provide it for anything from debt consolidation to elective medical procedures.

That business hasn't always run smoothly. LendingClub is going through a rough stretch after years of rapid growth. In May, its founder and chief executive officer resigned amid an internal probe into a botched loan sale, sending LendingClub's shares tumbling.

So far, there have been few defaults in real estate crowdfunding deals. When they happen, the platforms say they'll pay investors the proceeds from property sales.

The business has other potential pitfalls. When it comes to real estate, faster isn't always better. Wall Street's home-mortgage machine of the mid-2000s valued speed over accuracy, with disastrous results, though most crowdfunding sites cater to investors and not homebuyers. Also, clicking for capital can be exploited by fraudsters who may not be who they say they are, according to Sara Hanks, co-founder and CEO of CrowdCheck, which provides due-diligence services for online investors.

"We've seen some things where the entity that's supposed to own the property doesn't actually own it,'' she said.

To keep a lid on fraud, PeerStreet doesn't originate loans like most of the other platforms. Instead, it created a secondary market. It buys hard-money, or high-interest-rate, loans made to real estate investors and spreads the risk among individuals, who purchase pieces of them online.

"If you're originating and selling, you're just trying to get as much volume as you can," said Brett Crosby, a Google Inc. alum who co-created PeerStreet and is now chief operating officer. "In order to get more borrowers in the door, you start to drop underwriting guidelines." PeerStreet got an early investment from Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager who was played by Christian Bale in the movie version of Michael Lewis's 2011 book "The Big Short."

Borrowing Rate

The ease of fundraising through these nontraditional lenders could be a warning sign, according to Erik Gordon, a law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"Whenever you see a big difference between the terms on which you can raise money in one market versus another market, something is wrong in at least one of those markets," Gordon said. "It usually is the market with the least-experienced players, and they usually end up wishing they hadn't played."

Sifakis said he's borrowing money at an annual rate of 14% over two and a half years. He keeps all the profit he makes from selling homes, he said.

Crofton, Md.-based Caruso Homes Inc. used RealtyShares to build new houses in Raleigh, N.C., and Washington, D.C. Wall Street isn't as interested in financing single-family developments in smaller and medium-sized deals, making crowdfunding a better way to fund Caruso's projects, said Chief Financial Officer Jack Haese.

Few Defaults

The companies are in the early stages. Patch of Land said it's originated more than $180 million in loans, RealtyShares said it's raised more than $200 million for real estate deals and PeerStreet said it's funded more than $100 million. LendingHome won't say how much it's generated  the company started crowdfunding only this year. Those totals are peanuts compared to platforms like Lending Club.

Jeff Bullian, a Boston-based consultant, has invested in about 30 deals on RealtyShares and in a handful of others on websites such as Patch of Land. So far, only one deal has gone bad, he said. In that instance, the platform, which Bullian declined to identify, went to bat for investors so everyone could get their money back along with a small return.

Bullian said he contributes an average of $10,000 in each deal for returns of about 10% to 20%, similar to what he was getting from a marketplace lender.

"I really like the risk profile of real estate deals compared with some other investments because they're secured," Bullian said. "If something goes bad, you have the asset to fall back on."

Income Requirement

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require investors to be accredited, or meet conditions such as an annual income of at least $200,000 or a net worth of $1 million. Individuals generally put in a minimum of $1,000 to $5,000 and are promised interest-only payments each month, with the rest of their money back at the end of the loan term. Some enroll in automatic options that invest in a variety of deals for diversification.

Through RealtyShares, investors can raise different kinds of debt and equity. The company verifies and underwrites every offering, according to CEO Nav Athwal. Of the prospective projects brought to the company, only about 3% are selected to be listed, he said.

LendingHome keeps loans in a bankruptcy-remote entity so the debt and repayment streams are insulated from anything that may happen to the firm. The company had previously only offered loans to institutional investors, according to CEO Matt Humphries.

Bankruptcy Remote

Patch of Land also keeps loans in a bankruptcy-remote entity. The company generally requires borrowers to provide personal guarantees and to put at least 20% of their own money into deals, according to AdaPia d'Errico, the chief marketing officer.

Sifakis, the Florida flipper, said he typically gets a $3 million line of credit from an investment firm for about every $1 million he raises on RealtyShares, giving him added buying power.

"It's the greatest thing in the world," Sifakis said. "The amount of money you can raise isn't limited by anything but their investor base. And the investor base is growing and growing."
(NaturalNews) Taxpayers in cash-strapped California will be forced to subsidize higher education for illegal immigrants under a new law proposed recently that would permit them to get state-backed loans because they cannot get federal school loans under current legal restrictions.The effort is being seen as one to provide public assistance to children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents. The legislation, Senate Bill 1210, "would establish loan programs at the state's two public university systems for students who have no access to the relatively low-interest federal student loans," thereported.Initial funding for the program, which will be called the "California Dream Loan Program," if the legislation passes as expected, would be $9.2 million -- $2.3 million from the universities themselves (which are both recipients of federal funding via federally backed student loans for American citizens and legal residents) and $6.9 million from state taxpayers, according to a news release from the office of the measure's author and chief sponsor, Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Huntington Park/Long Beach.University of California (UC) President Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona and former chief of the Department of Homeland Security, spoke in favor of the legislation at a Senate Education Committee hearing recently."These students have worked hard to achieve their dream of a university education, and I believe we should work as hard to ensure that they have every chance to succeed, including providing them access to equivalent resources as their campus peers," Napolitano said, according to a transcript of her testimony.As governor of Arizona, Napolitano, a Democrat, repeatedly opposed or vetoed legislation that would have tightened up the state's border with Mexico. As Homeland Security secretary, she approved of President Obama's executive actions that essentially granted amnesty to illegal alien children currently in the country, some say in violation of U.S. law.The California university system says it estimates that about 1,200 California State University (CSU) students and 1,300 UC students would eventually seek such loans. UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein said the program would initially cost UC about $1.6 million per year, though, if the loans are structured well, they could become cost-neutral. CSU's annual cost would be roughly $900,000, according to spokesman Michael Ulhenkamp.Because of the struggling economy, some analysts have said, the default rate for U.S. student loans has been steadily rising. In a September 2013 press release, the U.S. Department of Education, which oversees the student loan program, announced:The trend to provide taxpayer-supported school services to illegal alien children living in California began in earnest in 2001, when the state became one of the first to allow such students who attended high school in the state to pay in-state tuition rates at public universities. Last year, students who entered the U.S. illegally became eligible for state tuition aid, or Cal Grants.But without access to federal Pell Grants or loans, the students still have financial aid gaps averaging up to $6,000 a year for UC students and $3,000 for those at CSU, the news release said."We invest in California students from an early age, and many of them have done what we've asked them to do: work hard, study and pursue a higher education," Lara said."If we're serious about strengthening our economy then we must remove obstacles for our future workforce when they're close to the graduation finish line," he said.There are plans for UC Berkeley to test a similar school-provided loan program for the coming school year, using funding that Napolitano had set aside to assist students living in the country without authority to do so, according to Nohemy Chavez, a counselor with UC Berkeley's Undocumented Student Program.Some students see trouble looming on the horizon. While the loan program will be "a great temporary solution," according to UC Berkeley student Jesus Lopez, whose family came to the U.S. illegally when he was seven, "once we graduate, those students who are not legally authorized to work will encounter another problem -- paying back those loans," he said.
Goldman Sachs suddenly wants to stop pay to play corruption

Goldman Sachs CEO has a history of supporting Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's health issues spiral out of control

(NaturalNews) The multinational banking firm, the Goldman Sachs Group, can no longer lend private political donations to the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump . The news comes in light of the fact that top executives within the firm have for years been permitted to donate to Hillary Clinton's campaign.The new policy, effective September 1, applies to certain campaigns only, and is reportedly an effort "to remove any implication of so-called 'pay to play,'" according toThe rule only applies to Goldman Sachs partners. In 2012, the bank was forced to pay $12 million in a settlement involving a former banker from Boston involved in a conflict of interest.The banker "had picked up bond underwriting business in the state while working for and contributing funds to the campaign of a then Massachusetts state treasurer and governor-hopeful, Tim Cahill."The policy makes it illegal for partners to donate money to politicians running for state or local offices, or to individuals running for president. The memo specifically mentions the Trump-pence campaign as one of the campaigns Goldman Sachs is prevented from donating to.Banned donations include: "Any federal candidate who is a sitting state or local official (e.g., governor running for president or vice president, such as the Trump/Pence ticket, or mayor running for Congress), including their Political Action Committees (PACs)," according to copies of the memo obtained byDonations to the Clinton campaign are still permitted, of course. This is because Democratic vice presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, is a Virginia senator, "and not considered a local official under Goldman's rules."On the other hand, the memo states that partners are prohibited from donating to the Virginia Democratic party, which Kaine is a member of.The firm's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, has not expressed support for a candidate in the 2016 Presidential Election. However, in the past he has been known to support Clinton , donating to her campaign against Obama in 2008, as well in other circumstances.Goldman Sachs is the sixth largest donor to Clinton's campaign, forking out over $912,609 according to data from 19992016. Blankfein and the banking firm "paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 in personal speaking fees, paid Bill Clinton $1,550,000 in personal speaking fees, and donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation,"reported on March 27.Monsanto is also known to have provided large donations to the Clinton campaign. Reports from the Federal Election Commission show that Monsanto lobbyist Jerry Crawford of the Crawford & Mauro Law Firm in Des Moines, Iowa, donated $151,727 to the Clinton camp over the quarter ending December 31.Clinton continues to surface in the news media for her failing health. A YouTube video featuring an experienced doctor who claims the Democratic candidate has Parkinson's disease recently went viral.Speaking with Gary Franchi of the, Dr. Ted Noel says Clinton appears to be displaying symptoms of taking Levodopa, a common drug used to treat Parkinson's disease. He also believes that her difficulty swallowing is a result of the degenerative nervous system disease, which affects an estimated 1 million Americans.While it's unclear if Clinton has Parkinson's, we do know that she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, which her people insist is the reason for the presidential candidate's latest struggle.Clinton was again caught on camera falling over, almost as if she was fainting or about to faint, while attempting to get into a van following a ceremony honoring the victims of 9/11 over the weekend.Secret Service agents are seen in the video grabbing Clinton by the arm, preventing her from falling to the ground. Her doctor released a public statement saying that Clinton is being treated for pneumonia and dehydration.
'Responsible drug policy?'

Proposition 205 vote expected to be close

(NaturalNews) Given marijuana's many healing properties and the impressive body of scientific evidence backing up its capabilities, it is not surprising to find that those who are fighting against legalizing it typically have some type of self-serving interest driving their actions.This is evidenced by the actions of the pharmaceutical company Insys, as Arizona prepares to vote on the legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes. The firm shelled out $500,000 to the anti-legalization group Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy to fight against Proposition 205.Insys might not be a household name, but you've probably heard of the only product that they currently market: Subsys, a spray version of the potent opiate fentanyl . You've likely seen fentanyl in the headlines, as it has been singled out for contributing to the dangerous rise in heroin overdoses, with many dealers adding the drug to their heroin to boost its effects.Fentanyl is actually 50 times stronger than heroin, and is responsible for deadly overdoses like the one that killed Prince earlier this year. In fact, more than 700 deaths between late 2013 and 2014 were blamed on the drug, with the DEA issuing a nationwide alert after the surge in deaths from overdoses involving fentanyl-laced heroin.Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, which now finds itself half a million dollars richer thanks to the Insys donation, has gone so far as to claim that the states that have already legalized cannabis have seen "disastrous repercussions for their youth, workplaces and communities."The facts say otherwise, however. In Colorado for example, business, tax revenues and tourism have all enjoyed spikes thanks to legalization, while the state is also noting lower teen cannabis consumption rates than the national average. Moreover, a Johns Hopkins study found that the states that passed medical marijuana laws were reporting lower rates of opiate overdoses. While most people would consider this good news, it's simply bad for business for Insys.Insys does not appear to be too worried about PR problems. Last month, the Illinois Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the firm, accusing them of promoting Subsys to physicians for off-label uses. In the suit, AG Lisa Madigan said that Insys's "desire for increased profits led it to disregard patients' health and push addictive opioids for non-FDA approved purposes." Meanwhile, two of its employees have been charged for their roles in a kickback scheme involving doctors.It seems more than a bit hypocritical for a campaign group with the term "responsible drug policy" in its name to accept funding that comes from the profits of opioid sales, some of which were possibly obtained illegally.The company's vested interest in keeping marijuana illegal actually goes much further than protecting its dangerous Subsys product, however. The firm once sold a synthetic cannabis product, and they have already earned FDA approval for a similar product, which they plan to launch soon. The existence of these products validates marijuana's incredible painkilling properties, while at the same time illustrating exactly why they are so desperate to keep marijuana illegal wherever they can: to eliminate the competition. Quite simply, the legalization of cannabis threatens their profits.Arizona citizens are set to vote this November on Proposition 205. If passed, this would make the possession of small amounts of marijuana legal, and regulate the sale of both the plant and its products for recreational purposes. Of course, products like hemp protein powder are already legal throughout the nation as they do not contain THC.The use of marijuana for medical purposes is already legal in Arizona and 24 other states, but only four states so far, along with the District of Columbia, also allow recreational use. The passage of the medical marijuana law in Arizona was very close, with just 4,000 votes deciding the matter, and the Proposition 205 vote is expected to be close as well. It's no wonder, then, that Big Pharma is getting nervous.
Top 7 ways to ruin a decent cup of coffee, including with most liquid coffee creamers

Best choices for liquid coffee creamers

(NaturalNews) Is coffee good or bad for you? That seems to be an intriguing question that rears its head whenever health enthusiasts begin a conversation about one of the most popular morning beverages known to the world.The answer depends on what you put in it, because a couple of cups of "bean water" with some pure ingredients certainly won't put a damper on your day; in fact, it can be quite the healthy "booster shot" for anyone who pays attention to what they put in their body and who has a moderately active lifestyle. However, it's easy to royally screw up a decent cup of coffee, and the majority of Americans do it every day, even people with good intentions. So, before you go out and dose your cup of "Joe" with toxins that cause short- and long-term health crises, know all the usual suspects.1.: If you don't know it by now, be aware that genetically modified foods contain chemical pesticides that cause cancer and Alzheimer's. Unfermented soy also unnaturally alters hormone levels.2.: White sugar is a white "devil," and comes from Monsanto's BT corn . Research shows the BT toxin causes cancer tumors and early death in laboratory tested animals. Are you a lab rat? Any conventional liquid coffee creamer that doesn't carry the USDA "certified organic" label or a "Non-GMO" label most likely contains "Franken-sugar." Watch out!3.: According to research published by the National Institute of Health (NIH), carrageenan is an " immunosuppressive agent and mediator of intravascular coagulation ." It suppresses antibody responses in lab animals. After a week or two in the refrigerator, you'll notice the creamer at the bottom of the container becomes a gooey, stringy gel. Imagine that stuck in your digestive tract.4.: You can't boil out fluoride, which is really sodium fluoride, an industrial by-product that the USA imports from China and dumps in the municipal taps, saying it's "good for your teeth," even though it causes cancer and lowers IQ.5.: Likely contains antibiotics, artificial hormones and most likely pus from the cow's infected udders. Cows stuck in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) are exposed to high amounts of hormones, antibiotics and GMO substances, including in their feed, and they release these toxins through their milk. Common artificial hormones used are rBGH and rBST, both of which are linked to breast, colon and prostate cancer in humans. Forced by drugs to overproduce milk, cows' udders form pus that's not properly filtered out by conventional means.6.: These powders contain artificial flavors, artificial coloring, GM soy, other partially hydrogenated oils and of course genetically modified ingredients.7.: In order to remove the caffeine, coffee is put through a chemical process. All decaffeinated extraction methods alter the coffee bean's phytochemical structure. The chemical solvents used, including methylene chloride (a dry cleaning fluid also used for paint strippers), are harmful to human health . Though the beans are steamed afterward to remove the solvents, residues remain, as does some caffeine (at least 3 percent). The FDA permits residues (trace amounts) of dangerous chemical solvents to remain on the decaf coffee beans after roasting. Research shows that decaf coffee drinkers have a higher rate of rheumatoid arthritis. Coincidence? We think not. Decaf coffee is highly acidic, and acidic bodies are more prone to inflammation, sickness and cancer. Putting toxic liquid coffee creamers in decaf coffee is a "double whammy" for your health. Beware.The brands "Bliss" and "Organic Valley" both sell creamers that are not GMO, do not contain soy and do not contain carrageenan. Even better, you could make your own homemade coffee creamer with raw, organic ingredients, and that way you simply can't go wrong!
The quest for 'compliance'

Parents insist on freedom of choice

(NaturalNews) Thousands of students have been banned from Maryland public schools, after their parents failed to prove compliance with government-mandated vaccine schedules.Students in kindergarten, first grade, second grade and seventh through ninth grades must prove that they have received a series of vaccines that are newly required. Elementary school students must prove that they have received two doses of the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, while older students must prove that they have received the varicella vaccine as well as the Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) and meningococcal vaccines.Under Maryland law, parents must provide written proof of required immunizations within 20 days of the start of the school year. When this grace period expired, students were pulled from class and their parents were called. The students will not be permitted to return until they have received the shots.The numbers of "non-compliant" children varied widely by region of the state. In Prince George's County, more than 6,400 children were non-compliant at the end of the grace period. In Baltimore city, approximately 5,000 students were found to be non-compliant as of September 12; within two days, however, the number had dropped to about 3,800. That's because many of the "non-compliant" students had actually been vaccinated, but their parents had not submitted the required paperwork to the schools."In a lot of these situations the students have the immunizations; we just haven't received the records from the parents," said Filipa Gomes, health services director for Carroll County Public Schools. "Once they got the call from the school principal, 'We need your records,' all of a sudden a lot of them came in."Schools across the state have set up clinics to provide free vaccinations.Baltimore school officials said that only about 100 elementary school students were found to be non-compliant, and most of those were children just starting school. The vast majority of non-compliant students were seventh and ninth graders who had not received the Tdap or meningococcal shots.According to the CDC, meningococcal disease can cause disability and death, but "is not very common in the United States."Many of the students to be banned from class had already been through at least one exercise of state power. According to Kerrie Wagaman, coordinator of health services for the Howard County school system, it is standard policy for non-compliant children to be removed from class on the first day of school and made to wait in a health room, cafeteria or library until their parents can be contacted."I find that the more firm you are from the first day of school with implementing the policy, compliance with it becomes more consistent across all levels," Wagaman said.Maryland allows exemptions to vaccine requirements only with documentation of a medical or religious objection. Groups such as Maryland Coalition for Vaccine Choice claim that such policies violate parents' rights to medical choice Every state requires at least some vaccines for public school attendance. Three states (California, West Virginia and Mississippi) allow only medical exemptions, and 18 allow exemptions for personal reasons. The rest, including Maryland , allow only religious or medical exemptions.Parents who choose not to follow the federal vaccine recommendations cite many reasons for their "non-compliance," ranging from concerns about particular vaccine side effects, to skepticism about the need for particular shots . Public health officials find such non-compliance very troubling, and are constantly looking for ways to prevent it.A recent study in the journalexplored the possibility that exposing people to vaccine side effect reports would reassure them that vaccines are actually safe and the federal government is a trustworthy source of health information.Instead, people who read the reports became less likely to vaccinate, less trusting of vaccine safety and more skeptical about federal vaccine recommendations.
How a disaster gets swept under the rug

EPA's history of deception

(NaturalNews) Most people who don't live in Florida are not aware that the state is kind of famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for; in fact, they're fairly common And, as reported by Daisy Luther, you may have recently heard some scuttlebutt about a new sinkhole in the state.But there is more to this one than meets the eye, Luther reports, in fact. As in, this one is poisoning the environment at a remarkable rate, and as usual, the Environmental Protection Agency has, for weeks, been in cover-up mode. So much for upholding the "public good."Luther notes that while there hasn't been much news coverage of the sinkhole, it is massive and has already leaked more than 215 million gallons of water contaminated with radioactivity into the state's primary drinking water supply. Worse, the EPA has known about this contaminant leak since the early part of August, but it  along with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)  has kept quiet about it. This, despite the fact that officials knew Floridians and guests to the state were drinking, bathing in and cooking with radioactive water Why not? Because the company responsible for the spill, Mosaic, said that the leaching of radioactive contaminants into a state's drinking water isn't a problem. No big deal.As reported by Russian Times , radioactive wastewater has been flowing into the sinkhole and into an aquifer in Polk County, which is situated in the central part of the state between Orlando and Tampa.Thereported further that the sinkhole opened up below a gypsum stack at a Mosaic phosphate fertilizer plant near Mulberry, dumping millions of gallons of poisonous runoff into the aquifer.Now that the word is out, it may be months before the hole is filled in, according to officials working on the problem.The hole is 45 feet wide, and is believed to be around 300 feet deep. It opened at the New Wales plant, where trucked-in phosphate rock is converted into fertilizer. The contaminated water contains sulfate and sodium from a pool that sits atop a 120-foot gypsum stack. "An unknown amount of gypsum, a fertilizer byproduct with low levels of radiation, also fell into the sinkhole," thereported.At present, the pond is drained. However, as thenoted, aerial video taken recently shows that polluted water continues to seep in from the gypsum stack, and is cascading like a waterfall into the sinkhole . And with each new rainfall, there will be more contaminated water leeching into the sinkhole until it is filled.Workers at the Mosaic plant became aware of the leak August 27, after water levels in the pond fell two feet below previous readings. At that time they began diverting water from the pond, which is believed to hold as much as 215 million gallons.Thereported that wells have been used to monitor groundwater contamination around the sinkhole. Mosaic officials claim that no off-site contamination has occurred, but then the company's transparency about the leak from the outset is questionable, as is that of both the EPA and the DEP.For it's part, Mosaic notified the DEP and EPA, but that's as far as the notifications went. Neither the company nor state and federal officials alerted the public.But why not? After all, if the company and federal and state environmental officials are certain that no contamination has occurred, thenThe company has agreed to pay for testing of well water around the sinkhole, and has already received more than a dozen requests (citizens can also submit their own water samples here ).But, as Luther points out, the EPA has a history of covering up mistakes and hiding or downplaying the severity of spills and toxic incidents like the Gold King Mine spill in Colorado last year. Native American tribes are still dealing with the contaminant fallout from that disaster. So, why should we believe the agency now?As for Mosaic, Luther says the company paid over $2 billion in fines last year alone for mismanaging hazardous waste.
ADHD Nation Alan Schwarz Scribner (2016) 9781501105913 9781408706572 | ISBN: 978-1-5011-0591-3

Some 15% of US children have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Journalist Alan Schwarz is sceptical about that incidence and the powerful pharmaceuticals prescribed for the condition, calling ADHD the most misdiagnosed condition in American medicine. His nimble investigation interweaves the narratives of pharmaceutical companies with those of child psychologist Keith Conners, who led ADHD's 'Manhattan Project', and young people grappling with the medical fallout. An intriguing sidelight is the misuse of ADHD drugs as performance enhancers.

The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World Julian Baggini Yale University Press (2016) 9780300208238 | ISBN: 978-0-3002-0823-8

Humanity has lost its reason, asserts philosopher Julian Baggini: many trust gut feelings and received wisdom, decrying rationality as a cold tool of desiccating logic. Baggini reveals it as anything but. Debunking myths such as the idea that reason is purely objective, he reminds us how reason actually functions in diverse arenas. Thus science, although hyper-rational and data-ruled, integrates the mess of guesswork and inspiration. And a rational stance in politics demands that we embrace complexities  in debate, difference and diversity. A thoughtful analysis for hyper-emotional times.

Einstein's Greatest Mistake: The Life of a Flawed Genius David Bodanis Little, Brown (2016) 9780544808560 9781408708095 | ISBN: 978-0-5448-0856-0

In 1915, Albert Einstein created a masterpiece: the equation at the core of his general theory of relativity. Its profound implications for many aspects of physics are assured. But, argues science writer David Bodanis, Einstein's confidence and intuitive brilliance tipped over into hubris in the quantum debate, when he found himself ranged against the likes of Niels Bohr. This is a sympathetic appraisal of Einstein's intellectual development. But however wrong the old revolutionary was about the new thinking, hanging a full biography off such a weighted title seems a little tendentious.

Something in the Blood David J. Skal Liveright (2016) 9781631490101 | ISBN: 978-1-6314-9010-1

The vampire, a cultural trope that crept bloodily along for centuries, has finally achieved ubiquity in film, television and fiction. Yet the man who embedded the archetype remains an enigma. Cultural historian David Skal reveals Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897), as a figure marked by childhood paralysis (which may have involved blood-letting) and maturation in an era of epidemics, famine and a titanic tug-of-war between science and spiritualism. Stoker's opus emerges as a psychological reading of the age  a veritable Rosetta Stone of Victorian anxieties, as Skal puts it.

Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe Ian Stewart Profile (2016) 9780465096107 9781781254318 | ISBN: 978-0-4650-9610-7
For decades, physicists have puzzled over why the Universe contains more matter than antimatter  essentially, how it is that we are here. It was expected that particles of matter and antimatter would mutually destruct. Univ. Chicago

A major step towards the answer came from an experiment in which James (Jim) Cronin and Val Fitch, along with two other colleagues, showed that an elementary particle, called a neutral kaon, decayed in an unexpected manner. For their discovery, Cronin and Fitch received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980.

Cronin, who died after a fall on 25 August, was born in Chicago in 1931. He grew up in Dallas, Texas, and attended the city's Southern Methodist University, where his father was a classics professor. In 1951, he pursued a PhD at the University of Chicago in Illinois, on the spin and parity of the nuclear states of carbon. Subsequently, he moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and later to a faculty position at Princeton University in New Jersey. In 1971, he returned to Chicago  largely because of the university's proximity to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).

In 1964, the team of four at Brookhaven found that the long-lived neutral kaon decayed unexpectedly into two pions. This observation is known as chargeparity (CP) violation, and because of it we can begin to understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe. The CP violation experiment had at its heart spark chambers  a technique that allowed the decays to be studied in unprecedented detail.

Cronin's expertise with this technique was pivotal to the design of another Brookhaven experiment, in which it was shown that the neutrino associated with muon decay was different from that associated with beta decay  and for which the discoverers were awarded the 1988 physics Nobel prize. However, Jim's modesty was such that he would never claim credit for his role in this achievement.

In 1977, the director of Fermilab appointed Cronin as head of the Colliding Beams Division. Cronin resigned after only a few months, realizing that he would never be happy with the responsibilities of academic or scientific administration. He returned to making seminal discoveries in particle physics, which included, in 1982, measuring the lifetime of a subatomic particle called the neutral pion at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

By the mid-1980s, however, a golden age of particle physics had ended. For Cronin  who liked to do things with his own hands and take a leading role  experiments being done by teams of hundreds held little appeal. So he shifted his attention elsewhere.

In 1985, with a small team, he designed and constructed an experiment to study the cosmic-ray showers expected to result from the high-energy -rays emitted by certain stellar systems. The showers are cascades of ionized particles and electromagnetic radiation that are produced when a cosmic ray enters the atmosphere. In terms of the number of detectors it involved (more than 1,000), the scale of the project was vast by conventional standards. Indeed, Cronin's leadership and vision gave new respectability to a field for which many particle physicists had little regard.

With typical thoroughness, Cronin visited several cosmic-ray institutions to discuss his plans and seek advice. One of these was Haverah Park in the United Kingdom, near the University of Leeds, where I had a professorship. Our strong friendship, helped by a mutual respect for malt whisky, grew from his Leeds visit  as did the creation of the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, which at 3,000 km2 is the largest cosmic-ray detector ever built.

Designed to detect cosmic rays of multi-joule energies, the Pierre Auger Observatory is operated by 430 scientists from 16 countries. Having the project evaluated, sourcing initial financial support and getting people from all over the world to collaborate would have been impossible without Cronin's formidable drive and status.

At the time, the United States was not a member of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which aims to promote international collaboration, including through scientific initiatives. Cronin still managed to extract US$100,000 to enable scientists from developing countries, such as Bolivia and Vietnam, to work on a design study at Fermilab. Ultimately, an evaluation of the project by a panel of experts invited by Cronin helped us to raise $50 million, an unprecedented sum for cosmic-ray work. Cronin even formed a remarkable relationship with the then-president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, whose government contributed 11 million pesos (roughly $11 million at the time of the donation) towards the project.

The Pierre Auger Observatory has greatly enhanced the profile of fundamental physics in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Vietnam. Vietnam is no longer a member, but a thriving astrophysics community has evolved there. The James Cronin School, a high school in the small town of Malargue in Argentina, which hosts the Pierre Auger Observatory, was financed by Cronin and private donors.

Neither Jim nor I (both averse to working in vast teams) had expected the Auger collaboration to become so large. But Jim thrived in his role as a leader of the project. He stimulated the ambitions of many young scientists and conducted his own analyses of the data using FORTRAN, an early programming language, and an ancient graphics package hosted on a Chicago computer.
Astronomers at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made an exciting new discovery. They've found the slowest-spinning neutron star, all thanks to its unusual bursts of X-rays. So what's so great about this new star?

The extremely dense and magnetized neutron star, also called magnetar, is found at the center of RCW 103. It is a dense cloud of dust which was left over from a supernova that lies approximately 10,700 light-years away. The star, called 1E 161348-5055 or 1E 1613 for short, is truly a unique find as it rotates a thousand times slower compared to other magnetars in existence.

"Observers had previously agreed that 1E 1613 is a neutron star, an extremely dense star created by the supernova that produced RCW 103," explained NASA officials. "However, the regular variation in the X-ray brightness of the source, with a period of about six and a half hours, presented a puzzle."

How was it discovered? Researchers from Italy's National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) first came into contact with the star after they picked up unusual bursts of X-Rays. Antonio D'Ai, the lead of the researchers, had picked up these signals through NASA's Swift telescope.

"Observations with multiple space telescopes have revealed that, while other neutron stars spin multiple times a minute, this object rotates only once about every 6.5 hours -- making it by far the slowest-spinning star in its class discovered to date," stated David Burrows, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. "The data collected by Chandra show that this object has properties of a magnetar -- a type of neutron star with extremely powerful magnetic fields trillions of times as powerful as those of the Sun that can erupt with enormous bursts of energy."

With the current findings and data, the 1E 1613 is the 30th known magnetar in existence.

Read More:

Milky Ways Blowout Bash 6 Million Years Ago Could Explain Galaxy's Missing Mass

NASA Detects Wind Nebula Around Rare Ultra-Magnetic Neutron Star
Scientists from Alberta, Canada and Shanghai, China have set new world records for quantum teleportation. Two independent teams have managed to successfully teleport photon over several kilometers.

According to Science Mag, one group from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada managed to teleport quantum particle light over 6.2 kilometers while another group from the University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, China was able to transport quantum particle for over 14.7 kilometers. Both studies were published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Quantum teleportation, as New Scientist notes, is a phenomenon that relies on the "entanglement" property where one particle could affect another particle despite distances. In quantum teleportation, the quantum states of a particle could be transferred to another without physical travel.

However, it must be pointed out that despite its name, quantum teleportation does not lead to human teleportation. Instead, this discovery is a major stride in the development of quantum internet, where users could transfer information and quantum states instead of the usual binary strings.

Physicists and engineers have currently built quantum networks, where they could send secure messages, but these networks are still partially built and in the infantry stage. This new feat in quantum teleportation technology could result to the creation of a quantum network within a city (which will be connected to a central quantum computer). Wolfgang Tittel of the University of Calgary also said that the technology could even go beyond a city, creating quantum communication networks between large cities by using quantum repeaters to increase the signal scope.

We have shown that this works across a metropolitan fibre network, over 6.2 kilometres, as the crow flies, said Tittel. You can scale the whole thing up and can go, in theory, to arbitrarily long distances.

"The two experiments can be seen as milestones on the path to a long-term goal, namely to build a fibre-based quantum internet connecting large cities, said Johannes Kofler from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics.
The planet Mars is one of the most studied and intriguing bodies in the Solar System because of the fact that water may have thrived in its ancient state, suggesting that life could have once survived on the red planet. Because of this, some of the planet's Earth-like formations have prompted conspiracy theorists to look for clues, that even today, extraterrestrial life survives on Mars.

Recent news surfaced suggesting that an "alien" snake was spotted on an image of Mars taken by NASA. Earlier this month, NASA released high-resolution images of the red planet showing rocky formations similar to that of National Parks in the U.S. However, instead of studying the rock formations, conspiracy theorists claim that they saw an image of an "alien snake" lurking between the crevices of the rock formations.

From the enhanced photo, an image of a long figure that resembles a snake descending the rocks were circled and highlighted to show people that there is indeed and "alien snake" in the photo. Conspiracy theorists say that the photo is enough evidence to prove that there is still life on Mars even today, according to a report by Tech Times. However, NASA continues to deny the allegations.

James Oberg, a former NASA employee, explains that what people perceive as "alien" in nature could only be things that are beyond man's knowledge or familiarity, but it does not necessarily mean that those were clues of extraterrestrial existence.

"Our sensory system is functioning absolutely perfectly for Earth conditions," says James Oberg, former NASA employee in an interview. "But we're still a local civilization. Moving beyond our neighborhood has been visually confusing." It can also be related to what experts called "Pareidolia" where people link what they see with familiar objects, even though what they perceive the object to be isn't really what it seems.

But why is it that every time an "alien sighting" appears on the news, it usually points to Mars? Experts think that it's because Mars is most likely to become man's second habitat so the interest is there. The existence of water in ancient Mars also drives even scientists to look for signs of life that could have existed on Mars.

Mars will always be the nearest focus of interplanetary missions, and with that, people can expect a lot of "pareidolia" references that shouts about evidence of "aliens" on Mars that no one can confirm or deny for sure, maybe until men step foot on the red planet soon.
Asteroids pose a constant threat to Earth and mankind, but these ferocious space rocks can also provide a ton of information about the origin and formation of the Solar System and the universe. This is the reason why NASA and private companies are interested in gathering more information on asteroids. NASA is planning on launching an Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in 2021, just a few years after the llaunch of asteroid-mapping mission OSIRIS-REx.

The OSIRIS-REx mission was launched to space this month to perform surface mapping of asteroid Bennu. The mission is also tasked to collect asteroid samples using its robotic arm and to bring the samples back to Earth for analysis.

Since the first asteroid mission is purely scientific in nature, NASA ARM mission will be focused on protecting the Earth from an asteroid collision. Even the White House science chief believes that the Earth is not prepared in case of an asteroid impact, implying a greater possibility that the $1.25 billion ARM project is likely to push through.

"Could we be hit by an Armageddon-sized asteroid, and the answer is 'absolutely," Dr. Laurence Garvie from the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University said in a statement. "And here's the interesting thing, or maybe scary thing I don't know which, we will be hit by an Armageddon-sized asteroid at some point in the future."

NASA's first ever robotic mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid aims to collect a large boulder from a space rock and redirect it into a more "stable" orbit around the moon. According to NASA, ARM is also directly linked to the manned mission to Mars in 2030.

"The robotic mission also will demonstrate planetary defense techniques to deflect dangerous asteroids and protect Earth if needed in the future," a NASA official said in a press release.

No one really knows when an asteroid will hit Earth, but the agency and scientists around the world are constantly thinking of ways to improve asteroid predictions to enable preparation of such an event.

This is where the new mission comes to play. ARM will protect the Earth from asteroid impact by preventing predictable collisions, potentially saving lives and the planet itself. ARM will be designed to redirect asteroids predicted to hit Earth ahead of time.

Reports say that there is a total of 15,000 objects that intersect with the Earth's orbit that may, in the future, pose a threat to the planet.

Read more:

NASA to Map Surface of an Asteroid, Collect Samples
Apple is in talks with British supercar engineer McLaren about a potential acquisition, according to a report Wednesday from the Financial Times.

FT reported that the talks are the clearest signs so far that the iPhone and Apple Watch manufacturer is eyeing a move into the automated car industry.

Its no secret that the Cupertino-based company has reportedly been working on a self-driving electric car project for some time now, according to anonymous sources who have talked to people familiar with it. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Apple is rethinking its automative strategy.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that Apple has hired hundreds of engineers, including some from

Apple has yet to comment, but McLaren released a statement to The Verge, which said the company "is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment."

The FT report indicated that Apple is eyeing a full takeover of McLaren, according to at least three people briefed on the negotiations.

McLaren is headquartered in England, is perhaps most famous for its Formula One racing cars. The McLaren marque was founded by driver and engineer Bruce McLaren in 1964.
Berkeley Police Chief Mike Meehan has resigned, and the acting police chief will be Andrew Greenwood, city officials said Wednesday.

According to a memo from Berkeley Mayor Tom Bate's office, the Berkeley City Manager has accepted Meehan's resignation. Meehan cited personal reasons for his unexpected departure and wrote in his resignation letter that "the time is now."

Meehan joined the Berkeley Police Department in 2009.

A 23-year veteran of the Seattle Police Department, Meehan also headed Violent Crimes, which includes overseeing the homicide, robbery, CSI, gang, polygraph, bias crimes and fugitive units.

However, his time in Berkeley was not without controversy.

In an internal survey, Meehan was criticized for weak leadership, insufficient staffing and lack of communication skills.

"That direct feedback tells me that I am failing some members of this organization, Meehan wrote in a recent email to the police department. That is unacceptable.

On Wednesday, some in the community wondered if a scandal of some sort had prompted Meehan's abrupt departure.

"I think its kind of bizarre that he would quit just because he doesnt get along with the officers," Diane Griffin said.

Others accused Berkeley police officers of chasing out the "nicest person" in the department.

Bates disagreed.

"It really has to do with his ability to lead the force," he said. "I think there were tensions between him and the police department, internal fractions, policies. Thank God it wasnt misuse of force or sex scandal or guns or covering up something.

"I dont think theres any scandal there."

Berkeleyside reported that morale was at an all time low inside the Berkeley Police Department. But Meehan was also praised by Bates for building excellent community relations. Berkeley police have not had an officer-involved shooting since 2012.

In 2012, Meehan made headlines when he sent an officer to a reporter's house in the middle of the night to ask for a changes in an article. His handling of themurder of Peter Cukor has also come under fire.

But Meehan isnt the first Berkeley police chief to clash with his rank-and-file and tension has been building for years, Bates said.

"Theres always some friction between management and labor," said Sgt. Chris Stines, president of the Berkeley Police Officers Association. "We dont always see eye to eye, but I dont think those things are necessarily unusual."

Stines declined to elaborate on the tension alluded to by Bates, but on a whiteboard at the union's office NBC Bay Area noticed that someone had written, Chief  needs to go.

Meanwhile, Greenwood, who will take over his new position in mid-October, is a "fantastic" choice, Stines said.
A preliminary hearing Tuesday in the case of two drifters charged with murdering a hiker in Marin County and a tourist in San Francisco opened Tuesday with chilling testimony about the October 2015 slayings.

Nineteen-year-old Lila Alligood and 24-year-old Morrison Lampley are charged in the shooting deaths of 23-year-old Audrey Carrey of Quebec and 67-year-old Steven Carter of Fairfax. A third defendant, Sean Angold, has pleaded guilty in the murder of Carter and has agreed to testify against his former companions.

On Tuesday, the court heard testimony from a Marin County sheriff's detective detailing the scene where Carter was killed and what one of the defendants confessed to a jail cell mate during the subsequent investigation.

Detective Scott Buer, on the stand at the San Rafael courthouse, described the scene on a trail in Marin County where Carter and his dog were found dead.

"The male victim was shot," he said. "There was blood all over him. There was also a dog there that had been shot."

Even more disturbing were the statements of confession Alligood made to her jail cell mate that were relayed to Buer. Alligood told the cell mate Lampley had shot Carter in order to rob him of his wallet and silver Volkswagen Jetta, according to Buer.

"The old man needed to die" is the phrase Alligood reportedly told the woman Lampley used.

NBC Bay Area

In the killing of Carrey in Golden Gate Park, Alligood reportedly said she had already taken the woman's wallet without her knowing and that the young tourist was actually thanking them for being her first friends in California. That's when Lampley jumped up and shot her in the head, Buer told the court.

Alligood initially told Buer it was Angold, 24, who pulled the trigger in both shootings. She later changed her story to say it was Lampley.

"She stated that she was protecting Lampley, that she loved him and that was the only thing she had left, and shed do anything for him," Buer told the court.

Under cross-examination, the court learned details about the cell mate who provided the information to Buer. She has been sent to prison five times. But she knew details that detectives say she could only have learned from Alligood, such as the fact that a bullet pireced Carters wallet, putting a hole through his Visa card and soaking $20 bills in his blood.

Alligood broke down in court as the detective talked about her relationship with Lampley. Alligood and Lampley face life without parole if convicted.

The preliminary hearing is expected to last into next week, with Angold due to testify Monday.
The first trailer has been released for ''Birth of the Dragon,' a film about a pivotal fight between Bruce Lee and Shaolin Master Wong Jack Man that took place in Northern California in 1965. The film was shot in various San Francisco locations.

The film stars Hong Kong actor and martial arts master Philip Ng as Bruce Lee. It began shooting in Vancouver, Canada in November 2015 under the tutelage of Corey Yuen, a martial arts choreographer who created action sequences for films such as "X-Men," "The Expendables" and "Romeo Must Die."

Were thrilled to be telling one of the great untold stories in martial arts history, especially at this unique moment when China and Western audiences are opening up to each other as never before, producer Michael London told Variety.

Lee was born in San Francisco in 1940. He passed away in 1972 in Hong Kong.

Wong Jack Man, now 75 and said to be living in the Bay Area, has not spoken often of his match with Lee, who was only 25 when they fought.

The film recently had a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A release date for the United States has not yet been announced.

View the 'Birth of a Dragon' trailer below:
A San Francisco YMCA summer camp counselor suspected of child molestation and sending sexually explicit images and videos to children was arrested in Arizona on Thursday, according to police.

Evin "Devin" Blanchard, 24, is suspected of inappropriately touching three juvenile campers during several field trips, as well as sending them explicit images and videos through social media, police said.

Police began to investigate Blanchard after the camp director at the Embarcadero YMCA reported that an adult counselor was having inappropriate contact with children, police said.

Vijay Bhaskaran said his 12- and 14-year-old kids attended summer camp where Blanchard worked for nine weeks. He's hoping they never met him.

"As I tell my kids, there are weird people out there. I will watch out for you, but you have to watch out for yourself and tell me what's going on," Bhaskaran said.

In a statement, the "Y" says safety of the kids in its programs is paramount. It does not allow staff to be alone with campers, has a no outside contact policy and does background checks.

"This individual no longer works for the organization," the YMCA said. "Were working closely with authorities to make sure whatever information they need they get."

The U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force apprehended Blanchard in Phoenix. Once extradited to San Francisco, police are expecting to ask the District Attorney's Office to charge Blanchard with five counts of child molestation, four counts of sending harmful material to a minor, production of child pornography and three counts of annoying or molesting a child.

The Marshals Service said Blanchard has an extensive criminal history that includes an arrest for weapons offenses in California.

Police ask anyone who feels they might have been victimized to call the department at (415) 558-5500.
Two large oil sheens on San Pablo Bay Wednesday morning, after a mysterious odor prompted shelter-in-place orders in Vallejo Tuesday night, appear to have come from a Phillips refinery tanker in Rodeo, authorities said.

A spokesperson for the Phillips 66 Rodeo Refinery Marine Terminal in Rodeo said a tanker berthed at the marine terminal might have released the crude oil. A light, oily sheen was discovered near the refinery around 8 a.m. Wednesday. The refinery notified the National Response Center and the U.S. Coast Guard and temporarily shut down operations.

The Rodeo refinery supplies gas and diesel throughout California at Phillips 66 gas stations.

By Wednesday night, Coast Guard officials could no longer detect the sheens on the water.

"It may have sunk, we don't know," said Coast Guard Lt. Megan Mervar. "There are a lot of unknowns. But dissipation is one possibility. If it was a lighter oil, it could've just evaporated."

Officials have not said whether the oil sheen is linked to the mysterious odor that sickened dozens of people in Vallejo on Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Coast Guard crews earlier Wednesday laid down a thousand-foot boom to contain oil surrounding the Yamuna Spirit tanker.

Scientist Ian Wren of the San Francisco Baykeeper said his environmental advocacy group is working closely with the Coast Guard.

"The community is watching, and the local environmental watchdog is kind of making sure that adequate cleanups are proceeding," Wren said. "But they are reluctant to actually prescribe blame at this point."

It's unclear what caused the spill or how much has spread, but Wren says there will be an impact.

"Yeah, fish, wildlife, sea birds, as well as marine mammals might be affected," he said. "We don't know if it's crude oil versus bunker fuel from the vessel."

The exact volume of material released is being determined and the incident remains under investigation, the refinery spokesperson said. According to the spokesperson, there have been no injuries associated with the release so far and health impacts to the community are not anticipated.

The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit searched through Environmental Protection Agency records and found the Phillips 66 refinery in Rodeo did not comply with federal standards for the disposal of solid and hazardous waste for the past three years. An inspection report from March reveals the refinery was operating in significant violation, which is the agencys most serious designation and shows the refinery poses a severe level of environmental threat.

The shelter-in-place in Vallejo was lifted around 6 a.m. Wednesday after reports of a strong smell sent multiple people to hospitals in Vallejo and Fairfield Tuesday night.

Late Tuesday night, Coast Guard Lt. Steven Dross said a sheen had been confirmed on the water in a number of mostly connected locations in and around Vallejo as well as San Pablo Bay and the Carquinez Straits.

Ferry service between Vallejo and San Francisco was delayed Wednesday morning because of the oil spill investigation in San Francisco Bay.

The Vallejo Fire Department said it received more than 500 calls reporting a strong odor in the Glen Cove and Beverly Hills Park neighborhoods in South Vallejo Tuesday night. Firefighters reportedly were able to rule out natural gas and refinery emissions as the source of the odor.

Michelle Norris sheltered in place at her Crockett home, a few hundred yards from the ship and refinery. She said at her house, strong odors are not unusual.

"Quite often, I smell strange things," Norris said. "I never know what to worry about and what's just normal."

Vallejo fire officials said local hospitals reported multiple patients as a result of the mysterious odor. Patients complaining of burning in their throats and noses arrived at Sutter Solano Medical Center in Vallejo, Kaiser Vallejo Medical Center and Northbay Medical Center in Fairfield.

Crews have been utilizing portable 4gas monitors throughout the area and have not picked up any abnormal readings.  Vallejo Firefighters Association (@VallejoFire) September 21, 2016

NBC Bay Area's Elyce Kirchner, Terry McSweeney and Rachel Witte contributed to this report.
Two toddlers drowned in their next-door neighbor's swimming pool after apparently wandering out of their home Monday. No foul play was suspected, police said.

The 2-year-old girl and 3-year-old boy were being watched by their great-grandmother when they left the house sometime Monday morning.

Family members searched for the children for an hour before calling police, Fresno Police Lt. Joe Gomez said.

The children were last seen in a room with access to a garage that had its door open.

Investigators believe the toddlers left their home through the garage and walked to the neighbor's house.

They entered the neighbor's yard through an open gate and climbed or squeezed through a 4-foot high wrought iron fence surrounding the pool, Gomez said.

"There were some bikes next to the fence they could have used to climb over it," he said. "It appears to be an extremely unfortunate tragic accident."

Their next door neighbor, Elizabeth Valle, found the kids in her pool after a police officer asked her for permission to search her backyard.

Valle told the Fresno Bee that she screamed and jumped into the pool, as did one of the officers. The boy was floating in the water, and the girl was found at the bottom.

Officers and paramedics tried to revive the children, Valle said. They were pronounced dead at a hospital.

Valle told the newspaper she found the same children unattended in her backyard about six months ago and walked them home.
Police are investigating another possible rape at the University of California at Berkeley that is the latest in a string of attacks reported recently, according to campus police.

The latest assault took place on Sept. 10 at a residence hall and was reported nine days later by the victim, who is described by police only as a 19-year-old student.

No other information on the attack was released.

"We've had a few reports (of sexual assault) over the past couple of weeks," UC Berkeley police Sgt. Sabrina Reich said. "We're looking to see if there are any possible similarities."

Since early September, there have been five reported rapes on campus, Reich said.

One occurred at a residence hall on either the night of Sept. 4 or the early morning hours of Sept. 5 and three separate attacks happened at a concert at the Greek Theatre on Sept. 10, the same night as the latest reported attack is suspected of happening.

Investigations into all of the recent attacks are still underway, Reich said, and a man has been arrested for the first one this month.

Police on Sept. 14 arrested Sardar Sikandar Wali Zia Khan, 25, on suspicion of the Sept. 5 dorm attack. Khan is suspected of raping a 19-year-old female student resident with whom he was acquainted, police said.

Anyone with information about any of the assaults is asked to call UC Berkeley police at (510) 642-0472 or (510) 642-6760.
Amid concerns about academic freedom, UC Berkeley has reinstated a student-led course on Palestine a week after administrators cancelled the class. Jewish activists had argued the 1-credit "DeCal" class promotes anti-Semitism and had a political agenda.

Administrators said the course didn't get the proper faculty approvals when they suspended the class after only one session last week.

In a letter released Monday, Carla Hesse, executive dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, wrote that the Ethnic Studies department reviewed and revised the syllabus, so she would reverse her decision and rescind her suspension of the course.

Following a meeting of the faculty committee that approves courses, the Academic Senate strongly refuted the administration's action in a statement released Tuesday.

"The administration's attempts to suspend the course reflect a disturbing lack of transparency and disregard for the fundamental principles that underlie the faculty's curricular oversight," it read.

Under the UC Regents policy on course content, the faculty has final say over academic content of courses, with the Academic Senate's Committee on Courses of Instruction deferring to experts in each individual department who alone can determine the standards of their respective fields.

The administration's action undermined the Senates authority over courses and curricula, the faculty wrote.

The changes made to the syllabus mostly rephrase statements in the first version to make them questions in the second. DeCal stands for Democratic Education at Cal.

Paul Hadweh, 22, a senior who never thought he'd find himself in the middle of an international academic controversy, said he made "minimal" changes to the syllabus. He was represented by Palestine Legal.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, the director of a non-profit that calls out anti-Semitic activity on college campuses, said the modifications were "dismissive" and demonstrated that ethnic studies faculty didn't take the dean's concerns seriously.

"It's outrageous for an academic department at a university known for high standards of excellence like Berkeley to say they don't care about whether a course is full of political proselytizing and is completely one-sided," she said.

Her group, Amcha, and dozens of other Jewish organizations wrote to the Chancellor's office to complain that the class indoctrinates students with anti-Israel bias.

Hadweh, a peace and conflict studies major who was born in Sacramento and moved to Bethlehem at age 10, said he was encouraged that many Berkeley faculty and students came to his defense but disappointed that administrators caved to outside interests.

"Just look what happened to a 1-unit, student-led course. That's why there are so few spaces to critically engage in the question of Palestine," at Berkeley, Hadweh said.

When Hadweh, faculty advisor Hatem Bazian and the Ethnic Studies chair met with Dean Hesse, Hadweh said he asked if anyone in the class actually complained.

"She said that she couldn't respond. It was clear that no one complained," he said. Instead, the 26 students enrolled in the class wrote a letter in support of his class. Hundreds of students and teachers from universities around the country signed an online petition authored by Jewish Voice for Peace.

"This course was meant for everyone. Anyone interested in the topic was welcome to enroll. At first I didn't even know if anyone would. I had convinced myself that if two people showed up, we'd have a good discussion," he said.

During the first session, he focused on writing a community agreement that would ensure that his students would feel safe and comfortable.

"Call me biased if you like, but I have the conviction that we can all live together. This is a campus of 37,000 people with almost no courses on Palestine. Instead of complaining I decided to do something about that," he said.

Since the class was reinstated on Monday, more than 30 people have contacted him asking to join the class.

The syllabus says the class aims to explore Palestinian history "through the lens of settler colonialism."

Some Jewish students hear that terminology and assume Hadweh's instruction won't consider Israels right to exist, or feel welcome to express their perspectives in class, Rossman-Benjamin said.

"It's disingenuous for people to yell and scream academic freedom," she said. "The Regents policies are there to maintain the public's confidence in the university."

Rossman-Benjamin also pointed to the Regents Policy on Course Content to argue that the class is in violation because it takes a slanted approach to a controversial topic.

"When the faculty aren't doing their job, then the administration has to step in and say, 'Wait, let's take a pause.' It's about process, she said.

Last year, a working group appointed by the Regents published a report that condemned anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and called on instructors to challenge bias and fight intolerance while protecting free speech.

Hadweh said he just wants to teach his class. Hes indignant that his attempt to foster a discussion was interpreted as propaganda.

"It's offensive to students to claim that this was indoctrination, as if students can't decide what to think themselves," he said. "I think it's shameful that the administration would so publicly throw me, one of its students, under the bus in such a public manner," he said.
In a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 69 percent of registered voters said they are concerned by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's comments and language in regard to women, immigrants and Muslims, NBC News reported.

More than half of that group said they have "major" concerns about those issues, according to NBC News.

By comparison, nearly as many  64 percent of registered voters  said they have concerns about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Thirty-three percent of those polled said that Trump's temperament concerns them the most about him; 36 percent said that the issue about Clinton that concerns them the most is her judgment when it comes to dealing with Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the Chicago Sun-Times Tuesday that he isnt considering a run for Chicago mayor or Illinois governor.

Duncan served as the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools before spending seven years in President Barack Obamas Cabinet. He now serves as a managing partner at the California-based Emerson Collective, which puts money into programs in low-income neighborhoods, promoting economic growth.

According to the report, Duncan helped launch the To&Through Campaign Tuesday. The University of Chicago Urban Education Institute program looks to give educators, non-profits, civic leaders and families the research, data and resources to help students graduate from high school and college.

Additionally, Duncan attended the launch of U of Cs Gleacher Center Tuesday morning, the Sun-Times reports. He also planned to stop by Cook County Jail, where he works with inmates to ensure they have opportunities when theyre released.

He pushed for renewed economic opportunity to combat violence, noting, We have to create jobs."

But Duncan told the Sun-Times he wasnt planning a run for mayor or governor, as has been speculated. He wouldnt be eligible for a gubernatorial run in 2018 due to residency requirements.
Vice President Joe Biden will headline a Chicago-area fundraiser for Rep. Tammy Duckworth next Wednesday alongside Sen. Dick Durbin, the Chicago Sun-Times Lynn Sweet reports.

Duckworth is currently locked in one of the nations hotly-contested Senate races against incumbent Republican Mark Kirk. The fundraiser is set to take place at the North Side home of Fred Eychaner, a Chicago executive who is considered one of the nations biggest Democratic donors.

According to Sweet's report, contributions for the event range from $12,500, which includes a photo reception and dinner, to $36,100, which includes a VIP reception.

The money raised will go to the Illinois Victory 2016 fund. That joint committee benefits the Tammy for Illinois committee, which is Duckworths main campaign war chest, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
A recent Loras College Poll found that Republican presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by 13 points in Illinois.

Loras College surveyed 600 likely Illinois voters in live-caller phone interviews between Sept. 13-16. The poll includes a +/-4 margin of error and results were calculated at a 95 percent confidence interval.

According to the poll, 43 percent of respondents backed Clinton, while 30 percent supported Trump. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson received 8 percent of the vote and Green Party candidate Jill Stein garnered 3 percent. 14 percent of those polled were unsure who they would vote for in November.

While the last couple of weeks have been rocky ones for Hillary Clinton, and she has seen her lead evaporate in several swing states, right now Illinois remains firmly in her column, Christopher Budzisz, Ph.D., associate professor of politics and director of the Loras College Poll, said in a statement. Unlike some of its neighboring states, Illinois has been dependably voting for the Demarcating nominee for president since 1992.

While Democrats have been successful at the top of the ticket in presidential elections, Republicans have seen success statewide in Gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections, as evidenced by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Senator Kirk, Budzisz added.

Additionally, Clinton received a net favorability rating of -8, while Trump received a -40. The net favorability rating was found by subtracting the candidates percentage unfavorable opinion from their percentage favorable opinion. Only 24 percent of voters surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of both Clinton and Trump.

According to the poll, 46 percent of Trump supporters said they intend to vote for the billionaire out of opposition to Clinton, while 44 percent said they were voting in support of Trump. 54 percent of Clinton voters indicated they were voting for Clinton, not against Trump.

Many voters are thinking of this election in almost defensive terms  of which outcome they most want to avoid, Budzisz said. Fear and anxiety can be great motivators in electoral politics, and given the unfavorable ratings of both candidates this year, voting against someone may be an easier sell to voters than voting for someone. It remains to be seen if such appeals to fear and anxiety will impact voter turnout.

The poll also found that 53 percent of likely voters think Clinton will be elected in November, while 26 percent think Trump will win.

In addition, 35 percent of voters said the country is on the right track, while 51 percent said its headed in the wrong direction. More specifically, 52 percent of Democrats said they believe the country is on the right track, comparted to 11 percent of Republicans. 79 percent of GOP voters said they believe the country in headed in the wrong direction, compared to 33 percent of Democrats.

The survey also found that most Illinoisans are dissatisfied with the presidential choices. 22 percent of respondents said they were very dissatisfied, while 37 percent said they were somewhat dissatisfied. Compare that to the 13 percent who said they were very satisfied and the 23 percent who said they were somewhat satisfied. 5 percent had no opinion.
According to a recent survey conducted by Loras College, Rep. Tammy Duckworth leads Sen. Mark Kirk by 5 points in one of the nations most hotly-contested Senate races.

According to the poll, which was conducted between Sept. 13-16, 41 percent of the 600 likely voters interviewed by phone preferred Duckworth, while 36 percent preferred Kirk. 22 percent of those polled were unsure.

Duckworth also received a net favorability rating of +12, while Kirk received a rating of +4. The net favorability rating was found by subtracting the candidates percentage unfavorable opinion from their percentage favorable opinion. Additionally, 31 percent of likely voters indicated they had no opinion of Kirk, while 22 percent said they had no opinion of Duckworth.

The numbers undecided and those who have yet to form an opinion of Kirk, coupled with his net favorable rating, mean this race is not over," Christopher Budzisz, Ph.D., associate professor of politics and director of the Loras College Poll, said in a statement. Add in the general volatility of this years campaign season, and the next several weeks could be interesting in Illinois.

That said, Duckworth holds some real advantages  including that this is a presidential election year and that tends to help Democrats in a state such as Illinois, Budzisz added.

The poll also found that Kirk has more crossover appeal than Duckworth. 22 percent of self-identified Democratic voters said they plan to vote for Kirk, while 13 percent of Republicans said they were supporting Duckworth.

On top of that, 41 percent of independents supported Duckworth, while 29 percent backed Kirk. Additionally, 20 percent of Trump supporters remained undecided about the race, compared to 12 percent of Clinton supporters.

The poll numbers are also regionally split across the state. Duckworth garnered more support in Chicago, 54 percent to 21 percent, while Kirk received more support downstate, 41 percent to 32 percent. The Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area was more evenly split, with 41 percent of respondents backing Duckworth and 39 percent supporting Kirk.

Respondents were also asked about the direction Illinois is moving. 14 percent said it was on the right track, while an overwhelming 75 percent said it was moving in the wrong direction. 11 percent were unsure.

The polls margin of error is +/- 4 percent and results were calculated at a 95 percent confidence interval.
Race to Watch is a twice-weekly Ward Room column dedicated to helping voters familiarize themselves with candidates in the lead-up to the Nov. 8 general election. This edition's focus in Illinois' 9th Congressional District.

In the race for Rep. Jan Schakowskys 9th congressional district House seat, the incumbent Democrat is facing off against Republican newcomer Joan McCarthy Lasonde.

Schakowsky has served as the U.S. Representative for Illinois 9th congressional district since 1999. Prior to that, she served in the Illinois General Assembly for eight years.

The congresswoman is a pro-choice candidate who supports LGBTQ rights and comprehensive immigration reform. As a Jewish lawmaker, she has close personal ties to the State of Israel. She has pushed to ensure the country's security and has worked toward a peaceful relationship with Palestine.

Schakowsky recently introduced the Medicare Fair Drug Pricing Act that would require transparency and accountability in prescription drug prices and require negotiation for the price of certain drugs covered by Medicare Part D. The bill would lower the cost of many prescription drugs and open up lifesaving treatment to more Americans.

Additionally, Schakowsky supports raising wages, promoting union and collective bargaining rights and, as co-chair of the Democratic Seniors Task Force, expanding Social Security benefits to improve retirement security. She served on President Barack Obamas National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, offering her own proposal to balance the budget without cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

The Democrat also looks to expand access to reproductive health services, from birth control to prenatal care to abortion services. She also supports fetal tissue research.

Schakowsky and Lasonde hold differing positions on a variety of issues. According to her campaign site, Lasonde considers medical leave, paid time off, workers compensation, unemployment insurance and the Americans with Disabilities Act to be burdens placed on employers. Schakowsky sharply disagrees.

The congresswoman considers those programs vital to working families.

I believe that someone who gets hurt on the job still needs to feed their family, I believe that someone with a disability should have the opportunity to live up to their fullest potential, and I believe that the out-of-touch, anti-worker policies that my opponent supports would do real harm to families making less than $150,000 per year, Schakowsky said in a statement.

The economic pressures that we face are real, but as a nation we cannot and will not create economic growth and shared prosperity by eliminating the Americans with Disabilities Act, medical leave, paid vacation and unemployment benefits, the congresswoman added. Working families have enough hardships to handle without gutting basic rights at work."

Lasonde is a socially moderate, pro-choice newcomer with no legislative background. She supports limited government, free markets, vigorous competition and efficient regulation where its needed. She has vowed to restore the country as an economic powerhouse and plans to make economic growth a top priority, something she claims her opponent pays no attention to.

Economic growth is essential to paying for the services we need and balancing the budget, Lasonde said in a statement. Restoring growth levels like weve traditionally had must be a priority."

The Republican plans to address income and wealth inequality by creating job opportunities, improving schools and breaking the cycle of dependence. Lasonde claims income and wealth gaps will not be addressed through higher taxes and additional government programs.

The candidate, who is the daughter of two Chicago Public Schools teachers, supports school choice through a voucher system. She also supports term limits and has promised to limit herself to eight years in the House if shes elected.

On immigration Lasonde supports comprehensive reform and a path to normalization for those already in the country. She is also a proponent of increased border security.

Additionally, Lasonde says she is a champion of bipartisanship in Washington.

I want to end obstructionism in Congress, Lasonde said. Ill work across aisle and cross my own party if I have to."

She has also vowed to fight Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on issues she deems wrong, like deporting millions of illegal aliens or broadening laws to allow individuals to sue journalists.

The Republican also looks to restore the United States relationship with Israel, which she feels has been adversely affected by the Iran nuclear deal and the 2015 boycott of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus speech to congress. Schakowsky participated in the boycott.

Lasonde also opposes a plan to bring at least 100,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S., something Schakowsky has signed on to.

With our own people living under bridges, we should not be increasing the Syrian refugee quota by tenfold, as my opponent wasnt, Lasonde said. The welfare and safety of Americans must come first."

If elected, she has vowed to work for federal support for mass transportation and supports increasing the minimum wage to $9 or $10. Schakowsky has pushed for an increase to $15.

The 9th District deserves a new congresswoman who reflects the values of its people: socially moderate and fiscally responsible, Lasonde said. Right now  we dont have one."

Lasonde is a founding member of the Policy Circle, a women-run nonprofit focused on educating everyday Americans on state and federal policy. She also serves as a member of the board of directors of the Illinois State Crime Commission and was an officer at the New Trier Republican Organization.
Ward Room's Campaign Round-Up is a weekly column dedicated to keeping you in the know about the upcoming 2016 elections. Check the Ward Room blog for continued coverage every Wednesday.

10th Congressional District Race

Brad Schneider, the Democratic candidate battling for incumbent Rep. Bob Dolds 10th congressional district House seat, released a new television ad featuring photos of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren that promises solidarity with the Democrats and their policies.

Brad Schneider and the Democrats are working to get big money out of politics so we can keep Americas promise to our seniors, protect our kids from gun violence, preserve a womans right to choose and most importantly reject the politics of hate and fear, the ads narrator says. Embrace whats best in us. Support Brad Schneider and the Democrats.

Schneider was endorsed by Biden in September, but hasnt received endorsements from Obama or Warren. However, a representative for his campaign said the former congressman stands with them and their policies. The ad began airing on TV this Monday and will also receive a digital ad buy.

Last week, a prominent gay rights advocacy group criticized Schneider for attacking Dold in a separate television ad.

The ads narrator claims Dold and the Republicans even said employees could be fired, just for being gay. The ad features photos of Dold standing with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan.

The Human Rights Campaign, a prominent LGBTQ advocacy group, defended Dold, the only House Republican to score an endorsement from the group. The group has also endorsed Republican Sen. Mark Kirk.

Bob Dold has repeatedly voted in favor of federal non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, David Stacy, the groups government affairs director, said in a statement. He stepped forward to become the first House Republican to co-sponsor the Equality Act to ensure those protections are in place nationwide. And he has made clear through his votes and support for marriage equality that he believes in a world where everyone, including LGBTQ people, can live free from fear of discrimination.

Thats why Bob Dold earned the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, Stacy added.

Schneiders campaign responded Friday, faulting Dold for taking part in continuous political gamesmanship and doublespeak.

The question isnt where Congressman Dold is today on this and other issues, Schneider spokesman Steven Kirsch said in a statement. Its where will he be tomorrow? Brad is proud to be a consistent supporter of LGBT rights and his support is rooted in conviction, not political convenience.

In the ad, Schneider also attacked Dold and Republicans for cutting "environmental protections while protecting subsidies for big oil."

Nevertheless, the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, a liberal political advocacy organization that assists political candidates who it believes support a pro-environment agenda, said it will not be endorsing either candidate in the race, despite supporting their positions.

We think the people of Illinois 10th congressional district are fortunate to have two candidates  Rep. Bob Dold and former Rep. Brad Schneider  who understand the significant threats climate change poses, see the opportunity in solving this challenge, and who support the single biggest step our country has ever taken to reduce the solution fueling climate change, the EPAs Clean Power Plan, John Reuter, the groups director of local and bipartisan strategies, said in a statement.

Dold won the 10th district House seat in 2010, replacing Kirk. The congressman lost his seat to Schneider in 2012, but ultimately won a rematch in 2014.

U.S. Senate Race

According to a recent report by FiveThirtyEight, Rep. Tammy Duckworth has a 77 percent chance of taking Sen. Kirks seat in November. Kirk is considered one of the nations most vulnerable Republican senators up for re-election.

The prediction, which considers three separate polls, is forecasted using polling average, adjusted polling average, polls-based vote share and projected vote share on Election Day. The sites formula gave Duckworth a 76.8 percent chance of winning and gave the Republican incumbent a 23.2 percent chance.

The most recent poll used in the sites formula was released this week. The Loras College survey shows Duckworth leading Kirk by 5 points.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEights editor-in-chief, successfully predicted 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 presidential election.

Duckworth also scored an endorsement from the Illinois Education Associations political arm Wednesday. The union represents most Illinois teachers outside of Chicago.

Tammy Duckworth is a true champion of education who understands that educators deserve respect for the work they do, every day, to support students, IEA President Cinda Klickna said in a statement.

Notable Contributions

As of Saturday, $20,071,600 of the $20,927,496 the Illinois Republican Party has raised this election cycle has come from Gov. Bruce Rauner, his committee or his wife, according to Illinois Election Data.

The House Republican Organization reported a $124,700 to state Rep. Michael McAuliffe, the only Republican representing parts of Chicago. The House GOP fund has sunk over $1.2 million into his re-election bid, according to the Chicago Tribune. McAuliffe has been spending money on expensive broadcast TV ads.

McAuliffes opponent, Merry Marwig, reported $70,000 in contributions over the past week. That includes $28,500 from a construction and laborers union fund.

House Speaker Mike Madigan Democratic Party of Illinois fund has received sizable contributions from some prominent unions over the past week. On Saturday, the DPI reported nearly $300,000 in contributions, which included a maximum $53,900 contribution from a construction and laborers union fund. On Tuesday, the fund reported nearly $206,000 in contributions, including a $53,900 maximum donation from the SEIU Healthcare fund.
Dozens of Illinois museums will offer free admission Saturday as part of Smithsonian magazine's annual Museum Day Live! event.

For the 12th year, Smithsonians Museum Day Live! aims to celebrate museums and cultural institutions across the nation by providing free entry to anyone with who downloads a ticket.

After selecting a participating institution, guests can download a ticket on the Smithsonians event page here.

Below are the Illinois museums that will be offering free entry by participating in the event:

AURORA, IL

Aurora Regional Fire Museum

SciTech Hands on Museum

BARRINGTON, IL

Barrington History Museum

CHAMPAIGN, IL

William M. Staerkel Planetarium

CHICAGO, IL

Adler Planetarium Smithsonian Affiliate Museums

Chicago History Museum

Clarke House Museum Free everyday

DuSable Museum of African American History Smithsonian Affiliate Museums

Glessner House Museum

International Museum of Surgical Science

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

Loyola University Museum of Art

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

National Hellenic Museum

Smart Museum of Art Free everyday

The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

DANVILLE, IL

Vermilion County War Museum

GALENA, IL

Galena & U.S. Grant Museum

GENEVA, IL

Geneva History Museum

GLEN ELLYN, IL

Stacy's Tavern Museum

Willowbrook Wildlife Center

GREAT LAKES, IL

Great Lakes Naval Museum (Free everyday)

LINCOLN, IL

Lincoln Heritage Museum

LISLE, IL

The Morton Arboretum

The Museums at Lisle Station Park (Free everyday)

MAHOMET, IL

Museum of the Grand Prairie Free everyday

OAK BROOK, IL

Mayslake Peabody Estate

SKOKIE, IL

Illinois Holocaust & Education Center

SPRINGFIELD, IL

Illinois State Museum

URBANA, IL

Spurlock Museum (Free everyday)
The priest who once led a prominent vocational program for Latino men interested in the priesthood has been arrested on child pornography charges, NBC 5 has learned.

Father Octavio Munoz, of Casa Jesus, was ordered held on $50,000 bond Wednesday after being charged with one felony count of child pornography, according to the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and Chicago police.

It has taken more than a year to finalize the charges against 40-year-old Munoz, who was removed from ministry in August of 2015. At that time he was pastor of St. Pancratius Church in Brighton Park, only serving there for a few months. Before that assignment, for 7 years Munoz was the rector of Casa Jesus, an Archdiocese program for young Hispanic men considering the priesthood. Munoz, who was currently living in Maryland, was brought back to Chicago to face charges.

Over the years, Munoz traveled to Latin America at the Archdioceses expense to invite young men to apply to Casa Jesus. But in 2015, he was transferred and sent to rehab, according to multiple sources, after pornography was allegedly discovered on his computer.

The Cook County State's Attorney's office says an archdiocese employee initially discovered the child pornography on Munoz's computer. Archdiocese officials contacted a private investigative firm first -- which conducted an internal investigation -- nearly two weeks before the Archdiocese informed local law enforcement.

As NBC 5 first reported this week, Archbishop Blase Cupich quietly suspended the Casa Jesus program in April, but did not disclose that to the public. NBC 5 and Telemundo Chicago also revealed in November 2015 that three seminarians were removed from the program after allegations they attended a gay bar while studying in Jerusalem.

Two other priests tied to the program were also removed from the Archdiocese after questions over sexual misconduct.

Father Marco Mercado, the director of Our Lady of Guadalupe in DesPlaines, was removed after allegations of sexual misconduct and Fr. Clovis Vilchez Parra, an assistant pastor in Arlington Heights, is facing child pornography charges in Cook County after being arrested in February 2015.

Munoz was in police custody Wednesday and unable to respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.

If convicted, he could receive probation or up to seven years in prison.
A vigil was held for a 15-year-old found shot to death and burned in a trash can on Chicagos West Side.

Days after her son Demetritus Griffin was found killed in an alley, Polyneisa Sykes offered a desperate please.

They killed my baby out here in this alley, she said. I need somebodyyou know somethingplease come forward.

Family and friends of the teen gathered Tuesday night near the alley where his body was found in the South Austin neighborhood.

Griffin had recently started high school at Steinmetz College Prep. On Friday he never came home.

His body was found in a burning trashcan in the 500 block of Cortez Street. Police have not offered a motive but believe whoever started the fire may have burns on their hands. They are asking for anyone with information to come forward.

Theres nothing a 15-year-old can do to anybody for him to deserve what you guys did to him, said crisis responder Dawn Valenti.

Ald. Emma Mitts, 37th, lamented the violence in the city.

This is happening too many times in our neighborhood, Mitts said.

She believes Griffins death was meant to send a message that she and others say is not welcome in their community.

This is no accidentthis is intent, she said. And as the alderman I will be working to make sure this family gets some justice.
Police say a man who was kicked out of a wedding reception in Madison, Wisconsin punched a bridesmaid, the groom's father and others as he was leaving.

Jordan D. Killerlain, 20, was arrested on possible charges of battery and disorderly conduct.

Officers responded to Madison Turners Hall Saturday night and found a chaotic scene, according to authorities. Police say the man was arguing with the groom before he was asked to leave.

Another man also reported being hit, according to NBC 5 affiliate TMJ4, as well as the brides stepmother, who told authorities she received a blow to the arm.

Guests attending the reception held the man until police arrived. The State Journal reports.

Officials say no one was seriously hurt.
An airstrike in northern Syria killed four medics responding to an earlier bombing raid, a relief group said Wednesday, as the U.N. announced it would resume aid deliveries suspended after an attack on a convoy two days ago that killed 20 people.

The escalation of violence against humanitarian workers has all but destroyed a cease-fire that took effect on Sept. 12, and has stoked tensions between the truce's architects, the U.S. and Russia, which have traded blame for running it into the ground.

The U.N said convoys to priority areas would be resumed, with deliveries planned as early as Thursday. "Our obligation to civilians on all sides is to go where and when we can with relief," said Jan Egeland, a senior U.N. humanitarian official focused on Syria. "We hope to resume convoys tomorrow and Friday, but still work on security guarantees."

But air raids continued in other parts of Syria, with activists reporting at least 23 civilians killed in the besieged parts of Aleppo city and the nearby rebel-held Idlib province.

The attack that killed the medics took place shortly after they arrived at the scene of an airstrike in the rebel-held town of Khan Touman on Tuesday. As the medics deployed, planes circled around and struck the area again, Dr. Oubaida Al Moufti, vice president of the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, said. Al-Moufti initially said that five medics were killed. The group later said two nurses and two ambulance drivers were killed, while a third nurse remains in critical condition.

Syrian government forces have been accused of carrying out "double tap" attacks throughout the five-and-a-half-year war, placing paramedics and rescue workers in peril.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nine militants, some of them belonging to the Fatah al-Sham Front, an al-Qaida-linked group previously known as the Nusra Front, were also killed in the "double tap" attack.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike. Aircraft from Syria, Russia and the U.S.-led coalition are targeting the Fatah al-Sham Front, which along with the Islamic State group was excluded from the cease-fire.

The airstrike on a Syrian Arab Red Crescent convoy Monday night prompted international condemnation over attacks targeting humanitarian facilities and workers. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the convoy strike as a "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate attack." The convoy was carrying U.N. aid.

The U.S. initially said it believed Russian or Syrian government jets were behind the attack on the aid convoy. But a senior U.S. official said Wednesday that Washington has determined with a very high degree of confidence that the attack was carried out by a Russian piloted aircraft.

Moscow denied that Russian or Syrian aircraft were behind the attack, saying there was a fire in the cargo. Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said a U.S. Predator drone was in the area of the convoy attack when it happened.

In New York on Tuesday, Russian and U.S. diplomats insisted that the cease-fire, which went into effect nine days ago, was not dead, despite soaring violence. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart Sergey Lavrov exchanged blame in a public session on Syria at the U.N. Security Council.

The Syrian military said the truce expired Monday night, shortly before presumed Russian or Syrian government jets launched a sustained aerial attack on Aleppo's opposition-held neighborhoods.

The cease-fire was intended in part to allow humanitarian convoys to reach besieged and hard-to-reach areas throughout Syria. The U.N. estimates that some 6 million Syrians live in such areas.

On Wednesday, Syrian opposition activists said suspected government airstrikes in the northern city of Aleppo and the rebel-held Idlib province killed 23 civilians, including at least five children.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, said at least 11 civilians, including three children and three women, were killed Wednesday during air raids on several rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo.

Ibrahim Alhaj, a member of the volunteer first responders known as the Syria Civil Defense, said 24 people were killed in the Aleppo strikes.

In nearby Idlib, the Observatory said 12 civilians, including two children, were killed in at least eight air raids.

Elsewhere in Syria, airstrikes on the opposition-run town of Talbiseh, outside of the central city of Homs, killed two civilians and wounded tens of others, according to the activist-run Talbiseh Media Center.

The town is besieged by government forces. The Observatory said government jets subjected the town to heavy bombardment Wednesday morning.

State TV meanwhile said a Syrian warplane crashed after carrying out a combat mission against Islamic State militants northwest of the capital, Damascus. The pilot was rescued, according to an unnamed military official quoted on state TV.

The IS-affiliated news agency Aamaq said the group downed the plane in the eastern Qalamoun mountains after the aircraft carried out four raids. IS shot down a government aircraft on Sunday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province.
A Connecticut man who spent 48 years on the lam after escaping from a work camp in Georgia will be allowed to stay in the state, the fugitive's attorney said.

Robert Stackowitz, 71, was arrested at his home in rural Sherman, after officials processing his Social Security application discovered a warrant for his arrest.

Stackowitz's lawyer, Norman Pattis said Gergia officials will let the fugitive stay in Connecticut and they are now waiting for the state to agree on supervising his parole.

Imprisoned on a robbery conviction, he escaped in 1968 from a prison work camp in Carrolton, Georgia.

His attorney told the Associated Press his client is in poor health.

Pattis provided previously undisclosed details of Stackowitz's life before the robbery and his time on the lam, including stints as a high school auto shop teacher, Ford dealership mechanic and boat repairman.

Pattis gave the following account:

Stackowitz grew up in Bridgeport and did modeling work as a child. He later got married and had a daughter. He divorced at age 22, which broke his heart and prompted him to hit the road traveling for a while.

Stackowitz ended up in Georgia in 1966, where he met two other men who asked him to be the getaway driver for a home burglary in Henry County, Pattis said, but the homeowner was there, and the burglary turned into a home invasion robbery. Pattis said no one was injured.

All three men were arrested and sentenced to prison.

While in prison, officials learned of Stackowitz's mechanic skills and allowed him to tune up the warden's car and work on school buses at a facility next to the prison camp, Pattis said. It was at the bus facility where he escaped from custody.

Stackowitz, apparently with enough cash to buy a plane ticket, went straight to an airport and flew back to Connecticut and went on to teach automotive class at Henry Abbott Technical High School in Danbury and worked at a few Ford dealerships, Pattis said.

He eventually settled in Sherman, a small town in western Connecticut along the New York border where he repaired boats at his home. In Sherman, he went by the alias Bob Gordon, but some people also knew him as Bob Stackowitz, Pattis said.

Stackowitz never remarried, but lived for several years with a woman who later died of cancer, Pattis said.

"This is a great guy who made horrible mistakes as a young man," Pattis said. "He would freely admit that what he did was wrong. My hope is that Georgia officials will be inspired by a realistic view of justice."
A New Britain man accused of murdering his girlfriend in her apartment in January 2014 pleaded guilty to murder under the Alford doctrine Wednesday.

Darren Davis pleaded guilty under the Alford doctrine before Judge Joan K Alexander in New Britain Superior Court Wednesday. A plea under the Alford doctrine means the defendant does not agree with some of the facts the state alleges.

Davis was arrested in March 2014 and charged in the stabbing death of 49-year-old Veronica Skinzera, his girlfriend. Skinzera was found dead on Jan. 27, 2014 in an apartment she shared with Davis at 85 Spring Street in New Britain.

Police said DNA testing led them to Davis. Investigators found three kitchen knives in a nearby dumpster, wrapped in towels and a shirt. Davis' DNA was found on the wrapping materials and the handle of a steak knife, authorities said.

Alexander accepted the plea and sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 30. The state will recommend 25 years in prison.
Some of the worries from civil rights groups when it comes to the use of surveillance video is possible abuse.

They want to see mandates for what they describe as basics like when and how the cameras can be used, and how long a department can store footage for.

"The biggest thing we feel is that the technology has outpaced regulation said David McGuire, the interim Executive Director of the Connecticut ACLU. A lot of cities and towns who use closed circuit television don't have safeguards against abuse of that technology."

Hartford has kept pace with the most recent trends better than any city or town in the state. The citys Real Time Crime Center monitors cameras placed all over the city that can pan and zoom, and in some cases they can automatically track individuals who are moving through their view.

The city uses the technology with neighboring cities and towns to assist with investigations.

In the last ten years the technology has exploded and they're all around the city, said Deputy Chief Brian Foley, who helps to oversee the Real Time Crime Center. "Some of them are able to move and control on their own and some of those that we have move and control will actually track movement on their own.

McGuire with the ACLU supports advances in law enforcement, but said policies have to be adjusted to ensure that such technology gets used in the right way.

McGuire also said there is little supporting evidence that the more cameras that are out there, the more they deter crime.

"A lot of these crimes are crimes of opportunity where they're not going to think there's a camera here, I ought not to do that. That is a myth that towns often use to justify these cameras and expanding them."

Foley with the City of Hartford said they try their best to train officers and staff as much as possible, to ensure proper use.

"We're not here to track people. We're only using this for when there's a major incident, wen something major happens and there's an emergency. We just don't have the time, resources or money to be watching people in that regard where the ACLU is going to be upset."
A Norwich man is accused of beating and sexually assaulting a teenager, police said.

On Monday night, Norwich Police arrested Edward J. Simpson, 34, after an extensive sexual assault investigation conducted by detectives.

The 19-year-old victim told police she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a man on West Thames Street. The suspect was identified as Simpson.

Simpson was charged for first-degree kidnapping, first-degree criminal attempt at sexual assault, third-degree sexual assault and third-degree assault.
A woman was run over by a car and another pinned between two vehicles in a three-car accident in Meriden Tuesday night.

Meriden police said around 9:36 p.m. A Honda Odyssey and a Chevy Impala were involved in a minor accident in the area of 474 Chamberlain Highway. The driver of the Chevy, identified as Cynthia Santiago of Meriden, got out of her car to check the damage. A passenger in the Honda, identified as Feizi Wang, also exited her vehicle.

Police said it was then that a Nissan Altima rear-ended the Chevy. The force of impact caused the Chevy to run over Wang, who was sitting on the curb, and pinned Santiago between the two vehicles.

Wang was airlifted to Hartford Hospital by LifeStar. Santiago was also transported to Hartford Hospital. Police said both women are listed in critical but stable condition.

The driver of the Nissan, identified as Tyrrell McFadden, and the driver of the Honda, identified as Dao Zhangming, were not transported.

No charges have been filed.

Meriden police are investigating the crash. Any witnesses are asked to contact Officer Christian Rodriguez at (203) 630-6299 or Lt. Thomas Cossette at (203) 630-6256.
The only step left to ensure that Sikorsky remains in Connecticut through 2032 is approval from both the Connecticut General Assembly and the Teamsters Union, which represents thousands of the company's employees.

Sikorsky did not release details of what union members would vote on and Gov. Dannel Malloy said lawmakers don't have much wiggle room when it comes to changing the deal his administration struck with the helicopter maker.

"The agreement that weve reached with Sikorsky assumes that the agreement weve reached with Sikorsky will be approved," he said during a news conference at Sikorsky's world headquarters in Stratford on Wednesday.

The deal ensures that Sikorsky will build the CH53 King Stallion Helicopter in Stratford. The Navy has already submitted orders for the Marines to use the helicopters.

CEO Dan Schultz said the commitment from Sikorsky is meant to show it values Connecticut as a destination, but did concede that it was not necessarily the most ideal destination from a dollars and cents perspective.

"Connecticut was not the cheapest state when we went through (our search process)," he said.

Schultz said the company started searching for a location for a new headquarters in November 2015, before Lockheed Martin purchased Sikorsky from United Technologies.

The $220 million incentive package the state agreed to with Sikorsky will be paid out over the life of the agreement. In return, Sikorsky will commit to $1 billion in new capital expenditures to upgrade its facility, maintain $11 billion in payroll and commit $6 billion to suppliers that are located in Connecticut.

Sen. Len Fasano, the minority leader in the Connecticut Senate, who has been very critical of Malloy and the state's business climate, said he thinks the agreement with Sikorsky is important and worth completing, despite the state's issues.

"It is too expensive to do business in this state and if it wasnt as expensive we wouldnt have to make these deals. That being said, we are where we are and were at a unique period in time where they have an accelerated schedule to build these helicopters so we have to react to the moment," he said.

Malloy described the commitment from the state as, "an investment."

Fred Carstensen, an economist at UConn who helped the governor's administration craft its deal with United Technologies to stay in Connecticut, said the deal is a very good one for taxpayers.

"I think its an extremely good deal. Its a 15-year keep them anchored in CT. That should generate well over $10 billion in economic activity over the 15 years, probably a good deal more than that, he said.

The state still has work to do when it comes to creating an environment where more companies can use tax credits and grow without specific assistance from the state of Connecticut, Carstensen said.

These are really good deals but I would like to see more of a commitment to a general policy that says anybody who is sitting on these tax credits," Carstensen said.

The Sikorsky plant is scheduled to be built by 2019 and the first delivery is expected by 2020.
New Haven police arrested a man on gun charges after an off-duty New Haven police officer reported hearing gunshots.

Anthony Martinez, 20, of West Haven was charged with criminal possession of a pistol and carrying a pistol without a permit.

Officers responded to the area of 353 Sherman Avenue just before 3:30 p.m. Saturday after Officer Chad Curry, who was off duty at the time, called in a report of gunshots. Curry said he got out of his car to investigate and a man in a window told him hed seen someone shooting from a yard, police said.

When Curry entered the yard he was approached by a suspect, later identified as Martinez, with a gun in his hand. Martinez demanded to know what Curry was doing. Curry claimed he was looking for his lost dog and left the yard to call police.

Officers Elvin Rivera and Joshua Smereczynsky responded. PWhen they took Martinez into custody they found two guns, a Rohm R638 .38 caliber revolver and an ERA Armentina 20 gauge shotgun, police said. Martinez did not have proper permits for the firearms. He also had an outstanding warrant for drug charges out of West Haven.
A trip to the bathroom early Tuesday morning likely saved a Delaware man's life when a tractor-trailer crashed into his home.

"That's where I was sittin' this morning," homeowner Bob Iwanowski told NBC10's Tim Furlong, pointing to the toilet in his New Castle home.

Iwanowski would normally have been outside smoking a cigarette at that time of morning, he said  but nature called.

A Canada Dry tractor-trailer crashed into a New Castle, Delaware residents home Tuesday morning. NBC10s Tim Furlong has more.

He was in the bathroom when suddenly the entire house shook.

"The house went this way, this way, this way," Iwanowski told NBC10, swaying his body side to side.

It turned out the tractor-trailer had left the nearby Canada Dry plant shortly before the crash. Police said the driver told them he struck a parked car and lost control of the big rig on Iwanowski's block of Moores Lane near East 14th Street, then careened into the man's home. The home sustained serious damage, but Iwanowski wasn't injured.

"I came outside, there's the driver standing in my driveway, and I just laid into him," Iwanowski said.

The driver went to a hospital to be treated for minor injuries and was expected to be OK.

Other neighbors on the block said tractor-trailers zooming through their neighborhood are a common problem.

Authorities at the Canada Dry plant haven't returned a request for comment on the incident.
A Tarrant County resident has been diagnosed with the Zika virus after traveling to Miami, health officials say Wednesday.

This is the first such case in the county  and the second in Texas  involving a person diagnosed with Zika after traveling to an affected area of Florida.

No other information was released, in order to protect the identity of the person involved.

The Tarrant County Public Health Department said the state health department tested and confirmed the sample for Zika.

There have been 22 reported cases of Zika in Tarrant County to date, including 21 cases involving travel to Zika-affected areas outside of the United States.

Still, no known Zika cases have been transmitted locally by mosquitoes, local health officials confirm -- all local cases have been imported with the exception of one case in Dallas County that is believed to have been spread by sexual contact.

Zika virus is spread to people primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito, a known aggressive daytime biter. Common symptoms of Zika virus include fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis (red eyes). The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting several days to a week, though there can be profound impact to a developing fetus should the mother contract the virus.

There is no medication to treat Zika virus and there is no vaccine; the best prevention is to avoid mosquitoes and sexual contact with infected people. The recommendations for avoiding the Zika virus are the same for avoiding West Nile virus.

TCPH's Zika Hotline at 817-248-6299 is available to help answer any questions residents may have about this disease. For more information on Zika virus and for other useful tips, click here.

How to Protect Yourself From Mosquito Bites

Dress in long sleeves, pants when outside: For extra protection, spray thin clothing with repellent.

in long sleeves, pants when outside: For extra protection, spray thin clothing with repellent. DEET : Make sure this ingredient is in your insect repellent.

: Make sure this ingredient is in your insect repellent. Drain standing water in your yard and neighborhood: Mosquitoes can develop in any water stagnant for more than three days.

It has been recommended in the past that to avoid mosquito bites you should avoid being outdoors during Dusk and Dawn (the 4 Ds). While this is true for mosquitoes that commonly carry the West Nile virus, other types of mosquitoes that are more likely to carry Zika, dengue and chikungunya are active during the day. When outdoors, no matter what time of day, adjust your dress accordingly and wear insect repellent containing DEET, picaridin or oil of lemon eucalyptus as your first line of defense against insect bites.
A six-alarm fire at a hotel in North Dallas Tuesday evening was sparked by an accidental electrical short, investigators said.

More than 120 Dallas firefighters were dispatched to The Grand Hotel, just off Interstate 635 near the Coit Road exit and U.S. 75. [[394206841,R]]

Thick smoke could been seen billowing from one of the buildings at the sprawling three-story hotel, and fire department spokesman Jason Evans said the fire had spread laterally through the open space just beneath the roof.

The six alarms were called in order to try and locate and extinguish all of the fire, Evans said. Much of the damage is near the unit of origin, but there are varying degrees of smoke damage throughout the hotel.

Firefighters rescued two people from a third-story unit by bringing them down an aerial ladder, and a third person  who is in a wheelchair  was rescued from a unit on the first floor, Evans said. The person from the first-floor unit was transported to a hospital for treatment of smoke exposure and is expected to recover.

Dallas Fire-Rescue crews battle a six-alarm fire at The Grand Hotel off LBJ Freeway in North Dallas.

At least 65 rooms were occupied in the hotel, and the number of tenants displaced is unknown. The American Red Cross has been called to assist those people with shelter.

A firefighter who was overcome by heat was sent to a hospital and later released, authorities said.
A regional jet landed safely at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport after mechanical issues were reported Wednesday morning.

American Eagle Flight 5756, operated by Mesa Airlines, was scheduled to depart Louisville, Kentucky at 6:29 am. The plane landed at D/FW Airport at about 7:15 a.m.

Emergency vehicles were seen surrounding the Bombardier CRJ-900 moments after the plane landed.

Initial reports indicated a problem affecting the aircraft's nose gear. NBC 5 has reached out to American Airlines for more information.

No further details have been released.

Please check back for the latest on this developing story. As Developments unfold, elements may change.
President Barack Obama urged more countries to take in refugees from war-torn countries during a speech Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly.

"We have to imagine what it would be like for our family, for our children, if the unspeakable happened to us," Obama said.

There are about 80 Syrian families currently living in North Texas, according to local charities, and half of them arrived in just the past three months. Ibrahim Aloqa, his wife and four kids arrived about two months ago.

"I'm very happy to be here, and the number one feeling is, I feel safe," Aloqa said.

It took the family five years to reach their new home in North Texas after fleeing Syria to Jordan, and then to America, when they got visas.

"Foremost for my children, is they are now happy, they are going to school, they are getting an education and can fulfill their dreams," Aloqa added.

While they are in North Texas, the future of other refugees could be in doubt. It is a hot-button issue because of terrorism.

Sen. Ted Cruz wants to ban refugees from what he calls "hotbeds of terrorism."

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for extreme vetting of refugees.

Aloqa says people whom he has met have been very welcoming, and he has this message to North Texans.

"I want to tell them that Syrians are good people, we are kind and hard-working, and we want to be part of the community here," Aloqa said.
An airstrike on a medical site near Aleppo, Syria, left at least four aid workers dead overnight on Tuesday, NBC News reported.

The attack in the town of Khan Touman, controlled by rebels, comes amid a fragile cease-fire brokered by the U.S. and Russia. But another airstrike hit a convoy of aide workers Monday, killing at least 20 people and touching off a round of blame-trading.

The Associated Press reports that both nations claim the others' aircraft were overhead when the convoy was struck, and it was not immediately clear who launched the airstrike that hit the medical facility overnight on Tuesday.

The humanitarians killed in Tuesday's strike were ambulance drivers and nurses who worked for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations. A fifth person injured, a nurse, was critically injured in the strike.

The organization condemned the "unacceptable" loss of life, and said the medical center was completely destroyed and left victims buried under debris.
Charlotte's police chief said officers gave 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott multiple warnings to drop a handgun before killing him, the latest black man to be shot by police across the country, while the city's mayor urged calm in the wake of violent protests overnight.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said during a news conference Wednesday morning that officers were searching for a suspect Tuesday when they saw Scott exit a vehicle with a handgun. He said the officers told him to drop the gun and that he got out of the vehicle a second time still carrying the gun. He says the man was shot because he posed a threat.

"It's time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the story's a little bit different as to how it's been portrayed so far, especially through social media," he said.

His comments were an apparent reference to a profanity-laced, hourlong video that a woman who said she was Scott's daughter posted to Facebook soon after the shooting, saying that her father had an unspecified disability and was unarmed. In it, she appears to be at the shooting scene, which is surrounded by yellow police tape, as she yells at officers.

The woman did not respond to Facebook messages, and her claims could not immediately be verified by The Associated Press. It also was not clear if she witnessed the shooting.

Scott's family did not speak at a news conference on their behalf Wednesday in the neighborhood where the shooting occurred.

But Nation of Islam representative B.J. Murphy and other black community leaders called for an economic boycott of Charlotte, tying Scotts death to the deaths of other black men by police around the country.

Were sick and tired of being sick and tired, Rev. John Barnett said.

He said that Scott was disabled and was waiting to pick up his son.

Yesterday his son could not get that hug, he added.

Barnett said that instead of me staging rallies, we are going straight to a law firm.

The black officer who shot Scott, Brently Vinson, has been placed on administrative leave as is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

Police said the protests broke out about 7 p.m. Tuesday, about three hours after the shooting at an apartment complex on the city's northeast side. Authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters in an overnight demonstration that left about a dozen officers injured in North Carolina's largest city and shut down part of a highway.

The protests continued into early Wednesday morning, when TV footage showed dozens of protesters on Interstate 85 apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire on the highway.

The police chief said 16 officers suffered injuries and police cars were damaged after people began throwing rocks One officer was hit in the face. Photos and TV video showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Some officers were in riot gear.

By 5 a.m. Wednesday, the streets were quiet with no protesters in sight and I-85 was moving again. Broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance of a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.

The unrest in Charlotte came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.

Charlotte police officers went to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott  who was not the suspect they were looking for  inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers say they saw Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

Scott was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Detectives recovered a gun at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and patience as the shooting is investigated.

In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.

Shelby's attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he were carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.

Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.
An apparently domesticated deer wandering along a Jurupa Valley road was captured today by a sheriff's deputy and taken to a shelter, where the exhausted and dehydrated animal was recuperating.

The deer was spotted just before noon by a deputy patrolling Limonite Avenue, near Lucretia Avenue, according to Riverside County Department of Animal Services spokesman John Welsh.

"The deputy was able to tie the very domesticated deer to his cruiser until Riverside County Animal Services Officer Will Luna arrived," Welsh said.

"Luna retrieved the deer and transported her to the Western Riverside County Animal Shelter in Jurupa Valley."

The deer arrived at the shelter panting heavily and barely able to walk.

She was placed in a secure barn stall, where Luna and another officer supplied her with a bucket of water and some hay.

According to Welsh, shelter staff contacted the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, and arrangements were made for a game warden to retrieve the animal.

"It's likely she will be taken to a sanctuary to live out the rest of her life," Welsh said.

He emphasized that capturing and keeping a deer as a pet is illegal in California.
Prompted by the death of an 11-year-old boy found emaciated and malnourished in the closet of an Echo Park home, county supervisors voted Tuesday to re-evaluate an assessment tool designed to identify children at risk of abuse or neglect.

Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Mark Ridley-Thomas recommended the review, citing evidence suggesting "potential shortcomings in the SDM tool which may provide unclear guidance and the ability to override results."

Structured Decision Making was developed to give social workers "simple, objective and reliable tools" to make the right decisions for children and help managers with planning and resource allocation, according to the Department of Children and Family Services website. However, use of the tool did not save Yonatan Daniel Aguilar, whose mother has been charged with murder and child abuse. Veronica Aguilar, 39, is being held on $2 million bail.

"The question is, where was there a breakdown?" Antonovich asked his colleagues. "We don't want this boy's life to be in vain.' Yonatan's 34-pound body was found on Aug. 22, wrapped in a blanket inside a closet, by his stepfather.

Jose Pinzon called 911 and said his wife had told him her son was dead. The boy died due to neglect and showed severe signs of malnutrition, according to prosecutors. However, the autopsy report was placed on a law enforcement security hold and the coroner has not disclosed a cause of death. Records provided to the Los Angeles Times by DCFS show that Yonatan's risk of abuse at home had been marked as "high" four times from 2009 to 2012 by DCFS workers using the SDM.

That should have triggered additional investigation, but case workers chose not to pursue what they viewed as unfounded allegations, according to Kathy Park, CEO of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, who defended the SDM to the board. The SDM model was developed by NCCD. Teachers and others reported the family to DCFS at least six times dating back to 2002, before Yonatan was born. But the boy was never removed from his home and stopped attending school in 2012, police told The Times.

"It was reported to DCFS that the child had gone to Mexico," Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said, questioning whether any diagnostic tool could have made a difference. "Our investigations are triggered by someone reporting."

Office of Child Protection Director Michael Nash agreed, saying, "I'm not sure that it's necessarily a case where the (decision-making tool) is called into question."

And it is a social worker's qualitative judgment about a child's safety, not the quantitative risk tool, that determines whether a case is opened, DCFS spokesman Armand Montiel told City News Service.

"It's not about probability or norms" derived from answering the risk tool's multiple choice questions, Montiel said, but about talking to the child and interviewing parents, teachers and others familiar with the child's care.

A preliminary investigation into the reports of abuse or neglect concerning Yonatan's family seemed to show that the social workers involved "did the right job," Montiel said. "(They) interviewed Yonatan independently ... and spoke to teachers" and several other people who had contact with the family, he said.

The family was already connected to some social services and it was "consistent and clear that the professionals (in Yonatan's life) believed that he was well cared for," Montiel said. If there were signs of abuse or neglect, "apparently nobody saw it," he said. As the investigation continues, "the real mystery is what happened in those intervening years," Montiel said.

Supervisor Hilda Solis, who was moved to tears by the case, questioned why social workers didn't remain in contact with the family even after the boy allegedly left the country. "There were other children in the house. What happened to them?' Solis asked.

Montiel said the court ruling ordering the department to release records about Yonatan barred discussion of any other children involved. As for quantifying risk, the county has been experimenting since sometime in 2014 with an alternative tool dubbed Project AURA, Approach to Understanding Risk Assessment.

AURA mines predictive data from criminal and social welfare databases to develop probabilities of risk. While DCFS says no tool can replace the critical skills, training and judgment of social workers, the board directed the office of Children Protection and DCFS to report back on the strength and weaknesses of both the SDM and AURA in 60 days.
Authorities say a firefighter assigned to a blaze at a California military base was killed and another was injured when a water tanker truck overturned on a highway Wednesday morning.

Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Steve Swindle says the crash occurred at a roundabout on State Route 246 just outside Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The other firefighter was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, according to the Ventura County Fire Department. They were the only occupants of the truck.

Osler has worked for the Ventura County Fire Department for 18 years, the Ventura County Fire Department said in a statement. He is survived by his wife and two children.

"Our collective hearts are broken at the loss of our friend and brother Ryan," said Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family. We are deeply moved by the outpouring of public support for Ryan and on behalf of all the men and women of the Ventura County Fire Department, we thank you for your continued prayers."

Osler was a second-generation firefighter, Swindle said. His father also worked for the Ventura County department.

The California Highway Patrol is investigating the crash.

Ventura County is among several departments that have sent crews to the 19-square-mile fire at Vandenberg, dubbed the Canyon Fire. The fire broke out Sunday and was 45 percent contained. No structures were threatened.
Author shares ideas about sharing ideas

From:chinadaily.com.cn | 2016-09-21 08:46

The Chinese edition of Zoref's book.

The Chinese post photos of overseas vacations, cute pets and gym selfies every moment of every daybut social networks can prove powerful if users understand how to distill collective wisdom.

That's the view Israeli author and crowdsourcing researcher Lior Zoref shares in his book Mindsharing: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything.

He toured Shanghai and Beijing for the Chinese edition's launch this month.

"Today, social networks are mostly about sharing moments. In the next decade, they'll also help you answer questions and solve complex problems," Zoref writes, quoting Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, in his preface.

"Before my visit to China, I thought US technology is superior with regards to social networks. Now, I think that Chinese technology in some respects is far more advanced," Zoref tells China Daily.

"People here are so open to the idea of crowdsourcing, because they use the technology so much in their life, probably more than any other nation. That's why I am so happy to publish the book here."

Zoref worked at Microsoft as a marketer from 1996 to 2010.

He's pursuing his PhD at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, where he's researching ways in which people can use social networks for professional development.

His book cites examples of how he got ideas for public speeches and career development from people on social networks with whom he wasn't particularly close, such as acquaintances and friends of friends. He also examines how other people have used social networks to deal with such problems as managing finances, raising children and finding romantic partners.

"There is a saying (that) two heads are smarter than one. I say: What about 1,000 heads?" Zoref says.

He also writes about different strategies for different social-network platforms, how to manage digital relationships and ask the right questions.

Lior Zoref, Israeli author.

The book itself is a product of crowdsourced brainstorming and editing.

"I wrote the draft of each chapter and posted it online for comments," Zoref says.

"I said: 'Don't tell me it's great. If you like something explain why. And if you think something is missing, tell me why.'"

Zoref says that although crowdsourcing is his topic, discussions during his China visit often veered toward questions about how to live happily.

He believes people should start exploring and following their dreams.

Those who are courageous enough to share their passions and dreams with others may discover crowds will help them realize them.

Zoref once shared his aspiration to give a TED talk about his concept of "mindsharing".

His close friends told him it was impossible. But his Facebook and Twitter friends helped him. He delivered the first-ever crowdsourced talk at TED 2012.

"People are afraid to share what their passions are. I was scared, too," Zoref says.

"But being sincere, open and vulnerablepeople could see that this is true courage and appreciate it. So, if someone has good advice, they will tell you and help you."
A man was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of burglarizing the Mexican Consulate twice, in addition to several other burglaries, Santa Ana police said.

Police located the suspect after conducting a traffic stop on a vehicle for a code violation around 7:41 p.m. in the 1400 block of Cabrillo Park Drive in Santa Ana, police said.

Albert Sierra, 32, allegedly smashed a glass door to break into the Mexican Consulate located at 2100 East 4th Street in Santa Ana on Saturday night. He stole "office equipment, money from the Consulate and several Red Cross donation containers," from inside the building, Santa Ana police said in a statement.

Before last weekend's break-in, surveillance video captured Sierra breaking into the Consulate on July 10. He stole a HP document scanner during that burglary, said Det. Duane Greaver of the Santa Ana Police Department.

Sierra is also wanted for stealing thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment from at least three businesses in Santa Ana collectively between July and August of this year, Greaver said. He added that one business, Insurance On Line, had been hit the hardest.

Sierra is a U.S.-born homeless man and believed to own a dark-colored Volkswagen Jetta, according to police.

Anyone with information about the burglaries or Sierra's whereabouts is encouraged to call 714-245-8362.
A warning was issued in an Orange County wilderness park after a mountain lion was spotted around 6 p.m. Monday, officials said.

The big cat was spotted in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park on Trabuco Canyon  a park that features 17 miles of hiking, biking and equestrian trails.

Aerial footage from NewsChopper 4 showed Fish and Wildlife officials searching the area with flashlights by ground around 10 p.m. Monday.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife officers were searching for the mountain lion on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, but could not find it. An Orange County Sheriff's Department helicopter was also requested to assist with the search.

There are no plans to hunt or relocate the animal which could be anywhere in the parks 2,500 acres.

A level two warning was issued because the mountain lion seen in the park was not aggressive. It was simply walking close to a trail used by bicyclists and runners.

Warning posters were placed throughout the park after the sighting was confirmed.

The park, located in southeast Orange County within the foothills of the Cleveland National Forest, has a history of mountain lion sightings.

In 2004, a mountain biker was attacked and killed by a mountain lion at Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park. Mark Reynolds, 35, was attempting to fix his bike when the 2004 attack happened. That mountain lion was captured and killed following the attack.

The recent sighting has mountain bikers and hikers on alert.

"Our plan is to stay still, make ourselves as big as possible, make as much noise as possible and hope we scare it off," said mountain biker Brian McNeill.
Days after a shooting at a birthday party left six teens injured, Miami-Dade Police arrested three men in connection to the gun violence.

Eighteen-year-old Michael Melon, 18-year-old Dontavious Byrd and 20-year-old Travonte Berry were charged with attempted murder Tuesday.

Detectives said shots were fired during an altercation at a house party around 10 p.m.Saturday.

The incident happened at a home located on Southwest 205th Street and 119th Avenue.

Six party-goers were shot. The youngest victim was 12 years old.

DeAndre Foster, 17, was also injured. His mother told NBC 6 the teen was shot in both legs and being treated in ICU at Jackson South Community Hospital.

Three other injured victims were also transported to the same hospital.

One victim was taken to Baptist Hospital and the sixth victim was airlifted to Kendall Regional Hospital.

All victims were listed in stable condition, police said.

The investigation is on-going.
Residents in one Southwest Miami-Dade neighborhood were greeted with quite the sight Tuesday night  an eight foot long Burmese Python snake.

The Venom One crew from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue responded to the area near SW 8th Street and 137th Avenue after 8 PM. The snake was found by three cyclists in the area, who thought it was a giant branch and walked toward it. The snake began to move and the cyclists fled to call authorities.

Rescue crews were able to capture the snake, which will be turned over to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Officials say the Burmese Python is one of the largest snakes in the world, sometimes reaching 10 feet in length. The snake is very active from the months of April to October, eating as much as possible before the temperatures go down and they need to find a heat source to survive.

Homeowners are advised to keep their yards free of clutter, avoid tall plants and ground level water sources in an effort to keep the snakes from being attracted to the area.

Rescue crews were able to capture the snake, which will be turned over to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Officials say pythons are very active between April and October when they try to eat as much as possible before temperatures drop.

In February, 106 Burmese pythons were captured during a month-long, state-sanctioned hunt.

Thousands of the invasive snakes are believed to be stalking Florida wildlife in the beleaguered Everglades.

In February, 106 Burmese pythons were captured during a month-long, state-sanctioned hunt. Thousands of the invasive snakes are believed to be stalking Florida wildlife in the beleaguered Everglades.
A 13-year-old Florida girl was arrested after she was accused of trying to poison her teacher by putting powdered chalk in her coffee.

The girl was arrested Tuesday on a charge of poisoning food or water to kill or injure a person in the September 16 incident, according to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office.

Officials said the girl, a student at the Achieve Center of Pasco, took a beige piece of sidewalk chalk she was using for a class assignment and made it into a powder.

She distracted the teacher and put the powder into the coffee. As the teacher began to drink the coffee, another student stopped the teacher, officials said.

The school is for students with emotional and behavior issues.
If youre looking for something to do on Saturday for free, a visit to one of the many museums across the South Florida area just became a serious option.

In honor of the 12th annual Museum Day Live presented by Smithsonian Magazine, entry for you and another person is free at over 1,000 places across the country.

Some of the locations in Miami-Dade County you can visit for free include Zoo Miami in Miami, the Gold Coast Railroad Museum in Miami, the Miami-Dade College Museum of Art and Design and the Ancient Spanish Monastery in North Miami Beach.

In Broward County, you can visit places like the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, the International Swimming Hall of Fame Museum or the Coral Springs Museum of Art free of charge.

To redeem the free tickets, simply click on this link and select the venue you want to attend. After that, you print out your tickets and enjoy the day!
Students at Miami-Dade School District wore green Wednesday to stand against youth violence.

It's part of a new national initiative launched this week called 'Sandy Hook Promise'.

"We wear green so people don't feel left out because recently there's been violence with kids," explained Sara Ruiz Mesa, a 4th grader at I-Prep Academy.

'Sandy Hook Promise' is a non-profit group created by several families whose children were killed at a Connecticut school in 2012.

The core program is called "Know the Signs" to help identify and counsel anyone showing signs of violence to themselves or others.

Parents at I-Prep Academy said they embrace the initiative.

"I don't even buy toy guns for my kids. So I think it's a great idea to get the kids involved and you know let them be aware of what's going on," said parent Marie Friends.

Miami-Dade Schools was chosen to launch the program. An event called 'Start With Hello', was held Monday at John A. Ferguson High School.

Teachers said they hope the initiative will bring about change to the classroom and make campuses safer.

"I think the kids definitely feel a sense of teamwork and unity," said Amy Rose.
Three teens have been arrested after a 13-year-old was shot Tuesday near Brownsville Middle School in Northwest Miami-Dade.

Eric Williams-Bell, 19, along with a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old, were arrested in connection to the shooting, police said.

Williams-Bell appeared in bond court Wednesday on attempted murder charges. He was ordered held without bail. The 17-year-old suspect also faced a judge in juvenile court. He was ordered to stay away from the victim once released from jail.

Police responded to the scene on 47th Street and 24th Avenue just before 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. Sources told NBC 6 the victim, Cedric Pernell, is a student at Brownsville Middle School.

"We were getting on the bus and then we heard two shots," said witness Amaya Dillard, who also attends the school.

Pernell was shot in the back and taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital in stable condition, police said.

A white Mercedes 4-door sedan was seen fleeing the area at the time of the shooting. Officers tried to stop the car but the driver refused. Eventually, the driver lost control of the car and crashed on Northwest 56th Street and 7th Avenue, police said.

"The motive is still unknown at this time. Regardless of a reason a 13-year-old should not be in a hospital bed," said Miami-Dade Det. Marjorie Eloi.

The investigation is on-going.
Tapping into a rich past

From:chinadaily.com.cn | 2016-09-21 08:46

A young reader and his mother look at publications at a Beijing book fair.DA WEI/CFP

Yang Chenxi, an 8-year-old from Zhejiang province's Huzhou, recently spent half of her summer holidays with her grandparents in the countryside in Suqian, Jiangsu province.

Every night before bed, the girl, a fan of Disney cartoons and My Little Pony, begged her grandmother, Li Yuehua, to tell her a story.

"I told her stories about how bad people who mistreated good people were punished, and stories about illiterate but cocky people who made mistakes when they tried to read Chinese characters. My granddaughter loved the stories and laughed a lot," says Li.

Thankfully, for Chinese children like Yang, Western fairy tales like The Little Mermaid and Cinderella are not the only options when it comes to bedtime stories.

In recent years, Chinese writers have been using tradition, folk stories and legends to create books for children.

Wang Quangen, a professor of children's literature at Beijing Normal University, is currently working on a series of six books based on stories from such Chinese classics as In Search of the Supernatural from the Eastern Jin Dynasty (AD 317-420), Classic of Mountains and Seas from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) and Strange Stories from a Studio from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

For the series, called Chinese Fairy Tales Passed on From Generation to Generation, Wang has chosen 217 stories and is rendering them into language children easily understand.

"We need to pick stories that will not only interest children today, but also cater to current tastes and values. Through these books, children should be able to see the virtues and the wisdom of the ancient Chinese," says Wang.

On the cover of one of the books is an illustration from a story titled Maid Yexian, a tale similar to Cinderella.

It is a story from Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang about a maid named Yexian, who can make clothes using gold thread.

After her parents die, her stepmother treats her badly.

One day, she loses her shoe on her way back from a party, which leads to her encounter with her Prince Charming.

The tale, however, does not end like Cinderella.

The tale of the maid Yexian existed at least 800 years before Cinderella, but few Chinese know the story.

"From this perspective, this series promotes classic tales that have been forgotten," says Wang.

Wang Lin, who has a PhD in children's literature and is a promoter of children's reading, says that in a globalized worldwhere language does not indicate nationalitythe cultural genes of a nation are represented by the songs people sing, the books they read and the stories they listen to when they are young.

Last year, a set of three books based on mythical creatures in the Forbidden City (also known as the Palace Museum) was released and became very popular with children.

Two popular series are inspired by Chinese folk tales and legends. [Photos provided to China Daily]

The series, called Mythical Creatures in the Forbidden City, features an 11-year-old girl called Li Xiaoyu whose mother worked in the Forbidden City; a white cat called Lihua that's said to be a descendant of the cats raised by the emperors' concubines; and mythical creatures that people see in the old palace, such as the stone statues on the roofs.

The writer, 37-year-old Chang Yi, lived near the palace as a child, and she grew up listening to tales and legends of the Forbidden City.

For her, the ancient palace was a big amusement park full of fabled beings.

Chang says she often went to the palace with her grandfather to look at the creatures.

But she finds that today's children are not so interested in the Forbidden City. They see it as a boring place full of buildings, or an attraction to which parents take their children to look for places they saw in a TV series.

She says she once heard a grandfather telling his grandson that the creature on the giant door of the palace was a lion. She corrected him.

"It's called Jiao Tu, whose body is actually like that of a snail. It dislikes other creatures entering its den and always guards against any casual entry. So people put its head on doors," she told the man and the boy.

Speaking about the characters featured in her books, Chang says that, in order to better understand and present the characteristics of the creatures, she referred to such works as The Classic of Mountains and Seas and In Search of the Supernatural.

She also created new plots for these mythical creatures to make the old legends and tales more acceptable for a modern readership.

The books have sold more than 240,000 copies.

Chang hopes that they can provide a reason for children to visit and learn about the Palace Museum.
What to Know The notebook was found on Ahmad Rahami when he was captured

Law enforcement officials describe it as rambling and disjointed with "jihadist-style" writings

There was also praise for Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qaida cleric killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011

Authorities released an image of Ahmad Rahami's blood-stained journal, a bullet hole piercing the small booklet that was found in the alleged bomber's possession when he was captured after a shootout in New Jersey.



The right side of the notebook is filled with blue writing; law enforcement officials previously said the journal included praise for American al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and "jihadist-type" language. Rahami also referenced Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the ISIS propagandist killed in a U.S. airstrike.



In the handwritten journal, Rahami warned bombs would resound in the streets and prayed he'd be martyred rather than caught. He remains hospitalized in New Jersey after being shot 10 times in Monday's shootout.



Federal charges, including using a weapon of mass destruction and bombing public places, were filed against Rahami Tuesday. A public defender representing Rahami in New Jersey, where he faces charges of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer in the Linden shootout, wanted him in court on the federal charges Wednesday, but authorities said he could not be arraigned on those charges until he was in federal custody.



U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department planned to transport the 28-year-old naturalized citizen from Afghanistan to the city to face charges in the "near future."



According to the court complaint, Rahami's journal included a passage that said: "You (USA Government) continue your (unintelligible) slaught(er)" against the mujahideen, or holy warriors, "be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham (Syria), Palestine ... ."

Another portion expressed concern at the prospect of being caught before being able to carry out a suicide attack and the desire to be a martyr, the complaint said.

It added that another part included a reference, on a page that is largely unintelligible, to "pipe bombs" and a "pressure cooker bomb," and declared: "In the streets they plan to run a mile."

One official earlier described the notebook to NBC News as a "a hodge podge, a rambling, disconnected, choppy series of references to past events."
What to Know Nicholas Batka, 28, has been charged with vehicular homicide, manslaughter, vehicular assault and other crimes in a 26-count indictment

He allegedly struck and killed a 21-year-old MIT student in Brooklyn while driving drunk

Attorney Michael Farkas told NBC 4 New York in August that the case is "a terrible tragedy for all concerned"

A former NYPD officer accused of killing a 21-year-old MIT student with his car while driving drunk in Brooklyn faces many charges including vehicular homicide, prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Nicholas Batka, 28, has been charged with vehicular homicide, manslaughter, vehicular assault and other crimes in a 26-count indictment, the district attorney's office said.

It's outrageous that this defendant  a New York City police officer at the time  chose to get behind the wheel while drunk and caused a deadly and horrific car crash," Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson said in a statement.

The SUV crash on July 16 in Williamsburg killed 21-year-old Andrew Esquivel, and seriously injured three of his friends.

Esquivel, a native of Healdsburg, California, attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had an internship at a New York City company.

Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said at the time of the crash that two other off-duty officers who were with Batka have been stripped of their guns and shields while the investigation continues.

Attorney Michael Farkas told NBC 4 New York in August that the case is "a terrible tragedy for all concerned" and says he and Batka will work to bring all the facts to light.

Batka was fired from the NYPD soon after the crash. His lawyer says the firing wasn't a surprise.
What to Know Kevin Moore was being held at the prison pending transfer to Rikers Island when he was beaten; prosecutors say he didn't threaten the guards

The indictment says the guards "brutally beat him" and caused "many life-threatening injuries"

All three guards are charged with participating in the beating and trying to cover it up

Federal prosecutors allege in an indictment unsealed Wednesday that three former New York prison guards beat an inmate bloody and one ripped dreadlocks from his head to use as a souvenir.

Authorities allege two guards and their sergeant violated the civil rights of Kevin Moore at Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill when he was being held Nov. 12, 2013 before transfer to New York City's Rikers Island for a court proceeding, then they covered up the beating.

They say Moore never physically threatened the officers and merely questioned why he was being placed in a mental-health unit overnight at the Hudson Valley prison.

"Excessive use of force in prisons, we believe, has reached crisis proportions in New York State," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara told a news conference. His office also has been investigating the homicide of an inmate last year at nearby Fishkill Correctional Facility in a confrontation with guards.

Corrections Commissioner Anthony Annucci said the indictment "sends a strong message that we will pursue anyone that fails to uphold the integrity and professionalism that we place in our department."

The indictment says the Downstate guards - then-Sgt. Kathy Scott, George Santiago Jr. and Carson Morris - "brutally beat" Moore, giving him five fractured ribs, a collapsed lung and facial fractures.

"We allege that through retaliation, the charged corrections officers struck Moore with wooden batons, punched him repeatedly in the face and ribs, hit him in the head and the body and even ripped dreadlocks off his head, one allegedly picking up the dreadlocks from the floor, saying he wanted to save them as a trophy," Bharara said. "That beating left Moore in a pool of his own blood."

Moore was hospitalized 17 days. The indictment alleges Santiago took Moore's dreadlocks as a souvenir for his motorcycle. It also charges the three with falsifying records, saying the guards almost immediately concocted a story that Moore attacked a guard, bruising their colleague's back to support the lie.

Calls to their lawyers were not immediately returned Wednesday.

The indictment references two unindicted co-conspirators in the beating and cover-up.

State corrections officials said Scott and Santiago were fired. Morris was suspended for 10 months after arbitration, though corrections officials said they wanted him dismissed, and he no longer works there.

They also said the corrections department's investigations office has been overhauled, has "zero tolerance" for such behavior by officers and worked with federal and local prosecutors on this case.

The union representing New York's prison guards said it "in no way condoned" the alleged crimes by these three former members.

In a federal civil suit filed in June, Moore said the infirmary staff at the prison refused to treat his injuries, and he was instead locked overnight in solitary confinement, and his bloody clothes returned to him before he was taken to Rikers.

The lawsuit names the same three guards, two others and a registered nurse at the infirmary. It also names Annucci and Downstate Superintendent Ada Perez, alleging they knew of previous beatings and cover-ups, including what the suit alleged was Santiago's deliberate assault four months earlier on an inmate that broke the prisoner's ankle.
Repair crews worked through the night trying to restore electricity to Puerto Rico's 3.5 million people early Thursday after a fire at a power plant blacked out the entire U.S. territory.

Officials said they hoped to restore service by morning, but some schools canceled classes for the day as a precaution. The island's largest public hospital canceled elective surgeries and non-urgent appointments, while government officials and private groups put off dozens of scheduled events.

The Electric Power Authority said investigators were trying to determine what caused the fire that broke out Wednesday afternoon at a power plant in southern Puerto Rico that serves a majority of customers on the island. The fire began at a switch and caused two transmission lines of 230,000 volts each to fail.

"This is a very serious event," Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said. "The system is not designed to withstand a failure of this magnitude."

The outage was the latest hit for an island mired in a decade-long economic crisis and whose government has warned it is running out of money as it seeks to restructure nearly $70 billion in public debt.

Javier Quintana, the power company's executive director, said he expected most power to be restored by morning. He said airports, hospitals, police stations and water pumping stations would get priority.

Many Puerto Ricans expressed doubts that power would be restored quickly, saying the economic slump has affected basic government services. Hundreds of people took to social media to criticize the Electric Power Authority, noting that they already pay bills on average twice that of the U.S. mainland.

It was unclear how much damage the fire caused or where the power company would obtain the money to repair or buy new equipment. The utility is struggling with a $9 billion debt that it hopes to restructure as it faces numerous corruption allegations. Company officials have said they are seeking more revenue to update what they say is outdated equipment.

The governor, however, said that no amount of money or maintenance would have prevented the fire. He said the switch where the fire began had received proper maintenance.

Authorities said Wednesday's outage caused 15 fires across Puerto Rico as a result of malfunctioning generators, including at the upscale Vanderbilt hotel in the popular tourist area of Condado and at the mayor's office in the northern coastal town of Catano. All those fires were extinguished and no one was injured, officials said.

The blackout knocked out traffic lights, snarling the island's roads. Businesses, universities and government offices closed early, putting even more cars on chaotic roads. Some people opted to not go home and hotels in the capital of San Juan quickly filled up.

As the sun set, people crowded into restaurants running on generators. Others chatted with neighbors while standing or sitting at opened doors and windows trying to beat the hot night.

For more breaking details (in Spanish) from Telemundo 47, click here.
What to Know Ahmad Rahami, 28, was charged with federal crimes in New York City and New Jersey on Tuesday related to bombings over the weekend

Rahami is recovering at a Newark hospital after being shot 10 times during a shootout with police Monday

The federal complaint against Rahami paints a chilling portrait of man championing jihad and looking to become a martyr

The 28-year-old New Jersey man suspected of planting bombs in New York City and his own state was still recovering from multiple gunshot wounds at a hospital in Newark Wednesday, a day after he had federal terror charges filed against him in Manhattan and New Jersey.

Ahmad Khan Rahami was recovering from surgery at University Hospital after being shot 10 times by police before his capture Monday outside a bar in Linden. Federal agents have tried to question Rahami in the hospital, but New Jersey Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur, who said he received a classified briefing from the FBI, said Rahami was not cooperating.

The FBI charged Rahami with using a weapon of mass destruction Tuesday. The federal complaint against Rahami paints a chilling portrait of a man championing jihad and looking to become a martyr. The complaint says he bought bomb ingredients on eBay and recorded a mirthful video of himself igniting a blast in a backyard. In a handwritten journal, he warned that bombs would resound in the streets and prayed he'd be martyred rather than caught.

Rahami's jihad journal ended with a stark message, according to court papers: "Death to your oppression."

Federal court complaints filed Tuesday gave a frightening glimpse into what authorities say motivated the Afghan-born U.S. citizen to set off explosives last weekend in New York City and New Jersey, including the bomb that injured 31 people in Manhattan. The blasts came two years after the FBI looked into him but came up with nothing tying him to terrorism.

Prosecutors say he detonated a pressure cooker bomb on 23rd Street in Manhattan Saturday night. Some people suffered "lacerations to the face, abdomen, legs, and arms" caused by flying glass, metal shrapnel and fragmentation embedded in skin and bone, according to the federal complaint. Others suffered various head injuries; a driver was knocked unconscious.

Rahami was also charged with terror counts by federal prosecutors in New Jersey on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office said he has been charged with two counts of using and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction. Those charges are in connection with Rahami's alleged attempts to detonate explosives during a race in Seaside Park on Saturday morning and near an NJ Transit train station in Elizabeth on Sunday night.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York told NBC News that Rahami will first face charges in federal court in Manhattan.

It's unclear when Rahami will be released from University Hospital to face federal charges in New York City. When he is released, he will be transported from Newark by the U.S. Marshals and taken to a federal court in lower Manhattan, officials said.

It wasn't immediately clear whether Rahami had a lawyer who could comment on the charges against him, which include the federal terror crimes and state charges in New Jersey of attempting to murder police officers related to the shootout Monday in Linden.

Just two days before Saturday's bombings, a relative's cellphone recorded Rahami igniting incendiary material in a cylinder buried in a backyard, the fuse being lighted, a loud noise and flames, "followed by billowing smoke and laughter," the complaints said.

And the complaints said in his bloodied journal  damaged by shots from his gun battle with police  he fumed that the U.S. government was slaughtering Muslim holy warriors and alluded to plans for revenge.

One portion expressed concern at the prospect of being caught before being able to carry out a suicide attack and the desire to be a martyr. Another section included a reference to "pipe bombs" and a "pressure cooker bomb" and declared: "In the streets they plan to run a mile," an apparent reference to one of the blast sites, a charity run in Seaside Park, New Jersey.

"The sounds of bombs will be heard in the streets," the journal declared.

Rahami ordered citric acid, ball bearings and electronic igniters on eBay and had them delivered to a Perth Amboy, New Jersey, business where he worked until Sept. 12, the court complaints said. San Jose, California-based eBay Inc. noted that the products are legal and widely available and said the company had worked with law enforcement on the investigation.

The journal included laudatory references to Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki  the American-born Muslim cleric who was killed in a 2011 drone strike and whose preaching has inspired other acts of violence  and Nidal Hasan, the former Army officer who went on a deadly shooting rampage in 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas, the complaints said.

The FBI has said Rahami apparently was not on its radar at the time of the bombing. But he was in 2014, when the FBI opened up an "assessment"  its least intrusive form of inquiry  based on comments from his father after a domestic dispute, the bureau said in a statement.

"The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism," the bureau said.

A law enforcement official said the FBI spoke with Rahami's father in 2014 after agents learned of his concerns that the son could be a terrorist. During the inquiry, the father backed away from talk of terrorism and told investigators that he simply meant his son was hanging out with the wrong crowd, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Rahami's father, Mohammad, told reporters Tuesday he called the FBI at the time because Rahami "was doing real bad," having stabbed his brother and hit his mother. Rahami was not prosecuted in the stabbing; a grand jury declined to indict him.

"But they checked, almost two months, and they say, 'He's OK, he's clear, he's not terrorist.' Now they say he's a terrorist," the father said outside the family's fried-chicken restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Asked whether he thought his son was a terrorist, he said: "No. And the FBI, they know that."

The FBI has faced questions before about whether it could have done more ahead of time to determine whether attackers had terrorist aspirations. The issue arose after the Orlando massacre in June, for instance, when FBI Director James Comey said agents a few years earlier had looked into the gunman, Omar Mateen, but did not find enough information to pursue charges or keep him under investigation.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Obama was confident the bureau would review Rahami's interactions with law enforcement "to determine if there's something different that could have been done or should have been done to prevent the violence."

Meanwhile, investigators are looking into Rahami's overseas travel, including a visit to Pakistan a few years ago, and want to know whether he received any money or training from extremist organizations.

Rahami's wife is thought to be a Pakistani national. On a trip to Pakistan in 2014, Rahami emailed his local congressman seeking help because his pregnant wife had an expired passport. (On Tuesday a New Jersey court gave his ex-girlfriend Maria Mena sole custody of their child.)

David Duerden, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, was unable to confirm or deny reports that Rahami's wife had been questioned in the United Arab Emirates, which is home to a large expatriate Pakistani population and has airports that offer daily flights to Pakistan.

"We're aware of the reports but don't have any comment at this time," he told the AP.

Emirati officials in Dubai and the federal capital Abu Dhabi said they had no information on her.

Rahami, who came to the U.S. as a child, studied criminal justice for a time at a community college, and he worked as an unarmed night guard for two months in 2011 at an AP administrative technology office in Cranbury, New Jersey. At the time, he was employed by Summit Security, a private contractor.

AP global security chief Danny Spriggs said he learned this week that Rahami worked there and often engaged colleagues in long political discussions, expressing sympathy for the Taliban and disdain for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Rahami left that job in 2011 because he wanted to take a trip to Afghanistan, Spriggs said.

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the news cooperative told law enforcement officials about Rahami's work at the Cranbury facility.

Summit's vice president of security services, Daniel Sepulveda, said Rahami last worked for the company in 2011. Sepulveda said he was unaware of any complaints about Rahami's conduct.
Authorities in Massachusetts are looking for a man wanted in connection to Ponzi-like schemes across the country.

Quincy Police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Scott Wolas on charges of larceny, embezzlement and identity theft.

The department notes that Wolas has active warrants for similar charges out of New York and Alabama.

In Quincy, authorities say Wolas deceived around 16 people out of a combined $1.65 million.

Wolas also allegedly goes by the names Eugene Grathwohl, Frank Amolsch, Drew Prescott, Allen Lee Hengst and Robert Francis McDowell.

The Boston Globe reports that under the Grathwohl alias and working at a Quincy Century 21 office, Wohl raised money from investors to buy and reform what was once the Beachcomber bar, then vanished. Victims tell the Glboe he would get close with them, joining them for drinks and holiday dinners.

The Globe also reports the suspect allegedly defrauded clients for more than $6 million in Florida as a stockbroker going by the Hengst moniker. Before that, according to the report, Wolas worked as a lawyer for Hunton & Williams in New York, where he was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in a $20 million fraud case. He was indicted and has been a fugitive there ever since.

Police say Wolas was seen on Sept. 15 at the UMass/JFK MBTA station.

Anyone with information is asked to call Quincy Police.
An police chief in Ohio voiced his anger after the recent shooting of unarmed black man Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma, NBC News reported.

Rodney Muterspaw took to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon and wrote, As an officer I am so sick and drained of some cops doing things like this. You are making us all look bad. STOP."

Life is precious man. Sorry we don't all agree. Compassion and empathy is eternally important. Just sick of seeing death & hate. #Life  RM (@RodneyMute) September 20, 2016

The 26-year veteran of the Middletown, Ohio, police force told his local paper that he could not longer stay silent following the questionable shooting of Crutcher in Tulsa.

These types of incidents, Muterspaw told his local newspaper, set us back every time and its hard to get a grip on what we are trying to do.
Lebanese performance group explores story of the Silk Road

From:chinadaily.com.cn | 2016-09-21 08:46

Dancers perform the new theatrical production Sailing Through Time by the Caracalla Dance Theater at the opening of the Baalbeck International Festival, in Baalbek, Lebanon, in July. REUTERS

Lebanon's Caracalla Dance Theater is now exploring the story of the Silk Roadtraveling through history and geography to revive an ancient path that has united people of different cultures.

Sailing Through Time tells the story of Taymour, a Baalbek native whoin the prime of lifesets out along the Silk Road in search of China.

The show premiered in July at the Bacchus Temple, in Baalbek, Lebanon.

It was the opening performance of the 60th edition of the Baalbeck International Festival, an annual cultural event in Lebanon.

The production, comprising 195 artists from Lebanon, Spain, India, Ukraine and China, will tour Europe later this year. And Ivan Caracalla, head of Caracalla Dance Theater, plans to bring the production on a full tour of China next year.

Caracalla, who was in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, with his troupe to participate in the third Silk Road International Arts Festival from Sept 7-21, says: "The news today is full of stories of destruction, wars and many ugly things. We are losing our sense of humanity, our sense of values, our sense of morality. So, when we were thinking about a production for the Baalbeck International Festival, we wanted to do something to remind people that all of us share a common humanity.

"When we look back into our history, what's the biggest thing we learn from it? It was the Silk Road, which provided the background for many adventures and stories that have informed human, cultural and commercial exchanges between civilizations.

"The Silk Road brought together the world. It was not just about trade but about people meeting each other and people discovering each other. This is what made the Silk Road thrive," he says.

"This promoted the dialogue of civilization, the dialogue of culture, the dialogue of people. It was a great way to break barriers.

"Since Xi'an was the departure point of the Silk Road, we wanted to stage a show in Xi'an next year to kick off the China tour."

Ivan Caracalla, head of Caracalla Dance Theater.

He also says the production has dancers from China's Inner Mongolia Dance Theater, and their presence is the biggest tie-up that the Caracalla Dance Theater has had with China.

The Caracalla Dance Theater, founded by Caracalla's father, Abdel-Halim Caracalla, in 1968, is one of the leading dance companies in the Middle East.

The troupe, which has developed its own language of dance by bridging Eastern and Western styles through its work with companies and performers from around the world, has its own theater and dance school in Beirut.

Comprising around 60 core members, including Abdel-Halim Caracalla, the artistic director; and Ivan Caracalla's sister, Alissar Caracalla, the choreographer; the Caracalla Dance Theater has produced 16 dance shows. They include Two Thousand and One Nights and Knights of the Moon, which toured such major cities as Paris, London and Washington DC.

Meanwhile, the group has been performing in China since 2005.

In 2010, it worked with Chinese actors from the Hangzhou Song and Dance Theater for the first time for its musical and dance production Zayed and the Dream, which toured the world in 2011.

Ivan says that besides inviting Chinese performers to join the theater's productions, he hopes to have exchange programs where students from the Caracalla Dance School can visit China and learn traditional Chinese dance.
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The way Josh Fattal tries to look at it, the experience was only 1/17th of his life.

Five years since the Cheltenham High School alum's release from two years as a prisoner in Iran, Fattal has become a husband, father and PhD candidate at New York University.

It was a chance to renew my appreciation for life, my family, and friends, he said in an interview Wednesday.

The Elkins Park native was released from Tehran's notorious Evin Prison on Sept. 21, 2011, following two years of captivity on charges that he and two friends were American spies. Their families always claimed they were simply three young people vacationing in Iraqi Kurdistan near the Iraq-Iran border. Shane Bauer and Sara Short were also held as prisoners. Short was released in 2010. Bauer was released the same day as Fattal.

They became internationally known as "the three American hikers."

Fattal said he hopes to instill in his 3-year-old son some of the lessons he has learned while traveling.

Id like for him to learn and differentiate the good guys from the bad guys. Hes growing up in a world where the planet is becoming more uninhabitable and wars are more common. By introducing him to these things, he can get a sense of appreciation for life, Fattal said.

Since being freed, the social justice activist has done speaking tours at several universities, where hes shared his experiences as a prisoner and an object of what he called American and Iranian propaganda.

The Iranian government would instill fear in their citizens by lying to them and saying we were spies; In America, the media would portray [our captivity] as an act of extreme terrorism, he said.

The three hikers published a joint memoir titled A Sliver of Light."

The book brings people into a very intimate stage in my life, and they come away affected from it [after reading the book], he said.

Fattal, now 34, isnt phased by the two years he lost while being held captive. He plans to spend the rest of it devoted to his family and his charitable work.

He currently lives in Brooklyn.
The highest court in Massachusetts on Tuesday threw out a gun conviction against a Boston man in a ruling that says black men who flee when approached by police may be reacting to racial profiling rather than trying to hide criminal activity.

In its ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court found that Boston police had "far too little information" to stop Jimmy Warren after seeing him and another black man walking in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood about 30 minutes after they received a report of a home break-in in 2011.

Police had received only a vague description of three black males wearing dark clothing and hooded sweatshirts seen leaving the home. Warren ran when police approached him. After a foot chase, an officer arrested him in a backyard. He was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm after a handgun was found on the front lawn.

The SJC found that police did not have a reasonable suspicion to stop Warren and his friend, noting that an officer's hunch is not enough. The court cited a report by the Boston Police Department and an ACLU study that found black men were disproportionately stopped and frisked by Boston police between 2007 and 2010. The court said black men in Boston who flee when approached by police does not necessarily indicate that they are guilty of a crime.

"Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO (field interrogation and observation) encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity," Justice Geraldine Hines wrote for the court in the unanimous opinion.

"Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus."

The court vacated Warren's conviction.

Boston Police released a statement Tuesday night saying in part, "For the court to consider studies that were never introduced into evidence or offered into the record is concerning. At the very least, the court should have heard from the experts who compiled and analyzed the data. We will continue to consult with the district attorney's office moving forward."

Warren's lawyer did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
A self-proclaimed Tibetan healer in San Diego County convicted of sexually assaulted a client while giving her a massage was sentenced to state prison.

Vasiliy "Ardi" Galashev, 62, was sentenced by Judge Carlos Armour to four years in state prison for sexually assaulting a woman who hired him for massage services.

The incident first came to light in May 2015, when the alleged victim came to the Escondido Police Departments Family Protection Unit, saying she had been raped by 61-year-old Vasiliy "Ardi" Galashev.

Galashev, a registered sex offender in California, calls himself "Master Ardi" and claims he is a 7th generation Tibetan healer, according to Escondido Police detectives. He massages clients as a form of treatment.

During one of those massages, the alleged victim said she was raped. When she went to police, investigators collected DNA evidence from her and sent it to the sheriffs crime lab for analysis.

Two months later, detectives interviewed Galashev and collected DNA from him to compare to the evidence found on the woman.

The crime lab confirmed the two samples were an exact match in November 2015, Escondido police said.

Galashev pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the victim.
Fallen San Diego Police Department (SDPD) officer Jonathan "JD" De Guzman was honored during a ceremony celebrating San Diego's heroes on Tuesday.

The tribute was part of the "Honoring our Regions Heroes" ceremony at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido.

Officer De Guzman and Officer Wade Irwin were gunned down during a traffic stop in July. De Guzman was shot multiple times, at point-blank range in his patrol vehicle and died from his injuries. Officer Irwin continues to make a recovery from his injuries.

Officer De Guzman's son, Jonathan Jr. De Guzman, was watching as his father was honored posthumously.

Its hard, of course, said Jonathan. There are days I think Im fine, totally fine. There are times in class when I'm at home where it just feels weird and I know my dad isnt there anymore.

A two minute video tribute during the ceremony showed slices of Officer De Guzman's life, from childhood to having his own family, to his time as a SDPD officer.

De Guzman's family took to the stage accepting a plaque and a donation to help the family.

His 17-year-old son Jonathan talked about how much he appreciates his father's brothers in blue becoming an extended family.

Even though my dad is gone they're like, its like another way I can have my dads presence with me," he said. "So the police department means a lot.

Jonathan made the audience laugh as he talked about how they often check on the family, offering rides even when they're not needed.

His family talked about how difficult the past two months have been for their family.

"I try to stay strong. I try to stay motivated and determined on what I want and my goals are to continue my dads legacy," Jonathan said.

Jonathan says he does not think he wants to be a police officer, but he definitely is interested in a career helping others.

He says he has learned a lot about his dad in the two months since his death.

Now hes hoping people in the community learn police are people too.

I want everyone to know every police officer is a person too. Everyone always has negative views toward cops and people dont understand that they're people and they have families and their own goals," he said. "They're not just people in uniform.
A two-alarm fire damaged a liquor store in La Mesa early Wednesday.

Heartland Fire and Rescue crews responded just after 11:15 p.m. Tuesday to the La Mesa Market and Liquor on Lake Murray Boulevard.

Jonathan Boutros was at home when he noticed smoke in the sky.

He arrived and found a lot of fire crews fighting a fire in the liquor store that has been in the neighborhood for years.

It was pretty crazy. We werent expecting it to be this big, Boutros said.

Boutros captured video of flames shooting through the roof and witnessed the side of the building collapsing.

Crews had a handle on the fire in approximately an hour after it was reported.

Multiple people called 911 to report the fire, Sonny Saghera, Public Information Officer with Heartland Fire and Rescue said.

One San Diego Fire-Rescue firefighter was taken to the Sharp Grossmont Hospital however his injuries do not appear to be fire-related, according to Saghera.

Fire investigators are looking into the cause of the fire.
Two local bayou-tied organizations are raising relief funds for Louisiana musicians affected by recent flooding.

Gator By The Bay, the largest Louisiana-themed music and food festival in San Diego, and The Bon Temps Social Club of San Diego (BTSC), a non-profit that sponsors Cajun and zydeco dance events, are hosting a benefit concert on Wednesday at Tio Leos Mexican Restaurant in Morena.

Admission is $10 and all proceeds will go towards the Louisiana Musicians' Flood Relief Fund.

The event goes from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. and features a Louisiana-inspired dance lesson and live sets by seven local zydeco, blues and swing bands. Here's a look at the schedule:

6:00 p.m. - Dance Lesson with Greg Benusa

6:30 p.m. - Naked I

7:00 p.m. - Euphoria Brass Band

7:40 p.m. - The Bayou Brothers

8:20 p.m. - Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra

9:00 p.m. - Theo & The Zydeco Patrol

9:40 p.m. - Mercedes Moore Band

10:20 p.m. - Casey Hensley Band

Concertgoers will have a chance at winning a limited-edition, signed Gator By The Bay poster through a silent auction, and random drawings for CDs, Gator By The Bay t-shirts and restaurant gift cards will take place throughout the night.

Click here to donate to the Louisiana Musicians Flood Relief Fund.
San Diego Police are asking for the public's help in finding a missing 36-year-old mother and her 11-year-old daughter.

Yadira Robledo, 36, and Michelle Rosas, 11, were last seen on Sept. 16, San Diego Police (SDPD) said. Th pair live in southeastern San Diego.

The circumstances of their disappearance are unknown, police said.

Robledo is described as 5-foot-4 and 200 pounds; she has black hair and brown eyes, police say. She was last seen wearing a green shirt and black leggings.

Rosas is described as 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds; she has brown hair and brown eyes. It is unknown what she was wearing when she was last seen.

Police are asking anyone with information on the pair to contact the San Diego Police Department at (619) 531-2000. The SDPD case number is 16-038797.

As of 6:30 a.m. Thursday, police confirmed the mother and daughter were still missing. No other information was immediately available.
More than 20 law enforcement officers, public safety officials and other emergency services personnel were honored this week at a special Hero Awards held by the North County Business Chamber.

Two California Highway Patrol Officers were honored for helping save the life of a young woman who threatened to jump off of a highway overpass. Officers Kerry Comphel and Jason Hughes each grabbed a hold of the woman to keep her from falling into traffic.

In the span of 10 minutes, California State Lifeguards Cole Magro and Jeff Knapp worked together to rescue 19 people who were at risk of drowning in a massive rip current in Carlsbad. They were honored for preventing what could have been multiple fatalities.

Escondido Police Officer Patrick Hand was honored for his work to solve a series of indecent exposure crimes. Hand got a positive identification from all of the victims and arrested a suspect.

The Rincon Fire Department Paramedic team of James Banister and Scott Ferguson were credited for saving four lives in seven months. Banister and Ferguson were honored because few teams have the number of saves in a short period of time.

U.S. Secret Service Supervisory Investigative Analyst Blair Keene tracked down a SeaWorld employee who was under investigation for stealing $818,000 through an elaborate embezzlement scheme.

Northwestern Division Juvenile Services Officer Bob Briggs covered 30 schools across four districts. Even on a day off, Officer Briggs went to work to help a suicidal student who he knew had access to guns.

San Diego Police Department Northern Division, Officer Jacob Vasinda helped in the arrest of a suspect wanted for violently attacking and injuring an 88-year-old business owner.

Deputy Probation Officer Cyrus Rust has assisted every division in the Escondido Police Department and has helped in several high-profile cases, including homicides.

In Valley Center, San Diego County Sheriffs Deputy John Malan worked with his partners to arrest more than 50 people and confiscate over 20 guns, including high-powered assault rifles.

SDSO Deputy Jeffrey Chu is credited with saving the life of a young woman who was being held against her will and forced to work as a prostitute.

A member of the Joint Effort Program between the City of Escondido and Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Deportation Officer Mario Vidrio is credited with identifying a woman who had been stabbed multiple times and left for dead. Her attacker was arrested within 12 hours of the crime.

Detectives Cesar Delgado and Mark Green tracked down stolen items from San Diego City College in an investigation that led to the arrest of a university employee. As a team, theyre credited with 30 arrests in more than 60 cases.

Murrieta Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Kean was honored for leading by example.

DEA Special Agent Ryan Ford of the San Diego Field Divisions OCDETF Strike Force put in hundreds of hours of undercover surveillance resulting in the arrest of 11 members of a heroin drug ring.

San Diego Lifeguard Jordan Gaudet was honored for rescuing a family visiting San Diego and swimming in Mission Beach on the Fourth of July. As part of the rescue, he moved four victims to shore safely without any of his own equipment

In an investigation of a man accused of trafficking assault weapons in the North County, ATF Special Agents Scott Brahin and Sean Becker stumbled onto much more. The agents saved the life of a 15-year-old runaway while disrupting an illegal firearms operation.

Oceanside Lifeguard Nicholas Kaipo Kelley helped save a mans life through early AED activation and his ability to remain calm.

SDPD Northern Division Officers Dan Neifer and Josh Clabough started a program using GPS and radio technology to stop bike thefts. During the first year, 60 felony cases were prosecuted connected to their program.

Escondido Captains Dan Revere and Tyler Batson were recognized for their work improving safety training for all firefighters operating in the hazard zone.

DEA Officer Jason Arnotti led the Narcotics Task Force to disrupt a drug trafficking organization based in Carlsbad was distributing large quantities of methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana and pharmaceuticals around the county and throughout the U.S.

Cal Fire Captain Steve VanHeertum suffered burns to both hands and forearms when he helped rescue a victim in a head-on traffic collision. The captain was on his way home at the time he spotted the crash on a remote stretch of Highway 78 between Ramona and Santa Ysabel.

NBC 7s Omari Fleming spoke with the son of fallen officer Jonathan JD De Guzman, who says life without his father has been tough, but he is fortunate for the support he is receiving from the community.
Families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 attacks are calling on President Barack Obama to sign a controversial piece of legislation.

Survivors and widows staged a protest outside the White House on Tuesday and held a news conference on Capitol Hill. The president has threatened to veto the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

The bill would allow U.S. victims of terror attacks and their families to sue foreign actors who support terrorism. It passed both the House and Senate unanimously, and supporters said its about justice.

Wed like President Obama to sign a clear message across the world, said Mindy Kleinberg, a 9/11 widow. If youre going to come to our country and murder our citizens, were going to hold you accountable.

The White House opposes the legislation, saying it will open up Americans to similar suits in different countries and damage diplomatic relations.
Fairfax County is hiring a civilian auditor to monitor police officers' use of force and police-involved shootings.

The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to create the auditor's position.

The Washington Post reported the auditor will be paid at least $98,000 a year and report directly to the Board of Supervisors.

An independent auditor was one of more than 200 recommendations by a task force formed after the fatal shooting of Springfield resident John Geer by a county officer in 2013.

Earlier this year, the officer, Adam Torres, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after a protracted investigation, where county attorneys were accused of stonewalling.

The county is also considering a requirement for officers to wear body cameras.
Security for the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture will be at very high levels, according to a document obtained by News4.

The Joint Special Event Threat Assessment, prepared by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, said there are no current, credible threats surrounding Saturday's opening of the new museum. But the assessment referred to the sustained interest of terrorists and criminals in targeting mass gatherings or landmarks in the National Capital region.

It specifically referenced concerns about white supremacist extremist groups, as well as international threats from groups, like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. Kim Dine, former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, has participated in many such high security events.

"Given the significance of this museum, significance in history, the fact that it is in downtown Washington, D.C., and the timing with all the other things going on nationally and internationally, it is of the utmost importance to all the law enforcement organizations to coordinate," Dine said.

The actual physical security perimeter for the museum's opening was taking shape Tuesday night. Those lucky enough to have secured the timed entry tickets should be prepared for a considerable walk to get inside.

Visitors can only gain entry through security screening at access points at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW or at 17th Street and Independence Avenue SW. Many streets in the area will be blocked off, but Metro stations will be open.

Stay with News4 and NBCWashington.com for the latest information on events leading up to and including the opening weekend. Check out our special section for an inside preview look.
A man pleaded guilty to killing his Rockville, Maryland, neighbors on Mothers Day, 2015, before leaving on a cruise with his parents.

Scott Tomaszewski pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder, admitting that he killed and robbed Richard and Jody Vilardo. Jody Vilardos body was found in the kitchen with eight stab wounds, while Richard Vilardo was found on the patio after being stabbed 42 times.

Police said Tomesczewski broke in to the home through a ground floor window and attacked the sleeping couple in their bed, starting with Richard Vilardo. Jody Vilardo managed to run downstairs but died after Tomesczewski stabbed her as she tried to call for help.

Investigators said Richard Vilardo put up a fight.

"Whether it was the bathroom or in the closet or in the bedroom, there was nowhere you could walk in this house and not see evidence of the attack," said John McCarthy, state's attorney for Montgomery County.

Police began looking at past burglaries in the neighborhood. Another neighbors home had been recently burglarized, and Tomesczewski was seen on surveillance video pawning some of the items taken from that neighbors home.

When he was developed as a suspect, he was on a cruise with his parents on the Pacific Coast, a trip he left on within hours of killing the Vilardos. When the ship docked in Alaska, he was met by detectives, who found a knife with traces of Richard Vilardos blood and money also bearing traces of the victims blood.

"He ran toward the danger rather than away from it, because he was attempting to save the woman that he loved," said McCarthy.

Tomesczewski faces a life sentence without parole. He will be sentenced in November.
A local college sophomore spent the summer working as a nanny to make money, but a scam almost cost her all of her money.

I signed up through Care.com, and thats how I found the first family I nannied, Delany Turner said.

That online service that connects families with caregivers worked so well the first time, when Turner wanted more hours, sue used it again.

She got an email from someone claiming to be a military mom who was moving from Norway to the United States. The email described the job in detail and told Turner she would be receiving money in advance.

She told me that she was going to send me a check, Turner said.

She received a cashiers check for $1,950 with instructions to deposit the check, deduct her first weeks wages -- $350  and deposit the remaining $1,600 in a separate account in cash.

Turner said she didnt think it was a big deal since the family was moving from Europe.

But her bank account was drained after the cashier's check bounced.

I was just shocked, she said.

The Federal Trade Commission said it has received 1,200 similar complaints since January 2015, with most involving caregivers targeted by someone seeking childcare or nanny services.

Asked if it has added any additional security measures, Care.com said in part, "We have implemented a number of features, including: Proactive email communications to caregivers on our site with tips on how to spot and avoid scams, resources on how to avoid consumer fraud scams, a monitored messaging system for all communications, and fraud detection tools to create a safer environment."

Police investigated Turners case, and her account was made whole, but the scam artists were never found.
What to Know The former girlfriend of NASCAR driver Kurt Busch was charged Tuesday with stealing from a military charity she led.

Prosecutors believe Patricia Driscoll took money from the D.C.-based Armed Forces Foundation.

A 2014 tax form claims she misused money for meals, travel, parking tickets, makeup and personal gifts.

The former girlfriend of NASCAR driver Kurt Busch was charged Tuesday with stealing from a military charity she led.

Court documents don't say how much prosecutors believe Patricia Driscoll took from the District of Columbia-based Armed Forces Foundation, whose mission is to support service members, veterans and their families.

But a 2014 tax form for the nonprofit said the "foundation has become aware of suspected misappropriations" by Driscoll totaling more than $599,000 for the years 2006 to 2014. It said she misused money for meals, travel, parking tickets, makeup and personal gifts.

Driscoll was indicted on seven federal charges: Two counts each of wire fraud, mail fraud, and tax evasion, and one count of attempts to interfere with administration of Internal Revenue laws. She also faces a first-degree fraud charge under District of Columbia law.

An 11-page indictment charged Driscoll with using foundation money to pay her personal bills, diverting foundation funds to her personal bank account and lying to the Internal Revenue Service about her salary and benefits.

Driscoll, 38, of Ellicott City, Maryland, declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday.

"All the allegations that have been made are unproven, and Ms. Driscoll contests them and looks forward to her opportunity to do so in court," her attorney, Barry J. Pollack, said Tuesday evening.

Driscoll had resigned from the charity in 2015 amid an internal investigation into published reports alleging that she used foundation funds for her personal expenses. At the time she left, she had been president of the foundation for 12 years.

Driscoll and Busch had a very public breakup in 2014 after she accused him of physically and verbally abusing her about a week after they split. Driscoll said Busch smashed her head into a bedroom wall and choked her in his motorhome at Dover International Speedway in Delaware.

Law enforcement officials said there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges against him, but a family court commissioner in the state ultimately granted her request for a protective order, requiring Busch to stay away from her.

As a result, NASCAR suspended Busch two days before the Daytona 500. He sat out the first three races of the 2015 season before being reinstated.
What to Know Police said a fifth victim was found on Sunday.

Officials said the search for more victims has been slowed by the unstable condition of the building, as well as extreme heat conditions.

The explosion and fire on Aug. 11 injured 31 residents.

The seventh and final victim of the explosion and fire that tore through an apartment building in Silver Spring, Maryland, has been identified.

Saeda Ibrahim, 40, was killed after natural gas sparked an explosion and fire at the Flower Branch Apartments on the 8700 block of Arliss Avenue, federal and Montgomery County officials said.

Ibrahim is the last person identified to have been killed by the disaster.

Two women, three men and two little boys were killed.

Maria Auxiliadorai Castellon-Martinez, 53, Augusto Jimenez Sr., 62, and Saul Paniagua, 65, were identified on August 19.

Eight-year-old Deibi David Samir Lainez Morales and 3-year-old Fernando Josue Hernandez Orellana were identified on August 23.

The explosion and fire injured 31 residents. Three firefighters also were hurt battling the blaze.

A natural gas explosion occurred in the meter room of 8701 Arliss Ave., feeding the fire that consumed the apartments upstairs, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said last month.

A nonprofit group that helps immigrant communities will file a lawsuit on behalf of people impacted by the blast.
A nurse beat a 20-year-old student with autism on a school bus in an attack caught on video, sources tell News4.

Prince George's County police and Prince George's County Public Schools (PGCPS) are investigating after the Sept. 1 incident, police said.

Sources said the nurse became frustrated when the student began poking her in the parking lot of C. Elizabeth Rieg Regional School in Mitchellville, Maryland.

The nurse hit him and struck him with her shoe, sources said.

The nurse was not a PGCPS employee, the district said; she was hired by the family of another student.

PGCPS CEO Dr. Kevin Maxwell saw the video Sept. 14 and gave it to police, the school district said in a statement. Five school district employees have been placed on leave as the investigation continues.

No one has been charged, police said.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated from a previous version.

Stay with News4 for more details on this developing story.
University of Maryland students listened to a diverse panel talk about traffic stops Tuesday night, outraged and scared after seeing what happened during the Terence Crutcher stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Friday.

University of Maryland student Mark Busbee worries about getting stopped by police for driving while black. He's scared after seeing video showing a Tulsa police officer shoot and kill Crutcher, 40.

After I saw the video, I was just astonished, Busbee said. He had his hands up. The female officer didn't give him a warning shot. It was just crazy to see.

Busbee and dozens of students listened to a criminal defense attorney, a judge, and Prince George's County police officers talk about what to do during traffic stops. Bobby Henry has practiced law for more than three decades.

What should people do if they get stopped by a police officer? Number one, if you get stopped by a police officer, you ought to follow the instructions of the police officer, said Henry, a criminal defense attorney. I know some of my colleagues will disagree with me on that point, but my position is what you want to do is survive.

Henry told students if they have a problem with the officer, take it to court or talk to the officer's superior after the traffic stop.

Should you be stopped, I always recommend, especially if it's at night, you turn on all the lights in your car, you roll down all the windows, put both of your hands on the steering wheel, and wait for further instructions, Henry said.

Some students fear that won't make a difference.

"I always feel like no matter if I'm doing everything right, that just seeing most of the things that have been going on, that if I stop and do what is said, that things can still go wrong, said Kelsey Stewart, a student at the University of Maryland.

Busbee said the panel was beneficial.

You have to do anything you can to stay alive, Busbee said. That's how it is now in the United States of America, and its a shame. It's 2016.
Virginia State Police said one of their explosive detection dogs has been found safe.

A Facebook post on the Prince William County Police Department page said Chuy went missing in the Nokesville, Virginia, area. They said he decided to take the day off shortly after 11 a.m. Tuesday.

Shortly before 9:30 p.m., Chuy's handler, Brandon West, posted on his Facebook page that the dog was found and safe at home. West thanked all those who searched and spread the word on social media.

No word on how Chuy spent his "day off."
Maine State Police say two men were killed and two others injured in a traffic accident involving a dump truck and a pickup truck on Route 9 in Durham on Wednesday morning.

Troopers said the pickup ran into the side of the dump truck shortly after 7 a.m. as the pickup exited Rabbit Road. The pickup caught fire after the collision and passersby pulled three men from the burning truck.

The two men who were killed have been identified as Malakai Cawood, 21, of Limington and Brendon Harthorn, 24, of Cornish. The third man inside the pickup - Jeremy Reardon, 35, of Buxton, was taken by medical helicopter to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, w here he is being treated for multiple injuries.

All three men were employees of Plowman Construction of Gorham and were headed to a job site in the area.

The dump truck driver - Clifton Larrabee, 42, of Durham - was taken to Maine Medical Center in Portland. The dump truck is owned by Larrabee Construction of Durham.

State police said they are not sure yet who was driving the pickup truck.

Route 9 is expected to reopen around mid-afternoon.
A third suspect in the murder of a 19-year-old man this past January faced a judge Wednesday.

Rigoberto Landaverde-Lemus, 22, of Everett ordered to be held without bail during his murder charge arraignment.

Landaverde-Lemus is accused of killing Omar Reyes during the evening of Jan. 2 with two others, 17-year-old Jose Vasquez Ardon and 18-year-old Cristian Nunez-Flores, also Everett residents.

The Middlesex County district attorney's office says police officers were able to connect Landaverde-Lemus to the crime using DNA and fingerprint evidence that was found at Ardon's home.

Ardon and Nunez-Flores were arrested and arraigned earlier this year.

Authorities also add that evidence suggests the three defendants are members of MS-13, a violent gang originating from Central America.
Newington police have released surveillance photos of two suspects wanted in connection with an armed robbery at a Newington motel on Thursday Sept. 8.

Police responded to the Siesta Motel on Berlin Turnpike around 3 a.m. for reports of an armed robbery.

A man and woman were approached by the suspect when as they were going into their motel room, police said.

The suspect tried to force the man into the room but the victim resisted. When the suspect exposed a handgun that was in his waistband, he demanded the male victim hand over his duffel bag, Newington Police said.

After taking the bag, the suspect fled on foot.

Police said the victim described the thief as being in his 20s, 6-foot to 6-foot-2 tall with a slender build, medium-length braided hair, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants.

Police released surveillance photos of two possible suspects.

Anyone with any information regarding this incident is encouraged to contact Officer W. Kornbrath at (860) 666-8445 or wkornbrath@newingtonct.gov, reference case # I20163313.
A man is facing a number of charges after taking his two children from their mother's vehicle and fleeing from Connecticut to Massachusetts.

Massachusetts State Police said troopers were on the lookout Tuesday for a gray Audi that had originated from New Britain, Connecticut. The driver was identified as Kurtis Webb, 28.

Police said he had forcibly removed his two children from their mother's vehicle in Connecticut and was headed to Springfield, Massachusetts.

Webb was later arrested later in Springfield without incident and the children were reunited with their mother.

Webb was charged with being a fugitive from justice from Connecticut, two counts of cruelty toward a child  risk of injury, and two counts of disturbing the peace.
City officials in Manchester, New Hampshire, have received the first round of approval for tens of thousands of dollars to pay contractors for biohazard cleanup on public property.

Public Health Director Tim Soucy says the funds aren't in response to an uptick in crime, the city is just looking for a better, more efficient way to clean up.

Soucy says he came up with the idea along with fire and police officials after recent incidents in the city, including a homicide at Prout's park where he says part of the bleachers were removed due to blood. There was also a stabbing at a parking garage, where Soucy said he himself and public works crews actually cleaned the blood one morning.

"We would be working with contractors who work with biohazard remediation all the time, it would take the burden off our fire department, public works folks so we have a more efficient safer way of doing it," Soucy said.

If the budget is approved, it would pay for biohazard companies to clean up blood and bodily fluids at crime scenes and accidents.

"Our fire department will come out with bleach and a water solution sometimes. If you're using a high pressure hose you can get a little more splashing then you'd like to see so this helps us contain the scene," Soucy said.

The money will only be used for cleanup on public property.

"I think it's important to note this is not being driven by crime, this is being driven by a way to do things safer and more efficiently," Soucy said.

Soucy also added that the funds will also protect city officials.

"We're always concerned with HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, the blood born pathogens so this is just a new way that's more efficient of cleaning up a crime scene or a trauma scene the result of a motor vehicle accident," he said.

Cheryl Schwotzer lives right near Prout's park. While the Attorney General's Office has a separate fund for homicide cleanups, she and her husband say they support the public funding.

"This is probably only the second time I've been down here since it happened, because I just don't want to be here anymore," Schwotzer said. "I think it's a good idea to have the professionals do it, people that are trained."

Approval for the funding will have to go to the full committee of Alderman in October.

Soucy says he believes the money would last for years and if approved, they would make a policy for managing it.
The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department is monitoring the site of a recent major fire as it works to assess its possible impacts on a state-endangered species.

The little brown bat is a species that has been in sharp decline in Vermont. A colony of little brown bats recently lost a key roosting site, when the historic covered bridge connecting Cornwall and Salisbury was destroyed September 10 in a massive blaze.

"It was a great home," small mammals biologist Alyssa Bennett said of the wooden one-lane bridge. "They were using all the tight crevices, it had good sun exposure, and access to a water source, which enabled them to forage for insects."

A recent study tallied approximately 180 of the struggling little brown bats inside the wooden covered bridge, Bennett said. However, she said it is likely most of those bats had moved onto a different area before the flames broke out, as they start preparing for the winter.

Bennett explained the animals tend to return to the same roosting site for generations. She added that in Cornwall, conservationists have preserved open space near the bridge and installed bat boxes to create additional habitat options for the animals.

Roughly 90 percent of Vermont's little brown bats suddenly died in 2009 from a mysterious fungal disease called white nose syndrome, Bennett said. It causes the animals to wake prematurely from their hibernation, when they could not find food, and weakens their bodies.

"It's a very fragile and vulnerable species," Bennett said of the little brown bat.

One witness to the fire reported to Bennett that she saw a bat zip from the flaming timbers of the bridge, only to drop to the ground. On recent surveys of the area around the bridge, Bennett said she has not found any dead bats.

Bats often elicit negative responses from people, but not near the buggy Otter Creek, said Cornwall resident Richard Isenberg.

"They have an important place in the ecosystem," he told necn. "There is no one who lives near the cedar swamp here who isn't grateful to have bats keeping down the mosquitoes."

Isenberg was glad to hear Bennett is finding more bats in conservation shelters near the bridge. She believes they are ones that used to roost in the bridge.

Bennett explained she and colleagues believe many of the little brown bats had already left the covered bridge for their fall and winter spots before the flames broke out. Caves and mines are a destination in the cooler months, as the bats look to start their hibernation.

The bats' departure from the bridge would have come after their babies learned to fly, Bennett pointed out.

"If this fire had happened in June or July, those bats certainly would've perished," Bennett said.

Long-term, Bennett plans to watch the land around the destroyed bridge to see if bats return. She said officials with the Vermont Agency of Transportation have pledged to soon start installing more houses to provide bats with extra habitat, trying to make up for what was lost.

Investigators with the Vermont State Police are still looking into the cause of the fire, spokesman Scott Waterman said.

The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has published information online to assist in conserving the state's fragile bat species. You can view it here.
Quinnipiac University is condemning a controversial photo shared on social media.

"The university takes this matter very seriously and acted swiftly to discipline those responsible for the offensive photo," the university said in a statement. "This incident does not reflect the true nature of our university, where we have a long history of zero tolerance for any acts of racism, hatred or bigotry."

On Monday, someone who identified themselves as a Quinnipiac student shared a photo of a girl with a black substance smeared on her face, captioned with the phrase "Black Lives Matter."

"I'm livid, I'm hurt and more importantly, I'm empowered to do something," the student wrote about the posted photo. "I am a black student and I should feel comfortable on my own campus."

A source with knowledge of the incident says the person in the photo's roommate took the picture, wrote the caption and posted the photo to social media. NBC Connecticut was told the roommate is facing disciplinary action and the girl seen in the photo is not.

The provost met with the students on Tuesday night to discuss the incident.

An email sent to Quinnipiac students read:

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,

I am deeply troubled to learn of a recent incident in which a racially offensive photo of one of our students was posted on social media. This incident is clearly not reflective of our values as a university community. Please know the university has acted swiftly to discipline the individual responsible for this action.

I believe this is an opportunity for all of us to reaffirm our long standing commitment to diversity, inclusion and creating an environment that is supportive and respectful of all of its members.

I want to thank the students, faculty and staff for continuing to support and participate in our various efforts around diversity and inclusion on our three campuses.

Mark Thompson

Executive Vice President and Provost
The husband of a Maine woman whose body was discovered buried behind her Fairfield home has been arrested and charged with her murder.

State police say they arrested Luc Tieman in Waterville, where he stayed overnight in a motel.

Tieman, 32, claimed that his wife Valerie Tieman had disappeared from their pickup truck after he had gone into a Wal-Mart and returned on August 30, according to state police.

In an interview with necn affiliate, WLBZ on Monday, Tieman said he didn't call police because he wanted to find Valerie on his own.

"I wasn't going to make her look bad," said Luc Tieman. "I was waiting for her to get into contact with her parents."

Valerie Tieman, 34, was reported missing to police on September 9 by her parents; her body was found in a wooded area about 200-300 yards behind the home she shared with her husband and his parents on Tuesday afternoon.

"The missing person case turned into a death investigation very quickly," said Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland. "Now, it's a homicide."

Police did not disclose the cause or manner of death. Court documents state Valerie Tieman died on August 25, five days before her husband claimed she went missing, and 16 days before she was reported missing.

"It's a strange juxtaposition of being mad, and thinking there must have been something that led to this," said Valerie's friend, Emily Fournier.

She described the husband and wife as the "perfect couple," and said there were never any signs of serious issues in their three-year marriage.

Luc Tieman did not resist arrest and was taken to Somerset County Jail. It's unclear if he has an attorney.

He will make his first court appearance Friday morning in Skowhegan.
A Massachusetts man was found guilty Wednesday of killing a former Army sniper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It took a Suffolk Superior Court jury ninety minutes to convict 28-year-old Salem resident Peter Castillo of first-degree murder in the 2012 shooting death of Stephen Perez.

Prosecutors say Castillo shot Perez in the back during a fight in a parking garage in Boston's Theater District. It was an altercation allegedly sparked by a racial slur.

Castillo then took off to the Dominican Republic, but police arrested him there in January 2015 and brought him back to Massachusetts, where he was charged.

Perezs death has been difficult for his family to accept. Family said he served two tours in Afghanistan only to be killed here at home.

"We all loved Stephen so much," said cousin Arianna Bordonaro. "He had a heart of gold do anything for anybody."

His family said they were glad to finally see justice served.

"Itll never bring back Stephen but it is something we can move on from," said Bordonaro.

Castillo is scheduled to be sentenced on Monday.
Anna Price encourages Christians to engage positively with Halloween rather than hide away, on what many see as the darkest night of the year.

Anna Price encourages Christians to engage positively with Halloween rather than hide away, on what many see as the darkest night of the year.

First service takes place at Norwich church site SOUL Church hosted around 400 people for a special service on the site of their new building on Heartsease Lane. Read more

Dereham draws up list of warm places for winter As rising energy prices make it harder to heat homes, churches in Dereham are leading the way in creating warm spaces where people can go. Read more

South Norfolk church scoops national award A medieval Anglican church in a tiny hamlet in South Norfolk has won a national award and a 10,000 boost. Read more

Dereham churches help people to help themselves A group of churches in Dereham have launched an ambitious project which aims to meet needs in the town, including the provision of food and skills training. Read more

Executive assistant and nursery manager jobs SOUL Church is a vibrant, welcoming and growing church in Norwich. They are seeking an organised and versatile Executive Assistant to provide key support to the churchs Senior Pastors, as well as a qualified Nursery Manager to head up SOUL Nursery. Read more

Halloween light in Gorleston church On Halloween this year, St Mary Magdalene Church in Gorleston will be preparing to welcome around 200 families to experience their Light on a Dark Night event. Read more

An opportunity for Norwich to pray for the nation Rev Nigel Fox, who has served as a Methodist Minister for 15 years in Norwich, shares an open invitation to pray for the nation at a crucial moment. Read more

Norwich church seeks musicians Kingdom Ambassadors International Church is appealing for instrumentlists, keyboardists and guitarists to be part of their worship experience. Read more

Please keep Rishi in your prayers Andy Bryant urges us to pray for our political leaders, especially the new Prime Minister, and avoid unhelpful judgementalism. Read more

Emilys art boosts growing Yarmouth foodbank A pupil at a primary school in Bradwell has been selling her pictures in order to raise money for the Yarmouth and Magdalen Foodbank, which is expanding its capacity and is seeking more volunteers. Read more

Patrick Regan helps Norwich to bounce forwards On Saturday St Stephens in Norwich hosted Bouncing Forwards as part of a national tour by the mental health charity Kintsugi Hope. Read more

Painting and biblical feasting in Overstrand There will be opportunities to improve your painting skills and indulge in some biblical feasting next month at the Pleasaunce in Overstrand in North Norfolk. Read more

Latest Norfolk Christian community events Events of interest to the Norwich and Norfolk Christian community happening over the next few weeks are listed. Read more

National award for Dereham Christian bookshop The Green Pastures Christian bookshop in Dereham has won a national award for providing boxes of Christian books to 21 local schools. Read more

Norma's care home jigsaw challenge complete A resident at Norwich-based care home Corton House has completed an incredible 70 jigsaw puzzles in celebration of the homes 70th anniversary this year. Read more

Norwich charity's appeal to support Palestinian students A Norwich educational charity, set up in memory of a Norwich Anglican priest, to support students from a Palestinian refugee camp, is inviting people to support its Christmas appeal  to be launched on November 29. Read more

Norfolk drug and alcohol charity pays tribute to its founder Andy Sexton, CEO of the Matthew Project, introduces a series of tributes from the charity to its founder, Peter Farley. Read more
Security is a top priority at the Bank of Labor, but the financial institution updates its formal information security policy only once a year, maybe twice, regardless of what's happening in the ever-changing threat landscape.

That's not to say that the union bank ignores emerging threats such as new malware variants or phishing schemes, says Shaun Miller, the bank's information security officer. On the contrary, the organization, which has seven branches in the Kansas City, Kan., area plus an office in Washington, routinely tweaks its firewalls and intrusion-protection systems in response to new and active threats. To avoid fatiguing its 120 users, however, it refrains from formalizing new policies more frequently.

"The purpose of our policies is to be at a high level, not to cover every eventuality out there," says Miller. "We update procedures for tactical day-to-day stuff, but when it comes to our strategic direction on security going forward, we change our policies in a limited fashion so as to not overwhelm users."

[ Download the full report: IT Security's Looming Tipping Point ]

The Bank of Labor isn't alone. Given how fast the threat landscape changes, it can be difficult for a company to modify something as rigid as a corporate security model to keep pace with every new attack vector. In a recent survey of 287 U.S.-based IT and business professionals conducted by Computerworld, CIO and CSO, 33% of the respondents said that they work for organizations that have had the same model for information security management in place for five or more years. Meanwhile, 23% said their model had been in place for three to five years, 33% said one to three years, and just 11% said less than a year.

However, 50% of those polled said their organizations are considering making changes to their infosec management models. When members of that group were asked what factors are driving their employers to contemplate a change, the top three responses were concerns about breaches and data loss (cited by 78% of the 144 respondents), technology advancements and upgrades (53%), and regulatory compliance (49%).

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

How often to adopt infosec policy changes is a conundrum. Companies need to come up with a way to remain flexible, to ensure that their policies and procedures reflect the current threat landscape, yet they can't hand down so many new rules and restrictions that they frustrate users and inadvertently compel them to consider bypassing corporate rules, explains Kelley Mak, an analyst at Forrester Research.

At the same time, companies have to strike a balance between using firefighting tactics to address the most current threats and treating information security policy as a holistic strategy, Mak says. "It's not as simple as taking the data and making a new policy, because you have to make sure information workers aren't upset," he says. "The more restrictions you put in place, the more likely someone is to go around it."

Filling day-to-day gaps

That's exactly what Miller is trying to avoid. The Bank of Labor maintains an information security policy that addresses high-level issues, including the bank's overall stance on security and broad rules, such as a mandate requiring employees to use passwords to access data. The policies, which are put in place only after board approval, don't get into the weeds of the technology or spell out details such as the exact character requirements for passwords (which might change over time, anyway).

The purpose of our policies is to be at a high level, not to cover every eventuality out there. Shaun Miller, information security officer, Bank of Labor

To complement the broad policies, Miller's group regularly modifies rules to tackle current security gaps. Most recently, the security team blocked the use of Flash software because of its well-publicized vulnerabilities, and because it's rarely used in business-related websites anymore. "We don't consider that a change to policy," Miller says. "Our board of directors approves policy, and they don't know what Flash is or what it does. It's just an example of a simple, day-to-day business response to threats as needed."

To keep people in the loop about updates, Miller sends email messages announcing changes and explaining why they're important. Saying he often includes links to background information, Miller explains that making sure people understand why the changes are necessary and being clear about the risks has been instrumental in preventing user frustration and ensuring that employees are willing to comply with even with small policy changes.

Test, test, test

Devin Meade, senior systems manager in charge of security at Frankfurt Short Bruza (FSB), says he prefers to keep security policy fluid because the architectural engineering planning firm is relatively small (it has 150 users) and because it isn't directly affected by regulatory requirements. While FSB does have a formal security policy that is approved by the board of directors, Meade and his team make frequent recommendations for new procedures, using a small steering committee of about a half-dozen users to solicit feedback before rolling out the changes to a wider user audience.

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

"Our standard way of doing patches or making changes to our security stance is to test them out on a machine to see how they work and to roll them out to a representative group of people," he explains. That steering committee then tests the changes to determine what will work and what won't for FSB's users.

For example, Meade and his team recommended bumping up encryption. But during the steering committee's tests, the changes were found to make VPN access too unstable and slow, so Meade's team went back to the drawing board. It was a similar story when the team tried to enforce URL whitelisting and blacklisting to restrict user access to certain "not safe for work" sites. That move, Meade says, didn't work out as anticipated because the technology involved wasn't mature enough at the time.

Only after being approved by FSB's steering committee do infosec policy or procedure changes get implemented across the company. "My job is to inform [the executive team and business sponsors] about what we can do and what the process would be if we made the changes," Meade says. "Because we're a small firm, we can make modifications as the technology changes."

Most organizations aren't as nimble as FSB and don't update security policies often enough, and many don't test-drive changes to gauge what's effective and not too cumbersome, says Forrester's Mak. "You don't find a lot of organizations doing the right amount of testing to identify vulnerabilities, so there's not an accurate understanding of what the effect is on the environment from the human side," he says.

Mak advises companies to create security awareness programs that not only provide direction to employees, but also underscore the importance of embracing a serious security culture.

CIO / Computerworld / CSO

Getting users on board

That approach will soon to be in place at Fay School. Like the Bank of Labor, the school makes frequent minor updates to its infosec procedures to keep up with emerging threats but enacts major policy changes only a few times a year to avoid overwhelming users, says Joseph Adu, director of technology at the Southborough, Mass., private school, which serves grades pre-K to 9. Abu, who came on board a year ago from the for-profit sector, is drawing on his experiences in the business world as he develops the school's IT policies. Among other things, he's making a concerted effort to help employees feel invested in security.

This academic year, the school's 150 staffers and faculty members will take part in both in-person and digital training sessions that will be repeated annually to cover important infosec policy changes, Adu says. In addition, a new plan in effect this year calls for new employees to undergo security awareness training as soon as they are hired. Infosec training will also eventually be incorporated into the school's new-hire orientation process. That means newcomers will know right off the bat that sharing personal information en masse via email is prohibited, and they will understand how the school classifies particular types of data and why, among other things.

The hardest part is getting people to realize that a lot of responsibility falls on them as end users. Joseph Adu, director of technology, Fay School

Adu says presenting security policies at the point of hire is a way of indoctrinating users into the corporate culture and makes them feel accountable for upholding security best practices. Also, people are generally more open to direction when they first come on board, so they're more likely to accept and abide by the policies. (The school also holds short training sessions for its 400 students to cover security basics, such as a rule against sharing passwords.)

"We're trying to create a culture where people know they can count on the IT department to keep them abreast of what's going on," Adu says. "But they also need to understand that data security is an important part of working at this [organization] and they have a role. The hardest part is getting people to realize that a lot of responsibility falls on them as end users."

Related video:

This story, "How flexible should your infosec model be?" was originally published by Computerworld .
If cops are going to do something shady, something as unethical and illegal as violating a citizens First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless seizure, then they definitely dont want their actions being recorded. Yet that is exactly what happened when Connecticut State Police troopers seized a camera belonging to a protestor and the camera continued to film while they conspired on which bogus charges to level against him.

In September 2015, Michael Picard was protesting near a DUI checkpoint in West Hartford by holding up a big handwritten sign that read Cops Ahead: Keep Calm and Remain Silent. Picard, who was lawfully carrying a handgun, also had a camera that he was using to film the policepublic employees on a public street.

According to the ACLU complaint (pdf), one of the three state troopers working the checkpoint approached Picard and swatted the digital camera out of his hand.

Trooper First Class John Barone can be heard on the video saying, It's illegal to take my picture.

Picard said, No, it isn't.

Yet Barone insisted, It's illegal to take my picture. Personally, it is illegal. He snatched the camera and took it over to two fellow officers before placing it on the police cruiser. He also seized Picards handgun and the handgun permit from Picards pocket.

In what ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley called an unlikely stroke of cosmic karma, the camera was still recording while the officers debated on which trumped-up charges they could throw at Picard.

While they were plotting, and accidentally allowing the conversation to be captured on film, one of the troopers suggested calling a Hartford police officer to see if the cop had an grudges against Picard. Picards gun permit had come back as valid, and one of the cops talked about needing to punch a number on this guy before adding, we really gotta cover our ass.

Stanley wrote:

In the end they decide on two criminal infractions: reckless use of a highway by a pedestrian, and creating a public disturbance. They have a chilling discussion on how to support the public disturbance charge, and the top-level supervisor explains to the other two, what we say is that multiple motorists stopped to complain about a guy waving a gun around, but none of them wanted to stop and make a statement. In other words, what sounds like a fairy tale.

It took nearly a year, but the criminal charges against Picard were dismissed in court.

ACLU-CT Legal Director Dan Barrett said, As the video shows, these police officers were more concerned with thwarting Mr. Picards free speech and covering their tracks than upholding the law. Even though the cops were recorded during their conversation, Barret said, a year later, there has been zero movement on the internal affairs investigation as far as anyone knows, which just shows that police and prosecutors in Connecticut should not be in charge of policing themselves.

The ACLU is helping to represent Picard, claiming the cops violated Picards right to record public officials working on a public street, violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and violated his Fourth Amendment rights by seizing the camera without probable cause or a warrant.

Picard issued the following statement:

Community members like me have a right to film government officials doing their jobs in public, and we should be able to protest without fearing political retribution from law enforcement. As an advocate for free speech, Im deeply disappointed that these police officers ignored my rights, particularly because two of the troopers involved were supervisors who should be setting an example for others.

A State Police Union spokesperson claimed the lawsuit was frivolous and the video had been deceptively edited. Although the charges against Picard have been dismissed in court, the union said that does not mean he is innocent.
Spam is back in a big way  levels that have not been seen since 201o in fact. Thats according to a blog post today form Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet, stated the blogs author Jaeson Schultz.

+More on Network World: +

Many of the host IPs sending Necurs' spam have been infected for more than two years. To help keep the full scope of the botnet hidden, Necurs will only send spam from a subset of its minions. An infected host might be used for two to three days, and then sometimes not again for two to three weeks. This greatly complicates the job of security personnel who respond to spam attacks, because while they may believe the offending host was subsequently found and cleaned up, the reality is that the miscreants behind Necurs are just biding their time, and suddenly the spam starts all over again. At Talos, we see this pattern over, and over again for many Necurs-affiliated IPs, he wrote.

Talos noted that Necurs recently switched from sending largely Russian dating and stock pump-n-dump spam, to sending malicious attachment-based spam. This was the first time we'd seen Necurs send attachments. The malicious attachments were propagating either Dridex, a well-known strain of banking malware, or Locky, a prolific ransomware variant.

In June security researchers at Proofpoint stated they detected a large Locky campaign with zip attachments containing JavaScript code. If opened, these attachments would download and install Locky with an Affiliate ID of "1" and DGA seed of 7743. The messages in this campaign had the subjects "Re: with the attachment "services_[name]_[6 random digits].zip", [name]_addition_[6 random digits].zip or "[name]_invoice_[6 random digits].zip". The zip files contained JavaScript files named "addition-[random digits].js."

Proofpoint also noted an uptick in spam related to the upcoming presidential election:

As we approach November in an especially sensational Presidential race, Proofpoint researchers have seen a variety of election-themed emails - everything from straightforward text-based spam with embedded links to credential phishing. In terms of our themes, our spam samples skew heavily towards lures featuring Donald Trump. The Republican nominee appears in nearly 169 times as many messages as those featuring his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, Proofpoint stated.

Unfortunately there is no silver bullet to defending against a spam campaign. Organizations are encouraged to build a layered set of defenses to maximize the chances of detecting and blocking such an attack. Of course, whenever ransomware is involved, offline backups can be critical to an organization's survival. Restoration plans need to be regularly reviewed and tested to ensure no mistakes have been made and that items have not been overlooked, Talos wrote.

Check out these other hot stories:

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Cisco discloses PIX firewall, IOS software security holes

Small, low flying drones the target of newfangled DARPA defense system

Brocades big new router is all about network size, automation

Extreme swallows Zebras WLAN biz for $55 million

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Open source algorithm helps spot social media shams

Guccifer gets 52 months in prison for hacking crimes

Researchers sport system to pull rare earth materials from used hard drives

1,650lb 3D printed aircraft tool sets Guinness World Record

Cisco buys into containers with Container X acquisition
It is alleged that the accused wanted to eliminate the Parassala youth as the horoscope said her first husband would die young.
The New York visit of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark is still going on. Yesterday, on September 20, Crown Princess Mary of Denmark attended a series of events planned by United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The Crown Princess is the patron of international development organization of United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA . That organization deals with women's health and children's rights. The Crown Princess wore Ba&sh Peper Dress.
What if one blood test could screen for more than 50 types of cancer?
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. High near 60F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Steady light rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 55F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
NOTICE: This Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) is intended for persons living in Australia.

[serah-ZIME] Imiglucerase-rch [im-e-glue-sar-aze R.C.H] 400 U, Powder for Solution for Infusion Consumer Medicine Information

What is in this leaflet This leaflet answers some common questions about Cerezyme. It does not contain all the available information. It does not take the place of talking to your treating physician or a trained health care professional. All medicines have risks and benefits. Your treating physician has weighed the risks of you or your child having Cerezyme against the benefits they expect it will have. If you have any concerns about this medicine, ask your treating physician or nurse. Keep this leaflet. You may need to read it again.

What Cerezyme is used for Cerezyme is used as enzyme replacement therapy to treat patients who have a confirmed diagnosis of Type I or Type 3 Gaucher disease, who show signs of the disease such as: anaemia (low number of red blood cells), low numbers of platelets (a type of blood cell) which can lead to a tendency to bleed, spleen or liver enlargement or bone disease. Gaucher disease is a disease in which the enzyme -glucocerebrosidase in the body does not work properly.

How it works Patients with Gaucher disease do not produce enough of their own active enzyme,  -glucocerebrosidase. The reduced  -glucocerebrosidase activity in patients results in the accumulation of a fatty substance in the body called glucocerebroside. Cerezyme is an enzyme replacement therapy that is intended to restore a level of enzyme activity enough to remove the built up glucocerebroside and to prevent further build up.

Before you are given Cerezyme

When you or your child must not be given it Do not use Cerezyme if you or your child have a known, severe, life-threatening allergic reaction to: Cerezyme any of the ingredients listed at the end of this leaflet Symptoms of an allergic reaction may include: shortness of breath, wheezing or difficulty breathing swelling of the face, lips, tongue or other parts of the body skin rash, itching or hives If you are not sure whether you or your child should have Cerezyme, talk to your treating physician or nurse.

Before you or your child are given it Tell your treating physician if you or your child have received Cerezyme or another drug and experienced any of the following: life-threatening allergic reaction difficulty breathing Tell your treating physician if you or your child have allergies to: any other medicines any other substances, such as foods, preservatives or dyes Tell your treating physician if you or your child have previously had surgery to remove the spleen. Tell your treating physician if you are pregnant or intend to become pregnant. There is no information available regarding the use of Cerezyme in pregnant women. Your treating physician will discuss the possible risks and benefits of having Cerezyme during pregnancy. Tell your treating physician if you are breast-feeding or plan to breast feed. It is not known whether Cerezyme passes into breast milk. Your treating physician will discuss the possible risks and benefits of having Cerezyme during breast-feeding.

Taking other medicines Tell your treating physician or nurse if you or your child are taking any other medicines, or health supplements, including any that you buy without a prescription from your pharmacy, supermarket or health food shop. Some medicines and Cerezyme may interfere with each other. No studies have been carried out on drug interactions.

How Cerezyme is given Cerezyme is given through a drip into a vein (intravenously) by a trained Healthcare professional in a hospital, or in a clinic. The infusion can last 1or 2 hours. It is supplied as a powder which will be mixed with sterile water before it is given. Your treating physician will decide on the dose and frequency of infusion that is most suitable.

If you are given too much (overdose) There have been no reported overdoses of Cerezyme. Your treating physician is trained to work out the correct dose and to contact the Australian Poisons Information Centre (telephone 13 11 26), or the New Zealand National Poisons Centre (telephone 0800 POISON or 0800 764 766) in case of an overdose.

Things you or your child must do Keep appointments with your treating physician or clinic. It is important to have the infusion with Cerezyme at the appropriate times to make sure the medicine has the best chance of providing effective treatment for the condition.

After having Cerezyme Have any tests when your treating physician says to. Your treating physician may wish to test your or your childs bodys response to Cerezyme to make sure that it is working.

Things to be careful of Be careful driving or operating machinery until you know how Cerezyme affects you. Cerezyme is unlikely to have any effect on your ability to drive a car or operate machinery. Make sure that you know how you react to Cerezyme before you drive a car or operate machinery or do anything else that may be dangerous if you are dizzy, light-headed, tired or drowsy.

Side effects Tell your treating physician or nurse as soon as possible if you or your child do not feel well after having Cerezyme. Cerezyme may have unwanted side effects in a few people. All medicines can have side effects. Sometimes they are serious, but most of the time they are not. You or your child may need urgent medical treatment if you notice some side effects. Ask your treating physician or nurse to answer any questions you may have. Tell your treating physician or pharmacist if you notice any of the following and they worry you: nausea vomiting These are mild to moderate side effects of Cerezyme. Tell your treating physician or nurse immediately if you notice any of the following: shortness of breath, wheezing or difficulty breathing swelling of the face, lips, tongue or other parts of the body local reaction around the injection site such as redness, itchiness, tenderness, pain or discomfort, warmth, burning or stinging, swelling or the formation of hard lumps or scars flushing or redness of the skin headaches stomach ache or cramp diarrhoea rash or hives tiredness dizziness These may be serious side effects of Cerezyme, which may require urgent medical attention. Tell your treating physician if you notice anything else that is making you or your child feel unwell. Other side effects not listed above may occur.

Storing Cerezyme Cerezyme will usually be stored in the hospital or clinic pharmacy refrigeration at 2C - 8C. Reconstituted and diluted Cerezyme should be protected from light.

Product Description

What it looks like Cerezyme is a white to off-white powder before it is prepared for infusion and a clear, colourless solution after it has been prepared for infusion.

Ingredients Active ingredient: imiglucerase Other ingredients: sodium citrate dihydrate, mannitol, citric acid monohydrate and polysorbate 80.
Preliminary findings from 32 cases confirm causality but the true size of the effect will only be available following the full analysis of all 200 cases and 400 controls.

The relation between Zika virus and microcephaly is widely assumed to be causal because of strong evidence of an association. However, evidence so far comes from case reports, case series, modelling studies, and preliminary reports from cohort studies  none of which have included appropriate control groups.

Today, researchers from Brazil and the UK report the preliminary findings of the first case-control study examining the association between microcephaly and in utero Zika virus infection. The study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, was requested by the Brazilian Ministry of Health to investigate the causes of the microcephaly epidemic that was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in 2016.

The study included all infants born with microcephaly delivered in eight public hospitals in Pernambuco State in North Eastern Brazil between 15 January and 2 May 2016. For each case, two controls were selected. Controls were the first two infants born the following morning without microcephaly in one of the eight hospitals. Controls and cases were matched for region of residence and expected date of delivery.

Blood samples from cases and controls were collected and samples of cerebrospinal fluid were collected from cases with microcephaly. Samples were tested for Zika virus and Zika virus antibodies. Blood samples were collected from mothers and analysed for Zika and dengue virus. Infants with microcephaly had their head circumference measured and most underwent brain imaging.

24 of 30 (80%) mothers of infants with microcephaly had Zika virus infection, compared with 39 of 61 (64%) mothers of controls. 13 of 32 cases (41%) tested positive for Zika virus infection in blood or cerebrospinal fluid samples, and none of the 62 controls tested positive for Zika virus infection in blood samples. A high proportion of mothers also tested positive for dengue and other infections such as cytomegalovirus (a type of herpes), rubella, and toxoplasma but there was no significant difference between mothers of cases and controls. Additionally, only seven of the 27 cases with microcephaly who had a brain scan had brain abnormalities, suggesting that congenital Zika virus syndrome can be present in neonates with microcephaly and no brain abnormalities.

A high proportion of mothers of newborns with and without microcephaly had been infected with Zika virus, reflecting the rapid spread of Zika infection in this region. However, when we compared laboratory confirmed Zika virus infection in newborns with and without microcephaly, we found that about half of the cases with microcephaly had laboratory confirmed Zika virus infection, compared to none of the healthy controls. The presence of Zika virus antibodies in the cerebrospinal fluid indicates infection in the neural system of the neonate, but interestingly not all cases of microcephaly had brain abnormalities, says article author Dr Thalia Velho Barreto de Araujo, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil.

The authors warn that preliminary analyses can overestimate the strength of an association, so the true size of the effect needs to be treated with caution. The full study, which will include 200 cases and 400 controls will help quantify the risk more precisely and shed light on the role of co-factors.

The authors add that detecting the presence of Zika virus or antibodies in blood and cerebrospinal fluid is the only current method of testing for Zika virus in newborns but the reliability of this method, especially when infections occur early in pregnancy, is not fully understood. The authors say that these limitations might partly explain why 19 (59%) of microcephaly cases were not confirmed as positive for Zika virus.

This is the first case-control study to examine the association between Zika virus and microcephaly using molecular and serological analysis to identify Zika virus in cases and controls at the time of birth. Our findings suggests that Zika virus should be officially added to the list of congenital infections alongside toxoplasmosis, syphilis, varicella-zoster, parvovirus B19, rubella, cytomegalovirus, and herpes. However, many questions still remain to be answered including the role of previous dengue infection says Dr Thalia Velho Barreto de Araujo.

The study was led by Fiocruz-Pernambuco, Federal University of Pernambuco, State University of Pernambuco, the Pan American Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (UK).

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Patricia Brasil, Fiocruz RJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Professor Karin Nielsen-Saines, Department of Pediatrics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA, write:

As acknowledged by Araujo and colleagues, microcephaly remains a poorly defined disorder, and a uniform diagnostic approach is urgently needed. There is much debate in Brazil and worldwide about ascertainment of microcephaly, and the issue of disproportionate and proportionate microcephaly needs further clarification. Infants might be diagnosed with microcephaly when in fact they are globally smallie, small for gestational age, without true isolated microcephaly. This issue deserves attention, especially because in-utero growth restriction leading to the birth of small-for-gestational age infants is also a feature of congenital Zika virus syndrome. Although disproportionate microcephaly has been the most publicised feature of congenital Zika virus infection, proportionate microcephaly is also identified in the setting of in-utero growth restriction caused by maternal Zika virus infection during pregnancy, not unlike other congenital infections such as cytomegalovirus. The distinction, however, is important because there might be distinct prognostic implications. Although microcephaly has been associated with poor outcome in children with congenital cytomegalovirus disease, other researchers have not found such an association. A possible source of discrepancy is failure to adjust the head size to the weight of the infant when defining microcephaly.

They add:
Genetic testing of mitochondrial DNA could reveal otherwise unknown ancestry that can influence a person's risk for certain types of breast cancer, a new study finds.

UT Southwestern Medical Center cancer researchers studying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in a group of triple negative breast cancer patients found that 13 percent of participants were unaware of ancestry that could influence their risk of cancer.

"We found 12 differences among 92 patients, a significant amount," said lead author Dr. Roshni Rao, Director of the George N. Peters, M.D. Center for Breast Surgery at UT Southwestern.

"Some patients who self-identified as Hispanic had African-American ancestry. One Hispanic woman was found to be Ashkenazi Jewish. Both African Americans and some Ashkenazi Jewish populations have a higher risk for triple negative breast cancer," said Dr. Rao, Associate Professor of Surgery and with the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Triple negative breast cancer is characterized by tumors that do not express receptors for estrogen, progesterone, or Her2-Neu, and accounts for about 15 to 20 percent of all breast cancer cases. This form of the disease is known to be particularly aggressive, and challenging to treat. Patients with triple negative breast cancer have a higher incidence of metastatic disease - cancer spreading to other parts of the body - and an overall higher rate of death from breast cancer, compared to patients with other types of breast cancer.

"This study is the first to perform mtDNA testing for self-described African-Americans, Caucasians and Hispanics with triple negative breast cancer and to identify unexpected mtDNA patterns," said senior author Dr. Barbara Haley, Professor of Internal Medicine, who holds the Charles Cameron Sprague, M.D. Chair in Clinical Oncology. "It is estimated that 10 to 30 percent of Americans may not be aware of their mixed ancestry. This type of assessment has the potential to be informative for other cancers where we see ethnic differences in frequency without understanding the cause."

Genetics & Genomics eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

Patients diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer tend to be younger and are more likely to be African-American or Hispanic. These patients may be less likely to be identified through traditional mammography screenings, which tend to target women 50 and older.

"If you know your ancestry, then you could be included in the group that gets screened at a younger age," Dr. Rao said.

The researchers asked each volunteer - 31 African-Americans, 31 Caucasians, and 30 Hispanics who are triple negative breast cancer patients - to come in for a simple test, which collects cells from inside the cheek on a swab. Mitochondrial DNA was then isolated from these samples for comparison. Mitochondrial DNA differs from nuclear DNA because it is maternally inherited so it does not change or mix. Researchers can trace the lineage of mtDNA through multiple generations.

Among 30 Hispanic patients in this study, 22 did not have a family history of breast cancer whereas eight did. These results suggest that further genetic testing can potentially become an important step in identifying those at risk.

Additionally, those of Nigerian, Cameroon, and Sierre Leone ancestry were most strongly associated with triple negative breast cancer, an unexpected finding of this study. This association could indicate that ancestry from specific African countries may predispose an increased risk in the rate of triple negative breast cancer, which does not respond to standard breast cancer therapies, such as tamoxifen, aromatase inhibitors, or trastuzumab.
A new study shows that when you finish your spouse's sentences or answer a fill-in-the-blank question, you're engaging the brain's relay station for memories, the hippocampus. Until now, scientists largely neglected this area in relation to language. The new experiment conducted by researchers at UC Berkeley and Vitoria Piai, neuroscientist at Radboud University's Donders Institute, shows that memory and language are in fact deeply linked via the hippocampus.

Nestled in the center of the brain, the hippocampus acts like a router to link related memories - the color, shape, feel, scent and taste of an orange, for example - so that we are able to make associations. In the new study, direct brain recordings reveal that the brain region is also active during language processing. It relates incoming words to stored semantic knowledge, which is necessary in understanding and generating sentence meaning, the researchers say.

Neuroscience eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

Intracranial recordings

Language studies most often employ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures oxygen flow in the brain, a slow process that doesn't allow researchers to measure activities that take place in a fraction of a second. This new study however was conducted in twelve epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial electrode monitoring at the UC Irvine Medical Center and Stanford University Medical Center to locate the source of their abnormal brain activity. The researchers recorded neuronal activity from the non-epileptic hemisphere of the brain, using electrodes inserted into the hippocampus.

During the experiment, people heard fill-in-the-blank sentences with an obvious completion: "He swept the floor with a ____," for example.

In ten of the twelve subjects, listening to sentences that had an obvious completion - the constrained sentences - caused a burst of highly synchronized activity (theta waves) in the hippocampus, activity characteristic of the hippocampus when it makes a memory association. This is a sign that the region was making associations throughout the brain to come up with the right word, in this case: broom.

Language in real-time

According to Vitoria Piai, former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and now a senior researcher at Radboud University's Donders Institute and Radboud University Medical Center, depth-brain recordings capture millisecond by millisecond neuron firings, showing precisely how the brain deals with language in real-time. "This experiment is so exciting because of the possibility that we will start to understand language and memory in a more integrated way, start examining language as it really happens."

The new findings could open up a whole new area of study with intracranial recordings to probe details of the connection between language and memory. UC Berkeley professor Robert Knight, co-author of the publication, said: "This study shows that memory contributes as a sentence is evolving in time; it is a real-time part of our language system, not a slave to the language system."
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded a 6-year, $4.4 million grant to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and collaborators to improve the use of prescribed medication by sickle cell patients.

The new Sickle Cell Disease Implementation Program, which comprises a team from St. Jude, the University of Memphis, Methodist University Hospital, Baptist Memorial Hospital, Vanderbilt University and the Sickle Cell Foundation of Tennessee, will jointly develop, assess and integrate mobile health applications to manage hydroxyurea treatments in the patient community.

"While we have made good progress using hydroxyurea to help children and younger adults look after their disease, much remains to be done to slow the progress of sickle cell as older teenagers transition to adult life," said Jane Hankins, M.D., an associate member of the St. Jude Department of Hematology and Principal Investigator of the project. "Our goal with this project is to use mobile health applications to help 15-year-old and older patients in the Memphis and wider areas manage sickle cell. This is crucial since at this time in their lives they often have less access to healthcare providers and comprehensive sickle cell programs which greatly impacts their quality of life."

The funding from the NIH will be used to identify barriers to medical care and any constraints on the proper use of hydroxyurea by patients in the Memphis and greater Memphis areas. In addition to helping design, test and implement the new mobile health app to improve medication access and adherence, the team will also make the findings of the study available nationwide to encourage best practice and wider use of hydroxyurea in the national sickle cell community.

"We want to have an impact across the country," Hankins said. "Our starting point for this mobile health project is its potential impact on the patients we want to reach," said Hankins. "The widespread availability of mobile phones in our patient community makes for an ideal communication channel to deliver messages that will help patients take hydroxyurea at the right time. It will also provide important other information on the disease and tips on how to stay healthy."

A pilot project conducted at St. Jude demonstrated that text messages improved adherence rates for hydroxyurea by more than 15%.

Hydroxyurea can greatly reduce some of the complications of sickle cell disease by enhancing the production of fetal hemoglobin, a healthy form of the essential oxygen-carrying molecule in red blood cells. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has pioneered the use of hydroxyurea as an effective treatment for sickle cell disease in children and younger adults. However some studies have shown that only 15-35 percent of sickle cell patients adequately follow their prescribed medication schedules.

Sickle cell disease often affects vulnerable, low-income populations. In the United States, more than 100,000 people are affected, mostly African Americans, many from disadvantaged backgrounds. In the Mid-South region alone sickle cell disease affects approximately 2,000 individuals. If not treated effectively sickle cell disease can lead to organ failure and early death.

Hankins was recently appointed leader of the Methodist Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center at Methodist University Hospital, a joint initiative between St. Jude and Methodist University Hospital to enhance evidence-based clinical care for older sickle cell patients and offer support for further research into the disease.

A research team led by Lisa Klesges, Ph.D., professor at the University of Memphis, will develop the app and measure the population impact of its implementation.

"We have assembled a multidisciplinary team of statisticians, epidemiologists and informaticians who will involve patients in the design of the new app and work closely with all collaborators to optimize the design and measure its use within the community system of care," Klesges said.

In addition, a team led by William Cooper, M.D., M.P.H., professor at Vanderbilt University, will use administrative healthcare insurance data from Medicare, TennCare, and a commercial payer to map existing use of hydroxyurea in the Memphis area. "We are interested in understanding patterns of hydroxyurea use by age and providing a baseline for the findings of the clinical study," Cooper said.

Patients will be recruited and participate at four clinical centers - St. Jude, Methodist University Hospital, Baptist Memorial Hospital, and from the private practice of Dr. Curtis Owens in the Memphis community.

The team will measure the impact of the program and collect all of the data needed to assess the app's effectiveness. The goal is to look at how many patients have adopted the technology and assess its reach, cost effectiveness and longer-term sustainability.

The desired outcome is to share the findings nationwide to make sure that sickle cell patients in this vulnerable age group have the best possible access to the most effective drug treatments.
Scotland has a strong legacy as one of the pioneers of medical imaging. In the late 70s, Aberdeen University became the first institution to develop a full body MRI scanner; the system named the Mark I prototype was an enormous step forward for healthcare. A standard feature on current hospital wards, obstetric ultrasound was also developed by a team of researchers in Scotland. More recently, Scotland has developed a celebrated reputation for the development of innovative techniques and applications to produce high quality medical imaging information for clinicians and researchers.

A CT image of the heart produced at the Clinical Research Imaging Centre (CRIC) at the University of Edinburgh

Scotland has utilised its heritage and used it as an opportunity to push its strengths further; this is led by the Scottish Imaging Network: A Platform for Scientific Excellence (SINAPSE) with the aim of developing a world-class future in medical imaging for Scotland. The network draws on the combined expertise of six Scottish universities, Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, and Stirling and is the medical imaging research pool for Scotland. Created in 2007, it has brought high-quality imaging research together within Scotland, and through positive outcomes has permanently put Scotland on the map for transforming healthcare. The SINAPSE network has leading strengths in MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, Ultrasound, EEG, Functional Neuroimaging and Retinal Imaging. This is being used to enhance imaging research and education through strategic academic and industry collaborations.

Enhancing strengths with advanced technology

Three decades on since Scotlands first MRI scanner, the country has invested in some of the most advanced imaging technology in the world to support its research. In 2016, Scotland's first clinical 7T MRI system, a MAGNETOM Terra from Siemens Healthineers is being placed in the new Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) Building at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital Glasgow. The technology will enable researchers and clinicians to study the human body in greater resolution than ever before. The system is amongst the most powerful of its kind for use in a clinical research setting, allowing techniques to take place that can only be performed through powerful, ultra-high frequency MR. The MRI is joined by Scotlands first MR-PET scanning technology, a BiographTM mMR from Siemens Healthineers. The system is located in the University of Edinburghs Clinical Research Imaging Centre, combining two of the most effective scanning procedures for clinical research in areas such as dementia and cardiovascular disease. It complements existing facilities including new state-of-the-art Siemens brain optimised 3T MRI in the major South East Scotland regional acute hospital, plus 3T MRI for body imaging PET-CT and radiochemistry.

Creating a research base renowned across the world

With links to extensive academic and medical imaging research, the SINAPSE network is able to create a shared environment which encourages and enhances strategic research, education and knowledge exchange. However, its reach does not end at Scotlands borders; it is extended beyond Scotland and the UK, contributing to studies across the globe.

In the past year Scotland has developed worldwide partnerships in medical imaging; representatives from Scotland visited Taiwan, China, the USA and several European countries to collaborate on many research topics, including neuroimaging research for clinical applications, development of novel technologies and applications in stroke and dementia, psychology, cardiovascular imaging, MR elastography and pulmonary imaging. Along with this, a number of international scientific meetings including the annual meeting of the European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology and the International Workshop for Pulmonary Functional Imaging have been hosted in Scotland. These brought delegates from across the world including USA, Canada, South Korea, Japan and Europe to discuss the latest innovations in imaging research.

Creating value for Scottish society and the economy

Scotlands developments in medical imaging are increasing public awareness and understanding of imaging across the nation. The work it produces is having a direct impact on improving healthcare for the people of Scotland and beyond. The expertise is also benefiting the pharmaceutical industry and manufacturers of imaging equipment to create new treatments and procedures, leading to scientific and commercial success and bringing in significant revenue to the Scottish economy.

As medical imaging in Scotland looks to flourish, and the next generation of researchers are developing essential skills to continue the great work, opportunities are immense. The country is in an excellent position to participate in the upcoming growth of the industry, based on the first-class research being undertaken to enhance medical research and clinical applications across the world.
A new study from Drexel University College of Medicine suggests all organ transplant recipients, regardless of race, should receive routine, total-body screenings for skin cancer.

Out of 259 nonwhite transplant recipients who were evaluated in the study, 19 skin cancer lesions were identified in 6 percent of the patients. The research was published Wednesday in JAMA Dermatology.

Further, the study shows risk factors for nonwhite transplant recipients likely differ between races/ethnicities  which represents an important shift in how dermatologists approach minority patients. Doctors should keep these unique characteristics in mind when examining and counseling nonwhite patients about prevention strategies, said Christina Lee Chung, MD, associate professor of dermatology in the College of Medicine and director of the Drexel Dermatology Center for Transplant Patients.

"Once physicians began to realize there was a significant number of transplant patients dying from skin cancer, there was a push to prevent it. But much of the field has focused on trying to decrease the morbidity of the Caucasian transplant population, which is more susceptible to skin cancer overall," said Chung, the study's principal investigator. "This is the first research of its kind to look at a diverse population of nonwhite transplant recipients and how skin cancer affects them."

Squamous-cell carcinoma of the skin is 65- to 250-times more frequent in patients who have received an organ transplant, due to the side effects of the anti-rejection medications they are prescribed. Skin cancers in transplant patients also tend to be more aggressive and more deadly.

There are currently no guidelines that require transplant patients to be screened for skin cancer pre- and post-operation. At some centers, Chung said, fair-skinned patients are encouraged to receive a full-body evaluation from a dermatologist. While black transplant patients, on the other hand, may only be sent to a specialist if a suspicious lesion is identified. And while a white patient may be screened yearly, a black patient is likelier to either never or only be evaluated one time post-transplant.

"Overall, people tend to believe that dark-skinned patients can't get skin cancer," Chung said. "But they are taking the same immunosuppressant drugs as their white counterparts."

The Drexel Dermatology Center for Transplant Patients  which opened in 2011  is uniquely positioned to track the rates of skin cancer in nonwhite patients. As one of the only models of its kind, the center provides coordinated, post-transplant dermatological care to every single patient who receives a transplant at Hahnemann University Hospital or who is managed by the Drexel transplant program. That means each patient, regardless of race, is screened annually for skin cancer.

With a large African-American, Asian and Hispanic patient population, Drexel researchers were able to perform a retrospective medical record review of 259 nonwhite transplant recipients who had visited the center between 2011 and 2016.

They found six black patients, five Asian patients and four Hispanic patients presented with 19 different cancerous lesions. Interestingly, the predominant type of skin cancer diagnosed within the group was in the "in situ" stage, which means it was caught in its earliest form. No black patients were diagnosed with a late-stage skin cancer.

This suggests that screening for skin cancer early and often can prevent it from becoming more aggressive, which touts the Drexel Dermatology Center for Transplant Patients as a successful model that Chung hopes can be replicated throughout the country.

Finally, the researchers found that the majority of skin cancers in black transplant patients were found in the groin-genital area, and most of those lesions tested positive for high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV). For the Asian population, sun exposure appeared to be the most significant risk factor for skin cancer.

The potential association between HPV and squamous-cell carcinoma warrants careful examination of the groin, genitalia and perianal area in search of early lesions, the study authors write. The finding also suggests there may be significant differences in risk factors pertaining to the development of skin cancer between white and black organ transplant recipients.

"If you're spending all of your time counseling your black patients about sunscreen, you're probably missing more important aspects of skin cancer prevention," Chung said.

Instead, she added, consideration should be given to administering the HPV vaccine to all patients prior to transplantation. In addition, black patients, and especially those with a history of HPV, should be taught how to identify potential cancerous lesions in their groin areas.

"The ultimate takeaway is that though people of color are at decreased risk for skin cancer, but they're not not at risk. And those people have different risk factors," Chung said. "So when you see a person of color who is a transplant patient, you need to approach them differently, depending on their skin type and tone, where they are from and their medical history."
An analysis of the quality of life of several thousand breast cancer survivors in North Carolina found differences in how black and white women functioned and felt physically and spiritually during treatment and two years after diagnosis.

The study, led by researchers from the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, found white women reported higher physical and functional health-related quality of life scores compared with black women during active treatment. The gap in physical quality of life scores narrowed two years after diagnosis, however, and in both physical and functional measures after researchers adjusted the data to account for differences in education, insurance, and marital status. The findings suggest that improved socioeconomic conditions could enhance physical and functional quality of life for breast cancer survivors.

Yet, some differences remained. Chiefly, black women had higher spiritual quality of life scores five months and two years after diagnosis than white women, and after adjusting for socioeconomic factors.

"Black women generally had poorer physical and functional quality of life after the diagnosis of breast cancer, and socioeconomic and other factors explain some of these differences," said study co-author Andrew Olshan, PhD, associate director of population sciences at UNC Lineberger and the Barbara Sorenson Hulka Distinguished Professor in Cancer Epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. "However, for some domains, black women report better quality of life."

The study, published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, drew upon surveys that assessed health-related quality of life issues for women aged 20 to 74 years who lived in North Carolina and had breast cancer. The analysis is part of the third phase of the Carolina Breast Cancer Study, a study first launched at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1993 as part of an effort to better understand why black women have been found to disproportionately die from breast cancer. Olshan is the co-principal investigator of the study.

Researchers used surveys to gauge the physical, functional, emotional and spiritual health-related quality of life of more than 2,100 women at five months after their breast cancer diagnosis, and at 25 months, when women have typically stopped active treatment and have entered the survivorship phase.

For spiritual quality of life, researchers found that black women scored two points higher than white women at five months, when they were in the midst of active treatment, and two years after diagnosis. Specifically, black women scored an unadjusted average of 41.4 points on spiritual quality of life, while white women scored an average of 39.3 at five months. Two years after diagnosis, black women scored an unadjusted average of 40.5 on spiritual quality of life, while white women had an average score of 38.5. Even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, black women continued to score higher than white women for spiritual quality of life two years after diagnosis, the study reports.

"Black women we surveyed had significantly better spiritual wellbeing than white women, and it was both statistically significant and clinically meaningful," said the study's first author Laura Pinheiro, a doctoral candidate in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

White women's average scores for physical and functional quality of life, which track women's feelings of fatigue, nausea, pain, the woman's ability to work, sleep, acceptance of her illness and ability to enjoy things in normal life, were two to 2.5 points higher than black women at five months. The unadjusted average score for white women's physical health at five months was 20.9, compared to 18.4 for black women. For functional health, white women scored an average of 20.1 compared to 18.2 for black women.

At 25 months after diagnosis, the researchers found that white women still scored higher for physical, social, and functional health-related quality of life, but the gap between the unadjusted physical scores for white and black women narrowed compared to what they were at five months for physical health-related quality of life. Pinheiro said that the findings, in-line with previous studies, could suggest that the health care system may have had a positive impact on the black women's overall physical health, helping to narrow those gaps.

"As these women are entering the health care system, perhaps some of their other health conditions are better managed," Pinheiro said. "That is our speculation, and it will merit some additional investigation."

They also report that after adjusting for socioeconomic factors during survivorship, differences in physical health-related quality of life were diminished.

"Our research suggests that improved social and economic conditions could improve access to care, reduce co-morbid conditions, and other factors that are associated with both the prognosis of breast cancer, quality of life, and the disparities seen between various groups," Olshan said.

The study demonstrates the importance of the Carolina Breast Cancer Study in understanding how breast cancer and its treatment impacts the lives of North Carolinians, said the study's senior author Bryce Reeve, PhD, a UNC Lineberger member and professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

"We hope to use these findings to find opportunities to improve the quality of life of women with breast cancer," Reeve said.
News18  Blogs  India

Uri Lesson: Secure Security Higher Priority Than Jingoism

TV grab of Uri terror attack.

11:20 am, September 18, 2016: Indian Army statement: On the early hours of 18 September 2016, a group of heavily armed terrorists targeted the rear administrative base of a unit at Uri, Kashmir. In the counter action, four terrorists have been eliminated and combing operations are in progress. The administrative base had large strength of troops of units turning over after their tour of duty who were stationed in tents/temporary shelters which caught fire, and resulted in heavy casualties. We salute the sacrifice of 17 soldiers who were martyred in the operation.





The statement is a bit stingy with the truth. It does not say that the shelters caught fire when the terrorists hurled bombs/grenades/incendiary devices at them. It was also perhaps embarrassing to admit that most of the deaths were caused by burns to the soldiers inside the shelters, that the terrorists had recceed the place for quite some time before making their move.





In a sense, avoidable deaths. They sacrificed their lives, but they should not have died in that manner. Things should not have reached that far. We do not know if there was any prior intelligence about the attack. We do not know if anything was done to prevent the attack. So, let us not talk about it. Incidentally, the media swayed public opinion away from this bitter truth by raising the emotional tag of martyrdom, much to the unexpected relief of the government.





But we can talk about the run-up to that Sunday. The Kashmir Valley was seething for the last couple of months, owing to a bitter stand-off between the separatists and the state government; one unrepentant, the other unyielding. It was an ideal time for anyone across the LoC to send across bunches of armed terror-mongers into India. Such an assumption itself should have prompted all security agencies in the Valley to be on high, even highest, alert. Were they?





There were nearly a dozen infiltration attempts since the killing of the separatist Burhan Wani on July 8. The series of attempts was kicked off a week earlier, on July 1, when terrorists crossed into India in Pulwama and attacked a CRPF camp in Litter village. They managed to hurl grenades, injuring four security personnel. A week earlier, eight CRPF jawans had been killed and 20 others injured in a militant ambush on a convoy in Pampore town in Pulwama district. On August 21, the army shot dead three terrorists as they tried to enter Kupwara in the Tangdhar sector. These terrorists had attacked a BSF camp in Kupwara two days earlier, injuring a few jawans. Come September, on the 9th, a CRPF camp was attacked in Pulwama, though the terrorists were eventually driven away.





On September 11, that is, the Sunday before the Uri Sunday, a three-day operation concluded with the killing of four terrorists holed up in a building very close to the armys Brigade 93 Headquarters in Poonch town. They belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba. They were suspected to have entered into India in mid-August, responsible for sporadic firing across Poonch district. Eventually they hid in a building bang next to the brigade headquarters. This was a major break of security, considering the town was like a garrison, specially because of Eid and the Amarnath Yatra. A policeman died in the bloody confrontation, a soldier was injured.





There is no question of the security forces being unaware of these developments. There are also strong reasons to believe that the army was alerted about possible disturbances in Uri. What happened in Uri on September 18, also happened in Poonch on September 11.





Yet, Uri it was which was determined by the Indian government, army and the media  in that order  to given vent to emotions because there was so much blood-letting. It was a highly emotive issue with the potential to leave Indians teary-eyed and the strategists with another opportunity to launch a verbal war against Pakistan. Both events came to pass. Loudly. Unlike before, the octaves scaled new highs as the media, the social media and the general public wanted to see the Modi government in action, preferably a same-day strike against terror camps or whatever in Pakistan or something equally jingoistic. There was no end to their orchestrated protestations, as they lost all sense of proportion and breathlessly droned and riled and abused Pakistan.





The din has dimmed. But the question remains. The 18 Indian soldiers who died without firing a bullet seek justice. From the army. From the government. Kashmir may take a generation or two more to resolve, we dont know. But the killings can be checked right away, isnt it?





The Kashmir Valley is an area 135 km by 32 km. We do not know the actual figures, but not less than 400,000 security personnel are there in that area, much of it is inaccessible, with mountains and thick valleys and drains and "nallas" which are difficult to monitor. They are equipped with the best technology, weaponry, strategies and funds. They are short of nothing, literally. Except perhaps intelligence. A big hole that needs immediate plugging. Except perhaps a clear-cut chain of command, like someone in Delhi trying to pull the armys strings when the Pathankot air force station was attacked in January, 2016.





We need to anticipate the enemy, pin-point the enemys position at all times and thwart all attempts by the enemy to attack us. That is the sum and substance of the sane voices that could be heard amid the media din in the last two days. If civilians are attacked, the security forces are there to protect them. But if the forces themselves are specifically attacked? And repeatedly? Like on September 18 and so many occasions in the past? Then what?





The point is, let us take it step by step. Strikes, conventional attacks, diplomatic efforts, talks, and the like are the arrows in our quiver. But these are political decisions. Their time comes when the ground situation worsens. The ground situation is controlled by the army, the security forces. They have but one arrow, that is, to not allow their blood to be spilt unnecessarily. At any cost.





There is a saying at the LoC in Kashmir that a soldier is lulled into violence. The counter-saying is that the soldier is lulled by violence. This atmosphere has its own logic of justice which is swift and instant. The retaliation to killing of Indian citizens and/or security personnel by terrorists or Pakistani soldiers is brutal. Our forces do not hesitate to take revenge, nor do they waste time taking it. They cut our heads. We cut their heads. Simple as that. Uris turn will also come. The idea, however, is not to confuse between political action by the government, military action by the armed forces and precipitate action at ground zero by the local commanders. Each has its logic, time and space. Political accountability for what happened will be sought, today or tomorrow. It is the accountability of our security apparatus which needs equal attention.
There are brave people, there are heroes and then there are straight up badasses. 49-year-old Karamjit Sangha of Hull, England belongs to the third category.When her store Sangha News And Booze, was recently attacked by a robber armed with a knife, she was cool as a cucumber. She said, "I was just sitting there having my cup of tea when he came in holding this 7 inch kitchen knife. He told me to give him all the money, but I was relaxed. I told him I was having a cup of tea."Mrs Sangha then proceeded to pick up a smaller knife and scared the robber away. The accused, Stuart Gleeson, has since been arrested and convicted of attempted robbery.Watch Mrs Sangha describe her tale of utter badassery right here:
Srinagar: A soldier was killed on Tuesday as army foiled two infiltration bids along the Line of Control in last 48 hours in Uri and Naugam sectors in Jammu & Kashmir.



"Two infiltration bids by militants from across the Line of Control have been foiled in Uri and Naugam sectors today. At both places the operations are in progress," an army spokesman said here.



The spokesman refused to comment on the number of militants killed in the ongoing operations so far saying details will be made public in due course.



He said one soldier was killed in the operation in Naugam sector.



However sources said, at least 10 militants were killed who attempted to infiltrate India from LoC reportedly under the cover of Pakistani firing.



Since Wednesday morning, a massive combing operation underway and the security forces have cordoned off the area. It is believed that 5 more terrorists are still hiding in the jungle areas.



Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chair an emergency meeting of the cabinet committee on security to finalise India's response to Pakistan - even as his government is waging a diplomatic war at the United Nations.







Party sources said, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Defence minister Manohar Parrikar and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley met BJP president Amit Shah on Tuesday and briefed him on India's stand at the UNGA.



BJP sources said that the party has given its full backing to the PM to launch an offensive against Pakistan.



(PTI inputs)








Uri: Despite inclement weather, army was on Wednesday carrying out intense combing-cum-search operations in

Uri and Naugam sectors along the Line of Control in Kashmir where alert troops foiled two infiltration bids but have so far drawn a blank in retrieving bodies of the slain militants.



Army personnel continued their search operations in the higher reaches of Uri and Naugam sectors of Baramulla and Tangdhar districts respectively but have not managed to reach the spot where the bodies were supposed to be lying.



The bodies lay very close to the LoC and there was a possibility of the jawans coming under fire from across the border, official sources said.



The army personnel were maintaining a tight vigil to foil any fresh attempts by militants to sneak in through these sectors by breaking the security cordon or inflicting casualties on the troops.



Low clouds were also hampering the operation for retrieving the bodies of the militants which were lying close to the LoC, the sources said.



"The operations along the LoC in Uri and Naugam sectors continue," an Army spokesman said.



One soldier was killed on Tuesday as Army foiled two infiltration bids in the two sectors of Kashmir.



While bodies of militants have been spotted nearly 300 metres short of the LoC, a search is on in neighbouring areas to find out if there are more casualties on ultras' side, the sources said.



Army officials in New Delhi on Tuesday had claimed that 15 terrorists had attempted to cross the LoC.



However, the sources said army was treading cautiously in retrieving the bodies of the slain militants as there was a possibility of enemy troops opening fire. "The bodies of the terrorists are so close to the LoC that army might not be able to recover them," they said.



The combing-cum-search operations have been intensified to cover the densely forested areas adjacent to Uri and Naugam sectors to ensure that no remnants of the infiltrating terrorists are missed, they said.



The infiltration bid came just two days after the deadly attack by four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists on the Army base in Uri which claimed the lives of 18 soldiers and left several others injured.



As part of strengthening the counter-infiltration grid, army is firing illuminators intermittently at night to prevent more militants from sneaking in to this side of LoC, the sources said.



The failed infiltration bids yesterday were provided cover by the Pakistani troops, who resorted to ceasefire violation in Uri sector.



Army has refrained from making any comment on the number of terrorists killed during its operations to neutralise the infiltration attempts as the operations are still going on.


Mathura: The Army widows here demanded "blood for blood" in retaliation to the deadly attack in Uri which claimed lives of 18 Army personnel.



"Sushma Swaraj, in January 2013 had assured me of bringing ten heads if her party comes to power," Dharmavati whose husband was beheaded on January 8, 2013 said, adding that now at least 36 heads must be brought in turn for the killings of 18 army personnel.



Ravita, the widow of Babloo kumar who was martyred in Jammu on July 30, held Centre "responsible" for its "unstable policies."



"Army should be given free hand to counter such cowardice act," Kamlesh Devi, widow of Soran Singh who was martyred in Kargil in 1999, stated.



Seema Chaudhary, wife of martyr Shaheed Samod Kumar Chaudhary asked for "direct action" in such incidents. "I can feel the pain and separation widows of killed army personnel of Dogra regiment are experiencing."










The Examination Board of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TMBU) in Bihar on Wednesday recommended cancellation of the law degree of former Delhi Law Minister and AAP MLA Jitender Singh Tomar, who was arrested on charge that his degree was fake.



The Examination board of the university found true the findings of an interim committee constituted earlier on Tomar's degree and recommended cancellation of the degree, Pro Vice Chancellor AK Rai told PTI.



"The Board's recommendation would now go to University Senate for necessary action," Rai said.



"If due to any reason the Senate, whose Chairman is state's Governor Ramnath Kovind, fails to meet, then the recommendation would go to Syndicate and then to the Chancellor," he said.



The interim committee in its report a few months ago had found the migration certificate of the former Law Minister of the Arvind Kejriwal cabinet wrong and on the basis of it had recommended cancellation of the Law degree.



The controversy relates to the acquisition of Law degree by Tomar on the basis of a doubtful enrollment at Biswanath Law College in Munger in the academic session 1994-95. He had claimed to have passed the law examination in 1998-99.



Tomar was arrested and later released on bail last year in the Law degree issue and had to resign from the Kejriwal ministry.
The Karnataka government on Wednesday decided to defer release of 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 23, when a special session of the state legislature would take a decision on the Supreme Court direction.



"The Cabinet has decided to defer release of water," Chief Minister Siddaramaiah told reporters in a brief statement after an emergency Cabinet meeting which was preceded by an all-party and council of ministers meetings during the day.



Siddaramaiah said the cabinet decided to convene the special session of the state legislature on September 23 in the backdrop of the apex court order on Tuesday, ordering Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water till September 27 from Wednesday. He said the all-party meeting had advised the government to call the special legislature session to discuss the Supreme Court's direction and the Cabinet decided accordingly.



The Cauvery Supervisory Committee had on September 19 asked Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs per day from September 21 to 30 but the apex court on Tuesday had doubled the quantum to 6,000 cusecs from September 21 to 27 after Tamil Nadu pressed for water to save its samba paddy crop.



On September 5, the court had ordered release of 15,000 cusecs of water for the next 10 days to address the plight of the farmers in Tamil Nadu.



The quantum was reduced on September 12 to 12,000 cusecs to be released till September 20. Karnataka had complied with these directions thought it had been maintaining that the storage in its reservoirs was inadequate to meet the drinking water needs of its people.



Siddaramaiah on Tuesday had termed the Supreme Court's fresh order on release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu as "unimplementable" and called for the all-party meeting.



A bench of justices Dipak Misra and U U Lalit had also asked the Centre to constitute within four weeks, the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) in its award.



The all-party meeting was boycotted by principal Opposition BJP which criticised the Siddaramaiah government for not taking any specific decision keeping the interests of farmers in mind despite holding all-party meetings earlier.



It was attended by former Prime Minister and JDS supremo H D Deve Gowda, Congress leader in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and former Chief Minister M Veerappa Moily.



BJP union ministers from Karnataka had conveyed their inability to attend the meet because of the union cabinet meeting, Siddaramaiah said.



"In the backdrop of the interim order of the Honourable Supreme Court dated 20-09-2016, government had today called an all-party meeting and discussed the matter in detail. In the all-party meeting it was unanimously decided to call the joint session of the state legislature.



"In this background, the Cabinet has decided to request his Excellency the Governor to call a session of both the houses of the legislature on 23-09-2016 at 11 am.



"Further, until the session decides on the issue, the release of water has been deferred," the Chief Minister said in a prepared statement.
Ahmedabad: A magistrate's court for CBI cases on Wednesday rejected IPS officer Satish Verma's application, seeking a copy of the supplementary chargesheet, filed in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan encounter case.



Magistrate DR Vyas said as the court had not taken cognizance of the chargesheet, it could not give him a copy.



The court had, in March, rejected Verma's first application on the same ground.



The IPS officer, who had assisted the CBI in the probe of the case, had last week filed a fresh application, seeking a copy of the chargesheet, saying he wanted to ensure that the trial in the case began and concluded "expeditiously".



While the first chargesheet was filed by the CBI in the court of Special CBI (Sessions) Judge in July 2013, a supplementary chargesheet was filed in February, 2014 in the magistrate's court.



The Sessions Court had allowed Verma to inspect the first charge sheet, but on CBI's appeal, the High Court had overturned the order.



Proceedings against the accused named in the second chargesheet -- four officers of the Intelligence Bureau -- are yet to start as the Centre has not given nod for their prosecution.



Verma had said he wanted to challenge the delay in grant of sanction so that the trial was expedited.



Mumbra-based college girl Ishrat Jahan (19), Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in an encounter with Gujarat police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.



A special investigation team (SIT), constituted by the Gujarat High Court, had concluded that it was a "fake" encounter and handed over the case to the CBI.



The first chargesheet named seven police officers as accused, including IPS officers PP Pandey, DG Vanzara and GL Singhal.



Verma is presently serving on Central deputation in the north-east.
Sharif said that Hizbul militant Burhan Wani had become "the symbol of the new Kashmiri intifada that was led by common Kashmiris".

Indian brutalities are well documented" and that "Pakistan will share with the Secretary General a dossier containing detailed information and evidence of the gross and systematic violations of human rights committed" in Jammu and Kashmir," Sharif added.





Let us be clear: talks are no favor to Pakistan. Talks are in the interest of both countries. They are essential to resolve our differences, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to avert the danger of any escalation.

Pakistan is "ready for talks to agree on a bilateral nuclear test ban treaty," he added.



Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA glorifies Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani in UN's highest forum. Shows continued Pak attachment to terrorism.  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

Pak PM Sharif at #UNGA in complete denial of Uri terror attack. 19 infiltration attempts stopped at LoC this year. Indigenous??!!  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 21, 2016

: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday raised the Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly and said that peace between India and Pakistan can only be achieved if the Kashmir issue is solved.Repeatedly mentioning Kashmir and India in his 20 minute address, Sharif said that Pakistan fully supports Kashmiris right to self-determination.He also spoke of "Indian brutalities" and "human rights violations by Indian forces" in the Kashmir valley.Sharif added that Pakistan was ready to enter into a serious & sustained dialogue with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially J&K.Sharif also glorified slain terrorist and Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "young leader" even as he expressed readiness for a "serious and sustained dialogue" with India for peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir.Read: China Backs Pakistan's Position on Kashmir: Li Tells Sharif Sharif devoted much of his speech at the UN General Assembly session to Kashmir and the current situation in the valley and said Pakistan "fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination".He demanded an "independent inquiry into the extra-judicial killings" and a UN fact-finding mission to Kashmir "so that those guilty of these atrocities are punished."Sharif also made a number of allegations with regard to the current unrest in the valley."The Security Council has called for the exercise of the right to self-determination by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and fair plebiscite held under UN auspices.The people of Kashmir have waited 70 years for implementation of this promise," he said, adding the Security Council must honour its commitments by implementing its own decisions.Sharif, who spoke amid heightening tensions between India and Pakistan, insisted that his country wants peace with the neighbour as "confrontation should not be our destiny in South Asia."The Pakistan Prime Minister claimed that he had "gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues but India has posed unacceptable preconditions to engage in a dialogue.Sharif said that for Pakistan this is an "objective evaluation, not a partisan position.""Today, from this rostrum, I would also like to reiterate our offer to India to enter into a serious and sustained dialogue for the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes, especially Jammu and Kashmir," Sharif said.He also said that Pakistan was "open to discussing all measures of restraint and responsibility with India, in any forum or format and without any conditions."Claiming that Pakistan "neither wants, nor is engaged in an arms race with India", Sharif said, "We have consistently urged the conclusion of bilateral arms control and disarmament measures between Pakistan and India to prevent conflict and avoid wasteful military expenditures."India has blamed Pakistan for engineering and fuelling the unrest.Reacting to Sharif's speech at UNGA, Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Vikas Swarup hit back at Pakistan's doublespeak through a series of tweets.Also read: Uri Terror Attack: India Summons Pakistan Envoy Abdul Basit (With inputs from PTI)
New York: Despite outreach to international players by Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his top ministers, Pakistan stands isolated ahead of his speech at the 71st United Nations General Assembly.



After being lambasted by US lawmakers for backing terror, the government of United states had asked Pakistan to limit their nuclear arsenal.



A day after Washington urged Islamabad to curtail its atomic activities, Pakistan's UN envoy Maleeha Lodhi said on Wednesday that the country will not limit its nuclear programme.







Lodhi told reporters that such proposals of nuclear restraint should be first implemented by India before Pakistan does it.



"Pakistan's nuclear programme cannot be limited," Lodhi said at the joint press conference with Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry.



"The world should first put an end to nuclear activities undertaken by India."



The remarks came a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to limit Pakistan's atomic programme.



US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said at a briefing on Tuesday that Kerry and Sharif discussed "our strong, long-term bilateral partnership and to build upon the US-Pakistan Strategic dialogue".



"Kerry also stressed the need for restraint in nuclear weapon programmes. The secretary praised Pakistan for hosting the Afghan refugees for over 40 years and highlighted the importance of continued respect for humanitarian principles."
















Islamabad: Continuing with efforts to internationalise the Kashmir issue, Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz has briefed foreign ministers of Japan, Austria and Switzerland about "human rights violation" in Kashmir.



Aziz, on the sidelines of 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, separately met with the foreign minsters -- Fumio Kishida of Japan, Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Didier Burkhalter of Switzerland, Pakistan's Foreign Office said.



Aziz also briefed his counterparts on Indo-Pak relations and the situation in Kashmir.



Highlighting "human rights abuse perpetrated by Indian security forces with impunity" in Kashmir, he stated that settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, was essential for peace and stability of South Asia, the Foreign Office said.



It claimed that while acknowledging the "sacrifices" rendered by Pakistan in the campaign against terrorism, the three foreign ministers appreciated "successful counter

-terrorism operations" conducted in tribal areas and the rest of the country.



Aziz noted that as a result of these operations, the security situation in the country has improved, which has enabled Pakistan's economy to grow at steady and sustainable rate.



He welcomed investments from Japan, Austria and Switzerland in Pakistan.



The Foreign Office said that Japan, Austria and Switzerland have underscored commitment to further strengthen existing cordial relations with Pakistan and promote mutual understanding on regional and international issues of common concerns.



Foreign Minister Kishida stated that Japan attached high priority to its relations with Pakistan. He evinced keen interest in investment in Pakistan's power sector.



Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz welcomed the prospects of investment in Pakistan due to improved security situation. He recognised significant potential of cooperation between the two sides in renewable energy.



Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter stated that Swiss development cooperation is completing its fifty years of work in Pakistan, the Foreign Office statement said.



Other issues discussed in these meetings were cooperation in multilateral organisations, Pakistan's application for membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group, the situation in Afghanistan and ongoing conferences and themes of 71st United Nations General Assembly, the statement said.
The Foreign Secretary reminded Basit that the Government of Pakistan had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India.



We were given some material on Uri. Pakistan rejects these baseless claims. India needs to come back to the negotiating table on Kashmir. And stop this anti-Pak propaganda," he said.

: The Centre on Wednesday summoned Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit and issued a demarche demanding Islamabad stop supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.Foreign Secretary Jaishankar called in the Pakistan High Commissioner to South Block even as a high-level meeting was taking place at the Prime Ministers residence to discuss the Uri attacks. Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Manohar Parrikar and Nitin Gadkari attended the meeting convened by PM Narendra Modi."The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern," said an MEA release."The latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. We demand that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India," it said.Pakistan, however, rejected Indias claims as baseless. A High Commission source said it was a routine demarche.New Delhi had categorically informed Pakistan that in the recent incidents involving cross-border terrorism including Uri and Pathankot attacks, India had recovered a number of items that include GPS with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site, grenades with Pakistani markings, communication matrix sheets, communication equipment; and other stores made in Pakistan, including food, medicines and clothes.India has also said that if the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide finger prints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents."We now expect a response from the Government of Pakistan," the MEA release said.
After months of denial and speculation, the news that one of Hollywoods most loved couples  Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt  splitting up was confirmed on Tuesday night after Jolie filed for divorce.The story of how Brangelina met and fell apart is nothing short of a films script in itself.For years, the couple gave relationship goals to the youngsters from around the world. Be it them expanding their family or Brad standing by Jolie through her cancer days; looked like they were the chosen one!The two of them met while shooting for Mr and Mrs Smith in 2005. While Brad was still married to Jennifer Aniston, Angelina had recently divorced Billy Bob Thornton.After a month-long formal separation, Jennifer filed for divorce from Pitt citing "irreconcilable differences".When Angelina and Pitt got busy in promotions of the steamy action-comedy Mr and Mrs Smith, the rumours of their closeness start ramping up.In October 2005, Pitt and Anistons divorce is finalised. Soon after the divorce, Pitt is snapped accompanying Jolie as she heads to Pakistan to participate in earthquake relief efforts.Everything became official in 2006 when Jolie confirmed in an interview to People Magazine that shes soon having a baby with Pitt. They also got the last names of her two kids, Maddox and Zahara changed to Jolie-Pitt.In May 2006, their first daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt is born in Namibia. The two continued to expand their family; adopted a three-year-old son Pax Thien from Vietnam. At the Cannes Film Festival 2008, Jolie confirmed she was pregnant with twins Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon.The duo then moved ahead to debut their wine, an award-winning rose, which was specially made at their 1,000-acre vineyard in France. In 2013, Jolie expressed her choice to undergo a double mastectomy, citing genetic predispositions towards breast cancer.Succumbing to their kids pressure in 2014, the two of them officially tied the knot in a close ceremony in the presence of a small number of guests and their six children.The two actors finally appeared together on the big screen in 2014 in Jolies directorial By The Sea.With the announcement of the split in September 2016, #Brangelina quickly became the top trending news on Twitter. While Angelina hasnt issued any statement yet, Pitt gave out a statement to People magazine and said, I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.(Image courtesy: Reuters Pictures)
1/4 Beg your pardon Mr Sharif, If people those who gave you your name knew what your characteristics would be,  Salim Khan (@luvsalimkhan) September 20, 2016

they would have named you Be-Nawaz Sharir.A big blunder has been comitted. Its your own admission that no one listens to u in Pakistan be it  Salim Khan (@luvsalimkhan) September 20, 2016

your army, your parliament or your people. Wonder if your respected family listens to you ???  Salim Khan (@luvsalimkhan) September 20, 2016

Ironic then that you are going around the world complaining about India. Is anyone listening ??  Salim Khan (@luvsalimkhan) September 20, 2016

: Acclaimed Bollywood screen writer Salim Khan has lashed out at Nawaz Sharif on Twitter, saying that when no one in Pakistan listens to their Prime Minister would anyone in the international fora heed his complaints about India.He also said that the Pakistani Prime Minister should have been re-named to "Be-Nawaz Sharir"."Beg your pardon Mr Sharif, If people those who gave you your name knew what your characteristics would be, they would have named you Be-Nawaz Sharir," Salim tweeted on Tuesday.Salim, 80, also said it was Sharif's admission that no one in Pakistan listens to him."A big blunder has been committed. Its your own admission that no one listens to you in Pakistan be it, your army, your parliament or your people. Wonder if your respected family listens to you??," he added.Salim said that it was ironic that Sharif was going "around the world complaining about India. Is anyone listening??".Salim's comments come in the wake of Sunday's terror attack on an Indian army camp in Uri, in Jammu and Kashmir, that has left 18 soldiers dead. India has blamed the attack on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohamed.Sharif is also in New York where he is to highlight alleged human rights violations by India in Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly.
Mumbai: Actress Sonakshi Sinha says she "would love" to work in the biopic of Rio Olympics bronze medal-winning wrestler Sakshi Malik.



"Of course I would love to do the biopic on her. Now Sakshi has also admitted that I am powerful and I do the stunts well. If any movie is being made on Sakshi, I would definitely play her character," she said at the LikeAGirl campaign's flagging-off on Tuesday.



About the gender bias in payments of Bollywood, the Akira star said: "I think gender biases in fees can be seen in any industry, not just in Bollywood. That is why we came here to tell people that do not make feel your girl that she is less than anyone. So that in future they should not face the problem of gender biases. Gender equality is utmost important."



"Today women have come to a position where they can raise their voice against any odd. They are doing so well in every field. So the awareness is there and things are changing but gender equality is yet to be achieved," she added.



Asked if ever someone has restrained her from doing something in her life, Sonakshi , 29 replied: "Honestly if someone has tried to restrain me from doing something, I am an obstinate girl so might be I haven't listened to that. This is why I am here today. I am fortunate that my parents have always supported me and made me realized that I am no less than my brothers."



Sonakshi currently is filming Sunhil Sippy's comedy Noor. She has also signed for Abhay Chopra's remake of the 1969 murder mystery, "Ittefaq" opposite Sidharth Malhotra, and Vipul Shah's comedy Namastey England opposite Akshay Kumar.
New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday accused the PDP-BJP coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir of "undoing" the work done by the previous UPA government and said this had led to "emboldening of separatists and militants" in the valley.



"The current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and People's Democratic Party (PDP) coalition has just managed to embolden the separatists, militants and Pakistani groups to disturb Kashmir," Congress leader R.P.N. Singh told reporters.



"Separatists, militants and Pakistan didn't have any role and were put into sidelines of Kashmir but after the last elections in the state, the BJP-PDP coalition, which was formed just to grab power, undid all the work that we did," he alleged.



"In 10 years of the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) rule there was relative peace in Jammu and Kashmir and our mantra was development. There was a fillip in tourism, job creations, education etc, which led people of Jammu and Kashmir to have faith in the mainstream of the country," Singh said.



The Congress leader's remarks came in the wake of Sunday's terror attack on an army camp in Kashmir's Uri sector, in which 18 Indian soldiers were martyred, and ongoing protests in the valley that started after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani on July 8.



Over 80 people have been killed and thousands have been left injured in clashes between the security forces and protesters since then.



Taking a dig at the central government, Singh said, "We saw how in this present dispensation things have became worse in Kashmir and stone pelting is back in large scale."



"Flags of Pakistan and ISIS are being waived in Kashmir, we see separatists, militants and Pakistan stamps in the state while present dispensation could only manage to clamp curfew," the Congress leader added.



Singh said that the Congress expresses full solidarity with the central government on any meaningful action which it initiates in the interest of national security.



Highlighting the work of the Congress-led UPA government, Singh said, "After the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, the UPA government prepared dossier for the United Nations (UN), the United States (US), and for our allies and as well as for the allies of Pakistan."



"We showed them through the dossier that state actors and non-state actors in Pakistan are the same people and it perpetrates terror, provides safe haven for terrorists," he added.



"It is because of that policy of our UPA government that Pakistan didn't dare to attack the very idea of India," he said.



Singh asked, "Today what is the foreign policy of this country?"



"Our Prime Minister is going there and inviting them over here, talking and non-talking etc, what is this flip-flop policy of India," he wondered.



"It's high time now that we have a decisive policy which helps in restoring the pride of the nation and making sure that no more jawans of our nation are martyred, borders become secure and there's no easy passage for terrorists," Singh added.
Ankara: An attacker wielding a knife tried to storm the Israeli embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara on Wednesday but was shot before reaching the building, Turkish reports and Israeli officials said.



Turkey's NTV television said the attacker tried to enter the well-defended embassy but was "neutralised" by being shot in the leg.



Employees of the embassy took refuge in a shelter, it added.



Israel's foreign ministry said the assailant tried to attack the Israeli embassy but was shot before reaching the building.



"The team members are unharmed. The assailant was injured before he reached the building," a ministry statement said.



The health condition of the attacker was not made clear. It was also not clear if the person had been shot by Turkish security forces or embassy guards.



Large numbers of police vehicles were dispatched to the scene and the road closed on which the building is located, an AFP correspondent said. Witnesses said they heard several shots fired.



CNN-Turk television said a suspicious package was also being investigated in front of the embassy.



The attack comes three months after Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship that left 10 Turks dead.



Under the deal, Turkey and Israel are to begin the process of exchanging ambassadors to fully restore their diplomatic ties although this has yet to formally take place.



Despite the crisis, the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul have carried on working in the last years, under heavy security.



Israel had already offered compensation and an apology over the raid, but with the agreement it also eased the naval blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, allowing Ankara to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.



The incident also comes with foreign missions in Turkey on a state of high alert following a spate of attacks across the country this year blamed on jihadists and Kurdish militants.



The British embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara was closed on Friday over security concerns while the German embassy offered only limited services.



Israel was quick to give its support to the Turkish government in the aftermath of the July 15 coup bid, condemning it while repeating its faith in the reconciliation

process between the two countries.
Caracas: Venezuela accused the United States of spying on a Non-Aligned Movement summit it recently hosted, saying Venezuelan fighter jets had intercepted a US surveillance plane and forced it to turn back.



President Nicolas Maduro's latest beef with Washington comes after Venezuela hosted leaders from the 120-member group on the Caribbean island of Margarita last weekend, a meeting that featured numerous jabs at US foreign policy.



"We know a military aircraft carried out flight patterns 130 nautical miles from Margarita island, collecting information, carrying out intelligence operations on the summit," said Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez on Tuesday.



He said a US Coast Guard Dash 8 plane was detected near Venezuelan airspace on Friday and Saturday, "flagrantly violating international norms" by failing to announce itself to the Venezuelan military's air traffick controllers.



"Our fighter jets, commanded by the president, flew out, intercepted the aircraft and informed (its crew) of the violation it was committing. The aircraft agreed to return to its base," on the island of Curacao, the minister said.



He called the incident a "provocation" that "underestimated" Venezuela's capacity to respond.



Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said Venezuela would present a formal protest.



Venezuela took over the presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement from Iran at the summit.



Maduro sought to use the occasion to strengthen old alliances, amid a severe economic crisis that has left him fighting for his political survival and increasingly isolated on the international stage.



The Non-Aligned Movement -- founded as a backlash against US and Soviet dominance during the Cold War -- has a history of prickly relations with Washington.



The United States and Venezuela likewise have a history of bad blood under Maduro and Hugo Chavez, his late predecessor and mentor.



Caracas and Washington withdrew their ambassadors in 2010, and Maduro has repeatedly accused the US of backing coup plots against him.








RUSTBURG  A Lynchburg man goes on trial next month on multiple felony charges in connection with a police standoff in Campbell County last fall.

Calvin Garvis Ramsey III, 40, faces five counts each of attempted malicious wounding of a police officer, assault on a law enforcement officer and using a firearm in commission of a felony.

Ramsey also was charged with several misdemeanors, including reckless handling of a firearm, pointing/brandishing a firearm, obstruction of justice and carrying a concealed weapon.

Campbell County Circuit Court Judge John Cook on Wednesday set a jury trial for Oct. 3.

In May a grand jury indicted Ramsey on the felonies, which according to Virginia State Police stem from an October overnight standoff on the 200 block of Walnut Lane in Campbell County.

State police said a trooper found Ramsey, who was wanted by the Appomattox County Sheriffs Office in an unrelated investigation, in his vehicle and that Ramsey pointed a firearm at the trooper.

Ramsey then barricaded himself in a nearby utility trailer. A standoff ensued, and Ramsey fired several shots at officers while they tried to talk to him, police said. He later was arrested, and no one was injured, they said.
Andrea Eis connection to Sweet Briar College was forged in 2008, when she was on sabbatical in Athens, Greece, studying feminism and the classics.

While doing research at a library there, Eis noticed some notes in the margin of a copy of Sophocles Antigone.

They belonged to Meta Glass, who was a Ph.D. student at Columbia University when she made the notes in the early 1900s and later served as Sweet Briars president from 1925 to 1946.

I was there to make my art, but  I wanted to look into backgrounds of feminist scholars who were reinterpreting the classics, because that was the kind of thing I was doing in my art, said Eis, a professor, filmmaker and artist who works in photography, film and fabric.

I spent a lot of time at this library and was reading all sorts of books that I didnt usually have time to.  I just love old books, and I thought, Well lets just take a look at these. And the first one I picked up was one of Meta Glass [books].

Eis checked the book out, not exactly sure what she was going to do with it. She started taking photographs of it and Glass notes, and kept going as she found more of her old books.

There were 20 total, of her books, in that library. Not all of them were [in] Greek. They were either Greek or Latin, Eis said. I just experimented with different ways to photograph them, looking for more intriguing words. I felt like I was getting to know her through all these words in the margins.

The resulting images, which Eis eventually combined with other photographs shed taken of ancient Greek sculptures, are featured in the exhibit, Andrea Eis: Marginalia, which opened in Sweet Briars Babcock Gallery last month and continues through Oct. 9.

Before the exhibit closes, Eis will give a gallery talk there, at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4.

Eis has degrees in classics and anthropology from Wisconsins Beloit College and photography/film/video from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She also has a masters in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and now teaches cinema studies at Oakland University, also in Michigan.

Her kinship with Glass grew deeper the more research she did into her scholarship and educational background.

There was all this information, the connection to Sweet Briar College and how she was president there. How shed gotten her Ph.D. at Columbia well before many women were getting their Ph.D.s in the classics, Eis said.  So I started feeling like I was getting to know her. The fact that she was an educator, her emphasis on higher education for women  it was just fascinating to me.

Glass was the half-sister of E.C. Glass High School namesake Edward Christian Glass and his brother, Sen. Carter Glass. She was a graduate of Randolph Macon Womans College and eventually taught there. Prior to becoming Sweet Briars president, she trained nurses in France during World War I, according to Karol Lawson, director of the colleges art collection and galleries as well as the Sweet Briar Museum.

She was quite a scholar herself and did a great deal here to keep academic standards growing and always improving, Lawson said. I think thats a theme you see throughout the history of our college, even our first president.  In the very early days, she constantly was driving the board of directors, for example, to be recruiting the very best high school students they could.  Meta Glass is very much a part of that.

After Eis finished her sabbatical, she kept the original photographs and began making art with them the following summer. Then she started talking about the work through Oakland Universitys Presidents Colloquium, which invites faculty members to discuss their research.

At that point, I talked a lot of about marginalia and how it shows up in a lot of other different fields. I talked about what marginalia meant to me, [that it] was this silent conversation that I was having with this woman who I was so connected to.

In 2014, Eis visited Sweet Briar for the first time to continue her research, where she met Lawson and began discussing the possibility of showing her work there.

She is a classics scholar herself, and a fine art photographer, Lawson said. So to see both of those things coming together in her work  you kind of get a front row seat on her process, of how she goes back and forth. She kind of toggles back and forth, being a scholar and being an artist.

Lawson said the work exhibits a wonderful combination of cutting edge stuff like digital photography with these ancient books  and then youve got the intermediary of Meta Glass translating them.

Here is more of what Eis had to say about her affection for Glass and why its important to be showing this work at Sweet Briar College:

What were your impressions of Meta Glass when you first discovered her notes?

My description that I use a lot of her is she was just this powerhouse of a woman. She was so determined that she could make things better.  Some of the ways that she would talk to the incoming students about how important it was that they be educated and that they take certain steps with their lives.

It just seems she was an active, energized, determined woman. I was just impressed with her. The character that came through in her writing. That sense of humor sometimes. And the struggles she had in learning. [When] she went to get her Ph.D., she knew Latin already but she didnt know Greek. To get a Ph.D. in Latin and Greek when you dont know Greek when you start your Ph.D., that is really something amazing. Because of my own fascination [with] the language, I like thinking about how she thought through issues in translating.

Could you talk more about your process, how youre layering these texts and margin notes with the ancient sculptures?

Well theres two parts of it. The basic technical thing, where its a Photoshop process where you either knock out the background with the one with the writing [or vice versa].  I was also interested in when I took some of the photographs, I photographed them from an angle and, that way, they sort of give a sense of moving through time and space. That sounds a little extreme. But that you get this sense of a physical nature of the book, and to me it was  the idea that she held this book, and she wrote in it. And then I held this book, and I photographed it. Its about the book as an object, as well, that connected us.

Because I have thousands of images from her book and I have probably thousands of photographs of Greek sculptures, its not like Im photographing a certain text and knowing it will go with an image.  I just go through them and I find  sometimes I find a text I want to use and then I look for a sculpture that I think connects with it emotionally or visually, and sometimes its the other way around. I kind of think of it as I have this archive of the sculptures and an archive of the marginalia images, and then work on them.

What does it mean to you to be showing them at Sweet Briar?

It feels so incredibly special to me. It was amazing just to go and visit Sweet Briar. But I feel like this is coming around full circle.  For me, its important because of my connection with her and feeling like I can show other people a side of her they probably dont know about and think about a great deal. For the current students, theres Meta Glass Dormitory, but I dont know what they think of Meta Glass or if they even know who its named after. This kind of humanizes her and makes her into someone they might be interested to know about.

Its a kind of exhibition that has a lot of layers. Its different from any exhibition Ive ever done before because it is so connected to the place and the person.
Liberty University is interested in seeing Wards Road expand to three lanes each way in the busy section between the River Ridge mall entrance and U.S. 460, President Jerry Falwell said during a meeting with other area college presidents and Lynchburg government leaders Wednesday.

That could be accomplished, he said, by changing some turn lanes into regular lanes. Falwell told the other leaders hed brought up the idea with Lynchburg City Manager Bonnie Svrcek during a recent meeting with her. He said Liberty is willing to help pay for it.

Wednesdays luncheon meeting at Heritage High School was part of the quarterly Town & Gown series, aimed at getting representatives of local colleges and the city talking with each other.

Among those attending were the presidents of Central Virginia Community College, Liberty University, Lynchburg College, Randolph College and Virginia University of Lynchburg. Sweet Briar Colleges president was invited but was unable to make it. Council members present included Mayor Joan Foster, Sterling Wilder and Mary Jane Dolan.

In his remarks, Falwell said after years of rising enrollment, Liberty plans to hold its on-campus enrollment steady next school year because the campus is reaching the limits of what it can accommodate. Right now it is about 15,000, and he expects to have about that number next year instead of allowing another increase.

Foster said she avoids Wards Road at some times of peak traffic. She said if it were possible to make traffic there better, by whatever means, it potentially could be helpful for businesses to attract customers from other parts of the city at those times.

CVCC President John Capps said his school  located on Harvard Street across Wards Road from Liberty also is affected by traffic congestion on Wards and on Harvard. Unlike Wards, Harvard Street is owned by the State Board of Community Colleges.

He said after the meeting any improvement to Harvard Street would have to come from that board, and he doesnt think its a priority, given the many expensive challenges the state is dealing with.

After the meeting, Svrcek said when she met with Falwell a couple weeks ago, they spoke very informally about the idea of three lanes.

Its a vision, she said, explaining that discussion was the first time shes been involved in a conversation about it. Im not aware that it is in the citys transportation priorities.

Right now, those include work on U.S. 501 and U.S. 221.

She thinks it would relieve congestion to go to three lanes, and any time a solution relieves congestion, thats a good thing. On the other hand, she said shes not a traffic engineer. Her next question would be whether getting rid of the turn lanes might increase the risk of traffic crashes.

During the meeting, Virginia University of Lynchburg President Kathy Franklin shared she wants to see her school get accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.

That would be a big shift for the school, which has been accredited through the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, or TRACS, which has a headquarters in Forest.

All the other colleges represented at Wednesdays meeting are accredited through SACS-COC, which has a reputation among college accrediting agencies for being relatively stringent in its requirements upon schools.

She said she is working with a couple other members of her staff to tackle this. She also said VUL had been approved by its board to build a student commons. The school, she said, has increased enrollment from about 320 students last year to about 420 this year.

Franklin, previously the provost and executive vice president, was named president this spring after serving as interim president.
Hawk Claus spreads Christmas cheer in DC's Grifter Got Run Over By a Reindeer first look

Take a look at two stories from the DC holiday special including the titular chapter and a Hawkwoman and Hawkman tale
GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Heres why you can trust us.
Tough role for Alzheimers caregivers

Because people are quite quick to comment that someone like myself would not understand as I had not walked in their shoes, I will agree that dealing with my fathers forgetfulness was barely a step into the shoes of so many other caregivers whose stories I have heard. He never forgot me to the day of his death in 1997 and was always manageable. I always remember the ophthalmologist who did his regular glaucoma checks remarking, Angela your father does not have full Alzheimers, he knows you. Its when they do not even know themselves in the mirror. My four siblings and I never ever had to totally care for him as our mother, his wife of 60 odd years whose mind was very alert, supervised the caregivers from her wheelchair. She suffered with arthritis. When she passed away six months before he did, it was decided by us five siblings that since he was none the wiser about his whereabouts, a good home would be best, rather than employ three caregivers in his Newtown residence. There was none better than Nurse Margot Williams, who being a well-qualified nurse, could look after his primary lung disease, complete with provision of oxygen, in the home without any transference to a private or public hospital.

I make the last point before moving to Forgetting Forever, published about one year ago by Patricia Ann Da Costa, who seeks to share Memoirs of The Alzheimers Challenge, in the role of primary caregiver for her parents, both victims of this dreaded disease dating back to 2000, to show that I understand how overwhelming it must have been in her role as total caregiver. Her father passed away in August 2015 and one year later continues to care for her mother as promised to my father on his death bed, to give her the best care that she truly deserves, as she seems to forget forever. Says Da Costa: My parents both enjoyed and embraced life with an inexplicable joie de vivre, perhaps the envy of many couples their age who certainly had not found the love and devotion as they had. To forget this would be a grave error, as it instilled in me the fine example of how life should be lived to its fullest and best regard in spite of obstacles. Such a legacy has transformed me and in the end would account for my determination to keep my parents with their grace and dignity through the scourge of forgetfulness and beyond. Very noble words once you and your immediate family are able to enjoy some semblance of a normal life.

It has taken me one whole year to write about the small book, where every single gory detail that the writer experienced personally during the 15-year sojourn into the world of forgetfulness of two very prim and proper human beings who were neither aware nor responsible for their actions, was being placed before the world.

And I have wondered over and over how did that keep their grace and dignity? Had I ever publicly gone into every detail of the things which forgetfulness could make the patient do, and they were not one-quarter of those she mentioned, my father would never have forgiven me.

We must remember that when those we love and have loved for a lifetime, start acting out with this disease, their actions can become from plain amusing to unimaginably bizarre. Writing about it is not going to help future caregivers as each individuals disease travels a different path, for instance some can be aggressive, others laid back.

What also is not going to happen, as she expected, was for her book to provide forewarnings every step of the way as to what would be the next phase of the illness  the stages vary.

No close relative should be involved in 24x7 management/ caregiving of a loved one. Sometimes it is better to step back and leave it to professionals. In any case, when this time comes, the patient is neither aware of, nor cares about, where they live, just as long as they are being well-looked after and those close to them continue to visit daily, whether they know you or not on any specific day, and try to provide the things that they love. Also, they could be more comfortable in surroundings where other people communicate in like manner and they are not forced to try to understand conversation going on around them.

I asked myself many questions going through this booklet. How did the author survive mentally sharing in every aspect of this total deterioration of two people so near and dear to her 24x7; how did her marriage stand up to this - her husband will surely soon be elevated to sainthood; what was her young daughter doing in the midst of these episodes which have robbed her of parts of her youth, some of which might never leave her memory causing lots of emotional problems as she grows older.

A recurring thought was that she needed to engage the support of her siblings, not just financially but physically and mentally as well. Each one of them will bring different ideas and solutions. No one person should commit to this 24 hours of each day.

Finally, a very dear friend was laid to rest two weeks ago. About one year ago, I went to visit her in the home where she had been placed by her four adult and loving children. She did not know me and when the caregiver invited me to come and speak with her, common sense and former experience told me trying to engage her in conversation could never be the best thing for her to have to make that effort to even remember who I was, far less to carry on any ole talk as we used to in days past.

Here again thats my philosophy.

Why make the person rack his/ her brain to recognise and address you?
RATS CHASE WORKERS

The workers said they are not willing to place their health and lives at risk by working among the rodents. The treatment plant purifies water that goes out on a daily basis to thousands of consumers in Penal and environs. Because of the increasing rat population and the presence of other vermin, the seven- man crew told Newsday all they do is report for duty on mornings and leave. Since August 14, they have stopped working and contractors have been brought in to oversee the day to day operations of the plant.

The workers occupy a 20-foot container on the plant that treat gallons of water on a daily basis.

They have been occupying the container for the last five years after their building they were in was demolished.

They also complained of tick and flea infestations because of the number of stray dogs that roam the compound. Rats are known carriers of the deadly leptospirosis disease which can be transmitted to humans via rat urine.

Is rats and more rats on the compound and they have found a home here, Eyon Swan, union worker representative of the National Union of Government and Federated Workers (NUGFW) told Newsday yesterday. He explained that the container with work stalls is situated just in front of a sludge tank that is part of the purification process. Swan continued: All on our desks at our work stations in the container there is rat faeces.

Rats carry diseases in their urine and this is serious issue and no one is taking us on. The workers have blamed the rat invasion on the large pipes, old valves and garbage that is on the compound. Why no one is listening to our cries still baffles me,, Swan said.

As the representative I have spoken to WASA officials but nothing was done. Yesterday, Chairman of the Siparia Regional Corporation (SEC) Leo Doodnath confirmed that the Rodent Unit of the SRC responded to complaints from workers and treated with the problem by placing poisoned bait in the plant.

Workers however said it the poison has had very little impact on the rats.

They (rodent unit) put down pellets in April but it didnt help, Swan said Yesterday they returned and put down some more bait. But not only are there rats, workers also complained about ticks and fleas crawling all over the walls because of the many stray dogs that roam the compound. They showed pictures of the vermin crawling on the wall and pictures of rats running around It is definitely poses a health risk, Swan said. A large yellow dumpster located next to a sludge tank is also of concern to the workers.

When the rats eat the poison and are dying, they would go running all over the plant looking for water to drink. Swan added, There are some chambers they enter as they go in search of water.

When they die, they decay all over the yard and stink up the place making the environment very uncomfortable to work in. Workers told Newsday that WASA is yet to address the problem of the stray dogs. Among their duties, the workers explained, are to maintain pipelines and install water connections to homes.

He said their work office should never be on that compound because of the hazardous material stored there. We dont do any work there but our offices are there, Swan said. In an interview yesterday, regional corporation chairman Doodnath said, I am aware that based on a request, our rodent control team went in and treated with the problem. If it is that what our team is doing is insufficient because of the enormity (of the vermin) then WASA may have to get involved to treat with the issue. Up to press time, emailed queries from Newsday to WASAs head of corporate communications Daniel Plenty had gone unanswered.

Efforts also to reach line minister Ancil Antoine (Public Utilities) for a comment proved futile.
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(Newser)  While America might more typically worry about what its youth are doing, Japan spends a lot of time worrying about what they're not doing, and what they're not doing is having sexat all, apparently. A new government survey suggests that the country's millennials are not only in no hurry to marry, but apparently aren't in any rush to do the deed. To wit, a whopping 44% of women and 42% of men, amounting to nearly half of the country's millennial singles ages 18 to 34, say they are still virgins, reports the Washington Post. But the percentage of these singles who say they hope to marry in the future is up close to 90%. "People marry later or stay single for life, contributing to the nations low birthrate," the head researcher tells the Japan Times. "They want to tie the knot eventually, but they tend to put it off as they have gaps between their ideals and the reality."

With an aging generation of baby boomers weighing down what is already the world's oldest population, Japan has for years been trying to encourage its dwindling number of young people to marry and have children. But complicating this quandary, CNN reports that the apparent lack of interest in engaging in actual sex could result in part from the country's many manga fans choosing fantasy over reality. Plus more women are making more money and choosing to marry later or not at all, while many men report feeling intimidated by them. "They feel threatened by women who are empowering themselves," one expert says. (A quarter of young men and almost half of young women in Japan go so far as to say they despise sexual contact.)
(Newser)  By 2013, 11 states legally required schools to stock auto-injectors for epinephrine and pretty much all the rest recommended it, while the federal government passed the "EpiPen Law" giving funding preference to schools that did so. The push for auto-injectors, of which EpiPen was pretty much the only option, was Gayle Manchin, head of the National Association of State Boards of Education, andaccording to a report from USA Todaymother of embattled Mylan CEO Heather Bresch. Mylan is the maker of EpiPen and is currently under a federal investigation for price hikes and an antitrust investigation in New York. That second investigation is related to Mylan's contracts with schools.

"It just looked so bad to me," Brenda Welburn tells USA Today. "[Manchin] becomes president and all of a sudden NASBE is saying EpiPens are a good thing for schools." Welburn, the former executive director of NASBE, says the association had always tried to stay way from "corporate influence" prior to Manchin's tenure. While Manchin was head of NASBE, her daughter's company funded panels on allergies in schools, gave money to NASBE, and launched the "EpiPen4Schools" program. Read the full piece here. (Read more EpiPen stories.)
(Newser)  Eric Manu moved from Ghana to British Columbia in 2012 after marrying a Canadian woman he'd met at home, and he began to work as a landscaper. But his uncle, who had served as chief of their tribe, died a few years ago at age 67, and Manu was next in line to lead his people. So he returned to the village of Adansi Aboabo No. 2 in southern Ghana last year to be crowned the chief of the Akan tribe, where he leads 6,000 people, reports CTV News.

Now Manu is back in Canada for a few months to continue his work landscapingand says he is "proud to work for my boss" and that "this is humbleness, you understand." He's also raising money to improve conditions for his people, who are currently served by a single medical clinic with a few nurses. Manu and his landscaping boss have started a foundation called To the Moon and Back to send medical and school supplies to Ghana, and they are raising money for a second shipment. Manu tells the CBC that since being crowned he is a "totally changed person" who wants to "think far and accept people, irrespective of who they are. Either young or old, physically challenged or able. Everybody." (Manu and his wife have a toddler and plan to split their time between homes.)
(Newser)  There's tough love, and then there's calling the cops on your own toddler because she isn't wearing a seat belt. ABC 7 reports that's exactly what Arizona mom Michelle Fortin did when her 3-year-old daughter unbuckled during a car ride home on Monday. "All I heard was her screaming and crying, and all of a sudden her brother, who was sitting next to her, yells, 'Mommy! Mommy, she unbuckled her seat belt,'" Fortin tells KPHO/KTVK. Fortin pulled over and explained to little Camille why it's important she wear a seat belt. But she wasn't sure Camille got the point.

So when Fortin got home, she called the Scottsdale Police Department on her daughter. She says she wanted to make sure Camille took the issue seriously because "her safety was at risk." Apparently, two officers were happy to come over and teach Camille and her brother about seat belt safety. Camille promised the officers she would keep her seat belt on in the future. "I guess it was an extreme choice on my part to call police, but...I knew that was gonna drive the point home better than just hearing it from mom," Fortin tells ABC 7. (Read more Arizona stories.)
(Newser)  A cafeteria worker in Pennsylvania says she loves her job, but she can't continue taking hot meals away from kids who can't pay for them. Stacy Koltiska, who has quit her job at Wylandville Elementary School in the town of Eighty Four, tells the Washington Post that a new policy brought in over the summer requires workers to refuse hot meals to kids whose parents owe $25 or more for lunches. If they are in kindergarten to grade 6, they are allowed to have bread and a slice of "government cheese." Older kids owing $25 or more get no lunch at all. Koltiska says the "lunch shaming" policy has forced her to take hot meals from kids, throw them away, and still charge them for the meal.

"The first week of school on Friday, I had to take a little first grade boys chicken and give him this 'cheese sandwich,'" Koltiska writes in a Facebook post. "I will never forget the look on his face and then his eyes welled up with tears." District Superintendent Matthew Daniels says the policy isn't intended to shame or embarrass children and it doesn't target kids who qualify for free lunches, the AP reports. He says that before the policy was brought in, around 300 families ended up owing the district $60,000 to $100,000 annually, and now it is down to fewer than 70 families owing less than $20,000. (This chef left a world-famous restaurant in Denmark to create better school lunches in the US.)
(Newser)  Donald Trump has described climate change as a hoax and a fraudbut he has inadvertently done more than most to bring about worldwide agreement on the issue. The New York Times reports that fear of a Trump presidency has helped United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon persuade more countries to ratify the Paris climate pact, which is now expected to enter legal force by the end of this year. Trump has vowed to pull the US out of the pactbut President Obama has already ratified the deal, and the withdrawal process takes four years. A round-up of coverage:

The AP reports that 30 more countries are expected to join the Paris deal this week, bringing it much closer to the target of 55 countries representing at least 55% of emissions. When that target is hit, the deal will officially come into force.

Some 375 scientists from the National Academy of Sciences and foreign affiliatesincluding Stephen Hawking and almost 30 other Nobel Prize winnerssigned an open letter Tuesday criticizing Trump's pledge to pull the US out of the deal, reports Reuters. The move "would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: 'The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change,'" they wrote.

Climate Central reports that the deal won't be completely "Trump-proof" even if it comes into effect soon. Even if withdrawal takes years, he will be able to undermine it by abandoning plans to reduce pollution. Trump has already said he plans to get rid of the EPA.

The Guardian reports that climate change hasn't been as big an election issue as some had expected: Since winning the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton is mentioning the issue a lot less, with roughly one mention per five speeches, compared to one in two before the endorsement.

(Read more climate change stories.)
(Newser)  Yet another American city has erupted in protests after a fatal police shooting. Police in Charlotte, NC, say around a dozen officers were injured late Tuesday and early Wednesday after a man was shot and killed in the parking lot of an apartment complex Tuesday afternoon, CNN reports. Police say they were searching for somebody at the complex when they saw Keith Lamont Scott, 43, leave his car holding a gun. Police say Scottwho was not the man they were looking forwas approached by officers after he got back in the car and was shot dead when he emerged from the car with a gun again.

Police say Scott "posed an imminent deadly threat," but family members give a very different account of the shooting to WCCB. They say Scott was sitting in his car reading a book while he waited for his son to get off a school bus, and police mistook the book for a weapon. Brentley Vinson, the officer involved in the shooting, has been with the force since 2014 and is on paid administrative leave while the incident is investigated. Sources tell the Charlotte Observer that Vinson, like Scott, is African American. The Washington Post reports that tear gas and rubber bullets were fired during Tuesday night's protests and protesters shut down traffic on I-85 early Wednesday. (Read more Charlotte stories.)
(Newser)  Donald Trump may have finally given up on the birther debate, but Joe Arpaio sure hasn't. The Arizona sheriff who organized a volunteer posse that claimed President Obama's birth certificate was a fake back in 2012, says he's still investigating the document. "I don't care where he's from. We are looking at a forged document. Period," he told a group of Surprise Tea Party Patriots on Tuesday, per the Arizona Republic.

Arpaio's lead investigator, Mike Zullo, says Trump's statement last week was "unexpected" but likely "strategic." "I'm not going to give up, and we're looking into it," Arpaio adds. "I don't know how its going to turn out." Paul Penzone, the man running for sheriff against Arpaio this November, however, says the investigation is "nonsense" and "a waste of resources," per KSAZ. (Arpaio was recently found in contempt of court.)
(Newser)  A man whose job was to test gold for purity at the Royal Canadian Mint is accused of stealing $135,000 in precious metalin his rectum. Leston Lawrence, 35, was known to set off the Mint's metal detectors more often than most, but he always passed a search with a hand-held wand, according to prosecutors. They say that's because Lawrence smuggled coins and 18 unmarked gold nuggets out of the Mint hidden in his rectum, then took them to a gold buyer, where he received checks for about $5,000 per piece between November 2014 and March 2015, reports the Ottawa Citizen. After noticing the high number of checks, however, a bank teller discovered Lawrence worked at the Mint and alerted authorities, prosecutors say.

The Mintwhere "gold is left sitting around in open buckets," says Lawrence's lawyer, Gary Barnescould find no record of the alleged thefts, but investigators say they found four nuggets in Lawrence's possession after executing a search warrant. The nuggets are in the shape of the Mint's "dipping spoon," which is not available commercially, notes the newspaper. Investigators also found Vaseline in Lawrence's work locker. A security employee proved one could pass a security check with a hand-held wand while smuggling gold via the butt, investigators say. Still, Barnes argues there's no proof Lawrence's gold came from the Mint, per the Toronto Sun. He's charged with theft, laundering the proceeds of crime, possession of stolen property, and breach of trust. A decision is expected Nov. 9. (Your butt is welcome to touch this gold toilet.)
(Newser)  A history teacher says his lesson on free speech came with the unintended caveat that free speech isn't always guaranteed after it landed him a suspension. Students at Massey Hill Classical High School in Fayetteville, NC, say Lee Francis was discussing a court case that determined flag desecration was protected by the First Amendment when he asked for a lighter or scissors. When no student obliged, students say he put an American flag on the ground and stomped on it, prompting two students to walk out of class, per WRAL. Franciswho some parents in the military community want fired, per WTVDhas been placed on administrative leave until he meets with the Cumberland County Schools superintendent on Thursday.

"Clearly there are other ways to teach First Amendment rights without desecrating the flag," the superintendent says. But Francis defends the move. "It's really disconcerting," he tells the Fayetteville Observer of the reaction. "My question to everyone is who is entitled to freedom of speech?" Though "trampling" on the American flag is illegal in North Carolina, "the very freedoms and principles that the American flag represents include the freedom to stomp on the flag," says a rep for the American Civil Liberties Union. "The Constitution gives people the right to free speech and expression, no matter how much others may disagree or be uncomfortable with the message. And that is certainly a lesson worth teaching." (An Illinois teacher was fired for the same thing.)
(Newser)  US and Russian diplomats say there's still hope of reviving a ceasefire in Syria, but developments on the ground suggest it would be a tall order. An overnight airstrike wiped out a mobile medical unit run by a French relief organization, reports the AP. At least five staffers from the International Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations were killed south of Aleppo, though it remains unclear who was behind the strike. It comes a day after what is shaping up to be a much bigger issue: An airstrike hit a humanitarian convoy delivering aid to Aleppo, and US officials now say Russia was likely responsible, reports the New York Times. Russia denies it.

Two US officials tells Reuters that a pair of Russian war planes were spotted above the convoy before it was hit, while Moscow says the US "has no facts" to back up the allegation. In fact, Russia says it's not even clear that the convoy was hit from the air, notes Al Jazeera. Whatever the cause, civilians are bearing the brunt of the fallout, because the UN has halted all further aid convoys in Syria. All this comes as pro- and anti-government forces battled anew near Aleppo and Hama, and as the UN plans a high-level meeting on Wednesday. And it follows last weekend's errant US airstrike that hit Syrian troops. (Read more Syria stories.)
(Newser)  It smelled so bad in Vallejo, California, overnight that the city ordered people to stay inside. The shelter-in-place order has since been lifted, but the cause of the nasty odor is still a mystery, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. For now, the best bet is that it comes from an oil slick reported in nearby San Pablo Bay, and the US Coast Guard is currently trying to find the slick and determine if it's the cause. The smell was so sickening that several residents went to the hospital. Vallejo authorities have ruled out a gas leak, notes KNTV, which reports that the first call to authorities came in Tuesday evening. (Read more odor stories.)
(Newser)  Police say they found a handgunbut no bookat the scene where Keith Scott was shot and killed by an officer Tuesday afternoon in Charlotte, CNN reports. Family says the 43-year-old father of seven was reading a book in his car while waiting for his son to get out of school and had no weapon. Police were at the apartment complex where Scott was killed to serve a warrant on another man. "I can tell you from the facts that the story's a little bit different as to how it's been portrayed," police chief Kerr Putney says. "The suspect exited the vehicle with a handgun, threatening officers," the New York Times quotes Putney as saying.

Putney says it's unclear if Scott pointed the gun at officers, ABC News reports. But officers believed him to be "an imminent deadly threat." Brentley Vinson, the officer who killed Scott, wasn't wearing a body camera, but others at the scene were. Police say footage from those cameras won't be released until after an investigation. In the meantime, police say evidence and witnesses indicate that Scott had a gun, which he refused to drop. Scott's daughter said on Facebook she believes police planted evidence at the scene. The Justice Department is looking into the shooting. Both Scott and Vinson are black. (Read more police shooting stories.)
(Newser)  Huma Abedin dumped husband Anthony Weiner last month amid allegations that he couldn't stop his sexting ways. Those allegations have just gotten worse: The Daily Mail reports in painful, intricate detail that Weiner carried on a months-long relationship via text and Skype with a 15-year-old girl beginning in January of this year. The messages were explicit, and the unidentified girl and her father tell the newspaper that the 52-year-old knew she was underage as he encouraged her to indulge in rape fantasies and the like. While the Daily Mail may not be the most reliable of sources, Weiner responded with a statement that is a little vague but acknowledges something was going on.

"I have repeatedly demonstrated terrible judgement about the people I have communicated with online and the things I have sent," he writes. "I am filled with regret and heartbroken for those I have hurt. While I have provided the Daily Mail with information showing that I have likely been the subject of a hoax, I have no one to blame but me for putting myself in this position. I am sorry." As the Daily News notes, Weiner does not deny communicating with the girl. The Daily Mail says the girl eventually told her father and a teacher, after which Weiner pressured her to tell them that she lied and that they were "just friends." (Read more Anthony Weiner stories.)
The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574.
Bengaluru:

Terming the Supreme Courts order directing Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 27 as unimplementable, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has called for a cabinet and an all-party meeting on Wednesday to chalk out the next step.



....the Supreme Court has passed an order, since we do not have water, it is very difficult to implement it. It is an unimplementable order, he said.



Siddaramaiah said Karnataka had placed certain facts based on ground reality before the Cauvery Supervisory Committee but it still passed an order directing the state to release 3,000 cusecs per day between September 21 and 30.



Noting the committee was constituted by the apex court only, he said it had given a direction on September 5 to Tamil Nadu to approach the committee and also asked Karnataka to file a response to the neighbouring states plea. Despite all this, the Supreme Court has passed an order on Tuesday, he said.



Siddaramaiah appealed to public to maintain peace, while assuring that the government is committed to protect the interest of the state and its people and farmers.



There is a cabinet meeting tomorrow, we will discuss, we are waiting for the copy of the order of the Supreme Court. The (state) cabinet will take a view, meanwhile we will consult legal experts also.I have also called an all-party meeting, in that meeting we will discuss the pros and cons of this order. After taking views and opinion of leaders from all parties we will proceed further, he added.



Karnataka will have to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water per day to Tamil Nadu from tomorrow till September 27, the Supreme Court said today while raising the quantum fixed by the Supervisory Committee yesterday by 3000 cusecs.



A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and U U Lalit has also directed the Centre to constitute within four weeks the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) as directed by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) in its award.



Apparently keeping in mind last weeks widespread violence over the Cauvery issue in Bengaluru, Siddarmaiah said, I appeal to the people, especially to people from Cauvery basin to maintain peace; they should not get carried away by emotions. Government is committed to protecting the interest of the state, its people and its farmers. Every one should cooperate...



Soon after the Supreme Courts order, the chief minister held meetings with senior state ministers and officials.

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New Delhi:

A crucial meeting of Cabinet ministersA chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the wake of terror attacks in Uri that left 18 Indian Army jawans martyred and 19 other soldiers injured is currently underway. The meeting is attended by top ministers including Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The meeting may discuss possible options on how India can respond to Uri attacks.

Here are the live updates:

Delhi: Union Cabinet meeting ends. HM Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, MoS PMO Jitendra Singh leave PMO. pic.twitter.com/LEj2PBqpou a ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

#Delhi: Union Cabinet meeting at the PMO ends



#Cabinet Committee on Security meeting underway, HM Rajnath Singh, FM Arun Jaitley, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrive for meet

Delhi: Cabinet Committee on Security meeting underway, HM Rajnath Singh, FM Arun Jaitley, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrive for meet pic.twitter.com/Ve53ZWoAki a ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

India had reacted strongly to the deadliest attack on the Army in Jammu and Kashmir in a quarter-century-old insurgency that sparked an outrage with the Prime Minister strongly condemning it.

aWe strongly condemn the cowardly terror attack in Uri. I assure the nation that those behind this despicable attack will not go unpunished,a Modi had said.



The assertion by PM Modi has triggered speculation about the options that India could exercise in the current situation.A The options that are being speculated include a swift, surgical strike on terror camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). However, experts caution it could have consequences. One of the speculated options also include targeting artillery and heavy-mortar fire on Pakistan army posts and bunkers.

Home Minister Rajnath had pointed a finger directly at Pakistan, saying it is a aterrorist statea and should be isolated. while BJP leader Ram Madhav said days of strategic restraint are over and suggested that afor one tooth, the complete jawa should be the policy after the attack.



Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Monday chaired a high-level meeting attended by top ministers and other officials over the deadly terror attack in Uri.



Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag besides other senior officials attended the meeting.



Heavily armed militants suspected to be from Pakistan-based JeM on Sunday stormed an army base in Uri in Kashmir, killing 17 jawans.

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New Delhi:

Pakistan seems to have been cornered by the international fraternity after the recent terror attack on an army base at Uri, South Kashmir that killed 18 soldiers of the Indian army and left many criticially injured.

The US has severely condemned Pakistan over its role of sponsoring terrorism in the Kashmir Valley.

A bipartisan group of two powerful American lawmakers has introduced an act in the US House of Representatives to designate Pakistan a State Sponsor of terrorism. "It is time we stopped paying Pakistan for its betrayal and designate it for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism," said Congressman Ted Poe, who is Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.

The 'Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act' (HR 6069) has been introduced by Republican Poe along with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of the Democratic Party, who is Ranking member of this influential Congressional Committee on terrorism. "Not only is Pakistan an untrustworthy ally, Islamabad has also aided and abetted enemies of the US for years," Poe said. "From harboring Osama bin Laden to its cozy relationship with the Haqqani network, there is more than enough evidence to determine whose side Pakistan is on in the War on Terror. And it's not America's," he alleged.

Poe said the bill will require the Obama Administration to formally answer this question. The President must issue a report within 90 days of passage detailing whether or not Pakistan has provided support for international terrorism, he said. "Thirty days after that, the Secretary of State must issue a follow-up report containing either a determination that Pakistan is a State Sponsor of terrorism or a detailed justification as to why Pakistan does not meet the legal criteria for designation," Poe said. In a separate statement, Congressman Pete Olson supported every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Uri terrorist attack.

"I strongly condemn this terrorist attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir that resulted in the death of 18 Indian soldiers. India is a strong partner and ally in peace," he said. "I support every effort to find out who committed this heinous act, so that the perpetrators are brought to justice. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims," Olson said. Senator John Cornyn, Co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus tweeted a story which said the Indian Army had suffered its biggest stack in a decade.

Indian-Americans continued to call for designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. "Pakistan has been pursuing for almost 30 years the state sponsored terrorism as its strategic policy to further its sinister designs across its borders. In the process, Pakistan became a cradle and epicenter of global terrorism. At present it is totally isolated in the global community and turning into a rogue state," said Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP)-USA. "OFBJP-USA believes that the attack at Indian Army in Uri by Pakistanis should not be termed as another incident of terrorism by infiltrators, but it should be considered as an act of war by Pakistan against India. And India must respond to teach a befitting lesson to Pakistan," it said.

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New Delhi:

Music Composer Vishal Dadlani met Tarun Sagar on WednesdayA in Chandigarh and apologised to theA Jain monk over his sarcastic tweet. After meeting Tarun Sagar, Dadlani said that he has developed a friendship bond withA the Jain monk.

"'Guruji' (Jain Muni Tarun Sagar) accepted my apology and think we've also developed friendship bond", Vishal said.

A court had directed music composer Vishal Dadlani to join the investigation on September 21 in connection with a case against him by the Haryana police for allegedly hurting the religious sentiments by his "sarcastic" tweet on Jain monk Tarun Sagar.

'Guruji' (Jain Muni Tarun Sagar) accepted my apology, I think we've also developed friendship bond: Vishal Dadlani pic.twitter.com/DjNotRihwa a ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

District and Sessions Judge Deepak Gupta directed Dadlani to join the investigation at at Ambala Cantonment Sadar police station on an application filed by the music composer for anticipatory bail.A

Music composer Vishal Dadlani meets Jain Muni Tarun Sagar in Chandigarh pic.twitter.com/XX6LnucqYD a ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

The court adjourned the matter till September 23. Ambala Cantonment police had lodged a case three weeks ago against Dadlani and one more person under relevant sections, including 153A (promoting enmity between classes), 295A (maliciously insulting the religion or religious beliefs of any class) and 509 (uttering any word or making any gesture to insult the modesty of a woman) of IPC.A

The case was registered on the basis of a complaint filed by Punit Arora, a resident of Ambala Cantonment and a follower of the Jain monk. The complainant had alleged that the accused had intentionally hurt the religious sentiments of Jains by his "sarcastic" tweet on Sagar. Dadlani came under criticism from various quarters including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, for his tweet on the Jain monk's speech in Haryana Assembly.

He had subsequently tendered an apology for his tweet on the microblogging website and later deleted it.A

Dadlani had apologised to Sagar subsequently. The Jain monk had delivered a lecture, 'Kadve Pravachan', in Haryana Assembly last month on an invitation of the state government.

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Washington:

In another round of sparring, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have accused each other of misappropriation of funds meant for charity and "fraud" after reports said that two rival presidential candidates have overlapping interest in their charities. Trump's version of charity is taking money from others to settle his own legal issues, charged the Clinton Campaign.

On the other hand, the Trump Campaign alleged that the Clinton Foundation is first and foremost an arm of the Clintons' political and buck-raking apparatus. Allegations between the two campaigns flew thick and fast following publications of news reports in the US media that raised questions about the two charities and foundation. The Wall Street Journal in an investigative report said that Bill Clinton's speaking fee overlaps with the Foundation business.

"These revelations show that the Clinton Foundation is first and foremost an arm of the Clintons' political and buck-raking apparatus," alleged Jason Miller, senior communication advisor to the Trump Campaign. "After all, if there is one thing the Clintons are known for, it is that there is no line they won't cross and no corner they won't cut in order to earn a quick buck," Miller said.

In an investigative report, it also said that Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire's for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents. "Clearly the Trump Foundation is as much a charitable organisation as Trump University is an institute of higher education," said Hillary for America deputy communications director Christina Reynolds.

"Trump's version of charity is taking money from others to settle his own legal issues and buy at least two pictures of himself, which experts say is a clear violation of laws governing charitable organisations," she said. "Once again, Trump has proven himself a fraud who believes the rules don't apply to him. It's past time for him to release his tax returns to show whether his tax issues extend to his own personal finances," Reynolds alleged.

Trump has proven time and again that he only cares about looking out for one person, himself, and it doesn't matter who he steps on to make that happen, alleged the Democratic National Committee press secretary Mark Paustenbach. "Now, we've learned he has gone so far as turn his 'charitable foundation' into a slush fund for covering his legal settlements, making illegal political contributions, and buying extravagant portraits of himself.

"Today's report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend's attacks," Miller said based on another report in The Journal. "The decision to honour the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton's foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency," he alleged.

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New Delhi:

India has moved the units of Indian Army and Indian Air Force to forward air bases near Line of Control (LoC) to launch surgical strikes as part of India's three-phased strategy, according to reports in Pakistani news websites.

India has completed its first phase preparations to attack selected targets in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) under the Cold Start Doctrine, Pakistani website The News International and Pakistan Today reported on Wednesday.



The report further says that Pakistan would respond with full force in case of any strike by India.



The decision by the Pakistan government to cancel flights to the country's northern areas was taken as a precautionary step on Wednesday.

The tensions between the nuclear-armed adversaries have soared recently after the Uri terror attacks.



Heavily armed terrorists had stormed the Army camp in Kashmir's Uri sector in the wee hours of September 18, killing 18 jawans and injuring 19 other personnel in the terror strike in which four militants were neutralised.



What is Cold Start Doctrine?



Cold Start Doctrine is a military strategy developed by the Indian Armed Forces for use in a possible war with Pakistan. It involves the various branches of India's military conducting offensive operations as part of unified battle groups.

The Cold Start doctrine is intended to allow India's conventional forces to perform holding attacks in order to prevent a nuclear retaliation from Pakistan in case of a conflict.

Its objective is to foster initiative and creative thinking and links theory, history, experimentation and practice.

Also Read | Who is India's NSA Ajit Doval and what is 'Doval Doctrine'?

Also Read | News Nation poll: 74% people believe 'Doval Doctrine' is working for India; 23% vote against it

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

India on Wednesday gave Pakistan evidence of involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against this country.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active.

Jaishankar provided Basit with the content of GPS recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistans role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed.

If the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents, he told the Pakistan envoy.

(Read Also: Something may have gone wrong, admits Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Uri attack )

Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India.

He also reminded Basit that the Pakistan government had made a solemn commitment in January 2004 to not allow its soil or territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India. The persistent and growing violation of this undertaking is a matter of very serious concern, he told Basit.

WATCH: MEA Spokesperson Vikas Swarup speaks on Pakistan Envoy Abdul Basit summoned by Foreign Secy S Jaishankar pic.twitter.com/LmPkuX6Xwe  ANI (@ANI_news) September 21, 2016

In a release, External Affairs Ministry said this year, beginning with the Pathankot airbase attack, there have been continuous attempts by armed terrorists to cross the LoC and International Boundary in order to carry out attacks in India.

(Read More: Terrorists who stormed army base in Uri belonged to LeT: Probe)

Seventeen such attempts have been interdicted at or around the LoC, resulting in the elimination of thirty one terrorists and preventing their intended acts of terrorism. Foreign Secretary also reminded him that even as he spoke two engagements at the LoC were ongoing, it said.

Apart from GPS content, India has recovered a number of items that included communication matrix sheets and equipment, other made in Pakistan stuff like food, medicines and clothes, which were shown to Basit.

We now expect a response from the Government of Pakistan, Jaishankar told him.

Basits summoning came a day after Jaishankar headed a high-level meeting, attended by senior Home Ministry officials and Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), during which the evidence recovered by Indian Army from the terrorists was shared with the MEA.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Bengaluru:

In an all part meeting, Karnataka cabinet has decided not to release Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 23. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah chaired a cabinet meeting to discuss the issue.

Earlier, the Supreme Court had asked Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water everyday till September 27.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, said the Cabinet has decided to defer releasing of water to Tamil Nadu. He even said, the Cabinet has decided to request Governor of Karnataka to convene both the houses on 23rd September 2016 at 11 am.

Earlier, BJP has decided to boycott the all-party meeting called by Chief Minister Siddaramaih to discuss the future course of action following Supreme Court's order directing Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu till September 27.The party has demanded that the government should call the Assembly session immediately to decide the issue.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday addressed 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York and said in many countries the ghost of intolerance has revived xenophobia and Islamophobia.

In his address to the UN on Wednesday, Pak PM Sharif said, "Pakistan wants peace with India, we have gone the extra mile to achieve this."

Live updates on Sharif's speech at UNGA session in New York -

#We will not allow foreign forces to destabilize the development of Pakistan.

#We will not allow externally sponsored terrorism and threats of destabilisation to cause turbulence in Pakistan.

#Peace between India and Pakistan cannot be finally achieved without resolution to the Kashmir dispute.

#We have gone the extra mile to achieve this, repeatedly offering a dialogue to address all outstanding issues.

#I demand an independent inquiry into the extrajudicial killings in Kashmir,demand an end to the curfew.

#India posed unacceptable pre conditions to engage in dialogue. Talks are no favour to Pakistan,they are in interest of both countries.

#Peace between India and Pakistan cannot be finally achieved without resolution to the Kashmir dispute

#This is an objective evaluation not a partisan position. Our predictions have now been confirmed by events

#Burhan Wani, the young leader murdered by Indian forces has emerged as a symbol of latest Kashmiri 'Intifada

India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will address the 71st session of the UNGA on September 26 in New York.

This years general debate opened on September 20 and will run through to September 26, when Swaraj will address the annual debate. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not attending the UNGA session for the first time in three years.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
India vs South Africa Highlights, T20 World Cup 2022 Latest Updates: Miller, Markram, Ngidi Star as SA Beat IND by Five Wickets to go Top in Group 2

WATCH: Arshdeep Singh Runs Riot in His First Over, Dismisses Quinton de Kock And Rilee Rossouw

'How Can Someone Bat Like That': Cricket Fraternity Hails Suryakumar Yadav For His 68-run Knock Versus South Africa

IND vs SA: Virat Kohli Achieves Massive Feat, Becomes First Indian to Score 1000 Runs in T20 World Cup
Cathy Zuraw / Hearst Connecticut Media

BETHEL - Residents can attend meetings on an Eversource plan for another power line in town at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Sept. 22.

Called the Southwest Connecticut Reliability Project, Eversource aims to install a 3.4 mile, 115-kilovolt power line from the companys existing Plumtrees Subsstation in Bethel to its Brookfield Junction. The line would run through the Stony Hill neighborhood.
Sharing global insights and learnings to deliver innovative solutions to clients

TORONTO, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ - CIBC (TSX: CM) (NYSE: CM) announced today that it has formed a strategic partnership with National Australia Bank (NAB) and Israel's Bank Leumi focused on delivering new and innovative ways to enhance client experiences.

The partnership enables three banks on three continents to collaborate and share aspects of their proprietary innovation strategies to enhance their respective client experiences. The partners will share information regarding innovation insights and learnings, co-develop products and services to support and grow their respective client bases, and facilitate the exchange of employee talent in the innovation space.

"We are excited to partner with NAB and Bank Leumi, two highly respected banks that share our commitment to client-focused innovation," says Stephen Forbes, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, CIBC. "We have created a culture of collaboration among teams to drive innovation inside our bank, and formed important external partnerships with innovation hubs and fintechs to help us build the bank of the future for our clients. This alliance further strengthens our leadership position in innovation, and broadens our access to global insights and talent in this fast-moving space."

The alliance was officially signed this week in Tel Aviv, a world leader in high-tech startups and a global tech hub.

In the two months leading up to today's announcement, CIBC and NAB worked together to test Ripple blockchain technology, moving money from Canada to Australia and vice versa, becoming part of a small group of banks globally to have successfully completed a cross-border blockchain transfer.

"We're excited to be working with CIBC and have already partnered with them in using Ripple's blockchain technology to complete international payments transfers between our banks as a proof of concept," says Jonathan Davey, Executive General Manager, NAB Labs. "Like NAB, CIBC is a customer-focused bank with a strong emphasis on the use of innovation to deliver improved customer services; and like NAB, CIBC recognizes the power of partnerships to help drive transformation and true differentiation for our customers."

"It's common knowledge that Israel is the 'Start-Up Nation' and a hotbed of innovation. Bank Leumi is a key player in both the local and global innovation arena and I am strongly convinced that this alliance will enable us to mutually share innovation strategies and to enhance our respective customer experience," says Dan Yerushalmi, Bank Leumi First Executive Vice President, Group CTIO and COO. "We find this open dialogue and knowledge sharing to be of great value and see the alliance as the beginning of a wider collaboration with NAB and CIBC in future programs."

CIBC has delivered a number of recent innovations for clients, many of which disrupt the traditional approach to banking, including:

Launching a no-fee Global Money Transfer service, eliminating up front remittance fees and moving money faster to better meet the needs of clients who regularly send money overseas.

Launching our new Digital Account Open technology first among the big five banks, allowing clients to open a new account through their mobile device.

Developing an award-winning derivatives platform, recognized as the best in Canada three years in a row by GlobalCapital for its forward looking, innovative and solutions-driven approach.

three years in a row by for its forward looking, innovative and solutions-driven approach. Partnering with Toronto's MaRS Discovery District as a founding partner of the MaRS C Suite, to establish CIBC Live Labs and collaborate with leading technology talent to create the next wave of banking innovations. This highly collaborative lab environment has already directly led to the launch of the CIBC Mobile Banking App for the Apple Watch, and the creation of the CIBC Hello Home App which uses image capture technology to allow clients to apply for a mortgage entirely through their mobile device.

MaRS Discovery District as a founding partner of the MaRS C Suite, to establish CIBC Live Labs and collaborate with leading technology talent to create the next wave of banking innovations. This highly collaborative lab environment has already directly led to the launch of the CIBC Mobile Banking App for the Apple Watch, and the creation of the CIBC Hello Home App which uses image capture technology to allow clients to apply for a mortgage entirely through their mobile device. Delivering Apple Pay to clients;

Partnering with C100, a non-profit based in San Francisco , to support Canadian technology entrepreneurship.

About NAB

For more than 150 years NAB has been helping customers with their money. With more than 35,000 employees, serving 10 million customers at more than 800 locations across Australia, New Zealand and around the world, NAB aims to make a difference by being a responsible, inclusive and socially innovative bank. As Australia's largest business bank, NAB works with small, medium and large businesses to help them start, run and grow. NAB also funds some of Australia's most important infrastructure projects including schools, hospitals and roads.

About Bank Leumi

Bank Leumi, established in 1902, is one of the leading and largest corporations in Israel, providing comprehensive banking services and commanding an approximate 30% domestic market share. The Leumi Group operates more than 250 branches throughout Israel, in addition to branches and offices located in key financial centres across the globe, including London, New York and Shanghai.

Leumi is leading the way for Innovation in Israeli Banking. Today, 'Leumi Digital' spearheads the digital banking field in Israel, with a wide range of innovative online banking services based on cutting-edge technology. During 2015, Leumi was the first financial organization in Israel, and one of few in the world, to implement cloud computing technology via U.S. Salesforce's CRM platform. In early 2016, Leumi was the first Israeli bank to establish a Digital Banking Division, that includes a designated Innovation Department. Going forward, Leumi will be the first Israeli bank to launch a standalone Fully-Mobile Bank  'Pepper', planned for the last quarter of 2016.

About CIBC

CIBC is a leading Canadian-based global financial institution with 11 million personal banking and business clients. Through our three major business units - Retail and Business Banking, Wealth Management and Capital Markets - CIBC offers a full range of products and services through its comprehensive electronic banking network, branches and offices across Canada with offices in the United States and around the world. Ongoing news releases and more information about CIBC can be found at www.cibc.com/ca/media-centre/ or by following on Twitter @CIBC, Facebook (www.facebook.com/CIBC) and Instagram @CIBCNow.

SOURCE Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

Image with caption: "Executives from CIBC, National Australia Bank (NAB) and Israels Bank Leumi gathered in Tel Aviv for the official signing of a newly formed strategic partnership. (From left to right: Dan Yerushalmi, First Executive Vice President, Group CTIO and COO, Bank Leumi, Tamar Yassur, First Executive Vice President, Head of Digital Banking Division, Bank Leumi; Stephen Forbes , Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, CIBC; and Jonathan Davey, Executive General Manager, NAB Labs, NAB). (CNW Group/Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160921_C7065_PHOTO_EN_777934.jpg

For further information: Olga Petrycki, Director, External Communications, CIBC at 416-306-9760 or [email protected]; Evelyn Ek, Senior Consultant, Corporate Communications, National Australia Bank, +61 412 887 853 or [email protected]; Lee Neumann, Bank Leumi, +972-76-885-6313, [email protected]
BERLIN, Germany, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ - A declaration of intent was signed today between Germany's Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) to stimulate and fund innovation-driven collaborations among German and Canadian SMEs. The signing took place as part of bilateral meetings between Mrs. Iris Gleicke, Parliamentary Secretary to the Federal Minister of Economy and Energy and the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Canada's Minister of Science.

By fostering collaborative scientific and industrial research and development projects, both countries aim to build on existing strong and lasting partnerships to accelerate the development of new innovations with high potential for commercialization. A funded call for proposals was launched in which eligible Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may receive funding through NRC's Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) for approved projects, ultimately creating jobs and opportunities to grow the middle class. In Germany, support will be provided to German companies by the Central Innovation Programmes for SMEs (BMWi ZIM).

"Innovation and Internationalization create growth and wealth. With the ZIM-Programme, we, therefore support the development of innovative products or more efficient production processes and initiate networks between science and international partners. In particular SMEs benefit from international knowledge transfer by research and development. We are particularly committed to create ideal framework conditions, because SMEs are the backbone of our success. Canada and Germany already have intensive relationships, and we are happy to strengthen them with this cooperation." said Mrs. Gleicke.

"Innovation is a national priority that will strengthen the middle class and enhance the global competitiveness of Canadian businesses, putting them on a clear path to create jobs and long-term economic growth," added Minister Duncan. "Through scientific and industrial collaboration between our two resourceful nations, as well as the recently launched Innovation Agenda, the National Research Council will explore valuable new partnerships to benefit both our countries' small and medium-sized enterprises while sustaining our scientific excellence."

Related links

SOURCE National Research Council Canada

For further information: Media Relations Team, National Research Council of Canada, 1-855-282-1637 (toll-free, 24/7, in Canada only), 1-613-991-1431 (elsewhere in North America), 001-613-991-1431 (international). [email protected], Twitter: @NRC_CNRC; Veronique Perron, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Science, 343-291-2600
HONG KONG, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ -- The official nomination procedure for the largest international prize in education research and development The Yidan Prize has been launched. The Yidan Prize established by Charles Chen Yidan, core founder of Chinese internet company Tencent and China's Philanthropist of the Year, recognizes individuals whose work transforms education in an innovative way that can be repeated around the world to provide access and improve the quality of education for all.

In early September Mr. Chen visited the USA to introduce the Yidan Prize to leading members of the academic community as well as facilitate dialogue on the future of education with a number of educational institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also had meetings with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and among other foundations. During his stay in the USA, Mr. Chen gave a keynote at UBS Philanthropy Forum -- Americas.

Speaking on his visit to the USA, Mr. Chen said: "The idea of the Yidan Prize is to highlight awareness of the best projects and ideas out there today that could benefit people all around the world. There are fantastic initiatives all across the United States. Some schools are working with the idea of games as the way to a child's mind. Others are engaged in 'flipping' the school program, so that children watch their lessons at home and do their homework at school, under the supervision of the teacher. Some are working with nature and the environment as the entry point to a child's mind. Personalization of the school program allows for the interests, strengths and weaknesses of each child to form his or her curriculum, starting from a young age and continuing through higher education. I want not only to show my support with grant money associated with the Prize, but also to spread the word about best practice that could be accessed by all. I hope we receive many nominations from the United States and other countries."

After the Yidan Prize Foundation's visit to the USA, the team will head off to Canada as part of its outreach to North America. During the nomination period from this September to March 2017, the Foundation plans to visit Europe, Asia and other regions to call for more high quality nominations from across the globe.

Each nomination will be reviewed by a jury of highly respected experts led by former director-general of UNESCO Dr. Kichiro Matsuura. The Prize is divided between two categories -- The Yidan Prize for Education Research and the Yidan Prize for Education Development. The two independent judging panels will screen valid nominations and select a candidate for each prize category. Prof Paul Chu Ching-wu, professor of physics, T.L.L., temple chair of science, University of Houston heads the Yidan Prize for Education Research panel, and Dorothy K. Gordon, director-general of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT leads the Yidan Prize for Education Development panel.

Judging committee will review each nomination based on the criteria covering sustainability, future orientation, ability to achieve transformation and spirit of innovation. The first laureates will be announced in September 2017.

The Yidan Prize in education research and development will become the largest educational prize in the world. Each recipient will receive a total of HK$30 million (about $3.8 million), with a cash award of HK$15 million (about $1.9 million), and another HK$15 million (about $1.9 million) impact investment, to finance the winners' research or projects. The Prize is backed by an endowment trust of HK$2.5 billion (about $320 million).

For nominees:

Nominations can be made by individuals or institutions -- including schools, international organizations and private companies -- from anywhere in the world. Self-nomination is allowed in exceptional cases.

Submissions must be made through the Yidan Prize website by March 31 2017. Nominations will be reviewed by international Judging Committee chaired by Dr Koichiro Matsuura, former director-general of UNESCO. The laureates are to announced in September 2017 and awarded at the Yidan Prize Summit in December 2017.

To submit a nomination: https://nomination.yidanprize.org

Lawrence Lui

Tel: +852-2155-1582

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Yidan Prize Foundation
OTTAWA, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ - The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today issued the following statement in recognition of Armenia's Independence Day:

"Today, we join the Armenian community  here in Canada, in Armenia, and around the world  in celebrating the country's 25th Independence Day.

"Canada and the Republic of Armenia enjoy a dynamic and friendly relationship, rooted in the shared values of democracy and freedom, bilateral relations, and our collaboration in international organizations such as La Francophonie.

"I look forward to working with President Serzh Sargsyan and newly-appointed Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan to further strengthen the relations between our two countries, and to work together on global and regional issues including peace, security, and development cooperation.

"On behalf of the Government of Canada, Sophie and I invite all Canadians to reflect on the important contributions of Canadians of Armenian descent to our national fabric, and offer our best wishes to everyone celebrating today."

This document is also available at http://pm.gc.ca

SOURCE Prime Minister's Office

For further information: PMO Media Relations: 613-957-5555
HAMILTON, ON, Sept. 21, 2016 /CNW/ - The United Steelworkers (USW) welcomes today's announcement of a framework agreement between the Ontario government and Bedrock Industries, LP for the purchase and continued operation of U.S. Steel Canada facilities in Hamilton and Nanticoke.

"We are encouraged by many aspects of the agreement announced today between the Ontario government and Bedrock Industries," said Marty Warren, USW Ontario Director.

"We have been briefed on the agreement and we acknowledge that the province and Bedrock have made an effort to address many of our concerns about protecting the interests of our members and retirees," Warren said.

"It has been a stressful and painful two years for our members and pensioners," Warren added, referring to the fact U.S. Steel Canada has been operating under Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) protection since September 2014.

The agreement announced today contemplates that Bedrock, an industrial company building its production platform in metals, will purchase and continue operating U.S. Steel Canada's plants in Hamilton and Nanticoke.

"We have been in discussions for quite some time with the province and various potential buyers about a restructuring of U.S. Steel Canada that would be good for our members and our retirees," Warren said.

"The deal announced today is far from perfect, given the challenges that arise from such a lengthy and complex insolvency process," he said. "However, after two years in CCAA protection and after numerous discussions with other bidders, we believe this could lead to a good final deal for the Union's members and retirees."

Among the challenges to be resolved, Bedrock must complete negotiations for new collective agreements with Steelworkers Local 1005 in Hamilton and USW Local 8782 in Nanticoke, noted Tony DePaulo, Assistant to the USW Ontario Director.

"Subject to completing negotiations for new collective agreements and resolving other details related to the transaction, we believe this agreement offers a positive step forward," DePaulo said. Details of the framework agreement have been shared with leaders of both USW locals, DePaulo said.

"Subject to finalizing this complex deal to the union's satisfaction, this transaction appears to be the best available way to secure jobs for our members and offer as much protection to our retirees as possible," he said.

The USW recognizes the Ontario government's efforts to find a resolution to the U.S. Steel Canada insolvency, Warren said.

However, the union is calling out the federal Liberal government for failing to take any meaningful action to address the steel crisis in Canada or to provide any support to workers and pensioners affected by the crisis.

"The federal government has not been engaged and has not offered any material support  neither in this case nor to help other communities across the country hurting from the steel crisis," Warren said.

"Essar Steel Algoma in Sault Ste. Marie is operating under CCAA protection and other steelmakers have cut jobs and production, but our federal government is missing in action," he said.

"Thousands of pensioners and working families are desperate for real support from the federal government. So far, they're being ignored."

SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

For further information: Marty Warren, USW Ontario Director, 416-243-8792; Tony DePaulo, Assistant to the USW Ontario Director, 416-243-8792, 905-869-0760, [email protected]; Bob Gallagher, USW Communications, 416-544-5966, 416-434 2221, [email protected]
Reaction Engines is firming up plans to build a fighter engine-size ground demonstrator of its reusable hypersonic propulsion system.

SABRE is at heart a rocket engine designed to power aircraft directly into space (single-stage to orbit) to allow reliable, responsive and cost effective space access, and in a different configuration to allow aircraft to cruise at high speeds (five times the speed of sound) within the atmosphere.

If the rocket for space is not used then the US air force could use Skylon and SABRE engine technology to develop a 4000 mph hypersonic fighter plane or spy plane.

In the past, attempts to design single stage to orbit propulsion systems have been unsuccessful largely due to the weight of an on-board oxidiser such as liquid oxygen, needed by conventional rocket engines. One possible solution to reduce the quantity of on-board oxidizer required is by using oxygen already present in the atmosphere in the combustion process just like an ordinary jet engine. This weight saving would enable the transition from single-use multi-stage launch vehicles to multi-use single stage launch vehicles.

SABRE is the first engine to achieve this goal by operating in two rocket modes: initially in air-breathing mode and subsequently in conventional rocket mode:

Air breathing mode  the rocket engine sucks in atmospheric air as a source of oxygen (as in a typical jet engine) to burn with its liquid hydrogen fuel in the rocket combustion chamber

Conventional rocket mode  the engine is above the atmosphere and transitions to using conventional on-board liquid oxygen.

In both modes the thrust is generated using the rocket combustion chamber and nozzles. This is made possible through a synthesis of elements from rocket and gas turbine technology.

This approach enables SABRE-powered vehicles to save carrying over 250 tons of on-board oxidant on their way to orbit, and removes the necessity for massive throw-away first stages that are jettisoned once the oxidant they contain has been used up, allowing the development of the first fully re-usable space access vehicles such as SKYLON.

While this sounds simple, the problem is that in air-breathing mode, the air must be compressed to around 140 atmospheres before injection into the combustion chambers which raises its temperature so high that it would melt any known material. SABRE avoids this by first cooling the air using a Pre-cooler heat exchanger until it is almost a liquid. Then a relatively conventional turbo compressor using jet engine technology can be used to compress the air to the required pressure.

SABRE Airflow

This means when SABRE is in the Earths atmosphere the engine can use air to burn with the hydrogen fuel rather than the liquid oxygen used when in rocket mode, which gives an 8 fold improvement in propellant consumption. The air-breathing mode can be used until the engine has reached over 5 times the speed of sound and an altitude of 25 kilometers which is 20% of the speed and 20% of the altitude needed to reach orbit. The remaining 80% can be achieved using the SABRE engines in rocket mode.

For space access, the thrust during air-breathing ascent is variable but around 200 tonnes per engine. During rocket ascent this rises to 300 tonnes but is then throttled down towards the end of the ascent to limit the longitudinal acceleration to 3.0g

In 2012, Reaction Engines built the core new technology (pre-cooler) for their hypersonic engine.

Ultra-Lightweight Heat Exchangers:

These cool the incoming airstream very quickly and effectively, from over 1,000  C to minus 150  C in less than 1 / 100th of a second (six times faster than the blink of an eye) They are extremely lightweight -. Approximately 100 times lighter than current technology  allowing them to be used for aerospace applications for the first time.

The impact that these miniaturised heat exchangers will have on aerospace propulsion systems is comparable to the impact of the silicon chip on computing: new products, new markets, new capabilities.

SABRE Pre-cooler Demonstration Facts:

Over 50 km of heat exchanger tubing for a weight penalty of less than 50kg

Heat exchanger tube wall thickness less than 30 microns (less than the diameter of a human hair)

Incoming airstream to be cooled to -150  C in less than 20 milliseconds (faster than the blink of an eye)

No frost formation during low temperature operation

The next stage of the SABRE programme includes the construction of a full engine demonstrator.

ESA are confident that a ground test of a sub-scale engine can be successfully performed to demonstrate the flight regime and cycle and will be a critical milestone in the development of this program and a major breakthrough in propulsion worldwide.
The Independent National Electoral Commission has revealed that 30 political parties would take part in the Ondo State governorship elec...

The Independent National Electoral Commission has revealed that 30 political parties would take part in the Ondo State governorship election, coming up on November 26, 2016.Some of the prominent ones among the political parties include the Alliance for Democracy, the Social Democratic Party, the Peoples Democratic Party, the Peoples Redemption Party, the All Progressives Congress and Accord Party.Others are the Labour Party, the Citizen Popular Party, the Peoples Party of Nigeria, the Allied Congress of Nigeria, the National Conscience Party and the Unity Party of Nigeria.The INECs Resident Electoral Commissioner in the state, Mr. Segun Agbaje, made this known while speaking with journalists in Akure, the state capital, on Tuesday.The commissioner said all the 30 parties had concluded their primaries before Monday, September 19, 2016, which was the deadline given by the commission to conclude all parties primaries.He said the commission was adequately preparing to ensure that the election was conducted in a free and fair atmosphere.He added that the commission would make use of technology to smoothen the process of the election.He said, The commission has commenced an aggressive, persistent and sustained voter education, mobilisation and public enlightenment campaigns in order to create necessary public awareness for the election.Essentially, the voter education campaigns are geared towards preventing voter apathy and to appeal to the citizen to shun violence before, during and after the election. However, the commissioner did not mention the names of candidates of the parties that would participate in the election, as he said the candidates names would be revealed by the national headquarters of the commission in Abuja on October 26.Agbaje also declared that the commission, in conjunction with the security agents in the state, would ruthlessly deal with anybody caught disrupting the electoral process before and during the forthcoming governorship election.It is pertinent to indicate that if we must eradicate electoral vices, electoral offenders must always be punished to serve as a deterrent to others,  the REC stated.
The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris has described a recent Amnesty International report alleging torture in Police Speci...

The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris has described a recent Amnesty International report alleging torture in Police Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) detention cells as bias and unfortunate.Similarly, the IGP claimed that the police management was not given room to air their side of the story before Amnesty rushed rushed to foreign media.A new report by the International agency alleged that the elite Nigerian police squad (SARS) set up to combat violent crime tortures detainees to extract lucrative bribes and confessions.According to the report, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad demands bribes, steals and extorts money from criminal suspects and their families and is fomenting a toxic climate of fear and corruption.Reacting to the report in Abuja on Wednesday, IGP Idris said the Amnesty International has taken a bias position against the Nigerian Police Force, adding that the report did not reflect the position of the Police.While alleging that the Force was not given a chance to respond to the allegations in the report before it was made public, the IGP explained that recently, Amnesty International and other Civil Society Groups requested to inspect SARS detention facilities and other police detention centres across the country and were allowed to do so only for them to say the cells were prearranged and kept clean because they were coming.However, IGP Idris warned police commanders and other senior officers to ensure their officers and men operate within international best practices as the Police will not tolerate any action that would bring embarrassment to the Force.
A former Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriation, Abdulmumin Jibrin, and supporters of the Speaker, Yakubu Dog...

A former Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriation, Abdulmumin Jibrin, and supporters of the Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, on Tuesday clashed over Jibrins call for Dogara to resign.Jibrin, who addressed journalists after Tuesdays plenary, reiterated his call for the resignation of the Speaker and three other principal officers of the House, whom he accused of budget fraud.According to him, the time is ripe for either the Ethics and Privileges Committee or a specially constituted committee of the House to probe the 20 allegations of wrongdoing against the Speaker, including the N40bn budget padding allegation.Jibrin also claimed that the Speaker attended separate meetings of the six zonal caucuses in the House on Monday night.He alleged that during the meetings, the Speaker begged for forgiveness for himself and his co-accused persons.Jibrin said Dogara was begging members to forgive him and the other principal officers mentioned for whatever offences they may have committedit was a pitiful sight.He added, We were waiting for him as the leader of the caucus to tell him we no longer want himand if he doubts it, I challenge him to convene a meeting of the caucus in 24 hours or even one week.The former appropriation committee chairman also alleged that he was denied an opportunity to state his case during the meeting.Jibrin further alleged that the situation became so tense that the Speaker was literally whisked away by his security details to avoid the wrath of members present.However, 13 lawmakers from the North-East and the North-West caucuses addressed a separate press conference, where they debunked Jibrins claims.Abdulrazaq Namdas (APC, Adamawa), who spoke on behalf of the caucus, defended the presence of the Speaker at the meeting in question and said Jibrin had not said anything new since the crisis broke.He said, The fact of the matter is that he (Jibrin) has presented his position. He should allow due process to take care of the issues.It is a convention that on resumption from the annual recess, the Speaker conveys caucus meeting of the six zonal caucuses through the caucus leaders and preside over it.The meeting was not conveyed in a bad light and the Speakers presence was to show the unity of the House.At the meeting, the Speakers remarks centred on how to tackle the economic recession and why the efforts of all are needed.Also the claim that the Speaker begged, bribed or blackmailed members was also not true because the issue of cars that he raised predated this crisis.That the Speaker was whisked away was also not true because he had to leave before Jibrin spoke.Three people were allowed to make comments and after the three had made their comments, the Speaker had to leave because he had other caucuses to attend to as well.Even his claim that a vote of no confidence was passed in Alhassan Ado-Doguwa and removed as caucus leader was false because he conveyed the meeting.On Jibrins call on the Speaker to step down, he said, Let him come to the floor of the House and raise the issue through a motion.This is not for the newspapers. It is all about numbers and we would see who would have his way on the issue.A member of the North-West caucus of the House, Munir Dan-Agundi, who also faulted Jibrins claims, said 21 out of the 24 members of the caucus passed a vote of confidence in the Dogara-led leadership of the House.Dan-Agundi faulted Jibrins claims that Ado-Doguwa had been removed as the leader of the North-West caucus of the House.Earlier, Dogara, who presided over the days plenary before it was adjourned for 24 hours, announced the death of a former and a serving member of the House and called prayers for the repose of their souls and for the members of their families.Christian and Muslim prayers were said after which the House Leader, Femi Gbajabiamila, moved the motion for adjournment.The deceased lawmakers are Adewale Oluwatayo (Ifako/Ijaiye, Lagos), who was a member of the present Eight Assembly and Alex Eze (Nsukka/Igbo-Eze South, Enugu), who was a member of the House from 1999 to 2003.
President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated music legend, King Sunny Ade, as he turns 70 on September 22nd, 2016.

President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated music legend, King Sunny Ade, as he turns 70 on September 22nd, 2016.In a statement by the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, the President joined all friends, family and fans of the multi-talented instrumentalist, songwriter and dancer in celebrating his remarkable life, which he said has been graced with numerous awards for outstanding performances, including nominations for the Grammy.As a Nigerian musician, the President believed that the Septuagenarian has over the years brought pride to his country by mastering his art against all odds, taking the African musical genre to the global stage, and serving as an inspiration and a mentor to upcoming artistes.Apart from bringing joy to many hearts and homes through his music, President Buhari also commended King Sunny Ades love for humanity, especially the less privileged, by setting up a foundation that caters for the needs of others.He prayed that the Almighty God will grant the versatile entertainer longer life, good health and more strength.
The Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) has postponed judgment on the alleged false asset declaration by former Minister of Niger Delta Affairs...

The Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) has postponed judgment on the alleged false asset declaration by former Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godsday Orubebe to October 4th.The Head, Press & Public Relations of the Tribunal, Ibraheem Al-hassan on Wednesday told Dailytrust that the postponement was necessitated as a result of the planned trip of the Chairman of the Tribunal to the United States for the International Bar Conference.There were challenges with securing visas for both the Chairman and the honourable member for them to attend the International Bar Conference in the United States. These challenges denied them the opportunity to make the trip, he said.He added that However, the Tribunal had already postponed the judgment to October 4th because of this trip, and when they couldnt make it again; we decided to stick by this postponement instead of reverting to the earlier date (today).This is the third time the Tribunal is postponing the delivery of judgment in this case. The judgement was first slated for June 30, 2016 but could not hold due to the absence of the Chairman of the Tribunal, Justice Danladi Umar and it was thus postponed to July 19.
The Senate on Tuesday explained that the level of economic recession being witnessed requires sincere approach by the federal government i...

The Senate on Tuesday explained that the level of economic recession being witnessed requires sincere approach by the federal government in a manner that those who have the competence should be allowed to serve in critical sectors of the economy.Senate Leader, Ali Ndume in his speech enjoined Senators to be focused on forward looking, noting that the phenomenon was a global one which other countries have successfully overcome.The economic recession was not caused by the present government, but a global one and those countries successfully came out of it, he noted.Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu on his part, emphasised on reshuffling of the cabinet by President Buhari to enable him put competent persons I critical sectors.Dino Melaye (APC), Kogi West Senatorial District, on his part called for outright sack of the economic team as well as some Ministers, explaining some have failed the nation.Mr Senate President, we have to tell ourselves the truth at this time of the day, some Minister and Buharis economic team have failed and they should be sacked, he insisted.Senator George Akume (APC), Benue South Senatorial District in his submission recalled that former President, Olusegun Obasanjo consciously saved over $60billion in Nigerias foreign reserve between 1999 and 2003, lamenting that that money was stolen by successive administration.He wondered that when former Central Bank governor, Sanusi cried out that $20billion was missing, government at that time was busy countering, a situation he explained contributed to the present situation.Shehu Sani (APC), Kaduna Central questioned sharing formula of the federal monthly allocations, saying, it make Nigeria citizens to be lazy.According to him: Nigeria has been in recession and what is happening is that the situation has only been aggravated as a result of laziness and corruption by past administrations.
ADDRESS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, MUHAMMADU BUHARI GCFR, PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE UNITED STATES  AFRICA BUSINESS...

Protocol1. I am delighted to be present here today at the 2nd edition of the United StatesAfrica Business Forum. I wish to thank the United States Department of Commerce and Bloomberg Philanthropies for organizing this event and for giving me this opportunity to address this august gathering of Political and Business Leaders from the United States of America (USA), Africa and other regions of the World. I believe all of us will take advantage of this Forum to establish and strengthen business relationships; share valuable experience; and collaborate for mutual benefits.2. The United States has historically been one of Nigerias top trading partners; for decades, the US was the biggest importer of Nigerias crude oil. In the last two years, however, the sharp decline in US imports of our crude, on account of rising domestic production of Shale, has altered the trade balance between our two countries. But it has also thrown up opportunities for Nigeria to increase its non-oil exports  especially in agricultural products  to the U.S.3. Today, Nigeria enjoys a mutually beneficial trade and investment relations with USA. This relationship has culminated in massive inflow of Foreign Direct Investment into Nigeria. There are several US Companies doing business in Nigeria, including Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Company, British-American Tobacco Company, UPS Courier Company, BCG, Johnson Wax Nigeria Ltd, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to name a few.4. These are no doubt challenging times for the Nigerian economy. But let me use this opportunity to boldly affirm our conviction that there is no crisis without an accompanying opportunity. In our case, we see Nigerias ongoing economic challenges  occasioned mainly by the fall in oil prices  as an opportunity to set the economy firmly on the path of true diversification, sustainable economic growth, and shared prosperity.5. Since the inception of my Administration in 2015, all efforts have been aimed at ensuring that all Nigerians enjoy rising standards of living. We campaigned for and came into office on the back of three fundamental issues: One, Securing Nigeria from terrorism and banditry, Two, Fighting corruption and ensuring that public funds work for the public good, and Three, Revamping an economy that was dangerously dependent on crude oil, and afflicted by rising inequality and jobless growth. We are pleased to note that our efforts are yielding fruit.6. (On Security)  Hundreds of communities and thousands of people have been liberated from the clutches of the terrorists, under our watch, and are now getting a chance to, with support from the government and the international community, rebuild their homes and their lives.7. (On corruption)  Our quest is to ensure, through a combination of institution-building and judicial efforts, that public funds work for the public good, and that persons responsible for overseeing the use of these funds come to this task with the utmost sense of transparency and accountability. Earlier this year we signed up to the Open Government Partnership, a clear demonstration of our commitment to a radical departure from a past characterized by large-scale state-enabled corruption. Let me also assure that we will continue to strengthen Government institutions established to address investors concerns.8. (On the economy)  We are weaning ourselves from a historical dependence on crude oil, diversifying our economy, and putting it on the path of sustainable and inclusive growth. To this end, we have embarked on policies aimed at establishing an open, rules-based and market-oriented economy. We will continue to actively engage with the private sector at the highest levels to listen to your concerns and to assure you of our commitment to creating enabling policies in which your businesses can thrive. Indeed, we have constituted a Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, which is working on a wide range of business environment reforms, ranging from making our planned visa-on-arrival regime a reality, to ports reform, to improving the speed and efficiency of land titling and business registration. We aspire to make Nigeria one of the most attractive places to do business.9. Let me now focus on the priority investment sectors for our administration: Infrastructure, Industry, Agriculture, Mining and the Digital Economy.10. Infrastructure: For far too long Nigeria has under-invested in the critical infrastructure necessary for a modern economy. Now, that is set to change. We are working hard to bridge an electricity deficit of several thousands of megawatts, which will require substantial private sector investment, especially in Transmission. Our railway system is being opened up after decades of a government monopoly that has hindered the needed private sector investment. We are well on course with a concessioning deal that will see General Electric take over hundreds of kilometers of existing rail assets, and invest billions of dollars to upgrade assets and services.11. On Industry, there is the Nigerian Industrial Plan that is being implemented. The implementation is directed at interventions to improve productivity and output in five industry groups, namely: agri-business and agro-allied; solid minerals and metals; oil and gas; construction, and light manufacturing. Currently, investments and partnerships are being directed to leather and leather products; sugar; palm oil processing; food processing, specifically tomato and fruit processing. Automobile assembly and manufacturing are important to the diversification of the Nigerian economy. Industrial zones and parks are being established. This is work in progress.12. In Agriculture, through our Agricultural Promotion Policy (APP), we are prioritizing the improvement in domestic production of rice, wheat, maize, fish, dairy milk, soya beans, poultry, fruits and vegetables, and sugar, as well as the export of cowpeas, cocoa, cashew, cassava (starch, chips and ethanol), ginger, sesame, oil palm, fruits and vegetables, beef and cotton. To achieve these goals, we are ready to partner with and support willing private investors, by creating an environment that is stable, safe, and competitive. I am pleased to note that Coca Cola has recently invested substantially in one of Nigerias best-known dairy and fruit juice companies, and is looking to increase its stake over the next few years.13. In Mining, Nigeria is determined to build a world class minerals and mining ecosystem designed to serve a targeted domestic and export market. To accomplish this, we are prioritizing exploration, local processing and beneficiation of our mineral assets with provision of generous incentives including favorable tax regimes and royalties to investors interested in our market. We have as part of this identified mineral resources, which exist in commercially viable quantities, and designated them as strategic priorities for Nigerias domestic Industrialisation and Infrastructure requirements.14. In the Digital Economy, which, like Infrastructure, has a multiplier effect that touches every part of the economy, opportunities abound. We have welcomed and continue to welcome investors willing to take a stake in one of the worlds largest and fastest growing telecoms markets  a market which has attracted more than $35 billion in FDI over the last decade and half. The Nigerian Communications Commission will shortly commence a licensing process for the deployment of broadband infrastructure across metropolitan areas in the country.15. Young Nigerians are increasingly demonstrating that they have the talent and the passion to leverage the digital economy for solving our most pressing challenges. We are seeing a lot of activity in that space, and not just in Lagos, but even in cities further afield, from Uyo to Abuja. There are currently 150 million active mobile phone lines in the country  sixty percent of which are connected to the Internet. I can confidently say that Nigeria is in the early stages of a domestic technology revolution, and the government is paying serious attention and offering its full support.16. Three weeks ago I hosted Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder and CEO of Facebook, which is now used regularly by 17 million Nigerians, more people than in any other country in Africa. A few months ago Mr. Zuckerberg invested $24 million in Andela, a technology company that has Iyin Aboyeji, a 25-year-old Nigerian as one of its co-founders, and maintains its main campus in the city of Lagos. On the same day that Mr. Zuckerberg visited I also welcomed and interacted with 30 of the most exciting technology startups in the country; among whom lie tomorrows billion-dollar corporations.17. In terms of Trade, Nigeria is keen to more effectively leverage the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) opportunities to boost exports to the US Market. In collaboration with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) we have developed an AGOA Response Strategy to boost exports under AGOA. We are willing to collaborate with willing development partners to address some of the constraints to accessing the US Market under AGOA, such as our inability to comply with US requirements. With our U.S. counterparts, we are also working on a post-AGOA framework. Nigeria will continue to work closely with the U.S. to ensure that trade works for development.18. I urge the American businesses present here to take advantage of the investment opportunity that Nigeria represents. Nigeria remains the number one investment destination in Africa, with total FDI inflow of about US$3.64 billion in 2015. Apart from our domestic market of 170 million, the largest in Africa, we are also the main gateway to a combined West African consumer market that is about as large as ours. With a median age of 19, and with 70 percent of the population below the age of 35, Nigerias greatest potential lies in the talent and energy of her youth.19. Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, we recognize that the economic benefits of our trade and investment relations with the United States and other partners are unambiguous. In order to encourage private capital inflow, we have packaged some fiscal investment incentives which include the following: up to 5 years of tax holiday for activities classified as pioneer; Tax-free operations; no restrictions on expatriate quotas in Free Trade Zones; Capital Allowances (Agriculture, Manufacturing and Engineering); a low VAT regime of 5 percent; among others.20. Let me use this occasion to announce the commencement of the latest in a series of bilateral engagements between the United States and Nigeria: the U.S. Nigeria Commercial and Investment Dialogue. This Dialogue, which will focus on Infrastructure, Agriculture, the Digital Economy, Investment and Regulatory Reform, will be jointly led by the Nigerian Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, and the US Commerce Secretary, and will include business executives from both countries. By strengthening existing trade and investment ties between our two countries, as well as opening up new vistas, it will complement the work currently being done by the US-Nigeria Binational Commission, the US-Nigeria Trade and Investment Framework, and similar initiatives. We very much look forward to the mutual benefits that will accrue from this Dialogue.21. On this note, I enjoin investors here today to take advantage of this Forum to build synergies that would translate to increased trade and investment flows between Nigeria and United States of America. Nigeria welcomes you.22. I wish you a fruitful deliberation. Thank You for listening.
Gov Fayose of Ekiti State has casted a shadow of doubt on the picture taken by wife of the President, Mrs Aisha Buhari with United States ...

Same picture tweeted by Rwandan First Lady? Was it that Mrs Obama was stationed like a statue to take d 2 pictures? pic.twitter.com/qKX3sPZcBD September 20, 2016

Gov Fayose of Ekiti State has casted a shadow of doubt on the picture taken by wife of the President, Mrs Aisha Buhari with United States first lady, Mrs. Michelle Obama.Fayose's media aide, Olayinka disclosed this on his social media account.He said: Mrs. Aisha Buhari's picture with Michelle Obama looks like a more Photo-shopped image.He said: First Lady of Rwanda, Mrs Jeannette Kagame tweeted this picture that she took with Mrs Michelle Obama at the "Spousal Reception hosted by Mrs Obama, on the occasion of the #UNGA71" at exactly 9:39pm yesterday.President Buhari's Wife, Aisha tweeted her own picture with Mrs Michelle Obama at exactly 12:10am today, claiming the picture was taken at her (Mrs Obama) "broadway event about girl empowerment."#The FraudNow look at the two pictures taken at two different events.Mrs Michelle Obamas posture was the same in the two pictures.Was it that Mrs Obama was stationed like a statue to take the two pictures?"See tweet:Okay nah, finally finally, can we have other pictures she "took" with Mrs Michelle Obama? Or was the ASO VILLA PHOTOSHOPER (sorry photographer) who "took" the picture forbidden from taking more than ONE PICTURE?
A Nigerian police unit, Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) set up to combat violent crime has instead been systematically torturing deta...

A Nigerian police unit, Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) set up to combat violent crime has instead been systematically torturing detainees in its custody as a means of extracting confessions and lucrative bribes, Amnesty International said in a report published on Wednesday.In Nigeria, you have signed your death warrant, former detainees told Amnesty International as they had been subjected to horrific torture methods, including hanging, starvation, beatings, shootings and mock executions, at the hands of corrupt officers from the feared SARS.A police unit created to protect the people has instead become a danger to society, torturing its victims with complete impunity while fomenting a toxic climate of fear and corruption, said Damian Ugwu, Amnesty Internationals Nigeria researcher.Our research has uncovered a pattern of ruthless human rights violations where victims are arrested and tortured until they either make a confession or pay officers a bribe to be released.Amnesty International has received reports from lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists and collected testimonies stating that some police officers in SARS regularly demand bribes, steal and extort money from criminal suspects and their families.SARS officers are getting rich through their brutality. In Nigeria, it seems that torture is a lucrative business, said Damian Ugwu.SARS detainees are held in a variety of locations, including a grim detention centre in Abuja known as the Abattoir, where Amnesty International found 130 detainees living in overcrowded cells.Amnesty Internationals research shows that, in addition to its stated remit of tackling violent crime, SARS investigates civil matters and in some cases tortures detainees involved in contractual, business and even non-criminal disputes.In one case in Onitsha, Anambra state, a 25-year-old fuel attendant was arrested by SARS after his employer had accused him of being responsible for a burglary at their business premises.He told Amnesty International: The policemen asked me to sign a plain sheet. When I signed it, they told me I have signed my death warrant. They left me hanging on a suspended iron rod. My body ceased to function. I lost consciousness. When I was about to die they took me down and poured water on me to revive me.Like many people detained by SARS, he was not allowed access to a lawyer, a doctor or his family during his two-week detention.Yet in various cases where victims of police torture or other ill-treatment attempted to seek justice, the authorities took no action.When asked by Amnesty International to explain why no police officers had been suspended or prosecuted for torture, the police simply denied that any torture had taken place.However, one senior officer disclosed that around 40 officers alleged to have carried out various acts of torture and ill-treatment of detainees were transferred to other stations in April 2016. He did not say whether the claims against them were being investigated.This lack of accountability breeds and perpetuates impunity, creating an environment where SARS officers believe they have carte blanche to carry out acts of torture, said Damian Ugwu.This is hardly surprising when many of these officers have bribed their way to SARS in the first place. The police chiefs in charge are themselves entwined in the corruption.Chidi Oluchi, 32, told Amnesty international he was arrested in Enugu before being robbed of his belongings and then tortured in custody by SARS officers.They told me to slap myself and, when I refused, they started beating me with the side of their machetes and heavy sticks. My mouth was bleeding and my vision became blurred, said Chidi, who was released after he paid SARS officers N25,500 ($100) to be freed.Apart from demanding bribes, SARS officers have been accused of stealing or confiscating property from relatives of detained suspects.Some family members told Amnesty International that SARS officers stole their cars or withdrew all the money from their bank accounts.The brother of a man arrested on suspicion of participating in an armed robbery told Amnesty International how a team of SARS officers raided his home in Nsukka.The police team from SARS forcefully broke into boxes, locked furniture and drawers. By the time they left, several items including watches, jewellery and shoes were missing. We were too scared to report the incident, he said.The majority of the victims of torture in SARS custody are poor and unable to hire legal representatives. In some cases when detainees cannot afford to pay bribes, they are simply tortured more.Our research has exposed the callous workings of a police squad operating outside of the law and inflicting daily brutality on Nigerians who are often legally powerless to defend themselves against criminal accusations, let alone from the torture meted out by SARS, said Damian Ugwu.Depressingly, there are scant judicial or any other mechanisms in place to prevent SARS officers from subjecting vulnerable targets to human rights violations for their own financial gain.Despite repeated calls from Amnesty International in recent years, the Nigerian justice system has failed to prevent or punish torture.In December 2014, the Nigerian police launched a human rights manual which prohibits torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, but SARS has failed to implement it.When a new Inspector General of Police was appointed in early 2015 it was announced that there would be reform and reorganization of SARS, but officers attached to the unit told Amnesty International they were not aware of the reforms.A revised version of a bill to criminalize torture, which was first introduced in 2012 but was returned unsigned by the President, was passed by the House of Representatives in June 2016 and will be resubmitted to the Senate for further debates in 2016.With the Nigerian governments previous attempts at stamping out torture proving completely ineffective, it is time for the authorities to ensure that officers responsible for such human rights violations are finally held accountable, said Damian Ugwu.Police torture is a stain on Nigerian society that must be addressed with clear orders to law enforcement officers not to inflict torture or other ill-treatment on detainees under any circumstances.There is also an urgent need for robust legislation that ensures all acts of torture are offences under Nigerias criminal law. All victims have a right to reparations, and steps must be taken to ensure that nobody profits from abusing detainees.Nigeria is obligated under international and regional human rights law to ensure the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment.
Wife of the President, Aisha Buhari has expressed confidence that her husband will restore the lost glories to Nigeria.

2. I am more convinced of his intentions for Nigeria and I am certain that Nigeria will be great again under this administration #UNGA September 21, 2016

Wife of the President, Aisha Buhari has expressed confidence that her husband will restore the lost glories to Nigeria.She said this while sharing photos from the US where she and her daughters listened to President Buhari speak at the UN General Assembly meeting yesterday...
The Minister for Women Affairs and Social Development, Aisha Jumai Al-Hassan has debunked the report that she collapsed during her two da...

The Minister for Women Affairs and Social Development, Aisha Jumai Al-Hassan has debunked the report that she collapsed during her two days visit to the Internally Displaced Persons camp in Fufore Local Government Area of Adamawa State.The Women Minister who expressed shock at the report said it was false. Speaking through her director of information, Mallam Hassan Dodo, the minister said that she had gone to visit the IDPs camp as instructed by President Muhammadu Buhari to inspect the stores where the federal government had bought provisions for the IDPs as well as to ensure that they were well taken care of.She said, When I went into the stores to inspect the items, it was quite stuffy and I had to sit down.I even spoke to some press men after the inspection. I am shocked that it was reported that I slumped. I dont know why the media will report something so false. She said that after the visit, she had gone to the government house to hold a town hall meeting with some women before finally leaving the state.
Chelsea recovered from two goals down to beat Leicester 4-2 at the King Power Stadium thanks to two goals in extra-time from Cesc Fabregas.The visitors' defence was highly culpable as Shinji Okazaki ended a 13-game goal drought with two first-half goals for the Premier League champions, but two of Antonio Conte's back four were able to make amends either side of the interval.Captain Gary Cahill headed home a Fabregas corner in first-half stoppage time before Cesar Azpilicueta  who tried in vain to hack both Okazaki goals off the line  elevated a pulsating match further with a spectacular long-range volley in the 49th minute.Leicester were forced to play the additional half-hour with 10 men after Marcin Wasilewski struck substitute Diego Costa with a forearm and Chelsea made merry against reduced numbers as Fabregas struck twice inside the opening four minutes of extra-time.The match took place following conflicting reports of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich's displeasure regarding last Friday's 2-1 loss to Liverpool, meaning Conte's men turned in a timely showing of character and class.Marcos Alonso was selected for his Chelsea debut as both managers made seven changes and it was the reshuffled visitors who settled quickest.Pedro had an early goal chalked off for a marginal offside and Wasilewski breathed easily when referee Robert Madley did not punish him for handling inside the box.There was a similar sense of relief for Cahill when his pass was intercepted by Okazaki and his subsequent collision with Ahmed Musa in the penalty area went unpunished.Nevertheless, Chelsea remained some way below Conte's famously exacting defensive standards and fell behind thanks to some dismal defending after 17 minutes.Azpilicueta chested Musa's right-wing cross back across his own six-yard box and could not rescue the situation after Okazaki reacted quicker than a lumbering Asmir Begovic to head the opener.Michy Batshuayi should have done better when he nodded Pedro's delivery wide at the back post and Chelsea's task became steeper 11 minutes before half-time.Okazaki took Andy King's lofted pass impressively on his chest, but was ably assisted by a ball-watching David Luiz as he scuffed a shot into the turf, over Begovic and in.A chastening half for Chelsea's defence ended on a high - Cahill heading over the line, with Luiz charging into Danny Drinkwater's clearance to make sure.The equaliser arrived four minutes after the restart and in spectacular fashion, as Fabregas' cross was only partially cleared and a sweetly hit volley from Azpilicueta flew into the top corner from 25 yards.Batshuayi tried to pick out the same part of Ron-Robert Zieler's goal midway through the second half, only for the Germany international to produce a superb flying save.With his team increasingly camped close to his penalty area, a long Zieler clearance sent Musa darting through at the other end, with Begovic turning his chip unconvincingly behind before King missed a glorious headed chance from the resulting corner.A raking pass from Luiz saw Costa force a double save from Zieler before Wasilewski  already on a booking  foolishly ensured his early exit.Costa rifled against the side-netting in stoppage time but linked smoothly with fellow replacement Eden Hazard, who ruthlessly exposed a flagging Leicester by backheeling for Fabregas to score wonderfully in the 92nd minute.A poor Zieler punch allowed Fabregas to smash a second to seal the tie and quell talk of early cracks appearing under Conte.
Troops of Operation Lafiya Dole and Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) have captured Mallam Fatori in northern most part of Borno af...

Troops of Operation Lafiya Dole and Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) have captured Mallam Fatori in northern most part of Borno after a fierce battle closely covered by air operations.According to a statement signed by Col. Sani Usman, the acting Director, Army Public Relations and issued on Wednesday, the town was captured under Operation Gama Aiki of the Operation Lafiya Dole.Usman said that the troops killed several of the Boko Haram terrorists in the resulting encounter, who subsequently withdrew to a vantage position.However, the terrorists reinforced around the border with Niger Republic.This was while the troops were consolidating on this success.The Operation is continuing, the army spokesman said.
Another earth tremor on Tuesday rocked the Kwoi community in Jaba Local Government Area of Kaduna State.

Another earth tremor on Tuesday rocked the Kwoi community in Jaba Local Government Area of Kaduna State.The incident had reportedly forced many residents to flee the community.It was gathered that the Tuesday incident which occurred around 9am was accompanied by a heavy vibration.An earlier tremor had taken place on Monday around 3am.Following the incidents, schools in the city were shut down and students, who had just resumed from the long vacation, were asked to return home.Many of the residents too had started fleeing the community.A resident of the community, Ayuba Nok, in a chat with our correspondent described the Tuesday incident as more serious than the earlier ones.Nok said, Todays tremor was very loud. It was louder than the previous ones. Some schools were forced to close. They sent their students back home.Mallam Maude School, LEA Central Primary School and Sabzuro Primary School were some of the schools which were forced to close as a result of the sound of the tremor. They were afraid that something worse might happen.The heavy vibration of the tremor happened around 9 am today. It also occurred on Monday around 3am. The sound of Mondays tremor was not as loud and devastating as the one of this morning.The Chairman, Mr. Ben Kure, is saying that people should be calm and stay where they are. But, the people are already frightened and they are in shock.When the incident happened again today, many of us who were thinking otherwise before decided to leave the town, especially the women and children. This is because we dont know probably the whole town may sink when another one happens. And the government is not doing anything for now to evacuate people.Meanwhile, the Head of Geography Department, Kaduna State University, Dr. Idowu Abbas, said the constant incident of earth tremor in Kwoi town might lead to a major earthquake, urging the government to place the community on a watch list for a possible evacuation.He said, It is unfortunate that the tremor happened but it is not unusual. This is because it can happen anywhere and at any time as long as there is movement underneath the earth surface. It can happen anywhere, it is just unfortunate that it happened in Kwoi.The tremor could be a signal of a bigger incident in Kwoi. And it still depends on what happens within the earth surface. I think the Nigerian Space, Research and Development Agency is already looking into that. Honestly speaking earth tremor is a small earth quake, the major earth quake can come.Meanwhile, a Non-Governmental Organisation, the Environmental Right Action and Friends of the Earth Nigeria, has condemned the relevant authorities for failing to institute a probe to ascertain the causes of the earth tremors that took place in some communities in Bayelsa and Rivers states.Communities such as Mbiama and Okaki in Ahoada West local Government Area of Rivers State and Igbogene, in Yenagoa LGA of Bayelsa State were hit by earth tremors in July 2016.The ERA observed in a field report after visiting the affected communities that findings from the residents of the communities confirmed that the incidents were real.The report which was made available to reporters in Yenagoa on Tuesday indicated that there was need for the relevant authorities to institute a body of experts to ascertain the immediate and remote causes of the earth tremor to avoid future occurrence.